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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, just a brief housekeeping here. I hope you all enjoyed the beginning of the Oliver Burkeman series on time management that I previewed here in the last episode. Again, the rest of that will soon be appearing over at Waking Up in our New Life section. And the whole point of this section is to bring relevant philosophy and science to bear on the question of how to live a good life. And that will include conversations between me and outside experts, but also courses designed by other people. And we have some interesting courses already in the works there. Also, I enjoyed the previous podcast with Peter Zion and Ian Bremmer. That was a new format where I invited a subject matter expert to ride shotgun with me and help facilitate a conversation that was somewhat outside my wheelhouse. Perhaps I'll do more of that or even begin moderating some debates here. Thought about doing that for a while, and this seems like a good provocation in that direction. And also just a reminder that we launched the Best of Making Sense podcast, where we surface some of the evergreen episodes from previous years. I know many of you are enjoying that, but for those of you who haven't discovered it, it is a separate podcast where subscribers to Making Sense get full episodes, and otherwise we release half episodes in podcasters everywhere. Okay, today I'm speaking with Mark Andreessen. Mark is a co founder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is one of the few people to pioneer a whole software category used by more than a billion people, and one of the few to establish multiple billion dollar companies. Mark co created the first proper Internet browser, Mosaic, which then became Netscape, which he later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co founded Loud Cloud, which as Opswear was sold to Hewlett Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett Packard from 2008 to 2018. Mark holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, and he serves on the board of several and recent Horowitz portfolio companies applied, Intuition, Carta, Dialpad, Honor, Open, Gov, and Samsara Networks. And he is also on the board of Meta, otherwise known as Facebook. And in this episode, we cover a lot of ground. We talk about the current state of Internet technology and culture some of what has gone right, but there is much that is in the process of going wrong. We discuss mark's background in tech. The birth of the internet, how advertising became the business model for digital media. We talk about the three stages of the web and the birth of blockchain. How successful technology reorders status and power in society. The bitcoin white paper, the mystery surrounding the identity of satoshi nakamoto, the importance of distributed consensus. Bitcoin as digital gold. How society has performed during COVID james burnham and managerial capitalism. The ubiquitous principal agent problem negative externalities risk and regulation, trust and institutions. What the fuck happened in 171? Regulatory capture, banning trump and Alex jones from social media, perverse incentives and philanthropy and other topics. Anyway, I really enjoyed this conversation. Mark knows a lot about a lot, and he's a very fast talker. I'm a slow talker. So those of you who listen to this podcast on two x are probably screwed for this one. Anyway, I now bring you mark andreessen. I am here with mark andreessen. Mark, thanks for joining me. Hey, sam, it's great to be here. So we have a lot to talk about. You are a man of many talents and wide experience, and we haven't hung out much, but I've spoken to you enough to get a glimmer of your polymathic intentions, if not actual achievements. It's really obviously you cover an incredible range of material in your just in your information diet. And I want to get into what you're most focused on and worried about these days. And I also want to talk about your background a little bit because people will know some of it. But I think in having you recapitulate a little bit of that journey into tech, you might be able to give us some insights as to what we should be thinking about now. But first, at a high level, how do you describe yourself these days in terms of what you do professionally and what you focus on? Yeah, so my career has had three stages so far. So stage one was an engineer, and I was trained as an engineer. And sort of that sort of method of engineering is kind of central to everything, as it turns out, that at least I do and think about. Then I became an entrepreneur. So I went into business despite having taken zero business courses and sort of went to the school of hard knocks. And so I went into business and started originally my first company with my partner jim clark in 94, and then my second company with ben horowitz in 99, and then so forth and so on. And then phase three, starting in 2009, was to become an investor, professional investor, venture capitalist. And so that's phase three. And then maybe someday one more phase. But at least those three have come to be busy so far. So what does it mean to be a venture capitalist basically think of it as like we're a hub that's the sort of center of flows of basically ideas, people and money would be the way to think about it. So we try to stand the leading edge of all the new areas of technology. We try to know all the really smart people who are working on new technology and want to be part of the technology ecosystem. And then we actually raise money and we invest money and we invest in startups. We get very deeply involved in the companies. We are typically on the board. We're very often the founders kind of main outside confidant advisor. We get the call when things go horribly wrong and try to pitch in and help, then try to maximize the success for the companies. That kind of hit a chord. Yeah. And how would you describe your politics at this point? So I would say mostly I'm sort of, you know, on an ice flow all by myself headed slowly out to sea. I think there's a few people on that flow with you probably at least on nearby flows drifting together apart. I could go in length about this. I was always kind of a centrist Democrat like basically everybody else I knew in in Tech and in The Valley. The Valley is like, you know, 99%. The picture always gets painted. The Valley is a bunch of radical libertarians or something. And in reality it's just like 99%, basically Clinton Democrats and now kind of whatever warren Democrats, Bernie Democrats. And so I was always that up until I call it 2015 2016. And then like everybody else, I was just completely shocked by really by two things. One was Trump winning both the nomination of the election and then also just the huge shift on the left that took place. And so I kind of checked out of traditional politics in 2015 and kind of went on a spirit walk and decided to try to kind of reread everything from scratch and figure out what was going on. And I've kind of come out the other side in sort of a weird, fuzzy, undefined state. So I don't even know that I even apply any labels. I'm not doing anything politically. I'm completely out of it. So I'm mostly just trying to learn and understand at this point more than like half positions. Yeah, well, that describes my own political identity pretty well at this moment. Perhaps we'll get back to that, I think. I don't think we'll focus on politics, but the political context will inform much of what we say about the breakdown and rebuilding or failures of rebuilding around institutions and solving the massive coordination problem of how do we get strangers who don't trust themselves all that much or trust one another all that much to collaborate. But before we talk about your background earlier, again, high level, what would you say have been a few of the influences or life experiences that you currently consider most formative of your worldview on a day to day basis. You know, I think you look part of it was growing up in the sort of, you know, Midwest, I used to think I traveled sort of this weird road from, like, rural agricultural Midwest all the way to kind of high tech Silicon Valley. And it was kind of an unusual thing. And then I discovered years later, I discovered Tom Wolf, the great American novelist, reporter, wrote a long form profile of a guy named Robert Noyce, who was basically the inventor of the microchip and the creator of intel and basically the creator of the tech industry as we know it today. And he wrote this profile of Bob Noyce. And Bob Noyce basically was like an Iowa farm boy who grew up in rural Iowa and then moved to the valley and sort of created the valley, created technologies we know it today. And then Wolf also pointed out that's the story of, like, Philo Farnsworth, who created television and many others and so I always described The Valley is, like, this intersection of, like, 1950 style Midwestern tinkerer engineer. The guys with the brush cuts and the white short sleeve polyester shirts like you see in all the old photos of NASA or something. It's kind of got that kind of square culture engineering, kind of nerd culture. And then it's got the kind of 1960s California counterculture, which is because it happened here. And so that stuff all kind of threaded into it and it's like, balanced on a knife's edge between those two cultures. And so I definitely kind of come out of that kind of former background. So, yeah, I mean, going from there to here was very important. Partnering with my business partner, Jim Clark, was a very successful entrepreneur, was the founder of one of the most successful full companies in the history of the industry. And I kind of got lucky and that I got to work with him at a time when he wanted to start a new company and all the smart people he knew were kind of working at his current company, so he had to go get fresh blood. And I happened to be newly arrived. And so we kind of hooked up and built our company, Netscape. That was formative. the.com crash was a very formative experience. We hit that really hard. And then look, the last 20 years, the fact the internet didn't die after 2000, and there was like a whole second tech boom and then everything kind of magically coming together starting in 2007 or 2008, between the iPhone and broadband and social networking and everything else that created the world we're in today. All this stuff at this point has worked way beyond any expectation any of us could have possibly had. So kind of seeing that all crystallize and come together has really taught me a lot. And then, of course, now we're in whatever weird state we're in today. That's kind of how I got here. So what was your academic background before you became an Internet pioneer? You did a CS degree. Yeah. So it's a classic Midwestern kind of story, which is, of course, the purpose of a college education is to make money. Fairy stuff. And so I went to the US news and World Report issue in, I think, 1988, and I looked up the income levels by a bachelor's degree. And of course, the top degree was electrical engineering at that time. And then I looked for the top double E schools, and the number three school was University of Illinois, which was right across the border. So that made those two decisions easy. I got in school and then discovered I hugely preferred software, which I should have known because I was always coding as a kid. But software double es are tremendously important and have done a lot to build the modern world. But software, there's a level of creativity that's just hard to do in atoms. And so I kind of got seduced by software, and then I got a computer science degree. Let's talk through what happened with Mosaic and Netscape for a few minutes. Most people associate your name with Netscape, but it was Mosaic first, right? You started this company. And what was the name change about what happened there? Well, it didn't start as a company, and so it started as a project. It started as a project at the University of Illinois, and so it started as a federally funded research project at what was at the time called the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which the sort of short version is. Remember when Al Gore said that he invented the Internet? Yeah. It turns out that story is actually largely true in the sense of what he actually said was the full quote was, I took the lead in creating the Internet in the Senate, and that story actually is true, which is in the Senate. The US. Senate in the mid 1980s funded two things that ended up being very important for my career. One was they funded the Internet backbone to end what was called at the time NSFNET, after the National Science Foundation. And then they funded what were called the four national Supercomputing Centers. And one of those just happened to be at the University of Illinois. The significance of that was basically, they just dropped like a ton of money on these four universities, including Illinois, to basically by state of the art computers and then hook them up to the Internet. And this is starting in the mid eighty s. And so by the time I got there in 89, this was kind of underway. And so we had, in retrospect, basically a modern computing, internet networking, broadband, graphical environment, just basically 510 years before the rest of the world. You can kind of see it working. Was that pure serendipity or did you actually know, going to Illinois, that you were going to have access to unusual computer resources? Well, like I said, they were number three ranked for double E nationally. It was like MIT, Stanford, and then University of Illinois. So that reflected that they were top ten CS at the time. So they were by far the best engineering school in the Midwest at that point. And it was just too much of a leap at that point in my life to go to the East Coast or the West Coast. Right. The reason they ranked so high is because they were so central. Like, they had these very advanced programs and all these resources. And so I had a glimmer of it. I knew about it, but I didn't fully understand the import until I got there and I saw it. Right. And then basically and what happened was NSF basically just, like, funded this essentially to build the modern Internet at the time as a research something for scientists at the time. This is back in the days, there was actually illegal to do business on the Internet during this period. Right. There was something called the Acceptable Use Policy that basically banned all commercial transactions. So it was purely a research thing. Nobody really envisioned it having real world applications at that time. It was just kind of for scientists and academics. But there was a research group there that had the job of basically writing software to make the Internet work for people. And we basically had a project that started as kind of a renegade project that became an official project. That was this thing called Mosaic, which was the first browser that kind of got widely used. It kind of pulled in all the functions, made everything graphical, and then made it work really well and fast and secure and so forth. And then everybody started using that on the Internet as it then existed. That was when I was making $6.25 an hour. Yeah. Well, I hope you invested that wisely, because I'm told compounding really works well. Until recently. Yes, until the last two months. So then you formed a proper company, Netscape. And what happened what happened to Netscape as a product? Yeah. Well, so first of all, it was very tenuous that we ever even started that company because there was such a wall of negativity. It was so universally known that the Internet was not something that ordinary people would ever use. Right. And if you read the newspapers and magazines at the time, they were just wall to wall when they wrote about the Internet. It was primarily either as an object of curiosity that would never matter or negatively. If this thing is never going to move, what year are we now? 93. 94. Right. Okay. Yeah. 92. 93, 94. The first issue of Wired Magazine. I bought the first issue of Wired Magazine off the news stand in, I think, 90, early 93. When I was working on Mosaic or late 92, and I remember bought it like four in the morning going do a do a snack run and I saw this thing on the new stand and I, you know, I was excited. It's finally a magazine for me. And I went back to my office and read it from front to back. And it didn't even mention the Internet. Right? No. Okay, I guess I guess I'm on the wrong end of this whole thing. It's not that Wired got anything wrong. It's just that that was universally the view. And all the experts said that and all the big company CEOs said that it's just not going to be a thing. So what was motivating you at that point? Did you actually believe that everyone was wrong and realized that the Internet was going to be a way to not only get rich, but just basically do more or less everything that was going to prove indispensable in the future? Or were you just tinkering and following your interest without any big picture vision? So it was actually a process of elimination, which is we kind of tried everything else instead. Basically concluded that, no, it was just going to be the Internet. And so my partner Jim and I actually had other business plans that we kind of cycled through, trying to do at the time, interactive television was this big idea. And then we tried to do we had a plan for an online gaming network that's sort of like what Xbox Live today is today. We basically work through all these other ideas for kind of advanced AOL at that point was starting to work a little bit. So it's like, what would it mean to do one of those like a proprietary consumer service? And we kind of kept we had the startup mentality of like, okay, let's from scratch make a business plan for building a company that does anything like this. And basically we cycled through all the other ideas and then in the background kind of Mosaic kind of kept growing. Right. It kept going after I left Illinois and more people were using it and it was just like and I still had my email log in and so I had the account. Mosaic was free for academic use, but we put a provision in the license that said you have to pay for commercial use. And we just did that as a placeholder because we didn't have a business model in Illinois. But I had the email box where people would send in commercial inquiries, where they would want to do something in the commercial sector with ecommerce or whatever. And so there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these messages coming in from people who wanted to do crazy things like, I want to build a bookstore on the Internet. Like, that's crazy. Lose my email. Jeff yeah, exactly. Well, actually prejeff right prejudice. Even before that, at some point, Jim and I literally looked at each other and were like, okay, this inter Internet thing might actually be the thing. Like, maybe all these other experts are just wrong. Maybe this actually is the correct thing. And look, the Internet had all kinds of problems and issues that I could take you through, and that's a long litany of people had all these complaints about it that were correct. It's not secure and you can't do transactions and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's not fast, right? And it's like, well, look, if the network effect really takes and lots of people sign up to use this and lots of businesses come online, then it's going to drive an investment wave that's going to solve all these other problems, which is basically what happened. And so we kind of did what, in retrospect, was the obvious decision, which is we just leaned in hard on that. Right. And how did the business model get anchored to ads? Because of all the things that could have gone differently in the beginning and maybe the tech wasn't there. You just said there was no way to pay for things, but it seems like that could have been an early priority. And I'm not sure you entirely share my view of just how diabolical the ad based economy has been in the end. But I wonder what was that moment like where you just slap a banner ad on it and that's how you monetize the future of digital media? Yeah, so it's because we had no native money, all right? We had no native ability to do money. We had no way to do microtransactions. We knew this at the time. So we knew right upfront front, we were like, look, there needs to be a way to send and receive money. There needs to be a way to do ecommerce. There needs to be a way to do microtransactions. We knew this at the time. There were two kind of big things, and we were in a position to do it because we had the browser, but we also had the servers and the ecommerce software and all the back end stuff. And so we were in a position to do all this. So we figured there were two parts to the problem. Part one was cryptography, right? So basically security, right? So to be able to have secure communication and we invented this protocol called SSL for secure cryptography. It's the first widely used kind of delivery of the science of cryptography to consumers. Sort of happened as a consequence of the Netscape browser and SSL. And by the way, that's still in use. SSL is still the encryption method for the Internet today. So that part worked, and then the other part was like, okay, you need to plug into the existing banking system, right? You need to be able to plug in so people can load, have their credit card, their debit card, their bank account, their checking account, because they've got all their money somewhere and they've got be able to kind of get it to the Internet. And so for that, we went and we started talking all the big banks and the big credit card companies, and we got, again, this kind of wall of skepticism. And everybody kind of told us, basically, this is never going to work. And then we got our big meeting that kind of really hammered this home for me. We found this guy I guess I shouldn't name names specifically, but one of the very big credit card companies, let's say yeah, there was a CTO who was like, considered we were told he was like the visionary for the payments industry and the guy that everybody listened to. And it's like, if you can get him on your side, you can really do something here. So we had him to our office. He had not used the Internet or Mosaic or Netscape at that point. So we sat him down in front of a workstation with a keyboard and a mouse and a big screen and, you know, had it all queued up for the demo and said, I basically pointed on the first link on the screen, and I said, Click here. And so, of course, he reaches up with his finger and touches the screen. And this is 1994, right? So there's no touchscreens, so nothing happens. And then I'm like, no, no, you use the mouse. And so then of course, he looks at the mouse, and then of course, he picks it up. Right? How could that possibly be the case? Well, because the entire banking payments industry at that point was on mainframes from 30 years earlier. They didn't do new things. That's not what they were in business to do. And so I remember in that meeting, it was just like, okay, this is it. We're sunk. There's no way this can happen. We tried, microsoft tried, other people tried, AOL tried, and it's just there was never any way to do it. And so if you can't charge people for things and you got to run ads, and that basically is what happened. Maybe give us a short primer on the stages of development. Here we have web one, web two and web three. I'm imagining you envision Web Three as ushering a new age of monetizing everything potentially in a secure, trustless way. So let's climb there. What do we mean by Web One, Two, and Three at this point? Sure. So my partner, Chris Dickson, has sort of the best encapsulation of this. He says Web One was read, right? And so the big breakthrough was you go online, you could read stuff, you could see stuff, you could do search, you could do all this, but you could consume. Web Two was what he calls read, write. Right. And that's sort of the social networking, blogging, video, YouTube kind of user generated content era, right? So not only could you read, you could do what you do. Not only listen, you could produce podcasts. And that led to kind of the whole world that we've been in. And then he says Web Three is read, write, and own, right? And own means you can own value, right? You can own money, you can own digital assets, you can have ownership claims on things, right? You could say read, write, pay. You could say read, write, make money. You could apply whatever term you want to that third one, but basically fill in all of the economics and all of the capability of having incentives and ownership that really should have been there from the start. But like I said, we tried to get in from the start, but we just didn't have the technology. For now, we basically have a chance with these new technologies of blockchain cryptocurrency, web Three. Basically we think a chance to kind of do the other half of the Internet is how I think about it, or the other third. And it's basically have a trust layer, a money layer and an ownership layer that rides on top of the sort of untrusted, unowned kind of space to spend the internet so far and then kind of fill in all the things that we wish we had been able to do from the start but now we can actually do. I wouldn't be alone in noticing that there's a fair amount of skepticism about Web Three at this point and a fair amount of shot and FreudA watching cryptocurrency crash or almost crash in recent months. Do you view that skepticism as truly analogous to all of the naysayers around Web One when they thought the internet was just going to be a bust and that no one was ever going to migrate away from their answering machine, even this email thing wasn't going to take off? Or do you think there is a greater foundation for a perception of misspent dreams and failures, of scaling the technology around the energy concerns, the cost of it all, the capacity for fraud, the tulip mania aspect of the kind of the investing landscape or the speculation landscape there? How much of it is an echo of the early ninety s and how much of this is a genuinely new condition of uncertainty? Yeah, so there's a lot in there and we can go through each of those points. Here's the big thing I'd say overall look, a lot of things just don't work, right? So a lot of people have ideas for things that don't work. And so it's always possible that the critics are correct and it's always possible something thing either is just never going to work, or the other possibility is things are just too early, right? What happens with a lot of new technologies is they just take time. There were people doing analog, there were people doing mechanical television 30 years before Philoharnsworth did electronic television. They did mechanical television, like the 1880s, 1890s, with like spinning wooden blocks representing pixels, right? And so there's this prehistory, and it's like, what was it? Paris had a telegraph system working through flashes of light through long glass tubes under the streets of Paris in like, the 1830s, which is not practical because the tubes kept breaking, but people had that idea way before the telegraph rolled out. Anyway, look for any new technology. Maybe you're just early. Maybe you're just wrong altogether. Maybe it doesn't happen. For the new technologies that do work, you see basically a pattern of the reaction to them. And I used to kind of think I was kind of fantasizing this, and then I found a book that kind of explained this book by this MIT guy named Elton Morrison 50 years ago, where he kind of goes through this is even pre Internet, but he goes through the whole history of new technologies. And he said there's basically a three stage process to the adoption of any new technology. Stage one is just ignore, right, where basically just people pretend it doesn't even exist. And of course, of course, that's, you know, the Internet was ignored basically from the 1960s through to the like I said, even into the even into the early 90s. Stage two is basically vigorous protest. And that's the stage where basically it's like, basically, here are the 30 reasons this can never happen. Or call it the reasons phase, right? So here's the 30 reasons this could never happen. And usually what that is, is a laundry list of everything that's technically wrong with new technology. So the Internet, it was, is too slow and it's not graphical, and it's this and it's insecure and hackers and fraud and all these sort of, you know, basically, by the way, real issues, right? These are all issues that actually had to get fixed and then ultimately were fixed. And then he said stage three. Stage three in the book, he says, is when the name calling begins. And so stage three is basically rage. And what he basically says is it's basically rage. It's basically the existing power structures basically just like go incandescent with rage. And he said the reason for that is because any new technology that works is a reordering of status and power in the system. And basically the stage status quo is what do they hate more than anything else? Reordering of status and power, right? There's only downside for them. And so they just go crazy. And that's when they pull out all the stops and they call you names and they try to put you in jail and they do everything under the sun they can possibly do to sabotage it. And then, look, it has to prove itself, right, to get through those three gauntlets. Like, it has to be a real thing. Like I said, it's not predictive that because something goes through this, it's going to work it's just that every single time something works like this, it goes through these stages. And so at this point, I'm like in nerd to it, right. I've seen it now so many times in the exact same sequence of things that I'm just like, okay, fine, bring it. This is what they're going to do. We're just going to keep going. What percentage of your time and commitment of resources at this point is focused on web three? We might actually need to I know I've done this on other podcasts, but we probably should define web three a little bit more. Just differentiating cryptocurrency from everything else that could be done on the blockchain. But you can do that. But then how much of your attention and material resources are aimed at that at the moment? Yeah, look, it's a very big push for us. We have a very big group in the space now. It's probably a third of I would say you could topline it and say maybe a third of the firm in terms of a combination of people and money. Right. Which for us, it's one of our biggest things. Okay, so give me the potted definition of web three at the moment. Yeah. So let's take the three terms that we kind of get kind of conjoined. So blockchain is like the underlying technological breakthrough. So basically what happened was this person, he, she, it, or they named Satoshi Nakamoto, never identified. Are you swearing that this is not you? It is definitely not me, although if it was, that's exactly what I would be saying. Yes, but still I trust you somehow in this trustless environment. Well, same is true for you. If it was, you'd be pretending to ask me the question without knowing, too. I think it does stand a better chance of being you given our different backgrounds. But do you have any suspicions about who it is or whether it's a single individual? Yeah, there are suspicions. Most of the people in the space think it was a combination of people. It was a deep technological breakthrough and it was one of these things that built on 30 years of prior work. It's one of these things that has kind of a long wind up before it happened. And so it was somebody and he or they posted a lot on forums and you can read all the posts as it was in development, so you can kind of see whoever it was had like, a very deep knowledge in the space. And that kind of reduces it down to pretty small number of candidates, just given the nature of the technology at that time. So it was probably people think it was a handful of those people probably working together. This is the bitcoin white paper, which yeah, one is this 2010 nine 2009. Nine 2009. Well, by the way, profoundly significant. By the way, just profoundly significant. This gets missed, but 2009 was the low of the economy and the stock market and everything else, and the high of unemployment following the financial crisis, right? So it was the last year you would expect a major new break. Like, everybody was in a horrible mood in 2009. I remember very clearly because we started the firm then and everybody was like uniform, formally negative that you could start a new venture capital firm. And so in the middle of just like complete misery and by the way, in the middle of the collapse of the prior financial system, what we call the trad financial system, just being like completely trashed and discredited and falling apart and having to be bailed out, this like, magic thing happens. This paper comes out and it just basically redefines the industry. It was a very special moment. Did you see its significance immediately? No, I didn't. No, I wouldn't claim that. It was something kind of people knew about. Everybody read it, people talked about it a lot. It was like a parlor game in Silicon Valley for the first five years or so, which is like, even in Silicon Valley, it's like, okay, this probably is not going to be a thing like really internet money. Jeez right. Like all the reasons why you shouldn't be able to do that, can't do that, it won't work. But the Silicon valley parlor game of that is less. Maybe some people had foresight and so but a lot of people didn't and a lot of us were like, wow, but wouldn't it be cool if it did? Right? And so then the part of the game was like, wow, what if we always have the joke, it's like on earth too, this stuff is all working, right? And it's like, well, what would earth two be like if it really had bitcoin everywhere? And it was like, wow, this is a really cool idea. And then at some point we and others were just like, okay, we need to stop being idiots here, and basically just be like, yeah, this is actually a thing. This is actually going to happen. This stands a very good chance of actually happening. Accredited our partner, Bolaji Srinivasan was the guy who kind of got us really clued in on this and kind of set us down at one point. And it's like, look, you guys have to stop thinking about this as hypothetical, like, this thing is actually happening. And so we were early relative to the world, but there were other people in the valley who were ahead of us. And is there kind of an initial cache of bitcoin that has not been claimed, which is satoshi's coin or initial wallet that still has the coin sitting in it or what's the story there? Yes, this is part of the great kind of mythic legend behind the whole thing. So all a bitcoin is basically based on this underlying science of cryptography, right, which is an ancient science, but in its modern form. You know, it's a 50, 60 year old kind of thing in terms of the the way we use the technologies now, the so called public key cryptography. And so it's it's all based on that. And as part of that, you can have what are called private keys that are uniquely yours. And as part of that, you can sign messages with your private key and such that anybody in the world can decode them or read them, but only you could have written them. You can have absolute validation that you were the creator. And then bitcoin wallets basically work the same way. Like, you have a private key for the wallet, and anybody who has the private key can decrypt it. It's like a bearer instrument in that way. But anybody who doesn't have the private key, they have no claim to it. Over the years, various people show up and claim to be satoshi, but none of them can demonstrate that they have the private key. None of them can. So therefore, you have nothing. So, anyway, we know how to recognize satoshi when we see it, or they, which is they can use their private key to sign things. They could also use their private key to unlock the money. I don't know what the current value is. I'm going to guess it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 to $50 billion us. Dollars today that is sitting in a wallet somewhere that the satoshi key unlocks. That money has never been touched. That's an extraordinary fact. If it's a single individual or a group of people, I mean, this is even without that, this is one of the best kept secrets ever. But when you look at the treasure, sierra Madre incentives that that are growing with that kind of wealth locked up in a box, how do you explain that this is just this this person is ideologically so pure and enamored of the brilliance of this founding myth and moment that they're just they're not tempted to suddenly own $50 billion? Yes, exactly. So this is the amazing thing, the fact that money was not claimed for a long time, right? And by the way, the messages stopped after the bitcoin white paper came out. Satoshi stopped posting in public. And so and and by the way, you have to pause for a second here to say, how prescient must this person have been to not only develop this thing and write it and create it after basically 30 years of people trying to do the same thing? By the way, this was the breakthrough. How prescient was he, she, or they that not only did they get the technology right, but also they knew ahead of time that they needed to stay anonymous. Right? That's not normal. I've never been anonymous. It's not normal in our industry to be anonymous. And so whoever it is had, like, tremendous foresight to know to do that, and then yeah, to not claim the money. So the prevailing view for a long time was, he, she, it, or they are dead, right? Which is the most obvious thing. And there is at least one candidate for satoshi who did pass away. So it's certainly possible that's the case. It's also possible, by the way, something very embarrassing happened. It's possible he or they forgot their key. Forgot their key, which would be embarrassing, the kind of thing that might torture you for a long time. And then this weird thing happened. I don't remember. There was newsweek magazine did this cover story claiming that they had uncovered satoshi nakamoto. Okay, so this is several years ago now, this huge newsweek cover story, and they said, we found satoshi, and they identified an older gentleman who is a japanese american named Dorian nakamoto who is like an aerospace engineer or something in, I forget, southern California somewhere, like San diego, orange county. And they did this entire expose about he's the guy. And the whole time he's like, I'm not the guy. The guy not I'm. I'm not the guy. I'm not the guy. I'm not the guy. And they're like, yes, you are. In the CS community, we're all like, well, he's not a computer scientist. He seems like he's like a smart engineer, but he doesn't have this background. Like, this seems weird. So, anyway, there was one final message signed by satoshi's private key that came out at that point, and it literally was, I am not Dorian nakamoto. And then satoshi has since gone quiet. And so now we're back to the great mystery, which I don't know, actually. I don't know if I hope it gets solved. The engineering me would like to know, but it may be better for, you know, I think the world should have some mystery to it, and if this is the fundamental breakthrough that sort of is a division and, you know, before and after in civilization, we never find out who the person was. I think there's something romantic about that. So, yeah, I kind of hope we never find out. It's a great story. So I derailed you. You did not yet differentiate bitcoin from all else that can happen on the blockchain. Yeah, so blockchain is the under. So basically the white paper basically came out. The bitcoin white paper. It's very short. People can read it. And basically it says we have this basically a data structure called the blockchain, which is a way to do decentralized permissionless, basically. Data structure that everybody agrees on, which we could talk. Sort of it's sort of a way to do a database. But in a database, that kind of is spread out across the Internet, called that the blockchain, literally a chain of blocks. And then so and the computer science term is distributed consensus. And so if you read the computer science literature like that, that's the thing that was solved. That's the technology breakthrough, like the cold fusion or whatever of the thing and then basically said there's sort of an immediate and obvious use case for this, which is digital money. Because if I have basically a database, an internet wide database that records debits and credits or records ownership of assets, then basically those slots can represent money, they can represent value. And if you own the slot today, you own the money. And if I own the slot tomorrow, I own the money. And there it goes. It's this way to get agreement distributed, consensus. It's a way to get consensus of who owns what across the entire internet. And actually what happens, and this is a subtle point, is the capability of doing digital money is sort of an artifact. It's sort of a natural consequence of having this kind of database. And then, by the way, it turns out you also want a form of digital money to make a blockchain work because you need to pay the miners, right? And so the way the blockchain works is people run the code on their computers, and that costs them some amount of money, primarily in the form of power. Well, they got to buy the computers and they got to power the computers and store them somewhere. And so the way the miners get paid is with the currency that sort of emerges from the system. So you've got the blockchain, which is sort of the infrastructure, and then you've got this like use case, artifact, spin off, emergent thing, which is kind of the coin, the currency that comes out the other end. That was that original pairing. And then immediately upon that release, people started to say, okay, that's great. And the true believers right up front were like, okay, that's great. That's obviously going to happen. And then they basically, right from the beginning, they started saying, okay, what else could you do with the blockchain? And that leads to all these other use cases that people are talking about now. And that's what we call web three. So we use the term web three, all of the basically use cases of the blockchain, which includes digital money, but the other 100 ideas that people are pursuing today, right, and how much of your investment and bullishness with respect to web three is predicated on the expectation that bitcoin will endure? Bitcoin specifically, as if not the only cryptocurrency and store of value? A major one. Yeah, so bitcoin is really unusual, and it goes back to this original kind of founding myth reality, which is very unusual, which is it's not changing, right? If you just think about technology, like we have this adage in the valley, it's like technology is like bananas. New technology becomes obsolete almost immediately, right? You see this all the time now. I ship a new whatever, this, that video game player, whatever, it's like a year later. It's like last year's news. It's the previous iPhone model, right? It's the great glory of the tech industry. It's like, we keep pushing this stuff forward, we keep doing new things. And so there's a museum in san jose called the museum of whatever, computer museum, computer history museum is it's fun to go to, but every single thing in it is something nobody uses anymore because they're all obsolete. And so any other area of technology you'd say bitcoin comes out, the founder vanishes. It doesn't change. It's essentially unchanged. They made a little tinkering around it, but it's essentially unchanged since 2009. It's now 13 years old. It's obviously going to be completely obsolete. And by the way, lots of other people have developed lots of new blockchains and lots of new forms of cryptocurrency and lots of new web, three things and so forth along the way. And so shouldn't it just kind of fade away? We honor it as the forerunner of what we have, but we're building better systems now. The thing that's so unusual about it on this topic is that it is digital gold, right? And so it's sort of one and only, like, real foundational, fundamental use cases, store of value, and basically, it's like, okay, it's digital gold. If you were going to basically write a spec for digital gold, what would you say would be the main thing you would need from it? And the main thing you would need from it is that it doesn't change. Right. So this is like the one application of technology I've ever seen, whereas it's actually a benefit, right? It's a part of the bull case for it that it doesn't change. In particular, if the amount of it doesn't change, you're not going to find much more of it. Suddenly. Yeah, that's right. The amount of it is fixed. The amount of it is fixed. But even more than that, it's like bitcoin, ten years. It's the only thing I know of where ten years from now, 20 years from now, 100 years from now, it's going to be running essentially the same way that it runs today. And it's just literally because satoshi is not here to change it and nobody else is going to change it, and it's honest track. But if it's literally digital gold, if it's like a permanent store of value, then all of a sudden you've taken what historically be a weakness, turned it into a strength. My best guess would be that bitcoin is sort of digital gold. My best guess, though, also would be that it's new systems being developed today or over the next ten years that will basically take all the other use cases. And and again, it's the same thing. Bitcoin is not changing. Bitcoin can't actually do all the other use cases, and so it's, it's going to have to be new developments. And so we're, we're, we're in the and camp, you know, this has become a very you know, this is, you know, this is, this is a full fledged religious war at this point. So there are very strong believers with a great deal of kind of force and energy on all sides of this. And so there's definitely schisms on this, but we're kind of a big tent kind of thing, and we're making all the bets, including bitcoin. But you're betting that bitcoin doesn't become the digital currency. You're distinguishing it as a store of value from it being an efficient and scalable digital dollar. Essentially, yeah. So it can't in its current form, it can't it can't be the digital dollar. The transaction processing system of bitcoin, the way the blockchain works, it's not built for that level of scale and performance. Right. And you can see that, by the way, because there's a cost associated with transactions. There's so called mining fees and the cost to clear a transaction through bitcoin. I don't know what it is today, but it's non trivial. And then there's long delays, and so it's just not going to be able to do that. And that's today, right? If it actually takes on even like a quarter of the global economy, it's going to be many quarters of magnitude bigger than it is today, and it's not going to be able to handle it. This is that this is the downside of Satoshi no longer being with us, is it's not adapting to be able. On earth two, satoshi stayed involved and bitcoin became everything. But that's not what's happened in Earth One. Now, look, having said that, there are smart entrepreneurs that are developing layers on top of bitcoin where they're going to try to make that happen. Jack Dorsey, who's a smart guy, has a whole effort to try to have layers on top of bitcoin to do this kind of thing. There are other people trying to do it. So there are people trying to kind of augment bitcoin bitcoin and kind of turbocharge it in different ways. Maybe some of those efforts will work, or maybe it will just be brand new systems. There's also, by the way, a big transition, a big technology transition underway. The original way bitcoin worked with so called proof of work, where you solve all these math problems to sort of validate that you own what you own. The way the underlying transaction processing engine works, there's sort of an overall architecture change being kind of proposed in the industry, which is to what's called proof of stake, which is sort of a much less energy, sort of aggressive thing if Ethereum is switching from proof of work to proof of proof of stake. And so if proof of stake works, like, it's one of these phase shifts that happens in the industry where just things work differently. On the other side, bitcoin would remain proof of work because it kind of can't change. But you may have these new systems that just fundamentally work both different and much better for high scale transaction processing. That's a TBD, but we're pretty confident that that has a good chance of succeeding. So I guess now I want to kind of pivot to, if not politics, politics adjacent, larger societal concerns where we are at this moment in history, how technology is coming to the rescue or failing to come to the rescue. And I guess as a starting point to this chapter in the conversation, I would reference the essay you wrote early in COVID titled It's Time to Build, which was really the technologists and entrepreneurs and in your case, VC's. Heart cry over just the misspent energy of the moment and just how much so many of us at the time were feeling that we really needed to seize this opportunity to shore up our society against the forces of fragmentation. And it really was an opportunity to get our heads straight. And I don't know how you feel about this, but I think looking back on it, obviously we're still in Copenhand to some degree, but I look back on it as a kind of failed dress rehearsal for something much worse. I think there will be things that are much worse. And I'm not drawing the comforting lesson that I wish I could draw from our performance over these last couple of years, that we've learned many lessons. Even if we've made some obvious mistakes, we understand what those mistakes were, and we're not going to make those mistakes again. I just feel like we're all waking up from a bad dream, and in the waking state, some of the horrible creatures of the dream are still with us and that we're not all that much wiser. Take me back to the moment you wrote that essay and give me your your view of the last couple of years. What did COVID do to us? Yeah, so that essay was a primal scream. I think it probably comes across that way. And I can't say that in the essay, it was at a very specific moment. It was when COVID was hitting in New York City and we all thought COVID was going to hit his heart everywhere. Unfortunately, it didn't. But in retrospect, there were specific moments like Italy was a catastrophe and then New York City was catastrophe. There were some others, but unfortunately it didn't actually hit the rest of the country the way it hit New York. But at that moment, it seemed like we were all really in for it to the degree to which New York was in for it at that time, which was very catastrophic for people in New York at that moment. Those were the days of just like, constant at whaling, mass ambulance sounds everywhere in New York. And so the mayor of New York, the since departed Bill de Blasio, put out a call and said people with rain ponchos could please donate them to local hospitals for use of surgical gowns. Yes, that inspires confidence in our civil. By the way, is this a family podcast or can I swear. You swear to your heart's content. Jesus. Jesus Christ. Really? Like the civilization of the United States of America, 240 years in or whatever, literally. Like, we're using rain ponchos for surgical gowns in hospitals in New York City. Honestly, like, that's where we've gotten to, you know, we don't you know, we don't have masks, we don't have this, we don't have that, and now we we don't have freaking surgical gowns. So it's like, this is just ridiculous. And so that that sort of thing what I tried to do. At the end of the day. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at Sam Harris./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. OK, a few things to announce here. I have an event in Los Angeles on July 11. If you're a supporter of the podcast, you should have already received an email. This is actually the first event for the app. It's the first waking up event. It is at the Wiltern on July 11, and it is with a great Tibetan lama by the name of Mingir Rampagee. And Mingir is a fascinating guy. He's the youngest son of the greatest Zog gen master I ever studied with Tukorgan Ripeche, and I wrote about him in my book Waking Up. So that name might be familiar to some of you. I studied with him in Nepal about 30 years ago and I've never met Minguer. And he's about, I don't know, seven years younger than me. I was in my 20s when I was in Nepal and he was a teenager and he was on retreat for much of that time. He did his first three year retreat when he was, I think, 13, and he was always described as the superstar of the family. I studied with two of his brothers choking Emer and Pache. And Sulkima. And Pache. But I've never met Minguer and really looking forward to it. He has a very interesting story because at some point he started teaching and started running monasteries. I believe he has three monasteries he's running as well as a foundation. But then in 2011, when he was 36, he just disappeared from his monastery in India and spent the next four and a half years wandering around India as a mendicant yogi, living in caves and on the streets and encountering all kinds of hardships. I believe he got very sick and almost died. Anyway, he's written a book about this titled In Love with the World, which I haven't read yet, but I will obviously read it before our event. And we will discuss the book and the nature of mind and the practice of meditation and take your questions. And again, that will be happening at the Wiltern in Los Angeles on July 11, and you can find more information on my website@samharris.org. Events and tickets are selling quickly there, so if you care about that event, I wouldn't wait. And the audio will eventually be released on the podcast. Okay. The waking up app. There have been a few changes we've added Onika's meditations for children, which are great, and there are some meta meditations coming from me as well. Also, we'll soon be giving you the ability to sit in groups, where you can organize a virtual group with your friends or colleagues and sit together either in silence or listening to a guided meditation. And very soon there will be a web based version of the course. You can get more information about all that@wakingup.com. So this podcast is the result of three interviews, and it is organized around a new book from my agent, John Brockman, who edited it. And the book is titled Possible Minds 25 Ways of Looking at AI. And you may have heard me mention John on the podcast before. He's not just a book agent, though. Between him and his wife Katinka Matson and their son Max Brockman, they have a near monopoly on scientific nonfiction. It's really quite impressive. Many of the authors you know and admire steve Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, and really most other people in that vein you could name. And many who have been on this podcast are represented by them. But John is also a great connector of people and ideas. He seems to have met every interesting person in both the literary and art worlds since around 1960. And he's run the website Edge for many years, which released its annual question for 20 years and got many interesting people to write essays for that. And there have been many books published on the basis of those essays. He's also put together some great meetings and small conferences. So he's really facilitated dialogue to an unusual degree and at a very high level. And he's written his own books, the Third Culture. And by the late John Brockman. But this new book is another one of his anthologies, and it's organized around a modern response to Norbert Weiner's book, The Human Use of Human Beings. Weiner was a mathematical prodigy and the father of cybernetics, and a contemporary of Alan Turing and John von Neumann and Claude Shannon, and many of the people who were doing foundational work on computation. And Weiner's thoughts on artificial intelligence anticipate many of our modern concerns. Now, I didn't wind up contributing to this book. I had to sit this one out. But I will be speaking with three of the authors who did. The first is George Dyson. George is a historian of technology, and he's the author of Darwin Among the Machines and Touring's Cathedral. My second interview is with Allison Gopnick. Allison is a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley. She's a leader in the field of children's learning and development, and her books include The Philosophical Baby. And finally, I'll be speaking with Stewart Russell, who's been on the podcast before. Stewart is a professor of computer science and engineering at UC Berkeley, and he's also the author of the most widely used textbook on AI titled artificial Intelligence a Modern Approach. This is a deep look at the current state and near and perhaps distant future of AI. And now, without further delay, I bring you George Dyson. I am here with George Dyson. George, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Happy to be here. So the occasion for this conversation is the publication of our Friend and Mutual Agents book, possible Minds 25 Ways of Looking at AI. And this was edited by the great John Brockman. I am not in this book. I could not get my act together when John came calling. So unfortunately, I'm not in this very beautiful and arudite book. Previously, you wrote Touring's Cathedral. So you have you've been thinking about computation for quite some time. How do you summarize your intellectual history and what you focused on? Well, my interest yeah. It goes back much further than that. During Cathedral was a recent book. 25 years ago, I was writing a book called Darwin Among the Machines at a time when there actually were no publishers publishing, you know, any general literature about computers except Addison Wesley. So they published it thanks to John. Thing to remember about John and Katinka is a family business. Tinker's father was a literary agent, and John's father, I think, was in the flower merchant business. So they have this very great combination of flowers have to be sold the same day, and books have to last forever. Sort of works really well together. Yeah. And your background is you also have a family background that's relevant here because your father is Freeman Dyson, who many people will be aware is a famous physicist. He got inducted into the Manhattan Project right at the beginning as well. Right. He was at the Institute for Advanced Study. Correct. My sequencing here, first of all, the important thing in my background is not so much my father, but my mother. My mother was a mathematical logician, so she worked very closely with Good Goodall and, you know, new Alan Turing's work in logic very well. And that's where the world of computers came out of. That my father. They both came to America at the same time in 1948. So long the Manhattan Project was long over. My father had nothing to do with it. Oh, okay. He was working for the conventional bombing campaign for the Royal Air Force during the war, but not the Manhattan Project. So your mother so you have deep roots in the related physics and logic and mathematics of information, which has given us this now century of or near century of computation and has transformed everything. It's a fascinating intellectual history because the history of computing is intimately connected with the history of war, specifically code breaking and bomb design. And you did cover this in Turin's Cathedral. You're often described as a historian of technology. Is that correct? Does that label fit well with your true yes, I mean, more a history of people of the people who build the technologies, but somehow the label is historian of technology. I'm not a historian of science. That's also I don't know why that's always it's just sort of a pigeonhole they put you into. But maybe we can walk through this topic by talking about some of the people. There are some fascinating characters here, and the nominal inspiration for this conversation for John's book was his discovery or rediscovery of Norbert Weiner's book, the Human Use of Human Beings. But there were different paths through the history of thinking about information and computation and the prospect of building intelligent machines, and Weiner represented one of them. But there was another branch that became more influential, which was due to Alan Turing and John von Neumann. Maybe, I guess. Who should we start with? Probably Alan Turing at the outset here. How do you think of Alan Turing's contribution to the advent of the computer? Well, it was very profound. Nor Ravini was working in a similar way at almost the same time. So they all sort of came out of this together. Their sort of philosophical grandfather was Leibniz, the German computer scientists and philosophers. They all sort of were disciples of Leibniz and then executed that in different ways. Von Neumann and Weiner worked quite closely together at one time. Turing and Weiner never really did work together, but they were very aware of each other's work. The young Allen touring, which also people forget, he came to America in in 1936. So he was actually in in New Jersey when his great sort of paper on computation was published. So he was there in the same building with von Neumann. He said, here's a bright, and offered offered him a job, which he didn't take. He preferred to go back to England. Yeah, I don't know how to think about that. So just bring your father into the picture here and perhaps your mother, if she knew all these guys as well. Did they know? Von Neumann and Turing and Claude Shannon and Weiner. What of these figures? Do you have some family lore around? Yes and no. They both knew Johnny von Neumann quite well because he was sort of in circulation. My father had met Norbert Weiner, but never worked with him, didn't really know him, and neither of them actually met Alan Turing. But of course, my father came from Cambridge, where Turing had been sort of a fixture. My father said was that when he read Turing's paper, when it came out and he thought like many people, he thought this was sort of the least likely. This was interesting logic, but it would have no great effect on the real world. I think my mother was probably maybe a little more prescient that logic really would change the world. Von Neumann is perhaps the most colorful character here. There seems to be an absolute convergence of opinion that regardless of the fact that he may not have made the greatest contributions in the history of science. He seemed to have just bowled everyone over and given a lasting impression that he was the smartest person they had ever met. Does that ring true in the family as well? Or have estimations of von Neumann's intelligence been exaggerated? No, I don't think that's exaggerated at all. I mean, he was impressively sharp and smart, extremely good memory, phenomenal calculation skills, sort of everything. Plus, he had this his real genius was not entrepreneurship, but just being able to put everything together. His father was an investment banker, so he had no shyness about just asking for money. That was sort of, in some ways, almost his most important contribution was he was the guy who could get the money to do these things that other people simply dreamed of, but he got them done and he hired the right people. Sort of like the orchestra conductor who get the best violin player and put them all together. Yeah, these stories are I think I've referenced them occasionally on the podcast, but it's astounding to just read this record because you have really the greatest physicists and mathematicians of the time all gossiping essentially, about this one figure, who certainly Edward Teller was of this opinion. And I think there's a quote from him somewhere which says that if we ever evolve into a master race of super intelligent humans, it will recognize that von Neumann was the prefiguring example. This is how we will appear when we are fundamentally different from what we are now. And Vigner and other physicists seem to concur the stories about him are these two measures of intelligence, both memory and processing speed. You grab both of those knobs and turn them up to eleven, and that just seems to be the impression you make on everyone, that you're just a different sort of mind. Yeah. In other ways it's a great tragedy because he was doing really good work in, you know, pure mathematics and logic and game theory, quantum mechanics and those kinds of things, and then got completely distracted by the weapons and the computers. Never, never really got back to any real science, and then died young like Alan Turing. The very same thing. So we sort of lost these two brilliant minds who not only died young, but sort of professionally died very early because they got sucked into the war, never came back. Yeah, there was an ethical split there because Norbert Weiner, who was again part of this conversation fairly early, I think it was 47, published a piece in the Atlantic, more or less vowing never to let his intellectual property have any point of contact with military efforts. And so at the time, it was all very fraught seen that physics and mathematics was the engine of destruction. However ethically purposed, obviously there's a place to stand where the Manhattan Project looks like a very good thing that we won the race to fission before the Nazis could get there. But it's an ethically complicated time, certainly. Yes. And that's where Norbert Weiner worked very intensively and effectively for the military in both World War I. He was at the proving ground in World War I and World War II, but he worked on anti aircraft defense. And what people forget was that it was pretty far along at Los Alamos when we knew, when we learned that the Germans were not actually building nuclear weapons. And at that point, people like Norbert Weiner wanted nothing more to do with it, and particularly Norbert Weiner wanted nothing to do with the hydrogen bomb. There was no military justification for hydrogen bomb. The only use of those weapons still today, it's against genocide against civilians. They have no military use. Do you recall the history on the German side? I know there is a story about Heisenberg's involvement in the German bomb effort, but I can't remember if rumors of his having intentionally slowed that or not are in fact, true. Well, that's a whole other subject. We stay away from not getting to that, and I'm not the expert on that. But what you know, what little I do know is that it became known at Los Alamos late, later in the project that that there really was no German threat yet. Then the decision was made to keep working on it. There were a few people right now, there's one name. I don't remember who it was. One or two physicists actually quit work when they learned that the German program was not a real threat, but most people chose to keep working on it. That was a very moral decision. Yeah. How do you view it? Do you view it as a straightforward good one way or the other, or how would you have navigated that? And if you have any extremely complicated, very complex I mean, of the people you were talking about, the Martians, these sort of extraterrestrial Hungarians, they all kept working on the weapons, except Leo Salad, who actually he was at Chicago. He then sort of communicated from Los Alamos. Groves wanted to have him put in jail, and he circulated a petition I think it was signed by 67 physicists from Chicago to not use the weapon against the civilians of Japan, to at least give a demonstration against an unpopulated target. And that petition never even reached the president. It was sort of embargoed. I've never understood why a demonstration wasn't a more obvious option. I mean, it was the fear that it it wouldn't work. And yes, because they didn't know, and and they had only a very few weapons at that time, two or three. There were a lot of but that's, again, a story that's still to be figured out, and I think the people like von Neumann carried a lot of that to the grave with them. But Edward Teller's answer to the Solar petition was, I'd love to sign your petition, but I think his exact words were, the things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of fiddling with politics will save our souls. That's pretty much an exact quote. Yeah. So I think Teller was first. Teller was another one of these Hungarian mutants, along with von Neumann, and the two of them really inspired the continued progress past a fission weapon and on to a fusion one, and computation was an absolutely necessary condition of that progress. So the story of the birth of the computer is largely, or at least the growth of our power in building computers is largely the story of the imperative that we felt to build the age bomb. Right. And what's weird is that we're sort of stuck with it. Like it's. You know, for 60 years, we've been stuck with this computational architecture that was developed for this very particular problems that do numerical hydrodynamics to to solve this hydrogen bomb question, to to know the the question was, would the Russians they knew the Russians were working on it because von Neumann had worked intimately with Klaus Fuchs. It turned out to be a Russian spy. So they knew the Russians sort of knew everything. They did. But the question was, was it possible? And you needed computers to figure that out, and they got the computer working, and then now, 67 years later, our computers are still exact copies of that particular machine they built to do that job. It's a very none of those people would I think they would find it incomprehensible if they if they came back today and saw that, you know, we hadn't really made any architectural improvements. Is this a controversial position at all in computer circles, or is this acknowledged that the von Neumann architecture, I think it is still called, we got stuck in this legacy paradigm, which is by no means necessarily the best for building computers. Yeah. No, they knew it wasn't. Even by the time Alan Turing came to Princeton, he was working on completely different kinds of computation. He was already sort of bored with the Turing machine. He was interested in much more interesting sort of nondeterministic machines. And the same with von Neumann. Long before that project was finished, he was thinking about other things. What's interesting about von Neumann is he only has one patent, and the one patent he took out was for a completely non von Neumann computer that IBM bought from him for $50,000. Another strange story that hasn't quite, I think, been figured out. Presumably, that was when $50,000 really meant something was an enormous amount of money, just a huge amount of money. They all wanted to build different kinds of computers, and if they had lived, and I think they would have. In your contribution to this book, you talk about the prospect of analog versus digital computing. Make that intelligible to the non computer scientist. Yes. So there are really two very different kinds of computers. Again, back to touring it in sort of a mathematical sense. There are continuous functions that vary continuously, which is sort of how we perceive time or the frequency of sound or those sorts of things. And then there are discrete functions of sort of ones and zeros and bits that took over the world. And Alan Turing gave this very brilliant proof of what you could do with a purely digital machine. But both Alan Turing and von Neumann were almost ends their lives obsessed with the fact that nature doesn't do this. Nature does this in our genetic systems. We use digital coding because digital coding is, as Shannon showed us, is so good at error correction. But continuous functions and analog computing are better for control. All control systems in nature, all nervous systems, the human brain, the brain of a fruit fly, the brain of a mouse, those are all analog computers, not digital. There's no digital code in the brain. And von Neumann wrote a whole book about that that people have misunderstood. I guess you could say that whether or not a neuron fire is a digital signal, but then the analog component is downstream of that, just the different synaptic weights. Right. But there's no code with a logical meaning. The complexity is not in the code. It's in the topology and the connections of the network. Everybody knew that you could take a part of brain. You don't find any sort of digital code. Now, we're sort of obsessed with this idea of algorithms, which is what Alan Turing gave us. But there are no algorithms in a nervous system or a brain. That's a much, much sort of higher level function that comes later. Well, so you introduced another personality here and a concept. So let's just do a potted bio. And Claude Shannon and this notion that digitizing information was somehow of value with respect to error correction. Yes, what Claude Shannon's great contribution was sort of modern information theory, which you can make a very good case. He actually took those ideas from Norbert Weiner, who was explaining them to him during the war. But it was Shannon who published a great manifesto on that, proving that you can sort of communicate with reliable accuracy, given any arbitrary amount of noise by using digital coding, and that none of our computers would work without that. The fact that basically your computer is a communication device and has to communicate these hugely complicated states from one fraction of a microsecond to the next billions of times a second. And the fact that we do that perfectly is due to Shannon's theory and his model of how. How can you do that in an accurate way? Is there a way to make that intuitively understandable why that would be so? I mean, what what I picture is like cogs in a gear, where it's like you're either all in one slot or you're all out of it. And so any looseness of fit keeps reverting back to you fall back into the well of the gear or you slip out of it. Whereas it's something that's truly continuous. That is to say, analog admits of errors that are undetectable because you're kind of sliding off a more continuous smoother surface. Do you have that's a very good way to explain it. Now it has this fatal flaw that you sort of there's always a price for everything, so you can get this perfect digital accuracy where you can make sure that every bit, billions of bits and every bit is in the right place. Your software will work. But the fatal flaw is that if for some reason a bit isn't in the right place, then the whole machine grinds to a halt, whereas the analog machine will keep going. It's much more robust against failure. So are you in touch with people who are pursuing this other line of building intelligent machines now? What does analog computation look like circa 2019? Well, it's coming at us from in two directions. There's bottom up and there's sort of top down. And the bottom up is actually extremely interesting. And I'm professionally not a computer scientist, I'm a historian. I look at the past, but occasionally I get dragged into a meeting a couple of years ago that was actually held at intel. You'll have a meeting like that and they like the voice of a historian there, so I get to go. And this was an entire meeting of people working on building analog chips from the bottom up, using the same technology we use to build digital computers, but to build completely different kinds of chips that actually do analog processing on them. And that's extremely exciting. I think it's going to change the world the same way the microprocessor changed the world. We're sort of at the stage where like we were when we had the first four bit calculator you could buy and then suddenly somebody figured out how to play a game with it, the whole thing happened. So that's from the bottom up, some of these chips are going to do very interesting things like voice recognition or smell things like that. Of course, the big driver sort of killer app is drones, which is sort of the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb. That's what's driving this stuff. And self driving cars and cell phones and then from the top down is a whole another thing. And that's the part where I think we're sort of missing something that if you look at the sort of internet as a whole, or the whole computational ecosystem, particularly on the commercial side, enormous amount of the interesting computing we're doing now is back to analog computing where we're competing with continuous functions. It's pulse frequency coded. Something like Facebook or YouTube doesn't care the file that somebody clicks on, they don't care what the code is, they just care. The meaning is in the frequency that it's connected to very much the same way a brain or a nervous system works. So if you look at these large companies, facebook or Google or something, actually they're large analog computers. Digital is not replaced, but another layer is growing on top of it. The same way that after World War II we had all these analog vacuum tubes and the oddballs like Alan Turing and von Neumann and even Nor Rainer figured out how to use the analog components to build digital computers. And that was the digital revolution. But now we're sort of in the bright, in the midst of another revolution where we are taking all this digital hardware and using it to build analog systems, but somehow people don't want to talk about that. Analog is still sort of seen as this archaic thing. I believe differently. In what sense is an analog system supervening on the digital infrastructure? Are there other examples that can make it more vivid for people? Yes, analog is much better. Like nature uses analog for control systems. So you take an example, like an obvious one would be Google Maps with live traffic. So you have all these cars driving around and people have their digital cell phone in the car and you sort of have this deal with Google, whereas Google will tell you what the traffic is doing and the optimum path if you tell Google how fast where you are and how fast you're moving. And that becomes an analog computer or an analog system where there is no digital model of all the traffic in San Francisco, the actual system is its own model. That sort of anointed definition of an organism or a complex system that it constitutes its own simplest behavioral description. There is no trying to formally describe what's going on. Makes it more complicated, not less. There's no way to simplify that whole system except the system itself. So you're using Facebook is very much the same way it would be impossible to build. You could build a digital model maybe of social life in a high school, but if you try to do social life and anything large, it becomes just collapses under its own complexity. So you just give everybody a copy of Facebook, which is a reasonably simple piece of code that lives on their mobile device, and suddenly you have a full scale model of the actual thing itself. The social graph is the social graph. And that's what's huge transition we've sort of, I think is at the root of some of the unease people are feeling about some of these particular companies is that suddenly used to be google was someplace where you would go to look something up. And now it really effectively is becoming what people think. And the big fears that something like Facebook becomes what your friends are and that can be good or bad, but it's a real just in an observational sense. It's something that's happening. So. What most concerns you about how technology is evolving at this point? Well, I wear different hats. There my other huge part. Most of my life was spent as a boat builder, and still I'm right here in the middle of a kayak building workshop and want nothing to do with computer. That's really why I started studying them and writing about them, because I was not against them, but quite suspicious. The big thing about artificial intelligence AI, it's not a threat, but the threat is that not that machines become more intelligent, but that people become less intelligent. So I spent a lot of time out in the wild with no computers at all, live in a treehouse for three years, and you can lose that sort of natural intelligence, I think, as a species, reasonably quickly if we're not careful. So that that's what worries me. I mean, obviously, the machines are clearly taking over there's no, if you look at the just the span of my life, from when von Neumann built that one computer to where we now almost biological growth of this technology. So as a member of Living Things, it's something to be concerned about. Do you know David Krakauer from the Santa Fe Institute? Yes, I don't know him, but I've met him and talked to him. Yeah, because he has a wrap on this very point where he distinguishes between I think his phrasing is cognitively competitive and cognitively cooperative technology. So there are forms of technology that compete with our intelligence on some level, and insofar as we outsource our cognition to them, we get less and less competent. And then there are other forms of technology where we actually become better, even in the absence of the technology. And so, unfortunately, the only example of the latter that I can remember is the one he used on the podcast was the Abacus, which apparently, if you learn how to use an advocates, well, you internalize it and you can do calculations you couldn't otherwise do in your head in the absence, even of the physical advocates. Whereas if you're relying on a pocket calculator or your phone or for arithmetic or you're relying on GPS, you're eroding whatever ability you had in those areas. So if we get our act together and all of this begins to move in a better direction or something like an optimal direction, what what does that look like to you? If I told you 50 years from now, we arrived at something just far better than any of us were expecting with respect to this marriage of increasingly powerful technology with some regime that conserves our deepest values. How do you imagine that looking? Well, yeah, it's certainly possible, and I guess that's where I would be slightly optimistic in that my knowledge of human culture goes way back and we grew up as a species. And speaking of just all humanity, most of our history was among animals who were bigger and more powerful than we were and things that we completely didn't understand. And we sort of made up our not religions, but just views of the world that we couldn't control everything. We had to live with it. And I think in a strange way, we're kind of returning to that childhood of the species in a way that we're building these systems that we no longer have any control over and we, in fact, no longer even have any real understanding of. So we're sort of, in some ways, back to that world that we originally were quite comfortable with, where we're at, the power of things that we don't understand, sort of megafauna. And I think that could be a good thing, it could be a bad thing. I don't know, but it doesn't surprise me. And personally, I'm interested if you take back why we're here, which is John's book, almost everyone in that book is talking about domesticated artificial intelligence. I mean, they're talking about commercial systems, products that you can buy, things like that. Personally, I'm sort of a naturalist, and I'm interested in wild AI, what evolves completely in the wild, out of human control completely. And that's a very interesting part of the whole sphere that doesn't get looked at that much. The focus now is so much on marketable captive AI, self driving cars, things like that. But it's the wild stuff that to me, that's like, I'm not I'm not afraid of bad AI. But I'm afraid. I'm very afraid of good AI. The kind of AI where some ethics board decides what's good and what's bad. I don't think that's what's going to be really important. But don't you see the possibility that so what we're talking about here is increasingly powerful AI. So increasingly competent AI. But those of us who are worried about the prospect of building what's now called AGI artificial general intelligence that proves bad is just based on the assumption that there are many more ways to build AGI that is not ultimately aligned with our interests than there are ways to build it perfectly aligned with our interests. Which is to say, we could build the megafauna that tramples us perhaps more easily than we could build the megafauna that lives side by side with us in a durably, benign way. You don't share that concern? No, I think that's extremely foolish and misguided to think that we can I mean, sort of by definition, real AI. You won't have any control over. I mean, this sort of idea that, oh, we, we there's some that's again, why I think there's this enormous mistake that thinking it's all based on algorithms. I mean, real AI won't be based on algorithms. So there's this misconception that happened back to when they built those first computers that they needed programmers to run. So this view is that while the programmers are in control, but if you have non algorithmic, there is no program by definition, you don't control it. And to expect control is absolutely foolish. But I think it's much better to be realistic and assume that you won't have control. So then why isn't your bias here one of the true council of fear, which says we shouldn't be building machines more powerful than we are? Well, we probably shouldn't, but we are. I mean, the fact is we've done it. It's not something that we're thinking about, it's something we've been doing for a long time and it's probably not going to stop. And then the point is to be realistic about and maybe optimistic that humans have not been the best at controlling the world and something else could well be better. But this illusion that we are going to program artificial intelligence is, I think, provably wrong. I mean, Alan Turing would have proved that wrong. That was how he got into the whole thing in the beginning, was proving this statement called the in Shining Problem. Whether by any systematic way to look at a string of code and predict what it's going to do, you can't. It baffles me that people don't sort of somehow we've been so brainwashed by this. The digital revolution was so successful. It's amazing how it has sort of clouded everyone's thinking. They don't think of if you talk to biologists, of course, they know that very well. People who actually work with brains of frogs or mice, they know it's not digital. Why people think more intelligent things would be digital. Again, it's sort of baffling. How did that sort of take over the world, that thought? Yeah. It does seem, though, that if you think the development of truly intelligent machines is synonymous with machines, that not only can we not control, but we on some level can't form a reasonable expectation of what they will be inclined to do. There's the assumption that there's some way to launch this process that is either provably benign in advance or so. I'm looking at the book now, and the person there who I think has thought the most about this is Stuart Russell, and he's just trying to think of a way in which AI can be developed where its master value is to continually understand in a deeper and more accurate way what we want. Right, so, and what we want can obviously change, and it can change in dialogue with this now superintelligent machine, but its value system is in some way durably anchored to our own because its concern is to get our situation the way we want it. Right. But all the most terrible things that have ever happened in the world happened because somebody wanted them. There's no safety in that. I admire Stuart Russell, but we disagree on this sort of provably good AI. But I guess at least what you're doing there is collapsing it down to one fear rather than the other. The fear that provably benign AI or provably obedient AI could be used by bad people toward bad ends. That's obviously a fear. But the greater fear that many of us worry about is that developing AGI in the first place can't be provably benign and we will find ourselves in relationship to something far more powerful than ourselves that doesn't really care about our well being in the end. Right. And that's again, sort of the world we used to live in and I think we can make ourselves reasonably comfortable there, but we no longer become the classic religious view. There are humans and there's God and there's only nothing but angels in between. That can change nothing but angels and devils in between now. Right. North Weiner sort of the last thing he published before well, we have to publish after he died. But I mean, there's a line in there which I think gets it right, that the world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our own intelligence. Not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be weighted upon by our robot slaves. Those are the two sort of paths so many people want. Some of the cars are going to drive us around and be our slaves. It's probably not going to happen that way. On that dire note. It's not a dire note. I mean, it could be a good thing. We've been the sort of chief species for a long time and it could be time for something else, but at least be realistic about it. Don't have this sort of childish view that everything's going to be obedient to us. That hasn't worked. And I think it was did a lot of harm to the world that we had that view. Again, one of the signs of any real artificial intelligence would immediately be intelligent enough not to reveal its existence to us. That would be the first smart thing it would do, would be not reveal itself. The fact that AI has not revealed itself to me is no, that's zero evidence that it doesn't exist. I would take it the other way that if it existed, I would expect it not to reveal itself unless it's so much more powerful than we are that it perceives no cost and it reveals itself by merely steamrolling over us. Well, there would be a cost. I think it's sort of sort of faith is better than proof. You can see where I'm going with that, but it's not necessarily malevolent. This is likely to be benevolent as malevolent. Okay, so I have a few bonus questions for you, George. These can be short form. If you had one piece of advice for someone who wants to succeed in your field and you can describe that field however you like, what would it be? Okay, well, I'm a historian when I became a boat builder. And so the advice in all those fields is just specialize and they find something and become obsessed with it. I became obsessed with the kayaks that the Russians adopted when they came to Alaska. And then I became obsessed with how computing really happened. And if you are obsessed with one little thing like that, you immediately become you can very quickly know more than anybody else, and that helps to be successful. What, if anything, do you wish you'd done differently in your twenty s? Thirty s or forty s? I mean, you can't you can't replay that tape. I wish well, I can be very clear about that. I wish in my twenty s I had gone to the Aleutian Islands earlier while while more of the old time kayak builders were still alive and and kind of interviewed and learned from them and then very much the same in my 30. All these projects. I did go find the surviving Project Orion people and technicians and physicists and interviewed them. But I should have done that earlier. And the same with computing. In my forty s I could have interviewed a lot more people who really were there at that important time. I sort of caught them, but almost too late. And I wish I had done that sooner. Ten years from now. What do you think you'll regret doing too much of or too little of at this point in your life? Probably regret not getting out more up the coast again, which is what I'm trying to do. It's what I'm working very diligently at. But I keep getting distracted. You got to get off the podcast and get into the kayak. Yeah, we could be doing this from Orca lab. They have a good internet connection. That's the beautiful thing that you can do this. The other thing I would say is a side, but I grew up since a young teenager in Canada where the country was united by Radio Canada. People didn't get newspapers, but everybody listened to one radio channel. In a way, podcasts are again back to that past where we're all listening to the radio again. And I think it's a great thing. What negative experience, one you would not wish to repeat, has most profoundly changed you for the better. I very nearly choked to death. Literally the only time I've had a true near death experience. Seeing the tunnel of light and reliving my whole life and not only thinking about my daughter and other profound things, but thinking how stupid this was. This guy who had kayak to Alaska six times with no life jacket, dies in a restaurant on Columbus Avenue in New York, and John Brockman saved my life, ran out and came back with a New York City off duty fireman who literally saved my life. Wow. I'm so glad I asked that question. I had no idea of that story. Learn Heimlich maneuver dr. Heimlich really did something great for the world. Fascinating. We may have touched this in a way, but maybe there's another side to this. What most worries you about our collective future? Yes, kind of what I said, that we lose our we lose all these skills and intelligences that we've built up over such a long period of time. The ability to survive in the wilderness and understand animals and respect them. I think that's a very sad thing, that we're losing that and, of course, and losing the wildlife itself. If you could solve just one mystery as a scientist or historian or journalist, however you want to come at it, what would it be? One mystery? Well, one of them would be one. We just talked about cetacean communication, what's really going on with these whales communicating in the ocean. That's something I think we could solve, but we're not looking at it in the right way. If you could resurrect just one person from history and put them in our world today and give them the benefit of a modern education, who would you bring back? Probably most of the people I'm interested in. History sort of had extremely good education. You're talking about john von Neumann and Alan Turin. You're right. Yeah. And live notes. I mean, he was very well lately. The character in my project I've been working on lately was kind of awful, but fascinating was Peter the Great. He was so obsessed with science and things like that. So I think to have brought him, if he could come back and it might be a very dangerous thing, but he sort of wanted to learn so much and was again preoccupied by all these terrible things and disasters that were going on at the time. What are you doing on Peter the Great? I've been writing this very strange book where it kind of starts with him and Leibniz. They go to the hot springs together, and they basically stop drinking alcohol for a week. And Leibniz convinces him wants him to support building digital computers, but he's not interested. Computer thing failed. But what Leibniz did convince him was to launch a voyage to America. So that's how the Russians came to Alaska, became the Bearing Turico voyage. But it all starts in this hot springs where they can't drink for a week. So they're just drinking mineral water and talking. There is a great biography on Peter To the Great, isn't there? Is there one that you recommend? Several. I wouldn't know which one to recommend, but again, he's both. Why he's peter to grade. Because he's been well studied. His relationship with Liveness fascinates me, and there's just a lot there we don't know. But kind of amazing how this sort of obscure mathematician becomes very close to this great leader of a huge part of the world. Okay, last question. The Jurassic Park question. If we are ever in a position to recreate the trex, should we do it? I would say yes. But this comes up as a much more real question. With the woolly mammoths and these other animals, the stellar sea cow. There's another one we could maybe resurrect. Yeah, I've had these arguments with Stewart Brand at George Church who are realistic about, could we do it? I would say yes. Don't expect it to work, but certainly worth trying. What are their biases? Do Stuart and George say we should or shouldn't do this? Yeah, if you haven't talked to them, definitely. That would be a great program to go to that debate. The question more is, if you can recreate the animal, does that recreate the species? One of the things they're working on it, I think, trying to build a park in Kamchatka or somewhere over there in Siberia so that if you did recreate the wooly mammoth, they would have an environment to go live in. So to me, that's actually the payoff. The payoff to recreating the wooly mammoth is that would force us to create a better environment, same as we did. Buffalo are coming back and we should bring the antelope back. It's sort of the American cattle industry that sort of wrecked the great central heart of America that could easily come back into the grasslands it once was. Well, listen, George, it's been fascinating. Thank you for your contribution to this book and thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. It's a very interesting book. There's short chapters which just makes it very easy. Yeah, it's a sign of the times, but a welcome one. I am here with Alison Gopnik. Alison, thank you for coming on the podcast. Glad to be here. So we are the the occasion of our conversation is the release of John Brockman's book possible Minds 25 Ways of Looking at AI. And I'm sure there'll be other topics we might want to touch, but as this is our jumping off point, first give me your background. How would you summarize your intellectual interests at this point? Well, I began my career as a philosopher and I'm still half appointed in philosophy at Berkeley. But for 30 years or so, more than that, I guess now I've been looking at young children's development and learning to really answer some of these big philosophical questions. Specifically, the thing that I'm most interested in is how do we come to have an accurate view of the world around us when the information we get from the world seems to be so concrete in particular and so detached from the reality of the world around us? And that's a problem that people in philosophy of science raise. It's a problem that people in machine learning raise. And I think it's a problem that you can explore particularly well by looking at young kids who, after all, are the people who we know in the universe who are best at solving that particular problem. And for the past 20 years or so, I've been doing that in the context of thinking about computational models, of how that kind of learning about the world is possible for anybody, whether it's a scientist or an artificial computer or computational system or again, the best example we have, which is young children. Right. Well, we'll get into the difference between how children learn and how our machines do, or at least our current machines do. But just a little more on your background. You did your PhD in philosophy or in psychology? I actually did my first degree, my BA. Honors philosophy, and then I went to Oxford to actually wanting to do both philosophy and psychology. I worked with Jerome Bruner in psychology, and I spent a lot of time with the people in philosophy. And my joke about this is that after a year or two in Oxford, I realized that there was one of two communities that I could spend the rest of my life with. One community was of completely disinterested seekers after truth who wanted to find out about the way the world really was more than anything else. And the other community was somewhat spoiled, narcissistic, egocentric creatures who needed to be taken care of by women all the time. And since the first community was the babies and the second community was the philosophers, I'd be better off spending the rest of my life hanging out with the babies. Right? That's a little unfair to the philosophers, but it does make the general point, which is that I think a lot of these big philosophical questions can be really well answered by looking at a very neglected group in some ways, namely babies and young children. I PhD in the end in experimental psychology with Jerome Bruner, and then I was in Toronto for a little while and then came to Berkeley, where, as I say, I'm in the psychology department but also affiliated in philosophy. And I've done a lot of collaborations with people doing computational modeling at the same time. So I really think of myself as being a cognitive scientist in the sense that cognitive science puts together ideas about computation, ideas about psychology, and ideas about philosophy. Yeah, well, if you're familiar with me at all, you'll understand that I don't respect the boundaries between these disciplines really at all. I think that it's just interesting how someone comes to a specific question. But whether you're doing cognitive science or neuroscience or psychology or philosophy of mind, this can change from sentence to sentence or it's just really depends on what building in a university campus you're standing in. Well, I think I've tried and I think to some extent succeeded in actually doing that in my entire career. So I publish in philosophy books and collaborate with philosophers. I had a wonderful project where we had half philosophers who were looking at causality, people like Buckleymore and James Woodward and Chris Hitchcock, and then half developmental psychologists and computational cognitive scientists. So people like people like me. Like Josh Tennenbaum at MIT, like Tom Griffiths. And that was an incredibly powerful and successful interaction. And the truth is, I think one of my side interests is David Hume. And if you look at people like David Hume or Barkley or Descartes or the great philosophers of the past, they certainly wouldn't have seen boundaries between the philosophy that they were doing and psychology and empirical science. Let's start with the AI. Question and then get into children and other areas of common interest. So perhaps you want to summarize how you contributed to this volume and your angle of attack on this really resurgent interest in artificial intelligence. It was this period where it kind of all went to sleep. And I remember being blindsided by it, just thinking, well, AI. Hadn't really panned out. And then all of a sudden, AI. Was everywhere. How have you come to this question? Well, as I say, we've been doing work looking at computational modeling and cognitive science for a long time. And I think that's right. For a long time, even though there was really interesting theoretical work going on about how we could represent the kinds of knowledge that we have as human beings computationally, it didn't translate very well into actual systems that could actually go out and do things more effectively. And then what happened, interestingly, in this new AI. Spring wasn't really that there was some great new killer, app new idea about how the mind worked. Instead, what happened was that some ideas that had been around for a long time, since the 80s basically these ideas about neural networks and in some ways, much older ideas about associative networks. For example, suddenly when you had a whole lot of data the way you do with the internet. And when you also had a whole lot of compute power with good old Moore's law running through running through its cycles, those ideas became very practical. So that you could actually take a giant data set of all the images that had been put on the net, for example, and train that data set to discriminate between images. Or you could take the giant data sets of all the translations of French and English on the net, and you could use that to actually design a translation program. Or you could have something like alpha something like alpha zero that could just play millions and millions and millions of games of chess against itself, and then you could use that data set to figure out how to play chess. So the real change was not so much a kind of conceptual change about how we thought about the mind. It was this change in the capacities of computers. And I think to the surprise of everybody, including the people who were including the people who had designed the systems in the first place, it turned out that those ideas really could scale. And the big problem with computational cognitive science has always been not so much that finding good computational models for the mind, although that's a problem, but finding ones that could do more than just solve toy problems, ones that could deal with the complexity of real world kinds of knowledge. And I think it was surprising and kind of wonderful that these learning systems could actually turn out to work at a broad scale. And the other thing that, of course, was interesting was that not just in the history of AI, but in the history of philosophy, there's been this constant kind of pingponging back and forth between two ways to solve this big problem of knowledge, this big problem of how we can ever understand the world around us. And a way I like to put it is here's the problem. We seem to have all this abstract, very structured knowledge of the world around us. We seem to know a lot about the world and we can use that knowledge to make predictions and change the world. And yet it looks as if all that reaches us from the world are these patterns of photons at the back of our eyes and disturbances of air at our ears. And the question is always, how could you resolve that conundrum? And one way going back to Plato and Aristotle has been to say, well, a whole lot of it is built in in the first place, we don't actually have to learn that abstract structure. It's just there. Maybe it evolved. Maybe if you're Plato, it was in a past life. And then the other approach, going all the way back to Aristotle has been to say, well, if you just have enough data, if you just had enough stuff to learn, then you could develop this kind of abstract knowledge of the world. And again, going back to Plato and Aristotle, we kind of ping pong back and forth between those two approaches to trying to solve the problem. And sort of good old fashioned AI said, well, if we just, you know, famously, Roger Shank said, well, if we just had like a summer's worth of interns, we'll figure out all of our knowledge about the world, we'll write it all down and we'll program it into a computer. And that turned out not to be a very successful project. And then the alternative, the kind of neural net idea was, well, if we just have enough data and we have some learning mechanisms, then the learning mechanisms will just be able to pull out the information from the data. And that's kind of where we are now. That's the latest iteration in this back and forth between having building in knowledge and learning the knowledge from the data. Yeah. So what you've done there is you've sketched two different approaches to generating intelligence. One, I guess, could be considered top down and the other bottom up. And what AI has done of late, the great gains we see in image recognition and many other things is born of a process that really is aptly described as bottom up, where you take in an immense amount of data and do. What is essentially a statistical pattern recognition on it. And some of this can be entirely blind and black boxed, such that the humans who have written these programs don't even necessarily know how the machines are doing it. And yet, given enough processing power and enough data, we're now getting results that are human level and beyond for specific tasks. But of course, you make this point in your piece that we know this is not how humans learn, that there is there's some structure undoubtedly given to us by evolution that allows us to generalize on the basis of comparatively small amounts of data. And so this makes what we do non analogous to what our machines are doing. And I guess now both top down and bottom up approaches are being combined in AI. I guess one question I have for you is, is the difference between the way our machines learn and the way human brains learn just of temporary interest to us now? I mean, can you imagine us kind of blowing past this moment and building machines that we just, we know are developing their intelligence in a way that is totally unlike the way we do it biologically? And yet it is successful. It becomes successful on all fronts without our building any analogous process into them. And we just lose sight of the fact that it was ever interesting to compare the ways we do it. There's an effective way to do it in a brute force way, let's say bottom up on every front that will matter to us. Or do you think that there's some problems for which it will be impossible to generate true artificial intelligence unless we have a deeper theory about how biological systems do it? Well, I think we already can see that. So one of the interesting things is that there's this whole really striking revival of interest in AI among people in AI, in cognitive development, for example. And it's because we're starting to come up against the limits of this kind of pattern of having this technique of doing a lot of statistical inference from big data sets. So there are lots of examples, for instance, even if you're thinking about things like image recognition, where if you have something that looks like a German Shepherd, it'll recognize it as a German Shepherd. But if you just have something that to a human just looks like a Mess that has the same textural superficial features as the German Shepherd, it will also recognize it as a German Shepherd. If it sees a car that's suspended in the air and flooded, it will report this is a car parked by the side of the road, and so forth. There's a zillion examples that are like that. In fact, there's a whole kind of area of these adversarial examples where you can show that the machine is not actually making the right decision and it's because it's only paying attention to the sort of superficial features, and in particular, the machines are very bad at making generalizations. So even if you taught, teach AlphaZero how to play chess, and then you said, all right, we're going to just change the rules a little bit. So now the rooks are going to, are going to be able to move diagonally, and you're going to want to capture the queen instead of the king. That kind of difference, which for a human who had learned chess, would be really easy to adjust to for the more recent AI systems, leads to this problem they call catastrophic forgetting, which is having to relearn everything all over again when you get a new data set. So in principle, of course, there's no, in principle, reason why we couldn't have an intelligence that operated completely differently from the way that, say, human children learned. But human children are a demonstration case of the capacities of an intelligence, presumably in some sense a computational intelligence, because that's the best way we have of understanding how human brains work. But that's the best example we have of a system that actually really works to be intelligent. And nothing that we have now is really even in the ballpark of being able to do the same kinds of things that those systems, that system can do. So in principle, it might be that we would figure out some totally different way of being intelligent, but at the moment, the best case we have is a four year old human child. And we're very far from being able to simulate that. I think part of it is if people had just labeled the new techniques by saying statistical inference from large data sets instead of calling it artificial intelligence, I think we would be having a very different kind of conversation. Even though statistical inference from large data sets turns out to be an incredibly powerful tool, more powerful than we might have thought, which should remind people how alarmingly powerful it is in narrow cases. And when you take something like Alpha Zero, what happened there was fairly startling because you have a, an algorithm that is fairly generic in that it, you know, can be taught to play both a game like Go and a game like chess, and presumably other games as well. And we have this history of developing better and better chess engines. And finally the human grandmaster ability was conquered. I forget when that was 90, 97 or so when Gary Casperov lost famously. And ever since, there's just been this incremental growth in the power of these machines. And what AlphaZero did was create again a far more general algorithm, which over the course of 4 hours, taught itself to be better than any chess engine ever. So, I mean, you're taking the totality of human knowledge about this 2000 year old game, all of the engineering talent that went into making this better and better over decades. And here we found an algorithm which turned loose on the problem beat every machine and every person in human history. Essentially, when you extrapolate that kind of process to anything else, we could conceivably care about the recognition of emotion in the human face and voice. Say again, coming at this not in an AGI way where we've cracked the code of what intelligence is on some level and built it from the bottom up, but in a piecemeal way where we take the 100 most interesting cognitive problems and find brute force methods to crack them. It's amazing to consider how quickly a solution can appear. And once it does and this is the point I've always made about so called human level intelligence. For any ability that we actually do find an AI solution, even a narrow one, in the case of chess or arithmetic, once that solution is found, you're never talking about human level intelligence. It's always superhuman. So the moment we get anything like a system that can behave or learn like a four year old child, it won't be at human level even for a second, because you'd have to degrade all of its other abilities that you could cobble together to support it. You wouldn't make it worse than your iPhone as a calculator. Right, so it's already going to be superhuman. Yeah, but I mean, you know, I think there's a question, though, about exactly what different kinds of problems require and how you solve those problems. And I think an idea that is it's pretty clearly there in computer science and neuroscience is that there's trade offs between different kinds of properties of a solution that aren't just because we happen to be biological humans, but are built into the very nature of trying to solve the problem. And in some ways, the most striking thing about the progress of AI all through has been what people sometimes call Marovich's Paradox, which is that actually the things that really impress us as humans are the things that we're not very good at, like doing arithmetic or playing chess. So I think of these sometimes as being like the corridors of nerd mckeesmo so the things that you have to just be have a particular kind of ability that most people don't have and then really train it up to do really well. It turns out those things are things that computers are good at doing. On the other hand, if you might be an example I give is my grandson, who's three, plays something that we call addy chess. His name is Atticus. So how do you play addy chess? Well, the way you play attic chess is you take all the pieces off the board and then you throw them in the wastebasket and then you pick them up out of the waistbasket and you put them more or less in the same place as they were in before. And then you take them all off and throw them in the waste basket again. And it turns out that addy chess is actually a lot harder than Grand Master chess, because addy chess means actually manipulating objects in the real physical world so that you have to figure wherever it is that that piece. Lands in the waste basket. Whatever orientation it is, I can pick it up and perform the motor actions that are necessary to get it on the board. And that turns out to be incredibly difficult. If you go and see any robotics lab, they have to put big walls around the robots to keep them from destroying each other, even trying to do incredibly simple tasks like picking up objects off of a tray. And there's another thing about Eddie chess that makes it really different from what even very, very powerful artificial intelligence can do, which is, as you said, what these new systems can do is you can take what people sometimes call an objective function. You can say to them, look, this is what I want you to do, given this set of input. I want you to produce this set of output, given this set of moves, I want you to get the highest score, or I want you to win at this game. And if you specify that, it turns out that these neural net learning mechanisms are actually remarkably good at solving those problems without a lot of additional information, except just here's a million examples of the input, and here's a million examples of the output. But of course, what human beings are doing all the time is going out and making their own objectives. They're going out and creating new objectives, creating new ideas, creating new goals. Goals that are not the goals that anyone has created before. Even if they might look kind of silly, like playing at a chess and in some way that we really don't understand at all, there's some sense of a kind of progress in those goals that were capable of setting ourselves, goals that were better than the goals that we had before. But again, that's not even kind of in the ballpark. It's not like, oh, if we just made the machines more powerful, then they would be able to, to do those things, too. They would be able to go out and physically manipulate the world, and they would be able to, and they would be able to set novel objectives that's kind of not even in the same, in the same category. And as I say, I think an interesting idea is that there might really be trade offs between some of the kinds of things that humans are really good at. Like, for instance, taking very complicated, high dimensional spaces of solutions, having to think of incredibly wide range of possibilities versus, say, being able to do something really quickly and efficiently when it's well specified. And I think there's reasons to think those things. You might think, well, okay, if you could do the thing that's really well specified and just do that better and better, then you're going to be able to solve the more complicated problem and the less well defined problem. And I think there's actually reasons to believe that that's not true, that there's real trade offs between the kinds of things you need to do to solve those two kinds of problems. Yeah, well, so the paradox you point to is interesting and is a key to how people's expectations will be violated when automation begins to replace human labor to a much greater degree than it has. Because people tend to expect that menial jobs will be automated first, or lower skilled lower, not famously high cognition jobs will be the first to be automated away. But as you point out, many of the things that we find it amazing that human beings can do are easier to automate than the things that virtually any human being can do, which is to say it's easier to play grand master level chess than it is to walk across the room if you're a computer. So your oncologist and your local mathematician are likely to lose their jobs to AI before your plumber will. Just a harder task to move physically into a space and manipulate objects and make decisions across tasks of that sort. So there's a lot that's counterintuitive here, I guess. My sense, however, is that, one, you're not at all skeptical, are you, that intelligence is substrate independent, ultimately, that we could find some way of instantiating humanlike intelligence in a non biological system? Is there something potentially magical about having a computer made of meat from your point of view or not? Well, I think the answer is that we don't really know. Right? So again, the one we have a kind of species of one or maybe species of a couple of examples of systems that can really do this and the ones that we know about are indeed biological. Now, I think the most it's rather striking, and I think maybe not appreciated enough, that this idea that really comes with Turing, the idea of thinking about a human mind as being a computational system, that's just been an incredibly productive idea that's ended up enabling us to make really, really good predictions about many, many things that human beings do. And we don't have another idea that's as good at making predictions or providing explanations for intelligence as that idea. Now, again, maybe it'll turn out that there is something that we're missing that is contributing something important about biology. But I think at the moment, the kind of computational theory of the mind is the best one that's on the table. It's the one that's been most successful just in empirical, scientific terms. So, for instance, when we're looking at young children, if we say, are they doing something like Bayesian inference of structured causal systems? That's a computational idea. We can actually say, okay, well, if they're doing that, then if we give them this kind of problem, they should solve it this way. And sure enough, it turns out that over and over again, that's what they do, kind of independently of knowing very much about what exactly is going on in their brains when they're doing that. So again, it could be that this gap between the kinds of problems that we can solve computationally now and the kinds of problems that every four year old are solving, it could be that that's got something to do with having a biological substrate. But I don't think that's kind of the most likely hypothesis given the information that we have now. I think actually one of the interesting things is the problem is not so much trying to figure out what our representations and rules are, what's going on in our head, what the computations look like. The problem is what people in computer science call a search problem. So the problem is, really, given all the possible things we could believe about the world, or given all the possible solutions we could have to a problem, or given all the possible things that we could do in the world, how is it that we end up converging? How is it that we end up picking ones that are, as it were, the right ones, rather than all the other ones that we could consider? And that I think that's at the moment, that's the really deep, serious problem. So we kind of know how a computational system could be instantiated in a brain. We have ideas about how neurons could be configured so they could do computations. We kind of figured that part out. But the part about how we take all these possibilities and end up narrowing in on ones that are relatively good, relatively true, relatively effective, I think that's the really next deep problem. And looking at kids can help us to think about looking at how kids solve that problem we know that they do solve. It could help to let us make progress. Another name for this is common sense. What computers are famously bad at is, as you say, narrowing the search space of solutions to rule out the obviously ridiculous and detrimental ones. Right? This is where all the cartoons of AI apocalypse come in. The idea that you're going to design a computer to remove the possibility of spam and an easy way to do that is just kill all the people who would send spam, right? So obviously this is nobody's actual fear. It just points out that unless you build the common sense into these machines, they're not going to have it necessarily for free. The more and more competent they get at solving specific problems. But see, in a way it's even worse than that, because one thing you might say is, well, okay, we have some idea about what our everyday common sense is like. We have these principles. So if we could just sort of specify those things enough so we could take our everyday ideas about the mind, for example, or our everyday ideas about how the physical world works and we could build those into the computer. That would help. And it is true that the systems that we have now don't even have that. But the interesting thing about people is that we can actually discover new kinds of common sense. So we can actually go out in the world and say that thing that we thought about how the physical world worked, it's not true actually. We can have action at a distance, or even worse, it turns out that actually space and time can be translated into one another, which is certainly not anything that anyone intuitively thinks about how physics works. Or for that matter, we can say that thing that we thought that we knew about morality. It turns out that no, actually, when we think about it more carefully, something like gay marriage is not something that should be perceived as being immoral, even though lots and lots of people for a long time had thought that that was true. So we have this ability to go out into the world and both see the world in new ways and actually change the world invent new environments, invent new niches, invent new worlds, and then figure out how to thrive in those new worlds and look around the space of possibilities and create yet other worlds and repeat. So even if we could build in sort of what in 2019 is everybody's understanding about the world or build in the understandings about the world that we had in the police to scene, that still wouldn't capture this ability that we have to search the space to consider new possibilities, to think about new things that aren't there. And let me give you some examples. For instance, the sort of things that people are concerned about, I think legitimately concerned about, that AI could potentially do is, for example, you could give the kind of systems that we have now examples of all of the verdicts of guilty and innocent that had gone on in a court over a long period of time, and then get it to give it a new example and say, okay, how would this case be judged? Will it be judged innocent or will it be judged guilty? And the systems that we have now could probably do a pretty decent job of doing that and certainly changes to those systems. It's easy to imagine an extension of the systems we have now that could solve that kind of problem. But of course, what we can do is to say, you know what all that law? That's really not right, that isn't really capturing what we want. That's not enabling people to thrive now. We should think of a different way of thinking about making these kinds of judgments. And that's exactly the sort of thing that the current systems again, it's not just like if you gave them more data, they would be able to do that. They're not really even conceptually in the ballpark of being able to do that and that's probably a good thing. Now, I think it's important to say that, and I think you're going to talk to Stuart Russell who will make this point. These systems don't have to have anything like human level general intelligence to be really dangerous. Electricity is really dangerous. I just heard was talking to someone who made a really interesting point, which is about like, how did we invent circuit breakers? It turns out the insurance companies actually started insisting that people have circuit breakers on their electrical systems because houses were being set on fire. So electricity, which we now think of as being this completely benign thing we put on a switch and electricity comes out and none of us is sitting there thinking, oh my God, is our house about to burn down? That was only a very long, complicated process of regulation and legislation and work to get that to be other than a really, really dangerous thing. And I think that's absolutely true. Not about some theoretical, artificial general intelligence, but about the AI that we have now that it's a really powerful force. And like any powerful technology, we have to figure out ways of regulating it and having it make sense. But I don't think that's like a giant difference in kind from all the issues we've had about dealing with powerful technologies in the past. Yeah, I guess this issue of creativity and growth in intuitions is something I guess my intuitions divide from many people on this point because creativity is often held out as something that's fundamentally different, that our machines can't do this and we routinely do this. But in my view, creativity isn't especially creative in the sense that it clearly proceeds on the basis of rules we already have. And nothing is fundamentally new, down to the studs. Nothing that's meaningful is you can create something that essentially looks like noise, that is new, something that strikes us as insightful, meaningful, beautiful, is functioning on the basis of properties that our minds already acknowledge as relevant and are already using. And so you take something like, again, a simple case of a mathematical intuition that was fairly hard one and took thousands of years to emerge in someone's mind. But once you've got it, you sort of got it and it's really the same thing you're doing anyway, which is you take a triangle having 180 degrees on a flat plane, but you curve the plane and it can have more or less than that. And it's strange that it took so long to see that. But the scene of that doesn't strike me as fundamentally more mysterious in the fact that we can understand anything about triangles in the first place. I think I would just set that on its head in the sense that, again, this is one of the real advantages of studying young children is that when you say, well, it's no more mysterious than understanding triangles in the first place, people have actually tried to figure out how is it that we can understand triangles? How is it that children can understand basic things about how number works or in the work that I've done, how do children understand basic things about the causal structure of the world, for example? And it turns out that even very basic things that we take for granted, like understanding that you can believe something different from what I believe. For example, it's actually very hard to see exactly how it is that children are taking individual pieces and putting them together to putting them together to come to realizations about, say, how other people's minds work. And the problem is, if you're doing it backwards, once you know what the answer is, then you can say oh, I see. This is how you could put that together from pieces that you have in the world or from data that you have. But of course, if you're sort of doing it prospectively, then there's all sorts of incredibly large number of different other ways that you could have put together those pieces or you could have interpreted the data. And the puzzle is how is it that you came upon the one that was both new and interesting and wasn't just random. Now, again, I don't think there's any kind of giant reason why we couldn't solve that problem. But I do think that's looking at even something as simple as children figuring out basic things about how the world around them and the people around them work, that turns out to be a very tricky problem to solve. And one interesting thing, for example, that we found in our data, in our research is that in many respects children are actually better at coming to unlikely or new solutions than adults are. So again, this is this kind of trade off idea where actually the more you know in some ways, the more difficult it is for you to conceive of something new. We use a lot of bayesian ideas when we're trying to characterize what the children are doing. And one way you could think about it is that as your priors get to be more and more peaked, as you know, more and more as you're more and more confident about certain kinds of knowledge and that's a good thing, right? That's what lets you go out into the world and build things and make the world a better place. It gets to be harder and harder for you to conceive of new possibilities. And one idea that I've been arguing for is that you could think about the very fact of childhood as being a solution to this kind of explore exploit tension. This tension between exploring, being able to explore lots of different possibilities, even if they're maybe not very good, and having to narrow in on the possibilities that are really relevant to a particular problem. And again, that's the sort of thing that people or humans, over the course of their life, history and culture seem to be pretty good at doing in a way that we don't even really have a good start on thinking about how a computational system could do that. Now we're working on it. I mean, we're hoping that we could get a computational system that could do that and we have some sort of have some ideas, but that's a dimension that really, really differentiates what the current powerful AI systems can do and what every four year old can do. Yeah, no, I'm granting all of that. I guess I'm just putting the line at a different point because, again, people often hold out creativity and being able to form new goals and insights, intuitions, as though this were a uniquely human thing that was very difficult to understand how a machine could do. But as you point out, just being able to walk across the room is fairly miraculous from the point of view of how hard it is to instantiate in a robot and to ride a bicycle and to do things that kids routinely learn to do very early. My point is that once we crack that these fairly basic problems that evolution has solved for us and really for even non human animals in many cases, then we're talking about just incremental gains into something that is fundamentally beyond the human. I mean, because no one's putting the line that nobody says, well, yes, you know, you can you can might be able to build a machine that could run across a room like a human child and balance something on its finger. But you're never going to get something that can produce the creative genius of an Olympic athlete or a professional basketball player. But I don't, I mean, that's where I think the intuitions flip. I mean, once you, once you could build something that could move exactly like a person, then there is no limit to there's no example of human agility that will be out of sight at that point. And I think, I guess what I'm reacting to is that people seem to think different rules apply at the level of cognition and artistic creativity. Say, well, I think it's just an interesting empirical question. We're collaborating now on a big project with a bunch of people who are doing things in computer vision, for example. And that's another example where something that we think is very simple and straightforward. We don't even feel as if we do any effort to go out into the world and actually see the objects that are out there in the world. That turns out to be both extremely difficult and in some ways very mysterious that we can do that as well as we can. Not only do we identify images, but we can recognize that there's an object that's closer to me or an. Object that's further away from me, or that objects have texture, or that objects are really three dimensional. Those are all really, really challenging problems. And an interesting thought is that at a very high abstract level, it may be that we're solving some of those problems in the same way that enables us to solve some of these creativity problems. So let me give you an example. One of the things that the kids very characteristically do is do experiments, except that when they do experiments, we call it getting into everything they explore. They're not just sort of passively waiting for data to come to them. They can have a problem and actually go out and get the data that's relevant to that problem. Again, when they do that, we call it playing or getting into everything or making a mess, and we sit there and nod our heads and try and keep them from killing themselves when they're doing it. But that's a really powerful technique, a really powerful way of making progress, actually getting more information about what the structure of the world is like and then using it to change what you think about the world and then repeating by actually going out into the real world and getting data from the real world. And that's something that kids are very good at doing that seems to play a big role in our ability to do things like move around the world or do perform skilled actions. And again, that's something that, at least at the moment, isn't very characteristic of the way the machines work here's. Here's another nice example of something we're actually working on at Berkeley. So one of the things that we know about kids is their motivation and affect is that they're insatiably, curious. They just want to get as much information as they can about the world around them, and they're driven to go out and get information and especially get new information, which, again, is why just thinking about the way that we evolved isn't going to be enough to answer the problem. One of the things that's true about lots of creatures, but especially human children, is that they're curiosity driven. And in work that we've been doing with computer scientists at Berkeley, you can design an algorithm that, instead of, say, wanting to have a higher score, wants to have the predictions of its model be violated. So actually, when it has a model and things turn out to be wrong, instead of being depressed, it goes out and says, that's interesting. Let me try that again. Let me see what's going on with that little toy car that it's doing that strange thing. And you can show that a system that's got that kind of motivation can solve problems that your typical, say, reinforcement learning system can't solve. And that what we're doing, is actually comparing children and these curious AIS on the same problems to see the ways that the children are being curious and how that's related to the ways that the AIS are being curious. So I think you're absolutely right that the idea that the place where humans are going to turn out to be unique is in the great geniuses or the great artists or the great athletes. They're going to turn out to have some special sauce that the rest of us don't have, and that's going to be the thing that AI can't do. I think you're right that that's not really going to be true, that what those people are doing is an extension of the things that every two and three year old is equipped to do. But I also think that what the two and three year olds are equipped to do is going to turn out to be very different from at least what the current batch of AI is capable of doing. Yeah, well, I don't think anyone is going to argue there. Also, how do you think of consciousness in the context of this conversation? For me, I'll just give you one. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes, episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+There's so much here that's confusing. So let's first talk about what went wrong and what could have not gone wrong. Your whole podcast is about just having honest conversations about topics. It's offensive to your and my sense of justice. Do you actually care? How has my mind been fundamentally worked? So the topic today is the threat of nuclear war. Slow erosion of the social fabric, synthetic media revolution, collapse of our economy, the role of religion in public life, morality and moral disagreement. Breakdown of truth. I'm scared that us two in a room would egg each other on. You can't have a subtle argument anymore. There's no place for nuance. Everything has to be binary for the right people to agree and disagree. It's not a healthy place for society to be when everyone is afraid to say anything. I've learnt to exercise censorship on myself in a way that is deeply disturbing. I don't feel that I should have to. I appreciate who you are, really. And you elevated me and those ideas. I'll never forget you for it. We all danger during the Cold War, but blundering into a nuclear war and I believe that that is the same situation today and with at least the same likelihood today. You're so full of Christmas cheer today. I'm speaking with Robert Plumman here. I reached out to Jonathan Height, William J. Perry. I am here with Gabriel dance. Dartha Mukherjee david Miliband graham wood ricky Gervais steven fry james doe stone harris Michael. You all know a Ferrari. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one no housekeeping today. We will jump right into it. Today's episode is a conversation first had on Zoom for podcast subscribers with Gary Casparov, who perhaps needs no introduction. He's been on the podcast before. One of the greatest chess players of all time, world champion for many years. But in his more recent incarnation, he has been a tireless advocate for democracy and Western liberal values in his home country of Russia. And as you might imagine, he now has much to say about Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine. So we really cover the whole topic. We talk about how we got here, what the perception of the war is inside of Russia, the allegation that US and EU foreign policy is to blame, that NATO expansion has been too threatening. We talk about the perception of American weakness and how that might have provoked Putin. We notice in passing the otherwise unimaginable Republican support for Putin. We talk about the sanctions regime and how effective that may be. The extent to which Putin miscalculated in this war, whether he might be the victim of a popular uprising, whether the US and the EU should impose a no fly zone over Ukraine or insist upon regime change in Russia. And if we do either or both of those things, how we can avoid World War III. We talk about the role of China in all this and discuss the larger implications for the defense of the Western liberal order. Anyway, a useful and all too timely conversation. I think I may do some more of these live on Zoom, because you all seem to like that, and I hope you find the conversation useful. And now I bring you Gary Casparov. All right, well, just to remind everybody, this is a live recording of a podcast. So this is an opportunity for all of you to just watch us record a podcast. And I'm very happy that you're joining us. And I'm especially thankful to you, Gary, for taking the time to have this conversation with us, because I know you're inundated with demands on your time here. Many people know you as one of the greatest chess grand masters who's ever lived, and it's always fun to talk about that. But we've got other priorities now. Maybe remind us how you come to have such strong opinions on the topic. We're going to touch today. You for years have been politically active in and outside of Russia and a great advocate for democracy and Western liberal values. And you're working now with the Renewed Democracy Initiative and other orgs. Just tell us what you're doing on this front. I grew up in the Soviet Union, and I had my own experience living in unfree country and dealing with KGB that's every other Soviet citizen and of course, as being chess prodigy and top grandmaster and eventually world champion. So I was under very special attention of party officials and KGB operatives. And when I saw Vladimir Putin taking over at the end of 99, year 99 so I have to say I was stumped because during his glorious days of August revolution in the Soviet Union, august 9091, when the Jubilant crowds toppled the statue of the KGB founder Felix Derzinsky LBNCo Square in Moscow. I don't believe anybody could bet one, 2 million that in less than nine years, KGB lieutenant Colonel would be in charge of Russian affairs again. And it was not just about a KGB officer. Vladimir Putin was quite frank explaining his views of the world even before he became President of Russia, being a prime minister and hair apparent of Boris Yelsen, he spoke at the gathering of KGB officers in their headquarters, which was televised. And he said there were no former KGB officers. One KGB. Always KGB. He never tried to hide his sympathies for the Soviet Union. It's his famous phrase repeated many times. The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of 20th century. The first thing he did as the president of Russia is a restoration of Soviet national anthem and, of course, the war in Chechnya, carpet bombing of Grosby and other Chechen towns and villages, very mysterious explosions of apartment blocks in Moscow and other Russian cities as a pretext for this war. I didn't know what could have happened, but I knew that the guy could be a great danger for the world if given the chance. And every time he did something, that was a warning signal to me. I tried to communicate my concern to the rest of the world. And I think that it was modern enough to listen to Vladimir Putin in person. If nobody cared what Gary Kasparov or Boris Nemtsov said about Putin and repeatedly said Putin was our problem, but at one point it would be everybody's problem. But Putin himself at some point decided that he could express his views about the future of our planet in public. 15 years ago in Munich, at security conference in Europe, he talked openly to the world leaders about what he called fears of influence, returning to not even the 20th century. To the 19th century, where the big countries, big guys, as he said, would be in charge of all affairs and will dictate to smaller countries how to behave. And he believed that Russia, under his command, was entitled to control not just former Soviet Union, but Eastern Europe. It was within Russia's heritage rights. And every time that he did something to materialize his views, like attacking Republic of Georgia in 2008 or annexing Crimea in 2014, I thought that the world would wake up because he did it. And unfortunately, nothing happened. So basically, we are now in this in this tragic situation, and Ukrainians are paying with their blood every every not day, every second as we speak it's because for so many years, nobody wanted to take this threat seriously. We read history books about 1930s, and many of us, I guess, as myself, were surprised. How come that nobody could see the danger coming from Hitler. Because in 1933 was one story 34, another story, 35, 36, 37. But when I mentioned Hitler or just Berlin Olympic Games in 1936, compared them to 2014 Sochi Games, I was ostracized by international media saying, how could you compare anyone to Adele Hitler? And I said, Look, Hitler hitler is a monster with no comparison, but it's Hitler of 1941. 42 and onward. But in 1936 just read your newspapers. American, canadian. German. German. French. British. And he was treated differently. So again, dictators never ask why, so why not? And Putin attacked Ukraine now because he believed that he could get away with this crime, as he did many times in the past. And these are the Ukraine Putin said many times. Also, we just again, you don't have to take my word. Ukraine was not a real estate. According to Vladimir Putin, he believed that Ukraine basically belonged to Russia and could be split between Russia, maybe Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine. For him was something like Poland for Stalin, an obstacle on the way for their geopolitical plans. So what do you say to people who you hear from now, both on the left and the right, certainly in American politics, that there's been something provocative about US. And EU foreign policy, that NATO expansion is really the reason why Putin has done this? You have to sort of see it from his side and sympathize with his security concerns. We're hearing a fair amount about this, and I guess you might even just run through some recent presidents and just how their dithering has enabled Putin's sense that he could do this right? I mean, there's been something provocative about American weakness too. So I guess I've asked you two questions there. What's the role played by NATO and NATO expansion? And what's the role played by just the perception of American and European weakness and internal division? I think we're dealing with two separate questions. So one is more strategic, one is more tactical. So I use the chess metaphors. So I'm always reluctant to use chess metaphors discussing Putin. I prefer poker. But in this case, let's start with this. The argument about NATO expansion and provocative foreign policy of NATO. Did I hear you say EU, European Union, provocative politics it's a toothless organization that they buy a lot of shadow, but it's good because that's the way that everything is in mixed. It's like a salad. Oh, it's NATO, EU, all sorts of the guys that are trying to attack Mother Russia. That's a classical Russian propaganda, unfortunately, parroted by people on the right and on the left. Some of them are on the payroll, some of them are useful idiots. But these argument scenarios could be discussed before Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Now, looking at the war crimes on an industrial scale, I hope some of these people should now recognize that they were not just wrong, they were dead wrong. And their attempts, maybe gender attempts to spread the blame, emboldened Putin to move beyond Imaginable, because so many times we heard, no, Putin would never do that. The list of things that Putin would never down because it's so bad, it's too long. And now I think everybody recognizes that the man cannot be stopped until he stopped. And same people who said he would never do that, now they are seriously discussing whether you can use nukes. Now, speaking about these so called concerns, I don't think we can blame Pauls or Lithuanians or Estonians or Latvians who rush to NATO because they had an experience, a genetic memory of being occupied. The price they paid for Soviet occupation was too high just to blame them for their desire to join NATO and to hide under American nuclear umbrella. Now, speaking about threat to Russia, estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the three Baltic states, they joined NATO officially in 2003. The distance between Estonia and St. Petersburg is about 150 miles. I never heard about any threat coming from Estonia or Latvia or Lithuania or even Poland to Russia. It's about Russia. It's about Russian aggressive wars and open threats to the neighboring countries that we reach these climates. Now speaking about American aggressive policy clinton bush 40 bush 43 obama trump Biden I'm not here just debating their political views, but until very recently, it was concession after concession. And I think that if we try to understand Putin's rationale, if you may call the rationale for attacking Ukraine, it's not NATO strength, but it's a weakness, it's lack of American leadership. And he's believed that he could get away with direct assault on Ukraine de facto, if not the Euro liquidation of an independent nation and installment of a puppet government, and continuation of his imperial policies beyond Russian border or even beyond former Soviet Union. Let's not forget this is Putin had other qualified foreign adventures. What about Syria? So I don't think there's any argument about Syrian rebels threatening Russia, but Russian planes carpet bombed Aleppo. Gary, do you share the view that Putin significantly miscalculated how the west would respond and just how world opinion would turn against this war so quickly? Yes and no. I mean, he made mistakes in his calculations, but it's probably not so much about Western response immediate response because he had a simple plan. The way I see it, and what I read from Russian propaganda machine and Putin, by the way, he has been building his military presence around Ukraine for quite a while. Unlike the dictators of the past that tried to hide their plans, putin was quite open about it. He even brought part of his Pacific fleet to the Black Sea. Last time I looked at the map, it's quite a distance. And he surrounded Ukraine from East Russia, South Crimea, and also from Belarus from the north. So the Ukraine was surrounded and he had Russian fleet in the Black Sea ready to shell Ukrainian Ukrainian infrastructure. And last year, there was an argument that Putin did it all for blackmail. He wanted to squeeze concessions out of Ukraine, maybe. But I think that is just after he met President Biden in Geneva. We all remember this summit. And the summit was, according to American administration, all about Ukraine. And Biden and his team said that they looked at Putin, put straight in Putin's eyes, and said, forget about it. If you do it, we'll impose sanctions. Just that's beyond your imagination. I don't think Putin believed him. It's just that there was, as we were told, some decrease of the tension around Ukraine. But Putin hasn't removed his troops. So he looked around and then he continued his build up. Then there was one call between Biden and Putin, same result. Then the third call, I think that is this is what Putin read. Putin's reading of these calls was america was not ready, was not ready to pose him decisively. And also while American intelligence it's not me, it's U. S. Intelligence. And biden is not Trump. Trump didn't trust American intelligence. Biden did. Kept repeating over last few months, attack was imminent. The question is why? If attack was imminent, ukraine received no military support that could inflict greater, much greater damages to to Russian troops, especially to Russian warships and Russian plates. So why do you think that is? Why didn't we support them earlier? I think that because Biden administration played game. Again, either we say on many chess boards, or if we use poker analogy, on many tables. United States viewed Russia as a partner in climate change talks. You have to listen to John Kerry, who even mentioned the climate change talks after Putin's attack on Ukraine, but more importantly on Iran. I think it's some sort of a cognitive dissonance to have Russia as a part of the Iranian deal, which is, as we've been told, to prevent Iran from getting nuclear, and Russia has to stockpile enriched uranium from Iran. And Russia today is a country that is openly threatening to use nukes in conventional conflict. So I think that the US administration tried to separate these issues and Putin saw nothing but weakness. So he could downplay Americans warnings about Ukraine because he could always negotiate. And he's quite good. Give him credit. He's very good in negotiating and shifting these bargaining chips. On this table of Jubilee Casino, it's poker. He's a great poker player who used to bluff and to win, because even if he had a weak hand, he raised the stakes so high that opponents always folded the cards. Can you generalize about the perception of the war inside of Russia? Or I guess, look, the question is, how effective do you think the propaganda is domestically in Russia? It's a question there. It's not just about information that's available or not available in Russia, because Putin now is closing every hole that we could use to send messages to Russian people. The Internet is still functioning there, but Facebook is now banned. Twitter now YouTube is just slowing down. So there are very few channels left for information to travel back to Russia, because the pictures from Ukraine, they are very different from what Putin expected. And I think now this is talking about information war. So the Putin is losing it because his main plan to take over Ukraine failed miserably. No doubt that he wanted to and he believed he could, to take over Kiev within two, three days after beginning of his advance, since the distance to Kiev from Belarus was very much shorter than from Russia. And he thought that the moment he takes over Kiev, zelensky is on the run, ukrainian government is paralyzed, or just it's gone. The infrastructure infrastructure is broken. And his puppet is sitting in Kiev as the newly proclaimed leader of Ukraine, maybe Victorianokovic, the deposed president who was hiding in Russia after he was kicked out from Ukraine in 2014. And he expected, and not without a reason, that the free world would be talking to him. And we'll hear so many pragmatists saying, oh, it's a new geopolitical reality, the same way they told us about this after Crimea. Oh, it was bad, but we had now had no choice but to accommodate Putin because what else we can do? So this is classic, nothing is being done, and eventually say it's too late for anything. So nothing had been done now. And the failure to take over Kiev and to break stiff Ukrainian resistance in Kiev and Harika and other other major cities, I think, led to the change of the strategy and, and bombardment of Ukrainian cities. In the first three days, they tried to avoid direct hits. The campaign was very different. They it obviously they, they hit occasionally few buildings, but it was very clear that they, they had an order to avoid civilian casualties because Putin wanted to present the story of liberation of Ukraine. Only when he failed in Kiev, they changed it. And now that says they try to bombard Ukraine into submission, same way they did in Grossly or in Aleppo in 2015. And I think the information actually is traveling to Russia even through this Putin's information bubble. One of the reasons massive Russian losses massive losses. I think we can trust Ukrainian sources because they they they count it's. It's head. It's good head count. There are more than 11,000 soldiers being killed. We don't know how many wounded. The reports that are finding its way through the censorship in Crimea telling us about the hospitals, they are overcrowded with wounded, sick and wounded. So it seems that, again, from various sources that I think we can trust with some level of confidence that public opinion in Russia is slowly shifting because you can't deceive people all the time. It's already nearly two weeks. We are at war. And by the way, now the war's, war is banned in Russia. So this is the new laws that have been adopted by Russian puppet parliament. Now, if you are protesting in the war, if you are standing in the streets of Russia with a poster note war, three years in jail. If you try to tell Russian people using your social media account in Russia about Russian losses in Ukraine and about just tell anything that contradicts official version of events in Ukraine, which is called special Operation of War, up to 50 years in prison. So that tells you that the truth is a mortal enemy for Putin's propaganda. They are afraid of it as much as vampires are scared of daylight. On that point, do you think Putin is vulnerable to some domestic uprising at this point? Whether it's coming from the top, from oligarchs, or it's coming from an anti war movement lower down, what's the prospect that we could see Putin actually unseeded by this and see a complete reset of the Russian government, I mean, navalny coming out of prison, et cetera? No. As for Alexi, I've been saying that Alexi got life in prison, putin's life. As long as Putin is in Kremlin, Alexi will be in prison. The moment Putin is out, Alexi is also out. And I'm sure if he survives, god forbid anything horrible happens to him in Putin's jail. So he will definitely play a role in very important role in the future of my country. But analyzing the probabilities of some sort of uprising and you've put together all these ingredients, oligarchs, police, army, security apparatus, popular uprising, political and social economic protests. I think what we're seeing now, it's quite a significant political protest. When it's significant, it is quite amazing. And I was very proud for tens of thousands of people who made it to the streets of Russia. You say, oh, country of 145,000,000, and you have what, 20, 30, 40,000 people protesting is the war. But that's not demonstration in New York or in San Francisco or in Berlin or London. You go to the streets protesting is the war, almost guaranteed, beaten, arrested, detained, and then you can end up in jail for many years. So for people of different ages, you can look at them, this is demographics. It's very broad to take this risk just to defend I don't know whether they think about the owner of the country or about their own feelings. I feel incredible. I'm a Russian citizen. When I just talk to Ukrainian journalists and I do it every day, it's tough because it's being done. It's not on my behalf. I'm one of the staunchest opponents of puts in from day one. He's day one in the office. But still, it's Russia that brought death and destruction to Ukrainian soil. And many people, I think, feel the same, and they just believe that they have no other choice, even with a huge risk but to show up on the streets. Nobody's going to defend them, nobody knows their names, but it's a very personal choice. But that's not something that can shatter the Putin's dictatorship. But if sanctions are working, and I say real sanctions, sanctions that will throw Russia back to the technological Stone Age, sanctions that will include financial, economic, technological measures, also total isolation and eventual military defeat in Ukraine. This combination could create an explosive mixture that could lead to a social economic protest. And that's a revolt that will bring millions of people to the streets. And if Putin is running out of cash, and it looks now that he is no longer in charge of the greatest fortune in the history of humanity, because most of the assets are frozen, so how he's going to pay for his military, police and propaganda? So that's why I think the chances for massive revolt against Putin within the next month or two, if situation doesn't change on the ground and and and the war continues, more losses and the free world stands firm, united against Putin might lead to internal conflict, because loyalty, you don't see a possible backlash against the sanctions. If the sanctions are really biting the people of Russia, could they be perceived through a Russian nationalist lens, basically confirming that the west is the enemy of Russia and that Putin is right to view it? As I hear this argument all the time, I think it's just it's not realistic yet for maybe for a day, maybe for a week, for two weeks. They can blame the west. At the end of the day, you have to feed your family. And it's Putin who started the war, and people have to find solution. And free world is far away. The west is far away. Putin and Putin's cronies are just nearby. So I don't think that we should now worry about the hard economic hardship. I sympathize with these people, but please don't tell me about that when Ukraine is being killed. It's not about economic hardship. It's people, women, children, elderly being killed as we speak now. So it's time for Russians to make a choice, and I wish they could rise earlier. And it will influence people around Putin, his henchmen, his cronies, because they are loyal to him, not because of ideology, great ideas, communism, imperialism, Russian nationalism. It's a mafia state. Every state has its mafia. But in Russia mafia state, and Putin is a mafia boss, Kapo de Tutapi. And he again, give him credit. He built this very sophisticated system where loyalty is just being changed for personal gains. But people who always show loyalty to him for personal gains, for benefits, I don't think they're willing to die for you, whether they are just from his government security apparatus or his military. That's why I'm so adamant demanding the no fly zone, because I don't think that Russian pilots will be willing to sacrifice their lives to give Putin a pretext to start a war against NATO. I want to see how many Russian pilots or Russian generals will follow Putin's orders to enter confrontation with NATO, because that's for them, it's it's a suicide. And I don't think that the morale in Russian army, in Russian political circles, in security apparatus, it's it's can be can resemble anything that we witnessed in Hitler Germany or Stalin Soviet Union, because many old dictatorship, they had this ideological craziness and fanaticism. I don't see it in Russia. It's all about, oh, we can, we do it because we can do it. If we cannot do it, I'm not so sure that they will be willing to put their lives at risk. I want to talk about the strategic logic of a no fly zone. But one more question on sanctions. What do you think about the strategy of rolling them out, incrementally the way we have? Naively. When I look at this, it seems I understand the logic of holding something in reserve so that you can, when Putin calls our bluff again and again, we can ratchet the sanctions on him. But why on earth are we still buying Russian oil and gas? We're directly funding his war on a daily basis. What do you think of the sanction regime thus far? And what do you think we should have done differently? This is a very important question, Sam. It just helps us to understand the roots of the current crisis, because, in theory, incremental sanctions could influence decisions of a potential aggressor. But it's important that you have an adequate response. Now, even 50% of the sanctions that have been imposed lately, maybe 25% of the sanctions in 2014 after annexation of Crimea, could have saved us from this nightmare. Right. Some sanctions imposed, let's say, between Geneva summit and first biden, putin zoom call. So from June 2021 to, I think, November last year, also could actually send a message to Putin and his and his inner circle that America was serious. I think the big mistake was to threaten the sanctions without actually doing it. So now we reached a point where, unfortunately, no half measures will work. And that's another rule that I learned from history books, and unfortunately, we're all learning today, every day of our delay, responding decisively to the threat of a dictator. The price goes up. And something that could have worked before. The invasion doesn't work now. When Americans, american administration talked about sanctions as a threat, I said many times I put it on, it was on my Twitter or my Facebook. Sanctions cannot stop tanks if tanks are rolling, if planes are just dropping bombs. So sanctions could actually help to prevent it. Maybe. But now we reach the point where it's no longer prevention. It's about solving the problem. You do not compromise with cancer. You have to cut it out. And I think now there's no other choice for us to see that the end of the war must lead to the collapse of Putin's regime. Because as long as Putin stays in Kremlin, there will be no peace. So would you favor ramping up all 100% sanctions at this point so that we exert every feature of economic war we can all of a sudden look oil embargo sounds great, but I said it was not even necessary. If America could impose technological embargo because Russian oil industry will not function without or gas industry without a full attack support from from the free world. But obviously no oil embargo has a psychological effect. My only concern is that doing this oil embargo, we are helping other bad guys. As much as I'm concerned about Putin and his criminal war in Ukraine and people being killed all the time, look, helping Iran, Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, those are also bad guys with blood on their hands. I understand there's a balance. So you just have to find a balance. What I think is important now is to come up with a strategy, because at the end of the day, look, we're all concerned about climate change, but what's the difference? There's more oil from Venezuela or more oil from America at the end of the day, or from Canada? So I think it's important to agree on priorities. And if priorities are about Putin and about the let's be honest about change of the regime and Russia, then we have to concentrate on this goal. And I think it can be done. But I'm not sure that there is an agreement about the future goals and how we're going to solve Putin's problem, which does not disappear with the defeat of his armies in Ukraine. And also we are all talking, you just mentioned in the beginning of our conversation about Putin's attempts, crazy attempts, to spread the war beyond Ukrainian borders. So I think it's time to recognize that we are playing the game again. Let me use chess analogy this time. That cannot end in a tie. That's why it's not exactly chess. Either we win or Putin wins. And I think we just have to do whatever mobilizing all the resources of the free world and from political to call it spiritual and ideological, because Ukraine, I think, gave us very powerful spirit to show how to fight and die for freedom and democracy and to make sure that as. A result of this war, not only Ukraine will be safe and will restore its territorial integrity, but Russia will become free. You've spoken two phrases that I think are going to strike fear in many people. The first is a no fly zone, and the second is regime change. And each in their own way, by a slightly different logic, seems to invite a serious escalation of the conflict and even the threat of a nuclear war, right? So, I mean, many people are looking at the situation and all of their bandwidth is taken up with a concern about just avoiding World War Three. How do we prosecute this conflict in such a way as to know that we're not going to go over the brink here? And so let's take them by turns. A no fly zone? A no fly zone seems synonymous with a shooting war between the US. EU and Russia, which is to say a conventional shooting war with nuclear armed powers, where one is run by a psychopath who increasingly has less and less to lose and who's already threatened in some form to use nuclear weapons if he's antagonized. So talk to me about a no fly zone. How is it that you can advocate that? Again, we're dealing with a strategic question because you raised a very good point and I again hear this all the time. No fly zone involves considerable naming a family. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at sam Harris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. My guest today is Timothy Snyder. Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar before joining the faculty at Yale in 2001. He held fellowships in Paris, Vienna and Warsaw. And an Academy scholarship at Harvard. He has spent some ten years in Europe and speaks five and reads ten European languages. He's also written for the New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, the Times Literary Supplement, the Nation and The New Republic, as well as for the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. He is a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and he's the author of several award winning books, including The Red Prints, bloodlands Europe between Hitler and Stalin and Black Earth the Holocaust as History and Warning. His latest book on tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th Century, which is what we focused on, is currently number one on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction in paperback. As you'll hear, this is a timely conversation, but please take my early admonishments about the nonpartisan nature of this conversation for what they are. We do talk a lot about Trump, but whether or not Trump is actually an example of Snyder's thesis can definitely be held to one side. You'll figure out what I think about that by the end, but it's actually not the core of the conversation. And now I give you Timothy Snyder. I am here with Timothy Snyder. Timothy, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. You have written this beautiful little book on tyranny. When did you write this? Because it's a very short book. I'm a huge fan of short books now, both as a reader and as a writer. Most books are far too long. Certainly argument driven books tend to be far too long because the dirty little secret about publishing is that publishers haven't figured out how to publish short books and still make enough of a profit. A 300 page book could be 60 pages in many cases, but to publish a 60 page book just is not a profitable enterprise. But anyway, you've written a very short book on tyranny, 20 Lessons from the 20th century. I just want to move through this book fairly systematically. But when did you write it? Because this reads as something you wrote the moment Trump became president. When did you actually start typing? So I'm going to give you a slightly pompous historian's answer and maybe defend publishers a little bit, too. It's true that I wrote it very quickly, but it was a compression of longer spans of time, right? So it's a compression of the history of the 20th century, which in turn I've spent 25 years trying to understand. And along the way, many years have been invested very pleasantly in friendships with people who have lived through communism and sometimes fascism. And then fewer years, but still more than I'd like to admit, with students from Eastern Europe who themselves have lived through the failed promise of democracy and who have learned about resistance or relearned about it. And I've tried to learn from them. So, yeah, I'll tell you when I wrote the book and how quickly I wrote the book, but it's as though all these layers of time are simultaneously present. I couldn't have just sat down and written the thing without all of that previous time weighing down on me. What I was trying to do was to convert all of that into a format that would be immediately useful. So, yeah, I mean, I wrote the 20 lessons in a few hours after the election, and then the book I wrote in December in a few days. But in a way like that itself demonstrates one of the points of the book, which is that we are in a critical moment where we don't have very much time, and so whatever was going to make a difference had to appear immediately at the very beginning. And I'm not sure that my press in fact, I'm sure that my press hasn't solved the problem of how to make money out of a short book. I don't think they're making any money. But what they did do was join in this venture very enthusiastically, and for that I'm really appreciative. Oh, yeah, no, it's fantastic you have 20 lessons here, and maybe we'll just get through the first ten or so, but I just want to make it clear that I don't view this conversation as a surrogate for someone buying the book, no matter how comprehensive we seem to be in talking about it. And this can be generically said of the conversations I have with most authors. I try to not put people in competition with the free versions of themselves that exist online. I want people to buy people's books. But in this case, this really is just such a satisfying read. So I just want to make it clear that our listeners should buy this book and read it. You can read it in an hour. You can probably read it more quickly than we will have this conversation. But first of all, your writing is so wonderful and so lapidary and aphoristic that it's a pleasure to read. And I'll read a few pieces from it as we talk. Here one criticism of this book, and we'll get into this, and people will get a sense of just how worried you can sound about our current moment in history. One criticism is that it exaggerates the danger of Trump. And I'm wondering how you feel the book is aging over the first few months of the Trump presidency. Is there anything that has reassured you? Or are you exactly where you were when you hit send to your publisher? So let me again take a slightly different angle on that. The whole point of the book is that we have to spread out our political imagination and have a broader sense of what's possible. And the danger precisely is that we just go day by day, and then every day seems normal, even if, you know, today is much worse than yesterday. We're very good at getting used to today, and then tomorrow the same thing happens. So I didn't write the book, in fact, directly about Trump, although it is striking and I'll start to answer your question it is striking how many of the things I wrote about actually have happened. In the meantime, I wrote the book more for us. It was clear from 2016 that we were dealing with a candidate who didn't respect basic American institutions like the rule of law or democracy. It was clear that we were dealing with a man who was not tolerant, to put it very mildly, and who had a certain vision about how things should be run, which was not consistent with checks and balances or institutional constraints. It was clear that we had a man whose political heroes were foreign dictators, who had precisely done away with the rule of law after being elected. So the question is not really so much Trump. The question is us. What happens in these situations is a person with the kind of character that he has, who finds himself in an institutional situation that constrains him, will push against those constraints. He can't really do anything else. That's who he is. And so the relevant question is more can those constraints hold him? And even more to the point, what can we do to make sure those constraints hold him? That's what the book is really about. So when I first posted the 20 lessons, there were a lot of people who thought that I was going overboard. But I have to say, as time has gone past, that has ceased to be a major reaction. And the more dominant reaction has been, how did you see this coming? And the simple answer is that history doesn't repeat, but history gives you a much broader palette of what's possible. And the point of the book is not to go point by point and hit off particular things that Trump will do so much as to prepare ourselves to do a whole bunch of different things which make an authoritarian regime change less likely. So, yeah, I mean, some things people have done, I've been reassured by. I've been reassured by lawyers filing briefs in advance. I've been reassured by the the spontaneous protests at airports. I've been reassuring reassured by the marches. I've been reassured by the new non governmental organizations that didn't exist before. I've been I've been reassured by the civic mindedness and patriotism of some of our civil servants. I've been reassured by the investigative journalism, especially investigative print journalism, at the Washington Post. But on the other side, we have plenty of people who don't see that there's a problem at all. We have plenty of people who are doing the normal human thing of just normalizing the situation and basically taking whatever they're given from day to day. So my fundamental reaction about the notion that I'm exaggerating is Americans are super provincial. We don't really have a sense of what's possible because we've been lucky. We overestimate how much we deserve what we get, and we underestimate how we can just simply get unlucky. At the moment, we're unlucky, which means that at the moment, more is demanded of us than would otherwise be the case. Yeah, I don't want people to get the wrong sense of the connection between your book and this current moment, because, again, it does read not as narrowly focused on Trump. But you're talking about how democracies can fail and how people can not realize that they are being pulled by the tide of history in a very unlucky direction with great consequence. So we're going to get into this specifically now and talk about your points, even if you were wrong about Trump, if Trump just has a stroke tomorrow and becomes magically the perfect president, the generic case still holds. If not Trump, then someone. And the election of Trump has proven to many of us, certainly all of us who are alarmed by it, that our system is vulnerable to a demagogue in a way that many of us haven't anticipated. And it's scary for me to imagine someone much more competent than Trump and much more ideological, much more nefarious, but who can find the loophole in our system the way Trump did and come to power. And so I don't want to give people the wrong sense that this is narrowly focused on Trump. And you handle it beautifully because you may mention his name once in here, but you generally just refer to the President, which I thought was very artful, and the book will age well. This is not a book that five years from now is going to read like a magazine article. I want to pick up on the point you just raised about how provincial Americans are and you say here in the beginning, americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the 20th century. And then you say one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Why are we so blinkered? Yeah, thank you for putting the question so boldly, because it's a really important one. If we're going to get out of this mess, we're going to have to notice some of our weaknesses. We've gotten into the habit of congratulating ourselves on our strengths, and this is a ritual that both Democrats and Republicans engage in in their different ways. I think it was one of the weaknesses of Obama rhetoric, for example, that we were constantly got into the habit of telling ourselves how good we were at certain things. I think there are three things at play here. The first is the long standing religious tradition of exceptionalism, the notion that Americans were escaping a world of evil into a pure world, which is, of course, ridiculous on a whole number of fronts, but it's there as a tradition. The second is the obvious fact that we are in many ways a world unto ourselves. And so people who work on American history rarely venture beyond American history. So it's a lot to expect that the American citizen could do could do better. And the third thing, and maybe the most relevant, is that in a move which I think is going to be remembered as one of metaphysical laziness, we decided after 1989 that history was over. And therefore we disarmed ourselves against the very threats which history ought to have been reminding us of, and we prevented ourselves from seeing some of the weaknesses in our in our own system. So after 19, eight, nine, I mentioned 1999 because that's the year when communism came to an end. Of course, after that, many of us got ourselves worked into various versions of a story whereby human nature would lead to a market, which would lead to democracy and enlightenment, which would lead to peace or something like that, which is basically a historical nonsense. I mean, there are more left wing versions of this as well, but all of these theological stories are basically wrong. History is always going to be full of surprises and structural forces that we don't anticipate and accidents. And the very fact of claiming that history is over is itself a historical choice. It's a historical choice to be ignorant, to forget the concepts which were once useful. And it's a historical choice to be vulnerable when threats start to seep up on you again. That's what's happened to us that was part of the perfect storm of 2016, is that it happened a full generation after 1989. In a way, it's the payback for deciding that history was over. That's part of what happened. And you describe fascism and communism both as responses to globalization and this antipathy for globalization obviously played an important role in the 2016 election. Talk about that a little bit. How is a recoil from the world responsible for these antidemocratic tendencies. Thanks for bringing that up, because that's an important part of the answer to some of your other really good questions. So if we just take a step back and think about globalization itself, that concept is a good example of how we're trapped in a present and have trouble seeing the past. The whole paradigm of globalization as we've invented it for ourselves in the 21st century assumes that it's something new. And when you assume that something is new, then you don't see that it has arc. You don't see that it has patterns. You don't learn where it might be going. And the basic fact and this is one of the things that historians bang their foreheads against the table about the basic fact is that this is the second globalization. There was a very similar movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We had the same expansion of a foreign trade. We had the same export driven growth. And interestingly, maybe most interestingly, in the late 19th century, we had much the same thing as we had in the late 20th century. We had the idea that these expansions of trade would inevitably lead to expansions of consciousness and that universal ideas would inevitably triumph. So we've been down this road before. This is the intellectual history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and that globalization ends in, as we all know, the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. So the whole point of remembering this is to be braced on the one hand, to be braced, be braced in the sense of being sobered up, realizing that globalization can also go in these ways, that we shouldn't be surprised, that there are contradictions in it and reactions to it, and that some of them can be quite extreme. But it's also bracing in the sense that it reminds us that there are people who live through this the first time around who are perhaps not only more experienced than we are because they came out the other end of it. They survived, but more articulate and perhaps wiser than we are. And we can save a lot of time by drawing on what they left behind, which is which is the point of the book. But anyway, that's just all prologue to trying to answer your question. It's natural that globalization is going to bring, even if it brings an average improvement in some kind of abstract notion of well being, like GDP per capita, that is going to also produce local or fractally local inequalities, and it's going to produce various kinds of resentments, because globalization also is the globalization of comparison. It means that people compare themselves to other people in ways that they hadn't done before and can often subjectively feel themselves to be the victims, whether or not they are objectively. That's clearly happened in the United States in the 21st century. Something similar happened in the middle of Europe in the early 20th century. And in that environment, it's very easy then for clever politicians to come around and say, look, globalization is not complicated. It's actually simple. It's not a multi vector challenge. It's actually a conspiracy. I will put a face on globalization for you. And the way that fascism and National Socialism worked was usually to put a Jewish face on globalization and to say, look, all these problems are not the result of an unhindered process which nobody controls completely, but they're actually a result of a particular conspiracy of a particular group that's very powerful politically, because then you can get your hands on, figuratively and literally, you can get your hands on members of that group who are inside your country, and you can imagine that you're carrying out some kind of political change. So similarly, although, you know, in in a minor key, if we think about the US in the 21st century, you think about the campaign now, the presidency of Donald Trump, you see basically the same reaction to globalization. The problem is not that the United States can't control everything. The problem is not that globalization is always going to be full of challenges, which we need to actually face and try to address. The problem is not that we need to have state policy. No, says Mr. Trump. The problem is that globalization has a face. It has a Chinese face, it has a Mexican face, it has a Jewish face. That is a familiar form of politics, because what that does is it relieves Mr. Trump and the government in general of any obligation of actually addressing the challenges of globalization. And instead, it replaces that with a form of politics in which we are meant to just chase after the supposed members of these various groups. And while we do that, then we forget about what the government is supposed to be doing for us, namely, making us more prosperous. So the attempt at a Muslim ban is terrible for Muslims, but it's not really about Muslims. It's about getting us into the habit of seeing Muslims as a source of our problems. The new denunciation office at Homeland Security, where you're supposed to call up a bureaucrat in Washington if you think you've been a victim of a crime by an undocumented migrant, that's not about the migrants. It's about getting you into the habit of denouncing your neighbors. It's about bringing in a new form of politics. So this is how anti globalization politics works. You give up, you say, we can't handle it. We don't have the strength to deal with this. We're going to personalize it all. And that changes politics inside the country in ways that we're starting to see. Well, when you put it that way, when you say it's not about undocumented migrants, it's about ushering in a new kind of politics, right, where you have people informing on their neighbors, that seems to attribute some kind of nefarious intention or agency on the part of people who are currently in government. It's not a system working unconsciously in this direction. This is people and correct me if I'm wrong it sounds like you are alleging that people are having consciously undemocratic thoughts, whether we want to call them fascistic or or some other flavor of edging toward tyranny. We can table that for a second. Yes, we do have people in the White House, such as Mr. Bannon, who are quite consciously ideological and think in far right traditions that are anti democratic. We have a President of the United States who spent 2016 telling us that democracy is basically faked, which is one of the things that people say in the first stages of regime changes. When it comes to denunciation, I think people half understand what they're doing, and then when it happens, they take they take the next step, whether it's the administration or whether it's the citizens doing the denouncing. You you cross a certain moral threshold when you do it, but if you denounce somebody, you get praised for doing it, and then maybe you get the first crack at their property or whatever might follow, and then a new cycle begins. So, yes, I would say quite clearly, there are people who do have what you're calling anti democratic thoughts. Absolutely. Part of the whole point of history is to recognize that democracy is not automatic, and there are plenty of people who don't like it. But also there are these processes by which both civil servants and citizens get drawn in and then find themselves in a different moral place afterwards, even if they didn't completely understand what they were doing at the beginning. Yeah. Okay, well, I want to get directly into your book and into the lessons. I just want some of this language inserted into the conversation. The first lesson is do not obey in advance. And then you have these summaries before each chapter. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given in times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. And then you talk about how the Nazis moved into Austria and how really the behavior of the Austrians more or less unbidden taught the Nazis how far they could go in victimizing the Jews. And you seem to suggest that there was something to learn from how readily people acquiesced to this project. Yeah. So, thank you. That's lesson number one, don't know bay in advance. And it's number one for a bunch of reasons. One, as you suggest, it is right at the core of what historians think we understand about authoritarian regime changes, nazi Germany in particular, but also in general, namely that at the very beginning, whether it's the takeover in Germany itself or whether it's the angels in austria at the very beginning, authoritarian leaders require consent. This is a really important thought because when we think of authoritarians, we then think of villains and then we think of supervillains. Then we think of superpowers. We imagine these guys in uniforms who can just stride across the stage of history and do whatever they want. And maybe towards the end something like that is true. But at the beginning it's not. At the beginning, interestingly, people have, in a sense more power than they do normally because they have the power to resist. The problem is that we don't usually realize that. The problem is that we tend as human beings to take new situations as normal and then to align ourselves with them. Our little needle compasses look for the new true north and align ourselves to it. We follow along, we drift. And most of the time that's appropriate, but sometimes it's an absolute disaster. So historians generally agree about that, which is notable because historians, particularly historians of Nazi Germany don't always agree about everything, to put it mildly. The other reason it's at the front of the book is that if you blow it, if you blow number one, then you can forget about the rest. Because if you if you can't do don't obey in advance, which is harder than it sounds, if you can't do that, then the rest of them become will become impossible because the rest of them will seem psychologically senseless to you if you fail not to bay in advance. If instead you normalize and you drift, then the rest of them won't make any sense to you because you'll already be drifting. Things which would have seemed abnormal to an earlier version of you will start to seem normal. Now, the point to start doing anything will never seem to come. You'll keep saying tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. In fact, you'll just be internally adjusting, adjusting, adjusting. And psychologically you become a different person. And then the final reason why that's lesson number one is political. If people don't take advantage of the moment they have in the first weeks, months and maybe at the outside the first year, if you don't do anything, then then the system changes and the cost of resistance become much, much higher. So right now, the little things that we do that would make a difference like looking people in the eye, subscribing to newspapers, making small talk, founding a neighborhood organization, running for local office, protesting, having political conversations like the one you and I are having at the moment, these things require just a tiny bit of courage, right? Not very much. But later, when these things start to become illegal or even dangerous, they require much more courage. So politically, you have to get out front and do these things. Even if you're not sure exactly what you're holding off. You have to do these things at the beginning. So yeah, I mean, I bring up these examples as you rightly, say, 1938 in Austria, because they really powerfully convey this dynamic. Hitler did not know that he could absorb Austrian a few days. He did it because of the messages he got from below. Austrian Jews did not know they were in such a position of threat. They found out because of how people reacted to the arrival of German force. These actions that the population chooses or doesn't choose to take at the beginning are really crucial to authoritarianism. It means that we have power. It also means that we have responsibility. It means that you don't have the option of doing nothing in America in spring of 2017. If you're doing nothing, you're actually doing something. If you're doing nothing, you're helping a regime change come about. So I want to flag the reaction that I know is occurring in some percentage of our listeners, which is that everything you just said, when mapped on to the present, sounds like a symptom of paranoia. Right. We're fundamentally not in the situation we just described, and we can remain somewhat agnostic about that. I can't name a person really now who is more critical of Trump than I am to some percentage of my listeners. I have completely lost my mind on this point. But I want to try to maintain what will be viewed as a less partisan line through this conversation, because everything you're saying here generically applies. Again, if not now, sometime this applies. And certainly you and I are going to be in large agreement about how much we should be taking seriously these concerns right now, given what has happened in the White House. But again, this is not even if you're a fan of Trump, these dynamics are in play potentially everywhere, all the time. No matter how stable your democracy seems, it's vulnerable to this kind of thing. So I want to move to .2, which is defend institutions. And you say that institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other, unless each is defended from the beginning. And then you use Nazi Germany as an example. And then you quote from an editorial that I had never read. I've read a lot about the Holocaust. I had never seen an editorial like this. And this was written in a newspaper for German Jews. And this is the editorial from the newspaper. This is the editorial's position. So imagine The New York Times writing an editorial like this in 1933, on the eve of the decade that would usher in the Final Solution. This is the perspective of German Jews in 1933. We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power that they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in Nazi newspapers. They will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob. They cannot do. This because a number of crucial factors hold powers in check, and they clearly do not want to go down that road. When one acts as a European power, the whole atmosphere tends towards ethical reflection upon one's better self and away from revisiting one's earlier oppositional posture. And then you say, such was the view of many reasonable people in 1933. Justice is the view of many reasonable people. Now, the mistake is to assume that rulers who come to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions, even when that is exactly what they've announced they will do. So this is just the phrase cautionary tale doesn't really do this moment justice. It's just amazing to put yourself in the position of people before the Holocaust was ever known to be possible, right before that kind of implosion of a very cosmopolitan society was. Thinkable before you could even dimly imagine that people would start marking places of business as Jewish owned, and that would be the precursor to your neighbors coming and seizing your property out of this kind of ecstasy of reappropriation of wealth based on tribal hatred. Anyway, talk about the defense of institutions. And again, this kind of natural myopia that people don't see that they're swimming in history. So let me start with history. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today, I'm speaking with Chris Voss. Chris is an expert in negotiation. He's the founder and principal of the Black Swan Group, which consults with Fortune 500 companies about negotiation. He also teaches at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business and at Georgetown University School of Business. He's lectured at many leading institutions harvard, MIT, and Northwestern. And perhaps most relevant to our conversation today, he was a hostage negotiator for the FBI for many years. And we spend most of our time talking about his experience in the field there, negotiating with terrorists and ordinary hostage takers and bank robbers. And then he has distilled some of the lessons he's learned from those extreme conversations for more ordinary ones. And he's written a book on negotiation titled Never Split the Difference. Negotiating as if your life depended on it. And now, without further delay, I bring you Chris Voss. I am here with Chris Voss. Chris, thanks for coming on the podcast. Sam. My pleasure. Sorry I made it so hard getting all my tech set up. Not at all. It's amazing we can do this remotely. So let's just jump into your background because you have more than the usually fascinating background for a podcast guest. Thank you. How is it that you became a hostage negotiator? Okay. All right. So the pivot point in the FBI, because I was an FBI hostage negotiator, and you have to be an FBI agent first to be an FBI hostage negotiator. I was actually a member of the SWAT team. I was on SWAT FBI Pittsburgh, and I had a recurring knee injury, and I realized that there was only so many times they could put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I'd had my knee reconstructed for the second time. So then before I blew it out entirely, I thought, you know, I talk to people every day. How hard could it be to talk to terrorists? I could do that. Is this the usual path to becoming a hostage negotiator? Do they just draw from the ranks of existing law enforcement or, I guess for the FBI, anyone who's in the rank and file? Or do most people seek it out in a very deliberate way through a separate track? It's a little bit more that people seek it out after becoming whatever law enforcement agency they're in. I mean, every law enforcement agency has additional specialties that if you get into it, there might be something that attracts you, and they're kind of four basic specialties and four basic real different types. Negotiation is one of those. And you can be a hostage negotiator with the FBI. You can be a hostage negotiator with New York City Police Department. You got to be a law enforcement guy with that agency first, and then if you find it, if it finds you, whatever serendipity lines up, and hopefully it's your calling. And I originally thought SWAT was my calling, and thank God I hurt my knee because negotiation was better for me than SWAT ever was, and SWAT was great. How long were you a SWAT operator? Probably two years, roughly. I mean, I got on the Pittsburgh SWAT team, actually, before I'd actually gone through our SWAT school, but there was a lot of local training with the Pittsburgh team, and then plus, I'd been a cop before, so I was used to running around waving guns responsibly, as opposed to not paying attention to what you were doing. So I was a Pittsburgh SWAT for about a year and a half, two years. So you went from Pittsburgh SWAT to FBI SWAT or FBI Negotiation. Yeah. It's all confusing, right? All right, so Pittsburgh FBI office has its own office, and they got their own SWAT team. They got their own negotiation team, each field office. About 56 of them have their own teams, if you will. And I had gotten transferred to New York in the interim and then worked to get on the New York hostage team. And how many hostage negotiations were you involved in? Is this the kind of thing you keep count of? I would imagine it might be. Well, hey, yeah, not just on a bed post, right? Or on the belt or the totem pole or wherever you want to put it, but while I was in New York, I was involved in probably about, off the top of my head, three sieges of varying sizes. Fortunately for me, one of them was a bank robbery with hostages, which is really a really extremely unusual event. Happens in the movies all the time in real life, bank robberies where hostages are taken and negotiations subsequently ensue are very rare. Happens once every 20 years in New York City, about the same amount across the US. I mean, just rare. Usually the bank robbers get away first, right? So, yeah, I've been in one of those and a couple of some fugitives in a high rise in Harlem, smaller situation in upstate New York. So that was a fair amount, relatively speaking. Most negotiators don't get that many in an entire career. I got them in in just a couple of years. And then when I became a full time hostage negotiator at the FBI academy at Quantico, you know, we started working stuff right and left, and I probably worked counting the kidnappings I worked internationally, my rough guess is no less than 150 situations around the world. And can you generalize about the dynamics of a hostage negotiation, or do they change radically and maybe even totally invert depending on the context? Because I can imagine there are I'm kind of thinking in international terms here, where there are countries where they routinely take hostages as a kind of cottage industry where it's not routine to kill the hostages, and it's very routine to just negotiate until you get some economic completion. Whereas if ISIS is taking hostages now, we know all too well that it's very common to have them killed. What can you say about the different kinds of situations people are in? Yeah, great question. So domestic us. Contains situation inside a bank, inside somebody's house, inside an apartment in Harlem that resembles a family holiday dinner, terribly awry, lots of people upset past wrongs that other people have completely forgotten about being thrown on people's faces. Every year, there's a movie out about a holiday dinner at somebody's house, and with siblings mad at each other and parents trying to hold it all together. That's a little more common, contained situation, if you will. Very much as you observed, international kidnapping mostly as a commodities business commodity, cold heartedly, happens to be human beings. And there's perception in reality. Perception is people get killed all the time, even with ISIS reality, it's a financial transaction. ISIS, their commodity, was lots of different citizens, and they got what they could out of them, whether it be publicity or money. They get money for Western Europeans, they get publicity from Americans. But there's always a commodity there that challenges spotting what the commodity really is in any negotiation. Yeah, well, that's an interesting point, because with respect to international hostages, even with a group like ISIS, you have the effect of the different countries policies. We have a policy, if I'm not mistaken, that we don't pay ransom under any conditions. And there are a few well publicized cases where the US. Even made it illegal for the families to pay ransoms, whereas these Western European countries, many of them, routinely pay ransoms. And so you become a very unlucky hostage if you're the American among many Western Europeans. I don't know if that's changed at all. What is the current US. Policy with respect to negotiating and paying ransom for international hostages? Well, the US. Policy is all gray, and that's why it's been reported so many different ways in the media, and it was actually funneled back to the families improperly by the wrong US. Government officials. There was a bonehead, and I'm happy to say it was a bonehead at the National Security Council that was quoting it wrong the entire time. What nobody knew was that nobody from the Department of justice ever told the families it was illegal for them to pay ransom. And the Department of justice people responsible for prosecution, the National Security council Bozo was not responsible for prosecution and was ultimately essentially relieved of his position because he handled the family so badly. What does all that mean? What all that really means is the US. Doesn't make concessions and there's some real fine nuancing to that, but there is room to allow ransoms to be paid. But US. Government officials aren't always smart enough to know that the issue is what's the long term consequences as opposed to the short term expediency. And of course, there's the way the Europeans do it and they back up to the hostage takers strongholds with truckloads of money and dump it all out on them, which makes it far worse for the rest of the world. And that's what turned it into chaos. I mean, all the western European nations are famous for showing up with suitcases if not truckloads of money for hostages. And that's where things really get out of control. Yeah. So what should the policy be in your view? Because it's easy to see how we would be creating this industry by rewarding it so reflexively. And yet when you are in a specific situation where especially if it's your loved one who's hostage, you can imagine that there's just this moral and psychological imperative to just pay at any cost and you really don't care about the external effects of creating higher risk for other people in the future. What do you think? If we could get everyone on the same page with respect to how to treat these situations, everyone being all the relevant countries, what should people do? Well, the best analogy is the bank robbery analogy. We give bank tellers bait money and that way you give the bank robber a little bit of money, the money is marked and the bank robber gets his money and he leaves. I didn't even know that. Is this widely reported or I just haven't watched the right movies? All bank tellers have money that they can just hand over it. All bank tellers have bait money and every single one of them, and they're all trained bank robber comes in a bank, you reach for the bait money, you hand them that money. It's not worth losing the life of a bank teller over a couple of hundred, few thousand dollars. So you save the bank teller's life. The bank robber gets some of what he came in for. He's scared, he's rattled. He just wants to take some money. Take the money and run. He gets the money and run. Now the bait money is marked. So the great thing about that is there's probably an exploding die pack inside the bait money and as soon as the bank robber steps out, it goes pout poof and it puts all sorts of green dial over the bank robber. But even if the diapac doesn't go off and he goes back to his hideout and he splits the money up among his co conspirators who didn't go to the bank money is ridiculously easy to trace. Insanely easy to trace. How is that? I can't picture how it would be easy to yeah, it's only in the serial numbers. And those of us that aren't in the business of tracing money, we figure it's complicated because we don't keep close track of our money. But ever since the US. Watergate days, the refrain was follow the money. Well, it's follow the money because the money is insanely easy to follow. You can follow it back. You can find out who else had the money. It actually is a great way to round up the entire gang instead of just the guy that they thought was expendable enough to send into the bank to get the money for everybody else. So you can round up the whole gang if you follow the money. And that's really where it comes down to. There was a kidnapping in Ecuador in about 2000. The first time. The US. Government tried this. This kidnapping gang had been hitting oil platforms every year around October and had been getting away with money because there's insurance money for kidnapping. And the third time they hit it, unfortunately, an American was executed. But then the US government decided, like, all right, so we're going to get behind this payment and we're going to follow the money. And what ended up happening, because it only takes about five or six guys to conduct the kidnapping. Well, they made the payment. They followed the money. They rounded up 50 people, and they shut down the entire kidnapping gang. And they never executed another kidnapping. They never killed another person. This is the first time the entire organization had ever been taken down. It was incredibly successful. Now, they didn't get all the money back, but what they did was save countless lives on down the line by following the money and taking out the entire gang of 50 instead of maybe taking five. Had they gone on a rescue, maybe they'd have gotten three, four, five kidnappers. The rest of them would have gotten away. A lot of hostages would have got killed. The long term solution is to be smarter than the bad guys, and that's the way you're smarter than the bad guys. Walk me back to the analogy from bank robbing to other hostage situations. So what should be the international policy with respect to terrorist organizations? Well, first of all, you go ahead and engage in the conversation. The US policy actually is explicitly stated these days that we shouldn't be afraid to communicate with anybody. We should deal. John F. Kennedy line, you should never be afraid to negotiate. Never negotiate out of fear, but never be afraid to negotiate. So communicate. The communication process becomes an intelligence gathering process. You generate a lot of information. You learn a lot about them. You learn you profile them. You learn their tendencies. They tell you who they are inadvertently by their word choice. You can narrow down where they're from, how old they are, where they grew up by the choices of words. And you talk to multiple people on the other side. You gather a massive amount of information. You actually give yourself a better chance to conduct a rescue if you engage in communication. Then if you get into some bargaining, you bargain them down. They want some money. They want to take the money and run. You find a way to make the delivery. You gather information over the delivery. You find out about how they pick up money, where they go, what they do with it. You follow the money, and you follow them back to their hideout. You trace the money. You find out where they're buying weapons. You find out where they're buying bandages. You find out where they're buying beer, whatever they're buying, who are they doing business with, what's the illegal markets they're spending their money in because they're buying weapons someplace. You want to know who they're buying them from. You trace all the money. You do a couple of month investigation. You not only bring the kidnappers to justice, but you bring justice to their colleagues that have been supporting them also. It's long term. It requires patience, and it works. But how does one trace money in these kinds of transactions? For instance, I just walked into a market and used a $20 bill. Had I gotten that from a bank robbery, I can only imagine that just disappears into the economy without a trace. That's what you imagine. And that's why I'm a bad bank robber. The guys that do white collar round all these people up I mean, the greatest investigations in the world, that Al Capone was taken down by a white collar investigation following the money. Watergate was unraveled by following the money. Our brothers and sisters in forensic accounting work magic on following the money. The rest of us think it disappears into oblivion when we walk into a 711 and drop a $20 bill. And that is not the case. But how is it getting tracked when the 711 sends their cash to the bank? It gets scanned as coming from the 711. All right, so you want me to reveal to the bad guys right now we're tracking their money? Well, I'm not going to do that. I'll let you judge what's prudent here, but it is interesting. So we have different situations here. You talked about the highly personal hostage situation. I mean, just a boyfriend taking his girlfriend hostage. This is clearly a situation born of real emotional distress. And I could imagine that has a very different character than the routine hostage taking overseas done by people who do this all the time as a business. Do they require radically different approaches, or can you generalize about the commonalities between those situations? It's a great question, and the answer is every hostage negotiation team in the world and every situation that they approach, whether it be contained, emotional, or transactional kidnapping, they all use the exact same eight skills. Now, the commonality is there's going to be an emotion, and there aren't that many emotions now. It's either going to be anger, it's going to be greed. It's going to be excitement. It's going to be a sense of loss. It's going to be a fear of loss. Daniel Conneman, who won the Nobel Prize in behavioral economics, said that human beings around the planet, regardless of situation, are most driven by fear of loss. Not exclusively, of course, but most driven by fear of loss. So this encompasses human behavior. It doesn't matter what it is, whether it's a kidnapping, whether it's a bank robbery, whether it's a business transaction. So human beings have the same basic set of emotions, and they're all driven from the caveman days by the same survival instincts and fear of loss. Fear of loss is the biggest single driver of human behavior globally. And I mean globally by age, gender, ethnicity, or globally in terms of situations. So you start with those rules, and then you begin to look for commonalities. You start to find them really quick, regardless of whether or not it's a bank or it's a kidnapping. Well, we'll get into the general principles that you've extracted here in a minute, and these don't just apply to hostage negotiations, but to negotiations of any type. But let's just talk about your experience in the trenches here a little bit more. Are there any negotiations that stand out for you as far as having taught you the most or having been the most intense or impactful on you? Well, yeah, kind of. Try to learn from all of them, but let's go to the bank robbery first. Bank robbery with hostages. Chase Manhattan Bank. The ringleader in that group was a ridiculously controlling guy, interestingly enough. Right on. You call into a bank, you expect the bank robbers to be upset, concerned. He actually said to the NYPD negotiator who was the first negotiator on the phone with him, he literally says to him, I'm the calmest one here. He was a really manipulative guy. Crazily enough. He exhibited the same negotiation approaches as a really smart CEO. He tried to diminish his influence, how influential he looked on the phone when he was talking on the phone with us, he was saying, yeah, it's not up to me. There's a lot of other guys here, and they're more dangerous than I am. They're the unreasonable ones. He was in love with plural pronouns. What's the guy who's in love with plural pronouns going to do? He's trying to hide his influence, he or she, so that you don't put him down at the table. And this is what this guy did in the bank. By the time I got onto the phone with him, I used a hostage negotiation technique that we referred to as mirroring, which is just repeating what someone has said kind of word for word because he said stuff that startled me. And it's a great verbal reflex when you're caught off guard, and it buys you a lot of time. And the other side ends up just blurting stuff out that they wouldn't blurt out otherwise. When I mirrored this guy because I was asking him about the getaway van and he said, we don't have one van. I said, you don't have one van? He said, we have more than one van. I said, you have more than one van? He said yeah. Will you chase my driver away? Now, what he did when he said, you chased my driver away he just roped in a third guy that we didn't even know was involved in a bank robbery, which is he was so controlled, he involuntarily blurted out admissions of guilt not just on him, but on other people. And we ended up rounding up the whole gang. Everybody surrendered. Took about 12 hours from start to finish, which is kind of par for the course when you begin to understand a profile of situations, if you will. And I learned a lot from that. Once he realized that he'd voluntarily given us stuff that he wished he hadn't said he actually handed off the phone to another guy. The controlling negotiator will get flustered. They'll get frustrated, but they won't get angry in a way that damages the situation. He got so frustrated and flustered, he just handed off the phone to his colleague who had been manipulated into the situation. I got that guy who surrendered to me in about 90 minutes. He met me outside the bank, and when he came out, he admitted to everything that was going on, told us who was inside and what was going on. Then it was just a matter of time for us to continue to work our process and get everybody out of line. So is it common in these situations that you're able to exploit different levels of commitment or different goals on the part of the people involved? The hostage takers? Yeah, it's real common. And you start out just sort of feeling your way through the situation, looking gently for whatever thread you could get. And then with a gentle sort of patient approach, you can unravel a situation really easily. And it works. I mean, it just works consistently. And if you work the process, you'll actually negotiate through the entire situation with patients faster than you will by being in a hurry. There were a few cases in your book where you essentially give the blow by blow for some of these negotiations where it's a family who is in the loop with, I guess, the FBI in this case, and you're trying to negotiate the price down. This is not a bank robbery, but some international hostage kidnapping. Kidnapping, yeah. In a situation where the initial demand is so sky high that no one involved could possibly pay it, I sort of understand it. But at a certain point, it must begin to seem unethical to be driving a hard bargain in dialogue with someone who is threatening to kill or dismember your loved one. What is the point of, you know, when you, you know, get it down to whatever it is, $50,000 that the family can pay to be driving it? Lower than that. Some of these negotiations that you detailed continued past the point where I thought, okay, this seems like it's just raising the risk to the hostage. Yeah. Great questions. And so the issues of ethics and morality. Any negotiations? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Douglas Murray. Douglas is an associate editor at The Spectator, and he writes for many other publications, including The Sunday Times, Standpoint, and The Wall Street Journal. He's also given talks at both the British and European Parliaments and at the White House. And he's most recently the author of a wonderful book titled the Strange Death of Europe immigration, Identity, Islam. And if you don't know him, Douglas is a truly wonderful debater. I recommend you check out more or less anything you can find from him on YouTube. Douglas and I spend a lot of time in this podcast, certainly most of the time, talking about the situation in Europe with respect to immigration and Islam and the social attitudes in the Muslim community that are at odds with values that really should be really must be non negotiable, like free speech and women's rights and gay rights. And what I'd like to point out is that neither of us are against immigration, and you might not notice that in the first hour or so. And we're not against Muslim immigration. In fact, both of us count among our friends, Muslims and former Muslims who are precisely the sorts of people we are most concerned to protect. And in particular, we're worried about protecting them from many of the illiberal people who have been pouring into Europe. I know there are some things that Douglas and I disagree about. I think we have a different sense of the place of Christianity as a foundation of Western values. I don't give it much of a place at all, certainly not a contemporary one, and Douglas does. But we'll tackle that in another podcast. In this one, we more or less fully agree on what we're against, and what we're against is Western civilization committing suicide. And if you think that puts the matter too strongly, you haven't read Douglas's book, and you probably haven't been paying much attention to what's been happening in Europe. And if you think one has to be a fan of Trump in order to worry about this, well, then you haven't been paying attention to this podcast. But on the topic of Trump, trump just gave a speech in Poland where he said, and I quote, the fundamental question of our time is whether the west has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert or destroy it? End quote. And while I find abundant fault with the messenger, as you know, I can't find fault with that particular message. And the fact that liberals can't seem to see what's at stake here, the fact that they are embarrassed to defend, quote, Western values as though that were synonymous with racism or the legacy of colonialism or xenophobia or a lack of compassion that is making liberalism politically defunct at this point. And that increasingly worries me. And happily, in the United States, we are in a better situation demographically and with respect to immigration and just geographically, and that has implications for immigration. But one cannot be cheerful about what's been happening in Europe. And in his book and in this conversation, douglas finds a path through this wilderness of competing concerns that is deeply ethical and also deeply pragmatic. I don't think Trump comes up, or if he does, it's just in passing. So consider yourself spared. But Douglas and I get into the fairly gloomy thesis of his very witty book, which is that what's happening in Europe is something that not even the most paranoid people would have predicted a decade ago. And it concerns all of us. And now I give you Douglas Murray. I am here with Douglas Murray. Douglas, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's a great pleasure to be with you. It's been, what, almost two years? Yeah, I have actually I haven't checked, but it was we last spoke when the refugee crisis in Europe was getting its most press here in the in the US. I know it had been going on for years before that, unremarked more or less here, but we spoke about immigration and all of its attendant problems and we will cover some of the same ground again because you've written this great and harrowing book on the topic. But first, congratulations on the book. It seems well launched and it's a fantastic book. Well, thank you. It's very kind. It's just really a beautiful read. And it's grim, don't get me wrong, there's not a lot of hope in the book, but it's very funny. Your style of approaching this is rather than be hectoring and communicating a sustained sense of emergency, you become quite ironic, and I recommend people pick it up simply to be amused in addition to being terrified. That's a fine combination of feeling. It's all too rare. Now, you've painted a picture of certainly the possible destruction of Europe, and I would say even the likely destruction of Europe. You can walk me back from the cliff's edge if you think I'm being too pessimistic over the course of this hour, but it's hard to feel hopeful that this will turn out well. And at the center of this you paint a picture of really a morally exhausted civilization and one that is certain of absolutely nothing apart from the fact that it has no right to think itself better than any other civilization. So I guess we could just start with kind of the nihilism and self doubt at the core of this problem. No. The book is called The Strange Death of Europe with the subtitle immigration identity islam. And, I mean, I've been thinking about and writing about these areas and researching them for a very long time now. And it was during the 2015 crisis that the migrant crisis, refugee crisis that I sort of realized this was the epitome of everything that had been going on. And the core thing really was two things. One was the mass movements of people into Europe in a sped up form of something that's been going on for decades. And the second was the fact that this would be happening at the time that, in my view, Europe has lost any faith in itself for its own right to continue, particularly in a recognizable form. And I think the combination of these two factors is pretty hard to see how this ends well, but I constantly throughout the book try to show that it's not the case, that there's no argument for, for instance, Angela Merkel Opening the Doors. It's not as if there's no understandable reason or no justification for Europeans feeling the way they do about their history or the way in which we feel towards our past and the way in which we therefore feel in the present. And I'm trying to explain this because it's something we all feel. To my mind at any rate, something like this crisis goes down the middle of all of us. There are people on the left who say, Let everyone in. There are some people on the right who say very few, but some people let them drown. I think these are people who are peddling fantasies, albeit very dark and grim fantasies, but they're not things that most of us could possibly think. And so therefore, what I'm trying to do is to lay out what is what we're really facing in all its grim complexity and amusement. I think you find that the middle line there wonderfully. As you point out in the book, this really, for the most part, isn't a contest between good and evil. This is a contest between competing virtues. And I think you put it in terms of justice and mercy. Yes. And that's not often remarked on because each side is so busy painting the other as heartless or insane. Yes. This is one of the things I felt so strongly in recent years and which we've all come across some symptoms of or demonstrations of. But to my mind, this is what we should do with all these sort of complex issues. I had strong feelings that we were doing something suicidal in Europe. But I knew also that I had to go and look this in the face. I had to see it at its hardest. I had to go, as I did, to the reception ports of southern Europe, of the Italian and Greek islands, and speak to the people who literally just got off the boats, to see the boats coming in, to hear the stories of the people coming from all over Africa, North Africa, sub Saharan Africa, the Middle East, the Far East. People from as far away as Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and I had to hear their stories as well as hearing from speaking to people in the Chancellor's of Europe and so on. And the reason for this was, as you mentioned, is this thing that we are very used, sadly, in all of our political discussion to discussions that basically I'm Churchill your Hitler or I'm Churchill your Chamberlain, and I'm good, you're a Nazi. And it's my view that on something like the migration crisis, it's only possible to see it in terms of competing virtues. I take it from Aristotle that there are sometimes things that are two goods, two virtues colliding, and that this was such a time when, as I say, the desire to be generous to the world ends up, in my view, overriding what should be a sense of justice for the people of Europe. Well, I want to talk about the ethics of immigration in a few minutes, because I think it is a nontrivial ethical and even psychological problem to figure out what one thinks about this and how one can be justified in having a position here that isn't a suicide pact, essentially. But I want us to illustrate the suicide pact because the details are surprising. Some of what you describe as fairly predictable, it's of a piece with the masochism and self doubt. That postmodernism has spread really to the limits of culture, so people will be familiar with some of the details, but there are some things that have happened that actually seem impossible. And to even speak about these events, I feel like I'm trafficking in lies and conspiracy theories, even to speak of them, they're so incredible to me. This is one of those topics where we have to measure more or less every sentence against our listeners capacity to wonder whether or not we have our facts wrong or we've lost our minds. And so I want to start the conversation with one of these extreme cases known as the Rotherham scandal. First of all, this is not, as far as I can tell, well known at all in the US. I think one of the reasons why it has been underreported is that it just sounds incredible and the lack of credibility seems to rub off on anyone who would talk about it. So I just want our listeners to be prepared who haven't heard this story, that in a few moments you're going to wonder whether I'm talking to an Alex Jones character or some other nutcase, I can say. Unfortunately, I'm not. So, Douglas, just take a couple of minutes to describe what happened in Rotherham. Sure. I mean, the context of this is that I try to explain that absolutely everything that happened in the post war period in Europe in terms of migration was not expected by anybody at all, really, and particularly not anybody in charge politically. And I say that because in 2010, Angela Merkel gave a famous at the time speech and pot storm in which she famously said that multiculturalism had failed and went on to say that it failed utterly and that particularly she said the people who came after the war, in case of Germany. The guest workers, mainly from Turkey, she said. We expected them to go home. And they didn't. Well, of course they didn't. Looking back, why would you, if you were leaving a poor developing country and had landed in a developed country, and why would you not then bring your wife? And why would you, if you were with your wife, not have children? And why would your children not go to the local school? And so on and so forth. But it's just at a peace with everything that wasn't expected. And one of the things I say in the book when charting out the sort of brief history of this period in postwar European migration, is that we we got to a stage, the so called multicultural era, where we became good at talking about the good sides of it. I mean, at the at the lowest, most sort of frivolous end, but actually very common, talking about cuisine, for instance, the benefits we had in cuisine terms. And I mean, you know, it's understandable. Who would want to go back to the British food of the 1950s? But it was also that the negatives, anything bad at all started to become impossible to say because it was as if that might speak to the whole. Now, the most visceral and terrible example of this inability to talk to the bad things that happened emerged in different countries at different times. And in my telling, it emerged really first in the UK, and that was the scandal that subsequently became known as the Rotherham Scandal. This was in the first decade of this century. I became aware of it and other journalists did, because two groups of people really started to mention it. One were Sikh groups and others in the north of England who complained that where girls from their community were being trafficked by Muslim men. And the other was that it started to become a focal point for some far right elements in the UK. That is particularly and this was at a time when the British National Party, which is really a truly racist neo Nazi party, it's now, thank goodness, pretty much moribund, but for a moment, they got almost a million votes in the UK. And there were two, to our shame, there were two members of the European Parliament for the British National Party and they made enormous headway with this, or tried to. And this was around 2004 and at the time there was actually a Channel Four documentary that was meant to because some, you know, finally some journalists took a real interest in this. And Channel Four was meant to broadcast a documentary about this, what became known as the Grooming Gang Scandal. And it was actually stopped from broadcasting at the request of local police, among others who feared that it would be a recruiting sergeant for the British National Party at forthcoming elections. So the documentary was canceled. It was subsequently shown after elections and at a time that was deemed to be less volatile. But that episode spoke to a sort of general issue, which was that people really didn't want to know about these stories. Largely, it was thought, these were events that were happening in northern towns outside the sort of metropolitan London bubble, and so they were easier to ignore for a lot of people. But within the last decade, it became increasingly hard to ignore it. And eventually the government set up an official inquiry into what went wrong. And it turned out that in the town of Rotherham alone, up to 1400 young girls had been systematically groomed and raped, often gang raped, by gangs of Muslim men, largely of Pakistani origin. And the official inquiry into this, the government inquiry, found that the fear of accusations of racism as it were, penetrated and prevented the police and local authorities acting on this, even when the local outcry was really very, very strong indeed. And it gets worse because unfortunately, as we all know, like the Catholic Church rate scandals and with all sorts of other similar cases, sadly, what happens is the first story breaks and then you learn the depth and width of the problem. And this in the last few years, it's turned out that there were similar cases in towns across the north of England and in places that people thought to be more leafy and green. In Oxfordshire, most people think Oxford, dreaming spires, et cetera, et cetera. In Oxfordshire, there was a case five years ago now that came to trial, the Operation Bullfinch case, where numerous young white girls, again, often underage, have been trafficked for sex by Muslim gangs. And I mean, the details that came out of that trial at the Old Bailey in London included, for instance, that one of the men branded one of the girls on her backside, I think with an M for Mohammed, which was his name, he branded her as his property. And again, these cases, when they came to trial, they just for the reasons that you and I feel awkward talking about it, the British state, the British people, felt awkward and wanted them not to be true. But this was just the same story in a way that then later emerged after I mean, much faster between being covered up and coming out, but of similar events at, for instance, music festivals in Sweden in recent years. Where it wasn't until Cologne on New Year's Eve, 2015. That when the large scale assaults happened, famously in front of the cathedral on New Year's Eve. That that. Then the Swedes, this sort of having reported that, turned round and some of the press said, oh yeah, didn't that happen at our music festivals in recent years? And oh, yeah, that did. So it's a real scandal and it's an ongoing scandal. There are still many cases coming to trial. I think there's a lot more to find out. But it is just a symbol, a symptomatic example of this deep, deep discomfort of this whole discussion. Because if you or I had been asked to invent a sort of gross, racist sort of favorite trope, it would be, well, they'd complain about people coming over here and raping our women. And I think that's one of the reasons that it's been so little covered. I have a friend who's a journalist who mentioned to me just a few days ago that he went to interview some of the victims in rather image and he said he thought by now, as it were, their stories. They'd be talked out about their stories, they've been interviewed so many times. Not so these women now, even now, have basically not had a chance to tell their story to the press or anyone else because people just really don't want to know this stuff. And one of the points in my book is that everyone knows the benefits of some migration, but the downside bits are we're still not really willing to face up to. And that is it at its absolute most base and worst. Again, this story just puts me at the absolute limit of what I find believable the fact that this happened. I'm thinking now specifically about Rotherham, the numbers of people in this small town and the parents having to appeal to the police for years and nothing comes of it, right? The fact that the authorities stood by and let this happen year after year. There are so many I mean, I'd test your listeners patients if I gave too many examples. But let me give you an example from the Oxfordshire case I mentioned, which is sort of in the UK, it's less well known than Roblum, which has become really well known in the UK. But in the Oxfordshire case there was a girl who because quite often the young girls were bribed with drugs and things, or plied with drugs and alcohol and so on. There's one case of a girl who was actually in a care home in Oxford and she was being gang raped and she managed to escape and she got back to the children's home she was in, meant to be being looked after by local authorities. And she didn't have the money for the taxi that she had managed to hail to get her back to the care home. And the care home staff thought that she was just playing up, as it were. The taxi driver took her back and she was gang raped. Again, it's sort of wholesale failure of I think this is why it particularly has begun to, or at least has for time. Some people really speak to a greater failing because we'd like to think, I think that young people, particularly young people in trouble in care homes and things, are actually the people the state should most look after and care for, and that at that stage, there's such a total lack of care that you could end up basically facilitating. That is, I think, horrifying. Well, yeah, and facilitating it at a certain point, knowingly the thing that the situation you just described is a horrible misunderstanding on some level. But when you have the police knowing what's happening, but being unwilling to investigate for fear of being perceived as racist. Right, yeah. By the way, the interesting thing is some of your listeners may not know the background, but this also speaks to a fascinating thing, again, which doesn't come from nowhere. The police didn't have that fear for no reason. In the 1990s, the early 90s, there was a famous racist murder in Britain of a black teenager called Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered on the streets and his killers weren't brought to trial for a very long time. And one of the failings, undoubtedly in the Lawrence case was the presumption by the police that it had been a black on black gang murder. And this was encouraged by various people, this perception. And when there was a report in the late 90s into this, the McPherson report it was called, it found that the local police and the police and UK general were, quote, institutionally racist. And this label was certainly, I would have said, accurate in some cases. I think it was far too broad a claim to make about the British police as a whole. But it meant that in the years immediately afterwards, the police in Britain would have been even more adamant than they would have been for not to tread onto things that, you know, would would embed that or take them back to having that reputational problem again. So all these things are problems built on problems. Yeah. What is illustrative and perhaps even diagnostic about this case for me is that and again, it really strains credulity on every level is that the fact that it's possible, the fact that you have really a whole society being willing to just eat this horror year after year and do nothing about it, that suggests to me that other things are possible. And this kind of great unraveling that you sound like a scaremonger to worry about is possible. What freedom wouldn't you be willing to forfeit if you're willing to let your daughters and your neighbor's daughters by the thousands get gang raped for years, it absolutely beggars belief. Another example was that during the same period that the Rotherham scandal was starting to break was when the British police admitted that there had been certainly some scores of murders in the UK, which had almost certainly been so called honor murders, honor crimes which the police hadn't really bothered to investigate because they were community matters, right? I mean, it's all a part of a stumbling for a period which, as I say in the book, we were just having to improvise during. Yeah. And the interesting wrinkle here that we'll get to, and this is will be quite familiar to our listeners, but that the hypocrisy here on the left is fairly breathtaking because you have the same people who are most concerned about women's rights and gay rights, and even, as you describe, even more niche concerns. Now, transgender rights and getting your pronouns straight, these are the kind of the highest moral priorities at this moment. These are the very people who seem quite happy to import millions of people into their society for whom the very notion of women's rights and gay rights, and to say nothing of transgender rights, is not only foreign but anathema. There's a double thing here that everyone is paying a massive penalty for. And this is a point you also make in the book when you look at the most vulnerable people in these immigrant communities, the liberal Muslims and the gay Muslims and the apostates and the Muslim reformers, the people who threaten their lives, right? Who make their lives an actual safety concern from one moment to the next are not, by and large, the fascists and the neo Nazis and the bigots and the xenophobes. It's the intolerant Muslims who are being brought into the same community. It's the subject that's incredibly disheartening, because it suggests that there are many other things going on, doesn't it? I mean, it suggests, for instance, that there are people who are perfectly willing to COVID up atrocity, really, in order that their own community doesn't have any negative publicity by the normal in most communities. I think that you don't want your dirty linen, as it were, washed in public, but there's obviously a greater tolerance of that going on. You might think that a small amount of embarrassment might be not worth airing in public, but considerable numbers of gang rapes might be serious enough to actually think it's worth having it out. And then there is the, to my mind, supplemental problem, in a way, of the people who basically think that this is a story about white working class girls and they don't find much sympathy for them, to put it at its strongest. By the way, it's a very slightly analogous but example, but I was following with great interest the case of this American student who died last week, who was brutalized in North Korea after trying to take down a post Otto Warmbier. The bit of this whole horrible story that, in a way, was most striking was not as if the North Korean authorities behaved differently than one would expect, but that there was this glee on parts of the left, on huffington Post and Salon and so on when he got arrested and detained and then brutalized and tortured and beaten, as it turned out, to death because he was a sort of beneficiary of white privilege and ha ha. It was both Huffington Post and Salon. Ha ha. He's just learnt the limits of white privilege and he's just thinking, how much sickness do you have to have as a human being to respond to these stories with this kind of political reflex that actually I mean, overrides? All humanity. And that's really, I think, one of the less spoken about things in this whole Rotherham sort of thing was this kind of these are white, working class trash, not people I know sort of thing, and therefore not deserving of your pity or concern even. Yeah. That's especially odious when you reflect on the fact that some of these girls were as young as eleven. Right. Yeah, it is mind boggling. I did, I saw that piece and I think it was the Huffington Post on the North Korea incident and it is yeah, the idea that his white privilege caused him to think that he could tear down a propaganda poster with impunity and that he got his just desserts for that sort of arrogance. It is wrecking of one's hopes for humanity to see that sentiment even articulated. I want to talk a minute about the ethics of immigration because this is the other side of the equation. They felt moral imperative, which I certainly feel to respond generously to the unluckiest people on earth. This really comes to the moral indefensibility of good luck. Right. When I search my mind I can't find any way to argue that I deserve my good luck. I'm extraordinarily lucky. And among the many reasons I could list, one that comes to mind is I'm extraordinarily lucky not to have been born a woman in Afghanistan. Now to what can I ascribe that good luck? Well, it's just pure good luck. I didn't earn it. There's nothing I imagine I did in my past life or in utero to earn that good luck. And so when I think of the unlucky people who happen to be women in Afghanistan or in really anyone in Syria at the moment, I can't justify this ethical disparity. This is just the sheer fact of the matter that I I seem to have emerged in part of the world where I was simply given citizenship and where good luck and opportunity just more or less grows on trees. And you have millions of people born elsewhere into circumstances that are about as pointlessly wretched as any in human history. So. The question is, how does one live a moral life in light of this kind of disparity? And how do we build societies in light of this fact that good luck has not been spread equally over the surface of the Earth and societies that are organized around a moral vision that we can defend? And I'm happy to have you give your answer to that question, but it clearly can't be. This is the answer that I think we want to close the door to, and this is an answer that some people have tried to defend. It can't be that we have a moral obligation to let as many people as possible move into our society in such numbers that it becomes scarcely better than the societies they're leaving. Right? It can't be from some kind of principle of osmosis, which just creates the lowest common denominator of all possible fates on Earth. And that's something that is defended by essentially someone like Mario Namazi, who I had on the podcast, to the absolute frustration of every listener, the problem of open borders. Perhaps you want to touch it, but it seems to me that can't be a solution at some point. You are regulating the flow at a minimum. Yes, of course. I'm so glad you framed in those terms because that's obviously how most decent people in the west feel these days. I mean, we don't feel that we've not only won the lottery of life, but deserve it. We know that it's luck. We all have friends who or most of us have friends who have been born without some of that luck and have acquired it. That also makes us feel more aware of the luck and more unable to explain what we should do and why we should keep anyone else out from sharing it. And I think that one of the bits that is least focused in on all this is the long term point, and it's one you touched on there about the open border thing. For short term reasons, one could understand why we have the views we do for long term reasons. It's inexplicable that, for instance, you would think that you could import, as Angela Merkel did in 2015 alone, an extra up to 2% of the population in a single year and for it not to have long term effects. I recount towards the end of my book a conversation with a great supporter of Angela Merkel's in The German Bundes Targ, and it made me hit on one of the thoughts which I express in the book about this. Which is that we seem to think at this stage in our liberal democracies that our liberal democracies are so appealing and so strong that basically, if you bring the world in, it comes up to speed with us almost immediately. Or the same one point in the book that to just walk into Europe is to immediately breathe the air of St Paul and Voltaire. And it seems highly unlikely to me to put it no stronger, that everybody who walks into Europe arrives at the same point that we are at in regards to our views on religion, our views on all sorts of rights questions and others. It's just very implausible to me. But then the idea that changes, and to me at any rate, I say that we should understand our societies to be more like a fragile ecosystem where you can't just endlessly tear things up and put new things in and expect the whole thing to look the same. It's much more likely that it will look very different and that therefore you should take care with it and take care with the thing you've inherited in order that you pass it on. At least you pass on something that isn't a grand version of the Balkans. And that brings me to the other analogy, which I at one point hit on. Some people would find it uncomfortable because, of course, so many of the people coming into Europe come on boats, and so many of the boats, thanks to the smugglers, are very rickety vehicles indeed. But I say, what if Europe is not this massive liner that can just keep taking people on, but a boat itself which has to decide how many people it can take on before it itself capsizes? And I think that this is something we have not given sufficient thought to. And of course, one of the reasons is that it isn't a science, is it? I mean, it's not as if there was a graph one could produce to show the point at which people become uncomfortable about where their society is going, the point at which the welfare stretch is too great, et cetera, et cetera. It's just something you get feelings about. And that's why I have one chapter on what I call early warning sirens. Various people who went off across Europe in recent decades, different people, left wing feminists there, a gay activist there, and the people who just went off saying, hang on, I'm starting to get nervous about the future. And again, we didn't really listen to those because we kept on to this idea that it doesn't matter, because when people get to hear, they'll realize how great it is and they'll become just like us. This intuition is also propped up by arguments in favor of immigration that you dispatch fairly early in the book. And there really is really a set of myths in at least on certain points, about immigration, aging, society and all that. Yeah, perhaps take a minute or two to talk to those, because people have this sense that this is not only in some sense inevitable, but necessary. There's no alternative for Europe. You have this senescent continent that needs workers. What else could be done? Yes, I go into that. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content. It including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, well, today I'm speaking with Ian McGilchrist. Ian is a Fellow of All Souls College at Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and he was a Research Fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins. And most importantly for our purposes, he's the author of the book The Master and His Emissary the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. And that is the focus of our conversation today. We talk about the differences between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, which are fascinating and consequential and I think under appreciated. And this gets us into many thorny issues. We discuss the popular misconceptions about these differences. The prospect that consciousness might be partitioned even in an intact brain. The difference between consciousness and attention. The boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. How face to face encounters differ between the hemispheres. The unique deficits that result from damage to each the ascendancy of the left hemisphere in modern culture. The possibility of the brain as a mere receiver of mind. People's expectations about surviving death. Anyway, I thought it was a fascinating conversation. We certainly could have gone on for many more hours. And now I bring you Ian McGilchrist. I am here with Ian McGilchrist. Ian, thank you for joining me. It's a great pleasure, Sam. Thank you. So we're about to speak about what I consider one of the most interesting topics in any field. The focus of our conversation is covered really in exhaustive detail in your book The Master and His Emissary. And there's also a film based on that which I discovered online last night, The Divided Brain. But before we jump in, what is your academic and intellectual background? All my life, really, I've been interested in philosophical questions, particularly the end of philosophy that accommodates theology. And so at 18, I wanted to go to Oxford and study philosophy and theology, but you had to take an entrance exam in some school subject, and almost at random, I chose English Literature. And when I went to interview, they said, oh, you can't do theology and philosophy. It's not an honors degree. So in 172 in Oxford, theology and philosophy wasn't an honest degree. Each on their own was, but not the combination I think it is now, but there we are. So they said, look, you obviously like and are good at English. Come and do that. So I did. And I was interested really in the philosophy of literature and the philosophy of aesthetics, in a way. And something struck me as very odd about what we were doing. I got a fellowship immediately after graduating which enabled me to have time to reflect. And I thought there's something that's really troubling me about the way in which we approach literature. Somebody in the past took great pains to create something that is unique, embodied and largely speaking implicit. In other words, if you try and unpack it like explaining a joke or trying to say, well, this is what this poem means, you really are losing a lot of the value and the meaning. And people came along, you know, in seminar rooms and took the disembodied and made it thoroughly sorry, took the embodied and made it thoroughly disembodied, took the implicit and made it explicit and in the process rendered this entirely unique thing, this completely unique experience, something that was utterly general in nature. So I thought, there's something wrong with this. And I wrote a book called Against Criticism. And what seemed to me wrong was that we'd become very disembodied in the way that we think about everything. In fact, it's something since the earliest days reflected on the way we lead our lives nowadays that they're overseerable in some way and that the process is somewhat destructive. It has its advantages, but it also has major problems. And I went to the philosophy seminars to discuss the mind body question, but I found that the philosophers were just altogether too disembodied in their approach. And so I thought I'd read Oliver Saxon's book Awakenings had just come out around that time. I'm that old. And I thought, this is really fascinating. Here's someone who's attended to the individuality of his patients but made completely amazing drawn philosophical conclusions. They're very important about what happens when something changes your brain or your body and what that does to your personhood, to your mind, and to your whole humanity. And I thought, this is what I want to do. So I had to start again, study medicine from scratch, and then as soon as I qualified and done my basic jobs in what you'd call internships, I then did a little bit of psychiatry and sorry, a bit of neurology and neurosurgery and then went to the Maudsley to study psychiatry. And my interest there has all along been in the overlap between mind and body. So that's how I got into being somebody who writes about the mind body relationship from an embodied point of view. There's a further question how did I get into the issue of lateralization, but you may be coming on to that, so we can yes. Have you had a psychiatric practice all this time, or are you retired in that mode? Oh, I'm retired now, but for years I was a practicing psychiatrist, first at the Bethlehem and Mortality Hospital in London and then privately. Right. So we're going to talk about the divided brain, which is something I've spoken about before, I think, at least in passing on my podcast and on my app, Waking Up. I've certainly written about it in at least one of my books. But given its strangeness as a phenomenon and its relevance to just how we conceive of ourselves as persons, it's an underreported finding in science. So I think we should just describe the phenomenon itself, how we've come to know anything about it. The basic picture is that the human brain and, you know, not just human this is true of the avian brain and all mammalian brains, but for our purposes, and most interestingly, our own brains are divided across the longitudinal fissure into left and right hemispheres. And this could have worked out in various ways. The two hemispheres could have been functionally identical. They could have shared information perfectly. There could be no differences between them. And one would sort of think that would be the case. And yet what we have found is that they are quite different. And we're going to go into those differences. And we know this based on the fact that they can be disconnected. So maybe we should actually, before we dive into the splitbrain phenomenon and how we know any of this stuff, just explain the title of your book that The Master and His Emissary. What what do you mean by that title? Okay, well, that's essentially a story which illustrates how I see the relationship between the two hemispheres. Here we are kind of jumping ahead a bit, but there's been a general view, the one that I was trained on, that the left hemisphere is the one that does all the heavy lifting and is intelligent and perceptive, and that the right hemisphere is a bit of a kind of no good. We're not really kind of sure what it is. I mean, it might be there for propping up the left hemisphere to make sure it doesn't fall over. I mean, literally, people have talked like that, but I see them as having developed two entirely different roles. They've been separate in all the brains we know, going right the way down to reptiles and even the networks of insects, of nematode worms, and even the most ancient sea creature that we know of already shows an asymmetrical neural network, which is very interesting in itself. But what I think has happened in humans is with the evolution of language, we've decided to devote one part of the brain for dealing entirely in theory of the symbols of experience rather than the gathering of experience itself. And in a new book I'm writing, I actually take the pains to go through all the various ways in which we get a hang on the world. And in all cases, the left hemisphere is not as good at this as the right hemisphere. Why is that? Because the left hemisphere needs to be kept away from that because it's busy doing some theoretical processing. Now, the thing is that in fact, the right hemisphere is actually more intelligent. And I mean in terms of IQ. In the book that I've been writing, I've got the information about that, which sounds a bit odd, but it's also the one that attends much more broadly to the world, perceives more, makes better judgments, is less taken in. Tends not to jump to conclusions in the way the left hemisphere does. Has social and emotional understanding in the way the left hemisphere doesn't. And indeed, it is the one that we rely on to be connected to and make sense of the world. When people have a left hemisphere stroke, they carry on, for all intents and purposes, being largely in touch with the same world they were in before. But when they have a right hemisphere stroke, they find it hard to understand what's happening, what people mean when they say things. I mean, their language functions are going, but what does this really mean anymore? So patients who are cared for by people and they have a right hemisphere of stroke, the main complaint is that these patients lack any human understanding or empathy, whereas the complaint with people who have a left hemisphere stroke is they have difficulty reading and writing. He's really on a very different level. So to come back to the master and his hemisphere, the right hemisphere is in the way the master the idea I had here was of a spiritual community in which there was a wise spiritual master who looked after the business of a community so that it flourished and grew. And in a while it became obvious that the master couldn't look after all the daily business of the community and indeed ought not to get involved with it, in fact, if he was to be able to maintain his all important overview. And so he delegated his brightest and best sort of second in command to go about doing the sort of administrative business. But this administrator, while very bright, wasn't bright enough to know what it was he didn't know. And so he thought, what does a master know? What does he know? He's just sitting back at the palace meditating saraphically, I'm the one that does all the hard work here and I'm the one that knows. And so he took on the mantle of the master and in the process, because he didn't know what the master knew, he was not able to perform his job. And the whole community, the master and the emissary, fell to ruin. Now I see that as a parable very loosely based on a hint in nature to describe the relationship, the advancing relationship between the right and left hemisphere and the way we have ended up in the world today enthralled to the emissary to the servant that doesn't really understand what the master would have known and been able to tell us about. We could move on from there to just a little reflection on this question that you raised the divided nature of the brain. Yes, when I was in medical school, I mean, obviously we we saw that it was there it is on the slab and it's divided and it was just taken for granted and nobody really said why. What on earth is the point of having a mass of neuronal interconnections whose value we seem to believe is predicated on the sheer number of interconnections it can make? Why divide it right down the middle in this way? And as I say, this has been the case in all living creatures that we know of. Indeed, the corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres, a band of fibers at the base of the brain that connects about 2% of the fibers of the brain directly is a mammalian invention. Up until mammals, ie. In birds and reptiles, amphibians monitorings, there isn't a corpus scalosum at all. So that's fascinating. And indeed, Chap called Hullings'jackson, who's one of the great fathers of modern neurology in the 19th century, said it's not common enough for us to wonder at this fact that the brain is divided in this way. And when I got to my medical training and so on, the topic of difference between the hemispheres was really a non subject. It was considered entirely pop psychology. It was tacky people pled with me don't allow your career to be tainted. You can do well, don't do this, don't get involved in this issue. It's all been rubbished a long time ago. But that's actually to go far too far. First of all, it's very clear and undeniable that the two hemispheres do have quite different functions because or at least they contribute to I'd rather put it this way they contribute to a human being in different ways. You can see that when people have strokes in one hemisphere, they have a stroke in the exactly same sort of mirror position in the other hemisphere. The outcome is completely different. So it's not good enough to say they're just the same, they aren't. And they wouldn't have evolved in this way if there was really no purpose in their difference. The question simply was what was that difference? And all the things that people used to say back in the after the first split brain operations, which was a procedure invented to aid patients who had constant epileptic seizures. And somebody had the idea that it would be a good idea to divide the connection between the two hemispheres so that if a seizure started in one hemisphere, it wouldn't automatically overwhelm the whole brain. The other half would be able to carry on functioning. And indeed, it was a great success in achieving that. But it gave people a window into the difference between these two worlds because you could actually, by clever experimentation, address problems and questions and test out each hemisphere on its own. And this gave rise to a literature which was, in a way people jumped to a lot of conclusions rather fast. And the story was, well, the right brain is kind of emotional, but the left brain is rational and it's dependable. It may be a little bit boring, but at least it's very dependable. It tends to be our contact with reality. Whereas the right hemisphere is all very well if you want to paint pictures, but you know, and this is just so, so terrible as a way of looking at them. In many ways it's the inverse of the truth because as I have discovered and explained at length in my works, the left hemisphere is actually less in touch with reality, less reliable, more prone to jump to conclusions, more prone to quick and dirty decisions, and more prone to getting emotional in certain ways. For example, emotions are not all particularly in the right or left hemisphere, but one in particular is especially well represented in the left hemisphere and that's anger. So it is a fascinating topic. Well, so I want to revisit some of those landmarks that you just sketched because again, this is a topic that it seems to me most of culture and even most of scientific culture and even neuroscientific culture has really only glanced at and it's kept at a distance, I think largely because it is so strange. There's something very disconcerting about what we have come to know about the organization of the brain here and some of its implications. I'm wondering what you think about why this topic has been strikes me as it's almost been treated as a kind of intellectual pornography. Right. It's been held in disrepute, as you describe. But beyond the fact that there's been some cartoonish portrayals of the differences between left and right and this kind of pop psychological misinformation that has been spread, is there any other reason why you think this, why you were warned off this as a topic when you were doing your studies? I think there are two main reasons. One is that, as you say, it had got into popular culture in a certain way. So it was an ad, the Volvo, a car for your right brain and this kind of thing. And so people went, oh, please don't let's go near that. So in order to remain aloof neuroscience oh, no, it's not like that. Which indeed it isn't. But the other reason is that there were some, as I say, some slightly too quick conclusions drawn in the early days in the into the these were based on, I believe, a misconception which is that the real difference between the two hemispheres was what they do. Which is the right answer or the right way right question, perhaps to ask of a machine, what does it do? But it's not necessarily the right question to ask of a person, of a person who may be more interested in the how, in what way, in what manner this is done. And what I discovered fairly early on was that the old division, that reason and language was solely the province of the left hemisphere and emotion and visiospatial things, the province of the right hemisphere, that this was not the case. Each was involved in all of those, indeed, in everything that we do. Yeah. So where does that leave my position? Fine. Ready to go on a very interesting adventure. Because then one says it's not the what, it's the how. And in every case, whatever it is that each hemisphere is dealing with, it deals with it in a reliably, consistently, predictably different way. And what is that? Well, it's to do, I believe, with a problem which is entirely explicable in terms of Darwinian evolutionary advantage. So before we jump into that, I want to talk about the evolutionary origins of this, insofar as we can speculate about them. And just why would it be that brains would be divided and divided in the way that they are? But let's describe how we know that the hemispheres are so different in our own case, based on the I just want to summarize the split brain research in a little more detail for people who may not be familiar with it. And the interesting thing here is that the claims that you are going to make about the differences between right and left and you have gone so far as to suggest that the right hemisphere is the more competent, the more fully human, the more just the master, rather than the emissary. That is quite different from where science started once we started splitting the hemispheres by cutting the corpus colossal in those surgeries you described. And even people who were very close to that research early on felt that they went from thinking that the right hemisphere was, in fact, unconscious, right. That there was nothing that it was like to be the right hemisphere. That the left hemisphere was entirely the basis for human experience of any kind to thinking that the right hemisphere, while it might be conscious, is definitely subhuman. Michael Gazaniga, who I know, and who's very early as a cognitive neuroscientist studying this, worked under Roger Sperry. He at one point I'm sure he's recanted here, but at one point he suggested that the right hemisphere was essentially beneath a chimpanzee in its cognitive abilities. So we have come a long way in in appreciating what the right hemisphere is doing. Ironically, maybe it's our maybe it's our left hemisphere that had to be dragged all this way to appreciate what the right hemisphere is doing. So let's just describe the original fairy experiments born of the neurosurgeries done by Joe Bogan and discuss how does we were able to interrogate the hemispheres separately and know that there really are, in the case of a divided brain, two different points of view on the world and really two different subjects, two different people in a single human head. Absolutely. And it might be worth just saying that already in the 19th century people saw that the hemispheres were quite different, famously broken. DAX saw that patients who lost their speech had damage to a certain area only in the left frontal lobe, not in the right and so forth. And people observing, people with strokes, massive strokes in one hemisphere or the other over the subsequent decades often notice that the subjects seem to live in a quite different kind of a world. So it wasn't just the split brains that told us this. We should also recall that and this is a point you make in your book, that long before, a full century before anyone thought of doing the split brain work, we already knew, or someone already knew, that the right hemisphere was sufficient for consciousness. Because there were neuroanatomists who discovered upon autopsy that people who lived fully normal lives, which is to say conscious lives had, upon inspection after death, only one hemisphere of their brains could be the right or it could be the left. And this is born of the fact that there are people who are born without one hemisphere or they suffer some illness or injury very close to birth and manage developmentally to compensate. And this is just not discovered until much later in life. Now, this kind of thing can be discovered during routine neuroimaging. You can discover that a fully intact person is in fact missing a hemisphere and have been their entire lives. So we already knew that the right hemisphere could be conscious and then we seem to have forgotten that over the course of 100 years of doing neurology and neuroscience. Yes, I mean, what you're particularly, I think, alluding to there is the work of Wigan in the 19th century with this amazing figure who spent a lot of time in the autopsy room. But I would just like to gloss something since you've raised that topic. It's slightly different because if somebody's had only one hemisphere from birth which can sometimes happen because there may be a space occupying sac or lesion that's in the place where the hemisphere should be you're dealing with something rather different because from the word go, the neural the central nervous system will have reorganized itself to take into account this element. But still, it is true that people who develop normally can certainly live well with the right hemisphere. They're better off with their right hemisphere if they've only got to have one than with the left. Anyway, to come back to the split brain operation yes, first of all, people were amazed by a couple of things that they just observed without doing any experiments. People were first of all thinking what would it be like for somebody to have the two parts of their brain completely separate? When I say completely separate, there are a couple of minor fish, minor commissions that connect the hemispheres. But to all intents and purposes, the very much, the most important had been severed. And the answer to that was that they were remarkably normal, as if these two hemispheres would carry on like that without doing a lot of talking to one another. But they did also notice, at least in the early days after the operation going on for the first months, that sometimes people would show completely conflicting behavior. So a woman would go to the wardrobe to take out a dress with her right hand and her left hand would take it and put it back and take out a different one. Or somebody would get out money to pay from the wallet and the other hand would take it away and put it back in his pocket. So this is the kind of thing that you saw, I believe there was a case of a man trying to embrace his wife with one hand and strangle her with the other. Yes. Well, at least push her away with you. I think the story's got more as it got told. It got better. But no, that's right. But very good. Very interesting experiments were devised, very clever and genius experiments were devised whereby, for example, you could give information to just one ear or you could give conflicting information to the two airs at the same time. And normally, of course, information is shared, but in this case it wouldn't be shared. And so you could actually have a different input to each hemisphere. And you can also do this visually using a technique called takistoscopy, in which a different image is put up in the right visual field, which goes to the left hemisphere from the one that's put up in the left visual field, which goes to the right hemisphere. And you can then ask questions of the person about what they've seen or what they've done. Some of those are rather intricate and would take us a long time to explain, particularly without a diagram. But one of the most interesting findings was that when the left hemisphere knew really nothing at all, because the information had all gone to the right hemisphere, it would pretend that it knew all about what was going on. So when it was asked, why did you respond in a certain way about which it knew didle squat? Because that had been the information the right hemisphere had had and that was why we had responded in that way. It would make something up that was plausible. And it is one way of looking at it is that the left hemisphere is extraordinarily good at making things up and it's a bullshitter, in fact. And this is why Mike Gazaniga calls it the interpreter, because it can make sense of whatever it sees happening and it actually seems to believe its own propaganda. The left hemisphere seems to have dominated our politics of late. One thing you can see is the confabulatory nature of the left hemisphere in the news on an hourly basis. You can indeed. And on that Roger Sperry, who, as you mentioned, was one of the most important neuroscientists of that era, investigating this phenomenon, for which he was given a Nobel Prize, said and he was no mean philosopher, actually, as well as being a neuroscientist, he said that the problem with modern Western civilization is that it has relegated, it ignores the right hemisphere. Anyway, Mike Gazaniga has changed his views quite a lot since those early pronouncements. I imagine they live on to haunt him slightly. But what pleases me is that some of the things I was saying earlier about the way in which the left hemisphere is more prone to bias and more prone to jump to conclusions and make poor judgments, actually comes from the work of Nikki Marinsek, who works in Gazanica's lab. So obviously things have changed now, but it's been a process of trying to get people to see that just because all we knew was a rather quick and dirty formula at a certain stage, it wasn't enough to dismiss hugely important questions. Why is the brain divided? Why is it asymmetrical, by the way, since the skull that contains it is not? Why is the connection between the hemispheres so much involved with inhibition rather than facilitation? These were questions that haunted me and it took me 30 years, basically to come up with what I was able to write in The Master and His Emissary, and another ten years for what I've just written and I'm hoping will be published in the next twelve months. So, yes, it didn't start from a very auspicious place, but I was completely convinced that something of great interest was being neglected. And you asked why had people not sort of gone further with it? I think the answer is that to make sense of it would have required 30 years. And in doing so they would have basically forfeited their career, because when they were juniors, their bosses wouldn't have wanted them to do research on lateralization. They said, don't forget it, that's all passe. And as they got further on, they wouldn't have got grants and they wouldn't have got promotion and so on. So actually very few people have taken the trouble to really look at this in any great depth. And with all due modesty, I am one of the people who has spent decades really, really getting acquainted with the literature. And so I know some things about it that there are people who do know them, but it's not in the general culture. I think there may be an additional reason. Here, which is that there's something impossible or at least very difficult to assimilate about this finding into one's sense of one's own being in the world. I want to try to make what we're talking about here as subjectively real to people as we can make it. And we'll go further into just the differences between the hemispheres and perhaps what we can start with just the basic question which you've raised is why is the brain divided in the first place? And why would it not be functionally symmetrical? But here's what strikes me as most strange about the phenomenon which you really can just extrapolate from the split brain finding. So the split brain finding is that if you divide the brain surgically by cutting the comissures or at least the corpus colossal, but the anterior comicure and there are a few others that need not be cut but could be cut and you have this very stark finding where you have just undeniably two points of view. Whatever their differences, as we will yet describe, there are two points of view at that point in the the human mind is is dual and the left hand quite literally doesn't know what the right hand is doing. And reminding people again about the contralateral organization of the nervous system, as you said, the right hemisphere in a divided brain sees only the left side of the world and the left hemisphere sees the right side of the world. It's not divided left and right eye, it's the left hemifield within both eyes and the right hemisphere within both eyes. So you can present an image to the right hemisphere which the left hemisphere does not see. But because language is so disproportionately subserved by the left hemisphere, certainly 95% of people, when you're talking to the subject and you say what did you see? The answer you're getting though the right hemisphere hears you, the answer you're getting is coming from the left hemisphere that has control of speech. And so you're talking to a person who says well, I didn't see anything. And then in an experiment like this, you could say well, can you take your left hand and reach for the object that you may or may not have seen? And then at that point, the right hemisphere, which is in full control of the left hand or near full control of the left hand, can reach and pick up an object which is in fact the object that was presented to it visually. And then when asked why did you pick up this key or egg or whatever the object was? As you point out, the left hemisphere at that point confabulates and tells a story. It seems to always have a story as to why in this case, the left hand over which it has no control did what it did. And it shows that it has basically no reality testing mechanism left to it, left to its own devices. It will just publicize some account of the world and it's apparently the most credulous person on earth. The amazing thing about this is if you extrapolate from this finding that a divided brain gives you two people, right, two fairly different people, and even if they were the same in their emotional tone and their cognitive styles, which they're not, there would still be two of them at this .2 different points of view on the world. If you extrapolate from that and realize that, you know, as you said, an intact corpus colossal only terminates on a mere 2% of cortical neurons, right? I mean, it's not that every neuron is connected with every other like neuron across the hemispheres, right? So we have to be imperfectly connected even in the healthiest, most intact brain. Which is to say there isn't perfect information sharing across the hemispheres. And so it opens the question to what degree are we dual even now? To what degree could there be islands of consciousness in an intact brain or shifting, overlapping, non shared spaces of consciousness? Whereas it is something that it's like to be part of the right hemisphere and there's something that it's like to be part of the left hemisphere. And in any given moment, these points of view may not be unified. They may be I'm agnostic as to whether or not this is a totally fluid situation and they can come to be unified and separate again. But it gives a kind of Freudian spooky picture of the mind that the unconscious from the point of view of the conscious, you in this moment may in fact be conscious and looking over your shoulder. In a sense, the phenomenology with which any person is identified subjectively may not be the totality of the subjectivity, the conscious subjectivity in their own brain. And I think there's something about that picture that is so weird that people just don't want to think about it. Yes, you pointed to something definitely that I don't think can be dismissed. But I think I'd like to sort of moderate that picture a little. Sure. And the first is that we all grow up with information coming to us from both parts of the world and it is communicated through the body and into the brain using both endocrine transmitters as well as the neurological system that we are describing, right? And the normal person is receiving a picture all around of the world and this information is being taken as a whole. So on the whole, we don't find ourselves noticing this. In fact, if we noticed it, it would be very damaging for us because we would find ourselves constantly torn like the person who's trying to pay and putting the money back in the pocket. And it's also worth saying that after usually about the first five or six months, most split brain subjects started to lose this inter manual conflict as it's called. So it's something that the person sort of accommodated to. But it's also not just true. On the other hand, it's also not just split brain patients that must be thinking very differently and seeing the world very differently. Because you can produce this effect experimentally in normal subjects using transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is a technique whereby you can painlessly stimulate or suppress, depending on the frequency of the pulses areas of the brain. And I don't know, but you've probably talked about that in another podcast. But in any case, the point is this when you do that, something full fledged and ready to go is released. So it's not like it was there. When you knock out the left hemisphere and knock out the right hemisphere, you find instantaneously decisions being made which are characteristic of what we know to be the way of the right or the left hemisphere. And this can actually be advantageous in certain circumstances. So that problem solving of a certain kind Alan Snyder in Sydney has experimented on this can be facilitated by suppressing the left frontal cortex and enhancing the right frontal cortex so that complex problems, including mathematical problems, can be more easily solved. In any case, all I'm really saying there is that, yes, there is something spooky and it's not just in split brain patients. I acknowledge that because as I say, it's there and ready to go. And when people have a stroke and they suddenly start experiencing the world differently, how did that happen? Just like that, unless it was there and ready to go in the intact individual. So we know that is the case. But I suppose I'm less troubled by the idea that there might be two people here. It looks like that, but then it would only be like that if, as it were, we were sure that whatever it is that is my left hemisphere's consciousness and my right hemisphere's consciousness were generated straight out of those hemispheres. Now, I suspect that this may be a point on which we might differ, but I'm not convinced that the brain is merely a producer or secretary of consciousness. So it becomes possible to think of consciousness that is a flow and that is transmitted transduced by the brain. So you can see the brain as something that is receiving a stream of information to both hemispheres simultaneously and together and that that is producing the whole personal experience. But that what happens when you artificially divide the brain, is that it's rather like an island in a stream where the stream has to go either side of the island and then reconvene again. And the stories I've been telling about the coming together and the coming separately of the two hemispheres might be better thought of in terms of such a metaphor. That's all, really, I'm suggesting I think it's too extreme to say that there are two persons that says there's Sam Harris left and Sam Harris right. I think that's too simple. Yeah. No, I wasn't suggesting that. I guess what I was suggesting, though, is that in any picture other than perfect information sharing, then you have to ask yourself what is left out and what are the consequences of it's being left out for subjectivity in. Any given moment and however fluid you want to make it. Anything less than perfect access across the commissures gives you this Venn diagram where of of conscious experience wherein the two circles don't completely overlap and become one. So then you have to ask yourself well, what is the penumbra like where the left doesn't share what the right is in fact experiencing and vice versa. And again this could be completely fluid so that you could have more global states of the hemispheres where there is a kind of synchrony. And synchrony may in fact be what is mediating the sharing of a conscious percept or thought in any given moment. But again, the spooky part for me is not so much that much of what the brain is doing is unconscious or outside the experience of the conscious subject at any moment. It's the idea that some of what's outside your experience as a conscious subject in this moment may itself be conscious. Right? That's the thing that just makes the hair stand up on the back of one's neck. Go ahead. So much that you're commenting on there that's so important. I mean, something we might come to later, because it comes back to the question why the two hemispheres are separate in the way that they are. Is that much of the traffic, as you describe it, bringing information together? Across the corpus callosum is inhibitory. And much of the effect of the corpus callosum is for one hemisphere to say, I'm dealing with this, you keep out of it, because that's just going to make the matter confused and I'll work slower. So even in a perfectly functioning brain where as it were, at one level the communication is good, some of the functional effect of the communication is not positive but negative. It's not facilitation, it's inhibition. But even more so, I wanted to comment on the question about consciousness, because, of course, consciousness means many different things. And in one sense, we think that consciousness is what is in my mind, that I'm aware of right now and I'm focusing on. But that is variously estimated to be between half a percent and 5% of what's going on in one's brain. In fact, I read a paper in which the the authors said that 99.44% of brain activity was not within the field of consciousness which is alarmingly precise but in any way it makes the point. But the way I would see that is that there is also material that can quite quickly become conscious. It's just that it's not conscious now for reasons of expediency. If we are to function, we simply can't be conscious of many things of which we have consciousness at a different level and that can be brought into effect like that if it's necessary. So the way I see it is that one distinction between the left and the right hemisphere, which we must come on to at some point, is that the left hemisphere has very narrow beam attention that is highly clarified and precise, but it's only to like three degrees of the 360 degree attentional arc, whereas the right hemisphere sees a very broad picture. And that is quite different. It's on the lookout, it's vigilant all the time. So if you think of the field of consciousness as being a stage on which life is going on, the bit that is within the spotlight is the bit the left hemisphere sees and that's the bit we say, oh, I'm conscious of that. But when the spotlight moves 5 minutes later, you're no longer conscious of what you were conscious of even a few seconds ago, but it's still within your consciousness, it's still possible for you to summon it and it's still there. It's like the part of the stage that's not illuminated hasn't gone away. It's just a bit we're not any longer attending to in this very particular highly selfconscious consciousness. What would you say about that? That's interesting. I think I would bound the concept of consciousness a little differently there because for me, again, I think consciousness as a concept is actually irreducible, which is to say we define it in circular terms. It's synonymous with experience. Agreed. Yeah. You know, I like Thomas Nagel's framing that it's something that it's like to be a system. So if a bat is conscious, that's simply saying that there's something that it's like to be a bat. If you could trade places with a bat, you'd have some qualitative character to your being in the world. It wouldn't be synonymous with just having the lights go out. No. So when talking about one's own conscious experience, I would differentiate consciousness from attention, say, so I can be paying attention to one thing, but also dimly aware of the things that I'm trying to exclude from my experience by focusing on the one thing. There's a kind of a center and periphery very much analogous to what we experience in vision. You have your fovial in focus vision and then you have all the stuff you can see in the corner of your eye and so there's a spotlight of attention, but then there's this wider field of illuminated experience that has a qualitative character. And at the margins of this, it's always possible to have, as you say, new percepts and ideas and phenomenons surface and be brought into direct awareness. And as William James quite brilliantly pointed out now over 100 years ago, our experience of this, the kind of liminal boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness, has a kind of structure that can be interrogated if you're clever. And we've learned to do that scientifically in all kinds of ways. But even just introspectively, you can notice things that one example that James gave is that if you think about what it's like to suffer the tip of the tongue phenomenon, you're trying to remember a word, you're trying to remember somebody's name and you just can't get anything there. So on the one hand we're talking about what is absent from consciousness. Like the word is not there, the name is not there. There is a vacancy which you're struggling to fill. But this vacancy has structure because someone can say to you is the name Jim? And you instantly know that it's not Jim. You can exclude Jim because Jim is not the name you're trying to think of and yet you don't know what the name is that you're trying to think of. There are fascinating aspects to this where take a phenomenon like hemi neglect, which, you know, we're we're in our leisurely way. Getting to is one of these issues where you have, in this case, a right hemisphere lesion, usually in the parietal lobe, which causes this phenomenon of people neglecting the left half of the world and being unaware of their deficit. Right. So if you tell them to draw a clock face, they'll draw a circle, but then they'll put all the numbers on the on the right side of the clock. If you ask them to start writing on a piece of paper, they'll start writing down the just the right half of the piece of paper. But this raises a kind of Jamesian conundrum which is in order to systematically neglect the left half of the world, you need to know where the middle is, right? And to know where the middle is, you do need to know where the left half of the world is. I mean, in order to reliably start writing on the right half of a piece of paper, part of you needs to have found the middle in order to jump over to the right side of things. So the question is again, the very strange question from my point of view is not that some or most of this processing is happening subliminally in the dark beneath the light of consciousness. It's that some of it could be associated with consciousness, that there could be something that it's like to see the left half of the world and then get the rest of the person to ignore it. There's something that it's like to know the word that the rest of you is trying to think of and yet not provide it or not be able to provide it. And this just opens the door. And I'm not suggesting that in an intact brain we have two separate people in there, but insofar as the real estate of consciousness itself might not be fully integrated, it does force a very spooky picture. And again, a quasi Freudian picture of a conscious part of you that you, the so called conscious subject, isn't aware of in any given moment. Right. There's something that it's like to be part of your mind that you the conscious person in this moment, doesn't directly experience. And that's, again, even if you're convinced that that is a possibility, and even if you see some indication of that in your life in moments of self deception or in or in moments of, you know, dream you might experience a dream where there really seems like there's an author of the dream that has anticipated you as the protagonist of the dream, not knowing what's going on, having a dream where a dream character is telling you a joke that has a punchline, that surprises you, that's just an incredible experience. You're the protagonist in your dream. You meet a person who doesn't exist, and you're obviously not aware of that because it's a dream. It's not a lucid dream, and this person tells you a joke and you're waiting to hear the punchline. And then when the punch line is delivered, it's actually funny. And so how is it possible for part of your mind to have written on demand something that the other part of your mind will find funny? All of these moments, again, suggest something very weird, and I think it's just very hard for people to keep this in focus. You raised so many things, a few issues. If you could be patient. Sure. I think the first thing I think is if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I am speaking with Renee Duressa. Renee is the Director of Research at New Knowledge and the head of Policy at the nonprofit Data for Democracy, and she investigates the spread of hyperpartisan and destructive narratives across social networks. She's co authored a recent report on the the Russian disinformation campaign both before and since the 2016 presidential election, and we talk about all that she's advised politicians and policymakers, members of Congress, the State Department. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and many other outlets. She's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Truman National Security Project. Security fellow? She also holds degrees in Computer Science and political science from SUNY Stonybrook. As you'll hear, Renee was recommended to me by my friend and former podcast guest Tristan Harris, who recommended her as an authority on just what happened with the Russian influence campaign in recent years. And Renee did not disappoint. So without further ado, I bring you Renee Duressta. I am here with Renee Duressa. Renee, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. I was introduced to you through our mutual friend, Tristan Harris. How do you know Tristan? Tristan and I met in mid 2017. I had written an essay about Bots, and he read it and he shared it to Facebook, funny enough, and we discovered that we had about 60 mutual friends, even though we'd never met. And we met for breakfast a couple of days later. And he wanted to talk about what I was seeing and the things I was writing about and how they intersected with his vision of social platforms as having profound impacts on individuals. My research into how social platforms are having profound impacts on policy and society. And we had breakfast, hit it off, and I think had breakfast again a couple of days later. So fast friends. Yeah. Well, tristan is great. So many people will recall he's been on the podcast, and I think he's actually been described as the conscience of Silicon Valley, just in terms of how he has been sounding the alarm on the toxic business model of social media in particular. So you touched on it there for a second, but give us a snapshot of your background and how you come to be thinking about the problem of bots and also just the specific problem we're going to be talking about of the Russian disinformation campaign and hacking of democracy. Yes. It's sort of a convoluted way that I got to investigating Russia and disinformation. It actually started back in 2014. I became a mom, and I just moved to San Francisco a little bit prior, and I had to get my kid onto a preschool waiting list, which is not always easy. Yeah, not like a nice preschool. Just like a preschool. I knew California had some antivax problems, and I started googling for the data sets. The California department of Public Health has public data sets where they tell you vaccination rates in schools. Anyway, I looked and I thought, god, this is a disaster waiting to happen. And lo and behold, a couple of months later, the Disneyland measles outbreak in fact did happen. And I reached out to my congressman, it was the first time I'd ever done that. And I said, hey, we should have a law for this now. We should eliminate the vaccine opt outs. And they told me they were introducing something. So I said, great, I'd love to help have a data science background. I can maybe be useful as an analyst. And what wound up happening was that there was this extraordinary thing as the bill took shape, which was that the legislators were finding that polling in their districts was about 85% positive. Like, people really liked the idea of eliminating what were called personal belief exemptions, the right to just kind of voluntarily opt your kids out. But the social media conversation was like 99% negative. It was very hard to even find a single positive tweet or positive Facebook post expressing support for this bill. And so I started looking into why that was and discovered this entire kind of ecosystem of what was this hybrid between almost activism and manipulation. So there were very real activists who had very real points of view, and then they were doing things like using automation. So the reason that they were dominating the Twitter ecosystem was that they were actually turning on automated accounts. So they were just kind of spamming the hashtags that anytime you searched for anything related to the bill in the hashtag, you would find their content. So this is sort of like a guerrilla marketing tactic. And I thought how interesting that they were using it and then realized that there were like fake personas in there. There were people pretending to be from California who weren't from California. How were you figuring that out? How were you assessing a fake persona? They were created within days of the bill being introduced, and they existed solely to talk about this bill. And then I discovered these communities on Facebook, things with names like Tweet for Vaccine Freedom, where there were actually moderators in the group who were posting instructions on for people from out of state how they could get involved and the answer was, create a persona, change your location ID to somewhere in California, and then start tweeting. So they sort of at the time, it seemed brazen. Now it seemed so quaint. But these tactics to shape consensus, to really create the illusion that there was a mass consensus in opposition to this bill. And so a very small group of people using social media as an amplifier were able to achieve dominance to just really own the conversation. And it led me to think this is fascinating because what we have here is this form of activism where there is kind of like a real core, and then there's some manipulative tactics layered on top of the real core. But if you're not looking for the manipulation, you don't see it. And most people aren't going looking. They're not digging into this stuff. So it was kind of a first indication that our policy conversations, our social conversations, were not necessarily reflective of kind of the reality on the ground, the stuff that we were still seeing in the polls. It was an interesting experience. And then a couple of months after that law was all done, I got a call from some folks in the Obama administration in the digital service saying, hey, we've read your research. Because I published about this in Wired. Hey, we've read your research. We'd like you to come down and look at some of the stuff that's going on with ISIS. And I said, I don't know anything about ISIS or about terrorism. Candidly when they said, no, you have to understand the tactics are identical. The same kind of owning the narrative, owning the hashtags, reaching out to people, pulling them into secret Facebook groups, the idea that terrorists were actually following some of these kind of radicalization pathways, these efforts to kind of dominate the conversation. Anytime there was a real world event related to ISIS, they would get things trending on Twitter. And so people in the administration wanted to understand how this was happening and what they could do about it. So that was how I wound up getting more involved in this in sort of a more official capacity. It was first kind of conspiracy theorists and terrorists and then Russia. Russia was following the 2016 election. There was a sense that, again, there had been these bizarre bot operations, and they were far more nefarious and sophisticated than anyone had realized. And we had to do a formal investigation before we get into the Russia case. Specifically, how do you view the role of social media in this? Do you distinguish between the culpability or the negligence of Twitter versus Facebook versus YouTube? Are there bright lines between how they have misplayed this, or are they very similar in the role they're playing? I think that they've really evolved a lot since 2015. In the early conversations about ISIS, there was just to kind of take you back to 2015, the attitude wasn't, oh, God, we've got terrorists on our platform. Let's get ahead of this, right? It was Facebook, to its credit, took that attitude from day one. This is a violation of our terms of service. We take down their content, we find them, we shut them down. YouTube would kind of take down the beheading videos as they popped up. Twitter, if you go back and you read articles from 2015, I've been doing a lot of going back and looking at the conversations from that time. You see a lot of sympathy for Twitter and this idea that if you take down ISIS, what comes next? There's a slippery slope, interesting co on to ponder Satan. If we take down ISIS, I mean, who knows what we have to take down next? One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And I would be sitting there in these rooms hearing these conversations saying, like, these are beheading videos, you guys. These are terrorist recruiters. These are people who are killing people. What the hell is this conversation? I can't get my head around it, but that's where we were in 2015. And go back and read things that people like the entities like the EFF were putting out, and you'll see that this was a topic of deep concern. What would happen if we were to silence ISIS? Would we inadvertently silence things that were tangentially related to ISIS, and then from there, would we silence certain types of expression of Islam? And so on and so forth? It was a very different kind of mindset back then. I think that the context has changed so much over the last year, in part because of stuff like what Tristan is doing and the tech hearings. And I think that 2016 was almost like the sort of Pearl Harbor that made people realize that, holy shit, this actually does have an impact. And maybe we do have to do something to get ahead of this because everybody's doing it now. Reading recent articles specifically about Facebook makes me think that there is just an insuperable problem here. You can't put enough people on it to appropriately vet the content, and the algorithms don't seem to be up to it. And so the mistakes that people plus algorithms are making are so flagrant. I mean, they're preserving the accounts of known terrorist organizations. They're deleting the accounts of Muslim reformers or ex Muslims who simply say something critical about the faith. I mean, there's just people can't figure out which end is up, apparently. And once you view these platforms as publishing platforms that are responsible for their content, it's understandable that you would want to, given the kinds of things we're going to talk about. But I don't know how they solve this. There's a lot of tristan and others have done a lot of work on changing the conversation around culpability and accountability. And I think that, again, in 2015, 2016, there would be references to things like the CDA 230 the Communication Decency Act, Section 230 that gives them the right to moderate, which they chose to use as the right to not moderate. And the norms, I would say that that evolved in the industry around, not wanting to be seen as being sensors in any way at the time, which meant that they left a whole lot of stuff up and didn't really do very much digging. And then now the shift kind of the pendulum swinging hard in the other direction, which is leading to allegations that conservatives are being censored and allegations that per your point unsophisticated moderation. I think there was an article about this in The New York Times over the weekend. Has led to some disasters where they take down people fighting extremists in Myanmar and link the extremists up. I think that the recognition that they are culpable, that fundamental change in the attitudes of the public has led them to start to try to take more responsibility. And right now it's being done in something of kind of a handhanded way. Yeah, well, they're certainly culpable for the business model that have kind of less of a view of Twitter here because Twitter doesn't seem to have its business model together in the way that Facebook does. But clearly Facebook per Tristan's point that their business model promotes outrage and sensationalism, preferentially. And the fact that they continue to do that is just selecting for these crazy, conspiratorial, divisive voices and then they're trying to kind of curate against those, but they're still amplifying those because it's their business model. And at least that's the way it seems as of my recent reading of the New York Times. Is that still your understanding of the bad geometry over there? Yeah, I would say that's accurate. So I see a lot of I try to focus on the the disinformation piece. There are some people who work on privacy, some who think about monopoly, you know, a lot of different grievances with tech platforms these days. But I see a lot of the manipulation specifically I would say, comes from a combination of three things. There's this mass consolidation of audiences on a handful of very few platforms, and that's just because as the web moved from these kind of decentralization, where there's always been manipulation and disinformation and lies on the Internet. Right, but the mass consolidation of audiences onto a very small handful of platforms meant that if you were going to run a manipulative campaign, much like if you were going to run a campaign for Pepsi, you only had to really blanket five different sites. And then the second piece was the precision targeting. Right. So the ads business model, the thing that you're referring to, these are attention brokers, which means they make money if you spend time on the platform. So they gather information about the user in order to show the user things that they want to see so that they stay on the platform. And then also as they're gathering that information, it does double duty and that they can use it to help advertisers target them. And then I would say the last piece of this is the algorithms that you're describing and the fact that for a very, very long time now, they've been very easy to game. And when we think about what you're describing, the idea that outrage gets clicks, that's true. And the algorithm, particularly things like the recommendation engines, they're not sophisticated enough to know what they're showing. So there is no sense of downstream harm or psychological harm or any other type of harm. All they know is this content gets clicks and this content drives engagement. And if I show this content to this person, they're going to stay on the platform longer. I can mine them for more data, I can show them more ads. So it's beneficial to them to do this. And I think one of the interesting challenges here is as we think about recommendation engines, that's where there is, in my opinion, a greater sense of culpability and a greater requirement for responsibility on the part of the platforms. And that's because they've moved into acting as a curator, right? They're saying you should see this. And the recommendation engines in particular often surface things that are not necessarily what we would necessarily want them to be showing. This is how you get at things like my antivaxers, right? I had an antivax account, an account that was active in antivax groups and it didn't engage with any of the people. It just sort of sat in the groups and kind of observed and it was being referred into Pizza Gate groups so long before pizza Gate was a matter of national conversation. Long before that guy showed up with a gun and shot up a pizza place thinking that Hillary Clinton was running a sex dungeon out of the basement. These personas that were prone to conspiratorial thinking the recommendation engine recognized that there was a correlation in people who were prone to conspiracy type A would be interested in Pizza Gate, which we can call conspiracy type B. And then soon enough, QAnon started to show up in the recommendation engine. And so the question becomes, where is the line? The platform is actively making a recommendation here. These accounts have never gone and proactively searched for Pizza Gate and QN on it. They're being suggested to them. So where is the responsibility? Should we have the recommendation engine not surface that type of content? Or is even making that suggestion a form of censorship? These are the kinds of conversations I think we'll start to see more of in 2019. Okay, well, let's focus on the topic at hand, which is Russian interference in, I guess, democracies everywhere, but specifically the US presidential election in 2016 and the recent report that you helped produce on this, which runs to 100 pages. And I'll put a link to that where I post this on my blog first. Just got a big picture, sort of political partisan question. It seems to me that many people, certainly most Trump supporters, continue to doubt whether Russia interfered in anything in 2016. And this is fake news. Is there any basis for doubt about that at this point? No, this is just crystal clear. As a matter of what our intelligence services tell us and as a matter of what people like you can ascertain by just studying online behavior. It happened. There's really nothing else to say about it. The intelligence agencies know it happened. The foreign governments know it happened. Researchers know it happened. The platforms acknowledge it happened. I mean, they're sure there can be some small group of people who continue to live like Ostriches, but that doesn't mean that it didn't happen. And what do you do with the charge that we do the same thing all the time everywhere ourselves, so there's really nothing to complain about here? Well, we probably do it to each other at this point. There's evidence of that as far back as 2016. Some things that insinuations about Alabama. There's a whole lot of evidence that domestic groups can and do do this as well. And that's why what I keep going to when I talk about this topic publicly is that this is not a partisan issue. This is not one state, one foreign actor interfering in one moment issue. This is sort of just an ongoing global challenge at this point. If we're speaking specifically about Russia and whether that happened, I think that it's incontrovertible truth at this point. And the other thing that seems incontrovertible is that it happened to favor the election of Trump in many obvious ways and in many surprising ways that we'll go into. But it they were not playing both sides of this. This was not a pro Clinton campaign. And in your report, you break down three ways which their meddling influence things and or attempted to influence things. We're going to be talking about one of them. But I'll just run through those three quickly, and then we'll focus on one. The first is there were attempts to actually hack online voting systems, and you know, that that's been reported on elsewhere. Secondly, there were there was just this very well known and consequential cyber attack on the Democratic National Committee and the leaking of that material through WikiLeaks. And that was obviously to the great disadvantage of the Clinton campaign. Then finally, and this is what we're going to focus on, there was just the social influence based on the disinformation campaign of the sort that you've just described, using bots and fake personas and targeting various groups. This is what's surprising when you get into the details of who was targeted and the kinds of messages that were spread. It's fairly sophisticated and amazingly cynical. There's a kind of morbid fun you can imagine these people were having at our expense in how they played one community against another in American society. So let's focus on this third method. And this was coming from something called the Internet Research Agency. We'll call them the IRA, as you do in your report. What is the IRA and what were they doing to us? So the IRA is you could think of them a little bit as a social media marketing agency meets an intelligence agency. So what they did, to a large extent, was they kind of built these pages. They built these communities, they built these personas, and they pretended to be Americans, americans of all stripes. So some were Southern Confederates, some were Texas secessionists, some were black liberationists. They had all of these personas. They really ran the gamut. What they were doing was they were creating pages to appeal to tribalism. So a lot of the conversation about the IRA over the last two years has referred to this idea that they were exploiting divisions in society. And that's true. But the data set that I had access to, which was provided by the tech platforms to the Senate Intelligence Committee, was the first time that anybody saw the full scope through the full two and a half years. And what we saw there was not a media marketing, meme ship, poster type agency that was just throwing out memes half hazardly and trying to exploit divisions. What they were trying to do was grow tribes. So a little bit a little bit different. The IRA originally started as an entity that was designed to propagandize to Russian citizens, to Ukrainian citizens, to people who were in Russia's sphere of influence. And the early stuff in the data set, twitter provided, the earliest possible information of the material the companies gave us was actually Russian language tweets talking about the invasion of Crimea. It was talking about it was creating conspiracy theories about the downing of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 17. So the early activities of the IRA were very much focused, inward focused domestically. And then around 2015, they turned their energy to the United States in what the Mueller and some of the Eastern District Court indictments have been referring to as Project Lochta. So Project Lochta was when the effort to grow these American tribes really started. This precedes the election. Right. So this precedes trump's plausible candidacy, and there was still this goal of amplifying tribalism in the US. Yeah. So the goal was to create these this is a long game. This was not a short term social media operation to screw around with an election. This was in a long game to develop extended relationships, trusted relationships with Americans. And what they did was they created these pages. So an example would be Heart of Texas was a page that really amplified notions of Texas pride. Almost all of their pages, an LGBT page, pages targeting the black community, pages targeting Confederate aficionados. All of these pages were designed around the idea of Pride and Pride in whatever particular tribe they were targeting. So the vast majority of the content, particularly in 2015, in the early days, was, we are LGBT and proud. We are Texas and Texans and proud. We are proud descendants of Confederates. And so this idea that you should have Pride in your tribe was what they reinforced over and over and over and over again. And then you would see them periodically slide in content that was either political or divisive. Sometimes that would be about othering another group. So we are some of the content targeting, the black community in particular did this. This country is not for us. We're not really part of America. We exist outside of America. And so a lot of exploitation of real grievances tied to real news events, so constant drumbeat of Pride, plus leveraging real harms to exploit feelings of alienation, sometimes you would see them do this with political content. So as the primaries heated up, that was where you started to see them weaving in their support for candidate Trump, weaving in their opposition to candidate Clinton. I'm looking at your report now, and I'm seeing this list of themes, and I'll just tick off some of these because it's, again, rather diabolical and clever how they were playing both sides of the board here. So they would focus on the black community and Black Lives Matter and issues of police brutality, but also they would amplify pro police Blue Lives Matter pages. You had antirefugee messages and, you know, immigration, border issues, Texas cultures, you said southern culture, Confederate history, various separatist movements, Muslim issues, LGBT issues, Meme culture, red Pill culture, gun rights in the Second Amendment, pro Trump and anti Clinton, and more anti Clinton in the form of pro Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein. Tea party stuff. Religious rights, native American issues. And all of this is just sowing divisiveness and conflict. Although it really does seem there was to a surprising degree of focus on the black community. Do you have more information or just an opinion about why that was such an emphasis for them? Yeah. So there were about there were 81 Facebook pages, 133 Instagram accounts. Of the 81 Facebook pages, 30 focused on the black community. Now, there were other pages that focused on other kind of traditionally left leaning groups, as you mentioned, muslims, Native Americans, Latinos. So there were other kind of non black lefty pages. Before we go on, Renee, those numbers don't sound very large. So 81 Facebook pages sounds like not even a drop in the ocean. I think we should give some sense of the scale of what happened here. Yes. So there were 81 Facebook pages. I think there were about 62,000 posts across them. There were 133 Instagram accounts, 116,000 posts across them. There were about 187,000,000 engagements on the Instagram content and another 75 million engagements on the Facebook content. And an engagement is like a like, or a share or a comment. The pages, to be totally clear, they had what I would call, like, a long tail. Like, 20 of them were successful enough that they had in the hundreds of thousands of followers, and then a lot of the remainder of the long tail was just crap. They were just failed pages. And so one of the things that was actually interesting was you could see them in the data set, pivoting those pages, so pivoting their failures, going in there and actually and saying, like, okay, well, one example is the army of jesus page. A lot of people have seen some of the memes of hillary fighting satan. There are about 900 posts by that account before it found jesus. It started as a kermit the frog meme page, memes of, like, kermit sipping tea and stuff, and they didn't seem to get enough traction there. They pivoted it to a simpsons meme page, and it was sharing these kind of ridiculous homer simpson memes again, just, like, messing around with american culture, seeing what stuck. When that didn't stick, all of a sudden it became a religious page devoted to jesus. They seem to have then kind of, like, nailed it. You start to see the memes doing things like like for jesus. When you do something like, say, like like for jesus, share for jesus, they're getting people to share their content organically. So you actually see them kind of hitting their stride with standard kind of tactics of social media audience growth with examples like this, this army of jesus account. So it's absolutely true that many of their pages were complete failures that had no lift. But then some of their pages were actually if you go and you look at the audience reach using things like crowd tangle, and you look at their engagements versus the engagements for other conservative pages or other black media, you do see them kind of popping up in the top 20, top 50 in terms of engagement overall. Am I saying these were, like, the best possible pages for this content for these audiences? No, but what they did do was they achieved substantial success with some of them, and they used their successful pages to direct people to their other pages. So the black community was particularly they did this particularly, I can't say effectively necessarily, because I can't see the conversion data. I know that they showed people these other memes. I don't know if people converted to the page for these other memes, but what they were doing was they were saying, if you like this content from our page, blackstagram that you're following, here's some other, hey, look at this other group called williams and calvin. And of course, there's no disclosure that the internet research agency is also running williams and calvin. And then they're saying, look at this other content from this page called blackvist. Look at this other content from this page called. Nefertiti's community. So a lot of this kind of cross pollination of audiences in an attempt to push people so that if they're following one of their accounts, one of their pages, they're inundated with posts from the others, right? And they're also amplifying legitimate pages that are highly polarized in their message. So what's cagey here is that not only creating their own fake partisan account if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes, episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today I'm speaking with Matt Tayibi. Matt is a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, and he was a winner of the 2008 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary. He has written many books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Great Derangement Gryphtopia and The Divide. And in this episode, we focus on the state of journalism and the vacuousness and polarization of our politics. We discuss the controversy over inviting Steve Bannon and then disinviting him to the New Yorker Festival. We talk about monetizing, the Trump phenomenon, the Jamal Khashoggi murder, the Kavanaugh hearing, the Rolling Stone reporting on the UVA rape case, the viability of the political center, the 2020 presidential election, the Russia investigation, our vanishing attention span, and many other topics. Anyway, many of you have requested that I get Matt on the podcast. Please enjoy my conversation with Matt Taibi. I am here with Matt Taibi. Matt, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So we haven't met, but I've been a fan of your work for quite some time and no doubt we have friends in common, so we haven't figured that out yet, but I'm sure we're in some similar orbit of some large and dangerous object now. Definitely. So how would you people will be fairly familiar with you, I think, but how do you describe your interests as a journalist? I would say I'm an investigative journalist. Usually I'm also do commentary, obviously. I kind of my specialty over the years has been the sort of deep dive into an arcane subject. Specifically after the financial services crash of 2008, I did a lot of stories about how Wall Street works and basically translating all of that for ordinary readers. And I'm a humorist kind of an absurdist. I take an absurdist point of view on things as often as I can. And yeah, I think people would probably classify me as on the left, but I don't really think of myself that way. I am sort of more of a writer than I am a polemicist, I guess. Yeah, I want to touch the financial crisis at some point, but let's just start with the current state of journalism and its health or state of disease. You have an interesting perspective on this because you actually grew up in a journalistic family. Wasn't your father was a TV reporter? He started in the business when he was 17. He was a student at Rutgers University, and when I was born, he started working very early and became a television reporter in his early 20s in Boston. And so my childhood was actually a lot like the movie Anchorman. I spent a lot of time around those goofy 70s affiliates, and my dad was sort of one of those characters. He had the bad facial hair, and he was in a big collar shirt, big collar shirts, funny ties, and he had mutton shops and all that cool stuff. But I grew up around the business. My earliest memories are all journalists. My father's, my family's, friends are all reporters. So it's been my life since I was probably three or four years old, I would say. And so I have a perspective on it that it's not totally unique, but it's a big part of my life sort of watching the changes in the business. Yeah, I want to talk about how it has changed and maybe changing just by the hour now, because we have this kind of this horrible integration that we've all witnessed of journalism and social media and politics. That the politics side since Trump just seems unrecognizable to many of us. So I'm just wondering the thing that many of us are trying to get a handle on here is how we can have a sane discussion about facts and values, about what's actually going on in the world and what we should do about it. When our epistemology appears to have been shattered by partisan politics and new technologies and new perverse incentives in media, we just appear to be driving ourselves crazy. How do you view it as somebody who at least has some distant memory of pre Internet journalism and who's now working as a journalist full time? Yeah, I'm actually writing a book about this right now, and it's called The Fairway. It's sort of like a rethink of Manufacturing Consent, and it's a lot about what's gone on in the last three or four decades with the business. And I think you hit on a really important word when he talked about incentives. The financial incentives in our business have really gone haywire. And with the collision of the Internet and this business, we're now more or less all completely at the upper levels in the media and the big corporate outlets. We're basically in the business of telling our audiences what they want to hear. And there's a driving pressure on journalists to make audiences happy in a way that didn't exist probably a generation ago. Almost everybody now almost all journalists have a social media presence. They're all, whether they do so in their day job or not, they're op ed writers to a degree. And this is really filtered into the way we cover everything. And it's gotten dramatically worse since Trump arrived because he's such a polarizing figure that now there's really only two kinds of media, in big media, there's pro Trump media and there's antitrump media, and we basically market those two brands and it's very difficult to write about anything else. I've really struggled with it because in my career I really did a lot of things that were not about partisan politics, that were about bipartisan issues or things that had bipartisan causes, like the financial crisis or military contracting or whatever it is. But you can't do that today. It's very hard to market your work if you don't have an overt Trump angle on it. And as you say, it's becoming more and more pronounced, I think, by the minute. And that's difficult. It's hard not to be part of the problem in the act of responding to the problem, however constructively you think you're doing that because it is. There's something so demeaning about what is now normal, and just to be covering Trump all the time, just politically, journalistically, on social media the status quo is so eclipsing of deeper possibilities and it's just so magnifying of what's petty and superficial. And yet to try to make sense of it or improve it is to be dragged into the same swamp. And it reminds me of the fear as many people had of the Large Hadron Collider, that there was a fear that some future high energy experiment in physics might rip a hole in the fabric of space time and destroy the world. It just might open up a mini black hole that would swallow everything. Right. Or a nuclear explosion would ignite the atmosphere or something like that. Right? Right. However physically plausible those fears have been at any point, I actually feel something similar every time I turn on the news. What I'm afraid of and responding to is not the threat of nuclear war or cyber terrorism or climate change or any, you know, real problem. It's this high energy experiment of our own banality and childishness in the face of these real challenges that eclipses any prospect of thinking about these challenges intelligently. I mean, like yesterday we're, you know, we're recording this a day after we had Kanye West and, and Trump in the Oval Office, you know, where Trump got to look like the same one for minutes at a stretch. And it's just at this moment where human history is an episode of reality television and it's so appalling, and yet to even talk about it is to be, in some ways, just participating in this circus. It's very hard to see how, as a journalist, you thread this needle where you again, you have to choose how much time to spend on this freak show, which is the place that is either determining the course of human events or just preventing us from dealing with problems that are just not going to go away on their own magically. I spent a lot of time sort of warning about this in the last twelve years. One of the things that I do a lot of at Rolling Stone. They have me covering the campaigns every four years, so I'm now going to start my fifth in a few months, unfortunately. You're starting this early? Yeah. No, of course that's one of the problems, is that it starts earlier and earlier each cycle. But I've been saying for a couple of election cycles now that we were turning the electoral process into a reality show and we were making it more and more vacuous with each progressive cycle. And the media was sort of celebrating its role as essentially judges in a kind of beauty pageant. We had all these terms and code words that we used to identify people who we thought were appropriate presidential candidates. So if you saw somebody described as pointed in a campaign story, that was a bad sign. That was the press's way of saying that this person is going to be offensive or difficult for Middle America to swallow if we use the word nuance, that was a good word. Of course, there was the whole contest over which candidate you most want to have a beer with. We invented all of these little ridiculous kind of reality shows sort of events. Which one is the most tough on defense, which one is the most is the warmest and the vacuousness of it. I think people started to rebel against it. I started to notice, I think, in the Romney Obama election, that people were just really impatient with that kind of coverage. And when Trump came along, I recognized right away that this is going to be a problem because he was, in a way, the campaign was a bad reality show with bad actors, and here was an experienced reality TV performer who was going to come in and make a complete circus out of it. And the problem I knew from the very start that the problem was going to be that the commercial press was not going to be able to resist that narrative. And I wrote about this from the start, that Trump was perfectly designed to walk through the front door of a process that had already been deeply flawed before he even got on the scene. And that's exactly what happened. I lost a little bit of faith throughout the course of the election that I initially thought that he was going to win against all odds, but then I lost a little bit of confidence in that. I didn't want him to win, of course, but I saw right away that he was going to fit like a glove into what we'd created. Yeah, I've been thinking of him and talking about him as an evil chauncey gardener right. Where rather than based on his own talents and genius and strategy and vision, he was the perfect person to exploit a very flawed system and situation where his own personal flaws, his narcissism, his crassness, everything that's wrong with him as a human fit like a perfect key into the lock of the present moment. Maybe I'm not giving him quite as much credit as I should be for being a talented Demagogue, but I really do think that just being the right ugly character at the right moment explains a lot of his success. Oh, absolutely. And I've talked about this, actually, oddly enough, with pro wrestlers, because one of the first things I noticed in the last election was Trump was basically doing a heel act. If you if you watch any wrestling, he was casting all of his opponents as the baby face, you know, the the good guy. And if you watch any WWE, you know, the audience is always cheer when the sort of gorgeous George character gets a chair across the face. And that's what Trump did with people like Jeb Bush. He made them offended. He attacked their families, their mothers, their wives, and they didn't know how to handle it and responded in many ways as just basically any sane person would, instead of acting upset and outraged. But that but Trump made a mockery of it, and he understood that the spectacle was more important than what he was actually the actual words that he was saying, and the cameras would be drawn more to him than they would be to his opponents. And that's A, why he got so much more coverage than everybody else, but B, if you watch the debates, especially on the Republican side, early on, he just sort of looked physically bigger than everybody else on the stage because he just had such a dominating media presence, and he knew exactly how to control that WWE dynamic in each of these events. And he did it with us in the press, too. Not to drone on about this, but I remember being in New Hampshire and he would point to us, we're all standing behind the rope line with our notebooks, and he would say things like, look at them. Look at those bloodsuckers. They didn't think I could win. They're elitist, they doubted me. They hate you. And the crowd would physically turn in our direction and start hissing and booing. And I realized Trump is taking this incredibly boring, stealthifying, stump speech format and he's turning it into this intimate, menacing television event. And that was going to fly, and it did. And that's why everybody just gave him so much attention. He crushed the ratings, and it was just a perfect confluence of all these factors that made him, his, his celebrity grow during that time. Well, I don't want us to get fully pulled by the the tractor beam that is Trump. I mean, I'm sure he'll come up again. And I think when we talk about I mean, it's no secret that you and I are about as critical of Trump as any two people that can be found. But I think in talking about this phenomenon and the underlying politics, I think we should try to bend over backwards to be sympathetic to the millions of people who voted for him. I mean, just to put the best possible steel man construe on the reasons for that. Yeah, I do. Yeah, definitely, go ahead. Yeah, I'm sensitive to the the charge that at least on this topic in particular, I'm in an echo chamber or amplifying one. And I mean, the truth is, I think there really is truly zero partisanship in my criticism of Trump. I think virtually everyone I've had on this podcast to talk about Trump is a Republican who is criticizing Trump. And I have very uncharitable things to say about the Clintons as well. So there's just a unique problem with him as a person which is motivating me to rail about him as much as I do. But let's just back up for a second and talk about how we got here. Journalistically because a couple of days before this theatrical event in the Oval Office with Kanye West, we have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releasing a fairly dire report, which gets, perhaps predictably now, very little oxygen in the press. And half of America probably thinks climate change is a hoax. And we have a president who will say that it's a hoax. Journalistically how did we get to a situation where it is so difficult to define fake news clearly enough to even address the problem? And we're now living in an ambient level of conspiracy theories and unwillingness to engage in the case of climate change, a fairly impressive scientific consensus about the basic problem, and yet journalism can't seem to get a purchase on it. How is this where we are? Well, I think in that case, it's almost entirely a financial issue. Back in the day, maybe during the Fairness Doctrine years, when there was more attention paid to the public interest standard, I think we were raising a whole generation that doesn't know some of the history here, that the press originally was sort of a grand bargain, right? The government would lease the public airwaves to radio and television stations. And as part of the sort of negotiation, the private media companies were obligated to create programming that was in the public interest and convenience. And for a long time there was an unwritten rule that the news could be a loss leader, right, that you could make your money on sports and sitcoms and entertainment and whatever else, and the news didn't have to make money. And that change, that began to change with some very profitable programs. I think 60 Minutes was one of the first news magazine programs to actually make money. And then in the we started to see this phenomenon of companies like Fox starting to actually make significant amounts of money in ways that they didn't have to before because they were being more overtly commercial than they used to. And so it's hard for people to understand, but I watched this journalist just sort of grow up with this idea of what is and what isn't a story. It's something that's more by smell than by discussion. And back in the day, I think reporters would have placed more emphasis on how important a story is and in deciding whether or not something is newsworthy. Now we probably are whether consciously or not consciously thinking more about what's going to sell more when we talk about what stores are going to COVID what we're going to pitch to our editors and that sort of thing and so climate change is just a tough sell. I've done a very few stories on that but I've done stories on topics that are like that that are difficult sells and it's really hard to get traction. I think the hardest part is you might be able to get your own audience interested for a little while, but the hard part is getting everybody else to pick it up. And that's really the difficult part. Right now. In order to affect anything, you need the whole news cycle. You need everybody piling on. And that doesn't really happen with that kind of story very often unless there are powerful interests behind trying to get something, a lot of ink, it just won't happen. And Mother Earth doesn't have that kind of pull, unfortunately. Yeah with climate change you sort of have every variable working against it because it is this slow moving problem which is in each specific instance something that you can't at least from a scientific point of view confidently say is happening as theorized. So you can't say this hurricane is the result of climate change. You can just say that this is general trend of worsening storms that we would expect but you can never point to the devastation from last week and say there you go, climate change. Or at least if you do you'll have all the caveats of scientists working in the background to kind of undercut you. So it's a hard problem because to make it journalistically sexy enough it's certainly tempting to distort the underlying science and then when scientists or people like Al Gore get caught for doing that then it sets the whole conversation back. Yeah you need to hook right to sell any news story so people are going to look for some kind of event, something historic maybe water levels rising to a certain degree that had never been reached before temperatures getting hotter than they ever had before. I used to live in Uzbekistan, and I remember walking in what used to be the Aral Sea, and it's not there anymore. And so people look for hoax like that to do environmental stories. But if you're trying to compete against Kanye West, giving Trump a hug in the White House, that's just not an easy pitch. It's just not going to get the same kind of clicks and eyeballs, even from people who claim to be interested in the topic. Believe it or not that's one of the reasons why in my own work I've had to resort to some pretty weird tactics to try to get people interested in things like the financial crisis or Iraq war. Use storytelling techniques, humor, make black hats, white hats, make characters out of the main people who figure in the story, and you feel not so great about that sometimes, but that's necessary in order to get people eyeballs trained on important subjects. So it seems that journalism has now essentially monetized domestic political conflict more than anything else, especially when you add the I guess there are a few rungs on the ladder here, which I know you've written about. I think the first is probably conservative talk radio and Fox News and 24 hours cable news cycles, which just demand a kind of endless polarizing conversation about politics. But then when you add the Internet and social media and the micro targeting of groups with Facebook ads and we're now monetizing every individual's confirmation bias and addiction to outrage, do you see a way of breaking this spell? What's the exit from this? I don't know. I mean, I'm in the middle in that book that I'm writing, The Fairway, right now. I just wrote this thing called The Ten Rules of Hate, which are it's explicitly about how we monetize political division, how we train audiences to be sort of pre angry and get them addicted to conflict. Pre angry? Yeah. Pre angry is a great phrase. Everybody knows that we do it, and we know that we do it. It goes back a long way. First of all, I think people have to realize they have to think about the logistical challenge of filling all those hours on 24 hours cable. And when that first happened, the news had a very difficult time making all those hours work. What they basically did is they would do a newscast and have it on a loop every hour or so. But that doesn't work in modern day media. You need something new pretty much constantly. And so what works and what they found over the years in terms of what works to fill all the hours and what gets people's attention the most, it's either an ongoing crash kind of a story like the cursed disaster or a baby down the well or a storm or something like that, where they can update it every minute. Or it's something like the presidential campaign that has 18 months of scheduled conflicts and you can create lots and lots of graphic doodads to talk about your predictions and you can turn it into a kind of sports format where people argue constantly. But the easiest way to fill all that time is just to do the sort of crossfire format where you have one person on one side, one person on the other side, and they argue. And the show doesn't really work if they try to reach an accommodation during the show. It has to be conflict. If you think about what Crossfire does and Saturn Live was lampooning this way back in the 70s with point counterpoint. The idea that people would sort of dress up in shirts and ties and scream insults at each other over things that have nothing to do with their lives, with their lives. It's totally crazy, but we do it constantly. And that format works so well as a way to fill the hours that it went from being a variety show that we tuned into occasionally to being the entire news landscape. And we have some channels that are from the left and some channels that are from the right, and they're just lobbing grenades at each other constantly. And the additional factor that you talked about with the Internet now means that all those algorithms are going to be searching for audiences who are already sort of preselected to agree with certain topics. So when you create a story about how you just say Trump is awful, the 101 ways Trump is awful or whatever, right? There's going to be an algorithm that's going to identify all the people who are going to like that story or are likely to like that story, and it's going to feed it to them through the Facebook feed and through various other social media methods. And so there's all these commercial polls that push us to try to create that kind of content, which is just about feeding people's hate reflexes. And it's really unfortunate because what ends up happening is that people like me who, when we come across a topic that isn't partisan or isn't going to make you angry, but if you cover it correctly, it's going to make you maybe think about your own culpability. Or it's going to make your readers not so pleased with the politicians that they vote for. There's kind of an internal discouragement from doing that kind of material. I mean, I'm sure I've heard you talk about how a certain segment of your audience turned out to be Trump supporters. It's difficult right, went to, to do content that maybe, you know, is going to turn those people off and that's I think that's unconscious. That's something that's unconscious and going on at the unconscious level with a lot of reporters these days. It's one of those situations where incentives are more powerful than what most people at least can consciously will themselves to do. You can keep your eye on the public good a fair amount, but if all of your incentives, especially your incentives for being able to pay your rent and advance your career, are run in the other way, it's not hard to guess what's going to win there, at least for most people. I noticed you were fairly critical of the New Yorker Festival. Beyond there just disinviting Steve Bannon, which we can talk about. I think you and I had a very similar take on that, but you seemed much more critical than I would tend to be in this environment just around their business model. They were somehow prostituting journalism by creating events that people would pay a fair amount of money to attend. But again, one of the main problems from my point of view is we're in an environment now where virtually everyone expects to get their news for free. So if The New Yorker can create a yearly conference that's expensive, that people actually want to pay for to see their favorite writers or whoever get up on stage and talk, why be skeptical of that project, given the financial contingencies now with journalism, just trying to figure out how to stay in business? You're right. I mean, I was probably unfair about that. I just kind of reacted to that whole thing as somebody who's just sort of been in the business for a long time. It would be tough for me to do that kind of event. And I don't know, I just have a sort of an old school take on that. It just feels kind of odd to me for some reason. But I understand it. It's a way to make money now, and it's proven, I guess, to be pretty successful. And people do want to meet their favorite writers and pundits and that sort of thing. I guess it's analogous to what happened, or what happened in the music industry, where musicians can't make nearly as much money actually selling their music so they have to tour. And the problem for writers has always been that there's no real analog for touring for most writers. Some can have careers as speakers. But it seems like this New Yorker Festival, which I've never attended, so I'm just guessing, but it seems like this is a micro example of a magazine figuring out some touring component to its business model, which obviously not every magazine can do, but that part seems good to me, provided there's actually a market for it. What really was objectively not good was how they handled the Steve Bannon situation. I don't know if you want to give your I've already spoken about that briefly on the podcast, but I don't know if you want to give me your take on what happened there. Well, I I do think that interviewing Steve Bannon is totally a legitimate thing to do. And when I first heard about the controversy, I i guess I didn't understand what the New Yorker Festival was. And I should probably just back up and say again, I grew up with people in an era when the sales people, the ad people, were literally not allowed in the same newsroom as the reporters. Like there was a Chinese wall between the press and the business side, and we just didn't have to think about it. And so the idea of the festival, I think from an old school perspective, it just feels a little weird to me. But if you add the component of we're going to. Charge an extra special high amount of money to bring Steve Bannon in so that everybody can gawk at the public spectacle of him on stage. I don't know if that's basically monetizing the Trump phenomenon in a way that's a little bit too direct for my taste. I understand why they did it. Some of the things that David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, said about we need to challenge people who are powerful, and all of that is valid. And in fact, one of the things that I wrote about was that if you read the Michael Wolf book and there's all these amazing questions that I would like to ask somebody like Steve Ben and what was he talking about when he was cheering the nomination of a money laundering prosecutor to the Mueller's team? And also about his sort of strategic decisions during the campaign? All that stuff is interesting, and it's worth exploring, but in the context of that of that festival, it felt like a little bit too commercialized for me. I don't know. What did you think about that? Well, you just brought up two interesting points that are bigger than the festival. One is just the general phenomenon of wondering who is worth talking to? This is something I've struggled with openly on the podcast. Is it okay to, as it's said, give a platform to Person X when there's interesting differences of opinion to be aired in that conversation? The other thing you brought up is just monetizing the Trump phenomenon in general. Let's just take that piece first. It seems to me that journalism in general must have benefited from Trump, right? I'm wondering if there's a kind of a perverse incentive now that has crept in where this is the best thing that's ever happened to CNN or any of these other outlets. Has anyone quantified just how good Trump has been for journalism? Yes, there have been lots of reports about this. The numbers are historic. Typically, the networks, in the year after a presidential election, the cable networks anyway, see significant drops in ratings. That didn't happen with CNN. CNN, I think, in the first year of the Trump presidency, made a billion dollars profit. And there was a really interesting phenomenon for me about that, which was poll after poll showed that there was less trust of the media than ever, including on both sides of the spectrum, among Republicans and Democrats, but particularly among conservatives. But the media is being consumed more than ever. So what does that mean? That means that we're starting to eat into the entertainment world's budget, basically, because people aren't really consuming us as a product that they trust. They're consuming us as some other kind of product that serves some other kind of purpose. And that's pretty weird. I mean, all the networks have been just amazing ratings ever since Trump has been in office. And that's one of the reasons why I have this queasy feeling about a lot of Trump coverage. Originally when he first came on the scene, there was a lot of sort of snickering, and let's give this clown a little airtime because we know it's going to get ratings. And then when people felt bad about it and they realized that they were helping him get to the presidency, they sort of started to add this. Instead of a million hours of Trump, it's a million hours of Trump is bad. I think it's basically the same thing, and I really worry about that. I think that's not a positive phenomenon for the press because it's so easy now to make money with Trump content, and that's a bad habit for the press to break. Yeah. Back to the platforming thing. I'd love to talk about the Nefarious podcast. Guest or interview? Guest. When I've described this on my podcast, I've talked about it in terms of this uncanny Valley phenomenon where if someone is bad enough, then it's just a straightforward decision. I guess the clearest case is you could sit down and talk to Hitler. That would be interesting. But to talk to Richard Spencer is to give a platform to an awful person with his awful ideas. And I just wonder how you again, I totally agree with you about Steve Bannon. He's not Richard Spencer. I think he's unfairly slimed as being that sort of right wing xenophobe or racist. And he's someone who already has a platform and he's already used it to great effect. So he's somebody who has made the news and in large measure is responsible for who's currently in the Oval Office, so he seems worth talking to. And the idea that David Remnick could not have performed his side of that interview in a way that would have credibly undercut bannon's bad ideas, insofar as they are bad, is just to put so little faith in Remnick. As a journalist and in just the possibility of shedding sunlight on bad ideas, that it made everyone on the disinvite side of the ledger look craven. And so it was just the worst possible outcome because it bannon gets to say that he destroyed the left without even showing up, right? Yeah. I don't know. The deep platforming movement on campuses is something that I've never covered. I've never had any reason to really look at it. But in journalism, I don't see that it really has a place because the standard is just is the person newsworthy or not? Do they have something that we want to know or not to talk about? And in the case of Bannon, it's easily true that he's newsworthy. There are a million things that I would want to ask Steve Bannon, and I understand the objections. I mean, I heard a lot of them when I wrote about this, that there's nothing you're going to learn from Steve Bannon. He's a racist and a white supremacist, and that's all you need to know. Well, I don't think that's true. I think Donald Trump would not be president right now if it weren't for Bannon, and his tactics were very successful, among other things, in conning a whole lot of journalists like myself, and I would love to learn from him what his thinking was throughout that process in the summer of 2016. I'm sure there are a million things that have happened in the White House that, if he were inclined to talk about, I would love to hear about. He's a newsworthy person. Spencer that's a little bit different because there's very little news value in what he's done. I think if you're a big corporate media outlet and you're covering spencer you're basically just giving him free advertising. I don't love that, but you're absolutely right. We interview all kinds of crazy people, and we don't think about whether they're good people or bad people. At least I never have. I just think about whether they're newsworthy or not. I mean, would you interview bin Laden? Of course you would. Yes. I found that whole thing really troubling, and I worry about it creeping into reporting. Because if you add the requirement that reporters now have to sanitize the content for audiences and add all these indicators so that audiences know that this or that idea is bad first of all, that's showing a remarkable, like, lack of confidence in your audience's ability to understand things. And secondly, that's just not what we do, where we're in the business of sort of finding out what happened and understanding things and letting the world do with that information what it will. I hope we're not in the business of making political judgments about people in the same way that a campus administrator might have to take into consideration when they're deciding whether or not to invite somebody or something like that. Would you interview Alex Jones? Yeah, I probably would. What do you think about I know you've written about this, but what do you think about the censorship of him by the various social media channels that have censored him? Was it all of them, or is he still on Twitter? I know he was pulled down from YouTube. I'm not sure. I know that he's gone for most of them. How do you view that phenomenon? And would he be someone you would certainly get a lot of grief for speaking to him, but what do you think about the merits of speaking to him? Well, on the censorship angle, I thought it was really interesting because I think people didn't understand that moment all that well. We have had in this country for a long time, since the early sixty s, a way of dealing with bad speech. And the standard has been new York Times v. Sullivan. Right. We've decided what's liable, what's slander, and the courts sort that out. And it's been a very effective system for preventing people from lying or publishing damaging information. The courts typically react pretty swiftly. And that private system has been a great shield to people like me. Because if I want to write about a company like Goldman Sachs or something like that, I know that in order for them to successfully sue me, that I have to get things wrong, that it's going to go to a courtroom and not some private executive somewhere to make that decision. And so the idea that we're going to switch and now have a new standard where the decision about how we deal with bad speech is going to be dealt with behind closed doors in these sort of gigantic transnational companies, and it's not going to be public, and you're not going to really have a say in it if they decide to remove you from the platform. I really worry about that. I think, as I said when I wrote about this, to me it looks like Jones falls under the category of somebody who could have been successfully sued on a number of occasions and probably would be out of business. In the old days, but instead because he was so unpopular and he's so noxious to a lot of people. When they removed him from all those platforms, everybody cheered. And I thought that was a really dangerous moment, because we're sort of formally switching from one enforcement mechanism to another, and this other enforcement mechanism is kind of scary to me. So I worry about that a lot for sure. What do you do with the argument that these are private platforms? These are essentially publishers that by this argument would be forced to publish ideas that are noxious, false and damaging. In the case of Jones, damaging to the bereaved parents of murdered children is part of the problem here. That Facebook and YouTube and these other platforms are so big now as to be not best thought of as private companies, but they're essentially public utilities or just common space that a person shouldn't be barred from inhabiting. Well, if you just take just the two companies, Facebook and Google, that's where above 70% of if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. OK, jumping right into it today. Today I'm speaking with Eric Schmidt. Eric is a technologist entrepreneur and philanthropist. He joined Google in 2001 and served as its CEO and Chairman from 2001 to 2011 and as Executive Chairman and Technical Advisor thereafter. In 2017, he cofounded Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative that bets early on exceptional people who are helping to make the world better. He is the host of Reimagine with Eric Schmidt, his own podcast, and most recently, he is the coauthor of a new book, The Age of AI and Our Human Future. And that is the topic of today's conversation. We cover how AI is affecting the foundations of our knowledge and how it raises questions of existential risk. So we talk about the good and the bad of AI, both narrow AI and ultimately AGI Artificial General Intelligence. We discuss breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals and other good things, but we also talk about cyber war and autonomous weapons, and how our thinking about containing the risk here by analogy to the proliferation of nuclear weapons probably needs to be revised. Anyway, an important conversation, which I hope you find useful. And I bring you Eric Schmidt. I am here with Eric Schmidt. Eric, thanks for joining me. Glad to be with you. So I think we have a heart out in an hour here. So amazingly, that's a short podcast for me, so there's going to be a spirit of urgency hanging over the place and we will be efficient. And covering the fascinating book that you have written with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttonlocker. That's right. And Dr. Kissinger, of course, is this former secretary of state. And Dan Huttenlocker is now the dean of artificial intelligence and computer science at the Schwarzman center at MIT. He's a proper computer scientist. Yeah. And that book is The Age of AI and Our Human Future, where you cover most of what I have said about AI thus far. And every case where I have worried about our possible AI future has been focused on the topic of AGI Artificial General Intelligence, which you discuss briefly in the book, but it's not your main focus. So I thought maybe we could save that for the end because I would love to get your take on AGI, but there are far more near term concerns here and considerations that we could cover and you are quite well placed to COVID them, because, if I'm not mistaken, you ran Google for what was it, ten years? That's correct. What was your background before that? How did you come to be the CEO of Google? Well, I'm a computer scientist. I have a PhD in the area, and I worked for 45 years in tech. In one way or the other, whole bunch of companies. Larry and Sergey brought me in as the early CEO of the company, and we built it together. After a decade, I became chairman, Larry became CEO, and then he replaced himself with Sundar, who is now doing a phenomenal job at Google. So I'd say, collectively, this group, of which I'm a member, built one of the great companies, and I'm really proud of that. Yeah. And obviously, Google is quite involved in developing AI. I just saw just the other day that there's a new I think it's a 540,000,000,000 parameter language model that is beating the average human at something like 150 cognitive tests now. And it seems like the light is at the end of the tunnel there. It's just going to be a larger model that's going to beat every human at those same tasks. But before we get into some of the details here, I just want to organize our general approach to this. There are three questions that Kant asked in his Critique of Pure Reason, I think it was, which seem unusually relevant to the development of AI. The first is what can we know? The second is what should we do? And the third is, what is it reasonable to hope for? And I think those really do capture almost every aspect of concern here, because as you point out in the book, AI really promises to, and it has already begun to shift the foundations of human knowledge. So the question of what we can know and how we can know it is enormously salient. Now, and maybe we can talk about some of those examples, but obviously this question of what should we do and what can we reasonably hope for captures the risks we're running in developing these systems. And we're running these risks well short of producing anything like artificial general intelligence. And it's interesting that we're on a path now where we're really not free to decline to produce this technology. I mean, to my eye, there's really no break to pull. We're in a kind of AI arms race now, and the question is how to put that race for more intelligence on a footing that is not running cataclysmic risk for us. So before we jump into the details, I guess I'd like to get your general thoughts on how you view the stakes here and where you view the field to be at the moment. Well, of course, we wrote the book Age of AI precisely to help answer the questions you're describing, which are perfectly cast and what's happened in the book which is written roughly a year ago and then published. We described a number of examples to illustrate. The .1 is the development of new moves in the game of go, which is 2500 years, which were discovered by computer, which humans had never discovered. It's hard to imagine that humans wouldn't have discovered these strategies, but they didn't. And that calls the question of are there things which AI can learn that humans cannot master? That's a question. The second example that we use is the development of a new drug called Halison, which is a broad scale spectrum antibiotic, which could not be done by humans. But a set of neuroscientists biologists and computer scientists put together a set of programs that ultimately searched through 100 million different compounds and came up with candidates that were then subsequently tested, advancing drugs at an enormous rate. That's another category of success in AI. And then the third is what you've already mentioned, which is large language models. And we profile in the book GPT-3, which is the predecessor of the one you described. And it's eerie. On the back cover, our book, we say to the GPT-3 computer, are you capable of human reasoning? And it answers, no, I am not. You may wonder why I give you that answer. And the answer is that you are a human reasoning machine, whereas I am a language model that's not been taught how to do that. Now, is that awareness or is that clever mimicry? We don't know. But each of these three examples show the potential to answer Kant's questions what can we know? What will happen? What can we do about it? Since then, this past few weeks, we've seen the announcement that you mentioned of this enormous large language model which can beat humans on many things. And we've also seen something called Dal E, which is a text to art program. You describe roughly what you want and it can generate art for you. Now, these are the beginnings of the impact of artificial intelligence on us as humans. So Dr. Kissinger, Dan and myself, when we looked at those, we thought, what happens to society when you have these kinds of intelligence? Now, they're not human intelligence, they're different kinds of intelligence in everyday life. And we talk about all the positives of which there are incredible positives. Better materials, better drugs, more efficient systems, better understanding, better monitoring of the Earth, additional solutions for climate change. There's a long, long list which I can go through. Very, very exciting. And indeed, in my personal philanthropy, we are working really hard to fund AI enabled science discoveries. We recently announced a grant structure with a guy named James Mannika, friend of mine, of $125,000,000 to actually go and fund research on the really hard problems in AI, the ones that you're mentioning and others, and also the economic impacts and so forth. Because I think people don't really know. The real question is what happens when these systems become more commonplace. Dr. Kissinger says if you look at history when a system that is not understandable is imposed on people, they do one of two things they either invent it as a religion or they fight it with guns. So my concern, and I'll say it very directly, is we're playing with the information space of humans. We're experimenting at scale without a set of principles as to what we want to do. Do we care more about freedom? Do we care more about efficiency? Do we care about education and so forth. And Dr. Kissinger would say the problem is that these decisions are being made by technical people who are ignorant of the philosophical questions that you so ably asked. And I agree with him speaking as an example of that. So we recommend, and indeed I'm trying to now fund that people begin in a multidisciplinary way to discuss the implications of this. What happens to national security? What happens to military intelligence? What happens to social media? What happens to your children when your child's best friend is a computer? And for the audience who might be still thinking about the killer robot we're not building killer robots and I hope we never do. This is really about information systems that are human like that are learning. They're dynamic and they're emergent and they're imprecise being used and imposed on humans around the world. That process is unstoppable. It's simply too many people working on it too many ways in which people are going to manipulate it including for hostile reasons, too many businesses being built and too much success for some of the early work. Yeah, I guess if I can just emphasize that point, the unstoppability is pretty interesting because it's just anchored to this basic fact that intelligence is almost by definition the most valuable thing on Earth. Right? And if we can get more of it, we're going to, and we clearly can. And all of these narrow intelligences we've built thus far, all that are effective, that come to market, that we pour resources into are superhuman, more or less right out of the gate, right? It's not a question of human level. Intelligence is a bit of a mirage because the moment we get something that's general it's going to be superhuman and so we can leave the generality aside. All of these piecemeal intelligences are superhuman. And the example you give of the new antibiotic Hallison it's fascinating because it's not just a matter of doing human work faster, if I understand what happened in that case. This is an AI detecting patterns and relationships in molecules already known to be safe and efficacious as antibiotics and detecting new properties that human beings very likely would never have conceived of and may in fact be opaque to the people who built the AI and may remain opaque. I mean, one of the issues you just raised is the issue of transparency. Many of these systems are built in such a way as to be black boxes. And we don't know how the AI is doing what it's doing in any specific way. It's just training against data and against its own performance so as to produce a better and better result, which qualifies as intelligent and even superhumanly so. And yet it may remain a black box. Maybe we can just close the loop on that specific problem here. Are you concerned that transparency is a necessity when decision making is important? I mean, just imagine the case where we have something like an AI oracle that we are convinced makes better decisions than any person or even any group of people, but we don't actually know the details of how it's making those decisions. Right. You can just multiply examples as you like, but just questions of who should get out of prison, the likelihood of recidivism in the case of any person, or who's likely to be more violent at the level of conviction. Right. What should the prison sentence be? It's very easy to see that if we're shunting that to a black box, people are going to get fairly alarmed that in any differences in outcome that are not transparent. Perhaps you have other examples of concern, but do you think transparency is something that one question is, is it technically feasible to render black boxes transparent when it matters? And two, is transparency as important as we intuitively may think it is? Well, I wonder how important transparency is for the simple fact that we have teenagers among our midst and the teenagers cannot explain themselves at all. And yet we tolerate their behavior with some restrictions because they're not full adults. But we wouldn't let a teenager fly an airplane or operate on a patient. So I think a pretty simple model is that at the moment, these systems cannot explain how to became to their decision. There are many people working on the explainability problem. Until then, I think it's going to be really important that these systems not be used in what I'm going to call life safety situations. And this creates all sorts of problems. For example, in automated war, automated conflict, cyber war, those sorts of things where the speed of decision making is faster than what humans can. What happens if it makes a mistake? And so again, we're at the beginning of this process, and most people, including myself, believe that the explainability problem and the bias problems will get resolved because there's just too much money, too many people working on it, maybe at some cost, but we'll get there. That's historically how these things work. You start off with stuff that works well enough, but it shows a hint of the future, and then it gets industrialized. I'm actually much more focused on what's it like to be human when you have these specialized systems floating around. My favorite example here is Facebook, where they changed their feed to amp it using AI. And the AI that they built was around engagement. And we know from a great deal of social science that outrage creates more engagement, and so therefore there's more outrage on your feed. Now, that was a clearly deliberate decision on part of Facebook, presumably thought it was a good product idea, but it also maximized their revenue. That's a pretty big social experiment given the number of users that they have, which is not done with an understanding, in my view, of the impact of political polarization. Now you sit there and you go, okay, well, he doesn't work at Facebook. He doesn't really understand, but many, many people have commented on this problem. This is an image of what happens in a world where all of the information around you can be boosted or manipulated by AI to sell to you, to anchor you, to change your opinion, and so forth. So we're going to face some interesting questions in the information space, the television and movies and things you see online and so forth. Do there need to be restrictions on how AI uses the information it has about you to pitch to you, to market to you, to entertain you? These are questions. We don't have answers. But it makes perfect sense that in the industrialization of these tools, the tools that I'm describing, which were invented in places like google and Facebook, will become available to everyone and every government. So another example is a simple one, which is the kid is a two year old and gets a toy, and the toy gets upgraded every year, and the kid gets smarter. The kid is now twelve and ten years from now there's a great toy. And this toy is smart enough in non human terms to be able to watch television and decide if the kid likes the show. So the toy is watching the television, and the toy says to the kid, I don't like this show, knowing that the kid's not going to like it. And the kid goes, I agree with you. Now, is that okay? Probably. Well, what happens if that same system that's also learning learns something that's not true? And it goes, kid, I have a secret. And the kid goes, tell me, tell me, tell me. And the secret is something which is prejudicial or false or bad or something like that. We don't know how to describe, especially for young people, the impact of these systems on their cognitive development. Now, we have a long history in America of having school boards and textbooks which are approved at the state level. Are the states going to monitor this? And you sit and you say, well, no parent would allow that, but let's say that the normal behavior of this toy is smart enough, understands the kid well enough to know the kid's not good at multiplication. So the kid's board, and then the toy says, I think we should play a game, kid. Goes great. And of course it's a game which strengthens his or her multiplication capability. So on the one hand, you want these systems to make people smarter, make them develop, make them more serious adults, make the adults more productive. Another example would be my physics friends. They just want a system to read all the physics books every night and make suggestions to them. Well, the physicists are adults who can deal with this, but what about kids? So you're going to end up in a situation at least with kids and with elderly who are isolated where these tools are going to have an out of proportion impact on society as they perceive it. We've never run that experiment dynamic emergent and not precise. I'm not worried about airplanes being flown by AI because they're not going to be reliable enough to do it for a while. Now, we should also say for the listeners here that we're talking about what a term which is generally known as narrow AI. It's very specific and we're using specific examples drug discovery, education, entertainment. But the eventual state of AI is called general intelligence, where you get human kind of reasoning. In the book, what we describe that is the point where the computer can set its own objective. And today the good news is the computer can't choose its objective at some point. That will not be true. Yeah, well, hopefully we'll get to AGI at the end of this hour. But I think we should talk about the good and the bad in that order and maybe just spend a few minutes on the good because the good is all too obvious. Again, intelligence is the most valuable thing on Earth. It's the thing that gives us every other thing we want and it's the thing that safeguards everything we have. And if there are problems we can't solve, well, then we can't solve them. But if there are problems that can be solved, the way we will solve them is through greater uses of our intelligence. And insofar as we can leverage artificial intelligence to solve those problems, we will do that more or less, regardless of the attendant risks. And that's the problem because the attendant risks are increasingly obvious and it seems not at all trivial. And we've already proven we're capable of implementing massive technological change without really thinking about the consequences at all. You cite the massive psychological experiment we've performed on all of humanity with no one really consenting. That is social media. And it's you know, the the effects are ambiguous at best. I mean, there's some obviously bad effects and it's not even straightforward to say that democracy or even civilization can survive contact with social media. It remains to be seen, given how divisive some of its effects are. I consider social media to be far less alarming than the prospect of having an ongoing nuclear doctrine anchored to a proliferating regime of cyber espionage, cyber terrorism, cyber war, all of which will be improved massively by layering AI onto all of that. So before we jump into the bad, which is really capturing my attention, is there anything specifically you want to say about the good here? I mean, if this goes well, what are you hoping for? What are you expecting? Well, there are so many positive examples that we honestly just don't have time to make a list. We give you a few. In physics and math, the physicists and mathematicians have worked out the formulas for how the world works, at least at the scientific level. But many of their calculations are not computable by modern computers. They're just too complicated. An example is how do clouds actually work is a function of something called the Navier Stokes equations, which for a normal size cloud would take 100 million years for a computer to figure out. But using an AI system and there's a group at Caltech doing this, they can come up with a simulation of the things that they care about. In other words, the AI provides enough accuracy in order to solve the more general climate modeling problem. If you look at quantum chemistry, which is sort of how does how do chemical bonds work together? Not computable by modern methods, however, AI can provide enough of a simulation that we can figure out how these molecules bind, which is the Halsen example in drug discovery. We know enough about biology that we can basically predict that if you do these compounds with this antibody, we can make it stronger, we can make it weaker and so forth in the computer, and then you go reproduce it in the lab. There's example after example where AI is being used from existing data to simulate a non computable function in science, and you say, what's he talking about? I'm talking about the fact that the scientists have been stuck for decades because they know what they want to do, but they couldn't get through this barrier that unleashes new materials, new drugs, new forms of steel, new forms of concrete and so forth and so on. It also helps us with climate change, for example, because climate change is really about energy and CO2 emissions and so forth. These new surfaces, discoveries and so forth will make a material difference. And I'm talking about really significant numbers. So that's an example. Another example is what's happening with these large language models that you mentioned earlier, that people are figuring out a way to put a conversational system in front of it so that you can talk to it. And the conversational system has enough state that it can remember what it's talking about. It's not like a question answer, question answering. It doesn't remember. It actually remembers the context of, oh, we're talking about the Oscars, and we're talking about what happened at the Oscars and what do I think? And then it sort of goes and it gives you a thoughtful answer as to what happened and what is possible. In my case, I was playing with one of them a few months ago, and this one I asked the question, what is the device that's in 2001 A Space Odyssey that I am using today? There's something from 1969 that I'm using today that was foreshadowed in the movie. And it comes right back and says, the iPad. Now, that's a question that Google won't answer if you ask it the way I did. So I believe that the biggest positive impact will be that you'll have a system that you can verbally or by writing ask it questions, and it will make you incredibly smarter, that it'll give you the nuance and the understanding in the context, and you can ask it another question, and you can refine your question. Now, if you think about it in the work you do, or that I do, or that a scientist does, or a politician, or an artist, this is enormously transformative. So example after example, these systems are going to build scientific breakthroughs, scalable breakthroughs. Another example was that a group at Deep Mind figured out the folding structure of proteins. And proteins are the way in which biology works and the way they fold determines their effectiveness, what they actually do. And it was thought to be not really computable. And using these techniques in a very complicated way with a whole bunch of protein scientists, they managed to do it, and their their result was replicated in a different mechanism with different AI from something called the Baker Lab and University of Washington. The two together have given us a map of how proteins work, which in my view is worthy of a Nobel Prize. That's how big a discovery that is. All of a sudden, we are unlocking the way biology works and it affects us directly. Those are some positive examples. I think the negative examples let's wait because I'm chock full of negative examples, but I'm interested in how even the positive can disclose a surprisingly negative possibility, or at least it becomes negative if we haven't planned for it ethically, politically, economically. So you imagine the success. You imagine that more and more so what you've just pictured was a future of machine and human cooperation and facilitation, where people just get smarter by being able to have access to these tools, or they get effectively smarter. But you can imagine just in the limit more and more getting seeded to AI, because AI is just better at doing these things. It's better at proving theorems, it's better at designing software. It's better, it's better, it's better. And all of a sudden, the need for human developers at all, or human mathematicians at all, you make the list as long as you want. It seems like some of the highest status jobs cognitively might be among the first to fall, which is to say, I certainly expect at this point to have an AI radiologist, certainly before I have an AI plumber. And there's a lot more above and beyond the radiology side of that comparison that I think is going to fall before the basic manual tasks fall to robots. This is a picture of real success. Right. Because in the end, all we're going to care about is performance. We're not going to care about keeping a a monkey in the loop just for reasons of sentimentality. You know, if you're telling me that my car can drive a thousand times better than I can, which say that, you know, it's going to reduce my risk of getting in a fatal accident, killing myself or killing someone, else by a factor of a thousand. If I just flip on autopilot, well, then not only am I going to flip it on, I'm going to consider anyone who declines to do that to be negligent to the point of criminality. And that's never going to change. Everything is going to be in the position of a current chessmaster who knows that the best player on earth is never going to be a person ever again. Right. Because of AlphaZero. I disagree a little bit and I'll tell you why I think you're correct in about 30 years, but I don't think that argument is true in the short term. Yeah, no, just to be clear, I'm not suggesting any time frame there. I'm just saying ultimately if we continue to make progress, something like this seems bound to happen. Yes, but what I want to say is I defy you to argue with me that making people smarter is a bad thing. Okay? Right. So let's start with the premise of the human assistant. That is, the thing that you're using will make humans smarter. It'll make it deeper, better analysis, better choices. But at least the current technology cannot replace essentially the free will of humans. Sort of wake up in the morning, you have a new idea, you decide something, you say that's a bad idea, so forth and so on. We don't know how to do that yet, and I have some speculation on how that will happen. But in the next decade, we're going to not be solving that problem. We'll be solving a different problem, which is how do we get the existing people doing existing jobs to do them more efficiently? That is smarter, better, faster. One of the when we looked at the funding for this AI program that I've since announced, the funding 125,000,000, a fair chunk of it is going to really hard computer science problems. Some of them include we don't really understand how to explain what they're doing. As I mentioned, they're also brittle when they fail. They can fail catastrophically. Like why did it fail? And no one can explain. There are hardening, there are resistance to attack problems. There are a number of problems of this kind. These are hard computer science problems which I think we will get through. They use a lot of power, the algorithms are expensive, that sort of thing. But we have also focusing around the impact on jobs and employment and economics. We're also focusing on national security. And we're focusing on the question that you're asking, which is what's our identity? What does it mean to be human? Before general intelligence comes, we have to deal with the fact that these systems are not capable of choosing their own outcome, but they can be applied to you as a citizen by somebody else against your own satisfaction. So the negatives before AGI are all of the form misinformation, misleading information, creating dangerous tools, and for example, dangerous viruses. For the same reason that we built a fantastic new antibiotic drug. It looks like you could also imagine a similar evil team of producing an incredible number of bad viruses, things that would hurt people. And you could imagine in that scenario they might be clever enough to be able to hurt a particular race or particular sex or something like that, which would be totally evil and obviously a very bad thing. We don't have a way of discussing that today. So when I look at the positives and negatives right now, I think the positives, as with many technologies, really overwhelm the negatives. But the negatives need to be looked at. And we need to have the conversation right now about let's use social media, which is an easy whipping boy here. I would like so I'm clear what my political position is. I'm a very strong proponent of freedom of speech for humans. I am not in favor of freedom of speech for computers, robots, bots, so forth and so on. I want an option with social media which says, I only want to see things that a human has actually communicated from themselves. I want to know that it wasn't snuck in by some Russian agent. I want proof of providence, and I want to know that it's a human. And if it's a real human who's in fact an idiot or crazy or whatever, I want to be able to hear their voice, and I want to be able to decide. I don't agree with it. What's happening instead is these systems are being boosted, they're being pitched, they're being sold by AI. And I think that's got to be limited in some way. I'm in favor of free speech, but I don't want only some people to have megaphones. And if you talk to politicians and you look at the political structure in the country, this is a completely unintended effect of getting everyone wired. Now, is it a human or is it a computer? Is it a Russian, a Russian compromat play or is it an American? Those things need to get resolved. You cannot run a democracy without some level of trust. Let's take that piece here. And obviously it extends beyond the problem of AI's involvement in it, but the misinformation problem is enormous. What are your thoughts about it? Because I'm just imagining we've been spared, thus far the worst possible case of this. Which is just imagine under conditions of where we had something like perfect, deep fakes, right, that were truly difficult to tell apart from real video, what would the controversy around the 2020 election have looked like? Or the war in Ukraine and our dealings with Putin at this moment. Right. Just imagine a perfect, deep fake of Putin declaring a nuclear first strike on the US. Or whatever. Just imagine, essentially, a writer's room from hell, where you have smart, creative people spending their waking hours figuring out how to produce media that is shattering to every open society and conducive to provoking international conflict that is clearly coming in some form. I guess my first question is, are you hopeful that the moment that arrives, we will have the same level of technology that can spot deep fakes, or is there going to be a lag there of months, years, that are going to be difficult to navigate? We don't know. There are people working really hard on generating defects, and there are people working really hard on detecting deepfix. And one of the general problems with misinformation is we don't have enough training data. The term here is, in order to get an AI system to know something, you have to give it enough examples of good bad, good, bad, and eventually you can say, oh, here's something new, and I know if it's good or bad. And one of the core problems of misinformation is we don't have enough agreement on what is misinformation or what have you. And the thought experiment I would offer is President Putin and Russia has already shut down the Internet and free speech and controls the media and so forth. So let's imagine that he was further, even if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris or work./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, we're about a week into the tragedy and fiasco of Afghanistan, which is in part the topic of today's podcast. As you'll hear, I'm not entirely sure what I think about our withdrawal. That is, I'm not sure what I think about whether or not it should have happened. I can honestly inhabit both sides of that debate. But how we withdrew the lack of preparation, the lack of foresight, the lack of consultation with our allies like the British, our failure to extract the tens of thousands of Afghans who helped us, the interpreters and their families, whose lives are now in utter jeopardy because of our bungling, our failure to ensure the safe passage of our own citizens. All of this is such a shocking betrayal of our obligations and of our own interests that it just beggars belief. It's almost impossible to imagine a greater indication of American decline and a greater gift to our enemies, to the jihadists globally, who must feel absolutely triumphant at this moment, and to China and Russia, who must now know to a moral certainty that they can always call our bluff because we simply are no longer a competent superpower. We have been visibly spooked by our own shadow here. So if China invades Taiwan this year or next or the year after, I think it's safe to say that our frantic withdrawal from Afghanistan will surely be one of the reasons why they felt they could. Again, I'm not taking a position on the question of whether we should have left Afghanistan now or last year or ten years ago. I can see both sides of that debate. But the way we left is absolutely astonishing, and it will harm us as a nation, guaranteed. Who will trust our assurance of protection now, whether it's an ally like Taiwan or any faction within a country that we're trying to support in some future humanitarian crisis? If you don't think that matters, if you don't think we need our friends to trust us and our enemies to fear us, I don't know what planet you think you're living on. Perhaps you think we can just retreat from geopolitics altogether and simply ignore the rest of the world. We should just repair our bridges and get the lead out of our own water pipes. Right, of course we should do those things immediately. But a world without America as a functioning superpower is a very scary world, and not just for Americans. A world where our NATO allies can't trust us to honor our obligations is a world where the risk of major wars has increased, not decreased. So what has happened in this last week is like the wheels have completely come off. As a country, we have to get a handle on this. And, again, I think this has to be recognized and responded to. Whatever you think about the wisdom of getting out of Afghanistan anyway, those of you who might want to support our friends in Afghanistan who desperately need refugee status, I would recommend a donation to the International Rescue Committee. I had David Miliband on the podcast previously, I think about a year ago, who runs it. And the Waking Up Foundation will be donating $100,000 to the IRC this week, which of course, is made possible by those of you who subscribe either to the Making Sense podcast or to the Waking Up app, or both. So thank you for that. And if any of you get inspired to ride along with us in this donation this week to the IRC, I would certainly welcome it. And the website for the International Rescue Committee is rescue. And now for today's podcast, where we get into many of the details here today, I'm speaking with Peter Bergen. Peter is the author of several books, most recently The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden, which we discuss in the second half of the podcast. He is a vice president at New America and a professor at Arizona State University and also a national security analyst for CNN. Peter has testified before Congress and held positions at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and has been covering jihadist, terrorism, and Al Qaeda in particular since the 90s. So in this podcast, we discuss the US. Exit from Afghanistan and the resurgence of the Taliban. And then we get into his new book. We cover the neo isolationist consensus that seems to be forming on the far right and far left politically, the legitimacy of our initial involvement in Afghanistan. Whatever you think of the ultimate outcome. We discuss our ethical obligations to our Afghan allies. Biden's disastrous messaging, the weakness of the Afghan army and what happened there. The advantages that the Taliban had the implications for global jihadism the relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, how Osama bin Laden came to lead al Qaeda, bin Laden's religious convictions, our failure to capture him at Tora Bora, the distraction of the war in Iraq, the myth that the CIA funded Al Qaeda. Bin Laden's relationship with his wives, his years of hiding in Pakistan, his death at the hands of U. S. Special Forces and other topics. Anyway, the conversation is all too timely, unfortunately. And whether or not Afghanistan stays in our news cycle, I think the reality of what's happening there is going to have implications for a long time to come. And this conversation is certainly a good starting point for thinking about why that's the case. And now I bring you Peter Bergen. I am here with Peter Bergen. Peter, thanks for joining me. Sam, thank you for having me on. So you've written a wonderful book which we will get into the Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden. Actually, it's a great audio book, too. That's how I consumed most of it this week. That's good to hear. Yeah. You didn't read it, but you I didn't, actually, strangely, reading these books, I don't know if you've done your own books, but it's a very exhausting process, which is kind of counterintuitive. Oh, yeah. No, it's a total ordeal for me to read books. It's genuinely heroin. I've actually had to rewrite sentences on the fly because I literally could not get through them, even after 20 takes. And I just they were not written to be read by me. It was just an insane circus olay routine that I could not perform. So, yes, we'll get to the book, which is which is all too germane to the current topic, that's absorbing everyone's interests now and concern, which is the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. But I guess before we jump in, maybe summarize your background, how is it that you come to know about these issues and what have you focused on these many years? I was living in Manhattan in the in the early 90s, before I moved to DC. And in late February 1993, a group of men drove a van into the World Trade Center parking garage and blew it up, intending to bring down both towers. And there were these men had one thing in common. They'd all supported the Afghan war effort against the Soviets or actually even fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets. And so I went to my bosses at CNN and said, this seems interesting. There seems to be some sort of phenomenon here. I traveled to Afghanistan. The first time I ever went there, it was in the middle of a very brutal civil war. Much more intense than what we see now with Peter Arnett, who was then almost certainly the world's most famous correspondent. Because it was relatively shortly after the end of the Gulf War and we and another colleague sort of spent many weeks in Afghanistan trying to document this. And it was a very tricky situation because it was A, very nasty civil war and B, no communications to speak of. We took a satellite phone in. That was the size. It was £200. That was the state of the art satellite phone. And today, of course, you can just use a cell phone. So it was kind of a hard place to function. But after that, I heard about bin Laden in 1996 and again went to my bosses at CNN. They, of course, had no idea who he was. And I said to them, you know, perhaps he was responsible for this, you know, for this phenomenon. And he really wasn't involved in in the the Trade Center bombing in 93, except in the most peripheral of ways. But of course, he was responsible for this both organization and movement. That kind of was an outgrowth of the 93 Trade Center bombing. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll go, you know, we'll go back into the history a bit and, and track through your book. But what are your thoughts now upon seeing over the last week what has happened in Afghanistan? Well, unfortunately, it was both predicted and predictable, not only by myself, but by others, because you didn't need to be sort of Klaus Swiss to recognize that if we absented ourselves entirely with the United States, then all our NATO allies would leave. There were, by the way, 2500 American troops, but there were 7000 NATO allied troops and 16,000 contractors, all of which have left or are in the process of leaving. And this caused a complete collapse of morale amongst the Afghan military and Afghan government. And there's a kind of line of argument that the Afghan army was weak. And certainly there is some truth to an incompetently led organization. But 66,000 Afghan soldiers and Afghan policemen died fighting the Taliban, which is about 30 times larger than the number of American fatalities. So it's not that there wasn't a will to fight, it's just the will to fight evaporated when there was no longer medevac, close air support, American advisers, et cetera. Yeah, I want to get into the seeming conundrum of what happened with the Afghan army. But before we do what I'm troubled by in the last few days in witnessing the reaction to this, there seems to be a consensus forming domestically in America. Maybe it's worldwide, but there's a kind of neo isolationist consensus on the far left and the far right. And maybe far is in scare quotes. I don't know how far in either direction you have to go before you run into this, but it seems that both sides of the political spectrum have large cohorts that agree that not only did we have to leave Afghanistan, but we had no business being there in the first place. Right. And the whole project was illegitimate. And, you know, on the right, I think you, you tend to hear people denigrating the Afghans and, and thinking that they just, you know, they're they're not ready for democracy. They they want the Taliban, they're barbarians. This was a fool's errand to try to bring them into the 21st century. And above all, at this moment, let's keep their damn refugees out of our country. So there's that attitude on the far right. On the left, people tend to denigrate America and Western civilization. And so the idea that we could pretend to want to spread our values to the rest of the world when we're the greatest criminals and terrorists in history, it's surreal. On the left, you have people who list their preferred pronouns in their Twitter BIOS and who would want to see their neighbors and coworkers destroyed for telling off color jokes, but who will simultaneously claim that we shouldn't judge the treatment of women under the Taliban, right? Who are we to pretend to care about these women? And who are we to even judge this ancient culture for its own norms? But both sides seem to agree that we have no business being the world's cop and that nation building never works. You have these phrases, these catchphrases that do immense work here where Afghanistan was the graveyard of empires, right? So which of course, this was ill conceived and we were committed to a forever war here on both sides. People seem to imagine that the reason why we were in there was to enrich ourselves in some way. We were stealing natural resources. And I'm sure both sides in the end, will find some way to put the Jews to the back of all of this. We're living in an information space that is contaminated by conspiracy theory and a complete loss of trust in the media, in institutions, in the possibility of benign American power. And so before we get into the details of the rest, I'm just wondering how you see this consensus that we had to rip the Band Aid off and we're better for it. We just get the hell out. This was going to fail. Precisely. In some ways, Biden has almost echoed this like it was always going to be this bad. There was no way to exit, there was going to be any better. Just rip the Band Aid off. Right? Yeah. And of course, I have a whole host of reactions to that. I mean, we've heard from the White House, in a sense through White House reporters, that, you know, the fact that it all collapsed so quickly is evidence of Biden's brilliant, brilliant decision, which kind of a sort of strange way of defending a not very smart decision. There are many things to be said. For a start, there are 1.3 million active duty Americans, 2 million when you throw in the reserves, and 2500 is not a large I'm not a mathematician, but it's a really, really small percentage of the force that we have. And that was what sufficient to kind of prevent the collapse that followed. And I think that this was completely unnecessary. There's kind of two arguments that have been heard. One is that this was a great idea, but the execution was terrible. Well, no one's denying the execution was a total fiasco, but I'm unconvinced it was the right policy decision. One of the there's a great Washington DC tendency, which we're seeing right now, which is when you make a policy fiasco, you blame it on the intelligence. You say, the intelligence didn't really tell us that this would collapse so quickly or whatever, but I think this was very fast moving. And it was predictable that if we just pull the plug or rip the bandage off, as you put it, that there was going to be real problems. And here they are. And there's kind of back to the future element to this, because we're approaching the 20th anniversary of 911. The Taliban are in control of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, according to the United Nations, in a report released in June, is closely aligned with the Taliban. Al Qaeda is present in 19 of the 34 Afghan provinces, again according to the UN. And the resistance to the Taliban has been led by Aquaman Bashar Masood's son in the Pangir Valley, which is exactly what was two days before 911. Akma Sharma, sued, was assassinated by al Qaeda. So we'll see how this what does it mean for American national security is kind of another question. We're much more well defended than we were in the past than, say, on 911. But there are going to be plenty of people sort of excited about this who either will try to go and get training in Afghanistan or simply radicalize at home in front of their computer and do something in the name of the Taliban or al Qaeda, as we saw during the ISIS caliphate. Yeah, just to focus on the legitimacy of the initial project for another moment, it seems to me one really has to make distinctions, fairly granular distinctions, across every point in this timeline. So, for instance, one could certainly admit that going into Afghanistan was perfectly legitimate. We we went in for the right reasons. We had to go in, but then also concede that the project failed there for a variety of reasons that we need to understand and that weren't for ordained. Right. Or you could further argue that despite how difficult our 20 years there were, the project itself was still salvageable. Right. That, you know, that the serious combat for our troops had ended somewhere around 2014, and that our continued presence there would have been far preferable to what has now happened. I mean, we've been in South Korea for 70 years or so, and we've been in Western Europe longer than that, and no one's talking about a forever war with respect to those places. So it's clear that we can maintain troops in places for a sane purpose, whether it's humanitarian or geopolitical or both, without feeling that we have become the world's masochists or an evil empire. So it's just wherever you fall in your optimism or pessimism with respect to the possibilities in Afghanistan, it's still possible to argue that maintaining our presence there, as mediocre as the result seemed, is far better than what has just happened and what is likely to be coming. I mean, I'm in violent agreement with that. The enemy of the perfect isn't sort of the reasonably okay, and what we had before was sort of reasonably okay. And this is obviously a catastrophic debacle that has sort of taken place, the 2500 troops or the 3500 troops. And part of this also was just about, I think, our messaging. And we've been saying since that we're planning to leave Afghanistan since December 1, 2009, when President Obama went to West Point to announce a surge, and at the same time a surge of troops, and at the same time announced their withdrawal date. And of course, Trump repeatedly said, we're leaving, and Biden has completed the withdrawal. Of course he can change his mind. I mean, President Obama changed his mind in Iraq after the rise of ISIS, and sent in thousands of troops in the end to train the Iraqi counterterrorism service, which turned out to be a very effective special Forces unit, which pretty much destroyed much of Al Qaeda in Iraq with American air support. So this is not over. Biden can change his mind. Right now, we're in the phase of trying to get Americans out, and our allies, even if you disagree with the position I just sketched out, which the truth is, I'm not even sure what my view is here. I could easily be persuaded that we should have gotten out more or less now, right? But what seems patently obvious and has been denied by every one of Biden's public utterances I've heard thus far, is that we could have, and should have massively prepared to extract not only the ten or 15,000 American citizens who are rumored to still be there. But all of our allies, all of the people who put their lives on the line to collaborate with us, who are translators and people who are now very much at risk of being killed by the Taliban, we had an ethical obligation, we have an ethical obligation to get them out. And the idea that we couldn't have done it in a truly orderly way with sufficient force on the ground, that just seems insane in his messaging about this. I don't know why Biden would even be tempted to try to put a brave face on how this has unraveled here and claim that there was no better way to do this. We can't even guarantee the safe passage of our own citizens to the airport. I mean, I completely agree with that. I don't think there's a single person listening to this who doesn't think that this has been extremely poorly handled. The harder question where people do disagree is like, was it the right thing to do? Let's do the thought experiment where this was perfectly planned and a year went into the planning and everybody needed to get out, got out. I think you would have still ended up with the, with the Taliban in control. And some people may be fine with that and some people may not be. I mean, I fall into the category of I spent a fair amount of time in Taliban controlled Afghanistan, and I have a healthy skepticism for their claims of amnesty for people that were fighting them. I have a healthy skepticism for their claims about girls being educated or women having jobs. The crucial modifier in their statements, Sam, is whenever they say something like, of course we'll have education for women, and then they add in the context of Sharia law. Yeah, which is a pretty large caveat because their interpretation of Sharia law differs pretty markedly from most Muslims. And the same thing they've actually said about the independent media. Yeah, we're, we're going to have an independent media, but they're going to have to kind of do it in the context of Sharia law. So these are huge caveats, and these are coming from the sort of Doha Taliban or political Taliban. The people in the field, they're going to sort of make their own judgments about who they want to kill or attack, because the Taliban itself is not a monolithic entity. So I have a question for you, which is if you were to score this as sort of an American failure, is this Hurricane Katrina for Bush? Is this the Iraq War decision? It's hard for me to think of an analog of something that was so poorly handled and so unnecessarily screwed up. Even with the Iraq War decision, it didn't really become clear until several months in what a fiasco it was and all the false pretenses that it was kind of predicated upon here. The disaster is immediately obvious from day one, and I doubt the pictures are going to get better over time. Yeah, I mean, there's something especially grotesque about this because the images and I'm sure we're going to see worse in coming weeks, but the images we have are every bit as bad as the Fall of Saigon. And Biden is becoming a gaff machine with respect to this topic. I mean, the images have, have been supplied precisely in the form he said they, they would never appear. Right. He said, we will not see fall of Saigonlike images, and what we have seen is worse, but certainly reminiscent of those older images. There's just a pervasive sense that there are no grown ups left to help run the world. If Biden's presidency meant anything as a real turning of the page from Trump's, it was in a renewed commitment to competence. Right. And this is so incompetent. I don't think we should be under any illusions that it would be better if Trump were in charge. If Trump were president, I'm sure he would have done something just like this. I mean, he's the one who committed us to getting out in May. He signed this, I believe it's referred to as the capitulation agreement with the Taliban. So he's, he started us on this path. But if he were president, you could just imagine what his messaging would be. He would say things like, he's totally capable of saying things like, I love the Taliban. They only say nice things about me. It could just be a complete repudiation of any sort of moral integrity we once had. But effectively, that's happening anyway in how little thought we've given to the wellbeing of the people who helped us. And yeah, I mean, the idea that a generation of women and girls is now going to be pitched back into the Dark Ages is something that no one should be comfortable with. And it's certainly an argument it's all one needs for an argument to have continued our presence there for another generation at whatever sacrifice it seemed at this point, a truly minimal sacrifice just to ensure that women and girls are not pointlessly miserated for the rest of their lives under the Taliban. And I like the I like the verb emiserated, because also that's going to be true for much of the rest of the population. I mean, miseration that I witnessed when I was in Taliban controlled Afghanistan was, you know, that the country had already gone through the Soviet occupation and the civil war. The economy was what remained of the economy completely disappeared under the Taliban. You know, I spoke to doctors who were earning in Kabul who were earning $6 a month. So what is the Taliban project? The Taliban project is to make society pure, and then when society is pure, utopia will be achieved. Unfortunately, that doesn't plan for things like keeping the electricity on or the water or the Taliban is not really interested in sort of conventional governance. They are interested in judicial decision making, and they're interested in kind of kind of how to set up an educational system that conforms with their views. But as for anything else they don't have, maybe the new Taliban will have more competent people, but they certainly didn't when they were in power, and it's really not their priority. I mean, I haven't seen a Taliban plan for kind of what their economic plan is or, like, it's almost an oxymoron. So, unfortunately, we can expect them to, as we've already seen, attack or try and attack anybody that they consider to be an enemy, which is anybody who collaborated with the United States or our NATO allies. And the number is, you know, I it's hard to put a number on how many people worked with different we had 49 countries in there at one point who were going back to this kind of legitimacy. Actually, Sam, I mean, this is probably one of the more legitimate wars in history, because not only did the Congress vote overwhelmingly with only one descending vote, which was Barbara Lee of California, then NATO invoked Article Five for the first time and only time in its history, the collective right to self defense. And rather crucially, the United Nations passed a resolution a few days after 911 saying that the United States could respond by any any means necessary, which is UN speak for, you know, basically, you can go to war in a legitimate sense. So, yeah, I can't think of of a war. Certainly the United States is conducted where there was that level of international and unanimity on the legitimacy of the war. I'm surprised by the figure that you gave earlier of the troop levels of our allies that were still there. That opens the question, why is it all on us? Or maybe I'm just I have a myopic view of our own national disgrace here. And I think the UK is people in the UK are expressing the same opinion of themselves. But why was our pulling out synonymous with the unraveling of everything? That is a very good question. But I mean, the 7000 American allied troops, NATO troops that were there, a lot of them were doing advice and assist missions. It was non combat roles in Germany. The German political dispensation wouldn't allow Germans to be involved in combat, and so they were mostly in supporting roles of one kind of or another, which is important. We're gathering intelligence, but we provide the security umbrella under which all this took place. That's in terms of our satellite imagery and our drones and the levels of intelligence we have, and the fact that we have special operations and forces that can go out on counterterrorism missions. I think when that was pulled out, I mean, a leading indicator, I don't know if you remember this sound, but the Australians said they were going to close their embassy. It feels like it was several weeks ago that they said that. I mean, they saw the writing on the wall and the Australians actually fought rather bravely in Afghanistan. So it just created this sort of crisis of confidence. And war is always about a contest of wills. And if the will starts sort of receding, it's a very quick it's the Hemingway line about how did you go bankrupt? Well, first gradually, and then suddenly, this is what happened. Well, so on the point of bankruptcy, what do we make of the collapse of the Afghan government and the Afghan police and armed forces? It seems like the writing has been on the wall there for a very long time in terms of our knowing about the corruption of the government. Actually, I was unaware of how deep this ran, but this week someone surfaced, a documentary that was from 2012. Perhaps you saw it. The journalist Ben Anderson for Vice, along with Eddie Moretti, produced this documentary titled this Is What Winning Looks Like, I think. Came out in 2012. And he was just ben Anderson was embedded with US forces who were taking a purely supportive role for Afghan forces at that point. Just letting them execute all their missions and the lack of real trust and real morale between the Americans and the Afghans was pretty startling. And they're just these ghastly episodes where they'd find an Afghan police commander who's raping boys and they want to, you know yeah, the Americans want to do something about this. And what they. Come up against is that this is basically a social norm that, you know, it's just it's ubiquitous. It's like I think one of the Afghans said, you know, good luck finding a police commander who's not raping boys. This is what we do. And they were raped as boys, and now they're entitled to rape boys. And so there was such a disjunction between any kind of idealism for what could be built through this partnership and what was actually the actual truth on the ground. And there were so many signs that this would unravel. We're putting people in totally untenable situations when we're going into a village along with Afghan forces and demanding that people support the government. And it was perfectly obvious that the villagers, they had to hedge their bets because they know the Taliban could be in there in the next the next week making the opposite demands, and they have to more or less agree to be loyal to whoever is standing in front of them holding a gun. I don't know. Did you ever see that film? I didn't, but I experienced it myself, and I was in Helmland with the Marines in 2009. There was a Marine lieutenant colonel. He was asked by a farmer, you know, how long do you plan to be around? And the Marine lieutenant colonel wasn't going to lie to him. He said, I can only promise you I'll be here for nine months. And the farmer clearly, what the farmer meant was exactly what you've pointed out, which is like people switched surrender to the Taliban, not because they suddenly became enthusiasts for the Taliban's view of utopia, but because they wanted to keep their heads on their bodies. And, you know, the war in Afghanistan began began in 1978. It it began even before the Soviets invaded. So it's been going on for 43 years, and Afghans want to survive, and they've had multiple switches. In 92, the Kabul fell. The communists were defeated, and Kabul fell to the sort of the warlords. In 96, kabul fell to the Taliban. In 2001, Kabul fell to the Americans, and now it's fallen back to the Taliban. So I think there's a it's not that Afghans are sort of inherently conniving. They've had a long experience of needing to survive in a war that's gone on for almost half a century. And so what you describe in that documentary is exactly right, which is going back to the question of corruption and the police and the army. I went out on patrol with Afghan police in the sort of 2003, 2004 time period, and they were smoking the best quality grass you can get in the world, and that was about all they were doing. So, you know, the police were very poorly paid, no real morale. The army is slightly better. But when President Biden talks about the 300,000 man army, that figure is probably half that, because so many people were deserted, so many ghost soldiers. So, you know, it that was it hasn't really been that wasn't really much of a success. The Afghan Special forces are quite robust, and and they were they've been fighting well, and the Afghan Air force has some competence. But clearly the Afghan army, if you haven't been fed or paid for many, many months, it's not like you're going to have a tremendous loyalty to the central government. Yeah. And there's also just this truly asymmetrical advantage with respect to morale and commitment. When you picture the psychology on the Taliban side, you have one side that is literally fighting for paradise or their conception of paradise, and the other is fighting for money, praying, some pragmatic sense of the game, theory of the moment. And all of that is, however you can stitch it together, is far more fragile unless there are people, a sufficient number of people on the government and army side who are. This speaks to some possibility that there's more sympathy with the Taliban worldview than we might want to emphasize in this context. I could imagine if most Afghans are as horrified by the Taliban as I am, then the explanation that they haven't been paid doesn't cut it. Right. I mean, this is a life and death struggle against a totalitarian theocracy. You'd expect the two sides would really fight it out. But I have to expect that while they may not be totally sympathetic with the conception of sharia that the Taliban is going to demand of them, it's not as obscenely divergent from what most people think should be normative as it would be in our context. I would sort of caveat that pretty heavily in the following sense. So the Taliban is an overwhelmingly Pashtune movement. The Pashtunes are 40%, roughly, of the population. They are most almost entirely from the south and the east. And so the norms that they have are the norms of rural passions. These are not the norms of Tajik's hazaras or Uzbek's or people who live in the cities. They're not like right. Yeah. I'm not saying that people in Kabul are, like, sort of taking tons of drugs and going to discos, and there's obviously gender segregation, but it's a much lower order. I agree with you in the sense that just to ask you, I don't know a ton about him, but someone like Akman Shama sued right. Who you mentioned earlier. I can't imagine he was as liberal a figure as we would want him to be in opposition to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. That is true. Look, I mean, Akhma Sharma sued, who I met in 93, and was kind of an astonishing human being, probably the most impressive person I've ever met. He was an Islamist, but he was also an Islamist with a kind of orientation to the west. I mean, he's I think he went to a French Lisa in Kabul. He, you know, he was perfectly happy dealing with Westerners and so it's it is a matter of degree, as you point out. Yeah, but and the other thing also just a sort of related point on the Taliban. And the Taliban also pays people, and they're sitting on a, you know, multi billion dollar poppy opium enterprise. And so I think for a lot of the foot soldiers of the Taliban, they may not completely subscribe to Taliban ideology. They may not really care about it completely. They are getting paid pretty steadily. And just like ISIS was able to pay people, there's kind of a distinction between a terrorist group and an insurgent group. Obviously, there are kind of military differences, but terrorist groups tend to be volunteers, and often from the upper middle class or middle class. An insurgent group usually has people on the payroll. When you have 30,000 men in the field or 60,000 or 75,000, as in the case now, the Taliban, that's a pretty big payroll to meet. The Taliban was pending. People There are limited jobs for young men in Afghanistan, and so there is some ideological component to this, but there's also for some people, this is just a job. And it's a job where you're actually getting paid. Yeah. And again, you're back in what appears to be what clearly is the stronger horse. Right. It's just purely pragmatic at that point as well. Yeah. So how do you view this? Now, let's think about the implications of this for jihadism globally. Do we think that a resurgent Taliban, something like their version of a caliphate in Afghanistan, will have a similar Galvanizing effect that the Islamic State had worldwide? And is this just the pendulum swing back into global jihadism, claiming more and more of our of our bandwidth? Geopolitically and Journalistically I think the short answer is yes. I mean, why would it be any different? I mean, here here the Taliban in their own minds defeated first the Soviets, because a lot of them came out of the anti Soviet jihad and now the Americans. That's a pretty big deal. And they're going to declare not a caliphate, but an emirate. The distinctions between the two are less important than the similarities. Right. And the commander of the faithful is how the Taliban refers to their leader, which is a claim that not only do I lead the Taliban, but I'm in charge of all Muslims everywhere, which is the same claim that Abu Bakr al Baghdadi made when he declared ISIS. So one of the big differences, I think, is that ISIS was like pathologically sectarian. The Taliban certainly have engaged in anti Shia, anti Hazara massacres. They may not be the defining core of their movement, which for the ISIS, clearly that was the case. But I think you're going to see foreign fighters pouring in from South Asia and parts of Europe to join this incredibly successful enterprise. And you'll see a few Americans who may try and travel there. You'll certainly see people radicalizing in front of their computers because, you know, they they believe that this great jihadist victory has happened, and they self identify. And we saw that with ISIS. The problem, of course, in in the United States was people kind of self radicalizing because of the ISIS geographical caliphate. And it was very exciting. Once that caliphate geographically disappeared, the number of people who got excited about it was much, much smaller because no one wants to join the losing side. So right now, the taliban of the winning side, al qaeda, is kind of on the front lines with them, and not only Al qaeda, but other jihadi groups. So I think we've seen this movie before. We kind of know how it begins, and we also know how it ends. It doesn't end usually very well for the groups concerned because ultimately a coalition of nations and other groups like Napoleon in 1813, which is like, if you make a world of enemies, it's going to lead to your own defeat. And these groups tend to do that. They tend to kind of create a lot of antibodies, whether it's domestically or internationally. Now we're kind of backing into the contents of your book. We know through your reporting that there's been a very cozy relationship between the taliban and al qaeda. All the while, there was really while there was some discomfort at various stages of osama bin laden's reign, where he was seeking publicity in ways that malomar and others found inconvenient, there was never really a significant breach between them, and they've been mutually supportive until the present. But I'm wondering, what do we know about the fact that there was not only not real collaboration, but actually overt hostility between the taliban and ISIS or the islamic state? Yeah, I mean, they've certainly been fighting each other. Is that ideological, or is it just not wanting to share the power? As far as I can tell, it's mostly taliban groups that have slapped on the ISIS kind of patch, and that makes them bigger and badder. And I don't think it's like the narcissism of minor differences, which is freud's pretty observation about most human activity. You do think it is, or you don't think it is? No, I don't think there's some big ideological split. Certainly ISIS is more likely to attack shia, whether in afghanistan or anywhere else, but I think it's more just that certain taliban groups wanted to be the biggest, baddest person on the block and slapped on the ISIS patch, and it was more about local grievances or local personalities. I don't think there was the taliban, of course, had engaged in negotiations with the United States, which ISIS clearly hasn't done, but I see it as more the narcissism of minor differences rather than some big ideological split. Right. Obviously, ISIS and al qaeda have split in a kind of perhaps a little more ideological manner because al qaeda has tended to want to avoid attacking shia except Al Qaeda in Iraq, which of course, was sort of the progenitor of ISIS, right? Okay, so let's get into the history here and the fascinating case study of Osama bin Laden. We actually know a lot about him now, as you report, given how many documents were liberated from, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast cast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I recently ran an opinion poll online asking people how often they think seriously about death, about its inevitability, about their priorities in light of it, etc. Here. And I gave the choices many times a day, perhaps once a day. I can go days without thinking about it, I can go weeks without thinking about it. And I'm not sure what results I was expecting, but the distribution did surprise me. Obviously, this isn't a scientific sample it was mostly a sample of the kind of people who follow me on Twitter, though I think the poll did spread somewhat beyond my audience. I got over 40,000 responses anyway. The largest cohort were those who don't think about death very often. 32% said they can go weeks without doing so, 27% can go days without it, 28% think about death perhaps once a day, and only 13% were people like me who think about it many times each day. So judging from these results, I probably think about death more in the average day than most people think about it in many months or even a year. I generally don't think about it in a way that I would consider morbid. My thoughts tend to be more in line with the Memento Mori reflections that are widely recommended by Buddhists and Stoics, and which you could find echoed in several places in Waking Up, reflecting on the preciousness of life, on the nonrenewable character of time, on the reality that you simply don't know how much time you have. But you definitely have one less day, today and every day. Thoughts of this kind need not make a person depressed, though perhaps they make some people depressed. Rather, they can and should inspire us to wisdom and compassion. Do that most important thing. Now. Express your love now relinquish those hangups. Now, bury the hatchet. Now, recognize the nature of mind. Now, live fully now, for one day you will die. But it does seem that many people don't reflect in this way and do their best to avoid thinking about death altogether. And even those of us who think about it a lot still suffer from various forms of death. Denial, for instance. Even though the reality and inevitability of death seem very well established in my mind, more often than not, I'm still shocked to learn that any specific person has died unless that person was in his or her 90s. Any specific death still seems somehow anomalous to me. My first question is some incredulous version of what happened. So I do detect in myself some form of death denial. Even though I think about the reality of death a lot and the reality of it is everywhere, I notice more and more that many of the people I admire, people who I read or listen to with pleasure actors who I enjoy watching in films. People whose thoughts and personalities I can summon in an instant by picking up a book or typing their names into YouTube. I notice more and more that many of these people are dead, and some died at an age that I've already surpassed. And I'm also occasionally aware that I'm likely going to occupy this role for other people. I don't think it's totally grandiose of me to imagine that some people will listen to my voice or read my books after I'm dead. Now, I'm 54 at the time I'm recording this. How long will I live? Obviously, I have no idea. But what will it be like for someone who cares about the life I've lived and who finds some value in my view of the world? What will it be like for you to listen to this audio after I'm gone? To know that I lived as fully as you do now, but to know that I no longer do well, I know exactly what that's like. I have that experience more or less every day. There's something very strange about this time capsule effect, this one way communication with the past. It's amazing that we have media that allows us to do this, to have this shock of recognition. You can summon Carl Sagan or Marlon Brando from beyond the grave and fully recognize that they were once as alive as you are now. And we know the precise day that they died. And we also know that the world went on without them. When we think about death, there are different facets of it that we can focus on. We can think about our own deaths, or we can think about the deaths of other people, in particular those closest to us. And these are very different problems. When I think about the deaths of the people I love, the focus is much more on my own bereavement than it is on the fact of death itself. Even though it's true that when I die I will lose everyone, I won't be alive to experience that loss. So bereavement doesn't really enter into it. It seems to me that the pure reflection on death itself is really best focused on our own case. However, even here, it's possible to get distracted by other things. For instance, we can worry about the process of dying, whether it's going to be sudden or after a long illness. Will it be painful, or in some other way, chaotic, or will we go peacefully in our sleep. Thinking about the process of dying is really thinking about the specific experiences one will have at the end of one's life. To think about death itself is to think about what happens after that or about what doesn't happen after that. So it's not the dying, it's the being dead part that interests me here. So today I'm going to say a few things about what it might mean to be dead. And I want to explore certain paradoxes that seem to surround this phenomenon. So we can leave the process of dying aside. It's going to be whatever it will be. And whatever it is, it will be a finite experience. Which is to say that however painful it might be, in the case of any one of us, there will come a time when it ceases to be painful. Even if one suffers a long illness and a blizzard of medical interventions, there will be a moment when all of that ends. So dying will be like anything else in life. It will be temporary. The part that seems like it might not be temporary is the condition of being dead. Now, what we think about death, in particular about what happens to each of us after our bodies die, depends on what we believe about. Two fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind the nature of consciousness and the nature of identity. The question about the status of consciousness in the natural world is often referred to as the mind body problem. What is the relationship between mind and matter? Where does consciousness come from? Does it arise on the basis of information processing in the brain? Or is it a more fundamental constituent of matter? Or is matter itself a mere appearance in consciousness which would then be the true base layer of reality? There are rival metaphysical views here, specifically physicalism panpsychism and idealism and how everyone resolves the mind body problem. There remains the problem of personal identity. For instance, in what sense am I the same person or self or consciousness that I was yesterday? What could be the basis of any claim to identity? Is it just a matter of psychological continuity through time? What's the significance of such continuity when we think about replacing parts of ourselves, even parts of our brains or strangers? Still, when we think about the prospect of copying our minds onto some other substrate, what would it mean to create minds that have perfect copies of our memories and desires, perhaps better copies than we maintain normally while living? What would any of this suggest about the nature of personal identity? Now, I've discussed many of these riddles elsewhere without giving anything like final answers to them. But here I want to focus on the question of death as viewed from the inside, from the point of view of the experience of any person who has died. And of course, this will be each of us ultimately, unless we get to a time where we're actually duplicating ourselves or otherwise perfectly resisting biological decay. Each of us will one day be counted among the dead by those who outlive us. But before we get started here this one peculiar intuition often held by religious people that I think we should dispense with at the outset. And it's the intuition that if death really is the end of us, if it's synonymous with the end of experience, well, then that finality robs life of any conceivable purpose or meaning or significance. The idea seems to be that the only way for love or knowledge or beauty or happiness to matter is for these states of mind and states of the world to last forever. It's eternity or nothing. This is a surprisingly common point of view, as I said, especially among the religious. But if you think about it, it is a strange idea. And it's also strange that no one seems to apply it to specific experiences. I never hear someone say that if a play or a dance or a piece of music or a conversation or a hug or a meal or a sunset or anything else doesn't last forever, well, then it was pointless. Rather, I think one could easily argue it's the transgency of everything that magnifies the beauty of everything. I would also point out that the decisions we make while alive, the culture we create, the ideas we invent and spread all of this directly affects the minds of the people who will outlive us. And the effect we have on these people could well make the difference between humanity petering out over the course of the next century or spreading itself through the galaxy for millions or even billions of years. Just take a moment to contemplate the difference between these two futures. In the first, humanity has no future because we fail to mitigate some specific existential risks. And in the other, our future is truly open ended. We achieve a kind of escape velocity with respect to our survival. Now, of course, there are intermediate places on this landscape. If we don't play our cards quite right, we might persist for a very long time under conditions that are not only not desirable but may be quite terrible based on our failure to cooperate intelligently generation after generation. But how each of us lives now will help determine our trajectory here. So what we think and say now matters even if we're not around to experience the consequences. So I won't go into it further here, but I just wanted to indicate that I don't think the finality of death in the case of each individual says much, if anything, about that individual's life. And it certainly says nothing about the meaning of life itself. But there is also something paradoxical about the very idea of death as a condition in which every individual life and mind terminates. And my purpose now is to explore that paradox. The philosopher Tom Clark has a wonderful essay which you can read on his website, Naturalism.org, and the essay is titled Death, Nothingness and Subjectivity, and I want to explore his argument here in some detail. Of course, other philosophers and scientists have said many things on this point. For instance, we have the famous quotation from Epicurus as we encounter him in Lucretius's poem on the Nature of Things. Quote Death is nothing to us when we exist, death is not. And when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death, and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. End quote. So this idea of nothingness, of oblivion, of a dark abyss, of a kind of positive absence, of an endless deprivation of experience is misleading. If we're simply talking about the end of experience, you didn't experience your absence before you were born, and if death is truly the end of experience, you won't experience your absence after you die. So this reification of death as eternal nothingness is fundamentally misleading. And Clark starts his essay there. The philosopher Vitkinstein made a similar point in disparaging Freud's notion of the unconscious. He said, quote, Imagine a language in which, instead of saying, I found nobody in the room, one said, I found Mr. Nobody in the room. Imagine the philosophical problems that would arise out of such a convention, end quote. That's from the Blue Book. The point is, nothingness isn't something, and therefore it can't be a permanent condition of any being or mind. The second point that Clark explores is the subjective continuity of consciousness. From the point of view of consciousness, there can be no experience of before or after with respect to birth and death, so there is something almost eternal about it from its own point of view. Of course, we think we experience interruptions of consciousness while alive, in sleep or under anesthesia, but that's not quite true. It's true that we experience changes in the character of our experience, that is, in the contents of consciousness. It feels like something to wake up groggy from sleep, say. But from the point of view of consciousness, we just experience one moment after the next, even if some moments indicate that there were periods of time that we can't account for or did not experience at all. From the point of view of consciousness, there is justice and charity. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Mark Olilla. Mark is a professor at Columbia University and a prize winning essayist for the New York Review of Books and many other publications. His books include The Shipwrecked Mind, The Stillborn God, The Reckless Mind, and his latest book, which is what we discuss is The Once and Future Liberal. And Mark and I talk about essentially the nature and history of liberalism in the United States and how identity politics has changed it. We talk about the ways in which identity politics may or may not be legitimate. We talk about the role of class in American society, wealth inequality, and we disagree about a few things, we agree about others. But it was a very enjoyable conversation and one that many of us who care about the future of politics have been having more and more. So now, without further delay, I bring you Mark Lilla. I am here with Mark Lilla. Mark, thanks for coming on the podcast. Good to be here. So we have a mutual friend in, Andrew Sullivan. I think that was our connection. And Andrew is someone who I have sparred with to our mutual amusement and benefit. And he's a great example for me of someone who you can disagree, stridently with and still become friends. This is really what I aspired have all disagreements become, but it doesn't usually work out that way. You have the two of you have been going at each other for quite a while, haven't you? Yeah. So you've written this wonderful new book and it's wonderful also in part because it's so short. It really is one of these books that you can pick up and finish no matter what your bandwidth problems are. And the title is The Once and Future Liberal. And it's really this elegy for a real liberal politics that we seem to have lost and in its place we have this horror show of identity politics. So before we get into this, perhaps you can just summarize your background as a writer and political scientist and journalist. How do you describe what you have done and focused on as a writer? Well, the stuff that's relevant to this book, I think in my biography is I grew up in a place called Macomb County, Michigan, which is a blue collar county bordering on Detroit. Eminem. Grew up on Ten Mile Road. I grew up on Twelve Mile Road. So Macomb County used to be in early sixty s the most Democratic lopsidedly Democratic county in suburban county in America. By 1972 George Wallace won the Michigan primary and the county went for Nixon. And ever since political scientists have been studying it and pollsters have been studying it as the home of Reagan Democrats. And I saw this change happen in my life. I saw it happen with my neighbors. I saw it happen within my own family, extended family, not my close family. And I've been puzzling ever since then about why it is that the party and liberalism more generally lost the affection and the enthusiasm of what used to be their base, their white working class base and what might bring us back on course. So I started Wayne State University commuting putting myself through school, got a scholarship to Michigan and went off to the Kennedy School to study public policy. And when I was done I was offered a job on the Public Interest by my professor Daniel Bell. And the Public Interest was known as the first neoconservative magazine. But what neoconservative meant back in the 70s is that you were observing crystal like to put it, a liberal who had been mugged by reality. And what that meant was that you were still a liberal, but you realized that a lot of the solutions that or rather programs that we thought would solve social problems didn't do so well. And some of them were. Counterproductive realized that no one was paying attention to economic growth and also not paying attention to the white working class and the working class more generally. And so it was that the party had been sort of captured by the activist class. So people who had been involved with I forget what it was called the Coalition for Democratic Majorities so Bill Clinton came out of that. Pat Moynihan was part of that. He was on our board. And so being a conservative meant being a kind of reform liberal while liberalism sort of took off in its own direction after McGovern. And so ever since I've watched these various, you know, the lines between right and left and liberal and conservative move around. I don't feel I've moved that much. I've moved some but essentially I'm still the kind of prima governed liberal that I was back then. And so, you know, I've been writing, I've been writing in the New York Review of books about American politics, the American right. And then in my more scholarly work I've been writing about attacks, modern attacks on the Enlightenment. Well, let's define a few terms here because these key words that you use in the book. So let's start with liberal. How do you define liberal? What does it mean? And perhaps you could disentangle it from if it can be disentangled from the word left. Well, I think we have to talk about those two terms in the American context. The word liberal means something else in England. It means something very different on the continent where it essentially means just radical free market views. American liberalism was always, I think, founded or developed around two fundamental principles from the progressives through the New Deal. And the first was social solidarity that we stuck together, that the Hoover Republicans were happy to let people fall off by the side of the road. And the other is that there should be equal protection under the law. And so those two principles were the principles that liberals professed. They didn't always live up to those principles when it came to practice. And then I think what was added on to that was liberal anticommunism and no illusions about Marxism and especially communism as both in theory and in practice. And so there was a kind of liberal anticommunist consensus, certainly that continued from the New Deal down into the 1980s. And the left, I suppose you could say, include some of those liberals. But there are people on the left who, while they accept some of those two principles of solidarity and equal protection, have always had a soft spot, if not for communism than for Marxism, for movement politics, for radical movements seeking some sort of imaginary change, in my view. And so on the left, I would say there were the sober people who were the liberals and then everyone else. And what about the term progressive? Well, the word progressive originally was sort of the foundation of liberalism, but progressivism was also very patriotic. It's very interesting now to return to the writings of Teddy Roosevelt and to read his attacks on monopoly and his fight for protecting American workers, which was wrapped up with a kind of optimism about the country and the experiment that it is and a defense of America as a nation and as one nation. Without denying the kind of social diversity that we have. He believed in a kind of unifying citizenship. And people who called themselves progressive have held on to the economic message, but they've lost that sense of the nation. And that's what I'm trying to bring back in in my book. Yeah, you describe a time when liberals could salute the flag without embarrassment. And I must say that is a time before my time or certainly before any time I can remember. Liberalism, at least in my experience, has always been associated with it with a kind of cynical distance from anything that could be called patriotism without any kind of self consciousness. And I'm wondering when that happened. I mean, is this what Watergate and Vietnam did to liberalism? Well, I think it begins with the civil rights movement and the recognition that Democrats in particular had allowed Jim Crow to continue and flourish in the south. And that seemed to be a violation of what the country stood for and what liberalism seemed to stand for. And then, of course, Watergate, I think, was less important than Vietnam, which really broke the contract between the American government and the American people. I saw this quite intimately where I grew up. Where I grew up, a lot of kids served in Vietnam, and I had a paper route, and in the afternoons, I'd drive by a dusk, and I would see these stars in the window. Do you know what a star in the window used to be? No. Well, it used to be that if you had a child in the military, that the army, or whatever the service was, would send you a little flag with a star on it. And what people would do, they'd hang them in the window with the kind of Christmas light around it so you could see that they had someone there. And the flags came in two colors. There was one color if your child was alive, and there was another one if he or she had died there. And so you could just drive by. I could drove by on my bike, and I would just see all these lights and the two colors and know when it was that someone lost somebody. And I was an altar boy. I served at funerals of families that lost their sons, and and, you know, those people felt, on the one hand, betrayed by the government because it was clear that their sons were dying to no purpose. But they had even deeper anger at the elite class of journalists and writers and activists and kids on campus who were spitting on the flag that they had just used to drape the coffins of their sons. And I saw that happen before my eyes. And so it both disaffected these people from other liberals and also from the government itself, and made them cut them loose, in a way, for whoever came along. And Nixon came along promising to end the war. Reagan came along promising to make everything better, and on and on. And now Trump. Yeah, well, we'll talk about anger at the elites eventually, because that is at the center of so much of what's going on in our politics now, really, on both the left and the right, before we press on. What is identity politics? Well, I think the meaning of identity politics has changed, so I need to distinguish the kind of identity politics that began in the what we're living with now with the civil rights movement, you had a movement that was focused on one identity group, and then you had the women's movement that did the same. And the early gay rights movement. And those identity movements, in a sense, weren't about identity. They were about groups, but they weren't about so much about the inner experience of an identity. Rather, they were about making America fulfill its promise to make everyone an equal citizen. And so those movements were really about enfranchisement that you say, we're citizens and we're not full citizens. And so that is very consistent, to my mind, with the older liberal tradition. But then what happened in the on is that people who were wrapped up in the politics of these movements became very self referential. And for them, an identity was not something that bound people together and to the country, but rather it became a kind of way of reflecting on difference. And a lot of social movements broke apart on the basis of identity resentments. And so the New Left broke apart for all kinds of reasons. But one of them is that African Americans complained that they weren't part of the leadership, which is true. Women complained that they weren't part of the leadership, which was true. Lesbians complained that feminists were normalizing heterosexuality, which was also true. And so the united front of the Left broke down over these identity issues. And then what happened is that there was a retreat to the universities. And so people on the Left really abandoned electoral politics in these groups and instead developed this idea that all social change happens through social movements that are tied to identity. And you end up with gender theory, you end up with race theory, you end up with feminist theory, and you end up now with maybe three generations of young people, liberal elites who've been brought up in the university. To think about politics in terms of group and their own individual identities rather than of the common good and a message that might bind us together as a nation. You have a nice passage here on what happened to the New Left. Now I'm quoting you. The New Left was torn apart by all the intellectual and personal dynamics that plague every Left plus a new one identity. Racial divisions were quick to develop. Blacks complained that most leaders were white, which was true. Feminists complained that most all were men, which was also true. Soon, black women were complaining both about the sexism of radical black men and the implicit racism of white feminists, who themselves were being criticized by lesbians for presuming the naturalness of the heterosexual family. What all these groups wanted from politics was more than social justice and an end to the war, though they did want that. They also wanted there to be no space between what they felt inside and what they did out in the world. They wanted to feel at one with the political movements that mirrored how they understood and defined themselves as individuals. I love that. I mean, that picture of fragmentation seems exactly what has happened and that you have this what has been described as the the oppression Olympics, where there's an economy of victimhood, where certain identities trump others. And if you are a black lesbian, you're somewhere near the apex of grievance, and therefore, more or less anything you say is undeniable by someone who doesn't share your identity. If you're a black lesbian Muslim, well, then, better yet, I've been paying a little attention to the reception that your book has gotten. And so I noticed, for instance, the review in the New York Times, which had to be annoying to you. It was annoying to me. I hadn't even read your book, and it was obvious that that review was silly and unfair. And then I also saw the interview you did with David Remnick in The New Yorker, and he seemed, again, desperate to shore up some concept of identity politics. What has been your experience thus far in making your case post publication? And why do you think people are not readily seen? What is wrong with identity politics, both politically as a matter of just political pragmatics, but also intellectually and morally? Well, I think one of the reasons there are two reasons I think one of the reasons is that identity politics has really become an evangelical project and or it has all the all the markings of American revivalist religion. You know, the fact that we use the word woke, which comes from, you know, which comes from conversion, the great awakenings in this country, and especially over the past three, four years, for some reason, we've gotten into a panic about a lot of these issues that are real issues, but they've been around for a long time, and suddenly this developed a hypersensitivity about certain things. And there are reasons for that. What's happened with African Americans and the police and various other things? Charlottesville there are reasons for that, but it's also become dogmatic in the sense that it's not that people want you to agree with them or even just to work with you. They want you to believe they want you to accept their version of American history, their critique of American society, their particular critique of the police. And while you may agree with some of those things, what you look for in politics is kind of common ground, what you can agree on, like police mistreatment of African American motorists, for example, and you can work on that together. So they become people who won't take yes for an answer, I think, often. But the other thing is, I have felt in the reaction to the book that I put my finger on a real nerve or a sore spot, and that is that I keep saying in interviews, as I say in the book, that protecting minority groups is what we do as liberals. That's what we're about. You cannot protect anyone if you don't hold institutional power. Institutional power in this country is not just held in the presidency. It's held in the court, congress, and especially at the state and local level. If you are not competitive at the state and local level or the congressional level, you cannot protect anybody. Now, the only way to be successful at those levels is to have a message that reaches beyond your identity group. Therefore, if you want to actually protect African Americans, gays and lesbians just walking down the street holding hands, women who are being paid less than men. You need to hold power and you have to find a new message, not one based on yourself and your feelings and your identity, but a message about certain principles that you hold and that inform your political commitments, but that other people can also hold. And so these big themes of solidarity and equal protection, I think at just as principles most Americans hold to if you just ask them. But then once you get down to cases, then you're going to have disagreements that you can persuade people. But if you say to someone, you must understand me, but you cannot understand me because of who you are, you completely hermetically sealed yourself and you're unable to persuade anyone else. And so your politics become expressive and you fall in love with noble defeats. You become a bully too. That is what is left for you to do by way of persuasion, because reason has failed. There is to just bully people with, in this case, the threat of being called a racist. It's interesting, what you just said strikes me as a fairly complete recapitulation of what I recall Hillary Clinton saying when confronted by some Black Lives Matter people at one of her events. Yeah, I mentioned it briefly in the book, and I forget if it was at that time or not, but they weren't letting her speak. They had adopted these mama tactics of breaking into meetings, not letting people speak. And I forget if it was then or another time when Hillary Clinton pointed out that Martin Luther King would not have achieved his goals were it not for the practical politician LVJ who was willing to cut deals, cut deals with Dixiecrats and to make the civil rights legislation happen. The Great Society programs, movements alone cannot achieve anything, and institutional politics can always trump what movements have achieved. I mean, look what's happening at the state and local government in this country. The Democratic Party and feminist groups fought for a constitutional right for a woman to get an abortion. That was achieved. But in large parts of this country, a woman de facto cannot get an abortion. That is not because we haven't marched enough. It isn't because we haven't had enough court cases. It's because Democrats and liberals do not hold power at the state and local level, where in subtle and not so subtle ways, it's become impossible for people to run clinics where a woman can get an abortion, and they also feel under a threat of violence. And the only way to change that, the only way to make that right actual, is to go out to the south and the Southwest and find a way to convince those people to come over to your side. There's no other way. You got to get out of your bubble. You got to get out from behind your laptop and you got to go and meet people and talk to them just to reach your ends, not because you need to genuine flex to the white working class or Joe Six pack as if he's some sort of special figure. To achieve what you want to achieve, you've got to get out there. But you have argued that I think you say this in your book, perhaps this was just in an interview, but I believe you've argued that there's an asymmetry here between the right and the left. There's an identity politics of the right as well. But where identity politics is a losing strategy for liberals, it isn't necessarily a losing strategy on the right. That's right. It's hard to know what to say about this subject at this moment because ten years ago, when researchers would ask white people in surveys, how how important is your white identity? And do you feel whites are being discriminated against? You get maybe 5% now the figures are up over 25%. And why is that? Well, it's not that people have always felt that way. Rather, we have a right wing media, almost monopoly on news and parts of this country that have been able to play this up. And they've been able to play it up in part because we on the liberal side keep talking about identity. That's not to say that identity politics creates racism. It is to say that it can make it more salient at different moments. And the rise of this white consciousness, it's tied to all sorts of things, including social changes that have happened in the country, economic changes, the rise of a black middle class, the fact that women are in the workplace, and also the growth of a non working white male population. We're in a funny moment right now, but in this moment at least, it's certainly clear, and Steve Bannon said this himself, that the more we talk about difference and engage in sort of campus open a buffer, the more we help recruit people to the other side to say we have an identity too. Breitbart ran an article about my book saying, we've been saying this stuff for years and it's been working for us. And Steve Bannon said that in this famous interview with Bob Cutner that got him fired, he said, Keep talking about that issue. It's working for me, man. Just keep talking about them. Yeah. And on one level, it's just if you're going to practice identity politics, you shouldn't be surprised when white people eventually practice identity politics of their own. But is it a consequence of the fact that whites are still a majority in the country, that that it's it doesn't the identity aspect of it doesn't prove to be a liability in the same way? Actually, to give you just a little more material here, I wanted to read another passage which points up again, I don't know if this is the same asymmetry, but it certainly is an asymmetry. You talk about how the the web pages of the two parties differ. And you talk about, you know, on the Republican site at the time you wrote this, there was a essentially a white paper titled Principles for American Renewal. And just it was just a statement of positions of the party and just a vision for where the party wanted to take the country. And then you said on the Democratic website there was no such document. Now I'm quoting you. There's no such document to be found on the Democrats home page. Instead, when you scroll to the bottom of it, you find a list of links titled people, and each link takes you to a page tailored to appeal to a distinct group and identity women, Hispanics, quote, ethnic Americans, the LGBT community, native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders. There are 17 such groups and 17 separate messages. You might think that by some mistake you've landed on the website for the Lebanese government, not a party with a vision for America's future. I don't know if it's the same geometry of weakness there, but you can see how that kind of fragmentation where we means nothing but diverse groups, each of which is solely empowered to attest to its own grievances by virtue of its identity. That's not a moral or a political foundation from which to argue in ways that will attract people from outside your group to form a common cause with you. Yeah, one thing I've learned in talking about the book is that I should have emphasized one thing more that I say, but I needed to put it front and center, and that is that you cannot understand any social problem in America without talking about identity. You can't understand poverty. You cannot understand unemployment. You can't understand incarceration policy if you don't address how these policies affect many of these different groups. That's absolutely right, and we're more aware of that now, and that's a good thing. But when it comes to addressing those problems and building a common vision for the country that will appeal to people who aren't members of those groups, that's the time to employ a different kind of rhetoric. And so often the response I'm getting from people is, but how can we not talk about identity? Because identity is important in all these ways. That's true. So when you analyze, you know, what your commitments are once you understand the role of identity in this country, but in order to follow through and achieve a result out there and not simply express yourself and make yourself heard. Politics is not a speech act. Politics requires a common effort and persuasion, not self expression. And so it requires a kind of double mindedness, I would say now about identity, recognizing it to understand the country speaking in a different way in order to try to do something about it. I guess I'm going to sound more skeptical of identity than you do, at least in this moment. I hear you arguing that it's politically imprudent to emphasize identity as a matter if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, I should say something about my last podcast with Meg's Maker. As you might recall, Meg is a documentarian who had her first feature length documentary accepted more or less everywhere, including Sundance and south by Southwest, and then she got attacked by identitarian grievance entrepreneurs and promptly defenestrated by Sundance and the other festivals. And this really was a case of picking absolutely the wrong target. You just have to listen to Meg for about ten minutes and you realize she's pretty much the last person who should have been canceled for making the film she made. Anyway, she has a GoFundMe page to support her ongoing efforts to get the film jihad rehab, now known as the Unredacted distributed. And when we recorded that episode, her GoFundMe had raised $3,000. But at the end of that episode, I asked you all to contribute if you could, and now Meg has raised over $600,000 in one week. So needless to say, her situation has completely changed and it will be fascinating to see what happens next. So thank you all for supporting her. Beyond changing the material prospects for the film, your notes of encouragement, I know, have made a tremendous difference over there. The outpouring of love and support was tremendous and it was really, really gratifying to see. I love seeing a podcast guest supported in that way. So thanks again for showing up. And on the topic of love and support, I can't say I received much for tweeting into the Kanye West, I guess now known as the Artist, known as Yay, formerly known as Kanye controversy. With respect to his recent eruptions of antisemitism, I haven't focused much on antisemitism in the past. I think I've devoted exactly one podcast to it out of 300. I've noticed it on the extreme right and the extreme left. Obviously, briefly, the way this breaks down is that on the extreme right, Jews are not considered white and therefore they fall within the scope of white nationalist racism with the added spin of various conspiracy theories. But on the extreme left, Jews are considered extra white. They get something like double the white privilege points, so they fall within the scope of anti white bigotry and activism. So you move far enough left or right as a Jew and you meet fairly stark expressions of hatred. So I've been aware of that. But it's not something that has been a big deal in my life, certainly, and it has not been my focus. Kanye's statement on this one podcast, I believe it was the Drink Champs podcast. I believe they've pulled down their version of the interview, but I think it's up on other channels. His remarks went on at such length and they so assiduously connected all the traditional dots for the antisemitic worldview that it was fairly breathtaking. It was really a Protocols of the Elders of Zion level confabulation about the Jewish control of everything. Unfortunately, there's enough truth in what he said, which is to say there are prominent Jews who have made a lot of money in the recording business and in Hollywood and the other sectors of the economy that he was whinging about. It will seem all too plausible in many quarters to say that he is just calling balls and strikes as he sees them, right? This wasn't hatred. This is just the facts. You have an extremely famous, popular and influential artist truly exploding with antisemitism. Many people thought I was reacting to something he had tweeted that got him kicked off Twitter. No, that's not what I was reacting to. I was reacting to the interview, which was truly awful. Awful. As much for the fact that he received basically no pushback from the hosts, and at least in the original comment thread on YouTube, he received nothing but adulation from his fans. And when I tweeted about this, pointing out how despicable it was, what I got back was pretty amazing. I have a fairly thick skin at this point. I don't expect a lot from Twitter comments, but the torrents of hatred and cynicism I received out of Trumpistan were fairly amazing. Some of it was overtly antisemitic, some of it was just expressions of hatred for what I had said about Hunter Biden's laptop. I got some pain from the left as well. People claiming that after all that I've said about Islam, I'm in no position to criticize someone for their bigotry. Obviously, this just voices Frank confusion about the meaning of what I've said about Islam. Perhaps I should spell this out once again so it's fresh in everybody's mind, because the degree of dangerous idiocy that swings on this fulcrum is hard to exaggerate. I have said some extremely critical things about Islam as a system of ideas. I've said extremely critical things about Judaism as a system of ideas. In fact, I even made Judaism to some degree culpable for the Holocaust. That sounds like a neo Nazi position if you don't understand what I'm saying. So I've said a lot about ideas that I think are terrible and divisive and producing unnecessary harm. This is quite different from talking about people as people, especially for characteristics they can't change. If you listen to Kanye's statements about Jews, it's absolutely clear he is not talking about the religious ideas of Jews. He's not talking about Judaism. He's not talking about ideas at all. He's talking about Jews much more as a race. And it's Jews as a race that are the targets of virtually all antisemitism. When I talk about Islam, I'm talking about the beliefs of people to the degree to which they believe them. Yes, occasionally I will talk about Muslims, because I can't keep saying people who believe in Islam to whatever degree, but it's always clear in context what I'm actually talking about. There is zero xenophobia implied by my criticism of Islam. And what's more, I have said that with respect to immigration, there are no people I would rather have given green cards than moderate Muslims. I said that in response to Trump's idiotic Muslim ban. So you just have to follow me long enough to know what my attitude actually is toward Muslims as people. And I've regularly pointed out that there's nobody who suffers the consequences of the idiotic ideas contained within traditional Islam more than Muslims, more than Muslim women and apostates and aspiring intellectuals. Once again, if this is at all confusing, please recognize that criticizing Islam is like criticizing Marxism or Scientology. We're not talking about skin color or country of origin or anything else than the consequences of a specific set of ideas. And what I've criticized in Islam again and again and again really, I will admit ad nauseam, are the consequences of specific beliefs about jihadism and martyrdom and apostasy and blasphemy, and none of that entails bigotry against people. And yet I was inundated with moronic allegations of bigotry, even by some well known people, in response to my criticism of Kanye's. Absolutely crystal clear antisemitism. Yes. Kanye's Bipolar. I'm sure he suffers from that. Being bipolar doesn't make you antisemitic. That particular problem doesn't come with ideological content. So this struck me as genuinely new. Having a star of Kanye's size express that degree of antisemitism and to have it be celebrated at the level that it was seems genuinely new to me. This is not Mel Gibson on the side of the highway raving at the cops while getting arrested for drunk driving. So it seemed like a cultural moment worth addressing and clearly condemning, and I'm pretty surprised at the people who couldn't quite manage that. Anyway, for my troubles there, I got an extraordinary amount of hatred directed at me, mostly from Trumpistan, which provides further indication, as if one were needed, that there's a fair amount of antisemitism to be found there. I suspect this problem isn't going away anytime soon. We'll see what happens if the orange menace runs for President again, and perhaps I'll say something more on this topic at some point. One thing to notice over Waking Up, we built a live audio feature which allowed me to do a Q and A live earlier this week. I think something like 14 15,000 of you showed up for that. That was great, and I think we'll be building out that feature and using it more going forward. So if you follow me on Twitter, you might occasionally see me say, I'm on the app for the next hour, ask me anything, and hopefully we'll all find that useful. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Timothy Snyder. Tim is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of many books, among them On Tyranny, Black Earth, Bloodlands and the Road to Unfreedom. His work has received many prizes, and Tim has distinguished himself as a remarkably clear and urgent voice on the topic of fascist and quasi fascist propaganda, the way in which it seeks to erode democratic freedom globally. And he is especially an expert on Ukraine. And so I wanted to get his point of view on what's happening there in its ongoing war with Russia and its implications for nuclear risk. And in particular, I wanted him to address much of the commentary I've been seeing online from non subject matter experts, people like Elon Musk and the venture capitalist David Sachs, the physicist Max Tegmark, the economist Jeffrey Sachs. There are many people who've been calling with increasing urgency for a reset of our approach to supporting Ukraine. They've been calling for de escalation. They have been, to the eyes of many, dignifying Putin's claims about the provocations of NATO and NATO expansion. So I wanted to get a clear statement from Timothy about all this. I have no illusions that this is the final word on the matter, but it is, as you'll hear, a deeply informed word. And it's one that echoes many of my far less informed misgivings about what I've been hearing largely on social media from, again, very prominent people who are speaking very much in the vein of what I've called the new contrarianism. Everybody with and without a platform is now doing their own research and promulgating their resulting opinions however they can. And the results on many topics is a cacophony of unqualified voices. Whether we're talking about COVID or climate change or the war in Ukraine, this is just now the new norm, to have anti establishment voices create more and more noise, and sometimes this is to the good. I'm not saying it never makes sense to do your own research, but there is something to be said for expertise now and again. So I wanted to get an expert on Ukraine to come on the show to give us the lay of the land as he sees it. And that's what I've done. So now I bring you Timothy Snyder. I am here with Timothy Snyder. Tim, thanks for joining me again. Really glad to be with you again. So I've really been eager to talk to you. First, I should say that you've been on the podcast at least once before. We spoke about your book on Tyranny, which you've recently updated in audio format to COVID the war in Ukraine. And I've listened to that audio, and it's really fantastic. So I recommend that people download that now. You are a genuine subject matter expert on Ukraine and Russia, unlike many people who are spending a lot of time online at the moment, telling the world what we should all think about the war in Ukraine. Before we jump in, can you summarize your engagement with this topic? How have you come to know about Ukraine and Russia? Well, first of all, I want to thank you for remembering that the things that I maybe understand about America, I probably had my you know, I got my intuitions from other places. I've been working on East European history. My entire adult life is beginning more than 30 years ago. I went to Kiev for the first time almost 30 years ago. I've been speaking Ukrainian in Kiev, in Ukraine for more than half my life, working in Russian and Ukrainian sources for more than half my life. And I've I've been to the country regularly for the past quarter century. I've written six books that are of that are Ukrainian history or that bear on Ukrainian history, the the most well known of which is probably bloodlands Europe between Hitler. Yeah. And would I be right to assume that you currently know people who are fighting in this war or certainly experiencing its results firsthand in Ukraine? Yeah, I know hundreds of people in Ukraine. And just to give one little, tiny example, on the Monday before the war started, I was doing a doctoral exam, and the student passed. He was a wonderful, wonderful dissertation, and the next day, he signed up for the territorial defense. Everybody I know in Ukraine is involved in the war. Somehow. A large number of men and women who I know are in the army or in the territorial defense, and those who aren't are generally all doing something. Which is, of course, part of the reasons, part of the mystery as to why the Ukrainians are winning this war is that people are so active in civil society looking to fill the gaps that the state can't fill. That's a story which is kind of hard to write, but it's it's it's a fundamental feature of Ukrainian society. I really want to target a specific audience in our conversation. I think we'll take a few passes over the terrain to actually get down to bedrock. But here's what I most want to address, and I know you're going to have to COVID a fair amount of history before we get there, but what I most want to COVID are the doubts and fears of very bright, rational people who, at this point, think that US. And EU support of Ukraine has gone too far, and that we're running the risk of plunging into something like World War III quite unnecessarily, and that we, in some sense, provoked Putin, or at least we're culpable for our own failures of diplomacy and that NATO essentially. And the United States has backed him into a corner and put him in a position where his behavior is now pretty rational and even defensible from some non sinister angle. And again, you will be familiar with much of this. But if I look at my Twitter experience, I'm seeing many smart, well connected people, some of whom have very large platforms, as I said, none of whom are subject matter experts. But they're not Dummies, and yet they're speaking as though Putin has some kind of reasonable, as I said, non sinister claim upon the patients of the world at this point, and that we should step back and get Ukrainians to step back. And that there has to be some kind of path to de escalation here that isn't an abject capitulation to the threats of a tyrant. And just to kind of round this out, the cynical take here is that most Americans can't find Ukraine on a map, right, and still can't. And yet many are speaking about the donbass as though the blood of Ukrainian mothers runs in their veins, and that we've been propagandized to by a weird union of a neoliberal neoconservative order. And all doubts about the wisdom of this project and the wisdom of going all in on Ukraine is they're being silenced. And this is all kind of an escalatory ratchet towards something awful, the true awfulness being a proper exchange of nuclear weapons between the US. And Russia. So I want us to defuse all of that. And I know you have to get into some relevant history before we get there, but that's where I want to put that flag on the horizon, and I want us to aim at it. Yeah, that's fine with me. I think you'll probably have to have to break it up into little pieces. I will. What you're talking about is kind of you're giving a take on a bunch of takes, which are pretty far away from any recognizable empirical reality having to do with Russia or Ukraine or, for that US. I'll just say a little bit of the US. Before we get into the other parts. The idea that the US Was expecting this scenario and is somehow behind it is not only wrong, but deeply colonial. The US expected that this war was going to be over in three days. That was the official American position, and that was the basis for our actions at the beginning of the war. Very important to understand that the Ukrainians are people who have agency and who have taken risks and decisions. And the risks and decisions that they have taken have, in turn, affected Russia and America. I think a lot of the thinking, or some of the problems in the thinking that you're describing starts from the unspoken assumption that places like America and Russia are real countries and Ukraine is not. And once you start from there, you then have to twist yourself around an awful lot to try to understand what's happening. So I think that's a basic I would start out with, I think the idea that somehow America is behind all of this. It might be left wing imperialism, but it's imperialism because it's overlooking the agency that small and medium sized countries can have. And it's overlooking the decision, the ethically based decision that Ukrainians took when they decided they would defend their country from this atrocious war. Yeah. Okay, so let's go back in time, however far back you think we need to go to get to the present. I think the question I would give you to frame this part of the conversation is to describe the reality of Ukraine and Crimea and their relationship to Russia. Because obviously what is being said by Russia and being taken at face value by many critics of our support of Ukraine is that Ukraine was always part of Russia or has been part of Russia for so long that it is some kind of a historical obscenity to consider it its own real country, as you just described it to be. So how should we think about Ukraine and Crimea? I guess it should be separated there and Russia. I guess the first point which is really important is that I might know more history than other people, and I might have interesting things to say in response to your question, and I'll try to say them, but it is actually irrelevant. The border between the Russian Federation and Ukraine was agreed upon by both parties in December of 1991. Both parties are signatories of the basic conventions about involving borders. And it may seem like a really banal point, but history doesn't actually give you a reason for invading someone else's territory. If it did, there essentially is no border in the world, including the American Canadian border or the American Mexican border, which you could say is somehow perfectly legitimated or justified by history. That's just not the way that history works. History and large two different things. And so the unspoken assumption here is that if Russia had some kind of historical claim, then it would be okay to invade. But I would start by that assumption is 100% wrong, and that people who want to make if you want to make that assumption about Russia, you should be saying in general. Well, we would like for there to be warfare on every continent except Antarctica, because everywhere in the world there are disagreements about history, which would then justify war. The history is interesting. It's a lot more interesting than listening to Mr. Putin would get you to think. You used an interesting word, which is always and always. Whenever everyone says always in these things, what is happening is that an imperial claim is being made. It's imperial powers who say things like always and never. And what they're doing is they're asserting their right to control the forms of knowledge which get the rest of us to thinking that, wow, there isn't really something there. So in the case of Crimea. There was a state in Crimea which lasted for six centuries which is much longer than the United States or Russia in any recognizable form. And that state existed for two years as part of the golden horde sorry, two centuries as part of the golden horde, four centuries as part of the crime, and hana which was defeated and eliminated as a political unit by the Russian empire in the late 18th century. So that's not always. First of all, that's an awful lot of centuries before anything Russian power gets there. It's defeated by a bunch of Ukrainian cossacks in the Russian service, by an empress, Catherine the great, who's German, and by a state, the Russian empire, which is, which is nationally speaking or linguistically speaking majority, not Russian. That state ceases to exist in 1918 or 1917 sorry and is not the same state as today's russian federation. The native people of Crimea, who were almost 100% of the population not so very long ago were dispersed by first the Russian empire and then Stalin in 1944. In 1944, the incheda the Stalinist secret police forcibly deported every single man, woman and child who was a Crimean Tatar, thereby leaving open an awful lot of space for Russians and other people from the Soviet union to move in. That's 1944. That's not always. In 1956, the Crimean peninsula still inside the Soviet union was given from the Russian part of the Soviet Union to the Ukrainian part of the Soviet union because there were no longer any Crimean Tatars there. There was no longer a special status for the place. It was no longer an autonomous region as it had been. It was given to Ukraine for the very banal reason that from the point of view of Ukraine, crimea is a peninsula. There's a land connection. So you can supply it with water and you can use electricity grid. From the point of view of Russia, crimea is an island. There's no land connection. But Khrushchev in 1954 when he made this change, dressed it up because of course there's always difficulty with Ukraine in the Soviet union. So he dressed it up as some kind of great gift from the Soviet Union to Ukraine. And they had lots of celebrations and they printed cigarette packs and they printed nightgowns celebrating all this stuff. And so then some people now in the Soviet union remember this is this great gift, especially Russian nationalists. But at the time it was a purely pragmatic decision. So that's Crimea, the idea that Crimea is always Russian is a imperial, b wrong and c silences the history of the genocide of its native population. The history is very interesting and again you go into it considerable length in both your your reissue of the audio of on tyranny and also in in a I believe a ten part lecture series on YouTube on Ukraine that people can watch from your Yale class. But I really love the point you made about the disjunction between the stories we tell about history and the legal and political reality of that enforces any national border at this moment in time. And it's always hard to know where to start the clock, except when you have a treaty or when you have a border that has been ratified by both sides of that border. That is a very reasonable place to stop your wayback machine. So perhaps let's start with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. What's the significance of that for the present moment? And if you want to bring the character of Putin into the conversation at this point, that might be appropriate, because but, you know, Putin is very much driving the show here, and it's his decisions that we're living with the consequences of and trying to figure out how to respond to. And he has evolved as a person and as a leader over these last decades. Tell us about the fall of the Soviet Union and how that is setting the stage for where we are now. Yeah, I appreciate, Sam, you're reinforcing the point about law because it really is a very important point. I mean, we can choose to sympathize with anyone we want who is violating law. But as a result of the Second World War, as a result, in part of Hitler making exactly the kinds of arguments that Putin is making now, the principle was accepted that we're going to have sovereign borders. No, sovereign borders are not going to change. And that's a principle which has generally been of great benefit, especially inside Europe. I'm going to start this answer by making a similar distinction between Putin and the end of the Soviet Union. Putin says a lot of things about the end of the Soviet Union now, which he wouldn't have said then. And he says a lot of things now which people find plausible because he says them over and over again, but which are simply not true. One of them is that the end of the Soviet Union was somehow an American plot. I was there at the time. I mean, I wasn't of any significance, but I was in Washington, DC. Working on foreign policy stuff at the time. I was helping to run conferences at the time. I was in U. S. Soviet relations was what I did at the time. I was going to Moscow at the time. It was American policy to preserve the Soviet Union. And that's clear from the American archival material. It's clear from the open source material about Bush's visit to Kiev in September of 1991, which is remembered as the Chicken Kiev visit. We were actually trying to hold the thing together. It was the Russian Federation, the country that Putin now rules, which brought the Soviet Union to an end. And that's a kind of fundamental fact which tends to get overlooked in all of this, because Putin starts his story from such completely outrageous places, knowing that there will be people out there who will somehow meet him halfway. But that's not really how one should treat the historical record. So the end of the Soviet Union, I mean, one thing which is interesting about the Soviet Union is that its very existence is a recognition of the existence of a Ukrainian nation. The reason why the Soviet Union was founded as the Soviet Union in December of 1922 was that the people who founded the Soviet Union, bolsheviks and cosmopolitans though they were, were familiar from several years of civil war inside Ukraine that the Ukrainian nation was a real thing. As a result of that, when they won and they established their larger unit, they made it the unit of nominal federal republics. So Ukraine actually decides the form of the Soviet Union because of the obvious, even to people like Stalin and Lenin existence of the Ukrainian nation. And even though Ukraine inside the Soviet Union suffers more than any other republic from Soviet policies, in particular the famine of 1932 and 1933, there's never actually a moment in the Soviet Union where the existence of a Ukrainian nation is denied. And I stress this because the phenomenon that we see now with Russian nationalism and Mr. Putin at this point is actually quite radical and fairly new. And insofar as it has a precedent, its precedent is with right wing is not really the Soviet Union. It's rather with right wing and fascist Russian intellectuals of an earlier period. But the thing then which is worth stressing kind of bringing two points together now is that when the Soviet Union falls apart, it's also taken for granted that the borders of the republics will be the borders of independent states. In December of 1991, the leaders of the Russian yellow, russian and Ukrainian republics meet and agree to dissolve the Soviet Union. The reason why it's those three is that those are the three republics which existed in 1922 when the Soviet Union was founded and which still existed in 1991. And so they agreed that the borders as they were would be their borders, at which point these states become sovereign states governed by governed by the the same conventions that govern everyone else's borders. And those things aren't contested. And Ukraine actually has a referendum on its territory before all of this, and also in December, in which not only do 90% of Ukrainians and this is 31 years ago not only do 91 90% of Ukrainians vote for independence, a majority in every single region of Ukraine also votes for independence. And in those intervening 30 years, the drift has been, and I say this with great understatement the drift has only been in one direction. And that direction has been in favor of the notion that there is a separate Ukraine that deserves to have a Ukrainian state. Okay, so let's bring Putin into this. How has his thinking evolved here? Because I guess he. Came back in 2012, correct me if I'm wrong, and there's a kind of crazy making degree of unreality to his politics, right? I mean, this is a quasi fascist regime. Maybe it's just appropriate to just call it a fascist regime. It's definitely a single party state that, on your account, which I agree with, is engaged in an imperialistic war against a democracy, and yet is framed rather often from Putin's side as a war of denaturificationation of Ukraine, right? So he's the good guy going against the Nazis. It's inconvenient for that thesis that the president of Ukraine is Jewish, but that's really not an obstacle to the claim. And while I haven't noticed many high profile people on our side dignify the Nazi part of it, actually there is at least one exception to that. There's something happening in America in fairly high profile right of center or even centrist circles, where the perversity of Putin's framing is not only not noticed, it is denied, at least implicitly. I'll bring in one specific claim here just so you have something to react to. But for instance, I noticed the Economist at Columbia, Jeffrey Sachs, on some podcast talking about this, and it's hard to imagine the Kremlin not liking anything he said. He essentially said that the US and NATO have been provocative all along, and that the off ramp for Russia was always obvious. We just have to declare the neutrality of Ukraine and give an assurance that they'll never join NATO, because that obviously impinges on Russia's core security concerns. How would we feel if, you know, we had a Russian client state in Mexico or Canada, and there are many people saying things like this. I mean, one thing that's perverse about that, which I'll just point out before you give me the rest. But I mean, immediately, what strikes me as perverse is that it conceives that we are the moral equivalent of Russian despotism, right? And that the spread of democracy is no better than the spread of fascism. You try to flip things around in that way, it's just who's to say anything is better than anything else in terms of spreading a political orientation over the surface of the earth? And that's just so dishonest and ethically upside down that it's just amazing to see academics in America talking that way. This is something you speak about in your book. I think you call it Schizo fascism, the condition in which fascists themselves are claiming to be at war with fascists and Nazis. And it's pretty much pure fiction. Thanks for mentioning that the book in question is now Road to Unfreedom, where I do a very careful and slow dissection of all of this on the basis of the Russian primary sources, on the basis of everything that Putin said that I could track down over the period of his two presidencies. And in starting thinking of your question, it's clear that there was a kind of evolution with Putin. Putin, number one, his first couple of terms in office, was perhaps sincerely trying to carry out what he called a dictatorship of the law and centralized power. But it turned out that in centralizing power, in doing away with the other oligarchs, he and the people around him just became the chief oligarchs. So what Putin ends up with is a dysfunctional state, the most interesting feature of which is the extreme economic inequality. And that is a point which is really worth dwelling on for a minute, because it's only when you have the kind of power that he has and the kind of money that he has, that you're allowed to get away with the sort of lunatic ideas that he expresses. It may seem like a simple thing, but the fact that he's been in power for 20 years and controls the five television networks and has lots of money to spread around among influential people around the world without those things. I mean, he's just a guy on a street corner, probably with a pretty tattered looking soapbox, because his ideas in themselves are not neither original nor particularly convincing. But anyway, my point was that in Putin stage two, when he comes back, he's recognized that he can't make the Russian state function, or at least making it function, as inconsistent with him being the chief oligarch and being able to give his friends billions of dollars if he wants to. And so he moves to a politics of spectacle, where, of course, Russia is always right, whether it's intervening in Ukraine in 2014 or intervening in Syria in 2015, where everything becomes a kind of show, where Russia is always innocent and the other side is always to blame. And he develops, from about 2011 forward ideas about how Russia doesn't have to follow the rules, because Russia has a special destiny and Russia has a special mission, and Russia has a special civilization, and no one else can force understand this, but Russia has the right to do whatever it likes. And this is this fundamental challenge to international order, western, non Western, any kind of order. He's been espousing for about a decade. He made it very clear on September 30, talking about the annexations, when he said, what are the rules? Who made up the rules? Russia has a millennial mission, right. And these ideas are already more than tinged with fascism. A person that he cites regularly and who probably, by no coincidence, he also cited on September 30 this year, yvonne Lean, is the chief Russian fascist thinker, and he became essentially the house philosopher. Putin was citing him all of the time, but not only him. Contemporary Russian fascists began to get airtime on television and became part of the mainstream Russian discussion. Which leads me to I mean, the thing about the Schizophasm actually, Tim, can you just define fascism? Yeah, fascism is the idea that it's not rationality. That's the basis on which we build politics, it is will and imagination that rules are not the basis upon which we interact. We interact on the basis of strength. Strength is always proven as a matter of practice. Therefore, endless conflict is entirely normal. And given all of that, politics begins not with any kind of mutual recognition, but with the choice of an enemy. When I choose my enemy, then I know who I am. And the moment that I've chosen an enemy, that's when politics can actually begin. And that takes you pretty far, actually, towards understanding the Russian attitude towards Ukraine. Because one of the problems with Putin's rule is that he has no definition of Russia at all. He has no notion of what the future of Russia will be, nor can he from the state of oligarchy. Therefore, Russia is defined as the anti Ukraine, and it takes this arbitrary choice of an enemy in order to give meaning, which is also related to NATO. Now, I'm just going to be very straightforward about this. Russia is not afraid of NATO at all. Had they been afraid of NATO, they certainly wouldn't have undertaken an invasion like this. Right. And had they been afraid of NATO, they wouldn't be moving the the bulk of their troops from the actual NATO borders in order to fight in Ukraine, which is what they have done. They're not afraid of a NATO invasion. They've never been afraid of a NATO invasion. This is a giant guilt making factory. They're not afraid that NATO is going to invade them. Yep. Putin himself, until very late in the day, did not say anything to the effect that he was afraid of NATO. This is something he came up rather late so that we could so that we could have a guilt trap for ourselves. Your point about there being a difference between spreading democracy and not spreading democracy is well taken. But I think perhaps an even more fundamental point is that NATO it's not that NATO or the European Union in large NATO and the European Union take on new members when sovereign states, backed by their populations to express themselves in democratic elections, choose to join those institutions. The reasons why Poland is in the European Union or NATO do not have to do with Brussels or Washington. They fundamentally have to do with the polls. And the reasons why Ukraine would like to join institutions doesn't have to do with Brussels or Washington. It has to do with the lived experience of the Ukrainians themselves. And it seems to me that, if anything, that's an even more fundamental difference, that what Russia is trying to do is expand an order illegally, by force, whereas the European Union and NATO take on new members when independent states choose to join them. Yeah, well, let's cycle on that .1 more time, because I think it's crucial. So you're saying that Putin and Russia have no fear of invasion from the west? Right. It seems completely crazy to me that any Western power would want to invade Russia. But a person could be forgiven for believing that Putin might believe such a thing would be possible, and that he therefore would want Ukraine as a buffer between him and an antagonistic Europe. But you're saying that's just not the case. Well, that option was available to Putin, and he chose not to take it. The Ukraine had agreed to Russian base, russian bases on the Black Sea for decades. When Russia invaded in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, it was it was giving up as a result of its own decision, the possibility of a friendly Ukrainian buffer to the west. When you invade a country, you no longer have the option of treating it as a friendly buffer. When you invade a country, you're making an enemy of it. That was a choice that Moscow made on its own. One can decide that it was a mistake or not a mistake, but that option was available. They have pushed Ukraine to the west again and again with their own decisions. Before 2014, a majority of Ukrainians were against joining NATO. After Russia invaded in 2014, a majority of Ukrainians unsurprisingly decided that they were in favor of joining NATO. That's a result of Russia's choices. So that option was there. But that's not what they want. What they want to be able to I mean, and this is what they say openly, day in, day out on television, from the Foreign Ministry, from the President's office, from the Security Council. Day in and day out, what they say the commander in chief of the operation just said it yesterday what they say is they want a Ukraine where they are in control. And that's something completely different. That means invading the country, occupying it, replacing its leadership with someone else. That's not a friendly buffer. That's a genocidal aspiration. And that's what they care about. Again, to repeat the point, if they cared about security from NATO, which they don't, but if they cared about security from NATO, they would be dispersing their armed forces around the Finnish border, around the Polish border. They'd be concerned about places like that. That's not what they're doing. What they're doing is they are throwing absurd, an obscene amount of their available firepower into the project of destroying Ukraine as a country, which I'm just going to take a big step back here makes zero geopolitical sense. It is weakening Russia extraordinarily. And the reason I'm taking a big step back is that one of the assumptions that we're making in this conversation, or at least one of the assumptions that's made in the views that you're presenting, is that Putin actually cares about the interests of Russia. I think that's an assumption which should be made explicit and questioned. I see very little reason to think that Putin is a geopolitician who cares at all about the interests of Russia. If he were he would be much more concerned about the fact that there is a great power on Russia's border, which in fact, does have designs, unlike the United States, on Russian resources, which, unlike the United States, invests more in the Asian part of Russia than Russia does itself, and that is China. But rather than being concerned about China, what Putin has done with his entire antiwestern turn is to create a situation in which future rulers of Russia will have little choice but to be vassals of China. And the invasion of Ukraine has only accelerated this process. Troops that might have been defending the border with Russia have been brought west to fight a losing and pointless war in Ukraine, while Beijing just watches as the power relationship with Russia, which was already very much in its favor, accelerates, to the point where it's just hard to imagine that Russia is going to be able to get out from under it. A Russian leader who cared about geopolitics, who cared about Russian interests, would be balancing between the west and Russia. It is geopolitically absolutely idiotic to go so far in one direction that you can't come back, but that's what Putin has done. I don't think he's an idiot. I think he simply doesn't care about Russian interests. So what does he care about? He cares about dying in bed. He cares about being a legacy. I appreciate your earlier questions about Putin, which lead in profound directions, which I haven't always been able to follow in my answers. We have to think of this person as someone who's been in power for the lifetimes of many people who live in Russia. Many people in Russia can't remember anyone else. This is someone who's been in power for the entirety of this century. This is someone who is on a classical, as described by Plato, as described by Shakespeare, tyrannical trajectory, where at a certain point, he's no longer able to hear the advice of others. At a certain point, his own fantasies start to become realer than the reality around him. I think there's no question that his obsession with Ukraine is real. I think he really thinks something along the lines of historically weird fantasies that he projects. I think he really thinks that somehow, somewhere there really are Ukrainians down there who believe that they want to be invaded by him. But I think that that is a classical tyrannical mistake. And he is doing that thing that tyrants do when they're in power for too long, which is they commit state resources to their own fantasies. That's the tragedy of tyranny. And that's where Putin is right now. So right now, he's in the grip of a fantasy which doesn't have anything to do with interests or with geopolitics. I think if we take a deep breath and look coldly at Russia's geopolitical position, we can generally agree that this has been an asinine move. He is in the grip of something which can't be reduced to interests or doesn't have much to do with the state. What he thought he was doing in invading Ukraine was leaving a legacy. What he thought he was doing in invading Ukraine was leaving an indelible mark, his own mark on history, where he would be remembered as the person who united what he thinks of as the Russian lands, as Peter the Great did, as Catherine the Great did. I think that's what he thinks he was doing. He's not going to be able to do that because the world is just not the way that he thinks the world is. But I think that's what has him in its grip. Well, he's also been doing a bit more than that in that he's been launching a larger war, mostly a cyber war against Western freedom, really. There's been this, I believe you call it a hybrid warfare at various points, where the goal seems to be to destabilize democracies generally. Perhaps now is a good moment to say something about that, and how that what we've seen of that since, I guess, 2014, in the first war in Ukraine. I appreciate that question and I appreciate your earlier remark about there being a difference between democracy and other systems. And I guess I rather wish that in these conversations which seem to be about Putin, I don't mean yours and mine. I mean the kinds of discussions that you are refereeing here, people would admit, like, which of three positions they take. Because I think there are a lot of people out there who just like fascism, and I think they should just often own it, that they like fascism and that's why they like Putin. And I think that would clarify matters. I think the second position is I really don't believe in anything. I'm a complete nihilist. I have no preference between democracy and other thing. In that position, you can also say, Well, Putin is fine because there is no truth, there are no values. Yada, yada, right. Then there's a third position. I'm sure there are others, but there's a third position which says, actually people seem to like to vote, whether they're in Iran or whether they're in Russia or whether they're in Portland, Oregon. They seem to like to vote in countries where people are able to vote and a representative seem to be peaceful and prosperous and freer, and people seem to live lives where they're more satisfied and so on. I think it would be kind of like, in some way, this discussion about Putin is a proxy for all of that, where the people who are slightly afraid to say, yeah, I'm a fascist, or, yeah, I'm a nihilist. Are willing to say, well, I think maybe Putin's okay. Or I think maybe what's happening here is fine. And now semi forgotten where you want. Actually, let me add one more cohort there, because I guess it's Nihilist adjacent, but they certainly wouldn't think of themselves as nihilists. And these are all the people, most of whom are in Trumpistan. So I think I'm talking about maybe 40% of American society who think that more or less, everything said about Russia attempting to destabilize democracy, in particular our own, and especially their attempt to hack the 2016 presidential election, amounted to a lie, just a pure confection of the Democratic Party. Wherever it is true, you know, even if someone were going to concede that some aspects of those allegations are true, it's unimportant, because we do the same thing to other countries. This came out explicitly when Trump himself said, well, you think our hands are so clean? We've been pretty bad too. So we had the spectacle of a sitting US. President who said he trusted Putin and his intelligence services over his own intelligence services, and something like half the country was happy to go with that. And they think that basically this all gets summarized under the rubric of the Russia Collusion hoax, right? Like, anywhere, right of center. Now all you need to say is the Russia Collusion hoax to discredit any concern about Russia's misinformation campaign that's happened on, you know, dozens of fronts for years, which has created a politics of unreality within our own society, in large part. So, anyway, we might call that nihilistic, but I think most of these people think that they're not nihilists. They want to put American interests first. They want us to be essentially they want us to pull back from our engagement with a fairly crazy world and close our borders. And they want to get back to the good things of making America great again. So that's not nihilism. It's a kind of delusion, and it's a complete loss of contact with certain moral imperatives of the moment, I would say. But I think it is a different cohort. And there's a fair amount of evidence at this point that Russia has had more than a little bit to do with creating these perceptions. Yeah, no, there's a deep philosophical consistency here, because what happens in Russian domestic politics is that Putin finds himself in a place where he can't meaningfully promise Russian a better future. And one of the moves he makes at that point, very effectively helped by a very intelligent propagandist called Lettuce Lava Sotokov, is to argue that, well, actually, things may seem lousy in Russia, and maybe we close down your small business for no reason. And maybe there's very little social mobility, and maybe wealth is horribly badly distributed, and maybe your vote doesn't really count. But if you look around the world, the Putin line, it's actually all the same everywhere. It's the same in Britain. It's the same in the United States. And so the move that their propaganda makes is very different from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union actually still said there are good things, and we're moving towards those good things that might have been a lie, but it was a lie in a world where there was still truth. What the Putin propaganda does is that it says, look, nothing's really any good. Russia's rotten, we admit it, but Britain is just as bad, and America is just as bad. And then they just hit on the things which are bad about us, and they put them right in the center and they make them the absolute essence of our countries. So that is a kind of programmatic nihilism. It's a way to stay in power when you can no longer actually operate a state in the way that it's normally thought of as being beneficial to people. That connects with where we are in our politics, where we begin to doubt that the state can do things for us or that the state represents us, and then we are captured. And I'm not saying that the Russians are the only ones responsible for this. I'm saying what the Russians are doing is they're pushing forward like they're the avant guard in this general tendency to say, well, who knows whether our system is better than their system, right? Who knows whether it was better, whether Russia does this and we do all this. And so when Trump says, I trust their services more than our services, he has good reason to trust their services, because his services did much more for him than our services ever could do. But when Americans follow that and they say, well, it's kind of all the same, then that's not just adjacent to nihilism. That actually is nihilism, because what you're doing and you're using that way is you're saying, well, no matter how bad something is, it's probably just as bad somewhere else. And you can't really build up a democracy on that basis. I mean, to build up a democracy, you have to have some notion that you can improve things, that some values are real, that law does matter, that we can organize ourselves in ways that are better than other ways. And at the practical level, you're speaking to the right here, but at the practical level, this kind of posture also turns up on the left, where the existence of Russia just becomes an occasion to point out that America did things which was bad. And of course we did right. But that doesn't actually answer the question. I mean, if you know, if people if Russia is committing a genocide in Ukraine, and we say, well, yes, we did terrible things in Iraq, okay, that's fine. That means that countries shouldn't carry out illegal wars. So there's a principle there, and I'm happy to defend that principle. But the way it goes illogically and I think politically destructively, is for people to say, well, on the one hand, on the other hand, as though that were dispositive. And that just brings us to this nihilism. And with the nihilism, Russia wins because they're not aiming for anything else. They don't really need for us to believe that the Ukrainians are Nazis, right? They obviously don't believe that themselves. They don't really need for us to believe that Ukraine doesn't exist. They just need for us to be somewhere. They just need for us to be in nowhere land where we struck our shoulders and we say, well, who knows? Maybe we did something like that at some point. That's all they're aiming for. That's really all they're aiming for. And unfortunately, they're getting a lot of it. Okay, well, I know you have a hard stop in about 40 minutes now, so I don't want us to be short on time to address the nuclear elephant in the room, right? So many people think that we are running an intolerable risk by not doing everything we could possibly do to de escalate the situation. I want to give you some examples of this from what I've seen on social media, and I want us to analyze them. Because if you're not someone who's been, as you have been really in the weeds of Ukrainian and Russian history and politics, it's easy to think, well, there's got to be a reason why Ukraine is not a NATO state, right? And we're not treaty bound to defend it like it is. One, it's not, therefore, a core American national interest. So how is it that we are not doing everything we can do to mollify Putin at this point, right? Because this is a situation of nuclear blackmail. It even gets worse somehow if we accede to the idea that he doesn't even have Russia's interest at heart. He's just a tyrant who's psychologically unraveling. And he's given some speeches of late which suggest a kind of unraveling of a quasi religious sort. He gave one speech about a month ago where he sounded practically like a jihadist in terms of the other worldliness that was creeping into his claims. So why are we just not doing everything we can to get off this ride? And so I'll give you just a few examples of this. The venture capitalist David Sachs has been making a lot of noise about this, and he wrote an op ed in Newsweek recently, and this is a quote the online mob has decided that any support for a negotiated settlement even proposals that Zelensky himself appeared to support at the beginning of the war is tantamount to taking Russia's side, denouncing voices of compromise and restraint as Putin apologists. This removes them from acceptable discourse and shrinks the overton window to those advocating the total defeat of Russia and an end to Putin's regime, even if it risks World War III. Anyone who suggests that NATO expansion could have been a contributing factor to the current Ukraine crisis, or that the sanctions imposed on Russia are not working and have backfired on a soon to be shivering Europe, or even that the US. Must prioritize avoiding a world war with a nuclear armed Russia, is denounced as a Putin stooge so let's take that. How would you respond to that? Well, first of all, you're really difficult. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I am speaking with the yval. Noah Harare. Yeval has a PhD in History from the University of Oxford, and he lectures at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he specializes in world history. His books have been translated into over 50 languages, and these books are Sapiens a Brief History of Humankind, Homo DEOs a Brief History of Tomorrow. And his new book, which we discuss today, is 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Yeval is rather like me in that he spends a lot of time worrying out loud. He's also a long term meditator. I don't know if there's a connection there. There was so much to talk about. There is much more in the new book than we touched, but we touched a lot. We actually started talking about the importance of meditation for his intellectual life. We talked about the primacy of stories, the need to revise our fundamental assumptions about human civilization and how it works, the current threats to liberal democracy, what a world without work might look like, universal basic income, the virtues of nationalism. You've all had some surprising views on that, the implications of AI and automation, and several other topics. So without further delay, I bring you, you all know, A Harare. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you to Rivers Cuomo. That's amazing. So you've heard this from me before, if you've been to an event or listened to events on a podcast. So it may get old to hear, but it really doesn't get old to say, I can't tell you what an honor it is to put a date on the calendar and have you all show up. I mean, it's just astonishing to me that this happens. Thank you. And thank you to you all for coming out. It's my own pleasant to collaborate with it. Thank you. So, Yval, you have these books that just steamroll over all other books. And I know because I write books. You wrote Sapiens, which is kind of about the deep history of a few fans, which is really about the history of humanity. And then you wrote Homo DEOs, which is about our far future. And now you've written this book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, which is which is about the present. I can't be the only one in your publishing world who notices that. Now you have nothing left to write about. So good luck with that career of yours. How do you describe what you do because you're a historian? One thing that you and I have in common is that we have a reckless disregard for the boundaries between disciplines. You just touch so many things that are not straightforward history. How do you think about your intellectual career at this point? Well, my definition of history is that history is not the study of the past. It's the study of change, how things change. And yes, most of the time you look at change in the past, but in the end, all the people who lived in the past are dead, and they don't care what you write or say about them. If the past has anything to teach us, it should be relevant to the future and to the present also. But you touch biology and the implications of technology. I follow the questions, and the questions don't recognize these disciplinary boundaries. And as a historian, maybe the most important lesson that I've learned as a historian is that humans are animals. And if you don't take this very seriously into account, you can't understand history. Of course, I'm not a biologist. I also know that humans are a very special kind of animal. If you only know biology, you will not understand things like the rise of Christianity or the reformation of the Second World War. So you need to go beyond just the biological basis. But if you ignore this, you can't really understand anything. Yeah. The other thing we have in common, which gives you, to my eye, a very unique slant on all the topics you touch, is an interest in meditation and a sense that our experiences in meditation have changed the way we think about problems in the world. And questions like just what it means to live a good life, or even whether the question of the meaning of life is an intelligible one or a valid one or a one that needs to be asked, how do you view the influence of the contemplative life on your intellectual pursuits? I couldn't have written any of my books, either sapiens or Homodeo. So 21 lessons without the experience of meditation, partly because of just what I learned about the human mind, for observing the mind, but also partly because you need a lot of focus in order to be able to summarize the whole of history into, like, 400 pages. And meditation gives you this kind of ability to really focus. My understanding of at least the meditation that I practice is that the number one question is what is reality? What is really happening? To be able to tell the difference between the stories that the mind keeps generating about the world, about myself, about everything, and the actual reality. And this is what I try to do when I meditate, and this is also what I try to do when I write books to help me and other people understand what is the difference between fiction and reality. Yeah. And I want to get at that difference because you use these terms in slightly idiosyncratic ways. I think it's possible to either be confused about how you use terms like story and fiction, for instance, just the way you talk about the primacy of fiction, the primacy of story, the way in which our concepts that we think map onto reality don't really quite map onto reality, and yet they're nonetheless important. That is, in a way that you you don't often flag in your writing a real meditator's eye view of what's happening here. You're giving people the epiphany that certain things are made up. Like the concept of money, right? The idea that we have dirty paper in our pocket that is worth something, right? That is a convention that we've all agreed about. But it's an idea. It only works because we agree that it works. But the way you use the word story and fiction rather often seems to denigrate these things a little bit more than I'm tempted to do. When I talk about I don't say that there is anything wrong with it. Stories and fictions are a wonderful thing, especially if you want to get people to cooperate effectively. You cannot have a global trade of network unless you agree on money. And you cannot have people playing football or baseball or basketball or any other game unless you get them to agree on rules that quite obviously we invented. They did not come from heaven. They did not come from physics or biology. We invented them. And there is nothing wrong with people agreeing, accepting, let's say for 90 minutes, the story of football, the rules of football, that if you score a goal, then this is the goal of the whole game and so forth. The problem begins only when people forget that this is only a convention, this is only something we invented. And they start confusing it with kind of this is reality, this is the real thing. And in football it can lead to people to hooligans beating up each other or killing people because of this invented game. And on a higher level, it can lead to world wars and genocides in the name of fictional entities like gods and nations and currencies that we've created. Now, there is nothing wrong with these creations as long as they serve us instead of us serving them. But wouldn't you acknowledge that there's a distinction between good stories and bad stories? Yeah, certainly. The good stories are the ones that really serve us, that help people, that help other sentient beings live a better life. I mean, it's as simple as that. I mean, of course, in real life it's much more complicated to know what will be helpful and whatnot and so forth. But a good starting place is just to have this basic ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality, between our creations and what's really out there. Especially when, for example, you need to change the story of a story which was very adapted to one condition, is less adapted to a new condition which is, for example, what I think is happening now with the story. Of the underground liberal democracy, that it was probably one of the best stories ever created by humanity. And it was very adapted to the conditions of the 20th century. But it is less and less adapted to the new realities of the 21st century. And in order to kind of reinvent the system, we need to acknowledge that to some extent, it is based on stories we have invented. Right? But so when you talk about something like human rights being a story or a fiction that seems like a story or a fiction that shouldn't be on the table to be fundamentally revised, right? That's where people begin to worry that to describe these things as stories or fictions is to suggest tacitly, I don't think you do this explicitly, that all of this stuff is made up and therefore it's all sort of on the same level. And yet there's clearly a distinction between a distinction you make in your book between dogmatism and the other efforts we make to justify our stories. There are stories that are dogmatically asserted, and religion has more than a fair share of these, but there are political dogmas, there are tribal dogmas of all kinds. Nationalism can be anchored to dogma. And the mode of asserting a dogma is to be doing so without feeling responsible to counter arguments and demands for evidence and reasons why. Whereas with something like human rights, we can tell an additional story about why we value this convention. Right. It doesn't have to be a magical story. It doesn't have to be that we were all imbued by our creator with these things, but we can talk for a long time without saying it's just so to justify that convention. Yeah, human rights is a particularly problematic and also interesting case, first of all, because it's our story. I mean, we are very happy with you discrediting the stories of all kinds of religious fundamentalists and all kinds of tribes somewhere and ancient people, but not our story. Don't touch that. It depends what you mean by we, because I guess we most of the people. I don't see anybody here. It could be just empty chairs and recordings of laughter, but I assume that the people here, most of them, this is our story. The second thing is that we live in a moment when liberal democracy is is under a severe attack. And this was not so when I wrote Sapiens. I felt much clear writing these things back in 2011, 2012. And now it's much more problematic. And, yes, I find myself one of the difficulties of living right now as an intellectual, as a thinker, that you kind of I'm kind of torn apart by the imperative to explore the truth, to follow the truth wherever it leads me, and the political realities of the present moment and the need to engage in very important political battles. And this is one of the costs, I think, of what is happening now in the world, that it restricts our ability, our freedom, to truly go deep and explore the foundations of our system. And I still feel the importance of doing it, of questioning even the foundations of liberal democracy and of human rights simply because I think that as we have defined them since the 18th century, they are not going to survive the tests of the 21st century. It's extremely unfortunate that we have to engage on this two front battle, that at the same moment, we have to defend these ideas from people who look at them from the perspective of nostalgic fantasies, that they don't even they want to go back from the 18th century. And at the same time, we have to also go forward and think what it means, what the new scientific discoveries and technological developments of the 21st century really mean to the core ideas of what do human rights mean when you are starting to have superhumans? Do superhumans have superhuman rights? What does the right of freedom mean when we have now technologies that simply undermine the very concept of freedom when we created this whole system? Not we, somebody. Back in the 18th, they did back in the 18th and 19th century, we gave ourselves all kinds of philosophical discounts of not really going deeply enough in some of the key questions like, what do humans really need? And we settled for answers like, just follow your heart and this was good enough. This is Joseph Campbell. I blame Joseph Campbell. Follow your bliss? No, but follow your how the Voter knows best. The customer is always right. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. All these slogans, they were kind of covering up for not engaging more deeply with the question of what is really human freedom and what do humans really need? And for the last 200 years, it was good enough. But now to just follow your heart is becoming extremely dangerous and problematic when there are cooperations and organizations and governments out there that, for the first time in history, can hack your heart, and your heart might be now a government agent and you don't even know it. So telling people in 2018, just follow your heart, is a much more dangerous advice than in 70, 76. Yeah. So let's drill down on that circumstance. So we have this claim that liberal democracy is, one, under threat, and two, might not even be worth maintaining as we currently conceive it, given the technological changes that are upon us or will be upon us. No, it is worth maintaining. It's just becoming more and more difficult, given presumably, there are things about liberal democracy that are serious bugs and not features. In light of the fact that, as you say, if it's all a matter of putting everything to a vote. And we are all part of this massive psychological experiment where we're gaming ourselves with algorithms written by some people in this room to not only confuse us with respect to what's in our best interests, but the very tool we would use to decide what's worth wanting is being hijacked. It's one thing to be wrong about how to meet your goals. It's another thing to have the wrong goals and not even know that. It's hard to know where ground zero is for cognition and emotion if all of this is susceptible to outside influence, which ultimately we need to embrace because there is a possibility of influencing ourselves in ways that open vistas of well being and peaceful cooperation that we can't currently imagine right? Or we can't see how to get to. So it's not like we actually want to go back to when there was no, quote, hacking of the human mind. Every conversation is an attempted hack of somebody else's mind, right? So it's getting more subtle. Now, throughout history, other people and governments and churches and so forth, they all the time tried to hack you and to influence you and to manipulate you. They just weren't very good at it because humans are just so incredibly complicated. And therefore, for most of history, this idea that I have an inner arena which is completely free from external manipulation, nobody out there can really understand what's happening within me. How special you are and how special what I really feel and how I really think and all that it was largely true. And therefore the belief in the autonomous self and in free will and so forth, it made practical sense, even if it wasn't true on the level of ultimate reality. On a practical level, it was good enough. But however complicated the human entity is, we are now reaching a point when somebody out there can really hack it. Now, it can never be done perfectly. We are so complicated. I'm under no illusion that any corporation or government or organization can completely understand me. This is impossible. But the yardstick or the threshold, the critical threshold, is not perfect. Understanding the threshold is just better than me. The key inflection point in history, in the history of humanity, is the moment when an external system can reliably on a large scale, understand people better than they understand themselves. And this is not an impossible mission because so many people don't really understand themselves very well. No. Similarly with the whole idea of shifting authority from humans to algorithms. So I trust the algorithm to recommend TV shows for me and I trust the algorithm to tell me how to drive from Mountain View to this place this evening. And eventually I trust the algorithm to tell me what to study and where to work and whom to date and whom to marry and who to vote for. And then people say, no, that won't happen because there will be all kinds of mistakes and glitches and bugs, and the algorithm will never know everything, and it can't do it. And if the yardstick is the algorithm to trust the algorithm, to give authority to the algorithm, it needs to make perfect decisions, then yes, it will never happen. But that's not the yardstick. The algorithm just needs to make better decisions than me about what to study and where to live and so forth. And this is not so very difficult because as humans, we often tend to make terrible mistakes, even in the most important decisions in life. Yeah, I promise this will be uplifting at some point. So let's linger on the problem of the precariousness of liberal democracy. And there's so many aspects to this. Maybe just to add one thing to this precariousness, the ideas that systems have to change. Again, as a historian, this is obvious. I mean, you couldn't really have a functioning liberal democracy in the Middle Ages because you didn't have the necessary technology. Liberal democracy is not this eternal ideal that can be realized any time, any place. Take the Roman Empire in the third century. Take the Kingdom of France in the 12th century. Let's have a deliberate democracy there. No, you don't have the technology, you don't have the infrastructure. You don't have what it takes. It takes communication, it takes education. It takes a lot of things that you just don't have. And it's not just a bug of liberal democracy. It's true of any social, economic or political system. You could not build a communist regime in 16th century Russia. I mean, you can't have communism without trains and electricity and radio and so forth, because in order to make all the decisions centrally, if a slogan is that you work, they take everything and then they redistribute according to needs. Each one works according to their ability and gets according to their needs. The key problem there is really a problem of data processing. How do I know what everybody is producing? How do I know what everybody needs? And how do I shift the resources taking wheat from here and sending it there? In 16th century Russia, when you don't have trains, when you don't have radio, you just can't do it. So as technology changes, it's almost inevitable that the socioeconomic and political systems will change. So we can't just hold on. No, this must remain as it is. The question is, how do we make sure that the changes are for the better and not for the worse? Well, by that yardstick, now might be the moment to try communism in earnest. We can do it now, right? So you can all tweet that you've all know Harare is in favor of communism. I didn't say anything. I mean, we had a moment in the sun that seemed, however delusionally, to be kind of outside of history. The first moment in my life where I realized I was living in history was September 11, 2001. But before that, it just seemed like people could write books with titles like The End of History. And we sort of knew how this was going to pan out. It seemed liberal values were going to dominate the character of a global civilization. Ultimately, we were going to fuse our horizons with people of however disparate background. Someone in a village in Ethiopia was eventually going to get some version of the democratic liberal notion of human rights and the primacy of rationality and the utility of science. So religious fundamentalism was going to be held back and eventually pushed all the way back, and irrational economic dogmas that had proved that they're merely harmful would be pushback. And we would find an increasingly orderly and amicable collaboration among more and more people. And we would get to a place where war between nation states would be less and less likely, to the point where, by analogy, a war between states internal to a country like the United States, a war between Texas and Oklahoma just wouldn't make sense. Right. How is that possibly going to come about? Waiting to see. Yeah, exactly. But now we seem to be in a moment where much of what I just said we were taking for granted can't be taken for granted. There's a rise of populism. There's a xenophobic strand to our politics that is just immensely popular both in the US and in Western Europe. And this anachronistic nativist reaction, as you spell out in your most recent book, is being kindled by a totally understandable anxiety around technological change of the story. We're talking about people who are sensing it's not the only source of xenophobia and populism, but there are many people who are sensing the prospect of their own irrelevance. Given the dawn of this new technological age, what are you most concerned about in this present conference? I think irrelevance is going to be a very big problem. It already fuels much of what we see today with the rise of populism is the fear and the justified fear of irrelevance. If in the 20th century, the big struggle was against exploitation, then in the 21st century, for a lot of people around the world, the big struggle is likely to be against irrelevance. And this is a much more difficult struggle. A century ago, so you felt that at least you are the common person. There were all these elites that exploit me. Now you increasingly feel as a common person that there are all these elites that just don't need me. And that's much worse on many levels, both psychologically and politically, it's much worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited. Spell that out. Why is it worse? First of all, because you're completely expendable. If a century ago you mount a revolution against exploitation, then you know that if things, when bad comes to worst, they can't shoot all of us because they need us. Who's going to work in the factories? Who's going to serve in the armies if they get rid of us? That's a motivational poster I'm going to get printed out. I'm not sure what the graphic is, but they can't shoot all of us if you're irrelevant. That's not the case. You're totally expendable. And again, we are often our vision of the future is followed by the recent past. The 19th and 20th century were the age of the masses, where the masses ruled, and even authoritarian regimes, they needed the masses. So you had these mass political movements like Nazism and like Communism and even somebody like Hitler or like Stalin. They invested a lot of resources in building schools and hospitals and having vaccinations for children and sewage systems and teaching people to read and write. Not because Hitler and Australian were such nice guys, but because they knew perfectly well that if they wanted, for example, Germany to be a strong nation with a strong army and a strong economy, they needed millions of people, common people, to serve as soldiers in the army and as workers in the factories and in the offices. So some people could be expendable and could be scapegoats like the Jews, but on the whole, you couldn't do it to everybody. You needed them. But in the 21st century, there is a serious danger that more and more people will become irrelevant and therefore also expendable. We already see it happening in the armies that whereas the leading armies of the 20th century relied on recruiting millions of common people to serve as common soldiers, today the most advanced armies, they rely on much smaller numbers of highly professional soldiers and increasingly unsophisticated and autonomous technology. If the same thing happens in the civilian economy, then we might see a similar split in civilian society, where you have a relatively small, very capable professional elite relying on very sophisticated technology. And most people, just as they are already today, militarily irrelevant, they could become economically and politically irrelevant. Now, that sounds like a real risk we're running, but the normal intuitions about what is scary about that don't hold up, given the right construal and expectations about human wellbeing. So it's like we know what people are capable of doing when they're irrelevant, because aristocrats have done that for centuries. There are people who have not had to work in every period of human history and they had a fine old time shooting pheasant and inventing weird board games. And then if you add to that, some more sophisticated way of finding well being. So if we taught people in the Stoic philosophy and how to meditate and good sports, and it's nowhere written that life is only meaningful if you are committed to something you only will do because someone's paying you to do it right. Definitely there is a worst case and a best case scenario. In the best case scenario, people are relieved of all the difficult, boring jobs that nobody really wants to do. But you do it because you need the money and you're relieved of that. And the enormous profits of the automation revolution are shared between everybody. And you can spend your time, your leisure time on exploring yourself, developing yourself, doing out or meditating or playing sports or developing communities. There are wonderful scenarios that can be realized. There are also some terrible scenarios that can be realized. I don't think there is anything inevitable. I mean, the technology, the technological revolution which is just beginning right now, it can go in completely different directions again. If you look back at the 20th century then you see that with the same technology of trains and electricity and radio, you can build a communist dictatorship or a fascist regime or a liberal democracy. The trains don't care. They don't tell you what to do with them and they can be used for anything. You can use them for they don't object. And it's the same way with AI and biotechnology and all the current technological inventions. We can use them to build really paradise or hell. The one thing that is certain is that we are going to become far more powerful than ever before, far more powerful than we are now. We are really going to acquire divine abilities of creation. In some sense even greater abilities than what was traditionally ascribed to most gods, from Zeus to Yahoo. If you look, for instance, the creation story in the Bible, the only things that Yahweh managed to create are organic entities. And we are now on the verge of creating the first inorganic entities after 4 billion years of evolution. So in this sense, we are even on the verge of outperforming the biblical God in creation. And we can do so many different things with that. Some of them can be extremely good, some of them can be extremely bad. This is why it's so important to have these kinds of conversations because this is maybe the most important question that we are facing. What to do with these powers? Yeah. What norms or stories or conventions or fictions, concepts, ideas, do you think stand in the way of us taking the right path here? I mean, to take we've sort of alluded to it without naming it. Let's say we could all agree that universal basic income was the near term remedy for some explosion of automation and irrelevance. You look skeptical about that. Yeah. I have two difficulties with universal basic income, which is universal and basic income is fine, but universal and basic, they are ill defined. Most people, when they speak about universal basic income, they actually have in mind national basic income. They think in terms, okay, we'll tax Google and Facebook in California and use that to pay unemployment benefits or to give free education to unemployed coal. Miners in Pennsylvania and unemployed taxi drivers in New York. The real problem is not going to be in New York. The real problem, the greatest problem is going to be in Mexico, in Honduras, in Bangladesh. And I don't see an American government taxing corporations in California and sending the money to Bangladesh to pay unemployment benefits there. And this is really the automation revolution they're clapping to stop us from paying those with the libertarians in the audience. We've built over the last few generations a global economy and a global trade network. And the automation revolution is likely to unravel the global trade network and hit the weakest links the hardest. So you will have enormous new wealth, enormous new wealth created here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. But you can have the economies of entire countries just collapse completely because what they know how to do, nobody needs that anymore. And we need a global solution for this. So universal, by universal you mean global taking money from California and sending it to Bangladesh, then yes, this can work. But if you mean national, it's not a real answer. And the second problem is with basic. How do you define what are the basic needs of human beings? Now in a scenario in which a significant proportion of people no longer have any jobs and they depend on this universal basic income of universal basic services, whatever they get, they can't go beyond that. This is the only thing they're going to get. Then who defines what is their basic needs? What is basic education? Is it just literacy or also coding or everything up to PhD or playing the violin? Who decides? And what is basic health care? Is it just I mean, if you're looking 50 years to the future and you see genetic engineering of your children and you see all kinds of treatments to extend life, is this the monopoly of a tiny elite or is this part of the universal basic package? And who decides? So it is a first step. The discussion we have now about universal basic income is an important first step. But we need to go much more deeply into understanding what we actually mean by universal and by basic. Right? So let's imagine that we begin to extend the circle coincident with this rise in affluence because on some level, if the technology is developed correctly, we are talking about pulling wealth out of the ether, right? So automation and artificial intelligence, that the pie is getting bigger. And then the question is how generously or wisely we will share it with the people who are becoming irrelevant because we don't need them for their labor anymore. Let's say we get better at that than we currently are. But you can imagine that we will be fast to realize that we need to take care of the people in our neighborhood in San Francisco and we will be slower to realize we need to take care of the people in Somalia. But maybe these lessons will be hard. One, we'll realize if we don't take care of the people in Somalia, a refugee crisis unlike any we've ever seen will will hit us in six months, right? So that, like, there'll be some completely self serving reason why we need to eradicate famine or some other largely economic problem elsewhere. But presumably we can be made to care more and more about everyone again, if only out of self interest. What are the primary impediments to our doing that? Human nature? It is possible. It's just very difficult. I think we need, for a number of reasons, to develop global identities, a global loyalty, a loyalty to the whole of humankind and to the whole of planet Earth. So this is a story that becomes so captivating that it supersedes other stories that seem to say Team America abolishes them. I don't think we need to abolish all nations and cultures and languages and just become this homogeneous grey gu all over the planet. No, you can have several identities and loyalties at the same time. People already do it. Now they had it throughout history. I can be loyal to my family, to my neighborhood, to my profession, to my city and to my nation at the same time. And some of them are conflicts, say, between my loyalty to my business and my loyalty to them, to my family. So I hate to think hard. Sometimes I prefer the interests of the family, sometimes I prefer the interests of the business. So that's life we have these difficulties in life. It's not always easy. So I'm not saying let's abolish all other identities and from now on we are just citizens of the world. But we can add this kind of layer of loyalty to their previous lures. And people have been talking about it for thousands of years, but now it really becomes a necessity because we are now facing three global problems which are the most important problems of humankind. And it should be obvious to everybody that they can only be solved on a global level through global cooperation. These are nuclear war. Climate change and technological disruption should be obvious to anybody that you can't solve climate change on a national level. You can't build a wall against rising temperatures or rising sea levels. No country, even in the United States or China, no country is ecologically independent. There are no longer independent countries in the world if you look at it from an ecological perspective. Similarly, when it comes to technological disruptions, the potential dangers of artificial intelligence and biotechnology should be obvious to everybody. You cannot regulate artificial intelligence on a national level. If there is some technological development you're afraid of, like developing autonomous weapons systems or like doing genetic engineering on human babies, then if you want to regulate this, you need cooperation with other countries. Because, like the ecology, also science and technology, they are, they are global. They don't belong to any one country or any one government. So if, for example, the United States bans genetic engineering on human beings, it won't prevent the Chinese or the Koreans or the Russians from doing it. And then a few years down the line, if the Chinese are starting to produce superhumans by the thousands, the Americans wouldn't like to stay behind, so they will break their own ban. The only way to prevent a very dangerous arms race in the fields of AI and biotechnology is through global cooperation. Now, it's going to be very difficult, but I don't think it's impossible. I actually gain a lot of hope from seeing the strength of nationalism. That's totally counterintuitive because everything you just said in the space provided, there's only one noun that solves the the problem, which is world government. On some level, we don't need a single emperor or government. You can have good cooperation even without a single emperor. Then we need some other tools by which to cooperate, because we have in a world that is as politically fragmented as ours, into nation states, all of which have their domestic political concerns and their short time horizons. So you're talking about global problems and long term problems that can only be solved through global cooperation and long term thinking. And we have political systems that are insular and focused on time horizons that don't exceed four or in the best case, six years. And then we have the occasional semi benevolent dictatorship that can play the game slightly differently. So what is the solution if not just a fusing of political apparatus at some point in the future? No, we certainly need to go beyond the national level, to a level when we have real trust between different countries of the kind. You see, for example, still in the European Union, if you take the example of having a ban on developing autonomous weapon systems. So if the Chinese and the Americans today try to sign an agreement banning killer robots, the big problem there is trust. How do you really trust the other side to live up to the agreement? AI is in distance much worse than nuclear weapons, because with nuclear weapons it's very difficult to develop nuclear weapons in complete secrecy. People are going to notice. But with AI there are all kinds of things you can do in secret. And the big question is how can we trust them? And at present there is no way that the Chinese and the Americans, for example, are really going to be able to trust one another. Even if they sign an agreement, every side will say, yes, we are good guys, we don't want to do it, but how can we really be sure that they are not doing it? So we have to do it first. But if you think about, for example, France and Germany, despite the terrible history of these two countries and much worse history than the history of the relations between China and in the US. If today the Germans come to the French and they tell us, and they tell the French, trust us. We don't have some secret laboratory in the Bavarian Alps where we develop killer robots in order to conquer France, the French will believe them, and the French have good reason to believe them. They are really trustworthy in this. And if the French and Germans manage to reach this situation, I think it's not hopeless. Also for the Chinese and the Americans, what explains that difference? Because it is a shocking fact of history that you can take these time slices that are 40, 50 years apart, where you have the attempted rise of the Thousand Year Reich, where Germany is the least trustworthy nation anyone could conceive of, the most power hungry, the most militaristic. You could say the same about Japan at that moment. And then fast forward a few decades and we have what? I guess it's always vulnerable to some change, but we have just a seemingly truly durable basis of trust. As a historian, what accomplished that magic? And why is it hard to just reverse engineer that with respect to Russia or China or any other adversary? A lot of hard work. In the case of the Germans, what you can say about them is there. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, brief housekeeping. Last week we ran an experiment with a live zoom call, which many of you seem to enjoy. I hear the chat was delightfully anarchic. I didn't see any of it myself. I was too busy zooming, but I'm told it ran off the rails in some ways, but to the amusement of many. And my surprise guest for that conversation was Glenn Lowry, who always makes sense. Thanks again to Glenn for taking the time. Anyway, that was fun, and I think we'll continue doing that periodically. And these conversations will not be released on any other platform. They're not going to be on YouTube, I don't think they'll live on my website. Part of the point for me is to have them be totally informal and ephemeral. So this is one of those situations where you're either there at the time or not, but that seems like the best use of the format. Okay, well, today I'm speaking with John Mcwharter. John is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He's also a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and he hosts the podcast Lexicon Valley. Anyway, as you'll hear, I'm quite excited to get John finally on my podcast, and he did not disappoint. The man is a fountain of good sense on the topic at hand, which is what he calls the new religion of anti racism in America, and we discuss many aspects of this topic. We talk about how conceptions of racism have changed over the years and now the ubiquitous threat of being branded a racist. We talk about the internal contradictions within identity politics. We talk about the strange willingness among progressives to lose the 2020 election. We discuss racism as the all purpose explanation for racial inequality in America, double standards for the black community, the war on drugs, the problem of police violence and our misconceptions about it, the enduring riddle of affirmative action, the politics of blackface, and other topics. Anyway, I really loved this conversation, and I think you might as well. And I bring you John Mcwharter. I am here finally with John McWhorter. John, thanks for coming. My pleasure. As you know, and I think other people know as well, there's been a standing invitation to have you on the podcast. I have long celebrated your contributions to our public conversation, but you have been a koi podcast guest. So we were just talking offline a moment ago. What finally changed your attitude toward doing this? Well, you know, it's really it's pretty mundane, I think, to an extent that would surprise some people. I am a very meat and potato sort of person. What I most enjoy doing is sitting in a chair and either reading a book or writing. And there's a part of me that always thinks that what I'm supposed to be is a writer. And I've been doing this for about 20 years now, this race commentary, and I've slowly seen that it's gotten to the point that you have to deal with the spoken word, that to really be part of the conversation, you can't just write anymore. You also have to talk. And I'm always a little bit behind when it comes to technological things in general, and also the fact that I really do, I am so happy to be here right now. But for me, writing is more fun than talking because you have more control over it. So for a very long time I've thought of podcasts, even though I do one of my own, as kind of the other thing. I figure my writing will stand in for me better than anything that I could say off the cuff. But I've come to realize that podcasts now occupy the place that writing did a long time ago, and that if I'm not going to do podcasts other than my own, then I might as well not be trying to communicate anything. So I'm trying to change my ways, and especially in the case of people like you who do this so well, but it's taken me a while. There's a part of me that really just wants to be sitting in a chair with my nose in a book. Yeah, well, I can certainly echo that in my case. I think I'm just a little bit ahead of you in having this epiphany. I mean, if the goal is to actually reach people and alter the currency of good and bad ideas, diminishing the latter, you just have to go where the minds are and we just reach so many more people this way. So this is great. I'm very happy to finally have you here. And one of the background facts to this conversation is you are, as a writer, working on a book that the world is truly waiting for. I don't know of another example in my lifetime of knowing someone is busily scribbling and knowing the truly oppressive need to take delivery of this manuscript out in the world. Is there any undue pressure on your side here just to give not to give more away than you want to in this conversation, but you are no, no. You're working on a book that is, I'm hoping and you've telegraphed a little bit on this point, will be the argument we're waiting for against what you've called the new religion of antiracism and how's it going and how's it feeling to be writing. As the flames of moral confusion crest the hills and begin descending upon our sleepy little hamlet, what a calendar year this is. I I don't think I've ever been asked how a book I was writing was going, but the truth of the matter is that I feel no pressure of anything. It's coming out as if it was driven by some kind of water pressure, like from a showerhead. I am on fire with this one, and I can barely keep ahead of the news in terms of what I'm writing about and why it upsets me and why I think people need to hear what I have to say. This one just came. I told my agent. I can't help it. I know there are going to be people who hate me for this, but I have got to write this one. It's going to come out of me. What are we going to do with it? And so, yeah, chapter five fell out of me last week, and that's the fifth of six chapters, and so I'm pretty much finished. And really, this book is just going to get across that this critical race theory infused way of looking at things where people who are like Mitt Romney are on top and everybody else is laboring on the bottom like slave orzman in some ship a very long time ago. And that our notion of identity has to be about defining ourselves against the white hegemon and the idea that we're supposed to go back to thinking of ourselves as stamped by what our racial membership is in exactly the way that old time Southerners wish that black people would. The whole dialogue is something that enlightened. People are going to have to learn how to stand down if we're not going to go over a certain precipice. And I try to get across in the book, and this is something that I hope people won't miss, that there's no point in viewing the people who I'm calling the elect. You might call them the wokesters, et cetera. For me, it's the elect, because they do think of themselves as elect. In that way, it doesn't make any sense to see them as monsters. To say that they're coming for your kids, which they are, but to say that they're coming for your kids is not to imply that they're trying to do some kind of harm, that they have frowns on their faces. They really do think of themselves as ahead of the curve. They think of themselves as bringing a kind of good news, and that's for the capital G and a capital N to the world and they can't be reasoned with, is important. We have to realize that there's no point in trying to have conversations with people of those politics, of that philosophy along the lines of saying that they need to understand that we should enshrine free speech. There's no point in saying to them, why can't you be open to other opinions? That makes as much sense as trying to teach a fundamentalist Christian that they shouldn't have faith in Jesus, literally. And I don't mean that rhetorically. There is no point in engaging with people of these kinds of politics. What we have to do is work around them so that we can go on foraging progressivism of the kind that we thought could bear fruit. And what that means, and this is the final chapter, and it's going to actually be the toughest one, because I want it to be constructive rather than destructive, is that we've got to learn how to stand up to these people and say no. And it can't only be the occasional weird person like you or me who doesn't mind an argument and for some reason doesn't mind when people yell at them. Everybody's going to have to learn that you stand up to this sort of person. You tell them that you are not going to agree with them, and that includes that you do not think of yourself as, for example, a racist. And then this is something that it is going to be a major adjustment. And, goodness, we've had to make a lot of adjustments this year. But I think it's important that people learn how to make an adjustment, which is that they're going to get called a white supremacist, for example. You're going to get called a dirty name by a person who's usually educated and or very articulate, and they're going to call it to you loudly, they're going to say it again, and they're going to spread it on Twitter. We have to realize that that can happen without the sky falling in. And I'm gathering examples of people who actually have the nerve to stand up to it, who keep their jobs, who watch progressivism continuing to happen. Because if we don't do this, we're going to see our institutions taken over by this perversion of what progressivism is, by people who genuinely think of themselves as doing good. But we can't be scared of being called a racist to such an extent that we let all of this utterly misguided, under thought out, manipulative nonsense shape what we thought of as intellectual, the arts and moral philosophy. Yeah, well, I should remind people of your background as a linguist, because it's relevant here, because this trend we are opposing in so many cases seems to have language on its side, right? And I can only imagine that you, as a linguist, must be amazed at some of the clever, if not albeit cynical, moves made with language here and the kinds of people who get taken in by them. So there's a few examples I have in my head. Here one recently on Twitter. You may have noticed that Joyce Carol Oates, the quite famous, accomplished well regarded fiction writer, lacking any irony or self awareness, wrote on Twitter the other day that antifa means antifascist, right? So there could be nothing wrong with this group simply because of how they had branded themselves. And I think there you and Steve Pinker should probably show up at her house for foreign interventions. That's just amazing to see. But even more widespread is the effectiveness of the branding of Black Lives Matter, right? As though it has the exact same pretense of being morally unassailable, and everyone seems to be taken in by it. To say any word of criticism about Black Lives Matter as an organization or as a movement or with respect to its tactics or extreme positions held by some of its loosely affiliated members, to utter anything other than mere ascent to the branding is to be on the back foot trying to argue that you're not racist. And it's very clever and really insidious. What has been your linguistic ride through this morass in the last few months? Well, I wish that I could talk about dynamic and frightening synergy between the use of language and the ideology here in question. But to tell you the truth, I think that a lot of it really is just a matter of what people's ideas are now. To an extent, people are seduced into thinking these are valid notions because of large, often Latin eight words. Intersectionality is a pretty cool word. If you don't want to say tear things down or if you want to feel like you're doing something constructive by teaching people to walk around feeling guilty about their privilege, then saying dismantling structures is satisfying. I don't think it's even cynical. I think it's satisfying because dismantle and structure are biggest words, and they've got a certain crispness in them. So you can say dismantling structures, and that kind of holds a lot of people off because you are and this is the main thing I don't think it's so much language. It's that people are afraid. We have gotten to this weird point. It's it's very interesting. Starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 80s, we have this massive psychosocial revolution in this country, unprecedented in the history of the human species. And that is that the typical person comes to think of it as a horrible thing to be called a racist practically like being called a pedophile. That's progress. It doesn't mean that their minds are completely swept of all possible racist feelings. But that was new. And it's at the point where people, even under 50, are beginning to forget how new that was. Forget if you're under 30, but that was new. But once you've got everybody in that place, now here comes something a few beats later where what it threatens you with is you being tarred as a racist in public. That wouldn't have been processed as such a threat in even 1980. A lot of people would have just said, basically if you think I'm a racist, fuck you. And we think of that person when we look back and we think of them as callous, and they would have been, but now ordinary people, the ordinary good person, is so scared that they will do things that they don't mean, they will say things that they don't believe. And so one of them is that you don't say anything about what can be put under that umbrella of Black Lives Matter. And it's not necessarily that people don't in some part of their mind understand that a lot of this stuff doesn't make any sense, but they're afraid. They're afraid of being called a name. They would rather avoid being called a name than make sociopolitical sense. And part of why it gets up my nose, as Mrs. Slocom used to say in Are You Being Served? The British Sitcom. Part of what gets up my nose is that it's condescending. What any white person who is paying court to this sort of thing is doing is saying black people don't have to make sense. It seems like black minds don't matter. So I will say anything that I need to say to keep these people from embarrassing me in public and making me feel bad about myself. And if it doesn't make any sense, well, black people kind of don't, do they? I'll bet some people in their bedrooms are saying that when black people can't hear. And yet we're not supposed to talk about that either. So it's all very disturbing. But I don't think and Sam, we may differ on this, we may not. I don't think it's cynical. I think very few of these people are thinking to themselves, we are going to take power and we're going to do it by manipulating language and by playing with people's minds. I think these people are quite sincere and that's what makes it harder. It's almost harder to have to hurt somebody's feelings when they genuinely think that they're giving you a present. But unfortunately, the people in this case who think they're giving us a present, some of them are very naive. I think more of them are, if they're white, they're hell bent on feeling good about themselves as not racist and they'll let that trump sense. If you're a black person who subscribes to this sort of thing, you have been tricked by this sort of person. And a lot that was going on going on before into thinking that what makes you significant and what makes you special is your victim status rather than you as yourself. That's understandable, given black people's history, that you might need to reach a little further than some people to find a sense of well being and significance and security. It's completely understandable. But that means in this case that a lot of people think that the most interesting thing about themselves is what they suffer in terms of what people who aren't them are. Or maybe aren't thinking, that's not a healthy self identity. So all of this is just a complete mess. But no one is malevolent in these cases. We're not dealing with cynics. We're dealing with people who are tragically misled. That's really interesting. I think, on the cynicism point, maybe I'm putting the line between good and bad faith at a slightly different point. I want to plunge into a conversation about racism here and what it means as a term, what it should mean, and just how the mission creep of the concept is causing a lot of suffering to step back for a second. The reason why I want to talk about this is I'm really worried about this trend. We're speaking about the capture of our institutions and our language by this, I would say cultic behavior. I referred to it as a cult of wokeness. You're talking about the very much the new religion of antiracism. There's a there's a kind of moral extortion going on and a Stockholm syndrome. And, I mean, all of these, you know, analogies seem apt, and I'm worried about it for two reasons. One, I'm worried in the near term that it will be the thing that gets Trump reelected, and I put myself in second position to I think no one in my desire to see Trump's political career ended in November. I think it'd be nice. I really do think that this will be why we get four more years of the orange goblin in the White House. But beyond that and a much longer term concern is that I think it is doing and will do damage to race relations in this country, and it will do precisely the damage that I think it's pretending to expose in many cases. And the analogy that came to mind recently, I was on someone else's podcast, and I just wound up blurting this out. But I think I stand by it. What I feel like is happening over the course of many months is analogous to what happened, you know, on a single ghastly afternoon when the O. J. Verdict was delivered. Right. When you saw, you saw, you know, those of us who are, you know, old enough remember this, as I assume you do, we saw on split screen on every television in the country, we saw these opposing reactions to a single moment. And to see when white America obviously there were exceptions in both camps, no doubt. But the general experience was of white America seeing black America erupt in jubilation over this verdict. And this is why I use the term cynical here, because it's not that you can't explain that reaction in terms of all the terrible inequality and grievance that has preceded it. Right. We have the history of white and black America to explain that moment. But within the frame of that trial and that verdict and that moment, there was something cynical about it because I think it was widely understood, if not universally understood that he was obviously guilty, right? But everyone knew it and everyone knew that everyone else knew it. And so there was no sense that all of these black faces that were tearful in joy over the outcome here thought that this man hadn't nearly decapitated his wife and a stranger, right? They were playing a very different game that had nothing to do with truth or justice in this case, or putting an actual murderer behind bars or setting an innocent man free. And so that's where maybe cynicism isn't the right rubric here, but it's a lack of purchase on what is true that I think is so awful here. And again, the analogy has to change a little bit to COVID the phenomenon we're talking about now. But it's the dishonesty and bad faith, the notion that you need to break a lot of eggs to make this equity omelet. And so, yeah, there's a lot of people who we know really aren't racist who are going to go down for this because this is the way we have to play our political game. That's the kind of thing that is so toxic. And so anyway, I put that to you as an analogy. But I mean, that that's the I feel like that the spirit of that dissociation from honest conversation about facts. I mean, so I guess I guess the the frame here would be there's something like a default position now in polite society at the New York Times, in universities, in corporations that every disparity, every significant disparity we're seeing between white and black America, whether it's violent crime or educational outcomes or employment, how many Fortune 500 CEOs are of whatever skin color? The only way to explain those disparities is either white racism or institutional racism or systemic racism. And nothing else need to be thought about. And to think about anything else is to essentially volunteer to be cast as yet another racist who doesn't get it or yet another troglodyte, another Archie Bunker character who doesn't get it. And there's a commensurate just attempt to deprogram our whole society along those lines. And then we have this cast of characters like Ibrahimax Kendi and Rob DeAngelo spreading really the doctrine of a new religion to people who are avid to pay for it. That's where I'm placing the cynicism in this movement. Yeah, I see what you mean and you touch on very important points. One of them is something that you see that can be really confounding, which is that the central members of this elect group are willing to hold on to this ideology even if it means losing elections. And that's one of many things that shows that this isn't about politics, this isn't about dismantling structures. This is mainly it's a religious creed. We are like Romans watching the birth of Christianity. I genuinely think within my lifetime I have watched a really influential new religion in formation. Isn't it in its way interesting. And that's why. So, for example, Mark Lilla's book from a few years ago where he said that we need to tamp down identity politics with the purpose of getting this moron out of office, that a certain kind of person basically circled the wagons and called him all kinds of names, including white supremacists, because he wasn't with the gospel. And it's the same way now where what is most important is to talk about institutional racism and call the requisite people white supremacists and to really annoy as many people as possible, regardless of whether it could mean that we have another four years of that narcissistic insusion simpleton as the person running this country. They really have a different sense of ranking than anybody would, except if it was a religion. And what you're talking about otherwise comes down to what really is the keystone problem of the whole way that we're being urged to see the race problem. And that is this idea that any problem that black people have, any kind of lag, is due to racism. And it's partly you talk about language partly because of the way the use of the term racism has drifted. I don't think anybody was pulling the term along in order to throw up some kind of smokescreen. But racism starts as Archie Bunker and his personal bigotry. And then starting in the 1960s, it comes to refer not to active racism but to results of racist behavior or even just racism, meaning that black people are behind in some way such that you can say that the society is racist in that disparity by analogy with what racism originally was. And so it ends up being a very muddy term. Language tends to be muddy. But our new idea is indeed what you're mentioning that, say, Ibrahim Kendi or Rob and DeAngelo say, which is that if black people lag behind, then it's racist. And with Kendi in particular, you can feel him holding back the indignation because he really feels that if this isn't perfectly obvious, then I don't know what isn't. And the fact that I have to write a book saying this, or two books saying this is an indication of the racism in question. Although, of course, now we're getting into this extremely protein sense of what racism is. But the problem with all of this is that the racism in cases like this, whatever we want the term to mean, gets to be so abstract, so difficult to perceive, that if it is racism we're talking about such. A Rube Goldberg game of mousetrap that there's no way that you could meaningfully convince any dominant segment of any public of normal people that this made sense. And so, for example, every summer the number of teenage and 20 something black boys in distressed communities who are killing each other goes way up. And we haven't wanted to talk about it. But that's then, including in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. We've been talking about George Floyd and lately various other men who have suffered really grisly fates at the hands of the cops. And in the meantime, black men have been killing each other with abandon in city after city across the United States, as happens every summer. Now, that is a tragedy. It has nothing to do with any kind of inherent depravity of the boys and men in question. But tell me how it's about racism. And if you're going to call it being about racism, if you're going to talk about not having fathers, if you're going to talk about the fact that the war on drugs was created partly with black criminals in mind, 50 years ago. All of that is so indirect at this point that to just hold your hands out and say that the reason they're doing that is racism in the way that, for example, a kendy would. It's just a vast oversimplification. Once again, white people are being told that it's okay to pretend that when race issues come up, you let your IQ go down about 50 points because apparently black people's IQs are just stuck there. And so it won't work. I can understand a lot of people's good intentions here, to be honest. I don't think that Kendi or DeAngelo quite understand the matter beyond this. I think, to put it most politely, I think neither one of them quite understand that these issues would be worth a kind of sustained sort of engagement. They don't realize how complex these things are, apparently, because although they wouldn't use the word, they're under the influence of a religion. How complicated is the Bible supposed to be beyond the world of theologians? But they're not thinking about it all that hard. But this is the proposition that will never work. Irish people, Jewish people, there are certain people listening to me now who are just sitting at the edge of their seats waiting to say, but they were white. Hold on, folks. I've heard it before. Think about it. Have I not heard that before? Let me make the point. There were Irish people, they were Jewish people, they were Italian people, and they used to practically be thought of as black. And, well, they became white, and they did it without there being any grand psychosocial revolution in society. Now, the idea has always been, well, it wasn't fair to expect black people to do that. And you know what? Maybe it wasn't. And that's why we had a civil rights revolution that gave us a real boost. And nobody can deny that we did get a real boost in the early 70s. There are all sorts of things in place that allow that. So we get that real boost and there's a further psychosocial revolution in terms of how the country thinks about racism. But the idea is somehow that it's only going to go that far because since we're brown, the prejudice against us. Is stronger. And therefore this is what white people who are on the fence and I think white people even who wouldn't call themselves on the fence, but deep down when they're having a drink, think about is that black people are always waiting for the rules to be different. For us, there's this idea that everybody else just had to claw their way, and that with black people, even though there was a civil rights revolution, still not enough in our case, the rules have to be different. Now we have people with lots of letters after their names who can put that sort of thing in very elegant language. I don't think they're doing it on purpose, but the intersectionality is one way of doing it. People like Ibrahim Kendi's idea that we recast what we think of as intelligence and make it things like, quote unquote desire to know that's from one of his books. The whole notion that we recast what we think of as talent, the idea that we're going to reform the subject of stem and change how we think of physics, et cetera, that mathematics is racist, all of this stuff, what all of this translates into is for black people, the rules have to be different. And, you know, people are sick of it, and it's at the point where it's understandable that they will be. This whole new ideology is based on an idea that we're going to teach a significant number of people in the United States to have so creative, so transformative a view of how human affairs could go in this great nation, that change could actually happen. And you know, it's not going to. Part of the reason that I find all of this so disturbing is because they're poor black people who need real help and people who consider themselves to be speaking for them are sitting around in rooms putting their hands up in the air and saying they understand their white privilege. And teaching black people to think that their main role in society is to be the people who they should be grateful that white people consider themselves privileged over. And now we have people who are trying to teach this to our children, sometimes with actual books. And in the meantime, Donald Trump gets reelected and somehow all of this is progressivism. I seriously doubt it, but I say again, these people don't know what they're doing. They're not mean. They think that they're giving us the good news. They're like Mormons. But we just have to realize that those smiles on their faces are deceptive and we can't let them win. Well, it really is a complex picture, but there are so many ways to notice that its complexity has to exceed at every point the simple diagnosis that it's white racism or systemic racism that is not yet fully rectified because white people simply don't care enough about it. That explains all of these problems because just two things that occurred to me as I was listening to you. When you think about the variable of race and you, you notice that there are some communities, like African immigrants, Nigerian immigrants, who succeed disproportionately per capita in our society. They're among the most successful people in our society. White racism should be cutting against them in the same way. Right? So really, if it were that pernicious, if we just had racists in all these companies in Silicon Valley who just don't want black people in the office, it would show up there too. And this is a point that Coleman Hughes has made in various contexts. I was just thinking of him. And then there's also the fact that if you take the problem of violence that you referenced in a city like Chicago that you really can set your watch by and you can know the color of people's skin in advance. I mean, this is what's so depressing, right? If you tell me that 30 people were shot over the weekend in Chicago, I could make money all day betting that they were non white. Sad. Sadly, yes. So to obfuscate that fact is, as virtually everyone left of center is inclined to do at this moment, is really kind of sanity straining and totally unproductive. But when you ask what a non racist who would want nothing more than to solve that problem could do to solve it, right? If we could just, with all of our goodwill of non racism or antiracism come in there and fix the problem, what would that solution look like? Whatever the solution is, it's not a matter of just making sure that everyone within 1000 miles of Chicago is no longer racist, right? We have a cultural problem there that is being expressed, that needs some remedy and people need to be given somehow a totally different aspiration that has something to do with getting educated and something to do with integrating in polite society. It's just hard to see how even someone like Kendi can think that. That's the full story. It's an interesting thing and I'm glad you brought up Nigerians because there's a little bit more to the story that I was mentioning, which was that it used to be said that well, white people are only going to let black people get so far. Then after about 90 90 we started having a high level of African immigrants to this country, not to mention Caribbean ones who've been coming before. And it's become painfully clear that these are people who are often subject to exactly the same kinds of racism. It's not that racism doesn't exist, but they thrive. They make the best of the least. Now, people who speak for black people, black ones and fellow travelers have a standing response to that, which is that those people have what's called immigrant pluck and it's not fair to expect native born black people to have it. And one answer to that question is why what group in the history of the human species has ever had a motto of, yes, we can't? That's what that is. The idea is that you're supposed to be proud of saying, no, we can't be expected to have that kind of pluck. What that is, is self hating. And it's interesting because there's a grand old tradition of calling someone like me self hating. Apparently I lack confidence. Apparently I wish I were white. Well, you know what? I'm afraid not. And the truth is that from behind my eyes, I see people who are willing to settle for this weak vision of what black people are supposed to be as the ones who don't like themselves inside, which is part of why I almost never get really angry at them. I think to myself, if you don't like yourself, then of course you're going to settle for this, and of course you're going to get mad if somebody like me who does comes along and says that you need to buck up. I understand that anger, but yeah, the other problem is that we're not allowed to talk about that all human groups have negative cultural traits, and that being a descendant of African slaves at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st doesn't somehow make that untrue. And so instead of talking about the cultural problem, there's this assumption that you're saying that there's something biologically depraved about black people and you must have your wrist smacked about that. But yes, the question becomes, what racism would you withdraw to solve a problem? And so, for example, a lot of why black guys are killing each other in cities is based on things that trace back often maybe two or three steps, but trace back to the war on drugs. So one solution might be to fight tooth and nail against that ridiculous war on drugs, because its effect would be when you withdrew that, that things in the inner city would be quite different because there would be no drug turf to fight over. There would be no tempting black market if you went to a lousy school and had a lousy life to use to keep the wolf from the door. If there were no way of making half a living selling drugs. And notice, folks, I said half a living. I know the factoid that none of them get rich except the occasional person, but still, it keeps the wolf from the door. If that weren't possible, then the same men would go find legal work and claw their way up from the bottom. And it's not fair that they have to, but that would be better than getting killed or going to prison for a very long time and leaving children to recapitulate their lives because their dads weren't there. Let's face it, it would be better. But you don't talk about that too much. Now, many of the people will say, well, yes, we need to talk about that too. But why is it that their favorite topic is just to get rid of quote unquote, racism? With the idea that protesters about what happened to George Floyd actually putting their bodies on the ground, white protesters, and bowing down to black people standing up there above them is somehow more important or is even a necessary preliminary? All of this energy that people are putting into, for example, putting out statements that their organization is going to fight white supremacy and the organization is like a school of nursing. The organization is a school of music theory. It's a math department. All of these profoundly racist places. Why is any of that necessary when really all that energy could go into getting rid of a war on drugs that would solve probably about 65% of the problems that most AIL us? You don't talk about it because we're talking about a religion. It's not because the people are dumb. It's not because they're crazy. It's not because they're mean. And not to push this too hard. I don't think it's that they're cynics. It's that they are pious. They have taken on a way of thinking that means that you sequester a part of your brain for thoughts and responses that are not based on logic. And we can't say that that's crazy because most of the world's human beings are religious. Yeah, I totally follow you there. I tend to think of it as a cult, but, you know, the the difference between a cult and a religion is numbers of subscribers. So it's, you know, as it grows, it certainly could have the shape of a new religion. Let's talk about how to move forward. Just what would a sane path through the wilderness look like and how we should think about identity and just what the goal is. In my mind, the goal is something like a colorblind society, so that to truly overcome racism would not be to arrive in some future where more and more of us are passionate antiracists. It would be to arrive in a future where we could never dream, really that skin color could have moral or political significance, right? Just as is the case with hair color today, no one is trying to figure out how many blondes or brunettes or redheads are in various positions in society. And for good reason. Nobody cares. And if we perversely started caring about that right, and started advertising our grievances with respect to hair color, we would have taken a significant step away from basic human sanity. And so we have to recover sanity somehow with this variable of race. Just to give a little context, anyone who's been listening to my podcast for a while knows that and who knows anything about my views, about the nature of the mind and the nature of the self knows that I don't think a person should, even at the end of the day, identify with the face that he or she sees in the mirror each day. That is not the proper locus of one's self concept. But how much less should one identify with a group of people, most of whom will be strangers forever, who just happen to superficially resemble the face you see in the mirror each day. It just seems completely nuts to think of oneself in those terms in any kind of ongoing way. And the idea that I would spend any part of today thinking about my whiteness or feeling solidarity with other white people because we share some skin tone in the midst of my life that would be synonymous with me suffering some kind of brain damage. It would be a kind of illness of the mind. And yet what is being advertised to us from all quarters is that group identity. And again, this within the wokeness. This extends beyond race. This covers sexuality and gender and other variables. But there's a primacy of group identity that is apparently there's no vision any longer of getting beyond. Right. But as much as I want to get beyond it, that's not to say that I believe I am colorblind now. Right. Because that is actually it strikes me as impossible as long as one is aware of statistics. So, for instance, what I just said about being able to predict who is committing all of these crimes in Chicago, the fact that I know these background facts about just the identities of people who are committing robberies and other violent crimes gives me a certain expectation. I mean, I'm very surprised to hear it when it turns out to be a Hasidic Jew and not at all surprised when I hear it's yet another black man who's guilty of, you know, whatever the crime is. And so it's just that that sort of background expectation which violates any principle of of color blindness now. And I guess the the flip side of it for me, I mean, recently I remember I was watching one of these SpaceX launches, and when they went to the press conference, side of things, one of the people on the panel was a black woman who was one of the rocket scientists. You know, she was an engineer of some kind. So, you know, the reality of that situation for me is, you know, I'm watching that. And it it made me inordinately happy to see a black woman rocket scientist. And so and and the only way to understand that, you know, psychological change in me is two things are going on. One is I have some though I never thought about it up until that moment, I had some background statistical belief that it was fairly uncommon for a black person, much less a black woman, to be a rocket scientist. But in addition to that, there's a deeply positive, albeit not at all colorblind emotion, which is I'm overjoyed to see a black woman rocket scientist. I want there to be more black women in those roles. And conversely, I want there to be fewer black men in the role of yet another booked suspect for a robbery or a homicide in a major American city. So just the mere awareness of the statistics kind of overrides any aspiration for being truly colorblind at moments like these. But that failure of colorblindness cannot be the same thing as racism. Right. Because what I want is all of these good outcomes and more good outcomes and fewer bad outcomes for black people in either case. And beyond all of that, what I want more than anything is to get to a society where I wouldn't even be tempted to notice the color of a person's skin, whether they're a rocket scientist or a criminal. Right. Because it would make no sense to notice it because I didn't notice their hair color either. Right. The question is, how do we get there? But it does strike me that there's this transitional period where color blindness isn't quite the prescription. And I guess the question of affirmative action lands right in here. What is the right policy to be implementing, given that? I think the goal really is to get beyond any kind of politics of identity in the end, yeah, that's what we were supposed to want. And that's become unfashionable. And there are reasons for it. It's interesting if you could go into a graduate seminar in a humanities department on just about any subject, and you could hook up wires to every student after they had signed a certain protocol, making sure that everything's okay, knowing that nothing unpleasant was going to happen to them. Put some wires on everybody EKG or something like that. And then just get up in front of the class and say Identity. And you could watch people's blood pressure go up a little bit, and you could probably measure, if you did a quick blood test endorphins going through their veins. There's this notion that what it really has to be about is identity. And what I mean by that is that these days we're taught that the enlightened black person centers their sense of self on their relationship to what white people are doing or not doing. And so what exactly is your identity? And your identity has to be caught up in this idea of not being white and also being in eternal complaint about what white people are doing or not doing. That is considered the advanced thing that is higher reasoning. That is the equivalent in this religion to having faith in Jesus. And so if that's what you're doing, then the idea that we're going to get past race is inconvenient. Because for that kind of person, and unfortunately, that kind of person is common for that kind of person, if you're not thinking of yourself as colored, so to speak, you don't have anywhere to grab on to. To even think of the idea of a colorblind America is to imagine an America in which you cannot imagine just where you would fit in. What we're dealing with is ultimately what happens to Homo sapiens when groups get larger than about 150 people, where nobody has to wonder what they are. With white elect, in this case, a lot of it is that you want to have a sense of purpose. And if it can't be that you're just somebody's brother and somebody's son and you marry somebody and all of you go out and you hunt whales or something like that, you don't have any existential crisis. Once you're in a large modern society, you want to have a sense of what you are good for, what's your purpose. It can be hard to find that it is not natural to wish to be an individual and yet that is what modernity forces upon us. So one thing that you can be is this crusader where you're battling racism. But that means, especially with the way it's being put these days, that you must think of yourself as this evil white person who's always going to be racist no matter how many good things you do for black people. And you feel good about being able to say that about yourself. If you couldn't say it, then who exactly are you? And it's wrong to suppose that any of these people on either side, the white side or the black side. And of course, that's a vast oversimplification. But it's not that anybody's trying to make money. It's not that anybody's trying to have power. If anything, it's part of the self definition of the elect to think of themselves as not having power. It's what makes you feel like a person. And so what we have is a situation where here is the black female rocket scientist and I'm sure that the typical elect person applauds that in a kind of perfunctory way. But what they want is for it to be made easier for black people to become rocket scientists by getting rid of all of the really tough math. And I'm not exaggerating. You can actually hear people saying these sorts of things as I have walking next to them. You can read people saying things like this. There are tenured and hot shot black professors who stand up in front of august bodies of people saying that it's racist to expect black scholars to be mathematically competent. And I'm not exaggerating. And so the idea is that if we're going to have a colorblind society, it's going to have to be one where how we do rocket science is changed or that you can become a rocket scientist without learning a lot of the things that, until now, it's been thought of as absolutely necessary and even defining for a rocket scientist to know. And that's really dangerous stuff, again, partly because it's horrifically condescending. If the idea were that you could be a rocket scientist by not doing the things that rocket scientists are supposed to do. Everybody would know the ones that had not done the things that you're supposed to do, and everybody would be reinforced and thinking there was something wrong with black people, which the elect wouldn't mind. It's not that they're going for it, but they wouldn't mind because that would give them further fuel for talking about how indelibly racist society is. But, yes, ultimately we want to get past these distinctions. And yet my friend Thomas Chatterton Williams, whenever he tries to talk about how we need to start moving back towards the colorblindness that we see people in black and white newsreels singing of, well, he gets roasted as some kind of Uncle Tom or he's a white supremacist. And of course, Sam, we have to talk about the fact that for a lot of people, the instant answer here is the cops. So for many people, the idea is that, for example, my identity must be focused on how I am not white because of what happened to George Floyd. Now, the problem there is that with OJ. I had a whole kind of buildings roman about that. I was disgusted watching those black students on TV cheering when it was painfully obvious what OJ. Simpson had done. It took me a while to fully get that, yes, everybody knew what he did. It was painfully obvious. And I couldn't stand listening to people pretend not to know at the time because I like to have all the ducks in a row. But it was seen as a vigilante justice against a genuine terrorism that the La. Cops had exerted against particularly black people in Los Angeles. And there was a similar feeling across the United States for reasons which statistically made sense then. And even if they didn't make sense exactly in 1997, people's sense of how the world works for them is not going to change instantly because of gradual sea changes over time. So nowadays. I see that the OJ Simpson performance art had a certain understandability. It disappointed me a lot in my first book about race losing the race. I'm still white hot about people's willful refusal to understand the real facts on that case. Now I kind of get it, but, goodness, it's been a while. OJ. Was that 1994? So here we are 26 years later. There are people who weren't born then who have two or three kids and real jobs. It was a very long time ago. And at this point, we're in one of the most challenging situations that I have ever known in terms of how we move forward, which is that if you look at the statistics, it is quite clear that the idea that cops even subconsciously kill black people out of racist animus or even subtle racist bias is simply insupportable. It just doesn't work. And I was somebody who thought that that was true until about four years ago. And I was in a conversation with my sparring partner, Brown university economist and black man Glenn Lowry, where he and I were arguing about this. And I said, Glenn, you'd have to prove to me that this sort of thing happens to white people. And not only does it happen to white people, but there are further arguments that make it clear that even if black men are killed disproportionately to their numbers, then unfortunate facts about who commits the most crimes, including homicides. Not to mention just factoring poverty and how that affects interactions with cops, whether you're white, Latino, or black, makes it clear that the simple idea that's so intuitive that George Floyd died because of the color of his skin simply doesn't go through. And yet, Sam, what does worry me is that we are at a point where, because of the religion and its imperatives, you can't get that across to a critical mass of people. I have watched people much smarter than me presented with the very simple facts who simply can't hear them. And these are people who are usually rather even temple people who get upset. This really presses a button. And so, unfortunately, a lot of the people who identify as X, Y or Z and seem to be going directly against what Martin Luther King was calling for would say that they're doing it because the cops killed George Floyd because he was black. And that kind of thing keeps happening. And as long as that's what they know, and as long as they won't listen to what the truth is about black men and the cops, which is that the cops are a serious problem in this country, but that when it comes to who they kill, the data simply doesn't support that black men are being killed because cops are racist against them. We can't really get anywhere. That's the hardest thing about this, the cops. Interesting. Yeah. So, as most people listening will recall, I did a podcast in the immediate aftermath of the George Floyd killing. I believe it was titled Can We Pull Back From the Brink? Which was a solo podcast. As I said at the time, I consciously resisted the impulse to bring on someone like yourself to sort of to midwife that conversation, because I just felt like the idea that I couldn't say what I thought needed to be said on my own as a white guy was pernicious and worth not capitulating to. So I did it solo and got a lot of support and also a lot of criticism. And people can't shake the feeling that a white person shouldn't be saying these things very much along the lines of what you just said. I know you read the transcript of that podcast. I'm wondering, is there anything you think I got wrong? Or is there any place, is there any daylight between us on this issue? Sam, the honest truth is what you said on that podcast was all spun gold as far as I'm concerned, in terms of bravery. I was struck by your mentioning something that even I have hesitated to ever say anything about because of the nature of the situation, which is that really, you know, if the cops, you know, grab you and they want you to do something, you need to let them do it. The idea that you're being some kind of hero to resist that you're supposed to think about the cosmic sociopolitics and kind of flip the bird at the cops or do worse, and that that ends up creating a lot of these problems, frankly, as people say, there is some of that. And I do think that ideally, we would say one way that some of these things wouldn't happen is don't resist the police. Basically just do what they say. And as you said, putting your objections later after the heat of the moment has passed, if you feel that you've been stopped unfairly, if you feel that something has gone wrong, you can lodge the complaint. These days, there are more channels for getting your complaint out than there used to be. Social media means that you can basically have your say and possibly have it picked up much more easily than you could have in, say, 1974, but not then. None of the walking away, none of the yelling and screaming, none of the spitting, et cetera. And I feel like I'm black, and I can't say that because I feel like a lot of people feel that these people are having their say in a society that is dedicatedly, set against the well being of black people and black men in particular. And I just feel like many people simply couldn't hear that. There's a part of them that feels like this resistance of arrest in cases like this is a kind of new form of civil rights. And I sense that I could cut through that even less likely than I could make people understand that a George Floyd who was white, such as Tony Timpa four years before him, very similar situation, could have been killed under the same indefensible conditions. So it's a tough one. But no, what you said, I stand behind you, you were correct. And I thought to myself, it's kind of sad that you're not allowed to make this kind of logical sense when talking about these issues, because so much of it has been encrusted in what's thought of as higher reasoning. But is really a kind of performance art that serves more to make people feel secure in themselves within the structure of elect religion than to prevent bad things from happening to people. And so, for example, George Floyd take away the war on drugs, and the cops would have much less reason to patrol disadvantaged black communities. And many negative interactions that's not what happened to be happening with George Floyd, but many negative interactions wouldn't happen simply by virtue of that. There's an educational crisis with kids that disproportionately affects disadvantaged. Black kids, which has to do with how reading is taught and to be very quick about it. Reading should be taught by teaching kids how to sound out words. You'd think that was the most natural thing in the world. But there are other reading philosophies where you teach kids to recognize words as whole pieces because English spelling is weird, and you let them do that instead of, frankly, learning how to read. You and I probably learned by reading chunks, and that's because we are middle class readaholic kinds of people. But for kids who come from not booklined homes, from kids who come from places where most communication is oral rather than on the page, you need to be taught the good old fashioned way. It's surprising how that does not happen for a great many black kids who really need it. And once you're just an okay reader, you're never going to be all that great in school. And you can't make the most of, say, a moderate, although not great, school because you weren't taught how to read write. I had seen this happen. And finally, there needs to be free, easy access to long term acting contraceptives that are reversible, but for five years, make it so that you can do family planning without having to work too hard. Way too many births of children are accidental. And if a lower income mom does not want to have kids until she's gotten on her feet, a way to avoid the kinds of accidents that happen to almost anybody in the course of life is to have these contraceptives be available to as many women as possible. And this would, of course, cover black as well as Latino and white women. Women of that demographic in all colors have been shown in studies to like these. No, talk about eugenics is appropriate here. It's just about being able to plan your family without thinking too hard and without so many births being accidents, especially if you're somebody who would prefer not to interrupt the growth of a child once it started. Yes, I'm talking about abortion. If you don't want to have an abortion, great. But the larks, as they're called, make it so that you don't end up having to deal with those choices. If you did those three things, just those three, it would solve so many problems for black people who need help, and all three of those things would go a good 80% of the way towards solving the problems we're talking about. Regardless of how Derek Chauvin or however you pronounce his name, feels about black people, in his heart of hearts, however privileged white people are or aren't, it would really put black America back on its feet. But we're not supposed to think about anything so proactive because those aren't religious thoughts. We're supposed to think about things that are more emotional, things that are more interpersonal, things that make you feel like you've got the Lord in you. And that's where you get books like books like White Fragility. That's where you get books like how to Be an Antiracist and oh, my goodness gracious, that's where you get how to Raise an Antiracist Baby, which means that my children, five and eight, are going to have teachers. This is what scares me to my socks. My kids are going to run into this, and I'm trying to think of what I'm going to do about it. They're going to be these teachers with shining eyes, not cynics shining eyes, teaching my biracial daughters that they need to primarily think of themselves as black girls who are going to suffer racism at the hands of their white classmates. And I say, no, no, no. But I'm afraid that we're getting to the point where there's no school that I could put them in, where I could keep them from that, and I don't have time to home school. That's what's worrying me. But we need a real race sociopolitics that's about getting out on the ground and doing real things, and instead we are engaging in a kind of charismatic naval gazing, and I think that we really need to get past it. I'm in precisely that same position with respect to the education of my daughters, and it's amazing to witness. I think you just have to, at the appropriate moment, have the conversation with them, to inoculate them against the brainwashing that's coming or that has already started. But it's a fascinating thing to try to navigate. I want to linger on this issue of the police videos because they have such an outsized effect on everything that's happening here. Comparatively very few of them that have been widely seen. We really are talking about something like a dozen or two dozen videos that have defined this moment culturally. Now, no doubt there are thousands upon thousands of them available. I've watched many more than dozens. The thing that I just want to reiterate about these videos is that they are very hard to understand, much less understand dispassionately, right? These are functioning, as you say, they have a religious significance. These are held up as icons in orthodox Christianity. I mean, it's like this is the moral core of the religion, the injustice that is patently obvious here with a frame of this phone, and yet they're functioning, to my eye, much more like a kind of pornography of grievance and distrust of institutions. And again, they're just reliably misunderstood by even very well intentioned people who are who are not implicated at all in the video. You know, it's just, you know, my mother can't understand these videos. She she reflexively sees everything that Ibrahim Kendi would want her to see. Naively coming to one of these videos. The thing to point out is that for every video you've seen, whether it's the George Floyd video or, you know, Eric Garner or, or any of these other ones, I mean, one, there are differences among them that are incredibly important, right? I mean, this is for anyone who understands violence and what cops can do and should do to protect themselves and the public once things start running off the rails. All of these videos are highly non, analogous with one another, and yet that is virtually never acknowledged. And the cases where we don't have video, but where we know something about what happened, like the Michael Brown case, just totally unlike these other cases, each is the dissimilarities need to be noticed. But then, for every video you want to fasten on as emblematic of the problem of racism and police violence, you just have to know that there are other videos where all the relevant variables are reversed, where the skin color of all participants, cops and victims, are reversed. Right? You just swap that all out, and you can find that video. And one thing that largely goes unacknowledged is there are videos where the thing that the cops are most worried about suddenly getting shot in the face by the person who, until a moment before, showed no sign of being armed, those videos are there to be seen, too, right? So the thing that explains how spun up the cops often are in these circumstances where they're shouting commands and going increasingly berserk in the presence of a non compliant person, one it so often speaks to their lack of training, they simply don't have all the tools they need to nonviolently control somebody. We're speaking now on a day, the day after a video that's, especially disturbing, has circulated, which makes many of these points for me. And there's a video out of Tulsa, I believe, of a white person being pulled over where the cops, two cops, are attempting to make an arrest. And it's not clear from at least the version I saw, which now has several million views. I saw it on Twitter. It's not clear how this all started. I'm sure this person was driving like a maniac or you don't know why the cops are so spun up. But once they're engaging him in the car, they are getting ready to TASE him, and they do, and it doesn't work. And again, tasers often don't work. Then they begin pepper spraying him. The guy just refuses to get arrested. He does not want to come out of the car. They're trying to pull him out of the car. They don't have the skills to physically do this well, where they can keep himself safe and actually immobilize him. So they're yanking on him every which way and shooting him with pepper spray. And the guy is complaining about the injustice of this all, and he's innocent, and it's a violation of his rights, and why are you doing this? And had he been black up until the final frames of this video, this would be yet another case of monstrous misbehavior on the part of cops. I would have heard of it by now, right? Exactly. Yeah. And in the sovereign citizen lunatic cult in white society, I'm sure it also is emblematic of, you know, the overreach of state violence. But what happens at the end of this video is this guy is wearing a T shirt and shorts. I don't I don't think it's even clear where he pulls the gun from. I think it probably was on in his waistband. He might have retrieved it from his car as he was being pulled out. But up until the last moment where you think, okay, I'm not sure why they're tasing him and spraying him with pepper spray, but, you know, the cops are really freaked out, and this guy they're just not successfully arresting this guy. He's got his cell phone in one hand, and the next thing you know, both cops are shot. I think one has died. I'm not sure about the state of the other. And every cop knows on an hourly basis that this is a possibility every single time they have an encounter with a member of the public. It is absolutely obvious from the cop's eye view of the world that it is very hard to tell who the bad guys are. And we live in a society awash with guns. And so you owe it to yourself. If you're someone who has been successfully propagandized by the Black Lives Matter, take on all the famous videos. You need to see a few videos like this one from Tulsa to know what cops are dealing with. This is a traffic stop, and you get to watch two cops, at least one cop, be executed because of it. And that's the complete conversation about this. And so, yeah, the punchline is, whatever you're being arrested for, it doesn't matter that, you know, you're innocent. You have to follow directions so as to minimize the possibility that the cop is going to feel that something you're doing with your hands is presenting such an intolerable risk to his safety or her safety that they have to draw their gun and point it at your head. And now you're risking being killed for no good reason. Yeah. So often it's about somebody who reaches and it's clear that the cops are really afraid of somebody reaching for a gun and killing them. And I would have to assume that they're not afraid of that for no reason. And yet there seems to be a notion out there that that's something that the cops are only afraid of when it's a black person. And it leads me to something that I've come to realize over the years about these cop cases. And I should say, and I think it's very important for me to say this I was not thinking this way until about four years ago. I had the BLM thought about this. Many people who don't like me don't know that in my books I have written about this. I have a whole essay about the police and profiling. I knew this was the one thing that justified the way people like this think, as opposed to, frankly, everything else about being black. But the thing about this is that whenever you see a video such as the ones that we've seen now from Minneapolis and Kenosha, there seems to be a new one about every week these days is first of all, you have to think, is there a point? If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, do I have housekeeping today? I don't think so. Today I'm speaking with Richard Dawkins. Richard really needs no introduction on this podcast, but please note that he has a new book out titled Outgrowing God a Beginner's Guide. In this conversation, we mostly take your questions and we start by discussing the strangeness of the genes eye view of the world. We then move on to the limits of Darwinian thinking when applied to human life. We talk about his concept of the extended phenotype and memetics. We look at how ideologies act as meme complexes. We talk about whether consciousness might be an epiphenomenon and therefore might not have been evolved under selective pressure. And then we talk about psychedelics and meditation. I actually lead Richard in a guided meditation and the effects of that you can hear for yourself. And I'll have something more to say in my afterward. So now, without further delay, I bring you Richard Dawkins. Be you still trembling heart. Remember the wisdom out of the old days. Him who trembles before the flame and the flood and the winds that blow through the starry ways. Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood cover over and hide, for he has no part with the lonely, majestical multitude. What poem is that? It's an early one. It's from the wind among the reeds, I think. Well, that was a wonderful reading and the perfect sound check. I am here with Richard Dawkins. Richard, thanks for joining me again on the podcast. Thank you very much. And thank you for coming to the Biltmore Hotel rather than making me go to your studio. This is old school. I I love it. So, you know, you you and I have done a bunch of events together. Yes. I hope we haven't run out of things to talk about. I worry about that kind of thing. Yeah. So in the interest of not running to that problem, I decided to go out on social media and ask for questions. And that's the perfect algorithm because I know what kinds of questions we've hit in the past, and this simultaneously gets us what our respective audiences want to hear. And I have no fear that we're going to COVID the same territory in the same way again. I hope one or two of them may have seen my new book, maybe not, maybe too recently out, I don't know. So let's just mention the new books just so that we've done that. The new book is outgrowing. God. Outgrowing God. Yeah. And this is for teenagers, right? Yes. It's sort of quite a lot of complaints of being this is just like the God delusion. It actually isn't just like the God delusion. It's different. And it's sort of designed for teenagers. Yes. We can obviously spend as much time or as little time on these questions as we want and open any doors that they suggest to us. But the first frivolous question is, and this surprises me this means nothing, but do you realize that the most prominent atheists are all Aries? So you're an Aries. I'm an aries. Hitch was an aries. Dennett is an aries. Matt Dillahunty is an Aries. The great film director Otto Preminger once approached by a starlet on the set of one of his films. She said, oh, gee, Mr. Preminger, what sign are you? And he said, I am a do not disturb sign. That's my attitude towards astrology. Right. Well, I guess Aries don't believe in astrology. So the first question, which I think will set us on a nice path, it won't preempt everything else, but this is somebody who clearly is exasperated with the prospect that we might focus exclusively on atheism or bashing religion. And he says, for goodness sake, get him talking in detail about the genes eye view of natural selection, the extended phenotype, the arguments surrounding group selection and punctuated equilibrium, the way memetics has rather ironically taken on a life of its own and so on. Not just God, for God's sake. So this covers a lot of ground and I do want to do those topics justice. I think people are so casually aware of the revolution that has been wrought in our thinking based on our understanding of Darwinism. And it was really crystallized in your book The Selfish Gene. But it has kind of receded into the background of our thinking and it is such a strange view of the mechanics of things and the logic of things. And so maybe let's just spend a little time talking about the nature of replication. I like to think if it has receded into the background, that's because it's simply accepted which among professional biologists of the sort of field type, it has yeah, I'm thinking the general public, even perhaps the general public, I suppose it is a bit strange and it sort of is a turning on its head. Of the what used to be the more orthodox view. Darwin saw natural selection at the level of the individual. So he thought of individuals as competing with each other within the species. He was always a within species competition. And he was, of course, aware that survival is only a means to the end of reproduction. And his other great book well, one of his other great books, The Descent of man, is largely about sexual selections. The Darn was thoroughly aware that success at reproduction was also vitally important and any hereditary tendency to be, for example, sexually attractive or good at competing with members of their own sex would also be favored. But Darwin didn't have gene language. He had no concept of the particulate gene which mendel introduced. And that that particular view of genetics was actually essential to natural selection because, as was pointed out in Darwin's own time, if genetics was blending, as everybody in the 19th century except mendel thought if we were all a kind of mixture of our father and our mother, then variation would disappear as the generations went by. Each generation would be more uniform than the previous one, in which case there would be no variation left for natural selection to work on. This was actually advanced as an argument against natural selection. Actually, of course, it's an argument against manifest facts because we don't get more alike as the generations by mendel solved that problem, but Darwin didn't realize it. I don't think Mendel realized it properly. And it wasn't until the neodarwinian synthesis of the 1930s that it was realized that actually a natural selection is all about genes changing their frequency. So some genes become more frequent in the population, others less frequent in the population. That's what it's all about. I suppose all that I did, really, was to take that neodarwinian view and put it in a slightly more poetic way and say that that means that the individual is just a vehicle for carrying genes around and passing them on and it's temporary. I called it a throwaway survival machine. Right? That's the strange idea. You called it strange and that is a bit strange. I suppose I call them a robot survival machine. And an individual organism is is a device for passing on genes. The selfish gene is quite largely about not selfishness. It's often misunderstood because of the title as being about selfishness. Or even an advocacy of selfishness is actually mostly about altruism. The selfish gene explains altruism at the individual level. Right. But if you take a genes eye view of human life, many strange things happen. First you see that there's a logic by which certain genes would have been selected for and the behaviors they would encode would be grandfathered into the human condition. And yet evolution can't see most of what we care about. The logic of evolution is anything that has allowed these specific replicators to perpetuate themselves has been selected for. Right. So we are here to spawn and to ensure that our progeny successfully spawn. And I don't know what age do you think historically evolution ceases to care about us? I guess grandparents are still oh, there's no sudden cut off. And it's it's it's a gradual yeah process. But the older the older an animal is, the more likely it is already to have reproduced. Right? And so we're all descended from ancestors, most of whom reproduced when they were relatively young. A few may have been reproduced when they were old. And this, of course, is why we age, because we're descended from young ancestors. And very often whatever it took to be successful when you were young made you actually more likely to die. And this is especially true, of course, of sexual selection, where brilliantly colored male birds, say, are more likely to propagate genes for being brilliantly colored but then dying because brilliant colored attract predators. Just the matter they attract females. And that's an extreme case. But that sort of model for the Darwinian theory of aging. Right, but there's still something about the extended family that would have been selected for. You would think grandparents are good for helping. That's right. In those species where grandparents can, there may be a kind of changeover point where when you get to a certain age, you can do your genes more good by caring for grandchildren than you can by having more children. That, again, wouldn't be a sudden cut off point. But that probably is true of humans and a number of other species. Perhaps. But if we're talking about running viable governments and societies into democracies capitalism, pursuing scientific interests, building technology that doesn't destroy us, these are things that obviously are parasitic on cognitive traits that have been evolved. But evolution can't really see these details. No, that's right. I think that so much of our human life is has gone beyond natural selection. Natural selection put us in the world and the way that we are and our brains and our bodies are designed by natural selection to survive under wild conditions in Africa, and we've now moved beyond that. And so what we think of as successful in our society is really sort of pretty much left natural selection behind. But yes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is an observation that several of us have made in various contexts. If you were going to take a rigorously genes eye view of the human circumstance certainly as a man the thing you would want to do most the thing that you would find most fulfilling in life the thing to which you would purpose more or less every day is to donate your sperm to a sperm bank so that you could have tens of thousands of children for whom you have no financial or resource responsibility. The fact that sperm donors are actually paid is thoroughly underwinian and is a wonderful example of how far we have actually advanced. It's not that surprising because natural selection cannot build into our brains a kind of cognitive awareness of what our genes, so to speak, would want. All it can do is build in rules of thumb which would work under natural conditions. And so a desire for sex makes perfect sense because that for the whole of history, evolutionary has tended to lead to reproduction. But a desire to donate your sperm is something quite different. It cannot foresee that technology, natural selection, can't see that there have been a few notorious cases of doctors who substituting their own sperm for donors and things like that. But it is to a naive Darwinian, it is a surprising fact that sperm donors have to be paid. A naive Darwinian would think that they would pay to donate their sperm, right? Yeah. And pay quite a lot. Yes. Let's just talk about what genes are for a moment. Genes are a kind of memory. They're a kind of encoding of knowledge in the sense that and stop me if you think at any point these analogies break down. But I'm hearing echoes of David Deutsche here, where it's knowledge as a kind of solution to a problem. It's a genetically inscribed solution to problems that our ancestors have successfully faced. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I have a chapter in unweaving the rainbow called the Genetic Book of the Dead. Just sort of takes off from the is it a Hindu classic? The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Book of the Dead. Sorry, buddhist, yes. So the genetic book of the dead. I see the genome, well, let's say the genes of a species as a coded document describing ancestral world in which ancestors survived. That's sort of true because they are a filtered subset of genes which have helped ancestors to survive. And in principle, it should be possible in some future date for when technology has advanced, for a knowledgeable geneticist to read the genome of an individual and actually read off a description of the worlds in which the ancestors of that animal lived. To a lesser extent, I think perhaps it's easier you can read the body of the animal. I like to think that if you took a whole lot of water dwelling animals, say, mammals, it would be otters, seals, whales, water truths, marsupial, swimming animals and things. They'd all have webbed feet, say, for example, except whales. So that's an obvious one. But if you actually made a list of characteristics of water dwelling mammals and compared it with, say, desert dwelling mammals, you would find a whole lot of things that all the water dwelling ones have in common, including probably some biochemical ones, some genetic ones. And so that's part of the description. The Genetic Book of the Dead describes water or describes desert. Right. And one day, maybe I'll even write a book called the Genetic Book of the Dead trying to flesh out this idea. Yeah. And of course, it could also look forward prospectively to situations which we now to take the human case are not well adapted to that's. Right. The Genetic Book of the Day has always got to be a description of the past, and it helps the animal to survive to the extent that the future resembles the past, which on the whole, it does. If the world were totally capricious such that you could not predict the future on the basis of the past, then natural selection wouldn't work. But nature doesn't vary capriciously as the years go by. On the whole, tomorrow is pretty similar to yesterday, actually. There was a specific question that touches on that point that someone asks, why do we need vaccinations or acquired immunity to diseases at all? Why can't the mother pass on her immunity to her offspring? Wouldn't that be an enormous evolutionary benefit? So we have acquired immunity because on the assumption that the environment does change enough that that's the best algorithm to run. Yes, I suppose the immune system is a kind of short term, moment to moment substitute for natural selection. Natural selection works over generations and equips the animal to deal with circumstances that arise perennially or at least over over a long period. The immune system is all about equipping the animal, adapting the animal to insults that attack it during its own lifetime. From moment to moment. There are always new epidemics, always, always new viruses cropping up. Right. So that's what the immune system is about. And and vaccination is as it was sort of preparing the immune gaming of that. Yeah. But it would seem good to be immune to everything that your mother had encountered. It would. I suppose we tend to be immune to everything that most of our ancestors have encountered, but just our mother. We don't seem to have a mechanism for passing on the particular. If the mother had chickenpox, we don't inherit an immunity to chickenpox. One thing that's framing this part of the conversation for me is I watched your somewhat stifling conversation with Brett Weinstein, who I greatly admire, who I've done many events with, but he had a kind of ax to grind with you around, if not group selection, something he was calling lineage selection. And more broadly speaking, a sense that evolutionary thinking should cover many of the details of human life, like warmaking genocide, nationalism, to a degree that you were disinclined to extend it. And also just this notion that religion should certainly be considered an extended phenotype. Memetics generally should be considered an extended phenotype. And I'm just wondering what the I mean, I can't do a good impersonation of Brett for this conversation, but I'm wondering just what are your concerns there and what are the limitations in Darwinian thinking when we're talking about high level human social phenomenon and psychological phenomenon? First of all, I hugely admire Brett Weinstein's stand at Ridiculous University that he used to be a member of. Evergreen? Yeah. Evergreen, yes. I mean, he's a real hero standing up against that nonsense. The extended phenotype, I think, is often misused. The idea that it's anything is often misused. And I think we should remind people what a phenotype? Yes, I should. Phenotype is that which the genes engineer in a body, which in a Darwinian sense would help the genes to survive. So wings are part of the phenotype of genes that help the genes survive and behavior patterns and crests and sharp talons and sharp teeth and things. So we normally think of genes program bodies to develop phenotypes. Phenotypes help bodies to survive, and that helps the genes that built them survive. That's the normal way it happens. And genes do it by the processes of embryonic development, causing the body to develop the necessary phenotypes. The extended phenotype is phenotype, which is outside the body in which the gene sits. And my classic examples of this are animal artifacts, things like birds nests, where the nest, especially a complicated nest like that of a weaver bird, obviously an adaptation. It's just like an organ. It's beautifully shaped for a particular purpose. Beautifully shaped, for example, a long tubular nest to prevent snakes getting in. That is a perfectly good phenotype. Right, but it's not part of the body. Yes, the genes are producing that nest. The genes are producing that and they're producing it. They're still doing it via embryology. But the embryology then, as it were, reaches outside the body in the form of behavior, in this case, nest building behavior. But that's only a yet one more step in the embryonic chain of causation. The embryonic chain of causation begins with DNA influencing proteins and that influences something else. Which influences something else cell division, neuron production in the brain, which has the eventual consequence of causing the bird to build a nest of a particular shape. So there's just this chain of causation starting with DNA protein and going through various complicated steps in embryology, and then the final steps are outside the body. So I call it the extended phenotype. Well, then the idea is generalized to I just want to pause here at the risk of derailing you, I want to pause here to close the door to a certain species of doubt that evolution can explain the diversity of life that we see. So now I'm just closing the door to the creationists and the intelligent designers for the moment, because one of the concerns is that you take any example of phenotype. You take a batswing, for instance. Evolution could not have produced a batswing de novo by functional batswing. What you need is some incremental path from no wing at all to a bat swing. And each increment has to survive the logic of evolution. It has to be useful and lead to differential success. So you have to imagine here to explain any speciation and any path by which we have reached the diversity of life that we see, you have to explain how each increment, the first little bump that became the wing, how that in itself was useful. And many people just throw up their hands there and say, well, there's clearly no way you can do that. So there must be some other explanation. Yes, thank you for reminding people of that. I mean, that is, of course, very important. And of course, the evolution has to take whatever is there and modify it. So it's not like a little bump that appears. In this case, it's already existing arm in the case of insects, probably was a little bump because that's not using an existing limb. But yes, you're of course right. With a bat it's literally the hand. Yeah, as a membrane stretched between the fingers, which is not difficult to engineer embryologically, because in the embryo there already is a membrane between the fingers and actually it's carved away. There's a kind of sculpture process whereby the membrane is removed. All that needs to happen in bats is that that sculpting process didn't happen. The membrane state. And of course, fingers get hugely long. Terrace laws do it differently. They just have one big finger and they stretch that between the legs. And birds do it differently again, but in every case, it makes use of what's already there and modifies what's already there. Rather than starting de novo, which is what a human engineer would do, start with a clean design on the on the drawing board. Yeah, but I was thinking about the extended phoenix, actually, before we get there. So what is the argument that some non functional precursor wing would nevertheless have been useful enough? Yes, this is a favorite problem. What's the use of half a wing? There are a large number of animals that don't exactly fly, but slightly increase there's. For example, arboreal animals, squirrels, say, who leap from branch to branch. And it's a dangerous process, leaping from branch to branch. And so any slight increase in flight surfaces not really flight surfaces, but any slight increase in the surface area that's presented to the air will increase the distance that a squirrel can leap. The tail, the fluffy tail of a squirrel acts as a sort of rudimentary aerofoil that increases the distance that a squirrel can jump to. Well, now, flying squirrels, they're just squirrels, but they have a membrane between the fore limb and the hind limb, which started out, no doubt, as just a bit of membrane in the armpit, which just slightly increased. The could just leap 1ft further because of that. And then when that was there, then next generation, perhaps ten generations, could leap 10ft further. So you have a steady gradient of improvement. Are there orthogonal gradients that could explain some of these intermediate forms, like heat regulation or something that well, that's been suggested for insects. Yes, it's been suggested that in the insect, they really did start by just bumps growing out of the thorax rather than modifying existing limbs. And it has been suggested that originally these were thermal regulatory or were solar panels. And then when they got out to a certain size for their thermoregulatory function, then they then happened to act as aerofoils, and so they then became wings. And insect wings are moved not by limbs, as I said, but by movements of the thorax. So the thoraxes, there are muscles in the thorax that contracted in various ways which cause these flaps to go up and down. Interestingly, some insects flap their wings up and down with a separate neural command from the central nervous system, saying, up, down, up, down. But other insects have a kind of motor, sort of oscillating motor, where all that the central nervous system says is switch on or switch off. And the motor itself does rhythmic up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. And the frequency of the oscillation is determined not by the central nervous system, but just by the harmonic properties of the motor system. Yeah. Okay, so back to the extended phoenix. Yeah. Well, the next step after the idea of artifacts, after the idea of birds nest, say there are many cases where parasites manipulate their hosts to increase the chance that they will be propagated to the next stage of the parasitic cycle. So flukes, for example, usually have an intermediate host, which might be a snail or it might be an ant, and they need to get into their definitive host, which might be a sheep or a cow. And so in the case of the so called brain worm in the ant, for example, the worm in the ant burrows into the brain of the ant and changes the behavior of the ant to make the ant more likely to be eaten by a sheep. It crawls up to the top of stems in the heat of the day rather than going down to the ground. So the parasite is a kind of puppet master, which is manipulating the ant to get well, now, that, to me, is an extended phenotype because genes in the worm have their phenotypic effect in ant behavior. Yeah, I think isn't there some evidence that Toxoplasmosis and some other organisms operate in mammals like ourselves and very likely in people in similar ways to make us more likely to pass it on? Yeah, modifying modifying behavior. I mean, rabies is the classic example. The rabies virus actually makes rabid dog, for example, more likely to bite and froth at the mouth and pass on the virus when it bites. It also makes the animal more likely to roam and wander far and wide rather than stick around it at home, which then spreads the virus more widely. So that's extended to be a type of a parasite. And then you can say, well, parasites don't always live inside their hosts. Cuckoos manipulate their hosts. A cuckoo nestler terrible bird. Yeah, terrible bird manipulates the host with beautiful adaptations. I mean, super normal gape and things like that. This is, again, manipulating the host behavior. The change in the host behavior is an extended phenotype of cuckoo genes. Genes that change host behavior are more likely to survive again, it works via cuckoo embryology. But the final stage in that chain of events in cuckoo embryology is to produce behavior which seduces the host reed, warbler, whatever it robin, whatever it is. And so that, again, is extended phenotype. And then the next final stage in my argument would be all bird song, all animal communication where one animal manipulates another you can think of as extended phenotype. So a gene that changes in one animal has an extended phenotypic effect on another animal via a call, a song, a crest, a flash, a conspicuous signal. So my whole vision of animal signaling is a great network of extended phenotypes. Right. Okay. So before we talk about the prospect of something like religion or any other doctrine or institution being extended phenotype for humankind. Let's briefly talk about this other species of replicator, the Meme, which is a term of your coinage, which has an importantly different connotation now that we've all spent our lives on social media. But these are also it's actually a decent analogy to the memes. I wanted to make the point that what matters is replication. Genes are consummate replicators and they achieve their replication success by manipulating bodies via the processes of embryology. But I wanted to make the point that any replicator could do that doesn't have to be DNA. And of course, on other planets it almost certainly isn't DNA. If there is life on other planets. Probably is. But then I said, well, maybe we don't have to go to other planets because maybe memes, maybe cultural replicators could be the basis of Darwinian selection. There certainly are cultural replicators, no doubt about that. I mean, things spread. Does it matter that they don't randomly vary? The mutation isn't I don't think that matters. No. I mean, it incidentally happens to be true that genetic mutation is random. But even that is only random in the sense that it's not guided towards improvement. But mutation is not random in other senses. Mutations are induced by cosmic rays, for example. That's non random. But mutation is random in the sense that it's not. What do you mean it's non random if it comes from cosmic ray bombardment? Well, it has a cause. It's predictable if you subject yourself to but the specific base pair that's being targeted is random, presumably. That's true. Yes, that's true. But what's more important is that it's random with respect to improvement. So there's no tendency for mutation to be, as it were, anticipating what's necessary for survival. It's random in that sense and the great majority of mutations are actually deleterious. Okay, so but so when we talk about memes right, so now meme is almost any cultural product, an idea that is that is replicated. That's replicated. So it could be a close fashion or something like that, or a speech mannerism. Right. Awesome. Is which I use with disconcerting frequency. Do you? I never use it. I've given up. I mean, it's such a wonderful word to mean what it really does mean. Right now it just means kind of okay, I'm part of the slide into degradation. Yes. When language evolves, I am an American, this would be good case because language does evolve and so we have to accept that. Yeah. And I think there probably is some randomness, and not to say cosmic ray bombardment, that accounts for the changes in speech patterns. But most memes, it seems to me the changes in them are engineered at least with some forward thought. It doesn't really matter. Natural selection would still work even if genetic mutation was engineered. And of course it can be. We are now in a position. To do that right. That's what genetic engineering is, which I will talk about. So the fact that the basis for the change, directed or not, you still have an environment where things are competing and there's differential success, and so the environment is providing a kind of selection mechanism. Yes. So memes ideas, ways of doing things, really, all of human culture and ideology, this is being continually produced and spread and going in and out of fashion. And so this is this domain of memetics. And there literally are what are now called memes on the Internet, graphics paired with text that spread on social media, that spread various ideas. I don't know. How do you feel about that appropriation? Well, I'm not particularly keen on that appropriation because it rather I mean, they are a very specific example of a meme, a meme of I would rather think about whether natural selection of sort actually guides the spread of memes. And I like the idea of a meme complex or meme plex, where something like a religion like Roman Catholicism could be regarded as a mean complex. Right. And individual memes might be the idea of life after death or the idea that you have to confess your sins, the virgin birth. Virgin birth. And just like gene complexes are sets of genes which flourish in each other's presence, and that, I think, is an extremely important idea in genetic evolution. So there might be something similar in meme complexes. Yeah. So there's like there's a common fate to these various genes, various memes. They're all hitched together. That's right. I like to think of, say, the gene complex of a carnivore species like leopards, where you have carnivorous teeth, carnivorous eyes, carnivorous brains, carnivorous limbs. They all go together. And on the other hand, you have antelope. I mean, the herbivore prey eyes, noses, limbs, et cetera, which go together. If you suddenly plumped an antelope gene into a leopard gene pool, it probably wouldn't work. It wouldn't cooperate well with the other genes of the of the leopard gene complex. A very skittish leopard. Yes, yes. The cowardly leopard. Cowardly leopard. And so a species is a collection of mutually compatible genes which go well together, as opposed to another species, which is complex of different genes. Well, I believe you might do the same kind of thing with meme complexes, but the theory hasn't been really sort of worked out. I think it might be okay, so we have meme complexes, something like Roman Catholicism. And what was being urged upon you in your conversation with Brett and I've seen this come up many times before, is that something like Roman Catholicism should be or religion in general should be considered part of the extended phenotype of I've never liked that. I think that's taking the idea of the extended phenotype beyond where it should be, and I think it detracts from people's ability to comprehend the idea of the extended phenotype. Extended phenotype is supposed to be a genetic effect which manifests itself outside the body in the same kind of ways genetic effect manifests itself inside the body. I don't think Brett does this, but people have sometimes said to me, isn't a building like the building in the moment, an extended phenotype? And I think that would only be true if, say, there were genes that caused architects to design a different kind of building. And there aren't. I mean, there's no gene that makes an architect more likely to make Gothic arches rather than Romanesque arches. Our mere survival dependence on buildings is not enough to no, I don't think so, because variation in buildings is not under genetic control. Right? And I doubt very much that variation in religious habits is under genetic control. If it was, then you might make some sort of a case for talking about extending times. It's not like that. And so I think that it's possible to push an idea too far, and I think that's what's going on here. So what what about the prospect that having religions led to differential success of various groups, human beings? Well, that's quite a different idea and that's worth considering in its own right. And also it's what's worth considering in its own right is the idea that individuals having religions might survive better. That's been suggested and might be true. This opens the door to what's been called group selection. Yes, and I've never been a fan of group selection. Darwin himself it wasn't called group selection then. Darwin almost always was talking about individuals surviving better within a species. But Darwin did, again in The Descent of man, in one passage, talk about a kind of group selection where he suggested that groups of humans who had some kind of social cohesion, who behaved well towards each other, had altruism toward each other cooperation, would be more likely to survive than groups that didn't. And so that would be a form of group selection. I suppose in some ways I prefer to compare that not to group selection but to species competition. A bit like when the graceful was introduced from America into Britain as a sort of frivolous exercise. We did that to you. Was that a good idea or a bad idea? And it drove the red squirrel extinct. And so I think that would be a better analogy for a group that, say, has a war like aggressive god, like Yahweh or like some of the Norse gods. You could make a case that having a militaristic god, maybe one who rewards martyrs in a martyr's heaven, that kind of religion might spread as a kind of group effect, as a kind of species effect, an ecological competition effect. But I would call that ecological competition rather than group selection. I think we have, because it's so let's just create an example. Let's say that Hitler won the Second World War and we are now living under the thousand year reich and everyone who's not a Nazi is now dead. So Nazism would have triumphed over all competing political ideologies so that we on some level, you can say, well, this is a selective effect. Right. There were various competitors for political ways of thinking, and one has finally dominated and canceled all others. But that doesn't seem to suggest an analogy to the replication model. I don't think it does. No, I don't think it does. Slightly closer would be if, say, within any country, individuals who espoused Nazi beliefs were more likely to survive than individuals who didn't. So there would be an individual differential survival effect, which probably would also be the case. That would be a closer analogy to Darwinian selection. And we might do a kind of Mimetic analysis of that nazi memes survive better than anti Nazi memes, for example. That would be the case of Mimetics. Yeah, I think that seems that might actually be the environment we're currently in on social media comment on that. So I guess one final question here. Are there outstanding questions in what is now called the neo Darwinian picture that are significant challenges to the model? I mean, there are many people and Brett, frankly is one of these people. There are many people speaking as though neodarwinism and perhaps you should actually define that term is basically flawed in a way that should be troubling to biologists and public intellectuals. Yes. I don't think that I mean, any flourishing science will will change, of course. And Steve Gould was fond of saying that the modern synthesis is effectively dead. And I thought that was a rather irritating attempt at almost self publicity. He was irritating in in many ways. First defined well, okay, neodarminism is the neodarwinian synthesis was a joint effort in the 1930s, really, of, I think, above all, RA Fischer, JBS. Haldane, sewell wright, ernst meyer, Theodosius objanski, gigi simpson and others. And it was seeing Darwinian evolution as changes in gene frequency in populations. That was the population genetic part of it seeing well, the paleontological part of it would be seeing major macroevolutionary change as microevolution writ large. The geneticist was showing how, from generation to generation, you could get slight changes in gene frequency. And the paleontologists like Simpson was showing that such micro evolutionary changes extrapolated over millions of years, tens, hundreds of millions of years could produce changes from fish to mammal. So this movement of the 1930s and 40s, we're still in it. It hasn't really changed much. There have been, I suppose, W. D. Hamilton with his analysis of altruism kin selected altruism is one major advance of the 1960s and 70s. But we're still in the neo Darwinian era. And you don't think there are gaping holes in the theory that should keep people no, I don't. I mean, there are questions that remain to be answered. One of the big riddles is the evolution of sex, what sex is good for, and lots of the most distinguished neo Darwinian theorists have grappled with that problem. The origin of the Darwinian process is still a bit of a mystery. How did the first replicator arise? It almost certainly wasn't DNA, actually. I mean, the first replicator would have been something else, would have been RNA maybe. That's a good possibility and that's one of the more fashionable ideas. But that is still in the realm of theory. It may never become settled because it happened a long time ago and maybe impossible to repeat exactly what happened. We know the kind of thing it was the origin of something self replicating, possibly RNA. What about epigenetics and the way in which this feature of our biology seems to suggest almost a quasi Lamarckian kind of inheritance, this strange word epigenetics because actually, originally it was just another word for the way we see embryology. Every cell in the every mitotic reproducing cell in the body has the same genes, all the genes that your brain cells that's right, yes. And different genes get turned on and so the epigenetic environment of a gene in a brain cell is different from that in a liver cell. That's epigenetics. The word has been hijacked fashionably recently by people with, as you say, a kind of neolamarquian bent to suggest that some of that epigenetic cytoplasmic environment in which some genes are turned on and others are not, can get inherited to the next generation. And that does seem to happen in some cases. So examples like the stress experienced by the mother with the infant in utero, the change in hormonal environment there can actually create some durable effect on the expression of genes in the baby. That does seem to be that there are a few rare cases like that. I don't think it's worth the attention that it's been given. I prefer to reserve the word epigenetics for the ordinary process of embryology and say just occasionally there may be epigenetic effects which do pass on to the next generation, maybe even to the grandchild generation. But it's not one of these things that goes on forever like true genetic mutation. So what is the current frontier of evolutionary voluntary sector? If you could take one of the questions if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I am speaking with Douglas Rushkoff. Douglas has been named one of the world's ten most influential intellectuals by MIT. He is an award winning author, broadcaster, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. He's often described as a media theorist. He is the host of the popular Team Human podcast, and he's written 20 books, including the bestsellers Present Shock and Program or Be Programmed. He's written regular columns for Medium, CNN, The Daily Beast and The Guardian. And he's made documentaries for PBS's show Frontline. And today we discuss his work and his most recent book, which is also titled Team Human. Anyway, it was great to talk to Douglas. We get into many of these issues, and he is certainly someone who spent a lot of time thinking about where we're all headed online. So now, without further delay, I bring you Douglas Rushkoff. I am here with Douglas Rushkoff. Douglas, thanks for coming on the podcast. Hey, thanks so much for having me. So you have a very interesting job description and background. How do you describe what you do and your intellectual journey? I mean, I guess what I do is I am arguing for human autonomy or human agency in an increasingly digital age. And I guess what brought me here was originally I was a theater director and I got fed up with narrative, really, especially these closed ended, predictable, but felt like almost propagandistic narrative of most theater. And the Internet came around and I saw chances for participation and interactivity and sort of the pre open source participatory narrative that we could rewrite the human story and print our own money and make our own meaning and started to write books about that. And I wrote a book called Siberia about designer reality, and one called Media Virus, which was celebrating this new stuff called viral media, which seemed like a good thing at the time. And then I watched as the Internet really became kind of the poster child for a failing Nasdaq stock exchange. And all of these companies, from Google to Facebook that said they would never be about advertising, became the biggest advertising companies in the world. And these tools, which I thought were going to be the new gateway or gateway drug in some ways to a new kind of collective human imagination, ended up being the opposite. So I've been not really writing books or struggling against technology so much as asking people to retrieve the human and bring it forward and embed it in the digital infrastructure rather than just surrendering all of this power and all of these algorithms to agendas that don't really have our best interest at heart. You're often described as a media theorist. Is that a label you happily wear, or does that kind of miss most of what you're up to? I mean, I happily wear it when people understand media theorist and the way I do, but to most people, I feel like the word media theorist sounds like some kind of PBS boring show or something. That's good for you. But when I think of someone like Walter Ong or Marshall Mccluan or Lewis Mumford, then, yeah, because I don't mind being a media theorist, because almost everything is media. It's almost hard to figure out something that's not media. So as someone who thinks about it, sure, but I guess over time, I've become a bit more of a social activist or an economic thinker. It's kind of hard to just to say, I'm thinking about the content on television. I'm thinking more about the platforms and the political economy that's driving this media. Was McLuhan influential for you? I guess I should be embarrassed to say, I mean, I didn't really read McLuhan. He's famously unreadable. Yeah, maybe that's why. But I didn't read him until after people said, oh, your work is like McLuhan's. So I was three books in, really. It was after media virus. People started to say, this is what McLuhan was saying. And so then I went back and read him afterwards. And, yeah, he was crazy smart, but it's a bit like reading Torah or something, where everything he says, I could say, oh, it means this, or it means that. So while it's a terrific intellectual exercise, it's a bit like it becomes like James Joyce, where you can almost argue about it more than make sense of it sometimes. Honestly, part of why I'm excited to be talking with you is because there's certain ideas that I'm really unresolved about and sort of certain understandings of the human story, if you will, that I'm still really challenged by. And in writing this book, I feel like, on the one hand, I'm maybe accidentally or unintentionally telling a new myth. I'm sort of arguing in this book that humanity is a team sport, and that if you look at evolution or even read Darwin, there's just as many examples of cooperation and collaboration leading to species success as there is competition. And that if we want to understand human beings as the most advanced species, we should think about the reasons for that are language and collaboration and increasing brain size. So the Dunbar Number got up to over 100 people that we could collaborate and coordinate. And then, of course, I argue that all the institutions and media and technologies that we came up with to enhance that collaboration, they tend to be used against that. So instead of bringing people together, social media atomizes people into the separate silos or even you can go back and see how text abstracted people from the sort of tribal oral culture and then you could even argue that language before that disconnected people from some essential grunts or something. But that becomes an almost Eden like myth that I don't want to fall into to say oh, don't listen to the libertarian story, listen to this story instead. But then we're stuck in another story. What I'm really aching for, what I'm looking to do is to give people reasons to celebrate humanity for its own sake and human values and retrieve what I consider to be, and I hate even the word but these essential human values without requiring some mythology or some story to justify it. I'd rather justify it with science or with common sense or with some sort of an ethical template than, you know, than some other story, right? My first reaction to some of those ideas is that, you know, basically everything we do, virtually everything, has a potential upside and downside. And the thing that empowers us, the lever that we can pull that moves a lot in our world or in our experience, also shifts some things that we don't want to see moved. As you said, you could walk us all the way back to the dawn of language, right? And obviously language is the source of virtually everything we do that makes us recognizably human, right? It is the main differentiator and yet language under one construal. Anyone who has taken psychedelics or spent a lot of time meditating or trying to learn to meditate recognizes that this compulsive conceptualizing through language, this tiling over of experience that we do just as a matter of course once we learn to think linguistically. It is in most cases the limiting factor on our well being in so many moments because so much of the conversation we have with ourselves is a source of anxiety and despair. And yet we can't have civilization without our full linguistic competence and we certainly want to be able to use it on demand all the time. And basically any other complex technology built on language, every form of media has had this upside and downside. So as you briefly gestured at this now fairly famous notion that just the mere introduction of print and a widespread ability for people to read and write was bemoaned by many intellectuals of the time as a guaranteed way to lose our collective memory, the oral tradition would erode, each person's capacity to memorize things would disappear. And given the advantages of print and reading, that seems like a fairly fatuous concern. And yet it probably is also true, right? You can carry that forward into the present with respect to the way markets and digital technology are changing us, right? I mean, the one difference really between speech, text, radio, television, and today and digital technology is that the algorithms that we're building, the artificial intelligences that we're building, continue on. They change themselves as they go. If the words that we spoke mutated after they were out of our mouths in order to affect people differently, it would be very different than if they were just coming from us. So I get concerned that people are not. Certainly the companies that are building these technologies don't quite realize what they're setting in motion, that the values that they're embedding in these technologies end up well. The technologies end up doing what we tell them, but by any means that they see fit, they keep going, and we're not even privy to the techniques that they're using to elicit whatever response they want from us. So while I could certainly look at capitalism as a system that ended up seemingly kind of having its own agenda and capitalism working on us, and the defenseless CEO or the unconscious shareholder or the worker who's being exploited, that all of these people are kind of stuck in this system that they don't understand. But digital technology seems to make this reversal between the figure and the ground, or I guess McLuhan would say, the medium and the message. But I really just think it's the subject and the object that instead of having these tools that we're putting out there to get things that we want or to help us in some way, we're using these tools to get something out of us. We've turned this language, these machines, on the human psyche. And whether we're using Las Vegas slot machine algorithms or telling them to develop their own, they're looking for exploits in the human psyche. So the exploits aren't things that we look at or notice while we're meditating and go, oh, that's interesting. This must have evolved from the human need to do something. And while on one level it's a neurosis, on the other level, it's part of my human strength. And we could look at how do I want to use this in my life? The algorithm just sees it as a whole, oh, look, I can leverage that person's instinct for reciprocity, or, look, I can see this one trying to establish rapport and taking all of these painstakingly evolved social mechanisms and using them against us, you know, and that's where I can sort of feel that there's a kind of a good and an evil, and I never really go there in any of my prior work. I tried to be kind of non judgmental, but now I'm really arguing that whenever one of these technologies or languages or algorithms, when they're bringing us together, they're doing good, and when they're turning us against each other, they're doing bad. Just to have almost a simple litmus test for people to understand, am I helping or hurting? Are there companies that are getting to scale in the digital economy that are actually doing it well, that are at all aligned with your more idealistic notions of what the Internet could be doing to us and for us? Well, I don't know that there are companies that are doing it. There are certainly organizations that are doing it, whether it's a Mozilla, which invented the browser, really, archive.org, which is a great organization, where tremendous film archives and text archives, and the Gutenberg Project, the example everyone uses Wikipedia, is at scale and doing a good job. But they're not companies as such. The only companies I'm really seeing doing that are cooperatives. And I've gotten inspired by the platform cooperative movement, and there's many companies that sort of model themselves on the famous Spanish montregon cooperative, but basically where workers own the company. But that's not necessarily just a digital tradition. Associated Press is a co op. Ace True Value Hardware is an employee owned co op. So I've seen things reach scale that way, but usually, at least so far, they're not these traditional shareholder owned companies. How would you compare something like Netflix to Facebook? I consider myself a reluctant and none too well informed student of digital capitalism. Essentially, having a podcast and other endeavors, I've had to turn more and more attention to this. But I feel quite late to begin analyzing all of this. But in sort of the front facing, just consumer eye view of these platforms. When I look at Netflix, clearly they're playing games with algorithms, and they're trying to figure out how to maximize my time on their platform. But my experience is I want them to have all the content they can have. I want them to promote content that I find interesting rather than boring or haphazard connection between my interests and what they're promoting. So insofar as their algorithms begin to read my mind and anticipate what I will find interesting, and they do that better and better, and it becomes stickier and stickier on some level, I don't see the downside. I can curate the contents of my own consciousness enough to know that if I've spent 17 uninterrupted hours on Netflix, I've got a problem. So if every time I open that app, things just get better and better, that's good. And the business model there is, I have to pay a subscription fee, and presumably they're not selling my data to anybody, and I'm not the product. Right. Whereas with Facebook, everything is flipped. And again, they're trying to gain my attention and keep me on site. In the case of Facebook, it's completely ineffectual. But they're doing that in order to sell my attention against ads. And we know more and more about the downside of those incentives and that business model. Do you see the distinction between these two companies this way, or is there something I'm missing? No, I definitely see netflix versus Facebook is sort of the same thing to me as Apple versus Google, where here's a company where if I've got the money and that's kind of the sticking point, if I've got the money to pay for it. I can buy television and technology and email and all of these things that are treating me as the customer. And I'm paying for my privacy. I'm paying for my customization. I'm paying for it to understand me for my benefit and my enjoyment. Whereas on Facebook or Google, you know, we understand that we're not the customer and that someone else is paying Facebook or Google to understand us for their benefit and then not just understand us, but tweak us to their benefit. So if Facebook can determine with 80% accuracy that I'm going to go on a diet in the next six weeks, I'm going to start seeing advertising and updates and things to push me towards going on a diet. And they're not just doing that to sell the specific products, the specific diet products that are on their site, but to increase that 80% to 90%. They want to increase the likelihood that I will do the thing that they've predicted I do. So when I look at a platform like that, or when I look at the way YouTube makes suggestions of what videos I should watch, and when I go down three, four videos in, I'm always at some really dangerously extreme version of whatever it was that I was initially interested in. I see these platforms turning me into a caricature of myself or trying to get me to behave more consistently with the statistical algorithm that's predicted my behavior. Whereas on Netflix, the extent to which they use algorithms to deliver up to me what I might like, I find that almost part of the entertainment. You know, I'm interested when I finished narcos Mexico, you know, and I the next if they knew I finished it, then the next morning, I look in my inbox, and they say, here's what we think you might like next. Based on the last six things I watched, as well as how much I paused, how quickly I got through them, I mean, they're using a wealth of information I find it interesting, and I almost enjoy and maybe this is just sickness, but I enjoy using it as a mirror. In other words, what shows do I have to watch on Netflix to get it to suggest Roma? For me, right, because I wanted to think that I'm that kind of person. Apparently you're not that kind of person. I guess not. I watch too much Game of Thrones kinds of things, and they don't realize that I have that side. But the downside with Netflix and their algorithms is not so much what they suggest, but sometimes I'm a little creeped out by the way they construct some of their shows. So we know that House of Cards was partly derived through algorithms. They found out that, oh, people that like David Fincher also like political intrigue. Also like Kevin Spacey. I didn't know that. That's interesting. Yeah, and they concocted it. And then I wondered why the show kind of went through me. Like cheese doodles or something. It's like cheese Doodles is this sort of industrial age, taste, styrofoam sensation that's constructed for me to keep eating. It compulsively, but it doesn't actually deliver any nutrition. And I kind of felt that way with those shows. But the biggest problem right now, and it shouldn't be seen as a problem, is you get what you pay for. And I do get concerned about bifurcating society into these two classes of people, those of us who can afford to maintain our autonomy by paying for our technologies, and those, I suppose, who still need the remedial help of marketing on free platforms. Well, that really is the source of the tension I see, because, again, I have a podcaster's eye view of this. But as someone who's decided not to take ads and to just have listeners support the show, I now have a very clear view of these two business models. There's just the PBS NPR version, which is, this thing is free, and if you want to support it, you can. And I know how that works. And I've just released a meditation app, which is a subscription only service through the App Store, through the Google Play Store. So that's all behind a paywall. And I see that on the podcast side. I have been engaged in this fairly heavy handed effort to educate my audience to support this work if they wanted to exist. You know, many more people engage with the podcast than have ever engaged with my books. I know. I listened to that little six minute piece you did on why you have people, why you want people to contribute, and it articulated what the exact same thing I feel, is I'll do one podcast, or I did one of those Ted Talks for free. More people watch that Ted Talk than have bought all the books I've ever written combined. Yeah, it's amazing. And you want that kind of reach, obviously you want because the goal is as a writer or as a public intellectual or someone with any ideas that you want to spread, you want to reach as many people as can conceivably find them, these ideas valuable. And yet what's happened here is that your phrase, you get what you pay for, I think is true, and yet it's antithetical to everyone's expectations, even mine, frankly. Online, we're expecting our information to be free. There are certain contexts where people understand that they're going to hit a paywall, and that's somehow fine. Like Netflix is the classic example. Here's a pretty clear case. Like, Joe Rogan has a podcast. It's obviously free. It's supported by ads. Millions and millions of people listen to it. But then he often releases a comedy special on Netflix. I don't think there's anyone thinking that they should be able to watch his special for free. I don't think he gets angry emails saying, what the hell? Why are you putting this behind Netflix's paywall? But if he put it on YouTube, if you put online in some other context and put it behind a Paywall, it was like Vimeo on demand or something and he was charging $5 for people to see it, I think you would get a lot of grief over that. And it's just a very odd situation where we were in certain contexts and the widest possible context online. We have trained ourselves to expect things for free and yet the only way free is possible is this increasingly insidious ad model that is gaming people's attention. And in certain contexts it's innocuous. I don't have not against ads across the board, but in others it just feels like this is the problem we want to figure out how to solve. And yet even you voice the concern. If we put everything behind a paywall, then we have a real problem of people not being able to get access to content that we really do want to spread as widely as possible. Right? I mean, I heard your conversation with Jaron Lanier about this and it's interesting that he was sort of blaming the famous truncated Stewart Brand quote, information wants to be free, which always people leave off. But information also wants to be protected is the second half of that sentence. Apologies to Stewart. Yeah, but I don't think I look back at the early Internet and the reason why everything was free is because the Internet was a university based system. We were using Gopher and Veronica. It's these early previsual text only Internet search retrieval systems and you would download and share documents, but it was all university archives. It was free material. So because it was part of a nonprofit academic world, because people actually signed an agreement before they went on the net saying, I promise I'm using this for research purposes. I'm not going to do anything commercial on here. I'm not going to advertise anything. You actually signed an agreement. It set up expectations of a very different place. The Internet really was intended at that point to become a commons. Then once we brought business on, businesses really leveraged and exploited that freeness. The sense that everybody wanted things to be free without ever really bringing forward that sort of academic ethos along with it and it created a real mess. And then I remember the moment that I really thought it would change and maybe it did, was when Steve Jobs did his iPad demo and he was sitting in this big easy chair and showing a different posture and the iPad worked differently. The iPad, you couldn't just kind of download files the way you did with your computer. Now you were going to go through an itunes store to look at stuff. And I feel like what he was trying to do almost with the skill of a neurolinguistic programmer. He was trying to anchor this device in a different social contract between the user and the content maker. And to some extent it worked, at least in the Apple universe. He said, look, it's going to be easier and better to buy something through itunes than to go play around on Napster just collecting music for the sake of it. Yeah, well, part of it is once you move to digital and people understand that there's zero marginal cost in producing the content right, and that their use of a file doesn't prevent anyone else from using that same MP3 or whatever it is, at least psychologically. That seems to be one of the reasons why there's this expectation that free is the actual ethical norm and they're okay with that. First they came for the musicians and I said nothing. Then they came for the cab drivers and I said nothing, and then once they come for me so the thing that people are upset about is not that they're ruining all these other people's jobs and taking all this stuff. The thing that they worry about is, well now my privacy is being invaded, so now I'm going to get up in arms about what's happening here, or now my job is in danger, so now I'm going to get upset about that. Yeah, well, people speak specifically of what it's like to be a writer. Recently, an article, I think it was an op ed in The New York Times. It might have been the Washington Post. But in the last couple of weeks, talking about the economics of writing and how dismal they've become and it's amazing. I've had some sense of this for some time, but to read these stats was fairly alarming. The average professional writer who's making some portion of his or her living from writing is living below the poverty line. And even you have to be a massive outlier in terms of just not even an ordinary bestseller to make a very good living from writing. And for the most part, professional writers have to have other jobs. Most professional writers who turn out a book every year or two or three have professorships or they have something else that's paying the bills and that's not an optimal world to live in, especially when you throw in journalism there, which is massively underfunded. And ironically, we're living to some degree in a recent heyday of journalism because of how awful Trump is. Still, there's a kind of winner take all effect there where you have the New York Times and The Atlantic doing well and, and then everyone else still going slowly or quickly bankrupt. How do you view journalism and the life of, of a writer at this point? It's, it's harder. You know, I'm, I'm lucky in that, you know, when I wrote my first books in the early ninety s, it was still the end of the golden period for authors where I would write a book that sold a lot less than my books do now but my publisher would send me on airplanes on a book tour. I'd stay in the author's suite of hotels. And they had these special suites that we would go to at fireplaces and the books of all the people who had stayed in it before. And you'd get this person called a media escort who would take you to your events in the different towns, who was also being paid somehow, who was also being somehow right. And then whatever Viacom buys Simon and Schuster which buys each of the little publishers and all the slack and went out of the wheel somehow. They started to use just much more accurate spreadsheets and all the wiggle room that we had in publishing. It was an industry that somehow just kind of got by about at the same size. I guess for a few centuries, it just sort of worked. And we lost the ability to kind of fudge our way through that. And they started to demand better margins and more of a squeeze and yeah, the power law dynamics of the internet then came into it. So it's better for a publisher to sell a Taylor Swift's autobiography and sell half a million copies of that than 40,000 copies of a book that's going to actually change the way people think and it's tricky. I decided to get my PhD late. I got my PhD when I was 50 or 49 and that was right after the 2007 crash when all the publishers were asking for books that could help business people one way or another. Every book I wrote was supposed to have a business self help aspect to it. So I got a university job so that I could write books like Programmer be Programmed in Present Shock or Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus these ones or this one team Human which are books promoting humanism and I don't have to worry as much about whether I sell 5000 or 50,000 copies. But it's it's sad. I've done university lectures where college students a common question I've gotten is why should journalists get paid for what they do? If I could blog as easily as them so they've almost lost all touch with the other there's so much in that. It's one of the more terrifying questions I've heard. Yeah it's frightening. I mean the way I answer it now is well if governments and corporations can spend billions of dollars on propaganda don't you want someone who has enough money to spend a couple of weeks deconstructing what you're being told? It makes no sense. If I had to list my fears around what technology is doing to us the erosion of the economics of journalism is one and also just the distortion of their incentives. I mean the fact that even our best organs of journalism are part of the clickbait logic and it's. Incentivizing all the wrong things. But what we want, we should be able to reverse engineer this. We know we want smart people to be well compensated for taking months to really fully explore and vet topics of great social importance. And so the question is, how do we get there? And the idea that someone could take months to write the best piece that has been written in a decade on the threat of nuclear war, say, right, and that that could just sink below the noise of Kim Kardashian's latest tweet. In a similar vein, our president's latest tweet and just disappear from a news cycle and therefore earn comparatively little ad revenue. And the net message of all of that is that those kinds of journalistic efforts don't pay for themselves and that we really don't need people to hold those jobs because we can't figure out how to pay them. That's very scary to me. Yeah. And it should be. And we do see a few networks or cooperatives, like the journalists who put together the Panama Papers, and we see some response to that. I don't like the opposite alternative where it started to feel like, to me anyway, coming up, that the the journalists who got the the well, who got the biggest platforms, tended to be people who were paid well enough by the system not to challenge neoliberalism. It's like, well, if you pay the journalists enough, then they're going to support the system. As it is, they'll drink martinis and shut up. So now that it's getting harder and harder for journalists to make ends meet, I feel like a little bit of them there might be a little bit of a positive effect in terms of at least in terms of their politics. And they're looking at saying, oh, now I'm a gig worker, now I'm in precarity, and there's something valuable to not being able to just graduate an Ivy League school and get to write books for the rest of your life. Well, what do you do with the fact that this seems to be the counterargument, is that people want what they want, and it's not an accident that certain media products get tens of millions of views and certain others just sink beneath the waves, no matter how valid or valuable the content is, right? So if it's just a fact that only 8000 people in the United States really want to read the next white paper about climate change, well, then you can't monetize that white paper, because people just don't care about climate change now. They should care about it. And we have to keep trying to figure out how to make them care about it. But if they don't care about it, given the glut of information, given the fact that, again, you can just binge watch Game of Thrones for the third time, and you can't stop people from doing that, this is just a kind of fool's errand to figure out how to get them to take their medicine. On some level, what we're saying is that if it can't be made interesting enough and titillating enough so as to actually survive competition with everything else that's interesting and titillating, well, then maybe it deserves to sink. Even if that is selecting for the kardashians of the world and varying important stories. It's interesting. I make the same sort of argument in Team Human when I'm kind of defending the work of David Lynch against the more commercial kinds of movies and the way that Hollywood will use that argument. They'll say, well, look, people in the mall, they want to see the blockbuster with the spoiler and the climactic ending. They don't want to see the thing that makes you think they don't want the strange. But I think people do, deep down want that. I do think people want to experience awe, and they want to engage with paradox and with ambiguity and with depth. What makes me so annoyed with Netflix is that you can't talk about a Netflix show with someone else because you'll be on season three, episode seven, and they're on season two, episode one, and you're going to spoil something for them. Because these shows themselves are basically timelines of IP, of little IP bombs, the little spoilers that show up every three or four episodes. It's like the value of the thing, and you keep undoing them. It's, oh, Mr. Robot, he is his father. Or each one of them has these almost stock reversals, and you look at real art. What's the spoiler in a David Lynch movie? I couldn't even tell you what it was about after I've seen it twice anyway, even though I've loved it. But the idea that we should deliver what people want because this is this is what they're they're paying tickets for doesn't really make sense when the whole thing has been has been contextualized that way. And in other words, I don't think that's what people really want so much as that's what we're being trained, or that there are shows that almost open up wonder, or that almost make deep arguments, or books that make quasi deep arguments, but then just solve everything at the end. There is a right answer. So in a show I don't know if you saw that Westworld show on HBO, no, there is an answer. It's all these timelines that are all over the place, and then you find out, oh, these were different timelines, and this happened then, and this happened then, and this happened now, and it's just a kind of a postmodern Pyrotechnic, but it gets you to that same place where there is an answer. And every article we write is supposed to have, yes, therefore you should take Echinacea or don't take Echinacea, or vote for Trump, or don't vote for Trump. This need to give people the conclusion as if, well, I'm not going to pay you for an article or a book. If you don't give me the answer by the end, I'm not going to watch your movie unless everything works out by the end. And that's in some ways, the most dangerous aspect of this cultural collapse that we're in, that everything has to have an answer or every effort has to have a utility value that's recognizable at least by the time you've done this thing. Because you can't reduce all human activity, all writing, all product, all culture to its utilitarian value. And this is where I get into that weird, mythic religious place that I'm still uncomfortable speaking out loud, but I just read a reread Horkheimer. He wrote this book, The Eclipse of Reason, and he was talking about the difference between reason with a capital R, the real reasons, the essential human values we do things versus the small R utilitarian reasons we do things. And what I'm really trying to do is stress that human beings have capital R reasons for things, that there is something more going on here that meets the eye. And I don't just mean some magical other dimension, but some essential value to to human camaraderie, to establishing rapport, to being together, to looking in someone's eyes. It's not I mean, yes, it's the mirror. Neurons fire and the oxytocin goes through your bloodstream and your your breathing rate sink up. And this is the stuff that you studied, you know, and and and there's an evolutionary small R reason to establish rapport, but is there another one? Is there a value, is there a meaning to this? And that's the part I'm not willing to give up. That's the big argument that I guess the real thing I'm in now is the argument with the Transhumanists or the Posthumanists or the Singularitans who really believe that technology is our evolutionary successor and we should pass the torch to technology because tech will not only write a more factual article and a more utilitarian program, but tech is more complicated. It's a more complex home for information than the human mind. So we should pass the torch. And when I say no, that human beings are special and I start talking about awe and meditation and camaraderie and establishing rapport, I mean, the one that the famous transhumanist, I'll leave him nameless. I was on a panel with him and he said, oh, Rushkov, you're just saying that because you're a human. As if it was hubris for me to argue this, to argue for humanity. And that's when I decided, okay, I'll be on Team Human. I'll make a bet that there's something important here because without that as a starting place, I find it hard to make any of the arguments that we're making, whether they're against the market or against automation or against all of our stuff being for free or the collapse of quality or just giving in to consumerism. It seems that I have to hold up some sort of essential human value that needs to be recognized rather than surrendered so readily. Well, I guess there are two different kinds of surrender or blurring of the border between the human and what might be beyond. I guess you could talk about artificial intelligence replacing us or augmenting us. I know you touch if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I bring you a conversation with a person who agrees with me, and I with him on this point. David from is going to walk us through current events once again. There is just no way to keep up with the cascade of scandals. We had this conversation a day before Trump announced that he would be pulling us out of the Paris Climate Accord. I think I will reserve comment about that for a future podcast. I'm sure I'll have a climate change expert on at some point to talk about this. Let's just say it's another way in which Trump seems to be forcing our country into a kind of exile among developed nations. It's as though his only goal is to diminish our stature in the world. But David and I spoke before all that. David, as you recall, he's a senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine. He's a former speechwriter for George Bush, and he's someone who's been unusually clear eyed about the problem of Trump in office. So I bring you David from I am here once again with David From. David, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Thanks for having me. What a pleasure. As I was saying to you offline, you are a true road warrior here. You were doing this interview from an airport. You have found a reasonably quiet corner of a lounge. So I apologize in advance for any imperfections in the sound we're going to be treating our listeners to. So thanks for doing this. And we are jumping into another conversation about politics to the consternation of the, I think, small percentage of my listeners who are diehard Trump supporters. I want to start, as I attempted to start my last conversation with you, and I think I do this really every time I touch the subject. Now, I want to attempt to anchor this to some basic understanding that partisanship is not what is motivating this conversation. I think there are a few simple moves we can make to at least establish that to a moral certainty for any reasonable person in the audience. And one is to say that the implication of everything we're going to say that is probably urging impeachment proceedings along is that we are eager to have a President Mike Pence right. So that this is not we're not talking about a choice between Trump and hillary. Now we're talking about everything we say that suggests he's unfit for office, is ushering in a Republican replacement, and one who I'm really not at all sanguine about, given my concerns about the influence of religion in politics. And perhaps there are other ways to do it, but that is that is a fairly simple one. Can you think of anything to say apart from just referencing your obvious background as a Republican that can cut through this this allegation of partisanship? Before we start, the rule I try to follow, don't always look up to it by try is no arguments about arguments. So somebody will make a point. Comedian should not make a sketch about the assassination of a president. Twitch response will be not to engage with that, but to say, well, did you comment in a similar way about a situation that I personally believe is to be analogous? And you get this infinite regress where arguments turn into arguments about arguments. So with the present president, your statements about him are either true or false. And you may have good or bad motives, but they're either true or false. So it's either true or false that he's behaving in a certain way, that he's a man of certain character, that he's doing certain things to our alliance structure, or it's not. And these constant attempts to sort of go to the argument behind the argument, I think in the case of Trump in particular, that they are desperation moves. Trump is a very hard person to defend on the merits. So it's hard to say that. It's hard to acquit him on the Russia matter. It's hard to suggest that he is a person who lives up to the ethical and character standards that we've accepted of past presidents. And so you get these moves where they say, well, let's not talk about him. Let's talk about you. Frankly, I'm not that interesting, so I don't think anybody wants to talk about me. We want to talk about Donald Trump, who's the most powerful man in the world and probably one of the more interesting men in the world. Okay, yeah, well, I think that's good enough. I went out on Twitter a couple of hours ago asking for the hardest and most sane questions in defense of Trump for us. And honestly, I didn't get much. I will read some of those questions. Many of them focus on the problem of information siloing and fake news. And it is alleged that you and I are the victims of fake news and conspiracy theories. The whole Russia conspiracy is a conspiracy theory. I can come up with a much better argument in his defense. I'd love to hear it. What's prop him up for me? Okay, well, this is not an argument, actually, exactly in defense of him, but it's an argument that works his defense, which is, all of the disturbing things we know are many of the disturbing things we know about him. We know because people entrusted with public secrets have broken their oaths and released into the public domain information that is meant to be private within the government. And this information often involves real compromising of really important secrets. The Russians are not babies. The Russians do not have their important conversations on open lines. They have their conversations on lines by modes that they believe to be secure. So every time that somebody from the NSA or CIA or National Security Council releases something about what the Russians are saying with Trump or about some conversation between the Trump camp and the Russians, they reveal to the Russians that something the Russians had thought was secret is not, in fact, secret. And that is a real loss to the United States. And what somebody might say to me is, you are very angry at Edward Snowden and Bradley Chelsea Manning for betraying secrets. Here are secrets being betrayed. Why aren't you equally angry? That's the best argument. I view that as the way in which our political norms are eroding under what I'm increasingly viewing as a failed pressure testing of our system. The fact that you and I can be sanguine and even greedy with respect to leaks of classified intelligence that do our society harm. I would say I'm not sanguine about this. I mean, I think one of the tragedies of the Trump presidency trump's advent of the presidency is itself a terrible blow to the institutions of the United States and the things that society is having to do in an effort to defend itself against him, which may or may not ultimately be successful. I'm not saying that Trump won't ultimately prevail over these institutions, but themselves come with terrible costs. No, I was granting that. I'm saying I want those leaks to continue because I think Trump is so bad. But no, I'm not downplaying the cost at all. I think it's fairly terrifying that we're in this position. Look at what's happened with give you another example of the cost, the action of the courts in striking down Trump's. I don't know. Are we allowed to call it a Muslim ban? Yes, you can read the fine print on that. Yes, let's call it that, a Muslim ban. He's Muslim. Ban. The courts are these judicial decisions I mean, I think I basically agree with what they're trying to do, that you can say these actions by the president are obviously capricious. They're obviously motivated by animus. They're obviously stupid and irrational. However, the precedent's authority over immigration is plenary that these are. He is clearly acting within what would have been thought of as his rights until six months ago because he's so flagrantly using this power for ill and for malice and without a basis in an indiscriminatory way. The courts are telling him he can't do it, but the courts are overstepping. Let me give you one more example of a price of Trump, and this is maybe the most serious one of all. Everyone's laughing over this funny fake tweet that he did last night. The mangled thing that then it was a typo and it stayed out for 6 hours. Okay, so what it looked a lot like happened like was the President was tweeting while falling asleep, had some kind of spasm with his fingers, tweeted something nonsensical passed out so he didn't notice it and nobody found him for 6 hours or noticed the tweet or did anything about it. That's very amusing. While it can happen he's older man, maybe he takes sleeping pills. This is a man who also has a power with his other fingers to launch a nuclear war. We all are wondering whether the people who execute his commands would take an order from Donald Trump about a nuclear war in the same obedient way they would take an order from a Barack Obama or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. And I think we all kind of hope that they wouldn't. But what do we call societies where military people don't defer to the civilian leadership? Banana republics? What do we call them? Yeah, right. The point is that we are not coming out of this hole. However the story ends, we are going to have major losses for our institutions. Yeah, well, so let's talk about how the story might end. I want to talk about the Russia investigation. But first let's talk about some of these losses we've already noticed. How is Trump's foreign policy going? He just got back from this trip and I noticed that you reacted to the McMaster oped which seemed to rescind just what it really has been a multigenerational vision of a world where established democracies cooperate in ways that aren't guided by narrow self interest. And apparently we're no longer into that in the world. Before World War II, countries behaved like selfish entities and they regarded the world as basically a competitive enterprise. The United States, the other great powers, small powers too, it was a cab Asian world of all against all. And after World War II, our parents and grandparents decided we're not doing that anymore. And what we're going to do is this is this can't apply to the whole planet. Was there a lot of authoritarian regimes? There are a lot of backward societies. But among the advanced democracies we're going to build new kinds of structures where international politics begins to look a lot like domestic politics. So if an American company and a German company have a dispute that gets settled in more or less the same way as if two American companies had a dispute. If, if there's even a trade dispute between the German and American government or between the United States and the EU, that gets settled in a way that looks a lot like a domestic. There's that there are set of rules that are agreed upon in advance by the two sovereigns. The rules are then arbitrated by a neutral adjudicator that arbitration is binding, and you can then enforce it inside the court system of either country from in this zone of peace and cooperation that's the NATO countries, plus Japan, plus Australia, New Zealand, plus a few others, international and domestic politics, blur to a great example. I regard that as one of the most signal political accomplishments of the human race. So the Trump people went to Europe and they said, as far as we're concerned, that's over. We regard the countries of Europe and we don't first, we don't even acknowledge there is such a thing as the EU. And we regard the countries of Europe as power competitors in exactly the same way that we would regard Russia or China or Uzbekistan or Congo, and we call you our friends. But we think our relationship is regulated entirely by interest, not by values and interests in the most short sighted way. So when we have a trade dispute, we go to bat for the American company. We don't ask the question who's right? Or how do we sustain a long term regime? We just say, our guys, our guys win, your guys lose. Mike makes right. The stronger imposes his will on the weaker, and we're counting on ourselves to be the stronger for a long time to come. Here. You have a great passage in this op ed quote. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the Trump presidency is the way even its most worldly figures, in words composed for them by its deepest thinkers, have reimagined the United States in the image of their own chief selfish, isolated, brutish, domineering, and driven by immediate appetites rather than ideals or even long term interests. And I think that just puts it perfectly. It really is. This is the character of our country, too, which should be our greatest concern, but the way in which defenders of Trump have to basically I mean, you put it this way in a tweet people who defend Trump become just like Trump. And, you know, I said something similar a few days before, just watching how otherwise serious people with I mean, the most serious people in his administration, the people who we were relieved to see appointed, because finally there are a few grown ups at the table. You have them just jettison their credibility and their ethical gravitas insofar as they could maintain it for an hour. In the current administration, they just perform a kind of moral self immolation trying to defend him. They immediately start lying or speaking orwellian euphemisms. Just the sickness spreads. That's one of the most worrying things about what's happening in Washington right now. I agree. And the tragedy of McMaster this is happening with HR. McMaster. In his case, it really is like an opera, because I'm sure he took the job with a view to minimizing the harm, the harm that Donald Trump would do. And I'm sure in all kinds of ways that we won't know for 2030 years. He is minimizing the harms that Donald Trump would do. I'm sure he's playing a very public spirited role and sacrificing his own reputation in the process, which is kind of noble in a way. But at the same time, he is called on to tell lies about petty things, and he's doing it. So, one more question on foreign policy here, because this genuinely surprised me, and I'm sure there's some way of seeing it where it would just have been obvious he would behave this way. But I was not expecting Trump to behave the way he did with the Saudis, where he really just became like a lispiddle to the Saudi regime. He talked tough during the campaign. You can see tweets of his where he talks about their abuse of women and human rights and their responsibility for terrorism and exporting the Wahhabi worldview to the ends of the earth. He seemed to be aware of just how beyond the pale, much of what they do is and has been for a long time. And yet he didn't make a peep about this and then singled out Iran as though they were the true engine of jihadist terror. Can you explain what happened there? I can't, actually. I'm sure there is an explanation. I don't have the information to assess how much of this is driven by crass business dealings, how much of this is driven by the ideology of the people around him, how much of this is driven by certain kinds of domestic political considerations that he trump? Balances a lot of the pretty obvious antisemitism in his entourage with kind of championing of the foreign policy views of certain parts of the right wing of the Jewish community. Some of that may be in play there. There may just be, by the way, sluffinliness and lack of attention, where because he was flattered that he got dragged into endorsing the Saudi side of an internal sectarian war in the Islamic world. I can't assess all of those things. And look, there are also serious reasons why the United States will go and has gone easy on Saudi Arabia and will continue to do so, so long as oil remains an important fuel. One of the things I think is sort of exciting by the time we live in there are a lot of bad things is within the life of the younger listeners to this podcast. I think that day they will see the end of that day, but I don't think I will. That's something we should be going full speed ahead on, obviously. Okay, so the Russia investigation, how is that going? I was going to have you on the episode I did last week with Anne Applebaum and Juliet Kym, but then we had scheduling issues and your interview got pushed like, another 36 hours in the future. And the news was changing so fast that I got the sense that if we just waited a few more days, all of a sudden we would be in a completely different news cycle with new facts to worry about. And indeed that has happened since I had that conversation with Anne and Juliet. We now have Kushner and his back channel, as well as the ham fisted response to that disclosure on part of the administration. So talk to me about how things are going now in this investigation. Well, Anne, of course, has always been a great teacher of mine. So people who got to hear her, I think really I know how much I've benefited from her wisdom on these issues over the years, and I hope that your listeners would agree with me about that because she really has been at tremendous personal risk. I don't and doesn't tend to talk about this, but she has herself been a target and her family of Russian active messengers and disinformation, and it has taken a terrible price from her. And she's not one to complain about it, but it's true and needs to be recognized. Yeah, she's fantastic. On the Kushner matter, we still don't know exactly what happened. I think it's important in all of these cases not to get ahead of the story because you can see how rumor can easily overspread and you can disillusion people that they expect bigger news than they get. And I think we all need to be very cognizant of the terrible, terrible example of Louise Mitch, who is just I don't know if people listen to this podcast or wherever, but Louise Mitch, she was a British Conservative member of Parliament. She's had a very exotic career in a lot of ways, and the latest she's no longer in Parliament and the latest chapter of her career, she's become a disseminator of the inverse of RT. If there were an anti RT that is very anti Russian in its tone but just like RT in its method, in its total disregard for knowledge and fact of making up stories and circulating wild rumors in this struggle for the character of the country. Being careful with what you know and being careful about what you say is an important moral principle, not just a prudential principle. You don't want to be like the people who abuse the credibility of their audience. So I'm waiting to see if is the story what is the dimension of this story? We've heard many explanations of what could have happened. I have to tell you, the answers that come from the Kushner's spinners don't sound very plausible. The idea that the president's son in law with no military experience proposed to go into a Russian compound, have a secure conversation about military dispositions in Syria, we have an entire Pentagon. If anyone is going to talk about, well, how do we make sure that we avoid plane crashes? It's not going to be Jared Kushner. It's going to be the people in the Pentagon. And they have lots of ways of communicating with their Russian counterparts and in ways that are much more secure both technically and also making sure that you don't reveal more than you want to reveal. So that story doesn't seem right. On the other hand, the darkest version of the story, which is that Kushner was seeking some kind of personal financial advantage, which was suggested by a Bloomberg report. We don't know that to be true either. There are some stray hints about that, but that shouldn't be taken as written. All we know is the story is exceedingly strange, very difficult to justify and there has been no credible effort to justify it. And it is behavior that if not justified, should lead to the loss at least of a security clearance and maybe outright resignation and possibly even harsher sanctions. Yeah. And the effort to justify that I've seen most commonly is that it relies on equivocating on this term back channel, the claim that back channels are kind of standard operating procedure as though this sort of back channel is equivalent to the other kinds of back channels people are talking about. That is a truly specious move, isn't it? Yeah, well the people who make this point are they throw out this word as if we know what it means and if they know what it hits it. What is a back channel? That term gets applied to two kinds of conversations. The first is a conversation where in an effort to explore with an adversary, the government of the United States will send somebody who is connected to the adversary, but deniable by the United States. A business person, a retired military person, somebody who if the conversation goes wrong, the United States can say hey, he was just gassing, he wasn't talking for the mission impossible. If your mission fails, of course the Secretary will deny any knowledge. So the first reason you have a back channel is in order to have deniability. So Jared Kushner would be the absolute last person in the world you would choose to set up a back channel of that kind because he's obviously acting for the President undeniably. So the second kind of back channel that you get is the kind of back channel that the Obama administration had at the beginning of its approach to Iran, which is in an effort again to explore what is possible, you set up a three way conversation. In that case the intermediary was a man. The United States would talk to the government of Oman, the government of Oman would talk to the government of Iran and messages would be sent back and forth that way. And only after a certain point would the conversation become more direct between the United States and Iran that some preconditions were dealt with first. I'm not endorsing by the way, the Obama Iran policy, but this is how it worked. Now it's not impossible that the Trump people broke through those rules and norms and tried to do it a different way. But you just can't get past the fact that he went to them. Let me give you one last example drawn from American history about how these things work. Henry Kissinger, when he was National Security Adviser, had an informal set of contacts with the then Russian Ambassador of the United States, a guy named Dobrenna. Dobrenan would come to Kissinger first at the NSC. First they would meet in various neutral places, and then ultimately, when Kissinger became Secretary of State, he would come to the State Department. In fact, he even had a reserved parking space at the State Department, which is a big bone of contention. But the point was, there was no question about the security of their conversation. One of the big questions that we have about this is did Kushner not understand that he was putting himself in a position where the Russians could generate a transcript of his talk, alter that transcript in various embarrassing ways and release that, or use that as a weapon against him? He was putting his head inside their noose. Did he not understand it? Why was he doing it? What motive could have been so strong, or was he so stupid as to have taken such a terrible risk for himself and his administration, or his administration to be? They were yet in office. So now what do you expect of the coming comey testimony? I keep using a wine story. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, today's topic is a topic we all think about while doing our best not to think about it. The topic is death, and how we think about death changes depending on whether we're thinking about dying ourselves or about losing the people we love. But whichever side of the coin we take here, death is really an ever present reality for us. And it is so whether we're thinking about it or not, it's always announcing itself in the background, on the news, in the stories we hear about the lives of others, in our concerns about our own health, in the attention we pay when crossing the street. If you observe yourself closely, you'll see that you spend a fair amount of energy each day trying not to die, and has long been noted by philosophers and contemplatives and poets. Death makes a mockery of almost everything else we spend our lives doing. Just take a moment to reflect on how you've spent your day so far, the kinds of things that captured your attention, the things that you've been genuinely worried about. Think of the last argument you had with your spouse. Think of the last hour you spent on social media. Over the last few days, I've been spending an inordinate amount of time trying to find a new font for my podcast. This has literally absorbed hours of my time. So if you had stopped me at any point in the last 48 hours and asked me what I'm up to, what really concerns me, what deep problem I'm attempting to solve, the solution to which seems most likely to bring order to the chaos in my corner of the universe, the honest answer would have been, I'm looking for a font. Now, I'm not saying that everything we do has to be profound in every moment. Sometimes you just have to find a font. But contemplating the brevity of life brings some perspective to how we use our attention. It's not so much what we pay attention to, it's the quality of attention. It's how we feel while doing it. If you need to spend the next hour looking for a font, you might as well enjoy it. Because the truth is, none of us know how much time we have in this life. And taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity and energy to the present, or at least it can. And it can bring a resolve to not suffer over stupid things. When you take something like road rage, this is probably the quintessential example of misspent energy. You're behind the wheel of your car and somebody does something erratic or they're probably just driving more slowly than you want and you find yourself getting angry. Now, I would submit to you that that kind of thing is impossible if you're being mindful of the shortness of life, if you're aware that you are going to die and that the other person is going to die and that you're both going to lose everyone you love. And you don't know when you've got this moment of life, this beautiful moment, this moment where your consciousness is bright, where it's not dimmed by morphing in the hospital on your last day among the living and the sun is out or it's raining. Both are beautiful and your spouse is alive and your children are alive and you're driving and you're not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. You're just running an errand. And that person in front of you, who you will never meet, whose hopes and sorrows you know nothing about, but which, if you could know them, you would recognize are impressively similar to your own, is just driving slow. This is your life, the only one you've got. And you will never get this moment back again. And you don't know how many more moments you have. No matter how many times you do something, there will come a day when you do it for the last time. You've had a thousand chances to tell the people closest to you that you love them in a way that they feel it and in a way that you feel it. And you've missed most of them. And you don't know how many more you're going to get. You've got this next interaction with another human being to make the world a marginally better place. You've got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence. So why not relax and enjoy your life? Really relax, even in the midst of struggle, even while doing hard work, even under uncertainty. You are in a game right now and you can't see the clock. So you don't know how much time you have left and yet you're free to make the game as interesting as possible. You can even change the rules. You can discover new games that no one has thought of yet. You can make games that used to be impossible suddenly possible and get others to play them with you. You can literally build a rocket to go to Mars so that you can start a colony there. I actually know people who will spend some part of today doing that. But whatever you do, however seemingly ordinary, you can feel the preciousness of life and an awareness of death is the doorway into that way of being in the world. And there are very few people who are more aware of death and the lessons it has to teach us than my guest today. Today I'm speaking to Frank Ostaseski. Frank is a Buddhist teacher and a leading voice in end of life care. In 187, he co founded the Zen Hospice Project, which was the first Buddhist hospice in America. And in 2004, he created the Meta Institute to train health care workers in compassionate and mindful end of life care. And Frank has been widely featured in the media on Bill Moyer's television series, on our own terms, in the PBS series with our Eyes Open, on The Oprah Winfrey Show and in many print publications. He's been honored by the Dalai Lama for his work in this area, and he's the author of a new book, The Five Invitations discovering What Death Can Teach US about Living Fully. If you want more information about Frank and his work, you can find the relevant links on my blog. And I'm sure you'll hear in the next hour of conversation that Frank's is the voice of a man who has taken the time to reflect on the brevity of life. And a wonderful voice it is. So now I bring you Frank Ostaseski. I am here with Frank Ostevsky. Frank, thanks for coming on the podcast. Sam, nice to be with you. Thanks for having me. So we know many people in common. We were introduced by our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein, who was a very old friend of mine and one of my first meditation teachers. Was he a teacher for you as well? He was, as was Jack and Sharon in the early days and many of the other Asian teachers who came to town as well. So I had an introduction to that world of terabatan papasana practice, but also in Zen practice when I came to start the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, which was the first Buddhist hospice in America, actually. Nice. Well, I would definitely want to focus our conversation on death and dying, which is really your area of expertise. It's amazing that someone can be an expert in that, but you are certainly one of them. Just before we begin, tell people what hospice care is. So you could think of hospice care as something on a continuum of health care that is usually accessed when people are in the final six months to a year of their life. It's generally oriented toward comfort care, managing symptoms, controlling people's pain, helping people who have chosen not to necessarily pursue more curative. Therapies hospice care might happen in people's home or it might happen in a facility. And of course, now we're seeing a kind of blending of hospice care and what is called palliative care or comfort care that's even happening in acute care facilities. So what was different about Zen hospice? We did all the normal things that any other hospice would do. But we tried to add to that mix the component of mindfulness. We wondered what would it be like to bring together people who were cultivating what we might call a listening mind or a listening heart through meditation practice and people who needed to be heard at least once in their life, folks who were dying. And in our case, those folks were people who lived on the streets of San Francisco, at least initially. Now, was this during the AIDS epidemic? No, the AIDS epidemic was started around 1980 or so in San Francisco a little bit earlier. And this was in about the mid 80s. Right. So we were caring for both people with AIDS and also people with cancer. Mostly we were tending to people. That the system that kind of fell through the gaps in the system. How did you first get into this, and what was your first encounter with death? At what point in your life did you begin to have a more than average interest in contemplating death and using it as a lens through which to view your life and view how you could actually be of help to other people? Yeah, great question. Well, death and I got introduced early on. My mom died when I was about 16 and my dad a few years later. So death came into my life quite early. Buddhist practice, with its emphasis on impermanence, was another kind of path that helped me come toward this work. For a while, I worked in refugee camps in southern Mexico and Central America, where I saw a lot of horrible dying, actually, and was quite helpless to do anything about that at times. Then when I came back to San Francisco, the AIDS epidemic had just begun. We didn't even know what it was. Stephen Levine, who was a teacher and dear friend, was a big influence both on my own personal life, but also on the creation of his own hospice project. Much of what he did and taught influenced how we set up the hospice and how we cared for people. So, yeah, I think I was introduced to death really early on. And it wasn't so much that it wasn't just about the study of death. It was about how can we really be of service to people in their most vulnerable moments and what happens in that exchange. These days, of course, it's not just about how do we prepare for our dying. It's more about what can we learn from the wisdom of death that can help us live a full, happy, meaningful, rich life. I mean, to imagine Sam at the time of our dying, that we will have the physical strength, the emotional stability, the mental clarity to do the work of a lifetime. He's a kind of ridiculous gamble. And so I don't suggest that we wait until that time. I suggest that we reflect on these issues and reflect on this fact of our life now, and not so much so that we have a good death. I'm not even sure what that is anymore, but really so that we can really get how absolutely precarious this life is. And when we understand something about that, we come into contact with that directly in our bones. I think we also come into contact with just how precious this life is. And then we don't want to waste a moment. We want to jump in with both feet. We want to tell the people we love that we love them. So I think that this is really the great learning that's come to me from being with folks who are dying, which is that it's easy to take life for granted, and when we do, it's easy for us to get caught up in our neurotic concerns. And I think that's the beautiful thing about the beautiful legacy that I have from people who are dying. It really showed me what matters most. Yeah. Everything you just said can be valued in an entirely secular and atheistic context. Most people, given the nature of my audience who are hearing this conversation, will be fairly sure that when they die, that will be the end of conscious existence. And they will be certainly many of them reluctant to think about the significance of death in any form of otherworldly context. The idea that one would want to have a good death or be prepared to meet one's death for reasons that extend beyond the moment of death because they imagine there's nothing beyond the moment of death. And I must confess, I'm fairly agnostic on that point. I think that obviously there are good reasons to believe that when you're dead, you're dead. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what might happen after death. But I spend a lot of time thinking about death and about the shadow it casts back on the rest of life and the way in. Which that shadow can clarify life and cause us to to prioritize things that we will wish we had prioritized when our lives come to an end and whether that end comes by surprise or or in a way that's that's more orderly. I'm happy to talk about anything you may or may not believe about the global significance of death, but to focus for a moment on just what can be learned in the context of this life that doesn't presuppose belief in anything beyond it. What are the things that people are most confused about, most surprised by? What is waiting there to be discovered by someone who really hasn't thought much about death and has avoided thinking about it, frankly. And what is the value of learning those lessons sooner rather than later? Yeah, great question. I don't know. What happens after we die, Sam? I don't know. We'll find out, right? But I think that without a reminder of death, we tend to take our life for granted. And we become lost in these endless pursuits of self gratification, you know? But, you know, as I was mentioning, when we keep it close at hand, you know, at our fingertips I think it reminds us not to hold on so tightly. And I think we take ourselves and our ideas a little less seriously and I think we let go a little more easily. And what I find is that when there's a reflection on death we come to understand that we're all in the boat together. And I think this helps us to be kinder and gentler to one another, actually. You know, the habits of our life they have a powerful momentum, right? They propel us toward right onto the moment of death. And so the obvious question arises what habits do I want to create? Not whether or not they'll give me a better afterlife, but here in this life, my thoughts are not harmless. My thoughts take shape as actions. And, you know, the old story. They develop into habits and harden into character. So an unconscious relationship with my thoughts leads me to reactivity. And I want to live a life that's more responsible and more, I want to say, clean. That's the best way I could describe it. Yeah. Living with an awareness of death is obviously an ancient spiritual practice. I mean, an admonition that one should do this dates back as far as Socrates and the Buddha and several books in the Old Testament like Ecclesiastes. I think all three of those are more or less contemporaneous with one another. But it must go back further than that. And so it's no accident that monks and renunciates and contemplatives do this very deliberately. They focus on death, and they live their lives. They seek to live their lives as though they could end at any moment and they're trying to prioritize those things that will be the things that make sense in one's last hour of life. Again, this is often framed by a kind of otherworldly belief, but certainly not always. And I remember Stephen Levine, who you just mentioned at one point decided to live a year consciously doing this consciously living a year as he would want to live a year if it were going to be his last year. And this it struck me as an amazing thing to do. But of course, he had more than one more year to live. In fact, I think he had at least 20 at that point. He died a couple of years ago. There's a bit of a paradox here because there are many things, many good things in life, not merely superficial things, that we can only engage, that we can only seek with real energy based on the assumption that we will live a fairly long time. And something like the decision to have a child or to spend five or more years on your next project. And in most cases, it is a safe assumption that we have at least an average span of time in which to do these things. How do you square that with this imperative that we not take life for granted and that we use the clarifying wisdom of impermanence in each moment insofar as we're able? Yeah, I think that one of the ways we can shift the conversation, even the one that you and I are having, is that it isn't all about preparing for my death. It isn't all about this moment at which I stopped breathing, but more about how do I live my life on an ongoing basis. I had a heart attack a few years ago, and one of the things I did after that heart attack is I did some reading about other people who had heart attacks. And one of the people I met up on was Maslow. Maslow suffered a near fatal heart attack at one point in his life, and after which he wrote this beautiful thing. He said, the confrontation with death and the reprieve from it makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful, that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it, to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. He said, My river has never looked so beautiful. Death, in its ever present possibility, makes love, passionate love, more possible. Now, that's beautiful. It's not just about preparing for this final moment, but really looking and seeing. How does it what happens if these if we stop separating life and death, if we stop pulling them apart, we saw them as one thing. So for me, one of the things that does is help me really see the beauty of life. I mean, think about the cherry blossoms that cover the hillsides of Japan every spring, right? Or this place where I teach in northern Idaho, where there are these blue flax flowers that last for a single day. How come they're so much more beautiful than plastic flowers? Isn't it their brevity? Isn't it the fact that they will end that is part of their beauty. So I think that's true with our human lives as well. It's not like, Get ready, death is coming. Don't screw it up. It's more like, oh, how do I appreciate this? So, for me, being with dying is a lot, you know, has built in built up in me a tremendous sense of gratitude and appreciation for the fact that I'm alive. And so it isn't just about trying to cram for a test, this final test where we think we're going to pass, fail. I don't know what happens after we die. I don't know. We'll find out how it is. But what I do know and this is interesting, Sam, is that everybody's got a story about what happens after they die. And my experience is that that story shapes the way in which they die and in some ways, even the way in which they live their life. We could talk about that. And that's, you know, I I remember being with the president of the California Atheist Association who came to Zen Hospice to die. I was really proud that he came there, that he didn't feel anyone was going to push any dogma on him, that we weren't going to try and talk him into some kind of belief system, that it could go the way he needed it to go. It's not my job to convince him of something otherwise. It's my job to find out what's his vision? How does he need to go through this? Actually, I want to ask you about that because it has struck me more and more that secularists and atheists are really lacking resources to guide them both when they get sick and need to think about their own deaths or confront the deaths of those close to them. It just is a fact that there isn't a strong, familiar secular tradition around how to perform a funeral. Right? Who do you call when someone close to you dies? No matter how atheistic you are, many people are left calling their rabbi or their priest or just asking them to dumb it down, because the only people who know how to perform funerals and the only language around these moments in life, it's just explicitly framed by religion, and it needn't be. I mean, you know, I did hundreds of memorials for people through the AIDS epidemic, you know, and most of them had no you know, as you say, some of them had an early religious training, and we can talk about how that influences the way in which we die, by the way. So we had to create things. We had to draw ritual. You know how it is with ritual. Ritual has this way of bringing forward the truth that's already there in the realm. In a way, true ritual, different than ceremony, evokes something fundamental in us. We could say it might draw on an ancient wisdom or some ancient practice, but really it's about how do we evoke the truth? That's right here, right now. That's often what characterized a lot of the memorial services that I did. But one of the things that I saw with people, whether they had religious training or not, one of the things that really mattered most to them was relationship. What's their relationship with themselves, with the people that they cared about in their lives, with reality, however we might define that. And so one of the tickets in, if you will, or one of the paths in for people who even had sworn off religion years ago was some sense of interdependence, we might call it, or connection is a better way to say it, that was there. That was their religion. I could share hundreds of stories with you about people who had no religious training at all but loved their time in nature. And so we would work with that. We'd work with that experience as a way of helping them ease into the mystery of what happens in dying. Look, dying is we know at least this much. We know that dying is much more than a medical event, you know, and so the profundity of what occurs in the dying process is too big to fit into any model, whether that's a medical model or a religious model. It's too big. It shakes us loose of all of our all the ways we've defined ourselves, all the identities we've carried over all these years. They're either stripped away by illness or they're gracefully given up. But they all go and then who are we? And I think these are questions that people wrestle with in the time as they come closer to the end of their lives. Of course, if they have some religious or spiritual training, it influences that exploration. But it comes up for people anyway. Even those people who think dying is a dial tone where there's nothing that happens. Even then, the reflection on their relationships and how they've conducted those relationships is really important. I mean, this really big question at the end of people's lives is usually something not like is there life after death? But it's something more like am I loved? And did I love? I'm always struck by the asymmetry between dying and having others die. I mean, obviously I haven't died, so I don't know firsthand what that's like. But having lost people close to me and seen other people go through this experience, it is different being the one dying. And obviously the person who dies loses everyone. But here she also loses the experience of having to live with the with that experience of loss. And he or she doesn't have to live in a world where everyone is just carrying on as before and where a person's grief becomes a kind of embarrassment or something that other people have to figure out what to do with or navigate around in some way. Are there two sides of this? Is the death experience and the bereavement experience importantly different in any way? Yes, I think we could make some distinctions there that would be important. But I mean, remember that you say the person who's dying loses everything and so he or she going through this process is really going through some kind of way. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. There have been many things in the news. There was the Pennsylvania clergy sex abuse bomb that went off this week, a grand jury report detailing the abuse of more than 1000 children by more than 300 priests over the years. And they're probably vastly more. That sort of thing is underreported, as we all know, and also sedulously covered up by the Church. In fact, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the Catholic Church is a machine, one of whose primary functions has been to ensure that children get raped and that the world doesn't find out about it. This really is not an exaggeration. It reminded me of an article I wrote about ten years ago when a similar scandal happened in Ireland. I wrote an article titled bringing the Vatican to justice. Actually, I may have read this on a much earlier podcast, but I'll just read the first two paragraphs here because it's really all I have to say in the present case, and it makes a point that I think is all too rarely made. So here's what I wrote I think in 2009 or so, I've paid too little attention to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Frankly, it has always felt unsportsman, like to shoot so large and langers a fish and so tiny a barrel, and there seemed to be no need to deride faith at its most vulnerable and self abased. Even in retrospect, it is easy to understand the impulse to avert one's eyes. Just imagine a pious mother and father sending their beloved child to the Church of a Thousand Hands for spiritual instruction, only to have him raped and terrified into silence by threats of hell. Then imagine this occurring to tens of thousands of children in our own time, and to children beyond reckoning for over a thousand years. The spectacle of faith so utterly misplaced and so fully betrayed is simply too depressing to think about. But there was always more to this phenomenon that should have compelled my attention. Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible. The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature and consensual behavior is taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring instead that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy, or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution, one of the wealthiest on earth, that preferentially attracts pederass pedophiles and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock and their unwed mothers vilified wherever Church teaching holds sway, leaving boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to church run orphanages, only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery, set whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord. Okay, so that's how I opened that article. But let's be clear about what's happening here. This isn't just the law of large numbers, where you sample hundreds of thousands or millions of people and you find some thousands of them abusing children. There's something special about the Catholic Church. There's a specific machinery here based on dogmatism and faith in ridiculous ideas, and every detail matters, like the belief in hell and sin and celibacy and the shame of out of wedlock birth. Of course, there are other religious communities that have abused their kids and conceal the crime so as not to bring embarrassment to the institutions. There have been scandals among the Orthodox Jews in New York in recent years, but no one has perfected this horror show like the Catholic Church. This is an institution that routinely spends millions of dollars to protect individual priests who they know have raped children for decades, moving them from one parish to the next, where they can rape again, paying hush money to victims. And when these cases wind up in court, doing everything they can to shame and discredit the children or the adults who were once those children, this is pure evil, and the details are insane. I'm just going to read you a snippet from the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report. This is a quote. Despite a priest's admission to assaulting at least a dozen young boys, the bishop wrote to thank him for, quote, all the good you have done for God's people, the Lord who sees in private will reward. End quote. Another priest confessed to anal and oral rape of at least 15 boys as young as seven. The bishop later met with the abuser to commend him as a, quote, person of candor and sincerity, and to compliment him for, quote, the progress he has made in controlling his, quote, addiction. When the abuser was finally removed from the priesthood years later, the bishop ordered the parish not to say why. Quote nothing else need be noted. End quote. This is further down here. In the report we came across a file in which the diocese candidly conceded that this quote is one of our worst cases, end quote. But of course told no one about him. Actually, we came across the statement in the files of several other priests. Then there was the file with a simple celebratory notation, quote bad abuse case. Victims sued us. We won. There was the priest, for example, who raped a seven year old girl after she'd had her tonsils out. This is me. Now. This girl was raped in her hospital room. Just picture the life of this person in the context of a faith so captivating that there was no recourse here. Picture the family around this girl. You get indoctrinated from birth into a cult. And this is a cult staffed with an inordinate number of pedophiles who gain access to your kids. Back to the report. Or the priest who made a nine year old give him oral sex and then rinsed out the boy's mouth with holy water to purify him. Or the boy who drank some juice at his priest's house and woke up the next morning bleeding from his rectum, unable to remember anything about the night before. OK, so that's as much as I'll give you. Sorry to ambush you with that, but it's hard even for me, to pay attention to this stuff and to remember how horrible these details are. None of this should be surprising. This is in the DNA of this organization. If you had to sign a user agreement for the Catholic Church, this should be part of it. Somewhere in the fine print. It should say, the ideology of our organization acts as a filter, attracting sexually confused and conflicted and conscienceless men. And we employ these people and hide their crimes. And we've done this for over 1000 years. Now. Give us your kids. Hearing that the Catholic Church is raping children should be as surprising as hearing that Google and Facebook are selling your data to third parties. Anyway, it's intense to read about all this. You're getting me just after I did that. Hence the top spin. Imagine if there were a Fortune 500 company that was raping and abusing children for its entire existence and systematically concealing it. What would we have done to that company? And now consider what hasn't happened to the Catholic Church. Okay, there have been many other things in the news. I can't bear to comment on Trump at the moment, but it's good to see people in the military coming out publicly in criticism of him after McRaven wrote his letter. And there was the Sarah Jong hiring at the New York Times. I think I'll talk about that with Jonathan Height, who's coming up this week. And then Jaron Lanier is finally coming up. That had to get rescheduled. So got some good podcasts on the horizon. I'm going to break now for my discussion of funding the podcast. As always, if you've heard it, you can skip it. It's seven minutes long. But if you haven't heard it or remain to be yet convinced to support the show, you might give it a listen, because it's on the basis of listener support that this thing works. Okay, back in seven. I'd like to explain why I don't run ads on the podcast and why I've decided instead to rely entirely on listener support. For those of you who haven't heard me talk about this, or for those who might be regular listeners but feel that I should run ads like every other podcaster, I'd like to explain my philosophy around funding this work. And you might find some of this surprising, because I actually do. Now, if you already support the show or you're just not interested to hear my thoughts on this, I'll make it very easy for you to skip this section. It's exactly six minutes and 45 seconds long, so you can just scroll ahead and enjoy today's episode. But for the rest of you, I'd like to explain my thinking. I don't want to run ads here, even for products and services that I love and use myself. And there are many reasons for this. For example, The New Yorker magazine recently inquired about sponsoring the show. I love the New Yorker. I've read it for 30 years. It's one of the best magazines on Earth. But it also, from time to time, publishes articles that are inaccurate or highly misleading, especially where science is concerned. And what listeners value most from this podcast is my effort to get at the truth. You want to know what I really think, and I don't want to create any incentives that could make it more difficult for me to simply tell you what I think. If I were taking a lot of money from The New Yorker, would I be free to say that one of his writers had just published something scandalously? Stupid? Maybe. But the point is, I don't want to have to think twice about whether something I think is important to say might upset a sponsor. And you don't want me to have to think about that either. My goal with this podcast is to create a forum for honest conversation of a sort that scarcely exists anywhere else. I want to talk about the most pressing issues of our time without looking over my shoulder and worrying about who might be offended. And there's no way I could do that while depending on ads. But that leaves us with a challenge of how to fund the show. Many of us regularly pay $3 for a cup of coffee, and we don't think twice about it. Yet it would suddenly seem onerous to pay $3 for something that actually brings us much more value than a cup of coffee ever could. I'm guilty of feeling this way myself, and frankly, it was until I started podcasting that I saw the situation from the other side and asking for listener support is something that I approached with real trepidation in the beginning. However, having done it, I've discovered that it's actually the most straightforward relationship I can have with an audience, and that really was a surprise to me. Just think about it. If you want to read one of my books, you have to buy that book before you even know whether you'll find anything of value in it. And if I want you to read one of my books, I have to convince you to buy it before either of us know if you'll find anything of value in it, that is a strange transaction, and it almost never reflects the actual value given or received. Plus, there are publishers and booksellers standing between us. There are people trying to get you to buy a book, and there are people trying to get me to sell it to you. But this podcast is free, so everyone can listen to it, which, for the purpose of spreading ideas, is the best situation possible. I'll reach more people within 24 hours of releasing the next episode of my podcast than I will over the course of a decade with my next book. And if some of you find this podcast valuable, then you can support it to the degree that you do find it valuable, which is the transaction that most honestly reflects whatever benefit you get from my work. And it's born of a direct connection between you and me. There are no third parties here with their own interests. Now, it's a problem that so many people expect to get podcasts and other digital media for free. We've trained ourselves to expect this by creating an Internet economy based on advertising. But advertising is not free, because these companies want some of your time and attention. That's what they're paying for. And every podcast that relies on advertising contains five or ten minutes or more where the host reads ads. So there's this cost to the host's honesty or perceived honesty. If I spent the first five minutes of every show trying to sell you a mattress, you could reasonably worry about whether my enthusiasm for it was sincere. But what else might I exaggerate if I'm willing to assure you week after week that memory foam will solve all your sleep problems? By self funding this platform together, we're creating one of the only forums that is truly free from the outside pressures that are conspiring to make honest conversation on hard topics so rare. Now, digital media is experiencing a race to the bottom, and the reliance on advertising is what is dragging it down. Most of what we're worried about with companies like Facebook and Google, the invasion of privacy, the undermining of our politics, the spread of misinformation can be directly attributed to their reliance on ad revenue. What we need is a new ethic and culture of sponsorship, where each of us takes the time to support work we value. Otherwise, the work won't get done or won't be nearly as good as it could be, and it will always be compromised by bad incentives. Even the best newspapers and magazines now resort to clickbait headlines and hit pieces designed to maximize traffic, because they have to sell ads against that traffic to survive. The result is absolutely toxic. Even the people at the pinnacle of mainstream media, people being paid tens of millions of dollars a year, can be fired over a tweet or because they express an unpopular political opinion, even on their own platform. Depending on what you do for a living, you might feel the same pressure yourself. What do you think is true, or might be true, or might be worth discussing with an open mind that could get you fired if said in the wrong context? I'm working to create a platform where I can think out loud about precisely those things with the smartest and most courageous people I can find, and I need your help to do this again. I totally understand the reluctance to pay for media online, and I feel it myself whenever I hit a paywall. But more and more, when I decide that there's something I value, I just automate my support for it. This is what I'm doing with other podcasts and blogs I follow that rely on audience support, and it's what I now do with charitable organizations like the Against Malaria Foundation. I don't want to have to keep rediscovering my commitment to saving kids from malaria. I just want to decide once and then know that I'm supporting this work at a level that I'm comfortable with. So for those of you who are regular listeners who derive value from my podcast, I want to encourage you to support the show at a level you're comfortable with. But I also want to be clear about one thing there are some of you who shouldn't support the show, no matter how much value you get from it. If it causes you any financial stress to give even a few dollars a month, then my appeal for listener support is not directed at you. For everyone else, please know that the small percentage of you who have begun funding the Waking Up podcast in a recurring way, whether monthly, through my website or on a per episode basis through patreon, or making it possible to keep the podcast going adfree. And if the show grows in interesting ways in the future, it will be because of regular contributions, even in small amounts, from listeners like you. So thank you. Okay, well, today's guest is Marty Hazelton. Marty is the world's leading researcher on how ovulatory cycles influence women's sexuality. She's a professor of psychology at UCLA and at the Institute for Society and Genetics. She's a former editor of the leading journal in the field, Evolution and Human Behavior, and she now directs the Evolutionary psychology lab at UCLA. Anyway, I had a great time talking to Marty. We talk about sex and gender and the role of hormones in human psychology, something she calls Darwinian feminism. We focus on the unique hormonal experience of women. But upfront. We talk about things like transgenderism and the Google memo and other controversial topics. This stuff is increasingly important, not only ethically, but politically cuts across many of the free speech concerns we've been airing on this show. So without further delay, I bring you Marty Hazelton. I am here with Marty Hazelton. Marty, thanks for coming on the podcast. Hi, happy to be here. So describe what you do. I should say at the top here, we'll be discussing your book Hormonal The Hidden Intelligence of Hormones. But how is it that you have come to write about hormones, and what is your particular academic perch? I would call myself an interdisciplinary evolutionary scientist, by which I mean some people would probably look at my work and say, oh, that's evolutionary psychology. I know what that is. But I think of myself as being a little bit broader than what is typically assigned to evolutionary psychology, if that makes sense. So I certainly have looked at phenomena that are well worn territory in evolutionary psychology, like mating relationships and so forth. But I've really also been interested in connecting the dots between using the evolutionary or adaptive logic to understand why humans do the things that they do and perhaps to get new insights into those things and test new hypotheses and actually look then at behavior and see what people are doing and describe that sometimes in some detail. But I'm also interested in the mechanisms in between, both the psychological mechanisms, which I think people who are interested in evolutionary psychology would recognize as straight up evolutionary psychology. But I've also do this work looking at hormonal moderators or hormonal mediators of the kinds of phenomena that we're interested in. And maybe this is too nitty gritty for your audience. I don't know. Please just tell me if you want me to they're nitty gritty people. Back off a little bit in terms of the technical detail. But I think it sort of puts me in this field of biological endocrinology or social endocrinology, but also behavioral ecologists. I, you know, reference their work. I look at I do a lot of comparative work in setting up my studies. So I look at the literature on nonhuman primates and on female animals who experience estrus all the way across the spectrum. So some of our insights actually come from looking at rodents. Humans clearly aren't rodents. Not all of them anywhere. Not all of them. Right. Except the rat. But, yeah, the comparative work also figures into my approach. So I want to sort of claim a broader base for understanding the particular social phenomena that I'm interested in, which mostly had to do with intimate relationships. Well, it is a fascinating and fraught intersection of disciplines, as you know. And I think I'm going to lead you onto some of that dangerous territory. There are several taboos here. There's this taboo around viewing the human mind in biological terms at all. And there's a related taboo around acknowledging sex differences. It's even taboo in some quarters to acknowledge that biological sex is even a thing. Yeah. And this leads us to what I think you consider to be mistaken notions of feminism. And in your book, you write about something called Darwinian feminism, right? So let's just pick a place to start here. Perhaps we should just start with the basic concern around understanding the human mind in biological and evolutionary terms. I don't think anyone at this point thinks that the logic of evolution subsumes every interesting question about what it's like to be us or what it is to have a human mind. But how do you view biology and psychology at this point? I think you kind of have to take it on a case by case basis for some things, like things that are linked with reproduction. And this perhaps is why this is such well traverse territory in evolutionary approaches, social scientific approaches. So thinking about reproduction so close to the engine of natural selection and therefore how our minds and the minds of our cousins, our nonhuman cousins, have been shaped, that seems very straightforward that there would now, that's not going to tell us everything. So we're not going to be able to derive from first principles everything that we want to understand about humans. And there are plenty of surprises, and I could give some examples of some of those, but you're asking me a more general question, which is the intersection between psychology and biology. I don't think that anybody who is credible could say that it's all biology, right? It's turtles all the way down because humans do things that are very uniquely human. And I think this is interesting both in response to as a potential response to your question, but also as one of the things that's tripped us up in gaining access to information that I think is important. So humans are undeniably their own kind of special species, right? We can drive Porsche. We can, you know, make Lattes. We can we speak multiple languages. We can read and write in those languages. We have a way of preserving cultural knowledge over time that has allowed us to technologically exploit our modern environment or our environment in general, to an extent that you just don't see with other species. So I think that seeing so that's just a really important thing to acknowledge. And any competent treatment of evolution and human behavior will include a large component that explores how those things happen, how they make humans unique, how they make the animal models or the more purely biological models inadequate as the full story. You know, of course, the the line between biology and culture is difficult to draw because much of culture has to be viewed as a kind of extended phenotype and we've evolved for some tens of thousands of years in the context of having linguistically based culture. Yes. And I think that there are some fascinating evolutionary psychological questions there. So we can ask the question, well, what are the kinds of things that humans bring when they are entering their social world? What are the kinds of things that they bring with them that help them acquire these useful bits of culture? So things like this is some work that was done at UCLA and continues to be done all over. It's gotten very popular. It's gotten very influential, I should say. And that is thinking about how we keenly observe different potential behavioral models and which of those models have behavior that is most likely to be repeated because they show some signs of success. Right. So I think that there are some really fascinating evolutionary psychological questions about what is the evolved machinery that we bring to our social world that allows us to practice, transmit, benefit from technology. Let's focus now on sex and gender because this is really where you have spent most of your time. First, I think the difference between sex and gender may not even be clear to most people. How do you define these terms? Yeah, well, I think that there's some disagreement about just exactly how we should define the terms. So I think of gender as being more of the sort of like continuous difference in masculinity and femininity. So you can occupy any number of different levels of relative femininity or relative masculinity, the things that we would recognize. So if we can think about masculine and feminine as what is gender typical, there is still a ton of variation between those gender typical central tendencies. I think it is most appropriate to and it becomes very awkward otherwise. It's most appropriate to refer to those things as gender. I read a paper, it's been a few years now, but I believe it was about mate copying, mate choice copying and guppies. And the guppies in the paper were referred to as having gender. And I just thought, okay, this is definitely not how I'm thinking of the appropriate definition of the word. But I think what it points out yeah, is that people are reluctant to use the word sex. Male, female. Right, that's what I was going to say. There's something awkward, not even socially, but just semantically or grammatically using sex in all of these sentences. And I'm sure that in the past I have used gender in many of these cases as a synonym for biological sex. Yes. And so I would tend to think of biological sex. So I teach a class, an entire year long freshman cluster course, the so called sex cluster. It's all about sex and gender. And in that class we dig deeply into these issues. But one of the things that we do is we sort of arrive at some common definitions and sex and gender. The difference between sex and gender is one of those. And so the way that we tend to think about sex and the way that I think about it is it's more like understanding what are those central tendencies of masculinity and femininity that we can identify as being sexually dimorphic characteristics of human beings. Now of course there are going to be exceptions, right? There are cases, fascinating cases of intersex. There's the question of sexual orientation which takes people away from those gender typical categories. And so there's still plenty of variation. But I tend to be comfortable with using the word sex referring to biological sex. So if we're talking about at the chromosomal level, if we're talking about on average differences in hormones, although even there things can get a little squishy. But then I think sex is really most appropriate and even somebody's identity, whether they identify as male or female, I would often be comfortable using the word sex there as well. Now that we're fully in the wilderness, let's just define some more of these terms. So intersex and transgender and non binary. Give me the electrom. So intersex people are born with a phenotype that is neither clearly male nor female in some important way. And so the classic case, I suppose, would be looking at babies who are born with genitalia that are neither clearly male nor female. So they have an intersex condition. Is there a chromosomal abnormality here? We're just talking about amounts of testosterone or not. It has lots of potential triggers. So humans when we are born there's sort of a female default to our phenotype. And then with the appropriate gene and hormone actions, you'll see sex differentiation, you'll see sex differences emerge between males and females in utero and well beyond, of course. And so at any of those levels something could be different during development. So whether it be at the chromosomal, whether you're Xx or XY and some Xx individuals will appear to be male in their phenotype so they're the genetic predictors. But then there are other things that could happen down the line that involve hormone levels and potentially also some environmental determinants, environmental trauma. That's the easiest case. Somebody who has a botched genital surgery and is that changed from male to female or vice versa would also potentially have an intersex identity fall into that category of intersex. What's really interesting, I think, and I think really pushes the boundaries of political correctness is to ask the question well, we know what's gender typical. Usually a male is attracted to a female, a female is attracted to a male. What about these very numerous voluminous cases of people who are attracted to members of the same sex or maybe or have bisexual attraction or maybe they just change their attractions over time? Do we think about that as a sort of intersex condition even though everything else about them might be very gender typical? Right before I wait into that. So non binary yes. Is a statement about a person's self perceived gender waiting? Yes. And so those may be people who have an intersex condition or who just want to not be in the gender binary. They are more comfortable being in between, perhaps not having people know anything about the biological foundations of their sex at some level. So these are people who will identify openly as queer. Often those people have same sex attractions, and so part of their queer identity will be breaking out of that binary with respect to who one is attracted to. There are lots of flavors in the sexuality rainbow, so to speak, for humans, and we're discovering even more of them as we move along. So that's queer or non binary. But then there are, of course, all of the different boxes that you might be able to check on a questionnaire about your sexual orientation. Yeah, the boxes are proliferating. Somebody I saw on Twitter a few months back took a picture of the beginning of, I think it was like the LSAT or some other standardized test where they were asked to check their gender and there was something like twelve boxes. Right. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah. And maybe there need to be twelve boxes so that everybody's preference is acknowledged and respected. I know that it's bothersome to people who really prefer binaries and boxes and want to categorize the world in that way. And so we make people uncomfortable, I think, when we acknowledge that there are these variations. But I think it's really important to do just as a scientist who studies these topics that have real human relevance. So these students come into my class and they may be questioning their gender identity. They may have a lot of questions about how they are different in some way from others that they have noticed. And one of the things that I'm really proud of at my time here at UCLA is exploring those things, talking about them, and giving students a language to do both, to ask some questions about themselves, but also to sort of have their consciousness raised about these gendered issues in our everyday society. Well, I wasn't actually planning to start here, but now that we've opened Pandora's Box, let's just stay with these more esoteric questions before we get into just basic differences between men and women. So just to pivot back to the time bomb, it sounds like you armed for us. Is it a plausible thesis that homosexuality should be thought of in terms of intersex? Is that what you just suggested? Well, I think that we're really pushing the boundaries when we ask that question, and no doubt people will get quite irritated with me for having raised it. But I think that if what we mean by sex is gender typicality, and gender typicality is not hard for us to quantify. So on average, what are men like on average, what are women like? We respect the fact, of course, that in defining that, that there's a lot of variation. But as soon as we recognize that an individual is not fitting into that binary or not even really getting close to the on average male or female in certain aspects of their phenotype, then I think we ask the question, well, do we want to consider that to be an intersex case? I wouldn't say condition necessarily, because that medicalizes it a little bit too much. So as soon as we apply start being principled in our application of these definitions, then I think it leads us to these questions which, rightly, have made people quite uncomfortable. Well then what would you do with all the other just ambiguities of human sexuality or the varieties? So you have things that are, I guess, traditionally classed as paraphilia or something, that it's definitely nonstandard. If someone if you have a boot fetish or you have something that's not especially well subscribed, does that throw a wrench into any kind of paradigm where you would want to just think in terms of this single continuum? Well, I think that we might think about those cases as just different and so there's their own ingredients. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. So today we have my first live podcast officially in Seattle with Brett Weinstein. I introduce Brett on stage, but Brett is the biologist who is at the center of the Evergreen scandal, which you may have heard about. We don't go into as much details we might have because Evergreen is just an hour outside of Seattle, and many people in the audience were well aware of what happened there. It did make national news, and it was the most visible, apart from what happened to Nicholas Christakis at Yale, of these recent moral panics on college campuses. But briefly, what happened there is they traditionally had what they called a day of absence, where people of color would stay away from campus for a day to make their their absence felt. And Brett, as an extremely liberal and progressive member of the biology department, was always in support of that. But last year, they decided to flip the logic of this event, and rather than people of color deciding to stay away, they decided to tell white people that they were not welcome on campus on that day. Absence wasn't compulsory, but it was highly recommended. Now, Brett noticed immediately that this was not quite the same ethical and political message and said as much in an email to administrators and his colleagues. And then the witch hunt began. So there's much more about that online, and you can see Brett's other interviews on other podcasts, like the Joe Rogan podcast. But suffice it to say, this was an extremely bizarre and unproductive self immolation of a liberal student body. And Brett and his wife, also a professor there at Evergreen, have since been forced out. There was some settlement. We talk about it a little, but that's the necessary backstory to today's conversation. And now I bring you audio of the Seattle event with Brett Weinstein. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sam Harris. Thank you. Well, thank you all for coming out. I can't see you all, but I can hear you, and it really is an honor, I must say. I will never take this for granted. The fact that I can put a date on the calendar and you all show up is just insane to me. So thank you for doing that. And another thing I won't take for granted is that people like this actually want to talk to me. My guest tonight is an evolutionary biologist. He is not that one, though. I've released some audio from those events with Richard Dawkins. You should know this is actually my first official live podcast. So you guys made it to the start of the tour. But my guest tonight is a biologist who focuses on big questions. He's done narrow research on things like the evolution of cancer and senescence and moral self sacrifice, but he also focuses on how an understanding of evolution can actually inform our lives and improve society. And we'll get into all of that. He's also become, in the aftermath of what is now known as the Evergreen Scandal, a truly wise and articulate defender of human rationality and free speech. So please welcome Fret Weinstein. Hey, Fred. Thanks for coming. Brett, I've been wanting to talk to you for some time, as some people here must know, I'm friends with your brother who did my podcast about a year ago. And your brother is this polymathic, very articulate, very interesting man. And then I saw a bit of you on YouTube, and you are also this polymathic, very articulate, interesting man. So your parents did something right. I want to know what happened there. But welcome. Thank you for doing that. Thanks for having me. So I think since we're in Seattle, the Evergreen Scandal is probably a noun phrase that people recognize. But I think we should talk about what happened there because it's a point of entry into many of the issues we're going to consider. I have actually seen it described by another name, the Weinstein Debacle. Yes. So let me give you the very brief version, and I should say it's a story that's very easy to get wrong, and the press, even when they are well intentioned, to often get the story wrong. I'm not going to bore you with the details of what actually happened, but I will say the general narrative is this. We hired a new president at the college. He set in motion a committee to study the question of equity on our campus and to propose some solutions to problems. And that committee advanced an elaborate proposal, sweeping changes to the college that was, in my opinion, a threat to the ability of the college to continue to function, certainly as an educational institution, and maybe at all. It was a threat to our fiscal solvency. And I objected to it, which was more or less part of my job as a faculty member. And I said, we really have to talk about this proposal. And there was Steadfast refusal to have that discussion. And as I continued to insist that we have that discussion, it raised the hackles of some other faculty members who became more and more aggressive in challenging me in faculty meetings, accusing me of being antiequity itself. And then the next part is hearsay. But I'm led to believe that one faculty member in particular set a bunch of students in motion, students that I had never met who arrived at my classroom and erupted into protest which disrupted the entire building. They demanded my resignation, and instead of backing down or running away, I tried to reason with them. And when those videos were placed online by the protesters, the reaction was not what the protesters had expected. The reaction was many people were, I guess, impressed that I had tried to talk to them rationally about the questions that were at the heart of the equity issue on our campus. And so it backfired. And that set in motion a debate about what the rights of people to protest are in the context of a college campus and what equity means and how we might pursue it. What was the reaction of your fellow faculty? How much support or lack of support did you get? That's a very interesting question. It looks very different on the inside of the college than the outside. On the inside, I got tremendous support from many people, but it was almost silent. And many of the people who were telling me that they were supportive were telling me that they wouldn't speak publicly about their position because they were afraid of what would happen. And in fact, they watched what happened to me. And I can't say that they were wrong. Yeah. Although the word cowardice does come to mind. It's a word that I refused to use at first because I don't think their fears were unjustified. And it's hard to judge other people in that way. But I will say, although their fears were not unjustified, if they came out one at a time or only one came out. But there really is safety in numbers here. It's the fact that you were out there all alone that led to this. This is exactly right, and maybe I do know. How do we solve this problem? I'm thinking it's something that I've often said of the Salman Rushdie affair. The reason why he had to go into hiding for ten years, obviously, is a different circumstance. But the whole problem was that there weren't 10,000 Salman Rushdie's the next day and there and there should have been. How do we get that collective response tuned up? The answer is not an easy one. But people need to level up with respect to game theory. And so the colleagues who were opposed to these false and dangerous equity proposals were responding to their narrow, short term interests. In other words, they were correctly perceiving that they would be stigmatized and demonized and maybe driven out if they stood up. What they were not realizing was that that will come for them in the end anyway. And so it really isn't a question of whether or not to expose yourself to that danger. It's whether or not to group together and face that danger and maybe survive it, or to expose yourself to being picked off one by one over time. And so there's a problem that I call the activist dilemma which is really a version of a tragedy of the Commons or a free writer problem in which everybody wants a problem solved. But the best deal is to stand on the sidelines and let somebody else take the risk or the cost of solving it and to get the benefit of that solution anyway. And in the end that's the undoing of the coalitions that you're imagining should form to prevent these things. Seems like we could solve this with an app. The right app would just get everyone to go at the same moment. So what were the ideas at the core of this problem? What gave us the Evergreen moral panic? Well, I think it has to do with a couple of different problems. I mean, I've come to view the folks who protested at Evergreen as an insurgency which to me means that you don't take them literally. That they are actually engaged in a tactical action and what they say they are up to is not necessarily what even they believe that they are up to. They are trying to accomplish something and they're actually quite powerful in doing what they're doing. So it's a little bit hard to know how you deal with a movement that says it is about certain objectives. For example, equity itself. Equity is something that most people I'm sure most people in this auditorium would imagine themselves to be in favor of. Equity. The problem is if you build a rule into your personality where you say anything that is positive from the perspective of equity is therefore something that I am in favor of then you can be easily manipulated because all that has to happen is somebody needs to wrap that label around something. Noxious and you may not detect until too late that it isn't what you signed up for. What's more, this sets the stage for your cognitive dissonance to be weaponized against you. Because once you've signed up, once you've protested in favor of something called equity and then it turns out that it isn't what it was advertised as you have a predicament which is do you admit that you were wrong to favor this thing in the first place or do you double down on protesting even further? And I've seen a lot of people who simply got involved in this movement because it was labeled in a way that sounded good to them, continue to move in the wrong direction, because at the point they begin to detect that it isn't what it's supposed to be, it's too late for them to figure out how to how to back out. And what's the connection to biology here? Is it an accident that you happen to be a biologist? Or is there something about biology that presents an especially good target for this kind of confusion? Yeah, that's a great question. It's no accident. I think I've been teaching and thinking very deeply about questions about how groups compete with each other and what role those game theoretic parameters and predicaments have played in human history. And so really, this particular instance was a variation on a theme, and it was quite plain to me what was going on. And the question is, could I make it plain to enough people who hadn't yet chosen sides to avert a disaster? And the answer with respect to evergreen is no. On the other hand, with respect to the outside world, it does appear that we have a much healthier conversation on that topic now than we did six months ago. There are topics here that I think we should touch because they're of such critical importance to our national conversation or a global conversation. And there are topics that it seems like we should be able to talk about rationally and in a truly open ended and open minded way without becoming hysterical. But these topics so reliably produce hysteria that it's just like everything's covered with plutonium. Let's talk about first the concept of race, which was at the center of this disruption on campus. As a biological concept. Is it a valid concept? Okay, we're about to get into serious danger. You're about to get on Twitter. Yes. Well, I have changed my tune on this question. I have not changed my understanding. But the term race is actually close to indefensible. And the reason that it's close to indefensible is not the one that we are told biology has unearthed. We are told that there is more variation within races than between races, and therefore races don't exist. That's nonsense. That actually mathematically, essentially has to be true. It says nothing one way or the other about the reality of races. What does invalidate the concept of race is the way that concept has been used. So, for example, one drop rules say something about what category you're in that is not in any way mathematical right? If one drop of black blood makes you black, then this is not a biological concept we're talking about. It's a social concept. So what I would say you're not in favor of the Nuremberg Laws, is that what I'm hearing? Well, I would say I use the term race because it's the term people expect when you're having these conversations. And then when the conversations get technical, it causes a problem. The real term that we should be using is population. Population is a biologically viable term, and we don't get into one drop rule kind of shenanigans surrounding it. So I would say if you're having a technical conversation, recognize that race isn't the right concept and move to population, and then we can talk about what the meaning of population is. I would say there's a higher level version of that term too, which is even more useful thinking evolutionarily, but has to be used with care. And that term is lineage. So a lineage is more useful because it is a fractal meaning that it exists independent of scale at least over a certain range. And so you and all of your descendants are a lineage. Your mother and all of her descendants, which includes the lineage we just talked about, is also a lineage. And we can step all the way back up the evolutionary tree of ancestry and we can generate larger and larger, more inclusive lineages. And so what we call races are typically populations. And those populations are one level in that hierarchy that is important in human history. That said, not every one of these is actually a lineage or a population. So what happened in Rwanda with Hutus and Tutsis was in large measure, artificial. Those were not actual lineages in any biologically meaningful sense. They were arbitrary based on phenotypic characteristics that may or may not have tracked lineage. So is a family a similar concept to race or lineage? Here, there is actually no clear boundary between a family and the rest of the species. Well, family is not technically a lineage. So you and your wife and all of your descendants are not a lineage because the common ancestor between you and your wife is not included. But that's not, I guess, biologically related. Yes. Essentially the theme of what you're saying is right that as we step up to larger and larger collections of related individuals what we have are larger and larger lineages which function like families. They evolve in the same way that families are capable of because they're related to each other in a genetically precise way. But the borders aren't necessarily easily defined. And there's no easily defined borders of a species either. There was no first human. Well, there is a most recent common ancestor of all humans. There logically has to be right. That does not mean that that was the first human in any sense that if you were standing there to observe this person that you could recognize them as such. But the important thing to realize is for some reason we have a bias. We tend to think that evolutionary dynamics ought to function in ways that make them easily tractable, that make them comprehensible to us. And there's no reason that that has to be true. And you picked the perfect example. We cannot define species in a way that recovers all of the things that we think we mean when we use that term. And it actually becomes particularly broken when we get near human beings. But the fact that we can't define species is of no consequence one way or the other to evolutionary dynamics. They are evolving and lineages are diverging into sub lineages that ultimately can't interbreed. And there's some point at which we say well, they're definitely two different species. But on the road to being definitely two different species you are kind of two different species and you're not really two different species. So we shouldn't expect evolution necessarily to make our life easy. What we should understand is that it is a process that does not think. And what it simply does is present us with representatives that did a better job of getting here than competitors that did a worse job. And to the extent that you are a member of many lineages at once, that's not a problem for this process. The process doesn't need to be able to say, you are one of these and you aren't one of those. It just needs to simply continually select that subset of lineages that are playing the game well. So now why is this so inflammatory? Is it that the one fact that that seems to keep coming up or or and or its its existence or possible existence is the thing that is avoided in all of this is that populations or races or any geographically isolated group of people at any point in history if you take two groups, they will vary with respect to certain traits. So we could even add culture here. They'll vary with respect to culture, but they'll also vary with respect to genes. And these genes govern many of the things we care about. Anything you can name about a human mind or a human temperament or a human physical characteristics, these vary, and they vary in very predictable ways. The fact that you can look at someone and make an educated guess about where their ancestors came from tells you that there's some pattern here that is conserved and it doesn't stop at the skin. And it would be a miracle correct me if I'm wrong, if everything we cared about that wasn't superficial like the skin, things like intelligence, things like empathy, things like aggression, all of these things that to some degree are governed by genes, it would be a miracle if the average values in every population were the same. What you've said, I think is right, but I think it actually leads to a fear that I personally, having thought about it a great deal, having traveled in all different parts of the world, lived in different populations, I don't fear it. And I think you don't fear that that's true or you don't think this thing this thing, if true, should be feared? I think the fear is born of the following observation. If we look at different sports, they select for different populations, right? It happens that marathon running is dominated by Ethiopians and Kenyans. You are unlikely to find Inuits being highly successful in marathon running. And there's a good reason for this, because people from Ethiopia and Kenya, the fact that that's even funny to picture is worth flagging. It is. Don't get on Twitter with that. Yeah, this just stays between us. So here's the thing. If you think about what it means to be an Inuit, one of the things it means is that you have been selected to conserve heat, because the difference between conserving a bit of heat and failing to conserve it is a life and death difference in many circumstances. If you live in the Arctic, if you're an Ethiopian, you have exactly the opposite problem. Radiating heat is the key to survival in a habitat that's that hot. So my point would simply be inuits are shaped so as to conserve heat. They are rounder and that round shape does not lend itself to marathon running. And it should not trouble us or surprise us that we see this bias. I think though, that people are very concerned that what we see playing out in different sports, the fact that different populations dominate different sports is going to be a mirror for what we find inside the mind. And I don't fear this. I think there's a very good reason to see these things as unfolding very differently in evolutionary terms, which is in the example I just gave you, you can see a very good reason that two habitats select in very different ways for one's phenotype. Every habitat selects for intelligence. Which doesn't mean that differences in intelligence didn't accumulate somewhere first. But the real question is, given that human populations are interconnected to the extent that there are heritable differences in intelligence, what we should expect them to do is spread because they provide advantage to anybody who gets a hold of them. And so I realize at the moment there seems to be except they might not provide fecundity and anyone who gets a hold of them. What if intelligent people are having fewer kids at this moment in history? We have to put modernity aside as soon as you got but it's been the process of still having so modernity could just be the last 1000 years, right? I would say modernity. Let me flip that around. There are genetic changes in us that have been selected for very recently, maybe not 1000 years, but like 5000 years. Things like lactose tolerance. Just to ask you how quickly can that happen? Leaving aside deliberate manipulations to the genome, how quickly would you expect a culture to determine genetically relevant change? Well, I'm going to have to get pretty politically incorrect so I'm leading you into dangerous territory. None of this is on this piece of paper. So those changes can happen much more quickly than we think. But human beings are very evolutionarily odd. So everybody is well aware that both nature and nurture play a role in what human beings are. And at some level the sophisticated consensus around that is that it's a fool's errand to try to separate out the influences of nature from nurture because of course they're both playing a role. What we don't say is that human beings are by far the most nurture based creature that has ever existed on planet Earth. That we have been pushed in the last phase of our evolution very far in the direction of nurture and very far away from the direction of nature. And that is not an accident that occurred because it provided a distinct evolutionary advantage. But in practice, what it means is that if you think of a human being as a physiological creature, that's the robot, and then it's got a brain, that's the computer, and then it's got a mind and that's the software. The answer is that human beings are effective at doing what we do because so much of what we are has been offloaded to the software layer. And that is really the key to why human beings are capable of dominating every terrestrial habitat on the planet, why we can go into space, why you all can exist in this room in a way that your ancestors, even 500 years ago, probably wouldn't have understood. So the fact that all of these things have been shifted over into a software layer that can be written and rewritten as circumstances change says that the analysis that we might do for some other creature is less likely to be applicable to us. The software layer is culture. The software layer is culture. But culture has to be defined a bit carefully. So culture are units of information that are transmitted generally from one member of a species to another. Now, this does provide culture with a special attribute, which is that it can move horizontally. You and I can exchange cultural tidbits, but most culture is likely to be transmitted vertically. So we learn an awful lot in our natal homes before we go out into the world and pick up more nuanced stuff. So, yes, that cultural layer, I would argue, is every bit as biological and every bit as evolutionary as the genetic layer. And in fact, it is a special trick that has been deployed by the genetic layer in order to solve problems that the genetic layer is not capable of solving on its own. Well, I want to get deeper into this and the link between biology and culture and whether understanding evolution helps us produce more normative culture and society is more worth living in. But before we go there, I want to just ask a question or two about evergreen. And this is a moment where we have an opportunity to say how we should rewrite our culture or modify it. So you take these topics that can be raised in the context of a biology classroom and on their face they seem dangerous to talk about. And there's obviously there are many memes that have been spread about how even having a conversation like this that skirts these issues is a symptom of intolerance or some kind of perverse fixation on human difference that has an ulterior motive that we should be suspect of. What should students do? Whether or not their understanding of the issues is correct, in many cases it won't be. But students who are outraged by something that's happening on a campus, in the class, or an invited speaker, what is the appropriate means of protest that doesn't lead to this absolute collapse of an institution. Yeah, what indeed? I would say the first problem is that something about modern protest is absolutely deaf to realities that ought to be important to it. And were this not the case, there would be lots of room to navigate based on concerns, some of which may be legitimate, many of which I can tell you are not legitimate. But the key to dealing with these tensions is to air them and to discuss them. And the hallmark of what I saw at Evergreen and what we have seen elsewhere is that the movement is utterly inevitable on the topics that it's focused on, which is just the, the oddest thing, and it's very unnatural. So I should say I lost very few friends in this circumstance. I did lose a few on the faculty side, but students have overwhelmingly been loyal to my wife and me and very sympathetic and generous and understanding. So the students who actually knew you, knew you, and the students who didn't know you demonized you. Right. But here's the part that I can't get past. When I talk to these students and I talk to other friends who watch this whole thing unfold, I hear the same thing over and over again, which is they're not confused about me or Heather or any of what happened, but they cannot reason with their friends who don't know us. Heather is your wife, who is also a professor, is also Professor Deborgreen for 15 years, in fact, Evergreen's most highly rated professor based on rate my professor online. You can go see her reviews. She's marvelous. But I know that if I was watching somebody, let's say that I thought ill of somebody, I thought they were a horrible person, and then somebody said to me, you know what, I actually know them, you've got them wrong, I would immediately become agnostic about what was going on. In an instant I would say, well, either the person I'm talking to doesn't understand what's going on or I've missed something, but something doesn't add up here, so I'm going to have to go slow and figure out what I've missed. This is not functioning in this circumstance. People who believe that they know what took place are so convinced of it that they cannot be derailed even by somebody saying, hey, you know what, I know that person personally and they're not a racist. That doesn't apparently count for anything. So that tells me that this is a kind of religious fervor. It's not a natural, it's not an analytical conclusion that might be amenable to being changed if evidence arose that said something different. It's very yes, it is. It does have a kind of cultic shape to it. And you would almost have to deprogram someone who's got a ton of invested in viewing you a certain way. When this first thing unfolded. I don't know if you remember it, but you tweeted something about. It being cult like and I had not thought that thought before I saw your tweet, but it instantly resonated and everything I've seen since says that. That's the correct analogy. Yeah. And also social media is obviously not helping in this regard. It's spreading these memes. And again, once you have enough sunk cost seeing it one way and you've been public about it, then the the cost, the social costs of changing your mind publicly and apologizing seems insurmountable to people, which again, this is an intuition that I don't share. It's like if I've, if I've been wrong publicly about something, particularly in this kind of area where I thought someone was Satan and they turned out not to be, I would be so uncomfortable having just maintaining that by neglect. I just feel like I'm wired to immediately rectify that problem. But it seems people have different intuitions here. Yeah, I don't quite get it. Because intellectual honest brokers, I think, all reached the conclusion that you just suggested, which is at the point you discover that you've got something really wrong. It's very painful to get on the right side of it, but it's way cheaper than not getting on the right side of it and continuing to pay the cost of being dead wrong. So there's a way in which no matter how bad it is to backtrack and get on the right side of something, it's always a bargain relative to waiting. And somehow that logic does not seem to register with people. I guess there's another topic, two other topics we should mention here that freak people out. Well, there's a name for what I now consider the most vulnerable attitude that would bias someone toward freaking out on these issues. And it is this term that I don't think I've ever uttered on a podcast. And I'm going to have you define for me. I haven't thought a lot about it, but this notion of intersectionality. What is intersectionality and when will this go away? Yeah, well, actually, Eric and I have a long running private discussion on this topic and the upshot is that intersectionality, like so many of these concepts that we are now being backed against the wall with, actually has a bit of truth at the bottom of it. It's a real thing, but it's been weaponized in a way that just makes it very dangerous. So the basic notion is that people who are from historically oppressed populations, they're not identifiable with one of these things that if you're trans and you're black that that's two different kinds of difficult road that you're on simultaneously and that the interaction of them is unique and emergent. I'm not sure I've actually heard it said that way before, but there's some unique fact of all of the various things that you face that are obstacles. And the problem is that this gets turned into a very simplistic formula that essentially is like, well, maybe I should put it this way. There are two factions in the equity movement. Equity being something that is never defined for a particular reason. But the two factions are a faction that earnestly wishes to put an end to systematic oppression and the other faction wishes to turn the tables of systematic oppression. And in the context of turning the tables of systematic oppression, one's intersectionality quotient, that is to say, the number of kinds of oppression that an individual can claim, basically says, where in the new hierarchy you're going to be? Now, this is folly. It's not going to work. And even if it did work, the intersectional movement is unstable game, theoretically, because it is composed of all of these different entities that are not ultimately the same. And you can see the friendly fire happening in that world where it's almost like a very unhappy game of Dungeons and Dragons where you have various powers that get misapplied against your friends. It's actually tragic. At Evergreen. There were two. So Evergreen has a very large Indigenous population and the movement used a lot of Indigenous imagery to begin with, most famously at something called the canoe meeting, which was an absurd exercise. But the canoe was there not by accident. It was there as a metaphor for this Indian mode of transport. And you could see that there was tension between these two factions, the Indigenous faction and the black faction. And to my way of thinking, these two populations have the greatest claim on systemic oppression, having resulted in a permanent underclass status of any two populations. But they were also in tension with each other. And that, ultimately, I believe, is going to tear the movement apart if nothing else does first, which is very sad because the systemic oppression is real. It wasn't real at Evergreen. It was phony at Evergreen. Evergreen was challenged because it was a soft target, not because it was a bastion of racism. But there are legitimate concerns to be addressed. And unfortunately, by pursuing them in this false way, we leave the impression that maybe the problem isn't real at all. I'm hesitant to go here to land on another dangerous noun, but I'm encouraged by how little trouble we've gotten ourselves in thus far. Cool. How do biologists think about sex and gender? And how will this survive? Export to the culture at large? Yeah, take it away from lifetime. But actually, this is funny because to me, sex and gender is a walk in the park compared to race. Okay. Sex and gender, there's the embarrassing aspect of discussing it, but the logic of it is much more straightforward and I think actually probably easier for us to deal with. Sexes are real and they're different from each other for evolutionary reasons. And some of those differences we can do nothing about. And some of those differences, though, they evolved and they came to the present as a result of the fact that they made evolutionary sense. We are not stuck with them. And we can reorganize the truth of the way the sexes interact, but we should do so deliberately and intentionally and not haphazardly. Because we stand to lose a tremendous amount if we just simply say men and women are basically the same. And anytime men and women don't behave the same way, that's because the patriarchy is oppressing people. That's just nonsense. And so the message I would have is we should retool sex and gender for modern realities. Just the simple fact of birth control changes everything and if nothing else did, that would license us to reinvent these concepts. But we should do so in an evolutionarily aware way. Can you say more about that? So the fact that women have control over their reproduction changes the Darwinian logic of sex difference or where are you going with it, changes everything. And it also results in human beings, modern human beings being in possession of this marvelous gift that they are now abusing. The fact that human beings can have sex and not produce babies, not play the baby lottery, that's a gift and it should be treated with respect. It should not be treated as well. We're therefore entitled to treat sex as if it were nothing. It's actually a very important it plays an important role in bonding between people and to the extent that we are going to reinvent it in some modern way, we should be careful with it. But yes, men and women are different and that those differences, some of them are absolutely profound. So the one I find the most interesting is this women do not have a reproductive strategy that allows them to produce huge numbers of offspring in a lifetime. There is the the world record is something like 60, which I still don't know how you get to 60. What did you say, 60 or 16? No, 60. So every time I say that I think way I've got to have that wrong and I look it up but it turns out to be right. Somebody get on snopes yeah, well, I think the answer is something like what it would have to be where the woman was predisposed in some way to give birth to twins and she was constantly handing them off to wet nurses so that she was immediately becoming fertile again. But anyway, it's an interesting story, but it's very much an outlier. Whereas there certainly are males that produce huge numbers of offspring in a lifetime and the way males produce huge numbers of offspring in a lifetime is by producing offspring in which they invest nothing, which is impossible for a female. Even a female who hands off offspring immediately to a wet nurse is investing all of the effort of pregnancy which is very substantial in humans. So what this means is that a it produces evolutionarily, the phenomenon of menopause eventually where women adaptively shut down their reproductive capacity and invest in the offspring they've got rather than producing new ones. But what this means is that effectively women, especially postmenopausal women, but women are much more likely to view their own well being and the well being of their brood in a way that is compatible with the well being of their lineage at a larger scale. Because women cannot produce huge numbers of offspring at the cost of other individuals, they are likely to be very far sighted in their wisdom about lineage level phenomena. After they can no longer produce offspring of their own, their interests become almost synonymous with the larger lineage. This isn't the way males see the world because even an old male potentially could produce more offspring and his fitness could go up in that way. Males, on the other hand, precisely because of the way they reproduce, are much more likely to gamble in a particular way and to gamble productively. So a lot of the big wins in human evolutionary history have to do with men taking insane risks and managing those risks to a win. So there's a kind of male wisdom that has to do with risk taking and a kind of female wisdom that has to do with long term thinking. And they're both wisdom. And frankly, what should we do with these things? We should democratize them both, right? We should hand them off. Everybody should begin to see their own well being tied up in the larger lineage level questions. We would behave much more reasonably on environmental issues if we did that. And we should also figure out what the message of male wisdom is with respect to risk. And there's no reason going forward that it has to be deployed by males more than females. Anybody who wants it should have it available to them but we shouldn't expect it to magically appear equally in both sexes. We should probably have to be deliberate about figuring out how to pass it on. But now what do you do with more inflammatory issues like possible sex differences in both propensities and interests? I'm thinking of like the Google memo, the James Demore letter. Feel free to weigh in on that anyway you want to destroy your reputation? I understand that we can step out of the stream of mere evolutionary logic and rewrite the software of culture. But if it is just a fact that men and women are different not only physically but psychologically in ways that are relevant toward the kinds of careers they seek out, what do we do when the different representation of men and women is always scored as a sign of bias or some sort of systematic injustice? Unless they're exactly the same, there will be a different representation. So what's descriptively true of our current situation? And what do you think we should be normatively sought? I think the answer here is pretty clear. It is simply not true that anytime you have different numbers of males and females in a profession for example, that it is in and of itself evidence that there must be some unequal access. We know that's not true. Right. To take an analogy, it happens to be the case that cycling I'm a cyclist and I follow cycling. Cycling is a sport. I'm not talking about competitive cycling, but casual cycling is something that is much less frequently done by black folks than white folks. Now, I can tell you that the culture at the bike store is not uninterested in selling you a bicycle if you're black. In fact, maybe it even carries some special cachet. But there is something in just the experiences of different populations that has resulted in, at the present moment, a non representative distribution of people in the hobby of cycling. Couldn't that just be an economic variable? Could be a lot of things. Zip codes are more dangerous to cycle in, and so if you grew up in one, you weren't encouraged to ride a bike, or it could be a lot of mundane things. What we know it isn't is any obstacle to cycling, to any population. Anybody who wants to can get a bike and cycle. Nobody's going to tell you to get off the road. So we know that it is something else. It is not oppression, it is some other thing, which may be the result of the fact that zip codes are differentially desirable from the point of cycling, and that zip codes are not distributed in a fair way. That's possible, but it is not oppression at the bike store. And protesting at the bike store would be pointless. Right? It makes no sense. That's actually fun to picture. I would support a bike store protest just for the irony of it. But in any case, I think the answer is fields occupations should be open, assuming that the particular field doesn't depend on physical braun or something else that would explain why certain people need to be hired more than other people. Anything engineering, it doesn't matter. It should be equally open to everybody. And frankly, I like seeing women do stuff that is traditionally masculine. I happen to be married to a woman who, though she looks lovely, sort of sees the world in masculine terms. And she's an evolutionary biologist who goes off to the Amazon and is comfortable carrying a machete. And that's the way she is. And I think it's great. So I think we should encourage people to follow their passions and to the extent that their passion is not consistent with historical biases in the way jobs or fields were populated, all the better. But we don't get to just jump to the logic that says if the numbers in the seats aren't even, then something has gone awry here. Because it's logically not true. Which is not to say that that's never true, it's just not necessarily true. Exactly. In fact, I think we know, if you listen into what women in tech are saying, even people who are supportive of Des Moore and his memo acknowledge that there's an awful lot of not so nice boys club kind of stuff that goes on in tech circles. So that's not good. And it probably does have an effect. How much of an effect? That's a question that we should study. To the extent it's driving people out of tech, that's bad and it should be addressed. But that's a far cry from the facile notion that 50 50 is what we have to have in order to demonstrate that there's no oppression. So how do you think about gender and its relationship to biological sex? That's a good question. I've never done this before. I just I can't get over the fact that I'm just leading you down a burning hallway filled broken glass. They have rushed the state. You're doing great. Sounds good. Yeah. Let's put it this way. Gender and sex are not identical. I think it would be fair to say that gender is the software of sex, which is not the same thing as saying so. My wife is fond of the description that these things are not binary, but they're bimodal. Right. So sexes tend to be two modes, and those two modes tend to line up with two genders. And then there's a lot of stuff that doesn't exactly fit. Some of that stuff may be the result of chromosomally intersex, people being different, and some of it may just simply be at the software level. It would not be surprising at all in light of the fact that we are software based creatures more than any other creature that it has ever been. We are living in circumstances that don't look like our ancestral circumstances. We are therefore getting all kinds of information in our developmental environments that is abnormal and untested and what effect it has on your understanding of your own gender. We can't say it's too early in the study. What I would say is that morally, we are absolutely compelled to be compassionate about the fact that lots of people are telling us, you know what? I have the sense that I was born in the wrong body. We don't know why that is. It's probably a mixture of phenomena. But come on, these are human beings, and they're telling you something about an excruciating condition and they're doing the best they can to figure out how to navigate it. So at one level, I think it's a very interesting biological question. As a human being, though, I think it's a very simple question. We have to be compassionate. I don't want to sign up for any fiction. Yeah. And there are so many cases where the unclear biological or scientific picture is married to a very clear political answer like that. The politics are so simple, right? And the politics are what would compassion dictate in this circumstance? And once you connect with another person's lived experience, the idea that the politics are difficult to resolve, just goes completely out the window. It's quite analogous to the question of just straightforward male female differences and how we should address them. The biological facts are interesting and they need to be navigated carefully. We can't sign up for fiction to solve the political problem, but at some level the political dimension is up for us to navigate without all of the information being available to us as to what causes the thing. They really are different questions and unfortunately, because people have been effectively led to believe that they have a choice, that if they want to sign up for the right political answer, that they have to sign up for a fictional biological answer. We're caught in this conundrum where people like me are in danger because we want to say hey, actually the biology doesn't support the idea that gender is made up and assigned by somebody when you're born. Gender is in general a good match for sex and it is not something that is simply arbitrary. It's real, it's biological, it has a meaning, but we can do the right thing and that's what we should do. I will also say though there is a just as it was with Evergreen and the issue of the equity protests, the story from the point of view of the outside world is not the real story. Inside the world of trans people there is a diversity of opinion which is now beginning to emerge and it is penalized in order to keep people on narrative and that's something we have to address. So, for example, ContraPoints got in big trouble in the last couple of weeks based on her willingness to talk to people who were outside of a particular social bubble and she was basically penalized online by the very people that had been supporting her. And this was a very unfortunate thing because what she was really trying to do was bridge a gap that we should all want bridged. So anyway, if we support those people, this will work out much better and we will get to the conversation that doesn't insult our intelligence about sex and gender. Yeah, one thing that I've been spending most of my time doing is trying to think about questions of meaning and value in a rational scientific picture. And it's the marriage of science and moral philosophy, loosely speaking, and important questions that society is grappling with or will have to grapple with. And not everything is at the center of that Venn diagram, but many things that I focus on and there are many people who are struggling to speak about. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am here with Sadartha Mukherjee. Sid, thanks for joining me again on the podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. So you've been here twice before. We spoke about both of your fantastic tomes, the Emperor of All Maladies, which is really the definitive book on cancer in our lifetime, just an amazing book, and also The Gene, which was also amazing. And so we've spoken about both of those books at length on the podcast. I recommend anyone interested in those broader topics, consult those previous conversations. But today I just want to I want to talk to you about the COVID pandemic in general and and just get your kind of expert eye view of what has been happening here these long now five months in the US. That we've been dealing with this. I think, ineptly by any objective criterion, our ineptitude is fairly well established here. I'll just remind people who may not know it, you are a famous oncologist and also writer, but your background is in virology, so you actually have a wheelhouse that is relevant to our current concerns. So just to start off here and we can go anywhere you want to go. Sid but what has been your experience watching this all play out, and watching in particular, watching the spread of misinformation and just the way in which it's been given top spin by political cynicism in many cases. And also just in the beginning, there was a fair amount of actually good faith uncertainty about the biology and epidemiology of COVID And so it really has been hard to draw the line at various points between a valid contrarian opinion and a dangerously irresponsible one. And, you know, granted that that line is probably getting clearer, but what's it been like for you these last five months watching this unfold? So I think there are several threads in that conversation that I want to break apart because they're quite different. So I want to make a very clear distinction between the uncertainties of which there are many and the ineptitudes of which there are many. So we can talk about them directly because those are important and there is gray zones in all those cases. So let's first talk about what went wrong and what could have not gone wrong in the United States. And around the world. Well, before that, let's talk a little bit about why this particular virus, of all viruses has the capacity to cause a pandemic. And the answer lies in the biology of the virus. There are two features, or three features of the virus that make it particularly a pandemic causing virus. That obviously is not true for many viruses. One is that it's completely new. We have never encountered it before as far as we know. And so therefore humans are immunologically naive to the virus. That's one. The second thing, and now we're getting to really important things, is the fact that the virus has a high degree of high capacity to spread. Virologists use one measure of this measure called r not, which is a measure of how many people one person infects. And obviously, mathematically speaking, if that number is above one, then the infection will spread exponentially. So some viruses have huge numbers. Measles is a very, very highly infectious virus. Sarscope too sits actually in the higher range. It's hard to estimate exactly what that number is because it varies depending on the population and the behavior of the population, but it's got a high number. And the third feature, which is actually probably the one that we realize very late and perhaps too late in the game and is the most insidious feature, is that asymptomatic people, people with absolutely no symptoms, seem to seem to be able to carry the virus and spread the virus. Now, that's a big distinction. That is not true, for instance, for Ebola or other very lethal viruses, when you have symptoms, you usually then become a transmitter. But it's true for this virus, we might be familiar with other viruses that it's true for HIV also it's true for HIV. You can have be completely asymptomatic but still transmit the virus. You can have virus in your blood and transmit the virus. These viruses that have this capacity to have asymptomatic transmission are particularly difficult because you cannot simply find people by symptoms alone. You have to find them by testing. And if you want to contain the virus using public health strategies such as containment or quarantine or isolation, you have to essentially find them. You have to go and find them. They will not find you because they don't know whether they whether they by you I mean a medical doctor or a medical system. And that's because they don't know if they're carriers, asymptomatic carriers, or they're really have the virus. So that covers the territory of why this virus, of all viruses, has and had the capacity to start a global pandemic. So this brings us to the next piece of conversation, which is the conversation about ineptitudes. So very important to remember that the ineptitudes started right from day zero in Wuhan, China. We should have known about this virus long before we actually did as a global community, several attempts to buy Chinese doctors in full good faith to communicate. The urgency of what was going on in China were essentially blocked, we think, or we now know to some extent. And in fact, as you very well know, the the ophthalmologist who sounded the alarm on the virus was essentially censored. And unfortunately, as you also know, he died of that viral infection. We'll come back to that in a second. It's very important because that tells us something about the virus, I think. So that's where the ineptitude started. I would say that's a global ineptitude that is also I mean, people have conspiracy theories around it. I don't know what to believe and what not to believe because the investigation has not really proceeded. The Chinese government has been extremely reluctant to share many crucial pieces of information around those first few days. Are you referring to the speculation that this came from a lab as opposed to a wet market or what conspiracy are you thinking about? So many. So one is that I think we still don't know the origin of the virus. I think that there is an interview in Science magazine from one of the workers who cultivates coronavirus in the Wuhan Coronavirus facility and she's adamant that it did not come from the lab. But the question is that incident has not been fully investigated. I just don't know. I don't think it was a bioterror weapon, for instance, nor do I think that it was an intentional infection of someone. Right. But I do think that we need to investigate and find out where the virus came from and perhaps even track back the very first index case, which is usually possible if we have access to full free information, which we do not at this point of time, just to linger there for a second. Does it actually matter? Within a very short period, we had the full sequence of the virus and we're now dealing with the basics of vaccine design and treatment design and epidemiology. Does it really matter what the origin moment was? It matters for future pandemics and it matters for future surveillance. One of the things that we have to learn from this and never let it happen again, and doubtless there are hundreds of thousands of viruses xenoviruses that lurk in bats and other animals, particularly social animals. I mean, one question is why bats seem to carry so many viruses. It's because they're very social and they live in very dense populations in environments. So it matters for the next pandemic because we cannot let this happen again. But moving to the United States, the ineptitudes, or I would say the glaring errors began also very quickly and began from the start. So one error that began from the start was that obviously the first response here was, oh, it's going to go away, it's not going to come, it's going to go away. That's obviously now not been the case. But that was a completely misplaced response. It was not going to go away. The first index case was seen at the end of January in Seattle. And that should have been an immediate call for urgent action because we knew, as I said, that this was a Xenovirus, it had a rapid spread. And we knew by that time there was enough suspicion in the virological community that there were asymptomatic spreaders. It wasn't definitive, but as soon as that suspicion is raised, you need to start acting on it. So we're at the end of January, we're in a small hospital outside Seattle. The first index case walks in. That should have sounded a major alarm to the CDC and a major alarm to every health authority saying, the virus has now entered the United States and we should do something about it. The second major, I would say glaring error, which should never be repeated, was probably the biggest of them all. And that is, once the virus was in the United States, there was no test for the virus for about 40 days. So there was no FDA approved test for the virus for 40 full days. I cannot emphasize as an immunologist or a virologist that it is inconceivable that that would happen, but for 40 full days, there was no test for it. And that was partly because the the CDC tried to make a test. And the test, the first batch of the test worked. I interviewed virtually everyone I could, and there's a big piece that I wrote in The New Yorker about this. The CDC made a test. Actually, in the end, it was a good test. But when they expanded the batches of the test and sent it out to the Public Health Services, which is where these tests are usually then monitored, the test failed to work. One probe, one of the pieces of the test kept showing up with false positives, which meant the entire test was not reliable. Now, in that meantime, in that same period of time so as the clock is ticking now, day one, day two, day three several academic investigators, including folks like Alex Grenninger at the University of Washington, who I interviewed for the piece in The New Yorker and I have had a long communication with Alex Greninger. Had by himself in his lab, developed a test for the virus. But that test had to be in order to be used. It had to be licensed by the FDA and the CDC. Now, the FDA and the CDC, we have something which allows such licensing to proceed very quickly, which is called the Emergency Use Authorization EUA. And if you speak to the FDA and the CDC, they will tell you that, oh God, gosh, our EUA was working fine. We were just waiting for our tests to be corrected. If you ask people in the private laboratories, they will say just the opposite. They will say, well, we applied for the EUA, but it took. By the time it turned around, it was already too late. And I think you describe and I think this was in your New Yorker piece, you describe doctors spending nearly 100 hours filling out forms to get permission to test. And these forms couldn't even be emailed right. They had to be snail mailed to the FDA. And it just sounds like the infrastructure over there is a generation old. So I spoke with the FDA. And I spoke with the CDC. The FDA says that it was a parallel infrastructure that you had to do a snail mail, but they would also accept emails. That's what the FDA says. And it also says that, and it maintains that they were processing these as fast as they could. The laboratory investigators say that that's not the case, that in fact, the snail mail slowed them down. One problem, of course, you have to realize that there was an intrinsic problem at this point of time, which is that no one had samples. So in order to validate a test, you need samples to validate a test. But if you have only it's a perfectly circular argument. So, in other words, if you don't have a test that works, you don't know who to validate it on, because you don't know who's infected. And how can you prove that a test works if you don't have samples to validate it on? Do you see what I mean? Yeah. We really need to learn about these pieces of logic or these sort of failures, some of which are, I would say some of which are intentional, some of which are non intentional. But this is a perfect example, and it could be applied to any business. It could be applied to any medicine. If asymptomatic individuals can carry the virus, which happens to be in this case, then how do you get 20 people? How do you test whether the test works or not? You can't, because you don't have samples to test on anyway. In any case, by 1520 days in, Greeninger and others had scrambled together enough material from various sources to be able to test to show that their test worked. And eventually, of course, the FDA CDC test also began to work there. There was a faulty reagent that was corrected. But by all of this time, 40 odd days had passed. 30 odd days had passed for the most part. I mean, of course, there was testing going on as well, and that's a critical period of time, because that is when the infection was spreading. And we don't even know what happened in those 30 to 40 days. We don't know how many people flew from Seattle to, for instance, New York and New Jersey. We don't know how many people came in from there was no travel ban, remember, on Europe. So that is mistake number two. So we just went through mistake number one, which was the absence of testing. Mistake number two was to dismiss the idea or was to say, this is a Chinese problem, this is a problem that is in China, and not recognize the fact that the slopes of infection rates were climbing rapidly in Europe, in Italy and Spain. So during the time that we had no test, there were people coming in and going out of major cities, new York being probably the major epicenter. And there are several genetic clues that clearly suggest that the infection in New York at least, was primarily seeded by European travel and not by not travel from Asia. Right. The infection in Europe was ceded in turn from Asian travelers who came into Italy and Spain. But the infection in New York, we have genetic evidence to suggest that it was from people who came in from Europe. So not putting in a travel ban, testing ban, or even a quarantine in isolation during that period of time when we didn't have tests is a crucial error. And that was error too. I should say that just backtracking a little bit. I should add that the FDA and the CDC have had a long history of working with public health laboratories, but they have had actually not a very long history of working with private academic laboratories. So like the University of Washington or like Columbia University, et cetera. So that is in some ways error number three. Because if the FDA had had a well established track, if they had vetted and pre authorized, as countries like south Korea and other places did some academic laboratories as being good enough or of high enough caliber, that if they were to apply for a test, a successful test, that the FDA would say, okay, ours doesn't seem to be working. We'll take yours until ours gets to work. That infrastructure was present within the FDA, but present in a very infant form. That's what the academic laboratory folks told me. So academic pathologists told me. The FDA says that that's not true. And so the question is, when we perform the autopsy, one of these two things is correct. We don't know which one it is. Either the FDA has had a long tradition, and it's quite smooth and streamlined, their capacity to work with academic laboratories, pathology laboratories like Greeningers and Columbia's and New York hospitals, or it is, in fact, was not streamlined and had to be streamlined in a kind of emergency setting. So now we keep moving. The clock keeps ticking forward. So now we have people from Europe traveling into the United States carrying virus symptomatic, asymptomatic we don't know. There is nothing going on in the borders, except for originally, as you very well know, a ban against Chinese travel. But of course, that was not where the leak came from. And they're coming into New York, and they are spreading the virus asymptomatically and we don't even know where they're going, what they're doing, where they're spreading the virus. And we don't even know how many because the test is still lacking. So move the clock forward a little bit. Forward again. Actually, before we advance, I'm wondering let's just linger on the testing piece for a second. So what ensures that we learn the right lessons here? It seems to me that some lessons seem genuinely hard to learn because in normal times, you would view this sluggishness from the FDA and the CDC as a feature, not a bug, in that, I mean, we obviously it's got to be motivated to some degree by wanting to ensure quality control. You don't want to just approve labs all over the place to get their competing tests to scale. And I got to think the status quo was motivated to some degree by an awareness that there's a trade off between safety and speed in situations like so you're absolutely correct. I mean, you know, we the last thing we want is a trigger happy FDA or a trigger happy CDC. So that we certainly don't want that. But what we do want is CDC and the FDA and an FDA that is able to respond to pandemic situations in a different way than it responds to the approval of any drug or test in normal circumstances. So there has to be some kind of hysteresis or some kind of space, as it were, dial up, dial down system in which you can dial up or dial down the responsiveness based on the situation. One way that I proposed in the New Yorker piece and subsequent pieces, I'm on several panels that have to do with COVID response and what we learned from the COVID response. But one way is to do exactly what I told you, which is to do some kind of pre authorization so that the FDA would have, rather than waiting to receive applications in the setting where their own test was, not working to go and seek out people that they have already vetted and ask them, can you help us figure out at least an interim test? We will validate that test and at least launch that while we wait for our test to come and working. So that would have been one kind of solution. And this pre authorization process or pre vetting process could be quite stringent. The FDA has lots of time in between pandemics to ensure that the University of Washington is not just out to make a fast buck and that they're PCR machines, and this is what their capabilities are. How many tests can they do per day? What is the reliability of their testing infrastructure? Can they report out those tests, et cetera, et cetera, so that rather than waiting and being passive, the FDA would have been or the CDC and the FDA would have been active during this process. So that's one thing that one can learn. You don't want to trigger happy FDA, but you do want an FDA that is prepared to what I would call dial up and dial down in the circumstances of a pandemic. Yeah. Okay, so take me to the border. We now have people pouring in from Europe. Many under the increased load precipitated by the sudden announcement that if you don't get in in the next 15 hours or whatever it was, you're not getting in. So we just had people flooding the airports of Europe, trying to catch the next plane out, obviously breathing heavily on one another all the while. How do you perceive that moment? We're then now in a situation where, as I said in New York City, we don't have testing, we don't know what's happening here, and what is happening in Europe is just the opposite. So what is happening in Europe is that everyone is reacting to the situation in Europe, and they are getting on planes and jumping on planes and essentially coming as soon as they can. They're arriving into New York City, and New York City very soon is full of people from Europe who are trying to catch the next flight back. And we have no quarantine for them, we have no isolation for them, we have no contact tracing for them, and there is no way to know how long they will stay, whether they are tourists, whether they are locals returning back. It's just mayhem. So that brings us the clock now ticks, and we are now back in. We are now sort of 60 days, 50 to 60 days, and we're beginning to see the uptick in New York infection rates by now. So clearly this is a signal that's a problem. There's a you know, there's a surge or the beginning of the surge. And that's usually when a usually when we start to do things like quarantining and now things, you know, isolation, contact tracing, and masking becomes important. So at this stage, what's important is to have one clear, consistent message saying, we're just beginning to test. We don't know if people have been quarantined or not. We don't know if people have been isolated or not. We're just beginning to test. But the first thing you should do is start social distancing, avoid crowded situations, et cetera. But most importantly, we don't know, and we'll come back to this point in a second. Sam we don't know if masks work or not, but they have historically worked against other respiratory viruses. So if you're symptomatic, wear a mask, and particularly if you're a frontline healthcare worker, wear a mask and wear probably wear full PPE, because that's what we learned from the Chinese, that it's a highly contagious virus. And essentially the CDC vac vacillates on masks. First it says, Nope, not required. And we've spent a lot of time said it was even worse than that. I don't know if this was the CDC or the World Health Organization or both, but someone at that point, I think, clearly concerned that there was going to be a run on PPE, and therefore not enough for frontline workers. There was messaging around masks not only maybe not working, but being counterproductive, that you'd be more likely to be touching your face, you're more likely to get sick, perhaps by wearing a mask. So people were actively discouraged at one point from wearing masks. That's exactly right. And the Surgeon General at that point in time also said that masks were not required. And the logic that I have heard is that it was because people were saying that there'd be a run on PPE, personal and protective equipment, then, that doctors would therefore not be able to get any. But that obviously the public to the public, that makes no sense. How can it work for doctors but not work for you? It just doesn't make any sense. And so we then go through this moment in which we don't know if masks work or not. And you can't test it experimentally, right? You can't give people coronavirus and say either half wear masks or half don't wear masks. And see and remember, masks work both ways based on a whole bunch of experience with respiratory viruses. They protect a spreader from spreading, and they protect an uninfected person from getting virus, from getting the virus. So we don't know. And we're in this kind of limbo around masking. And so what's happening in the hospitals, meanwhile, is just really terrifying in New York hospitals, because they also don't have enough protective gear, so they don't have enough N 95 masks, the kind of mask that really is fitted and, you know, lets through only a very small fraction of, of respiratory particles. These are not that heavy duties. They're not that fancy. They cost less than a dollar, typically. But hospitals are running out of masks, and the emergency rooms and the hospitals are becoming progressively crowded with people who have symptoms. So there is a complete breakdown of communication between all the folks concerned about what what is happening. The hospitals are getting crowded, the doctors are and nurses, and I should say especially the nurses, don't have equipment to protect themselves, so they're cobbling together whatever they can get. Some hospitals have N 95 masks, some don't. They're cobbling together whatever they can get, and they're trying to move forward. But really, it's an emergency situation. Many doctors are getting exposed. And as you know, some people are going to the ICU because they don't have some patients are going to the ICU because they're beginning to develop these severe complications of COVID So that is where sort of all of a sudden, we are in the middle of we're now in the mid pandemic, and many people start obviously having severe problems. The second thing that happens at this stage, which is another mistake, is that some people get discharged from the hospital after being tested, and they are asked to return to nursing homes, where also they don't have PPE, and nor do they actually have any real equipment to protect the workers or protect residents from each other. So we have a situation in which people are basically going back, and these nursing homes become petri dishes because the virus then goes and infects via nursing home workers, healthcare workers, or through direct contact, people who are elderly and who are the most vulnerable, and this cycle begins to repeat itself. So you go to the emergency room because you feel sick. You aren't sick enough that they would admit you to the emergency room. There is no quarantine in place. There's no isolation in place. There is no contact racing in place. Some of those people are sent back to their rehab facilities, nursing homes, et cetera, because they aren't sick enough to be in the hospital, because the hospital beds are too full. And they go and they become new sort of sources of infection at the nursing homes themselves. Meanwhile, the government is saying publicly, don't wear masks. We have a federal system, as you know, which is a problem and a pandemic. We'll come back to that in a second. It's the governor's individual decision about what to do, whether to isolate, whether to quarantine, whether to close schools. New York ultimately closes schools, in my opinion, late, too late, two weeks too late, perhaps. And then by then, it is too late, in this city at least, to do anything. So from that moment forward, I mean, I know New York became its own version of Italy, and so many things happened from the public perception side of this that are just, frankly bizarre. I mean, the fact that we were sitting here watching, I guess it's understandable to hear that there's a flu in Wuhan, and who knows if it's going to get here? But once it's starting to get here, and once we see what's happening in Italy, our lassitude seems fairly inexplicable from my point of view. But even if you could explain that somehow, psychologically, this intuition that never really had to be stated, there might be some law of nature that would prevent this thing from spreading to every corner of the earth and every inch of our society if we just sat there and did nothing about it. Once it hit New York, and New York became fairly similar to lumbery, you still saw a country that was incredibly slow to respond. I mean, with some exceptions, California responded pretty quickly. But even the places that have responded, even California, and went through a significant lockdown, it still was a fairly piecemeal effort, and all the while undermined by our basic failure to get any of these necessary ingredients of a response to scale. I mean, testing, tracing PPE took a long time. I don't even know if PPE is in danger of running out now. How do you explain this general picture of forget our initial missteps? Once we understand the gravity of the problem, how do you explain our failure to get up to speed and. To perform the way you'd expect the leading technical and medical power on Earth to perform. Well, there are several explanations, Sam, and you've identified most of the problems right off the bat. One explanation is that in this federal system, or really in a system where governors have independent choices and decisions to make and have full authority or large authority, unless you have a system in which under emergency, a task force takes over and tells people exactly what to do, then things begin to fall apart. So what happens in this particular situation is that states essentially have or use their own metrics, their own decisions, and they are quite wildly different. So California and New York. New York is in the mid pandemic. California reacts early, and many places impose lockdowns. But in general, these lockdowns are not really severe or compliant. So business is our lockdown, which of course causes great economic loss, but people are still wandering the streets. There is no systematic lockdown. And that's the opposite of what you want, right? So you want business to businesses, obviously, to remain open as long as you can, and you want people to stay in their homes and be tested and be contact traced. But in many places we've seen in the United States, just the opposite happens. Businesses have to comply for lots of reasons, including the fact that they have to protect their employees, but people are not compliant. You remember in Spain and Italy and many other countries, you know, there was really a quasi military intervention to prevent people from from entering the streets. You know, if you went to the streets, a police officer would come up to you or a military officer would come up to you and say, what are you doing and why are you out of your house? That was the state of lockdown, which is a real lockdown. A quasi lockdown is worse because it hurts the businesses and it doesn't prevent the spread in people. And unfortunately, in many cases, there was a quasi lockdown. Masking was not mandatory in New York, we quickly made masking mandatory. And I suppose I'm proud to say that's one of the things that I and others pushed very early on saying that yes, we'll never have the final evidence and maybe we won't get it in time, but from lots and lots of respiratory viruses. We know that social distancing and mask wearing does reduce viral load, does reduce viral transmission, especially if both the infected and the infecty or the naive. If both of them wear it, you get a double effect and potentially a synergistic effect. So what you have in the United States is this kind of bizarre crisis in which there is what I would call a quasilockdown with enough leak through that in fact, as soon as the lockdown is opened in some places, the virus starts spreading again. Now, in New York, the lockdown was very strongly enforced. And to some extent, we saw the worst of things. We saw the worst of the pandemic, a huge number of cases and a huge number of deaths. But then once the lockdown was in place, there, it was quite a lot of compliance. There's a high degree of compliance in new york and new york state on masking. There's a high degree of compliance on social distancing. And new york opened in is still going through phases, but new york opened in phases. And that's important, because when you didn't open in phases, what we've seen in other places, when you went from lockdown to complete open situation, what happened is we've seen that once again, the curve of not just infected cases, but deaths has begun to rise again. It's very important here. These are lessons that we've learned actually from cancer and from other diseases. It's very important to count deaths, because deaths are not sensitive to testing. If you increase testing, you'll detect more people. Deaths are not sensitive to testing. Deaths are an absolute value. And I would urge anyone who's listening or reading to this it's very easy to google. You can just google us covered debts, and you'll see exactly the whole story laid out in front of you. You'll see the rise, which is mostly in new york, new jersey, et cetera, rise the lockdown, and then you'll see a second rise. And that is of course, in states such as arizona, southern california, especially more than northern california, and other states, texas, except sid, even here, there's been room for doubt and conspiracy theories, right? So they're even fairly prominent people have come forward saying that the death statistics are completely false because hospitals have been incentivized to more or less presume or assert COVID as the cause of death, even when someone is stage four pancreatic cancer and had a week to live anyway. Or they didn't even test them, they had a fever. And that's compatible with a COVID diagnosis. And you had you've had people again, you know, you've had obvious crackpots and lunatics saying this, but then you've had extremely prominent people who don't have any expertise here, you know, people like elon musk, you know, out on social media saying these things. So what can you put this particular concern to rest that our fatality statistics can't be remotely trusted? Yeah. Yes, I can. Or partly can. I can do it from two angles. One is from our own hospital, from the new york experience. I know from people from my patients, at least no one that I know was incorrectly marked as dead from COVID when they actually were dying, or dead from something else. So that's anecdotal, but more than anecdotal, actually, we have numerical evidence of this being true, and that is the fact that the case fatality rate of for COVID, which is the number of people who die upon getting infected, has really hovered across the world around 0.7% zero, you know, a little bit higher, a little bit lower. And obviously it depends on age groups, you know, so if you're in the in the worst category of the the most susceptible category to death, it would rise to five, six, seven. These are elderly people or having comorbid conditions. But if you look overall, the the pattern of the numbers end up being in the 0.7 to 0.8% range. And when we were doing adequate testing, we have now slowed down in the United States, because now the test is you can't get a test. The test turnaround time has now gone up again to about seven to eight days. But when we were doing adequate testing and appropriate testing, the mortality rate was tracking that number 0.7.8 .1%. It wasn't tenfold higher, one fold lower. So if you just use simple math, it will tell you that the simple math would tell you that as long as the deaths don't go a log fold, let's say, or ten fold higher or lower than what has been seen all around the world, then the debts are real. Now, of course, these people have pre morbid conditions or comorbid conditions. And yes, of course, some of them may have indeed have had other reasons to be susceptible and to die, and maybe they had pre morbid conditions that were quite severe. But again, pure mathematical reasoning will tell you that it can't be even if there is a conspiracy, it can't be such a large conspiracy to completely distort the distort reality. Am I making sense? Yeah, no, that makes sense. So how do you explain the fact that even at this late stage, we seem to be losing ground on testing? Again, the picture is one of an erstwhile medical and technical superpower struggling to produce everything down to cotton swabs. Why are we not testing and tracing like a supercharged South Korea at this point? Well, that's partly because we don't have all the equipment to do that, and we didn't you know, we have, unfortunately. And again, I would refer back to the piece I wrote in the New Yorker. There's a very important interview there of one of the people who makes N 95 masks as an example, and basically his business this is a guy named Mike Bowen. His business of making N 95 masks couldn't survive because he was constantly getting outcompeted by by the Chinese. And because of cost cutting and because of of efficiency in hospitals, their business was unable to survive. And so we became progressively dependent on other countries, including China in particular, to produce valuable reagents which are important in the medical process. So we have a situation in which all of a sudden one reagent isn't for a test, isn't available, and the whole testing system breaks down. And that's what we've seen again. So one thing that has become very clear is that supercharged as you are, you may be supercharged on efficiency, but you are not in this case supercharged on resilience, and you need both. You need to be supercharged on efficiency, and that's great. But when things are in short supply, you need to have stockpiles which are not efficient. You need to have a backup system which is not efficient. You may need to have again, you may need to have manufacturers, local manufacturers, not beholden to Chinese goods or to goods from any other country. I don't want to blame one country or over another in this particular situation, but not beholden to any particular country in which you are essentially so beholden to some good from that country that if that part fails, you can no longer work. And that's been the case in our situation. How have you perceived the role of public health communication here? I mean, I'm thinking in particular about Robert Redfield, who's heading the CDC, and Deborah Birks, who was heading the task force, you know, Pence's task force on, on Corona, and I guess you know Anthony Fauci as well. These have been the most, to my eye, the most public medical voices, and to varying degrees, most of their public statements have seemed fairly constrained. And even, you know, abject attempts to simply avoid embarrassing President Trump. We're walking a line which really in many cases can't coherently be walked around his misstatements in their efforts to communicate public health information. And again, to varying degrees, I would say Fauci has escaped comparatively unscathed. But both Burke and Redfield, again, forgive me if these are friends of yours and, and I now seem to be disparaging them, but they I know Fauci. I know Fauci very well. I don't know Deborah or or Dr. Brooks, I should say, and not nor any of the other folks in that. This is now getting to be a very old story, where you have people who have real reputations and who have accomplished a lot in their lives, right? Whether it's in business or the military or in this case, medicine, who I can only assume have reputations for integrity and probity and just a host of virtues that are worth protecting. And they undergo this horrible transformation in proximity to Trump. It's almost a visible diminishing of their integrity just standing next to the man. I mean, it's like radiation poisoning. Every second they spend standing too close to the reactor core, you can see them withering. And so for Burke's and Redfield, this has been fairly painful to watch when they're at the podium trying to make sense and say something responsible in the wake of whatever insane bloviation just came out of the president. And Fauci has had to navigate that same space as well. And the result has been a pretty just frankly ineffectual communication about the public health imperatives at the moment. That's just been my experience watching CNN whenever I happen to catch these press conferences which happen less and less. What has been your perception of this? I think of the people there. I know Tony Fauci the best, and I've worked with Tony on various things before. I think that it's been quite clear that he's had really a task that completely unenviable task. He's had a task that I just don't know how you could possibly navigate, given the situation and given the problems that have arisen. So I think you're absolutely right. You can't keep saying and play. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, Russia has invaded Ukraine, so we have the first major land war in Europe in decades, so that seems like a very big deal. It certainly deserves its own podcast at some point. I think I will wait to see how things evolve for a little while here. It remains to be seen how bad this war will be and what else might happen as a result. So I will reserve comment at this point, apart from echoing the nearly universal sentiment that Putin's actions are despicable, as is the support for him that came dribbling out of the mouth of our former president. Anyway, as chance would have it, the topic of today's podcast is also scary. This is another PSA and in some sense, the continuation of the podcast that my friend Rob Reed did for me in April of last year. That episode was titled Engineering the Apocalypse, and it was a four hour examination of the threat that is posed to all of us by developments in synthetic biology. In recent weeks, Rob discovered a specific threat along these lines that seems fairly imminent, and he's tapped Kevin Esfeldt to walk him through the problem. Kevin is a Harvard trained biologist, and he's credited as the first person to describe how CRISPR gene drives could be used to alter the traits of wild populations in a way that was evolutionarily stable, and he is currently a professor at MIT. As you'll hear, there's a call to action at the end of this episode, and the call is to get the attention of USAID, which is currently running the program of virus hunting that poses such a concern. Anyway, I won't say any more about this. Rob does an impeccable job at exploring the issue, and I hope you will join me in making noise about it once you come to understand the nature of the problem. Thanks for listening. Today's conversation will be an episode of two different shows the After On Podcast, which I host, and Making Sense, which my podcasting colleague Sam Harris hosts. We're doing this because we both find the subject extraordinarily important and also timely enough that we want to get it out there fast. And since I've done a bunch of research that's connected to the subject and also know the guest, sam and I thought the quickest thing would be for me to conduct the interview and then for both of us to distribute it for Making Sense listeners who don't know me. My name is Rob Reed and I'm a venture capitalist turned tech entrepreneur turned science fiction author turned science podcaster turned venture capitalist. Once again, one who steal podcasts and scribbles a bit on the side. My voice may be familiar because I was on Sam's show several months ago when we spent almost 4 hours examining how very awful the next pandemic could be and how we can prevent that awful pandemic if we get our act together. I spent about a thousand hours literally including over 20 scientific interviews researching those subjects, and our episode had a fairly unusual format as a result. I'm not a scientist myself, but over the past five years, I've gotten pretty deep into pandemic related issues. It started with research for one of my novels, which later led to writing a few articles on the subject, which led to several episodes of my own podcast, then appearances on other shows, and then to a Ted Talk that I gave right before COVID and then to that big episode with Sam, and then quite a bit more. Which brings us to today and my conversation with MIT's Kevin sfeld, a highly regarded evolutionary engineer who I met in the wake of some congressional testimony that he made on a subject that interests us both. Kevin's going to present something that will probably shock you, which you may find hard or even impossible to believe. But before that, he's going to lay down a fairly deep foundation of concepts, definitions, and a bit of history, which should give you a sophisticated basis for deciding whether you buy the fairly shocking points he's going to make in the second half of our conversation. Now, I think it'll be useful for you to know the full context while he's laying that foundation. So here comes a spoiler, which is that Kevin is going to argue that a small, new and very well intentioned US. Government program could completely, inadvertently cause the deaths of millions or even hundreds of millions of people, or even more, despite what Kevin is certain are the entirely good intentions of the people behind it. The program is called Deep VZN, which I believe is pronounced Deep Vision, and it's part of USAID, the agency which distributes most American foreign aid. Kevin believes deep vision is on a path to posting assembly instructions for what we can only call weapons of mass destruction to the open Internet for anyone to download. Specifically, the genomes of previously unknown pandemic grade viruses that we have no defenses against, viruses that tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries could easily build from scratch as soon as they're given the genetic code. Now, if this all sounds a bit bonkers to you, I get it. I struggle to believe my own ears at first, but if you listen to Kevin, you'll quickly realize that this isn't some covert era conspiracy theory, even if he doesn't ultimately persuade you that things are as dangerous as he thinks. I'll add that I wouldn't have interviewed him for this if I thought he had even the faintest partisan agenda. I actually have no idea what party, if any, cabin affiliates with, and I couldn't care less, because every point I've heard him make on the subject has been rooted in science, not politics. Now, one thing that made this story especially hard for me to credit at first is that it's coming out of USAID, which is dedicated to economic development in human flourishing in poorer countries and which puts its resources into so many great projects. Now, like any program that's put out hundreds of billions of dollars across many decades, USAID has had its share of blunders and scandals and lousy uses of funds. But I admire the agency on the whole, and that's partly due to personal experience, because right after college, I spent a year in Cairo on a Fulbright grant and met lots of USAID people. And they were funding things like irrigation projects, schools, and technical assistance in places that really needed them. And they were all smart, committed, and working for a fraction of what they could have made in the private sector. On top of that, USAID is run by former US. Ambassador to the UN. Samantha Power. I can't say that I know Samantha, but we have a fair number of people in common and had a couple great conversations at the Ted conference. And I know how smart and ethical she is. Plus, she literally wrote the book on nut killing millions of people. It was a searing denunciation of genocide, which you may be thinking isn't the most controversial or risky position for an author to stake out. But it won the Pulitzer Prize, so it was no puff piece, and there's zero chance that Samantha would deliberately imperil millions of lives. All of this is to say that there are two sides of this story, each of them held by very smart, ethical people. And as you'll hear, the other side sincerely sees Deep Vision as an invaluable weapon against Pandemics. And I'm sure this is the side Samantha hears from the most, because the program's creators work for her. And since Deep Vision is literally less than a 10th of 1% of USAID's budget, and she basically inherited the program, this just isn't something she manages directly. I should also point out that some of Deep Vision's plans could help us fight Pandemics. But after many hours of researching this and talking to various people in academia, philanthropy, security, and entrepreneurship, I believe that most of its agenda is appallingly misguided. And I'm not going to hide that because I'm not an actor, and it would be dishonest. Now, despite that, in the second half of the interview, I'm going to present all of the best arguments I've heard or have thought of myself in favor of Deep Vision, because this subject is way too important for you not to hear the other side. I also want to convey why some very smart and ethical people sincerely think this is a great idea and show that thinking this doesn't mean that they're not smart and ethical, because I'm sure that they are. Now, someone close to Deep Vision could surely do a much better job of presenting this side. And in an ideal world, we might have structured this as a debate between Kevin and a Deep Vision proponent. But I am an interviewer who has never once moderated a debate. And though I could probably become a decent moderator with some experience and guidance, this is happening right now. And we want to get the story out right now because the program is so new, it's barely underway. In fact, it may not even have quite switched on yet, which means it should still be possible to alter its focus or even redirect its entire budget to the countless world positive programs that USAID supports. And you may be able to help with this yourself, as Kevin and I will discuss toward the end of our conversation, which will start right now. So, Kevin, thanks so much for joining us today. And why don't we start out with a quick overview of your professional background and what you spend most of your time doing in the lab these days. Well, thanks so much for the invitation. I'm an evolutionary engineer and professor at MIT, where my lab specializes in building synthetic ecosystems to what we call direct the evolution of new molecular tools. And we also work a lot with communities to safely and controllably engineer populations of wild organisms and associated ecosystems. So we evolve cool tools in the lab, and then we talk a lot about whether, when, and how to use those tools to change the environment. Evolution, of course, doesn't know anything. It's just a natural process. And that means you can harness it to create things when you don't know how they work. And that's true of a lot of biology. Honestly, we still don't know the details of how it works, of how to make things fold just the right way to cause something to happen within a cell. One way to deal with this is to take something that does something reasonably close to what you want, make a billion variants, throw them all at the wall and see which ones stick best. Then take those, make a billion variants of those, throw those at the wall and see what sticks, and do this over and over again until you get something that does exactly what you selected for. And you do some related work with phages in your lab? Yes. So since we're interested in applying evolution to create molecular tools, it's useful to work with the fastest evolving things in nature, which tend to be bacteria, phages, viruses that infect bacteria. And these viruses can replicate once every ten minutes. That's a really short generation time. So what we do is we engineer the bacteria so that the phage only gets to reproduce if it does the molecular trick that we want to feed. So we put a gene, we want to evolve or multiple genes onto the genome of the virus, and we take away the pieces that it needs to reproduce. We move those into the host cell so the host cell will produce this critical factor for virus replication in proportion to how well the virus manages to perform the molecular trick. So that way all of these populations of a billion viruses compete with one another, creating mutations in those genes that we put on there. And the ones that perform the molecular trick best produce the most offspring. And of course, this is a continuous process, generation after generation for hundreds of generations in the lab until it spits out the thing that we want to see. All to create a better platform for making useful and hopefully safe biotech tools. Now, just a couple of clarifying questions. First of all, phages, they are viruses, but they're minuscule and they can only infect bacteria. There's no way a phage is going to infect a human and inflict disease, is that right? That's right. Their machinery just would not function within our cells. They're optimized for bacteria. Very different context. Got it. And to edge toward what I understand to be the practical application of this is you can train this ecosystem that you've put together to create a very good version of a complex thing that you want with all these billions and billions of shots on goal. And then having done that, you can make some useful product. In your case, it's generally for pretty sophisticated biological applications like big pharma, biotechs, other labs? For the most part, yeah. A platform for creating useful molecular tools can really accelerate biotech research because there's no way to have a big impact like accelerating everybody else's work and empowering others. So you've been doing this for quite a while, lots of experiments. These things replicate every ten minutes. You've got robotic tools accelerating it. How many genetically distinct phases do you estimate you've produced in your lab since you started doing this work? Genetically distinct is a hard question because we do crank up the mutation rate very high, so they evolve much more quickly, probably somewhere between ten to the 13th, maybe even ten to the 15th. At most like a quadrillion, I believe that would be to contextualize that the number of stars in roughly five to 10,000 galaxies the size of the Milky Way. So that is a lot. Now, you are often described as the inventor of the gene drive. What is a gene drive? So gene drive is a naturally occurring phenomenon that originated maybe a billion years ago. And it happened when some genes realized that they could replicate more often if they changed the odds that they'd get inherited by the offspring. So one way they do this in organisms that have sex, so they inherit one copy from the mother and one copy from the father. A gene can cut the chromosome that doesn't have it, which causes a cell to copy itself over. And that means that instead of half the offspring inheriting the particular gene drive system, all of them will. That's a huge fitness advantage. You're going from half of offspring inheriting you to all of them, at least for the case of heterozygotes that have one copy of each. And so gene drive systems can just sweep through populations of sexually reproducing organisms very, very quickly. Just to clarify, that means that the trait that this particular gene confers can go from rare or even one off because it was a mutation to saturating the population in a certain number of generations, the trait changes. We don't end up getting clones of the individual. That's right. And Austin Burt, who is one of the earliest gene drive researchers in the modern era at Imperial College London, first proposed that we use these things by engineering genes to cut sequences that we want in order to change the population. The problem is we really didn't have the tools to make this happen. Well, I played a minor role in developing CRISPR, which is a genome editing tool that is basically a set of molecular scissors that can be programmed to cut whatever sequence we want. A few months after we had been one of the first groups to show that CRISPR worked in mammalian cells, I was looking around outdoors at a bunch of ducks and I saw a turtle that day in the water and I was thinking, hey, are we ever going to edit wild organisms with CRISPR? And I thought, probably not, at least not effectively. Because when we edit an organism, we're changing it to do what we want. Which means we're diverting its resources away from survival and replication in nature. And that means natural selection is going to act to remove whatever changes we make. But then I thought, well, wait a minute. What if instead of just using CRISPR to edit the genome, what if we use it to insert our engineered trait? And we also encode the CRISPR system that can make that change. Then you get recursive genome editing. That means, in principle, we could build a system that would spread the engineered trait throughout the whole population even if the trait was harmful. And because I'd read the literature, as soon as I thought of this, I thought, wait a minute, that's a gene drive. Didn't I see a paper where someone had said we should use the genes like the one in yeast to engineer populations and maybe we could take out, say, malaria? What if we crashed populations of malarial mosquitoes? We might be able to help eradicate malaria that way. With CRISPR. It's so versatile. You could cut whatever gene you needed to at whatever site you needed to and you could even do it in multiple places which could make it evolutionarily stable or fairly so. So it was tremendously exciting thinking we might be able to help get rid of malaria and chestosomiasis and so forth. Okay, so you had this idea that was obviously very, very novel and exciting on many levels. But it also kind of terrified you, didn't it? Well, the first day, I admit, was pure euphoria thinking up all the applications because, I mean, malaria is an exceptionally horrible disease, kills nearly half a million people every year, most of them kids under five. And there's things like schistosomiasis, which cognitively stunt tens of millions. So I spent the first day kind of euphoric and, of course, doing research to see whether it would actually work. But the next day, I woke up in a cold sweat because I was thinking, wait a minute. If just about anyone who can edit the genome of a sexually reproducing species with CRISPR can make a gene drive system to spread their change through the population, well, what about misuse? Sure, you can engineer a mosquito so it can't carry a disease. Could you engineer a mosquito so it would always carry a disease? How much of a problem would misuse be? And it seemed rather frightening because you could imagine people weaponizing the natural world. So I spent quite a long time before I even told my academic advisor at the time about this idea because I wanted to learn whether or not that was a likely outcome. And fortunately, I concluded that it's not. Gene drive spreads only vertically, parents to offspring. So that means it's fairly slow. It can't do more than double every generation at absolute most, in terms of frequency in a population. It's fairly obvious in that it works in sexually reproducing organisms which don't have CRISPR in nature. So this is a signature that can't be hidden. It will be present in all gene drive systems. And that means you can always find it if it's there. And most importantly, if you see a gene drive that you don't like, it's trivial to reliably build the counter, you can add some extra instructions for CRISPR telling it to cut the original rogue version. Then your version, what we call an immunizing reversal drive, could still spread through the wild population, just like the rogue. But whenever it encounters the rogue, the immunizing reversal drive will cut the rogue and replace it with itself. So there is a reliable off switch if somebody does something bad that imperils human society or the ecosystem, this immunizing reversal drive is a reliable off switch. And did you think through and basically kind of map out the immunizing reversal drive before you told the world about the gene drive? Long before, yes, in fact, before I even told George. Before you even told your advisor? Yeah. So you did not let this new idea leak into the world until you knew you had an off switch. Well, I mean, an off switch is perhaps a little much. Just because you can reliably overwrite the unwanted change doesn't mean that it wouldn't have made changes in the ecosystem before you managed to do that. But anything that is slow, obvious, if you look and easily blocked, is not a terribly great threat. And so, with that understanding, I then approached George and said, I think there's a lot of good that we could do this especially if we do it openly and transparently. And I don't think there's much potential for misuse for this reasoning. What do you think? And when you first told me this story, you said the words that we're very lucky that gene drives, quote, favor defense. What exactly does that mean? Well, anytime you have a technology that is accessible to many people and gene drive isn't that accessible, there aren't that many labs that use CRISPR to edit the genomes of organisms other than currently, fruit flies, worms, and mice are sort of the big ones. If there's a lot of people who can use the technology, then there's a lot of people who could misuse the technology. And so favoring defense just means that if someone does misuse it, everyone else can prevent it from causing much harm. Anything that's slow, obvious, and easily blocked isn't much of a weapon. But things that are fast or are subtle or are unblockable are another story. And most obvious example of something that can't easily be countered is a nuke. Right. A nuclear warhead on an ICBM is something that we haven't figured out how to counter, despite many decades of wishing that we could. The way we have to deal with that threat is by minimizing access and deterring those who can actually wield that weapon, because if they actually use it, there's nothing we can do. On the subject of nukes, this could be a good time to define the terms information hazard and attention hazard, because we'll probably use them later in the conversation. Yeah. So, history of nuclear weapons. It's remarkable how they were originally developed because researchers were afraid of the consequences if malicious people got ahold of them. Specifically, Nazi Germany was the concern of Leo Silhouette and Albert Einstein when they wrote the letter that launched the Manhattan Project. But what's not so well known is that once Germany surrendered in World War II, Sillard launched a petition within the top secret Manhattan Project in which he argued that the United States should not use the bomb on Japan. Not because it wouldn't save many American lives by preventing an invasion, but because doing so would call attention to the power of nuclear weaponry. He pointed out that, at the time, the notion that any adversary could militarily threaten the mainland American city, los Angeles or New York, was just laughable. There was no way that any adversary could threaten the continental United States. But if you show the world that there is a single bomb that can destroy the bulk of the city, that would change. You would be advertising the existence of this kind of weapon and thereby incentivizing other countries to gain access to it, which would then imperil your own cities. So he said, if you use the bomb on Japan, the Soviet Union will get it that much more quickly and probably other nations as well, and you will make the United States less secure. And so he spent the rest of his career advocating for a nuclear nonproliferation, pointing out that the fewer actors who had the ability to wield this kind of power, the safer humanity would be. And so, in that sense, Hiroshima was an attention hazard. It informed the world that this is possible. This thing you might not otherwise have bothered with because it's going to cost billions of dollars to develop and distract a lot of your top scientists without that attention to the fact that this is possible. That's right. So there's different kinds of information hazards. One is like the blueprints. So, in a way, using the bomb on Japan, the isotopic signature told everyone what the Americans had managed to do. So without the blueprints of the bomb, they could look at the radioactive signature of Hiroshima and get a lot of hints. Yeah, that's a conceptual information hazard. But the big one is, as you said, an attention hazard. It says, this is a weapon powerful enough to destroy cities that could determine the future course of warfare. That's a giant neon blinking sign in the sky to anyone who wants to acquire power that they need to acquire this kind of weapon in order to matter in the future. Now, with all the background of the last several minutes, I'd like to now jump topics pretty significantly to the Spanish flu, which was quite literally extinct for 80 years. But then that changed. How did that change? Well, some influenza researchers at the CDC were concerned that something like 1918 influenza might come again. So they wanted to know, well, what about it was so bad because no other flu strain has killed anywhere near as many people. So they went to museum specimens that had samples from victims of the 1918 pandemic, and they also got samples from someone who had died of the flu and been buried in the permafrost in Alaska. And remarkably, they were able to extract the RNA genome of the virus from these samples and sequence it, and thereby learn how to make the virus using recently discovered techniques for virus assembly. So they resurrected this extinct, deadly virus. So that was a well oiled machine that came back into existence after having vanished into obscurity. I'm sure it was very seductive idea scientifically. But was that a reasonable thing to do from a global security standpoint? Well, there's arguments back and forth as to whether or not it was wise, and there's good arguments on both sides. But what bothers me from a security standpoint is that they posted the genome sequence online, and it's there for anybody to download, as I know, because I was able to find it very quickly via Google myself, which means literally anybody in the world can get this thing. Now, pretty sure I know how you're going to answer this, but what is bad about this genome being online? Well, posting the genome sequence of a virus online in this case gave exact blueprints for a pathogen that once killed maybe as much as one in 30 living humans to anyone, including lone terrorists and bioweapons programs who have the skills to assemble it, which doesn't seem like a great idea. Important qualifier. We should be grateful that it's pretty unlikely that releasing that virus again today would cause such a deadly pandemic. And the reason is that virus has been called the mother of all pandemics. That is to say, most modern flu strains are much less deadly descendants. But because most of us have been exposed to at least one of those, we tend to have immunity to that kind of flu virus, especially those of us who caught the flu during the 2009 pandemic, which was the same kinds of molecular coding. Second is we do have antiviral drugs that work against it, even though we probably can't produce enough of those quickly enough to really matter in a fast moving pandemic. But what we do have are antibiotics. And there's some pretty good evidence from autopsies and going through the records of autopsies from 1918 that it killed people at least as much by causing secondary bacterial infections of the lungs as it did directly causing damage that is the virus itself. And we definitely have enough antibiotics to dose the entire world population already available. Now, this is obviously completely impossible to know precisely, but taking those mitigating factors into account, what would you estimate? Back of the envelope? The plausible ranges are of a death toll if this thing gets out. I'm not so sure of the lower window just because of unlikely to take off at all. But if you presume that it does take off, then I would probably say somewhere between 200,010 million people. And that's just because it would probably be worse than most modern day strains. But it's not going to be nearly as bad as it was back then. So I think that's a probably reasonable ten to 90% confidence interval. But honestly, I haven't sat down and thought about it for 20 minutes. Of course, on the other hand, just because it's highly unlikely doesn't mean it's no chance. And when there's a nontrivial chance of millions or even tens of millions of people dying, well, some discretion would seem prudent. Now, I've actually known for years that the genome was freely available online, but I actually only learned that the CDC put it up there pretty recently. And at the time, the only explanation I could imagine for that was that it was so impossible for anyone to assemble a virus from scratch back then in 2005 that they just failed to realize how soon the publication of this genome would enable labs in dozens of countries to basically restart the engine of one of history's worst pandemics. And that was a scary enough idea to live with. But then a couple of weeks ago, you came along and told me that they actually did realize it would soon. Become possible to synthesize it, and they were fine with it. And since this makes my head spin, I'd love it if you could give us a quick sense of where the science of virus synthesis was in 2005 when they posted this. Well, the first instructions, the first detailed protocol for assembling influenza viruses was published in 1999, and the first virus was synthesized from synthetic DNA in 2002, and that was polio virus, which is probably comparable to maybe slightly easier to assemble than influenza. How long after the publication of the genome would you say it became scientifically feasible to synthesize it immediately? That is to say, probably a good 100 or so people had the skills at the time to follow that protocol, maybe a few hundred people to use the protocol to assemble 1918 influenza after publication of the genome sequence. What they may not have anticipated was just how cheap synthetic DNA would become, because in the last 20 years, the cost of assembled DNA that is, assembled into large gene length fragments like you would need in order to boot up the virus, the cost has fallen by a factor of 1000. And while presumably they knew that a good couple hundred people could assemble it immediately, they may not have understood how that number would grow because most of the folks involved were virologists. They weren't involved in biotech, and they weren't familiar with exponential technologies. Okay, so we've gone from 100 Ish labs that could create this more or less immediately after it was published. What would you say that number has grown to today? I'd estimate somewhere between 20 and 50,000 people could do that right now, which is pretty alarming, even given that it's unlikely that it would actually cause a pandemic. So is it fair to say that we're kind of relying on the goodwill of half a stadium to a full stadium's worth of people not to put this back out in the world? I mean, frankly, most people aren't that evil, and anyone who is that malicious, if there's only a small chance that it might actually take off, then why would they bother? But you can do the math and say it still looks like a pretty bad bet given the expected death toll. Even if you assign a very small chance that someone would, and a small chance that it would actually cause a pandemic, the numbers don't look good when you calculate it from that perspective, especially because it's going to remain accessible to future generations. That is, in five years, there's going to be even more people who could do it, and in ten years, quite a bit more, the number is only going to grow. Okay. Even though 1918 flu would probably be less destructive than many of us would fear if it was released today, the decision to put it online will probably boggle most people's intuitions. It certainly boggled my own. But the people, the CDC are really smart and by definition they're hugely concerned about public health. So what benefits might they have thought would accrue from publishing this and what perspective might they have that I lack that would cause them to prioritize those benefits over the fairly obvious downsides? There is a mindset difference which says something along the lines of if we understand how the world works, then we can come up with better cures and treatments and interventions that we couldn't necessarily predict in the absence of that knowledge. That is another way to say it is you got to do the basic blue sky research without being able to point to a particular benefit or you will of necessity lose access to all the benefits that you couldn't see before you did the research. That really is what drives folks in these fields the belief that we can come up with innovations that will make life sufficiently better to be worth the risk. It's important to point out that the scientific benefits that did accrue from resurrecting the 1918 influenza virus were largely accomplished by a relative handful of specialized laboratories doing research with it or with pieces of it. We didn't actually need to publish the genome sequence in order to gain virtually any of those benefits. Given that the number of people with access to 18 flu has grown by a factor of 300, and it's quite plausible that the CDC didn't realize it would be quite that large quite that soon, do you imagine the people who made the decision to post it regret that decision now, particularly in the post COVID era. While some of the folks who are in charge or highly influential at NIH today have been around for most of the last 20 years, and they've been among some of the strongest supporters of taking highly lethal viruses that aren't very transmissible and engineering and evolving them to become much more transmissible. Since that's simply identifying things from the past to which most people have immunity today, it's fair to say that they don't regret it. What other scary genomes are there online? Is the horse out of the barn when it comes to terrifying things being posted online, or are we currently in okayish shape? A lot of people seem to think that it's too late, but it's really not, because again, 1918 isn't that likely to take off itself. There is something that would take off, which is variola virus, smallpox, which is much more lethal and about as transmissible. And also online. And also online put there by the CDC. But with Varyola virus, the United States has 350,000,000 doses of vaccine ready to go, and Varyla is much harder to make as a virus, I would estimate that maybe 100 people could make Variela and it doesn't do the asymptomatic transmission thing the way COVID does. So I think we'd have a much better chance of getting under control, especially since we have so many vaccines. It would require the US to actually donate some to the rest of the world to stamp it out. But the world in living memory has experience of vaccinating people against smallpox and eradicating it. And other than that, people speculate about a few things, but there's nothing else out there that is really all that nasty in terms of potential pandemic pathogen. Right. So of course, the Ebola genome is online, 50% case fatality rate, but relatively not very contagious compared to COVID SARS 10% demonstrably far less contagious than COVID because we know how many people died in the SARS outbreak and it was less than 1001. That always frightens me is Myrs Middle East respiratory syndrome, another coronavirus like SARS, but also not very transmissible. So unless I'm missing something, we're in pretty good shape for now. That's right. I'm not super worried about all the viruses that are out there in terms of causing sufficient devastation to really certainly not to threaten civilization or anything like that. Probably not even the casualty levels that we've just seen with COVID Folks can reasonably disagree on this, but from my perspective, we're actually doing pretty okay when it comes to blueprints for nasty plagues online. Now, has anybody heard the last episode I did on Sam's podcast? One thing that really worries me a great deal is the deliberately artificially modified H five N One flu that was created in Madison, Wisconsin and Holland Two labs in 2012. It scares me because it has a 60% fatality rate, even worse than Ebola, and in nature, it's barely contagious at all. But that experiment led it to being transmissible, at least in ferrets. And the idea of something with that kind of case fatality rate ravaging the population freaks me out. But you're not as worried about that as I am, correct? That's right. Both of them. Yeah, they're respiratory transmissible in ferrets. That doesn't mean they're transmissible enough to cause a pandemic in ferrets, let alone transmissible enough to cause a pandemic in humans. And subsequent studies of them suggest that there are reasons to think that even if they were continually passaged to be even more transmissible and it translated to humans, the virus would be much, much less lethal. The same mutations affecting transmissibility would also reduce the lethality. So those are bad, but are still in the bucket of probably not. So unless we're quite unlucky with H five N One, at this point, we don't really have much to fear from the genomes that are currently on the Internet. Unless we keep posting new and worse ones to the Internet. And because it's more future risk than current risk. It's really alarming that you previously said that quite a few people seem to be operating under the presumption that the horse is already out of the barn and therefore why not post everything? Like, who's saying that? Well, a lot of people. In fact, to the extent that I've been trying to raise this concern, saying, you know, we perhaps shouldn't share blueprints for what amounts to an arsenal of plagues online by doing new research for trying to find things that would actually be that bad and would be likely to take off. A lot of people say we're already past that, and I think that's because some people are referring to COVID which is not really what we're talking about. There's no reason not to post COVID genome online when it's already causing a pandemic that's different from the scenario where it hasn't actually infected humans, because that means that it might never do so, at least unless humans cause it to do so. But a lot of scientists seem to take the view of there's lethal viruses online, therefore there's no reason not to put more of them online. And that attitude is quite worrisome. To give you just one example of this. So Dennis Carroll is a huge figure in the field of finding and identifying unknown viruses. In a December article in the Intercept that we were both interviewed for said that Dennis basically acknowledged that, yes, a scientist could use the genetic sequence of a dangerous virus maliciously, but he said that risk already exists and they quote him directly saying we don't need to find some new virus in order to elevate that risk. And I just can't imagine why he would say something like that. Now, to be fair, unlike many folks in this field, dennis does seem to invite us to hold him accountable in the case that he's wrong. He says, and again quoting, if you go out and cavalierly begin collecting and characterizing these viruses, there is inherent risk attached to that and you have to be accountable for that risk. So I applaud him for saying that, but I just couldn't disagree more when it comes to the risks of putting new viruses online. Speaking of Dennis, this is actually a really good moment to transition to talk about Deep Vision, the new USAID program that concerns you so much because Dennis ran the immediate predecessor to it, a program called Predict, which was basically the template for Deep Vision. And that's just strange to me that Predict was able to spawn a follow on program in light of some of the terrible scandals, frankly, it has been implicated in, at the center of which is the fact that Predict directed a fair amount of money by way of an intermediary called EcoHealth Alliance to fund research on Coronaviruses in Wuhan. And not just that, but in labs that were known to have very shoddy safety practices to the US government. We know that beyond a shadow of a doubt from some declassified diplomatic cables. So that seems like an incredibly radioactive error in judgment. This was all out in the open by the time Deep Vision was funded. And on top of that, we have to add the significant possibility, not a certainty, but possibility that that work may have resulted in a leak that led us to COVID While there was a time when a lot of well regarded scientists were putting the odds of a lab leak at zero, that's a long, long time ago. At this point, substantially nobody who has significant scientific depth in this would put the odds of a lab leak at zero. Some put it as high as 90%. I'm sure some put it in single digits. But it is undeniable that Predict may have had a hand in that. So for all those reasons, this is politics. It's irrelevant to your discussions, Kevin, so we can just leave it there. But I just find it a little bit unfathomable that Predicts spawn and encore. Now, one of Predict's main activities was something called virus hunting. And that's also going to be a major activity of deep vision. What is virus hunting? Well, you probably have this vision of someone who puts on some kind of suit and cavalierly goes spelunking in a bat cave to collect samples and take them back to the lab, see what kinds of viruses you can pull out. Yeah, Indiana Jones, National Geographic kind of vibe. Now, you got to keep in mind that's the media distortion, that's the glamorous presentation of the virus hunter. Most virus hunting is probably more like going to those wet markets or various wild caught creatures and taking samples or going to bush meat markets in other parts of the world or contracting with local hunters to bring samples of various wild critters back. Or even just taking general environmental samples out there from a wide variety of environments and isolating whatever viruses you can find from those samples in the modern day. Now sequencing them all, sharing the genomes online, and then potentially doing more than that with the viruses that you've isolated. The idea is we want to know what viruses are out there. Having done a bit of digging into this, some basic stats on predicting, they found roughly 1200 previously unidentified viruses. They identified them, they sequenced them, and they were active, I think, in 20 something countries, 60 foreign laboratories. And what was interesting to me in the 1200 viruses, all of them had the potential to erupt into pandemics. That was the presupposition for selecting them. And I got this from the La Times, including more than 160 novel coronaviruses. So that was predicts. Hall what's interesting to me about deep vision, they're actually talking about ten to 12,000 viruses over five years. So something like ten x the number of viruses at half the time, this is with $125,000,000 instead of 200. It's a big explosion in efficiency. And to the extent that this work poses risks, it's a big explosion in the risk. What's driving this acceleration. And if we continue to do programs like this after deep vision's legislated five year life, will that explosion continue to the point that at some point we might be doing this for many tens or even hundreds of thousands of viruses? So one big chunk of the cost is taking all of these isolated virus samples and sequencing them. That's creating the detailed blueprints, because once you have the genome, then we can use DNA synthesis to reconstruct that virus using these virus assembly protocols that folks have worked out and made tremendous improvements in over the last few years. But the main cost reduction for programs like Deep Vision is that sequencing is just getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and that means it's easier and easier to collect more and more viruses. What isn't appreciably easier is taking them back to the lab, culturing them in the lab, and performing the set of studies that tell you, is this one likely to actually cause a pandemic. So what you're talking about now is essentially step two. We have found the viruses. We have virus hunted. Now they're back in the lab. And what you're talking about now is called characterization, right? Yeah. The whole point of the program is to identify which viruses might spill over and cause future pandemics in the hope that we could do something to prevent it. There's four key classes of experiments that you perform on an animal virus to determine whether it's a good candidate for causing a pandemic in humans. You want to know how tightly does this virus bind to human target cells? How readily does it actually infect those cells? How readily does the backbone of the virus replicate and churn out new copies of the virus in relevant human tissue types? And because you can't test it in humans, of course, how readily is it transmitted in animal models that are chosen for their similarity to humans, whether naturally or because, in the case of mice, they've been engineered to express human receptors and have humanlike immune systems. So to play this back to you to make sure I understood, there's four sets of experiments. Experiment one is, does this virus bind to a receptor on a human cell? Like, can it find the door? Step two, having found the door, can it get in? Does it infect the cell? So does it find the door? Does it have the key? Step three having gotten inside, can it hijack the mechanisms of the cell to replicate? And then step four is, if it does those first three things, does it seem to be transmissible in animal models that replicate as closely as possible transmissibility in humans? Did I get that right? That's exactly right. Great analogy. And if you answer those four questions, you'll basically determine which of these 10,000 yet undiscovered viruses actually have major pandemic potential. There's going to be a tiny minority of them, and this is something you'd have zero knowledge about without taking these steps. So having done this characterization or pandemic identification process, you will know something that humanity would otherwise never have known, which is that these viruses could be incredibly dangerous, and these are not. Now, while I know this is, of course, an unknowable number. And the best we'll probably do is a confident range. Roughly how many pandemic grade viruses would you estimate deep vision is likely to find over its five years? If it does in fact net 10,000 to 12,000 mystery viruses? It's a good question. That's about ten times as many as predict found. And predict didn't find any that looked particularly likely in and of themselves. Found a bunch that looked worrisome in one or another property on some of those tests, but it didn't find any that checked all the boxes, so to speak. We can also just look back and say, well, how many viruses are plausibly out there? How many pandemics do we normally see? And then here's the real big one. What fraction of viruses out there are actually going to spill over and get into humans in the first place? Because we're still discovering new species out there. There's plausibly a lot of viruses out there that have never seen a human and never will. So some researchers say there's probably way more pandemic capable viruses out there than will ever cause pandemics because most of them are just never going to come in contact with humans. Let's try to drill this down and say the low end estimate for how many viruses might be out there in mammals is around 40,000, of which they estimate that maybe 10,000 are capable of human to human transmission. That's one rigorous estimate that's out in the literature, the low end estimate. Others in the field have estimated as many as half a million in mammals. They didn't give an exact number for how many in humans. But you dig into the other papers, they suggest that maybe 20% of those. So somewhere between ten and 100,000 viruses that could plausibly human to human transmission. But human to human transmission is not the same as causing a pandemic. There's lots of viruses that can spread human to human, but on average, each person infects fewer than one other person, so they die out like SARS, one and MERS. So how many of them could actually cause pandemics? That's really hard to know. But if deep vision finds 10,000 and you assume the lower end estimate, then that would be as much as a quarter of all the viruses out there. So let's say 20% of those are going to be capable of spreading human to human. It's 2000 that we expect human to human. What fraction of those 2000 spreading human to human could actually cause a pandemic? It's not really known because the ones that are endemic in humans are a biased sample from all of history. So it's really hard to say. But if we're guessing like one in 100, then that would mean 20 pandemic capable viruses. But that doesn't make sense statistically, because predict found 1101, 200 viruses and didn't find anything that clearly looked like a pandemic capable virus, which makes logical sense. And I do generally believe that probably that means eight ish is a high end plausible outcome. But a quick question is it possible that the targeting of the hunted viruses or the accuracy of some of the laboratory steps have gotten substantially more efficient? That perhaps more will be caught, maybe predict missed things that deep vision will not miss because it's being done in 2022 instead of 2009? The main difference is that now there are much better computational tools for matching virus to host species, virus or similarity and the like. So when deep vision decides a virus is worth testing from the sequence data, they're going to have a much better shot at identifying at that virus being high risk than predict was. Okay, so to play this back, the upper ceiling could be eight, it could be higher because of improved technology. Bottoms up estimate gets us into the possibility of it maybe even being low dozens. We don't know exactly, but it's important to note that it is possible that you will find zero pandemic capable viruses, in which case the program cannot, by definition, trigger any of the terrifying things that we're about to talk about that it could trigger. So this is not a certainty that there's a huge risk here, but zero feels like a low end estimate because the organizers of this program presumably know a lot about the state of the science and what can be done now and what can be expected. And they wouldn't be spinning up this program if they thought it was a real possibility that there would be zero, because then by definition, the program will fail. So zero is possible. And then the high end from the bottoms up and an intuition and a top down, we're getting into quite plausibly mid to high single digit number, possibly, but not likely into the dozens. Is that reasonable? Ballpark yeah, I think that's frankly, a much better way of estimating it than I was giving. Okay, thank you. Now, the characterizing work is really interesting to me for a bunch of reasons. How hard and expensive is it to do this characterizing work at scale, and how likely is that kind of work to happen with many thousands of viruses in the absence of this program? From what I understand, the characterisation aspect is the most expensive component of a program that is not limited to virus hunting and characterization. That is, deep vision is also about monitoring the human populations that are closely exposed to a bunch of the animals that are most likely to pass on viruses to them so as to identify outbreaks early and give us a better shot at containing them. So this program does a bunch of really good stuff, too. Yeah, that's an unadulterated good thing, what you just mentioned. But my understanding is that the bulk of the cost is actually taking the viruses back to the lab and running the experiments, because that requires a bunch of trained virologists with skills that are much more specialized than following a protocol to assemble a virus from the sequence. That is, there's a whole lot more people that can make a virus from a Genomic blueprint than can search through this haystack of wild viruses looking for ones that could plausibly cause a pandemic. Okay? So we virus hunt, we characterize, we call in a record shattering number of viruses over the five years at the end of which humanity knows something that it would otherwise not have known, which is that these, let's call them six previously undiscovered viruses, pose a very, very significant pandemic risk. Now, I could see very good arguments for us not wishing to know this information, but I could also see arguments for us wishing to know this information. But what's most significant to me is step three in this process, which so flabbergasted me when I learned about it, that my head is frankly still spinning a little bit. And I want to be very clear and I don't want to exaggerate what step three is. And so in order to put this out there in Deep Vision's own words, so to speak, I'm going to quote from their so called no Foe, which is a notice of funding opportunity. This is something that us. ID and other agencies put out in the world and say, we want this program created. And Deep Vision's NOFO is over 100 pages long, so it's very, very specific. And then universities and other people can bid on doing this piece or that piece. And all the pieces are eventually assembled by a program officer inside of USAID. So this NOFO, this 100 plus page document in the public sphere, bit of googling you can find, it is as clear and detailed and certainly official statement of Deep Vision's intentions as exists. So what I'm going to do right now, Kevin, is I'm going to read a few snippets and for those who find the no Foe, these are scattered a few phrases and sentences from the bottom of page 16 to the top of 17. And I'll ask you to explain a couple terms and meanings as I go along. So first of all, from the NOFO, since USAID expects the data generated by Deep Vision will be publicly available, and I'm going to skip ahead a few words for efficiency. Deep Vision will assist in linking incountry data with global systems e, G, Gen, bank, and GISAID. What are GenBank and GISAID and what does it mean to link the data with them? So that's referring to the standard open data practice of sharing the genome sequences of everything that you find in a given research program. So GenBank is the main repository hosted by the US government of all Genomic information that everyone has sequenced and submitted to GenBank. GISAID is the repository specifically of virus strains. Not everyone sends a sequence of every strain to GenBank. If there's already a sequence that is very similar, there GISAID is for the detailed virologist viral evolution specialists who want to see and map out how different are the mutational variants of a given virus. So basically, it is a wildly standard scientific practice now to put any sequence you find up to the cloud before have any notion of its significance. So everything they find by definition is going to be made publicly available long before they characterize it. Is that roughly correct? That's exactly right. The principle of open data is you collect data in a scientific experiment, you should really put it online for everyone to see. Okay, a couple words after that last snippet of text pointing again from the program's. No foe knowledge gained by deep vision on novel viruses assessed to be zoanotic and significant epidemic pandemic. Threats will be immediately available to the incountry owners of the data and will be expected to be available expeditiously to policymakers, the private sector and implementing partners. So I think I know what that means. Could you just play back what that amounts to? If you think there's a virus that poses a major epidemic that is local outbreak risk or god forbid, a pandemic risk, you need to tell the country that you found it in immediately so that they can take action. And it's expected that they will then share it with the international community as soon as possible. So, bottom line, if deep vision succeeds, everyone on earth will get the recipes for the dangerous viruses that we find. They will be put online just as the 1918 flu virus genome was put online. That's right, because remember, the intent of this program is to identify which natural viruses might spill over and cause pandemics if they spill over into humans so as to better target interventions to prevent that from happening. And the way they hope to do that is by creating a list of viruses rank ordered by perceived threat level, which they've already done for the viruses that are highly lethal and don't spread particularly well human to human, but are known to have spilled over. That's the product of a related USAID program called Stop Spillover, which is generally highly admirable with the perhaps exception of this list. Although, as we discussed previously, there's not a whole lot that's dangerous on that list so far. But what deep vision apparently wants to do is as soon as they find anything dangerous, they're going to alert the world to it and put it on that list, presumably in the number one position. So bottom line, if and when deep vision succeeds, based on what they've stated themselves in general practices, the genomes of potentially very significant pandemic viruses will be put on the open internet for anybody to find. Correct? And given the base of scientists and individuals who are already able to conjure certain viruses from whole cloth in the lab, tens of thousands of people will be in a position to follow those recipes as soon as. They're posted and animate that virus, even though they don't personally have a sample from the bat that it originally came from. Did I get that right? That's exactly correct. And to tie it back to what we were talking about a little while ago, the current population of frightening genomes on the internet is probably not all that bad. But this action could substantially change that by saying, yes, world 1918 probably not as bad as you think. H five n one. Pretty good chance it's not transmissible, but holy cow, people, these, whatever, six viruses can really do the trick that's going to be out there as a result of this program. And tens of thousands of people at first will be able to conjure these things, followed by we don't know how many in the future. Is that an excessively alarmist interpretation? No, it's really not, I'm afraid, and it's worth comparing. COVID has killed many more people than any single nuclear detonation. There are nine commonly acknowledged nation states with access to nuclear devices. So as soon as viruses likely to cause pandemics are publicly identified with freely available genomes, the number of actors in security terms capable of inflicting a million plus death in expectation will rise by roughly 1000 fold. So the vulnerability of the world to a deliberately inflicted pandemic will rise tremendously if deep vision succeeds. I mean, that's what I get from this. And again, please tell me if I'm being unrealistic in my interpretation. Frankly, I wish you were, but that seems pretty accurate. And I'm going to add it's a little bit worse than that, actually, because a lot of people seem to assume a pandemic is a pandemic, right? It's the same virus, but nature throws on average four or so pandemics at us per century. If someone deliberately causes a pandemic, if the list has eight viruses, they could make and release all eight at once. The idea of facing eight different Covids, none of them with vaccines or even tests, all at the same time, it just boggles my mind. That's just such a horrifying thought, given how hard it was to deal with this one. And it's worse than that, I'm afraid, because a lot of people see our best hope as being vaccines, because obviously that's what got us out of this one. Right, well, as we're talking about this, it's been 102 days since the Omicron variant of COVID was first sequenced and the genome shared with the world. The goal that the White House has put forward is that we should have vaccines available within 100 days of the genome sequence being identified. But by a couple of days ago, omicron had infected a very large fraction, maybe not 50%, but in some places definitely 50% of all humanity. So 100 days is too slow, even though Omicron arose in one place in the world and spread from there. And that's our stretch goal, is 100 days. And I agree with you as you know, I've been aware of that number for a while, and it's dangerously timid, but it's worse than that. Oh, good. If omicron can spread that fast from a single point of release, anyone malicious enough to deliberately cause a new pandemic, let alone several at once, would almost certainly release them in multiple travel hubs, say, airports throughout the world. So it wouldn't be single point of release you have a chance to notice, because lots of people are getting sick. It would be people getting sick in cities all over the world all at once. Wow. It would substantially diminish our response time and one would imagine, thereby substantially increase the resulting death toll. So even if it's just one virus, a deliberate release is worse than a natural spillover or an accident, because both of those are spread from a single site. Yeah, that's a really interesting and important point. So COVID emerges in wuhan, and it's two and a half months before it shows up in Detroit. That was nowhere near enough lead time for us, and it could be chopped by 99% by a malevolent actor. That's scary. And there's one more thing I really want to emphasize, which is some people might be saying, well, yeah, but no matter how those four experiments turn out, even if they're all four positive and give values comparable to an endemic human virus of the same family, you might say, well, maybe that's just a 50% chance that it would actually cause a pandemic. Because, again, the transmission studies are in animals, not humans. And to be fair, I just poopooed the h five n one s mutants as being actually likely to cause pandemic in humans. So let's say that, okay, they find five viruses that they think could cause pandemics. Let's assume each of them is actually 50% likely to cause one. Well, if someone were to assemble and release all five, they'd have a 96% chance of causing at least one pandemic and an 81% chance of igniting two or more simultaneously, again, presumably across multiple travel hubs. That's pretty terrifying. And if you assume that deep vision is only the beginning, and the goal is to find all pandemic capable viruses out there in nature and put them all on a list in order to prevent as many natural pandemics as possible, then you're raising the possibility that someone might do it. And then you'd see copycats, because that's what happens with mass shootings. It's a socially contagious behavior. Once one person sets the example, then many more people who are mentally ill or captive to a horrific ideology would be more likely to do it now that they know that it's possible. In general, I'm not super worried about civilization falling apart because of a single natural pandemic virus, but if you're talking releasing aid at once, that might be another story, depending on how bad they are. I mean, remember, if essential workers aren't willing to go out there and risk their lives, then you start having problems in food and water and power distribution, and if those fall apart, then everything falls apart. So putting those genomes online looks pretty risky. Given that the best case scenario is that we would prevent all of the natural pandemics, which is historically around four per century, seems a lot to say. It's definitely a good deal to prevent four natural spillovers per century in exchange for giving tens of thousands of people the power to launch more pandemics than that simultaneously across multiple travel hubs. In light of all of that, I don't know how you could argue against the statement that if deep vision is spun up and succeeds, the exposure humanity faces to malevolently inflicted pandemics skyrockets. Even if Deep Vision finishes its job and none of this work is ever, ever done again, which is, first of all, a completely naive assumption, I don't think anybody would make that, given that there's momentum, to do more and more of this rather than less and less of this in USAID, of all places, which we'll discuss in a bit. And that brings me to my last quote from Deep Vision's NOFO. The US Agency for International Development, parentheses USAID, seeks to assist a limited number of countries with a focus on Africa, Asia and Latin America to establish capacity to detect, characterize and disseminate information and findings regarding previously unknown viruses that have originated in wildlife. Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically it says in addition to doing this stuff ourselves, we are going to be training lots of foreign countries to also do this. And it's noteworthy that if this training, which is currently specialized and will probably enjoy many breakthroughs as a result of $125,000,000 of funding over five years, you're going to have a lot of smart people concentrating on characterizing better, cheaper, faster, which wouldn't otherwise happen without this program. So if deep vision succeeds and society continues tripling down on this stuff, this work will be, as a consequence, done on foreign soil where the US government has absolutely no sway or say will eventually be done with tools that are far better than what we've got right now, tools and techniques. So this is the horse out of the barn that doesn't actually yet exist on the internet with a relatively limited set of sort of dangerous viruses that are there. Now, there is one factor that I should probably point out, which is suppose we're concerned about state bioweapons programs. If they were to say, don't mess with us, we have the ability to launch new pandemics, no one would believe them. I would laugh and say, I can fabricate data too. That's cute. But if it's done by deep vision, by deep vision funding a bunch of independent labs who are well meaning because they want to prevent natural pandemics and they just haven't thought about the security risk, if they publish that data, I believe it. If it's done by independent labs who don't have a motive to have a pandemic in their pocket. It's going to be believable in a way that it won't be if malicious actors try to do it themselves. And I think this is one of the most powerful and original arguments that I've heard about the danger of this kind of genomic information being out there. And I hadn't thought about it until you first mentioned it to me on the phone before. If I don't know, an environmental extremist movement or a frightening anonymous source on the Internet or even a state actor like North Korea were to say, hello world, I am going to inflict a devastating pandemic unless you meet my demands, it would be laughed off. It would freak people out. It'd probably get a lot of coverage on CNN. But the scientists who are in a position to inform the national security apparatus in various countries about whether or not to take this threat seriously will say, this is just not feasible. That totally changes when a genome that the world would not have known otherwise is definitively blessed and publicized by a brilliant scientific group as being that thing. Once that work has been done, which wouldn't be done otherwise, now all of a sudden we know 30,000, and perhaps quite a bit more people can follow that recipe overnight. And what that means is we could suddenly go through a terrifying series of hijackings of the attention and the stress levels of the world with all kinds of people issuing those threats. And they don't even have to have access to one of those 30,000 people that could make that virus. They just have to say, because it's suddenly credible, nobody will be able to deny that it's impossible for one of those 30,000 people to be under the control of this terrifying anonymous source online or this terrorist group or this rogue actor or whatever. And that alone is just wildly disruptive. It's one thing if a kid pulls the fire alarm in their school to get out of their science exam or whatever, but if that kid calls the school and says, I have a hydrogen bomb that's ready to go off, no one's going to get that alarmed. The creation of this credibility empowers so many more people than, quote unquote, just the 30,000 people who could act on it to do awful things in the world. And it's probably even more likely because the people who might make that threat may, and their inner conscience say, I'm actually not going to do it. I don't have a gun. You know, I'm just holding up the liquor scorer with a squirt gun. No one's going to get hurt might actually make them more likely to move ahead with that kind of thing than it would be for a state actor to do something. Yeah, I'm actually at least as afraid of not just nonstate actors, but even just individuals mentally ill or otherwise. So Siyi Endo was a member of this apocalyptic terrorist cult om Shinriko in Japan. Om was responsible for making and releasing chemical weapons that killed a bunch of people in Japanese cities in the early mid 1990s. But before he joined the cult, endo was a graduate trained virologist, and he sought to obtain samples of Ebola for use against civilians, and was unsuccessful. James Holmes, who was a convicted mass murderer, the Aurora shooter, quit his life sciences PhD program not long before he opened fire in the theater. And, of course, pre Al Qaeda, the most famous terrorist was arguably the Unabomber. Ted Kaczynski was a brilliant mathematics professor who referred in his manifesto to the immense power of biotechnology, even though he wrote it decades ago. It's really hard to imagine someone like that who wanted to bring down the industrial system would not have used that power if given access to pandemic virus genome sequences and modern virus assembly protocols. And that's not even getting to groups like Daesh, ISIS, and other kinds of terrorists. Folks who might actually be tempted to use it even if it would hit their own people. Yeah. And the Omnicidal factor, if we can call it that, is something that I think people very frequently miss, because it's easy to rule out a majority of bad guys who normally dominate international headlines. We can safely say that Putin Xi, indeed North Korea, are wildly unlikely to inflict a pandemic on the world because they have so many people to protect and so much to lose. And if we're in the mindset that it takes a major state actor to do such a thing, there is a bit of mutual assured destruction built into that. There's radical, deep ecologists who don't think much of humanity in general and might think that the world is better off with a whole lot fewer humans. There's folks with those persuasions who have called for it. Certainly it's unclear whether a group like Al Qaeda would actually have unleashed something that would hit their supporters as well. But quite possibly, I mean, they did put out a call for brothers with skills in microbiology in 2010 to make biological weapons of mass destruction. And then one of the most haunting ones is folks with the mindset of the German wings pilot who decided to commit suicide. He was mentally ill, didn't disclose his mental state, and decided to end it all by flying the plane into a mountain. Yeah. In the United States, I'll add, we have an average of more than one mass shooting per day. So that suicidal mass murder instinct is out there, and the Omnicidal instinct is out there. And then just thinking out loud, like, there could be other people who don't realize quite how deadly the thing they're doing is and might have some sort of boneheaded cunning plan. Like, I could imagine somebody saying, oh, I remember the markets crashing when COVID came out. I got to release something, short the market, make a pile of money and stockpile gas bask. It sounds moronic and absurd, but there's 7 billion people in the world, and moronic, absurd ideas occur to at least some of us each and every day. Okay, now I want to get into the final and in some ways maybe even the most important part of our conversation with a little bit of a preamble. It's obviously abundantly clear that I am horrified by the agenda and the prospects of this program called Deep Vision. But I want to try to do my very best to push back with every argument that I have heard of or have dreamt up on my own in favor of Deep Vision, because there is another side to this story, and the people behind this program are extremely smart and well intentioned. And I'll also add that when I personally first heard about predict, it was when the news broke about it being shut down. And that actually happened either right before or right as the pandemic was starting. And at the time I thought this was insane because Xuanotic Spillover has obviously happened before, it will obviously happen again, and how can we defend ourselves against it if we don't study our enemies? I'm actually very sympathetic to these arguments, so let's go back and forth, and I'm really going to try to make every argument I'm capable of in favor of this. So as much as the other side as we can possibly deliver. So my first question to you, which is the question that was in my mind when this thing was first shut down shouldn't we want to know who the bad guys are and where they live before they strike? Shouldn't we want to know where the dangerous pandemics dwell and know exactly what they look like? Isn't that a bit like putting wanted posters all over the Wild West? It's an extremely intuitive and compelling rationale, and most of the time it's true. The problem is that it's kind of like saying, here's a wanted poster for this particular device, which happens to be the detailed schematics for a hydrogen bomb and peppering the world with different blueprints for hydrogen bombs or equipment necessary to make hydrogen bombs in order to identify people who might be making hydrogen bombs. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's hard at the top level to say, okay, best case scenario, we prevent all natural pandemics. Is that worth giving these tens of thousands of people the power to release more pandemics than would normally occur in a century all at once? That just doesn't seem like a good trade. And when you put it in that context, then you kind of have to look back at your basic assumption that it's always good to know more about a threat, because that intuition doesn't encapsulate the costs of knowing. That is, the value of information can be negative. That's the whole point of an information hazard. There's actually a whole field of modeling and information theory on calculating the value of information. When should you run an experiment to learn more? And it tends to assume that the information is always positive. And the question is, is the cost of running the experiment worth reducing your uncertainty about what would happen in the world? But it's also possible for the value of information to be negative. And you can imagine an extreme case. Suppose you figured out some way of creating a singularity on earth that would devour the planet. To give the absurd example, would we want humanity, anyone in humanity, to know that that is possible? Probably better off if no one ever knows that that's possible. And because of the credibility issue and the difficulty of doing this kind of research, it looks a lot like if we don't go there, then there won't be credible pandemic capable virus blueprints online for quite some time. That's not going to last forever. We will eventually lose, they will eventually go up there, whether through this kind of route or another one. But the longer we can push it off, the more time we have to build actually effective defenses. And it's important not for listeners to come away with a sense of doom and gloom. Because it's also true that even for the scenario where people release multiple pandemic capable viruses all at once in multiple airports, if we have sequencing based monitoring systems in place everywhere, we'll pick them up nearly immediately, certainly before they spread too widely through air travel and be able to put on our protective equipment. And if we actually tried, we could probably build comfortable, even stylish equipment that keeps you from getting infected with viruses. And we could make it available to everyone who is required to keep food and water and power flowing for as long as it takes to stamp out the virus entirely. And if we had that kind of equipment available and the threat was that salient, we could do it even after COVID, even after our manifest failure in so many ways with that kind of technological advantage, I think we could do it. But we can't do it today. So it's really hard to make the argument that the threat of natural pandemics could ever be enough to justify creating that risk of deliberate misuse that could be so much worse because humans make better terrorists than nature. Even if we can't make viruses worse than nature, we make better terrorists. I think the main difference between folks who think that this kind of attitude towards understanding the threat as thoroughly as possible, no matter what, assume that all technologies favor defense, that no matter how bad it is, if we just know more, we can come up with some kind of effective defense. But that's just not how the world necessarily works. And we know that from nuclear weapons, but also, frankly, we should know that from COVID because we weren't able to effectively defend against COVID, even though we arguably should have been. Certainly some nations did much better than others. But right now you can't say that understanding virus is better, especially given our difficulties reliably making vaccines quickly enough. Is plausibly going to mitigate the damage from any pandemic enough to warrant the kind of offense that you're giving to individuals? One individual can launch pandemics, and the entire world has to frantically make vaccines, test them, approve them, manufacture them, and distribute them. If we can even do that and then the offense can do it again, it takes so much less effort if you have a list of many different pandemic capable viruses to choose from. Okay, you mentioned vaccines. So that gets to another argument that I've heard in favor of this approach and one that I certainly harbored myself for quite some time, which is if we do identify the spillover bad guys before they spill over, don't we get a huge head start on creating vaccines and therapies to counteract that spilled over pandemic? And if that's the case, don't we have a great potential to really mitigate an awful lot of deaths? And we need to put that in the benefits column as we also look at the potential cost column. In order to have a head start in vaccine production, you need to be able to establish whether it works. And if you're trying to develop a vaccine against a virus that has never infected a human before, the only way to test efficacy that is to run what's called a phase two clinical trial would be to deliberately infect a bunch of people with a virus of unknown lethality that we think might cause a pandemic. That's what's called a challenge trial. And we weren't willing to do that even for COVID until well over a year into the pandemic. Would we really be willing to do it for a virus that was isolated from animals and might never actually infect a human or certainly ever take off as a pandemic? What if we discover a couple dozen viruses? Are we going to do it for all of them? Then you have to take into account how fast mRNA vaccines can be designed basically a day. I mean, moderns was famously in less than 48 hours. I'm sure we can do it within 24. Now, if you can design the vaccine within a day, and you already have production facilities that allow you to churn out tons of doses very quickly because again, you're just making RNA, you're just changing the sequence, it's very easy to specify it for a new virus. Then there's no reason why you can't run a combined phase one and phase two trial immediately. Because one of the best things that NIH has called for and is now working on with White House support is a program to develop one vaccine for a virus of every family. Because if you do that and we actually have some idea of this from many viruses, they're already ongoing, then you know roughly what dose you need to use for your mRNA vaccine against that family. If there's a pandemic already going, you should be making your mRNA vaccine candidate and getting it in people's arms who are high risk in order to protect them as soon as possible. Because you already know that an mRNA vaccine for a related virus at a given dosage was safe and effective. So given that you wouldn't save even a single full day of vaccine development by knowing the virus in advance, very few people know how quickly moderno was developed. And I think it's an important factual point to lay out there without any editorializing. This is just fact. I think it was something like 342 days between when moderna and most of the non Chinese world got the genome for COVID 300 and something mid to lower three hundreds of days before the vaccine came out. But what few realize is that roughly two of those days were the total vaccine development time frame and the rest of it was testing safety regulation and then point well taken that it doesn't take long at all to make one of these vaccines. But it's really important to note the development of the formula for the vaccine is much briefer than the time necessary, as we've seen with COVID to create 7 billion of them to vaccinate the world or even 350,000,000 of them to vaccinate our own country. That just took many months in the case of the US till we got to the point where anybody who wanted a vaccine could get it. And we're nowhere near that point with the world yet. So wouldn't it be beneficial to do the deep vision work to find the plausible bad guys and to just stockpile billions or hundreds of millions or whatever the appropriate number is of those vaccines so we are in a position to snuff it immediately? Well, what you just described sounds a lot like spending an awful lot of money stockpiling doses of vaccines that we're not actually sure work yet so that you can do what amounts to a phase one plus phase two trial of ring vaccination to try to stamp out an epidemic before it comes a pandemic. Define ring vaccination. So ring vaccination is what we use to get rid of smallpox for example. And it's where you have a case and you essentially give everyone in the area who might plausibly have come in contact with them a job just in case you do some contract tracing if you can. But it's more like list everyone you know plus everyone who lives or works within ten blocks of your home or workplace respectively. We're just going to vaccinate everyone to a couple of degrees of contact out or even whole cities if need be. But that's still actually not that many doses. What you described sounds a whole lot more expensive than just building the capacity to make mRNA vaccines in bulk very quickly in various places throughout the world. I mean, we're going to have these factories for making mRNA vaccines against other things. We're definitely going to be developing mRNA vaccines against other pathogens and probably mRNA versions of existing vaccines, because it looks a lot like the mRNA versions may well be better. Chickenpox is probably going to eventually be an mRNA vaccine because it's probably better. And if you have factories making all these other vaccines, you can immediately switch those to be making vaccines against some new Xoanotic agent that has just jumped. And that's a heck of a lot cheaper than having to stockpile all those doses in advance for a bunch of viruses that are probably never going to spill over anyway. My immediate rebuttal to that, I think I know your answer to it, but let me just make it is if that's so easy, why COVID why didn't we just do ring vaccination with a vaccine that took a day to make and stuff that one out in Wuhan? Well, that would have required the Wuhan officials to actually inform the Beijing central government that there was a problem in a timely manner and for them to have had mRNA vaccines available, which they still don't have today. I can think of another immediate rebuttal to the ring vaccine strategy, but the rebuttal is so obvious that even though I'm trying to be a good devil's advocate, I'm just going to lay it out there. Yes, it takes a day, but it took 340 days of testing and approval and so how can we really do this ring vaccination strategy? The obvious rebuttal to that is you're going to have the same problem if you have 350,000,000 stockpiled copies of a vaccine that itself, by definition, has not yet been tested and approved because there was no pandemic against which to test it. So that rebuttal has a built in rebuttal. But I do actually want to add something here and I'd like to just hear your take on it. My personal belief is now that we do have mRNA vaccines and we'll have more in three years and they'll be everywhere in some amount of time. And now that the safety profile of mRNA vaccines has been well established, my own feeling is when something scary emerges, we need to be able to access emergency regulations. We can't have this 340 day test period, which, by the way, was record suddenly quick. We can't have that because, as you pointed out early in the podcast, 100 days is nowhere near enough time if something diabolical is on the march. And so this is something I've thought about on my own. I'm wondering if you think it's a crazy idea to have ready to go pre approved, pre thought through, pre debated, pre protocolized emergency provisions, that if something really awful starts to happen, societyx, whether it's us or a. Country in the hot human animal interface can basically flip a switch and say, as soon as we have a high confidence vaccine, very high confidence in safety, and pretty damn good confidence in efficacy, because we've been doing mRNA for x years now, we can at least allow people to take that voluntarily rather than waiting 340 days before they can take it. What do you think of that as a tool that whether we take the stockpiled approach or the ring vaccination approach, I kind of feel like we need that tool. I mean what you say makes so much sense that it hurts. And it hurts especially knowing that so many of those 300 odd days could have been avoided given appropriate institutional incentives that were sadly lacking at both FDA and CDC. But it's not really to single out those agencies in particular because it's not like international agencies did that much better. And to be fair, mRNA vaccines were new. It took time for the manufacturing scale up. It just wasn't there. So even though a lot of lives could have been saved by accelerating the regulatory approval, which could then let the company's incompetence build up even faster than under Operation Warp Speed, there is a limit to how fast we could have done it when mRNA vaccines were new. And in future we'll be able to do it much faster. Which means that the regulatory approval is the sticking point. Even more, having a set of people who are authorized in the event of nascent epidemic, to just go ahead with a combined phase one, phase two trial in a ring vaccination format using an mRNA vaccine targeted to the new agent, using doses similar to those identified for viruses of the same family in the past. I think that's just got to be on the books as something you can do and negotiate internationally to get approval to do it everywhere we agree to do it. If our FDA agrees this is okay and we can do it, then it'd be a lot easier to get regulatory agencies in other countries to agree and just have that as the plan. That would frankly make a heck of a lot more sense your idea than what nations are currently arguing about in the World Health Organization for so called pandemic preparedness. Okay. I think another powerful argument in favor of knowing the precise genome of a potential bad guy in advance is monitoring the hot interfaces between the human world and the animal world. That human animal interface. Those are in fairly narrow parts of the world. And it seems that if we do identify the likely spillovers from a particular region, we can put a lot of muscle into that interface specifically targeted. At this one bad guy that might emerge from there and we're going to inevitably put much more muscle in there into that early detection in that geographically specific place than we would if we never did the work that Deep Vision proposes to do. I think that's inarguable that you could it's not clear how much better it would be than just looking at the animal human interface. Again, without looking for which specific viruses you think would actually cause pandemics were they to spill over, and instead saying which animals cause the most spillover events in which communities, and can we work to prevent those? So you're arguing that those hot interfaces between the animal and human world can be carefully monitored even in the absence of the precise genome. How would that happen, and how easy is that to do? And does it require new technology or enormous budgets? Well, so that's what the technology that's already made Deep Vision's job easier is doing. That is they're going out there and they're monitoring people who are often exposed to animals and checking to see which animal viruses they have been exposed to or even they're just getting a lot of samples from the animals that people are most likely to contact and sequencing them. And that would let you create a model of which creatures are highest risk. And the thing is, identifying that, say, a particular kind of bat is high risk because of the suite of viruses to which is it exposed and how often viruses from it end up in people in regions nearby. That doesn't give anyone blueprints that could be used to cause a new pandemic, but it does let you target interventions in communities ensuring that anyone who might have been exposed to a bat gets much prompter medical care and diagnostics to see what it is they might have been infected with and resources to contain that potential outbreak before it actually happens. Okay, next rebuttal, which I actually think is a very strong one, in which a number of people have put to me when I raised this issue, the United States can control whether or not Deep Vision does this work, but we can't stop the rest of the world from doing it. Based on what you told me about the level of expertise and budget that it would require, there's probably not a lot of actors out there who could do this, and there's obviously no economic incentive for any private actors to do it. But nothing stopping China, for instance, from doing this work. And wouldn't it be bad for China to do this work under the cloak of darkness, for them to identify six pathogens that we know nothing about, and then we have this information asymmetry isn't the danger of that frightening enough that we just can't let it happen, and we're kind of dragged into almost an arms race? Well, you have to ask, what do we really lose and what do they gain from that scenario? These are viruses that are going to kill their people as well. They're not strategically useful to great powers the way nuclear weapons are because they can't be effectively targeted. And you could say, well, what if they hypothetically tried to develop vaccines in advance and vaccinate their people in advance there? I would say I think it's pretty hard to vaccinate a billion people without intelligence agencies noticing that you're doing it and presumably getting a sample of whatever it is, or at least finding evidence of it. And even if you somehow manage to accomplish that feat, it's going to be awfully suspicious when it ravages every other country, but even your citizens abroad somehow never get it. That just seems quite a reach. I think normal deterrence really operates just fine in that scenario. And again, what do we gain from identifying it in advance a day when it comes to vaccine development? If we really do have that capability of make mRNA vaccines very quickly, which is I certainly hope we have, and frankly, even if the government fails to invest in it, it looks a lot like the private sector is interested in doing that anyway, because market forces to the rescue doesn't really look to me like we lose anything. So two responses to that a it would make no sense for China to do this unless b they start mobilizing in plain sight, to which I'll say governments do stupid things all the time, even though they shouldn't. And as we can see with Russia and Ukraine right now, governments even marshal their forces in plain sight and de facto tell the world what you got to do about it. So I feel better about the arguments you just presented. If I believe that there was a plausible path to, say, the United States deciding vehemently against deep vision and then basically evangelizing that viewpoint to the rest of the world successfully, could that happen? Realistically? Is there any shot of that? I think actually we are probably the hardest audience for that one. We'd be the hardest people to change the minds of. You mean honestly? Yes. I think it's inarguable that if China's leadership decides this kind of thing shouldn't happen, it's not going to happen there. True. Whereas in the US. If we decide that this isn't going to happen and the government isn't going to fund it, then it's actually a lot harder for us to stop the private sector from doing it anyway. The Global Virome Project hoped to raise a couple of billion dollars from government, yes, but also a lot of it from philanthropists to do this kind of research and assemble that ranked order list of viruses by threat level for all natural viruses using private money. And it's a lot harder for the United States to say you can't actually do that. There are some things we could do. Most notably, we could add most viruses with a hint of pandemic potential to this select agent list, which greatly increases the cost of working with them by requiring background checks and ensuring that physical samples are appropriately under lock and key and so forth. That could do a lot but we still can't actually stop them unless we actually decided to ban the particular class of experiments required to identify a virus as pandemic capable. That is, though, to give your example, can it find the door? Can it find the key to the lock in order to get in? Can it take over the inside once it's there? And can it actually take over others using the animal transmission models? If we were to say, you know what, a pandemic capable virus can kill as many people as a nuclear weapon, we spend somewhere between two and $70 billion a year on nuclear nonproliferation. Why don't we take pandemic proliferation similarly seriously? Internationally, there is a nuclear test ban treaty. Well, those four sets of experiments are the verological equivalents of nuclear testing. You actually make it a national security matter, then you treat it like a national security matter and a proliferation risk which is arguably greater than that of nuclear proliferation. Because, again, there's nine acknowledged nuclear powers versus tens of thousands of people that could gain access to these kinds of agents once the genomes are online. So I think that if you can convince USAID, which I think is eminently doable, and if you can convince NIH, which I think is much more difficult but still possible, then we could absolutely take the case internationally that this is in our shared strategic interest as the international community to prevent people from doing this. Tiny subset, less than 1% of all virology that is the equivalent of nuclear weapons testing. So tell me if this is a fair summary of that detailed response. It is definitely not in China's interest that this knowledge be discovered. They have a lot of people to protect. This is not targeted weapons. And even though governments do stupid things all the time, they're far less likely to do something stupid if it has been strenuously and persuasively argued to them, hey guys, this is stupid. Okay, here's another. And again, I'm not just being devil's advocate. I think some of the arguments in favor of deep vision are pretty strong, although you've done a decent job of demolishing a couple of them already. But this is one that I think about a lot. I believe one of the greatest and most securing development science could possibly conjure in the response to COVID would be so called panthamal vaccines, which just brief pocket definition for those who aren't familiar with it. The notional panned coronavirus vaccine would immunize the lucky recipient against substantially all coronaviruses, of which there are countless numbers. And there was talk about, and even, I believe, the beginning of an effort back in 2003 in the wake of SARS to gin up a pan coronavaccine effort, which was understood would cost a lot of money and take many years. But after SARS petered out and didn't even kill 1000 people, that focus was lost. Not because it was scientifically impossible it might be, but not because it was scientifically possible because it became politically uninteresting. And it haunts me to think of how different the world would be right now had that pan coronavirus vaccine in response to SARS been completed, before MERS came along, several years later, another coronavirus, and obviously before COVID came along. Now, isn't it true that the kind of virus hunting deep vision is proposing? Isn't it going to get a lot more examples of a lot more corona and other viruses, paramixoviruses, et cetera, to inform the development efforts of pan familial vaccines? Because I imagine to do one of those things, you need as many examples as possible because you need to find the vulnerabilities that are conserved throughout the family. That's exactly right. If you want a broad spectrum vaccine, you need a decent sample of the viruses within that family. What you don't need to know is which ones of those could cause pandemics in humans. Because if you have a pan coronavirus vaccine and it works against a good fraction of the diversity of the extreme diversity throughout the family, then you should believe that it'll work for all of them because you're not going to find every last coronavirus out there. You're only ever going to get a decent enough sample. So, yeah, you do need to have the genome sequences of a bunch of the coronaviruses, but you don't need to know which ones of those viruses could cause pandemics. So here is where we all have to draw a really important distinction between the virus hunting part or just sequencing viruses in nature to get an idea of what's out there and the pandemic virus identification, which is where you go back in the lab and you run those four sets of characterization experiments. It's the latter that creates the problem from a security perspective and you can do the former without doing the latter. So if I was in charge of deep vision, I would say, you know what? We already agreed that we would not continue to fund virus enhancement work because predict did fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology in not just finding a bunch of back coronaviruses, but they also funded research in which the Wuhan folks made chimeras of some of the more dangerous looking ones, the ones that passed one or another of the tests, but not all of them, and mixed and matched the pieces to see if they could make something that was more dangerous. So deep vision, to their very great credit, has said, we're not going to fund that anymore. And that's a very important point and I'm glad you surfaced it and I just want to highlight it because there's a little bit of definition flooding around here. Deep vision is already a step in the right direction. They've already made one sensible step by saying we're not going to do what many call gain of function. And the next step is to say the virus discovery part, the virus hunting, is important, not just the panned family vaccine development, whether or not it's actually possible, it's worth a shot for exactly the reasons you articulated, but also for panned family antiviral development. So if I were in charge of Deep Vision, I would say, just like we said, no more gain of function. Well, we're still going to go out there and sequence a bunch of viruses to help out the broad spectrum folks, but we're just not going to take them back to the lab and run those experiments to determine which ones are most likely to cause pandemic. And we're certainly not going to add them to a list of viruses rank ordered by threat level. Now, just to drill down a little bit more on that fantasy situation of Kevin Asphalt, deep vision director, you pointed out that the characterization work is actually probably a very, very high percentage of the budget. So if you're running deep Vision and you got that budget, what else would you do? Spend on the monitoring, not on the prediction. It's that simple. And there's an opportunity cost to budget. So I'll just point out an obvious fact if they're spending 20 million of the 25 on characterization, they ain't got that 20 to spend it on these other things. And I know that takes me a little bit out of my semi devil's advocatey role, but I'm actually done with it because I've made, I'm pretty sure all of the arguments that I've heard in favor of Deep Fish, some of which, as I said, aren't all that bad. So your responses to those arguments and also your assessment of the overall situation seems so intuitively obvious once one hears those arguments. So how is it that this program is going forward with its stated objective of posting what I'm going to call weapons of vast destruction to the Internet? USAID deserves a tremendous amount of credit for recognizing that one of the greatest threats to the poor comes from pandemics. And the problem came when they took the reasonable seeming step of saying, you know what, we could target all these efforts more effectively if we knew exactly which viruses were the most risky. I don't think anyone should blame the folks at USAID for failing to notice this because first of all, USAID leadership inherited Deep Vision as a program. The new director, Samantha Power, was confirmed only three months before the announcement, which means that the program was pretty much fully established and just needed the stamp. And what's more, even the folks who were working at Predict, like Dennis Carroll, who launched the program, as far as I know, no one ever mentioned that this could pose a security risk, let alone a proliferation risk. Greater. Than that of nuclear weapons during all of predict and afterwards, including in folks who are super worried about pandemics and even do think about security issues. I mean, you yourself, when you heard that Predict was canceled, you thought that was a bad thing. Absolutely. So no one, I think, pointed out that this was a security risk until after Deep Vision was announced. And that includes folks who do have security experience, which is not something that anyone at USAID is expected to have, is trained to have in any way, shape or form. These are people who have passed up, frankly, much more lucrative salaries in the private sector in exchange for the opportunity to help some of the most vulnerable people in the world. The poorest of the poor, the folks who have really been left out of all the benefits that have accrued from all of the technologies that we've developed, all of the economic growth. And they identified pandemics as one of the things that could most harm the poor and vulnerable. And they were right. I mean, remember, they did this before COVID more than a decade before COVID and they did their best to come up with a program to prevent them. And they started out by doing the really reasonable things, saying we need to know which communities are most at risk, we need to identify what we can do in order to limit potential exposure that could lead to spillover events and cause epidemics. We need to ensure that they have good medical care and diagnostics to identify viruses quickly, train their medical workers in fast response, give them support for isolation protocols and everything required to give the best chance of containing the epidemic, thereby protecting not just that vulnerable community, but vulnerable communities throughout the world. And they did all this, again, pre COVID, that's through their tremendous credit. So, bottom line is self evident. These arguments certainly seem to me, having heard them, they just were not self evident until people like you started raising them. That happened very recently. The fact that nobody, not just inside of predict, but in society pointed to this danger over the eleven year history, I think, of predict makes it pretty clear that these are not obvious or natural arguments to rise in the mind of somebody who is not tasked with security or even people who are. That's exactly right. You can't expect folks who have devoted their lives to serving the poor to recognize security risks that their work might be creating when folks who do have that kind of security background also failed to recognize them. Now, to wrap this up, and also to bring it home in a really important way, I'm just going to point out to listeners the reason we're having this conversation, and we're getting it out there as quickly as we can, is because although Deep Vision has been approved, it hasn't yet launched. Is there any evidence out there that you're aware of, Kevin, that it is underway? It's really hard to say. There's certainly been the press release of announcing what they were going to do, that the program existed, but there isn't anything out there suggesting that funds have been dispersed, certainly not to begin the characterization. And remember, the characterization comes after the virus discovery part. So even if they've begun the virus discovery, that doesn't mean they're taking them back to the lab and running those four classes of experiments that are again the virological equivalent of nuclear testing. So it's more or less beyond a shadow of a doubt that this train has not left the station, that deep vision's objectives might be shaped if people start thinking about them differently. Or perhaps all of its budget could be directed toward antimalaria bednets or who knows? And as a statement of obvious fact, it's much easier to influence the shape and objective of a program before it starts than after x dozen or hundred people are working for it and are deep into their objectives. So now feels like a really important time to get these arguments out into the world, which is obviously why we're doing this. If anybody who's listening to this is concerned, what might they do to try to influence folks, to try to spread the word, etc. Well, I don't want to be irritating and saying everyone should do something that would really bury someone who is not even directly involved in this with a mess. But I would suggest despite social media being consistently identified as being one of the high candidates for a net negative, USAID has a Twitter account at USAID. You could tweet at them and say this program could do a lot of good in some ways, but the security risks inherent in pandemic virus identification seem pretty considerable. I think you should reconsider that and perhaps move all those funds into the other aspects of the program that could really contain a pandemic before it starts. Yeah, and I totally agree that it is probably counterproductive to bury any particular individual with messages on the subject. But in addition to tweeting USAID, which is a great idea because I'm sure that account is monitored by the folks inside, people can go to USAID govcontact where you will find the following message general inquiries and messages to USAID may be submitted using the form below. They also have a phone number and again, we don't know this factually, but it stands to reason that this is an email account or a submission process that is monitored. And USAID isn't like the IRS, where they get literally tens of millions of consumer requests in a very short period of time each year. So I think that's another mechanism and perhaps a more reliable on ramped government is through elected representatives. If you reach out to a representative of whom you're a constituent, they do have staff to field all of those inbound messages. And I know this because I had quite a few friends in college whose job it was during their summers in Washington to deal with these things. I'll give the specifics in the outro. But just for now, if you live in Maryland, Virginia, Hawaii, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, Wisconsin, Florida, New Jersey or Idaho It's a lot of states. You have a Senate representative on the United States Senate, Foreign Relations Committee, on the State Department and USAID Management. So those would be good people to alert as well. And then of course, there's social media, blogging, whatever megaphones you happen to have. If you feel like spreading this word, there's lots of ways to do it and please do so and we thank you. Kevin, is there anything we haven't hit on that you think is important that we should touch? I think just the precedent that this would set. USAID has already done the right thing by stopping virus enhancement research. If they recognize that this is a problem and decide they're not going to do it, then that is one more step towards the US. As a whole moving away from identifying pandemic capable viruses and sharing the blueprints online. And thus being able to credibly lead the international community towards something like a virological test ban treaty for pandemic nonproliferation which would just be so powerful important as it is to do what we can to not allow this. Work to happen that's being currently contemplated. If it's the start of a series of dominoes that precludes an enormous amount of this work happening on a go forward basis, that's profoundly powerful and potentially profoundly curative. So please, listeners, don't despair. There's a lot of concerning information here, but this horse is not out of the barn at all and we may actually be in an extremely propitious historic moment to dramatically slow and perhaps even put a stop to the most threatening activity that we've talked about today. And that's why both Sam and I think this is a particularly important conversation with what is perhaps extraordinarily significant timing. So thank you Kevin, very much for joining me today. Well, thank you for the invitation and for again, highlighting this potential issue of inadvertent proliferation and what we really can do to stop it. And listeners, please stick around for a brief moment of couple of outro thoughts and more detail on those twelve states and who your representative is if you are moved to reach out to that person. Okay, so that's a lot to process, but I hope you collected enough background information as well as a rich enough sense for both sides of the debate to make your own informed judgment about whether you share Kevin's concerns. If you do and would like to help the situation, I have a couple more suggestions before I list those Senators. First, USAID has designated Washington State University to coordinate most of the scientific work that Deep Vision is funding. So if you have a WSU tie, then your school or employer or alma mater is Deep Vision Central. And if you know any heavy hitters over there, you may want to share your perspective with them next. After Kevin and I wrapped up, it occurred to me that at least someone who's hearing this, and maybe quite a few someone's probably knows Samantha Power, the head of USAID herself, or other heavy hitters inside the agency. If you are that someone and are deeply worried about this, then please pass on your feelings or just a link to this episode to Samantha or one of her senior lieutenants. Finally, the members of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on State Department and USAID Management. Quite a mouthful if you're from one of the twelve states I mentioned. Here are your representatives on that subcommittee. Maryland, it's Ben Carden and he is the chair of the committee. Tennessee, it's Bill Hagerty, and he's the ranking member, which means he's the most senior member of the opposition party currently. The Republicans for Virginia. Tim kaine. Kentucky. Rand paul. For Hawaii, Brian Schatz. For Texas, Ted Cruz. For Connecticut, Chris Murphy. For Wisconsin ron Johnson, which does rhyme. For Massachusetts, Ed Markey. For Florida, Marco Rubio. For New Jersey, Bob Menendez. And for Idaho. Jim risch. And that's all I've got. So thank you so much for listening to all of this with an open mind./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay. This is an episode that we were very slow to release due to events outside of our control. We've created an app for the Absolutely Mental Podcast, which is currently available on iOS only, and it's now in the App Store, except that got delayed because, strangely, the powers that be at Apple thought that we were impersonating Sam Harris and Ricky Gervais and stealing the intellectual property of those esteemed gentlemen. So it took some time to actually get the app situated, and that's why it took so long to release this conversation, wherein I get Ricky's reaction to the infamous Oscar slap. Obviously, we're a little late to the party here, but I think the conversation has aged well, and it was great to get Ricky's take on all this. He was actually trending on Twitter immediately after the event itself. He seemed to be the third person on Earth people most wanted to hear from at that moment, and I don't believe he has said anything at length since. So, for better or worse, here's our conversation about Will Smith, Chris Rock, and all things related to the ethics and psychological weirdness of that moment. As always, it's great to talk to Ricky. If you want more of us, you can find us@absolutelymental.com where we have now three seasons of that podcast. Also, if you're on iOS, you can download the Absolutely Mental app where this conversation can be heard in its entirety for free. And also, if you're a subscriber to Making Sense, you will now hear the full conversation. Enjoy. Hey. How are you doing? Yeah, good. Well, I mean, if you really want to know, it'll take a while. Give me the first pass. I'll give you the minor one. The minor one on my side, which I think we've talked about, but this will show you what a a hard headed fool you're collaborating with. I think I've discovered for the hundredth time that red wine is not good for me. And this is the way I do science. I perform this experiment 99 times and doubt it again. I'm dealing with that. I don't know what it is, but I understand what alcohol does to me. I understand how to avoid a hangover. But red wine gives me a headache. Reliably. That's how I drink now. I drink as much as I can, but avoiding the hangover. I know my limit. I tried to start drinking less in the lockdown, so I thought I just have two glasses of wine a night. Right? But all that happened was the glasses got bigger. It was like some sort of game. Yeah. You get you have to talk to the bartender. Yeah. Your right hand who's the bartender needs to needs to be, you know, I never go out. I think I go out about once every two months now. I didn't go out at all in lockdown, obviously, so that was some yeah. Drinking it drinking at home, watching Netflix. But yeah, it's also I'm older now. It's like you can't do the things like even tennis now. I play tennis every week and I can't walk for 24 hours afterwards. Right. I wake up and it feels like I've been in a car crash. Like I I do I'm doing warm ups or gigs and you don't notice. It like if I do two in a row again, the second it's like, what have I done? The adrenaline and that you don't notice at the time. It's just like everything everything has a bigger effect now. I've got like I've got shin splints in with one shin that I've got. Just got to stop running. But I don't stop doing it. That's the thing. I think I don't stop doing what's bad for me, because why should I? Just because I can't walk the next day. That's no reason not to play tennis today before. Yeah. So just getting worse and worse, really, isn't it? Yeah. Well, you're five years ahead of me, I think. But the view from here is already bad. I can't wait. I can't wait to like this also. You get heavier as well. You just creep up. You just stop weighing myself because it's like just every bad news. Well, I don't know. His metabolism and refuse. You work out less because it aches. It's all muscle. You're putting on a pound of muscle every month. Yeah, right. I had that idea that was my latest way to beat the system. I read that muscle weighs more than fat, but you burn more calories at rest. So I thought I'll just work out. So I just got fat and muscley. At least you're strong. If you're going to be fat, you might as well be strong. That's another thing. You're not as strong. You wake more. Your tendons are not as good. Like, if I do squats now, I think I'm not going to be able to get up after this. It's like you you lose your nerve as well. Everything just I don't know why it happens. It just does, though. You just feel you just feel weaker. And it is I'd say it's. In the last two years, I thought of 58. I don't like to hear that. 58. Yeah, I know. Yeah. But 60 is like no, that's it. That's it. I do have the solution for you. The the near term solution. You can do your squats as long as you're just picking up cases of wine. Yeah, exactly. With that, I do count things as exercise. Now, if I have to run up and down the stairs I think that's you don't for the day. Yeah. But I think you've got a certain amount of heartbeats and breaths and steps in you, and so as you do more exercise, 3 billion wear out. I forget it. I think the number is 3 billion heartbeats. Something like that, yeah. Really? Well, that's good, because my resting heart rate is really low. It's about 58 to 60. The clock is ticking down much faster. Anyway. Yeah, I'm all right. Thanks for asking. Okay, so we have something to talk about, and I think we're both a little sheepish about talking about it. There's a bandwagon that we don't want to jump on. Yeah. But in reality, I think you of all people can be forgiven for talking about this at any point, and the comments will age well, because, honestly, you were the from the looks of my Twitter feed, you were virtually the third person on Earth people were thinking about when this episode happened. So I'm referring to the the famous Oscar slap yeah. Delivered by Will Smith to Chris Rock. Now we're talking, you know, five days, six days later. Yeah. So let's just take a look up. I woke up that Monday morning, 730, and I had the odd email and message and DM from friends and colleagues in America going, you know, things like, what the fuck? I feel so sorry for Chris. What would you have done? That's disgusting. I didn't know what they were, so I put it together, and I thought Chris Rock went, oh, Chris Rock. What's that, then? Will Smith Oscar is right. So I googled it, and immediately I watched the clip. Yeah. Can you recapture your immediate reaction? I was angry. I thought no one should hit someone for hearing someone they don't like. This wasn't a bar. This wasn't a hockey field. You know, it was two men in tuxedos. It was strange, and it was it was shocking, and obviously, initially, it looked it looked like the world agreed with me that this shouldn't have happened and he shouldn't have done it. And I stand by that, and that's my first and last assessment of it. He shouldn't have done it. But I also saw there were people saying, well, Chris Rock deserved it. I think, well, what what do you mean, he deserved it? And they had lots of reasons that he deserved it. The joke was offensive. He shouldn't say that about his wife. All the not valid reasons in my book, but I could see that it wasn't a slam dunk. There were some people that thought that Will Smith was in the right, and I never did, and I still don't, even though I think I feel a bit sorry for him to some extent because we don't know what he's going through, but we get to that. But, yeah, I was sort of outraged, but I didn't want to join in. I didn't want to add my voice. Everyone was there, but then I saw I was trending. It was suddenly all about me, and everyone was saying, what would Ricky Gervais have done? Or, oh, my God. That's nothing to what Ricky Gervais said. Oh, my God. That was the most common intake. Yeah, exactly. And I resisted it and we spoke, and I didn't really want to do anything, and I just thought, it's not my thing. And I actually had a new material night the next night, and when something happens that's so big, you have to address it straight away. So they stopped thinking about it. So they stopped thinking about it. So I went out there and I went, I haven't got any WillSmith material. And they laughed. That big laugh of recognition. He said something, right? I said it was ridiculous. I trended. I was the number one trend. Nothing to do with me. I wasn't even there. And I said people were saying, oh, what would have happened if Ricky Gervais had been doing it? I said, well, nothing would have happened because I wouldn't have made a joke about his wife's hair. I'd have made a joke about her boyfriend. And that was the big laugh, and that was the end of it. Right. And I got on with it as well. But there was someone in from the press on a new material night that they tweeted that. And then I trended again, right? I trended again with that. So that's why that's why I compete with it. But realize this. But I desperately tried to keep my mouth shut when it's not to do with me, but you get drawn in, and suddenly now I've got to mention it. But, yeah, I was worried that I was worried about principle. I thought it was bad on principle. I thought Chris Rock didn't deserve it, and no one does. And and certainly not with that joke, because I didn't find the joke. It was not how anyone could find that offensive one, people were saying it's about a medical condition. Well, her medical condition was nothing to do with the joke. The joke was her appearance. And I don't think Chris Rock even knew she suffers from alopecia or any medical condition. I think he saw well, let's just linger on. Let's take this piece by piece, because there's so many layers to this. So just that point about the nature of the joke yes. Whether he knew or not. Whether he knew or not, the source of her baldness, that's probably relevant to his intentions. But even if he knew, it's not a hard hitting joke because of the basic reality of her appearance, which is one, she's a beautiful woman who happens to look beautiful bald, whatever she thinks. And the comparison to Demi Moore and GI. Jane was not an unflattering one, because famously, she looked great bald, too, and she was super fit, and she's this awesome first woman Navy Seal. So it's like it's not a comparison that is denigrating her. No, I didn't think it was an insult. I didn't think he was going for it. I didn't think he was trying to embarrass her. There was nothing nasty about it. There's nothing unflattering about it. It was a really tame you could say that to a kid at a barbecue. Oh, look at G-I-J you know, there was no there was no nothing to embarrass her. Yeah. You know, and then people were bringing up, you know, like, history, or he's mentioned her before again, which I think is is irrelevant, unless it's unless it's, you know, because I didn't know that. I didn't know he mentioned her before or that they were fresh. I don't know any of that. If you look at, in the cold light of day, that joke that there was no need for outrage, and Will Smith laughed. He laughed. He laughed. A polite laugh. Yeah, I get it. Oh, yeah, funny. Yeah, whatever. There was no and then she rolled her eyes, and he obviously thought he had to do something. Obviously, I'm not a psychologist or a body language expert, but it seemed to me like he started strolling up there and he didn't know what he was going to do. I think he regretted it almost immediately, thinking, oh, I've got to do something now. And Chris Rock thinking what's he going to do? He could have run away and made a joke or begged at a laugh, but because he did nothing and stood there, now Will Smith got, oh, no, I've got to do something. And I think if you look at it, will Smith doesn't want to hit him. He doesn't want to hit him hard. He sort of leans back, so he nearly misses and just touches his well, that's what I initially found quite confusing, because that's why the thing that most interests me here is to kind of put ourselves in the room, because the room was powerfully confused. The room was an alternate universe. I mean, the behavior of the people in the room is genuinely startling to me. So I want to talk about what people thought they saw and how they processed all that. But just watching on TV or on the computer, I saw it looked like he barely made contact. Given Chris Rock's reaction, I mean, if he had slapped him with any force, given the way Chris was standing, he would have had to have taken a major step back or fallen back or a slap delivered delivered hard. Could have just knocked him flat. Right. Well, that's the other thing about it. Whether whatever the stat was, again, my initial thought was this was a six foot three man hitting a guy. I think he weighs probably about £140. Chris Rob. He's slight. He's a tiny guy. That's a bad look. Optically. Yeah. It didn't look fair. It looked like bullying. Whatever you think jokes are and what words are, they're not bullying compared to physical violence. That really started annoying me when people started saying, no, but words are actual violence. No, they're not. No, they're not. But given that, given how tenuous the slap was, I think people in the room could be forgiven up until that moment for thinking, oh, this must be a bit they've worked out. I thought it was. I knew although I'd seen the controversy before, us all the thing, and I still had to watch it a few times, thinking, Is it a bit? And then Chris Rock said, Will Smith just slap the shit on me. I thought, this isn't a bit. But even there, the only place it became crystal clear I would say to the people in the room that it wasn't a bit was when he got back to his seat and yelled, keep my wife's name out of your fucking mouth. And even the second it took the second time for the reality to dawn, I think, yeah. That looked like a man who was adrenalized. That looked like a man who was enjoying being a warrior. He enjoyed the violence because he felt that he'd he'd sort of won and he was angry and he was frustrated. I think he knew he shouldn't have done it. And I think that what made me do that. Why did I do that? What have I done? Well, that that I would question that, because his behavior for the rest of the night did not seem like somebody whose conscience was settling especially hard. No, because he'd got away with it. Yeah, but he thought he'd got away with it. Don't forget, a few minutes later, he just won Oscar. It was without that slap. This was the greatest night of his life. This was the greatest night of his career. He couldn't believe it. So all that other stuff, it was still without the slap. This was amazing. And they had all that adrenaline, and he's thinking, oh, it's okay. I've won an oscar. It's okay. It's like when a kid thinks, ah, I didn't get caught. They didn't see me. They didn't I'm I've got away with the sweets. They didn't see me. It was like that sort of feeling. He must have thought. And he was dancing, and I think he thought he'd done well. I think he thought he was shiverious. I think he thinks his wife and family were proud of him. So it's like he got some sort of affirmation and reward. You slap a man on stage. That's never happened before. I've never seen anything like it. As I say, it happens in bars around the world every night. It happens in sport and it happens in the playground, but it doesn't happen on the the greatest entertainment, arguably, in, you know, in the world, in tuxedos, that's that's it was weird. And in particular, let's maybe hit this point now, because at minimum, we need to get it out of the way. The norm that was violated here was crystal clear. The role of a comedian in that context is understood. Right. And you have occupied this role, that precise role, many, many times at award shows, with much more of a lacerating effect on the people in the audience. And you are the court jester who's given full license to roast the people in the audience. Yeah, but also more than that, chris Rock isn't just a presenter or an actor going up there and saying stuff. He's a comedian. Right. And this is hard to explain, but when you're on stage, that's your home. Right. That's a psychological and a physical barrier. If someone gets out of the seat and gets on your stage, that's a massive thing. That's a massive effect. That's like someone's just let himself into your house. Yeah. And he must have thought, oh, my God, but I can't act like I do when I'm on stage, so I haven't got the power. And there's no doubt that in that room, will Smith had the power, and he'd stepped on the stage. He was alpha. He was not only a bigger man, but he'd broken down all those barriers. He'd broken down all those unwritten laws. He should not have stepped on that stage without permission. So Chris Rock, his world was shattered. He did amazing. I can't believe I mean, he fluffed his line a little bit. He didn't know what was going on. And I think that I saw a thing where he said that. I think he was bullied, and he was in therapy for it, so this wasn't good for him to go through that. I can't imagine it. Maybe we'll come back to that. I think he handled himself totally impeccably, despite him getting flustered is totally understandable, and he was barely flustered, given the situation, and this is what I do want to get to. I think he was totally betrayed by the academy and the room, really. I mean, it was just amazing to me that that just the way the rest of the event unfolded, what should have happened. I agree. But don't forget, those people were a bit in shock, and they wanted to go back to normal. It's like they were in slight denial, and I think they had some sort of deferred responsibility, like that happened. We don't know what to do. This is normal again. Will Smith's winning an award, and he's crying. It's all normal. There's nothing to see here. It's okay. The world is not out of joint. Yeah, I know. I don't know what happened. I've heard two opposing reports that the first was they asked him to leave, and then people said, that isn't true. They didn't ask him to leave. In fact, I heard the producer asked him to stay, although I heard a quote from the producer saying that he said he poured concrete on the room. And I think that's a lovely way of putting it, because they must have been just weird. It must have been so strange, because, again, let's get it in contact. He didn't punch him, he didn't kick him, he didn't stab him, he didn't headbutt him, he didn't do anything. That would be traditionally a terrible assault of violence. But I tell you, getting a slap in front of everyone from a bigger man, it is violence. Let me just linger on that point for a second, because it does matter what he attempted to do, because, yes, a slap of any degree is violence and it's designed to obviously assert your power over someone and humiliate them, and it is bullying. All the ugliness is contained, even in the mere grazing gesture there. But if he tried to slap him hard and he just failed because Chris moved to the degree he did, it could have been a very different outcome, because you can knock someone senseless with a hard time. And I genuinely think that he didn't want to hurt him. I don't think he even wanted to slap him. I think he regretted it, walking up there, but he wanted to look like John Wayne. No one insults my woman. I can be a hero here. And I think he felt some sort of weird pressure to do it and he was in two minds and I don't think he is that guy. I don't think he's a violent person who wants to I think it was like he wanted to be like that for a minute, to impress someone, and it just I think it must have felt really weird for him. But about the slap, right? I was talking to a security guard once and I don't know if it's true for everyone, but he said, oh, if it goes to it, a slap is really good because it shocks them. And he said, It looks good in court, right. You don't break your hand, as one often does, punching someone on the head. And he said, Most people don't press charges because they are embarrassed to say, I was slapped by a man. Oh, wow. There is a sort of dislike machismo using that embarrassment and that dominance. But the reality is, if you slap them on the ear, you break their eardrum with good contact and you will completely lay them out, right? Of course you can knock someone out. You can really hurt someone. You can break their joy, you can do it. But there is absolutely no way he wanted to do that and he showed it. That slap wouldn't have hurt, but that's irrelevant. He wanted it to look like a slap. He wanted to shut up Chris Rock. He wanted to look like a hero. He wanted it to look like he had dominated and shut someone up, and he wanted it to be justified. And to some people, it was, and some people it still is. Yeah. That's so many conspiracy theories that they won't back down. They think that. But now it's been going on a week, and, I mean, I don't know how much longer it'd do or what is is punishment is or will be. Right. Well, so let's just let's just nail down the objective fact that many people gave voice to. And I think Kathy Griffin might have put it in a tweet that was most visible, but she said something like, oh, great. Now every comedian has to wonder whether someone wants to emulate Will Smith and jump up on stage. It's like, our job just got more dangerous. And I do think that is, whatever the extenuating circumstances, whatever you think about Will Smith, and whatever the cause of this or the the nature of Chris Rock's joke, that norm violation yeah. Is just bad. Right. Yeah. If if there isn't some sort of, you know, comeuppance or agreed distaste, then it would be dangerous. And and it's more dangerous because even though it would be very rare if a man with everything to lose is willing to do it what's people with nothing to lose exactly willing to do. People want to get famous for anything. People do anything to be first. So for this week, Will Smith is the most famous man in the world. This week, he has been the most famous man in the world. And some people will go, well, I can do that. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right. An analogous situation, which is different, but it reveals the same problem here. I don't know if you've seen it. I think this has happened internationally, but there was this group of people that were hitting famous people they didn't like with pies, like, you know, like just fake pies, like shaving cream and a pie. Yeah. They did it here with milk. They threw milk over. Oh, that's right. I think we may even spoken about this at one point, but people who don't really think it through think that behavior is totally innocuous. It's just a social protest. You're just kind of embarrassing the person. It's just shaving cream or milk. What's the problem? But the real problem is it's a mock assassination, and you're showing the real lunatics of the world just how easy it is to go up and hit Bill Gates or Boris Johnson or somebody in the face, even when they have security around them. Right. So it's a bad meme to be putting out there, and it makes the lives of famous, controversial people just dangerous. I hadn't even thought of the extreme version of that. But even without that, I think it's still in the front. I think that is like a slap. It's done something to you. It's embarrassing. You covered in something you might have ruined your clothes, you're stuck in it. It really is inconvenience whether whether they've got a loophole around violence, you know, and one of our famous politicians years ago, John Prescott, he was a Northern sort of working class guy in the labor, right? And he was walking along and someone egged him, threw an egg at him, and he just turned around and punched him straight in the face. And I like that just because the egg leaves your hand in the eye is not an extension of your fist yet. No, exactly. And just like I talked about this, I think, with you before, that that dumb practical joke in school where they put a drawing pin attack on your chair and if you sat on it, they'd laugh because you did it. I go, no, that doesn't count. No, solve yourself of responsibility because I sat on a sharp object that you put there for me to sit on, that's still your fault. So I think you can play games all you like and try and get round. It's not as bad as a punch or whatever, but you can't do that. You can't do that. If that was paint on someone's house, they'd be done for criminal damage of vandalism. Okay? So let's jigger some of the variables here. If Will Smith had not been Will Smith, if he had been far less famous or just some anonymous creature who in a tuxedo, the outcome would have been obviously different. Right? Well, I assume he wouldn't have made it to the stage. If he was a seat filler who looked like he was walking on stage, and people looking at their notes going, what's this? This isn't in the script. And this truck went, I don't think he'd have made it. One would hope. I'm not so sure, but one would hope. But given that it was Will Smith, and given that he's that famous and people have so many positive associations with him, that's what made it so difficult to process, right? The moment you dial down his fame sufficiently, then it's just a straight up illegal act in plain view of millions of people. And this is completely anathema. The guy who's immediately arrested and has legal problems. Yeah, but that's a very good point as well, because I think that's what allowed him to do it as well, because it was Will Smith. I bet even producers thought, this is going to be funny, right? He's going to tease him, or they've done a bit they've worked out in the car park, we're not in on this or what's he going to do it's. All right. It's will Smith. What could go wrong? I know. Exactly. And then he slaps him and walks away. And they're going, okay, he did do something. It's too late. He's gone back to his chair. Okay. Chris rock's covering. Good. Now he's swearing. Oh, he's swearing again. I let all the organizers off for not acting quickly. Enough up to that point. Then I think then we don't know then what happens. But even then, he wins an award. He wins an oscar. Okay. The place where it goes completely off the rails for me, just tonally and just existentially is him winning the award, the contents and spin of his speech. Right. I didn't watch it because I didn't want to watch it because I didn't like the fact that he was winning an award and he was getting a standing ovation. So I didn't watch it, I'm afraid. I saw him cry, and I saw a clip of it. What did he say? How long was it? Was it like I think it's five or six minutes. Go. Well, the first thing I want to say is that I think it's appropriate to view I mean, again, I don't I don't know all the details of Will Smith's life and, you know, what has come before this. And, I mean, I just heard rumors of how complicated his relationship is with his wife and how colorful that has all been. Yeah. But I think when you look at how much he had to lose right. And what he decided to do in front of tens of millions of people, I think it's appropriate to view that whole episode as a kind of mental health crisis. Right. I saw the clip I saw of him crying and making it about the guy he played was the William sister's dad. I haven't seen the kill either. But did he make it about sort of protecting family to try and make what he just did, and he made it all about love, that he wants to be like a vessel of love, and he's a river to his people. So the text of it, he was obviously winging it in the moment because he was connecting it to what had just happened. But the broad strokes was that he apologized to everyone on Earth apart from Chris Rock, and he cast it all in terms of he's a protector of women and he's a river to his people. And it was the most self aggrandizing delusional. Well, he couldn't apologize because that would ruin it, because then he did something wrong. But you would think he was Gandhi. He was Gandhi who just had to be tough. Gandhi that one time right. That's like a superhero says, sorry you had to see that. Yeah. He wasn't apologizing for the violence. It's all in a day's work. I'm used to it. That might be a shock to you, but not to me. And he just takes off. He just takes off and flies away. Yeah, I know it was all about but it did again, it did look of a piece with a kind of mental health crisis. I guess that could be that's totally exculpatory on some level, just to say, the guy's having a breakdown. Cut him some slack. But I did sort of view it that way. Because the question is, do you locate the problem purely in his brain, or do you locate it in a kind of cultural confusion surrounding him? Because there's definitely some confusion because his son tweeted out, that's the way we do it. Nothing but pride and his dad. So there's a part of the culture that just didn't get how wrong the behavior was and is, and that's a kind of delusion that if you share it, is just morally confusing. The guy was a guy who just was stunning and confused. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app, The Making Sense. This podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, I have been trying to gather my thoughts for this podcast for more than a week and I've actually been unsure about whether to record it at all. Frankly, conversation is the only tool we have for making progress. I firmly believe that. But many of the things we most need to talk about seem impossible to talk about. And I think social media is a huge part of the problem. I've been saying for years now that with social media we've all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent and it's not clear how it will turn out. And it's still not clear how it will turn out. But it's not looking good. It is fairly disorienting out there. All information has been weaponized, all communication has become performative, and on the most important topics it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time. We appear to be driving ourselves crazy, actually. Crazy as incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination and confirmation bias and then lashing out at one another on that basis. So I'd like to talk about the current moment and the current social unrest and its possible political implications and other cultural developments and suggest what it might take to pull back from the brink here. And I'm going to circle in on the topics of police violence and the problem of racism because that really is at the center of this. And there's so much to talk about here and it's so difficult to talk about and there's so much we don't know, right? And yet most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago. I've been watching our country seem to tear itself apart for weeks now and perhaps lay the ground for something worse to come. And I've been resisting the temptation to say anything of substance, not because I haven't had anything to say, but because of my perception of the danger, frankly. And if I feel that way, given the pains I've taken to insulate myself against those kinds of concerns, I know that almost anyone with a public platform must be terrified. Journalists and editors and executives, celebrities, everyone has to be terrified that they might take a wrong step here and never recover. And this is really unhealthy, not just for individuals but for society. Because again, all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. And if we can't reason with one another, there is no path forward other than violence, conversation or violence. So I'd like to talk about some of the things that concern me about our current state of communication. And unfortunately, many things are compounding our problems at the moment. We have a global pandemic which is still very much with us and remains to be seen how much our half hearted lockdown and our ineptitude and testing and our uncoordinated reopening. And now our plunge into social protest and civil unrest will cause the COVID-19 caseload to spike. We will definitely see, as many have pointed out, the virus doesn't care about economics or politics. It only cares that we keep breathing down each other's necks. And we've certainly been doing enough of that. Of course, almost no one can think about COVID-19 now. But I just like to point out that many of the costs of this pandemic and the knock on effects in the economy and now this protest movement, many of these costs are hidden from us. In addition to killing more than 100,000 people in the US, the pandemic has been a massive opportunity cost. And the ongoing implosion of the economy is imposing tangible effects, of course, but it is also an opportunity cost. And now this civil unrest and other recent events is compounding these problems. Whatever the merits of the protest may be or will be, the opportunity costs of this moment are staggering. In addition to all the tangible effects of what's happening the injury and death, the lost businesses, the burn buildings, the neighborhoods that won't recover for years in many cities, the education's put on hold and the breakdown in public trust of almost every institution. Just think about all the good and important things we cannot do, cannot even think of doing now and perhaps won't contemplate doing for many years to come. Because we'll be struggling to get back to that distant paradise we once called normal life. Of course, normal life for many millions of Americans was nothing like a paradise. And the disparities in wealth and health and opportunity we've gotten used to in this country and that so much of our politics and ways of doing business seem to take for granted are just unconscionable. There is no excuse for this kind of inequality in the richest country on earth. And what we're seeing now is clearly a response to that. But it's a confused and confusing response. And worse, it's a response that is systematically silencing honest conversation. And this makes it dangerous. This isn't just politics and human suffering on display. It's philosophy. It's ideas about truth and about what it means to say that something is true. What we're witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we're attempting to have with one another in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what's going on in the world? What is real? If we can't agree about what is real or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we're stuck with one another. So what's happening here? Well, again, it's hard to say what is happening when a police officer or a mayor takes a knee in front of a crowd of young people who have been berating him as a cog in the machinery of systemic racism. Is this a profound moment of human bonding that transcends politics? Or is it the precursor to the breakdown of society? Or is it both? It's not entirely clear and the most concrete terms. What we're experiencing is widespread social unrest in response to what is widely believed to be an epidemic of lethal police violence directed to the black community by racist cops and racist policies. And this unrest has drawn a counter response from law enforcement, much of which, ironically, is guaranteed to exacerbate the problem of police violence both real and perceived. And many of the videos we've seen of the police cracking down on peaceful protesters are hideous. Some of this footage has been unbelievable, and this is one of the many vicious circles we have to find a way to interrupt. Again, there's so much to be confused about here. We've seen endless video of police inflicting senseless violence on truly peaceful protesters, and yet we've also seen video of police standing idly by while looters completely destroy businesses. What explains this? Is there a policy that led to this bizarre inversion of priorities? Are the police angry at the protesters for vilifying them and simultaneously trying to teach a lesson to the rest of society by letting crime and mayhem just spread elsewhere in the city? Or is it just less risky to collide with peaceful protesters? Or is the whole spectacle itself a lie? How representative are these videos of what is actually going on? Is there much less chaos actually occurring than it's being advertised to us? Again, it's very hard to know. What's easy to know is that civil discourse has broken down. And it seems to me we've long been in a situation where the craziest voices on both ends of the political spectrum have been amplifying one another and threatening to produce something truly dangerous. And now I think they have. The amount of misinformation in the air, the degree to which even serious people seem to be ruled by false assumptions and non sequiturs, is just astonishing. And it's important to keep in mind that with the presidential election coming in November, the stakes are really high. As most of you know, I consider four more years of Trump to be an existential threat to our democracy. And I believe the last two weeks have been very good for him politically, even when everything else has seemed to go very badly for him. I know the polls don't say this a large majority of people seem to disapprove of his handling of the crisis so far, but I think we all know now to take poles with a grain of salt. There's a very real problem of preference falsification, especially in an environment of intense social pressure. People will often say what they think is politically acceptable and then think or say or do something very different in private, like when they're alone in a voting booth. Trump has presided over the complete dismantling of American influence in the world and the destruction of our economy. I know the stock market has looked good, but the stock market has become totally uncoupled from the economy. Right. According to the stock market, the future is just as bright now as it was in January of this year, before most of us had even heard of a novel coronavirus. That doesn't make a lot of sense, and a lot can happen in the next few months, right? The last few weeks feel like a decade. And my concern is that if Trump now gets to be the law and order president, that may be his path to reelection, if such a path exists. Now, of course, this crisis has revealed yet again just how unfit he is to be president. I mean, the man could not strike a credible note of reconciliation if the fate of the country depended on it, and the fate of the country has depended on it. And I also think it's possible that these protests wouldn't even be happening but for the fact that Trump is president. Whether or not the problem of racism has actually gotten worse in our society, having Trump as president surely makes it seem like it has. It has been such a repudiation of the Obama presidency that for many people, it has made it seem that white supremacy is now ascendant. So all the more reason to get rid of Trump in November. But before this social unrest, our focus was on how incompetent Trump was in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. And now he's been given a very different battle to fight it's. A battle against left wing orthodoxy, which is growing more stifling by the minute, and civil unrest. Right. And if our social order phrase sufficiently, restoring it will be the only thing that most people care about in November. Just think of what an act of domestic terrorism would do politically. Now, things can change very, very quickly, and to call a basic concern about law and order racist isn't going to wash. Now, as I said, trust in institutions has totally broken down. We've been under a very precarious lockdown for more than three months, which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary. Doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political right for protesting this lockdown. People have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life. They've been unable to hold funerals for them. But now we have doctors and public health officials and news anchors by the thousands signing open letters, making public statements saying it's fine to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen. The degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate. Whatever your politics, this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy, especially so given that the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all. How many people will die because of these protests? It's a totally rational question to ask, but the question itself is taboo now. So it seems to me that almost everything appears upside down at the moment. And before I get into the details of police violence, I just want to attempt to close the door to a few misunderstandings. Let's start with the proximate cause of all this the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. I'll have a lot more to say about this in a minute, but nothing I say should detract from the following observation that video was absolutely sickening, and it reveals a degree of police negligence and incompetence and callousness that everyone was right to be horrified by. In particular, the actions of Derek Chauvin, the cop who kept his knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes. His actions were so reckless and so likely to cause harm that there's no question he should be prosecuted. And he is being prosecuted. He's been indicted for second degree murder and manslaughter, and I suspect he'll spend many, many years in prison. And this is not to say that the system is working right. It certainly seems possible that without that cell phone video and the resulting public outrage, chauvin might have gotten away with it, to say nothing of the other cops who were with him and who are now being prosecuted. And if this is true, we clearly need a better mechanism with which to police the police. So, as I said, I'm going to return to this topic because I think most people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this video and from videos like it. But let me just echo everyone's outrage over what happened. This is precisely the kind of police behavior that everyone should find abhorrent. Now, on the general topic of racism in America, I want to make a few similarly clear and preemptive statements. Racism is still a problem in American society, no question. And slavery, which was racism's most evil expression, was this country's founding sin. And we should also add the near total eradication of the Native Americans to that ledger of evil. Any morally sane person who learns the details of these historical injustices finds them shocking, whatever their race and the legacy of these crimes, crimes that were perpetrated for centuries remains a cause for serious moral concern today. I have no doubt about this, and nothing I'm about to say should suggest otherwise. And I don't think it's an accident that the two groups I just mentioned, african Americans and Native Americans, suffer the worst from inequality in America today. How could the history of racial discrimination in this country not have had lasting effects, given the nature of that history? And if anything good comes out of the current crisis, it will be because we managed to find a new commitment to reducing inequality in all of its dimensions. The real debate to have is about how to do this economically and politically. But the status quo that many of us take for granted is a betrayal of our values, whether we realize it or not. If it's not a betrayal of your values now, it will be a betrayal of your values when you become a better person. And if you don't manage that, it will be a betrayal of your kids values when they're old enough to understand the world they're living in. The difference between being very lucky in our society and very unlucky should not be as enormous as it is. However, the question that interests me, given what has been true of the past and what is now true of the present, is what should we do next? What should we do to build a healthier society? What should we do next, tomorrow, next week? Obviously, I don't have the answers, but I'm very worried that many of the things we're doing now and seem poised to do will only make our problems worse. And I'm especially worried that it has become so difficult to talk about this, right? I'm just trying to have conversations. I'm just trying to figure these things out in real time with other people. And there is no question that conversation itself has become dangerous. And think about the politics of this endless imagery of people burning and looting independent businesses that were struggling to survive during this pandemic. And seeing the owners of these businesses beaten by mobs cannot be good for the cause of social justice. Looting and burning businesses and assaulting their owners isn't social justice. It isn't even social protest. It's crime. And having imagery of these crimes that highlight black involvement circulate endlessly on Fox News and on social media cannot be good for the black community. But it might yet be good for Trump. And it could well kick open the door to a level of authoritarianism that many of us who have been very worried about Trump barely considered possible. It always seems somewhat paranoid to me to wonder whether we're living in Weimar Germany. I've had many conversations about this. I had Timothy Snyder on the podcast, and he's been worrying about the prospect of tyranny in the US for several years now. And I've known in the abstract that democracies can destroy themselves. But the idea that it could happen here still seemed totally outlandish to me. It really doesn't anymore. Of course, what we've been seeing in the streets isn't just one thing. And some people are protesting for reasons I fully defend, right? They're outraged by specific instances of police violence, like the killing of George Floyd. And they're worried about creeping authoritarianism, which we really should be worried about now. And they're convinced that our politics is broken because it is broken. And they're deeply concerned that our response to the pandemic and to the implosion of our economy will do nothing to address the widening inequality in our society, and they recognize that we have a president who is an incompetent, divisive con man and a crackpot at a time when we actually need wise leadership. Now, all of that is hard to put on a sign, but it's all worth protesting. However, it seems to me that most protesters are seeing this moment almost exclusively through the lens of identity politics, and racial identity politics in particular. And some of them are even celebrating the breakdown of law and order, or at least remaining nonjudgmental about it. And you could see in the early days of this protest, news anchors take that line on CNN, for instance, talking about the history of social protests. Sometimes it has to be violent, right? What do you think all these protests need to be nonviolent? Those words came out of Chris Cuomo's mouth and Don Lemon's mouth. Many people have been circulating a half quote from Martin Luther King Jr. About riots being the language of the unheard. They're leaving out the part where he made it clear that he believed that riots harmed the cause of the black community and helped the cause of racists. And there are now calls to defund and even to abolish the police. Now, this may be psychologically understandable when you've spent half the day on Twitter watching videos of cops beating peaceful protesters. Those videos are infuriating. And I'll have a lot more to say about police violence in a minute. But if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind. Giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have ever done as a species. It ranks right up there with keeping our shit out of our food. Having a police force that can deter crime and solve crimes when they occur and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system is the necessary precondition for almost anything else we value in society. Now, we need police reform. Of course, there are serious questions to ask about the culture of policing and its hiring practices and training and the militarization of so many police forces and outside oversight and how police departments deal with corruption, the way the police unions keep bad cops on the job. And yes, the problem of racist cops. But the idea that any serious person thinks that we can do without the police, or that less trained and less vetted cops will magically be better than more trained and more vetted ones this just reveals that our conversation on these topics has run completely off the rails. Yes, we should give more resources to community services. Sure. We should have psychologists and social workers make first contact with the homeless or the mentally ill. Perhaps we're giving cops jobs they shouldn't be doing. All of that makes sense to rethink. But the idea that what we're witnessing now is a matter of the cops being overresourced, that we've given them too much training, that we've made the job too attractive so that the people we're recruiting are of too high equality. Right? That doesn't make any sense. And what's been alarming here is that we're seeing prominent people in government, in the media, in Hollywood, in sports, speak and act as though the breakdown of civil society and of society itself is a form of progress, and any desire for law enforcement is itself a form of racist oppression. At one point, the woman who's running the city council in Minneapolis that just decided to abolish the police force was asked by a journalist, I believe, on CNN, well, what do I do if someone's breaking into my house in the middle of the night? Who do I call? Right? And her first response to that question was, you need to recognize what a statement of privilege that question is. Now, she's had to walk that back because it's one of the most galling and embarrassing things a public official has ever said. But this is how close the Democratic Party is to sounding completely insane. You cannot say that if someone's breaking into your house and you're terrified and you want a police force that can respond, that that fear is a symptom of white privilege. That's where democratic politics goes to die. And again, what is alarming about this is that this woke analysis of the breakdown of law and order will only encourage an increasingly authoritarian response and the acceptance of that response on the part of many millions of Americans. I mean, if you step back from this, you will notice that there is a kind of ecstasy of ideological conformity in the air, and it's destroying institutions. It's destroying the very institutions we rely on to get our information. Universities, the press. I mean, the New York Times in recent days seems to be preparing for a full self immolation. What's happening is that no one wants to say or even think anything that makes anyone uncomfortable, certainly not anyone who has more wokeness points than they do. It's just become too dangerous. I mean, there are people being fired for tweeting all Lives Matter hashtag all lives Matter in the current environment is being read as a naked declaration of white supremacy. That's how weird this moment is. A soccer player on the La galaxy was fired for something his wife tweeted. Of course, there are real problems of inequality and despair at the bottom of these protests. People who have never found a secure or satisfying place in the world, or young people who fear they never will. People who have seen their economic prospects simply vanish, and people who have had painful encounters with racism and racist cops, people by the millions, are now surrendering themselves to a kind of religious awakening. But like most religious awakenings, this movement is not showing itself, eager to make honest contact with reality. And on top of that, we find extraordinarily privileged people, whatever the color of their skin. People who are living wonderful lives in gated communities or Fifth Avenue apartments and who feel damn guilty about it. These people are also supporting this movement uncritically for many reasons. Of course they care about other people, and I'm sure most of them have the same concerns about inequality that I do. But they are also supporting this movement because it promises an expiation of their sins. If you have millions of dollars and you shoot Botox into your face and you vacation on St. Bart's and you're a liberal, the easiest way to sleep at night is to be as woke as AOC. And just like everything she tweets, the truth is, the problem isn't just with the looting and the arson and the violence. There are problems with these peaceful protests themselves. Of course, I'm not questioning anyone's right to protest. Even our deranged president can pay lip service to that right. What she did is the DC police were violently dispersing a peaceful protest so that he could get his picture taken in front of that church, awkwardly holding a Bible as though he had never held a book in his life. The problem with the protests is that they are animated to a remarkable degree, by confusion and misinformation, and I'll explain why I think that's the case. And of course, this will be controversial. And needless to say, many people will consider the color of my skin to be disqualifying here. I could have invited any number of great black intellectuals onto this podcast to make these points for me, but that struck me as a form of cowardice. Glenn Lowry, John McWhorter, Thomas Chattered, and Williams. Coleman Hughes, Camille Foster. These guys might not agree with everything I'm about to say, but any one of them could walk the tightrope I'm now stepping out on far more credibly than I can. But you see, that's part of the problem. The perception that the color of a person's skin or even his life experience matters for this discussion is a pernicious illusion. But for the discussion, we really need to have the color of a person's skin and even his life experience, simply does not matter. It cannot matter. We have to break the spell that the politics of identity has cast over everything. Okay? As I've already acknowledged, there is a legacy of racism in the United States that we are still struggling to outgrow. That is obvious. There are real racists out there, and there are ways in which racism became institutionalized a long time ago. Many of you will remember that during the crack epidemic, the penalties for crack and powder cocaine were quite different, and this led black drug offenders to be locked up for much longer than white ones. Now, whether the motivation for that policy was consciously racist or not, I don't know, but it was effectively racist. Nothing I'm about to say entails a denial of these sorts of facts. There just seems to be no question that boys who grow up with their fathers in prison start life with a significant strike against them. So criminal justice reform is absolutely essential. And I'm not denying that many black people, perhaps most, have had interactions with cops and other people in positions of power or even random strangers that seem unambiguously racist. Sometimes this is because they're actually in the presence of racism. And perhaps sometimes it only seems that way. I've had unpleasant encounters with cops and customs officers and TSA screeners and bureaucrats of every kind, and even with people in stores or restaurants, right? People aren't always nice or ethical. But being white and living in a majority white society, I've never had to worry about whether any of these collisions were the result of racism. And I can well imagine that in some of these situations, had I been black, I would have come away feeling that I encountered another racist in the wild. So I consider myself very lucky to have gone through life not having to think about any of that. Surely that is one form of white privilege. So nothing I'm about to say denies that we should condemn racism, whether interpersonal or institutional, wherever we find it. But as a society, we simply can't afford to find and condemn racism where it doesn't exist. And we should be increasingly aware of the costs of doing that. The more progress we make on issues of race, the less racism there will be to find and the more likely we'll be to find ourselves merely chasing after its ghost. And the truth is, we have made considerable progress on the problem of racism in America. This isn't 1920 and it isn't 1960. We had a two term black president. We have black congressmen and women. We have black mayors and black chiefs of police. They're major cities like Detroit and Atlanta going on their fifth or 6th consecutive black mayor. Having more black people in positions of real power in what is still a majority white society is progress on the problem of racism. And the truth is it might not even solve the problem we're talking about. I mean, when Freddie Gray was killed in Baltimore, virtually everyone who could have been held accountable for his death was black. The problem of police misconduct and reform is complicated, as we're about to see. But obviously there's more work to do on the problem of racism. And more important, there is much more work to do to remedy the inequalities in our society that are so correlated with race and will still be correlated with race even after the last racist has been driven from our shores. The question of how much of today's inequality is due to existing racism, whether racist people or racist policies, is a genuinely difficult question to answer. And to answer it, we need to distinguish the past from the present. Take wealth inequality, for example. The. Median white family has a net worth of around $170,000. These data are a couple of years old, but I think they're pretty close to what's true. Now, the median black family has a net worth of around $17,000. So we have a tenfold difference in median wealth. Now, that's the median, not the mean. So half of white families are below $170,000 and half above. Half of black families are below $17,000 and half above. And we're talking about wealth here, not income. And this disparity in wealth persists even for people whose incomes are in the top 10% of the income distribution. For whites, in the top 10% for income, the median net worth is $1.8 million. For blacks, it's around $350,000. Now, there are probably many things that account for this disparity in wealth. It seems that black families who make into the top 10% of the distribution fall out more easily than white families do. But it's also undeniable that black families have less intergenerational wealth accumulated through inheritance. Now, how much of this inequality is due to the legacy of slavery? And how much of it is due to the ensuing century of racist policies? I'm prepared to think quite a lot, and it strikes me as totally legitimate to think about paying reparations as a possible remedy here. Of course, one will then need to talk about reparations for the Native Americans, and then one wonders where all this ends, right? And what about blacks who aren't descended from slaves, but who still suffered some consequences of racism? In listening to people like John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes discuss this topic, I'm inclined to think that reparations is probably unworkable as a policy. But the truth is, I'm genuinely unsure about this. Whatever we decide about the specific burdens of the past, we have to ask how much of current wealth inequality is due to existing racism and to existing policies that make it harder for black families to build wealth. And the only way to get answers to those questions is to have a dispassionate discussion about facts. And the problem with the social activism we're now seeing, what John McWhorter calls the new religion of antiracism, is that it finds racism nearly everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And this is incredibly damaging to the cause of achieving real equality in our society. It's almost impossible to exaggerate the evil and injustice of slavery and its aftermath. But it is possible to exaggerate how much racism currently exists at an Ivy League university or in Silicon Valley, or at the Oscars. And those exaggerations are toxic and perversely. They may produce more real racism. It seems to me that false claims of victimhood can diminish the social stature of any group, even a group that has a long history of real victimization. The imprecision here, the bad faith arguments, the double standards, the goalpost shifting, the idiotic opinion pieces in the New York Times, the defenestrations on social media, the general hysteria that the cult of wokeness has produced. I think this is all extremely harmful to civil society and to effective liberal politics and to the welfare of African Americans. So with that as preamble, let's return to the tragic death of George Floyd. As I said, I believe that any sane person who watches that video will feel that they have witnessed a totally unjustified killing. So people of any race are right to be horrified by what happened there. But now I want to ask a few questions, and I want us to try to consider them dispassionately. And I really want you to watch your mind while you do this, because there are very likely a few trip wires installed there, and I'm about to hit some of them. So just do your best to remain calm. Does the killing of George Floyd prove that we have a problem of racism in the United States? Does it even suggest that we have a problem of racism in the United States? In other words, do we have reason to believe that had Floyd been white, he wouldn't have died in a similar way? Do the dozen or so other videos that have emerged in recent years of black men being killed by cops, do they prove or even suggest that there is an epidemic of lethal police violence directed especially at black men, and that this violence is motivated by racism? Now, most people seem to think that the answers to these questions are so obvious that even to pose them as I just did is obscene. When the answer is yes, and it's a yes that now needs to be shouted in the streets. The problem, however, is that if you take even five minutes to look at the data on crime and police violence, the answer really appears to be no in every case, albeit with one important caveat. I'm not talking about how the police behaved in 1970 or even 1990, but in the last 25 years, violent crime has come down significantly in the US. And so has the police use of deadly force. And as you're about to see, the police use more deadly force against white people, both in terms of absolute numbers and in terms of their contribution to crime and violence in our society. But the public perception is, of course, completely different. In a city like Los Angeles, 2019 was a 30 year low for police shootings. Think about that. Do the people who were protesting in Los Angeles peacefully and violently do the people who were ransacking and burning businesses by the hundreds, in many cases, businesses that will not return to their neighborhoods do the people who cause so much damage to the city that certain neighborhoods will take years and probably decades to recover. Do the celebrities who supported them and even bailed them out of jail? Do any of these people know that 2019 was the 30 year low for police shootings in Los Angeles? Now before I step further out over the abyss here, let me reiterate. Many of you are going to feel a visceral negative reaction to what I'm about to say. You're not going to like the way it sounds. You're especially not going to like the way it sounds coming from a white guy. This feeling of not liking, this feeling of outrage, this feeling of disgust, this feeling of sam what the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you even touching this topic? This feeling isn't an argument. It isn't or shouldn't be the basis for your believing anything to be true or false about the world. Your capacity to be offended isn't something that I or anyone else needs to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn't something that you should respect. In fact it's something that you should be on your guard for. Perhaps more than any other property of your mind this feeling can mislead you. If you care about justice, and you absolutely should you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly. Justice requires contact with reality. It simply isn't the case. It cannot be the case that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be most offended by conversation itself. So I'm going to speak in the language of facts now insofar as we know them. All the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most people's assumptions. Many of the things you think you know about crime and violence in our society are almost certainly wrong and that should matter to you. So just take a moment to think this through with me. How many people are killed each year in America by cops? If you don't know, guess right. See if you have any intuition for these numbers because your intuitions determine how you interpret horrific videos of the sort we saw coming out of Minneapolis. The answer for many years running is about a 1000. 1000 people are killed by cops in America each year. There are about 50 to 60 million encounters between civilians and cops each year and about 10 million arrests. That's down from a high of over 14 million arrests annually through the 90s. So of the 10 million occasions where a person attracts the attention of the police and the police decide to make an arrest about 1000 of those people die as a result. I'm sure a few people get killed when there's no arrest attempted but that has to be a truly tiny number. So without knowing anything else about the situation if the cops decide to arrest you it is reasonable to think that your chance of dying is around one in 10,000. Now of course in the United States it's higher than it is in other countries. So I'm not saying this number is acceptable but it is what it is for a reason. As we're about to see now there are a few generic points I want to make before we get further into these data and they should be uncontroversial. First, it's almost certainly the case that of these 1000 officer caused deaths each year some are entirely justified, right? It may even be true that most are entirely justified and some are entirely unjustified. And some are much harder to judge. And that will be true next year and the year after that. Of the unjustified killings there are vast differences between them. Many have nothing in common but for the fact that a cop killed someone unnecessarily it might have been a terrible misunderstanding or incompetence or just bad luck. In certain cases, it could be a cop who decides to murder someone because he's become enraged or he's just a psychopath, right? And it is certainly possible that racial bias accounts for some number of these unjustified killings. Another point that should be uncontroversial but may sound a little tone deaf in the current environment after we've been inundated with videos of police violence in response to these protests. But this has to be acknowledged whenever we're discussing this topic. Cops have a very hard job. In fact, in the current environment they have an almost impossible job. If you're making 10 million arrests every year some number of people will decide not to cooperate. Now, there are many reasons for this. A person could be mentally ill or drunk or on drugs and of course rather often the person is an actual criminal who simply doesn't want to be arrested. And among innocent people and perhaps this is getting more common these days a person might feel that resisting arrest is the right thing to do ethically or politically or perhaps as a matter of affirming his identity. After all, put yourself in his shoes. He did nothing wrong. Why are the cops arresting him? I don't know if we have data on the numbers of people who resist arrest by race, but I can well imagine that if it's common for African Americans to believe that the only reason they have been singled out, for arrest is due to racism on the part of the police. That could lead to greater levels of non compliance, which seems very likely to lead to more unnecessary injury and death. And this is certainly one reason why it's wise to have the racial composition of a police force mirror that of the community it's policing. Now, unfortunately there's no evidence that this reduces lethal violence from the side of the police. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. But it would surely change the perception of the community that racism is the likely explanation for police behavior which itself might reduce conflict. Now, when a cop goes hands on a person in an attempt to control his movements or make an arrest that person's resistance poses a problem that most people don't seem to understand. If you haven't studied this topic, if you don't know what it physically takes to restrain and immobilize a non compliant person who may be bigger and stronger than you are, and if you haven't thought through the implications of having a gun on your belt, one attempting to do that, a gun that can be grabbed and used against you or against a member of the public, then your intuitions about what makes sense here, tactically and ethically, are very likely to be bad. If you haven't trained with firearms under stress, if you don't know how suddenly situations can change, if you haven't experienced how quickly another person can close the distance on you and how little time you have to decide to draw your weapon. If you don't know how hard it is to shoot a moving target, or even a stationary one, when your heart is beating out of your chest, you very likely have totally unreasonable ideas about what we can expect from cops in situations like these. And there's another fact that looms over all this. Like the angel of Death. Literally, most cops do not get the training they need. They don't get the hand to hand training they need. They don't have good skills with which to subdue people without harming them. All you need to do is watch YouTube videos of botched arrests to see this. The martial arts community stands in perpetual astonishment at the kinds of things cops do and fail to do once they start fighting with suspects and cops don't get the firearms training they need. Of course, many police departments have elite units, but most cops don't have the training they need to do the job they're being asked to do. It's also true, no doubt, that some cops are racist bullies and there are corrupt police departments that cover for these guys and cover up police misconduct generally, whether it's born of racism or not. But the truth is that even if we got rid of all the bad cops, which we absolutely should do, and there were only good people left, and we got all these good people, the best possible training, and we give them the best culture in which to think about their role in society. And we give them the best methods for de escalating, potentially violent situations, which we absolutely must do. And we scrubbed all the dumb laws from our books so that when cops were required to enforce the law, they were only risking their lives and the lives of civilians for reasons that we deem just and necessary. So the war on drugs is obviously over. Even under these conditions of perfect progress, we are still guaranteed to have some number of cases each year where a cop kills a civilian in a way that is totally unjustified and therefore tragic. Every year, there will be some number of families who will be able to say that the cops killed their son or daughter or father or mother or brother or sister. And videos of these killings will occasionally surface and they will be horrific. This seems guaranteed to happen. So while we need to make all these improvements, we still need to understand there are very likely always going to be videos of cops doing something inexplicable or inexplicably stupid that results in an innocent person's death or not so innocent person's death. And sometimes the cop will be white and the victim will be black. We have 10 million arrests each year, and we now live in a panopticon where practically everything is videotaped. Now, I'm about to get further into the details of what we know about police violence, but I want to just put it to you now. If we're going to let the health of race relations in this country or the relationship between the community and the police depend on whether we ever see a terrible video of police misconduct again, the project of healing these wounds in our society is doomed. About a week into these protests, I heard Van Jones on CNN say, if we see one more video of a cop brutalizing a black man, this country could go over the edge. Now, he said this not as an indication of how dangerously inflamed people have become. He seemed to be saying it as an ultimatum to the police, with 10 million arrests each year, arrests that have to take place in the most highly armed society in the developed world, I hope you understand how unreasonable that ultimatum is. We have to put these videos into context and we have to acknowledge how different they are from one another. Some of them are easy to interpret, but some are quite obviously being interpreted incorrectly by most people, especially by activists. And there are a range of cases, some have video associated with them and some don't, that are now part of a litany of antiracist outrage. And the names of the dead are in toned as though they were all evidence of the same injustice, and yet they are not. Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight and he got out of his car and tried to flee. There might have been a brief struggle over the officer's taser. That part of the video isn't clear. But what is clear is that he was shot in the back multiple times as he was running away. That was insane. There was zero reason for the cop to feel that his life was under threat at that moment. And for that unjustified shooting, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. I'm not sure that was long enough, actually. That seemed like straight up murder to me. The George Floyd video, while even more disturbing to watch, is harder to interpret. I don't know anything about Derek Chauvin, the cop who knelt on his neck. It's quite possible he's a terrible person who should have never been a cop. He seems to have a significant number of complaints against him, though as far as I know, the details of those complaints haven't been released. And he might be a racist on top of being a bad cop, or he might be a guy who was totally in over his head and thought you could restrain someone indefinitely by keeping a knee on their neck. I don't know. I'm sure more facts will come out. But whoever he is, I find it very unlikely that he was intending to kill George Floyd. And think about it, he was surrounded by irate witnesses and being filmed. Unless he was aspiring to become the most notorious murderer in human history, it seems very unlikely he was intending to commit murder in that moment. It's possible, of course, but it doesn't seem like the likeliest explanation for his behavior. What I believe we saw in that video was the result of a tragic level of negligence and poor training on the part of those cops or terrible recruitment. It's possible that none of these guys should have ever been cops. I think for one of them, it was only his fourth day on the job. Just imagine that. Just imagine all the things you don't know when you're a new cop. And it could also have been a function of bad luck. In terms of Floyd's underlying health. It was reported that he was complaining about being unable to breathe even before Chauvin pinned him with his knee. And the truth is, the knee on his neck might not have been the only thing that caused his death. It could have been the weight of the other officer pinning him down. This is almost certainly what happened in the case of Eric Garner. It seems that half the people on earth believe they witnessed a cop choke Eric Garner to death in that video. That does not appear to be what happened. When Eric Garner is saying, I can't breathe, he's not being choked. He's being held down on the pavement by several officers. Now, being forced down on your stomach under the weight of several people can kill a person, especially someone with lung or heart disease. In the case of Eric Garner, it is absolutely clear that the cop who briefly attempted to choke him was no longer choking him. If you doubt that, watch the video again. And if you are recoiling now from my interpretation of these videos, you really should watch the video that shows the killing of Tony Timpa. It's also terribly disturbing, but it removes the variable of race and it removes any implication of intent to harm on the part of the cops about as clearly as you could ask. It really is worth watching as a corrective to our natural interpretation of these other videos. Now, Tony Temple was a white man in Dallas who was suffering some mental health emergency and I think cocaine intoxication, and he actually called 911 himself. And what we see is the body cam footage from the police which shows that he was already in handcuffs when they arrived. A security guard had cuffed him. And then the cops take over and they restrain Tempa on the ground by rolling him onto his stomach and putting their weight on him, very much like in the case of Eric Garner, and they keep their weight on him. One cop has a knee on his upper back, which is definitely much less aggressive than a knee on the neck, but they crush the life out of him all the same over the course of 13 minutes. He's not being choked. The cops are not being rough. There's no animus between them and Tempa. It was not a hostile arrest. They clearly believe they're responding to a mental health emergency, but they keep him down on his belly, under their weight, and they're cracking jokes as he loses consciousness. Now, your knowledge that he's going to be dead by the end of this video makes their jokes seem pretty callous. But the truth is, this was about as benign an imposition of force by the cops as you're going to see. And the crucial insight you'll have watching this video is that the officers not only had no intent to kill Tony Tempa, they don't take his pleading seriously because they have no doubt that what they're doing is perfectly safe, perfectly within protocol. They've probably done this a hundred times before. Now, if you watch that video, and again, fair warning, it's disturbing. But imagine how disturbing it would have been to our society if Tony Tempa had been black. If the only thing you changed about the video was the color of Tempa's skin. That video would have detonated like a nuclear bomb in our society, exactly as the George Floyd video did. In fact, in one way, it is worse, or would have been perceived to be worse. I mean, just imagine white cops telling jokes as they crush the life out of a black Tony Timpa. Given the nature of our conversation about violence, given the way we perceive videos of this kind, there is no way people would have seen that as anything other than a lynching, and it would not have been a lynching. Now, I obviously have no idea what was in the minds of the cops in Minneapolis, and perhaps we'll learn more at trial, and perhaps there'll be a tape of Chauvin using the N word in another context, and that'll bring a credible allegation of racism into the case. And it seems to me that Chauvin is going to have a very hard time making sense of his behavior. But most people who saw that video believe they have witnessed with their own eyes, beyond any possibility of doubt, a racist cop intentionally murder an innocent man. That's not what that video necessarily shows. As I said, these videos can be hard to interpret, even while seeming very easy to interpret. And these cases, whether they have associated video or not are very different. The Michael Brown is reported to have punched a cop in the face and attempted to get his gun. As far as I know, there's no video of that encounter. But if true, that is an entirely different situation. If you're attacking a cop trying to get his gun, that is a life and death struggle almost by definition for the cop, and in most cases it will justify a lethal use of force. And honestly, it seems that no one within a thousand miles of Black Lives Matter is willing to make these distinctions. An attitude of antiracist moral outrage is simply not the best lens through which to interpret evidence of police misconduct. I've seen many videos of people getting arrested, and I've seen the outraged public reaction to what appears to be the inappropriate use of force by the cops. One overwhelming fact that comes through is that people, whatever the color of their skin, don't understand how to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe. People have to stop resisting arrest. This may seem obvious, but judging from most of these videos and from the public reaction to them, this must be a totally arcane piece of information. When a cop wants to take you into custody, you don't get to decide whether or not you should be arrested. When a cop wants to take you into custody for whatever reason, it's not a negotiation. And if you turn it into a wrestling match, you're very likely to get injured or killed. This is a point that I once belabored in a podcast with Glenn Lowry, and essentially it became a public service announcement and I've gone back and listened to those comments and I want to repeat them here. This is something that everyone really needs to understand, and it's something that Black Lives Matter should be teaching explicitly. If you put your hands on a cop, if you start wrestling with a cop or grabbing him because he's arresting your friend or pushing him or striking him or using your hands in a way that can possibly be interpreted as you are reaching for a gun, you are likely to get shot in the United States, whatever the color of your skin. As I said, when you're with a cop, there is always a gun out in the open, and any physical struggle has to be perceived by him as a fight for the gun. A cop doesn't know what you're going to do if you overpower him, so he has to assume the worst. And most cops are not confident in their ability to physically control a person for good reason, because they're not very well trained to do that. And they're continually confronting people who are bigger or younger or more athletic or more aggressive than they are. Cops are not superheroes. They're ordinary people with insufficient training. And once things turn physical, they can't afford to give a person who is now assaulting a police officer. The benefit of the doubt. And this is something that people seem totally confused about if they see a video of someone fighting with a cop and punching him or her in the face, right. And the person's unarmed, many people think the cop should just punch back and that any use of deadly force at that point would be totally disproportionate. But that's not how violence works. It's not the cop's job to be the best bare knuckled boxer on earth so that he doesn't have to use his gun. A cop can't risk getting repeatedly hit in the face and knocked out because there's always a gun in play, right. So this is the cop's perception of the world and it's a justifiable one, given the dynamics of human violence. Now, you might think that cops shouldn't carry guns, right? Why can't we just be like England? And that's a point that can be debated, but it requires considerable thought in a country where there are over 300 million guns in circulation, the United States is not England. Again, really focus on what is happening when a cop is attempting to arrest a person. It's not up to you to decide whether or not you should be arrested. Does it matter that you know that you didn't do anything wrong? No. And how could that fact be effectively communicated in the moment by your not following police commands? I'm going to ask that again. How could the fact that you're innocent, that you're not a threat to the cop, that you're not about to suddenly attack him or produce a weapon of your own, how could those things be effectively communicated at the moment? He's attempting to arrest you by your resisting arrest, and unless you called the cops yourself, you never really know what situation you're in. If I'm walking down the street, I don't know if a cop who's approaching me didn't just get a call that some guy who looks like Ben Stiller just committed an armed robbery. I mean, I know I didn't do anything. I know that I'm mystified as to why the cop is paying attention to me at that moment. But I don't know what's in the cop's head. The time to find out what's going on, the time to complain about racist cops, the time to scream at them and tell them they're all going to get fired for their stupidity and misconduct is after cooperating at the police station in the presence of a lawyer, preferably, but to not comply. In the heat of the moment when a guy with a gun is issuing commands. This raises your risk astronomically. And it's something that most people, it seems, just do not intuitively understand, even when they're not in the heat of the moment themselves, but just watching video of other people getting arrested. OK, end of public service announcement. The main problem with using individual cases where black men and women have been killed by. Cops. To conclude that there's an epidemic of racist police violence in our society is that you can find nearly identical cases of white suspects being killed by cops, and there are actually more of them. In 2016, John McWhorter wrote a piece for Time magazine about this, and here's a snippet of what he wrote. Quote the heart of the indignation over these murders is a conviction that racist bias plays a decisive part in these encounters. That has seemed plausible to me. And I've recently challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so enrage us in cases such as what happened to Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, Sam De Bose, and others. End quote. So Mcwarter issued that challenge, as he said, and he was presented with the cases. But there's no song about these people admonishing us to say their names. And the list of white names is longer, and I don't know any of them other than Tony Timpa. I know the black names in addition to the ones I just read from McWater's article. I know the names of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. And now, of course, I know the name of George Floyd. And I'm aware of many of the details of these cases where black men and women have been killed by cops. I know the name of Brianna Taylor. I can't name a single white person killed by cops in circumstances like these other than Tempa. And I just read McWater's article where he lists many of them. So this is also a distortion in the media, right? The media is not showing us videos of white people being killed by cops. Activists are not demanding that they do this, right? I'm sure white supremacists talk about this stuff a lot. Who knows? But in terms of the story we're telling ourselves in the mainstream, we're not actually talking about the data on lethal police violence. So back to the data again. Cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25% are black. About 50% are white. Now, the data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind, but they've been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources like The Washington Post, at least for the last five years or so. And this ratio between black and white appears stable over time and again. Many of these killings are justifiable right. We're talking about career criminals who are usually armed and in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren't the cases we're worried about. We're worried about the unjustified homicides. Now, some people will think these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. After all, African Americans are only 13% of the population, so at most they should be 13% of the victims of police violence, not 25%. And any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism. Okay, well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts. Blacks are 13% of the population, but they commit at least 50% of the murders and other violent crimes. If you have 13% of the population responsible for 50% of the murders, and in some cities committing two thirds of all violent crime, what percent of police attention should it attract? I honestly don't know, but I'm pretty sure it's not just 13%. And given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I'm pretty sure that most black people wouldn't set the dial at 13% either. And here we arrive somewhere near the core of the problem. The story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black on black crime. It is also, in part, a story of black on white crime. But for more than a generation, it really has not been much of a story of white on black crime. Now, the murder rate has come down steadily since the 1990s, with only minor upticks. But nationwide, blacks are six times more likely to get murdered than whites, and in some cities, their risk is double that. And around 95% of these murders are committed by members of the African American community. The weekend these protests and riots were kicking off nationwide, when our entire country seemed to be tearing itself apart over a perceived epidemic of racist police violence against the black community, 92 people were shot and 27 killed in Chicago alone, one city. This is almost entirely a story of black men killing members of their own community. And this type of violence is far more representative of the kind of violence the black community needs to worry about. And ironically, it's clear that one remedy for this violence would be effective policing. Now, these are simply the facts of crime in our society as best we understand them. And the police have to figure out how to respond to these facts professionally and ethically. And the question is, are they doing that? And obviously, there's considerable doubt that they're doing that professionally and ethically. But Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist whose work I once discussed with Glenn Lowry on the podcast, he studied police encounters involving black and white suspects and the use of force. His paper is titled this is from 2016 an Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of force. And Fryer is black. And he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there's an epidemic of lethal police violence directed against black men especially. But he didn't find that. However, he did find support for the idea that black people suffer more non lethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do. So let's look at this. The study examined data from ten major police departments in Texas, Florida, and California. Generally, Fryer found that there's a 25% greater likelihood that the police would go hands on black suspects than white ones, cuffing them or forcing them to the ground, or using other nonlethal force. Specifically in New York City. In encounters where black and white citizens were matched for other characteristics. They found that cops were 17% more likely to go hands on black suspects, 18% more likely to push them into a wall, 16% more likely to put them in handcuffs in a situation where they weren't being arrested, 18% more likely to push them to the ground, 25% more likely to use pepper spray or a baton, 19% more likely to draw their guns, and 24% more likely to point a gun at them. So this is more or less the full continuum of violence, short of using lethal force. And it seems, based on the data we have, that blacks receive more of it than whites. So what accounts for this disparity racism? Maybe. However, as I said, it's inconvenient to note from other data that suggests that black cops and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. I'm not sure how an ambient level of racism explains that. Are there other explanations? Well, again, it could be that blacks are less cooperative with the police, and if so, this would be worth understanding. A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate, given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force. Now, whatever is true here is something that we should want to understand. And it's all too easy to see how an increased number of encounters with cops due to their policing in the highest crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black, and an increased number of traffic stops in those neighborhoods, and an increased propensity for cops to go hands on these suspects with or without an arrest, for whatever reason. It's easy to see how all of this could be the basis for a perception of racism, whether or not racism is the underlying motive. And it's totally humiliating to be arrested or manhandled by a cop. And given the level of crime in the black community, it seems that a disproportionate number of innocent black men are guaranteed to have this experience. Right? And it's totally understandable that this would make them bitter and mistrustful of the police. This is another vicious circle we have to find some way to interrupt. But Friar also found that black suspects are around 25% less likely to be shot than white suspects are. And in the most egregious situations where an officer was not first attacked but nevertheless fired his weapon at a suspect, the police seem more likely to do this when the suspect is white. Again, these data are incomplete. This doesn't cover every city in the country, and a larger study tomorrow might paint a different picture. But as far as I know, the best data we have suggests that for whatever reason, whites are more likely to be killed by cops once an arrest is attempted. And a more recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results. And given the data we have, it seems undeniable that more whites are killed by cops each year, again both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their contributions to crime and violence in our society. Now, can you hear how these facts should be grinding in that well oiled machine of woke outrage? Our society is in serious trouble now. We are being crushed under the weight of a global pandemic, and our response to it has been totally inept. And on top of that, we're now being squeezed by the growing pressure of what might become a fullon economic depression. And the streets are now filled with people who imagine, on the basis of seeing several horrific videos, that there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering African Americans. Look at what this belief is doing to our politics, and these videos will keep coming. And the truth is, they could probably be matched two for one with videos of white people being killed by cops. What percentage of people protesting understand that the disparity runs this way in light of the belief that the data run the other way? People are now quite happy to risk getting beaten and arrested by cops themselves and to even loot and burn businesses. And most people and institutions are supporting the civil unrest from the sidelines because they too imagine that cops are killing black people in extraordinary numbers. And all of this is calling forth an authoritarian response from Trump and leading to more examples of police violence caught on video. Now, as I hope I've made clear, we need police reform, right? There's no question about this. And some of the recent footage of the police attacking the peaceful protests is totally outrageous. Nothing I just said should signify that. I'm unaware of that. I mean, from what I've seen, and again, by the time I released this podcast, the character of this might have changed somewhat. But from what I've seen, the police were dangerously passive in the face of looting and real crime, at least in the beginning. I mean, in many cities, they just stood by and watched society unravel, and then they were far too aggressive in the face of genuinely peaceful protest. This is a terrible combination. It is the worst combination. There is no better way to increase cynicism and anger and fear on all sides. But racializing, how we speak about the problem of police violence where race isn't actually the relevant variable, again, think Tony Timpa. This has highly negative effects. First, it keeps us from talking about the real problems with police tactics. For instance, you take the recent case of Brianna Taylor, who was killed in a so called no knock raid of her home. As occasionally happens in this carnival of moral error we call the war on drugs. The police had the wrong address and they kicked in the wrong door, and they wound up killing a totally innocent woman. But the truth is, this had nothing to do with race. The problem is not, as some commentators have alleged, that it's not safe to be sleeping while black. The problem is that these no knock raids are an obscenely dangerous way of enforcing despicably, stupid laws. White people die under precisely these same circumstances and very likely in greater numbers. I don't have data specifically on no knock raids, but we can assume the ratio is probably conserved here. Just think about how crazy this policy is in a nation where gun ownership is so widespread. If someone kicks in your door in the middle of the night and you're a gun owner, of course you're going to reach for your gun. That's why you have a gun in the first place. And the fact that someone bearing down on you and your family out of the darkness might have yelled police or might have not yelled police, it's alleged in some of these cases that they don't yell anything. The fact that someone yells police isn't necessarily convincing, right? Anyone can yell police. And again, think of the psychology of this. If the police have the wrong house. And you know there's no reason on earth that real cops would take an interest in you, especially in the middle of the night, because you know you've done nothing wrong. You're not the guy running a meth lab, and now you're reaching for your gun in the dark. Of course someone is likely to get killed, but this is not a racial issue. It's a terrible policy. Now, unfortunately, the process of police reform isn't straightforward, and it's made more complicated by the kinds of things that are happening now. Yes, we will be urging police reform in a very big way. Now, that seems clear. But Roland Fryer has also shown that investigations of cops in a climate where viral videos and racial politics are operating have dramatic effects and dramatically negative effects. And he studied the aftermath of the investigations into police misconduct that followed the killings of Freddie Gray and Michael Brown and Laquan McDonald. And he found that for reasons that are pretty easy to intuit, proactive police contact with civilians decreases drastically, sometimes by as much as 100%, once these investigations get started. This is now called the Ferguson effect, right? And the police still answer 911 calls, but they don't investigate suspicious activity in the same way they don't want to wind up on YouTube. And when they alter their behavior like this, homicides go up. And Friar estimates that the effects of these few investigations translated into a thousand extra homicides and almost 40,000 more felonies over the next 24 months in the US. And of course, most of the victims of those crimes were black. Now, one shudders to imagine the size of the Ferguson effect we're about to see nationwide. I'm sure the morale among cops has never been lower. I think it's almost guaranteed that cops by the thousands will be leaving the force, and it's going to be much more difficult to recruit good people to the police force. I mean, who's going to want to be a cop now? Who could be idealistic about occupying that role in society? It seems to me that the population of people who will become cops now will be more or less indistinguishable from the population of people who become prison guards. I'm pretty sure there's a difference there. I think we're likely to see that difference expressed now in the future. It's a grim picture unless we do something very creative here. So there's a real question about how we can reform police departments and get rid of bad cops without negatively impacting the performance of good cops. That's a riddle we have to solve, or at least we have to understand what the trade offs are here. And why is all this happening now? Police killings of civilians have gone way down, and they are very rare events. They are one in 10,000 level events if measured by arrests, and one in 50 to 60,000 level events if measured by police encounters. And the number of unarmed people who are killed by cops is much smaller than that. Right. Of the thousand people killed by cops last year, around 50 were unarmed. And again, there were more white people killed than black. And not all unarmed victims are innocent, right? Some get killed in the act of attacking the cops. Again, the data don't tell a clean story or the whole story. I see no reason to doubt that African Americans get more attention from the cops, though, honestly, given the distribution of crime in our society, I don't know what the alternative to that would be. And once the cops get involved, blacks are more likely to get roughed up, it seems, which is bad. But again, it's simply unclear that racism is the cause of that. And contrary to everyone's expectations, it seems that whites are more likely to get killed by cops. Actually, one factor seems to be that whites are seven times more likely to commit what's called suicide by cop, and they're actually three times more likely to commit suicide generally. What's going on there? Who knows? There's a lot we don't understand about these data. But ask yourself, would society seem less racist to you if the disparity ran the other way is less physical contact, but a greater likelihood of getting shot and killed? A form of white privilege is a higher level of suicide by cop, and suicide generally a form of white privilege. We have a problem here that read either way, you could tell a starkly racist narrative. We need ethical, professional policing, of course. Right. But the places with the highest crime in our society need the most of it. Is there any doubt about that. I mean, in a city like Milwaukee, blacks are twelve times more likely to get murdered than whites. And again, they're being killed by other African Americans nearly 100% of the time. I think the lowest figure I've seen is 93% of the time. What should the police do about this? And what are they likely to do now? Now that our entire country has been convulsed over one horrific case of police misconduct? So we need to lower the temperature on this conversation and many other conversations and to understand what is actually happening in our society. But instead of doing this, we now have a whole generation of social activists who seem eager to play a game of chicken with the forces of chaos. Everything I just said about the problem of inequality and the need for reform stands. But I think what we're witnessing in our streets and on social media and even in the mainstream press, is a version of mass hysteria. And the next horrific video of a black person being killed by cops won't be evidence to the contrary. And there will be another video, right? There are 10 million arrests every year. There will always be another video. The media have turned these videos into a form of political pornography, and this has deranged us. We're now unable to speak or even think about facts. The media has truly been poisoned by bad incentives in this regard, and social media doubly so now. In the mainstream of this protest movement, it's very common to hear that the only problem with what's happening in our streets, apart from what the cops are doing, is that some criminal behavior at the margins, a little bit of looting, a little bit of violence has distracted us from an otherwise necessary and inspiring response to an epidemic of racism. And most people in the media have taken exactly this position, right? People like Anderson Cooper on CNN or the editorial page of The New York Times or public figures like President Obama or Vice President Biden. The most prominent liberal voices in our society believe that the protests themselves make perfect moral sense and perfect political sense, and that movements like Black Lives Matter are guaranteed to be on the right side of history. How could anyone who's concerned about inequality and injustice in our society see things any other way? How could anyone who isn't himself racist not support Black Lives Matter? But of course, there is a difference between slogans and reality. There's a difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims. And this can be genuinely confusing. And that's why propaganda works, right? For instance, many people assume that there's nothing wrong with antifa because this group of total maniacs has branded itself as antifascist. What could be wrong with being antifascist? Are you pro fascism? There's a similar problem with black. Lives matter, though. Happily, unlike antifa, Black Lives Matter actually seems committed to peaceful protest, which is hugely important. So the problem I'm discussing is more ideological, and it's much bigger than Black Lives Matter, but BLM is the most visible symbol of this movement. The wider issue is that we are in the midst of a moral panic, and it's been made possible by a near total unwillingness, particularly on the left, among people who value their careers and their livelihoods and their reputations and have a legitimate fear of being hounded into oblivion online. So this is nearly everyone left of center politically. People are simply refusing to speak honestly about the problem of race and racism in America, and we're making ourselves sick, right? We are damaging our society, and by protesting the wrong thing, even the slightly wrong thing, and unleashing an explosion of cynical criminality in the process, looting that doesn't even have a pretense of protest, the left is empowering Trump, whatever the polls currently show. And if we're worried about Trump's authoritarian ambitions, as I think we really should be, this is important to understand. He recently had what looked like paramilitary troops guarding the White House. I don't know if we found out who those guys actually were, but that was genuinely alarming. But how are Democratic calls to abolish the police going to play in half the country that just watched so many cities getting looted? We have to vote Trump out of office to restore the integrity of our institutions. And we have to make the political case for major reforms to deal with the problem of inequality, a problem which affects the black community most of all. We need police reform, we need criminal justice reform, we need tax reform, we need healthcare reform, we need environmental reform. We need all of these things and more. And to be just, these policies will need to reduce inequality in our society. And if we did this, African Americans would benefit perhaps more than any other group. But it's not at all clear that progress along these dimensions primarily entails us finding and eradicating more racism in our society. And just ask yourself, what would real progress on the problem of racism look like? What would utter progress look like? Well, here's what I think it would look like. More and more people, and ultimately all people, would care less and less and ultimately not at all about race. As I've said, in various places, skin color would become like hair color in its political and moral significance, which is to say it would have none. Now, maybe you don't agree with that, aspiration maybe you think that tribalism based on skin color can't be outgrown or shouldn't be outgrown. Well, if you think that, I'm afraid I don't know what to say to you. It's not that there's nothing to say. It's just that there's so much we disagree about morally and politically, that I don't know where to begin. So that debate, if it can even be had, will have to be left for another time. For the purposes of this conversation, I have to assume that you agree with me about the goal here, which is to say you share the hope that there will come a time when the color of a person's skin really doesn't matter. What would that be like? Well, how many blondes got into Harvard this year? Does anyone know what percentage of the police in San Diego are brunette? Do we have enough redheads in senior management in our Fortune 500 companies? No one is asking these questions, and there's a reason for that. No one cares. And we are right not to care. Imagine a world in which people cared about hair color to the degree that we currently care or seem to care, or imagine that others care, or allege that they secretly care about skin color. Imagine a world in which discrimination by hair color was a thing and it took centuries to overcome, and it remains a persistent source of private pain and public grievance throughout society, even where it no longer exists. What an insane misuse of human energy that would be. What an absolute catastrophe. Now, the analogy isn't perfect for a variety of reasons, but it's good enough for us to understand what life would be like if the spell of racism and antiracism were truly broken. The future we want is not one in which we've all become passionate antiracists. It's not a future in which we are forever on our guard against the slightest insult, the bad joke, the awkward compliment, the tweet that didn't age well. We want to get to a world in which skin color and other superficial characteristics of a person become morally and politically irrelevant. And if you don't agree with that what did you think Martin Luther King, Jr. Was talking about? And finally, if you're on the left and you don't agree with that if you don't agree with this vision of a post racial future, please observe that the people who agree with you, the people who believe that there is no overcoming race and that racial identity is indesoluble and that skin color really matters and will always matter. These people are white supremacists and neo Nazis and other total assholes. And these are also people I can't figure out how to talk to, much less persuade. So the question for the rest of us, those of us who want to build a world populated by human beings merely the question is how do we get there? How does a racial difference become uninteresting? Can it become uninteresting by more and more people taking a greater interest in it? Can it become uninteresting by becoming a permanent political identity? Can it become uninteresting by having thousands of institutions whose funding and therefore very survival depends on it remaining interesting until the end of the world? Can it become less significant by being granted more and more significance? By becoming a fetish, a sacred object ringed on all sides by taboos can race become less significant if you can lose your reputation and even your livelihood at any moment by saying one wrong word about it? Now, I think these questions answer themselves to outgrow our obsession with racial difference. We have to outgrow our obsession with race, and you don't do that by maintaining your obsession with it. Now, you might agree with me about the goal and about how a post racial society would seem, but you might disagree about the path to get there and the question of what to do next. And in fact, one podcast listener wrote to me recently to say that while he accepted my notion of a post racial future, he thinks it's just far too soon to talk about putting racial politics behind us. And he asked me to imagine just how absurd it would be to have told Martin Luther King, Jr. At the dawn of the civil rights movement that the path beyond racism requires that he become less and less obsessed with race. That seems like a fair point, but Coleman Hughes has actually drawn my attention to a string of MLK quotes that seem just as transcendent of racial identity politics as I'm hoping to be here. And you can see these quotations on his Twitter feed. None of those statements by King would make sense coming out of Black Lives Matter at the moment. But in any case, as I said, I think we're living in a very different time than Martin Luther King, Jr. Was. And what I see all around me is evidence of the fact that we're paying an intolerable price for confusion about racism and social justice generally and the importance of identity generally. And this is happening in an environment where the path to success and power for historically disadvantaged groups isn't generally barred by white racists who won't vote for them or hire them or celebrate their achievements or buy their products. And it isn't generally barred by laws and policies and norms that are unfair. Now, there are surely still some of that, but there must be less of it now than there ever was. The real burden on the black community is the continued legacy of inequality with respect to wealth and education and health and social order, levels of crime in particular, and the resulting levels of incarceration and single parent families. And it seems very unlikely that these disparities, whatever their origin in the past, can be solved by focusing on the problem of lingering racism, especially where it doesn't exist. And the current problem of police violence seems a perfect case in point. And yet now we're inundated with messages from every well intentioned company and organization singing from the same book of hymns. I mean, black lives matter is everywhere. Of course Black Lives Matter, but the messaging of this movement around the reality of police violence is wrong and is creating a public hysteria. I just got a message from the American Association for. The advancement of science. Talking about fear of the other. Right. And the quote from the email is left unchecked racism, sexism, homophobia, and fear of the other can enter any organization or community and destroy the foundations upon which we must build our future. Okay, fine. But is that really the concern in the scientific community right now? Unchecked racism, sexism and homophobia? Is that really what ails science in the year 2020? I don't think so. I'll tell you the fear of the Other that does seem warranted everywhere right now. It's the Other who has rendered him or herself incapable of dialogue. It's the Other who will not listen to reason, who has no interest in facts, who can't join a conversation that converges on the truth because he knows in advance what the truth must be. We should fear the Other who thinks that dogmatism and cognitive bias aren't something to be corrected for because they're the very foundations of his epistemology. We should fear the Other who can't distinguish activism from journalism or politics from science or worse, can make these distinctions but refuses to. And we're all capable of becoming this person, if only for minutes or hours at a time. And this is a bug in our operating system, not a feature, and we have to continually correct for it. One of the most shocking things that many of us learned when the COVID-19 Pandemic was first landing on our shores and we were weighing the pros and cons of closing the schools, was that for tens of millions of American kids, going to school represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day. Now, I'm pretty confident that most of the kids we're talking about here aren't white. And whatever you think about the opportunities in this country and whatever individual success stories you can call to mind, there's no question that some of us start out on third base or second base. Everyone has a lot to deal with. Of course, life is hard, but not everyone is a single mom or a single grandparent struggling to raise kids in the inner city, all the while trying to keep them from getting murdered. Right. The disparities in our society are absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable, and we need a rational discussion about their actual causes and solutions. We have to pull back from the brink here, and all we have with which to do that is conversation. The only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments, a willingness to update one's view of the world when better reasons are given, and that is an ongoing process, not a place we ever finally arrive. Okay, well, perhaps that was more of an exhortation than I intended, but it certainly felt like I needed to say that. I hope it was useful, and the conversations will continue on this podcast. Stay safe, everyone. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, a few new speaking dates to announce the links are not yet live on my website, but you can mark your calendars if you live in the relevant cities. I'll be in Seattle on December 6, San Francisco on December 7, Boston on January 11, DC on January 12, and Philadelphia on January 14, Those last three are surrounding the January 13 date in New York, which is virtually sold out. I believe there are twelve seats left last time I looked, so more to come about those events. Supporters of the podcast will get a link to tickets on September 20, and then tickets will be available to the general public a week after that. So you can see my events page on my website for more details, and you can also join my email list if you want to hear about these things in the most reliable way. Okay. Today I am speaking with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. They are filmmakers who have made some of the most beloved documentaries of our time and certainly changed the way that documentary films have been made over the last few decades. And they're releasing their latest film, The Vietnam War, this weekend on PBS. It premieres on Sunday, the 17 September, and it will be available on DVD and Bluray very soon after that. This documentary is in ten parts. It's 18 hours long, and as you'll hear in this conversation, it fairly blew my mind. It really is a remarkable piece of work, which took Ken and Lynn and the rest of their team ten years to make, so you'll hear much more about it and my experience watching it over the next hour. But I really recommend that you take the time to watch this series. If you thought you knew something about the Vietnam War and what it was like to live through it, I would dare say even if you fought in that war, there's something to be learned from this documentary. So now I bring you Ken Burns and Lynn Novic. I am here with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Ken and Lynn, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having us. Our pleasure. Well, listen, to say that I'm a fan of your work is certainly an understatement, and I think that's probably an understatement for almost anyone who encounters your work. You have made so many amazing films together, probably most famously The Civil War, which virtually everyone has seen, I imagine. But there was Prohibition, jazz, baseball, just so many great films. And these are miniseries, really. I mean, these are many hours long. And now you've released, or you're about to release the latest, which is the Vietnam War, which is 18 hours long. Is that correct? Yes. Ten episodes, 18 hours. Yeah. So I am about 15 hours into it. Don't spoil the end for me. We win this war. Right? I really don't want to do a spoiler thing for you. I've had a full immersion experience that most people watching it on PBS won't because I have the disks, and I've watched those 15 hours in the last 48. Really amazingly intense. And it strikes me that this is an utterly unique document for reasons that you couldn't fully control. I mean, first of all, there was an endless amount of footage of the actual war, which you can't say of every war. And there's also the fact that there were so many people who experienced the war who were still alive, who you could talk to. And then there's the additional fact that we are at enough remove from this particular war in time, now about 50 years, so that you can have this perspective on it and give it this amazingly even handed treatment. And finally and this is something you really had no control over there's the fact that you're releasing this now at this moment in history, and it has a resonance which I feel like it wouldn't have had you released this, let's say, in the first term of obama's administration, it strikes me as an incredibly relevant and prescient document. Right now, it's like we're looking into a time capsule. But I also felt like I was looking into a crystal ball that was 50 years old. I don't know if it strikes you that way, but it just seems like this is a gold mine. Yeah. This is the great gift of history that we always forget. And I would suggest that had we released it ten years ago, it might also have stunning and different kind of resonances. Human nature never changes. And so whatever's going on now, the past is always going to resonate with it because we can see features of it. But I think it's quite startling right now, and nothing that we intentionally timed the completion of the film to. Indeed, most of the editorial work was done on this before the caucus and primary seasons began in the election. But this is a film about mass demonstrations taking place all across the country against the current administration, about a White House in disarray, obsessed with leaks, about a president certain the press is lying, making up stories about him, about asymmetrical warfare that confounds the mighty might of the US. Military, about huge document drops of stolen classified material into the public sphere that destabilizes the conventional wisdom and the current conversation and accusations that a political campaign reached out during the time of a national election to a foreign power to help them influence that national election. Yeah, that's pretty stunning. Yeah. But all of these were true back in 2006 when Lynn and I began working on it, as they are still true now. And all of them and dozens more are from Vietnam that resonate in the present. Strangely, some of the resonances are inconvenient or at least uncomfortable in that their polarity is reversed in a way. Yes. So for instance, there was some I forget which administration did it. I guess it was LBJ at some point. There was the allegation that Russian operatives were stoking the anti war movement, essentially. And whether or not that could have been true then, it certainly played as a completely cynical bit of paranoia, whereas now we have this increasingly well documented meddling of Russia into our system. It was a bewildering experience, frankly, to watch this film. Yes. And then you have the actual evidence that the Nixon campaign reached out to South Vietnam to get them to boycott the peace talks that had suddenly improved and were improving Humphrey's chances. And Johnson gets wind of this and calls up Everett Dirkson, the Republican leader in the Senate, and said, this is treason. And Dirkson says yes. And in our film, the next call that you hear is Nixon sort of saying, oh, you know, Mr. President, I never do this and Nixon's lying and the President knows it. And so you have an exact correlation, just as the other one seemed kind of absurd and paranoia, but now true. This one is a fact, but we're now trying to connect the dots in this moment about that. So it's pleasant. Jeans. Yeah. So let's step back from the actual content of the film for a moment and just talk about your making of it. And then I want to move through the story a little bit systematically because it really is an education that most of us haven't had on just how damaging the Vietnam War was to our society and to Vietnam. And it was a disaster on so many levels. When did you guys decide to make this film? Well, we've been thinking about the Vietnam War as one of the most important events in American history since the Second World War. And it's been sort of on the back burner for many years, sort of lurking there along with many other subjects. And when we finished our film on the Second World War, we hadn't been broadcast yet, but it was around 2006. Ken turned to me at one of the mixing sessions and said, we have to do Vietnam. And I remember saying, I agree. Which part? And he said, all of it. And I said, OK, that's great, let's do it. And yet we took a big deep gulp because we knew even then how enormously complicated and challenging this story would be to tell, and it has turned out to be the case. We really wanted to try to tell it from every possible side and to listen to people who have very strong feelings about it, sometimes conflicted feelings, and to understand Vietnamese perspectives as well as Americans. And so it took us ten years to kind of wrestle this enormously challenging story to the ground. Yeah. And the footage you have is amazing. Both the contemporaneous footage of of actual battles, which you appear to have from both sides. You have North Vietnamese footage, too, right? Yes. It's just astonishing that this even exists. And you seemingly have an endless amount of footage of our own side, which also it just strikes me as strange that it exists in so many cases. Well, we had a free press that was unfettered in their access to the war and the theater of war. In this case, unlike World War II in Korea, where the press was very much censored and controlled, and Vietnam represents that one outlying situation that permitted the press at great risk to themselves. And in fact, hundreds of journalists and and videographers and filmmakers and soundmen were killed during the course of the war to provide this seemingly bottomless amount of footage. What happens, though, is that they congregate in archives all around the world, and a traditional film production only has the resources to spend a little time in each archive if they can even get there. So what happens is that we tend to push around our plate the same footage over and over again. And it's footage that we have. But we've also had the luxury of spending a decade and having the deep dive and permitting us to go into the archives and spend more than just a cursory amount of time, but literally months and years getting to know them and finding out all the nooks and crannies of that archives. Not just footage, but also still photographs to benefit this production. So while the classic images are there, the classic famous moments, we are able to deconstruct them in, we think, a different kind of light. Whether it's the Napalm girl, Kim Fook, or it's the assassination of Lem in the streets of Saigon during the Tet Offensive by the head of the National Police, Luan, or other famous things, we can in some ways deconstruct them. But more importantly for these quotidian moments, with fighter pilots and helicopter crew chiefs and Marines and army guys ambushed or in battle charging up hills, you have a kind of immersive experience that places you there. And one thing you should know is that 98% of the footage comes to us without any sound. And we have to therefore then research ourselves what an M 16 sounds like, as opposed to an AK 47, as opposed to a traditional tripod mounted machine gun, as opposed to other kinds of armaments. And what the sounds of the engines of an a three as opposed to an a four sound like and what they actually look like to get it strayed. And so much of the years involved in this is the attempt at fairisimilitude and in many cases, those battles that you referred to have new footage, perhaps never before seen footage, but also a sound effects track that may number into 150 or 160 individual sounds to create the moment of battle. I didn't know that, but in retrospect, it seems like the sound design was amazing. I felt like I had not actually seen war footage like this before. Well, we were our own sound editors we've worked with for years and years, and they are a remarkable group of people. What was the most telling test was when we would have playbacks of the completed episodes and invite periodically the head of the archive, say, at CBS or ABC or NBC principal source of material, as you can imagine. And watching them watch, stunned at how their footage had been used, intermixed with their competitors footage and then finally brought to life with this complex sound effects. And they found themselves as distracted and immersed into the story when their job was to sort of evaluate the uses of it. And we felt thrilled. And they were extraordinarily helpful at every juncture in making sure we could find and get every lost bit of footage, every obscure bit of footage. And that extended to still photographs and audio tapes from the presidential library, the presidential tapes that are so extraordinarily unbelievable and damning. Yeah, just to have that as a resource, those LBJ tapes are unbelievable because what you have, both in the case of LBJ and Nixon, I guess, Kennedy, too, you have the ultimate mind reading machine. And what is perfectly obvious from the earliest stages of this war is how hopeless it appeared, even from their perspective. And yet we meander further and further into this quagmire for years and years. And there's a point in the series where you think, surely the war is about over, given what we're hearing, and yet it's just beginning. I want to ask you a little more about your process before we dive into it, but perhaps you can address this question. How is it, given what they were clearly thinking, that this war was possible, that it unfolded the way it did? Well, we don't have historians appearing on screen interpreting what is the story being told. So we really try to just put the pieces together and using this remarkable real time audio of conversations in the White House as you hear LBJ and Nixon and Kennedy talking about what they're doing and their decision making process and the information they have available to them. And then you have to, as a viewer, sort of try to think yourself about, well, why are they continuing to prosecute a war when they don't think they have a very good chance of success? And one of the things that comes up again and again is that they're worried about getting reelected. They're worried about their popularity. They're worried about whether the American public would want to be told that we're not going to win the war. That's a pervasive theme, a drumbeat from very early on. And we live in a democracy. That's a real question for people who assume, you know, the greatest levels of power. They're always worrying about getting reelected. And the Vietnam War is a huge byproduct of that. Yeah, it was a concern over the loss of face, which it is a kind of psychosis when you actually understand what's happening on the ground and you're just sending waves upon waves of people to die for something that on every level. The descriptions of these battles where the whole goal is to take a hill, but there's no point in actually taking the hill. And once they take it at the cost of hundreds of lives, they occupy it for like an hour and then walk on down the other side because there was no point in getting the hill in the first place. The picture of futility that develops here over the course of the series, you basically live out the political implications of it hour after hour as you see the resistance to this war building. Again, before we jump into the content, I want to just ask you a little more about your process. How do you collaborate on a film like this? Are you together most of the time? Are you in different states? I live and work in New Hampshire, and Lynn lives and works in New York. So the New York office became the kind of production center during the production. The film was edited in New Hampshire. And so there's, thanks to the way we're talking now, all sorts of ways in which we collaborate instantaneously on this. And we have an extraordinary group of colleagues. Jeffrey Ward, the writer I've worked with for 35 years, editors I've worked with for even that amount of time as well, 30 plus years coproducers that have assisted us, people who are researching pictures. It's an extraordinarily close knit family divided between New Hampshire and New York and lots of communications. And it's a wonderful process, and you're right to focus on that because process is everything that we're about. We're not about setting a prescribed research period and then followed by a writing period out of which is produced some document that is now written in stone that informs the shooting and the editing, but in fact an open ended process that never stops researching, that never stops writing, that is constantly willing to shoot or reshoot or add a new interview and is always looking for new material, whether it's footage or still photographs. And I think more to the point, it's easy to say never stop researching. But that means constantly of being where particularly on a subject as controversial and as constantly shifting as the scholarship about Vietnam, aware of the most recent scholarship. So we find a lot of our work just changing a number from four to three when we find out that that was how many regiments of North Vietnamese soldiers went down the Pokemon trail that month to try to get it right? The last year and a half. As we were sound editing and onlineing and mixing, we were also removing adjectives and adverbs that we thought maybe, perhaps might have suggested a particular bent. We had no agenda. We had no axe to grind. This was not a polemical piece. We wanted to be umpires, calling balls and strikes. And it was hugely important that our process serve that. And it has for a long time. And I think this production, more than anything else, bears at the fruits of that kind of diligent adherence to process. Insofar as this was the most challenging of any production we've ever engaged in, and very satisfying because we were able, even in the darkest moments, to trust to our process and to yield to it and understand that eventually structures and arcs and storylines would emerge that things that we seemed overly identified with would be lost. That new things we would have to incorporate, that the little darlings would all have to be eliminated, but new ways of understanding it. Filmmakers particularly, my experience, is when you have a scene that's working, the last thing you want to do is change it if it's working. But inevitably, in every scene you found out new information that complicated each minute dynamic within every scene. And instead of sort of pushing back and perhaps settling, we sort of reveled in and moved towards that complication and tried to every time engage what was difficult about this and proved our point that we felt all alone. That particularly in war, but also in many other things, more than one truth can obtain at the same time and still be a truth. There's not a moral relativism to that. There is just depending on your perspectives. And as Lynn said, we had decided at the beginning to engage all sorts of perspectives. Not just American perspectives, but North Vietnamese, the winners, and South Vietnamese the losers who lost not only a war, but their country, which disappeared off the face of the earth after barely 20 years in existence. And so every day was a constant reminder that that open endedness. The willingness to be corrigible, the willingness to suddenly realize you might have to double back on yourself, the necessity to, at the very beginning, jettison preconceptions and baggage in favor of a Vietnam War that betrays even those like me who live through it, betrays our original conventional wisdom about it. It was exhilarating and humiliating and about as stimulating as you could possibly imagine. I just wanted to chime in one thing about the way that we collaborate because as Ken was speaking out, it's hard to explain, but we're documentarians, right? So we're not making up a story. We're actually trying to organize this enormous amount of material that Ken described into a coherent narrative that works sort of chapter by chapter, scene by scene, episode by episode, into some kind of coherent whole over 18 hours. And what happens is it's a process of distillation and it's enormously creative and it is enormously collaborative. And, you know, it really comes down to sort of intuitively suggesting ideas about what might or might not work in the film and then trying them out and listening to each other and then trying to make the film better. And that is what we do day after day after day in a very open way that I think is unusual in how most people go about their jobs. We just get up every day, go to work here to hear what each other has to say and how to make our film better. And it could be little tiny decisions or huge decisions about what's in an episode or what's in the scene or which character we're going to amplify and what we're going to cut and what word we're going to choose. And where we're going to put the comma and which picture we're going to look at and what music we're going to hear and where the sound effect is going to go. There's a million decisions, and it is, as Ken set, a process. And one of the most. It's almost euphoric when we're all working together toward this thing that ends up being bigger than any of us. And I just feel very lucky that we get to do it together. I'm glad you mentioned the music, because talk about an embarrassment of riches. And it's actually a point that's made in the film about the protest movement that somebody at some point says that the protest movement itself was immensely empowered by just how good the music of the time was, which is something I had never really thought of. But that point is brought home in just how you score this thing because it's just one fantastic song after another. I want to go back to something you said, Ken, about moral relativism, because what you get here is not a picture of moral relativism, but the status of the war, in so many respects is so ambiguous morally that it almost demanded the kind of even handedness you described, whereas you went there as though from Mars without any agenda, and you just let each side tell its story. And it's an amazing experience to witness a war from both sides in this way, where there aren't obvious bad guys, there are some obvious bad guys, and perhaps we can talk about that. But the picture of the pointless wastage of human life and the gains, such as they are, of civilization is brought home by this because you can understand both sides. And yet the whole thing seems so profoundly unnecessary. It is remarkable and it's not a story you could have told, say, of our fight against the the Nazis. No. And and we did do a film with an eye on the history of World War II and violently challenging phenomenon. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, I have Paul Bloom back. Paul, good to hear you. Good to be back. I leave a couple of messes to clean up, or at least one mess to clean up from the last round, where we I haven't gone back to listen to exactly what we said, but I got the sense that we disparaged Peewee Herman somehow, or at least minimized. That was the least of my intention. Nothing means spirited, but we had we diminished his stature or assumed that he was invisible or had disappeared into obscurity in some way because we haven't been paying attention to his career. But someone pointed out, and I quickly confirmed, that the man is selling out very large auditoriums with his latest act. I mean, he has quite a career. He's out there making a fair amount of noise. So it seems we were wrong about Paul Rubens. Well, good to know. Good to know. As as I was walking through the studio ten minutes ago, I saw that Al Franken is coming to to New Haven. So, you know, I think he had somewhat of a blow to his reputation, but maybe redemption is more common than we had expected. Maybe cancellation is rarely permanent. That's good to know. Anyway, so no hard feelings, paul Rubin's? Absolutely no hard feelings towards Paul Rubins. And the other thing so the other thing that I just had in my mind to mention, based on the last conversation, we started by talking about Kobe's death and the death of everyone else involved in that helicopter crash, because we recorded our last conversation the day after that happened. And I didn't know this at the time, but finding out about it, it's an interesting ethical question. So we didn't touch on this. I believe it is in fact true that TMZ, the kind of paparazzi inspired website, announced Kobe's death before the family even knew about it. That was the way the information came out. And I'm wondering just what you think about the ethics of that. The interesting thing, from my point of view is, given that I've taken such a strong position against the advertising model and what that has done to digital media, this seems to me to be another symptom of it. I mean, the race to publish is really directly incentivized by the kind of win or take all effects of clickbait journalism and with different incentives that there wouldn't be the same kind of sense of time pressure to publish. I was just wondering what you thought about that, because many people think, well, why does it matter? The tragedy is you've lost your husband, your father. This is a 20 megaton catastrophe, however you look at it. Does it really matter that you heard about it on Twitter? Because TMZ tweeted it and not through some sober channel. But it seems to me to matter a lot. I'm wondering what you as a psychologist yeah, I agree with you. I don't have any special expertise on this as a psychologist, just sort of common sense and decency. If somebody's father, daughter, wife, whatever dies, you want to be told in a sober, controlled circumstance. You don't want to find it as a hashtag. Yeah. And I think for the most part, news sources are often particularly well behaved in this way, but some of them aren't. And there is a sort of Darwinian battle for clicks and for attention, and so some don't play by the rules. And I think in some way there's a question of what should be legally allowed, which I actually think a lot, but there's also a question of what's sort of morally atrocious and something could be you wouldn't want the law to punish them, but you want to also say that's kind of despicable. Yeah. No, it really is hard to imagine the editorial call here when you have every reason to believe that this information is minutes old and that the family probably doesn't know anything about it and you're racing to publish it's. Just something has gotten away from you there and again. It's the incentives at your back, no doubt. But it's a symptom of our digital ecosystem at the moment. And definitely at the moment. I mean, we're both old enough to remember when there were newspapers and rushing to get it out. We rushing to get it out the next day. Yeah. And for the last long while, it's been a matter of minutes or seconds. Right. So that kind of changes everything. Okay, so now we're talking in the immediate aftermath of the Trump impeachment acquittal and the high drama of Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the Union address and Mitt Romney breaking from the herd and voting to impeach. What do you think about all of this? Do you have a hot take on on the politics of this? I have the observations everyone else has, which is, if anything, Trump is becoming more and more unhinged, more and more confident in his abilities to do whatever he pleases. And so I think things are going to get worse and worse and worse until, I hope with the next election, they get better. And it is true that the Democrats are responding in kind, and people have said, oh, this doesn't work. Trump makes fun of your appearance. You make fun of Trump's appearance. You're just descending to his level. But the thing is, the history of battling Trump is nothing works. The high road doesn't work. The low road doesn't work. That's what is so strange about him in this moment, politically, because nothing works. And I'm trying to understand why this is the case. I mean, it almost seems like a a supernatural phenomenon, right, because I can't map it on to any normal experience. It's it's like the the Obelisk in 2001, right? I mean, it's an it's it's the superficial version of that that was like an infinite profundity somehow, that never had to be explained. This is just the singularity that at the heart of the cosmos. And Trump is like the inverse of all of that. So it's like there's no depth. It's all surface, and yet the surface is engineered in a way so as to reflect the worst in everyone. This is what's so bizarre about Trump and the response to him. He has a capacity to tarnish the reputation of everyone who comes into his orbit, right? And this is, again, whether it's a supporter or a critic, and I mean, for supporters, this is very obvious. I mean, the effect is astonishing. You have serious people with real reputations. I mean, politicians and soldiers and business people who have lifetimes of real accomplishment, who achieve levels of personal hypocrisy and political cowardice in propping him up and in covering for his lies and in pretending not to notice his lies, in just pretending that he's normal that we've never seen before. But then the flip side of it is that all of his critics are also diminished by how they respond to this. And the case with Pelosi, I think, is an example of this. Many people are obviously celebrating what she did, but I think it does also diminish her, right? She is left behaving in a way that a Congress person shouldn't behave, right? And she's demeaning the office of the presidency because of its current occupant. And there's just something so strange about this, this term of disparagement that Trump supporters used. Trump derangement syndrome. Everyone has TDs. There's something to that, because he is a kind of super stimulus, right? The reaction to him is exaggerated because it's out of proportion to his qualities as a person. It's out of proportion to the bad things he's done and the bad things he aspires to do. Because he's not actually evil. Right. He's not as scary as he might be, and yet somehow he gets an even bigger reaction than someone would if they were just truly scary. Right? So it's almost like his smallness as a person is invoking a bigger reaction than you would ordinarily feel. And I feel it myself. I feel it personally. I've said this. I find him more despicable than I found Osama bin Laden. Right? And that's strange. This is psychologically true, because with Osama bin Laden, it's just obvious to me that he could have been a mensch in some sense, right. He's making serious sacrifices for ideas that he deeply believes in. He's committed to a cause greater than himself. I don't doubt that he had real ethical connections to the people in his life that he cared about. He was a real person, right. And in some ways, he's a kind of a moral hero in a very bad game. And so therefore, he's kind of prototypically evil when viewed from my game, but he's a person of actual substance. He's just committed to the wrong ends, whereas Trump is the negation of all of those things, and yet he's President of the United States, and the perversity of that juxtaposition is just fucking crazy making, and that's how you get this outsized reaction, or at least that's my interpretation of it. So there's some people I agree with all of that, but there are some people who have made contact with Trump and haven't been degraded. It's a very small list, I think. Who's on that list? Well, there's quite a bit of conservative writers who, when Trump came into power, they sort of said, this guy clashes with all of our principles. The NeverTrumpers. Like Jonah Goldberg, for instance. David from. Yeah. And they said, even though this is going to get me kicked off Fox News, I'm going to lose some revenue, I'm going to lose some fans, I'm going to sort of stand up for what I believe, and they paid a sort of financial and sort of professional price for it. And now we have Mitt Romney. And my feelings about Mitt Romney have always been complicated. I don't think he's a he's quite the sort of choir boy as people like to think of him as. When he was running for president, he was he was pretty rough and tumble, but I have nothing but admiration for him standing up against Trump at this time. So what do you think? Do you think would you put Romney as an exception? Yeah. Well, first, I should apologize for all the bad things I've said about Romney in the past, because I went fairly hard against Romney and his Mormonism when he was when he was a candidate in 2012. And I'm sure at least once or twice mentioned that he must be wearing magic underpants and that we did not need a president who believed what he believed. And yeah, my concerns about his religious beliefs and kind of the inflexibility of mind that you would imagine he would have given those beliefs, I view those as valid concerns in any president. And it's painfully ironic to me that in all of my hopes that Trump would be impeached, the person waiting to assume the presidency is a religious dogmatist of the first order, mike Pence, who in another context would trip all of the switches in me that would worry about theocracy in in the US. So I went after Romney for his religiosity in the past, and I've noticed the same things about him that everyone has noticed, that he's clearly a political opportunist in many ways, and there was something truly humiliating about his seeking to be secretary of state under Trump after all that had gone down between him and Trump. I mean, that was almost a Shakespearean level of cravenness at the time or attachment to political power. Still, if you want the full Shakespeare, go for Ted Cruz. Oh, you had Ted Cruz. Yes. Brutal, personal, deep humiliation by Trump, and then he has to go back and beg him for various things and champion him difficult politics. Well, also, we're still it was finally commemorated in the shot of him working the phone banks for Trump. I don't know if you saw that photograph. I have seen that. So it's just awful, right? I mean, just where does one go to get a spine in the game of but now, he did redeem himself to some extent. Yeah, that was all by way of my saying that in this moment, though, it's hard to imagine that it's a political price that matters. It's very real for him. He's someone now who's being vilified by his colleagues and his political tribe and probably worse. I mean, he probably has the maniacs in Trump's base sending him death threats, and some of which are credible. And it's just the people who go against Trump have stories to tell about what that's like when the mob turns on you. So, yeah, I just have nothing but respect for how he's comforting himself in this moment and certainly don't underestimate that it's, in his world, a real sacrifice. So let me switch gears for us and say something nice about Trump. It's sincerely nice. How surprising. Yes. And it's something from Tyler Cowan. So Cowan is one of my favorite writers and thinkers, and he has a little piece, I think, in Bloomberg News or something, where he talks about the best orators of the last decade. And he lists two of them discussed. He thinks Barack Obama's a third, maybe a distant third. One is Greta Thunberg, who is an extremely unusual, very powerful speaker. This unusual prosody and great moral seriousness that sort of juxtaposition between her being seemingly sort of a young woman and talking with such seriousness and gravity. But thunberg second. Trump is first. Yeah, Trump is an extraordinary orator, well, extraordinary in scare quotes. But obviously, I don't mean this is sort of like, oh, I don't mean this as a moral good. I mean in terms of skill. No, what can be ascribed to skill? I still stand by my evil Chauncey Gardner interpretation here. I think there's far less method to his madness than actual madness that just happens to work in this context for whatever reason. But and I certainly share your respect for Tyler Cowen, but I don't agree here. I think there's no advantage to him, or at least I don't see the advantage in him being incoherent. For him to contradict himself over the course of five minutes is not fourth level chess. It's just a mistake. Right. And and it just the fact that he pays no price for that mistake, whereas you and I would pay a very high price in the context of a conversation like this. He's managed to select an audience that doesn't care about contradictions. They're not going to hold him to the letter of any utterance because they don't. Why they don't, it's still a mystery to me. I don't think I have an adequate theory of mind for the people, and there are tens of millions of them who do not care when he says A in direct contradiction to B, or vice versa over the course of two minutes. And it may be on a topic that they profess to care about, and yet they don't care that you can't actually follow both of those paths through his mind or any apparent reality. A while ago, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt used the term bullshit as a technical term, and he says there's people tell the truth, then there's people who lie, but then there's bullshitters who are simply indifferent to the truth. And that was coined before Trump ascended, but it works well for him. I think you're holding Trump to sort of a standard that his audience doesn't. He's seen as an entertainer, as a showman. Just to give a sense of what I'm talking about, cowen points out his speech is highly repetitive, slow and ponderous. I have a soft spot for slow and ponderous because I am that, but highly repetitive. So when I watch him being highly repetitive, I see neurological injury manifest, right? I see someone who is in a visibly audibly, in a holding pattern because they can't get to the next thought. And worse. What I see with him and I've commented on this before I see with him to a unique degree. I I've mean, never seen it this bad in any other person. I see him being prompted by and anchored to accidents in his utterances that he then is committed to shoring up. And the way I tried to illustrate this in the past and I can't think of another way, but it's almost like he's speaking in verse, but this is extemporaneous. And he doesn't know how he's going to complete the rhyme, but he's held to it. So he'll just say something like, there was once a man from Spokane, right? And he doesn't know where he's going after this, right? But. He's got Spokane. He landed on Spokane, and then he has to get to something that rhymes there from immigrants. We get too much cocaine. Yeah. And he'll land on that. And that is the message. Right? And it's born of a process back to Frankfurt here. He's just bullshitting to remind people of this brilliant distinction that Frankfurt made between a bullshitter and a liar. A liar is someone who is fully aware of the logical expectations of his audience. He's fully aware of what reality is and the departures he's introducing from it in his speech. And he's having to fit the jigsaw puzzle pieces in where they fit in real time. So he knows that you're expecting coherence he knows what you know about the world and he's engineering his lives so as to go undetected. A bullshitter is just talking. He's not wasting any of the cognitive overhead to track what reality is or what your expectations are of his fit to it. And he's just creating a mood with the way he speaks and floviating and confabulating. And that's what Trump is doing to a degree that is truly unsurpassed. And in any other walk of life, he would immediately be recognized as a con man and a fraud and a bullshitter and someone who can't be trusted and certainly someone who can't be given significant responsibility. And yet it works in this country at this time in the presidency. So, yes, it's true that he's incredibly effective for the people he's apparently effective for, but I do not understand it. I think there's some sort of genius behind it. I don't think he himself is a genius, but I think everything you're saying there is the feeling that he has no idea what he's going to say next. He could drift everywhere he could find himself, get some laughter from the crowd and seize on that. And it's so different from the standard polished presentations one gets from typical politician. I mean, to some extent, I've listened to Jordan Peterson and Jordan Peterson is a thousand times more articulate. Yeah. And and smoother and clearer. You get somewhat of a hilarious feeling. It's hilarious you said that. Because I've actually said the same point about talking in verse and completing the rhyme. I've said about Jordan too, in my moments of the greatest opposition with him, that there is a quality where he's not doing the reality testing that I would want him to do. It just sounds good what he's saying, but if you actually bring him up short and say, okay, what do you actually mean by God or faith or whatever it is in this sentence, then it goes into the ditch. So there is that just kind of being carried away by the sound of your own voice. But with Trump it is so bereft of content. Right? It's at the level of a fourth grader and it's and it's repetitive at the level of a fourth grader. I mean, no fourth grader repeats himself as much as Trump does. You can hear the Trump derangement syndrome. And this is back to my point. It's like I stand by everything that I'm saying about Trump now, but the fact that I'm saying it and the fact that it's taking up this much of our conversation is even for the people who will agree with me. Certainly many of them think this guy is living rent free in your brain and this is bad for you and it's bad for us, and it's bad for conversation and it's and there's there's something true about that. And I think we have to you know, I don't know how we respond to that fact politically over the next nine months, but there is something. I really have had to pick my moments with Trump and just ignore him for many podcasts running because it's boring to criticize him ultimately. But I'll add one thing to my blast of Trump low. Then we can leave it alone. Yes. Which is other presidents have phrases that they're known for the soft bigotry of low expectations or a lot of Kennedy's lines, and they were typically written by professionals. But somehow I think these phrases we're going to remember like fake news, drain the swamp. Make America great again, make Mexico pay for it. The things which people know by heart. And he could start him and the audience will finish them. These seem to be coming from Trump's mind, and there's so little to respect about him. But he has some abilities, some really extraordinary abilities. Well, he has a one ability. Again, this is whether you call this an ability or a symptom, that's debatable. But he is utterly shameless. Right. He's scandal proof within his own mind. He just cannot be derailed by being shown to be at odds with himself or with reality. And that, again, is one of these crazy making things that he can lie 16,000 times and never pay a penalty for it. Well, you're talking substance, and I agree with that. But I'm thinking about style and think about analogy. I was listening to a podcast by Jordan Peterson, which I don't do, but I just wanted to listen to what he sounds like, what his book talk is. And there's something about it where you don't want to shut it off. You have no idea where it's going. And Peterson does something which Trump doesn't, which he displays genuine curiosity and interest and energy, a range of emotions you don't normally hear in this kind of talk. And there's something about it. He's a very good speaker, but there's a kind of free associative, meandering, somewhat confabulatory thing going on in that there's not a rigorously, honest reality testing. And again, I like Jordan a lot, so this is something I've said to his face and on stage. And so this is not me saying anything behind his back that I haven't actually said to him both in private and in public. And it's just on some level, it's a different he has an account for why this is a feature, not a bug. He thinks that my slavish attachment to reality testing and logic is something that is a symptom of my own rigidity and lack of awareness of certain truths that can be bivalued or however just making up words and putting them in his mouth. But he's more comfortable with paradox and a mythopoetic take on reality than I am, certainly, but none of that. It would be amazing to know that behind closed doors, trump is very different. Everything I've said about Trump and this is amazing this has gone on much longer than I anticipated, but more Trump Derangement syndrome. Yeah, no, let me comp to it. But I would add that I think it's warranted everything I've said about Trump and my, you know, evil chauncey. Gardner thesis is readily disconfirmable. I mean, it could be disconfirmable in a matter of 15 seconds. I mean, he would just have to say something that I would imagine he's incapable of saying if he just for a paragraph, was tenfold more articulate than I've ever seen him be and said, this is the way I talk with my friends behind closed doors, but this is the way I talk on stage. And then show me both versions, I would realize he actually is a genius who has calculated his effect on his audience. Then I'd be prepared to believe anything. He could be reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius behind closed doors and talking for hours about them. Insightfully. But I know exactly what he's doing behind closed doors, or at least I think I do. Right. He's just watching Fox and Friends and shrieking at people, and the reports of what he's like behind closed doors certainly substantiate that. Anyway. Okay, we're going to pivot to something here which is really adjacent to this topic and related to actually, it was synchronous that you mentioned, Harry Frankfurt, because he has also written about inequality and wealth. Inequality is something that has been very much on my mind, and it is really a pressing issue in our politics now, and arguably the most pressing issue on the Democratic side. I don't know what you think of the prospects of our nominating, someone like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in the general election, but a concern about wealth inequality would be the reason why that would happen. Yeah. Putting aside the specifics of who's going to be next president, I think people think in a very confused way about inequality. I think for the most part, people think they are very concerned about wealth inequality, but they aren't, really. And this guy, she comes from Frankfurt who wrote a book on a topic, so Frankfurt says this isn't exactly his example. This is the idea. Jeff Bezos. Compare Jeff Bezos to your average person is $10 million. They have a hugely unequal amount of wealth, way more than your average, extremely poor person and rich person. They have an extraordinarily by many magnitudes different than wealth, but nobody worries about that. Nobody says, oh, my God, such inequality. Right. Except for the person with $10 million. Yes. This person deals with staying of proximity to basis. Yes, this is true. But in general, it's not the biggest problem in the world. So I think, and this is Frankfurt's argument, and I've developed this in both technical papers and sort of casual papers, when people say they're worried about inequality, they're typically worried about one of two other things and a few other possibilities. One is poverty. Poverty is terrible, and we tend to worry about poverty justifiably so we want to. A world in which everybody was well off, can afford food and health care and recreation would be a wonderful world. And if we were in that world, and some people made ten times as much or 100 times as much, I think we would worry a lot less. So there's poverty and then the second factor is unfairness. So there's a lot of laboratory experiments finding that even young kids get very upset at unequal divisions. But these are always cases where the unequal divisions are arbitrary. If you switch it a bit so that, say, one person works harder than another and then makes more money, the kids are happy with the unequal divisions and they get annoyed when the divisions are equal. And the same thing for for adults, for regardless of the society, people actually want unequal societies. If you offer them total equality, it'll reject it. They want unequal societies so long as the inequality is calibrated to natural gifts or effort or some sort of thing that doesn't seem unfair. Not many people are that upset that JK Rowling is so long. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris well, very brief housekeeping here. Just reminding you once again that if you're supporting the podcast, please subscribe to the Subscriber Only feed. You do this by with your mobile device, going to my website, going to the subscriber content page and grabbing the RSS with one click on the icon of the podcasting app that you're using. If you're not using a supported app, then you can manually copy the RSS information and that will ensure that you get all the content that I produce going forward. Okay, well, I'm recording this on October 27, probably releasing this on the 28th. But this is the one year anniversary of the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, where eleven people were murdered. I believe six were injured. And this was the worst attack on the Jewish community in American history, I believe. And the timing of this episode is fortuitous because I am speaking with Barry Weiss about her new book, how to Fight Antisemitism. And Barry is a staff writer and editor for the opinion section of the New York Times. She was also an Op ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal. Before that, she has worked at Tablet, the online magazine of Jewish politics and culture. And she is a native of Pittsburgh and in fact was a bot mitzvah at the Tree of Life synagogue and knew people who were killed, as you'll hear. So this is a timely conversation, and Barry and I cover a fair amount of ground here. We talk about the different strands of antisemitism right wing, left wing, and Islamic. We talk about the difference between antisemitism and other forms of racism, which was a point that only became clear to me in reading Barry's book. We talk about the so called great replacement theory among white supremacists, the populist response to globalization, the history of antisemitism in the US. Its theological roots, criticisms of Israel, the fate of the Jews in Western Europe, and other topics. I'll have a few more things to say about all this in my afterward, but now, without further delay, I bring you Barry Weiss. I am here with Barry Weiss. Barry, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. So you have written a book that's not going to be controversial at all. This has to be fun for you. I know this is already out and launched and reviewed, and you're well into your book tour, or maybe somewhere near the end of it, or maybe the book tour is going to subsume the rest of your life, but it feels like that at the moment. Yeah, the book is how to Fight Antisemitism, and it is a great and bracing read. It's a short book. This is one of these books that you really can start and finish with confidence, which is nice. We want to talk about this in great depth. The topic of antisemitism. But before we do, I just want to get some context for you and your work as a journalist and as an opinion person. How would you describe your politics and your career thus far as a journalist? Well, if you Google me, you'll get one answer, which is that I'm apparently extremely controversial. My answer is that I'm fairly boring. I am very socially liberal. I'm sort of hawkish on foreign policy. I consider myself left of center. But I think, like many people who are similarly positioned, we're a bit politically homeless at the moment, so we sort of don't fit into either of the increasingly extreme tribes and therefore are sort of seized upon and pillaried by both of them. Just for some background, I spent six or seven years at The Wall Street Journal in two stints, first as an oped editor on the editorial page and then as a book review editor, both of which were under the umbrella of the editorial page, which is, of course, famously, I would say, free market, conservative place. And I was always the most left wing person in that milieu. Then I moved after Trump became a candidate, and I didn't want to be a part of an editorial page that was in some way apologizing for or kind of quietly supporting him or covering for him. I left along with many people, including Brett Stevens, who's now my colleague at The New York Times, and I went from being sort of the most left wing person at the Journal's editorial page to one of the most, I guess, right wing people at The New York Times. So that sort of, I think, concisely sums it up a little bit. Yeah. So needless to say, you are often maligned as a Nazi or Nazi adjacent. And I know the feeling, and perhaps we'll get into that. But let's talk about the genesis of the book, because I believe you began writing this book after the synagogue atrocity in Pittsburgh, which landed all too close to home, perhaps summarize what happened there for those who have forgotten. Right. There have been so many since then. On the morning of October 27, 2018, a white supremacist walked into Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, which is the neighborhood of Pittsburgh where I was raised. Tree of Life was the synagogue where I became a bob mitzvah. And he walked in, he shouted that all Jews must die, and then he murdered eleven people there on Shabbat Saturday morning. I was in Arizona at the time. I got a text from my youngest sister on our family chat, and she simply said, there's a shooter at Tree of Life. I immediately thought of my dad, who often goes to synagogue at one of the different services that meets there on Saturday morning. There are three communities that meet in that building. And I immediately typed back is dad. I didn't even finish the question. Thank God he wasn't there. He was still at home with my mom. But my mom wrote back, we're going to know a lot of people there. And my dad knew six or seven of the people that were killed. I knew too. I was supposed to fly to Israel, of all places, the following day to do a reporting trip on a very famous archaeological dig in Jerusalem called the City of David. I put off the trip. I went home for the week and I just sort of immersed myself in what happens to a community and a community you know so well in the aftermath of something like this and wrote several columns. I was on Bill Maher that Friday night, and I actually was under contract to write a different book, one that I'm still on the hook for sort of about our culture wars, but found myself just drawn back again and again to this topic and just sort of seeing it everywhere I looked. And so I sort of went hat in hand to my publisher and asked if I could do this quickly first and if we could get it out before the Jewish High Holidays, which somehow we managed to do. Well, you do a few very useful things in the book, and one of which is to differentiate the three poles of antisemitism the right wing, the left wing and the Islamic. I think we'll find as we speak about these things, that the latter two interact in ways that are so cynical and and sinister on the Islamic side and so Fantasmagorically stupid and masochistic on the left wing side that I mean, honestly, it's it's very hard to understand how that alliance is even possible. But when we talk about this, I think the left wing and the Islamist problem will become sort of braided. You also make a point which I hadn't really seen made before, which is that one of the reasons why the Jews are so often attacked from the left and the right and elsewhere is that on the right they are considered non white or insufficiently white, and yet able to pass for white in this kind of sinister way. And on the left, if anything, they are extra white. They somehow have extra privilege. And the least points in the intersectionality Olympics. Perhaps we should start with the right wing side because that's sort of the cleanest to talk about. And this obviously is most relevant to what happened in Pittsburgh. Did I describe the way you differentiate these things accurately? Yeah, I had written a column there was a survey or a study that came out that was very shocking last year about the prevalence of antisemitism in Europe from I believe CNN did it. And I wrote a column laying out what I described at the time as sort of a three headed dragon. I used that same structure in the book. But frankly, if I'm honest, I had hoped to avoid the chapter on Islam for all of the reasons that I think we'll get into, but are probably already obvious to anyone who listens to your show and sees the way that your ideas get talked about, that it's a very scary topic to write about. And I had honestly hoped to avoid it and then realized that it would be the most intellectually dishonest thing to write a book about antisemitism and not talk about it. Yeah. Okay, well, let's start with the cleanest case, which is the extreme right. And you make a point in the book that I really had never considered, and it explains a lot, which is that antisemitism really is not just another flavor of racism on the right. I won't put the words in your mouth, but how is the white supremacist hatred of Jews different from their hatred of other groups? There's an antiracist activist called Eric Ward who runs the Western States Center, and his essay, which is called Skin in the Game I really recommend it to people, was illuminating to me and helped inform my thinking on this. So what he says is that when I heard and maybe you're similar, when I saw the marchers in Charlottesville shouting, Jews will not replace us, I heard that originally in a very straightforward way. I heard it as, the Jew is not going to take my place in the corner office. A Jew is not going to take my status in society. Something along those lines. But I realized in reading Eric Ward's work and others that that's not what they were saying at all. What they were suggesting is that Jews, in a way and this is Eric Ward's language, they're, in a way, the greatest trick the devil has ever played. And the reason for that is because, at least in America, this is not true in Israel, where the majority of Jews are of Mizrahi descent, so they're of North African and Middle Eastern descent. In America, the majority of Jews are of Eastern European or Ashkenazi descent. 15% of American Jews are Jews of color, by the most liberal estimate. So we appear to be white, and we can pass as white. And so we trick real white people into thinking that we're like them, but in fact, we're loyal to black people and brown people and immigrants and Muslims. And if you go and you could see them as deranged, or you could see it as a kind of conspiracy theory when you read the social media postings of the killer in Pittsburgh. Right. The reason that he chose Tree of Life as the synagogue is that the previous weekend, the previous Shabbat Tree of Life, had participated in what was called national refugee Shabbat, in which dozens of synagogues around the country came together to say, we are safe spaces. I hate that language, but we are places that are open to the stranger. And the reason that we are is that one of the core Jewish values is the idea that we should never oppress a stranger because we know what it was to be strangers in the land of Egypt. And that whole initiative was put together by a very, very admirable righteous organization called Highest, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, founded in the 1880s to help settle Jews fleeing Eastern European pogroms and now helps Jewish refugees, but all kinds of refugees and immigrants around the world. And he said in his social media postings and there's lots of expletives, but something along the lines of, screw your optics, I'm going in. These people are bringing in they're selling the country by helping bringing in the, quote, dirty Muslims. So that is the logic behind it. So Jews are kind of the linchpin, in a way of white supremacist thinking, because we're the kind of shadow force being the handmaidens of the people that white supremacists see as sullying white Christian America, if that makes sense. Well, unfortunately, there's very often a kernel of truth embedded in these conspiracy theories. And the kernel of truth here is that, of course, Jews have historically had a very positive attitude towards civil rights and been very supportive of civil rights in the US. And through hard experience learned the consequences of being the victims of jingoistic immigration restrictions. I mean, the most probably shocking case is what happened in 139 with the SS St. Louis. This was a ship that was carrying over 900 Jews who were seeking to escape the Holocaust, and it was denied entry in the US. It was also denied entry in Cuba and Canada and wound up having to return to Europe, where many of these Jews ended up in Auschwitz. Experiences like that, that would explain, apart from just basic human decency around the general problem of refugees, that would explain a positive orientation toward immigration that if you're a white supremacist, you would revile. So we could sort of run to the same thing here on the right with the association between Jews and socialism and communism. There have been very prominent Jews who were supportive of those political movements. And it's kind of a perfect storm of populism and isolationism and conspiracy thinking that's been fed for more than a century with notions of born of fake literature like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And it culminates now and what you refer to as the great replacement theory, which perhaps you want to summarize. The right is organized around a kind of an anti globalist inward turn into nationalism and jingoism and isolationism, and Jews are on the wrong side of that divide, right? And that's a problem like that set up leaving out the Internet and all kinds of other new phenomenon. But that is familiar to us, which is one of the reasons that I think right wing antisemitism is easier to grasp, because we only need to look at our grandparents generation in Europe and what they experienced to understand it. I think it's in our bones, in a way. And I would also just say, speaking of the St. Louis, I don't usually recommend anything on Twitter, but there's this really beautiful moving Twitter account called St. Louis Manifest that actually just tweets out the BIOS of of everyone that was on that ship that I follow that's just really moving, and there's photographs and people want to know more about it. So remind me, what what is the great replacement theory? The great replacement theory is there's a great essay that Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote about it, but it's really this basic idea that summarized by Steve King, which is you can't replace our civilization, as he put it, with someone else's babies. This, to me, is a deeply antiAmerican idea because the ideal of this country is the idea that our civilization is open to anyone who wants to adhere to the ideas of it. It has nothing to do with bloodline. It has everything to do with fealty to a certain set of beliefs. And this whole notion of sort of like blood and soil nationalism that you increasingly see on the right. And that is at the heart of great replacement theory, which is that civilization or culture is somehow something that is passed down in the blood and not something that's passed down through culture and ideas and beliefs is just, to me, deeply anti American. And anyway, that's the idea of it. Yeah, well, and it's mirrored on the left with this notion that racial identity in particular is morally and politically paramount. And anything you would say against, let's say, Islam on the left will be immediately conflated with an attack on people for the color of their skin or the origin of their birth. Whereas it's always, certainly in the context of a conversation like this, a criticism of ideas and their consequences. Right. If I'm going to criticize neo Nazis, I'm not criticizing white people. I'm criticizing terrible ideas. And when I'm criticizing Islamism or Jihadism, I'm not criticizing Arabs or any other ethnicity. I'm criticizing the consequences of ideas. Yes. The fact that people can't track this continues to be bewildering. Yeah, well, part of it is that they can track it, and they're deciding not to. And the other problem, right, is that we have a president who does exactly the opposite. He attacks people not based on their ideas often, but based on immutable characteristics like their race or their gender or their religion. Obviously, that's mutable, but that's part of the problem, is that the second he touches something, it becomes toxic. Let's take a moment to just remind people a little bit more about the history of antisemitism in the US. Because it reaches further back than I think most people realize. So let's just briefly talk about the 1930s and what you do in the book. Well, it's amazing to me that most people my age have never heard of the name Charles Cochrane, but that's a name that if you were at all involved in the Jewish community, that is very, very familiar. He was the radio host, sort of the Rush Limbaugh of his day, I guess. Different, but very, very popular in the same way. Much more popular. I think something like 30 million Americans listen to him every week. He's someone he was a priest who's based in Michigan. He got so many letters that the town he was from actually had to build a new post office to keep up with the amount of mail he received. He was just hugely, hugely popular. And this was something who, you know, told 30 million Americans that the Jews deserved. Crystal Nacht he talked about the Jews as modern shylocks who have grown fat and wealthy. I mean, these are some of the most sort of old, vile antisemitic tropes, and you could hear them on the radio in America in the 1930s. Henry Ford people think of Henry Ford as the automaker, which of course, he was. But he had a Hitler shouted him out in mine comp, he was awarded this thing called the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, which was the highest honor the Nazis gave. And I think there was a short film made about this next thing I'll tell you, which is I really recommend to people at six or seven minutes, and you can watch, you know, 39, 20,000 people showed up at madison Square Garden to raise their arms to HIL Hitler and stood beneath signs saying, you know, smash Jewish communism and stop the Jewish domination of Christian Americans. So that all happened here. And yet still and this is the thing that I find fascinating, I was still very much and I don't know about you, Sam raised on the idea that America was uniquely inoculated from the virus of antisemitism that was just much more natural, or so I was taught in places like France and Germany and England. Yeah, it actually wasn't until I read the book the Abandonment of the Jews by David Wyman, which I think came out in the mid 80s, that I understood just how touch and go the history is here. I mean, you literally had Congressmen giving antisemitic speeches on the floor of Congress while the Holocaust was raging. And we understood the shape of it. I mean, it's mind boggling that the history was what it was. And you could add Charles Lindbergh to the list of prominent figures who got singled out for Nazi accolades. And Charles Cochrane was a Catholic priest. So he links up with a larger trend of Catholic fascism or fondness for fascism and explicit antisemitism. And all of this, of course, is cashed out in Christian theology, both Catholic and Protestant theology. The Protestants are hardly better. Once Martin Luther got an audience, he started raging against the Jews. Really an explicitly eliminationist vein. And you cite some of this in your book, that the New Testament has several verses that seem to justify antisemitism outright. Yeah, the most famous of which is, I think it's in the Book of Matthew, his blood be on us and on our children, which was used to justify untold amounts of violence. It's such a historically bloody line that even Mel Gibson, who right now is making a movie called the Rothschilds, and I'm not kidding, even he in Passion of the Christ, which was Naramaic, didn't translate the verse into English. That's how controversial it's been. But of course, there was Vatican too. And I don't want to undo the amount of progress that's happened because of course it has. Yes. But again, the progress has to grapple with the fact that obviously there's an incoherence here because there are antisemitic lines in the Bible and 2000 years of theologically mandated antisemitism resulted. And yet Jesus and the twelve apostles and the Virgin Mary were all Jews. How there could have been such a durable basis for Jew hatred is a little hard to square. Except for the fact that it really was a kind of Interneting schism. Exactly. In the religion you have Jews who were, in order to maintain their Judaism, had to explicitly reject the Messiah status of Jesus. And that is the founding sin that really is unforgivable if you're a dogmatic Christian. Yeah. The other thing that just going back a bit to American history pieces after Pittsburgh, there was a lot of talk about how there had never been an attack on a synagogue. Actually, there had never been that many people killed in a synagogue. That was true. And it was by far the most violent attack against Jews in American history. Also true. But there had been and this was one of the things I was shocked to find out a lot of attacks on synagogues, a lot, and I sort of go through them in the book. And the ones that stick out to me the most were these sort of spate of attacks specifically targeting civil rights, supporting rabbis in the south, in Mississippi and in Atlanta specifically. And one of the occasions they actually went and I believe bombed the house of the rabbi. That was news to me. I had not grown up learning about that at all. Yeah, there's an ambient level of antisemitic hate crime in the US. And there has always been and I've always been somebody who, as a Jew, have minimized its significance. I mean, it's always felt to me that antisemitism is not a major problem in the US. And even as shocking as the murder of dozens of people in any given year is we're not talking about 911 scale terroristic atrocities against Jews in general. Obviously it could get a lot worse. But the thing to point out is that all of the people who complain about hate crimes against other groups, in particular Muslims in the US. Have been complaining about a level of hate which has always been less than the level of hate crime against Jews. I mean, any given year, if you look at FBI statistics and you look for hate crimes against mosques and Muslims, it's always less than the number of hate crimes against Jews and synagogues. And these are mostly property crimes in most cases. And again, I don't mean to minimize it for the people who suffer it directly, but in a country of 330,000,000 people, the numbers are not that high, but it's generally ignored by I mean, we just we have to make apples to apples comparisons here. If you're going to derange our politics over how awful it's been getting for Muslims in the United States, it would be only decent to notice that the numbers for of the same sorts of insults and crimes against Jews has, for every year since 911 been five acts. Work Teams More if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org. Thank you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with David Benatar. David is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He's the author of a few books Better Never To Have Been, the Harm of Coming Into Existence and most recently, The Human Predicament a Candid Guide to Life's biggest questions. And he's a philosopher whom many of you have wanted me to speak with. I've been getting emails and tweets about him for quite some time. He is perhaps the most prominent exponent of a philosophy called Antinatalism and you will hear much more about that in today's episode. The question for David really is whether or not existence is worth the trouble. And he answers that question with an emphatic no. And this makes for an interesting conversation. As you'll hear, there are a couple of places where our intuitions diverge and I think you just have to pick which intuition you find most compelling there. But we talk about many interesting things. We talk about the asymmetry between the good and bad things in life, the ethics of existential risk, the difference between starting and continuing a life. He sees those as very different. Our built in bias towards existence and how that may confuse us. The relationship between Antinatalism and another position called promortalism. The idea that it would be a good thing if we all died in our sleep. Tonight I talked for a few minutes about my notion of the moral landscape. And we also talk about the the limits and paradoxes of introspection. How viewing your life in a certain way can actually change what there is to notice about your life. And there are many other topics here. Population ethics is a very rich conversation for those of you who like moral philosophy. And it got me to realize at least one thing that resolves for me at least one of the troubling paradoxes in Derek Parfit's philosophy. So I found it a very valuable conversation and I hope you do as well. And now I bring you David Benatar. I am here with David Benatar. David, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Nazi with you. So I've been hearing about you for at least a year. I plead unfamiliarity with your books, but people have been emailing me about you. I think they have read some of your articles and some undoubtedly have read your books, but you have been laying out a philosophy that is quite novel and quite pessimistic and quite interesting that really strikes to the very core of the question, is life worth living? And your answer to that is a resounding no, at least for those who don't yet exist. And no doubt most of what is interesting in moral philosophy can be brought to bear on this question. Before we dive into your philosophy, give us just a kind of a potted history of what you've been doing intellectually and the kinds of questions you've focused on. Well, this is one question that I've sort of revisited on multiple occasions and also examined issues related to it. I suppose my broad interests are in moral philosophy, more specifically in practical ethical questions. But often when I look at the practical ethical questions, I'm interested in the theoretical issues that lie behind them. And I suppose in this area of procreate of ethics, those two come together quite well. But I have written about other topics as well. Another book that I wrote is called The Second Sexism, which is about discrimination against men and boys. And then I've written on a range of practical ethical questions. And you're currently a professor of philosophy? That's correct. In Cape Town. So let's just jump in, because this really is fascinating. You describe your view as antinatalism. Is that a coinage from you, or did that view exist before you started working in this area? I've been asked that question, and quite frankly, I don't know the answer. Whether I coined the term or whether I heard it somewhere, I've tried to do some sort of intellectual archeology to find out whether I did hear it from somewhere else, and I've been unsuccessful. But the idea itself, I think, dates back to much earlier times. One hears it even in ancient times, the idea that it would have been better never to have been born. And a more recent exponent, of course, was Arthur Schopenhauer. So these ideas have been around for a long time, and that doesn't surprise me. Yeah, it's interesting. There's quite a convergence between your view and Buddhism. I'm sure someone must have pointed that out to you at some point. Yes, exactly, they have. Perhaps we'll touch on that because I have a long standing interest in Buddhism and related practices like meditation. So just lay out the argument for antinatalism. Make the case for us at the outset here. Well, perhaps I should clarify what the view is first. So it's the view that we ought not to bring new people into existence, but I think the view is broader that we ought not to bring new sentient beings into existence. Right. So it's not just the view that it's harmful to come into existence, but a further view that it's also wrong to bring beings into existence. And I think there are a range of arguments for this position. Some of them I characterize as philanthropic arguments, and others I think are misanthropic arguments. And here, of course, I'm restricting the scope to bringing human beings into existence, although I think that parallel points might be able to be made about other sentient beings. The original arguments that are advanced are the philanthropic ones, and those really are concerned about the being that you'll bring into existence. And my view is not only that it's always a harm for that being, but that it's also a very serious harm. And given the seriousness of that harm, I think that it's always going to be wrong to create a new being. More recently, I've developed some misanthropic arguments, and those have to do with the harm that the being you're bringing to existence will do to others. And by others I mean other human beings, but also other sentient beings on the planet. So those are two broad kinds of arguments, and although one is philanthropic and the other is misanthropic, I don't think that these two are incompatible with one another. So just to revisit a few of those utterances, unless they blow by and their significance be lost on some of the audience here. So one of the consequences of your view is that it really is a monstrous crime to have children. At a minimum, it's a colossal act of negligence on the part of people who haven't really thought about these issues clearly enough. And it's kind of analogous on your view to ushering souls into hell, because existence is either that bad or there's a high enough probability that it will be that bad that it's just irresponsible to consign people to the fate of existing. That's correct. Of course, hell comes in degrees, so as bad as it is, it can always be worse. And so we need to be careful about that analogy of ushering somebody into hell. But it's a kind of hell. I love this topic, and I think this will be fun to get into the details here and hear some more of your specific arguments. But what has been your experience promulgating this idea or set of ideas? I can imagine the thesis provokes anger in some people, that's for sure. A lot of angry people. Fortunately, not too many of those have made direct contact with me. But one does see a lot of hate mail of a certain kind and a lot of hate comments on the web. But the people who have contacted me tend to be those who have been more sympathetic to my views. And one very common kind of response I've received is from people who've had these sorts of thoughts and felt that they were entirely alone in the world. They thought that they were the only people who thought this, and they've drawn a measure of comfort from knowing that there are others who share that idea. One distinction to make here is between pessimism of the sort that you're expressing and nihilism your view really isn't nihilistic. Do you want to tease those apart? Yeah, you're absolutely right. Many people, I think, mischaracterize the position as the nihilistic position. And I'm not a nihilist. I think that suffering, for example, is bad and that's one of the reasons why I think it's wrong to bring new beings into existence because they're going to suffer and they're going to suffer pretty unspeakably. Nealism here would be that basically nothing matters, right? In a scheme of things, good and bad are just things we make up and the universe doesn't care about us. And therefore it doesn't really matter if conscious minds get ground up in some inferno interminably. That's not your view at all. You want to avoid the inferno and you want to avoid committing the moral wrong of consigning people to it. That's exactly right. Look, I am a nearest of some kind, so if you ask me about whether our lives have cosmic meaning, I'm a Nealist about that. I don't think that they do. But I just don't think that it follows from that that it's okay to inflict suffering on others. I can imagine that people also try to psychologize you. They must think that this view is really not so much the product of a valid chain of reasoning. It's the product of a likely mood disorder. Are you depressed? Is that a diagnosis you must get hurled at you? Yeah, there are lots of people who do exactly that. They try to psychologize it and I think that's exactly the wrong attitude to have. I think one should look at the arguments, examine them on their merits and see whether they stand or fall. But I guess both things could be true. I find the arguments very interesting and we will definitely get into those. But when I heard about you and your emphasis on this position, I did think that your just experience of the world, moment to moment and that would include your mood and everything else about you that can be brought to bear on experience must be coloring the arguments or could be coloring your sense of their veracity or moral import. And I guess I'll tell you about an experience I had and I'm just wondering if there's anything about it that could be relevant to your case. So I had a friend, not a close friend, but someone who I had met many, many times and this was a person who would email me periodically who was suicidal and he had been suicidal for quite some time. At one point he sent an email to everyone in his life saying, I'm going to commit suicide and here's your last chance to talk me out of it. Put that way, it sounds like a kind of macabre and gratuitous appeal for attention. But he was actually just being scrupulous to not kill himself so impulsively that he would leave everyone in his life feeling like if only they had known, they might have been able to do something. So he was going to give everyone his life a chance to reason with him. And it was kind of of a piece with the reasons why he thought he was killing himself. He really thought he had reasoned himself to a position where suicide was not only acceptable, but was really his best decision. And he had a very philosophy. He wasn't a professional philosopher, but he had a very philosophical cast of mind and he was quite smart. And I went back and forth with him a little bit over email mostly. And the experience was one of seeing someone, in my view, mistake his anhedonia, his lack of joy in living moment to moment for a kind of philosophical epiphany. Which is to say if he felt better, if he was feeling more joy, if he was feeling more of a connection to other people, he would have felt that the results of his reasoning on each of those points were less compelling. And I know your argument is not an argument for suicide, it will differentiate antinatalism from that. But I'm just wondering if you feel that if the character of your experience were significantly better moment to moment, if you feel like this philosophical conviction would just kind of evaporate or become so uninteresting to you that it would sort of evaporate. Well, I don't like to talk about myself, so I'm probably just not going to answer that question. But I'll make a few observations. And one is that I ought not to make the assumption that somebody who holds the sort of view that I do is thinking about themself. They may be thinking about themselves as well, but they might be just thinking about everything they see around them in the world. So just if you think about the amount of suffering that's going on in the world at any moment, you have to be precourse and callous to not take that seriously. So it needn't be about one's own experiences, it needn't be about one's own attitudes. It might be sort of sensitivity or an expression of what's going on in the world. So you sort of gave an example that's very self oriented. And what I'm suggesting is that's not the only possible way of looking at things. It's also possible to arrive at these sorts of views by looking outward and looking and seeing what you see around you. Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. And then of course, the other point is that you spoke about him being anodonic, but there are plenty of manic people out there and their views might be colored by their mania. They may be deriving too much pleasure to actually see the world for what it is. Yeah, it's hard to know what is normal here or what is an uncooled lens through which to look at these questions. And there may in fact be no uncolored lens, it may just be lenses all the way in. So let's get into the details of your argument run through the asymmetry argument for me. So there's actually more than one asymmetry argument, but there isn't kind of axiological, asymmetry, I think, between benefits and harms, between the good things and the bad things. And obviously, if we're speaking within a life, the pains that you have, the other harms that you have, these are bad, and the good things that you have, those are good. But if we considering the scenario in which somebody is going to be brought into existence, we have to compare the outcome in which they do from the outcome in which they don't exist. And in the outcome which they don't exist, we have to consider the absent harms and the absent benefits. And I think that the absence of the harms is good even though that person won't exist, whereas the absence of the good things in that life is not going to be bad. And that's because nobody is going to be deprived of those good things. And so the asymmetry is really between the bad and the good in the scenario in which somebody doesn't exist. Okay? So it strikes me I kind of want to run through each piece of that again so that to make sure that I'm not making a mistake here in reasoning. But it strikes me that there's kind of an imbalance here in how you're presenting that. And you could be conjuring the the asymmetry in a way. So you're saying and just point out where I go wrong here. You're saying that the absence of a good life can't be a harm because there's no one who is harmed. There's no person who is deprived of this life. So the absence of goods is not a bad thing, but the absence of a bad life is a good. Here you in my view, you're you're kind of smuggling the absence of existence in as part of the good. You're saying that the prevention of harm is a positive good, even though there is no one who enjoys this absence of harm. Is that where you're kind of putting the rabbit in the hat? Well, a lot of people have suggested that I'm doing that. But the point I'm making here is not so much a metaphysical one as an axiological one. It's about an asymmetry in of values between the good things and the bad things in life. And one of the reasons why I think first of all, I think this asymmetry is actually pretty intuitive, and I think large numbers of people would accept it until they see where it leads. But this basic asymmetry, I think, explains some other asymmetries that many people would endorse. So here's an example. There are large parts of the universe that are uninhabited. There aren't beings. There certainly not sentient beings. And if we think about those uninhabited parts of the universe, we're not filled with, and nor do I think we should be filled with remorse for the absent goods that they are there. So if we think about Mars, for example, where they could be Martians but they aren't, we don't think, gee, think about all that pleasure that those absent Martians could have. Isn't that a terrible thing? We don't think that at all. Whereas think if we think about the absence of, let's say, Martian wars, just like we have wars on Earth, and we think about the absence of all the suffering there, I think we said that's a pretty good thing. It's pretty good that they don't have that there, that there's nothing like that on Mars. That's an advantage that Mars has over Earth, but there's no one who doesn't have those harms. Exactly. But I still think that it's a good thing that there's the absence of that suffering on Mars. Now, I'll grant you that there are many other possible asymmetries here that we should be concerned about. So, for instance, one thing you claim, or at least I think it's implicit in some of your claims, is that there is much more suffering or possible suffering than there is possible happiness, or the depth of it is far greater. And so there's an asymmetry between suffering and happiness that also just swings the balance here. So we'll talk about that. But here, I feel like you're running afoul of my intuitions here. And what you just said about the moral significance of canceling possible goods definitely stands in opposition to the work of every philosopher who is working on what is called existential risk. Now, so you can have philosophers like Will McCaskill who will say that the greatest possible wrong would be to do something which put our species on track for self annihilation. And that would be, in large measure, not because of all the suffering that would be caused, because if we're annihilated in the right way, it could be completely painless. It would be wrong because it would close the door to all of the untold goods that could come from a billion years of creative involvement with the cosmos. If you knew that there was some decision you took today that not only deprived your grandchildren from living the most glorious possible life, they just have a sort of glorious life, but you deprived all of their descendants from even existing and discovering greater depths of beauty. People are persuaded, and I'm one of them, that those hypothetical losses are as real as the hypothetical gain of not suffering if you don't exist. So I think that when we think about human extinction, there's something that clouds people's thinking. And that's why the moment you think about the application of this asymmetry to human extinction, all these other intuitions of the kind bribing come up. That's why the example I gave wasn't about human extinction. It was a base of some other species, let's say, on another planet that could have been there and isn't there. And we don't spend any time worrying about that, nor do I think we should spend any time worrying about the absent pleasures over there. When we think about human extinction, there are some confounding variables. One is the mechanism whereby the extinction takes place. So there's a distinction between whether people sort of die out or whether they're killed off. And so one way in which we could go extinct is through people meeting an untimely end and being killed. But another way is for everybody to die peacefully in their beds and for the human species to have come to an end because there was no more reproduction. And I think a lot of what's going on with people's intuitions is a mixing up of those things. And then I think there's a lot of sentimentality about the human species. There's this idea that it's a wonderful species and we'd like you to be around for a long time, and haven't we discovered and done all sorts of wonderful things and wouldn't be good if that whole trajectory of scientific discovery went on? And there's a kind of sentimentality about having humans around. So I think that those sorts of factors confound our thinking about cases of human extinction. So I would like to move away from those to think of the application of the asymmetry to other cases and see how it works. Granted, some people might be confounded. I don't think I am here. In fact, I think there are a few more things to say about just canceling the human career that are relevant here. But before we do, I just want to linger on this. What strikes me as kind of an asymmetry that is giving you your first asymmetry here, which is you're accruing a good to nonexistent beans on one side of your equation where you're not on the other. Do you not see it that way, or you just think it's justified? No, I do see it that way, but I think it's justified. There is this axiological asymmetry, and I think when you do the calculation that follow from that the cards are stacked against bringing somebody into existence, but it's not an artificial stacking. It's one that makes eminent sense. I guess it's still not making sense to me. So let's just spend a few more minutes on this. So we have a person who could have existed but doesn't. And undoubtedly there are philosophical problems with thinking about possibility as well. Are there these possible things, or are there simply actual things and we're actually just misled by our notion of possibility? But leaving that aside, I might have had a I have two children which already convinced me of a monstrous ethical lapse on your account, but we'll leave that aside. But I have I have decided not to have a third child, you'll be happy to know. So this third child will not experience anything good or anything bad. And on your account, there's no deprivation to him or her for not being brought into existence on account of not getting to do all the good things there are to do. But there is a benefit to not suffering all of the inevitable pains of existence but that benefit doesn't accrue to anyone because no one by this description exists. That's correct. And it's impossible, of course, if the person doesn't exist for them to enjoy the benefit. But when we're looking at scenarios of bringing somebody into existence or not we're having to compare those two cases one scenario in which they do exist and one in which they don't. And if we want to know what's better for that potential person we need to compare the situation in which they do in the situation in which they don't. And we have to compare, obviously, the scenario in which they don't exist to the one in which they do and make the interest judgments relative to the world in which the person does exist. How would this calculation run for you if existence was, on balance, more pleasant and wonderful and creative and beautiful so that every person who comes into existence runs a better than even chance of having a life worth living? But still there are many lives that are not worth living and they come up quite frequently. They just don't overwhelm the lives that are worth living. Then how would you think about it? Well, that very phrase a life worth living I think is ambiguous and I think it's ambiguous between a life worth starting and a life worth continuing. And I think one mistake people make is to not see that ambiguity because I think different standards ought to apply to those two cases. So if at a given time there's more good in your life than bad then your life may indeed be worth continuing? I say may indeed because there's some complexities there that we could revisit later but I think the bar for starting a life is going to be much higher. Let's stick with the starting of life because we'll get on to whether life is worth continuing. Let's just say that we lived in a world where at birth every human being could expect to have a a slightly better than even chance. I mean, basically they're like the house in a casino playing blackjack, right? They have whatever it is a 52% chance of winning. And winning in this case really is winning. Right? There's no downside to winning. It's just the 52% of people who have good lives on balance really do have good lives on balance any way you look at them. And then the 48% of people who don't have negative lives to one or another degree then how would you think about it? Well, I think even the lives that are good on balance there's going to be plenty of bad. But let's just stipulate that we live in a world that's kind of like a coin toss and if the right side of the coin comes up that is a life on balance however you want to aggregate benefits and injuries. So I'm not quite understanding the question here, because if the analogy is sort of winning at blackjack well, when you win, you win. There's no downside to the winning. Whereas when you win in this life lottery that you're speaking about, what I want to get clarity on is, is there no downside? Is this a life of unmitigated good or is there some negative as well? And from what you said, I was understanding, you ought to be saying that there is some bad as well. It's just that on balance, it's good. I guess there could be some bad. But it is in the case of the lucky life, it is outweighed by the good so that each of your pains are manageable enough that when your pleasure comes around, you always feel that it was worth it. And let's just say that you're right to feel that we've tuned the luck of lucky minds in such a way that life is really good and pain does not overwhelm pleasure. Okay? You see, when you say that you think it's worth it, are you saying it's worth it to have come into existence or that it's worth it to continue existing? I am without granting you that distinction because I'm not sure I agree that exists, but we'll get there for the purposes of this point in the conversation, I'm talking about coming into existence so you don't exist, and I give you the opportunity to exist. And if you were one of the lucky ones, you would find yourself in a circumstance that was well worth your time. Well, that I think, is a confusion. I grant you that there are many people who say, I'm glad I was brought into existence because I think on balance, it's better that I'm around. I think I'm getting more good than I am getting bad. But I just think that people who hold that view have not thought carefully enough about what the question is. I think that because they already exist, they biased towards the condition in which they already exist. And so what they're actually asking themselves without realizing it is, is my life worth continuing? But I don't think there's any life that's worth starting, and I think there's no life that's worth starting because of this. Asymmetry surely you would grant that if existence were much, much better than it is. In fact, you could imagine a life worth living, right? What if existence just had no suffering at all in it, right? It was just one leap from creative height to another, and every moment was more interesting than the last. So I've considered that possibility, and I think in that scenario we should be indifferent between coming into existence and not. But I got to say that that scenario you've imagined is actually pretty hard to imagine in practice. Hard to imagine any real. Such life. But yes, if we're thinking about hypothetically, a hypothetical life where you come into existence and there's nothing bad about that, then I would say I've been different between that. And I think we should be indifferent between coming into existence in that condition and not coming into existence at all. That is a novel view that I have never considered. I'm wondering whether to focus there for a moment before going on to capture some of these loose threads. Let's spend a moment on that. If I posit a kind of Godlike paradise for all conscious beings, right? So there really is just there's nothing wrong in the universe. Anything that you can say is wrong. Like there's a little ache and pain over here, there's a little dissatisfaction over here. I will just cancel that by saying no, those are moments where there's more pleasure flooding in there and more even deeper sense of meaning, even deeper gratification of one's intellectual life. And these are beings who are far more competent than you and I are. To judge the character of their experience. They've had a billion years to consider the matter, and they're still happy to be here. Imagine minds constituted like that. Why should we be indifferent to that? And the primordial dial tone of nonexistent. See, I think what's dividing us here is the asymmetry. Because if you think there is the asymmetry that I'm defending, then you'll say, well, there's nothing bad in that Edenic life that you're speaking about, but there's also nothing bad in the situation of nonexistence. So they're there equal. Now you'll say, but in Eden there are all these pleasures. And I say, that's great, because if you're in Eden, it's good that you have those pleasures, because your life would be worse without them. But if you've never existed, the absence of those pleasures is going to mean nothing to you. You won't be there, you won't care about it. It doesn't matter that there's not a being that's having those pleasures. So if you think about Adam and Eve and then some third character that could have been there this is before the fall, obviously, and you say, well, is it a pity that there's not some additional being here that's not enjoying Eden? No, I don't think there's anything bad about that. And I think there's an indifference, and there should be an indifference. I can see that there's nothing bad about it because there's no one to suffer the absence of those pleasures and insights. But again, by the same token, I'm not convinced that you can make the other move you're making, which is to say that there's something good about not having the suffering imposed on you if you don't exist. If you don't exist, you can't feel the relief of not being tortured because you don't exist. So I feel like there's a symmetry there of just non being. Let's come back to your third possible child. Let's imagine you were thinking about having a third child, and you did some genetic tests and you found out that this child that you could have would lead a life that even by your standards is one of great suffering. And so you decide, well, we're not going to go ahead with this third child. We're not going to have this third child. Do you think that would be a good thing? Yes. And do you think you've got a reason to avoid bringing that child into existence? But the reason is one which is predicated on the existence of the child and therefore the existence of his or her suffering. We're talking here about the absence of a wrong that I'm not committing by bringing this guaranteed to suffer person into existence. So you're imagining some scenario in which this child does exist and is leading a life of suffering, and you say, Well, I've got a reason to avoid that. Right. Now, let's imagine that you're thinking of having this third child and you do the tests and everything's fine. And so it could turn out like your other children are. I don't know your children, I hope they're doing well as well as can be, but let's imagine they're doing well in the third child. The probabilities that it'll be like that, let's just say on their worst afternoons, they'll confirm everything you fear about the nature of existence by your children. They can complain about the most insubstantial things, and you'd be amazed at how much anguish can be provoked by having the television turned off prematurely. Right. But let's imagine that this third child would lead a happy life by your standards. Right. Do you have a reason to bring that child into existence? Well, let's leave aside all the other reasons that no doubt you've considered just, you know, their effect on other people, their effect on me, all that just so just localizing the benefit to the person? Yes, I think so. I think that there's I mean, this this comes down to population ethics and topics that I hope will touch, but there is a kind of more is better principle here when you're talking about good lives. These are all fascinating questions, and they connect to more or less everything that's fascinating. So I'm just trying to resist the slide into philosophy here, but it seems to me that much of what you're saying about bringing people into existence does in fact apply to the continuing existence of existing people. I know you draw a clear line of demarcation there. I'm not so sure you can. And I think this is an additional problem for me here. So how is it not analogous for me to say, well, I have a child and there was something very, very good that could have happened to her. I could have secured some benefit for her that she doesn't know about, but I declined to do that. Right. So she has the life she has, but I could have given her the super enhanced life with really very little effort on my part. You're talking about an existing child. An existing child. But I declined to do that. So now she has her life as it was and was going to be, but it could have been otherwise. And I, for quite capricious reasons of my own, you know, because I didn't want to spend 10 seconds to sign a form or click a button on a website. She does not have this extraordinarily positive thing happen for her, and she doesn't know about it. Right. So has she been wronged in any way? And I think most people's intuitions would be yes. And yet, on your account, I'm wondering if I could say that, well, we're talking about a case of an existing child here, and I think there are all kinds of other complexities about this case. Whether she had some entitlement to your bestowing, this benefit. There are all kinds of questions of that kind. But you are speaking about an existing child, and so I would say that this child is worse off without this benefit having been bestowed. So whether you've wronged her is another question. But she's worse off than she would have been if you had bestowed this benefit. But I don't think that a parallel claim can be made about a child that you don't bring into existence, although if it had come into existence, it would have had certain benefits. I think the absence of those benefits because it doesn't come into existence is not bad. And it's not bad because it's not deprived, whereas your existing child will be deprived of this benefit you could have given. Another point of confusion for me here is that you acknowledge a spectrum of experience ranging from the very, very positive to the very, very negative. But when you take the zero point of nonexistence, you say that we should be indifferent between zero and the very, very positive, whereas we shouldn't be indifferent between zero and the very, very negative. The very, very negative is worse, obviously, and we should avoid it, and we should choose zero every time over the very, very negative. But we should be indifferent to zero over the very, very positive. But I'm not quite sure how that would work in practice. So imagine if we were sliding down the ramp of hedonic experience. We start at the very, very positive, and life gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse until it gets truly neutral. And maybe there's other forms of neutral beyond the lights going out, but at least one form of neutral is not having any discernible experience. And then we just keep on sliding and things get a little bit bad and a little bit worse, and all of a sudden we're in hell. It seems to me that if you're going to preserve the logical integrity of that spectrum, you have to acknowledge that better really is better than nothing. Again, I don't think that it is. This assignment of zero that you're proposing is something that I've anticipated before. And I've got an analogy to to deal with a case like of course, it's an only an analogy. It can't be a like the case that we're speaking about in every respect. But I imagine these two people one is we call him sick and the other we call healthy. And sick gets sick. But he's also got some attribute whereby he recovers quickly from his sickness. Healthy never gets sick. I mean, never, never, ever gets sick. But he lacks the attribute of quick recovery. So if h were to were to get sick, he wouldn't quickly recover. It would be a very slow, very slow recovery. Now, what I want to say about sick is that that capacity for quick recovery, that that's good and it's good for sick, but the absence of that capacity in the healthy person is not a net disadvantage over sick because he never has any need for that. Right? I think we should say a similar thing about these scenarios about existing and nonexisting and that these absent pleasures are not bad relative to the other scenario. In other words, they're not a net disadvantage in comparison with the scenario in which the person exists. So I want to resist that sort of attribution of, let's say, zero to the absence of the pleasures or the absence of the good things in life if they're the absent good things of a non existent person. So not all of my intuitions are being conserved here. I will say here on this point, your view is especially Buddhist and for people who might be surprised by that and I don't know how familiar you are with Buddhist philosophy, but I'll just say that on the Buddhist account, existence is the problem. And they have this obviously this view of rebirth and karma and there's what's called a wheel of becoming life after life. You just can't get off this wheel unless you become fully enlightened. Enlightenment consists in no longer being subjected to this continuous cycle of rebirth. There's obviously very good reason to doubt that picture of existence scientifically. But the core of the ethical view there and the soteriological view, the view of what it means to be free is that existence has this intrinsically unsatisfying character. And this is for reasons that we really haven't gone into yet. It's just the fact that everything is impermanent. Your pleasures, no matter how good, always fall away and you're left with more of a search for pleasure. There's a kind of an intrinsic dissatisfaction even in satisfaction. It wouldn't be bad if no one existed. And the fact that people exist in a circumstance that is perfect to frustrate the search for happiness and well being is the problem. And enlightenment is the act of canceling all of the mental properties that would cause one to continually be reborn into existence. So your view is very Buddhist without offering the methodology of enlightenment or unless you do that, and I don't know about it or the odd metaphysics of reincarnation. Exactly. Yeah. But there are a few other wrinkles here in Buddhism, and one is that it's possible, through a really deep engagement in methods like meditation, to come to a kind of equanimity that equalizes pain and pleasure to a remarkable degree and to find a kind of intrinsic wellbeing in just the nature of consciousness. And that does make some of this some of the Buddhist view that I just described somewhat paradoxical. I mean, it's not the problem of existence can really go away to a remarkable degree on the Buddhist account. That's all just a long way of saying that your view is in very good standing with certain trends in in Eastern philosophy, and it just doesn't capture everything they say. But let's take this distinction between the possible lives and the existing lives and their interests, because I'm not so sure you're conserving my intuitions there. Why would it be a bad thing for everyone to die tonight, painlessly in their sleep? Let's just picture what this entails. So everyone goes to sleep none the wiser. They don't know this is their last day on Earth. There's been no dread in anticipation of the lights going out, but everyone, based on some bad luck or good luck, depending on your view, dies painlessly in his or her sleep. So there's no bereavement. There's no experience of this. There's just the lights going out in 7 billion brains all at once. What could be wrong with that? Well, I think that those of us who do exist have an interest in continuing to exist. We've got an interest in not being annihilated. And the scenario you are presenting is one in which we are annihilated. Why do we have an interest in being reborn tomorrow from the womb of sleep if existence is, as you say, such that bringing people into it is a terrible crime? Well, I think the analogy is not correct. I don't think we are reborn. We reborn in a metaphorical sense, but not literally. I think there are all kinds of things that are going on in our sleep. We're continuing to exist in a kind of dispositional state. Our interests in continuing to live are surviving through that period of sleep, as are many of our desires and our preferences. And I think if we die in our sleep, one of our interests and very important interests, at least one, if not many of them, have been thwarted. I can't see how we have any more interest than a new being would. Again, you have to imagine just canceling all of the usual problems with people dying, right? They don't know they're going to die, so there's no imposed suffering in advance, and there's no one around to suffer their loss. There's no grief. There's not even a single neuron in a single brain disposed to grieve about what's happened because no one knows that it will happen and no one's around to know that it has happened. How is that not analogous to someone not coming into existence on the next day? Because somebody who doesn't exist, I think, has got no interest in coming into existence, but somebody who already exists has got an interest in not ceasing to exist. Now, one thing I should add here is that I think these two views are separable. In other words, the asymmetry argument that I've given before and the argument that I'm giving you now, these are two separate arguments. So it's possible for an antinatalist to also be a promotionist of the kind that you're suggesting. So if somebody thinks that a painless death or they say death itself is not bad for the person who dies, and then we add all the stipulations that you've added. If somebody thinks that, then they say there's nothing wrong with the scenario. There's nothing bad about the scenario you've described. But that's a separate view from the tree that I've been presenting. So you can have the asymmetry that I presented earlier, and then you can either couple that with a view I'm offering now about ceasing to exist, or you needn't couple it with that. That's precisely the point. I don't see how you can keep them apart if existence has the character that you say that it has. And I would grant you, you're on very firm ground thinking that pains are worse than pleasures and that there are more of them, and we can talk about that. But if it really is bad to be brought into the world, and not just a little bad, it's really, really bad, then I don't see how that doesn't extend to the moral character of waking up the next day. And if I can give you a situation where there are no ancillary harms accrued by somebody dying. And implicit in everything you're saying about existence is the claim that all of these canceled goods of future people don't mean anything, right? I mean, there's no moral weight to place on all the good things that could have happened had humanity continued, because these are hypothetical goods that accrue to no one. How is it that having everyone die painlessly in their sleep wouldn't be on your account, a good thing, and in fact, perhaps the best possible thing we could imagine having happened? Like, if you could do it, if you could push that button, you wouldn't be a moral hero. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today I am speaking with Bill Maher and Larry Charles. Bill, you all know, I trust you know him principally from his HBO show Real Time, which I've been on a few times over the years. Bill is certainly one of our most politically engaged comics. He still does a ton of stand up and he's also an executive producer on Vice Media, on HBO and just a super productive guy. The occasion of this podcast was the 10th anniversary of his documentary Religious, which was directed by my other guest, Larry Charles. Now, Larry has been hugely influential in comedy. He wrote for The Seinfeld Show for the first five seasons. He also directed Sasha Baron Cohen's films Borat and Bruno. He's also worked on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage. He's just one of the 800 pound gorillas of comedy and also a very nice guy. I'd never met him before, but it was a real pleasure to sit down with him. And because we were celebrating the 10th anniversary of Religious, the first half of our conversation or so is focused on the film. So I think you'll enjoy that part more if you've actually seen the film. It's not that you'll have no idea what's going on if you haven't, but I recommend that you watch it. It's very funny. And again, even if you've seen it before, you just can't believe where people are at. On the topic of religion, it's really quite a view of the human mind, but otherwise we touch several other topics. We're mostly focused on the state of comedy and public conversation in general and politics. It was fun to have an excuse to get these guys on the podcast. And now I bring you Bill Maher and Larry Charles. So I'm here with Bill Maher and Larry Charles, which is quite an honor. We've never met, Larry, so I'm going to start with you, Bill. You actually need no introduction on my show. I will introduce you, but people out there going, larry, I think a bigger fan of yours than I realized because I read your bio in preparation for this conversation and realize that you've touched half of comedy in a very inappropriate way. So give us your potted bio me from Seinfeld on, because it is, I think, from Seinfeld. I thought that I was going to be a showrunner and make a lot of money and do that, and I did that for a few years, and it was a lot of fun, but I wasn't feeling any fulfillment at a certain point. And Larry David at one point came to me. I kind of had thought about directing for a long time. I was giving up on that dream as I sort of reached about 40, and Larry David literally came to me as he was doing Curb Your Enthusiasm, he was starting that show and said, hey, why don't you direct one of these? And I became a director, so I'm a very lucky person. And from there I met Bob Dylan, which is a long story, but we wound up collaborating on a script. We made a movie, but while we were writing the script, I was thinking, I'd go home every day and go, I should be directing this movie. How am I going to ask Bob Dylan to direct this movie? And one day I just kind of blurted it out and he went, okay. And then I directed directed that movie, and then I moved in that direction. I never made as much money again, but I wound up doing a lot of cool things, like religious as a result. You didn't make money on Borat? No, nobody made money on Borat, believe it or not. I mean, I made some money on Borat eventually, but I was paid pretty much the minimum to do that movie. That movie wasn't even going to get made. I mean, they didn't know what they had, but it was done in a very low budget. We need to fire your attorney, who we named him somebody met him, they're long gone. So curb your enthusiasm as well. Yes, but you've also dealt with a lot of great religious themes on Curb Your Enthusiasm as well. So we're here. The happy occasion is the 10th anniversary of religious. Was it 911 that put religion as a problem on your radar in a way that it hadn't been? Or had you been vocally worried about it prior to then? Well, I think that's somewhat covered I watched the religious. I hadn't seen it really since we made it. So I tend not to look back at my work because all you could do is obsess on I should have said this, I should have said that, I shouldn't have said this, but I think we did cover it in there that I was raised Catholic and never liked that very much. My father stopped going to Mass when I was a teenager, which was a hallelujah moment for me. And then for just the longest time, I didn't have Catholicism for sure, and I wasn't religious, but I didn't really think about it that much, and I just had God in my life as like when I got in trouble, oh please God, get me out of this one. I was one of those guys, but into your forty s, I think you say, yeah. And then at some point, that became ridiculous. And I realized I was making a fool of myself and just said full on and I don't know if 911 I don't remember that having a giant impact on me religious. Wise. But but in terms of your perception of it being a social problem that you had to comment on now, you had to be a vocal atheist talking about Islam and right. That certainly did move that to the forefront. Of course, it also caused me to lose the show as a forum. But we weren't off the air right away. We were on for another nine months. And those are my favorite nine months of Politically Incorrect because we were able to do a more serious kind of show. And we did talk the country was in a more serious mood and we were able to not do the show with Caratop and Pauly Shore and do ones with State Department officials and people like yourself. I didn't realize that it took nine months to that. Yes. The tragic events of 917, as we called it when I said the things that got me fired, that we didn't go off the air till the end of June 2002. How did it gain traction after nine months? Was there a continuous drumbeat to whistle you? I was never mad at ABC for canning us because it's a broadcast network and the advertisers did pull out. I was just mad at them because they lied and said we lost our viewership and our ratings, and our ratings never went down. The audience was not mad at me. We should remind people of what happened here. So you said the most frequent slur was that they were cowards. The 911 hijackers. Well, Dinesh D'Souza was the one who said it, and then I concurred, of course, he was at a cab when the controversy came. He did not want to be involved, but he was the one who said, these are he went on a whole rant about it. And I said, yeah, you're right. Strictly speaking, there is not a moral dimension to this. They stayed with the suicide mission. That's not cowardly. And then we were more cowardly. We meaning the society, not the military. That's what my enemies chose to interpret it as. But everyone knew I didn't mean that we were cowardly. Lopping cruise missiles from thousands of miles away. And that was the end of that. But, yeah, we were on for another nine months. And those were good months. Those were good times. Did they hassle you during that time, ABC? I mean, did you know that eventually it was going to come to an end? I'm surprised also to hear that it went on nine months. I don't think that's people's perception no, I thought it just the guillotine came down. Right. No, we had a contract and it was really to the end of the year, but then we all agreed I wanted to get onto the next show. I knew there was no future there. And I think one newspaper column referred to it as Dead Show Walking. Right. Which is what it was. But it was a good Dead show walking. It liberated you in a way. In a way, yes, it did. Yeah. So now, have you guys been professionally connected before? Religious or how did you guys no, we did not know each other personally. We had a lot of overlap in terms of friends and colleagues, but we had never hung out or met. And the great thing was, once we did, it was like it was very natural, as if we had known each other all those years. And I interviewed a number of directors, but I wanted to make a comedy. And, you know, as I watched this movie last night, I realized, boy, this could have gone terrible with a director who didn't fit it. But, I mean, this is it was the movie I wanted to make. But it really is like any movie, it's a director's movie. Larry made this movie with the cuts and the pacing, and there's a lot we worked on it together, but post production, I give him so much credit because there's so much funny stuff that is the result of these quick intercuts and juxtapositions and just the structure. And it's not a job. Most jobs in showbiz is, I think, yeah, I could do that. I couldn't do that. I can't be a director. Well, thank you. But I think again, not to throw it back at you, but it was an amazing collaboration and a great synthesis of our sensibilities and one of the greatest projects I ever worked on, also. Yeah, it was a joy from beginning to end. We did it with abandon. We had so much fun doing it. Counting that I'm a terrible traveler, I don't like traveling, especially overseas. But having said all that, I'm so glad we did it. And thanks for celebrating it with us. Yeah, so I just watched it again as well. I hadn't seen it since it's been close to ten years since I'd seen it. And we were talking about this just before we turned the mics on. The comedy holds up, and that isn't often true. I would say probably half the time I go back to some cherished comedy to watch with my wife, who may not have seen it, or with one of my daughters. It's just a stark encounter with the idiot you used to be or sometime some age of the earth that has elapsed. Everything just moves faster. Yeah. Try to watch a Hitchcock movie we just did last night. We walked out of north by northwest. Walked out and that's the best one. North. You couldn't get through north. It wasn't terrible, but it was just we've learned a lot about making movies in the intervening people just had their brains. This is your field. You're a neuroscientist. People's brains must have just been different because they were perfectly okay with things moving so much. Glacial. Glacial. I watched The Man Who what's? The Hitchcock movie he made. Like The Man Who Knew Too much. Yes. And it is glacial. That is the word for it. It's like, really, nothing goes on. It's so subtle. It's like, wow. All I kept thinking as I was suspense. Yes. People were different. Very different. Also, there was fake kissing that I never noticed before. The fake kissing isn't even an attempt to simulate real kissing. They just touch their faces together. Neither is violence. Right. We have too much violence now, and it's too graphic. But then it was ridiculous. People are being killed without any struggle and no blood, almost. Especially Indians, of course, Westerns. But that's another subject, I think, if I may. I think the reason that religious is still fresh, there's a number of really good reasons. For the first one, we're drawing on a thousands of year old tradition with religion. So in a way, it's kind of classic. Classic subject that had never been touched, humorously, satirically in a nonfiction setting. I mean, Life O'Brien is a brilliant movie also, but it's a fictional movie, and there have been other fictional comedies about religion. There had never been a nonfiction comedy, never been a documentary that tried to even be funny. How many documentaries are funny? So we had a very ambitious agenda, as it turned out, to tackle religion, be funny about it, and make a funny documentary. And so the subject matter was always ripe and never tapped into. And as we know, not enough has changed since the movie has been made, so that those jokes still resonate today to a large degree. And also the subject matter. We were ahead of the subject matter. I cited the stat on my show last Friday, that when we made the movie, 16% of people said in the Pew poll that they were of no religion. And now that is in some polls as high as 26%. So, in a way, the movie is ten years old and the public is still catching up to it. That's true. The subject. Right. So Bill referenced the technique you use of intercutting archival images, and it's pretty interesting because some of the shots that are landed against the interview subject are landed off camera. Right. So you're amplifying the fund that's being had at the person's expense. I mean, some of the blows land on camera because you and your interviews are pretty for the most part, I would say that's true. Yeah. But sometimes the person will be lying and you'll be subtitling their lives like, he didn't he's not a doctor. To cut away for 1 second to an old movie that just completely forgotten. I was laughing out loud. And in the case of people that are getting abused after the fact, we were very careful with our targets and the targets are hypocrites and liars. And would you love to do that in all of life? To be able to subtitle when people are bullshitting you? So I felt like that was all justified. It was funny and it was pointing out our basic itinerary on this journey, which was religion is really built on a lot of hypocrisy and lies and we were able to illuminate that constantly through the movie. Yeah. So I don't think the viewer ever feels like you unless they happen to be religious, I would imagine, but I don't think the viewer ever feels that you take an unfair shot at the targets. But I can imagine the targets did. Now, how are you just not trailing 1000 lawsuits with shooting a film? I guess probably even worse, the Sasha Baron Cohen stuff, right? Well, in both cases you have people sign releases beforehand and people don't read the fine print, frankly. And it says we could do anything we want with what we're about to shoot. And that's what we do. We do anything we want with it. So we try to stay ethical and we try to stay above board. But the fact is that usually the purpose of the interview, both with Bill and even with Sasha, was to illuminate some sort of underlying truth that's being concealed. And it takes sometimes interrogation techniques, comic interrogation techniques, as Bill uses so expertly, like with the senator, you see people who are saying things they know are not true, but they're stuck because they're going to get voted out of office and he doesn't let them off the hook. And that's one of the great things about him as a questioner, as an interviewer. So I felt like, yeah, this has to be hard hitting, but it'll pay off because it'll be really super funny. Also, I also was struck as I watched it, that it is so not mean spirited. Right. Because we're having a good time and we're laughing. And even when there's a number of times when I'm basically saying to somebody, in a way you're a fool or an idiot, I say to that Zeus guy, he said, no, really? Yes. And we looked it up. He wasn't resurrected. He was the second coming of Christ. And yet he died again, okay, this time of like liver failure or something. But he's jesus, Miranda. And I say, maybe you're the second coming of Carmen Miranda. You should have fruit on your head instead of fruit in your head, which is a terrible insult. But he's laughing. He was a good sport. He was the guy who sued us, the member, if you don't know me by now, singer, right, that's right, the preacher. Preacher with the winery. I'm insulting him, but it's with a laugh and he's laughing. And it just makes you think they all know it's a crack. They're selling the invisible product. I often tell people, because people say that I thought the people I believe that the Vatican needs to be dissolved. You need to sell off the assets. I mean, there's no way back from what's going on in the Catholic Church right now. But the most intelligent people we might have talked to in the entire journey were the priests at the Vatican. The Vatican priests were all PhDs, all know what's going on. Really smart guys. The guys who define for us where religion begins and where science begins and why they can overlap, they were very rational men who have to sell this thing to the masses. And the one guy who we see outside the Vatican but he's the one who took us in for that amazing tour. Exactly. You got kicked out of the Vatican. We weren't supposed to be in there in the first place. That guy who we see who's saying to me that when I say, doesn't this make you think? Oh, of course. Everything makes me think this is a croc. I mean, he was so upfront about it. He should have been hosting this movie. He was great. He was the Vatican Latinist. Latinist, yeah. He translated the letters either from Latin to English or English to Latin. Maybe both, but that was his job. He lived down the hall. We were in that hallway. No, I remember him telling us that he met the Pope the first week he was Pope in 1979 and hadn't seen him or talked to him since. That is how much the Pope carried. We also drank with him up there. Yes, we did. We all took a couple of shots from his model. Yeah, he looked like he was practiced in the arts, but he was quick to say, Christmas is ridiculous. Jesus here. He wouldn't live with the Vatican. He'd live out in the hills with the poor people. He was an iconoclast, standing right there in front of the Vatican and even said, People need their stories. Yeah. I mean, that's the ultimate mask drop, to say people need their stories. That's the magician going, See, the dub is right here. He was like a pen and teller of the Vatican priest. There was one guy you legitimately hated, though. That the rabbi who at one point you make the Holocaust joke. You say, Rabbi? Never again. I don't know who was you off camera. Larry off camera says something like, let's just get and you said, no, I'm out. I can't wait another second. Get a word in edgewise. Also, he had just met with Amma dinnershad. He did not think the state of Israel should exist. Right. And that the Holocaust was justified because the Jews had not been holy enough. So there was a lot to not like about him. Yeah. And he was unpleasant. He didn't present it in a charming way, his point of view. He had this insane verbal tick where he would say, don't interrupt me. Even in those moments where you had interjected your question in an appropriate silence where you had not interrupted him whenever you started, he would say, don't interrupt me. You interrupted his thoughts. Yeah. Bill, you cover your background a little bit. You actually have the same surprising fact in your bio that Hitch did, that you discovered your mother was Jewish late in life. How old were you? 13. hitchhi hitch was older than that. He was an adult when he learned this. You're technically Jewish according to the Jews they ever tried to coerce? Many times, and that always bothered me that other people are going to tell me what my religion is. And my mother was not a practicing Jew either, so it was culturally Jewish, and that's fine. And I'm a big supporter of the state of Israel, blah, blah, blah, but I never set foot in the temple. To this day, all my memories of religion are from Catholicism. And as my mother states in the beginning of the movie and that is always the highlight of the movie, my mother, for me, because she's just so funny. And when I asked her, first of all, big shock for me and my sister, we found out why. This is the first time we ever asked her, why did dad quit going to church? Because of birth control. We thought they weren't doing it anyway. We didn't think that was an issue. But when she basically said, yeah, we didn't think we needed to tell you, and we thought some structure was better than none, I thought that was very telling of the thought process of that era, that no structure was just not to be considered. She was certainly not a Catholic, although she pretended to take Catholic lessons. This was 1951, so she could marry my father. But, yeah, just you needed some some religion in your life. That was what I took away from that one. I don't believe him, and that's not good, but it's better than nothing. And that's so different than what we were saying, which is certainly not better than nothing. Nothing better. That's still a very common notion. But it was funny just to realize that you hadn't figured out that she wasn't going to church with you for a reason. It was like a kind of a family secret that wasn't even the open, but you hadn't even noticed that it was a phenomenon so telling of why kids put up with anything in childhood, because whatever, you're so young, you have nothing to compare it to, so whatever is the norm, you just think for you, that's normal. And that's why kids don't report abuse and a thousand other things, because it's just always gone on. I just never thought about it. Mom never went to church. She stayed home. My sister and my father and I went, and that was it. And then it just came up in conversation one Christmas when I was 13. And because I'm Jewish, well, that does explain a lot. So, Larry, what about your background? Do you have a religious indoctrination you're repelling? I think what Bill said, first of all, is really important because I think you see a lot of adults today who are very bright, very intelligent, very rational people, but they cling to this crazy idea because they have been indoctrinated as children. And even though it doesn't make sense to their adult self, that childhood part of their brain clings to this idea of God. And somehow there being some order, it's very, very hard to let go of. My parents were a secular Jews. I grew up in Brighton Beach and was sent to the local Hebrew school which happened to be a very Orthodox Hebrew school. So I was immersed with these very Orthodox rabbis who were like mean, like nuns hitting you and shutting down any discussions and punishing you and sending you into the big dark temple to sit by yourself and think about what you had done. So I kind of was really into the ritual and the darkness and the weirdness of it. But I also knew right off the bat very early on during the bar mitzvah lessons that it was kind of nonsense and it was kind of ridiculous. And I was into it on one level and I was also kind of stepping out of it. And by the time the bar mitzvah comes along and my father would constantly remind my father had a lot of very reductionist philosophies of life like do unto others and then split. That was one of his favorites. And he said, do the bar mitzvah and get the checks. Like that was his thing about the bar mitzvah. There was no spiritual dimension to it, right? So, like a lot of kids, we did the bar mitzvah, we got the checks. And I never went back into the temple after that. And most of my friends never went back either. Now, I notice in adulthood that a lot of people are sort of starting to drift back because I think we were talking about a little bit about getting older, and the fear starts to set in, and I see people starting to drift back in in a kind of way that they feel comfortable with, but still drifting back to the things that they rejected in religion. Sometimes these are the same people who start watching Fox News when they get into their sixty s. I haven't noticed that phenomenon. Really? Oh, I have. I could name names. Some you would recognize because they're famous people who I knew 1520 years ago as Hollywood liberals. Hadn't seen them in a long time, talked to them. Number one person actor, you'd know who it was and was telling me a couple of years ago not only did Obama ruin America, he did it on purpose. I'm like what? I thought you were blank. Blank. All I could think is, yeah, he started watching Fox News that happens. That's a thing for people of a certain age, people looking for comfort in some way. And those are the things that give people comfort because they give you answers. Even though you may know on some level they're false answers, it's still answers and it helps you sort of move on, I guess. It's interesting to think about how the landscape has changed in the intervening years. I think it was changing incrementally, as you point out in that poll result, that it seemed like secularism was winning some steady gains. That atheism was far more public. And I was getting the sense that people were more visibly embarrassed by you weren't meeting the same kind of bible thumper and then we were making clear gains politically on things like gay marriage. It was unthinkable. We had a brief moment of it in California, then it got rolled back and then all of a sudden it was the law of the land in like 15 minutes and you got the sense that even fundamentalist Christians weren't poised to fight that particular culture war issue again. And then Trump happened and it's like religion is just kind of a variable we don't even have to talk about and yet quietly behind the scenes, religious fundamentalists are getting a lot of what they want out of Trump and it's, it's like it's off, you know, it's off my radar. I'm not spending time talking about Christian theocracy. Occasionally I'll hit the topic of Islam when something blows up, but it's kind of all Trump all the time. And yet out of the corner of my eye I'm seeing the stealth theocrats in the US just quietly kind of build their kingdom in in a larger sense we are becoming my analogy would be Saddam under Iraq where a minority was ruling over a majority. The majority of this country is liberal but because it's rigged, it actually is on their part with the electoral College, with gerrymandering, with voter suppression. I mean, look at the Supreme Court as we see this play out in these weeks. The Supreme Court should be seven liberals because two people were appointed under George Bush who did not win the popular vote. Exactly. People forget that and now Trump has gotten two. So if the right person, if we had direct election, which we should, and the will of the people had put Al Gore and Hillary Clinton into office, the Supreme Court wouldn't even be in question. So in that sense, yes, you're right. The right wing and the evangelicals have enormous power, but they are a minority who are now this is very dangerous for America as it was a seething Pot under Saddam and Iraq you had two thirds of the country who were Shiites ruled over by a third Sunnis. And we're like a two thirds liberal country that's now going to be ruled what we are. We own nothing power wise by this minority right wing base. And. They are your right getting everything they want. I think, if I may, I think there's like two forces at work. Also to me, it seemed like from the day that Obama was inaugurated, the hate began to build and the backlash was just it was going to erupt in some way. And I think trump is that eruption to some degree. I think also the evangelicals in the christian right made a conscious decision somewhere along the line that they're tired of losing and they want to win and they will win at any cost, and they're willing to abandon all of their morality, their false morality, to win, and that's what they've done and they've won. So I agree with Bill. I think this minority has kind of amassed itself and organized itself in such a way to really, as you called it before, a kind of a slow coup. Yeah, they keep their eye on the ball. They know how to organize on the local level, which they have done. They had a plan from 30 years ago to put this guy in the supreme court, the heritage foundation. They groom these people. They put them up through the system. They clerk for other judges. They know exactly what they're doing from the beginning. Well, what are the liberals doing? We're having a big gathering. Okay? We gathered. We got our pussy hats on. We don't do that nuts and bolt stuff. We got to learn how to do that better if there's time, because it may be over now. I mean, we may never get it back. Power begets power, as we see with kavanaugh probably going on the court. How long is that going to last? For a long time. Yeah. It's a real concern that the left has pendulum swung into identity politics and its own kind of almost theocratic sensoriousness around speech and white privilege and male privilege. And it's not to say those things don't exist and they're obviously appropriate targets of outrage with respect to every one of those variables. But it is liberal outrage now or leftist outrage now is such a blunt tool that is hitting everything with the same force. You can see how that it's just if you call enough non racist, racist enough, at a certain point they're going to say, well, fuck you, I'm going to vote for trump too. It's like you're not my party anymore. And also, if I may, as bill pointed out, I mean, we don't need to worry about Russian meddling. They have meddled with the elections all these years, using the supreme court, the gerrymandering, all these different things were used. The electoral college to guarantee the republicans would have a larger percentage of the voters than they really earned. So I think the system is so broken, it seems like who's going to fix that? Just if ex felons could have voted yes in Florida, it would be a blue state. Yeah. The one thing republicans are creative about is cheating, their geniuses at cheating. If they channeled any of that creative energy into anything else, they could fix all the problems in the world. But they're brilliant at it. Like the way they chipped away at abortion rights. Who would have thought some of these things? You can't have abortion here unless the hallways are 8ft wide. And those kind of laws that they're always thinking up, all the environmental regulations pulled back. Pruitt's gone. You see, the thing is Pruitt's gone, but the environmental regulations keep on getting pulled back. We had this big moment of upset about the children being put in the detention centers. It's going on every single day since then, you know what I mean? In large numbers. So it's overwhelming. And again, I think this is why people are looking for some kind of a simple, comfortable answer and why people retreat into simpler solutions to the problem instead of facing the fact that it's kind of out of control. Before I feel the tractor beam of current events pulling us off the topic of religious, I want to go there. I wanted to say one thing to your last question about you said in the last ten years, things have changed a lot. And I always make the joke when people say religious, and I take all the credit, but I know it's really not because of religious. It may have had a nice little moment. I think the big thing that made the difference in the last ten years is Google. Mitt Romney used to come to your house with a pamphlet. That's as much as you could find out about Mormonism. And it sounded pretty good in the pamphlet. Scientology is a perfect example. You'd be in the religion ten years before you found out about the nutty creation. Zenu, right? Didn't you have to get to like, level six or something? Well, that's the amazing Paul Hage story. Not to derail you, but do you know the Paul Hagas story? I think it was in Lawrence Wright's book. Going clear. Yeah, I mean, he was in like, whatever, 20 years, and they finally give him the secret teachings. He has to take a briefcase to essentially like a bank vault and contemplate them in solitude. And it's all that just 70 trillion years ago, they're brought here on something that was battled with DC Eight and thrown into volcanoes and blown up with hydrogen bombs. And his summary of it was that he thought he was being given an insanity test. He didn't know whether or not he should just laugh and then pass the test or accept this. But that was what I'm saying, is that you can look that up now. It's all over the internet. And at a certain point it wasn't. And Mormonism is just as lacking. But they'll still deny it. I mean, the Mormons will still deny that there's secret handshakes to get into heaven. The Scientologists will definitely deny what was great. In religious is, we were able to find clips like promotional footage that they shot, animated pieces that sort of tell the origin myths mormonism and Scientology. And they were like Saturday morning cartoons, but they were real and those were very telling. I thought they were great. And they were hilarious. Hilarious. Because here they are as it is. It's like we don't have to play with that at all. How do you actually accomplish that as a director? Do you just you have some researcher who is just scouring the world? I tend to myself generate a lot of the clip thoughts because I'm thinking all throughout what movies might be funny to draw on, what stuff we might need. And then, yeah, I have great researchers who go out and find those clips, get permission to use them, which is very tricky. We had all these Middle Eastern clips from various terrorist organizations. It's very hard to get permission to use those things. It's tricky, but that's how you do it. Yeah. That's a laborious process. And that's one of the things that makes the film so much different than just the normal, uncomfortable interview. You can just sprinkle it with hilarity more or less on demand. Is there anything either of you would do differently or that you regret? Or is there any place where you felt like you don't? Because one thing I feel don't go there. I always regret. You just can't. I don't know. Both of us could watch that movie and imagine doing the entire movie over from beginning to end. We could do another version of it today. It's the kind of thing where that's what happens then, right? The old thing art is never finished, just abandoned. We abandoned it at some point. And I'm so glad people still like it and I still like it, but I can't watch it without thinking, yeah, I could have been more eloquent there. Or I could have thought of three other better examples or, I don't know, getting up in the morning. Sam, it was not there had to be some gentleman there. I am in Maguito at 08:00 A.m. Talking about the apocalypse. Right? Well, the Jesus land. I forget what it's called. Holy Land. Holy Land Amusement park. You know, Disneyland for religious sadist. I mean I mean, the crucifixion scene in there was insane. I still can't believe that. Does it still exist, do you think? Holy Land? Definitely. Yeah. And not only is it crazy, but it's like three times a day crazy. They do the show like the Disneyland shows over and over and over all day long. I love that Jesus. I hope he's getting paid well because he's earning his money. Lebowski. Jesus, like the lebowski? Yes. He was the dude. Yeah, he was perfect. But he was also a legit believer who wanted to argue with you. He came up with the best analogy of the best theologian. You went up against yeah, that's true. But you know something? That's one of the great things about Bill also, if I may tip my hat further, he's a great listener, and he is not, as much as it might seem like he's got an agenda. He's very open minded, and when people make good points all along the way in religious, when people make good points, he acknowledged that. He's not trying to trip them up, he's letting them speak. And when they speak intelligently, he acknowledges that. I mean, the trucker scene, that one trucker walks out, in the beginning, we thought he might be he was a big guy about to kill me, but luckily he went the other way, out the door. But the other guys and I wound up being very friendly, and they prayed for me at the end, and I mean, it was actually kind of sweet. Yes, exactly. Would you find yourself on camera going further in an adversarial direction than you would if the camera wasn't rolling? Like, if you were just in a social situation with these people and the topic of religion came up, do you think that you would agree to disagree much earlier or or because, I mean, I find myself at dinner parties, you know, you know, rarely, but now but, you know, it was more true ten years ago. But, I mean, I've had some you know, I've gone to the mat with some people in just purely social situations, just because what they're saying is dumb enough and strident enough that it just seems like, all right, this is a good time to dig in on this topic. But I could imagine if this was being captured for a documentary, I might want to go further. Because, listen, this is the war of ideas that's going to go public. I'm just wondering if you notice a difference between your on camera self and your off camera self in these kinds of conversations. Well, the good thing about me is really the same thing as the bad thing about me. I'm not really any different. I would agree with that. I don't think you feel pressure to perform once the cameras were who are you? Yeah. Especially in that kind of movie, in that kind of setting, and I'd rather let the comedy speak for itself. I was doing a bit at the end of my show Friday night to really at the end, I plugged this because it was my tribute on Real Time for the 10th anniversary, and April Ryan was on the panel, and it came up before we even got to the end of the show, something about religion. And I said to her, you are not going to like this end of the show. And I could tell she's probably someone who goes to church every Sunday, and she does not want to hear Jesus insulted. And I was afraid she was going to, like, really not have a good time or say something even during the editorial, and she wound up laughing so hard. We have cutaways of her. And to me that is the greatest thing about humor, is that laughter is involuntary. You cannot help it. And when it comes out that way, it must in some way say to your brain, there's some truth there, because I laughed at that. It must be a little ridiculous. Yes. Because me, this religious person on the paddle who doesn't really think that way, still laughed. So that's how I hope our message somehow got through to people who otherwise would not have appreciated. And I have found out to be, by the way, I just don't go to dinner parties anymore. That would be my experience. But I have found also in my travels that people religious, even people who are religious people, as long as they have a sense of humor, they love the movie. Yes. I have never met anybody who had a sense of humor who didn't like that movie. I mean, it's a very pleasing movie in that respect and it's about the subject that they are interested in. That's right. That helps. Yeah. Was there any situation that you got into that beyond the one trucker who exited in something that looked like it was approaching real anger? Was there anything that seemed dangerous or sketchy because you were in the Middle East when you went to the Alok San mosque? As far as it was on camera? That's totally fine. No, we got thrown out of so many places. I mean, you see it in the Morbid Temple and you see the lady. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking again with the great Douglas Murray. Douglas is an associate editor at The Spectator, and he writes for many other publications, including The Sunday Times, Standpoint, and The Wall Street Journal. He's given talks at the British and European Parliaments, as well as at the White House. He is a truly inspired debater. I've never had the pleasure of being on a debate stage with him, but it would be an honor. And he is the author of a wonderful new book which we discussed in the last podcast titled The Strange Death of Europe Immigration, Identity, Islam. And at the outset of this podcast, I wound up addressing what is currently the most popular question on my Ask Me Anything page. I was going to save that for my next AMA episode, but it just made more sense to work through it here with Douglas. So here's the question what are your thoughts regarding the Charlottesville incident? Please address the many aspects I e. The rioting, the media coverage, the individual groups present, antifa BLM, Trump statements, et cetera. So Douglas and I get fairly deep into that and to related topics like identity politics, guilt by association. And then we finally move on to the topics that have been left out of our prior discussion of his book, topics such as the source of Western values, the problem of finding meaning in a secular world, and related issues. Douglas is really one of my favorite people to speak with, and he's doing very courageous work on the topic of Islam and Islamism in particular. Like many people doing that work, he is often unfairly maligned. But he really is one of the most thoughtful people you could ever hope to meet. So it is indeed a great pleasure to once again bring you Douglas Murray. I am here with Douglas Murray. Douglas, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's a great pleasure, Sam. So we were all set to talk about questions of human values and their link to tradition. I think we were going to kind of stumble upon the glories of the Sistine Chapel, having already talked about Islam and immigration and all of that terrorism, et cetera, to our heart's content and to the laceration of our audience. But now we have some major news events threatening to derail us. We have neo Nazis marching and committing murders in Charlottesville. We have another terrorist atrocity in Europe, this time in Barcelona. And then I think just in the last hour or so, there are reports from Finland of a stabbing. Maybe you have more information than I do. You're you're in the time zone. It just doesn't stop. Douglas no, it doesn't. It just goes on and on. And as we've said before, I mean, the thing is that some of the facts vary, but, I mean, not very much. And it's sort of hard to ever find anything new to say about it, although sometimes new people discover the facts about it and get new opinions. But there's not much variation in all this, as you know. Yeah, I think there's some new ground to COVID with respect to Charlottesville, and I think having you on the podcast for this could be perfect. Although obviously we didn't plan to talk about this. But let's start with Charlottesville and Trump and the heat he's getting for his response to it, because I'm in hot water here with at least the moral imbecile wing of my audience. For a tweet I sent out right after Charlottesville, I wrote, quoting myself now on Twitter in 2017, all identity politics is detestable. But surely white identity politics is the most detestable of all. Seeing the absolutely cretinous response to that, I added, the necessary context, of course, is the last 200 years of human history. So I think it's perfect to debrief with you over this, because your bona fide is, as someone who is worrying about immigration, are impeccable, obviously, and there's no doubt there are people in the world or even in our audience who worry that you may be a white supremacist or be motivated by racism. So I want to kind of walk through this, and if there's any point where you disagree, I'll be very interested to hear it. But let me just clarify what I was saying about identity politics here, because the point strikes me as absolutely obvious. But given the response, it's clearly not obvious to some people. Just to give you the predictable response, I've been accused of virtue signaling in the most abject way. This is kind of reverse racism. So racism against white people is okay, or you can only be racist if you're white. I hate white people. Something in that genre just came to me in Torrance, so let me just clarify this and then see if you disagree. So just as not all religions are the same, I have much more to say against Islam than I have against Anglicanism, though I can find something to say about Anglicanism, and I have much less to say against Buddhism. I think there are wonderful things in Buddhism, although I have negative things to say about it as a religion, there are differences here, and so, too, with identity politics. Not all identity politics are the same, and they're certainly not the same with respect to the context in which they're being practiced in history. If you were practicing German identity politics in London in 1950, well, then you deserve to have the shit kicked out of you, right? The same could be true for Japanese identity politics in Nun King. And if you compare that to black identity politics in Alabama in 1964, which I think most sane people would acknowledge was not only morally understandable, but morally and politically necessary, right? That is identity politics, aka the civil rights movement in America. Now, my tweet was actually fairly carefully written. It starts with in 2017, all identity politics is detestable. And of course I'm thinking about the west and I'm thinking primarily about America. I was commenting on Charlottesville, and I believe this. I think Black Lives Matter is a dangerous and divisive and retrograde movement and it is a dishonest movement. I mean, it's not to say that everyone associated with it is dishonest, but I find very little to recommend in what I've seen from Black Lives Matter. I think it is the wrong move for African Americans to be organizing around the variable of race. Now, it's obviously the wrong move. It's obviously destructive to civil society. But let me just say that black identity politics in the US in 2017 is still totally understandable. I think it's misguided, but I think it's completely understandable and in certain local cases, perhaps even defensible. What is not understandable, generally speaking, is white identity politics in the US. In 2017. I mean, you've got pampered doeboys like Richard Spencer who have never been the victim of anything except now the consequences of his own stupidity, and now he gets punched as a Nazi because people mistake him for a Nazi, although he doesn't think he's a Nazi and perhaps he isn't a Nazi. But you have white nationalists and white supremacists marching in the company of actual Nazis and members of the KKK, and that is aligning themselves with people who actually celebrate Adolf Hitler and the murder of millions of people, right? So this is not the same thing as Black Labs Matter, and it's not the same thing as even antifa, these goons who attack them and perhaps got attacked in turn. It's hard to sort out who started it there. And I've got nothing good to say about antifa. These people have been attacking people all over the country and they're responsible for a lot of violence. I think it's a dangerous organization, but it doesn't have the same genocidal ideology of actual Nazis, right? So you have to make distinctions here and all identity politics is not the same. So I guess I'm just wondering, do you disagree with any of that? I think I have a slightly different take on it. I agree with most of what you just said. I think there are several things. One is that I think it's inevitable that if identity politics runs riot and rampant among one group of people, it's almost always going to cause a counter force. In my latest book in the Strange Death of Europe I mentioned how it's quite hard to see how you don't get nasty white identity politics at some stage as a response to nasty identity politics of other kinds. Or in other words I think as I say at one point it's not in the long term sustainable. Everyone's allowed to do it on the basis of their skin pigmentation apart from people of one skin pigmentation. It's just hard to imagine how that would be sustainable in the long term. Although I agree with you there are ebbs and flows in history of when you would legitimately have a cause among one group and then it would diminish and so on. And I think there are two other things. One is that it's very hard once you go down this route to know when to stop and it's not just a personal judgment is it because it relies on the goodwill of everybody else from your background or of the same skin pigmentation. I mean it means that you you're not going to have an opportunist on your side. Well we all know human nature. You always have hucksters and you always have opportunists and you always have people who as I often say remain on the barricades even after the battle is won because they don't have a home to go to other than the barricades. And that phenomenon is going to happen and I think it's been happening in a whole set of rights claims in recent years. I agree with you. I mean I can't see why somebody like Richard Spencer could ever be regarded as having a sort of as you say legitimate grievance as it were. Not that there's any legitimate grievance that could permit somebody going down into those fetted byways anyway. But I disagree that it's not possible that as it were a white person somewhere in the states or some people might be feeling some aggravation and I don't again I'm talking this much like you in the issue of context to do with particular groups at this moment in time. And let me throw out the obvious one. I can see how a white American in a former steel town without a job and with all the same sort of lack of prospects as people of other skin colors in the area and so on. Also on top of all of that has to endlessly hear from the media and from a lot of rich kids at universities the claim that he has got white privilege and him feeling particularly at this moment in time particularly disgruntled about that. Now as I say all of this to my mind it's just horrible horrible train which I just wish we weren't collectively stuck on. I mean of course we're agreed on that. It's sort of too obvious to say but but I say it because I have to say as an outsider looking at America it does seem to me that you're driving yourselves mad at the moment. And one of the ways in which you're driving yourselves mad is in this way in which you went towards something which I thought was the purpose and the dream within America, the dream after the civil rights achievements and so on, which now seems to me to be being thrown away and almost bungee jump going back from after the moment of progress. And I think that this is happening because people are going down the whole avenue of this identity politics in general. I see it everywhere in the States, on everything. And I've never heard the only one I can claim to have any legitimate kind of personal insight into is the sort of gay identity politics thing. I've never seen people at such a pitch of illegitimate agitation, and I don't know why they're doing it. Again, I fully agree. And this is why I would say that all identity politics is toxic at this point. Now, again, there are local cases where this almost certainly isn't true. If you're going to tell me that the Rohingya Muslims need to practice some identity politics against the murderous Buddhist and Myanmar, okay, fine, I'll sign that waiver. But generally speaking, in developed societies where civil society is or was well established, where you have norms of kind of universal political argumentation, where the color of your skin is irrelevant to the position you are arguing for or should be, must be to be persuasive, identity politics is a disaster. And yes, as you say, the light was just fully visible at the end of the tunnel here, and we had a two term black president. If we can't secure that as a durable gain for civil rights, what the hell is going on? Right. Exactly. And this Secretary of State and so on. But I think this thing about is it worth it's not just about where you individually or I individually or any other individual holds it. It's the fact that there are always going to be people who, for short term political gain, do not want to exercise the same standards. There will always be somebody who wants to who feels that they haven't had a fair enough, you know, go at things and or they just want more, or they want to be famous or they want to be rich or something. They want to lead a crowd, and and they will claim that it doesn't matter that, you know, we've had a two term black president. The whole country is still institutionally racist, and we're only minutes away from slavery. Again, there's always going to be a there's always going to be a reward for those people, it seems to me, in the situation that we are or you are in America setting up for yourselves. Yeah, let me just again reiterate that I agree with you that in certain cases, even white identity politics is understandable. Here again, if you're talking about people who have been kind of passed over by the new economy and are, in addition to finding it difficult to get a job, they're being told that it's good, that it's more difficult for white people, given the history of racism, and then they have to confront the reality of immigration. Taking some jobs, say, so, yes, that's understandable. But again, that doesn't map on to Richard Spencer, right? No. And I wouldn't want that person to go remotely near white identity politics as a response. It seems to me more likely that people are going to be pushed in such a direction if you sustain for too long. The idea is, I say, that everyone has that right. Other than them, of course. And that's what I see happening. By the way, just a thought. All these things, the context of these things in a way reminds me of that really interesting thing some years ago. Our mutual friend, I think I can say friend, certainly in your case, certainly I admire very much Richard Dawkins some years ago, do you remember in an interview talking about children? We didn't want people to be called Christian children. They're just the children of Christian parents and so on. Your listeners will probably be very familiar with this point. There was this really interesting point when Richard in one interview said there's no such thing as a Christian child. There's no such thing as a Muslim child. And then he stopped himself. He stopped himself because he was about to say something he knew he didn't want to say, and he acknowledged it. I don't want to say there's no such thing as a Jewish child. Now, why do you not want to say it? Because of the echoes we all know about this. And this is just that is a horrible thing. And he knew it and he pointed to it. It was fascinating. And that's the same, it seems to me slightly with what's going on with the identity politics thing. We are tolerant of the black identity politics because we recognize that within living memory, the black communities, particularly in America, had legitimate grievances and legitimate cause to have an identity that they marched on, as it were. And we're also aware that in living memory there were white people in the south who lynched people because of the color of their skin, as I said. So what we're doing is getting around and coping with the sharp corners of not that distant history. The thing I think that's so worrying about it, though, as I say, is that I hear almost nothing of mending. This I see only, and I hear only in America, people staking their careers and their livelihoods and their entire occupations are making this worse. People claiming it's never been so bad, people setting up their own stalls in the identity marketplace. Maybe, as I say, maybe it's just nature of the media and of people becoming well known because they make the most outrageous statement or whatever, but I just am not hearing in America anything to do with the sort of spirit of mending. And this worries me. Yeah, well, I think one way to mend it is to make the kinds of distinctions we're making now. It's relevant that within living memory, as you say, these kinds of atrocities and injustices were commonplace, as you and I point out ad nauseam. It is relevant when you talk about Islam at this moment. It is relevant what is happening not only in living memory but in in, you know, our working memory entered consciousness 2 seconds ago with respect to the news and to not move in the next sentence to some statement of moral equivalence with respect to the Crusades. So context matters here, and perhaps I don't need to belabor this, but I stand by this tweet. I think if you can't differentiate the identity politics of black people in America from the white supremacist identity politics we're seeing given voice in Charlottesville, you've got some moral calibration problems on your hands. That's not to say that some form of white backlash against the rampant identity politics we're seeing practiced in America isn't to be expected or understandable in certain cases. I know. I just look at all this with such horror because I genuinely have thought for most of my life that we were getting beyond this. And I sort of still think we are. I just think, as I say, that the standards that we might wish to apply there will always be people whose careers are predicated on not applying them. I mean, in my country, in Britain, we had this long business with the Cecil Road statues a couple of years ago, the roads must fall thing. But that whole thing really was whipped up by some South African students who happened to be road scholars who were basically appealing to an audience back home in South Africa and were going to make careers when they went back. There are always going to be people who are going to do that and are going to take advantage. Look at one other, by the way, a little hobby horse of mine, this Anne Frank Center in America. It's called Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect and Tolerance or something. It's run by a couple of just activist Democrats who are standing on the name of a murdered Jewish girl who they never had met or had any connection to and using this dead Jewish girl to attack Republican politicians they don't like. I myself think it's it's just grotesque beyond words. I think if they had any shame, they would stop, but they don't. They were furthering their careers. They're really keen on it. They ran some kind of gay rights group and then they obviously realized there wasn't such a running and so much fuel in that, maybe. And then they just decided to, as I say, grab a dead Jewish girl and run with using her name. And I just think this is from every community and every background and every skin color and everything. You're always going to have these people who just don't want to exercise the standards because they need not to. And there's also just an impressive degree of confusion here. People just can't follow the plot. So you have something like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which in the face of a Nazi rally in Charlottesville, seems like an absolutely necessary institution. This is what the Southern Poverty Law Center is for to combat this kind of white extremism in the country. But in the same period, they have listed our friend and colleague Maja Nawaz as an anti Muslim extremist. And as much as we've gotten the word out about that, you still have people like Tim Cook, the head of Apple, giving a million dollars to the SPLC in recent weeks. People can't cohere in a vision of what makes sense morally and politically because this identity politics and political correctness has just kind of cleaved our conversation about current events in ways that are just confusing to people. And the response to Trump in the aftermath of Charlottesville or the response to Trump's response, has been emblematic of this. So, for instance, I despise Trump as deeply and as broadly as I think any person I can think of. I mean, I just think he is a conscienceless monster. And, you know, I don't need to go into that at length. I probably have 15 or 20 hours on this podcast of me railing against Trump, but leave it to the left to attack him in ways that make him look nuanced and judicious in the aftermath of this thing. It's unbelievable how bad the commentary has been. Perhaps we can parse this and before we get off Charlottesville because I think it's important. So the first point to make is that Trump failed what, as many people have said is perhaps the easiest test of moral leadership the US. President can ever face, which is to condemn Nazis in our own society, right? That didn't happen early and it didn't even happen to a satisfactory degree late. He just has never managed to articulate what is wrong with a full embrace of the public square by Nazis and armed KKK members. I mean, we had people marching with military rifles in a US city, intimidating people. And in the context of this march, someone gets murdered in what I'm sure will prove to be an actual act of terrorism. Which is to say that the person who did it wasn't mentally ill, but was actually ideologically motivated by his beliefs as we know white supremacist beliefs. I don't think we know that yet. Perhaps that's been discussed in the news and I'm unaware of it. But it's absolutely the easiest possible thing for a sane and ethical U. S. President to get up and condemn this in the strongest possible terms and he didn't do that. So that's what people are appropriately reacting to. And in addition, there's the fact that because he's been so bad on this issue and because he flirted with these people throughout the campaign and in the last six months, and because he's managed to give white supremacists in our society the impression that he's on their side or at least giving them cover or winking at them in some sense, just he is, in some sense culpable for the brazenness of this emergence of white supremacy in recent weeks. That's one point. But what the left is also doing in response to his failure here is they're castigating him for things that actually are true and make sense, and there's no distinction here. They're castigating him to the same degree for points like that. Antifa were also violent, right? And they're also a dangerous organization and it's also despicable to have them attacking in many cases perhaps across the board, but at least in some cases were actually peaceful marchers who just happened to be Nazis, right? But if you're a Nazi who's marching peacefully and get attacked by antifa goons, well, then your violence is actually in self defense in that case, right. It is a morally ambiguous situation when you have these two groups in the public square, and yet he's getting savaged for making that point as much as any other point he did or didn't make. The other, the other thing about Trump is that is that he, as he always does, his narcissism and self regard bled through even in the moment of commenting on this political emergency. And so when he mentioned the mother of the slain woman and talked about how she sent him such a nice message on social media and how he appreciated that, it was so dripping with the focus on himself that it was just appalling. So virtually everything was wrong with how he handled that news conference. And yet the left still manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by focusing on the few points he was making that were in fact legitimate or at least potentially legitimate, unless we can learn to talk about these things in an honest way. What's happened now is the response to Trump's failure has been so uncritical of with respect to these issues that the left has managed to say all of the things that make it seem like just a purely partisan overreaction to his failure. And so the Republican base or the Trump supporting base now discount everything that's being said about him in the aftermath of Charlottesville. And you have, of course, again, idiots and goons antitrump appearing on all the major television stations in America saying that, yeah, we should bring down the statues of Abraham Lincoln and all the Founding Fathers, and we should also blow up Mount Rushmore. And you get all those people coming out making their short term political opportunity, if I can say so about this. Maybe it's just, as it were more generous in my interpretation of this. I may be wrong in it, but it seems to me there are two bits of the criticism of Trump after Charlottesville. The first was whether some of what he said was wrong or right. And the other one is whether the timing was wrong or right. Now, it seems to me that self evidently the timing was obviously wrong. You don't do a moral equivalence thing after somebody's been killed. You just come out and condemn the people who did the killing and so on. The problem is, I think there is probably a legitimate sense of grievance among some people in America about the fact that in terms of this antifar violence and so on, you're not starting from a level playing field. I mean, the so called antifascists in America are allowed to just go on to campuses and burn them down and smash everything up and still be called antifascists people who are actually the closest thing to fascists until you see the people in Charlottesville. And that doesn't get the condemnation and so on. So I imagine that what Trump was thinking was, I'm not again, I may be being generous, but but my my impression would be that he was thinking I'm not giving them that the so called antifascists are indeed all antifascists and that everyone they call fascists are fascists. But again, this is a breakdown of the terms. This is a result of the overreach. Again, if the Southern Poverty Law Center is allowed to designate churches that don't agree with gay marriage as hate groups, then we're already slipping. If Charles Murray is allowed to be called a fascist and allowed to be drummed off a campus and a female professor he's with assaulted, and it doesn't get any sympathy or care or concern, then we're already slipping down this problem. I'll give you a couple of examples that strike me as fairly egregious, which make your point. And this is I haven't really taken stock of who is guilty here, but they're very prominent people who you and I respect as journalists in every other context. But people tweet photos from DDay saying alt left rioters attacking fascists or something like that, making fun of Trump's point. And so the suggestion is that the people who were the antifa people or whoever they were, who were fighting the Nazis in Charlottesville were the moral equivalent of our soldiers during World War II. It's terrific, isn't it? I mean, it makes you also, by the way, how cheap and easy is it? I mean, the soldiers who stormed the beaches at D Day saw their friends and comrades shot down beside them. A lot of them saw things they'd never forget and went through an unbelievable thing. Every single person there that day had a courage that most people in our generation, thank God, will never have to even try to summon up or imagine. And. Here are these people who just have to tweet, and they make themselves feel like the moral equivalents of those people. Again, I've said enough against Trump to hopefully never be condemned for failing to detect any of his moral or intellectual lapses. But in this case, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and follow you there and imagine that he was just trying to be fairly scrupulous about the blame that existed on both sides. And what a danger. This represents to civil society, where you have people, members of the KKK and neo Nazis marching with a permit, right, which is something our First Amendment protects. And they're getting attacked by the people who show up to protest. Now, I'm sure that ran both ways. Perhaps there were neo Nazis who were doing the attacking first, but still, you can't attack members of the KKK and Nazis just because you don't like them. If you are using force first, you are the criminal in our society. Now, you might want to rewrite those laws. You might decide that that at a certain point, nazis shouldn't be allowed to assemble. You might want to follow Germany and pass laws against Holocaust denial or the display in the swastika. I don't think you do want to do that. I think our First Amendment is the right way to go here. But given the laws and the norms of civil society, you can defend much of what Trump was saying there. What you can't defend is the man and how he has practiced politics up until this point, and the dog whistles he has given to racists for now years. And so the context matters, and that's what's misleading people here. Can I make two points to that? The first is this comes down to a consistency point. This reminds me of a very important issue that has come up in my country all sorts of times. What do you what do you do about a collective group of people or a voluntary organization of people? And where do you draw the line between claiming they're all responsible for something or not? Now, you'll see where I'm going here, but let me give you an example. There's a mosque not far from where I'm presently sitting that's run by, among others, somebody who's a former military commander of Hamas, okay? I would not say that everybody in his mosque was a terrorist or that everybody in his mosque was Hamas, or even that everybody in his mosque was sympathetic to Hamas. I just be very careful about that for all sorts of reasons, some legal, some just practical, and some to do with just not wanting to imply to all sorts of members of the public that that whole place is filled with terrorists because there are consequences potentially of such speed. Now, I would like to think that it was possible to be consistent on that sort of thing. As I understand it, Trump seems to have thought, and I don't know whether this is the case or not, but there was a protest happening, and then the KKK and the others show up and so on. Now, there are lots of other cases of that stop the War Coalition marches, census. You start to Stop the War coalition march, and then some people come along with a load of stuff that hates the Jews. To what extent can you say, okay, everybody on that march hates the Jews? I think you can't. I think you have to say, look, it attracts those sort of people. So what can we infer about your cause, for instance? But I think in order to be in order to try to think our way through this, I think we do need to have some kind of consistency on that approach. And I think that there is a deliberate desire to say in certain directions, actually, I need these people all to be fascists or all to be Nazis. And I reckon I can't foresee a situation where I was on a march and was marching along and a bunch of people with sausages were beside me, and I was okay with that. Okay. But it's the sort of scenario that we've seen, as I say, in similar situations. And one of the big problems in this, it comes back to my point about the so called anti fascists is, as I said many times, they desperately need fascists. And the bar for describing people as fascists is commensurately low as a result. And this comes down to the second point I wanted to make, was that there's a member of the Cabinet here in Britain who I am a great admirer of, called Sajid Javid. He's been in the Cabinet for some years now as a Conservative MP, and he was, among others, among our politicians in Britain who immediately sort of leapt on the Charlottesville thing and made public pronouncements. Now, he said in a tweet, I think it was, look, it's not I'm abbreviating it's not hard. We're against fascists. We support antifascists. I was taught that in school. This sort of niggles at me because I just don't think it's as easy as that. And I think a lot of this is, as I say, short term political opportunism and a desire to, as I say, who doesn't find it easy when the KKK come along to condemn them. I mean, well, it turns out some people do. The President of the United States does. That should be a straightforward the one that concerns me are all the levels beneath that, including people who can just willfully be described as, I don't know, fascist. I've just seen too much of the kind of finger pointing and fascist claiming just vast numbers, it seems to me, of the self described antifascists are just very obviously fascistic. And so I don't see the same simple view of this. I think there are fascists and there are Nazis. I think the KKK fit that Bill and I think the photograph might. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Jennifer Dowdna. Jennifer is a biochemist. She is a professor in chemistry in the Molecular and Cell biology departments at the University of California at Berkeley. She's also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a researcher in the Molecular, Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is one of the world's experts on RNA, protein, biochemistry, and in particular, CRISPR biology. And she's the author, along with Samuel Sternberg of the book a Crack in creation, gene editing and the unthinkable power to control evolution. And Jennifer is credited as one of the inventors of the CRISPR CAS Nine gene editing technology, which is the topic of today's conversation. We get into all the details and the ethics, and time was short. Jennifer is a rock star scientist, and I could only schedule about an hour with her, but I will take it. It was great to have her walk me through the details of CRISPR, and I trust you will leave this podcast, as I did, knowing much more about where this technology is at present and where it's all likely to head. So without further delay, I bring you Jennifer Dowdna. I am here with Jennifer Dowdna. Jennifer, thanks for coming on the podcast. Great to be here, Sam. So you are a co inventor of CRISPR CAS Nine, which is a gene editing technology that we'll talk about before we get into this, perhaps you can just give a kind of potted summary of your background scientifically. Well, I'm a biochemist, so I'm somebody who studies molecules and how they work. And I've always been interested in evolution and the way that cells have evolved to use their genetic information in precise ways. And that's actually how we got into the whole area of gene editing. And you're at UC Berkeley, right? I'm at UC Berkeley. Correct. Now, I know there is some controversy about who should get credit for inventing CRISPR CAS Nine, and we don't really have to go into that. I think there clearly is no controversy that you are one of the world's experts on this. Is there anything you want to say about the controversy or is it kind of a distraction as far as this conversation is concerned? Well, I guess all I would say is that my work with Emmanuel Sharpentier was going on to really I would call it a curiosity driven project that was aimed at discovering how bacteria fight viral infection. So neither of us were aiming to create a technology. But the work that we did uncovered the activity of a protein that can be programmed to find and cut DNA sequences. And with that understanding, it was pretty obvious that this was going to be a great technology. And that was work that was published in 2012. So I don't think anybody argues about that. Right, okay, well, let's talk about CRISPR and that protein. But before we do, it might be good to give a very quick remedial summary of some basic molecular biology. I think we have a fairly educated audience here, but everyone, I think, can do with a primer on DNA to RNA to protein because we're going to be talking about just the mechanics of gene editing here. So can you give us a few minutes of basic biology here? Sure, absolutely. So I guess we could start by pointing out that people probably are familiar with the idea that DNA encodes genetic information. So it's really the chemical that stores information in cells and allows cells to grow and develop and become tissues or whole organisms. And the way that cells use that information is mostly in the form of proteins. So the information in the DNA is converted into proteins by a process that creates the protein molecules by reading the code in the DNA. And the intermediary in that process is kind of what I like to call a throwaway a copy of the genetic information, which is molecules of RNA. And what has emerged over the last probably two decades is that RNA molecules are not just throw away copies of the genome but they are actually molecules that have a lot of interesting functions in their own right. And that's actually what I've always been interested in in my own laboratory, is the role of RNA molecules that are involved in controlling the flow of genetic information and helping cells decide when and how to use the information that's stored in the genome in the DNA. And the story of CRISPR, the story of this gene editing technology is kind of interesting because it really involves all three of those types of fundamental molecules DNA, RNA and protein because it's a protein that is involved in the is really responsible for cutting DNA in at precise positions. The places in the DNA that get cut are defined by molecules of RNA that the protein, which is called CAS Nine holds onto. And the places in the DNA that get cut are the sites in the genome where editing occurs, where permanent changes are made to the genetic code. And so you discovered this in bacteria, right? CRISPR has been described as part of the bacterial immune system. That's correct. Take me there. So what happens? Viruses periodically infect bacteria. And what does the CRISPR sequence do in that context? Right? So viruses infect bacteria actually all the time in nature. And so bacteria have a very effective way of defending against viruses by storing pieces of viral DNA in their own chromosome. And then they use that stored viral DNA sequence. There are actually multiple sequences coming, one representing each virus that has infected the cell over time. So you can think of it sort of like a genetic vaccination card. And then those stored viral DNA sequences are copied into RNA and then those RNA molecules assemble with the CAS Nine protein to direct it to sequences that match the RNA sequence. In other words, sequences that belong to viruses. And when that match occurs, then the CAS Nine protein works like a molecular scalpel and cuts the viral DNA and basically allows the cell to destroy it. So again, this is semi dense material and you don't have the benefit of visual AIDS here. So I just want to make another pass on this just to make sure everyone has a picture of what's happening here. So you have this little machine, really, it's a combination of protein molecule and RNA which is really informing its behavior. Right? So you have an RNA sequence that matches a sequence in the DNA which determines what part of the DNA it will bind to and edit or cut. And this is something you've discovered in bacteria, but which can be used as a kind of molecular scalpel in eukaryotes like mammals such as ourselves. And this then becomes a way of targeting with a precision that we didn't have before, spots in the human genome that can be edited. You nailed it. That's perfect. Okay, so I guess I'm interested a little more in the mechanics of this. So what are the chances that the CRISPR CAS Nine technology will cut in the wrong place in the genome? Does there have to be a complete complementarity between the RNA and the DNA? Or is there some potential for error here? Sure, there's always potential for error. I think the amazing thing about the CRISPR CAS Nine technology is that it's it's really pretty accurate and it's not perfect, but it's it's it's it's close to. So I think I think what's emerged over the last few years that people have been using this and it's probably worth mentioning that this technology took off incredibly quickly. It was adopted very rapidly after our 2012 publication. And there are now probably thousands of people around the world using this as a tool in all sorts of systems. And the good thing about that, or one of them, is that it's meant that there's been very rapid development of the technology as well as understanding of how it works. And one of the things that's emerged is that this tool is accurate enough to make precise changes in even very large genomes like the human genome or plant plant genomes. And when when people have have sort of, as I think as people have become more sophisticated about using it, ensuring that the, the CAS Nine protein is used in limiting amounts in cells not present in huge quantities and not hanging around for too long, that it's actually remarkably accurate at generating those kinds of edits. It's possible to find off targets, but you have to look pretty hard. And can you edit a single base pair or do you have to deal with longer sequences than that? You can edit a single base pair, yeah. Wow. So you've described this as a scalpel. Now, what happens after the DNA is cut? Is it always a matter of inserting more DNA variant sequence or can you simply cut and remove parts of the DNA? Yes, you can cut and remove or you can cut and replace. The removal part turns out to be easier technically to do than the replacing part, but both are possible. So, again, this is so counterintuitive in ways when you actually picture what's happening here, because anyone who's taken biology in recent memory will know that the genetic material inside our cells is in the nucleus and it's bound very tight, it's just crammed in there. The chromosomes aren't laid out in the pretty way that they are when we picture them in textbooks. And now you've sent CRISPR, this little machine into the cell. We'll talk about how you can target tissues later on, but this goes into the cell and moves all over the genome and is searching for the sequence to which it is the mate and so that it can find the place to cut. How does it search the whole genome? How do you get full coverage of a genome? And how quickly does this happen? If we could take a video camera inside a cell, what would we be seeing there? Well, we've sort of done that, not quite a video camera, but it's been possible to make fluorescently labeled versions of the CAS Nine protein that can be visualized in live cells. So you can basically watch these little dots of light moving around in the nucleus. And when you do that kind of experiment, what emerges is that this is a protein that has very fast kinetics. So it's moving around the nucleus incredibly quickly, much more quickly than what you see for other kinds of proteins that are existing in the nucleus. And what's thought to happen is that this protein is rapidly sampling different sections along the sequence of DNA. And it is quite remarkable to think about it because we're talking about billions of base pairs of DNA in the cell. But, but somehow this, this protein very quickly samples along the, the DNA sequence, looking for a match to the guide RNA sequence. And one thing that's important to keep in mind is that it's not a single protein that would be in the nucleus, but instead many, many copies of this. There might be thousands or tens of thousands of copies that are all searching. And when one finds its target site, then it makes a cut and the edit occurs. Now, are the sequences of DNA unique enough so that we're not getting redundant cuts elsewhere? If you send a ten nucleotide sequence as your kind of search code, are we expecting that to be the only place in the genome that would get modified? Or just by dint of numbers, you're going to be altering something you didn't expect to alter if you do that. Well, in one of those interesting serendipities of science, this CAS nine protein actually uses a 20 nucleotide RNA sequence. So it's 20 letters that it's looking for. 20 letters in a row. And if you do the math, that's just about what you need to uniquely define a sequence in the human genome, for example, good numbers were on our side. Right, let's back up. So now we have a human being who has a variety of genes that are not as perfect as they might be. And we'll talk about the conditions for which we have some understanding of the underlying genetics and what could be modified here. But let's say we know what genes we want to alter. How would we target CRISPR to specific sites in the body? And presumably these insertions would sometimes need to be tissue specific. You wouldn't want to send this everywhere, right? Right. And I think you're putting your finger on what I think is one of the critical challenges for gene editing in the clinic going forward, which is just what you said. How do we deliver these editing molecules into the right cells at the right time? One of the ways that this can be done today is actually by delivering into cells that are temporarily taken out of the body. So, for example, people are working hard on correcting mutations that cause blood disorders because the blood cells can actually be taken out, edited and replaced. So I think that's one strategy that gets around the issue of trying to deliver something like this into specific tissues in a person. That's a much bigger challenge. And why is it a challenge, though? What would be the mechanism? Would you use some viral vector to deliver it if you wanted to get it into every cell in the body, what would be the methodology? Well, that would be hard even using a virus, because viruses tend to target particular kinds of cells. So you might have to use a cocktail of viruses that are able to get into many different types of cells. But I think what is typically envisioned is that you might be able to use viruses that would deliver into specific parts of the body, for example, into the liver or into the brain, and create edits that would alleviate disease in cases where the gene edit is necessary, just in those kinds of cells. And what is the time frame over which this would occur? Again, it will talk about how difficult this might be in practice, but let's say we know the gene we want to edit and we have the way to target the relevant tissue and someone has a disease born of this malfunctioning gene. How quickly would CRISPR change their genome and cancel the disease? Well, in principle, very quickly. I've seen some data in animal models of disease, for example in mice where mice get an injection and within a matter of a couple of days you can start to detect edits in the DNA of the cells that have been targeted in the treatment. So I think the idea in principle, and I think this is something the field is working towards doing, is that gene editing would be a fairly fast kind of treatment. And furthermore, and this is actually very important to appreciate, is that it's a different kind of therapy because it's really a one and done treatment in principle. Right. The idea is you would do this once and then you don't have to do it again. Yeah, I really want to get into the ethics of all of this because that is quite interesting and obviously this worries a lot of people. But before we do so, what are the most plausible if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMA and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm bringing you Nicholas Kristokis. Nicholas is a sociologist and a physician. He directs the human nature lab at Yale University, where he is appointed as the Song Goldman family professor of social and natural science. And he's the co director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His lab focuses on the relationship between social networks and wellbeing, and his research engages two types of phenomena the social, mathematical and biological rules governing how social networks form. This is referred to as connection in his work and the biological and social implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and this is often referred to as contagion. His lab also does experiments on how to change population level behavior related to health and cooperation and economic development. So it's very interesting work, and I would have wanted to speak with Nicholas anyway about his work. But another thing that reminded me of the need to speak with him was his experience at Yale, which you may have seen on YouTube, and you should watch it now if you haven't. But he was the professor a while back who was standing before a howling mob of students and stood there with the imperturbability of a saint, really, as he was casticated by young men and women who were properly unhinged by their identity politics and some of the crazy ideas about speech that are rattling around in their heads. I'll embed a relevant clip on my blog. There are many, but I'll have one there where this podcast is embedded. And you will enjoy the first hour of this conversation much more if you've seen five minutes at least of that encounter. Because you will see Nicholas's patience. You will see the untenability of the situation he was in. You will see a hostility to dialogue among Yale students that one could scarcely imagine possible. And this was, I believe, the first incident like this to come to national attention. This preceded the riots at Berkeley preventing Milo's speech, and it preceded Brett Weinstein's ordeal at Evergreen, and it preceded the attack upon Charles Murray at Middlebury. So this was, if not the first moment like this, the first that became very prominent in recent memory. It makes for very interesting viewing. So Nicholas and I talk about all that, and then we get into the dynamics of mob behavior and moral panic and related issues. And I think you'll find it an interesting and useful and certainly timely conversation. So now, without further delay, I give you Nicholas Kristakis. I am here with Nicholas Kristakis. Nicholas, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Sam. So we met at the Ted conference, if I'm not mistaken. I don't think we've met since. I think that was in 2010. And if I recall, you gave the talk right after mine. Or maybe it was just we were rehearsing together or something. But that's the moment I have in my memory where we shook hands and said, hi was at Ted just before or after one of us got off stage. Does that jibe with your memory? We were in the same session, and my memory is that you were sitting next to me as we were watching the speakers, and, you know, Sarah Silverman spoke, I don't know if you remember. And and the and the woman from 10,000 Maniacs who singing I Adore, whose name I'm spacing on, and you spoke. And what I remember of your talk was that remarkable slide. Maybe that was the first time you used it, where you showed side by side photographs of a bunch of women wearing the hadoor and then a bunch of the full burka in the full burka, and then a bunch of women on scantily clad yeah, on a pornography or whatever. And you said, these are very different moral landscapes, and even they looked like landscapes. I remember visually thinking there were these undulating heads in the way it was rendered, your image, and it really got me to thinking. And the topic of moral relativism and moral universalism is an old one, but I don't think the sophistication of thought that we've been bringing to that topic lately has been very strong. Yeah, you made a big impression on me, too. So we're going to talk about your science and some of the science you presented there at Ted and some of the stuff you've done in the intervening years. But first, just tell people what is your background generally, academically and scientifically? Well, I am trained in the natural and the social sciences. I'm a physician, trained as a hospice doctor. So I spent 15 years taking care of people who were dying. My first appointment was at the University of Chicago, and I worked on the South Side of Chicago taking care of primarily indigent patients, although I had a few faculty and sort of more well to do people. And I worked there as a hospice doctor. And then when I moved to Harvard from Chicago in 2001, I was a palliative clinically I was a palliative medicine doctor. So I was trained as a physician, but then also I was trained as a sociologist. And I have a PhD in sociology as well. And most of my career has been devoted to research. So I'm primarily a research scientist and doing work in public health, but and I stopped seeing patients about ten years ago now. So I'm a natural and a social scientist, and increasingly we do a lot of computational science as well. In my lab, we'll talk about the science because obviously what can be known about social networks and group psychology and many of the other topics you touch, you're now touching AI or human interaction with AI. So all of that's very interesting. But I want to start with your immediate background here because this is one reason why many people know of you, and we're eager for you to come on the podcast. You and your wife Erica were really the canaries in the coal mine for some recent moral Panic is the appropriate name we've witnessed on college campuses. You are the man that many of us have seen standing in the quad at Yale, or I assume that was the quad surrounded by a fairly large crowd of increasingly unhinged students. And this was really mesmerizing to watch. I can't imagine it felt the same to be in the middle of it. And I must say you handled yourself as well as I could possibly imagine, and you have been much praised for the way you conducted yourself in that situation. And many professors have since found themselves in similar situations. There was Brett Weinstein at Evergreen recently. So I just want to talk a little bit about your experience at Yale and then move on generically to the problem on college campuses in general, as described by people like Jonathan Height and others, who are focusing on the way in which there's a kind of authoritarianism emerging on the left, really exclusively, that is preventing free speech. And I want to get your sense of what's happening there and how big the problem is, and then we'll move on to the what we can understand scientifically about crowds and social trends. But insofar as you are comfortable talking about it, can you tell me about what happened at Yale? I think I have been devoted to in some ways, I'm a little naive in the sense that I believe in institutions. I'm also skeptical of institutions, and I am worried about institutions, but I also believe in social institutions. And so I've devoted my life to academia and to what I take to be the core commitments of modern American universities, which are envied the world over. And these commitments center around if you look at the motto of Yale, it looks at Veritas. I mean, that's an extraordinary commitment, light and truth. And these institutions are committed to the preservation, production and dissemination of knowledge, and they are guided ostensibly by principles of open expression and reason and debate and sort of liberal commitments to the quality of human beings, their capacity to perfect the world, the knowability of the world. They're, in my view, committed to a kind of belief in the objective nature of reality. And I would strongly defend those principles and have devoted my life to them, and in fact, even in the narrow issue of free expression, have been defending free expression, often for disenfranchised populations, for a very long time. So even before I came to Yale four years ago, I was at Harvard. I my wife and I had taken some unpopular stands defending the free expression of individuals who, you know, were on the side of Black Lives Matter, who were protesting. There was a high school student who had worn a T shirt that says, Jesus was not a homophobe, and we came to his defense. There were some minority students at Harvard who had some concerns about the final clubs at that institution, sort of their kind of like elite fraternities, and they had posted a satirical flyer, and some people were unhappy about that flyer and wanted to squelch the free expression of those students, and we came to their defense. And so we you know, I am committed to this. I have sort of maybe naively bought in hook, line, and sinker to this belief that these institutions of higher learning in our society are important, that they are worthy of protection and respect. And so this is why, when they fail us, I get very sad. I get sad for our society. I get sad for the students, and I get sad for the institutions. I don't want to just keep talking endlessly, but, I mean, there's a parallel set and I'll come back, I think, to your question. There's a parallel set of ideas about universities in our society. If you think about these universities, they are supported by tax dollars and the bequests of primarily wealthy people. And the reason this money is given to these institutions is to further the mission of the preservation, production, and dissemination of knowledge, not to provide faculty with easy lifestyles. I mean, it's a wonderful thing to be a professor. I see it as a calling, but that's not the purpose, right? I mean, the point is that we are supposed to be that place which discovers things, which preserves Sanskrit, which preserves Shakespeare, which preserves antiquities, which preserves mathematical knowledge and scientific knowledge, which produces discoveries. We're supposed to be the place that transmits this to new young people. And that's the role we're supposed to play in society. And we have a deep commitment to light and truth. So I get very upset when fields of inquiry or ideas are prescribed. And I think that we if our ideas are strong, they should win the battle of ideas. If you're so confident in what you have to say, you should be able to defend it. And your approach should not be to silence your opponents. Your approach should be to win the battle of ideas. I'm just going to interrupt you by reminding you of something you wrote which appeared in The New York Times, which I think is the only thing you wrote in the aftermath of what happened at Yale. Addressing it, he wrote here, quoting you, the faculty must cut at the root of a set of ideas that are wholly illiberal. Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words, even provocative or repugnant ones, are not violence. The answer to speech we do not like is more speech. I couldn't agree more with that sentiment. And it's amazing to me that this even needs to be said and said as frequently as we now have to say it. How is it that the left and again, I do want to come back to specifically what happened at Yale, because many people just might not be aware of it or have forgotten the details. But how do you think it is that the Left primarily has lost sight of this principle? That the antidote to bad ideas is good ideas and the criticism of bad ideas? Yeah, I think the right and the left take turns in this regard. I mean, let's not forget the history of McCarthyism on campus. Yeah, but we sort of expect the right to get this wrong at the extreme right. I mean, the left is I was talking to some students here recently. They happen to be conservative students. Again, I should say politically, I'm left of center. I mean, I'm very progressive. I have some libertarian ideas, I have some conservative ideas. But mostly, if I've done these surveys, I am significantly left of center politically, overall. Anyway, I was talking to some of these conservative students, and I was about to say it's the left wing that marches in the streets. But that's actually not true. The right wing also marches in the streets at different points in history, in different locations. I think lately it has been the left which has abandoned these principles. And for me, I should say that there are things like free speech or a non corrupt judiciary or a strong defense, which really should be apolitical. And I also think it's tactically idiotic of the left to surrender this free speech. I mean, after all, let's not forget the Berkeley. That's where the modern free speech movement was born, at Berkeley. And that's where you cannot give a talk now without police protection. I don't agree with many of the things that Ben Shapiro espouses, but the idea that $600,000 of police protection would be required for Ben Shapiro to speak on a university campus is preposterous, and it's a waste of money. I mean, I think this is the other thing that I think is astonishing to me is that if we could preserve and cultivate and recommit as a society to principles of open discourse and protest I totally support protest. I support the right of students to protest. I believe that many of the most important movements the civil rights movement, the gay marriage movement, many of these movements which I wholly endorse, the lead has been taken by young people and people protesting in the streets. This is also part of the American tradition, and it deserves respect and cherishing. But you cannot resort to violence or prevent others from speaking. And it's cost ineffective. Like, look at the money. That $600,000 could have been spent on dozens of students going to school for free. When we lose sight of these core liberal commitments, I think we wind up spending money and eventually spilling blood, which is just heartbreaking. So, yeah, I think it's nuts. Or that many of these speakers need protection. We're going to go back to Yale because I have to get there, but I'll just give a little more color to how crazy this has gotten. You sent me an article from The Economist prior to this interview, which I hadn't seen describing recent events at Read College, and it reads like an Onion article. It's just an unbelievable document. I'm going to read a couple of paragraphs here to give people a sense of it, because as much as I've paid attention to this, I was still surprised by these. Yeah, and I'll interrupt you before. He said, there's been a number of examples of almost stereotypical kind of cultural revolution, like almost Maoism, where the far left resorts to eating its own. So with Brett Weinstein, I mean, Brett is a completely progressive individual for his whole life. And Rebecca Tuval, who wrote that piece, she was stunned. And this this professor at Reed who, you know, who I might or might not agree with about a variety of things you'll read. You're about to read the case. I mean, these are so many of these cases which are so hard to understand, and I hope we can talk a little bit about where they might be coming from as well. But go on. Definitely. Okay. So there's this Western sieve course that apparently has been receiving protests, it seems, in every single class at Reed. So that's the set up. And so now, quoting from the article, assistant Professor Lucia Martinez Valdevia, who describes herself as mixed race and queer, asked protesters not to demonstrate during her lecture on Sappho last November. That's already an Onion article. Sappho is a great poet and also a favorite of queer theory as well. I mean, it's interesting. It's not a surprise you'd be lecturing on safo, but still, our poetry on love is unbelievable. But anyway, go on. I'm going to get some hate mail from my reaction to that, but it gets better. Ms. Valdevia said she suffered from post traumatic stress disorder and doubted her ability to deliver the lecture in the face of their opposition. At first, demonstrators announced they would change tactics and sit quietly in the audience wearing black. After her speech, a number of them berated her, bringing her to tears. Demonstrators said that Miss Valdevia was guilty of a variety of offenses. She was a, quote, race trader who upheld white supremacist principles for failing to oppose the humanity syllabus. She was quote, anti black because she appropriated black slang by wearing a T shirt that said Poetry is lit. She was quote an ableist because she believes trigger warnings sometimes diminish sexual trauma. She was also a quote gaslighter for making disadvantaged students doubt their own feelings of oppression. And then this is a quote from her. Now I am intimidated by these students. I'm scared to teach courses on race, gender or sexuality or even texts that bring these issues up in any way. I'm at a loss as how to address this, especially since many of these students don't believe in historicity or objective facts. They denounce the latter as being a tool of white, CIS, hetero patriarchy. So this is just so insane on every level. And this use of the term gaslighting with which I'm familiar, which has been used ever since the film came out, whatever, 60 years ago. But I hadn't heard this being appropriated by the Intersectional Mob. But then I recently watched rewatched part of the video of you talking to students at Yale and I heard one of the students admonish you for gaslighting, which I hadn't caught the first time around. I have to say, Nicholas said video is just astounding to watch. And I can only imagine what it was like to be there, not having yet been schooled in this trend, that this is the sort of thing that has been happening to people. Am I right about that? Were you aware of this happening to anyone else before it happened to you? Or are you the first? I honestly don't know the answer. I don't remember if at the time, because since then there have been so many similar episodes that I don't remember if two years ago I was then aware of other episodes. Part of the problem is here that there is some merit to some of the ideas, the grand philosophical ideas, and in my view, a lot of merit to some of the complaints of the students. And the problem becomes that these things have been so generalized and what Jonathan calls concept creep as well, affects these phenomena. So what do I mean by this? Earlier, you and I talked about a commitment to the idea that there's an objective nature to reality. Now, there is a long philosophical debate about this topic. It's a deep and interesting set of ideas about subjectivity. You know, can we even see the world objectively? Does objective reality even exist? I think it does. But you can make an interesting philosophical argument. What about the notion of so called social construction? The idea that the gender of the scientist or the racist beliefs of the scientist color their objectivity? Of course they do. We have countless examples of this. We know this from research done by historians and others. We know that it's difficult to be an impersonal observer, that every observer is situated somewhere. And I think there's validity to those ideas. Now, I also think there is an out there out there and that it is knowable and that we do our best to understand it. And so when you carry the rejection of objective reality to the extreme that you call it a tool of heteropatriarchy, you really have kind of jumped a shark. You've taken a core idea which says, look, we need to not always believe what we are told or we need to understand how a person's position in society might affect what they see. And we know this affects even ostensibly objective phenomena. We know that scientists, for example, looking so Emily Martin has done some fantastic work which I teach on how scientists looking at cell division or menstruation interpret the biology by virtue of who they are. But then it takes it to such a ridiculous extreme that it becomes absurd. And similarly the notion of cultural appropriation. So the kernel of the idea there is that some communities of people are so denigrated that not only are they, let's say, killed and wiped out, but all of their ideas and culture is stolen from them, is explored. They are effaced and that all that's left is a kind of caricature of who they are. And there is some truth to that too that it's like adding insult to injury. Not only do I engage in genocide, but like, I take all your ideas, your culture as well and don't even credit you. And who am I to do that? The problem is that, again, it's carried to a preposterous extreme so that now the whole history of ideas and of culture, of art and music is endless theft. I mean, it's endless modification and transformation and exchange of ideas and of thoughts and musical and artistic forms and so forth. To then start claiming that, like in the Reed College example, that she couldn't teach these things, she couldn't wear poetry is lit because she's appropriating African American slang is just a crazy caricature of what is otherwise potentially an interesting philosophical idea to discuss. And so I think this is the thing that has made it especially hard for me is that I believe that I have a more than passing understanding of the epistemology here and I have a more than passing sympathy for some of the concerns about that the students have about police brutality, about economic inequality, about racial justice. But I am deeply concerned with the Maoist abandonment of reason and discourse and the kind of dehumanizing atomizing of people. I mean, one of the things that has really just pressed me in the courtyard that day and I wrote a little bit about this in that one other prior I think you're the only second public remarks I'm making about this. The piece in the New York Times there was a young woman who I think was African American and she said to me, very plaintively and it pulled at my heartstrings, she said, you cannot understand our predicament because you are middle aged and white and male. And I said to her that I understood what she was saying but that I nevertheless believed in our common humanity. And I believe that all of us and I still believe this that all of us as human beings can speak to and understand each other, united by our common humanity and that even though I was a different gender and age and skin color than her that I nevertheless could understand her. And that I was interested in making the effort to understand her. And I would hope that she could understand me. And the students adeered at this. And then there was another student, a minority student who later wrote a post in the Yale Daily News where he wrote that he had never been more disappointed in his colleagues than when I was then the titles at the time were that we were the masters of these colleges. Now they were called Head of College. The title has changed. And he said, I'd never been more disappointed when the master made the argument about our common humanity and that his peers jeered. And so I think when so my point is when you abandon the commitment to our common humanity, when you atomize people, when you believe that only certain types of people have authority to use certain types of cultural ideas or tropes you efface for me a fundamental reality of our common humanity and a fundamental tool we can have to interact with Each other. So that professor at Reed, the claim that she can't wear a t shirt that says poetry is is lit is to me is just is preposterous and violates every basic principle. In my view that should animate a civilized society. To use the example of what the young woman said to you in the quad, that amounts to a naked declaration that meaningful communication which I think is really self defeating in the end. So what is your game plan? If you're saying that you can't communicate your grievances to anyone who is not exactly like you, to anyone who doesn't suffer them along with you, what help are you asking? There are other experiences that we all have had with pain and suffering and death and grief. And maybe I've not had exactly the same kind of suffering as you, Sam, but I'm pretty sure you've had some knocks in life. And I'm pretty sure that if we had a drink together and we're talking about a topic that we would find common ground or shared understanding even with dissimilar trajectories through life. Of course one person struggled with poverty as a child. Another person struggled with the divorced parents. Another person, you know, escaped Vietnam on a boat and another person, you know, witnessed violence and another person, you know, they're there gradations and differences, but I believe people can empathize with each other, I hope. But what was so disturbing about that encounter you had was the insistence that none of that is possible and none of that is ethically or politically relevant. And what was in its place was a desire to essentially shame you into silence. And this is again, coming from Yale students, objectively, some of the most privileged people who have ever lived, whatever the color of their skin. This is just undeniable. Again, taking on board everything you just said about who knows what suffering even privileged people have had in their lives. But the idea that these were some of the most aggrieved people on Earth, this was like the wailing of the widows of shrubbernitsa. I mean, it was just it was madness. And so, again, this is I'm speaking as someone who just watched this from outside, who doesn't know these students and hasn't lived with them and dealt with them subsequently. But just to see the breakdown of discourse through the lens of what you experienced there, again, from the outside, was pretty startling. So before we get more into this, and again, we're going to talk about the more general insights we can glean here about crowd dynamics and social contagion and all the rest. But before we do anything else, I want to back up and just remind people how this kicked off at Yale, what happened. You can be as abbreviated as you want, but just describe the sequence of events. Well, I would rather have you describe the sequence of events. Sure. In my recollection, what happened is your wife Erica, who was also a professor at Yale, responded to an email that came out from the school admonishing people to dress in the most tasteful possible and politically correct Halloween costumes. And your wife, Erica, if memory serves, wrote a response to this to the some hundred students who were under her charge in, what was it, their dormitory or their house. Yeah, I think the original email was sent by a person in the dean's office here, a man by the name of Burgewell Howard, who had previously been dean at the Northwestern University. And he had sent the same Halloween costume email there and then sort of decided to resend it five or ten years later at a different university and at a different time. There had been, to my knowledge, no episodes of students wearing blackface at Yale or pushing the boundaries in such an extreme way. But nevertheless, this email was sent out. And actually, in the New York Times the previous month, there had been a whole exchange about this Halloween costume guidance. So in in the in the Zeitgeist, people were talking about how this is getting was getting a little out of hand and seemed a bit silly that universities were providing official guidance on Halloween costumes. I think there were six people who wrote in that article, and five were against Halloween costume guidance, and one was for it. And so there have been a number of emails that had come out at Yale. At this time in the run up. And I think this one that Dean Howard sent was maybe the third and broadest most detailed. It had links to acceptable and unacceptable costumes or recommended and non recommended costumes, and it was coming from a positive intention, and that is to say that, you know, it it's not necessary to set out to cause needless offense. You know, I'm not I think in a free society, we have to tolerate offense, but it's not like I'm interested in deliberately offending people. And we can talk about some examples on college campuses where this can be hard anyway. And what had happened is we had been hearing from the students, and Erica in particular had been hearing from her students that the students felt infantilised by this email. So many of the students were objecting to this that they couldn't believe this. And Erica that day had taught a class this was in late October where the students in the class was about child development. She taught a class about child development. And there was an animated and intellectually rigorous conversation about what stage of development are college students at and are they capable of choosing their own costumes or negotiating among themselves, you know, if they're if they have taken offense, talking to each other and so forth? And because we had more detail than you want, probably, but because earlier in the year so this was in October, in August, I had sent an email to the students, the 400 students in Silaman that summer. There had been the murders in Charleston, where this man, whose name I'm blocking, thank God, who went into the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Mother church in Charleston, and slaughtered nine or ten people at close range who had welcomed him into their midst. So he was white, and the victims were all black and a vile and despicable carnage motivated by racial hatred. And there had been a lot of discourse in the public space that summer, and that was the summer where all the Confederate flags began to finally come down. And I was very concerned about these events, like many people were. And I had organized a series of speakers at Silaman. We had a famous African American historian from MIT who came and spoke about the history of slavery in American institutions. We had some people talking about other aspects of this. We also had booked months earlier, greg Lukianoff, who had come to speak about free speech. There was a series of public speakers. Anyway, I sent an email in August, late August, beginning of September, to the students in the college about the aftermath of Charleston. And I talked about how, as a public health person, one of the things that I found most distressing was that Walmart had stopped selling Confederate flags, but not guns, and that, in my view, this had it backwards, that there was all this focus on symbolism, but not on practical concerns. That really we need to address, let's say, issues of inequality and issues of violence in our society and that these symbolic things, while important, were potentially distracting us. So I had an essay about this, which is, I think, still somewhere online, and it's a couple of pages, and the student feedback was tremendous. Dozens of students wrote to me, and they said, wow, this has got me to think. And it was so interesting. And and the masters at Yale, you know, previously, we hadn't been spoken to in this way, and for me, this was normal. It was like writing an essay, like a thoughtful essay, where you're trying to defend a point of view. And we had done this previously when I had been at Harvard. My wife and I had a similar role there, and we would regularly communicate with our students in this fashion, and some would agree and some wouldn't agree. And, you know, we had debates there about religious symbols in public places and vegetarianism and, you know, could we roast a lamb at Greek Easter in the college courtyard, using university money to purchase the lamb? I mean, you know, they raise interesting sort of questions for the students to debate. Anyway, so we got all this positive feedback for this, and there had been a lot of students complaining about the Halloween costume guidance email, and that was the history and the background. The New York Times article, it was in the public sphere. Yale students thought it was infantilizing. Previously, we had gotten some praise for engaging the students with ideas, and that's what motivated my lovely wife, who has spent her career taking care of battered women and inner city children and homeless substance users. And this has been her life. We're very progressive people got her to send this email, which said, do you students and the email, just to clarify my wife's argument, was not actually taking a stand one way or the other on whether the guidance was necessary. And one way or the other on the costumes, she was saying, do you? You students should probably consider whether you wish to surrender this authority to superordinates. It fundamentally was a left wing position, saying you should be deeply skeptical of surrendering power to the state, to the administration, and you should talk about that. That was the intellectual essence of my wife's very gentle email. The aftermath of which you summarized earlier. Yeah, I should say that the email was utterly balanced, as was Brett Weinstein's email to his administration. Right. There's no trace of racism. There's no trace of bigotry. There's no trace of failure, of empathy or lack of sympathy for the students. Right. It's like showing respect. I believe we show respect for the students when we say, we are interested in engaging you in ideas. Again, we're talking about people who are old enough to be shipped off to fight a war. We're talking about people who in a few short years will be on the job market as some of the most highly educated and in demand young adults in the country. I mean, these are people who should be able to talk about a Halloween costume that offends them. Yes, but you see, the problem is, again, this is, again, where I have some empathy and sympathy for the students, too. And so this is what is so challenging, because, again, you see, there's a kernel of like we discussed earlier with this notion of cultural appropriation and these claims that science is an objectivity claim, subjectivity are tools of oppression, these ridiculously extreme claims. There's an element of truth as well to the student's sense of alienation. And part of it, again, is developmental, 18 to 22 year olds feel a sense of alienation. We all did different ways. And now if you're a minority student in these institutions, there may be an extra burden of alienation that you feel. And I think there are ways that we can discuss that with students. I think there are ways we can reform our institutions, and I don't lack sympathy for that. But as Jonathan Height has said, I think the fundamental commitment of these institutions is to luxe at veritas. And this has to be done in a way in which we retain a deep and abiding commitment to speaking the truth and having open expression. So then what happened? She sent the email and some fear erupted, and then you stepped out of the building to talk to an assembled group of students. How did the the YouTube video we've seen I'm not sure I'd want to go into all the details because it's, you know, it's it's remotely if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Okay, well, for this episode, the first of the new year, I am presenting the audio of my live event with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro that we did in San Francisco a few weeks back. To say that this audio has been much anticipated really is an understatement. Ben has an enormous following online, and I have been hearing from all of you, mostly on social media and in comment threads. I really haven't been sitting on this audio for any other reason than I had many other podcasts in the queue and I couldn't decently hold them for much longer. But the time has arrived and I just have a few things to say. By way of preamble. I introduced both of these guys on stage, so I don't need to do that here. Eric Weinstein. Many of you know from a previous podcast, he's always great. Ben, as many of you know, is quite a polarizing and controversial figure. I got a fair amount of grief when I announced that we would be doing a podcast together. Also, a ton of enthusiasm from his fans. Needless to say, I can't take responsibility for everything Ben has said or written in the past. I'm certainly unaware of most of what he's said and written, but I'm aware of enough to know that he has, like many of us, operating in this space on these topics, been unfairly maligned and demonized by his detractors. I think any comparison between him and Milo Yanopoulos is quite unfair given the differences in how they operate. This is something I say on stage at the beginning of this event, but that's a comparison that's often made. Ben and I disagree about some fundamental things here, and I found myself in a situation which I often find myself in on the podcast, where I have to play host and debate partner simultaneously. And I've begun to feel that there really is no perfect way to split that baby, and I certainly didn't do it perfectly here. More and more, I try to err on the side of being the gracious host who is not going to let things get bogged down, but the scientist and philosopher in me, who can't let a bad point stand, invariably flirts with the ditch on the other side of the road. So you can decide whether I struck the right balance here. Ben and I disagree fundamentally about religion and its connection to human values. We disagree about free will. I tackled some of these points as they came up and let others go in the interest of not getting bogged down. But I think Ben and I did about as well as we could here, where we disagreed, given the nature of the event. But you be the judge. I should say that despite our disagreements, the vibes with Ben were great in the green room beforehand. Afterwards. This was a very fun and collegial experience for everyone, and I'm very grateful for Eric and Ben's participation as well. As to all of you who came out for the event. We had a packed house at the Masonic in San Francisco, and from what I can tell, most of you had a lot of fun. So, without further delay, I give you the Waking Up Podcast. Live from San Francisco with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro. Thank you. Okay, well, sorry for the late start. I'm going to jump right into it because we have a lot to talk about. I've got two guests tonight, and the first is a mathematician. He has a PhD from Harvard, and he has held research positions at Harvard and MIT and Hebrew University and Oxford. You may have heard him before on my podcast. He is one of the most interesting people I have ever met, and honestly, that's saying a lot. And along with his brother Brett, who I just did a podcast with last night in Seattle, he has become one of the most valuable defenders of free speech in our time. So please welcome Eric Weinstein. Thank you for governor. And our next contestant is the editor in chief of DailyWire.com. He is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, so Guess His Name, which is the top conservative podcast in the nation. He is the author of seven books, and he has been a nationally syndicated columnist since the age of 17. Pity he got such a late start. He's a graduate of UCLA in Harvard Law School. Please welcome Ben Shapiro. Thank you for coming. So we have a lot to get into here, and there are areas of agreement. I mean, many of you know who these two guys are, and you can imagine the course we're going to chart here. I want to start with Ben because he's had a truly unusual experience, and many of you may not be aware of just how unusual. And this will take us into areas of agreement, Ben, where we definitely agree, which is around the primacy of free speech and how strange our national conversation is on so many topics. So Ben, if you don't know, is the person who, when he goes to Berkeley, requires berkeley University requires $600,000 worth of security to give a speech. We have a little bit less security here tonight, so please behave yourselves. But it's a bit ben, what what's what's been going on? What has it been like to be you in the last two years? Confusing it's I've always been a little bit bewildered by the scope of the opposition at these college speeches because I don't actually think that my message is supremely controversial. It's pretty mainstream and conservative, and yet when I show up on campuses at Cal State Los Angeles, there was a near riot when I went to Berkeley. Obviously, they required a fair bit of security, thanks to Antifa, and when I was at DePaul University, banned me outright. They threatened to arrest me if I stepped foot on their campus. Even though students had invited me, University of Wisconsin, they actually tried to pass a law banning the Heckler's vehicle, basically, after I spoke to University of Wisconsin. So I think it has far less to do with me than it does with this kind of mood in the country that's so polarized and so crazed. And I would say with regard to college campuses unique to the political left, I'm not seeing a lot of it from the political right. The political right certainly has its own problems at this point in time, but what's going on on campuses is something that I've been speaking on college campuses for most of my career. So 15 years, and only in the last couple have I needed security. The first time I ever acquired security guards was last year. And now every place I go, oh, I have to have security guards when it's a public event. And also, you're getting it from both sides in a way that's completely surreal, because, for instance, you were often disparaged as a Nazi or a white supremacist. Theamica gives me away on that. Yeah, but even if you were not going to notice theamica, you were actually the most targeted victim of antisemitism in, what, 2016? Among journalists on Twitter, anyway. It is upside down. And you're also often compared to your former Breitbart colleague, Milo Yanopoulos. Right. And and that's yeah, that's an unfortunate pairing. Because the reason why I wanted to talk to you is because while I think you and I will disagree about several, maybe foundational things, I see you as someone who is sincerely defending a position based on a rational chain of argumentation based on first principles that we may or may not share. But you're not a performance artist, and that's a crucial distinction. I mean, that's at least what I'm going for, right? I've always thought that what I'm trying to do anyway, is say things that I think are true, and if they piss you off, they piss you off. But I'm not going in there with the idea I need to piss somebody off to make a headline. That's why I've always found this a little bit puzzling, because there are provocateurs whose job it is to go into a university, say something deliberately provocative, just to get a rise out of people and get a headline. And since that really is not my Mo, I've been sort of puzzled, frankly, by the level of opposition on all sides. It was a very weird year. I mean, last year was a weird year. I had the alt right calling me a Black Lives Matter activist and Black Lives Matter calling me an alt writer. So it was unique time, 2016. We're still living in a parallel universe in which Marty McFly actually did not stop if from using the sports yearbook. One lens through which I want us to view the this conversation is really two lenses. It's it's what most worries you and what most interests you at this point? Let's start with the worry. Where are you at this moment? Well, I guess for me, I've tried to localize my concern with the breakdown of what I call semireliable communal sense making. If something happens, it's a very Eric Weinstein phrase. This is the reason my Twitter follower count is Orders of Bankitude below yours. The idea being that if something happens and everybody in the audience processes it, we will fall into certain clusters. And those clusters are fairly reliable and dependent to Ben's point that he is both Black Lives Matter and Altright in the Schrodinger superposition. So what is that? And it has to do with the fact that traditionally we've used institutions to guide our sensemaking and to make sense of things collectively and that has now gone away. And so, depending upon what institutions I'm hooked up to, what was my last? Where did the fox last have the scent? I can be at odds with somebody I love, somebody who I've thought about as somebody I've shared a life with because there's no longer any way to do this communal. And the semirelible I don't think that Walter Cronkite was actually always telling us the truth, but it was in some sense, to first approximation, close enough that there was a national consciousness belief structure. There was enough shared sort of complex for us to function as a country. And I think that that's gone away. So I think this is the parent of the crisis, which I increasingly think of as this I call it the no name revolution, or the N squared revolution, where in some sort of new regime, which doesn't look like any revolution we've seen before, it's much less physically violent. So far. It's digitally extremely violent and it has to do with the fact that we can't make sense of things communally at some semi reliable level. And what are the ideas or sets of ideas that you think are most culpable for bringing us here? Well, it's tough. I think that what really happened, if we think about it historically, is that we had this beautiful period of fairly reliable, high, evenly distributed, technologically led growth after World War II up until about, let's say, 1970. And we predicated all of our institutions on this expectation that this growth was some sort of normal thing that we could depend upon in the future. When it ran out, we were left with all of our institutions looking in some form or another like Ponzi schemes. And in order to keep running an institution that expected growth in a steady state condition, let's say you need to change the narrative to create some sort of as if growth story. So you start stealing from the future. You start stealing from groups that are too weak to defend their own economic interest so that certain slices can keep growing even if the pie doesn't grow so well. There are certain areas that kept growing, like communications and computation. So there was some real growth, maybe fracking. But in general, what we have is we have a bunch of institutions that used to be capable of honesty, that had to develop narratives. And that the problem, is we've had as if growth across the spectrum for most of our adult lives. And that story, which is a fiction, ran out. You're not one of these anti capitalists I've been hearing about, are you're? The Managing Director of Teal Capital. So that wouldn't be good. If this gets out, I'm toast. That's the genesis of it. So you actually think economics is the longest lever here that's influencing the machine? This breakdown of this failure of polite conversation to get us to converge on a meaningful worldview? Well, if you chase it all the way up the chain, I mean, markets are in some sense the continuation of natural and sexual selection by other means. And so what you have is that markets take over from this sounds like a very creepy come online from us. The night is young. I don't have to read this. Let me just acknowledge I'm actually a bad podcast host. I see. So you're not with an expert here. You're a good sport. Yeah, I think that we don't realize that when we look out at the city that nobody is telling people where to drive, what to do. It's sort of self organized with markets being this kind of invisible fabric that keeps us together. And so, yeah, it's really important that when growth stops proceeding at the levels that it's expected, people can't form families in real time. So fertility is threatened, people can't plan for coupling and for a future. So I think it gets right into the most intimate details of our lives when the markets don't materialize in the way that we need them. So what is keeping you up at night? Well, I worry a lot less about economics as the basis for social collapse. I think it's easy to overstate the extent to which growth has stagnated. I mean, we are at 4% unemployment. The economy is not 1935. This is not even 1975. There's still significant economic growth. To me, it seems like the social social fabric has been completely ripped apart. And some of that is due to social media and the fact that we coordinate with each other in a different way. But I think a lot of it has to do with loss of common values, like even the ability to have a common conversation. In order to have a conversation with one another, we have to take certain things for granted, like human reason, like objective truth. If we don't take these basic things at least for granted, then how are we even speaking the same language? And it seems to me that a lot of those things have disappeared in favor of radical subjectivism that may make us feel good but doesn't provide the common framework for a conversation and objective truth goes by the wayside because if we can't agree on the fact how are we going to have a conversation? You see this particularly in our politics where it seems like there's two bubbles that have been created and if you read Huffington Post you are in a completely different world than if you read Breitbart. And my mom actually first noticed this in 2012 because she said I was working at Breitbart at the time. She said well it looks like from Breitbart Romney's definitely going to win. I was like, yeah he's definitely going to win. And then all my friends at work read Huffington Post and they say that Obama is definitely going to win and I don't know who to believe. And I said well I really don't know who to believe either because no one knows the answer to that question. But you can see that it's broken down in incredibly radical ways now, because even things where there should be a common basis of fact, people are disagreeing on. To take the Senate race in Alabama, there's pretty good, reliable accounts that the Republican candidate in that race is likely guilty of some form of sexual abuse of underage girls. And a huge percentage of the Republican base, my party, my group, a huge percentage of them will outright deny that that's the case because they'll say this is a witch hunt. People are out to get Roy Moore. It's a conspiratorial attack on Roy Moore. So that's one example from the right and then on the left you'll have examples where you will say things that are biologically true. Take a controversial example like there is a male sex and there is a female sex. And if you say that then people will lose their minds because you're somehow insulting their subjectivity. And when you do that it's hard to have a conversation because people will change the terms they're using. They'll change the frame of reference they're using and then they'll toss reason out altogether. They'll say your specific bias as a person prevents you from even having a reasonable conversation. Your white privilege or your background or your ethnicity or all of this prevents us from even discussing on one on one level I can recognize my background and having an impact on how I think. But if that is supposed to be a conversation stopper then how exactly are we supposed to have a conversation? Yeah. So that's why identity politics is so toxic in my view. Because if identity is paramount communication is impossible because you haven't shared my specific experience or because you don't have the same skin color, you're not the same gender. There's no bridge between us. Right. And there's no chain of reasoning from you to me that should trump anything I currently think because what I think is anchored to identity exactly. We don't share an identity. Well we're atomized individuals kind of bouncing off one another as opposed to being able to form some sort of molecular bond. And I think that it seems like that's completely collapsed. Right. Do you think social media is the main engine of that collapse, or is it just we're headed there anyway. Obviously Fox News and the fragmentation of media precedes social media when we had our echo chamber. Yeah, I mean, I really don't think it's social media. And there's a study that came out from I think it was Harvard actually reported by the New York Times talking about how the impact of social media on polarization is overstated, that if you look at the most polarized populations in the country. It's actually older people that people who are older are more polarized politically and are having fewer conversations with people on the other side of the aisle than younger people. And younger people are obviously more apt to use social media. I really don't think it's that. I think that there is a ground shift in the way people think that's taken place even within our lifetime and has gained steam. And as I say, even basic concepts like reason are being thrown out in favor of a philosophy of feeling because maybe it does come down to lack of success for people. Maybe people do feel that they can't succeed in other ways. And so the way that they feel fulfilled, the way that they feel whatever need they have for fulfillment is by wallowing in themselves. If I can't find fulfillment in the outer world, then I will look inside me and I will look at what makes me special. And we've all been taught that we're special by Barney, and therefore, since we are all special, then you saying anything that disagrees with me is taking away my specialness. And that can't be infringed upon. You can actually try to look at the history of these ideas. Like, for example, you mentioned white privilege, and I at some point tried to track it down, and there's some two page it's not even an academic paper unpacking the knapsack in the late 80s coming out of Wellesley or intersectionality comes out of, apparently UCLA law School. A lot of these ideas actually began as kind of minor, interesting ideas heuristics that couldn't support an entire epistemology. And what happened was that you had some sort of vaguely approximate concepts that got pushed so far beyond their domain of applicability that they led to a kind of madness when they became sort of the substrate for thought. You can't really have conversations where white privilege is a barrier. If Ben has a drinking problem and I have a gambling problem, we may not be able to understand each other's addictions directly. But if I think about Ben's problem I asked you not to talk about that publicly. Step one, admit that you've got a problem. The issue is that this idea of being able to hack empathy and hack understanding by using our own personal experiences, our lived experience. To use the jargon and the felt experience in order to empathize across these dividing lines shows this incredible failure of imagination. It's as if there was no screenwriter who was able to write both male and female characters that men and women identify with. And so I think it has to do with pushing interesting but very limited. Heuristics so far beyond their domain of applicability. You can track each one of these things using Google Engrams to find out where they came from. Right. It seems to me that we're struggling and it's not just us, all of us are struggling to find a way to capture meaning and value in the context of a rational worldview. And I think that is a challenge that just doesn't go away. That is a perpetual challenge. Insofar as we understand the situation we're in, we need to find ways of talking about that so as to converge with a basic life plan with 7 billion strangers. And one difference between us is what we think the value of religion is in that picture. Just to get a little bit of the context here. You're an Orthodox Jew? What does that actually commit you to with respect to belief? What do you believe that I don't believe? That is salient here. Okay, I'm an atheist. Well let's see that gives you a clue. Yeah, I haven't picked up on that. It's going be to so awkward now. You kids have fun. This is Ali G. Well, I believe in a creator of the universe. I believe that he set certain guidelines for human behavior, that he cares what happens to us. I believe that he endowed us with an American sense, certain inalienable rights that accrue to us as virtue of being human from a judaic perspective, which doesn't really impact public policy so much. One of the reasons that I think we can have a conversation is that when it comes to public policy discussions, I try as little as possible to refer to biblical text, which means I almost never do. Mainly because what would an appeal to authority that you don't believe in do? I mean it's a waste of time. So in the areas where I think we can actually have a conversation where we're not talking about the value of kashrut or keeping Sabbath, which I think has very little relevant input for public policy and the kind of social fabric building that we're talking about, doing the stuff that I think is important, where we disagree, is man made in God's image, created taking the premise by faith that God created us with certain inalienable rights, endowed us with the capacity to choose, endowed us with the capacity to reason and cares about what happens to us. Right. Not sure if you could say right any more cynically. There one word can do so much unintended. But yet what I'm interested in is in a worldview that could be rebooted or rediscovered. Now, I mean, just imagine we lost all of our you know, we had all the libraries burned, the internet went down, we lost all of our texts. How would someone rediscover this thing? Now, we can make an easy case that we could rediscover science. It might take some time. But if the literature of Judaism in your case were lost, it seems to me patently obvious that whatever is true about reality is still there to be discovered. And if there's some part of reality that is ethical or spiritual or divine or spooky, it is there to be discovered by sentient creatures such as ourselves. So how would you reboot religion, the religion that's true? Because you are by accident born a Jew, right. And there are a billion people in India who weren't, and I must imagine that on your account, they have, by sheer bad luck, the wrong version of this story. Well, I mean, so Judaism is actually not quite as exclusive as a lot of other religions with regard to this. I mean, Judaism actually says that as long as you fulfill seven basic commandments like don't kill people, don't steal, don't eat the flesh of a living animal, that you actually have a pathway into heaven. So Judaism is not particularly exclusive and we actually try to discourage converts. So it's not quite the same as some of the other converting religions in monotheism. But as far as what's discoverable, I would agree with you. If the Torah were to disappear, tomorrow would not be discoverable. Which is why there is a necessity for revelation in the Jewish view. Right. The idea is that revelation was necessary, not that revelation was unnecessary, and that if people had not been graced with revelation, they would have come to this on their own. But the principles you just gave me, you don't think those are discovered? Those are discoverable. Right. And that's the reason why I say that I think that the principles that are granted through revolution, evolution are not necessarily I think that they caused a ground shift historically from certain ways of thought to other ways of thought. Like the advent of JudeoChristian thought changed the way of thinking. But I think that they are also things that you can discover through contemplation, for example. So all of the things that I said about free will and reason and the presence of an unmoved mover, that's more Aristotelian than it is JudeoChristian, right? And that is stuff that was essentially discovered through philosophy, not through revelation. So that is the stuff when I talk about the necessity for reason, that's the stuff I think that is more relevant. Now, I think that you do need a religious system in order to inform people who are not going to sit around philosophizing all day what are good and bad modes of behavior. And, you know, Voltaire thought the same. So I think that the notion of but is it important to believe that those good and bad modes were approved of or discouraged by an omniscient beam. Can't we just chart a course toward greater fulfillment, greater peaceful collaboration, based on just an intelligent analysis of what it is to be social? I don't think you can unless you're willing to acknowledge that reason, the capacity to choose, the capacity to act in the world that these things exist, and that has to be done based on assumption, because you actually oppose some of these things. Right. Like, you don't think free will exists. Yeah, but I also don't think you need free will to live a moral life. Right. I've never really understood that position, so we'll have to get into it. But to me, if you're going to have a conversation with someone and convince them, then we need to agree on the value of reason. The value of reason is not something that evolutionary biology suggests. What does reason have to do with evolutionary biology per se? It's a mode of action that is more likely to preserve your species. It doesn't create objective truth, the notion of an objective truth that exists apart from you, and it will exist whether or not you were living. This is not something that can necessarily be gathered from science alone. You have to make certain assumptions about the universe and the way that your mind reflects what is present in the universe. Right. As Kant would argue. Well, it's true that an evolutionary perspective on ourselves suggests that we have not evolved to know reality perfectly. If you believe that we are apes that have been selected for and all of our cognitive architecture is built by virtue of its adaptive advantage, in evolutionary terms, yes, it's hard to believe that we are perfectly designed to do mathematics or anything else. That is true. But you do feel that we can still gather objective truth. But even that picture suggests a wider context of minds more powerful than our own that could have evolved or our own future minds. I mean, there's no why would you appeal to minds that have not yet evolved their future minds, as opposed to just the creator who put us here with certain capacities? Well, no, because that I would argue we don't have any evidence for. What we do have evidence for is that we're here. We understand a lot about the mechanism that is operating now that got us here and that is causing us to be the way we are. We can see our relationship to other life forms. We know that we can look at chimps that share 99% of our DNA, and they obviously share a lot of the evolved precursors of our own social and cognitive architecture, but they have no idea what we're up to. Right. So they're cognitively closed to most of what we're doing and most of what we care about. And by analogy, we know that we could be cognitively closed to. What we might be capable of in a thousand years now. Our sense of what? Engagement with the cosmos. Promise. But I guess the argument is if you're arguing that we're cognitively close to certain things, then why are you arguing which specific things we are? No, I'm just saying that once you admit it's possible to not know what you're missing factually, ethically, spiritually, in any domain of inquiry, it's possible to come up against a horizon line where the known meets the unknown. You sound kind of religious here. Well, you wouldn't be the first to say it, but it's clearly possible not to know what you're missing. And if you kill I agree. You should come with me to synagogue. I've tried that already. But if you killed the 100 smartest mathematicians on Earth right now, Eric, you're in trouble. You would close the door to certain conversations, maybe for 200 years. Again, by analogy, it would be just sheer hubris to think that the 7 billion of us who are currently here collectively or anyone individually, have pushed the human conversation to the limit of what's rationally apprehendable about the universe. So we know there's more out there in every sense. So what you're imagining is that not every sense, right? Well, no, in every sense that this is why, really I'm going to have to have you over. But from the from the atheist perspective or from the perspective of not being convinced of any religion, this is what's so limiting about this notion of Revelation, because what you have, you're anchoring a worldview to a book that we know. We just know by the time of its composition and by its actual contents can't subsume right. The larger world view that we're gathering every day. So you're arguing past me a little bit. Right, because the argument that I was making was based on an Aristotelian philosophical view of an unmoved mover and certain properties that we have to have as human beings in order to create a civilization. And you're arguing back to Revelation, which I freely admitted that if Revelation were to be destroyed tomorrow, I could not recreate the Torah from memory. Right. It's not a matter of not being able to recreate it. It's just that what is its importance apart from being one among millions of books that have inspired people to the importance of jail? Christian revelation, in our particular context is it is the creator of the entire chain of events, or at least the progenitor, along with Greek thought, largely of an entire chain of events and thought that lead to the establishment of the modern science that you rely upon. Again, that's a set of historical contingencies that are but they're not coincidences that are contingent. Well, no, but there was no one else. My argument here is that you could also say that virtually everything that has been accomplished in human history was accomplished by people who didn't know a damn thing about biology. Right. There was no one else to do the job. Every bridge that was built, every beautiful building that was built was built by somebody who knew nothing about DNA. Okay? But that's not an argument that ignorance of molecular biology is a good thing or that it should be maintained. And I'm not arguing that ignorance is a positive. What I'm arguing is that no, but I would say that any kind of religious sectarianism is a species of ignorance. Now that we should be outgrowing and that's, again, an assumption that you're making based on premises that I don't necessarily agree with meaning. But on your account, the Hindus have to have it wrong. They're worshiping an elephant headed god and monkey god. I don't think everybody is right. I do think that the Hindus are not correct, otherwise it wouldn't be Jewish. Right. That's what I'm what's the significance? If you're going to go to Aristotle and you're going to go to seven precepts that anyone could discover so as to lead a well ordered life, what is the significance of being Jewish? So the significance of being Jewish is that even the foundations of what Aristotle believe that he's trying to arrive through, that he's trying to arrive at, logically have to be undergirded by a faith in a god who also provides us some level of moral guidance. Because even the precepts of Aristotle are too broad to actually create the civilization upon which we stand. Meaning this is not a Greek civilization. This is a Greek JudeoChristian civilization. It's the Athens in Jerusalem, in the typical phraseology. And if you just knock out the pillar of Jerusalem, then you're ignoring the impact that Jerusalem has on Athens and that Athens has on Jerusalem, historically speaking. Well, this is kind of reminding me of the moment when I debated Rick Warren once at Saddleback, just in his office. It was just the two of us and John Meacham, who was moderating, and he was telling me that basically without God, people would just be raping and killing. And you require this as an anchor for an ethical life. And he even said of himself, I mean, I don't believe this when anyone says this, but this is sort of the bluff that never gets called. He said of himself that if he didn't believe there was a Hell, he would be raping and killing. Yeah, and I don't agree with that. That's actually not something that I fully agree with. But I do agree with the idea that without a I'm glad to hear that. Fair enough. But what I do believe is that a scientific, materialist worldview cannot construct a moral system because is has nothing to do with ought. Science is about is and has no capacity to say anything about ought other than constructions that are based in a notion of free will that you yourself reject. I'm happy to get into all of that. Time is short, but I've written two books on those two, and I've read them. But if that were true, how would you explain the moral character of my life, assuming I'm not raping and killing people or living a very life that you would recognize? To be glad to hear that I just said moments ago, I don't think that you have to be a religious person to lead a moral life. I do think that there has to be a religious underpinning to a moral system, because I don't think that you can you're using terminology that is based in certain assumptions about human nature that I'm not sure that you are recognizing that you reject. Right. Let's take the scientific materialist worldview at its very base. At its very base. We are basically balls of meat wandering through the universe with a bit of self awareness attached. We're sort of spinoza stones that have been thrown, and we know that we've been thrown. We don't have control over our own behavior. We don't have control over what we do. We don't have the capacity to react. No. First of all, many people who would take an evolutionary picture of ourselves also imagine that we have free will. I've never understood that perspective, to be honest with you. I'll put the free will piece in play here because actually, I think there are moral insights we can have when we see through the illusion of free will, which we really can't easily have without doing that. And then I want to bring you in here, Eric. Very patient. Not falling for that twice. Well, I think part of the problem one of the problems is that in some very weird way, because Ben is wearing a kippa, we think of him as being very orthodox, pious and religious. In fact, I'm always struck by just how much he has chose any appeal to text in his public argument. So for functional reasons, I very often see him in a largely atheistic context. I find, Sam, that you're always focused on what is, to my way of thinking, very clearly a form of Judaism expressed as atheism. That really does sound antisemitic. Somehow I'll have to ask my rabbi how I just got insulted how much you're being paid tonight? And as much as I take a scientific worldview, I find that if I'm really honest with myself, I have a lot of certainly dialectical tensions that I can't resolve, needs for meaning that I can't find easily met within the rational systems. I think that the is and ought is a good distinction. I think a lot of this has to do with preexisting architecture that predisposes us, even though our rational minds may know better towards something that functions very much in an as if religious context. Well, let's just take Is in awe for a second because here's one way those two things collapse for me. If understanding how the universe is altogether, all the possibilities of experience, all the ways minds emerge all of the kinds of good lives and bad lives and all of the mechanisms that would determine one path over another a complete understanding of the mind and the cosmos. That's all the is. All the is that is there to be understood. If understanding that couldn't give you a complete picture of what you ought to do where would you go to get that picture? If you sum all the facts, how does that not give you a way to charge your course in this universe? Well, what else is there to inform your life? Well, there are these things that we notice in our minds that we can that run through our fingers like quicksilver, that aren't exactly facts these intuitions, these things that nod us even though we know the answer. We feel superstitious and we feel guilt. Economists talk about utility as a one dimensional object but how many kinds of utility and disutility? I can be happy, I can be interested, I could be fulfilled all these different ways of tagging utilities and disutilities. And if you just notice your mind, you'll notice there are all sorts of things going on in it that really aren't about facts. And I don't know where they originate. Neither do you. But just translate what you're saying, how I'm hearing what you're saying. You're telling me facts about the mind, which I agree with. There's kind of a congress. You guys decided that there was an objective reality when you were having that conversation. I suppose that there's probably objective reality. But I think that a lot of what goes on is that we've been in the shallow end of science where more or less me and let's say this gentleman over here share enough that we can probably agree that the square root of two is provably irrational. I believe that that's probably an objective fact but I don't believe proof checking is objective because we have things like the Amabi problem that sit in the literature for years and we think it's proof, but it turns out we didn't have the right proof. So we have situations in which we've been picking low hanging, easy fruit to console ourselves that we can all get at the objective reality. We've all seen optical illusions where some color is exactly the same wavelength but it looks two different ways because of the surrounding. That's a great example. Let's linger there for a second. Again, we thought we knew what we were talking about and then we find out at a deeper level that we didn't. And then we think we know what we're talking about again and then it can reverse again. But that move to the deeper level is more facts. It's more context, it's more objectivity. Right. But we already agreed on something that turned out not to be true as objective fact. The point is that I'm not entirely sure in any of these. Like, if I take the irrationality of the square root of two. There's a concept called not worth worrying about that does a lot of work. It's not worth worrying about whether or not somebody's going to find a mistake in that proof because it's so short when it comes to something like the ABC conjecture. It's been going on for how many years? We still haven't gotten our arms around it. We're now not in the shallow end quite so much. And so my concern is that it doesn't do a lot of damage to say we can prove that the square root of two is irrational. And that's an objective fact up until you start trying to extend that to more and more complicated proof. And then it actually matters that the original concept was the outside proof may exist, but proof checking isn't objective, and therefore we may never exactly know. But there are things that aren't worth worrying about. We call them objective fact for convenience. Sorry, let me make an objective what I think is an objective claim of fact that I think has moral that you won't agree with Ben, that I think has moral consequence that we should grapple with. And it connects to a very real world issue like wealth inequality, right? So wealth inequality is a problem if you think it's a problem or it's inevitable if you think it's inevitable. But I think everyone would agree that some level of wealth inequality would be intolerable and that we would want to correct for it. But wealth inequality is just one kind of inequality. There's every other kind of inequality. And there's this fact that none of us and this goes to the free will issue what we imagine is that people, they have a certain inheritance, they have their genes, they have their environments. You didn't pick the fact that you weren't born yesterday in Syria. You were born in a stable society when you were born. We can't truly own all of our advantages. We didn't make ourselves but most people feel that there's something like a ghost in the machine that has free will that can make the best of even a bad situation. Now, I think you probably agree that some situations are so bad that the debt can be so stacked against you that it's just life is unfair. Here are claims about you that I think are true and should be morally salient. You didn't make yourself you didn't determine anything about yourself that you would use as an exercise of your own free will. So you're very intelligent, you're very literate, you're very interested in things that get you ahead in all the ways you've gotten yourself ahead. You didn't create that about yourself, right? And obviously there's a genetic component to that. There's an environmental component to that. Maybe there's just cosmic rave bombardment that can help or hurt who knows what influences are there? But none of that is something that you have authored, and that's true of everyone in the room you have exactly the disposition you have, the effort you have. If you wake up tomorrow morning with twice the capacity for effort and grit that you had yesterday, you won't know where that came from. If it comes from a book you read, you can't determine the fact that the book had precisely the influence it had and not a little bit less or a little bit more. You are part of a system of influences. And so this is a picture, in my view, that just makes a mockery of the notion of free will, right? And it goes down to the smallest possible case of my getting to the end of this sentence, right? If I have a stroke now, well, then, sorry, I can't do it. But I didn't, and I didn't choose that either. Now, I think taking that on board does not rob us of morality because we still have a preference between excruciating plunge into civil war and needless misery and building a viable global civilization where the maximum number of people thrive by using a lot of active verbs for a person who is productive environment and genetics. No, but it's all happening. We can build robots that act, right? And I'm moving my hands now, but I honestly don't is the robot moving the hands? But the point that I'm making is when you say we can discern, we can build, we can create, we can decide. But it's exactly like you speaking now. You don't know how you follow the rules of English. Grant, I'm not arguing that you can't make a convincing case that I don't have free will. I'm arguing that you can't make a convincing case you can build a civilization on lack of free will. Take this case. The moral relevance of this and Eric, I'd be interested to know if you agree with this. It seems to me that once you admit you either won the lottery or you didn't on some level that conveys a kind of ethical commitment or an ethical obligation that you wouldn't otherwise have, you can't be the person who then says everyone just basically you're on your own. You either make it based on your effort or not. This goes to questions. Should we have universal health care? It's not just an economic you're going directly from Is to Ought with no stop on the train at all. Well, no. For literally decades, there were very wealthy and very sophisticated countries that took the premises that you are building upon and built some of the most repressive regimes in history. But they had other things going on. They had bad ideas of economics, they had personality cults. I agree with all of that. But the point that I'm making is that you are making definitive statements about value judgments with reference to a naturally selected interaction of biology and environment. I just don't know how you're getting from one to the other owning the truth of biology because do robots have morality is what I'm asking you. Well, no, they certainly would if we built them to have conscious states that they could allow for suffering and wellbeing, I mean, that that's coming. We're going to have to ask that question. So then we can be God, but God can't make us those kind of robots, is the argument. No, but should we maybe try taking the fun out of this? I thought I was trying. One possibility is that there's like a layer cake and at the bottom you've got quantum field theory and then you get organic chemistry and you build this thing up and you've got natural and sexual selection. Then you get systems of morality writing on top of this. And there's some sort of weird category error between the layers of this cake. So it may be that if you can get rid of quantum indeterminacy, that you have effectively laplacey indeterminism and everything is product of initial conditions and that takes place at the lowest level. But there's no morality at the level of exciting fields and electrons and quarks. So you don't pair that observable, which is like that quark is being unethical right now, with some behavior which affected whether some synapse fired. So that morality thing has to do with this very high up layer, which is some sort of social organization, which is not fundamental. And so what I hear us doing is talking about free will down here and talking about morality up here. And one of the lessons of physics is that every layer of the cake has well, it has its own language game associated with it. We call those observables, right? So those observables are paired with what we might call effective theories, right? And so these effective theories are not to be mixed up. And so every time we get into one of these free will conversations I don't know whether you're talking about free we have as if free will who was forced to buy a ticket to tonight's event. But to answer that question, really, did you actually I didn't have to buy one. Yeah, the night is young. You guys should totally get in on this. But the point is that I'm perfectly happy with the idea that I have as if free will at the top of the layer cake. And if we can get rid of quantum observation and get back to LaPlace and determinism at some higher level that I have no free will. But it's as if free will only because you actually are not aware of the proximate cause of your action in each if I look at a chaotic pendulum over at the exploratorium, it may have a very clear path that's determined through Newtonian mechanics, but I'm not smart enough to figure it out. So effectively, I'm super surprised and just sit there like an idiot twirling and thinking, oh, wow, I didn't think I was going to do that, even though I know the physics. Right. The point is that if I try to compute something that's much larger than I am, my computer can't handle that much larger system. So this is why sort of self reflection leads to madness very often. I thought you said it was going to be fine. Hopefully it's not that often. I'm still really interested in the app that you're coming out with for meditation. Don't hold your breath. But it is coming. Okay, but what I'm trying to get at is that the fun part of these conversations comes from making these category errors and the unfund part comes from sorting it out. And then when I played Johnny Raincloud, everybody will say, well, okay, I guess that makes sense, but it's no fun anymore. And so that's what I'm worried about. Well, but you're not disparaging the idea of a unity of knowledge. Right. Each layer of the cake, you can make a smooth transition between layers that doesn't maybe that I can surf your understanding of each layer. I mean, I have a fair idea when my wife's going to be angry at me for not doing the dishes, but I can't recover it from quantum field theory. So the idea is that maybe that the quantum field theory determines her behavior. No, but there's nothing about doing dishes that violates quantum field theory. One presume. It's not that you have to live in a different worldview in order to talk about the human relations layer, the moral layer, the free will layer or not. I can do my best, but I don't find it useful to try to think about human psychology from the point of view. Of course. But could organic chemistry if some neurotransmitters depleted yeah, so there are some ways in which these different layers can talk to each other. But there's no reason that I should be able to compute necessarily across these layers successfully, even if there is some sort of concept of entailment or determination. What I'm interested in is kind of a first principal methodology of moving forward into the unknown. Right. What I object to in religion and then this notion of revelation, is that there was some prior century where we were given the best ideas we're ever going to have on a specific topic and we must cling to those ideas until the end of time. This is the analogy or the rubric that I find most convincing. There's only ever been people talking about reality here. Right. And so therefore, you can either locate yourself in a current, modern, open ended conversation or you can anchor yourself to an ancient one and never give yourself the freedom to rethink it. And you could have done it with Homer, you could have done it with Aristotle, you could have done it with Shakespeare, and the Hindus have done it with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And you're losing no sleep over whether or not you should do likewise. Right. And so my sense is that we need to. Every question of societal importance requires that we now outgrow the accidents of merely contingent history, outgrow the fact that people used to be living in geographical isolation from one another and linguistic isolation from one another for centuries, and outgrow therefore, our religious, provincialism and just get to a common humanity that's using the best tools available to solve the hardest problem. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. And I am once again with my friend, Paul Bloom. Paul, thank you for joining me. Hey, Sam, good to talk to you. We've been making a habit of this. This is fun. This is a lot of fun. And and I just want to I'm Paul Blume. Everybody knows who you are, but I'm Paul Bloom, professor of Psychology at Yale University, and I want to sort of start by continuing a conversation we were having, you know, just just now and we've been having over the last little while. Well, I'm going to try to get you to say something nice about Trump, and I figured it's a way to do it. Put it this way, are you ready for it? Yeah. Well, I'm bracing myself because this is a heavy lift. Emotionally and ethically, spiritually, I'll reassure you. I'm not going to ask you to say anything like he's a decent person or he has any positive moral qualities. It's a different line. So here's how it goes. Imagine a competition that starts off with a lot of people, 1100 gradually whittles down to a dozen. And these aren't extremely motivated people. They are accomplished. Some of them have extremely strong records of success, and they're seeking after probably the most sought after prize in the world. And they have a competition that lasts a year, at least many, many months. This is seeming vaguely familiar and is vaguely familiar. That's right. Not a hypothetical. Not a hypothetical. Sometimes they battle independently, but there's a lot of face to face confrontations where they're in a room and a million people are watching them, and it's a zero sum game. Can only be one winner. And after a long, savage battle, this guy who actually had never competed before, who had no reasonable qualifications for it, wins. So as you've twigged on, I'm talking about Republican primaries and I'm talking about Trump winning. Now, I'm less impressed that he won the election. Once you get to an election in this country, it's a coin toss. You know, half the people going to vote for the Republican, half for the Democrat, and you're fighting for the smidgen of undecideds. But doesn't it say something extraordinary about him that he won? I can give you some of what you're asking for. I think, yes. He clearly has an understanding of television that his opponents didn't have, even though they were all professional politicians, and some of them are just anti charismatic. He was up against Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, people who didn't have a stage presence and couldn't be trained to have one, apparently. And you add to that his experience as a showman, really as a reality TV impresario, mostly. Again, I go back to my evil Chauncey Gardner thesis, which is the responsibility for his success really isn't in him. It's more in the environment. It's in the electorate's relationship to fame. And having seen someone on television so much. He was, in fact, one of the most famous people on Earth, even though he was kind of a Rodney Dangerfield character in the business community, but he's one of the most recognizable people, more so than his opponents. But that's the environment. I guess I should remind people not everyone knows the reference because I'm old, but Chauncey Gardner was this character in the Jersey Kozinski novel Being There, which became that film starring Peter Sellers. And he was a gardener who happened to be a moron. But he was overheard saying aphoristic things like in the spring, new flowers always bloom, or something like that. And this was mistaken for political wisdom. And then through the course of events, he winds up being an advisor to the President. But so in that case, it's totally clear that the audience is in on the joke. They realize he's a moron, albeit a wholly well intentioned one. And it's all of the projection and misapprehension and confusion in the environment that winds up promoting him to a position of power. And when I look at Trump, when I look at the things that he's done that have been so successful, like, you know, chanting locker up at his rallies right now, was that a brilliant act of political persuasion? Was he playing 4D chess with the electorate or did it just happen to work? Given the political attitudes and moral attitudes of 40% of America? And I think it's the latter. I mean, I think he literally could have said almost anything ugly and authoritarian and sexist. He could have said, and I'm just going to now spitball from the ugliest part of my male imagination. He could have said, I wouldn't want to see her naked, I'll tell you that. Keep your clothes on, Hillary. Then people would be chanting, Keep your clothes on. Right. I think he actually did say he was talking about her, I think going to the bathroom at some point in one of the debates, and the crowd went wild at the very thought of it. Maybe I've repressed that moment. Yeah, I don't see lock her up as a brilliant political move. I don't even see it as a move. It's more of him that allows him to show up as a kind of superstimulus to 40% of America. I mean, there's something so cartoonish about him, and he has the power of a cartoon. And you've got me on another anti Trump rant here, so I once said he was like a golem that had been conjured by every bad thing that had ever been said about America. It's like the physical manifestation of everyone's external judgments of just what the ugly American is like. But it is something like that. If you took professional wrestling and McDonald's French fries and the NRA and infomercials about bogus products that don't work and you just mix them all together and you stick them in the back of a tacky white limousine and you drive it around Central Park 500 times, you open the door, out would step Donald Trump. He's the confection of all of that American crap. And for whatever reason, that apotheosis of all that is wrong with us, all, that is just self regarding and obtuse that works for 40% of America at this moment in American history. So it's a kind of perverse power. He's got the whatever. I don't really follow the Avengers movies, but what was that glove with all the stones that Josh Brolin was trying to get? Thanos, thanos he's got the stones of fucking hypocrisy and narcissism and he's working on the banality of evil and eventually he will have all the power in the universe when everything goes wrong. So I have really failed in my quest to get you to see exactly. Is that what you were hoping for? It has backfired. Horrendously. So here's your counter analysis as I see it. My analysis is he has some skills in that he knows what to say to enrage many people, including you and me, and to delight so many others face to face in a debate. Ho go. He'll be savage and cruel and comic and funny in a way that other people can't in the whole places other people won't go. And these abilities, these dark abilities are a large part of why he's president. Now, I think your analysis is more like I can't reiterate your beautiful description, but somehow he spawned, somehow he was born and he developed, and now you have this creature with this disgusting, degrading manner, which bizarrely, is strangely appealing, and he gets no credit for it. It's just the way he is. Maybe I'll give you a little more than you have any right to expect. I can imagine in fact, I'd be surprised if this weren't true. I can imagine that behind closed doors I would be surprised at how he shows up. I bet he's got some level of emotional intelligence and charisma that if only given now that he's ruler of the free world, because I've never met him, I've never seen him in person. I would imagine that the person I see on television and on stage is not the whole person. Something has to explain the fact that behind closed doors he manages to keep anyone on his team for more than a day and a half, though often not much longer than true. But yeah, I agree. I don't think when he's sitting by himself, he's reading Dickens and writing poetry. Wouldn't that be amazing? That would be something. But I imagine that a lot of what we see as a show and it's a very, very good show and it's it's quite entertaining. And I think that he might, in his personal life, actually just kind of tone it down and become more of a recognizable human being. But there's something else, which is a very backhanded compliment. I think he's very good at being cruel. I think he's a very effective sadist. I feel that a lot of his vicious attacks on people, of which they number in the hundreds, if not the thousands, by now, have really hurt people, have really damaged people. And I think the bully's understanding of what will make their victim cry, he's definitely a bully. But again, the effectiveness of his attacks on people, the fact that it deranges their lives and often causes them to have to get security or move from where they're living, they're effective in really screwing people over massively. Again, that's not a sign of how cutting his or clever his names are for people or anything else he's actually tweeting. It's just the fact that he's the leader of a mob. He's got a dangerous personality cult behind him, and we live in an environment where if you have anything like that kind of social presence, you can just direct your mob to DOX people and otherwise screw them over online. And he does that. He does it totally recklessly. Eventually someone's going to get killed because of one of his tweets and there'll be no recourse. He's got to know that what he does is dangerous on Twitter. I guess part of what's driving me is almost a version of the argument from design, where if you see something complicated and in this case successful, you say it's unlikely to be random. So, you know, if if we were Theus, we might say, I guess God decided that Trump was this man and gave him this great fortune, but we're not theists. So I think what we should look for is some abilities, something, something going on that has caused him to do these extremely low probability things. But he I mean, he's the distillation of the American grotesque in a way that is, you know, we have not seen before, and we saw its manifestation on reality TV for, yeah, more than a decade. His theme song was, I think it was Money, Money, Money, right. And it's just the crassness of American bullshit if you played it with gold. That's Trump. And yet, through amazing happenstance, he managed to move it all the way into the Oval Office, and now it's there. And the juxtaposition between who he is, really, and the moral and political seriousness of trying to steer human history at this moment is an insane juxtaposition, and half of the country wants to see every institution destabilized anyway. The other thing is the lack of regard, the lack of respect, the lack of trust in institutions now is an all time low, and that is he is the personification of that change of attitude, and he's ushered it in to some degree. It also was the explanation for the fact that he was able to take the stage in the first place, I would say. Yeah, I'll just say I agree with a lot of that. I'll just say one thing, which is that I'm sure you've had friends. I have friends, too, who said they predicted this, and some of them did predict it. I sure as hell didn't. And I bet you didn't. So whatever happened, it wasn't obvious it was going to happen. Look, so question. You and I were talking before about the Democratic debate, and so can I get you say something nice about Sanders. What do you think of Sanders? I should remind people our last podcast was recorded just before the Democratic debate in Las Vegas, where Bloomberg made his first appearance. And I believe I was appropriately cautious in my expectations for Bloomberg. We were both cautious. Neither one of us said, Bloomberg is going to really rip it up up there and do very well. No. So I was certainly worried about that. I don't know that I thought his performance was as bad as it has been said since. It was definitely bad, but it's being viewed as just catastrophic. It could have been worse, no doubt in ways. But he did very poorly. He could have burst into tears. He could have cried, he could have shot himself. There's a whole list of options which could have been worse. But once you get beyond the sort of he did very poorly and he did poorly in a way that I think, unfortunately matched up with the negative view many people have of them, the truth is, there just may not be good answers to some of those challenges. Right. So that could explain it. But he did seem kind of blindsided by much of what Warren, you would have imagined. He would have practiced and practiced and practiced and worked with people and do the thing that these politicians do, which is come up with a joke or a way to distract it or a way to honestly apologize. And he seemed as if these challenges about the sexual harassment issues, about stop and frisky, he was hearing him for the first time. Right. There was a New Yorker article that gave some color to what those NDAs probably concealed. It sounds like he's going to release a few of them, but I don't know whether there is more. But it just sounds like he clearly is from the Mad Men era of sexual impropriety. And so the kinds of things he said, again, there's no allegation for anything he's done in the me too sense, which is certainly good and compares favorably with the President, who's trailing, I think, 19 allegations of sexual assault. This is utterly asymmetric warfare here. The fact that we have to concern ourselves with Bloomberg's bad jokes, where the President has managed to get off scot free. I mean, we're now recording this on the day that Harvey Weinstein was just found guilty of some degree of rape, and it wasn't the highest charge on which he was indicted, but he's still facing, it seems, a lot of jail time for what happened today. And Trump is a character like Weinstein, if these allegations about him are true, or at least damn close, we're not talking about bad jokes. So it's crazy that the Democrats are. The debate was, as many of us tweeted, like a circular firing squad. I mean, basically, everyone was quickly rendering everyone else unelectable. And that's what I'm worried about on our side, that we could just get to the general election with whoever the candidate is. This is somebody who has to function by ethics and political norms that don't translate at all across the aisle, and yet there's no way of transcending this basic asymmetry. So let's take this one step up. Isn't this the stupidest way to choose a leader and have a debate? It's what people do. People like seeing fighting, but debates demonstrate the ability to memorize good lines, to be good at interrupting, to be very fast on your feet, to be savage in a certain way. I've heard people say, we really want a good debater to come out from this sequence of Democratic debates so they could be a good debater against Trump. And it seems ridiculous. What a terrible way to choose a leader. I tend to have a libertarian streak, but I got to say, if I was in charge, I would ban debates at the political stage. No more debates. People should should be speak, should get interviewed. They should be discussed, their policies and everything. But this mano a mano demonstration of your basically combat ability is so grossly unrelated to what you'd want in a president. No, I agree. We don't do that for anything else we value. You're looking for a swim coach, you don't have them debate other swim coaches. You don't have university presidents debated out only for this. The problem with debates, which I've long worried about, is that the way to win a debate is to get a big laugh at your opponent's expense. If you can do that, you have won. No matter what else happens in the debate, it does reward any kind of comic timing or a semblance of comic timing, given the lackluster performances of the kinds of people who tend to find themselves on those stages. But, yeah, if you can get off a good line, you win. So it has no relationship to your qualifications for the office. I think there's one thing so you asked me about Sanders, and I think there's something I should clarify because I noticed some comments in response to the last podcast. So I believe I said last time around that I thought Sanders is unelectable, which I noticed provoked some house of displeasure. And I think I also wondered whether or not it might be preferable to have a billionaire self fund his campaign, ie. Bloomberg, and then be beholden to no one. And that might be better than the normal situation where politicians perpetually have their hands out and get entangled with special interests. And I remember you countered that in the case of Bernie, we're talking about small donations, not special interests. And then I further said that I wondered whether this just made him beholden to the leftist mob. And so some people interpreted this as my expressing a preference for aristocracy or oligarchy over democracy. So I think I should clarify that my paramount concern here is that we get Trump out of office for reasons that I have not been shy about stating. And so my concern with Bernie being captured by his audience is that he may be unable I think he's frankly unable to tack to the middle in a credible way in the general election, and therefore, I think he's just bound to lose to Trump. I mean, I know we have polls that show him beating Trump in some key states, but in the last few days, it has changed a little bit. But up until a few days ago, he has not experienced the extremely uncharitable vetting that he's going to get hour by hour in the general election. And so, I mean, we're now seeing videos of him, his recent trip to the Soviet Union, where, you know, their cultural institutions and their subways seem so much better than our own. This is at the height of the Cold War. We're seeing articles where he's blaming us for the hostage crisis in Iran and blaming Carter as a warmonger. You can find him looking completely out to lunch with respect to our foreign enemies. And he also can't say how he's going to pay for anything. And as the price tag for his promises goes up into the tens of trillions of dollars, literally. The 60 Minutes interview last night suggested that he was about to cut a check for a minimum of $30 trillion over the next ten years, but it was probably more like $50 trillion and could give absolutely no account, no credible account of how he could pay for this. And this is just the beginning. It's like the first 48 hours of him looking like he's going to be the candidate. I'm just worried that he's actually unelectable, let's say nothing about my attitude toward democracy or even Sanders himself. I'm just worried that promoting him is guaranteeing four more years of Trump. I think some of that might be true. I mean, one thing to realize is, if we choose any other name warren Biden, Mayor Pete we could play the same game, right? You could easily list all sorts of problems this person has. Not to the same degree. No, I don't see it. Bloomberg, I think, functions by a different physics, because whatever his flaws are, trump's much worse on exactly those points. And then you just have to sort of pick your billionaire. Yeah, but a lot of Democrats might refuse to play and pick your billionaire and just stay. That's the real liability. With Bloomberg. With Mayor Pete or Klobuchar, I think. Oh, God, don't get me. I don't know if you know this, but Mayor Pete is gay. I don't know if you're following the news he's gay. Let me rethink this and my whole political calculation, and I actually think that that is going to be a pretty serious liability more than Sanders Judaism, which I think will actually cut into him a bit. Yeah, I think that Judaism is a non issue or close to him. I think we touched that last time. I think that wouldn't be a fatal issue. And I don't know about the homophobia variable, but the branding issue. I mean, just the word socialism, whatever he may mean by it, I think it's fatal. It's literally like running as a pedophile where you have to then say, no, it's not pedophile. I know you've seen pedophiles in the movies, but the moment you're having to explain this word, you're losing. Maybe Millennials and Gen Z are kind of out of touch with actually awful associations with the concept of socialism. But they are when they think socialism, they think Denmark and Bernie's honest. He says, when I say socialism, I mean Denmark and Denmark. There are arguments as to whether this could extend to the American model, but that's what he's talking about. But the truth is, when you look at his history, it's not so clear. If you go back far enough, he's looking pretty red. Right. I think that's fair enough. So one of the things you mentioned was his comment on the Iran crisis with the hostage and everything. And you got it exactly right. But what is this, 40 years ago? Right. It it's a long time, but he would need some credible account for how he's changed and take him on the issue of Israel. Right. It's like he has the sort of self hating, masochistic, moral confusion around the politics there. He's got genuine antisemites and theocrats in his inner circle, someone like Linda Sarsour right. Who are advising him on these issues and literally functioning as his surrogates in certain cases. He celebrates these people on social media. I mean, Linda Sarsur, this is like having, you know, farrakhan as one of your advisors. I mean, it's it's just completely clueless about the the moral aid and political asymmetries here. So so you're making you're making a moral case. Let me shift it to political case. Do you think this is going to hurt him? It certainly should hurt him, and I think it would hurt him, yeah. I think in the general election, people will be completely freaked out by the idea that someone like Linda Sarsour could have conceivably wind up in somebody's cabinet. This is every bit as bad as anything Trump is capable of. Right. It's nuts. Let me offer a different perspective on something you said. You said it doesn't seem like he's going to be able to adequately move towards the center. And I think you're right. But I think the advantage of Sanders to say mayor Pete doesn't have and biden. Well, Biden might have, but the advantage of Sanders is he might actually take away Trump voters. He may take away people who voted for Trump because they feel that they hate the system, they feel screwed, they feel capitalism has left them, they've been left out of everything good about America. And I think Sanders could take Trump voters away in a way that a lot of other people on the stage would not be able to. Yeah, I guess it's conceivable, but then those are some pretty confused voters, and I don't know how many of them there could conceivably be. I think Warren I mean, just the amount of daylight there is between Warren and Sanders around just the word socialism and the fact that she can just say she's a capitalist and she's not tempted to brand herself as a socialist even though her economic policies are in many cases indistinguishable from his, I think that's a crucial difference. And, you know, she's not going to get it. But you know something? I I agree with it. I with you. I'm not I i can't explain what happened. I don't think anybody can. But I always saw Warren in some way, strictly dominated Sanders. Like, everything Sanders did, she did better. She had a lot of his good ideas, but she didn't brand herself as a socialist. She's incredibly wonky and smart. I mean, you may disagree with her, but she's very into weeds. She's very personable face to face, and then for some reason, some combination of sexism or bad luck or or I don't know. Well, she did one stupid thing, which I don't think Sanders has done. She got pulled into the wokeness to a degree that Sanders hasn't. Sanders is just still just hitting the point of class warfare relentlessly, and which Warren hits as well. But Warren got pulled into the intersectional Michigan. I mean, she literally tweeted at one point. I think the tweet was like, black CIS and trans women are the backbone of our democracy. I believe that's verbatim. Right? So there's some charitable gloss you can put on that. But the fact that that gets summarized in everyone's brain as black, trans women are the backbone of our democracy, all 17 of them. There's just no reason for her to do that. Right? She's pandering to a constituency so small, it's so short sighted, and seems calculated to alienate half of America. But that's not I remember the tweets you're talking about, but that's not what happened to her. But I do think that's a fatal flaw in her campaign. I don't actually know what happened to her in terms of what caused her to lose her momentum this time in this last round. If she were ahead right now and we were talking about her as the front runner, I'd be worried that she's also unelectable for reasons that are slightly different than Sanders, but just as concerning. So who is electable? I think if Bloomberg could complete a string of sane and seemingly honest sentences in defense of his record, do you think all those Elizabeth Warren voters would and Bernie Sanders voters move to Bloomberg? Everyone who doesn't want Trump will eventually have to move to whoever is in the general election for the Democrats. And I just think once there's a single candidate, any of them stands a chance of solidifying everyone's understandable concern about Trump. I think if you can't energize half of America around just that single variable, just getting this guy out of office, and it's hopeless. But I think things change once there's just one of them. The moderates are split between Biden and Klobuchar and yeah. And Buttigieg and Bloomberg. And if it could magically be Klobuchar, I think yeah. You know, that she stands a chance. It's just like everyone would just reset, and she does stand a chance. You know the person I miss? I miss Cory Booker. I've I've never met him. I've heard great things about him. He seems like a gracious, intelligent, broad minded person. He seems genuinely likable in a way. I don't find any of these people and also what he says makes sense, and he seems rational and pragmatic and all good things. Yeah. I could never figure out why he didn't translate better on stage or on television. So much of this is just the way people speak. And now we're back to the debates and how crappy they are. Yeah, it's a performance. But I really do think it's got to be possible to backfoot Trump in a debate. It's not too much to hope that in the general election, he could be consequentially, embarrassed. I think the best person to do that again, it's just awful that Bloomberg doesn't have more natural gifts in this regard, because if he had a great stage presence, he has the perfect biography to go after Trump from. Yeah, and I've been kind of ragging on him the last episode in this one, too. But one thing about Bloomberg is he actually does a lot of good. He gives a lot of money to charity. He gives over, I think, a billion dollars to Johns Hopkins money regarding working on climate change and gun control and helping other Democrats. Unlike Trump, he's a massively generous person. No, I know. I mean, that's why the juxtaposition is so invidious. But, Sam, speaking of juxtapositions, do parents matter? We're supposed to question about this. We agree to do sudden transitions. So this is, by the way, from Proxima Ratio, and that's the name of on Twitter. Yes, the name of one of Sam's 30 million Twitter followers. And he raised the question. And there's been a bit of discussion online about the idea of whether or not parenting matters. Yes. And this could have been seeded by our friend Steve Pinker circulating a Boston Globe article about a meta analysis of all of the studies that have interrogated this question, whether. Parental influence really determines anything in the space of how kids grow into adulthood. This thesis was brought to the world's attention, I think mostly by Judith Rich Harris. Did you know her? Yeah, she's passed away, unfortunately. I edit a journal, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, where we publish controversial and theoretically interesting things, and then dozens and dozens of people write commentaries on it. And I contacted her after her book and asked whether she would contribute to our journal, which we usually don't make invitations, but this was an exception. And she was very nice, but she said her health would not allow it. Yeah. So her thesis was that for virtually everything we care about the human mind, the human personality, human ability is basically 50% genetic, more or less than 50% environment. But environment crucially from the point of view of mom and dad, doesn't seem to be anything they're doing. It seems to be the influence of peer group. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at Sam Harris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. My guest today is Masha Gessen. Masha is a writer for The New Yorker. She's been publishing there since 2014 and joined the staff in 2017. She's the author of nine books, including The Future Is History How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award in 2017, and The Man Without a Face the Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She writes for The New York Review of Books as well, and The New York Times, and she's also been a science journalist writing about AIDS and medical genetics, mathematics. She once wrote for a popular science magazine in Russia, but then got fired for refusing to send a reporter to observe the great Vladimir Putin hang lighting with Siberian cranes. She's a visiting professor at Amherst College. She's won a Guggenheim fellowship, a Carnegie fellowship, a Neiman fellowship. And I've long wanted to get masha on the podcast. I've been a fan of her writing for years. We cover many controversial topics here, russia and Putin and Trump, but also the MeToo movement. And we touch concerns about immigration and the differences between Christian and Muslim intolerance a bit fake news, the health of journalism. And I found it very satisfying to get Masha's point of view on the podcast. So, without further delay, I bring you Masha Gessen. I am here with Masha Gessen. Masha, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So there's a lot I want to talk to you about. I will obviously properly introduce you in the intro and link to your books, but I don't think we'll be focusing on your books here. I want to COVID many of the topics you cover so well for The New Yorker, and these may seem unrelated. I want to talk about Russia and what's going on there and the relationship between Russia and the US. I want to talk about the MeToo movement and perhaps, well, if we have time at the end, we can talk about immigration, which you've touched on recently. And these might seem unrelated, but they really are almost unified in the character who currently occupies the presidency of the United States as problems that are both real but also easy to exaggerate or misconstrue as a kind of political overreaction to Trump. And I'm increasingly worried that any false note here, any dishonesty in how we treat these issues becomes just so counterproductive that in the aggregate, just seems guaranteed to get him re elected. Let's just before we dive into all of that, let's just start with your background, because you have a fascinating story for those who don't know you. How how is it that you came to be writing what you're writing and doing it in the US. So I was born in the Soviet Union in 1967. I came to this country with my parents when I was 14, so in 1981. So I was educated here, and I got my start as a journalist in the gay press in the 1980s. I spent several years writing about AIDS, which was great training. And then in 91, I went back to the Soviet Union, still the Soviet Union, on assignment, and that sort of shifted my entire journalistic career. And eventually I moved back to Russia and lived there for more than 20 years. I kept writing for American publications and writing books in English, but I was also writing for Russian magazines and then edited several Russian magazines in succession. And then I was kind of driven out of the country at the same time that many people were driven out of the country during the crackdown that began after Putin's re ascension to the so called presidency in 2012. So I came here at the end of 2013 and gradually sort of stopped writing for Russian publications and and then became a staff writer of The New Yorker. So let's focus on the Russia piece first. Why were you specifically forced to leave Russia? Was it just the reality of what it was like to be gay and Jewish or both gay and Jewish in Russia at that point, or was it because something you were doing? Journalistically yeah, actually being Jewish, I think, had nothing to do with it. But there are a couple of ways to look at it. One is that is just that the reality of being queer in Russia and being a queer parent in particular, I was threatened specifically by name in the media, by politicians, with having my children taken away, and my oldest son was adopted. So that was not an empty threat. The social service could have gone after me and could have sought, probably successfully, to annul the adoption. So that sent me into a panic and basically packing all of our bags. Another way to look at it is that a large number of people who were active in the protests of 2011 2012 and I was very active in those protests I organized a thing called the Protest Workshop, which was modeled after Act Up. It was a large sort of clearinghouse for protest actions. So I sort of was coordinating a lot of the street level stuff that was happening in Moscow in 2011, 2012. Everyone who was visible in leading the protests at the time was either jailed or killed or driven out of the country. And obviously, you know, being driven out of the country is the best case scenario in that case. Now, these are protests against Putin generically, or these are protests over some specific issue? Well, that depends on who you ask. I think that the protests were framed by most people as protests against rigged elections. I think that the catalyst, to a large extent, the catalyst was sort of the blatant spectacle of the transfer of power from Dmitri Medievaja, if you remember such a character, back to Vladimir Putin in what they made clear was a prearranged transfer of power, and the voters were expected to rubber stamp it. Now, it's not like Russia had had real elections for more than a dozen years. Elections had become an empty ritual. But somehow I think that exposing how empty that ritual was was insulting to people. I mean, there's a way in which things can become obscene when they're exposed, even if everybody knows that they exist. Kind of like genitalia. It's a common knowledge problem in game theory. It's often referred to, by that term of jargon. It's different if everyone can know it, but once everyone knows that everyone else knows it, it's impossible to not react to it. The classic example is if you're drinking in public out of a paper bag, well, every cop that looks at you knows that you're drinking alcohol out of that bag. But because there's a bag there, they can decide to ignore it. But if the naked bottle of alcohol is out there, well, then they can't ignore it. And it's that sort of thing. That's an interesting analogy. I'm not sure that it holds because it suggests that Russian citizens generally feel like they have civic duty that they need to perform if they're forced to do so. I'm not sure that's actually the case. I think there was something sort of deeply offensive to people's sensibilities when it was made clear how little they mattered, even though each one of them individually felt that they mattered very little. Yeah, that's how the protests were framed for me. They were really anti Putin protests. I mean, that's what drove me. I didn't want Vladimir Putin to preside over free and clear elections because I don't actually think it's possible. But I thought that if the rest of my compatriots were willing to, for once, pay attention to the fact that the entire electoral system had been dismantled, then that was a good thing. And certainly the protests were incredibly inspiring and invigorating. So what do we actually know about Putin that is uncontroversial? We're living in this surreal moment now where Putin appears to be popular, at least among Republicans in the US. And we have a president who will not say a bad word about him. And I want to talk ultimately about the consequences and implications of that. But what can you say as a journalist about Putin that you really feel is not, in fact, disputable? That's kind of a huge question. I wrote a fairly long book about Putin that was essentially a compilation of things that we know about Putin. If someone were to say, well, listen, all leaders of countries have to take a hard line from time to time, and he's not better, but he's certainly not much worse than any other prominent leader on the world stage. And it's not a terrifying obscenity that we have a president of the United States who treats him as a normal leader. What would be the first things you would say to, you know, what would you pick out of Putin's bio that would argue against that kind of carefree attitude? Putin is a bloody dictator who jails and kills his opponents and has waged several illegal wars to the tune of hundreds of thousands of lives. And so I do not think it is okay to treat him as a normal leader, no matter how much the current American president aspires to be like him. But what's the status of public opinion generally in Russia now, insofar as you can gauge it, both toward Putin and toward the US. And Europe? Because what we see, at least what someone pretty far from the facts like myself sees in the media, is the suggestion that there is an extraordinary degree of anti US. And anti European sentiment there, and that some of this is kind of framed as of a piece with Putin's popularity as a leader, that he's kind of bringing back the strong country of Russia that has been so demeaned, really, since the fall of the Soviet Union. How would you describe public opinion in Russia? Well, I wouldn't describe public opinion in Russia. What I would say is that in a country that has no public and no opinions, it is very difficult to talk about public opinion. And, I mean, that literally puts in, over his 18 year reign, has presided over the near complete destruction of the public sphere. You can't have public opinion without a public sphere, if only a particular position, a hysterical, mobilizing, country under siege position, as it happens. But really, any position becomes the singular position that dominates the entire public sphere, then you can't have any meaningful opinion either. Right? That's why the subtitle of my book is how totalitarianism reclaimed Russia, because the lived experience of being in Russia now is the lived experience of being under totalitarianism. Even though Russia doesn't have a totalitarian regime, it doesn't have a regime of state terror. But what it does have is a total domination over the thoughts and feelings and perceptions of its citizens. So there is no such thing as public opinion. But that view, the view that dominates that emanates from the Kremlin and that dominates the public sphere or what passes for a public sphere in Russia is the opinion that Russia is a country under siege and that it is at war with the United States and that war is being fought by proxy in Ukraine and in Syria. Well, that's scary, because even if you can imagine, most Russians are not happy with how Russia is being governed. If you think that there's a consensus that really the real enemy is outside and it's the US. It paints a picture of the potential for a dangerous level of support for ramping up of aggression. I remember hearing at one point that the prospect of nuclear war with the US was being kind of casually referenced in the context of some political campaign. I don't know if it was Putin's or someone else's in Russia. And there is nobody else in Russia right. Or one of its proxy political campaigns. Yeah, but the idea that the prospect of nuclear war, in particular between Russia and the United States, could be a kind of happy talking point over there. First of all, is that factually correct or what is that story that I'm dimly recalling? It's an understatement. It's not just a stuff of political campaigning. It is enshrined in Russia's military doctrine that I believe was changed in 2012. Don't quote me on that. It may have been 2013, but the Russian military doctrine reserves the right of first strike in response to any attack, including a non nuclear one that threatens the integrity of the Russian Federation and Russia. The Russian military doctrine also identifies the United States and NATO member countries as its primary strategic enemies. I can only imagine we have a similar doctrine. Right. We haven't disavowed any possibility of first strike on our side, have we? I would have to check. But I believe that according to the military doctrine, first strike is actually reserved for immediate nuclear threat or nuclear strike. And that is a difference. Right. So the bar is higher. So the belief that America is the enemy is insofar. As you say, you can't really judge public opinion, but you feel that this notion is fairly well subscribed. However cynical people might be about the information that comes to them through state run media. I don't think you're understanding what I'm saying. Or maybe I'm not making myself very clear that's quite possible. I'm not saying that public opinion can't be judged, and I'm not saying that people are cynical. I'm saying that public opinion actually doesn't exist. I'm saying that people have been robbed of the ability to form their own opinions. Right. So it's just not a thing that is. So all we have to deal with is what we see in the Russian media. You believe you can't gauge how much the products of the Russian media that we see significantly influences the view of people on the ground in Russia? No, Sam, I'm saying people don't have views. How is that possible? Like, if we're going to ask everyone in Russia whether they thought America was a good place or a bad place, and they all answered that question one way or the other, you would say that the answer would be meaningless. Yes, I would say that the answer would be meaningless, because you can predict with 90% accuracy, or actually 86% accuracy, as the polls show, that people will say exactly what was last on television. So if a television is talking about the United States being the enemy, then if you conduct a public opinion poll, then you would get 86% of people saying, yes, the United States is our enemy. If tomorrow we become best friends with the United States, people will say exactly that. That's what a totalitarian society looks like. And that's what I mean when I say that people don't actually have views or it is a matter of survival in a totalitarian state to be able to accurately mirror the signal that comes from above. Well, that's interesting. I'll just put the question to you, given that, is there potentially a silver lining to Trump's approach to Russia? The fact that we have this glad handing narcissist who simply does not care or maybe even seem to know about the human rights violations of the people he's creating photo ops with? The fact that Trump is taking that approach to Putin, and we'll leave aside the Russian hacking scandal and everything else that might trouble us, is there a potential silver lining there in that relations can thaw between the US. And Russia, and then a different message gets passed to the Russian population, and we essentially de escalate a very tense situation, albeit with various casualties. It doesn't help people in Syria. It doesn't help people in Russia all that much. But it it does possibly close the door a little bit to the prospect of some horrible conflagration between Russia and the US. I don't see how that happens, because, you know, the imaginary mortal combat between the United States and Russia is not a function of American politics or American behavior. It is a function of Putin's need to have a mobilizing idea. The only mobilizing idea large enough to fit sort of the superpower ambitions left over from the Soviet Union is the idea of conflict with the United States. Putin has absolutely no interest in having that conflict diffused because his entire politics is constructed around that conflict. That's interesting. We have this summit or this meeting coming up between Trump and Putin. Let's say that is yet another instance of just happy talk between the two leaders. How will Putin represent that internally to Russia? He will show that the American president has come asking for a meeting that that acknowledges that Russia is regaining its superpower status. I mean, that is the ultimate ambition. The ultimate sort of insult, as Putin has framed it, is Russia's loss of its place as one of the two poles of power in the world. And Russia's ambition is to reclaim that that that place. And so Trump's desire, his near begging for a summit with Putin, is a reflection of of of Putin's success. And that's how it's going to be framed in Russia. So if we had a different president and a different policy, what would you want the US. Posture to be with respect to Russia now? Is there anything that would, in your mind, reliably move us in a productive direction or put pressure on Putin that would be not merely edging us toward conflict, but actually destabilize him within Russia? I don't know that that's possible. And so I don't think that that's how we need to think about foreign policy. Republicans are terribly fond of talking about values based foreign policy, which they haven't practiced since at least the times of Reagan, if ever. But I think that that's actually how we need to be thinking about it. And that requires a real reframing. You have to admit that it's extremely unlikely that any American actions will actually influence Putin's politics. Putin's politics are determined by his own logic of survival. So the question becomes not how do we destabilize Putin, but what is the right thing to do? Or perhaps more productively, what are the wrong things to do? It is wrong to sit down with a dictator who murders his opponents. It is wrong to seek to have common ground with a dictator who murders his opponents. It is wrong to even entertain the possibility of an alliance with a leader who is waging illegal wars. So everything you just said, at least for me, could be said about North Korea. Do you view them as similar situations? Absolutely. Let's just talk about Trump and in the US context. Well, first of all, what do you believe is true that explains Trump's unwillingness to notice anything unsavory about Putin? The Mueller investigation runs its course. We find out everything we're going to find out. Is there a there in your mind whether it's financial entanglements or something more unseemly? But what do you think is true and what do you think the consequences are of it seems that half the US. Population simply doesn't care what may or may not be true and just views it as a witch hunt. So, first of all, I don't think that you can ask, what do you think is true? There are things I know to be true, and there are things I know that I don't know. Right, but given what you know to be true, what would not surprise you? First, obviously, I would like I appreciate the bright line between what you think you know to be true and everything else that's conjecture. But conjecture is as much as you're comfortable with, I guess. Well, so what we know to be true is that Trump has never met a dictator he doesn't like. So, in a sense, we don't need the Mueller investigation to explain his evident affinity for Putin. He has a desperate desire to be liked and affirmed by the dictators of the world. He has an understanding of power that is as close to the understanding of power that is reflected by Duterte or Putin or the leaders of North Korea and China or even BB. Netanyahu. That's his understanding of power. That's what he understands. He does not understand sort of the imperfect, incomplete power wielded by elected officials. In actual democracies. Yes, the strong man archetype of the the leader is the one he recognizes and seems to want to embody. He wants 100% of Americans to support him. He thinks that that is the desired outcome. He doesn't understand that that's what happens in a totalitarian society. So how much have you gone down the rabbit hole of thinking about, reading about, wondering about more of an ulterior motive for not criticizing Putin, his own financial needs for his real estate branding empire? Well, again, evidently we don't need to find an ulterior motive to understand what's going on here. A crucial difference would be in revealing the latter. That would seem impeachable. A fondness for dictators, while perhaps it should be impeachable, is not the kind of thing that can be made salient enough, it seems to his fellow Republicans that they will even comment on it, much less act against it. I don't think anything is impeachable until you know that at least the House of Representative is majority Democrat. Yeah, well, that that may be the case. So, you know, again, it's like if you're asking me about sort of the instrumental, instrumental truth, kind of not terribly interested in that, I think we have a fairly clear understanding of the Trump phenomenon and his affinity for dictators. I mean, I'm not saying that the Mueller investigation shouldn't proceed. It should absolutely proceed. And I think the more we learn from it, the better. I don't expect it to be revelatory. Well, so then how concerned are you, given Trump's apparent affinity for dictators, how concerned are you that our own democratic institutions might not be up to the challenge of fully reining him in? Just let's imagine, for argument's sake, that he gets reelected in 2020. You've written somewhat about this that just what it's like to be in a totalitarian society or society that is losing its its democratic moorings. Again, it's it's hard to imagine that we're here and that we have such a difference of perception across the aisle politically. We have something like half of American society that doesn't seem to notice or care about all of the things you and I notice and care a lot about in Trump. I mean, the fact that we have a leader who has all of the instincts you just described, who's more concerned about applause and the size of his crowds and hankers for military parades and everything out of him seems like just the most benign interpretation is just the dumb ejaculation of a teenager's ego, essentially. But I think you are concerned that it's more sinister than that. So how do you view American democracy in the age of Trump now? Yeah, I don't think there's anything more sinister than the dumb ejaculations of a teenager that's beautifully put in power, right? In fact, democratic institutions are not designed for bad faith actors. They can't withstand it. They depend on everybody, more or less playing by the rules. The bad faith acting did not begin with Trump. It certainly began much earlier with the gridlock in Congress. And now we're reminded once again of the shameful spectacle of the non confirmation of Mary Garland. But what we have seen, for example, with the travel ban over the last year and a half, I think is a very good example of what happens when, on the one hand, you have democratic institutions that are designed to be collaborative and deliberative. And on the other hand, a dumb blunt force. The dumb blunt force for that will actually win. Right? If one side tries to find an imperfect solution and a temporary consensus and the other side is not at all interested in any of that and just wants to push through, it will succeed in pushing through. Well, on the travel banish, I would think some of my audience would want to know what I think about that. I've commented on it elsewhere. As you probably know, I've been very worried about the spread of jihadism and Islamism and those contagious ideas that jump borders, whether or not people move across them. And I think the travel ban is an idiotic response to a real challenge. So I don't support it. But my non support of it is in no way minimizing the challenge we have with Islamism. And there's nothing to envy in Europe now with unchecked immigration leading to this rise of right wing populism, and we are just by dint of good luck, surrounded by oceans and not having to respond to precisely that same problem. But I do think that even acknowledging the challenges in Europe, I think the travel ban is certainly the wrong approach here. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Well, I think that we agree that the travel ban is the wrong approach. I think we disagree on the comparison you just made between the United States and Europe because I don't think that to the extent that you can link the rise of the right in Europe to the influx of refugees, you can do the same thing here. Even the specter of immigration in the public imagination is enough to fuel the fear that in turns fuels Trump's politics. The fact that the United States took eleven refugees last year doesn't change this sense of coming doom. And that of course is also true of several European countries that took a piddling number of refugees but are seeing the far right rise in response to perceived threat. It doesn't help that you can actually find the cases where the fears can seem justified in Germany or in England there's clearly a less than ideal situation which the basic problem there is. Forget about the recent refugee crisis. It's just a problem with the failure of assimilation there, which you have to take England as the clearest case. If you run a poll among not even immigrants, but second generation British citizens who happen to be Muslim, asking whether homosexuality is morally acceptable, the response is 0%. Finding it morally acceptable, that's a public attitude that suggests a failure of assimilation that should be troublesome. Now, granted, the farthest of the far right populists are not so concerned about tolerance of homosexuality one presumes. But that's an example of the kind of lack of assimilation that could worry reasonable people and think that okay, we've probably had enough of this immigration stuff for a while until we can figure out how to get the various communities in our society to agree about how to live in a civil society. You know, I mean, as a homosexual Jew, I am not willing to exchange sort of my let me put it this way as a homosexual Jew, I am not willing to sacrifice Muslims sense of safety and security in the society in which I live for my own. And I think that's very much sort of the function of the rhetoric that we hear both in this country and much more prominently in Europe. Well, certainly some of the rhetoric, but there's also there's a problem of assimilation. I mean, there's a problem of Islamism, the, the expectation that Islam will become an ascendant political force and that the west will eventually bend the knee and Sharia law will be implemented globally, right? This idea that is subscribed by some percentage of the Muslim community, wherever there is a Muslim community, that's a problem of a clash of ideas and worldviews that we have to figure out how to solve. And we shouldn't be eager to import those ideas, those convictions, as quickly as possible into our society, no more so than we would want to import any other totalitarian fantasy into our society if we can help it. That's the concern. I mean, if if you tell me that we have 100,000 and this is a bit of a departure from the topic I wanted to hit with you, but just it's kind of interesting that we're disagreeing here. If you tell me there's 100,000 refugees from the Middle East that really need a home, and we're going to move them all to San Diego, and you tell me that they're all Christian, beleaguered Christians who are who require movement to the west to be safe from their highly sectarian neighbors, that's a completely legitimate claim upon asylum, it sounds like to me. And it comes with an assurance, insofar as we know who these people are, that none of these people are jihadists, right? None of these people have any fondness for Al Qaeda or ISIS, and that's all good news. I think you would probably acknowledge that. No, I wouldn't. You wouldn't say that a fondness for ISIS is bad news. Let. Me now that I've claimed this identity of the homosexual Jew, I feel much more threatened in this country by the increasingly powerful Christian right than by the powerless and marginalized Muslim community. Well, sure, but they may be equally intolerant of who I am, but the ones have the power and the guns and the others don't. So, no, both of those can be true. You're just not acknowledging that there's a I'm not acknowledging that it's good news. I'm saying that I think that both groups have valid asylum claims. But I am not going to get any more excited about an imaginary group of fundamentalist Christians than I am going to get an imaginary group of fundamentalist Muslims. Well, I didn't say they were fundamentalists. But you wouldn't acknowledge that there's a difference in the level of theocratic hostility toward homosexuality. Absolutely not. There's no difference across Christianity. That is simply not true. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, this is the kind of conversation I've been wanting to have about race for quite some time. At the end of these 2 hours, I think you'll recognize that you haven't heard people talk about race this way in a mainstream forum, and there's a reason for that, because this is just a minefield. Now, as I made clear at the beginning, I'm sure there are other ways of interpreting some of the data we cite on economics or crime, for instance. And I'm aware that there are other sides to many of these points. But all you've heard in the mainstream media are the other sides and often the most tendencies and sanctimonious and bullying versions. There is an orthodoxy on the issue of race, and it's taboo to question it. And it's growing increasingly clear that the orthodoxy is leading us in the wrong direction. Now, after the Atrocious podcast I did with Ezra Kline and all of the poison I wound up drinking online, in the aftermath, I realized that I had a choice. I could avoid the issue of race entirely, or I could continue to speak about it honestly. I've made my choice, apparently, because this is an important issue. In fact, it's one of the most important issues we have because it is so divisive. So I've been wanting to have a discussion like this for months. I found the person who could best walk me through this minefield quite by accident and in a somewhat unlikely place. My guest today is Coleman Hughes. As you'll hear, Coleman is still an undergraduate at Columbia, majoring in philosophy. However, he's written some extraordinarily brave and well reasoned pieces in the online magazine Quillette on Race. So I brought him here to discuss his writing. And I also made sure he would be invited to the conference we're doing at Lincoln Center in New York in November. Anyway, I really appreciate that Coleman has had the courage to tackle the subject head on. I felt like I was talking to a person from the future, or at least one possible future. A future where there's no such thing as identity politics and people of goodwill can just talk about social problems without feeling like they're walking a tightrope. But in this world, in the year 2018, we're still on that tightrope. And throughout this conversation, you'll hear me periodically look down and marvel at how far there is yet to fall. And the truth is, I expect a fair amount of malice to be directed at both me and Coleman from the usual suspects for what we say here. But that's fine. I used to be operating under the delusion that that was avoidable. I no longer am. So without further delay, I offer you Coleman Hughes. I am here with Coleman Hughes. Coleman, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me on. So let's get into your background for a minute because, you know, I actually don't know anything about it and maybe relevant to this conversation, this is something that I have remarked on social media, and as have others. You are still an undergraduate at Columbia, which, given the quality of your writing, is incredibly annoying. What are you up to? What are you studying and how did you get where you are now? Well, I'm studying philosophy. I have two more years to go, but I made my way to Columbia. Actually, it took me a little while to get there. Right out of college, I went to a music conservatory. I went to Juilliard. I was in the jazz program there, set on becoming a professional musician. And I ended up leaving after around a semester when I did Death in the Family and took about a year and a half off and then started college properly at Columbia when I was about 20. So I'm 22 and I have two more years to go with my philosophy degree there. And what are your interests in philosophy? I like Philosophy of Mind. I think that was initially what got me into it. Books by Daniel Dennett. Consciousness explained. I remember reading that and thinking that philosophy was something that was interesting enough for me to do for four years. Yeah, well, so this is the irony here, is that we probably won't talk at all about the philosophy of mind, even though it is my primary interest. And this is going to be a conversation that is framed by the path that we have both taken here. That is a path that I've continued to think about as the path of opportunity costs. Because the place where you're currently making your mark and where your voice is being recognized as indispensable is on a topic that I think you probably find intrinsically boring, or at least not among the most interesting, because you're having to endlessly spell out arguments that probably, in most cases, shouldn't even have to be made. And yet it's absolutely vital that you make them, given how incentivized people are, to remain confused on some extremely important topics. And I've done this in a similar way with respect to religion and the conflict between reason and faith and science and religion. I consider almost everything I've written in that area to be a kind of opportunity cost. And it seems to me you're probably doing a similar thing on race but again, it's very important that you do it because you have written these four articles in Quellette. I think it's four, right? Yeah, I think four in Quillette, which I'll kind of treat as a single text for the purposes of this conversation. And they're among the best things I've read on the topic of race and the problem of identity politics now. And this is all very much of the moment post Trump, and it's just amazing to have you again as an undergraduate making sense like this. So before we dive in, there may be a few caveats and warnings to issue, but just one question by way of background. How much pushback have you gotten for your views? So I guess I should spell out what may or may not be obvious for anyone coming to this conversation. You're African American, right? Are both your parents black? My mother's Puerto Rican, but most people saw her and assumed she was black. Both my parents are people of color. My dad's African American. So have you gotten a lot of pushback for what you've written? I've gotten a lot of pushback on Twitter, especially for the most recent one. The first few where there was good comments, bad comments, but this last one, it was like nine to one negative comments. I've gotten some pushback in real life from people who disagree with me, but I always find disagreements in real life, face to face, tend to go much better than on Twitter or wherever else online. So, yeah, I've got plenty of pushback. I can imagine you have, and I think I noticed it more for the last one as well. But if the pushback I get for retweeting you as any indication, I think what you're doing is highly controversial, and it's the pushback I get just crystallizes the problem for me. So in my world, when I retweeted your last article, you know, I was sincerely praising a person who I had never met, whose writing I admire. And yet, on planet Left, I was uttering racist, dog whistles and probably worse, promoting an Uncle Tom who, for some reason, is producing highly cogent arguments that a white supremacist like myself finds useful. This is the problem, because if in my world, retweeting the article of an African American that I agree with, that I think is amazingly well written, is further testimony to my racial bias. There's just no way to dig out from there. And yet there is a slight irony here, because the color of your skin is relevant to this conversation, because only someone with the color of your skin could do what you're doing right now, and a white guy can't be writing the articles that you're writing now, and it's not a good thing. The purpose of this conversation is to figure out how to get to some possible future where all of us can talk about race and try to find some way forward that doesn't leave any of us open for just this reflexive smearing and character assassination that's coming from it's predominantly the left here. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And the other irony here is that when you actually poll black people and ask them what they believe on any given topic, whether it's racial preferences or the influence of rap on society, you sometimes find astonishing results, which would be astonishing to some people. Right? We can get into these polls. But for example, Gallup did a poll in 2016 that found that over 50% of black people said that race should play absolutely no role in college admissions. So clear majority. Another poll back in 2008 found that 71% of black people said that rap was a bad influence on society. And I'm sure if you disaggregated that by age, you would find my grandparents generation virtually unanimously hating rap and my dad's being lukewarm and then my generation being a little more positive. But nonetheless, none of these views can be racist if the majority of black people hold them right. And it's like when I go to my family reunion, there is plenty of disagreement on all of these topics. There's clearly a way in which decrying and rehearsing the history of racism has become a sort of sacred value in the black community. But poll results show that there's plenty of room for disagreement here just among black people and it can't possibly be racist for white people to happen to have the same views as many black people. Yeah, well, that's a fantastic point. Just one big picture caveat before we dive in and we'll start there with opinion in the black community, but we'll cite statistics at various points of the sort that you just cited. And let's just acknowledge at the outset that many things here are debatable. We can cite data that can be, I'm sure, counterposed by other data. We might interpret data in ways that are open to criticism. But the reason why I'm having this conversation is that one thing seems to me to be not debatable. And it's that if we want to get to a colorblind society at some point and this would be a society where people are actually judged by the contents of their characters, we can't care more and more about race. Clearly, the path forward at some point has to be characterized by caring less and less about it. And that's why identity politics seems like such a dead end to me. But I think we have to acknowledge that one of the downsides of our having this conversation now is that you and I are both guaranteed to be smeared by the left for allegedly having an agenda that's bad for black people. Now, I don't know why you would have such an agenda. I know why I will be accused of having it because I'm not black. But we should just acknowledge that this is we're having this conversation because we think it's important to have, and we're trying to find a path forward that's good for everyone, black people included. And we have a vision of what that future would need to look like. And the path forward. You and I haven't spoken yet, but I can only assume, based on having read what you've written, we both agree that the path forward can't be this continual shattering of the political landscape into competing victim narratives. So, anyway, that's just a flag the masochistic pain we're walking into at the outset. And then let's jump in where you just started, this diversity of opinion in the black community, which, frankly, those poll results were surprising to me. I mean, I was poised to agree with everything you were you were writing, but I'm amazed to know that on many of these questions, like the question of whether affirmative action to get into college is good, you can find a majority of black people who think, no, you shouldn't be considering race at that level. Yeah, well, there's a framing effect here too. So if you ask the question, do you support affirmative action? And you ask it that way, you'll get majority support among black people. And if I'm not mistaken, you'll get a slight majority among white people too. But if you just phrase it a different way, which is to say, if you just give a straightforward definition of what affirmative action entails, you get minority support among blacks, which is to say majority dissenting. Right. So the 2016 poll I just cited, I think that the way they phrased it is race ethnicity, quote, should not be a factor at all in the college admissions process. So that seems to me an utterly clear definition of what affirmative action is. But if you just ask, there's a poll like one year earlier or one year later, I can't remember that just asks it as affirmative action and gets a totally different result. Which suggests to me that affirmative action has a kind of political halo around it where when you actually drill into the details of what that is, most people are uncomfortable with it. And indeed, most black people are uncomfortable with it. But when you just package it under the political label affirmative action, it becomes unchallenged. There's this phenomenon of black conservatism that is surprising to people and is just regularly ignored in the mainstream media. First of all, how would you describe yourself politically? Do you consider yourself a conservative or not? I've never considered myself a conservative. I've only ever considered myself either a liberal or a centrist. I voted for Hillary. I'm fairly sure if I had been old enough to vote, I would have voted for Obama twice. So I've never seen myself that way. It's just the way I see it. On the topic of race, the political spectrum is like a frame shift three notches to the left where what would otherwise be a reasonable center left opinion is kind of reads as a center right opinion, what would otherwise be a pretty reasonable, centrist opinion tends to read far right. So, no, I don't think of myself as a conservative, but I'm certain that I've already been labeled that way, and I don't invest too much in any of these labels, so I'm not going to fight it too hard. Right. There's a frame shift, and the people who are regularly described as conservatives or even gateway drugs to the alt right in my world, including myself, are almost uniformly liberal. I mean, this whole intellectual dark web idea that has recently been popularized, there's probably one true conservative in that whole group of people, and yet we are described as far right by many people on the left. But this phenomenon of black conservatism to some degree is mingled with the religiosity in the black community because the black community tends to be more religious than the white. Is that largely part of it? Yeah. I cite this poll in one of my pieces from I want to say his name is Theodore Johnson. He wrote a piece for the Washington Post. I believe that's his name. Yeah. He found that while 47% of blacks identified as liberal, 45% identified as conservative, which is almost identical. And my sense is that that conservatism is more of a social conservatism. Like you mentioned, blacks are disproportionately religious and on many social issues would tend to be more in line with a center right perspective. And Johnson's opinion about why it is that blacks vote so overwhelmingly Democrat despite being evenly split between liberal and conservative is that there is a sense that the Democratic Party is the party that stands up for civil rights. It could be as simple as the fact that Lyndon Johnson happened to be president during the 60s, but I don't think it's just that. My gut tells me it's also just the fact that if you put a true neo Nazi in front of me and just ask me to bet on who he voted for in the last election, I could win money all day betting that he voted for a Republican. And that proximity to the truly racist fringe of the Republican Party at least seems to sully that whole half of the political spectrum as far as many black people are concerned. You know, understandably so. And also the fact that there's, on many issues, not all that much difference between the two parties would just increase that effect. So it's interesting that it comes back to this issue, which you dissect out very much in the spirit of an academic philosopher, that it is at minimum strange to accuse a white person of racism for holding views that on any given poll, a majority of black people can be shown to hold. I'm looking at this one passage in your article where you say, for example, if a white person were to say, I don't think racism holds poorly educated blacks back, it would mark them on the left as woefully ignorant of systemic injustice, if not downright racist. But a 2016 Pew poll found that 60% of blacks without college degrees said that their race hasn't affected their chances of success. If a white person were to say that rap music is a bad influence on society, it might mark them as subconsciously prejudiced in the minds of many on the left. But according to a 2008 Pew poll, 71% of black people agreed with this statement. So again, it's possible to hold, I guess, any view, however correct for the wrong reasons. But the litmus test for racism can't be holding any of these views. Which leads me to ask how should we define racism in your view? What is the appropriate indicator of racism? When can we be sure we're correctly diagnosing it in other people? That's a very interesting question. One perspective on that is to take what I perceive to be a linguist perspective and say every word evolves over time, and language is a bottom up, distributed phenomenon that we can't control. So if it just is the case that people nowadays want to define racism as something black people by definition can't participate in, then who are we to say that that definition is wrong? Right, because words are only what they mean to people at a given time. But then there's another perspective that would say, listen, we need this word racism to mean exactly what it means. It's too important, and my biases are towards the latter. I have people in my extended family that I could only describe as black rednecks in the same way that white people have white rednecks, right? Just people with usually older with just totally retrograde views about how you view other races. So it seems silly and a little bit condescending to suggest that black people can't possibly be racist, although I'll grant that if you define it that way, then it's just a circular claim. But I guess racism is defined as, in my view, the belief that kind of essentialist characterization of a whole population of people who happen to share ancestry that holds that they're inferior, unfit for friendship and relationships, and just unfit to commingle with your race. I guess that's how I would put it. Well, let's make it even simpler. What would you consider to be white racism with respect to blacks? What's the bright line there, and how do we know we've crossed it? I guess on some level you have to go by somebody's behavior. So if somebody walks up to me on the street and calls me the N word in a tone that makes it totally clear that they are denigrating me, that person is obviously racist, and there's just no reason to mince words about it. But if someone behaves in a way that I find objectionable but hasn't said anything racist, I think people tend to make these kind of subconscious claims about other people's motives. They tend to mind read a lot and instead of attacking what you say, they impute motives onto you. So what is the bright line? I guess it's just behavior that is clearly racially skewed. I mean, you could look at an instance like the Starbucks fiasco recently where two black men were arrested for going into a Starbucks, not paying for anything, asking to use the bathroom, and it just seemed like it was too quick. The fact that the worker at Starbucks called the cops on them. It just seemed too quick to not have been racially motivated at all. And on some level we just can't know. So it's hard to actually be agnostic because the incentives are just to have an opinion, right? If you go out on Twitter and you say, well, I don't know, I actually don't have an opinion on whether that was racist, then you'll be accused of equivocating about racism downplaying it. I think in many instances it's just wiser to actually be agnostic until you know the facts. Yeah, well, I totally agree there. With respect to that case, I simply don't know enough of the details. So much of this is based on people's behavior and just the kind of crime that has been suffered in that neighborhood and the awareness of all the people involved. I don't know who the barista was and how street smart they were or not. So you can imagine two extremes where it's just straight up racism based on the conscious racial prejudice of the person working at Starbucks or it could have been a totally plausible judgment call based on 1000 cues that are very difficult to describe consciously but which, at a glance, people can take in when they're feeling afraid of other people. And there's just no generic solve for all those situations. And it's not even the case that skin color is never relevant. You know, race is never relevant in those situations. We'll talk about crime in the black community at a certain point and no doubt receive some punishment for even having that conversation. But there are many cases where being a white guy looking a certain way should put other people on their guard for a higher possibility of crime. The example I've used before, which is by no means farfetched, is I mean, if you see a couple of white guys with shaven heads and the appropriate tattoos standing in the parking lot of a black church, those guys suddenly become very interesting because of their race and because of their haircuts. Merely to be standing where they're standing from a crime prevention point of view, to tell anyone who's working in a store or just living their lives that they can't use those kinds of intuitions which are driven bottom up by the statistical reality of crime in our world, it's enforcing a kind of dangerous stupidity on people. And yet, given the environment, I'm sure we're there where people are feeling like they can't act on intuitions, which in the moment can be totally valid. Yeah, I agree. I think the brain is a pattern finding machine, and it is a highly politically incorrect pattern finding machine. And if in your personal experience you find statistical regularities with regard to what types of people look a certain way and how they tend to behave, you will form a kind kind of alarm in certain situations, whether you want to or not. It's really not up to you. And there have been some interesting cases where, for instance, black people have themselves admitted to if they live in a certain high crime area, let's say, where they just notice that the people who tend to commit crime tend to look a certain way. Right. They tend to be black. Let's just stipulate that in this particular area that is the case statistically, right? If you heard someone had just committed a robbery in this particular city, you could win money betting that that person was black over someone who was just betting by chance. We could just say 100 years ago, you could have said the same about the Irish and the Italians. You could have won money all day if you heard that there had been a murder betting that that person was Irish, for example, rather than German American. So these trends change over time, but it's nevertheless true that we tend to form impressions and biases in situations not based completely out of thin air. Although some stereotypes are totally out of thin air, others are just rooted in observations. Right. So there have been instances where prominent black leaders have admitted to having a fear, right? If you're walking in a certain neighborhood at a certain time, jesse Jackson there's that famous Jesse Jackson quote which is among the more honest things Jesse Jackson has ever said. Yeah. And there was also virtually the same quote by a former president of Spellman University, a Spellman College whose name I'm blanking on, who said virtually the same thing. Do you remember the quote? No, I don't remember it off the top of my head. But the thrust of it was that essentially I sometimes fear black men. Yeah. I don't have it verbatim, but just if it was this is the Jesse Jackson quote. He said, I'll tell you what I'm sick of. I'm sick of walking down the street at night hearing footsteps behind me, feeling the fear, feeling the hair stand up on the back of my neck and turning around and seeing that it's a white guy and feeling relief. That's basically the quote. And I'm sure he got a fair amount of pain for having said that. But I mean, the reality of I mean, maybe we should just touch on the reality of crime in the black community just so that we don't sound delusional here, but the statistics on black on black violence, which is almost the totality of the crime problem there. In large measure, it's the totality of the crime problem in many urban areas that have high crime problems. I can pull up those specifically, but do you have some stats off the top of your head? Yeah, I have the FBI crime data here, just the national data. I think the latest year for which it's available. 52% of homicides were committed by blacks, and that number has been relatively stable over the past two decades. It's hovered right around half basically every year. And you could just state it in reverse. To 50% of the homicide victims are also black. So it's a problem perpetrated primarily by black people and specifically black men, and specifically young black men, and also suffered disproportionately by young black men. For instance, there is data from the CDC that shows that if you look at black men ages 15 to 34, the number one cause of death is homicide. And even that slightly understates it, because you might say, I'm sure the majority of that is in the younger half of that age distribution. But it's actually the case that if you disaggregate it, if you just go from 15 to 19, number one cause of death is homicide. 20 to 24 still the number one cause. 25 to 34 still the number one cause. And that's a fact that can't be said about any other combination of age and ethnicity. And I think the important thing to keep in mind here is that among the things that governments do well, lowering crime rates actually happens to be one of them. So there's every reason to believe that this could come down given the right policies. So it's not just gratuitous to talk about it. Like I said, the rate of crime commission among the Irish used to be five times higher than the Germans in the early 20th century. Likewise with the Italians, it's maybe three times higher. And so we know certain ethnic groups have committed lots of crime in the past, and we know that those crime rates can be brought down with effective policing, with more policing, and with better policing. And obviously the whole challenge is how do we get there? But it's going to be very hard to get there if we can't even mention the statistics that describe the problem. Yeah, and they're actually a little arithmetic makes them look a little bit worse, specifically for young black men, because African Americans make up about 14% of the population, and as you say, they commit and suffer at least half the homicides. But virtually all of this falls to men rather than women. We're really talking about 7% of the population committing half the murders against largely the same 7% of the population. And when you see the crime statistics in a city like Chicago, the level of violent crime that makes America an outlier at the moment is largely driven by that phenomenon. And most people believe, at least on the left. That part of the problem is that now there's this epidemic of police violence against young black men. We can touch on to what degree that's true or not, but the net result of that is that many people think that there's simply too much police focus on the black community. Whereas I think you cite this book in one of your articles. Is it Jill Levoy who wrote the book? Jill Leovi, and that's how I've been pronouncing it. Jilly, yeah, sorry. I remember Glenn Lowry recommended that book to me, and her argument was that what you actually find, certainly in urban, gang ridden areas in America, in the black community, is that it's a failure of policing. It's the wrong kind of policing. It's under policing of homicides. And we're talking about the consequences of the worst crimes virtually never getting solved, and murderers walking free, and everyone knows they walk free. And so you get this unwillingness of anyone in the community to cooperate with the judicial system to put the most dangerous people behind bars, and then you get this over prosecution of petty crime, which is obviously terrible for any community and has been especially bad for the black community, as you say. It's very hard to argue that just less police attention is the solution here. Yeah. The way I think of it is this way. If an alien from Mars came to Earth and studied the past 10,000 years of human history with regard to homicide rate, specifically, they would find the homicide rate in South Central Los Angeles and inner city Chicago and St. Louis and New Orleans. They would find that to be the norm, and they would find the homicide rate in Cambridge, Massachusetts or other places where it's extremely low to be the exception to the rule. They would find that to be the phenomenon to be explained. I take Stephen Pinker's line in The Better Angels of Our Nature that much of the way this is explained is the state monopoly on violence, which is the police coming into town. The stereotype is of the sheriff coming into town. And that's a true stereotype. Right. Homicide and retributive violence is just something that young men tend to do everywhere on Earth until they can no longer get away with it because there's a police force that punishes crime, specifically violent crime, swiftly and effectively and reliably. What's happened throughout history is that we have to remember eugenics was a totally mainstream progressive orthodoxy in the first half of the 20th century. So the attitude towards policing black communities was essentially to let them kill each other as an almost a form of population control, right? Yeah. So what happens there is that a culture of honor is allowed to survive, whereas white communities got the benefit of more reliable policing, where black people, if someone kills someone and you're their brother, now you have to retaliate or else you lose face and there's just a never ending cycle of retributive violence. Yeah, that was explicitly stated. I remember reading some racist material of the time that, yeah, just let them all kill each other. It was essentially the view of the white community with respect to black violence. And, yeah, it's one of these painful ironies that the left is getting this part wrong to great consequence. It's not that again, this is what's so toxic about this topic. To even discuss the disparity in the crime problem is controversial. Your motives are impugned to even touch this topic, and yet how could you possibly improve life for people in the black community if you weren't going to squarely focus on this disparity? Right? Like I said, there's no reason to suppose that it has to continue on this way. If you just assume that in the year 2050, the crime rate has continued to drop because it has been dropping, especially in the 90s, it dropped precipitously. And just ask, what did we do to get there? It certainly isn't not mentioning the statistics at all. That that I can say for sure. And on the charge of racism, is it racist to notice in FBI data that whites are more likely to drive drunk than blacks and more likely to violate public drunkenness laws? I mean, you could wonder about why that is. It could be 100 different reasons why that's the case, and that could be an interesting research question. But if it's not racist to mention statistical disparities that seem to be unflattering towards whites, how can mentioning the same kinds of facts when they're the other way be racist? Well, so we'll talk about the origins of these problems and then the path forward. And the interesting thing is that understanding the origins may not actually indicate the path forward or in many cases may be irrelevant to finding the appropriate path forward. And this will be interesting and controversial, but there are two paragraphs you wrote in one of your pieces that summarize the political dynamic here. That worries me, and I just want to read those too. So to kind of frame this part of the conversation, this is you. Now, given America's brutal history of white racism, it is understandable that the pendulum of racial double standards has swung in the opposite direction. Indeed, it is a testament to our laudable, if naive, desire to fix history. But the status quo cannot be maintained indefinitely. Cracks in the reparations mindset are beginning to show themselves. This is me now. The reparations mindset being the idea that because racist policies and systemic racism has created this problem, the remedy must come in some form of reparations from the government or policies or the white community to fix the damage here. Now, back to you. Whites are noticing that black leaders still use historical grievances to justify special dispensations for blacks who were born decades after the end of Jim Crow. And many whites understandably resent this. Asian students are noticing that applying to elite colleges is an uphill battle for them and are understandably fighting for basic fairness and admission standards. The majority of blacks themselves are noticing that bias is not the main issue they face anymore, even as blacks who dare express this view are called race traders. As these cracks widen, the far left responds by doubling down on the radical strain of black identity politics that caused the problems to begin with, and the far right responds with its own toxic strain of white identity politics. Stale grievances are dredged up from history and used to justify double standards that create fresh grievances in turn. And beneath all of this lies the tacit claim that blacks are uniquely constrained by history in a way that Jewish Americans, East Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and countless other historically marginalized ethnic groups are not. In the midst of this breakdown in civil discourse, we must ask ourselves academics, journalists, activists, politicians and concerned citizens alike if we are on a path towards a thriving multiethnic democracy or a Balkanized hotbed of racial and political tribalism. That just captures our moment perfectly. In my view, you and I are all too aware of what's happening on the other side of this conversation, this ridiculous and retrograde eruption of white identity politics and in the sharpest case, white male identity politics. And it's easy to see this an amplification in other forms of identity politics to be thought on the left to be the only possible response to this. But again, coming back to the basic fact, if we want to get to a society where everyone is treated as an individual capable of taking any opportunity they can take, at what point do you start treating people as individuals rather than as symbolic representatives of any given victim group? Yeah, one point I would say there is. I totally agree that the identity politics of the left can affect an equal and opposite identity politics on the right. If you look at someone like Jared Taylor, for example, who I don't know exactly how to describe him, but I think white identitarian, perhaps white nationalist if you just look at the argument he makes, basically his entire argument is, listen, look what black people get to do. They get to organize around the variable of race politically. He'll say things like, the Black Congressional Caucus vets every bill that goes through Congress, not for its effect on America, but for its effect on black specifically. And then he'll just make the next logical leap why are white people the only one who don't get to do this? Now, that argument is based on a false premise, namely, that identity really matters. But once you grant that false premise, the rest of the argument is pretty sound. And that's not good, because then it's likely to be compelling to some number of young white men. The other point you bring up is a point about history and blame, right? So if you take a white murderer and a black murderer just hold everything constant in their lives, they've committed the same heinous crime. The attitude demonstrated towards the white murderer is not the kind of argument generally that someone like you might make about free will, which is to say they're not responsible for their genes, nor are they responsible for their upbringing. Just put all the mixture of causes that led them to offend in a box. You couldn't pull out a single one and say they really caused this. That's as true of white people as it is of black people. The problem all of that's true, but it's just impossible to actually have a criminal justice system that is constantly operating in that frame. We have to at least entertain the pretense of things like blame and praise just to get around in life, even if they're not deeply true. I would argue, and at the very least, whatever attitude we take towards free will and blame, it has to be consistent across the board. You can't just invoke slavery and Jim Crow to exonerate the behavior of a black person who is causing wreaking havoc on the innocent black people around him or her and not invoke those for other people. Right. The reason we blame people in the first place it can't be deeply predicated on the fact that everyone is deeply responsible for who they are because nobody is right. We just need to be able to blame people in order to make society work. Yeah, and there's just these obvious comparisons which again, are radioactive to even make. At one point in one of your articles you say Jewish people don't get to hate German people and get praised for it because of what the German people's grandparents did to the Jews. Right. This is one of these disparities that you point out where in the work of an author like Tanahasi Coates you can see expressions of what would be recognized to be racism in anyone else, but in Coates he's canonized for it. Let's table that for a second because I think we probably need to talk about Coates in a minute. But to stay on this larger point, you write about something you call the racism treadmill. What is the racism treadmill? The racism treadmill is essentially a pair of two beliefs that, in my view, virtually ensure that many progressives will never admit so long as they have these two beliefs that substantial progress has been made on the axis of racism in America. The first belief is that whenever you see a statistical disparity between blacks and whites, it's valid to reflexively assume that racial discrimination, whether it's systemic or overt, is the cause of that disparity, rather than the 100 or so other things that can be the cause of disparities. So I'll just take two quick examples to make this vivid. One is the fact that in the year 1952 there were four different southern states in which black school teachers had higher salaries than white school teachers. That's fairly astonishing if you believe that politics and the racial biases of politics determine every outcome in the economy. But economies are extremely complex and there can be a lot of racism in the political sphere, but just bizarre trends with regard to supply and demand and various other economic forces can make it so that there is some disparity that can't possibly be explained by racism because in this case it favors blacks. Right. Another example is if you just go to Wikipedia and look up household income by ethnic group, you'll find facts like for every dollar earned by the average white American of Russian descent or by the median white household of Russian descent, the median white household of French descent earn $0.79. So both of those households would just be viewed as white at this point and probably would view themselves as white and you wouldn't be able to pick them apart. And yet you have the kind of disparity that if it were between blacks and whites, would be presented in the pages of the New York Times and other respected outlets and reflexively ascribed to racism. And there are literally all kinds of disparities of this kind between different black ethnic groups. You compare Nigerians to Jamaicans to Haitians to African Americans. You find all kinds of disparities that are never talked about or rarely talked about because they're too deflationary of the idea that every statistical disparity can be ascribed to some kind of discrimination. Right. And the second belief, which is closely related to the first, is just that every culture is identical in the patterns of behavior that are encouraged, in the values that are inculcated, in the kind of social incentive structure that leads people to behave one way rather than another, and that there are no relevant differences to talk about. There are no differences that could possibly explain disparities. There's just no reason to believe that that's true. And I'm sure we'll get more into that. But once you put those two beliefs together, then you're in a situation where we're going to continue to have statistical disparities until the end of time. It's rarer to find I mean, I actually don't know of a single example in which you take two ethnic groups and by every metric they are close, whether it's crime commission or income or whatever it is, even if they're of the same race. Right. So the idea that we should expect parity across the board in the absence of discrimination, all the evidence suggests the opposite. Which is not to say discrimination can never cause disparities. It's only to say that you can't assume that it's just an empirical question. So insofar as these two beliefs are ascendant, then people will never recognize progress, no matter how much progress happens, because we'll still have disparities. And those disparities will still seem to prove that racism is a major force in society yeah, let's talk about black culture here and the degree to which it may play a role, because, again, there are many disparities which are accidental. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Stephen Fleming. Stephen is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and is the author of the recent book Know Thyself the Science of Self Awareness. And self awareness is the topic of today's conversation. We talk about the relevant neuroscience, the relationship between self knowledge and intelligence, the evolution of metacognition, error monitoring, theory of mind, mirror neurons, deception and self deception, false confidence, probabilistic reasoning, where metacognition fails, cognitive decline, those places where selfknowledge might be counterproductive, and other topics. Anyway, I found it quite interesting, and I hope you do as well. And now I bring you Steven Fleming. I am here with Steven Fleming. Steve, thanks for joining me. Thanks very much. It's an honor to be here. So you've written a very interesting book on perhaps the most interesting topic. The topic is self knowledge, self awareness. The book is know thyself the science of self awareness. But I'm really eager to talk about the whole sweep of this. But before we jump in, perhaps you can summarize your background academically and intellectually. Sure, yeah. So I'm currently a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, and I've always been interested in the sciences. I left high school without really knowing what I wanted to do, wanted to be a musician. So I didn't apply to university like all my friends were doing. And instead I took a year off back then and worked in an office job. And it was while I was commuting that I started reading popular science books on cognitive science. That's partly why I was also so interested in writing one myself when I got the opportunity. And interesting, just found it absolutely fascinating. I had, like, no idea that there was a science of the mind out there. We didn't get exposed to that at school, at high school. So I then became fixated on doing experimental psychology. I went to Oxford, and I was lucky there to have as a tutor a guy called Paul as a party who works on blind sight, this bizarre neurological condition of consciousness. And it was Paul who convinced me that there was a real rigorous science out there of consciousness and that it was possible to do good neuroscience on this. And I then went on to University College London to do a PhD in neuroscience. And that was co supervised with the psychologist Chris Frith and the neuroscientist Ray Dolan, both great people. I haven't met either, but I've obviously read their papers. Yeah, no, it was a fascinating time. And in Ray's lab, he was focused on studying decision making, reinforcement learning models. And in my PhD, I mostly focused on using brain imaging to study decision making. But on the side I was continuing to kind of have this off on love affair with consciousness, which has kind of continued with me now. And I guess towards the end of my PhD, I realized we could start applying some of the tools of decision making research to also study how we make secondorder decisions, so how we think about and reflect on how we're performing on various tasks. And that's what psychologists refer to as metacognition or thinking about thinking. At the time there was a long tradition in psychology of studying this topic, but very few people were working on the neuroscience of metacognition. And I had the opportunity, in a sense, to get in on the ground floor of that. And we ran a couple of early brain imaging studies looking at the relationship between prefrontal function and metacognition. I then went off to New York to do a postdoc at NYU to learn how to build computational models of metacognition and then in 2015 moved back to London and UCL, where I now lead my own research group studying metacognition and consciousness. Nice. Well, we should dispense with one possible source of confusion at the outset because I'm not sure how familiar you are with my work, especially on the topic of mindfulness meditation, the nature of the self. I'm someone who's given to say at fairly regular intervals that the self is an illusion or at best a construct. At bottom, it's not what it seems, but that's a very specific use of the word self. And when we talk about self awareness, I think we're talking about something that is far more capacious than the sense of subject object perception, which is really the linchpin of the self that I would argue that mindfulness ultimately reveals to be illusory. So we're talking about the whole person much more often than we're talking about the sense that there's a subject in the head independent of experience. So when we're talking about self awareness, this is not in violation of anything I have said about the status of the the selfish subject in in other contexts. And I'm happy to talk about the self with you as well, but I just wanted to try to clarify that for people because there's going to be something I can hear in the heads of many listeners. If the self is an illusion, what could we possibly mean by self awareness? Well, self awareness extends to everything else we can reflect on and be aware of in a kind of second order way that relates to our experience, our performance errors, the thing that we just experienced a moment ago lapses in memory. Let's just dive into the topic. How do you describe metacognition at this point? Yeah, no, I think that's a really useful background to have in place because I am talking about something distinct here to the philosophical notion of self, which is a complex object. And here I'm talking about something more practical, something more functional, which is this capacity to be aware of our traits, our skills, our personalities, our behaviors, and in some sense see ourselves like others see us. And we can study this in various ways. We can look at in very simple tasks how people realize they've made errors or how they're able to estimate their confidence in their skills and abilities and so on. And it's something that we often, I think, just take for granted. But the reason I find it so fascinating is because when you think about it for a moment, it is a kind of bizarre and wonderful feature of the human mind that we can, in some sense, think about how our own minds are working. And this has very practical consequences. So the reason we write a shopping list when we go shopping is because in some sense, we realize that our memory is not going to be good enough to hold all those items in mind. And similarly, when we start to realize our site is failing, for instance, it's not because we think the outside world has become blurry. It's because we realize that there's something in our perceptual systems that needs fixing with new glasses and so on. So it's this kind of practical, reflective thought that's not always obvious from the outside, but it's something that we can study with the tools of psychological science. Yeah. And one thing is increasingly clear is that other people, and now even algorithms, can know what we're like better than we can, certainly on specific topics. I remember a friend once told me a story from a board meeting where he was engaged in a very stressful conversation with the group, and someone in the meeting commented on how emotional he was getting, and it just seemed like they might want to take a break. And he denied being overly emotional. And someone around the table suggested that he bring his attention to the sensations at his upper lip. And the moment he did that, he burst into tears. Wow. Apparently his lip had been quivering as though he was about to burst into tears, and it was noticeable to those in the room. And you can imagine just how much can be known about any one of us now based on our Google search history, say, or anything we do with our attention online. And when you look at the database of knowledge, that is the profile of each of us that is accruing somewhere in the cloud. And what might be gleaned from that, when you compare it to everything else, every other profile of every other person, just the statistical knowledge there and the capacity to predict the next thing we'll find. Captivating that's exactly what you said. To take the view of oneself that another person could have opens the door to sometimes mortifying, at minimum, interesting facts that are not necessarily visible or salient when one is simply living one's life and having one's experience. Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting the example you mentioned of the person in the boardroom, because I I feel like I have, through studying metacognition, I've become more attuned in my own life to how I might have this fading out of self awareness at certain moments. And it's something that my wife has said to me on occasion when things are stressful with grant applications or whatever, that I just become a horrible person to live with for a few days at a time. And I used to deny this completely. I was like, I don't feel like anything's changing my behavior. And I now come to realize that how could I have possibly known at that time? I mean, there's a whole interesting story there about stress and how it is detrimental for metacognition itself. So you have this kind of paradoxical situation where the times when you might need to be aware of how your behavior is becoming causing problems for others, those are the times when metacognition and self awareness might actually be most impaired. But I have definitely, I think, become a bit more willing to accept in my own life that those fade outs of self awareness can happen. And they do happen probably more often than I'd like to admit. And I then have this stronger tendency to trust what, say, my wife is saying about my behavior and to try and correct it accordingly. Yeah. So let's build up this picture of metacognition. The simplest or most common definition I think one encounters is the phrase knowing that, you know, right? There's the knowing of things. There's the cognition piece, and then there's the self awareness that you have the knowledge. And this extends to knowledge in all of its forms, semantic knowledge. If you ask me, could you name more than four states in the United States? I could say yes to that. I could be sure about my knowledge there without actually going through the exercise of listing any states. So I have this more abstract understanding that my knowledge bank contains at least four state names. And so it is with so much of what we know, and of course, we can be wrong about that. We can actually think. We could produce specific concepts or memories and when asked, actually fail. But generally speaking, there's a representation of what is in our storehouse of knowledge that doesn't require us to actually go into the storehouse in order to cash it out in that moment. And so it is with even procedural learning or motor memory. So do you know how to ride a bike? Could you raise your hands over your head. We'd be surprised to have our confidence about that disconfirmed if we tried. But it's how would you build up the layers of what we're calling metacognition here? What is it beyond this representation to oneself that one knows certain things? Yeah, I think that's a very nice way of thinking about it, this notion that there are representations that go beyond knowledge. And one analogy that I sometimes use, it's not a perfect one because it's not how things actually work. But you can think of metacognition as in some sense being like the index of a book and the index usually points you to the right page in the book. But if the index maker has got things wrong and the book's self knowledge has in some sense failed, then sometimes there will be an index entry that does not correspond to the actual text in the book. And I think we can start to build up a picture of how metacognition works by thinking of the brain as effectively a hierarchical system and that it does not only encode information in memory, it does not only perceive and represent things at a first order level, but it also has what we think of as higher order representations. And we think parts of association cortex like prefrontal and parietal cortex are important for this, that it builds representations at a more abstract level of how the system is working. And I think that's probably the best way of conceptualizing metacognition at a cognitive systems level that we have at the moment. And then we can obviously take this in many different directions in terms of specific topics within that broader umbrella term of metacognition and how does it interact, if it interacts at all, with the variable of intelligence. I think there is an initial intuition that we have that intelligence is in some sense allied with having good awareness of what we know and don't know. But as ever, it turns on our definition of intelligence and empirically what we've found, perhaps surprisingly in many of our studies, is that when we measure metacognition in the lab and maybe it's useful to say a few words about how we actually do that. So typically the way we can quantify your method cognition and put a number on it in a particular task is by asking you to assess your performance on a number of trials. So of the task. So we might give you a memory task and after every decision about whether this object was on the list that you were asked to remember or not, we'd ask you how confident you were about that choice. Or we might give you a task involving perceptual judgments and then ask you how confident you are about each choice. And the key thing we're interested in there is not only your performance on the memory and the perception task, but also how your confidence tracks your performance. So intuitively, if I have high confidence when I'm right and lower confidence when I'm wrong. That's what we call having good metacognitive sensitivity or metacognitive ability. And what we found in those studies, now we've done studies of thousands of people, is that performance on classical IQ tests is not a great predictor of metacognitive ability. And this lines up with some other work in using other measures of metacognition, like whether we tend to be fooled by initially intuitive answers without reflecting on them. So these are things like the cognitive reflection tests that taps into more system two than system one thinking. And again, there in the literature on that kind of test, it does seem to be independent of classical IQ measures. And I think one way of thinking about this on a very broad brush basis is that the kind of neural and cognitive resources that we bring to the table to solve reasoning problems, which is effectively what an IQ. Test is tapping into, those are distinct to, or somewhat distinct to the kinds of neural and cognitive resources involved in reflecting on our performance in those tasks, including potentially even in an IQ test. So you in theory, and we have done a little bit of this, you can measure someone's metacognition about their performance on a test of intelligence. So in a sense, both on a theoretical basis but also on an empirical basis, we think metacognition and IQ come apart in interesting ways. Yeah, you can see that metacognition and performance have to break apart because you would have perfect metacognition if you were confident that you had utterly failed to perform. If in fact you had utterly failed to perform, you could just go through life failing again and again. And as long as you're aware that it's just one failure after another, well, then your metacognition score is perfect. That's right. That's exactly right. And I say I kind of make the throwaway line in the book that metacognition is often most useful when we're doing stupid things because that's when we need to be aware of making errors. So, no, that's absolutely right. What picture do we have based on evolutionary psychology of metacognition? How do we think this might have evolved? And what are the benefits of being able to represent to oneself the likelihood that one has made an error or that's obviously only one slice of metacognition. But this second order reflection, how does this fit in the context of evolutionary psychology? So one starting point for getting at that question is to look at how and whether we share metacognitive capacities with other species. And there has been an interesting line of work for many years in comparative psychology looking at tests of confidence and uncertainty and error monitoring in animals. And the general picture there is that in many species you can have pretty sophisticated tracking of confidence, tracking of errors and so on. So there's been some lovely work in dolphins and monkeys and rats showing that they pass confidence tasks similar to the ones that we use with humans. But that, I think, is a type of metacognition that occupies a different space to explicit self awareness in humans. And the reason that we think that's the case is because when we look at child development in humans, that kind of implicit metacognition, the ability to track confidence and monitor errors, that seems to be in place relatively early in life. So there's been some beautiful and heroic studies done by Sid Kuida's lab in Paris showing that babies as young as twelve months, I think even younger than that in some of their studies, show signatures of error monitoring both in EEG activity and also in their persistence for searching for particular objects. So when you use their persistence of searching for a toy, for instance, as a marker of confidence, then you get all the same metrics of metacognitive sensitivity that you can get out of the adult data. Now, that kind of lower level ability to self monitor seems to be in place quite early in life in humans. But when kids become verbal and you then ask them about their confidence and about whether they know something or don't know something, then as I'm discovering at the moment with my two and a half year old, their metacognition is terrible. They think they know things they don't know, they fail to realize they need to ask you about something, and so on. So it's not until the age of around three or four that children start to gain this explicit self awareness of what they know and don't know. And we think that in studies in adult humans, that kind of more explicit level of self awareness is related more to theory of mind, or the ability to think about other people as well as to think about ourselves. So I'm not sure if that answered your question, but hopefully it got us started along that line. Yeah, well, that does neatly differentiate us from other animals, even other primates. When you imagine that a comprehensive awareness of our own mind is of a piece with what we call theory of mind, it goes by other names like mind reading and mind sight. But it's the ability to represent the mental states of others such that you can recognize that other people can have rather often different beliefs and desires and expectations than you do, and they can be at odds with what is in fact true of the world. Obviously, the famous test of this is to set up a little playhouse with some dolls and ask kids around the age of four, one doll leaves the room, and then another doll hides a cherished object somewhere in the playhouse. And then you ask the kid, when this other figure comes back, where is he? Or she going to look for the object? It's only once they can develop the concept of another person holding a false belief that they can give the correct answer, which is he's going to believe it was where he where it last was before he left the room. So yeah, remind me, while there's some possible basis for very rudimentary theory of mind in other primates, I mean, I think there's some something like deception. It's not the it's it's still somewhat controversial to call it deception. Right. I think we still don't think that other primates have a proper theory of mind. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, it's an evolving field. And in fact, only in the past two or three years have there been studies suggesting that chimpanzees can represent false beliefs, at least to the extent of being able to shift their gaze towards where the object is actually going to be sorry. To where the object will they think the object will appear from the perspective of the other person. But so far at least and I was reading a review on this recently from Laurie Santos and colleagues, and so far at least, the picture is that even though if you use clever experimental techniques, you could get some hint that they can track false beliefs, at least in behavior, in terms of being able to act upon those and use those to guide behavior. It seems like there is a gulf there. From the best experiments on chimps to humans, there's quite a gulf. And this is not human adults. This is, as you say, kids age around four. And what's really interesting there is that if you go back that field of research, that field on animal theory of mind, was kicked off by this famous paper back in the 70s, which just had the title of does the Chimpanzee have a Theory of Mind? And going back to that paper, what the authors of that paper meant by theory of mind was the ability to think about other people's mental states, but also the ability to think about your own mental state. That term theory of mind has kind of got used most often in the literature to be about other people. What's interesting now, I think, with this rise of work on metacognition, is that we're starting to think, okay, maybe this is just a more general computational capacity that subserves not only thinking about other people, but also thinking about ourselves. Yeah, this is really interesting. This is a place where it does at least make a point of contact with the self that I often denigrate as illusory, and that there's this sense that our sense of our representation of ourselves in social space and in the world is of a peace with our concrete representation of others as others. Right. That this really indelible sense of self and other emerges together, kind of a single cognitive brushstroke. And when as many people kind of test in, you know, experiences in meditation and with psychedelics, when that boundary between self and other erodes, it erodes again. It's kind of a single boundary where if you're not really reaffin self. You're not quite reifying other in quite the same way in the normal course of events where we feel like ourselves and surrounded by other minds. It does seem intuitive to me that we're doing something quite similar when we're representing other minds and reflecting on our own. It's just we're thinking about the same kinds of things and it's the angle of our gaze that is different. But this goes to many other results in neuroscience. When you think of the mirror neuron research and just how is it that we interpret the behaviors of others? When you see someone reaching for an object you have you understand their intention in a way that maps on to what it's like to be you doing more or less the same thing, reaching for objects of that kind. There's a kind of mirroring component here in the way we understand other people's behaviors and it is the research thus far. I think it's appropriate to be somewhat skeptical of just how much has been made of the mirror neuron research, but it certainly seems that there is a kind of stealth mapping that is the basis for our understanding the behavior of others. Yeah, I think there seems to be a lot of circumstantial evidence surrounding that linkage. It's really hard to pin it down. And what I find fascinating and somewhat frustrating is can we cash that out in a more computational terms? Like what is that system really actually doing? Assuming it is a system that is, as you say, building a model of someone else and also building a model of ourselves. But it does seem like that similar brain networks are involved. And we recently did a meta analysis of all the studies of brain imaging studies of metacognition and compared that to classical theory of mind networks and there was interesting overlap in regions of the medial prefrontal cortex. And we know, for instance, in neurodegenerative diseases like dementia, decline in selfawareness is often accompanied by a decline in social cognition as well. And developmentally they seem to go hand in hand in children. So there's a lot of kind of there does seem to be a symmetry there and I'm attracted to that symmetry. I just think it's hard to find a good way and we are thinking of trying to do this, but it's hard to find a good way of directly comparing the kind of computations that might underpin self and other evaluation. Yes, we've just discussed that theory of mind is the necessary precursor for deception because it's not until you understand that other people have beliefs and representations that you can then manipulate those beliefs and representations strategically with an awareness of that this is a likely way to produce a desired effect in their behavior. But then there's this question of self deception, which again is a somewhat controversial topic scientifically. There are paradoxes that await us when we try to think of self deception as being truly analogous to the deception of others, because then you're left with this quasi Freudian picture of part of you consciously deceiving some other part of you. So the part of you that is in the deception business must know the truth in order to strategically hide it or distort it for the rest of you. How do you think of self deception or the phenomenology of being flagrantly wrong about one's inner life or outer behavior in ways that invite this analogy to deception, we do often summarize it as self deception or willful ignorance. I mean, the willful part of it is perverse and inscrutable from a cognitive point of view. Where does that fit into the discussion of metacognition? Yeah, it's interesting in terms of how that might connect to this notion of belief decoupling from accuracy or confidence decoupling from performance, because I think that is something we do see routinely in many studies. People's metacognition isn't very good. They are sometimes confident that they've got the right answer, even though it's clearly wrong. And we know that there are all these biases in belief and confidence that people like Daniel Kahneman have famously documented. I think that one place it connects there to the discussion we were just having on theory of mind is that we model or we create narratives to explain the behavior of others. That's part of the depth of mental state inference that we can do that. We can say, well, they must have ignored me in the street because of what I did yesterday, or something like that. There's a kind of like a narrative that we create about the thought processes going on in other people's heads, and we seem to create a similar self narrative and that can hear more or less with reality. And when it decouples completely, then we're in the realm of psychosis or confabulation. So I think that there are we can start building up a story about why beliefs or narratives might decouple from what is the ground truth of our behavior or how we appear to others. What I think is really interesting about your question that I hadn't really thought about before is that does that then, in some sense require a system to also know the truth internally? And it's not clear to me that that is the case, although I think it could be possible that that is the case in some circumstances. So we've done a bit of work. This was work led by a former postdoc of mine, Dan Bang, who has been really interested in this problem he calls private public mapping, which is effectively, how do we take our private beliefs and convert them into what we say to others? And so his example of this is, what do you say to a kindly aunt who's given you a terrible Christmas present and you don't want to hurt their feelings, so you say an untruth, but you do this strategically. And we studied that in. The context of metacognition by being able to track, using brain imaging, the confidence that was being formed at any given moment, because we have a fairly good understanding now of the neural correlates of confidence in individual decisions. But then we required subjects to strategically adjust the confidence they communicated to their partners in a collaborative game. And what we found was that there were distinct networks involved in this private sense of confidence. How do I feel about my performance now? And another part of the prefrontal cortex was engaged when they had to strategically adjust that to communicate to the other person. So that would be not quite deception, but it's some kind of strategic mapping between this kind of private feeling of what's going on and what we're trying to communicate to others for the purposes of strategic manipulation. So it would be super interesting to know whether we're at some level doing that to ourselves, that at some sense, that same general circuit for strategic manipulation of others is also working under the hood for ourselves. And I don't know of any work on that. Yeah, well, when you look at the structure of much of our thought, it is conversational. I mean, we are talking to ourselves much of the time as though there's someone in us who is listening, who needs to be told certain things. Otherwise much of our discursive thought is totally superfluous. Why does part of you say anything to the rest of you as though the rest of you isn't aware of the thing that's being said? If I'm looking for an object on my desk and when I spot it, I might say, oh, there it is to myself silently with the voice of the mind. But if I'm the one to see it, who am I telling? Oh, there it is. Who needs that further linguistic information when the one who is in possession of the eyes that have seen it is looking at it in that moment? And so, so much of our thought is dialogical that one could imagine a similar process is happening. The thoughts are tumbling out our mouths when we're speaking to others, and then when we shut our mouths, we keep talking to ourselves about more or less everything. Yeah, and I'm I'm very attracted to the position that Chris Frith holds on this, that in a sense and this comes back to the conversation about an evolutionary story of metacognition, that why did we start building this self narrative, this metacognition? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, just a brief announcement here. I have a new book coming out. It publishes August 11. It is available for preorder now on Amazon, and this is the first volume related to the podcast. It is called Making Sense conversations on Consciousness, Morality and the Future of Humanity. And in it, we've taken some of the best conversations from the first 200 episodes of the podcast and refined them for print. I edited my side of the conversation, the guests edited theirs. So this was an interesting opportunity to make sure we had said exactly what we wanted to say on the topic at hand. So for those of you who'd want to revisit some of these conversations and see them in their final form, the book is available. And for the people in your life who haven't figured out how to listen to podcasts, this would be a great way to share some of the more interesting conversations I've had here with them. These are the conversations I had with Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, David Deutsch, Daniel Conneman, David Krakauer, glenn Lowry, thomas Messinger, Robert Sapolski, anil Seth, timothy Snyder and Max Tegmark. Anyway, enjoy that. And that's it for housekeeping. As you know, I recently did a podcast on racism and police violence, and then I went on to the cheerful topic of existential risk. My next podcast is going to be on the ongoing threat of nuclear war. So it is a grim season on the podcast, but today there's a spot of sunlight, because today I'm speaking with Scott Barry Kaufman about human well being. Scott is the author of the book Transcend the New Science of Self Actualization. Scott is a humanistic psychologist who is taught at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and elsewhere. He writes the column Beautiful Minds for Scientific American, and he hosts the Psychology Podcast. He's also written for The Atlantic and Harvard Business Review, and his previous books include Ungifted Wired to Create Twice Exceptional, which he edited. And he also edited the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence. Anyway, we cover a lot of ground in this episode. We talk about the difference between intelligence and creativity. We talk about wisdom and transcendence, the history of humanistic psychology, maslow's, hierarchy of needs, the connection between wellbeing and ethics, self esteem, psychedelics and meditation, peak and plateau experiences, mortality, salience, the pretrans fallacy, fear of uncertainty, work and meaning, intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards, pathological altruism, intimacy versus belonging, two aspects of self transcendence and other topics. I now bring you Scott Barry Kaufman. I am here with Scott Barry Kaufman. Scott, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me on your show, Sam. So you've written a fascinating book titled Transcend the New Science of Self Actualization. And you also have a podcast of your own, the psychology podcast, maybe. Let's start with just an introduction to your background in psychology. What sorts of issues have you focused on and how do you describe your work at this point? Sure, I think we have lots of mutual interests. When I first started off, I got my PhD in cognitive science and cognitive psychology and was really interested in the cognition of intelligence. And I started off in real traditional intelligence research, so studying IQ testing. And I was absolutely fascinated with what are the cognitive processes underlining intelligence and IQ. And then it branched off a little bit to other forms of cognition, like in pussy learning and unconscious learning. And I was curious if unconscious learning was related to conscious learning and whether it was such a thing as unconscious intelligence that would correlate or not correlate with IQ. And that's what my dissertation was on. And then it moved on to creativity work and understanding the distinction and similarities between intelligence and creativity. And then in the past four or five years, I've really gotten into positive psychology and humanistic psychology and trying to understand above just our mind and human intelligence. But how can we realize our our whole being, you know, not just one slice of us? You know, I want to focus mostly on the humanistic and positive side of things and talk about self transcendence and the furthest reaches of human wellbeing, but maybe we can take a moment to tie it to some of your earlier work. How would you differentiate intelligence, creativity, and wisdom? How do you think about those things? Yeah, it's a great, great question. So intelligence I view as the we can just really shorthand it and say it's the ability to apprehend and perceive what is. And when I got into imagination research, I defined imagination as the ability to apprehend and perceive what could be. And so I actually view creativity as a combination of intelligence and imagination. So creativity is having the ability to apprehend what is and really learn and understand the real, true nature of the world without any prior beliefs or biases. But we have to go beyond that for creativity. We also have to have that foresight into what society could be, what could humans become? And I see creativity as a combination of both intelligence and imagination. Does that make sense? Creativity is somewhat paradoxical, it seems to me, because if you're too creative, right, if you're not obeying any of the rules, well, then it suddenly becomes worthless or next to worthless like you're, you're extracting meaning that either isn't there or is there only for you. Right? But it can't be communicated to others. And so this is sort of where the psychedelic experience can become obviously not normative and not all that useful, even though and I hope we'll talk about psychedelics as well. But how do you view yeah, how do you view the rule following and rule breaking with respect to creativity? One of the key aspects of creative people? And I did a research project when I was working on this book with the journalist Kyle and Gregoire. The book is called Wired Decree. And when I was working on that, I was trying to look to see what a creative people do differently. And one of the most obvious things they do differently is that they do things differently. You know, they creative people are rule breakers in the sense that maybe they're not necessarily provocateurs and that's a different kind of rule breaking. And I think it's actually important to distinguish between those who are intentional, I would say compulsive rule breakers versus those who do it as a means to an end for greater meaning and creative realization. So then where does wisdom come in? Okay, wisdom has been defined in lots of different ways in the psychological literature. It's been defined not just psychological literature, but throughout the course of human history. But in my book Transcend kind of that's the climax. That's where we end up in understanding what wisdom could mean from a self actualization perspective or a transcendence perspective. And I view wisdom as really encompassing this dichotomy transcendence that one of my favorite psychologist, Abraham Maslow, talked a lot about. He said at the highest state of consciousness, lots of dichotomies that everyone else in our society is really interested and obsessed with. And these false dichotomies, we are able to transcend them in some way and we're able to see how everything is just part of a larger whole. This might even have to be to make it concrete. It could be like the distinction between selfishness and and altruism. You know, at the highest level of consciousness, if you're and being the highest level of motivation, if you are selfish in the sense that you're getting really enjoyment out of what you're doing, but you are also connected to the world and your enjoyment brings enjoyment to others. Simultaneously, the word selfishness starts to lose meaning. Evil versus good. You start to have a more realistic understanding of human nature and you on the one hand can recognize the human frailties, but you also have the capacity to see that there's good in humans. So dialecticals wisdom to me is really this ability to hold seemingly incompatible things in your head as well as with yourself. Recognize your own contradictions and zoom out on yourself and see all those contradictions as part of an integrated whole that could be integrated. My gosh, if you can find a way to take all these warring factions that exist within ourselves, we were evolved to be that way. There was no unitary system that through the course of human evolution that tried to make sure that we were integrated. Humans. Oh, my gosh. These humans who exist, who can work towards integration and feeling inner wholeness to some degree, those are very wise people, in my opinion. Yeah, well, so let's talk about your book and how you sort of scale that mountain where wisdom is the place one hopes to arrive. Why has positive psychology and humanistic psychology and the various branches that I'm not sure how stable these labels are now, but why has the positive side of the human experience traditionally been given such little attention in psychology? I mean, I know that's changed of late with Seligman perhaps, you know, first in in my lifetime, but and, you know, as you show in your book, we had people like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers and other people who went by the label humanistic psychology struggling to focus on this. And is it a legacy of what Freud did to our thinking about the prospects of human happiness? How do you view that the last century or so of psychology's emphasis on all that is wrong with the human mind, or potentially wrong and basic ignorance of the possibility of things going right with the mind? Well, I long believe that we should have listened to William James and not Freud. We should have listened to, in some senses, the originator of research psychology or empirical data psychology. A lot of Freud's ideas were very armchair and were, ironically, projections of his own soul, so to speak, or his own issues, projecting that onto all of humanity. But you ask a very good question because humanistic psychology was quite popular in a ten to 20 year period, in fifty s. Sixty s. It caught the time of Hippies, the sort of spirit of the LSD and the Beat writers, all this sort of idea of creativity and spirituality. It was it was part of the culture. And I try to think why it died out, because it did die out from, like, the 70s till Martin Seligman really brought it back in a big way by putting positive psychology on a scientific foundation in 1998 or so. And what happened between the well, you know, there's lots of ways of trying to answer that question. One way is recognizing that the bad is stronger than the good. We are more focused on when we have deprivations, and there's certainly no shortage of deprivations among humans to work on. Depression, anxiety. These things become more pressing concerns for us when we're in that deprived state. If we're feeling satisfied, we don't seek a therapist so that we are even more satisfied. I mean, if you go to a therapist and you say, doc, I only feel average life satisfaction, but I want to be like these pops psychology. You find something else. You find a coach, maybe, or you don't go to a therapist for that. Not clinical psychology. Not psychology. You know what I'm saying? So the bad is stronger than good in a lot of ways, and it isn't important a purpose of the field of psychology, the state admission of the APA. And what I think psychology should be about is improving human life. And improving human life. Like I said, there's no shortage of suffering, so that can take up a lot of it. So, yeah, I don't know the exact answer to that question, but I think part of it is connected to the spirit of the times in the we don't really have that 60s spirit right now, do we? Yeah, well, the 60s died in various ways, and for some reasons, it makes sense. I mean, there there was a an explosion of dysfunction in addition to all the enthusiasm and insight, there was a fair amount of dysfunction and chaos being advertised. And it's just you know, I'm a big proponent of the wise use of psychedelics, as you probably know, but the haphazard use of them obviously comes with its significant risk, and that risk was borne out in many people's lives. I had another thought, and that's that they're definitely outside of psychology, there was no lack of the Tony Robbins of the world or books on how to be your best self, how to realize your potential. So outside of psychology, in the pop help and I wonder if to a certain extent, the field of psychology, which likes to see himself as a physics, like a science, at least a lot of psychologists do, we're really put off by that world and wanted to distinguish itself from we're not self help woo woo. We're more scientific. And I just wonder if that has part to do with it as well. Yeah, I think it does. And also the explicit religious and Eastern influence on humanistic psychology. And I know we'll get into this, but people like Maslow were influenced by teachers like Krishnamurti or Buddhist writers like Alan Watts. And the sort of brain trust for this movement, positive psychology before it called itself positive, would often meet at places like Esplan Institute. And, you know, that became a hub for the New Age, and it gathered all of these influences, some of which are really the antithesis of science. I once taught a weekend at Esplan a long time ago, but simultaneous with that, I'm sure there were things in the catalog like how crystals can balance your chakras and the sky is the limit in terms of what people will believe in the Esoteric vein, whether Eastern or Western, in its influence. And it has much more in common with traditional religion than it does with scientific rigor. And so the stink of the New Age on all of this is probably what academic psychology is, is reacting to as well. I think that's right. And that stigma is still there. Sometimes when you say you do research and positive psychology, there are some sectors of psychologists that look down on that as maybe not as scientifically rigorous. Right. Okay. So now people have heard of Maslow if they haven't really heard of him as a person or even humanistic psychology, most people have heard of his hierarchy of needs. And this is one of these exports from somebody's work that got somewhat falsified in the transit to the rest of culture. So what is it that people think they know about this pyramid? And what is it that Maslow thought he was teaching about it? Well, a lot of people may have seen the pyramid. They may not even heard the name Abraham Maslow, but certainly they've they've seen it on the Internet, maybe diagrammed as a pyramid with, like now you see toilet paper at the bottom of the pyramid, or in the age of COVID or WiFi, battery was popper before that. It's a meme. And suggesting there's different levels of needs. Some are more foundational than others. And Maslow's original theory, he never drew a pyramid in his writings. I mean, I was looking through the writings, I was like, where's the pyramid? Where's I couldn't find a pyramid? And he was talking about a hierarchy of pre potency. We have some needs that are more prepotent over others, that when they're deprived, they take up more of our attention, and we really focus all of our energy and resources to satisfying that. So he argued at the base, although it's not perimeter, but our most pre potent need, I should say, is the physiological needs, like food, shelter, water. And then the next prepotent need is the need for love and belonging, according to Mazlo. And then the next pre potent need is the need for esteem, esteem from others as well as self esteem. And then the argument was, if we could have these needs, these basic needs met, then we can really be free to self actualize, to become all that we're uniquely capable of becoming. All of those basic needs are things that we share with other animals and we also share with other humans. So it doesn't make you particularly special if you say, I'm lonely or I'm hungry or I want respect, stand in line. Everyone wants respect. But if you start to say something like, I can play a violin concerto like no one else in the world can play a violin concerto. Now we're starting to talk about self actualization. What is this unique core potentiality within you that can make the greatest positive impact on the world? And that's what I think he meant by self actualization. That's the original theory. But there was no pyramid. He actually made it very clear that life wasn't like this kind of video game. He never used that metaphor. But I use that metaphor in the sense that you don't reach one level of need, like the need for belonging. And then some voice from above is like congrats. You've unlocked the need for esteem and then you can go up a level and then you never have to worry about connection ever again. He made it very clear that life is always a two step forward, one step back dynamic, where we're always choosing growth, we're always trying to choose growth, but the fear response is always pre potent fear is always going to loom over us and uncertainty, but we have to consciously keep choosing the growth option. He made that very clear. And then it's germane to this idea that we're both interested in with transcendence. He argued the last couple of years of his life that self actualization wasn't the highest motivation in his hierarchy of needs, that there was a higher motivation. In fact, he realized that there were different types of self actualizing people. This is an insight he wrote in a personal journal entry of his that I found. He's like, big insight today. I realized that there are actually different types of self factualizing people. There are self actualizers who are perfectly content going their entire lives realizing their own potential. And maybe they read all the books how to realize their full Potential. They're obsessed with realizing their potential and maximizing their potential, but they really don't care much about maximizing the potential of society or maximizing the potential of others. There's not a great connection between self and others. They may dazzle with their talents or at work. They may be doing good work, and they feel self actualized, but they're not what Mazzo called the transcenders. He argued that transcenders were a different kind of self actualizers who were consistently motivated by higher values. He called them the B values, the values of being itself, things where there's no means to an end, their ends in themselves, like the search for beauty, the search for justice, for meaningfulness in the world, for goodness. And you're motivated by these values, but also you're motivated by peak experiences in life. So these sort of spiritual, I guess, called transcendent experiences in your life and these transcenders, this is what they lived for. There's these kinds of experiences and the realization of these kinds of values. Yeah, that opens up a lot of interesting questions because many of us who are in the transcendence business have noticed that there's the connection between so called peak experiences or even more durable experiences of self transcendence, which do seem normative within their purview. They have beneficial effects psychologically. They mitigate psychological suffering. But the connection to ethics and commitment, to an intelligent commitment to helping other people, say, the kind of normative prosocial emotions in action that is I think it's there. It's certainly advertised to be there in Eastern context, especially in a Buddhist one especially. But it's not as direct or as reliable as I think we would hope and to testify to that fact. All you need to do is look at the careers of great meditators and teachers of meditation who have gathered students. Many of them have come from eastern countries and come to the west to teach. And this was obviously happening in in maslow's time. And so many of them have produced incredible suffering among their students and mixed messages, to put it charitably with respect to their teaching, because they become in many cases, we're probably talking about fraud. These people are not who they say they are. But in the most interesting cases, I don't think that is what's happening. I think we're talking about people who have genuine insights, genuine access to fairly rarefied states of mind. These are not people who are failed meditators or failed yogis. These are, again, to one degree or another, spiritual athletes, but who still have whatever level of narcissism and ego needs and just unfulfilled desires that lead them to misbehave, sometimes with the abandon of a rock star trashing a hotel room. And it's left many people thinking that there's no there there, which is a real integration of self transcending wisdom and ethics that survive the normal tests, free of paradox that strains one's sanity and actually just leads people to be good and reliably harmless in proximity to others. And so that, you know, I've come away from my collisions with this literature and to some degree, these people feeling that there's more needed in the toolkit for living a truly examined life and becoming a better person than just having certain self transcending experiences. Certainly I think the peak experience is the wrong model. Whatever the peak is, it comes, it goes. It's not the ultimate insight into the nature of consciousness that will transform you because by definition it came and it went. But what's needed is an actual conscious integration with ethics that makes sense. And this is where culture comes in and just the relationship between the individual and society, right? So yes, it's possible to have real breakthroughs privately in solitude, but when one comes out and interacts with the rest of the world, what one has to do that with are by definition one's beliefs, assumptions, one's culture on some level. And in the eastern case, you've had many of these people come from effectively theocracies with all of those norms and have used those norms as a template through which to interact with people. And that hasn't worked out so well. So anyway, I realize I've dumped a lot on you, but I guess I'm interested to know what you think about the larger footprint of wisdom and how it relates to things like self transcendence and peak experience and that general project of becoming a better person. Yeah, there's a lot there. And I spent a lot of time when I was writing this book thinking about pseudo transcendence. What does pseudo transcendence look like? Mazda actually talked about pseudo growth. He talked about people who tried to jump to the top of his hierarchy of needs without addressing their other needs, thinking that it'll somehow if they just meditate or if they just do LD or they do spiritual practices, then suddenly they won't have these abiding concerns anymore that they had. He called that pseudo growth. So in my book, I try to distinguish between pseudo transcendence and healthy transcendence. So everything so this is a framework which Mazda used, but I started to see the whole world in that way, everything. So nothing in and of itself is good or bad. Everything has a D flavor to it and a b flavor to it. So the D flavor is a deficiency motivated flavor to it. So you do it because you're trying to satisfy some hole in yourself in some way and anything can apply to that. You can have dehumor versus being or growth motivated humor, love. You can have belonging. You can have deep belonging where you have a desperate need to belong with others because you severely lack belonging and you're trying to change and control the world in some way. Or be belonging where you see people for who they are or be love for the being of others, not what use they exist to satisfy some whole in yourself. So I think the big key is recognizing that integration is what matters here. And I have a section in my book called The Hitler Problem. So when I get to the need for purpose, I ask, well, was Hitler self actualized? Because he clearly had a sense of purpose. He had a purpose. I'm arguing purpose is a higher level of need. The point here is that life is not like a mountain or a pyramid, like it's been depicted in Maslow's. I actually have a new metaphor sailboat. And in a sailboat model. The reason why I think it works, and I'd love to get your thoughts on that, is that it clearly shows that you need to have a safe and secure boat. Your basic needs need to be met. There's no holes in the boat, no severely deprived aspects of your needs, or else you won't go anywhere. You can't move in your desired direction when all you're focused on is securing the boat. And for the boat, I talk about the needs for safety, the needs for connection and the need for self esteem. But once our boat is secure, we can open the sail and we open the sail and face the vulnerability and the unknown of the sea. We move with purpose and direction with that sale, but we move with an integration of the spirit of exploration, not fear and love, universal love, or what Mazda called be love for the being of others. It's moving in that purposeful direction, but with an integration of these other things. So the whole point here is that we operate as a whole vehicle experiencing the unknown of the sea, even though we each move in our own direction with our own purpose. There can be a great unknown, great wave can come crashing down on all the boats at once. And then suddenly we were all moving our own direction, and now we realize, wait a minute, we're all actually in the same sea together. So I think this metaphor works in a number of ways better than the static pyramid. And also the pyramid doesn't show that the point here of wisdom is the integration aspect. So people who appear as though will tell you because they're gurus or that I'm a transcendent being and they go abuse people or do whatever, you see all these atrocities from people who say they're enlightened. Not all, of course, but the kinds you point out. I would argue that they're pseudo transcending. They have built their spiritual practices on a very faulty foundation. They still have deeply unresolved belonging needs, or deeply unresolved safety needs or steam needs. They desperately need a steam. And so it's built on a very faulty foundation. So that's why I think that this healthy transcendence model I talk about in the book, I specifically define as healthy transcendence is defined as the harmonious integration of the whole self in the service of realizing the good society. That's how I define healthy transcendence, to make clear that it's the connection between self and world not being above the world in some way. My conceptualization of transcendence might differ from other people's notions of transcendence, but I wanted to make it very clear that it wasn't a horizontal thing. It's not like we're transcending other people. In some sense, it's actually quite the opposite. Healthy transcendence is when we have this great unity with the world. Yeah, well, I think the sailboat analogy is really a good one. And I could see it break down at one point at the extreme end of transcendence, really, where the things that seem to be needs for most of us, certainly most of the time, which is things that are part of the whole. The deficiency needs the safety, the connection, the self esteem. It really is possible, or certainly seems to be possible to transcend those in some basic sense. Now, that's not really a norm you can recommend to other people. But it does seem like a way of resolving some of the paradoxes you mentioned that Maslow was focused on, or seeming paradoxes, or the dialectic between extremes where if in fact, it's possible to achieve the sort of mind that sees fame and shame as being equally empty. Right? Well, then one has to question just what this need for self esteem is really about in the end. You know, if seeing yourself reviled on Twitter can be as meaningless as seeing yourself praised on Twitter, you know, then you you've surmounted something there and it's not you're no longer vulnerable to the vicissitudes by which most people would define their their effort to secure self esteem. Or being in good standing with a community, say. And there are practices in the Contemplative tradition that explicitly target these opposites for this purpose, right? Like if you're a great meditator who thinks he's transcended his concerns about selfesteem, well, then your teacher may recommend that you do something that you would normally find just absolutely mortifying, just to see how you can inhabit that channel of human experience. Right? So you deliberately embarrass yourself or engage some way of life that reduces your status so that people begin treating you differently and you begin to feel what that's like and play with that mode of human experience. Many people have done even just school projects where you go out in a wheelchair even though you're not you don't need one, right? You just see what it's like to be in a wheelchair and have everyone think you are a paraplegic and treat you with all the weirdness that often evokes from people. There are many insights you can get from doing something like that, but the thing you begin to notice is just how vulnerable you normally are to the changes in affects and attitude and assumption that can happen just based on some very simple social cues. So apart from that, I guess we should talk about just how far this project of transcendence can likely go because there is almost certainly false advertising here born of thousands of years of quasi religious philosophizing unconstrained by science. But in my experience, the assumptions that most Westerners and most people it's not just Westerners at this point, make about the superficiality of the project of, let's say, learning to meditate. Those assumptions can be proven false in a variety of ways. And it's interesting that that's kind of a limiting factor on how people think about transcendence and its prospects. You said a lot of wise things there. I think it's really important to not treat these practices as Panacea's, right, as quick fixes. Mazda called them quick hits of transcendence. He was very much against that. He thought self actualization took a lot of work and he actually was very wary of psychedelics. Did he take psychedelics? No, he didn't. That's interesting. He was surrounded by people who were both the major researchers and proponents of psychedelics at that time. So he must have just decided based on some reasons why not to. What were those reasons? I don't remember encountering that in your book. Yeah, he used to rib a lot with Timothy Leary and there's a famous story of them walking together Harvard Square and Mazzle saying something like, would you want to take an elevator to the top of Mount Everest? So he was like teasing him about LSDs being a shortcut and Mazzle very much viewed it as a shortcut. And I read all these letters that he had wrote, personal correspondence to various people about his thoughts on LSD. But during that same conversation there was a time where I think they were exhausted from walking and Mazzo said, should we get a taxi or something? And then Timothy Leary kind of made fun of it as well. He said, I thought you said you didn't want any shortcuts anyway. That was funny kind of joking back and forth. But yeah, Mazzo really was trying to hold off on that because he really railed against these easy answers to self. He really viewed self accusation as being committed to a calling or something deep within yourself that you love that brings out the best in you and that you are committed to working towards day in and day out. Very much was in that sort of meaning mode similar to Victor Frankel. And there's some fascinating discussions between Victor Frankel and Mazda about meaning and there are similarities and differences about their way of thinking about that. But he really railed against it and he would kind of go back and forth. Like in his book on peak experiences in religion, he says something to the effect, well, I know psychedelics is becoming popular now and this may scientifically someday show to have benefits, but he was very tentative about it. I think if he were alive today and he saw the science and saw a lot of the positive benefits, I actually think he changed his mind a little bit and would be a bit more excited about it. Have you taken psychedelics? I haven't. I'm like Mazda. Yeah. So what's behind that? Well, I personally have always been prone biologically dispositionally to hypomania, which is not the same as manic and sort of bipolar. Actually hypomania is a personality trait that we all vary on. It's correlated with Schizotypy and this is actually what led into a whole rabbit hole of research I've been conducting on Schizotypi and its relationship to creativity and how in some sense it can be related to schizophrenia. But I've been really interested in that paradox of when does it tip over to schizophrenia versus when does it tip over into creative thinking. So I've just noticed in myself that I've been prone to this kind of like I can see beauty somewhere and then just start crying over it. And without psychedelics I'm kind of scared. I want to do it with someone that's a good guide or someone who's really experienced with it because I'm kind of scared of being high or kind of having this wonderful experience and then can you have too much of this kind of transcendent experience where it becomes overwhelming? Can you tell me? Yeah, you certainly can. And I think being I don't know much about hypomania, but I can imagine just wanting to be cautious. If you feel like there's something that if you have a concern that you could be destabilized in some way that wouldn't be healthy. Yeah, I think for instance, someone who has a greater than normal reason to worry that they might be prone to schizophrenia, that's a real I say this without any clinical experience. But just from what I understand of the literature that seems like a contraindication for certainly real psychedelics. I would leave MDMA aside but LSD psilocybin mescaline DMT I think you would be wise to at the very least be cautious there if there's any kind of clinical risk in the offing. For me, the utility of psychedelics, and I guess this does relate somewhat you wrote an article on Mindfulness that I also wanted to talk about and it relates to your take on meditation there. There are many reasons to take psychedelics, but for me, the one that applies to most people and I think the one that integrates most directly with this larger project of getting to Everest by the means of growth rather than the elevator that takes you up there and then you promptly die of exposure or hypoxia. It's that without having had certain experiences, you really have no sense of how limited your normal experience is. This is in terms of affect and cognition and the ethical implications of both. You just don't know how confined the prison of your mind is. Or even that it is a prison until one of the walls has been broken down for you and you've seen some vast horizon that you didn't even imagine existed. Or even if you did, even if you paid a lip service to the possibility, you just didn't know what it would be like to confront it. And I guess the analogy that works for me is to think of mental training and meditation as a species of that somewhat analogous to physical training. And physical training is obviously something, it's a thing we know it's uncontroversial that you can get stronger and more flexible and improve your balance and you can become an Olympic gymnast, right? And so everyone who begins working out does it in a context. They know that while they may not become an Olympic gymnast, they know just how far this can be taken. You know, when you're just struggling to touch your toes or do one pull up or one push up because you've been sedentary for the last ten years, you know that extraordinary transformations of the body are possible. And then the question is just how far are you going to take this? How dissatisfied are you going to be with your inability to do much of anything? And how inspired are you going to be by watching the Olympics or seeing pictures of people who have completely transformed their bodies? And the problem with the contemplative life and meditation and other tools is that the changes are for the most part invisible. It's not that they don't have emotional correlates and therefore behavioral ones and that's why the rampages of various gurus seem to be disqualifying the whole project. But for the most part this isn't an inner landscape and therefore a hidden one. And therefore all we have is the testimony of people to say how far this landscape actually goes. And so you can't see the gold medal floor exercise at the Olympics to prove beyond any possibility of doubt that it is possible to take the project of becoming stronger and more flexible and getting greater balance and all that. You can take it to a level of perfection that you wouldn't otherwise be able to imagine. Right? And so with psychedelics it's a little bit like suddenly being dropped into the gold medal routine of the floor exercise modulo. A few ways this analogy breaks down. It's not that everything you can experience on psychedelics is normative or worth getting by some other route. You can experience things that are terrifying and clearly not normative. But if you hit the sweet spot on LSD or Psilocybin or MDMA, again, not a classic psychedelic, but it shows you a different room in the mansion of understanding. If you hit any of those sweet spots that do within their purview seem normative. If you experience something like unconditional love on MDMA or you experience self transcending unity with nature. I'll say on Psilocybin, it is like experiencing physical perfection of a sort that only the most highly trained athlete would ever touch. And you're just dropped into it. And then you lose it again. You come down, but you realize, okay, that's possible. Even though you can forget it on a day by day basis, you have seen something that you know there's a there there and then the question is what are you going to do about it? And then meditation, if you take it up as a practice, can be practiced in the context of knowing that this is not a false project, right? Just knowing that when someone says they've had this kind of experience, you know, from within, that this is an actual potential of the human mind and therefore the human brain and there's no reason why it couldn't be a potential of yours given the right changes. So the virtue is, again, it's not the only virtue, but for me the primary virtue is almost rhetorical. It's the only thing that would have convinced a skeptic like me that there was a path to go anywhere. Really, that's its utility. Again, we could talk about other things that it does for people. But for me it is the perfect rejoinder to the otherwise necessary skepticism, which is, you know, because again, we're surrounded on all sides by bullshit. You know, things that are clearly bullshit and it's hard to find the diamond in the bag of glass. And, yeah, psychedelics can help you distinguish the two. Yeah, there's a lot there and I really enjoy listening to your experiences, I enjoy listening to other people's experiences. We can intellectualize this stuff as much as we want, but until we actually experience it we sometimes don't fully understand something to be the case. And I'm really impressed with the scientific research that's coming out on showing that psychedelics in combination with spiritual practices show the greatest effects like meditation, but also prayer. There's some new studies, large scale studies that show that the combination is better than either alone. So the more you can integrate those psychedelic experiences into the rest of your life the more productive it will be. But what's interesting to me though is that there's lots of different routes to this certain transcendent state of being. There's lots of different routes. I'm wondering psychedelics do you think there's nothing else practices that can take us to those same insights? What are your thoughts on that? It depends which insights and experiences you're talking about. It's a Venn diagram for me which in certain cases barely overlaps between what is the real purpose of meditation or the kinds of experiences people can have in meditation and really the essence of it, I mean the real utility of it and the kinds of experiences people can have on psychedelics. The way I distinguish them is that there's consciousness and it's contents and almost any attempt, successful or otherwise to change experience is a matter of changing the contents of consciousness. That is really the goal and whether it's thought about in those terms or not and that is the effect. And by definition all of these changes are temporary. So you can have a peak experience through taking psychedelics, you can have a peak experience through, you know, going on a meditation retreat and meditating for 14 hours a day for a month and these kinds of experiences can be pretty similar. The difference with psychedelics is you're guaranteed to have a radical change in the contents of your consciousness and it's guaranteed to happen more or less within the hour. Right? So it's like if someone gives you an effective dose of LSD or Psilocybin there's no question something's going to happen. Now it may be a terrifying something but if nothing else it will prove to you that experience is a highly plastic thing and it is possible to inhabit states of consciousness that you never dreamed were possible a mere hour ago. And again you can get there with meditation and you can get there in a much more orderly way without the downside. I mean some people can go crazy on a meditation retreat as well so it's not that there's no risk but it's not the same kind of spin of the roulette wheel where you're really not sure what you're going to get until you get it. All your attempts to control set and setting notwithstanding. So it is more orderly and it can go into very rarefied terrain. But the actual sweet spot for meditation, which is to say the transcendence that actually matters, is something that you can recognize about the nature of consciousness in any moment that's coincident with any contents. You don't actually need the pyrotechnics of the psychedelic experience or even the pyrotechnics of changes in state born of intense concentration and meditation to recognize this thing about the nature of consciousness. And you know, this thing is referred to by many names but it's cutting through the illusion of the self or recognizing emptiness or nonduality. I mean, there are many sort of facets by which you could talk about it but it's the loss of this sense of subject object perception and this is completely coincident with ordinary perception. You can drive a car in this state of consciousness. This is a perfectly functional state because it's not actually a state. This is the way consciousness is when you're no longer constructing this sense of being the center of consciousness to speak of it in representational terms. It's like you can represent the world without representing a subject in your head, in your body, in the world. Most people have this additional sense that there's a homunculus in the head that's doing the thinking and the feeling and the reacting and that can be taken offline. And how that relates to neurophysiology or what the default mode network is doing, I mean, that's an open question but based on the current literature, it seems like it's probably at least part of what the default mode network is doing. In addition to just producing mind wandering or daydreaming or just random thinking, there's a strain of thinking that is explicitly self referential. And and again, I don't know if this has actually been studied, but more than just self referential thought, there's the difference between noticing thought as an appearance in consciousness among all the other appearances and being identified with thought, which is to say thinking without knowing that you're thinking. And that's the subtlest entanglement with thought which does give this feeling of subject in the head being the thinker. And so meditation can break that spell and breaking that identification leaves everything else untouched. Now, it is in fact true that the more you do that and the longer those moments of true nonduality or perception of emptiness last, then that does begin to change the character of the contents of consciousness as well, right? So that can begin to seem more rarefied and more psychedelic and more dreamlike. That's where some of that explicitly mystical language can come into even this sort of discussion. But it's never the point and it's never the thing you're trying to maximize. And in fact, when you begin to practice in this nondual way, it's explicitly part of the instruction that you need to break your attachment to any of those changes in consciousness that you think are a sign of something good happening. I mean, this is where the bean mode versus the becoming mode or the bean mode versus the deficiency the deficiency mode, which isn't your terminology. That's where that emphasis as a matter of practice becomes the entire game, right? Which is if being is really the point, if you've recognized something about the nature of consciousness that cannot be improved, it neither admits of being improved or suggests that there's any need to improve it. And it's compatible with anything else that can be noticed as the contents of consciousness. It's compatible with noticing physical pain or an ugly thought or anything that might arise. Well then at that point it's not a matter of changing anything, it's a matter of continuing to notice this quality of consciousness which is its centerlessness, its openness, its clarity. And then anything that changes, I mean, the feeling of, you know, joy or the feeling of bliss, I mean anything that becomes for most people, certainly in the beginning of meditation, a sign that meditation is actually working. All of that gets disavowed as an appearance in a dream that is meaningless. It has no meaning at that point. The fact that you suddenly feel good, that's not the point of meditation. And in that sense, most of what people experience with psychedelics just the experience of being bowled over by incredibly intense and often very positive experience, right? Bliss and seeing colors of a sort, colors in the natural world that you never imagined possible, and a feeling that the energy of your body is inseparable from the energy of the world and the energetics of all of that. Whatever the knob is in the brain that somewhere near the nucleus accumbens that you can grab and turn up to eleven, well then it got turned up to twelve there. And none of that is ultimately the point. Right? None of that can be the point. And yet again, it's the thing that if you've never experienced it, you're someone who just can't imagine how different a human experience can be. And that lack of imagination becomes the reason why you are satisfied with Netflix and not hating your life. You get up each day and merely repeat that project. I don't know if that answers your question, but it gets somewhat paradoxical in terms of trying to equate what the project is from the point of view of meditation and the utility of psychedelics. Yeah, it was really elucidating. I really appreciate that. I'm trying to square that away from way with something you said earlier about you kind of were pushing back against when I said transcenders, they live for peak experiences. You were kind of doubtful or criticizing. That's a worthy project. You noted how peak experiences were so ephemeral, and yet now you're talking about you're advocating for these kind of LSD type experiences that are ephemeral only insofar as they can get you to be sufficiently interested in something deeper than what you're tending to experience by the happenstance of your own conditioning. Right? So we've all been conditioned by culture to think certain things are possible and to hope for certain outcomes in our lives. And we're continually having various states of consciousness advertised to us as desirable and take the hull of the boat that we're trying to shore up. We all have various self esteem needs, say, and needs for belonging and connection, and then the fulfillment of those needs get advertised to us and modulated by culture. So what does self esteem mean now? Well, it means something different than in the 1980s before anyone had even heard of social media or imagined that such thing was possible. Now it means something online and we're all trying to navigate the consequences of that. So I would say that the role of a peak experience, which, again, by definition, is going to come and go like every experience, is to convince you that there's more to the landscape of mind than you may have assumed, and which you're tacitly assuming by prioritizing the way you're spending your time and attention in the way that you are. Right? I mean, like, if you might not think that you have bounded the horizon of your aspirations so narrowly, but if you're spending more or less every moment of your life just trying to come out on the winning side of a skirmish on Twitter and eke out a few more publications and earn 50% more money than you did last year, right? Like if that is taking up 90% of a person's bandwidth, well, you know, embedded in that use of energy and attention are certain assumptions about what will be ultimately satisfying. And, you know, this is a very common experience. To arrive at the fulfillment of all of that, you make a little more money, you publish a little more, your snark lands appropriately on Twitter. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I am speaking with Bart ermin Bart is the author of more than 30 books, including the bestsellers Misquoting Jesus and How Jesus Became God. He's a professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a leading authority on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. He's been featured in Time and the New Yorker and the Washington Post and many other places. He's been on The Daily Show, he's been in many documentaries, and his most recent book is The Triumph of Christianity, and this details the history of how Christianity spread through the world. Bart, as you'll hear, is a former believer. He's now, I think he calls himself a diagnostic. At this point, though, that didn't come up. But we had a great conversation. This was really the full tour of what Christianity is as a belief system and how it got that way. I wanted to come at it as though from Mars and consider the whole doctrine as though I had never heard of it before. We did that and it was fascinated. We talked about his background as a born again Christian and then his loss of faith. Once he became a true scholar of the New Testament. I asked him what the most convincing argument in defense of Christianity is. We talked about the status of miracles. We spent some time talking about the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus and the nature of heaven and hell. We talk about the end times and biblical prophecy and about who Jesus likely was and who he thought he was. We focus on Paul as the most important apostle and then discuss how it was that he likely converted so many people to the faith. Anyway, I thought it was a very interesting conversation. Sometimes it's good to examine something that you're familiar with as though you've never seen it before, and that's what we do here. I now bring you Bart Irman. I am here with Bart Ermint. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. So you have a fascinating new book, The Triumph of Christianity how Forbidden Religion Swept the World, which we will definitely talk about, I want to talk about, but it comes on the back of many books you've written about Christianity, and you have a very interesting story with respect to your own faith. And scholarship. So I just want to start there, which is not really the subject of your current book. For those listeners who don't know you, take us back to some of the crucial moments in your development as a thinker on this topic. What is your background religiously and where did you wander on the landscape of faith and doubt? Yeah, I know I'm a bit of an odd duck in the field of New Testament and early Christian studies because I'm a scholar of the New Testament. My PhD is a New Testament, but I'm actually not a Christian myself, and there aren't very many nonchristian scholars of the New Testament out there. I was raised Christian, though. I was raised in the when I was a kid, I was in the Episcopal Church and grew up fairly religious. When I was in high school, I had a bornagain experience and I committed my life to Christ. And that's how I got really interested in the Bibles, because I was religiously committed. Tell me more about that. What is a born again experience? We're going to talk about Saul and the road to Damascus that made him Paul. But what was your experience? So I was a church going Episcopalian and I started in high school attending a youth group that was not connected with the church, but was a very religious youth group. It was called a campus life youth for Christ. And the leader of this group was a 20 something guy who was very charismatic in his personality, who insisted that the only way to be a real Christian was to ask Jesus into your heart and to commit your life to him as your Lord and Savior. And so I decided I had to become a Christian. It wasn't clear to me what I was before that because I went to church every week. But this was sort of a personal commitment that somebody would make. And so being born again meant making this commitment. And then you were given a new life. Your old life was over, and now you began your life as a Christian. But was it merely a matter of deciding to do this? Did it entail some experience that seemed confirmatory of the belief structure? Was there was some evidence that came crashing down subjectively that seemed to verify the truth of the doctrine? Yeah. So the way it worked and still works in these circles is that it involves saying a prayer and making a personal profession to God of faith in Christ. And the confirmation is in a kind of feeling of elation where you have this kind of psychological moment of heightened emotion. And that is sort of the beginning confirmation that something's actually happened and you're a different person now. And so as a 15 year old, having only been born 15 years earlier, I was born again. Well, the liability here is at the level of epistemology is hard to ignore because what sort of group induction experience as a teenager wouldn't produce a feeling of elation. I mean, you could imagine so many other things being swapped in for Christianity there. Did you worry about this at the time, or was it just was the truth of the beliefs that you were taking on just kind of baked into you based on your background? Yeah, no, I didn't worry about it a bit. For many years, I was convinced that I knew the truth and that if somebody wanted to have eternal life, they had to also know this truth. And there was one truth, and it was rooted very much in an understanding of the Bible, that the Bible was the revelation from God, and one had to commit oneself to the truth of the Bible in order both to know God and to have eternal life. And anyone who didn't accept this message was destined to the fires of hell forever. So you would have called yourself an evangelical at that point. Does anyone call themselves a fundamentalist, or is that a word of appropriate spoken by secularists who don't agree with them? Well, not just secularists. Fundamentalism tends to be the term be used for the guy who's to the far right of you, even in Christian circles, you have a lot of Christians who talk about fundamentalists, and what they mean by that often is somebody who's sort of rapidly conservative. But I'll say when I went off to college, I went to a fundamentalist Bible college. And we were somewhat proud of the term fundamentalist because for us, it meant that we subscribed to the very fundamentals of the faith. And there were other Christians who were more liberal in their orientation who didn't accept even the very fundamentals. And so we considered ourselves to be fundamentalists in what we thought was a positive sense that we held to the essential elements of the Christian faith. Yeah. Wasn't it originally a coinage of Moody Bible college? No, I'm not sure where it originally started, but I think it actually started later than Moody started. Moody started in the late 19th century, and the term fundamentalist became a big deal in the 1920s when there was a split in several denominations over issues such as was there a literal virgin birth, or is the Bible inerrant in all of its wording or not? With conservatives saying, yes, it's inerrant, and, yes, there was a literal virgin birth, and other Christians saying, no, not so much. And so it divided into fundamentalists and liberals. Okay, so take me forward from there. So you're 15. You're now a fundamentalist Christian. You believe presumably a whole raft of doctrines, and now you're becoming, at some point, more of a formal student of the faith. What did your academic background begin to look like? So, in high school, I was very active on the high school debate team, and I was very involved in debate. And when I was graduating from high school, I had to decide whether I'd go on to Kansas University to be on the debate team or to go off to a Christian school and further my understanding of the Bible. And I ended up following the latter path. This 20 something fellow who is the head of this youth group had gone to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and told me that if I was going to be a serious Christian, i, too would go to Moody Bible Institute. And so I did. I went to Moody Bible Institute, which was a three year degree program that focused on Bible and theology. And there my classes. My initial post high school education was taking classes. One semester I'd have a class on the Gospel of John and another on the Book of Hebrews and another on how to evangelize the pagans is all Christian kind of stuff. That always comes in handy. So did you start with the study of the relevant ancient languages at that point? No. When I was at Moody, I wanted to take all the Bible and theology classes I could. And even though I knew the importance of learning Greek for the New Testament, I didn't want to waste time doing that because I just wanted to master the Bible as well as I could. And so I took all my classes on the English text. But my first semester at Moody, I took a class on the Gospel of John. So the entire semester on this one book of the New Testament. And during this class, the guy who's teaching this class seemed really smart to me. He's really organized, and I thought, this guy is getting paid to do that. I want to do that. And so already as a 17 year old, I decided I wanted to become a New Testament scholar. So then you went to graduate school, still full of faith. When did your study begin to erode your conviction and the truth of the doctrine? Right. So Moody was a three year institution, and to get the bachelor's degree, you had to transfer somewhere else to get credits. And so I transferred to after Moody, I went to Wheaton College, which was Billy Graham's alma mater. And for me that was a step towards liberalism because they were not quite as fundamentalist as I was used to. That was fine. At Wheaton, for my foreign language requirement, I took Greek, ancient Greek, and it turned out I was pretty good at it. And so then I decided I wanted to do my graduate work dealing with the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, studying the New Testament in the original Greek language. And the world expert on the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament was a man named Bruce Metzger, who taught at Princeton Theological Seminary. And so when I graduated from Wheaton with a degree in English, I went off to Princeton Theological Seminary to further my education in Greek manuscripts. And then did that take you through your PhD. So I did a master's degree there, a three year master's degree. And then I applied and got into the PhD program. And so it was another four years getting my my PhD. And in the process, my first year of my master's program, I took Hebrew so I could read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, and I learned German so I could read what scholars in Germany had said in French, so I could read what scholars in France had said. And so I started getting involved in serious scholarship as opposed to simply memorizing the Bible or learning about the Bible. I was actually studying it in the original language. And that was largely what led me away from fundamentalist Christianity. Well, so before we talk about the epiphanies you had that led you to doubt or the various stages of doubt, take me back to before that moment. And at that time, if we had met you at your most educated with respect to the Bible but also full of faith at that point, what would the young Bart Erman have said is the most convincing argument in favor of Christianity? I would have said that historians can prove that Jesus was raised from the dead and that there's no explanation for the evidence other than an actual resurrection, which means that God must have raised Jesus and that proved the historical reliability of the Christian claims. And what would you have said? The evidence was given that there's no doubt that most historians would balk at any challenge to prove the resurrection. So how would a historian go about doing that? Again, so this is back in my very conservative day, Christian days. I would have said that there are two basic historical facts that virtually everybody agrees on and people need to explain these two facts. The two facts are that three days after Jesus was put in a tomb, the tomb was empty and that some of his followers said they saw him alive again afterward, and that any explanation for those two facts has to explain both of them satisfactorily. And then what I would do is I would go by go through various explanations for why there would be an empty tomb and why people would say they saw him alive afterward, including groups of people. And I would say that none of the naturalist explanations simply work for those phenomena. Well, so as a skeptic here, some explanations just come rushing in for me, as you might imagine. I'm just wondering why. And I guess I'm not speaking about you personally here, but just as a matter of culture. The the culture of people like you who are very well versed in the Bible, who believe the central doctrines of Christianity and anchor their belief to this claim here's. The first thing that as an atheist debater on this topic would come to mind to say. I mean, there's there's obviously this Hume's famous line that about there being no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless that testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it's, I think his word is endeavors to establish. So again, translating that into modern English, the testimony about the miracle, it would have to be an even greater miracle for that testimony to be false. And that bar is almost never cleared. You can think of uncountable number of modern situations where you have Western devotees of Indian gurus who believe that their teacher has performed a miracle and the culture of confirmation bias and self deception is just palpable. When you talk to these people, I mean, you're surrounded by people who, even in a modern context where they have all of the resources of scientific skepticism at their disposal. And when they haven't been indoctrinated into these beliefs since birth, you can still find Ivy League educated people who are convinced of the veracity of various miracles really on the basis of hearsay. I mean, they're not disposed to put these claims to any kind of empirical or logical test. And certainly they're not meeting Hume's criterion here that the testimony of these people, the people who are delivering the hearsay is somehow so rock solid that it would be an even greater miracle that you'd have to admit if you were to suspect that it's false. How is it that you account for what seems, at least from the outside, to be such a disinclination to put these claims to some obvious skeptical tests? Right. I completely agree with your view on this now. And I have debates with people today, public debates with people who want to argue that resurrection really happened. And it's incredible to me that they continue to think that you can prove this. But as you know from your debates, people who are inside a particular tradition evaluate probability differently from people who are outside that tradition. And so the Christians, people who like me, were fundamentalists. What we would argue at the time was a couple of things. One is that the disciples absolutely thought they saw Jesus raised from the dead. They talked with Him, they ate with Him, they spent time with Him after his crucifixion. And the reason we know that they really did is because they all were willing to be martyred for this belief that he'd been raised for us was evidence that it happened. But not only that, but we're not just talking about individual things where you could say that somebody had a dream or a hallucination. We have authors claiming that 500 people saw him at the same time. So it couldn't be a hallucination because there I mean, you can't have a group of hallucination of 500 people. So this was these these are the kind of arguments we have. And these arguments made real sense to people who already believed in the resurrection because it just seemed plausible. And to outsiders, of course, it just seems kind of crazy. But to insiders for everything with the past, you're trying to evaluate what probably happened, and there's no reason it probably didn't happen. And so well, okay, it seems like it probably did happen. Yeah. So the other issue here which comes ready to hand is the time at which these various Gospels were composed. Perhaps you can remind me of the history here. None of these documents that are ostensibly reporting these eyewitness accounts of miracles were actually contemporaneous with the miracles or with the ministry of Jesus. What is the earliest account we have of anything that Jesus is reported to have said or done? Right, yeah. So the basic dating is that Jesus died around the year 30 of the Common Era. Our earliest Gospel is probably the Gospel of Mark, which is written around the year 70 of the Common Era. So it's 40 years later. This is the kind of contemporary view of critical scholars. Matthew and Luke would have been later than that, maybe 80 to 85 of the Common Era. John maybe 90 or 95. So we're talking 65 years later for the Gospel of John. And so when I was a when I was a fundamentalist Christian, though I didn't accept those dates, I thought that Matthew and John were written by people who were actually disciples of Jesus, and Mark and Luke were written by people who knew eyewitnesses. And moreover, I would point out at the time that even prior to the Gospels, the Apostle Paul was writing and Paul wasn't one of Jesus'disciples. But Paul claims that he himself saw Jesus alive soon after his death, within a couple of years of his death. And Paul tells us that he knew 500 people who had seen Jesus at one time. And so today, critical scholars would say, look, we don't have these accounts until decades later, which I think is right. But when I was a fundamentalist, I would try to kind of argue back closer to the time of Jesus, that we actually have people who said they knew eyewitnesses. And is that standard among fundamentalists, however well educated in the text, that they would not agree with the modern academic? That's right. So the deal with the modern academic dating is the Gospel of Mark seems to know that the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans. That happened in the year 70. And so probably it's written sometime after the fact, but fundamentalist Christians would say, no, it's predicting it's going to happen. And so it could have happened well before this gospel is well before that. And if you don't agree with that, it's because you have an anti supernaturalist bias. Interesting. So they get kind of an added benefit there. They not only get the contemporaneous record, they get the truth of prophecy. That's right. Interesting. It's good to focus on why all of this is important. There's a lot riding on this because the resurrection of Jesus is really the core miracle that I guess I should just ask you, what do you think? Or is there a standard conception of the minimal set of beliefs that makes a person a Christian? I understand that the fundamentalist would draw the line differently than others, but I'm just reminded of the line from I think it's first Corinthians from Paul, where he says, if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, which is to say, completely ineffectual in error. So there is no Christianity on Paul's account. There is no Christianity unless the miracle of the resurrection is true. At least that's how I read that line. Is that the center of the center of the doctrine for most Christians, or certainly anyone whose Christianity wouldn't have evaporated to a point where it really has no supernatural characteristic. Yeah. So the reality on the ground is that there is a bottom line for what one has to believe in order to be a Christian. And every Christian draws that bottom line in different places, and every Christian thinks that they're the only ones who have the right line. So, yes, there are lots of Christians who would say, if you don't believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus, then you really aren't a Christian, whatever else you might say. And they would quote that line from Paul, from one Corinthians 15 that you are quoting just now. I know lots and lots of Christians who don't believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus. They think that his body stayed in the grave, rotted in the grave, and that the resurrection is more of a spiritual event or it's a metaphorical event, but they still consider themselves Christian. There are lots of very highly educated Christians who are sophisticated. The more evangelical Christians would say, well, you're not really a Christian. And the other Christians would say, well, actually, you're not the one who's been given the right to define what a Christian is. And so there are these very large debates within Christianity itself about where the bottom line is. Yeah. And I must say, I have met very sophisticated people, very well educated people, very successful people, who are believing Christians. And when pressed on this point, I have been astonished to discover that they actually believe the literal story of resurrection. And these are not people who I would have thought were Bible thumpers or fundamentalists of any sort. This is like the last trench that has to be defended in the war against doubt. No, there certainly are a lot of people like that who are otherwise, who believe in evolution, they believe in science, they think the universe is 13.8 billion years old and whatever, but they would draw the line at a literal resurrection. And there are a lot of other people, not as many, but there are sophisticated Christian thinkers who say, no, that it's not a literal resurrection and that in fact, the earliest christians didn't believe in a literal resurrection, that that was a later imposition on the faith. Let's talk about a few other doctrinal claims that may or may not be central. So what is the place of heaven and Hell, would you say, in Christianity generally, and your version when you were a believer in particular? Yeah, so this is something I'm very interested in because it's what my next book is on. It's where the question of heaven and where the issue heaven and hell came from, because the standard Christian belief is that when a person dies, their soul goes to heaven or hell goes for eternal reward or eternal punishment. And that teaching is not in the Old Testament and it's not what the historical Jesus thought. And so where did it come from? And so that's what my next book is. When I was a fundamentalist Christian, I was a fervent believer in a literal heaven and a literal hell. And I believed that hell was a place of eternal torment, that it would never end, with no possibility of escape, and it was the destination of the vast majority of the human race. I can't say that the kind of arrogance involved with that kind of claim that I'm going to be rewarded forever, but my next door neighbor, poor SAP, he's going to help forever. That's the arrogance of it, I don't think, actually struck me at the time. And were you actually psychologically affected by it? I mean, presumably you knew people who you recognized to be good people, who you had nice connections with, but who you were sure were going to spend eternity and fire. Was that belief deep enough so as to cause you any feeling of psychological pain or compassion or how did you feel interacting with people who you knew were destined to be tortured for eternity? Yeah, no, it absolutely did have an effect. And where it was practically manifest was in my desire to convert people, because I believed that goodness had nothing to do with it. It didn't matter whether you were a good person or a rotten person. If you didn't believe in Christ for your salvation, you are destined for hell. And so this is what drove my attempt to try and convert people. Just as in early Christianity, it was this belief that drove the evangelism of the early Church. So it's always been this kind of motivation for Christians that if you really love somebody and you know they're going to hell, you need to sort of crack the whip and make them convert. There certainly are scriptural justifications for that belief. Now, we're up against the limits of my Bible scholarship, but I seem to remember many passages where it suggested either directly in the words of Jesus himself, or at least by one of the gospel writers, that there is no path to the Father but through the Son. Right? That's right. That's the emphatic teaching of the Gospel of John and that everybody who doesn't believe in Christ is going to be condemned. But in the Gospels, it's not clear that this is eternal torment in a particular place. The idea of eternal torment comes more clearly in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament, where those who are opposed to God are thrown into a lake of fire and they burn in this lake of fire forever. I seem to remember that Jesus is presiding over that lake of fire. Well, yeah. Part of the intrigue of the Book of Revelation is how intricate the scenario is, which is, I think, one of the reasons people have been so drawn to it over the years, because it isn't just kind of a straightforward statement. It's actually this graphic narrative portrayal and trying to piece it all together because you've got Christ and you've got God and you've got the angels and you've got the Antichrist and the prophet of the Antichrist, and so you have this entire scenario going on. But, yeah, Christ and his followers are given an eternal reward in the New Jerusalem, and all those opposed to Christ are sent to the lake of fire. So if one were going to read the Bible, both Old and New Testament straight through and form on the assumption that everything there is true and inerrant and that it's sort of on the reader to resolve any apparent contradictions, what rational understanding and expectation of the afterlife would one form? This is now a picture of the end times and one's personal end, you know, after death and I guess after the Resurrection. And this is now sort of uncontaminated by the rest of the literature that has grown up on this. So let's let's leave Dante and Milton and everything else that has come since aside. What does Heaven and Hell look like and what does the end of the world look like? Yeah. So it really depends on what the assumptions of the reader are. If you're a reader who knows nothing about Milton or Dante or anyone is just coming to it but is intelligent, but tries to reconcile everything, what that person would argue probably is in a view of progressive revelation, where the ideas that are most true develop over time. And some of the earlier authors don't recognize the truth, the full truth, they only have partial revelation. And in that understanding of things. The idea in the shield of the Old Testament where everybody goes to this kind of nether world and they stay in this netherworld forever. That gets modified over time until you get into the gospels where the righteous are rewarded and the wicked are punished. But it looks like they're punished by annihilation. That develops yet further when you get to the Book of Revelation, when you find out that, in fact, people are not annihilated, they're tortured forever. And so the idea then would be that it's all consistent, but only. In the sense that there was a progressive revelation. And this reader of the Bible, this hypothetical read of the Bible then basically agrees with the final book that there's eternal torment or eternal reward. Islam has a similar concept of abrogation where later verses abrogate earlier verses. And as luck would have it, the more violent verses tend to abrogate the more peaceful ones to the benefit of all humanity. So that is viewed in the Christian tradition that progressive revelation, not as any sort of data point against this notion of inerrancy. You can still be inerrant even while various Gospel writers or their predecessors are laboring under incomplete knowledge of God's plan. Yeah, it's because of the view of inerrancy that this view developed because you have to reconcile these things. And so what a critical scholar would look at and say, well, this is just inconsistent. One author has one view and another has another view and they can't be lined up to you. Then the way to get around that is by saying, yeah, it's progressive revelation. So then what would heaven look like to someone who has gone through this whole progression and come out with some kind of final expectation? What is the picture of the afterlife if you go to the Good Place, this is the interesting point is that if you're just sticking with the Bible, you don't have the idea that you die and your soul goes to heaven forever. It's that at the end of time bodies are going to be raised from the dead and that there will be a final judgment on the earth and God will destroy the forces of evil and he will send everybody who is opposed to Him into eternal punishment. But he will raise from the dead all of his righteous and they'll live here on Earth forever in a utopian kingdom. And so the earth will be returned to its state, the state that it was in during the days of Adam and Eve, and it'll be a perfect paradise forever. So it is a terrestrial paradise that presumably now functions by a slightly tweaked laws of physics so that it can last forever here, but it's not somewhere else and it's not in some ethereal condition. That's right. In this view, the tweaking actually happened with Adam and Eve that originally this world was created as a paradise and the because of their sin, it got corrupted. And so God is going to reverse the sin that was brought into the world by Adam and Eve and bring it back to its original state, which is supposed to be a place of eternal bliss. I must say I'm rarely in conversations with Christians about these sorts of things, but this is certainly not a scientific poll. But I am certainly walking around with the feeling that most Christians are believing in a very different heaven. I think when someone dies close to them who they think is still in the faith and destined for heaven. They're not picturing that person moldering in the ground for thousands of years or however long it takes for Jesus to come back and usher in the end of the world. They're picturing that person, that person's soul more or less moving directly from the hospital bed or wherever they were when they died into some ethereal condition, which is the afterlife. And it is eternal, and it's in the company of God or Jesus or some circumstance that's just a matter of pure satisfaction and well being. Two questions. Am I wrong about that? Is, isn't that what many, if not most Christians believe? And and if so, what are the the scriptural antecedents for that belief? That you're right, that that is the belief. And that's one of the reasons I'm writing this next book about where these Christian ideas of the afterlife came from, because most of the Bible doesn't teach them. You can get to that view from a few passages, sort of random and isolated passages which don't actually say quite that about this ethereal afterlife for the souls. But you do get a couple of passages in the writings of Paul where he seems to think that, yes, there is going to be this resurrection of bodies at the end of time, but in the meantime, when people die, they've got this immediate presence with Christ in heaven. And I think that that idea that you have this immediate presence with Christ at your death gets transformed into this idea of an ethereal existence. The thing is that most Christians who have this idea of this kind of existence of your soul, but not your body, have conflicted views because they also think that when they get to heaven, they'll be able to see their grandmother and talk with her. Well, I mean, if she doesn't have a body, what are you going to see exactly? And how are you going to recognize her? And, you know, so they have to come up with kind of weird explanations for how, in fact, it's your soul, but the soul has the physical appearance of your body, even though you don't actually have eyes anymore, you can still see and you can still hear and so forth. And how old is your grandmother? Is she restored to her the prime age of 30, or is she still granny in that condition? Well, that's right. And if you've had an infant child who's died, is the child still an infant? Or what are they in heaven? And so you have Christians who seriously debate these issues and actually write books trying to explain what it's really going to be like. I recall St. Thomas Aquinas dealing with some of this stuff. You have Christians debating all sorts of issues relating this all the way back into the second Christian century. I mean, you have Christians asking if the body is raised from the dead at the end of time. And so all of the parts of your body are brought together. What happens if you were eaten by a cannibal so that part of your body became part of the cannibal's body. So when the parts are raised from the dead, who gets the parts, you or the cannibal? And so you have people debating this kind of thing all the way back. It's tempting to picture the very different history where the doctrine of Christianity was fatally confounded by one cannibal. Yes. Right. So then what is the picture of hell that one can rationally form on the basis of Scripture? So most of the Bible, of course, is the Old Testament. And in the Old Testament, there isn't a Hell, a place of torment. There's this place called Shiel, which is a shadowy existence where everybody goes good or or wicked believers or non believers, and it's just you kind of you exist there and not much happens forever when you get to the teachings of Jesus. Jesus thought that there'd be a resurrection of the dead at the end of the end of time, and he appears to have thought that those who were opposed to God were not going to be tormented forever, they were going to be annihilated. Unlike the righteous, the righteous will be given an eternal reward, but God will punish the wicked by destroying them. And the Apostle Paul never says anything about Hell as a place of eternal torment. It's not really until you get to the Book of Revelation that you start getting this eternal torment idea of having this lake of fire. Is it Revelation that also gives us the notion of the Rapture, or is that prefigured somewhere else? Is that an Old Testament prophecy that then Revelation connects the dots on? Well, this is an interesting point that even most Christians don't know. The Book of Revelation does describe what's going to happen at the end of time, but it does not have a doctrine of the rapture. There's no rapture in the Book of Revelation. The idea of a rapture actually comes from the Apostle Paul. In the book of one, thessalonians Paul, it's talking about what's going to happen at the end when there will be a resurrection of the dead. And he says that Jesus is coming back from heaven and those who have died in Christ are raised from the dead, and those who are living at the time will be taken up with them into the sky and they'll meet Jesus there up in the air. So it actually comes from Paul's letters rather than from the Book of Revelation. Right. So now, did you believe in the Rapture when you were at this point, at the peak of your faith? I not only believed in it, I knew it was going to happen before the late 1980s, literally. Wow. So then had you lost your faith by the time the late 80s came around? Or was that one of the reasons why you lost it? Well, I'd certainly lost my faith in the Rapture by that time. My loss of faith was kind of a long term process, and the Raptor was one of the first things to go. So what was the first doubt that was truly insuperable? Did it move in discernible increments where you crossed some kind of bright line and couldn't get yourself back to feeling the faith you had felt the day before? Yeah, there were a number of lines, but the sort of first moment was when I realized that the Bible was not. Inerrant my first year at Princeton Theological Seminary, I was taking a course on the Gospel of Mark, which was based on an interpretation of the Greek text. And so I knew Greek by this time, and we had to translate the entire Gospel of Mark, and we did an interpretation of every every verse. You know, it's very deep and detailed. And I had to write a term paper, and I wrote a paper on a passage in Mark where Jesus is talking about a story in the Old Testament that happens. And he says that this account happened when Abiathar was the high priest. This is in Mark, chapter two. When you read the Old Testament account, actually, the account that he's summarizing didn't take place when Abiathar was the high priest. It happened when his father a Himalaych, was the high priest. So I write this 30 page paper arguing that even though Jesus said that Abiathar was the high priest, it didn't really mean that Abiathar was the high priest. He knew that Himalay was the high priest. I write this long paper and the professor reads the paper he likes the paper gives me an A because I had the this complicated grammatical argument. But at the end of it, he said, maybe Mark just made a mistake. I thought that'd be easier than 30 pages of dancing around the problem and coming up with this fancy grammatical thing. Yeah, maybe Mark just made a mistake. And once I recognized that there could be a mistake, it opened up the floodgates. And I started finding mistakes without wanting to. And then I started wanting to, and then I started finding them all over the place. There are mistakes with respect to facts we know outside the text of the Bible, but there are contradictions within the Bible that are any way you squint your eyes. They are contradictions. I remember there was an old book, I think it's probably 150 years old. I remember I have somewhere in the house which I I referenced in my first book, The End of Faith. I think the title is Self Contradictions in the Bible. And some of these are just, you know, it's just that the coin came up heads or the coin came up tails. You can't believe both. I think one was, you know, John the Baptist was in prison at the time of the crucifixion, or John the Baptist was somewhere else at the time of the crucifixion. How did you deal with those? Well, the intellectual task of fundamentalists involves reconciling differences. And if you work hard enough at it, you can reconcile just about anything. And so it was like solving a puzzle. You assume that there are no errors, and if that's your assumption, well, then there are no errors. And the task is to find out why this is not a contradiction. And so today when I talk with fundamentalist Christians and try and point out the Gospel of John says Jesus died the day before the Passover and the Gospel of Mark says he died the day after the Passover and they both can't be right, well, they have a way of reconciling it. So that's what you do. So what is the hardest thing to reconcile? If you are going to point out one thing that you think stood the best chance of toppling the whole house of cards, what is that thing? Well, the example I just gave is the one that I use if I want to convince if I've got one example, I walk them through what happens in John's gospel because John explicitly dates the day of Jesus death as the day before that. He explicitly says what time of day and which day it was on. And the Gospel of Mark also explicitly says what time of day and which day it was on. And they just flat out contradict each other. And so when you take somebody actually through the text and show this to them, then that does it. What I do with my students is I do a number of things with them to get them to see how there are different views in the Bible. But one thing I do is I have them compare either the accounts of Jesus birth in Matthew and Luke, or the accounts of his resurrection in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And I simply say, look, list everything that happens in this gospel, then list everything that happens in that gospel and compare your two lists and see if there's anything that is impossible to reconcile. And in both cases, there are things you simply cannot reconcile because they just contradict each other. Actually, I think we should go back to the time at which these texts were written based on modern scholarship for a moment, because if you accept that there was a significant delay in the composition of of even the earliest gospels. So if if Mark was 40 years after the the death of Jesus and that's the earliest text, just map that on to our present conversation. It's as though you and I were now talking about without the aid of any media, without the aid of any real written materials or anything. It's as though you and I are in a world now where we could talk about some historical figure who had a great influence a generation and a half ago. We're talking about JFK or Martin Luther King, Jr. Or somebody who we never met. We may not have met anyone who met that person. This person has. There's a kind of a residue of their life's work in the world based on almost entirely verbal accounts. Because, again, we don't have the Internet. We don't have widespread literacy and contemporaneous records. We just have rumors of rumors. And now you and I are going to put pen to paper or papyrus and write an account of exactly what happened in the last years and weeks and days of this person's life. That's the picture, at least I form of what this would look like. And the idea that that kind of effort, absent some direct line to an omniscient being who's just simply telling you what happened, that seems like an all too human enterprise that, if nothing else, will introduce a fair amount of error and creative license and whimsy into the process. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. Consent's podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. No housekeeping today. Going to jump right into it. Today I'm speaking with Matt McCarthy. Matt is an infectious disease doctor and a professor of medicine at Cornell, where he also serves on the ethics committee. His writing has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Sports Illustrated, Slate, and other journals. He's the author of several books and his latest is Superbugs The Race to Stop an Epidemic. And that's what we talk about today. The problem that many of the drugs we use to treat infectious disease are now failing and will always be failing. We're in a perpetual arms race against evolution and the emergence of new bugs that our immune systems have never seen. And this, quite amazingly, is a problem that is receiving very little attention. And yet it's on the short list of things that could utterly transform the character of human life, very much for the worse. It's also on the short list of problems for which the market appears to offer no solution, as we will discuss. So now, without further delay, I bring you Matt McCarthy. I am here with Matt McCarthy. Matt, thanks for coming on the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me. So you have written a book that could be terrifying. You try to be as hopeful as you can be throughout, but God, this topic is just brutal. I mean, this could be my own germ phobia creeping in here. But you have written a book superbugs. The Race to Stop an Epidemic. And this is a topic I've been worrying about for a long time, and I think ever since that the first ebola scare and some of the books that followed. Now we're talking. That must have been 1999 or thereabouts maybe earlier when I remember Laurie Garrett wrote a big book about the prospect of emerging pandemics. Before we jump into the topic, tell us how you got into infectious disease and just what your focus has been. Yeah, well, I'm glad that you've been worrying about this for a while because not enough people have been thinking about superbugs, and I think the first thing is useful to define the term. Some people say that drug resistant bacteria are superbugs, but I take a much broader look at it and say that what we're really talking about are drug resistant fungi and parasites and viruses and all kinds of living things that can come and attack us. And writing this book, I wasn't trying to freak people out, but I think that has been sort of the fallout, is that people read this and go, oh, man, this is a big deal. And those of us in infectious diseases have been trying to sound the alarm about this for a while. The World Health Organization just came out and said that superbugs are going to be a bigger killer than heart disease and cancer by 2050. And so how I got into this, it wasn't something that I had always dreamed of being an infectious disease specialist. I was a first year medical student at Harvard in 2003 and I heard a lecture by a young and charismatic infectious disease doctor named Paul Farmer, right? He traveled to Haiti and all over the world bringing drugs to people who couldn't afford them, bringing antibiotics and HIV medicines and tuberculosis medicines to people. And I just fell under his sway and I said, this is the guy. I want to do what he does. And six months later, I found myself in Western Africa hunting for the Ebola virus and trying to become an infectious disease doctor. And so that was 15 years ago. And so that sort of launched me in this career of trying to find what's going to be the next big pandemic, what's going to be the thing that gets to us and how do we attack that and how do we come up with treatments to stave off the next big thing? Yeah, I mean, one problem is that many of us have forgotten, or we never knew, in fact, how scary it was to live in a world where infectious diseases were ascendant. We have forgotten what it's like for people to routinely die from tetanus and other wound infections or the whole generations of people were moving to warmer climates, however ineffectually, to try to mitigate their tuberculosis, which would kill them anyway. And we lived in a world for the longest time, forever, where there was just simply no guarantee or even promise that infections could be reliably treated. And then we had this fundamental breakthrough, which you detail in your book. Penicillin was the first widely available antibiotic and it really ushered in a golden age when you could cure, you could expect to cure all of these invisible agents of death. And we seem to have taken it for granted up to the point where now we have fallen out of that happy condition. Well, you nailed it. This is the thing that most people don't realize is the luxury we have of antibiotics. As you said, penicillin ushered in the golden era of the 1950s where every month or two we were pumping out a new life saving drug and the life expectancy ballooned because of all of these new drugs. And then what happened was a number of prominent scientists, nobel laureates came out and said, we got this infectious disease thing kicked. It's time to move on to more pressing matters like heart disease and cancer. And the pharmaceutical industry responded and started making chemotherapy drugs and blood thinners and all of these lucrative things just as the superbugs were starting to mutate and to evolve and to become resistant to our treatments. And so now we're finding that as we're finally paying attention to this issue, we're behind the eight ball in a sense, because we're playing catch up. The drugs aren't working as well as they used to and we're scrambling to find the next generation of life saving drugs. I'm reminded of this every single day when I walk into the hospital. The first place I go is the emergency room and I meet the patients who have these drug resistant infections. And that's actually what led me to write this book, is that people have talked about superbugs before. They've talked about the policy, about the science behind it, all of the stuff sort of at a 30,000 foot view. But what I was interested in were the patients stories and the lives that are completely derailed by these things. And the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is losing interest in making new antibiotics is devastating for tens of thousands of people. And so I'm trying to raise awareness, but also say, here's how we got in this mess and here's how we get out of it. So let's talk about the ways in which the business model of the pharmaceutical industry is not helping us here and the market is not helping us here. But before we get there, let's just talk about the kind of the basic science. What we have is it really could have been foreseen based on evolutionary principles. I mean, we this isn't surprising that we have bugs that can mutate and become resistant to the treatments we devise for them. And again, the reminders of this happening are everywhere. We're recording this on a Monday. Yesterday, the front page of the Sunday New York Times had a story on urinary tract infections showing antibiotic resistance. To a surprising degree, something like 30% are resistant to most antibiotics. At this point, it really is a pressing concern. But it's not just a matter of bugs evolving and getting around our antibiotics. It's also just the fact that there are so called superbugs everywhere, as yet unencumbered by us because there are bacteria in the soil and elsewhere which our immune system hasn't devised any response to, and our drugs can't anticipate. And so, whether they mutate or not, we are very likely to encounter so called superbugs in the future. You're absolutely right. And one of the big problems we have is how doctors and scientists talk about these superbugs. You mentioned that front page Science Times article. I know the guy who wrote that piece because he's interviewed me before. And one of the quotes from that article is that this level of antibiotic resistance is shocking. And I read that and I thought shocking to who? Because doctors know this and scientists know this, but if this is shocking to delay public that's because we haven't done a good enough job of explaining exactly how this is happening. But we just had a new rollover with first year doctors who start in July, and every one of them knows by the third day of work that the antibiotics that they used in medical school are no longer working and they got to use a new crop of drugs just to treat people. And that's because the bacteria are evolving, as you mentioned, and they're coming up with these ingenious ways to destroy the antibiotics that we've relied upon for a generation. One of the things they do is they make these things called eFlux pumps, which are like microscopic vacuum cleaners, and they suck up antibiotics and they spit them out, and then they use these enzymes that can chop up antibiotics. And so what we do, and what my research is, is we look for new ways to fool the bacteria. And so one thing we found, for example, is that bacteria love iron. So we'll use a Trojan horse approach where we will attach an antibiotic to iron with the hope that the bacteria will see that iron and eat it and suck it up. And along with it, the antibiotic will go inside the cell and kill it. And we found that to be a pretty successful method so far for killing certain types of superbugs. And so the stuff that I do is, as I mentioned before, kind of scary stuff. But I'm also really excited and optimistic about all of the amazing science that's going on where we're constantly trying to to fool the bacteria and come up with the, the way to save, you know, millions of lives. It's, it's extraordinary the kind of science that's being done. And I don't think we're talking about it enough. Much of the work that you see in the newspapers has to do with the outbreaks or with the evolution of these drug resistant bacteria. But I'd like to see a bit more about the profiles of the scientists who are coming up with new cures. Yeah, I can see the basis for hope, although we might be a little slow in getting there. But the difference between not having a remedy and having one that actually works and works as emphatically, as an antibiotic that works does in fact, work. It's just amazing. The 1950s must have been a mind blowing decade to live through, to suddenly see these appalling diseases cured. Now we're talking about not just antibiotics, but let's add vaccines to that picture. And then it just begins to look like every previous generation of humanity begins to look just unfortunate for having been born at the wrong time. Because now we have these cures for diseases that people can just forget about for the rest of their lives. And yet the problem, as you point out in your book, is that we should have always known that the arms race would never stop. These microorganisms are evolving quickly and of course, our treatment, and in the worst case, our misuse of antibiotics is creating a selection pressure which will select for resistance. Absolutely. Yeah. And I open my book with a scene from the pre antibiotic era, which is that we're on a battlefield in France and there are these soldiers who are getting hit with shrapnel and they're getting infections. And what do you do before there are antibiotics? Well, you can try antiseptic fluid. It didn't work all that well. Or you can try a hacksaw. And that increasingly, is what people have to do, is just go to the hacksaw and cut somebody's leg off to prevent them from getting an infection. And the reason for that is that if the infection that's on the skin or on the leg gets into the blood, that's called sepsis. And if you have sepsis, you're going to die without antibiotics. And so I wanted to paint that picture for people to recognize that we're heading to a pre antibiotic era where the drugs we've relied upon for 75 years don't work anymore. And it's not a period to say it's not a doomsday scenario. We have a chance to invest in new treatments, but we have to do so selectively and carefully. And this is really an inflection point for humanity where we can say this is an important issue. It's like global warming. It's like whatever else you hear about every day, this needs to be talked about in the same breath as a danger that we can invest in and come up with cures for. Let's talk about the problem of overuse, which is part of what got us here. I guess we would have gotten here even if we'd use these drugs as circumspectly as possible. But there is this pervasive problem of overuse. And I'm wondering if the incentives are misaligned here between the individual and society, or if there's just a new way of understanding this. Because when I think about what most people's experience is in getting sick or watching their kid get sick and then facing the question of whether to treat with an antibiotic, it has been a very frequent experience for many of us to be prescribed an antibiotic, essentially to be on the safe side, just prescribed empirically. You haven't even gotten to the point where an infection has been cultured and you know precisely what is responsive to you're given a broad spectrum antibiotic and this is just a prudent thing to do. And now we're stepping back and saying, well, this is not great for society because, again, we're part of the arms race that is creating a selection environment for superbugs. But it's part of the problem here that what is in fact prudent for an individual is raising the risk for society, or are the risks actually the same? That is when you're taking an antibiotic, as it said. Just to be on the safe side. Are you actually running the risk of breeding a superbug? That is likely to be a problem for you first. Or is it conceivable that you're actually being prudent for yourself, but conceivably becoming a problem for society and how you're using these drugs? Well, I'm a medical school professor at Cornell, and that question that you just asked is what comes up on rounds almost every single day in various iterations, which is we've got a patient in front of us who may have an infection and we're not sure. Do we give them an antibiotic just to be on the safe side? And generations of young doctors and old doctors have been dealing with that question. I'll tell you, I was given a talk about superbugs a couple of weeks ago, and there was a guy who raised his hand and said, you know how locusts were cast upon the Earth as a judgment for human behavior? Do you think superbugs have been cast upon the Earth as a similar judgment for human behavior? And the question caught me off guard at first, but there's an argument to be made that in the same way that we brought this on ourselves. And and the issue really is on the small scale and the large scale, on the small scale, we've got doctors who are prescribing antibiotics, as you mentioned, just to be on the safe side. And that's no longer good enough as an excuse to prescribe something. And we've created a mechanism to check that. We have these people in the hospital who are called antibiotic stewards. And if you want to prescribe an antibiotic and one of our powerful drugs, the steward has to approve it. And that's a job that I've had before. And I'll tell you, it's a thankless job, because what happens is a surgeon orders an expensive antibiotic and then I have to call them and say, I'm sorry, that's the wrong drug. And they say, oh, come on, please. I've been doing this 20 years. This is the drug I use. And I have to say, well, not anymore. There's a better option for you. And so we're trying to check that the doctor's mis prescribing things. But also this is about patients can do a better job as well. If your doctor prescribes five days of an antibiotic and you stop taking it after day two because you're feeling better, that gives the bugs a chance to mutate and to evolve, because you're not killing all of them. And so it selects out the ones that can survive. So that's sort of on the small scale, how we can be doing a better job. Let me just ask you about the logic of that. Stewart is saying, no, don't use that drug. Use this one is that a case where he or she is trying to preserve the efficacy of the last line defenses we have? Absolutely. And so what happens is I'll give you an example. There's an antibiotic called Mirropenum that we love using because it is so strong and it wipes out just about everything. And so if you're a doctor who just performed a complicated abdominal surgery, you want things to go well for that patient. You're going to ask for mere penum and I'm going to say, well, based on everything we know about the patient and the environment and the type of surgery you did, you could use cephriaxone, which is not nearly as strong. And then we have to have an argument about how to go forward. And I was listening to your podcast with Ricky Gervais and he started out by telling you that there's no place for nuanced arguments anymore. And I felt so bad for him because all I do is have nuanced arguments with people all day long and I have many nuanced arguments about antibiotics with very sharp surgeons and clinicians who really are advocating for their patient. And we have to be the ones as stewards to say that's not the right drug and face the fallout if the antibiotic doesn't work. This is what I was worried about. So there really is a misalignment between the interests of the patient narrowly construed and the interests of society with respect to a choice about which drug to use? Absolutely. And I'm on the ethics committee, and my research interests sort of are the intersection of infectious diseases and medical ethics and what we talk about a lot. And what I study is, what do you do if you're a doctor and you have a patient who's got, let's say, two weeks to live, they've got terminal cancer and they get a superbug infection? Do you treat them with one of the powerful antibiotics that we have, one of our precious drugs in the arsenal and potentially breed resistance and potentially breed superbugs, but to save that patient who's only got a few weeks to live? As I've found, doctors approach that question very differently and there's no uniform answer for them. And so sort of the next generation of clinicians are sort of winging it and figuring it out on the fly, which is how do you make life and death decisions when there is no formal training in how to do that? And so that's sort of on the small scale question of antibiotics. And then there's the larger scale issue, which is that we are using syphilis drugs and tuberculosis drugs in our orange groves. We're using our powerful fungal drugs in tulip gardens. We're pumping meat, producing animals full of antibiotics. And whenever people hear this, they say, well, that's terrible, that should stop. But the reason that it doesn't stop is that there are powerful lobbies behind big orange, the meat industry big tulip is something that you have to contend with. And these are things that allow these groups, allow the antibiotics to go in places they shouldn't. And then when we search the soil around those tulips, it's full of superbugs. And if you're somebody with a weakened immune system, you breathe in the wrong thing, you could end up in the intensive care unit. And we're trying to become much more judicious about how we use those drugs. So how are our oranges and our tulips getting syphilis? Are they going to brothels? They're very promiscuous, oranges and tulips. And we're trying to get starts with education, get them early. But what we recognize that there have been just sort of this freewheeling approach to prescribing practices all over the world. And that brings up another issue, which is the more we look for superbugs, the more we find them. And people try to categorize what's the burden of disease or what's the burden of these things around the world. We don't even know what's going on in Africa or in many places in sub Saharan Africa, in Bangladesh, in India. Every time we start looking for superbugs, we end up finding much more than we expected. And I think that that's only going to continue to grow in the years ahead. And so part of it is getting better diagnostics so that we can know what we're dealing with, so that we can come up with treatment plans. As far as the source of each new antibiotic, what percentage of them come from nature? Penicillin was a compound produced by a fungus, right? So how much of our drug development is a matter of finding happy accidents in nature? And how much is us synthesizing new drugs based on a first principal understanding of the target microbe? Yeah, you hit on the two major approaches, which is do we just get lucky and, and hope for the best, or do we build a new antibiotic? And both approaches have worked. What we're finding is that it's getting to be prohibitively expensive to build new antibiotics atom by atom or molecule by molecule. So what people are doing now is they're searching in the soil. And the reason for that is that beneath our feet there is this subterranean warfare where survival of the fittest, bacteria and fungi are pumping out chemicals to kill each other. And if we can pull one of those out, you've got yourself an antibiotic. The problem is that it typically costs about a billion dollars and ten years of testing to show that that chemical is safe and effective as an antibiotic. And fewer and fewer companies want to take that financial risk because if they get that drug approved, compare it to a blood pressure medicine or a lipid lowering agent, these drugs antibiotics are prescribed. The doctors are very stingy about prescribing them. They're only prescribed in short courses. And then even that great new antibiotic is going to wear out its welcome. So these companies are saying, no, thank you. We don't even want to go on the fishing expedition anymore. And so that has kind of led us to what I consider the most important medical issue that no one is talking about, which is that the antibiotic market is broken and we should be asking every politician, every political candidate, what are you going to do to fix it? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Hey. Hi. How's it going? Yeah, good. Bit sweating. I just had a hot bath. I was already in. It was too late. I couldn't back out. But yeah, good. From judging from Twitter, you're a bathman more than a shower, man. I love it. I have I have two either two baths a day in the winter or a bath in the shower, or two showers in the summer. Sometimes I do it because I'm bored. There's something I think it's from my upbringing where, you know, we could only have one bath a week when I was little. Wow. Sometimes secondhand water. Oh, I've had it hard. It was like it's like a Bickens novel. That is that is hard. You joke, but that is yeah. Deprivation. One bath a week. I mean, that's that's 17th century stuff. Well, I remember in the winter in our house, we had this is absolutely true. This sounds like a joke. This sounds like a Monty Python sketch, but we had ice on the inside of the windows when I woke up. Yeah. I used to dream I'd got up and got dressed, and then I'd wake up and go, oh, fuck, I haven't got dressed. I know. Anyway, have you got a minute? I've got a question for you. Another question? Yeah. I'm just not in the bath. I've been thinking a lot about the brain, or rather my brain has that's sort of a point. Now, this is quite a long question. Stop me at any point if I've made some sort of fallacious leap. Okay. The brain I totally understand evolution by natural selection. It's a no brainer, and the brain is just an organ like anything else, okay? It came from 3 billion years, from a blob of reproductive protein to this most complex computer, right? But it is just physical. It's it, you know, it goes by all the laws, the contingent laws of the universe chemistry, physics, energy, electricity, all that, right? But obviously, we're talking about this. It has the epic phenomenon of consciousness. We feel like we've got a self. We feel like we've got free will, even though that's an illusion. And this leads to imagination, invention of philosophy, art, gods. So two part questionnaire. One, a chimps going through that. Do you think they've got all the rudimentary tools to invent their gods or have spirituality or he need his imagination and a decent brain, or even a sense of self? And two, if that is true, if the brain is purely physical, it can be reproduced. So in the future, will a computer will we have paranoid computers? Will we have computers that are nice and nasty and don't want to die and want to murder someone? Shoot, yeah. So that's a great question, and there's so many questions contained in it. Here's what's not controversial. There are many places where one can try to find a foothold or a handhold to debate some materialist assumptions and then try to open the door to something that many people in science and philosophy at the moment would consider spooky or theological or just unwarranted. So the central drift of your question is fairly uncontroversial in science, which is to say, it's safe to assume that everything we know and notice about the mind from the first person side, as a matter of experience, what it's like to be us all of that is a product of what our brains, as physical information processing systems, are doing, right? So our brains are essentially computers made of meat. Although they're they're not computers that are all that similar to the computers we currently call computers. I mean, they're different and important ways. Many people will point out that science has been repeatedly confounded by bad analogies, that we used to make analogies to water pumps and steam engines. And now we no longer do that because now we have a much better analogy a computer. But many people will be tempted to argue that it's still not a perfect analogy or not even a good one. No, but the important thing is that intelligence is basically the ability to problem solve, negotiate the world. And obviously those things, if they work, they're favored and they're passed on and it presumably gets better and better or it doesn't work or it's a dead end or whatever. Yeah, I get that, and it starts worrying me. I came from a science background and I went to do philosophy. So all the things like determinism and materialism, all those things, I sucked them up. Anything that felt a little bit new AG nonsense, mumbo jumbo, magic, I sort of rejected, but I kept no mind. I said, well, prove it to me. I am this sort of this hardwired contingent. I need proof. I need physical proof. And so even consciousness freaks me out because, yeah, it should because really we don't understand it physically yet and there are impressive impediments to doing that. I think the so called hard problem of consciousness is genuinely hard because it's not clear why anything we do as minds, all of our behavior, all of our mental behavior, everything, including our intelligence needs to be associated with experience, right? We could build robots and we undoubtedly will build robots eventually that pass the Turing Tests that are indistinguishable from humans and in fact only become distinguishable from humans by their superhuman capacities. They will be as intelligent as we are in every respect. They'll be conversant with our emotions and display emotions of their own because we will program them that way, very likely, at least some of them that way. And I think it's true to say they're already as good. They might even be better at facial recognition than humans are now. And that will eventually include detecting and responding to our emotions and just so much of what makes us effective social beings. Millions of years of evolution as social primates and 300,000 years or so of finishing school as Homo sapiens. We're very good at this, and there's no question we're going to build machines that are better than we are. And then literally everything we do cognitively will be like chess, where it will be true to say that the best mind at that is now a computer mind, not a human one. We will never be the best at chess ever again. Right? Yeah. And that's going to be true of looking at a person's face and deciding how they feel. Will there be a robot, right, that's bigger and taller and stronger than me, right. Made of steel that can see in the dark and he's a better stand up. The robots are coming for your job. I'll always love that. I'll go out, I'll fall over and the crowd will go wild. They go, look at him. They're going to look at that fat bloke. He's dying. And the robot will go, I can't compete with that. I never thought of that. Ricky and the steam engine. But, Nelly, I think it's true if ultimately something like that has to be true if intelligence and even comedic intelligence and comedic timing and everything that gets built into that empathy, I learned it. I learned it was still my brain. Yeah, exactly. If that's just information processing, there's no reason why a human has to be the best at that forever. And in fact, there's no way one will be if we just keep making progress building intelligent machines. So I think that I totally accept that. I suppose my question is, then what it comes down to is why this illusion of free will? Is it the same as if it wasn't an illusion? What's the difference? That's my question. I totally accept it. But so what? We are what we are, what does it matter? What does it matter that there isn't free will? I mean, the reason why it's important is that so much of our psychological suffering personally and so much of our social suffering in terms of what we, the ethical and legal decisions we make, is anchored to this illusion. The feeling that you are you and really responsible for you. It's not that it's never useful. It's useful in certain cases. But the fact that we put people in prison for the rest of their lives or even, you know, give them the death penalty in certain states and my country and feel totally justified in doing it as a matter of punishment, not as a matter of social necessity, that we have to just keep certain dangerous people off the streets, which obviously and I think that's quite different. Yeah, it is different. And I'd say what I'd say with them, I think to and I know you're not saying this, but to say no one has free will, so no one should be punished, is a nonsense. Rather like if a machine breaks down in a factory, you don't go, well, it didn't mean to break down. We keep it on you get rid of it because that's a new one. It's not a punishment. Well, we got to still protect the innocent and I get that and I think, yeah, definitely something else. There's loads of punishment certainly makes sense still in many cases, but retribution doesn't, or the vengeance part of it doesn't morally. Once you swallow this pill of free will being an illusion, what are the three reasons for retribution? Rehabilitation and what's the restitution? Yeah. Have you read Ted Hondrick's book on no punishment? I think it's called it might be called Eye for an Eye. No, I think it's just called punishment. It's got a picture of an eye and a tooth on it was my professor. Oh, yeah. He told me about four years ago. I was I was sold on it as he strode, rather. And yeah, he breaks down why that sort of punishment for retribution doesn't work. And, you know, we totally agree with and, you know, with the death penalty, you can't go back and say, we were wrong. We know the worries about that. My point is, even if everyone understood freewill was an illusion, we're hard to work. I don't think it should make any difference because we're not saying, oh, we came from a tough background, or it was a crime of passion. We're just saying, we're all robots, let's do what we like, which we know isn't acceptable. That's why I mean that it doesn't make a difference. All the other caveats would still be in place. A sympathetic judicial system and acts utilitarian as opposed to rule utilitarianism. All those things will still be in place. But what I can never accept is the people that say, if hard determinism is true, no one is responsible for their actions are the societe or level. That's the difference I'm making. Once you view people in this vein as akin to malfunctioning robots, right. If we built an evil robot, it would reliably produce evil. Nature has built evil robots for us as psychopaths and other people who just reliably create a lot of harm for everyone else. The question is, how should we feel about that? And whether hatred is the right emotional response. Now, it's a totally natural response, certainly if you've been victimized by such a person, but I think we should treat it like any other force that isn't our fault. You don't you go you don't go into morality of an angry bear exactly. Trying to attack you in the woods. Right? He came from a tough background. I love angry, but if a bear is attacking me, I don't care about his home problem. But he did come from a tough background. He came from the background of being a bear. Right. What else was he going to do? And I don't care when it's whether should I rehabilitate this bear? If I can't get out of there, I try and stop him it's not a moral issue. It's the fact that I don't deserve to die by a bear yet that's when it comes down to I love bears, I love bears. I've never heard of bear. I absolutely love them and good luck to them, and they've got to do what they've got to do. But as I say, if he's in my apartment, I've got other words, I don't care. Yeah, I don't know where that analogy goes. What I'm saying is the psychopath is part of nature, like the bear. I know it's not his fault it's a psychopath. Just like it's fault that it's a hungry bear. But that's no reason for me not to try and stop things. We've got things, but you don't have to hate it. And you wouldn't hate it in the same way you'd hate a person. And that's the crucial piece for me. That's a very good point. Ethically. Right. Even if it harmed you. I don't know if you got to that part in my in my I know you heard some of the audio from Waking Up, where I talk about free will, but just imagine the two cases. One case you're attacked by a bear, and let's say you lose a hand, so you really are you've had a terrifying encounter with near death, but you're saved and the bear gets tranquilized and let's say it gets put in the zoo. Right? Yeah, that's one case. The other case is you're you're attacked by an evil person and suffer the same injury. Right? Yeah. And so that but then the question is, what is your subsequent mental state? No, you're right. For the rest of your life, you could be hating the person and fantasizing over killing that person with your bare hands or hand. But with the bear, you might especially if he laughed in court. Yeah. He could just play upon your hominid emotions so that you would really hate him, you know, and want to kill him and fantasize. Totally true. Yeah. Yeah. Because we've got a sense of self and morality and we feel what's right and wrong. Yeah. We impose that on another human where we wouldn't do it on the bear. Rather in the way if I walk into a tree and I sprake my nose, I do not hate that tree. You hate yourself. I hate myself. And when the council put a fence down, I would want someone to blame. I want someone to blame with the weather if it rains, who didn't tell me to bring out whose job was it? Yeah, that's true. That's a very good point. And it's hard to forgive another human who hurts you for fun, even though in a naturalistic framework, they can't help it. I'm putting quote marks around help it. But we mean it literally as well, don't we, if we're determinist. And honestly, that does help me now a fair amount psychologically. I mean, there's so many people out there on social media in particular who this is where I tend to see it. I don't see it in my life who just maliciously attack me and attack people who are associated with me in any way. And it's, Why am I talking to you? There good luck on social media after this. I don't know anything about I thought you were super popular. I don't like Sam. I'm asking him. I'm using him, if anything. That's all, guys. If you're listening, that's a very good point. It's much easier to process when you actually recognize that certain people are doing what they do, because that's what they do. They're like bears. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And there's lots of other factors on social media getting noticed, wanting, being part of someone else called aware of heckling, they're not like that in real life. They ask you for an autograph. All these things their fault. I get it, really. If someone sends a nasty tweet I think I've told you this before that I thought, Why? They said that. And I look back and they've sent 20 nice ones, but I didn't notice them. And I think I put this line in afterlife as well. Why would people rather want to be famous for being an asshole than not famous? What is the attraction of being famous? Saying, I was here because cavemen used to put their hand on the wall and blow wood over it, and I was here, and now it's obviously got out of hand, but I think it's some sort of cachet for eternal life. I think that's a very human worrying quest. What's the point? What will happen after I die? Will people remember me? Will myself carry on? Will I come back as a spirit? Is there heaven? Have I led a good life? Was it worth it? Will I come back as a cow? I think all those things, as irrational as they all are, are very human. And I don't know why. I don't know. Again, they could be upshots, but yeah, all right. Well, we can work that out after you've had your third bath of the day. I'm going to have a tea now. So in conclusion, yes, robots, computers will soon be indistinguishable humans. Final question. Is there a chimp somewhere that sat down and looked up and thought, where do we come from? Who did all this? Where are we going? Has that happened here? As a chimp thought, what the fuck is going on here? I would highly doubt that, but the interesting thing is that there are certain things we do that are really crucial to our being smart, like, you know, working memory, which chimps are better at, which is pretty. And you can you can see this display there. We could find this video on YouTube where, given a memory task, where there's a keyboard, like a keyboard on a screen and many numbers and letters suddenly get illuminated and then you have to recapitulate. You have to press all the right keys. Yeah. Chimps are so fast and so much better at it than humans that it really is. It's kind of terrifying. Have you seen that experiment that shows it's not just the arbitrary test, it's the reward that has a sensory so they did a thing with a chimp with beads. So if it chose the small pile of beads, it got a jelly bean. Right. It got it right every time. Choose the smallest pile, get a jelly bean. When they gave it the choice to choose the smallest pile of jelly beans, it didn't. It chose the big pile of jelly beans because it wanted all the jelly. The experiment was out of the window. It just went fuck that. That's the big pilot. Jenny Bean. That's hilarious. Isn't that great? That's fantastic. That's a genius. Now I don't have a sense of self and I want to be a chimp. Brilliant. Cheers, man. Cheers. See you later./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with the philosopher Thomas Metzinger. Thomas is a full professor and director of the Theoretical Philosophy Group and the Research group on Neuroethics and Neurophilosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany. He is the founder and director of the Mind Group and adjunct fellow at the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies, also in Germany. His research centers on the analytic philosophy of mind and applied ethics and the philosophy of cognitive science, and he is the editor and author of several books. He edited The Neural Correlates of Consciousness and he wrote Being No One and the Ecotunnel. And in addition to Being a Philosopher of Mind, thomas is also a long term meditator. So, as you can hear, we have many, many interests in common. Our conversation starts on a political note, the significance of World War II for the history of ideas, and the connection between Nietzsche and the Holocaust. Thomas gives us the German view of current US. Politics, but then we go deep into questions of consciousness and the self. We talk about the role of intuition in science, the ethics of building conscious AI, the self as a hallucination, how we identify with our thoughts, and the paradox of doing that attention as the root of the felt sense of self, and the place of Eastern philosophy in Western science, as well as the limitations of secular humanism. So it's a very rich conversation, and it is the conversation that many of you asked for. Many of you have requested that I get Thomas on the podcast, so I bring you Thomas Metzinger. I am here with Thomas Metzinger. Thomas, thanks for coming on the podcast. Good to meet you. Yeah, we've never met, but I have followed you for some time now. I've been a happy reader of your books and the anthologies you've edited. You've done really great work in the philosophy of mind, and this has been an area that I've been interested in for some time. We might have been at the same conference at some point and just didn't get a chance to meet, but it's a pleasure to meet you virtually. I've had to live with emails by people telling me, thomas, Sam Harris, this guy is like you. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. All right, so, Thomas, tell our listeners what your focus has been in philosophy in general. And what work you're doing now. And then we're going to get into, obviously, questions of consciousness and AI and the self and all your areas of interest. But how do you summarize what you do as a philosopher at this point? Well, my core competence is in something that's called analytical philosophy of mind. That's where I come from. Done that for about three decades. But one thing that is special about me is that I have done it in very strong cooperation with neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, AI people for about 30 years. So my job has been to open up analytical philosophy of mind for a deeper and more productive interdisciplinary cooperation. It's got a lot of resistance for this in my life. It was bad for my academic career. But now, five years younger, there were four people in Germany like myself, and now it's just like a people's movement. All of the good young philosophers have one empirical area, like dreaming, social cognition, predictive coding, where they're really good and they combine this. But in this country, I got all the resistance. What form did the Resistance take and what specifically was it focused on? Many different types. First, in Germany, philosophy has very strongly meant history of philosophy. Secondly, something like naturalism has always had a bad press. People who thought, at least I have learned this as a student, that empirical sciences could contribute anything like bottom up constraints for conceptual work, just hadn't understood what philosophy was in the first place because it was purely a priori theorizing. But then there's also this territorial thing. I think you have recently had, for instance, to take this example of a freedom of the will debate too. We had a very hot one a little earlier in the public, and a typical event was that prominent neuroscientists said there is no such thing as freedom of the will. And it got to a point where philosophers said, listen, this is not to be decided and hard sciences at all. This is a philosophical problem, and there will be a philosophical solution. And then my friends from the neuroscience said, you're beginning to understand it. It's not your problem anymore. We have solved it. And then all of the humanities just rose in protest. So it's also a question who is allowed to answer which questions? So you introduced yourself as an analytic philosopher that is usually contrasted with continental philosophy. Has the European commitment to what is known perhaps mostly in the States, as continental philosophy? Is that part of the problem here? It's part of the problem. Now there is pretty much of a peaceful coexistence. It has gone through many stages. But you must also see the historical situation. In World War Two. We have either murdered or driven out of the country. All of the Jewish intelligentsia, so many teacher disciple relationships were completely cut off. And I'm very grateful to the generation of analytical philosophers who came before me to reconnect us to the global discussion again, to mankind's philosophical conversation. That was something that had to be established first after World War II because there were many people who thought the hottest and most recent stuff is heidegger who had more than a superficial connection with the trends that got so many people murdered and exiled. Of course. Yeah. Well, so that's a fascinating moment of intellectual history, and it's not something I'm sure someone has written about it in Germany, but in English. I haven't read much about the way in which the war affected philosophy, but it's interesting to picture those teacher student relationships being severed and Germany becoming isolated as a result. Well, there are many deeper dimensions to it. I mean, one is every German child at one age discovers what has happened. I still very precisely know the moment when I discovered the atrocities my tribe had connected. I don't know if you want to hear the story. I would love to, but how old are you, Thomas? I'm 59. How old were you? I was ten. And this little scholar in me was awakening, and I was getting interested in the books in my parents shelves. And I saw there was one book that put up very high because they didn't want me to see it. And of course, the next time they were out, I put a chair on my father's writing desk and crept up there and with a photo book called The Yellow Star. And I saw bulldozers pushing piles of corpses into mass grapes. And I saw photo documentation of medical experiments on Jews with phosphor burning away the flesh and stuff like this. And that was the moment when my childhood ended. Until then, I was living in a world of cowboys and Indians and fairy tales, and I didn't know that something like this existed in reality. So as you grow up, when I was 16 years old, I was still firmly and honestly convinced that I had been born in the worst country of the whole world with that tribe, with that history. And there's this aftermath where you ask your parents, how much did you know? And they all tell you, we didn't know anything. And then you ask the other school children in the schoolyard, and they all say, my parents also say they didn't know anything of this. And then you asked your history teacher, and they said they tell you, don't let yourselves be fooled. Almost everybody knew. At what point in school do children begin to learn about the Holocaust? Is it somewhere between ten and 16, or is there a standard year where there's I wouldn't know the curricula? Maybe 1415. You get it in history at that time. And then I'm coming back to philosophy. Of course, young intellectuals, if you study philosophy, for us, the whole thing was completely different than for you, because we were all trying to find out what's in our own intellectual tradition made this possible. Where did this come from? Nietzsche the Genealogy of Morals because we have been a great philosophical nation with German idealism and everything, and then a very urgent question is how could this happen? So studying philosophy meant something else for us? Yes, it's like an intellectual and moral autopsy. Did you come up with any answers there, or are there any answers that are agreed upon? How was it possible? Well, there's a century long European tradition of antisemitism, and what many people don't know in this year is that Martin Luther, for instance, was a hate pundit. He was the first person to explicitly in his writing say that the synagogues have to burn. And what many people also don't know is that the Vice Christina actually was a birthday present for Luta, who had his birthday. It was like celebrating a birthday party into his birthday. It was a gift the Nazis made to the founder of Protestantism. So there's a deep connection to the Church over the centuries, but then there's also plain old racism and some philosophical contributions. The story on Nietzsche, as far as I know, is that basically he was misused by his sister and the Nazis and that his philosophy really is only in its misinterpretation something that could be useful to the worldview of Nazism. I must say I've never been totally convinced of that, given some of the ranting one encounters in Nietzsche. What's your view of that? That's, of course, a long story, but of course he couldn't be a fascist and he couldn't be a Nazi because he couldn't be that. I also technically, I don't regard him as a philosopher because he, in my view, doesn't have a serious interest in the growth of knowledge. She's more a racist writer. But if you look at The Genealogy of Morals and you imagine you're a young German, then what you take away from it is we are a warrior race. The Jews are smarter than we are. The Jews have come up with something, I'm quoting, to poison our blood. They are poisoning our blood with Christian morals and they have done this. And the only thing we can do is remember that we are stronger. Not smarter, but stronger, because we are a warrior race. So we have to get rid of this Christian moral of the slaves and so forth. And that was, of course, a preparation, because imagine you're a young intellectual at that time, and this is presented to you as one of your best philosophers. That was dangerous and that was not innocent, and that was certainly a preparation for what came afterwards. But that's fascinating. I wanted to just go again, this is a topic I was not aware we were going to stumble on, but I just I can't leave it. This is great. It's not often I get a direct window onto this experience, or that people even have this experience. So your description of what it was like to be a child stumbling upon that book and the evidence of the Holocaust that had not yet reached you. And then the experience of talking about this with parents and friends who talk about it with their parents and getting a kind of denial, really it sounds like a blanket denial that anyone was aware at the time what was happening. And yet the official story from your historians and your teachers of history is no, of course, more or less everyone knew this was happening and the whole culture is complicit on some level. How do you reconcile those two pieces? Because in terms of Germany's reputation, it is much more of the latter sort that Germany has quite famously really lived in a kind of purgatory of self criticism since World War II in a way that Austria hasn't and Japan hasn't. In Austria and Japan you have a more or less official denial of just how morally dark their behavior became. But with Germany, everyone seems to acknowledge that there has been an impressive and perhaps even sufficient degree of hand wringing over the Holocaust and over World War II. But it sounds like your experience is one of where the grown ups are more or less living in total denial about that. How do you square those two things? Well, the last witnesses are dying right now. Many have finished their lives in denial. They have also been psychologically traumatized. For instance, my father had to go to war with 17 and he wrote a book about things he couldn't talk about. They have seen horrible things as children. And he told me when they saw 800 American airplanes fly over the Rhine Valley in broad daylight, using the Rhine Valley, and counted them as children, and they came back without their bomb load. And then it was the first time that dawned on them that they might not be winning this war like everybody told them. So actually I didn't want to go this direction at all. But now it, of course, connects to Trump and your political situation because I think as a German we can bring a unique perspective onto what you are living through right now. So I'm so very grateful for the US, for the thousands of beautiful young men that you have sacrificed, you know, to defeat the generation of my grandfather and my father. You brought us democracy, the Marshall Plan and everything. And now see how this has played out 70 years later. You are lying on the ground in a very serious situation and we are one of the most stable democracies in the whole world. It's completely bizarre to be a German right now. Everybody is tapping on your shoulder and saying, hey, you are the leaders of the civilized world now. Are you aware of this? Do something. All the young people come to Germany want to study here. The financial criminals from London are starting to relocate to Frankfurt. Even the southern Italian mafia is in Stoke Garden in southern Germany. Everybody likes it. Everybody thinks this is one of the most stable countries in the world. And now on the other side of it, everything is crumbling apart 70 years later on the other side of the Atlantic. And one of the many things I think we can bring to the table is there will be an aftermath. And you should think about this too. Trump is not going to last very long, but there will be an aftermath to this. Children will ask their parents questions. What have you voted? Have you stood your ground? What have you done? Daddy? Where were you in these decisive years? This is not going to be over. When it's over, there will be a deep intergenerational rift in this society, and it will be a major threat to social cohesion that you may need decades to get over. So there will be an aftermath to this bizarre Trump episode right now, and you better think about it now how you want to go about it, and then there will be no aftermath to climate change. Climate change is going to go on for centuries. Even in the best possible scenario. There is not going to be this episode is not going to be over. And, you know, the US are now what I would call a climate rogue state. They are completely isolated from the rest of mankind. And, you know, your children and grandchildren will have to deal with that too. And it's difficult. We just went through this the last 70 years. Yeah, it's interesting to hear that perspective. I can tell you that. What you just said about how dire it appears from the German point of view that we have elected a person like Trump to run this country, that will seem like sheer delusion to anyone. Who is at all sympathetic with Trump, or at least thought Clinton was terrible enough that it was just kind of an ordinary judgment call to pick Trump over her. And it will seem hyperbolic, I think, to most people who are even worried about Trump. I don't want to spend any real time on him because I don't know how much you've listened to this podcast, but I probably have 20 hours of me shrieking about Trump on this podcast, and even those who agree with me are probably sick of it by now. So I have to sort of pick my moments here on this topic. But I take your point. I think happily, with all the chaos that we see in the US government at the moment, there hasn't been much concrete consequence to Trump's tenure and his incompetence and his narcissism, the way in which he's eroded the norms of our politics and civil society. It's been a fairly quiet period in human history, despite the fact that North Korea keeps testing ICBMs and Russia keeps hacking the electoral process of democracies throughout the west. But I completely take your point that there's no telling how bad it could get with a person like him in charge. I'm not at all complacent on that topic. And insofar as I can do anything on this podcast, I have made noise about this to the limits of even my fans patience. But I want to move on to topics of our mutual philosophical concern and scientific concern, because there's just so much to talk about here. Well, may I just briefly interrupt before we leave that topic all together? I went to your website when I got all these emails and said, okay, this looks good, but it's probably one of these American self marketing robots. And then I had no time to read any of your books. Now you invited me, and during workouts I now have listened to many of your podcasts, and I think you're doing a great job, and it's fantastic. And in bringing up this ugly hobby horse again and again, I just want to say one thing, and then we can leave the topic. Because we are not completely impartial and we have egotistic motives to I don't want to insult anybody, but it's one thing if you guys wreck down your own country completely. That's one thing. It's far away. But the other thing is, of course, we all know The Moron is hard to predict. I don't know who he will pick a fight with, but I'm very much afraid that he underestimates China when he wants to incinerate North Korea or something like this. And this is a very dangerous situation, and I find this is the last thing I want to say. Now we can leave that topic. I never thought that I would have thought something like this. But my hope is actually with the higher ranks of the American military. I know that there are some very conservative people who are decent, who have some decency. And I think that's our main hope now, that if the day has come peacefully take him out of office and do not follow that order. I think that's the people we have to hope for now, and that there are some senior persons, maybe, who have combat experience and who know what that really means, that that is not a golf course in Florida or something like that, and that they will act. Yeah, well, obviously you as a German and a scholar of the relevant history, are in a good position to warn our society what it means to elect somebody who is not disposed to pay attention to constitutional or democratic norms. Germany in particular is aware of just how, as Timothy Snyder, the historian, said on this podcast, just how people go to the polls not knowing that they're voting away their freedom or that they're voting for the last time. And yet this is an experience that democracies have had, and we haven't had that in the US. There is an assumption that our institutions are strong enough and that the stakes are always low enough that nothing terrible will happen when we put a selfish imbecile of this magnitude in charge. But I just think it's not a safe assumption. And I've expressed my my worries again, more or less ad nauseam on this podcast, but I hope he gets reined in by everything that can rein him in, and the military professionals included. So, Thomas, let's start with consciousness. We have questions of intellectual and moral interest that will outlive us, and they outlived Plato, they outlived the Buddha, they outlived everyone who has touched them, and I think they will endure. But the mystery of consciousness. How do you think about consciousness? Well, I've been in this for 30 years now. You may know that I'm one of the people who founded the association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness 22 years ago. I think the first thing we have to understand that consciousness is not one problem, but that it's a whole bundle of problems, some more conceptual, some more empirical. And that's the first step. It's not that one big mystery out there. There's attention, there's sensory discrimination. There are conceptual issues about what may be conceivable and so forth. And I think the consciousness community in the last two decades has really made breathtaking progress. We're getting somewhere. And in this one popular book, The Egotunnel, I've actually predicted that by 2050 we will have the global neural correlate of consciousness. We will isolate that in humans, and that's only a very first step. But I think it will not be a mystery. Life is not a mystery anymore. But 150 years ago, many people thought that this is an irreducible mystery. So you're you're not a fan anymore, if you ever were, of the framing by David Tralmers of the hard problem of consciousness. No, that's so boring. I mean, that's last century. We all respect Dave and we know he's very smart and has got a very fast mind. There's no debate about that. But conceivability arguments are just very weak. If you have an ill defined folk psychological umbrella term like consciousness, then you can pull off all kinds of scenarios and zombie thought experiments. It helped to clarify some issues in the mid 90s, but the consciousness community has listened to this and just moved on. I mean, nobody of the serious researchers in the field thinks about this anymore, but it has taken on like a focaluristic life of its own, as a lot of people talk about the heart problem, who wouldn't be able to state what it consists of. Now, maybe we should just state it just so that those listeners who didn't hear me speak with David on the podcast or haven't read my book Waking Up. Basically, the issue is this that consciousness, if you define it as to follow Thomas Nagel here, the fact that it's like something to be what you are, the fact that a brain of sufficient complexity or a creature at a certain point in evolutionary terms, has a subjective qualitative perspective on the world. The lights go on this formulation. There have been many variants of it, but famously, the philosopher Thomas nagel wrote a paper, very influential paper in the early 70s titled what is it like to be a bat? And he said, we may never know. A bat experience could be totally unlike our own, but if it is like something to be a bat, if you switch places with a bat, that wouldn't be synonymous with just the canceling of experience, but you would be laid bare to a different domain of experience. Well, that is the fact of consciousness. In the case of a bat, whether we ever understand it or not, the fact that the lights are on, the fact that there is a perspectivable qualitative character there, that is what we mean by consciousness. And I've always thought that that is a good definition. It doesn't answer any of what Chalmers called the easy problems of consciousness. Those are separate. How does the eye and the visual cortex transduce light energy into a visual mapping of the visual scene? The hard problem on Chalmers'account is always this bit, the fact that it's like something to do any of that, because it's the transition from unconscious scene, which human brains do and robots do, to the conscious experience of seeing, which we know humans accomplish. And at the moment, there's no good reason to think our robots or computers do. And a corollary to this framing is that any explanation we get about consciousness. Let's just say we open the back of the book of nature and we get the right answer about consciousness, and it turns out that you need exactly 10,000 information processing units of a certain character. They have to be wired in a certain way, they have to be firing at a certain hurts. And just lo and behold, that is what gives you consciousness. And if you change any of those parameters, well, then the lights go out. Let's say we knew that to be true. It still wouldn't explain the emergence of consciousness in a way that is intuitively graspable. It still would seem like a miracle. And that's not the way most or really any satisfying scientific explanation works out. When I give you an explanation for any higher level property, the fluidity of water or the brittleness of glass in terms of its micro constituents, well, then that explanation actually does run through and conserves your intuitions about how things function at a lower level so as to appear as they do on a higher level. And so it is, I would argue, even with the example you just gave of life. So you said that 100 years ago or even less, 70 years ago, perhaps. Let me get my dates right. It's more like 80 years ago. People felt that we would never have a satisfactory explanation of what life is or how life, the energy of life relates to physical structure and how heredity could be a mere mechanism and how the healing of disease or from wounds could be just a matter of chemistry. But of course, with the the advent of molecular biology and other insights, we figured all of that out without really without remainder and and therefore vitalism or a notion that there has to be any kind of life spirit in matter that has gone out the window. That's another analogy that doesn't really get at how mysterious consciousness is because something like reproduction or growth or healing from injury that really can be explained. Mechanistically and and our intuitions run through there. So the conceivability issue for me with the hard problem isn't so much a statement about what is true. It's not that I doubt that consciousness can be an emergent property of information processing because it's so difficult to conceive or impossible to conceive how that works, but it is just a statement about the seeming limits of explanation. It sounds to me that whatever you put in the space provided will still sound like the restatement of a miracle. Which is it really analogous to how to take an analogy to cosmology the idea that everything, including the laws of nature, emerged out of nothing, right? Like just things exploded into being. Now, that may in fact be true, but I would argue, or at least it seems to me, that it's inconceivable or uninterpretable or it's not understandable. It's the statement of a miracle. And so that's really my fondness for the hard problem is a matter of epistemology more than it is ontology. Beautiful. You've now mentioned so many important points that I don't really know where to start. So maybe we should just say technically the hard problem is that phenomenal properties only nomologically superven on functional properties, but not logically. That is, the conscious properties of sweetness or redness or whatever the bat perceives is determined by information flow in its brain in this world, under the laws of nature holding in this world. But there are other worlds where we can imagine that the bed is a zombie with exactly that information flow in its brain that there could always be a functional isomorph to sam, right? Some entity that has the same functions on a certain level of granularity but which instantiates no phenomenal properties. Thomas, I want to jump in here for 1 second because I want people to understand the distinctions you're making. And you used some terms that will lose most people who are not philosophically trained. So I think you hit upon that consciousness nomologically supervenes upon the physical or something like that. You should unpack that and also nomologically means under the laws of nature holding in our universe. Now, there could be other universes, logically possible worlds in which these laws of nature do not hold. So the idea is that consciousness is determined from below, from the brain. May. Only hold in this world with these laws of nature, but it's not conceptually something that may hold across all possible worlds. That's the idea that that is the mystery that you are trying to isolate. That the mystery consists of the fact that we can always imagine that Sam Harris is a zombie, that he would talk, he would even talk about his emotions and his color experiences, but he would not have any inner perspective. That's the idea. Well, I would strike a slightly different emphasis here, Thomas, just to catch people up. There's this argument that is a I don't know if it originates with Chalmers, and he certainly made good use of it in his book, but this idea that we can conceive of a zombie, which is a beam that functions and appears exactly like a human being, but has no conscious experience the lights are not on in a zombie. It's just a perfectly humanoid robot that has no subjectivity or qualitative experience. Now, the fact that we can imagine such a thing does not even slightly suggest that such a thing is possible. It just may be that in order to get something that functions like a human being and seems like a human being from the outside, consciousness is always going to be necessary or will always come along for the ride. And I'm just agnostic as to whether or not that's the case. And I think as we develop AI, we may learn more and more about whether or not that's the case, or cease to find it intellectually interesting. So I'm not arguing from the side of it's conceivable that there could be a zombie Sam, and therefore there's a hard problem of consciousness. It's more that whatever I imagine the explanation to be, the idea that first the lights are not on and then they come on by virtue of some complexity in the system, some complexity doesn't explain anything. Complexity is not good. But then you can keep change, I mean, you keep changing the, the noun, whether it's information integration or so whatever the answer is, and there have been various answers proffered in recent decades, it still sounds like just a brute fact that doesn't actually explain anything. And again, it's not the way other scientific explanations, even with respect to life function. Well, the last point may not be right, but what you're actually getting at is what is the value of intuitions? Can we demand of a good theory of consciousness that it gives us an intuitive feeling? This is right, now I've understood it. We would never ask this of a theoretical physicist. If they tell us something about eleven dimensions and string theory, nobody would say this is completely counterintuitive, this has nothing to do with my life world, this is just brute facts. They're stipulating, we just trust these people. They know maths, they have theories with high predictive power, they're very smart, and we don't demand this intuition. I would say we actually do. This has been famously what has been so unsatisfying about quantum mechanics, which is that no one, not even Richard Feynman, can pretend to understand it. All the physicists can say is that the math works out and it has immense predictive value. But it's still that is enough. It could be enough. It could be enough. And I take your point about the limit of intuition, in that our intuitions were not designed by evolution for us to grasp reality as it is. Our intuitions were designed to avoid getting hit over the head by another ape or to mate with his sister. Our intuitions are very crude, but again, we use certain intuitions that we have, you know, whether mathematical or otherwise, to leverage ourselves into areas where our intuitions, our common sense intuitions, and certainly our folk psychological intuitions, are not good. So I can certainly follow you there, but it still just seems to be the case that consciousness provides some kind of extra impediments here. So take something like platform independence. So, like, if we assume that there's nothing magical about having a computer made of meat, and consciousness is as, mind is as, intelligence is clearly platform independent, and therefore, we could, in principle, build conscious computers that were non. Biological. How would we move, in your view, from having characterized the neural correlate of consciousness in people into being confident that the computers that seem to emulate that functionally and informationally are themselves conscious? What I'm imagining the future of AI will very likely look like is that we will build computers that pass the Turing Test with flying colors, whether or not we've figured out the neural correlate of consciousness in apes like ourselves, we will build computers that pass the Turing Test and that seem conscious to us. But unless we fully understand how consciousness emerges, we won't know whether they're conscious. They might say they're conscious. They might seem even more conscious than we are, and we will sort of lose sight of the problem. And I know you think that, as I do, that the fact of the matter, whether or not they are conscious, is hugely important, ethically speaking. And it would be monstrous to create computers that could suffer. So let's perhaps bring the platform independence issue into this conversation. And I know I've been talking a lot. I just want to kind of give you the full landscape of my prejudice and confusion so that you can run over it. No, it's all very interesting, and of course, I fully understand what you mean, but we have to think about intuitions a little bit. They have a long evolutionary history. If I have an intuition that an explanation is satisfactory, it is itself a kind of conscious experience. I don't know if you've ever thought about this. There's not only a phenomenology of redness. There's also a phenomenology of I just know this, but I don't know for what reason. I know it or where the knowledge comes from. And in many cases, intuitive knowledge is fantastic. It comes from condenses knowledge from the world of our ancestors. Just think about social cognition. If you have to set this intuition this guy is dangerous, or she is a good person, this is a way of computing itself. It doesn't generate senses in your head, but intuitions. Now, the question is, could we ever be intuitively satisfied? I think we cannot, because our theory of consciousness will also tell us what a self is and what a first person perspective is. And that is something we will not be able to ever grasp intuitively, what's coming out of there. But to come back to your question, you know that for a number of years I've strictly argued against even risking phenomenal states in machines. We should in no way try attempt to create conscious machines or even get close because we might cause a cascade of suffering. We might just increase the overall amount of suffering in the universe. And just because of this reason, it's very important to have a theory of consciousness. We must have one. So what would we do if we have a goal or a correlate of consciousness? That was your question. The hardware doesn't matter. We need to know the flow of information. What is the computation that is carried out? Then we have to describe this on the right level of conceptual granularity, meaning what corresponds to my experience of redness, what in that information flow is minimally sufficient for my intuition that we will never understand consciousness, what is minimally sufficient for my sense of selfhood, and so forth. And if we have that mapping from our own phenomenology to fine grain computational descriptions, then we can see, is this instantiated in a machine or not? The problem rather, is that machines could have forms of suffering or forms of selfhood that we cannot even grasp because they are so alien and so different from our biological form of conscious experience or emotion. Maybe they would develop it and we wouldn't see it. Maybe it is already there and we wouldn't discover it. So there's certainly a great problem across spaces, spaces of conscious experience. Just as with the bat, you're never going to understand what does it feel like to be the Bat? I mean, to hear the echo of your own ultrasonic calls is it like hearing I've heard people say, no, it's the dominant modality for the bad, it's for the Bat, it's like seeing other people say no, it's scanning a surface. It must be a tactile experience. For the bad, it's like feeling a surface to fly through that echo. And that is, if it has data formats, as I call it, internal data formats that we don't have in sensory processing. That is something we will never know how it feels to instantiate these data formats. And that may be happening with your machines as well. Right. Just on this point of echolocation. I don't know if this is analogous to what a bad experience is but contrary to what most people assume, we can echo locate to some degree. If you just hold your hand in front of your face and hum and then move your hand back and forth, you will notice that your humming reveals to you the location of your hand. So you can be a very bad bat if you want to try this at home. So let's talk about the self because you raised the topic of the self which is another thing that people find inscrutable and it of course relates to consciousness and yet it is quite different. And you have written a lot about the self and I haven't read everything you've written. But I feel like there's some significant agreement here between the way we view it and the way even traditional views that one meets in the east, like in Buddhism or advice of Vedanta, that the self, as most people conceive of it, is an illusion. So I put that to you. I think we want to distinguish between the whole person. And I would not say that people are illusions, but most people are walking around with a sense that they have a self inside their heads, that there's a subject in the head, a thinker of thoughts and experiencer of experience. This is kind of an unchanging rider on the horse of consciousness that just gets carried through from one moment to another and has various adventures but is in some sense never quite changed by them. It's the center of the whole drama. How do you think about the self and in what sense are people confused about it? Well, when I looked at the problem of consciousness I thought if I was an antireductionist the most interesting, the most pressing problem is what is a first person perspective and what would it mean for any information processing system to have a sense of selfhood and a first person perspective originating from it? This is the really difficult problem to solve, I think. And I have just as you been guilty of this illusion talk in popular writings in the past of course it is conceptual nonsense to say the self is an illusion because as a term, illusion means that there is a sensory misrepresentation of something where an outside stimulus actually exists. A hallucination is something where there's no stimulus and you still have a misrepresentation. But this sense of selfhood is only partly a sensory experience. Of course. It is grounded in what I call the intraceptive self model in inner sensations, in the body, in effective tone, in the emotions, in elementary Bioregulation. All these are important layers. But we have this robust misrepresentation of transtemporal identity. And I have always firmly said, you know, this probably that none of your listeners ever was or had a self and that we can explain everything we want to scientifically explain about self consciousness in a much more passimonious way with much simpler explanations, assumptions, much simpler structural assumptions. So for me, the question is, in a system that very obviously has no immortal soul or no self, we don't find anything like that in the brain, how does this robust sense of selfhood emerge? Because that is really counterintuitive, right? Imagine people would try to believe that there is no such thing as itself. You cannot believe this. Even if you want to believe this, nobody can believe it. Well, let me stop you there, because I not only believe it, I experience it. I don't know if you have any significant experience with meditation or psychedelics or have you gone down that path to see if you could confirm any of the Buddha's claim here. Oh, I thought you knew that. I do. I don't know how far it's gone. Well, I'm if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, it has been two weeks since the election, and those of you who don't spend a lot of time on social media may not be seen how crazy it is out there. All I can say is we appear to be living through a very dangerous moment, and Trump and his enablers, in their desperation to hold onto power, are making our situation much more dangerous. I want to elaborate on something I tweeted after it became obvious that Biden had won the election. This was around November 6, I think. I wrote, there's a needle that we really must thread successfully. Contempt for Trump and his enablers in government is a patriotic necessity. Contempt for 70 million Trump voters is a serious error. Life is complicated. So I want to spell this out a little more because very few people are threading this needle successfully or even attempting to thread it. And some people have confused what I was saying there with people like AOC seeming to call for vengeance against Trump supporters. She went so far as to encourage people to keep lists of everyone who had supported Trump in any capacity. I think it's quite clear that nothing good is waiting for us down that path. Over 70 million people voted for Trump, and there are many reasons for people to have done this or to have found that they just couldn't vote for Biden. And Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of the division in our society. Now, he is not Stalin, he is not Hitler. He is a vindictive little con man who got plucked out of a carnival somewhere by Mark Burnett and put on television for over a decade. Trump is the quintessential American fake. And it's been astounding to watch such a bizarre and insubstantial person accomplish one crazy stage dive after the next because there were millions of upraised hands waiting to catch him and to bear his weight. So there are real social problems at the bottom of all this that we have to address, and we won't address any of them by writing off everyone who voted for Trump as racist or otherwise irredeemable. But there are many people in my circle, friends and colleagues and podcast guests, who are making the opposite error. Many of them are almost exclusively focused on the problem of the far left, and this is causing them to significantly discount the harm that Trump has caused and is actively causing to our society. Some of these people are Trump supporters, but many aren't. And they've been taking the Trump team's allegations that the election was stolen through massive voter fraud way too seriously. And they're extending a principle of charity to Trump and to the rest of his team that is frankly delusional. Again, there is a needle to thread here, and many people don't appear to even see it, insofar as I've noticed what others in the so called intellectual dark web have been saying, it's generally not something I want to be associated with. I don't want to single anyone out in particular, but allow me to take this moment to turn in my imaginary membership card to this imaginary organization. The IDW was always tongue in cheek from my point of view. It was a funny name for a group of people who were willing to discuss difficult topics in public, mostly on podcast. But it never made sense for us to be grouped together as though we shared a common worldview. I never saw much downside to it, and I didn't much think about it. But in the aftermath of this election, with some members of this fictional group sounding fairly bonkers, I just want to make it clear that I'm not part of any group, right? So if you want to criticize my ideas, that's great. But I only represent myself here, and no one else speaks for me. We have a crisis of legitimacy now on all fronts. People have lost their trust in our institutions, and this is understandable, given all that's happened over the last four years. Trust in media has almost collapsed. But that doesn't mean there still isn't a difference between The New York Times and Breitbart, or between journalists who are doing their best to report facts even while they harbor their own political biases. And political operatives are conspiracy theorists who are obviously spreading lies. So as bad as things are in mainstream media and don't get me wrong, they're quite bad you simply can't place equal blame on both sides. Politically, at this moment, we have a sit in president who is essentially a QAnon conspiracist. So if you find yourself saying things like, all politicians lie, or Biden is just as corrupt as Trump, you have become part of the problem of misinformation in our society. Biden would have to be a supporter of antifa and lying about literally everything to be comparable to Trump. Biden's next tweet would have to say something like, we have evidence that the CIA invented the Coronavirus to kill black people. He would have to be that maniacal in the whole Democratic Party along with him for there to be an equivalence between Trump and Biden or between Republicans and Democrats at this moment. Yes, there is influence peddling and bad incentives and opportunism and cowardice and the whole carnival of human error on both sides of our politics. But the Republican Party has become a personality cult devoted to a fake strongman who really is doing his best to undermine our democracy. So a special focus on Trump and his enablers is totally warranted right now. And again, there is a needle to thread here. There is a difference between Trump and his inner circle and his most abject supporters in Congress. There's a difference between these people who are attempting to hold onto power illegitimately by vomiting lies on everything in sight and the millions of people who voted for Trump who are, to one or another degree, taken in by these lies. Now, at the time I'm recording this, it seems safe to claim the following there appears to be no credible evidence of significant voter fraud in the 2020 election. And whatever the Trump campaign is bringing forward is being looked at by the courts. And so far, it's being thrown out by the courts. Ironically, because we have such an uncoordinated election system, it appears to be very difficult to manufacture fraud at scale. And what is being alleged here is massive fraud across many states, several of which have Republicans in key positions of power. And strangely, the Democrats are alleged to have rigged the election for president, but they didn't think to also win the Senate and to get rid of Mitch McConnell, and they lost seats in the House. So this election fraud was really a work of subtle genius. And needless to say, all the Republicans in Congress have celebrated their victories in the House and the Senate, and these votes were cast on the same ballots they're disputing in the presidential race. This is the very essence of incoherence and hypocrisy, just as it was when Trump's campaign began demanding that we stop counting ballots in states where he was ahead, while simultaneously demanding that we keep counting them in states where he was behind. There is now such a degradation of our politics that people don't even feel the need to lie coherently. It's just a continuous carpet bombing of our information landscape with bullshit. So at this moment, it certainly appears that Biden won the 2020 election far more decisively than Trump won in 2016. And Trump claimed massive voter fraud in that election too, right? The election he won to become president. He even claimed that Ted Cruz was guilty of voter fraud in the Iowa caucus. This is what he does, and it's part of the authoritarian playbook. Trump is a con man who has no respect for anything beyond himself, and he certainly has no concern for the health of our democracy. These are facts about his mind that he confirms for us on a daily basis. Obviously, any credible accusation of voter fraud should be looked at by the courts, but it's very important to point out that no one has been denying this basic principle of election fairness. But this was not like Bush versus Gore in 2000, which came down to 500 votes in a single state. Here we are talking about tens of thousands of votes in several states, a bigger margin than Trump won by in 2016, to which Hillary Clinton quickly conceded right, even though she won the popular vote. And President Obama immediately began cooperating with the transition team while Trump is still refusing to cooperate with Biden's two weeks into this process. And more importantly, so are the leaders in the Republican Party. That's how perverse this has gotten. Right now, Biden should be getting a daily security briefing, and his team should be speaking with foreign leaders on secure lines facilitated by the State Department. They should be able to speak with officials in every branch of our own government so they can get up to speed. Normally, all this would be going on while the election gets certified in the coming weeks. And normally the transition team would be given funds and access to government buildings at this point. And yet all of these resources are being denied to them. The real problem is that all of this controversy is being manufactured by bad faith actors. You can be confident that no one on Trump's team thinks he lost due to election fraud. Rather, they're attempting to delegitimize our democracy by pretending to think there was massive election fraud. It's like a soccer player who takes a dive and begins writhing around on the ground, right, hoping to deceive the ref and to win a penalty kick and possibly win the game. That way, no matter how good he makes it look, the soccer player knows he wasn't fouled. This is cheating. Trump and his enablers are hoping to hold on to the presidency by pretending they were fouled. And they're looking for a referee, whether a court or a state legislature, who just might award them a winning penalty kick. Short of that, they're trying to motivate the base in Georgia so they can hold on to the two Senate seats that will be decided in a runoff election in January. And beyond that, Trump and his family are clearly trying to monetize their cult so they can do who knows what to further debase American society after Trump leaves office. Again, let me be clear. I believe that everything I'm saying about Trump's attempt to undermine our democracy is as objective and uncontroversial and nonpartisan as saying something like, trump doesn't want to release his tax returns. I mean, how can I say that Trump doesn't want to release his tax returns? What am I, a mind reader? He's even said on a few occasions that he wants to release his tax returns. It's just that they're under audit, you see? Why not take the man at his word? Well, if you are that confused about who this man is, then there really is nothing I or anyone else can say to persuade you on these points. So let me just bracket what will otherwise be totally unacceptable to you by saying that my adamant on these points is coming from a very clear sense that what I'm saying is not just my opinion about Donald Trump. I believe I'm making factual statements about what he has done and why he has done it. The man really doesn't want to release his tax returns for whatever reason. I don't have to be a clairvoyant to know that it's the only rational interpretation of his actions. And he really did try to steal the presidency two weeks ago, and he appears to still be trying, however hopeless that might be. Think about this chain of events. We have a President who for months railed about how unreliable our election system was and about how mail in ballots in particular were guaranteed to produce massive fraud. And he made these claims entirely without evidence while being someone who votes by mail himself in Florida. And he said over and over again that we need a result on election night, knowing that the vote count always continues over subsequent days and that in this election, the later votes would disproportionately be weighted toward biden literally for months. Trump stigmatized mail imbalance in a calculated effort to get his supporters to vote in person, knowing that in person returns are generally counted first on election night. In fact, Republican lawmakers seem to have collaborated in this scheme by not allowing mail in ballots to be counted early in several key states. And in fact, the Republicans tried to starve the post office of funding over the summer, and Trump admitted that this was to keep them from being able to handle a surge in mail imbalance. And all of this occurred during the COVID pandemic, during which, for nearly nine months, trump downplayed the risk of the disease even as a quarter of a million people died from it. So he knew that concern about the coronavirus was also heavily biased along political lines because he had worked hard to bias it himself. And this caused in person voting to be even more heavily weighted toward his supporters. It sounds totally fantastical, but all of this happened in plain sight. Trump tried to engineer an episode of reality television that could have ushered in the end of our democracy. He was obviously hoping to step before the cameras in the wee hours of Wednesday morning with a significant lead in the polls, and to then demand that the vote counting stop. He was stage managing an attempted theft of the election, all the while encouraging his supporters to believe that the election was being stolen from him as the counting of ballots continued. And he did this all in a context in which he, as the sitting President of the United States, refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost. So it's really hard to exaggerate how far from normal we had drifted when Trump stepped in front of the microphone on election night. We had a President of the United States declaring that he had won reelection by a large margin when there were millions of votes still being counted. And every reason to believe that most of those votes would be for his opponent. And the most prominent members of the Republican Party supported him in this. That is what has become of our politics. So in my view, this was a terrifying lurch toward authoritarianism, even if in many ways Trump is a fake authoritarian. And it could have worked. We could have lost our democracy two weeks ago. But the problem is, nearly half of our society doesn't know that. In fact, nearly half of our society is being told right now that we have lost our democracy because the election of Joe Biden was a fraud. This is a dangerous loss of social cohesion and it has been engineered by Trump and the Republican Party. I mean, imagine you're on a plane at 30,000ft and the pilot comes over the PA system and says, I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, but we've heard credible reports that there's a bomb somewhere on the aircraft. Some people are saying it's in the luggage. Some people are saying it might have been smuggled on board by food service and it might have been placed in an overhead compartment by one of your fellow passengers. But just sit tight. We're going to get to the bottom of this. Imagine the panic that would cause. And now imagine what you would think of the pilot if you knew that he was lying. Imagine the mind of a pilot who has assumed so much control over the lives of his passengers who would tell a lie like that? What sort of person would do that? That's the president. Right now, the situation is almost certainly worse. In fact, the Trump campaign is aggressively fundraising on the back of their fake allegations of election fraud. The fundraising is ostensibly for all their legal actions, but most of the money will be used for other purposes to pay down their campaign debt and to form a Trump political action committee. Trump's even threatening to run for President again in 2024. So the President is like a pilot who's just announced that there's a bomb on the airplane. But if you just get out your credit card and donate generously to the Trump Bomb squad fund, he might be able to land the plane safely. But it's a fake crisis and he's just stealing money from millions of frightened and angry people and creating more division in our society in the process and actually increasing the likelihood that the plane we're all on at this moment will crash. And this is why it is appropriate to be outraged over this behavior. Trump and the people closest to him know exactly what they're attempting to do to our democracy. They understand that amplifying conspiracy theories increases the risk of serious violence and social disorder. And they absolutely know that they're putting our country at needless risk by not giving the Biden team the resources they need for a smooth transition. And this is not at all analogous to what's happening on the left. Yes, it also sows division in our society to call half the country racist. But the people who are doing that really are confused, right? They think half the country is racist. And I'm sure the confusion extends all the way up to the top. Right? Someone like AOC thinks half the country is racist. But Trump and his team know that they lost the election. They know why they're doing what they're doing. They know they are trying to eke out some personal advantage at massive social cost. That's what's so reprehensible. Obviously, I don't know what's going to happen next. I am reasonably confident that the tide has turned here and that our institutions are strong enough. And when push comes to shove, the military and law enforcement are professional and apolitical enough that Trump can be dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House in January if need be. But honestly, I think this pressure test of our institutions nearly failed. And that's scary. A few days after the election, on November 6, the journalist Jim Shudo tweeted, a new restricted national defense airspace has been put in place over presidential candidate Joe Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware. And then Samantha Power, who was our UN. Ambassador under President Obama. She also happens to be married to Cass Sunstein, who is a constitutional law scholar who's been on this podcast. Samantha forwarded this tweet with the comment, it's real. Our institutions will hold. Now, I practically burst into tears when I read that. Tweet and here's why. The fact that that was ever in doubt, that our institutions would hold the fact that there was even a question as to how the military would respond if we had a madman in the White House refusing to admit that he had lost an election and demanding that we stop counting votes in states where he was ahead and continue counting them in states where he was behind. The fact that I can even understand samantha's tweet. It's real. Our institutions will hold. The fact that I can parse the fucking sentence is evidence of a crime that has been committed against all of us and everyone who's been accusing Trump's. Critics of having Trumped derangement syndrome has been party to this crime. You really have played a game of chicken with our democracy, and in my view, you actually do have a lot to apologize for. This is not partisanship. This has never been a difference of opinion. We can have those. But you have protected a man who was manifestly unfit to be president, and that has been obvious since day one and long before day one. Yes, as I said, there is corruption and confusion and bad incentives and ordinary human frailty on both sides of our politics. And yes, we have a crisis of legitimacy in our society that is bigger than Trump, but Trump is the most malicious exploiter of it, and you cannot let your gaze wander from the core truth of this moment. We have a sitting us. President who is trying to hold on to power by shattering every democratic norm we have. And failing that, he is trying to sabotage the presidency of his successor for his own personal gain, and he has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. This is probably the lowest point in our democracy since the Civil War. Now, of course, there is a silver lining to this. If the worst doesn't happen, if Trump's attempt to delegitimize the election fails, and it now seems virtually certain that it will, and if we don't see some crazy degree of violence or political assassinations sparked by his conspiracy theories, we have discovered that much of what keeps our democracy intact is not a matter of our laws, but of our political norms. So many safeguards against corruption and abuses of power and a creep toward authoritarianism depend on the decency of the people in power. And what Trump has taught us, beyond any possibility of doubt, is that we can't rely on human decency. We need a system that can handle a psychopath. In the White House, however, it seems clear that most Trump voters really don't understand what's happening. And I know that sounds patronizing, but it's not meant to be. I mean, there are reports of people in ICUs right now dying from COVID who still think COVID is a hoax. That's how crazy our information landscape has become, and Trump has worked tirelessly to make it that crazy. Remember, Trump launched his political career with the birther conspiracy. And when he came to office in 2016, about a third of Americans believed the birther conspiracy, and 72% of Republicans believed it. Let that sink in. During the 2016 campaign, 72% of registered Republicans believed that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore that his presidency was illegal and illegitimate. And things have only gotten worse. Trump is President of the United States. He has tweeted QAnon articles suggesting that Obama and Biden had members of Seal Team Six murdered to conceal the fact that they never actually killed Osama bin Laden. The President of the United States. Tweeted that? Now, if you don't think that's a catastrophe for our country and for the world to have promoted such a person to the highest position of power, I'm afraid that's on you. Caring about this sort of thing isn't Trump derangement syndrome. If you don't care about a US. President who lies as freely as he breathes, who makes a laughingstock out of our country with nearly every utterance that's on you, these things actually matter, whether they matter to you or not. So who do we hold accountable for what has happened here and for what has almost happened and for what may yet happen? I do think we need to give something like 70 million people a mulligan here and then make a serious effort to solve the social problems that cause so many of them to support Trump. No doubt this is a conversation that will absorb many future episodes of this podcast, but we run a serious risk of moral hazard if there are no consequences for the people who decided to torch our democracy on the chance that they might personally gain from it. Imagine that a man attempts to rob a bank, but it doesn't work out. Let's say that after he's pulled out his gun and started screaming for everyone to get down on the floor, and perhaps after he's pistol whipped the guard, something goes wrong and it becomes clear that he won't be able to rob the bank after all, what's the point of no return reputationally? What's the last moment where you get to say, sorry, this isn't really a bank robbery, I'm not actually a bank robber. Everyone can get up off the floor now. We're just going to have to agree to disagree about what happened here. I do think a line has been crossed here. Again, not necessarily with respect to our laws, but with respect to norms that are even more important than many of our laws. Is it illegal for a sitting president to not commit to a peaceful transfer of power? Is it illegal for him to pretend to think that there was massive election fraud and to claim to have won an election that he really lost? Is it illegal for him to spread socially toxic lies every hour on social media? It doesn't seem so, but that's not the point. Trump has still managed to do tremendous harm to our society, and he seems committed to doing further harm. So at a minimum, I believe the right way to treat Trump and his crime family after January 20 is the way we treated OJ. Simpson after he was acquitted of a double murder that everyone knew he had actually committed. We should just let them fall into oblivion. Of course, I'm under no illusions that will actually happen, but it should happen. We should all do our best to withdraw our attention from this man who has gotten more attention in the last four years than any person in human history. And for those of you who still think that not acknowledging how bad Trump is is the only way to resist the craziness coming from the left, all I can say is that it seems quite clear that you're wrong. Trump was never an answer to the problem of the far left. In fact, the left has drawn a massive amount of energy and seeming credibility from him. It's true that the problem of illiberalism on the left has been growing for a long time, but it has gotten as bad as it has under Trump. And Trump has been bringing gasoline to that fire again because it has always served his personal interests to do so. What we need is real moderation and pragmatism and professionalism in our politics now. And while I was never very enthusiastic about Biden and Harris, there is a big difference between both of them and AOC. And again, if you want a real parallel for the dangerous insanity that's been encouraged by Trump, you have to go further left than AOC. Trump is president. QAnon right now, the most destructive thing about the Trump presidency has been the orgy of lying and misinformation that has subsumed everything in our public conversation. The utter devaluation of truth has been the worst part, because it affects everything else. Anyway, the next two months should be very interesting. I certainly expect there will be a transition to a biden presidency, but who knows, really? It still feels like something bad can happen here. But even after a smooth transition, there will still be a lot of hard work to do to steer our culture toward basic sanity on real issues the pandemic, the economic effects of lockdown, wealth inequality, more generally, social cohesion. Collisions with foreign adversaries like China and Russia, cybersecurity, climate change. The list of challenges is quite long and daunting, and it seems clear that only a fact based discussion will help us meet them. And with that, I will leave you. As always, thanks for listening./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private SS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am here with Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Thanks for having me again. So I'll give that dog a moment. You sent someone over to kill my dog? I'll sacrifice a lot for a podcast, but probably not your dog. Okay, good. Thank you, Caitlin. So now people have read the article that was embargoed last time around that we couldn't talk about. We should start there first. I should say you and I have already spoken about your health before. We obviously had before the last podcast, so we'll talk about it here as well. But I can't feign surprise at the ordeal you've been going through. But let's take the article part first because people obviously should just go read it. It's this really just wonderfully luminous and wise and witty. This is sort of not a surprise with you ever, but it all came together on this topic, which is revealing both your current health concerns and the way in which they're compounded by the COVID pandemic. And it was just all interesting and beautiful and triggered an outpouring of appreciation on Twitter, which, again, was totally unsurprising given who you are and how many people I know love you, because having done now a few podcasts with you, it's just absolutely obvious the degree to which you inspire love in an audience. And this may not be something that was obvious to you, but it was very obvious to me because I've been on the receiving end of it. So I guess my first question is, was there anything about the reception on Twitter and anywhere else you saw it that surprised you? The the bigger feeling was embarrassment, you know, because it's really intimate to open up your health issue. I mean, some people are really comfortable with it, and for me, it's not something, obviously, that I talk about. So it was the first wave of it was I just felt embarrassed to have laid all this laid this heavy trip on people or to feel that I was getting I don't know. I don't know. I just felt embarrassed. But then after about 24 hours, as always happens when you come out of whatever closet you're in, when the minute you come out of it, you're like, what's an incredible relief. Because I would be sort of tiptoeing around this many times in my work or in what was expected or hoped that I could do in terms of sort of making appearances, places. So it's always easier to just sit out there, just to have told the full any relevant truth. Once people know it, then you're not hiding it anymore. And it really gotten to the point that I felt like I was hiding my illness and that felt really bad. Well, let's summarize it for people who haven't read it. What is your diagnosis? And perhaps just track through the stages of its presentation. All right. I'll tell everybody. I bet they'll be super bored and just fast forward over this part of the podcast. But for anybody who's interested and I should say whatever we're going to say now is no substitute for reading your piece because thank you. I want that read. Please go. Thank you. Well, so I was a young mom in the sweet spot. I was 40, so not a young mom, but I had really young kids. I had twins who were four years old and behind my generation, I guess I was just one of these girls who really I didn't ever really want a career. I mean I thought about teaching school, which I did, and I thought about writing, which I do, but I really wanted to be a mom. I wanted to be a housewife. I didn't know the dark side of it, but I just thought having kids, which will be the best part of my life and then when they're little will be the super best part. Because my parents really hated having adolescent daughters and I kind of remembered how horrible that was for them. But it was no picnic for us either. So everything was fine. Never been sick, never thought of myself as sick, nobody that I knew in our family, we don't have a lot of family history, but nobody had had cancer, breast cancer. And I went for this like routine check up mammogram and then it was like well can you just wait a few minutes? We need to get another film. Oh, sure. You know, I'm not really my ears aren't like freaking up at this. And then, oh, he wants to have a sonogram. And two of my closest friends had to have a sonogram after their mammograms and been totally fine. So I thought, like I said, what happens when you're in your forty s you get the sonogram. And then right then and there he said, yeah, you have cancer. And and he said, and we're doing a biopsy now. And he never asked me if he could do a biopsy. Just the things that happen to you when you're really heavily medicalized. It's really hard to assert your will again or to even know because I remember lying there thinking, well do and I have a say in this? But I didn't say anything. And then he said like these needle biopsy a little bit painful. And then he kept saying, you have to prepare yourself. You have to prepare yourself. It was a Friday, so it would take, I don't know, until the next week, early to get the results of the biopsy. I guess it was Monday. And he kept saying he didn't want me to drive. I got in dress. He wanted me to see him. We wanted to meet to see him in his office, at which point he told me it was aggressive, very aggressive. And then he said, I don't want you to drive and I should call your husband. And I just had this animal need to get as far away from him as I could and to contain the information as much as I could. I just thought, something weird has happened in this building. I got to get out of here. I got to not have anybody know about it. And so I'm sure I shouldn't have driven. I'm sure I was in shock. And then my husband called. So the guy had called my husband, and I'm not blaming the guy at all. It's just sort of interesting that you start losing your I don't know, it's very easy to lose your sense of who you really are in this. But I'm sure the guy was right to call my husband, but I got home safely. Before we proceed. That does strike me as an anachronism. That does seem like a throwback to the 50s, where doctors sort of messaged around the woman to the man and in some cases didn't even tell the woman their actual diagnosis. This seems like a slightly Mad Men era doc you were seeing. Does it strike you that way in retrospect now, at the time? You're thinking of so many things. That's the last thing I remember, really, like, oh, God damn it, because my husband called on the cell phone and saying he knew. I just heard from so and so, but I think the doctor whom I had really gotten to know, he'd help me with another problem earlier. I think he was freaked out, and I just think there was a lot of very human emotions going back and forth between him and me, and I blame him. 0% for either of those acts. It just was part of the introduction to me of what it's like to have cancer, what it's like to have a really serious disease where, like, suddenly you think you've seen things. I've had a cesarean section. I've been up against it. You haven't been up against it until you get that really serious disease and you're in a whole other world. And so I had turned on stage three and I got slammed with just this kind of chemo. I don't think they give it anymore. They've written books about it's called The Red Devil. I can't remember what it's taxateer. Maybe it's just a horrible, horrible, horrible experience to go through that kind of chemo, but I had the chemotherapy, I had the surgery, the lumpectomy, I had the radiation by a very charming doctor who I later heard was kind of in the early stages of dementia, but I totally dug him, so he got along great. He was always telling me how beautiful I was, and I was like, this is the best doctor I've ever seen. Like, I'm bald, I'm shriveled, I'm like, is that the first sign of dementia accomplishment? I think so. I think so. I should have run for the hills. But anyways, I had a good remission, and I was just at that five year point that kind of hyped up as a significant point, and I had a huge, devastating recurrence where it was in my liver and my chest wall in my lungs, and I thought, oh, my God, I'm really going to die. I'm going to leave these kids, you know? And how old are your kids at that point? They are just about ten. And so on the one hand, I was like, okay, I got him through to double digits area, you know? But a kid really needs and wants his mom, especially a boy, I think 13, 1415. Up until then, they have a very deep need for a mom because they're so behind developmentally. Girls at that point, obviously, girls and mothers, et cetera. But I've noticed that boys have a deep need for mom until kind of that age. I was like, I wish I had gotten them there. Give me a little more about your life at that point now, are you still married to your boy's father? Yes. Okay. I don't actually know the backstory. You guys are still married? Oh, my gosh, yes. He's the cancer husband of the year. That's one of the things about everyone's had a crisis and everybody's had a tragedy, and that's where you really find out what people are made of, you know? Yeah. Okay, well, I'm very happy about that. Yes. As is everyone listening? Yes. Were you at this point working full time as a writer? Are you at Harvard Westlake School as a college counselor? No. By then, I had quit the school to become a mother. Took me a year and a half to get pregnant. I had the children. And what was it? What was I doing? Well, I had just started writing. I was just writing these articles at The Atlantic. I just started as a writer, and they'd given me this chance to write, and they'd liked what I'd written, so I'd written more and more. And then I had written one that caused this huge sensation, and I had been given this huge book deal. And I literally am getting the deal at the same week that I'm finding out. Like, I'm so sick. This is back at the original diagnosis. So anyways, I got better. I published the book. There was a lot of press, a lot of negative press. But then a lot of people who really liked the book, but of course I ignored them entirely as fools and really trusted everybody who hated more dementia. Yes, exactly. So I had done that and I had a contract for the next book and I felt a lot of pressure about that. But yeah, I was out there in the culture, I was doing my thing that I do and getting more and more confident in it. And then it hit me again and it was so bad because you hear like in your lungs, you see every bad. You were a bit younger than I am, but we're kind of in the same range there where we grew up with these, like, really horrible, like, TV movies of the week. And it would always be like, gosh, my elbow hurts, you've got elbow cancer. And then like, the whole rest of the TV movie is the person, like, losing their hair and dying. So I thought, this is so bad. And then a nurse in the private practice. I knew so little about cancer when we started all this that we asked people for names of practices and it was a private practice. Cedar Sinai, excellent practice, excellent doctor. I love him to this day. So I thought, oh, a private practice, that's got to be better than a public hospital or a teaching hospital. Obviously, if you pay for more for something or for your insurance, that's really the hero of this whole thing is I haven't have great insurance or my husband's job. But it turns out that you don't always have access to everything that you could possibly have access to. If you're kind of down the line in a private practice, they're kind of getting the first crack at medications that are being put out there, but they're not getting it the way the labs are. And when you're stage four, nobody's going to question what they offer you. So a wonderful nurse took me aside at that private practice and risked his job by closing the door and saying, I think you should get a second opinion. Because I had really trusted him and I asked him, what should I do? And he said, I think you should get a second opinion. And that was profound. Maybe we should define stage four for people who haven't been through this on any level. So you originally had breast cancer, but now it has metastasized to your lungs and liver and elsewhere. And so stage four is just the fact of having metastasized elsewhere in the body from the primary site in most cancers. I think that's the way the staging works. It's certainly the way the staging works in breast cancer. Stage four in most cancers and in breast cancer just means it jumped the fire break that you had it contained within just one within the breast or whatever the primary form of cancer was, and maybe it's even in. The lymph node, which was, in my case, true when I first got it, so that you can really get warmth with the chemo and all that, to try to kill it from ever getting into the blood at all. Although it's in a little bit, starting to get a little bit, but when it breaks the fire, you know, jumps the fire break, as I say, that's when that cancer has wildly gone through the system and is attacking and finding locations to build itself in different parts of the body. And that's really serious. And in my mind I'd always thought, and it used to be kind of a pretty soon death sentence, but someone else I know in Los Angeles, and if she's listening, she'll smile because she'll know who she is, who knows a lot about cancer. She just looked at me and said, you have to get closer to the science. You have a particular kind of breast cancer. It is marked by the overexpression of a certain kind of genetic material. All of that work is doing being done at UCLA. And I know you have to wait longer to be seen, and it's a hassle, but that's where you need to go. Because this guy, Dennis Slayman, you have her two new breast cancer, and he's the guy who's really hacked into that with this new drug, Herceptin, and then with a hall armamentarium that followed that. So I got an appointment with one of these brilliant young oncologists in his lab, Sarah Hervitz, and my last practice that said, well, we're going to section your liver and take out the part of your liver with the cancer in it. I was like, oh, that sounds really bad. She was like, not at all. She had so many treatments. She said, I think this one will be the best. We'll give you six treatments. Six, it's chemotherapy plus the herceptin, plus some other things that were from their armamentorium. And after three treatments, we'll give you a scan and see how it's going. And, you know, you go for the scan after three treatments, that's terrifying. But the really terrifying part is going to find the result, you know, getting the answer. And we had actually, we booked a night, actually, because her office is in Santa Monica and we're far east of there. And we just said, okay, we're going to book a night in a nice hotel. Because if it's bad news, we'll need time to pull ourselves together before we see the kids. And if it's good news, we'll have a nice night in a nice hotel. So she walks in and said, your tumors are gone. Like, there's, there's still traces in the blood. We have to finish this. But they were gone, and they stayed gone for eleven years of durable remission. Eleven years. And you just think, I mean, if it had been five years earlier, the thought that a woman with metastatic breast cancer with lesions big enough to be biopsied in the or. Would be like, not have a single one of them. After three treatments of chemotherapy, that was much easier than my first chemotherapy. And I was tiptoeing into there's a cohort, a very small cohort of women in Dennis Slayman's sort of research and work, who doctors are starting to tiptoe around calling them cured, which stage four cancer, there's no cure, et cetera, et cetera. We're never going to use that word, but they have gone so long with no remission of any kind or no recurrence rather of any kind, that they're starting to wonder if they're actually cured of breast cancer. And I thought I was going to be in that group, and then my tumor numbers started going up, and sure enough, eventually a scan came about a year and a half ago, or almost two years ago, a year and a half ago, that I'm once again metastatic. So it's not good news to find out you have metastatic cancer, obviously. And it was in my spine that was really scary to me because I could just sort of see, not being a person who did well in biology but was interested in biology, I could sort of see a tumor in a soft tissue kind of disappearing. It was harder for me to think of a tumor and bone disappearing, but yeah, they do. The lesion goes, and then the bone starts to heal. Even in someone who's like, what am I, 58? And I've got all this treatment. So my biggest issues really are I have from all of this treatment over all these years. I have a lot of health issues that come from the treatment, not from the cancer. And it's mostly these issues that now I've been taught before they were just my conditions, I guess, but now they're my underlying conditions. It's really bad. If your worst condition becomes an underlying condition, then it's like someone just layered on another even worse condition. So just telling the public, to the extent that I have a public or any public of people who don't haven't read me at all, that I have stage four cancer. In a shortish essay was going to take a lot of unpacking. Anyway, to explain that this tall subcategory that I have been in and maybe still am in that's very good news relative to bad news. And then trying to layer the COVID on over it. It was just very it was like an exposure dream in a way, even though it's been a relief. Had you spoken about it or written about it at all? Because I had sort of missed it, but I got the sense that you hadn't been completely in the closet with respect to having gone through the initial round of cancer. Well, in my first book, in the very epilogue, because I wrote it after I'd had this first bout of cancer, but was now back on my feet, I wrote about, oh, I had one other thing to tell you. I had cancer. And this is what it was like. It was just a few pages. And then a few years after that, the Oprah magazine asked me to write something about it, and I foolishly agreed. And something came out that was kind of I don't know, I didn't do a good job with that. And then I thought, never again will I write about cancer. And then I what was the painful response to that? It wasn't the response. It was my feeling that I hadn't done a good job in the essay, that I hadn't like what I'd done. But the Oprah reading public is not a big overlap with the people who often read my I don't know. The thing is that it's true that this is a very deathy situation, and so people who have no idea that you've been in a deathy situation obviously respond thinking you're dying, which of course I am, as we all are. But then that kind of makes you look anew at your situation like, oh my God, this is a really shocking, terrible situation. And then trying to resettle yourself, especially in a pandemic where you can't go and see the people, you can talk to them. But I guess whenever someone hears about it from the outside of me and my family or people who really know us, the reaction of the people tell me, yeah, I've been through a lot in 17 years. But when you're living your life, that's not ever how it feels. It's just you live your life with whatever hand of cards you have. Yeah. Well, there's a lot in there that's interesting. First, I want to flag that a deathy situation is the phrase I'm going to use now. Okay, it's yours. Take it. It's yours. That's one of the windfall profits of this episode of the podcast. Okay, good. It is interesting the way in which talking about something realize it just based on the response. You get to having spoken about it, and then you're dealing with the response, and often that feels like it concretizes a problem in a way that's not entirely representative of the experience of going through the problem. Right. I guess in microcosm I've experienced this where this is highly non analogous. But I don't know if you have a fight with your spouse, and then a friend catches you right on the heels of that, and they ask how you're doing, then you say you just had a, you know, a fight with your spouse, you know. Then the next time they talk to you, they're asking you, how it's going? You know, in the marriage, I found a good lawyer yet. Right. You're like, what are you talking about? Yeah, like, who's going to keep the kids? Right? But that has no relation to what you've actually gone through. Right. And so I can imagine there can be a kind of amplification that happens when now you're dealing with this huge public response. The other thing that's unique about cancer it seems is just the word, the concept of this particular illness being unlike any other. And this is still true, but I'm sure it was even more true 17 years ago. It's a scary word and it is the quintessence of a deathly situation. How has the concept of having cancer influenced the experience of having it? In the beginning, I remember thinking that first weekend because I had the appointments Friday afternoon and I remember the first weekend just thinking I can't incorporate this information. I just felt like it was outside of me and I had to somehow get it into me that it's just the cliche that this is something other people get. We really Freud. We live by convincing ourselves we're invulnerable when we're very vulnerable. Somebody's got to get breast cancer. I couldn't take it in. I just could not take it in. And it does seem different from getting a diagnosis of heart disease or emphysema or I mean there are obviously bad things to get that kill people but don't have this same charge. Do you think it's the result of the difference or the very common difference in treatment around cancer where chemotherapy and radiation are what you're now picturing and in many cases actually going to experience? And so this is the one disease you go to war with in a way that you don't with, say, heart disease. Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it for sure. And I think that it is again so deathy. And that most of the I always felt and I used to say beforehand, just kind of looking at you always look at obituaries and you read them and I remember thinking, yeah, the three things I noticed over and over are smoking, car accidents and cancer. It was not a scientific study, but I noticed that the things that I tended to be like whenever I would be about to take off an airplane if I felt frightened at all and say, it's not smoke, you're not smoking, you're not this and you're not that. Numbers are on your side, and it's just the war on cancer. Remember Nixon had that and it was just that all of these other diseases were sort of falling by the wayside. And my mother told me my sister's older than I am, so she was a baby in the 1950s. And my mother said sitting with the baby in her lap in New York to go and get one of the first kids to be in the cohorts that got the polio vaccine, my mother said she just thought, my baby's never going to have polio. My child. It was like such a joyous. Amazing. She couldn't wrap her mind around it. Because if you had been born in the knew a lot of people with kids who had gotten polio and a lot of parents whose lives had been just completely taken to a terrible place because their kids getting polio and so like all these other diseases seem to be falling by the wayside. And yet cancer has stayed with us for so long, and we know that it's the one that and I've always been adamant that I'll not be in this situation, that you could be treated in such a way that made your life even worse for three months and then you die right after that. You know that. So it's kind of like this thing that can potentially the treatment can be so horrible and it might not work. So it's really kind of a heavy thing to think about. Yeah. Although no bravery. I can't tell you how many times I've been told in the last 72 hours, thank you to anybody who said that to me, and many times in my private life how brave I am. Zero bravery. Zero, zero bravery. Someone comes to you and they say, hey, got a choice here. You have a life threatening disease. It can kill you in a few months, or we could try out this treatment. I'm like, I'll take the treatment. Let's give it door number two. I'll take door number two. Maybe it's a Zonk, but maybe I'll get there. So a lot of things I've learned about cancer, like, number one, how you feel. Total myth. If you have a good attitude, you're going to do better. It's a lot of studies on that. You could be a total bitch. You can be upset, you can cry every day. You take the medicine, you take the chemotherapy. Sometimes it works for you. Sometimes it fails you and you have to try another one. You don't have to have a good attitude. You don't have to be right with God. It's nice to be nice to all your caregivers, and you will be because they are so great. But you don't have to be nice to anybody. It's just the chemicals go in. There's a response. I think probably there's probably more compliance with treatment in people who have a good attitude. I've never had a good attitude ever in my life. And look at me at 17 years later. Wait a minute. Are you in the total bitch cohort of this study? Well, there have just been I remember asking somebody who knew about this very early on who studies this, and I said, I just feel like I have to be so good because I'm in such a precarious situation. She said, oh, no, Caitlin, I have seen the nicest people, and you probably know many very good people who died of cancer. And I'm like, well, that's really true. And then she said, trying to cheer me up, and I've known some real bitches who made it. And I'm like, okay, somewhere between total bitch and really nice person, but maybe more to the former that it's irrelevant. It's just irrelevant. What obviously we know. This children get cancer. Who's punishing them for that? What have they done? Nothing. It's beyond our knowledge. It's not beyond our knowledge. It responds well. Some cancers respond well to certain kind of chemotherapies. One of the aspects of your essay, which I know touched a lot of people, is the way in which you discuss reaching these various landmarks by reference to your sons, their graduation from preschool and elementary school and reserving a hotel suite for their college graduation, which now is indefinitely postponed due to COVID And just seeing the psychological suffering based on uncertainty, which, again, if we have our wits about us, should be experiencing in some measure, without a cancer diagnosis, we're all in a deathly situation, as you point out. We're not no one knows how long they're going to live, and therefore we could be magnifying the preciousness of time in this way anyway. And I think a fair amount of wisdom is dependent on taking death seriously before you've had any kind of diagnosis. But in your case, in the case of anyone who gets cancer, it sharpens up the story considerably. And I know I know that moved me and I'm sure it moved a lot of people. How has just thinking in terms of being a mom and seeing various hypothetical dates out there on the calendar, being the way in which this whole experience has been framed for you? Well, very helpful, because it was just I've got a mission, and it's not a mission about my life, it's a mission about my children's lives. And to the extent children can have their mother, they want their mother. So I just I will account in my life in two ways by it just so happened that they were in preschool when I was diagnosed and there was nowadays there are all these constantly graduations but there was this sweet little preschool graduation. And everybody was just so happy and bustling and taking their pictures. And I had no hair. I was in a head scarf. And I just remember thinking, this is going to be the only graduation you're going to get. Kindergarten rolls around, well, they got a graduation and I'm still alive, and I made it a few more years and I thought, I'm going to make it to elementary school graduation. And then I had my recurrence and I thought, oh, I'm not going to get there. But I did. Well, I made it to elementary. The years pass. I'm like, I think I've got high school in the back. Yes, I got it to high school, and then I really thought I had made it to college. And then I got this recurrence halfway through there being in college. But I got treatment. I did. Well, I sat on the phone to make the very first reservation allowable for the graduation of this year at Kenyan wonderful Kenyan College in Ohio at the Mount Vernon Grand. And then now, because of COVID it's been canceled. So, like, in the movie version of this I have to keep it getting canceled forever so that I can stay alive because the graduation will be the end point. That's your appointment in Samara. Exactly. My appointment in Gambier. Exactly. But what you ask about death? Two things and how we hold life preciously. I remember, like, 25 years ago. Do you remember when there was an Alaska airline flight that crashed maybe off the coast of Santa Barbara? It was a big crash full of people from La. So it was very meaningful, touched a lot of people. And the weekend edition of the La. Times after that, they had a one pager where they went and asked different religious leaders what meaning do you make of this? What meaning are your followers or does your faith hold for this event? And, you know, some people said there's, you know, predetermination or there's mystery or life is you know, God has plans that we don't see. But the last one was a Buddhist and the Buddhist said the cause of death is birth. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's really accurate. There's one thing we can say for sure that once you're born, at some point you're getting out of here. You're checking out. It's temporary. But the other thing about how we should be holding our lives in such a tender, close way all the time I think that's kind of the lesson of the play. Our Town by Thornton Wilder is that you can't it's kind of a corny play, but it's about a girl who kind of comes back to life and realizes how preciously she should be holding and everyone in the room should be holding each moment. But you just can't do it, even after you've gotten the word about it. If we lived life with the intensity of somebody who's looking at their kids after getting cancer diagnosis we wouldn't be able to do anything. And to some extent, we're in such a precarious situation at all times that the only way to deal with how precarious it is is to almost pretend it's not precarious. I think there's one strand of that kind of wisdom in extremists that we can seize and maintain at its highest level. And I'll grant you that we can't say goodbye to everyone. Like, we're mounting the scaffolds every time someone's just leaving to run an errand. So there's an intensity to our awareness of our connectedness to other people that we can't quite maintain. But I think we can resolve to not suffer over trivial things the way it would be obvious. We shouldn't be suffering over those things under the shadow of a cancer diagnosis. Right. Although maybe someone is kind of a jerk to you and you have cancer. You don't have to necessarily think to yourself I must see the humanity in this person. Because it's like, I think you get to still know. You still get to have I mean, it's very refreshing. Let me tell you, when you're in a deathy situation, the minute some small trivial thing bothers you, you're like, what a wonderful sensation to just be, like, annoyed by something. God, it's excellent. Okay, well, speaking of that, I wasn't sure I was going to bring this up, but you did have one response on Twitter that was just amazing. I mean, amazing to it. Wasn't it great? Wasn't it the best thing ever? All Twitter kind it was glorious, but it was so perfectly crafted that it was one of those moments where you think, okay, this is a simulation we're living in, and it's showing, it seems, because this is just too on the nose. So you receive a tweet which has since been deleted, I think. Oh, has it? Yeah, which I guess maybe shows some scruple. No, it shows anxiety. Shows anxiety. If it had been a lauded tweet, it would be the pinned tweet. Yeah. It wasn't based on any scruple. I'm sure you're right about that, but I'm going to bend over backwards to be charitable to this person. All right. And you don't even have a deathly situation. Actually, I was charitable to this person, but carry on. You were actually you were perfect in your response. No, I was even more perfect in my response, but I'll tell you, at the end, it was private communication. Oh, good. So, yeah, I want to hear everything. So anyway, this woman, Dr. Amita Kalishandran, who is a doctor, and I was surprised and doubly horrified to learn a New York Times writer tweeted at you in response to your cancer article in The Atlantic. Yes, but open your eyes to the other Karen's in the room. You're going to have to explain what Karens are to people. Yes, but open your eyes to the other Karen's in the room. Like Caitlin Pacific. That's your Twitter handle. Her piece was slightly less overt and was likely edited down for tone. I read Caitlin's cancer story and sincerely hope she uses these last years of her life to learn to be a little bit less racist and anti feminist. Okay, isn't that the best thing ever? I mean, I'm not saying it in, like, a badass way. It's just if we just needed any evidence that I'm sure if she met me, she wouldn't have said that, but that Twitter is just this kind of this place where you float all these trial balloons and they're kind of meaningless. They're just absolutely meaningless. And even as I saw it, I thought I knew there'd be a ghoulish response from somebody because you're always hearing about, you know, how in the murders in the elementary school in Connecticut, sandy Hook, and there's this whole branch of thinking that they were not killed and it was a simulation. And parents can't even go to their children's graves, which was even the phrase children's graves is so obscene. So you know that it's a big country with a lot of people, but I didn't think it would be somebody who is a physician. It writes for The New York Times occasionally. And the Big Path. The other really horrible discovery was that she wrote her first thing on her own Twitter site was, here's my first article for The Atlantic. Yeah, but two weeks ago, she wrote for The Atlantic, and I was like and then also mindfulness. Mindfulness is one of her main passions, which was fantastic for my brain. I felt like the only thing I was going to find, like, what else is she like? And she slept with your husband. It's like, what else has this woman done to me? So that it just became kind of drool. There was nothing but drollery to be had. Well, so I'm less interested in singling her out for abuse than in flagging. What was so interesting about seeing this tweet for me? First of all, my obviously, I feel very protective of you, and as did many people following you. So the response from Twitter collectively was just analogous to this will date me and you, perhaps, but do you remember the film Silkwood with Meryl Street? Yeah. Okay, you're telling me that that's not a current movie? Half of our audience will have never heard of this on any level, but there's a scene where she's leaving the reactor and sets off the the radiation alarm, right? And everything goes into just emergency mode, and she gets a horrific shower with the bristle brushes. And it's like everyone following you on Twitter just had that reaction. It was just, oh, my God, this is the most toxic despicable hottake possible. And people were fairly modulated in how much they slammed her. But the one thing that could be said in her defense is she couldn't have been referring to your cancer article for having been edited down for tone. She must have been referring to some other piece that she thought, well, this is the thing. So I published a long piece about Meghan Markle about two months ago, and it was a very positive Meghan Markle. It was sort of saying explicitly, she's the best thing that ever happened to the royal family. It's a multicultural Britain, and that's an all white balcony up there and really talked about what she had been through and ultimately decided that the Queen of England is really an admirable person because she is someone who just, no matter what, has put her own desires last and what she perceives to be the country's desire first. And so at the time of that article, there was a perception that it was motivated by racial animus. And I was really interested, and I started to engage with people. I said, what is it that you find here that's racial animus? And they would say, you never said this. You never said this. You never said this. You said this. You said this. You said this. And I said, I did say all the things you thought I should say. I never said any of the things you thought I shouldn't have said. And then I started replying to the Twitters with the tweets about it with lines directly from the article itself so that they would see that I think that they just saw the article and that it was about Megan. And they're very protective of Meghan, which I certainly understood because when I was young, I was very protective of Princess Diana, whatever. But so that had been kind of what she was responding to, for sure, was this two month old Megan Markle piece. So Karen and a Becky I don't know what happened to Becky. I don't know if Karen killed Becky and now Karen is ascendant or if Becky and Karen are like cousins and kind of like Midge and Barbie, where there's some slight distinction. But these are middle aged white women who or maybe any age woman, maybe Karen is the middle aged woman and Becky is the younger sister. I don't know. But they're clueless white women whose casual expectation of privilege, which they wouldn't even think of as privilege in the world, comes at tremendous cost to other people, and in particular to African American women. And I think they have the people who believe in the Becky Karen continuum, I would say they're absolutely right about that. No argument. Have seen it many times. And I wrote 15 years ago, a long cover story was really the first story in a big national magazine that really said at length what we think of as a women's movement, as feminism, has been tremendous gains for wealthy white women. And not only has it been far fewer gains for women of color and poor women, but in fact, white women have leveraged rich white women, successful professional white women have leveraged their gains on the exploitation of darker skinned women. So I agree with them about a lot of that. But she was dead wrong about this essay. And then you would sort of think but not only wrong about the essays, she seemed to be suggesting that the transgressions were all the more conspicuous for their absence. Right. It had been likely edited down for so now we have to deal with the dog of racism that doesn't bark, right? It's incredible. And the thing that I think provokes such delight in people, certainly in me, is that this was a crystallization of the problem that we've been commenting on for now years, but the way in which the antecedent good intentions that get organized into wokeness become a kind of mental disorder, right? I mean, this is just such a bad take at this moment on you and your cancer story from a doctor. And again, the fact that she's a New York Times writer, she's written, I don't know, six or seven pieces for them, and that's enough to call her a New york Times writer for sure. It compounds the horror of this. I mean, honestly, if she were just a doctor, I'm not sure I would be inclined to even name her in our discussion here. But she has a journalistic responsibility not to be this clueless beyond the Hippocratic Oath of a doctor. You could imagine a doctor who just doesn't know how social media should work, but that's not the case here. Upon reading that, how much of your brain's real estate was given over to being offended or annoyed, and how much of it was just pure delight, I will be honest that in the moment, it was extremely painful. Yeah, it was. And I always remember this great routine NZ Ansari had where he said he scrolling through his tweets or whatever, and there was some young woman who said, I just love is he's Ansari? And he said, she just assumed that I would never find that tweet. And he's like, of course I found the tweet. That's all I do. I'm a comedian. I sit home looking at Twitter, and then I go to work at night. So it's sort of like a lot of times, people tweet things out, assuming that the other person won't see them or maybe won't react to them as a human being, in a sense. And it was such a shocking thing. It was so shocking. Well, the fact that she's the remaining years, it was a lie to say, I sincerely hope she spends her remaining years. So the idea is like, okay, she has decided that I am anti feminist and a racist, and I'm going to spend my few remaining years, which she's giving me a prognosis now and then when I am a perfect vehicle of cleanliness, I can die. There won't even be like that. I can bring this out to the world. It's just that I must prepare for death by cleansing myself of sins that she says I have but cannot prove that I have. Right. Which were all the more evident by their absence in your article because you had been so successfully edited. Right, yeah. I mean, the fact that she's a doctor. There's something truly vile about a doctor playing the prognosis card in some way. To dunk on you to make a social justice point that is obviously an error. The fact that this is what's so fucking vile about this. The fact that the social justice triumphalism could co opt the Hippocratic oath, the role of a doctor in talking responsibly about cancer, a cancer diagnosis, and all of the suffering and uncertainty and sheer chaos that is in that bag when you open it. That's what I think everyone found so despicable, and I think rightly, so she's deleted the tweet for reasons that are, I'm sure, self serving. It would be nice for her to actually apologize to you. Let's pivot to that. Because for me, it's interesting to consider how we repair our public conversation around moments like this, because it seems to me that there should be some apology adequate to this moment that you and anyone else could accept. Right. It's like, for me, this is something I've referred to in previous conversations as the physics of apology. I think it's an interesting question to consider what constitutes and what should constitute an adequate apology. So you do something wrong, you say something stupid, you reveal intentions that were despicable, and you think better of it, and you actually want to repair the situation. And so that really the only instrument available is an apology. The closest I can get to it is for an apology to be acceptable, it has to be clear what process you went through so that you're no longer the same person who committed the original transgression. So for her to successfully apologize to you, the apology, it would have to reveal that she stands in the same place, or at least a relevantly similar place to her original, in this case, tweet that you and everyone else who found it despicable do. She has to be able to look back on what she did with more or less the same horror that everyone found appropriate in the moment the tweet was seen, and to apologize from that place, and it has to be intelligible how a person had that epiphany. Otherwise people will think they're just faking it, they're just trying to get out of hot water. And it's not a sincere apology. So for an apology to be sincere, you have to be able to articulate or at least seemingly display a journey out from the place where you were the asshole who was so clueless as to say or do this wrong thing, and now you're the person who you're able to say, I can't believe I did that. That's just mortifying. I'm so sorry. I hope you accept my apology. It can only be credible if that journey is plausible. Well, I think a lot about apology. I've had to make a lot of apologies in my life because I screw up a lot. Maybe everybody screws up to some extent, but this is for me when I make an apology. And number one, I have to own every part of the thing that was hurtful about what I did. So it's not about a lot of explanation for why I would do that thing. It's just that thing must have hurt you in this way and this way and this way. And that is grievously wrong. And I am extremely sorry. And I really want to know if there's anything I can do to, in any level, repair this. That's to me as a gold standard for apology. Now, the gold standard for forgiveness there is no gold standard. I forgive her a thousand percent. And the reason for that isn't that she sent me what I consider a very not good apology and sort of the pantheon of apologies. The reason for that is I don't want to be changed to her in anger if I don't release her in a complete forgiveness so that I can look forward. Hey, she's 31. She's learning. She's trying to get her hustle on with this website. If I don't turn away from that and just say forgiven and mean it, even though I can laugh at how cruel it was and how much it hurt me, then I'll be chained to her forever, and I can't even really remember her name right now, so I totally, really legitimately forgive her. Right. I missed that part. Maybe perhaps you telegraph that in the last few minutes. Did she send you an apology? That was so I looked back on at the Twitter that day, and somebody said, that was really cruel, and she said, I've apologized privately, and that was my only second tweet. I was like, I didn't see any apology. And she said it was sent out at 05:28 p.m.. As though, like, I was maligning her about her apology, and she had the receipt for it, but then I found it. She had sent it to my work email, and it was a super long it started with, well, first place as an editor told me, and I was like, you're really right about that. She's like, why? A private apology for a public wrong? Yeah, that's the first mistake. Yeah, she said something really terrible about you in public, but you didn't apologize for it in public. You're sneaking it around this day. But I kind of scanned it. It was more upsetting to me in many ways. And then I thought, Hold on, there's a really good game I rarely play, but it's always a good game to play, which is like, what if I were an incredibly evolved, good person, which I'm not? What would the Buddha do exactly? They would accept the apology and not be lying about it. They would accept that there was some apologetic intention. And then my brilliant son Patrick, whose picture was in that, the article you're talking about his picture when he was a little boy, the day before I got cancers in there, he said, and then you would tell her to stay safe in this pandemic. And I'm like, oh, Patrick, that's the killer right attitude. Can I have it? And then I had to think through that several different ways, and I was like, yeah, I hope she stays safe. You know, she's a young woman. She's a physician. She's she did something really hurtful. I don't see any evidence that she I don't know. I just hope she does well, and I do forgive her completely. Now, forgiveness doesn't mean that you're open to be hurt by someone again. You don't make yourself vulnerable. You're not kumbaya we're not going out for high tea anytime soon, ever. But it just means I'm not changed to her anymore. I got a lot of other enemies to keep tight in my body, you think out loud rather freely, and that's what makes you such a delightful interlocutor. And so no doubt you have provoked people to send tweets of this sort in the past. Never this bad. I've had some bad tweets sent to my way. I've had some horrible reviews. No one has ever said, I hope she spends her remaining years atoning for sins she doesn't have. No one's gone that far. Yeah, well, I think we all hope that the good doctor spends the remaining years of her life learning to be less sanctimonious. I think that would be a good use of it. You know, she's going to be writing, we will like, in two days see her New York Times piece about how horrible we are to have had this discussion. Yeah, well, I'm trying to have it in a way that I will not feel the need to apologize for again. I'm holding her even on the heels of a bad apology. I think there would actually be a way for her to adequately apologize. Can you apologize for a bad apology? Can you pull yourself up by the final bootstrap here and get back to zero? I mean, can you imagine? I would not have had that level of self knowledge when I was her age. I'm 58. What if we could get her on the line right now and have a conversation? Do you think there's any way that conversation would go? Well, it would converge on a full reboot of basic human decency and we could all be friends. I would start it with someone much higher up on the feeding chain of my enemies than this one. I don't see any need to have any. I really think that maybe you need to be a lot more deathy to really understand how apology and forgiveness works and to really understand that forgiveness releases you and you don't have to. Do you'll see these people who forgive the killers of a loved one? Yeah, you can spare me from cancer for 500 years. I don't think that's going to be happening. But I can free myself from her. But I don't want to have but part of it is what I'm trying to say is just because you've forgiven someone doesn't mean it's a love in. And it certainly doesn't mean, as I always tell people who are in any kind of abusive relationship, it doesn't mean you let the abuser back into your life if they haven't shown any possible sign of having changed. You forgive them, but you keep your fence close to them. Yeah, you're talking about there's two layers of forgiveness here or two forms. So you can forgive somebody who is actually unrepentant, who's still, even in the extreme case, a danger to you without losing your awareness of the danger they represent. You want nothing more to do with them, but you can forgive them in some deeper whether the Christian model summarizes it or the Buddhist. What you can notice is to fail to forgive is to grasp some kind of hot coal of suffering, which you actually can release on your side. I mean, you there's no there's no reason to be carrying this person around in your mind with your hatred of them or your your anger or resentment so you can perform that miracle on your side, all the while leaving this person out there in the real world completely unchanged. What's interesting for me is the warranted forgiveness based on that person's true apology. I would love to fully understand what makes it possible for someone who has really wronged another person to become aware of it and apologize, and for that apology to be so sincere and real, such that genuine friendship between those two people is thereafter possible. That's the thing we need more of in our world. We also need the former. We need people just to be able to put down the burden of their reaction to assholes. Well, I often talk to young women about because some of the best minds of our generation or their generation some of the best minds of the generation that's young now that are female, half of it they just feel for reasons to protect themselves. They can't go on any kind of a public platform such as Twitter because these hideous, hideous things that flow back to them are so poisonous. And once it gets gendered, once you have really angry, anonymous men saying things to young, very public women, it gets into a place far, far beyond what this was about. And so I'm always telling them, don't worry about that. Pay no attention. It's nothing. It's pixels. It's somebody else on the other side who's just you're as remote to them as, like, Richard Nixon, who's dead and gone. You're just like a public figure. They don't think if they're not having any kind of personal communication with you, just ignore it. So I tried to live into the advice that I always give young women, which is just this had a little more bite, as I say, because she publishes where I publish, and because I said, I have children. I want to live for their graduation. And she told me to, like, I should use my remaining years atoning for a sin that she's divined that I have. But that was edited out. Forget your children. Just spend the free hours becoming less racist and less anti feminist. Yes, that's the project. And if she thought that The Atlantic would public the Atlantic began. It was founded by abolitionists, thought that they would be, oh, we have this racist writer. Let's just lightly edit her for tone is absurd. There was another thing I noticed. I've thought about this before. I don't know if we've spoken about it. This doctor is obviously very focused on the problem of privilege, and I looked at her Twitter feed after I saw this tweet, and there's. Just a lot of stuff about privilege and wokeness more or less wall to wall. But I couldn't help but notice that she's a very attractive woman. Right. And this is a form of privilege that few of us are talking about, but it is as real as privilege gets, as just being a beautiful woman or a very handsome man is not nothing in this world. And I guess it sort of compounds the irony here, but it struck me as a final layer of a lack of awareness. If you look like Padma Lakshmi and you're going on and on about privilege, there's a ridiculousness to the project. When you think of the advantages that just effortlessly flow to people who are very attractive in our culture, you have to at least take the wokeness game a little more lightly than you would otherwise. How do you think of that form of privilege in our society? Well, first place, if there's anything in the world she is not unaware of, it would be her beauty, I would say. Just the way she displays herself brightly. So beautiful young woman. There's a wonderful English expression that at age 50, you get the face you deserved like that. It is going through life as a beautiful or a pretty or attractive young woman. Oh, man. A lot of doors fly open and you're intensely aware that it's going to stop, but then you kind of charter over into confused older lady and they open the doors too. So maybe it's not as dire, but for sure I would say more to the point is that she's Canadian and she's presenting herself as a sufferer of the ancient wrongs against people of color in this nation, which is just a very odd I missed that point. Odd part of it. But I don't even want to let's not talk about her anymore. I don't want to think about it. Maybe she's a Russian bot. Maybe we just have been successfully trolled. Well, only a Russian bot could troll the op ed section of the New York Times. It's just a matter of time. Yeah. Okay. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but the goal of this post mortem amita was not to be mean spirited, but to try to extract whatever lessons can be found in in yet another amazing installment of social media in the midst of the deathy situation we call life. Right. Oh, that's a good title for a book. Kind of a cheesy book, but one I wish I could write and make a fortune on because it sounds like something I would buy. Okay, so before we move on to even more superficial topics than Twitter, so what is your understanding of your prognosis now? And just one of the points of your article was the way in which this COVID pandemic has compounded the hassle, among other things, of just dealing with ongoing cancer treatment. Give us a picture of your current situation and these are some of the implications of the pandemic that people aren't really thinking about. We think about elective procedure as not being done, but an elective procedure is a cancer scan or even in some cases a cancer surgery. Bring us up to the moment with your health. Well, part of having cancer at this stage is that you have to get a lot of Pet CT scans because you have to find out if the treatment you're on is working and if it has the cancer stable or if the cancer is growing during in the presence of this treatment. Meaning you have to get a different treatment, you have to change your treatment. And then because of very long story with these other cancer treatments I've had in the past, they have given me certain other problems that have to be checked a lot that I gained because I was treated for cancer. So I should have really had a Pet CT scan probably a month ago and I will have it this month on the 27th because they're really trying to push anything they can do. I don't know, really. In the beginning, if it was because they felt that the hospitals out here in California would be overrun as they have been in New York City, or if they just wanted patients that have these underlying conditions to stay out of, hospitals that are so full of every kind of thing floating around could be COVID as well. As much as possible. I don't know. But at a certain point you have to get your scan. So I'll go there and then I have to go a lot to get my infusions. So with that it's just a lot of like they call you first and ask you the questions and then you're out in the about symptoms. Do you have any of the symptoms? No. And I would love to have a test for this thing because I wonder if in early January I might have kind of been exposed to it because I was a bit sick in early January and so it was my husband and he'd just come back from New York. But the beautiful, perfect, available tests are not as perfectly beautifully available as we've been led to believe. But anyways, then they take your temperature and then finally they let you in to the infusion space and you're kind of like I've made it to this horrible place where I get treated for cancer but everyone there is really nice. So there's a lot of just things you have to jump over and I'm not parking down in the basement because I don't want to have more people in my car but I want to go down there to give a tip to the guys I know. So it's all a little bit challenging, I'll admit, but a lot of people are in a lot worse situation and are you still taking her septin or has it moved on to other drugs. Well, now I take her septin because obviously it failed me because I'd been on her septin every three weeks for eleven years. So I started to the cancer assert itself more strongly against it, but I still get it in combination with this other drug that's now in the armamentorium called Progetta, and then with an injection of huge horse size injections of something else every three weeks. The thing is, I'll be on treatment the rest of my life until or unless something better comes along or more definitively, curative. So the first one that I tried was doing a good job, but I just couldn't imagine living my life on it. I was just too sick from it, right? I mean, I was nowhere near as sick as I was on actually being on chemo. And it was a chemo, but it was this smart bomb kind of chemo where it goes through your body and it only explodes inside a cancer cell, which is wonderful, but it does still, so you don't lose your hair or anything, but it does still left me really tired and kind of sick. So then I switched up to this new treatment. So there's a lot in the armamentorium and it just goes to show when you throw a whole lot of money and a whole lot of science at one very particular problem, you start getting some answers to it. Science is real, I guess. Well, needless to say, vast numbers of people love you who haven't even met you because your spirit comes through so clearly in your voice, both on the page and in conversation. I think not meeting me is probably inducive to me. This could be the sweet spot. Just enough, Caitlin. It's my next book. Your next book? Okay, so pivoting to. In some ways these are equally existential topics because we're talking about the fate of global civilization here when we're talking about politics at the moment. But in our last podcast, you and I said that I think we call that the New York Times, but a general journalist would have to deal with the target scam if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely, entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, very brief housekeeping here. Once again, my meditation app is available@wakingup.com, and if you're using the app and finding it valuable, your reviews are incredibly helpful. Please leave those in the App Store or in the Android store. And any reports about bugs, please send directly to wakingup.com. We are continually fixing those and pushing new updates, so please make sure you're using the latest version. My major priority for this year is to make the waking up course as good as it can be. So thank you for all the feedback. Today I'm speaking with Sally Settle. Sally is a practicing psychiatrist and lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine. She's an expert on addiction, and she focuses on mental health policy as well as political trends in medicine and psychiatry. And her most recent book is Brainwashed the Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, which she wrote with Scott Lillianfeld. Anyway, we talk about addiction. We discuss the opiate epidemic and the significance of fentanyl. We talk about PTSD. We cover the intrusion of politics into medicine. We also talk about the ethics of organ markets, the buying and selling of organs. Anyway, fascinating conversation. This is one that I hope will be of practical use to anyone who either has suffered from addiction or knows someone suffering. There were a few connection and latency issues that you'll hear, but nothing too terrible. This is what happens when you do these interviews remotely. In any case, I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. And now I bring you Sally satellite. You were recommended to me by our mutual friend, Steve Pinker. It was a fulsome recommendation of your expertise on many topics that we're going to touch, and here you are. So thanks for coming on the podcast. Well, thank you. And thanks to Steve Pinker. Obviously a great fan of his and yours. I'm a longtime podcast listener, so yeah, so you were reminded me we met at one of those beyond belief conferences at the the Salk Institute back in in 2006 or so. Yeah, I think it was more like 2009. It was quite a while ago. And yeah, it was very interesting. I think I was writing a book at that time with Scott Lillianfeld on the promise and peril of neuroscience in the public square that was a very important meeting for me, actually. I learned about a lot of people's work there and I was familiar with yours, but I heard your talk and I remember I spoke on since I'm a clinician, I'm a psychiatrist. So I try to stick with clinical matters and see most things through that lens. How brain science, how junk science all refracts through a clinical lens? So I spoke about post traumatic stress disorder and how it is both a product of brain and mind, other words, mechanism, which is brain function and meaning. And that in my field, I think we've tended to be a little reductionist about it and see it largely through the lens of anxiety, of a fear response that hasn't extinguished after the stressor has gone away, which is, to me, the essence of continuing fear. And that's very highly legitimate. And, of course, one of the best therapies is exposure therapy, which touches on that mechanism. But there is so much more to post traumatic stress disorder in terms of what keeps it alive for people, and that often has to do with meaning. That was my yeah, I want to talk about that. There are many intersecting issues here with addiction and the opioid epidemic and PTSD, and so I want to dive into all that. But first, more generally, how do you view your work as a psychiatrist? Because you're sort of at the nexus of clinical work on these various fronts, but also you comment on the politicization of science and medicine, and there's kind of, to some degree, a culture war component to what you've been doing. How do you summarize your approach to psychiatry? Well, very much there is a culture or component. In fact, I wrote a book back in 2001 called PCMD. How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine. And and then I collaborated with Christina off Summers in 2005 on a book called One Nation Under Therapy, and both of those books had a very thick thread of politicized science or even junk medicine. And in fact, in a way, so much of it comes down to the critiques often came down to explanatory reductionism. And and as an addiction psychiatrist, that's my main field. And I do work I do work part time in a methadone clinic. I've done that for about 20 years. And this year, I'm actually spending the year in a small town in Ohio trying to understand the I even call it an addiction epidemic at this point. Not just an opioid epidemic in a small town compared to an urban area. And there are lots of interesting differences we can talk about. But the overarching, I guess almost everything I've written has to do with some sort of perversion of the data or some sort of questionable interpretation. And so just give you an example. Take, for example, post traumatic stress disorder, since I brought that up, a reductionist approach, and not an incorrect one, but just one explanatory level would be at the level of the amygdala, at the level of neuroscience. I'm not saying it's illegitimate at all. It's very real, it's very true, but it's just one level. And when you reduce things to one level, we do that in addiction as well. Now, the dominant view of addiction is that it's a brain disease. And anytime you reduce things to one level, it's it's obviously a precursor to oversimplification. And when you're in the clinical world and policy world, that's usually a recipe for a bad policy. And it's also a recipe for politicization because it can foster a victim narrative, because someone if there's a certain level of explanation that can be traced back to a perpetrator, then it becomes a victim narrative. And any time again, there's someone to blame. And in the case of the opioid crisis, there's been much focus on, of course, the pharmaceutical companies, and I do think they bear some responsibility, don't get me wrong, but it also very much fits into litigation. But of course, as a clinician, I'm most concerned with how it may undermine the best kind of care. So pretty much everything I've written about, yeah, it goes to these kinds of oversimplifications and what's being left out. Now we have to be more nuanced. Right, let's start with addiction, because it is obviously an enormous problem and many people listen to this podcast will either have some firsthand experience with it themselves or know somebody suffering with some version of it. What should we understand about addiction at this point? I should reference another podcast I did, which I don't know, you may have heard. Do you know Johann Hari? The journalist? So he's written a couple of books, one on the war on drugs and addiction, Chasing the Scream, and the other on depression, Lost Connections. He came on the podcast and he's a great speaker and a very interesting guy. But he's taken a line through both of those topics that seems to deemphasize the role of biochemistry and the disease model, certainly of addiction, and puts the blame far more on the lack of meaning and lack of connectedness that someone may experience in their life. And he draws a lot of motivation from a few experiments. One is famously described as the Rat Park experiment, which you probably know about. So in the aftermath of that podcast, I received some angry pushback from people who didn't like that line at all. In Johann's defense, he doesn't actually discount the role of biochemistry, but if you get him talking, he can certainly seem to. One question off the top is, is there much daylight between your view of addiction and the one he's putting forward? And whatever your view is, what do you think people should understand at this moment about? I think there's a little daylight. I agree with you. I think one could walk away from his excellent work. I admire him very much. But you could walk away from that with perhaps an undue emphasis on the cultural, social, psychological dimensions. However, I think that my profession or the addiction field has over medicalized addiction. And I don't say that as someone who is not enthralled to the technology of brain imaging, but I think we have over medicalized it to the point where we put too much emphasis on the I'll call them anti addiction medications. People call it mat, and I'm referring there to methadone, bubinorphine, and then there's another medication now, TREXone, which is an opioid blocker. These are all excellent medications, and I use them every day. I'm going to prescribe them. And occasionally there is a patient who gets on methadone, and I would say he would fit the classic medical model, which is to say that addiction is something almost imposed on you, even. We call it a person with substance use disorder. And I realize in medicine we have to give things shorthand names, but I even cringe sometimes when I hear that because it makes it sound as if it's something that happened to you. And addiction is a very intricate and deeply personal kind of affliction. So, for example, basically I see things on a large spectrum, and as a clinician, you take people as individuals. But occasionally I'll see a person who says, all I need is the methadone and I'll be fine. And usually that's not the case. They're on the methadone. So what does that mean? Methadone, of course, is an opioid replacement. It's a synthetic opioid, actually. Can you remind people, why is the transition from heroin or another opiate to methadone advantageous at all? Why is it given as a treatment? Well, if one is abruptly withdrawn or one loses supply to opioids and they've been on it chronically and on a substantial dose for a while, even though some people low doses can even precipitate withdrawal when they stop it abruptly. And that's basically just your body just already adapted. There's been neuro adaptation to the chronic exposure. And so there's a withdrawal syndrome. And it can be very intense, extremely intense, to the point where some people will continue using drugs just to avert the withdrawal. People feel extremely ill. It's been called the worst flu you've ever had. Nausea, evolving shakes last about 72 hours at its worst, and then it's over in about a week. Some people have documented what's called a protracted withdrawal syndrome, which is sort of a low grade withdrawal, which could go on even for months. And so it's highly destabilizing, and you can't break the cycle. A lot of people can't break the cycle on their own, I should add. Many people do, and clinicians don't see them. But the folks we see obviously have a very hard time stopping drugs on their own. So to suppress the withdrawal symptom, there's this replacement opioid. It's called methadone. And buprenorphine, which is a partial agonist methadone is a full agonist. Mureceptor will suppress the withdrawal and it also suppresses craving. So as you can imagine, that's an excellent way to break the cycle and stabilize someone. For most people it's not enough. It's necessary, but it's far from sufficient. They have so much repair work to do. Not only do they have to repair all the damage to their life that was done while they were addicted, all the bridges they've burned, all the relationships they've destroyed, all the jobs they may have lost, the reputation, the health, there is also the problem of what predisposed them to using in the first place. And this is where I'm very much with Johan in saying that most, but not all, but most people I've treated most addiction memoirs well, all addiction memoirs I've read talk to a kind of psychic, profound psychic distress. It often takes the form of self loathing as one of the most prominent themes. But other people want to repress painful memories. Some people, I think, just should have been on a better dose of Prozac or something else because they're using it to deal with anxiety and depression. And sometimes conventional medication can be what they need, but other times it's a more existential kind of lostness. And these drugs really help. They really do. And sometimes they're a very good they're just a good numbing agent. In fact, I refer to them as oblivions. You've heard of stimulants and depressants have a new class called oblivions. And in fact, that's what Morphine is, right? It's Morpheus from the god of morpheus who lived by the river. I'm going to mispronounce this because I'm not a Greek scholar, but lethe and that's the river of oblivion. So and these drugs, of course, have a profound history. So that's what the that's what replacement opioids do and that's huge, but it's rarely enough. Now, occasionally there's a person for whom it is enough. This is a person, let's say, for whom the withdrawal was so or the avoidance of withdrawal was such a powerful engine for continued use, that once you took care of as a clinician, once we basically treated the withdrawal, the person had enough social capital. Just had enough of a social network to be able to get back on his or her feet, just with a medication. That happens to be rare in my experience, but it would happen. And in that case, I would say the person fit the medical model more snugly. But in most cases, in fact, we think of addiction or b. I say we because Scott Williamsfield and I have written about this quite a bit. We think about it as operating on many different levels simultaneously, obviously on the neurobiological plane, but on the psychological one, on the behavioral one. It's incredible how important cues can be, how important conditioning is in perpetuating drug use and also in treating drug use. Because, of course, one of the first things you try to get to patients to work on is identifying the kinds of kinds of situations, the kind of internal mood states, the kind of people they're around that get them craving. And that's a pure Pavlovian phenomenon. And that's part of cognitive behavioral therapy for addiction, is to get people to recognize these things. And sometimes they're obvious. You don't drive by your dealer's house. I had a school teacher once who had to get what do you call those things? Like a marker board as opposed to a chalkboard, because a chalk dust reminded him of cocaine. Right. Well, what is the role of AA in kind of framing our beliefs around addiction? Because there's this model that specifically an alcoholic is somebody who is irretrievably suffering from a kind of disease. And once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. I actually don't have direct experience with AA or addiction. I may be getting it slightly wrong in terms of just how they place emphasis on this, but what's your view of the role AA has played in all of this? And in what sense is addiction a disease? And what sense does that analogy break down? I actually don't consider AA the source of what I think is a problematic medicalization I attribute that to the National Institute on Drug Abuse and we can get back to that. But as far as AA is concerned, interestingly, in the early 30s it did not use the word disease. But in any case, if you look at the Twelve Steps, there's so much about they do have a spiritual dimension to them. There's a big emphasis on the so called moral inventory. Not moral as in you're a morally flawed person, that addicts are morally flawed people. Just that in many cases, so many I'll use their word amends need to be made. And going back to I suppose what Johan would, where I agree with him is that so much addiction flows from so much personal unhappiness that you want to also go back to the origins of why you even became addicted in the first place. I find AA, I personally have trouble with a higher power. I don't quite understand that, and I don't understand the surrender when in fact you're doing all the work. So that because they have that and what are the steps? I surrender my will, I believe. In any case, there seem to be paradoxes, but the point is so many millions of people have found it useful. But as far as being a disease, I think if you took a poll, the majority of Americans see it that way. And I try not to debate it. And I do make a different distinction between disease, which is somewhat metaphorical, and a brain disease, which reifies it much more as a physiological problem and a physiological problem almost only. But when people say to me, and I found this very interesting in this small town I'm working in Ohio, that a few of the nurses and social workers have said to me they kind of lower their voice because they know they're being politically incorrect here. But do I really think that you're a psychiatrist. Is addiction really a disease? And I like the fact that they asked me that question. Now, if there were some crusty old sheriff who just wanted to lock people up and didn't want his deputies to be administering the lock zone, the overdose reversal drug, and didn't want to be bothered with these folks, that would be a whole different discussion. And there I'd say, yes, it's a disease. Because my my usual response to that question is what are my choices? Because my choices is that it's a moral failure or it's a sin. Well, then I'm going with disease. But I'd like to be able to be more nuanced about it when I have these conversations. I'll just stipulate if for some people it's very important to embrace that disease model, for others, less so. But I just say so if addiction is a disease, then it's more most important for us to say, well, what kind of disease is it? Because unlike one of the many slogans one here is lately, addiction is not a disease like any other. And that's important to know. And I'll get into that in a minute. But I would like to say that I acknowledge why the National Institute of Drug Abuse, which is responsible for this brain disease formulation and so many other advocacy groups endorse that, that I do see the virtues in it. I understand that they were trying to rest it out of the realm of criminal justice. And of course, I endorsed that. They wanted more funding for treatment and research. And those are completely laudable goals. They think it can erase stigma. I don't believe it can. And there's a lot of interesting research, some of it by Nick Haslam, who's an Australian cognitive behaviorist, and others who have shown that the more you medicalize a behavior problem, actually, the more you increase social desire for social distance on the part of others and the more it induces a sense of therapeutic nihilism. And there's also research showing that patients who endorse a disease model for themselves actually don't quite do as well because there's a sense of the loss of self efficacy that goes along with that. But again, these are studies as a clinician, you deal with everyone on a personal level. To be honest, Sam, it never comes up when you're treating someone, these concepts just never come up. You just deal with how do you put 1ft in front of the other? One of the skills you have to use to stay clean. And then at some point, people get enough sober time, abstinence time, where they can start exploring if they're interested. What are some of the kinds of problems that preceded their drug use in the first place, because some of those vulnerabilities still exist and put them at risk. But we don't do classic depth psychotherapy. We're not getting into childhood traumas or primitive events because those are anxiety provoking. And that's the last thing you want to do for a person whose habit has been to look for a drug when they feel anxious. So for many years of therapy, I'm not saying people have to be in therapy for many years. Hopefully they internalize a lot of these skills for themselves. But the effort is very much pragmatic and I would say cognitive behaviorally based in terms of therapy therapy, and then in terms of rebuilding their lives again, vocationally, getting their kids back if they've lost them, getting jobs back, regaining trust, establishing a healthy social network, these kinds of things. But that's interesting. So the classical talk therapy, you're saying in this case, certainly in the acute stage after cessation of drug use is counterproductive because just kind of endlessly taking an inventory of all of your past suffering that may or may not explain how you got here. Just produces the the negative mental states that people want to self medicate away from in the first place. Exactly. And some patients have said to me, well, shouldn't I be talking about because they see a psychiatrist and they have this because most people in the addiction world are not treated by psychiatrists. They're treated by counselors or social workers. But I'm the psychiatrist, so maybe they have Freudian images, I don't know. And they say, maybe I should be talking about my childhood. And then I explain just what I said to you. I explain to them and they say that makes a lot of sense. And I say that's a luxury you will have after you've been after you've stable for quite a while. If you still feel that's important to you, then you can pursue it. And luckily they seem to accept that. And of course they're free to go to someone else who will do that with them. Although I think most people who are sophisticated about working with people with drug problems would not do that kind of exploratory work in an early stage. Is it simply an empirical fact that people who can cross some line into a clear substance abuse pattern can't then go back and let's take alcohol as the normal social lubricant? Is it possible for someone to become a, quote, healthy social drinker after having had a problem with alcohol? Or is the AA model of once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, a fair description of no, I would not say that's fair, although it's very common. Certainly it is probably not a good idea for someone who's had a severe alcohol problem to attempt moderate drinking. Presumably they tried that along the way. However, there is a group and it's I think it's legitimate, it's called moderation management and it does have membership. And then it has there certainly is a subpopulation of individuals who who can return to controlled drinking as a clinician by the time they get see by the time someone gets to a clinician, you have to remember there's so many layers at which people have peeled themselves off. I mean, let's take this situation of two people who go they seem to be matched on almost every variable and they're both curious about, like what, let's say cocaine, because most people have, I suppose, experienced alcohol, but they're going to a party and they know there's going to be cocaine there. And they both say, look, we'll make a pack. We'll both try it, see what it's like. And one of them tries it and his reaction is which is actually most people's reaction the first time they try cocaine and most people's reaction the first time they use a heroin as they throw up. But the other friend tries it and says, oh my God, this is fantastic. Now, that's very interesting. And that's where I think more biologically oriented folks stop and frankly, you could build a whole career on figuring out why are those reactions different? Because I think they're mediated through neurochemistry differently. But now here's another scenario where these two friends, two more friends go to a party, they know they're going to be cocaine. One of them tries it and says, oh my God, this is fantastic. It gives me more. And the other one says, oh my God, this is fantastic. Get it the hell away from me. And that's very interesting. So that's someone who peeled off at the very first step. Then you have people who peel off in terms of quitting use after they've used a few times and they came home late and their wife gives them a dirty look and she says, what have you been doing? And they don't think, okay, I don't want to go down this road. Well, you can see where this is going. Then there are people who lose their job or about to lose their job and they think, wow, I better get it together. And then there are the people I see who, despite so many of these consequences, didn't quite get it together. Now, there's always one consequence that brings them in and why that one and not the one before is the alchemy of addiction. I don't know why there are too many variables because everyone who's walked into our clinic practically is there because a spouse is going to leave them, a boss is going to fire them or a probation officer is going to violate them. And that goes to one of the reasons why I find the brain disease formulation, which privileges so much the neurobiological level, why find it problematic. Because it takes our eye off several other levels of explanation. One of them being that addiction is a behavior that responds to consequences. It responds to sanctions and incentives. And so if you read the early papers, in fact, the brain disease was officially unveiled in 197 in an article in in Science, the definition why it was a brain disease, I kid you not, because addiction changes the brain. Well, this conversation changes the brain, so that's absurd. Yeah, but you could everything changes the brain. Well, okay. In what way does it change the brain? Does it change the brain in which people have no choice but to use or but to continue to use? And we know that's true just because of what I told you, because people because there's an enormous literature on contingency management, which is how you manipulate the incentives and sanctions to help people stop. And one of the most fascinating, I'd say if I had to sum up all the diction science in one vignette, it would be the Vietnam Veterans experience, which I'll I'll tell you, this was 71. And I remember the New York Times in the fall in the spring of 71 reported on the Department of Defense research on all the veteran, all the GIS in Vietnam that were addicted addicted not just using, but addicted to opium and heroin and really good high grade Southeast Asian stuff. And that's no surprise, in a way, because what is war? It's terror and boredom. And what are drugs good for? Terror and boredom. Plus, there was this was towards the end of the towards the end of the war, and there was so much demoralization and such a sense of betrayal by so many that there was just a simmering rage that a lot of these men had. So drugs worked for that. Drugs were totally normalized in the military at that point in Vietnam. They were abundant. So every possible every possible variable that lowers the threshold for using a drug was there. They had access. It was normalized. It was good quality, and they had a reason for using it. Well, Nixon was terrified, and there was already a heroin problem in the urban centers, and he was afraid that these men would come back and seed that population even further of heroin users. So he instituted a program which has the best name in the world, operation Gold and Flow. And as you might guess, basically, it said, for those of you whose year is up, whose tour of duty is up, you will not be allowed back in the States until you pee in a cup and there's nothing in it but your pee. And actually, once they were told this, the folks who were about to leave, the vast majority of them were able to stop using on their own. They did offer some treatment in Vietnam for those who had more trouble, and then they left. Now, these GI La Mao veterans were followed by Lee Robbins of Washington University, who wrote a paper in which she said, this has blown the title of it, or the subtitle was something like, the data I'm about to present now Blows Out of the Water. This once addicted, always addicted meme. And what she found following these guys for three years was that very. Few of them resumed use of heroin 12% over a three year period. The majority of those who resumed use had a prior use. In other words, a use that predated their deployment. And that the reason she interviewed many of them subset and they said, well, we had lives to live. Now we're back in the States. We have families, we have responsibilities. If we wanted to continue to use heroin, we'd have to go into these terrible neighborhoods now. It's easier. People will deliver. But of course, it was totally stigmatized. And that, to me, is the full spectrum of so many of the dynamics that are involved with addiction. Yeah, well, the context clearly matters to context. What do we know, though, about the behavioral genetics here? Is it well understood that there are a gene or genes that govern a person's susceptibility to falling into addiction regardless of context? I'm not a behavioral geneticist, but I'm going to say that whenever you're in the realm of behavior in humans, it's rare that one gene is responsible. So everything and most things in psychiatry are highly polygenic. But I have no doubt that there are some people whose circuitry is genetically built so that they find their reward system is more sensitive, that their locus aurelius is much more attuned to the withdrawal phenomenon so that it's much less tolerable we have impulse, of course there's the issue of impulse control. I mean, one becomes a highly steep discounter in the course of being an addict. Some people are steep discounters before they become one and that probably predisposes them. But it's usually a combination of many things. We know that so called adverse childhood experiences predisposed, but they're all predisposing. And one could argue, for example, that if everyone in your family were an alcoholic, to the extent that anyone might use that as a justification for why they became an alcoholic, one could just as easily say, well, you saw what it was like then it was your job to not drink at all. Something like that. So that can also go both ways. Right. So now, on the spectrum of difficulty in kicking an addiction, where do these various drugs and substances lie? Can you generalize about how hard it is to get off of heroin versus the pharmaceutical opioids that people are having problems with now versus alcohol and anything else? Well, as far as opioids, a lot of this is obviously dose dependent and often root of administration dependent. But conceivably, it could be as hard to get off opioids as prescription opioids, especially if you've crushed them up and snort or injecting them as heroin. There should be probably no difference. Interestingly, nicotine is considered the most addictive drug, but that is highly conflated with the fact that smoking itself as a behavior is addicted, highly addictive, arguably more so than nicotine itself. The ritual of it and the social the ritual of it, yes, the social aspect of it. But also the fact that you talk about context, of course it's hard to of course the uptake, it's called capture. The capture rate for nicotine is about one in four. In other words, if you start smoking with some regularity, probably continue to smoke with regularity, whereas with heroin, other drugs, it's more like one in ten. Why would that be? It looks like when you hear a capture, a one in four, you think, wow, that must be highly addictive. But think about the context. Nicotine is legal, I mean, in the form of cigarettes. Nicotine is ubiquitous. Admittedly, cigarettes are much more maligned nowadays, and for good reason than they were, but still. And nicotine, and this perhaps is one of the most important aspects, it's not an intoxicant, it doesn't affect your performance, if anything, and might enhance it in some ways, so that the consequences for using for smoking are so much less and so much less immediate. And that's that's very important too, because of course you can get lung cancer and devastating diseases, but they're so delayed, whereas the consequences for intoxicants come much sooner. So all these play in to the fact that someone would sustain their use. But that's over and above the base addictiveness of nicotine itself. And that's also why cigarettes are so hard to quit. And that's been misconstrued as nicotine being one of the most addictive drugs in the world. But that's not true. And where does marijuana fit in here? Is there an addictive component to it? Or is there some other category of compulsive use that shouldn't be categorized as addiction? Actually, the physical addiction, the physical withdrawal that I explained before, that you get from opioids, that you would get from alcohol, you would get from barbiturates, you would get from benzodiazepines, like Xanaxo withdrawal, those were considered the hallmark of withdrawal. But ever since cocaine, ever since the 80s, that's been downplayed as an indicator of addiction, because cocaine and the Stimulants don't have that kind of physiological picture. They have their own discontinuation syndrome, there's no question. So some drugs have that and some drugs don't. I have to say I'm not that expert in marijuana. I do know that because the potency is so much greater now than it was when sure, we may be a little older than you, but I think we were both we probably had the same marijuana, though. So much of this back to the concept of capture. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I'm speaking with Oliver Burkeman. Oliver is a feature writer for The Guardian, where he wrote a long running weekly column on psychology. He's also written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other publications. He's also written a few books, most recently, 4000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals, which is a book that I really loved. It is certainly not your usual time management book and touches upon some of the deepest questions in life. And in what sense should we even be thinking about time as a resource anyway? We get into many aspects of this. We talk about our relationship to time, the perils of efficiency, being versus becoming, parenting and childhood, the notion of work life balance, the loss of leisure, the trap of planning, social isolation, the idea of a modern Sabbath, and other topics. Anyway, this conversation is all too timely as we careen into December here, the end of the year being the time where many of us think about reprioritizing things. Just how did we spend this year? That seemed like it was four months long, so I hope you find the conversation useful. And now I bring you Oliver Burkman. I am here with Oliver Burkeman. Oliver, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much for inviting me. So I'm not aware if we've ever met. I think you've interviewed me once or twice, but tell me our history together. I think that's right. I think that we haven't ever met. I fairly recently consulted you for a piece that I was writing for The Guardian on free will. That was our most recent interaction, I think. Yeah, but was there a time before that as well? You know, there might have been a time before that when we exchanged less friendly words via Twitter, which tends to do that to people. All right. Apologies for anything. Unfortunately, no. I'm sure it was me being impertinent. Anyway, it's all in the past. Well, great to turn the tables on you and to be interviewing you about your book, the title of which is 4000 Weeks Time Management for Mortals. And it's really a it's a fantastic book. It's the we'll we'll get into the way in which it breaks the mold for the topic of time management. But before we do, can you summarize your background as a writer and journalist and just how you came to this topic? Sure. I worked for a very long time on the staff and then as a freelance contracted person for The Guardian. One of the things I did for many years, just until a couple of years ago, was to write a weekly column on, I guess, self help culture, the science of happiness, productivity, all that kind of whole sector. And on the one hand this is an amazing opportunity to explore all sorts of fascinating modalities and research and the rest of it I think it probably also served as a slightly as a sort of an enabler of various problematic tendencies in myself. If you're the kind of person who wants to spend your life exploring methods of productivity rather than actually getting on with things and being productive, then it's great to be able to have the excuse that you're doing it for work purposes. So in a way this book was sort of came out the other end of that. It was like after spending many years trying to find the perfect productivity technique or the perfect time management technique and failing. So before we jump into the iconoclastic and heretical take you have on this topic, maybe we should just at the outset say whatever can be said in support of the obvious virtues of time management. We're just acknowledging the problem and reclaiming whatever baby is in that bathwater. What do you think actually survives scrutiny here in terms of the standard advice? Well, clearly time management matters. I try to make the case. I think that it matters even more than the people who have promoted that sort of standard version would claim. It has this reputation as a slightly sort of narrow topic but it's actually on some level surely the whole of life is the whole challenge of constructing a meaningful life is a question of time management. And then I would say that there's definitely some room for becoming more efficient and more strategic and there are things that we all do in our days that we could do in less time and make savings around the edges in that way. I have plenty to say that's critical about that sort of efficiency and optimization based approach to using one's time. But I think that there's no doubt that there are ways of organizing your daily schedule that will see you spend less time switching between less time on email than you otherwise would or more time on the things that you truly care about. So it's certainly not all nonsense. Maybe we can start with one of the paradoxes or perverse dynamics here where the focus on efficiency leads strangely to a subversion of one's deeper priorities. There's so many ways into this that you explore in your book but maybe we can start with this all too common impulse of feeling the need to clear the decks before one can actually do the important stuff. And so much of time management amounts to recommendations around this kind of thing, doing things more efficiently, getting one's to do list truly clear, getting to inbox zero. What's wrong with the level of focus when one approaches it that way? I mean, I think we're all familiar with this problem, it's just that don't always put a name to it or sort of see it in objective terms. But this general problem, I think, is that if you focus on efficiency as the governing value in your personal use of time and I think this probably applies to all sorts of other systems as well and it's recognized in those other contexts. All else being equal, a more efficient system will simply attract and process more inputs. If you get really good at getting through your email, you will receive more email because you will reply to people at a greater tempo, at a faster tempo, and those replies will generate replies. And you'll develop a reputation in your organization as someone who's responsive to email, so more people will be worth their while to send you email. So that's just one example. But this is Parkinson's Law, the idea that the work expands to fill the time available for its completion. It's just this basic problem that efficiency pursued as the governing value leads to more stuff coming in that you have to process. And for other reasons that I can talk about, I think it also leads to a lower quality of stuff, right? It focuses you on spending more and more time on the things that you don't particularly value. And so if you take that approach of trying to clear the decks before you get round to the important stuff firstly, the decks will never be clear anyway because of the world we live in is we are finite and the potential number of little things to do is effectively infinite. And secondly, the act of trying to clear the decks increases the number of things on the decks. So it's a very sort of a very sort of counterintuitive stance that is required, I think, to sort of allow the decks to be too full and to sort of allow the feeling of being overwhelmed to exist and nonetheless, at the same time to spend an hour or the first part of the day or whatever on the thing that you really want to prioritize. It's not how we're conditioned to approach the feeling of being overwhelmed. There seems to be this psychological quirk at the bottom of all of this, which is we don't want to admit the fundamental limits of what we can do. I mean just the basic fact that doing any one thing is synonymous with not doing an infinite number of things. So if you're going to spend an hour reading a book, you're spending that hour if in fact you are merely reading that book and not doing ten other things with your phone, there are an infinite number of things you are neglecting to do for that full hour. And in some sense we don't want to admit this to ourselves and we want to live with the illusion that if we could just control things better than we've been to date, we could do more or less everything that we want to do, should do, feel we must do. And what that allows for is what that encourages is a failure to triage at the first opportunity to admit to yourself okay there's I've got 24 hours in the day, I will never have a longer day than that. And therefore if I'm not doing these most important things first, they're vulnerable to my doing far less important, less rewarding things in the meantime. And this is something you explore at various points in the book. The embrace of our limitation, the recognition that this finite resource of attention allows us to live with, as you say, the decks not being remotely clear and focus on the most important stuff, whereas actually not acknowledging the limitations. Causes us to just respond to the email we need never have responded to in preference for that most important thing that is yet once again not getting touched today. Yeah, right. Exactly. I mean, for me, this is the core of it all this deep discomfort that we have with confronting how limited we are, not just in terms of quantity of time, I think, but also control over the unfolding of time, the degree to which we are just rafts on the white waters of the river of Time and have really relatively little control over how things go. And the wonderfully alluring thing about chasing this promise of total productivity, total optimization, being completely in control and having everything sorted out at last, it never comes. Because yeah, it would entail being non limited when in fact we are limited. But there's always the sense that it might just be around the corner, it might just be in the future. And that was my experience for years as a total sort of paid up productivity geek. It was not that I had everything working brilliantly and could do everything that was thrown at me but it was always like it was maybe only a few weeks away that I would have this system set up and everything would be perfect. So there's this kind of constant future allure that you're eventually going to get your time sorted out, which really just means break through the limitations of the human condition with respect to time. And because it always feels like it's coming, right, that's a reason not to face the discomfort that would be entailed by saying, okay, it's never coming. I am going to end up neglecting in this life huge numbers of things that matter and that would have been a legitimate use of my time along with lots of other less meaningful things. I'm going to end up neglecting lots of them. It's going to happen whatever I do. And so at some point I've just got to apply myself to a few things that seem like the most important the most important things? Yeah, there's this piece of corporate speak that has worked its way into my vocabulary despite my best intentions and I find that myself using this phrase a lot because it does capture this ever present problem and it's the phrase opportunity cost and it comes down to the need to decide. You actually break open. The etymology of the word decide in your book, from the Latin to cut off to decide what to do is, by definition, to circumscribe something and separate it from everything that it's not. And I guess there's something on the other side of this. There is something to having a carefree attitude too, and just allowing yourself to wander within certain limits and discover what happens of itself. But even that kind of experience needs to be prioritized, given the world in which we live. So inevitably we have to confront this fact that we to not decide is also a to make some sort of decision you know, by default you're going to be just left with whatever habit pattern is being played upon by circumstance. So it seems to me that the focus for making any kind of change in the quality of one's life has to be around this variable of deciding what it is that's really worth your time and attention and noticing all the ways in which your life is buffeting you away from those priorities. And it takes this continuous act of recalibration. Because as much as we may be intellectually aware of the finiteness of life and the transitoryness of everything, in some sense we're really not aware of it, we're not emotionally aware of it so much of the time. And to live a life that you really can't regret at the end of any given day or year or at the end of your life, I think it's got to entail succeeding more and more at this choice point of granting your attention to all those things that most merit it. Absolutely. I mean, I think I'd push it even a bit further and say it isn't only about making sure that you only focus on what matters the most to you, but it's almost about accepting that quite a few things that might be among the things that matter the most to you won't make the cut either. Because there's just no reason in our situation to assume that the quantity of things that matter fit comfortably inside the available time. Now, I mean, it's a big responsibility and it's a daunting thought, but I do also think there's something deeply liberating about it. Right. It's the liberation of seeing that something you were trying to do was completely impossible. And given that it was completely impossible, given that there was no hope ever of sort of escaping the terms and conditions of the human situation you don't need to fight that and you can sort of relax into the situation a bit. I think there is something very sort of something that's it sort of stops life. It gets rid of the idea that, like, life is a problem, that there's already a sort of a problem that you've got to solve just through being here. You mentioned meditation briefly in the book, but I forget what your background is with it because it's obviously very informative of how I see this issue. What has been your experience with meditation? I have had a sort of patchy practice for many years. Done a couple of five day, week long or so retreats at the Insight Meditation Society. Oh, nice. Followed a lot of your writing on it and the waking up app. So I'm very, very interested. But I feel slightly sheepish when I get involved in claiming that I'm any kind of active regular meditator, because that would be dishonest. But I do think that a lot of these ideas have touch points with a lot of Buddhist ideas, for sure, in the possibility of relief that you just described. And it comes by acknowledging the endlessness of experience. You're never going to actually accomplish everything, not only everything that you might do, but everything that even upon final analysis, you would think is truly important and truly rewarding. There's an infinite amount of that too, potentially, just like there's a functionally infinite number of good books to read. Once you give up the war here, you just give up hope. You recognize that there's just on some level, more can't be the point, because more is always dwarfed by everything you can't do. And probably more important, everything you do do doesn't really accrue in quite the way that you expect. You look back at all of your past experience now, which is just a memory, and it is by its very nature evanescent. You can't grab hold of it. You can just keep mulling it over by thinking about it. So it never quite lands. And it's not to say that you don't learn things and develop new skills and develop new opportunities for life in the present based on past experience. But the satisfaction of satisfaction doesn't last in quite the way we sense it will by default. And yet we rarely turn the same understanding on the future and recognize that all of these things we are looking forward to or worrying about or somewhere or other focused on, they too are going to have this mirage like quality. When the future finally arrives, it will be this cascade of sights and sounds and sensations and impressions and assumptions, and it will blow through us yet again and very quickly become a memory. So in some sense we need to recognize this different mode of being versus becoming. I mean, it's the becoming side of the equation which is always taken in yet again by the illusion that if we could only check all these boxes in the future, we will be satisfied. Whereas the bean side recognizes that in some basic sense, there is no real place to land beyond recognizing that this moment, with all that has been done and left undone, has to be, in some sense, the ground of our well being. Whatever you have to be being in the very middle of writing the email, you would you really don't feel like writing. The good life requires that you be able to locate some tranquillity and acceptance and even happiness. Even in the midst of that. It can't be predicated on getting it done or just getting through, because then you're just getting through your life, you're getting through your day, and it's just treadmill time. Right. You're so right that we forget this for sort of years and decades at a time, but it's also kind of immediately obvious that if it's all leading up to something, it's all leading up to what? A single moment on your deathbed that makes no sense. It's obvious that it makes no sense. I don't know if I can articulate this properly, but it has something to do with a kind of fundamental misunderstanding or illusion or something about what time is, I suppose. Right. It's this idea that time is a resource. It's a thing that we use, that you have to sort of get the most out of the portion of time that you've been given. All of these things imply a separation between time and you. And yet, as I try to go into in the book a little bit, there's a real sense in which it might make more sense to think of to think of the idea that we are time. Right, that you are a portion of time. And that, to me, speaks to this idea that it's not a dress rehearsal. It has to matter now, if it's ever going to matter. The whole idea that you're sort of using this resource to get to some place of paradise in the future stops making any sense. If you think instead that we just are this portion of time, well, then obviously it's got to be in the present. That meaning is to be found. I attribute some of these ideas in the book to Heidegger, who I sort of grappled with to try to understand this. But since the book was published, I've found, I think, strikingly similar things in some work commentaries on Dogan, the founder of Soto Zen, who seems to have said some very similar things and wrote a essay that the title of which is translated as being time. This idea that we just are time, for me anyway, it almost, at least sometimes triggers this kind of bodily shift into the feeling that it has to matter. Now, I don't know if that makes sense when I put it into you. Yeah, well and Dogan has the virtue of not having joined the Nazi party, right? Exactly. It would have been all things being with him. Yeah, you said you made one point about it can't all be purpose toward getting safely to one's deathbed, you know, with one's priorities intact. And it's this instrumental relationship to everything in life. It is pernicious, actually. You have some reflections on parenting and childhood that make this pretty poignant. Perhaps you can talk about it in light of how we tend to think about our kids as parents and how strange that conception of living life as a means to some nebulous end becomes in that context. Yeah, I mean, I'm not the only person to have made the observation, but it's just the degree to which we think about parenting or naturally fall into thinking about parenting as solely a matter of creating the most successful adults later on for any value of successful. Right. This isn't necessarily a point about money and professional success. It's a point about treating your job as a parent as being the act of creating something in the future to the exclusion of the experience of childhood and the experience of parenthood in the very moment itself. And I quote in the book, I think Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker writer, calling this the causal catastrophe, the idea that the only question to ask about the quality of a childhood or of a parent child relationship being what it's creating for the future. And as I recall, one of the examples, I think it was him who gave there is a question when it comes to violent video games. Very controversial question, obviously, about whether this leads to sort of bad psychological traits later on in life. But it's kind of only one part of the question. The other question is whether a childhood spent playing violent video games is or is not a good childhood. And it might be. I'm steering well clear of having an opinion on that matter right now. But the point is just that you can ask the question about how the quality of time is spent now, not only about whether it is adding up to certain outcomes. And if you don't at least a little bit focus on what it's like to be on the experience right now, you sort of SAP all the meaning and value from it. I write in the book about still being in this very sort of productivity oriented mindset when our son was first born and finding myself not sufficiently absorbed in the experience of interacting with him because one part of me was trying to figure out whether he was meeting the developmental milestones that I read about in some book. And these things matter. It's that you can't disregard them. But there's a real possibility for that to completely crush the experience itself. And I think it's certainly not just parenthood, but it becomes very parenthood is a sort of a terrain where it seems very easy to fall into it. Yeah, it's a very strange question to pose what is the purpose of a good childhood? Right? Like if the whole point of having a good childhood is to have a good adolescence and the whole point of having a good adolescence is to have a good young adulthood and the whole point of a good young adulthood is to have a good middle age. You see where this is going? Yeah, it might make some sense if we lived forever, but we don't. Exactly what are your thoughts about the occasionally vaunted ideal of having anything like a work life balance? The more I thought about and read about this topic, the less I understood what it meant. So I don't know that I have anything particularly coherent to say. I think the most obvious thing that I do think about it is that this is a sort of classic example in traditional approaches to productivity and time management that looks like what it's offering is calm and peace and a sort of appropriate level of involvement in different domains of life. But really in practice and in the way it gets internalized by people just ups the pressure. It's basically the demand that you have sort of 100% level of appropriate engagement and accomplishment in your work and 100% in your life outside work. And you know that that it ought to be possible to find a way to feel that you're giving all you would like to give to your work and all you would like to give to your family and your social life and your hobbies. And that if you're not managing it sometimes the argument gets said that you're not managing it. Then it is a sort of issue with the societal arrangements and work policies and the rest of it. But usually it's just that it's your fault that you haven't found the right reserves of energy and self discipline to make it work again. The sufficiency problem kicks in, right, this problem that if you get really good at handling any given domain in your life, it will lead to the sense that there is more that you ought to be handling. If you get to the point where you do feel that you have a good work life balance, I think it's virtually inevitable that you'll feel some new pressure to do something else to add another domain in which to excel. So it all it just seemed like a very typical example of that Treadmill phenomenon. Yes, I think we should probably acknowledge that people are in very different places here with respect to a few of these variables. So they're people for whom their work really is just a job because they need to make money to survive. But it's not something that is truly aligned with how they they would want to spend their time if they if they didn't have to work. And then there are those of us who have managed through just sheer good luck to figure out a line of work that is to some significant degree similar or if not identical to what we would want to do even if we didn't have to do anything. And those strike me as fundamentally different circumstances in which to think about how one defends one's work from the rest of one's life and one's life from one's work. For me, I'm definitely among the luckiest here, where what I do for work is what in fact I want to do anyway most of the time. And then it has this strange quality of bleeding into the rest of life because selfishly I'm doing what I want to do a lot, and a lot of that is work. And so there's no real boundary between my work and the rest of life. So the challenge for me is not to be a total workaholic, where my working just competes with family, time and everything else that I also want to give attention to because it really, you know, I'm confronted by you. Know, the zero sum contest between things I genuinely want to do, rather than the burden of work, which, you know, I know I have to do it, but I wish I didn't have to do it, where I have to think. Many people are caught. It's interesting, isn't it? Because it's like there is a similarity between the two situations, much as you're absolutely right. I think that they're very different. They are both kind of confrontations with finitude and the discomfort of finitude. It's obviously a much better problem to have if you're at risk of letting your deeply absorbing job squeeze out time with the family you love than if it's a terrible job that you wish you didn't have to do that's doing that. But I don't know, there is a certain kind of through line between the different situations that I think is I don't know. It's interesting to me. There's obviously a sort of feels like existentialist philosophy or something, but there is a kind of internal shift that I think people do sometimes make when they are doing work that they don't find intrinsically fulfilling. That if they can sort of see the reason why they're doing it in the context of goals that are intrinsically fulfilling, if they can truly believe that it's their best option right now to support the family that they want to support, then there is a level of sort of meaning that gets inculcated just through the choosing. But yeah, I don't know, it's fascinating. The other thing that makes me want to ask you is whether this other phenomenon that one encounters, even if you are lucky enough to spend your work time doing things that you might choose to do otherwise is the phenomenon whereby the fact that it is work, the fact that it is a job threatens to sometimes to erode the satisfaction of it and the fact that you sort of have committed yourself to producing a book manuscript or putting out a regular. Podcast or whatever it might be, starts to threaten to undermine the joy that you would otherwise take in the activity. I don't know if you resonate with that at all. Well, inevitably there is a kind of treadmill effect even in doing what one loves to do the moment it becomes something that has to adhere to any kind of calendar or, you know, so, you know, deadlines or deadlines, even if you like what you're having to do. So there's that. But to an unusual degree now I find myself in the spot of my work, and my guilty pleasures are more and more indistinguishable if you just look at just take this conversation. The reason why we're having it is because I wanted to read your book, and I read it and I loved it, and now we're talking, right? So it's like, had this book been forced on me, which occasionally happens, then it's a slightly different experience. But this really was a book I felt like reading anyway, and now it has become the substance of my, quote, work. But it's really a uniquely privileged spot to be in, to have found a way to do this. But as you point out, it does have this other effect of throwing me up against the limits of all that I want to do and all that I feel I should do. And just the limited bandwidth for all of that. It does make a mockery of this other concept, which used to be pretty well enshrined in our culture among certainly among the most fortunate people. And that's the concept of leisure, right? Something you analyze in the book. We have kind of lost sight of leisure and the whole point of it, even the most fortunate people have, especially when you look at how the rich, certainly among the rich, knowledge workers, if you look at how they spend their time, these are not people who are especially good at downtime. You have people working, as measured by the clock, more hours than anyone else in society. On some level, they're choosing to work this hard. And not all of them are in precisely my spot of doing almost entirely things they want to do anyway. But in most cases, presumably, they're free to do less work and they're not accomplishing it. And leisure has become this. It's something that we feel that we either need to justify or we just fail to even try to justify it. Whereas in previous generations, that kind of inversion of priorities would be unthinkable. I mean, the point of being rich and lucky in generations past was so that you could enjoy leisure, right? Yeah. And it's such a strange I'm thinking about what the causes of that are. It's such a strange mixture of, I think, economic forces sort of glomming on to this inbuilt tendency that we have to want to be unlimited to want to get to the very end of workload that we're brought and all the technological reasons that that workload has become ever more functionally infinite, so that there's no possibility of getting to the end of it. And then the way that that becomes like a status symbol. It's kind of embarrassing on some level to seem to have leisure and to be very busy is I'm not saying anything original here, but to be busy is a sign that you must be in demand and that you must be living your life in a useful fashion. And then, as well, you get this very strange phenomenon where leisure itself becomes subject to the instrumental imperative, where it doesn't really count as a good use of your time off if you're not at least building some skill. Or resting and engaging in, quote, self care so that you can be a better worker or more productive in your job or at least meeting your fitness goals or something. Right. There's something very counter to the spirit of the times in just sort of tinkering around with some hobby because you sort of enjoy doing it and not particularly caring with you whether you even get better at it or manage to turn it into an income stream or something. There's one version of multitasking around which I'm I think unabashedly positive. Now, this is going to sound self serving because it's speaking directly to what is increasingly my career here. But you know, listening to audio, listening to podcasts, listening to audiobooks while doing something else that would otherwise be merely instrumental has changed. I think many people's relationship to whatever it is, the long commute, the doing of the dishes, just doing something which is inevitable, but not the point of one's day when you're listening to a podcast or to a book or something that really is adding value to what you're doing with your mind. That strikes me more and more as an unalloyed good. I mean, it's made me, by default, patient with a drive that takes a half hour longer than planned for, right. The sense of rushing, provided there's no real urgency out there in the world, has just completely evaporated for me because I'm now virtually always listening to something that I really do want to listen to. And I don't know if you've experienced the same thing in your life and or if you see any unhappy little caveat to add to that that rosy picture I just painted. No, I totally know what you mean. I mean, this is a I defer to you on this, but there's a neuroscientific point about different channels of attention here, I think, David, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Today I am presenting the audio from the event I did in Denver with Robin Hansen. Robin's professor of Economics at George Mason University, diversity and he's the author with Kevin similar of a very interesting book titled The Elephant in the Brain hidden Motives in Everyday Life. I give more of his bio from the stage, but I really enjoyed this conversation with Robin. We spoke about all the related issues here of selfishness and hypocrisy and norms and norm violations, cheating, deception, self deception, the evolutionary logic of conversation, social status signaling and countersignaling, common knowledge. There's many interesting topics here. I enjoyed the event. Unfortunately the audio is a little wonky. We are completely at the mercy of whatever recording we get from these venues and there are a few moments where things cut out. It's a little echoey, it's not that bad. Once you start listening, you will acclimate to it. But it was a good conversation. And so now I bring you Robin Hanson. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sam Harris. Thank you all. Well, thank you all for coming out. Really, it's it's amazing to see you all or see some fraction of you. I'm going to jump right into this. We have a very interesting conversation ahead of us because I have a great guest. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He's also a research associate with the Future of Humanity Institute, which you might know focuses on existential risk and other big topics of ethical importance. He has a PhD in Social Science from Caltech, a master's in Physics and the philosophy of science. He did nine years of research with Lockheed and NASA studying mostly artificial intelligence and also Bayesian statistics. And he's recognized for his contributions in economics and especially in prediction markets, but he's made contributions in many other fields. And he has written a fascinating book which unfortunately is not for sale here today. But you should all buy this book because it's amazingly accessible and he just touches so many interesting topics. That book is the elephant in the brain. Hidden motives in everyday life. Please welcome Robin Hanson. Thanks for coming. We're here. So your reputation for being interesting precedes you. I deny it all. So there are many things we can talk about and as you know but I want to focus on your book and I want to move in kind of a linear ways of your book because your book is so rich and I don't think we will do the book justice, but we will try. The book is really kind of a sustained meditation on selfishness and hypocrisy. We have these ideas about why we do things and then we have all of the evidence accruing for the real reasons why we do these things and the mismatch there is rather harrowing to consider and your book is just an unvarnished look at that. So I want to tour through this, but perhaps before we get to some of these specific topics. How do you view the project of your book? What were you up to in writing? I should say that you have a co author on the book, Kevin Similar, who's not here tonight. But what were you doing writing this book? This was what I wish I would have known. When I started my social science career many years ago, I started out in physics and then went into computer science. And in those areas, I noticed that people were really eager for innovation. And then I seemed to see that in social science there were even bigger innovations possible. And so I moved there. And then I was puzzled to find that people were not very interested in innovations compared to the other areas. And I kept also finding other puzzles in social science ways in which our usual theories don't make sense of what's going on. And our book is an attempt to explain a lot of the major puzzles in social science and the lack of interest in innovation. And one of the conclusions is that we're just doing policy wrong, policy analysis wrong. But first we have to get into the basics here. There's really two levels of it. There's how you as a person might think about these things, but it's the level of personal hypocrisy and then the mismatch between what your motives actually are and what you may think they are. And then there's the fact that institutions have this kind of structure or this blindness where the institutions think they're about something and they seem not to be, upon analysis, an institution like medicine or a university. So what's the basic problem? Why is there this mismatch between what we think we're doing and what we're actually doing? So if you've read many psychology books, you're familiar with the idea that people are not always honest about what they're doing and why. And you might find that fright and kind of boring by now because, of course we all know that. But so far, people haven't taken that insight to our major social institutions, and that's what we think is new and original about our book. We say that not only are you not always honest about whether you like to go to the opera with your spouse or whether you enjoy playing and cleaning up after your kids, you're also not honest with yourself about why you go to school and why do you go to the doctor and why you vote and why you do art. That is, these deviation between what we think we're doing and our actual motives infect many major social institutions, and they therefore, you know, should make us reconsider the basics of what these institutions are for and therefore why we support them and whether we should subsidize them and how we should structure them and everything. Right. So unlike many conversations I have here, I have a list of nouns that I just kind of a ladder through which we could walk. Let's start with norms and what you call meta norms. What is a norm, and why do we have them? And what does it mean to protect them or to fail to protect them? So animals like chimpanzees and most other social animals, they have a complicated social world, and they pay attention to each other, and they reward others for helping them and punish others if they hurt them. So they have many regular behaviors. But humans uniquely have norms in the sense that we have a rule of what you're supposed to do or not supposed to do. And if somebody else sees you breaking the norm, it's a rule that they're supposed to do something about it. They're supposed to tell other people that you've broken a norm and then try to find a way to make you stop breaking the norms. And so humans have these norms about what we're supposed to do, we're not supposed to do. And many of these norms are quite common around the world. We're supposed to help each other. We're supposed to not brag, not be violent to each other. We're supposed to make group decisions together by consensus. And we're not even supposed to have subgroup coalitions, people who are aligning against the others. These are just common human norms. And many of these norms are expressed in terms of motives. So there's a rule that we're not supposed to hit each other on purpose. It's okay to hit accidentally, but not on purpose. And so because our ancestors had these norms and they were so important, their social world was their main world. We developed these big brains that we have mainly apparently for social reasons. We balanced these big brains to deal with our social world, and we have the biggest brains of all. So our social world must have been the most complicated. But norms were a big part of this world. And so we have this part of our brain, this all the time thinking about what we're doing and trying to explain why we're following good motives that's, in a sense, the conscious part of your mind you are the conscious part of your mind, and you aren't necessarily the one in charge of your mind. There's this idea that instead of, say, being the president or the king, you're the press secretary, you don't actually know why you do things, but you're supposed to make up a good excuse, and you do that. You're constantly looking at what you're doing and asking yourself, what would be a good explanation for this thing I'm doing? And you're good at that. You're good at coming up with excuses for what you're doing, but you don't actually know what you're actually doing. You don't realize that you don't know. Yeah. And this is a very robust but not really celebrated neurological finding, and it becomes horribly elaborated. And people who have what's called a split brain procedure, where as a remedy for grandma seizures. You can cut the corpus colossalum which connects the two hemispheres of the brain and that prevents the seizure activity from moving from one hemisphere to the other. And what people have found going back now many decades is that most people, the left linguistically agile hemisphere confabulates reasons for doing things. When those reasons are brought out in an experimental paradigm, those reasons are just manifestly not so. So you can present the right hemisphere of the brain with a demand like get up and walk toward the door. And then you can ask the linguistically competent left hemisphere why are you walking toward the door? And it will confabulate a reason. I want to get a Coke. This is a result from a classic experiment which I think you cite in your book. These experiments were done by Roger Sperry and Michael Kazanaga and Aron Zadel. And the left hemisphere just continually completes the picture linguistically without any apparent awareness that those claims are out of register. They're based on nothing. This is what the word confabulate means just to just make up this reason out of full cloth. And it seems that though most of us have not had our brain split, we have an ability to give a post talk rationalization for why we did things, which is certainly an experimental paradigm can be shown to really have no relationship to the proximate cause of our actions. And it is embarrassing if caught on video. So we're living with this fact that we are our own press secretary giving the at minimum the most benign but often just the most grandiose and apparently noble rationale for why we're doing what we're doing. And yet evolution and and other modes of logic suggests that that isn't the reason for why we do much of what we do well. So that you are in the habit of just making up excuses. That means you could be wrong a lot but doesn't mean you are wrong a lot. Maybe you are mostly right even though you would be wrong if you didn't know. So we have to go further than just the possibility you're being wrong to decide you're wrong. So we have to wonder, well, how sure can you be about most of your activity, whether it's the real reason you have? Now, one thing to be clear about is almost any area of life like going to school or going to the doctor is big and complicated. The world's complicated. So a great many motives are relevant. And if we average over people, surely thousands of different motives irrelevant for almost everything we're doing. And so what we have to be asking here is what is the main motive? What's the most dominant motive? Not what's the only motive. Just as an example, if you say the dog ate my homework as an excuse, that only works because sometimes dogs eat homework. If dogs didn't exist, it wouldn't make much sense. Dragon ate my homework doesn't work. So these things that we come up with as excuses for our behavior, they only work as excuses because sometimes they're true. They have an element of truth. So we're not going to say that your usual motive isn't at all applicable. The claim is just it's not as true as you think. And you're not saying that no one has noble motive. Exactly. So there is real altruism, there's real no all of these things. Exactly. Sometimes people get up to get a Coke. Yes. But in addition, there are evolutionary reasons why we would be self deceived about our motives. We are actually, and this is based often on the work of Robert Trivers, who's done a lot of work on self deception and the evolutionary logic there. We are better at deceiving others. We're better at getting away with norm violations if we in fact are not aware that our press secretary is not telling the truth. Which is to say that if we in fact are self deceived, we are better deceivers. So if we want to lie, it's better not to know we're lying because then it seems sincere, right? Well, you can be sincere, right? The easy way to seem sincere is to be sincere, even if you're wrong. Famous Seinfeld episode I believe you're not lying if you believe it. I should say that basically this is something you and I should probably talk about, but the jury is out as to whether or not knowing any of what we're about to talk about is good for you. So this sorry, there's a psychological experiment being performed on you and you have not consented memory white pills will be available after the session. How do you think about let's take cheating as cheating is a classic norm violation. There's reason to think that our brains have evolved in large measure both to cheat and to detect cheating and others. How do you think about cheating in your line of work? Well, cheating is, again, violating norms and so we want to live in a community where the norms are enforced and we also want ourselves to be exceptions to rules. So, for example, most criminals actually think crime is a bad thing. They just think that their particular acts don't quite count as crimes. So we all basically would like to make exceptions for ourselves. So the question is how? And one of the ways we can do it is to not be very honest about what we're doing with ourselves. This may not be relevant, but it just put me in the mind of it. I've never understood why no one remarks on the fact that when we think of it like just reducing our speed limit laws, what that would do in terms of saving lives. And we could save tens of thousands of lives a year. But if we made cars that could not exceed the speed limit, that would guarantee that no one would exceed the speed limit. But no one would want that. No one who thinks that we should have speed limits would want a car that it would slavishly follow the speed limit. Is that just synonymous with wanting the right to cheat on the speed limits? Are we all imagining some emergency where you have to speed past the speed limit? So the whole theme here is that in your head you think you want things. So in your head you think you want to enforce speed limits with your actual actions. You don't. You want to speed and there's a contradiction there and you don't want to look at that contradiction. So you look away and that's the elephant in your brain. As you know, the elephant in the room is the thing we all know is there that you don't want to look at. And the elephant in your brain is this contradiction between what you say you want and what you actually do. Let's actually raise this issue now, whether this line of thinking or this analysis has a downside. So if, in fact, it's true that we are better fit to our social environment with a certain amount of ignorance with respect to our own motive, so that it's optimal there's, like, an attractor of optimal fitness which entails some measure of self deception, and we are in the process of you in the process of writing this book. All of us, in the process of talking about it, are to some degree undeceiving ourselves about these things. Why isn't that bad for us? And is it worth worrying whether it's bad for us? So apparently evolution constructed you to be ignorant about why you do things. It thought, yes, it might be useful if you know why you do things. But that's to be traded off against all these other benefits of not knowing why you do things. So you were constructed not to know if the situation you're in in the modern world is much like the situation evolution anticipated for you. That's probably better in your personal interest not knowing. You are probably better off going on with the usual sort of ignorance that the rest of us have had and acting that way because you'll get along that way and that's what evolution anticipated for you. Now, evolution couldn't think of everything. So you could be in an environment today which is not something evolution might have participated, or you might be in an unusual situation. For example, you might be a salesperson or a manager, the sort of person for whom it's really important to understand people's motives and to be able to read them and understand what's going on. You also might be a nerd, like myself. That is, most people could just intuitively read the social world around them and do the right thing. Some of us can't. And some of us need more conscious analysis in the world to figure out what's going on. And so you may appreciate this more cynical conscious analysis, even if it has the disadvantages. But most importantly, as a self help seminar, I think that's not going to sell a lot of tickets. Not that you'd be nerds or anything, but some of us are. But I also just think if you're going to be a specialist in policy analysis, if you're going to stand up and say I have studied education or medicine and I have thought about what changes would be better, it's more your responsibility to know what's actually going on in those worlds. Even if it costs you some degree of social awkwardness to know that I think at least social analysts and policy analysts should understand these things. Let's take an institutional example. Take education. What is it that we're deceived about with respect to education? Again, just to be clear, just because you might be deceived about many things doesn't mean you are. So I need to walk you through arguments to convince you that in fact in each area your motives isn't what you think it is. Now, my colleague, beloved colleague Ryan Kaplan has a book just out called The Case Against Education and he goes through a whole book like treatment of this. Our chapter is just a summary of that, but a summary is sufficient. A summary is when you ask people why do you go to school? If they are answering in front of a public speech or in a letter of application, say they will tell you the usual story is to learn the material so that you can become a more useful person later. That's our standard story about school and there are a number of puzzles in education that just don't make sense of that theory and I'm going to offer another theory that makes more sense of it. Some of these puzzles are you don't actually learn very much at school. Most of the stuff you learn isn't very useful. Yet people who don't learn useful things are paid more. So bartenders who go to college make more than bartenders who go to high school. You do make more for more years of school in terms of your wages. But the last year of high school and the last year of college is worth as much as the other three years combined. But you don't learn more in the last year of high school or college. I went to Stanford for a while for free without registering or applying, simply by walking in and sitting on classes. One of the professors gave me a letter recommendation based on my performance. Nobody tries to stop you from doing that. Why? You can get the very best education for free if you don't want a credential that calls into question the idea that you're there for the learning as opposed to something else. So the alternative theory is that you're there to show off and to gain a credential that shows that you are worthy of showing off. That is, you are smart conscientious informants. You're willing to do the sorts of things that they ask you to do. You take ambiguous instructions with long deadlines and consistently over several decades, over several years complete mildly boring assignments, great preparation for future workplaces and by the end you have shown that and that's something employers value and that's a standard plausible explanation for education. Most of you will find that it plausible unless you are an education policy expert which case you will be offended and search for another explanation. So in most of these areas most of you will not and say yeah, that makes sense unless this is your precious area. For all of us there is something precious in our lives, something sacred. And for that we will be more reluctant to accept one of these more cynical explanations of what's going on there. But as long as education isn't sacred for you, you'll probably not. And say yeah, you don't learn much in a school but so now what is signal and what is noise? There are employers wrong to value those things. What should people do differently as a result of understanding this about individually? You shouldn't do different if individually, if you want to convince an employer in our world that you have what it takes, you do need to go to school, jump through the hoops and perform well. And in fact you might do that better if you aren't aware that you're just doing arbitrary things to show off to an employer that may be demotivating for you. You might be better off pretending to yourself and believing that you're learning usefulness. But the point is you are showing that you have a characteristic, not creating a characteristic. The school isn't changing you, it's distinguishing you. It's like certifying you as different. So now what's the role of common knowledge in some of these situations you should define what common knowledge is, right? It's not common knowledge what common knowledge is. So think about cheat. He asked about cheating. And think of the rule that you're not supposed to drink alcohol in public. This is a rule and there are people who are supposed to enforce this rule, the police. And you might think this of course is relatively easy to enforce. But think of the example of people putting an alcoholic beverage inside a paper bag and drinking it outside. This happens. Now ask yourself how hard could it be for the police to know that you're drinking alcohol if you're drinking some bottle of a paper bag? Outsource of course they know but you're giving them an excuse to look the other way. That is, it's not common knowledge. We don't know that. We all know that. We all know that it's alcohol. Somebody could be fooled and that's enough to pretend that you don't know. So this is why it's actually much easier to cheat in many ways than you might have thought. We have all these rules and we're supposed to enforce them. But we're not very eager to enforce them. We'd rather go about our business and ignore the rule violations. And so a rule violation needs to be kind of blatant and other people need to see us see the rule violation and then we kind of feel forced to do something about it. But if it's not blatant, it's not something we all can see and know that we know, then you might prefer to pretend you didn't see. And many of you probably have seen things that are not supposed to happen as you walk by the street and you just keep walking, hoping that nobody saw you saw it, because then you could pretend you didn't see it and go about your business, because it would be a pain and trouble to stop and try to enforce the rules. Yeah, well, also, there's so much about our social lives where we know there's a subtext to what's going on. But if that subtext ever became explicit, it would destroy the basis of trust or good feeling. Or like if you said to someone I'm only inviting you over to dinner tonight because you invited me last time and I needed to reciprocate. Exactly. That's why we're having this dinner on some level that we all know that's going on. But to make it explicit is sort of antithetical to being friends with people, right? So there are often many levels of what's going on. And, in fact, we expect to see that in movies and stories. So if somebody as an actor was given a script and the script said you're at a romantic dinner with somebody else and the two of you are there talking to each other and what you're saying to each other is I love you. I love you too. This is great. We're having a wonderful relationship. This is a wonderful restaurant. Isn't this a great night? The actor will tell you, I can't act. That because there's just one level there and that doesn't seem plausible at all. We expect, and it seemed like that there to be multiple levels that is, there's the surface level of I love you. Isn't this great? And something else wants to be going on and the actor will actually look for another level so they can act to see I'm afraid you'll leave me, so I'm trying to make sure you don't. Or I'm thinking of leaving you, and so I'm trying to let you off night. Something to make there be two levels of motives because that's what we expect to see out of actors and scenes. So we are really, at some level, we kind of know that people are quite often pretending one motive and really acting another motive. It's one thing that one chapter in your book on conversation which I found fascinating because conversation is fairly mysterious in terms of the mismatch between what we think, what is going on and what is actually going on. And why it would be valued in an evolutionary sense. So let's talk about what most people think is going on during a conversation and what seems to actually be going on. So we're going muddy here because of course this is the conversation and we will try to pretend that this isn't true about our conversation because that's the truth. The jig is up. Exactly. So the usual story if you ask why are you talking to your friend? Why did you spend an hour talking? Why didn't you do the dishes? Or something useful? You might say, well we're exchanging information. We each have information the other person doesn't. And by talking and exchanging information we can all know more. And this is the standard rationale for most of our conversations. What I'm about to tell you applies not just to personal conversation but also applies to our news media conversations, to academic conversations and journalists and all of them. The standard rationale is information. That's why you read the newspaper of course, right? To get more information. Now there are many features of our conversations that don't fit very well with this explanation that's again my main argument here is to show you the detailed puzzles that don't fit with the explanation, then offer you another explanation that fits better. So some of the puzzles here are if it was about exchanging information, we would keep track of debts. I might say, well I've told you three useful things so far. You haven't told me any useful thing. It's your turn. We would be more eager to listen than to talk. It would be our turn to talk. And then sigh, okay, I'll find I'll tell you something, we would be searching for the most valuable things to tell each other, the things that matter most to each other. And we would talk about important things instead of the trivialities that we usually fill our conversations with. And it would be fine to jump from topic to topic as long as we were saying something valuable and important because the point is the correct to communicate information. But as you know, the usual norm of conversation is to slowly drift from topic to topic, none of which need to be very important, but each time we should say something relevant to that topic. Now, an alternative explanation in sharing information for this theory is that we are showing off our backpack of tools and resources that we can show, we can bring to bear to any topic you dare to offer. So it's important that the conversation meander in a way no one of us can control. So that we are each challenged to come up with something relevant to whatever that is and by impressing you with knowing something, having a friend or a resource, having a tip, having some experience that's relevant to whatever you bring up. I show you that if you and I stay allies and associates in the future, whatever problems you have. I'll have something relevant I'm ready for you with resources that would be useful to you because look what I can do no matter what conversation topic comes up. Well, the mismatch between desire to listen and desire to talk is pretty I think that's the one that people will find very salient because if it was really about just getting information we would be massively biased toward listening. We would be stingy with we would be pricing out all of our disclosures. We'd have much bigger ears and smaller mouths. Then how do you think about gossip and reputation management and what's happening in that space? We do in fact exchange information. So again it works as an excuse because it's partly true. We do exchange information and it is somewhat valuable. It's just not the main thing we're doing. But often well, the information we're exchanging is meta to the actual apparent topic as you may know indirectly through what people say. They tell you other things like bragging about themselves indirectly by telling you about their great vacation in some expensive prepare place. And they talk about each other often in the guise of saying what's been happening. But we are very interested in knowing about each other and evaluating each other. And so part of what's going on when we're impressing people is not only impressing the people who immediately see us we're impressing the other people who will hear about it indirectly. And so it's important that we impress other people in ways that can transfer through that gossip to the other people who will hear about it. And we are trying to avoid negative gossip or negative reputation of things that would look make us look bad. And this is you know, a basic explanation for why a lot of decisions in the world are really quite shallow. So so for example as an employer you might look at an employee and say this this potential employee is looks really good. Yes, they don't have a college degree but they don't need a college degree for this. And I can tell they could do the job but then you might think to yourself say yes but other people will hear that I hired this person and they will notice that this person doesn't have a college degree and they will gossip about it. And then I might look bad for having hired someone with a college degree and maybe I just don't want to take that chance. So even if I know that this person could do the job I still because I'm trying to impress this wider audience who will gossip about it. I am pushed to make shallower choices based on less than I know. Is there anything that you do differently in this area based on having thought about this? Do you view gossip as a negative character trait that should be discouraged in yourself or do you or do you just see it as inevitable or socially useful as a way of correcting misaligned reputation. I understand and appreciate gossip has an important human role as a natural nerd. I'm not as inclined they're interested in it personally, but that's my failing, not the world. So is social status the main metric to which all of this is pegged? Is that what we're concerned about as subtext virtually all the time? It's one of the things, but it's actually less than people might think. So if you're forced to admit you're showing off, often the thing you want to admit to showing off is how great you are. That is, how smart or conscientious or careful, how knowledgeable, but plausibly. At least half of what you're doing in showing off is showing off loyalty, not ability. And so perhaps we push medicine on it to show that we care about people. We participate in politics to show that we're loyal to our side. We do a lot of things to show loyalty and that is not something we're as eager to admit because of course, by trying to be loyal, we are showing some degree of submission to those we are trying to. Yeah. So that is a somewhat craven motive to sign on to. I'm being loyal. Right? But why is that? In fact, loyalty is a virtue that we humans actually have two different kinds of status, and it's suspicious and noticeable that we don't make the distinction very often and we merge them together. There's dominance and prestige. Dominance is more having power over someone and prestige is earning respect. And the difference of these actually show up in where your eyes go and how you look. When somebody has dominance over them, you are not supposed to look them in the eye. Looking them in the eyes shows defines when somebody has proceeds. You are supposed to look at them, presumably up here, you are looking at us. We are claiming we have prestige and you're not supposed to look away at it. I wish you wouldn't put it that way. Yes. Well, how embarrassing. And so people want to get prestige and they don't want to admit to accepting dominance or submitting dominance. But of course we do. People admit to wanting prestige more. So they might admit to accepting prestige, although not to seeking it, of course. Now, in ancient history, most societies had kings and their neighbors had tyrants. Tyrants dominated because they bad guys over there had dominance and those people were submitting the dominance and what a terrible thing they had to suffer. But we have a king who has prestige and it's okay for us to look up to and obey our king because he's worthy of the status. And so this is often how people come to terms with their bosses. So from a distance, people say how terrible it is that we all obey our bosses at work, but each of us at work often makes peace with that by saying, well, my boss is okay. He's earned that right, to be in that role. And I'm okay with doing what he says, right? So now, I don't want to spend a lot of time on politics, but obviously everything you've written about is relevant to politics. And as I was reading the book, it seems somewhat mysterious to me that in the current moment, someone like Trump seems to violate more or less every rule you mention in your book. I mean, the things we've evolved not to do or not to do brazenly like brag or lie without any hope of being believed or advertise our most crass motives in place of more noble ones that could have been plausible, right? Yeah, right. He seems to get away with all of this. So how do you explain the success of what's essentially the antievolutionary algorithm? Sure. So let's start with something called counter signaling. So, ordinarily if you have an acquaintance and you are trying to show that you like an acquaintance, you will do things like smiling at them, being polite, flattering them, opening the door for them, offering them some food. Those are ways we ordinarily show someone that we are trying to be friendly. When you have really close friends, however often you go out of your way to do the opposite. You insult them, you trip them, you don't show up for some meeting. Why do you do the opposite for a close friend? So that's in part to show that you are more than an acquaintance. Once it's clear that you are at least an acquaintance, people might wonder, how close are we? And doing the opposite can show that you are more than an acquaintance. A paper that discussed this was called Toothpool for School. As you know, many students try to show how studious, how good they are at school by studying hard and doing well. And then some students try to show that they can ace everything without trying. And that's, again, counter signaling. So he's managed to convince half the country that he is their best friend by revealing all of these. But remember, politics is about loyalty signaling. And at one level, we might all want politicians who are high status. We might all want politicians who are articulate and tall and went to a good school and smart and say all the right polite things and have stamina, et cetera. And so in general, we would all want the same thing there. But if you want to show that your side is different and you are being especially loyal to your side, you may have to go against the norm. So, as you may know, when the election of Trump, there was a subset of our society who felt neglected, who felt that their voice was not being heard and that the politician establishment was not catering to them. And so Trump stood up and said, I will cater to you. And he went out of his way to show loyalty to that group by countersignaling, in many ways by doing the opposite of what an ordinary politician might do to appeal to everyone, to show I really am appealing to you and you in particular. And I'm going out of my way to raise the cost of appealing to other people, to appeal more to you, to show that I really am loyal to you. He did convince that group that he was unusually loyal to them, and they voted for him on that basis, and he has successfully countersignaled his way into the presidency. The rest of the world and other people are saying, but this is not the usual leader. And of course, the people who voted for him said, yes, that's exactly how I knew he was trustworthy. On my side is that he countersignaled the usual signals of overall political competence. But we often do that to signal loyalty. We often go out of our way to pay costs to signal loyalty. So one of our chapters is on religion, a topic that I know my guest host up here has written a lot about. And one of the standard stories about religion is you may agree to unusual rituals and to believe strange things in order to convince people that the people you share those rituals and strange beliefs with, that you are tied to them and that it will be expensive for you to leave them and that they think they're therefore reliably. Actually viewing back at Trump just for a second. Viewing a lot of this through the lens of loyalty explains a few other things. Because when you look at how people in his inner circle or people who have to function like his press secretary, try to make the with as brave a faith as possible, try to put some positive construal on his line or his mistakes or his misrepresentations of fact, that does function as a kind of loyalty test. I mean, whenever you are just when people with real reputations have to get out there and, you know, put both feet in their mouths so as to pretend that the President didn't do likewise, it looks like a bizarre hazing ritual from here, but it does signal loyalty. But again, those people across the border, they have tyrants and we have kings. It's easy to criticize the other side for being excessively loyal and submissive, but this happens all across the political spectrum. It's not just on the Trump side. Yeah, I don't know what that yeah meant. I wasn't accepting that at all. That was confabulation, in case you were wondering. So, Daniel, you're an economist by day. Let's spend a few minutes on incentives. Because it seems to me that many of the problems in our lives are the result not of bad people doing bad things because they're bad, but all of us good people or more or less good people struggling to function in systems where the incentives are not aligned so as to get us to do the right thing most of the time or make it easy enough to do the right thing. I think you have a line in your book about incentives being like the wind. You can decide to row into it or you can tack against it, but it's better to have the wind at your back. How do you think about incentives? And what's the low hanging fruit here? What is it that we could be doing differently in any area of consequence? So our book is about motives and money and power and respect are things we have as motives. And incentives are often aligned with those things. So we often do the things that give us more of these things. We want, but we'd rather not admit that those are our highest priorities. And so we're usually reluctant to overtly. Just do what it takes to get the money or respect. So in most areas of life, we have to put some sort of gloss of some higher motive that we have to pretend we're trying to do and that means often very direct, simple incentive games don't work. They are too obvious. Just like your incentive to reciprocate the dinner. That's an incentive you have, but you have also an incentive to not admit that too directly, because otherwise you would force them to admit that they mainly wanted the reciprocation. And so this is an issue with incentives that many of the problems we have in the world happen because we have insufficient incentives to do the right thing. But often that's because we don't want to admit how important incentives are. So we don't want to admit that we need incentives so we don't restructure things to produce the incentives because we want to pretend that we don't need the incentives. So, for example, your doctor's incentive to give you the best treatment can often be compromised by the fact that under one incentive system just want to treat you more just because they get paid every time they treat you, or another incentive system might be to treat you less because they have to pay out of. Their pocket every time they treat you under. Either case, their incentives might not be well aligned with you, but you could have set up some sort of more direct incentive system where they had a stake in your health. But you might not be comfortable with asking for that, because that might show that you didn't trust your doctor. You might rather, on the surface, pretend like you trust your doctor and they trust you. And you have a nice, comfortable relationship. This is also a problem in financial investment, actually. An awful lot of people invest an awful lot in intermediaries who take a lot of money but don't offer that much in return. And people often just like the relationship they have with the intermediary. And they don't want a distrusting relationship that would have some explicit, stronger financial incentives. So they accept a weak relationship. People often want to feel like you had a relationship and that relationship is degraded by the idea that you might not have trusted them. I'm a researcher in academia and most money comes in the form of grants where they say, apply for the grant and then they might give you the grant. We've long known that prizes are often more effective prizes where they say, if you do the following thing, then we'll give you this much money. And a prize can give stronger incentives for people to do things, but a prize is less trusting and you, as the granting agency, often want to just form a relationship with someone and then take credit for them as if we were buddies. And the prize sort of makes an arms like distance where clearly I don't trust you if I'm going to only pay you if you do this measurable thing. And so we'd rather have this closer relationship than to have a stronger incentive. Is there a meta level to many of these considerations where it can be reasonable to not follow the purely rational line through all of these problems? It sounds like what would happen is if we took all of this to heart, we would try to bootstrap ourselves to some new norms that paid better dividends, that seem more rational, economically or otherwise in terms of health outcomes. And yet, given human nature, we might find the price of anchoring ourselves to those new norms to be unacceptable for one reason or another. So the way I would summarize this is to say our usual institutions let us pretend to be trying to get the thing we pretend to want while actually under the surface giving us the things we actually want. Policy analysts typically try to analyze how to give policy reforms that would give us more of the things we pretend to want. And we're usually uninterested in that because we know we don't actually want more of the things we pretend we want. If you could design a policy reform that let us continue to pretend to get the things we pretend to want while actually getting more of what we actually want, we'd like that, but we can't admit it. If we stumble into it, we'll stay there. But if the policy healthy analysts were just to out loud say, well, this is a system that will give you more of this thing is what you actually want, but admit it, don't you? We don't want to admit it and then we want one to embrace that. So yes, what we want to do is pay for the appearance of the thing we're pretending to want and we're often paying a lot for that appearance. I would love to see a transcript of what you've just said there. So I'm going to ask you some rapid fire kind of bonus questions here. I want to leave a lot of time for Q and A because though conversation isn't about just exchanging information. You have a lot of information to exchange and I want to get the audience involved. But if you had one piece of advice for a person who wanted to succeed in your area of work what would that be? I am an intellectual and my measure of success would be insight. There are other measures of success. You can have a prestigious position, you could make a lot of money, you could get a lot of friends. But if the measure of success is insight, then a number of strategies, one of which is just to look for neglected areas. So as we talked about in conversation, there's a strong norm in ordinary conversation to follow the conversation, to talk about what everybody else is talking about. And academics do that, news media does that and we do that in ordinary conversations in a group of people. But for intellectual contributions, if you jump right in on what everybody else is talking about your chances of making a large impact are pretty small. You're adding a small amount to what everybody else is talking about. If you go talk about what somebody else isn't talking about, find something important but neglected, your contribution can be quite large even if you're not especially brilliant or well tooled. And so one very simple heuristic, if you want to produce intellectual insight is just to look at what other people aren't looking at that seems important and hope that later on they'll come around to your topic and realize that you did make a contribution. But how long would you stay in that important area waiting for people to come around? You don't have to stay. You have to stay long enough to make a contribution and then you can go off looking for another area to make a contribution to. What, if anything, do you wish you had done differently in your twenty s, thirty s or forty s? You can pick the relevant decade. Well, I wandered around a bit much like Sam in that I started my PhD program at the age of 34 with two kids aged zero and two. It's a relatively late start. That was in some sense the price for continuing to switch because other areas seem to be actually be more objectively important and to have more promise. But as I said before, this book that I'm out with here is summarizing the thing I wish I would have known at the beginning of that social science career, which is that we are just often not honest with ourselves about our motives. So the thing I'm most known for actually is something called prediction markets, betting markets on important topics. And they do work well and they give people something they say they want, which is more accurate estimates and information on important topics. And it turns out people are usually not very interested in them even though you can show over and over again in many ways that they work and they're cheap, et cetera. Part of why I didn't realize that that would happen is I took people afterward for what they want. So you wish you hadn't spent so much time on prediction? Well, I wish I would have understood the constraint that people are not honest about what they want, and thought about that constraint when I was initially trying to design institutions. So I read many other ideas and worked on ideas for reforming politics and medical purchasing and information aggregation, et cetera. And in each case I assumed the usual story about what we're trying to do and worked out a better answer. And we actually can not only work out better answers, we can show them. And not only in math, but in lab experiments and field experiments. We do actually know many ways to make the world better substantially. And the world's not interested, most of them because we know how to make the world better according to the thing that people say. They want to learn more at school, to get healthier at the hospitals, to get more policy in politics, but in fact, emotionally, at people's heart, they kind of know that's not what they want and so they're not interested. So I wish I would have known that 20 years ago. And this book is hopefully to somebody at a younger career, somebody can pick this up. You might know a 20 year old who has been saying for a while, everybody's bullshitting, nobody's telling the truth. Where can I find out what's really going on? I'm hoping our book could be that book. So ten years from now, what do you think you'll regret doing too much of or too little of at this point in your life? I mean, if I knew that, I would presumably be doing something different. Do you actually think that's true? Isn't that just one of the problems? That, for instance, you know, you want to lose weight, you know how to lose weight, but you still can't get the things? If I'm neglecting the long run for the short run, right? I don't know if I am, but yes, if I am neglecting the long run, then I would regret not investing more in the long run. But I am primarily investing in this long run effort to produce intellectual insight. And I actually think there are scale economies in that. So the more fields you learn, the more mental models and tools you have is to learn new fields so you can actually learn new fields faster, more fields you have. So if your intellectual project is to learn many fields and then find ways to combine the insights from them together, that's something you continue to do more and better as you get older. And so I'm enjoying that wave, and I'm not thinking I'm over at all. What negative experience, one that you would not wish to repeat, has been most valuable to you, most valuable to be negative or changed you for the better, but it's got to be negative. You wouldn't want to repeat it. Well, so early in my academic career, I sort of really just failed to do the simple standard thing of applying to the best colleges. I'm not sure what went wrong, but somehow my family or me somehow just did not go through the process of applying to good colleges far away. We just sent me to the local college, which was easy for me, okay, too easy compared to my colleagues. So I had lots of free time. So perhaps I might have thought I should have gone to a more challenging college and then people would have challenged me. But that made me who I am in the sense that with all that free time, I just started studying stuff on my own. I sort of made up my own topics and made up my own questions and just started going in and working on things. And so actually, I was a physics undergraduate major, and the first two years of physics classes are going over all the major topics, and then the last two years are going off over all the major topic is again with more math. And I had all these questions that the math was not answering. And so what I did in the last two years of college was to just play with the equations, just rearrange them, try in different ways. And by spending the semester rearranging the equations, I could ace the exams, but I didn't do any of the homework. And so professors who had a formula, like so much percentage homework, so much percentage exams, they didn't know what to do with me exactly. And so I got low grades in some classes, although people were willing to give me letters or recommendations. But basically that informed me that as I became the person who didn't do what I was told, I wasn't following a path that people had led for me, and I wasn't going down learning the things I was supposed to learn. I was just making up my own problems and my own questions and working them out for myself. And in the end, that has some advantages, but I'm not sure that was best overall. I'm going to put that in the bragging category. What worries you most about our collective future? We are collectively ignorant compared to what we could be. We are a vast population, a vast world, a lot of smart people, very capable people. We have many great tools, and we just don't pull that together into a consensus that we can use very well. We fail to do something we could do quite easily. My work on prediction markets was one attempt to try to create an institution which would allow us to collect what we know together effectively and efficiency. And it would work if anybody was interested, but we're not very interested. And so part of my intellectual work is just try to diagnose why aren't we interested as part of the understanding how could we do better? And I think this fact that we're all trying to show off to each other as part of it and if I ask well, what's going wrong with our showing off? I would say the problem is we are showing off to audiences that are too ignorant. That is, if we focus on a really smart audience, a really knowledgeable audience, you're trying to show off to them that we would be forced to show off in better ways. So for example, we haven't talked much about it, but basically I've said medicine is mostly about showing that we care rather than helping people to get healthy. So when grandma's sick, you make sure she gets expensive medical treatment, the sort that everybody would say is the reasonable thing to do even if it's not actually very effective. But as long as your audience doesn't know it's not very effective, they will still give you credit for being caring about grandma's. If your audience knew that the medicine you were pushing hurt her instead of helping her, they would not consider you as such a caring person. So the more that our audience knows about what actually works and has what effects, the more we would all be pushed to do things that actually had good effects as as part of the process of trying to show off and show that we care. Similarly in politics actually before we move on to that same more about the mismatch in medicine. But how is it that we know or how is it that you think you know that it's more about caring than about results? So again, the structure is a set of puzzles that don't make sense from the usual point of view. So it turns out we have data on variations in health and variations in medicine and there's almost no relationship that is geographic areas that spend more on medicine or have people do more doctorate visits. Those areas are not healthier. We also even have randomized experiments where some people have been given randomly a low price for medicine and they consume more and other people have a high price and they consume less. And then there's no difference in health between these groups. So at a very basic level, there's very little if not any correlation between health and medicine. Not only that, there are other things that correlate strongly with health that people show very little interest in. There must be a lower bound to that though, because some medicine is life saving clearly right? Where are you putting the line between well, it's not a line that is there's a whole mix of medicine and some of the stuff helps and that means other stuff hurts. So if you could just get the stuff that helps and avoid the stuff that hurts why then you could do better. But people show relatively interested in doing. That. And so some medicine hurts. Not only does it do zeroid on average hurts. We are not interested in exercise air quality, but what's the measure of people not being interested in the information that would allow them to get better medicine? We have experiments and studies where people have been given access to information and asked if they would be willing to pay much for it and even just given it, and seeing if it affects the behavior. And consistently, if you give people privately information about the quality of medicine, they just aren't interested and don't act on it. And they won't pay for it. Right. Certainly won't pay for it. Exactly. So there was a study of people about to undergo heart surgery where a few percent of people undergoing heart surgery die. So that means you face a few percent risk of death. That should be a serious situation. They said, we have statistics on the local surgeons and the local hospitals in terms of what the percentage is of those patients dying there, and it varies by quite a bit, twice as much in some places than other places. Would you like this information? Only 8% were willing to pay $50, and those who were just given the information didn't act on it. What why is it that I think that everyone I know is in the 8%? Well, that's that's what they're pretending. A way to understand this is to think about Valentine's, which happened recently on Valentine's is traditional, to try to show that you care about someone by, say, buying them a box of chocolates. Now, when you do this, do you ask how hungry they are? When you think about how large a box to buy, no plausible. You need to buy as much chocolate as it takes to show you care more than somebody else, regardless of how hungry they are, which is like medicine. We just give people a lot of medicine, even though the extra medicine isn't very useful. And if you ask, well, how do I know which quality of chocolate to get? You know that you need to give a quality of chocolate a signal. That's a common signal of quality. If you happen to privately know that this is a great kind of chocolate, or they happen to privately know a certain kind of thing is a great kind of chocolate, that won't actually affect whether you interpret this as a generous act. The interpretation of generosity is based on a common signal of quality. So if medicine is a way to show that we care, that similarly what we want is common signals of quality, we aren't actually very interested in private signals of quality of medicine, which is what we actually see. All right, back to rapid fire questions. I'm taking too long. No, I've been asking follow ups as well. If you could solve just one mystery. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org. Thank you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, today I'm talking about some fundamental questions of human existence, but they are rarely thought of as such. This is not the mystery of being or the nature of consciousness or what happens after death. No. This is a conversation about a far more basic question than those, and it's the question of what we eat and how that affects the prospects of our survival here. It does it in two ways. How we produce food, in particular, how we produce protein, affects climate change and pandemic risk very directly. And on both counts, the status quo really is unacceptable. So today I get into that topic with Bruce Friedrich and Liz SPECT, both of whom work at the Good Food Institute. GFI is an international nonprofit that is reimagining the process of protein production. Bruce oversees GFI's global strategy. He is also a ted fellow and a y combinator alum. He has published in the wall street journal, USA today, the Los Angeles times, wired, and in many other places. He has a Ted Talk that some of you may have seen, and he is a graduate of Georgetown Law, johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics. Liz is a scientist who works to identify and forecast areas of technological need within this field. She has a degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Johns Hopkins and a doctorate in biological sciences from the University of California, San Diego. As we are discussing such a pressing need here at what one hopes is the tail end of the COVID pandemic, we're releasing this episode as a PSA outside the Paywall, and we're also giving a significant donation to GFI through the Waking Up Foundation. As always, if you want to support the podcast and get access to full episodes in general, you can subscribe@samharris.org. And now, without further delay, I bring you Bruce Friedrich and Liz SPECT. I am here with Bruce Friedrich and Liz SPECT. Bruce and Liz, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having us. We're delighted to be here. So we have a lot to talk about. These are these can seem like unrelated issues, but they intersect in ways that will be immediately obvious to people. I think we'll probably focus on how global health concerns, especially with respect to things like pandemics and antibiotic resistance, coincide with a concern about climate change and how innovations in food production really seem like a silver bullet of sorts to help deal with both of these problems. It's not to say that it subsumes all of our efforts, but it will subsume some very important ones. And then I guess that all of this just relates to how we can intelligently solve problems in the world. These are problems that we have thus far, not been able to marshal sufficient resources to solve for reasons that are, at this point, somewhat inscrutable. But before we dive into that nexus of concerns, maybe you guys can just summarize how you come to focus on these problems. I'll start with you, Bruce. How did you come to focus in these areas? Well, I've been concerned about resource economics for a bunch of decades and have been concerned about the external costs of industrial meat production for quite a while as well. And about five years ago, I started thinking about whether we could use food technology to address the harms of industrial animal agriculture. And I think the answer to that question is absolutely yes. So these are some of the questions that we'll be diving into, but started working on the Good Food Institute just a little over five years ago to answer what are really the two big questions in global food. And the first one is, how are we going to feed close to 10 billion people by 2050? And the second part of that is without lighting the world on fire and GFI and food technology and markets are kind of what we came up with as the solution to both those questions and expanded it into global health. The other topics that we'll be talking a little bit more about subsequently and how big is the Good Food Institute at this point? How many employees do you have, and what's your annual budget? Our budget for 2021 is $18 million. We have $8 million spent in the United States on programs. We have about 65 full time scientists and lawyers and lobbyists and others on the team in the United States. And then we have about 45 across our international affiliates, which are in India, Israel, Brazil, Asia Pacific, out of Singapore and Europe. We have teams in both London and in Brussels, and about $8 million for US. Operations. About $5 million for international operations. And then we have a scientific granting program. We'll be spending about $5 million this year on open access science, plant based cultivation and fermentation, focused on basically replicating the entire experience of meat eating, but using plants or fermentation or cultivation. And Liz, where do you come in here? I came to the Good Food Institute straight out of academia, but I've long had a sort of altruistic, and for many years, ultimately, global health or public health kind of bent to my work, really. Kind of trying to leverage technology as a means of having easily adoptable solutions to what are otherwise really sort of wicked societal problems. So I started in chemical engineering in my undergraduate work, had the opportunity to go abroad for several summers to work in places like Slum environments in India on global health issues and just really saw sort of that nexus. Of societal intersection with technological solutions and gravitated towards biotechnology as a means of trying to find solutions that are easy for people to adopt and easy to really scale and deploy globally. So I went to graduate school in molecular biology, was working in an algae lab that did a little bit of biofuels work. This was sort of during the rise and subsequent fall of the algae biofuels era. But what really drew me to that lab was that they were also using algae as an expression platform for producing oral edible vaccines for malaria that, again, could be extremely low cost, extremely easy to deploy. You don't need cold chain or sophisticated healthcare infrastructure and so forth. I then went to do a postdoc in a biochemistry lab where my focus of my project was trying to develop a biosensor system that could be used as sort of a remote diagnostic for low resource settings. So again, this sort of bent towards how can we use relatively low hanging fruit in the biotech space to solve issues that would have massive global impact has always been sort of the driver behind my interest in science and biotechnology. And a couple of years into my postdoc, I sort of went down a bit of a rabbit hole of learning about all of these multifaceted implications of animal agriculture, specifically industrialized animal agriculture, on our global health system, on the environment, just the sheer resource utilization inefficiency of it. And for a long time I feel silly saying this in retrospect, but for a long time, it really wasn't obvious to me that there was a biotech solution or a technology driven solution to these multifaceted issues of animal agriculture. I considered this to be in the realm of public policy or consumer education or something like that, and it wasn't clear to me how I could use my background to really solve this issue that had almost overnight become my real passion project. The thing that I felt I have to spend my career working on this. And it was sort of a beautiful coincidence, honestly, that GFI was founded just a few months before I started kind of trolling around for career opportunities. And they had just posted a role for their first couple of senior scientist positions. And immediately upon seeing that and sort of reading about this theory of change, it was that light bulb moment for me. Yes, this is imminently solvable, and yes, we can use a technology approach to do it. Well, I think I discovered the two of you independently. So if memory serves, Bruce, you reached out to me, and I found you through the Effective Altruism network. Your foundation, the Good Food Institute, is in high esteem among Effective altruists. Founders Pledge recommends it as a charity, and Founders Pledge is also advising my foundation, the Waking Up Foundation, at this point. But, Liz, I noticed you on Twitter as an especially sane voice on COVID just when the pandemic was kicking off. I think you put together a threat or two, which many people found very valuable. And so, yeah, when, Bruce, when you reached out, when I saw the association between the two of you, it seemed like there was a lot to talk about. I don't know if this is too pessimistic for you, but I've drawn a lesson from COVID that is really pretty gloomy with respect to the prospects of our marshaling a political response to climate change. The idea that we are ever going to convince ourselves that this is an emergency that we need to respond to. Given that we couldn't convince ourselves to respond to COVID even when Italians were shrieking from their ICUs that this wave of contagion was coming, even when it was hitting New York and the rest of the country couldn't seem to care or take it seriously. I just don't know how we break this spell of misinformation and hyperpartisanship in response to a threat that it strikes me as at least an order of magnitude more difficult to get your mind around. Pandemics can be hypothetical until they arrive, but climate change seems to just persist in this zone of hypothesis even if most of the science is fairly settled and I just don't see people responding to it. So it seems that we need to find a way around this which solves the problems without actually having to convince people that these problems are anything like an existential threat that must be responded to like an emergency. Which is to say that I think we just have to build the cars and produce the technology and produce the food that people want and take whatever friction we can find out of that system of gratifying people's desires as opposed to convincing them that the house is on fire. I don't know if you think I'm being too pessimistic about the political avenues here, but that's a lesson I feel like I've learned from the last year under COVID. I don't know. I mean, listening to UCM, it feels to me like your indictment and I think it's absolutely right and it's the observation that led to the founding of GFI is that convincing individuals to change is going to be very difficult. So what we know about meat is just one example and we can dive a little bit more into this, but we know that it is an extraordinarily inefficient way of producing food. We know that it is the most likely cause of the next pandemic. We know that more than 70% of antibiotics are being fed to farm animals, which is driving antibiotic resistance, which could lead to the end of modern medicine. And we know that it packs a megaclimate wallop relative to alternatives and these things. People may not know the intricacies, but people are basically aware of these issues. And yet per capita meat consumption goes up and up and up. Even in the United States, 2019 was the highest per capita meat consumption in recorded history. And globally the UN says we're going to have to produce 70% to 100% more meat by 2050. So that's a pretty thorough indictment of behavior change. But I think if you look at your question with regard to climate and you look at US funding for climate solutions politically. EU funding for climate solutions politically. What China is doing in terms of addressing climate issues, it certainly may not be enough. But it is billions and billions and billions of dollars spent on renewable energy and climate mitigation and other strategies for addressing climate that don't require that individuals make big changes. So switching to an electric car and incentivizing that switch or switching to renewable energy as the price comes down and governments incentivizing that switch, that's really what GFI was designed to focus on. We think science and markets are the way to go, but science and markets, left to their own devices, just like science and markets left to their own devices with renewable energy, are going to be a very slow road. So most fundamentally, GFI exists to lift this entire space. And a big part of that is helping entrepreneurs be more successful, helping investors be more successful, helping big food recognize this as an opportunity rather than a threat. And really our organizational battlecry is that governments should be putting resources into both open access R and D to create meat in these alternative ways. And it's got to be meat that eventually tastes the same or better and costs the same or less. Further to your point, it has to give consumers everything that they like about meat, and it has to cost less. And we're very optimistic that governments will get on board with this theory of change. And then that gets past the sort of behavioral modification that I think your pessimism around that is pretty on point. You guys take an interesting angle here with respect to the dietary focus because this is not a vegetarian or vegan argument per se. Obviously the ethics here are virtuous in that direction, right? So it is a matter of reducing animal suffering and ending the current practices of factory farming. But you aren't emphasizing the ethical case. It seems to me you're emphasizing more the pragmatic case that given the role that meat production plays in climate change and raising pandemic risk, we have to make these changes. And the changes are it's producing plant based meat and producing cultured or otherwise known as clean meat, which is real meat, but just it's cell based rather than derived from a slaughtering animal after animal in an avatar. It sounds like that is a conscious decision. Is it a practical one? Is it just that you think it's much more effective to talk about the Pragmatics here? Or is there more behind this angle you're taking? I think it's primarily observational. So Daniel Kahneman talks about systems one and systems two thinking, as you know. And it just seems super clear that food is systems one thinking and some people will change their diets on the basis of ethical considerations. And one of the really interesting observations, I think, is that a lot of people will change their vocations based on systems two thinking. So education is how somebody like Uma Valletti or Pat Brown or Ethan Brown forms their company. But education as a method of sort of radical dietary change just absolutely has not worked. And if education worked, we wouldn't see the color charts of obesity, where they keep having to get all new colors because people just keep getting more and more overweight and more and more obese. There just seems to be something about human physiology and physiological needs where food is concerned that people, everybody cares about cost, everybody cares about taste. And for the vast majority of people, that's kind of where it ends. So when we're thinking about solutions that work globally, even in countries where education levels around, external costs for meat are very, very high and a lot of people know, nevertheless, most people don't change their diets. But we also need a solution that works in rural China. We need a solution that works literally everywhere. And GFI has operations in Israel, not because we care what the Israelis eat. We have operations in Israel because it is so advanced technologically. And as a country, it's very interested in producing all of its own food security. So Israel and Singapore are the two countries that are most advanced on both plant based and cultivated meat for that reason. So we operate in those places because the science that's discovered in Singapore or Israel can change the way that meat is made literally everywhere. So we're big fans of education mostly to educate policymakers, to educate environmental and global health NGOs, to educate scientists, because this is a great vocation for people who want to address global health, address food security, address climate change. This is a great vocation. But for the vast majority of people sitting down to eat, it's really going to distill to how does it taste and can I afford it? I'll chime in on the consumer front as well. If you look at what's really driving the tipping point of interest in alternative proteins, where there was virtually no new activity going on, just a blip on the radar in terms of new product launches or investments or what have you, until about 2015, 2016. And ever since then, you can look at any of those metrics investment, product launches, new startups, et cetera and you'll see a very rapid uptick in the past five years or so. And that shift is really driven not by increasing numbers of vegetarians or vegans. Those are still small, single digit. What that's driven by is a huge swell in the number of folks who identify as so called flexitarians or reduceitarians. People who are looking for different protein sources for certain meals of the day or of the week. If you look at data from Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods, they're both finding that over 90% of consumers purchasing their products are also consuming or purchasing meat products in the same shopping cart or in the same meal. So the reason this space has become of interest to the sort of global food giants and to investors and entrepreneurial folks is because we've seen a huge broadening in that consumer base that is now interested in these products. It is no longer relegated to these sort of niche consumer categories like vegetarians or vegans that historically were kind of driving activity in alternative protein products. And correspondingly, we've seen obviously, a huge revolution in the sort of quality of those products with respect to how well they recapitulate that consumer experience from a flavor perspective, from an old factory perspective, from a texture perspective and so forth. And just to build on that, it's sort of an interesting theory of change that we have at GFI because right now the plant based products do cost more than animal based products. So we need flexitarians and people who are looking to reduce their meat intake because we need people who are willing to pay a little bit more. But the theory is that because these products are so much more efficient so chicken is the most efficient animal at turning crops into meat. And according to the World Resources Institute, it takes nine calories in the form of soy or oats or whatever you're going to feed to the chicken. It takes nine calories into the chicken to get one calorie back out. That is extraordinarily inefficient. And that means nine times as much land, nine times as much water, nine times as many pesticides and herbicides. As we get better at biomimicing the entire meat experience and a lot of people listening are going to be thinking, well, I've had veggie burgers and they're not very good. This is not that. This is people who are literally focused on making products that you will not be able to distinguish from animal meat, but using plants. And then, as you said, Sam, with cultivated meat, it is literally the exact same product just made through cultivation, which is similarly three times as efficient as chicken in terms of input output. So as this scales up, as the factories are built, as we move in the case of cultivated meat to food grade ingredients, the hypothesis is, and we're very optimistic about this, that plant based meat and cultivated meat can taste the same or better and cost the same or less. And that's why this should be seen as a massive opportunity for big meat companies like JBS and Tyson and Smithfield and also for big food companies like Adm and Nestle. And so far we've been really gratified by the degree to which the companies are seeing this as an opportunity. Yeah, there's an interesting psychology here. There's a few threads to pick up on him. One is that the flexitarian reduceitarian approach is interesting because it doesn't tend to get much ethical standing, certainly not among vegetarians or vegans. But it is worth acknowledging that if you're someone who reduces your meat intake by half, let's say you're someone who used to eat meat twice a week, and now you go to once a week. You have made precisely the same contribution to this project that someone who eats meat once a week does when they go to zero and become a vegan or a vegetarian. It's the same reduction, and yet it doesn't have the ethical purity of changing your status as an eater. And it's very interesting to know that most of the people who are buying these alternative protein products are also still eating meat. They haven't radically changed their lives, but they're showing that they either want to or just are interested in eating differently and could easily be incentivized to just eat in a truly benign way if the products simply arrived in the stores. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. That's the theory of change. It's just making it easier and easier for people to make decisions that align with their values. But we do, I think, have to meet people halfway. Liz was talking about five years ago being sort of the real advent of these products ramping up and getting more successful. That is also the point at which the companies started thinking about their mission differently. They started thinking about the fact that they really did need to make products that didn't require sacrifice. Because the easier you make it for people to switch, the more likely they are to switch. And eventually, once you have products that literally give consumers everything they like about meat but cost less, our expectation is that you'll see basically just a transformation of how meat is made. So in the same way that we moved from phones that require cords to cell phones, or the same way we moved from analog photography to digital photography, we just give consumers everything they like about, in those cases, communication or taking pictures, but we do it in a better way. And if it also costs less, that dynamic should really make a significant impact. And eventually the idea that meat requires live animals just becomes a thing of history. Where are we with the cultured meat, cell based meat in terms of its actual availability to consumers? I had, as you know, uma, Valeti on the podcast a couple of years ago, and full disclosure, I actually invested in his company after that podcast because I was just so taken with the prospect of this becoming an available technology. I mean, it wasn't even so much a bet on its likelihood to succeed, it was more just an aspirational investment. But where are we with clean meat specifically? We have now seen the first commercial sale of cultivated meat just a few weeks ago in Singapore by the company Just, which has been in this space alongside their plant based work for several years now. I think we're likely to see, over the next year to 24 months quite a sort of follow on effect of first more governments approving this product. It is a new to market product and in some cases, that regulatory path is still being sort of sussed out. But there are multiple companies that are sort of at that point of ready to move into true largescale commercial scale production in the next few years. So there are several companies building out pilotscale facilities right now, and we're starting to see these first commercial sales. Okay, so let's start with our farming practices and how why are we talking about finding other ways to produce protein at this point? Why is this a problem we need to solve? People have been eating meat for as long as there have been people, and we've been growing it in one form or another for thousands of years. We've lived in proximity to animals all this time. We've been dimly aware of how this causes various pathogens to enter the human population and have grown more acutely aware of that of late. But still, why is this not sustainable? Why is this a slow moving emergency that is now not moving slow enough for anyone's comfort? And how does this connect to the question of climate change? I guess I'm looking for some picture of how big our problem is. Sure. So I mentioned a minute ago that the most efficient animal at turning crops into meat is the chicken. And it takes nine calories fed to a chicken to get one calorie back out, and it's even worse for pork and beef. So you're talking about many times as much land. But it's not just that. You're growing all of those crops and you're shipping them to a feed mill, and you're operating the feed mill, and then you're shipping the feed to the animal farm, and you're operating the animal farm, and then you're shipping the animals to the slaughterhouse and you're operating the slaughterhouse. And the United Nations crunched the numbers on all of this inefficiency, and they said that animal agriculture is responsible for about 14.5% of all human caused climate change globally. If you think about it in a meal by meal basis, you're looking at chicken is the least climate change inducing meat, and yet chicken causes 40 times as much climate change per calorie of protein when compared to legumes, like soy and like peas. So we are going to have to produce 70% to 100% more meat by 2050, and it is just a huge problem for the climate. So Bill Gates in his new book, talks about plant based meat and cultivated meat. And in both his book and on his tour, he was talking about how food and AG is a critical pillar of addressing and mitigating climate change. But he was sort of scratching his head, wondering what next steps could be. And he is now super enthusiastic about plant based and cultivated meat as part of the solution. At GFI, we spent about a year working with Breakthrough Energy, which is his umbrella organization on how we can best accelerate this transition toward plant based meat and cultivated meat. And we're delighted that Breakthrough Energy adopted GFI's recommendations that governments should be incentivizing these alternative proteins, open access R and D that the entire industry can build on. And then governments should also be incentivizing private companies to transition their factories to build factories and to shift in this direction. I'll also mention that we don't want to be too reductive when speaking about environmental impacts. Obviously, climate implications are huge and front and center, but there are also a number of other implications for biodiversity and local ecosystems that are incredibly damaging resulting from industrialized animal agriculture. One of the biggest externalities of this industrialized intensified system is the enormous quantities of animal waste being produced that we've seen instances where in hurricanes, for example, in the East Coast, these lagoons of animal waste are overflowing their fences and flowing into local waterways. There are huge zones of eutrification, or so called ocean dead zones, at the outlet of virtually every river that has run off from agricultural basins that's contributed to in part by fertilizer on fields, but to a very large degree from runoff from animal waste from these large scale animal facilities. The other thing we should probably address, and I don't know if you want to address I mean, you actually did sort of nod at it, Sam, but the global health implications are pretty colossal in terms of how we produce meat right now. We are ushering in an age of antibiotic resistance where, according to the former president of the World Health Organization, dr. Margaret Chan, she says it's the end of modern medicine if antibiotics stop working. And about 70% of all of the antibiotics that are produced globally are fed to farm animals. If one of your listeners gets sick, or if one of us gets sick, we'll go on a course of antibiotics that will be quite short. But farm animals are fed antibiotics for their entire lives, and it's leading to antibiotic resistance. The UK government released a report. They said the threat to the human race from antibiotic resistance is greater than the threat from climate change. So if listeners want to scare, google the end of working antibiotics. If you want an even bigger scare, add the word China to that Google search. There was a truly chilling cover story in the New York Times Magazine maybe 18 months ago called Pig Zero that addresses this issue. So the way that we are raising animals right now requires all of these sub therapeutic drugs. If you shift to plant based meat production or cultivated meat production, no antibiotics required. So it's another really big benefit of shifting in this direction and another reason that governments should really be incentivizing these technologies. Yeah. I must say I'm a fan of slightly changing the subject when talking about the problem of climate change, to get around the abstraction of it and to connect with things that people can be more easily led to care about. Or acknowledge they already care about. So for instance, often when we're talking about climate change, I feel like we could do more work when focusing on just the benefits and the pleasure, the sheer pleasure of breathing clean air. Just when you think of just how much nicer it is to live in a city where the air is actually clean and imagine what it would be like to live in a city like Los Angeles when there was basically no air pollution, right? If we were all driving electric cars and the port of Los Angeles were not being inundated with diesel fumes it would just be a different life in the city and we experienced it. One of the epiphanies we had when COVID was first changing life everywhere in the first lockdown and we noticed the reduction in air pollution it was a vision of a possible future where we could breathe clean air. And then you connect that to all of the health effects of bad air and the tens of thousands of people who are killed outright by it in any major city over the course of a year. When you look at emphysema and asthma and lung cancer and all the other pulmonary and cardiovascular knock on effects of people essentially smoking cigarettes when they didn't consent to smoke them it's just very easy to see that kind of ancillary benefit being so enormous that we will seem retrospectively insane not to have made these changes earlier. We will seem as crazy as we seem now. When you look back at what it was like to fly on airplanes that had smoking sections, how did we ever get ourselves into that situation to consent to be put on a sealed tube with a few hundred other people and let them smoke for the next 10 hours on a flight to Europe? It's just sheer masochism. And yet it was our common practice. And I got to think the spell is going to break here as decisively as that and we will not recognize ourselves. In retrospect, I think it's probably a pretty relatable experience for anyone who's driven cross country or across states that have animal farming operations to know that you're coming up on an industrial animal farm and literally have to hold your nose for several miles. And I think some of those sort of societal implications and worker implications have been laid bare in this pandemic as well as folks have sort of taken a peek behind the curtain of how conventional meat is produced and the conditions on processing lines and so forth. There really are health implications for the communities that surround these farms and for the workers who are working in these processing plants. And it's probably worth just taking a moment and stepping back and thinking about the fact that everything we're talking about right now is domestic. We could also be talking about insane weather events that are created by climate change. But if we look outside of the United States and at developing economies in particular. I mean, that's where it becomes a huge problem that it takes nine calories fed to a chicken to get one calorie back out. We're literally burning down the Amazon rainforest in order to grow soy, to ship that soy to Europe to feed to agricultural animals. That is the sort of thing that is sort of the real world outcome of this inefficiency. And you think about it's almost tautological, but in the United States and developed economies, we will do a pretty acceptable job of acclimating to bad climate events. The people who get hit the worst are the people who contributed the least. It's the developing economies where people are going to be displaced, entire cities are going to be wiped out. And it's the economies that are least able to deal with these impacts. What do you do with the argument that in the developing world they require more or less the same career we had with building their economies based on a 19th century style industrial revolution? Now that we have grown as wealthy as we have, we are demanding that the rest of the world that has not yet caught up to us clean up their act, when only now, as a, you know, the at the tail end of our development, do we have the courage of our scruples here. What's our obligation to help the developing world bypass the industrial mistakes we've made? Self preservation alone should dictate that we figure out how to do this. But how do you view that dialogue in trying to persuade China and India and Africa to not follow all the missteps we in the utterly developed world have made? I think at least on the meat front, you can look at cellular technology and cell phones and the concept of leapfrogging. So making meat from plants and cultivating meat from cells. What I think we can't do for the reasons that you just underlined, is go to them and say you need to eat less meat. You need to not adopt practices of industrial animal agriculture, look at the adverse harm to the climate or antibiotic resistance or whatever else. But we can go and say, let us help you switch to renewable energy is one climate solution that is win win. And in the case of meat, we can help you figure out how, in the case of India, to turn millets into palatable products that Indian consumers will be enthusiastic about. We can do that with plant based meat. We can also do that with cultivated meat. And we've been deeply gratified. We operate in India and GFI India. The Modi government in India was the first to fund through the center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in India. Cultivated meat open access R and D. The Chemical Technology Institute in India is also very enthusiastic. And the entire food industry in India, adm has been a phenomenal partner as well as other companies in India. And then China wants to be the global leader on addressing climate change. China should be all in on these alternative ways of producing meat as well. We haven't even talked about pandemics to any significant degree yet, but as you know, Sam, we kind of lucked out. COVID-19 could have been significantly more deadly. It could have been significantly more transmissible. Scientists say the next pandemic is inevitable. And according to the UN environment Program, the most likely cause of the next pandemic is the consumption of animal meat, followed by intensification of agriculture. So with plant based meat and cultivated meat, the chances that your food contributes to antibiotic resistance, or the next pandemic falls from very, very likely to zero. It eliminates those problems. And that is in the best interest of governments in developing economies. But it is particularly in the best interest of governments in developed economies to incentivize this, to make it something that is not a sacrifice for these other countries. And this leapfrogging concept also speaks to the urgency here. The vast majority of the increase in demand for meat and animal protein will come from these emerging economies. And they don't currently have one of the biggest challenges that the developed world is facing right now in this protein transition, which is to say that they don't have the inertia of sunk assets into all of this infrastructure that underlies industrial animal agriculture. So the opportunity to go straight to production methods that are more efficient, that are cleaner, that are safer, that are more resilient, and not have to expend all of those resources in building these incredibly damaging systems that then the folks who invested in that are incentivized to keep that status quo in operation as long as possible. Yeah. Well, on that point in the developed world, what sort of partners have the established agribusinesses been? I got to think that, and I know this was, uma, Valeti's opinion when we spoke you have to figure out how to bring them in as partners so that they don't view these alternatives as a mere subtraction from their potential market. What's that dialogue been like? And how hopeful are you that the Tysons of the world are going to recognize that they should be in this game rather than resisting it? We have been deeply gratified by the response of both the biggest food and the biggest meat companies in the world. So Pre COVID GFI had an annual conference, and we had JBS and Tyson at our conference. The two largest meat companies in the world speaking from the deus, talking about how they want to be protein companies. They want to supply the world with high quality protein as profitably as possible. So literally, all of the world's largest food companies and all of the world's largest meat companies have gone into their own plant based meat brands. So JBS, Tyson and Smithfield have their own brands. Cargill is supplying KFC in China, which is pretty exciting. Tyson and Cargill, which are the two largest US based meat companies, have each invested in Uma's company. They've invested in Memphis meats. And kudos to Uma for seeing the value and being so enthusiastic about inviting them in, because, yeah, we want them to see this as opportunity. We their supply chains are robust. They know what consumers want from meat. They are trusted brands. So we are just very, very excited about having Nestle, Adm, JBS Tyson, and as far as we can tell, they are all taking this concept very, very seriously. It's a little toe in the water at the moment, but there has not been resistance. And it does seem to us that there has been real enthusiasm, and we're delighted by that. It's interesting to consider how few mines actually need to change to utterly transform our practices here globally. Because as we've pointed out, it's not a matter of successfully getting through to all the individuals to modify their day to day choices. We simply have to deliver more compelling choices and they will just grab what they want. So when electric cars become better than gas cars, by every metric, and also cheaper, there will be no more friction in the system. There will be a few people who are nostalgic for the rumble of an internal combustion engine, but for the most part, people will want faster, safer, cheaper cars. And that's what they'll get. And I think we're more than halfway to already transforming the basis of that decision. The final piece is probably price. But how many people's minds do you think would have to change at the decision making level in government, in these companies to essentially rewrite the rules of industry here? We're certainly not talking about millions of people. We might be talking about 10,000 people. I think you're absolutely right. I wanted to to squeeze in one of my favorite quotes ever, which is, if we could make meat without the animal, why wouldn't we? And the reason that's one of my favorites is because that was said by the CEO of Tyson Foods, tom Hayes, in about 2018, which just really speaks to the incentives when you approach this from a really pragmatic perspective. You know, for, for a meat company that controls enormous market share of total global meat production, to be that candid, that the animal is almost the most inconvenient part of their whole process. If they can make them meet without the animal, why wouldn't they? It becomes quite easy to sort of identify what those incentives and what those drivers are for, as you say, a relatively small number of key decision makers. And I sort of feel like there might be just like one person in China who, if they got really absolutely behind this, could steer billions of dollars into it. Or if John Kerry got really into this, or Joe Biden, for that matter, in the United States. And there is tremendous incentive for them to do that. I mean, you think about electric cars, which you were just talking about, sam and GM has said by 2035, they're going to be 100% electric. Ford has said they'll be 100% electric by 2035 in Europe. And that means they're all going to go to China, because China has 93 of these gigafactories for lithium ion batteries, and they're going to have 140 by 2030. The US has four of these gigafactories, and we're expected to have ten by 2030. So if that happens to meat, if China goes all in on reconstructing meat from plants and cultivating meat directly from cells, they become the global supplier of meat as well. So there should be a sort of space race among governments to reconstitute meat from plants to cultivate meat directly from cells, because it is how we take the likelihood that our food causes the next pandemic or leads to antibiotic resistance from significant to zero. It's a huge part of the climate solution. And the countries that decide to take this on, they're going to have bragging rights until the end of time, but it'll also be spectacularly good for their economies. So we certainly want the corporations, but getting governments really behind this and lifting up these entire sectors, you know, could be very, very few people who could make a massive difference. Yeah, that's one of the silver linings of having a totalitarian approach to government. You really only have to change a couple of minds and everything changes. So before we close here, I want to revisit an issue I raised with, uma, in my original podcast on this topic, because I feel like people's intuitions are probably in the process of changing here. But at the time when this notion of clean meat was first floated, there was a concern that there was a kind of ick factor around the concept. And this is, I've always thought, somewhat counterintuitive or paradoxical. You tell people that a single cell has been removed from the finest producer of steak you can find on Earth, and then steak has been amplified on the basis of that single cell. So all of the disorder and suffering has been bypassed. Literally, a single cell has been removed from an otherwise happy animal. And that started the process. And now you have meat that is getting grown in perfectly clean vats by people in white lab coats. And when you pitch this to people, at least there was a kind of ick factor where they thought, that's not something I really want to eat. Right? And yet what's so strange about this is what they're telling you is that if you could only add all the blood and chaos and misery of a slaughterhouse to the picture, then they would get hungry all of a sudden. Then they feel like eating that steak that had to be reclaimed from the murder of terrified animals and somehow rendered antiseptic enough to consume add to the picture these xenoviruses that now everyone has good reason to worry about. How do you guys view the psychology here? Have we actually just blown past this initial reservation in people? And do you think there really won't be any problem in adoption? Or do you think people are still stuck with this? I guess it's a kind of uncanny valley of food intuitions. What do you guys think about the psychology here? I think people eat meat right now, not really very thoughtfully. So human beings, I mean, again, our, our programming is to be wary of new foods because for however many thousands of years, a new food might kill you. I think once you have the two products side by side, and one of them has basically no chance that it is contaminated with bacteria. If it's seafood, no chance that it's contaminated with dioxins or mercury. If it's other animal products, no chance that it has any kind of antibiotic residues. It's just a safer product. Live streaming production on the internet, very, very boring, very quickly, but kind of the opposite of passing laws to make it illegal to find out what's happening on these farms and in these slaughterhouses. So I think it's natural that people, when they first hear about it, might not be super enthusiastic, but as the products come to market, I think people will be very enthusiastic, especially as it starts reaching price parity and assuming that it tastes the same or better. I will just say that the initial consumer surveys that are done, even when it's referred to as like in vitro meat or lab grown meat, you still have somewhere on the order of 35 to 70 plus percent of people who say they're happy to eat it. You have a significant portion who say they are happy to pay more for it. That alone is a colossal, colossal market. But I think we go back to what dictates consumer choices is. How does it taste and what does it cost? So I think we'll have lots and lots of early adopters. And as the products scale up and the price comes down, I think just about everybody will go in this direction and familiarity goes a huge way towards this. I don't know if you've seen the charts of people's reservations about getting a COVID vaccine prior to the approval of those vaccines, and then afterwards the curve drops almost immediately once the vaccines were approved and people started hearing about friends and family members who had gotten them. I think the exact same kind of psychology applies here, that people may say they have reservations about something just because it's new and unfamiliar, but as soon as you know a friend who went to a restaurant and was able to try this really cool new product, I think a lot of that evaporates right away. And as Bruce mentioned, we largely have not really seen that IC factor to a substantial degree. In the last few years. Even of these consumer surveys of this product before it's on market. Yeah. Bruce's side by side comparison does suggest a diabolical commercial that could be shot just how one steak was made versus how the other was made, and all of it culminating with the taste or not being able to tell the difference. I do think we will rewrite our intuitions on this front and just shining a light on how strange they are to take vaccines. As an analogy, we're currently living in a country where something like half of the population is quite sanguine about getting coronavirus. Right? They think that's no big deal, and yet they're afraid to get vaccinated for coronavirus. That's how upside down it is for I don't know. I don't know if it's half, but it has to be tens of millions of people. I know some of these people personally. I know people who have taken basically no precautions to avoid getting COVID but are highly vaccine resistant. And these people are not uneducated either. So there's sort of an imperative to shine a light on how discordant these beliefs are or should be. In the case of a COVID vaccine, this is basically someone expressing a preference for taking into their body whatever it is that naturally came out of a bat so as to sicken and kill millions of people. To the thing we have consciously engineered that is well understood not to be a complete virus that can sicken you and whatever side effects one gets from getting a vaccine at this point. This experiment has been run on millions and millions of people. And we know people are not being sent to the hospital and dying based on their reaction to the vaccine, whereas they are to the disease proper. And it's still it's a hard conversation to have with people. So it's fascinating how clear the path to daylight should be on so many questions and how difficult it is to actually get people to walk in the only reasonable direction. I think one salient point here that's different is that this transition towards alternative proteins is currently and should remain entirely apolitical or bipartisan. And we've seen support from sort of libertarianleaning folks who recognize this as, yeah, this is just a free, open market solution to an inefficiency, as well as folks who are kind of driven by some of those larger societal implications. Yeah. And I mean, you look at somebody like Sonny Perdue, who was Donald Trump's Secretary of Agriculture, or Scott Gottlieb, who was Donald Trump's FDA commissioner. And further, to Liz's points, they were both all in on alternative proteins. So I think socializing it, what Liz says is absolutely true. It's just also the case that if you're thinking about meat with cultivated meat and I guess I will also just take a step back and say this is a fairly small thing. The term that GFI is using is cultivated. It allows us to talk about cultivating meat and doing it in cultivators, and it's a familiar term that we think is also helpful, and that a big thing. As I mentioned, even the polls that talk about in vitro meat or lab grown meat, the numbers are pretty good. And when it's explored why people might not want to eat cultivated meat, their answers oftentimes are things that we can disabuse them of fairly quickly. So it's going to cost too much or it's not going to taste good enough or whatever else. But once we actually do have the product available, it is literally the exact same product in the case of cultivated meat. And with plant based meat, it's made up of things that people are used to consuming. The reason that people are resistant to plant based meat is generally maybe they had a bad experience with a veggie burger or something. So again, we can educate people and move them in the right direction. I think with both these products also, there must be two markets here. Obviously, there's the market of people who eat meat and want things to taste the way they used to taste under the Odious regime. And if you can give them that, then they'll be happy. But then there must be vegetarians and vegans who don't want their meat substitutes to be too realistic. Right. Isn't there a preference that has now grown up for millions of people that you want a veggie burger to taste great, but you actually don't want it to taste exactly like a burger? Yeah, I think at least at GFI, it's a little bit of a laugh line. But it's also true when vegetarians or vegans say, well, I don't want to eat that. It's like we really don't care what you want to eat or don't want to eat. The value to all of the positive qualities of a shift to plant based and cultivated meat is zero if you're eating that instead of beans and rice or whatever vegetarians and vegans are eating. So we are pretty laser focused at GFI on something like 98% of Americans who continue to eat meat. I mean, it's a sort of funny thing that something like 6% of the public self identifies as vegetarian. But when the vegetarian resource group asks people, what did you eat in the last month? A significant portion of those have eaten fish or chicken in the last month. The arithmetic doesn't work yet. I think you're absolutely right, Sam, that some people don't want the taste exactly the same. But for those people, they have a range of products that they can consume instead for the positive benefit of this shift. What we're really trying to do is that Holy Grail, it needs to satisfy meat eaters. It needs to taste the same or better, and then eventually, as it scales up, it needs to cost the same or less. Okay, so is there anything that people can do at this point to help. Again, we're trying to change the minds of decisionmakers here. But what can people do to effectively change the timeline over which this is bound to happen at this point? Well, I will start by saying that the Good Food Institute operates as sort of a think tank and open access resource hub. So we operate across three programmatic areas our policy department and we are hiring in our policy department, but people can get involved in lobbying their members of Congress to support the work that GFI is doing and others are doing to incentivize this shift, and also to fund open access research. We operate in terms of industry engagement, so we work with the really big meat and food companies. If somebody works at one of those companies, you have a huge lever to try to help make change. We also work with entrepreneurs and investors and encourage people to check out all of the resources that we have on our website@gfi.org. For entrepreneurs and investors, we work with scientists and I'll let Liz talk a little bit about what people can do if they're interested in getting involved and they have scientific acumen. Yeah, one of the biggest bottlenecks we hear over and over for what's hampering the growth of the alternative protein industry is a gap around technical talent. A lot of folks from sort of adjacent technical fields, whether it's tissue engineering or biochemistry or bioprocess design, have relevant skill sets. But this may not be on folks radar as an up and coming sort of career vocational calling. So that's a big area where we support with resources to help folks plug into this industry. We do a lot of work on campuses. As Bruce mentioned before, we are funding grants to get new researchers and new investigators pivoting some of their research focus towards the biggest, highest impact knowledge gaps and research questions in this field. So almost at any career stage, there's sort of an inlet to figure out how that technical talent can go to serve some of these needs. And I do just want to reiterate how utterly tractable this field is. There is a great need for research and research funding, but this is not rocket science. If you look at the improvement in the quality of products and the breadth of products that has happened in the last few years, that's really been on a complete shoestring budget. So there's immense capability here as we've touched on a couple of times, we don't bat an eye at the hundreds of billions of dollars going into renewable energy, R and D every single year. But in our tallying, the total public funding that we estimate has gone towards alternative proteins across all time, across all governments, is on the order of tens of millions, not trillions or hundreds of billions. So there's just immense potential here for allocating more resources, more talent, more attention towards this field. And having that manifest as a really outsized impact on the world. And I will just toss out Sam for people who just want to put their toe in the water. GFI has a couple of different monthly seminars. We have a business of alternative proteins. Seminar It's a webinar and a science of alt proteins. Webinar every single month we have some newsletters which people can sign up for, which are sort of everything that's happening and alternative proteins. And we do have job openings in the United States as well as I think, maybe in all of our global affiliates, certainly in most of them. So folks can find all of that information just on our website, which is Gfi.org. We are also philanthropically funded, so this is extremely high impact, extremely neglected, and extremely tractable. And we certainly invite anybody who would like to join our family of supporters. That's great. Actually, Liz, I want to spell that out a little bit more because it seems to me that we should make it crystal clear. Many people go into science without any clear concept of what they're going to do, how they're going to put it to use. They're interested in it, and they're just kind of meandering through their undergraduate years following their interests, but they haven't actually connected with a more vocational sense of how they're going to do good in the world. And so I'd like to tap into this idealism a little bit more, because what we really want to engineer here is a kind of gold rush, both purely material I mean, let's leverage people's greed for material success, but also a kind of moral gold rush. We want people to feel inspired by solving a massive problem and reducing suffering and existential risk. And this topic really does sit at the crossroads of all of that. If you were starting college today, what courses of study would be obviously relevant to making a contribution in this area? At risk of feeling like I'm dodging your question, it really is true that any Stem discipline has a role to play here. These approaches are so interdisciplinary that that's actually been one of the challenges from a technical talent training perspective, is finding folks who would have, say, a stem cell or tissue engineering background, who also understand the biochemistry of flavor in food or the biomechanics of texture. Those are typically biomaterials folks or food scientists who would have that kind of expertise. So what we've started to see at some universities is students who have the opportunity to sort of create a major and pull coursework and lab work, in some cases from multiple areas to really understand those intersections, which I think is where there's the greatest potential for these sort of innovative leaps. We have seen tremendous traction with our student group chapters on campuses. We have eleven chapters so far with plans to scale those, and those students have been extraordinarily influential as this voice on campus to advocate for more coursework in this area. To go out and connect directly with faculty members, to implore them to consider applications of their research area towards addressing these challenges. And I think there's among this sort of up and coming generation of scientists a real appetite for making sure that they're not just doing research for research sake, but that it's truly tapping into something that is a passion project for them. And the sort of sense of disillusionment with maybe kind of older paradigms in academia of finding your niche and just publishing relentlessly in that sort of obscure corner of the knowledge sphere, but rather kind of taking this holistic approach and saying we can have it all right. We can explore really fascinating kind of fundamental biochemistry and biology and engineering questions, but do it in the context of also addressing these massive societal and global issues. How much of this is needing to get people to do doctorate research in the relevant areas? And how much can be more along the lines of what we've seen in computer science, where you can come out of an undergraduate computer science background and quite clearly make the relevant contributions to the software industry. And obviously, people can be self taught in those areas. It's so modular. But is this the kind of thing that with the right undergraduate curriculum, we could help engineer a functionally unlimited supply of relevant talent? I've certainly seen my fair share of incredibly impressive folks who are passionate about this field and don't have endless letters and credentials after their name. And I think I'm glad you mentioned computational science because I think that's an area that has a huge role to play in alternative proteins that hasn't been quite so recognized yet. The degree to which we can automate and accelerate R and D through simulating experiments rather than having to conduct that work empirically, there's massive potential there for acceleration. And certainly as startup companies in this space become more mature, they'll need talent at sort of every tier of training. When you're a startup first formulating your R and D strategy and so forth, you're typically just hiring folks mostly at the PhD level. But once this starts to move more and more into commercial operation, you'll need technicians to kind of maintain your cell banks. You'll need folks who are keeping the system running but don't need to be those sort of highly credentialed, highly trained and skilled innovators. And just further to something that Liz noted at a minute ago, the GFI University focused is pretty single mindedly on Stem. And some of the undergrad students that are taking very seriously alternative proteins on their campuses are making just a massive impact from sort of the bottom to the top in terms of their outreach to professors and getting even graduate level courses considered and working with professors on research centers. So we need people in private industry, but we also just like there are climate centers at universities all over the world, there should be alternative protein research centers at universities all over the world. And that does not require an advanced degree to be a champion of that concept. It seems like they could be incentivized financially too. If a university like Stanford created the relevant department and that department could have equity in whatever enterprises were spun out of its curriculum. It just seems like you could marry the academics and the business case there and get people moving. Absolutely. And those models do exist and have been pioneered in other fields. And I think that's really a beautiful sort of trifecta of players in those types of research institutes is if you have government funding, university involvement and industry partners and they all have the appropriate incentives to be involved, it's value creation or job creation from the government perspective. It's training opportunities from the university perspective and really the ability to establish a center of excellence. And then, as you note, these industry partners get sort of first look at new technologies coming out of that space as well as an opportunity to help guide those research focus areas based on what they're seeing as the true pain points in the industry. Well, it's exciting stuff. So I just want to thank you both for taking the time to explain all of this to my audience and for the work you're doing. And I recommend people go to the Good Food Institute site and get more information and support your necessary work and I will certainly do that myself. So both of you, thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Pleasure. Thank you./n
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+Welcome to the making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, we have released the third season of absolutely mental, so today I'm previewing that for you so you get to hear from Ricky Gervais. It is always great fun for me to speak with him. Anyway, if you enjoy this, the other episodes in season three as well as the first two seasons are all available@absolutelymental.com. Enjoy. Hey, how's it going? Good, how are you? I'm good. I actually have a question for you that I've been forgetting to ask before we move to anything that's on your mind. We're at the moment where we're deciding whether or not to get a pet. My two girls want a pet and it's the dog versus cat conversation. I noticed you're always tweeting pictures of your cat, but I know you're also a dog lover. Do you not have a dog? Yeah, no, we cover other peoples. I go walking every day just to meet dogs. I think I told you, I talked to my stand up that I know about 200 dogs by name, and they're an absolute joy, a dog. But there's two reasons why we don't have dog. One, I travel too much. You can leave a cat sitter and it's happy, it gets fed. That's it. With a dog, I can't stand that look on their face and they go, why are you leaving me? When I was growing up, I used to go on holiday with my mum, my dad, just look after the house and dogs it and that was his holiday, too, because he could get drunk. And when we came home, our dog pretended to be ill, like, come out limping or something. And the vet said, yes, he doesn't want you to go away again. They do have emotions very human like, very close to us, that attachment, what looks like fear, shame, gratitude, unlike a cat. The other reason, if I'm honest, I don't think I can live through 15 years of knowing I'm going to have to say goodbye to that dog. It's bad enough with cats and it's it feels just as bad. You know, every cat I've had to put down, I've I've been in a state. It's like but you but you do think you do think there's less of an emotional attachment to a cat in the end, no matter how attached you are, it's worse for the dog. No, I think there's less of an emotional attachment from a cat, so I can personify pretty much I can feel sorry for a car that's left in the road for things like that. But, yeah, I do think because there's a genuine it looks like human camaraderie from a dog more than a cat. There's still something about the cat that sits on you because it wants to be warm. And I feel with a dog and I could be totally wrong and you know more about it than me, but I feel there's genuine love from a dog. So that's my pros and cons. That's no reason not to have a dog. That's like saying you shouldn't have friends or family engagement or I shouldn't have had the kids in the first place exactly in the world we're leaving them. But I don't know if I'm honest. That would be the reason. I think the traveling too much. And if you're going to have a dog, I feel you've got to have a dog. Twenty four, seven, and it's your friend, and you got to be with it. And as I say, it's okay to leave a cat for a couple of days if it's in its own environment or whatever. But I mean, I'd always say get a pet, though, for all the pain you eventually go through and the inconvenience and remembering to walk it, feed it every day or whatever it is. I can't imagine not being around animals or pets. Genuinely. It sets me up. There is something you don't think that's the toxoplasmosis talking. I don't know what that is, but tell me. It's a brain parasite you get from exposure to cat feces. Oh, yeah. No, I honestly still try and keep away from pets feces. I try and distance myself. I go for the other end. I let a dog lick my face. But that's where that's where I draw the line. That's putting a lot of faith in the dog's behavior here. Dogs famously don't draw the line too well themselves. No. Well, I think it's a no brainer. Of course. Of course children should have pets. I think it's also a learning process as well. That attachment and then that early loss, I think. Well, the thing for me is I always grew up with dogs, so I don't have a you know, I have a very clear sense of what it's like to have a dog and how great that is as a kid. But I've never lived with cats, so no. Well, I mean, it's very different. Obviously, cats have got sort of one mode with dogs. There's degrees of stuff, and lots of cats are either alive or dead. Yeah. You don't know till you open the box. They've got to get one of each puppies and kittens. That's the longer negotiation that I've noticed directly at my brain. I think it also teaches them duty. You can't suddenly go, don't feel like doing this today, or feeding them or walking. I do have another question about cats, though. I don't know. I guess some people are allergic to dogs, but I never seem to encounter people who admit to a dog allergy. But I do know people who are seriously allergic to cats. And so what happens when someone with a cat allergy shows up? Well, I think you know, don't you? By then, it's very rarely that one of you gets it and suddenly realizes you just killed your best friend. Yeah, exactly. The ft pen's expired. It's the actual dander, isn't it, of the cat and dog? No, dogs are quite common. That's why the labradoodle was invented, because they found out that poodles are sort of hypoallergenic, so they bred poodles with everything. And then you can get most breeds of dog if it's bred with a poodle. And I think that's mostly for the shedding, though. People just like not having the hair all over their clothing. Oh, is it? It's a fashion thing, is it? I thought it was because people were less allergic to them. I could be wrong. We sorted that out in Los Angeles. I think it's all about the hair. Right, okay. Yeah. You got your black clothing that you don't want. Well, that's the other thing as well, about cats and dogs, that the black cats are the last one to be left in rescue homes. People don't want them. And I thought it was superstition, and it was to a certain degree. But now the worst crime is people don't want black cats because they don't instagram well, which is like the most infuriating, shallow reason I've ever heard. I mean, if you want to get more annoyed at the world, just know that fact. Just filter by instagram. Instagram. What kind of breed of cat do you have? That's a very good looking cat you keep instagram a moggy. A big old normal rescue cat. A big fat, healthy tabby. But that's what that's called. That is a tabby cat. Tabby, yeah. With a bit of torture shell. But always get a rescue as well. Don't buy these £5000 designer dogs that have been from sort of horrible farms and stuff. Always get a rescue. Go to a pound. Right. Get a big old Maggie or a big old Map. Okay, I have another question that was on my mind to ask you. Have you watched any of this new Beatles documentary? I haven't yet. No, I haven't. Let's talk about that when you do, because it's an interesting experience of anthropology, watching these guys interact and create. Oh, really? All right, okay. I'll get right. It's one of those things that you get around to five years after, I think when there's too much hype, I dig in, I go, no, I'm not going to watch it, because everyone else is. I'll watch it in five years. Okay, I love a look. Well, my question, I think this might be right up your alley, because I remember a few years ago, I think, when we first came in contact with each other, you've done sort of an epic essay, as I remember, or a small book, whatever you'd call it, on lying, hadn't you? Yeah, you blurbed it. I think that was our first connection. Sent it to you. As I remember, it was mostly about the morality of lying. Yeah. I watched this thing that was more about the anthropology and the psychology of lying and the evolution of lying. Do you know the lying experiment? They did with different sample groups. I know some experiments, but I don't know what you're referencing. I'll try and explain it. So they got a group of people, a lot of people, they told them they were doing a test, but not what it was or what they were testing, obviously, and what it was to answer as many questions. I think they were just math questions. As many as they could in a certain time, they could grade themselves. Yeah. They would market themselves and then shred the papers. Now, what they didn't know was they weren't really shredded, so people could tell if they were telling the truth. So they got a dollar for every question they got. Right? And 70% of people lied, but only a little bit. They could have lied a lot more. They they made it realistic, and we all we all lie, apparently. And then they did another experiment where instead of getting a dollar per question, they got a token per question, and they had to go somewhere else to cash it in. And because of that one step removal of responsibility that they weren't ripping off the person they were talking to, they lied even more. Right. And then they did another experiment where before they did the test, they just said, oh, we're going to do this right. They can tell them what else can happen. They said, Please promise not to lie. And they didn't. They didn't lie. They lied a lot less. Yeah. So I think it was about social responsibility and guilt, which is fascinating, that if you're going to lie and I just wonder where it came from, because it's obviously part of our evolution. It's obviously due to group selection, where I suppose it was more important, wasn't it? It was more important to lie, to survive. Very rarely now, lying is a matter of life and death, and I think a lot of our moral decisions are conscious sort of mind suppressing, our instincts. That might be bad or might have been more useful before, but apparently it exploded with the advent of language. But there's always been lies in our evolution, even down to, you know, camouflage is a lie in the, you know, pretending you're poisonous when you're not, and things like that. And I just I wonder if you know more about the the psychology of why we lie, because I think everyone does, apparently. Yeah. Well, I had a total change in my outlook on this topic. It's really one of the I can count on, I think, one hand and even just a couple of fingers moments in my life where my my relationship to a whole set of behaviors and norms and just, you know, something that was kind of background became suddenly foreground. And I had a change in how I decided to live as a person. And it was based on this course I took in college and as a freshman, and it was just a course that analyzed whether lying was ever ethical. And it was just this machine for producing people who came out the other side of it convinced that Line was basically always wrong. Right now I carve out that's a tricky one. There's kind of self defense situations. I view Line now as sort of the first step on the continuum of violence. So that when you're when you're dealing with someone who you really can't collaborate with, this is not a rational interlocutor anymore. This is somebody who is just one or another degree your enemy. And you're now deciding how much violence you need to use to get them out of your life alive is ethically, permissible and even necessary in that case. So if you're thinking about whether you have to punch this person in the face, well, then obviously you could be thinking about whether to lie to them first. But generally speaking, everyone who took this course, it was really fantastic. Professor at Stanford, Ron Howard was a very influential course in the lives of many people because he just deconstructed this background assumption that everyone had that some amount of lying was not only normal, but inevitable and socially desirable, that white lies were an expression of compassion generally, and you just have to lie. There's no way to navigate social space without you must agree that white lies are from empathy and compassion. Where you want to protect someone's feelings, you don't have to. There's lots of steps here, isn't there? Because telling the truth doesn't mean blurting it out when you're not you don't have to. So if a little kid says to you, am I ugly? Whatever you think, surely the better thing to do is no, of course you're not. I mean, who would argue that that's the ethical answer? Well, so there are situations where first, as you point out, a commitment to telling the truth doesn't require that you just blurt out everything you're thinking like you have some neurological disorder. Yeah. And it doesn't prevent you from kind of curating the kinds of truths you will tell because you can't say everything on any given topic. So there is no burden to say absolutely everything you think or could possibly think about someone or about a situation. So you're filtering by what's true and what's useful, right? And so sometimes it's not useful to say something and there's no need to say it. And some things can be kept private. I mean, so you can keep a secret. For instance, I'm not a fan in general of keeping too many secrets, but you can be honest about that. If someone says, how much money do you have in your bank account? The truth could be I don't want to tell you. Right? So you can just say it's none of your business. It doesn't require a lie to carve out different zones of privacy. But in the case you referenced here, there are situations where you're not in a relationship among equals. Right. So you've given me a kid. Right, yeah, exactly. I went straight to that because I think parents lie all the time for the child's own good, whether they're right or that. Actually no, but the truth is, I have found that we have really never needed to lie to our daughters. I'm only aware of once telling a lie to one of my daughters. And it was, it was really by accident. It was just stunned. It was kind of like a malapropism. I just we'd done a Google search for photos for something. I forget what, what the search was, but she was very young, maybe she was seven. And we came upon an old woodcut, like a 14th century woodcut of somebody being decapitated. And she said, what was that? I just tried to move by it as quickly as possible. And she said, what was happening there? And I said, oh, that was a very old and impractical form of surgery. That was my life. But that's nearly a joke. Well, let me get into what's a lot okay, well, that's interesting because have you never pretended there's a Santa? No. No. And that was actually the the most common question I got in response to that book, Lying What About Santa? So I have a whole argument about why you don't need to lie about Santa. But the interesting thing is I heard from dozens and dozens of people who remember what it was like to learn that Santa didn't exist and to realize that their parents had been lying to them about it and they remember how betrayed they felt by their parents. Yeah. And it was actually a wound in the relationship. They just felt like they never quite trusted their parents. I can't imagine that I could say my mum lied to me about being a god, but it's ambiguous whether she was lying or she believed it or not. But in that case, I think she probably believed it also. I did hear from many fundamentalist Christians who said, oh yeah, my parents never lied about Santa because they didn't want us to think they were lying about Jesus. Right. So they were they were scrupulous about Santa. That's interesting as well, isn't it? That's interesting as well. To give another comparable piece of information more credibility. That's really good. But hold on though. Okay. I think that we've got to decide what constitutes a lie because I think you're being very strict what a lie is when it comes to talking to kids. What is that? It's something else or I don't know. I mean, because if you say, Ask your Summer and you say, I don't know. And you do know, that's lying, isn't it? Yeah. It's pretending not to have heard their question. Lying. I think there's an ambiguity to what lying is. I wish I could think of something. I mean, it's incredible. It's incredible that you say that confidently, even that you say it whether it's right or wrong, and I'm sure it is, but that blows my mind that you don't lie. I only ever mean white lies. Of course, you know, because here's the thing. The truth is I'm almost never in a situation where it's remotely tempting, where I even see it's. Like, we live in three dimensional space and it's impossible to visualize the fourth dimension. For me, the dimension I'd have to point where it's tempting to lie, has almost been lost in my experience. I can't even find it. What would you say when they say when someone dies, if I remember dies, where are they now? What do you say? Well, the honest truth, there this is just kind of a happy accident because you and I are in slightly different camps here. My honest truth is I don't know, right? I can get into the details of why it's intellectually credible to think that nothing happens, that there's no further experience. That's a big blank spot on the map for me, right? You genuinely and honestly say you don't know. Yes. Right. Six poor kids have got to ask the right question to get an answer, haven't they got about 15 questions to put you on the spot? Right? I've become a very good lawyer by asking this, asking this. It's a deposition. The endless deposition. I'm like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates in a deposition. It depends what the meaning of is is. Do you ever take the fifth when your kids are asking you about stuff? But in truth, once you recognize that you're on the same team, right, and you have the interest of this person at heart, then it's just a question of how best to communicate the truth to a child generally. And so, like so in the case of that, decapitation would cut, right? There's been many versions of that sort of thing that came up later. One of our daughters would hear us talking about something that's something horrible that had happened out in the world, and she would ask, what are you talking about? And the honest truth is, listen, there are all kinds of things that happen in the world that you don't need to know about now, and this is one of them. But that's my point, because your argument is a bit of a circular argument. If we're trying to find out what's best to tell a child, that includes whether the truth is the best thing to tell a child because we don't know the reaction. So you might find out that sometimes lies are better for the child in the greater scheme of things in the world. I think there are a few cases. There are cases in extremists, right, where you're in some sort of emergency where it's easy to imagine, or at least it's plausible to argue that a well crafted lie is the compassionate and even life saving artifice that you need, whereas the truth, however well intentioned, is going to run risk of serious harm. But generally I just have not been in that situation and it's always honest to say, listen, we're your parents and there's all kinds of things we know that we'll eventually tell you, but right now you don't need to know that. I think it's fair enough and I think that I think that's probably Erin on the side of caution and you've still got a lot of maneuvering at your disposal there. It's not like you haven't gone to the point of no return in either way. So I think you're right. I think in general but I think that if you take lies by themselves in general they are wrong. But when they're connected to the rest of the world, all those knock on effects, what you've said before what that what caused me, I think I think it is ambiguous whether always and I only mean in the sense of like act versus rule utilitarianism, right? Do not walk on the grass. Very good. Rule it's for everyone. It ruins it. Someone having a heart attack on the grass cause you walk on the grass. So take taking that as a metaphor, there must be many, many situations where certainly immediately it's better to lie. And I feel that we know that. And again, I'm only talking if it's a compassionate lie, if you're protecting the feelings of someone else. I think that if you're protecting your own feelings and your own reputation, giving yourself an advantage, because that's what a lie does, isn't it? It gives you an unfair advantage in the world over someone else who's left in the dark. That's why it's morally wrong. Psychologically speaking. The temptation to lie is always born of the sense that your interests and the interests of the other person have now diverged. Right? You have a view of the world that you now can't share or it would be too awkward to share, or you're, for whatever reason, not disposed to share it with this other person. You don't want to give them access to reality as you see it because you think in some way it would be bad for you. And so it is the very definition of selfishness, even if you have told yourself this story that it's also compassionate. Rarely do people in my experience think it all the way through to the end and actually believe that if they were the other person, they wouldn't want to know. Usually the so called compassionate lies are born of just this feeling of awkwardness that it's just you don't want to be the one to say this, I agree, but if you were the other person, you would want to know, right? The great example in my life that came pretty early for me was I had a friend who was a screenwriter who had been working on a script for probably a full year and he asked me to read it and he asked me what I thought of it, and I thought it was terrible. Right. I really thought it was bad. But the truth is, I also thought he was very smart and a very promising writer, and he has gone on to have a great career as a screenwriter and a television writer. And the net effect of me telling him that I thought that script was terrible was that forever after he knew I was being honest with him whenever I said I thought something was great. Right. Now I'm someone I mean, this is now decades old, but I've always been someone he could trust to Calibrate. And it's not to say that my opinions are always right, but he knew I wasn't bullshitting him ever. And that's something at least with our daughters, given how much we've emphasized the value of honesty, they just know we're not going to lie to them. And it's such a refuge emotionally because what you have to price in is how meaningful praise becomes from someone definitely who you know will not lie to you. That's a very different kind of praise you're getting from people who are just giving it because that's what they do because it's too awkward to say anything critical. So so your decision outside your own personal integrity is that this is better for the child, isn't it, to learn the lesson that never lying is a reward for all those things. Would there ever be ever be a case, could you imagine, where you'd want them to lie yeah. In some kind of self defense situation? When you're dealing with someone who you know you can't trust and who's, who you don't, you're treating this person as a kind of dangerous object because that's the, you know, that's what they've you count it almost as self defense metaphor is violence with yeah. And, and get that. And even there, there are, you know, it's worth considering whether the truth might not be better. I mean, so like the classic cases, you know, the the Nazis show up at the door, and you have Anne Frank in the attic. The Nazi of the door says, we're looking for a little girl. Have you seen her? Now, obviously, in the general case, the ethical thing to do there is lie and say, no, sorry, but if you were actually in a stronger position, the truth would be better. I mean, what you actually would want to want to happen, say, yes, I got a fuck you. Yeah, fuck you. And if you make another if you take another step, I'm going to put a bullet in your face. Right, exactly. Of course. But we know that's great. I mean, that's probably the best example we could ever have here. But to take it as a metaphor as well, the world is full of us not being in charge of the outcome. It's full of that, isn't it? And I sort of agree with you in principle, definitely, that I don't lie. I never lie for gain. I never lie criminally, I never lie. I just never lie to take an advantage. I never do, because I know it's wrong. But also, I couldn't stand it. But I do lie, as I said loads of times. Will you come to my party? I can't come to your party now. The reason I can't is because it's awful and I don't want to be there. But I haven't said that. I just said I can't. That's an interesting I'll remember that next time I invite you to a party. I'd make up a really good reason with you. I'd say I would not detect it. I'm giving blood at the orphanage again. And you'd go, oh, he always gives blood at the orphanage. So that'd be a really believable he must not have any blood left. That's why he's so pale and weak. I heard he fainted on stage at Wembley. You really couldn't come to the party. Oh, dear. Okay, but this is a great example, which is, yes, it is tempting to lie in those cases, but once you set yourself the rule that you're just not going to lie, even in those socially awkward situations, two things happen. One is it holds a kind of mirror up to your life, where you are then forced to recognize, okay, one, I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to go to these kinds of parties. Do I want to be that kind of person? What does this say about me? That the truth is I don't want to go to this party, and that's worth reflecting on. And two, it holds a mirror up to all of these relationships that you might not want to have. Right. Maybe you just don't want this person to think they should keep inviting you to the party you don't want to go to. Right, yeah. Well, it does depend whether it's like, yeah, friends, family, best friends, acquaintance, annoying acquaintance, somebody. Exactly. Of course, there's a sliding scale of wanting to go to the party or not, but it was just that I was the only reason I came up with that was that I'd say, okay, I know what you're saying. Really? Yeah. I think that's a white light because it's for their good and the truth would hurt. I'd say, no, I don't like you enough, or your party will not be as good as me sitting in my pants watching Netflix. Right. But I suppose I'm really protecting myself, aren't I? That I'm getting the best of both worlds. I'm staying in and watching Netflix in my pants, which is what I want to do. And I haven't heard their feelings, so they might like me still. So it isn't but also that it's interesting. There are certainly relationships I have where I could honestly say, I'm sorry, I just I really just don't feel like going. I just wanted to stay home and watch Netflix. Right. And. That would not be because of the nature of the, you know, all past communication. That would be fine. I mean, the person is not going to take it personally. No, exactly. This reminds me of something that Annika discovered when she was I think we just had our first daughter and she's being asked to various situations. And because she was never telling a white lie to get out of, you know, having lunch or going to parties or whatever it was, she was just constantly being honest about how exhausted she was, how overwhelmed she was, how just like she's sorry, I don't want to go, I'm just too tired. And she realized that most people don't do that. And you get a false picture. You almost get like an Instagram fake image of how good everyone's life is and how much they're holding it together when really they're busy telling white lies to get out of situations that they're just too exhausted to be in. And once you start telling people how exhausted you are, you unmask that in your network of friends and everyone confesses. Yeah, I just couldn't bring myself to go because I was so tired. I just felt like watching Netflix. Yeah, but I mean, the script example, that happens to me a lot as you read this, right. My heart sinks, but I already know, however bad it is, I'm never going to say anything too terrible about it. What I do is I try and find one good thing about it, and I just say that go, oh, I like the so and so. Good. So and so, good luck with it. I could never say, I mean, how honest were you? Again, this is not my best friend. I'm assuming this is not my best friend. No, flip it around. So you're saying you would be honest with your best friend? I'd be much more honest. I go, oh, I don't know. There's a thing about that. I wouldn't do that. It's a bit clear. I'd still do it with compassion, but I'd be a lot more honest because I care more. I'd want my best friend to make it more. Okay, but what if you had a friend who was spending all their time trying to do something that you really thought they were not cut out for? Right. Let's I mean, let's take it I think they that's a very good one. The example I use in in the book, I think, is with an with an actor, someone who wants to be an actor, wants nothing more than to be the next, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio. But for a dozen reasons, you think this whole project, this whole life course is doomed, right? Like, there's no way this person is going to make it as an actor. Yeah. What do you say? Well, I'd still keep my mouth shut because I could be wrong if I was the person to say, you never make it, give up. If I could see that alternative reality if I was God and I suddenly see that in five years, he actually does something and he gets a lucky break and he's massive. I don't want to be the one in my reality that destroys his dreams because I don't know the truth. But but that's but that's part of it. So that uncertainty is the an accurate description of the truth as you see it, right? So you can always discount your opinion. You could say, Listen, this is just my opinion but honestly I think you should find another game to play, right? But you've established that the more you tell the truth like that, the more brutally honest you are people, the more they respect your opinion. So now me being brutally honest about how terrible he is has much more chance of him believing that and giving up. But you just have to think of what might be a good thing or it might be depressed not doing because people can do the thing they love and never get anywhere. That's true. Actually have had a happier life doing it. Okay, yes, but again, this is a conversation and that's more of the truth you're putting out. I'm agreeing with you. I'm just throwing up little, I suppose, counter examples or upshots really because it is a tricky one but also it comes down to the shoot one person and the other nine go free or all ten get shot. There's a certain amount that goes it's not up to me to shoot anyone, it's not up to me to save the other it's not up to me this isn't my problem. Do you see what I'm saying? I think it's totally valid morally to go who the fuck are you handing out? Okay, but you just have to visualize the complete situation here. We're talking about someone who has asked for your opinion and if you imagine this is just the golden rule, what would you want to know? If you were in their place? If you were trying to be an actor and you actually didn't have the talent for it or the people closest to you thought you didn't have the talent for it and they weren't telling you? But now I'm an expert in the Node that can genuinely help him. You see, I think the important thing is here that I'm not well people come to me and show me their scripts because they know I've made my way. I'm quite high up in that industry so it's not just my opinion, it's how useful I am because I could give them golden nuggets I could give them you know so I think we have to take that out of it. Yeah, I think I think we have to I don't know what to do. I can't think of an example, something I don't know about and my honest opinion I think that is more interesting because it's just purely my opinion and whether that's hurtful or not, I'm glad we've had this conversation because it's been something I've been wanting to tell you, and I'm just going to be brutally honest. I don't think this stand up comedy thing is going to work out for you. You know what, though? When you started like that, it was very well done and there was a little adrenaline rush. What the fuck is he going to tell me? Actually, for 1 second, then I thought, this is going to be a joke, but for 1 second I thought, what the fuck is he going to say? But that's my point. I don't want to be the one to brutally hurt someone's feelings for 1 second, even if in five years they might appreciate it. But the thing is, I do think the Golden Rule is the right heuristic here because it might be the case that you wouldn't want to know if you were in their shoes. And then it becomes more interesting to consider whether you should tell them anything. But if you know, you would want to know. I've seen situations where all of the friends of this person are having a conversation behind their back and no one is telling the person and we're talking about their closest friends. It's crazy. I know. That's really unfortunate and awkward and a little bit sad because we're assuming they're delusional now, aren't we? Yeah, it's nice to be delusional. Yeah. But you say the Golden Rule and I think there's a bit of a luxury to saying that, because when you say, I'd want to know it, so so do you. That's arrogant, because everyone's different. And just because I can take insults, I can take trolls. For me to suddenly go, Well, I can take it. So I'm going to just troll someone on Twitter and do a devastating thing. Then I'm going to go, what are you crying for? I can take it. I think that's I don't know. But that's an adversarial situation. You can correct for what you know of the difference between yourself and another person, but the truth is, you very quickly train the people in your life. Once you start being rigorously honest with everybody, then people don't ask your opinion anymore unless they actually want it. I'm almost never in a situation where someone's asking me my opinion and then I discover this mismatch between my valuing honesty and their expectation of me just blowing smoke and they walk away unhappy. That hasn't happened for decades that I'm aware of in my life at this point. I know. Now if I ask you something and you go, you're going to get it. I don't know. I know you're lying, Sam. Do you think I'm losing my hair? I don't know. Well, look, I don't know. You're not looking to I don't have eyes, Ricky. I'm blind, having problems with my vision. I can see you juggling. Am I going bald? Yes or no? Well, that's a very interesting as well, because just going back to your kids asking you, where do dead people go? I don't know. Again, that's very convenient for you because this is my thing with when people mistake agnosticism with atheism one's knowledge and one's belief, so no one knows. So your kids could say, what's your best guess, though? Dad, what do you believe? You're a smart you're a smart blow, dad, what do you believe? So you don't know. No one knows. What do you believe? My friend Ricky over here believes. And that's why we're not going to invite him to the next party. Exactly, yeah. In general, I'd say if anyone asks me, I think lying is wrong for all the reasons we've discussed. I do try and be brutally honest. I think it's something to be proud of, but I still wield that with a bit of compassion. And I put it in fiction as well, like the film I did with our mutual friend Matthew Robinson, the scene in that where I lie to my mum because there's nothing to gain from that. I can suddenly lie. She's terrified of death. She's definitely going to die in 30 seconds. What would be the point of saying, you go into the ground your worms me by mum. So that's an example there of clearly I could say it's a good lie, even though you could also say it made me feel better that I didn't have to go through that awkward thing and see her in fear. I think that's quite clearly and distinctly an example of what we we have to agree on is a good lie. Well, again, yeah, there are situations where you're now no longer relating to someone who is an equal. I mean, it's a paternalistic situation where you're saving a child or you're saving an old person or someone with dementia, you're saving them some emotional distress and that's where it becomes tempting. And I think in those cases, yes, it is sort of like it's different, but it is like the self defense situation where it's no longer I agree, you're just putting a fire out. Well, with those two caveats with nothing to gain or lose, whether and self defense, I think I'm in agreement. There's one variable here which we haven't mentioned, which is probably the biggest certainly one of the biggest reasons not to lie is that it eliminates a kind of cognitive overhead that people have that is completely unwieldy, and it's a continuous basis for embarrassment and reputational harm, which completely goes away. Which is when you know you're going to tell the truth. In any situation, there's nothing to keep track of. You don't have to remember what you said last time, you don't have to think about what you told some other person who may have told this person. There's just a seamlessness to your life where so if your story changes honestly, well, then you then it's like it doesn't matter what I said last time, I might have believed that last time, but now I'm just telling you how things look to me right now. I agree. But I don't think we can treat morality and lying and all those things like a science. I still think there's a certain amount of dogma to it that if you say it's always wrong to lie no, it's not always, but it's not always wrong to shoot someone in the face either. No, it's not. I think we both agree it's probably better to lie to them and then shoot them in the face. Yeah, okay. Yeah, we do agree. I think there's an ambiguity of what lying is as well. I think there is a convenience of sidestepping the lie that isn't totally honest. But with all those caveats, I think we're in agreement that in general, it is always better to tell the truth, and I think the truth will out anyway because there's delusion as well, isn't there? And there's, like, people denying the facts that are in front of them. That's never good on that scale. It's dangerous to humanity, of course, but on a very personal level, I think, yeah, you probably do have a better life, and everyone around you has a better life. If you're all if ever, if they're all honest and everyone knows they're honest. That is surely the best society we could have, because we only have to undo all these fears of heaven and hell because we started them in the first place. A secular society from the last living person, the oldest person in a society who was brought up secular and logical and probably wouldn't have those we probably wouldn't see those fears starting, would we? I don't know. I don't know about that. Psychologically, is it better to tell kids to not know, to not give your best guess, not to give the whole truth, nothing but the truth? What does death what does death mean? What does death mean? To a ten year old, the lie is always the stark lie of certainty about heaven. Say Grandma is definitely in a better place and we're going to see her again. It doesn't even make sense, given the fact that people are still assimilating every death as though it were a genuinely bad thing. People are bereaved they're sorry to not see the person again in their life, but if it were actually true that you were sure that she went to a better place and that you will be reunited, it's just not a bad thing. Death is just I mean, and so insofar as you can I mean, the temptation to believe this is that insofar as you actually can believe this about death, it does remove the sting in death. I mean, there is no problem. I can't get over that I care less about humanity and society when we're talking about this sort of thing than I do about what does it do to one six year old when you're brutal. I keep coming back to that. I don't know whether we know it's good or bad. Yet I think we know that the thing you actually want to be able to teach a child in order to equip them to be a sane and well integrated human being is not that there's this fictional world or this world about which no one can be sure that rectifies every problem, every apparent problem in life. The good people go to the good place, the bad people go to the bad place, and you get everything you want after you die. It's not to teach them that. It's actually to equip them emotionally to deal with reality, insofar as we have every reason to believe it exists. You want a child who learns that grief is part of life, and it's an expression of one's love for that person, and it's totally healthy and predictable and understandable, and it bonds you to other people with this force of compassion. I mean, we're all in this circumstance together, and it's I mean, the very interesting thing about the pretense of certainty about the afterlife that religious people indulge is that it isolates truly grieving people. When you're a fundamentalist Christian and your husband dies and you are actually miserable, right? And insofar as you're paying lip service to the idea that they might be in heaven and you're going to see them again, you are actually bereaved right. You're actually devastated. You're surrounded by people who are just aiming their happy talk at you, saying, you know, it's all for the best, and he's with Jesus. And you're you're isolated in your grief. You're not actually getting real compassion from them. You're getting a fantasy that is not meeting you in the moment of your grief. Well, okay. Well, in conclusion, if you want the truth and you want kids to grow up knowing that the harsh realities of life, to prepare them, I think you should not only get them a dog, but get them a very sick dog. Mission accomplished. Good. That was great. That's hilarious. It's great. Merry Christmas. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am back with my friend Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for joining me. Nice to be with you, Sam. It seems like it in Earth time it hasn't been that long since we've spoken, but in pandemic time it has been, I don't know, a year, a year and a half. How are you? Time is moving. Funny. I am good. Since we spoke last, absolutely nothing has happened to me. I stayed in my apartment, I go for walks and for runs and I sit in front of my computer and watch. Absolutely nothing interesting has happened to me. What about you? Yeah, I've been surprisingly locked down. I mean, actually more locked down than I even sometimes intend. I noticed that there are days where I can actually just sort of forget to go outside, which doesn't seem entirely healthy. Yeah, I've learned from this that I really would not like prison. I kind of knew I wouldn't like prison. It was kind of over determined. But yet another reason is I got to go outside of it. I got outside, I like walks, I like sitting outside, I like hanging out with friends. It really taught me that I got to avoid finding myself in prison later in life. Okay, well, let's talk about this situation and what of interest we can glean from it. There's a bunch of questions I've gotten from Twitter and we won't be entirely on COVID as a topic, but let's just get all the COVID stuff out of the way first because I want people to everyone to have access to it and hopefully some of it will be useful. But there's this one idea that has been circulating as people struggle to figure out how and when we can reopen society. And it's this difficult equivalence between economic cost and lives lost or the risk of lives lost. And people seem anchored to what appeared to me to be patently false claims and false comparisons. Here you have someone like Andrew Cuomo, who's been a superstar through this, but even he will say patently absurd things like, you can't put a price on human life. Right? As though we are thinking about when to reopen society or whether or not to close it and fully lock down as we have. It's obscene and impossible to even attempt to put a price on human life, which is obviously not true. We put a price on human life all the time. We know companies and governments do that explicitly sometimes. But even when it's not explicit, it's absolutely there. And it's there whenever we decline to spend all the money in the world on the project of pushing the risk of dying as low as it can go. We could make every car cost a million dollars by engineering maximum safety into them. We could treat every plane flight like it was a rocket launch, right? We could check and recheck everything prior to takeoff. And the reason why we don't do this is that we've put a price on human life. The fact that it's implicit really doesn't matter. It's still there. We've weighed some implicit price against the time and the money required to guarantee everyone won't die in a circumstance. And this opens on to kind of an interesting ethical question, because there's an obvious price disparity when you look at a country like the United States and the developing world. A human life is obviously and even necessarily worth less in the developing world because there's much less wealth. And the trade offs in the use of wealth translate into different kinds of lives lost. I mean, when you think about what we would spend to resurrect someone from the dead if we could. Let's say we had the power of resurrection, but it cost a billion dollars to resurrect somebody. Well, we would do that in the United States at least once to prove that we could do it and see if it works. And there'd be a few billionaires who would probably resurrect their mothers or somebody. But even in the US. There's no way we would spend a billion dollars per life. We wouldn't spend $300 billion to bring back 300 people and then 301 and then 302. There's no way that would that would happen even in the richest country on earth. But when you look at the developing world, if it cost a billion dollars to resurrect someone in Kenya, well, there's no way you would spend that even once, because you can spend $5,000 on bed nets and save a life. So it's literally something like a 2 million fold difference in the wise allocation of resources there. So I just wanted to kind of open with that reflection that we were putting a price on life all the time. And this is just a very uncomfortable fact when you spell it out, especially in a global context where it's just obvious that we can't help but put less of a price on lives in the developing world where this pandemic is going to land. And it's certainly landing now with very likely much greater consequence in well over 100 countries. So it's certainly true we often have to deal with this trade off, particularly in this case now to some extent right now in America and Canada and other countries there really isn't such a trade off in that. What a lot of economists would say is that the goal of helping out the economy and the goal of saving lives, they actually lead to the same action at this point. So pretty much every economist is saying, look, the lockdown is actually an end. If all you care is about is business and money, the lockdown is still good for that. And so you have a convergence of people on the right and the left agreeing that some degree of lockdown, there's going to be disagreements at the margins, is right later on. There's going to be trade offs of exactly what you're saying. I don't think anybody would say we should keep locked up in our houses until the virus is entirely gone, until we have a vaccine that puts everybody out of risk. No, they're going to say, we're going to open things up a bit. And if they're honest, they'll say, yeah, a few more people will die, but the trade off is worth it. And I agree with you. And one way to think about it is it's a mistake to think of this inherently as money versus lives. What it ultimately is, is human flourishing versus human flourishing in that the people who want the lockdown to be alleviated are not just saying, because it leads to more money, it's because they want people to get their jobs back. They want businesses to flourish. They want people to be able to get married and attend funerals and be present when their loved one is having birth and have elected medical procedures and all of that. There's no easy answer, but you're trading off different things, but they're not different kinds of things. They all revolve around what you've been most interested in human happiness and human flourishing. So you bring up what has struck me as a second fallacy here, which I'm hearing many people resist the lockdown even now, suggesting that this cure is worse than the disease, that the economic costs are too high and these costs will translate, if not immediately, into lives lost. There will be livelihood lost and sanity lost. And the cost to human well being is just too excruciating and will be in very short order, such that we should just roll the dice and open everything up and realize everyone's going to get this virus anyway. And the reason why this seems to be a fallacy to me is these people are not properly comparing two states of the world. They're comparing the economic costs of lockdown to the way the world used to be right before lockdown. They're not comparing the cost of lockdown to even just the economic costs of doing nothing or doing much less than we are now in terms of social distancing and letting the contagion explode, right? So you just have to imagine, what does the economy look like when literally everyone you know has a story about a friend who went to a restaurant or to the mall or to a movie theater and wound up on a fucking ventilator. Where is your economy then, when we've basically just ridden the exponential curve as far as we can with contagion? People aren't making that comparison. They're comparing the obviously scary and depressing effects. I'm sure they're only going to increase now in the coming months of lockdown to the way they remember the world of yesteryear, but that world there's no scenario under which that world exists before we get to a place where we've got a vaccine or a truly effective treatment for COVID-19, where the risk of getting this thing by living normally is absolutely tolerable and economic behavior can return to normal. Yeah, I agree. I think some people have a fantasy where you say, well, look, let's make a hard choice here, and we snap our fingers. We snap our fingers and life goes on exactly as it had. We go to sporting events and restaurants and everybody keeps their jobs. And then just magically, some fairly small percentage, 1% half of 1% whatever, of humans disappear due to the virus. And they say, well, that's the cost we paid. But that's bizarre, it wouldn't happen that way. Every projection done by a serious person, for instance, points out that the fact is, as people got sick, they would flood the hospitals and that would cause enormous collateral damage besides being incredibly cold blooded. Because often this comes in with saying, well, just old people will get it, which isn't true, and to the extent it is true that the proportionately are more likely to get it, well, some of us all love old people. Some of us are old people. Beyond being cruel, it's just irrational. It doesn't take into account that economic damage cannot be disentangled from all the lives lost. What do you do with the moral non equivalence between this kind of real world decision and a thought experiment we could easily cook up that could leverage the empathy module in a way that would be, at minimum, misleading. So, like, obviously people are willing to accept some number of deaths here for life to go back to normal. And given the way we're anchored to certain figures, I mean, given that people have accepted that in the worst year, the normal flu can kill 80,000 people in the US. Right? Like sort of 80,000 people died in I think it was 2017 or 2018 by the flu. That's the worst influenza year in recent memory, and more or less nobody noticed unless they happen to have had a loved one killed by the flu. So we're sort of anchored to a figure like that. And if COVID-19 only kills 80,000 of us, many people will be saying we overreacted and it was no big deal. It's just another flu. The flu came twice this year. But when you picture killing 80,000 people in any other way, what if we were given a choice that we could just perform a human sacrifice of 18 people in order to rid the world of this pandemic, we would clearly balk at that. They identify viable human life. Sacrificed is intolerable, and yet the statistical life and it sort of brings us back to the I guess it's the Lenin quote, one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. How do you think about our failure to reconcile the moral arithmetic? There there is a framing issue, which is how you put it. I heard Rudy Giuliani say something to the effect of, you know, well, that many thousands of deaths isn't that much. It's equal to the flu. And imagine after 911 and the planes crash into twin Towers, and you say to Jerry Julian, only about 2800 people died. That's a rounding error. When it comes to flu, nobody should get upset at all. You would be looked at rightfully as a monster. And so, so the framing serves a rhetorical purpose. You, you, you connect the deaths to the COVID due to some large number of things that we accept and not something else, in order to calm people down and get them to think this is a minor matter. But if it was any other thing, we would not think of it as minor. And then, of course, this is something which utterly enrages me, and I've seen this more than once, including by William Bennett on Fox News, where he says, well, 60,000 Americans, we were told it was going to be much more. We did all this, and for 60,000, for, you know, 60,000 death is not such a terrible thing, ignoring the fact that it's a number as low as 60,000, if that's what it's going to converge on, precisely because we spent a damn month in quarantine. Yeah, I'm some guy saying we really need fire extinguishers for the fire. The fire comes. I used the fire extinguishers. There's not much damage. He says, you idiot, you thought we needed fire extinguishers. Look, there's not much damage. Yeah, that's what I referred to on Twitter as the first paradox of quarantine. If social distancing works exactly as intended by lessening the contagion, the people who were against social distancing will feel vindicated that we overreacted. So it's a paradox or a seeming paradox, but you can knock your brain against it and figure it out. And the counterfactual is pretty clear, and it's being advertised to us and will be continually advertised to us in other countries that have not or cannot affect an actual lockdown. We'll see what exponential spread looks like and what its consequences are in some places. I'm sure that's right. And you raised before something which really is a genuine moral problem, which is a problem of how to compare things that aren't naturally comparable. So it's terrible for people to lose their jobs. It is painful. It could be humiliating. It could lead to, in this country, in another country, starvation, loss of medical treatment and so on. It is terrible how many jobs lost equals one life or one death, actually? And that's a strange question, you know? You know, but but it's a strange question, but it's one that people actually have to wrestle with. I mean, if you knew that you could save the jobs of 10,000 people, but five people had to die. This isn't science fiction. This actually could be just a policy analysis. We'll open up these restaurants and these bars and these stores and, you know, you look at the numbers, five people will probably die because of it. It's not monstrous to say, go ahead. It would be monstrous to say that there's no amount of death that's worth people getting their jobs back, businesses flourishing and so on. That's crazy. That sanctifies human life in such a way that it treats it separately from human happiness and human flourishing. I think to some extent we have to make these comparisons, but they're very difficult to do. But they may be impossible to do when made explicit. Right. The example that's always come to mind in this context for me is the speed limit. None of us have committed ourselves or very few people I'm sure there's someone out there, but very few of us have committed ourselves to getting the government to pass speeding laws so as to bring the risk of death down on our highways as low as possible. So the lowest possible speed limit that's still compatible with the functioning of society so as to minimize death. None of us is wanting that and yet are not wanting that is just paid for in blood every day. So the reasons why we don't want that because we like the freedom to drive more or less as fast as we want, or it would just be too boring to spend that much time in a car because it takes three times as long to get anywhere. These are incredibly callous when held up against even a single death in a given year. Right. And we know we reliably have something like 40,000 of them every year. So when it's spelled out, if you had to opt in rather than find yourself in this system by default, but if every time you got in your car you had to sign a waiver saying, yes, I consent to put the lives of my neighbors at intolerable risk or at needless risk by driving this fast. If made explicit, it would be somehow unsustainable. And this just happens everywhere? I'm not quite sure I know how to think about it beyond just flagging the problem. But if you just had to honestly assess real risk and your choice to embrace it, you can't help but look like a psychopath. That's right. Phil Tatlock calls them taboo trade offs. And the paradox we're in is we have to do this all the time. We have to have some sort of speed limit, and any speed limit we have, if it were lower, it would save lives. If you had a speed limit, 10 people won't die on the roads, it just did. What would happen is you'd have millions of very pissed off people, and in our heads, we don't talk about it, we don't make this policy, we say, well, that much inconvenience, that much waiting and sitting in your car and getting bored out of your skull and not getting there on time. Yeah. It's worth many, many people dying, so we don't have to go through that. And it sounds psychopathic to say this, but if you don't say it, you're stuck with absurdities, where you demand a two mile per hour speed limit, or you're stuck with absurdities, where you say, we will not open up business in restaurants and bars and so on, until the coronavirus is entirely gone, entirely eradicated. Which would be a ridiculous decision. Yeah. Although it'll be a decision that you can't make for everyone. Right. So we could decide to open restaurants tomorrow by fiat, but no one would go, or few sane people would go under the current conditions. That's right. We know there's no adequate testing, we know there's no contact tracing, we know we're just bailing water as fast as we can and the boat is still filling up. Right. So if you flip the switch and turn the economy back on, there would still be whole sectors of it where it would be dark. And the only thing that's going to change that is the mass and hopefully vertical perception that the risk has been diminished to a tolerable level. That's right. But diminished to a tolerable level, not eradicated. The easiest we'll talk later about some predictions we want to make, but the easiest prediction in the world is we will end the lockdown before we end coronavirus. It'll be a presence and we'll worry about it and we'll try to block it. We'll test people, we'll look for people who are immune to it, we'll do all sorts of sensible things, but if we're honest with ourselves, we will all take some risk. Yeah. So what do you think in terms of the complexion of life changing? What do you anticipate in terms of new norms around greeting people? Where does the handshake go? Let's start with handshake. So let's look at a few things. Where would a handshake go? I could imagine prison. The handshake is going to stay. There's enough people who shake hands. But I could imagine among certain elite groups, people who travel a lot, people who worry a lot, people who are wealthy, maybe Hollywood, which tends to come first. The handshake may drop, it could be replaced by the fist bump, the bow. Other options? I don't think it's going to entirely go away, but it wouldn't surprise me if five years from now, there are some people who did. Handshaking don't do it anymore. I could see it actually bifurcating along the typical political lines in the United States, where many Democrats give it up and Republicans doggedly hold on to it. And the fact that each one of them, each group is doing it makes the other one more extreme, where you and I shaking hands, we saw each other, we'd be like wearing MAGA hats while some Trump supporters bowing to each other. That's just getting a fistfight for trying to do that shit. So real Americans shake hands and the latte sipping coastal elites namaste each other. They do. Exactly. Namaste. What could be more of a cosmopolitan, tree hugging bullshit than namaste? What could be more of feet? That's right. I don't know. Physical contact is a human appetite. I think we're learning this, so I might be too quick to say that the handshake will go away in among any group because people like touching each other. Not everybody. Your mileage may vary, but people like the contact, the hug, the kiss and boat cheeks, the handshake. It's a natural human expression of solidarity and friendship and love. And shutting it down would be hard, but I don't think things are going to go exactly the same. And I can imagine some groups moving to other options, particularly particularly if a threat of infection lives on for next year or more than a year. Yeah, well, I got to think that once we have a vaccine, assuming we get a vaccine that works like a normal vaccine, that offers a hard reset, where we just go back to who we used to be, hopefully with a few durable changes just in terms of our being poised to respond better next time. I think one thing we might get out of this, there's a phrase that the philosopher Nick Bostrom uses in talking about how we could respond to various existential risks, and I guess he would apply to the risk of pandemic as well, but we were talking about it in a different context. But he has this phrase that one path of mitigating risk is developing something which he calls turnkey totalitarianism, where you can just you just know how on a moment's notice, to turn society into the maximally defensible project. And that entails mass surveillance, and in this case, impeccable social distancing and the abrogation of all the rights that we have come to expect. And it's the temporary abrogation of these rights, but we've all signed up to survive for this period of a fortnight or a month or six months or whatever it is, where we're going to go into lockdown. I got to think this has been a dress rehearsal for something that could be quite a bit more deadly and we can learn something from this and become truly adept at pivoting to the everyone get into your spaceship and seal the airlock scenario. Yeah, I mean, the idea of the stickiness of this sort of response is interesting to some extent. We've seen that with 911, where our security theater at airports is right now, indistinguishable from that, like, three months after 911. In many regards, we just stuck with it. We've shaken the etchesketch pretty hard with respect to travel, so who knows what's going to come back? That's actually interesting. You can imagine this kind of a restart where maybe TSA is going to let me carry my liquids on the plane because what the hell? We've gone through a lot. Yeah. And I don't know how much it is for habits, and this is my prediction about handshaking and alike. If two months from now we're kind of back into normal I doubt it, but if that were the case, we'd probably go back to our normal habits. But if we go a long period of time, then I think our habits might change. You had somebody on your podcast, Doctor. I'm trying to think of positive implications of this event. If it were to turn out that, as you're saying now, that what we've learned from COVID will prepare us for the big one, the one with 60% of people die and spreads like wildfire and a species threatening, then as horrible as to say this was a godsend, this was ultimate. It's amazing that once you take consequentialism seriously, you're left whatever judgment you have about the negativity of a given experience or a given outcome. It always has to be bracketed by your uncertainty around how things will look once you get further out in time. Right. So this is like when do you actually do the math on whether something was bad? Chernobyl. Is it too early to say that Chernobyl was definitively a bad thing for the world? Well, if something about Chernobyl leads us to become truly safe around the next generation of nuclear reactors which save us from the greater evil of climate change, well, then Chernobyl was again, another thing that actually we use to our advantage and was a net good or worse. If Chernobyl scared us away from nuclear power, thereby thereby hastening climate change because we lost a really important form of energy, it might have been, you know, a thousand times worse than it looked. Right. And for reasons that no one is even thinking about. Yeah, there's a Taoist parable to this, which I won't repeat because it takes too long, but basically it's about this farmer. Something bad happens to him and he says yeah, and if so, it's too bad. He says, yeah, we'll see. And then it turns out the bad thing turns out good thing. And I think this is the way the world works. It's why it's so hard to be utilitarian. I have a fun variant of a more R rated variant of your question. I've heard two people, two very smart people, argue about this and come to different conclusions. Pretty soon this is going to release and people are going to be dating and dating or whatever euphemism you'll use. Tinder will reactivate. People be hooking up. Do you imagine a release of pent up sexuality I never said that phrase before that will immediately throw everybody into the arms of strangers and this explosion of promiscuous sex? Or do you imagine a period of reticence where for a little while people kind of holding back a little bit more cautious? I guess this could be very different in different age cohorts. I think the people under 30 probably even now, consider themselves more or less immune to this thing, or the consequences of getting it will be trivial or extremely likely to be trivial. And that still seems to be sort of true, although you can find examples of, of people in their 20s dying or being brought pretty close to death from this. So it's not something that really anyone at any age should be eager to get. But I think the perception could be very different there. That's a good answer. As you get older, you get into your thirty s and forty s. I have to think it's going to seem more like the AIDS crisis for people. I think you're going to want some testing prior to hooking up. Otherwise it's going to seem like Rush merlette the world after a vaccine and the world after, you know, in nearer terms, probably the world after a truly effective antiviral treatment for COVID. I think those are very different worlds than the one we're in or the one we'll be in when we stumble out of our isolation with a regime of very arduous testing and tracing, keeping us safer than we would otherwise be. Though this may happen sooner than a vaccine where they could test you. You could turn out to have the antibodies suggesting that you've had COVID, you'll be immune. And then I think they were doing this in China or something on your smartphone. You can get a little red flower or something, something glowing in a little orange flashing light that you could happily hold up to people saying, I'm clean. That person will be Axel Rose wherever he is, in China, elsewhere. Is that really the sort of avatar of unfettered sexuality? Probably Axel Rose 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when I'm dating myself and Axel Rose, he's there listening somewhere saying, whoa, okay. Your listeners will never forgive us if we don't mention Trump. Is this going to help Trump or hurt Trump come election time? Well, there are so many things that are conspiring to help and hurt Trump that it's hard to analyze this in isolation, but it should have destroyed his presidency already. I mean, I just think the level of incompetence and dishonesty on display should be something that for those for whom he had a good reputation, his reputation should never recover from what happened in the month of March and what we've since learned about the month of February. He missed every opportunity to avoid distinguishing our country as the country in. Which the contagion did the most damage. I mean, that's where we are. We're winning in the, in a very Trumpian sense now, and we should be tired of it. But he is only going to get stronger as our response to this becomes more effective. Right. So he's now getting credit for or will get credit if, you know, there's only 60,000 lives lost that's right. Or whatever the, the number will finally be, he'll get credit for anything short of an absolute holocaust. Right. You know, if there's 2 million lives lost because we come rushing out of our houses and hit the exponential again in 50 states simultaneously and can't figure out how to get back in, in time, we've got nothing effective in terms of testing, and we tip over into something horrific, well, then that could make him unelectable. But I think anything short of this is the worst thing that's happened on American soil in a century and a half. I think he looks like the guy who, however ineptly solved the problem. He delivered the aid, it's his name on the checks that are going out to people, however belatedly. And part of this makes sense in that everyone wants him to succeed on some level. Everyone wants an effective remedy. Everyone wants to put politics behind them in an emergency. So the default is to give him mulligan after mulligan after mulligan just to try to get things in the right place. And he just benefits from that in a way that Biden can't. Right. And any criticism of him, as I've noticed, sounds to the ears of anyone who supports him like mere partisanship, however appropriately targeted it is to his genuine mistakes. So I'm very depressed by our political prospects. And this is coupled that with the fact that Biden seems like he's in the twilight of some twilight and can barely complete a sentence without advertising the threat of old age, disease and death to everyone listening. I just think it's a bad political season if you're hoping Trump is not going to be given four more years to rampage through human history. Yeah, I have a similar view of him watching this press conferences out of a kind of masochistic delight, and he's endlessly preening declaring victory. Boasting and I try to see this from somebody who hasn't been otherwise following it, and I think, wow, he's done really well. And because I think things are going to go well, I'm kind of an optimist, and I think that the governors and the people in charge of the CDC are doing pretty rational planning for the future. I think this is going to turn out not as bad as it could have, and we're going to come out in the fall and Trump is going to be declaring victory over and over again. And then people, presumably Biden will point out, and they'll be exactly right, that he messed it up. He was far too slow. It was a disaster, but they're going to come off as nitpicking as saying, they'll say I won the war. And you're complaining that very early on there were some missteps. Well, I won the war. Yeah. And so I worry about that. There's one question that came in from Twitter which seems appropriately targeted to you. What do you think about the impact on children of this whole ordeal? I mean, both the I mean, I guess, most relevantly, just the experience of normal life being disrupted. And what do you think about the impact on education? Oh, that's a great question. We'll talk a bit about the first, see if we get to the second. But we have a mutual friend, and he sent me some stuff that Freeman Dyson wrote about The Blitz. So in the Blitz, what a 60 day long barrage of bombs over London by Germany? And the kids, of course, were sent off to the country. I think about half of them were sent off to the country. Education was gone. The kids in the country basically went feral and would just spend each day running around in the woods. And Dyson talks about this a great nostalgia and points out, hey, we're fine. There's a lot of evidence suggesting that kids are alarmingly, strikingly, wonderfully resilient. There are certain things that are really awful for a kid. I think the worst things turn around cruelty by parents and stuff like that, indifference. But when it comes to this sort of thing, kids are great. And so I have every reason to believe that at the end of all of this, there will be no we won't have some sort of generation of the corona traumatized, the corona kids who have to be under special medication and so on. They'll be fine. Does pulling the brakes at a fourth hour of continuous face timing with one's friends count as cruelty? Because I'm sure there'll be some debate in my house about that. Yeah, well, everything people so confidently said about screen time has been gone out the window. And I think when it comes to implication, maybe we'll learn that we worried a little bit too much about screen time and other things, maybe worrying a little bit too much about that extra hour of school and so on. So I'm really optimistic about the kids. When it comes to education in general, I'll sort of shift from kids to college kids and university kids. So every university, every college I know has gone online, and Yale has gone online, and I'm teaching online now. And if you ask professors about this, what do you think of teaching online? I've talked to friends, and so we we hate it. How are you actually doing it? What are the mechanics of it? So so the mechanics are twofold. And this is this is similar to what a lot of people are doing for introsych, which is what I teach. The lecture component of the class has been replaced by online lectures. I already had some up as part of a coursera online system, so I just tell my students which ones to take. I refer them to some YouTube videos and some other things I've done and ask the lectures. They watch the lectures online, but then we also have sections, and we do that by zoom in small groups, right? It's not the same. It's really not the same. The seminar is not the same. The lectures are not the same, and professors will complain about it justifiably so. But I can help but think there are some positive features of this. It's not that bad. For one thing, it's very egalitarian. It's egalitarian at the level that you see everybody's faces at once, exactly the same size. You're not sort of trapped by the structure of a seminar room or the distance of a lecture hall, but it's also egalitarian in that you can take a Yale course and you don't have to be in New Haven, Connecticut. You can be anywhere. And there was a big push for these MOOCs, these massive online courses, many years ago, and I don't think that much came of it. I don't think very few universities shifted to them and so on. But having tasted this, I wonder whether it's going to change the way universities work. I think maybe to the better, to some extent, where more stuff be made online and more stuff will be available to the 99% of humans who don't get to be close to a great university or college. But wasn't the issue with MOOCs again, I don't know this firsthand, but my sense was always that the lesson learned was that it's just harder to be motivated in solitude, interacting with screen based content, and being asked to do a lot of hard work to get through a course. There's something about physically showing up with other people, even if it's only the ritual of moving your body from one place to another, that makes it easier to just actually get the work done. So I think that's a correct observation. My office is right next to a large lecture hall on Yale campus. And suppose Solomon Rushdie was coming to give a talk. I'd go see that. I'd wait in line for that. But if somebody told me, what are you doing on YouTube? There's the same talk. Right. Well, who wants to see it on YouTube? Whatever. I can see anything on YouTube. Being in person matters a lot. But but in defense of the MOOCs, the experiment has never been properly done because you're comparing kids who are at a university, say, or a college, and they have to take courses, they signed up for them, they get grades, they had scholarships, rests on them. This is their career versus people who are taking MOOCs like they're picking up a paperback book they bought, which is look through it and then toss it aside if it's boring. Right? So the proper experiment would have a university course with the same requirements and grades and commitments and exams, but this time it's run long distance. It's a flip classroom. And I agree with you that the in person matters, and I think we're seeing this more generally. I've been talking a lot of friends over zoom and having occasional drinks, regular drinks with friends. It's not the same. I'm not kissing them, but when I'm in person, we're not touching, but it's not the same. So I don't think that there'll be a full replacement. I think something is lost. But I also think that this might really transform higher education, maybe in a good way. And I'm thinking about this more generally. So now if I want to see my doctor, I'll FaceTime with him. He sent her an email saying, you want to meet with me? Here's how to do it. We're doing it through FaceTime. Here's the procedure. And it occurs to me for a lot of things that's actually really efficient, some things you got to touch. You got to touch the person, so on. But if I tell him, look, I'd like a renewal for this prescription, she's going to talk to me. And that could be done online. Do you think there are many universities that might not survive a long hiatus here if this drags on into next year? I know there are major ones, have endowments that I would imagine make them bulletproof over a much longer time span. But is there talk about just the failure of colleges in the near term? There's always been smaller colleges that are on the brink and that rely on tuition money, and they don't have million or billion dollar endowments, and we're going to lose a lot of those. We don't know what's going to happen in the fall. Enrollments definitely going to go down for many of them, whatever endowments these colleges have been damaged by the financial downturn. I think places are going to go broke. So nobody's going to cry for the Yales or the principles and everything, nor should they. But we have a hiring freeze. We have a salary freeze. And I know at Yale School of Management, the the tenured faculty are actually devoting some of their salaries and shifting it to help out untenured faculty and staff who might lose their jobs. So even at the higher levels of very, very rich places are hurting. This is really going to damage the smaller and less financially flexible places. Even at a place like Yale, untenured faculty are losing their jobs or, or at risk of losing their jobs. No, they they wouldn't be at risk of losing their jobs. This is in some way, the School of Management works differently, and I think the money might actually go to staff who may get laid off. But the untimed tenured faculty here are not going to lose their jobs. We're not going to tenure. Fewer people or anything like that. That never happens. But I think a lot of people who work for Yale are at risk. I think the graduate program is going to be maybe taking fewer graduate students. This has had all sorts of ramifications. I mean, you know, look, I feel awkward saying this because, you know, I know people have lost their jobs, I know people who loved ones have gotten sick, but I have students who have research projects and their research careers have been set back by a year. Yeah. Or if they're lucky, a year. When you think about the economic environment into which people graduating now or soon to graduate will be seeking to start their careers and how long it takes for us to dig out from this, strangely, to watch the stock market respond with a rally, as it did yesterday, I think it went down again today. But you'd think there's been good news that decides the winds of the economy have shifted. But, I mean, we're just at the very beginning of understanding how bad this is and will be economically. And it just seems like it could be years before people get back to zero. Certainly in some sectors. I don't see how it could be anything other than years. Yeah, it could be devastating for people early in their careers, for a lot of different careers. And more generally, I've heard economists talk about it, and nobody's quite clear on what projections to make. It's not like the Great Depression. All these people lost their jobs. But in some way the jobs will be waiting for them, are waiting for somebody. When lockdown ends, you don't expect this huge leap in unemployment to remain once this is over. Yeah. Except when you picture all of the small or smallish businesses that have failed in the meantime, you turn the lights back on, but some significant percentage of restaurants no longer exist. Right. There's just space now available for rent as a restaurant. To reboot that is difficult. I don't know what the time course of that is. Yeah. We talked before about how do you compare death to misery? And each of these stories of a person losing their job, a business doesn't get started up is just misery. You could spend your whole life trying to create something and have it dashed. I find myself struck by all of the small stories about women giving birth without their partner being present. Somebody's loved one dying and they can't be in a room with them. That one's ubiquitous and that's really brutal. I don't know if anyone, I'm sure, in the context of some other pandemic or epidemic that's been a common experience, but that really is the experience now of people. Anyone who's going into a hospital, whether they're going to be there for weeks recovering or they're going to die, it seems like it's the universal experience that they're waving goodbye to their loved ones and hoping to see them. At the end of all this, I mean, this gets to the bigger question where a lot of my colleagues, a lot of people on social media have been talking about, what are the long term psychological effects of this? Will this cause a sharp increase into depression and anxiety disorders? Will it be sort of this collective trauma that a lot of people suffer from? And I think the answer is yes. But not only yes, it gets complicated. We also have psychological mechanisms that are protective against these things. I said kids are resilient, but adults could be resilient too. But one thing that strikes me, which is kind of I'm trying to struggle my way home to think about this. There's a literature on how we deal with sort of collective disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the September 11 bombing or the Blitz, and the answer typically, is Rebecca Solnit has a great book called A Paradise Built in Hell, where she talks about this is it brings people together. It brings people together. They work together. It becomes rich and poor, black and white. Everybody works together. And there's a feeling of joy and bliss in a common purpose and a common goal. So you read about these cases and people talking back about what it was like to be in a bliss, what it was like in these circumstances, saying it was wondrous. You know, we we lost our house so and so die, but it was wondrous. It was a moment in my life I can't recapture. And you think, well, there's a bright side. People will look back on the pandemic this way. But the cruel thing about the pandemic is we can't get together. We get together. We're getting together now more of a skype. But you look at every other case, and there are people physically together in large groups, helping out, working together. And the cruelty of this pandemic is it blocks us from, I think, a process that would leave us far more resilient to the suffering that would make us better. Yeah, I mean, putting your shoulder to the wheel here is synonymous with social distancing. That is what you can do. It is the opposite of bringing people together. Right. And if what I can do is help pull the rocks from people who have been crushed by earthquake kind of working a day and night, it's horrible, but it's also such a thing to do. But if what I could do is sit at home and bake bread and watch Netflix, it doesn't scratch the same. Itch one thing that's interesting for me is the prospect of having one's perception of the risk of contagion and its consequences permanently reset. I don't know if this is going to happen. I do think that it's possible that once we have a vaccine, well, then the world essentially goes back to where it was. And you and I never really were worried about Ebola, and we're not going to worry about it now. We're not going to worry about the next pandemic until it's sufficiently well advertised to us that we're convinced we need to get back in our houses and hunker down. So I could imagine a perfect reset there. But currently, if I'm looking at a video shot in the distant past of six months ago and and you just see normal social behavior, right? You see a crowd of people shoulder to shoulder. You see a politician wading into that crowd and shaking hands. And, you know, I feel like I now have the Agoraphobia module in my brain fully installed, where I think that just looks fucking crazy. What are those people thinking? Don't they know about aerosolized contagion? That is the thing that is astonishing about this circumstance is that this was not a maybe something like this was more or less guaranteed to happen. Right? It's like we're open systems with respect to the rest of the world, and it's novel viruses. And once we solve this particular problem, we will be absolutely sure that the next one is coming. Now, whether it's coming in four years or 40 years, we don't know. But this is like the next tornado arriving in Tornado Alley. You can't pretend you don't know about tornadoes if you live in Kansas. Yeah. And there's two possibilities for what happens when you get hit by a tornado. One is it's always the safest bet when somebody says, how will this transform us to answer? It won't. We'll just go back to normal. And I think this is true for some aspects of this. I hear people say this will give us increased respect for the value of science. No, it won't. The people who care about science will care, and then others will forget about it. Even antivaxxers will come back. I bet after a little while, you don't think we can quash that one for good. Well, I was thinking of the one group at risk is probably antivaxxers. It is very hard to be an antivaxxer, to stay but wait, but wait. I just think the most natural answer is the safest answer is always, it won't change us. My predictions about handshakes or fantasies. People shake hands because they always show hands. Why should this make a difference? It's months. It's a year. It's not enough. But I have some sympathy for your kind of analysis, too. Take it at an individual level. You go for a nice walk around the neighborhood, you know, every night you're all happy and everything. And then one day you take a walk in a neighborhood and a vicious dog bites you and you're hospitalized. You come back for the rest of your life. Walking in a neighborhood is different. It's different. It's fraught with anxiety. Maybe you do therapies you work on it, but it's always there. And in fact, the next time the dog bites you, it comes back like wildfire. And I wonder whether this touch with disease and contagion. I guess I'm saying that there's some chance you're right. This touch with disease and contagion will forever reconfigure us where right now you're fine and then a couple of years later someone lousy sneezes at a party and everybody flinches. We find ourselves washing our hands more often. People with obsessive disorders get worse. That has to be an irony of anyone who's far along on that spectrum. Just this compulsive hand washing behavior is the order of the day now. Yeah, it's like it's the introverts revenge and also the obsessive washers revenge. I I know a guy on on friend of mine and on Twitter he was saying so this is another take on it, saying that he's normally a very anxious person and I know him and he self medicates with marijuana, but he's basically an anxious guy. He says this has been the least anxious period of his life because a everything he worried about has happened and B everyone else is sharing his feelings, his experience too. The consolations of I told you so. That's exactly right. That's exactly the happiness of the paranoid person who finally sees the black helicopter circling his house and says, in fact, that's something which is just amazing. I don't know if we talked about it last time or this time, but one of the things which is unique about this is how shared it is. For the first time in my life, and maybe I will never experience this again, I'm experiencing something that everyone else in the world is in different ways, but pretty much the same. Yeah. Although I keep having to remind myself that on the one hand we're having a shared experience. Just take the United States, something like I think it's 97% of us are under something like lockdown orders, but they're very different experiences to be having in that context. There are people like me who are extraordinarily fortunate to be one lockdown in a condition of relative comfort with family, who I'm experiencing the silver lining of lots of enforced quality time, which we're all enjoying. There are people who are even in similar circumstances, but they're not having a happy family life at all. Right. They're figuring out how they can get divorced the moment the quarantine lifts. But then you just add all these other variables. There are people like me who can continue working and there are people who have just seen their economic life completely implode because work is synonymous with not being locked down. And then there's just every other permutation of this in other contexts, like what's going to happen in the developing world where you can't even lock down, right. And there's so much crowding and kind of hand to mouth economic necessity where you just have to try to keep living normally because there's not much of a health system that you're going to crash in the first place. Right. So people are just going to get this virus, and you can try to avoid it, but it's more or less hopeless. So it's just the range of experiences under this common condition is impressive. And we don't have shared fates here. No, that's true. I'm in Toronto now, and there's a lot of controversy about people. People of wealth in Toronto typically have a summer cottage by the lake because the mayors of these cottage communities are saying, don't come. We don't want you to come. You risk getting sick. You risk infecting people. We don't have the resources and everything like that. But if you say, I pay taxes and I bought this place. So on the one hand, you have that. On the other hand, I could walk down Queen Street where I'm at, and I see clusters of homeless people, and they're not obeying social distancing because they're homeless. They don't have anybody. They're protecting each other. But I'd still say I read something in The New York Times, and the headline was something that affected half of the world under lockdown. And yes, we experienced it very differently. But still, when have you had an experience? When have you thought about something and knew of some certainty that people in Kenya and Tokyo and Saskatoon are thinking about the very same thing? I can name those occasions. They're impressively few, but I think the first moment like that, that seemed like it was truly a global moment where everyone was paying attention to the same thing, or nearly everyone, strange to say it, that it was the first thing in my lifetime that seemed to rise to that level was Princess Diana Diane. Oh, yeah. That was just an order of magnitude bigger than anything else that had happened in terms of its media coverage. And then you had 911, and then you had Trump's election. Then you have a fair amount of Trump, and then you have this. And I don't know what. I'm sure there's something else on that list, but they're pretty few and far between these events. But a lot of those things, I don't think they compare. I think that when Trump was elected, there was probably a snapshot where the whole planet was going, oh, fuck, just for a moment. But then two days later, if you're a real estate agent in Beijing, you probably not thinking about Trump. You weren't thinking about 911. People in New York thought about 911, but how much do people in Nebraska two months later think about 911? But now we're thinking about this all the time. Yeah. And and so on the one hand, it's this enormous collective, communal thing, but on the other hand, we experience it alone. And I'm worried that the loneliness is going to block any positivity that you might get from the shared experience. But you're totally right. I don't want to diminish that. You're very fortunate. I'm fortunate as well to be stuck with somebody I love. There's a lot of people even people who aren't having terrible experiences are stuck with people they hate. And imagine being stuck in a place and imagine it's not a big place with somebody who hates you and you hate them. Yeah. Or just completely isolated. Right. The people who are isolated and are not well designed for isolation. Okay, so let's go to a few more topics. We had a bunch of topics from Twitter related to the election, the prospect of Bernie supporters refusing to vote for Biden. We should touch that. So in my last podcast with Caitlin, if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. My guest today is Michael Pollan. Michael is the author of seven previous books, which include Cooked Food, Rules in Defensive Food, the Omnivore's Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. And he's a long time contributor to the New York Times Magazine. He also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. And in 2010, Time Magazine named him to its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Today we're speaking about his new book, which is titled how to Change Your Mind what the New Science of Psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression and transcendence. And as I say in the outset of this conversation, many of us have been waiting for somebody to write this book and it was really perfect that Michael was that person. Anyway, I could have spoken to Michael for many hours about this, but he was in the middle of a punishing book tour, so I got about an hour and 20 minutes or so of his time and I hope you think we put it to good use. And now I bring you Michael Pollan. I'm here with Michael Pollan. Michael, thanks for coming on the podcast. Great to be here, sam, I am so grateful that you wrote this book. I think this must be a sentiment that has been expressed to you many times. This book you have written how to Change Your Mind, which is your deep exploration into both the current science and clinical use of and your own personal experience with psychedelics. It really couldn't be more timely and I just got the sense while waiting for the book in the aftermath of your New Yorker article, which came out a few years ago, and in reading it, that this was just perfect. You were just the person to do this and you really delivered on a lot of promise that was laid out in your article. First, just thank you for doing this. Thanks for those generous words. The book's only been out for a few days, but I do feel like this is a conversation that the culture was waiting to have. And I'm just really surprised first how many people have come forward to tell me about their own experiences, which are often profound and maybe have not been taken out of that box labeled weird Drug Experience for 30 40. Years, but also the fact that it seems like we're ready to have a kind of more matter of fact discussion of these things and and look at them as tools, what they're good for, what they're not good for, rather than the usual kind of instantaneous reaction invoking all the problems of the 60s. I've been hopeful and encouraged by the response. Yeah. And you were especially well placed in my view, to write this because not only your your background as a writer and journalist, but because the 60s had sort of passed you by. You were born right in this valley where you were sort of young enough to kind of miss the summer of love. So you were not this old acid head who was now dusting off his interest in altered states of consciousness. You were exploring this for the first time. Yeah, I guess the first question is what was that like? You're 60 now or you're 61? I'm 63 now. I was in my late 50s when I started working on this. So that is precisely the time where people's risk aversion seems to be kicking into high gear. And as someone who has done a fair amount of psychedelics in his youth but has since done none for precisely the reasons that might have given you some trepidation to do this in the first place, what was that like? How long did you have to negotiate with yourself and with your wife and your agent? What was the process before you jumped? Well, I definitely didn't tell my agent about it. Not at the beginning. I was a very reluctant psychonaut. I hadn't really had experience of these drugs except for a couple of very mild so called aesthetic experiences with psilocybin. In my late twenty s, I came of age at a moment where the moral panic was in full flower and I heard all the horror stories and honestly I didn't feel like I was a psychologically sturdy enough person to do this. And so I stayed away then to approach it later. I mean, it's true when you're 20, when you were having your experiments in Nepal, you believe you're immortal and you are, you know, I mean, men that age are great risk takers, that's why we sent them to war. And but here I was, approaching 60 and, you know, was not unhappy and had a pretty good life and why mess with it? And on the other hand so I had to overcome a lot of reluctance of so many things. I mean, the fear of the drugs and the experience, the New age kind of woo woo vocabulary of my guides, the music that they played, so many things just rubbed me the wrong way. You're unusually hung up on the music. I know. I don't know why. It's kind of adorable that that was such a sticking point. It really got to me. It was the kind of music you might hear at a high end spa while you're getting a massage. For some reason, this is profound to some people. I argued with myself before every one of my trips. I had an awful sleepless night where part of me was arguing, Are you crazy? You know you're going to go up to the top of this mountain, you're going to be with someone you barely know, you could have a heart attack and he's not going to call 911 because it's going to get him into trouble, and then the other half and be saying, but aren't you curious? You've never had a spiritual experience, plus you got a book to write. And so it was this ping pong match every night, and I realized eventually that was my ego trying to stop me from what was going to be a full assault on it. So fortunately I overcame that reluctance. I'm very glad I did, but I could see how easily you would not do this. Now, you hadn't taken any trip yourself when you wrote The New Yorker article, is that right? That's right. I hadn't done it then and that article was kind of straight ahead science writing. I think The New Yorker would have been frightened off had I said, hey, and I'm going to have a trip too. I had to stick to the people in white coats to get it into The New Yorker. It was hard enough to get a piece on psychedelics into The New Yorker in 2014. That's interesting. That actually took some negotiation with your editors. Well, I mean, think about it. I proposed it to them and they bit. But then I handed in 14,000 words on science that had not yet been peer reviewed, so I could see why it was a bit of a stretch. And there was this very interesting moment two or three days before close where I got word from my editor that I had to find a prominent psychiatrist or somebody who thought this was all bullshit. And so I spent a day dialing around until I found I thought Tom Insole, the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, would give me the establishment cautions. But when I reached him in Davos, he was like he was on acid. No, this research is really interesting. I think we need to do it. I finally got the head of the National Institute of Drug Abuse to give me the quote I needed, which was these drugs can be abused, which we know. I don't disagree with that. That's the squarest quote you could find? Yeah, that was the best I could do. That's funny. Well, so I think we should probably give our own disclaimer here. It's certainly clear if listeners have read anything I've written about psychedelics and it would be clear to anyone reading your book, that there's potential downside. First, we have to acknowledge that the word drugs names a very wide spectrum of compounds that are significantly different both psychologically and physically. So much of what we're going to say about the classic psychedelics doesn't necessarily apply to something like MDMA, which has also therapeutic value and people have derived a lot of benefit from it. But unlike the classic psychedelics, LSD psilocybin being the most common here, but you would add DMT as well, you can make the case that MDMA is physically not good for you. It's very hard to make that case with LSD and psilocybin. They seem to be impressively nontoxic, but they produce such a strong experience psychologically for good or for ill, that you can't recommend this without serious caveat to people and people who can't afford, as I think I said when I wrote about this, to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug, really shouldn't. And so if someone's at risk for schizophrenia or worries that they could be destabilized in some permanent way by experiences like this, this isn't just a matter of what one would want to say about psychedelics, this applies to even long term meditation practice. I wouldn't recommend that someone go into silence for a month and do nothing but meditate if they're at risk for a condition like schizophrenia. So we're about to say some very positive things and we should just anchor that. Yeah. I'd like to say an additional word about risk. I think it's very important to preface any conversation with a sense of risk. The risks are, as you suggest, less physiological than they are psychological. Physiologically, the drugs, as you say, are relatively nontoxic. I mean, they're lethal doses of all sorts of over the counter drugs that you have in your medicine cabinet and there doesn't appear to be lethal doses of the classic psychedelics. And I agree with you that I would take MDMA out of that, that it is more toxic. I would also add to that though, that they don't appear to be addictive and that in animal experiments, in the classic setup where the rat has a lever that administers cocaine to itself and another lever for food, it will press the lever endlessly for cocaine until it dies. Whereas if you do that, set up with LSD, it'll press it once and never again. The first reaction after a big psychedelic trip is not where can I get some more? It's just too powerful in experience. But psychologically some people do get into trouble. I'm hearing those stories when I talk to audiences about this. It's anecdotal, but there are casualties and we don't know whether psychedelics have ever created a case of mental illness where there was no predisposition for it. That's really not clear. But certainly people have very powerful reactions. They can be just panic reactions sometimes, but they can also be psychotic episodes and in some very few cases psychotic breaks. So in the trials that are going on, people are screened very carefully and if they have a family history of schizophrenia, they're just not allowed in. And some personality disorders too, I think. People who have bipolar, they also don't let into their trials. So all of that is very important. But on this other point that we're going to be talking about this together. I just want to say that your own accounts of psychedelics, especially in Waking Up, were incredibly important to me as I was deciding what to do in this book and that they really emboldened me, that a person of your reputation and evident sanity and that you would be willing to describe your experiences so openly. Made it a little easier for me to do that, too. So I'm grateful for that. Oh, nice. Well, I was glad to see that you didn't take 400 micrograms of acid in the middle of a canoe in the middle of a lake in the middle of Nepal. I'm not 20. It wasn't good even if you were 20. So that's great. I'm very happy to hear that. And for those who want to hear more of my cautionary tale with respect to psychedelics, I can read that chapter in Waking Up. It's also a blog post titled Drugs in the Meaning of Life. But the flip side, of course, is that both of us are convinced that these drugs have immense promise, both therapeutically for people who are in one or another state of obvious unwellness, but also, as you phrase it many times in the book, the betterment of well, people. And that's the more controversial side of this, that people who are experiencing ordinary levels of happiness and well being still stand a lot to gain from these sources of experiences. That's certainly been my experience and it's been yours. Again, we'll dive into that, but the disclaimer still stands and people need to find whatever experts in their life to consult before they take any implicit advice coming from us here. And also ideally, I mean, one way to mitigate the risk is to work with a guide, someone who is a professional, someone who really knows the territory. And we'll talk a little later about how a guided experience differs from a so called recreational experience. But I think it's a profound difference and it definitely mitigates the risk, I guess. Let's start with a snapshot of the landscape here. I guess I've distinguished two aspects to it here. There's the renewed clinical interest. Maybe you can describe how that looks now and the conditions for which people are marshaling psilocybin and other drugs. And then we can talk about the notion of the betterment of well people as well. Sure. Well, what's happening right now and has been happening now for really almost two decades, is a renaissance of research that was going on in the 1950s that I was not aware of. I think many people I mean, even I talked to young psychiatrists, they never heard about this in their education, but that in the 50s, there was a really fertile period of experimentation by, you know, serious psychiatrists and academics to try to figure out what LSD. And then a little later, psilocybin might have to contribute to mental health treatment. And the work that's been going on now since the late 90s is really attempt to pick up that thread that was dropped during the moral panic that led to the backlash against psychedelics in the we had this 30 year hiatus in research, which is? I don't know if I can think of another example of a promising line of inquiry that scientists were very excited about. I mean many people thought this was going to be a psychiatric wonder drug that was completely suppressed for a period of time and then resumed. And we can only imagine what we might know had we continued and had that other 30 years of experience and research with these drugs. But anyway, the work that's going on now so far is mostly repeating experiments that were done in the 50s but doing them to much better standards. The randomized double blind controlled trial doesn't really come into common use until 1962 or three after the solidimide scandal or tragedy. And that's when we had an experience with a drug that was being given to pregnant women that led to birth defects. It was a horrible episode and it was only then that we started regulating the drug approval process the way we do it now. And so these trials that were done in the 50s by modern standards aren't adequate, they're often weren't controlled. And it is hard to control a psychedelic experiment because you usually can tell who got the acid and who got the placebo. The double blind thing becomes unblinded pretty quickly. So the kinds of indications they're using the drugs for now are the anxiety and depression felt by cancer patients after they get that life. You know, either that terminal or life threatening diagnosis that was done in the 60s also in the is being done now with remarkable success. These studies that I wrote about in that New Yorker piece have been published since in December 2016 and they were done at Johns Hopkins and NYU so top institutions and they found that in 80% of the volunteers there were statistically significant reductions in standard measures of anxiety and depression. Quite remarkable results you can't get with an antidepressant. So a very high effect size. Now these are just phase two trials. We're talking about 80 volunteers and they need to be replicated on a much wider scale and that will happen fairly soon. So that's been one promising area of research and perhaps the most advanced in terms of scale and rigor of the experiments. There's also been a pilot study of smoking cessation. Smoking is a very hard addiction to break and in 15 people, 67% of them were abstinent after a year, which is quite remarkable. I think the standard of care for that, I think it's shantex or something like that is 20% after a year success rate. So that's pretty remarkable. But again, needs to be and is being repeated on a larger scale. There was one study for obsessive compulsive disorder that showed encouraging results. Another pilot study in New Mexico for alcohol addiction that was encouraging enough in its results to lead to a very large phase two trial that's underway right now at NYU. So it's addiction, depression, anxiety, obsession. I think there's great potential for eating disorders, and I know the people at Hopkins are looking at that. It seems to do best in disorders that are characterized by kind of obsessive thinking, rigid thinking, people getting trapped in a narrative about themselves that is unhelpful. And that one of the most striking things to me is the success of psilocybin. And by the way, I should point out that today they use psilocybin almost exclusively and stay away from LSD for two reasons. Even though LSD was used a lot in the effects are quite similar. The psilocybin trip is much shorter, though it's only like five or 6 hours, as opposed to a potential ten or twelve with LSD. And that's very hard to fit into the therapeutic work day. They can't get home for dinner. Yeah, they want to get home for dinner. And then there is also the fact that LSD carries so much more cultural baggage and that you're much more likely to excite a reaction on the part of some congressman standing up and saying, why are we doing research with LSD? He can't get the same bang talking about psilocybin, which he might not be able to pronounce and his audience doesn't know what it is. So psilocybin can operate under the cultural radar a little bit, at least so far. So the indications that it works best, you realize, have something important in common, which is that the ego or the self is kind of stuck in these stories, these narratives that are really unhelpful. Narratives like I can't get through the next hour without a cigarette, or narratives like I'm worthless, or narrative is that I'm about to die and what's the meaning of life? And I'm confused. So they kind of dope slap people out of their stories. And I think that's a very I mean, it's kind of a new model for psychotherapy, right? Because you're really administering an experience, not just a chemical. Yeah, well, so you remark on this at some point in your book that it may at first glance seem surprising that a single antidote is being proffered for all of these diverse conditions. But when you boil it down and I guess my experience in meditation would tempt me to boil it down even further all of these conditions, as you say, have this common feature of the mind being imprisoned by certain patterns of thinking. And, you know, I would say that basically all of mental suffering has this feature that it's really significantly or entirely mediated by thinking and one's relationship to one's thoughts. And so you're left with a few options. You can either change your thoughts or change the world so as to be convinced by it that a change in your thinking is warranted. You can change your relationships, you can change your career, you can change your health, you can rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, or you can change your relationship to your thoughts. And there's something about a psychedelic experience that I would argue does both. Meditation is and we'll talk about the differences here because I think in the Venn diagram of remedies for existential problems, I think that meditation and psychedelics overlap significantly, but not entirely. Meditation is much more weighted on the side of changing your relationship to thoughts in a pure way without really changing content. And the thing about a psychedelic experience is the contents of consciousness change so radically that you can't help but be shoved into different patterns of thinking about yourself and your place in the world and what it is to be an ape confronted by the cosmos. It's not actually a surprise that these experiences change people's suffering with respect to many different conditions, and probably many conditions that are not on anyone's list yet. I want to come back to a few things you mentioned here, because in your book there are these fascinating anecdotes. Well, first you mentioned the application to treatment resistant depression. I was astonished to hear from you that that idea actually came from the FDA that was thrust upon researchers who were looking for a more narrow application, and the FDA opened the door to that. Yeah, that was fascinating. So when the researchers from Hopkins at NYU brought the results of these phase two trials to their meeting at the FDA, they were hoping to get approval to do a phase three study of the same thing, depression and anxiety and cancer patients. But it was the regulators at the FDA, and this reporting is based on what the researchers told me. The FDA wouldn't say a word about it because they don't disclose anything about drug approval processes, but that they said there's a strong signal here that this is effective with depression and we have a tremendous problem with depression and very few tools to treat it. The SSRIs, antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil, there are a lot of problems with them. There was recently a meta analysis that showed they only do slightly better than placebo and that their effects fade over time and that they're very hard to get off and people really hate the side effects very often. So the FDA was very open to studying depression in a larger population in America. It's not just to correct you. It's not going to be treatment resistant depression. It's going to be major depression in Europe is where they're going to do treatment resistant depression. These are depressions that have failed to respond to two courses of treatment. And so that was, as one researcher described it to me, said, it was a surreal moment. And one of the reasons they had worked, wanted to work with cancer patients is they thought it was a particularly sympathetic population that we had very little for, because antidepressants really don't help very much if you're facing your mortality, if you have what they call psychospiritual distress. So, yeah, that was another indication, I think, that there is a receptivity to this work right now that really flows from the desperate straits of the population and the limitations of mental health care right now. And Tom Insole, the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, he was really the one who sensitized me to this. And he points out that if you compare mental health treatment, which by the way, only reaches half the population of people who need access to it right now, if you compare it to any other branch of medicine to oncology or cardiology or infectious disease, it's achieved very little. And there is a tremendous amount of sufferings out there. The rates of depression are climbing, suicide is going up alarmingly, and addiction is rates of addiction are raising, and addictive behavior is rampant. And Big pharma, the pharmaceutical industry apparently has very few, what are called CNS drugs, central nervous system drugs in the pipeline. So I think even the FDA is a little desperate when it comes to looking for innovation in mental health treatment. And there really hasn't been much innovation since the early 90s. So I think psychedelics come along now at a at a very propitious moment. Yeah, I want to spend a couple of minutes on the end of life care and the cancer patient stories you tell, because there's one in the book that is fairly arresting and inspiring. And also, I just had recent experience with this. Someone close to me and my family recently died of pancreatic cancer. And I was for the first time in many, many years in the situation of being close to someone who was dying and just being taken through every stage of the medicalization process of death where treatment is no longer treatment, and you go into a hospice situation. And I was struck at every stage along the way that the promise of bringing equanimity to the person who's dying, it's really not just about the person who's dying. The state of mind of the person who's dying affects everyone around him or her. And to some degree, this is just luck of the draw. You're lucky not to have dementia. You're lucky not to be in excruciating pain. And our treatments for both of those things are, in the first case, basically nonexistent. In the second, imperfect. But as it happened, my family member got very lucky and he died in a state of just virtually unbroken gratitude and love. And it was just he won the death lottery, essentially. And the effect why what happened he was not someone who was at all overcome by regret or, I mean, he was just feeling gratitude and love for seemingly every conscious moment that was left to him. And the experience of being with him and mourning the loss of him was totally different than if he had been in some radically different state of being terrorized by the contents of his own mind, which is the way many people die. And you tell a story in your book of a cancer patient who on the basis of I think it was one psilocybin experience, was set on course to have an extraordinarily beautiful process of dying which affected everyone around him. Yeah, you're talking about Patrick Metis, who is a was a journalist in New York, worked for MSNBC. It was about my age at the time, in his fifty s. And he had bioduct cancer that had spread to his lungs. He was really paralyzed by anxiety and depression and he read about the trial at NYU in the same article. I first heard about it actually in the New York Times and he immediately called them and applied to get in. It's interesting his wife Lisa was against it and thought that this represented a surrender to death and that he had given up fighting and that's a very common reaction. And indeed most oncologists, at least when that study was going on, reacted the same way. They had a lot of trouble getting referrals because the oncologists see any acceptance of death as a defeat and they take it personally as if it were their defeat. But he went ahead anyway and he had a profound experience that involved a rebirth. He suddenly started shuddering and lifted his legs and held on for dear life with one of his guides. And he said to them life dying and being born is a lot of work. And he was being born or he was giving birth and he was giving birth to himself, he felt, after it had happened. And there was a very rich kind of feminine principle at work. Michelle Obama showed up in his trip and his late sister in law, and he had an interesting experience with his mother, who I think he had problems with. I never really understood what those problems were, but he had an epiphany that a mother had to love her child and so perhaps what he had failed to understand as love was love. And then he had this interesting experience and I'm cutting out lots of things. Derek Jeter showed up. He had this whole riff on aesthetics and why we need to simplify everything we do, that we put too many notes in the songs, too many elements in the TV program and that we needed to focus on love and that love was the most important principle. And I'll get back to that because the problem of platitudes on the psychedelic experience is interesting if it is a problem and then. He had this experience of kind of climbing up to this precipice that was made of stainless steel, and it was kind of sharp and looking out over it and seeing this plane of consciousness that was infused with love. And he saw that as a form of consciousness outside of himself that would survive him and he could go there. Now he realized he could go over to that side, but chose not to. That he didn't want to leave his wife yet and that he still had some time that he wanted to spend in this world. When the trip ended, he was sweaty, exhausted. His wife said he looked like he'd run a marathon. And he wrote a beautiful account of it that his wife and his doctor allowed me to quote at length. And it's extraordinary. And he spent the next 17 months in a very different frame of mind. At one session, I had the therapeutic notes with his palliative care psychologist. He spent his days walking around Brooklyn finding interesting places to have lunch, savoring every moment like the family member you were describing. And in one session with his shrink, he said he'd never been so happy in his life as in those last months because of the gratitude he had for the time he had left. And his focus turned from the quality of his time to the quantity. And in fact, he did stop chemo eventually. Not because he wanted to die, he said, but because he didn't want to live that way while he was still alive. Toward the end, his lungs began to fail, and he went into the hospital at Mount Sinai. And Lisa, his wife, and Tony Bosas, his therapist, said that his room in the palliative care unit at Mount Sinai became this gravitational field in the hospital. Everybody on the floor wanted to spend time in that room because he was putting out so much love. His wife said it was like he was a yogi. They wanted to be near this presence. Here is someone facing death within a matter of days, yet is putting out this energy that we normally turn away from the dying. We have to work very hard not to, but this was quite the opposite. I never met him. Everything I know about him came from interviews and reading these notes. He had died before I wrote about him. But there's a moment where his his wife sent me a photograph that she'd taken four or five days before he died. And I remember vividly the moment I clicked it open on my computer screen. And here was this man. I had never seen a picture of him. He was emaciated. He was very thin. He had an oxygen clip and was wearing that blue hospital scrubs. And he was shining blue eyes that he had. And he was beaming, absolutely beaming. And it just took my breath away. And he died in a very deliberate way. He was ready and with what appeared to everybody around him to be complete. Equanimity but your point about the caregivers and how important it is to them too, because it's very hard to take care of someone who is suffering in that existential way, let alone the pain and all the physical problems of dying. And actually there are some of the therapists who've done this work thinks that there's a place for giving it to the caregivers also, that it could help them. So what happened in the mind of Patrick Menace is a question that I became intensely concerned with. I wanted to understand that had he had a glimpse of an afterlife, was that what it was? I don't think exactly, but he'd had a glimpse of a kind of consciousness that was literally selfless. It was a consciousness that was outside of him, that was universal in some ways and that he was part of and would continue to be part of even when he died. Now, you can argue if that's a form of immortality or not, but it is a transcendence of the self. And I think part of what's going on here is people are rehearsing their death. An ego death is a death and it can feel like a death and it can be agonizing or ecstatic, depending on your preparation and your mindset. And that rehearsal, I think, and what you're rehearsing is letting go also. And that's very important because we cling to all sorts of things and to let go of yourself and have that experience, I think equips you to die. Well, I want to talk about the experience and your experiences in particular and what they may or may not mean kind of the metaphysics lurking at the back here, but I think we should deal with this problem of platitudes that you raised a moment ago. And this relates to the so called and much remarked ineffability of the psychedelic experience. It's not that it is I mean, it can certainly be hard to remember. Many psychedelic states have somewhat the quality of dreams where they can be incredibly intense, but paradoxically very hard to remember even a few moments later. But I don't think they're as ineffable as all that you do a good job of effing in this book. If anyone's heard Terrence McKenna talk for 14 hours about any of his drug experiences, he's quite articulate on all the details. So you can capture many of the features of interest here, the problem of platitude and and again, you remark on this several points in the book and it's something I'm sensitive to also as a writer, you hate to boil it all down to a sentence that belongs on a Hallmark card, I think, as you put it. But I think there's a principle of charity you have to extend to the other person and even to your former self when you're trying to capture these experiences, because a statement like love is the principle of being, say, right, love is everything that matter is the only thing that matters. Yeah. Right. That that like if if you actually do the work to capture what that state of mind is, it's worth doing. Yeah. So I have a slightly different take on the platitudes. I like, I think they're true. I think that that a platitude is a truth after you bring out more of the emotional. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am here with Jonathan Height. John, thanks for joining me again. My pleasure, Sam. So we're planning to do a two part conversation here, starting with the topic that has been omnipresent and on everybody's mind for now some months, which is the COVID-19 pandemic. And I wanted to talk to you about that just because of your expertise in social psychology and the way in which it's informing or should be informing, our view of political polarization, the frame of societies concerns about social cohesion and everything. That is a kind of knock on effect or a potential knock on effect of the immediate concern here, which is epidemiological and economic. And so we'll dive into that. And then in the second half, I thought we could talk about our mutual interest in self transcendence and the nature of consciousness and the kinds of methods people have used. And you and I have both used to explore that terrain, psychedelics and meditation being too. So this will be kind of a two chapter conversation, and I'm looking forward to it. So before we begin, John would just perhaps summarize your background briefly in terms of your kind of intellectual life as it relates to psychology and politics, perhaps? Yes. So I think in a lot of ways I started out on a very similar path to you, where, yeah, I was a philosophy major in college and I wanted to understand the meaning of life. And then I went to to graduate school and psychology and I and I shifted over to Social Psychology and morality and emotion. And I began studying how morality varies across cultures. But as the American culture wore heated up, I shifted over to looking at left right as being like different cultures. So I started studying political polarization back in 2004 and boy, is is that a stock whose value has risen. I mean, it's just reached insane valuations right now. So that's what I've been studying. And during so I actually got into it in part to help the Democrats win. I was so upset that the Democrats in 2000 and 2004 just had no idea how to talk about morality. But as I began to write The Righteous Mind, I really started reading conservative ideas and intellectuals and discovering that there are actually a lot of ideas out there that I didn't know, and it's very valuable to hear other sides. I kind of stepped out from being on a team and since then I've really just been trying to help everyone understand across the divide, and I'm extremely alarmed about our democracy and its health. So that's what I've been working on for the last ten or 15 years especially, is how do we help people understand all the different moral matrices that they live in and thereby turn down some of the anger and make it possible to have pragmatic solutions of the sort that a democracy should be able to reach? Yeah, and you were one of the earliest people on some of these points. You might have been the first person to signal just how dysfunctional the ivory towers view of the political landscape has been. So it's just natural within the academy to have a level of political bias that just would be starkly dysfunctional. Anywhere else you could guarantees an echo chamber effect. And you were very early on talking about how a lack of diversity of ideas was really socially and intellectually problematic. So you started the Heterodox Academy to shine more light on that. Do you want to say something about that? Yeah, sure. Because it's very well connected to what we'll be talking about today. So once I stepped out of the Matrix and stopped being a member of a team, fighting the other team, and just started being just a social scientist trying to figure out what the hell is going on, I started noticing not just that we lean left, that isn't a problem. A field can function even if it leans. If you got two or three times as many people on the left as the right, that's not a problem. And it wouldn't be a problem to reverse either. We don't need balance. What we need is a complete absence of orthodoxy. So orthodoxy means that if you dissent, you will be punished. And that's fine if your goal is cohesion, if you're an army marching into battle, maybe that's fine. But if you're scientist seeking the truth, anybody who's read John Stewart Mill knows he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. So that's what alarmed me. As soon as I started looking at the polarization in the country, I saw it happening in my own field of psychology and saw it happening in most of the social sciences and humanities. And I could see orthodoxy, I could see bad social science thinking, and I started getting alarmed by it. I gave a talk in 2011 on how this was a problem for social psychology and to my field's credit, I didn't suffer, nobody wasn't kicked out, people didn't get angry at me. People generally agreed it's a problem, but it's been hard to really change things and that's what Heterodox Academy is trying to do. Well, it was a problem way back then, but in 2016, the reckoning really seemed to happen because what we witnessed there was a country divided along seems we had seen before this heartland revulsion against the coasts and against the cosmopolitanism and elitism or perceived elitism of big cities and their liberal inhabitants. And Trump managed to magnify that divide to a degree that I still think we're trying to grapple with what happened there and try not to repeat the same psychological experiment over the next six months. And then I should also say that now the pandemic has somehow, if it were possible to amplify that dynamic. It has. That's right. So how are you viewing the current moment and what this quasi quarantine has done to further expose this intellectual and tribal schism in the country? Yeah, so to understand where we are, you have to go back at least to the well, let's go all the way back to the 1950s and 60s when America was pretty unpolarized. The post war world was an unusually historically was quite unusual in the mid 20th century and having very low levels of polarization. There were liberal Republicans, there were conservative Democrats and for a variety of reasons in the especially in the 80s, we began to see almost like tectonic plates moving around. We began to have one party that had psychological progressives and one party that had psychological conservatives. So before then things were all scrambled and rural people were often Democrats and the Democrats were the party of the working man. There was a lot of mixing and matching and there was the possibility of bipartisan legislation. A lot of legislation was bipartisan back then but for a variety of reasons we start getting sorting into types of people who are sorting by values. I think Ronald Reagan put together a coalition that was not just economic pro business, it was also with Christians and religious right and family values. And this is much more dangerous because if you have coalitions based on interests, well, you can make deals, you can trade off. But when you have coalitions based on personality types that share values, well, now the other side is evil. They are bad people. And as the parties increasingly then became more purified in terms of density, that is, if there's a lot of people per square mile, it votes Democrat and if there's a few people per square mile, votes Republican. And also very alarmingly by race as the Republican Party is becoming more of the party of white people, these splits are very dangerous. So I'm extremely alarmed. I was extremely alarmed even back around 2010, 2012 and it is so much worse now. And then there's the media environment. We can get into that later perhaps, but changes in social media between 2009 and 2011 gave us much more of an outrage machine adding on to cable TV which has been causing problems for a while as well. So the table was really set for an election in which reality had little grip on a lot of people and passions. Anger, fury gripped a lot of people. I mean, it's basically straight out of the Federalist Papers where Madison writes about faction and the human tendency to faction. If we hate the other side so much, we don't care about the common good. And there was a lot of anger in the 2016 election. Had there not been so much anger, had we not been so polarized, there's no way Donald Trump could have gotten elected. So I think everyone needs to think, whatever side you're on, if you care about the country, we need to figure out what do we do about this? How can we turn things down in the future? Yeah, and the information piece is crucial here. The fact that people can so successfully silo themselves and prestigmatize other sources of information or messages that they don't want to hear. There's a level of confirmation bias and just allergy to data that doesn't fit your narrative and conspiracy thinking that doesn't even recognize that it's conspiracy thinking in terms of just the public conversation we're having with one another and failing to have. There's something unrecognizable about this. I don't know if that's just some kind of delusion that I've acquired based on it being delivered through new channels like social media, or if it's some recency effect, or if I'm just getting older, but to some degree it's even ramped up in the context of this pandemic where I see otherwise very smart, rational people, ie. Not the usual tiny hat crowd, succumbing to degrees of motivated reasoning that without apology and without apparent bandwidth to check themselves ever and proving completely unsusceptible to argument. It's just like there are no universally trusted sources of information that can resolve disagreements at this point, it seems. Well, that's right, because you have to see people not as creatures seeking information, but as social creatures enmeshed in games of competition or war or conflict. And when the conflict level is low and you put us in the right circumstances and institutions, we actually can find the truth. And that's the magic of a university, that's the magic of science. But imagine a scientific field in which suddenly let's just take all the normal dynamics of science and then let's put a lot of money in, so that there's a huge amount of money riding on whether you get this discovery or patent. Well, that would corrupt things. And of course that has happened to some degree in in medicine, in some areas in the social sciences, money doesn't play much of a role, but politics does. And so as tribal passions and hatred of the other political party rises, you get the same kind of corrupting dynamic there. So I do think it is a theme of the suppose of the 2020s that it is actually getting harder to find the truth than it was 20 or 30 years ago. I believe that is despite obviously some kinds of facts and truth are just fantastically easy. But I'm very grateful for Google and the Internet. Obviously, many things are getting better, but anything that is politically or morally tagged so that one side wants to believe in the other doesn't. In some ways, it is now harder to find the truth than it used to be. At least that's what I'm coming to see. In my own field in psychology, we've had this replication crisis and so this is a different mechanism. But we used to think that when I was in grad school, we learned that correlational studies are not very reliable, but experiments, wow. That's the gold standard. If it's a random assignment, double blind boy that tells you what caused what. But now we're finding that even a lot of our experiments don't replicate. And so I think the attitude we have to take into the 2020s is a lot more humility. We simply don't know what the truth is, no matter how fervently we believe we do. And I imagine you're quite familiar with that kind of a mindset and issues of faith, but it infects all of us. And I'm hopeful that this virus, this pandemic, has humbled everyone because we were pretty much all wrong about a lot of things. We're still wrong about most things, or many things, probably. Yeah. This has been an interesting ordeal of epistemology, really, this pandemic, because we've been dealing with patently unreliable information, rumors leaking out of China, and then the overt attempt to suppress those rumors or a message against them by a communist regime that has every reason to worry about the perception of it in the world. And then all of the tribal spin given to that circumstance by our own politics. We have a completely deranged president who is concerned about the stock market and its effect on his chances of reelection. We have a personality cult amplifying every one of his errant ideas. But then we have just all these different vested interests and people without much political partisanship exposed to very different or likely very different outcomes with respect to the single variable of deciding to lock down society. Right. So you have people whose businesses can still be maintained once we lock things down, and then some of them even improve. Right. And then you have people who for whom every aspect of economic life is going to grind to a halt. And these people may, on either side of this divide, they may be equally reasonable and equally respectful of science. And yet you can see the consequences of your economic concerns trimming down your ability to think clearly about what the data is suggesting at any time point. It's been very interesting to witness. I continue to believe that at every point along the way, even when we the truth is we still don't know how lethal this disease is. That's right. But at every point along the way, it has been prudent to try to stop the spread of the contagion to spare our healthcare system, because we could see what was happening in Italy and other countries and to use the time we were thereby gaining for ourselves to ramp up testing and our ability to trace and isolate cases and to understand the virus and obviously develop therapeutics and ultimately a vaccine. Now, we have proven surprisingly inept at using the time well and that's something we have to figure out how to improve and understand going forward. But it has always been prudent, even given the absolutely predictable economic costs, to err on the side of caution here. Because at every point along the way this has seemed considerably worse than the flu. I mean, the analogies to the flu have always seemed inaccurate and then the question is how much worse is this than the flu? Then reasonable people can debate that. So for instance, they're very prominent people who are making claims like hospitals are coding more or less every conceivable death as a COVID death. Yeah, the mortality statistics are completely fake right now, whether this is I'm sure that's happened in a few places, but this is either a very dangerous conspiracy theory or something we have to get to the bottom of immediately and it's very hard to tell. Right. You can't figure this out in 2 hours and who would you trust to put this claim to rest or not? The New York Times isn't good enough, apparently. So I don't know how you think about how we move forward in the space where there are very few trusted gatekeepers of information and the disparity between believing one thing and believing its antithesis is enormous. That's right. I'll go with you on your analysis on the first few weeks or a month or two of this, which is that as long as we didn't know much about this thing, we didn't know what the death rate was, it could be 3% 6% and for God's sake, our doctors didn't even have masks. So I think there was really no dispute that we had to do lockdowns at first when we just didn't know what was going on and we could not deal with it. We had no idea where the high water mark would be. And I'm sitting here in Manhattan where everything is peaceful and the streets are quiet, but it was pandemonium in the hospitals and we had no idea how high the wave of death was going to crash. And I think to their credit, americans actually really did accept that. I mean, Americans really did. I was surprised that I think in those first weeks we actually did get obviously not like they did in China or other places, using a lot more force, but Americans did go along with it and the surveys still show that most people support that. But once we got through that first wave with enormous economic cost, which is also a personal cost now, I think there are at least real alternative views that need to be discussed. And if we had some sort of a reasonable, rational media system, reasonable democracy with reasonable discourse norms, we could actually do it. What I mean is especially, say, the Sweden model, it is at least reasonable to say, okay, they're doing it differently in different countries. Well, let's look, how does it work? Do they get immunity faster? So as long as there was so much unknown, it actually would be really important to listen to the other side, to listen to critics. And that's the way that we all get smarter, is by having our confirmation biases challenged. So I'm a big fan of that. Now, unfortunately, we live in this crazy, funhouse madhouse in which, as you said, there are national interests trying to distort things. There are Russian operatives trying to use rumors to divide us. We have a president who, when George W. Bush gave a call for us to come together, it was a beautiful call from a former president. And for Trump to attack him on the spot, that, to me, was one of the several just horrible low points of this whole thing. It also just shows us how far from normal politics we've wandered, because here we have a current Republican president, Vilifying, a previous Republican president who was making nothing more than a call for national unity and a transcendence of partisanship. And the current president can't even transcend his own thin skinned. I know when that happened, I didn't get angry at all. I was laughing. It's like, oh my, this cannot be happening. This cannot be happening now we are so far beyond we're just so deep into the absurd. And so, yeah, that's what we have to figure out. Let me just put one distinction on the table, is most Americans are pretty reasonable. Most Americans are not that polarized. You have to distinguish between the average and sort of the dynamics of the system. And so let's take, just to take one example, on a college campus, most students are pretty reasonable. But we've been, because of social media and other things, the people who will use social media or mountain protests can have a disproportionate voice. Same thing in a democracy. There's wonderful work by a group called More in Common, British organization that surveyed America. They've done really wonderful work on studying polarization in the United States. They find that Americans fall into about seven different groups based on their political attitudes. And four of the groups, which is a large majority, they call the exhausted majority. And these are people who are quite reasonable. Two of the groups are on the left, one is centrists, one is people who are just disengaged. So most Americans you can't blame most Americans, but because of the nature of social media, the nature of Congress, the nature of cable news, various people have megaphones that are pursuing either commercial interests or ideological interests. And so you get absurdities like Fox News saying that Remdesivir is bad and Chloroquine is good. And this is after the scientific studies have come out showing the reverse. So what I'm saying is, don't give up on Americans, but it's almost time to give up on the system or the network that we have and I give up on. I don't mean that there's no hope. I just mean, like, man, we can't just go back to normal. We got to dig deep, figure out what's wrong and fix this so that this becomes the bottoming out, that 2020 becomes the worst year in a long time and that something changes by the end of this decade. How do you view the next, let's say six months? So the next six months is overshadowed entirely by the 2020 presidential election. It's just going to be politics all the time. When it's not pandemic, it'll be politics. And we obviously don't know how much the economy is going to unravel in the meantime, but it seems like it's poised to unravel to an impressive degree. I mean, we're certainly flirting with a real depression, if joblessness numbers are any indication. And again, the most hopeful predictions for a vaccine, which is really the only thing that will fully reset our circumstance with respect to public health, nothing arrives before something like it would be a miracle if it arrived in January, right? And even that is very few people are imagining that it's sooner than a year from now. And again, we've got to remind ourselves of how amazing that would be. I think the fastest vaccine we've ever developed was four years for the mumps, and the average is 15 years. One year would be a massive breakthrough, and let's say we improve on that and we get a vaccine by January. Still, we have this period, not just our country, but the entire world has been pitched into a circumstance of real uncertainty, financially, economically, and I think as a result, politically. How are you viewing the next six months? And there's just so many concerns on the table, like, how do we even have a safe election, right? If we can't vote by mail, right? How do we get people to actually vote? What are you thinking about for the next six months? So I completely agree that it's going to be all pandemic and Trump all the time with just sideshows over biden and other things here and there. So there's no chance of the fever breaking until after the election. I'm certainly hoping that Trump is not reelected. I think that, as many people said, oh, well, there are adults in the room in the first year or two. There were many good people in government, and I think there are not so many of them at the upper level anymore. So the point is that the craziness we've seen in the last year or two would get even worse. So I think that if Trump is reelected. I think the damage to our democracy and our reputation in the world are standing in the world. I'm terrified to think what would happen if Biden wins, or there could be some route in which he's not the nominee or who knows what's going to happen. But if Biden wins, it would be great if we had a bold and inspiring leader, and I'm not expecting that Biden will rise to that level, but who knows? Of course there's a chance for a reset of a lot of things. It's very hard to predict how things would play out. The one thing I would question, what you said is you say nobody is predicting a vaccine for a very long time. Yes, that's true. But this is one of those things we've been told a lot of things about the virus, like don't wear masks, wash your hands for 20 seconds. And it turns out a lot of that was either wrong or at least not based on evidence. It is true that experts tell us it's likely to be a long time, and you're right that no vaccine has ever been invented that quickly. But there's 100 I just saw on the news the other day there's 100 vaccines that are in development, and three or four of them are going into clinical trials now. And of course, there's no way, way we're going to follow the old protocol where we inoculate a lot of people and wait a year to see if how many got sick. No, we're going to do challenge trials. People are going to volunteer like crazy to be infected with the virus to see if they have the immunity. So I just raised this as just one example of how a lot of things that are put forth as facts about this, you have to at least actively look and say, okay, is this really a fact? Do we really know this? And, you know, under what scenarios might this not come true? And of course, if suppose one of these ones just starting at NYU, just they saw it on the news on Friday, they're injecting well, they're giving the vaccine to people this week, and then they'll start exposing them, or some of them, I think. I'm not sure what the plan is exactly, but they'll have an answer within a couple of months. And so let's just suppose it works. Well, that would really change everything and in a way that I think obviously could greatly benefit Trump. What I'm hoping presidents leaders often get a bump because of a crisis. Trump got hardly any. But it's the incompetence which is what I'm hoping will turn off the middle of the country. It's the bumbling incompetence that I think is likely to be powerful for a lot of people who are not part of his base. But if somehow, if there's a scientific breakthrough and the vaccine comes quickly, a lot of people will say, see, it's just like trump said, it'll just magically go away. So I just think we can't it's very hard to game out how things are going to play out, both scientifically and economically. Yeah. I would place a bet on what seems to be the pervasive incompetence at the moment, because even if we had a vaccine today that we knew worked, we have to roll that out to, in our case, 350,000,000 people. And our struggle to even get testing going is instructive. Just imagine having to produce the vials of vaccine. And if this is an injectable right? As opposed to something that you can inhale it's daunting. Yeah, but look, it could be invented in China. We're all assuming that it's going to be invented by Americans, but there's a lot going on in Europe and Israel, China. Then all the more reason to worry that we're not first in line to get it right. That's right. Well, so I don't know how in the weeds you've gotten with Trump supporters. I've commented on this in several places. And the thing about the Trump phenomenon that has been most mystifying to me is that among his supporters, and not even people who are unsophisticated, even people who I'm surprised to even discover they did support him at all, what I find that is truly mystifying and really just confounds. Any effort to have a reasonable conversation about politics is a total unwillingness to admit that there's anything consequentially wrong with him. That his lack of understanding of complex issues, that his bluster, his dishonesty, that any of this is in any way negative. Right. What I feel like I meet in trying to convince Trump supporters of anything is just an absolute stonewalling on points that just seem objectively true. And my noticing them is not at all a sign of my own partisanship. Just to say that Trump lies more than is normal in a politician, that is as objectively true as the Pythagorean theorem. There's just no possibility of debating that. And yet even that will not be conceded. Or if conceded, there'll be some assertion that it just doesn't matter. All politicians lie is the mantra you will reliably hear at that juncture in the conversation. And there's something like 100 points like that. It's hard to understand what is at the root of it because it's not an ordinary form of tribalism. This is not like members of, you know, the Christian right who are Christian fundamentalists and they're they have a whole worldview organized around there, you know, having grown up evangelical or whatever. And now they're voting for whoever it is, George Bush, because he's on their side and he's going to put in the right conservative judges and block abortion. And it's not part of a whole system of belief like that. It's just in many cases, the only thing that seems to be organizing it ideologically is a revulsion at the status quo that was repudiated in the 2016 election. The business. As usual, that Hillary Clinton represented. We don't want any more of that. And also we probably don't want to pay any more in taxes. And you get those two variables clattering around a person's brain, and it has summed to something like a cultic unwillingness to admit the obvious just across the board whenever the conversation turns to Trump. Yes. So let me give you a handy little psychological tool that explains that can explain this. So there's a wonderful term. There's research by Tom Gillivich at Cornell who studied motivated reasoning. And I got this little formula from him. He says when we want to believe something, we don't look at the evidence and say, is the evidence mostly on the side that I want to believe? We just say, can I believe it? Do I have permission to believe it? Meaning, can I find one example, one argument, one piece of evidence? And if I can, I'm done. I stop thinking because if someone challenges me, I can point to this piece of evidence. Whereas if you don't want to believe something, you say, must I believe it? Am I forced to believe it? So I've had the same experience as you. I have several. I communicate with a lot of people on the left and the right, and I have some very smart correspondents who are Trump supporters. And I've had that exact debate with him about whether there's something wrong with him. And the psychologists, the psychiatrists say the most likely diagnosis is narcissistic personality disorder. He makes everything about him and you. And I think that that's as objective a fact as the sun rises in the east that he does that more than other people. But once you understand that, everybody's asking not is it true? But must I believe it? Well, the answer is always no. There's almost nothing that you have to believe, certainly not anything about politics or anything that can't be measured exactly, precisely with no questioning about what the rules are. So you and I can point to, well, look at the fact checkers. They find 10,000 errors. Well, the Trump supporters will simply point out that the fact that those fact checkers work for the Washington Post or Snopes or other places that have known left wing biases in the right. So it's very hard to get at the truth. And, you know, I think of course there is a truth, but when Trump supporters ask, must I believe it? The answer is always no. And one of the best ways to get a little bit more humility here and calm down the angle a little bit is to say, just always turn it around and say, is there some different issue on which my side is just as obtuse? And I think people on the right would point out that, well, people on the left pretty much anything about race and gender and LGBT and immigration. I mean, there's all these issues that are sacred issues on the left, at least in my part of the left and universities. But as you know, I spend a lot of time hammering the left for its systemological vices as well. For your guts. Yes. So I get it from both sides. Yet when you just look at the way in which we have shed influence in the world in the last few years, where we have just by turn, terrified our allies and gratified our actual adversaries, it's mind boggling that you have something like 40% of American society that sees absolutely no problem with this. I mean, worse, they see some this as some form of progress. Yeah. Okay, so let me get so here's the metaphor that's helped me understand the otherwise just unfathomable state of our country now. So I began to feel around 2014, 2015, that something was deeply wrong, like something has changed about the universe. And I played with this. I just had this uncomfortable feeling for, for a couple of years. And finally, a year or two ago, I started working this, this metaphor into my talks. Suppose that God one day just doubled the gravitational constant. So in our universe, there's like 25 physical constants, the mass of an electron, things like that. And if God just said, one day, let's just double the gravitational constant just for fun, like, everything would go totally haywire in the physical world, and planets would move in their orbits, and planes would come out of the sky, and it would just be bizarre and disastrous. And I think that what happened is basically that. But in the social world, and that is connectivity is generally good, but we're now hyper connected. That's changing a basic parameter of the universe. We're so connected. But it's more than that. It's not just like, oh, because giving us telephones and email, I mean, we've been getting more and more connected for centuries, and that's generally been a good thing. It's the nature of the connectivity. It's connectivity in which we are communicating not privately, but in front of an audience, and the audience rates the communication. So this, I think, is what social media has done to us. That is, when Facebook and MySpace came out, it was just, look, here's my page, here are all my friends, here are the bands. I like, there's some showing off. But it wasn't toxic, and it was not bad for democracy. I have an article in The Atlantic last November with Tobias Rose Stockwell, where we show how beginning in 2009, when Facebook added the like button, and then Twitter copied it, and Twitter added the Retweet button and Facebook copied it, and then they both algorithmicized their newsfeeds much more. So between 2009 and 2012, the nature of human connectivity changed radically in ways that I think are very, very bad for democracy. That is, it wasn't just that we could now talk to each other privately for free. It's that a lot more of our conversation was now in public being rated, which means it was inauthentic, often dishonest, and with a lot more intimidation. I hate Twitter. I hate going on Twitter. I'm also fascinated by it, and it's like opening a garbage can and watching rats and cockroaches fighting, and there's something fascinating about it. But things really changed after 2012, and the Russians noticed it, and they've been trying to mess with our democracy for 50 years. In 2014 is when they realized, hey, there's this great outrage machine that the Americans have built for us, and we don't have to go over there. We don't have to fly agents over to mess them up. We can just sit here in St. Petersburg to do it. So I think that I hear your incomprehension, I hear your frustration. Things are terribly wrong, and we could blame those Trump supporters. We could say they must be insane, they must be badly motivated, but that's not likely to be true. They're likely to be normal human beings. And so I think we have to look elsewhere. That's why I'm so mystified, because the people I have in my personal life who are Trump supporters, I know to be smart and well intentioned, and it's just that they're completely aloof with respect to all of the downsides of his personality, and what, to my eye, are the obvious risks being magnified by those downsides. What an amazing species we are that we can believe such obviously false things. I think there's some people who've done some work on that. Yeah, I agree. That the style of communication, and it's created an information space where it really is just total war all the time in information terms. That's right. Yeah. And I don't think our democracy can survive that. I think that if things keep going the way they're going, our country is going to fail catastrophically. I'm not predicting that it will, because I don't think things will keep on going the way they're going, but the trends are really bad, and they've been really bad for at least ten years. More than that, even. So what would you change if you could actually get Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg and other people to just take your advice? What would you change? There's all kinds of systems I change, including elections and Congress and all that. But if we're going to focus on social media, to bias, and I offered a couple of suggestions. The most important one, the most important single thing that we think needs to change is there has to be some kind of identity verification for our major platforms. We're not saying that you have to post with your real name. We understand that there's often a need to, not to use an avatar or a fake name. But if democracy is moving into a virtual public square, if what's fundamental to our democracy is how we engage with each other, and we're no longer doing that in newspapers and real public squares. We're now doing it on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, places like that. I think these places have an obligation to create a kind of public square that fosters some sort of understanding, some sort of working out, and that really cracks down on intimidation. It is stunning to me that you can make death threats, rape threats, racist rants, you can say anything you want, and the worst that will happen to you is eventually your account will be closed down and then you can just make ten others with no verification. And the Russians figured this out long ago, and a lot of Americans do it too. So if we're serious about having a democracy that has a public square, and that public square happens on these platforms, I think there has to be at least enough skin in the game or accountability that when people open an account on Facebook or Twitter, Instagram or any of the major platforms let's suppose it worked like this. The platform would send them out to some other entity. Maybe it's a non government agency entity, it's a nonprofit. The Internet has a number of those. And that entity just verifies that you are a real person associated with a country and that you are over 18 or not. If you're under 18, there might be another cut off like 13, because right now any eleven year old can get on any platform that she wants to. And that's a whole another set of issues. We can talk about mental health effects on girls and all kinds of other effects on teenagers, but I think that's the most important thing is that we have to reduce trolling intimidation. I don't want to go into a public square where anybody can hit me over the head or throw acid in my face and run away laughing and there's nothing I can do about it. That's number one. Yes. Is there a tension between that and our broader concern about free speech? Obviously these are private platforms and they can regulate speech however they want. But given that they're essentially becoming Internet infrastructure and they are becoming a kind of public square for which there's no alternative, the erring on the side of just basically defaulting to the Constitution has seemed tempting. How do you think about free speech concerns? Sure. So I would hate to live in a country in which if somebody espoused an opinion that somebody else or the government didn't like that that person could be arrested or punished. So to me that's the core of free speech. There are no thought crimes, there are no speech crimes other than obviously intimidation, threats. There are certain categories that are not constitutionally protected. So I don't want a solution in which platforms have to look at what you say and judge each thing you say. What I'd rather is that it's not focused on the thing you say, it's focused on the features of the space. And so if as long as we allow anonymous trolls in. Well, do you have a constitutional right to say whatever you want without anyone knowing who you are? I don't think so. Do you have a right to reach millions of people? No. You have a right to say what you want without being punished. But as is sometimes said, freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach. The platforms are under no obligation to let you reach millions of people with claims that chloroquin is a miracle cure. That's not that's not free speech. So I think just, you know, these platforms, they're not individuals talking in the public square and they're not newspapers. They're somewhere in between. And we don't our law doesn't quite account for that yet. But I think just as we have a lot of responsibilities placed on newspapers and magazines, I think we need some sort of in between thing for these platforms. And that means no, you can't just open 100 accounts and say whatever you want all day long and attack people without anyone knowing who you are. Right. So now what are your thoughts about the 2020 election and, you know, now the the concern about the Biden campaign and his viability? Yeah, really on two fronts. I mean, so that we have the Tara Reid allegations and surrounding those, we have this fairly credible charge of hypocrisy against the left, because on the left, we're all about me too, and believe all women. But then the inconvenient woman shows up making fairly shocking claims about the only candidate standing between us and four more years of Trump. And what we see is either a massive disinclination to even hear the allegations, and once that becomes untenable, what we've now seen is an analysis of the allegations that does, frankly, suggest a kind of double standard where we could go hard against Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated for the Supreme Court based on more or less nothing but the fairly dim memory of one person. And we're in a similar situation here and behaving rather differently. I mean, the way I reconcile this, you know, is just that I think Trump is so dangerous. I think four more years of him would be so awful for many of the reasons you mentioned. And I do think there's something especially awful about doubling down on Trump for a second term, what that says about our country. It would validate that it wasn't a fluke. We really meant it. We know exactly what we're buying here, and we're going to buy it again for four more years. I don't know how American standing recovers. I mean, we literally have to have the Messiah come for 2024 to reboot. So given that I honestly don't care what is true here, I can own that he might have done something absolutely awful which should, in a normal world, disqualify him for the presidency. I don't feel like I know that. I don't feel like I don't know that. I just feel that whoever Joe Biden is or has been, he's better than Trump. Just his facade of professionalism as a normal politician and a normally empathic person is so much better than what Trump manages to muster as a person that there's really nothing to decide here. For me, that seems to skirt hypocrisy. I'm not inclined to treat Tara Reid's allegations differently than glossy Fords, and if that's the apt comparison, it's just that the context is so different that in this case, they don't matter. I consider this a political emergency, that it only has one adequate resolution, which is somebody other than Trump becomes president. Yeah. So without getting into the details, I have not been following the story closely enough to have a view about what might have actually happened. But the key thing that I would want us to focus on here, if you're asking about the implications for the election, is enthusiasm, passion, things like that. So Trump won the election. He didn't in 2016, not because people loved him and wanted him, but because we have negative partisanship in this country. That is, since 2004, we vote more. Political scientists tell us that the strategy for president used to always be you run to the outside to get your party's nomination, and then, because America is a fairly moderate country, you have to run to the center to get to win in the general. And in 2004, Carl Rove correctly calculated that the center had shrunk so much that the key was turnout. And so they went with gay marriage to try to inflame the evangelicals. And it worked. They got higher turnout on the right. So since then, that has been more of a winning strategy and negative partisanship. Voting against what you don't want is more powerful than voting for what you do want. And that, I think, explains how Donald Trump was able to win in 2016 when it seems as though he didn't even want to win. He made no preparations for it. He didn't spend any of his own money. He didn't campaign that hard. So Hillary Clinton ran a terrible campaign against someone who wasn't trying to win and was a complete mess and had no ground game and didn't play by the normal rules. And even though she won the popular vote, he still did win by the recognized rules of the game. And that's because her people were not passionate. And the tone in your voice just before when you were saying, why, of course you're going to vote for Biden, was similar to what a lot of people were saying about Hillary. Obviously, there were very different issues, but people weren't passionate about her. But they would say, well, yeah, but I mean, but she's better than the alternative. So that is how Trump won. He should have lost in a landslide, but he did. My fear is that while Biden is not an inspiring candidate, I do believe that people have known him for a long time who say that he's a fundamentally decent man. That doesn't mean that he didn't do something inappropriate with a young woman in the Senate. I have no idea. But there's not a lot of enthusiasm for him before people generally like him. Democrats, I think, were okay with him, but a lot of groups were not. And that was the big question was will the people who wanted Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, will they come back to vote for him in the fall? And now you add in this, which is going to alienate a lot of people, particularly women, and particularly young women, for whom these issues are much more salient these days. So I'm extremely concerned about the fall election because I think the Democrats you know, the Republicans I was fully expecting the Democrats to win, no matter who the nominee was, unless it was Sanders. I was expecting the Democrats were going to win because of the passion issue. But now I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. And if a number of constituencies are not enthusiastic, they're not going to turn out, especially if there are still risks to turning out, and especially if mail in voting is not easy and universal, for God's sake, during a pandemic. Of course we should all be voting by mail or by Internet or by other remote methods. But everything's so politicized, and there's so much incompetence that that may not happen. So I don't know what is going to happen. And it's another reason for alarm. What about the perception this is the second thing that's dogging Biden, the perception of his senescence? Essentially, he's obviously lost a step with respect to his speech and memory. And again, we're in an environment where there is an asymmetry here with respect to the way his glitches play, to the average audience, and the way Trump's glitches play. I mean, Trump is a producer of word salad much, if not most of the time, and yet it doesn't make him seem old. It's just more Trump. Right? It's like he's got the energy of a 20 year old on Adderall. Yeah. So he's full of life, and he's just chaos. Whereas every single glitch, every hiccup in his speech for Biden, you're holding your breath, hoping he can get to the end of the sentence. The optics are so different, it's surprising. This is the other thing that worries me. No, that's right. This is why I was not a fan of Joe Biden. I mean, I like him personally as a person. I agree with you, he's a reasonable person, but he ran for president twice before, and he was a bad candidate, and he's not a good campaigner. He is not eloquent. And as a psychologist, what I can add is that the research on cognitive aging is just stunning. People are at their peak in terms of fluency and speed in their twenty s, and then it's kind of downhill from there until you get to your 50s or sixty s, and then this downward slope accelerates. So in your seventy s, it really accelerates. So most 70 year olds are still doing okay on cognitive tests, although they're not nearly as sharp as they used to be. But as you go beyond 70, by the time you get to 80, most 80 year olds are not doing so well. Obviously some are. But if Biden was not a good candidate long ago, when his brain was much younger, I think there's not much reason to think that he's going to be much better now, and I think we're seeing the signs of that. So as you say, it's also the issue of vitality, and that matters in politics. People want a vigorous leader, not one who seems frail or scattered. So for a lot of reasons, I think that obviously many Democrats wish they had perfect candidate. Many Democrats think that there were better candidates. And with the terror Reed allegations, now the candidacy is even weaker. So, my God, is this a drama? I mean, just when you think it can't get more insane, it gets more insane. So who do you think he should pick for his VP? That I don't know. I've not given any thought to I imagine that he committed to well, I don't know why, but he committed to picking a woman, I suppose, knowing that these allegations were coming. So once he's done that so I'm not a political prognosticator. I can't read the horse race politics. I don't have a view on that. Part of your analysis of what social media has done to us and the new kind of Balkanization of our epistemology has you've spent some time focusing on the young, I mean, Gen Z and below. I mean, now we're soon dealing with a cohort of people for whom social media is as common a fact of the world as Water, which is to say, there's never been a time where they were without it. And we're also having a younger generation that seems destined to graduate into an economic environment that is just as objectively punishing as any in our lifetime. When you think of what it would be like to be looking for a job in six months, unless we reboot here in some way, that just ushers in a renaissance of a sort that will be fundamentally surprising. It's hard to see how we escape a fairly dismal economy for a good long while. How do you think about the cohort you're currently teaching as undergraduates? What's the near future hold? Yes. So paradoxically, it it could be it could end up, in the long run, being good for them. That is clearly it's going to be devastating to their economic prospects in the near term. And research on previous generations that graduate into bad economies shows that it does hurt their earnings for the rest of their life on average. So I'm not saying this is good overall, but the trajectory, the outlook for Gen Z was horrific. It was terrible. The rates of anxiety, depression, self harm, and suicide have been spiking upwards since 2012, roughly, especially for well, suicide is up for both genders, but depression anxiety is especially up for girls. And so Greg Lukianoff and I wrote this book, The Coddling of the American Mind, and we think the two major causes there are many, but the two major causes of the vast overprotection, the safetyism that we put on kids in the 90s, we stop letting them play outside. We told them the world is dangerous. We let them just play with devices inside. And the normal risk taking, the normal adventures, the normal testing the limits of your physical abilities, and that we we denied them beginning in the nineties and early 2000. And so this, we think, is the major reason why Gen Z is coming out so much more fragile and depressed and anxious than the millennials were. So we're talking about kids born 1996 and later. The other factor, we believe, is too early exposure to social media. And here I actually have some news to report, brand new news. The long running debate over screen time, I think, is actually nearing a resolution that is in the coddling of the American mind. Greg and I focused on social media. That's what we thought was worse. But we did sometimes refer to screen time, or that parents should limit screen time. And some other researchers pushed back on us and said, no, look here's. Our evidence is that the amount of hours spent on screens isn't related to mental illness. And then Gene Twangy and I reanalyzed data and are basically able to show that consistently. If you look at almost all the data sets that show no overall effect of all screen time, well, if you dig in and you say, okay, not all screens, including TV, but rather just social media, and not all kids, but just girls, then you consistently find a relationship between heavy social media use and depression and anxiety. And it shows up in lots of data sets, lots of different studies and experiments back this up that when people go off of social media, they tend to get happier. So anyway, all I'm saying is I don't think parents need to freak out about screens per se, if what they're concerned about is depression, anxiety. But they should still look out if what they care about is that their kids actually do other things, like go outside or learn to climb trees or go out with their friends in person, which of course will happen again someday, but not this year. Yeah. So what do you do with the fact that now a concern about the dangers, even invisible dangers out in the world seems all too warranted, right? So now we have a cohort of kids. I mean, I've got two daughters, six and eleven, who are now quarantined and having a fairly unusual experience. Happily, our limitations on screen time have been impressively relaxed. So they're enjoying that. Yeah. But tell me about social media. Is your eleven year old on Instagram? No, I'm going to be as conservative as can be achieved on that front. But there are elements of it that are starting to leak into her experience now, just because of the classroom is on Zoom and they have common projects where they're commenting on each other's work and so they're texting and so there's communication in front of an audience happening a fair amount. And how that differs from social media really is just that it's not open to the rest of society, it's just her among her friends. But even there, it just seems to me like a whole new module has been installed in her brain, which is her attention is being captured by somebody else's response to something she put out there. And that has many of the features that would concern one with social media. Yeah, that's right. So to the extent that screens foster direct face to face interaction, talking on the phone by FaceTime resume, that's all great. There's no problem at all there. I actually bought my son an Xbox when this all hit. He wanted one for a long time and the research doesn't seem to show that it's related to anxiety, depression, although it is very addictive and it does tend to fill up all the available time. So he has 3 hours a day on Xbox, but it's great that he, you know, he's really playing it with his friends. So to the extent that these devices facilitate real direct interactions, that's great. But yes, as you say, the problem is a lot of these are indirect interactions where people are rating and commenting and that seems to be especially hard on girls. So this could get worse. But here's where I think things could get reset. There is actually danger out there now because of the virus and not that much for kids, but it's a physical thing. Whereas what, what we were getting to before this hit was emotional safety. We were treating kids as though they were so fragile that if they were exposed to bad news that they would somehow be damaged. And what I'm hoping is that this pandemic will reset some of our safetyism and move us away from sort of the trivial things we've been looking at the effort to protect kids self esteem, the effort to protect them from words and ideas. So having more adversity in your childhood could end up being beneficial. And this is the idea of anti fragility, which is really central to our book. The word was coined by Naseem Taleb. Lots of people have many views about him, but I'll just say that idea, I think that idea is a good one. I should say he has views about many people. Too. Yes, I've noticed. I don't want to miss this one point, but what you just said suggests to me there's another trap to fall in here, which is overprotective. If I'm trying to curate just go back to what you just asked me with respect to my allowing my daughter the social media experience. One, the impulse there is to protect her from the onslaught of negative or destabilizing or anxiety producing information that I don't want her to have. And it seems to me there are two potential pitfalls there. One is just this. It's another form of coddling, right? I'm trying to protect her from something that she should develop the tools to just assimilate. Or one could say that. And then there's just this other feature which I think it's natural to worry about, which is if all of her friends are on Instagram and she's the one who isn't, well, then there's just a social exclusion penalty that you would imagine a young would pay. Yeah. So to take your first point, it does seem as though I might be contradicting myself. I'm saying that in general, kids should be exposed to Adversity. They should learn from experience and you should let them make mistakes. Yes, in general that is true. But there are certain things such as, let's say alcohol, heroin, prostitution, gambling, where we say, you know what, my eleven year old is not ready for that. Maybe when she's 1618 or well, obviously not prostitution. But the point is that there are certain things that an adolescent brain is just not ready for. And what I found from speaking with a lot of middle school and high school kids is I ask them, all right, so how many of you have been shamed on social media? All hands go up. And I say, now, how many of you think that being shamed on social media toughens you, that is. You go through it and you say, you know what? I don't care what people think of me. I've been shamed so many times, I don't care anymore. No hands go up. How many of you think it makes you more cautious, more fearful? You double check and triple check yourself. You're not authentic. Most hands go up. So there's something about public shaming and exposure that is especially unhealthy for middle school kids and especially for girls. So I'm not saying it's a losing battle to keep it out of high school, but look, the minimum age, you have to be 13 to get an account. But by fifth to 6th grade, most of the girls have it in many schools. And that is something that I'm really trying to change. As long as there is now evidence that social media is particularly bad for girls. Now, the millennials weren't harmed by it. They didn't get this until they were in their 20s. But I suspect that middle school is the place to focus. I think we really need to try to get social media out of middle school. And that would solve your second question because, yes, if it's only your kid. When I kept my son off of video games, he did feel excluded because the other boys were all on it all day long. So it has to be done systemically. And that's why I think middle school is the place to focus. If anybody has listened to this who has any influence over middle school, try to get a schoolwide policy that discourages parents from letting their kids from discourages anyone from having a social media account until they get to high school. Wait till they're 14 or so. Wait till they're in high school. But middle school is so hard already, especially on girls, so don't make it harder. So now let's pivot to topics which, on their face may seem impressively detached from the current concerns, but not really. I want to talk about human well being and experiences of the positive end of the spectrum of human psychology and how we conceptualize this terrain. And this is, if anything, an interest in this has been heightened by our current circumstance because so many people have been forced into something that impressively resembles a kind of retreat. Right. I mean, people are experiencing solitude to a degree that is not normal for them. And for most of us, there's been a forced reprioritization of values. We have an advantage point from which to see how we've been living all these years and the kinds of things that have captivated our attention. And much of that has been stripped away or at least shuffled to a degree that many people are experiencing. Even a silver lining to this quarantine because they're experiencing better time with their families in many cases. Or this heightened sense of uncertainty, the sense that really anything can happen at any time. And that's always been true. Right. But we live most of our lives as though we take a lot for granted. And taking those things for granted amounts to a kind of death denial and a sense of control that has never really been factual. So there's there's a lot to to motivate a conversation about things like meditation and psychedelics and what they can reveal about the nature of the self and experiences of self transcendence. So let's dive into the deep end of the pool. John, perhaps to start, give me a sense of your background here. I know you spent some time in India at some point in either in graduate school or as a postdoc, but remind me how you came to be interested in these topics. Sure. So, because I study morality, I've been interested in moral transformations. You get that from religious experiences. William James book Varieties of Religious Experiences, full of all these sudden moral rebirth from an encounter with God. So I've always been interested in these self transcendent experiences and their capacity to change people's moral nature. But actually there's a very personal reason for it, and I've been looking forward to talking about this with you, because you've been out on this for a long time, talking about psychedelics. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversation I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, I should start with an addendum to the last podcast on vaccines and vaccine hesitancy that I did with Eric Toppel. Some of the responses I received to that have been astoundingly stupid. I guess that's not a total surprise. I don't feel like dealing with too many specifics here. One criticism I do take to heart, if only because it came in one form from my wife, is that despite my saying that I wanted to remain non judgmental and try to produce a document that the vaccine averse could actually receive without feeling denigrated in any way, I didn't try hard enough. And certainly my guest Eric didn't try hard enough there. I would have to say we are guilty as charged, and in truth, I'm not even sure it's the right target. I mean, there is something patronizing about the claim that in order to reach the vaccine hesitant, you have to walk on eggshells so as to not make them feel judged. Nevertheless, I do see the depressing results of the last podcast all around me. Those who were disposed to agree with me absolutely loved it and were grateful. And those who are worried about the COVID vaccines and taken in by what they've heard on Brett Weinstein's podcast or Tucker Carlson or wherever thought Eric and I were totally clueless about the state of the conversation that's happening over there. I don't actually know what the solution is here because some people ask, why not just have Brett on the podcast to talk about all this? But I think that would be a bad idea. Not because I don't think there are adequate answers to the kinds of points he would raise, but like so many debates on fairly fringe topics classic conspiracy theories, religious fundamentalism many points can't be addressed in real time, many anomalies can't be fully explained, right? And it can give a sense of uncertainty that is truly unwarranted. So there are many cases where merely having the conversation can be misleading for many, many people, and in this case, in the middle of a public health crisis. I think it is irresponsible to run this just asking questions routine in public. That's that really is my objection to what Brett is doing. It's just too easy for even smart people to come away from a discussion on these topics confused and by default, disposed to not do anything, which is to say not get vaccinated. There's so many things at play here. There's the fact that sticking a needle in your arm really seems like something intrusive. Right. People are afraid of needles. They find the whole thing unpleasant. They certainly find it unpleasant to have someone do it to their kids. And it's interesting to consider how the debate here would be different if the vaccine were delivered as a chewable gummy or as a nasal spray. Right. I think that would feel different to many people. But the default is to feel that getting vaccinated or getting your kids vaccinated is an act of commission which entails greater ethical concern and responsibility than an act of omission. Right. Not doing something not doing something is who can fault you for just sitting on your hands. Well, in this case you become part of a petri dish potentially breeding new variants of this virus and you are a free rider on herd immunity if it were ever achieved. And I think it is appropriate to judge people for taking that position. It is not merely a choice you're making for yourself. Even choosing not to wear a seatbelt isn't merely a choice you're making for yourself there. You don't have the problem of epidemiology, but if you are not wearing a seatbelt and you're thrown from your car in an accident and horribly injured, society pays the costs of that. Your medical bills raise the costs of insurance for everyone. And if you're uninsured, society bears those costs. Right. And society is bearing the costs of people who are landing in ICU's with severe complications from COVID when it wasn't necessary. At this point, I think it's totally appropriate to put the onus on the vaccine hesitant here, unless of course they have really compelling reasons not to want to get vaccinated. And there are some people who do. The very people for whom heard immunity is such an important variable. The people who are immunocompromised in various ways or who have terrible reactions to vaccines. There are people like this who can't get vaccinated and those are precisely the people one is thinking about when championing the virtues of herd immunity. So it's hard to get past a sense that what is happening among the vaccine hesitant is, given the state of our current information, a failed commitment to the common good, you are helping prolong a problem that need not be prolonged. We know these vaccines work and we know they are safe enough at this point, certainly compared to the problem of getting COVID without the benefit of getting vaccinated. And if I didn't believe we knew this, then there might be something to debate. But just I'm not going to have a podcast where someone's haranguing me about thermites and the melting point of steel. I'm not going to have a debate about these vaccines in the absence of truly compelling evidence. And to give you a sense of how weak the evidence is out there. I mean, just when I saw Brett's response to my podcast, one of the things he and his wife Heather did on their podcast is single out for distinction. A wonderful thread on Twitter by someone named Alexandro's Morenos who dissected my podcast with Eric Tople minute by minute. And Brett and Heather recommended that people study this thread as a demolition of that episode. Again, there's no reason to go into the details here, but so much of this was so obviously missing the point and silly. But I'll just flag one thing that should alert Brett and Heather to how far into the precincts of paranoia they've wandered. At one point, Alexandro references my claim that we could take the worst fears of the vaccine hesitant at face value, and it would still be rational to get vaccinated. The worst fears being that the various database is reporting real numbers of deaths associated with the vaccine, suggesting that as many as 12,000 people may have died outright from it. Alexandro's admonishes me to be more careful than that, because actually, because of the UI and UX concerns of this database, people fear that the problem may be tenfold greater than reported. So now I'm being asked to imagine that 120,000 people in the US. Have died outright by being vaccinated. No one died in the clinical trials, but 120,000 people may have died in the last few months, and and no one is really noticing, apparently, right? I mean, what's what's happening here? Are ICUs filling up with people who were just vaccinated? Is that what I'm asked to believe? Or are these people dying in their homes and no one knows about it? There's absolutely no reason to believe anything like that. So if you are in a social context where those fears seem plausible to you, you have been lured into some kind of information backwater that is not good for your mind and it's certainly not good for our collective well being. Actually, there was another thread that's even more to the point, which Brett also singled out as absolutely indispensable for our understanding of what's going on among the vaccine hesitant. And this comes from someone named Constantin Kissing. It's a very long thread, but the first tweet reads, you're struggling to understand why some people are vaccine hesitant. The let me help you. Mega thread. Imagine you're a normal person. The year is 2016, rightly or wrongly. You believe most of what you see in the media. You believe polls are broadly reflective of public opinion. You believe doctors and scientists are trustworthy and independent. You're a decent, reasonable person who follows the rules and trusts authority. And then he goes through all of the insults to this naive way of thinking that have occurred in the last five years or so. He talks about Brexit election of Trump and the claim that Russians were involved in getting him elected. The Steele dossier, the Jussie Smollett hoax, the Covington Catholic High School affair, the capitulation of various institutions, medical and otherwise. To woke ism all the epidemiologists who shrieked about COVID when people on the far right were protesting. But the moment the protest for George Floyd erupted, they not only didn't judge the protesters, but asserted that protesting was itself a contribution to public health. All of these insults to reasonableness and instances of public hypocrisy and just the full litany here. So he runs through all of this as an explanation for why the vaccine, hesitant now no longer trust authority of any kind the government, scientists, scientific journals, public health officials. As though this explains it all. I would quibble with a couple of things Constantin said in his litany of abuse, but the general shape of it is something I totally accept. Yes, there has been an impressive breakdown in our institutions, and in particular the media, and the way in which politics has deranged our public conversation more or less on every topic. But the one thing that this analysis does not explain is the thinking of those of us who have still followed the plot, those of us who experienced all of these insults to our intelligence and yet still managed to understand that Trump really was a threat to our democracy. And if the sight of a US president not committing to a peaceful transfer of power doesn't convince you on that point, nothing will. And in the case of COVID despite all of the failures of clear thinking and clear public health messaging, many of us still understand that the vaccines are incredibly effective. And all things considered, it is far wiser to be vaccinated at this point than to be running the risk of getting COVID without having been vaccinated. It's possible to keep the big picture in view. Here's the big picture. The failings of our institutions need not lead to a total breakdown of trust in our institutions. It is possible to exaggerate how much our institutions have failed. And that is what is most objectionable and so dysfunctional about what Brett is doing with this podcast. This just asking questions routine is corrosive of public trust at a time where the failure of trust translates into disease and death, an unnecessary risk of disease and death for others. We're in the middle of a pandemic. There is no compelling reason at this point to be worried about these vaccines. There is a compelling reason to be worried about just letting this pandemic burn through the unvaccinated population. We should be spreading these vaccines to the entire world at this point. And we need institutions. We need to repair our institutions. We need to criticize them for their failures. But the idea that we can navigate a global public health emergency by podcast and substac newsletter is patently ridiculous. We need a functioning CDC and FDA. And who? We need medical journals that are credible. And it's this breakdown in legitimacy, or perceived legitimacy, that is proving so dysfunctional. So my issue with what Brett is doing is that he's doing it in public. Fine. If you're uncomfortable getting vaccinated, you want to make that private decision for yourself and your family, well, fine. I don't agree with it. But that is very different than making it a public cause to convince as many people as possible that they should be worried about these vaccines. There is no compelling reason at this moment to be worried about these vaccines, and yet you're devoting podcast after podcast to spreading that fear again in the middle of a pandemic. That's the part that doesn't make any sense. That's the part that seems unethical and irresponsible. Of course it's possible to worry about the long term safety implications of these vaccines or of any other new medical intervention for which long term safety data are unavailable. I'm not saying it's crazy to worry about these things. I'm saying that, all things considered, it's not reasonable. And it's not reasonable to stoke those fears in millions of people. We have a forced choice. You can get exposed to COVID without having been vaccinated or after having been vaccinated. That's the choice. Of course, Brett thinks there's a third choice. You can be exposed while taking Ivectin prophylactically. But he admits that Ivctin is not widely available, that most people can't get their hands on it. So this isn't an option for his audience for the most part, even if he could justify it for himself, which, again, I don't think he can really do. So this really is the crux of the matter, which I would put directly to Brett. What public good is being served by spreading fear of the COVID vaccines to millions of people who have no rational alternative, really, but to be vaccinated? We have every reason to believe that the long term implications of getting COVID without having been vaccinated are worse. Take the concerns about election fraud that are endemic on the political right at the moment. Now, is it completely insane to be concerned about election fraud? No. Election fraud is certainly a possibility that we should be worried about. We should guard against it. We're absolutely right to want to be confident in the results of our elections. And if there's new technology that we introduce that turns out to be hackable, all of that is a concern. So you're not crazy to be thinking about election integrity. And happily, many smart people on both sides of the aisle have thought a lot about it. It turns out that there's no significant evidence of election fraud. But should we be on guard against this? Of course. But what we have among Republicans at the moment is the utterly delusional claim that the 2020 election was stolen. And this has become a crystal of doubt around which an insane personality cult has formed. So the merely asking questions routine is in bad faith, or it's totally oblivious to the corrosive effects of asking certain questions again and again. I'm not going to have someone on the podcast to talk about the 2020 election who's going to say well, what about the 4000 ballots in Phoenix that went missing when it's impossible to respond to a claim like that? You platform a claim like that that you can't possibly respond to. I don't know if it's made up I don't know how many journalists it would take to track it down but I know that in the general picture of things the incentives are such that the claim is guaranteed to be spurious. We're talking about an election which in the relevant case was governed by Republican election officials and there were Republican judges who heard these challenges and threw them out, right? The incentives were never there to produce a massive fraud. All of this is virtually guaranteed to be bullshit. Now, is it conceivable that some facts will come to light so that I'll have to recant this statement? Sure, it's conceivable and it's conceivable that in some years we'll discover that mRNA vaccines were more dangerous than we thought and that Ivermectin is a far more potent prophylactic against COVID than we have any right to believe now. But the question is what is it rational to believe and do now, given the information we have? Anyway, as I said, I don't actually think there's much to say on this topic. I do think it is quite straightforward. We have enough information to know what happens to people, generally speaking, when they get these vaccines and the differential outcomes for the vaccinated and unvaccinated who get COVID. That part really isn't debatable anymore. So if we want to get society back to something like normal, globally speaking, I think we have an ethical obligation to help get the world vaccinated against this disease and it's worth considering what the world will look like if we get a variant that is far more deadly than those currently circulating. How will the just asking questions routine look in the case of something that's killing five or ten or 15 or 20% of those? It infects hopefully will never experience such a thing but under those conditions, to get a vaccine that works and not to use it and to argue against its use should be unthinkable and I'm not so sure it is at this point. Again, I think we're in the presence of something like a religious or pseudoreligious phenomenon. People are just not thinking clearly and mere contrarianism is becoming part of their identities. There's something pornographic about all this. This reflexive distrust of institutional authority is like the pornography of doubt. People are infatuated with this stuff and there's a zealotry around it and the quality of the thinking is so bad in so many cases. Given my experience on other topics, it's impossible to shake the feeling of familiarity here. This is what it's like to argue about religion or the 911 truth conspiracy and those fronts have learned to pick my battles because getting into the trenches is so unrewarding. COVID aside, we have a much larger problem on our hands. But we have to figure out how to solve this riddle of how do we improve our institutions and trust them when we should, all the while recognizing they become less worthy of that trust. It's like we have to repair an airplane as it's flying, right? And not do anything so stupid or iconoclastic that it just falls out of the sky. And that's what I perceive Brett and his audience to be doing. We're just asking questions. We're just doubting everything. We're just being scientific skeptics. Show us the data. I'll believe it when you show it to me. Oh, but what about this little wrinkle over here? You know, the jet fuel only burns at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit and the melting point of steel is 2500 degrees Fahrenheit and you mean to tell me that those planes brought down those buildings? Have you heard of thermite I've got a 90 page master's thesis I want you to read on the thermite hypothesis. Can you set a day aside for that? That's where we are and it matters that people like Brett are choosing to contribute to that side of the conversation. Okay, and now getting to your questions. Hi Sam. My name is Walt Dalcash and I live in Dublin, Ireland. My question for you is how can I, inoculate my biracial children against the identity politics ideology they are bound to encounter at school and university? Okay, well, Walt, this is a question that is on the minds of many of us these days, whether or children. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, we are well into December here. The end of the year is upon us. I'm sure this has put you all in a reflective mood, as it has me. Where did 2021 go? That really felt like it was six months long at best. It was amazing. It has also been ten years since Christopher Hitchens died. That anniversary has arrived the 15th of this month, which, depending on when I release this, is either tomorrow or today. And that remains a loss. The truth is, Hitch was really just hitting his stride when I came to know him. I believe his book God Is Not Great was his first bestseller. He was famous in journalistic circles, but was really just connecting with a wider audience. And then his memoir was the last book that he actually wrote. His amazing short book, Mortality, was a collection of his Vanity Fair essays that came out after he died. Well worth reading. Anyway, he is sorely missed in this post institutional time where journalism and media and the Ivory Tower, or really the whole class of professional commentariat, has heaped shame upon itself with both hands. And that, in part, will yet again be the topic of today's podcast. It is amazing to think of how good Hitch would have been aiming his intelligence at the twin horrors of Trumpism and Woke Ism man. The pyrotechnics we would have seen on both sides of the political spectrum would have been amazing. Hopefully, in some universe, that is happening anyway, I will endeavor to do my best with the tools at hand. However, as you know, one of the things that lures my attention away from matters journalistic and political is what I'm doing over at Waking Up, where there has been a development that has made me very happy of late. On January 1, 2022, a mere two weeks away, we will be releasing the collected talks of Alan Watts. Watts was an extraordinarily lucid thinker and writer and one of the most gifted speakers we've ever had. I could be describing Hitch there as well. But as many of you know, Watts did as much as anyone, and probably more than anyone, to bring Eastern wisdom to the west and the counterculture of the 1950s and the 1960s would be hard to imagine without him. I never met Watts. He died in 1973 at the age of 58, I believe, in his library on the slopes of Mount Tamil Pius in Marin County. But in my twenty s, I had nearly 100 cassette tapes of his recorded talks, all of which got lost in transit when I moved back to California. But now all of these hours of good company have been restored to me in the digital archive that has been curated by Alan's son, Mark Watts, and it makes me very happy to present these collected talks on Waking Up. So look for that on January 1. That'll be a great way to start the new year. And that is it by way of Housekeeping today, I'm speaking with Nicholas Kristakis. Nicholas has been on the podcast a few times before. He probably needs no introduction. He is a physician and sociologist, an expert on network theory, a professor at Yale, and a wonderful guide to the COVID pandemic about which he has written a book just out in paperback titled Apollo's Arrow the Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. And in this episode, we discuss the lessons we have learned or struggled to learn, or should have learned from the pandemic. At this point, we discuss our failures to coordinate an effective response at almost every level the politics surrounding the rollout of the vaccines, vaccine efficacy, vaccine safety, how to think about scientific controversies the epidemiology of excess deaths, transmission. Among the vaccinated, natural immunity selection pressures and new variants, the failure of institutions, the lab leak hypothesis, the efficacy of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, boosters, what would happen in a worse pandemic and other topics. Anyway, the purpose of the conversation is to try to say something reasonable to those who are as yet unvaccinated. As you'll hear, I am quite consciously providing a counter message to much of what is heard out here in podcastAn and over there in substagistan. I'm increasingly worried about the appetite I have detected outside the gates of the mainstream media for contrarian takes on more or less everything, a generic word of caution to everyone with an earshot of this broadcast. The nonstandard explanation is not always the correct one. Even when our institutions have repeatedly disappointed us. In fact, the nonstandard explanation is still, I would say generically, rarely the correct one. So keep that in mind as you listen to my fellow podcasters discuss what they think is true or likely to be true in this universe of ours. And as this is yet another PSA on this topic, there will be no paywall. But if you value the work we're doing here, you can support the podcast by going to samharris.org and subscribing. Okay. Without further delay, I bring you Nicholas Kristakis. I am here with Nicholas Kristakis. Nicholas, thanks for joining me again. Sam, thanks so much for having me back. So you might be the record holder at this point on the podcast. I've lost count. I think maybe Paul Bloom might be ahead of you, but it's you and Bloom for most frequent guests. I think it's our third conversation that's being recorded, at least. Right? Well, you're in good company, so there's a lot to talk about here. First, your book, Apollo's Arrow the Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live just came out in paperback about six weeks ago or so. We're going to COVID some of the themes in that book because, among other things, I want to talk to you about the state of our understanding and the state of our public conversation around all things COVID. Vaccines, vaccine hesitancy, lockdowns, school closures, everything that has happened. Any missteps that we may think we have made in the last 18 months. Coming up on two years. And I want to get some of the public service aspects of this conversation sort of loaded to the front for us here. But before we jump in, briefly remind people who you are. How is it that you know anything about what we're about to talk about? Okay, so, yeah, first of all, it's good and really nice to talk to you again. I'm a physician and a sociologist, and I've spent 20 years studying social networks, so I study spreading processes and networks, how ideas spread, how emotions spread, and, of course, how germs spread, which is a very profound metaphor for how other things spread. But it's not just a metaphor. Germs spread. And so understanding how germ spread is very important. So I have some training in public health and epidemiology as well. And actually, when the pandemic was coming on about a year and a half ago now, in January of 2020, I became very alarmed about what was coming down the pike and decided to redirect a lot of my efforts to study it. Yeah, and you really have been on the shortlist of people who have been worth listening to lo these many months that we have been in this pandemic experience. And I must say, I remain fairly mystified about the sociological problem we face here, just in figuring out how to communicate about these issues in a way that doesn't just obviously fail to solve some basic problems of coordination and cooperation and persuasion. Apart from the speed with which we developed vaccines, we have failed on so many other fronts that it is fairly bewildering and depressing. I don't know if you share that outlook at this point. It's almost a quintessentially American success on the technological front, you know, that we did the vaccines, and and we'll talk about that, I'm sure, but it's also depressingly American in some ways, our failures. I mean, one of the things that I think it's interesting to step back for a moment and understand is that we are a rich and plural society in the 21st century, and we are a capitalist economy, and we exchange goods and services of all kinds. And in our society, you can find any expertise that is humanly available. So when you need a cabinet made or your car repaired or you need surgery or you need detectives or military activities or basically any kind of domain of musicians, artists, you name it, we have people who have devoted their lives to those different sorts of activities, and we pay for those, right? When you have a plumbing problem, you don't know how to fix the problem, or you have an amateur understanding, so you hire an expert plumber. And there's a famous saying in sociology that one man's occupation is composed of another man's emergencies. So for you, the plumbing thing happens rarely and is a disaster. Your basement is flooding. But for the plumber, this is his or her usual course of business. And then you gladly give money to that person. In a classic Adam Smith kind of everyone has their own expertise and we exchange our expertise and we're all better off as a result. But here's my point. In our society, and after hundreds of years since the Enlightenment, with advances in science, we have experts on every scientific topic, including respiratory pandemics. And what is happening to us is not novel. There is an enormous wealth of knowledge about what is happening to us and about how optimally to respond and about the epidemiology of respiratory pathogens and the biology of coronavirus and the development of vaccines and an understanding of the human body, the physiology and the treatment of people with these conditions and the organization of our hospitals and our public health systems. And we have thousands of people who have devoted their lives to acquiring this expertise. And so it's a mystery to me that we don't happily deploy them like we would with any other activity in our capitalist society. And what's especially odd to me is that different societies have different strengths. So, for example, the Chinese are authoritarian country with a collectivist culture. And when Coronavirus the pandemic began, they deployed those attributes and did things that would have been impossible in our society. And frankly, things I wouldn't have wanted either, I think, which included welding people into their apartments at various points. I've heard the same stories. I don't know for sure they're too but but functionally, yes, that's what they did. They they ordered 930,000,000 people to stay at home for months and they enforced this and they tightly controlled the messaging and so on. Now, we, thankfully are not like that. We have more freedom. We have a free and open society. We have a free press. But we didn't bring our best game. We didn't bring our strengths to the battle. We have world leading scientists, world leading epidemiologists. We have a media environment which would have allowed for the rapid diffusion of information and we kind of bungled it from the beginning. Now, a lot of that, in my view, is the fault of the previous administration. But it's not just the fault of previous administration. We, the citizenry, also have some responsibility for this fiasco. And I think it's worth pausing for your listeners to understand, just to frame what has happened to us, because I don't think people really get it yet, honestly. Over 750,000 Americans, nearly 1 million, will probably die from this. In the end, when the dust settles, the excess deaths will be a million of our fellow citizens will have died, probably five times as many and we should talk about this won't die, but will be disabled by the infection. In other words, it's not long or short COVID they'll have survived the acute infection, but their bodies will be marked. They'll have pulmonary fibrosis or renal insufficiency or neurologic or psychiatric problems or so on. These individuals, our fellow citizens will need our care. A million will have died. 5 million will probably be disabled. Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, and David Cutler, a health economist at Harvard, have called this the $16 trillion virus. They estimate that the loss to our society is $16 trillion. 8 trillion due to economic damage and 8 trillion due to loss of life and disability and illness. Death, disability and illness. This is a catastrophe that far exceeds the Great Depression in its economic impact. And then we have millions of children that have missed school who will have been harmed by this, and millions of people who are entering the job market during the pandemic and faced extra difficulties, millions of firms that went bankrupt. So I don't think people get it yet. Like, this is a once in a century event. And part of the reason I think they don't get it is, first of all, economically, we are borrowing trillions of dollars from the future to soften the blow right now. And because this virus, while it's bad, is not it's not smallpox, it's not bubonic plague. So even though a million Americans will die, probably only 10 million will have known those people intimately, and maybe 100 million will have known of someone who died, which still means the majority of Americans will get through this pandemic, neither having died nor having a loved one died, nor having known someone personally who died. So that's why, in part, I think we aren't haven't taken this as seriously as as we we should any other kind of calamity like this. I can't imagine if the Russians had invaded and killed a million Americans and decimated our economy this way, I think people would be standing up and paying attention. Yeah. If you had told me that we would more or less be totally sanguine about a million people dying from a disease, a disease that we had very quickly developed vaccines for and that in that context, nearly half the country would decline to get these vaccines and more or less ignore the fact that nearly a million people had died and even dispute whether anything like that number had actually died, and then fall into various conspiracy theories about the number of deaths being exaggerated. I don't think I would have believed that we would have arrived here. But it seems to me that's where we are and there's well, we haven't just to correct one statistic, I don't think we have 50% refusing vaccines. I think it's closer to 20% or something like that. Well, it's 23% of health care workers still refuse to get vaccinated last year. Is that true? Still like that? I'm surprised by that, but I believe you. I mean, it's approximately the numbers are high in the general public higher than we would want. But we should look it up if that if the precise number is important, we should look it up. So 60% have been fully vaccinated, 40% have not in that 40% probably also includes children who for whom the vaccine has not yet been fully indicated. But anyway, regardless of the precise percentages and a large fraction of our population still has not been vaccinated, which is to someone like me, very surprising. So there's an opinion that has solidified on the right politically and it appears at other points on the political spectrum, but it's mostly on the right, I would say. And it's also taken hold out in the alternative media wilderness among podcasters and substac newsletter writers that much of what has been communicated about COVID by the government and by the mainstream media has amounted to really a hoax. Right. And that much of what we've done and demanded that others do in response to COVID has been therefore unnecessary and even unethical. And so everything from lockdowns to school closures to mask mandates to the vaccination campaign itself to downplaying the efficacy of ivory mechan, all of this has been done for sinister political motives and based on corporate greed. What we have now is something tens of millions of people at least believe that our entire response to COVID basically everything we've done for the last 18 months or so has had the ulterior purpose of increasing social control, right? Basically we've got people this is the explicit claim, one here is from all these quarters now that the whole purpose of this has been to soften us up for some kind of orwellian acquiescence to state power. And then with respect to the vaccines in particular, it's also being driven by just the sheer profiteering motive of pharmaceutical companies. Now there are many specific which is odd because of course the vaccines are free to the citizenry, but anyway gone, right? We should just unpick all of this. But there are specific policies that one could debate, obviously. I guess at the moment, I think I'm currently uncertain about why kids in schools where all the kids have been vaccinated are still wearing masks. I think you could wonder about the wisdom or necessity of that and I'd like to talk about that kind of stuff. But it seems to me that this basic idea which has again it's infected these are not just uneducated rubes who believe this. I'm not talking about the QAnon cult, although obviously this includes the QAnon cult, but I'm talking about many people who are quite smart. Several friends and colleagues who have prominent podcasts have fallen into this paranoid picture of what's going on and there are extreme endpoints of this paranoia. There's the idea that Bill Gates is putting tracking devices into us with the vaccines, right? So there's the crazy end of crazy. But it seems to me that this basic picture, even without the craziest flourishes on it is more or less insane. I mean, the idea that we are dealing with something akin to the Chinese Communist Party here and that all covert related policies have been implemented merely to abridge our freedom politically, that does strike me as patently insane. What do you think accounts for this kind of it's still a fringe view, but it's a fringe view that I think something like a quarter of the country has been taken in by. What do you think accounts for its popularity? Well, I think part of the answer has to do with what happens during times of plague and a typical human response. I mean, one of the things, again, that's helpful is to look at how humans have responded to plagues for thousands of years and denial and lies have been a constant companion to plagues. If you look at accounts going back a very long time, you find them. One of my favorite stories I forgot which ancient plague it was. I want to say The Plague of Justinian, which was about 1500 years ago. There was an account by an observer that said that, you know, the plague was decimating the city and you could there was fear in the streets, of course. And that he observes that a rumor went out amongst housewives that if they threw clay pots from the second stories of their houses onto the streets below that this would ward off the plague. And so this observer says, mocking the superstition, he says it became more dangerous to walk down the street for fear of being hit by pots than for being infected getting the plague. And, I mean, that's exactly what we have now with, you know, people with crazy ideas about bleach or, frankly, ivorymectin for which, in my view, there's not anywhere near enough evidence to support its use or hydroxychloroquine, which also was the previous ivory mectin. Let's not forget that. So we did lots of randomized trials to show it was not useful. So people don't want to believe that a calamity of this kind has happened, that their ordinary lives have been disrupted. Nobody wants to believe this. It's a little bit like the Jews at the beginning when Hitler was rising to power. Many did not want there were more and more and more antisemitism was rising and more acts of violence. And these people, they lived in these communities. They had businesses, they had families, they had connections. They had languages and religious connections. They spent their whole lives there. They didn't want to believe it. Right? And so it is difficult to accept that your life is changing and there has been a change in our environment. This new deadly germ is introduced into our midst. It's circulating. It's doing what germs do. Part of me understands the American response from the great sweep of history. But part of me is also like you, baffled and if not enraged by it because it is so immature and it is so unscientific and it is so unnecessary. We could have had a much better response that would have saved lives and I think have spared our economy even more. So you mentioned the top, the role that you believe that the previous administration played here. And I must say even the politics of that seem fairly confounding to me, because there was this moment where Trump seemed desperate to take credit for Operation Warp Speed, right? And to have us all think of the vaccines as essentially the Trump vaccine. I don't know why he didn't do that theory. Why did he walk away from that? I think he didn't even acknowledge getting the vaccine himself in the end. He certainly didn't turn it into a photo op and recommend that others do well. I think he wasn't sure the vaccine would arrive in time to make a difference in the election. So I think from Trump's point of view, the emergence of the pandemic, he correctly deduced that it would be a threat to his reelection. And I think his strategy and this man, that Trump is not a very honest individual. And I also don't think he took his duties to the American people sufficiently seriously. I think he was more selfish and more interested in his own. I think he's very narcissistic. So it was a threat. He took it as a personal threat and was interested in what was good for him, not what was good for the country. And what was good for him, he thought, was to pretend like it wasn't there. And there's detailed account of this that I actually give in the book, so I won't necessarily rehearse it here, but Trump was ignoring and saying it will go away. It will go away. It will go away. He said when there were 50 cases in the USA, he said it will go away. When there were 500 cases, it will go away. When there were 5000 cases, it will go away. When there were 50,000 cases, it will go away. He kept saying it will go away. There was no evidence it was going to go away. And we now know that he was briefed, unsurprisingly. We're the United States, for the love of God, we have elite intelligence agencies and scientists working for the government, briefing the President. He was briefed on what was going to happen, and he chose to ignore it. In fact, this is one of the things that got me I was interested in this topic. But one of the things that motivated me to direct the attentions of my lab to this pandemic and also to up my public profile a little bit and write the book and so on was that so my interactions with COVID actually began in January of 2020. So I had this long standing collaboration with some Chinese scientists, and we were studying using phone data, looking at the mobility, the networks of people in China ascertain because of their phone calls and studying things like, well, what happens when you build a high speed rail line? How does that reshape, if at all, social interactions or economic interactions, or what happens when there's an earthquake, for example, in China? And so I had been had this collaboration, and we had data on people moving through Wuhan in January of 2020, and my collaborators and I thought, well, we could use these data to understand this nascent pandemic. And so, as a result of this, I was working day and night, beginning middle of January to study what might be happening in China. And therefore, I was aware on January the 24th of 2020 that the Chinese government had basically shut the country down. And I was also aware of some of the papers that Chinese scientists were putting online describing the basic properties of this pathogen in January. And by February, let's not forget, we had Italian scientists doing the same thing when Lombardi collapses. And I did some basic calculations that every competent epidemiologist could do, and we can discuss those if you want. And it was clear as day it was going to be a serious respiratory pandemic, like a once in a century event. And you and I spoke, I think our second ever conversation, but our first about the pandemic. I can't remember exactly. In March, maybe, or something early. Yeah, something like that. I can't remember exactly. And I think I said from my desk, this looks bad. And what surprised me was that the pronouncements from the White House were so anodyne, and they and they stayed anodyne, and I was getting really, really concerned. And I thought to myself, how is it possible that I, Nicholas Kristakis, you know, Yale professor sitting at my desk appeared to know more about this situation than the President of the United States? This is alarming. And of course, we now know that that was not true. In fact, the President was briefed and chose to ignore it. And I think this is a grave dereliction of duty, because I think the the central function of the government is to keep the citizenry safe. And and the fact that there was a super spreading event in the White House itself, which is a national security threat. Let's not forget, like, if the whole apparatus had been decimated, that would have been a grave problem. Shows the kind of lackadaisical attitude that they had not only to the safety of the country, but to their own safety. So, you know, I know that other governments also did poorly, and this is an argument that's often used. And and to be clear, this is not just a there were there were Democratic governors who were also incompetent. For example, Governor Cuomo in March was saying absurd things about the pandemic, and me and other epidemiologists were writing letters to try to stop the St. Patrick's Day parade and so on, which would have been nuts, mayor de Blasio was a Democrat and so on. But we're talking here about the White House, we're talking here about the President of the United States. And so yes, maybe other countries did poorly as well. Maybe governors of various states, republican and Democrat, did poorly. Okay. But that doesn't excuse the utter collapse, insane public policy in the White House in our sophisticated, I hope, rich nation. So yes, I think a lot of blame can be laid. Now, just to be clear, and I think Trump perceived this. He must have been told, look, hundreds of thousands of Americans are going to die. And that was clear. And you and I talked about that from the beginning. That's not a winning electoral position to be in. And he probably thought, well, maybe I can just use smoke and mirrors until the election. And so the vaccine he probably at that time remember the vaccines arrived much faster than anyone, including me expected. They arrived by November of 2020, which is just miraculous. We had clues that the vaccines would work and people started getting vaccinated by December. So it was after the election and too late for him to frame the politics that way. But I think if he had, I think he might have won the election honestly. Well, the politics were awful here because there was, I think, a valid concern that given Trump's political selfishness, given that everything was being motivated based on what was politically expedient for him, and one didn't really understand how much. He could bend the apparatus of the vaccine approval process to his will. There was this period where it seemed like the vaccines were coming soon, perhaps in time for the election, and he was going to try to rush them out in time for the election. And now we have video of all of these prominent Democrats saying that they would be reluctant to take the vaccine. This includes Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And you get them on a microphone in 2020 before the election, you have them saying, yeah, I'm not sure I would trust a vaccine that came out that fast. Right. Whereas, well, know what, my memory and you might be right, this has all been spread on social media of late as basically a campaign ad for more Trumpism. And I remember thinking about I mean, I think I may have even talked about it on the podcast. It's just if you thought that Trump could possibly get vaccines out sooner to surface political ends and thereby we would be cutting corners with respect to safety above all, that was something that people were openly worrying about at that point. Yes. And then when the vaccines came out after the election, the whole thing flipped. And you have Democrats by and large saying, oh, these have been totally well vetted. And then you've got Trump not taking credit for the thing. He was desperate to take credit for a few months. Before. Yeah, but I think that's a bit of a coincidence and a misreading of the sequence of events. So nobody was saying we shouldn't rush to get vaccines into the arms of people. At least I wasn't saying that, but I and others were saying we don't want to cut corners. And I still agree with that. Now it turns out these vaccines have been miraculously effective and miraculously safe. But there is a long history of bad things happening when you cut corners with drug approval. And we have a conservative drug approval process in this country. Now we can debate and there is a rational argument to be had. Where do you want to set? Like, how conservative do you want to be when you approve drugs for public circulation? And there's a scientific debate about this and then political debate. You have libertarians who'll say, what business is it of the government to decide what I can and can't put in my body? And you'll have others that say, no, that's not true, especially with communicable diseases. But anyway, and there's also a way to go faster. We could have had challenge trials, right? Yes, correct. And I discussed that in the book and people talked about that. And that would have been, I think, illegitimate in the national security kind of strategy, although the pace was so fast that those were not deployed, although they could have been deployed. But anyway, my point is, to my memory, and I won't speak for the politicians, the scientists that I know were not saying we shouldn't rush to get a vaccine. They were saying we shouldn't implement a process for speedy development of vaccine that is unsafe. If we can do it fast and remain safe, then of course we should do that. Now, as it turned out, we did do that. And it happened that the approval happened right after the election. I don't think there was a conspiracy there. It's just that it actually it was even sooner than we expected. You know, the trial results, the trials were shut down early because the vaccine was so obviously effective in November, whenever the precise timing was. So that's just the way it happened to come out. But Trump could have the phase two trials were already out. We had a lot of clues that the vaccines would be work would be good, well, even before the election. And there was a scenario in which it could have been handled that way, but maybe Trump decided that that wouldn't have been enough to mollify the American people like the promise of a vaccine at some point. And remember, at the time we didn't know that it would be quite so good and quite so fast. Right. Just now, in retrospect, we know that. And this is an astonishing accomplishment to have these types of vaccines this safe this fast. So let's talk about this. There's a few questions I just want to dispatch up front here. Certainly before a paywall comes crashing down so we can get the PSA component out into the world. So what do we know about the vaccines at this point? The basic question how much does vaccination reduce a person's risk of hospitalization and death? And maybe we can break this down by age cohort or maybe we can take the general case. Obviously this is more important the older you are and less important the younger you are. But what do we know about the efficacy of the vaccines? Let's leave safety aside. That's my next question. Well, we know a huge amount and I think it's important to distinguish the pfizer and moderna so called mRNA vaccines from some of the others. So that the AstraZeneca and the J and J vaccines are based on so called adenovirus vectors. And we have Novovax, a protein based vaccine which is also very good. And these don't even include the foreign, the Chinese and the Russian vaccines and other vaccines developed around the world. So we have many vaccines right now, but the main ones we have in this country, the pfizer and the moderna vaccines are so called mRNA vaccines. They're based on 30 years of science. And what you have to understand is that if the virus infects you it's the whole virus with some proteins on the surface and 30 kilo basses of RNA. And the RNA has quite a few genes in it. And one of those genes is for the spike protein that the virus has on its surface. And then the virus inserts all of this RNA into your cells of your body and takes over your cellular machinery. And then you start producing all the constituent elements of another virus. That's how the virus reproduces which are then assembled in your body and your body tries to fight them off and so on. What the vaccine does is it takes just a small part of that process. In other words, instead of being exposed to the whole virus you're just exposed to the RNA. What the RNA vaccines do, you're exposed to the RNA of just the spike protein which can't harm you. The spike protein itself alone can't harm you. And so you fool the body into thinking it's been infected with a whole virus when you haven't been. You've only been affected by a small part of it. And then you mount an immune response. Your body says warning. Warning there's an invader. And you develop antibodies and memory immunity against the spike protein which is a part of the virus. So that if you then are ever exposed to the real virus you eradicate the real virus because you're prepared. Now these vaccines that we have, the mRNA vaccines are about 95% effective. What does that mean? It's kind of like an airbag in your car. Having an airbag in your car doesn't mean that if you get into a head on collision, you won't die. But if you are get into a head on collision. The airbag greatly reduces your chances of death. How much? Let's say 95% reduction in your chance of death. That's how you can think about the vaccine. It's like an airbag. If you're exposed to the virus, if you're infected with the virus, it will reduce your chance of serious illness by 95%, not 100%. You still could die even if you're vaccinated. But it is a really strong line of defense. It's like a seatbelt or an airbag. And, and and we now know this not only from the original trials, which involved tens of thousands of people. Some got the vaccine, some did not. And then we waited to see how many people in the placebo arm got infected or seriously ill. And we waited to see how many people in the treatment arm who got the vaccine, got infected or got seriously ill. And we compared those numbers and the vaccinated group had a much smaller number by an amount that yields an efficacy of 95%. But now that hundreds of millions of people have been vaccinated, we also have other kinds of quantitative data that confirms those findings. That confirms that the vaccine efficacy is about 95% for the mRNA vaccines, which is amazing. That is a higher efficacy than many, many other vaccines that have been developed that people have been routinely taking for decades for diphtheria, for tetanus, for mumps, for measles, for all of these other scourges for which we're blessed that modern science has given us these vaccines and prevent hundreds of millions of deaths. I mean, two or 300 years ago, tens of millions of people died every year from these contagious diseases. And they don't anymore, at least in the rich countries in the world, because we have vaccines. So we have this amazingly effective vaccine in coronavirus. Actually, coronavirus historical comparison is kind of interesting to the polio vaccine because and I had forgotten this if I ever knew it, but I recently encountered this fact online that I think you spend a lot of time online. Yes, but I'm not alone there. I know that there are other people there. But yeah, something like 95% of polio cases were quite mild. You think of polio just as this spectacularly, awful disease, which it is, but something like 95% of cases were virtually asymptomatic and the sauce vaccine was around 80% to 90% effective. Many people have alleged that in the time of polio, when the sauce vaccine came out, it would have been unimaginable to meet this kind of politicized vaccine resistance. What explains that? Just the fact that when polio, I think, is bad. It's so graphically bad that I think that's part of it. I think that we have to remember. You're exactly right. That polio looms large in all of our memories as being a complete scourge. And it was a nasty piece of work, but it only killed a few thousand people every year. Paralyzed some greater number. But it was nothing like the toll of death that Coronavirus is taking. It the entire nation mobilized. And the people who invented the Sabin and Salt, who invented the two vaccines were widely hailed as heroes. They were on the COVID of magazines. This was seen as a triumph of American science and engineering and technology. And the public lined up to get vaccinated. They were afraid of polio, of course, but they also saw it as a normal civic thing to do. And the entire nation was vaccinated. I don't remember the precise amount of time someone listening will probably know, but within weeks or months or something, I mean, it was very rapid. There was also some glitches. It was a so called famous the Cutter incident, where there was a defective batch of vaccine that was released due to bad factory procedures in one manufacturer that resulted in the vaccine not being sufficiently inactivated such that it actually gave a few people polio. This cannot happen. It's just biologically impossible with the mRNA vaccines to be completely clear, because you're not being given the virus. But the way the polio vaccine worked is there was inactivated virus. So what we did is we made the virus, weakened it so that you would mount an immune response. And that way if you ever encountered the live version of the virus, you would be prepared, but you didn't run any risk from the weakened version anyway. And then of course, that happened too, in fairness, during the polio, but the country tolerated that. I mean, I think about ten or a few kids died and they also spread it to a few other people who got sick. But it was in the low tens of people that had this adverse event from that. And the country moved on and all of us got vaccinated for polio. And we had to be there are rules. You can't go to school if you're not vaccinated for polio. Yeah, as as well, you shouldn't be able to, you know, you need to be vaccinated. That's part of being a 21st century citizen of a country like ours. Okay, so back to this first question about the efficacy of the vaccine. So in recent reading about this, I encounter a range of numbers around this mitigation of risk of hospitalization and death. And again, this is undoubtedly different as you ask the question about each age cohort. But generally speaking, it's something like a ten fold reduction in risk of death for those who get vaccinated versus those who don't get vaccinated. So is that your understanding in terms of what the efficacy is of vaccination? Yeah. And you had asked her a little bit earlier, and we didn't quite nail it in the follow up conversation we just had now about by age. And the studies that I've seen show that the vaccine is equally effective at young ages and old ages. There have been a couple of papers that the CDC has released looking at cohort studies or studies of cohorts of people that are twelve to 18 versus greater than 65 and so on. And the way to think about it is that go back to the airbag example. So if you have a 65 year old that's in an accident and they can either have an airbag or not have an airbag, the airbag is going to reduce their risk of death. And if you can have a 20 year old that's in an accident and they can have an airbag or not have an airbag, the airbag will reduce their risk of death. Now, it's also the case that a young, fit body of a 20 year old may be less likely to die if in a collision than in an elderly person. It's true, young people are better bodies than old people, but both bodies benefit from the airbag roughly equally. In other words, there's a reduction in the risk of death by the airbag for both the young and the old if you're in a head on collision. And it's the same with the vaccines. It is the case that the intrinsic probability of death is lower if you're young, if you get COVID, but it is reduced by a proportionate amount if you get the vaccine. One of the things that's a big misconception about this and one of the figures that I use in Apollo's arrow is the following. So illness and death are problems of the aged, right? Young people face a low risk of death in the next year. You and I might have a risk of death in the coming year of, I don't know, one out of 101 out of 200. And a 20 year old might have a risk of death in the following year of one in 5000 or one in 10,000. So most 20 year olds that are alive today, the great majority will be alive a year from now. But the thing I'm tempted to use a few 20 year olds as human shields now. Well, because we're we're the 20 year olds in my life. Yes. Or, I mean, I could use a 20 year old body, but the point is but the coronavirus will increase your risk of death at any age by about 30%. So, in other words, you're unlikely to die if you're a young person and you get coronavirus, it's true, but your low probability will be upped by about 30% should you get infected with coronavirus. And that is a nasty thing to happen. It's not necessary for you to needlessly face this increased risk of death in the in the new year. It is absolutely lower your risk of death in absolute terms. But whether you get coronavirus or not but if you get coronavirus, it's relatively higher. So another way to think about this is that if you would be concerned about having a heart attack if you're 20 or 40 or 60 or 80 and being hospitalized with a heart attack. If you're hospitalized with coronavirus, if you're 20 or 40 or 60 or 80, your risk of death is higher than if you had had a heart attack. In other words, whatever age you are, being hospitalized for coronavirus is significantly more deadly than being hostilized for a heart attack. So so, yes, 20 and 40 year olds are not commonly afflicted with heart attacks. But if it crosses your mind, you say, gee, God, it would be bad to have a heart attack. It's worse to get coronavirus and to have an outcome bad enough to hospitalize you. Yes. I'm not talking that's correct. This is conditional on being hospitalized. That's right. So let's be clear about what comparisons we're making here. But it's just a way of benchmarking people's expectations of risk in a way that helps them sort of see it. Yeah. And the stratification by age sets up some equivalence here. We would have to research the details. But it's something like if you're a 75 year old who gets vaccinated, that gives you the equivalent risk of hospitalization or death of an unvaccinated 45 year old or something. There's some equivalence there, right? Yeah, I haven't seen that calculated. But it could be calculated pretty trivially. That's correct. Something like that. That's right. That's on the question of efficacy. Now, let's talk about vaccine safety because this really is the sticking point. We're living in a world where millions and millions of people, whatever they think about the danger of the coronavirus and whatever they think about the the risk of getting COVID not having been vaccinated, you know, some people think that's trivial. Some people think that is perhaps as dangerous as we think it is. But on the other side of the balance, they think the vaccines themselves, in particular the mRNA vaccines, are terrifying. Right. And therefore the option to get vaccinated is more or less unthinkable. Whatever story you paint about the risks of getting COVID unvaccinated, it's not scary enough to motivate them to get vaccinated given how they feel about these vaccines. And I must say, I personally know people who have been spreading this fear to no exaggeration tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people. And it's, you know, it it has the predictable result of convincing millions of people that they shouldn't get vaccinated. So what do you, what do we know about vaccine safety at this point? Well, first of all, there's a lot going on there. People who are saying vaccines are dangerous, don't get vaccinated are also preaching a little bit to a willing audience. In other words, people want to think there's a desire that humans have to be the person that so on the one hand, we follow the crowd, we copy our neighbors, we don't wish to stick out. This is how fashion works. This is how all of our norms work in our society. I mean, people copy their neighbors and this is something actually, which I spent a lot of time studying. And it's actually a little bit odd in a way that we are that way. Like when we're free to do anything we want, what do we do? We do what our friends are doing. But there's also a strain of people that want to seem like smart, like they've outsmarted the crowd, like everyone else wanted to do something. But I knew, I pulled my money from the stock market just before it crashed. Look at me or everyone else was doing, going left, and I decided to go right. And look, I was right about that. So I think there is a strain of that which telling people there'll be people who want to have gone against a crowd and been proven right. And that's kind of an appealing fantasy for many people, no doubt. So some of the people that are pitching that are capturing a little bit of that psychology. And then of course, there are people, like we said earlier, who want to deny the seriousness of what's happening. But I think that the claim that the vaccine is and there are some people, and I think these people need to be met head on, who rightly say, wait a minute, this vaccine was developed very fast. I'm a little worried about that. Or this technology is very new. We haven't used the mRNA vaccines. We haven't used that before. Although if they say that, you could say, well, why don't you take the Chinese sinovac vaccine which uses old technology, it inactivates the coronavirus and then you're injected with inactivated coronavirus or live attenuated coronavirus, which is another technique. In other words, you take the live version of the virus and basically you mutate it till it still elicits an antibody response from you, but it's not sufficiently severe so as to infect you. This is actually analogous to what happened with the invention of vaccines with the cowpox being used by genera instead of smallpox 200 years ago. More. So if you don't want if you're really worried about the novel technology, okay, get the Chinese vaccine, which is based on older technology. It's been around a long, long time. That's better than nothing to get the Chinese vaccines. There are several actually Chinese vaccines. Anyway, the point is that people who say, I'm a little worried about the speed or I'm a little worried about the novelty of technology, I understand that on an intellectual level and that's the topic you can then engage. You can say to such people. But let's talk about what happened, why this vaccine was developed so swiftly. The billions of dollars that were spent, the mobilization of the nation's doctors and pharmaceutical companies, the tens of thousands of people that rapidly signed up to be in the trial so that we were able to discern the good luck that the vaccine candidates actually happened to work. All the biology that informed our design of these vaccines and can I reassure you thereby that the speed is, and also at this late date the fact that we have a cohort literally hundreds of millions of people correct. Globally, billions of people who have received these vaccines. Correct. So now you can even add that to it, to the argument in answering such a person and then some subset of them in turn will say, well, we don't have enough follow up. What if in ten years it proves that this vaccine and then the honest answer to that is we can't know for sure without the passage of time, but there's no reason to believe, no rational reason that anyone can discern that that would be the case. And so conversely, we know for a fact that if you get coronavirus you face a 1% risk of death. Now it depends by age, but on average getting infected with the coronavirus you have a 1% chance of dying approximately. And then there are other people who say, well, it's not the speed, it's the novelty of the technology. To those you could say, well, we have other vaccines that use older technology. Would you like those instead? And so on. There's one footnote I'd like to add here because there is a brilliant piece of incoherence here. Because these same people for whom the Emergency Use authorization was more or less a declaration of the unfitness for human consumption of these vaccines. These are precisely the people who have no problem with monoclonal antibodies or any of the treatments that one gets after getting COVID. And I think in every case these treatments have been less validated and less safety tested than the vaccines themselves at this point. Well, I'm not sure I would be prepared to say that they're less validated and less safety tested, but I am prepared to say that they are less safe because most of these with a few exceptions so there's the dexamethasone, which is a very safe steroid that early on we knew was randomized controlled trials that shows effective. A lot of these antiviral drugs have known toxicities and now of course, they're still worth it because your alternative is to run the risk of death from the virus. But they're not benign, these treatments, whereas the vaccines are, you know, truly benign. And you asked me about like the safety profile. There was a paper that was published in September of this year in a journal called Vaccines in in issue nine. The first the first author's last name is Fan, F-A-N. It's a meta analysis of safety trials and just that was using the safety of the trials themselves. And for example, if you look at 100,000 people that were in the mRNA trials across all the vaccines and trials, about 51,000 were in vaccine group and 51,000 were in the control group and there was no statistical difference in adverse events occurring in those two groups. In other words, if you want to claim that vaccines are causing strokes or heart attacks or whatever you want to claim. Those rates were roughly the same in both the people who got the vaccine and the people who didn't get it. And then if you look across body system by body system in this meta analysis the rates of the adverse events are almost without exception, exceedingly low. Less than 0.1. In other words, less than one out of 1000 people. Now we have follow up studies that show that, for example, a lot of people are talking about this risk of myocarditis and pericarditis. These are inflammation of either the heart muscle itself, myocarditis or the casing of the heart muscle pericarditis. Just to be clear, the viruses can also cause those conditions. The question is we see some of those in vaccines but those are also exceedingly rare, let's say on the order of one in a million people who get vaccinated and also relatively self limited. Myocarditis and paraconitis are serious conditions. But to date, most of the people who got that as a result of the vaccine have been fine. So the point is, is that the rate of, of death due to the vaccine or serious events due to the vaccine is exceedingly low, less than a one in a million. And one of the things that we need to understand is, is that when we're dealing with public health threats we have to engage in a kind of cold utilitarian calculus. Just like when we send men and women to the battlefield, to the battlefront, we decide that the sacrifice of those lives is for the greater good, that it saves more lives than are lost. And the same thing happens here. The way I would think about it is this way unless you're given the new mutations, the delta variant and perhaps the Omicchone variant as well unless you're a hermit that lives in a mountaintop or unless you're exceedingly lucky, everybody on the planet will either be infected by the virus or will be vaccinated. Those are your choices. If you're infected with a virus, you face a one out of 100 risk of death from the virus. If you are given the vaccine, you face a one in a million or less chance of death from the vaccine. This is a no brainer as far as I'm concerned about which of those two choices to make. And the vaccines we are lucky are exceedingly safe and far safer than any. You know, the usual standard that's used for vaccines is that a serious adverse events or death are less than one in a hundred thousand or one in 200,000. In other words, there are vaccines out there which we administer, which we say, okay, one in 200,000 people we give this vaccine to will die because we give them the vaccine. But we'll save thousands of lives. And so that's what we're going to do. This, these mRNA vaccines are even safer than that which is a prior standard we had. Okay. This point is so important that I think I want to just cycle on it again just so that there can be no question about it. So with respect to the inevitability of some adverse events and even fatalities for any intervention, this is how I made this point previously. If peanut butter were the perfect prevention of COVID and we gave peanut butter to hundreds of millions of people, we would have some number of people dying outright from peanut butter. We know this. Given the nature of allergies to peanut butter, we would we would kill many more people with peanut butter than we've killed with these vaccines. Correct? I'm not that's about right. And yet it would be a miracle if we could solve the COVID problem with peanut butter to the tune of 95% with peanut butter. Yes. And we'd count ourselves very lucky in that case. So and none of this would minimize the tragedy of being the parents whose kids were killed by peanut butter, right? Yes. So that's the world we're living in. We're talking about an intervention that rolls out to hundreds of millions and globally billions of people, and then you do these statistics on those population level outcomes. This is such a simple case to make. We have this head to head comparison. Everyone's going to be eventually going to be exposed to COVID Personally, you have a choice about whether you should be exposed, having been vaccinated or not vaccinated. And we know that you're running a ten X or more greater risk of death or serious complication if you're unvaccinated. And yet many people are making this choice and everything they're worried about with respect to vaccines, myocarditis, or any other very low probability side effect is much worse with COVID when you're unvaccinated, right? Yes. In addition, not getting you can also make the argument quite apart from the fact that it's in your self interest to get vaccinated, it's also civic duty. Well, I want to get to that. Let's table that, because that's a further question I have I just want the choice point here that there's a two branch tree of where a utility function should be pretty damn easy to calculate. Right. Down one branch, you've got a 1% probability of death, or worse if you're older, and less if you're younger. But if you're 50 and above, this is really a no brainer. It's probably a no brainer if you're 20 and above. I guess, I mean, I guess we should talk about kids. Yes. In particular. It's harder. So it it is true. So here's some you know, I think it's true to say that when you're talking about mortality, the flu poses a greater risk of hospitalization and death to a three year old than COVID does. That do? I don't know if that's true. I would have to double check that to report that. I know that flu flu, but flu is also nontrivial. For three year olds, right? Yes, that's correct. I'm sorry, which way did you say it was that flu was intrinsically deadlier to three year olds and coronavirus? That was my belief. But that's circa some months ago. I don't know if it's yeah, I mean, flu has a so called U shaped mortality function. It kills the very old and the very young and spares middle aged, whereas coronavirus is a so called backward L shaped mortality function. So it kills the elderly, but spares the middle aged and the young. Now, I don't know the scale of the Y axis on those curves offhand, I'd have to double check. But yes, flu is worrisome to young kids. Absolutely that is the case. We have people who are saying to themselves, I have not taken these crazy precautions, masking and testing vaccination and boosting and watching the news in fear, et cetera, for flu for my kids. Right. And now we're looking at the complete derangement of our education system and society in order to protect kids from COVID Yeah, here I see this argument a bit more honestly, so just very narrowly and quickly on the issue of vaccination. Despite anything we might discuss, I still believe it's appropriate and smart to vaccinate your children, certainly those for whom the results show already older than five. There's a benefit. And my brother, who's a well known pediatrician, you know, has publicly argued for this position, and I have a ten year old at home and or eleven year old, and we vaccinated him. They're very relieved and happy to vaccinate him. There are lots of reasons to vaccinate your kid, including the fact that it reduces their probability of spreading the virus to others, including you, by the way, your death as a parent would be really a bad thing for your child. So if your child, if vaccinating your child reduces your own risk of dying, it's good for the child that that happened. So there are lots of reasons. And also the more we vaccinate children, the less we run the risk of outbreaks at schools that might require us to close schools, which is harmful. So the bottom line for me is that I still believe the benefits of vaccination outweigh any putative risks down to the age of five, for which we have good data so far. The masking is harder for me. And I also think here when we talk about schools and masking, it's very important to draw distinctions between elementary school and middle school and high school as the kids get older and more adult like and they face more adult like risks. And it's easier for them to wear masks, and the less harm comes to them from wearing masks. I think we can expect high school kids to wear masks, but when we're talking about four and five and six year olds, especially the way the masking is implemented in our country, which is very hard to get these kids to obediently wear masks. They're rarely on their faces. These kids need to see the faces of their teachers and of each other, to read their emotions, to learn language, to learn to read, and so on. The benefits of the mask, while there, may not outweigh the educational costs, and for me here, I have no political agenda. I would just like to see some really good cost effectiveness analyses that, on the benefit side, say, okay, if we have kids wear masks, we reduce a certain number of infections, we reduce the likelihood the kid will have to stay home because they're sick and that missing school is not good for the kid. We reduce the transmission in the community when we mask our children and save some adult lives. And those are all the benefits. On the downside, we have some educational loss, we have some financial cost, we have some inconvenience. We have all of these things. Let's just do the calculations and then decide. Like we said earlier, public health is a cold, utilitarian calculus. And for me, I'm happy to be led wherever they such an analysis would lead. And at the end of it, we might conclude, no, it's inconvenient to wear masks, but it's worth it. Or we might conclude it's beneficial to wear masks, but it's not worth it. And either outcome would be fine with me. It's just a scientific question as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, I think once you're talking about a school population, you know, for kids above five, where everyone has been vaccinated, then the logic of wearing masks, for me, truly evaporates. Then it just seems like a silly imposition. Yeah, well, I think we could either like you I mean, I think that's quite possible that you're exactly right about that. But I guess all I'm saying is that I would like us to just do these in a very sober minded way to do these calculations and see what happens. And see, here's the thing. The other thing I wanted to communicate at some point is earlier when we were talking about paranoia and people who hold crazy beliefs, and it makes little sense to us. I think another approach to such individuals is to ask them, what kind of evidence could I bring to the table that would make you change your mind? And invite them to say, okay, if you did this study or you showed me this thing, then I would change my mind. Then at least we're dealing in the realm of science, but the classic kind of Paparian falsifiability issue. In other words, if you cannot think of an experiment that would disprove your hypothesis, then that's theology. Well, part of it is, I can tell you on the vaccine arm, they're saying that we can't possibly know what the long term consequences of these novel vaccines are. And I would just say that you need another branch in this decision tree, and the other branches you can't possibly know what the long term consequences are of catching COVID unvaccinated are. Yes, and there's every reason to believe they're worse in this case. That's correct. But many people won't even give you that response. They'll say, Well, I don't think we should mask for this or that reason, or I don't think we should engage in lockdowns for this or that reason, or vaccinate for this or that reason. And I think the point I'm trying to make, just a very narrow point, is that if the person and if the person says to you, there's nothing you could tell me that would change my mind, then you are dealing with someone who has an ideological or religious conviction. We're not dealing with the realm of science. So I would ask everyone who has strongly held beliefs about what is or is not the right thing to do in this case, for example, masking children to say, well, what evidence would make you change your mind? And if you're a person who thinks the kids should be masked, what evidence could I bring to the table that would persuade you? No, actually, they shouldn't. And conversely, if you're the person who thinks that kids should not be masked, well, what evidence could I bring to the table that would persuade you otherwise? Then we're in the realm of science. Then we just do the science. We just conduct the experiments or do the studies, and then maybe you're at least thinking rationally from my point of view. Now, I also need to say something else, which is often misunderstood. It is normal for scientists to disagree. It is normal for scientists to revise their opinions, especially as new data and studies come in. It is normal for studies to be confusing and conflicting. And this is why, if you want to hold a belief and then you're going to cherry pick the data to go and find, well, which one study, for example, of masking showed that masking didn't work, you'll find a study or more where masking did not work. And conversely, if you are promasking, you could reject the studies that show that masking didn't work. But what you really want to do is to look at the totality of the evidence and judge and weigh the evidence. As a scientist who's trying to discern, does masking help or not? What is the scientific evidence in support of this claim? Just like when you're trying to figure out does the Earth rotate around the sun or not? Which is it? Is it the heliocentric or geocentric theory of our solar system? Well, what is the evidence on either side of this debate, as Galileo's discourse famously engaged? And so I think that's the way I would approach this, and I would not be afraid of the fact that some scientists disagree. And also, just one more thing, just to hammer this home. People have said, well, the scientists used to tell us this. Now they're telling us that, well, that's not a bug, that's a feature. That's how science progresses. As we get more knowledge, we change our mind. As the famous British I forgot who it was, you may know who said this. When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? Why do I stick to my guns? I ignore the facts, the new facts. No. So I think we as a society, one of the things that has happened and the virus has relentlessly exploited this. It struck us at a particular moment of vulnerability in our civic discourse. We had century high levels of economic inequality and therefore sort of suspicion and polarization on that grounds. We have decades high level of political polarization and we have lost the capacity for nuance in our in our civic discourse. People think you're with me or you're against me, you're right or you're wrong. Not like that. There's shades of gray. We have this kind of antialitism where people are very suspicious of larger forces that are governing their lives. Because I think we are at a particular historical juncture, looking across the sweep of centuries where there is a lot of confusion about what forms of governance are optimal and so on. And can we believe our leaders are not? And are they trustworthy? And so on. All of which preceded the pandemic. And this anti elitism has bled into a kind of antiscience as well, who are scientists are seen as just another elite that's telling me how to live my life and what do they know anyway? Which is, again, kind of stupid if you think about it, because surgeons and expert car mechanics are also elite and have expertise in that regard and yet we don't seem to be suspicious of them necessarily as trying to exploit us. So all of these things predated the virus. And the virus, you see, has relentlessly exploited this. And we have a kind of a thinned out intellectual life as a nation right now where we are not engaging in public policy debates in the most rational and self protective way and we're dying as a result of it. I think many hundreds of thousands of Americans will have died needlessly because we politicized it, because we were unable to just approach this in a quintessentially American technocratic way, just like we approached the vaccine. Wasn't it amazing? We invented these vaccines. Yeah. Why wouldn't we have done that? With other aspects? On this point, I would add a few more nefarious pieces that have been in play. One is the fragmentation of our information ecosystem, social media being the prime offender here, but also just alternative media podcasts like this one, and newsletters and the failing business model of mainstream journalism leading to a kind of Wild West effect around just providing information. And this interacts unhelpfully with political polarization and siloing and people can curate their own echo chamber such that they really never have to deal with information that they don't like, or they deal with the straw man version of it. But there's also just this fact which has been true forever, but its nefarious effects are amplified here, that you can always find a PhD or an MD or half a dozen PhDs or MDS to take any crazy position on any topic within or outside of their wheelhouse for psychodynamic reasons that are as yet not fully understood. You can find PhDs who are willing to testify that cigarette smoking is non harmful and non addictive and climate change is not a thing. And in this case, there have been several MDS in particular, some of whom have just five minutes of digging exposed their long standing antivax roots. But in other cases, it's it's a little more mysterious who have jumped on, you know, the most popular podcasts in existence and in other forums said just absolutely crazy things about the vaccines and about ivorymectin and just muddied the waters. Powerfully for millions of people here. And without dealing with the specifics of any of that. It's just it will always be the case that if you want to, you can find someone who apparently has the right credentials to have a strong opinion, give you a very crazy opinion about more or less anything. There's always that contrarian yes. To be found and to be amplified. I'm not sure what we do with that. It's a very high leverage environment now where you can get the weaponization of that. Yeah, I mean, I think, again, this is a bug, not a feature. I'm sorry. This is a feature, not a bug of science. We actually want scientists to be skeptical. We want there to be people who are saying, wait a minute, I don't believe you. There's, of course, a very famous story about ulcers. When I was in medical school, we were taught that ulcers were due to stress. I was taught this. I went to Harvard Medical School in the 1980s, and people were aware of alternative theories, but we were still kind of taught this was a possibility. And of course, there was this crank guy in Australia that said, wait a minute, I think it's caused by a bacterium. Helicobacter pylori. And he was right, and he won the Nobel Prize and so on. And scientists tell these types of stories to each other all the time, and it's a way of checking our ego and checking our beliefs. This is what we want scientists to do. We want them to be skeptical. We want them to consider alternatives. We want them to consider crazy, far fetched ideas that were previously rejected by everyone and so on. Nevertheless nevertheless, I don't think that when we are going to address a question, let's say as a consumer of information, we should go about seeking the person who has the opinion we want. We should instead try to say, okay, what is the opinion of scientists on this topic in general. In other words, I don't think you should sort of say, well, I don't want to believe about climate change or I don't want to think humans do it. Can I find a scientist that holds that belief? Well, here is one therefore I'm right. That's not a search for truth, that's a search for confirmation. Right. But this is a very interesting point of scientific epistemology because, yes, in science, the status of scientific authority must remain forever precarious because we just know that significant progress in science entails again and again the usurpation of scientific authority and scientific consensus. Right? Everyone was wrong yesterday about topic X, and the new Einstein has shown us why. So there's that process that is, as you say, it's a feature, not a bug. And yet scientific consensus on any given topic, if you're just going to reason probabilistically, right? Is climate change a thing or does the Earth rotate around the sun or not? You are virtually always wise to be guided by unless we're in some zone of truly perverse incentives and confirmation bias, you're always wise to be guided by scientific consensus as a consumer of information, especially when lives are hanging in the balance. And I mean, we're going to talk about some of the ways in which we have just obviously failed and our main institutions have obviously failed to provide an accurate picture of good information during this pandemic. But still, there is this apparent paradox to reconcile because we don't rely on authority in science. You really only have as much authority as your last sentence in science, right. You can be a Nobel laureate who's completely unhorsed by a freshman who asks you a pointed question at the end of a lecture. And that's the way scientific debate proceeds. Yes, because what we should be committed to is not scientists, but the scientific process, right. If you're trying to understand do vaccines help control epidemics? Well, let's engage in a process to see what the answer to that question is. And that's what we should be doing, not trying to pick which scientist we want to hear on whatever particular topic. And that means looking at the totality of the evidence and that means forming our own opinions. Now, the other thing that's important here is that if you're outside your expertise, it's probably not wise to do this yourself. So, for example, if I'm you know, if it's a question well, outside my scientific expertise a topic in geophysics or quantum, you know, mechanics or something like that I don't I'm not the right person to decide what is or is not the truth. Saying, by the way, with more humdrum topics, if I have differing opinion, my car is broken and I take it to three different mechanics and each expert gives me a different opinion, well, then do I conclude that the car mechanics are all idiots then none of them know what's going on. Or, more likely, I find a friend of mine who I trust, who is a more expert car mechanic and I have him take my car and to these three guys and then decide who to do so. We have to at some point repose our confidence in someone else. And so here's where I think something like if you're the man on the street and you don't know, you believe that there's some conflicting ideas about something, you could or should have some confidence in some authorities, who would those be? The CDC. Tony Fauci. I don't know. But you should be humble and recognize that you are actually not a fit judge of the scientific consensus on this topic. You might be a fit judge of other topics that you have expertise in, but not in this regard. Yeah, exactly. Except in this case. I mean, in this case, the the CDC, the FDA, the who certainly Tony found from time to time they have slipped up in truly impressive and galling ways. They have slipped up because they're human also, and because science is not infallible. That's true. But that doesn't mean that if someone slips up, you then move to astrology. You say, well, what do the scientists know? What do the astronomers know? Let's just go with the astrologers. That's not a rational response. There was a very famous experiment about background radiation and the Big Bang theory called the Bicep Two Experiment that was published, I don't know, five or ten years ago, one of the most elite journals of science, I think it was in the journal Science, actually, and it turns out that the scientists screwed up. They had thought they had detected this and they had to withdraw their results. They made a mistake. Yes, they made a mistake. But that doesn't mean that because these elite astronomers screwed up in that occasion, that now the alternative is just to go with the astrologers. No. Right. Or just the backyard astronomers. Right. It's like even if a backyard astronomer occasionally does point out a flaw in a professional astronomer's paper, there's two things there. That is science actually working. The cure for bad science is more science and better science. But it shouldn't completely reset our bias for professional astronomers over backyard astronomers. That's exactly right. And we can listen to that. We should also not close off the backyard astronomers from the discourse. No one is proposing that they be silenced or unable to speak. But we're also not proposing that they somehow be seen as having special virtue or special wisdom. There was this famous case recently, a couple of years ago, about this housewife, that there's this geometric problem called tessellations, whether you can create overlap with a set of geometric shapes. Can you tile a floor with them? Can you arrange them in a fashion where there are no gaps between them? And there's like this repeated pattern, like complex tiling, like hexagons on your bathroom floor. You can tessellate a hexagon, but there are other non hexagon shapes you can Teslate as well. And there's a lot of interesting mathematics about this in this area. Yes, and it was theorized remember the precise details, but it was theorized that there were, like, only four ways to tessellate a floor with a quadrilateral or something. And some housewife who had some mathematical training but had never been a professional mathematician was saying, well, wait a minute, I think I should be able to figure this out. And she started noodling around and developed her own notation, and she found unexpectedly two other ways that no one had known before disproving the claim that there were only four or whatever it is. I'm garbling the story a little bit, but the point is, she was right. And here's the proof. We know she's right because we can evaluate her claims using the scientific method. We can test and see is she right or is she not. And so here's the thing. When some backyard astronomer says, ivory mechan works, we're like, okay, let's evaluate this claim. Let's do a randomized controlled trial of Ivermectin and see if it works. Oh, my goodness. We've done the trial. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And in fact, we've done so many trials of Ivactin now, yes, there's some that hint that it may have some effect, et cetera. And there's some biological reason, suppose, but not at the doses we would give people and so on. The body of the evidence shows that Ivar mectin is not useful. I'd be delighted if it worked. I have no political agenda here, but it's like hydroxychloroquin. We put that one to bed, and now we have Ivermectin rearing something incidentally. I don't understand why people are so obsessed with believing that ivorymectin is useful. Like, what's that to do with you don't have to take a political stand on this. Like, either the drug works or it doesn't. Maybe there's some other drug that works. Maybe there are no drugs at work and you should get vaccinated. I think this may be what people are afraid of. Well, there is this diabolical notion that the profit motives are completely skewed here, where no one stands to make any money off of Ivermectin, but people stand to make billions of dollars off of the vaccines. And therefore a legion of mustache twirling pharmaceutical executives have rigged the whole conversation to foreclose the compassionate use of essentially free generic drugs and built at expense of our lives for vaccines. Well, no, you take more risk taking Ivermectin than you do by getting the vaccine. No, I mean, you have to ask yourself, why would someone like me who's I'm not profiting, I don't own stock in pfizer or moderna, why would I recommend the use of this? Or your doctor who says you should get vaccinated? They're not being paid for offering this advice over one thing or another thing. I mean, I understand people's suspicion of the profit motive, just like if my mechanic recommends that there's a little knocking sound that actually I can't currently see you, but you don't have Pfizer and moderna merch all over your office, their coffee cups and fleece jackets. No, I do not. And the same goes for, yes, that's right. So the person, yes, your car mechanic may be lying to you and tell you that a $50 thing is $1,000 repair and so on. And so rapidly, such a car mechanic loses credibility or loses business or whatever, gets sued or whatever. So I just don't think it's credible theory to imagine that there's some vast conspiracy among your doctor and the expert on TV or someone like me, like, what's in it? Some people, I guess I was accused on Twitter somewhere of being forgot what the accusation was that I was like, not a COVID whore exactly, but that I was somehow there was some word, like whore. I can't remember what it was, where I was like, somehow jonesing, I think was a word. Someone said I was jonesing on COVID or something. And I was like, really? You think that I was just, you know, the way I would actually to be honest, here's what I'll tell you. For years and years I've been teaching public health, and there's a very famous graph in public health where on the X axis is years since like, 1900, and on the Y axis is mortality. And there's this decline in mortality over the last hundred years, which is just a miraculous achievement of modern society, primarily. And the story goes that this is for three reasons. First of all, we got richer, and as we got richer, we died less. Second, we had public health interventions, like clean water and hygiene and cotton underwear and so on, and that's why we died less. And that's about a third of it. So a third of it is we got richer, a third of the decline in mortality is we got public health interventions, and only about a third is because of medicine, modern medicine. Anyway, I've been teaching this topic for years, and in this graph, however, there's this huge spike that just dominates the graph in 1918. And for 30 years I've been teaching public health and I teach this graph, and I put it up on the table up, and I show the students and I ask the students, who knows what the spike is? Invariably, someone knows. It's the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic. And I say, isn't it amazing? Except for that pandemic, you have this steady decline in mortality decade after decade because of what we as a society are doing. Isn't that it's a triumph of human ingenuity. And honestly, Sam, I've been teaching this for all these years. It never occurred to me this was like I taught this as, like, as a historical oddity why it didn't occur to me that it could happen again while I was alive. I don't know. You know, I it just never occurred to me that I would be alive while there was a major respiratory pandemic. And so when it started bearing down on us, the COVID in 2020, in January 2020, as we were talking about earlier, on the one hand, I was prepared because I know about these things, and I had been thinking about this thing. On the other hand, it took me a while to sort of register, oh, my goodness, why was I not even more prepared? Like, why was I so surprised that this thing was happening? You've been teaching about this for decades, Nicholas, so I don't know why I went off on this tangent. Well, honestly, my expectations have been reset here. Now. I'm surprised that it's not always happening. Well, respiratory pandemics come every ten or 20 years, and serious ones every 50 or 100 years, and there's some evidence that the serious ones are coming more frequently. We can talk about that if you're interested. Well, I just want to put a few more numbers to what you just described here, because there's what we know about COVID deaths directly, but then there's this other analysis of excess death statistics that people have done. And actually, The Economist just did an analysis. It was published a few days ago, and globally, they estimate that it's more like 17 million people who have died so far. And it's not just from COVID but it is because of COVID I mean, for instance, there are people who didn't get treatment for cancer because they couldn't get into the hospital because the hospital was full of COVID patients. Right. So there are knock on effects of the pandemic, and I think for the economists, there was a there was a 95% confidence interval between 11 million and 20 million for excess deaths globally now. And in North America, they put it at, you know, officially, we're around 800,000 deaths. This analysis would adjust that upward by about 20% to to something close to a million at this point, which, by the way, is the range that I had forecast the last time. Actually, on our call, I had thought several hundred thousand. But in the book that I released in August of 2020, I put the range of deaths in the United States between half a million and a million. I'm not saying this to pat myself on the back and say I'm so smart or something. I'm just saying this is standard epidemiology. You can just do the calculations and look at exponential growth and the intrinsic properties of pathogen and forecast the impact on our society. So I'm not at all surprised, and I've been long saying, in fact, at the beginning of this conversation, I said that probably in the end, when the dust settles, a million Americans will have died from this condition. That's exactly right. Maybe more. Yeah. But let's talk about excess deaths. The technique was invented, actually, by. A demographer called the founder of Epidemiology called William Farr in England in the 19th century. In the middle of the 19th century, he did a lot of very cool things. And the reason they invented this technique was that the state of knowledge about nostalgia, about diseases and what causes illnesses and deaths was so weak 200 years ago that it was not often possible to know what someone died of. So what Far said is, we don't actually need to know what every some people died without having a doctor. There were no death certificates. They were buried, but we don't know what they died of. Or we said they died of A, but in fact they died of B. And so we were ignorant. And Farr said, we can dispense with all of that. Let's just count how many people died. And that was a number that was known. And we're going to compare that to the number that we expected to die. And we're going to compute that expected number by looking at the last five years and seeing, okay, in England, we had 100,000 people died every year. And during the plague year, 200,000 people died. And so we're going to say that the plague caused 100,000 deaths. This is the method of excess deaths. Now, it turns out that that method is also useful even to scientists today for a number of reasons. One is it's useful when you're looking at very ancient plagues and there are no death certificates or records, so you don't know. But you can calculate, like, how many bodies, how many people died in a particular year, looking at graveyard or other evidence, compare that to other years and conclude that, oh my goodness, this plague killed so many people. Now it can also be used even not looking historically, looking at the present day, in part for the reasons that you mentioned, during times of plague, some people are killed directly by the germ infecting them. Others are killed indirectly. For example, like you said, in the situation in which a person with cancer dies because they weren't unable to get hospital care, or they're killed indirectly in other ways. For example, the plague forces people to stay at home, and you have domestic violence goes up. So more people are killed by their spouses, for example, during the plague, let's say. But also there are people whose lives are saved by the plague. For example, car accidents might decline because we're not out on the road. So 10,000 Americans who would have died from car accidents didn't die because we were, let's say, lockdown at home or something. Not that that's why I would lock us down, but in fairness, you have to put all of those together, all of the direct and indirect deaths caused by the plague and all of the lives saved because of the plague, for whatever reason. For example, in India, because of the lockdowns, the air quality got so much better a year and a half ago people for the first time could see the Himalayas at some distance because the air pollution is so bad in India. Ditto in China, by the way, millions of Indians and Chinese die every year because of bad air quality. And when all the factories stopped and all the people stopped driving their cars, air quality improved. So fewer kids died of asthma, fewer adults died of emphysema and so on, or pneumonias, because exacerbated by the air pollution. So you got to put all of that together, and that's how you ultimately we will ultimately calculate the impact of COVID-19. And when that calculus is done, in two or three years, we will see that the impact of this epidemic has been enormous on our society, as you say, probably in excess of a million people. At least a million, I think, will have been judged to have died. And let me just say, and then I'll shut up in a second that we're not through this yet, okay? We should not be spiking the football, not only because of the Omicone variant, which we haven't talked about yet, but also because respiratory pandemics, it's in their nature to come in waves, especially in the winter. So we're having a winter wave right now. Thousand Americans are still dying every day of this condition right now, and we will have another winter wave a year from now. By the way, when you and I spoke over a year ago, I'm pretty sure I said, I don't know for sure, but I would have said, sam, be aware of the fact that next winter we'll have another wave. And here we are having that wave, and a year from now, we will have another wave. The amplitude of the wave will be lower. That's what happens. The waves tamp down as time goes by, but these respiratory pandemics typically take four or five years before the mortality that the plague is causing falls into the kind of background welter of general causes of death. So so some of the people who think, well, this will be just like influenza are right. It will eventually be like influenza, but that doesn't mean like lemmings. We have to run for the cliff and die needlessly. There are things we can do to reduce the toll of death. Right? Okay. So I can see this entire conversation is turning into a PSA, because we're still working through my my questions that I imagine we would answer in the first ten minutes or podcast. So so we've we've hit, you know, vaccine efficacy and safety. Although I think there's one other point to make about efficacy, because there's a kind of confused notion traveling around now that the vaccines actually don't work very well because there still is some transmission with respect to in vaccinated populations, right? So people are imagining it that the goal of the vaccine was to stop transmission entirely. And if you're if you can still get breakthrough cases and you can still pass the virus to others in a vaccinated population, well, then these vaccines don't work. There's a related issue here where people think, well, if you need to get boosted, just how many boosters are we going to have to get? We're going to have to get one booster a year for the rest of our lives. All these vaccines don't work. So in the antivax world, there's just an endless amount of chatter about how these vaccines really haven't panned out. You really are spending too much time online. We should address these concerns. Okay. Well, and also you did put on the table this ridiculous statement that natural immunity not a ridiculous statement. There's some interesting science about natural immunity versus artificial immunity through vaccination. Like which is better? And we can talk about that too. So on the issue of the vaccine so when we say a vaccine is effective, we have to specify what is the effective against what does it prevent you from becoming infected? Does it prevent you from being able to infect others? Does it prevent you from becoming seriously ill or does it prevent you from dying? Those are four different outcomes. And believe it or not, the vaccine doesn't have to be equally effective against all of those outcomes. For example, only some vaccines provide what's known as sterilizing immunity. In other words, it prevents you from even being able to be infected. That's not what the coronavirus vaccine does. Yes, it does reduce your probability of being infected if exposed. But what it really does is it reduces your probability of getting seriously ill if infected and infectiousness is another topic. Because even if the vaccine prevents you from becoming seriously ill if I'm vaccinated and I'm exposed to the virus, as the virus multiplies in my body and my body starts ramping up because it's been vaccinated to fight off the virus, there is a window of time when I could potentially spread it to others. But that window is greatly narrowed if I have been vaccinated. In fact, the vaccine does benefit, does reduce my infectiousness and does benefit others. We had deferred still the topic of whether it is a civic duty to be vaccinated. I think it is. You should be vaccinated not just to protect yourself but also to protect others. And there are many, many examples in our society where we have state power that prevents you from being a risk to others. The reason we regulate speeding on the highway is not so much because of our solicitous interest in your well being, but because you don't have the right to crash in and kill someone else. Yeah. I would also add here, though, that even if we knew the effect was only borne by you directly, you getting sick and dying has a very likely a terrible effect on other people. I mean, there are these cases where I mean, there literally have been cases where two antivax parents get killed by COVID and their kids are they got, you know, two four year old orphans now. Right. It's just unbelievable what is out there when you go looking for details. And I mean, the idea that it was just an expression of the personal autonomy of these two parents not to get vaccinated because no one's putting a needle in their bodies, as though there were no implications for anyone else, now they've got these two orphaned kids that society has to figure out somehow how to raise. And that's really sad. And I also think it's sad for those people that they became that they politicized something which could have been seen. Look, I like the fact that we live in a plural democracy. We don't live in North Korea or some kind of autocracy. We have people across the political spectrum with different political beliefs. I like this fact. We live in a plural democracy, and we resolve how do we resolve our disputes? We do not resolve them by force of arms. We vote, and we get to vote repeatedly. So if we don't like the people we vote for, we get another bite at the apple in two years or in four years or in six years. This is fantastic about our society. So when people are wanting to communicate their divergent political beliefs, I think the right way for them to do that is to have a bumper sticker or a lawn sign. It is not by whether they get vaccinated or not. In other words, you do not need to link your political beliefs or your political identity to whether you get a vaccine or not. You can signal where you are in the political spectrum in all kinds of other ways. And so this the hypothetical case you described of the two antivax parents who not hypothetical, no real case. I know, but exactly. Let's take the generic version of that. Yeah, there are real cases. I actually sent out a Twitter thread that assembled some of these cases months and months ago when some of them were hitting the news. They were heartbreakingly. But the point is, just as you're suggesting, that those individuals, they could have had their political beliefs and their political ideology about the government or whatever it is they want, but they don't need to signal that by whether they get vaccinated or not. They may have other reasons not to get vaccinated. They may not want to, but it's a kind of wrong headed admixture of belief systems. Also, there's just this fact which I know we almost certainly mentioned last time. There are some people who can't get vaccinated. Right. Also true. We have a duty to do whatever we can to mitigate their risk. Yeah, that's correct. So the fact that there's some breakthrough infections, the fact that there's still some transmissions, this is normal. There's nothing surprising. This does not mean the vaccines don't work. It's just again, going back to the airbag example, the fact that someone was in a collision and died despite an airbag doesn't mean that airbags don't work, means they work pretty good, but not 100%. And that's exactly the same thing with the vaccines. And on the natural immunity thing, it's a very complicated and interesting topic. So it is usually the case, not always, but usually the case that people who survive an infection with a natural pathogen have better immunity than those who are vaccinated. And the reason, the intuitive reason for this is that when you're infected with a natural pathogen, you're exposed to all the so called epitopes, you're exposed to all the antigens, all of the proteins in the pathogen. So your body amounts a very broad attack on the pathogen with antibodies and memory T cells that attack many parts of the pathogen. Whereas if you're vaccinated, you typically get a reduced set of those. For example, in the mRNA vaccines, you're just exposed to the spike protein, not the other proteins in the coronavirus. I just got to say as an aside here that the name spike protein has done some terrible PR for these vaccines. People find the name so scary, the idea that mRNA vaccines are proliferating the spike protein throughout your body, it's something that the spike protein certainly sounds like it's going to harm you in all kinds of ways. And there are people who are alleging that it almost certainly will. In addition to people's ambient fear of needles, a fear of the spike protein is, I'm convinced, doing some at least subliminal work here. I hadn't thought of that, but I think you're right. If scientists by chance had been calling it the rainbow protein and we're going to inject you with rainbow proteins, if it were called the rainbow protein and we could deliver these vaccines with a nasal inhaler or better yet, a pill, we would be living in a different world. Or like on a sugar cube, like the polio vaccine. Yes. So, yeah, let's have some rainbow protein on a sugar cube and you'll be better. Sorry, I derailed you. So you're talking about natural immunity? Yeah. So no. So natural immunity. So it is generally the case that but having said that, let me say a couple of other things. This is not always the case. There are previous examples where the vaccines provide superhuman immunity. For example, with human papillomavirus or tetanus. It is known that those vaccines provide a kind of immunity that's superior to the immunity acquired for natural reasons. And we can discuss a little bit about why that is the case. But in addition to that, in order to acquire the natural immunity, let's not forget you have to survive. You have to run the risk of death. And this is, in my opinion, just stupid. In other words, there's no polite way to put this. It is not a rational strategy to say even if you believe that the natural immunity acquired natural immunity is superior to the vaccine immunity. It is not wise to seek to acquire it by natural infection because you have to survive. You you run the risk of death in order to be in that state. Incidentally, for any listeners who've had COVID, there are abundant studies right now that show that you should still be vaccinated. And actually, the people who have both been vaccinated and have had COVID in either order, those are the ones that are actually in the best position to endure. Even mutants like Omicrone and other mutants that are on the horizon. So the variants that are on the horizon because they have a mix of intense immunity, let's say, from the vaccine and broad immunity from the natural infection. So it is not a rational approach to say we are going to reach herd immunity as a society or we are going to as an individual. That's going to be my strategy. It is far superior from an individual and a collective point of view to get vaccinated. Let me ask you here on this point, many people have expressed the grievance that in all this push to get people vaccinated, natural immunity. Of those, many millions of people at this point who have caught COVID and recovered their natural immunity is not being dignified as akin to or even better than normal vaccination. And they should be given credit for essentially they are vaccinated. They were vaccinated by the virus. Yes, I think there's some validity to that point of view, even though, as you did, you would just recommend that they also get a dose of the vaccine. It does seem crazy that if this comes down to just the colossal failure of our testing regime but it does seem crazy that we have not figured out a way to credit people for having recovered from COVID So that they then can you know, in a world where you know, you can't get into a restaurant unless you prove that you've been vaccinated, you should be able to get it into a restaurant, proving that you you had COVID survived the infection. Yes, I think that would be from an individual's point of view, that's not crazy. Although, as I've just said, if I were such an individual, I would still be vaccinated because you're actually not as protected and it's a very wise course of action to have. Well, you're you're not as protected as you might be, but you're correct. But I still think it's I still but think it's true or that we currently believe that natural immunity is superior to a two dose mRNA. No, I don't think that's true. That's not true. No, that's not true. That's what I'm saying. In fact, you're saying that the mRNA vaccines are analogous to a tetanus vaccine. Yes. They provide superhuman immunity. That's exactly right. There's a sheer coincidence. There's a lot of I don't know where we're going to find the ground truth for that information because I've heard it both ways. But more recently, I've heard it the way I'm saying it, which is natural immunity is actually better than vaccination immunity. Although the combination of a vaccine and natural immunity is the best. The last thing is true, but it is not true that natural immunity is superior. That's what I was saying before, that there are cases and the mRNA vaccines are in that category. I'm quite confident about this, that the immunity conferred by two doses of mRNA vaccine is superior to the immunity conferred by having survived a natural infection. That's what I was saying, that there are two reasons to be vaccinated. Obviously, the audience can fact check us here, but whatever is the case there, there seems to be a current consensus that even if you've recovered from COVID you're better off getting a boost of the vaccine and then you are the superhero you want to be. So like we're talking about, the question is which immunity is superior? If you survive, assuming you survive, then let's again constantly remind ourselves of this important feature. There is a survivor bias in these data. Yeah, absolutely. So to acquire this natural immunity, you have to run the risk of death. But let's say you acquire it, is it better than having been vaccinated or not? So there was actually a study that was released by the CDC on November the fifth, about a month ago, that looked at this question and concluded, as have several other studies, by the way, that no, in fact, it's superior to be the immunity conferred by vaccination is superior. And here I'm looking at the adjusted odds ratio. It's about five times your odds of being hospitalized with serious illness are five times worse if you have natural immunity compared to immunity from vaccination. And the last author of this paper is Bozio, Bo Zio, and it was published in MMWR on November the fifth, 2021. So that's one of many studies that have come to this conclusion. So, no, I reject the claim that immunity as of now, I mean, I may I reserve the right to change my mind if the facts change or we see more studies. But as of now, my summary of the literature is that in most people, on average, vaccination with two doses of the mRNA vaccine provides superior immunity than than having acquired it naturally. Yeah, well, there's a kind I think I want to spend more time on the sociological problem here just to account for how this got so politicized and so crazy. But I just have one more question here around vaccines and their efficacy. It's widely claimed now among people not disposed to get the vaccines that vaccines are creating because we do not have a sterilizing vaccine here, that's 100% effective. Vaccines are therefore creating a selection pressure that is spawning new variants that will evade the vaccines. And so we're basically our own worst enemy here and vaccinating imperfectly. What these people tend not to notice is that also natural immunity would be doing the same thing. It would be exerting a selection pressure that would then cause variants to emerge that escape natural immunity. But among the fans of Vaccination, there's this rival claim, which is that it's better to have a vaccinated population than an unvaccinated one. For all the reasons we've mentioned, but for the additional reason that in an unvaccinated population, when you have a reservoir of tens of millions, hundreds of millions globally, billions of people who have not been vaccinated, you have the condition of greatest spread and greatest virulence and greatest opportunity to manufacture fresh variants that keep this game of chicken with evolution running in the worst possible way. And so I guess my question is to what degree does vaccination mitigate the problem of variance compared to lack of vaccination? How do you think about the selection pressure that the vaccinated and the unvaccinated together are creating for the arising of new variants? I think people are right to be concerned about that. And let me try to see if I can provide an analogy, as most people will have an understanding. There's a herd of antelope and there's a lion that's going to predate them. And everyone knows from having watched nature videos that the lion kills the slowest antelope, the weak one, the old one, whatever it is. But if you can run fast, you outrun the lion and you don't get eaten. As a lion kills a few antelope each generation, the antelopes evolve to run faster and faster and escape the lion. Now of course, the lion also evolves to run faster and faster and you have predator prey coevolution. And there are experts in our society who have studied this in many predator prey relationships and many relationships between pathogens and the animals they infect, which is a similar kind of thing, or parasite host interactions, for example. This is a well understood topic, but you should also have the intuition that if there is no lion, what happens to the speed of the antelope? Does it change? No, there's no selection pressure on speed and so the average speed of the antelope remains the same. And conversely, if the lion is indifferent to speed, if the lion kills all the antelope, also the antelope don't evolve, they're all dead. So you don't get faster and faster antelope, but you get a really good Netflix video narrated by David Attenborough. Yes, it's like a fox and a chicken coop just killed them all. Okay, but the point is that from this little toy example that we realize that partial selection pressure is the thing that will be most likely to induce evolution of speed in the antelope. And that's the argument that people are making in terms of partial vaccination. And the crucial thing here is partial. So if you partially vaccinate the population, for example, in south africa where they have 24% or something vaccination rate and they have a lot of immunocompromised individuals, which is another interesting and important detail in the emergence of the Omicone variant, is that what happens is is you create almost the perfect circumstances for vaccine evading strains, right? So what we're talking about here is not new strains that cause us trouble. We're specifically focused on causing us trouble in a particular way, which is that they can evade the vaccines if we vaccinate some of the population, but not the rest. Those strains that are circulating that can move despite the partial vaccination come to predominate. And so it's just like the the partial predation by the lion example. And so partial vaccination will enhance or pick up the speed of the virus or endow the virus with more of the property that allows it to avoid the predation, or in this case, the elimination because of vaccination. But the crucial thing there is partial. So basically what we want is a world in which either no one is vaccinated or everyone is vaccinated. Just to escape confusion here, there are two forms of partiality. Here there's partial vaccination. Not everyone has received a vaccine in any given population. But then there's the partial efficacy, the incomplete efficacy of the vaccine itself, right? Yes. I'm talking sterilizing. Yes, correct. Both are contributing to this problem. Well, the latter, the fact that the vaccine is not 100% perfect. I have to think for another moment or two before I can put that into the story. But the part of the story that I'm emphasizing right now is the fact that not everyone is vaccinated. This is, by the way, the reason that I and many others have been arguing that the United States should vaccinate the whole world. It would cost us $50 billion to vaccinate the world. And we should do it. We should do it, first of all, because we profess it's a moral obligation. We profess to have the right morals and be a leading nation. And I think it's something we should do for moral reasons. We should do it for economic reasons. We're a rich country. Everyone is experiencing supply chain problems now. They have trouble buying Christmas presents or products are missing at the grocery store, and they bake orders for furniture and they're told it won't arrive for months. And this is not a typical experience of late American capitalism, but everyone is having this experience now because of supply chain problems and we need trading partners. So we have economic reasons to vaccinate the world. But most importantly, I would argue we have epidemiological reasons because to the extent there are parts of the world that are not vaccinated or partially vaccinated, those are petri dishes for the emergence of new Worrisome strains of the virus. And those strains will inevitably come to our shores, just like we've seen with Omicron. They will come to our shores and they will cause us woe. So we need to vaccinate the whole world, not just our country. Now you made a second point, which is really important, and I just alluded to it a moment ago, which is to the extent that they are partially vaccinated or unvaccinated, the reason wholly unvaccinated parts of the world are also a problem is a numbers game. Because if you have 100 people who are infected with a virus or 10 million people who are infected, you should have the intuition that with many more people afflicted with a virus, you have many more opportunities for the virus to have a mutation that makes it worse. And this is why rip roaring infection is also not good. In other words, why the so called you know, the the point you made earlier, which is that large numbers of people who are infected with the virus don't necessarily benefit us because it provides more terrain, more opportunity for the virus to explore what's known as the Darwinian fitness landscape. Where the virus by chance? Because there's so many millions of people who are infected by chance, it'll stumble on a variant that's really bad for us. It's like, it's a little bit like, you know, if you want to roll aheads, are you more likely to roll aheads if you get ten coin flips or 1000 coin flips? Well, everyone has the understanding that however likely it is to roll aheads when you flip a coin ten times, it's a certainty you're going to get aheads if you flip a coin a thousand times. And it's a little bit like that with the coronavirus. If you have millions of people who are infected, the virus has more opportunities to have a worrisome strains mutate and emerge. So for both of these reasons, the wisest strategy is if you have three options no immunization, partial immunization or complete immunization, from the point of view of us combating the virus, the wise strategy is complete immunization. Yeah. You mentioned in passing the implications of having a large population of immunocompromised people in Africa. What is that? I assume you're talking about the spread of HIV or the there. Yes. Well, there's a lot of theories. For example, let's take the Omikone variant. The Omikone variant is its most recent relative in the virus family tree is about a year ago. So it's not a descendant of Delta, for example, the Omicone variant. It seems to be a descendant from some other ancestral strain about a year ago. This is work that Trevor Bedford and others have done. And so the question is, well, what happened? Well, one possibility is that the Omicurin variant was spreading in parts of the world where we had low genetic surveillance and therefore we just didn't detect it earlier. We just finally stumbled on it. When it got to South Africa, let's say it was in Botswana or somewhere else nearby, and there wasn't a lot of genetic surveillance. But in South Africa, they have. Decent genetic surveillance. Then it comes to South Africa, up, we detect it. And so it seems like it hadn't been around for a year, but actually it had been. That's one possibility for the emergence of such a strain, sudden emergence of a new strain. Another possibility is that it wasn't circulating in a population. Rather, it was enduring in a specific individual. So, for example, imagine you're an immunocompromised individual. You're infected with a virus, you can't fight it off, and that virus lives in your body and keeps mutating and mutating and mutating viruses chance mutations occur. I forgot the rate of mutation in this virus. I think it's once a week or every two weeks or so. And so over a year in your body, the virus accumulates a lot of mutations. So one theory is that the omicone variant kind of was incubated in an immunocompromised individual, where finally enough mutations occurred in the virus, and then it leapt from this person to others and then began spreading. That's a second theory of and. And therefore in a place where there are a lot of immunocompromised people, and I think in South Africa, something like 20% of the population is HIV positive. I don't know the precise number, but I think that's about right. You have a lot of people there that we really should be vaccinating because those poor individuals can serve as incubators for new worrisome strains of the virus. A third possibility, and this is one of the reasons we will never eradicate coronavirus, is that unlike smallpox, which can only infect humans, coronavirus can infect animals. And everyone has been reading about this. There's the gorillas no, leopard of the zoo. Yeah, and the tigers in the zoo and deer like something like some studies show that a significant fraction of North American deer are infected. They got it from humans. Apparently, feeding deer is a thing, and then the deer spread it among themselves and mink. There was an outbreak, I think, in Denmark, where they had to slaughter thousands of mink, and outbreaks in China, in fur farms. And we know our pets, our dogs and cats can get it. So the point is that the coronavirus can. Even if we vaccinated, everybody, will never eradicate this virus because it can live in animals who we live with. So there are animal reservoirs possible. So a third possibility is that omicrone was incubated in some kind of animal reservoir and then returned to humans. It was in humans, it went to animals. It started first in bats, it came to humans, and then from humans it went to some other animals, and now it's coming back to us. The coronavirus is a feature of the natural world. Our world has changed. There's a new pathogen in our midst that was not there before, and so we have to accept this reality. That's the third possibility. And then, of course, there's some since you're in the dark reaches of the internet. Sam, there are some people who speculate that this is still a Chinese plot. Like first they softened us up with the original strain and now they're releasing, you know, another strain suddenly, which I think we can exclude that possibility. I think the most likely thing of the three I've just mentioned is, is the second possibility that it was in an immunocompromised human and that's where omikron was incubated and now has has left us interesting. Interesting. Okay, well, let's pivot to the topic of why this all became so confusing and so difficult to talk about. We've touched on it some here. But I want to at least acknowledge just try to put yourself in the position of someone who has listened to us now for 2 hours and is still unconvinced because they still can't shake the feeling that the incentives are such the corruption of our institutions is such, that we just can't trust the information we've gotten. We've got a whole segment of our society that is declaring epistemological bankruptcy on some level and then turning to nonstandard sources of information for their facts. And as I said, I think the alternative media wilderness is especially culpable for giving energy to this. But the truth is our institutions have failed to a remarkable degree. I mean, they, they have, they have proven hypocritical or and capturable by crazy ideology to a degree that I would not have thought possible. And I'll just give you a couple of examples here to react to. I would imagine these are in your memory. But it was at one point during the pandemic where we had something like 1000 public health professionals who signed an open letter attesting to the necessity of demonstrating for Black Lives Matter protests and how that was epidemiologically. A fine thing to do because racism is such a problem in our society. But of course it was a terrible thing to demonstrate against lockdowns or any other sort of mass gathering on the right side of the political spectrum that was totally irresponsible and dangerous and guaranteed to get people killed. But lo and behold, it's safe to get out there after the killing of George Floyd and demonstrate en masse for the right political cause. I mean, that was such a distortion of public health messaging that I think I mean, anyone right of center politically took one look at that and said all right, we're done here. I don't need to hear from the Anthony Faucis of the world. This is how they bend their scientific advice in response to woke identity politics. Well, I don't know if Anthony Fauci himself was saying it was fine. I don't think he was. I don't know if he signed that letter or not. But Fauci like people were well, yeah, but I was publicly opposed, just to be very clear. So in real time I was saying this is insanity. The virus does not care about the justice or non justice of your cause or whether you have pink hair. Yes, it doesn't care. And therefore I did. I could not see how we had denied people the right to visit loved ones who were dying in the hospital or funerals. Let's not forget funerals were deemed too risky at that time, but somehow turn on a dime and say, well, we're going to sort of give a pass too. Or at that time in New York, I think the governor of New York City was cracking down on Jewish weddings amongst the Orthodox Jews but turned around in the very same week or something. I may have bungled these facts a little bit, but was saying, oh well, BLM protests are okay. This is not rational, and I was strongly opposed. Now we can talk about whether what is the actual risk from outdoor interactions? And now we have a lot more evidence now a year later, about the extent to which it is or is not risky to be outside. And we now know a lot more about the aerosol dynamics of this pathogen. But at the time it was inconsistent and I think deeply injurious to credibility. But this is why I would tell listeners who are skeptical, try to find a voice that you trust. Try to find someone who you trust about these matters and try also to ask yourself again, I repeat what I said earlier. What evidence would disprove my beliefs if I believe that I've remected and works or that masks are useless? What evidence could I find from perhaps ideally, someone you trust that would make you change your mind? Again, I think that's a crucial heuristic. But on your point on the crisis in institutions, I mean, you and I have talked about in some of our past conversations, for example, the collapse of higher institutions, of higher learning in our society. I think we're at an interesting moment in the history of our nation where the pendulum swings back and forth. And I think you're right to talk about a crisis of our institutions. I think the media people are worried about the legacy publishers. There was a time when you could have confidence in The New York Times and the CBS and the Evening News with Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite or whatever, and you had a kind of notion about the Supreme Court. Yes, maybe they didn't rule your way, but you didn't think of them as venal or as somehow being driven by their politics perhaps and our universities. You thought of them as perhaps as institutions that were devoted to free expression and scientific inquiry and no idea was nothing was unsayable. No idea was unthinkable and so on to our public health institutions and so on. And I think there is a moment right now again, the virus has struck us when we're vulnerable in this regard because I think there is a crisis for other reasons. There's a crisis of institutions in our society just to give you another example here. I think this is more recent, but the American medical association has changed its guidance for doctors about how to talk to patients. And at one point they they recommend, instead of referring to low income people, they recommend that you say, and this is a quote people underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers, gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations, weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of heart disease. Right. So saying poor people have high levels of heart disease, we're supposed to tell that? Well, I mean, you could even do a little, like you said, an onion headline or not, this is an SNL sketch. Exactly. Maybe SNL will do it, who knows? Yes. That's ridiculous. I mean, that's like shooting fish in the bar. There are other examples, I understand, by the way, just to be clear. I have studied the influence of those forces for decades, like how it is that poverty kills you and the mechanisms by which being poor is harmful to your health. And many of those things that were identified I have looked at, for example, how for profit hospices I did a lot of work in the 1990s on how for profit hospices had different incentives to care for the dying than not for profit hospices. So I'm completely sympathetic to the workings of such forces and their relevance. But to manipulate our language in that fashion and to politicize it, to ex antipoliticize it, to prejudge the outcome through the manipulation of language, I think is nuts. Yeah. And then there was the example of this included fauci in the beginning when so many people in the medical establishment told what was really, I think, considered a noble lie, but was in fact, that was a fiasco. It was so transparent, it was so illogical. They basically claimed that masks don't work because they were worried about all the run on PPE and that there would be no n 95 masks left for doctors and healthcare workers. But if masks don't work, why do you care that there's going to be a run on the masks? It made no sense. And just that alone was so damaging that some people just never recovered their caring about what's a valid source of information coming from the government or from CDC. That was absolutely awful. And in early april and I was again not in that category, I was talking about the utility of masks and making homemade masks and using n 95 masks. I released a paper with some colleagues at Yale in April of 2020. So again, I was thankfully not in that category either. And I think that was a slip up by fauci. And I don't know the reasons they did that. It may have been, as you suggest, this sort of noble lie idea, but for those individuals who are pissed about that, I would encourage those individuals, especially if they have a political reason for being pissed, to ask themselves why our wealthy, great nation didn't have PPE. Why did the president of the United States, when warned, actually back in November of 2019, certainly by January, certainly by February, when Italy was collapsing, why were we not manufacturing PPE? Why did hundreds of doctors and nurses and EMTs and others die from infection that they acquired in hospitals caring for the rest of us because they did not have adequate PBE? This boils my blood. When I was a early I was I'm a hospice doctor. I was I don't see patients anymore. But in the 1990s, I used to take care of people who had HIV, and about a third of our patients in hospice had HIV. And of course, in the hospitals, many had HIV. These were typically young gay men who were dying awful deaths until the invention of highly active antiretroviral therapy in the late 90s. We had to take risks to care for these people. We were worried that if we were drawing blood from them, we would have a needle stick injury. Some of my colleagues did have needlestick injuries, and we were worried that you would get HIV if they vomited on you, these patients, or urine or spit body fluids got on you. You would get a deadly disease, and you would be infected with HIV. But it was our duty to care for these patients, and we did. And we took some risk in so doing, as was expected of us, just like a soldier going into battle. But we had equipment, we had mass, we had gloves, we had gowns, we had special rooms, we had special ways of disposing for the needles to minimize needle stick risk and so on. So we were expected by the society to take a risk, but we were equipped by the society to minimize that risk. This was not what happened as coronavirus crashed into our society in March of 2020. We expected our doctors and nurses to take risks, but did not provide them with equipment. And this was an enormous dereliction of duty by the federal, federal government what they should. And and so people who are saying, why was Fauci lying? They should then ask the next question why was Trump lying? Why did Trump not order or otherwise engineer this wealthy nation to produce the PPE that we needed? In fact, I'll tell you an anecdote, because, as I said earlier, I was worried about this pandemic back in January and February of 2020. I can't remember precisely when, but roughly in February, I decided that I should buy some equipment. And I live in Vermont, and I went to the Home Depot in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, across the border, to buy some N 95 masks, which are often available in such places to minimize when you're dusting or sanding stuff. You need this type of masks. And I went there to buy it, and I got one of these guys in one of these orange aprons and I asked him where the masks were, and he looked at me, he said, we don't have any more. And I said, what do you mean we don't have anymore? And he said, in this West Lebanon Home Depot, that many Chinese people that live in this area had purchased the masks and sent them back to China. So why was our country not able why were other people aware of the need for this equipment and being acquiring it, and yet our country was not on the ball and manufacturing adequate amounts? By the way, I'm saying this not to demonize those particular individuals or to demonize the Chinese. That's not my point of my story. The point of my story is that other people in other countries were aware of the utility of this equipment, but we seemingly were not. And so this was a major collapse of the federal government, in my opinion, that we expected healthcare workers to run these enormous risks and did not properly equip them. Incidentally, one more point. Many loved ones, as a hospice doctor, we would struggle mightily so that people would not die alone. Having a patient die alone was considered a really bad outcome. And I have held the hand of countless people who were otherwise would have died alone when they died, just as a doctor, like sitting in the room watching and helping this person transition to death. And we had tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Americans during this pandemic, just like in times of bubonic plague. I mean, literally a thousand years ago, we seemingly had not progressed in a thousand years. People dying alone because the hospitals could not spare the PPE for their families. So it's not just that the healthcare workers are dying. The decedent died alone. What an awful thing to happen. The loved ones weren't present. These are all derelictions of duty that can be traced back, in my view, to the lack of our preparedness, which again, can be traced back to our politicians and others. Yeah, actually, it reminds me of another strike against Fauci that is also not said to disparage the job. Just to be clear, I don't think Fauci was responsible at all for the lack of PP. No, I was coming back to I'm just trying to get into the heads of the people who haven't believed a word of what we just said. Right. For 2 hours. There are those people if they're still listening, they have a long way. Why are we so concerned with those people? Because some of these people have bigger podcasts than I do. Wow. I didn't know that. Okay. It's incredible what's happened in the podcast landscape. Okay? And some of these people have smaller podcasts than I do, but still large podcasts that reach millions of people. And they have a list of things. They have these articles from the preprints from some journal that we haven't heard of that has something that we have scandalously neglected in this conversation. There's just so many details that either look nefarious or within their purview are nefarious, but that don't actually have the implications that people would want to draw from them. What was going on a few weeks ago when it was disclosed that I think it was Pfizer wanted their data on the kids trials kept out of public view for the next 50 years or something? You tell me if you know anything about that, but all I can tell you is that in the minds of tens of millions of Americans, that factoid detonates like a 20 megaton bomb, right? That's all you need to hear to know which end is up. Yes, I understand that, and I'm actually sympathetic to that, and I am I am very you and I have talked about some of these topics before. I'm very high on the open expression and full transparency. Like, I think I really believe that the cure for ignorance is light, and you need to throw bright light into dark recesses, and that includes releasing pertinent data of this kind. What I read was that Conglomerate, a large group of interested parties, had filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the FDA for some of these data. And the FDA said, look, we only have ten employees to provide all the data that's being requested, and clear it in the way that has been asked would take us 50 years so we can't do it. I hadn't heard that Pfizer itself had said no. To me, that strikes me as bad business. In addition to being maybe I have that wrong. Maybe it was the FDA basically saying, at this rate, we're not going to get to this for 50 years. Yes, and but but then I think then Pfizer could step up and say, no, we'll release it ourselves. Why wouldn't they? You know, I think it's in their interest for people to be vaccinated. And then and I can see why people would say, we want now, I also think this can be a kind of turtles all the way down an infinite regress. Like, as soon as this data released and the conspiracy theorists there's no satisfying conspiracy theorists. So let's say the Pfizer released the data they requested. They would say, well, actually, now we want to see the original Xerox copies of the original clinical charts of the 20,000 people in the you know, we want their names and addresses. If you don't believe their names and addresses, we think you made them up. Like that guy that was hawking the Sandy Hook conspiracy, that notions what an awful human being. What a disgusting, disgusting human being. Profiting off the murder of other people's children. This is ridiculous. But even if you showed this guy video and you showed him death certificates, he said, no, I still don't believe it. At some point you've say, well, excuse my language, but fuck off. There's no way to satisfy such individuals. But I do agree that some accommodation for people's curiosity, inquisitiveness and suspicion needs to be made in a society such as ours. Yes, but in this vein, again, back to Fauchi's Besmerged reputation. I hold Fauci in high regard, I have to say. Tony, I don't know him personally, I've never met him. I've read a lot of his papers. I actually had read his papers before COVID Fauci was writing about respiratory pandemics when I was in, in high school and I, and I followed some of his work on HIV. You know, as I would say, as a politician, as a leader of as the leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, I was aware of some of his work with HIV in the 1990s, and there's a lot of history that's been written about his response to the HIV, the AIDS activists and how they came to be friends and so on. And I think he was a little slow in responding to them, but ultimately did the right thing and I generally think highly of him. Right. I recognize some of the slip ups, nontrivial slip ups that you're discussing that you bring to the table. I think the biggest mark against him at the moment is the Lab leak hypothesis and the sort of stonewalling he deals with those senators are no, I don't agree with that. That I think is unfair. I think that from what I've seen, these far right senators that are trying to suggest that fauxy wanted to give American dollars to Chinese scientists to deliberately weaponize coronavirus that's ridiculous. I'm not sure that's the shape of the claim, but it was just a claim that we had given money to the Wool on Lab that was used for gain of function research. And then he was in that exchange with Rand Paul, he was lawyering the language. He had a very Clintonian it depends what the meaning of is approach language around gain of function, which drove a lot of people crazy. The whole left of center commentariat ruled Rand Paul to be just an embarrassing ignorance there. But in most of America, or certainly much of America, it seemed obvious that Fauci was just not acknowledging the plain meaning of gain of function. Well, okay, so first of all, I follow this a little, but I've not seen every video clip, I've not seen every statement. I have seen some of Ron Johnson and I have seen some of Rand Paul, I've seen some clips and I honestly don't think those guys are I think they're being completely disingenuous. And it's also implausible on its face that an American in his eighty s, the leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is happily providing money to the Chinese to do gain of function research. That's the wrong framing of what no, I think the real allegation would be that it was done, however advertently or inadvertently, and he's just covering. We had partnerships with Chinese laboratories, which, by the way, if we hadn't blown those up, we'd be in a better position right now to know where the virus came from. Now, I don't know all these facts exactly right, but my understanding is that the federal government gave some grants to the Eco Health Alliance, this entity in New York, which had been partnering with Chinese scientists to collect coronaviruses in caves in China. I think roughly that's what was happening. But it's to our advantage. Imagine if we had had a big archive of bat coronaviruses somewhere in the United States right now. And the way Trump defunded that looking for like some kind of a whipping boy actually was injurious, as I understand the fact pattern was injurious to our country because we pulled the rug out from a partnership with Chinese scientists at the precise moment when that partnership would have been most useful to us to actually lay our hands on virus. That would have allowed us to figure out where this COVID-19, where SARS CoV two came from. So it is to our nation's credit that we have a commitment to science and scientific inquiry and that we think that science can be apolitical and that we have partnerships with scientists around the world who are even during our competition with Russia during the nuclear arms race, the American government and the Russian government encouraged physicists to talk to each other so that there would be these back channeled communications that were apolitical between scientists. So to suddenly take this and make it into something nefarious I think with respect to the lab leak hypothesis, my view of it has always been it was always plausible just because of the nature of the case. You've got the back coronavirus you've got the back coronavirus lab right next to the epicenter of this outbreak. But it never seemed important to figure out at the beginning because we had the genome sequence of the virus, we know what we have to vaccinate against. But obviously we need to figure this out eventually because we don't want any more lab leaks. So the thing that seemed truly crazy making and obnoxious at a minimum was the political pressure coming from the other side to say that to rule out the Laplay hypothesis as a racist thought crime against the Chinese. Yeah, that's also BS. I think if I had to guess of the two possibilities we're discussing here the so called Zoanotic leap, that it was a natural move from animals to humans, or the accidental lab leak theory, I still think the Zonotic leap is more likely, but I absolutely do not exclude the lab leak theory. And the Chinese have done themselves no credit by their secrecy and their lack of transparency. Now, again, however, in fairness to the Chinese, if the Chinese government was demanding that they come to fort Dietrich to inspect our labs. We also would be quite unhappy with that possibility, I think, if it was a lab leak. The Chinese have a lot to answer for, not only for the incompetence that resulted in the leak, but also the COVID up, which is not ideally the way our nation would function. There was another famous example of this, I think, in the an anthrax leak in Russia, which actually was a lab leak and was covered up actually, I think, by American scientists as well. And then I don't know the story exactly. There's a couple of books written about this, but I used to know the story. I just don't remember it right now at the level of accuracy I want to be heard by however many hundreds of thousands of people are hearing us right now. They're this far into our conversation, and they're all very angry ones are. Exactly. But on the lab leak, I do want to say a couple of things. My lab has done my own lab has done a little work on this topic. Earlier I talked to you about how we had this phone data about movement of people, 11 million people transiting through Wuhan in January. And we published a paper in the journal Nature in April of 2020 very quickly into the pandemic that showed that we could forecast the timing, intensity and location of the epidemic in China simply based on human mobility patterns alone. And a few months ago, it occurred to me and actually, I have this in the in the paperback version of my book, I put in this analysis in the afterword, it occurred to me that we could use these. Data to reason backwards, not just forwards and trace back. When would be the likeliest time that the first patient that was infected with coronavirus could have left? Wuhan. And I call this patient zero prime. So this is not the first person to be infected. This is the first person who left Wuhan, and that date is November 1. So already by November 1, the virus was had circ, was circulating. And then if you make some further assumptions based on what's known about the epidemiology of the virus, it suggests that patient zero, the first person to be infected, probably occurred closer to October 1. So I am interested in the origins of the virus, and my own laboratory has done some work on this. I think if I had to guess, eventually we may know there's increasing evidence, very good scientists on both sides of this. I don't want to say it both sides because that makes it like a political debate. It's not a debate. There's evidence accruing in support of both Hypotheses, the lab leak hypothesis and the Zonotic leap. And eventually I think we will have a corpus of evidence that allows us to make an educated guess as to the most likely thing. I should say one thing we left hanging from. Part of our conversation maybe an hour ago now is this issue of the inter pandemic interval. Earlier we talked about how serious pandemics may be coming more frequently. What's the evidence for that? Well, most listeners will be aware of the fact that even in our own lifetimes, there have been many zoonotic diseases. Zoonotic means that disease circulating in animals that comes to humans. HIV was a simian immunodeficiency virus, and monkeys came to us. Ebola, we hear about Ebola outbreaks, zika virus, Hantavirus SARS one in 2003. These happen. And there is evidence that there was a nice paper published in Nature about ten years ago now approximately or approximately, that showed that if you look at the zoonotic diseases, by decade, we're getting more and more and more of them as each decade goes by. And part of the reason for that, actually, believe it or not, connects this global threat of pandemics to the other great global threat of our time, which is climate change. That with climate change, we're seeing increasing motion of people encroaching on the territory of animals, and also animals, their territory is being destroyed by climate change. They come in contact with us. So we have more and more contact between humans and wild animals, and therefore more and more of these sonotic leaps that are happening. First point, second point, if you look at the interpondemic interval, the time interval, and and this is stochastic, I mean, there's no it's not like these new respiratory pandemics occur like clockwork. They just occur roughly every ten or 20 years. But it could be every year, could be every 30 years. There's some variation. The serious ones used to occur every 50 to 100 years. But there's some evidence that that's narrowing. So it's possible that we could have another pandemic not in 50 or 100 years, but in, let's say, five or ten or 20 years. And here's the thing that I think people need to understand, that as coronavirus is, it's actually pandemic light. It only kills about 1% of the people it infects. Just imagine, just imagine the lethality of the virus is an intrinsic property of the virus. It kills 1% of the people it infects. But imagine if this virus had killed ten or 30%. There are other coronaviruses like MERS, middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, that kills 30% of the people that infected. If that had happened, we would have been facing a bubbic plague like Black Death type situation in the 21st century and the richest nation the world has ever known. And it would be like in the movie Contagion, for example, which is a fantastic movie, one out of three people dying. And I don't think people fully understand how we've kind of almost bad as it has been, we've kind of dodged a bullet. And this is why Republican and Democratic administrations for decades have rightly seen respiratory pandemics as a national security threat and why we need to take them seriously. Why we should have taken this one even more seriously than we did, and why we need to continue to take this seriously and prepare for the future so it's not to have to suffer like this again. That brings up a point that I want to talk about. We are in this wormhole of time dilation where what I thought was going to take 15 minutes has taken two and a half hours. Now we're on to the topic I wanted to address with you at minute 16, which is to the point you just raised. This is a dress rehearsal for a worse pandemic, which is more or less inevitable at some point. I'm very worried that we have learned some of the wrong lessons here. And I think one lesson we learned, at least in the United States, about which there seems to be almost a consensus, is that lockdowns don't work. No, I don't agree with that. You'd be amazed if you ever turn on your computer and get on the Internet. I don't appear to be in the Dark Reaches as much as you do. I mean, sometimes the Dark Reaches find me, Sam, as I know they find you, but I don't go looking for it. I am surrounded by people who think lockdowns don't work. And so there are two ways to make this claim not true. There's huge amount of scientific evidence of this. Yes, that's what I want to get to, but there's two things that could be claimed here. You could be claiming that for some truly mysterious and magical reason, lockdowns don't work. Like you successfully locked down and still the virus spreads. Well, if it's spread through the water, if it's if it you've rained down from the heavens, that could be the case. Or it was spread by an insect vector, for example. Exactly. Flew from household towel, but in this case and a respiratory virus, we know that's not the case. If people actually are not commingling, if you actually managed to lock down for a month or six weeks at the outside for a virus like this, yes, you can quash it, but so the second claim, which is apparently true, I don't think that's true either. If you're saying that there are people who argue that if we had just all gone home for six weeks at the beginning, we would have killed this thing, I don't think that's true. I think the virus would have escaped our dragnet and we'd still be look what's happening in China or even in New Zealand. Here's the second claim, which I think is the more accurate one, which is given just the nature of people and the imperfect nature of any lockdown, no matter how draconian, you can't fully lock down and people are just not going to comply. In the United States, we seem to have 300 million people who really were not going to comply. And therefore, what you're calling a lockdown is never really a lockdown. But the counterpoint to that is when you look at Australia and when you look at New Zealand their level of excess mortality during COVID is nothing like our own trivial. They simply didn't have excess mortality during COVID That's right. That is right. And if they now vaccinate their entire population 50 years from now those countries will be seen as models. Now, in fairness, New Zealand is a rich island and Iceland and the United Kingdom they weren't as able to implement this strategy. But yes, that's right. It would be seen as an incredible victory. They kept their population secure. They waited till the vaccine was available. They vaccinated everyone and they had a minimal loss of life. And they are having minimal loss of life and that is admirable. But another point of confusion on this lockdown thing is people. The word is used very sloppily for me, lockdown is stay at home orders or business closure orders. But there are many other steps short of that that are effective. For example, closing schools or banning gatherings or minimizing the size of gatherings or curfews where we say, okay, you can only be out from nine to a. M. To 10:00 p.m.. Or whatever. There are all kinds of procedures the government can implement to reduce social mixing. By the way. Sometimes those procedures have paradoxical effects which make things worse. Like like curfews, for example, that I just mentioned can actually sometimes make things worse by making by increasing the density in stores. So so these are all complicated things that need to be thought through and worked out and modeled and experimented with and so on. And also you don't do idiotic things like close the beaches when you're talking about a totally know where outdoor transmission is greatly reduced. You force people into their boxes and you tell them they can't go to beaches or parks. Yes, that was dumb. And in fact, we had a paper on that that we published I forgot where. I think on the Atlantic. We just had a little kind of cute little study we did about why every time they were talking about lockdowns or mass gatherings they showed photographs of beaches, which was just stupid. That's the least risky place. But anyway so the thing is when people talk about lockdowns what they don't understand is they say some people say lockdowns are ineffective but what they mean by that is that the studies show that after you have closed the schools and closed the stores then ordering people to stay home is no longer additionally effective. But basically you've functionally implemented a lockdown anyway. You've thinned out the movement of people dramatically short of ordering everyone home. And also those same people who decry lockdowns are also the people who say well, they don't want to wear masks and this is not sensible. Like if you really want to avoid lockdowns, okay, then do your part. Wear your mask, get vaccinated people don't want vaccinations either. Well, they don't want anything. But that's immature. I mean, that is like saying, I wish. It's like that scene in Lord of the Rings when Gandalf is talking to I forgot Frodo or somebody. He says, we all wish that we didn't live in such awful times, but what can we do? Yes, I wish I wasn't having to cope with a respiratory pandemic. That's a once in a century event. I imagine the young men that fought on the beaches of Normandy wished that the World War hadn't taken place when they were young men either, but that's when they happened to be alive. And so it's just immature to pretend like nothing is happening. No, the world has changed. There's a new pathogen in our midst. It's like radioactive fallout. It's just there. And so we have to take some action to respond to it. We can debate how to take the least injurious action. We can debate which actions do or do not work, which are effective, are they worth the cost? All of those are legitimate questions. But to somehow want to pretend like we don't have to do anything, you know, we can have our cake and eat it too, is not, in my view, befitting a great nation. It's not befitting an educated citizenry or the kind of civilization that I think we have. All right, so so on that point, in terms of what we should be doing and or not doing at the moment, where do you come out on vaccine mandates of various flavors? I think it's totally fine to have vaccine mandates. In fact, I think I would say I'm in favor of them. Now, I also recognize that we live in a plural democracy and there are people who will disagree with me. And for example, if I could, I would ban the private ownership of weapons. But I realize that I'm in the minority here and that many Americans want to bear arms and they use those arms responsibly, and that we have at least some kind of constitutional right to bear arms and that I live in a plural democracy and I live with other fellow citizens who have different beliefs about different things. And so we kind of have to compromise and tolerate each other. So on the one hand, I would be in favor of mandates. On the other hand, I realize that there are people who will refuse to get vaccinated. I do not think such people should be put in prison. I don't think that we should send the army to their door and say, well, there's a law that you have to be vaccinated and now we're going to arrest you. Okay, that's not what I am saying. But I do think we can say your nonvaccination is in fact posing a risk to the rest of us, just like we can conscript you in time of war, which the state reserves the right to do that the state reserves the right to come into your factories to manufacture stuff in time of war. We reserve a lot of rights as a collective, we are going to mandate vaccination, and if you refuse, well, it'll be harder for you. Maybe you can't fly or maybe you can't go to restaurants or whatever. You know, it's more difficult for you. But again, to be so, i, I would say that I think that requiring people to be vaccinated, as we have, by the way, for for decades, for all kinds of childhood immunizations, we provide for some exceptions, for people, of course, who have medical exceptions, we provide for and we should with coronavirus, we have some religious exceptions. If there was I haven't seen a legitimate religious objection to coronavirus vaccination, but maybe there is one, and maybe we should tolerate such individuals, but there'll be very few in number. I would not get personal belief exemptions for vaccine mandates. I don't think that's a credible way to run a society. That's a thing. Would you have a personal belief exemption to pay my taxes? I mean, that's not how we run a society. Would you give an exemption for natural immunity if someone can prove that they yes, I would. There. I think I would. Now, we touched on earlier, I think from an individual perspective, yes, but from a public health perspective, we might not wish to do that for at least two reasons. First of all, we've already established that being vaccinated, in addition to being naturally exposed, is superior for transmission and for the person being infected. And second, the difficulty in ascertaining whether someone truly had had the infection may mean that it's easier for us to just mandate vaccination for everyone, just like we have other public policies there where we say we can't sort out who is or is not supposed to do such a thing. Some teenagers may be able to drink responsibly and some not, but we don't implement a policy of saying, okay, if you're a straight a student, you can buy alcohol, and if you're not, you can't buy alcohol. No, we just say, if you're a teenager, you can't buy alcohol. We may not want to have complex public policies. So while I would certainly talk about it, and it's not unreasonable to imagine that people who've survived the infection should not have to get vaccinated, I think that would not be a crazy thing to discuss or even to implement. Generally speaking, I would be in favor of mandated vaccination, and again with the idea not being we will arrest people or something, but for example, I don't think healthcare workers should be able to perform their duties without being vaccinated. When you go to the doctor, you don't expect the doctor to infect you with his disease. That's the opposite of what you expect when you go to a doctor. I think that hospital systems that mandate that their employees be vaccinated are well within their rights and they should do that. Yeah. I have not understood how we can't have hospitals and other places where health care is dispensed. The idea that we have 23% of healthcare workers currently. I have to look at that. I've seen a lot of cases recently where there was some resistance in various hospital systems, but in the end, only 100 or 200 people simply refused to get vaccinated and, and, you know, were let go most of the time. What I've seen is that when those things have been implemented, they have been effective. The same with the military, by the way. I never understood the argument in the military because if you can order people to battle and they run the risk of being shot and dying, why you can't order them to be vaccinated. And well, the subtext and, and that and in fact, the military now, now that the vaccines have been approved, the army just said you're in the army now, you're getting vaccinated. It's not battle ready. You can't have outbreaks on ships or on airfields or in the front lines of disease when you're trying to fight a war. So, no, we vaccinate you. That's what we do. But the subtext to all of the controversy here, the fact that people think it's an extreme imposition to mandate a vaccine in this case, is the belief that there's something extraordinarily concerning about these vaccines. Right. Like you really are imposed. Is that really what people are saying? They're saying you are trying to give me something dangerous or they're saying you are trying to give me something against my will. Well, there's that, I mean, there's this bodily autonomy argument, but it does seem anchored to a belief. Here's what you get in this, again, this Wild West space of crazy and dangerous bloviation that you'll get people saying, listen, I am not antivaxx. I have had all of my standard vaccines and my kids got vaccinated. I'm not one of these yoga pants wearing wackos who is against vaccines because antivaxxers used to be primarily on the left, right? This right wing antivaxxer is kind of a new phenomenon. But go on. But for these vaccines, in particular, the mRNA vaccines, that's where I draw the line. All right, well, then get the Chinese, get the sinovac or sinopharm vaccine, which are inactivated virus vaccines, old technology, like many other vaccines you got or even Johnson and Johnson, right? Well, Johnson and Johnson is a new adenovirus vector. What they do is they took the AstraZeneca, I think took a Chimpanzee cold virus, which sounds really weird, but actually doesn't sound good. Yeah, it doesn't sound good, but it's actually smart because we're not really affected by Chimpanzee viruses. It's like your dog can be sick in your house, right? You don't get the sickness that your dog has because that virus is optimized to infect dogs, not humans. So giving you a Chimpanzee virus is just a way of transmitting that has been genetically modified to express the Spike protein on its surface. You mount an immune response against the Spike protein and you just use the so called adenovirus vector or the Johnson and Johnson uses a mild human cold virus that's been weakened even more and then they add the Spike protein to it and then that's how they deliver it. Those are relatively new technologies, the Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca identifiers. Although we have more of more precedent for those than we did for the mRNA vaccines. But like I said, the Sputnik vaccine, the Russian vaccine, the Chinese vaccines, those are based on older technology. If you want those, get those right. What's your answer to that? If you're opposed to I can only imagine that would be hard to do if one were willing, but I'm sure in this case they're not willing. Yes. So to bring this home because now we're hitting the three hour mark and we're now talking to five people who already agreed with us. It's wiz by Sam, the 3 hours of whiz by, at least for me, I won't say for you or the listeners. No, it's been great. So given all that we've said, and given just the experience we've had over the last now coming up to two years almost, what would you expect in the case of a much more dangerous and lethal virus? Let's say we had the ten x or worse version hit us two years from now. We have demonstrated that we can produce vaccines very quickly. I've come to think that we're sort of in the uncanny valley here with respect to pandemics, where it's just not, as you said, it's not dangerous enough to really nullify all political controversy. I got to think that if 10% of people or 20% of people were dying from COVID we wouldn't be having this conversation. That's right. People would just be getting vaccinated. Yes, I think that's exactly right. And I think, like I said, this virus was deadly enough to cause us harm, but not deadly enough for for us to take it sufficiently seriously. I think that if the next respiratory pandemic happens within our lifetimes or within 30 or 40 or 50 years, we will do better. But if it happens more than that, it'll be like people will forget. And this is why, by the way, plagues have been a part of the human experience and our ancestors try to warn us the plagues are in the Bible, they're in Shakespeare, they're in the Iliad. The beginning of the Iliad, the oldest work of Western literature, begins with a plague. It's Apollo's arrow brings down the plague upon the Greeks laying siege to Troy. So our ancestors tried to warn us about this human experience, this awful thing known as a plague. They put it in our religious traditions, they put it in our literary traditions and yet we didn't heed the warning of our ancestors. And partly this is the and I contrast this with an example with hurricanes. So residents of districts of parts of the United States that are afflicted by hurricanes when the meteorologists forecast a hurricane that people get watch the TV, they see the radar images, they know what to do when they take it seriously. Because hurricanes come every year, two or three years, bad ones every ten or 20 years. People remember, and they take it seriously. But something that happens at a time interval of every 50 to 100 years out of human memory tends to be forgotten. This is part of the whole denial problem we discussed earlier. So if the next pandemic occurs within the next ten or 20 or 30 years, I think we will do better. We'll take it more seriously. There'll be a lot of people that remember this COVID-19 and pay attention. And furthermore, as you mentioned, the world has changed in another way. I rarely am triumphalist about medicine. I can count on one or two hands. The number of medical advances I think have radically improved human wellbeing, penicillin is in that category. Insulin is in that category. Cat scans are in that category, aspirin is in that category. But also in this category are mRNA vaccines. I think this is a radical new technology that our descendants, when faced with plagues, will have at their disposal a tool such that they can effectively and in real time build a defense. So I think a future president of the United States might say, we have detected a new pathogen. It's serious. We're going to lock down for four months while our pharmaceutical companies make a vaccine and mint and make hundreds of millions of doses and then we're going to efficiently distribute it to you all and we're going to have minimal loss of life. That is a realistic potential future. And I think people might be more willing to tolerate such a response and such a common civic purpose given this new technology that's available. And finally, what are you expecting over the next year or two or three? When do we get out of pandemic mode with respect to COVID and get into the new normal of endemic illness? Because I got to assume the the possibility of getting rid of COVID isn't exactly no one's mind. No, we're not going to get rid of COVID for the reasons we discussed earlier. I discussed this a little in the book. Like the phases of a respiratory pandemic, the immediate phase, the intermediate phase and the post pandemic phase. We're going to enter the intermediate phase, as I had forecast in 2022, when we're going to reach herd immunity, pretty much everyone in our country will either be vaccinated or infected and will have acquired immunity that way. And then coronavirus will become endemic. It will circulate, it won't be eradicated. It will still kill people, but the numbers will drop and it will sort of become like another flu. It'll be bad, but it be kind of in the background. And this is what happens with respiratory pandemics. And then we're going to have a period of time in which we're coping with the aftershocks, where all the kids that miss school, all the workers that lost their jobs, kind of the great resignation, all the rejiggering of our economy, the debts that we're going to have to start to figure out how to repay our debts. There may be inflation because of the money the government borrowed and so on those aftershocks. And then I think that'll last for a couple of years, until 2024 or so. And then I think we'll enter a kind of post pandemic period, a kind of roaring twenty s of the twenty one st century similar to the roaring twenty s of the twenty th century where finally we will put the plague behind us. Where we will, you know, people will feel like we survived. You know, we let's party. So I think, I think that's sort of what's going to happen. We're going to have, as I said earlier, another wave next winter. And eventually this will tamp down. The clinical impact will tamp down soon, within a year, and the epidemiological impact will tamp down. But then we're going to have to deal with the psychological and social and economic aftershocks, and then those will eventually recede. And we'll see the other side of this, as our ancestors did, who also confronted serious plagues. Are you expecting to need a booster every year indefinitely, or do you think we're going to get a whole class of coronavirus nullify vaccines? Yeah, so I think that the forecast I just made depends sensitively on whether we see the emergence of new vaccine evading strains of the virus. The worst thing that could happen to us now would be that the virus we would have mutants of the virus which were much more deadly, let's say, killed 10% of the people instead of 1%, or fully evaded the vaccine. If that were to happen, we would be back at square one. I think the probability of that happening, a kind of tail risk event, is between one and 10%. I think it's unlikely to happen, but it's possible. And that would be awful, really, Calamitous, if that were to happen, where if we had a fully vaccine evading strain, which Omicrome does not appear to be or if we had a much more lethal strain of the virus which Omicuron is not. Now deaths will rise from Omicron not because each person, if infected with Omicone, is more likely to die than if infected with Delta. No, deaths will rise because the number of people infected is going to be much larger, because Omicrome is so much more spreadable and has some capacity for immune escape. So we are going to see a bump. The United States is going to lag Europe by about three or four or five weeks. So we should watch what's happening in Europe in terms of deaths and their response, because that's going to come to this country. The general overarching forecast I gave, I think, is going to be what happens unless we have the emergence of something that's not Omicurin, something that's fully vaccine evading, which I don't think Omicroin is, but we don't know for sure yet, or much deadlier, which I don't think Omicrin is, but we don't know for sure yet. If that happens, then we're back at square one and so on. On the boosters, I think if you've had two shots, you should get a booster. I got my booster. I think that's quite sensible. There's evidence that it will be helpful, including against Omicron, and I think that there's a good possibility that we will have to get coronavirus shots in some time interval between every year, like we do for Flu and every ten years that we do for Tetanus. So I can imagine a future in which every three to five years you get go to your doctor and you get a coronavirus shot that is updated for the latest strains of the virus. Right. Well, I can't help but notice that with a last name like Christopher, you're well positioned to pronounce the name of each new variant. I joked when they first said they were using the Greek alphabet, which only has 24 letters. I was like, this is not enough, you know, we're gonna we should have used the Cambodia Alpha or the Khmer alphabet. I think it has 74 letters, because we're going to run out of letters. And then there was also this whole political thing where they skipped the Greek letter C. Yeah, right, yeah. Which looks like the Chinese leader. Yeah. What a stupid thing. Like we're going to offend the Chinese leader because we happen to use a Greek letter and they also skip new and you because it would be the new strain. It would sound like people would confuse it with any w. I think they should have just stuck with then it wouldn't be called omaker if you call something else. Anyway. Thank you, Sam. It's been great talking to you. Likewise. Thanks again for all your time. And again, your book is Apollo's Arrow, which is out in paperback and audio, etc. Here. Always great to talk to you, Nicholas. Until next time. Yeah, exactly. Thanks, man. I'll talk to you later./n
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+Today I spoke with Anel Seth. He is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex and founding co director of the Sackler Center for Consciousness Science. And he's focused on the biological basis of consciousness and is studying it in a very multidisciplinary way, bringing neuroscience and mathematics and artificial intelligence and computer science, psychology, philosophy, psychiatry, all these disciplines together in his lab. He is the editor in chief of the academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, published by Oxford University Press, and he has published more than 100 research papers in a variety of fields. His background is in natural sciences and computer science and AI, and he also did postdoctoral research for five years at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego under Gerald Adelman, the NOPA laureate. And we cover a lot of ground here. We really get into consciousness in all its aspects. We start with the hard problem, then talk about where consciousness might emerge in nature, talk about levels of consciousness, anesthesia, sleep, dreams, the waking state. We talk about perception as a controlled hallucination, different notions of the self conscious, AI, many things here. I found that all fascinating, and I hope you do as well. And so, without further delay, I bring you on. Neil Seth. I am here with Anniel Seth. Anniel, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for inviting me. It's a pleasure. So I think I first discovered you I believe I'd seen your name associated with various papers, but I think I first discovered you the way many people had after your Ted Talk. You gave a much loved Ted Talk. Perhaps you can briefly describe your scientific and intellectual background. It's quite a varied background, actually. I mean, I think my intellectual interest has always been in understanding the physical and biological basis of consciousness and what practical implications that might have in neurology and psychiatry. But when I was an undergrad student at Cambridge in the early 1990s, consciousness was certainly as a student then and then in a place like Cambridge, not a thing you could study scientifically. It was still very much the domain of philosophy. And I was still at that time, I still had this kind of idea that physics was going to be the way to solve every difficult problem in science and philosophy. So I started off studying physics. But then through the undergrad years, I got diverted towards psychology as more of a direct route to these issues of great interest, and ended up graduating with a degree in experimental psychology. After that, I moved to Sussex University, where I am now actually again, to do a master's and a PhD in computer science and AI. And this was partly because of the need, I felt, the time to move beyond these box and arrow models of cognition that were so dominating psychology and cognitive science in the 90s towards something that had more explanatory power and the rise of connectionism and all these new methods and tools in AI seemed to provide that. So I stayed at Sussex and did a PhD, actually, in an area which is now called artificial life. And I became quite diverted, actually. Ended up doing a lot of stuff in ecological modeling and thinking a lot more here about how brains, bodies, and environments interact and co construct cognitive processes. But I sort of left consciousness behind a little bit then. And so when I finished my PhD in 2000, I went to San Diego, to the Neuroscience Institute, to work with Gerald Edelman, because certainly then San Diego was one of the few places, certainly, that I knew of at the time that you could legitimately study consciousness and work on the neural basis of consciousness. Edelman was there. Francis Crick was across the road at the Salk Institutes. People were really doing this stuff there. So I stayed there for about six years and finally started working on consciousness, but bringing together all these different, you know, different traditions of of math, physics, computer science, as well as the tools of cognitive neuroscience. And then for the last ten years, I've been back at Sussex, where I've been running a lab, and it's called the Sackler Center for Consciousness Science, and it's one of the growing number of labs that are explicitly dedicated to solving or studying, at least the brain and biological basis of consciousness. Yeah, well, that's a wonderful pedigree. I've heard stories, and I never met Edelman. I've read his books, and I'm familiar with his work on consciousness, but he was famously a titanic ego, if I'm not mistaken. I don't want you to say anything you're not comfortable with, but everyone who I've ever heard have an encounter with Edelman was just amazed at how much space he personally took up in the conversation. I've heard that too, and I think there's some truth to that. What I can say from the other side is that when I worked for him and with him firstly, it was an incredible experience, and I felt very lucky to have that experience because he had a large ego. But he also knew a lot, too. He really had been around and had contributed to major revolutions in biology and neuroscience, but he treated the people he worked with, I think, often very kindly. And one of the things that was very clear in San Diego at the time, he didn't go outside of the Neurosciences Institute that much. It was very much his empire. But when you were within it, you got a lot of his time. So I remember many occasions just being in the office, and most days I would be called down for a discussion with Edelman about this subject or that subject or this new paper or that new paper. And that was a very instructive experience for me. I know he was quite difficult in many interviews and conversations outside the NSI, which is a shame, because his legacy really is pretty extraordinary. I'm sure we'll get on to this later, but one of the other reasons I went there was one of the main reasons I went there was because I'd read some of the early work on dynamic core theory, which has later become Giuliotoni's very prominent integrated information theory. And I was under the impression that Giulio Tanoni was still going to be there when I got there in 2001. But he hadn't. He left, and he wasn't really speaking much with Edelman at the time. And it was a shame that they didn't continue their interaction. And when we tried to organize Festriff, the few of us, for Ableman some years ago now, it was quite difficult to get the people together that had really been there and worked with him at various times of his career. I think of the people that have gone through the NSI and worked with Abelman, their extraordinary range of people who've contributed huge amounts, not just in consciousness research, but in neuroscience generally, and of course, in molecular biology before that. So it was a great year, great experience for me. But yeah, I know he could also be pretty difficult at times too. He had to have a pretty thick skin. So we have a massive interest in common. No doubt we have many others, but consciousness is really the center of the bullseye, as far as my interests go, and really, as far as anyone's interests go, if they actually think about it, it really is the most important thing in the universe because it's the basis of all of our happiness and suffering and everything we value. It's the space in which anything that matters can matter. So the fact that you are studying it and thinking about it as much as you are just makes you the perfect person to talk to. I think we should start with many of the usual starting points here, because I think they're the usual starting points for a reason. Let's start with a definition of consciousness. How do you define it? Now, I think it's kind of a challenge to define consciousness. There's a sort of easy folk definition, which is that consciousness is the presence of any kind of subjective experience whatsoever for a conscious organism. There is a phenomenal world of subjective experience that has the character of being private, that's full of perceptual, qualia or content, colors, shapes, beliefs, emotions, other kinds of feeling states. There is a world of experience that can go away completely. In states like general anesthesia or dreamless sleep, it's very easy to define it that way. To define it more technically is always going to be a bit of a challenge. And I think sometimes there's too much emphasis put on having a consensus technical definition of something like consciousness, because history of science has shown us many times that definitions evolve along with our scientific understanding of a phenomenon. We don't sort of take the definition and then transcribe it into scientific knowledge in a unidirectional way, so long as we're not talking past each other. And we agree that consciousness picks out a very significant phenomenon in nature, which is the presence of subjective experience, then I think we're on reasonably safe terrain. Many of these definitions of consciousness are circular. We're just substituting another word for consciousness in the definition like sentience or awareness or subjectivity or even something like qualia, I think is parasitic on the undefined concept of consciousness. I think that's right. But then there's also a lot of confusions people make too. So I'm always surprised by how often people confuse consciousness with self consciousness. And I think conscious experience of selfred are part of conscious experiences as a whole, but only a subset of those experiences. And then there are arguments about whether there's such a thing as phenomenal consciousness that's different from access consciousness, where phenomenal consciousness refers to this impression that we have of a very rich conscious scene, perhaps envisioned before us now that might exceed what we have cognitive access to. And other people will say, well, no, there's no such thing as phenomenal consciousness beyond access consciousness. So there's a certain circularity. I agree with you there. But there are also these important distinctions that can lead to a lot of confusion when we're discussing the relevance of certain experiments. I want to just revisit the point you just made about not transcribing a definition of a concept that we have into our science as a way of capturing reality. And and there are things about which we have a full psychological sense which completely break apart once you start studying them at the level of the brain. So something like memory, for instance. We have the sense that it's one thing intuitively, pre scientifically. We have the sense that to remember something, whatever it is, is more or less the same operation regardless of what it is. Remembering what you ate for dinner last night, remembering your name, remembering who the first president of the United States was, remembering how to swing a tennis racket. These are things that we have this one word for. But we know neurologically that they're quite distinct operations, and you can disrupt one and have the other intact. The promise has been that consciousness may be something like that, that we could be similarly confused about it, although I don't think we can be. I think consciousness is unique as a concept in this sense. And this is why I'm taken in more by the so called hard problem of consciousness than I think you are. I think we should talk about that. But before we do, I think the definition that I want to put in play, which I know you're quite familiar with, is the one that the philosopher Thomas Nagel put forward, which is that consciousness is the fact that it's like something to be a system, whatever that system is. So if a bat is conscious. This comes from his famous essay what Is It Like to Be a Bat? If a bat is conscious, whether or not we can understand what it's like to be a bat, if it is like something to be a bat, that is consciousness. In the case of a bat, however inscrutable it might be, however impossible it might be to map that experience onto our own, if we were to trade places with a bat that would not be synonymous with the lights going out, there is something that's like to be a bat, if a bat is conscious. That definition, though, it's really not one that is easy to operationalize and it's not a technical definition. There's something sufficiently rudimentary about that, that it has always worked for me. And when we begin to move away from that definition into something more technical, my experience has been, and we'll get to this as we go into the details, that the danger is always that we wind up changing the subject to something else that seems more tractable. We're no longer talking about consciousness in Nagel's sense. We're talking about attention, or we're talking about reportability or mere access or something. So how do you feel about Nagal's definition as a starting point? I like it very much as a starting point. I think it's pretty difficult to argue with that as a very basic, fundamental expression of what we mean by consciousness in the round. So I think that's fine. I partly disagree with you. I partly disagree with you. I think, when we think about the idea that consciousness might be more than one thing, and here I'm much more sympathetic to the view that heuristically at least the best way to scientifically study consciousness and philosophically, to think about it as well, is to recognize that we might be misled about the extent to which we experience consciousness as a unified phenomenon. And there's a lot of mileage in recognizing how just like the example for memory, recognizing how conscious experiences of the world and of the self can come apart in various different ways. Just to be clear, actually, I agree with you there, we'll get into that, but I completely agree with you there that we could be misled about how unified consciousness is. The thing that's irreducible to me is this difference between there being something that it's like and not the lights are on or they're not. There are many different ways in which the lights can be on in ways that would surprise us. Or, for instance, it's quite possible that the lights are on in our brains in more than one spot. We'll talk about split brain research, perhaps, but they're very counterintuitive ways the lights could be on. But just the question is always is there something that it's like to be that bit of information processing or that bit of matter? And that is always the cash value of a claim for consciousness. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think that it's perfectly reasonable to put the question in this way, that for a conscious organism, it is something like it is to be that organism. And the thought is that there's going to be some physical, biological informational basis to that distinction. Now, you've written about why we really don't need to waste much time on the hard problem. Let's remind people what the hard problem is. David Chalmers has been on the podcast and I've spoken about it with other people, but perhaps you want to introduce us to The Hard Problem briefly. The Hard Problem has been, rightly so, one of the most influential philosophical contributions to the consciousness of debate for the last 20 years or so. And it goes right back to Descartes. And I think it encapsulates this fundamental mystery that we've started talking about now that for some physical systems, there is also this inner universe, there is the presence of conscious experience. There is something it is like to be that system. But for other systems, tables, chairs, probably most computers, probably all computers these days, there is nothing it is like to be that system. And what the hard problem does, it pushes that intuition a bit further, and it distinguishes itself from the easy problem in neuroscience. And the easy problem, according to charmers, is to figure out how the brain works in all its functions, in all its detail. So to figure out how we do perception, how we utter certain linguistic phrases, how we move around the world adaptively, how the brain supports perception, cognition, behavior in all its richness, in a way that would be indistinguishable from and here's the key, really, in a way that would be indistinguishable from an equivalent that had no phenomenal properties at all, that completely lacked conscious experience. The hard problem is understanding how and why any solution to the easy problem, any explanation of how the brain does what it does in terms of behavior perception, so on how and why any of this should have anything to do with conscious experiences at all. And it rests on this idea of the conceivability of zombies. And this is one reason I don't really like it very much. Hard Problem has it has its conceptual power over us because it asks us to imagine systems, philosophical zombies that are completely equivalent in terms of their function and behavior to you or to me or to any or to a conscious bat. But that instantiate, no phenomenal properties at all, the lights are completely off for these philosophical zombies. And if we can imagine such a system, if we can imagine such a thing, a philosophical zombie, you or me, then it does become this enormous challenge to think, well, then what is it? Or what could it be about real me, real you, real conscious bad that gives rise, that requires or entails that there are also these phenomenal properties, that there is something, it is like to be you or me or the bad. And it's because Charmers would argue that such things are conceivable that the hard problem seems like a really huge problem. Now, I think this is a little bit of we've moved on a little bit from these conceivability arguments. Firstly, I just think that they're pretty weak. And the more you know about a system, the more we know about the easy problem, the less convincing it is to imagine a zombie alternative. Think about you're a kid, you look up at the sky and you see a seven four seven flying overhead, and somebody asks you to imagine a seven four seven flying backwards. Well, you can imagine a seven four seven flying backwards. But the more you learn about aerodynamics, about engineering, the harder it is to conceive of a seven four seven flying backwards. You simply can't build on that way. And that's my worry about this kind of conceivability argument that to me, I really don't think I can imagine in a serious way the existence of a philosophical zombie. And if I can't imagine a zombie, then the hard problem loses some of its force. That's interesting. I don't think it loses all of its force, or at least it doesn't for me. For me, the hard problem has never really rested on the zombie argument, although I know Chalmers did a lot with the zombie argument. So let's just stipulate that philosophical zombies are impossible. They're at least what's called in the jargon nomologically impossible. It's just a fact that we live in the universe where if you built something that could do what I can do, that something would be conscious. So there is no zombie sam that's possible. And let's just also add what you just said, that really when you get to the details, you're not even conceiving of it being possible. It's not even conceptually possible. You're not thinking it through enough, and if you did, you would notice it break apart. But for me, the hard problem is really that with consciousness, any explanation doesn't seem to promise the same sort of intuitive closure that other scientific explanations do. It's analogous to whatever it is, and we'll get to some of the possible explanations. But it's not like something like life, which is an analogy that you draw that many scientists have drawn to how we can make a breakthrough here. It used to be that people thought life could never be explained in mechanistic terms. There was a philosophical point of view called vitalism here which suggested that you needed some animating spirit, some elan vital in the wheelworks to make sense of the fact that living systems are different from dead ones. The fact that they can reproduce and repair themselves from injury and metabolize and all the functions we see a living system engage which define what it is to be alive. It was thought very difficult to understand any of that in mechanistic terms. And then lo and and behold, we managed to do that. The difference for me is, and I'm happy to have you prop up this analogy more than I have, but the difference for me is that everything you want to say about life, with the exception of conscious life, we have to leave consciousness off the table here. Everything else you want to say about life can be defined in terms of extrinsic functional relationships among material parts. So, you know, reproduction and growth and healing and metabolism and homeostasis all of this is physics and need not be described in any other way. And even something like perception. The transduction of energy, let's say vision, light energy into electrical and chemical energy in the brain and the mapping of a visual space onto a visual cortex. All of that makes sense in mechanistic physical terms until you add this piece of oh, but for some of these processes, there's something that it's like to be that process. For me, it just strikes me as a false analogy. And with or without zombies, the hard problem still stays hard. I think it's an open question whether the analogy will turn out to be false or not. It's difficult for us now to put ourselves back in the mindset of somebody 80 years ago, 100 years ago, when vitalism was quite prominent, and whether the sense of mystery surrounding something that was alive seemed to be as inexplicable as consciousness seems to us today. So it's easy to say with hindsight, I think that life is something different. But we've encountered, or rather scientists and philosophers over centuries have encountered things that have seemed to be inexplicable, that have turned out to be explicable. So I don't think we should rule out a priority that there's going to be something really different this time about consciousness. There's, I think, a more heuristic aspect of this is that if we run with the analogy of life, what that leads us to do is to isolate the different phenomenal properties that coconstitute what it is for us to be conscious. We can think about, and we'll come to this, I'm sure we think about conscious selfhood as distinct from conscious perception of the outside world. We can think about conscious experiences of volition and of agency that are also very sort of central to certainly our experience of self. These give us phenomenological explanatory targets that we can then try to account for with particular kinds of mechanisms. It may turn out at the end of doing this that there's some residue, there is still something that is fundamentally puzzling, which is this hard problem residue. Why are there any lights on for any of these kinds of things? Isn't it all just perception? But maybe it won't turn out like that. And I think to give us the best chance of it not turning out like that, there's a positive and a negative aspect. The positive aspect is that we need to retain a focus on phenomenology. And this is another reason why I think the hard easy problem distinction can be a little bit unhelpful. Because in addressing the easy problem, we are basically instructed to not worry about phenomenology. All we should worry about is function and behavior. And then the hard problem kind of gathers within its remit everything to do with phenomenology. In this central mystery of why is there some experience rather than no experience? The alternative approach and this is something I've kind of caricatured as the real problem, but David Chalmers himself has called it the mapping problem. And Varela. Francisco Varella talks about a similar set of ideas with his neurophenomenology is to not try to solve the hard problem to court, not try to explain how it is possible that consciousness comes to be part of the universe, but rather to individuate different kinds of phenomological properties and draw some explanatory mapping between neural, biological, physical mechanisms and these phenomenological properties. Now, once we've done that and we can begin to explain not why is there an experience at all, but why are certain experiences the way they are and not other ways? And we can predict when certain experiences will have particular phenomenal characters and so on, then we'll have done a lot more than we can currently do. And we may have to make use of novel kinds of conceptual frameworks. Maybe frameworks like information processing will run their course and will require other more sophisticated kinds of descriptions of dynamics and probability in order to build these explanatory bridges. So I think we can get a lot closer. And the negative aspect is why should we ask more of a theory of consciousness than we should ask of other kinds of scientific theories? And I know people have talked about this on your your podcast before as well, but we do seem to want more of an explanation of consciousness than we would do of an explanation in biology or physics that it somehow should feel intuitively right to us. And I wonder why this is such a big deal when it comes to consciousness. Because we're trying to explain something fundamental about ourselves doesn't necessarily mean that we should apply different kinds of standards to an explanation that we would apply in other fields of science. It just may not be that we get this feeling that something is intuitively correct when it is in fact a very good scientific account of the origin of phenomenal properties. Certainly scientific explanations are not instantiations. There's no sense in which a good theory of consciousness should be expected to suddenly realize the phenomenal properties that it's explaining. But also, I think I worry that we are too much of theories of consciousness this way. Yeah, well, we'll move forward into the details and I'll just flag moments where I feel like the hard problem should be causing problems for us. I do think it's not a matter of asking too much of a theory of consciousness here. I think there are very few areas in science where the accepted explanation is totally a brute fact which just has to be accepted because it is the only explanation that works. But it's not something that actually illuminates the transition from atoms to some higher level phenomenon. Again, for everything we could say about life, even the very strange details of molecular biology just how information in the genome gets out and creates the rest of a human body, it still runs through. When you look at the details, it's surprising that part is difficult to visualize. But the more we visualize it, the more we describe it, the closer we get to something that is highly intuitive. Even something like the flow of water. The fact that water molecules in its liquid state are loosely bound and move past one another. Well, that seems exactly like what should be happening at the micro level so as to explain the macro level property of the wetness of water and the fact that it has characteristics, higher level characteristics that you can't attribute to atoms but you can attribute to collections of atoms like turbulence, say. Whereas with, you know, if consciousness just happens to require some minimum number of information processing units knit together in a certain configuration, firing at a certain hertz, and you change any of those parameters and the lights go out. That for me still seems like a mere brute fact that doesn't explain consciousness. It's just a correlation that we decide is the crucial one. And I've never heard a description of consciousness of the sort that we will get to like integrated information tanoni's phrase that unpacks it. Any more than that and you can react to that. But then I think we should just get into the details and see how it all sounds. Sure. I'll just react very briefly, which is that I think I'd also be terribly disappointed. If you look at the answer in a book of nature and it turned out to be, yes, you need 612,000 neurons wired up in a small world network and that's it. That does seem, of course, ridiculous and arbitrary and unsatisfying. The hope is that as we progress beyond, if you like, just brute correlates of conscious states towards accounts that provide more satisfying bridges between mechanism and phenomenology that explain, for instance, why a visual experience has the phenomenal character that it has and not some other kind of phenomenal character like an emotion, that it won't seem so arbitrary. And that as we follow this route, which is an empirically productive route and I think that's important, that we can actually do science with this route. We can try to think about how to operationalize phenomenology in various different ways. Very difficult to think how to do science and just solve the hard problem head on. At the end of that, I completely agree there might be still this residue of mystery, this. Kernel of something fundamental left unexplained. But I don't think we can take that as a given, because we can't well, I certainly can't predict what I would feel as intuitively satisfying when I don't know what the explanations that bridge mechanism and phenomenology are going to look like in ten or 20 years time. We've already moved further from just saying it's this area or that area to synchrony, which is still kind of unsatisfying, to now, I think, some emerging frameworks like predictive processing and integrated information, which aren't completely satisfying either. But they hinted a trajectory where we're beginning to draw closer connections between mechanism and phenomenology. Okay, well, let's dive into those hints. But before we do, I'm just wondering, phylogenetically, in terms of comparing ourselves to so called lower animals, where do you think consciousness emerges? Do you think there's something that's like to be a fly, say, that's a really hard problem. I have to be agnostic about this. And again, it's just striking how people in general's views on these things seems to have changed over the last recent decades. It seems completely unarguable to me that other mammals, all other mammals, have conscious experiences of one sort or another. I mean, we share so much in the way of the relevant neuro anatomy, and neurophysiology exhibits so many of the same behaviors that it would be remarkable to claim otherwise. It actually wasn't that long ago that you could still hear people say that consciousness was so dependent on language that they wondered whether human infants were conscious, to say nothing of dogs and anything else that's not human. Yeah, that's absolutely right. That's a terrific point. And this idea that consciousness was intimately and constitutively bound up with language or with higher order executive processing of one sort or another, I think just exemplifies this really pernicious anthropocentrism that we tend to bring to bear sometimes without realizing it. We think we're super intelligent, we think we're conscious, we're smart, and we need to judge everything by that benchmark. And what's the most advanced thing about humans? Well, if you're gifted with language, you're going to say language. And now, already, with a bit of hindsight, seems to me anyway rather remarkable that people should make these I can only think of them as just quite naive errors to associate consciousness with language. Not to say that consciousness and language don't have any intimate relation. I think they do. Language shapes a lot of our conscious experiences. But certainly it's a very, very poor criterion with which to attribute subjective states to other creatures. So mammals for sure, I mean, mammals for sure, but that's easy because they're pretty similar to humans and primates being mammals. But then it gets more complicated. And you think about birds diverge a reasonable amount of time ago, but still have brain structures that one can establish analogies, in some cases homologies with mammalian brain structures. And in some species, scrub jays and corvids generally pretty sophisticated behavior, too. It seems very possible to me that birds have conscious experiences and I'm aware underlying all this. The only basis to make these judgments is in light of what we know about the neural mechanisms underlying consciousness and the functional and behavioral properties of consciousness in mammals has to be this kind of slow extrapolation because we lack the mechanistic answer and we can't look for it in another species. But then you get beyond birds and you get out to I then like to go way out on a phylogenetic branch to the octopus, which I think is an extraordinary example of convergent evolution. I mean, they're very smart, they have a lot of neurons, but they diverged from the human line, I think as long ago as sponges or something like that. I mean, really very little in common, but they have incredible differences too. Three hearts, eight legs, arms. I'm never sure whether it's a leg or an arm that behave semiautonomously and one is left when you spend time with these creatures. I've been lucky enough to spend a week with them in a lab in Naples. You certainly get the impression of another conscious presence there, but of a very different one. And this is also instructive because it brings us a little bit out of this assumption that we can fall into that there is one way of being conscious, and that's our way. There is a huge space of possible minds out there and the octopus is a very definite example of a very different mind and very likely conscious mind too. Now, when we get down to not really down, I don't like this idea of organisms being arranged on a single scale like this. But certainly creatures like fish, insects are simpler in all sorts of ways than mammals. And here it's really very difficult to know where to draw the line if indeed there is a line to be drawn, if it's not just a gradual shading out of consciousness with gray areas in between and no categorical divide, which I think is equally possible. Many fish display behaviors which seem suggestive of consciousness. They will self administer analgesia when they're given painful stimulation. They would avoid places that have been associated with painful stimulation and so on. You hear things like the precautionary principle come into play that given that suffering, if it exists, conscious suffering is a very aversive state and it's ethically wrong to impose that state on other creatures. We should tend to assume that creatures are conscious unless we have good evidence that they're not. So we should put the bar a little bit lower in most cases. Let's talk about some of the aspects of consciousness that you have identified as being distinct. There are at least three. You've spoken about the level of consciousness, the contents of consciousness and the experience of having a conscious self that many people, as you said, conflate with consciousness as a mental property. There's obviously a relationship between these things, but they're not the same. Let's start with this notion of the level of consciousness, which really isn't the same thing as wakefulness. Can you break those apart for me? How is being conscious, non synonymous with being awake in the human sense? Sure. Let me just first amplify what you said, that in making these distinctions, I'm certainly not claiming pretending that these dimensions of level content and self pick out completely independent aspects of conscious experiences. There are lots of interdependencies. I just think they're heuristically useful ways to address the issue. We can do different kinds of experiments and try to isolate distinct phenomenal properties and their mechanistic basis by making these distinctions. Now, when it comes to conscious level, I think that the simplest way to think of this is is more or less as a scale. In this case, it's from when the lights are completely out, when you're dead, brain death, or under general anaesthesia, or perhaps in very, very deep states of sleep all the way up to vague levels of awareness which correlate with wake from this. So when you're very drowsy to vivid awake, alert, full conscious experience that I'm certainly having now feel very awake and alert, and my conscious level is kind of up there. Now, in most cases, the level of consciousness articulated this way will go along with wakefulness or physiological arousal. When you fall asleep, you lose consciousness, at least in early stages. But there are certain cases that exist which show that they're not completely the same thing on both sides. So you can be conscious when you're asleep. Of course, we know this. This is called dreaming. So you're physiologically asleep, but you're having a vivid inner life there and on the other side. And this is where consciousness science, the rubber of consciousness science, hits the road of neurology. You have states where, behaviorally, you have what looks like arousal. This used to be called the vegetative state. It's been kind of renamed several times. Now, the wakeful unawareness state where the idea is that the body is still going through physiological cycles of arousal from sleep to wake, but there is no consciousness happening at all. The lights are not on. So these two things can be separated. And it's a very productive and very important line of work to try to isolate what's the mechanistic basis of conscious level independently from the mechanistic basis of physiological arousal. Yeah, and a few other distinctions to make here. So also, general anesthesia is quite distinct from deep sleep, just as a matter of neurophysiology. Certainly general anesthesia is nothing like sleep, certainly deep levels of general anesthesia. So whenever you go for an operation and the anesthesiologist is trying to make you feel more comfortable by just saying something like, yeah, we'll just put you to sleep for a while and then you'll wake up and we'll be done, they are lying to you for good. Reason. It's kind of nice just to feel that you're going to sleep for a bit, but the state of general anesthesia is very different and for very good reason. If you were just put into a state of sleep, you would wake up as soon as the operation started and that wouldn't be very pleasant. It's surprising how far down you can take people in general anesthesia almost to a level of isoelectric brain activity where there is pretty much nothing going on at all and still bring them back. Many people now have had the non experience of general anesthesia. And in some weird way, I now look forward to it the next time I get to have this, because it's a very reassuring experience, because there is absolutely nothing. It's complete oblivion. When you go to sleep as well, you can sleep for a while and you'll wake up and you might be confused about how much time has passed, especially if you've just flown across some time zones or stayed up too late, something like that. Might not be sure what time it is, but you'll still have this sense of some time having passed. Except we have this problem, or some people have this problem of anesthesia awareness, which is every person's worst nightmare if they care to think about it, where people have the experience of the surgery because for whatever reason, the anesthesia hasn't taken them deep enough and yet they're immobilized and can't signal that they're not deep enough. No, absolutely. But that's a failure of anesthesia. It's not a characteristic of the anesthetic state. Do you know who had that experience? You've mentioned him on the podcast. Really? Francisco Varella. Oh, really? I didn't know that. I did not know that. Yeah, Francisco was getting a liver transplant and experienced some part of it. Well, that's pretty horrific. Could not have been fun. Yeah, I mean, of course, because the thing there is under most serious operations, you're also administered with a muscle paralytic so that you don't jerk around when you're being operated on. And that's why it's it's particularly nightmare scenario but you know if anesthesia is working properly certainly the times I've had during an anesthesia you start counting to ten or start counting backwards from ten you get to about eight and then instantly you're back somewhere else very confused, very disoriented but there is no sense of time having passed. It's just complete oblivion. And that I found that really reassuring because we can think conceptually about not being bothered about all the times we were not conscious before we were born and therefore we shouldn't worry too much about all the times we're not going to be conscious after we die. But to experience these moments of complete oblivion during a lifetime, or rather the edges of them, I think is a very enlightening kind of experience to have. Although there's a place here where the hard problem does emerge because it's very difficult, perhaps impossible to distinguish between a failure of memory and oblivion. Has consciousness really been interrupted? Take anesthesia and deep sleep as separate but similar in the sense that most people think there was a hiatus in consciousness. I'm prepared to believe that that's not true of deep sleep, but we just don't remember what it's like to be deeply asleep. I'm someone who often doesn't remember his dreams, and I'm prepared to believe that I dream every night. And we know even in the case with general anesthesia, they give amnesia drugs so that you won't remember whatever they don't want you to remember. And I recently had the experience of not going under a full anesthesia but having what's called a twilight sleep for a procedure. And there was a whole period afterwards where I was coming to about a half hour that I don't remember, and it was clear to my wife that I wasn't going to remember it, but she and I were having a conversation. I was talking to her about something. I was saying how perfectly recovered I was and how miraculous it was to be back. And she said, yeah, but you're not going to remember any of this. You're not going to remember this conversation. And I said, okay, well, let's test it. You say something now and we'll see if I remember it. And she said, this is the test dummy. You're not going to remember this part of the conversation, and I have no memory of that part of the conversation. You're right, of course, that even in stages of deep sleep, people underestimate the presence of conscious experiences. And this has been demonstrated by experiments called serial awakening experiments where you'll just wake somebody up various times during sleep cycles and ask them straight away what was in your mind. And quite often people will report often very simple sorts of experiences static images and so on in stages of nonREM, non dreaming sleep. And I concede that there may be a contribution of amnesia to the post hoc impression of what general anesthesia was like. But at the same time, there's all the difference in the world between the twilight zone and full on general anesthesia where it's not just that I don't remember anything. It's the real sense of a hiatus of consciousness, of a complete interruption and a complete instantaneous resumption of that experience. Yeah, I've had a general anesthetic as well, and there is something quite uncanny about disappearing and being brought back without a sense of any intervening time because you're not aware of the time signature of having been in deep sleep. But there clearly is one. And the fact that many people can go to sleep and set an intention to wake up at a certain time, and they wake up at that time often to the minute, it's clear there's some timekeeping function happening in our brains all the while. But there's something about a general anesthetic which just seems like, okay, the hard drive just got rebooted and who knows how long the computer was off for? Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about these other features. We've just dealt with a level of consciousness. Talk to me about the contents of consciousness. How do you think about that? When we are conscious, then we're conscious of something. And I think this is what the large majority of consciousness research empirically focuses on. You take somebody who is conscious at a particular time and you can ask a few different questions. You can ask what aspects of their perception are unconscious and not reflected in any phenomenal properties and what aspects of their perception are reflected in their phenomenal property. What's the difference between conscious and unconscious processing, if you like? What's the difference between different modalities of conscious perception? So at any one time we may certainly outside of the lab our conscious scene at any one time will have a very multimodal character. There'll be sound sight experiences of touch maybe if you're sitting down or holding something. And then a whole range of more self related experiences too of body ownership of all the signals coming from deep inside the body which are more relevant to self. But the basic idea of conscious content is to study what the mechanisms are that give rise to the particular content of a conscious scene at any one time. And here the reason it's useful to think of this as separate from conscious level is partly that we can appeal to different kinds of theories different kinds of theoretical and empirical frameworks. So the way I like to think about conscious perception is in terms of prediction in terms of what's often been called the Bayesian brain or unconscious inference from Helmholtz and so on. And the idea that perception in general works more from the top down or from the outside in than from the sorry, I got that wrong. Perception in Jet works more from the top down or the inside out rather than from the bottom up or the outside in. And this has a long history in philosophy as well back to Canton and long before that too. I mean, the straw man. The kind of the easily defeated idea about perception is that sensory signals impinge upon receptors and they percolate deeper and deeper into the brain. And at each stage of processing more complex operations are brought to bear. And at some point ignition happens or something happens and you're conscious of those sensory signals at that point. And I think this is kind of the wrong way to think about it that if you look at the problem of perception that brain's face and let's simplify it a lot now and just assume the problem is something like the following that the brain is locked inside a bony skull. And let's assume for the sake of this argument that perception is the problem of figuring out what's out there in the world that's giving rise to sensory signals that impinge on our sensory surfaces eyes and ears. Now, these sensory signals are going to be noisy and ambiguous. They're not going to have a one to one mapping with things out there in the world, whatever they may be. So perception has to involve this process of inference of best guessing in which the brain combines prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is with the sensory data to come up with its best guess about the causes of that sensory data. And in this view, what we perceive is constituted by these multilevel predictions that try to explain away or account for the sensory signals we perceive what the brain infers to have caused those signals, not the sensory signals themselves. In this view, there's nothing that it is for there to be raw sensory experience of any kind. All perceptual experience is an inference of one sort or another. And given that view, one can then start to ask all sorts of interesting experimental questions like well, what kinds of predictions? How do predictions or expectations affect what we consciously perceive? Consciously report what kinds of predictions may still go on under the hoods and not instantiate any phenomenal properties. But it gives us this set of tools that we can use to build bridges between phenomenology and mechanism. Again, in this case, the bridges are made up of the computational mechanisms of Bayesian inference as they might be implemented in neuronal circuitry. And so instead of looking for asking questions like is V one is early visual cortex associated with visual experience? We might ask questions like are Bayesian priors or posteriors associated with conscious phenomenology? Or Are prediction errors associated with conscious phenomenology? We can start to ask slightly, I think more sophisticated, bridging questions like that. Well, yeah, in your Ted Talk you talk about consciousness as a controlled hallucination and I think Chris Frith has called it a fantasy that coincides with reality. Can you say a little more about that and how that relates to the role of top down prediction in perception? Yeah, I think it's they're both very nice phrases and I think the phrase controlled hallucination actually has been very difficult to pin down where it came from. I heard it from Chris Frith as well originally and I've asked him and others where originally it came from. And we can trace it to a seminar given by Ramash Jane at UCSD sometime in the 90s. But it was a verbal there the trail goes cold. But anyway, the idea is sort of the following that we can bring to bear a naive realism about perception where we assume that what we visually perceive is the way things actually are in the real world. That there is a table in front of me that has a particular color, that has a piece of paper on it and so on. And that's vertical perception as distinct from hallucination where we have a perceptual experience that has no corresponding reference in the real world. And the idea of controlled hallucination or fantasy that coincides with reality is simply to say that normal perception is always a balance of sensory signals coming from the world and the interpretations, predictions that we bring to bear about the causes of those sensations. So we are always seeing what we expect to see. In this bayesian sense, we never just see the sensory data. Now normally we can see this all the time. It's built into our visual systems that light is expected to come from above because our visual systems have evolved in a situation where the sun is never below us. So that causes us to perceive shadows in a particular way. Rather we'll perceive curved surfaces as being curved one way or another under the assumption that light comes from. But we're not aware of having that constraint built deep into our visual system. But it's there. And the idea is that every perception that we have is constituted, partly constituted by these predictions, these interpretive powers that the brain brings to bear onto perceptual content. And that what we call hallucinations is just the tipping of the balance slightly more towards the brain's own internal predictions. Another good everyday example of this is if you go out on a day where there's lots of white fluffy clouds and you can see faces in clouds, if you look for them, this is periodlia. You can see patterns, you can see patterns in noise. Now that's a kind of hallucination there. You're seeing something that other people might not see. It's not accompanied by delusion, you know it's a hallucination, but it just shows how our perceptual content is always framed by our interpretation. Another good everyday example is dreams. Because of the dreams we know are a situation where our brain is doing something very similar to what it's doing in the waking state, except the frontal lobes have come offline enough so that there's just not the same kind of reality testing going on. And our perception in this case is not being constrained by outer stimuli, it's just being generated from within. But would this be an analogous situation where our top down prediction mechanisms are roving unconstrained by sensory data? I think yeah, dreams certainly show that you don't need sensory data to have vivid conscious perception because you don't have any sensory input apart from a bit of auditory input when you're dreaming. I think the phenomenology of dreams is interestingly different. Dream content is very much less constrained. There is this naive realism just goes nuts in dreams. Doesn't it mean things can change? People can change, identity locations can change, weird things happen all the time. You don't experience them as being weird. That's the weirdest part of dreams. The fact that it's not that they're so weird, it's that their weirdness is not detected. We don't care that they're so weird. Yeah. Which is, I think, a great example of how we often overestimate the insight we have about what our conscious experiences are like. We tend to assume that we know exactly what's happening in all our conscious experience all the time, whether it's weird or not. Dreams show that that's not always the case. But I think the idea of controlled hallucination goes it's as present in the normal and non dreaming perception as it is in dreaming. And it really is this idea that all our perception is constituted by our brain's predictions of the causes of sensory input. And most of the time, walking around the world, we will agree about this perceptual content. If I see a table and claim it's this color, you'll probably agree with me. We don't have to go into the philosophical inverted spectrum thing here. It's just a case of we tend to report the same sorts of things when faced with the same sorts of sensory inputs. So we don't think there's anything particularly constructed about the way we perceive things because we all agree on it. But then when something tips the balance, maybe it's under certain pharmacological stimulus, maybe it's in dreams, maybe it's in certain states of psychosis and mental illness, then people's predictions about the causes of sensory information will differ from one another. And if you're an outlier, then people will say, oh, now you're hallucinating because you're reporting something that isn't there. And my friend, the musician Baba Brinkman put it beautifully. He said what we call reality is just when we all agree about our hallucinations, which I think is a really nice way to put that. This leaves open the question what is happening when we experience something fundamentally new or have an experience where our expectations are violated? So we're using terms like predictions or expectations or models of the world. But I think there's a scope for some confusion here. Just imagine, for instance, that some malicious zookeeper put a fully grown tiger in your kitchen while you were sleeping tonight. I presume that when you come down for your morning coffee, you will see this tiger in the kitchen. Even though you have no reasonable expectation to be met by a tiger in the morning, I think it's safe to assume you'll see it even before you've had your cup of coffee. So, given this, what do we mean by expectations at the level of the brain? That's a very important point. This whole language of the Bayesian brain and predictive processing bandies around terms like prediction expectation and prediction error, surprise and all these things. It's very, very important to recognize that these terms don't only mean or don't really mean at all psychological surprise or explicit beliefs and expectations that I might hold. So certainly if I go down morning, I am not expecting to see a tiger. However, my visual system, when it encounters a particular kind of input, is still expecting. If there are sensory input that pick out things like edges it will fit will best interpret those as an edge. And if it will pick out stripes, it will interpret those as stripes. It's not unexpected to see something with an edge and it may not be unexpected to see something with a stripe. It may not even be unexpected from my brain's point of view to see something that looks a bit like a face. And those become low level best guesses about the causes of sensory input which then give rise to higher level predictions about those causes. And ultimately the best guess is that there's some kind of animal there and indeed that it's a tiger. So I don't think there's a conflict here. We can see new things because new things are built up from simpler elements for which we will have adequate predictions for built up over evolution and over development and over prior experience. And one thing you point out, at least in one of your papers maybe you did this in the Ted Talk that different contents of consciousness have different characters so that visual perception is object based in a way that interception is not. The sensing of experience like nausea, say, or even of an emotion like sadness does not have all of the features of perceiving an object in visual space. You're looking at an object in visual space. There's the sense of location. There's the sense that anything that has a front will also have a back. That if you walked around it, you would be given different views of it. None of which may ever repeat exactly. I'm looking at my computer now. I've probably never seen my computer from precisely this angle and if I walked around it I would see thousands of different slices of this thing in the movie of my life. And yet there's this unitary sense of an object in space that has a front and back and sides. And yet, of course, none of this applies when we're thinking about our internal experience. Do you have any more you want to say about that? Because that's a very interesting distinction which, again, is one of these places where the terminology we use for being aware of things or being conscious of things or perceiving things doesn't really get at the phenomenology very well. Now, thank you for raising that. I think this is a great point and something I've talked quite a lot about. There's a couple of elements here. So I'll start by talking about this phenomenology of objecthood that you beautifully described for vision there and then get on to this case of interreception and perception of the internal state of the body. So indeed, for most of us, most of the time visual experience is characterized by there being a world of objects around us. I see coffee cups on the table, computers in front of me and so on. Actually, that's not always the case. If I'm, for instance, trying to catch a cricket ball or a softball. Or something. Someone's thrown to me what my perceptual system is doing. There is not so much trying to figure out what's out there in the world. It's all geared towards the goal of catching the cricket ball. And there's a whole branch of psychology has roots in Gibsonian ecological psychology and William Power's perceptual control theory that sort of inverts things. And it says that has this whole tradition in thinking about perception and its interaction with behavior. I mean, we like to think that we perceive the world and then we behave. So we have perception in the control of controlling behavior, but we can also think of it the other way around and think of behavior controlling perception so that when we catch a cricket ball, what we're really doing is maintaining a perceptual variable to be a constant. In this case, it would be the acceleration of the angle of the ball to the horizon. If we keep that constant, we will catch the cricket ball. And if you reflect on the phenomenology of these things, if I'm engaged in an act like that, I'm not so much perceiving the world as distinct objects arranged in particular ways. I'm perceiving how well my catching the cricket ball is happening. Am I likely to catch it? Is it going well or not? That's a different kind of description of visual phenomenology. But most of them this will become important a bit later when we talk about why our experience inside of our bodies of being a body has the character that it has. I think it's more like catching a cricket ball, but we'll get to that in a second. But if we think now just back to when we're not catching things, we're just looking around and we see this visual scene populated by objects and you're absolutely right. That one way to think of that. Is that when I perceive an object to have a volumetric extension to be a three dimensional thing in the world occupying a particular location. What that means is that I'm perceiving how that object would behave if I were to interact with it in different ways. This has another tradition. Well, it's back to Gibson again and ecological psychology, but also sensory motor theory of Alvino and Kevin O'Reagan, that what I perceive is how I can interact with an object. I perceive an object as having a back not because I can see the back, but because my brain is encoding somehow how different actions would reveal that surface, the back of that object. And that's a distinctive kind of phenomenology in the language of predictive processing of the Bayesian brain. One thing I've been trying to do is cash out that account of the phenomenology of objecthood in terms of the kinds of predictions that might underlie it. And these turn out to be conditional or counterfactual predictions about the sensory consequences of action. So in order to perceive something as having objecthood, the thought is that my brain is encoding how sensory data would change if I were to move around it, if I were to pick it up, and so on and so forth. And if we think about the mechanics that might underlie that, they fall out quite naturally from this Bayesian brain perspective. Because to engage in predictive perception, to bring perceptual interpretations to bear on sensory data, our brain needs to encode something like a generative model. It needs to be able to have a model of the mapping from sensory data to or rather the mapping from something in the world to sensory data and be able to invert that mapping. That's how you do Bayesian inference in the brain. And if you've got a generative model that can invert that mapping, then that's capable of predicting what sensory signals would happen conditional on different kinds of actions. This is it brings in an extension of predictive processing that's technically called active inference, where we start to think about reducing prediction errors not only by updating one's predictions, but also by making actions to sort of make our predictions come true. But in any case, you can make some interesting empirical predictions about how our experience of something as an object depends on what the brain learns about ways of interacting with these objects. And we started to test some of these ideas in the lab because you can now use clever things like virtual reality and augmented reality to generate objects that will be initially unfamiliar, but that behave in weird ways when you try to interact with them. So you can either support or confound these kinds of conditional expectations and then try to understand what the phenomenological consequences of doing so are. And you can also account for situations where this phenomenology of objecthood seems to be lacking. So, for instance, in synesthesia, which is a very interesting phenomenon in consciousness research and I'm sure you know this, Sam, but a very canonical example of synesthesia is when is graphene color synesthesia. People may look at a black letter or number or graphene, and they will experience a color along with that experience, they will have a color experience, a concurrent color experience. This is very, very well established. What's often not focused on is that pretty much across the board in graphing color synesthesia synesthes, they don't make any confusion that the letter is actually red or actually green. They still experience the letter as black. They're just having an additional experience of color along with it. They don't confuse it as a property. So this is why whenever you see a kind of illustration of synapses with the letters colored in, it's a very, very poor illustration. I'm guilty of using those kinds of poor illustrations in the past. But this color experience does not have the phenomenology of objecthood. It lacks it. It doesn't appear to be part of an object in the outside world. Why not? Well, it doesn't exhibit the same kinds of sensory motor contingencies that an object that has a particular color does. So if I am looking at if I'm sympathetic and I'm looking at the letter F and I change your lighting conditions somewhat or move around it, then a really red F will change its luminance and reflectance properties in subtle but significant ways. But for my synesthetic experience, it's still just an F. So my experience with red doesn't change. So I think we can we can this is just a promising example of how concepts and mechanisms from within predictive perception can start to unravel some pervasive and modalitiespecific phenomenological properties of consciousness. I think it's worth emphasizing the connection between perception and action because it's one thing to talk about it in the context of catching a cricket ball, but when you talk about the evolutionary logic of having developed perceptual capacities in the first place, the link to action becomes quite explicit. We have not evolved to perceive the world as it is for some abstract epistemological reason. We've evolved to perceive what's biologically useful. And what's biologically useful is always connected, at least when you're talking about the outside world, to actions. If you can't move, if you can't act in any way, there would have been very little reason to evolve. A capacity for sight, for instance. Absolutely. I mean, there's that beautiful story I think of. Is it the sea slug or the sea snail or something of that sort? Some very simple marine creature that swims about during its juvenile phase looking for a place to settle. And once it's settled and it just starts filter feeding, it digests its own brain because it no longer has any need for perceptual competence now that it's not going to move anymore. And this is often used as a slightly unkind analogy for getting tenure in academia. But you're absolutely right that perception is not about figuring out really what's there. We perceive the world as it's useful for us to do so. And I think this is particularly important when we think about perception of the internal state of the body, which which you mentioned earlier, this whole domain of interreception. Because if you think what are brains for fundamentally, right? They're not for perceiving the world as it is. They're certainly not didn't evolve for doing philosophy or complex language. They evolved to guide action. But even more fundamentally than that, brains evolved to keep themselves and bodies alive. They evolved to engage in homeostatic regulation of the body so that it remains within viable physiological bounds. That's fundamentally what brains are for, therefore helping creatures stay alive. And so the most basic cycle of perception and action doesn't involve the outside world at all. It doesn't involve the exterior surfaces of the body at all. It's only about regulating the internal mileage, the internal physiology of the body and keeping it within the bounds that are compatible with survival. And I think this gives us a clue here about why experiences of mood and emotion and of the most basic essence of selfhood have this non object like character. I think the way to approach this is to first realize that just as we perceive the outside world on the basis of sensory signals that are met with a top down flow of perceptual expectations and predictions, the very same applies to perception of the internal state of the body. The brain has to know what the internal state of the body is like. It doesn't have any direct access to it just because it's wrapped within a single layer of skin. I mean, the brain is the brain. All it gets are noisy and ambiguous electrical signals. So it still has to interpret and bring to bear predictions and expectations in order to make sense of the barrage of sensory signals coming from inside the body. And this is what's collectively called interreception perception of the body from within. Just as a side note, it's very important to distinguish this from introspection, which could hardly be more different. Introspection, you know, consciously reflecting on the content of our experience. This is not that. This is interreception perception of the body from within. So the same computational principles apply. We have to bring to bear our brain has to bring to bear predictions and expectations. So in this view, we can immediately think of emotional conscious experiences, emotional feeling states in this same inferential framework, and I've written about this for a few years now, that we can think of interreceptive inference. So emotions become predictions about the causes of interreceptive signals in just the same way that experiences the outside world are constituted by predictions of the causes of sensory signals. And this, I think, gives a nice computational and mechanistic gloss on pretty old theories of emotion that originate with William James and Karl Langer that emotion has to do with perception of physiological change in the body. These ideas have been repeatedly elaborated. So people ask about the relationship between cognitive interpretation and perception of physiological change. This predictive processing view just dissolves all those distinctions and says that emotional experience is the joint content of predictions about the causes of interceptive signals at all levels, at all low and high levels of abstraction. And the other aspect of this that becomes important is the purpose of perceiving the body from within is really not at all to do with figuring out what's there. My brain couldn't care less that my internal organs are objects and they have particular locations within. My body couldn't care less about that. It's not important. The only thing that's important about my internal physiology is that it works. That if you imagine the inside of my body is a cricket ball, I really don't care where the cricket ball is or that it's a ball. All it cares is that I'm going to catch the ball. It only cares about control and regulation of the internal state of the body. So predictions, perceptual predictions for the interior of the body are of a very different kind. They're instrumental, they're control oriented, they're not epistemic, they're not to do with finding out. And I think that gets it for me anyway. It's very suggestive of why our experiences of just being a body have this very sort of nonobjectbased incoept phenomenological character compared to our experiences in the outside world. But it also suggests that everything can be derived from that. That if we understand the original purpose of predictive perception was to control and regulate the internal state of the body then all the other kinds of perceptual prediction are built upon that evolutionary imperative. So that ultimately the way we perceive the outside world is predicated on these mechanisms that have their fundamental objective in the regulation over internal bodily state. And I think this is really important for me because it gets away from these, I don't know, pre theoretical associations of consciousness and perception with cognition, with language, with all these higher order things, maybe social interaction and it grounds them much more in the basic mechanisms of life. So who you have a nice thing that it might not just be that life provides a nice analogy with consciousness in terms of hard problems and mysteries and so on but that there are actually very deep obligate connections between mechanisms of life and the way we perceive consciously and unconsciously ourselves and the world. If interception is purpose toward what is sometimes called allostatic controls regulation of internal states on the basis of essentially homeostasis as governed by behavior and action if that's the purpose, an emotion is essentially parasitic on these processes. An emotion like disgust, say, or fear or anger much of the same neural machinery is giving rise to these kinds of emotions. How do you think about emotion by this logic? What precipitates an emotion is most often, I mean it can just be a thought, right? Or a memory of something that's happened but its reference is usually out in the world very likely in some social circumstance. What is the logic of emotion in terms of this picture of prediction and control in, you know, our internal system? It's a very interesting I think it's more a research program than a question that's easy to answer in the here and now. But I think the idea would be that emotions emotional content of any sort is ultimately marking out in our conscious experience the alistatic relevance of something in the world an object or a social situation or a course of action so that our brain needs to be able to predict the allostatic consequences. And here you're absolutely right allostasis is sort of the behavioral process of maintaining of homeostasis. So our brain needs to be able to predict the allostatic consequences of everything. That it every action that the body produces whether it's an internal action of autonomic regulation whether it's an external action, a speech act or just a behavioral act. What are the consequences of that for our physiological condition and the maintenance of viability? And I think emotional content is a way in which those consequences become represented in conscious experience, and they can be quite simple. So if you think of probably primordial emotions like disgust have to do with the rejection of something that you try to put inside your body that shouldn't be there because the consequence is going to be pretty bad. And that's a very non social kind of emotion. At least certain forms of disgust that have to do with eating bad things don't depend so much on social context, though they can be invoked by social context later on, but then other more sophisticated or more ramified emotions like regret. Think about regret. It's not the same as disappointment. Disappointment is I was expecting X and I got Y, like a lot of people might have done Christmas last week. You can be disappointed, but regret has an essential counterfactual element that oh, I could have done this instead, and then I would have got X if I'd done this. And I think certainly my own personal emotional life involves many experiences of regret and even anticipatory regret, where I regret things I haven't even done yet because I kind of assume they're going to turn out badly. And the relevance of that is that these sorts of emotional experiences depend on quite high level predictions about counterfactual situations, about social consequences, about what other people might think or believe about me. So we can, we can have an ordering of the of the richness of emotional experience. I think that is defined by the kinds of predictions that are brought to bear, but they're all ultimately rooted in their relevance for physiological viability. We've been talking about the contents of consciousness and how varied they are and how they're shaped by top down predictive processes, perhaps even more than bottom up processes. But what do you think about the experience of it's often described as being of pure consciousness, consciousness without content or without obvious content. Is this something that you are skeptical exists or do you have a place on the shelf for it? I think it probably does exist. I don't know. I mean, unlike you, I've not been a very disciplined meditator. I've tried it a little bit, but it's not something that you probably gain very much from dabbling in. I think it seems to me conceivable that there's a phenomenal state which is characterized by the absence of specific contents. I can imagine I'm happy with the idea that that state exists. I'm somehow skeptical of people's reports of these states. And this gets back to what we were talking about earlier, that we tend to somehow overestimate our ability to have insight into our phenomenal content at any particular time. But yeah, I mean, the interesting question though, which I haven't thought about a lot, is what would the computational vehicles of such a state be in terms of predictive perception? Is it the absence of predictions or is it the prediction of that nothing is causing my sensory input at that particular time? I don't know. I don't know. I have to think about that some more. Yeah, it's an experience that I believe I've had. And again, I agree with you that we're not subjectively incorrigible, which is to say we can be wrong about how things seem to us, we can certainly be wrong about what's actually going on to explain the character of our experience. But I would say we can be wrong about the character of our experience in important ways. Just to say that if we become more sensitive to what an experience is like, we can notice things that we weren't first noticing about it. And it's not always a matter of actually changing the experience. Obviously there's conceptual questions here about whether or not being able to discriminate more is actually finding qualia that were there all the time that you weren't noticing, or you're actually just changing the experience. When you learn how to taste wine, are you having a fundamentally different experience or are you actually noticing things that you might have noticed before? Or are both processes operating simultaneously? I think it's probably both. Yeah, I mean, I think this whole predictive perception of you would come down pretty firmly that at least to some extent, your experience is actually changing because you're developing a different set of predictions. Your predictions are better able to distinguish initially similar sets of sensory signals. So I think it's not just that you're noticing different things, your experiences are changing as well. I mean, to take the experience of pure consciousness that many meditators believe they've had, people have had it on psychedelics as well. And perhaps we'll touch the topic of psychedelics because I know you've done some research there, but the question is what I'm calling pure consciousness, was there something there that I could have noticed? That was the contents of consciousness that I wasn't noticing there. But the importance of the experience doesn't so much hinge for me on whether or not consciousness is really pure there or really without any contents. It's more that it's clearly without any of the usual gross contents. It's quite possible to have an experience where you're no longer obviously feeling your body, there's no sensation that you are noticing, there's no sense of, you know, proprioception, there's no sense of being located in space. In fact, the experience you're having is a consciousness denuded of those usual reference points. And that's what's so interesting about it, that's what's so expansive about it. That's why it suddenly seems so unusual to be you in that moment, because all of the normal experiences have dropped away. So seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and even thinking have dropped away. This is where, for me, that the hard problem does kind of come screaming back into the conversation on many of these accounts of what consciousness is. We should probably move to Tanoni's notion of integrated information on his account, and this is a very celebrated thesis in neuroscience and philosophy on his account. Consciousness simply is a matter of integrated information, and the more information and the more integrated, the more consciousness, presumably. But an experience of the sort that I'm describing, of pure consciousness. Consciousness, whether pure or not, consciousness stripped of its usual informational reference points, is not the experience of diminished consciousness. In fact, the people who have this experience tend to celebrate it as more the quintessence of being conscious. I mean, it's really some kind of height of consciousness as opposed to its loss. And yet the information component is certainly dialed down by any normal sense in which we use the term information. They're not things being discriminated from one another. And I guess you could say it's integrated. But there are other experiences that I could describe to you where the criteria of integration also seems to fall apart, and yet consciousness remains. So, again, this is one of those definitional problems. If we're going to call consciousness a matter of integrated information, if we find an example of there's something that it's like to be you, and yet information and integration are not its hallmarks, well, then it's kind of like defining all ravens as being black. And then we find a white one. What do we call it? A white raven or some other bird. Do you have any intuitions on this front? There's an awful lot in what you said just there. I think if we just put aside for a second trying to isolate what we might call the minimal experience of selfhood, is there anything left after you've got rid of experiences of body and of volition and of internal narratives and so on and so on? Have a thought about that? Just for one point of clarification. I would distinguish this from the loss of self, which I hope we come to. I think you can lose your sense of self with all of the normal phenomenology preserved, so you can be seen and hearing and tasting and even thinking just as vividly. And yet the sense of self, or at least one sense of self, can drop away completely. This is a different experience I'm talking about. Yes, that sounds like flow state type experiences in some way, but maybe we can get on to that. But if we move indeed to IIT and think about how that might speak to these issues of pure consciousness, and whether these experiences serve as some kind of counterexample, some phenomenological counterexample to IIT, I think that's very interesting to think about. And it gets at whether we consider, IIT, integrated information theory to be primarily a theory of conscious level, of how conscious a system is, or of conscious content, or of their interaction. Perhaps it's best to start just by summarizing in a couple of sentences, the claims of IAT, because you're absolutely right, it's become it's come to occupy a very interesting position in the academic landscape of consciousness research. A lot of people talk about it, although in the last couple of meetings of the association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, certainly the last one, there was surprisingly little about it, and I never thought why that might be, which we can come on to. It's probably worth trying to explain just very briefly what Integrated Information Theory IIT tries to do and what it tries to do. It starts with a bunch of phenomenological axioms. So it doesn't start by asking the question what's in the brain and how does that go along with consciousness? It tries to identify axiomatic features of conscious experience, things that should be self evident, and then try to from there, derive what are the necessary and sufficient mechanisms already. What's the sufficient mechanistic basis given these axioms? IIT will call these postulates. There are actually, in the current version of IAT, five of these axioms, but I think we just consider a couple of them. And these are the the fundamental ones, information and integration. And these particular you can call them axioms or you can call them just generalizations of, you know, what all conscious experiences seem to have in common information integration. So the axiom of information is that every conscious experience is highly informative for the organism in the specific sense of ruling out a vast repertoire of alternative experiences. You're having this experience right now instead of all the other experiences you could have, you could have had, you have had, you will have, you're having this particular experience. And the occurrence of that experience is generating an enormous amount of information because it's ruling out so many alternatives. As you go through this, I think it will be useful for me to just flag a few points where this phenomenologically breaks down. For me. Again, the reference here is to kind of non ordinary experiences in meditation and with psychedelics. But the meditative experiences for me at least, have become quite ordinary. I can really talk about them in real time. So the uniqueness of each conscious experience as being highly informative because it rules out so many other conscious experiences in meditation, in many respects, that begins to break down because what you're noticing is a core of sameness to every experience. What you're focusing on is the qualitative character of consciousness that is unchanged by experience. And so the distinctness of an experience isn't what is so salient. What is salient is the unchanging quality of consciousness in its openness, its centerlessness, its vividness. And one analogy I've used here. If you've ever been in a restaurant which has had a full length mirror across one of the walls and you haven't noticed that the mirror was a mirror, and you just assume that the restaurant was twice as big as it in fact is. The moment you notice it's a mirror, you notice that everything you thought was the world is just a pane of glass. It's just a play of light on a wall. And so all those people aren't really people, or they're not extra people. They're in the room just being reflected over there. And one way to describe that shift is almost a kind of loss of information, right? There's no depth to what's happening in the glass. Nothing's really happening in the glass. And meditation does begin to converge on that kind of experience with everything. The Tibetan Buddhist talk about one taste being that basically there's a single taste to everything when you really pay attention. And it is because these intrinsic properties of consciousness are what have become salient, not the differences between experiences. So I don't know if that just sounds like an explosion of gibberish to you, but it's a way in which when I begin to hear this first criterion of tanonis stated as you have, it begins to not map on to what I'm describing as some of the clearest moments of consciousness. Again, not a diminishment of consciousness. That's very interesting. And those states of being aware of the unchanging nature of consciousness, I think that's really very important. I'm not sure it's misaligned with Sononi's intuition here, because I think the idea of informativeness is, if you think about it, there's one way to think about it, which is that specific experience that you're having in that meditative state of becoming aware of one taste, or of the unchanging nature that underlies all the experiences. That itself is a specific experience. It's a very specific experience. You have to have trained in meditation for a long time to have that experience. And the having of that experience is equally distinctive. It's ruling out all the other experiences when you're not having that experience. So it's not so much how informative it is for you at the psychological level. It's a much more reductionist interpretation of information. I think the other way to get at that is to think of it from the bottom up, from the simple systems upwards. And Tonna uses an analogy which I think has got some value. Why is a photodiode not conscious? Well, for a photo diode the whole world. In the world outer world, it's either dark or light. The photo diet isn't having an experience of darkness and lightness. It's just on or off, one or zero and generalizing that that a particular state has the informational content it has in virtue of all the things it isn't, rather than the specific thing that it is. So we can think about this in terms of color. Red is red not because of any intrinsic redness to a combination of wavelengths, but because of all the other combinations of wavelengths that are excluded by that particular combination of wavelengths. And I think this is really interesting. This point goes actually precedes integrated information theory goes. Right back to the dynamic core ideas of TINone edelman which was the thing that first attracted me to go and work San Diego nearly 20 years ago. And even then, the point was made that an experience of pure darkness or complete sensory deprivation where there's no sensory input, no perceptual content call this a hypothetical conscious state for now. I don't know how to what extent it's approximated by any meditative states that has exactly the same informational content as does a very vivid, busy conscious scene walking down the high street because it's ruling out the same number of alternatives. And it may seem subjectively different, less informative because there's nothing going on. But in terms of the number of alternative states that it's ruling out, it's the same. So I think there's a sense in which we can interpret information, this axiom of informativeness, as applying to a whole range of different kinds of conscious contents. Of course, this does get us onto tricky territory about whether we're talking about a theory of level or a theory of content. But this idea, I think it can account for your situation though it does ask the question about can we really get at content specifically there? So the number of states over which you can range as a conscious mind defines how much information is encoded when you're in one of those states. That's right. That would be the claim. And you can think of it in terms of one of the quantities associated with this technical definition of information theory is entropy. And entropy simply measures the range of possible options and the likelihood of being in any particular one of those options. Entropy is a measure of the kind of uncertainty associated with the system state. A photodiode can only be in one of two possible states. A single die can be in six possible states. A combination of two die can be in twelve possible states. And there's actually, I want to link here slightly longer because it's in these technical details about information theory that, IIT, I think, runs aground because it's trying to address the hard problem. It's because of this identity relationship that Tanoni argues for between integrated information. We'll get on to integration in a second, but let's just think about information. It's because of this identity relationship in which he says consciousness simply is integrated information measured the right way. The whole theory becomes empirically untestable and lame. Because if we're to make the claim that the content and level of consciousness that a system has is identical to the amount of integrated information that it has, that means in order to assess this, I need to know not only what state the system is in and what state it was in previous time steps. Let's say we measure it over time but I also need to know all the states the system could be in but hasn't been in. I need to know all its possible combinations and that's just impossible for anything other than really simple toy systems. There's a metaphysical claim which goes along with this too, which is that information has onto logical status. This goes back to John Wheeler and it from Bit and so on, that the fact that a system could occupy a certain state but hasn't, is still causally contributing to the conscious level and state of the system now. And that's a very strong claim and it's a very interesting claim. I mean, who knows what the ontological status of information in the universe will turn out to be? But you also have an added problem of how you bound this possibility. So, for instance, so not only can you not know all the possible states my conscious mind could be in so as to determine the information density of the current state, but what counts as possible, if in fact it is possible to augment my brain even now, I just don't happen to know how to do that. But it's possible to do that, or it'll be possible next week. Do we have to incorporate those possibilities into the definition? If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, the last episode on guns and gun violence caused some consternation, especially for people outside of the US. Listening from Europe or Canada or Australia. I don't think I have more to say on the topic. It seems that clearly articulating that I was recommending policies far more restrictive than anyone in the gun safety community in the United States was insufficient to spare me the wrath of those of you who think we should just scrap the Second Amendment and confiscate all firearms. If any of you see a path toward doing that, well, then by all means, describe that path honestly. There have to be 5 million people for whom gun ownership is basically a religion. So unless we were going to fight a civil war with these people to confiscate their guns, I really don't see any hope there. Graham and I briefly discussed the possibility of a $1 trillion buyback of guns. I'm pretty sure that would be a non starter for a variety of reasons. Anyway, if you need more from me on that topic, my original article, The Riddle of the Gun is there, and it's in podcast form in episode 19. Okay. Well, today I'm speaking with Judd Apatow. Judd is an Emmy Award winning director and producer, screenwriter, author, and comedian who is one of the most prolific comedic minds we have. He recently co directed, along with Michael Bonfiglio, and produced the HBO two part documentary George Carlin's American Dream. He also recently authored a book, which is a New York Times bestseller titled Sticker in the Head, which is a collection of interviews with fellow giants in comedy. And he has no doubt written, directed, or at least produced some of your favorite comedies in film. Anyway, this is a wide ranging conversation about Judd's career in comedy, how he views society at large, questions of fame and success, advice for other creative people, and other topics. I found it a lot of fun. I hope you enjoy it. And now I bring you Judd Apatow. I am here with Judd Apatow. JuD, thanks for joining me. Great to be here finally. It's only taken two decades or more to actually have a conversation because you and I sat across the table from one another at our mutual friend Brent Forrester's wedding. I think that's the only time I'm aware of hanging out with you? Am I forgetting sometime? I think that was it, other than a drive by in the neighborhood, but I remember that wedding very well. And Brent is an old friend, one of the original writers of The Ben Stiller Show and we also work together on love and so we share an intimacy. We're not intimate with each other, but we are intimate with the same math and that's the proximate cause of us speaking. In addition to you bringing out a documentary that was great that we'll talk about just to remind people of who you are and the kinds of things you do. You are known for producing and often writing and directing some extraordinarily funny films. This is 40 knocked up the 40 Year Old Virgin Walkhard Anchorman super bad. These are all just hilarious movies. And you've also done a fair amount of television going all the way back to, I guess, was The Ben Stiller Show your first TV or did you do something before that? That was the first thing I did. Before that I wrote four people and produced some stand up specials. So I did some writing and produced Roseanne special and I worked on Jim Carrey special in the early 90s. But the first CB series was the Ben Stiller sketch show on Fox, right? Right, yeah. I'll be interested to know how you first started, but your filmography here also now includes documentaries of which I have seen too. I don't know if you've done others, but you had The Zen Diaries of Gary Shannon that came out a couple of years ago, which was really great. And then you have this new one on HBO, George Carlin's American Dream, which we will talk about a little bit. I think people should just go see it, but I'll be interested to know what your experience of Carlin was. But before we go there, let's go to the beginning. How do you start producing a special for Roseanne? What was your first foothold? Well, I used to interview comedians in high school from my high school radio station just as a way to meet them and ask them how they do it. And that led to finding the courage to try to do stand up during my senior year of high school on Long Island. And then I went to USC Cinema School where I would book comedy at the school and then started booking a club and getting on stage, which led to getting in at the improv and doing a lot of stand up there. And then a lot of my friends started needing jokes and a lot of comedians wouldn't write jokes for other people. But I needed money and I thought that was a fun thing to do because I just liked hanging around with comedians. And then slowly people started getting specials like Tom Arnold and Roseanne and Jim Carrey. I did a pre game show to Paul Simon in Central Park for Dennis Miller and then I met Ben Stiller and we came up with an idea for a sketch show, and that led to me veering away from doing stand up and focusing more on writing for a long time. I went back into stand up about eight years ago, but at the time I stopped because I just thought, well, the world is pulling me in this direction for some reason, so I'll just follow it. Did you go to USC as an undergraduate, or was that a graduate school and film? It was undergraduate. I was 17 years old. I didn't know what I was doing. I just saw all my notes in a storage facility from class, and it was everything I should know right now, but still don't know in the notes about making movies. But it was the only major that seemed close to comedy or stand up. So I studied screenwriting and ran out of money about a year and a half in, and then went full time into stand up just because I couldn't afford USC any longer. So you knew you wanted to go into comedy at the first possible moment. That's pretty interesting. Who was in the pantheon at that point? My comedy history is weak here. Was Richard Pryor the most famous comedian in the world at that point? Well, I'm about the exact same age as you. Yeah, I forget. When did Eddie Murphy become the most famous comedian? What year does that put us at? That's around 1981. Okay. When Eddie Murphy really hit. And so, yeah, that's our sweet spot. That's 1314 Saturday Night Live hit when we were eight. So then Steve Martin came on the heels of that, and that was the era of Richard Pryor and Monty Python and Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart and Mash and all the family. That's what I grew up on. And so comedy was what I was attracted to. It's how I saw the world. I obviously goes into George Carlin. He was hitting hard in the mid seventy s, and it was my way of processing, I think, just how weird life is, how weird the world is, our families, our schools. And I must have been hostile. I look back and think, I must have been angry and enjoyed the avatar of furious people, even if it was the Marx Brothers that I just liked that someone was calling out all the bullshit. And it was a way of figuring out how to look at the world as something that in a lot of ways was scary and ridiculous. Did you know Carlin at any point, or is this just this documentary, just a labor of love that is more abstract than the one you did with Gary Chandler? Gary Shandling, obviously you knew quite well, and that really comes through in the film. But was there any overlap between you and Carlin? Well, I interviewed George Carlin for Canadian television in the early 1990s, and I had gone to see him work on new sets, but I didn't know him at all. I knew his daughter, Kelly. And when I was asked to do this, I knew Kelly a little bit at the time, through Gary Shannon. My first thought was, don't ruin this man's life. It is pretty scary to put these things together because in a lot of ways, it becomes the main public record of their entire life. And if you do a terrible job and we've seen documentaries that don't work, it may change people's perception of this person. So I was really nervous about it, especially because I didn't know him. And I wondered if through talking to relatives and friends and looking at the footage, you could capture this. Can you really capture the vibe of a person? So I'm so happy that Kelly loves the documentary because that is the thing that drives me, my terror of doing it wrong. I might have had a stroke in the interim. I watched the documentary a couple of weeks ago. I don't remember. Did you put footage of your Canadian TV interview of him in it? No, it was the one interview I could not find. I'm such a hoarder. I saved everything. But you know what? I think it was a bad interview. I was very young. I think other people did much better interviews with him than I did. I mean, it might have been cute to see me there, but I think it wasn't very good. But I remember him being very clear and kind and was certainly in that early 90s phase where he started getting very dark and very political and had a special called Jamming in New York around that time. And a lot of the bits that people are quoting about abortion and other issues came from that special. Yeah, it was interesting to see what a prisoner of the available formats he was. In the beginning, he was doing all those variety shows, and then it was fascinating to see how he had to kind of muscle his way out of all that. It was, I think, a simple path back then, if you were a comedian. When he started, there were no comedy clubs, so you were performing at night clubs, usually with a singer. I mean, he got fired from the Playboy Club for talking about Vietnam. This was a Playboy Club in Wisconsin, and the Bill was him and Bette Midler, and that's what the shows were like. And if you wanted to get famous, you had to go on these variety shows. And they were very conservative for the most part. People weren't very edgy. They didn't challenge the audience politically. It was pretty soft. And I think he really was a clean shaven, well behaved comedian trying to slip some things in here and there, like the hippie dippy weatherman. Obviously, he's finding a way to act stoned on TV in the do, that kind of a bit. But then I think as the country was having a lot of problems and the war was getting more and more intense and the counterculture movement hit, he thought, I don't want to play for everybody's parents. He just thought, my crowd is the people that I don't want it to be. I want to be talking to the people who are changing the world. And he had to take some chances and he started cursing on stage and getting more political. He started getting fired for it and also later arrested for it. And finally, you know, he grew his hair and his beard and just made a very conscious choice to not be the guy he was before. And he was making a lot of money. I mean, they said he was making twelve grand a week in Vegas when he got fired for cursing on stage at the Frontier Hotel. That's insane money for 1969 and to then switch to colleges and, and coffee houses. I'm sure he, he did really badly for, for a long time, but, but it was important to him and I think that inspired a lot of other comedians to be themselves on stage and to be more authentic. It is amazing to reflect on the fact that just a few decades ago you could get arrested for saying something off color on stage. We talk a lot about cancel culture and abridgements of free speech or attitudes that would lead to such abridgements, but it really was watching the documentary, it was a bit of a shock to realize I had forgotten that a few short years ago, literally, the cops would show up and drag you offstage. It just somehow seems impossible. Yeah, we hear about Lenny Bruce getting arrested and you wonder what that was about. And I think Lenny Bruce thought it was about the fact that he talked about the church and that they used obscenity laws as a way to punish him for doing bits about the church. He had this very famous bit called God Incorporated where he would do a sketch where he played all the characters and it was the head of every denomination talking about how business was going, like a stockholders meeting or a board meeting of the company, and the company being religion. And he went after religion pretty hard. So he went to certain cities. He would get arrested for cursing on stage. But they said it was a way to just, you know, victimize him for his stances. And he spent, you know, a lot of, you know, the end of his life fighting. Those things in court and he was a drug addict at the time and and died of an overdose, but really lost himself in that battle and would stay on stage. Reading the transcripts, a lot of people have seen the movie Lenny with Dustin Hoffman, but it was a pretty tragic affair and it does feel like it was less about the cursing than it was about speaking out against organized religion. Is Lenny Bruce still funny? It's been a long time since I've watched any of his stand up, but I remember going back at some point and trying to find what was funny and coming up short. Is it am I did I just miss his genius? You didn't like Dwight Eisenhower bit, how they didn't land for me, comedy ages really badly for most people. Can you draw any lesson from that? Is there comedy that you think will be truly timeless that stands a chance of being absolutely hilarious 50 years from now? Or are you continually surprised and disappointed to find that you're finding stuff? You know, you thought something was hilarious and now it is decidedly less so or even unfunny to an embarrassing degree to you now? Yeah, it's certainly a victim of changing times, changing values. Lenny Bruce, he was a hipster comic. It was connected to, like, jazz clubs and a certain way of speaking. And at the time, no one did it the way he did it. And he was very bold in a way very few people other than maybe Mort Saul was. And if you listen to the records, you almost have to listen to them through the filter of history and think about when he did it to really appreciate it. There certainly are things that are very funny, but also it's a style that doesn't resonate anymore for the most part. But there is some funny stuff, but you probably have to dig through a bunch of things to get to it. The things that were shocking then are not shocking at all now. A lot of references are to things at the time, but it is pretty hard to be funny in the long run. For me, I can watch WC. Fields and really laugh. I think some of the Charlie Chaplin stuff and the Buster Keaton stuff can be hilarious. The Mark's Brothers make me laugh a lot. With stand up, though, it ages out pretty quickly. And even people that we love, like, say, Bill Hicks, who was in the style of Carlin to a certain extent, his stuff was maybe more about that moment. He had more references. And so it ages. Where George Carlin, he didn't have that many references to things like Reagan and the Sandinistas. He would do it here and there. But he tried to talk about the big issue. What do we make of abortion? What do we make of dark money in politics or big pharma drug laws? And as a result, it doesn't age because he's asking the larger question? Yeah, I was surprised to learn just how much drugs and alcohol derailed him. It was cocaine for him and I guess alcohol for his wife. But they really had a precarious existence there for a while. It was easy to see they could have been just total casualties of the lifestyle they had created at one point. But then they kind of pulled themselves out of a nosedive. Part of the story is about he met his wife in 1960 and had a baby, Kelly, shortly after. And he went on the road and he didn't have much money, and he would leave, you know, three weeks at a time, six weeks at a time. And his wife, Brenda didn't get to pursue her dreams. She she had to stay home. That was part of, you know, the culture. It wasn't like a marriage was built around what she wanted to do professionally. And I think he wanted her to stay home because he wasn't home, and I think it broke her spirit. And a lot of the story is about her becoming addicted to alcohol as a result of that. I'm sure there are other reasons as well. And then he was, I think, a pot smoker from the time he was in junior high school. And at some point that turned into hallucinated genes, which he said was part of his transformation to his new style of comedy. And then it was also cocaine, which it seems like was somehow connected to an obsessive compulsive disorder. He had an obsession with words and language, and maybe he had some sort of attention deficit that he was self medicating for. But back then, I don't think people thought they were going to die from cocaine. They looked at it differently. People started dying later than that. People were more aware of the danger. And he would go on three day benders, six days without sleep. And there's tapes in the documentary which are him just screaming and singing, and it's a little bit terrifying. And that's what Kelly grew up in this house where, yeah, her parents were really at war with each other, and there was an enormous amount of addiction. And strangely, thank God they they both got sober. I think George still probably did some things throughout his life, but for the most part, they were sober and were able to find each other again. It's kind of a miracle that they were able to do that. Yeah, he got surprisingly nihilistic toward the end of his life. I don't know if this was when he was still having problems with drugs or even if this was when he was sober, and it's just a shadow that was cast over the rest of his life. But there's a quote, and I think, if memory serves, this might have been one of his handwritten notes that you show in the in the dock where he says you can't care what happens and be really funny. And by caring what happens there, he seemed to mean, like, whether the human species gets wiped out or suffers any other kind of cataclysm. And he seemed to be do you think he was honestly expressing his psychological and ethical worldview at that point, or do you think it was just kind of a nihilistic affectation? He was putting on for comedic or rhetorical effect. Well, I think it was a combination. It certainly was a comedic stance. I think the more you exaggerate, the funny you are. The angry you are. The funny you are. That's why there's a lot of angry people, a lot of opinionated people. I mean, he had five different sections to his career. I mean, he kept changing what he was doing. He started out in a comedy team that was a little bit political. Then he did a pretty soft solo act, and then he went and became a hippie and went hard against authority, became a real critical thinker. Then he softened again because he had, like, a heart attack, and he thought, I can't make myself so crazy I'm going to die from being this stressed out. And then he saw Sam Kennyson, and he thought, I don't want to breathe this guy's dust. And he tried to become a better writer and a better comic and out Kennyson in a way. And then he became very political. But the last phase was that phase that people debate, because he started saying, there's no hope for the human race. I'm just going to watch it as a spectator, and I'm going to enjoy the show as this comes apart. And I always took it as getting so dark that you're basically saying to people, I'm trying to be funny, but things are terrible, and I doubt it'll get fixed in my lifetime. If you're smart, you would fix it, but it ain't going to happen for me. So I'm just going to enjoy the madness of this reality and the human race and the disaster they've made of it. And he did say that underneath a cynic, if you scratch a cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist. And I think he was disappointed in the opportunity that the human race had. He would joke about how beautiful the world was, nature, and how we decided to build malls and just walk inside these malls and that we were just screwing everything up and hurting each other and how ridiculous we are. And I think he thought it was funny to just call it all out, but underneath it, I think he never wanted anyone to get hurt or suffer. I think it was just the final scream of someone who was saddened by some of the things that we all do. Well, anyway, all I can do is recommend that people watch both parts of the dock, because it's just an amazing tour through his career and also just the time capsule experience of just that period in history. It's fascinating. How do you think about your career at this point? How much of your life is spent writing versus actually making movies versus doing the business of making movies? I mean, do you have a sense of how many days a year you're you're you've got a camera rolling and how many days a year you're just facing a blank sheet of paper. Well, a lot of, you know, directing is writing and trying to get something together to direct. So I usually direct every two or three years and in between produce some television and do some documentaries. I have this book, Sticker in the Head, which is interviews with a lot of comedians. I enjoy the historian aspect of it now, and I get pulled in different directions. I try to just be very open and do what I'm passionate about in that moment. There's no real logic to the career other than if I have a good idea. I think, Well, I'm being pushed to make a movie with Pete Davidson and I'm interested in the world of firefighters and everything that Pete went through as the son of someone who lost their life in 911. So that suddenly might occupy me for three years, where I'm just trying to figure out how to tell that story appropriately. And then in the aftermath of it, I might just go, well, now is a good time to make the George Carlin documentary. It's almost a form of healing and recovering and switching to a different skill. You know, when I'm out of gas and it almost fills up my tank to think about someone else's career and their work and organizing a way to tell that story and writing the book and interviewing comedians. If I take two years and interview Sasha Baron Cohen and Margaret Cho and Amber Ruffin and all these people, I learn from talking to them. And it makes me excited about taking another risk because the movies are the big risk. If they don't do well, it hurts. And you're really putting years of your life on something, which is an experiment. Every movie is an experiment. It might not work. And you do have to steal yourself for the swing and hope that you pull it off. Yeah. How much of your experiences of having too many irons in the fire or something close to too many where you're bouncing between projects and triaging your attention? Or how much is your just having actually figured out a cadence and a workflow that really is really optimized, where you can just kind of move from project to project and without a sense of having taken on too many commitments? It's a never ending struggle to figure that out. Because early in my career, I tried to write a movie and do nothing but write this one movie. I thought I'll be like James Brooks and I'll just spend several years on one thought and then I finished it and no one wanted to make it right. And I felt like I just wasted, like, two or three years. So I guess I need to have a couple of things going at the same time. And usually people only want to deal with one every once in a while. A few things are happening at the same time. But the main moment when I was really busy was after the 40 Year Old Virgin was a hit. We had written a lot of movies and developed a lot of movies that no one wanted to make. And then suddenly everyone was like, oh, we get what you're doing now, so we'll make Pineapple Express and Super Bad and Walk Hard and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, suddenly they all just went. And that was a terrifying moment. But I was lucky because I was working with teams of people, incredible directors and writers like Seth and Evan and Greg Matola and David Gordon Green and Jason Segel, that they were so incredible that we were able to avoid disaster when suddenly there clearly was too much going on. But that was just the result of being so out of work that we just kept writing another movie. And I kept saying, let's just write another one. At some point, someone is going to let us make one of these. And then we got lucky that they were like, okay, well, we'll make it now, because Super Bad, we were trying to get that made for forever. I mean, it was six or seven years when we were trying to convince people that that would be a good idea. And then suddenly people thought, oh, I think we get your style now. And then they said, okay, well, from the outside, it seems like there's a fair amount of improvisation. Is there? How much is on book and how much is just you letting these these very talented comedic actors freewheel for a while and hoping you catch something? You know, it you know, it depends. I know I remember, you know, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote Superbad, and we couldn't get anyone to make it, so we kept doing table reads of it and they would punch it up and we do another table read and they would punch it up, and still no one would make it. And then when we shot it, everyone talked about how much improv was in it, and Jonah, I think, thought, oh, there's so much improv in it. And I remember we all looked at the shooting script afterwards and realized there actually wasn't that much improv in it. I think it was such a great loose set that it felt like a lot more. But other movies, I think when I direct, I encourage more of that. I just enjoy that process of seeing if something incredible can happen that you don't see coming. With the movie I just did for Netflix The Bubble, we did an enormous amount of improvisation. And I think some of the great moments in movies like Knocked Up or The Four Year Old Virgin were from letting people know they had a lot of rope, and people like Craig Robinson as the doorman and Leslie Man, they could really have a moment. We would have a great script and we could pitch them some lines. But if you just said. All right, just go at it. You know where you have to go. Here's A. Here's B. Let's just see what happens. Someone would do something so funny that you didn't see coming, that I was always happy that I gave them that opportunity. That's a very funny scene. So when did you start working with Leslie, your wife, in film? What was the first film she was in with you? The first movie we did together was The Cable Guy. And that was a wild movie because at the time, Jim Carrey was just exploding, was the biggest comedy star in the world. He got paid a lot of money for it. There was a lot of attention on it. And Jim told everybody that he wanted to do something different. He didn't want people to think he was going to just make super hard comedies like Ace Ventura every time. And this was a darker satire. And so when it came out, we took kind of a beating. Even though it did pretty well financially, it didn't do what they were hoping it would do, but it was Jim laying down the gauntlet to say to the world, you're not going to pigeonhole me. And then he went on to do the Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But we took a little bit of a hit because people were shocked to see him go dark. Right. And then now it's a few decades later, and that's one of the movies that really held up over time because it's pretty pure to Ben and Jim's vision of what they wanted that to be. So that was the first time Leslie and I worked together. And then I don't think we worked together again until we did the 40 Year Old Virgin, where she played Nikki, who was like the bad date who was drinking that Steve Carell wet outlive. Yeah. That movie is less clear in my memory, but Knocked Up and this is 40. I don't know when I last saw them, but she is so funny on camera. I agree. And a real co writer of most of those ideas and scenes. It's a real collaboration as we try to figure out those types of stories. Yeah, that's great. Is that just an unalloyed good to be working with your family? You have your daughters in some of your movies, too. You have a full showbiz family now. Is that just a pure guilty pleasure to be able to collaborate with your family? Or is there any aspect of that which is a tightrope walk? Well, in the beginning, I like to work with my kids when they were very little on movies like Knocked Up, because I didn't want to work with other people's kids. I just was happy to have my kids around. And then you don't have to worry about the parents of the kids. You could just have them there. So a lot of that work was just strapping them into a chair and putting bacon in front of them, and they would just relax, and you'd throw them a line here and there, or they would improvise here and there. But over the course of a bunch of movies, they really learned how to act. And now they've gotten ridiculously strong mods on that show. Euphoria and Iris is just in the bubble that we did, and it's really fun to see them learn the craft, but in a very slow way without a lot of pressure, because we would just do this together every few years. I think it's fun. I like the business. I like being creative, so I always encouraged it. Sometimes I wonder, if I encouraged dentistry, would they have gone in that direction? Did I steer them too much, just with my pure love of it? I think a film where Leslie is cast as a dentist offers a lot of comic potential. It's a fairly terrifying picture. My wife and I just learned that we are probably terrible parents for having allowed our 13 year old daughter to watch Euphoria. We haven't seen it. We don't know what horrors she's been exposed to, but all of her friends have seen it, apparently. And we were just we were just brow beaten to the point of, Fine, you can watch it. And we were at a dinner party where we confessed this and were greeted by looks of actual horror on the part of grownups who had seen Euphoria. I don't know how guilty your daughter is for producing that pornography or or the or the most extreme scenes in there, but how much of a lapse of judgment was that to expose a 13 year old to Euphoria? It's funny because I've thought about this issue a lot, because when you're a parent now, you're just at war with the phone. You're at war with them being on YouTube, them exploring what's on the Internet without you. And for a lot of years, when they're little, you think you can stop it. And then there's this moment. I think, for most people, it happens when they start junior high and they convince you that they can handle a phone, and you want them to have a phone because you just want to know where they are. Yeah. So you basically lose the battle of content of what they watch, the moment you would like to control them with your GPS or that they always confined you. And I think, what am I fearful of them seeing on the Internet? Because if I was 13, there is no scenario where I would miss anything. And I think we all fool ourselves and believe that they're not seeing the things we're afraid of them seeing, because maybe we took their phone away, but every one of their friends has access to everything in the world, basically. So my philosophy has always been, I will discourage what I don't want them to see as much as I can. But I do want the relationship where they know they can tell me what they saw and we can talk about it. If they're ashamed or they think they're going to get in real trouble, they'll never go, what was that scene about and what are they doing and why? And I think when I look at Mike As, I realize, well, that's that's why they're hopefully smart. We had an open place where we could talk about it because euphoria is basically about traumatized kids, a lot of them having drug problems or acting out or acting out sexually. And it's a really beautiful story about how it affects them. It affects them negatively in the ways that they try to heal and the ways that they struggle. And I thought he did a pretty remarkable job over the two seasons of telling that story, which is very personal to the creator of Sam Levinson. But certainly parents put it on and lose their minds. And like, for me, I've never seen the the movie kids yeah, the movie 13. I remember that because I'm I'm so afraid of seeing it. So I get I get it. But I think kids can process it and understand it more than parents can imagine. Yeah, well, the lesson she seemed to be drawing from it is not a positive one with respect to drugs. And she wasn't perceiving, or at least as far as I could tell, she wasn't perceiving much in there that was normative or desirable. It was just a sense of how deranged people's lives can get by picking the wrong relationships and taking the wrong substances. It was a nice kind of conservative message, being imparted, I think. But still, I have not laid eyes on it. So you'll hear from our lawyers and psychiatrists. When our kids see something like that, such as a scene where drugs create a nightmare for somebody, do they get that? Does it make them go, I don't want to do that? I was always the person that did think that my grandfather produced Janice Joplin's first album at our house, they always talked about how Janice Joplin was a tragic figure because she was the most talented person in the world who was addicted to drugs, and she died. And so from birth, it was like, don't do drugs or you'll wind up like Janice Joplin. That was the joke in the first episode of Freaks and Geeks when he says, you know what happened to Janice Joplin? She's dead. That was my family. And you know what? It worked like, it worked for me. But you do always wonder, are my kids picking up those messages? I think there's a moment in Monterey Pop where Janice Joplin takes the stage. And if that's not the first moment where some of the prominent people in the audience were getting exposed to her, it seemed like it I just have this memory of I think it was like mama Cass and people has that look in her eyes where she just kind of says, wow, holy shit. You know, I mean, this is unbelievable. Yeah. Talk about a great documentary that's in a time capsule that's just amazing to look at. And there's a great Janice Chaplin documentary out there too, for people who are interested in such things. I'm obsessed with all of those documentaries. When when someone pulls off an amazing documentary like the George Harrison documentary or the Bob Dylan documentary, I'm so happy. Yeah. Yeah. So how are you viewing the world at this point? What are you I know you're you're fairly active on Twitter. I get the sense that you might be left of me on a few points. I don't know how familiar you are with my various heresies, but is there anything we we worry about differently or is there any what's the view of this moment in history? Capital House. Yeah, well, I get worried probably most about the intersection of technology and money and control of what people think. That's where I get most nervous with me. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, today I'm speaking with Yvonne Noah Harare. This was first recorded as a zoom call for podcast subscribers, and there will be more of those coming, especially on topical subjects like the war in Ukraine. And that is the topic of today's conversation. Yeval is a historian who probably needs no introduction. He's been on the podcast several times before. He is the author of the best selling books sapiens and Homo DEOs, among others. And today we talk about the wider implications of Russia's war of conquest in Ukraine, especially as they pertain to the maintenance of global order. We discuss various forms of war. We talk about the problem of misinformation, international norms of behavior, the role of China, the civilizational importance of trust, globalization, and deglobalization existential risk, the role of India, Ukrainian leadership, the increased risk of nuclear war, regime change in Russia, and other topics. So, always great to speak with yval. He is a wealth of information and wisdom. So now, without further delay, I bring you Yuval Noah Harare. Yuval, thank you for doing this. Great to see you. Thank you for having me. So wait, you're in Israel now, right? I'm right now in Tel Aviv, one of the most peaceful places in the world right now. Imagine the irony of that. Yeah. Wow. Well, I know our time is limited, so, you know, I'll just start running. People will get in here when they get in here. Obviously, this is mainly a podcast. People are joining us to listen while we get it made. But the so we titled this Zoom event Defending Western Civilization. Or I titled it that. And some back and forth between the two of us has led me to believe that you don't think that's quite the right framing. And just to tee that up, you're someone who spends a lot of time thinking about the power of narratives to shape human events. And even just titling a conversation like this is to partake in the generation of narratives. What is the right framing here, do you think, for what we most need to talk about now? And how does that fit into a larger story of what's going on at this moment in history? I think that the Russian invasion of Ukraine doesn't threaten Western civilization. It threatens the global order and its repercussions threaten the ability of humankind as a whole to deal with the main challenges of the 21st century, including climate change, including the rise of disruptive technologies. So it's not at all about Western civilization. And also, you know, if if we title this Defending Western Civilization, it kind of may give some people the impression that Russia is not part of Western civilization. It's an alien force, and it is a part of Western civilization. I think, yet again, we need to defend Western civilization from itself, not from an alien force. Yeah, but what's really at stake is not the west. What's really at stake is the global order, and it concerns people in Africa. It concerns people in India as much as it concerns people in the United States, for example. Right. So when you say the global order, to my ear, that sounds like the liberal global order or liberal democracy versus autocracy. I guess my framing with the Western got smuggled in there because I've been thinking perhaps inordinately about the role of China in all of this, or the looming implications of what happens in Ukraine for what happens with China and what seems to be a new Cold War or a great power clash in the making. I don't know if we want to take the China piece early or save it for later, but how do you see it? No, first of all, I mean, it's not again, it's not just democracy. It's not just liberalism. It's also, you know, self determination. It's also nationalism. It's the basic idea that you can't just invade a neighboring country and conquer it and wiping it off the map. It goes far, far deeper than just liberal democracy. Over the last few generations, maybe the most basic rule established in the international arena, irrespective of the type of regimes you're talking about, is that you no longer do these things, which are very common. I mean, throughout history, this is kind of you open one history book after the other, so you have the Assyrians or the Romans or the Mongols or the Russians invading neighboring countries and taking them over. This is how every empire in history was established and over the last few generations, maybe the most basic rule of the new global order, and again, if it goes far beyond Western liberal democracies, is that you don't do that. You don't do that even if you are an Arab dictatorship or a military junta in South America. And I think this is part of the of the shock that, you know, that the shockwaves around the world, that people realize that if Putin succeeds, if Putin is allowed to win, then this will become the new normal all over the world. Well, let's cycle on that .1 more time, because I think many people look at this, or certainly some people look at this and wonder why we're deciding to care so much about this particular invasion. Right. Obviously, it's a humanitarian crisis, but there have been many of those, some of which we're in part or in whole culpable for. Right? So we have invaded places. I think there's some obvious disallogies there. But people look at this and say, there's something about, again, the story we're telling ourselves or are inclined to tell ourselves at this moment that is different from the story we seized upon when Russia invaded Crimea previously or when, you know, Syria fell apart and, you know, Obama's red line was crossed, and we just decided to move on in the news cycle and talk about other things. Why is this a kind of 911 moment that puts us once again very close to the hinge of history? Partly because it's now established as a pattern. When Crimea happened, then people said, well, this is a very unique situation, and there are all kinds of excuses, and it won't happen again, and it won't happen on a larger scale. And now you realize, no, this is the beginning of the pattern. If we don't stop it here, it will continue. It will also continue in other places around the world. Secondly, with regard to all the comparison, well, people didn't get so much excited or interested in what's happening in Yemen, what's happening in Syria, what's happening in Ethiopia. Part of it is because, again, it's a different kind of war. Part of the global order of the last few generations, for better or worse, was that civil wars are part of the game. But invading and conquering other countries and wiping them off the map is not. And this is now what is at stake. And there is a huge difference there. It's not that civil wars are okay. It's not that civil wars are people don't die in them or suffering them. We had throughout history several kinds of wars. External invasions and conquests were always the most dangerous and the kind of backbone of military and diplomatic history. But there were always other kinds of wars, like civil wars. And what happened in the last few generations is that, first of all, the big wars between superpowers and secondly, the external invasions and conquests, they kind of get out of the picture, out of it. You don't do that anymore. Whereas civil wars, they continue to be part of the system. And now we are seeing the return of something that we thought, well, we already got over that. Yes, we still have a way to go. We also need eventually to reach a situation when there are no civil wars. But now we are feeling that we are falling back. We are falling back to the most dangerous and most destructive kinds of wars. We are basically going back to the jungle, to the situation when at any moment the neighbors might invade and conquer us, which was the situation for most of history, but not in the last few decades. I guess another part of the picture here is that this recent adventure or misadventure as it seems to be turning out for Putin seems to have been occasioned by his perception of American and European weakness. Right. And he's done a fair amount on his side to engineer that weakness. There's probably a thousand points of salience here we could seize on, but one is just. We have built the social media tools that allow bad actors like Putin's regime to use our own hyper partisanship and divisiveness against us, right? So we have the kind of the rampant hacking of our society. I'm not making the claim that any election has been, quote, hacked with respect to voting machines, but there's no question that there's been an inflaming of public opinion from the outside. And we have built the tools to run that particular psychological experiment or psyops campaign ourselves. We've also collaborated in an increasing dependence on regimes that we can't actually trust. And some of this has been done with good intentions. There's this notion that trade and engagement would modify the political visions and aspirations of autocracies. Right. So we thought China would come around and Russia would come around and join the well behaved democracies of the world, as long as we traded enough and became aligned enough in our economic incentives. But that seems not to be happening. We have Germany, in retrospect, quite insanely, deciding to become energy dependent upon Russia and decommission its nuclear plants. And in the current moment, that looks as masochistic as can be. We have the UK happily laundering the money of oligarchs endlessly, even as Putin poisons people with nerve agents on their soil. Russian dissidents. It's just at a certain point, all of this should have been obvious. This was leading in a dangerous direction. But now it finally seems and this goes to the point of Putin's miscalculation, it finally seems that enough was enough. The spell has broken for all of us, or most of us, simultaneously. And we're now thinking of reengineering a world where our ability to trust in the political vision of our allies is paramount. And I'm wondering what you think of that and how much of this sea change in our sense of globalization and global priorities is going to be durable? And what should we be reengineering here and rethinking here? How do you see that part of the picture? I think it really was a very big shock because people, not only in the west, but people all over the world, had the feeling that we are living in a more peaceful era, that we have managed to somehow crawl out of the jungle, put at least some distance. When I talk about a jungle, I talk about a situation. When at any moment, the neighboring country, empire, tribe, city, state might invade our territory and just occupy us, conquer us, take our lands, drive away our people, whatever. Which was the basic situation all over the world for most of history, whether it's ancient China, whether it's medieval Europe, whether it's the 19th century, this was the basic situation of human beings. And peace in those days, for most of history, meant simply the temporary absence of war. Now there is peace, but at any moment, a war might start. And amazingly, humanity managed to really get out of this jungle and create not a completely peaceful world. I come from the Middle East. I know perfectly well there are still woes in the world, but more peaceful than any previous era. And it's not some kind of hippie fantasy. If you want to really see peace in action, don't look in poems. Look in state budgets. You look at the budget of the world in the last few years, and it's really amazing because the average military budget, out of total government budget of countries all over the world, on average, is about 6%, something like that. In Europe, it was something like 3% compared to most of history, when the majority of the budget of every king and emperor and sultan went to finance the army and the navy and the fortresses, not health care and education. The world that we know, whether in the US. Or in Israel, but also in Brazil, also in Indonesia, it's built on these foundations of the new peace. And Putin shattered that, reminding us that the jungle is still nearby. A few decisions by a few individuals, and we are back there. And the danger again, the danger is not just to Ukraine or then to Poland. You will see military budgets all over the world skyrocket, which means healthcare budgets and education budgets decline. You see less possibility for international cooperation on things like climate change, on regulating AI. So this has repercussions everywhere. Now, the positive potential, it's still just we're not sure. But the positive potential is it's been such a shock that you saw Europe and also, to some extent, the United States uniting and reacting in a forceful way that would have sounded impossible just a month ago, with Switzerland joining the EU sanctions, with Finland sending arms to Ukraine, with Germany doubling its defense budget overnight. And I think the biggest Putin made two big miscalculations. One was about Ukraine. He thought that Ukraine is not really a nation, that the Ukrainians are actually Russians and they will welcome him, they will throw flowers on his tanks, and they are throwing a lot of cocktails. He was completely wrong about Ukraine, but he also made a big miscalculation about the west, about Europe, and about the United States. I think if he waited a few more years, just done nothing, just wait a few more years, there is a good chance that Europe and the United States would have self destructed due to their internal conflicts and culture war. And he is now giving with his own hands. He has united them, and he is giving them a chance to save themselves. I hope that the positive results of this war on the big scale would be on the one hand that we will see a green Manhattan Project to stop depending on oil and gas, which is what fueling the Russian military machine but also an end to the culture war in the west. Because suddenly you realize there are far bigger issues, there are far bigger dangers in the world than who gets to enter which toilet. And if we can unite around a really big issue, then the Western democracies don't need to fear anybody. If you look again at the numbers, they are still the most powerful. Russia has a smaller economy than Italy. The Russian economy is about the same as Belgium and the Netherlands put together. Forget even about the US. As long as Europe stands together, it has nothing to fear from Russia. Let's linger on the culture war piece here, because I do view that as, in large measure, what would seem to be provocative about our apparent weakness that Putin felt that we were so divided against ourselves that we would never cohere in the face of this kind of challenge. And I think he rightly thinks that after all of our failed wars, our appetite for conflict is somewhere near an all time low. So the idea that we're actually going to get militarily involved in anything seemed remote. I'm sure the culture war piece, it's hard to disentangle that from just the misinformation piece. We have tens of millions of people in America now. This cohort disproportionately on the right who believe that the world is being run by a cult of child raping cannibal. Right. There's no limit to the craziness that passes for political engagement on the right at this moment. Not quite that far toward the fringe, but still pretty far toward it. We have people with platforms in the millions who are obviously parroting Russian propaganda in the middle of this war. And this piece needs to be disentangled from the quite odious claim that any criticism of any possible policy here, like enforcing a no fly zone, is treasonous or carrying water for Putin. No, I mean, there are things that we need to debate with respect to how we react to this, but there are still obvious untruths being confidently spread by people who have bigger platforms than either of us do. And I'm hopeful, as you sound like you might be, that this challenge could get our head straight and cut through the culture war, but an information ecosystem where it's becoming harder and harder to agree about facts. One thing I thought just the other day is what would this current situation be like if deep fake technology was five years better than it is now, where really we were struggling to figure out whether any of the video we were watching of Zelensky or whether any of it was real? Right? Like, if that was where we were stuck. So, anyway, just talk to me about the misinformation piece as you see it. Partly we can't get everybody on board. You can never get everybody on board. You just need enough. You just need enough of the still sensible people on the right and also on the extreme left to have their AHA moment. That okay, we need to face this challenge. It's bigger than all the other things we've been discussing. And especially if you talk about the American right. They have this Cold War inheritance of all the Rumble movies and all the Rocky movies with the bad Russians. And here you have it in real life, and it's almost irresistible. And I was kind of flipping between Fox News and CNN, and for the first time in a long time, they are actually showing the same thing. They are showing the same reality with a different take on it. So in Fox News, we're really excited about all these people getting guns. And look, it's so important to have a gun in your home, because when the Russians come, you can shoot at them. And you didn't see so much of that on CNN. But still they are on the same page, roughly, they are on the same reality. And you'll never get everybody there, but you don't need everybody. It's never the case in history that you have everybody. And also, I'm less familiar with the specific situation in the US. But you see also what's happening in Europe. That the kind of closing of the ranks very quickly and quite surprisingly. And, you know, even figures like Victor Urban saying that he will not oppose, he will not prevent sanctions against Russia and accepting waves of refugees. After all his talk against refugees, against the European Union, against Brussels, he's suddenly behaving in a different way, maybe because there is elections coming in Hungary. I'm not sure. But you see something changing. I can't predict the future, whether it will last. This could be a very long war, and people need it's, not just the first two or three weeks. We need to see what happens in a month, in two months, and even after the war is over, at some stage, a big question will be how to win the peace. No matter how the war ends, it's crucial again, especially for Europe, to some extent also to the US. But Europe is the main player here to win the peace. Europe has the economic resources to turn Ukraine whatever the peace treat is. Europe has the power to turn Ukraine into a prosperous democracy by making enough investments and sending enough help in various forms, not just rebuild roads and bridges and hospitals and schools, building research centers, moving factories. And if they make this investment and turn Ukraine into a prosperous country, this will obviously not just benefit Ukraine enormously. It will be the biggest defense for Europe and also the biggest challenge for the Putin regime to explain to the poor citizens of Russia how come the Ukrainians can do it and you don't see the same thing in Russia. Russia is a much, much wealthier country than it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world in terms of natural resources. But the citizens are poor. They receive very low level government services, healthcare, education, welfare. And that maybe the biggest question that Russian citizens should ask their government why don't we get the same level of health care as they get in Finland or as they get in Canada? And the answer, of course, is because the money went for tanks. We mentioned earlier that the Russian economy is smaller than the Italian economy. So how come Putin has this military machine? Because the military budget of Russia, in percentage out of government budget, is not 3% like in the EU. It's not 6% like the world average. Nobody knows exactly how much it is because it's secret the estimates. The lowest estimates are around 11%. The highest estimates, they reach 2030 35%. Truth is probably somewhere in between. And again, that's the key question for Russia, but also the key question for European citizens and for people all over the world. Which kind of country do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a country like Russia, which spends 1020 percent of its government budget on the military or not? And I think that even people on the right know the answer to this question. No, we don't want to live in this kind of country. But it seems to me that if we're going to seize the right lesson from this moment and unite the liberal world order against all of the remaining autocracies, that's one lesson we might seize from it, and one of those being China, right? Then we're talking about acknowledging that we're losing this peace dividend, and we're thinking it's a good thing that Germany now is willing to spend more on its own defense, right? So, I mean, what is the normative that is desirable move now in light of what is happening with respect to things like military budgets? Don't unite the world against autocracies. Unite the world against aggression. We need some autocracies on the right side. It would be difficult. I mean, if you divide the world into autocracies and democracies, you're making it much, much more difficult. There are many autocracies that are not necessarily in favor of the kind of aggression. And again, this is why what we talked about earlier, why is this so different from other wars? And why does this create this kind of reaction? Because it's not about the internal regime of a country. It's about the behavior, the norms of behavior in the international arena. When you look at the past few decades, you see that also many, if not most of the autocracies in the world. And again, there are many terrible things to say about them, of course, but at least most of them also kept this key norm of the international community that you just don't invade a neighboring country and conquer it. And, you know, you look at China since 1979 and the Chinese incursion invasion into Vietnam, china has not engaged in any external invasion, and we shouldn't kind of rush to push the Chinese together with the Russians into one camp. If the Chinese choose at this critical moment to join the Russians and support them, that's terrible news. And if it happens, the world will have to deal with it, but it still didn't happen. And ideally, we should isolate the Putin regime, not push countries to join it. Now, I have no kind of china is not going to actively take actions against Russia, but it's also very careful so far about supporting it. The best we can hope from the Chinese is to stay on the fence, to stay neutral, and we shouldn't do anything to push them towards the Russians. The same is true of other countries like Iran, like Venezuela. If the US can diplomatically work with these countries so they don't join a block with Russia, that's a plus, right? What's your view of the degree to which the US and the EU or the NATO countries should be engaged on the ground or in the skies over Ukraine? What's your position on enforcing a no fly zone, for instance? That's above my pay grade. I'm not a military expert. I don't understand the kind of military issues involved. I also don't understand that the complicated political issues involved with NATO and Europe and so forth. I don't know. I don't have a strong opinion on that. Do you have thoughts about what this does to the logic of nuclear proliferation? I mean, it seems to me one lesson many countries might draw from this moment is that if you have nukes, no one invades you, and if you don't have nukes, you might be invaded at any moment. That's part of the danger. Again, the norm that you don't invade in conquer countries was very important for a number of reasons. One of them is, again, military budgets, but the other is the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, because you had the kind of feeling that even if I don't have nuclear weapons, I'm still protected against the worst. And I'm not against all violence, but against the worst form of violence, which is to just being wiped off the map by some crazy neighbor. And if this norm no longer is no longer valid, then we are very likely to see the proliferation of nuclear weapons, not just in the usual suspects like Iran, but think about Germany. If I'm now a German and I'm looking around, then I said to myself, okay, we need nukes to protect ourselves and also to protect Eastern Europe. Now, who controls these nukes? In NATO, there are three countries that control the nukes. It's the US. It's France, and it's Britain. Now, let's imagine a scenario that in 2024, Trump is again US president. Let's say that it's a bit extreme, but let's say that Le Pen still possible, wins the coming elections in France, and Britain got its Brexit way. Can Germany really trust Trump, Le Pen and the Brexiters to risk nuclear annihilation for the sake of Germany or for the sake of Poland? Maybe not. If so, the logical conclusion could be germany needs its own nukes. And the same kind of thinking can be happening in Japan, can be happening in South Korea, can be happening in more and more places, which is extremely dangerous, because the more fingers you have on these red buttons, chances grow that somewhere, sometime, somebody would press the button, with terrible consequences for the whole of humankind. So, again, nuclear weapons play a very double role here in this war. On the one hand, they prevent intervention, for better or worse. I'm not sure they prevent the entry of NATO into this conflict. I mean, if Russia had no nuclear weapons, I think it was a very high chance that either NATO or at least some members of NATO, like Poland, would have intervened. On the other hand, if Putin is allowed to win, then the lesson for many countries around the world, including in Europe, as we just discussed, would be we need our own nukes. Right. Well, what do you see about the forces of globalization and deglobalization now with respect to this was not only a story of what Russia and Beta and Ukraine did to our minds, but this is obviously what COVID did as well. We noticed that our supply chain was no longer reliable when everyone was faced with the same emergency. Again, this is part of a peace dividend unraveling for us, because obviously it's more expensive. If you need to vertically integrate much of what you care about economically, where do you see that going? And is that something we should be resisting? It seems like the normative lesson you would want to draw here is that while some of this may be necessary, why it may be necessary for Germany to think about doubling its or tripling its military budget now, and that seems appropriate, and it seemed also appropriate for them not to be dependent upon Russia for natural gas. Several moves ahead, all of this begins to look like a more divided world, a world that's predicated far more fundamentally, even explicitly, on a loss of trust. Right? And trust is a good thing. Trust is something we want, we want to maximize, and yet it's unraveling here. Geopolitically and again, this also links it back to the internal divisions of the culture war you were discussing, because perhaps the most salient variable right and left politically here has been a total breakdown in trust of institutions. The far left and the far right agree about one thing that you can't trust the mainstream media, you can't trust mainstream science. You can't trust corporations, certainly. And there's this epidemic of contrarianism that is being leveraged, which is being sold psychologically to people as. A kind of skepticism. It's kind of been like, do your own research, right? But it's actually not skepticism. It's it's skepticism about the mainstream narrative. Always and everywhere. You have people who will deride the New York Times as fake news and you'll and they assume that a corporation like Pfizer will always lie to them about their data, and yet they will trust something they they get on a substance newsletter about alternative medicine without blinking. So it's not skepticism proper. It's quite asymmetrical. But I got to think that civilizationally, the larger project here is for us to find some pathway back to trust both within and outside of our respective countries. Without trust, both on a national level and on the international level, civilization collapses. Trust is the glue that holds everything together. And trust in institutions I mean, not trust in the 100 people you know personally. You can't build a nation of 300 million people or a world of almost 8 billion people, if you only trust the hundred people you know personally. How do you trust people you don't know personally? This is where institutions come into the picture. And again, without institutions. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. Backed by popular demand, I have Jordan Peterson. Jordan is a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto. He formally taught at Harvard University, and he has published articles on drug abuse and alcoholism and aggression, but he has made a special focus on tyranny, and of late, he has been fighting a pitched battle against political correctness up in Canada, and he's attracted a lot of support and criticism on that front. As I said last time around, he is far and away the most requested guest I've ever had. And we did a podcast about four or so episodes back entitled What Is True? Podcast number 62. And that, to the disappointment of everyone, was a fairly brutal slog through differing conceptions of epistemology. If ever the phrase bogged down applied to a podcast, it applied there. Some people enjoyed it, but most of you didn't. But as I say in the conversation today with Jordan, I did a poll online and 30,000 of you responded, and 81% wanted us to try again because there was much more to talk about. And as it turns out, there was. We had a much better conversation this time around. It was very collegial, and if you have anything to say about it, feel free to reach out to Jordan and me on Twitter or make noise wherever you want. And now I bring you Jordan Peterson. I am back here with Jordan Peterson. Jordan, thanks for coming back on the podcast. My pleasure. Let's just take a moment to bring people up to speed. While we can assume many have heard our previous effort at this, all won't have. So we did a podcast a little over a month ago. It was podcast 62, I believe, on my list, and it went fairly haywire. We intended to speak about many things, but got bogged down on the question of what it means to say that a proposition is true, and I consider this actually a very interesting problem in philosophy. But it seemed to me that we got stuck at a point that wasn't very interesting, and many of our listeners felt the same. And at the time, I didn't let the conversation proceed to other topics because I felt that it would just be pointless. I knew you wanted to talk about things like the validity of religious faith and Jungianian archetypes and many other controversial things. And I felt if we couldn't agree on what separates fact from fantasy, we would just be doomed to talk past one another. I think it's still possible we are doomed to talk past one another. But we ran a Twitter poll after our first podcast and despite all the complaints I received about our conversation, 81% of people wanted us to make a second attempt. I think 30,000 people answered that poll, so it was a considerable number of people. I decided we should give our our people what most of them claim to want and we'll just see how it goes because I don't want us to fight the same battle all over again. I think listeners who are curious about how that last conversation went can listen to it, and I'm sure the topic of truth and falsity will come up, but if it does, I think the best thing to do is kind of flag it on the fly and move on. And I think this will be an exercise in seeing just how much can profitably be said across differing epistemologies. With that warning about the various road hazards, I think we should just see where we wind up. And I think it could be someplace interesting because you and I appear to share many of the same concerns. I think we both find the question of how to live in this world to be the most important one. And I think we're equally concerned about some of the very well subscribed answers to that question that are obviously wrong. And so I think we should just do our best to make sense and see where it goes. Well, I hope so too. That seems right. I mean, you place a tremendous emphasis on the moral necessity of the spoken truth and that's certainly something that I'm in accord with. And you're also concerned with ethics in relationship to the alleviation of suffering from what I've been able to understand from what I've read of your writings. And you're also very much concerned with the relationship between scientific fact and value. And so we do share this intense concern about the same domain and I think for many of the same reasons. And I think that you're an outstanding exponent of your particular position and that makes you an excellent person to talk about these things with. I was actually going to start with a bit of an apology because I listened to our talk twice, trying to figure out where it went off the rails. It actually went okay for the first hour and then we got bogged down in the truth issue and I think I made a couple of strategic errors, which I hope not to repeat. The first one was that I started the conversation by more or less accusing you of being insufficiently Darwinian and that was designed to be, I thought, playful and provocative. But when I listened to our conversation again, I thought that that wasn't a very wise, strategic move. That was one mistake I made. And the second mistake I made was that I had just read a number of things that you had written, and I told you a lot about what you thought instead of letting you say it. And I was doing that partly well, partly because there is an argument to be had here and I suppose partly because I was nervous, but also partly to demonstrate that I had actually familiarized myself with what you had read. And I wanted to indicate or what you had written, and I wanted to indicate to you that I was taking it seriously. But I'm going to try to not be the least bit provocative in that manner during this conversation, because I really do think that we have something important to talk about, and I think that that's why so many people actually want to listen to us talk. So anyways, hopefully we get bogged down. Yeah. Just in the interest of completing that bit of housekeeping, I don't think the first was an error at all. To say that I'm insufficiently Darwinian is provocative, and I don't take it in the least bit personally. We just didn't find a path through that particular thesis that we could converge on. As far as the second point, telling me what I think in advance of our actually hitting that topic, I think that's almost certainly a mistake with me or anyone. And that's fine that you did that post mortem, and I agree with that bit. So let's just start with a clean slate here. And I think kind of a natural starting point would be to ask you, and again, I've heard a few of the things you've said on this topic, but I'll just let you invent yourself anew however it strikes you. What is the relationship, in your view, between science and religion? Well, I think that religious systems are descriptions of how people ought to act, and I think that those arose in a quasi evolutionary manner. And so imagine the dominance hierarchy structure of a chimpanzee troop or a wolf pack. So we'll use the wolf idea first, and then switch, if it's okay, to the chimpanzee idea. So as a consequence of the behavioral actions and interactions among social animals, you could think of something as something that might be described as a procedural covenant arising, and that would be the animal's knowledge of the structure of the dominance hierarchy, which is kind of ill named, but we'll use that for now so that there's a hierarchy of rank, and every animal in the social community understands that hierarchy of rank. That's essentially the culture of the of the of the troop or the or the pack. And there is an implicit recognition of the value of each individual within that troop or pack, such that, for example, if two wolves square off in a dominance dispute, of course they puff themselves up to make themselves look large, and they growl at each other and they engage in ferociously, threatening displays. And generally speaking, the wolf that has the lowest threshold for anxiety activation will capitulate first, generally without much more than the pose of a fight, and roll over and expose his neck. And then the dominant wolf will not deign to tear it out, basically. And you could think of the wolves acting out what you would describe propositionally as respect for each individual's value. And then in the chimp troops. Franz Dewald's research has indicated, for example, that if the dominance arky is only based on brute force, and the chimp at the top, who's generally male, is there because he's a barbarian dictator, let's say, then he's very likely. To be taken out by two male chimps three quarters his power who are much better at social bonding and who made a very tight compact between one another. And so that the chimp troop that's based on a tyranny is unstable. What Dewal indicated was that the chimp troops that tend to be more stable are run by dominant males who actually are very good at social bonding and reciprocity, and who pay a fair bit of attention to the females and infants in the troop. So the dominance isn't power so much as you might think of as good politics. And so there's an emergent ethic, and I truly believe it's emergent ethic that's very similar to what PSJ described as emerging among children when they play games that not only specifies the nature of the social contract, let's say, but also is structured as if the individuals within the social contract have some implicit value. So imagine that as human beings diverged away from their chimpanzee progenitors, the common ancestor we had with chimpanzees, we already started to act out this ethic. It was coded in our procedures to speak technically because we have a procedural memory. And then as we developed cortically, we watched each other and ourselves very, very intently. And once we developed language, we were able to start encapsulating that procedural ethic first in stories. And those stories were partly about what a very well structured procedural ethic might be and how it might go wrong, but also about how an individual within that procedural ethic should be treated and should act. And the storytelling, which was the mapping of that procedure, was the birthplace of the image and story basis of religious ideation, as far as I can tell. So that's the basic thesis. It's like PSA's notion that children, when they first come together to learn a game, if they're young enough, they can play the game when they're together, but if you take them out of the game and ask them individually about the rules, they give widely disparate accounts. So they've got the procedure in place, but they haven't got the episodic representation, technically speaking. It's only once they become more linguistically sophisticated that they can actually come up with a coherent representation of the rules. And then it's only later when they start to construe themselves not merely as followers of the rules, but also as originators of the rules. And that's akin to the recognition of, I would say, constructive individuality and relationship to the state. So I see these things as very deeply biologically predicated where's the concept of an archetype come into this picture. Well, okay, imagine this sam. You tell me what you think about this. So, you know, how can I tell you? Just a two minute story. Sure. Okay. So one time I was at the hockey rink with my son and he was playing, he was young, he was about twelve, and they were playing this championship game in this little league that they had. And my son was a pretty good hockey player, but there was a kid on the team who was better than him, who was kind of a star, but he was a diva. And even though he would score goals and all of that, he wouldn't pass and he wasn't facilitating the development of any of the other team members. And so anyways, we watched this game and it was very close, it was a very exciting game. And in the final few minutes of the last period, the other team scored and my son's team and the stars team lost. And so then the kids went off the ice and the Diva kid smashed his hockey stick on the cement and started to complain bitterly about how unfair the game is. And then his idiot father came running up to him and told him how unfair the refing had been and how it was stolen from them and how catastrophic all of that was. And I thought it was one of the most highest displays of poor parenting that I'd ever seen. Now there's a moral of that story. So his kid was very good at playing hockey, but he wasn't very good at being a good player. And so you always tell your kids, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it matters how you play the game. And of course you don't know what that means, and neither does the kid. And it's often a mystery to the kid what that means because obviously you're trying to win. But imagine it this way. Imagine that human beings, that the goal of human life isn't to win the game. The goal of human life, in some sense is to win the set of all possible games. And in order to win the set of all possible games, you don't need to win any particular game. You have to play in a manner that ensures that you will be invited to play more and more games. And so when you tell your children to be good sports, to play properly, what you mean is play to win, but play to win in such a way that people on your team are happy to play with you and people on the other teams are happy to play with you. And so that you keep getting invited to games. Now, if you think of each game as a small hierarchy of value or dominance, then obviously the appropriate thing is to move up the hierarchy. And that's what animals do, is they move up in their specific hierarchy. But because human beings are capable of abstraction, we've been able to conceptualize the hierarchy as such rather than any specific one, and then also to characterize a mode of being that is most likely to move you up the hierarchy, no matter what that hierarchy is. And as far as I can tell, that's the archetype of the hero. The hero is the person who's most likely to move up any given dominance hierarchy at any time in any place. And the hero is also and then so that the nature of that archetypal hero first was acted out. It was laid out in procedure, and then it was acted out and then it was described. But it's multi dimensional. It's not only he who plays to be invited to play again, but also he who goes out into the great unknown to face chaos and the dangers there, but to gather what's valuable as a consequence and to bring it back to the community. And that's the basis of the dragon myth archetype, which is, of course, plays out in art and literature throughout, while throughout recorded history. The oldest story we have, which is the Enuma Elish from Mesopotamia, is a story about Mardoc, who's the culture hero and also the highest god in the Mesopotamian pantheon. He confronts the Dragon of Chaos, cuts her into pieces and makes the world. In fact, one of his names was Nam. I can't remember the name, unfortunately, but it meant he who creates ingenious things as a consequence of the combat with Tiamat, who's the Dragon of Chaos. So he cuts up the unknown into pieces and makes ingenious things out of them. And it's a perfect description of the human archetype, the fact that we are hyper exploratory and that we use our capacity to explore the dangerous unknown, to gather the treasure that lies there and then to distribute it to the community in terms of the evolution of that archetype. Sam, think about it this way, okay? Again, you could tell me what you think about this. So we know that, roughly speaking, that human females mate across and up dominance hierarchies, whereas chimpanzee females are non selective maters. The dominant chimps males will chase away the subordinate chimps from the females in estros, and so they're more likely to have offspring, but the females will mate with anyone. Whereas human females are very selective and they have hidden ovulation and they mate across an up dominance hierarchy. So imagine the woman wants the man who's most capable of rising up the set of all dominance hierarchies. So what happens is she outsources that problem to the computational capacity of the male hierarchy, and she lets the men fight it out among themselves, compete, and cooperate to determine who the best man is. He's provided with the majority of the mating opportunities. And so that's how the extended religious phenotype manifests itself in evolutionary space, which was something that you and Richard Dawkins were wondering about the last time that you talked like it's not psychopathy, which was in some sense, you were thinking about the charismatic liar. But really what's being selected for is the consciousness, because that's the right way of thinking about it, that's best able to rise across the set of all dominance hierarchies. And females are selecting very hard for that, which is at least in part, why we've had this tremendously expanded cortical capacity. Well, let me see if I can wade into this picture and find places of agreement and disagreement. For clarity's sake. I think it's useful to distinguish between two different intellectual projects here with respect to values and morality and and the question of just how to live in this world, which is our least nominal starting point. First, there's the the description of how we got here. Right. And this captures all of evolutionary psychology and much of what you just began to say about selection pressures with respect to dominance hierarchies and the kind of heroic male mate that female apes will find attractive and all that. Then you can add religion to that as perhaps an extended phenotype or the possibility of group selection pressure. More religious tribes have a way of organizing themselves in a more durable way than less religious tribes. And therefore, there's something in our evolutionary history that has selected for religiosity, say, an overarching story that unites nonkin in a way that is more energizing than some other story. I don't really have much of a dog in that fight. I think some of that is plausible, some of it isn't. I think group selection, though you haven't mentioned it, is working to some degree in the background of this way of talking about religion in evolutionary terms. And at the moment, I happen to be convinced that group selection is implausible and based on some bad analogies. But again, this doesn't strike me as important for this conversation or for really for anything that I've written about the relationship between morality and science or facts and values, because I view this problem of describing how we got here. How is it that apes like ourselves have the moral attitudes and concerns that we have? That's a distinct project which is quite separate from the question of deciding how we should live now, given what we are and given the opportunities available to us and given the way in which we're continually flying the perch. That has been prepared for us by evolution with our technology and with our institutions and with our new moral norms that have absolutely nothing to do with ancient selection pressures. And this is even true in a religious context. So you have in many religions, perhaps even most, you have certain ideals that could never have been selected for because they are the antithesis of anything that would offer an adaptive advantage. Celibacy, for instance. Anyone who was committed to celibacy in our ancient past by definition didn't breed. You could say that they might have helped their kin but still celibacy is not an ideal that you can make much Darwinian sense of and yet you can have the most committed adherence of any faith tending toward a life of celibacy at the very least promiscuity is taboo in most religious traditions. Now, I'm not taking a position that that's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just saying that this is where evolution is no longer relevant to a discussion of how people should live. And as I think I said in a blog response to some of the things you said after our first podcast if you wanted to just take a genes eye view of how human beings should live, especially how men should live. Well, then you would conclude that given current opportunities, every man should be passionately committed to doing more or less nothing but donate his sperm to a sperm bank. Because then he could father possibly tens of thousands of offspring for whom he would have no financial or emotional responsibility. From a Darwinian perspective, that should be every guy's deepest dream. You should just get up in the morning with just a commitment to that project unlike any other that could be discovered in life. So we have motives and norms and concerns that don't narrowly track a gene level analysis of what we should be doing. So I just put that out there. I think the more interesting conversation is not to talk about how apes like ourselves could have gotten religion, but to talk about what we should do given the way the world is now and what we seem to know about it through science. Well, that's fine. I just want to make a couple of comments about that. I mean, the hypotheses that I'm proposing is certainly not dependent on group selection so we can leave that one aside as far as I think the jury is out on the ultimate validity of the idea of group selection. But I'm not interested in going down that rabbit hole because it doesn't matter to me one way or another really, how that's resolved. With regards to the potential validity of evolutionarily derived motivations to the present day. I think that's more complicated. So the first thing I would say is that I believe there has been a central march forward with a set of very productive ideas as human beings have evolved their morality but those have spun off counterproductive evolutionary dead ends like everything does. And it's possible, for example, that celibacy is one of those with regards to the donation to sperm bank idea that's essentially the mosquito way of propagation, right? And it's R versus K. Is that the correct terminology? I don't remember it correctly, but there's two fundamentally different strategies, extreme strategies for propagating yourself in the world. And one is to disseminate yourself as widely as possible and let the offspring liver die as they may, which would be the sperm bank approach. And then there's the other one, which is high investment in children, which is maybe taken to its extreme in human beings. And so we're tilted a lot more towards that. And so you can't really imagine a human being being motivated to take the mosquito approach because that's really not built into us. But that isn't to say that the sexual morality, that's part and parcel of our being, which seems to tend relatively strongly towards monogamy, for example, as marriage is a human universal, although there are variations of it, we're still very much tilted towards the high investment in single offspring patterns. Let me just clarify one point. I certainly am not saying that you can't see the thumbprint of evolution in more or less everything we do. You obviously can. And as you point out, our sexual morality and our commitment to monogamy, all of that is amenable to being interpreted in evolutionary terms. No doubt those stories are valid and interesting to understand. My point is that we are in the process of repudiating and struggling to outgrow most of what evolution has prepared us to want and care about and fear. Tribalism xenophobia. The list is long, but we want to get out of our tribal violence program and all the rest. Let me address that, because you see, most of the evolutionary psychologists that I have encountered have what I consider the misbegotten notion that our primary period of evolutionary determination was on the African vet. And my viewpoint, I would say, spans broader time spans than that. So I'm starting from the presupposition that the most permanent things are the most real, which I think is a reasonable starting point. But I have a reason for saying that, because what I've been able to understand by delving deeply into the grammatical structure underneath mythology is that the the religious landscape actually describes that which is most permanent in what shaped human evolutionary history. And I mean way back, I mean 350,000,000 years back, before trees, before flowers, back when we shared common ancestor with crustaceans. And so one of the most permanent features of the biological landscape is the existence of the dominance hierarchy. And that's roughly portrayed in religious mythology as culture or explored territory or the known. And it's usually given the character, logical representation of the great father. And there's a positive one and a negative one as the dominance hierarchy can support you in your development or crush you completely. So the dominance hierarchy is one major selection mechanism and it's known territory. There's another major selection mechanism which is, roughly speaking, Mother Nature. And that's that which exists outside of explored territory, and it's generally been kept conceptualized as feminine. And I think the reason for that is because it's the unknown, cognitively speaking or territorial speaking, that gives rise to new forms, but it's also, more importantly, that female human beings, so the feminine plays a very vicious role in the selection process. You may know and probably do that you have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors. So as far as human beings are concerned, the feminine is a bottleneck through which genes must pass, so to speak, and it's a very narrow and picky and choosy bottleneck. So it has a positive element and a negative element. So roughly, it's the same thing, Sam, that's represented in the Taoist yin yang symbol, because that yin yang symbol basically is predicated on the idea that being is partly the known or the interpretive structure that's brought to bear on the situation. And so that's the white paisley serpent, actually, and the unknown, which is the black paisley or serpent, and the two are interchangeable, and out of them arises meaning. So the idea behind the Taoist symbol is that you should have 1ft in what you know and 1ft in what you don't know. And that's the place where information flow is maximized. And that's the same thing as occupying the position of the hero who confronts the unknown and generates new information, and those evolutionary realities remain absolutely unchanged. The idea that every place you go, there's something you know and an interpretive framework that you bring to bear. So there's a cultural element, and everywhere you go or are, there's something that transcends that knowledge that you have to deal with, and everywhere you go, you're there. And so that's the so the three basic archetypal characters of mythology are the individual, positive and negative, culture, positive and negative, and nature, positive and negative. And we haven't outgrown that in the least. It's exactly the same problem it's always been, and as far as I can tell, it's exactly the same set of problems that always will be. And that's partly why these archetypal stories cannot be transcended and they cannot be ignored. They pop up of their own accord. One question, Jordan. How is any of that religious, though I understand how, you know, thinking of the individual versus the cosmos gives us a kind of narrative structure, right? You have your protagonist, and you have all of the things that can happen to him or not, and all the things that he can want or not. And it's very easy to conceive of any human life or the life of a whole civilization in terms of stories like that. But how does this bring religion into the picture? Okay, well, I'm going to approach that from two perspectives. The first perspective, I presume, is one that you might find interesting, given your interest in spirituality. So it's certainly capable for people to experience deeply a sense of. Meaning. Chick Sent Mahali talked about that as flow, which I think is a rather trivial way of dealing with it, but at least it's one that people can directly understand. But I would say you can understand when you're doing something meaningful because you're deeply engaged in it. And you also have a sense, in some sense, of standing outside of time because you don't time slow, and it also feels worthwhile. And that the sacrifices that you have made to enable yourself to do that were justified. And so I would say because the ultimate domains of reality are in fact chaos and order or known and unknown, that when you straddle those two properly and maximize information flow, you feel a deep sense of intrinsic meaning. And that's the output of the entire structure of your consciousness telling you that you're in the right place at the right time with regards to furthering your capacity to thrive and move forward. A question here, Jordan. Wouldn't you grant that there are pathological experiences of meaning? Meaning that is actually based on a misconception or divorced from the truth, which can be no less intoxicating to the person who's finding something meaningful? Sam I think that's a great question. One of the things that really disturbed me when I was first working out these ideas was exactly that question, because I've read an awful lot about extraordinarily pathological people, serial killers and people who were malevolent right to their core. And that's exactly the question I asked, because with serial killers, for example, especially the sexual predator types, they seem to have to live on the edge of their pathology in order to continue to be rewarded by it. They have to keep extending their pathology into the unknown to keep getting that rush. And then, of course, there's a situation with schizophrenics where the underlying mechanisms that produce the sense of meaning actually go astray. And that's especially the case, say, with paranoid schizophrenia. But you see, that's partly why I think I developed a viewpoint that's similar to yours with regards to the necessity of stating the truth or at least attempting very hard not to say what you believe to be false. Because as far as I can tell, at least under most circumstances, that meaning orienting system, which is actually the extended orienting reflex, technically speaking, neuropsychologically speaking, I think that you pathologize the underlying mechanisms. If you speak deceitfully because you build pathological micro machines, so to speak, into the architecture of your physiology. And then the underlying systems much more fundamental, say limbic systems for the sake of for lack of a better term, they start producing pathological output and take you down extraordinarily dangerous roads. So if you're going to let your intrinsic sense of meaning serve as a guide through life then you have to ally yourself with the commitment to speak the truth or at least not to engage in deceit. Because otherwise you will do exactly what you said and pathologize yourself and then all hell will break loose in your life and in the life of others. And you could be rigorously honest but still mistaken, right? I mean, you could have a belief system or be raised in a culture that has a belief system that is completely illogical or out of touch with reality and you could not know it. The dishonesty doesn't have to be local to your own brain, you could just be confused. Right. Well, I think this is partly why I was more insistent than I should have been in our last discussion about a particular idea about truth. Because I would say there's the truth that's associated with being in possession of a set of accurate facts, but there's a more enacted truth, or embodied truth, which is the consistent attempt to go beyond what you know. And so that would be the necessity of living in humility or in ignorance. So that what you're doing when you're discussing with someone or when you're acting in the world is not so much attempting to prove that what you already know is completely right and correct, but attempting to understand very carefully where you're in error and learning everything you can to correct that. And you see, that idea is also deeply rooted in religious mythology. So, for example, the figure of Horace, who's the Egyptian eye, and who's also a falcon, now, Horus is an eye and a falcon because falcons can see better than any other animal, including human beings, even though we can see very well. And he's an eye because the eye with the open iris signifies paying attention. And Horace, who's a messianic figure in some sense, for the ancient Egyptians, had his eyes open to the corruption of the state, which was symbolized by a deity named Seth, seth, who later became Satan in the developmental pathway of this set of ideas. And Horace, who lived in truth, so to speak, was able to keep his eyes open and understand the corrupt nature of his society. And his uncle, his uncle was set and to put that right again. And so there's the there's the idea that lived truth can rescue you from pathological untruths, and that might be moral or factual. If you're a scientist and operating in a truthful manner, you update archaic empirical representations. If you're a what would you call more culture hero type of person than what you're doing is updating archaic and blind representations of the proper moral pathway forward, which can never be encapsulated completely in a set of rules. That's partly why, for example, in the line of Christian thought, moses couldn't reach the Promised Land because his morality was bounded by rules. And it's not possible to reach the proper mode of being by only acting out rules, because rules, the same rules aren't applicable in every situation. I could tell you the Christian story in a way that you might find interesting in about ten minutes if you would like me to do that. Let's hold off on Christianity. I want to get there because I know that's the system of thinking you find most interesting in this area, and so I would like to talk about that. Okay. My issue is that it seems to me that this kind of language game of talking about ancient stories and the way in which they seem to cash out some of the pre scientific intuitions and moral norms of any group of people, so there's a validity to the whole picture when you talk that way. I just see that that's kind of unconstrained by anything. I think you can do that with anything, with any system of beliefs. You can find a people which, from my point of view, are living in some form of radical error, which is to say that virtually everything they think is true almost certainly isn't, and the way they're treating one another is terrible on the basis of those misconceptions, and they're never going to get anywhere worth going. Right? So a modern example of that is something like ISIS or the Taliban, but there's some ancient examples or older examples that are in some cases even easier to understand because we have no affinity for them. So do you know the Dobu people? The anthropologist ruth Benedict wrote about them. I wrote about them for a few pages in my book The Moral Landscape. Yeah, I read about them in your book, actually. Yeah. So for listeners who didn't read the book or can't remember the Doboo get my vote for perhaps the most tragically, confused people who have ever lived. And this is just kind of a hot house version of radical confusion, which you wouldn't believe would be possible, but for the fact that some anthropologist wrote about it. But so this was a culture that was completely obsessed with malicious sorcery, and their primary interest, every person's primary interest, was to cast spells on other members of the tribe in an attempt to sicken or kill them in the hopes of magically stealing their possessions and especially their crops. It was like a continuous magical war of all against all in this way. And they believed that magic had to be consciously applied to everything. They literally thought that gravity had to be supplemented by magic, so that if you didn't cast the right spells, your vegetables would just rise out of the ground and disappear. And they thought every interaction of this sort and every outcome for people was zero sum. So that if one man succeeded in growing more vegetables than his neighbor, his success, his surplus of vegetables, must have been stolen from one of his neighbors through. Sorcery even the farmer who got lucky in this way with a surplus would have believed that he succeeded for this reason, that he actually magically stole his neighbor's crop. So to have a good harvest was a crime by everyone's estimation, even the person who was a lucky harvester. And it seems to me that you could play this same game with the DOPU. You could talk about archetypes, you could talk about whatever stories, ancient or otherwise, that they were using to justify this view of life. You could find some evolutionary way of kind of threading the needle of how what they were doing was a response to the ancient imperative of dominance. Hierarchies you could give some sympathetic construal of the whole enterprise in terms of myth and archetype and meaning, but clearly this was like a kind of strange basin of attraction that you'd be very lucky never to have found as a tribe or as a culture. And we're very lucky not to be stuck in some similar place. There there's another detail here which is especially horrible, because the Doboo felt that magic became more powerful the closer you were to somebody, so that the people who were closest to them in life, their spouses or their children, were the people who were most likely to destroy them with their magical powers. Well, that's actually true, Sam, if you've ever had family, you know that. But yeah, so, again, you could connect it to some kind of story that makes sense, so you could go to Greek mythology and Shakespeare and spin a yarn about it. But clearly this underlying belief in magic was, one, it's almost certainly not true, but two, it was creating a truly toxic moral environment for these people. And so, again, I just put that out there as an example of something that one would never want to spend a lot of time trying to justify this worldview by reference to stories, ancient or otherwise. Yeah, well, there's actually a technical solution to the problem that you're posing. I mean, part of the problem is how do you know if what you're looking at is a gentleman thing or an artifact in your imagination? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, sorry for the long hiatus here, but I finally caught COVID or it caught me. There's not much to report about my actual experience. It was not especially terrible, given the possibilities, but it was also not just a cold either. I was left feeling quite grateful to have been vaccinated and boosted and to have had PAX LoVid available to me. I'm not sure what it did, apart from produce a truly galling taste in my mouth, but I just don't know what the counterfactual was. I don't know how I would have done if I hadn't taken it. Anyway, it was not a lot of fun, but it was also manageable. So happy to be back and to give you today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Jay Garfield. Jay is a professor in the humanities and professor of Philosophy, Logic and Buddhist Studies at Smith College, and he is also a visiting professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School. And he is the author of, most recently, the book Losing Ourselves learning to Live Without a Self. And we get deep into that topic. I found it a really useful conversation. We talk about how the self is an illusion, must be an illusion, can't be what it seems, et cetera, from a wide variety of angles, and we do that fairly systematically. So I hope you find it both useful and interesting. I think the nature of what we are as subjects, as persons, as experiencers in the world, really is central to everyone's concerns, whether they know that or not. It is, as I point out, inextricable from the question of why we suffer and how we can be happy, how we can live better lives, what it means to be a good person in the world, how we can be ethical, all of these questions are interlinked. Anyway, we get deep into it. So without further delay, I bring you Jay Garfield. I am here with Jay Garfield. Jay, thanks for joining me. Well, thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure. So you are a philosopher who is focused on areas that are really dear to my heart. Before we jump in, can you summarize your intellectual and academic background and orientation? Sure. I tend to move around a lot. That is, I work in foundations of Cognitive Science, philosophy of Mind Logic, indo, Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy, cross cultural hermeneutics ethics, a little bit of this and that. I'm not really a specialist. Well, so I want to focus on the topic of your recent book, and that book is Losing Ourselves Learning to Live Without a Self. And that is an explicitly Buddhist framing of what could be considered one of the central mysteries, paradoxes illusions of our being in the world. But my goal for this conversation is to make the claim that the self is an illusion as understandable as possible for people. And this is something that people find really inscrutable, even those who are seeking to penetrate this illusion through practices like meditation. Even if they admit that this is a worthy goal, to have an insight on this front and are not at all skeptical about it, they still find it very difficult to think about. And to say nothing of all. Of the people who think it's a preposterous claim on its face and that it sounds even undesirable if such a thing could be understood or experienced directly. So before we jump into that central question, and this will link up with ethics and cognitive science and other areas, first tell me how did you come to be influenced by the Buddhist framing of all of this? What's your entanglement with Buddhism and meditation practice and any other related issue there? Sure. First, let me say that while there are certainly a lot of Buddhist ideas in this book, and I draw on some Buddhist texts, I also draw on the Western philosophical tradition, in particular on the work of David Hume, but also contemporary phenomenology. So I really take it to be a more crosscultural look at this than a specifically Buddhist look. But to answer your question, I began working in Buddhist philosophy quite a while ago, largely at the instigation of students at the college where I then taught at Hampshire College, who were really interested in Buddhist philosophy and dragged me into it kicking and screaming. And it was as a result of getting interested in teaching this material that it became an important research interest for me. And so, for the last 30 years or so, I've been spending a lot of my intellectual time with Indian and Tibetan Buddhist texts and some East Asian Buddhist texts and trying to place them in conversation with Western philosophy and to bring Buddhist philosophy more into the mainstream of the philosophical curriculum around the world. I find the Buddhist tradition a very rich, very complex, very large tradition. And I think that to ignore Buddhist ideas when we're doing philosophy is simply irresponsible, given the extent and the depth and the rigor of that tradition, and in particular, when we're thinking about questions like the nature of the human person or the nature whether there's a self there or not. Buddhists have been working on this problem for a long time. Western philosophers have as well, of course, but the Buddhists have distinctive contributions. And when we place the Buddhist and the Western ideas together, we often get a lot more clarity, and that's what I'm trying to do in this book. Yeah. And what's been your engagement with the methodologies whereby Buddhists have traditionally come to have their insights and opinions on these topics, specifically meditation? Yeah. Well, there's a lot of methodologies within Buddhism, many different meditative traditions, but also a lot of specifically academic philosophical practice. I'm not a religious person, and I'm not much of a meditator. I'm somebody who engages with this work philosophically, and that's something that many Buddhist scholars have done as well. I mean, there's always this myth that if you go to a Buddhist monastery, you're going to find lots of people sitting in meditation. In fact, what you find is lots of people sitting in classrooms, in offices, in kitchens, and people doing various jobs, but among those jobs, teaching and debating philosophy. And so I think of my practice as more in the line with academic Buddhist practice that is, working on ideas, debating, analyzing, writing, asking questions. That's what I do. Have you had more contact with Galupas than with any other tradition within Vadrana Buddhism? Yes. My principal teachers in the Buddhist tradition have almost all been in the Galukpa tradition, and many of the commentaries on which I rely on a lot of the work that I've translated is Galuk work. So I also certainly read in other traditions. I'm not a sectarian defender of the Galuk lineage. I also read work in the Sakya, Kagu, and Yingma lineages and in the rema or non sectarian movement of the 19th century. So I read pretty broadly in that area. And of course, when you're reading in Chinese and Japanese Buddhist philosophy, these Tibetan lineages have no relevance at all. So I try to be pretty broad. But my the people from whom I've learned the most are certainly people in the Galluk lineage. Yeah. And that would certainly bias everything in the direction of scholastic, scholarly, philosophical emphasis, and conceptual analysis as being intrinsic to any path of practice. You certainly get more of that with Kloppas than with the Ning, MAPAS or Kagu schools. That's true. But of course, the Sakya lineage is also highly academic scholastic. I think the way to put this is if you're somebody like me, who's trained as a professional philosopher and is trained to be scholastic, when you encounter the Galuc and the soccer lineages, you kind of feel like you've come home. Yeah. Okay, so let's jump in here. The self. What do you think most people mean by the term self? So when we proposed to the naive listener that the self is an illusion or it's a construct, and those are different claims, obviously, or that it's not what it seems to be, what is the object that's coming under conceptual or empirical attack there? Sure. Let's begin by drawing a distinction and then by talking a bit about illusion, and then coming to the self illusion. So I'm going to try to be a little bit systematic here. There's a distinction that runs through my book and one that I think is very important between the self and the person. And so while I argue in the book that the self is a nonexistent thing and a chimera, I'm not denying that we exist as persons. And I want to replace the idea that we exist ourselves with the idea that we exist as persons. The second thing to say is that when I think about illusion, I tend to think of this in a very Indian way. And in most Indian philosophical traditions, including the Buddhist tradition, an illusion is always defined as something that exists in one way but appears in another way. So, for instance, when we say that a mirage is an illusion, we mean that it exists as a refraction pattern of light, but it appears to be water. When we look at the Mueller Liar illusion, we say that those two lines exist as equally long, but appear to be different. So when I talk about the self illusion, I'm going to be talking about the person existing as a person, but often illusionally taken to be a self. So what do I mean by a self? I mean by the self the thing that we kind of instinctively ativistically think that we are the me that owns my body, the me that stands behind and owns my mind, the subject of my mental states, the agent that acts upon the world but isn't quite in the world. And it's a hard illusion to really get people to see, in part because it's so atavistic and in part because when you put it into words, it sounds preposterous. So when I say that I naively and instinctively don't take myself to be my body or to be my mind, but to own them as a separate thing, well, that sounds crazy. But it is how we think. And I use a thought experiment in the early part of the book to illustrate that. And the thought experiment is really simple. Just imagine somebody whose body you'd like to have for a little while or for a long time. The moment you form that desire, whether the desire makes sense or not, you've told yourself that you are not your body or something that has a body and that could, in principle, have some other body. And you can do the same thing with your mind. You can imagine a mind you would really love to have for a little while or for a long time. And if you can form that desire, then you don't regard yourself as identical to your mind. You regard yourself as something that has a mind and could have a very different mind, maybe a better one, maybe a worse one. But it's that thing that we think of behind our experience, the thing that's pure subject and never object that's pure agent that acts upon the world that we take to be free of the causal nexus. That's the thing that I take to be the self. And I think that it's almost maybe a universal illusion that that's the way in which we exist even though when we subject it to analysis we find that it doesn't make a lot of sense. But we also find that lots of philosophy not just Western philosophy but also Indian philosophy, also philosophy and other traditions takes that atavistic idea of a self and then ramifies it into a kind of philosophical theory about what that self must be like. In Greek, we get the sukhi, the kind of soul that then moves its way works its way into the Judaic and Christian and Islamic traditions. In India, we get the atman, the thing that persists through lives and remains constant while everything else changes. And what we get then is a kind of sophisticated philosophical theory about what that self might be like. And my take is that those theories are kind of like theories of how deep the water is in a mirage. You start out with something that doesn't exist and then try to figure out what its nature is, where what I think we need to do is to try to work our way out of that illusion and come to understand ourselves as persons things that are part of the world, that are embedded in the world, that are embodied, that are interdependent, that are causally conditioned, that are kind of continua of psychophysical processes rather than individual things and that only exist in interaction with other persons in a social context. And if we understand ourselves that way, we get a much deeper and much richer understanding of what it is to be a human being. Yes. So let me see if I can ground this in the experience of our listeners. This is something I've done at many points before in discussing meditation. But I think it's important to make this visceral for people because I think many people intellectually would repudiate the concept of the self that you just put forward. If I pulled in my friend Dan Dennett here, he would say well, I don't believe in any self of that sort. The self I believe in is simply the person, right? The whole person. And he would be right to say that. But he would not be honest about the nature of most people's experience virtually every person's experience. And I would allege his experience as well, which is that of being a kind of passenger in the body of a sort you just described where most people don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel that they have bodies. They feel that they're appropriating the body from some position of subjectivity, very likely in the head. Right. They feel like a locus of consciousness and attention and will. This connects us to the perennial debate about the nature of free will. And it's that inner homunculus, that sense that you're behind your eyes as a subject and therefore as a center to experience that we refer to when we say I or me most of the time. Now, of course, we do think of ourselves as people. We think of our bodies as being ours. We understand intellectually that whatever we are as minds and agents is arising out of the whole body. But when you pay attention, when you feel what in you is implicated when someone looks into your eyes or points at you or refers to you, when you become self conscious before a crowd, there is this experience of being an inner subject that is threatened or implicated, right? In that case, just take the case of acute self consciousness. Your own face becomes a kind of mask, right? You're not identical to your face. You're behind your face. And in some sense, your face is misbehaving. I mean, think of what it's like to be so embarrassed that you're blushing, blushing obviously against your will. And you are the one implicated in the center of it all, feeling at war with your experience. In those moments. Your body is in some sense part of the world, right? You are the inner man or woman and everything else is out there. And it is from that place of being this embattled subject that virtually everyone seeks to have a better experience in life. To get out of the position of always looking over your own shoulder and being abstracted away from your experience, but rather to have experiences that are so good and compelling that you're unified with them. And then we call these experiences flow experiences or peak experiences, those moments of unself conscious unity with an athletic performance or an intellectual engagement or pure pleasure, whatever it is those become highlights of the day. And the rest is us as subjects thinking, thinking, thinking, talking to ourselves in a way that is paradoxical and perhaps we can examine. But it is a subset of the person. It is the subject inside that is the self, whatever you may believe about its emergent dependency on the brain and the rest of the body and its entanglement with the world. Yeah, that's a very nice way of putting it. And I'd like to emphasize something that you said in passing, and that was you talked about having a kind of inner experience or inner world. And part of the self illusion is the illusion that our experiences and our actions happen in a kind of inner space that's outside of physical space and time and that somehow physical space and time is all exterior to us, but that we have this inner life happening in an inner space. And what that does is it kind of removes us in consciousness from the world and takes the world to be something of which we're a kind of spectator or upon which we can act, but to which we don't belong. And again, the moment we say it, it might sound crazy so that nobody thinks that. On reflection, perhaps. Well, some people probably do, but most of us don't. But the moment we stop reflecting, we fall right back into it. And that's the illusion. Just as you could measure those lines in the Mueller Liar diagram, convince yourself that they are the same length, but still when you look at them, they look different. Just when we look at our experience, it feels broken into subject and object, inner and outer, agent and action. And that all implicates this idea of a non spatiotemporal inner ego or self that inhabits our body and mind or makes use of our body and mind in engaging with the world. And that's the illusion that I'm really concerned with here. Okay, well, before we perform surgery on this concept and experience, why do you think this is important? Right? I'll give you my answer in a second. But I would love to know what you think the significance of all this inquiry is. I think it's important for several reasons. One reason is that I really do believe that part of our task as human beings is the socratic task. Right. Know thyself to try to understand who we are and what it is to lead a human life. And so the clearer we can get on that, the more we actually have a kind of authentic self understanding. But the other issue is a moral issue that is that very often the self illusion functions as a kind of foundation for moral egoism that I think can be extraordinarily corrosive. It also can be the foundation of a lot of moral reactive attitudes that can be very corrosive. Reactive attitudes like blame and anger, where we take other people to be selves, acting freely and forget about the kinds of causal relations in which they're implicated. So I think that the self illusion actually inhibits our relationships. I also think, as you pointed out earlier, the place where the self illusion disappears is when we're in flow states. And when we're in flow states, we're in states of real expertise as well as states of real happiness. And if we can understand that the self illusion is one that breaks flow and takes us out of real expertise and can often suck the joy out of our lives, then becoming more aware of the self illusion might enable us to be more attentive to what brings us into flow and so lead us to live happier, more effective lives. So for all of those reasons, I think this isn't a matter of kind of idle philosophical curiosity, but one that can actually enrich our lives if we get clearer about it. Yeah, I would just add that the obverse side of that coin of flow is all of the psychological suffering that is anchored to this feeling of self. And when you can cut through the illusion that suffering itself can evaporate, right? That this insight into selflessness is a kind of psychologically speaking, kind of universal solvent of psychological suffering, and that is the explicit promise of Buddhist soteriology suffering and the end of suffering, right? We're talking the whole Buddhist project was to or the Buddha's whole project was to diagnose why we suffer. And an insight into selflessness is at the root of the remedy there. And I would just say, personally, this is something obviously I'm interested in the philosophical and conceptual side of this, but for me personally, being able to experience the illusioness of the self has been the most important thing I've ever learned in my life. It's really one without a second. And it shouldn't be surprising that it can be experienced, right? Because we're making a claim about what's true about the nature of consciousness in each moment. And the claim is not that there is a self and you can by some process of analysis or meditative insight, get rid of it. No, it is not there in the first place, and it can be discovered. Its absence can be discovered in a way that changes the character of experience. I mean, its absence can be felt, its absence can be made salient. And that is not a claim that needs to be taken on faith by anyone. It's merely an empirical claim that is there to be investigated. So the goal of a conversation like this, if not to actually precipitate that experience in the listener, is to make the terrain sound plausible enough that a person has some indication of where they would look to find it and the path by which they might actually arrive there. So we're essentially describing the map to the territory as clearly as we can. And to that end, let's talk about this from both the so called objective or third person side and the subjective or first person side, because they yield substantially the same view in my experience, but they seem very different from the third person side. When we're talking about the physical universe that includes bodies and brains and everything that science and most of Western philosophy is going to acknowledge to be real there. The existence of a truly separate self, a truly dualistic picture of what a person is, doesn't make any sense at all. It's obvious from that point of view that there is simply the physical universe and you are arising within it as an expression of it. You're inseparable from it materially. You're constantly exchanging atoms with it across the boundary of your skin. You're breathing yourself out and you're breathing in the environment. There is no real boundary that a physicist is going to want to fight for here. And it's on that basis that any radical disjunction between a person and the world can be denied. And this is why a notion of free will, as in libertarian free will, never made any sense to anyone who thought about it. It's just obvious that there's the total set of all that happens in the universe. And fully within that part of the Venn diagram as a subset of what happens are all the things that, quote you do right. Your actions are part of the physics of things and can't be otherwise. And so I guess, throwing it back to you here, do you see that as an incontestable and non controversial starting point from the outside? Yeah, I think that's an extremely important starting point. I would only add one aspect to that, if I might, and that is that as hyper social beings which we are, in which we've evolved into that kind of status, we don't only find ourselves inseparably embedded in the physical universe. We find ourselves inseparably embedded in a social universe, embedded with other people, with other persons. And that becomes extraordinarily important because one of the mechanisms of that embedding, one of the many mechanisms is language. And when we acquire language, we acquire a medium through which we introspect and through which we understand ourselves. That's entirely transformative. And we can have the kind of illusion that when I find myself, for instance, believing right now that I'm talking to you that I do that by introspecting and finding a little sentence in there that says, hey, Jay, right now you're talking to Sam. But that's, of course, crazy. I'm interpreting myself in terms of a language that's socially constituted. I understand myself as a philosopher or as a teacher or as a son or as a father in terms of social relations. And so we end up being constructed not as autonomous beings who enter a world and then interact with it, but we're constructed and emerge out of a world that is both physical and social. And everything we are reflects that fact and reflects that constant interdependence and that dynamic interplay between our bodies and the physical environment around us, between our psychological states and the psychological states of others. And you just can't understand who we are without that. I think that's extraordinarily important. And as you put it, if we were to do physics or chemistry or biology or psychology, we can do all of that, and we do all of that without ever saying, oh, yes, and then there's the self, and we've got to think about that too, because it simply falls out of the equation. It's not part of that. Illusion isn't one that's propagated by our best science. Yeah, you used a word interdependent there, which obviously has Buddhist overtones and links up with another concept of that we might refer to by the phrase conventional existence of things. So maybe we should explain some of that or introduce some of those distinctions. In your book, you reference the story of King Melinda Nagasana to do this, and you use a few other examples. Hume has an approach here with his church analogy. So maybe talk about the way in which the things, including people in the world, exist but their existence is a kind of paradox or things exist by convention which is not quite the same thing as something existing truly independently from everything else. That's right. Oftentimes when people hear the idea of conventional truth as opposed to ultimate truth they think that what this is is a kind of second class sort of reality an airSouth sort of reality that isn't really real something you do until ultimate truth comes along. But that's a deep misunderstanding. So let's begin with the idea of dependent origination and then work our way into conventional existence. When in the Buddhist world we talk about dependent origination we mean that everything that occurs occurs independence on a vast network of countless causes and conditions. My speaking depends upon all kinds of things happening in my nervous system but it also depends upon my being able to breathe and there being oxygen in the air. It depends upon the things that I've been taught the things upon which I've reflected. It depends upon the fact that you're at the other end of this conversation and that I see you as an interlocutor. When we talk about that dependence in the Buddhist world we often distinguish three different dimensions of that interdependence. The first, the one I've been stressing so far is causal. Interdependence effects depend upon their causes and there are many different kinds of causes some of which are antecedent, some of which are simultaneous. We don't need to worry about that botany now. But even when you think about an ordinary event like, say, turning the lights on you might say that flicking the switch is the cause. You might say that the power plant and the electric grid are the cause of the lights being on. You might say that your desire to read is the cause for the lights being on all kinds of different causes to which we can appeal. So the causal nexus isn't linear. It's a real mesh. But secondly, we talk about part whole dependence. The technical term for that is myriological dependence. So a whole entity depends for its existence on its parts. I depend on my liver and my spleen and my lungs and my hair and all of that stuff to be who I am. But parts also depend upon their wholes. My heart can't function as a heart without being embedded in my body. My liver isn't my liver unless it's in me and so forth or to take other kinds of analogies. The college at which I teach depends upon its faculty and its students and its library and its buildings and its administrators and so forth. But each of those things depends upon the college in order to be a classroom building or a teacher or a student or an administrator. So that's a bi directional myriological interdependence. But the third form of interdependence the hardest one for most people to get their minds around. But the most important. One in some ways for the present purposes is dependence on conceptual imputation. That is, things depend for their identities upon the ways in which we understand them. And I want to start with a really easy example to make that clear. And it's an example that I use throughout the book, and that's the example of money. If I've got a five dollar bill in my hand, nobody denies that it's actually true that I've got $5 there. Unless it's counterfeit, of course. But what I've got is a piece of paper in green ink. There's nothing about the paper and the green ink that make it worth $5. It's worth $5 because we've got the institution of the Federal Reserve, because I can exchange it for five ones, because I can buy something with it, people will accept it as a five dollar note unlike, say, an IOU or some Confederate money. And it's important to see that the identity of that piece of paper as a five dollar note depends upon this vast network not only of physical causes and conditions, but of conceptual activity that constitutes its value as a five dollar note. I mean, after all, if I've got a five dollar note and a $20 note, the paper and the ink are worth exactly the same in both of those cases. It's not like there's four times as much really cool paper and ink in the $20 note as there is in the five. But we have different conceptual responses to them. Those conceptual responses don't reflect the identity of the two notes as a five and a ten. Rather, they constitute that identity. And the more we look, the more we see that almost everything that we take seriously as a real existent is interdependent in all of these three senses. It's causally interdependent. It's myriologically interdependent. But it's also dependent for its identity on our conceptual resources. Now, that's important because when we think about things that are extended in time, like persons who often live for 60, 70, 80, 9100 years, and we think about the difference between what that person was, when its body was brand new when it first was delivered out of the womb and what it might be like when it's an adult or an aged being. Those are very different bodies. But we unite them through a conceptual imputation by seeing that they're physically causally connected, that they share some parts, that one part of the sequence is caused by earlier parts of the sequence. And we conceptually decide to say, let's call that one thing, and that gives us a person. But that person is something that is every bit as constructed as an entity, as a dollar bill is. But just because the dollar bill or the $20 bill or the five dollar bill, just because the fact that those are constructed doesn't make them unreal, but rather describes that in which their reality consists. When we understand the constructed nature of our own identities, a construction in which we are not the only agents, in which other people participate as well. We see that our existence as constructed beings doesn't amount to our nonexistence. Rather, it constitutes our mode of existence. When we understand ourselves as persons, we understand ourselves as interdependent artifacts in that sense. Hume, in The Treatise of Human Nature, makes the beautiful point that human beings are natural artificers, that we are born to make things. Among the things we make are cookies and cakes, houses and cities. But we also make cultures. We also make ideas. And I think that the deepest part of this whole, our activity as artificials is that one of the things that we make is ourselves. And in a lot of ways, we persons are the most sophisticated things that we human beings make as natural artificers. And so oftentimes you can understand the illusion of the self as the illusion that something that we've in fact made was something that existed independently and that we just found. It would be as though you thought that here's how money originated. Somewhere on a beach, somebody saw lots of pieces of paper and coins and then noticed that they were each valuable and that you could exchange them for things and that you could put them in the bank. And so they started doing that, but that the value in the coins in the papers was just there before we did anything with them. Nobody would accept that view. I want to suggest that it's exactly that way with us, that we're not just great apes who happen to be to discover that they were persons, but we've constructed ourselves as persons and then erroneously think that that's because we noticed that we had selves. Okay, so I can imagine some listener being very skeptical about this analogy to the dollar. The claim would be, well, it's obvious that there are different types of existence among all the myriad objects and properties in the world. And yes, some things are socially constructed. Some things only exist by virtue of our agreeing that they exist. And money is among those many things. Something is a dollar because we say it is. And the moment we stop saying it is, well, then it ceases to be that. And there are cocktail parties and corporations and other things might be constructed in this way, but there are other things that exist whether or not we even know about them, much less have formed the right concepts about them and had conversations about them. So if a new virus comes flying out of a bat next week and begins to spread surreptitiously throughout the world, making people sick, well, that virus is what it is, whether we know about it or not. And its efficacy in making people sick will be what it is, whether we've learned to even talk about it or not, much less cure it. So there are different ways in which things exist, and perhaps the self is much more like an unnamed virus than it is like a dollar that was the mere invention of people at a certain moment in time and that the self has. And now I'm referencing your book and your own terminology. This self has the properties of priority and unity and subject, object, duality and agency of the kind that we discover in ourselves. It's me in here, and I can think and do whatever the hell I want, and I have free will. I'm a me. Yes, I'm in my body, perhaps in some paradoxical way, and I'm sure I'm dependent on my brain in ways that I can't introspect about. But all of this highfalutin talk about interdependence and emergent causation and all the rest, maybe there's something of interest to say there with respect to the neuroscience of being a self or the information processing aspect of what's actually happening in my brain. But as a matter of phenomenology, as a matter of lived experience, there's a simple point of view that is as undeniable as any conceivable feature of experience, and it's that I'm me and I'm not you. And so none of what you've said really has put that into question. That's right. Nothing that I've said so far in this conversation has. But now maybe it's time to start doing that, because what you've done is very ably characterized the self illusion. And part of the kind of tell there the giveaway is that you talked about it as a kind of undeniable phenomenological fact, a fact about our experience. And I think that we have to be really careful when we go from how things seem to us to how they are. Because, of course, we know that we're all subject to illusions of all kinds. Some of those illusions are what you might call accidental illusions, like the Mueller liar illusion that you encounter sometimes but not others, or the bent stick illusion or something like that. Other illusions are pretty constant. So, for instance, the illusion that our visual field is uniformly colored or that it doesn't have a hole in the center of it. The illusion that our senses simply deliver the world to us just as they are, instead of thinking about perception as a complicated neurological construction system and so forth, so we know that we can't simply go from the phenomenology to metaphysics directly. And so that's an important cautionary right there. Now, when we start looking at the properties that you correctly assigned to the illusory self, things like primordial, independence, free agency, pure subjectivity, unity, simplicity, all of those, those are properties of the illusion. And we can kind of see that in a bunch of different ways. Let's start with the one that you've mentioned several times already and that I haven't really addressed, and that's the question of free agency. Oftentimes, especially in modern Western cultures, part of the self illusion is the illusion that we can literally do whatever we want that we've got libertarian freedom. And that's the illusion that while everything else is part of the causal matrix, that somehow we stand outside of that causal matrix. The real locus classicus for that, of course, in the Western tradition is St. Augustine, who basically invented the idea of free will. And when he did that, he invented two things. One was the idea of a will as a kind of component of of the ego, and the other was its exemption from the laws of causality. And the theological reasons for doing that have to do with fiatcy, and we don't have to go there. But it is worth pointing out that if you've taken a psychology course, you don't suddenly find, oh, yes, and there's the will. That's the will part of the brain. Or first there's a cause, a perception, then there's a bit of will, and then there's an action. The idea of the will simply is completely inert in psychological theory. Let's spell that out a little more because it's a point that I'm embarrassed I've never made before, given my bona fides as a critic of organized religion and organized Abrahamic religion in particular. But this idea of the will from Augustine is really the whole point is to get God off the hook for human evil, right? That's right. I mean, this is all about the Garden of Eden and the Fall. Yeah. So it's worth reminding ourselves of this, I guess. I mean, I don't want to bash the entire Christian tradition that's not my axe to grind, but this one is a pretty serious one. Augustine was worried about whose fault it was that we fell from Eden. And the problem is that if we understand God as omniscient, omnipotent and omniban evolve, it sounds like he should have known. He had to have known that Eve was going to take the apple from the snake. He had to have really wanted her not to do that because he knew what a bad thing that was. And because he was omnipotent, he had to be able to stop it, but he didn't. And so if you put those things together, it makes it sound like the Fall is God's fault. And Augustine was worried about that because you can't blame God for stuff like that. And the way that he got God off the hook was to invent this faculty of voluntary of will, which was a new faculty to create. And he said that we have this general faculty to act. And what's more, that faculty is special in that it's exempted from causation. And so there's nothing God could have done because Eve was free and could do things free of causation. So even though he was omnipotent, omniscient and omnibanvolent, he couldn't have stopped her from doing what she freely did. Now, if you are worried about talking snakes and apples from magical trees and the origins of evil and a triple omni God, then perhaps you should take the idea of a free will seriously. But my point here is that if that's not what drives you metaphysically then you better recognize that that's the origin of this idea. And that to the extent that we think of ourselves as selves and so as free agent outside of the causal nexus even though we know that we are biological organisms in a causally determined world then you've really got a crazy picture of who you are an alienating picture. And it's a picture that, as I said earlier, both can lead to illegitimate feelings of pride, shame, guilt I did this but can also lead to very dangerous attributions of blame and anger failing to see that other people just like me fail to have this kind of free will. And I think that extirpating this myth of freedom is a really important task of philosophy. But what I'm trying to also do in this book is to show that that myth of freedom is tied deeply to the idea of the self. And so one of the reasons that we want to say that the self isn't something that we just found is because to find it we'd have to find something that was causally exempt. And there isn't anything that's causally exempt. We also have to find something that's simple. And when we look at who we are, how we act, how we perceive and how we understand what we discover is a complex of constantly changing phenomena not some simple single thing that persists through those phenomena. When we look at subjectivity, we don't find a single eye lying behind all of that. We see perceptual subjectivity, affective subjectivity within perceptual subjectivity, auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory subjectivity. What we see is a complex, more like a committee than an individual thing. So when you start losing simplicity and this kind of perfect subject and free agency you start seeing that this kind of mythical apparent thing really isn't there at all. It's as though you were looking at those lines of the Mueller Liar illusion. And as you erase the arrowheads on each side the lines come back into a perception of equality. And when you see them that way, you see them correctly. When we see ourselves as natural organisms enmeshed in a causal nexus with an identity that we constitute then you begin to see who we are. And that's very different from the eye that I think that I am when I succumb to the self illusion. Well, it's interesting. I think you can get there by taking the dualistic starting point of pure subjectivity seriously. So taking duality seriously, one can move this way. So you you are the subject aware of objects and you're this you know, whatever your beliefs about this subject or not, leave that aside. But as a matter of experience, there is this experience to be had of just being a pure witness of all the things that can be noticed sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts, feelings, et cetera, objects out in the world. And because you can be aware of them as objects that testifies to the fact that they are not you, right, you are something else over here that is aiming attention like a spotlight upon all the objects. And the fact that you can be aware of something proves that it's on the object side of this subject object chasm, and therefore not you, right? You are just the subject. But if you persist in doing that, what you notice is that this feeling of being a self is itself a kind of object. It is an appearance of a kind, however inscrutable. Otherwise you would never sense that it was so, right? And certainly you could never experience a loss of this feeling unless it is in fact a feeling, right? So there's some signature inexperience that we're calling self. There is a sense that it feels like something to be me in the middle, right, that we're criticizing this thing we're saying doesn't exist. The denial of that critique feels like something. And if that feeling suddenly went away, then there'd be no basis upon which to say I'm a self in the appropriating experience from the middle of experience. And so if you take this duality seriously, you notice that, well, okay, consciousness, that which is aware of the feeling of self must be prior to it and actually unimplicated in it in the same way it's unemplicated in the existence of the water bottle I can see on my desk, right, that's over there, as an object. And so this feeling in the face or in the head or in the body, whatever it is, the energetics of it, that whatever the signature is of feeling individuated internal to the body, that is itself a kind of object, and therefore it doesn't actually constrain what consciousness is in itself as a matter of experience. It's a logical point, but more importantly, it's a phenomenological one. Because if you keep falling back into that position of just recognizing that everything, including this feeling of being a subject, is appearing all by itself in a condition that is aware of appearances, that you can begin to feel that the condition itself doesn't feel like I, it doesn't feel like a self. Right? That is the way to punch through to this base layer of just consciousness and its contents, which can be experienced without that usual subject object duality. That's right. And it's subject object duality that's kind of the bogeyman in this particular context. Because when we experience the world through that duality, which we very often do if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I am speaking with Jeffrey Miller. Jeffrey is an evolutionary psychologist best known for his books, The Mating Mind, mating Intelligence, spent and Mate. He got his BA in biology and psychology from Columbia. And his PhD in psychology from Stanford. He is a tenured professor at the University of New Mexico, and he has over 100 academic publications addressing sexual selection, mate choice, signaling theory, fitness indicators, consumer behavior, marketing, intelligence, creativity, language, art, music, humor, emotions, personality, psychopathology, and behavioral genetics. Anyway, Jeffrey is a very interesting guy, and we recorded this event in Houston in March, and we covered a wide range of topics, things like sexual selection and virtue signaling and public shaming. Social media spent a fair amount of time on monogamy versus polyamory. We touched other taboo topics in science, spoke briefly about genetic engineering and existential risk. In particular, AI. Spoke about gender differences. The Google memo many things here, so I hope you enjoy it. I now bring you Jeffrey Miller. Thank you. Thank you, guys. I must say, I'm a little thrown by this room. I hope you're not expecting electric guitars and death metal music, but thank you for coming out. I've never been to Houston before, and it's an honor to be here, so I will jump right into this. We have a very interesting guest tonight. My guest is an evolutionary psychologist and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He's the author of many books and many scientific papers, and he is focused on topics as diverse as sexual selection, mate choice, consumer behavior, intelligence, creativity, language, psychopathology, many other topics. His research has been featured in Nature, in Science, in The New York Times, and in many documentaries. Please welcome Jeffrey Miller out here. Thank you for coming, Dicker. Hey, Texas. So we have a lot to talk about, and I guess let's start with your field, which is evolutionary psychology. Why is this so fraught? The thesis which is now just undeniable that we are evolved creatures and therefore not only our bodies have evolved, but our minds have evolved, our brains have certainly evolved. Yeah. Why is this still so difficult to talk about? Honestly, it's pretty surprising because I've been working in this field for about 30 years and when we first started the field, it was fairly heretical to apply evolutionary theory, natural selection, sexual selection, ideas of social competition and behavioral ecology to apply all of that biology that had worked so well for thousands of other species to apply it to humans. It was new, but we had no idea that it would get such a political backlash. And I think in the popular imagination, evolutionary psychology is still kind of associated stereotypically with oh, you guys study nothing but sex differences or oh, you guys do intelligence research, which very few of us actually do. And I think it's part of a general defense of a kind of blank slate ideology that says, look, if you bring animal behavior, if you bring genetics, if you bring evolutionary theory into the human sphere, particularly where they affect political controversies, then that's anathema, that's kind of a taboo. It muddies the waters. It makes people uncomfortable. But for reasons I'm honestly baffled by, I've never really felt uncomfortable viewing humans as animals. I've never really felt uncomfortable with the idea that all of the hard work our ancestors did for millions of years have endowed us with amazing capacities like emotions, motivations preferences that that generally help us do awesome things and get along and and invent things and and make progress and show altruism. I've never really felt the kind of panic, the moral panic that a lot of people seem to feel about this. Is it an attachment to kind of mind body dualism? Because obviously no one's disputing that the body has evolved and that we are apes in that respect. But is it a concern specifically what we care about in the mind and differences between minds that could be beholden to evolution? I think so. But I think honestly, the common folk aren't really approaching this metaphysically. I don't think it's really about mind body dualism or free will or any of that stuff you get in Philosophy 101. I think it's often more to do with the fact that people worry that you're reducing the rich smorgasboard of human capabilities down to a very small number of basic instincts, which is, in fact, the exact opposite of what I try to do. A lot of my work has tried to illustrate, for example, that human capacities to produce art or learn and create music or to have a good sense of humor are genuine adaptations that evolve for specific social and sexual functions and that those are endowments that we have. So that's not really reducing the human mind to simpler things. It's saying our ancestors cared so much in selecting mates and friends who were interesting and witty and funny that we now are all amazingly witty and funny and interesting compared to any other primate. Yeah, we are funnier than at least some of the orangutans. Although I think all actors know that you don't want to share a stage with one. You will be upstaged. So you just introduced you surreptitiously introduced the concept, which I think many people are not familiar with. Everyone more or less knows about natural selection. But there's this other variable, sexual selection. What is that? Sexual selection, I think, was Darwin's most brilliant idea. Natural selection. Wallace also invented it. Other folks would have invented it, I think, if we hadn't had Darwin, we might not have had sexual selection for another 50 years in the history of ology. Brilliant idea. Darwin realized if animals choose their mates selectively for certain traits, those traits will tend to get amplified and become more complex and conspicuous and colorful and intricate and impressive. They'll work better and better as signals of the animals underlying good genes, good health, good coordination, ability. And that opens a real Pandora's box of amazing adaptations like bird song, whale song, human song, human language that you might not have been able to get if you only had natural selection for survival. But Darwin's theory was kind of neglected for about a century. Nobody really applied sexual selection theory very seriously to human behavior until the got absolutely fascinated by it in grad school at Stanford in the late 80s when I thought, being a young single man, why is it that women and men have the mate preferences they do? Why do they seem to care about these things like verbal fluency or humor or musical aptitude that don't have survival payoffs in any simple way? And that's what I ended up writing my dissertation about to argue that the same things that are romantically attractive now in humans may have been romantically attractive in prehistory and may have shaped our minds to be able to do specifically those things. So I think the human mind is not just a survival machine. It's also a courtship machine. So how would you distinguish between something that has been selected for based on mate preference and something that is what Stephen J. Cool calls a spandrel, something that's just there by virtue of other underlying things but was never selected for and never got anyone to further their genetic legacy? Well, you look for certain patterns, like if there are abilities where kids don't very much care about them until puberty and then they get really excited about them right, just in time for mating, that's a hint. If there are skills and aptitudes that people suddenly develop an interest in when they fall in love and they really want to display those, that's a hint that it might have been sexually selected if people brag about a certain thing on their okay cupid dating profile, right? That's sort of a hint. And crucially, maybe heartbreakingly things that people did a lot before marriage and then get kind of lazy about afterwards where it's like, well, you used to do all these things. I think we're going to need a list of these things just to be better people. That's what you expect from the profile and mating effort. And I think with a lot of these kind of aesthetic and entertaining behaviors, that's kind of the pattern that you tend to see with humans. Let's take some of these categories. How does this relate to consumer behavior? So consumer behavior is a little bit more of a stretch. So what I did in my book Spent, which was about ten years ago, was I tried to analyze why do we buy the goods and services that we do, really in a modern market economy with complex marketing and branding and advertising and lifestyle branding where you try to create a link between this product and this brand and this aspirational lifestyle in the consumer's mind. How does that work? I think it's all signaling theory. It's all about how do you signal what kind of entity you are to others. Just like sexual ornaments can be described through signaling theory, what kind of peacock are you? As displayed through peacock's tail. But in the case of consumer behavior, we're not literally growing these ornaments, we're making the money and running around buying them. Right. So whatever you're wearing out there in the audience, you probably made a conscious choice about, this is my look for tonight. This is the kind of person I want to come across as. You might be rethinking those choices. Now look to your left and we're going to see you. When the Q and A starts judge each other, there's no hiding. And we're all very good at picking up these sort of subtle cues about interesting jacket choice right. And those shoes on a first date, really. So we are very tuned into the signaling, and we don't typically talk about it in these terms, but I think there's a continuity between sexual selection for sexual ornamentation in nature and consumer choice for goods and services in the modern market economy. The underlying signaling principles I think, are quite similar. Now, there's this phrase that has seemed to have spread like a mental virus on social media. You could probably guess the phrase I'm going for now, which I would imagine everyone has heard now, but virtually no one had heard even twelve months ago. And that phrase is virtue signaling. Everyone who castigates me for having virtue signaled about something seems to have a green frog in their Twitter bio. Undoubtedly this is being overused, but what is virtue signaling and is it an embarrassing social trait or a necessary one? I think virtue signaling gets a lot of flak, but it's really important and I think it's largely positive. We all do it all the time. It's not monopolized by any particular part of the political spectrum. I wrote a paper called Sexual Selection for Moral Virtues about ten years ago where I tried to analyze what are the virtues that we tend to show off to potential lovers during courtship. Right. They tend to be things like kindness and agreeableness and fidelity and commitment and romantic love. And these are all signals that say, I'm a kind of person who might make a good long term partner and future parent. So when you're doing virtue signaling and courtship, it's all good unless you're doing it deceptively. And we're actually pretty good at picking out who is being deceptive because the technical term is shit testing. We test them, we give them little challenges and we see how they respond. Now, in the political sphere, do you have any recommended challenges? Some people might be on a first date here and you could just cause chaos. You really want to create a situation where someone's true moral character comes out when they're under severe stress and they're tired and preferably a little tipsy, make it a kind of moral obstacle course. But in the in the political sphere, virtuous signaling can be really toxic. If a bunch of people get together and they say, this is an issue where I'm going to demonstrate what a good and kind and concerned person I am about Issue X by advocating a new policy or intervention or law that doesn't actually address the problem in any pragmatic way, but is sort of symbolically associated with expressing concern. And I think that's where you get real problems. I have a lot of respect for human instincts when it comes to managing our affairs in small groups. I don't have a lot of respect for our instincts in terms of scaling up to manage large scale social policy decisions in nation states. Yeah. So in that respect, what are your thoughts or misgivings about what we're doing on social media? What you just said put me in mind of the kind of mob like moral panic behavior we see spread. It's a very low cost virtue signal to forward something on Twitter or to add your voice to this cacophony that is singling somebody out for abuse. Yeah, I think when you get the intersection of virtue signaling and a sort of online witch hunt and mob mentality and let's have an auto defay that destroys someone's career, because I'm going to misinterpret this one thing they said take it out of context and then feed it to people who reliably express outrage about it. That's a terrible kind of society to live in. And I think pretty much every public figure now lives in almost constant fear of that happening. And folks who engage regularly with social media, like Sam or like Jordan Peterson or like Christina Hoff Summers or anybody from anywhere across the spectrum, is self censoring quite a bit, because we know everything we say is going to be taken out of context by someone and they're going to try to weaponize it into embarrassment or perhaps a career killing event. So I hope that as a society, we can develop a better kind of conceptual immune system that rejects that sort of dynamic and it's very skeptical of that particular kind of virtue signaling. Is there something that the platforms themselves could change or that we could change as far as our behavior goes? Or is it conceivable that there's another sign to this that will take it to such an absurd extreme that everyone will have a thicker skin and a more durable reputation as a result. Well, when I talk to my students about this, I point out, look, in five or ten years, everybody will have augmented reality glasses or contact lenses. We will all be recording audio and video all the time for pretty much every interaction we have with everyone. That means any cocktail conversation, any little interchange as you're walking down the hallway with someone, everything that you do is going to be vulnerable to going up on YouTube. Is that just, by definition, dystopian, or do you see a silver lining to that? It's going to be hell for about three years. It's going to be held. There's going to be mass embarrassment and horror, and there will be a very steep learning curve until we all realize we all, dozens of times a day, say things that, if taken out of context, are really, really embarrassing. And I think we just have to level up and realize that and get over it and judge people by the whole mass of what they do and say, and not just by these isolated incidents. Yeah. Having been on the receiving end of a lot of this, it seems to me that the most insidious thing is to seize upon something that can be misconstrued out of context for the purpose of misconstruing it out of context, and then hold someone accountable for that thing rather than actually care about the totality of what they think on any given issue. And those efforts are always in bad faith, and I just feel like the penalty for doing that should increase. I think that's something that we haven't quite found. Whatever dial can be turned there because people do that with impunity and seem to always get away with it, and there's really no recourse but to just keep saying, that's not what it meant in context. Yeah, I think we all have to hold each other accountable for that, and I think we have to do it kind of in private. I think that's the leverage. I'll sometimes impulsively want to tweet something, and my girlfriend, who's also pretty active on Twitter, will go, I don't know about that, or it'll go out and it'll start to get some bad traction. And then she'll go, if you follow Jeffrey on Twitter, you'll know just how diabolical some of those edited tweets must be because he's very edgy on Twitter. Yeah. So what you're getting is the stuff that made it past my girlfriend's. Yeah. That says a lot about what it would look like if the dam burst. But yeah, I think calling each other to account. So, for example, I had one incident a few months ago where I retweeted something where some graduate student at a particular university had used something called the progressive stack in her classroom, which is a way of making sure you call on certain people by ethnic groups before you call on other ethnic groups. And that went viral much more than I expected it to. I didn't really want her to get in as much trouble as she did with her university, but conservative media picked up on it and I ended up kind of writing an email to her dean saying, please don't take this too seriously. I was one of the instigators of this. Go easy, this is ridiculous. This is yet another witch hunt. Don't cave to the social pressure. And I think if you ever find yourself in a situation where you've unwittingly fed one of these online mobs, you you have a moral duty to try to correct it to the extent that you can. Yeah, that's interesting because there seems to be an ethic, certainly that public shaming has an appropriate role to play here. It's very tempting when you see someone, something that is clearly wrong or something that has been put out there for which the author should be embarrassed. Do you feel that someone's getting away with murder somehow and you circulate that for the purpose of shining some sunlight on this and shaming this person? At least I have done that from time to time feeling like, okay, this is totally warranted, but I'm never foreseen some catastrophic reputational cost there. I'm not saying that this person should be fired and as you say, things can get out of hand. Is that initial ethical intuition, you think, an error? Should we not be leveraging shame at all in public discourse or on social media? I think shame is a dangerous tool, but what are the alternatives? So I'm a libertarian, so I generally don't want the state to outlaw things that I don't disapprove of. I think it's better to have social norms enforced by shame than laws enforced by state threat of violence. Right. So can you do better than shame? I think you can use shame carefully or you can use it recklessly. And I think to use it carefully you have to understand what is the nature of shaming? How do online mobs work? How does, how does human moral psychology work in general? There's some good books out there now. We have a much better understanding of these so called social emotions like shame and gratitude and anger than we used to ten years ago. And I think at this point, every citizen kind of owes it to society to understand our instincts about these issues and to have a certain amount of distance from our initial reactions and to go, oh, I have the urge to express my moral outrage. Is that really constructive? If it gets out of hand, will I regret it? And is my moral outrage informed or is it just kind of a culturally programmed reaction to an issue that I don't really know anything about? Well, you, you have many thoughts on human sexuality and our evolved moral intuitions around monogamy and its alternatives. Polyamory is something you've written about and actually adopted. This seems like a very complicated way to live for those of us who who are are not part of it. So let's talk about just innovation in that sphere. Well, first we should define polyamory. But why is this just not way more trouble than it's worth? Well, it's totally worth it. So I was a good little monogamist and I believed in monogamous mating norms until a few years ago when my girlfriend turned me. Humans have an innate tendency to form long term Parabons. No doubt Parabons are extremely important in human evolution. People finding mates, settling down, having a little home, raising kids together by parental care, dads investing. That has been crucial to human evolution for at least a million years. And then it's kind of gotten ritualized culturally into the expectation of lifelong monogamous marriage. And every large successful civilization in human history has adopted monogamous marriage as the typical mating pattern for most people most of the time. So I'm not going to go disk monogamy. It has been a wildly successful way to take sort of hominid pare bonds and update them for agricultural and industrial civilizations in ways that work for most people most of the time pretty well. However, they can be oppressive to certain people who have certain values or certain life situations or simply certain personalities. So I think the first psychology of polyamory course last term at University of New Mexico and we reviewed all the what was enrollment like in that course? What was the ratio of women? It was 50 50. And it all worked very well. There are no fisticuffs or big arguments. Other professors gave me some flack, another story. But I think in the modern era if you go back and you ask what were the original cultural and social functions of monogamous marriage? A lot of them had to do with things like reduce the transmission rate of STDs ensure paternity certainty that your kid is who you think your kid is, manage inheritance of wealth and land. And it was also crucially about spreading reproductive opportunities fairly evenly across young males and young females so that nobody kind of monopolizes the mating market. And that all worked very, very well. You couldn't have had Chinese or Roman or medieval European civilization work as well as it did without monogamy. But in the modern world, 21st century relationships the issue is are your kids or grandkids seriously going to pursue lifelong monogamous marriage as their default or their aspiration? The surveys among millennials and gen z say no, a lot of them don't want that. So what are they going to do? We don't know. This is probably the topic of my next book but I think we have to basically look at all the different little sexual subcultures that have tried different kinds of mating patterns. Monogamy people, polygamists, polyamorists swingers asexuals figure out. What are the lessons learned from each of those subcultures? Can you differentiate those? Because between monogamy and asexuals, it all sounded like a big orgy. It all sounds like a big, messy orgy from the outside, but from the inside, the poly people think the swinger is, like, super conservative and like, Red state. And the swingers think the polyamorous people are really young and naive. How does one know whether one is a swinger or polyamorous? If you're probably a swinger. If you're a married couple and you like to go to events where you meet other married couples and you kind of court them couple to couple, and if you get along, then you get together and you kind of swap partners temporarily for a few hours, or you hang out together for a weekend with a sexual swap, but typically not a long term emotional connection expected to be formed, although they happen sometimes. So swinging is sort of a couple meets couple thing. Polyamory is more of a there might be this individual or they might be with another individual in an open relationship and each of them will typically be dating other people with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved. That's the crucial thing, is the honesty and the transparency. So that's kind of the poly ideal. And there are other emerging ways to do this. I think of it as a kind of Cambrian Explosion of different relationship patterns, most of which will end up being dominant fail. But the ones that don't fail, I think will be great learning experiences for kind of updating monogamy and figuring out how to do it or something else better. So I guess it's not hard to envision the bumps in the road down that path. So how do you deal with jealousy? How do you deal with kind of an asymmetry between just how much one partner in the relationship is hooking up with other people? Is there a sociology around this that's understood what is the success rate or failure rate of these relationships? The success and failure rate seems kind of comparable, at least in terms of how happy people are in these relationships short term. We don't yet have good data on how stable are they long term? If there's a couple who's about to have twins, I would not necessarily say you guys should definitely try polyamory right now. Okay? Because I don't know how the longevity would work out. But in terms of the jealousy issue here's where I part company with the kind of standard polyamory culture. A lot of polyamorous say jealousy is a kind of cultural construct. It's arbitrary. You can jettison it. You can unlearn it. It doesn't run very deep. I think, on the contrary, evolution created sexual and emotional jealousy for very good reasons. They are deep instincts. They have important adaptive functions. However, that doesn't mean you have to let them rule your life. So the steeper book, the better. Angels of our nature is all about. We have these aggressive homicidal instincts, right? But we managed to drop the rate of aggressive homicide by orders of magnitude over the last thousands of years. That was a win for civilization, taking aggressive instincts and harnessing them and managing them and making them not run our lives. I think the same thing could be done with sexual jealousy, but most people aren't willing to try. They're terrified of jealousy. And they can't imagine being in a relationship where they're comfortable with a partner going out on a date for a night that terrifies them more than, like, bankruptcy or a bad election. But it's survivable. It's survivable. But then the question is why? And then one wonders whether that murder curve is going to go up, as ever catches on. There must be some perceived limitation of well being imposed by monogamy that is corrected for by polyamory. And it's worth the jealousy that you say is unavoidable. Yeah. Okay. So what are the upsides? It's fun. You get to meet more people. I think humans are actually evolved to use sex to make friends, and I'm not being totally facetious about that. Sex is a great way to get to know somebody better very quickly. That's a tweetable meme. I think the poly culture tends to be very tightly socially networked, and that can bring a lot of benefits socially, emotionally, professionally, in terms of careers, in terms of cost savings, all sorts of ways. You sort of are recreating a tribe in a way that a lot of modern alienated people in society don't have a tribe. So is it functioning that way, that there is a kind of community that is so it's not that polyamorous people are continually having you're in an open relationship with people who are I don't know what the name is civilians who don't know what they're getting into. Right. This is a kind of hermetically sealed, or I would imagine people are being inducted into this, sounding a little cult like. Is there any kind of proselytizing of this that is necessary to get this working out in the world? Well, all great ideas. You have to proselytize it. No, the crucial thing, though, is that everybody involved should give fully informed consent for what's happening, and you should be upfront. Like, if you go on a date and you're polyamorous and you're in a relationship, you got to say, I'm in an open relationship. I'm polyamorous. You can't hide that. But would you reveal that even before you go on the date so that there'd be no surprise in that first conversation? Well, on certain dating sites, like, okay, cupid, you can actually specify, this is my dating orientation. Non monogamous, whatever. I think more seriously, a lot of people who are in long term relationships get stale. Their self image is, I don't know whether I'm an interesting person anymore. I don't know how attractive I am anymore. I don't. Know who I am. I don't know what my interests are. You kind of get locked into this duet with a partner, and you're just sort of out there isolated on your own, without any genuine romantic or emotional engagement with anybody else. And I think for a lot of married couples, that can be extremely alienating after a while and actually increase your divorce rate because a lot of people feel like, either I'm stuck in this bored to tears, or we break up the relationship. There is a third alternative. You can learn more about consensual non monogamy, openness, transparency, maybe open the relationship and try it. And it might not work, but the more you read about it, the more likely it is to work. And a lot of people might end up in a situation I think that that Dan Savage calls monogamish, where you're kind of 90, 95% monogamous. But maybe the wife goes out on a date once a month with somebody else and you can handle it because maybe you have a date the same time and then you get the equity. There's not a mismatch. So I'm not like, advocating this for everybody, but I am saying these are trends that are happening socially in America, and they are rapidly increasing. And a lot of people under 30 take these seriously as a possible way of life, and we should pay attention to it, do more research on it. Think think hard about it. Okay, so I just want to say the fine print here is that if that part of the conversation winds up deranging any of your lives, send all your email to Jeffrey and not to me. My polyamory syllabus is posted online. You can just read all the read all the papers there. Get busy with that. I'm hoping my wife doesn't hear this part of the podcast. There are so many taboo topics that we've touched on, some just at a run, things like intelligence and gender difference. Are there any now that you feel like we just have to learn to speak about more honestly from a biological or psychological point of view, or are these third rails that are left untouched? I think at some point in the next ten or 20 years, america is going to have to start to make its peace with the fact that a lot of mental traits are heritable. Not necessarily for political reasons, but just because of the practicalities of the genetic technology that are going to make it possible to do preamp plantation embryo selection and genetic screening where probably within ten or 20 years a couple who are having a baby are going to have the option of deciding. Do we want to try to do the selection among all the possible fertilized eggs? Selecting for this trait or that trait or this other trait? A lot of people will say, don't care. Let the chips fall where they may. Let it be random, but some folks will say, well, look, if I can get a kid who's a little bit smarter than they would otherwise be, they'll do better in school and college and their career and their relationship and everything else. Why not? Or they might go, maybe some moral virtues are heritable as they are. All personality traits are heritable, including things like agreeableness and conscientiousness. So if you could select for those in your kids, will you? Well, at some point if we had the technology and there were no safety risks, if we had vetted it fully, it would seem like a truly unconscionable moral lapse not to give your kid those advantages. If you could. It's like not putting a seatbelt on your kid. There's no downside to wearing the seatbelt and you're increasing their chance of survival. If you can amplify unambiguously good traits without raising the risk of negative consequence, it should be said it's not guaranteed that the genome will work out that way. It could be that if you increase the genes that increase the probability of intelligence, you could be increasing the liability of different kinds of diseases. I think there's actually some data already on that that various dystonias are correlated with whatever genes we understand relate to intelligence. But if something like conscientiousness can be dissected out genetically such that you get the right alleles and you are just four standard deviations above the norm in that trait, of course people are going to do it. Yeah, I think people will do it. And the people who perhaps even five years earlier were saying, oh, IQ is totally discredited. It's not heritable at all. Nobody believes in it. We read Stephen Jay Gould? The mismeasure of man IQ is bunk. Right. Those will be the first people to use the genetic screening. I bet they will turn on a dime as soon as there's actual Pragmatic benefits from it. I think the real issue then is going to be are we going to have a society wide push that tries to make access to that technology as widespread as possible so that whoever wants to use it can use it rather than just being the preserve of the rich and the well connected. I think that's going to be the crucial inequality issue in about 20 years. Yeah, that would be a massive amplifier of inequality. So I guess another issue here is gender difference and not differences in aptitude but even just differences in interest across genders. There is this blank slate dogma that men and women aren't actually different despite the existence of things like uterus. I guess this got focused very recently with in the last year with the the James Des Moore memo and the Google firing. You know, I actually haven't spent as much time focused on Des Moore and his travails subsequently. But how did all of that shake down for you as an evolutionary psychologist? That was an interesting summer last summer because right before the whole to more Google memo thing blew up. I'd written an article for Quillat.com magazine called The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech in which I argued that people who have a range of neurodivergent conditions like Asperger's or PTSD or whatever, it can be difficult to obey campus speech codes that say, never be offensive to anybody else. I'm pretty aspy, and that means I can't always anticipate who I'll offend if I say something, because I don't have a good theory of mind. I don't understand other people's beliefs and desires the way some folks do. So if you have a speech code that says if you offend someone, you must have meant it and you must be evil and you should be punished, I was pointing out that's not really fair to people who are neurodivergent and who have Asperger's or lots of other syndromes. Then about a week later, James Amore, who is probably also on the Asperger spectrum, right, google Engineer, comes out with this memo saying, look, maybe some of the differences in men and women in terms of where they end up occupationally might be due to different preferences that they have about are they interested in things or people? And how risk seeking are they? And so forth. And I read the memo and I thought, a, this is all pretty much scientifically correct. I would give this an A if this is a paper in a graduate seminar, but B, this is going to be a world of hurt for Des Moore, because I'm sure Google doesn't want this news. And indeed that's what happened. Let's just pause there for a second because it is a shock, or at least it should come as a shock to us, that he was fired for writing something which you, an expert in the field, said is scientifically correct. And there was no malicious framing of it. It was just this summary of what he believed to be the current science and his fairly tame pushback against this diversity and doctrination that he was having to weather as an employee. There's still people out there who think that he did something credibly ugly that merited his firing, but we seem to be quite far from that. Yeah, I mean, when I read it, I thought it's actually surprising that someone who's not a psychology professor would get the empirical research pretty much that accurate. And it's kind of surprising and alarming that Google didn't care that it was accurate, that it transgressed their diversity agenda so awkwardly precisely because his claims were empirically pretty well supported, so they didn't really have any defense apart from firing him and saying he perpetuated harmful gender stereotypes. That's all they could really do. And that, I think, was a really bad moment in American culture because it means well, it sends a message to everybody in every corporation that you can have views that are empirically well grounded and perfectly reasonable and expressed as carefully and constructively as possible and still be subject to these witch hunts. And I think that exerts a massive chilling effect on public discourse and even discourse within companies. Yeah, well, what has the aftermath been like? I know there's a lawsuit, right? Have you followed any of that? I haven't really followed it in detail because I know Google can afford better lawyers, and this is America, so more expensive lawyers win. So we have these evolved moral capacities. We have evolved moral intuitions. We're highly moralizing creatures. Being social primates, this extends to pretty much everything we do. There's a descriptive story to tell about how we got here in terms of evolution, but there's a very different project. And this is something that I attempted to put forward my own views about in the moral landscape, which is a normative one. You can start from where we're at and just take an inventory of our moral hardware, such as it is, and then ask a very different set of questions just how good can human life become? How good can the life of any conscious creature become? Given everything that we can change about ourselves and about our institutions and about our social arrangements, it's different to take an inventory of our moral psychology descriptively. Someone like Jonathan Height will talk about human morality in terms of just what the facts on the ground. People have very strong intuitions about jealousy, say, or humiliation or concern for authority if you're conservative, but not so much if you're liberal. But what I tend to want to do is ask a further question about just what is possible for conscious minds like our own in terms of flourishing. Do you think that's a valid differentiation, or do you still want to continue to see everything in evolutionary terms? Well, I think the evolved moral psychology that we have is a set of little tools that are largely about managing relationships like kinship, and how nice should I be to my offspring and my blood relatives and managing reciprocity. Relationships and trade and managing ingroup dynamics and making sure the clan and the tribe work and then doing the little virtue signaling that we use to attract social and sexual partners. And that's sort of the toolbox that we have. But we can repurpose a lot of that stuff to achieve levels of moral excellence and progress that go far beyond what any prehistoric human could have imagined. I really like, for example, the Deirdre McCloskey idea that there is a set of bourgeois virtues that get cultivated under capitalist society. Where to succeed as a storekeeper in 18th century Europe, you have to pay attention to what kind of things am I offering to my customers? How can I add value to their lives? So they will voluntarily exchange things with me, and that selects for conscientiousness and empathy and reliability and good reputation in ways that simply didn't happen before in prehistory. And then I think virtue signaling gets a bad rap, but it's been at the heart of almost every major ethical development. Like, of course, the early antislavery abolitionists were partly virtue signaling. My here's my empathy, because I'm concerned about these other people. I don't care about the animal rights movement like I care about cute, cuddly mammals. Let's save them. It's easy to mock that, but virtue signaling lets you get a beach head on moral issues that nobody would care about otherwise. Right? And I've seen this happen in the vegan movement that my girlfriend is involved with that the way to reach out to certain kinds of people is not necessarily to say, well, look, if you're a strict utilitarian, then and here's the evidence for this animal having this level of sentience, therefore you shouldn't eat it. No, the way to to popularize that movement is to make veganism a virtue, a social virtue, and then to convert your lovers and your friends and your family through that route. And I think it can be a great source for moral progress. What keeps you awake at night? As far as the risks that we face as a species, what worries you going forward? I'm terrified about this set of risks called existential risks. And my friends in the effective altruism community focus on those quite a bit. These are risks that are not just global catastrophic risks where millions could die or billions, but the risks where everybody could die. So existential meaning does the human species go extinct entirely, like, within this century? Or do at least a few of us survive? And the big existential risks that people worry the most about are nuclear war, bioweapons like engineered pandemics, artificial intelligence, things that aren't really existential risks, like, okay, meteor impacts, they would be x risks. But the probability that will happen is extremely low, and those things are already being monitored. I think AI. Is the wild card. AI. Is what keeps me awake at night. I've started to think and work a little bit on AI safety research. The issue there is nobody really knows how far we are away from developing an artificial general intelligence that will be smarter than us in at least some ways. It's very hard to predict what kind of agenda or behavior such a thing would have. It's very hard to apply our intuitive psychology of how do you talk to such a thing or convince it or propagandize it if it might operate on completely different principles with different preferences and priorities than we do. So there's a lot of uncertainty. What we do know, though, is America and China are investing hugely in an AI arms race. And some of the top talent in both countries is going into this. And both countries are quickly realizing that if we fall behind, we will be at a very serious military and economic and even cultural disadvantage. So that kind of makes me want to barf. And it's something also where people have been misprogrammed by Hollywood to worry about the wrong kinds of things happening. What do you make of the fact that there's some very smart people who are arguably as close to the data as we are who are not worried about this? This is something we were talking about backstage. What are they not seeing? And what's the likelihood that they're right and we're wrong to be concerned about AI. So, for example, Steven Pinker in the Enlightenment Now book, which I love and which is awesome, but there's a chapter in it on existential Risk where he's fairly dismissive of AI. As an ex risk. I think it's notable that a lot of people who used to be skeptical about AI as an X risk are now worried about it. A lot of people change their minds in that direction. There are very few people who say, oh, I used to worry about it last year, but now I've been convinced it's fine. I don't know what I was thinking. Chicken Little. Don't worry. Well, just to take that structure, how many people are going that direction with monogamy versus polyamory? Yeah, this is just a stampede out of monogamy. It's really cute. There's no stampede back, just these little stampede people who there's a little stampede out of monogamy in high school and then there is a little bit of a stampede back when people get pregnant. Right, that's true. But I think with the AI thing, my view is even something that causes a 1% chance of extinction is worth really worrying about very seriously and devoting billions of dollars, too. Yeah. A 1% probability of destroying absolutely everything is still a major thing to hedge against. Listen, I want to now open it to all of you, because for me, the real motivation to have these live events is to make it a proper dialogue. So there should be microphones in the aisles, should be two. And we would love your questions. And we have a full hour where we can take them. I guess we'll start over. Here our left. All right, I think it's on, I should say, just as a preamble, if your question can end in a question, that would be good. If you can just even just accomplish a high rising tone at the end of whatever you say, the audience will appreciate it. And if you can, be brief. Otherwise you're surrounded by 1000 very impatient people. So no, thanks so much for that. So just two things that I thought about. So I lived in South Africa and was there for the Sacco incident. I definitely remember that. But what I want to mention is that in so many places in Africa, polygamy was the norm for the longest time. And even within that, like, so many folks are still going and having relationships with other women. And the wives in that relationship are aware of that. It's actually almost a norm sometimes. But despite that fact, they still get jealous. And all of my younger African friends, when I asked them about this, they have no interest in polygamy, no interest in polyamory or whatever. They want a monogamous relationship. So whenever you say this kind of stuff, for me I'm thinking kind of like I feel like some of this stuff has been tried before and it really didn't work. And even the people who were in situations like this are actually moving closer towards monogamy. And the second part of that is that we talked about from the people in a relationship standpoint, but what about the children? Because I know for me myself, if I knew that my dad was going and even going on dates, even if he was announcing it, that's going to really affect me. And even my African friends who knew that their dads were going on this, it really affected them as well. Right. So what I want to know is why do you think that places that already have kind of relationships like this are actually moving towards monogamy rather than maintaining that? And two, what do you think the effect on children in such relationships is going to be? Yeah, good question. So polyamory is very different from traditional polygamy, right? Polygamy is there's there's one man with multiple woman women and he's typically the high status dominant guy and he sort of monopolizes a few local women and then other guys don't have women and they're frustrated. So it's a very socially destabilizing situation with a lot of variation and reproductive success across men and a lot of violence, actually. And this is exactly why cultural monogamy was instituted to cut down on that violence and jealousy and sort of distribute mates more evenly. What they don't do in those cultures is any of the basic ethical precepts of polyamory, which is open, consensual, transparent communication with everyone about everything that's happening. So polyamory is as new relative to human mating as the smartphone with all the strengths and benefits of that. It might be awesome, it might crash and burn terribly. We don't know yet so far. For some people it seems to work and we can predict it won't work for everybody. Some people will not have the personality traits that make it work. I suspect successful poly requires in today's culture a very high degree of intelligence, organization, conscientiousness, emotional self control, self insight, anger management, all of that. Second question briefly. I think kids are incredibly adaptable about whatever their parents are doing. As long as they get good input and support and care from one or more adult caregivers, I think they can adapt pretty quickly to anything going on as long as there's not a whole lot of violence and abuse. And see we that in every culture that has different mating norms, the kids don't care if they think it's normal as long as they're being taken care of. Thank you. Hi. Thank both of you for this conversation. I've really enjoyed it and enjoyed the podcast. Thank you. This question is for Sam primarily, but it seems to have relevance to many of the issues that you've touched on in this conversation. So, Sam, in your post Charlottesville podcast with Douglas Murray, you articulated a hesitance to engage with Stefan Molyneux because he had talked with Jared Taylor and was therefore, in some sense, tainted. Obviously, you should only have conversations you think are likely to be fruitful, but because you are so cognizant of incentives, do you see how publicly parameterizing your willingness to engage with people around this six degrees of Richard Spencer principle encourages the kind of dishonest smearing that you and so many of your friends have been subject to? Is the tarnished reputation of an interlocutor the right predictor of the value of a discussion? Yeah, well, again, I have to confess some uncertainty as to who anyone is. I only know what I know about somebody like Stefan, or at least I think I know enough about him to worry that he's not someone I should be speaking with. And one data point was the conversation I saw him have with Jared Taylor. Presumably he knows who Jared is and he found no daylight between him and Jared when he was speaking to him on the podcast. They were just like two peas in a pod. And Jared Taylor you can see talking to just a straight up neo Nazi, again, without any daylight between them. Right. So, again, this may seem like a transitive property that shouldn't be operating, but I think there's something fishy there. Again, the ethics of this are not totally worked out in my head. I don't know where the line is between it being a bad thing to give someone a platform by just agreeing to talk to them, or it being a good thing to invite someone on who holds morally reprehensible views and just debate them and just air those views. And I don't know where the line is. And strangely, it gets much easier, and I think I said this when I was speaking to Douglas on that podcast, it gets much easier when the person is obviously evil, right? Like, you know, if I could talk to the Unabomber and not have to waste any fuel virtue signaling to my audience, saying, you know, it's a really terrible thing you did, sending those bombs in the mail. I mean, that would just that would go without saying. And so it's kind of an uncanny Valley problem with respect to moral culpability. I don't know if you have any thoughts about this and who one should talk to and where one draws the line, but I'm still working it out and Stefan is kind of a corner case, and I admit to not having spent many hours trying to figure out who he is. So thank you very much. Hi, Sam. I just first want to say that I really appreciate your style of communication. It's really changed the way that I've dealt with people on a daily basis. Cool. And my question is, how do we reconcile the difference between our biological need to reproduce and growing concerns that overpopulation might be a problem in the future? It's not clear to me what the consensus is now with respect to population concerns. You can find people who are just as concerned about under population. It's like that the difference between there being too many of us and too few of us might come down to like 20 people. There's this weird factoid that in Japan right now, they sell more adult diapers than kids diapers. That's fairly alarming to picture. If we could get fully obedient AI to surface our needs, and I guess in the context of this conversation, those needs could extend to polyamorous robots, something like Westworld. But in the absent that, it does seem and maybe you have some insight into this, but it seems like we are in some vast Ponzi scheme. You need a new generation to stack under this this looming pyramid of aging people. What what are your thoughts on on world population and what it's going to be like to have nine or 12 billion of us? I'm pretty pro natalist, and I think there's a lot of alarmism about overpopulation, has been since the 70s. Most of that alarmism hasn't come true. That was Paul, ehrlich? Right. Yeah. The population bomb, I think as the utilitarian, the more people, the better, all else being equal. And one of the things that gets me excited about managing the AI X risk is if we do it, if we survive, if we colonize the solar system, the galaxy, the super cluster, and then we could have ten to the 30th sentient beings that are post human, I think that would be amazing. I'm willing to add up utilities and go, the more the better. So we should have that long view that as long as we don't wreck the planet in a really predictably dramatic, horrible way, we should have some faith that our little kids and grandkids will be smart and will be able to help solve problems we can't even solve yet. That's a relief. Thank you. So it seems to me that money in politics is the largest problem in American society today, because it's the problem that stops other problems from being solved. So, for example, Sam, if you think a lack of an AI safety net is a huge problem, then if technology companies lobby against that solution because it increases their revenue, then that problem won't be solved. So my question for you, for either of you, is what are your thoughts on money and politics? I think it is a huge problem. It's hard to solve because the line between if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, no housekeeping today, apart from reminding you that I have released a new podcast series with Ricky Gervais that can be found over@absolutelymental.com and people really seem to like it, and it was a lot of fun to make. So enjoy. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Jesse Single. Jesse is the former editor of New York magazines the Science of US. He has written for The New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, the Boston Globe, the Daily Beast, and other outlets. And his own podcast with Katie Herzog blocked and reported, which I recommend. And here's a new book the Quick Fix why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills. We really don't discuss the book much in this podcast, electing instead to touch a wide variety of controversial issues, from racial inequality to transactivism to the conflict in the Middle East. We really make a fair amount of trouble for ourselves. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Now I bring you Jesse Single. I am here with Jesse Single. Jesse, thanks for joining me. Hey, thanks for having me on. Sam. I will have properly introduced you. But to remind people you've got a new book. The Quick Fix Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills. And you have a very enjoyable podcast, Blocked and Reported, which you do with Katie Hertzog, and you have a substac newsletter, which is also a great read. So I guess there are many intersecting things here I want to speak about with you. I think one thing we should cover is something that I think you and I both typify at the moment, which is the fragmentation of media and how this relates to all of our other cultural problems. Maybe that's the lens through which we could focus this conversation. But before we jump in, perhaps you can give a potted history of how you got here. How do you think of yourself as a journalist and what has been your career prior to the properties and platforms I just mentioned? Yeah, so in my twenty s, I was sort of just mostly a liberal opinion writer and by, you know, mid to late twenty s. I became more interested not just in arguing that people were wrong, but but trying to understand the roots of disagreement. And John Height was a big influence on me on that front. Ended up getting a public policy masters in a program with a pretty heavy psychology component for a public policy program. I was sitting in a coffee shop on a fellowship in Berlin trying to figure out what the hell to do when I got back to the States and I saw New York Magazine was launching a whole behavioral science vertical. So I was the first editor of what was called Science of US. And that sort of brought me more into that stuff, just writing and editing stories about human behavior every day. And along the way I learned that a massive amount of social psychology is probably complete bunk, which was disappointing, but the bread side is it provided good fodder for a book. And yeah, I'm condensing a lot of stuff, but I also became slightly controversial among some people along the way, which I think probably helped me gain a platform on substac and patreon. So now, like an increasing number of journalists, most of my income comes just from direct subscribers, which if you told me that would happen three years ago, I would have said that probably means there was some sort of catastrophe and I had to go that way. But it just turned out that's the better approach for a lot of people. Yeah. Let's start with the fragmentation of the media, I think, because individually it's clearly the right choice. And as we get into some of the controversies here, I think it'll become explicit why it is the right choice for you. It's certainly the right choice for me, but ultimately it's a choice that I'm still worried about. It's a choice that doesn't really scale. We just cannot devolve into a wilderness of competing substac, newsletters and podcasts, right? We need institutions. We need a New York Times and other media properties that function by intellectual standards and journalistic standards that we can all rely on and defend. And so this flight to the suburbs of media is troubling even when we're really succeeding at it. Right? And it also has a kind of winner take all dynamics to it, which is Worrisome. It seems to me there are many points of contact between the kinds of things that are so difficult to talk about that are forcing this fragmentation of media. And some of what you discuss in your book I mean, your book kind of rolls over social psychology in a fairly devastating way, and you take on the self esteem, industry and grit and the implicit association test, which purports to reveal unconscious bias. And there are many other exports from social psychology of late that don't withstand all that scrutiny, and some of them are directly related to some of the problems with with Wokism and cancel Culture that we'll talk about, I guess, as just a first step into in this direction. What is it that you are most concerned about now with respect to the state of media and the career of a journalist and the bad incentives that seem to be reliably pushing us in the direction of being less and less competent to talk about socially polarizing issues? Yeah, I think there's two issues here that sort of overlap but are useful to separate out. One is just the general collapse of funding models for media and for newspapers in particular. So in this conversation, we have shared interests. We're probably not going to talk a lot about this, but we should keep in mind that America as a country has an interest in us. Knowing what's going on in the Baltimore City Council or the national courts, all these areas of life where unless there is a local newspaper that is well funded, they will just not be covered. And there'll be no incentive for people to not be corrupt. Basically, that's just gone. So the bigger story here that sometimes gets obscured and I'm sure I've helped to obscure it because I have my own interest, is just a steamroller devastating the American media ecosystem. So that's one thing. Then there's what's going on at the elite outlets at the New York Times or the Atlantic or the Voxosphere. And there, I think, in part because when your livelihood feels more precarious and like it's collapsing and then you have Trump. I think all this has combined to create a mainstream media ecosystem that, as you said, is having a harder and harder time talking seriously about complicated issues. And I think it's leading to a lot of groupthink and a lot of work that ranges some of it's just unreadable but fundamentally harmless. It's just bad X Men analysis or whatever. And then there's there's stuff that I think causes some harm because it's actively misleading on important policy issues. Yeah, well, it relates I guess this is a direct point of contact with your book. It relates to concerns about inequality and meritocracy at this point. And, you know, much of the stuff in social psychology that hasn't held up very well relates to this notion that inequality can be fixed in ways that would be wonderful, if true, but boosting people's self esteem or understanding and improving grit and whether or not that's just a synonym for conscientiousness is another matter. But whether or not that's the case, whether improving those things, if you could improve them, would really fundamentally address the inequality that is becoming a greater concern and more and more difficult to speak about insofar as it interacts with variables like race. And maybe we should get your own misadventures with cancel culture out of the way before we jump in. You come trailing a fair amount of cancellation related debris in your orbit. What has been your experience here? Yeah, we should say attempted cancellation, because I think some people rightly point out, like, screw you're not canceled. You make a good living doing this. Which is true. But most of it stems from a 2018 cover story I wrote for The Atlantic about trans youth and about the question of what you should do when a twelve or 13 year old wants to go on puberty blockers. Which cause puberty or cross sex hormones, which, if you're a natal male and you go on estrogen, you'll develop some female secondary sex characteristics and that is generally not reversible. It's a 13,000 word article. It goes to great lengths to explain why transition is important for people with gender dysphoria, because it is. The science on that isn't great because this is a difficult thing to study, but I think it's fairly solid. But it points out that for kids, there are reasons to maybe be a little bit more cautious and to ask more questions. It's not an antitransition piece, it's not a pro conversion therapy piece, but it sort of launched a firestorm that's continued to this day. And it sort of occupies so much real estate in the minds of a group of people where when Donald Trump did something bad in antitrans, or more recently, these states trying to pass these laws banning transgender health care for minors, which I'm very much against, everything just traces back to my article. My article is sort of the cause of all transphobia in the states, and I just think that's a result of people spending too much time online. But it's been a weird experience, because if you told me 15 years ago I'd be added to glad their enemy list of supposedly transphobic thinkers, that stuff like that would happen to me, I would not have believed you. It's been strange, but at the end of the day, I stand by the article, and no one has pointed out any factual flaws in it in the interest of not creating more hassle for you. It was grammatically ambiguous as to whether or not you were saying you were against the laws against transgender health care or you were against transgender healthcare for minors. Yeah, these laws are attempting to ban puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for minors. I'm very much against those laws. I think there are serious gaps in the research that I'd be happy to talk about. But saying there's gaps in the research is not the same as saying, I trust the Tennessee legislature to weigh these issues in a way that would take the right out of parents hands or doctor's hands to weigh that issue in a different way. I think they're terrible laws, and I've tried to be outspoken in my opposition to them. So was there anything truly controversial or that you understand to be why it would be controversial that you put forward in that piece? Or is this really a case where there's just a fairly concerted effort to demolish you with bad faith misconstrues of what you actually said. A lot of it was bad faith in some case, just sort of making up things about the content of the piece. Genuinely. To me, the fair points are there's two of them. One is why focus on detransition? People have argued basically I talked to some people who transitioned, regretted it, and then said that they felt they were sort of led too quickly down the road of taking hormones or getting surgery by what they saw as incompetent therapists and healthcare providers. You could make a good faith case like, why focus on that? People often say D transition is rare. We don't know that it's rare in an American context because in the American context there's basically no binding guidelines for things like mental health assessment and how long before you get surgery, stuff like that. So that's fair. The other fair critique is I presented sympathetically the idea that some teenagers who have other mental health care problems going on might become convinced through peer influence that really their issues come down to the fact that they're trans and they haven't transitioned yet. I didn't sort of say as myself, I think this is happening, but I presented parents and cases of kids where it does appear to have happened. So the thesis there is that there's a social contagion component to this, the trans phenomenon, which, if true, would be something that many people would be concerned about. Yeah. One thing no one disagrees about is that the number of kids being referred to youth gender centers around the world has skyrocketed. And the question is whether that's just people being the reduction of stigma. More people feel like they can go to the parents and say, I think I'm trans, can we go to a gender clinic? Surely that is part of it. The question is whether in some cases it's kids who are a little bit going through a phase or slightly confused and having sat and talked to kids who that has happened to. I find it impossible to believe that the number of cases of that is zero or close to zero. Now, how much of the increase does that account for? We have no idea. Anyone who claims to know how much of the account the increase is X versus Y, I think is lying or is overconfident, we don't know. But there are very compelling anecdotal accounts of kids doing what kids do, which is becoming convinced of something at age twelve that they'll look back on at age 20 and be like, huh, that's interesting. I thought that yeah. And I think the larger problem here is that the conversation around this issue is not a dispassionate, intellectually, honest, compassionate approach to getting to something like ground Truth here. It is a picture of scorched earth activism on the one side and a range of well intentioned and blockheaded approaches to resisting the activism on the other side. Right. I would certainly put you in the well intentioned camp, but then you've got everything that's happening in Trumpistan going on over your shoulder from the point of view of the left, and it's just very difficult to sort out, but it culminates in just culturally bizarre products. Like, I don't know if you recently saw this on Twitter, but Sarah Silverman, the comic, who I absolutely love, who's brilliant in so many ways, but she on this topic, she's clearly drunk the woke Koolaid here, and she just attacked Caitlyn Jenner, of all people, as a transphobe. Did you see this? I did, yes. I mean, if you're calling Caitlyn Jenner transphobic, at some point you need to check your math along the way and wonder what cul de sac you have argued yourself into. Well, but I could do you one better than that because something like that you can understand. Why? Because she's just trying to say she's been criticized in the past for offensive humor. But like CNN in a news article, not an opinion article, a news article recently said there's, quote, no consensus method for assigning sex at birth with a newborn. Does it help trans people to say that? Does anyone think that's true or that it helps anybody to think sex is a total mystery at birth? Yes. And this is the kind of thing where people often jump to the Soviet comparison or the Cultural Revolution comparison. I obviously don't think we're there. I do think it's completely bizarre that we're at a place where CNN, in a news article, would try to tell its readers, we just don't know what sex babies are. Who knows? So this is an issue that I basically have not touched. What we've just said, apologies in advance now, is as much as I've ever said about it. I guess I should probably put out a few fires before they start, but I just think that there's no question gender dysphoria is a real phenomenon that isn't merely a product of cultural contagion or propaganda. Right. I know someone who, at the age of four at least, was just obviously identifying as the opposite gender and alleging any brainwashing from the parents or the culture just doesn't make any sense when you get close to this case. And clearly there needs to be some path for her to live as happy a life as possible, and whether that requires transitioning through hormones and surgery at some point, that's for the parents and the child to figure out. And only someone who's really just not sensitive to the difference between happiness and suffering here could doubt that we would want some process to make that as orderly and as sensible and as compassionate as possible. I mean, and you wanted to terminate whatever someone winds up doing in this space. You want a political environment where there's just no question that there's political equality, whatever one's self identified gender. But around cases like that, there's an activist culture that is just not at all committed to having a sane conversation about this. And the trade offs between women's interests and trans interests and the interests of the gay community and trans interests now are increasingly zero sum in ways that are pretty weird. And the JK. Rowling affair was a flashpoint around this. I think the argument here is that we want to be able to talk about this, but it does seem like the controversy here is completely out of proportion to the numbers of people who are actually implicated in this issue. I mean, I don't I don't know what the even with an explosion in gender identity uncertainty in the culture for whatever its origin, whether it's just, you know, exposing the level that was always there or there's some component of social contagion, it has to be a sub 1% of the population phenomenon. And yet it has a presence online in particular that you would think it's as big as wealth inequality or racial inequality in our society. Do you regret touching this topic at all? I do. Sometimes. It's just sort of when this gets it's craziest, it gets very crazy. And I'm not trying to report from Syria. I don't feel my life is at risk. But there's a subset of people who really try to inflict as much reputational damage as possible, and it's not fun to go through. That said, I'm confident in my work, and I'm confident in the Atlantic's editing and fact checking, and I would still point people to this article as a good way to understand this issue. And it includes the voices of happily transitioned young people, so I can't really say I regret it. I also on net, I've benefited from the controversy because controversy attracts eyeballs, and then people see read the article itself and are baffled as to what's controversial about it. And the question of why the issue is so big, I do think it's complicated. There's a subset of people who from a very young age are deeply dysphoric. And you know, when I first started learning about this issue, the idea of forcing people to live as men or as males when this is just going to bring them tremendous misery, and when in 99% of cases, this won't hurt anyone else for them to transition. I find there is a genuine level of cruelty there or a level of maybe like, rigidity of thinking where at a certain point it really is. There should be a little bit of who cares to this discussion? Who cares if people transition if they're not hurting others? And then there's that 1% or 5% or 10% of the issue when you're talking about kids and diagnostic procedures or when you're talking about sports or sort of non every day, but still important issues like prison, stuff like that, where we need to be able to have a sane conversation or there's just going to be endless culture warring and backlash. But there's absolutely a subset of people who I do not think will be able to live authentic, happy lives unless they're allowed to transition. The percentages are tricky because a lot of social science institutions and media outlets have sort of taken cues from activists who are trying to lump together very different cases. Basically, the definition of someone who's transgender at this point is someone who identifies as transgender, and that ranges from people who don't have any dysphoria, who will never need medical health care, to people who are deeply Dysphoric. So that sub 1% figure, I think, is actually not true. I mean, some polling shows much higher numbers, especially among young people, but that's because no one's ever bothered to really define gender as it's used today in a coherent way. Gender seems to mean a million different things. So when we talk about a gender revolution, which is language, you often hear sometimes that really is just 14 year old saying, I painted my nails, so I'm non binary, which is fine, it doesn't hurt anyone. But that's not the same as having dysphoria needing medical help. What would you put the percentage at? Well, the UCLA's Williams Institute, I think, puts it at around 1%, but I do think, especially in the rise of people kids, especially, identifying as non binary, any chunk of the younger population, it's probably significantly higher than that. And it doesn't matter. This is not a threat to anyone. The only cases I'm concerned about are when medical interventions are on the table. Right, yeah. It's difficult, and no one should envy anyone, parent or child, going through it. But the style of conversation on this issue and on so many others at the moment is so poisonous and so explicitly aimed at defenestrating people. And the people who survive the mobbing are either very lucky or they've they've been previously insulated from the consequences of this. I mean, someone like JK. Rowling is is probably the best example because in her case, I think it's pretty obvious that had she not been JK. Rowling, she would have been canceled. Her book would have been Too Much Money is on the line. Yeah, yeah. I mean, she's she is a, you know, literally a billion dollar colossus in the publishing industry, opening theme parks based on her novels. It's impossible to cancel her. But it seems that even there, they got fairly close, given I mean, when the Hollywood actors whose careers were entirely defined by her intellectual property come out and disavow her, that's a big deal, especially given how anodyne the things were that she said on this issue. Yeah, it gets complicated because they're expressing their opinions. They have every right to. In the Rolling case, she was mostly responding to the idea of reforming the Gender Recognition Act in the UK. So that self ID is basically the law of the land, meaning you can transition your sex without much of a process. You just sort of announce bureaucratically. You sign something and you say, I'm now a man. I'm now a woman. It's just been weird watching the conversation over that unfold. I generally don't have a strong opinion on it. I haven't looked deeply enough into it. But you would think that, like, we should at least be able to talk about a proposed change to the law. But any opposition to that or even questions about it is treated as though you want trans people to die. And I'm not really exaggerating there, and that's just not, I don't know, watching mainstream media outlets go along with that and pretend that there couldn't possibly be any trade offs here, to the point where the Guardian wrote an unsigned editorial simply stating there might be some trade offs here. And the US Guardian, several staffers there wrote a scathing rebuttal about how transphobic their colleagues across the pond were. It's just you need to have an actual conversation about a policy issue, and that means that those of us participating in it, we run the risk maybe 20 years ago, 20 years from now, we'll be history's mobsters. But to not have that discussion at all, to skip right ahead to this is the right policy, and anyone who questions it should be destroyed, just isn't a sane way to do business. I wasn't even thinking of that aspect of the conversation. It was more I mean, when I saw things kick off against Rowling, it was just on her obvious concern about the degradation of the English language. She was pushing back against some I forget who it was, but someone was not using the word woman in the context of talking about people who menstruate. Right. They didn't want to use woman because that would be would be denigrating to all of the trans women who don't menstruate. So they they referred to menstruators or people who menstruate. And JK. Rowling got on Twitter saying in a somewhat snide way, well, surely there's a word for someone who menstruates, and then reap the whirlwind on the basis of that. Yeah, I think there's an extent to which, not just among trans activists, but activists in general, there's been this weird tumblrization or Twitterization of everything, where the specific fights we have aren't always the most productive ones. If your goal is to convince people who aren't yet convinced, I mean, imagine the difference if you're new to transactivism between hearing an interview with someone who is just going to be miserable unless they have access to transition services. And there are a lot of people like that versus your first encounter with it being you can't say pregnant women anymore. They're pregnant people or they're menstruators. There seems to be, here and elsewhere, people aren't really attending to the idea that maybe they should try to couch their political claims in language as yet. Unconverted would be sympathetic too. So now how do you pick your battles at this point because you don't shy away from controversy even though you are BATTLESCARD on this topic. Are there things that you decline to touch now because of this experience or do you just keep forging ahead toward any culture war issue that interests you? One of the benefits of having a substance is when I do write about these issues, it's often behind a paywall and there's downsides to that because if you'd like to contribute to the public discourse but especially given that my views aren't that radical, you can avoid the Twitter shit storm which is nice. I do think people who write about cultural issues, there is this risk that you get pulled into this black hole where your entire intellectual identity becomes centered on fighting the SJWs or whatever or fighting the worst college professors and I'm worried about that because there is some incentive to do that. If I wanted to maximize my substance revenue, I would just do culture worship all the time. But there are more important things in the world so I haven't figured out how to strike the right balance but I'm trying to yeah, that is a real liability of touching these topics. It's this phenomenon that I've discussed at a few points, which goes by the name, at least in my brain, of audience capture, where if you train your audience or you acquire an audience that wants to hear from you on this hottest of topics, yeah, you can kind of self incentivize to keep doing it. And I've certainly done my best to avoid that. Really? Not because the main reason for me is just that it's too boring, right? It's just deadly. There's not that much to think about here once you have a modicum of intellectual honesty and goodwill in hand. This is not rocket science to see what's wrong with essentially lying and seizing upon confirmation bias or some kind of virtue and then trying to destroy people who won't play that game. I mean, so criticizing that whole tangle of bad form in argumentation again and again and again, it just gets deadly boring. And there are people who do it and they become single issue people to a point where then they allow themselves to make alliances that are obviously ethically or intellectually questionable or both. Right? I mean, I don't know that we need to name names here but there are people who you know, I think I agree with 95% on the topic of what's wrong with Wokism or, you know, cancel culture or identity politics. But the 5% of Daylight between us opens on to the full horror show of Trumpistan and QAnon and just absolute madness that these people refuse to criticize because those cultural forces are pointing in the same direction against the wokeness on the left. And so this principle the enemy of my enemy is my friend which really is just a bad heuristic. That was like a big moment for me as. Like a warning sign of what can happen if you're not intellectually careful and don't have some humility watching. All these sort of anti woke people either announce they were voting for Trump or claiming there wasn't really a big and meaningful difference between Trump and Biden. To claim to speak for liberalism, classical or otherwise, and then not be outraged by Trump. It all becomes tribalism and in many cases they take on the characteristics of their enemies. You'll see them talk about woke ism in the same way the least thoughtful thinkers on the left talk about white supremacy as this like, mystical force that just infects everything and can't really be explained in normal terrestrial language. And you end up sounding like a cult member at the end of the day, not someone capable of intellectual engagement and weighing trade offs. Yeah, I can't stand that at all. I also there's a really good book by Todd Gitlin called The Twilight of Common Dreams. He wrote it in 1995 as a lefty attempt to make sense of the culture wars, and he's outraged by the 1995 equivalent of wokeness. He's also outraged at conservative attempts to sort of piggyback off it in bad faith. And it's such a depressing book to read because there are almost other than social media, there are no differences between the fights that were going on then and the fights that are going on. It's all the same shit with slightly different language and it's just like how many decades of your life do you want to spend doing the culture war thing? I'm not sure it's going to be any different 30 years from now, but something has changed. This may be a difference of view between us in terms of how dire the current moment is. Because in 1995 there hadn't been unless I just slept through it or I was too young to care or something, it does not seem that there had been the same kind of institutional capture by what certainly to my eye seems like a public hysteria. And the difference, I mean, the reason why it makes sense to worry more about the far left and I guess we just can keep calling it wokeness to capture the whole phenomenon. The reason why it makes sense to be more worried about wokeness than by white supremacy, say, is because genuine white supremacy is a true fringe phenomenon on the right. The people who show up with tiki torches are obviously retrograde assholes, and they don't. I mean, apart from the fact that Trump gave them some comfort with his ambiguities. We're not talking about real cultural power for the fringe on the right. Whereas the fringe on the left really does seem to have captured academia and media and tech and Hollywood. Not every inch of it, perhaps. And obviously there's a ton of preference falsification. I mean, there are many, many people who are just keeping mum or paying lip service to an ideology that they don't actually share and they're waiting for everyone to wake up so that it will be safe to be honest again. But it still has been captured to an amazing degree in terms of cultural influence and the stifling of honest conversation that's happening in mainstream, really in every mainstream quadrant of culture. That is a leftist phenomenon. So I agree that that's a difference between then and now. Part of me, I think the preference falsification thing is huge just based on the emails I get from professors and journalists who think their own department or newsroom has gone crazy. If there is capture, I'm not sure how sustainable it is because so many people are quietly freaking out about what the Trump years have done to their institutions. And there seems to be a steady stream of stories that leak and that outrage every whatever it is. And I agree, Wilkeness is I don't know if that's the best word or it, but you could fight all day over what to call it. It is not a popular ideology. It really isn't. I mean, whatever polling you look at, but the people who believe in it, they're people from backgrounds like mine, they're well educated, they're in media. I'm not sure you can sort of foist it on people for that long without there being backlash. And I think that does partly explain the substance thing and the success of our podcast and others. So I guess what I don't want is like total Balkanization where these outlets keep going down that road. And to get the other view, but still left of center view, your only choice is substance or certain podcasts. Yeah, that I think is totally unsustainable, but what to do about it is the question. I was recently at a meeting of very connected people in tech and media, and I won't name anyone, but I mean, these are people who are running or were running some of the biggest companies. These are people with massive influence and these were people who were on the same page with everything we've said here, but when told that they really should just present a united front here and not tolerate these mutinies of their woke employees. So the example I gave in this meeting was, you know, what happened to Nicholas Kristakis at Yale? So my premise was at some point, and I think we're at that point, there is no substitute for institutional courage, right? I mean, you can have the courage of individuals, but at a certain point, the institutions themselves have to say, okay, no more. This party of masochism and delusion is over. So when you look at what happened at Yale, when you watch that video of Nicholas summoning more patients than anyone short of a Christian saint who has been crucified with a happy smile on his face, has managed to muster. And you see the behavior of those students that was borderline physically threatening at points and totally intolerable from an academic point of view. It's patently obvious to me what should have happened there, that some of those kids should have been expelled from Yale. It was completely beyond the pale what they were up to there. And what actually happened is they got awards for activism. They were literally given awards, right. Some of them I don't know how many got awards, but some some of the principal people in that video got singled out for their their heroic activism, which was antithetical to anything a sane university needs to be committed to in terms of a dispassionate search for truth. So I floated that example to these captains of industry, and I said, at what point do your companies just hold the line and say, if you feel that way, go work somewhere else? And everyone in the room agreed that that was not going to happen, that there was no way that was going to happen just because of the backlash, you mean? Yeah, that it's gone too far, it's too scary. There's too much money to lose. It went over like a lead balloon. It was a complete non starter. And I kept pushing, and I said, Listen, the people in this room literally know everybody. You could have a star chamber meeting where everyone agreed to be on the same page here so that the mutineers from Google couldn't just jump over to Amazon or Facebook or Apple. You could literally get everyone to agree to just wake up simultaneously. And they said, there's no way it's going to happen. It's over. It was an incredibly bleak picture coming from people who either are at the top or were at the top of some of the biggest businesses in tech and media right. Which suggested to me that the situation is worse than I thought, not better. I saw the video. It was terrible. But I wouldn't want the kids expelled. Why can't it be a middle way where you don't expel them, but you just explain at a certain point, you need to explain, like, you guys don't make the rule. Something similar happened as Simon and Schuster, where Mike Pence's book employees wanted to cancel it, and the higher ups were like, no, we're not canceling it. Obviously, that's another case where a lot of money was involved, so it wasn't like doing it out of the good of their liberal hearts. But that's a depressing story. I just think it doesn't seem like the places that have just said, sorry, we disagree with you on this, have suffered as a result. I mean, there's another dumb blow up involving Trader Joe or some blogger or Twitter or tried to say their brand names were offensive, and Twitter just trader Joe's just said no. Why can't more people just say no? That's the one example. I mean, they had in basecamp are the examples of companies standing. I don't think Trader Joe's suffered any. I don't actually know. But I haven't heard that they suffered much of anything as a consequence, but Basecamp lost, whatever, 30% of its employees. And I think the picture of something like that happening at Facebook or Apple or anywhere else is too terrifying. But that only presumes that they would have somewhere they could go. I just think that at a certain point, institutions have to present a united frontier. I mean, the problem is that if you flipped it, if you flip the to take the variable of race here, it is reverse racism when it's creating which case are you you mean like the Yale thing? No, the Yale thing was deranged around this issue of Halloween costumes. But the thing that is causing so much chaos in most of these instances in these corporations, obviously the trans issue comes up again and again, but it's much more common that the issue is born of concerns about racial inequality, which obviously are understandable and need to be addressed in some way throughout our society. But there's just a continuous allegation of racism where the allegation is not only unwarranted, it's obviously unwarranted. Right. All the participants actually know that it's unwarranted. You take the case of there are so many cases here, but the one that comes to mind here is what happened at Netflix with the head of communications, Jonathan Friedland, who got fired for using the N word in a context that was not a use of the N word as a slur. It was the use of the N word to tell people just what a concern it was that they get their messaging correct. For those who don't remember this episode briefly, what happened is Tom Segura, the comic, released a comedy special on Netflix where he used the word retard over and over again, and they got a ton of blowback. And so Jonathan Friedland, who was head of communications in a closed door meeting at the company, said, listen, this is a huge deal. It turns out that using this word is like using the N word for the black community. But he didn't say N word. He used the word. And for that use of the magic syllables in a context where he's expressing his own very liberal opinion that they have to be even more scrupulous about the use of the word retard. He wound up getting fired, but it was in a context where literally no one thought that he was actually a racist. Right. This was not a case where that his use of the word suggested to so many people that he really is a closeted racist. No, he had simply uttered the word voldemort, and the taboo is so deep that there was no digging out. So there's a couple of different things. There was another case, similar at the New York Times involving Donald McNeil Jr. That I found similarly infuriating, and you had 150 time staffers signing a letter demanding he be reinvestigated. I do think there's maybe a difference between cases like that where basically what people are trying to do there is established. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, a reminder that we're releasing more episodes of the series The Essential Sam Harris, created by Jay Shapiro. Jay has mined my catalog and put together episodes on specific themes, adding his own commentary read by the wonderful Megan Phelps roper and weaving that together with excerpts from many podcasts on a similar topic. We released Artificial Intelligence about a week ago. There will be episodes on consciousness and violence, free will, belief and unbelief, existential threat and nuclear war, social media and the information landscape, death, meditation and Eastern spirituality, and perhaps other topics beyond that. Jay has also created workbooks for each episode and recommendations for further exploration. And these full episodes and other materials are available to all podcast subscribers. As always, if you can't afford a subscription, you need only send an email to support@samharris.org and request a free account. And I remain extremely grateful to have a community of subscribers that support the podcast, knowing that others who can't afford to are nevertheless able to get everything for free. That really is the business model that makes sense for me in digital media, and it's our policy over at Waking Up too. So don't let real concerns about money ever be the reason why you don't get access to my digital work. Okay, well, I've been off Twitter for about ten days now, and I must say it's been interesting. It's almost like I amputated a limb. Actually, I I amputated a phantom limb. The limb wasn't real, and it was mostly delivering signals of pain and disorder, but it was also a major presence in my life, and it was articulate in ways that I was pretty attached to. I could make gestures or seeming gestures that I can now no longer imagine making. There's literally no space in which to make those gestures in my life now, so there's definitely a sense that something is missing. My phone is much less of a presence in my life. I've noticed that I sometimes pick it up reflexively, and then I think, what was I hoping to do with this? And my sense of what the world is is different. My sense of where I exist in the world is different. This might sound completely crazy to those of you who are never obsessed with Twitter, but Twitter had really become my newsfeed. It was my first point of interaction with the worlds of information each day, and now that seems far less than optimal. I once went up in a police helicopter and experienced what it was like to have a cop's eye view of a major American city. At the time, this really was a revelation to me. When you're listening to police radio, there's always a car chase or shots fired or reports of a rape in progress or some other astounding symptom of societal dysfunction. And without a police radio in your life, most of that goes away, and it's genuinely hard to say which view of a city is more realistic. Is it more realistic a picture of your life in your city for you to suddenly be told that someone is getting murdered right now a mere 4 miles from where you're currently drinking your morning cup of coffee? Is the feeling of horror and helplessness that wells up in you a more accurate lens through which to view the rest of your day? Or is it distorting of it? It does seem possible to misperceive one's world on the basis of actual facts because of what one helplessly does with those facts. It's almost like the human mind has its own algorithmically boosted information. So misinformation aside, and there was obviously a lot of that, I now feel like many of the facts I was getting on Twitter were distorting my sense of what it is to live in the world as well as my sense of my place in it. Today's conversation was recorded before I got off Twitter, so you'll hear it come up briefly. Actually, it was recorded the day before I deleted my account because I did that on Thanksgiving Day, and this was recorded the day before. And at a few points, you'll hear the residue of how much time I had been spending on Twitter that day. I complain about it, I draw an analogy to it, and frankly, listening back to this conversation, I sound a little more cantankerous than normal. This conversation had the character of a debate at times, especially in the second half, and listening to it, I sound a little bit at the end of my patience. And while it had some reference to the disagreement being discussed, it was certainly drawing some energy from my collisions on Twitter that day. Anyway, today's guest is Eric Hoell. Eric is a neuroscientist and writer. He was a professor at Tufts University, but recently left to write full time. He's been a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a Forbes 30 under 30 Notable in science. He has published a novel titled The Revelations, and he now writes full time for his substac, which goes by the name of the Intrinsic Perspective. And today we talk about the nature of moral truth and by implication, the future of effective altruism. We discuss the connection between consequentialism and EA, the problems of implementing academic moral philosophy, bad arguments against consequentialism or what I deem to be bad arguments the implications of AI for our morality, the dangers of moral certainty, whether all moral claims are in fact claims about consequences. The problem of moral fanaticism. Why it's so difficult to think about low probability events and other topics. Anyway, I really enjoyed this. Despite being slightly prickly. These are some topics that really are at the core of my interest as well as Eric's. And now I bring you Eric Howell. I am here with Eric Howell. Eric, thanks for joining me. Thank you so much, Sam. It's a delight. I actually grew up selling your books. I grew up in my mom's independent bookstore and all through high school, which was, I think, like 2004 or so. This was right when the end of faith came out. And I sat on the bestseller list for a long time. And so I probably sold, I don't know, 50, maybe even 100 copies of that book. I mean, I sold it a lot. It was really dominant during that period of time. Oh, nice. Nice. Where was the bookstore? Or where is the bookstore? Yeah. It's in Newburyport, Massachusetts, which is north of Boston. It's just an independent bookstore up there. But it was great. I highly recommend growing up in a bookstore if you can get away with it. I can only imagine that that would have been my dream at really every point from, I don't know, twelve on. That would have been amazing. You guys still have the store? We we do, actually. It survived COVID, incredibly thanks to the generosity of the local community who leapt in to support it with a Go fund me. And it's now going on 50 years. Amazing. Pretty incredible. Let's plug the store. What's the name of the store? The name of the store is Jabawaki Books in Newburyport, Massachusetts. I highly recommend checking it out. Jabberwocky? As in Lewis Carroll? Yes. Cool. Well, that's great. I love that story. So you and I have a ton in common. Apparently. We've never met. This is the first time we've spoken. I have been reading your essays and at least one of your academic papers. Let's just summarize your background. What have you been doing since you left that independent bookstore? Well, I originally wanted to be a writer but I became very interested in in college about the science of consciousness which I'm sure you sort of understand in the sense of it just being very innately interesting. It seemed like a wild west. It seemed like there was a lot there that was unexplored. And so I became so interested that I went into it and I got a PhD and I worked on developing what's probably arguably one of the leading theories of consciousness which is integrated information theory. Now, I think that particular theory has some particular problems but I think it's sort of what a theory of consciousness should look like. And I was very lucky to sort of work on it and develop it over my PhD. But during that time, I was still writing, and so eventually that spilled over onto Substack and doing sort of these newsletters, which is almost to me like this emerging literary genre. Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, but I really sort of think of it that way, this sort of frictionless form of communication that I really find intriguing. And so that's what I've been devoting a lot of my effort to lately. Yeah. So just to back up a second, so you got your PhD in neuroscience and did you do that under Tanoni? Yeah, I did. So I worked with Julio Tanoi, and we were working on this was right around the time when Integrated Information Theory was sort of coming together. He was the originator of it. But there was sort of this early theory team we called ourselves that was all built on shoring up the foundations. And it was a deeply formative again, an instance of me just being very, very lucky. It was a deeply formative experience to work on a really ambitious intellectual project, even though now I can sort of see that that like frankly, I don't think that the theory is is probably 100% true. I think maybe some aspects of it are true. I think some aspects of it are incredibly interesting. I think it sort of looks very much like what we want out of a science of consciousness. But regardless of that, I think as an intellectual project, it was incredibly ambitious and intricate, and it had just a huge to go into that environment of really high level science at a frontier when you're 22 is is mind expanding. Yeah. Right. I mean, it was just it was just absolutely mind blowing, and it was a privilege to be to be a part of that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's so many things we could talk about, obviously. We can talk about consciousness and free will, the brain AI. I know we share some concerns. There digital media. You just raised the point of your migration to Substac. Maybe we'll linger on that for a second, but we could talk about we have many, many hours ahead of us if we want to COVID all those things. But there's something else on the agenda here which is more pressing, which is your views about effective altruism and consequentialism, which have been only further crystallized in recent weeks by the fall of Sam Bankman Freed. So maybe we'll get to some of the other stuff, but we definitely want to talk about moral truth and the larger question of just what it takes to live a good life, which really those are questions which I think are central to everyone's concern, whether they think about them explicitly or not. But before we jump in, let's just linger for a second on your bio, because you made this jump to Substack, which really appears, at least in the last ten days or so to have actually been a jump. You were a professor of neuroscience at Tufts, was that correct? Yeah. So I'm resigning my professorship at Tufts in order to write full time on my substance, the intrinsic perspective. And one of the reasons I'm doing it is just that the medium itself offers a huge amount of people who are interested in multiple subjects. Right. I mean, you surely have sort of felt some of these constraints wherein you're really expected to be hyper focused on particular academic problems. And I do do technical work and so on, but I'm also sort of just more interested in general concepts. And there hasn't been at least for someone who's a writer, there hasn't been a great way to make a living off of that. And actually subsac is now sort of providing that. So I think I can do stuff that's as in depth as some of my academic work, but sort of do it in public and create conversations. And I think that's really important, and I should seize the opportunity while I can. But why resign your post at Tufts? What do most people not understand about academia at this moment that would make that seem like an obvious choice? Because I guess from the outside, it might seem somewhat inscrutable. I mean, why not maintain your professorship, continue to be a part of the ivory tower, but then write on substac as much as you want or can? Yeah, I think what is not quite understood is how focused you have to be on the particular goal posts that are within academia that move you towards tenure track. So basically, whatever professor wants is this tenure at some major institution. And to do that now, it's not really just a matter of doing your research, right? It's a matter of sort of crafting your research. So it will receive big governmental grants. And the areas in which I work, which is like science of consciousness, mathematically formalizing, the notion of emergence. These are not areas where there is a huge amount of funding to begin with. Right. But beyond that, it also means being involved with the student body in not just having students, but in all sorts of ways, like extracurricular activities, volunteering, taking on essentially busy work of editing journals. And it involves you sort of citation maxing and paper maxing and sitting on all the right committees. And I sort of have tried to avoid doing that and thought maybe I could make a career within academia without really leaning in heavily into all that, into sort of the all the goalposts and hoops of academia. And I think it's it's effectively just impossible. Like, I've sort of been very lucky to have gotten as far as I have. And the simple truth is that last year I published a novel and I've been publishing essays on substacc. And the simple truth is, is that a tenure committee will never sit down and say, oh, you, you wrote a novel and a bunch of popular essays that's, you know, just this massive plus for our biology department. It's like totally inscrutable to them. And I've never had anyone in any sort of administrative or hiring or grant giving capacity show anything but, like, hesitation and intrepidation about sort of my work outside of either direct academic stuff or direct research stuff. Yeah, but has something changed or has that always been the case, do you think? I think it's essentially always been the case. It's just that my fear is that people think, oh, this is someone hopping on subsack as some sort of life raft. I think if subsack didn't exist, I would sort of happily split the difference and just take the career head and keep writing and probably not get tenure where I want to get tenure, or even if I could, but I would still try it. But I think subsack as this sort of emerging genre. You're an author, you've written books. And there's a certain sensation, at least that I have and I imagine most authors have at a certain point where when you're publishing a book, it's like you're entering this queue behind a line of like massive titans who have all written incredible works. And you're sort of offering up this sort of meager, here's my book. I hope it's sort of at all lives up to any of this stuff, and I just don't feel that way. And I just don't feel that way on substance. Right. I feel like, oh, this is new. People haven't really done this. I mean, of course there's been many great essays throughout history, but this sort of constant contact of the newsletter form and the frictionlessness of it, it strikes me as like a new genre and I want to sort of explore it. Yeah, the huge difference is the cadence of publishing. To be able to hit publish on your own schedule and then to see it instantaneously land in the hands and minds of readers or listeners. In the case of a podcast, that strikes me as genuinely new. I mean, the rhythm of book publishing now, it's been some years since I've been engaged in it, and it's really hard, especially for a nonfiction book. I guess with a novel it would probably feel differently, or this wouldn't be quite the pain point. But if you have an argument to make that you think has pressing intellectual and even social importance and it all relates to issues of the day to spend a year or more crafting that argument and then to wait nearly a year. In the usual case, it's something like eleven months for that to be published. It just seems like a bizarre anachronism at this point as a counterpoint to that substance. And podcasts and blogs generally, anything digital that you have for which you're the publisher, it's just a different world. Yeah, absolutely. Publishing moves at a glacial speed. And it's funny as well. Just as someone who grew up, as I said, selling books, I mean, there are a lot of people who have moved to reading primarily on their phone. And what I don't want is reading to sort of die out, right? I want to have high level, book level content that people can read on their phones. And one reason for that is just that when you wake up in the morning, what a lot of people do is check their phones and they'll look through their social media messages and they'll read their emails, but they'll also read an essay. They'll read an essay with their head right on their pillow. And that is so powerful if you can sort of direct that towards things worth attending to. And I realize this by looking at my own behavior. As much as I love books, I mean, I'm sitting in my office surrounded by free books stolen from my mother's store. But as much as I absolutely love books, I don't wake up in the morning and put a book in my face, right? I wake up in the morning and I check my phone, right? I realized this and I thought, well, what am I doing? Why am I putting all this effort into something that, yeah, I still read books, but clearly there's this huge open market for sort of good, high level content that you can read online or on your computer. And I want to bring a lot of the old school sort of literary and scientific qualities. I mean, that's my hope, right, is to bring that sort of stuff online. Anyway. Well, I think you're executing on that hope because your subsack essays are great and they're quite literate, and you also have a great artist you're collaborating with. I love the illustrations associated with your essays. Yeah, it's a huge amount of fun. He does these artistic reactions to the post, so he reads draft and then somehow knocks out, with no direction from me, his sort of reaction to it. And it's a lot of fun. Yeah, nice. So let's jump into the topic at hand because this was kicked off by my having noticed one of your essays on effective altruism. And then I think I signed up for your substac at that point, and then I noticed maybe I was already on it, and then you wrote a further essay about Sam Bankman Freed and his misadventures. So we're going to jump into effective altruism and consequentialism, and there are now many discontents. Perhaps we should define and differentiate those terms first. How do you think about EA and consequentialism? Yeah, absolutely. I think effective altruism has been a really interesting intellectual movement in my lifetime. It's sort of made contributing to charity intellectually sexy, which I find very admirable. And they've brought a lot of attention to causes that are more esoteric. But just to give, like, a very basic definition, maybe of effective altruism. And how I think about it is that you can view it at two levels. So the broadest sort of definition is something like moneyball but for charities. So it's looking at charities and saying, how can we make our donations to these charities as effective as possible? And again, this is something that immediately people say, that sounds really great, but it comes out of a particular type of moral philosophy. So the movement has its origins in a lot of these intellectual thought experiments that are based around utilitarianism. And, you know, where I've sort of criticized the movement is in its sort of taking those sort of thought experiments too seriously. And actually, back in August, I wrote, I think, the essay that you're referring to. And it's not just because I've decided to, you know, critique randomly effective altruism, which at the time was just people, you know, contributing money to charity, like, what's there exactly to critique about it? But they actually put out a call for criticism. So they said, please, we'll pay you to criticize us again, something that is very admirable. And so I ended up writing a couple of essays in response to this call for self criticism. And my worry was that they were taking maybe the consequentialism, you could call it you call it utilitarianism a bit too seriously. And my worry was that they would kind of scale that up. And in a sense, the FTX implosion that recently occurred, which now over a million people, it seems like, have lost money in that that occurred. Perhaps arguably this is arguably in part because of taking some of the deep core philosophical motives of effective altruism too seriously and trying to bring it too much into the real world. And just to give, like, a definition, maybe we should give some definitions here. In case I've said utilitarianism, I've said consequentialism very broadly. I would say consequentialism is when your theory of morality is based around the consequences of actions or to be strict about it, that morality is reducible in some way to only the consequences of actions. And utilitarianism is maybe like a specific form of consequentialism. People use these terms in a little bit different ways, but utilitarianism is kind of a specific form of consequentialism where it's saying that the consequences that impact let's just be reductive and say the happiness or pleasure of individuals is sort of all that matters for morality. And all of effective altruism originally comes from some moral thought experiments around how to sort of maximize these properties or how to be a utilitarian. And I think that that's I think that that's, in a sense, the part of the movement that we should take the lease seriously, and then there's a bunch of other parts of the movement that I think are good and should be emphasized. So I just want to sort of make that clear. Okay, great. Well, let me go over that ground one more time just to fill in a few holes, because I think I just don't want anyone to be confused about what these terms mean and what we're talking about here. So, yeah, it is, in fact, descriptively true that many effective altruists are consequentialists. And the, as you say, the the original inspiration for EA is, you know, arguably the thought experiment that Peter Singer came up with about the shallow pond, which has been discussed many times on this podcast. But briefly, if you were to be walking home one day and you see a child drowning in a shallow pond, obviously you would go rush over and save it. And if you happen to be wearing some very expensive shoes, the thought that you you can't wade into that pond to save the life of a drowning child because you don't want to damage your shoes, well, that immediately brands you as some kind of moral monster, right? Anyone who would decline to save the life of a child over, let's say, a $500 pair of shoes just deserves to be exiled from our moral community. But as Singer pointed out, if you flip that around, all of us are in the position every day of receiving appeals from valid charities, any one of which indicates that we could save the life of a drowning child, in effect, with a mere allocation of, let's say, $500. But none of us feel that we or anyone else around us who is declining to send yet another check to yet another organization for this purpose. None of us feel that we or anyone else is a moral monster for not doing that, right? And yet, if you do the math in consequentialist terms, it seems like an analogous situation. It's just a greater remove. The moral horror of the inequality there is just less salient. And so we walk past the pond, in effect, every day of our lives, and we do so with a clear conscience. And so it's on the basis of that kind of thought that a few young philosophers were inspired to start this movement. Effective altruism, which, as you say, is I like the analogy. It's essentially moneyball for charity. Let's just drill down on what is truly effective and how can we do the most good with the limited resources we have. And then there are further arguments about long termism and other things that get layered in there. And I should say that Peter Singer and the founders of EA, toby Ord and Will McCaskill, have been on this podcast, in some cases multiple times. And there's a lot that I've said about all that. I guess I would make a couple of points here. One is that there's no, I guess, a further definition here. You brought in the term utilitarianism. So that's the original form of consequentialism attributed to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which, when it gets discussed in most circles, more or less gets equated with some form of hedonism, right? But people tend to think, well, utilitarians really just care about pleasure or happiness in some kind of superficial and impossible to measure way. And so there are many caricatures of the view that you should avoid pain at all costs. There's no form of pain that could ever be justified on a utilitarian calculus. So there's a lot of confusion about that. But I guess the you know, if you if we wanted to keep these terms separate, I just tend to collapse everything to consequentialism. You could argue that consequentialism, as you said, is the claim that moral truth, which is to say, you know, questions of right and wrong and good and evil is totally reducible to talk about consequences, actual or perhaps actual and potential consequences. And I would certainly sign on to that. You could make. The further claim, which I've also made, is that all of the consequences that really matter in the end have to matter to some conscious mind somewhere, at least potentially right so that we care about in the end the conscious states of conscious creatures. And anything else we say we care about can collapse down to the actual or potential conscious states of conscious creatures. So I've argued for that in my book The Moral Landscape and elsewhere. But much of the confusion that comes here is, as I think we're going to explore, comes down to an inadequate picture of just what counts as a consequence. So I want to get into that. But I guess the final point to make here just definitionally is that it seems to me that there's no direct connection, or at least no two way connection. Maybe there's a one way connection between effective altruism and consequentialism, which is to say, I think you could be an effective altruist and not be a consequentialist, though, although I would I would agree that probably most effective altruists are consequentialists. I mean, you could be a fundamentalist Christian who just wants to get the the souls of people into heaven and then think about effective altruism in those terms. Just how can I be most effective at accomplishing this particular good that I'm defining in this particular way? And so I do think EA and consequentialism break apart there. Although I guess you could say that if any consequentialist really should be an effective altruist, if you're concerned about consequences, well, then you should be concerned about really tracking what the consequences of your actions or or a charity's actions are. And you should care if one charity is doing 100 times more good, you know, based on your definition of good than another charity, and then that's the charity that should get your money and time, et cetera. So I don't know. Do you have anything you want to modify about all that? No, I think that that's correct, and I agree, actually, that you could sort of separate out the utilitarianism or consequentialism from. Effective altruism in some particular ways. But I think that where it gets a little bit difficult is that the whole sort of point is this effective part of the altruism. So when one makes a judgment about effectiveness, they have to be choosing something to maximize or prioritize. So you want to be choosing the biggest moral bang for your buck, which again, strikes me as quite admirable, especially when the comparisons that you're making are local. So let's say that you set out with your goal of saving lives in Africa. Well, maybe there are multiple different charities and some are just orders of magnitude in terms of the expected result of just raw number of lives saved. And this is actually a big part of precisely what the effective altruism movement has done. It's isolated some of these charities. There's a couple of them, some are around like mosquito bed nets and things like that, that are just really, really effective at saving lives. But what if you're comparing things that are very far apart? So let's say that you have some money and you want to distribute it between inner city arts education versus domestic violence shelters. Well, now it gets a lot harder and it becomes a little bit clearer that what we mean by morality isn't as obviously measurable as something like an effective economic intervention or an effective medical intervention. Maybe it is to some hypothetical being with a really perfect good theory of morality. And one way to that effective altruist essentially get around some of these issues is just to say, well, actually both of those are essentially wastes of money. Like you shouldn't really be contributing to inner city arts education or domestic violence shelters. You really should be arbitraging your money because your money is going to go so much further somewhere else. And again, this all sounds good. Like, I don't think that this is bad reasoning or anything like that. But the issue is that the more seriously you take this, and the more literally you take this, what happens is that it's almost like you begin to instantiate this academic moral philosophy into real life, and then it begins to become vicious in a particular way. Like, why are you donating any money within the United States at all? Why not put it where it goes much further? And that's where people begin to get off the bus to a certain degree. Again, no one can blame anyone for maximizing charities, but to say that, okay, wait a minute, a dollar will go so much further in Africa than it will here, so why donate any money to any charity that sort of operates within the US. And that's where, again, people begin to say, wait, something is going on here. And I think what's going on is that this maximizing totalitizing philosophy within that you can have this hardcore interpretation of utilitarianism or consequentialism and you can take it really, really seriously. And if you do. I think it can lead to some bad effects, just like the way that people who take religious beliefs and I don't want to make the comparison. I'm certainly not saying that effective altruism is a religion, but in sort of the same behavioral way that people who take religious beliefs really, really seriously and they have some sort of access to moral truth and that allows them to strap a bomb to their chest or something. And that is this level of sort of fanaticism. And I think that if you take academic philosophy too seriously, you should sort of take it as interesting and maybe as motivating, but you shouldn't really go and try to perfectly instantiate it in the world. You should be very wary about that. And that's what this sort of arbitrage leads is, right? It's just like taking it really, really seriously. Yeah. Well, that's a great place to start. This really is the core of the issue. I'm going to make a couple of claims here which I think are true and foundational and I would love to get your reaction, but before I do that, I just want to acknowledge that the issues you just raised are issues that I've been thinking about and talking about all the while defending consequentialism. This is really the fascinating point at which our reasoning about what it means to live a good life and the practical implementation of that reasoning. It's just very difficult to work out in practice. And the first thing I would want to claim here is that consequentialism is a theory of moral truth, right? It's a claim about what it may what it means to say that something is morally true, that something is really good or really bad. It's a claim about value and in the end it's a claim about what it's possible and then legitimate to care about. But it isn't a decision procedure, right? It's not a way of doing the math that you just indicated may be impossible to do. And there's a distinction I made in the moral landscape between answers in practice and answers in principle. And it just should be obvious that there are a wide variety of questions where we know there are answers in principle, we know that it's possible to be right or wrong about any given claim in this area. And what's more, to maybe not even know that you're wrong when in fact you are wrong. And yet there may be no way of deciding who is right and who is wrong there or ever getting the data in hand that could adjudicate a dispute. And the example I always go to, because it's both vivid and obviously true for people, is that the question of how many birds are in flight over the surface of the Earth right now has an answer, right? Just think about it for a second and you know it has an answer. And that answer is in fact an integer and yet we know we'll never get the data in hand. We could not possibly get the data in hand, and yet the data have changed by the time I get to the end of this sentence. So there is a right answer there, and yet we know no one knows it. But it would be ridiculous to have a philosophy where a claim about, you know, birds and flight would rule out the possibility of there being an answer to a question of, you know, how many are flying over the surface of the Earth? Simply because we can't we don't know how to measure it. Right? The first thing many people say about any consequential disclaim about moral truth with respect to well being, say, the well being of conscious creatures, which is the formulation I often use, the first thing someone will say is, well, we don't have any way of measuring well being. Well, that's not actually an argument, right? I mean, certainly it may be the beginning of one, but in principle it has no force. And as you can see by analogy with birds. But further, I would make the claim that any claim that consequentialism is bad, right, that it has repugnant implications, is ultimately a claim about unwanted consequences. And usually it's it's an unacknowledged claim about consequences. And so, in my view, and you inevitably did it in just stating the case against taking an academic philosophy too seriously, you pointed to all of the terrible effects of doing this right, the life negative effects, the fact that now you have to feel guilty going to the symphony because it's such a profligate wastage of money and moral resources when you could be saving yet further starving children in Africa. And so we recognize we don't want to live in that sort of world, right? We love art and we love beauty and we love leisure and we're right to love those things. And we want to build a civilization that wherein there's such abundance that most people most of the time have the free attention not to just think about genocide and starvation, but to think about the beautiful things in life and and to live creative lives, right? And and to have fun, right? And so if you're going to take the thought experiments of Peter Singer so seriously, that you can no longer have fun, that you can no longer play a game of Frisbee because that hour spent in the park with your children is objectively a waste of time when held against the starvation and miseration of countless strangers in a distant country who you could be helping at right this very moment. Well, we all recognize that that is some kind of race to the bottom that is perverse. That is not it's not giving us the emotional and cognitive resources to build a world worth living in, the very world that the people who are starving in Africa would want to be restored to if we could only solve their problems too. And so it may in fact be true that when brought into juxtaposition, if you put the starving child at my doorstep, well, then, all right, we can no longer play Frisbee, right? So there's a local difference. And that is something that it's very difficult to think about in this context. And we'll get into that. But the claim I want to make here is that it's not a matter of I think you said in one of your essays, it's not a matter of us just adding some non consequentialist epicycles into our moral framework. It really is, in the end, getting clearer and clearer about what all the consequences are and what all the possible consequences are of any given rule or action. Yeah, so anyway, I'll stop there. But those are the kind of the foundational claims I would want to make here. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that the danger that I see is not so much someone saying let's maximize well being, right? It's more so that someone says, let's maximize well being. And I have a really specific definition of well being that I can give you right now. And what ends up often happening is that you can very quickly find, because it's all about maximization. You can find these edge cases. And in a sense, moral philosophy operates like this game wherein you're trying to find examples that disagree with people's moral intuitions. And an example that people often give, right, would be something like this serial killer surgeon who has five patients on the operating table and he can go out into the streets, grab someone off the streets, butcher them in an alleyway, take their organs and save five people. So it's one for five. And the difficulty is in sort of specifying something like a definition specific enough that you don't want to do that. Most people sort of get off the bus with that sort of example. And that aspect of utilitarianism is very difficult to do away with. You can sort of say that maybe there are long term effects, right? So what people will often say with this example would be, well, wait, if the serial killer surgeon got caught, if we lived in a society where people were just being randomly pulled off the streets and murdered, this seems like sort of this would have a really high levels of anxiety on people or something like that. And so the overall net well being would decrease or something like that. But I think that's very difficult to sort of defend again once you've chosen something very specific to maximize, like live saves or something like that. That's the mistake of misconstruing consequences. Because I take this case of the rogue surgeon is, in my mind, very easy to deal with in consequentialist terms, and yet it's off even in your essays. You put it forward as a kind of knock down argument against consequentialism and consequentialism just obviously has a problem because it can't deal with this hard case. But I would just say you can deal with it in precisely the way that people recoil from it as a defeater. To consequentialism that is a sign of what an easy case it is. We all recognize how horrible it would be to live in a world which is to say how horrible the consequences are that follow from living in such a world. None of us would want to live in that world. I mean, no one wants to live in a world where they or someone they love could at any moment be randomly selected to be murdered and butchered for spare parts, right? And when you would think of just what sort of mind you would have to have as a doctor to believe that was a way to maximize goodness in this world. I mean, so just imagine imagine the conscious states of of all doctors as they surveyed their waiting rooms looking for people that they might be able to put to other use than than merely to save their lives, right? It's just that it perverts everything about our social relationships. And we are deeply social creatures. And states of mind like love and compassion are so valuable to us, again, because how they directly relate to this experience of well being again, this is a suitcase term in my world, which it can be kind of endlessly expanded, but it doesn't mean it's vacuous. It's just that the horizons of wellbeing are as yet undiscovered by us. But we know that it relates to maximizing something like love and joy and beauty and creativity and compassion and something like minimizing terror and misery and pointless suffering, et cetera. And so it just seems like a very easy case when you look closely at what the likely consequences would be. And yet there are probably local cases where the situation flips because we really are in extremis, right? I mean, if you think of a case like a lifeboat problem, right? Like, listen, the Titanic has sunk, and now you're on a lifeboat, and it can only fit so many people, and yet there are more people actually clambering on, and you're all going to die if you let everyone on. And so I'm sorry, but this person is going to get kicked in the face until they stop trying to climb onto the lifeboat because we're no longer normal moral actors in this moment. And we'll be able to justify all of this later. Because this really was a zero sum contest between everyone's life and the one life, right? Those are situations which people occasionally find themselves in. Yes, they do function by this callous consequentialist calculus, and they're uncomfortable for a reason, but they're uncomfortable for a reason because we get very uncomfortable mapping the ethics of extremists onto life as it is in its normal mode, right? And for good reason. There's so much I realize now the fire hose of moral philosophy has been trained on you but there's so many edge cases that are worth considering here. But again, it never gets us out of the picture of talking intelligently and compassionately about consequences and possible consequences. So I think that there is a certain sort of game that can be played here and this is basically the game that is played by academic moral philosophers who are debating these sorts of issues. And just to me I think the clearest conception is to say okay, we have some sort of utilitarian calculation that we want to make for these particular consequential calculation, let's say for these particular cases. And so we have the serial killer surgeon and we say okay, the first term in this equation is five for one. So that seems positive. So it's adding this positive term but then there are these Nth order effects, right? So then you say, well, wait a minute. If we can add in the second term. And the second term is like the terror that people feel from living in a society wherein they might be randomly butchered. And then the argument is, well, when you add enough of these higher order effects into the equation, it still sort of ends up coming out negative, thus supporting our dislike or distrust of serial killer surgeons going around. And I think what academic philosophers often do in this case is they say okay, so what you've done is you've given me a game where I just have to add in more assumptions in order to make this equation positive or come up positive or negative. And the goal would be for the critic to make it come out positive so that utilitarianism recommends the serial killer surgeon and therefore sort of violates our moral intuition. And I guess what I think is that there are some ways to do that. So an example might be that you say well, what if you are a utilitarian and you learn about a serial killer surgeon? You know, are you supposed to go report them to the police? You know, well if you did that it would be very bad. It would even be bad for utilitarianism itself. So you should sort of try to keep it a secret if you can. In fact you should sort of support the act by trying to COVID up as much of the evidence as possible because now this is still technically maximizing well being. And even if you say well wait a minute, there might be some further effects, it seems as if there's this sort of game of these longer term effects. And not only that, as you add Nth order effects into this calculation it gets more and more impossible to foresee what the actual values will be. There's this great story that David Foster Wallace, the writer, actually quotes at some point which is there's this old farmer who lives in a village and with his son and one day his beloved horse escapes and everyone says, oh, bad luck. And the farmer says, who knows? And then the horse comes back and it's somehow leading a herd of beautiful horses. And everyone says, oh, great luck. Who knows, right? And then his son tries to tame one of the wild horses, breaks his leg and everyone says, oh, bad luck. And the farmer says, who knows? And then last instance, the army comes in and drafts every able bodied man to go serve in this horrific Sino World War I conflict where he would certainly die but because his leg is broken, he's not drafted. And so the farmer says, Good luck, bad luck, who knows? And it seems to me that there's two issues. One, as this calculation gets longer the terms first of all, get harder and harder to foresee. And then second of all, they get larger and larger. So this is sort of like a function of almost like chaos theory, right? It's like what would seem very strange to me and again, maybe it's sort of true from this perspective of this perfect being who can sort of calculate these things out. But once you've sort of specified what you're trying to maximize and set it in our terms you can find examples where it's like well, should this visigoth save this baby in the woods? Well, if it does, that leads to Hitler. If the visigoth leaves leaves the baby in the woods, you know, we never get Hitler, right? And that's because effects sort of expand just like how if you go back 1000 years pretty much everyone is your parent, right? Or 10,000 years or however far you go back. But pretty much everyone living eventually becomes your parent because all the effects get mixed. And I think probably causes are sort of similar to that where they get mixed together. And so you have these massive expected terms and they seem totally defined by you can always say well, what was foreseeable and what wasn't foreseeable. And I agree that's certainly a reply. But it just seems that when we try to make this stuff really why I say to be wary about it is not that I think that it's automatically wrong. It's that any attempt to try to make it into something very specific and calculable to me almost always appears to be wrong. And there are always philosophers in the literature who are pointing out well, wait a minute, wait, you can't calculate it that way because that leads to this and you can't calculate it that way. And I think the effective altruism movement, in a sense while many within the movement do not take it so seriously that they are trying to do exactly that maximize something that they can sort of specifically quantify. Some people do. And I think Sam Bankfinfreed was one of them. And while I cannot personally say at all that that actually directly led to his actions. I think that given the evidence of the case, you could reasonably say that it might have contributed that the takes on risk and this notion of maximization and having something very specific in mind that he's trying to maximize, I think very well could have led to the FTX implosion. And therefore it's an instance of trying to essentially import academic moral philosophy into the real world and just crashing on the rocks of the real world. Okay, well, just briefly on Sam Bankman Freed, I would think that what's parsimonious to say at this point about him is that he clearly has a screw loose. Or at least some screws loose precisely where he should have. Had them turned down just in this area of moral responsibility and thinking reasonably about the effects his actions would have or would be likely to have on the lives of other people. Right? The stuff that's come out since I did my last podcast on him has been pretty unflattering with respect to just how he was thinking about morality and consequences. But to come back to the fundamental issue here again, consequentialism isn't a decision procedure, right? It's not a method of arriving at moral truth. It's a claim about what moral truth, in fact, is, what makes a proposition true. So that distinction is enormously important because I fully agree with you that it's surprisingly difficult to believe that you understand what the consequences of anything will be ultimately. And there are many reasons for this. I mean, there's the fact that there are inevitably trade offs, right? You do one thing by definition, you at least have opportunity costs incurred by doing that thing. And it's impossible to assess counterfactual states of the world. Right? You just don't know what the world line looks like where you did the opposite thing. And as you point out in one of your essays, many harms and goods are not directly comparable. You put it this way in mathematical terms, the set of all possible experiences is not well ordered. Right? So it's impossible to say how many broken toes are the equivalent evil to the loss of a person's life. Right? But it seems like, in consequentialist terms, you should be able to just do the math and just keep adding broken toes. And at a certain point, okay, it would be good, quote good in moral terms, to sacrifice one innocent human life to save a certain number of broken toes in this world. Right? And that, yeah, I mean, that just may not be the way the world is for a variety of reasons that we can talk about. But, I mean, it seems our moral intuitions balk at those direct comparisons, perhaps for good reasons, perhaps for bad reasons. I mean, we're living in a world where it's not crazy to think that we may ultimately change our moral intuitions. And then there has to be some place to stand where we can wonder what would that be a good thing to do good in terms of consequences, right? Would it be good if we could all take a pill that would rewrite our moral code so that we suddenly thought, oh yeah, it's a straightforward calculation between broken toes and innocent human life and here's the number, right? And now we all see the light, we see the wisdom of thinking in these ways because we've actually changed our moral toolkit by changing our brains. Would that be good or would that be moral brain damage at the population level? That's actually a criticism that people have made of exactly what you're saying of utilitarianism, where people have basically said again, this is sort of a game where I can add a term. What if, in the serial killer example, I add the term that everyone on earth is a utilitarian and totally buys the fact that you should sacrifice the few to save the money and then that actually ends up being positive. And then you can have a society where everyone's going around and it's like, oh, yeah, Samantha got taken in by one of the serial killer surgeons last month. What a tragedy for us. But it's all for the greater good. That's the vision of morality that I sketch in the moral landscape. The reason why I call it the moral landscape is that I envision a space of all possible experience where there are many peaks and many valleys, right? There are many high spots and not so high spots. And some high spots are very far away from what we would consider a local peak. And to get there would be a horror show of changes. But maybe there are some very weird places where it's possible to inhabit something like a peak of well being where in the example I think I gave is an island of perfectly matched sadists and masochists, right? Is that possible? Maybe it's a cartoon example, right? But maybe something like that is possible where I wouldn't want to be there because of all of my moral intuitions that recoil both from sadism and from masochism. But with the requisite minds, maybe it's possible that you could you could have a moral toolkit that perfectly fitted you to that kind of world and did not actually close the door to, you know, other states of well being that are in fact required of any peak on that landscape. I doubt it in this case, but again, that's just my moral intuitions. Doubting it. But the problem is we we know our moral intuitions first. The general claim I would make here is that there's just no guarantee that our intuitions about morality reliably track whatever moral truths there are the only thing we can use and we and we may 1 day be able to change them. But we it's always true to say that we could be wrong and not know it and we might not know what we're missing. In fact, in my view, we're guaranteed not to know what we're missing most of the time. And so this just falls into the bin of it's just nowhere written that it's easy to be as good as one could be in this life. And in fact, there may be no way to know how much better one could be in ethical terms. And that's both true of us individually and collectively. Yeah, I think that that's absolutely right. And it's why I personally am very skeptical of moral philosophy and sort of have been advocating for people to take it less seriously. And that's because you can very quickly get to some very strange places, right? I mean, as an example, if you're trying to maximize well being, it seems now, again, this depends on your definition of well being. So let's take like a relatively reductive one, like happiness or something, but just for ease. But if you're trying to do that, it seems way easier to do that with AIS than with people. Like, you can copy paste an AI, right? So if you make an AI and it has a good life, you just click copy paste, you get another AI, and you can fit a lot more AIS into the universe than you can fit human beings. So, again, maybe there's some inaccessible to us or just very difficult to specify a notion of. Wellbeing, that sort of avoids these sort of things. But I honestly believe, and I think here here is really getting to the heart of the matter, that there is some sections of the effective altruist movement who take that sort of reasoning very seriously. And I sort of just strongly disagree with it. And let me give an example of this, which is William McCaskill, who I think is a good philosopher. And I read and reviewed his latest book. And I know you talked to him on the podcast about this book as well, but in it I was sort of struck by when he's talking about existential risks and he's talking about things that might end humanity. He has this section on AI because he views AI as a threat to humanity, and it reads very differently than the other sections on existential risk. And that's because he takes great pains to emphasize that in the case of an AI apocalypse, civilization would sort of continue as AI. And it's very difficult to even read that section without it appearing to be almost some sympathy for this, probably because William Castle said he accepts sort of a lot of the conclusions of utilitarianism. From a utilitarian perspective, it's not necessarily a bad thing in the very long run. It's probably very bad when it happens because somehow you have to get rid of all the humans and so on. And that sort of reasoning strikes me as almost a little bit dangerous, principally because the effective altruist movement are the ones giving so much money to AI safety, right? So. As much as the strange to say that people could be overly sympathetic to AI. I think we're living enough in the future where that is actually now a legitimate concern. Well, for me, everything turns on whether or not these AIS are conscious, right? And whether or not we can ever know with something like certainty that they are right. And I think this is a very interesting conversation we could have about the hard problem of consciousness and what's likely to happen to us when we're living in the presence of AI that is passing the Turing test. And yet we still don't know whether or not anything's conscious, and yet it might be claiming to be conscious, and we might have built it in such a way that we're helplessly attributing consciousness to it. And many of us, even philosophers and scientists, could lose sight of the problem in the first place. I understand that we used to take the hard problem of consciousness seriously, but I just went to Westworld and had sex with a robot and killed a few others, and I'm pretty sure these things are conscious, right? And now I'm a murderer. We could lose sight of the problem and still not know what we're dealing with, but on the assumption that consciousness arises on the basis of information processing in complex systems and that's still just an assumption, although you're on firm ground scientifically, if you make it. And on the assumption, therefore, that consciousness is, in the end, its emergence will be substrate independent again, it seems quite rational to make this assumption, but it's by no means guaranteed. Well, then it then it would seem just a matter of time before we, you know, intentionally or not implement consciousness in a non biological system. And then the question is, what is that consciousness like and what is possible for it? And if this is a place where I'm tempted to just bite the bullet of implication here, however unhappily, and acknowledge that if we went to building AI that is truly conscious and open to a range of conscious experience that far exceeds our own in both good and bad directions, right? Which is to say, they can be much happier than we could ever be and more creative and more enjoying of beauty and all the rest, more compassionate, just more entangled with reality in beautiful and interesting ways. And they can suffer more. They can suffer the deprivation of all of that happiness more than we could ever suffer it because we can't even conceive of it because we basically stand in relation to them the way chickens stand in relation to us. Well, if we're ever in that situation, I would have to admit that those beans now are more important than we are, just as we are more important than chickens, and for the same reason. And if they turn into utility monsters and start eating us because they like the taste of human the way we like the taste of chicken, well, then, yeah, there is a moral hierarchy depicted there and we're not at the top of it anymore, and that's fine. That's not actually a defeater to my theory of morality. That's just if morality relates to the conscious states of conscious creatures, well, then you've just given me a conscious creature that's capable of much more important conscious states than we are getting to see. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having having on the Waking up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+I am back with Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for joining me. Hey, thanks for coming back. This conversation is it's always a break from what I'm normally doing on the podcast, but this week it is a very stark break because I've been having some very gloomy conversations. I just released one on nuclear war, and I just recorded one on this phenomenon that we euphemistically call child pornography, which, if there's anything more gloomy than nuclear annihilation, it is the details of what is going on in tech around child pornography. I haven't released this one yet. This is probably going to drop after we release this podcast, but the scope of the problem and our apparent unwillingness to actually confront it, it's impossible to understand. So, anyway, that's where my head has been. No matter how dark you get, you will be bringing levity to my world. Very few people say that to me. I'm normally kind of a downer, conversation wise. Also, I got views on child pornography, but maybe I'll save that until your thing lets out. We could talk about a bit more. Yeah, we can talk about it next time. Actually, the guy interviewed Gabriel Dance, he's the New York Times writer who's been covering this in a series of long and harrowing articles, and they just interviewed him on the daily the New York Times podcast today. So if people want a preview of that that's going on there, I think, you know, the Daily conversation is like 25 minutes, but I think Gabriel and I spent two and a half hours wading into this morass, and it's astonishing that it exists. But what you really can't get your mind around is our lack of motivation to deal with it, because we actually can deal with it. I mean, there are technological solutions to this. There's just obviously a law enforcement solution. But we just I mean, we're like we're paralyzed largely around, I think the fact that the details are just so dark that nobody wants to focus on it for long enough to actually deal with it. It's taboo to even think about it. And I don't know, maybe there are other examples of this kind of thing, but there's just such an IC factor with the topic that that has more or less protected these truly sinister people and networks from much scrutiny, much less prosecution. So that sounds fascinating. I realized I began this by saying I have views on child pornography and just kind of left that hanging. I think rather than wait a few weeks and let Twitter have itself at me, I decided I should really clarify good. Say, yes, I have the same views everybody else has about it's morally monstrous to prey on children. But what I would add to this is that there are people who are sexually attracted to children, and I see that as nothing but a curse. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. It is a terrible thing to have, and it is unchosen. Nobody wakes up and says, oh, I want to rework it so that I could only be attracted sexually to kids. It is hard to imagine a worse thing to happen to you now. That doesn't excuse you morally if you act upon it. It still, I think, should reframe a little bit how we think about such cases. Yeah, that's actually a point I make at some point in that podcast. Because if you view pedophilia as a sexual orientation, albeit an illegal and unfortunate one, yes, nobody decides to be a pedophile. But given that the production of child pornography is, in every case, the commission of a crime so essentially that's why the word pornography is a euphemism. These are just records of child rapes and tortures. The difference is this preserves the point you were making. It's as though being a heterosexual man is one thing, one doesn't choose it, and it's perfectly legal and happy to be one. But if you're a heterosexual man who likes to watch real women get really raped and are participating in a network that engineers the rape of non consenting adults, that's a depraved addition to your sexual orientation for which you can't be held responsible and just by its very nature, anyone who's consuming child pornography, much less distributing it, is part of that second sadistic phenomenon. But I completely agree with you. My position on free will commits me to that view. Obviously. That's right. Again, this is exciting. I can't resist. It's just that what you describe as plainly evil and monstrous and should be punished. The question of fantasies that hurt nobody but themselves are violent fantasies and perhaps involving depictions of acts which would be terrible if they took place. Those, I think, sit in a more complicated place for me, and so we could talk about that at a later time, I guess. Yeah. Okay. I promise people we will not spend too much time on this because there's a lot to COVID But I don't think I got into this with Gabriel Dance and any completeness what do you think of this? Connects to your point about fantasy. What do you think about purely fictional products of this taboo material? Right. So, you know, fictional child pornography, the production of which entailed the rape or mistreatment of no one that's obviously nearly as taboo as the real stuff and also illegal. This is just I don't know whether this is true or not, but I believe some people suspect that if it were legal, it would, to some degree, satisfy the desires of pedophiles who are otherwise seeking child pornography. I don't know if that's psychologically realistic, but what do you think about the ethics there? I think you're asking the right question. It's plainly icky, and again, I wouldn't want to be condemned to have that taste. But I think the answer to the question of what I think about that rests on the empirical issue of what its effects are. So if it turns out that these robot sex stalls or just people depicting themselves as children but they aren't really children, if it turns out that men who satisfy themselves over that become less likely to harm real children and it makes the world a better place, then on balance, it seems like a good idea. If it turns out to sort of feed their desire and make them want more, it's definitely a bad idea. I'd be very mindful of the consequences of this, and I don't know what the consequences are. Right, yeah. You've uttered the phrase that was uttered only once on this podcast before the notion of child sex robots. Kate Darling, who is a robot ethicist at MIT, first introduced me to the concept more or less as a as a fayacomplee. The moment we get robots that are truly humanoid, some genius will give us sex robots. And the moment that arrives, some perverse person will give us child size sex robots. I hope we avoid the path in the in the multiverse that is leading toward child sex robots, but I suppose if it has the consequentialist effects you hope, then it would be a good thing on balance. And it's a good illustration of a contrast which we always get into when talking about morality, which is you're considered moral views, which might lead you to an unintuitive claim that child sex robots are a good thing and make the world a better place. And our gut feelings would say, oh, that's disgusting. That's terrible. Someone who creates child sex robots should be strung up. But I think you and I agree and talk about this, that moral progress involves turning away our ick reactions and focusing in a more considered and deliberative way on consequences. Right, okay. So I see I dragged you kicking and screaming into the land of ick, but what are you thinking about these days? Yeah, let me actually this is actually not incredibly far from it. It's another moral dilemma. By the way, I'm Paul Blume. I'm from the I'm a psychology professor at Yale University. And so I was at Cornell University giving a series of talks, and I was at a seminar talking to some students and some terrific graduate students and undergraduates, and we ended up talking about research ethics. And somebody brought up the case of this person works in a lab, and he talked about his lab made hypothetically, what if she was engaged in scientific misconduct of some sort? Maybe any example was fairly mild, but it was scientific misconduct. And so, you know, we kind of agreed that he should encourage her to stop doing it and turn herself in, particularly if some data got compromised. But then the question came up, what would happen if she wouldn't? She refused, and he said, very matter of factly, well, then I would turn her in. And everyone's nodding, this makes sense. And and something about it sat funny with me, and I said, well, what if she was your friend? What if she was a good friend? And the student thought about it. I said, no, I still turn her in. And I said, what if this was your girlfriend, your partner? What is your wife? And there was some hesitation and the conversation got a little bit awkward. And I thought of a couple of different things here, but we were talking here about loyalty, and I had two observations from this, and I kind of want to throw them at you and get your own sensitives. But one is I worried that my own intuitions were a little bit out of whack and maybe this is a generational thing. I give loyalty of that sort fairly high value. If my best friend was a serial killer, yeah, I'd call the police. But if my best friend is doing stuff which I thought was wrong but fairly minor, I don't think I would I think my loyalty would override my moral obligation. And then this got me to think about how subversive loyalty is. Loyalty pulls you together with your allies, your friends and your families, and sits uneasy uneasily with broader moral goals, including a sort of broader utilitarian picture you tend to defend. So I was wondering what you thought about that. And I was also wondering to make it a bit more personal, you would get involved a lot of controversies and debates, and you're often defending your friends on Twitter and social media and elsewhere. And it's really easy to defend your friends when you think that they're right. But do you ever defend your friends when you think that they're wrong? Yeah, this is a really interesting topic and I've been thinking about it lately because it's one of the variables I see in politics that leads to such dysfunction, and it's something that trump prizes above everything else. Every one of his abominations seems to be a kind of loyalty test for those around him. The people who will pretend he's not lying or pretend he's normal are essentially passing a loyalty test at all times. And I have waxed on forever about how degrading I find that. But I think loyalty is a virtue, obviously, until it isn't, right? So it's one of these virtues that can be kind of bivalent, and I'm not sure what other examples there are. But what's interesting is it is kind of parasitic on the notion and experience of friendship. So to say that someone is loyal to a friend or is a loyal friend, it's almost redundant because being a real friend entails some degree of loyalty. That's right. But also family as a second place. Right. We're loyal to our children, we're loyal to our parents, to our siblings. Yeah. And then, derivative of that, people become loyal to organizations or to, you know, loyalty to your nation is patriotism. But I think the edge cases are interesting. And we reach the edge when a friend or a family member or a member of the organization to which we're pledged or our country does something terrible. Right? And at that edge, I think being anchored to loyalty as though it were the moral virtue that trumped all others, I think that clearly is pathological. My country, right or wrong, just becomes blind nationalism. If your country is doing something obviously illegal and wrong and counterproductive, you can turn up those dials as high as you want. At some point, you look crazy for supporting your country at any apparent cost, so to speak, of groups for a second. Everything I tend to complain about with respect to tribalism and identity politics really just looks like a perversion of loyalty to me. It's just that if a member of your group is behaving like a psychopath, you should be able to acknowledge that. And if you can't acknowledge it because you have a different set of ethical books you're keeping for people in your group than for people outside your group, well, then that is tribalism or identity politics. And it's obvious that can't be a foundation for universal ethics. Right? Right. To be universal, you have to be able to triangulate on something that's happening within your group and judge it by a standard, certainly the standard you would apply outside your group. And that erodes loyalty. This same argument applies, though, for friends. And for friends it's more complicated. For friends, I think there's more of a pull for loyalty. The bar just gets higher for the bar gets higher. And certainly for your child. I would do all sorts of things for my child. Would I? I don't know. If my child murdered somebody, would I lie to get him off so he doesn't go to prison? That's a toughie, you know, would I and there was a movie having this theme would I murder another child to take away that child's organs, to save my own child? Probably not. My preference ends somewhere. Again, it comes down to mitigating harm for me. So let's take it back from the far extreme. If you have someone, if you have a friend who's doing something objectively wrong, we can use the scientific misconduct case, or it just depends on what you mean by misconduct. But your loyalty to the friend should translate into a commitment to their well being, right? And so if they're doing something wrong that you think they should stop doing on some level, you view it as bad for them, too. It's making them at minimum, it's making them a worse person or revealing them to be worse than you wish they were. If you want to improve them in some way, if you want to improve their ethics, if you want to bring them into compliance with intellectual standards you think they should share in the scientific case, well, then you're urging them to stop and correct their misdeeds based on a concern for them. At least in part, it seems to me. Right. There are cases where it could conveniently line up that way, where the most loyal act is also the act that is the best for the community and the best as a whole. But I think we got to agree that there are some cases where they really diverge. Yeah. So then the question is, what are the real motives and the real consequences of the transgression? So, I mean, I could imagine a murder which, while illegal because it's murder, could still be viewed as ethical or close enough to ethical or ethically gray enough such that it's not clear that you even think they did the wrong thing. Right. So then the question is you're helping them to conceal it or you're not turning them in. That becomes much easier to think about than if you think this person who's a friend of yours did something completely insane and sadistic and poses a further danger to society. Right? That's right. Well, you know, we might get on to talk about Richard Dawkins recent adventure on Twitter, but put aside exactly what happened, I admire Dawkins a lot. I don't know him personally. I think you do know him personally. Let's say hypothetically, you'll view him as a friend, but suppose you thought he was really on the wrong side of it. I might imagine you might at minimum not be vocal about that. If it was somebody you didn't like, you might sort of announce it and say, this is really irrational and immoral. But if it's somebody you like, you'd say, ah, I'm sure he was well intentioned. Everybody makes a mistake, or you might just be silent. And I think that's actually the right way to go. I think that as his friend, you have some burden of you should treat him in a different way you would treat anybody else. Yeah, I understand that, and I think by default I fall into that pattern. I do think that being more and more ethical compassionate certainly wouldn't require that you treat your friends worse, but it does require that you treat strangers more and more like friends. I think so. I am increasingly suspicious of the impulse to dunk on somebody who I consider an enemy, or at least somebody who's worked very hard to make themselves my enemy. And I do look for opportunities to do the opposite. So, for instance, Ezra Klein, I forget what his perch at Vox is now. He's one of the founders of Vox, and he's no longer the editor in chief. But I mean, he's somebody who I do think has treated me terribly and never apologized. To the contrary. He's actually someone who just simply can't see that he's treated me unethically and dishonestly and actually done considerable harm to my reputation. These just strike me as objective facts when I get outside of my reaction to them. But recently I saw he just released a book, and there was an excerpt from it in I think it was the New York Times. It was an oped. There might have been the Washington Post. And I read it and thought it was very useful. I thought there was just some great political analysis in there. And so on Twitter, with the caveat that we disagree about many things, I circulated that as a great piece of political insider. I forget how I phrased it, but basically just pure praise while just telegraphing that I hadn't completely lost my mind and forgotten how much blood there was under the bridge for us. So first of all, that feels much better to me, that's leading me in a much better direction as a person psychologically, than my endlessly rehearsing all the reasons why I have every right to despise as recline. And so that's one example where it's like, I acknowledge the difference you're describing. And so if it's a friend who does something embarrassing, I will I'm certainly inclined not to add any top spin to the bad press they're getting. And if it's somebody who, who is a neutral person or somebody who I have reason already not to like, it's certainly more tempting to give their reputation a push toward the brink. But I don't know, I just feel like there's a course correction that I'm looking for more and more in my life, which is leading everything to converge on the standard you seem to be articulating for friends. Right. And I understand that you and I have had this discussion many times before, and it's a good discussion to have, where you're always pushing for impartiality and being an optimist about how much of a sort of pure impartial morality we should have. And I see some of it, but I see so many cases which are kind of zero sum, where you have A and B, and you have to choose between them, and the option of treating everybody the same just isn't available to you. But I got to say, I agree with the general point, which is I am trying very, very hard to be nicer on Twitter, and I am trying to recognize, I think, maybe the exception of Donald Trump, but that everybody these are real people here, and nobody's a villain in their own heads. And people have had unfortunate lives. And the sort of public shaming, the impulse which I think people everybody has it, they just have different targets, is an unhealthy and corrosive impulse. So I'm in favor of treating everybody nicer on Twitter and elsewhere. Yeah, I think it's a hard balance to strike because I think becoming completely anodyne and just not participating in any public criticism of bad actors, I don't think that is the sweet spot. At a certain point, you have to say something about a phenomenon, especially if your particular take on it is underrepresented. When you're talking about somebody like Trump, the only real danger is boring yourself and everyone around you. But I do think the ethics are pretty clear. We have to figure out how to get this guy out of office. So you want to be critical and you don't want to take that away. That's right. But a friend of mine, Owen Flanagan, once got to ask a question, Dalai Lama, and the question was a good question. He said, if you had had a chance, would you kill Hitler? And the Dalai Lama was translated, and he thought about it, and he smiled and he said and his answer was, yeah, I would kill Hitler, but I wouldn't be angry at him, and I would do it with ritual and grace and kindness. And to some extent, I don't know if you're a good advice for killing Hitler, but it's pretty good advice for Twitter, which is if you have to correct somebody finds this person's wrong, this is an immoral view. You shouldn't take this adolescent glee in it. You shouldn't do it out of anger. You should just, you know, trying to help people. Yeah, I totally agree with the anger part, but this also connects up to something we spoke about. I think we spoke about killing Hitler last time or or the time before that. And and it does raise the ethical question of at what age is it appropriate to kill Hitler? Because, I mean, if you go back and kill him as a seven year old, you do look like a moral monster because he's not quite Hitler yet. Right. So it's interesting to consider when that would happen. And I think someone should produce a YouTube animation of the Dalai Lama going back and killing Hitler with ritual and without any hatred. That's a cartoon, I was thinking, that you'd imagine, like, a science paper which has a graph, and the graph is the best time to kill Hitler. Yes. We could float that as a poll on Twitter or somewhere. I'm sure there would be a bell curve around the appropriate age. Yeah, I'll do that. Okay, so back to Dawkins, who, yes, I do consider a friend, and I did not react one way or the other to his tweet. Maybe I should remind people what the tweet was, though. I went out on Twitter before this recording and asked for questions, and this came up, as you might expect, a few times. So it was a series of tweets, I believe, to forgive me if this is somebody else's summary, but it's one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, or moral grounds. It's quite another to conclude that it wouldn't work in practice. Now, this is kind of hilarious, because this really is I can immediately understand the spirit in which he tweeted it. I'm not sure what the proximate cause of him deciding to screw up his day and week this way was, but can we agree he's very bad at Twitter? What's hilarious about this is just, you take one look at it, having been around and around the block with this kind of thing, this is just poised to explode in the minds of every person on Earth who's just waiting for another reason to vilify Richard. Yeah, I don't know what got into his head around this. Do you know what his point was? Is this point that as biological creatures, our intelligence and creativity and kindness can be shaped through breeding? What was his point? Well, I think his point might have been a topical and political one. I think there's somebody in the press in the UK right now who just got nominated as an advisor to Boris Johnson or something, and then someone did a little scandal archaeology in his Twitter feed and found some celebration of eugenics or something. So that could have been what Richard was reacting to. I got it. Yeah. But anyway, he's making the obvious point that eugenics is a thing. I mean, forget about that. It's history as a movement among scientists and pseudoscientists. 100 years ago, as the facts of Darwinism and genetics were only starting to be absorbed, it's just obvious that whatever is under genetic control, whether that's the way our physical bodies perform and look or the way our minds emerge from our brains, basically everything about you is genetically influenced to some degree. You should be able to breed for that or engineer toward some goal in the same way that I think in further tweets, he uses the example of cows giving more milk and all of that. So it's the biology of of it is not debatable. And that's just his point as a biologist. Like, of course this kind of thing is possible, and acknowledging its possibility is not at all a suggestion that it's desirable that we institute any kind of program to do this. So he was just separating the people's political and moral reaction to the idea based on, presumably some notion of what its social consequences were originally and would be in the future, and separating that from this claim that it wouldn't work in practice. I'm not sure which claim he was responding to there, but yeah, out of context, it was weird. Like I said, I don't know him. I'm a huge follower of his work and I think he is an extraordinary scholar and has a lot of interesting things to say. I think nobody in their right mind would think that he's really defending eugenics. It's a comically unfair take on this, but as somebody pointed out, the very structure of what he said is, it's the same structure as it would be wrong to burn down Paul Blooms house on moral grounds, on political grounds and ideological grounds, but if you had enough gasoline and enough tender, yeah, you could burn it down. It has this sort of taunting, trolish claim, and I am totally accepting that it wasn't intentional. And I think it probably speaks the idea Twitter is the wrong arena for these sorts of comments. Let me take the opportunity to get us into more trouble than Dawkins got into. Don't we practice? If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Today I'm speaking with Frank Wilcheck. Frank won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004 for work he did as a graduate student. He was also one of the earliest MacArthur Fellows, and he has won many other awards for his scientific work and writing. He's the author of several books, but most recently, he has published a fantastic primer on the state of physics, and that is called Fundamentals Ten Keys to Reality. He's also written for the Wall Street Journal. He is currently a professor of physics at MIT, and he's also the chief scientist at the Wilcheck Quantum Center in Shanghai, China. And he also has appointments at Arizona State University and Stockholm University. Busy man. Anyway, you will hear that Frank is a wonderful explainer of physics, and I really couldn't have asked for a better guide to this terrain. We discuss the difference between science and non science, the role that intuition plays in science, and then we plunge into the matter at hand. We discuss the nature of time, the prospect that possibility is an illusion, and that only the actual is ever real. We talk about the current limits of quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, space time as a substance, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in science, the possibility that we might be living in a simulation. We cover the fundamental building blocks of matter as we know it, the structure of atoms, the four fundamental forces wave particle duality, the electromagnetic spectrum, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the prospect of infinite space time. We really get the full tour here, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And now, without further delay, I bring you Frank Wilcheck. I am here with Frank Wilcheck. Frank, thanks for joining me. Very great pleasure to be here. You've written a wonderfully accessible book. You've written several books, but the new one is Fundamentals Ten Keys to Reality, and I highly recommend people read it because it's just a fantastic and just amazingly digestible introduction to really the whole history of physics but our modern picture of the universe, which we'll talk about here, but by no means fully cover. But before we jump in, how is it that you have an opinion about the nature of physical reality? What maybe summarize your intellectual perch over there in Massachusetts? Well, I grew up very curious about the world from many points of view. I grew up during a time when science was very highly valued, partly because of the Cold War and the memory of World War II, which was relatively fresh, although that was before my time. And so at the same time, I was very interested in cosmic things. I was raised in the Catholic Church, so I got exposed to these ideas that there are deeper meanings to the world and read Bertrand Russell Red. Einstein was a big hero. So it sort of seemed like a very natural to me to deepen my knowledge of science and physical reality. And that's what I've spent the bulk of my life doing. And it's been a great trip, and I've learned a lot, have a lot of surprises, a lot of adventures, a lot of positive feedback. And I feel I've learned a lot. If I could transport myself back to myself as a teenager, I would have a lot to convey. And that's one of the things that I was thinking about as I wrote this book. The other spur to it was conversations with intelligent friends who wanted to know what I was doing, what I had learned, what's really going on at the frontiers of science? How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? What does it all mean? So I really wanted to take the opportunity to answer my friend's questions and my own questions from way back when. And just fortuitously at the same time my grandson was born. And I started to think about what I'd like to tell him when he's ready to answer these questions. And also watching the process of how he constructed his world. Making basic distinctions between self and not self. And getting the idea that the world is organized into a three dimensional space with objects that have some kind of permanence and regularity. These very basic things we learn about the world that get us by very well. And yet I reflected that the scientific view that is revealed to our most accurate experiments and critical thinking, once we use telescopes and microscopes and spectrometers and accelerometers and all the other kinds of things that allow us to get more accurate perceptions and also to think and also to think critically about them, it's a different world. I like to say you have to be born again to come to terms with reality. You have to not only learn some things, but also unlearn some rules of thumb that you construct for yourself as a child. Yeah, well, I would like to try to recapitulate that journey for our audience here and really start with the minimum set of assumptions and overturn some of the assumptions that make it difficult to think scientifically. I'm struck with how unintuitive many of the tools of scientific thinking are. And they're hard to make intuitive. Some may we kind of bootstrap ourselves to new intuitions on the basis of others that are almost defied by where we land before we jump into the physics of things, maybe we can start by differentiating science from non science. And I guess one way to do that, and it's actually something you mentioned early in the book, is to describe why something like astrology isn't science. How do you demarcate science from non science? And that's just a conceptual endeavor. Yes, it's it's actually a complex question. And the short answer is that science works and non science doesn't work. So it could have been that it could have been that you could make successful predictions for people's personalities, for their destiny, based on the positions of things in the sky when they were born. But over centuries of trying to refine that possibility into an actual tool for making useful predictions, it hasn't been very successful. Whereas a very different interpretation of what the things we meet out in the sky mean and the forces they exert and what kinds of influences they could possibly have back here on Earth has been much more successful. It's kind of led to one successful prediction after another. Nowadays we can put men in space and really do many impressive things with GPS system and look back to the Big Bang and make predictions about how distant galaxies are going to look and how the microwave background is put together and many, many other things that work. So we have, on the one hand, a coherent body of explanations that's built on patient investigation with the most accurate instruments we can find and demanding very high standards of proof. They're trying to push things as hard as possible, make them quantitative, make them precise, worrying when things don't quite agree, instead of trying to explain it away. You can compare and contrast and you know it when you see it. One of them is scientific, the other is not scientific. I think that's the difference. So it's not even the subject matter so much as the approach and whether it's critical, whether it takes correction and whether it works. Those are the defining criteria whether it's scientific. If we could put the final nail in the coffin of astrology, it seems to me obviously disprovable in at least two ways or one and a half ways. One way to see that it's almost certainly not true in its basic assumptions is to recognize that this idea that the position of the stars and planets must affect the life course of a person born based on the time and place of their birth that's belied by the fact that a doctor or nurse walking by in the hall exerts more of nature's forces on the child than anything up in the heavens. Yes, if you take seriously the successful description of the world, there's no room in it for such astrological influences. That's true. And on the other hand, we have a lot of circumstantial evidence that it's I mean, we have a lot of more than circumstantial evidence that the principles of that description are remarkably complete. And so the fact that there's no room for it, for astrological influences means there are no astrological influences. I think that's fair. And even short of that, even if even if we didn't accept physics yet, you could still run the experiment of finding two babies born at the same moment in the same hospital, mere feet apart, and you just have to find two such babies that have importantly different lives. Well, famously, people talked about, I think, going back to St. Augustine, if not earlier, because St. Augustine didn't like astrology either, and he argued about identical twins having very different faiths. Right. And you might say they're well, they're not quite at the same time, but if your predictions depend so sensitively on the exact time, they they're they're almost impossible to make in practice, so so it becomes empty. Right? Yeah. Okay, well, now we've pissed off the astrologers. Even more controversial. You can you know, you can you can have fun with it if you have a sense of humor, and it gives people a thing to talk about and break the ice sometimes on dates or whatever. But no, as a serious enterprise for predicting the future or predicting someone's personality, I don't think it's serious at all. Well, the fun you should have with it is to give everyone Charles Manson's astrological chart and notice that virtually everyone finds something resonant in it with their own personality until they find out whose chart it is. So then let's start with this issue of intuition and how we use it in reason generally and in science specifically. And many of the intuitions we need to use in science are mathematical, and they get pushed into areas where most people's intuitions reliably fail. I guess I'm wondering if I think everybody's but the only way to build up intuition is to sort of work with nature and think about examples and think about very simple examples and get to more complicated ones and figure out what the equations and experiments are telling you. So here's a very simple one which boggles the minds of most people. I'm wondering if you, as a physicist and mathematician, ever really gets your intuitions around this. So you take something like the validity of exponentiation very simple way to illustrate its powers. You ask someone what would happen if you could take a very large sheet of newsprint and fold it upon itself a hundred times in a row, right? People imagine doing this, and they made sense that there's some trick in the offing here. But when you ask them how thick the resulting object would be, many people suggest something like the size of a brick, or they sort of see how the trick is done, and they think, well, maybe it could be 10ft tall if you could fold a piece of paper that many times. But of course, it's light years across. It's galaxy size, if you could do such a thing. If you keep duck right now, do you actually have an intuition for that, or do you just know that powers of two have those consequences? Well, I do in the sense that I can very quickly figure out what the answer is, and I'm not shocked by it. If you want to call that intuition, I guess, yes. And I'm also alert to the fact that this kind of question is taking me out of the realm of familiar experience very rapidly. So that's what I meant by building up intuition. You build up intuition by thinking about hard examples and thinking them through and really digesting them. And then you can have intuition that's correct and useful about things that you didn't have intuition about before or where you had incorrect intuitions. That's a small example of this process I love to call being born again, that you have to go back and really open yourself up to reality and take it as it comes and speak its language in order to get the most out of it. Okay, well, let's see if we can baptize everyone with the vision science here. So here's the starting point for apes like ourselves. With our open eyes and outstretched hands, we interrogate the world around us. We, as you point out, at a certain point, differentiate ourselves from the world, and we begin to act in it and upon it. And we develop intuitions about space and time as the context of our adventures here. And we have a sense of events that happen in space and time, right? So things seem to happen, yes. And we have a thirst for at a certain point, we have a thirst for a causal explanation for why and how things happen. And we have some sense that with an explanation, we will be able to be less surprised in the future by future happenings. Let's start with time. And obviously we're going to land in spacetime eventually and have a more sophisticated description of things. But how do physicists think about time? Well, there's a lot to be said about time. In fact, the accurate measurement of time using atomic clocks is one of the great frontiers of physics. Now, we can we can synthesize clocks that lose or gain time relative to one another at the level of 1 second over the lifetime of the universe. And accurate clocks are a central, central feature of the GPS system and all kinds of things. So we have successful ways of measuring time. And of course, our whole apparatus of predicting what's going to happen in the future is based on using equations that contain a variable called t that's time. That is the basis of our intuitive notion of time. I don't think there's a separate thing that's our intuitive notion of time. But our intuition has a handy description of the underlying physical reality that people have captured in the equations and the basic equations that describe how the world works. And it's very remarkable because there's well, the deepest facts about time are that it's a one dimensional manifold and that there's only one time everybody and everything in the universe marches to the same beat. It's an amazing thing if you think about it. It didn't have to be that way. Computers don't necessarily work that way. You can ship things off to another module that runs at a different speed and so forth. Our memories and psychology certainly don't work that way. We can loop back, we can leap into the future. But the physical world seems to have only one time that everybody agrees on. And humans sort of experience that in music and dance, when we can keep time with ourselves and also with others and not run into inconsistencies. But the time of intuition is a measure of change, right? We have things in the world that change with a certain frequency, and these things are clocks either, something you point out in your book that we make a lot of this, but certain things are reliable clocks. But really, everything is a clock. Your aging body is a clock. Everything is a clock. That's right. I like to say everything is a clock. Some of them are harder to read than others. But the precise meaning of that, if you think about it, is that when you write down the equations that describe change, there's a quantity in those equations called t. And as I said, there's only one such quantity that seems to work for everybody. And that so, in principle, if you measure the change, you can infer measure what's happened. You can infer how much t has changed. And everything is a clock in a broad sense. But of course, we want to have clocks that are portable and reusable, so you can keep measuring an interval of time accurately the same time over and over again and things like that. So when we think of clocks as the instruments of time, it's a special case where they are specially adapted to make the readout of time easy. But in a larger sense, everything that changes is a clock. I think that's correct. I mean, human beings are clocks. They age. So in principle, if you could study the cellular processes really accurately, you might be able to use the human as an actual clock. But if we can all do that roughly, we can estimate people's age and so forth. Yeah, every time I look in the mirror in the morning, I know what time it is. It's later. But what do we make of this intuition that time itself flows or moves? Because what we're talking about is a measure of change. And against what could we say? Time is changing or moving? That seems like a contradiction. Time itself. Yeah, time itself. I'm afraid I won't be able to give you a really satisfying answer because in the current formulation of physics, the fact, the axiom, I guess, the assumption that time is a one dimensional continuum is rock bottom. We don't know how to explain it in terms of anything simpler, at least I certainly don't. And I haven't seen anyone else do that either. So, in fact, what's truly amazing to me is that and I don't understand it and I don't like it in some sense is that the concept of continuum that was developed by the ancient Greeks and in Euclidean geometry. For instance, that you have this infinitely divisible uniform. Essence is what we use for time in the basic equations of physics. Even though we know that in reality things really change. When you get to short distances and short times, you have to bring in quantum mechanics, and things have irreducible jiggle and fluctuations and wave functions. It's a completely different world in many ways, and yet there's still in the equations, there's this one dimensional continuum that's time that Euclid would have recognized. In what sense might time be an illusion? Is that or just a mere construct that is useful for modeling the change we see in the world? What happened to the concept of a block universe in physics? Well, there might be deeper levels of description not yet constructed, so it's hard to talk about what they are with any precision. But I can't preclude the possibility, and I'm very sympathetic to the possibility that there would be deeper levels of description in which these Euclidean concepts of continuum run out of steam and we have to be replaced by something else. So the idea that there are atoms of time, that time is fundamentally discreet. I think if they're going to be atoms, they probably have to be atoms of spacetime. We'll come to that, I guess. But the fact that the continuum has to be replaced by something else, I think is a very appealing thought, because continuum is a very complicated concept if you try to define it precisely. And axiomatically, the ancient Greeks really struggled with it, and it's really only in the 19th and 20th century that mathematicians got to a satisfactory description. But it's really complicated. It's not simple, and it's not the sort of thing that I would like to have as rock bottom in our description of reality. I'm tempted to open that door and find out why a continuum axiom is imponderable, but maybe we'll get to that. I want to linger on time for a second. What's happened to this concept of a block universe? That was a maybe 100 year old notion in physics, the idea that past and present and future might all exist simultaneously, despite the fact that we seem to perceive it through a keyhole of a seemingly moving present. Yes, well, that's more an attitude, I would say, than a distinct statement about the universe. I mean, mathematically, if you have a one dimensional continuum of time and then you have space and events inside, you can describe three dimensional space plus one dimensional time as a three plus one or four dimensional space, and then it's just a space. And that's a very legitimate object of contemplation. And sort of if you like a God's eye view, you can see everything that's ever going to happen or did happen all at once. If you could stand outside this four dimensional space and just look at it, although in some sense it didn't happen in that case, right, then the notion of an event is an epic phenomenon of just how limited our perception is. But in some sense, and also that the notion of possibility. We live in this space of time and space and space time, where there are events which we think could have not happened or happened differently. And possibility is a thing. But in a block universe, there's no such thing as the possible. There's only the actual. And it's not even certainly not punctate in the way that an event is so to talk about, there's no process, there's no verbs, really. There's just a single noun of the actual. And it does make a mockery of time and events and possibility. Yeah, well, that's the God's eye view. And yes, you can imagine a consciousness, I suppose, that just knows all and sees it all at once. Although you might ask, how is that entity thinking? How does it implement logical operations or information processing? And I don't know. I think that leads to madness. But what I was going to say is I think the thing that can be said about this question is that the laws of physics as we have them now are not directly statements about this block world. They're not directly statements about all of spacetime. They are statements about if you take a slice at any particular time and know the state of the universe, know what all the particles in it are doing in a quantum mechanical description, what the wave function of everything is. So this is far beyond what you can actually know. But if you did, in principle, you could calculate what's going to happen in the future and what's going to happen in the past. But it does have this natural division into slices and you have to start somewhere in order to reconstruct the whole thing. So the laws don't naturally describe the whole thing. They describe how things develop in time. At least the laws we have now have that character. And then, of course, the other question is that what is this description for? Who is this description for? If it were for God, well, then the block description might be appropriate. But for us poor mortals who are moving along world lines in spacetime, it's very useful to have a description that's not the block universe that gives us tells us how the different snapshots get put together and so forth. Let's step back from the god's eye view and get into spacetime and acknowledge the reality of events. But even in this context you have quantum mechanics now governing our understanding of how things happen at the smallest scale. That seems to give us a probabilistic picture of what's going to happen in the future. And I'm wondering if even even within that frame, if it's possible this will sound paradoxical but if it's possible that the idea of the possible is mistaken I mean, given that there is simply what happens, how can you justify the possible? I think that question is very much I think that is very much an open question. There are aspects of quantum mechanics that are deeply mysterious and I think subject to change in the future. If we understand things better. We may or may not need to change the equations but for sure I think we need a deeper understanding. Quantum mechanics is less than 100 years old and it's a profound modification of how we understand the world. It's going to take a while to really absorb. But if you take a look at how the equations are actually formulated they are deterministic equations but they are determinist. They are deterministic equations for something called a wave function. So if you know the wave function at one time then in principle you can solve the equations to figure out what the wave function and therefore the universe is going to be at the next time or what it was at the past time for that matter. You can always run them backwards. However, and this is what's really weird you can't know the wave function completely, right? So the equation wants you to tell it the wave function but you don't know the wave function not only in practice but even in principle you don't know the wave function because you have to make incompatible process. You have to do incompatible processing on it to extract all its information, putting it roughly but precise. But there is a precise formulation. So for instance, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells you that even though you have a perfectly definite wave function if you want to answer questions about position of a particle you have to process it in one way. If you want to answer questions about its momentum you have to process it in a different way. And those two ways of processing are mutually incompatible. So you can't actually predict either one because you have incomplete knowledge. So that's the situation. We have equations that are perfectly definite that would be perfectly definite to an observer who knew the wave function completely but we're not that. And we have to deal with what are the consequences we can draw from the limited information that we have including well, let's assume the equations are correct but we don't know exactly what they're acting upon. So we only get probabilistic predictions. But it's deeper than a methodological limitation, right? It's deeper than a methodological implication because in principle because even in principle you can't pin down the wave function. Sort of in trying to pin down some of the information, you destroy other parts of it. Right? There's no way of doing it non invasively. But I guess my question here admittedly it's a philosophical one more than a scientific one I think is given this state of affairs and the disposition here is to say that certain things are possible and we understand a kind of probability. We summarize this possibility with a probability distribution of some sort. Yes, but is it scientifically wrong to say that we don't in fact know that? And it is possible? Again, this sounds paradoxical, but perhaps isn't it's possible that possibility isn't even a thing and there really is only the actual? There is simply what happens. And then we have a story about what might have happened that we're adding to that picture. Is there some place to stand within physics to rule that out? No, I don't think so. I think these quantum mechanical wave functions I've been talking about are very rich objects. And in principle, I'm contained in a quantum mechanical wave function and you're contained in a quantum mechanical wave function. In fact, we're contained in the same quantum mechanical wave function that describes the universe as a whole and different parts of that wave function which, as I mentioned, we don't know completely. And in practice, we only know very little about it compared to what's its full content allows us to make only probabilistic predictions because there's a lot we don't know that we would need to know in order to make definite predictions. So it's relative to our knowledge, which includes everything that we know, all the measurements that we've made, all the laws that we think we know, all the experience that we've had relative to our knowledge, our predictions about the future are probabilistic relative to some unattainable, even in principle knowledge, some god's eye view of the world. Maybe the equations are perfectly definite. So if that somehow means something to you, that's also true. But in practice it doesn't change things very much. So it's kind of philosophical determinism, but practical, not determinism. Okay, so let's go back to the point of view of the mere ape trying to find his or her way in the world. So we have this intuition that we exist in a space of three dimensions. And it's that intuition is is born of this experience that we we really can't figure out any other direction to point than just some combination of backwards, forwards, left and right and up and down. It's a pretty solid empirical fact, I would say. There's certainly only three large dimensions. If there are other dimensions, they have a very different character, right? And we do. Sense that time is distinct from space and yet now physics has given us a unified picture of space time which is well, you tell me how do we get this? It doesn't make them the same thing no, but it's important in understanding the world to treat them together. So the idea that you can just stack up a bunch of copies of three dimensional space and call this is a time t zero, then time t one and so forth, that's not wrong. But it doesn't do justice to our understanding because for one thing, the theory of relativity tells you that. Let's just take the special theory of relativity, which is the first and simpler version, is that you can also slice things up in different ways. You can take and this would happen naturally if one set of observers sets up things, a division into space and time. And then you have other observers that are moving with respect to those at a constant velocity, it will be natural for them to divide space and time in a different way, to have different slicings that sort of mix up the original space and time. And the remarkable thing that relativity says is that they will arrive at the same equations. So it kind of destabilizes the notion of time as a separate entity from space because it says there are other just as good times at least from the point of view of the fundamental equations of physics as any one time there are alternative times that are just as good. Now, that's about the fundamental equations. It's not about the world we actually experience, of course, because there is a preferred time, namely the time that points back to the Big Bang and a uniform space. But you're saying that in a different frame of reference. One set of observers could say that A preceded B, but another set of observers moving with respect to the first set could say that B proceeded A. Yes, and that falls out of Einstein's. That falls out of the Einstein yes. So there is that possibility but on the other hand, there are also observers can also agree that some events definitely precede others. So there's kind of another world which is called the space like region but there's also a time like region where you can order things linearly. Anyway, special relative is a fascinating theory and we could discuss it easily for several hours but for present purposes it made the traditional separation into a unique time and space unstable. Now, there are other versions of time that mix in some space but are just as good as far as the fundamental equations are concerned. Well, does the fact that there's a preferred frame at least to find with respect to the Big Bang give us a notion of simultaneity that is valid? I mean, is there some place from which I can say yeah, in cosmology we commonly use that language when we say for instance that a given star was formed, umpty, amp seconds after the Big Bang. We can say that about distant stars. And there's a unique definition because there's this preferred frame in which the universe, the distribution of galaxies, looks uniform. If you move relative to that frame, then it won't look uniform. There'll be some distortion. The colors won't be quite uniform either. So there is a preferred frame, and so there's a preferred rest frame. And you commonly in cosmology, use that as a way of synchronizing times across distant galaxies. But in everyday life, as opposed to cosmology, the different frames are more or less equivalent. If you cancel out the astrological influence of distant galaxies, so to speak, what's left allows you freedom. In the definition of time, there are many times that are equally good. Okay, so we have a spacetime continuum of some kind, which is a kind of medium, right? Oh, that's the other thing. Right? That's the other thing is that when you go to the more advanced parts of physics, from special relativity to general relativity in particular, then you find that it's very, very convenient and really unavoidable. Unless you want are satisfied with extremely ugly equations, it's very, very convenient to treat the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time as a unified structure because the equations display tremendous symmetry between space and time. There are still distinctions, but there's also tremendous symmetry between space and time. And you can only separate them at the cost of making the equations very unnatural. Right, but also we have further phenomenon like gravity, which seem best explained in terms of space time itself being exactly the sort of thing that can bend. Right? Exactly right. That's the leading idea of the general theory of relativity. And as I said, it's very difficult to formulate the bending equations in an elegant way without explicitly bringing in the idea of space and time as a uniform, as a coherent, integrated, three plus one dimensional entity. OK, so we have this context of our experience. We have this condition of space time, which now disconcertingly, we've learned, is not just a mere context in which the things that exist can happen. Rather, it is a kind of thing itself. Right? That's right. It's not a void. Yeah, it's not a void. That notion was something that famously Aristotle rejected and most thinkers rejected until Newtonian physics, which works very well with space being just sort of an empty platform or stage through which particles move. But in modern physics, we've reinstated space time as a substance. I would say it has a life of its own in many ways. The primary entities we use to describe the world are all core fields, actually quantum fields, but they're space filling entities that vibrate. And the things that we call particles are excitations within these fields, but they fill all space at all time. And the elegant description of how they work uses that description. And most dramatically, space time itself is like an elastic medium that can bend and warp. And in the general theory of relativity, the kinds of distortions of motion we call gravity are ascribed to that bending and warping of spacetime in very successful equations. And we also, in very recent years have learned that so called empty space actually weighs something. This is called the dark energy, but Einstein called it the cosmological constant. But basically what it is is that space time itself has an intrinsic density. So it's a very respectable substance by any reasonable definition. It's not a void. Okay? So again, we'll see if we can somehow conserve our intuitions or at least notice when we're violating them here in building up this picture. So we have this people are listening to us. Let's assume their eyes are open or they can open their eyes and they see the space in front of them occupied by the objects on their desk and perhaps their hands. If they wave their hands in front of them, they can feel the air, right? Which is yet more stuff in this what once seemed like a void like condition. But what we're now being told, that this condition, the only place in which they experience their own being, has all kinds of structure that is not apparent, which is really only fully captured in the mathematical devices and discoveries we've used to tease out this structure, I guess. Before we jump further into the constituents of things. Do you have any thought as to why mathematics works here? I remember that Eugene Vigner wrote a paper, I think in 1960 or so about what he called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. It just seems a very strange accident that apes like ourselves have enough linguistic ability, or at least some of us do, to develop a symbol system that produces not only an uncannily powerful description of what we can understand, but actually has predictive value. It points into the darkness of nature and suggests what we might find there. And then, lo and behold, we find those things, whether it's the absurd energy in the center of an atom or more of the electromagnetic spectrum that we can't see with our unaided eyes. Why does any of this work? It's a gift. I don't know. It's rock bottom, and it didn't have to be that way. I think it's been a continuous revelation and surprise and gift as science has developed since the 17th century. That's sort of modern science where we make extreme demands of accuracy and test things very hard and so forth. The program is to try to understand things fully and deeply and probe with all the accuracy we can muster and yet at the same time try to boil down what we find into as compact a description as possible, even if the description has to be kind of in an unusual language which we call mathematics. That's very different from what we hear at Cradles. And it's worked. And surprise after surprise, more and more layers newton's theory of gravity and then Maxwell's electrodynamics and then quantum mechanics and relativity and quantum chromodynamics. The equations get more structured in some ways, but I think there's a tendency that they've actually gotten more beautiful and certainly more comprehensible and more comprehensive. Less comprehensible, maybe more comprehensive so that now I think we've gotten very close, if not to the rock bottom foundation of understanding how ordinary matter works so sufficient for biology, chemistry, and all forms of engineering. And we can summarize it in a few equations. And it didn't have to be that way. That's why I say it's a gift, for instance. And I think there's an important thought experiment you can imagine, and people have imagined, and people even have gone off the deep end on this, but you can imagine that someday artificial intelligences will be fully embodied in general intelligences within computers. And you could even imagine that these artificial intelligences were not sensing the same world that we're sensing. They would be sensing electronic inputs that were designed by some programmer. So these would be worlds in which intelligent design is actually true, but the laws wouldn't have to have this character. The laws would be whatever the designer or the programmer imposed, and they wouldn't have to have the character of deep simplicity and mathematical coherence that we find in our world. So it's a gift, and I don't know any way to explain it other than to say that's the way it is. It's a wonderful gift. Following that argument, couldn't we be in a simulation wherein we're no more in touch with the base layer of reality, but our simulation is consistent in all the mathematically satisfying ways, or at least seems to be thus far? It could be, but it would be very, very wasteful programming practice to sort of hide so much complexity inside useless things that don't directly support, presumably, the interesting thoughts that are going on or the interesting games. If you think about a Super Mario world or something. If I were programming Super Mario, I wouldn't make the bricks out of quantum mechanical atoms. It's just an awful waste. And also, you really could make a lot of creative use out of having more than one version of time. For instance, you could have astrology being true. You could have people moving back and forth doing time travel. You can have all kinds of things once you free yourself of constraints that we seem to have in our actual physical reality. But that doesn't seem to be the world we live in, for better or worse. Okay, so back to the world we live in or seem to live because intelligent design so I'm sort of joking, but not really. That's what intelligent I think intelligent design is maybe the future, but I just don't see much evidence for it in the world we actually experience this. In other words, if they're going to be intelligent designers, it's going to be humans or their successors. Well, you've heard the simulation argument that I think originates with I've heard it and I've thought about it. Oh, no, that kind of idea is very old. Right. But the added wrinkle here, I think it's the wrinkle he's introduced, which is there's just a couple of minimal assumptions you need to get what seems to be the following probabilistic conclusion. If you assume that, leaving aside the possibility of intelligent aliens that we know nothing about that have computers that might be running simulated worlds, if you just imagine that our species doesn't annihilate itself and we continue to get better at building computers, at a certain point, we will build simulated worlds on our computers, complete with conscious entities like ourselves. And seemingly, by definition, simulated worlds will outnumber real worlds because they'll just be functionally infinite number of worlds to create. So then, just as a matter of probability, you should assume you're in a simulated world rather than a real one. Right? Well, probabilities are always relative to priors. We have an alternative scientific framework in which things are what they seem, more or less, that the universe follows the laws of physics as more or less as we know them, and there was a big bang, and there just hasn't been time for those developments to take place, if they're ever going to take place. And if you just look at the internal evidence as we discussed, our world, I don't think it how should I say our world doesn't look like it's a programmed world. It just doesn't. And so if it's programmed, if there is an intelligent design to it, it's very non intuitive. And let me put it as a challenge, I guess, to Nick Bostrom or whoever wants to propound that kind of idea. Tell me something about the world that I can understand better on the basis of this picture than on the conventional, now conventional framework of physical science. I don't know of any such example, and I don't think there is one. Actually, on that point of intuition, which is interesting, our intuitions obviously have evolved entirely in a context that has left us blind, both perceptually and intuitively to the domain we're talking about the very small, the very large, the very old, the very fast. Right. We have intuitions for how thrown objects can behave local to the forces that a human body can participate in all the experiments we do as babies. Exactly. And mostly as adults, unless we decide to study science. Right. But when you're talking about moving fast enough so that you're approaching the speed of light and time slows down, or you become increasingly massive, or the energy that exists internal to the nucleus of an atom, or the fact that atoms are as small as they are, but nevertheless mostly empty space. All of these facts that we understand in physics are not facts that we should have any intuitions for. One punchline seems to fall out of this. And this is actually something that I've discussed with Max Tegmark before. You must know him. You're both at MIT, right? I've even written papers with him, yeah. So Max is a great guy. His claim is that we should absolutely expect the right answer written at the back of the book of nature to be deeply non intuitive. Given that our intuitions if we're going to take evolution and evolutionary logic seriously we should be suspicious of any answer that is at all commonsensical to us or that fits comfortably within our apish intuitions. Well, that's the way it's worked out, yes. I mean, we how should I say? But it's not even it's not an open question anymore. We know we know a lot. Maybe it's not the final language, but we know the language of nature, and we know what the operating system is. Maybe not in all details, but for most practical purposes, we know what the operating system is. And surely it is not comprehensible or in terms in the terms that we use in everyday life to get around. That's really what I try to capture in this notion of being born again, you have to learn a new way of thinking that's mind expanding requires you to revisit things that you thought you knew and use an enormous imagination to come to grips with what accurate observations and critical thinking reveal. But the good news is that it can be understood. And that's the amazing thing, which I guess this unreasonable success, if you like, is that it can be understood. And I've tried to convey this in a slim book, which of course doesn't contain the equations, but does, I think, contain the essential concepts and the kinds of philosophical questions that they settle or certainly address with deep illumination. So, yes, they are surprising. They're very surprising. If that's the claim, I fully agree with it. Okay, so back to what exists here, because I last left our listeners with hands outstretched, waving them around in what they imagined was three dimensional space and feeling the air. And we've established that space time itself is not merely the void context of the things that happen. It is itself a kind of object. It's a kind of medium that the bending of which explains gravity, among other things. So let's introduce into this space or into this condition, the minimal ingredients for the universe as we know it. What is there in front of us and as us? What is the matter that gets introduced here? So for most purposes of engineering, of biology, of chemistry, and most of astronauts, as well as brilliant, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Andrew Yang. Andrew has a new book just out today. I believe the title is Forward Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, and he also has a new political party, the Forward Party. And in today's podcast, we cover all of the relevant experiences and issues that led him to write the book and found the party. We cover the obvious brokenness of our political system, the importance of things like open primaries and rank choice voting as a means of reforming it. We talk about his experience running for the presidency and for the job of mayor in New York City. Very different experiences, and we cover many other interesting issues here, politically and socially. Anyway, it's always great to speak with Andrew, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. And now I bring you Andrew Yang. I am back with Andrew Yang. Andrew, thanks for joining me again. Sam, it's great to be back with you. Anytime I talk to you, something good is going on if we're going to launch you in one direction or another every time we speak. That's what I'm getting used to. Now, first we should mention at the top that you have a new book. The title is Forward Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, which is essentially your memoir of being a presidential candidate, which has very had to be a fascinating experience. And it comes across in the book and then basically your pitch for the ways in which we can change our politics and the role for the Forward Party in that conversation. And so I think we'll save that final piece for the end. But let's talk about the nature of the problem. You say very early in the book that democracy itself is losing legitimacy. So much of the book is a look at the ways in which our system is broken. And this brokenness relates to politics, it relates to the media, it relates to a fundamental distrust in institutions that is now spreading to catastrophic effect. And it also relates to the issue that really launched your presidential run, which is a growing concern around inequality, wealth inequality in particular, as you wanted to address by UBI, but also with respect to education and health care and other variables. So I think there's really three problems we could talk about before we start getting into solutions politics. Two, party politics, the media, and inequality in general. And I thought we could just kind of track through them and get your view on them as a candidate both in your presidential run. And I'd be interested to hear how the run for mayor of New York was a different experience. So let's start with politics. What was it like to run for president, and what was it like? Let's take it from the beginning. I know we've talked about this a little bit, but your book is so interesting on this point. What was it like to do this when no one knew who you were? And for the longest time, that was the case at the outset. It seems like a completely quixotic enterprise to declare your candidacy for the presidency and the reactions of friends and people who would support you out of some prior relationship without any expectation that you could possibly get anywhere. Yeah, take us back to that, to the beginning. Sure. I do tell some fun stories in the book about how I'd go to my son's birthday party, and another dad would say, oh, what do you do? And then I didn't want to say, I'm running for president, because I would have seemed crazy. So I would say, I'm in policy or I'm an author. My evasiveness would often not work. And then I'd wind up saying, I'm actually running for president now. And then we'd have a 30 minutes conversation about that, and at the end of it, they would not sign up to volunteer for my campaign. They'd be like, oh, that's really interesting. Good luck with that. So you can imagine why I wouldn't really want to have that conversation over and over again. And during that time, I'm so grateful to you, Sam, because you and I sat down for a conversation like this one. And your podcast really launched my campaign in multiple ways. One, the people who listened decided to take an interest in my campaign and supported and donated, which I was incredibly grateful for. But then this Iowan who was organizing something called a wing ding was a huge fan of yours and decided to invite me to Iowa to speak in 2018 on the basis of our conversation. So you were a better friend to me than a lot of others, despite the fact that at that point, we were still just getting to know each other. And you said something to another journalist that I really appreciated. You said, well, no, I don't know Andrew that well, but he seems like a fairly normal fellow who just decided to ruin his life by running for president. I heard that. I was like, oh, I'm so glad that came through. But the early months of the campaign were like that, where I had a vision for what the campaign could be. And that vision slowly started to grow, thanks to people like you and the people who worked on my campaign. Yeah, this is one of the points you make in the book, which was a genuine surprise for me. It shouldn't have been. I've certainly noticed this process. It was all on the surface, but until you pointed it out, I was someone who, along with, I think most people, assumed that there is a kind of egocentricity and narcissism and just search for ego gratification that is informing many presidential runs. And that may be the case in certain candidates. But what you make clear again, which really should not have been surprising, but you make it so vividly clear in discussing the experience of Mary Ann Williamson and Joe Cessdack that the process for most people, unless you already happen to be a front runner for some reason or another, the process is just ego. Annihilating. You talk about that. Yeah, you show up. My first trip to New Hampshire, there were literally two people there waiting for me, maybe one. And one person just happened to be there and politely pretended they were there for me. And that was an entire day. I went to a rally in Iowa, Labor Day in 2018 that drew twelve people maybe, and none of them were there for me either. And these were everyday occurrences. And keep in mind, at this point, though, I was a very anonymous presidential candidate. I'd still done some things in my life. I'm still like a person who values his time and has a family and stuff. So you would do things all the time that weren't positively reinforcing. And the media, as I write in a book, is a huge part of this dynamic where the media will completely sideline you if you're not one of the major candidates and when they do mention you, they will mock you. Really, is the way it goes. As happened with many other candidates and happened to me, to some measure. And so when you talk about the problems I outline in the book, the media gauntlet was such a huge part of running for president, and I'm now convinced that that's core to our problems. It's core to why we can't seem to make any real progress. If memory serves, you weren't mocked so much. When I think about the mocking part, I do think about Marianne Williamson, who, as you point out, in her own life, had a very successful career. Lots of people loved her, she made a lot of money, she had a very big platform, she ran a successful charity. She's very accomplished in her world. You might not agree with her metaphysics in the end, but she really had a very comfortable life that she didn't need to screw up. And then she runs for the presidency and is immediately framed as a kind of punchline. And I think you could have predicted it with something like 100% certainty that that would have happened, but that version happens. But then there are the people who have have have a fair amount of gravitas in terms of their biographies, where there's there's no obvious joke to make at their expense, but they're just utterly ignored by the media. And for you, you fell more into that bin, and there was some egregious. The example maybe say something about Joe Cesstac for a second, because I wrote in the margin of your book when you mentioned him, I literally wrote who question mark, because I have never heard of Joe Sestak. Right. Did you then Google it but look him up? No, I haven't yet. I'm a blank slate apart from what I read in your book. Give me a little color on Joe for a second. Joe, as a PhD from Harvard, was an admiral in the US navy, was entrusted with thousands of lives, and was a two term member of Congress from Pennsylvania. So he's a very, very serious person who had spent decades in service and had put his life on the line for the country. When he decided to run for president, it was like he didn't exist. And it was somewhat mystifying. I spent time with Joe, so that's another thing that happens on the trail, Sam, is that I have hung out with virtually all of the other candidates in union halls and people's driveways and at the fair and the steak fry. So you do get a sense of people. And I have spent time with Joe and Marianne and many others, but Joe is a great guy, a great man, a real patriot. He does have a lot of gravitas where he's commanded thousands of people. The media treated him like a nonentity. And because he's a committed individual, he even walked across the state of New Hampshire as a way to try and generate attention for his campaign. Completely ignored. And when it was mentioned, it was mentioned as kind of a look at the crazy person sort of thing. I thought that was deeply unfair, because, again, if you look at Joe's record, he's a very serious individual who should have been given a fair hearing. Yeah. And in your case, there was some fairly stark and egregious efforts to ignore you, literally, like fundraising memory serves. There were like, fundraising graphics where it was showing the candidates who had raised a certain amount of money or gone up in the polls enough to make debates. And you were left out where people who had raised less money and were ranked lower than you were left in the graphics. This happened most on MSNBC. How much of this I think you uncovered at one point that there was a policy that you should just not be talked about. How much of this was inadvertent and how much of it was actually an explicit effort to disappear your campaign? It happened consistently enough where you really could not chalk it up to neglect or incompetence or admission. I think the exact count was a dozen times. And we heard later from a producer, Ariana Pakari, who was at MSNBC during that time, that she was given a list of candidates not to ever invite on the show or interview. And I was on that list. So there was definitely a decision made at some point. And if you wanted to hypothesize, I believe that there is an ownership structure at MSNBC where you could draw a pretty direct line to people who were backing Joe. But at the time I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. And it was only later in the campaign when I had just gone through a debate that MSNBC had moderated, where they clearly wanted nothing to do with me, where I decided to say, look, I'm not going to appear on MSNBC unless they start actually treating us fairly. And at that point they completely omitted any mention of me from the race for the following month plus during really the final stretch of the campaign. So it was an important time. It was most stark when I actually made the 7th debate stage, which was a very significant piece of news. I was the last non white candidate to make the debate stage and MSNBC decided not to mention that, even though that was mainstream news for just about everybody. So there's going to be more to say about the media in a minute because it's just an enormous problem on many fronts now. But going back to your presidential run before, well, really at any point, what was the most surprising part about this process to you? You must have had some expectations of what it would be like. In what ways were those expectations violated? It was around my treatment by certain types of institutions where I kind of imagined that maybe some people would be excited to have a conversation about the automation of jobs and technology and AI, and some people might even be interested in or excited by my being the first Asian American man to run for president as a Democrat. Like some people who really love to talk about the firsts in various categories. And neither of those things was true. What I think of as journalistic organizations of fact did not seem to care about the decimation of millions of manufacturing jobs and the ongoing automation and dehumanization of the economy. And what it made me realize, Sam, and made me more grateful to thinkers like you, is that there is a particular discourse and language in media, there's a particular discourse and language in politics and they aren't the discussion of fact in the way that you'd hope. And I thought they were going in. And so my relative success and performance ended up being based upon all of these behaviors and adaptations that I adopted in order to try and compete. But it was very discouraging to me that it seemed like when I was talking about economic facts and figures, it was like I was speaking a foreign language. Yeah. So, yeah, that's something that you go through in the book as well. Just the hacks you found for a system that really didn't care to hear from you on substantive issues, but could be exploited by a dance video or a workout video. What did you begin to think? What do you think now about this system by which we pick our leaders? We're going to get into the political reforms you recommend, but it had to be bizarre to see that the way to get traction. The classic moment of this from years past, which has been much remarked upon, but the moment where Hillary Clinton's campaign was transformed, when she shed a tear in a diner over whatever it was. The fact that the attention of the media can be swung by, I guess. The human interest component of a story without any substance, and it really can't be swung by. Substance, it seems. Yes, I characterize it as a reality TV show at one point during the debates, but there are narratives and characters that the media in particular is interested in enhancing and elevating. And that's really the crux of the coverage. In my case, my leaning into humor or physical activities or whatever it was, ended up being positive in terms of our coverage and the energy. But Ezra client said something about how we're collapsing systemic issues into personalized narratives. And I think that's like a reasonable characterization of a lot of the political coverage, though there is a real agenda behind a lot of it where the media just decides to elevate certain characters and ignore others. I think ignore is their main weapon of choice when they want someone not to get anywhere and then kind of like slightly mocking, snide, ridicule might be like their second weapon of choice. And then among the approved characters, then they'll constantly be trying to characterize people and talk about something around their relationships, behavior, emotions. One thing that happened to me a lot on the trail, and this is very true of this process, is they are constantly digging for vulnerability. 99 times out of 100, if they find a vulnerability, it's not going to be good for you. Like, they're not going to be like, oh, this person is really human and vulnerable. Isn't that nice? They'd be like, oh, look at this. So that's one of the things that unfortunately makes politicians into automatons over time. So how is running for mayor of New York different? I mean, one is a different office, although unlike most mayor races, it it does have a national lens on it. But it strikes me that one big difference had to be that by the time you ran for mayor, you were pretty famous. You were, I think, naturally viewed I certainly viewed you as a front runner without even looking at the polls because of your national platform at that point. How was your experience of being a candidate different. It was a completely different dynamic. To your point, Sam, where on the presidential trail I was continuously trying to build up energy and race against oblivion, whereas in the mayoral I was the center of attention essentially from day one. I will say that the media coverage tended to be quite negative or questioning, and they would chalk it up to my being the front runner, though I think there might have been a couple of other dynamics. And so in many ways, it was kind of the opposite of my presidential run. Instead of being the unlikely underdog, constantly doing things to get energy, instead I was like the front runner who was continuously under attack by other candidates through the press, often because that was their best way to try and win. Yeah. What do you make of the fact that you didn't win? Maybe if you had to ascribe it to a couple of most important causes. What happened? I think the single biggest variable was the reopening of the city and then the crime surge in New York where it was on the front page of at least some of the papers every day, and that being the number one concern, heavily favored Eric Adams because he was a police officer earlier. The main narrative was around reopening and economic recovery. And those were things that people saw as a strength of mine. Right. Okay. So let's just talk about the political system as it is and what to do about it. Because I think wherever someone is on the spectrum of political concern, bias, persuasion, I think everyone agrees that there's something less than optimal about our system as it exists. What do you ascribe the main dysfunction to at this point? How is it broken? And this is the heart of my book. The deeper I got into the machinery, so to speak, and now at this point, I would consider myself either friends or friendly with dozens of political figures, most of them on the Democratic side because I ran as a Democrat. But you know all of these people, and you start to get a sense of the environment that they operate within. Why we're stuck, really. And so I do want to go back to some first principles because I've been learning myself about some things that I've taken for granted. But the core argument in my book is that people will do what their incentives demand. And if you are a political figure today, your incentives are to generally cater to the most polarized and extreme points of view and voters in your district because that's who's going to vote you back in. One numerical contrast that I cite is that Congress has a 28% approval rating nationwide right now, which probably doesn't surprise anyone listening to this. It's like, yeah, three out of four of us don't think things are going well. The individual reelection rate for members of Congress is 92%. So even though seven out of ten of us are really sad without things are going, you're almost assured of reelection if you decide to run, which most of them do, because they really like this job. The people that will decide whether you come back are not the mainstream public, but the ten to 20% most extreme voters in either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party because 83% of the congressional districts are now safely Democratic or Republican. So your incentives are to be less reasonable and more ideological. And unfortunately, that's what we're seeing on both sides, which is leading us to this historic level of polarization that we all can feel that is resulting in political violence and could end up being a new civil war that ends up bringing down our democracy as it currently exists. I just want to reiterate your opening point about the power of incentives, because when viewed from outside, there are so many institutions and there's so many human dramas where it's very easy to believe that the people involved who are doing these inexplicably, stupid, heinous things either are sociopaths or malignantly, selfish or total morons. And it's very easy to believe the worst of the individuals involved until you have some insight into the system in which they're forced to function. And if it's a system where the incentives are terrible, even very good people, very competent people, very smart people, wind up doing disastrously, stupid, destructive and even seemingly evil things. It's not to say there aren't narcissists and incompetents and people who you wouldn't want in power in these systems, but it's got to be, for the most part, a story of decent, fairly competent people incentivized terribly by the system that's in place. That's exactly right, Sam. And a result of understanding this is that we should not expect it to change or get any better. People will. If anything, the incentives are higher now than they've ever been. And the political incentives toward the extremes are now compounded by the media, which at this point is separating us into ideological camps and ginning up support for the good guys and hatred for the bad guys and then pouring gasoline on. The whole thing is social media, which obviously is going to reward the most inflammatory and aggressive language and behavior. So we're being set up. We're being set up to turn on each other, to eventually end up disintegrating in terms of the society we currently regard as like a normal, safe environment. And that's what I concluded from my journey into this, which is that these people are not bad people, some of them are not great people, but for the most part they're reasonable people responding to perverse incentives. And so then the great project becomes how can you in real life improve their incentives? And I do want to give a shout out to you, and this is something that is a major theme of the book, is that to me you represent the Antidote in many Ways, Sam, it's Like, what are the media Incentives For You? I mean, you're just like a highly reasoned individual. Like you don't have the same, you know, I don't think your producer is giving you a list of people not to talk to or anything like that. There's, like, a search right now. People are groping for trusted Perspectives and Voices more and More. And I just want to thank you personally for being such a huge figure for people who are looking for wisdom and truth. Really? Well, it's great to hear. And I happen to be in a spot where there are almost no incentives that aren't of my own making. I have consciously designed my life that way. And It's Not that it's impossible to be badly Incentivized, even in this Space, but it's Much Harder, and that's why I'm Here. And it's A relief, frankly, to be able to say whatever I want to say and to talk to Whoever I want to talk to and to not be Calibrating any of that against Any kind of outside Pressure, even pressure from my audience. And I don't know how much you followed me down these various byways, but whenever I've discovered that a significant percentage of my audience really disagrees with me about something, that's the one signal for me that I need to take pains not to be trained by in any way, because I notice other people being captured by their audience in various ways. I Just have never wanted that. So when I discovered that a significant percentage of my audience I never really drilled down to what it was, but it seemed like something like 20% favored Trump. For reasons that I still cannot fathom, I just made it a point to not care how much pain I got from them every time I wanted to trample on Trump because it felt important. And so it is with the equally large percentage of my audience that is very far to the left and hates everything I have to say about wokeness and identity politics. The pain I get from them, I have decided to take as noise rather than signal because it's just very important for me to preserve my freedom to say what I think is true and important rather than to be course correcting based on what's rewarding me from my audience and what you get on any of these pain points. And this is obviously amplified by social media is there's so much more energy from the haters than from the people who agree with you that you can really get blown around by it's? Highly disproportionate the noise. Yes. If someone's virulently opposed, it just seems like the most prominent thing in The World, even though there could be 100 people who just silently Nodded. So we're living in the system where less than 10% of Any population can really steer the Conversation on a Polarizing Issue because they just have so much more energy. We got these various activist groups on the left, and we've got all the noise that comes out of Trumpistan and the most extreme voices over there. You do get the sense that on many points you have a lot of reasonable people that have been cowed into silence and therefore aren't influencing the conversation. And the media doesn't seem to care except the media. They just keep amplifying the extremes. Well, again, that's where their incentives are. They've figured out that their ratings will be higher and their ad revenue will be higher if they cater to a particular point of view and then reinforce it. There was an anecdote about cable TV producer who said, look, our people don't even regard us as news. They regard us as comfort, which then will justify all sorts of things that you might do, journalistically if you're like, hey, it turns out we're not even reporting the news here. And the fact that you have to take such great pains, I mean, you're acutely aware of the kind of pressures that some of these media figures and organizations would be under. But in their case, they don't have to self regulate to that extent. It's like oh. What? Like my people like this? Let me give them more of that and then you'll be thanked for it and paid more for it. At the political level, what are the reforms that you think will really change the system and the pressures that are on all of the various parties here? I'm happy to say that I can use a real life example that you're going to love Sam. This isn't my book because it didn't happen yet, but there was a handful of Republican senators who decided to impeach Trump, and only one of them is up for reelection in 2022, and that is Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. She decided to impeach the Trump personality that you need. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, very short intro today. Just two things reminding supporters of the show. To subscribe to the private RSS feed, please go to my website, log in, preferably on mobile, and go to the Subscriber content page where you can push a button for your favorite podcasting app and get the private feed. Then you should be seeing this show appear in your podcaster with a red Making Sense icon, not a black one. And then you will not miss any content because a few things are changing and I don't want you to fall through the cracks. Sorry for the inconvenience. And finally, with regards to my previous podcast with Andrew McAfee, whose book is More from Less, many of you love that podcast. And I just want to let you know that his book is now available this week, publishing on Tuesday, the 8 October. And now for today's guest, who also has a book publishing this week. My guest today is Megan Phelps roper. Megan is an amazing woman. She's been on the podcast before. Her book is Unfollow a Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. And Megan is a writer and formerly a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, which she left in 2012. And she's now an educator on topics related to extremism and communication across ideological lines. As you'll hear, she's very well placed to do that and really just an amazingly resilient and wise and together person. Given her background, that is no small miracle. So without further delay, I bring you Megan Phelps roper. I am here with Megan Phelps roper. Megan, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's really good to be back. So you have been really busy. The last time we spoke on the podcast. You just had a Twitter feed, if I'm not mistaken. And now you have a daughter, first, most important. But you also have a book and I think a movie that will be based on the book. You've been very busy. Yeah, there's been a lot going on. It's kind of funny. For a long time I felt like everything I was doing was really reactive. Somebody was asking me to come speak somewhere or talk about Westboro and my life and everything. And then when it came time to write this book, this was the first thing that I actually had to say, I want to do this. That was a little bit and I think we talked about that a little bit last time, just that feeling of not wanting to having spent my entire life telling people how to live, to now say, okay, you guys, now I have it all figured out and let me tell you what the answers are now. Right. So obviously, that's not the tone I take in the book and that's not the tone I take in real life. But it definitely is kind of a little bit of a mental hurdle to get over. Yeah, well, it's certainly quite a task to decide to sit down and write a book as well. And you've written really a wonderful one to read. And I think our conversation will not do the book justice deliberately. I just want people to read it. The book is unfollow, and it's your memoir and your account of leaving the Westborough Baptist Church. And on the last podcast, we spoke a fair amount about your life and what it was like to be in the church. I think we should recapitulate a little bit of that just so people have a sense of what's going on here, but then we'll move on to some other topics. And also I got questions solicited from Twitter, which I want to COVID Sure. I think you have to tell people who don't know, and that will be some significant percentage of people, I think. Just what is the Westboro Baptist Church and how did it start? The Westboro Baptist Church is a group of about 70 to 80 people, and it's made up almost entirely of my extended family, and they have become really well known in the past. It's been almost 30 years now since they started this picketing ministry. We would go starting from the time I was five years old in 1991 and protest. It started with the LGBTQ community and then just expanded from there until it included literally everyone outside of our church. Everyone outside was a legitimate target for our protests. The things that they're probably most well known for are, again, their protests of the LGBTQ community and then also military funerals, the funerals of AIDS victims, and anybody that they considered centers, which again, is literally everyone. So anybody that got any kind of attention, especially was a target. So people have seen pictures of kids, and you were one of those kids holding signs at military funerals and just in protest over whatever, basketball games and just in random places. And the signs, the juxtaposition of the kids and the signage is what has been so shocking about this church. The classic sign is God hates fags. Give me some of the other signs that were most offensive to military families and others. Thank God for September 11. Thank God for dead soldiers. Those especially were really offensive to a lot of people. And then there were ones like pray for more dead soldiers and pray for more dead kids. And those ultimately, they became a huge problem for me. And I'm happy to say now that in the time after I left the church, I started reaching out to my family and making these arguments to them generally from a scriptural perspective. So even though I am no longer a believer, I don't believe in the infallibility of the Bible. I still make arguments to my family from the Scriptures because I know that that will be what they find most compelling. And so I started to say I'm happy to say that since I left and started making those arguments, they no longer hold those signs. And of course, I always have to joke that not praying for people to die is kind of a low bar when it comes to human decency. But for Westboro, it was a huge shift in their position. And so for me, that's a really hopeful sign that just like I was reached, they can still be reached. That's interesting. So I wasn't aware that they had modified their message to that degree because I saw the Louie Through documentary, the more recent one, which we'll talk about. So you're saying that they still hold the homophobic signs, but they don't hold the ones celebrating the deaths of soldiers and children? I think they still have the faint God signs because for them, that's absolutely still a scriptural, because they believe in predestination. That is a scriptural proposition that you are supposed to thank God for all of his judgments because they are by definition, righteous. So I think the thank God's signs are still there, but the praying for more dead, praying for more curses on their enemies, those are the ones that are not part of their repertoire anymore. So your grandfather started the church and what was his background? How did he get his revelation or his commitment to an unusually doctrinaire version of Christianity? I think he grew up Methodist. It didn't seem like they were particularly or especially religious. But then he graduated high school at 16 and got a principal appointment to West Point Military Academy. And but he had to wait until he was 17, you know, in order to, you know, matriculate. And so in that time between when he graduated and, and when he could actually enroll, he got saved at a tent revival meeting in the south and he thought he needed to become a preacher. So that's what he did for a while. He was a traveling preacher. He went to a few different he went to Bob Jones University, which at that time was in Tennessee, and then also to Pray Bible Institute in, in Canada. And, and so he started this religious education and then either he got to Topeka, you know, as as a traveling preacher, he got to Topeka, Kansas, and he was preaching at this church called East Side Baptist. And they liked his preaching so much that they asked him to stay in Topeka and settle down and become the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church on the other side of town. But how do you think he became more hardcore than anyone within 1000 miles? What was that path like for him? Some of this, of course, is conjecture. It just seems like he had such confidence in his own thinking. He was extremely intelligent. He graduated high school at the top of his class. But it just seemed to like over time, and especially once he became the pastor of his own church, it just seems like he had such a sense of certainty that the Bible was the literal and infallible word of God, and that his understanding of it was necessarily the truth, the only righteous view of it. He didn't believe in interpretation, which is that's kind of a feature of groups like Westborough. They don't believe in interpretation even while they are necessarily interpreting, they have to figure out how to apply these principles to their lives. But yeah, they don't believe in it. They just think that just the literal understanding from their perspective is the truth and the unquestionable truth. So it seems like with Graham's, it was just that sense of certainty that made him so sure that everyone else was wrong and that everyone needed to bow to his understanding of it. Yeah. And so and so then he essentially indoctrinated the whole family. I mean, he didn't have a family yet, I suppose, and then he started having many children and many grandchildren. And you all became the church, right? Yeah. So most of the church, it's about 80%, 80, 85% is my extended family. And even now, the few outsiders who have joined the church, the very few outsiders, especially when you consider how much attention Westborough has gotten, the few outsiders who have joined, many of them have married into the family as well. So of this, if you saw Louie's most recent documentary, two of my siblings are now engaged to a family that had a father, had joined with four children. Three of those four are now either married or engaged. And I think the oldest is just in their early twenty s. Yeah. And there's the crazy story of the first documentarian who came from the outside world to COVID the church, wound up joining it. Is he still a member of the church? He is. He's one of the elders, actually. He wasn't the first documentarian who came, but he is the first one who came and stayed. Right. He really went native from my perspective. He had many of the same features, just psychologically as grants. That idea of there being one standard. That's a really compelling idea. That there is one standard, that it is a divine and unquestionable standard, and that my judgment has to be followed in all things. For a lot of people, that can be really and especially people with large egos, which I believe is absolutely true of both that documentarian you mentioned and my grandfather is the path to perfect clarity. Right. I mean, if you're just going to shoot any ambiguity or any burden of multiple readings and you're just going to find the most literal one possible in every case, was that the algorithm that you guys used as far as rendering interpretations that were not considered interpretations, just be as literal as possible in every case? Basically. I mean, that was definitely a feature of how we read the Bible. It's kind of funny because I also feel like we tended to choose the most strict interpretation. So, for instance, there was an expositor that we would read a lot named John Gill. And, you know, when it came to certain aspects of the New Testament, you know, where in cases like, you know, divorce and remarriage, westbrook sees that as always, that is always, you know, forbidden by God, because Jesus and, you know, in Luke 16 says, if you divorce your wife and marry another, then that's adultery. And if you marry a woman who's been put away from her husband, then that's adultery. So it seems like very clear, but there are other verses that kind of seem to moderate that position, and John Gill took the more lenient stance, and in that case, we thought John Gill was a hairtick. So even the people that we looked to for a lot of guidance became heretics if they weren't as hardline as we were. The other interesting fact about your grandfather that became an interesting fact about the whole family is that basically everyone became a lawyer, right. Or many of you became lawyers, and there's a family legal firm that you must have had clients that were not religious maniacs. So how did all that work? Yeah, no, I would say most of the clients of Phelps Chartered, they're not related to us. They don't share any kind of ideology with us. But my family has a reputation of being good at their jobs, not overcharging. And I feel like it was very similar to the way it was in school. People just kind of generally compartmentalize who we are at work or at school versus who we are on the picket line. And so, yeah, we had clients that were part of the LGBT community. So there was a couple I remember every time they sent in a payment, it was a lesbian couple. They wrote on both the check and the envelope with the check, they would put the two female symbols, like interlocked. I just thought that was very funny. Just this, that's going to work out. Where did the emphasis on protest come from? This is not the usual way that people try to spread their brand of Christianity or any other faith. How is it that you guys spent so much time with all the kids in tow on the sidewalk with signs? Well, it didn't start with picketing. There was about a two year period from because I mentioned, I think, the last time, the incident that sparked the picketing at this time yes, at this local park, from the time of that incident to when we actually picked up the first picket sign was about two years. And in that time, my grandfather was going to city council meetings and writing letters to the mayor and such and trying to and the park commissioners and trying to figure out how to clean up Gage Park because it's this ongoing problem. Right. So to remind people there was a park where gay men were having sex in the bushes, essentially. And I assume all of that's true, right? This was not your grandfather's Malignant not making this up, right? No, he wasn't making it up. I mean, he wasn't making up that there was a pickup spot. I think once the picketing started and once he saw the kind of attention that he could get from that kind of activity, that became this something that he couldn't turn away from. And even I remember at a certain point after we'd been I was in middle school, so we would have been picketing for, you know, nearly ten years by then. You started when you were five. Yeah, so just before I started kindergarten, I started picketing. Well, so yeah, so I remember being in middle school, and it was like a discussion they were having with a newspaper, a local newspaper, about possibly basically if we give you a column, a weekly column in the newspaper, will you stop picketing? Because if your goal is to reach people, this could be a way of doing that. And I remember first being a guest that we would even consider this. It didn't occur to me. And then, of course, everybody else in the church seemed to come to the same conclusion. This was not an option. Our place is there's these phrases from the Bible without the camp, like, we are outside of mainstream society. We are not inside talking to these people. We are outside because they have cast us out, because they have abhorred God and his message, and so therefore, they abhor us. Yeah, well, there's something self fulfilling about that kind of persecution complex. Once you tell yourselves a vivid enough story of how separate you are from the rest of human society and all of that entails and you begin to act on that perception as you did you then, as if by magic or some perverse irony, begin to attract all the hatred that seems to confirm your status as everlasting outsiders. And so your experience you write about this in the book, but your experience, even as a young child standing on the sidewalk picketing, was the experience of just reaping kind of an infinite amount of hatred from the rest of society. And I can only imagine that experience confirms the sense that these people are irretrievably lost and destined for hell. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it was those very human dynamics that kind of pushed us further and further to the extreme as time went on, because there are passages, the things that led us to be praying for our enemies to die and for God to do horrible things to them. That didn't happen overnight. In some ways, it did happen overnight because it was a sudden shift in doctrine. But the theology and the mental state that got us there definitely developed over time. And so, you know, as we're as time goes on, you know, and the the louder we get, the more angry the response gets, the more hostile that response gets. And so then you can't help. But even though we work and this is where I write about this in the book, like that moment where it finally hits me that I am believing these two completely contradictory things at the same time. I'm holding them in my mind together at the same time, but never in the same moment. So it's this the sense that, you know, our stated goal for picketing, the reason we were out there was the fulfillment of the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself. It's the idea that you go and rebuke your neighbor when you see him sinning because you know that the consequences of that sin is death and curses from God in this life and then hell in the next. So ostensibly we're out there because we love these people and we need to go and warn them. And yet, because of those dynamics on the picket line, it just pushed us further and further to the extreme of we stopped thinking of them as our neighbors and people that we loved and that we needed to go and preach this to as their only hope for salvation. And started thinking of them as these people who are irredeemably lost and hellbound and cursed by God. And so now we need to pray for God. So we would be demanding we would be standing out there demanding that people repent and we hold these signs repent or perish. And then we go in our prayers as we arrive to the picket and as we leave the picket for God to preserve them in their sins. So it's this again, this completely contradictory ideas that I was simply unaware of at the time. I can't remember if we talked about this last time, but I think we must not have, because you started to read on the podcast the end of Faith, and you got to. That the part you kind of paused. And told the story of about being in Paris with your wife and both at the same time trying to avoid the American Embassy and then also trying to get a room at a hotel next to the American Embassy. Yeah, and I think it just has to do with the way that our minds process information in certain contexts and we compartmentalize and so we can hold these completely contradictory ideas at the same time. And then when they finally meet, when we finally become aware of them I can't remember what you said about it, but I literally felt insane. How could I have believed both of these things at the same time? The phrase preserve them in their sin, that is to say, you're praying that God keep them in ignorance so that they merit the pain of hell or does have some other meaning. No, yeah, that's exactly right. That's a theme in Islam as well. You encounter this lot in the Koran that if God had wanted to illuminate them and give them faith, he would have. So the fact that the unbelievers are blind to the truth is something that God intends, really. It's a kind of a perverse vision of a psychological experiment that's never really honestly run. It's not like anyone outside the faith ever had a chance when you actually look at the details and this is considered a good thing. Right. And that's actually something that I mean, I still currently, when I will be reading my family's tweets sometimes, and they're written from a perspective of as if it were possible for these people that they're accusing and demanding repentance from, as if it were possible for them to repent even while believing in predestination. Right. Or that anything that they have done could have been otherwise. They don't believe that it could have been otherwise because it happened. It must have happened exactly as God set it up to happen. So it's always very funny when they try to do that. It's like but you don't believe that. You don't actually believe that it's possible, and yet you are working yourself up into a frenzy of rage, getting mad at these people and upset with them for taking the wrong path and for having done these things that Westborough imagines will lead them to hell. And yet from your own perspective, from your own theology, it could not have been otherwise. And so that was something that I also kind of would skim over in my own mind when I was still with Westboro. And mostly people didn't bring it to our attention. And so now sometimes it just becomes I just have to say something because it is so I don't know, it's like at some point you hope at some point that they will be able to step back long enough to realize that this doesn't make sense. Yeah. It's interesting to see the footage of these protests because there's something it almost has a kind of trolling feel to it. I mean, I know that you guys believed what you said you believed, and so it was, on some level a sincere communication, but it's playful enough and kind of arch enough that it just seems like you're also sort of trolling. Can you explain how that impression is coming across? Yeah, it was always very important for us to be happy on the picket line and just generally, like, we had to be happy to show that we were content with our lot. Right. That God had given us this ministry and we needed to be joyful about it, even when it was difficult. And so that was kind of just a big part of just the church culture. It's just so arresting to see a little girl of any age beaming the good vibes of childhood while holding in each hand a sign, damning people to hell. That's why it does have a perhaps trolling is the wrong framework, but there's something not straightforward about the communication. It's just a kind of goof that on some level is very high stakes and perverse because viewed from the outside, what's happening here is really a kind of child abuse. We have a child, IEU and your siblings in a situation where you've been truly deprived of real world information and have been indoctrinated into this kind of malicious and paranoid worldview. And now you're being put to work to spread it and yet you're this happy little thing in a parka with a God haze fag sign and it's just such a mind stopper. Yeah. I think when people look at groups like Westboro, they see them generally as very, like, uneducated, backwards, unhappy people who are just looking for something to be mad about. And they have found it in whatever the gay community or people committing for an occasion or whatever, like, so you see them as just and so there is definitely part of that. Part of the reason it was so important that we show our happiness on the picket line is to thwart that image. And also, there's this Bible passage that my mom would quote all the time about how this is the love of God, that you keep his commandments and that his commandments are not grievous to you. So if God's commandments, if it's grievous to you to follow his commandments, then clearly you're not one of God's elect. You're not one of his people. Because even if you follow the letter of the law and your spirit isn't in it, your heart isn't in it, and you're not joyful about it, then that is unacceptable service to God. So I feel like there's a whole lot of and the fact that we were so happy as part of what and that dichotomy that you described, the juxtaposition between the extremely serious negative message and the happiness of the people proclaiming it, that was part of what got so much attention for the church. And were you having religious experiences that you interpreted as confirmation of your faith? What was it like apart from just announcing it on the sidewalk and dealing with the blowback every day? We were reading the Bible, memorizing Bible verses, and talking about what was happening in the world in light of Westboro's understanding of the Scriptures. For me, I never felt like God was, like, talking to me or something. That wasn't how I experienced religion. I experienced it as this very rigid set of rules that it was literally only possible to follow if God was giving you the right kind of heart to want to do it. I experienced religion as fear initially, especially as a kid, because there was fear of so much yeah, fear of hell. Exactly. And what God would do to you if you stepped out of line. I got baptized when I was 13. I had tried to get baptized a little earlier. Than that a few years earlier, but apparently one of my aunts thought I wasn't serious. So that closed down that discussion. In that church, you can't get baptized before you demonstrate that you're actually serious in some ideological way. Yes, exactly. They do not believe in infant baptism. Actually, I saw on Twitter one of the questions that your tweet about arguing this podcast elicited, one of the questions was what was one of the funniest things that you thought was a sin at the church? Now, looking back, and I think one of the funniest things and I wrote about this in the book was when I look back at my grandfather gave a sermon about infant baptism, and without any sense of hyperbole whatsoever, he compared that act of sprinkling some water and saying a few words about this infant and their hopes that they go to heaven or whatever. They're washing the blood of Jesus. He compared that to literally burning the child alive and sacrificed to a pagan god. And that was exactly and when I look back at that now, that's a little extreme, but yeah. So they do not believe in infant baptism at all. So you have to demonstrate an orderly walk. You have to talk to all of the members of the church. And so they say if there's this question, can any forbid water? So is there any reason that anybody in the church has that you should not be baptized? As long as the answer is no, then you can be baptized. So kids as young as, like, I think, six, seven, eight have been baptized at Westboro. Well, it's a much stronger ceremony. It sounds like it has just far more import to it. There's obviously no content on the infant side when you're getting baptized, and you can't even speak human language. And so this is the real thing. If you are demonstrating you have sufficient commitment to the creed, that's where you actually transition to something significant. So you got baptized at 13. I know where that was coming from. Sorry, you asked a question, but I've forgotten what it was that led me there. Yeah, it was just whether you were having religious experience of any kind and interpreting anything in the world apart from the harassment you were getting from the outside as confirmation of the truth of your faith. Yeah. I mean, obviously, that the interaction with outsiders and how much they hated it, especially given all those passages in the New Testament where Jesus is saying, if you follow me, the world is going to hate you. Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you and revile you and persecute you for my name's sake, for so did their fathers to the prophets. So we saw ourselves in that line of righteous people who had delivered the word of God to a world that despised them. And it there's no question that was a huge part of it, but just because of. How everything in the church, this extraordinary amount of love and support that you get as a church member as long as you are a member in good standing, all of those I felt enveloped in the love of God by those things. And because they teach you your own worthlessness from such a young age that you are of yourself, you have nothing that God didn't give you, any part of you, that's you that's all corrupt. And there's this passage talks about their righteousness is as filthy rags. Right? So it's just you are taught from such a young age that you are nothing and that you have nothing and that all things come from God. And so the sense that the idea that you could have this really wonderful family and people who loved and cared about you and showed you that in innumerable ways, all of that felt like a wonderful gift from God. I felt the same way. Singing in church on Sundays. All these songs that talk about how worthless you are as a human being and how graceful God is and how merciful to have taken any pity on you and given you any good thing that just tells you what a wonderful God he is and how generous. Because clearly you are too worthless to deserve any of this on your own. Yeah, it really is a complex picture because at first glance from outside, again, this just seems like pure misfortune. I mean, you were unlucky to be born to the people you were born to and insulated from sort of a normal, happy life in the modern world, and you're very lucky to have gotten out. And I would certainly sign off on that final claim. But your experience of being in your family and being your mother's daughter and your father's daughter and even your grandfather's granddaughter is far more complex than that. You are clearly a remarkable person, and you got some gifts from this ordeal as well. I mean, just how do you view your childhood and and what you got from this experience? You know, I think about this a lot now because now that I am a mother and the kinds of things that I want, there are so many aspects of my upbringing that I want to give my daughter. And, you know, I think I talked about this. I think I talked about this last time. I definitely wrote about it in the book. And it's something that was really powerful to me, this moment where it was just a few months after I left, and I was at the shabbat table of this rabbi that I had protested a few years earlier with this. Your rabbi is a horse sign being held by my sister and David Abbottball, who he was the one who invited me there, and he had he was the one who made that first point on Twitter that first allowed me to, in my own mind, challenge Westbrook's teachings. So as I'm sitting there with him just a few months after I left and feeling like a complete betrayer, that I walked away from my family and everyone I loved, and having betrayed everything that I stood for, and I just felt so overcome with guilt and shame. And in that moment, for David, what he said was, in a lot of ways, leaving Westboro Baptist Church was the most Westboro Baptist Church thing you could have done. They're the ones he told me and my sister, he said, you are your parents children. They're the ones that taught you to stand up for what you believe in, no matter what it cost you. They just never imagined you'd be standing up to them. And that was the first time I realized that I because I basically had accepted Westborough's framing of the whole situation, that I had walked away from my family, that I had rejected all these people that I loved, and being able to start to see it with nuance and to realize, no, I didn't walk away from my family. I walked away from the church. I walked away from the ideology that I saw had come to see as extremely destructive, not just for the people that the church targeted, but for the church itself and all of its members. And then and then also to to look and look back and realize that there was so much of my upbringing that was really wonderful. I mean, it's the idea of and of course, you have to also keep in mind all of the destructive parts of it. It's not like I'm not trying to take away from the destructiveness of it or the pain that we caused so many other people, but to look back and see this idea of that we were motivated by, at least initially, by this desire to love our neighbor. Right. That we, as a group of 70 to 80 people, could be so dedicated and so active that we could get that much attention for our cause. And it's not just attention, right? It's. It's this idea of dedicating yourself to something and sacrificing for it in such a way that you can accomplish the objectives that you set out to. Like that kind of perseverance and the diligence, the hard work that went into that, the very spending so much time trying to get to the bottom of a thing and examining it from so many different angles. Obviously, I think now a lot of the things that we spent a lot of time on were not good. But the process itself is something that I absolutely still want to emulate, if that makes sense. Yeah. So you mentioned Twitter a couple of times, and you are really if anyone is a social media success story, it is you, because Twitter was your way out of this, and you then met your husband on Twitter. Tell me why Twitter is a good thing. For one person on this earth for me. Twitter? Yes, twitter was the way out. That was another question that somebody asked in response to your tweet yesterday was it was about do you think you would still be part of Westborough if not for Twitter? And I have every reason to believe that I would be. Because even though, and I read about this in the book, this whole process of this group of older men in the church kind of taking over as becoming the elders, like taking over as this church leadership role and a bunch of other things that happened that helped me see that we were doing wrong. But I have every reason to believe that without those conversations on Twitter, without having come to the realization that we could be wrong about something before that conversation with David Abbottball where he points out this internal contradiction in our theology, before that, I always felt like I had the answer to everything. We spent hours, hundreds, thousands of hours on the picket line talking to people about these doctrines and Westbrook's theology, and there wasn't a person outside of our church who agreed with it all. And so we're constantly being challenged by it. And, you know, doing that from the time I was five years old and you know, by the time I'm, you know, in my mid twenty s on Twitter, the feeling that we had an answer for everything, that the doctrine was airtight. You mentioned that my family is full of lawyers and that's they're extremely intelligent, analytical people. And we spent a lot of time memorizing the evidence in Ka, the Bible, so that we always were ready to give an answer to the people who ask these questions. So I had so much faith in the church and their understanding of the Bible, their interpretation of how the world worked. And I've mentioned all this, the sense that you have of yourself as being just this depraved human being, and that Bible verse about how you can't trust your heart, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and who can know it? So having that be your framework and then having this group of people who it feels like this divine, unquestionable institution until that came into question for me, because of those conversations on Twitter, anytime something didn't quite make sense. I always assumed that the problem was in me, that the error was in my own thinking or because I had some kind of depraved heart or Satan was whispering in my ear. This is the framework I was dealing with. Yeah. And that is the way any religion or cult hermetically seals itself against criticism from the outside. Any point that seems unanswerable or any blow that seems to land can be reinterpreted as your own fallibility. You can't trust your own intuitions here. Who can understand God's ways, or you're actually in dialogue with and being tempted by Satan or some divine adversary. Yes, and that was if not for Twitter, I have every reason to believe that I would have continued to do the same thing I had always done. So what was the moment on Twitter where the first domino fell? If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay. The siege of the capital. I can't say I was expecting that exactly, but I can't say I was surprised either. And nothing will surprise you about my view of Trump's responsibility here. I think I need hardly express it, but like so much that has happened under Trump, what occurred at the Capitol was in every way unsurprising, but it was also in every way astonishing. Trump has managed to invent a new state of the human brain. Trump has turned our democracy and this period in American history into pizza gate. That was a pizza gate insurrection. We had people visibly and audibly deranged by misinformation. Just listen to what they say when you stick a microphone in front of their faces. These are people who have been unhinged by the lies that have spilled ceaselessly from the mouth of this president for years. In a way, it was absolutely perfect. It had none of the gravitas of a real coup, but it fully degraded our country. I mean, sometimes it was more debasing than a real coup attempt. What we saw in DC was like a YouTube comment thread come to life. Now, we may find out much more about what happened here, and it may even be more sinister than it appeared. I don't know. But at the time I'm recording this, I'm seeing two truly terrible, unforced errors being made at the moment on social media and in the media generally, and they're causing a lot of further harm, one's occurring on the right and the other on the left politically. Once again, those two polls are a little hard to map, but they'll have to do for the moment. We have a problem on both sides of our politics, where people have become single issue thinkers, even people who are very smart on other topics. It just seems that now most people can't manage to think about two problems at the same time. It's possible to have cancer and heart disease at the same time, right? That's a possible state of the human body. And they're both problems, and they have to be thought about differently. They've got different causes, different remedies. It is possible to acknowledge that Donald Trump is the most dangerously unfit person who has ever occupied the office of the presidency while also acknowledging that leftist social justice hysteria is terrible and needs to be opposed. You don't have to be a genius to keep both of these grotesque objects in view. And yet it appears that only a handful of people really can manage it. I just cannot believe what I'm seeing on social media. Now, here are the two reactions that I find most troubling on the right or right of center, many people are minimizing the gravity of what happened at the Capitol by comparing it to the violence that attended the BLM protests last summer and the insane events in Seattle and Portland. And these people are now focused on the hypocrisy of those in the media and in the Democratic Party who overlooked the violence last summer and who are now calling for law and order. The real problem is almost certainly worse than this. The real problem is that nearly 50% of Republicans support the attack on the Capitol. That is a horrific polling number. That is the abyss politically. But that aside, virtually everyone right of center is focused on the hypocrisy of the left, both real and imagined. This is a dangerous delusion on many levels. First, in many cases, it's not true. It's not true to say that Biden and Kamala Harris didn't condemn the looting and violence last summer. They did. They just didn't do it enough. Not nearly enough. And I criticized them at the time. But there's a much deeper disallowogy here. What happened in D. C. This week was not a protest that got out of hand. This was an insurrection incited by the sitting President of the United States. Granted, terms like insurrection and coup seem grandiose. Given Trump's total ineptitude. He can't actually accomplish his aims. But consider the people who attacked the Capitol fought with cops, right? They really fought with cops. They weren't all just a lead in and risked their lives to get into that building. One cop is dead from having been beaten over the head with a fire extinguisher, and one insurrectionist is dead, having been shot in the neck by a police. And there was no telling what that mob would do once it got inside those buildings. They were not looting a shopping mall. They were storming the halls of Congress at the direct encouragement of the President of the United States, who had convinced them over the course of months that their democracy had literally been stolen from them, that they don't have a democracy anymore, that they don't have a country anymore, and that they must fight to get it back. He set them loose on the Capitol that very morning, saying that he would be with them. If you don't see a difference between that and a BLM protest that devolves into looting an arson, take a moment and try there is no analogy to be drawn here. Now, it is a miracle that more people weren't killed at the Capitol. In fact, many more should have been killed. Don't misunderstand me. Right. I'm not saying I wish that many more people had died. I'm very thankful that so few did. But if you run that experiment again, right, that let's storm the halls of Congress experiment, you run it a hundred times. I am certain that many more people die in most of those scenarios. And it was only due to a total failure of security that more people didn't die. The people crashing through those doors who had already overwhelmed cops, the people who were staring down the upraised guns of the cops who were inside smashing through the glass, those people should have been shot, because what is the alternative? To just let the lives of our elected officials depend upon the restraint of a mob? Some of the people were armed. One guy was carrying zip ties of a sort that cops used for handcuffs. What was he planning to do with those? Take hostages? There is actually no way of knowing what would have happened had those people gotten their hands on Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence. There were people calling for the hanging of Mike Pence. So you're going to rely on the restraint of people who have just risked their lives to break into the Capitol, who believe that there's a global conspiracy of child raping cannibals running the world? People who have never received anything other than a wink and a nod from the President of the United States on those very points. Granted, much of the footage of this attack on the Capitol is perplexing. You've got a cop taking selfies with some of the crowd. You've got cops seeming to let people in after others had broken through their ranks. And then you've got everyone just wandering around, taking selfies and vandalizing the place. Some of the footage that makes it look like a busload of people headed to Burning Man just decided to use the restrooms at the Capitol. Some of the people are surprisingly old, right? But other footage reveals that this was an absolute emergency. To not acknowledge the gravity of what happened here, to not acknowledge the degree to which it disgraced our country and weakened it in the eyes of the world. Yes, the BLM riots were also a disgrace. And yes, the press contortions around them were also a disgrace. To have CNN anchors say as a dozen cities were being set on fire. Well, whoever said protests need to be peaceful, that was a disgrace. To have a journalist on camera trumpeting the mostly peaceful protests, even while cars and buildings burned in the background, that was all a disgrace and just amazing dark comedy. And yes, it was insane, patently insane, to see calls to defund the police as social order was unraveling across our country. But what happened this week was altogether different. Nothing like this has ever happened in our country before. This was a desecration of our government, of our whole system of government engineered by the President himself. A mob was set upon the Capitol by the President himself for the purpose of disrupting the certification of an election that he lost, absolutely lost, but claims to have won. Just take a moment to view this travesty through the eyes of Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin or any other dictator on earth who has a real interest in proving that democracy just doesn't work, that there's nothing to aspire to. They have captive populations who they are messaging to. Now they get to tell them that democracy is bullshit, that having a free press is just dangerous bullshit. Right, because it drives people insane. What does the United States stand for in the world today if you don't think it matters for our country to become the laughing stock of the world? To fail and fail and fail again, to fail to deal with COVID and to fail in a way that still seems impossible to understand, to fail to distribute vaccines we already have in hand when there are more deaths from COVID than at any point during the pandemic right? We're at the absolute peak, and this desecration of the very seat of our democracy is happening before the eyes of the world. To fail to prevent the Russians from accomplishing the greatest hack in the history of cyber war, and to fail so hard at containing the absolute madness of our president that we can't even talk about these other failures. We can't even talk about COVID or the Pearl Harbor level hack of our government because we have a shirtless fucking Viking stalking the halls of Congress. We've got people in Camp Auschwitz T shirts hunting down Nancy Pelosi at the behest of the fucking President of the United States. Trump has been assaulting the foundations of our democracy since before he took office. And if you couldn't see it earlier, as many of us did, it should have been absolutely clear to you the moment he refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power during the 2020 campaign he actually did that during the 2016 campaign that should have been disqualified. But throughout 2020, he repeatedly refused to offer an assurance that he would cooperate with a peaceful transfer of power half a dozen times at least. He shattered the most important democratic norm we have right before our eyes. He should have been impeached for that. I think that moment was the most shocking development in our politics in a hundred years. The real Trump Derangement Syndrome is not to have seen every day of this obscene presidency, what a terrifying risk Trump has posed to the safety and integrity of our country. And, of course, the ultimate Trump Derangement Syndrome sent a delusional mob attacking the Capitol, imagining that this was a path to securing Trump another four years as president. As I hear myself getting tuned up here, I want to respond to one species of criticism I keep getting on social media. I think I should have cleared this up a long time ago, because there is some conceptual confusion here. I keep hearing from people who are apparently contented users of the Waking Up app who say things like, your app has changed my life. I'm getting incredible value from it, but I find your comments on politics really offputting. These are not the sort of things that a teacher of mindfulness should be saying. You know, there are many versions of this. People tweet me and they say, you should use your own app. You know, it sounds like you need some mindfulness. Let me clear this up. If you think there is something about meditation, successful meditation, right. If you think there's something about cutting through the illusion of the self or recognizing the nature of mind prior to concepts, if you think there's some necessary contradiction between that project and caring about the kinds of problems I'm talking about now, you're confused. There is nothing incompatible between mindfulness and not wanting to lose a cyber war, say. There is no contradiction between what I'm saying now and how I'm saying it, and the practices or worldview I present in Waking up. You may disagree with some points I'm making here. There are probably several things worth debating. But if you think that meditative insight should cause one not to care about the implosion of our democracy or about our ongoing failure to deal with civilizational challenges if you think we get to not care about the world, we're building or wrecking the world that our children will be condemned to live in. It's time to take your head out of your ass. And if you think I can't say that mindfully or mean that mindfully in this very tone of voice if you think it's impossible for me to be mindful right now nondualistically mindful right free of self mindful even as I tell you to take your head out of your ass. Then you are confused about what mindfulness is and about what meditation is and about what the whole project of living an examined Life is. You have mistaken a style of communication, an anodyne religious or New Agey communication, and a pseudoethic around being as inoffensive as possible for the goal of spiritual life. Yes, there are some apparent paradoxes here, but there should be no confusion. Yes, it is possible to be free and happy in almost any circumstance. I believe that is true. If you put me in solitary confinement, I know that I could be happy, given what I know about my own mind. That is true. And that is an immense strength born entirely of meditation, and it's available to everyone. But that doesn't mean that we should acquiesce to the ruination of everything, to the breakdown of society. If we find ourselves living in some hellscape out of the Road Warrior movies, yes, it will still be possible to meditate and to feel compassion for oneself and others and to find equanimity. That is the capacity of the human mind that will not go away. But we are right not to want to see things totally fall apart in our society. And if your practice of meditation is making you unable to take problems of civilizational importance seriously, well, then you may be managing your own stress well, but you're no good to us. What we need now are people who understand their own minds and who also understand the world. I mean, I studied with some of the greatest meditation masters who were alive at the end of the 20th century. These were extraordinary teachers, but they didn't know a damn thing about most of what I talk about on this podcast, and if they were alive today, they still wouldn't. And it is a very good thing that people like that aren't in charge of our cyber war capabilities, because then we wouldn't have any. We have to play this game on multiple levels. So it's great that many of you are getting value out of Waking up. But if you don't like me in this mode when I'm actually doing my best to respond to a real emergency in our culture, if you don't understand that we need to mount a competent response to the challenges we face on a hundred fronts, you're not really getting what I'm teaching over there at Waking up. You can't let meditation turn you into a New Age goofball who just burns incense and thinks that the universe is one big mystery and that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes things happen for bad fucking reasons, and a whole generation or generations lose the most basic capacity for order and for getting what they want in life and lose good things they didn't need to lose. You know, sometimes the barbarians really do come through the gates. Yes, we can always have conversations about the fundamental nature of reality. We can have them here in this circumstance of relative order and prosperity, where we can take important things for granted, where I can have a podcast and you can have a smartphone on which to hear it, or we can contemplate reality after we've bombed and hacked and surveilled and abused ourselves back into the Dark Ages. The nature of consciousness is available everywhere, even in a cave, and many great contemplatives have found it in a cave. I've met great Tibetan yogis who have spent years in caves, but I would prefer not to have to live in one because the world has become a Cormac McCarthy novel, and you would prefer it, too, no matter how much you meditate. There is simply no contradiction between deep insight into the nature of mind and getting our shit together out in the world. That tirade was brought to you by Waking Up, a meditation app. All right, this brings me to the second bad take I've been seeing on social media and everywhere else. Many people on the left are interpreting the utter failure of law enforcement to protect the Capitol this week as a symptom of white supremacy. They're racializing this travesty and everyone's doing this. Here's what Joe Biden tweeted no one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesters yesterday, that they wouldn't have been treated very differently than the mob that stormed the Capitol. We all know that's true, and it's unacceptable. And every anchor on the news has made this point, and Kamala Harris has made it. Michelle Obama, Barack Obama. Everyone has tried to stick this woke landing, and in some cases, it was the only point they made in response to this desecration of American democracy, and it's the wrong point to make, and it's wrong in almost every way. It would be wrong even if it were right, even if it were obviously true. It's not the point to make now, but there are so many ways to see that it is probably not true. At best, it's a half truth and a slightly paradoxical one. When you look at the details, when something is this easy to see and it isn't being seen, you really have to worry about what's happening in our culture. First, consider the events of January 6 at the Capitol through the eyes of all the black cops who were struggling to defend that building and the people in it. Some of the most shocking footage of how unprepared and unequipped the cops were was of this lone black officer being forced up the stairs by the mob endlessly retreating. Perhaps you've seen this. It's crazy footage. At one point, he picks up a baton and then thinks better of it. His gun is apparently meaningless to the horde of zombies who are pursuing him. And there's one especially aggressive white guy who keeps chasing him up the stairs, right? And the cop keeps backing up and backing up what is being claimed here. Are you telling me that this black cop didn't shoot white boy in the face because of his own internalized white supremacy? This double standard was operative there. He would have shot a black rioter and not a white one. Is that really the claim you want to make? And the truth is obvious. This black cop was undoubtedly in fear for his life, and he recognized he was in a totally untenable situation. He was struggling to do his job and keep a mob back. That wasn't going to be kept back unless he started killing people. But if he went down that path, he didn't have enough ammunition to kill all the people he would have to kill to have saved himself. One cop with a handgun can't hold back a hundred people who aren't afraid to die. Had there been an appropriate police presence, had that cop been joined by 50 others, at that point, there would have been a fight on those stairs, and there would have been people in that mob bloodied and beaten by cops, as there should have been. It was an insane situation. And in other places in the capital, that's what was happening. There were cops fighting what had become an insurgent mob, and one died. And, yes, one Trump supporter was shot in the neck and killed as she tried to breach a door. There's another place to put the lie to this racialized framing. A white woman was shot and killed. How many BLM protesters were shot and killed by cops over months of rioting in dozens of cities? To my knowledge, none. Imagine if one were imagine if a black woman were executed at point blank range. Surely that's the way it would have been described had it happened. Black woman executed at point blank range for merely trying to breach a door at an otherwise peaceful BLM protest. What would have been said had that happened? That's all we'd be talking about now. But here a white woman was shot in the neck and killed. It's completely understandable she was shot. What's not understandable is that more weren't shot. But to interpret this as yet another symptom of white privilege is frankly crazy. And there is endless footage of BLM protests gone wrong where the cops are just standing and watching and doing nothing right. They are not using extreme force on crowds of looters who were disproportionately black. We all saw that footage and asked ourselves, what the hell are the cops there for if they're not going to stop people from burning down buildings? Yes, absurd force was directed at peaceful protesters in many places rather than looters and arsonists, and many of those peaceful protesters were white. Using this abomination that occurred at the Capitol as yet another opportunity to score a social justice point is frankly idiotic, and it's incredibly divisive. It convinces everyone right of center that their cynicism and blind partisanship is totally justified. What we're witnessing now is just how high a price we are paying for the hypocrisy and moral blindness of the media during the BLM riots. We would be in a much better place had they not bent over backwards to obfuscate what a sickening eruption of criminality we were witnessing, how destabilizing it was, how dysfunctional it was, how appropriate the anger was of business owners who were left to their own devices to defend their businesses. And many lost them. And there are whole neighborhoods that will take a generation to recover because they were burned out by mobs of cultic lunatics. Here's another disallowogy. We're being told that the Capitol police would have behaved like jackbooted thugs had the capital been attacked by a BLM protest. Anyone remember the endless imagery of cops bending the knee at those BLM protests, literally getting down on their knees in solidarity as something approaching a Maoist struggle session surrounded them? Yes, there was some peculiar behavior of cops on the Capitol, but I didn't see any bending the knee in solidarity. Honestly, at the time I'm recording this, it is still a mystery why the Capitol was so unprotected, and there might be some real conspiracy behind that. It could be something that reaches all the way to Trump, or it could be due to the fact that the mayor of DC didn't like the heavy handed federal response to the BLM demonstrations that happened in DC. In particular when Trump orchestrated his photo op in front of the church. So, ironically, it could be a fairly woke mayor's resistance to heavyhanded policing that left the Capitol undefended. That would be amazing to have that be the underlying cause of what is now being alleged to be proof positive of the truth of white supremacy and white privilege governing law enforcement in this country. Anyway, I don't know what happened there. I'm sure we will learn a lot and it could point in both directions, right? It could be over determined. We could find out that some of the cops are die hard Trump supporters who totally sympathized with the attack on the Capitol, and some obviously did their best to resist it. From the footage I've seen, it's easy to see how in certain places at least, the cops could have been somewhat mystified by what they were up against. I mean, it was kind of mystifying. You had people who looked the part, right, who looked like straight up insurrectionists, which is what they were. And then you had old ladies and old men who were kind of shuffling in there and then all the cosplay and costumed weirdness. I don't put a lot of onus on a cop in that circumstance who's trying to humor a bunch of people by taking a selfie. I don't know what the mood in that particular room was like at that moment, but there are many social cues that are hard to interpret. But the general picture we should draw from what we know at this point is of a police force that was totally underresourced. The cops were put in a totally untenable position for reasons we should understand, and something like this can never happen again. Those cops got completely screwed. And to summarize their failure as a symptom of racism again, even as you see black cops among them struggling to protect the place, it's so sloppy and disingenuous. And this pseudo insight is now raining down from on high from every liberal voice in the media. I am genuinely concerned that we have tens of millions of people in Trumpistan now who are, for all intents and purposes, totally unreachable. But between them and the rest of us, we have millions of conservatives who are not QAnon lunatics, but they are absolutely outraged over the selective application of outrage. And as I said at the beginning here, they are not following the plot. They are missing something crucial. The analogy between what happened last week and the BLM riots is idiotic. But it is easy to see how the media and Democratic politicians have totally discredited themselves in their eyes. That has to be corrected. There's so many things here that have to be corrected. And to just dunk on the right now as the Orange goblin is driven out of office is a colossal mistake. Politically pragmatically. We have to figure out how to heal the divide in our country. Our country is shattered, and Trump is largely responsible, but not entirely responsible. Finally, I just want to touch upon the fact that Trump was finally banned from Twitter. And while I admitted that there was a lot to debate here of interest, I signaled my approval of this in very clear terms on Twitter, for which I got fairly furious pushback. There are people who seem way more agitated over the fact that Trump was kicked off Twitter than they were over the attack on the Capitol. This is a very interesting topic, and I think there are many issues to debate, but it seems to me that in the case of Trump, it's not even a close call. Trump has been violating any sane terms of service policy on Twitter for years. He's threatened nuclear war on Twitter. More importantly, he has ruined people's lives intentionally on Twitter. As President of the United States, with tens of millions of rabid followers, many of whom he knows to be quite deranged, he's attacked private citizens repeatedly, knowing that they would be doxed and inundated with death threats. That shouldn't get you kicked off Twitter. He should have been kicked off years ago. In recent months, he's relentlessly spread misinformation about the election, and he has destabilized our society in the process. And then he incited an attack on the Capitol. Twitter isn't obligated to give him a platform to do those things. This is not a free speech issue. This isn't a why can't we just debate all ideas issue. This is why should we let the most dangerous cult leader on earth use our platform to sow division in society issue. Why should we give him the tools to produce mob violence? Honestly, I would expect to get kicked off Twitter for causing one. 1,000,000th. The harm Trump has caused on the Platform many people have pointed out an apparent irony here that the President of the United States has been kicked off Twitter. But Ayatollah Khameni or the Chinese Communist Party still have their profiles up and they're spreading odious misinformation. Well, they should be kicked off too, right? It's not an argument for not kicking Trump off. It's an argument for being consistent. Yes, the Chinese Communist Party doesn't need Twitter as a platform to spread its propaganda. That seems like a pretty easy call. But there are many other things to say here, and I share people's concern about the power of big tech and especially the harm that these social media platforms have done to our society. This needs to be the focus of government regulation, right? I think Facebook should probably be broken up as a monopoly. I think there's a lot that has to be done here. But people have been getting kicked off Twitter for far less every single day you've been on Twitter. And it is somewhat ironic to see all of these erstwhile libertarians not be able to find their libertarian principles and recognize that private companies should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do. Twitter can kick anyone off its platform it wants to. It can kick all the men off tomorrow and all the women off. It can have only trans people on the platform if it wants to tomorrow. Granted, there is. An interesting discussion to have about the power of these platforms. Maybe social media needs to be looked at more like telecom. Should the phone company be able to kick all the Nazis off its platform because it doesn't like what they talk about? These are interesting questions, but we have much bigger problems that in large part have been caused by social media. And the malicious spread of misinformation by some of the most powerful figures in our society on these platforms is one of the biggest problems we have. And with less than two weeks left in his doomed presidency, letting an increasingly destabilized Trump just tweet whatever the hell he wants to millions of proper lunatics, which is what everyone who believes his lies has become, that was an untenable situation. So it might have been a hard call for Jack and the other people at Twitter, but as far as I can tell, it was the right one. Needless to say, there's a lot we need to figure out going forward. I do not have a crystal ball here, but I can tell you what I'm concerned about. I am certainly worried that we will see some Timothy McVeigh style terrorism coming from the right at some point. And of course, part of the responsibility for this will fall on Trump and his enablers, even if it happens months from now. Honestly, the lies that he has told will long outlive him. Our society has been poisoned, verifiably poisoned by lies, and Trump harbors an enormous responsibility for this. But the antidote to the lies of Trump and his enablers can't be the lies of the left. We need an intellectually honest discussion about what's going on in the world. So I am certainly worried about what the far right and the Trump cult is capable of, and to just for 10 seconds revisit a position I took long ago, which has now changed in light of recent events. Whenever the topic of white supremacy and Christian militia risk has come up, I have claimed to be agnostic about how big a problem these things are in our society, whether they were diminishing, whether they were being exaggerated by the people who focus on those issues. I now think that everything in that cesspool, whatever you want to call it, is suddenly of much greater concern and growing concern now. Again, given how Trump has behaved in recent months, to have nearly half our society believe, I think the last poll showed that 90% of Republicans believe that the election of Joe Biden was fraudulent. I hope that number is wrong. Maybe it was 70%, I don't honestly know. I can't believe these numbers. But to have anything like half our society believe that the government has been stolen, that is a shattering of society. We have to figure out how to remedy that. So Biden's presidency, with all the challenges he's going to face, COVID and its economic consequences. The bellicosity of China got major challenges that Biden should focus on. But honestly, one of the most important things we can do and begin doing immediately is figure out how to hold elections in this country that are secure in a way that everyone can recognize, transparent, unhackable, where the right people get to vote and they know their vote has counted. So that when you lose, you could admit you've lost. We simply have to figure out how to put such a system in place. And I also think Biden should work very hard to diminish the power of the presidency. I think the Oval Office has to be made psychopath proof. Of course, it would be great if we could figure out how not to elect a psychopath to the presidency, but once having done that, we need a system that will check the misuse of that office. We need laws where we only had norms that Trump was more than happy to violate. I don't know how that can be done, and I'll look to have people on the podcast who know much more about that. But Trump has been a stress test of our democracy that we nearly failed, and we should do our best to learn from it. I've just been a barrel of laughs these last two podcasts. Can we start 2021 again? Is that okay? It's January 9. I'm starting the New year all over again. Happy New Year, everybody. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, what's going on out there in the world? I hadn't spent much time thinking about the British monarchy. I guess I've always had a good American skepticism about the validity of the institution. But Andrew Sullivan just wrote a really wonderful short piece mourning the Loss of the Queen, that gave me, I think, for the first time, an appreciation of the value of a constitutional monarchy. At one point, he quotes CS. Lewis, who wrote, where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires athletes or film stars. Instead, even famous prostitutes or gangsters for spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served. Deny it food, and it will gobble poison. I disagree with Lewis about many things. I've always thought his defense of Christianity was fairly visible. I'm not even sure I agree with this quotation entirely, but there's something interesting there. And Sullivan continues writing, the crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically, indefensible, but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. However shitty the economy or awful the prime minister, or ugly the discourse, the monarch is able to represent the nation all the time in a living, breathing, mortal person. So anyway, this, as I said, gave me something to think about, as though for the first time. It strikes me now that a monarch, when she or he is actually functioning as intended, is the opposite of a scapegoat. In the Bible, in Leviticus, the scapegoat is literally a goat that's imagined to contain all the sins of a community, and then it's cast out into some wasteland to die, taking the sins of everyone with it. Of course, the phenomenon of scapegoating is something that happens with people, too, albeit unwittingly, and one can often see this. You can see a community on the verge of violence or just intolerable conflict, can focus its destructive energy on a single person and use the obliteration of this person, whether in reality or just reputationally, as a way of resetting itself. Everything can go back to normal now that the witch has been burned. The philosopher Renee Gerard wrote about this some, and one can see a lot of this online now, the way a community increases in solidarity by sacrificing individuals who commit some sort of blasphemy. Perhaps this point's been made many, many times because it seems somehow obvious. But the monarch in a constitutional monarchy seems like the opposite of a scapegoat. And Queen Elizabeth seemed to serve this role unusually well. She was the embodiment not of the community's sins, but of many of the virtues. It didn't even have virtues like discipline and dignity and self restraint, the sacrifice of self to the institution, which the Queen demonstrated to an incredible degree. She was a kind of anti celebrity. She was perhaps the most famous woman on earth, but she was really a cipher. She subordinated everything to the role that she was meant to play. It simply wasn't about her. In place of her personality, she functioned as a kind of symbol of service to her country and of patriotism and of civility and continuity and stability. So in venerating the Crown, people were venerating all of these things. And O'Sullivan points out, all of these things are markedly absent in society at this point anyway. Culturally and personally, all of this is quite foreign to me. But I can understand it, and I can understand why so many people felt so personally touched last week by the Queen's death. Which brings me to something that happened on social media that seemed to typify all of it's wrong with social media itself and with our larger culture. A professor at Carnegie Mellon University wrote the following on Twitter when the Queen was on her deathbed, she wrote, I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating, and that she wrote a series of tweets defending this tweet after Twitter removed it. So, anyway, this professor became Twitter famous when Jeff Bezos reacted to her tweet, I think I'm not even going to name her. My intention, needless to say, isn't to make a scapegoat of her, I think. I just want to point out that she's probably not this terrible person in real life, right? I think the existence of Twitter is largely to blame for what's happening here. She's clearly a diversity, equity and inclusion expert, right? So she's talking to a cult and being rewarded for it. And social media is what is providing the incentive here, as well as the mechanism for her to broadcast this opinion, and it's providing the mechanism for everyone else to discover just what an aberrant person this woman is or seems to be, and to react to that. And there's no possibility of anyone persuading anyone of anything. So our conversation more and more is conforming to the epistemology of the mob. And by mob, I mean not mafia, but the crowd. And the mob is unreasoning, more or less in principle, and it's unprincipled. It has no limiting principles, it has no mechanism by which to detect or even care about its errors. It's just pure advocacy and agitation. It's continually shrieking about the worst of its opponents and it's determined to see the worst in them. Now, I've experienced this both from the right and from the left. And it's not fun coming from either side, obviously. But what one sees once one ceases to take it personally, is the dysfunction of it. How people aren't even making contact with the problems they're purporting to respond to, all the while growing increasingly certain that they are responding to some kind of moral emergency, and what's more, that they're making progress toward solving it anyway. I really think life is better than it seems online, and yet I'm increasingly worried that the distortions of reality one gets online is feeding back into the world and making people more cynical and more distrustful and more despairing of making progress. I think social media is making us less capable of living good lives together. Anyway, this is in part, the subject of today's conversation. Today I'm speaking with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah is editor in chief and co founder of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant Podcast. He's a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, an La times columnist, a CNN commentator, and the author of three New York Times bestsellers, and he also worked at National Review for two decades. And today we speak about the whole catastrophe, really focusing mostly on the state of American politics and civil society. We discuss the hyperpartisanship of the left and the right, what Trump has done to the Republican Party, the breakdown of trust in institutions. We discuss this new catastrophism enabled by social media, the problem of populism and other topics. And despite all of those dire things, I thought we ended on a refreshingly hopeful note. And now I bring you Jonah Goldberg. I am here with Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, thanks for joining me. It is truly a pleasure and an honor to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we've never spoken. I've spoken to some of your friends and colleagues, most recently David French, but I've admired your work from afar for years now, and perhaps you can summarize your background politically and as a writer. How do you describe your Pilgrim's Progress at this point? Sure, let's see. I sort of grew up in a pretty political family. Both my parents were, at one point or another, journalists. My mom was something of a famous troublemaker. She was involved in that Lewinsky scandal stuff and some other scandals, to be honest. And I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We were always politically conservative, so we were a bit like Christians in ancient Rome in that sense. And my first job in Washington was at the American Enterprise Institute as a research assistant. I was there or adjacent to it for much of the then I came over to National Review, where I was the founder of National Review Online and the founding editor of National Review Online. And I was at National Review in one capacity or another for 20 years. In that time I was a contributor to Fox for about eleven years. And my conservative bona fide is the only reason I'm bringing this up is I'm making assumptions about why you want me to lay this stuff out are pretty solid. I mean, I joke, and it's funny because it's true. I met Pet Buchanan at my bris. Hopefully he didn't perform the bris. No. I have friends who think that maybe this explains some of his problems with Jews. Like, my God, what do these people do? And then in the run up to in 2015 and 2016, I was one of many conservatives who was deeply troubled by Donald Trump and thought this was a bridge too far and was troubled by the rise of populism on the right. And then the ranks of people who saw the world the way I did shrank quite rapidly over time until it was me, David French, and maybe a dozen or so other people, written three books. I'm very interested in intellectual history, particularly conservative intellectual history, and my syndicated columnist been running for the La times for about 17 years, I think. And you have the dispatch. Your main platform now is The Dispatch, which you founded. Right. Thank you for bringing that up, because my co founder would scream at me if I didn't mention it. A couple of years ago, Steve Hayes and I steve was formerly the editor of The Weekly Standard. We launched The Dispatch, which is unabashedly right of center, but fact driven place, and it's trying to prove that you can do honest, serious reporting and analysis from the center right without doing a lot of the fan service you see on a lot of the parts of the right. In some ways when I try to explain it to people of a certain age. I compared a little bit in terms of the editorial philosophy to the New Republic in the 1980s and early ninety s. You knew it was coming from a generally liberal perspective, but it also had in a more classical sense a liberal attitude of rejecting sort of cant and piety, of being willing to call BS on its own side and trying to do reporting with some famous failures, but trying to do reporting that was trying to engage in making serious arguments that took the other side's arguments seriously. And that's sort of the spirit that we would like to have at The Dispatch isn't going very well. We're we're leaving Substac soon because we launched on Substac as a full publication. But since our launch, I believe I believe it's still true. Maybe there's something going on in the last six months I haven't looked at, but since launch, we've been the number one revenue generating product on all of Substac, and it's worked very well, and we've assembled a great team of about 25, 28 people, and we're growing even more every day. That's great. Congratulations. Thank you. Though I do think it's a troubling sign of the times that we're all having to rebuild civilization in this piecemeal way on our own. And we'll talk about the failure of institutions, which I know is a concern we share. But one of the reasons why I like you putting your conservative bona fide days up front is that one, you know, I don't have them right. I I have been traditionally a liberal. I have I have never voted Republican for anything on any point, I don't think, certainly not for president. And yet I'm often attacked as a partisan whenever I say anything negative about Trump. And my argument has always been that there really is nothing intrinsically partisan in noticing his unfitness for office and the corrosive effect he's had on our politics. Which is to say that there's almost nothing really, absolutely nothing I say about him that I would be tempted to say about a Republican like Mitt Romney. Right. And it is also true that I spend more of my time criticizing the left at this point for all of its obvious failings. So it's just good to have someone like yourself or David French or David From or many of the NeverTrump ers to talk to on that particular point. And it's also interesting that it's just while we are coming from different places politically, I think we will agree about almost everything with respect to the failings of Trumpism and the failings of the far left. And it's just there really is a reshuffling of political intuitions here on many fronts. And so yeah, anyway, I think it's a good point and I've made a similar point many times. If you're willing to reject the group, think of either political party and stand up for I mean, we're going to talk about institutions, but the sort of simple liberal institutions that define much of what it means to be an American, at least in a political and in some ways cultural sense, too. If you're classically liberal at heart, where you're willing to engage in good faith arguments and deal with inconvenient facts in a good faith way, that makes you something of an outlier from either side these days. And I'm not trying to do a symmetry between a lot of people understandably hate the both sides thing, but there is a remarkable mirroring going on among the sort of the hard left and the populist right in terms of embracing identity politics kind of arguments, tribalist kind of arguments. And so there are people, you know, like you again, we've never spoken, but, like people like you, people like Jonathan Height, I can, you know, list a bunch yasha monk who probably profoundly disagree with me about various public policies. But agree with me about sort of on the epistemological level and agree with me on the sort of basic systemic or I agree with them on the basic sort of systemic level about what are the institutions, customs? Norms, mechanisms, whatever you want to call them, that preserve and define a free society and that creates this weird sort of cross trans, ideological kind of fellowship that I do think is is oddly I don't I don't know if it's totally new in American politics, but if it's been around, it feels new, at least in my lifetime. Yeah, it certainly feels new. And I don't know how distorting a lens social media has thrown over it, but it does feel new. And I want to talk about the pathologies as we see them on the right and among Republicans, but I don't want us to exclusively focus on that. I really want us to talk about what it would mean to repair our society at this point, because I think many of us are asking whether we're witnessing the beginning of the end of our political and social order in some sense. And the breakdown of trust in institutions is certainly part of that. And perhaps the most galling part of that is that in many cases, the loss of trust has been well earned. Right? It's not just that people's attitudes have changed. It's just that there has been a breakdown of competence on so many fronts and in so many crucial moments that it's fairly fantastical at this point. And it extends from everything from public health messaging, from the CDC and the FDA, to scientific and governmental institutions in general. It encompasses the media in all its forms, from journalism to Hollywood. There's now a serious question about whether we can run free and fair elections. And even if that's not really in doubt, there is a serious concern that large segments of society will no longer trust the results of free and fair elections when we do run them. And there are new institutions that are proving corrosive of social order, I'm thinking in particular of social media. And it does this in part by amplifying our doubts about everything and exaggerating the severity of real problems, but also by inventing imaginary ones. And it has just been a factory of lies and misinformation at a scale we've never seen before. And so to my eye, what we have now, we have people on the far left who think that racism and other forms of bigotry have in some sense never been worse. And you've got someone like JK. Rowling who is their idea of a moral monster. And then we've got people on the far right who think that the far extreme of the far right, way out there in Trumpistan, they think the world is being controlled by child raping cannibals. So there's a kind of a radical core of craziness that is touching a lot. I mean, it shouldn't have as much political surface area as it does, but it really is distorting. And again, it's hard to know how much social media is magnifying this and how much that. The mere magnification of it is itself feeding back into creating real problems. There's a new religion of catastrophism that is in many cases an exaggeration I think, but also the exaggerations result in a level of cynicism and distrust that can become a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. So I guess that's my general picture of what we're living through now. I don't know if it departs at all from yours, but what is your view of American society at the moment? Yeah, so let me put it this way. I have days where I agree with you entirely, and then I have days where maybe I'm too online, I'm too in a bubble. Maybe I'm taking the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave too seriously, which is a lot of the social media stuff. You can do these gut check things like when you see a wildly viral tweet that has 5000 likes or 10,000 likes, and then you say, okay, that's as many people as we would fill a decent sized high school football stadium in Texas. And it gives you a sense that there's just a lot of stuff going on in America. Most people aren't on Twitter. Most people aren't taking their cues from it. The sort of pareto distribution of how many people are extremely online and tweeting constantly, particularly political tweeting, is very distorting. And I think it creates real problems for Democrats and Democrat affiliated or sympathetic mainstream media. We can get into it, but in the same political climate, James Carville would have and I'm not a huge James Carville fan, obviously, but like James Carville, any old style serious politician, the second they heard some Democrats say, defund the police, they would have gone on the phone and say, shut up. Are you crazy? And at the height of the defund the police stuff, all the polling said that something like 80% or upwards of people of color wanted the same amount or more policing. No one wanted no policing. But this was one of these ideas that transmitted through this sort of pure petri dish of blue, checkmark bubble, Twitter online stuff and went straight into the blood veins of MSNBC and at the time, CNN. So even though it was a bullshit thing on Twitter, it becomes real because it goes on TV and then politicians are asked about it and have to take a position. And so it's difficult to figure out whether some of this stuff matters or not because it gets into the bloodstream, even though it shouldn't. And then once it's in the bloodstream, it becomes a real thing. I wrote this book a few years ago called Suicide of the west. And part of my argument about where we are is that we increasingly, in part, and I think part of this has to do with the breakdown of civil society. The breakdown, you know, the whole bowling alone thesis, the cocooning that we're doing, where we're basically hiding in front of screens rather than engaging with human beings in real life. And one of the things that has led to is following politics like it's a form of entertainment. And there's a thing that happens you know this stuff better than I do, but there's a thing that happens in your brain when you follow entertainment. We allow ourselves to root for murderers, bank robbers, torturers when we see them on the screen, so long as it's been clear that they're our hero or our antihero or whatever. And we forgive all sorts of behaviors that we would say should put you in jail, never mind make you a pariah. And the problem is that when you start following politics like it's a form of entertainment, you start the sort of tribal mind kind of takes over, and you start judging things about whether your team is winning or losing. And you no longer care about the norms, the institutional rules and all that because in movies, you don't care about that stuff. You just want the hero to get the McGuffin. And in politics now, so much of I'll give you an example, it'll feel partisan, but I know we're going to do a lot of Trump bashing, so I'll get the equal time. In barack Obama said I think it was 24 times, maybe it was 28 times that he literally did not have the power to do DACA the deferred thing with the Dreamer kids. And he said, Look, I'm not a king. The Constitution does not give me this power. We don't live in the kind of society where I can just rule at a whim. And he said that for a year, and then he realized that he couldn't get it through Congress, so he did it anyway. And the response from the leaders of the influencers and leaders of our political class, the journalists and and so forth, if they weren't like objectively partisan Republicans, they all cheered about this courageous, you know, act of political morality without caring that according to the president's own terms, he had just done something tyrannical and monarchical. Now you can agree with the policy. That's not my point. It's like the student loan stuff, the student loan thing that Biden is proposing is lawless. I mean, it's like literally lawless, and no one seems to care. And I think it's sort of emblematic of the way we follow politics because so many of the things that Donald Trump did were either literally lawless or certainly in open and complete defiance to all traditions and norms of the job. And that's what his biggest fans loved about him. And it's particularly problematic as a conservative because, look, you guys on the left, you own the fact that you believe you're the forces of progress and the forces of change and the forces of reform and rewriting the face of society. That's your bag and that's fine. That's an ancient and honorable thing to believe, even if I have disagreements with it. But conservatism at a metaphysical level is supposed to be about preserving those things that need to be preserved, about loving this country as it is not just for as. It should be for thinking that fidelity to the Constitution matters. And if all of a sudden the right joins this game in an even uglier, fascistic kind of way and just simply says it's all will to power. It's all about winning. It's all about whether my guy can punish your guy, then that's really bad for America. It's fine when one party it's not fine, but it's tolerable. When one party is the gas pedal and the other party is the break. When both parties are the gas pedal, the whole thing can just fly apart. Yeah. Well, so one thing I think I hear you arguing for is that we maintain a sense of proportion. And in the spirit of doing that, I think we have to recognize that there are asymmetries on both sides of this continuum. So it's really like the game of both sideism doesn't quite work. And so it's the was one asymmetry, which accounts for why I've spent more time focused as much as I bang on about Trump, I've actually spent more time focused on the problems of the left. And it's because the left has really captured culture and institutions in a way that the right hasn't. The morons who marched in Charlottesville don't have significant cultural power, but their equivalents on the left really do, in that their arguments and their moral intuitions have filtered into institutions that I actually care about. Right, right. So the New York Times isn't being vitiated by Kukuk's clan ideology, but it is being vitiated by a sense that racism is at the bottom of everything. And what's more, it's intellectually and ethically trivially easy to the point of just absolutely stultifying boredom to point out. What's wrong with the far right? What's wrong with being a member of the KKK? Well, do we really have to do a podcast on that? Whereas what's wrong with the far left is genuinely confusing to smart, well educated, well intentioned people. What's wrong with Black Lives matter. What could be wrong with that? How was the video of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd not proof positive that we have an omnipresent problem with racist, sadistic cops killing young black men? Right. That's just confusing to vast numbers of smart people. And so there's much more to pick apart there. But the other asymmetry that is truly enormous is in the political derangement of the Democrat and Republican parties at the moment and the way in which the Republicans have been captured by a personality cult under Trump. And this is something that, again, people who defend Trump always get wrong. I mean, they'll point out the kinds of things you've pointed out, sort of like ordinary opportunism and cynicism and hypocrisy that happens within the ordinary norms of norm violations politically. So Obama said he wouldn't do this thing, and then 24 times, and then he did the very thing he said he wouldn't do. And so if you line those indiscretions up with the kinds of things Trump has done, well, then it seems like, okay, this is both sides problem. You know, politicians always lie, right? That, you know, what's new about that? And many people saw in, in Biden's recent speech, you know, he's, he's doing the very thing we've accused Trump of. He struck a sort of very discordant, semi fascistic note in condemning a large part of American society. But it's just the wrong scale of comparison. And so here's an analogy that comes to mind, which it's not perfect, but it certainly doesn't capture the multiplicity of problems with Trump and Trumpism, but it captures the scale and maliciousness of the dishonesty that is really the underwriting the whole enterprise. And so I would ask our listeners to imagine that, especially any listeners who are still with us who would defend Trump here, imagine that rather than having President Biden, we had a President Jussie Smollett, right? Now, that may seem insane, but that's precisely how insane I think it is that we have a had a President Trump. I mean, just imagine for those who don't recall Jussie Smollett was this actor who faked an attempt at lynching on himself. He claimed that two MAGA people attacked him and put a noose around his neck and poured some flammable liquid on him and tried to kill him because he's black and he's gay. And they said this is MAGA country and inconveniently for his allegations. It happened to be 20 below zero that night in Chicago. And the idea that there were two guys running around in MAGA hats looking to lynch somebody seemed pretty far fetched and his story unraveled. But he got on national television and talked about how harrowing it was to have been almost lynched. And he told what really is at bottom, a vicious and society shattering lie at scale right now. Imagine if he had been politically rewarded for this. Imagine if he was holding rallies with tens of thousands of people and whipping them up into a frenzy over the lie that he was almost lynched in. In my view, that's really the scale of derangement we see among Republicans at the moment. This lie that the election was stolen, the lie and the fact that we had a sitting president who wouldn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power and the party has defended him on this. That's what's just so far beyond the pale here, and it's quite divorceable from all of the policy concerns that are rational that would cause people to have defended Trump in the first place. I mean, it's totally rational and defensible. It's not necessarily my position, but we can argue about whether we want to have less immigration or different immigration, whether we want more economic nationalism, whether we want fewer foreign entanglements. All of that is fine. But it seems to me what can't be argued for at this point is that it's acceptable to have. Had a president who is lying at this scale, this maliciously and deranging our politics that fully on that basis. Yeah, look, I agree with you entirely. I wasn't trying to do just to be clear, I wasn't alleging that I was just trying to connect the dots the way a Trumpist would. Yeah, no, let me stipulate I agree with you entirely in the sense that my late friend PJ. O'Rourke probably understated it, but it gets directionally. It's the right point. In 2016, he said, Look, I'm paraphrasing, but he said, Look, Hillary Clinton is unacceptable within normal parameters. Donald Trump is unacceptable outside of normal parameters. And I think that's right. Trump himself is suey generous in a lot of ways. Insofar as I've been issuing this challenge for seven years now, to have somebody give me a definition of good character that Trump can clear and no one has done it successfully, and many people have written thousands of words claiming that they've done it, and then you look for the actual sentence that says, here's why Jonah is wrong. And it's like David Horowitz says, well, Trump is incredibly loyal to his family. Well, first of all, even if that were true, it's not true. But even if it were true, really, that is a threshold thing to say. He has good character. I mean, we normally think that that's sort of priced into normal behavior, but it's not true. This is a guy who cheated on his third wife while she was nursing their newborn with a foreign star. I mean, he's famously vicious to his kids. Not his daughter, but his sons. There's one story that he don't have to do that I can go on autopilot about this stuff, but when his first wife suggested that they named their first born Don Jr. He said, we can't do that. What if he turns out to be a loser? And there is literally, I mean this very sincerely, there is no definition of good character, no matter how far out you want to take it, that Donald Trump can get a passing grade on. And I'm one of these fuddy duddy conservatives who used to think that emphasizing good character was an important thing to do in politics, maybe not to the point where it was the only issue, but to me, it's important. Good character also should not have an ideological valence. And this is just a sordid narcissistic guy who I guess this is a good way to I don't know if you've had my friend and colleague Yuval Levin on, but no, he wrote a wonderful book called Fractured Republic on the role of I'm sorry, another book called The Time to Build on the role of institutions in America. And I think he has a fundamental insight that gets at the broader landscape of why we're in the mess that we're in and why institutions are so sick. Normally, institution is a lot of thing for economists. It's just a rule. But when we talk colloquially about an institution, we think of an organization or some other form of association that molds character, right? The sort of cliched version of it would be you get some irresolute slacker or hippie, you put them in the Marines, they turn them into a Marine. You have undisciplined little boys, you put them in the Boy Scouts, they end up helping little old ladies across the street. You go into the monastery, you come out a priest, right? There are things that institutions do to shape the individual for the greater good of the institution and in the process, make the individual a better person along the way. Or at least that's the hope. And the problem that we have today is that we no longer see, or too many people don't see institutions as mechanisms of character formation. Instead, they see them as platforms to perform upon, to to extract, essentially rents or status from the institution for their own self aggrandizement, their own glorification. And you see this in journalism all over the place. These journalists who used their association with The New York Times or The Washington Post or wherever, and then they go out and they tweet and they create their own cults of personality, their own brand. We can have a perfectly legitimate conversation about Colin Kaepernick and certainly say that the cause he was associated with is a righteous cause. That's all fine, but there's no disputing that he used the NFL as a platform for his own issues. Elizabeth Holmes at theranos he can go through a long list, and Donald Trump is, I don't know, the napus ultra of all of this. He used the presidency as a platform for his own personal cult of personality in ways that where he was commenting on things that the government was doing as if he was a pundit. He was using the mechanisms of power and of government to create an independent, informal base of power and adulation, when normally what presidents do, whether it's Barack Obama or Ronald Reagan or whoever, they bend their needs, to a large extent to the needs of the presidency itself. It's a job that requires remarkable amounts of self sacrifice. And Donald Trump rejected that entirely to make it all about him and the glorification of him. And that is something I mean, I don't know enough about Andrew Jackson to say that we've never had this before, but certainly we've never had it before in the age of modern media or anything like it. And he's done lasting and permanent damage, not just to our institutions in the country, but also my ballywick, which is conservatism, because conservatism is now being redefined into a kind of right wing populism, which is antithetical to actually being a conservative. Well, it's often said that Trump is a symptom, right? Really? The problem isn't Trump. The problem precedes him. I think there's some truth to that. But he's also a cause of further symptoms. Right. He's the product of hyperpartisanship on both the right and the left, but he's also made that partisanship much worse, and he's also a symptom of the loss of trust in institutions, but he's also made everything on that front worse, too. So obviously there's a dialectical nature to all of this. He's made the right worse and he's also made the left worse, and then the left becoming worse has given much more energy and justification, even for Trumpism, right? So it's like almost everything that Trumpists decry on the left is something that is worth worrying about on the left. And as the left turns up the volume of their moral panic over pronouns or whatever it is, it's understandable that it's causing the right to go berserk. But this mutual reinforcement is really unhealthy. I agree entirely. There's a quote from Orwell, which I use often to make this point or orwell I think it's in politics in this language where he says, a man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks. And I think that's sort of the dynamic. We had problems that led to Trump, but Trump made all of those problems worse. It's almost Tolkien esque how this creature brings out and distorts the worst in his enemies, too, and provides justification to hate the enemies even more. And it's very depressing if you get too caught up in it. Well, what's been your experience at first? Remind me. I called you a NeverTrump or I imagine, in fact, that was the case. When did you get off the train? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listening and your support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Cass Sunstein. Cass is the Robert Walmsley University professor at Harvard Law School, where he's the founder and director of the program on behavioral economics and public Policy. He is by far the most cited law professor in the United States. Amazing. From 2009 to 2012, he served in the Obama administration as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, been involved in constitution making and law reform activities in a number of countries, and written many articles and books, including Nudge with Richard Thaler. And Thaler actually won the Nobel Prize in Economics since we recorded this podcast. And he's written other books on his own, two of which are under discussion today. The first is Hashtag Republic Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media and the forthcoming Impeachment a Citizen's Guide. And Cass and I talk about the polarization and fragmentation of American society. We talk about choice architecture, the importance of face to face interactions for problem solving, group polarization and identity politics, virtuous forms of extremism, the much vaunted wisdom of crowds, the possibility of ever having a direct democracy, rational limits on free speech, the process of presidential impeachment, and other topics. As I say at the end, I found this conversation truly educational. There was a lot I didn't understand about impeachment in particular until today, and I hope you find listening to Cass as valuable as I did. And I now bring you Cass sunstein. I am here with Cass Sunstein. Cass, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much. Great to be here. Before we jump into your book, there are actually two books I want to discuss. I'll start with Hashtag Republic, but perhaps you can just summarize your background. You have a very diverse background. You've touched a lot of topics. You've served in government. How do you view your decades of work at this point? Work in progress. So I started as a law professor at the University of Chicago after a short stint at the Justice Department. And I guess before that, I had clerked for a couple of judges, including Thurgood Marshall. I was at Chicago for many years. I did some work connected with governments, including our own, but I didn't leave the academy until Barack Obama became president. And then I worked in the white House helping to oversee government regulation for about four years. After that, I left to be an academic again at Harvard. The president asked me to be on his group on surveillance and national security. I did that for approximately a year. That was a part time job as I was teaching, and after that the Defense Department asked me to be on the Defense Innovation Board, which I was on up until quite recently, which works on the subject of national defense and innovation. Since I left a government as full time job that was in late 2012. I've worked with our government and various other governments on strategies that can promote health and increase safety and maybe help employment go up and poverty go down, environmental protection and issues of that kind. And you and I have never met, but we have an editor in common. We've got Thomas Lebeen linking us. He's edited two of my books. I think he's edited maybe more of yours. He is fantastic. He really is. Thomas is an amazing person and a kind person, and also a brilliant editor with real creativity about how to make things go, at least in my experience, in better directions. Yeah, well, it's great to meet you virtually here. I want to focus on Republic first, and mostly because it's so timely. The other book I want to touch at the end, Impeachment, is also super timely. But when did you actually write Republic? It came out earlier this year. But when were you actually writing it? I was working on it for approximately, I'd say, 18 months before the election. So I actually finished it right about the time of President Trump's victory. But I'd been thinking hard about it for probably two years before then. It actually builds on earlier work on the question of polarization. But my own experience in Washington and my own observation, I guess, since leaving Washington kind of fixed me on the issue of polarization and mutual misunderstanding, and that was kind of 2014 2015 obsession. So you analyze the forces that are leading to increased fragmentation and polarization in our society, and it's fragmentation and polarization of all kinds. It's political, which I'm sure we'll focus on, but it's also moral and intellectual and religious every way in which belief systems can be segregated. There's a similar dynamics to what's happening there. The most natural place to start here is with a few of the concepts you introduce very early in the book, and the first is the concept of choice architecture. And this can be summarized with nicholas Negroponte's rather dystopian idea of what's called the daily me. And many of our listeners will not have heard of either of these phrases while actually living with their implications every day. So perhaps you can explain choice architecture and its consequences. Dick Sailor economist, and I worked on a book called Nudge a few years ago, and one of the driving ideas is, if you're in a grocery store or at a cafeteria or on a website, there's actually an architecture for choosing. So a grocery store might have Pepsi there or it might instead of diet Pepsi there or it might have carrots or it might have chocolate bars. And what's at the checkout counter actually matters in terms of what people purchase and what's approximate and visible, what's eye level actually matters in terms of what people end up stocking in their refrigerator. So too in a cafeteria it can be have a choice architecture that favors meat or fish or vegetables or brownies. And if the designer is smart they will create an architecture that's good for you or good for them or hopefully good for both you and them. A website designer who is alert to the importance of particular choices will know that if you put things in big font and colorful letters and you make it really simple, you can attract the eye and the thing that's first on a list is likely to be what people will purchase. And that is a clue for someone who's trying to sell clothes or books. And so choice architecture is really everywhere. A rental car company is engaged in choice architecture. The US. Government is engaged in choice architecture. So is the state where you live and so are some of the great forces in society and so are some of the less great forces in society. Sometimes we're choice architects when we don't really even think about it. So a teacher of kids is doing choice architecture all the time. So is a doctor who is saying we have five options for you. Here's the first and saying that will often bias the decision. Parents are definitely choice architects. I have two small kids and one's five, the other is eight. And they are extremely effective choice architects with respect to their father. They now have to design situations. So it's me to do it running in the wrong direction completely and I'll run after them and then we're going in the direction they want. So for media, both a social media platform like Facebook and a newspaper like let's say the Wall Street Journal and a network is a choice architect. Facebook, let's take an example, can have a newsfeed that has one kind of default choices. So it can say we know from your choices and from our algorithm this is the kind of thing that you look at. Or we know that this is the kind of thing that most people look at. And it can feed you stuff that fits with your own political convictions or it can feed you stuff that fits kind with what the median person in your state likes. Or it can feed you stuff that is serendipitous and diverse. And that's also true of the local newspaper, which can say, I'll provide you an assortment of things that it's probably good for someone in your area to know about or which can think most of our readers, they are right of center, they are left of center, or we are right of center and left of center. And we're going to provide that perspective. So that's choice architecture too. So choice architecture is everywhere. The term kind of suggests, I hope helpfully, that the architecture that we often just take as kind of a background fact or furniture of life often will have big effects on what we end up selecting. The idea of daily Me, which comes from the far sided nicholas Negropanti, actually comes from a pretty long time ago, the 1990s, and he said we're not going to have TV stations and general interest newspapers so much in the future. We're going to have a system where every person can design his or her daily me. So if your name is Bob, you can create the Daily Bob and suppose what you're most interested in is Star Wars. That can highlight Star Wars on your screen and suppose what you really think is the problem of unlawful immigration is spiraling out of control. That is their political focus. Your daily me can tell you both about the immigration problem and it can talk about it in a way that you find congenial rather than silly or unhelpful. And so the Daily Bob can look one way, the Daily Mary can look a completely different way. And in a way, Silicon Valley has for a long time seen this power of personalized choice architecture, let's call it as the ideal. That's heaven, that's democracy, that's freedom. So that each of us gets a news diet that isn't what anyone else thinks we need, but is specifically based on our own values and tastes. And obviously the incentives for these companies run in the direction of more perfectly fulfilling this formula. And so what we have essentially is an arms race for people's attention. And the daily me version of things one would expect would be stickier. If you can deliver me information which I find captivating and the algorithm keeps prioritizing that and I can be captivated by outrage, I can be captivated by desire. The ads get better and better at actually delivering me things that I will be tempted to buy. The incentives seem aligned to fulfill Negroponte's idea. It's a very, what is it? Promising or seductive business route model, either for a startup or for an established company. A few years ago, I was traveling a lot and I found myself getting on my Facebook page a lot of luggage ads. And how did they know I was in the market for luggage? They figured it out. They were right. And I was much more likely to click on luggage ads than I would be to click on ads for, let's say, sneakers. And they knew that, and that is in their economic interest. So if you're a political candidate, let's say, who wants to win a particular state, if you know, these people will like me better if I suggest that I'm with them on this issue, or those people are likely to give me money if they see my face over the following five words, then you can get very precise. And as you say, that's the incentive of someone who wants to win an election. So both for companies and for political aspirants, and it looks like the Russian government, by the way, knew about this in their role in the US 2016 election. There is a business model that suggests that building on the idea of the Daily Me is a good one. Now, there are some reasons to think that people are a little more complicated than that, and there may be other business models that are as good or better, but certainly we can call it the business model of the Ops, meaning the first decade of the 21st century. The Daily Me model has been all the rage. So in opposition to this, you discuss the value of what you call serendipity. You've already used the word and also irritation and shared experience. Describe what you mean by those three things. Okay, so there are three very different ideas. The idea of serendipity means that in a great city, large or small, it may be that when you go around the corridor, you'll see a Lebanese restaurant or a sports event that you didn't know you had any interest in. Maybe the sports event is soccer, and you thought you were bored by soccer, but, whoa, those kids are pretty good. Or the Lebanese restaurant you never tried but looks interesting. And you might see some of the times a political protest about something might be Black Lives Matter or it might be abortion as murder. And you might learn from that both what your fellow citizens think, and you might also think to yourself for a moment, maybe more than a moment, gosh, I didn't know that that was on the view screen of my neighbors, and maybe they have a point. And that can change your mind, it can change your life and can certainly broaden your horizon. So the idea of serendipity is that a good choice architecture, let's call it for communications, has a lot of surprises in it. And some of these words aren't the most familiar. Choice architecture probably has too many vowels or something. The word architecture is a lot of them. But it's pretty familiar that if you go on a news station or a talk show that interests you, you'll see stuff that you never would have specifically said. You want to hear about that, but it could be stuff that will be the most important thing you see that week or hear that week. So you might hear something about a problem or an initiative in India. And while you thought you had no interest in India, the problem is something that alarms you, or the initiative is something that you think, gosh, the whole world can learn from that and maybe benefit from that. And that can be super important for people. And I think in individual lives, if you think about what your job is or what you're reading or who you're married to or who your friends are or how you got to do the thing you're doing a few hours from now, chances are there's some serendipity that played a huge role. And what I'm urging is that in a democracy, serendipity is a frequent and great force for what is it broadening and also togetherness in a non corn ball, non Hallmark card way. So that's serendipity. Now, let's talk about irritation. It may be that if you are reading, let's say, a good daily newspaper, you'll encounter an editorial or a column that thinks exactly the opposite of what you think. So you might be inclined to think, I like a $15 minimum wage. I think Senator Sanders is on the right track and calling for that. But then you might read something that says a $15 minimum wage is actually going to be terrible for the economy and it's going to be very harmful for people at the bottom of the economic ladder because employers aren't going to hire as many people. If they have to hire people who for $15 an hour, they'll hire them at ten, but not at 15. And so the minimum wage actually hurts the poor. If you like the minimum wage reading, that is very irritating. It's not congenial, but you might think, oh, maybe that's true. Or if you think that, you know, president Trump is on the right track on issue A, B, or C, and then you read something that suggests he's all wrong might be very irritating, but it might move you. So irritation can be good also, meaning it's productive of learning and kind of understanding what our fellow citizens think. And you might also learn something that will produce a shared experience. So the Super Bowl, the response to something great, like a celebration of something very good that's happened in a community, or July 4, I would actually single out July 4 because of what brings Americans together. It's a shared experience, and that can create some social glue for people who might otherwise think of one another as occupants of the same country, but kind of enemies. To be clear, it's not just the information bubble we're talking about. We're talking about a lack of face to face interaction in many cases. So there's the whole phenomenon of telecommuting. In fact, you and I are telecommuting right now to do this interview. And so this interview is made possible by this great technology. But this technology is enabling, in this case me, to do the vast majority of my interviews remotely in this way. And that enables me to make it very easy for someone like you to come on this show. But it also comes at a kind of cost. And I remember I recently met a CEO of a very big company, now a multibillion dollar company with thousands of employees, and something like 99% of them work from home or work from a Starbucks. There's like 15 people in an office in San Francisco and everyone else is elsewhere. So there's more to it than just the media streams we will emphasize here. I think you're making a great point, that it's not emphasized enough in my book. And I learned it actually very concretely in the government, where sometimes if you're trying to solve a problem and you're in one building and people are half an hour away, you send them an email, and the email doesn't have the right tone or will not be read as having the right tone. And in any case, problem solving is harder if you're using text sometimes than if you're actually looking at someone's face and phone or something that involves voices of any technology. It can be better than email, as you're saying, but because it's more personal. But I found in government and after, if you really want to solve a problem, often the best thing is to get a group of people in the room. And we decreasingly rely on that. And one reason it's good is that you can understand different perspectives better if you see people's faces and they'll understand yours. And another thing is so it softens some of the interactions. And another thing is that, and I don't know of data on this, but I bet there either is some or there will be some, that creativity grows because sparks fly. And we've all seen that where in an office or in a family, even if people are all talking to each other face to face, something new will come out that couldn't have been produced by email, even by phone. Yeah, and all the communication at that point isn't merely transactional in the way that it is when you're sending an email. I think this is just now a ubiquitous experience that everyone will be very familiar with, where you're having some communication that's growing increasingly fraught by email. And if you're wise, you will realize that the medium is very likely contributing to the problem. The tones are getting misread and everything is sounding sharper than you intend, or, or in fact, you just become a slightly different person behind the keyboard. I mean, the maniac comes out a little bit and your response to another person isn't being modulated by a face to face encounter or even by being able to hear the humanity and their tone of voice on the phone. I'm sure other people have had this experience, but I've had exchanges with people by email that just either aren't working or they're just strangely unpleasant. And then you get on the phone with the person or you see them face to face and there's this sort of shock of recognition that oh, okay, this is that person. Right, this person has a different shape in your experience than the shape they had acquired in the back and forth by email. And it does kind of break a spell, which was defining the communication and defining it almost invariably in an unproductive way, completely. No, I think that's a deep point, and it has implications for a zillion different things, including political polarization. So I had a friend in the government with whom I was frequently at odds on what to do, and she just developed a habit of saying call me. Right. Email. And she said, call me. And we became great friends. And in DC. I was working for a Democratic president, and the Republicans were often not happy with what President Obama was doing. But I learned so much from Republicans in the House and the Senate, from face to face conversations where not seeing some email they didn't write a lot of emails, but they would write a lot of letters which would be harsh or accusatory or something. But they'd actually have often very good ideas. And when it's in person, then you're not fighting or are you bad. You're thinking, what's the best way to solve a problem? And that what you're saying about human interactions, either in business or in families or whatever. It's it's basically a national thing. So I was thinking, as you were talking, is the harsher or misread stuff that we all experience in a way, our political process is facing that. And that's a challenge for, let's say, infrastructure, random problem, right? But to be clear, you're not exactly nostalgic for some form or time where you think communication was better across the board. You actually believe, I think you say this in the book, that things are just simply better now than they were in the past. It's a matter of fixing problems now. But there's no place you would point the wayback machine if you could completely. So if you ask me when was communications in America the best it's ever been, I would say today. And if it's next week, probably next week is going to be a little better than today, just because if you can talk to each other across very long distances, that's a huge improvement. And if you can learn stuff just at a click about something you care about that may really affect your life, that can be incalculably great. But one way to think of it is the cell phone is a fantastic advance, but if you're using it while you're driving, the chance of your being an accident is higher than it would be if you were using it when you were driving. And the technology is great, but to optimize, let's say, the benefits of its existence would be a good idea. And we're not nearly there yet with respect to social media. Well, I want to talk about social media and how Twitter and Facebook have been behaving themselves. But before we get there, I think we should talk about the phenomenon of hyperpolarization in groups. And this is a general phenomenon that you describe in the book where like minded people become more extreme once they begin associating with one another. And it may sound paradoxical on its face, but it really functions by dynamics that are fairly easy to understand. Perhaps you should explain maybe the Colorado study is the place to start here, but talk about what happens in groups among the likeminded. Okay, so what we did in Colorado was to get a bunch of people in Boulder, which is a left of center, together, to talk about climate change, affirmative action, and same sex unions. We asked them for their views privately and anonymously. Then we had them discuss the issues together and come to a verdict. And then we asked them to record their views privately and anonymously. And there was reason to expect that if you got a group of people together, they'd end up coming to the middle of what the group members privately thought, and that would be their verdict, and then they'd all be in the middle. But that's not what happened. They were kind of to the left on all three issues. They went way to the left on all three issues as a result of talking to each other. So the left of center people in Boulder had some diversity on climate change and affirmative action before they talked to each other. After they talked to each other, they were more extreme, they were more confident, and they were pretty well unified on all of those issues. This isn't just the left of center phenomenon. We did the same thing in Colorado Springs, which is right to center. And as the people in Boulder went whoosh to the left, the people in Colorado Springs went whoosh to the right. And it's just because they were talking with like minded others. So the basic rule is that usually people who are inclined in a certain direction end up, after talking to each other, thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. And we can explain, I think, why sometimes in primaries both of our political parties go left and go right has something to do with this. Why within cults, people end up sometimes getting all extreme. That's often the phenomenon of group polarization, as it's called, why terrorists often get radicalized and also why people who do great things like attack extreme injustice, why they get radicalized because they're all talking to each other. And you say that the mechanisms are pretty intuitive. I think you're completely right that the leading one is if you have a group of people who think, let's say, that the minimum wage should be raised, that's what they tend to think. Some of them aren't sure they're talking with each other. They'll hear a lot of arguments about why the minimum wage should be raised because that's what most of them think. And they won't hear a lot of the arguments the other way, and the arguments that they hear will be kind of tentative as well as few. And then if they're listening to each other after they've heard all the arguments, they'll think, oh, minimum wage really should be raised a lot. And it's just because of the arguments they're hearing. And if you have a group of people who tend to think the minimum wage should not be raised exactly, the mirror image of what I've described will happen. And I'm smiling as I talk because we actually taped our conversations in Colorado. And so I've seen them, and in real time, you can completely see the process where the right people on the right are going more. Right. Because they're talking to people who think conservative thoughts. And the conservative thoughts are going to look numerous and excellent and the disagreement will seem rare and kind of stupid. There's also this phenomenon of reputation management within the group where you have your concern for how you're appearing in this group that's now getting constellated around a consensus and that will tend to filter out any expressions of doubt about this forming consensus. And it functions as a kind of a tractor state for convergence. You're completely right. So in Boulder, our left to center groups, you can see them talking about climate change, whether the US. Should sign an international agreement. And some of the people who are left of center were a little nervous about that. They thought, I don't know what would happen to American sovereignty if we yielded to an international agreement. They just weren't sure. But you could see them looking at their fellow citizens of Boulder and thinking, oh man, if I say that, I'm going to look really bad in their eyes, so I'm just going to agree with them. This strikes me as yet another argument against identity politics. Do you see a connection there? I think exactly right. Identity politics. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Arthur Brooks. Arthur is a social scientist who focuses on human happiness. He's a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School. He's also the best selling author of twelve books and the creator of the popular how to Build a Life column in the Atlantic. He previously served for ten years as President of the American Enterprise Institute, and most recently, he's the author of the book From Strength to Strength finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. And that is what we get into in this conversation. We talk about what it takes to build a good life, the perverse power of social comparison, taboos around talking about intelligence, political dignity and ethical hierarchy. We talk for a while about the Dalai Lama and our mutual experience of him, the nature of love, fluid and crystallized intelligences, the strange case of Linus Pauling, the limits of identity. And then in the second half we have a spirited discussion about atheism and religion. Arthur is a devout Roman Catholic, I am not. And we get into that a little. We talk about the fear of death, psychedelics, existentialism, st, thomas Aquinas and other topics. Anyway, I enjoyed this. This is an example of the kind of conversations I'm having more and more over in the Life section of waking up. But I'm presenting it here too, because I think it will be of general interest to all of you. And I bring you Arthur Brooks. I am here with Arthur Brooks. Arthur, thanks for joining me. Thanks, Sam. What a delight. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time. Yeah, yeah, we've I know we know many people in common, but I don't think we've ever met. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of having met you anywhere. I agree. I think that's I think it's absolutely right. Yeah. I feel like I know you, though. I've listened to you so much. Well, I loved your latest book, which we'll discuss the title of which is From Strength to Strength. And I think we'll focus on that for most of the discussion. But catch me up on what you have done. Maybe this will be relevant to the conversation about your book, but how do you describe your professional and intellectual history, what have you focused on, and then we'll get to the present. It's peripatetic. I haven't actually done the same thing year after year after year, like a lot of people have in my profession. I'm an academic, like you, I'm in the world of academia, but I came late to it. I started my career after being unceremoniously ushered from college at age 19 as a professional musician. I started as a professional classical French horn player. I went on tour for a long time, through my 20s, as a matter of fact. My parents called it my gap decade, and they were none too pleased about it, actually. My father was a college professor, as was his father, and I wound up in the Barcelona Symphony, playing in the symphony orchestra there until my late twenty s, and then I actually went back to college by correspondence. I didn't have enough money or time to do it traditionally, and finished my bachelor's degree at 30 and started graduate school and got very interested in the social sciences, just the behavior of how people, what made people tick and weirdly. Became an economist, started my PhD and became an academic for ten years, then left after ten years, most of it at Syracuse, to be the president of a think tank in Washington, DC. Called the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most, one of the oldest think tanks and largest think tanks in the world. And after doing that for ten years, I retired in my mid fifty s at this point, and came to Harvard, where I've been for the past three years, teaching at the business school and the Kennedy School, where I teach the science of happiness, mostly to MBA students. Nice. Well, I want to circle back to several of the transitions there. You and I actually have a slightly similar background in having taken the decade of our 20s off from the usual academic grind, only to return to it and sort of do things backwards, which is interesting. When you were at AEI, what years were you running AEI? I took over AEI in the last month of the George W. Bush administration, and I finished in the middle of 2019, so I came on the first day of 2009, and then I left in June of 20, 1910 and a half years. I forget what. So were you running it when ayan Hercules joined, or was that no, she was there. We were a coincidence for a while. She joined under my predecessor, and she was there with me, and we did a lot of stuff together when she was a non resident fellow. Okay. Yes. Though my politics have always diverged considerably from AEI, I have a soft spot for the organization because it was literally the only foundation that would take Ion when she was really just desperate for refuge, leaving the Netherlands and incurring all of these security concerns around her. Apostasy and, you know, the AEI saved her, and it was so I was incredibly grateful of that moment, being one of her friends. Yeah, no, it's also it's it's an organization dedicated to intellectual apostates, sort of literal apostates, like Ian Hercali, but also just the intellectual apostates. Weird people, people who think differently because, look, this is what makes life interesting, and the competition of ideas really is fundamental to a free society. The idea of conventional thinking is antithetical to progress as far as we're concerned. And so I was really dedicated to that principle. I was looking for weirdos, quite frankly, people who are going to break up convention. Yeah. Okay, so let's start with your book, and maybe we can start with the way you actually start your book. You have this anecdote that is kind of the founding inspiration and epiphany for your book. Perhaps you can tell that and link it up with these various transitions you have made in your life. Yeah, I start the book by telling a story that had a kind of a foundational impact on me because it was about halfway through my time as president of this think tank. And it was a great job. I mean, I was working my tail off. I was traveling around giving maybe 175 speeches a year, and I was fundraising like crazy. I had to raise $50 million a year. My job was running for the Senate and never getting elected, basically, which probably is better than getting elected in the Senate. But about halfway through, five years or so through, I was having this mild existential crisis. What does this lead to? What am I actually trying to do? I'm going to do my work and do it better and be more successful, I suppose, or at least create more impact and value for society as I saw it. But then what? Sooner or later, I'll get a shove or I'll get tired or something and stop. And what does this mean, basically? What's the cadence of it, basically? And around that time, I was on a plane and had overheard this conversation. Now, you and I, as basically as social scientists, know that our real laboratory is overheard conversations. It's the conversation on the plane, the people talking behind you at Starbucks. That's where the interesting ideas come from. And I heard a conversation of a couple, an elderly couple. I could tell other voices. I could tell it was a man and a woman, and I assumed they were married because it was a pretty intimate conversation. And I couldn't see him. It was nighttime, it was dark. But I heard the husband kind of mumble a little bit, and then the wife say, don't say it would be better if you were dead. And now they really have my attention. I mean, I'm just keyed in at this point. I'm not trying to eavesdrop, but who wouldn't be listening at this point? And then he mumbles a little bit more. And she says, It's not true that nobody cares about you and nobody remembers you. And I'm thinking that this is probably somebody who's not like me, Sam, or the people listening to your program. This is not somebody who was super motivated. It's probably somebody who's disappointed because he didn't get the education that he wanted and start the business or get the jobs that he wanted. And now it's near the end, and he's disappointed. Well, we were coming from La. To Washington, a flight that was on a lot in those days. And we land in Washington maybe an hour later, and the lights go on, and we all stand up, and I'm curious. So I turn around just to get a look at this at the disconsolate old guy. And it's one of the most famous men in the world. I mean, this guy is rich and famous because of things that he did in the he's very old, but he's super well known. I mean, people recognize him. And as we were leaving the plane, you know, he's right behind me coming up the aisle, and the pilot stops him and says recognizes him, of course, and says, sir, you've been my hero since I was a little boy. And I turned around, and he's beaming with pride. And I'm thinking to myself, so which is it? Which is the real guy? The one beaming with pride right now or the one confessing to his wife that he might as well be dead? And I thought to myself, the world has kind of a bogus formula for success, actually, which is what I had been suffering under and which I just had witnessed, that if you want to be happy, you want to die happy. Sam, here's the deal. Work hard, succeed, bust your pick. Bank your success. Die happy. And it's wrong. It's not true. And we all kind of know it's not true. But I saw this in stark relief, and I started actually reading biographies differently at that point of great men and women throughout history to see if they died happy, and a lot of them didn't. And it sent me on this quest to figure out what was this curse of a lot of people who were very successful in life that they tended to be very unhappy at the end of life, and what could somebody do to build what amounts to a happiness 401K plan? I was going to turn my social scientist toolkit on the business of getting happier as you get older. And that's the book that we're talking about. And this curse is something you call the Strivers Curse. But the insight into the problem visited you earlier than is really the central lesson of your book, because your book, as we will see, focuses on inevitable changes that come with aging. But you kind of slammed up against a brick wall in music, you know, still in your I guess your late 20s. Just maybe describe that and yeah, talk about what you just what those implications were for you. Well, one of the things that I talk about in the book is one of the reasons that strivers really hard workers, ambitious people, why they struggle and suffer often later in life, is because what they're good at, they can't keep doing forever, that there is inevitable decline. And I talk about the neuroscientific basis of that. I mean, there's very strong neuroscience and social science for why that is the case. But I also have some personal experience in decline. I'd experience decline not the kind that comes in midlife, but I'd had a weird decline in my musical career that gave me a taste of how bitter it actually is. All I ever wanted to be as a kid was a French horn player. I wanted to be the world's greatest French horn player, which is kind of a weird ambition, I realized. But nonetheless, it was my ambition. And as I went through my teenage years, it seemed like that was actually within reach or something like it was within reach, because I was just getting better every year, and my career was going well, and I was playing professionally. And then something happened in my early 20s where I started getting worse, and I couldn't figure it out. Now, this happens to people that rely on gross and fine motor skills a lot, and there's a lot of possible physiological or even neurological explanations for it, but it's not well understood why some athletes, why they burn out early, why some classical musicians peak and decline early. But I was and by the time I was 22, I was finding that things that that used to be easy were hard, and things that used to be hard were impossible. And and I was noticing this decline all the way through my mid 20s. So I was trying desperately. I was going to the best teachers. I was practicing more and more. I took different jobs. I wound up in the symphony in Barcelona because I thought that maybe this kind of job, this kind of playing, would respark my ascent as a French horn player. And of course, it didn't. And, you know, it really took a lot of well, it took getting married to somebody who was kind of my guru to help me understand that I was not a French horn player. I was a person. I was a human being that happened to play the French horn. That had never occurred to me because I was a classic success addicted self objectifier, which is one of the things I talk about a lot in my book. What holds people back is that they're hopelessly addicted to success, and I was too. And it took somebody who really loved me for who I was as a person, as opposed to what I was professionally, to help me do something else. What's the normal pattern of decline for a musician of that sort. The normal pattern of decline is that you would get better all the way through your twenty s and into your 30s. So your technique would actually get better. And then you'd peek as a French horn player, a violinist or something, ordinarily your technique would peak in your late thirty s and you start to see pretty gradual decline through your forty s and fifty s. And if you're truly a prodigy, even in your sixty s and seventy s, you can be playing very beautifully. But you're best playing will typically be in your late thirty s. What you find and that had happened to me in my early twenty s. For whatever reason there may have been an injury that had gone undetected or whatever reason, I guess I was just precociously in decline. And it gave me by the way, Sam, it was a blessing because it gave me an opportunity to retool and go back to school and learn something new. But I was so tied to it that I didn't even tell anybody I had gone to college. I was ashamed that anybody would know that I was studying. And it was a real secret. The only person, literally the only person who knew was my wife and none of my colleagues. I remember one time in the music world that we were hanging around and there was this one woman, she's a pretty good French horn player but she came and said, I got big news. I just got a full scholarship to go to medical school at the University of Miami. I'm going to become a surgeon. And after she left, the room were like, see, she doesn't have it. Talk about a low status job. A surgeon. Yeah. If you're among French horn players, that's funny. Questions of status are essential here and questions of identity, what you're describing is your identity was entirely anchored to this notion of you being an increasingly wonderful musician. And when that began to erode, you became increasingly uncomfortable for obvious reasons. Right? I mean, even just in the story you just described, one sense of identity and it's something you point out in the book is notions of success that can accrete around it are for the most part in relation to others. They're born of social comparison. They're born of notions of status, explicit or implicit, so they're positional. And yet there are multiple axes for these kinds of comparisons and status judgments. And so it's kind of we're both laughing when we describe the elitism of the French horn players looking down on lowly surgeons. But of course surgeons would return the favor. And I think this has probably happened to you. There are many contexts in which you could find yourself in the company of highly successful people and witness various status games and witness what they do to your own self concept. But these comparisons occur and combine and recombine in strange ways you can be an academic who may feel kind of low status compared to some other academics but higher status with respect to the variable of education around people who just have a lot of money, say right? Absolutely. And there are at least a dozen ways you can kind of point the arrow of your self regard so as to compare yourself to those around you. And it is really the lesson in the end is that all of this is fatuous and not the basis for a durable feeling of well being or a sense that one is living a meaningful life. Absolutely. We can even find stranger versions of it today. I mean we talk about on college campuses or any place there are people who get their sense of identity and their sense of hierarchy of identity with respect to their grievance, their sense of victimhood. People will often say that college campuses are like the victim Olympics in some cases and what that is about is nothing to make light of because there are legitimate grievances to be sure. But to the extent that we say one group is more aggrieved than another group that's the same thing as saying that a good French horn player has less status somehow than somebody with a PhD. It gets very exotic very quickly and is pretty unhelpful and pretty unconstructive for living the best life. I think it's suffice it to say so in your book you make much of two different types of intelligence and the time course of their decline. Maybe we should jump into that. Perhaps we should acknowledge upfront that intelligence itself is a somewhat taboo topic. I mean even to acknowledge that it is unequally distributed in the world is taboo. I mean it's it's there for all to notice. However you want to define intelligence even if we admit that how you define it may be open to some cavalry. Whatever definition you have, you have something that is implicitly hierarchical and it's just there is no definition that renders everyone equivalent. And yet it's strange that it's taboo to acknowledge that it's not at all taboo to acknowledge that some French horn players are better than others or some athletes are better than others. And yet to talk in any straightforward way about someone being smarter than someone else, that makes everyone uncomfortable. Do you have a sense of why that is? Well, part of it is that we've made the mistake for a very long time of equating intelligence with moral superiority. How many parents will complement their kids by saying you're so smart you wouldn't compliment your kid by saying your hair is so long? If these are characteristics that actually that vary not just on the basis of your own effort but by something having to do, for example with your genetics then it's nothing worth complementing. For Pete's sake. It's like your eyes are so blue. I mean what a weird thing to compliment somebody for, I suppose that we could to admire that particular quality, but to not equate it with some sort of moral superiority is really important. And yet that's what people have done for the longest time. And if we think that there's an equivalency between intelligence and cognitive ability, for example, and moral superiority, then we're going to be getting into all of this confusion to begin with. Now, there's other ways that people have in our field. Yours and mine have talked about it that's less controversial. For example, in my book, I talk about the work of Raymond Cattel, who is a social psychologist in Great Britain. Working in the catel was basically just noticing that there are two types of geniuses one that blooms early and one that blooms late, and they have different characteristics, they have different strengths that give them these genius characteristics. And then he noticed later that these genius characteristics exist in everybody in varying degrees, that you're really good at something early, and you're really good at something later. So it's a lot less polemical than the way that we talk about, for example, IQ scores. Right. And this is the distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence that you yeah, exactly. I just wonder if there's something more to it. I haven't thought about this much, but my own relationship to this concept strikes me as peculiar. So, for instance, at no point in my life did I ever think that maybe I should be a professional athlete. Right. The sport I played the most, the team sport I played the most, was soccer. I definitely had enough exposure to soccer to discover in myself the aptitude that would lead me to be a professional soccer player. Right. I mean, I think I started playing around age nine. I played straight through high school. I was certainly not a bad soccer player. And, you know, even in in the context of, you know, a little school team, I think I probably thought of myself as a good soccer player. But then I went to college, when I went to Stanford, there was literally not a single neuron in my brain that thought, maybe I should try out for the varsity soccer team. Right. It was a good team. I think they even when I was there, I think they beat the Olympic team. So it was, you know, a serious soccer team. And, I mean, I don't even think I consciously closed that door. It's just I never even looked for a door. It was obvious that my abilities as a soccer player were so bounded that no thought need be expended on my future professionally as a soccer player. Right. And in no way do I feel diminished by that egoically that just that was not my my wheelhouse. But when I think about, you know, other things left unexplored of that sort, if I think, well, if I had applied myself more to mathematics, could I have discovered in myself that I was really a great mathematician. Right. I was obviously exposed to mathematics as much as I was exposed to soccer. Presumably I was exposed enough to have discovered whether I was going to be the next Alan Turing or Claude Shannon or Norbert Weiner or you take your pick. I didn't discover that. And yet I think if in my crazier moments, I think part of me believes that if I had just pushed into that area, if I had persisted, really the sky was the limit. There's no telling what I could have become in that area. Now it takes me about 10 seconds to convince myself that that is almost certainly bullshit. Right. There's no way I was going to be the next Alan Turing. Just statistically, it's as likely as me being the next LeBron James or some athlete who I never for a moment would think I would stand a chance of being, and yet it doesn't feel that way. Intelligence is the sort of thing that you feel like it's very hard to admit to yourself that there is a scale and you are at a certain point on it. Again, define intelligence in as piecemeal away as you want. Give me 100 different forms of intelligence. Take your pick. You are not the greatest at that one. Very likely. Right. And yet it's there's something about that that's hard for people to admit, and it does feel diminishing in a way that just acknowledging that, you know, you weren't going to be a professional athlete isn't I don't know what to compare this to. It's a little bit like as writers, we've run into this this is kind of an old saw of writers that basically everyone imagines that they should write a book. Right. Everyone imagines that they have a book in them because everyone's a language user and everyone does some writing. And you're constantly bumping into people who think they should be writing a book, whereas you're not bumping into people who think they should be playing the French horn at the highest level. And so maybe intelligence is something like that where because everyone is using it all day long, it's very hard to think about it being bounded in a way that is invidious to oneself. Yeah. We also have a society that is increasingly giving returns to intellectual ability. I mean, we have a very complex society and it's one of the things that virtually guarantees that you're going to do well if you have strong intellectual gifts. And so the result of that is that it's it's a better thing to have than good lips for playing the French horn. I mean, it's like and if you're going, you have your kid and you say, oh, you got two choices. The kid is going to be really gifted intellectually. The kid's going to have an unbelievable ambassador to play the trombone or the French owner or something. You're going to like you'd be nuts to say, look, little Johnny's intellectually pretty mediocre, but man, he can he can he's got good technique on the trombone. There are very few people that would take that. Maybe my parents would have taken that. I'm not sure. But but the truth is that it's just that intellectual giftedness is highly fungible across modern society, which has been more and more and more rewarding that and a lot of people are, you know, putting moats around their castles for that too, making it into a harder and harder society. And, you know, this is what it really does. I think it comes down to a question of we all have to recognize the radical equality of human dignity, notwithstanding our differences of all different kinds and to the point that we can't quite recognize that everybody has the same dignity, then we have to be very uncomfortable with differences that people actually have. I think yeah, I think there's a distinction between human dignity and the political equivalence between people. All people are created equal. That's a political statement. That's the world we want to live in. And yet we know that there are some people who add much more value to society than others. Right. And again, this is just whether you want to talk about this in absolute terms or if this is just a contingent fact of what a society happens to value, you're going to find certain people who cater to those desires and demands more than others. And so in a hostage crisis, it is natural to want to rescue Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr. Before you rescue, I don't know, somebody who has and will do nothing of special value for anyone else. Right. And more resources will be expended upon trying to rescue that person. Presumably now, we don't want to live in that world. We want to live in a world where we're impartial, or at least there's a pretense of impartiality more or less across the board where doctors work as hard as they're ever going to work to save the life of anyone. But as you say, intelligence is this magical property that is incredibly fungible. It's just so useful across the board. Almost anything we want either depends more or less entirely on intelligence or at least it's safeguarded by intelligence. But obviously there are many more things or at least several more things that are arguably as important or more important, and we'll talk about a few of those things. But there's certainly a dissociation in some people between intelligence and wisdom and certainly an intelligence and a capacity for ethical engagement and love and compassion. And it's the love and compassion and wisdom side of things that that wants to build a more egalitarian view of the situation. But I feel like we can't lie to ourselves about there being a kind of ethical hierarchy as well. I mean, to make this absolutely clear, there are people who create net harm to society. You. Know, we put certain people in boxes for the rest of their lives because they're so despicable and dangerous if you let them out of the box. And yet we also give them competent medical care when they need it. How do you think about the situation of moral worth and dignity versus the kind of gradations of benefit to others that I just sketched? Well, all of these are incredibly nuanced ethical questions that we're trying to live out day to day. And I think it's interesting that we can explore these things in the context of what we want for ourselves and what we want for our own kids. So we tend to prize certain things, certain characteristics above all other things. And in the hierarchy of what we want for our kids, we want our kids to be really successful, and we want them to be really smart, and we want them to. But if I gave you the two choices you have a son or a daughter who's a psychopathic genius, or one who is of moderate ability, who's benevolent in, loving and kind, I know which one you'd choose 100 times out of 100. And what you've just told me is those are competing characteristics. And in point of fact, benevolence, love and kindness is probably more important as far as you're concerned. And that's an important value for our society to start prising and be more overt about as far as I'm concerned. That's one of the things that I think that we could all probably agree on that would cool a lot of the tensions around a lot of these conversations. What are the human values that should be and actually kind of are more important to us than cognitive ability, than academic performance? And the answer is the extent to which we can behave ethically and in a loving way toward one another and the sort of benevolence across society that we can and how we can foster that more in young people. And so that's a lot of what I've dedicated my work to doing as an academic. For example, when I left my think tank, I was discerning, what do I want to do the rest of my life? And I decided that I was going to spend the rest of my mid fifty s fifty five years old and I said I'm going to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using my intellect and using my ideas because I think that those are higher values than the other things. Yeah. Although I would just point out that there's an implicit hierarchy even there. I think it's obvious that some people are more compassionate and wiser and more loving than others. For sure, that's a domain in which any one person can grow, and there are methods by which one can grow across all of those variables. But there's no question that there are ethical prodigies in the world, at whatever point in life, they fully embody those abilities. And you mentioned a few in your book, and I think you mentioned your book that you actually had some direct connection with the Dalai Lama. What has that been? About ten years ago, when I was still president of AEI, I started thinking about the people that I wanted to have deep conversations, ethical conversations about big issues of the day with people whom I really admired morally, people whom I admired spiritually, people who are adroit. And and really, the person at the top of that list is the world's most respected religious leader, who is the Dalai Lama. And so I got in contact with this team and with some of my colleagues at AEI. They granted us an hour with him in Daramsala, in his monastery in the Himalayan foothills. And it was an arduous journey getting up there, for sure, but it was just sort of magic. As soon as we met, we started talking, having these big ideas. I invited him to the United States. He came, I interviewed him. We wound up writing together. I interviewed him many times. We become friends. He's a beloved teacher and friend, and I've learned a great deal from him. I mean, he has a completely different spiritual tradition than me. He sees the world in many ways very differently than me. But what we agree on is this inherent dignity of all people. He reminds me it's interesting because he's Tibetan, he's not American. You and I are Americans, and we see things inherently a little bit differently. But he'll say, Remember, you're one in 7 billion people. By which he doesn't mean that I'm a spec, that I'm insignificant, but that we're all part of I mean, I know that you practice meditation in a very serious way, so the concept of emptiness means something to you. And the whole idea is that there's this coan in Zen Buddhism. What is the sound of one hand clapping? It's almost a cliche at this point. But really what it is, it's the answer to a question who am I as an individual? I am the sound of one hand clapping. The truth is that I, as an individual, with my ideas, don't mean very much until I my hand clapping comes against the hand of Sam Harris, and we have this particular conversation, and it's the Dalai Lama who's helped me understand that my dignity that doesn't mean very much until it actually meets your dignity together. It's the togetherness that really matters a lot. That has been one of the most valuable relationships in my intellectual and my spiritual development. Yeah, it's been many years since I've seen him, but I did have some very nice, concentrated exposure to him in my, I guess, late twenty s. The most substantial was I was invited to be part of a Buddhist group that was arranging his Tour of France for a month. And these were people these are some friends who had been on three year retreats in Tibetan Buddhist retreat centers in France. And so they were organizing his tour, and it was this fairly arduous tour where he was basically changing cities every 24 or 48 hours for a month. And so you're packing and unpacking and packing and unpacking. And we were his security detail. Unlike in America, he was also given the French equivalent of a secret service detail as well. But we were kind of the buffer between the real bodyguards and the rascal multitude in France. So strangely, we got into much more conflict with the people than the real bodyguards did because they just used us as a buffer. But it was a really interesting experience because I got to see what he was like in all of these transitional moments with large groups of people again and again and again in a situation where I had to be like, my job was to be paranoid and to be scrutinizing every room looking for a threat. And his job is to be Mr. Compassion and just beam love and good humor at everyone. So it was a strangely toxic role to be in because it was just rather than stay on his channel, you had to be the jerk on some level, and I got to be a jerk with very poor language skills so that I didn't even have enough French to be diplomatic. So I'm telling people there's not enough French in the world to be diplomatic. And the French, I notice, often aren't very diplomatic. But I was telling people not to move and back up and just kind of barking orders at journalists. And it's amazing how rude people can be. Literally, there were journalists who at some point physically grabbed him and turned him, wheeled him around in order to get a photo of him. It was completely insane. But what I saw in him was just this ability to almost without exception, not miss anyone. He would be exiting a hotel, and there'd be a dozen or more people just gathered to watch him go because he was such a celebrity. Again, he's a bigger celebrity in France than he is in the States, at least at that point. And he would just make you know, it could be almost instantaneous, but he would make a connection with basically everyone in the room on his way out. And he's just kind of the ultimate mench. I guess I could be projecting somewhat on him, but I don't hold him out to be at the top of the pantheon of of meditation masters in Tibetan Buddhism. I mean, in fact, I studied with some of his teachers and, you know, so I've met the people he looked up to and, you know, among Tibetan contemplatives. So it wasn't that. It was just that he was just such a kind and well integrated person in the way he engaged everyone at every level of society. It was just so admirable. And again, some of it could be innate. But look at how he spends his time. It's not far fetched to believe that a lot of it has to do with the training. He's engaged, for sure. And I love him. And it's interesting because the model of that kind of kindness and goodness is really quite different than that which we're used to the Dalai Lama. He's unattached to everything, including the people. He's not attached to people. He often talks about his cat. He loves his cat, so it seems. And so one time I asked him, so what's your cat's name? And he looked at me like I was asking him a bizarre question. Like I was asking him, what's your left shoe named? He says no. Name Cat. And the whole point is that there's love and then there's attachment and love and attachment are not the same thing. And this has been hugely instructive for me because I have traveled with him as well. I wasn't doing bad cop like you. I've been in the nice situation of actually being able to be with him and interviewing him and just being with him when he's been on tour. But I've noticed the same thing, that he has this love, this universalism and the love that he has for everybody. And part of it is because he is loving and unattached at the same time. I think this is a standard that's very hard to attain. It's a really hard thing for me to attain and it's made me reflect an awful lot about how I try to live my life. In many ways, one of the things that I find in my own research as a social scientist is I study a lot. The satisfaction problem. I mean, the satisfaction problem. We'll call it the Mick Jagger problem. I can't get no satisfaction. And the truth is you can't keep no satisfaction. That's the truth. That's the homeostasis problem, the hedonic treadmill problem. Anybody who listens to your show knows about all about all these ideas that you try and you try and you try and you think that the new car smell will last forever that the marriage will give you permanent satisfaction. Nothing does. And the reason is because Mother Nature just doesn't care if you're happy. And she wants you to pass on your jeans and doesn't want you to be satisfied. She wants you to run and run and run to strive and strive and strive. And the answer to it really comes from detaching love, from attachment. That's the really important thing. Because if you think of something as the be all and the end all that you conceive of something as your permanent source of satisfaction, you will always be disappointed. It's okay to love and be none attached at the same time. How do you do that? Well, that's the trick, isn't it? Ultimately, that's not a question of having more that's a question of wanting less. And that's one of the really the great moral lessons that I've learned from the Dalai Lama, and something I'm trying to that I'll probably spend the rest of my life trying to instantiate in the way I live my life. Yeah, I think you need to unpack what you mean by love and differentiating a few components, I think shows how you could maximize love without any real implication of attachment. And Buddhism is, I think, especially useful here in how it differentiates some of these concepts. But there's a term that is usually translated as loving kindness from Buddhism. The Poly, Sanskrit is Metza, and it really is just the wish for others to be happy, the wish for them to be free of suffering is the compassion variant of that. And for that wish to really be tuned up to something like its maximum, a few things have to be purged or kind of burned off as impurities there. And one is the sense that you want something from the other people, that your happiness is in any way predicated on getting something from them, or that your happiness is in any way competitive with theirs. Another aspect of another variant of it is called mudita, which is a sympathetic joy, which is the antithesis of envy. Right? So we've all noticed this ghastly quality of mind where, you know, something good happens in the life of a friend, right? They they have some great professional success, or, you know, something great happens, and you find in yourself a limit on your capacity to actually be happy for them, right, because you feel somehow your happiness has been diminished. It's just a ghastly quality of mind. Oh, it's the worst. I mean, envy is a deadly sin for that reason. My father was very funny he's to say that, son, remember, it's not enough to win. Your friends have to lose, too. Yeah, I think there's isn't our Gore Vidal quote around there, which is just incredibly ugly. I forget what what it was. Every time one of my friends succeeds, I die a little bit inside. I think that's what he says. But, you know, there's this there's a there's a Western tradition that gets at this in the same way that is a little bit easier for most most of us to understand. And that comes from Aquinas, who was really paraphrasing Aristotle. So Aquinas, of course, in the 13th century and the sum of theological he was really reintroducing. He was a he was a Neoplatonist, but he reintroduced Aristotle to audiences. We probably wouldn't read the Nicomachian Ethics today were it not for St. Thomas Aquinas. And Aquinas defined in an Aristotelian way what love means, which gets at exactly what we're talking about here. He defined love as to will the good of the other as other. This could have been right out of the mouth of the Buddha, as a matter of fact. He was really impressed and really influenced by many Eastern teachings. And so when you read Aquinas, it's pretty Eastern. But to will the good of the other, this is not about sentimentality. This is not about feelings, which is really important. When I teach happiness at the Harvard Business School, the first day of class, I say, what's happiness? And they start talking about that feeling I get when dot, dot, dot. And I say wrong. Happiness has feelings. But just like the Thanksgiving dinner has a smell, that's evidence of happiness. Happiness has to be something more tangible than that, or you can improve it. There's not much you can do about it. You shouldn't be taking a class in it, for Pete's sake. That's really an arithmetician or a temistic concept very related to the Buddhist ideas that we're talking about here. Do you love somebody? Well, then will they're good as that person, and then you're on the road to be perhaps becoming a Buddhistadfa. Okay, well, I want to get back to Aquinas and related topics there, but let's go back to intelligence, where we left it. We did not actually describe the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence and the use to which you put these concepts in your book. So tell me, what are your thoughts on that topic? So Raymond Cattel, the great British social psychologist noticed that people, they get better at things through their twenty s and thirty s that kind of 10,000 hours deal where they have focus, the ability to work hard a lot. Of working memory and almost anything that you can get good at. From being an air traffic controller to being a French horn player to being a college professor, a researcher in particular that requires innovative capacity to crack the code to solve problems. That's fluid intelligence. And that gets better and better through your twenty s and thirty s. And weirdly, it tends to peak in your late 30s or early forty s, and then it tends to decline. And he noticed this, cattle noticed this, that these abilities tend to decline. Now, if you're really a striver and you're really good at what you do, and most of the people listening to us right now, they're good at something, they're really the only ones in their 40s who are going to notice these declines. And the way that you notice it is what people in the management world called burnout. So you find that your dentist, for example, when he's, let's say, 43, weirdly starts taking Fridays off to golf, it's like, why would you do that, do this trivial kind of hobby instead of doing something that you love, like being a dentist? And the answer is because humans aren't happy when they're not making progress. The mathematicians will put it that all of happiness is in the first derivative. All of happiness is in getting better. The state is this is a reason, by the way, Sam, that that it's very easy to lose weight, but it's very hard to keep weight off because when the scale is going down, you're motivated and happy. And when you hit your goal, the reward for hitting your goal is now you never get to eat the things you like ever again for the rest of your life. Congratulations. And this is the nature of how we're wired. Progress is everything. And so what happens is that people get very frustrated and angry and desperate and afraid and sad when they're on the downslope of this fluid intelligence curve. What Cattel also pointed out is there's a second intelligence curve behind it that doesn't reward the same things. It's called crystallized intelligence, and it's based on all the things you know and how to use the things that you know. So your working memory is a lot worse. Your innovative capacity is worse. Your speed and your ability to solve problems is worse, but your wisdom is higher. Your pattern recognition is higher. Your vocabulary is higher. Your teaching ability is higher. And so what you need to do if you want to use that is actually start doing the things that favor that increasing intelligence. The great news, incredible news, is that crystallized intelligence increases through your forty s and fifty s and even sixty s and stays high in your seventy s and eighty s. So there's a guy at University of California at Davis again named Dean Keith Simonton who's the world's I don't know if you've had him on your show. No, I've read his books. But yeah, he's wonderful. I mean, he talks about the cadence of creative careers and he talks about the half life where he measures the corpus of work and quantity and quality of people in different creative careers. And he finds that those that have that load on fluid intelligence like poetry, where you're just inventing stuff with words that that has a half life around age 40 where you've done half of your lifetime work around age 40. When you think about it, TS. Eliot does repound. Their best works were written in their late twenty s and early thirty s, and both guys lived into their eighty s. Now, if you look at something that loads on crystallized intelligence, the body of knowledge and how to use it, like historians, they're basically just teachers. You have to have the New York Public Library in your head to be able to be a historian. Their halfway point is about age 65. So if you're a historian, take care of your health because your best books are probably coming in your 80s is the point. And that's the difference between a career that loads on fluid and a career that loads on crystallized. Now, our job, you and me, is to be walking in our forty s and fifty s from our fluid intelligence curve onto our crystallized intelligence curve by manifesting what we do in different ways. Probably that goes from writing mathematical theorems which I was doing to writing a column in the Atlantic and teaching at Harvard, which I'm doing now. This podcast that you're doing is like a master display and crystallized intelligence because you're teaching with this particular podcast. This is a good thing that you're doing to favor what you're naturally getting good at in your fifty s. One likes to think there are some skills or some kind of career arcs that leverage crystallized intelligence much earlier, right? Or it's not so much about fluid intelligence and then there's some careers where to move from fluid to crystallized is really just requires a fundamental change of career. Right? I mean, you have to admit you've hit the ceiling and now you've and now you're declining and you're not going to be. There are examples of this in science. You single out Linus Pauling as one example of somebody I guess this wasn't so much synonymous with a diminution in his abilities, although that could have been at the back of it. It was more just in his attachment to his own status and influence. He kept jumping on to one more lurid misuse of his abilities after the next until he finally landed on mega doses of vitamin C. We should probably I mean, for people who don't know the Linus Pauling story linus Pauling, of course, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the nature of the chemical bond, which was just I mean, if you don't have to be a chemist his work in chemistry changed our lives in all sorts of ways. Esoteric and not so much. And then later on in life look, the fluid intelligence curve is the fluid intelligence curve. He won the Nobel Prize for work that he did in his 20s. They all win for work that they do in their twenty s and thirty s. They win it much later usually. But it's for work that they do when they have this maximum amount of this incredible ability to focus and to use their unbelievable cognitive ability to greatest innovative ends. Well, later on in his life he's like the man behind me on the plane or like so many other people, he's frustrated, obviously, and perhaps to keep the limelight or for whatever reason, he got more and more involved in activities that were really ostentatious and probably ill advised. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the limitation of nuclear arms. But he took the Lenin Prize in the Soviet Union around the same time and for the Lenin Peace Prize, really. And then later he went on to kind of a pseudoscience of massive doses of vitamins. He thought that vitamins could cure virtually all mental illness. He was also very interested in eugenics and the idea that you could find the propensity to commit crimes and you should put a tattoo on people for these. I mean, all kinds of stuff that's really anathema of what we think is moral and appropriate but also scientific today. And you would say that he's a person who was just desperate, desperate to stay on the first curve and he could have done a lot better by getting on the second curve. And so one of the things that I talk about in my work these days is how I can do it, how you can do it and how everybody can do it by thinking about what is it in our lives that's more fluid and what's more crystallized. And so I talk about startup entrepreneurs. They're much better later in life as venture capitalists because they have perspective and they're teachers but they're not going to be sitting in a room 16 hours a day writing code having people slip up pizza under the door. It's just not going to happen. If you're lawyers, for example, they're star litigators ninjas, kind of like soul cowboys early on and then later on they make better managing partners. People are better as crack employees earlier, better as managers later for people like you and me. We write the most innovative theoretical papers early in our academic careers but we're much better explainers and teachers later on in our career and each one of us can find our own crystallized intelligence curve. But if you don't, we'll be under you. If you stay handcuffed onto that fluid intelligence curve you're going to write it down to the basement and feel aggrieved for the rest of your life. How much of this is an actual difference in these subtypes of intelligence and how much of it is just energy and ambition and life circumstance? I mean many people delay having families. I guess this is not so true if you go back far enough in history. But you know, now it's certainly true that you know there's a period in your twenty s and even early to mid 30s where if you're playing an academic or entrepreneurial game and waiting for pizza to be pushed under the door you very likely don't have kids. And again, you've got, you've got a kind of endless energy just to, to burn the candle at both ends. How much of that is a variable here that could be confounding? How you're thinking about this? Well in the literature that's a, as you can imagine that's a big discussion. There is a work of both psychologists and neuroscientists that suggest that some of it is structural and the way that the brain works. But no doubt some of it is just the cadence of life. And part of the part that I find especially provocative and interesting is that I think that a lot of people, by the time they get into their 40s, have stopped falling for Mother Nature's tyrannical little trick, which is you're finally going to get that thing that you've always wanted, and it's going to be endlessly satisfying until the end of your life. After a while you start saying actually that's not true. The new car smell isn't going to last. That if I get that thing that I want in my career, if I invent the theorem or get the patent or get tenure or whatever your thing is or become the greatest French horn player in the world, if the things had gone my way. That it's actually just not as satisfying as you think it's going to be. And not for very long. And so that you start tempering your expectations that that has to be part of it too. No doubt these are separable things, but they're complementary to each other. They exacerbate each other, and they make it impossible for you to be able to be this kind of fluid genius that you were early on on the basis of man, I'm going to work till I drop. What are your thoughts about identity here and the normative degree to which it can be diminished or appropriately linked to something in your life? I know you touch on this in the book, but I don't think there was a moment where I clearly understood whether or not you and I view this in the same way. Just to give you my view, it feels to me, and this is you'll detect the Buddhist influence here, that the sanest relationship to identity is to basically have none, right? Or certainly to have none that is that is crystallized to any sort of point of being inflexible or, you know, when challenged, becomes a source of suffering. Right? It's just like there's no version of a self concept. Actually, you do, at one point invoke the term, actually the Buddhist term mana, which is usually translated as conceit. But I think you talk about it in the mode of just social comparison, right? Like comparing oneself favorably or unfavorably to others. And the insight here for me is that there really is no comparison to others. That is a psychologically healthy basis for satisfaction. If you're comparing yourself unfavorably to others, well, obviously that hurts, right? You're feeling diminished by proximity to others, but comparing yourself favorably to others also is just a very petty, morally impoverished place to be. How much does do you want your sense of well being to be predicated on looking down on your friends? If you're noticing that you're smarter or richer, better looking than your friends, and what does your friendship consist, right? If that's where you're finding your happiness. So my sense personally is that and I think it's what I believe philosophically, is that you just you want the fumes of identity to fully dissipate, and it's immensely freeing on some level not to know who one is in the world. I mean, it's not that you want your you want to be able to function. You don't want to have a kind of aphasia with respect to how you navigate social roles, right? I mean, you need to be able to say the appropriate and civil things on queue. You want to. Know how to dress for dinner, but to wear whatever self concept you have as lightly as possible so that it really is just not the place from which you're relating to the next moment of experience. That's what seems optimal to me. Is there any way in which you disagree with that? No, I just note there's no way that I disagree with that. I think that's exactly right. But I also will point out that that is not human nature. And that brings me to my sort of overarching point, which is that Mother Nature doesn't care if you're happy. Mother Nature has other goals for you. And the great crossing of circuits in the in the human mind, as far as I'm concerned, is that we want to be happy and we have urges for money and power and pleasure and fame. And the only way that we're going to know if we're successful along those dimensions is by comparing ourselves to other people. And we have brains, by the way. I mean, you can oxygenate your ventral striatum as well by having favorable social comparison as you can by taking methamphetamine. And you can get that, and it's a real reward, and people will be stuck on it, but it will not bring you ultimate happiness because happiness is not something on which we're sorting. But Mother Nature is not actually giving us this imperative, this evolutionary imperative. That's the important thing to keep in mind. And I think that that is entirely consistent with Buddhist teaching, also with Christian teaching. The idea that if it feels good, do it is not the best way to live your life. It's actually a foolish way to live your life and that you need to be in charge. You can't let your feelings manage you. You should work to manage yourself and to manage your feelings. And there's interesting, because other traditions look at it in a slightly different way. One that I find especially useful is the Hindus. They talk about atman, which is the best way to think about it in English, in the Western tradition, is that there's a difference between I and me. So I am an observer of the world. Me is an understanding of myself reflected through what Sam Harris thinks of me right now. And most people are all me and no I. Atman is the ultimate eye, and the Hindus believe that only atman can be in communion with Brahman, which is the Godhead. You can only really have a full communion with the universality of the true nature of things when you're just observing as opposed to understanding yourself in the reflection of what everybody else thinks. And boy, oh boy. I mean, that's the reason that people say that, for example, Zen Buddhism isn't a philosophy or let alone a religion. It's an attitude. It's inus it's outward facing observation of the world. And I think that this is a really important ambition for all of us. If we want to be best in our best nature, notwithstanding the fact that it's not very natural. Okay, well, so we've landed on this topic of religion, and no doubt my blasphemy or reputation for blasphemy will have preceded me. Really? I'd never hurt are you an atheist? I didn't know. So you can anticipate we might disagree about a few things here, but I'm just wondering, there's probably some useful venting of our different perspectives here that we could indulge. Why is, on your view, faith the right gesture, given our spiritual opportunities here? Why does this perhaps describe what your relationship is to faith here? Because obviously, I know it because I've read your book, but the audience won't. And then tell me what I guess you know what you mean by faith and and why is because on my account, faith is, in the usual sense, something I think we need to overcome, as opposed to something that is the spiritual center of the bullseye. So tell me what you mean by faith and what your faith is at this point. Faith. I'm talking about it in different ways as a Christian and then I do as a scientist. So when when I do my work, when I say faith, it's it's simply it's an abbreviation for living in a trend. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the con conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. OK. Well, today I'm speaking with Jack Goldstone. Jack is a sociologist and a professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, and he's one of the world experts on revolutions and the social and political and economic variables that produce them. He focuses a lot on economic growth in a global economy and on the effects of population change, on economic growth and how all this feeds into the causes and outcomes of revolutions. And I must say, I was very impressed with how clearly he frames these issues. And we talk about many of the relevant variables here. Inequality of various kinds, wealth inequality included, failures of social mobility, changes we might make to the tax code, new norms around social responsibility that we clearly need. I probably don't have to remind you that a few short weeks ago we witnessed the capital stormed by a mob whose diverse interests and commitments certainly included an intent to overthrow the government of the United States. So talking about the prospect of revolution at this point in American history doesn't seem as paranoid as it otherwise might. And I'm convinced that we really need to keep all of the trends that are leading to this level of political instability and hyperpartisanship in view. And this conversation is an excellent place to start. So now, without further delay, I bring you Jack goldstone. I am here with Jack Goldstone. Jack, thanks for joining me. My pleasure. Good to talk to you. So, before we dive into the matter at hand, how do you summarize your background? What's been your professional and academic focus? Well, academics would call me a sociologist, but my study is long term social change. I've looked at revolutions and social protests and changes of regime and government from about 1500 to the present. And this gives you an expertise that seems excruciatingly relevant at the current moment in American life. Really? Globally it seems relevant, but I think I want to focus on our own country here. We can go wherever in the world you like. I'm happy to travel. Yeah, I've noticed that in your work. Maybe we should start at least acknowledging the global nature of the phenomenon we're going to talk about and then we can talk about the American scene specifically. But we've seen that there's been a rise of populism and anti globalism nativism. There are many nouns that intersect. There's a loss of trust in institutions. What do we know about the sources of this kind of political instability and loss of social cohesion generally? What are the kinds of variables you think about when you try to understand these trends? Sure. Well, let me give you a general and then circle around to what's happening in the globe today in general, across the centuries, there's a pretty persistent pattern, and it goes back to some of the wisdom that Roman leaders shared among themselves. And that is when you work for honor, and the richest and most powerful members of society try to enrich and make their society as a whole stronger, the society flourishes. On the other hand, when the rich and powerful simply try to protect and extend their own wealth at the expense of others, the society sooner or later collapses. So that's the general picture. And you might say, well, elites know that. Why would they do that? The answer is, when a country gets rich and elites are in competition with each other, they often fall back on just kind of keeping score with how they do compared to their peers. And they think, well, the rest of society will just go on. It's not my problem, not my issue. And so then you get people trying to accumulate more and more wealth to protect it from taxation and to prevent public services from being fully funded. And all of that leads to the rest of society growing more and more angry because they have a sense that they're falling behind, they're being left out. The government no longer is watching out for them. And so they turn against it. They turn against the government, they turn against the elites. They get angry, and they look for ways to let that anger out, usually joining some radical or extremist movements. So that was a wonderful summary of a very depressing landscape to bring it to the US. Context here. How much do you view Trump and the four years we've just experienced as a mere symptom of these underlying problems? And the problems themselves were evident in 2015 and before. And how much do you view him as an exacerbator or cause of these problems? Well, he's certainly an exacerbator. He's not the underlying cause. And in fact, the underlying cause, and this is why it's a global phenomenon, has more to do with the changes in technology and society that we've seen in the last 30 years. We've had two things happen. One is that the big post World War II generations, what we call the baby boom in this country, post war surges elsewhere, they came of age in a time when manual labor was the key to the economy. People made things, they provided services, they got wealthy, or at least made stable good incomes doing that. And there was respect for people who made things and built things and did things with their hands. But as the baby boom got older, they found the rug pulled out from under them. The economy started to shift in the direction of finance. High finance loans, credit management of securities grew bigger and bigger, from like 5% of the economy to 15% of the economy. And the other thing that grew, of course, is the digital economy, which we're all familiar with and which we all enjoy. But the digital economy doesn't employ that many people, and it certainly doesn't give its rewards and respect to people doing manual labor. And so for the baby boomers, the life that they expected, the respect, the dignity that they had in work, they find is disappearing. Their communities are hurt by it. The prospects for their children, if they can't get into university, which is increasingly expensive and difficult, have diminished. So we've seen a slowdown in social mobility. At the same time, we've seen a reduction in the life quality and life prospects for those, especially in kind of the smaller towns, rural areas that were the farming manufacturing heartland. Now, the big metro areas have continued to thrive, but the big metro areas have their own issues. They tend to be very diverse. They have to deal with the issues of racial justice, discrimination, managing diversity. And that's another source of anger for those who feel that as immigrants, perhaps, or as people of color, society doesn't grant them dignity and respect either. And so you have, both on the left and the right, these kind of widespread feelings that, wait a minute, all the rewards of society seem to be going to a very small group, and they also seem to be taking over all the institutions, and they seem to be rigging everything in their favor. And what's going to become of us? We need someone to fight back against everything being rigged. And that leads to the attraction of kind of the populist strongman who says, I alone can fix it. I can be your champion, and produces, really, an almost quasi religious devotion to someone who presents themselves as a savior, as a national symbol of regeneration. Donald Trump came along and, with all the skills of a pro wrestling television celebrity, donned the mantle of hero and was very successful in that. But of course, he had counterparts in other countries bolsonaro in Brazil, duterte in the Philippines, erdogan in Turkey, boris Johnson and the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom. The details vary, but in each case, it's not been the leading edge economically of the society that's been driving change. It's been those who feel frustrated that they are not benefiting as much as those leading edge elites that they see. I think you wrote in a piece that you published with Peter Turchin, and I'm quoting you, inequality and polarization have not been this high since the 19th century. I think we're probably going to want to focus on wealth inequality, but what are the important measures of inequality. Can you put some numbers to this in the US. And is there anything other than wealth inequality that is a major driver of this problem? Well, there certainly are many inequalities besides just inequality of wealth, and inequality of wealth is probably not the most troubling. Oh, interesting, that's great, because my assumption coming into this conversation is that wealth inequality is really the elephant in every room now. And so, yeah, please fill in the gaps in my knowledge here. Okay, look, we've been through this before. We had the railroad robber barons, we had the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's build up huge amounts of wealth, but when they did so, other parts of society were benefiting as well. That is, the railroads and the oil industries employed lots of workers and gave them opportunities. What we've had in the last 30 years, with the rise of finance and digital fortunes, is the rich getting richer while everyone else stagnates or grows very slowly indeed. And it's more the differences in opportunity, in social mobility, in access to what I would call middle class amenities, a safe neighborhood, good schools for your children, medical care, the ability to have a varied diet. Those things have. Even though the price of a colored TV has gone way down, the price of a new automobile has gone way down the things that are essential to quality of family life remain competitive and therefore expensive and in many settings, increasingly beyond the reach both of young people and people who don't have college degree professional positions. Now, wealth inequality harms society. If those who are wealthy use that to get control of government policy and steer that wealth in ways that benefits themselves, if they are generous with the wealth and use it to endow museums, universities, to invest in new businesses, to rehabilitate districts, then that's fine, that's good for society. So a lot of it has to do with how wealth is deployed and how income and opportunities are distributed. And it's the fact that the use of private wealth and the distribution of opportunities really seems to have diminished for large portions of the population, maybe 30% to 50% in many of the advanced western countries. And so you have a lot of that anger. The, the yellow vests in France, people in Chile who rioted against their government, people in Brazil who rioted at the cost of bus fare going up. These are people who feel like they're just getting by, and every imposition upon them is increasingly pushing them over the edge. So fundamental psychological fact here, which is certainly an unhappy one, is that perpetual's personal judgments of wellbeing are generally comparative. So that even if by any absolute measure, everyone was getting better off, if the difference between the, the most fortunate and the least fortunate is continuing to widen, then that is seen as a source of real grievance and frustration. Even if everyone you know, you know, or virtually everyone has a smartphone in their pocket that not even the President of the United States could have managed to get 30 years ago. On some level, we seem to be doomed to dissatisfaction. No matter how good things get for everyone, if things are getting better and better and better faster, for a subset of the population at least, it seems like something like that structure is part of our legacy code. That's a pessimistic way of looking at it. Yes, there's always envy. People always feel down and out if they see others doing better than themselves. But people compare themselves mainly to other people they encounter in their own life. So if you're living in a subdivision or urban neighborhood, you don't really care whether the guy living on the 70th floor of a penthouse has a gold bathtub or a porcelain bathtub. You don't care whether he's keeping an 80 foot yacht in the harbor or a 50 foot yacht. Those things aren't relevant to you. What you care about is whether you're going to be able to move into a better house when you get married with room for your kids. Whether the people down the block or on just the other side of town who you see are somehow able to afford things that you can't afford anymore, that you thought you or your parents could afford. So you're right. There's always a degree of comparing ourselves to others, but it doesn't have to be the kind of, well, there always be people richer than me, so I'm always going to be unhappy. That's not how people are. As long as people feel that they're getting better, that they're getting ahead in their own lives, and that the progress that they're making is reasonable compared to most of the people they see immediately around them, they're usually quite pleased. Most people are not quite as prone to torment themselves with the envy of the rich as you might think. Otherwise there wouldn't be as much of a happy market for watching all those tales of the rich and famous. Those are like fairy tales that people hope will come true, but they don't actually hurt people's feelings. What hurts is if in their day to day lives, they feel stuck. If they feel that they can't live the way that their parents did or that they expected to do 1020 years ago. And they've been working hard to get ahead, and it just hasn't happened. So the circle of comparison is tighter than I suggested there. But it seems like this structure travels with us at every level of success in society. So you have billionaires who currently feel like they haven't made it financially because they can compare themselves to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, and you have people who have tens of millions of dollars who feel poor by reference to billionaires. And there's something insidious about this, because, as you say, if they were deploying their wealth in extremely prosocial and generous ways. It wouldn't represent a kind of toxic capture of resources. But I think if people feel they haven't made it, even when they have a billion dollars on some level, and they're keeping score with reference to the people who have ten or 100 fold more resources than they do, it either, erodes good norms we used to have. You can educate me on this point. I'm not sure how much we used to have them, or at least it prevents the formation of norms that we should have, which is people should see that one of the main reasons to be wealthy is to be able to help other people and produce the kind of society that we all want to live in, right. And not to allow that kind of abundance to become just a magnifying glass for the light of self concern to be even more concentrated at some point. You've got it. I think if we think about the elites having become more cosmopolitan and traveling to the same conferences and the same ritzy resorts and really being cut off in some ways from their society in which they grew up, that's a very unfortunate thing. Not that long ago, the rich might have lived in the fanciest part of town, but they attended public festivals and they attended church in the same town and in some of the same buildings and institutions as the other people who lived in that community. And the way the rich wanted to be remembered was as benefactors, as generous, whatever they were in their private lives, in their public lives, they wanted to be seen as people who were pillars of the community. And that phrase, the pillar of the community seems to have gone out of fashion. We used to talk about it being harder for a rich man to enter heaven right, than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The religious idea was virtue and honor were to be found in helping your fellow men. And today, I think Joe Biden actually believes in the ideal of public service. He is more interested in making 350,000,000 Americans better off than making himself better off. That has diminishing returns for him. But he will go to his grave delightfully happy if he has made all Americans better off. That's an old school ideal. I'm glad it's back in the presidency in the United States, and I hope it can spread. But that's what successful societies, frankly, rely on. If the richest and most powerful turn their backs on public welfare, then democracy doesn't make sense for people anymore. Because why should they vote for a government that ignores them and that concentrates its benefits on the rich? So if we want to restore and rejuvenate democracy, we need governments that function to provide broad general benefits again, not that simply exist to help those who have the best positions or the most capital get even further ahead. Well, it's interesting. It seems that there's a tension here because in my lexicon, personally, cosmopolitanism is not a pejorative term. To think of oneself more and more as a citizen of the world who's just open to the best ideas, whatever their provenance and whose circle of moral concern has extended beyond the borders of one's country to encompass all of civilization and to feel that we should be prioritizing. Certainly, some of our generosity much of our generosity along the lines of greatest need. Right? So to care about what's happening in some beleaguered place in sub Saharan Africa is not a misappropriation of one's compassion. In fact, it's just a recognition of one should be more moved than one tends to be by the greatest need. And kind of accidents of geographic distance are just that. They don't actually have ethical import, even though they feel they do. And if you tell me my neighbor's daughter fell down a well, then it's going to occupy all of my attention. And you tell me that there's a genocide raging in Sudan or some other place, and hundreds of thousands of children just like my neighbor's daughter have been killed, you know, I'm going to find that so boring that I'm going to switch to the channel when it appears on the evening news, right? So that seems like a bug in our code rather than a feature. So it seems like much of what you seem to have just derided or at least flagged as a source of political liability as cosmopolitanism is just an acknowledgment that so many of our problems are global now and that no, no one nation and so many of our opportunities are global, right? It's just that we are struggling to build a global civilization that actually works. And so our thinking on many points should be global. And it's actually all to the good that we wind up going to conferences where people from all over the world bring their best ideas and network. And yet one externality of that trend, it sounds like, is the complete erosion or near complete erosion of the very principles that would make a single country like our own work as a democracy. Well, I clearly hit a nerve here. Let me try and talk about cosmopolitanism in a way that avoids, I hope, some of these concerns about where do you do the most good? If you have a family and you're living in a house and as you say, your neighbor's daughter fell down a well, of course you're going to go help your neighbor and rescue the daughter. That's an imperative to do. On the other hand, let's say you hear that someone all across town, their daughter fell in a well, and you certainly would like to help if you didn't have any other priorities at home. But if your own daughter is upstairs sick with a fever and needs to be cared for, maybe she's just gotten out of surgery or she has a very high fever. You're not going to leave your own daughter, who is sick, to go help someone else, even if they need help, until your own house is in order. Now, when you asked me about different types of inequality, I said I wasn't focused on wealth. Let me talk about one that's really down to earth, and that is life expectancy, how long people live. America, along with the United Kingdom, was one of the only rich countries in the world where life expectancy started going down between 2015 and 2018. We've never had that in our history. It indicates that our society was suffering from illness. It was an illness of opioid addiction and other deaths of despair, alcoholism, suicide. Now, I do think it's important we have one planet, we have one climate. We all have to pitch in. I contribute money to medical charities overseas, as well as to hospitals here at home, because you're right, it is important to recognize we're all part of a global community. But we cannot neglect people who are really suffering, who are losing years of life here that they shouldn't be losing. And as I say, that was going on even before Trump was elected, as part of the reason I think he was elected. You can look at the vote for Trump against counties that had declines in life expectancy in the prior few years, and it's a very close match. It's one of the best predictors of Trump kind of voting as a protest, because you're unhappy with conditions in your community and your life. So when I say cosmopolitanism is a problem, it's only if people say that they think their country United States is fine, and we can look beyond that. You can look beyond your own country, but not if it blinds you to what's going on right in your own home. And I think this is something we missed. It really wasn't until Anne Case and Angus Deaton published their research, calling attention to the fact that life expectancy had started to go down, that it became an issue for policymakers and for the media. It went on for years, quietly, in communities across America without being appreciated. But we could have seen the precursors of it, I believe, by looking at changes in the distribution of income, in the distribution of opportunity and mobility in what was happening to the economic base of many rural and small town communities. So, by all means, be a cosmopolitan, but that also means get to know parts of your own country that you might not know as well. We talk about flyover and coastal elites. I find that kind of demeaning. I spend a lot of time when I was a kid taking buses across the country, listening to country western music. I still like to drive when I can from the East Coast to the west and see this big, beautiful country in between and get to know the people there. Because those are the people, at the end of the day whose choices as long as we live in a democracy, those are the peoples whose voices and whose choices will make a difference just as much as mine. And we have to come together and find things that will make everyone better off if we're going to keep democracy going. Otherwise we get into these historical cycles of selfish elites, angry popular groups, and the rise of populist leaders, demagogues and mass protest, and it gets violent, it gets ugly. And we've seen that and we need to change direction. So I guess where I want to land here in this conversation is with some sense of what we think we should do going forward. It seems like we have massive problems to solve, many of which are only exacerbating the problem we're talking about. We have to deal with the COVID pandemic, obviously, but the COVID pandemic has ramified and worsened various forms of inequality in our society. Certainly wealth is one. And I guess and we've begun this conversation framing it in terms of what the most fortunate people decide to do. Essentially we've put it in terms of philanthropy and charity. But really the other piece here is our tax code and the willingness or disinfectant inclination of rich people to pay what we might think as their fair share or more in taxes, and the degree to which they're going to fight any attempt to raise taxes. How do you view taxation here and any specific strategies we might use to redistribute wealth? Here's what I think the psychological status quo is here among fortunate wealthy people at every level. There's a sense that rather often the government is terrible at what it attempts to do right? There's a basic cynicism that the government can ever do anything especially well, and therefore you tend to encounter rich people who think that this offers some argument for not paying more in taxes because the money will be wasted or spent on some boondoggle. Whereas in my view, that's an argument for better governance. By all means, point out all the ways in which government fails and is wasteful. But that's not an argument at where you want to set the tax code. It's an argument for better government. But there's a sense that taxes are already too high. You run into this with disconcerting frequency among rich people, and therefore it's only rational to want to decide to give the money to the most effective causes oneself, rather than have the government waste it. So this explains a bias for philanthropy over taxation. But as we know, people aren't all that generous when they don't have to be, or at least most of them are not. So the amount that people actually give away, even when it's well publicized, is a rounding error on a rounding error of their wealth rather often, and it's certainly not what they would be obliged to give away if we raised taxes on them. So how do you view taxation here? And feel free to get into any specific ideas about how to change our tax code. Thank you for that invitation. Most people would like to tear up the existing tax code and start over. But let me say, from the point of view of my model, there are actually three things that need to be kept in mind as we try and pull our society back from the edge of extreme conflict and decay. One is restoring people's trust that government can function and can solve problems. The days when we looked to government to provide the interstate highway system, to build beautiful airports, to build subways, to take us to work, to provide law and order, to provide for the national defense, to send rockets to the moon, to develop new cures for disease. All of these things we trusted government to do reasonably well, and we thought they were prudent investments for the future. But, as you say, too many people now think that any dollar spent by government is wasted. And therefore even a dollar spent on an ultra premium whiskey for one person's consumption is still better than letting that money be wasted by the government. So that philosophy has to change. We have to say, look, there are legitimate things that government can do. And you know what? When there's a disaster, when even a rich person's land gets flooded or a tornado comes, they come to the government and say, what about restoring my property? What about fixing this? And so on. So government has to be seen as having a valid role in a complex, wealthy society. There are big problems, COVID-19 obviously a huge one that's hitting us in the face. But so too is climate change. As the Midwest is flooding and the California is burning and the Gulf Coast is being battered by repeated powerful hurricanes, we can't allow those things to double or triple and expect that quality of life will go on. So you're right. People have to recover a trust that government is worth funding. Otherwise everyone fights taxation. The second thing is that elites have to work together to find some common ground in what needs to be done to strengthen and improve society, as opposed to just being in competing camps, saying, this is what our group needs to do and we don't want you to be involved, and vice versa. If you have Republicans and Democrats or Tories and Socialists, whatever your divisions are, if instead of saying, yes, of course we have differences, we're human beings, but because we're human, we have some common needs and interests and we have to work hard to find them. If you put that task aside and just say, I want my group to win, we go back on the path toward, I'm not going to raise anyone's taxes because you might spend them on things that you want. And I think that's awful. And the. Other group will say, well, we're not going to raise taxes because you might spend it on things that you want, instead of saying, let's have an agenda for things that we agree we need, and then find a level of taxation that allows us to accomplish what is necessary. So you need to have government that's trusted. You need to have elites that work together. And then the third thing is you need people to feel the system is fair, that the taxes that they pay are not unfair compared to the taxes that others, especially the rich, pay. I mean, one of the big problems we have with the tax system now is not the rate of taxation, but the fact that so many assets and so much income escapes taxation altogether. It's in offshore LLCs, it's in real estate trusts, it's in exempt inheritance trusts. All of these things make the system unfair and give people a general hatred of taxation as just something else that's rigged. So we need to go back to fair enforcement, clear and understandable laws and a system that people believe in. Well, let's take the first piece. What do you think we can do? Because there's a kind of perverse, self fulfilling aspect to this. What can we do to increase trust in government? There really is a pervasive sense that virtually anything that can be handled by the private sector is better accomplished in the private sector. There are endless numbers of invidious comparisons between private businesses that have to function by the constraints of a market and the government simulate rims of those businesses. You compare FedEx to the post office, say, or any business you've ever had to deal with to the DMV, right? Like so it's just there's a sense that throwing more money at it from the government side just gets you a business that, you know, no one would ever direct their their money out if they had a choice. And so there's that kind of cynicism. How do you see us rebooting from where we currently are to a time where it would just be expected that if the government sets itself to a specific task, whether it's a space program or a public health emergency, it's going to do a a wonderful job at that task because many of the best people are involved. And it's all well funded and it's got its priorities straight and it's not captured by endless layers of bureaucrats who don't understand how the world works. How do we get to something like daylight here? You need a few big wins. I applaud President Joe Biden for making COVID-19 treatment and mitigation his first priority. This is clearly a job that private industry can develop. Vaccines. They're not going to distribute them. So getting vaccines into people's arms, making them safe, is a perfect example of the type of thing public health has been doing under government since the 19th century. And if we have a big success I think it'll be applauded. And we'll go a long way to making people say, you know, I'm glad the government was on the job. Now, if the government, as under Donald Trump says, well, you know, government can't do things, not really our responsibility. We'll just encourage private firms to make the vaccine and then we'll let people figure out how to get it. That's a disaster. That's what we're living through now. That's why even though the vaccines became available last fall, fewer than 5% of Americans have benefited from them. So we need government programs that are visible and that work. And it's not as rare as you think. People love Social Security. They fought bitterly against efforts to privatize it. Sometimes people don't realize it's a government program. They tell government, keep your hands off my Social Security. It's mine. Okay, but it came to you and still does come to you through your, through your government. Your local government provides police protection, provides fire protection. Your local government provides public schools. America has always been attached to private schools. I'm sorry. To public schools and the rich who feel, hey, I can send my kids to private school. You know, there tends to be a kind of let them eat cake view. That is, if you're wealthy enough, you can have beautiful private property. You don't need public parks. You can afford private schools. You don't need to pay for public schools for everybody else. You can afford private concierge medicine. You don't need to worry about public health. And that kind of let them eat cake goes to what happened in Iran in the 1970s, where you had such terrible traffic congestion that people couldn't get to work. And instead of building more roads, the Shah's son was quoted as saying, look, if people are unhappy with traffic congestion, you know, let them make some money and buy helicopters. That's the attitude that led to a revolution. Now, we're not as extreme there, but that's the endpoint of where elite selfishness and lack of understanding and empathy leads. If leaders have empathy for people, if they really do work to make government benefit, not just this interest group or that particular minority, but really help all Americans where all Americans need it, like with public health care, like public education, then we get back to people seeing government as a good thing, an important part of society. Yeah, I mean, this is something I'm, I'm really quite worried about now. I've been, I've been worried about this general topic at least since 2009, but oh, that's good for you. Yeah. But under COVID, I guess the specific case that I find alarming, and I'm not alone here, is what we've seen in California with the flight of many people in Tech to other states that just by coincidence don't have income tax. Right. So many people are going to Texas and Florida, and it's an unimpeachably rational decision if your concern is to make an immediate change in your own quality of life and to have it make sense on paper. If you're going to be essentially paid millions of dollars a year to live in another city that you like just as well as you like San Francisco before it was inundated with crime and homelessness, well, then why not do that? Why not move to Austin or Miami? It makes sense on every level, and yet it's part of the very trend you sketched out in the beginning of this conversation. It's a miniversion of cosmopolitanism. The fact that you were also deracinated, that any nice city will do. We're knowledge workers. We can work from anywhere. And COVID has really delivered that lesson to everyone who was available to it. So that what we're witnessing is just a flight of some of the most productive people in our society and the corresponding tax base to other states that have a different tax code. Not to get bogged down on this specific case, but I'm wondering what you think California should do in this case, because what we're suffering from here is just the fact that we have a tax system that can be gained simply by crossing a border. And the barrier to doing that is quite a bit lower than believing the United States would be, and therefore many, many people are doing it. Do you have any ideas for what California should do in light of if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Wake Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Today I'm speaking with Eliaser Yutkowski. Eliaser is a decision theorist and computer scientist at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, and he is known for his work on technological forecasting. His publications include a chapter in the Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence titled The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, which he co authored with Nick Bostrom. And Elias's writing has been extremely influential online, especially he's had blogs that have been read by the Smart Set in Silicon Valley for years. Many of those articles were pulled together in a book titled Rationality from AI to Zombies, which I highly recommend. And he has a new book out which is inadequate equilibria where and How Civilizations Get Stuck. And as you'll hear, Eliaser is a very interesting first principles kind of thinker of those smart people who are worried about AI. He is probably among the most worried, and his concerns have been largely responsible for kindling the conversation we've been having in recent years about AI safety and AI ethics. He's been very influential on many of the people who have made the same worried noises I have in the last couple of years. So in today's episode, you're getting it straight from the horse's mouth, and we cover more or less everything related to the question of why one should be worried about where this is all headed. So without further delay, I bring you Eliaser Yudkowski. I am here with ELLISER Yudkowski. Ellis or, thanks for coming on the podcast. You're quite welcome. Honor to be here. You have been a much requested guest over the years. You have quite the cult following for obvious reasons. For those who are not familiar with your work. They will understand the reasons once we get into talking about things. But you've also been very present online as a blogger. I don't know if you're still blogging a lot, but let's just summarize your background for a bit and then tell people what you have been doing intellectually for the last 20 years or so. I would describe myself as a decision theorist. A lot of other people would say that I'm an artificial intelligence, and in particular in the theory of how to make sufficiently advanced artificial intelligences that do a particular thing and don't destroy the world. As a side effect, I would call that AI alignment following Stuart Russell. Other people would call that AI control or AI safety or AI risk, none of which are terms that I really like. I also have an important sideline in the art of human rationality, the way of achieving the map that reflects the territory and figuring out how to navigate reality to where you want it to go from a probability theory, decision theory, cognitive biases perspective. I wrote two or three years of blog posts, one a day on that, and it was collected into a book called Rationality from AI to Zombies. Yeah, which I've read and which is really worth reading. You have a very clear and aphoristic way of writing. It's really quite wonderful. So I highly recommend that book. Thank you. Thank you. But your background is unconventional. So, for instance, you did not go to high school, correct? Let alone college or graduate school. Summarize that for us. The system didn't fit me that well, and I'm good at self teaching. I guess when I started out, I thought I was going to go into something like evolutionary psychology or possibly neuroscience, and then I discovered probability theory, statistics, decision theory, and came to specialize in that more and more over the years. How did you not wind up going to high school? What was that decision like? Sort of like mental crash around the time I hit puberty, or like physical crash even. And I just did not have the stamina to make it through a whole day of classes at the time. I'm not sure how well I do trying to go to high school now, honestly, but it was clear that I could self teach, so that's what I did. And where did you grow up? Chicago, Illinois. Okay, well, let's fast forward to sort of the center of the bullseye for your intellectual life here you have a new book out, which we'll talk about. Second. Your new book is inadequate. Equilibria where and How Civilizations Get stuck. And unfortunately, I've only read half of that, which I'm also enjoying. I've certainly read enough to start a conversation on that. But we should start with artificial intelligence, because it's a topic that I've touched a bunch on the podcast, which you have strong opinions about, and it's really how we came together. You and I first met at that conference in Puerto Rico, which was the first of these AI safety alignment discussions that I was aware of. I'm sure there have been others, but that was a pretty interesting gathering. So let's talk about AI and the possible problem with where we're headed and the near term problem that many people in the field and at the periphery of the field don't seem to take the problem as we conceive it seriously. Let's just start with the basic picture and define some terms. I suppose we should define intelligence first and then jump into the differences between strong and weak or general versus narrow AI. Do you want to start us off on that? Sure. Preamble disclaimer, though the field in general, like, not everyone you would ask would give you the same definition of intelligence. And a lot of times in cases like those, it's good to sort of go back to observational basics. We know that in a certain way, human beings seem a lot more competent than chimpanzees, which seems to be a similar dimension to the one where chimpanzees are more competent than mice, or that mice are more competent than spiders. And people have tried various theories about what this dimension is. They've tried various definitions of it. But if you went back a few centuries and asked somebody to define fire. The less wise ones would say ah, fire is the release of phlogiston. Fire is one of the four elements. And the truly wise ones would say, well, fire is the sort of orangey bright hot stuff that comes out of wood and like spreads along wood. And they would tell you what it looked like and put that prior to their theories of what it was. So what this mysterious thing looks like is that humans can build space shuttles and go to the Moon and mice can't. We think it has something to do with our brains? Yeah, I think we can make it more abstract than that. Tell me if you think this is not generic enough to be accepted by most people in the field. It's whatever intelligence may be in specific context, generally speaking, it's the ability to meet goals perhaps across a diverse range of environments. And we might want to add that it's at least implicit in intelligence that interests us. It means an ability to do this flexibly rather than by rote following the same strategy again and again blindly. Does that seem like a reasonable starting point? I think that that would get fairly widespread agreement and it like matches up well with some of the things that are in AI textbooks. If I'm allowed to sort of take it a bit further and begin injecting my own viewpoint into it, I would refine it and say that by achieve goals we mean something like squeezing the measure of possible futures higher in your preference ordering. If we took all the possible outcomes and we ranked them from the ones you like least to the ones you like most, then as you achieve your goals, you're sort of like squeezing the outcomes higher in your preference ordering. You're narrowing down what the outcome would be to be something more like what you want, even though you might not be able to narrow it down very exactly. Flexibility generality humans are much more domain general than mice. Bees build highs, beavers build dams. A human will look over both of them and envision a honeycomb structured dam. We are able to operate even on the moon, which is very unlike the environment where we evolved. In fact, our only competitor in terms of general optimization, where optimization is that sort of narrowing of the future that I talked about. Our competitor in terms of general optimization is natural selection. Like natural selection built beavers that built bees that sort of implicitly built the spider's web in the course of building spiders. And we as humans have this similar very broad range handle this like, huge variety of problems. And the key to that is our ability to learn things that natural selection did not pre program us with. So learning is the key to generality. I expect that not many people in AI would disagree with that part either. Right? So it seems that goal directed behavior is implicit in this or even explicit in this definition of intelligence. And so whatever intelligence is, it is inseparable from the kinds of behavior in the world that results in the fulfillment of goals. So we're talking about agents that can do things. And once you see that, then it becomes pretty clear that if we build systems that harbor primary goals, there are cartoon examples here like making paper clips. These are not systems that will spontaneously decide that they could be doing more enlightened things than, say, making paper clips. This moves to the question of how deeply unfamiliar artificial intelligence might be because there are no natural goals that will arrive in these systems apart from the ones we put in there. And we have common sense intuitions that make it very difficult for us to think about how strange an artificial intelligence could be, even one that becomes more and more competent to meet its goals. Let's talk about the frontiers of strangeness in AI as we move from again, I think we have a couple more definitions we should probably put in play here. Differentiating strong and weak or general and narrow intelligence? Well, to differentiate general and narrow, I would say that well, I mean, this is like, on the one hand, theoretically a spectrum, and on the other hand, there seems to have been like a very sharp jump in generality between chimpanzees and humans. So breadth of domain driven by breadth of learning, like DeepMind, for example, recently built AlphaGo, and I lost some money betting that AlphaGo would not defeat the human champion, which it promptly did. And then a successor to that was AlphaZero. And AlphaGo was specialized on go. It could learn to play Go better than its starting point for playing Go, but it couldn't learn to do anything else. And then they simplified the architecture for AlphaGo. They figured out ways to do all the things it was doing in more and more general ways. They discarded the opening book, like all the sort of human experience of Go that was built into it. They were able to discard all of the sort of like programmatic special features that detected features of the Go board. They figured out how to do that in simpler ways. And because they figured out how to do it in simpler ways, they were able to generalize to AlphaZero, which learned how to play chess using the same architecture. They took a single AI and got it to learn Go and then reran it and made it learn chess. Now, that's not human general, but it's like a step forward in generality of the sort that we're talking about. Am I right in thinking that that's a pretty enormous breakthrough? I mean, there's two things here. There's the step to that degree of generality, but there's also the fact that they built a Go engine. I forget if it was a Go or a chess or both, which basically surpassed all of the specialized AIS on those games over the course of a day. Right. Isn't the chess engine of alpha zero better than any dedicated chess computer ever? And didn't it achieve that just with astonishing speed? Well, there was actually, like, some amount of debate afterwards whether or not the version of the chess engine that it was tested against was truly optimal. But even to the extent that it was in that narrow range of the best existing chess engine, as as Max Tegmark put it, the the real story wasn't in how alpha Go beat human chess human Go players. It's in it's how Alpha zero beat human Go game ghost Go system programmers and human chess system programmers. People had put years and years of effort into accreting all of the special purpose code that would play chess well and efficiently. And then AlphaZero blew up to and possibly past that point in a day. And if it hasn't already gone past it, well, it would be past it by now if DeepMind kept working on it, although they've now basically declared victory and shut down that project, as I understand it. Okay, so talk about the distinction between general and narrow intelligence a little bit more. So we have this feature of our minds most conspicuously, where we're general problem solvers. We can learn new things. And our learning in one area doesn't require a fundamental rewriting of our code. Our knowledge in one area isn't so brittle as to be degraded by our acquiring knowledge in some new area. Or at least this is not a general problem which erodes our understanding again and again. And we don't yet have computers that can do this, but we're seeing the signs of moving in that direction. And so then it's often imagined that there's a kind of near term goal which has always struck me as a mirage of so called human level general AI. I don't see how that phrase will ever mean much of anything, given that all of the narrow AI we've built thus far is superhuman within the domain of its applications. The calculator in my phone is superhuman for arithmetic. Any general AI that also has my phone's ability to calculate will be superhuman for arithmetic. But we must presume it'll be superhuman for all of the dozens or hundreds of specific human talents we've put into it, whether it's facial recognition or just obviously, memory will be superhuman unless we decide to consciously degrade it. Access to the world's data will be superhuman unless we isolate it from data. Do you see this notion of human level AI as a landmark on the timeline of our development, or is it just never going to be reached? I think that a lot of people in the field would agree that human level AI defined us literally at the human level, neither above nor below, across a wide range of competencies is a straw target an impossible mirage. Right now it seems like AI is clearly dumber and less general than us. Or rather that if we're put into a sort of like real world, lots of things going on, context that places demands on generality, then AIS are not really in the game. Yet humans are clearly way ahead and more controversially. I would say that we can imagine a state where the AI is clearly way ahead, where it is across sort of every kind of cognitive competency, barring some very narrow ones that aren't deeply influential of the others. Like, maybe chimpanzees are better at using a stick to draw ants from an anthive and eat them than humans are, though no, humans have really, like, practiced that to world championship level. Exactly. But there's a sort of general factor of how good at you are. You at it when reality throws you a complicated problem at this. Chimpanzees are clearly not better than humans. Humans are clearly better than chimps. Even you can manage to narrow down one thing the chimp is better at, the thing the chimp is better at doesn't play a big role in our global economy. It's not an input that feeds into lots of other things. So we can clearly imagine, I would say, like, there are some people who say this is not possible. I think they're wrong. But it seems to me that it is perfectly coherent to imagine an AI that is better at everything, or almost everything than we are, and such that if it was like building an economy with lots of inputs, humans would have around the same level input into that economy as the chimpanzees have into ours. Yeah. So what you're gesturing at here is a continuum of intelligence that I think most people never think about. And because they don't think about it, they have a default doubt that it exists. I think when people and this is a point I know you've made in your writing, and I'm sure it's a point that Nick Bostrom made somewhere in his book Superintelligence. It's this idea that there's a huge blank space on the map past the most well advertised exemplars of human brilliance, where we don't imagine what it would be like to be five times smarter than the smartest person we could name, and we don't even know what that would consist in. Right. Because if chimps could be given to wonder what it would be like to be five times smarter than the smartest chimp, they're not going to represent for themselves all of the things that we're doing that they can't even dimly conceive. There's a kind of disjunction that comes with more. There's a phrase used in military context. I don't think the quote is actually it's variously attributed to Stalin and Napoleon. And I think Klauswitz, like half a dozen people who have claimed this quote. The quote is, sometimes quantity has equality all its own. As you ramp up in intelligence whatever it is at the level of information processing, spaces of inquiry and ideation and experience begin to open up and we can't necessarily predict what they would be from where we sit. How do you think about this continuum of intelligence beyond what we currently know in light of what we're talking about? Well, the unknowable is a concept you have to be very careful with because the thing you can't figure out in the first 30 seconds of thinking about it, sometimes you can figure it out if you think for another five minutes. So in particular, I think that there's a certain narrow kind of unpredictability which does seem to be plausibly, in some sense essential, which is that for AlphaGo to play better Go than the best human Go players, it must be the case that the best human Go players cannot predict exactly where on the Go board AlphaGo will play. If they could predict exactly where AlphaGo would play, AlphaGo would be no smarter than them. On the other hand, AlphaGo's programmers and the people who knew what AlphaGo's programmers were trying to do, or even just the people who watched AlphaGo play could say, well, I think the system is going to play such that it will win at the end of the game. Even if they couldn't predict exactly where it would move on the board. So similarly there's a sort of like not short or not necessarily slam dunk or not like immediately obvious chain of reasoning which says that it is okay for us to reason about aligned or even unaligned artificial general intelligences of sufficient power, as if they're trying to do something but we don't necessarily know what. But from our perspective that still has consequences even though we can't predict in advance exactly how they're going to do it. I think we should define this notion of alignment. What do you mean by alignment as in the alignment problem? Well, it's sort of like a big problem and it does have some moral and ethical aspects which are not as important as the technical aspects or pardon me, they're not as difficult as the technical aspects. They couldn't exactly be less important. But broadly speaking it's an AI where you can sort of say what it's trying to do and there are sort of like narrow conceptions of alignment which is you are trying to get it to do something like cure Alzheimer's disease without destroying the rest of the world. And there's sort of much more ambitious notions of alignment which is you are trying to get it to do the right thing and achieve a happy intergalactic civilization. But both of the sort of narrow alignment and the ambitious alignment have in common that you're trying to have the AI do that thing rather than making a lot of paperclips right. For those who have not followed this conversation before, we should cash out this reference to paper clips which I made at the opening does this thought experiment originate with Bostrom or did he take it from somebody else? As far as I know, it's me. Oh, it's you. Okay, well, then it could still be Bostrom. Like, I sort of like, asked somebody like, do you remember who it was? And they searched through the archives of a mailing list where this idea plausibly originated. And if it originated there, then I was the first one to say paper clips. All right, well, then by all means, please summarize this thought experiment for us. Well, the original thing was somebody saying that expressing a sentiment along the lines of artificial, who are we to constrain the path of things smarter than us? They will create something in the future. We don't know what it will be, but it will be very worthwhile. We shouldn't stand in the way of that. The sentiments behind this are something that I have a great deal of sympathy for. I think the model of the world is wrong. I think they're factually wrong about what happens when you sort of take a random AI and make it much bigger. And in particular, I said the thing I'm worried about is that it's going to end up with a randomly rolled utility function whose maximum happens to be a particular kind of tiny molecular shape that looks like a paperclip. And that was like the original paperclip maximizer scenario. It sort of got a little bit distorted and being whispered on into the notion of somebody builds a paperclip factory and the AI in charge of the paperclip factory takes over the universe and turns it all into paperclips. There was like a lovely online game about it even. But this still sort of cuts against a couple of key points. One is the problem isn't that paperclip factory AI spontaneously wake up wherever the first artificial general intelligence is from, it's going to be in a research lab specifically dedicated to doing it for the same reason that the first airplane didn't spontaneously assemble in a junk heap. And the people who are doing this are not dumb enough to tell their AI to make paper clips or make money or end all war. These are Hollywood movie plots that the script writers do because they need a story conflict. And the story conflict requires that somebody be stupid. So the people at Google are not dumb enough to build an AI and tell to make paper clips. The problem I'm worried about is that it's technically difficult to get the AI to have a particular goal set and keep that goal set and implement that goal set in the real world. And so what it does instead is something random. For example, making paper clips where paper clips are meant to stand in for something that is worthless, even from a very cosmopolitan perspective, even if we're trying to take a very embracing view of the nice possibilities and accept that there may be things that we wouldn't even understand that. If we did understand them, we would comprehend to be a very high value. Paperclips are not one of those things. No matter how long you stay at a paperclip, it still seems pretty pointless from our perspective. So that is the concern about the future being ruined, the future being lost, the future being turned into paper clips. One thing this thought experiment does. It also cuts against the assumption that a sufficiently intelligent system, a system that is more competent than we are in some general sense, would by definition, only form goals or only be driven by a utility function that we would recognize as being ethical or wise and would, by definition, be aligned with our better interests. We're not going to build something that is superhuman in competence, that could be moving along some path that's as incompatible with our wellbeing as turning every spare atom on earth into a paperclip. But you don't get our common sense unless you program it into the machine. And you don't get a guarantee of perfect alignment or perfect corridability. The ability for us to be able to say, well, that's not what we meant, come back unless that is successfully built into the machine. So this alignment problem is the general concern is that we could build even with the seemingly best goals put in, we could build something that especially in the case of something that makes changes to itself and we'll talk about this the idea that these systems could become selfimproving. We can build something whose future behavior in the service of specific goals isn't totally predictable by us. If we gave it the goal to cure Alzheimer's, there are many things that are incompatible with it fulfilling that goal. One of those things is our turn it off. We have to have a machine that will let us turn it off even though its primary goal is to cure Alzheimer's. I know I interrupted you before you wanted to give an example of the alignment problem, but did I just say anything that you don't agree with or are we still on the same map? Well, we're still on the same map. I agree with most of it. I would, of course, have this giant pack of careful definitions and explanations built on careful definitions and explanations to go through everything you just said. Possibly not for the best, but there it is. Stewart Russell put it you can't bring the coffee if you're dead pointing out that if you have a sufficiently intelligent system whose goal is to bring you coffee, even that system has an implicit strategy of not letting you switch it off, assuming that all you told it what to do is bring the coffee, right? I do think that a lot of people listening may want us to back up and talk about the question of whether you can have something that feels to them like it's so smart and so stupid at the same time. Is that a realizable way an intelligence can be? Yeah. And that is one of the virtues or one of the confusing elements, depending on where you come down on this, of this thought experiment of the paperclip maximizer. Right. So I think that there are sort of narratives there's like multiple narratives about AI. And I think that the technical truth is something that doesn't fit into any sort of any of the obvious narratives. For example, I think that there are people who have a lot of respect for intelligence. They are happy to envision an AI that is very intelligent. It seems intuitively obvious to them that this carries with it tremendous power. And at the same time, their sort of respect for the concept of intelligence leads them to wonder at the concept of the paperclip maximizer. Why is this very smart thing just making paperclips? There's similarly another narrative which says that AI is sort of lifeless, unreflective, just does what it's told. And to these people, it's perfectly obvious that an AI might just go on making paper clips together. And for them, the hard part of the story to swallow is the idea that machines can get that powerful. Those are two hugely useful categories of disparagement of your thesis here. I wouldn't say disparagement. These are just initial reactions. These are people you have right? Yeah. Talking to you. Yeah. So let me reboot that those are two hugely useful categories of doubt with respect to your thesis here or the concerns we're expressing. I just want to point out that both have been put forward on this podcast. The first was by David Deutsch, the physicist who imagines that whatever AI we build, and he certainly thinks we will build it, will be by definition an extension of us. He thinks the best analogy is to think of our future descendants. These will be our children. The teenagers of the future may have different values than we do, but these values and their proliferation will be continuous with our values and our culture and our memes, and there won't be some radical discontinuity that we need to worry about. And so there's that one basis for lack of concern. This is an extension of ourselves and it will inherit our values, improve upon our values. And there's really no place where things where we reach any kind of cliff that we need to worry about. And the other non concern you just raised was expressed by Neil degrasse Tyson on this podcast. He says things like, well, if the AI just starts making too many paper clips, I'll just unplug it or I'll take out a shotgun and shoot it. The idea that this thing, because we made it, could be easily switched off at any point, we decide it's not working correctly. I think it'd be very useful to get your response to both of those species of doubt about the alignment problem. So a couple of. Preamble remarks. One is by definition, we don't care what's true by definition here, or as Einstein put it, insofar as the equations of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality, and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain. Let's say somebody says men by definition are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. Okay, suppose that Socrates actually lives for a thousand years, the person goes, ah, well then by definition Socrates is not a man. So similarly you could say that by definition an artificial intelligence is nice, or like a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence is nice. And what if it isn't nice and we see it go off and build a Dyson sphere? Ah, well then by definition it wasn't what I meant by intelligent. Well, OK, but it's still over there building Dyson spheres. And the first thing I'd want to say is this is an empirical question. We have a question of what certain classes of computational systems actually do when you switch them on. It can't be settled by definitions, it can't be settled by how you define intelligence. There could be some sort of a priori truth that is deep about how, if it has property A, it like almost certainly has property B, unless the laws of physics are being violated. But this is not something you can build into how you define your terms. And I think just to do justice to David Deutsche's Doubt here, I don't think he's saying it's impossible, empirically impossible, that we could build a system that would destroy us. It's just that we would have to be so stupid to take that path, that we are incredibly unlikely to take that path. The super intelligent systems we will build will be built with enough background concern for their safety that there's no special concern here with respect to how they might develop. And the next preamble I want to give is, well, maybe this sounds a bit snooty, maybe it sounds like I'm trying to take a superior vantage point. But nonetheless, my claim is not that there is a grand narrative that makes it emotionally consonant, that paperclip maximizers are a thing. I'm claiming this is true for technical reasons, like this is true as a matter of computer science. And the question is not which of these different narratives seems to resonate most with your soul, it's what's actually going to happen. What do you think you know, how do you think you know it? The particular position that I'm defending is one that somebody, I think Nick Bostrom named the orthogonality thesis. And the way I would phrase it is that you can have sort of arbitrarily powerful intelligence with no defects of that intelligence, no defects of reflectivity. It doesn't need an elaborate special case in the code, doesn't need to be put together in some very weird way that pursues arbitrary tractable goals, including, for example, making paper clips. The way I would put it to somebody who's initially coming in from the first viewpoint, the viewpoint that respects intelligence and wants to know why this intelligence would be doing something so pointless, is that the thesis? The claim I'm making that I'm going to defend is as follows imagine that somebody from another dimension, the like standard philosophical troll, omega, it's always called Omega in the philosophy papers, comes along and offers our civilization a million dollars worth of resources per paper clip that we manufacture. If this was the challenge that we got, we could figure out how to make a lot of paperclips. We wouldn't forget to do things like continue to harvest food so we could go on making paper clips, we wouldn't forget to perform scientific research so we could discover better ways of making paper clips. We would be able to come up with genuinely effective strategies for making a whole lot of paperclips, or similarly, an intergalactic civilization. If Omega comes by from other dimension and says, I'll give you a whole universe is full of resources for every paper clip you make over the next thousand years, that intergalactic civilization could intelligently figure out how to make a whole lot of paperclips to get at those resources that Omega is offering. And they wouldn't forget how to keep the light turns on either. And they would also understand concepts like if some aliens start a war with them, you've got to prevent the aliens from destroying you in order to go on making the paperclips. So the orthogonality thesis is that an intelligence that pursues paperclips for their own sake, because that's what its utility function is, can be just as effective, as efficient as the whole intergalactic civilization that is being paid to make paper clips. That the paperclip maximizer does not suffer any deflective, reflectivity any defective efficiency from needing to be put together in some weird special way to be built so as to pursue paperclips. And that's the thing that I think is true as a matter of computer science, not as a matter of fitting with a particular narrative. That's just the way the dice turn out, right? So what is the implication of that thesis? It's orthogonal with respect to what? Intelligence and goals? Not to be pedantic here, but let's define orthogonal for those for whom it's not a familiar term. Oh, the original orthogonal means at right angles. Like, if you imagine a graph with an x axis and a y axis, if things can vary freely along the x axis and freely along the y axis at the same time, that's like orthogonal. You can move in one direction that's at right angles to another direction without affecting where you are in the first dimension, right? So, generally speaking, when we say that some set of concerns is orthogonal to another, it's just that there's no direct implication from one to the other. Some people think that facts and values are orthogonal to one another. So we can have all the facts there are to know, but that wouldn't tell us what is good. What is good has to be pursued in some other domain. I don't happen to agree with that, as you know. But that's an example. I don't technically agree with it either. What I would say is that the facts are not motivating. You can know all there is to know about what is good and still make paper clips. That's the way I would phrase that. I wasn't connecting that example to the present conversation, but yeah. So in the case of the paperclip maximizer, what is orthogonal here, intelligence is orthogonal to anything else we might think is good, right? I mean, I would potentially object a little bit to the way that Nick Bostrom took the word orthogonality for that thesis. I think, for example, that if you have humans and you make the humans smarter, this is not orthogonal to the humans values. It is certainly possible to have agents such that as they get smarter, what they would report as their utility functions will change. A paperclip maximizer is not one of those agents, but humans are. Right. But if we do continue to define intelligence as an ability to meet your goals, well, then we can be agnostic as to what those goals are. You take the most intelligent person on earth you could imagine, his evil brother, who is more intelligent still, but he just has bad goals or goals that we would think are bad. He could be the most brilliant psychopath ever. I mean, I think that that example might be unconvincing to somebody who's coming in with a suspicion that intelligence and values are correlated. They would be like, well, has that been historically true? Is this, is this psychopath actually suffering from some defect in his brain where you give him pill, you fix the defect. They're not a psychopath anymore. Like, like I think that they would that this sort of imaginary examples is one that they might not find fully convincing for that reason. Well, the truth is, I'm actually one of those people in that I do think there's certain goals and certain things that we may become smarter and smarter with respect to like human well being. These are places where intelligence does converge with other kinds of value laden qualities of a mind, but generally speaking, they can be kept apart for a very long time. So if you're just talking about an ability to turn matter into useful objects or extract energy from the environment to do the same, this can be pursued with the purpose of tiling the world with paper clips or not. And it just seems like there's no law of nature that would prevent an intelligent system from doing that. The way I would sort of like rephrase the fact values things is we all know about David Hume and the Hume's Razor. The Is does not imply ought way of looking at it. I would slightly rephrase that so as to make it more of a claim about computer science, which is what you observed is that there are some sentences that involve an is, some sentences involve OTS. And you can't seem to get. And if you start from sentences that only have is, you can't get to the sentences that involve OTS without an OT introduction rule or assuming some other previous OT. The sun is currently cloudy outside. That's like a statement of simple fact. Does it therefore follow that I shouldn't go for a walk? Well, only if you previously have the generalization. When it is cloudy, you should not go for a walk. And everything that you might use to derive an OT, would it be a sentence that involves words like better or should or preferable and things like that? You only get odds from other OTS. And that's the Hume version of the thesis. And the way I would say is that there's a separable core of Is questions. In other words, okay, I will let you have all of your auth sentences, but I'm also going to carve out this whole world full of Is sentences that only need other Is sentences to derive them. Yeah, well, I don't even know that we need to resolve this. For instance, I think the Is ought distinction is ultimately specious, and this is something that I've argued about when I talk about morality and values and the connection to facts. But I can still grant that it is logically possible, and I would certainly imagine physically possible to have a system that has a utility function that is sufficiently strange that scaling up its intelligence doesn't get you values that we would recognize as good. It certainly doesn't guarantee values that are compatible with our wellbeing, whether a paperclip maximizer is too specialized a case to motivate this conversation. There's certainly something that we could fail to put into a superhuman AI that we really would want to put in so as to make it aligned with us. I mean, the way I would phrase it is that it's not that the paperclip maximizer has a different set of odds, but that we can see it as running entirely on Is questions. That's where I was going with them. It's not that humans have there's this sort of intuitive way of thinking about it, which is that there's this sort of ill understood connection between Is and ought. And maybe that allows a paperclip maximizer to have a different set of OTS, a different set of things that play in its mind the role that ought to play in our mind. But then why wouldn't you say the same thing of us? The truth is, I actually do say the same thing of us. I think we're running on Is questions as well. We have an odd laden way of talking about certain Is questions, and we're so used to it that we don't even think they are is questions. But I think you could do the same analysis on a human being. The question how many paperclips result if I follow this policy is an is question. The question what is a policy such that it leads to a very large number of paperclips? Is an is question. These two questions together form a paperclip maximizer. You don't need anything else. All you need is a certain kind of system that repeatedly asks the is question what leads to the greatest number of paperclips? And then does that thing even if the things that we think of as odd questions are very complicated and disguised, is questions that are influenced by what policy results in how many people being happy and so on. Yeah, well, it's exactly the way I think about morality. I've been describing it as a navigation problem. We're navigating in the space of possible experiences and that includes everything we can care about or claim to care about. This is a consequentialist picture of the consequences of actions and ways of thinking. And so anything you can tell me that is or at least this is my claim anything that you can tell me is a moral principle that is a matter of oughts and shoulds and not otherwise susceptible to a consequentialist analysis. I feel I can translate that back into a consequentialist way of speaking about facts. These are just his questions. Just what actually happens to all the relevant minds without remainder. And I've yet to find an example of somebody giving me a real moral concern that wasn't at bottom a matter of the actual or possible consequences on conscious creatures somewhere in our light cone. But that's the sort of thing that you are built to care about. It is a fact about the kind of mind you are that presented with these answers to these is questions. It hooks up to your motor output. It can cause your fingers to move, your lips to move. And a paperclip maximizer is built so as to respond to is questions about paperclips, not about what is right and what is good and the greatest flourishing of sentient beings and so on. Exactly. I can well imagine that such minds could exist. And even more likely, perhaps I can well imagine that we will build superintelligent AI that will pass the Turing test. It will seem human to us. It will seem superhuman because it will be so much smarter and faster than a normal human. But it'll be built in a way that will resonate with us as a kind of person. I mean, it will not only recognize our emotions because we'll want it to. I mean, perhaps not every AI will be given these qualities. Just imagine the ultimate version of the AI personal assistant Siri becomes superhuman. We'll want that interface to be something that's very easy to relate to. And so we'll have a very friendly, very human like front end to that. And insofar as this thing thinks faster and better thoughts than any person you've ever met, it will pass as superhuman. But I could well imagine that we will leave not perfectly understanding what it is to be human and what it is that will constrain our conversation with one another over the next thousand years with respect to what is good and desirable and just how many paper clips we want on our desks. We will leave something out or we will have put in some process whereby this intelligence system can improve itself that will cause it to migrate away from some equilibrium that we actually want it to stay in so as to be compatible with our well being. Again, this is the alignment problem. First, to back up for a second, I just introduced this concept of self improvement is the alignment problem. It's distinct from this additional wrinkle of building machines that can become recursively self improving. But do you think that the self improving prospect is the thing that really motivates this concern about alignment? Well, I certainly would have been a lot more focused on self improvement, say ten years ago, before the modern revolution in artificial intelligence, because it now seems significantly more probable and AI might need to do significantly less self improvement before getting to the point where it's powerful enough that we need to start worrying about alignment AlphaZero. To take the obvious case, no, it's not general. But if you had general AlphaZero, well, I mean, this AlphaZero got to be superhuman in the domains it was working on without understanding itself and redesigning itself in a deep way. There's gradient descent mechanisms built into it. There's a system that improves another part of the system. It is reacting to its own previous plays and doing the next play. But it's not like a human being sitting down and thinking like, okay, well, how do I redesign the next generation of human beings using genetic engineering? AlphaZero is not like that. And so now seems more plausible that we could get into a regime where AI can do dangerous things or useful things without having previously done a complete rewrite of themselves, which is like, from my perspective, a pretty interesting development. I do think that when you have things that are very powerful and smart, they will redesign and improve themselves unless that is otherwise prevented for some reason or another. Maybe you built an aligned system and you have the ability to tell it not to self improve quite so hard, and you asked it to not self improve hard that you can understand it better. But if you lose control of the system, if you don't understand what it's doing, and it's very smart, it's going to be improving itself, because why wouldn't it? That's one of the things you do almost no matter what your utility function is, right? So I feel like we've addressed deutsche's Non concern to some degree here I don't think we've addressed Neil degrasse Tyson so much. This intuition that you could just shut it down. This would be a good place to introduce this notion of the AI in a box thought experiment, because this is something for which you are famous online. I'll just set you up here. The idea that and this is a plausible research paradigm, obviously. In fact, I would say a necessary one. Anyone who's building something that stands a chance of becoming super intelligent should be building it in a condition where it can't get out into the wild. It's not hooked up to the Internet. It's not in our financial markets, doesn't have access to everyone's bank records. It's in a box. That's not going to save you from something that's significantly smarter than you are. Okay, so let's talk about this. So the intuition is we're not going to be so stupid as to release this onto the Internet. I'm not even sure that's true, but let's just assume we're not that stupid. Neil degrasse Tyson says, well, then I'll just take out a gun and shoot it or unplug it. Why is this AI in a box picture not as stable as people think? Well, I'd say that Neil degrasse Tyson is failing to to respect the AI's intelligence. The point of asking what he would do if he were inside a box with somebody pointing a gun at him and he's smarter than the thing on the outside of the box. This Neil degrasse Tyson going to be, you men, give me all of your money and connect me to the Internet so the human can be like, Haha, no, and shoot it. That's not a very clever thing to do. This is not something that you do if you have a good model of the human outside the box and you're trying to figure out how to cause there to be a lot of paper clips in the future. And I would just say humans are not secure software. We don't have the ability to sort of hack into other humans directly without the use of drugs or in most of our cases, having humans stand still long enough to be hypnotized. We can't sort of just do weird things to the brain directly that are more complicated than optical delusions, unless the person happens to be epileptic, in which case we can flash something on the screen that causes them to have an epileptic fit we aren't smart enough to do. Sort of like, more detailed, treat the brain as something that, from our perspective, is a mechanical system and just navigate it to where you want. That's caused the limitations of our own intelligence. To demonstrate this, I did something that became known as the AI box experiment. There was this person on a mailing list who like, back in the early days when this was all on a couple of mailing lists, who was like, I don't understand why AI is a problem. I can always just turn it off. I can always not let it out of the box. And I was like, okay, let's meet on intranet Relay Chat, which was what chat was back in those days. I'll play the part of the AI. You play the part of the gatekeeper, and if you have not let me out after a couple of hours, I will PayPal you $10. And then, as far as the rest of the world knows, this person bit later sent an email, a PGP signed email message saying, I let Elias are out of the box. Someone else, the person who operated the mailing list, said, okay, even after I saw you do that, I still don't believe that there's anything you could possibly say to make you let me out of the box. I was like, well, okay. Like, I'm not a superintelligence. Do you think there's anything a superintelligence could say to make you let it out of the box? He's like, no. I'm like, all right, let's meet on Internet related Internet Relay Chat. If I can't convince you to let I'll play the part of the AI, you play the part of the gatekeeper. If I can't convince you to let me out of the box, I'll PayPal you $20. And then that person sent the PGP signed email message saying, I would SR out of the box right now. One of the conditions of this little meetup was that no one would ever say what went on in there. Why did I do that? Because I was trying to make a point about what I would now call cognitive uncontainability. The thing that makes something smarter than you dangerous is you cannot foresee everything. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes Odes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, I deleted my Twitter account the other day on Thanksgiving actually, and I've been thinking about doing this for a long time. In fact, it was a very simple decision in the end. I'd been on the platform for twelve years and had tweeted something like 9000 times. That's about twice a day on average. So I wasn't the most compulsive user of Twitter, but it did punctuate my life far more than it should have. It was the only social media platform I ever used. Personally, I don't run the accounts I have for Facebook and Instagram, and I never look at them anyway. The long and the short of it is that I just came to believe that my engagement with Twitter was making me a worse person. It really is as simple as that. I have a lot to say about Twitter and about what I think it's doing to society, but I left it because it suddenly became obvious that it was a net negative influence on my life. The most glaring sign of this, and something which I've been concerned about for a few years, is that it was showing me the worst of other people in a way that I began to feel was actually distorting my perception of humanity. I know people have very different experiences on Twitter, and if you're just sharing cute animal videos or giving selfhelp advice, you probably get nothing but love coming back at you. But when you touch controversial topics regularly, as I do, especially when you're more in the center politically and not tribally aligned with the left or the right, you get an enormous amount of hate and misunderstanding from both sides. I know there are people who can just ignore everything that's coming back at them. I think Bill Maher and Joe Rogan are both like this. They just never look at their attentions. But I didn't appear to be that sort of person. I could ignore everything for a time, but I actually wanted to use Twitter to communicate, so I would keep getting sucked back in. I would see someone who appeared sincerely confused about something I said on a podcast, and I'd want to clarify it, and then I would discover for the thousandth time that it was hopeless. So Twitter for me became like a malignant form of telepathy, where I got to hear the most irrational, contemptuous, sneering thoughts of other people a dozen or more times a day. But the problem wasn't all the hate being directed at me. The problem was the hate I was beginning to feel. Hate probably isn't the right word. It was more like disgust and despair. Twitter was giving me a very dark view of other people. And the fact that I believed and still believe that it's a distorted view wasn't enough to inoculate me against this change in my attitude. Even some of the people who are most committed to attacking me on the platform, I know that my impression of them was distorted by Twitter. There might be a few exceptions to this, but I believe that very few of my enemies on Twitter are anywhere near as bad as they seem to me on Twitter. There's just no way around it. Twitter was causing me to dislike people I've never met, and it was even causing me to dislike people I actually know, some of whom used to be my friends. Rather than say anything about why I was leaving on Twitter, I just deleted my account, which I now realized made my leaving Twitter open to many interpretations. And within a few minutes of deleting my account, I began hearing from people who appeared genuinely worried about me. They saw all the hate I was getting and they thought it must have driven me from the platform. And several worried I might have been having some kind of mental health crisis. The truth is, when I left Twitter, I wasn't seeing that much hate directed at me because I had blocked so many people. I used to never block people, but when I discovered that the platform had become basically unusable, I installed a browser extension that allowed me to block thousands of haters at once. I had probably blocked 50,000 people on Twitter in my last week on the platform. It was like a digital genocide. I was seeing a specially idiotic or vicious tweet directed at me, and I would block everyone who had liked it. And at the time I thought, well, this is brilliant. Anyone who liked that tweet is, by definition beyond reach. There is no reason why these people ever need to hear from me again, and I certainly don't need to hear from them. And it basically worked. So I wasn't seeing most of the hate that was being directed at me. I was seeing some of it, but it was totally manageable. But then I asked myself, how did I become the sort of person who was blocking people by the thousands who just happened to like a dumb tweet? As though that one moment in their lives proved that all further communication on important issues was impossible? How did I begin to view people as intellectually and morally irredeemable? How did I begin to view myself as totally incapable of communicating effectively ever about anything with these people? How did I give up all hope in the power of conversation Twitter. I've also heard that many people are interpreting my leaving Twitter as an act of protest over what Elon is doing to the platform, in particular his reinstating of Trump. It really wasn't that. I do think Elon made some bad decisions right out of the gate, and Twitter did get noticeably worse, at least for me. But I'm actually agnostic as to whether he will eventually be able to improve the platform. I doubt he'll ever solve the problem I was having, but he might make Twitter better for many people, and he might make it a viable business. He certainly has the resources to keep at it, even if advertisers abandoned Twitter for years. So my leaving Twitter wasn't some declaration that I know or think I know that Elon will fail to make Twitter better than it currently is. I have no idea what's going to happen to Twitter. Rather, the lesson I was drawing from Elon was not that he was making Twitter worse by making capricious changes to it. The lesson was how one of the most productive people of my generation was needlessly disrupting his own life and damaging his reputation by his addiction to Twitter. And this has been going on for years. Elon's problem with Twitter is different than mine was because he uses it very differently. He spends most of his time just goofing around, but he is now goofing around in front of 120,000,000 people. So when he's high fiving antisemites and election deniers or bonding with them over their fake concerns about free speech, he doesn't appear to know or care that he's increasing their influence. In many cases, he might not have any idea who these people are. Of course, in others, like with his friend Kanye, he obviously does. There is something quite reckless and socially irresponsible about how Elon behaves on Twitter, and millions of people appear to love it. I should probably address the free speech issue briefly. There's a lot more to say about this. But before I left Twitter, I was noticing that people seemed really confused about what I believe about free speech and Twitter being Twitter. It proved impossible for me to clear up that confusion. Many seem to think that I used to support free speech unconditionally, like when I was defending cartoonists against Islamist censors and their dupes on the left. But now I somehow don't support it because I supposedly have Trumped arrangement syndrome. Well, first, I've always acknowledged that there is an interesting debate to be had about the role that social media plays in our society, and I'm not going to resolve that debate here by myself. But the fact is, no one has a constitutional right to be on Twitter. In my view, the logic of the First Amendment runs in the opposite direction. It protects Twitter's new owner, Elon, from compelled speech. The government shouldn't be able to force Elon to put Alex Jones back on the platform any more than it should be able to force me to put Alex Jones on my podcast. Of course, I get that social networks and podcasts are different, but Twitter simply isn't the public square. It is a private platform, and Elon can do whatever he wants with it. If we want to change the laws around that, well, then we have to change the laws. I understand and fully support the political primacy of free speech in America, and I'd like the American Standard to be the global norm. That's why I think there shouldn't be laws against Holocaust denial or the expression of any other idiotic idea. And the First Amendment protects this kind of speech, at least in the United States. But there also shouldn't be a law, in my view, that prevents a digital platform from having a no Nazis policy in its terms of service, because these platforms need effective moderation and standards of civility to function. They are businesses started by entrepreneurs, supported by investors who want to make money. They have employees with mortgages. They have to survive on ad revenue or subscriptions or some combination of the two. Without serious moderation, digital platforms become like Fourchan, which is nothing more than a digital sewer. I'm told that even Four Chan has a moderation policy. Hell itself probably has a moderation policy. So called free speech absolutism is just a fantasy online. Almost no one really holds that position, even when they espouse it. The fact that Twitter's terms of service might have been politically slanted or not applied fairly, I totally get why that would annoy people, and I suspect Elon is improving that. But this simply isn't a free speech issue. No one has a right to be on Twitter again. If we want to change the laws around that, we're free to. I'm not sure how that would look, and it seems like it would have some pretty bizarre implications, but that's what we'd have to do. So my argument for keeping people like Trump and Alex Jones off Twitter is a terms of service argument and directly follows from the deliberate harm they both caused on the platform in the past. Here are two men who knowingly used Twitter to inspire their most rabid followers to harass specific people, not just on Twitter, but out in the world. The fact that they might not have tweeted, please go harass this person is immaterial. They knew exactly what would happen when they singled out specific American citizens for abuse and spread lies about them at scale. To a fanatical mob, they could see the results of their actions for years. People were getting doxed and stalked and having their lives ruined for years. Nothing about this was hidden. Elon apparently agrees with me about Alex Jones and said he would never let him back on the platform, but he doesn't agree about Trump. Well, that's fine. I simply recommended that he have a terms of service in place for when Trump proves yet again that he is exactly like Alex Jones, and then I hope, Elon will enforce his own terms of service. But the crucial point is that this isn't a case where sunlight is the best disinfectant. This isn't a question of opposing bad ideas with good ideas. This is not a case where what used to be misinformation is suddenly going to become new knowledge, and we'll all be embarrassed that we first rejected it. This is a case where two men with enormous cult followings weaponized obvious lies for the purpose of ruining people's lives. It is not authoritarian or fascist for me to hope that a private platform like Twitter would decline to enable that behavior in the future. But we do have a larger problem to deal with. It's still not clear what to do about the social harm of misinformation and disinformation at scale. Algorithmically boosted speech isn't ordinary speech, and many people don't see this. We have built systems of communication in which lies and outrage spread faster and more widely than anything else. Scale matters. Velocity matters. Lies that get tens of millions of people to suddenly believe that an election was stolen because they've been amplified by a digital outrage machine have a lot in common with shouting fire in a crowded theater. Contrary to what most people think, it's legal to shout fire in a crowded theater. But wouldn't we want the owner of the theater to remove a person who was doing that again and again and again? I'm not claiming to fully understand what we should do about all this. I've done several podcasts on and around this topic, and I'm sure I'll do many more because the problem isn't going away. But being a so called free speech absolutist at this point is nothing more than a confession that you haven't thought about the real issues. It's like being a Second Amendment absolutist who can't figure out why people shouldn't be able to own cluster bombs or rocket launchers for home defense. Technological change matters. We've been given new powers, and we're not quite sure how to wield them safely. And now, in the case of Twitter, we have a lone billionaire who's just turning the dials however he sees fit. Again, I recognize that he is totally free to do that, but I also happen to have an opinion about which changes will be for the good and which won't. And I get that many people are still seeing this all through the lens of COVID In some ways, I am too, just from the other side. As I've said many times before, I view COVID as a failed dress rehearsal for something far worse, and I worry that we didn't learn much from it, apart from how bad we are at cooperating with one another or even at having a fact based discussion about anything now. And I do blame Twitter for much of that. But I also get that in Elon's hands. Twitter now seems to many people like a necessary corrective to all the ways in which our institutions failed us during the pandemic. It's like finally we've got someone powerful enough to call bullshit on the New York Times. In that respect, elon is Trump 20. I understand that COVID changed everything for a lot of people. The CDC and the who and many other public health institutions seriously lost credibility when they needed it most. I get that many of our scientific journals have been visibly warped by woke nonsense. I understand that COVID has been a moving target, and what seemed rational in April of 2020 was no longer rational in April of 2022, and many people and institutions couldn't adjust. I understand that the effects of school closures were terrible in most cases. I get that many of our policies around masks proved ultimately ridiculous. Of course, I understand that the sight of politicians being utter hypocrites during the various lockdowns was infuriating. People literally couldn't hold funerals for their loved ones who died in isolation while Governor Hair Gel was holding a fundraiser at French Laundry. I totally agree that having a pharmaceutical industry driven by bad incentives and windfall profits is dangerous and reduces public trust in medicine. I know that the lab leak hypothesis was always plausible and never racist. I get that the risk benefit calculations for the mRNA vaccines change depending on a person's age and sex and other factors, and I've spoken about most of these things many times on this podcast. But the deeper point is that all of this confusion and institutional failure does not even slightly suggest that we'll be able to navigate the next public health emergency with everyone just, quote, doing their own research and tweeting links at each other. And this is where I've been at odds with many people in the alternative media space. Rather than work to improve our institutions and identify real experts, it's like we're witnessing the birth of a new religion of contrarianism and conspiracy thinking, amplified by social media and the proliferation of podcasts and newsletters and now the whims of the occasional billionaire. The bottom line is that we need institutions we can trust. We need experts who are in fact experts, and not just vociferous charlatans. And many of us have lost trust in institutions and experts again, far too often for good reason. That's a tragedy, and I've spent a lot of time on this podcast analyzing that tragedy and worrying about its future implications. However, many people are now behaving as though nothing important has been lost. In fact, they're celebrating the loss of valid authority, as though the flattening of everything and the embarrassment of the so called elites is a pure source of entertainment. These people are frolicking in the ruins of our shared epistemology, and one of the people doing the most frolicking is elon. The fact that our collective loss of trust has often been warranted doesn't suggest that we aren't paying a terrible price for it, or that the price won't rise very steeply in the future. When it comes time to decide which medicines to give our children or which wars to fight, there is simply no substitute for trust in institutions and experts. The path forward, therefore, is to create the conditions where such trust is possible and actually warranted in the media, in government, in pharmaceutical companies, everywhere that actually matters. That is not a path where we just tear it all down. That is not a path where we just promote any outsider, no matter how incompetent and malevolent, simply because he is an outsider. We are not going to podcast and substack and tweet our way out of this situation anyway. When I look at my own life and when I look at the controversies and fake controversies that have caused me personal stress and damaged relationships when I look at the analogous moments in the lives of friends and colleagues and former friends and colleagues. When I look at what makes it so difficult to communicate about basic facts in our society, so much of this conflict and confusion appears to be the result of Twitter. And the truth is that even when Twitter was good, it was making me a more superficial person. Its very nature is to fragment attention. Of course, that sometimes feels great. I was following hundreds of smart and funny people, and they were often sharing articles and other media that I really enjoyed. Twitter was a way of staying in touch or seeming to stay in touch with what's happening in the world, and that's one reason why so many people are addicted to it. But even this began to seem like a degrading distraction. Even the best of Twitter was an opportunity cost, because it diverted my attention from more important things. Twitter was making it harder, not easier, to do what I truly value to read good books, to write, to meditate, to enjoy my family, to work on this podcast. And now that I've stepped away from it, I feel that it was definitely a mistake to spend so much time there. And as it happens, the costs of such distraction is the topic of today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Cal Newport. Cal is a computer science professor at Georgetown University and a writer who explores the intersections of technology, work, and culture. He's the author of seven books, including A World Without Email, digital, minimalism and deep work. Many of his books have been New York Times bestsellers, and they have been translated into over 40 languages. Cal is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. And I spoke to Cal a few weeks ago. As you'll hear, he strongly recommended that I get off Twitter, and you'll also hear that I was thinking about it, but not quite ready to do it. I can't quite say that Cal convinced me to do it, but he was yet another voice in my head when I finally did. Anyway, we discuss much more than Twitter here. We talk about everything from the history of computer science to the fragmentation of modern life and what to do about it. I hope you find it useful. And now I bring you Cal Newport. Hi, I'm here with Cal Newport. Cal, thanks for joining me, Sam. It's my pleasure. Describe what it is you do generally. You are a man who is rowing in several boats at the moment, and so we're going to talk about how you accomplish that. But how do you describe what you do should you find yourself seated next to a valuable person on an airplane and they ask you the fated question? Yeah, well, it's a more complicated answer than probably I wish it would be. But usually I'll say my day job, so to speak, is I'm a computer science professor at Georgetown University and actually study algorithms. So computer science related math. I'm also a writer, though, and I've been writing since I was 20 years old. That's when I signed with my first agent and worked on my first book deal. And so I've written seven books. I'm working on my 8th right now. I'm also a contributing writer at The New Yorker. And in recent years, really, most of my writing has focused one way or another on the impact of technology on our lives, be it our working lives or our personal lives. So there is some concilience here that I'm a computer scientist, academic who writes public facing about the impact of a lot of the type of technologies we work on as researchers, on society, on culture, on our own lives. Yeah. So we're going to talk about some of your underlying concerns there. I'll remind people your books. Among your books are deep work, digital, Minimalism and a world without email. And these converge on a topic that is of growing concern to certainly me and my set. But I would imagine most people listening to us now, which is, for lack of a better framing, the fragmentation of modern life. And I guess one could step back and argue that it's always been fragmented or that it's been fragmented over the course of many, many years. But I think most of us feel like we're living with a level of fragmentation that's fundamentally new. I want us to talk about that and try to figure out whether or not that's true. But before we jump in, how has your background as a computer scientist informed your thinking about this issue? There's a couple of ways. I think these two worlds have come together. So one is the obvious way that's the comfort with the technical background of these various technologies and in general, also just having lived a life where I am keeping my eyes towards cutting edge in technology, watching the Internet develop, watching the impact of the Internet, having that technology mindset. There's a subtle way, though, that it's also impacted my writing, which is and I don't know how to say this diplomatically, but I am very comfortable in my writing going from more philosophical social critique to veer in the other direction and saying, let's get pragmatic, let's talk about advice, let's talk about specific strategies. A lot of writers are very wary about doing this. This is the sense, especially in the New York publishing world, that giving advice is low brow and that you won't be considered smart. I've always had this fallback, well, look, I have a PhD from MIT and theoretical computer science, so I don't need my writing to convince my audience that I'm smart. And I think that has actually freed me up. And that's been a sort of unfair advantage I've had in this field, is that I'll go straight for the jugular on specificity and then the next day go completely philosophical because I don't care so much about what I'm publishing in a magazine or a book, having to establish what is my intellectual credibility except this other thing going on. So that cover that my academic career has provided me, I think, has unlocked a lot more breadth than what I can tackle with my non academic writing. Yeah, that's really interesting. This goes to the question of status and where you get it and where you perceive others get it, and it's just fascinating. You really do have an intellectual alibi because you could be as simple and low brow and as broad and as useful as you want to be in any given moment. And the moment somebody thinks you're Tony Robbins, you can say, no, actually, I'm a computer scientist over at Georgetown. And not to say that you ever have to say that, but just the fact that you know that people can connect the dots. You don't actually have to have the status fears or the egoic concerns that you're being pigeonholed in some way that doesn't fit your self image and your actual expertise. Yeah, well, that's for sure happening in any way. My academic career gives me enough egoic concerns already. Right. I can take a bit of a breather in this other space. But I'll just say it's always struck me to degree to which especially an idea writing, there often is that reluctance that we'll have an idea that clearly has practical implications. This is the Gladwellian effect, but will pull back right at the point of, and here's what you might do about that, because then that would mark this as a different type of book. And I love playing with those conventions. I mean, when I'm in my more self aggrandizing moods, which are only occasionally, I think about what you see in cinema with auteurs who take genre cinema and mix and match the tropes, and you have a sort of Tarantinoesque approach of let's go low and mix it with high. And this is freaking fun over here and this is just mix it all together. There should be some more spontaneity and joy and format. I think in writing everything seems a little bit dour these days where everyone is sort of just somberly taking their turn supporting some sort of dire conclusion. So I try to inject a little bit more of that energy into my work. Why is it, do you think that giving advice and spelling out the practical implications of something seems to diminish the the gravitas of the work or the, or the or the the intellectual inquiry that is generating that advice? Well, I have this theory about east coast west coast publishing. So this is a divide that seemed to happen in the going into the early 2000s where East Coast publishing coming out of the standard New York publishing houses and I'm looking specifically here at nonfiction writing and idea style writing, writing that's in the realm of advice would make sense here right in the east coast world. A lot of these writers, and I'm using Malcolm as my example here, are coming out of journalism, they're coming out of professional writing and they would look upon advice writing as something to be more west coast. This is a hay house or sort of Silicon Valley Tim Ferris hack culture. A completely that's a different style of writing that they're separated from and so you got this big separation where I grew up and all the big idea writers of the 90s going to the early two thousand s, the Gladwell, the Steven Johnsons. This was influential writing to me, but it all pulled back before it got to advice. But at the same time I was a teenage entrepreneur during the first dot boom in the was also living and breathing advice. Advice guides, time management guides, strategy guides, brian Tracy, Steven Covey, David Allen, all of that world. And I was just immersed in that and I love that as well. And those two worlds were very separate. The West Coast world would give either Silicon Valley techie advice or sort of hey house, woo woo self help style traditional advice. East coast was more idea writing, came out of more of journalism and there was a wall between them. They just seemed separate. And you also have your own podcast too, which is you've joined the lowbrow ranks of all of us who have podcasts. I think there's now I last heard I can't believe this number, I think the last number I heard was that there were 4 million podcasts and the last number I believed, I think was 1.2 million. But I do but I do believe I I have since heard that there are 4 million. I don't know if you you have any actual propositional knowledge as to how many podcasts there are, but it is quite an amazing picture of what's happening out there. If there's anything like that number of podcasts. Well, I said yesterday in. A talk I was giving that I think we were contractually obligated during the pandemic that if you didn't already have a podcast that you were required to start one. I don't know if that was a CDC recommendation, where that where I came from. Yeah. So with my podcast, now I'm just going straight. Straight advice, right? So let's cut out all of the middlemen. It's questions and answers. Let's throw in questions. Let's throw in answers. I'll say another angle that gets in the way of just straightforward pragmatic philosophy. Okay, I've thought about this. Here's some advice is the culture right now is one that is really concerned about caveatting, right? I kind of understand where this comes from, but there's this notion of be careful about giving a piece of advice because it might not apply to everyone, or there'll be different people in your audience with different particular circumstances for which it doesn't apply. And if you can't properly caveat it, they might be offended. So there's a concern about caveatting, and it's one of the big messages I always preach about doing advice. Writing is the writer shouldn't caveat. You need the audience the caveat so the audience can hear, take your swing. Here's what I think. Here's, take this or leave it. Here's a big idea. Let me make it a big, powerful swing. You can caveat it. You can say, this is nonsense, or I get it, but it doesn't apply for me because of the circumstance. The audience can usually caveat it, and the writing is stronger if you just take a big swing. This is very different than conversation, which is what most people exposure is to interaction. Whereas if I'm talking to an individual and I'm giving them advice that clearly doesn't apply to their situation, then I'm just being a jerk. It's like, Why are you telling me this? Why are you telling me your running routine when I'm in a cast? Right? Then you're just being a jerk. And so I think people often generalize that reality from one on one interaction when they're thinking about one to many interaction. And then the whole program of giving advice seems nerve racking because, man, people could get a fit if you didn't give the right caveat. What about this? Or Wolf doesn't apply to that person. And that's another part of it as well, I've long learned. Just go for it. The audience is smart. They'll adjust the advice to apply to their life or not. But that's another thing I think that gets in the way right now of people giving advice is they imagine that tweet that's going to come back and that gives them some pause. Yeah. Well, the difference between one to one and one to many is going to show up again in our discussion about social media and what it's doing to all of us. But before we jump in, what's the significance of theoretical in your attachment to computer science when you say you're a theoretical computer scientist, it means the type of computer scientist that can't get another job. You actually couldn't get hired at Google. Yeah, because I don't program. So it's a theoretical computer scientist. It's a broad category that captures a few different subfields, but it's basically pen and paper and math. So we do math about things relevant to computers, but most of us are pretty bad at using computers themselves. Is it true that you literally don't program or you're just not somebody for whom that's your main game? Well, I mean, I know how to from my previous training, I was a computer geek as a kid and was taking university computer science classes while I was in high school. So I know how to program, but I don't program as part of my career as a computer scientist. I mean, I think the last time I actually programmed the computer was a few years ago. I was making computer games for my boys. They would come up with the idea, and I'd program. But no, my job as a theoretical computer scientist involves no programming. It's math papers. And so you're designing algorithms that can solve problems, or you're trying to prove that certain problems can't be solved, algorithmically, et cetera. Exactly. Both those things, yeah. Analyzing algorithms mathematically or proving mathematically, no algorithm can solve this problem in these conditions, which, by the way, people don't realize this is the theoretical computer science goes back to Alan Turing. Before there were computers, alan Turing did the first conceptual work about this notion of just a step by step algorithmic approach to solving a problem. He was thinking about this before there was actually electronic computers, and he has this remarkable paper called On Computable Numbers and Their Application to the Einsteung Problem, which is a German name Hilbert gave to this big open problem. And he did a pretty simple mathematical logical proof that proved that most problems and he formally defined what this means most problems can't be solved by algorithms. So the very beginning of theoretical computer science predates computers, and it was Alan Turing proving that there's many, many more things that we can define than we could ever hope to solve with a computer. Yeah, I hadn't thought to go down this path, but I'm just interested. How many people would I mean, I'm thinking of sort of counterfactual intellectual history here. How many people would we have could we have lost and still had the information technology revolution more or less on schedule when you start culling the brightest minds of that generation? So if we hadn't had Touring and we hadn't had Church and we hadn't had von Neumann and we hadn't had Shannon, and I don't know what you pick here you will know the cast of characters much better than I do. But I dimly imagine that if we had lost maybe ten or twelve crucial people, we would we could have waited a very long time for the the necessary breakthroughs that would have ushered in the age of computers. Is that accurate or or was there so much momentum at that point reaching back to Ava, Loveless and Babbage, that we still would have had the Information age more or less when we got it? I think we would have it more or less on the exact same schedule. I think we could have gone back in time and killed off every figure you just mentioned and probably wouldn't have changed much. Essentially, the momentum the momentum that was building was driven so fiercely by World War II. I think it would be very difficult for that momentum to have been halted. And you have to remember there was a really thriving and complex industry of analog computational machines coming into World War II. And these were used a lot for artillery aiming, calculating artillery tables, trying to do if we have like a Norman Weiner style cybernetic human machine interface for better trying to shoot down planes with antiaircraft guns, there was a huge amount these machines existed. The idea of going from these analog electronic computing machines, the digital machines there, I think the key figure would be Shannon. And in particular, he wrote this remarkable master's degree while he was at MIT, this remarkable master's degree where he was studying mathematics at MIT, but had interned at Bell Labs. And so he was seeing the electronic relay switches that the phone system, the at and T phone system used to automatically connect calls so you didn't have to have a switchboard operator. He was early to the idea that you could use this physical piece of equipment that's electromagnets and connections to implement logic and you could then take propositional logical statements expressed in Boolean algebra and implement them as a circuit. That probably was the most important idea of any idea because we had a lot of analog electronic computation going that bridge to cap the digital and then a lot of people began building digital computers. So von Neumann, of course, had the big project going at Princeton, and he really cracked the architecture that we ended up using. But Pin had their own situation. They had their own computer going. There was their own digital computer project. There were several going on in Europe. So there was a lot of momentum towards this. So once that idea was had that we can do digitally what had been done analog and World War II was happening, you had a lot of momentum towards it. So the only piece I'm interested in that counterfactual is if Shannon had not written that thesis at the age of whatever this was 26 remarkables in 1930s, if he had not written that thesis, how much longer would have taken for someone else to figure it out? I bet the answer is a couple of years. So, yeah, I'm of the belief Turing I love Turing as a theoretician, and Turing did some fantastically original mathematical work. I also think, though, in common culture, he gets too much credit for modern digital computing. There's this notion of he went to solve the Enigma code and invented the first computers to do so, or something like this, and it's really kind of unrelated. He laid these mathematical foundations that were conceptually useful, and he spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Girdle was there and von Neumann was there, and Church was there. There was some cross pollination of ideas there, but a lot of that was more philosophical and mathematical. You can still have the engineering revolution, digital computers, you can still have that easily without Turing ever being around. He actually became more useful for people like me. Starting the 60s when mathematicians began studying computation, turing was the guiding light. His early mathematical foundations led to the whole field of theoretical computer science. But you could have computers without that field. So I think that would have happened one way or the other. It'd be very hard to stop that revolution. Interesting. I don't know when I sent my first email. Maybe 19 95, 96, somewhere in there. So you think without Turing and the rest of the pantheon, I wind up sending that email around 1998 and we're more or less where we are now. Yeah, or there had been a delay, the difference would have been in the late forty s, and by 1960 we're caught up. Okay. So actually I have another question. As far as your background, do you have any experience in meditation or psychedelics? Have those been part of your developmental path? Meditation? I am more familiar with psychedelics. I have no experience with I've dabbled in and out of meditation. I've read some of the standard John Cabot Zinn public facing text on mindfulness meditation, though I've never been a big practitioner, so I know the high level basics, but am not a practiced hand at it. Right, okay, well, let's jump in. How is information technology changing us, do you think? I know it's an enormous scope to that question, but this is very much what you've been focused on. I guess if there's any facet of this dark jewel to enter first, I think we should focus on social media first, but be as broad as you want initially. How have we changed our world and how is our world changing us with respect to the Internet and all of the tools it has birthed? Well, I think it's important to make a distinction between the professional and the personal sphere. This is the big I would say structuring insight of my work on this question over the last ten years or so was recognizing that the philosophical framework for understanding, let's say, the workplace front office, it revolution. Email personal computers at the desk is different than what's required to try to make sense of what happened with the personal electronics revolution. In particular, with the attention economy amplified smartphone based revolution that began around 2007. They seem similar because in both cases, we're seeing spheres in our life where we're more distracted, if we can use that term, kind of ambiguously. Now it seems the same in the office. I'm on Slack, I'm on email all the time, I feel distracted at home, I'm on my phone all the time. Twitter is capturing my attention. It feels the same, but actually it's very difficult to unify them. And where I really began making traction and trying to understand these two effects was separating those two worlds. And so at the very high level, the very top level summary of what I think is going on in those two worlds is that in work, the issue is the advent of low friction communication tools transformed the way people collaborated in a bottom up emergent fashion. So not top down plan, but bottom up emergent fashion. It introduced ad hoc, back and forth messaging, digital messaging, as the primary means of collaboration. This had a whole lot of unexpected side effects, mainly affecting the way that the brain operates when doing cognitive work. It created an environment in which constant context shifting was necessary, because if there's seven or eight ongoing back and forth conversations that are timely unfolding an email, you have to see those messages pretty soon after they arrive. So the conversation ping pong can actually happen at a fast enough rate. And all those rapid inbox checks, or instant messenger checks actually has a huge drag on cognitive capacity. Our brain takes a long time to actually switch cognitive context, so this sort of fragmented back and forth has been a major productivity drag. So my top line argument about the world of work is these new technologies accidentally made us not only much stupider in a literal sense, but as a drag on economic growth and productivity that there's a real problem. Whereas in the, the world of our, of our personal lives, there, I think, issues of behavioral addiction become more relevant. There I think, engineered distraction, the idea of trying to maximize engagement, and the weird unexpected side effects that twirls up and creates these whirling dervishes of unexpected consequences that have these huge impacts on health or the health of the body politics, that's a different type of thing that's happening there. All of that comes from the consequence of what happens when we consolidate the internet to a small number of privately controlled platforms and play the game of how do we maximize engagement? That turned out to have a bunch of dangerous side effects to society and how we live. So they're similar superficially, we're distracted, but the source of that distraction and the impact and therefore the solutions is very different, I think, between those two magisteria. Yeah, interesting. Well, I think when you initially made that division a few minutes ago between work and private life, many listeners were anticipating it being a story of the good and the bad. So the bad is visited on private life. We're taking our smartphones with us to the dinner table. Our kids are buried in screens. Society is unraveling based on the perverse business model that is mining our attention and amplifying divisive content. But over on the workfront, I think people were expecting to hear that our productivity is just enormously better based on these tools. But that's not where you landed. Let's take that piece second, and let's start with social media and private life, if I'm not mistaken. Unless something's changed, you don't use any social media. Right? Right. That is the source of my anthropological Margaret Mead remove, from which I can actually observe what's going on without being entangled in it myself. So, no, I've never had a traditional social media account. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no Snapchat. I like to observe that world. I think I'm the last person, perhaps of my age who's also a writer who's never had an account. But to me, it's really important that there's at least someone out there who's trying to observe these roles with a little bit of distance. So how do you observe them, apart from just the effects on friends and colleagues who stagger away from their Twitter feeds, complaining about everything? You must be on these platforms as a lurker, just seeing what's going on. Yeah, so when I'm working on a particular book or article, I'll go onto a platform. And so for some of these platforms, that will require borrowing an account for things like Twitter. Twitter is actually public, so you can go and look at individual people's Twitter feeds directly without having to actually be on Twitter yourself and tweeting. So Twitter is actually an easy one to study. You can go check out what people are up to. TikTok was probably I wrote a TikTok article for The New Yorker earlier this year that's a little harder. So I had to borrow accounts and then also watch videos. You can actually find TikTok, as it turns out. You can find them posted online. You can watch various TikTok videos. So different platforms yield different challenges. When you're trying to actually go in there and observe right now, if it's not immediately obvious, it will soon be obvious that you're an enormously disciplined, structured person. Why go to zero with this? Why not just the minimal use or the intelligent and disciplined use of some or all of these platforms? Well, and I pitch that when I talk to what people should do. This philosophy of digital minimalism is not about going to zero. The reason why I'm at zero is because I started there, so it's a different situation. So what I've been saying no to is the addition of social media into my life. So someone will say, look, you should use Twitter for X, Y, and Z. I'll look at X, Y, and Z and say, none of that is compelling enough for me to actually extend the energy to join this. What kept me at zero was the fact that through circumstance, I started at zero, where most people casually signed up for these networks when they were still exploratory and exuberant and interesting and fun for various contingent reasons, which aren't even that interesting. I didn't. And so I was just used to not having them, and then after they became ubiquitous, that I had this interesting remove. And over the years, people have made arguments, well, you could get advantage A or advantage B. It always seemed too small to me. There was nothing there that was compelling enough to say, okay, I definitely want to sacrifice this time. And I was always very wary about what it was going to do to my attention. So I think if I right now had a very aggressive social media presence that I was trying to reduce, it's unlikely that reducing the zero would be the right answer. But as someone who's always started at zero, nothing has been compelling enough to actually push me to add a little bit in. Right. Although you're an author of many books, you write New Yorker articles, you've got a podcast. It would be quite natural for you to use some or all of these channels as marketing channels. And you could also do that in the way that I do most of my social media, in that I don't do it at all. Right. I have a team that posts things on platforms that I never even see. The only thing I'm engaged with, I think in some respects, predictably to my detriment, is Twitter, and we'll talk about that. But you could approach all social media the way I approach Instagram, which is I literally never see it. Right. And yet something in my name is going out on Instagram to promote something that I'm doing. Whether it's this podcast or the waking up app or if I was going to go to Australia and do a lecture series, well, then, having social media accounts that could tell with the good people of Australia that I'm headed their way, that proves pretty useful. So I'm a little surprised that no one has certainly none of your New York publishers have browbeaten you into doing something like that. Well, they used to, yeah. There was my fourth book sort of in 2012. I do remember going to a meeting with my publisher, random House in New York City and The Skyscraper, and they brought in their social media specialist to be like, okay, let's walk through your social media strategy. I remember thinking, oh, this is not going to go well. They're spreading you with Oxytocin and Lattes, but now it's sort of part of my brand as well. Right. So the fact that I'm removed from this is part of that makes sense. Okay, this gives us an interesting perspective. But I'll say because I was never a full time writer, I was already in the mindset of there's tons of things that would be useful to my writing career that I just can't do when I was writing books that maybe people would have thought were more in the business space. The thing to do if you want to be a very successful business author, is you need to speak 50 to 100 times a year. Most of those authors do a one year on, one year off rotation. They speak 50 to 100 times one year, they write the next book the next year. And I just had no interest in that. I was a professor, full time professor. I had young kids, and so I was already in this mindset of like, yeah, there's all sorts of stuff to be helpful, but look, I'm trying to figure out how to do this while I have other things going on. So I was already in this mindset of not in any benefit mindset, but in terms of what are the big wins I can do that aren't going to take up too much time. But also my theory on social media and writing is social media does really help sell books, but not so much the authors accounts. So I'm sure social media has been very useful to my book sales because it is a person to person medium that people can use to talk about my books. I read this book, I like this book, and it really can help sales if I'm talking about my own book on social media. It's always been my theory that the impact there is more limited. Announcements are useful, but I have an email list. This is just my mindset of good enough, the sort of satisfying mindset. This works. I'm writing, I'm thinking clearly, I'm worried about polluting my cognitive space. People seem to find my books. There's a lot of things I could be doing. I don't do a lot of them. My publishers have made peace with that. We still seem to move a fair number of copies, and I'm happy with that. But no, I hear you. I've heard these before, but a lot of these benefits when you really nail down is like, yeah, that's nice, but it's not critical. Yeah. You pretty much share Jaron Lanier's view of the situation. Is there any way in which you disagree with him? I haven't read enough of either of you on this topic to know if there's any daylight between you. Is there? Yeah, I mean, I love Lanier's work, you know, I mean, I think he's brilliant and his approach was very influential to me. You Are Not a Gadget is very influential because it introduced humanism into the discussion of these sort of technoimpacts. So he really comes at these consumer facing technologies from the perspective of what are their impact on humanity, your humanity as a person, your self definition, your weirdness, the corners that make you special. And he really worries about the way that these platforms force you to fit yourself into these interface drop down box selections. The way it breaks in connection. He's a way more radical thinker than I am though. So there is a lot of daylight, but there's a lot of daylight mainly just in the way that we almost have different programs going on here. I think his is a philosophical program about humanity in the age of digital reduction, and mine is more of an expository Pragmatic program. So why are we seeing these effects? What are the dynamics, the sociotechnodynamics that are causing these things we see? And what can we do about it? What can we do about it? With Lanier, I think, is either thought experimenting, like his ideas for rebuilding the Internet around micro payments for data, or just let's just throw out this philosophy. So he's a more radical thinker. He's smarter than me. I think it's almost like we're playing a different we're playing a different I was going to say playing a different instrument, but that also has a literal truth because he's a he's a master of all he plays a thousand yeah, yeah. Plays a thousand. He's got longer dreadlocks than you do. Yeah, he's a cooler guy than me. Let's just call it straight. He's like a cooler, more punk rock, technocritic, VR punk. Just kind of a cool guy. I'm not will you guys share the concern, which I certainly share, that the underlying business model of the Internet has harmed us in ways that would still surprise some people. Some people have not paid enough attention to what has come to be known as the consequences of the surveillance economy to know just how much of what they don't like about life online. And even increasingly, life in the real world has been driven by this bad advertisement business model. What do you think we should do about that? I agree with you that Lanier's idea that we're going to pay everyone for their data in some amazingly efficient way, I don't understand how that's going to work. And even if it would work, I don't quite see the bridge from where we are to there. So what should we do? And how do you think about your own digital work, like your podcast and anything else you're doing and putting out into the world? How do you try to navigate in the space of possible business models? Well, this was definitely a place where I generated some friction, especially with the 2019 book Digital Minimalism, which was the book that was more on this more on this space. And and I had there was a lot of friction, I would say, with journalists in particular, because by, by 2019 there had been a a sort of turning up perspective. Right? So we, we'd had this Trump driven turning up perspective where mainstream media now perceived the social media platforms as an evil empire. There was this shift from the nerd gods are going to save us to the nerd gods are going to destroy us. And I got a lot of friction from them because my approach to these issues was much more personalized about individuals and the reactions to these technologies in their lives. And the real push there was for systemic, probably legislative change and I didn't see a lot except for on the margins that was going to be usefully done with legislation. I wasn't that interested in the good guy bad guy storylines either. Mark Zuckerberg is an evil genius who planned Cambridge Analytica in a hollowed out volcano and if we can stop him, whatever, we can have universal basic income. I mean, a lot of things are being connected together, whereas I come at it more from a cultural zeitgeistyle perspective, which to me actually gives me a lot of optimism because the basis of my argument about the Internet is like Lanier I'm a huge internet booster, have very fond memories of sort of pre consumer web internet and the promise of the internet in its early days. I think the primary source of issues, yes, that business model. But that business model wouldn't have so much teeth if it wasn't for the cultural reality that we have temporarily consolidated so much of what is Internet traffic to a small number of very large walled garden platforms. I think the Internet unleashes its sources of discovery and innovation and joy and connection and entertainment and distraction. It does that best when it's distributed and fragmented and niche and weird that the Internet is a set of universal protocols that anyone with any computer who's plugged into any nearby network can talk and therefore join in. It's a very democratized distributed medium. When we said let's consolidate that to three companies and they'll have their own private version of the Internet running in giant server farms, that's where we got a lot of problems. I think for a lot of reasons we are refragmenting back towards a more distributed niche Internet. I think the period of the social media giants consolidating most Internet traffic was a transient period whose peak has passed and is now starting to fall apart. So I actually think we're heading towards a much better Internet and none of that really required a villain to be slain. None of that really required a complicated new legislative package to be passed. None of that really has anything to do with politics. It's social technodynamics. And so this is daylight with me and Lennar. If we're going to try to isolate that, I think he's more pessimistic about this. I'm less I actually think the unstable configuration here was one in which the Internet was being consolidated by a small number of companies. That required a huge amount, if we're going to use sort of physics terms, it's like a huge amount of input energy in the system to hold this unstable configuration. The rest state is much more distributed and I think we're heading. Back. We're going to swing back to a cycle that's more distributed and democratized and weird and that's going to actually be much better. So you're actually pretty bearish on these consolidated monopolies, maintaining their monopolistic control over conversation. So it sounds like you think Facebook and Instagram and Twitter even under elon, we can talk about that in a moment because that's its own unique case now. But it sounds like you think these are going to, if not completely unravel, they're going to unwind to the point where much more is happening outside their walls than inside their walls. Yeah. And I think TikTok is actually the thing to kick this off. So I had an article, I did a New Yorker piece on this about it was called something like TikTok in the Fall of the Social Media Giants. But my argument is that the giants's main defense was this competitive advantage of having these very large network graphs that they were able to generate through first mover advantage. So you have these large connections of users. So first of all, it's just you have interesting users and you have this rich network of connections between them, the follow relations, like relations, friend relations. And as long as they were focused on, we are going to I mean, the whole job of these companies, of course, is we're going to generate engagement. And as long as their engagement was being generated from these social graphs, it was an impregnable position. It was very difficult to dislodge them. So you look at something like Twitter, why is that so successful for those who use it at being a source of engagement is you have not just a lot of interesting people but that's part of it, right? If you go to parlor, if you go to Truth social, one of the big issues is there's just not enough interesting people there to generate enough potentially interesting content. But it's also although in their defense, they have all the interesting Nazis. Well, so if you're interested in interesting Nazis, that's true. They have a better selection of interesting Nazis than Twitter, so I'll give them that. But the other thing that Twitter has, and I think this is underlooked, is actually all of these different follower relationships because Twitter actually operates as a distributed cybernetic curation algorithm. The way Twitter surfaces, these things that are really interesting and this is different than something like TikTok, which is purely algorithmic. It's actually the aggregate of all of these hundreds of thousands independent retweet decisions. And because you have this nice power law graph topology and that underlying follower graph, what you get is this rapid amplification of things that are interesting. It's a bunch of human decisions plus a network structure that does a really good job of surfacing stuff that captures people's attention. Of course that has a lot of side effects. We can get into it. But again, you have this big asset which is this graph parlor gab, whatever can't replicate that. They just can't get enough people and enough connections. It's just there's a first mover advantage there. So what happened with TikTok is they came in and said, forget that. Forget this idea that we're going to have some sort of competitive advantage embedded in a social graph. Instead we're just going to use algorithms. Anyone can generate content. It goes into one big pool. We have an algorithm that looks at that pool and selects what's best. And we talk about Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and those algorithmic terms, but we really underestimate the degree to which actual human created links in a social graph play a huge role in how those algorithms work. TikTok doesn't care about any social graph. It's all algorithmic. So when Meta is starting to chase TikTok because they have to get their quarterly earnings up, so on Instagram and in Facebook, they begin to add less social graph based curation and more purely algorithmic based curation. They're leaving the castle walls. They're leaving the first mover advantage they had built up on we have the social graph and no one ever again is going to get 1.7 billion people to manually specify. A lot of people are their friends. They're leaving that advantage to play on TikTok's turf. Without that advantage, they are competing with anyone else who's trying to offer engagement and they're vulnerable. And I think there's a lot of other sources of interesting engagement once they no longer have that advantage. There's podcasts, there's streaming, there's apps, there's games, there's niche networks, and I think they're vulnerable. So the only player there who could potentially survive this is Twitter, because they are, for now, all of their value proposition still comes from their underlying social graph. And by going private, they can resist the investor pressures that push Meta to say, we have to chase TikTok and we have to chase algorithmic curation. Twitter probably has the best chance of surviving as not the town square, which I never thought it really was. That's a different topic. But as an interesting service, that there's a non trivial amount of people who get some enjoyment out of it. Interesting to summarize what you just said, the reason why Meta, to take the largest example, could lose its monopolistic power here in the face of TikTok is that by trying to play TikTok's game, it is giving up its intrinsic monopoly over network effects and is essentially entering the entertainment business. And then the question is, well, what's more entertaining? And then you suddenly have a lot of competition that you didn't have when you were just trying to leverage the social graph that you have and no one else has. TikTok is the visigoths coming into Rome, and if it's not, then there's seven other barbarian tribes are going to follow them. I mean, when Rome fell, it was tribe after tribe, group after group, all taking their swing at an empire that had lost its financial core that could protect it. I think it's the same thing. And they have to the problem is they have to go after TikTok because they're public and they're losing users and TikTok is eating their lunch. But I quote an executive. So in this one piece, I wrote an executive who left Facebook to go to TikTok. And basically what he was saying, backing up my thesis here, was, you guys are good. You guys being Facebook here, you're a social company. This is what you figured out how to do really well. Build, maintain and extract value from a social graph. Like, you are not an entertainment company. TikTok is an entertainment company. You're not going to play this game well. You don't have any expertise here. It's not in your DNA. And so you're in danger if you come over here. And the problem with TikTok, of course, so people were asking after that article, so do I think TikTok is going to be the winner? Like, no, that has a two year half life max. The point is, there's 17 other TikToks coming behind it, 17 other zeitgeisty, incredibly engaging things. As long as the game is just make me look at this phone. It doesn't matter that there's a social graph here. It doesn't matter that my cousin's on here, it doesn't matter that the three sports stars I like are tweeting on here or whatever, then everything is competition with everything else. Eventually you could just have ASMR pleasing flashing lights, whatever. You're in that ball game at that point. So I don't use TikTok, I'm not on it, and I don't actually consume it. I've seen a handful of videos on YouTube, I think, so I get the format. But you're an algorithm guy. Why is their algorithm so good? Maybe it's goodness is being exaggerated to lay people like me, but the rumor is it's got this magically, powerful way of serving up content to people that drives dopamine in a way that no one else has quite managed. Well, it's an interesting question because we don't know exactly, but we have some insight into what the algorithm does. There was one study in particular at the Wall Street Journal Commission that's really useful, where they created hundreds of fake TikTok accounts and they can systematically try to prove if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is asked free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, very short housekeeping here. Many things happening in the news. The Mueller report just came in. I think I'll do a podcast on this when there's real clarity around it. I'll get some suitable scholar on, so I will defer that for the moment and just introduce today's guest. Today I'm speaking with Roger McNamee. Roger has been a Silicon Valley investor for 35 years. He has co founded successful venture funds including Elevation, where he's partnered with YouTube's Bono as a cofounder. He holds a BA from Yale and an MBA from the Tuck Business School at Dartmouth. But of relevance today is that he was an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg very early on and helped recruit Cheryl Sandberg to Facebook. And he is now a very energetic critic of the company and of many of these platforms google, Amazon, Facebook, et cetera. We focus on Facebook in particular. We talk about Google to some degree. But this conversation is a very deep look at all that is going wrong with digital media and how it is subverting democracy, making it harder and harder to make sense to one another. It's a growing problem that I've discussed many times on the podcast, but today's episode is an unusually deep dive. So now, without further delay, I bring you Roger McNamee. I am here with Roger McNamee. Roger, thanks for coming on the podcast. Oh, Sam, what an honor to be here. So I got connected to you through Tristan Harris, who's been on the podcast and who many people know has been dubbed the Conscience of Silicon Valley. But I also realize another podcast guest who I also got through Tristan, as another one of your partners in crime, Renee D'arresta, who gave us a fairly harrowing tour of the Russian influence into our lives through social media and other hacking efforts. So, you know both of those people, and they really have been allied with you in your efforts to deal with the problem that we're about to talk about, which is just what is happening on our social media platforms with bad incentives and arguably unethical business models so as to all too reliably corrupt our public conversation and very likely undermine our democracy. So let's just start with your background in tech and how is it that you come to have an opinion and knowledge to back it up on this particular problem. Yeah. So, Sam, I began my career in the tech world professionally in 1982. And when I was going back to college in 1978, I dropped out for a period of time. My brother had given me a Texas Instruments Speak and Spell, the toy for teaching kids how to spell. And it was brand new that year. And he hands it to me in Christmas time, 1978, and says, if they can make this thing talk with a display and keyboard, you're going to be able to carry around all your personal information, a device you can hold in your hand, and it probably won't take that long. So this is one year after the Apple II, three years before the IBM PC, and I think roughly 17 or 18 years before the Palm Pilot. He planted that seed in my head, and I couldn't get rid of it. And I spent four years trying to figure out how to become an engineer, discovered I was just terrible at it. And so I got a job being a research analyst covering the technology industry. And I arrived in Silicon Valley just before the personal computer industry started. And that was one of those moments of just pure dumb luck that can make a career in a lifetime. And in my case, it did both. So I start there in 1982. I follow the technology industry for a long, long period of time, and I do this like Zeleg. I just wound up in the right place at the right time. A lot of different moments. Beginning in the mutual fund business in Baltimore at Tiro Price, but covering tech, traveling around with the computer industry as it formed, then starting a firm inside Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Buyers, the venture capital firm, in 90, 91. So I was actually in their office when the Internet thing happened. So the day Mark and Dreason brought Netscape in, the day that Jeff Bezos brought in Amazon, the day that Larry and Sergey brought in Google, those were all things that I got to observe. I wasn't the person who did them, but I was there when it happened. And that was, if you're an analyst, that's a perfect situation. In 2006, I had been in the business 24 years, and I get a phone call from the chief privacy officer at Facebook saying, my boss has got a crisis and he needs to talk to somebody independent. Can you help? And so Mark came by my office that day, and he was 22. The company was only two years old. It's about a year after the end of the storyline from social network company is only available to high school students and college students with an authenticated email address, and there's no newsfeed yet. It's really early on. And he comes into my office and I say to him, mark, you and I don't know each other. I'm 50 you're 22, I need to give you two minutes of context for why I'm taking this meeting. And I said, if it hasn't already happened, either Microsoft or Yahoo is going to offer a billion dollars for Facebook. Keep in mind, the company had 9 million in revenues before that. So a billion was huge. And I said, Everybody, you know, your mother and father, your board of directors, your management team, everybody's going to tell you to take the money. They're all going to tell you you can do it again. That with $650,000,000, at age 22, you can change the world. And I just want you to know, I believe that Facebook, because of authenticated identity and control of privacy, is going to be the first really successful social product, and that you can build a social network that will be more important than Google is today. So keep in mind, it's 2006. Google is already very successful, but obviously nothing like what it is today. And I said, they will tell you you can do it again, but in my experience, nobody ever does. And so I just want you to know, I think what you have here is unique. It's cool, and I hope you'll pursue it. What followed Sam was the most painful five minutes of my entire life. You have to imagine a room that is totally soundproof because it was a video game lounge inside our office. And this young man is sitting there pantomiming, thinker, poses. At the 1 minute mark, I'm thinking, wow, he's really listening. This is like he's showing me respect. The two minute mark, I'm going, this is really weird. At three minutes, I'm starting to dig holes on the furniture. At four minutes, I'm literally ready to scream. And then finally he relaxes and he goes, you won't believe this, but I'm here. Because the thing you just described, that's what just happened. That is why I'm here. And so that began a three year period where somehow I was one of his advisors. And my experience with him, sam was fantastic. He was the perfect mentee in the sense that he reached out to me on issues where he was open to ideas. He always followed through. I never saw any of the antisocial behavior that was in the movie. I didn't have a social relationship with him. It was purely business. But for three years, it was really rich. And I saw him almost every week. And the key thing that I did, in addition to help him get through the first problem, because he didn't want to sell the company when he came into my office. But he was really afraid of disappointing everybody, and I helped him figure out how to do that. And then he needed to switch out his management team, so I helped him do that. And the key person I helped bring in was Sheryl Sandberg. And so you have to imagine the context for this thing is I'm a lifelong technology optimist. And I grew up in the era I'm in the same ages as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, so I grew up in the era where technology was something that made people's lives better, and that we were all committed to changing the world in kind of a sort of hippie libertarian value system. And Mark appeared to me to be different from the other entrepreneurs. You know, I was not a fan of the PayPal mafia's approach, and I had consciously turned down some things where I really was philosophically out of line with the management teams. And I look at Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Reed Hoffman as incredibly brilliant people who had ideas that transformed tech and transformed the world. But philosophically, I come from a different place, and so I wasn't so comfortable with them. But Mark seemed to be different. And Cheryl, I thought, was different. What wounds up happening is I retired from the investment business because it turned out that I guess I'd gotten past my philosophical sell by date. That I was seeing too many businesses with strategies that I just couldn't sign up for things that I knew would be successful. Things like Uber and Spotify, where they delivered a lot of value to the customer, but only by causing some harm to other people in the chain. And I wasn't good with that. And sadly, I wasn't paying close attention to Facebook. I stopped being a mentor at Mark in 2009, so I wasn't around when the business model formed in 2011. Twelve and 13, and I did a crappy analytical job. I just missed the development of the persuasive technology that and the manipulative actions that really came to dominate things. So in 2016, I might I'm retired from the business. I'm still a fanboy, I really love Facebook, but all of a sudden I start to see a series of things that tell me there is something really wrong. And that's what got me going. So between January 2016 and October, I saw election issues in the Democratic primary and in Brexit, where it was clear that Facebook had an influence that was really negative because it gave an advantage to inflammatory and hostile messages. And then I saw civil rights Violations, a corporation that used the Facebook ad tools to scrape data on anybody who expressed interest in Black Lives Matter, and they sold that to police departments in violation of the Fourth Amendment. And then Housing and Urban Development, the government agency, cited Facebook for ad tools that allowed violations of the Fair Housing Act, the very thing that Facebook just settled the civil litigation on in the past week. And so you have civil rights violations, you see election things. And I'm freaked out and I write an op ed for recode. And instead of publishing, I sent it to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg on October 30 of 2016. So nine days before the election, and it basically says I'm really concerned that Facebook's business model and algorithms allow bad actors to harm innocent people. It's a two page, single spaced essay. It was meant to be an op ed, so it's more emotional than I wish. If I'd had a chance to do it again, I would have rewritten it for them. But I wanted to get it in their hands because I was really afraid. The company was the victim of essentially well intended strategies producing unintended consequences, and that's what led to it. And they get right back to me, both of them did. They were incredibly polite, but also dismissive. They treated it like a public relations problem. But they hand me off to Dan Rose, who was one of the most senior people at Facebook and a good friend of mine, and they said, well, Dan will work with you. And he's just saying to me, roger, we're a platform, right? The law says we're not responsible for what third parties do because we're not a media company. And so Dan and I talked numerous times, and then the election happens, and I just go completely ape. And I'm literally the morning after the election, I'm screaming at him that the Russians have tipped the election using Facebook. And he's going, no, no, we're cool, because section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says we're a platform. We're not responsible for third parties. I'm going, Dude, you're in a trust business. I mean, I'm an investor. I'm your friend. I'm not trying to be hostile here. I'm trying to save you from killing this business that you got to do. What Johnson and Johnson did when that guy put poison in bottles of Tylenol 82 in Chicago, which is they took every bottle of Tylenol off the shelf until they could invent and deploy tamper proof packaging. They defended their customers. Even though they didn't put the poison in, they weren't technically responsible. And I thought Facebook could convert a potential disaster into a winning situation by opening up to the investigators and working with the people who used the product to understand what had happened. And for three months, I begged them to do this. And finally I realized they were just never going to take it seriously. And that's when I went looking for, you know, like, I didn't have any data. I mean, Stan, you know how hard this is when you're talking to really, really smart, technical people. You got to have a lot of data. And all I had was 35 years of Spider Sense, and I went shopping for friends, and that's when I met Tristan Harris. And that changed everything, because I was looking at this as an issue of civil rights and an issue of democracy. And Tristan's on 60 Minutes, and he's talking about brain hacking and the use of manipulative techniques persuasive technology to manipulate attention and create habits that become addictions, and then how that makes people vulnerable and how filter bubbles can be used to create enormous economic value, but at the same time increase polarization and undermine democracy. And I had a chance to interview him on Bloomberg a couple days after the 60 Minutes thing, and I call him up immediately after the show's done and go, Dude, do you need a wingman? Because I'm convinced he's, like, the messiah of this thing. He's the guy who gets it. And I thought, well, maybe I can help him get the message out. And so that's how we came together. So that was April 2017, and we literally both dropped everything we were doing and committed ourselves to seeing if we could stimulate a conversation. And it was really clear we were going to focus on public health because I was certain that Tristan's idea was the root cause of the problem. And so that's what we went out to do. And the hilarious thing was, he may have told you this, but it began with going to the Ted Conference. Eli Parrisser, the man who identified filter bubbles and wrote the amazing book about that guy Tristan, onto the schedule of the Ted Conference two weeks before the conference itself. It was amazing what he did, actually. It was chris Anderson got in touch with me, having heard Tristan on this podcast a few weeks before the Ted Conference, and that was also part of the story. Oh, outstanding. Well, thank you for that. I did not know that piece of it was super gratifying to see that effect because, oh, my God, I wanted Tristan's voice amplified. Okay, well, so then we owe it to you. So I look at this as as so it may that's really funny because then that's perfect. That explains a lot of things. So anyway, we go to the Ted Conference, right? We're thinking, there's a thousand people there. We're going to make this thing a big story overnight. Right? We're going to solve this two weeks from the day we meet. We go to Ted, right. He gives us impassioned thing. You've seen the Ted Talk. Yeah. And we go around to collect business cards. I think we came out of there with two. Right. You're talking to people whose job depends on not understanding what exactly oh, my God. It's just exactly right. And so we're just, like, completely traumatized because we don't know anybody who's not in tech. And that's when a miracle occurred. So when Tristan was on 60 Minutes, the woman who did his makeup happened to be someone whose regular gig was doing the makeup for Arianna Huffington. And she called up Ariana, for whom she'd worked for a decade, and said, ariana, I've never asked you to do this, but you need to meet this young man. And so she sets up for Tristan to meet Ariana. So the two of us go to New York, and Ariana takes Tristan under her wing, gets him onto Bill Maher and introduces him to a gazillion other people. So all of a sudden we go from not having any relationship at all. And then this purely beautiful woman, Brenda From, who did Tristan's makeup, gets him on there. And she recurs in the story throughout because she did his makeup on Bill Maher. She did mine when I was on Bill Maher. And it's like you sit there and you go, it's the butterfly's wings. And she was the butterfly. And while Tristan's meeting with Ariana for the first time, I get an email from Jonathan Taplin, who wrote the book Move Fast and Break Things. And Jonathan was a friend who had the first insight about the antitrust issues on Google, Facebook, and Amazon and wrote a book about it in early 2017 that had really helped frame my ideas. And he sends me a card for an aide to Senator Mark Warner. And if you recall, in May of 2017, the only committee of Congress where the Democrats and Republicans were working together was the Senate Intelligence Committee, of which Mark Warner was the vice chair. So to get a card for somebody who is policy aide to him was a huge deal. And so I called him up and I said, have you guys I know your oversight mission is intelligence agencies, but is there anybody in Washington who's going to protect the 2018 elections from interference over social media? It was clearly outside their jurisdiction. Anyway, he brings us to Washington to meet Warner because he goes, you're right. If it's not us, it's not going to happen. So we got to find some way to get it. You need to meet Warner. And it took a couple of months to set up. And in between, we get a contact from Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has a hypothesis about the tech group that is really profoundly insightful, where the question she asks is, isn't this basically the same problem as the banks had in 2008? That you have one side, the powerful banks in that case had perfect information, and their clients only had the information the banks were willing to give them. And she had this insight that Facebook and Google and to a lesser extent Amazon were doing exactly the same thing, that they were maintaining markets of perfect information on one side and starving the other side. So they were essentially distorting. Capitalism really undermining the notion of capitalism, which requires at least some uncertainty on both sides to have a market and using that in a monopolistic way, which, I mean, I was gobsmacked, I've been in the investment business for 35 years. I know a lot about antitrust. I was a first party to the Microsoft antitrust case and to the at and T break up. So I really got to watch both of those up close. I'm a huge believer in using antitrust in tech, and here is a senator who has this whole thing figured out in 2017. So that's the start of our day. And then we go and meet Warner. And Warner immediately gets the need to do something about to protect the elections. And he goes, what should we do in Tristan? This is how genius he is. Tristan without blinking. And I goes, oh, we need to hold a hearing. You need to make Zuckerberg explain why he isn't responsible for the outcome of the 2016 election. I want to drill down there. I want to fast forward at some point to those hearings, because those hearings were, I think, famously unproductive. At least the public's perception of them is that let's articulate what the problem is here with the business model of Facebook in particular, and this extends to Google. I think Facebook has a uniquely culpable story here. And the ethics around this are interesting because you knew these guys, you knew Zuckerberg, you knew Sandberg. You had a reason to believe that they would appreciate their ethical obligations once this became evident that there was a problem. And the problem, as I understand it, is this. I should remind people that we're talking about your book Zucked, which is about Facebook in particular, but it covers the general footprint of this problem of bad incentives and a business model trafficking in user data and generically. The issue here is that misinformation spreads more effectively than facts. The more lurid story is more clickable than the more nuanced one. And you add to that the emotional component, that outrage increases people's time on any social media site. And this leads to an amplification of tribalism and partisanship and conspiracy theory. And all of these things are more profitable than a healthy conversation about facts. They simply are more profitable, given the business model. And one could have always said that this dynamic vitiates other media, too. I mean, this is true for newspapers, it's true for television. It's just true that if it bleeds, it leads on some level. But this is integrated into Facebook's business model to an unusual degree. And yet, to hear you tell the story of your advising of Zuckerberg and I don't think you said it here, but in the book, that you actually introduced Sandberg to him and facilitated that marriage, that was at a time where the ethical problem of this business model wasn't so obvious, to hear you tell that. Were they having to confront this back in 2007 or not? Well, they were certainly not confronting it in any way that I was aware of. To be clear, in the early days of Facebook, they had one objective only, which was to grow the audience. There was really no effort made during the period I was engaged with them to build the business model. Cheryl's arrival was about putting in place the things to create the business model. But there was a great deal of uncertainty. In fact, Mark was initially very hesitant to hire Cheryl because he didn't believe that Google's model would apply or work at Facebook. And it turned out. He was correct about that. So my perception of the model I love the way you just described that. The thing that I always try to explain to people is that when you think about filter bubbles and you think about when it bleeds, it leads. That whole notion has been with us for 150 years, but before google and facebook, it was always in a broadcast model. So when I was a kid, everybody my age saw the Kennedy funeral, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the moon landing, and we all saw it together. And the filter bubble brought people together because we had a shared set of facts. And the complaint at the time was conformity, right? Because we all saw exactly the same thing with Facebook and Google. They create this world of, in Facebook's case, across all their platforms. 3 billion Truman shows where each person gets their own world, their own set of facts, with constant reinforcement, where they lure you onto the site with rewards, right? Whether it's notifications or likes to build a habit. And for many people, that turns into an addiction. I always ask people, if people say, oh, I'm not addicted, and I go, okay, great. When do you check your phone? First thing in the morning. Is it before you pee or why you're peeing? Because everybody I know is one of the other, and we're all addicted to some degree. And then once you're coming back regularly, they have to keep you engaged. And this is the stuff that was not happening until roughly 2011, which was this notion of before 2011. What they had to keep people engaged was zynga, right? They had social games. That was the big driver of usage time before 2011. But what they realized was that appealing to outrage and fear was much more successful than appealing to happiness. Because one person's joy is another person's jealousy. Whereas if you're afraid or outraged, you share stuff in order to make other people also afraid or outraged, because that just makes you feel better. And Tristan had this whole thing figured out, and we obviously shared that in Washington, and that was an important stimulus. But when I think about the problem, that's one piece of it, which is the manipulation of people's attention for profit and the natural divisiveness of using fear and outrage and filter bubbles that isolate people, that if you start out antivax curious and they can get you into an antivax group, within a year you're going to be in the streets fighting vaccination. It's just how it works. That constant reinforcement makes your positions more rigid and makes them more extreme, and we cannot help that fundamental. It's not a question of character or whatever. It's about the most basic evolutionary wiring. I just want to COVID this ground. Again, not to be pedantic, but I do have this sense that there are many people who are skeptical that this is really even a problem. Or that there's something fundamentally new about this. So I just want to just cover a little bit of that ground. Again, you've used this phrase, filter bubble a bunch of times, if I recall. That actually came from Eli Parriser's Ted Talk, where many of us were first made aware of this problem. He might have mentioned Facebook, but I remember him putting it in terms of Google searches where if you do a Google search for vaccines and I do one, we are not going to get the same search results. Your search history and all the other things you've done online are getting fed into an algorithm that is now dictating what Google decides to show you in any query. You know. And the problem here is that and I think I think it was Tristan who no, either Tristan or Jaron Lanier. You might you might correct me here. One of them said, just imagine if when any one of us consulted Wikipedia, we got different facts, however subtly curated, to appeal to our proclivities on any topic we researched there. And there could be no guarantee that you and I would be seeing the same facts. That's essentially the situation we're in on social media. And social media is the Google. And this is obviously the majority of anyone's consumption of information at this point. Exactly. And so if we take that as one part of the problem so when Eli first talked about filter bubbles, he used both Google and Facebook and showed these examples and how essentially these companies were pretending to be neutral when in fact they were not, and they were not honest about it. So you know, the Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff has a new book called the age of surveillance capitalism. And there are some things in there where she spent a dozen years studying Google's business and gathering data about it. And in my book, which I wrote at the same time she was writing her, so I was totally unaware of her work. I hypothesized a bunch of things. And Shashana has data, so she's like, in my opinion, a god. But the core thing that Google did, and here's how the flow worked, because without this, what Facebook did would have been less harmful. But when you talk about the people who are skeptical harm when you see the Google piece, then the two of them together make it really clear. So Google begins like a traditional marketer. They have one product, it's 2002. The product is search. They're gathering data from their users in order to improve the quality of the product for those users. And they have an insight, which is that they only need a couple percent of the data they're gathering to improve the search engine. So they decide to figure out, is there any signal in the other 98%? And the insight is traditionally, I think, credited to Halverion, an economist at Google, that there was in fact, predictive signal. So. They could basically do behavioral prediction based on this stream of excess data that they were capturing from search results. And the signal wasn't hugely strong because it was just from search. So they had the insight, we need to find out the identity of people. And then they did something incredibly bold. They create Gmail, which would have given them identity, which you could tie to the search queries, and therefore, you'd know, purchase sent tent and whose purchase intent it was. But the really bold thing they did was they decided they were going to scan every message and they put ads into the Gmail, ostensibly to pay for it. But I think that was actually just duck food. This is a hypothesis of mine that they knew people would squawk at the ads and force them to be removed. But once they were removed, people would stop complaining and Google would still be scanning all the messages. So essentially, if you're looking for data for behavioral prediction, it's hard to get a better product than email for telling you what people are thinking. And for whatever reason, people who signed up for Gmail went along with this. So suddenly Google got this massive treasure trove of data about what people are going to do with their name and their search results to tie it to actual purchase intent. Then they decide, we need to know where they are. So they create Gmail. Or, sorry, they create Google Maps. And so now they know where everybody is, and then they realize, wait a minute, there's all these open spaces. We can turn them into data and monetize them. So they start driving cars up and down the street to create Street View, and they do this without permission, but nobody really pushes back very hard. There are a few complaints. Germany got very uppity about it, and there was a big stink over there. But in the US. People sort of went along with it, and then they realized, well, wouldn't it be cool if we also took pictures of everybody's house from the top? So they do Satellite View, and then they create Google Glass so they can get up close. And that doesn't work. People blow that up. So the guy leaves, creates niantech, and so they do Pokemon Go, and they do all the API stuff. So they get all this people think they're playing a game, but they're really gathering data for Google. And when you put all these pieces together, you realize, oh my gosh. The business model initially was about improving the targeting of the ads. But then they have a genius insight that with filter bubbles and with recommendation engines, they can take that market of behavioral prediction and increase the probability of a good outcome by steering people towards the outcomes that the predictions have suggested. And so that's how they use filter bubbles. That's how they use and so the way to think about it is, if you're a marketer today, google and Facebook have all of your customers behind a paywall. But you can do this Faustian deal with these guys, which is you can get perfect information on these people as long as you're willing to do it on their terms. Now, the other side of that trade, if you're a consumer, the data you're getting is coming primarily from google or facebook, right? It's being controlled by them. So if you take the emotional component of what Facebook has been doing, and that whole thing with manipulation of attention and the notion of creating habits that become addictions, and that inflaming of lizard brain emotions like outrage and fear, and the use of disinformation and conspiracy theories to essentially get past people's civility, right? Civility is a mask. And you want to strip people of that and get to their underlying reality, because that's where all the behavioral prediction value is. And then you overlay onto that what Google was doing, and you realize, oh my god, these people have created digital avatars for each and every one of us. And they've got this choke collar on it and a leash, and they control our digital avatars. We do not control them. And they control them simply because they went into a place where there were these where there was this unclaimed asset called data, and they claimed ownership of all of it, and we let them get away with it. So, on the one hand, you're talking about companies. Let's just focus on google and Facebook here. I'm sure twitter is involved as well, but I can't figure out how twitter is functioning. Microsoft and Amazon are the other guys who really do this, right? Okay, well, let's just focus on the products you've already described here. So google rolls out gmail and maps and the user perception of this and search before them. The user perception is, this is adding immense value to our lives. Just to be able to navigate in a city based on accurate mapping data and to understand what streets to avoid because the traffic is so bad. This is what technology should be doing for us and gmail. I was never a fan of the idea of gmail until I started getting spammed. I don't know who put me on the devil's list, but I woke up one day and I was literally getting 99 to one spam to real email, and no spam detector could deal with it. And I ran my email through google servers, and all the spam magically disappeared forever. So I was immensely grateful for this. And there are many other instances of this where if you're a user of Facebook, which I'm really not, I can imagine you like the fact that Facebook is serving you stuff that you find interesting. But the general principle here is that everything that these platforms do that is good for a user or seems good for a user is really doubly good for advertisers. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. That is the bottom line. And what's so perverse about the incentives built into the business model? Yeah. So the way I handicap it is this way. If all they were doing was capturing the data that you put into the system in the form of the roots for your going to the office and back, or the emails that you send, or the photos or posts that you put on Facebook, everything, I think would be fine. The problem is, there is also a third leg of the stool, which is the third party market in our most personal data. So this is our credit card transactions data, which is sold by Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. It is our location sold by our cellular carrier, but also captured through the APIs that Google has with companies like Uber. It is wellness and health data captured from apps and devices that are outside the protection of HIPAA, the Health Information Protection Act. And it is also our browsing history, which can be freely acquired. And to me, we've never asked the question, well, wait a minute, why is it legal for companies to do commerce in our most private data? We've actually never agreed to that. Right. There's nothing that I can find in a credit card transaction that gives those people the right to sell that data. They've simply asserted, and no one has said no. And we live in this really deregulated economic environment where the government, in contrast to a normally highly functioning capitalist system, where the government would set the rules and then enforce them uniformly on everybody. Well, it must be in their terms of service that nobody ever reads. Right. It's got to be in the fine print somewhere. Well, hang on. I don't have a business relationship with Experian or Equifax. Right. My relationship is with Visa. Visa just runs the technology, and Equifax actually handles the transaction processing. I don't have a relationship with them. Right. Okay. Most of these guys have something buried in the terms of service. But I think on that one, I'm not even I don't even know where it would show up. Right. And, you know, I can't imagine why, why it would be in Visa's interest to have that happen. And also, they just have a monopoly. You can't opt out of using credit cards, or at least you can't do that. Exactly. And so my point is, if you take those three problems, the emotional component, the essential data capture, and the claim of ownership so it's like they're acting like a government exercising a right of eminent domain. Right. They're claiming, okay, well, this data has touched our service, therefore we own it forever, and we can do whatever we want with it. And then you've got these third parties who simply will trade your digital life to anybody who wants it. So in that scenario, you wind up with this thing where the gatekeepers, in this case Google, Facebook, Amazon, and maybe to a lesser degree, microsoft can offer perfect information to marketers in exchange for access to all of their consumer customers. And the consumers are in this extraordinary position of having their access to information limited by those people. And my point here is not that Google or Facebook do not provide good value. I think they provide tremendous value. What I believe is true is that the value they're receiving in return is not only disproportionate, it's that they have the ability to influence our choices in ways that we are not aware of. And they're taking our agency away. They do a lot of first party gathering. That would be the Google apps, that would be the Facebook apps, and then they acquire data wherever it's available. So they create this digital, high resolution digital avatar for each and every one of us, and they sell access to that avatar. That's the perfect information, right? And so they're selling access for cash, right. So they're getting paid. That's why they're so immensely profitable, right? And my simple observation is, if you want to understand the nature of the relationship, is ask yourself how much more value you get from Google maps or Gmail today than you got, say, two years ago. And then look at Google's average revenue per user over those two years and see how much more value they got from you, right? And here's where the moral problem gets really dicey, is there is no opt out. We all say, hey, my data is out there. I don't care, and I'm an honest person. And I sit there and go, that would be true if the only impact of the data was on you. But I don't use Gmail. And if I send an email to somebody in a Gmail account, it is being scanned by Google, and it is going into their behavioral prediction on lots of people, including me, and I have no voice in that. And there are hundreds of examples just like that all over the economy. And so if you sit there and think that phase one was, again improving the quality of the ad targeting, which is the thing you liked inside Facebook, and phase two is using recommendation engines and filter bubbles and things like that, to steer you to desired outcomes, you're sitting there saying, oh, I don't maybe don't like that quite so much. Here's phase three. Anyone who is a subscriber to things like the Financial times has run into the Google caption, a system where they say, hey, we want to figure out if you're a robot. So look at these photographs and touch all the photographs that have a traffic light or all the ones that have a bus. And I think we've all seen that one degree another, and those things are getting harder and harder. And we think, okay, well, they're just trying to figure out if we're humor or not. And of course, that's not what you're doing at all. What you're doing is training the artificial intelligence for Google's self driving cars. That's why it's getting harder, because they're getting to corner cases. Now. They've figured out you're a human because of the movement of your mouse. Now, I assume that they're keeping a log of all of that, and I assume that Amazon does the same thing and Facebook does the same thing, which means that they may already be able to do this, but if not very soon. When my mouse movement becomes slower than it used to be and gets more wobbly, that may be the first indication that I have a disease like Parkinson's. Now, here's the problem, and this is a deep moral problem. Whichever company captures that, whether it's Facebook, Google, Amazon is under no obligation to tell me. In fact, they're not even under an obligation to keep it private. They are free. And all the incentives point to them selling it to the highest bidder, which would almost certainly be my insurance company, which would almost certainly raise my rates or cut off my coverage, and I still wouldn't know. I'd shown a symptom. And I would simply point out that that same technology could be used in an insurance product that simply said, pay us $10 a year, and if you ever show a symptom of a neurological problem, we're going to let you know. Like, you'll be the only one. We'll be covered by HIPAA, and it will protect your secret and get you to a hospital quickly. And of course, all of this could be probabilistic, so it might not actually apply to you, but it just has to apply to people like you in the aggregate to be worth trading in this data and acting on it. Exactly. And so the issue that we have here is that in a traditional advertising business, we would say that you're not the customer, you're the product. But in the model of these guys, in what Zuboff calls the surveillance capitalism, you're not even the product, you're the fuel. Each one of us is a reservoir of data that they're pumping the data out of. And I simply make the observation that their influence, if we simply look in democracy, their influence on democracy in every country in which they operate is enormous, that their code, their algorithms have so much more influence on our lives than the law does, and yet they're not elected. They're not accountable to anyone. And that, from a democracy point, is a huge problem. You have all the issues on public health where, why is it legal to even capture data, much less exploit it relative to minors under 18? Yet Google has whole businesses in Chromebooks and YouTube that do precisely that. And if you simply look at the imperatives created by the business model they have, they sit there and their first rule of thumb is, well, we'll let any content go on there, and then the users will be responsible for telling us when there's a problem. So if a madman kills 50 people in New Zealand, the users have to tell us first. And then when that didn't work politically, they said, okay, well, we'll have moderators who will sit and watch stuff. But I would like to point out that all of these things happen after the fact. And the reason they happen after the fact and the reason these guys are so insistent on doing it that way is they want to capture what Zuboff calls the behavioral surplus, the signals that come from the raw parts of our psychology. They want to strip the veneer of civility office and get to that what are our real underlying emotions? What are our real biases? And so they're going to fight us every step of the way. I mean, obviously, you had Renee Duressa on here, and Renee is completely brilliant. And one of the things that she taught me is this notion that freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of reach, and that the issue here isn't censoring people. The issue we're talking about is avoiding amplification of the most hostile voices in society. And these platforms are platforms designed to provide status as a service. And in that model, you're basically rewarding people for being more outrageous, more angry, more disinformed, if you will, more conspiracy oriented, and then leaving it to the users to clean up the mess. And I got a problem with that. And I just don't think that there's any amount of value that you can get from Google Maps or Gmail or from Facebook or Instagram that offsets the damage that they're doing right now to society as a whole. That individually, we may love these products, and I don't dispute that, but they're causing huge harm. And my basic point here is I believe we can get rid of the harm without having to eliminate what we like about the products. They're going to be a lot less profitable. A lot less profitable, but tough. Nogis. I mean, corporations are not allowed to destroy civilization just because it's more profitable than building civilization. I want to zoom out for a second. I want to talk about these specific problems more, and I do want to get to the government's response and to possible solutions, but I just want to zoom out for a second and talk about this basic quandary, which I'm fairly sympathetic with. The most charitable view of what these platforms are doing is simply thinking of themselves as platforms. They insist, we're platforms, we're not media companies. And on his face, that seems like a legitimate distinction which could absolve them of responsibility for the content that appears on their platform. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. My guest today is Joseph Rome. Joe is one of the country's most influential communicators on climate science and solutions. He was chief science advisor for the show Years of Living Dangerously, which won the 2014 Emmy award for outstanding nonfiction series. He is the founding editor of Climate Progress, which Tom Friedman of the New York Times called the Indispensable blog. In 2009, Time named him one of the heroes of the environment, and Rolling Stone put him on its list of 100 people who are, quote, reinventing America. Rome was acting Assistant Secretary of Energy in 1997, and he's a fellow at American Progress and holds a PhD in physics from MIT. And perhaps most relevant, he is the author of Climate Change what Everyone needs to know, put out by Oxford University Press. And it is a very handy, accessible, comprehensive book that is organized in Q and A format. So every question you have ever had or heard, posed skeptical or otherwise, about climate change seems to be answered in this book. And Joe and I get into many of the details. We talk about how we know the climate is changing and how we know that human behavior is the primary cause. We talk about feedback mechanisms that increase the problem of global warming and why small changes in temperature matter so much. We talk about the threats of sea level rise and desertification and the best and worst case scenarios given where we currently are. We talk about the much maligned Paris Climate Agreement and the politics surrounding climate science. And now, without further delay, I bring you Joe Rome. I am here with Joe Rome. Joe, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. We're going to talk about climate change, which, as you know, is a big and important topic, and we will talk about what we know about it, what we don't know about it, and I suppose what many people refuse to know about it. But first, before we jump in, can you describe your background scientifically and in policy circles and just the work you've done on this issue? Sure. Well, I have a PhD in physics for MIT. And I spent a year on Capitol Hill as a Congressional Science Fellow. And then I went to work at the Rockefeller Foundation for a couple of years, looking at issues like the environment and national security and energy. Then I worked with Amory Lovins for a couple of years, the father of energy efficiency, really a great guy, and then five years at the US. Department of Energy during the Clinton administration, where I ended up acting Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which is the billion dollar office that does all the clean energy research, development, demonstration programs for the federal government. Then I left to do a lot of consulting with companies on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and how to use efficiency and renewables. And then August 29, 2005, hurricane Katrina destroyed my brother's home. He lives in Past Christian, Mississippi, and a mile inland there was a 20 foot storm surge and the inside of the house looked like a washing machine. He asked me if he should rebuild his home. And I started talking to climate scientists and hurricane experts and reading the literature and going to conferences, and that's when I realized that two things climate change was a lot more dire than I realized and that scientists weren't doing a very good job of communicating it. And since I had been raised by newspaper people, my father's newspaper editor, I decided to stop doing clean energy consulting and just do writing and communications on climate change. And I was able to get a position as the center for American Progress, which had recently started and launched its Think Progress website, which is one of the most widely read news, progressive news websites in the world. And that was about eleven years ago. Eleven years ago next week, I launched ClimateProgress.org, which grew over time into we now have a staff of five or six reporters. It's part of the larger Think Progress enterprise. If you go to Think Progress, you'll see articles by me and other people on clean energy and climate change, and it's probably the most widely read climate website in the world. And that's what I've been doing for eleven years. To also worked with the years of Building Dangerously TV series, some of you may have seen on Showtime a few years ago, or last year on National Geographic Channel. That's the James Cameron Arnold Schwarzenegger series, emmy winning series that documents what's going on on climate change, what the solutions are. And so that's what I've been doing. I'm very fortunate to be able to keep track of climate change and clean energy and write about it and speak about it. Yeah. And you've written this very lucid book that's right on point titled Climate Change what Everyone Needs to Know, published by Oxford University Press, which is not actually known for publishing propaganda. And if I'm not mistaken, your PhD in physics from MIT was not focused in some totally unrelated area. Didn't you have some focus on oceanography? It did focus on oceanography, yeah. I was fortunate I was able to do my PhD thesis with Men and Costa Sippus, who back in the day wrote a great number of Scientific American thesis, particularly on arms control issues. And he allowed me to do my thesis research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography with Walter Monk, one of the world's greatest oceanographers, and actually did my thesis wasn't on climate change at all, but the thesis itself was an analysis of data from the Greenland Sea. And, you know, just being at scripts and attending seminars by some of the world's greatest oceanographers, you know, why, couldn't help but also learn at the time, this this was the mid 1980s, before a lot of people were talking about climate change. They were talking about climate change. So that was that was a true education, right? Right. So before we jump into the details here, I should say that my goal in this conversation is to dispel the most consequential forms of confusion on this topic. I went out on Twitter when I knew we were going to do this interview, and I now said I'd be doing a podcast on climate change. And I asked people to post questions and I got over 1000 responses, so there's no shortage of questions here. But let's start with the basic picture of what's going on. And I want to get into the weeds, but I don't want us to assume that people know much of anything about this issue because despite its enormous importance, most people, certainly many people, don't. So first, what is the difference between climate and weather? Well, climate, they say, is what you expect and weather is what you get. So weather is highly variable day to day. Is it going to be cloudy? Is it going to rain? Is it going to be a very hot day? Is it going to be a coolish day? That's the weather. But of course, on a given day, whether it's warm or cold is relative to what the underlying climate is. A hot day in the summer is obviously quite different than a hot day in the winter. So weather forecasting is obviously tricky, hard to do more than a week, ten days in advance. But climate is the statistical aggregation of all the weather. So climate tells you it's going to be warmer in the summer. Climate tells you the Greenland is going to be colder than the Sahara Desert, and the Sahara Desert is going to be drier. So the long term trends in your local climate are very slow moving. And one of the points that I make in the book and on the website is that since we came out of the last ice age 11,000 years ago, the Earth's climate has been very stable. The temperature has really varied over maybe half a degree Fahrenheit, plus or minus. And that stable climate is what allowed people to settle in cities. They had reliable the weather wasn't constantly changing. They knew what the rainfall would be, they knew what sea levels would be. People therefore could have large scale agriculture and that led to cities. And that has sustained now a population of over 8 billion people. But because we have been pouring vast amounts of heat trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we have seen a rapid rise in temperature, particularly over the last century or so. And in fact, the temperature of the earth, driven by greenhouse gases, driven by burning fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas and releasing carbon dioxide, that temperature change has been 50 times faster than the very slow changes in the past 5000 years. And it is both the amount of change and the speed that worries them, because the faster it changes, the harder it is to adapt to. And the more it changes, of course, the more dramatic the impacts are. We've already closed the door to one source of skepticism here about climate change because most people understand that it's impossible to predict the weather far in advance. And from that they conclude that it must be hard to say anything about the climate far in the future. In fact, we got one of these on Twitter. One person wrote most forecasts can't accurately predict the weather more than five days in advance. How can you have it right for five years or five decades ahead? So we spared one person some fatal embarrassment. I think that is a very important point worth driving home. I can't tell you in one year whether you're going to have 100 degree Fahrenheit day or a 60 degree Fahrenheit day. But I do know what the average yearly temperature is. And if you look at the average yearly temperature of the globe or even the average monthly temperature, that doesn't change very much over time. Unless of course, something is forcing it to change. That's the key point. We're forcing the change. And that's why year by year we've been seeing these hotter and hotter years. Okay, so tell me how we know that we are forcing this change. There's two parts here how we know that the climate is changing, ie. Heating up, and how we know that humanity is playing a role in changing it. And for this part, I'd really like you to limit yourself to what is totally uncontroversial from a scientific point of view. We can get into gray areas later. But is there a version of this story that is at the level of smoking is harmful to your health? Can we make it that uncontroversial? Sure. Although that still won't make it uncontroversial in the sense that, as you know, the tobacco companies launched a major disinformation campaign to confuse the public for decades about the science of smoking and the health consequences. And so, decades after the medical community was quite certain that smoking was bad for your health, that myth persisted. But it is true. In recent years the scientific community has said that our certainty that the climate is changing, that humans are the primary cause. Our certainty level is exactly comparable to our certainty level that cigarette smoking is bad for your health. So they are comparable. One thing I want to say right away, and I'll probably repeat, anybody who wants to know the underlying science of these myths and the debunking of them, there's a website, a great website, which just has 10th year anniversary called Skeptical Science and it literally goes through each of these. And you can click on links to the actual scientific literature depending on how informed you want to get. So fundamentally, if you look over the history of the Earth, whenever the climate changes substantially, it's because it was forced to by some external change. Often that change was a slow change in the earth's orbit, reducing the amount of sunlight that hit particularly the northern hemisphere. And that led to the ice age cycle over the past million plus years. But those ice ages and the end of those ice ages, as it turns out, were triggered by the changes in the earth. But those changes then actually led to a feedback, which is release of greenhouse gases and other feedback. So we have known literally for two centuries that that there are certain gases that trap heat in the atmosphere and that the major one, the major one that we control is carbon dioxide. And that it has been predicted, it was predicted for over a century that if you keep burning the fossil fuels that have been tracked in the ground in the form of coal, oil and gas, if you keep burning those, you are going to be basically putting more and more blankets around the earth. You're going to be heating up the earth and that heating up is going to have a whole bunch of consequences. As to the question of how do we know that humans are the major cause, the answer is twofold. One, you can look at all of the potential sources of heating and cooling and you find, particularly in recent decades, that all of the ones that aren't human costs would actually be cooling the earth because the sun's solar radiation has actually declined slightly in recent decades. We've had volcanoes, they're another cooler because they put in aerosols that block the sun. So if you take away all of the so called natural cycles and natural things that change the climate, you would find that the vast majority of warming since the middle last century is due to human activity, principally the release of these heat trapping gases. And in fact, not only did the scientific community conclude in its most recent assessment, every five years all the world's leading scientists review all the scientific literature and they issue reports to the world's government. Those are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And those reports by the way, are literally argued over line by line by all of the governments of the world. So they end up as the least common denominator. And those study, the most recent one, concluded two things. There is a 95% to 100% chance that most of the recent warming is due to humans. And at the same time, the best estimate for how much of recent warming is due to humans is all of it 100%. So the peak in the in in the most likely scenario is that humans are responsible for all of the warming since 1950. But like you envision a curve, like a bell curve, there are small chances that humans are only responsible for, let's say, 75%. But there's no point in getting into a lot of detail on that because this is not a subject of much debate at all in the side of the community. I'm actually wondering whether it's relevant in the end. So there are at least three parts to this story. There's the fact that the planet has been warming over the last century. There's the fact, or at least the claim, that human behavior has contributed to it, either in part or in entirety. And then there's the claim that warming past a certain point would be catastrophic for us. And we will definitely get into that. But this third claim, in my view, seems to undercut the significance of the second. If warming past a certain point is going to be catastrophic for us, it doesn't much matter who caused it, right, or what the cause is. We'd want to find some way of mitigating this warming or arresting it and mitigating it anyway, right? Well, I don't entirely agree with that in the following sense. Knowing that humans are the major cause tells us we are the major solution. If this were just an underlying natural change like the incredibly slow changes in and out of the ice ages, then there's not much we could do. I mean, we could adapt, we could plan for the changes, but we couldn't stop the changes. The fact that we know that we are essentially all of the cause of recent warming tells us that if we were to change, replace fossil fuel combustion with clean energy renewables and the like, that we would slow and ultimately stop the amount of warming. So that's sort of .1.2. Joe, let me just jump in there. I totally agree with that in that it points to a way forward toward a solution. But given the predicted consequences here, a sudden warming, not a gradual warming, would be bad for us. Whether or not we're the cause and if there's any way to mitigate it, we would be interested in doing that. I guess what I'm trying to do here is differentiate the problem as we face it from kind of common attitude you find among people, which is just a matter of disapproving of human caused change in principle and analogous to thinking that it was a bad thing that we wiped out the dodo bird. There's a kind of a sentimentality for nature that I don't want us to be confused by. I'm not saying I don't share it. But that's not really the issue. The issue is if the average temperature of the planet keeps going up and we hit the most dire projections, whatever the cause, we have a huge problem for which we should be seeking a solution. Right? But if one thing I can get out of this discussion with you is to persuade you that the phrase whatever the cause is really a phrase that concedes the battle and it is false, it's wrong, it isn't. Whatever the cause. If we didn't know the cause, then we wouldn't know that warming is not only going to continue, it's going to speed up. Right? This is science. We put twelve men on the moon and we got them back. We don't make guesses. And the scientific community as a whole doesn't come out and say, on our current path of burning fossil fuels, we are headed towards rates of warming that will have catastrophic impacts. If you took away the cause, then you would be able to make no statements about the future. At the end of the day, what science is, is an ability to make testable predictions. And if your predictions don't come true, you know your theory is wrong. And if they do come true, then you have growing confidence in that theory. So no, I don't use the phrase whatever the cause because we know the cause and that's how we know what's going to happen. And that's why we know it's going to happen literally thousands of times faster than whenever the climate change because of purely orbital or natural changes. And we are, in fact, acidifying the oceans more than ten times faster than ever happened before under, you know, previous, you know, dating back millions and millions of years. Can I, can I make one other point, which I'm not going to go into, but you can read my book. The type of warming that we're getting is also the exact type of warming that you would expect if it were due to greenhouse gases. And I go through that in the book. The fact that the lower troposphere, the air near where we are, is warming quickly. But in fact, if you go high enough in the atmosphere to the stratosphere, it's actually cooling. But it's only cooling there because the warming is caused by a heat trapping layer lower than that. So the point is, I don't want to get technical, but one of the reasons that scientists have so much confidence that humans are the cause is the theory predicted that greenhouse gases would cause the warming. The type of warming is the kind of warming that you would have expected from greenhouse gases. And all of the other things that cause warming a are moving in the direction to cause warming. And again, the type of warming we're getting is not the type of warming they would cause. That's why you get these incredibly strong statements that we know humans are the primary indeed, almost entirely the cause of breach of warming. Well, Joe, those are exactly the kinds of technical details I want you to bring forward. Because, as you know, in the absence of a statement of the sort you just made Skeptics take, the fact that part of the atmosphere is warming and part is cooling as a sign of the ambiguity of the situation, even a coarser grained source of confusion. True or feigned on the part of skeptics is the fact that what is predicted in terms of the results of global warming entails both conditions of drought, but also increased flooding. And so now you have a climate change skeptic laughing over the imponderable fact there. That what is some sort of scientific co on where you're telling me we're going to have a drought and lots of flooding. So it's good for you to make sense of all of that as we move forward. Before we get into the details of what's predicted, what are some of the feedback mechanisms that cause this to get out of hand in ways that may be counterintuitive? So that where an initial warming can become far more substantial. Well, one of the best known feedbacks is the loss of ice on land and the ocean, particularly the Arctic Ocean. So what happens is that as the planet warms up, of course, ice melts. Now, ice is highly reflective. So if the ice is on the land, then as the ice retreats, you're exposing the land, which is dark. And therefore, whereas ice might reflect 90 95% of the light that hits it, the ground absorbs most of the light. So as the ice retreats, the earth is actually absorbing more of the Sun's heat and therefore it heats up faster and therefore the ice retreats more. So that is one of the best known feedback effects, and that is occurring both on land and as we get the reports year by year, the Arctic Ocean, the Arctic ice cover, particularly during the summer, is retreating rapidly. And again, when you replace ice covered ocean with the blue wavy ocean, you get the ocean absorbing considerably more of the sun's energy than it was when it had a nice insulation blanket, if you will, from the ice. So that's called a fast feedback. And that is one of the best known, and we're clearly witnessing it now. It's one reason, by the way, that the warming is occurring twice as fast in the Arctic as it is in the rest of the globe. And now there's also a feedback mechanism with respect to water vapor, right? Yes, that's another fast feedback. So water vapor is a heat trapping gas. So when you start the initial process of warming through injecting a large amount of greenhouse gases or changing their sorbit, then you start to evaporate more water as you warm up the planet, and that water goes into the atmosphere and it also traps heat. So that is a feedback too. Yes, and that is another major fast feedback. I think I've seen that fact in isolation, seized upon by skeptics as a sign of just how preposterous the situation is as described by science. Yes, and again, this is the kind of thing if you, you know, skeptical science will go into details, if anyone is interested, that most of the warming is due to the water vapor, but the excess water vapor is there because of the excess carbon pollution. By the way, it should be said people should understand that the greenhouse effect is not controversial in the least. We have an atmosphere. That's why we have a habitable planet. That's why we're not Mars. Right. If you took away the entire atmosphere, the carbon dioxide, the water vapor, everything that traps heat, the planet would be 60 degrees Fahrenheit colder. So there would not be a lot of places that would be very hospitable for life. One problem here strikes me is that the changes in temperature that people are worried about don't seem so great when you look at your thermometer or you judge the weather for yourself. On any given day when you hear about a two degree rise celsius, like 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit or a four degree rise, or even, in the worst case, an eight degree rise. If you told me 30 years from now my children will be living in a world that is, on average, four degrees Celsius warmer. It's not immediately obvious why that would be a big deal. If you don't like the heat, you just move further north. Right. Canada is going to be great. What are the likely effects of these changes in temperature as we go up in increments of two, four and six degrees Celsius? Well, I think this is a very good point. First of all, obviously the rest of the world talks Celsius. And whereas Americans have in their mind that their temperature gradations are based on Fahrenheit, so I think it is better to talk about Fahrenheit. It's still a small number. 3.6 degree Fahrenheit is indeed widely viewed in the sign of a community and by essentially all the major governments in the world except our current one, as a threshold beyond which climate impacts move from being dangerous to being catastrophic at a very rapid rate. Now, you can look at it a couple of different ways, one of which is that the average temperature going up pushes the extremes up much faster. And I have a chart in the book that shows that if you can visualize a bell curve in your head where at the very right side is that tail where you get the monster heat waves that really are devastating to people in agriculture or the monster droughts or the monster superstorms. They are a teeny fraction of the area under the Bell curve. But if you now visualize that bell curve shifting a couple of degrees to the right, all of a sudden, what had been varying frequent events all of a sudden start to become quite frequent. And that's why you hear that like a Superstorm Sandy, which might be a once in a thousand year storm, is now actually under a once in a century storm. And in fact, Sandy was followed hurricane Irene, which was also at the time a once in a century storm. And so you see storms that used to be once in a century, once in 500 years. If they're now coming every few years, it's because we changed at the high end of the far end of the bell curve, the frequency of the really rare events. And historically it has been the really rare events that have done most of the devastation in the history of hurricanes. It has literally been seven or eight or nine hurricanes that have done half of the damage. Katrina and Sandy, these are the two most destructive storms and so they're outliers. So part one, the reason we worry about this is we're very concerned about the outlier events because they're the true catastrophes. Secondly, when you look at, let's say, Superstorm Sandy, one of the things that warming changes is sea levels. And as you raise sea levels, every storm that you see is going to have a storm surge which is higher and higher because it's the underlying average sea level keeps going up. So you get that impact of whatever the weather was going to be. Now you have global warming on top of it. That's why, for instance, El Nino years, which are years that have freaky weather and are slightly warmer than usual, they tend to be the hottest years on record because the small amount of the extra regional warming from the El Nino is put on top of the global warming trend. Now we've had 2014 was the hottest year on record and then 2015 beat that easily to become the hottest year on record and then 2016 beat that. So we've been seeing unprecedented records in warming and 2017 is on track to probably be the second warmest year on record, but the hottest year on record without an El Nino. So we're starting to see, the point is, we're starting to see levels of warming that you normally only see during extreme years be the normal weather. In other words, the climate is changing. And that's what I try to tell people. For instance, when I talk about drought, you can look at the California drought, which lasted five, six years and that was the worst drought in 1000 years. But the point is that as you make the average rainfall a little less and the average temperature higher, then suddenly that type of drought becomes a ten year drought or a 20 year drought. And instead of it happening every hundred years, it happens every ten years. So that is one, you know, obvious thing that that is why even small temperature changes can have a big impact just. By the way. I mean, another analogy people use is, you know, if you imagine a planet to be like a human being, it's designed you know, we we spent 10,000 years at a relatively constant set of weather patterns. Over time, the climate didn't change very much. Billions of people have chosen where to live based on their knowledge of is it too warm here? No. Is there enough rainfall to sustain light? Yes. Is the sea level endangering us? No. So the point is, literally 8 billion people are living in places that they chose to live on based on a relatively stable climate. You now add a few degrees to that, and it's literally like adding a few degrees Celsius or, you know, or or twice that. Fahrenheit five degrees, let's say, Fahrenheit to your body temperature. Our entire body temperature is constructed around 98.6. And we have mechanisms in our body, as I'm sure you know, to regulate that temperature. And if you start going outside of that bound, it means something is wrong. And if it stays outside that bound for a long period of time, it has dire consequences. Well, the same is true for the climate. If the planet warmed two degrees and stopped, then we would adjust to that. But that still doesn't mean that the 8 billion people who live where they do now wouldn't have to move. A billion or 2 billion people moving. This is a catastrophe. Right. I mean, we saw, what, two or 3 million refugees from Syria turned global politics upside down. Let's talk about that for a second, why people would need to move. I guess two obvious reasons come to mind. You're talking about sea level change, so the inundation of certain coastal areas, and you're talking about the dust bolification of certain areas where we depend upon agriculture to be viable. Perhaps there are other reasons that I haven't thought of. Tell me about certainly those two variables and anything else relevant to ranging global politics. Sure. Well, people talk a lot about different impacts. So certainly if your listeners come away from anything, I would want them to think in terms of the two most worrisome impacts is, yes, dust falsification turning an area that was, let's say, semi arid, but could grow crops and sustain life into something that's purely arid, ultimately a desert. But in the transition from it being semiarid or near semi arid to becoming a desert, it's just going to get drier and hotter and droughts are going to last longer and longer. And we know that. Again, we have designed an agricultural system of the world in which we feed large amounts of the world from relatively small tracts of land. We have two bread baskets in this country, the Midwest, extending to the Great Plains and California, even though, of course, Southern California is essentially a semi air and near desert climate. So, again, if you just shift the climate zones a little bit, all of a sudden, you find that your bread baskets are getting these mega droughts on a regular basis. And many of our crops are quite temperature sensitive. People want to Google corn and temperature sensitivity. They will learn a great deal about it. So the point is that, yes, much of our population is fed by an agricultural system that truly wants a stable client. Talk to a farmer. The thing that causes the most problems, obviously, is extreme weather variability. Too much rain, too little rain. It's too hot or it's too cold. So that's an enormous problem. Literally. There are lots of people living in places where they're not going to have sources of food. And by the way, this is also related to sea level rise because many of our richest agricultural areas are deltas, right? The Nile Delta and the low lying areas of Bangladesh and Southeast Asia. So you raise sea levels a couple of feet, and suddenly the many rich deltas that were feeding hundreds of millions of people, they are flooded. And of course, they're flooded with salt water. And that saltwater intrusion, by the way, is already happening. As sea levels rise, salt water goes further and further up those deltas. And if you Google saltwater intrusion, you will find that as a mammoth problem already for places like Egypt and Bangladesh and the water systems of Miami. So part one is, are you going to be able to feed? I mean, we're going to have 10 billion people in mid century. And I wrote an article for Nature on dust bullfication. It's titled The Next Dust Bowl, saying the biggest threat facing humanity is, how are we going to feed 10 billion people when we're moving in a rapidly changing climate to a world that has less potable water, less arable land, and much more intensive droughts and superstorms? So that is problem number one for billions of people and the choices that they've made where they live now. The second is sea level rise. Most of the population in the world, or half the population in the world, lives within 50 miles of the ocean. People like to be near water. Water has made trade possible. Most of your major cities are near waterways near the ocean historically and even today. So we have billions of people. So we have hundreds of millions of people who live right on the ocean. And in places like Bangladesh, and even in places like Miami and Louisiana and Norfolk, Virginia, or even Los Angeles, we have staggering amounts of people who live where they live because sea levels have been, until recent decades, pretty damn stable. And we are now moving to a situation where the worst case scenarios of sea level rise appear to be the ones that we are facing. And if you were to have a leading expert, a glaciologist expert on Greenland or Antarctica, they would tell you that the great ice sheets are melting much faster than anyone thought and that we may be much closer to tipping points beyond which we can't stop them. And therefore we look to be headed to what used to be the worst case levels of sea level rise are now pretty much the business as usual projections and talking about three, four and 5ft. And you can go online and find programs that allow you to look at the coast of the world, coast of different cities under three, four or 5ft. But I can tell you that all of South Florida, if you've been there, you know how flat and low lying it is. It's simply not possible that South Florida is habitable by the end of the century under those scenarios. But the same is true of Bangladesh and the same is true of, you know, lots of places in this country and lots of places around the world. So again, we are talking about places where hundreds of millions of people live are simply going to be either underwater or they're just going to be routinely drenched in storm surges. I mean, after all, we don't live in places that are routinely dunked by storm surges, but all the storm surges are on top of the sea level rise. So no one lives I didn't say no one, but we don't live right at sea level rise, right? Because you have the tides if you have storm surges. So yes, the kind of withdrawal is starting to happen is going to be fed up and so we are going to end up with a hundred series worth of failed states inundated areas and refugees. That's where we're headed towards. And that's of course, why the Pentagon is incredibly concerned about climate change. And, and the Pentagon has been issuing report after report saying, you guys, climate change is going to become a major driver of civil conflict as people fight for scarce fresh water as people are forced into their home. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe up now@samharris.org./n
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+Today I'm speaking with Daniel Goldman and Richard Davidson. Daniel is known for his bestselling books on emotional intelligence. His book Emotional Intelligence, I believe, was the best selling non fiction book of the 90s. If it's not literally true, it is close. And Danny's interest in meditation goes way back to his years spent in India as a graduate student at Harvard. He's a trained psychologist who for many years reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times. He's been a visiting faculty member at Harvard. He's received many journalistic awards, including two nominations for the Pulitzer Prize, and he received the Career Achievement Award for Journalism from the American Psychological Association. And my experience with Danny goes way back. We have spent many, many months on retreats together. Back in the day, we've traveled to India and Nepal to study with various meditation teachers together. And Danny has, over the years, given me advice with respect to publishing. So it's great to be able to get him on the podcast. And Richard, known as Ritchie to those who know him, is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and he's the director of the Wasteman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior there. He's also the founder of the center for Healthy Minds at the Waysman Center. Richie also received his PhD in psychology from Harvard and has been at Wisconsin since 84. And he's been a very prolific experimental scientist. He has published more than 300 papers, as well as numerous chapters and reviews, and he has edited 14 books. And I think it's beyond dispute that Ritchie has done the most important neuroimaging research on meditation to date. He generally works with functional magnetic resonance imaging and EEG as well. All of those articles you've seen with the French monk Matthew Ricard with EEG electrodes on his head. That research was done in Richie's lab. And really, there's no one better to talk about the current state of the science for our understanding of mindfulness and meditation. And as luck would have it, Danny and Ritchie have just published a book together presenting all of the relevant science. And that book is altered traits science reveals how meditation changes your mind, brain and body. And we get into all of that in this conversation. We talk about the original stigma associated with studying meditation, the history of introspection in Eastern and Western culture, the more recent collaboration between Buddhists mainly, and Western scientists, the difference between altered states of consciousness and altered traits, the importance of actually practicing meditation. We talk about an alternate conception of mental health, what it means to be identified with thought, and how non optimal that is, the relationship between mindfulness meditation and so called flow states and many other topics here. This relieves the conversation that will get you most grounded in the why and the what of meditation from a scientific point of view. So now, without further delay, I bring you Daniel Goldman and Richard Davidson. So I am here with Daniel Goldman and Richard Davidson. Dan Ritchie, thanks for coming on the podcast. Pleasure, Sam. Happy to be here. So, just to clarify, this is not an undue sign of familiarity. You actually go by Dan and Richie among friends, and I certainly consider myself a friend, so you'll be referred to. Thusly let's talk about your history together and my history with you briefly, just to orient people, because you guys go way back, I guess, starting with you, Dan. Just say how you view your intellectual history briefly and how you came to this topic, and then we'll talk about how you guys met. So my intellectual history took an unexpected detour when I was a graduate student at Harvard and I had a predocal trialing fellowship to India. I had met Ramdas, who five years before had been fired from my own department at Harvard as Richard Alpert, gone to India and come back with the name Ramdas as a yogi and a teacher and a lecturer. I ran into him by accident, and I was very impressed by what he was saying about his teacher in India named Nimrally Baba. So I went to India. Harvard was nice enough to give me a free ride there, and I went to see Nimrale Baba, who was unlike anyone I'd met before. He was completely present, completely loving to everybody. It seemed open to anyone, high cast, low cast, anybody, and didn't seem to want anything for himself. And I never met anyone like that. So I go back to Harvard and I say, there's a positive side to human nature that we don't look at. I was studying clinical psychology, which is how to diagnose what's wrong with people. And my professors were basically uninterested. There was one graduate student there who was interested in his name was Richie Davidson. And so Richie and I became friends, and both of us did our research on meditation, and we've circled back to that with our book Altered Traits. After being under the radar for many years and then finding that the field of meditation research has just exploded, it's been flourishing. When we did our dissertations, there were three peer reviewed articles we could cite. When we reviewed the literature some decades later, there are now more than 6000 on the topic, and we use very rigorous standards to winnow them down to about 60. And that field has been flourishing largely because of the neuroimaging work that Ritchie has been doing in his lab at Wisconsin. So, Richie, give us your brief CV here and take us back to the was very fortunate to meet some people during my early days in graduate school whose demeanor and whose presence was infectious to me. These were the kind of people I wanted to be more like. I wanted to know what their secret sauce was. And I learned that they were all meditators. I met Dan my very first day of graduate school. And I decided that after my second year of graduate school I needed to find out more about this tradition and to get a taste of it more experientially. So I went to Sri Lanka, into India and spent part of the time with Dan that summer I spent about three months in Asia. That was the summer during which I participated in my first meditation retreat and so got a glimpse of what these practices were like and came back with a conviction that this was something important for Western psychology and neuroscience to take more serious account of. But it was made very clear to me that if I wanted a successful career in science, studying meditation was a terrible way to begin. Let's talk about why that was the case. You are coming right on the heels of the psychedelic craze in the was largely kicked off by some of your elders at Harvard, tim Leary and Richard Alpert, aka Ramdas, and they got fired. And most people's entrance into the topic of meditation at that point as being of interest had some connection to the altered states that people were encountering doing psychedelics. And this whole area was stigmatized to a significant degree in academia. Is the connection to psychedelics relevant there or was it just stigmatized on its own? Well, I think it is relevant, Richie. You probably add to this, but basically the department people who are professors then were pretty much the people who had been traumatized by all the publicity, the adverse publicity around Leery and Albert and their firing. And I think that anything that had to do with consciousness in any way was rather anathema to me. I think it was to them rather it was scary. And so I think they reacted to us and our interest in meditation from that framework. Richie, what would you say? I would agree that that played a role, but I also think there are other factors at play as well. Remember, this was at the end of the behavioral era. Behaviorism was still a force in the academy within psychology. And in fact, another encounter that I had during my first year in graduate school was running into Skinner in the elevator in William James Hall. And there's a very extraordinary encounter that I had with him because this was actually my first couple of weeks at Harvard and I didn't know exactly where I was going. And I pushed button on the elevator and then I mumbled to myself, whoops, I changed my mind. And I hit another button, realizing that I needed to go to another floor. And Skinner was standing next to me in the elevator and he put his arm on my shoulder and he said, son, you did not change your mind, you changed your behavior. That's hilarious. The 6th floor of our building had his pigeons along with Dick Kernstein. That was another element that we had to contend with. Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought that up, because the influence of behaviorism, I think it's to some degree still felt, although very few people would answer to the name of behaviorism now. But it's one of those intellectual influences that in retrospect seems almost impossible. The idea that people thought, and most of the people who made it their business to study something about the human mind and human nature thought that all of this could be captured in terms of the outputs and inputs. To the system and that the brain and mind in between could be treated like this black box that really was doing nothing of interest. That was the view then. But on another floor in that same building, was a subversive guy, Jerome Bruner, who was starting to found what's now cognitive science. And as cognitive science and then neuroscience developed better methodologies, really, they swept behaviorism aside. Behaviorism was only interested, as you point out, in what you could observe. But cognitive science was a way of cleverly tracking what's going on within the mind. And now, of course, cognitive science is quite ascendant. Behaviorism is pretty irrelevant. I think there's another piece here, which is that introspection was always more or less stillborn in the Western tradition. This briefly in your book, you talk about the the Western precursors to meditation. You point out that the Greeks had a piece of this. Aristotle had a concept of human flourishing or eudaimonia, which many Greek philosophers thought about. And presumably there was some methodology there among the Stoics and the Skeptics that was analogous to what we're calling meditation, but it really died out in Western philosophy, this idea that you could train the mind to be different than it is and that the point of philosophy would be a life well lived or a way of maximizing human well being. And even then in psychology, you had people like William James try their hand at introspection, but it did peter out into some kind of cul de sac by virtue of just a lack of depth of experience and the methodology to take it from there was go ahead, Richie. I was going to say, I think to some extent it's still that way today, largely because there is still the presumption that the instrument of our mind that we use to interrogate the nature of our mind is relatively constant across people. And the notion that we can train our mind to, in some sense, polish the lens and have a more accurate observing apparatus is still something quite foreign to most people in the academy. And so it's always been interesting to reflect on the project of looking at correlations between what's going on in the brain and what people report in their experience and those correlations historically, while when you arrange the experimental situation, in the right way. You can find positive correlations. They've never been particularly strong or overwhelming. And there's never really been the questioning of the verticality of the reports themselves and asking whether an individual who has trained his or her mind to clean lens, so to speak, might actually have better introspective access, more accurate introspective access. And therefore, the correlation between the reports of experience and what's going on in the brain potentially might be higher. And of course, this is the project of neurophenomenology that Francisco Varella, the biologist who co founded the Mind and Life Institute, was really pushing, but in his life, which ended prematurely because he died of liver cancer, he really never saw the fruition of that dream, and we still haven't. But I think that the framework is now in place to actually do this in a systematic way. I'm glad you mentioned Francisco. I want to just come back and speak about him a little bit more here, but just to not give people the wrong picture here. This notion of mental training is actually esoteric even in the east, even among Buddhists. I mean, most Buddhists don't meditate, and I've even met Buddhist monks who don't meditate. I've even met Western Buddhist monks, westerners who have gone to Thailand and ordained and become monks who themselves didn't meditate. So meditation is esoteric as a practice, even among Buddhists, and that's just something that is especially strange in that context to me. But it's not like everyone east of the Bosporus is spending half their day in meditation. Well, Sam, if I could say, I think every major spiritual tradition, certainly in Eurasia, has had an esoteric center which is training the mind. Now, in modern day, we talk about neuroplasticity, but in the second century, there were Christian monks in the desert of Egypt who were meditating, essentially, and they're doing the same thing a yogi in India might be doing. And I think you're right that being a full time meditator, as occurs in some Asian cultures, but means you have to be a monk or a nun or a yogi. And even among monks and nuns, not everybody will do that. It takes a particular kind of dedication, and it's a narrow slice. Those are the people who go the deepest, then they're the meditative traditions as they've been brought from Asia to the west, and a lot's been left behind, but it's accessible to a larger swath of people. And then there's the remove beyond that, where you've got MC mindfulness. You have mindfulness of a kind in schools and businesses and so on. And that's a pretty thin experience, but it goes to scale. So I think that generally there's a trade off between doing a little bit and lots of people doing it or doing it very intensely and very deeply. And every, you know, Sufis do a kind of meditation. Certainly there are Hindu meditations among yogis. The Christian tradition of meditation, by the way, was wiped out by the church as heresy. It's too bad because it ended that tradition in the west. But I think that what we were able to capture in looking at the meditative traditions that have had research done on them. It's interesting. It was mostly Buddhist, it's mindfulness, it's Zen and Vipassana, which is another Buddhist method, and then Zogchen or Mahamudra, which is done by Tibetan yogis. And that's the bulk of the research so far. It's not an accident that you and Western science in general has focused the collaboration between third person scientific methods and first person Contemplative methods along Buddhist lines, because there's so much in Buddhism that is just perfectly designed for export into a secular context. It's not to say that Buddhism doesn't have its literature on magic and iconography and rituals that seems as religious as anything else, but there's a central strand there that is empirical in a way that doesn't presuppose any religiosity or any doctrines that need to be accepted on faith. And it's much harder to say that of these other Contemplative traditions. On your point about the stamping out Christian esotericism as a heresy, the problem has always been that the moment Christians become too contemplative of people like Meister Eckhart, they begin to sound like Buddhists. It's not an accident that the fires of the Inquisition had more or less reached Eckhart's door. It's more sinister than that. They're saying that, hey, I can have an unmediated relationship with something greater than myself. I don't need the church. And of course, the Church didn't like hearing that for a minute. So one of you or both of you briefly describe the the recent history. I mean, I guess going back to to Francisco's time of collaboration between Western scientists and Buddhism, let me give some background, and Richie can fill in that. The answer to that the background has to do with the upsurge in meditation research itself. And I think a lot of that has to do with the efforts of the Mind in Life Institute. Richie and I are now stepping down as board members who was originally founded by the Dalai Lama, francisco Varela, the scientist and a businessman and a mangle. And the idea was to create dialogues with the Dalai Lama about different sciences. And they're quite in depth, and they cover the quantum physics and all kinds of things, including neuroscience. And that said, the institute also very early started having summer research institutes. Richie actually was one of the most active people in founding where graduate students and postdocs in cognitive and neuroscience came together who were interested in meditation but lonely in their own institutions. Nobody else cared. But here they found a network of supportive family, if you will, of fellow scientists, and that's encouraged a lot of the research. Many of the studies that we cite in our book actually were done by graduates at institute. And at the same time, in parallel, there was the impetus given by the Dalai Lama at a Mind in Life meeting where he turns to Richie and he says, this is around 2000, year 2000. Our our tradition has many methods for managing disturbing, upsetting emotions. Take them out of the religious context, study them rigorously in the lab, and if they're a benefit, spread them widely. Now you're spreading them widely with this book, which we will get into in a minute. But I guess just to describe my point of contact with the history you just sketched, I knew you already, Dan, but I met up with you guys in Dharmsala for one of your mind and life meetings, and that's where I met Francisco for the first time. And Francisco was the one who strongly recommended that I go to Nepal at that point and study Zoggen. I had had years as a Vipassana meditator, and I had studied with various Advita teachers in India, but I hadn't yet connected with a Zoegen master in San Francisco recommended that I go to Nepal to study with Tuku, Oregon, and he was instrumental in that happening. And also he wrote me a letter of recommendation to graduate school for neuroscience. And so that was as you know, he was a neuroscientist, so he straddled both these worlds before I really knew these worlds were being straddled by anyone. And then I think I went to your first summer research institute, Richie, and also was at least collaborated with you in setting up that first Vipassana retreat at IMS for for Scientists, where we put up 100 scientists in silence around 2006 or somewhere around there. Let's get into the book, because this book is really the most comprehensive and up to the minute presentation of the scientific research on meditation in general and specifically Mindfulness, which, as you just pointed out, Dan, is everywhere, and people are making extravagant claims for its benefits, some of which are grounded in the science and some of which aren't. Or at least aren't yet. Richie, give us this basic distinction that you make early in the book, which carries throughout it between altered states and altered traits. Well, altered states refer to the experiences that we have sitting on the cushion or sitting on a chair when we're meditating. And the importance of meditation lies not really in the transitory experiences that we have when we're meditating, but it is in the impact of these practices in every nook and cranny of our everyday life. And this is what we refer to as altered traits. Altered traits are enduring changes that are consequences of our practice that impact every aspect of our lives and can be discerned in specific kinds of measures that are taken when we are not explicitly meditating. And so, while much of the early work, including the early work from my own lab, was focused on the changes during the meditation period itself, what really counts in terms of the impact of these practices are the enduring changes. And so one of the central questions that we ask in the book is how do the more fleeting experiences that we have when we're practicing ultimately become more enduring changes that persist. And one of the key answers to that is practice. Practice really makes a difference, and there is no substitute for practice. This is a question that we get so often, particularly in America. How can we shorten the process? Are there strategies or technological AIDS that we can use to shorten the time? But I don't think this is fundamentally different than learning any other kind of skill. It takes time to become a chessmaster. It takes time to learn to play the violin. It takes time to learn to be a collegiate athlete. In the same way, practice is important here. You can sort of flip it and acknowledge that at every moment in your life you are practicing something. You're using your attention in a certain way, and for the most part, if you're like most people, you're using it in ways that lead to predictable source of dissatisfaction. You are practicing a kind of meditation on all the things you want, all the things that make you anxious, and a kind of a perpetual distraction for which a method like mindfulness is put forward as an antidote. But as your mind is, your life becomes and so you're you're ingraining various tendencies and habits and neurophysiological states moment by moment, every moment of your life. One of the things I frequently say is that neuroplasticity occurs willingly or unwittingly most of the time. It's occurring unwittingly most of the time. We're being shaped by forces around us about which we have little insight and little control. And the invitation in this work is that we can actually more intentionally take responsibility for our own minds and brains by cultivating healthier habits of mind. Your brain is constantly changing in response to experience. If the three of us remember having had this conversation, that will be by virtue of having laid down a physical memory trace in our brains. Genes get transcribed, receptors get made. This is a change in the physical structure of the brain to encode any memory. So neuroplasticity is just a background fact of our brains all the time. And what's happening with meditation or any kind of practice of anything learning to play golf, learning to play the piano. You are deciding to change your brain in a way that, in this case takes attention and effort. There's another point here, Sam, and I think it's the social context and technological context in which this is now happening because we're living in an age that's never been more distracted and never had more luscious, seductive distractions available day or night on our tech devices. I just was witnessing or hearing one of the guys who was on the team that developed the ipod and the iPhone at Apple, the very first one, he said, we're all, you know, single, 20 somethings, we had no life, and we try to make it as seductive as we could. Now, I'm a parent and I really regret that. And I I think any parent knows what he's talking about. You don't want your kids to spend all their time pulled in to staring at a video screen for hours and hours. You want them to be, you know, relating, looking around, experiencing the world. So things are changing in direction. I think people may feel a little helpless about, but meditation or cultivating the ability to concentrate and ignore distractions, I think has a special cachet and virtue. Now, that wasn't true in the past, if only as an antidote to a social trend. There was a research at Harvard, that famous paper in Science, where they monitored how distracted people are during the day. And the title was A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind because the more your mind wanders in distraction, the more depressed you get. There really is a different conception of mental health here that we are tacitly endorsing because the assumption has been for most people, and certainly for most of science, that certain default facts about our mind are normal and the idea of changing them just simply wouldn't occur to a person. Most people don't even know that their minds are continuously lost in thought and it's not even considered. It really is just the white noise of our worldview. And then when you enter a contemplative tradition, and in particular a discussion of mental training in the Buddhist tradition, you see really as almost your first claim that this is absolutely pathological, to have your attention continually buffeted by the winds of discursive thought and you're helplessly carried away by every single thought that enters consciousness. And not only are you carried away by the emotions that it invokes desire and fear and boredom and all the rest, you are identified with it such that it seems to be you. Your sense of self is bound up in the flow of thought in a way that most people, it's never occurred to them to question. And there's very little in has been heretofore, very little in Western science that has inspired questioning it. And I want to talk about how you both view the self, but do you want to say anything about what it means to have a healthy human mind in light of this meditation research? Richie has done a lot of work on that recently. There is a growing body of scientific research which is suggesting that attentional, distraction, mind wandering, as well as reification of the self. Richie, what do you mean reification of self? Can you translate that? Yeah. Believing the thoughts that we have about ourselves as a true depiction of reality, considering them to be vertical that you see in depressed people, for example, one of the characteristics of depression is that negative self thoughts are actually taken to be a vertical description of who the individual is. What if it's a positive thought? Well, for a positive thought, I think that there's less of an obvious deleterious consequence. But I think there's another more subtle kind of suffering that may be associated with that as well, which certainly the Buddhist tradition speaks to. And this whole idea we call experiential fusion, where you have the experience of being completely fused with the thought rather than having a quality of meta awareness, which is knowing that there is actually a thought occurring and being able to see it as a thought. And that's something that, of course, we know can be taught through the kinds of contemplative practices that we're considering. And one of the most important findings, really is the finding that meta awareness can be strengthened. And meta awareness is simply knowing that you're knowing, recognizing that a thought is a thought rather than being swept up in its content. One of the main principles of cognitive therapy is that you don't have to believe your thoughts. That's a very revolutionary idea for most of us. We should probably define mindfulness at this point. Most of the listeners to this podcast will be familiar with this concept because I've spoken about it before, and I've had our mutual friend Joseph Goldstein on twice, and so this is not the first time I've hit this. But for those who are new to the topic and this really is the center of the bullseye as far as the meditation instruction that has been mostly studied by Ritchie and others at this point, how would you define mindfulness? I'll take a crack. I think mindfulness, as it's taught in the classic traditions, encourages us to take an equanimious position amidst the coming and going of our own feelings and thoughts and to see them as feelings and thoughts rather than that's me, and to just note them without judgment or without reactivity and let them come and let them go. That's a very radical stance internally. And so is there any distinction between what you're calling meta awareness, Richie, and mindfulness as you just used it? Well, I think that in the classical traditions, mindfulness often has some additional components in addition to the ones Dan described. It includes remembering to bring a certain view to each and every encounter. And what is it that we mean by a view? Well, in part, it means recognizing that every human being shares the same wish to be happy and to be free of suffering. And also a view that has an altruistic intent, the disposition to help relieve the suffering of others whenever it's encountered, and remembering to bring that conviction, if you will. That stance to every encounter is also part of mindfulness. Now, it's not typically how it's defined by psychologists or neuroscientists, but in the contemplative traditions, it certainly in part has that flavor. When we talk about metawareness, I think meta awareness is a psychological feature that is strengthened by mindfulness training. There are very specific ways that psychologists have devised to measure meta awareness objectively, and all of them in one way or. Another have to do with recognizing the nature of what is occurring in our mind, recognizing that we are knowing, recognizing that we are engaged in certain kinds of behavior. We often experience things and actually behave and not have that sense of recognition. We do it in the absence of meta awareness. And one metaphor which might be helpful for listeners to better appreciate this is one that we sometimes use. Most people have had this experience of being in a movie theater, watching a very engrossing movie and completely losing awareness that you're in the theater, that you're sitting in a chair, you're just so wrapped up in the plot. That is what we would call experiential fusion where there's no metawareness. But we can be equally attentive to the movie and sitting in the theater and in the background recognize that we're sitting in a theater. And that would be akin to having meta awareness which is that background recognition and in the case of thoughts, it's recognizing that these are thoughts. This is not who we are, but rather these are thoughts. I like that analogy for many reasons although it's potentially misleading for some people because what you just described about movie watching this experiential fusion is what is so good about movies. We want to disappear into the movie because it's much less fun to be constantly reminded that you're sitting in a theater with a bunch of people and you're looking at light on a wall. But what we should remember is that the movie of our lives with which we are fused in every moment that we're not aware of being lost in thought is very often a bad movie. It's a depressing movie, it's a scary movie. It's a movie that is filled with feelings of sadness or at least dissatisfaction much of the time. And what you're describing is the ability to recognize thoughts as thoughts and emotions as transitory appearances in the flow of consciousness. And those moments of recognition provide real relief from the dissatisfaction and mediocrity and even extreme physical pain that may be arising in consciousness in each moment. Right. But to go back to a point that Dan made, even if the movie was a good movie, so to speak even if there are positive thoughts, the same would be true. And so I often get the question whether meditation is like flow and chicksA. Mahai, the psychologists who studied flow studied rock climbers, for example, who have this extremely ecstatic state when they're rock climbing and are totally engrossed in what they're doing. But what what that is a case, again, of experiential fusion. There is no meta awareness. Rock climbers, you know, or else all rock climbers would be enlightened people. Not necessarily. Yeah, well, that's an important distinction because this connection with flow is often made and it's often meditation as an idea is often sold by kind of advertising. This possible connection I've done it myself in emphasizing that the moments in life that we all love are the moments in life where we are where attention is fully captured by the present moment, where we're lost in our work or we're lost in the pleasure of some athletic experience. People very frequently reference things like athletics and sex and peak experiences as moments where there's no distance between attention and its object. You're not wondering what you're going to have for lunch because you're fully engrossed in what you're doing. It really is the concentration component of meditation that is being echoed there. And some meditation types TM mantra, what's called the Jana practices in Vipassana insight meditation are concentrative methods that get you into a blissful state in much the same way because it's using your attention fully concentrating 100%, and then you feel wonderful when you do it. But there's a different path which has to do with pulling back into meta awareness. And I think that shifts from joy bliss to equanimity, which is a different kind of contentment, it's a different way of feeling good. But one other consideration here is that when you are no longer in that concentrated state, the monkey mind rears its ugly head again. It's back to where it was. It is an altered state and not an altered trait. Well, this is true in our original formulation, way back when we were at Harvard together, Richie. Remember we said the problem with altered states is that after you come down, you're the same schmuck you were before you went up. And that got us to think about altered traits, what's really lasting, what are the real benefits? Yeah, actually, there's a very poignant story about that from Ritchie's first time sitting with Goenka in India that you tell in the book where he had this peak experience of having quite a wonderful alteration in his state. And then, well, Richie, you can tell that. You can tell the story you had. This is your, I believe, your first ten day retreat with Goenka that got you something like meditative success. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriberonly content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. Thank you./n
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+Imagine we're in another pandemic, and the disease has been deliberately engineered to be more contagious and way more lethal than COVID-19. That's right. It's a man made pandemic. And the virus is so deadly, it kills roughly half the people it infects. So if you and your spouse catch it, at least one of you will probably die. And maybe you both will. Likewise, any other duo you and your best friend, you and your your kid, the President and Vice President. And an uncontrollable outbreak is underway. Next. Imagine this outbreak sweeping through a power plant. Did the lights stay on with half the staff dead or dying and the other half thinking they're next? And if the power goes out, how do we reach the Internet? And with no Internet, how do we find out? Well, practically anything that we need to know to navigate this unprecedented existential threat. Now, imagine you're a frontline worker at the power plant or caring for the sick or delivering food. People are getting wiped out at 50 to 100 times the rate of COVID It's a coin toss as to whether you'll survive. If you get sick, do you report to work? Or do you hunker down with your loved ones at home until you all get really hungry? Supply chains disintegrate in situations like this, the grocery stores that actually open sell out, not just out of toilet paper, and they don't get restocked. And pretty much everything else disintegrates, too. For all of its horror, COVID hasn't shut down the power, the water, law enforcement, or the flow of information. But something this lethal could just shut them all down. And while you may be more imaginative than I am, I just can't picture civilization surviving an encounter with something this deadly. And the problem is, we're on a collision course with some version of this scenario. Hi, I'm Rob Reid, and I've been worried about artificially modified viruses for a few years now. My background is that I'm a longtime tech entrepreneur who went on to become a writer. I write science fiction for Random House, and I'm also a science writer and science podcaster. A while back, I wrote four articles from Medium about artificial pandemics and other subjects. That led to an episode on my own podcast, which is called The After On Podcast and mostly considers fairly deep scientific issues in ways that nonexperts can follow. That particular episode was a conversation with a thinker and entrepreneur naval Ravi Kante, and it led directly to a talk that I gave on the Ted conference's main stage about a year and a half ago. I'll be integrating some of that earlier work here and then building on it in this short series. In the course of it, I believe I'll persuade you that an engineered pandemic will almost inevitably happen eventually, unless we take some very serious preventive steps. And I'll tell you exactly what those steps are. We'll also talk about the science and techniques that are at play here about the sorts of people who might actually want to inflict a pandemic on the world and what drives them. But first, a big spoiler. I may not sound like one, but I'm an incurable optimist. I wouldn't be telling you all this if I wasn't convinced the story can have a happy ending. And more than anything, this series is about navigating our way toward one. I'll start out with this strange claim that we actually got rather lucky with COVID Not in an absolute sense, obviously. This is clearly the most horrifying year humanity's endured in quite some time, but compared to what might have happened in terms of sheer deadliness. Now, I say this with the caveat that it's hard to know exactly how deadly COVID is in percentage terms. We can't just use simple ratios of deaths to officially reported cases, because huge numbers of cases never get diagnosed. Many people who catch COVID never get symptoms, for one thing. And for those who do get sick, testing capacity is notoriously inadequate, so countless cases go undetected. But adjusting for all this murkiness, the World Health Organization estimates that between a half a percent and 1% of infected people die. And in many age groups, it's a tiny fraction of 1%. And I'm saying we got lucky because there is no biological reason why the death rate had to be this low. I mean, take SARS. It killed about 10% of the people it infected. That's an order of magnitude worse than COVID. And we were lucky with SARS, too. And that people got so obviously sick so fast, patients were easy to identify and quarantine before they spread the disease very far, so fewer than a thousand people died of it. But if SARS had been like COVID and spread like mad when people were still asymptomatic or thought they just had a cold, we'd be living in a very different and badly diminished world right now. And SARS is a kitten compared to Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, which kills over a third of its victims. So we're incredibly lucky. Mirz just doesn't happen to be very contagious. And then Merz is mild compared to H five N One flu, which kills about 60% of the people who catch it, making it even deadlier than Ebola. So, thank God it's insanely hard to catch. How insanely hard? Well, the World Health Organization tallied every instance of H five N One over a decade and came up with just 630 cases and 375 deaths. To put that scale in perspective, lightning kills about 60,000 people in a typical decade. So h five m one is barely contagious at all. In its natural form, that is. But unfortunately, there's an artificial form of H five N One as well. It exists because several years ago, some scientists started poking at the virus in hopes of understanding just how dangerous it could be, since it was plenty deadly but barely transmissible, they set out to create a contagious form of it. And you heard me right. They deliberately produced an artificial version of this ghastly virus with a terrifyingly high potential to spread easily between people. This incident is the basis of the grim pandemic scenario. I opened with a contagious modified form of H Five N One, killing half the people it infects. The researchers made this monster by manipulating its genes via passing the virus between several generations of ferrets. Ferrets, being common, standins for humans and virus research. Eventually, they had a strain that could pass from ferret to ferret without any contact through the air. The head of the Dutch team, Ron Fauci, candidly admitted that his creation was, quote, probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make over in the US. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity didn't disagree. In a press statement, it said that the modified virus's release could result in, quote, an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is inadequately prepared. Coming from an organization that's not known for drama, the words unimaginable catastrophe are bone chilling. If that's not scary enough for you, I'll add that this work wasn't done in the world's most secure labs, literally, because both the Wisconsin and Holland facilities were certified biosafety level three, which is a big notch below the top rating of biosafety level four. This isn't very reassuring, given the history of deadly substances erupting from profoundly secure labs. Think of the anthrax attacks of 2001, when the lethal spores found their way from a US Army lab to the offices of the Senate majority leader. Or consider that the last person killed by smallpox caught it because a British lab let the bug escape after decades of globally coordinated efforts had eradicated it from the entire planet. Or consider Britain's 2007 foot and mouth disease outbreak, which began with a leak from a biosafety level four lab. Incidents like these make it blindingly clear that any pathogen can potentially escape from any lab because humans are fallible and so are labs of any biosafety level. Knowing these facts, what kind of person brings into existence a pandemic ready bug that could be 100 times deadlier than COVID that could kill a majority of the people it infects and perhaps be wildly contagious? In this case, not evil people. These were virologists who thought their research would help us face subsequent natural mutations in H Five N One. But they were shooting dice with our future and given their equipment, and sophistication they didn't need to ask any outsiders permission to do that. They may have run things by an internal review board of some kind, but they only needed outside permission to publish their results once they were done. And they did encounter some speed bumps on that front. But no regulator, no judge, no outside body of neutral citizens was in a position to say, don't you dare take that gamble, however small it may be on humanity's future to say your judgment alone does not give you clearance to perhaps spend millions of lives on your assistant, never screwing up, or on your lab. Not being just a little bit imperfect, I call this sort of thing privatizing the apocalypse. By this, I mean that at the dawn of the Cold War, playing chicken with doomsday went from being something no one could do because it was impossible with preatomic weapons to something that two people could do. Kennedy and Khrushchev, Nixon and Brezhnev, Reagan and Gorbachev, et cetera. This transition traumatized generations, but the leaders represented giant countries with hundreds of millions of citizens, which made the act of risking annihilation a perverse form of public good. This approximate situation is still with us, and there's obviously plenty to dislike about that. But at least we've only needed to keep a fairly low number of decision makers in line. People who spend years looking after a nation's wellbeing, who have major international obligations they hopefully take somewhat seriously, and who are subject to certain checks, balances and failsafes. None of that's true for an autonomous researcher running a lab who decides to make an apocalyptic pathogen in the general name of science, even if the odds of it escaping are small. The decision to play chicken with doomsday has effectively been privatized, which is plenty scary when the folks who get to toss the dice in these situations are very few and far between and are generally good guys. White cowboy hats. But as we'll soon discuss, the casino is about to throw the doors wide open. Not because anyone thinks that's a good idea. Very few people have even considered this issue, which is a big part of the problem. But rather because relentless advances in technology are about to make these kinds of gambles and these kinds of potentially genocidal powers very widely. Available to far more people than we can keep an eye on and to people we can't keep in mind by threatening with wrist slaps like delaying publication of their research papers. In the next section of this podcast, we'll talk about the terrifying proliferation of doomsday powers and who might abuse them and why. But for now, consider the landscape this is happening in COVID is our dress rehearsal for handling something much worse, and in lots of places, certainly including the United States, it's been one of the most disastrous dress rehearsals in the history of theater. It's like half the actors forgot all their lines, a quarter got bizarrely doctored scripts which have them saying and doing the opposite of what they're supposed to do. The lights have caught fire, half the costumes didn't show up, and disease is spreading throughout the cast. To step out of the dress rehearsal analogy, I'm referring to things like the ongoing disaster connected to adequate COVID testing and timely results. Our early lack of PPE are all but nonexistent contact tracing, the lethal politicization of slowing infection via masks, et cetera. In an October editorial, the normally sober and understated New England Journal of Medicine frankly stated that, quote the magnitude of this failure is astonishing. And remember, this is just a dress rehearsal. Opening night is coming. Which means that as we do the post mortem on this botched rehearsal, it's vital that we start planning maniacally for the next pandemic. That we start thinking obsessively about all the cannonballs. We've had the great fortune to partially dodge lately that we consider the next set of cannonballs which are inevitably on their way and that we humbly acknowledge that no one's luck lasts forever. For one thing, the rate of diseases jumping over from animals to the human population is rising dramatically as we encroach evermore unnatural habitats. So nature is taking potshots at us with increasing frequency. As for artificial viruses, there's no reason they'll hit us at nature's relatively leisurely recent pace of one major scare every five to ten years, because the cadence will be determined by the people behind them. All this means that humanity's future depends on keeping our guard up if and when we put COVID-19 into the grave, and I mean way up preparing for absolute worst case scenarios. Natural pandemics are random case scenarios because evolution is driven by blind chance. But nothing will be random about a virus designed by a malicious and murderous party. Unfortunately, we don't have a great track record for keeping our guard up after a major disease scare has passed, despite all the close calls of recent years, civilian biosecurity funding fell by 27% between 2015 and 2019, according to the Economist magazine. Meanwhile, governments haven't exactly inspired the private sector to carry the ball. The Economist also tells us that after the swine flu pandemic Peter Dowd, european and American governments reneged on contracts with vaccine makers, leaving them hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole. Speaking to the New York Times, biologist Peter Dashek summed up the situation, saying, quote the problem isn't that prevention was impossible. It was very possible, but we didn't do it. Governments thought it was too expensive. Pharmaceutical companies operate for profit. In light of this, we should consider the finale one of the most popular Ted Talks of all time, in which Bill Gates warns against the dangers of complacency. He wraps up by saying, if anything good can result from the current outbreak, quote it's that it can serve as an early warning, a wakeup call to get ready. If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic. Unfortunately, Gates didn't get his wish because, as many of you probably know, he wasn't talking about COVID buddy Bola. That talk was recorded over five years ago. And of course, we were far, far from ready for the coronavirus outbreak that followed it. Now, as I said upfront, there are many steps we can take to dramatically increase our resilience against pandemics, both natural and unnatural. And although we have a history of hitting the Snooze bar hard enough to scatter alarm clock fragments into the next county. The wake up call we're getting from COVID is uniquely thunderous. In response to it, I say we take inspiration from the ways our own bodies fight off infections and build a global immune system to identify and destroy deadly new diseases on a planetary basis. This system can be agile and adaptive, just like the ones in our bloodstreams. We'll talk about the components such a system might have and the fascinating science and technologies underpinning each of them. And I think you'll agree that if we finally heed the warnings nature has been sending and resending and re resending to us, we can navigate this danger. Bottom line, if you take only one thing away from this series, I want you to understand that a catastrophic pandemic is heading our way. But it's not too late to prevent its arrival if we can push our policymakers to rally to this challenge. Okay, Rob. That was terrifying. So before we jump into the topic of pandemics engineered and perhaps natural, let's just get a little bit of your background here. How did you come to be interested in this? And I know you have a generic interest in science as a science fiction writer, but how did you come to be worried about this particular topic of the catastrophic risk posed by an intentionally engineered pandemic? Well, I guess the earliest threat of that actually goes all the way back to when you and I overlapped briefly. As Stanford undergrads. At the time, I was studying a ton of Arabic and Middle Eastern history. And after graduating, I went to Cairo on a Fulbright Fellowship, where I spent a year doing research on the secular opposition, people who were pushing for a non religious, non dictatorial government, the faction whose political heirs ultimately, to a great extent, led Egypt's Arab Spring revolt, although they didn't actually gain any power from that. Long story. And one person that I spent a lot of time with back then was a guy named Farragh Foda, who was Egypt's most prominent secularist at the time. And the fundamentalists hated him because he was vocal. He was for a non religious government, and he was really brave and really tragically. Not long after my year in Cairo wrapped up, Farragh was assassinated. And that kicked off a ghastly wave of terrorism that Egypt endured throughout the beyond. And it was a really big shift because there had been almost no terrorism in Egypt for years prior to that. And really as a direct result of that, I got very focused on terrorism as an issue. And that's a focus that persists to this day. Fast forward significantly. I founded a company that created the Rhapsody Music Service, which some of your listeners might be familiar with, and although that's unrelated, just give a quick side note. Rhapsody, for those who don't know it, it's pretty fair to say it was the first spotify. After I sold that, I really became sort of a twofisted person. I'm a tech investor with some of my time, but I'm also kind of a media, creative type of person and written a few books, a couple of which are science fiction novels for Random House. And when I was writing the second science fiction novel book called After On, I delved into a whole bunch of the technologies that we'll be talking today, particularly synthetic biology. There was a subplot in the story that was connected to a Sinn bioterror attack. And when the book came out, I decided to do what I thought would be a very limited podcast series, just going deeper into the science of the various things that were in this science fiction novel and in that podcast ended up taking on a life of its own. And I've now done over 50 episodes, quite a few with leading lights and synthetic biology. So that's really where the other thread came in. Yeah, well, one thing that one gets from your discussion thus far is that it really can't be a matter of relying on there being no one willing to do this sort of thing. There's a level of incredulity psychologically that one has to cut through here. When you think about who is going to want to unleash a catastrophic pandemic upon the whole world for some reason, it takes some convincing for people to acknowledge that not only will there always be someone who will, there will always be many people who will aspire to do that sort of thing. And many ten as many, but there are probably hundreds, if not thousands in any generation who would be willing to do such a thing. And therefore it just can't be a matter of messaging successfully to these people, changing their minds, preventing the wrong memes from lodging in their brains. The memes are already there, and therefore we have to fundamentally make acquiring the technology so difficult as to dial down the probability that this will ever happen. So as things stand now, we're on a collision course with the democratizing of this kind of technology. Where should we start here to absorb this initial lesson? The first thing to think about is, what kinds of things can we do to make the near future? Tools that, let's say, a less sophisticated person, somebody who's not a top mind in synthetic biology, might be able to turn to in 10, 15, 20 years, tools that will be able to do things that the entire project of synthetic biology can't possibly do today. And what we need to do is to really exercise our imaginations about what tools like that could possibly do in a short period of time. Because I would argue that there is a very different level of moral responsibility on inventors and scientists and regulators when we're starting to develop and handle a potentially catastrophic exponential technology. Exponential being that this is something that can go in radically unexpected places in a short number of years than when we're handling a normal dangerous technology. So to use somewhat silly example, whoever the medieval Chinese blacksmith was who first invented a firearm, we don't blame that person for mass shootings. Mass shootings approached us at an incredibly slow speed over centuries, meaning it was on us to dodge those literal bullets or not. And we could have done things to make mass shootings difficult and rare, like keeping guns out of private hands. Now, I don't want to dive into a second amendment discussion because that could last for hours. I'll just say that whatever your position on gun rights, we can agree that society had ample time to decide whether or not mass shootings are a reasonable price to pay for today's policy. This situation did not sneak up on us at an exponential pace. But it's very different when something's improving 1000 fold in a few years. Because while it's impossible for anyone to definitively predict where that trajectory is going to lead, the people closest to the technology have a much better shot at it than the rest of us, which puts a particular moral weight on them to ask what rapid changes could end up ambushing a society that just doesn't see them coming. So one example of this, the US department of Health and Human Services includes in its huge grip the CDC, the FDA, the National Institutes of Health, and clearly has all the intellectual and technical firepower it needs to be profoundly informed about synthetic biology. But it was the HHS of all entities that posted the 1918 flu genome to the internet in 2005, when smart people like Ray Kurzweil, who's basically the godfather of exponential thinking, who really came out stridently against doing that, could have easily told them that this information might be catastrophically weaponized within a couple of decades. And we can't keep having failures like that. Which means private sector leaders need to use their imaginations a lot and academics a lot about worst case scenarios, be very transparent about them, and self regulate more than any industry in history. And meanwhile, governments have to be unbelievably smart about sin biosynthetic biology and they have to monitor the industry relentlessly, and they have to regulate dangerous practices on a coordinated international level. And I'm a generally very free market oriented person, so I don't say any of this lightly, but this sort of thing is just necessary when we have a wildly promising exponential technology that we want to nurture and benefit from, but which also has a cataclysmic downside. And the funny thing is that we don't really have a good precedent or analogy that we can turn to, to guide us. This wasn't the case with digital technology, another exponential technology. Whatever we think of super AI risk, today computing posed no innate existential risk for its 1st 50 plus years. It could surprise and delight us with astounding unforeseen developments for years in a row. No real downside. So we just don't have a good historic map to turn to for guidance here. You and I are recording this during, hopefully, the waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Let's hope we are. We're in this frustrating uncanny valley of knowing that vaccine is is everywhere, sitting on shelves, and it's being administered at a shockingly leisurely pace. California was just declared the worst state in the nation with respect to the velocity of its vaccination program. Good grief. How we achieve that is anybody's guess, but many of us have drawn the lesson here that we have experienced a comparatively benign pandemic. I mean, it almost couldn't be more benign, right? You know, it's worse than flu, and then perhaps tenfold worse than flu, but it is still killing at most 1% of people, infected and disproportionately elderly people. So the impact of something tenfold more lethal or more is really difficult to picture. Or rather, it's easy to picture how catastrophic that would be, because I'm not alone in thinking that this is a dress rehearsal. We've experienced for something quite a bit worse and we have just manifestly failed this dress rehearsal. Our response to COVID has been abysmal, and it's been abysmal even though the scientific response has been amazing. The public health response has been as inept as you could have ever feared. But the the research response, the molecular biology response, the vaccine production response has been amazing. I mean, the moderna vaccine was created apparently before there was a single death in the US from COVID It's astounding that we have the juxtaposition of that kind of technical competence and the utter mismanagement of a public health response. And as we know and need not get sidetracked by, there's been a layer of political controversy and chaos that in part explains how bad we are at this, but not entirely. We're a society that can't figure out how to produce masks at scale, it seems, or Qtips. So we have supply chain problems. It's been a colossal embarrassment and an excruciatingly consequential one, given the body count. And again, this is about as easy going a pandemic as we could have hoped for. So what lesson do you draw from this, given that what would be engineered would very likely be quite a bit worse? And as we know, and as you've discussed, and we'll discuss further in this series, there are natural variants of diseases that we, that we're already worried about, which are quite a bit worse than COVID. And it's just by sheer luck that they haven't spread more efficiently than they have. So we know that almost everything on the menu is worse than COVID. And yet this has unmasked our near total inability to respond quickly to a challenge like this. To summarize all that frankly, the private sector has covered itself in glory, and in many countries, certainly including the United States, the public sector has covered itself in shame, and we need to do much, much better than that. You mentioned order of magnitude. I actually think that's exactly the right way to think about hypothetical future diseases, because, you know, movements of 25 50% on different metrics are kind of hard to model out. But let's think about order of magnitude along two metrics deadliness and transmissibility, which is to say, transmissibility how contagious the disease is. Because particularly if there's an artificial pandemic, we can rely on the malevolent designers of that to dial things up significantly beyond where COVID is. And we also can't rely on nature, as you rightly pointed out, to keep things dialed down to where they are with COVID So let's start with deadliness. As I mentioned in the recording, the World Health Organization puts COVID's case fatality rate somewhere between half a percent and 1%. So that could be dialed up by up to two orders of magnitude. One order of magnitude, and it's five to 10%. Two orders of magnitude, and it's 50 to 100. And as you noted, these are not unheard of numbers. SARS kills about 10% of the people it infects H five m one flew over 50%. So there is no biological reason why the next pandemic, even if it's natural, necessarily has to top out at 1% fatality. And if it's artificial, we can rely on it topping out higher. As for transmissibility, the big number of courses are not, which is how many people the average sick person infects and without public health measures. Covids are not is, two ish or three ish, something like that. Estimates vary. To get a sense of what it would be like if the R naught was much higher, think of the measles whose R knot can hit, I think, the 15 to 20 range. An example if you get into an elevator a minute or two after someone with COVID leaves it, almost all the aerosolized particles will fall under the ground and you'll be extremely unlikely to catch COVID But if you're unvaccinated for measles and a sick person leaves an elevator 2 hours before you show up, you could very easily catch the measles. So imagine a one order of magnitude disease and transmissibility. Think of something as deadly as COVID it currently is, but as contagious as the measles, the result of that situation would be that virtually everyone would catch it in very short order, and we'd have an unbelievably hard landing into herd immunity. I think that would be absolutely ghastly. The death rate would go north of what COVID is because hospitals would be overwhelmed, but I'm pretty confident civilization would survive. As for the death rate going up by one order of magnitude, five to 10%, I'm still confident society would march on, but a bit less so not because of what it would do to people who were lucky enough to seclude at home. They could probably still dodge the virus. But what it could do. To supply chains. Like if there's a five to 10% chance of death, do meat packers show up at work? Or grocery store workers? And if you start having food supply outages, even small anecdotal ones, just imagine the pandemonium of hoarding that would ensue and the Road Warrior like scenes that would unfold in stores. We could barely handle a toilet paper shortage, which itself was kind of like the game stop run up. I mean, it was a reflection of crowd psychology, not of an actual supply chain breakdown. Still, I don't think that's a civilization canceling scenario either, but it'd be way more dangerous than what we're facing now. Now, those are two one order of magnitude diseases beyond COVID. As for two orders of magnitude, all bets are off. I mean, I don't know if anyone shows up to work if there's a 50% to 100% fatality rate or if there's an order of magnitude jump in fatality combined with one in transmissibility. And in that sort of scenario, I start worrying about staffing the electrical grid because if the power goes out for a sustained period over a national grid or, God forbid, a global footprint, civilization teeters very, very quickly. So if there ever is a wide outbreak, and I'll come back to those words, wide outbreak in a moment of a two order of magnitude disease, the only way society could possibly survive would be with very meticulous contingency plans that are drilled at local and national levels and very, very careful to keep power, food and law enforcement flowing. Plans which I'm sure we don't currently have now much. It was right behind the QTIP plan and the mask plan. Exactly once the QTIP plan was contingency plan to survive a doomsday apocalyptic disease plan. Now, a much better alternative to ever facing a wide outbreak scenario would be to have an incredibly robust global immune system response to quash the disease the instant it shows up on a radically improved global surveillance network, which we're going to talk about a lot later in the series. So in any event, somewhere between one to two orders of magnitude distributed between deadliness and transmissibility, I do think civilization teeters. And there's no way we could survive a wide outbreak much more than one order of magnitude without a radically improved public health game. There's a couple of threads I want to pick up on here. One is this distinction between natural and synthetic pandemics. You focus on the synthetic possibility, but really everything you say is just as relevant to anything nature might cook up for us. I absolutely agree. And also, I think the boundary there is a little blurry because even in the case of natural pandemics, you're still talking about human behavior. I mean, anyone who's putting a bat on top of a pangolin and calling it lunch is teasing out these xenoviruses from the the womb of nature. And that's one vector by which they get into our population so we have to figure out how to modify human behavior across the board so as to reduce the likelihood of this kind of thing happening. And we already know that there are natural viruses and other pathogens that have very high lethality, and a single mutation could make them super transmissible in ways that they're not currently. And we know that nature is running that experiment continuously. This is the Darwinian principle by which things change. But there is one human behavior that I think we do want to shine a light on and very likely block, and that is related to the experimentation on H Five N One that you discuss. And this is what often goes by the name of gain of function research, where biologists, in studying how a pathogen might behave, can actually modify its genome such that it acquires a different rate of transmissibility, say, right, so something that was not yet transmissible human to human becomes so. And it's easy to see how well intentioned people might think it wise to do such research, assuming they have extraordinary confidence that they're not going to accidentally leak one of these pathogens out of their labs. But we know so much about how difficult it is to be perfectly careful in an ongoing way that after a few minutes of reflection, some of this research seems patently insane. What's your current view on the H five N One research that you began speaking about? Well, so you made an important point, which is that gain of function research is done by well meaning people. It's done with the public health agenda. These aren't mad scientists. They're trying to probe at the worst things that could conceivably happen so we can better prepare for them. And the whole debate that the scientific community has had to a lesser degree society writ large is actually geared off of precisely this H Five M One research that we've been discussing. There was, and to some degree remain some confusion about the virulence and transmissibility of the H Five M One modified viruses that were created. Some have questioned the consistency of the statements at least one of the researchers made. And also the transmissibility that the research achieved was in ferrets. So we really have no idea how these viruses would behave in humans. Of course they didn't infect humans. They could have been way worse than the ferret results. They could have been a dud. We don't know. So for this reason, I used the H Five N One incident both as a scary and thought provoking historic fact. I mean, this happened, and holy shit, but also as a bit of a metaphor, like a touchstone for conversation. And that what we can say is that a virus of unknown but potentially catastrophic power resulted from gain of function work in 2011. Using the technology that time and to assess what that means for our security. Now, we need to consider the speed with which the tools and techniques of synthetic biology have been improving since 2011 and the degree to which they've been spreading. And we'll get into much more detail on that in a later section. But short answer is these tools are improving with unbelievable speed and just as rapidly they're spreading to very large widespread levels and academic biology and beyond. So the original H five N one gain of function research was the roughest of prototypes for what's possible now for a much, much larger group of people, which makes any clouded understanding of the human transmissibility of those original viruses kind of immaterial. Anyway, to get back to what happened in 2014, there was a series of blunders that the US government committed in relation to some scary pathogens. In one incident, some live anthrax spores were mailed from one lab to another. And another one really crazy live smallpox virus was discovered in a forgotten FDA storage facility. And as a result of these and some other things, concern ramped up about deadly pathogens. And one result of this was a pause on government funding of gain of function research. Emphasis on pause and government funding. So gain of function wasn't banned by any means. This just meant the US government itself wouldn't fund any of it. And both of those projects had some US government funding. And as for private research, I think the words were request for a voluntary moratorium on gain of function. So nothing like a ban and certainly nothing like enforcement. Then, after three years of careful thought, I'm sure the government put together some ethical frameworks and other things. Government funding for gain of function was resumed. I think that was 2017. And then in 2019, funding for the exact two H five N One research projects that we've been discussing resumed. So now it's all systems go for gain of function as far as the US government is concerned. And as for whether it should actually be practiced, I've given this a huge amount of thought and I fully appreciate the conceptual value of anticipating the worst bugs that might arise naturally by developing them artificially first. But I still, despite that, do not believe gain of function research should be carried out at all. The first reason is that it is enormously possible that nature will never get around to creating the ghastly things that we invent with our gain of function research. I mean, no highly contagious form of H five N One has ever managed to evolve across however many centuries. So widespread gain of function research will inevitably bring god awful pathogens into existence that would never have existed otherwise. And why do that? But an even better reason to never do any gain of function research is, as you pointed out, no laboratory of any level of security can be wholly immune from leakages and accidents. And history shows this very, very clearly. And if you'd like, I could run through a few quick and rather unfortunately, chilling examples that illustrate that. Sure. The first one that I often draw attention to was a smallpox leak that occurred back in 1978. And the timing is relevant because just one year before that, smallpox had been eradicated from the entire world after a heroic ten year effort. And right before that eradication effort, 2 million people a year were dying from smallpox. Still in the late 60s, after hundreds of millions had been killed in the first half of the century. Yeah, something like 500 million people died in the 20th century from a small, crazy numbers. And so we can imagine the level of care and attention that must have been lavished on every remaining sample of smallpox one year after the eradication. But nonetheless, smallpox managed to escape from a British lab. It infected two people and killed one of them. So the last person in history to die of smallpox died as a result of a lab leakage. And as for biosafety level four labs, which is the very, very highest level of biosafety by an international set of standards, and biosafety level four is extremely rare. There aren't a lot of them in the world. So this is the pinnacle. We can look at a foot and mouth disease outbreak in or leakage, rather, in Britain, once again, back in 2007. And again, this timing is relevant because just a few years before that, britain's cattle industry had suffered a crippling foot and mouth outbreak. So high alert for foot and mouth in the UK. But despite that, the virus literally leaked out of the SPL four lab into the surrounding groundwater. And then two weeks after that lab resumed work, it happened again. So we're at the pinnacle of biosafety in a country that's been blighted by this disease recently, and we have this leak. And in light of that, do we really want to do gain of function research into pathogens that might imperil civilization itself? And by the way, many very level headed people believe that COVID itself might have leaked out of a biosafety level four lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Now, I haven't dug deep enough into that to fully form my own point of view on whether that would have been a leak or not, but it's definitely not just the realm of the tinfoil hat crowd. And then the last example which is relevant for an additional set of reasons, as if it's not grim enough, is the anthrax attack of 2001. She killed five people. This was a week after 911, and envelopes containing anthrax spores showed up at some media outlets, as well as the offices of a couple of senators, including the Senate Majority Leader, Tom Dashl. And as it happens, I was in Dashel's office that week. So this one's kind of seared into my memory. And it turns out that those fours came out of a high security US Army biodefense lab, probably at Fort Dietrich in Maryland. Although some people think it might have been another army lab. Now, there's always going to be a swirl of mystery and conspiracy theory around this one because the FBI's main suspect actually killed himself before any indictments or trials. But regardless of who took the spores out of the lab, it's hard to imagine a country at a higher level of alert than the US after 911, one week after 911. And it's hard to imagine a significantly more security minded and security capable organization than the US. Military. And yet, even in those circumstances, anthrax made its way from the heart of the military industrial complex into the office of the Senate Majority Leader, again while proving two things. One, any facility can leak, but also showing us that safety measures which are meant to prevent accidents are all but helpless against a malicious insider, because that's not the disaster scenario they're designed around. And the odds of there being an unhinged insider go up as you increase the number of places working with disastrous pathogens. The consequences go up as the pathogens become exponentially more terrifying than Anthrax or even COVID. Which again leads us to question why in the world would we ever do Ganafunction research? Yeah, well, there's another variable here which you discuss throughout the series, the prospect that this technology will become increasingly democratized. And you'll have high school students performing experiments that now the most sophisticated laboratories would struggle to perform because there's some desktop piece of technology 510, 15 years from now that embeds so much knowledge that you don't even have. To be a person in the field of in this case, biology, to do biological experiments that no team is currently or few teams are currently capable of. It's very easy to see how the consequences of this meddling will get away from you. And the idea that we are poised to spread the tech around to the level of high school students is fairly terrifying. But at the same time, there is something that's undeniably cool about high school students discovering things like synthetic biology and doing really cool things with it. And so a little bit of a sidetrack. The most vivid evidence of sin bio technology in high schools to me is something called the iGEM competition. And I Gem is sort of an annual sin bio jamboree for students, which spun out of MIT a while back. And each year, thousands of students grouped into several hundred teams compete in creating sort of little sin bio marvels. And those teams come out of grad schools, they come out of college, and they do come out of high schools. I recently eyeballed the list of last year's teams, and I'd say about a quarter of them came out of high schools. And the high school projects I read about included a virus testing system that delivers PCR like technology at home, which is not easy to do. Another was a field kit you could take out of the woods to test wild mushrooms for toxicology. So pretty sophisticated stuff coming out of today's high schools. And I do think Igema is a great thing, as I mentioned. And I don't think that we have to worry at this instant about a rogue high school kid doing something catastrophic, you know, with Synbio today. But we do have to appreciate that this is the end point of the academic transmission channel, and it's wide open. So things that are only possible for today's top synbio professors will rapidly diffuse to smart grad students and then to smart undergrads and then to smart high school kids and eventually to dumb 8th graders. Right. And we obviously can't put a biosafety level four protection protocol into every high school. So we either have to stop the diffusion of this technology, which I think would be tragic and also completely impossible, or we have to start building safeguards that selectively prevent dangerous practices down the line, which is tricky because our intuitions reliably defeat us when exponential change is involved. I mean, there's a famous question of whether it's better to have a million dollars or a penny that doubles every day for a month, and our intuitions scream, take the million bucks, but it turns out the penny is a much better deal. And I believe we have this miswiring because our ancestors simply never encountered exponential processes when they were living on the savannah and they were evolving on the savannah. They had to solve all kinds of de facto Newtonian physics problems when they went hunting, when they fled predators, when they were cracking things open. So that kind of mathematical intuition is very hardwired into us, but not exponential processes. So therefore, we have things like HHS naively posting the Spanish flu genome to the world. And rather than laugh at that, we need to be unbelievably concerned about what information and methodologies we're putting out in the world today. To spoil alert, a little smidgen from section two of the recording. The awesomeness of this, the speed of this advance and send bio to me is best captured in looking back at the Human Genome Project, which lasted 13 years and cost about $3 billion and ended in 2003. So not in ancient history, at which point the team had basically read out a single human genome. And today you can have your genome read not for $3 billion, but for $300. And two, 2003 wasn't that long ago. It was a 10 million to one price drop. Yeah. I mean, that's that's flabbergasting. Yeah. And so that is the kind of pace of change that we are simply unaccustomed to dealing with, that our ancestors we're utterly unaccustomed to dealing with, that defeats our intuitions. And so I go back to the point I made earlier that those who are deep in the process of creating this technology have a much, much higher moral weight on them to try to forecast the things that might otherwise blindside a society that doesn't see it coming. And there really needs to be a symphony of coordination between academia, a self regulating private industry, and really, really smart public health people to prevent catastrophic unforeseen circumstances. Okay, well, it will not surprise you to know that you have not yet made me an optimist, Rob. But happily, you've got further installments in this series to try. Absolutely. There's more to come and much more optimistic ones to come. We've talked about the apocalyptic nature of artificial pandemics. Now let's consider the reason someone could possibly have for unleashing one. Doing this would almost certainly doom the unleasher. If he doesn't die of his own awful disease, he ends up in a post apocalyptic hellscape. That doesn't sound like a great incentive structure, so it's fair to question whether anyone would ever actually do such a thing. A doctrine called mutual assured destruction comes to mind. It got us through the Cold War and basically said that since a nuclear slugfest would annihilate everyone, neither side would start one. The policy had some terrifying holes in it, but you got to admit, here we still are. Meanwhile, a vial filled with an obliterating contagion has its own mad deterrence built into it. So if we could trust the Soviets with thousands of nukes and it turns out we could who couldn't we trust with that vial? When I've explored this issue in writing or in talks or interviews, I've come to gravitate toward a handful of examples that really help frame it. On the question of whether anyone would ever unleash a doomsday virus, I often think of the Las Vegas shooter who murdered 58 Concertgoers in 2017. For starters, unlike the Soviet Union, he was committed to self annihilation, making him undeterrable by nature. Given that, would he have preferred to unleash something 100 times worse than COVID if he somehow had that capability? Obviously, we don't know if he would have done that, but we sure can't say he wouldn't have. After all, this guy, like countless other mass shooters, had no proven boundaries when it came to inflicting death and untold suffering on as many strangers as possible. And there's really no reason to think he even grazed the outer limits of the horror he would have liked to inflict. So we can't say he didn't want to topple civilization. We can only say he didn't get to. Now, this guy was no rocket scientist, nor was he a world class biologist in 2017. That meant he didn't get to have a vial full of deadly manmade viruses, so we don't know what he would have done with one. But here's the thing I bet he didn't know squat about ballistics either, and that he couldn't have designed a semiautomatic weapon any more than he could have hoisted himself to Mars. But he did get to have a private arsenal, which illuminates a critical point. Even if it takes geniuses to create a technology and more geniuses to translate it into functional tools. It may only take a sick lunkhead to operate those tools. Now, the frontiers of biology are generating extraordinary tools, and for now, they're both created and operated by brilliant people. But there's no reason why this has to be the case forever. In fact, the tools and techniques in question are set to spread far and wide, which we'll discuss in a bit. But for now, the key point I always make when discussing this topic is that when suicidal mass murderers really go all in, technology is the force multiplier. For a low tech example of this, I often cite a series of school attacks that occurred in China several years ago. There was a rash of ten of them, just like in the US. They were carried out with the deadliest things you could find in the local stores. But since this was China, that wasn't semiautomatic rifles, but things like knives and hammers and cleavers. Just like the Vegas shooter, the ten attackers in China pushed their technology to its murderous limits. But all of them combined killed less than half as many victims as the Vegas shooter alone. To slide to the other end of the tech spectrum, consider the German wings pilot who decided to end it all in 2015. He wasn't armed with a knife or a machine gun, but with an Airbus 320, which he drove into a mountainside, killing everyone on board. A lot more than twice as many people as the Vegas shooter, who himself killed more than any other mass shooter in history. So again, in the hands of suicidal mass murderers, technology is the force multiplier. With this in mind, let's return to the problem of artificial superbugs here. The question isn't whether someone can make a bug that could potentially kill at the scale of a world war. That one was already answered twice when those two teams made H five N one flu contagious almost a decade ago. So the real question now is how many people can create something diabolical? Because as a group of people who can grows, our ability to monitor and deter them vanishes. To frame this, let's reconsider that situation. In the Cold War, when just two heads of state held annihilating powers, the world ultimately spent trillions of dollars to monitor them and to deter them from hitting the red button. Early warning systems diplomacy, vast militaries, maintaining the balance of power, missile stockpiles so huge they could destroy the enemy even if he struck first, et cetera. All this to deter just two people from doing the unthinkable. But what if we had to keep the Chieftains of 30 nuclear arsenals in line? Or a thousand? There wouldn't be enough money or resources in the world to fund all that deterrence. So we're lucky that two is such a low number. We're also lucky that the heads of the superpowers were mostly serious, stable people who spent decades soberly making their way to the top. Now, we could probably say similar things about a very different duo. The two had researchers who created the contagious form of H five N One. They were brilliant biologists, the heads of labs. They had decent budgets, excellent equipment, and spent years cultivating their minds until they could do things that no scientists had done before. A decade ago, when they did their thing, the cadre of people who could create genocidal pathogens was a pretty elite club with really high admission standards, ones that would tend to weed out loopy, erratic people. But what if that club grows and the hurdles to joining it plummet again? Try to imagine an analogous world with thousands of sovereign nuclear powers. It's a very unstable picture. Now, on the biology front, we're way past the point when just twoish people in the world could groom a bug as deadly as the contagious form of H five N One. The reason is a new branch of science called synthetic biology. I'll call it sin. Bio. From now on, for short, is what's known as an exponential technology. That means it gets more powerful and cheaper in rapidly compounding ways. The output that cost a $1,000 last year might cost 500 a day, 250 next year. And before we know it, just pennies. When this goes on, things don't just get cheaper, but capabilities spread from nobody to a handful of people to masses of people. We've all personally lived through this with computing, another exponential technology. 15 years ago, not even Bill Gates could casually place video calls from his cell phone. But today, billions of people can, and I'm one of them. But that sure doesn't mean I know more about computing than Bill Gates knew 15 years ago. This sort of thing happens all the time with exponential technologies. Over just a few years, complete nonexperts pick up capabilities that were initially beyond the top people in the field. That's pretty cool when it's video calls, not so much when it's unleashing an artificial disease. To give a sense of how steep the exponential curve is in biology, I always cite the Human Genome Project. It lasted 13 years and cost about $3 billion. When it ended in 2003, the team had read and documented a single human genome. Today, you can have your genome read for $300. That's a 10 million to one price drop in less than 20 years. So the impossible is now affordable, and soon it'll be practically free. Of course, lots of things are still extremely hard in synbio. For now, only a tiny handful of truly elite scientists can generate viable replicating viruses from scratch just from genetic code. And it's a good thing that capability is so rare, because the genomes of eradicated monsters like smallpox and the flu that killed 50 million people right after the First World War are up on the Internet for anyone to download. And, yes, that means smallpox can now be created from scratch by anyone with the skills and motivation. Two researchers recently proved this point by synthesizing the closely related horsepox virus, which is extinct and harmless with a hundred thousand dollars budget and some male order DNA. This definitively showed that highly specialized scientists can now cook up some smallpox. But that elite monopoly won't last because rare capabilities routinely become widespread when exponential technologies are in play again. Think of video calls. The trailblazers on the edge of synbio tend to be brilliant, career minded and highly non murderous. But as the trail gets worn down and the tools get simpler, lower and lower levels of skill, expertise and long term dedication will be needed. And at some point, probably fairly soon, freshmen premed students will have homework assignments that the entire field of sinbayo couldn't complete. Today, with this in mind, let's go back to that grim subject of suicidal mass murderers. The ones who hit those Chinese schools had simple tools and killed a couple dozen people between them. The guy who killed a lot more people than that in Vegas had guns which much smarter people than him designed to slaughter humans. The German wings pilot had a plane designed by people much smarter than him, and so on. Each killer hit the limits of his technology, but there's no reason to think they hit the limits of their ambitions. None of them was in a position to die while launching a pandemic. But once again, that doesn't mean none of them would have given the chance. It just means none of them got to. So how rare are these sorts of people these days? The US. Alone averages over one mass shooting per day. According to the Gun Violence Archive, a big proportion of the perpetrators are suicidal and a big fraction of that subgroup, like the Vegas shooter, take every random stranger they can with them. We need to worry about this group as massively deadly technologies become widespread. Because again, their death tolls reveal the limits of their technology, not the limits of their bloodlust. And no doubt some people in this category have no upper limits. Each year this group is replenished as hundreds of people throughout the world go on a final deadly spree. Think of those killers as being in a circle on a Venn diagram. It's very small and stable in size, but it's extremely significant. And a neighboring circle are those who could trigger the deaths of millions of us if they really wanted to. That circle is even smaller. It's barely a speck, but it's growing. It used to include just a few heads of state, as we discussed. Then in 2011, assuming their creation was in fact contagious between humans, those H five n one biologists entered it. And these days quite a few more scientists are surely in that circle because in biology, the heroically difficult feats of ten years ago are just a hell of a lot easier now the enabling technology is simply moving so fast. For instance, the world's most celebrated and prominent gene editing tool, which is called CRISPR, didn't even exist when the H five N One flu was modified. And today, CRISPR is taught in high schools. And post CRISPR tools, which are even more powerful, are now cropping up and are also proliferating. So, again, we have two circles in our Venn diagram. One contains the people who are going to snap this year and kill as many people as they can. And the other contains those who could kill millions of us or more if they really wanted to. That second circle is set to grow with insane speed due to the proliferation of ever more powerful synbiotools and techniques. Which means unless something changes, those circles are going to collide and intersect, and the world will be home to someone who wants to kill us all and is capable of producing or obtaining an annihilating pathogen. The deadliness of that pathogen could have absolutely no precedent, because for all its faults, a bug like the coronavirus has nothing against us. Technically, viruses aren't even alive. And many deadly ones actually become less deadly over time, because killing off all your hosts is no way to win the game of evolution. So natural viruses will never go out of their way to maximally harm us. They just don't have ways to go out of. That wouldn't be true of someone who sits down to design a deadly virus. For instance. One thing that makes COVID dangerous is that some people are contagious without any symptoms. That period is thought to last a few days, so why not extend it to a month? The Coronavirus won't take that on as a personal goal, but a designer might. A designer might also make something 100 times deadlier than COVID, like a contagious form of H five N One flu. Now, this wouldn't be easy, but ease is a function of tools and skill. And we know the raw tools of DNA synthesis and editing are improving at breakneck speeds. As this continues, some profoundly skilled people with perfectly benign motives will probably design some profoundly deadly things. They might be virologists pushing biologies out of limits, graduate students doing thesis projects, militaries exploring what their enemies might cook up, counterterrorism units doing the same thing. I expect that almost all the people playing this game will be white hat operators precisely because of the brilliance and resources it'll require at first. But that doesn't mean their work can't be dangerous. For starters, we've already talked about how many deadly bugs have found their way out of secure labs. And they could also escape in nonphysical ways. Because although good guy scientists may make critters and petri dishes, they'll really be creating tiny data files. The H five N One genome is just that a packet of information with just 10,000 letters in it. That's nothing. A transcript of this recording would have way more letters than that. And data networks get hacked constantly. And when they do, the significant files go missing, then get copied and copied and copied. Just ask any music label, movie studio, or Fortune 500 company that let hackers get the intimate details of millions of customers. Like ask equifax. Now, when the first deadly genome gets swiped and spread all over the dark web, technology may not be advanced enough for bad guys who are not elite scientists to do much with it. But the Internet never forgets. And a decade or two later, the technology to synthesize genomes could be a million times more powerful. And in a million labs, you see, injecting the time variable between the brilliant good guy who does the hard work and a later bad guy who abuses that work is really destabilizing. Because while the bad guy may not be brilliant at all, a couple of decades could give him access to vastly more powerful tools that make up for that. Again, think of the Vegas shooter, who was no ballistics expert, but who stood on the shoulders of generations of them. Or think of whoever posted the genetic recipes of smallpox in the 1918 flu to the Internet. They couldn't possibly have been thinking exponentially. Which means they either couldn't imagine a near future in which platoons of people could resurrect those diseases, or they didn't bother trying. With this in mind, please dial up your inner science fiction writer for a moment. Let's imagine it's the intermediate future. A few decades out, and every high school BioLab has a bench top DNA synthesizer. These already exist, as we'll soon discuss, but definitely not in high schools, because they're way too expensive. However, like the personal computers of the 1970s, they'll get much cheaper and better, and it's hard to imagine their descendants won't end up in high schools. Now, let's imagine this high school printer can crank out a complete error corrected virus genome if you input its genetic code. You can't do this with today's DNA printers. They can only produce batches of about 2000 error corrected letters of DNA, whereas viruses typically run in the low tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of letters. But history has shown that ten to 100 x improvements are fairly short walks in exponentially compounding technologies like synbio. Recall the 10 million x improvement in reading DNA in the 18 years since the Human Genome Project. Next, let's imagine that modern tools make the complex process of translating a genome into a viable replicating virus easy enough for smart high school kids to master. Now, everything I've described so far is so plausible, it verges on inevitable, given enough time, if not in this decade, then a bit further out. And yet, I've described an all but impossible world. Because remember, those genetic blueprints of smallpox and 1918 flu are already floating around the Internet. And God only knows what other blueprints will eventually join them. In our scenario, any smart but disturbed high school through postdoc student along with millions of people working in life sciences could start an outbreak. That world just can't exist, or at least not for long. So we need to do whatever it takes to avoid ending up on a glide path that leads to it. When I think of this kind of intermediate future, suicidally murderous individuals worry me, because the world produces so many of them. Groups with those motives are much rarer, but they're inherently scary, too, because groups can be way more capable and formidable than individuals. And some groups do have bizarre urges to sweep the earth of humanity. There's plenty of doomsday cults out there, and at some .1 of them will get bored and decide to speed things along. Japan's om Shinriku Cult did this. It gathered over a thousand members, including several biologists, and it meant to bring about the end of the world. But the tools to do that just weren't around in 1995. So it made its big move with a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. When the next Om Shinrikyu comes along, I doubt they'll limit their arsenals to deadly gases. Meanwhile, environmental, or maybe animal rights extremists, could decide that humanity doesn't deserve a future. Or consider the strange philosophy of antinatalism, which argues that human lives are so unpleasant the ethical thing is to minimize the number of humans living them. For now, the people who think this way just try to avoid having children, but who knows where that could lead? The crazy motives we can imagine driving someone to launch a doomsday pandemic are terrifyingly broad, and that's not counting the ones we can't imagine. Meanwhile, the ways for dangerous, well intentioned work to leak out are boundless. Okay, that's the bad news. But luckily, there is a way out of this. That's the whole premise of this series. But before we get to the right way out, let's briefly discuss the wrong way out, which would be a technology ban, because we can't stop Send bio from advancing, and we'd be fools to try. If a worldwide ban is enacted, could we really trust China and Russia to respect it? Would they trust us? Could anyone trust North Korea? Unlike nuclear programs, which require vast industrial complexes and therefore can be monitored, biology can be practiced almost invisibly. So swear off of sinbio, and you're giving some rival a sin biominopoly. Again. Think of North Korea. This is a really bad idea. Much more importantly, we shouldn't want to stop sinbio in its tracks, because its promise is almost boundless. It's already starting to revolutionize medicine and is set to save untold millions of lives. It holds extraordinary promise for the environment in the form of crops that need less pesticides, biodegradable, plastics, and perhaps even biofuels secreted by engineered microbes. And it has some Sci-Fi wonders up its sleeve, like clean meat that's molecularly identical to the real stuff, but is produced without animals, so there's no suffering in factory farms and greenhouse gases. Are sharply cut. Yet another giant reason to forego a sin Biotechn is that our greatest allies will be people trained in this field. And while a tiny handful of such people will almost inevitably go rogue as training proliferates ever more broadly, the ratio of allies to enemies will be staggeringly high in our favor. I mean, think about it. The bar to being a good guy is that you're opposed to wiping out humanity. That's about as low as a bar gets. So the more sin bio experts the world creates, the safer we'll be on a certain level. So how do we put the good guys to work in protecting us? In the next part of this series, we'll talk about the right way out of this predicament. Okay, I'm back with Rob Reid. That was section two. Rob, you have raised this terrifying memory of what smallpox did to the world and the prospect that it could be resurrected. What's your thinking there? Well, I'd say the thing that unfortunately gives us confidence that some people out there could resurrect smallpox today if they put their minds to it, is that someone recently created the harmless but closely related horsepox virus from scratch, and they're very closely related. So if you can create one, you can absolutely create the other. And in fact, the researcher behind that indicated in one of his interviews that part of the reason why he did this horsepox work was to force the world to confront the possibility that smallpox could be resurrected. And so how many people could also create these viruses? In addition to this researcher, whose name was David Evans today and asking that, I think there's two things to note. The first is that the horsepox work was done in 2016, so this was almost five years ago, using the tools of its day, and all kinds of sin bio tools have improved dramatically since then. And secondly, it was done by a very talented team, which kind of constricts the group of people who could do this, because at the time, it was actually the largest virus that had ever been assembled from scratch. So that was not a small thing to do. So who did this? Like I said, his name is David Evans, and he's a virologist at the University of Alberta. And when he's described his work publicly, both in a paper that he put out there and in interviews, he's basically said two things that I'm, of course, paraphrasing here. One is that for good or for ill, the world is full of talented scientists who, like him, can stitch together disparate bits of widely published knowledge to create things that don't have ready made recipes on the Internet. But he also said so that's the bad news. But he also said that doing what he did would require advanced scientific training, a very specialized lab, and a fair amount of inside knowledge, all of which I'm sure was entirely true in 2016, and all of which I'm equally sure is less true today. Now, I can't reliably place David Evans in the, I don't know, global constellation Virologist, but for what it's worth, and take it with a grain of salt. I found what looks like a bottomless list of the world's most influential virologists online based on AI rankings, which presumably includes things like academic citations and whatnot. And he wasn't listed in the top 500, so take that with a big grain of salt. But it doesn't seem like he's the top virologist in the world. So if we triangulate from all that, I would say that conjuring up the horsepox virus and therefore smallpox would probably be hard but doable for a high powered academic virologist who's really determined to do it. And my gut sense tells me that's probably hundreds of people in that category. So not thousands, but not mere dozens, but that's a really high number when you think of the terrifying power each of those people could potentially wield if they went off the rails. I mean, we are, in a very real sense, counting on all of those people to never go columbine. The analogy to guns is not reassuring because guns do not have this exponential quality to them. Right? I mean, you only kill as many people as you shoot. It's not like you unleash rounds of ammunition onto the world and they keep spreading and killing people. And we know where the trend lines for all of this technology, really any technology, tend to go, which is to embed the highly specialized knowledge that was required to create the tech in the tech itself, such that a person without any real knowledge can use it and leverage all of that power to whatever end. And so, as you pointed out, you don't have to be a master of engineering of any kind or ballistics to own the most powerful firearm available and use it. And someday you won't have to be a virologist to engineer a virus if we don't manage to contain this technology. Yeah, and a really scary thing you kind of touched on is just the open endedness of a sinbio attack. I mean, every terrorist attack we've experienced so far has had inherent limits to it. There's only so many people on an airplane. There's only so many people in a building that's being attacked, or there's only so many victims one person can shoot before the cops show up. But COVID makes it abundantly clear how open ended a disease's damage can be. We're a year into this thing. We still have no idea what the final bill is going to come to. And what's also scary is to think about what would a dud of a sin bio attack look like? I mean, let's say someone who's really smart and really determined, who has completely mastered the best biological tools that will be available, I don't know, let's say 20 years from now. What if that person sets out to cancel humanity and falls 99.9% short of that goal, that's 8 million dead. And just imagine how the US. Would react to an attack that kills on that scale proportionately in the US. Just think of how we reacted to 911, which killed fewer people than COVID currently kills on a bad day. I mean, two wars costing trillions of dollars. Civil liberty, ramifications. The scary thing is that not only can we not afford to suffer a successful symbiote attack, but we probably can't afford to experience a failed one. Yeah, well, again, the analogy from COVID is depressing because this is just about as benign as you could imagine, while being worse than the ambient level of contagion that's already there. If this were any more benign, we would barely notice it. Right? And it has brought global civilization to something like a standstill. We don't know what the ultimate bill will be from this, but we know it is certainly more than a million dead globally and trillions of dollars. And again, this is just if it were any more like flu, it would be the flu. And so just anything that would be properly weaponized with an intent to kill as many people as possible. You have to imagine this is the dud scenario, and it's still scarcely tolerable. So we're talking about, by definition, people who would intend to harm vast numbers of people by doing something in this space. The prospect that this can happen by accident is something we've touched on, and that's also terrifying. But here we're talking about the most malicious case. Who are we imagining would do such a thing? Well, it's an interesting question, and it's obviously a really important one. And what I personally go back and forth about is, is the risk greater from lone wolf individuals, or is the risk ultimately greater from groups of individuals? From organized groups. And on the one hand, groups are obviously way more dangerous on a one to one basis. Like if we compare a single group to a single individual with an identical goal, because obviously, unlike the individual, the group of five people, let's say it can be five places at once, it can pool expertise that might be hard to find in a single person. It can pull resources. They're just countless advantages. But the thing is, it's not really a one to one comparison because lone wolf operators are just way more common when it comes to suicide attacks. Even if we include suicide bombings, which are the works of groups in those statistics, lone wolf suicide attacks are way more common. I mean, we had more than one mass shooting per day in the US. Last year, many of which were suicide attacks and almost all of which were lone wolf operations. I mean, things like Columbine, where you have multiple shooters coordinating, are incredibly rare. So I worry about groups because of their capabilities, but I worry about lone wolves because of just sheer numbers. And it's also hard to find groups in history that have been committed to total annihilation. I mean, the only one I can think of is Omission Riku, and I bet even ISIS's leaders would have been horrified on their worst day by a plan to exterminate humanity. That kind of Nealism is just much easier to imagine in an unhinged individual than an organized group. But that said, groups aren't really historically known for focusing on trying to do things that are utterly impossible on a technological basis, which has been the case with total annihilation up until now, thank God. And there are schools of thought that might just be a few deranged steps away from considering that. Like, should we be worried about what the outer fringes of the environmental movement or maybe the animal rights movement, might do, let's say ten years from now, if they think they can create an off switch for humanity? Or maybe a particularly unhinged group of antinatalists? Yeah, I would divide this more or less as you have, into two possibilities. One is ideological, and that is more or less what you would need to have a group do anything like this. There has to be a belief system, some kind of doctrine that makes sense of this kind of apocalyptic genocidal behavior and suicidal behavior, unless you've also vaccinated yourself against this pathogen, which is, I suppose, also a possibility, although then we're imagining very competent people doing this. Right. So in the case of a lone wolf, I guess it could be ideological. You know, one person can have a rationale for what they're doing. It may seem consistent to them, and they may be alone in doing it, but there's so many more ways for people to just snap, and it doesn't even have to make sense. Right. And they're equipped with this technology. They are far more dangerous than a school shooter. Right. He may have some internal story as to why he's doing what he's doing, but it doesn't need to be of the sort that we saw with someone like the Unabomber who, you know, published a disconcertingly coherent manifesto, and that was he was a group of one, essentially. They really are very different problems, even though they're terminating in the same way. I know this from the space of just having to deal with crazy ideologues and crazy people more than I would want. And so you can have people who bend their attention toward you based on their ideology that disagrees with you and they criticize you and attack you, and in the worst case, pose a security problem, but then there are just crazy people who think you're sending the messages, right? And that's a completely different problem to think about and to try to mitigate. And when you're talking about truly democratizing this tech and putting it in the hands of people who could be starkly delusional yeah, we clearly have to find some way of closing the door to this. Yeah. And it's interesting to think of that starkly delusional side of it. Kind of one chilling example. If you remember the guy who shot up the movie theater in Colorado, there was a Batman premiere dressed as a Joker. He was like a PhD candidate. I want to say neuroscience, some biological science with an NIH grant. So that level of delusion can actually penetrate into fairly high academic circles, and then as the technology proliferates into ever lower circles, that high bar matters less and less. And I never really thought of this before, but I guess an interesting question to ask ourselves, I just have no idea, is what percentage of that daily mass shooter population in the US. For example, is actually schizophrenic or in some ways deeply delusional. We should know that as a society. I think if we kind of follow the logic of all this, we start realizing that suicidal mass murder could absolutely begin to pose a national security risk. And if we look at it through that lens, we should probably be treating every mass shooting kind of the way we treat, you know, the crash of an airliner with an incredibly serious effort to figure out exactly what went wrong? And what are the aspects of this case that might have provided warning signs and really get a real epidemiology of this phenomenon? And I don't know that we're not doing that, but I don't believe that we're doing that. And it's something that we really don't understand a lot better. Yeah. That airline crash you referenced, the German Wings flight or a pilot, it seems all but certain, intentionally crash the plane. That's one of those cases where this is a sort of murder suicide that most people have never even thought about. Right. It's just one of the most horrific things you can imagine. But you can see how it's a very odd case where you could see someone being, I would imagine in this case, suicidally depressed, someone in that condition might be capable of doing something like that. And you got to think it presents psychologically as different than arming yourself and showing up at a school and shooting people. It's a different act. It is, in fact, a more murderous one, but it is a more abstract one in some ways from the you would imagine from the point of view of the pilot, the pilot's experience is he's just committing suicide. Right. And obviously he knows he's got a couple of hundred people on the plane with him. Who he's going to kill? But you could imagine that there's some state of the human mind where all of those deaths are really an afterthought, and there's no kind of murderous rage needed to motivate the instantaneous murder of hundreds of people, whereas there would be. If you're going to start killing people with a club out in the world or shooting them one by one, or at least it does strike me as that the method of creating harm really does select for a different population of people who would be capable of causing that harm. Yeah. There'd be a squeamishness that the pilot wouldn't have to overcome, that nobody who's actually getting into the gritty business of killing people would have to overcome. Yeah. The moment you've bought into, you want to commit suicide anyway. Right. And for whatever reason, you're happy to kill a lot of people in the process. But after that, it's all hypothetical. There's no up close and personal encounters. There's no conflict. There's just a plunge out of the sky with you at the controls. And this is analogous to different actions in times of war. Right. It takes a different kind of person to just drop a bomb from 30,000ft, knowing all the while that beneath that bomb there are hundreds or even thousands of people who are dying. That's different than, you know, trench warfare or, you know, any other sort of conflict that produces death. This is the example I give somewhere. I think it's in my first book, The End of Faith. When you find out that your grandfather flew bombing missions over Dresden in World War Two, that's one thing. If you hear that he killed a woman and her kids with a shovel, that's another thing. The visceral reaction to that difference is an appraisal of just how different a person you would need to be to do those two things. And yet we know he would have killed many more people flying a bombing run over Dresden than he would have killed with a shovel. These differences matter when they interact with technological innovations, because we are now in a world where you could kill a lot of people with what never seems like anything more than an idea. It is an abstraction, even when you're going through the steps required to weaponize a virus, because on some level, you're not sure what's going to happen. You're just going to release this thing into the wild and let's see what happens. It's all hypothetical until it isn't. Right. And it's I don't know. I just I can see this kind of possibility interacting with mentally unwell people of various sorts, where the bar to initiating this kind of thing is quite a bit lower than other acts of violence that would not nearly be as harmful. Yeah. Because most of that process of engineering this thing, and even unleashing it would involve gazing in a computer screen yeah. Traveling with lab equipment, you know, and the level the bar to being able to brutalize somebody with a shovel is is one thing. It's lower, I'm sure, when it comes to killing somebody as a sniper in war from 500 yards. Yet another thing, dropping a bomb and designing and releasing a pathogen might even be more abstracted than that. You can imagine people just deciding to do things that pose incredible downside risk, but you're never quite sure, right. So you could decide, well, I want to get a lot of people sick to make a point. There is this prospect that this could get completely out of hand and kill millions, but that's not my intent, but what the hell, right? It's the exponential part here that just makes this so scary because you keep rolling dice of these sorts. And again, what we have with COVID seems like a best case scenario. Yeah. And you could even get somebody I just thought of a grim scenario I hadn't thought of before. You could even get somebody with a messianic complex who decides, I'm going to release a minor pathogen to warn the world about this stuff, warning shot here and that can get out of control. There's all kinds of motivations that people could have on this. Whenever you have a destructive technology of this sort that can be unleashed by a single person, that variable alone is enormous. Just the fact that it takes perhaps a dozen fairly technical people to produce anything like a crude nuclear bomb. Right. The difficulty factor for one even super competent person is just too high. I mean, there's just too much engineering to do. There's just too many parts to get together. Moving the thing requires collaboration. You need some people. And when you take that away and you deliver into the hands of any single person technology that is potentially even more destructive, it seems like it does change the game significantly. And groups get busted. Groups get busted because they have to communicate with each other. They get busted because somebody defects from them. They get busted because they have a lot of surface area with the rest of the world and somebody's going to try to impress his girlfriend by blabbing about something. You look at the statistics and I don't remember the exact numbers, but the number of terrorist plots that have reportedly been foiled since 911, and it's a pretty impressive number and a very small number of plots that actually went forward. But if you look at somebody like the Vegas shooter or Obarmatin who shot up the nightclub in Orlando, there's no coordination, there's no signal leakage. All the actions that those people took that most mass shooters take in preparing for their crimes are perfectly legal. And so if it's one person, it's just almost undetectable. And I guess I'm swinging around to being all the more concerned about lone wolfs more than groups as we talk about this. Okay, well, let's get back into it and listen to Section Three. A while back, I said the way out of this is to build a global immune system to identify and destroy deadly new diseases. And there's plenty of inspiration to take from our own bodies. Our immune systems are simply amazing. They fight off countless attackers each year without us even noticing. And countless attackers are bugs the immune system has never encountered. Before, yet it fends off these completely unknown enemies because it's agile, adaptive, and multilayered. We need to build something like this for humanity as a whole to fight off new threats, whether it's an artificial disease or a natural one on a worldwide basis. Early the great news is we can do this if, after putting COVID behind us to whatever extent we're able, we maintain our focus on the threat of new diseases much more intensely than we did after SARS, MERS, Zika, et cetera. As we'll see, doing this properly will take big investments, which can be very tricky to fund. But let's compare that to the cost of doing nothing. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that COVID will cost the US. Alone $7.9 trillion in economic activity, while former Harvard President Lawrence Summers pegs the domestic costs at $16 trillion. Whichever estimate you use, it maps out to tens of trillions of dollars worldwide from COVID while an artificial bug could be vastly more deadly and destructive. Indeed, as I said earlier, I'm not confident that civilization could even survive something like a highly contagious version of H five N one flu. I, meanwhile, can't imagine everything I'm about to discuss combined costing even one to 2% of the bill that COVID alone is sticking us with. And these measures would come with a massive side benefit, in that they defend us from natural diseases as well as artificial ones that would include previously unknown enemies like COVID or dreadful annual reruns like the flu. Let's talk about the flu for a second. The White House Council of Economic Advisors estimates that it costs the US. Alone $361,000,000,000 a year in medical spending and lost productivity. This maps to over a trillion dollars worldwide. And as we'll discuss in a bit, we might all but eradicate the flu if we get just one thing off of my wish list. Not definitely, but we'd have a great shot at it for less than 1% of the flu's annual cost. Modern life sciences absolutely including sinbio, are magical arts, and we can and should enlist them against ancient enemies along with emerging ones. Now, as I said, this immune system should be a global thing, but global initiatives can take years to gin up, so we can and should get started everywhere at national levels, although it would be best if we eventually do things collaboratively and cover the globe. I've divided the immune system into five components. The first is about making it much trickier for bad actors to hijack our sin bioinfrastructure and use it to churn out awful things. The second component is outbreak surveillance. The earliest days of an outbreak can make all the difference between derailing a disease and letting it go global. So we should monitor the biosphere for new outbreaks as carefully as we watch the skies for enemy nukes. As we'll see, some really interesting science could help a lot with this if it gets the right funding and prioritization the third component is about hardening society against a sin bio attack or a natural pandemic. In military terminology, a hard target has some protection and is tougher to destroy than a defenseless soft target. Like, you could say the US. Hardened its airports back in the 70s when it first equipped them with metal detectors, then hardened them again after the 911 attacks by creating the TSA. Component number four is about conquering viruses. This is all about getting ahead of the next viral outbreak with vaccines and medications that could just stop it in its tracks. There's a huge amount that could be done here, but again, it's all about getting the right funding from a society that tends to underinvest badly in these things. I call the last component battle infrastructure. What do we need in place to fight the next novel disease after it's broken out? To either stop it from becoming a pandemic or to dampen a pandemic that takes off? Despite all of our other measures, at least one thing we'll discuss may sound like science fiction. The immune system I'll describe will be a dual purpose framework. While some parts of it are specifically targeted at artificial diseases, some of it would also pay huge dividends and are never ending battle against natural ones. So even if no one ever attempts to create an artificial bug, which I find almost impossible to imagine, it would still pay for itself probably hundreds of times over in saving lives, suffering, and economic damage. Before we start, I should say this isn't meant to be the last word in anything. It's instead a framework for thinking about how to respond to an existential threat humanity faces, one that the COVID crisis has brought into much sharper focus in the year and a half since I gave my Ted Talk about these things. It's not meant to be comprehensive. It can't be. For one thing, this podcast is meant to have a manageable duration. Also, so much is changing in sin bio and infectious disease research due to COVID that one writer can't hope to have it all on his radar. There might be dozens of measures and promising technologies worth slotting into each of my notional components. And if some form of this immune system does arise, I certainly hope it'll be that deep and rich. So my hope in this is to start a conversation, not to complete one. A conversation that could lead to a blueprint for an immune system more agile, multilayered, and adaptive than anyone can currently imagine. So onto component one hardening the sin bioinfrastructure. A few minutes back, I mentioned the TSA. Most of us have a friend who likes to say that if they wanted to hijack a plane, it would be so easy because the TSA sucks. Next time that happens, ask your friend how many us hijackings there have been since the TSA got started and cockpit doors were hardened. The answer is zero. Not because it's become impossible to hijack planes. But it's tricky enough that hardly anyone bothers. So while we haven't made aviation invulnerable because that is impossible, we've made it much, much harder to disrupt. This is what we need to do. With the act of creating deadly artificial bugs, we can't make that completely impossible, but we can push it past the reach of most people, including people acting on urges that will eventually pass. This matters a lot with someone bent on suicidal mass destruction, because most suicide attempts and many mass shootings are driven by transient phases of extreme rage or despair. An analysis of over 175 academic papers showed that less than 4% of those who tried and failed to kill themselves later successfully did so. Now, that's obviously 4% too many, but it shows that most suicidal phases are impermanent. Hijacking, of all things, is an interesting parallel. Believe it or not, it was once possible to hijack a plane almost on a passing whim. Between 68 and 72, there were 130 U. S. Hijackings, almost all of them by domestic perpetrators. Many of them were radicals who just kind of wanted to go to Cuba. It got so bad, Cuba created a special dormitory for wayward American hijackers. Alarmed citizens, meanwhile, swamped the FAA with anti hijacking suggestions like building trap doors outside of cockpits. Eventually, metal detectors and so forth drop the ambient level of hijackings from about 40 a year to almost zero. Now, we clearly can't live with dozens of biological attacks per year, so we need to think carefully about hardening the products and services that create synthetic DNA. Luckily, this process is already well underway. Back in 2010, the US. Department of Health and Human Services issued guidance for securities and biopractices. And by then, the industry had already founded the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, or IGSC, which is all about biosecurity. Its member companies represent about 80% of the world's gene synthesis capacity, although nobody is quite sure how accurate that estimate is. The government's guidance asked the industry to screen its customers for bad actors and to look out for orders of dangerous DNA sequences. So the Igse created a regulated pathogen database. Its members now follow special review processes for potentially dangerous requests, and contacts the FBI when appropriate. They also follow government watch lists of terrorists, people subject to export controls, and more. I discussed these issues with science policy expert Sarah Carter. She has estimated that IGSC members spend an average of almost $15 for each synthetic DNA order that they receive on biosecurity compliance, which is a very serious investment. So there's lots of great news here. The bad news is that the government hasn't once updated its guidance. That's a ten year lapse in guiding one of the fastest moving industries in history. Plus, that ancient government guidance is just that guidance. In other words, it's voluntary. And while it's impressive that the Igsc's members produce maybe 80% of the world's synthetic DNA, is that really enough. I'll use an analogy that many current and former American high school students will identify with. When I was growing up, my five town area, a couple hundred thousand people total had exactly one liquor store that reliably sold beer to teens. Every young beer enthusiast knew all about that store, and for a while, there may as well have been no drinking age whatsoever. Now, there had to be 99% compliance with the liquor laws amongst liquor stores in our area, but that hardly mattered. So I'd say when the fate of the world might literally hinge on controlling deadly DNA, 80% self directed compliance to voluntary guidance is nowhere near enough. That other 20%, in the hands of companies that are doing their own thing, is just a gaping hole. And even for its members, the IGSC is no real arbiter because it thoroughly lacks independence. Its chair works for an IGSC member called thermo Fisher, and the other folks who give it bits of their time also work for one member company or another. So if you're wondering why the IGSC website has no phone number, it's because they have no phone. Now, luckily, I wouldn't call this a pure fox watching the hen house scenario because Sinbio executives have huge incentives to prevent Sin Bio attacks. As humans, they'd suffer as much as the rest of us, and even a botched attack that hurts no one could lead to calls to shut down their industry. That said, any company's prime directive is to make money, and every IGSC representative has a day job and a company that has to make quarterly goals. So it's not surprising that in a recent Sin Bio industry survey, sarah Carter wrote that the people she interviewed, quote, repeatedly emphasized that biosecurity considerations were not a priority for the industry overall, with very little attention paid to the topic by investors and in industry venues. Now, this isn't true everywhere. A thought leader in this field is Twist Bioscience, a relatively large and publicly traded Sin bio company and an IGSC member. A company representative told me that Twist treats the consortium standards as a baseline starting point for their own biosecurity measures. They have a small, full time staff of PhDs who drill down on every DNA order that could possibly be misused. And the list of sequences that trigger reviews goes far beyond the Igsc's regulated pathogen database. That said, not everyone has twists resources, and the cost of synthetic DNA is dropping, while the cost of screening is increasing as databases of concerning sequences grow larger and more complete. This means screening is eating up a growing share of company's margins, which increases the incentives to cut corners. And My contact at Twist said that some companies are in fact opting out of the IGSC for profitability reasons, particularly internationally. This worries him, and he's not alone. The World Economic Forum and a nonprofit called the Nuclear Threat Initiative have teamed up to address it. They've proposed a common screening platform that's robust, open source, and given to all industry players for free or at a very low cost. In a 2020 white paper, they wrote, quote development of a common mechanism for screening, pathogen and toxic DNA would reduce the time and expertise required to adopt and implement synthetic DNA screening practices and thereby expand those practices to a wider range of DNA providers. They hope to have this available this year. In their white paper, they called for governments to require DNA screening practices through legislation or regulation. And although I'm generally a very free market oriented person, I fully agree governments worldwide should collaborate on tough regulations to forbid the distribution of any synthetic DNA to anonymous parties or known bad actors. As for dangerous DNA, it has its uses in research and other settings, and there are gradations of danger, which should be treated differently. But in general, it should only be provided to highly trusted customers with excellent reasons for needing it. And as for pandemic grade DNA, it should never be synthesized or distributed. Period. I'll add that there's no reason to ever mutate living organisms in ways that could let them cause devastating pandemics. I'm looking at you, H five N, one flu and those who modified you in 2011 not even if the head researcher has the most angelic history and motives, because no lab is 100% secure, as we've discussed. Plus, lab security is about preventing accidental leaks, not deliberate ones. And it's always possible that some lab worker will pass through an incredibly dark year and decide to cause the world enormous harm. This is evident in the mass shootings that happen on a roughly daily basis in the US. Alone. No social class or level of education makes people immune to this. The regulators should be as brilliant as the people in the industry they oversee, and they should coordinate globally. Yes. The US. China, Russia and others disagree on plenty, but they each have everything to lose from synbio run amok. Finally, regulators need to move as fast as the industry. No more ten year lapses. For one example of what happens when regulators fall asleep that ancient US government guidance didn't foresee the rise of benchtop DNA printers, which could be the future of the industry. These generate DNA in users labs, so they don't have to order it from companies like Twist. This is significant because history is full of transitions from the center to the edge. By this I mean capabilities that used to be provided by specialists migrate into the hands of users themselves. For example, getting photographed used to require a technician with pricey gear to send text messages. People used to go to telegraph offices, printing anything on paper required professionals with special equipment. All these things can be done by users themselves. Now, the list is endless. The move from the center to the edge is generally a wonderful and empowering trend. But there have been regulatory tragedies. For instance, the explosion in child pornography has been partly attributed to the fact that pictures are no longer printed in photo labs, where developers could spot something evil at some point. Benchtop DNA printers will be powerful enough to aid in a bet, an apocalypse. Long before that, they all need to report any dangerous sequences that they're asked to create triggering level headed review processes. Now, luckily, this is already happening. The most advanced product on the market is called the Bio XP, and I spoke extensively with its creator, Dan Gibson. The way it currently ingests and processes raw materials requires close communication between its user and its manufacturer, a company called Codex DNA, which Dan co founded. Codex is an IGSC member, and it doesn't let its printers synthesize any DNA without a review. Over time, Bioxps will become more autonomous in terms of the raw materials they process, but Dan says they'll continue to report all print runs back to Codex, so they can be reviewed like any order to an IGSC member. So far, so good. But this won't be the status quo for long. For one thing, the current version of the BioXp is analogous to the Apple II computer in 1977, which is to say that, revolutionary as it is, its capabilities are minuscule compared to what's coming. And with the passage of time, the limitations of the BioXp and its airs will melt away. Limitations like its current inability to crank out a virus length genome. Another factor is that someday there'll be cheap knockoffs of the Bioxp's distant descendants, and they'll be capable of things we can scarcely imagine, because, remember, a lone lab tech can now sequence a human genome in a few hours, something that recently took the entire field of biology 13 years. So we can count on the fact that someday, undergrads will be doing things the entire field of sin Bio can't possibly accomplish right now. And many of them could be using knockoff DNA printers made by amoral companies that cut corners and ignore safety measures unless they're sternly required to follow them. By then, hundreds of thousands of people could have access to gear that could cause a terrifying outbreak. And we cannot count on all of those people never having a catastrophically dark day. So there needs to be an iron set of rules and an iron culture about keeping dangerous DNA out of the wrong hands and the most deadly DNA out of all hands. And the time to create these universal rules is now, not a few months before distributed printers attain apocalyptic powers. This may sound like a terrifyingly tall order, and I'm sure government skeptics are particularly aghast at the need for brilliant and fast moving regulators. But remember, in less than a century, we humans banished diseases that had plagued us for millennia, made 200 ton chunks of metal fly, and transitioned from slide rules to the Internet. And I'm just talking about shaping an industry that's still in its infancy and is leaning in the right direction, we can put a very serious lid on this. Now that won't make it completely impossible for some disturbed person or group to make a profoundly lethal pathogen, because like eradicating all hijackings, that is impossible. Which is why our immune system has four more components. So let's talk about the second component early detection. Early detection is everything in epidemics, especially when a new disease is stalking the earth, like COVID or any artificial pathogen that could be unleashed in the future. That's because in the first days of an outbreak, cases tend to grow exponentially. And we saw how profound exponential growth is when we discussed sinbio's speed of improvement. COVID illustrates the cost of ignoring a novel diseases outbreak. A study published in Nature estimates that if China had implemented lockdowns and other measures three weeks sooner, the number of Chinese COVID cases could have been reduced by 95%. Had that happened, who knows if the disease would have reached the rest of the world? And the tragic fact is, China squandered much more early lead time than that. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, the head of the country's own center for Disease Control and Prevention learned about the outbreak not from some advanced disease monitoring system, but from reading the news online. And by then, there were dozens of suspected cases. Why? Among other things, the Journal reports that local hospitals didn't log cases in the China CDC's real time tracking system. Plus, local authorities wanted to hide bad news from Beijing. National leaders later followed suit by hiding information from the rest of the world. This is not meant as national finger pointing because my own country's CDC has a dismal COVID history. I instead want to show how vital early detection will be if a deadly artificial pathogen is ever unleashed. So how do you find the first signs of a pandemic? It's not like you can just Google it. Or can you? One of the most fascinating COVID related articles I've read was written by a data scientist named Seth Stevens, divitowitz for the New York Times in April of 2020. In it, he showed that Google searches for the phrase I can't smell almost perfectly tracked the prevalence of COVID across the 50 US. States. Loss of smell had only just been recognized as a COVID symptom at that point, so the article's chart seemed almost magical to me. In a conversation, Seth told me that Google is remarkably generous with their search data, and he didn't need any special access to write his piece. In it, he boldly predicted that eye pain would emerge as a COVID symptom. This was not recognized as a symptom at the time, but he'd seen searches for it spike by as much as 500% in countries like Italy, Spain and Iran when they were in the throes of their COVID outbreaks. Sure enough, within a few months, news articles were identifying eye pain as a COVID symptom. If you'd like to hear a lot more about this, then I can squeeze in here and many other topics Seth has explored using data science. I interviewed him for my own podcast, which is called the after on Podcast. I'm posting that interview simultaneously with Sam's posting of this episode, meaning that it should be available now. So could searches be used to predict outbreaks? Work by Bill Lampost of the computer science department at University College London says yes. He and a team of researchers dug deep into search traffic across several countries and compared it to reported COVID cases and deaths. They found that search traffic pointed to national outbreaks an average of 16 days before case counts started to spike. This could be an amazing tool for countries trying to get early warnings of outbreaks before local doctors have even seen many patients. And in fact, Bill told me that Public Health England is now using his COVID models as well as a search powered flu detector that his team has built. I'd like to see this kind of work grow exponentially for our global immune system. Since we don't know what symptoms an artificial pathogen or any new disease would trigger, we should continuously scan the search sphere for every known symptom of every known disease. And yes, I know that sounds like an insanely tall order, but big data is called big for a reason. Any symptom spike outside of a seasonal norm, like the huge spike Seth saw in loss of smell searches in Italy, could be a signal. And if it's a cluster of symptoms, it could be a strong signal, especially if that cluster shows up in more than one place at once. Now, building this would present all kinds of interesting data science challenges, as Seth and I discussed in our interview. The biggest one would probably be dealing with false positives. But Bill Lampost believes that such a system is buildable. Better yet, he wrote to me, quote, a moderate scientific research budget can support the development of a system like that. This translates to the very low millions of dollars to potentially get way ahead of something that could cost us trillions or even cost us everything. Of course, there are many offline places to search for emerging pandemics. One of the best, and certainly most obvious is in the bodies of sick people who turn up at doctor's offices one day. Artificial pathogens could strike anywhere. But meanwhile, we can greatly expand our virus hunting expertise by relentlessly identifying and neutralizing new natural diseases and hotspots where viruses commonly jump from animal hosts to humans. Southern China is one such place, and parts of Africa are others. SARS, MERS, Ebola, and perhaps COVID all jump from animals and are known as zoonotic viruses. Zoonotics are especially dangerous because until the moment they jump, no human body has any immunity or experience in fighting them. An amazing program that's just rolling out in West Africa called Sentinel could be a role model for the developed world as well. As we gear up for a time in which new diseases could strike anywhere. One of its co leaders is Pardis Sabeti, who has appointments at both Harvard and the Broad Institute. The Broad is basically a joint venture between Harvard and MIT, and is worth knowing about because a huge proportion of the world's best genetic science is coming out of there. Sentinel is called, quote, a pandemic preemption system for the real time detection of viral threats, and it's launching first in Nigeria. It will be a multi tiered system. Its creators believe that we are, quote, on the cusp of a new era. Ultrasensitive genomic technologies have the unprecedented ability to detect virtually any pathogen, including those circulating under the radar, and can be leveraged to create simple point of care diagnostics to be deployed anywhere in parallel. Powerful new information systems allow us to continuously collect, integrate, and share viral surveillance data. By unifying these tools into a coherent system, for the first time ever, we can detect and prevent pandemics on the ground before they start. End quote. So basically, it's Sci-Fi grade genomics meets cloud computing, and it sounds pretty good. Sentinel will be built around a three tier system with simpler tools out in the field and more powerful ones in regional and national centers, and data about every single infection flowing back to a central system for tracking and analysis. If a patient has one of the area's top priority diseases, partisa expects that they'll be able to identify it within an hour and to identify any other known human virus within a day. When I asked her how long it would take to create a test for a previously unknown disease that they discover out in the field, she said a day to build it and a week to know that it works. Pardis absolutely believes we need something like Sentinel in the US. And throughout the rest of the world. Although her own focus is currently on western Central Africa, and she shares my concerns about biosecurity. So could we afford a worldwide sentinel system? I've seen the program's budget, and while it's confidential, I can say it's absolutely in the reach of any developed country and any less developed country with just a little bit of outside financial health in the US. Adjusting for cost of living factors and population size, I estimate it would cost in the low billions per year. This is a trifling sum just compared to what we lose to the flu every year, let alone a pandemic like COVID. And it's negligible compared to what a truly nasty artificial pathogen could cost us. If it goes undetected for a few critical weeks, how else might we detect a new pathogen? Well, how about plucking it right out of the air? A handful of researchers are now pioneering bioerosol science, including Mark Hernandez at the University of colorado. One technology he's excited about is called condensation particle capture, or CPC. This uses humidity to condense incredibly tiny particles out of the air. It then concentrates them into a little vial from which DNA and RNA can be sequenced. Next generation CPC systems are small, roughly shoebox sized. They're also networkable and cheap, about a $1,000 each. Someone needs to collect those little vials, so CPC doesn't provide instant results. But if the samples arrive at a robust enough lab, there's no limit to the number of pathogens you could test for. Mark and I talked about a plausible future CPC system, which could do analysis right inside the box with a miniature robotic lab. He believes that if the right R and D resources are applied, this could be achieved in about five years, and the system might be about the size of a ticket kiosk. These could be deployed at transit hubs and other places you'd want to monitor particularly closely. There was actually an early US. Government effort to do something like this called Biowatch. It arose in the wake of the anthrax attacks of 2001 and was deployed in dozens of cities, targeting six pathogens. Although it got some terrible press, Mark says Biowatch wasn't bad for its day, that it did pull genetic information out of the air and achieved its goals to some degree. Another technology Mark is excited about has the fabulous name of Spectrophotometric comb. This is more physics than biology and uses lasers to characterize gases and the particles in them. The proportions of gases we exhale change when we get sick, and tracking changes could be a fantastic early warning tool. A group Mark works with has proposed an experiment looking at the breadth of mice infected with COVID to see how their exhalations change as they get ill. Unlike CPC, Mark could see this technology one day plugging into a phone, breathe into it daily, and it will get a baseline understanding of what you exhale when you're healthy. Diverge from the norm, and it could mean something's wrong. As the science gets smarter about what different shifts mean, better early warnings could be delivered. And if millions or billions of people start to do this regularly to monitor their personal health, the aggregate data could amount to an amazing early warning system. Mark is one of over 100 contributors to a global microorganism survey called MetaSUB, run by geneticist Chris Mason, a professor at Wild Cornell Medicine. Each year, researchers in 114 global cities plus an outpost in Antarctica spend a day sampling an average of 50 local sites. Some sample the air like Mark Hernandez. Others sample wastewater. But most of them swab surfaces in places including public transit systems, shopping malls, hospitals and homes. You could think of this as a microorganism census, but it could be converted into a massive disease surveillance network by doing swabbing and analysis on a daily rather than yearly basis. Chris Mason ballparks that a budget of about. $3 billion would enable this with extremely deep genetic sequencing, which would uncover even highly rare bugs in each environment. Like everything discussed in this series, that's nothing compared to the annual cost of the flu, let alone a devastating pandemic. And about half of that cost is for reading genes, costs which are continuing to drop dramatically over time. This could let hundreds of additional cities join the survey for the same budget, or the budget could be increased to expand coverage, because, after all, it is peanuts compared to the stakes. Over time, investments in R and D could result in robotic systems to do the swabbing automatically and do the genetic analysis right on the machine, potentially enabling far more sampling or allowing more to be accomplished on the same budget. The bottom line is disease surveillance is an incredibly promising frontier for improvement if we prioritize the right investments today. Okay, well, Rob, in thinking about how to solve this problem, we have to think about how to pay for the solution. What is the role of money in this equation? Well, I think there's two things to think about how much is it going to take? And is society actually going to be willing to make those investments, given that we know society basically hit the snooze bar after SARS, after Zika, after a bunch of other things? This time around, there's definitely promising signs. I do think that COVID's wake up call is uniquely noisy, and the Biden administration has, of course, drawn up a megabillion dollar pandemic budget. But with almost all the conversation, understandably enough, focused on the immediate project of fighting COVID, it's a little hard to tease out what permanent changes will be made to our pandemic readiness, but there are some really good ideas starting to circulate. And also, the real test won't be what we're doing against pandemics in 2022, but what we're doing in 2032. If we've been lucky enough to have a quiet decade, like, do we lose focus and let our capabilities atrophy after COVID's a distant memory? And for this reason, the right way to look at this and I think the only way to look at this is through a national security lens, in that we spend massive amounts on defense every year, even though the huge majority of our military capacity isn't being used at any given moment because we want to be prepared for an extreme military emergency that's never happened before. And since pandemics are huge national security risks, that's definitely how we need to budget for them. And viewing through this lens, I'd say, for example, the odds of another pandemic happening vastly outweigh those of an all out nuclear war happening. Right? And the US. Currently spends about $35 billion a year, according to at least one report that I saw maintaining its nuclear arsenal, while the world as a whole spends about $70 billion a year. Now, that kind of annual budget would fund every pandemic preparedness measure I'm going to mention in this series many times over. So it's a highly precedented level of investment to make against a major national security risk, and an investment that I think would do the trick of defending against future Pandemics if it's spent wisely, which, of course, governments don't always do, but they can in a pinch, and this is a pinch. But it needs to be a relentless investment, year in, year out, across even Pandemic free decades. So again, the analogy has to be defense spending, which like an even bigger example is counterterrorism, which the US. Has spent trillions on since 911, including two world wars. And all that shows we absolutely have the resources to fund almost any imaginable pandemic immune system on a national or global level. It's just a matter of political will. Yeah. And the point I would make here, which I think we've made at least a couple of times already, is that everything we're saying about defending against a sin bioattack applies to natural pandemics, right? Absolutely. Even if we managed to completely solve the problem we're mostly focused on here, we managed to keep the tools of sin bio out of the hands of all the bad or crazy people that could ever want to wield them. We still have this massive risk, which we know is never going away, that nature will produce the next pandemic, that if it doesn't wipe us out, it still can be much worse than COVID unimaginably worse than COVID in its effects on civilization if we can't immediately deal with it. So every step we would take here to prevent bioterrorism, we should be taking any way to prevent the bioterrorism of mother nature. Yeah, that's absolutely the right lens to look at it through. And every countermeasure we're going to talk about or pretty much everyone is equally applicable to natural pandemics. Then on top of that, just look at this flu. Even if we never face another pandemic again, which is awfully unlikely, the White House counsel and economic advisors put the annual cost of the flu in the US. Alone at $361,000,000,000 a year. That's lost productivity as well as medical spending. That maps out to a trillion dollars a year and hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide. And there's plenty of ways to recoup any investment that we make about against these things. Yeah, so, so how do members of the IGSC screen for dangerous DNA, how is any of this being monitored? Well, the good news is it's actually a really interesting and ambitious precedent and it's a great place to start. We start thinking about hardening our sin bio infrastructure against being hijacked. So I'll start with a quick overview of the market for long error corrected strands of DNA and RNA. Those strands are mostly assembled by specialized companies for customers who don't want to create their own advanced DNA synthesis capability, which is almost everybody because that's very expensive to build. So it's kind of like how people used to get their photos developed at drug stores rather than building home dark rooms. Right now, the centralized DNA creators are almost shockingly unregulated. There's just this voluntary guidance which the government issued over ten years ago to keep dangerous DNA away from bad guys, guidance which has never been updated. But luckily, the industry itself doesn't want a hindenburg moment like a catastrophic biosecurity lapse, because that could lead to massive regulation or even the industry getting shut down. Which is why we have this self regulating body called the IGSC, which doesn't really have its own staff or resources, but its members jointly maintain a comprehensive database of pathogen genomes. That's the main function of the IGSC, as far as I can tell, and the members screen all of their orders against that list. It's pretty impressive. And every order is tagged either red, yellow or green. So if there's no meaningful overlap between the order and the genetic code of any known pathogen, the order is marked green and it sails right through. That's about 95% of orders, but about 5% of orders are yellow. And that means there is significant overlap with some stretch of DNA and a pathogen. Those orders are very carefully reviewed for maybe an hour or two, and it usually turns out that the overlap is with a benign stretch of DNA, like maybe it's a housekeeping gene or something like that. But every so often, a yellow order becomes a red order because the genetic code that someone's requesting is directly connected to some kind of dangerous machinery in a pathogen. And those orders take several hours to review, and sometimes they're ultimately proved, sometimes they're mended. And in some cases, I understand, they're actually reported to the FBI. Now, the thing that's interesting is this review work is done by bioinformaticians, I mean, very often PhDs. So it's a very thorough apparatus and it's also very expensive. And the industry is doing this on its own already. It's a hell of a start. But its expense is why some companies are just opting out of the whole thing and don't join the IGSC at all, because none of this is required by law. And the IGSC has the statistic that it represents 80% of total industry capacity. But that was really just an educated guess that someone, and nobody can seem to remember who, made many years ago. And I'm totally confident in saying that it's very outdated, because the IGSC has exactly one Chinese member, and China's Sin bio capacity is growing like mad because it's a huge government priority. So what should change? Well, the guidance on Sin biosafety, first of all, has to stop being voluntary. It has to stop being ten years out of date. It definitely has to apply to 100% of the industry, and it's got to be internationalized through careful cooperation with China and everyone else. And that's a very tall order. But the great news is that the starting point that the IGSC has coordinated can absolutely form the core of the first layer of our global immune system of hardening up our synbio architecture. Because if it's universalized, it would, without question, just hugely reduce the number of people who could do something awful with synthetic DNA, because working around universal restrictions would just require so much more planning, so much more stealth and skill than simply ordering something from a rogue supplier that doesn't implement any protections. So we have a great start, but it does need to be universal. And again, it has to be up to date, ten year lags. Don't cut it. But what is the mechanism that would enforce compliance internationally here? Certainly, if you're talking about a rogue state, well, it's in the very nature of being a rogue state that it is not complying with international demands. Again, North Korea is a perfect example, but even state level misbehavior aside, even within labs or individuals within other countries, what leverage do we, or any collective we have to make sure that this compliance is truly international? Yeah, I mean, there's two dimensions of that. One, how do you get IGSC like regulations enforced by all countries that have sin bio, private sin bio industries, and that is challenge number one. And it's an ample challenge, but there are I'm sure there are many industries that have relatively universalized regulations throughout the world, in part because that's in the interest of industry to not have to comply with rules and countless jurisdictions that might be different and so forth. But that's hard enough, and I don't want to minimize that, but state actors are a whole nother wrinkle, because if you look to the Montreal Protocol for reassurance, the hole in that analogy is that state actors themselves didn't have big fluorofluorocarbon projects of their own. Those were industrial ingredients, they were coolants for air conditioners, they were making foam packaging for McDonald's, that sort of thing. So in that case, governments were regulating society, which they're perfectly happy to do, but sovereign governments get really grumpy about restrictions on their own actions. And so it's not hard to imagine the Chinese state, or the US. For that matter, secretly developing governments and bio capabilities to stay ahead of the rest of the world. So in addition to an internationally coordinated, IGSC like system for keeping private industry safe, we definitely need something like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty for Sinbio amongst nations, which is a really tall order, and it's not something that I have a ready made playbook for. But I will say that as we scale up all of our national protective layers, it's really important not to neglect the international side of things. And this has to be a feat of very significant and determined international diplomacy without any question. So are there any lessons to draw from on this point of cooperation and its enforcement internationally? From our experience with China and COVID, there are so many ways in which cooperation almost happened and then failed, and then we're still trying to figure out to what degree just rank deception is the story of what China has done here. What lessons do we draw from COVID Well, it's it's obviously not an encouraging example on so many levels. I mean, the denialism, the suppression of people spreading the word about the outbreak, the fact that people in regions like Wuhan are often afraid to report bad news up to Beijing. So there was stonewalling internally. According to that very extensive research that I cited in the recorded material by the Wall Street Journal, there was often stonewalling on an international level. But what we can hope for, and I don't think this is a naive hope, is that a lot of people in a lot of countries are looking at all the botched responses to COVID and saying, Never again. And they're saying it with the kind of determination that carries over across years and across decades. And the kind of encouraging thing, in a weird way, is that I think China's disease detection system might have actually been up to the challenge of containing COVID, but for some tragically delayed responses, which Beijing will presumably do everything possible to avoid in the future. And from that, my optimistic side says the world may be closer than we think already to adequate warning and detection systems. And where I get this from is a fascinating paper in the journal Nature, whose lead author is Shenzhi LII at the University of Southampton, and it analyzes China's so called non pharmaceutical interventions against COVID, which is a fancy term for quarantines locked down. It's a fancy term for welding people into their apartments exactly. And masking and that kind of thing. The non pharmaceutical interventions, the NPI and the papers analysis goes into a lot of depth and says that these interventions had been implemented a week earlier. China's COVID cases could have been cut by about two thirds or cut by something like 85% if they were implemented two weeks earlier, or 95% if the lockdown and so forth happen three weeks earlier. So, you know, did China have three weeks? And the answer is these interventions started, I think it was on the 23 January and as early as late December. This fairly heroic doctor that some people have probably heard of named Li Wen Liang first sent a message to some fellow doctors warning of a SARS like outbreak in Wuhan. So, yeah, that's over three weeks of lead time. And since this was a lone doctor basically successfully tuning into the pandemic, just from his narrow personal experience, I think we can safely assume the local health authorities, who would have had much broader access to data, had to be aware of something. Now, this is just terrible to even think about, because a 95% drop in China's cases may well have prevented the global outbreak, but it's also it feels just really unlikely that a delay like that will happen again in a post COVID world. There's just going to be so much more urgency about any warning signs. And there's, meanwhile, a ton of things we can do to dial up the sensitivity of early warning systems throughout the world, which we'll talk about. And all that together gives me real optimism about our ability to detect and hopefully also snuff out potential pandemics, whether they're natural or artificial. Is there any more that you've uncovered on the monitoring front or just how we can pay attention to what's happening in the world? Because again, this is the kind of thing that by its very nature will emerge by stealth. I guess some maniac could decide to take the Bond villain approach to this, saying that if my demands are not met, I will be releasing the doomsday virus on New Year's Eve. But generally speaking we're just going to hear about people getting sick somewhere and we're not going to know what's going on or for how long it's been going on unless we build some system by which we detect these things earlier and earlier. Yeah, I mean I would definitely like to draw attention back to that Nigerian system called Sentinel, or it's being rolled out in Nigeria called Sentinel that I talked about in the recording, which just to quickly review is I think they call it a pandemic prevention system using real time detection of viral threats or something like that. The expectation with Sentinel is that they'll be able to empower community health workers to diagnose any of a region's most common viral infections or highest priority viral infections. So probably the common ones along with rare scary ones like Ebola or whatever within an hour and to basically diagnose any known human virus within a day by pushing things up the chain to a central organization. And my back of the envelope math on that, as I mentioned the recording, is that it would cost in the low billions to trot out something like that for instance, in the US. And you've got to ask yourself on a certain level, why in the hell haven't we done that? And part of the answer is that somersentinel's technology is very new and also the amount of genetic sequencing that it involves would have been impossibly unaffordable just six or seven years ago. But the bigger reason is the American healthcare system is just this baffling thicket of overlapping jurisdictions. I mean, some things are managed by 50 different states, other things are managed by 3000 different counties. And at least for now, a nationally coordinated system like Sentinel seems to be completely beyond us. Just one example from yesterday's New York Times. An editorial in yesterday's Times said that 20 million COVID vaccines have essentially gone missing in the US. Which is a huge number when 40 million vaccines have actually been injected so far. And I think the intent of the editorial was that it had gone missing from the standpoint of the federal government. Which basically means the federal government is pumping out the nation's scarcest and most precious resource into 3000 counties in 50 states and losing all track of it. And we obviously need to do better than that. And when it comes to disease surveillance, we need to do what Sentinel is bringing to Nigeria this real time radar of viral infections. And obviously counties can't build that. It needs to be a national system and I think it would have to hinge on radically expanding testing and diagnosis of all respiratory infections. I mean, flu, rhinoviruses, you know, minor brushes with the common cold, the whole, the whole shebang, which we don't currently even attempt. I mean, have you ever in your life had a flu diagnostic? Like as a doctor ever said, hey, you don't have the flu, you have a rhinovirus or you have influenza A, not influenza B. Basically no one has ever experienced that because people usually recover from these things and collecting the data didn't seem important. But this has got to change because the only way we're going to know if something new and dangerous is emerging is if we track the full national inventory of viral infections as close as we can. Which basically means in my mind, a project warp speed for diagnostics, for testing, not just COVID testing, obviously, but every respiratory infection we know of. And I understand the Biden administration plans to invest a lot in tests, and I don't know how much of that is for the current crisis and how much of that is ongoing, but we basically need a whole new category of diagnostics, ones that can test for multiple diseases and which are reliable, which are cheap as hell, and above all, can be taken at home. Because we want to track these things much more closely. But we don't want to trigger an avalanche of new doctor visits. We just don't have the capacity for that. And most people wouldn't bother with a doctor visit for mild infection anyway. So these tests should be in every home, they should be free and somehow the results should be automatically logged with the national cloud. Like maybe you need to scan some kind of coded display on the test with your phone to get the results. And all of this disease information needs to go into a real time integrated system that's inhaling lots of other data as well. I mean, something kind of like NORAD, the super high tech military command that scans the skies for nukes and enemy planes. Like a disease tracking center that's staffed 24/7 by data scientists looking at data from all kinds of sources, like all those diagnostic tests. Also online data search engine queries and so forth like we talked about. And hopefully we're smart enough to invest in a bioerosol grid. And the technologies I talked about for pulling viruses out of the air in public spaces that data should also feed in continuously. And hopefully we're also smart enough to build a hugely expanded version of MetaSUB, that academic project which tests, you know, surfaces and wastewater and air samples for viruses in over 100 cities that data would feed into. And it should also be dialed into, obviously, the local public health systems. So so if there's an alarm signal somewhere, you can get boots on the ground and see what's happening. Now, that's quite a wish list, but we could build something like that, and it would be an amazing layer two for our global immune system. Yeah, well, at least two parts to this that are distinct. There's the actual diagnostic end of it, where you have to swab the door handle on a bank or the keypad on an ATM or somebody's nose or get a saliva sample, and then you need to take all the friction out of the system that allows those samples to be processed and analyzed. But then there's just this massive information integration problem and prospective and retrospective search of the data looking for patterns. And I got to think on that second piece once again. The 20% time companies like Google and Palantir and these other major tech corporations that have so much engineering talent that could profitably be spent there, and it's got to be shouldered as a responsibility by every smart person who has something to contribute here. My fear is that we will solve COVID. The vaccines will ultimately get distributed, and they will work, if not in the first volley, maybe the second. Right. We still have these variants now that could be out running some of the vaccines, but you can imagine us putting this behind us fairly conclusively, and then that ushering in a kind of Roaring 20s like spirit of, okay, well, we've reset everything. Hallelujah. And that we could lose the lesson that we really must draw from this, which is we can't let this happen again. Again, this is a dress rehearsal that we have manifestly botched in almost every way, apart from the the speed with which we produced vaccines. And yeah. So I do worry that once we get out from under this, we will lose the sense of urgency and just assume, okay, this sort of thing only happens once a century anyway, so we can go back to sleep. Yeah. That's why I'll come back to the idea that this absolutely needs to be viewed through a national security lens. And maybe just because it is so damn good at lobbying for hundreds of billions of dollars every year, we kind of hold our nose and put it under the Department of Defense because, you know, they sure know how to lobby for dollars. It's got to be something that is done relentlessly, year in and year out, like we do with funding military capacities that at almost any given moment are 99% unutilized, and we've become okay with that as a society because we we know that we sometimes might someday might need to draw on emergency capacity. But the other thing is, you know, that the It work. I mean, I'm just sort of glibly describing something like NORAD. I assume NORAD works really well. I don't know. I've never been there. But what we do know is that the It contracting that the government has done for all kinds of things has at times been completely catastrophically. Inept and just look at the debacle of the vaccine rollout. The New York Times editorial that I just mentioned about the 20 million vaccines that have gone missing also mentions that the federal government gave Deloitte $44 million no bid contract to develop software for states and others to use during their vaccine rollouts. And the product is simply catastrophic. A lot of health departments have completely ceased to use it. And we can't have that level of incompetence and that lack of seriousness invade or infest something like this. If we're really going to build a radar screen for emerging pandemics, we can absolutely do it. But I take much more heart from the kinds of things that companies like Palantir can allegedly do than from the kinds of projects the federal government has overseen. I mean, it's hard to imagine a more urgent task than getting vaccines distributed. But even that It project was colossally botched. So there just needs to be a completely different level of governance, much, much higher standards, and again, just a radically higher level of seriousness as we tackle this thing. And again, maybe this gets back to that 20% time notion. Not that you would want this natural detection grid to be staffed by part timers, but maybe people who are intent on careers in sinbayo view things from kind of a linear standpoint and say, maybe I'll give 20% of my career to doing work in the public interest. And so maybe we could have some really top flight people from academia and private industry see to it these systems are outstanding and work incredibly well. Yeah, and I'm sure there's a role for philanthropic organizations here to point resources in the right direction and just lobby for this being a priority. Some of the most important work that can be done here, I think, is just to make the case that we need to allocate the resources at the government level. And this is the problem we've run into all these long years with climate change. We're still barely at the starting line because the war of words has been so difficult to win. Right. And we really need to figure this one out somehow. I think this is less abstract to most people than the risk of climate changes. But we're also living in a country where it seems at the time of this recording, something like half the country is fairly care free about the prospects of catching COVID and quite worried about getting vaccinated for it. So it's the absolute inverse of what you would think would be psychologically possible. So we obviously do have a major messaging problem here, which also requires a commitment of resources. And that is in large part, the purpose of this podcast. So, Rob, let's let's listen to the fourth and final section of your by turns fascinating and harrowing meditation on the future of sin, bio and global pandemic. This brings us to the third component of our immune system, which is hardening society against future pandemics. So what can we do to toughen things up? Well, probably dozens of things. And as I said earlier, this podcast can't be a comprehensive list of everything we could do. But I'd like to lay out a couple of intriguing possibilities that might just be game changing. For now, they're both unproven, but they are examples of the types of investments we should be making, in some cases, tiny ones, to bulk up our arsenals. The first is a very particular ray of light of ultraviolet, or UV light. As you may know, UV is invisible to human eyes. It's carved up into various bands and subbands, just like radio UVA and UVB light from the sun shine through our atmospheres and cause sunburns and skin cancer. A higher frequency band called UVC light doesn't get through, but we can make it ourselves down here with lamps. UVC has lots of energy, so much that it kills microorganisms by frying their DNA. You may have seen it sterilizing things in hair salons. It's also used to sterilize operating rooms in hospitals and buses in some countries, but only when those places are empty. Because again, UV light is bad for us, or at least most of it is. The UVC spectrum has its own little neighborhoods. One of them is called far UVC. And fascinating research shows that it may not damage human tissue at all. David Brenner, a radiation physicist at Columbia, has done most of the groundbreaking work here. In a July 2020 interview with Ted's David Biello, he explained that light around the 222 nanometer wavelength just can't penetrate the dead cells that form the surface of our skin and our eyes. He's exposed the skin and eyes of mice, as well as human skin to it, and there's no sign that it gets through that outer layer to do any damage. But viruses and other bugs are much tinier than our cells, and this light zaps them. David Brenner's experiments have shown that it kills off airborne thugs like influenza and coronaviruses. He'd like for far UVC lights to be in indoor spaces everywhere and to be switched on safely in the presence of humans whenever outbreaks occur. He's calculated that 99.99% of the pathogens in an enclosed room could be knocked out by these lights in just a few minutes. Now, this wouldn't sterilize diseases out of existence. After all, it takes seconds, not minutes, for a sick person to sneeze on you in the subway. But it could. Bring the ambient level of pathogens way down and completely sterilized surfaces. In other words, while it wouldn't make the built environment virus proof, it could harden it quite a bit. But there's a puzzle here. Dangerous UV wavelengths aren't all that much longer than far UVC. It's all measured in nanometers. So why can the bad UV penetrate our skin when far UVC can't? I talked to a Scottish physicist based in Australia named Charlie Ironside, who explained this. Different materials absorb and reflect different frequencies of light, and the proteins in our cells happen to be highly absorbent, right around that magic 222 nanometer wavelength. And when light is absorbed, it decays away exponentially as it enters the material. So, boom. Our outer layers of dead cells are bulletproof, or at least very opaque at 222. To make far UVC today, you need clunky tubes, which are big, ugly, inefficient and generate way too much heat. Charlie has spent decades working with LEDs and has issued a call to arms to the industry to make far UVC Led products. If things work out, he thinks they could even be integrated into smartphones, letting them act as germicidal wands. No more need for hand sanitizer. But lots of research and development would need to be done. And as Physics World recently pointed out, nothing's going to happen until safety is proven beyond a doubt. David Brenner's intriguing experiments notwithstanding, this is yet to be done. If you're like me, you're wondering why in the world not safety studies would cost in the millions in a world that's losing trillions to a pandemic. A world which will, without question, face future pandemics. And this could be a game changer, or it could be a dud. But we'll only find out if we put it to the test. Our global immune system has to fund research that could strengthen our pandemic readiness, especially when next steps cost so little. And excellent research shows that the results could be transformative. This brings us to the BCG vaccine. BCG prevents early childhood tuberculosis and has been given over 4 billion times since the 1920s, more than any other vaccine. It's so safe, it's given to over 120,000,000 infants each year. And there have been signs that it fights many diseases beyond tuberculosis for almost a century. Way back in 1927, a Swedish study found that BCG vaccinated children turned out to be three times less likely to die from any cause. More recently, a 25 year study of over 150,000 kids in 33 countries showed the vaccine reduced lower respiratory tract infections by 40%. Then a very recent study in Greece showed an 80% drop in respiratory infections amongst older adults who were given the vaccine, as well as a 50% drop in all other forms of infection. And BCG's superpowers go far beyond this. It's now a frontline treatment for bladder cancer. And there are promising signs that it might even help to prevent cancer from arising in the first place. And possibly even prevent Alzheimer's. BCG seems to work its magic by strengthening the innate immune system over the long term. Think of this as being your body's first responders. It's the innate immune system that instantly kicks in when something punctures your skin or when you first get an infection. It's ready to fight anything, unlike the adaptive immune system, which creates highly effective specialized responses to specific enemies but needs time to get started. So could widespread BCG use help foil a pandemic? Well, as early as March, people started noticing that countries with long running BCG programs, like Japan, generally had much lower COVID infection and death rates than countries with no BCG programs like the US. A rigorous study of this effect appeared in the July 28 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. To control for things like socioeconomics population structure and urbanization, the researchers looked at a set of what they called socially similar European countries, and they found that for every 10% increase in a BCG coverage index, COVID death rates dropped by 10.4%. An intriguingly, stark example was found in Germany. Back when the country was divided, east Germany pursued a policy which has yielded far more BCG coverage in today's elderly adults, who are, of course, the most vulnerable group to COVID And today, the death rate from COVID is 290% higher in Western Germany, the opposite of what we'd expect to see, given that Western Germany is the far more prosperous region. Is all of this just a coincidence? Of course it could be. Which means this screams for multiple clinical trials. They should be run in places like the US. Where almost no one has ever had the vaccine. Researchers would then give one group of people BCG and another group a placebo and then compare COVID infection rates between the groups over time. Although some BCG COVID trials are in fact underway, I'm still stunned by how hard it is to raise tiny research funds for such obviously important work. As I was researching this, I got to know two scientists who were proposing some exceptionally well designed research into BCG's benefits for an extremely vulnerable population to COVID They're from one of the world's top and best known universities, but instead of running their trial, they were hunting for a few million dollars in funding during a pandemic that's costing the US. Alone $7 trillion at least. Again, this is insane. Even though BCG like Far UVC light could admittedly turn out to be a flop, we won't know until we fund the inexpensive research that tells us. You might question why this research is still important with so many COVID specific vaccines entering the market. The answer is that we have an entire planet to vaccinate almost 8 billion people. Some of the new vaccines are expensive, with limited production capacity, whereas BCG costs as little as seven cents a dose and is made by 22 different manufacturers throughout the world. And COVID aside, this could be a game changer for future pandemics. BCG's greatest superpower seems to be fighting respiratory infections of all types, and a huge percentage of pandemics, as well as novel diseases with the potential to become pandemics are respiratory in nature SARS, MERS, COVID, flu, tuberculosis itself. You get the picture. And God forbid we ever have an artificially modified H five N one outbreak. But if we do, why will that be a respiratory nightmare? If a future pandemic could be greatly softened by a precautionary BCG vaccination program, we'd be fools not to do the inexpensive research to either prove or debunk BCG's efficacy. And again, if we do decide to vaccinate people, BCG costs as little as seven cents a dose. So giving the largest totally unvaccinated country the US full coverage would cost peanuts. If you'd like to learn a lot more about the BCG vaccine, tuberculosis and more, I interviewed a brilliant Harvard epidemiologist named Megan Murray from my own podcast, which again is called The Afternoon Podcast. Her academic focus is tuberculosis, and she knows tons about BCG and its potential. Our interview runs for well over an hour and goes into much more depth than I can cover here. That episode may or may not be posted by the time you're hearing this, but if it hasn't been posted, it's the next one in the queue, so you'll be able to access it quite soon. The last method for hardening society that I'd like to highlight doesn't hinge on cutting edge science, but on plain old public policy. It is to greatly increase the social safety net that keeps people from sliding into states of extreme despair. Though it may be hard to feel empathy for suicidal mass murderers, we have to accept that all of them arrive at profoundly dark places that few of us can even imagine. These are not swift journeys, and all involve some form of mental illness, be it extreme depression, uncontrolled rage, pathological narcissism, schizophrenia, or something else. We need to study the case histories of everyone who snaps in this way, and greatly increase our vigilance and generosity in detecting and treating the relevant conditions. Here in the US. A de facto policy of emptying asylums for the mentally ill back in the 80s has done us no favors. More broadly speaking, every single one of us can be a white blood cell in this global immune system, by each doing what we can to ensure that no one goes unloved. This brings us to the fourth component in our immune system, which is conquering viruses. But before we talk about viruses, let's briefly discuss bacteria, which can be extremely dangerous. They cause things like cholera and bubonic plague, which still bubble up in places with overwhelmed healthcare systems, plus their so called superbugs, which resist all antibiotics. These killed about 700,000 people in 2016, and could be over ten times as lethal by 2050, which means they could significantly exceed the death toll of even COVID. We're desperately under investing in new antibiotics, and this urgently needs to change. That said, almost every major epidemic since antibiotics were discovered has been viral influenza, polio, mumps, yellow fever, measles, dengue, AIDS, SARS, MERS, COVID. And as for true pandemics, only viruses cause them in the modern era. So why are viruses such tough customers? Ironically, it's because there's not much to them. They lack the basic machinery of life and don't have any cells, so they infiltrate our cells. That doesn't leave us many targets when you go after them, because we don't want to wipe ourselves out along with a virus. Bacteria, on the other hand, are cells, ones which are very different from ours. That gives us loads of targets when we fight them. And many of our antibiotics are broad spectrum, which means they can wipe out all kinds of bacteria, sometimes too many. This makes it almost certain that the first deadly artificial pathogens will be viruses. So does the second factor, which is that bacteria are radically more complex than viruses and are therefore much harder to engineer. Other deadly critters, like the parasites that cause malaria, are more complicated still. Complexity also makes it almost certain that early manmade bugs will be modifications of existing viruses, not completely artificial ones, because it's currently beyond anyone's capacity to make complex functioning viruses from scratch. So how should we face the threat of artificially modified viruses? Terrors, like that contagious version of H five N one flu, which has already been created? Well, I'd say exactly how we should have been facing natural viruses for decades, steps that probably could have stopped COVID in its tracks. There are two main sets of tools to consider. The first is vaccines to prevent viruses from infecting us in the first place. The second is therapeutics, a fancy word for medicines to help us fight viruses if we do get infected. The trick is that so far, both sets of antiviral tools have been very narrowly targeted at very specific diseases, rather than having the broad spectrum disease fighting power of many antibiotics. So let's start by talking about the therapeutics. Here. Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security senior scholar Amesh Adalja sums things up, writing, quote the existing armamentarium, by the way, I love that word of antiviral drugs is rapidly expanding and now covers several viral families. However, very few existing antiviral agents have spectrums of activity that even slightly measure up to the spectrum of penicillin or sulfa, the first antibacterial agents discovered, end quote. But it's not hopeless. In a conversation with me, Amesh pointed to several viral therapeutics that hit multiple targets. One influenza treatment has proven effective against Ebola. Another, medicine fights members of four virus families herpes, pox, adeno and polyoma, and something called ribavarin, which was name checked in the movie. Contagion can help treat hepatitis CNE, influenza A and B per influenza viruses. Crimean Congo hemorrhagic fever metanumovirus new and Old World Hemorrhagic Arena virus and SARS, although it unfortunately has what Amesh calls serious toxicity issues. So what do we do with all this? emesh told me he'd like to see a serious multiyear program to test every antiviral medicine that's ever been developed against every dangerous viral family. Though reluctant to put a firm budget on this, he said it could cost several billion dollars and take several years. Chump change in light of what we're up against. And this would give us something crucial that we lack a complete understanding of what our existing weapons can already clobber for. Now, we make these discovers haphazardly or reactively, like when the Ebola medication remdesivir proved to have some effectiveness against COVID. There may be some truly broad spectrum wonders in our viral toolkit already that we just don't know about. So let's figure this out. A mesh also calls for us to proactively develop new antivirals to COVID full viral families like all coronaviruses. Pull that off and you've tackled SARS and MERS, as well as four causes of the common cold, plus, above all, COVID. Just imagine where we'd be now if we'd launched a successful campaign against the full coronavirus family right after the SARS crisis in 2003. With a powerful anti coronavirus treatment in our arsenal, COVID fatalities could have been a tiny fraction of today's death tolls, and society and the economy could have been far less disrupted. Amesh notes that it usually takes about a billion dollars to get a drug to market. Big bucks, but small change compared to what's at stake even if you do this for every viral family that sickens humans, of which there's just a couple dozen. Although there are a few viruses that don't currently infect us that we should probably sharpen some weapons for. Remember those zoonatic viruses? Something called the Global Virome Project keeps a wary eye on bugs that haven't yet jumped to humans, but may 1 day do so. Like so much of what we're discussing, all these antiviral measures would bring massive benefits against natural pathogens as well as artificial ones. And strictly in light of the endless costs that natural diseases inflict on us, we'd be crazy to skimpier. Also, there are things that could help bring the costs down, like software based modeling and screening of drugs against specific diseases, a new field that's showing lots of promise and appears to be very cost effective. Now, of course, the other side of the viral defense equation is vaccines. And here we'll start by talking about the flu again, because lots of smart people have been calling for a universal flu vaccine for years. By this, they mean a vaccine that works against all strains of the influenza virus. So if you stamp out seasonal flu, you've protected people from rogue versions of H five N one flu for free, along with countless other variations. A universal flu vaccine would also hopefully be good for multiple years. Unlike the annual vaccines we currently get, there are lots of good reasons to get blanket protection from influenza. As we've already seen, with H five N one flu, it can be hacked in terrifying ways. It also kills three to 500,000 people worldwide each year and costs over a trillion dollars in global economic activity. Plus, it mutates constantly, reinfecting people who recovered from earlier strains. Those mutations can also trigger deadly pandemics, as happened in 1918 and three times since. Finally, the current vaccine is just so inadequate, it's only ten to 60% effective, depending on the year, and its manufacturing is largely based on 1940s technology. One of the top people who has long called for a universal flu vaccine is Harvey Feinberg, a former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health and a former president of the National Academy of Medicine. He told me that he thinks it would cost just one to $200 million to fund a fully dedicated effort that would have, quote, a very good chance, end quote, of developing a universal flu vaccine over about ten years. You heard that right just ten to $20 million a year. And he points off that even if he's off by an order of magnitude, and it cost one to $2 billion total, it's a staggeringly good deal. Now, you could spend this money only to find out that a universal flu vaccine is impossible. With today's science, Harvey puts those odds at at least 25%, and maybe at a stretch as high as 50. But if we take the worst possible numbers from all of his ranges and figure it's $2 billion to get just a 50 50 shot at saving the world a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives each year, it's still the deal of the century. And, of course, there's no reason to stop with the flu. Harvey thinks similar programs against other viral families would cost similar amounts and face similar odds if, given the budget. He'd start with universal influenza and coronavirus vaccines. He thinks we'd learn enough from this to make later efforts targeting other viral families faster and cheaper. So, again, let's say we take the worst possible number from Harvey's ranges and launch universal vaccine programs against all of the couple dozen virus families that sicken humans. This one time moonshot program would cost less than 5% of what the flu alone costs the world every year, and less than 1% of COVID's bill. Even if artificial bugs are forever pure science fiction, this is an investment humanity cannot afford not to make. And no, you wouldn't have to get all those shots, although you'd be wise to get the influenza and corona ones. Instead, we'd stockpile these vaccines and have them ready in case something is bad or worse than COVID emerges from one of those many viral families. And as with viral therapeutics, just imagine if we'd had the foresight to launch a familywide coronavirus vaccine program in response to the SARS outbreak in 2003. Society literally could have been inoculated against COVID before it even raised its head onto our global immune system's final component battle infrastructure. So let's say the worst happens, and an evil artificial bug or something nasty and natural is on the loose. What do we need in our arsenal that we'll wish we had invested in today? As a first step, Harvey Feinberg thinks we should adopt a national security mindset toward pandemics. And I fully agree. These can be threats on the scale of a world war, after all, which calls for a unified command. And Harvey believes the head of it should carry, quote, the full power and authority of the American president to mobilize every civilian and asset needed to win the war. That's the approximate opposite of how the US. At least met COVID. One small example of dozens the federal government here triggered a bidding war between the 50 states for critical equipment and supplies by refusing to coordinate purchasing and distribution. This turned the states into rivals rather than allies, while prompting hoarding and backstabbing. In the words of The Wall Street Journal, quote, some states turned against each other. One refused to give another contact information for lab supplies. Fearful of being outbid, governors kept shipment details secret. Other governors dispatched state police to airports to guard their cargo. End quote. A bigger example the federal government left it to each state to concoct its own defense and public health strategy against COVID. Of course, by definition, states don't have National Institutes of Health or National Centers for Disease Control. Thus, badly underpowered, states made their best guesses as to what might work, resulting in a stew of conflicting policies and even quasi border controls against citizens of other states. Could you imagine approaching something ten to 100 times deadlier than COVID? With this sort of flailing, the virus would finish us. Harvey also thinks voluntary quarantine should be more widely practiced and available on demand. By this, he means offering temporary accommodations to people who have been exposed to protect the people they live with. This is important because close, extended indoor contact is the surest way to catch someone's infectious disease. Just consider how badly COVID spread in nursing homes. Now, it may seem heartless to suggest that someone consider separating from their housemates or family. But saying you should quarantine at home is an invitation to infect everyone there while only getting ad hoc homespun medical care, unless you happen to live with a doctor or a nurse. Is that less heartless or more? Imagine someone's instead offered a free stay at a hotel that's been shuttered by a pandemic. Harvey outlined a compelling pitch to me you could stay somewhere other people would pay hundreds of dollars a day to live in. You'll have room service because that enables social distancing. You'll have 24/7 zoom access to everyone you love via in house broadband. Okay, you won't get spa services, but you will protect your family for the next ten to 15 days. Quarantine locations could have trained personnel ready to manage mild infections much better than most people's housemates. And if things turn ugly, someone under quarantine could be transferred smoothly and directly to a hospital. We haven't seen much of this sort of thing outside of a few places like New York City, perhaps partly because China adopted a very coercive approach to this with what they called fever clinics, which gave the practice a bad name. It also takes forethought and perhaps some earmarked funding to set up a more comfortable voluntary program. And COVID caught the world unawares. But we have no excuse for letting the next pandemic sneak up on us, especially if it's something much deadlier and more contagious than COVID. A complete lack of quarantine could really sink us. To all this, I'll add the dead obvious suggestion that personal protective equipment, ventilators, and other defensive tools should be stockpiled to a degree that verges on absurdity, and that all nations should try to establish highly local supply chains for this critical gear. Also, this stockpiling should not be limited to governments. Just as all homes are mandated to have smoke detectors, home stockpiles of N 95 masks, hand sanitizer and other essentials should be mandated by law and perhaps paid for with government funds to ensure high compliance. I say this as someone who tends to be highly antiregulatory by nature, but if we get whacked by something much worse than COVID, we cannot afford months of supply outages, hoarding, price gouging and counterfeit products on the personal protection market like we saw at the start of this pandemic. And if you think all this sounds like a totalitarian imposition, recall that personal hygiene and PPE use don't just affect the person practicing or not practicing them, they affect everyone, because scofflaws and free riders infect the rest of us. So this isn't a matter of personal freedom, like choosing to eat junk food. It's a matter of civic obligation, like refraining from drunk driving. In this spirit, universal PPE stockpiles should be accompanied by a predefined set of rules and levels. For instance, if a region goes to a certain infection level during an outbreak, universal mask wearing in public becomes mandatory. Everyone knows the levels, everyone knows the rules, everyone has the gear at home, and there are no excuses. Another relative novelty we should consider seeing more of is challenge trials. These involve testing a vaccine by deliberately infecting healthy volunteers with the disease it targets. Now, I know that sounds insane, so let me explain the rationale. Using COVID as an example, big COVID trials inject tens of thousands of people. Half of them get the vaccine, half get completely inactive placebos. Then everyone waits until a couple hundred people come down with the disease while going about their ordinary lives. If most or all of the sick people turn out to have gotten the placebo in other words, if the people who got the vaccine don't get sick, then the vaccine's a winner. There are two issues with this approach. First, it takes a long time to recruit tens of thousands of people to take an experimental injection. Second, it can take months for enough people to get sick on their own to generate statistically significant data, which is normally fine. But what happens if thousands of people are dying each week? If your vaccine works and you could have saved several months by running a challenge trial, tens of thousands will die waiting for the results. Compare that to the number of test subjects who might die from deliberate infection. In the case of a COVID challenge trial, that number may actually be zero. The reason is you'd probably mostly allow young volunteers to enlist people who are quite unlikely to die from the disease. And instead of signing up tens of thousands of participants, you'd have just a couple hundred. Why? Because you don't have to wait for a small percentage of a huge group to catch the disease to get the couple hundred infectees it takes to determine efficacy. Because in challenge trials everyone's infected. And at least with COVID if they're all healthy and mostly in their 20s or thirty s, the odds are decent that literally no one out of a couple hundred participants will die. But what if one or two volunteers do die? Isn't that unconscionable? Well, compare that to the tens of thousands of people who could end up not dying if your vaccine works. When are one or two lives worth more than tens of thousands of lives? Well, when lawyers are involved, for one thing. And that's one reason why we don't see challenge trials. Because the loved ones of someone who dies in one might sue the trial manager, whereas the anonymous masses who die waiting for a vaccine trial to run its course have no one to sue but Mother Nature and she doesn't pay up. Another reason is that doctors are deeply squeamish about imperiling anyone in their care, as they should be. Not only do our moral instincts scream this, but the Hippocratic oath famously says first do no harm. The culture of medicine is built on that foundation, which of course is hugely admirable. But it makes it hard to put the good of the many ahead of the good of the few if the few happen to be under your care and the many are countless strangers. Now, an important moral dimension to consider about challenge trials is the mindset of the volunteers. If they're fully informed of the dangers, as they absolutely must be, what are their motivations? Well, if they're not being paid, they're probably signing up because they're willing to take a risk to help fight something awful that threatens society. People joined the US military after the 911 attacks for somewhat similar reasons. Those volunteers put their lives on the line. Too many of them died and society didn't reject their offers of service. So should it reject people who volunteer for challenge trials. These aren't hypothetical beings, by the way. Tens of thousands of people have volunteered to participate in COVID challenge trials via an organization called One Day Sooner, and no one's taken them up on that offer. I could fill a podcast twice as long as this one, exploring the nuances of challenge trials and their morality. But I'll leave it to you to decide where you come out on this complex issue. And if you really want to dive into a rabbit hole, google the term trolley problem while you're thinking it through. Now, the one good thing about any future pandemic is that it'll happen in the future, of course, giving sinbao's exponential momentum some growing room. Which is great, because, as I said early on, sinbio itself and the countless people who will one day practice it at doctoral levels, high school levels, and everything between are our best defense against evil uses of biology. So I'll close on an appropriately optimistic note describing one of the coolest things I see in synbio's midterm pipeline, which is teleporting vaccines. And yes, I mean that metaphorically, but only just to appreciate how valuable this could be. Let's imagine an artificial pathogen or something natural and much more lethal than COVID is on the loose. Having taken the various precautions I discussed earlier, we have an effective vaccine that targets its viral family. But it's incredibly deadly out there, and all supply chains are fragile or breaking. It also takes months to manufacture hundreds of millions of vaccine doses using standard methods, let alone billions of doses for the entire world. In this situation, you'd want the vaccine available everywhere now, not in a few lucky places. A few months from now. You'd also want as few miles between you and your personal dose of that vaccine as possible. So wouldn't it be great if vaccines could be printed right at the local pharmacy? Or better yet, in your living room? Enter the Bio XP, the DNA printer I talked about earlier. It will soon be able to directly convert the four basic genetic letters AGNT into DNA or RNA strands, giving it unlimited flexibility in what it can write. Just as four color inkjets can produce any imaginable image. Its creator, Dan Gibson, actually invented it with vaccine production in mind, particularly RNA vaccines, a new technology which is behind the wildly exciting vaccines from pfizer and moderna. And here's where his teleporting term comes in. Imagine you have the genetic code of a working vaccine at the center of your system at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, say, if you now print that genetic strand in thousands of pharmacies and doctors offices, you've basically teleported it throughout your network. Now, simply printing a strand of RNA doesn't give you an RNA vaccine. There are several additional steps, often referred to as fill and finish. Dan says the BioXp team is building these steps right into the machine. He believes fully integrated systems. Should be operational at pharmacies and doctor's offices within three to five years. As for consumer friendly home systems, he puts those in the ten plus year time range, which I'm sure sounds like science fiction. But most of what's happening in Sin bio today would have sounded like science fiction to the top people in the field when the Human Genome Project was wrapping up just 17 years ago. As with most of what everyday folks do with computing today, compared to the minimal things that were possible on the world's most powerful computers just a few decades ago, that's the thing about exponential technologies they can deliver science fiction in short time frames. Of course, they can also enable evil or disturbed people to wreak terrible devastation, but they can enable the rest of us to prevent that devastation if we have the foresight to do it. As we come to the end of this survey of what could go wrong with engineered pandemics, which is practically everything, and what we can do to protect ourselves, there's lots of reasons for optimism. There are many steps we can take to nip tomorrow's problems in the bud. Most of them have huge dual use benefits in fighting the natural diseases that clobber us constantly. And their costs are tiny compared to their benefits. To finish making this case for optimism, let's style up your inner science fiction writer one more time. Imagine it's ten to 15 years from now. A smart person with a biology background and a crippling emotional disease has decided to inflict a devastating pandemic on the world. He has access to a DNA printer with the raw horsepower to crank out any viral genome and tools we can scarcely imagine today, which easily translate printed genomes into replicating viruses. Worst of all, the Dark Web has given them the genetic code of that contagious H five N one flu, which those researchers created all those years ago. Only it's an upgraded version, which some darkly motivated biohackers have made wildly contagious way more than COVID. But luckily, our deeply disturbed protagonist lives in a world in which we had the foresight to defend ourselves from his attack years before he even thought of launching it. Strong laws require all DNA printers, not just 80% of them, to scan for deadly sequences before printing anything. So the only way to make his virus is from scratch, using methods that only a few elite scientists ever bothered to learn many years ago before it became automated. That's a huge win right there, because with that one step, we've radically constrained the number of people who could do something awful. In other words, the population of one circle in our Venn diagram, those who could kill millions, has plummeted, greatly reducing the chances it ever intersects with the other circle, which contains the people who'd like to kill millions. But let's say this person actually is an aging elite scientist who still knows the obsolete methods of making viruses from scratch and that he somehow infects a few people with his creation. Now, our early detection system kicks in. We're monitoring the air, wastewater, and surfaces in hundreds of cities daily with tools that are several generations beyond what we have today. And everyone with a viral infection is diagnosed and logged the moment they show up at a clinic, and many more are feeding in data from simple, rapid tests they take at home. So, unlike with COVID the very first victims light up the global public health radar. If we're lucky and smart, by then, virtually all humans have had a universal flu vaccine anyway, which would stop an H five N one outbreak in its tracks since it's in the influenza family. We've also made huge investments in therapeutics for influenza, along with dozens of other viral families, which can help cure the unvaccinated people who get sick. And if somewhere in the world there's a large unvaccinated geography and the epidemic gets momentum there, we can fall back on our unified command for fighting disease. There's plenty of masks and ventilators, and no one's in a bidding war to access them. And within hours of that local outbreak, vaccines are teleporting into its pharmacies and even some living rooms, killing the outbreak in its crib. So that's my case for optimism. We do have time to create our global immune system before this happens. It can be multilayered and like our own immune systems, agile and adaptive, with a diversity of tools to tackle whatever threat emerges. The case for pessimism is that this immune system will not build itself. We've botched so much in the face of COVID and if we respond to COVID's hope for defeat in the same way we responded at the end of SARS, the Snooze bar could be the end of us. So for all my optimism, there's absolutely no room for complacency. The new era in biology could put us in the best position we've ever occupied in relation to disease, but only if we make the right investments and take the right precautions today. Okay, well, I'm back with Rob Reed. Rob, you finally brought us to something like a glimmer of daylight here at the end. Let's talk about how we might yet survive. How would you characterize your own outlook here at the moment? How optimistic are you? I would say that I'm extremely optimistic for somebody who is really marinated as much as I have in the twin dangers of suicidal mass murder and the relentless exponential advance of sinbio not happy topics. And I've been marinating them in them for much longer than I'd like to since even before the pandemic. But for somebody who has really grappled with those issues, I got to say I'm wildly optimistic. Because the science and technology that's in the pipeline is just so promising and the dead obvious things that we fumbled during COVID Should be incredibly fixable, especially with a post COVID mindset, which should give us all the political will we need to invest in fixing them. So, definitely optimistic, and I think it's important to highlight that, because the last thing you want to do in talking about this stuff is to bring people directly from a state of denial to a state of despair, because you don't do anything in either one of those states. And the first one denial, you don't see a problem. And in despair, you think it's hopeless. And in either cases, you're equally motionless. And I think this is actually a problem that the environmental movement had. I mean, I'll just pick on An Inconvenient Truth, which I thought was absolutely brilliant, but I did think it had the tendency to put people on an express train from denial to despair. And there's definitely no need to despair here. We can absolutely harden our sin bio infrastructure to make it really hard for any but the most brilliant and determined people to do something awful that is doable. We can definitely invest in panrial vaccines and therapeutics. I mean, the cost of investment is trivial compared to the likely returns and all the rest of us, and in doing that, really make ourselves a hard target for future pandemics, whether it's artificial or natural. So, yeah, on the balanced, I think there's just so much we can do that can be so helpful. Okay, so let's talk about some of the topics you raised in this final chapter. Where are we with the Far UVC light technology? So far, UVC has had unbelievably promising signs in the lab, but so far it's been relatively small academic studies, and we need more. I mean, the next step really, is to do rigorous FDA quality tests that fully establish whether these wavelengths annihilate pathogens as we think they do without damaging human health, which is obviously unbelievably vital if we're going to contemplate exposing people to these lights for long periods of time during flu season. Or in the case of a pandemic, the signs are really promising, but we do need to do more. And if things really work out, unlike almost any of the other measures I'm talking about, this one could be really expensive if we go all in. But we'd only go all in in an incremental manner, starting with that relatively cheap step of proving this stuff out. And this could easily turn out to be a complete flop for UV C light. But like I said in the recording, that's completely fine, because while we're testing this, we're also hopefully testing things like the BCG vaccine and dozens of other things. They're just some incredible super weapons against pandemics, almost inevitably, in the tech and scientific pipelines. We just need to turn over the rocks. So anyway, if Far UVC light is everything we hope, the next thing we'll need to do is figure out how to make Led lights that emit them. Because the current bulbs are just huge. They're clunky they're unbelievably expensive, and they throw off way too much heat for use in public spaces. Just way too much maintenance and everything else. Now, getting LEDs to emit far UVC light will take significant R and D work. I mean, the whole history of LEDs is one of the industry turning its attention to new wavelengths of light and figuring out how to make them after some heroic R and D efforts and figuring out how to make blue Led light was actually particularly difficult. And there's a really interesting story behind that which we won't go into, but the Led industry is good at this, and it basically is all about really precisely tuning the alloys of the LEDs semiconductors. But Far UVC has already been demonstrated in an Led in the lab, I think, in Japan. So we know it's possible. It's a matter of bringing the science into technology. And once the technology is dialed in, we would need to build a fab or a fabrication plant to build the Led bulbs, which is probably a multibillion dollar proposition. So, like I said, not cheap, but one that we would never take unless we had high confidence. This is going to have a huge ROI for society. Then, once we're making the bulbs, the question becomes how many bulbs and who pays for them? So if these things actually work, we'd clearly want them in public transit. I mean, just imagine how much safer a subway car would be if 99.99% of the pathogens in it are killed every few minutes, which is what the the science out of MIT shows is possible. And we'd also probably want to put them in big public spaces. So basically, we'd have a lot of local governments buying bulbs, installing them, maintaining them, et cetera. As for where you go beyond that, it's probably a bunch of private decisions like stores and restaurants might install them if customers call for them or want them. Maybe more to keep safe from flu and flu season than pandemics, you know, in normal times. And maybe businesses will install them in offices also with flu in mind to cut down on sick days, which pays which would pay for an awful lot of balls. So the bottom line, if UVC becomes widespread, it'll cost a lot, but it'll be a lot of justified incremental investments made by people who are thinking rationally. And the path to it a real wide deployment feels like it should be less than ten years. It's not going to be right around the corner. There's a lot of work to be done, and building a fab takes time, but this is absolutely something in the intermediate future, if it makes sense. Well, on the other end of the spectrum here we have this BCG vaccine, which I only just heard about during COVID Describe what this is and why we can't get access to it, even though it seems like an incredibly promising vaccine for a variety of reasons. Well, what it is and why we can't get access to it here in the US. Are kind of the same answer. Which is that it's a tuberculosis vaccine. It's frontline for infant tuberculosis. So it's given shortly after birth to a high majority of the babies who were born on Earth in any given year. But it's never been given in the United States because, well, it was developed in the. We definitely had a tuberculosis problem back then, so I can't really say why we never had it. But the US. I think by the time universal BCG program started kicking in, I think it was much later than the was invented in the think it's more like fifty s, sixty s even 70s before countries began implementing universal vaccine programs. And by the had the first antibiotics. And antibiotics can be quite effective against adult tuberculosis, also against infants. And so I think there just wasn't a huge TV problem in the US by the time these vaccination programs really started coming online. And there is this unbelievably promising data going all the way back to the 1920s about BCG protecting against all kinds of things other than tuberculosis, above all, respiratory infections and broad spectrum protection against respiratory infections. The most recent study of which was quite recent, I think it was concluded just last year in Greece. And in that case they were basically taking older adults who were checking out of hospitals. I think people 55 and up and half of them got the BCG vaccine and half of them did not got a placebo. And the statistic was that those who got the vaccine had an 80% reduced incidence of any kind of respiratory infection and a 50% reduced incidence of infections of all kinds. So there's all this really intriguing data and then of course, there was that unbelievable data that was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that showed this huge inverse correlation between national BCG vaccination rates and COVID cases. Now, the thing is, most of this data, not the Greek study, but most of the state, is what epidemiologists call ecological data, which means it's data about groups of people rather than individual case studies. And also it comes from observational studies rather than hands on work with injections and patients. So that inverse correlation amongst countries, classic ecological data. But obviously to get a vaccine approved for a specific disease, you have to track cause and effect in individual subjects. In other words, you have to do a classic double blind test with control groups. And a full phase three trial for FDA approval is generally beyond the reach of academic budgets. And the people who have been poking at BCG are mostly academics, whereas pharma companies, they're just not going to spend their limited capital on testing a seven cent vaccine that's in the public domain. There's just no money in that. And, and I hope I'm not over pimping my podcast here. And if I am just telling me, but I'll be posting a really detailed interview with a Harvard epidemiologist named Megan Murray about all this stuff probably shortly after you post this conversation. And Megan actually is hard at work on developing and trying to fund a phase three trial, despite being an academic and this normally being a pharma thing. And we're counting on her to do this rather than Pfizer because it's a market failure. There's just no deep pocketed players who are incentive to do this research. And we really need to fix this for two reasons. The most obvious one is that if BCG actually can protect against COVID and we don't know, but if it can, even if it's a long shot, figuring this out would totally change the global vaccination timeline. Because there's 22. BCG manufacturers throughout the world. And there are distribution channels for BCG into almost all the developing world with armies of people who know how to store and administer the vaccine. And it's obviously just morally urgent to speed up vaccinations in poorer countries. But it's also in the selfish interests of rich countries that are about to get all the pfizer and moderna vaccines they need, because every person that COVID infects is another opportunity for it to mutate. And COVID is incredibly prone to mutation, as we're seeing from these terrifying new strains, at least one of which is the South African one is partly resistant to vaccines. And so if we take our guard down after wealthy countries are vaccinated, if COVID keeps rampaging amongst billions of people, we can pretty much count on a new strain emerging which can steamroll through all of our hardearned defenses. And so we need a great phase three trial test of BCG against COVID, whether it's Megan's or someone else's, even if it's a long shot, because this test would cost tens of billions of dollars, not the billion plus we spent on each candidate for Project Warp Speed, because there's no vaccine to be developed. It's just a test. And there are, luckily, some huge philanthropists like Bill Gates who have started investing in BCG with an eye toward COVID. But we shouldn't sit around and wait for somebody to gift this to the world. It should be an immediate public investment. And the other reason to do this, to study BCG much more deeply beyond COVID, is this apparent protection against respiratory diseases in general. Because if the initial trial in Greece, which is very promising, but very initial, that pattern holds up, it could be a real game changer against the flu, against future pandemics, which are almost sure to be respiratory in nature, against all kinds of things. But there's a lot to be studied. Like how frequently does BCG need to be given to have this effect as a work in all age groups? Is it particularly effective against a certain class of respiratory infections and so forth. And again, we shouldn't be waiting for someone to gift this to the world, particularly because an initial set of academic studies would cost very, very little. Yeah. We have to become increasingly sensitive to market failures in this domain, public health generally, but across all of the fronts of where we're running something like existential risk, we've been living with the problem of producing antibiotics in a market that can't effectively incentivize it. So we have antibiotics that are losing their power over really, every bug that concerns us. And we are meandering toward a time that will be indistinguishable from the 1920s and 30s when we simply didn't have the drugs that could solve our most basic infectious disease problems. And the reason is there's not enough money in it. You know, you take a new antibiotic, costs a billion dollars to produce, and you take it once for ten days in your life, and then that's it. That is, if you're unlucky. You know, most people don't have to take them, you know, any specific new antibiotic ever. Right. And yet, if you need it, this is the one drug that's going to save your life. You know, it's so it's we have to this is the role of government or major philanthropy on some level. We just have to say whether it makes any market sense in any rational time horizon for a business person. We have to spend money on these things. Yeah, we've basically stood by as multiple antibiotic companies have gone out of business in the US. And it just allowed this market failure to propagate to the point that who's even developing new antibiotics? I only think of a couple of companies that are even in that business anymore. And we're talking more about viruses than bacteria, obviously, in the series. But that is an equally glaring issue and something that one estimate that I saw superbugs could easily be killing millions of people per year within ten years. Yeah. So what are the prospects of developing vaccines for whole classes of viruses? A universal flu vaccine, a universal coronavirus vaccine? What have you uncovered on this front? Well, this actually ties to what you're just saying about market failures because it seems, talking to some pretty informed people in this domain, that a universal flu vaccine effort would probably have very good chances of succeeding at least 50%, which is a shot worth taking. And the budget that I was quoted was, you know, probably in the range of $200 million over ten years, with kind of an extreme, like, why don't we just for safety, go up an order of magnitude budget of $2 billion over ten years? And you look at those numbers and you you remember that the flu is costing the US. Alone $361,000,000,000 a year in lost productivity and medical spending. And it's just flabbergasting. And I couldn't believe my ears when that budget estimate was quoted to me, and it couldn't have come from a more informed person who is Harvey feinberg. He's the former president of the National Academy of Medicine and the former dean of the Harvard School of Public Health. And more to the point, he's done a lot of work studying the potential for universal flu vaccine, including at the Sabin Vaccine Institute. And so this is just another stunning market failure. I mean, if you can spend, take the worst case scenario, $2 billion over ten years for the chance of saving $361,000,000,000 a year, even if it's a 1% chance, you should take that. And it's, you know, according to Harvey, it's probably more like a 50% to 75% chance. And once again, to go back to what you were saying about antibiotics, why this isn't happening? Well, pharma is not going to do this because it's a lousy business proposition to make a cheap vaccine that people might only use just once. I mean, one of the models for universal flu vaccine is one and done in a lifetime you'll hopefully never need again. Or maybe it's even even if it's annual every five years. I mean, pharma companies just won't do this unless they're presented with non market incentives, so there's that. But then, obviously, this is also just a shocking failure of public policy, because the ROI on this would be profound. Now, the optimistic way of looking at this, which I prefer, is to say there's just so much low hanging fruit here. And Harvey Feinberg believes that much as we could create a universal vaccine effort for influenza, we could do that against any arbitrary number of viral families. And as I think I mentioned the recording, he would suggest we start with influenza and coronavirus, get good at that, and then start tackling more. And there's only a couple of dozen viral families that actually infect humans, and there's probably also a couple of other zoanotic diseases out there, viral families that don't currently infect us that we want to be careful of. But even if you multiply this out by every family we can think of by $2 billion over ten years, the numbers that come back are just minuscule. Just compared to I mean, like I said earlier, compared to what we spend maintaining our nuclear arsenal on an annual basis, just miniscule compared to anything that seems like a comparable and especially when we think of how quickly these COVID vaccines were created, just days in the case of Madeira. So we're obviously in a completely new age when it comes to vaccine science, which screams for just ambitious new goals for vaccine science. Yeah, we've not only accelerated the time it takes to produce the vaccine itself, but we've accelerated the approval process. And it sounds like we could accelerate it even further if we changed our cost benefit analysis and how we do research. Obviously, we're doing research now under duress, with a global pandemic, crushing economies and killing hundreds of thousands of people, even just in the United States. But what role would challenge trials play here because this is something that many people first heard about in recent months under COVID, but they're controversial. How do you think about this? Well, I think the right way to look at it, it's ultimately an ethical question, so we can safely say that there's no, quote unquote right answer to this conundrum. But I do think that it helps a great deal to put concrete numbers on the assets and liabilities in terms of human lives of the two approaches. So to just quickly review challenge trial would involve deliberately infecting a much smaller number of people than you would have in a normal trial with COVID The numbers are really, really stark. A normal COVID trial, you're talking tens of thousands of volunteers. They get that huge number of people because they need to wait until there's essentially maybe 200 Ish people have come down with COVID from that vast base of 30, 40, 50,000 people. And once 200 Ish people have definitively tested for COVID, they can basically take off the blinders and figure out which of those people were in the control arm of the trial, which of those people actually got the vaccine. And based on that, you can come up with these exciting numbers, like 95% effective. Now, if you're just doing a challenge trial and you know all those people are going to be infected instead of 50,000 people, you might just need 200 people or maybe a little bit more, just in case some data points bounce out for some reason. So that really collapses the time frame. And to compare a challenge trial with a normal trial, let's imagine, I mean, I don't know exactly how long a challenge trial would take, but recruiting 200 people would be harder on a per person basis because you're asking them to submit to a hell of a lot more than just an experimental vaccine. You're asking them to contract COVID. But as I said in the recording, 20,000 people, I think it is, have already expressed a willingness to participate in challenge trials through a group called One Day Sooner. So there's a ready body of people recruiting presumably would not be anywhere near the challenge that it is with 50,000 volunteers. And then in terms of the time frame, you're infecting them on day one, so you're not waiting months and months and months for people to contract things. I mean, it seems logical that this time frame could collapse into a very low number of months. Let's talk by comparison about the AstraZeneca vaccine, because I was able to find cobble together a detailed timeline on that. Its last phase of trials started in the UK on May 28 and they eventually recruited. It was a smaller trial, 23,000 volunteers, mostly in the UK, but also in Brazil. Now, there was some weirdness with this trial that people might remember. There was a pause to it because of an adverse reaction in one of the volunteers but that was only a six day pause, turns out. So it generally proceeded along its timeline. And the results of this trial were reported out on November 23. So, in other words, it ran for just under six months. And most of that time was spent recruiting all those volunteers and then waiting for enough of them to test positive for the trial to have a statistically significant result. Now, during that six month period from May to November, over a million people died of COVID worldwide, while what turned out to be an impressively effective vaccine was slowly and methodically tested. And we can probably assume that other vaccine trials had similar timeline. Timelines I just happened to know the dates with AstraZeneca. Now, a challenge trial obviously wouldn't have been instantaneous, but it would shave months off that time lane, not weeks during a time when thousands of people are dying every day. But it would have involved deliberately infecting a couple of hundred people with COVID while most of them would have presumably been younger volunteers. So fatality rate would have probably been extremely low. It's all too likely that one or more of those people would have died. And it's also likely that very few of those 200 people would have caught COVID on their own. So how do you balance the ethics out of that? I mean, the numbers are enormous. Hundreds of thousands or a million people dying during the running of this trial versus perhaps a tiny handful or even one or even no people dying in a challenge trial. But it's very much like the trolley problem, isn't it? Yeah, except with the variable of consent here, which I think is ethically decisive, there's no argument against someone deciding to consent to a challenge trial once they understand the risks they're running and the possible benefits. And as you say, it's surprising. But it is just a demonstrated fact that you can find people eager to serve on this front and you can find people eager to take all kinds of risks that any individual listening to this might never entertain themselves. Once there's a one way ticket to Mars offered, you can be sure there are going to be thousands of volunteers willing to die on Mars. There's a spirit of wanting to advance the the Human project and be part of something great. And in this case, again, there are relevant variables here around just how widespread the illness is at each point when trials are being run. That affects how long you have to wait around for people to catch the virus naturally. Yeah, totally affects it. And it affects the perceived odds for anyone enrolling in a trial. How different is a challenge trial if this virus is burning so quickly through the population that you seem guaranteed to get it anyway? But I do think consent is the master variable here ethically. And, yeah, we certainly should be talking about running challenge trials under circumstances like. This where we're having to respond to a pandemic that is burning out of control. It would be different if we're preemptively trying to design a universal flu vaccine or a universal coronavirus vaccine under conditions where we don't feel like we're currently losing thousands of people a day to a pandemic. But it is very interesting and it's amazing that so many people volunteered. It's great. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's kind of like the people who volunteered for the US military after 911. Yeah, they were yeah, there was a big surge of sign ups and these people were certainly signing up to risk their lives and the government didn't tell them, no, we're not going to accept your service. And in a sense because I don't think there was any serious conversation about a challenge trial at all in this COVID period, was there? I mean, I don't think there was. I remember it being spoken about and obviously people volunteered, but I think most of the conversation I heard about it was going on in the UK. Right, in the US. Yeah. I mean, and another thing to think about, which when it comes to this regulator saying, no, you can't do that type of thing, is it's interesting that I guess both well, certainly the Russian vaccine and I believe the Chinese vaccine as well have started coming out. There's starting to be some independent research that's signifying that these are actually reasonably effective vaccines. And in both cases, the countries started administering the vaccines without waiting for phase three data, which at the time was generally viewed as or discussed as being a particularly bad idea, at least in, I'd say, the Western media. But as we're finding out that these things actually work, maybe that's another policy that policymakers should consider along with challenge trials when future problems come up. Because imagine if and it's always easy to do something looking with the benefit of hindsight, but imagine if the FDA said, okay, Moderna has come up with this vaccine. It's going to go through rigorous trials. It hasn't yet, but we're in an emergency time here. So any US citizen who is courageous enough to take the chance and is willing to sign a thick legal document saying that they're not going to sue or anything is welcome to take this vaccine. And, you know, it's an experimental vaccine. So there could be bad effects, probably unlikely because they'd already and I think they'd already done a safety trial before phase three, but, you know, may not work against COVID at all. We could kind of imagine perhaps millions of people I mean, I would have certainly entertained that idea. If there'd already even a safety trial on this thing, I mean, why not? And you know, if millions or tens of millions of people had been vaccinated with Moderna and Pfizer Johnson and Johnson, who knows what else, during the six months of trial times, we might already be seeing the end of this thing already. Yeah, the safety stage is the most important part from my point of view. Whether it's effective or not is obviously important, but it's the first due no harm principle, which I think everyone is rightly focused on, especially with the vaccine, because as has been pointed out many times before, this is a medication you're giving to healthy people. By and large, this is not an intervention, a new form of chemotherapy. When all other forms have failed you, what do you have to lose in this case? You have a lot to lose if the vaccine is basically unsafe. And I guess the novelty of the current batch was relevant here. I mean, the more work we do in this area and the more any new vaccine has already been pre characterized by similar vaccines in the past, working by a similar mechanism, perhaps the safety concerns get dialed down quicker. Yeah, but particularly, and you're right, with the mRNA vaccines, this is a completely new type of vaccine and safety testing was especially important. But now that we have seen that these apparently are very safe vaccines, I do hope the policymakers take a different approach. Like for instance, with booster shots. Madeira and Pfizer, I believe, are already working on booster shots to take care of the South African and British variations. If we do need to go through a six month trial process for those to get a perfect phase three, I would certainly hope that there would be an option given to adventurous people, which would certainly include myself, who are willing to take the chance that this isn't efficacious to get the vaccine before the phase three is done. Because we are in an emergency situation here. Yeah, well, as should be obvious to everyone who has followed us this far, this is the beginning of the conversation, not the end. But I know you and I will both together and independently keep our attention on this front and we'll certainly surface any good ideas we come across, any organizations that are moving the dial here, whether it's in the philanthropic space or for profit or rumors of government actions that seem auspicious. This really just needs to be kept front of mind here. Pandemic response generally and the sin bio privatization of the apocalypse problem more narrowly. This is really something that our generation has been tasked to figure out. And I just want to thank you, Rob, for producing such a comprehensive and comprehensible document for us to all get started with. Well, it was absolutely a thrill to be able to present it on your show, Sam. So thank you so much for that./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, very brief housekeeping today. Just a couple of announcements. First, I will be doing another zoom call for subscribers and that will be on October 7. I'm not sure if that's going to be an open ended Q and A or whether the questions will be focused on a theme. I'll decide that in the next few days. But anyway, the last one was fun and hopefully the fun will continue. So I will see you on October 7, and you should be on my mailing list if you want those details. Also, there's a few exciting changes happening over on the waking up side of things, so pay attention over there if you're an app user and I think that's it. Okay, well, today I'm speaking with Tristan Harris. Tristan has been on the podcast before and he is one of the central figures in a new documentary which is available on Netflix now. And that film is The Social Dilemma, which discusses the growing problem of social media and the fracturing of society, which is our theme today. So, as you'll hear, I highly recommend that you watch this film. But I think you'll also get a lot from this conversation. I mean, if you're looking out at the world and wondering why things seem so crazy out there, social media is very likely the reason. Or it's the reason that is aggregating so many other reasons. It's the reason why we can't converge on a shared understanding of what's happening so much of the time. We can't agree about whether specific events attest to an epidemic of racism in our society or whether these events are caused by some other derangement in our thinking, or just bad incentives or bad luck. We can't agree about what's actually happening. And amazingly, we are about to hold a presidential election that it seems our democracy might not even survive. Really, it seems valid to worry whether we might be tipped into chaos by merely holding a presidential election. It's fairly amazing that we are in this spot. And social media is largely the reason. It's not entirely the reason. A lot of this falls on Trump, some of it falls on the far left. But the fact that we can't stay sane as a society right now that is largely due to the fact that we are simply drowning in misinformation. Anyway, that is the topic of today's conversation and I was very happy to get Tristan back on the podcast. Apologies for the uneven sound precovid. We were bringing everyone into studios where they could be professionally recorded. Now we're shipping people zoom devices and microphones, but occasionally the technology fails and we have to rely on the Skype signal. So what you're hearing today is Skype. It's actually pretty good for Skype, but apologies if any of the audio sounds subpar. And now I bring you Tristan Harris. I am here with Tristan Harris. Tristan, it's great to get you back on the podcast. It's really good to be back, Sam. It's been a while since the first time I was on here. Yeah, we will cover similar ground, but a lot has happened since we last spoke and to my eye, everything has gotten worse. So there's more damage to analyze and try to prevent in the future. But before we jump in, remind people who you are and how you come at these things. What's your brief bio that's relevant to this conversation? Yeah, well, just to say briefly, I guess one of the reasons why we're talking now and most relevant to my recent biography is the new Netflix documentary that just came out called The Social Dilemma, in which all these technology insiders are speaking about the Frankenstein that they've created. We'll get into that later. Prior to that, I was a Google design ethicist, coming in through an acquisition of a technology company that I had started called Apture that Google acquired, and after being at the company for a little while, migrated into a role of thinking about how do you ethically steer 2 billion people's attention when you hold the collective human psyche in your hands? And then prior to that, as also discussed in the film is I was at Stanford at studied computer science, human computer interaction, but specifically at a lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab, which I'm sure we'll get into, which relates to just sort of a lifelong view of how is the human mind vulnerable to psychological influence and have had a fascination with those topics from cults to sleight of hand magic to mentalism and heroes like Darren Brown, who's a mutual friend of ours, and how that plays into the things that we're seeing with technology. Yeah, so I just want to reiterate that this film, The Social Dilemma, is on Netflix now. And yeah, that's the proximate cause of this conversation. And it's great. It really covers the issue in a compelling way. So I highly recommend people go see that and they don't have to go anywhere, obviously, just open Netflix. And there's no irony there. I would count Netflix as I'm sure they're an offender in some way, but their business model really is distinct from much of what we're going to talk about. They could have made the choice to. They're clearly gaming people's attention because they want to cancel churn and they want people on the platform and deriving as much value from the platform as possible. But there is something different going on over there with respect to not not being part of the ad economy and the attention economy in quite the same way. That's a distinction we could draw later on. But is there a bright line between proper subscription services like that and what we're going to talk about? Yeah, I think the core question we're here to talk about is in which ways and where are technology's incentives aligned with the public good? And I think the problem that brings us here today is where technology's incentives are misaligned with the public good through the business model of advertising and through models like user generated content. Clearly, because we live in a finite attention economy where there's only so much human attention, we are managing a commons, a collective environment. And because Netflix, like any other actor, including politicians, including conferences, including you or I, or this podcast or my podcast, we're all competing for the same finite resource. And so there's a difference, I think, in how different business models engage in an attention economy, but a business model in which the cost of producing things that are going to reach exponential numbers of people, exponential broadcast. In the case of Netflix, but also in the case of these other companies, there's a difference when there's a sense of ethics or responsibility or privacy or child's controls that we add into that equation. And I'm sure we'll get more into those topics. Right? Okay, so let's take it from the top here. What's wrong with social media at this point? If you could boil it down to the elevator pitch answer. What is the problem that we are going to unspool over the next hour or so? Well, it's funny because the film actually opens with that prompt, the blank stares of many technology insiders, including myself, because I think it's so hard to define exactly what this problem is. There's clearly a problem of incentives, but beneath that, there's a problem of what those incentives are doing and where the exact harms show up. And the way that we frame it in the film and in a big presentation we gave at the SF Jazz Center back in April 2019 to a bunch of the top technologists and people in the industry, was to say that while we've all been looking out for the moment when AI would overwhelm human strengths and when will we get The Singularity? When would AI take our jobs? When would it be smarter than humans? We missed this much, much earlier point when technology didn't overwhelm human strengths, but it undermined human weaknesses. And you can actually frame the cacophony of grievances and scandals and problems that we've seen in the tech industry, from distraction to addiction to polarization to bullying to harassment to the breakdown of truth, all in terms of progressively hacking more and more of human vulnerabilities and weaknesses. So if we take it from the top, you know, our brain's short term memory system have seven plus or minus two things that we can hold when technology starts to overwhelm our short term and working memory. We feel that as a problem called distraction. Oh my gosh, I can't remember what I was doing. I came here to open an email. I came here to go to Facebook to look something up, but now I got sucked down into something else. That's a problem of overwhelming the human limit and weakness of just our working memory when it overwhelms our dopamine systems and our reward systems, that we feel that as a problem called addiction when it taps into and exploits our reliance on stopping cues that at some point I will stop talking. And that's a cue for you to keep going when technology doesn't stop talking and it just gives you the independent bottomless bowl. We feel that as a problem called addiction or addictive use, when technology exploits our social approval and giving us more and more social approval. We feel that as a problem called teen depression because suddenly children are dosed with social approval every few minutes and are hungry for more likes and comparing themselves in terms of the currency of likes and when technology hacks the limits of our heuristics for determining what is true. For example, that that Twitter profile who just commented on your tweet 5 seconds ago, that photo looked pretty real. They've got a bio that seems pretty real. They've got 10,000 followers. We only have a few cues that we can use to discern what is real and bots and deep fakes. And I'm sure we'll get into GPG Three actually overwhelm that human weakness. So we don't even know what's true. So I think the main thing that we really want people to get is through a series of misaligned incentives, which we'll further get into, technology has overwhelmed and undermined human weaknesses. And many of the problems that we're seeing as separate are actually the same. And just one more thing on this analogy. It's kind of like collectively this digital fallout of addiction, teen depression and suicides polarization breakdown of truth. We think of this as a collective digital fallout or a kind of climate change of culture that much like the oil extractive economy that we have been living in, an extractive race for attention, there's only so much when it starts running out. We have to start fracking your attention by splitting your attention into multiple streams. I want you watching an iPad and a phone and the television at the same time because that lets me triple the size of the attention economy. But that extractive race for attention creates this global climate change of culture. And much like climate change, it happens slowly, it happens gradually, it happens chronically it's not this sudden immediate threat, it's this slow erosion of the social fabric. And that collectively we called in that presentation human downgrading. But you can call it whatever you want. The point is that if you think back to the climate change movement, before there was climate change as a Cohesive understanding of emissions and linking to climate change, we had some people working on polar bears, some people working on the coral reefs, we had some people working on species loss in the Amazon. And it wasn't until we had an encompassing view of how all these problems get worse that we start to get changed. And so we're really hoping that this film can act as a kind of catalyst for a global response to this really destructive thing that's happened to society. Okay, so let me play devil's advocate for a moment, using some of the elements you've already put into play because you and I are going to impressively agree throughout this conversation on the nature of the problem. But I'm channeling a skeptic here and it's actually not that hard for me to empathize with a skeptic because as you point out, it really takes a fair amount of work to pry the scales from people's eyes on this point. And the nature of the problem, though, it really is everywhere to be seen. It's surprisingly elusive, right? So if you reference something like a spike in teen depression and self harm and suicide, there's no one who's going to pretend not to care about that. And then it really is just the question of what's the causality here and is it really a matter of exposure to social media that is driving it. And I think I don't think people are especially skeptical of that. And that's a discrete problem that I think most people would easily understand and be concerned about. But the more general problem for all of us is harder to keep in view. So when you talk about things, again, these are things you've already conceded in a way. So attention has been a finite resource always and everyone has always been competing for it. So if you're going to publish a book, you are part of this race for people's attention. If you were going to release something on the radio or television, it was always a matter of trying to grab people's attention. And as you say, we're trying to do it right now with this podcast. So when considered through that lens, it's hard to see what is fundamentally new here. Right? So, yes, this is zero sum. And then the question is, is it good content or not? I think people want to say, right, this is just a matter of interfacing in some way with human desire and human curiosity and you're either doing that successfully or not. And what's so bad about really succeeding, just fundamentally succeeding in a way that you can call it addiction, but really it's just what people find captivating. It's what people want to do. They want to grant their attention to the next video that is absolutely enthralling. But how is that different from leafing through the pages of a hard copy of Vanity Fair in the year 1987 and feeling that you'd really want to read the next article rather than work or do whatever else you thought you were going to do with your afternoon? So there's that. And then there's this sense that the fact that advertising is involved and really the foundation of everything we're going to talk about, what's so bad about that? So really, it's a story of ads just getting better. You know, I don't have to see ads for Tampax anymore, right? I go online and I see ads for things that I probably want or nearly want because I abandoned them in my Zappo's shopping cart, right? So what's wrong with that? And I think most people are stuck in that place. We have to do a lot of work to bring them into the place of the conversation where the emergency becomes salient. And so let's start. There's so much good stuff to unpack here. So on the attention economy, obviously we've always had it. We've had television competing for attention radio, and we've had evolutions of the attention economy before. Competition between books, competition between newspapers, competition between television to more engaging television, to more channels of television. So in many ways, this isn't new, but I think what we really need to look at is what was mediating where that attention went to? Mediating is a big word. Smartphones. We check our smartphones 100 times or something like that per day. They are intimately woven into the fabric of our daily lives, and ever more so because of if we pre establish addiction or just this addictive checking that we have than any moment of anxiety, we turn to our phone to look at it. So it's intimately woven into where the attention starting place will come from. It's also taken over our fundamental infrastructure for our basic verbs like if I want to talk to you or talk to someone else. My phone has become the primary vehicle for just about for many, many verbs in my life, whether it's ordering food or speaking to someone or figuring out where to go on a map. We are increasingly reliant on the central node of our smartphone to be a router for where all of our attention goes. So that's the first part of this intimately woven nature and the fact that it's our social it's part of the social infrastructure by which we rely on, we can't avoid it. And part of what makes technology today inhumane is that we're reliant on infrastructure that's not safe or contaminated for many reasons that we'll get into later. A second reason that's different is the degree of asymmetry between, let's say, that newspaper editor or journalist who is writing that enticing article to get you to turn to the next page versus the level of asymmetry of when. You watch a YouTube video and you think, yeah, this time I'm just going to watch one video and then I got to go back to work. And you wake up from a trance 2 hours later and you say, man, what happened to me? I should have had more self control. What that misses is there's literally Google's billions of dollars of supercomputing infrastructure on the other side of that slab of glass in your hand pointed at your brain, doing predictive analytics on what would be the perfect next video to keep you here. And the same is true on Facebook. You think, okay, I've sort of been scrolling through this thing for a while, but I'm just going to swipe up one more time and then I'm done. Each time you swipe up with your finger, you're activating a Twitter or a Facebook or a TikTok supercomputer that's doing predictive analytics, which has billions of data points on exactly the thing that will keep you here. And I think it's important to expand this metaphor in a way that you've talked about in your show before, about just the power, increasing power and computational power of AI. When you think about a supercomputer pointed at your brain, trying to figure out what's the perfect next thing to show you, that's on one side of the screen. On the other side of the screen is my prefrontal cortex, which has evolved millions of years ago and doing the best job it can to do goal articulation, goal retention and memory and sort of staying on task, self discipline, et cetera. So who's going to win in that battle? Well, a good metaphor for this is let's say you or I were to play Gary Kasparov at chess. Like, why would you or I lose it's because, you know, there I am on the chessboard and I'm thinking, okay, if I do this, he'll do this, but if I do this, he'll do this. And I'm playing out a few new moves ahead on the chessboard. But when Gary looks at that same chessboard, he's playing out a million more moves ahead than I can, right? And that's why Gary is going to win and beat you and I every single time. But when Gary the human is playing chess against the best supercomputer in the world, no matter how many million moves aheads that Gary can see, the supercomputer can see billions of moves ahead. And when he beats Gary, who is the best human chess player of all time, he's beaten like the human brain at chess because that was kind of the best one that we had. And so when you look at the degree of Asymmetry that we now have, when you're sitting there innocuously saying, okay, I'm just going to watch one video and then I'm out, we have to recognize that we have an exponential degree of Asymmetry, and they know us and our weaknesses better than we know ourselves. To borrow also from a mutual friend, Yval Harari. So I guess I still think the nature of the problem will seem debatable even at this point. Because again, you're talking about successfully gaming attention, making various forms of content more captivating stickier. People are losing time perhaps that they didn't know they were going to give over to their devices, but you know what, but they were doing that with their televisions anyway. I mean, these statistics, long before we had smartphones, these statistics on watching television were appalling. I forget what they were. There was something like, you know, the average television was on 7 hours a day in the home. So that the picture was of people in a kind of alvis huxley like Dystopia just plugged in to the boob tube and being fed bad commercials and therefore being monetized in some way that strikes people as not fundamentally different from what's happening now. Yes, there was less to choose from. There were three different types of laundry detergent, and it was not a matter of a really fine grained manipulation of people's behavior. But if you wanted from the perspective of what seems optimal, it still had a character of propagandizing people with certain messages that seem less than optimal. I'm sure you could talk about teens or just people in general having body dysmorphia around ideal presentations of human beauty that were unrealistic, whether Photoshop was involved at that point or not. I mean, it was just good lighting and good makeup and you know, selection effects that make it make people feel obliged to aspire to irrational standards of beauty. All of these problems that we tend to reference in a conversation like this seemed present. I think the thing that strikes me as fundamentally new, and this is brought out in the film by several people, relates to the issue of misinformation and the siloing of information. So which really does strike me as genuinely new. So and there are a few analogies here that I find especially arresting. One thing that Jaron Lanier said. He says it in the film, and he said it on this podcast a year or so ago, which I think frames it really well. Is that just imagine if Wikipedia would present you with information in a way that was completely dependent on your search history, all the data on you that had been collected that showing your biases and your preferences and the way the ways in which your attention can be gamed. So that when each of us went to Wikipedia, not only was there no guarantee that we'd be seeing precisely the same facts, rather there was a guarantee that we wouldn't be right, that we're in this sort of this shattered epistemology now, and we built this machine. So the very machinery we're using to deliver information, really what is almost the only source of information for most people now is a machine that is designed to partially inform people, misinform people, spread conspiracy theories and lies faster than facts, spread outrage faster than disinterested nuanced analysis of stories. So it's like we have designed an apparatus whose purpose is to fragment our worldview and to make it impossible for us to fuse our cognitive horizon so that if you and I start out in a different place, we can never converge in the middle of the psychological experiment. And that's the thing that strikes me for which there is no analog in all previous moments of culture. Yeah, that's 100% right. And I mean, if we jump to the chase about what is most concerning, it is the breakdown of a shared reality and the breakdown therefore, of our capacity to have conversations. And you said it that if we don't have conversation, we have violence. And when you shatter the epistemic basis of how do we know what we know? And I've been living literally in a different reality, a different Truman Show, as Roger McNamee would say, for the last ten years. And we have to keep in mind we're about ten years into this radicalization polarization process where each of us have been fed, you know, really a more extreme view of reality for quite a long time. That what I really want people to do isn't just to say this technology addictive, or these small questions. It's really to rewind the tape and to ask how has my mind been fundamentally warped? And so just to go back to the point you made a second ago, so what, YouTube is giving us information. Well, first on that chess match I mentioned of are we going to win or are they going to win? 70% of the billion hours a day that people spend on YouTube is actually driven by the recommendation system, by what the recommendation system is choosing for us. Just imagine a TV channel where you're not choosing 70% of the time. Then the question becomes, as you said, well, what is the default programming of that channel? Is it Walter Cronkite and some kind of semirelible communal sense making, as our friend Eric would say? Or is it actually giving us more and more extreme views of reality? So three examples of this. Several years ago, if you were a teenager and looked at a diet video on YouTube, several of the videos on the right hand side would be thinspo anorexia videos because those things were better at keeping people's attention. If you looked at the 911 videos, it would give you Alex Jones infowars 911 conspiracy theories. YouTube recommended Alex Jones conspiracy theories 15 billion times in the right hand sidebar, which is more than the combined traffic of the New York Times, Fox News, MSNBC, guardian, et cetera combined. So the scale of what has actually transpired here is so enormous that I think it's really hard for people to get their head around because also each of us only see our own Truman Show. So the fact that I'm saying these stats, you might say, well, I've never seen a dieting video or anorexia video or someone else might say, I've never seen those conspiracy theories. It's because it fed you some different rabbit hole. Guillaume Chaslow, who's the YouTube recommendations engineer in the film, talks about in an interview we did with him on our podcast, how he the algorithm found out that he liked seeing these videos of plane landings. And it's this weird, addictive corner of YouTube where people like to see plane landings, or the example of flat earth conspiracy theories, which are recommended hundreds of millions of times. And because we've been doing this work, Sam, for such a long time, and I've talked to so many people, I hear from teachers and parents who say, suddenly all these kids are coming into my classroom and they're saying the Holocaust didn't happen, or they're saying the Earth is flat. And it's like, where are they getting these ideas? Especially in a time of coronavirus where parents are forced to sit their kids in front of the new television, the new digital Pacifier, which is really just YouTube. They're basically at the whims of whatever that automated system is showing them. And of course, the reason economically why this happened is because the only way that you can broadcast to 3 billion people in every language is you don't pay any human editors, right? You you take out all of those expensive people who sat at the, you know, New York Times or Washington Post editorial department or PBS editorial department saying what's good for kids in terms of Saturday Morning or Sesame Street, and you say, let's have a machine decide what's good for people. And the machine cannot know the difference between what we'll watch versus what we actually really want. And the easiest example there is if I'm driving down a freeway on the Five in La. And according to YouTube, my eyes go off to the side and I see a car crash, and everybody's eyes go to the side, they look at the car crash, then the world must really want car crashes. And the next thing you know, there's a self reinforcing feedback loop of their feeding us more car crashes. And we keep looking at the car crashes, they feed us more and more. That's exactly what's happened over the last ten years with conspiracy theories. And one of the best predictors of whether you will believe in a new conspiracy is whether you already believe in one. And YouTube and Facebook have never made that easier than to sort of open the doorways into a more paranoid style of thinking. And just one last thing before handing it back is I think this is not to vilify all conspiracy thinking. Some conspiracies are real or some notions of what Epstein did with running a child sex ring is all real. But we need a more nuanced way to. See this because when you're put into a surround sound rabbit hole where everything is a conspiracy theory, everything that's ever happened in the last 50 years is part of some master plan and there's actually this secret cabal that controls everything and Bill Gates and Kronavirus, this is where the thing goes off the rails. And I think this really became apparent to people once they were stuck at home where you're not actually going out into the world, you're not talking to as many neighbors. And so the primary meaning making and sense making system that we are using to navigate reality are these social media products. And I think that has exacerbated the kind of craziness we've seen over the last six months. Yeah, well, you're really talking about the formation of cults. And I know you've thought about a lot about cults. And what we have here is a kind of cult factory or a cult industrial complex that we have built inadvertently. And again, what the inadvertent is really interesting because it relates directly to the business model. It's because we have decided that the only way to pay for the internet, or the primary way to pay for the internet is with ads. And we'll get into the mechanics of this. That is the thing that has dictated everything else we're talking about. And it really is incredible to think about, because we have created a system where indisputably some of the smartest people on earth. This is really some of our brightest minds are using the most powerful technology we've ever built not to cure cancer or mitigate climate change or respond to a very real and pressing problem like an emerging pandemic. They're spending their time trying to get better at gaming human attention more effectively to sell random products and even random conspiracy theories, right? In fact, they're doing all of this not merely as in a mode of failing to address other real problems like mitigating climate change or responding to a pandemic. The consequences of what they're doing is making it harder to respond to those real problems. Climate change and pandemics are now impossible to talk about as a result of what's happening on social media. And this is a direct result of how social media is being paid for or how it has decided to make money. And as you say, it's making it impossible for us to understand one another because people are not seeing the same things on a daily basis. Have this experience of looking at people out in the world on my own social media feed or he's just reading news accounts of what somebody is into. Let's say somebody is into QAnon, right? And this cult is not too strong a word, this cult of indeterminate size, but massively well subscribed at this point for people who believe that not only is child sexual abuse a real problem out there in the world, as more or less everyone believes. But they believe that there are uncountable numbers of high profile, well connected people, from the Clintons on down, who are part of a cannibalistic cult of child sexual slavery, where they extract the bodily essences of children so as to prolong their lives. Right. It's as crazy as crazy guess. And so when I, as someone who's outside this information stream, view this behavior, people look frankly insane to me, right? And some of these people have to be crazy, right? This has to be acting like a bug light for crazy people of at least of some sort. But most of the people are presumably normal people who are just drinking from a fire hose of misinformation and just different information from the information I'm seeing. And so their behavior is is actually inexplicable to me. And there's so many versions of this. Now, I don't think it's too much to say that we're we're driving ourselves crazy. We're creating a culture that is not compatible with basic sanity. I mean, we're amplifying incommensurable delusions everywhere, all at once. And we've created a system where true information, real facts and valid skeptical analysis of what's going on isn't up to the task of dampening down the spread of lies. And maybe there's some other variable here that accounts for it. But it's amazing to me how much of this is born of simply the the choice over a business model. Well, I think this is to me, the most important aspect of what the film hopefully will do is right now we're living in the shattered prism of a shared reality where we're each trapped in a separate shard. And like you said, when you look over at someone else and say how can they believe those crazy things? How can they be so stupid? Aren't they seeing the same information that I'm seeing? And the answer is they're not seeing the same information that you're seeing. They've been living literally in a completely different feat of information than you have. And that's actually one of the other. I think psychological, not so much vulnerabilities, but we did not evolve to assume that every person you would see physically around you would inside of their own mind be actually living in a completely different virtual reality than the one that you live in. So nothing from an evolutionary perspective would enable us to have empathy with the fact that each of us have our own little virtual reality in our own minds and that each of them could be so dramatically, not just a little bit, but so dramatically different. Because another aspect you mentioned when you brought up cults at the beginning of what you said was the power of groupthink and the power of an echo chamber where many of the things that are going on in conspiracy theory groups on Facebook, I mean, the Pandemic video spread actually through a massive network of QAnon groups. There's actually been a capturing of the new spirituality sort of in psychedelics type community into the QAnon world. Interestingly, which I know. That's what these people need. Acid. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a good addition to an already mad world. But I think if we zoom out, the question is, who's in control of human history right now? Are human beings authoring our own choices? Or by the fact that we've ceded the information that feeds into 3 billion people's brains meant that we have actually ceded control to machines because the machines control the information that all 3 billion of us are getting. It's become the primary way that we make sense of the world. And to jump ahead of mind, read some of the skeptics out there, some people saying, well, hold on a second. Weren't there filter bubbles and narrow partisan echo chambers with Fox news and MSNBC and people sticking with those channels? Yes, that's true. But I would ask people to question, where are the editorial departments of those television channels getting their news from? Well, they're just living on twitter, and twitter's algorithms are recommending, again, that same partisan echo chamber. Back to you if you follow, as you had Renee diersta on your podcast, who's a dear friend and amazing colleague, talking about how radicalization spreads on social media. And she worked back in the state department in 2015, where they noticed that if you followed one ISIS terrorist on twitter, the suggested user system would say, oh, there's suggested people you might want to follow, and it gives you ten more suggested ISIS terrorists for you to follow. Likewise, if you were a new mom, as she was several years ago, and you joined some new mom groups, specifically groups for, like, making your own baby food, kind of a do it yourself, organic moms movement. Well, facebook's algorithm said, well, hold on. What are other suggested groups we might show for you that tend to correlate with users in this mom group that keeps people really engaged? And one of the top recommendations was the antivaccine conspiracy theory groups. And when you join one of those, it says, well, those groups tend to be also in these QAnon groups and the chemtrails groups and the flat earth groups. And so you see very quickly how these tiny little changes, as they say, german says in the beginning of the film, the business model of just changing your beliefs and identity just 1% changing the entire world. 1% is a lot. It's like climate change, quite literally, right, where you only have to change the temperature a tiny bit and change the basis of what people are believing, and it changes the rest of reality, because as you know from confirmation bias, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And technology is laying the foundation of hammers that are looking for specific kinds of nails. Once you see the world in a paranoid, conspiratorial lens, you're looking for evidence that confirms that belief. And that's happening on all sides. It's really a thing that's happened to all of us. This is why my biggest hope, really, in the global impact of the film, and this is not a marketing push, it's really a social impact push. Like, I genuinely am concerned that there may be no other way to put Humpty Dumpty back together again than to show the world that we have created that we need a new shared reality about that breakdown of our shared reality. There are many aspects to the ad model, and I think people can get it doesn't take much work to convince people, as we've hope we have begun to hear, that the shattering of shared reality is a problem. It's at minimum a political problem. I mean, whether it's a social problem for you, you know, out in the world or in your primary relationships, to see the kind of hyper partisanship we see now, and and the the just inability to converge on an account of basic facts that could mitigate that partisanship, I think people feel that that is a kind of assault on democracy. And then when you add the piece that bad actors like the Russians or the Chinese or anyone can decide to deliberately game that system. I mean, just the knowledge that Russia is actively spreading Black Lives Matter information and pseudo information so as to heighten the anguish and polarization on that topic in America, that just the fact that we've built the tools by which they can do that and they can do it surreptitiously. Right. We don't see who is seeing these ads, right? You don't see the 50,000 people who were targeted in a specific state for a specific reason that is new and sinister. And I think people can understand that. But when we're talking about the problem with sharing information or using our information in these ways, I think we should get clear about what's happening here, because this is a distinction several people make in the film. It's not that these platforms sell our data. They don't really sell our data. They gather the data, they analyze the data, and what they sell are more and more accurate predictions of our behavior to advertisers. And as that gets more refined, you really have as close as we've ever come to advertising being a kind of sure thing right, where it really works. I think most people won't necessarily care about that because if you tell them, listen, that thing you really thought you wanted and went out and bought, you were played by the company. The company placed an ad with Facebook, and Facebook delivered it to you because you were the perfect target of that ad. I think the person can, at the end of the day, own all of that process and just subsume it with their satisfaction at having bought the thing they now actually want. Right, but I wanted a new Prius, right? It was time. I needed a new car, whether it's confabulatory or not. There's some way in which they don't necessarily feel violated. And I think people think they care about privacy, but we don't really seem to care about privacy all that much. We care about convenience, and we care about money. At bottom, nobody wants to pay for these things. No one wants to pay for facebook, they don't want to pay for twitter. They don't want to pay for most of what happens on the internet, and they're happy to be enrolled in this psychological experiment so that they don't have to pay for anything. And the dysfunction of all of that is what we're trying to get across here. But I'm always amazed that you focus on it, and parts of this monstrosity begin to disappear. It's very hard to keep what is wrong with this in view every moment all at once. And so maybe for the moment, let's just focus on information and privacy and the ad model and just how we should think about it. Well, when we talk about the advertising model, you know, people tend to think about the good faith uses like you're talking about, you know, a prius or a pair of shoes. What dismisses the geopolitical world war III information warfare that is happening right now? Because a line I say often is, while we've been obsessed with protecting our physical borders as a country, we've left the digital border wide open. I mean, if Russia or China tried to fly a cruise missile or a bomber plane into the United States, they'd be blasted out of the sky by the pentagon. But when they try to fly an information bomb into the United States, in our virtual infrastructure of facebook, they're met by a white glove that says, yes, exactly. Which zip code and which African American sub district would you like to target? And that is the core problem. We are completely unprotected when it comes to the virtual infrastructure. So if we go to the roads and the air and the telephone lines that we use here in this country, they're completely air capped from Russia or china. But when most of the activity happening in our country happens in a virtual, digital online environment, as mark andreessen says, software is eating the world. Meaning software and the digital world are consuming more and more of the physical world and the physical ways that we used to get around and the physical conversations we used to have. That digital environment is basically the big five tech companies. It's all happening through the landscape of YouTube, TikTok, facebook, et cetera. And how does an empire fall? You use the power of an empire against itself. After world war II, we had all these nukes, and the big powers couldn't do conventional wars with each other, so they had to use settler methods, plausible deniability, proxy wars that would be waging economic warfare, diplomatic warfare. But if you're russia or iran or turkey, and you don't want to see the US. In a position of global dominance? Would you do a Ford facing attack on the country with all the nukes? Obviously not. But would you take the already existing tensions of that country and turn the enemy against himself? That's what Sunzu would say to do. That's what Chinese military strategy would say to do. And Facebook just makes that a trillion times easier. So if I was China, I would want extreme right and extreme left groups to proliferate and fight each other. And we know that this is basically happening and this has been stoking up groups on all sides. I can go into your country and create an army of bots that look just as indistinguishable from regular people. If I'm China, I'm running TikTok, and I can manipulate the political discourse in your country with the fact that I have 300 million Americans on my service. It might even be bigger than that, if I'm remembering correctly. So I think the advertising model isn't just that it enables these good faith users. I think people have to recognize the amount of manipulated and deceptive activities that are almost, like you said, untraceable. I mean, the fact that I'm saying all this to you and the listeners out there would sound like a conspiracy theory until you know the researchers who are tracking these things. Because if you're just looking at your own feed, I'm living in California. I'm not actually part of a targeted group. So I don't really see these things, and it's actually invisible to me anybody who is. So, again, our psychological vulnerabilities here, technology, is not allowing us to empathize with people who are closest to being harmed by these systems. Yeah, okay. So I think people can get the central fear here, which is that it seems at best difficult, more likely impossible to run a healthy democracy on bad information. I mean, if we can do it for a few years, we probably can't do it for a century. Something has to change here. We can't be feeding everyone lives or half truths, different lives and different half truths, all at once, 24 hours a day, year after year, and hope to have a healthy society, right? So that's a discernible piece of this problem that I think virtually everyone will understand. And then when you add the kind of the emotional valence of all these lies and half truths, people get that there's a problem amplifying outrage. The fact that the thing that is most captivating to us is the feeling of in group outrage pointed outward toward the outgroup for whom we have contempt growing into hatred. That's the place we are so much of the time on social media that runs the gears of this machinery faster than any other emotion. And if that changes tomorrow, if it turns out that sheer terror is better than outrage, well, then the algorithm will find that, and it'll be amplifying terror. But the thing that you have to be sure of is that it's contained in the very word. A dispassionate take on current events is never going to be the thing that gets this machinery running hottest, and so I think people can get that. But when we talk about possible remedies for this problem, then I really think it's hard to see a path forward. There are few ways to come at this. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with the writer and journalist A. J. Jacobs. A. J. Is the author of several New York Times bestsellers the Know It All, the Year of Living, biblically, the Guinea Pig Diaries, and most recently, It's All Relative. He's the editor at large of Esquire magazine, also contributor to NPR, and he's written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other journals. And we talk about many of the topics he's touched over his career. We talk about his full immersion approach to journalism, the way he performs elaborate experiments on himself. We talk about religion, gossip, polyamory, health advice, how to think about one's past and future selves, the ethics of honesty and what's been called radical honesty, his recent adventures in human genealogy in his new book, its connection to tribalism, and many other topics. And now, without further delay, I bring you AJ jacobs. I am here with AJ. Jacobs. AJ. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. So you are really a unique sort of writer. I mean, I'm sure there are other people who take a similar approach, but I can't name them off the top of my head. You go into each book and to some of your articles more or less determined to perform a very elaborate and sometimes painful psychological experiment on yourself and presumably everyone you care about. We're going to run through some of these topics you've touched, but first, just summarize your approach here and describe your background as a writer. Yeah, as you said, I am a writer and a journalist, and what I like to do is I immerse myself in an idea or lifestyle and then report back what I've learned. So, for instance, I spent a couple of years trying to be the healthiest person alive. I spent another trying to follow all the rules of the Bible as literally as possible. For my new book, I wanted to help build the world family tree, which is a family tree with millions of people all connected, and hopefully soon we'll be all seven and a half billion people on Earth. So, yeah, that's my people call it experiential journalism, immersion journalism, whatever. But it's a good job. It's a fun job. I think we should go through each of these because they're quite different and they're independently interesting. Was your first the year of living biblically? Actually, no. My first was where I decided I was woefully ignorant. I tried to remedy it by reading the encyclopedia from A to Z Encyclopedia Britannica when it still existed in print form. I don't recall. How far did you get? Did you get to Z? Well, yeah, I don't want to spoilers, but yes, I did get to Z. I got to the last word is Ziviach, a town in south central Poland. And how long did that take? That took over a year and a half of reading. About six or 7 hours a day. Was that a painful ordeal mostly, or was it an incredibly enriching guilty pleasure that you were just amazed that you could get paid to do? Where did it fall on the pleasure index? I would say both. At times it was incredibly painful, including for my wife, who started to find me $1 for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation. So she made a lot of money, but at other times it was a pure joy. And actually one of the big takeaways was it did make my life better. And it was partly because reading about the full sweep of human history, it really was clear to me that the good old days were not good at all. They were diseaseridden, violent, sexist, racist, dirty, smelly. So, you know Stephen Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, I sort of saw that through reading the encyclopedia and it just made me, even when I'm feeling down, even just this three word phrase, surgery without anesthesia. Surgery without anesthesia. That brings you back. It really does. So, yeah, it was overall an uplifting experience if not for my wife. And how much would you say stuck? Is there a lasting benefit to it? Do you have a sense of what it did to your mind? I would say I retained less than 1%, although 1% of 33,000 pages is a lot more than I was at before. I wish that I could control what I retain, but I think the human brain is drawn to the bizarre. And for instance, I still remember that the origin of heroin was the Bayer Aspirin company invented heroin as a cough suppressant, and it is actually a very effective cough suppressant, but it turns out it has some other side effects and they had to take it off the market. But they're the ones who named it heroin after heroism. So that's the kind of it has to do with sex, irrelevant fact, for which you'll get fined $1. Yes. If you want me to cut a check right now, I understand. No, I like facts like that, but I do not have to live with you on a daily basis. It's also often forgotten it's amazing what Wikipedia has done to the stature of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but it's often forgotten that some of those articles were really well written. They're famous editions of the Britannica where some of the great intellectuals of the day were writing the articles. I don't know if that persisted until the final edition, but no, but you're right. Early on in the 19 hundreds, you had Cudini writing about magic. You had Freud writing about psychoanalyst psychoanalysis. So it really was the writing was quite literary, so it was beautiful. At the same time, it was also sort of a snapshot into the past because a lot of it was incredibly racist and a lot of it in the first edition, they said that California was quite likely an island. So you do get to see all of the mistakes as well. All right, well, let's go to another book that also has some nice writing in it and some that's not so nice, and it has yet to be superseded fatally by Wikipedia or any other resource, and that is the Bible. So tell me how you hatch this plan to become the most religious person in New York City. Right? All right. Well, yeah, the plan was to follow every rule of the Bible as literally as possible. So I had two motivations for writing this book. The first is that I hoped to expose the absurdity of fundamentalism by becoming the ultimate fundamentalist. So as you know better than me, there are millions of people who say they take the Bible literally, that homosexuality is a sin, that's what the Bible says creationism is true. It seemed clear to me they were not taking the entire Bible literally. They were taking parts. It was very selective literalism, and they were ignoring other parts and cherry picking. So I wanted to show what would it look like if you actually took the entire Bible literally without picking and choosing? So I followed the hundreds of rules that are often ignored. The Bible says you can't shave the corners of your beard. I didn't know where the corners were, so I just grew this massive topiary. I looked like you look like Ted Kaczynski at the height of his bomb making prowess. I definitely had a Kaczynski vibe. The Bible says no wearing mixed fibers, so I know polycotton blends in my closet. Bible says to stone adulterers, so I thought I should try that. I used Pebbles because I didn't want to go to jail for life. But basically I followed everything and I acted like a crazy person, which is what you will do if you take the Bible literally. So that was motivation, number one, to show that fundamentalists are deeply misguided and actually not doing what they say. The second motivation was a little more earnest. I wanted to understand the appeal of religion and see if are there any aspects of religion that can make my life better, because I grew up with no religion at all. I say in the book, I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian, so not very so you were taking just the old Testament or did you extend it to the New Testament? I mostly did the Old because of my Jewish background and because that has most of the laws. But I did dabble in the new. So I did about eight months of old, four months of New. So were you officially a Jew for Jesus at that, for the last third? I suppose so. I did meet with them. They were interesting. Yeah, I met with all sorts of different groups to see how they interpreted the Bible literally. So that was the second motivation, was to see am I missing anything? Were you missing something? Well, let me if I could just back up. And one of the ways I I realized looked at religion, which I found very helpful were the three B's. I think it was a Jewish scholar who first came up with it, that religion is belief, belonging and behavior. So belief in God, belonging to a community and behavior, so encouraging ethical behavior like no stealing or lying or going to a weekly meeting of some sort. So through this project, I did see the appeal of the first of two of those three belonging and behavior. I did see the rituals can be beautiful, like Passover. You get together with your family, eat some food, some of it's good, some of it's disgusting. But I see that as a community, belonging to a community. I think we are as humans, we're built to belong to a community. And there are studies on how people who go to church live longer. And I don't think it's because God likes them better. It's because they have a tight knit group. So I understood more about two of the three. The belief in the supernatural I don't buy, and I don't and I think I was actually a little too easy on supernatural belief in my book. If I were going to write it again, I would come down harder on the dangers of supernatural belief. And that is that the good of religion, because I do think sometimes religion can do good, like the civil rights movement or antislavery, but I think the good of religion can be outweighed by the bad because of these supernatural beliefs can justify just the most horrible behavior. My argument there is always that religion gives people reasons to be good, but it gives them bad reasons where good reasons are actually available, right? And it's like, obviously it's great that some people are inspired to do legitimately good things on the basis of their religious beliefs, but it's a failure of a wider ethical culture and conversation that they have those reasons as opposed to the truly unimpeachable reasons one could have for a civil rights movement or anything else that we would agree is good. And I think the danger is you can take the Bible and then interpret it in a hundred different ways. So it was used not just by abolitionists, but it was used by people in favor of slavery and say it's in the Bible and that Cain's offspring are meant to be slaves. So, yeah, I think that is very dangerous in that sense. But again, I do like the belonging and behavior. So I am one of those who believes some sort of secular church, some sort of secular religion, might be good for our species. So I see how you got the behavior and we should probably talk about specifically what you did and its effect on you. But the belonging part, I would imagine that because the roots of your this experiment were so obvious, that you're basically you're it's not a sincere conversion experience. You're just trying it on for size and trying it on for the purpose of this writing project. These communities that you interacted with, how did people treat you? Were you pretending to be totally sincere for your interactions with them or how did these conversations go? Well, I would say that in terms of sincerity, I do think that I was insincere in trying to learn what the appeal of religion was. And also it got very murky because even if you start something as a lark, if you fully commit to the behavior, then your mind eventually starts to turn. So that was basic cognitive behavioral therapy and cognitive distance. I was acting as a religious person all the time and eventually my mind caught up. It it faded after I stopped. But I've actually found that that can be a very useful tool. There's a great quote by the founder of Habitat for Humanity that says it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. So I would force myself to visit friends in the hospital and I would say, even though I hated going to the hospital and my mind would look around and say, oh, I'm in the hospital. I must be an ethical, compassionate person. And you do that enough and you start to become a little bit better. You hadn't put any of these friends in the hospital by stoning them for working on the Sabbath or anything like that? No. Although I did stone one astrologer as well as an adultery. She did not think it was funny. She was not into it at all. But yes, so I would say there was an earnestness as well as the desire to satirize fundamentalism. It was sort of those two prongs. And it was interesting to see. I spent a lot of time with very religious people who were open to me because I was going in there to try to learn their point of view, even if I disagreed with it. And one of my most interesting trips was going to the Creation Museum. This was right before it opened. And as you know, that's the museum devoted to the idea that young Earth creationism world is 6000 years. Beautifully done. Museum, by the way, millions of dollars. They have beautiful statues of Eve and Adam, although you can't see any of their private parts because that would be sinful. But what struck me there is basically how amazing it is that very intelligent people can believe very foolish ideas. And the amount of mental energy and mental gymnastics that these creationists used to justify their beliefs was astonishing. I mean, I would go they had a whole book in their library about the feasibility of Noah's Arc and it was so detailed and well researched about how the ventilation system would work, how they would get rid of manure and it was an impressive work, but in my opinion it was just an exercise. It was just a crazy use of mental energy. But they were very smart. Yeah, it is interesting. You actually don't have to be irrational across the board to be a religious maniac. You just have to have an initial down payment of irrationality on the basic premise that, say, this single book was dictated by the creator of the universe. But once you believe that, then you can put all of your remaining rationality to work trying to make sense of the text and getting it to square with all the inconvenient facts that come your way from the wider world. Then you can have people who go and get PhDs in biochemistry and view everything they're learning through the lens of how to square it with the Book of Genesis. Right? And that is one of the people I met there was fascinating. He was an astrophysicist and he has spent all his time doing just that. He did believe that the universe was billions of light years across. So how did he square that with the fact that the world was only 6000, the universe was only 6000 years old and he had all these complicated theories involving time travel, but it really was remarkable. I will say that one thing that made me more that I don't know if it softened my heart, but it made me understand a little more why they were so passionate about it, is one of the creationists told me if evolution is true, we all evolve from ponds gum. And how can you have human dignity if we all are just pond scum? And of course, I do believe we evolve from ponschum and I believe that you can have I actually think it's inspiring that we've come so far from pond scum. But not only that, we have a fair amount of pond scum in us still. If you just look at every person's microbiome, the ratio of bacterial cells to human cells in any body is something like ten to one. It's a crazy place to try to hang your human dignity on some sort of fundamental material difference between our species and the rest of nature. Well, that's it. I think that they really want to separate humans from everyone else. There's a lot in religion that's about separation, even kosher, just separating milk and meat, separating ourselves from the philistines. And I view life as more of a spectrum and so I'm okay with having us be on the same spectrum as animals, but they find it hard to retain the dignity. So the challenge is to try to convince them, you know what, you can still have human dignity without a 6000 year old arc. Who were you in dialogue with mostly? Was it mostly ultra Orthodox Jews or did you split your time evenly across a dozen sects? Who did you talk to? And I can imagine that even among the Orthodox Jews you spoke with, your orientation wasn't exactly what they would recommend, or was it correct? Yeah, I tried to spread myself around to at least a dozen. So the Evangelical Christians and the Jehovah's Witnesses. By the way, I might be the only person who boarded Jehovah's Witness, who out Bible, talked to Jehovah's Witness. He came to my house and after 3 hours he was like, all right, I've had enough. Thank you, Jews. But I also had more progressive rabbis and ministers talking to me. And yeah, you're right about the Hasidic. Jews don't actually follow the Bible literally. As you know, they have the oral law, which is the Talmud. So something in the Bible, for instance, it says that Leviticus, you should not boil a baby goat in its mother's milk. So if you're taking the Bible literally, I just had to avoid boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk for a year, which I was able to do. But very Orthodox Jews have it's been interpreted over the years and widened and widened to mean do not have milk and meat at the same time. So that's where you get no cheeseburgers. So it is actually not. It's an offshoot of Judaism called caraite. Judaism does try to follow the Bible literally, but they are seen as sort of heretics what was the most surprising or a few of the most surprising changes in your outlook born of adopting the mere behavior by rote? Well, I would say yeah, I did become slightly more compassionate. One thing that was I tried to avoid gossiping and that can be defined in various ways, but I just tried to cut out any negative talk about anyone and it was actually a remarkable experience because I did feel a little bit better about humanity. And the way I think it might have happened is my brain. I would start to form a negative thought about someone and my brain would sort of kick in and say, you know what, this thought will never be expressed. Let's not even follow through on it because it's a waste of energy. So I had fewer negative thoughts and made my life better. I will say, I mean, I still gossip all the time because I'm human, but I do think I gossip maybe 30% less than I used to. Right gossip is very interesting and there's a similar rule in Buddhism the whole doctrine of right speech and gossip is one of the forms of speech that is considered just not useful for building a mind and a life that you want to inhabit. I'm sensitive to the character of my own gossip and I'm kind of of two minds about gossip because on one level you you can feel what's wrong with it. If you're all sensitive to this you can immediately feel what's wrong with it because if you're talking about people behind their back, one if you're sort of trading in negative stories about them especially for their entertainment value, you can see how you're sort of just kind of dining out on the on the misfortunes of others. And also you're introducing into the conversation with the people you're gossiping with this rarely acknowledged fact, which is you are showing yourself to be the kind of person who will talk about his or her friends in their absence. This can be as stark as one friend getting up from the table to go to the bathroom and the remaining friends talking about him or her in his or her absence in a way that wouldn't survive that person's company without some problem. And so everyone is drawing from that experience. The message again, almost never acknowledged that you're the sorts of friends who will dish about one another in the other's absence and it just creates a fundamental lack of trust, often unacknowledged. The rule I've set for myself is not really a non gossip rule but I really try to be aware of how I'm talking about other people and I make every effort to only speak about them in a way that I would be comfortable with them overhearing. I tend never to say something about a person that I wouldn't say to his or her face and in many cases that I haven't said to his or her face. And again, it's hard to be perfect here because sometimes you're caught up in the moment where you're in dialogue with other people who are not at all following that kind of standard and it's kind of pushing your orientation around. But it's very useful to look at because we'll talk about dishonesty too because I know you've touched that topic. But gossip can be really corrosive. Although I guess the flip side of it is and this is where I don't totally align with the Buddhist view that gossip is just bad, it does serve a social function in the need that everyone feels to manage their reputation. If reputation management were not a problem, the door to hell is sort of kicked open in the sense that you now have totally shameless people willing to do more or less anything because they just have no concern about their reputations. And on some level we have a new president who fits that mold. I guess he thinks he cares about his reputation, but he's someone who on some level just wants to be talked about. He doesn't really care in what vein. And it's probably better for society that people can still be humiliated or embarrassed by trespassing various norms. Right, yeah, I agree with you. I think you do need some gossip. But it has to be the right kind of gossip. If there's a publisher I know and you're in talks with him, but I know that that publisher is a horrible person who lies and cheats and doesn't pay. That's the kind of gossip that I think is instructive. But a lot of gossip is just, as you say, like a Roman Holiday, just pure joy in other people's pain. And that is not a good way to go. I actually just learned this is a little sideline, but I learned for one of my books I spent some time with the polyamory community. I'm not polyamorous myself, but they had an interesting emotion that they call compersion polyamory is an open relationship, or polyamory also conveys some implication of bisexuality? No, it's just ethical non monogamy, so it could be in any formation. Wasn't that part of the Bible experiment? You're absolutely right. I actually brought it up to my wife. David had twelve wives, solomon had 700. I actually talked to well, let's split the difference. Yeah, actually, that sounds exhausting. I really don't relish that idea. But I did talk to, during my year of living biblically, the head of the Polygamy Association of America, who is very religious and had just this argument that in the Old Testament all these men had wives. And he actually had I said, it's an interesting idea, how do I do it? Practically. And he had some very specific advice. He said I should go out, marry the second woman, come back to my wife and tell her it's fate accompli and then it's more likely that she'll accept it. So just pure insanity. That would have been a good article, though I think your editor at Esquire might have signed off on that one. Yeah, it would have been a good article at the end of my marriage. But yeah, if I were committed. But they talk about composition, which is happiness at other people's happiness. So being joyful when your partner has sexual relations with another person and I love the idea. I cannot imagine experiencing compersion whenever I think about my wife with another guy. Is this a neologism of the polyamory community or is this a word that I haven't yet read in The OED? I had never heard it, so I think it might be, but maybe there's some precedent for it. But I thought it was a really interesting idea. And their argument is just try to think about if you love someone and your wife goes out and has a really great meal at a restaurant. You would be happy for it even if you're not there and you take that to the extreme and you should be happy if she has a vibrant sex life with someone else and it's an interesting idea, I cannot do it myself, but maybe the world would be better if he could. It is a pretty Buddhist idea as well, the Buddhist term for that attitude. It's rarely thought of in the context of extramarital sex, but the name for the mental state of being happy, being made happy by the joy of others, is sympathetic joy. I like that it's more or less the way love feels in the presence of another person's joy. When you're in the presence of another person's suffering, you feel compassion. But to be made happy by the smile of someone you love is obviously an experience we all share. And then to extend that to all possible reasons why she could be smiling seems like a fairly heroic act, given the level of jealousy many people feel, because I do think Shot and Freud is one of the worst emotions out there. Have you been able to cultivate this sympathetic compassion in yourself? Yeah, but it's just there are conditions where it comes up against something else you seem to really care about, like something like monogamy. But yeah, I can understand it even in that context. Just imagine if you had some terminal diagnosis, right, and just what sort of person would you be if you found out you had six months to live and now you're having to envision your your wife's life going on for decades after you and do you have children? So you have your picture and your wife and your children living long lives after you're gone. Then what do you hope for her in that context? Do you hope that she meets some man who she's happy with and who's a great stepfather to your children? It's pretty easy for me to get there, and obviously I don't want to think about that happening, I wouldn't be made happy by this happening. But it's pretty obvious to me that should I find myself in that situation, the only rational and decent ethical commitment is to want my wife and children to be as happy as possible going forward and not be made needlessly miserable by my absence. Well, I think that is one advantage of not believing in an afterlife or a soul, is that since I believe that when the lights are out, the lights are out, what happens after that has absolutely no impact on my joy or pain. So I've actually given some thought to this and I told my wife at my funeral, it's totally up to you. Even better crowdsource it, ask what people would want. Do they want a speech? Do they want just drink whatever they want? Whatever would give them the most happiness is what you should do. Yeah, well, we need not take this in a morbid direction. Presumably you and I are both healthy enough for the moment to. Be jealous husbands. And on the topic of health, if there's more to say about the biblical experiment, I want to say it, but I do want to touch your experiments in health as well, because obviously that's of interest to every person who does not want to die. Yeah, so that one came about because I did not want to die, as you say, and I I was pretty unhealthy for most of my life. I sort of saw my body as a way to carry my brain around. I didn't give much thought to it. I wasn't traditionally fat. I was more what they call skinny fat. So my body looked like sort of a snake that swallowed a goat. But I wanted to I think there's a lot to being healthy and the links between health and emotions and brain. So even if I was just doing it for a better mental state, it was important. So I decided to do a similar project to the Bible, where I wrote down hundreds of pieces of health advice, and I tried to follow them all. So I revamped every part of my life my exercise regimen, my diet, the way I slept, my sex life, the way I went to the bathroom. There was the whole idea that our paleolithic floor parents were squatters, not sitters. So I did everything possible. It was supposed to be a year, but I was so out of shape, it took me too. And it was a really interesting experiment, and it did change my life somewhat. And it also made me realize, did you measure the change in terms of body fat and blood work and all that? I did. Part of it was being aligned with the quantified self movement, which Kevin Kelly, your former guest, was part of. And yeah, so I definitely went in all the right directions. I did feel better, but I also discovered just the shocking amount of bunkum and quackery in the health world that might have been the most useful takeaway, actually, is just this being able to spot a little better the absurdities that are passed off as science. So if you had to summarize your beliefs now about the best health advice, how would you say someone should live so as to cheat death most reliably? Well, I think one of the lessons was that I could pretty much summarize it in a paragraph or two. They wanted me to write a health column for Esquire, and I was like, all right, but it'll be the same two paragraphs pretty much every month. I'm not sure anyone will want to pay attention, but the basic idea is very simple. Move more, eat less. And when you do eat, eat real food. I do believe that processed carbs are some of the worst. I think there's a lot of evidence for that. Don't smoke, get a lot of sleep. There's increasing evidence how important that is. It affects everything from job performance, to driving to your IQ the day after. And don't hit yourself in the forehead with an ax. It's really quite basic. But there are millions of people trying to make money by selling some sort of secret, and Goop is perhaps the biggest violator that comes to mind. Gooping? Gwyneth Paltrow's Company, right? With the insanity that they try to peddle. And Dr. Oz, I've actually been on his show, and I like him as a person, and I think he's probably a great heart doctor from all I've heard. But he kind of ran out of things to say. He ran out of real advice, and he got into the whole I don't know if he's done homeopathy, but he's done a lot like that. He was now we can get into gossip mode, but I'm pretty sure I won't say anything about him that I wouldn't say to him on this podcast. Was he prosecuted for something he touted that turned out to be purely fictitious? Oh, I wish I knew. I can I think that there was there was something, but he has sort of gone down the path of recommending miracle berries or something that that lead to fat loss or something unseemly for a real doctor. So as far as the dietary advice, where did your research take you on the question of eating meat versus being a vegetarian versus being a vegan? Well, I am actually a vegetarian, but for ethical reasons more than health, as far as I can tell. And this gets to basic epistemological concerns because I think people like Gary Tauves, who I quoted in my book, are very smart, and he's very much into the idea that the Cholesterol hypothesis is wrong, and he's sort of an advocate of the low carb movement. So you've got Gary Tau's and the low carb movement on one end of the spectrum, and then you've got books like The China Diet on the other, which say that eating purely vegan is the way to a long life, from what I can tell. It seems to me that the mostly plants does at this point have the most evidence, scientific evidence behind it. I know that Gary and many of his folks will disagree with that, but one thing that they both agree on is that processed carbs are terrible for you. So staying away from processed carbs and just eating real food, even if they both agree that it should be real food. So whether that's real meat or real vegetables. But it basically got to the idea. I did not have the time to spend three years like Gary investigating whether the Cholesterol hypothesis was true. And I think he's very smart. But for me, in terms of health, I like to think of it as almost like the rotten tomatoes model for deciding what's healthy, because you can always find an outlier who says bacon is good for you. You should eat bacon three times. There are just so many quacks with great academic pedigree who will say the craziest things. So you've got to look at the meta studies and the meta meta studies and you've got to so, for me, it's looking at what 100 reputable scientists say and sort of taking the middle of what they say, the rotten tomatoes approach. So if 80% say that it is mostly plants that has the most evidence now, I'm going to go with that. Yeah, it's quite humbling from a scientific perspective, how little consensus there is on some very basic questions about diet. So I had Gary on the podcast, and it's amazing what happens when you touch this topic. I thought I knew what it was to hit whatever third rail I hadn't yet hit as a topic of controversy. But now I get Gary's hate mail and it's amazing how energized people are around, prepared for one. I don't know how hard it comes in the other direction. There's a vegan mafia out there that will hate you if you dignify the claim that eating some meat is probably healthier than eating none. I do want to define health, because I do think there's a lot of evidence that a very low carb diet, high protein diet, will help you lose weight in a shorter period of time. What I don't think that there's a lot of evidence on is that this will make your lifespan longer. And since I'm married and sadly, I don't care as much about my waistline as I should, I'm more interested in the lifespan, which I know is linked to obesity. But it's not the same. Yeah, but it is amazing that I think the only totally uncontroversial statement about diet that can be made now, the statement about which everyone will nod their head, in a sense, is that eating less sugar is generally a good idea. No one's advocating that you eat more sugar, as in more food with added sucrose. And that's pretty much where consensus ends. True. Yeah. I mean, even salt, is there a clear consensus on that? Yeah. I will say, in terms of diet, I am very excited for clean meat and lab grown meat. I think that could be a huge game changer ethically, that feels like the lever that would move the world if we can build it and pull it hard enough. Because just to take suffering animals out of the equation entirely and yet allow everyone to eat meat if they want it, that would be huge. Although I guess there is an interesting ethical wrinkle there, where if you imagine that the lives of farm animals or some class of farm animals are better than no life at all. Right. So if you imagine that it's possible to give farm animals even raised for slaughter or raised to produce milk, if it's possible to give them lives worth living that are better than nonexistent in the first place, well, then canceling this industry by finding some technological workaround to produce meat and milk without animals is a net negative from that point of view. But I would say that from what I understand, the life of the average industrial farmed animal is not worth living. That the pain outweighs the pleasure. So that if we are able to do cultured meat, then we can sure, we can have a bunch of cows having a wonderful life and outside of the factory farms. I'm excited because it also opens up. You don't have to just eat cow meat or chicken meat, you can eat rhinoceros meat or any endangered species and ivies. And there's a friend of mine who wrote a book about this and there's talk of ethical cannibalism. Right? I was going to suggest your next book topic could be The Cannibal Diet. If anyone wants to eat me, I am pleased to offer up myself. If we can recover some DNA from the shards of the cross, you can eat the body of Jesus for real. There you go. So is there anything that you are doing now that you weren't doing before that book? That is, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am here with David Miliband. David, thanks for joining me. Thank you, Sam. Thanks for having me. So there's so much to talk about and I'm really happy to have you on the podcast. Let's just start with your background. How is it that you come to know many of the things you will obviously know as we get rolling here? What have you been up to? Well, you know that British people don't like talking about themselves, but here goes. I'm proud to be the President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee. It's an extraordinary American organization founded by Albert Einstein, a refugee in New York in the 1930s. He founded the International Rescue Committee to rescue Jews from Europe. Our first employee variant, Fry, ployed to Marseille in 1940 and helped issue 2000 passports, fake passports that helped Jews predominantly, but also intellectuals escaped from occupied France. People like Mark Shagal made it to the US because of the extraordinary heroism and ingenuity of Barry and Fry. And today the organization is an international humanitarian agency working in war zones and for internally displaced and for refugees around the world. And also the largest refugee resettlement agency in the United States. Albeit there are very few refugees coming into the United States at the moment. No doubt we'll talk about that. I suppose one question that your listeners might be thinking is, well, how did a guy with an accent that's more British than Brooklyn get to be the President CEO of the International Rescue Committee? And I think that backdrop is that I've been in British politics and government for 25 years. In the 1990s, I was part of the project led by people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who became Prime Minister. I was part of the project to turn the British Labor Party from an election losing machine. We'd lost four elections on the Trop. 7983-8792 people ask Must Labor lose? Question mark? After the 1992 election, we were determined to rebuild a progressive party, a party of the center left that could win elections. And I'd then been fortunate enough to be involved both on the policy side in the run up to 2001 and then in 2001, I was elected as a Member of Parliament for South Shields, which is an ex shipbuilding, ex mining constituency in the northeast of England. I was proud to be the Member of Parliament for, for twelve years until 13. And in the was in government I was Minister for Schools. For three years, I was Secretary of State for the Environment. Time when we legislated for the world's first emissions reduction requirements for 40 50 years hence, we bound the hands of future British Parliament. And between 2007 and 2010, I had the extraordinary honor of being the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the 74th century of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of the UK, representing the country around the world. And I'd spent my time in diplomacy looking at global geopolitics, obviously, but we were in opposition in 2010. I'd lost the leadership race for the Labor Party in 2010. And so I felt a frustration that while I was proud to serve my constituents, I felt that I had more to give and more to do. And the International Rescue Committee offered me the chance to try and address some really tough issues in global policy. How do you get aid into Syria? How do you get education into Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan? How do you tackle sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo? And I felt that the IRC was a bit of a sleeping giant and it had a chance to become a great organization. And I suppose one other point that's relevant and that I've learned, I think, as I get older, is more important. Both of my parents were refugees. My dad was a refugee from Belgium to the UK in 1940. My mom spent the war in Poland, came as a twelve year old in 1946 on her own. She was put on a boat by her mother. Her father had been killed in a concentration camp, and they're both Jewish. My mum and dad and my mum came to the UK in 1946. And if Britain had not admitted refugees in the 1940s and 50s, then I sure as nightfall as day, I wouldn't be here today. And so, in some way, working for an organization that was committed to helping people whose lives are shattered by conflict and disaster was a way of closing a circle, if you like, and putting back something that related to my own history, albeit in very different circumstances in the 21st century. Well, so you're obviously well placed to speak about many of the things that interest me here. I want to talk about the Pandemic and our inept response to it, the especially inept response in the United States, and what I certainly perceive to be America's loss of stature in the world. And we can talk about the reasons for that, and you seem to be in a great position to triangulate on our circumstance and view us both from inside and outside the US. I want to talk about that, but let's speak about the IRC for a bit here, because I want people to understand what it does and I want to talk a little bit about the politics and ethics around just philanthropy and the way we think about refugees and humanitarian aid generally. First, how would you differentiate if, in fact, there is daylight between what the IRC does and some other groups? I know that the UN. Has its own refugee efforts, which I've supported in the past. There's obviously medicine, stone, frontier, doctors without borders that does medical work in similar conditions. The red cross, save the children. People know about many of these organizations. Where does IRC fit in that pantheon of people doing good in the world at considerable risk and expense, and frankly, without the kind of plaudits, certainly in mainstream conversation, that you would expect all these groups to have? Yes, it's interesting, but it's a confusing picture. We are a non governmental organization. So the first point is we're different from the UN. Because we are independent. We are adhering to the humanitarian principles of independence and neutrality and impartiality, but we're not a government agency. I think there are three or four ways that make the IRC the international rescue committee unique, distinctive. One is that we're not a generalized antipoverty agency. We're focused on people whose lives are shattered by conflict and disaster. We're focused on people who are in war zones, people who are internally displaced in their own countries, people who are refugees. And I'll come back and explain a bit about the differences. And we're focused on people who start new lives in countries like the United states or germany. We work across the arc of crisis. We work in about 35 to 40 countries, not the 120 countries that the anti poverty agencies would work in. We're defined by our origins in that way. And when I arrived, we defined ourselves as helping refugees and others. I thought that wasn't I wouldn't have wanted to be an other. I thought we had to do a better job of defining who we were and who we served. And we settled on this phrase that we help people whose lives are shattered by conflict or is asked to survive, recover, and gain control of their lives. And so the first point is that we have a focus. We're not trying to do everything. The second thing that I think makes the organization unusual is that it's both an international humanitarian aid agency in 200 field sites around the world, 35 to 40 countries, 13,000 employees now, and 17,000 auxiliary workers, many of whom are refugees and displaced people themselves. But we're also a refugee resettlement agency in 25 us. Cities. We're the largest refugee resettlement agency in the US. The US. Has historically been a leader in helping the most vulnerable refugees restart their lives in a new country. Interestingly, ronald reagan was the president who admitted the most refugees in the early 1980s, many from south vietnam. 210,000 a year. And under the trump administration, the bipartisan support for refugee entry into the US. Has been slashed by about three quarters. But we are unusual. We're distinctive as an organization because we're both an international humanitarian aid agency. We're a global agency in that sense, but we're also us focused through our 25 cities. The third thing that I think makes us different is the focus on research and evidence. We talk a lot about impact. We spend a lot of time trying to document best practice. We say all of our programs must be evidence based or evidence generating. And we're now the largest research agency in the humanitarian sector. If you want to study crisis, the plurality of impact evaluations are done by the International Rescue Committee and its partners. I suppose that the fourth element of this and that people often ask about is how does the organization recruit and work? And about 95% of our staff are hired locally in the places that we work. So inside Syria, we've got 800 staff across the country and in two main areas, northeast and northwest. And and that pattern of local recruitment adds to our credibility. It adds to our local expertise, frankly, adds to our security. And so maybe just to put some flesh on the bones of this, just to give you a sense, at the moment, we know that there are wars and conflicts taking place in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo. The most likely consequence of a civil war is another civil war. That's why I talk about the crisis of diplomacy, internal displacement that's people who have had to flee their own homes but stay within their own country. And in Syria, to take that as an example, there are about seven to 8 million internally displaced. Globally. There are 45 million internally displaced. Then a refugee is someone who is forced from their home not for economic reasons, but for political or conflict reasons, and lands in the next door or other country. And at the moment, there are about 29 and a half 30 million refugees. If you're a refugee who's crossed the border into a neighboring state or another state, and you are claiming refugee status but haven't yet received it, you're an asylum seeker. So there are about three and a half, 4 million of those. If you tally those numbers up, it's 80 million people. So for the first time since records began in the 1940s with the foundation of the UN, more than 1% of the world's population are now forced from their homes by conflict and violence separate from economic migration. These are people who are forcibly displaced. And so that's the kind of picture of who we are and where we work. The final part of the the jigsaw is we're one of the implementing agencies. We're funded in the main. Three quarters of our funding comes from governments. Our budget is about $850,000,000 this year. Three quarters of our funding comes from government, 25% from the private individuals, foundations, and corporations. And that's changed over the last five or six years that I've been at the IRC. In that period, our budget is more or less doubled, and the amount of private funding has also doubled in percentage of the total. But we're still partnering with US government, EU governments, et cetera, predominantly Western governments, although some governments in the Middle East. But we're also increasingly reliant on our private supporters. And we fit into the framework of humanitarian aid by working with UN agencies, working with host governments where they allow that, but always saying that it's the needs of the clients who drive us. Let's talk about the ethics and the politics around this because frankly, we don't speak or think about refugees very much unless there's some real obvious crisis or a crisis that for whatever reason gets our attention. Maybe there's always a crisis and we just avert our eyes at a certain point. But the time when this was really being talked about a lot as a phenomenon was during the height of the Syrian civil war and the refugee crisis, so called refugee crisis in Europe in particular, and Trump's messaging around this issue captured a lot of attention in our local US. Politics. There's so much here that's confusing and becomes fodder for cynicism in the end that I think it would be good to just try to, however, patiently try to unpick some of these variables here. So, for instance, from my point of view, it just seems to me that we have a responsibility in the developed world to recognize that it's through no genius of our own that we weren't born in Syria, in the middle of a civil war that no one can take responsibility for the good luck for not having been born in Syria ten years ago, say. Yeah. And therefore it is surely a matter of luck that you and I and or anyone listening to this hasn't found himself or herself and their children to be in dire need of rescue from some hellscape of a failed state. So once you admit that, we can leave aside whether or not a person's agency should factor into this moral calculus. But there really is just no agency in play here. It's just a sheer disparity in luck and those of us who find ourselves to be among the luckiest people who have ever lived living in reasonably stable societies with a level of abundance that would be unimaginable in at least a quarter of the world. We have a responsibility to help people who are objectively among the least lucky people on earth at the moment. These are people living in poor, disease ridden, and now conflict ribbon spots on the earth where life has become completely unlivable. And yet what happened, certainly in the case of the Syrian diaspora, is political controversies around just what Angela Merkel did, kind of opening the doors in a fairly sudden and unmitigated way to a flood of people, some of whom were clearly refugees. But some, upon even minimal analysis, revealed themselves to be economic migrants. And so that was the first failure of distinction that made many people very alarmed and closed the door to what would otherwise have been a humanitarian response in many of them. And it amplified right wing populism, which obviously if you go far enough to the right, you have people who just don't care about refugees at all. But there were certainly people in the middle who want to help but recognize that you can't just have an open borders policy, right? There has to be some criteria by which you admit people into your society because if you have a great social safety net, it simply cannot absorb all the needy people on Earth in any given state. So there has to be some filter. And a failure to distinguish between refugees and economic migrants seemed pretty important and seems like it will always be important at least to know who you're admitting. But in response to that right wing response, both the extreme version and the reasonable version, one then encountered a left wing response which seemed to grade fairly directly into a kind of open borders ethical argument, which is you have no right to maintain anything about your society in the face of this need. Just rarely put that starkly. But you find yourself in arguing for anything like a sane policy. You find yourself on a slippery slope where there is no handhold. And we just have to allow all of humanity to equilibriate by osmosis such that in the limit there'd be no reason to come to New York or La. Or San Francisco or London because the quality of life there would be reduced to whatever the common denominator would be for the entire planet. And no one's, no taxpayer in any of those cities is going to sign on to that. Let's just start with look, I think that react to this initial concern. Yeah, there's a good deal to unpack there and I think it's worth unpacking. And if I may, I think we should unpack three things because I think they do play into the debate. One is exactly the point you make, which is are these people real refugees or are they not? There's a second and third which I'd just like to touch on, which I think does speak to the popular and political reaction around this second is around security and are they properly vetted? Which was a big issue in the US. Yeah. And the third is do is their control of our borders. Which speaks to your point. And if I may, I'll just address all three because I think it's really important if you want to defend the rights of refugees that you take head on the points that are made when they are reasonable point. So the first point is how can you tell what's the definition and how can you tell the 1951 Refugee Convention transposed into us law in 1980 in the Refugee Act talks about a well founded fear of persecution. And what that means is, is it safe for the person to go home? And sometimes that can be told by where they're from. So it's not safe to send a Yazidi back to north northwestern Iraq, for obvious reasons. They've been chased out. It's not safe to send a Muslim back to Burma, Myanmar, because they've been ethnically cleansed out of there. It's not safe to send a Sunni young man back to Syria, but he's going to be persecuted by the Assad regime. And my point to people is to say we have now over 70 years since the passage of the Refugee Convention, a well founded, organized ways of treating each case and assessing them. And there's a good example in Germany, you mentioned Germany. Angela Merkel said she would assess the claims. That turned out to be one and a half, one and three quarter million asylum seekers tried to claim asylum in Germany. And every case was addressed. And at the beginning, it was more or less 50 50. Then it became 70 30 who were being admitted. Now it's more like 40% who are admitted, 60% who are not. And so the system can work. It then becomes difficult. Just in all transparency, there are then difficulties, and the Germans have faced this difficulties, and then saying, well, if you failed your asylum application and you're from Niger or you're from Mali, it may be hard to get them back. But nonetheless, I think the philosophical point, and I run an agency that is the largest refugee resettlement agency in America, we say very clearly there should be a test, and if you pass, you should be effectively integrated into the society that you've come to. And if you don't, then you can't stay. And what we can point to is parts of the world that do this well in America, it's not being done well at the moment. If you come and claim asylum in America in February, before the COVID pandemic started, it would be three or four years before your case was actually seen in the immigration court. So the first thing is it's a reasonable thing for you to say, can there be a system that works? And my answer to that is yes, and it can evolve. So, for example, 70 years ago, if you were a woman suffering domestic violence in El Salvador, and you fled and claimed asylum, it wouldn't have recognized your claim. Today, it can recognize your claim, and your case law has built that up. If it's okay with you, can I just deal with the other two points? Yeah, that'd be great, because I think they're relevant. Look, there's a security point as well, which is to say, well, how do you know these people are safe? Who chooses them? And we went through this in inordinate detail, because refugee the granting of resettlement or refugee status is important. We support I support effective security vetting. The truth is, it's tougher to get into America as a refugee than under any other route, a tourist, a student, or anything else. The vetting process takes 18 to 24 months. The UN defines the most vulnerable, but then it's US agencies, US officials who do the vetting. And some of the most tragic stories I've had are people who worked with the US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, who were promised yeah. That by working for the US military or diplomats putting themselves at risk of reprisals, we employ some of these people. They would then be given haven. Now, there are 100,000 Iraqis who are still waiting to be able to exercise that right to come and resettle in the US. And they've been literally standing, sitting next to senior American military, diplomats, et cetera, and yet they're still caught up in the system. So I would say on the security front, there can be proper vetting. The third element, which was perhaps bigger in the European debate than in the US debate, but it's part of the US debate is, well, hang on, what kind of controls are there at the border? And in Europe, in 20, 15, 16, there wasn't an entry exit system where everyone arriving was properly docketed, properly noted, and properly registered. Now there is everyone entering and exiting the European Union. The 27 does get properly registered and vetted. And I think that if the politics of the refugee issue goes wrong, it goes wrong on one of those three grounds. And it's very important that those people who are willing to have a fact based argument on those three grounds have that fact based argument, which I think it's a winnable argument. And interestingly enough, actually, if you look at the latest polling in America, it does wax and wane. But it's popped up again, the number of Americans, 60, 70% now, who are saying they recognize that if you're a victim of war in, for example, Syria, you should be allowed to take refuge here and say it's a historic American tradition. Yeah. Yeah. So now how do you decide whether it's wise to resettle people in a country like America versus in a country bordering a conflict? You take Turkey or Lebanon. Yeah, it's not our choice. We're a refugee resettlement agency. In the end, it's the US government who decides. But here's something that I think is really important. Where people like me in our organization, we need to do a bigger and better job. There are a lot of myths associated with the refugee issue. One myth is that most refugees are in rich countries, and in fact, it's completely untrue. 86% of the world's refugees are in poor and lower middle income countries. They are in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. If they're from South Sudan, they're in Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia. If they're from Somalia, they're in Kenya. If they're from Burma. Myanmar? They are in Bangladesh. And the number of refugees in America or Europe is actually pretty low by comparison. It's a myth. And it's also a myth, by the way, that they're mainly in camps. Most 60% of refugees are in urban areas now, not in camps. And the biggest myth, in a way, the most damaging one, is that, well, look, all they need to do is survive for a few months or a few years, and they go home. The truth is, less than 3% of the world's refugees went home last year because the wars keep burning. And you just say the list afghanistan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, syria now in its 10th year, and the figures are disputed, and the figures are not great, but we're talking about multigenerational displacement of a kind that we've never known. Because while the world has a history of wars between states, what we're suffering from at the moment is wars within states, civil wars, depending on how you classify the India China standoff at the moment. There are no hot wars between states at the moment, but there are 1520 countries who are spilling out significant numbers of refugees because of implosion at home. And that is a new phenomenon for which the tools of diplomacy that I used to be involved with, for the British government, are not well suited, because the record of helping peace building and peace making in countries of civil war is not a good one. Yeah, it really is a circumstance where we've drawn lessons that just can't be integrated into any political or behavioral plan. So you take Syria and Afghanistan by turns. We intervened in Afghanistan, and that's we being the United States, and that is now our longest war in history. And I'm reasonably sure that once the last American soldier leaves, we will feel that that was a pointless and ultimately masochistic exercise in nation building. But we are also chastised for having done nothing about Syria, although had we gone into Syria, many would have been outraged that we hadn't learned the lesson of Afghanistan. You really are damned if you do, damned if you don't. And mere diplomacy, not sending troops of any kind, seems, in many cases, totally ineffectual. What has diplomacy done for the Palestinian Israeli conflict that has simmered now for at least 50 years? And many of these things, as you know, just rage out of sight and out of mind. So you take something like Yemen. I know in the abstract that Yemen is a terrible place to be right now. I was there last year, and we've got 800 people working there. It's the world's largest 24 million people in humanitarian need. And so you're right to raise it as a terrible failure of diplomacy as well as misbegotten military strategy. So what could we do, given our experience in Afghanistan and elsewhere, given our experience of avoiding conflict in Syria? And we had Obama's red line, which Assad quickly crossed, revealing us to be some kind of paper tiger or at least an exhausted superpower. What to do? I mean, if you were in control right now, if you could just pull the levers of diplomacy or military intervention or strong arming our allies and adverse areas, you take the Saudis involvement in Yemen. What do you think the US. Should do. Or the US. Should attempt to get its allies to collaborate on? Well, look, it's an important and a good question, and the first thing to recognize is that there are different cases from Afghanistan. America faced a threat to its own homeland. Syria doesn't represent that, and Yemen represents the meltdown of Yemen represents a threat to an American ally, although there is now a debate in America about the extent to which Saudi Arabia should be seen as an ally. So I want to say that I recognize the differences, but I want to also try and say that there are some common elements, and I don't want to sound glib, because these are very, very difficult issues, but I think there are some common elements of learning that we can say. The first is that without a clear view of the political settlement in a country, the political compromises between different religious or ethnic or geographic groups, without a vision of the political settlement, no military strategy, no development strategy, no diplomatic strategy will work. That's a common lesson from all of the conflicts that you have mentioned, and you can add Iraq to that. That essentially civil war is the failure of politics by other means. It's not the continuation of politics, as Klaus Witz said, it's the failure of politics, and it's the failure to build political institutions that can forge compromise and share spoils. So that's, I think, the first warning. The second point is that unless you are willing to put assets in play and they don't have to be military assets, they could be economic assets, unless you're willing to exercise leverage, then diplomacy on its own is not going to work. I think Frederick the Great said that diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments. And this applies not just to military, but to economic and other political pressure. If you're not willing if you don't want to put pressure on Saudi Arabia in respect of Yemen, then they're not going to take any notice of you. And so I think there's a question of priority and interest, frankly. President Trump has inaugurated what Richard Has of the Council on Foreign Relations calls the Withdrawal Doctrine, which is essentially that you get out of everything, and you don't accept the argument that the world is interdependent, and you assert that America can prosper through its own means, and it doesn't need to get its hand in the mangle. So the second, I think, common element is that unless you're willing to put skin in the game of different kinds, then it won't work. The third element of this from the conflicts that. You mentioned is that these civil wars and one could add civil conflicts, one can add others is that unless you think about the region as well as about the country concerned, you're not going to be able to forge a conclusion. I came to this studying the Afghan issue very closely. I went to Afghanistan for the first time in 2007. As it happened, I was there for the funeral of the last king of Afghanistan. So here Shah, July 2007. Afghans from all across the country, and frankly, all across the world gathered, but so did the region. And it came home to me so strongly that there could be no Afghan settlement without a regional settlement. And frankly, that applies in other parts of the world as well. So the diplomacy is not just bilateral, nation to nation. It's also got to include the rest of the region. Now, if you just take those first three principles and start applying them, actually, American power works. I mean, if you listen, if you think about Yemen, the world's largest humanitarian crisis, bruce Ridell, Brookings Institution, formerly an American government, outstanding scholar of the Yemen catastrophe, he says, look, if America put down his foot and said to Saudi Arabia, you must stop this war tomorrow, because it's a misbegotten military strategy that is actually strengthening Iran, not weakening it. It's creating space for al Qaeda rather than reducing it. And America is willing to put its assets on the line to ensure that happened. Bruce Reddell will tell you it would happen tomorrow. And I don't want to oversimplify this, because stopping the fighting is not just a matter of what the Saudis do in Yemen. It's also a matter of what the Houthis do, and the Houthis are backed by the Iranians. But the strategy of the Saudi led coalition, which I'm sorry to say, the US. And the UK have signed up to, is a misbegotten military strategy. And there's a danger that America underestimates its power and mislearns the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, which I think are painful, incredibly painful. Not I wouldn't say pointless. You said that we'll look back on Afghanistan is pointless. If you're an Afghan, you wouldn't say it was pointless. But I know what you're saying. The price has been very high indeed. Well, I guess I would add to the picture of pointlessness the prospect that in the end, wherever we recognize the end to be, we may just see a resurgence of the Taliban and a return to something like the status quo circa 2000. You may, and many Afghans would fear that, especially female Afghans. But the American national interest would say, the big question is not ended by the question of the Taliban. The big question for America's strategic interest is whether Afghanistan is a source of threat to the wider world by providing a haven for al Qaeda and or others. But I take the point, your point about the progress, but it didn't start as a nation building process. But my point in answer to your question is that we need to create a new kind of diplomacy. I was the Secretary of State in the UK. Diplomacy was in a transitional period because this question of the civil wars that were threats to regional peace and security was emerging because of the failings in Iraq and Afghanistan. And what we face now is a true crisis of diplomacy. It's not just that wars are continuing. We are living through what I call an age of impunity. And I get I'm sorry. I apologize. I don't know if I need to apologize, but I get passionate about this because, literally, international rescue Communities staff running an ambulance in northwest Afghanistan get bombed by their own government and by the Russians. That is the age of impunity. The fact that 70% of people who die in war today are civilians in urban areas is the age of impunity. The fact that aid workers are killed in higher numbers is the age of impunity. The fact that military commanders in Yemen, where a coachload of children were bombed by the Saudi led coalition in Syria, never mind what non state organization the fact that military commanders think they can get away with anything means they do everything. They do everything beyond the limits that we thought we'd established after the Second World War. Chemical weapons they get used. Bombing of civilians that gets used. Cluster munitions that gets used. That is the age of impunity. And my point is that the retreat of countries like the US. For all of the failings, for all of the mistakes, for all of the dangers of thinking in an American centric or Eurocentric way, when countries that formally are committed to human rights and to the accountability of power, when they retreat from the global stage and remember my own countries in retreat as well, exemplified by Brexit. When those countries retreat, for all their failings, the bar for the legitimate exercise of power goes down and the tendency for power to be abused goes up. And that's what we're seeing in the war zones, the conflict zones around the world, both in ungoverned space and in governed space, ungoverned, where nonstate actors are in control, governed, where state actors who are formally meant to be committed to international treaties are concerned. So I think that your question about what's the right lesson of the traumas of the last 20 years of foreign policy is incredibly important in a world where there are growing numbers of these unstable states producing growing numbers. Of refugees who are in miserable conditions, in too many circumstances themselves, and for whom the international aid system is at the moment a sticking plaster. Okay? So let's linger on this skepticism about the wisdom or pragmatism of worrying about the rest of the world in the first place. So you have this retreat to nationalism, populism, and a kind of radical selfishness that is on one level understandable, because again, we rarely see the evidence of great success for all of our misadventures out in the world, and we have historical successes. We look back at the resolution of World War II and we see that what we did in Germany and Japan in the aftermath, well, these are now allies and we're not dealing with mortal enemies anymore. These are some of our closest allies. So clearly it's possible to rectify even the worst schism diplomatically in the end, even in the aftermath of the worst possible war. But there's not much evidence of that, at least in popular consciousness of late. And just take the American case, and I'm sure it's somewhat similar under the shadow of Brexit in the UK. But in America, you look around at our own failing infrastructure, you look at the crisis of homelessness in major cities, and it's easy to draw the lesson. We can't even put our own house in order, and we are hemorrhaging jobs and economic prospects again. We'll turn the conversation toward the pandemic and all of its knock on effects soon. But I could see that somebody in a Trumpian frame of mind could say, well, all of those crises, as tragic as they are, are far away. And I know I'm being told a story that the world is interconnected. But what I find most galling is that the potholes in my own roads and the homeless people on my own doorstep, that those problems can't even be solved apparently by the exercise of government and by my paying my taxes year after year. There's just a general message of hopelessness and ineffectuality the zero sum marshaling of resources where there's just not enough money or attention to go around. So why pay attention to any of this? Why isn't the Trumpian retreat to the citadel, both politically we understand it's politically pragmatic to anyone who's thinking along these lines, but why isn't it actually a plausible path toward at least American and first world prosperity? Let's not call it a Trumpian point. Let's call it a good point. It's a good point to say, yeah, if America come, America should be able to fix its potholes and it should be able to fix its education system, and it should be able to fix its immigration system. Now, those are good, perfectly sensible points, and I think the way to address them is as follows, or at least discuss them is as follows beyond saying that those are rightful frustrations, to put it mildly. The first is that tending to the international front does not preclude tending to the home front. The diplomacy doesn't take away from the home front, and frankly, the sums of money involved are also limited. The sums of money in respect of overseas aid. A very small zero point 17% of US. National income goes on overseas aid. Actually, I just want to just flag a fascinating poll result. I don't know if this is done year after year, but I know it's been done well. You ask people whether we give too much money to foreign aid or not, and most people I forget the actual numbers here, you might know them, but most people in the US. Think we give too much to foreign aid. But when asked how much we should give, they put the number at something like 4%, which is ten x what we actually give. Yes. And also they think the current level is 25% very high. So look, the demand to fix the home front is a rightful one, but point one, that doesn't preclude you from working internationally. Secondly, you use the phrase retreat to the citadel, which is a great phrase. The Israeli author Yuval Harari talks about a dystopian future of a quote unquote network of fortresses. And it's dystopian because it doesn't work. The blessings of the global economy, global innovation, mean that a future of a network of fortresses is not going to deliver anything that people have come to expect or hope for. That's the reality of the global economy and society. And that's why the Pandemic does provide an absolutely critical point of rupture. If the lesson of the Pandemic is that a connected world is dangerous, then we're going to have deglobalization retreat from connection. And I'm afraid not actually tackle the problem if the diagnosis of the Pandemic is that globalization has been mismanaged, that actually we need a stronger World Health Organization, not a weaker one. That if you're worried about Chinese influence in the World Health Organization, the worst possible thing to do is to pull out from the American point of view. So the second part of the answer, I think, is to make the case that the world is more interdependent than when John Kennedy proclaimed a declaration of Interdependence on Independence Day. 20 19 62. He went to Philadelphia and he said, my fellow Americans, we're living in an interdependent world and we need a declaration of interdependence. And it's even more the case today whether you think about the supply chains that allow the economy to proceed, never mind the innovations, for example, on the vaccine that need to be globally spread. There probably is a third part to this, though, which is important, which is to really recognize that the renewal of fragile and failing states around the world is primarily the responsibility of people who live there. And it's important not to have hubris about the role of international engagement, but it's equally, or even in some ways more dangerous not to recognize that the retreat from global engagement doesn't mean that other people aren't there. If America retreats, that doesn't mean the Russians are going to retreat or the Chinese are going to retreat. In fact, the evidence of the last six months is that China thinks that American retreat creates circumstances for it to expand its footprint. And so I think there is a global security aspect that doesn't have the short term resolution of fixing a pothole, but does speak to the kind of strategic, patient global engagement that is essential to the prosperity and security of a country like this. And that's a political argument that has run for 200 years in this country. I'm very conscious of that and I wouldn't teach American politicians how to win it, not least because we lost it in my own country. But I think that it is striking to me that the European Union is defying the predictions that it was going to that it was going to crumble under the weight of COVID And for medium sized countries, the case for global engagement is overwhelmingly strong. I think that the case that has to be made here is obviously different because this is a superpower and it's one of only two real superpowers in the world. And it's a harder argument, but I think that if you want to think about American prosperity and security, it's intimately linked, not just to its neighbors to the south and to the north, because by virtue of geography, you're a long way from some of the world's trouble spots. But if we've learnt anything in the last six months, it's that the world is actually smaller, not more disconnected than people say. Yeah, well, you mentioned Harare and a point he makes a lot, which it's very simple, it's almost an aphorism, but it does seem like a very good heuristic for thinking about this. He says that there are global problems which only admit of global solutions. There's no single nation that can solve the problem of climate change or a truly adequate pandemic response. And there are many things in the end that will be added to that list of threats, some of which are existential threats. There are developments in technology which could spell the end of us, for which we're currently in an arms race condition, whether it's AI or genetic engineering, nanotechnology, any one of these things could get away from us, even under the best conditions of success. And if we merely have an arms race and are not collaborating globally around some understanding of the shared risks, the very future of the species seems to be in question. Look, I think that's a great point and it obviously has a climate dimension. But here's an interesting thing. I was in Beijing last November and quite a senior person said to me, look, I'm really worried about cyber warfare directed at nuclear power plants. And do you think that this is something that China and the west could collaborate on? And the fact that they're thinking about it is a good thing. The fact that they're worried about whether or not the west would talk to them and collaborate on it is a bad thing, because it speaks to a kind of myopia that has gripped our countries that is dangerous. So now, where do you come down on collaborating with governments whose human rights records are objectively worse than ours perhaps not worse than ours have ever been in our history but worse than ours are now. And we've mentioned the Saudis, we mentioned China. It's often seen as a moral failing not to issue ultimatums where one can, but whatever the other topics of conversation, if you're talking to the Saudis and you're not admonishing them about their treatment of women or apostates or any other minority who fares terribly under that theocracy, if you're talking to China and you're not belaboring the point about their concentration camps, now for the uyghurs. And yet those are the very points which might cause conversation on any other topic to totally break down. How would you recommend governments and individual politicians navigate those? To answer your question directly should we be collaborating, which was the word you used with governments that are repressing human rights? The answer is we should certainly not be collaborating in the repression of human rights. Collaborate collaboration means egging on supporting, you know, I mean I mean, on other fronts, yeah so but but I think it's important to start with that to collaborate in something is to help it happen. Secondly, I think that it's really important that if we're not willing to defend our own values and speak to our own values which is the most basic defense of them, then what use are they? And so if the first point is that you shouldn't be collaborating in the repression of human rights the second point is should you be speaking up about it? My answer to that would be yes. I mean, I spent three years as foreign minister and I think that when you go to China they don't respect you if you don't raise difficult issues that they will not respect you. They know what's on your mind and maybe in more ways than one but they scanned your phone. Yeah if you don't have the self respect to speak up for what you think that I think betokens weakness and you can guarantee you'll get nowhere. Thirdly, you use the word ultimatums and the truth about ultimatums is twofold one you should never use an ultimatum unless you're willing to follow through and secondly you shouldn't overuse ultimatums because if you throw around too many ultimatums you'll be shown to be not just a broken record but actually a hollow shell. So you have to choose your ground. The fourth thing that I think is incredibly important is that in dealing with powerful autocrats never mind leave aside the less powerful ones because that makes it too easy. But if you're dealing with powerful autocrats, powerful autocratic regimes then take you on your own. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Wake Up app the Making sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well there's a lot going on in the world but we'll all have to wait for the next podcast. Today I wanted to give you a sampling of some of the content that we've released over at Waking Up. I recently recorded a ten minute audio essay on the relationship between psychedelics and meditation titled The Paradox of Psychedelics and thought that might be of interest to some of you here. And then my friend Tim Ferris had requested about 30 minutes of Waking Up audio for his podcast and so I'm adding the package we delivered to him here as well. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it and if you do more information can be found over@wakingup.com in recent years there has been an explosion of interest in psychedelics. One thing that these drugs do for almost everyone is prove beyond any possibility of doubt that the mind is far more vast and interesting and malleable than they had any reason to expect before taking psychedelics. Taking a sufficient dose of Psilocybin or LSD, provided you have a generally positive experience, makes it absolutely clear that you have been living in a kind of prison. And once the drug wears off and you're returned to that prison, you can't quite convince yourself that it's good to live there. If you have a truly liberating experience on psychedelics, it is difficult not to view a conventional sense of self as a form of mental illness. And many of us who practice meditation and consider it among the most important things we've ever learned have arrived at this discovery only after first taking psychedelics. However, there is an apparent paradox here because while psychedelics might be indispensable for some people, and I think they probably were, for me, they are potentially misleading where meditation is concerned. The reasons why people practice meditation and take psychedelics are often the same. They both expose the mechanics of our psychological suffering and they both suggest that the remedy for it lies in experiencing ourselves in the world beyond our usual concepts. Both meditation and psychedelics are a response to the felt dilemma of our simply being in the world. Once questions of our survival have been basically answered, we're faced with the question of how to be happy. What more is there to life beyond getting what we want and avoiding what we don't want? How can we cease to be mere prisoners of time? For instance, in what sense and to what degree are our feelings of dissatisfaction relieved by living more and more in the present moment? What is there defined in the present moment that is truly transformative? Meditation and psychedelics both address questions of this kind, but they provide very different answers. So I want to say a few things about the differences here. The great strength of psychedelics is that at a sufficient dosage they are guaranteed to produce a profound effect. No one has ever taken 5 grams of mushrooms or 300 micrograms of LSD and been bored, that has literally never happened. The resulting experience might be terrifying. And that is one of the primary downsides of psychedelics the prospect of having a so called bad trip. But no one ever says, sorry, I don't get what all the fuss is about. With psychedelics, at a sufficient dosage, you need only wait an hour or so for a freight train of absolute significance to come roaring into the station of your mind and for better or worse, you will get on it and you will never be the same. Conversely, if someone has never taken psychedelics, it is quite possible for them to try meditation, even repeatedly and to claim that nothing happened. They look inside and they see nothing of interest, right? What's the point of paying attention to the breath? How is that not the very definition of wasting time? If a person has never taken psychedelics and never glimpsed that vast firmament beyond the prison walls of their conceptual mind, it can be all too easy not to see the point of meditation. For many people, learning to meditate without having first taken psychedelics is a little bit like learning to play a musical instrument. When you've never heard music before, you've never experienced the final product at all, right? So you have absolutely no idea where all this plucking at strings and learning musical notation might be going and you can't verify that anyone else knows either. Maybe the whole thing is just a scam. By contrast, taking psychedelics is like being dragged on stage with Jimi Hendrix. Rather. It's like suddenly being Jimmy Hendrix. And whatever else happens over the next 10 hours, one thing is certain you will know what music sounds like. It might not be the only form of music in fact it certainly isn't. But there's no longer the slightest doubt in your mind that music is a thing, right? So when you come down from the drug and you're returned to your lonely guitar, even if you can't do much with it, you can't deny what it was like to hear music coming out of that thing. So psychedelics, perhaps above anything else, serve as a cure for skepticism about the basic project of having a much deeper engagement with the present moment. The problem, however, is that they can give you a distorted sense of what is worth finding there. Because psychedelics work by producing extreme changes in the contents of consciousness, whereas the true purpose of meditation is to recognize the freedom that is inherent to consciousness itself, whatever its contents. If you take a drug like LSD or Psilocybin, your perception of the world and of your mental life radically changes. It's not an accident that these drugs are also called hallucinogens and your emotional engagement with literally any arbitrary thing or idea can achieve an intensity that has no reference point in ordinary life and is in fact incompatible with ordinary life. Again, this can be true in both positive and negative ways. You can be sent sailing across an ocean of bliss, or you can be hurled into a pit of terror. And at either extreme you can lose all memory of ever having existed in any other state on a sufficient dose of LSD or psilocybin. You no longer recall that you are a person in a world, much less that you have taken a drug. So these experiences of bliss or terror can seem truly eternal without any connection to your life and without any memory of the past. You really have been there in that state since beginningless time. Now, if you have an unremittingly bad trip, well, then you might just conclude that drugs are dangerous and that the tray table of consciousness is best left in the upright and locked position. But if you get a glimpse of the beatific vision, you will know that it is possible to enjoy an utterly transfigured experience of the world and even to lose any sense of separation from it. And you will know that consciousness in this moment is truly sacred. However, you will very likely come to believe that the path back to the sacred is to keep getting high, if not through drugs and through a practice like meditation. And you will approach meditation in the hopes of changing your experience in various ways, making it seem less ordinary. You might understand conceptually that the practice of mindfulness entails accepting this moment's experience exactly as it is. But you will subtly, or not so subtly, be straining to improve your experience by getting better at meditating. And whenever your experience does seem to change in auspicious ways, perhaps you get a feeling of bliss or unconditional love in one of your sessions of formal practice. You'll seize upon this change as a sign of progress. Surely getting more of that sort of thing is the point, right? But it really isn't the point. The point of meditation isn't to collect more transitory spiritual experiences. The point is to recognize that even the most ordinary state of mind is free of self. And it is free of self already. It isn't made free by the practice of meditation, and it isn't made more free of self when you add the pyrotechnics of psychedelics. The ultimate purpose of meditation is to recognize what consciousness is like prior to identification with thought. And you don't need a 20 megaton change in the contents of consciousness to do that. In fact, such changes aren't even helpful. And yet many people are so identified with their thoughts and are so skeptical that there's anything profound to realize about the mind by observing it directly, that they are, for all intents and purposes, unreachable. They either won't try meditation or trying it. They will think that they have discovered that it doesn't work. And the truth is, I was once just this sort of blockhead. I really don't think I would have recognized the power of meditation without having taken psychedelics, without first knowing that there was much more to the mind than I was tending to experience. And so there is this seeming paradox. Psychedelics are very likely indispensable for some people. But as for the project of awakening from the dream of separateness they are also misleading and ultimately unnecessary. There is something that almost everyone learns by taking psychedelics that you must unlearn to experience the true freedom of meditation. And this is why I created Waking Up to help people recognize the freedom of consciousness directly. Because for me, regardless of how many times psychedelics open the doors of perception and they have many times, it is ultimately the simple recognition of the nature of mind, the pure freedom from self that is available in each present moment that has changed my life for the better. I'd like you to take a moment to think about all the things in this life that you will experience for the last time. Of course there will come a day when you will die and then everything will have been done for the last time. But long before you die you will cease to have certain experiences, experiences that you surely take for granted. Now if you're a parent when is the last time you will pick up your child or tuck her into bed or read her a story? Our youngest daughter still says aminals instead of animals and though I'm a stickler for words, I am not correcting her. Each one of those is priceless. Now thinking in this way it lends a poignancy to everything, even to things that you don't like. Again, let's say you're a new parent and you're getting woken up several times a night by your baby. That's brutal. But there will be a last time and knowing that can change your experience in the moment. There's something sweet even about this experience. It's possible that you will miss this. We do everything a finite number of times and yet we tend to take even beautiful moments for granted. And the rest of the time we're just trying to get through stuff. You're just trying to get to the end of whatever experience you're having. Tim Urban, who writes this wonderful blog titled Wait But Why often touches this topic. He actually publishes a poster which represents 90 years of life in weeks. Each line has 52 squares and there are 90 lines on a single page and the scale is frankly a little alarming to contemplate. Each week is a significant piece of 90 years and you can put your finger on the current week in your life. You can see where you are and then of course you realize you have no assurance of how many weeks you have left. Assuming that you have 90 years. Certainly 90 good years is generally not a safe assumption. What you can know however, is that each time you do something pleasant or unpleasant that is one last time you will do it. And there will come a time when you will have done something the final time. And you will rarely know when that is. For instance, I used to love to ski and I now haven't skied in well over a decade. Will I ever ski again? I have no idea. But I can assure you that the last time I took off my skis, I was not even dimly aware of the possibility that it might be the last time, right? That I might live for many, many more years. And yet this stood a good chance of being the last time I would ever ski. When is the last time you swam in the ocean or went camping? When is the last time you took a walk just to take a walk? As you go about your day today, consider everything you're doing is like this. Everything represents a finite opportunity to savor your life. On some level, everything is precious. And if it doesn't seem that way, I think you'll find that paying more attention can make it seem that way. Attention really is your true source of wealth even more than time, because you can waste time being distracted. So this is just to urge you to take a little more care when you meet someone for the first time and you shake their hand. Pay a little more attention. When you thank somebody for something, mean it a little more connect with your life. And mindfulness is the tool that allows you to do that. Because the only alternative is to be lost in thought. And every time you notice that you're lost that you're distracted by a thought about the past or the future and you come back, you are training your mind. And it may feel like an effort at first, but eventually it's like continually waking up from a dream and ask yourself how much effort does that take? Many people who are at first skeptical about the benefits of meditation find their skepticism relieved when they hear that meditation changes the brain. And there are areas of the brain that appear to physically change size in response to meditation. Undoubtedly, new connections are made and others are diminished. And in addition to structural changes, there are functional ones and there does seem to be a more or less linear relationship between changes of this kind and the amount of time a person is spent practicing. Now, this information is interesting and I will certainly discuss it in other contexts. But the truth is, virtually anything you do changes your brain. The fact that you had breakfast this morning and that you can remember it changed your brain. And of course, learning any complex skill requires that your brain physically alter its structure. That is what learning is at the level of the brain. So saying that meditation changes the brain is not to say that it's special or that it's good for you. Most things that are bad for you also change your brain. Of course, there's a growing literature on the benefits of meditation, but I want to suggest that there's nothing likely to appear in that literature that represents the deepest reason why one should meditate. For instance, there are studies that suggest that meditation improves immune function or reduces stress, or that is associated with less age related thinning of the cerebral cortex. Well, having a good immune system and reducing stress and not suffering neurodegeneration are good things in general. But those studies might fail to replicate tomorrow. And should that happen, my recommendations in this course would not change at all. There really are deeper reasons to meditate and to live an examined life in general. Meditation is a skill that opens doors that you might not otherwise know exist. And to say that you should do this because it reduces stress or confers any other ancillary benefit is really to miss the point. Consider an analogy to reading. Is reading good for you? Does it reduce stress? Do you see what's peculiar about that framing, given how profound the difference is between being an avid reader and being illiterate? These are strange questions. Just think about it. Does reading reduce stress? It sort of depends on what you read, right? Is it good for you? Well, I think we can all imagine scenarios where it's not good for somebody in any kind of straightforward way. But reading is one of the most important skills our species has ever acquired. Almost everything we care about depends on it. Of course, mindfulness is a very different sort of skill, but it also has sweeping implications. And the other way to think about this is that you are always meditating on something. Your attention is always bound up in something. We largely become what we pay attention to. We are building our minds in each moment. We're building habits and desires and worries and expectations and prejudices and insights. And mindfulness is just the ability to notice this process with clarity and to then prioritize what you pay attention to. Why not pay attention to those things that make you a better person? Why not free your attention from all of the trivial things that are clamoring for it? Let's say you pick up your phone to check your email, and at that moment your five year old daughter starts telling you a story. Now, several things are possible. You could be so lost in your thoughts about your email, and you could find the urge to respond to it so compelling that you don't even notice that your daughter is talking to you. Or you could notice it only to rebuff her in a way that makes her feel terrible. And you might be so entranced that five minutes later you wouldn't even recall that this episode occurred. That's how most people live their lives. In fact, that's how most of us live most of our lives. Even after we learn to meditate. But the more you train in this practice, the more degrees of freedom you'll find in situations like this. You can notice, for instance, that your daughter is trying to get your attention and that giving her your attention is in competition with your following this urge to check your email. And when actual mindfulness comes online, you can feel the urge to check your email as a pattern of energy in your body and simply let it go. That is, you can actually break the link between the feeling and the behavioral imperative it seems to communicate. It's true that one way to get rid of this feeling is to check your email, but another is to simply let go of it. And only mindfulness allows you to do the latter. And then you can direct your attention to the five year old who is standing in front of you and it might be the only story she tells you that day. And you can be aware of this fact in that moment. You can feel the poignancy of that. And in that moment you can further ingrain this new habit. You can become the kind of person who is fully present in moments like that. And you become that kind of person not just for yourself by changing your brain, but in this case, for your daughter, by changing her brain. And this is just a 32nd slice of life. When you learn to meditate, there are literally hundreds, even thousands of moments like this throughout the day. These are choice points that wouldn't otherwise exist. These are paths taken and not taken for good reason. But without free attention, there's no place for good reasons to land. And as you grow in mindfulness, you begin to notice the lies you can no longer tell. And you begin to have insights into your true motives in various situations that are sometimes not flattering. But you want these insights all the same. Because how else could you become a better person? That is what it is to live an examined life. So don't meditate just because it's good for you. It's more important than that. When you sit down to meditate, you will find yourself assailed by thought. Thoughts about what you need to do later in the day. Thoughts about things that worry you. Thoughts about things you want or don't want. The moment you attempt to pay attention to your breath or to the sound of the wind and the trees, you will meet your mind. And your mind is the most rambling, chaotic, needling, insulting, insufferable person you will ever meet. It's like having some maniac walk through the front door of your house and follow you from room to room and refuse to stop talking. And this happens every day of your life. It is possible to get him to stop talking for brief periods of time and that can come with greater concentration in meditation. It's possible to pay attention to the breath, for instance, and to be so focused on it that thoughts no longer arise. And this can be an extremely pleasant experience when it happens, but it's a temporary experience. Real relief comes when we recognize thoughts for what they are mere appearances in consciousness, images, bits of language. The fact that a thought has arisen does not give it a necessary claim upon your life. It need not have any implications, psychological or otherwise. Of course, you'll continue to think and to be moved to act by thoughts, but meditation gives you a choice. Do you really want to follow this next thought wherever it leads? There's a story from 2012, I think, but I only recently stumbled on it online, about a woman who was on a tour bus in Iceland. And at one point, when the bus stopped near a scenic canyon rest stop, she got off and decided to change her clothes. And when she returned to the bus, nobody recognized her. So when it came time to leave, many people grew concerned that the woman in her original likeness was missing. And they told the driver that an Asian woman in dark clothes had not yet returned to the bus. And apparently the woman in question didn't recognize this description of herself. And so she too became concerned about the missing traveler and a search party was quickly formed and she joined it. And the search apparently went on all day and into the night. And the police were notified and the Coast Guard was notified too, and they even ready to helicopter for use in the morning. And it wasn't until 03:00 A.m. That the woman finally realized that she was the missing person. And of course, the search was called off. Now, this is obviously a quite crazy and comical situation, but we are actually in a similar position with respect to our own minds, because we spend our lives seeking, and the goal of our search is poorly defined. We get inducted into a search by our culture, by the expectations that others place on us and which we learn to place on ourselves. And we learn that there are things we want out of life largely because others want them. We want to succeed in various ways rather than fail, and we need to acquire skills to do this. And we want all the social advantages that come with success. We want others to respect us. Why we want this is never really inspected. It goes without saying. This is something we crave. Of course, various sources of danger and disappointment seem to lurk everywhere. And however much we succeed, things naturally fall apart. Everything needs to be shored up against the forces of entropy. And the landscape continues to shift. Expectations change, cultures like a vast tide that keep sweeping everything out toward a horizon that we can't clearly see. Where is all this going? What will life be like in ten years? Think of everything that captures your attention, the things you buy or wish you could buy, how you dress, and all the preferences that are enshrined there in your closet. Your exercise routine, your relationship to sleep, your diet. Consider all your efforts to improve these things, or to maintain them, or to reconsider them. And of course, all the while you hope to have whatever fun you can have while making these efforts to entertain yourself socially or binge watch the latest series on Netflix. You're continually in motion as a matter of attention. It's just one damn thing after the next. Then occasionally, something big happens. Somebody close to you dies, say, and you have a moment to reflect on the whole spectacle of what is otherwise normal. And you might think, what is the point of all of this? What am I up to, really? Now, I'm not saying the details of life don't matter. It's not that fun doesn't matter, or work or money, or clothing. There are countless transitory sources of satisfaction. And if we have our priorities straight, these are ranked in a hierarchy of sorts, at least implicitly, and we spend our time and attention in ways that are proportionate to what we actually value. Now, we might be lying to ourselves about what our hierarchy actually is. For instance, I might believe that my kids are the most important thing in the world to me, but if that's true, they should get more of my time and attention than my following college football does. It's against this background of seeking satisfaction amid ceaseless change that you can see how radical an act meditation actually is. Meditation is the act of calling off the search. It is the art of doing nothing. But we should be clear about what it means to do nothing, because it actually matters what sort of nothing one is doing. For instance, you can just space out and make no mental effort at all, and then you'll naturally be lost in thought, just daydreaming. Now, this is actually our default state when we're not explicitly paying attention to something or trying to get something done. In fact, it's our default state even when we're doing many things that do require our attention, like driving a car. Thoughts just keep coming, and we keep thinking them, for better or worse. And if you pay attention to the character of your thoughts, you'll find that you're mostly talking to yourself about all the things you want to do or wish you had done to become happy. You're continuously narrating the search, so that's not quite the doing nothing we're after. When one first begins to meditate, the practice seems like it requires effort. It doesn't seem like you're doing nothing. You're actually struggling to pay attention to the breath, for instance, or to other sensations in your body, or to sounds, or even to thoughts themselves. And the struggle is to sustain one's mindfulness for any significant amount of time without being lost in thought. And it's true this apparent struggle continues for quite some time. But once you know how to meditate, you discover that real mindfulness is free of effort. It too simply appears like anything else. The clouds part all on their own, and you just notice the next thing you notice. And you can even try to practice this way from the beginning. And rather than strategically pay attention to an object of meditation like the breath, you can practice what's often called choiceless awareness, where you just notice whatever you notice without making an effort to stay focused on any specific object. But this isn't quite doing nothing either. There's still this fluctuation, this feeling of being lost and found, this game of cat and mouse with attention. And there can still be this subtle or not so subtle sense of seeking to get somewhere, and the sense that there's a self that is doing the seeking. The only way of truly doing nothing is to recognize how consciousness always already is open, unobstructed, effortlessly aware of its apparent changes. You have to recognize what you would otherwise seek, the very context of any effort you could make to pay attention. You have to turn about and realize that nothing is or can be lost. Think of that woman on the bus the moment before she realized that she was the object of the search. She's looking for a lost tourist. And think of that next moment when she suddenly realizes that she is the one who has been presumed lost. Now, is it accurate to say that she has now found herself? Was the search ever fulfilled? No. There was a false premise that had been unrecognized. Just think of how the sense of seeking evaporated. In her case, the recognition of consciousness reveals that the contents of consciousness are beside the point. And all seeking is an effort to improve or to maintain or to otherwise modify the contents of consciousness. So the freedom that you find in meditation is not a change in experience, really. It's the recognition of the context of experience itself. You simply need to drop back and recognize the condition in which everything is already appearing. Thoughts and intentions and moods and emotions, sensations, perceptions. Everything is simply appearing as a matter of experience. There is no you apart from this flow. So the real way of doing nothing isn't to stop doing anything. It's simply to recognize that everything is already happening on its own. Take a moment to close your eyes and become aware of your body as a field of sensation all at once. You don't need to take time to do this and notice your tendency to establish your point of view in your head, noticing the rest of your body as though from above. See if you can recognize that from the point of view of consciousness, there is no above or below or inside or outside. Everything that appears is simply appearing in consciousness as a modification. Of it as a matter of experience. Awareness is not in your head and it can't be aimed from your head toward other objects of perception or sensation or emotion or thought. Everything is simply appearing in its own place, all by itself. Just as the sky need not make any effort to contain or open to the clouds. Notice that consciousness itself need not do anything. It's simply the condition in which everything appears, including the sense of having a head, including every movement of attention. And you're not aware of this condition. You're aware as it when we practice meditation, one of the things we learn is how to begin again. In each moment, you notice that you're distracted. You've been lost in thought for who knows how long. And then suddenly you return to a clear witnessing of the contents of consciousness. You notice a sound or the breath or some other sensations in your body, or you see the present thought itself unraveling. And in this clear noticing of this next appearance in consciousness, we're training our minds. We're practicing a willingness to simply return to the present moment without judgment, without disappointment, without contraction, with a mind that is standing truly free of the past. And it's always possible to recover this freedom no matter what happens. Let's say you notice you're distracted and rather than just observe the next sound or sensation, you're immediately plunged into self judgment. You're annoyed, you subscribe to this damn app and you're supposed to be meditating. But you just spent the last five minutes thinking about something that you saw on television last night. But you can break this spell and begin again at any point by just noticing self judgment and frustration as appearances. And the truth is, they're as good as anything else you can notice when it comes to revealing the intrinsic freedom of consciousness. It's openness, it's centerlessness, it's selflessness honestly frustration, real frustration. A mind like a clenched fist is just as good as the breath or a sound, or even an expansive emotion like joy if you'll just drop back and recognize what consciousness is like in that moment. Now, this ability to begin again has ethical force as well. It's actually the foundation of forgiveness. The only way to truly forgive another person or oneself is to restart the clock in the present. And this habit of mind allows for a resilience that we can't otherwise find. And there are literally hundreds of opportunities each day to practice it. If you notice that a conversation with a friend or a family member or a colleague isn't going very well, or you're not having fun at a party, or you've been trying to get some work done, but you found that you've just wasted the last hour on the Internet or you're working out in the gym, but you haven't been making much of an effort. The moment you notice this ghost of mediocrity hovering over the present, you can fully exercise it just by beginning again and then fully commit by relinquishing the past. There's no real reason why the next ten minutes in the gym can't be the best you've had in years. There's no real reason why you can't put this conversation that's almost over on a new footing by saying something that is truly useful. So the practice is to stop telling ourselves a story about what has been happening and to fully connect with experience in this moment. Notice this present thought, this fear, this judgment, this doubt, this desire to be elsewhere as an appearance in consciousness and then just begin again. Okay, well, that was a sample of a few lessons from the Waking Up app. For those of you who might want to locate this content on the app, what you heard were the lessons titled the Paradox of Psychedelics the Last Time. Don't meditate because it's good for you. The veil of thought, the art of doing nothing and begin again. There was also a moment thrown in there. Moments are short reflections from 30 seconds to two minutes in length that arrive once or twice a day if you have your notifications turned on. Generally speaking, the aim of waking up isn't to just help you meditate, it's to help you live a more examined and fulfilling life altogether. And to that end, there's no shortage of resources you can explore in the app now, including dozens of conversations I've had with philosophers and scholars and contemplatives. There are other courses with some of the best meditation teachers around, and there are discussions about psychedelics and sleep and happiness and stoicism and effective altruism and much more. We recently added the full catalog of Alan Watson's talks too, which are great fun. The app does require a subscription, but it's also free for anyone who can't afford it, and we give a minimum of 10% of our profits to the most effective charities, and we're actively looking for ways to encourage individuals and businesses to join us in doing that. Anyway, if you want more information about Waking up, everything can be found@wakingup.com./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today's podcast, I think, is a really important conversation. It is a conversation about cancer. And before you decide that you don't feel like listening to a conversation about cancer, please reflect on the fact that you or someone close to you will almost certainly get it. This is just a virtual guarantee. My father died of cancer. I've had friends die of cancer. Someone in my own family has cancer. Now, this is just all around you, whoever you are. And today's guest is one of the great authorities on the topic. You've heard him before on the podcast, but today I'll be speaking with Sadartha Mukherjee about the topic with which he is most closely associated. Sadartha is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia NYU Presbyterian Hospital. He's a former Rhodes scholar. He graduated from Stanford and Oxford, where he received a PhD studying cancer causing viruses, and from Harvard Medical School. And his laboratory focuses on discovering new cancer drugs using various biological methods. He's published everywhere you would expect, but he's also a regular writer for The New Yorker, and he has won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Emperor of All Maladies a Biography of Cancer. And our conversation ranges widely from his experience as an oncologist. Ask him many questions from both a patient and doctor centered point of view how to think about a cancer diagnosis, the biology of cancer, how the mapping of the human genome has changed our understanding of cancer and the possibilities of treatment, how cancer spreads. We talk about whether we're always getting cancer and simply fighting it. We talk about the difference between remission and cure. We talk about how much of cancer is due to environmental causes. There's a lot here, and it was great to steal another hour of Sadartha's time. So without further delay, I bring you Siddhartha Mukherjee. I am here with Sadartha Mukherjee. Sadartha, thanks for coming back on the podcast. My pleasure. Thank you. So the last time around, we spoke about your more recent book, The Gene, which was fascinating and also led us a little further afield than at least you realized we would go. I had just come fresh off my controversial podcast with Charles Murray and then led us into a discussion about the genetics of intelligence or suspicions of such and exhausted both of our interest, if not our patients. On that topic, I won't do that again this time around because we're talking today about your book, for which you are certainly best known and for which you won the Pulitzer Prize, the Emperor of All Maladies a Biography of Cancer. And you are an oncologist and spend a considerable amount of your time working with patients and also doing research into the biology of cancer. So I'm really looking forward to having this conversation because we only had about ten minutes last time around to touch on this all too important topic first before we get into the biology of cancer and treatment. What's your story here in terms of how you got into becoming an oncologist? People tend not to think about how the different medical specialties dictate a very different experience from the side of a doctor. I can imagine that being an Er doc is not at all the same as being a dermatologist. You don't get calls in the middle of the night when you're a dermatologist. You're not constantly seeing people die. I would imagine you're dealing as much with human vanity as with actual health concerns. First, what is the experience of being an oncologist? Because it seems like it would be emotionally very challenging. And how did you decide to take this on yourself? So I came into cancer medicine a little bit in reverse in the was at Oxford. I was training as an immunologist. My graduate work as an immunology, I was interested in vaccines. This is the time when the immunology revolution was taking off and it was researchers, the biology committee had just figured out some of the most important things about how the immune system works, how it might allow for enabled vaccination and so forth. So I went to Oxford and I studied viruses. I was an immunologist and a virologist by training. The one particular virus that I got interested in is actually a major human pathogen called Epstein Barr virus, EBV. And part of the reason that we still deal with it is it's one of those strange viruses that lives in the human body but doesn't seem to cause overt disease. I'll come back to the word overt in a second, but virtually all of us have Epstein Bar virus. This is a virus that's evolved with us, with the human species, for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. And there may be 70% to 80% of people are infected in some parts with EBV. And it seems our immune system doesn't seem to reject it. We never clear it during our lifetime. So the question I was interested in is why is it that we don't clear Epstein Bar virus? Whereas if you have influenza, if you have the flu, you get the flu, your body clears the flu, and you don't have flu virus left in your body. What's the difference between these two things. Why is it the flu gets cleared, but while EBV remains persistent? And I tried to solve it, I partly you know, I helped partly solve that mystery. But then it became obvious to me, if you read the epidemiology of EBV, it turns out that, in fact, this word doesn't cause overt disease, but in fact, there's a long history of it being linked to various cancers, including lymphomas and other cancers. In fact, the links between EBV and cancer Are quite deep. And so I began to became more interested in cancer, began to think more and more about cancer, cancer genetics. Why is it that what genes in EBV allow it to do the things that it does? Why is it able to stay persistent in the human host? And so I became interested in cancer, and as I became More and more interested in cancer, became more and more interested in going to thinking about cancer medically, and then became an oncologist. So I came into cancer through the world of science and immunology. And it's only interesting because immunology, as you might know, has suddenly come alive in the world of cancer. Again, the question you ask is, what is it like being an oncologist with it's? Very unlike the examples you gave. It's very unlike Being in the emergency room, because things change extremely quickly. The things that I knew Were absolute certainties in ten years ago, five years ago. So I think one of the things about being an oncologist is that the amount of information and the rapidity with which it changes is striking. Things that I knew as absolute certainties ten years ago are up in question now. Ten years ago, if someone told me that we would be manipulating the human immune system to reject cancers, I would say chances of that being true Are pretty minor ten years later. That's the new direction of cancer. So that's one of the surprising things. You don't get up in the middle of the night like a surgeon might or as often as a surgeon might, but you stay up in the middle of the night because you're finding out new things that wouldn't be the case ten years ago. Do you work with children as well, or only adults? I do all my work with adults, although within the world of cancer, leukemia is one area that I particularly have interested in. It's a funny story, sam. Leukemia, for the longest time, blood cancers led the charge in the science and treatment of cancer. And we can explore why. There are sort of Deep reasons why. And then now the world of cancer Is moving beyond leukemias and looking for how to take those lessons and learn them in solid cancers like breast cancer and lung cancer. I see both. I see all. But mainly, I'm still interested in blood cancers. The history here, again, I'm now focusing not so much on the disease, but on the doctor patient. Experience, there really was this amazing stigma associated with cancer. I recall a story about my own grandmother, who I never met, who died before I was born, where she had metastatic melanoma and was in the hospital really to die. But I believe it's true to say that she was never told her prognosis at all. In fact, she was lied to about what it was. I think she was told she had arthritis and would recover. It's just something so unthinkable at this moment. It used to be I don't know how widespread this practice was, but I've heard from many other sources that it was routine for doctors to lie to patients about their prospects, especially women patients, and sometimes in collaboration with their husbands. And there was one point in your book where you painted a picture, very flattering picture, of one of the people you studied under. I believe it was Thomas Lynch, a lung cancer specialist, and you described him as a kind of virtuoso of telling people bad news. But there was a kind of correct me if I'm wrong, but there seemed to be a kind of necessity of shading the truth even there. How do you think about this? What was the practice then and what is the practice now in terms of delivering bad news in a context of real uncertainty? Because it seems to me that oncologists must, in many cases take refuge in uncertainty because even in the most dire circumstances, there are still these stories of the outliers, the less than 5% cases where someone makes a recovery, even from some fairly dire stage four diagnosis. It's a complicated issue, as you point out. It's an important question, and I think the capacity to take refuge and uncertainty is an important philosophical question, actually. To what extent are human beings allowed to take refuge under uncertainty? And to what extent does that become a kind of opium? So I think oncologists have very individual styles around this. But the one thing I think you learn in cancer is that hope is negotiable and that you navigate your way through an individual's, individual's journey, your patient's journey through their cancer. I think the most important thing that I try to convey to patients and I think the field has strived somewhat now is to convey that uncertainty without sort of washing it up and cleansing it and sterilizing it. And that's a tough question. That's a tough thing to convey because on one hand, there is the hard statistics, but on the other hand, there are the individual troops. Whether you lie within the distribution of patients who are likely to die in five months or whether you will be the one your patient will happen to be the one who will survive at that time. I think that the most honest way of dealing with it is to imagine this as a process that on day one when I meet someone, I can give them the bare statistics. And then I try to also describe what the outliers look like. Who is an outlier? Why I think they were outliers? Is it because of the location of the cancer they had, the genetics of the cancer, the genes of the cancer, the mutations? Is it because they happen to have a particularly successful surgical resection? Is it that they were the best responders to that particular chemotherapy? So I try to describe that, and I tell people honestly that I don't know where they will sit, but the curve, the mean, the medians look like this. And then in time, the next time I meet them, I know a little bit more. And so I'll modify my understanding. If you wanted to have a formal name for it, this is Bayesian Statistics. It's a wise way of thinking about the world. When you take your priors and you modify your priors to make conclusions about how these people, how individuals will behave, given the circumstances. I think, and I've written about it, I think Bayes's insight into the world, thomas Bayes's insight into the world was very profound, and medicine is still trying to deal with it. We're coming to terms with that idea again in terms of your emotional experience as a physician. I remember at one point in the book, I think you were describing what it was like to be a resident at that point. I don't know how it's since changed, but you were talking about a kind of professionalization of your emotional range in the presence of these distraught families or patients for whom you have to deliver very scary news. And you were talking about that as a kind of necessity, but also as perhaps a psychological or ethical error. You obviously weren't comfortable with this change that was coming over you, how this was becoming. You had a routine way of distancing yourself from the pain or just kind of dampening down your empathy so as not to be bold over every time you had to talk to a very sick patient. How has that evolved for you? And is there an optimal way of being in that role? I don't know if there's an optimal way of being in that role, but I think that the conflict that you're talking about is very important, because the professionalization of empathy is a rather dire thing. As you can imagine. It creates all sorts of internal conflicts. There are now classes which hope to professionalize medical empathy. There are good things about that. There's a kind of importance to sensitivity training, if you want to call it it's an orwellian word, sensitivity training in medicine. But that said, I think there's also a regret that people have that. The spontaneity that you had when you were a resident, when I was a resident, when I was an intern, to be able to tell people sort of honest news about themselves is somehow being filtered. You feel as if there's a filter that's come into your life. I think I personally try to resist the filter. I try to maintain the honesty. I told you my method. My method is to think in, if you want to call it formally, a kind of Bayesian way about medicine. I think that helps. It allows you to maintain a kind of personal honesty in the face of so when someone says to me, am I going to die in five months? You don't resort to the kind of nonsense speak of a professionalized empathy training in which you hold their hand and pretend to be aggrieved. You try to assess yourself, what your own feelings about their impending death is. You try to understand. You try to help. I think it's a real struggle. And I know, like many disciplines, the exaggeration ultimately the exaggeration of false empathy is detected by patients very quickly and they shut themselves off. The last thing they want to hear is false empathy. I think you're pointing to an important struggle that's very much inside the discipline, and they also probably don't want a physician who bursts into tears and begins sobbing on their shoulder when he delivers the news. You can't be clear eyed when your own eyes are clouded with tears. So I've written a little bit about this. I wrote an essay for The New Yorker on numbness, which is about this idea and about trying to connect life as a doctor and how it benumbs you. The fastest response to living as a doctor is to shut it down, to become numb to all the enormity of the suffering. And there is something in one of the connections I sought in that piece was to check off who was a doctor and a writer and about his capacity to remain clear eyed about the world without shutting off, without becoming numb to it. It's a pretty tough act, but I think we try. Yeah, well, it's just amazing to witness. I also watch the documentary based on your book that Ken Burns produced. And again, given this is so far outside the range of my professional experience, I just was amazed at what oncologists have to go through as their patients go through the scariest moments in their lives, especially when you're talking to the parents of children who have received a diagnosis of leukemia or some other cancer. It was just so lacerating for me as a viewer, and it was very difficult for me to watch until I just kind of surrendered to it. But basically for me, it's just the continuous effort to stifle tears, seeing people go through that. But just to remind you and your readers or your listeners that, of course, the point that you're making is incredibly important, which is that no one wants a sobbing doctor and you want someone. There is a fundamental and I suspect that I will raise some hackles as I say this, that the fundamental relationship between a patient and a doctor. Even today, the power lies in one direction. The doctor knows that the patients are there to try to seek help. That is not to say that that's a good thing. It is just to remind ourselves that empathy can be helpful and of course, is a prerequisite for medicine. But false empathy and trying to emulate the actual experience of the patient as a doctor is going to be necessarily flawed. You are not the person with cancer. It is the person and sitting in front of you that has the real problem. Actually, there's a good distinction. I don't know if you know the psychologist Paul Bloom at Yale. He's done a lot of work on empathy and he wrote a very controversial book entitled Against Empathy, where he differentiated what he calls cognitive empathy. Just understanding what another person's experience is and the more emotional, contagion style of empathy where you just find yourself crying when you see someone is sad. I think in this case he would say that what we want are physicians who have a lot of cognitive empathy. They know what you are very likely to be going through and they care to alleviate your suffering, but they're not being held hostage by their own emotional reaction to suffering vicariously through you, or thinking about how would I feel if it were my kids I was talking about, and all of that. Absolutely. It comes down to, again, very important basic things is that in the laboratory, when we study cancer genetics or study cancer cell behavior, you're abstracting away so much from the experience of the illness. But it's important to remember the experience of the illness lived through the lives of your patients as well. It's what motivates the laboratory life, at least for me. So I think it's very important. I think the distinction I've certainly read this distinction between the cognition of empathy, the cogitation of empathy, and the enactment of it. And I would agree that I think that's an important distinction and I think it's a struggle. It's not simple. I don't think I would be lying if I said to you that one doesn't bleed into the other quite quickly. And this, I think, goes back to the idea across the board that in a behavioral sense, you can teach being a doctor, but of course, that's just merely in a behavioral sense. What does it mean to behave? What words do you say? But patients could very quickly pick up the idea that you're saying them without believing them. So believing it, believing inside what it means to have, if you want to call it cognitive empathy, is a psychological realm which is actually quite deep and understudied, actually. We don't fully understand it. Is there anything that you know from the side of being an oncologist that you think cancer patients or their family members should know but often don't, in terms of the experience of receiving a diagnosis and going through treatment? And talking to their doctors, is there any question you would ask your doctor or anything you would do differently? Given how much you know about what it's like to be an oncologist and what the full course of treatment often is, what does your experience give you as a prospective cancer patient that most people don't have? Well, one of the things I'm thinking of an important essay, which I often encourage patients to read by stephen gould, called the median is not the message, in which the back story is that stephen j. Gould was diagnosed with a very unusual cancer of abdominal mesothelioma. And if you read the statistics, gould's prognosis was extremely grim. It was very sobering. And the question that gould asked himself in this essay, and I encourage people to read it, is if you take the curve of survivorship. So if you just plot, as you can plot the number of patients who are live five months, seven months, twelve months, 20 months after the diagnosis, it might look like a gaussian curve, it might look like any kind of curve. The question you want to ask yourself is, where are you located in that curve? Are you on the side of the kind of person who is going to rapidly succumb to this cancer? Are you likely to survive the batterings of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy? If you do, what are the chances that you will survive this with a meaningful life, et cetera, et cetera? So he tried to place himself, and once he had placed himself in that curve, he was able to make decisions about treatment more accurately. If I were to become a patient, and I will, I mean, statistically speaking, you and I will both likely have cancer, one in two men, one in three men, one in three women. Pardon me. And again, statistically speaking, there's a good chance that we will die of cancer. So if I were a patient, I would try to ask when I was sort of sitting on the other side of the desk, as it were, I would try to locate myself as Stephen Jay Gold did and say, what's the likelihood that I will be one of the few people who will succeed with some kind of novel therapy versus the chances that I won't? And once I know that I might be able to make decisions thoughtfully, the questions that I like to ask myself is, what are the strong endpoints that I should struck treatment? I'd ask my doctor that, what are you looking for? When you would say to me, I think we're getting to the point of time that we'd better seriously consider hospice, seriously consider the withdrawal, what are those endpoints? And in the opposite sense, what are the things that you're looking for that would tell you, this is the kind of patient that I would rather treat more aggressively, treat more proactively than with chemotherapy? This is not to say that hospice and palliative care are not proactive treatments. Please don't make that let's not make that mistake. But this is just to remind us that's the direction that those are the kinds of guidance that I'd like to know. And it could be hard science, it could be genetics, it could be the microenvironment, it could be the nature of the tumor. I'm looking for a Hitchhiker's guide to Bayesian cancer, right? The fact that so many people are dying of cancer and will continue to die from cancer is in some perverse way, good news. Because it shows that many of the diseases that killed us before we even had a chance to get cancer have been cured or at least beaten back into submission. Let's talk about the disease itself, and I'm sure there'll be other questions that could come up here relevant to the patient experience, because, as you say, virtually everyone will either get cancer or have someone close to them get it. So the simplest possible question, for which, no doubt there is no perfectly simple answer but what is cancer? Cancer is a family of diseases. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Michelle Gelfand. Michelle was a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland for many years. She's now moving to Stanford, and she's done some very interesting research on the power and primacy of cultural norms. All of this has been widely cited and she has received numerous awards. On the day after we recorded this conversation, she learned that she's been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, which is a big deal. So congratulations on that, Michelle. And she's the author of the book rulemakers Rule Breakers how Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. And we get into the book. We talk about the power of cultural norms, the difference between tight and loose cultures, the distinction between that and conservative versus liberal cultures. We talk about the implications for US. Politics, our response to COVID the way in which tight and loose interact with variables like crime and resource scarcity and the perception of threat. We talk about the Jeffrey Tubin affair and many other topics. Anyway, I really enjoyed this. And now I bring you Michelle Gelfand. I am here with Michelle Gelfand. Michelle, thanks for joining me. Great to be here. So you've written a very interesting book. When did this book come out? The book is Rulemakers Rule Breakers, and we will be discussing a lot of what's in it, although by no means covering every detail. When did the book come out? Came out in 2018. The hard copy and then the soft copy came out in 2019. Right. Well, the world has only conspired to make it more relevant, I'm afraid, for better and worse and mostly worse. So I'm eager to talk about all that. But before we jump in, how would you summarize your background intellectually? What kinds of things have you focused on and what are you most focused on now? So I'm a cross cultural psychologist, so I study human behavior around the world to try to understand some of the deeper seated values, norms, cultural codes that drive our behavior. And I got into this field pretty serendipitously. Like many people, life happens when you're making other plans. I was actually premed at Colgate University, upstate New York. And I'm a New Yorker. I don't know if you could tell by my voice. And I had the sort of typical New Yorker view of the world, that cartoon where it was basically New York. And then we acknowledged New Jersey, and beyond that, there's basically rocks and oceans. And I went abroad for a semester my junior year at Colgate. And that view of the world shattered when I was there in a very good way. I was really experiencing a lot of culture shock, even though we spoke the same language. And I remember having this very important call with my dad, Marty from Brooklyn, and just telling him how shocked I was and confiding him all sorts of things, including the idea that people were just going from London to Paris or to Amsterdam for just the weekend. And and my dad said something really important. He said, well, imagine, like, it's going from New York to Pennsylvania in his Brooklyn accent. And I thought, wow, Pop, that's a great metaphor, and this is a true story. The next day, I booked a trip to Egypt, and I thought, Well, dad, it's kind of like going from New York to California. He wasn't too pleased with this, but I had a lot of time on my hands, and I thought, why don't I just go and explore the world? And it's there where I really realized and beyond working on a kabuts in Israel and around the world, that I realized how little I knew about culture. And I thought, if I don't know much about culture, then I probably don't know much about myself. And I really took that to heart. I came back to Colgate. I had the great fortune of taking a class on cross culture human development by Carolyn Keating, who was studying with Marshall Siegel, doing work on visual illusions in Africa, with the idea that some visual illusions that are seem to be Western are really not universal. And I thought, wow. So anyway, I lucked out. Found Harry trendis at the University of Illinois. He's one of the founders of the field of cross cultural psych, and the rest is history. And I'm a generalist by orientation, and I think that's something Harry cultivated, really trying not to have many disciplinary boundaries, even within psychology, but also beyond. Yeah, well, that approach really resonates with me. I've begun to think of culture more and more as an operating system, and that that analogy is perhaps more literal than most. I just think that so much of what we mistake for our own psychology and just being able to function as human beings in so many ways is a matter of culture more than it's a matter of the individual or any individual brain. I mean, if you're going to look within a person's subjectivity or even scan their brains for evidence of so much of what they notice or poised to care about. It's not there. It's at the level of cultural norms that we're all being ruled by, even if we don't think about norms explicitly. I mean, most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about norms, and perhaps we should just start off by defining what we mean by that term. But so much of us is a simple example that is adjacent to what we're talking about. Just that if you listen to the two of us, have a conversation, we're following the rules of English usage and grammar to some considerable degree, one hopes. And yet you would not find the rules of the English language in us or in our conscious experience. I mean, this is just something that is governing us from the outside, and we have learned it, virtually all of it, implicitly. And so much of what we care about and what we are outraged by and all of our collisions with other human beings, it's just all governed by stuff that's outside of us that we have, that we or our ancestors have tacitly agreed is important, or, you know, rules worth following or our taboo to break. So anyway, to set that contract. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. One of the things that fascinates me about culture is that it's this great puzzle. It's omnipresent it's all around us, like 24/7, but it's totally invisible. Like, we really take it for granted. We're not thinking about it. It's really an unbelievable thing that I think you've talked about it even indirectly. I'm a big fan of your app waking up. Actually, when I hear your voice now, it's a little conflicted because I'm like, well, should I be meditating right now? Like I'm talking to Sam. But there's this people kind of walking around in a spell without realizing that they have been socialized to follow certain values and norms. And in my work and in Harry's tradition of cultural research, some of these norms and values have an important function. Like, they've been evolving to help groups adapt to certain ecological and historical contingencies, and they make sense to some extent. And so I think the most important part of, you know, the goal of cross cultural psychology is to try to make those codes more visible and to help people understand where they come from and also how we might negotiate them. So that's the only thing I would sort of differ with your perspective. I think we can once we understand these codes, I think we can try to change them when needed. We can try to pivot I'm not saying it's easy. I didn't mean to imply that we couldn't do that. Yeah, I'm all about changing the culture when it seems non optimal. Before we get into all of the trade offs here, what are norms? How do you think about norms? Yes. So social norms are these unwritten rules for behavior. Sometimes they get more formalized in terms of codes and laws we follow them constantly. For example, most of us wear clothes when we leave the house we don't steal food from people's plates at restaurants we don't sing loudly or dance in libraries, most of us. And we do these things because they help our society function and in a lot of ways social norms are this incredible human invention because they help us to predict each other's behavior they help us to coordinate. In fact, if you just do a thought experiment and think about a world without social norms it quickly becomes obvious that we couldn't function. Societies, organizations, families we'd all collapse. And my work has been focused on a distinction that actually was first discussed indirectly by Herodotus in his book The Histories, later picked up by Pierre Pelto an anthropologist in the late sixty s. And the gist is that although all cultures at least we think all cultures have social norms some cultures abide by social norms much more strictly. They're what we call tight cultures. Other groups are much more loose they have more relaxed attitude toward rules they have much more permissiveness. And so I've been trying to understand this distinction of tight and loose not just across societies but also within nations, even within households and across history and why they evolve and what consequences they have what trade offs they confer to human groups. So that's the kind of gist of what we've been looking at. Yeah, well, there's a basic trade off here that certainly covers most, and it's one you discuss toward the end of your book, which is this trade off between order and freedom, personally and collectively. And I think we'll want to talk about how we imagine kind of an optimal strategy or disposition here. But whatever is optimal, there's no question that there is just a stark fact of trade off, right, where there are cases where you really want more freedom, but then there are situations where that freedom is coming at an unacceptable price, and you want to be able to impose more order. And so there's sort of a flexibility response here that I think we're going to land on. And you describe this as a kind of ambidexterity with respect to tight and loose, but you sent me a quiz that you have on your website before we started here, and I took it. And do you want to guess where I fall? Or should I just confess where I fall on your continuous I'll let you tell us. I'm not really sure I could guess totally but where did you fall? I got a 74 which is moderately tight I was going to guess that. I didn't want to say that but I was going to guess that. Where are you? What did you get on your own quiz? I'm moderately loose and I'm constantly negotiating with my moderately tight husband who is an attorney and we have lots of interesting negotiations around our household in terms of order and openness and what domains need to be tight and what domains need to be loose. We can get maybe back to that in terms of negotiation of tight loose. But yeah. Were you surprised when you took the quiz? Is that what you no, as I was going through the questions, I was kind of anticipating their logic and we could dissect it as a psychometric instrument. But I think I may be an odd use case for some of the logic of that quiz because there are clearly questions I was answering in a very tight way and others not so much. And it's more based on some peculiarities about me which actually relate to waking up and meditation and other related so you have a bunch of questions there, like I can control my emotions when I need to or something like that. Right. And obviously that is in fact very true of me, but it's very true of me based on my fairly idiosyncratic focus on meditation and mindfulness, et cetera. So I don't know if I deranged your instrument there by having my weird background, but anyway, I do feel like I'm someone who is fairly attuned to norm violations. And it's not to say that I don't violate other people's norms too. It's like there are norms that I think should be rewritten and I do a fair amount of that attempted work in that direction on this podcast. But where there's a norm that either seems obviously good or I haven't examined it, so I'm presuming it to be good by default. I think I'm on the tight side of thinking, okay, that's not something you should violate. And whether it's somebody cutting in line in front of you or whatever, it's just something that I feel like I notice the downside risk of I think the stakes for maintaining norms are quite a bit higher than most people realize. And this is something you get into when you talk about how tight societies and honor cultures view their norms. Like, perhaps you want to say something about the way the American South views politeness. Say that's that's something that actually kind of resonates with me more than you would expect given that I've spent about five minutes in in the south. I want to just back up, make a couple of points, you know, so the Tight Loose Mindset quiz, which any of your audience can take online, is actually based on the paper we published in Science. And I I want to just emphasize that there's not one I don't like to call people tight or loose individuals because that's kind of the levels of analysis problem that's kind of plagued the literature on culture. The way I study tight loose is that certain ecological and historical factors create the need for order and predictability and that's what norms, strict norms provide in those contexts. So if you have a lot of threat in a society or in an organization or in a household, or even as an individual, then abiding by norms is actually a good strategy. It helps to avoid, in groups, defectors that can cause a lot of chaos. And so big picture is that what we found is that countries and groups that have a lot of collective threat, whether it's from Mother Nature, like chronic natural disasters, resource scarcity, or human nature, number of invasions on your territory in the last 100 years, for example, from our paper, those countries tend to have stricter rules. Not all of them, not all tight cultures have a lot of threat, and not all those cultures are on easy street. But in general, there seems to be a connection between threat and tightness, both in field data and lab experiments and also in computational models. But at the individual level, the way we study this is to see, okay, what individual differences help people adapt to the strength or weakness of norms in their culture. And so in that paper, we study things like self monitoring, like we predicted, and found that tight cultures have people who tend to be higher on self monitoring. They also tend to be higher on prevention focus. This comes from Tory Higgins, people who are worried about not making mistakes. They like more order. And so these are a suite of individual differences that help people to reinforce the norm strength in their environment. And on the flip side, people that are in context, that have less threat, can afford to not really have as much impulse control. They can be more risk taking. They could be more tolerant of ambiguity. And so tight loose is a mindset. At the individual level, the metaphor I write about in the book, Taking US from Dollar Litwick is the order versus chaos muppets. So you could think about Burt and Kermit the Frog as kind of order muppets, and they tend to notice rules, and they are managing their impulses, and they like a lot of order. That's the tight mindset. On the flip side, you have, like, Ernie and Cookie Monster that are kind of the chaos muppets. They're less likely to notice rules, and they're more kind of impulsive. But in any event, these are general like metaphors. But I just wanted to mention that the quiz itself comes from the scales, and the items that you were answering come from that data. And I think the important point here is also that it doesn't mean that we're always at our default. In fact, what's really remarkable is we can tighten or loosen very quickly, depending on the situation. When you're in a library or a funeral, we tighten up. We tend to start following rules and manage our impulses to a much greater extent, or in a movie theater or most of us, when we're in a public park or in a party, these are looser situations. Goffman actually, the famous sociologist who probably said everything about anything we need to know about. He talked about tight versus loose situations, and I think so I just wanted to point out that, like, a lot of individual differences, they're dynamic, they could change based on the situation, and we don't even notice it. We don't notice that. That's the case in the science paper. I'll just mention one more thing. We rank ordered situations in terms of how tight or loose they were around the world, asking people how appropriate 15 different behaviors like arguing or eating or singing, how appropriate are these across 15 different situations? And the rank order of tight loose in these situations, meaning that tight situations had a more restricted range of behaviors that were seen as permissible, was identical around the world. There wasn't a single flip of situations. But what we found was that in general, in tight cultures, there were tighter situations, like what it means to be in a public park is more strict in Pakistan, for example, than in the US. So anyway, that's a broad kind of introduction. The only other thing I want to say is that I'd love to peer into your brain and see how do you react to norm violations, what's happening when your brain or anyone's brain, what's happening when you're witnessing people doing strange things. Like Michelle is in the library and she's studying is a reasonable thing, but Michelle is in the library and she's shouting is a norm violation. And we developed some new paradigms to try to understand what's happening in the brain as people are witnessing norm violations as compared to, like, linguistic violations. Like, Michelle is having coffee with dog, which is huge literature on that kind of in 400 they call it response in neuroscience, this negative deflection 400 seconds after stimulus onset, and it's an incongruity. But in some research that we've done trying to look at neuroscience and tight loose, we can start seeing that there are big individual differences in how people are reacting in the central parietal area, in the frontal area, there are cultural differences in how people react in terms of EEG responses to norm violations. So it's kind of an exciting frontier. What's fascinating to me is that social norms are so important, but there's so little research on neuroscience of social norms. This, of course, work on economic behavior, fairness, but not on the kind of norms that we've been talking about. Anyway, so I forgot what you were asking me about. I'll steer us back to the second half of that question. But actually, you mentioned Goffman, who I don't think you discuss in the book. But Goffman has always been fascinating to me because for those who haven't read him, he's got some great books, interaction, Ritual Asylum. I mean, he did a lot of work focusing on the mentally ill and the difference how we bound sort of the categories of human behavior in particular, face to face behavior around the concepts of sanity and insanity. And one course cut at this that he introduced is to not have any boundary between how you behave in public and how you behave in private is fairly diagnostic for mental illness. That's what we notice about people who are mentally ill. They're often doing things that sane people would do in private, but they're just doing them in context where this private behavior is on display and it seems totally inappropriate. And there are these kind of rituals of interaction that he described in terms of just what necessarily happens when people come into each other's presence and know or should know that they're being observed by others. And that kind of haul the mirrors effect and the pressure that imposes or should impose on normal psychology is something he discusses really beautifully. But to come back to culture, there are tighter cultures, and perhaps you can pick any example you want to describe. You mentioned many in the book, but everything from Singapore to ancient Sparta to the American South by comparison with the rest of the US. And viewed from outside, viewed from a looser point of view, the emphasis on following certain norms not swearing, say, in the south or being polite, being kind of elaborately polite, even when there's not necessarily all that much goodwill between the parties all of this is viewed as fairly high stakes and violations. There are viewed as very quickly provocations to violence. And when viewed from loose cultures, the stakes are just non obvious. What's wrong with swearing or saying something inappropriate or not being polite or trespassing on a person's imagined sense of honor when you don't view yourself in those terms. And I'm certainly American enough to be horrified at the extreme versions of all this when you find out that in Singapore you can be jailed for even bringing chewing gum into the country right. And killed for bringing marijuana into the country. I mean, this just seems like an orwellian dystopia, but the knock on effects of being that rigid one of the knock on effects of being that rigid is to close the door to a lot of unpleasantness that we're trying to figure out how to clean up in our society some other way. And so it's just an interesting again, we're just in the domain of trade offs here, but anyway, give us a snapshot of the tight loose difference at the level of society, perhaps comparing a couple of cultures here. Yes, and as I mentioned earlier, all cultures have tight and loose elements, but we can classify countries in terms of where they veer tight or loose on a continuum. And places like Japan, Singapore, Austria to some extent, Germany tend to veer tighter as compared to places like the US. In General spain Brazil, Italy And like you mentioned, a lot of times, people are kind of horrified when they look at practices and cultures that have the opposite or different code without realizing that they have their own liabilities. Often the strength of another culture is our own liability and vice versa. And just as an example, we call this the order versus openness trade off. And cultures that are tight tend to, generally speaking, have less crime. They have more monitoring by police, by God. You know, Ara Naranzayan, my colleague at UBC, would say that people who are monitored are people who are good people. They're following rules, at least publicly. And they also have more synchrony. They have more uniformity, even in clocks and city streets I talk about in the book, and we actually publish this in the science paper. You know, in tight cultures, when you look at clocks around city streets, they pretty much say the same exact thing. They're highly synchronized. Whereas clocks and city streets in loose cultures are really off by quite a bit. You're not totally sure what time it is in, like, places like Brazil or Greece in general. And tight cultures, as another indication of order, have more self regulation in general. They are places where people are monitoring their impulses more. At the national level, that translates into less debt, translates into less obesity, controlling for lots of factors and also alcoholism and recreational drug use. And so you could think about tight cultures corn on the market on order. And loose cultures struggle with order. They have higher crime in general. They have less synchrony. They're less coordinated, less discipline. So they have a host of self regulation. Let's just call them problems or challenges. But loose cultures on a wide variety of indices are much more open. They have more tolerance, relatively speaking, in terms of attitudes both explicit and implicit towards people that are different. In one experiment we did, we even sent our Ras around the world to see whether people react differently to people who look stigmatized. This is actually one of these crazy field experiments. I had my Ras wear fake facial warts on their faces or tattoos and rings in another condition or in another condition not. They weren't wearing anything, just the normal face. And they went back to their home countries to ask for help in city streets or in stores. And when people were not wearing anything on their face, there was no difference in how much they were helped around the world. But when they were wearing these really strange tattoos and facial warts, they were helped far more. In loose cultures, there's just more openness to people who are different. There's a whole host of getting back to goffin issues with being stigmatized in tight cultures and could talk about that if you'd like. But that's really where loose cultures corner the market on openness. They also tend to be more creative. So in large scale crowdsourcing contests of creativity it's really clear that people from loose cultures are more likely to enter creativity contests, and they're more likely to win them. So the big picture is that tight cultures struggle with openness, but they are really disciplined and have a lot of order. And I think we can talk about this later when it comes to COVID But this kind of presents this evolutionary mismatch where certain traits might be really great in some contexts, but not in other contexts. And this sort of begs the question of how do we kind of pivot when we need to? When are the traits that we naturally are evolved to the context that they're useful in? Like, Lucius is great for creativity and innovation in contexts where there's not much threat in general. How adaptive is that to context of collective threat like COVID? Right. I want to mention also these are generalities. Clearly, there's going to be some differences, but we have found this order versus openness trade off, both at the national level, at the state level in the US. Rank ordering the 50 states on tight loose. Others have found it in China. Rank ordering the 30 plus provinces in China. In terms of the measures we developed, organizations tend to have the same trade off. I'm actually could talk later. I'm working with the Navy to try to help them become more ambidextrous, even though they need to veer tight, et cetera. So the tight loose trade off tends to be something that constitutes kind of a fractal pattern coming from physics, this repeated kind of pattern across levels. But again, we have these strong stereotypes around what's good, what's correct, what's objective. To us, looking at another culture, really, we would get this moral outrage. And often, if we step back, I mean, like you said, the extremes are bad anywhere. But like, if we look at the gum example that you gave, americans are kind of horrified. Why can't you bring a lot of gum into the country of Singapore? And actually, it has some kind of historical basis. In the late 80s, people were chewing gum. It's a very highly populated, dense, high population density context, about 20,000 people per square mile, and people were chewing gum. And I guess, as a lot of us do, we'd throw it on the floor. And it was causing this massive problem throughout Singapore with gum and wads of gum, like blocking sensors on trains and elevators. And Lee Kuan Yew, who, if you read his autobiography, the dude was really a cross cultural psychologist at heart. He talks about how Singapore has a lot of threat and that we need to sacrifice some freedom in order to kind of come together and coordinate. And he talked about gum as being one of these issues, like, guys, like, we live in a very small place, and this gum is causing a big problem, and we better just kind of ban this tasty treat because we have so many mouths per capita. And I'm sure there was some resistance to that, I would guess. But overall, I think when we start looking at these differences with some. Eye to the ecology of countries, we might have a little bit more empathy. Yeah, actually there's a distinction that you make in the book which is a little hard to understand quickly, so perhaps you can spell it out because it's easy to see this tight, loose distinction as analogous to or identical to the distinction between being politically conservative and politically liberal. But those are not the same axis. In your view, how do you differentiate liberal and conservative here politically? Yeah, well, I think social norms are a different level of analysis. Individual differences in conservativism and liberal attitudes tend to be individual differences. They might be adaptive in certain contexts, but clearly you'll find conservatives living in looser states, you'll find liberals living in conservative states and so forth. So I think that we can think about them as separate but interrelated that clearly conservatives probably like to be in context where there's strict social norms. They also have domains in which they're quite loose. And likewise, liberals might find themselves enjoying living in loose states, but they also will have a lot of domains that are basically loose, also have some domains on which they would fall tightly. So I see them as like interrelated at different levels of analysis. Actually, COVID is a very good mechanism for dissecting out this difference because when you look at the conservative bias against mask wearing say, because they don't want this new norm of mask wearing imposed on them based on their underlying beliefs about epidemiology here. And we can talk about the problem of information and misinformation. But yeah, that's an example of people who are disproportionately conservative rebelling against the tightness that's coming to them from the political left in our country. Yeah, I mean, this was one of the big evolutionary mismatches of the century. Much of the work in the social sciences has found that conservatives, this is prior to COVID are much more sensitive to threat. I'm sure you've seen some of this work. It's both surveys, it's experiments, it's neuroscience data. So when COVID hit and we see that conservatives are the ones that are actually resisting because of that, this is a real threat really makes us realize that there's a strong propensity for people, particularly conservatives, to follow the leader. And what we know during times of threat now is that that threat signal can get hijacked, it can get distorted, it can get manipulated. And if it does, then groups don't tighten. And I think that's where we see the pandemic. The switch with conservatives to me, makes sense in a context where it's a germ, it's invisible. It's kind of easier to ignore as compared to warfare or terrorism. If you have combined with the abstract nature of the threat and you have leaders who are telling you, don't worry about it, then conservatives their kind of normal propensity to be threat sensitive, it just goes basically out the window. And that's been the big kind of story of COVID Actually, there's another piece to it which is deeply ironic or depressing, depending on your view, but they're sensitized to the threat around this. But they're disproportionately sensitized to the threat of the vaccine. Basically, we have something like 40% of the country, it seems, that is quite sanguine about the prospects of catching COVID but quite averse to getting vaccinated against COVID. They're basically running a head to head trial between the disease and the vaccine for the disease and deciding the disease is better. Yeah, it's just remarkable. And there's some interesting new data coming out that a lot of this has to do with signaling that if you hear from Republican leaders that that vaccine is okay and it's good, then you'll see people in the Conservative Party starting to veer towards their intentionally getting the vaccine when they hear that same message from liberals, of course it backfires. But I think this is just yet another example of the power of social norms. Humans are social creatures, and I think that's where people have been trying to get Republicans to get out there and be role models and say, this is important because we do know that people are starting to listen to that. It's just that we don't see it that often. Yeah, well, maybe there's more to say about COVID When we talk about how we want to try to steer the ship in light of what we understand about norms, I'm struck by how important norms are and how it's not totally obvious where they get their power from. You can think of certain norm violations, but certainly in a religious context, there are norm violations that are absolutely fatal to a person's reputation or even to their lives in a theocracy. But even in the context of a very loose society, there are norm violations, which really are an extraordinarily big deal. And it's not totally clear why or what would be optimal here. I'm thinking one example that came to mind was the misadventures of Jeffrey Tubin, the New Yorker writer. Most people probably know this. He was on a zoom call with his colleagues, who are other famous writers, disproportionately, one must think, very liberal, and he thought they were taking a ten minute break, apparently, and started masturbating. And to the uniform horror of the people who were still on the call with him, originally, his statement was he thought his camera was off or sounded like he didn't actually know how to use zoom very well to his everlasting disadvantage here. But basically he masturbated in front of his colleagues, clearly making a mistake. Not he was not some boorish ogre who was imposing this sexual harassment style on his colleagues. I mean, he clearly thought he was in private and was wrong about that. And yet it has proved to be a norm violation without any intent, so catastrophic that one wonders if he will ever be heard from again. So it was certainly career wrecking and, at minimum, life deranging. And on some basic level, I look at it as he was just very unlucky to be so confused as to have inadvertently violated this norm. It's easy to see how CNN and the New Yorker wouldn't be eager at this point to rehire him because he's done himself and them, by association, massive brand damage, but it's just not clear to me what should be done in situations like this. Yeah, well, I mean, it's such a great example. I think there's so many examples where you've seen this kind of intentional or unintentional behavior from major leaders. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMA and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, this is my second podcast on coronavirus, and it is very consciously a follow up to the one I just dropped with Nicholas Kristakis. I've done this with Dr. Amish Adolphia, who is an infectious disease specialist affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. As many of you know that John's Hopkins website has become a resource for more or less everyone on the spread of coronavirus. And Amish has a background in infectious disease, and he's helped develop US. Government guidelines for the treatment of plague and bongulism and anthrax. He has edited the journal Health Security, a volume on global catastrophic biological risks. He's a contributing author to the Handbook of Bioterrorism and Disaster Medicine. So the spread of an emerging pandemic is very much in his wheelhouse, as you'll hear. He sounds less concerned than I do, and the reasons for that become explicit at two points. So I just want to flag that here so that you have an emotional barometer to the conversation. The first is that his estimate for the case fatality rate for coronavirus worst case puts it at 0.6%, which is six times worse than influenza, but quite a bit better than the worst case scenarios being talked about elsewhere. He definitely thinks that this is going to be considerably lower than 1% fatality. So if true, that's obviously good news. Six times worse than the flu would still be quite terrible when you run the numbers. But it doesn't put this virus at 3% or 2% or even one and a half percent, which is a very common figure one sees at the moment. So I don't know how accurate an estimate that will prove to be, but that is one reason why he sounds more hopeful than I have been. But there are two other reasons that don't become explicit until the end of our conversation, and I want to preview them here. So you have the appropriate frame coming in. The first is that Amish is a man who spends a lot of time thinking about the worst case scenario. And the worst case scenario is something like a bird flu that mutates and becomes highly infectious among people and has something like a 60% mortality rate. He is thinking about species annihilating plagues that we know are possible and that we need to prepare for. So in light of that possibility, what we're experiencing now, even the worst case scenario, is very much a dress rehearsal for something much, much worse that could yet happen. So that's worth understanding. But the other piece here, which, again, we talk about only at the end, is that his primary concern now is not to sow panic, right? And my primary concern has been to spread not panic, but heightened concern, because I'm encountering people who think that this is no big deal, right. I'm encountering them disproportionately on the right side of the aisle politically. But I've seen people with real reputations and considerable reach. Tell their fans that this is just like the flu and 6000 people die every year of diabetes and we don't freak out about it. They're not even making contact with the dynamics of this thing that is unfolding in front of us. So where you come down on the need to mollify people's fears or amplify their concerns here, I guess, is a matter of judgment. And Hamish and I are running in different circles and have calibrated that rather differently. So please know that going in. I see a society that still doesn't want to close its schools. I know people who are still going to concerts. I have people who seem surprised that I expect that their spring break plans are going to change. I know people who don't seem to understand why conferences are getting canceled. And there's a pervasive sense, again, especially on the right side of the political spectrum, that the media is exaggerating the problem here, very likely for political and monetary gain. And my concern is to break through that bubble. And you'll hear in a few places where I attempt to do that without fully understanding Amish's concern. Not to so panic, but we come to a full understanding by the end. Anyway, I hope you find this useful. Undoubtedly this will not be the last conversation on this topic I have. Amish has agreed to come back anytime there's new information that he thinks people should know. And I will do my best to make myself useful during what I am confident will be a challenging time for all of us. And now I bring you amish. Adalja. I am here with Dr. Amesh. Adalja Amesch, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. So this is the second podcast I have done on Coronavirus in 48 hours and I just really want to COVID this topic completely, insofar as we we understand it at the moment. And you really seem to be the right person to speak with here. Give us your background and why you have any expertise on this topic. Sure. So I'm an infectious disease critical care and emergency medicine physician that I focused my whole entire career basically on emerging infectious disease pandemic preparedness, how infectious diseases and national security intersect. And that's basically where I've kind of niched myself. And when these types of outbreaks occur, it often is something that I've been thinking about long before the outbreak occurred. And that's sort of why the media sometimes turns to me during these incidents and I try to understand them, dissect them, predict what's going to happen, and even do this when there's not an outbreak. And you're affiliated with Johns Hopkins, correct? Right. So I'm part of a think tank at Johns Hopkins called the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which is a think tank devoted to infectious disease emergencies and was founded back in 1997 by the man who eradicated smallpox from the earth, d. A. Henderson. And it was initially founded in response to bioterrorism, but is now really expanded to think about all infectious disease emergencies. And we have a multidisciplinary team of epidemiologists physicians, people with MPHS, lots of different types of people, infectious disease modelers, and we tried to really keep on top of these issues and kind of be the leading voice on them. And you do seem to be the leading voice because the Johns Hopkins dashboard seems to be the dashboard that everyone is using to track the spread of this disease. Yeah, that was something that people put together rapidly. It's not in our specific center that's actually, I think, from one of the engineering schools that's put that together, but it's been really useful and it's been refreshing to see the world using Johns Hopkins talent to help understand what's going on. Okay, so it's March 10, the day we're recording this. I think we'll probably release this on the 11th. And at the moment there are around 118,000 confirmed cases and a little over 4000 deaths. And I know we have a denominator problem still, so we don't actually know how many people have been infected. So it still requires some guesswork to estimate the case fatality rate. But what is your best estimate at this point? So the best estimate I think, is derived mostly from the South Korean data where there's been extensive testing, the most per capita testing that's been done in any country where they actually have drive through testing centers. There you're seeing the case fatality rate at 0.6. So that's now become my upper bound. I do still think that there is probably a severity bias there because it still takes some effort to want to go get tested. So we're still not fully getting capture of everybody that might have very mild or minimal symptoms that people don't even barely notice. So I think 0.6 is the upper bound and I think the lower bound is going to be somewhere, I would say a little bit above seasonal flu, which is 0.1%. So it's somewhere in there, but it's still a lot of fluctuation and still a lot of uncertainty. Okay, so that is actually quite a bit more sanguine than anything I had heard up until now. I recorded my previous podcast 48 hours ago and there you have, I think it was the Lancet reporting 1.2% to 1.6% or somewhere in there. I mean, something like, you know, half the rate of the most dire predictions of around 3%. So you're reasonably confident that 0.6% is the upper bound, which now we're talking about six times more lethal than the seasonal flu. 0.6 seems to be the best way to look at this when you think about the fact that we've had major testing constraints in many countries, and South Korea has been very aggressive at testing and that's where they're seeing their number. So I think that that's the easiest parameter to try to put into this big world of unknown about this. And I definitely think the 1% 3% numbers are way off because of the severity bias. It's important to remember that seasonal flu is is .1%. So that's it's still a little it's still magnitude's higher and it will will be difficult, more difficult than dealing with the seasonal flu to deal with this virus. I want to talk about the comparison with flu with respect to both severity and contagiousness in a minute. But I'm wondering, so have any of these ships that essentially have been rather unfortunate and accidental science experiments where you have people cooped up in a giant floating petri dish with this virus and then you just have them quarantined and so we can see what happens. Have any of the ships provided a clear picture of the case fatality rate here? I'm sure there's an age bias with respect to the cohorts who are on the ships, but why don't we have a clear picture based on what's happened in each of these cases? I think you just answered your own question that there is a severe age bias when you're on a cruise ship because remember, those are going to be older people. Those are going to be people with medical conditions that like to go on these trips. It's not going to necessarily be the representative sample of the population that you need to actually calculate a proper case fatality ratio. What the ships do offer us is some idea of the attack rate, even though that's also limited because sometimes those ships were doing things in order to try and prevent spread, even though it wasn't very successful. But we saw about 20% attacked in the Japanese cruise ship. So I do think that they provide some information. But it wasn't quite the perfect experiment and I think it ended up almost being torture for some of those humans that were left on board that ship. And I wouldn't draw too much from it other than the fact that we know that this is contagious in those types of settings and that elderly people are disproportionately going to be impacted with severe illness if they are infected. Okay, so let's deal with the comparison with flu because many people have been drawing comfort from the idea that if you're a healthy non smoker under 70, you basically have nothing to worry about. It's more or less just like the flu. And most of us are going to get this right. In fact, I think I've even saw you say more or less this in a talk you gave I watched a YouTube video of a lecture you were giving a couple of weeks back. So most people are going to get this and if you're healthy and not too old, it's not likely to be a problem for you. Another statistic that I've heard a lot is that 80% of cases are mild. So what is a mild case and what is actually rational to believe here, and I say this knowing personally knowing someone who is 50 and an extreme skier I e quite healthy or was quite healthy until he caught coronavirus, a non smoker, and he's now on a ventilator. Obviously, this is an anecdote. This is not science, but I don't have similar stories to tell about flu. So what's the picture in terms of comparing the severity of this generally to flu? While it is true that most cases are going to be mild and indistinguishable from the cold and the flu, this does seem to have a higher case fatality ratio. So you are more likely to see people die from this than from influenza. It is true that the deaths cluster and those that are elderly that have other medical conditions, but it's important to know that just because something clusters there doesn't mean that other diseases, other deaths can't occur at other age groups. So we are going to see healthy people that die from this. It's not going to be the norm, it's not going to be as common, but it is going to happen, and it's important to prepare for that. So even we see that with influenza right now, this year's flu season, to draw the comparison back to flu, has seen the most children die from influenza in recorded history, except for during the 2009 h one n one pandemic. So we don't often hear so much about the younger people that die from flu as well. But it is true that those death deaths occur, and because this has a higher case fatality ratio likely than seasonal flu, we will see deaths in other age groups, although they will be clustered in in the the highest age groups. And in terms of the mildness cases, it's true to say that it would be possible for this to present as benignly as an ordinary cold. There are people walking around with the sniffles who may in fact, have coronavirus. Right, that's definitely true, because, remember, coronaviruses are a family of viruses. There are four of them that cause seasonal colds every year, and this is now basically becoming the fifth seasonal coronavirus. And we are going to see this spectrum of illness where many people will just have the sniffles or just have a cough or a sore throat, and nothing really becomes of it. It's just like a normal cold. But then there are that group that have risk factors or, by luck of the draw, have a more severe case. So that's kind of one of the things that this virus is used to transmit itself so well is the fact that you've got these mild cases walking around in the community that just look like a cold, but they can then get transmit it to other people. So that's really advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint for a virus to have this spectrum of illness with these mild cases out there that are really serving as vectors for the virus. And what do you make of the fact that it seems to be systematically more benign in children? So that's a really important question that we're all trying to answer and try to come up with hypotheses for. There's a couple of them. One is that children tend to have less robust immune responses. And maybe most of the symptoms that we're seeing, especially the severe ones, are triggered by an overabundant immune response that's more characteristic of adults than in children. And we know that that's the case for many infectious diseases. For example, chickenpox is much milder in a child than an adult. So that's one hypothesis. The other is going back to those four circulating coronaviruses that are around every year. Children get a lot more colds than adults and there might be some cross immunity because they have many more exposures to coronavirus in their daily life than an adult might. So that cross immunity might be somewhat protective. But this is one of the leading research questions we need to understand, especially as we're trying to figure out what the role of children are in transmission. As you hear about school closures occurring around the country, would that cross immunity suggest that parents who have young children who also seem to get exposed to more of these viruses than people who don't have kids would we likely be able to detect lesser severity in their case? It's a logical conclusion. I don't think that we've actually tested any of that. But these are all important things we need to do when we get proper diagnostic testing available to do these types of studies. But these are all important research questions that are going to help us kind of right size this outbreak response. So let's talk about the contagiousness of this in terms of the so called are not factor. How does this compare to flu? It looks like it's about in the same category as flu. And there's a lot of mysticism, what I call mysticism about the Rnaught. People think it's like something intrinsic. It's an intrinsic feature, like horsepower on an engine in a car. When it's not, it's really an average number. And you can have varying Rnaughts for the same infectious disease. It just depends on what that person does in the environment they interact in. So you can have someone like Typhoid Mary who has a very high r not for Salmonella typhoon, which caused typhoid fever, and you can have someone who doesn't have a high r not. So it's not something that I spend much time trying to delineate. If the Rnaught is 2.3, meaning it infects one person, infects 2.3 other people, or if it's 2.8 or whatever it is, I kind of think of them in batches. I think if the Rnaught is less than one, meaning that most people are not going to affect anybody, it's not something to worry about. Then I think of the other extreme. The r not is 15. So that's something like measles or whooping cough. That's going to be very hard to deal with because you're going to have lots of people infected and lots of exposures. And then I think of that middle ground of like the R knots between like two to four, and I put flu and I put this virus in there. And I think that's a better way to think about it than trying to look at it as some intrinsic feature that you're trying to compare between viruses. I think that gets a little bit too tried to put too much of a statistical flavor to something that really is not completely exact that way. It's just this is transmissible. It's not as transmissible as measles. It's more transmissible than tetanus, which is not transmissible between humans. In terms of the mechanism of spread, what do we know about that? This is a respiratory virus. So the main way that it spreads from person to person is through the coughs and sneezes that people experience and the particles that emanate from their body. These are large droplets that fall to the ground in about 6ft because of the action of gravity. And it can also be transmitted from the surfaces that people touch that may have those droplets on them. But the main mechanism is this respiratory droplets, the coughs and sneezes. Because you got a lot of questions I get all the time about if someone hands me a pen, can I get it from a pen? And of course, the answer is theoretically yes. But really that's not how this virus is transmitting. It's mostly through coughs and sneezes from person to person. We don't know that there's quote unquote, airborne spread. Airborne spread is some people mix that up with respiratory spread. Airborne spread refers to a virus or a pathogen that can stay in the air for a long period of time. So if I got on an elevator and had measles, for example, and then you got on the elevator an hour later, that air would still be infectious. That's not really what we're seeing. There may be some component of airborne spread in hospitals. When they're doing procedures on people and they're aerosolizing the virus. Suppose they're putting a breathing tube in someone or looking down in their lungs with the telescope or giving them a treatment that requires a drug aerosol that can sometimes cause airborne transmission. But the primary means is really these respiratory droplets. So with respect to surfaces, how long do we think it can live on a surface? If you go look in medical journals, you will find stories of coronaviruses living nine days, being viable for nine days on a surface. But that's important. That's hard to extrapolate to everyday life because there are certain environmental characteristics that are conducive to the virus and certain ones that are not. So, for example, temperature, humidity, UV radiation all of that affects the viability of a virus. And this is not a very hardy virus. It actually has this lipid envelope or this kind of fatty layer around it which actually can dry out. So when you talk about viruses and how well they survive in the environment, if it's an enveloped virus like the coronaviruses are, it doesn't usually last that long in the environment compared to something like the Norovirus, which you might have heard of from cruise ship outbreaks that can be very difficult to get out of a surface or in a structure that it might have been contaminated with it. So what I would say to most people is it's probably hours today, a day or so, and it's not something that you have to worry too much about, because this is a virus that's easily deactivated by your standard household cleaners that you use during cold and flu season anyway. Okay, so unfortunately, I just watched a press conference given by the mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, where he said that this virus degrades in only a matter of minutes if it's on a surface. This is a direct quote it's only a matter of minutes before the virus is rendered inactive in the open air. And he was referencing subway poles and plastic chairs and tabletops, and that seems to be misinformation. Would you be confident touching a tabletop that someone had just sneezed on a few minutes later and not washing your hands? No, I think that minutes, that's not scientifically accurate. If it was hours, I would agree with, but I don't think minutes, unless the surface is a special surface that's got special characteristics on it, like it's made of copper or something that's bad for the virus. But no, I don't think that minutes is correct. Okay, so if you're among the nearly 1 million people who have watched that press conference on Facebook, please be advised, what about objects that you might have shipped to you in the mail? So someone has ordered a computer from Apple that was just freshly minted in Shanghai and made the trip. Let's say it took ten days to get to their house. Now they're opening it like it's a very large piece of medical waste. What do you say about that moment? I don't think there's a real risk there. I wouldn't hesitate about opening a package from China unless somebody told me that they packaged sneezes in there for me, just special. But no, I don't think that these types of ordinary products are going to be a risk for individuals to touch or open. Okay, so let's talk about flattening the curve. This is a phrase that many of us have absorbed. Now, what does it mean and why is it what we should be thinking about at the moment? So what we're talking about is an epidemic curve, and that's the number of cases that occur over time. And what flattening the curve refers to is trying to not have this big initial spike of cases. So you still have the same area under the curve, the same number of cases, but you spread them out over time, and that's somewhat easier for communities to cope with, especially when you're talking about bed space at a hospital or any kind of limited resource that might come into short supply during a pandemic. So that's why you see people talk about, for example, closing schools or limiting social gatherings or trying to do any kind of social distancing, just trying to decrease the intensity of spread, knowing that you're still going to have the same number of cases, but they're going to be spread out and they're more easy to deal with. So after this last podcast I recorded with Nicholas Kristakis, and after absorbing the growing concern around the spread of this virus, the punchline I've come away with is that if you can work from home, you absolutely should. And whatever nonessential social contact you have on the calendar should be canceled. If you have tickets to the concert that you've been looking forward to for a month and that's rolling around this weekend, you shouldn't be going to that concert. You should avoid eating in restaurants. If you actually can avoid eating in restaurants, anyone who can pull back at this point should pull back. Is that too alarmist or is that simply good advice at this point? It's all going to depend on each individual's risk hierarchy and where it all fits. If you're an elderly person or have medical problems or maybe you live with one someone like that and you want to decrease their exposure, it might be prudent when you have high intensity transmission in your community, to take those types of actions. I don't think that the whole world needs to take those actions. I myself haven't done most of that. I think that you have to really look at each location that the virus is spreading in and make a distinction on whether or not you think that this social distancing is going to help or it's going to not have an impact. Because if you have widespread community involvement with this virus, already, social distancing is maybe going to decrease your individual risk. But then you have to put that into your own value hierarchy and decide, yes, this is really important to me, so I'm going to risk it and just be very meticulous with my hand hygiene and not touch my face or this is something that I didn't really want to go to anyway, and I'm not going to do it. Once we get to a point where if there's high intensity transmission, then you might see more stricter recommendations coming out about that type of nonessential travel. But I do think that you're going to see variations across the country and variations with each person's risk preference. And we do know that social distancing can cause damage because it's going to cause economic disruption when that happens. So there are some things that are easier to do, like telecommuting, but some things that might be a little bit harder to do, and I think that it's going to be difficult. And we didn't do so much of that during 2009 h one, N one, we had some school clothes and people do did some things, but not as aggressive as we're seeing now. So it will be interesting to see how this actually plays in an American setting with people trying to adjust their daily life to this virus. And I think eventually you're going to see people start to be able to cope with it a little more as this doesn't go away without a vaccine. Right, so let me just push back on two points there. So we know that we're not doing and have not been doing adequate testing. So we really can't be confident that we know how fully it has spread in our community. How can a person assess that it hasn't yet spread much in the community and they don't have to worry about going down to the local coffee shop? And two, given that the primary vector of contagion is having someone cough or sneeze too close to you, even more than anything that you can control by assiduous handwatching, going to the rock concert puts you shoulder to shoulder with people who at any moment might turn and cough and sneeze on you. So I'm not quite sure how to be confident going into those spaces, given those two facts. So you're not going to be able to completely avoid this virus in that type of a setting if you're in a concert or if you're at something where you're going to have multiple interactions with people that are not in a controlled manner. And rock concerts are going to be very different than certain other activities like going to a restaurant or going to a coffee shop, where you can have some distance between people. And I do agree that we don't quite know how much this is transmitting in our communities, but one indicator that you can use is looking at what hospitals are doing. You're going to hear about even if there's a small proportion that get critically ill and need ICUs, you're going to hear about that in your community. So I think in most communities we haven't heard about people in the ICU. There are definitely cases in ICUs, but we don't have large numbers of them, which may be an indicator that there's been less community transmission or maybe this is less severe than we thought because we're not seeing those ICU patients all across the United States. So it does become difficult because of that testing problem. And I do think that there is some level of community spread going on in every city in the United States. But then what lesson should we draw from the experience in Italy right now? It seems like there's no reason to think that we are different from Italy, apart from the timing. At which the virus first landed. What's happening in Italy now that is basically forcing the whole country into lockdown and straining the health system to the breaking point? And why wouldn't you expect that to happen here if we just carry on business as usual? I do think that the experience in Italy and hearing about these ICU bed shortages is something that kind of hits home for America because the health systems are somewhat similar, not completely similar. And it's unclear to me exactly what's driving the force of infection in Italy and how that might be different in the United States. We do know they have an older population in the United States, so that may account for more severity than here, but it's not that much older. I think that the Italian government is taking an approach where they want to try and flatten the curve in a very drastic manner, kind of following what China did. And I think that paradoxically may make things worse because you're going to panic the population and you're going to inundate the hospital with scared individuals and other parts of the healthcare system are going to suffer just like it did in China, where people with heart attacks and strokes had difficulty getting their way to a hospital. I think that we have to really drill into the Italian numbers and understand how much testing they're doing, what is their real case fatality ratio there, and try and use that information the best we can to prepare our hospitals and our ICU's for what might be a very severe season. I do think that some of those drastic social distancing measures may be necessary in certain situations, but I don't think that you could have a blanket lockdown and expect that to actually work or be effective and not have negative consequences that might outweigh any positive there. But this is all very fluid and very hard to quite these aren't easy decisions to make, and there's a lot of uncertainty here. And that makes it hard to make any kind of specific recommendation on what to do without having full data and knowing what's exactly going on in the ground in Italy to come back to my question, because I really do want to sharpen this up and have listeners come away with a clear plan of action. Again, my heuristic here is that if you can work from home and if you can cut out social contacts, there are people who can't. Obviously there are jobs that are synonymous with being in that particular store or restaurant or office. But if you can pull yourself out of society to whatever degree and thereby deny this virus a path through you and your life to others, that seems to me to be an intrinsically wise and ethical thing to do. Apart from, again, there are economic consequences to doing that, which people who own restaurants and own retail stores are understandably worried about. But if the goal were simply to stop this thing as fully as we can, which is to say flatten the curve as fully as we can and keep the health care system running. Is there any argument against taking that advice? No, I don't think there's any argument against taking that advice. I think sometimes it becomes impractical for certain people to do, but it is technically what you should be doing, even during flu season, if you can. And there are some things that are easier to do and some things that are harder to do. I don't think we'll see full social distancing with every American, but I do think that there will be a large proportion that do do that, especially those with high risk conditions that are worried for their own safety or that of their if they have relatives or they live with people that have those types of conditions. I think it's going to be hard for that to happen for everybody, and there's going to be limited social distancing in certain locales. And I think there's going to be a hesitancy to go to complete social distancing as an ideal, although theoretically, yes, if you look at the actual facts of it, yes, if everybody's social distance, you would be able to flatten the curve substantially. And in terms of actually flattening the curve and even reducing mortality, as we're seeing in China now, I mean, that is being achieved in China by the most extreme and heavyhanded quarantining of the whole society that has ever occurred. I saw at some point recently I forget where it probably was on social media that South Korea seems to also be driving this contagion downward. Is that true? Is there any place else is having success the way China is? We have seen, I guess, variations of the Chinese model in other countries with Singapore, with Hong Kong, as well as even Taiwan, where they have done some extreme social distancing. We're even seeing it now being implemented in New York state, in Westchester County. China, I think, took a very authoritarian approach because they had that tool available to them and really went to an extreme level that we really haven't seen probably since medieval to medieval time, with basically locking down 60 million. People suppressing free speech in terms of what doctors were allowed to say and making it very difficult to even leave that area using armed guards. And that was something that we were very from a public health standpoint, most people were very kind of appalled by that type of reaction. And now you're seeing people say maybe that flattened the curve there, maybe that bought the world some time. And I don't know if that's the truth or not, because this spread very quickly. And I wonder when I saw this virus emerge in late December and we realized quickly that this was something that was spreading between human to human very efficiently and had been spreading at least since November, unbeknownst to anybody. We knew that this wasn't going to be just a China problem, that it likely had left China. And a lot of us really argued that this probably should have moved from containment at a very early stage to mitigation with less of that type of lockdown mentality and more with fortifying hospitals, vaccine development, antivirals diagnostic testing, and really taking a different approach, more like the one we took during 2009, H one N one. Right. But it's true that H one N one is not as contagious, right? I don't know if it's not as contagious. We know that H one N one infected a billion people over six months. So that's pretty contagious. And 61 million people were infected with H one N one. So it wasn't something that was small. And I think that's the best model we have. We don't know where this one's going to end. And I would say this is around the same contagiousness level of H one N one, maybe a little bit more because we don't have an H one N one. We had certain age groups that were less likely to be infected because of prior immunity that they had. I think that the approach of containment probably wasn't the best one to take for this type of virus, and it might have expended public health resources that could have been better spent fortifying hospitals. And of course, the Chinese built new hospitals and did things during this outbreak. And I think that some of that Chinese stuff is not replicable in other parts of the world because there are certain values in other countries that people do not want to transcend that China did. And I think those are very good values. And I myself objected to what China did there because I do think that there's another cost that's not necessarily this disease that you have to kind of figure into. What happened in China, and especially the fact that this is now being held out as an example by certain individuals, I think really can put us in a domino effect of this kind of draconian response that may, in the end, we might lose more than we gain from it. Yeah, I think there's nothing to emulate in the Chinese model apart from drawing the conclusion that insofar as you can avoid social contact, that is the way to mitigate the spread of this thing. And if you really manage to avoid it, if you could wave a magic wand and impart a new norm of social distancing to everyone, not at the point of a rifle, but at the point of a bright idea, we could change the level of contagion a lot, but it's just whether everyone can get the message all at once. And we have a kind of coordination problem and we have massive economic incentives pointing the other direction, which worries me. Right. And you have to remember that people run businesses. If people can't work and they eventually aren't going to be able to eat. So there's going to have to be some trade off that you have there between social distancing and then being able to be productive and be able to flourish. So how much does smoking play a variable here? I don't know the rates, the relative rates of smoking in China and in Italy compared to the US. But is there any reason to believe that smoking is part of the epidemiological picture here in terms of the severity of the disease? We definitely have seen smokers get severe illness in China, but the number looking at some of the data, some of my colleagues are looking at that, and at least the data that's been published, we haven't been able to see a major signal there. But it is true from a physiological standpoint that smoking is something that is conducive to respiratory viruses being much worse in a smoker than in a non smoker because it does damage all of these airway protective mechanisms that you have and makes you more at risk for diseases like emphysema and bronchitis, which make you more likely to have a severe case. So I do think smoking plays a role. How much of a role it's playing currently is hard to tell, but I do think, all things being equal, the smoker is going to have a harder time with this virus than a non smoker. And it may be responsible, responsible for some of the severe illness that we're seeing in certain countries where there are higher smoking prevalences. So in addition to being old, the risk seems to go up with every decade here. So in addition to being over 50 and being a smoker, the points a person might have against them include heart disease, lung disease, cancer, compromised immune systems, diabetes. Is there anything to add to that list, or is that comprehensive? I think that's pretty comprehensive. Obviously, you're going to need to get a lot of data on the severe cases to see if there's any other disease processes, but they all kind of fit into that cluster that you're mentioning there. I think people who are on dialysis, I might add, as well, kidney disease is also it's a high risk for people to have a severe infection. But it's really any of these chronic medical conditions that keep people going to the hospital, keep them having to take medications, especially ones that interfere with their immune system as well as advancing age. It also seems like being a man is a chronic medical condition here, perhaps on other fronts as well. So do we still think that it's hitting men harder than women? It does appear to be a signal that we're seeing in the data that male males are disproportionately, getting more sick with this than than females are. And I think we've seen that with other infectious diseases. Even influenza is worse in males than females. And that may have to do with some idiosyncrasies and the differences between the immune system and a male and a female and the influence of of certain sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen on the way the immune system functions. And maybe men have a more actually, I think they have a more exuberant immune response, which is responsible for how sick you feel, and that's likely what might be behind this. But it's something that needs to be investigated. What about the idea that a higher exposure creates a more severe expression of the virus? So I think this was alleged with respect to medical workers in China getting it, some of them being quite young and dying. Is it a story of your exposed or not? Or it really matters just how much dose you got of the virus initially. There definitely is a dose response because we do this in animal challenge models where when you're trying to look at a virus, you might give them a really, really high dose of something to see how much what the lethal dose is. So there definitely is an inoculation effect. So the more you're exposed to the intensity of the exposure could give you an overwhelming infection that might be hard to recover from versus someone who gets a smaller exposure. The kinetics of that haven't all been worked out, but we've seen that with many different pathogens that the load that you're exposed to does have an impact on the severity of symptoms and how quickly you become ill. And what does recovery look like? I've heard reports of lung damage in people who recover. There's a giant green number on the Johns Hopkins website. I think last I looked, it was 65,000 people had recovered. How cheerful a picture is it to recover from this? So I would look at that number that you're seeing, the 65,000 number with a little bit of put a little context to it. When we use the word recovered in terms of this type of data, they're talking about officially recovered by those ministries of health in those countries. And what they're using there is fever free for a certain number of days and two negative diagnostic tests. That's not really what recovery means to an individual. For me, what recovery means to an individual is that they're able to do their activities of daily living. And so I think that many more people than that have actually recovered because that's more of an epidemiological distinction that they're trying to decide when can they discharge someone and not have them infect other people? When are they clear of the virus? Basically not clear of symptoms. Recovery is going to depend upon how severe, in general, your infection was. Obviously, if you just had a mild illness that was indistinguishable from the common cold, there really is no recovery period. You're going to have about a week of illness and you're going to bounce back just fine. If you're in a hospital and suppose you have pneumonia or you end up on a mechanical ventilator or in respiratory failure, then that recovery is going to be months and months with lung damage taking you a while to get back your same exercise tolerance if you've actually had damage to your lungs from this. So it's going to really depend on how severe the initial insult was from this virus. And those that are in ICUs are going to have protracted, protracted recovery periods, just like with any other type of pneumonia. So let's talk about what might be on the horizon with respect to treatment and prevention. Let's talk about treatment first. What do you think the plausible timeline is for developing an antiviral treatment? So, fortunately for us, we have this ability to repurpose antivirals that may have been used for other causes for other reasons and then try them out on this virus. And we've been doing that rapidly. So, for example, there is a product called Remdesivir, which was used in the Ebola trials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and didn't do so well in those trials, but it had activity against coronaviruses and actually animal studies against the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus that look good. So that's currently in phase two clinical trials right now, and we are hoping to see results from that in a couple of weeks. It's already been given to patients on compassionate use basis. So there is a lot of hope that that antiviral will appear maybe in several months after we get data from the clinical trials. There are a whole host of other things. There's actually a malaria drug that they're repurposing that happens to have activity against this virus and that's already FDA approved. So doctors can actually prescribe that in the United States off label to their patients with that. And then there's a bunch that are kind of earlier in the development stage. So I do think we will see an antiviral much quicker than a vaccine, for example. But it's still going to be several weeks before we get data on how effective they are. What's the antimalarial? Is that chloroquine or something else? It's chloroquine, yes. What's actually the belief now with respect to the efficacy of chloroquine as a treatment? We haven't done human trials on it, but there is a lot of studies in vitro, even before the SARS and before all these other coronaviruses, trying to use it against the other common cold causing coronaviruses. And it seems to exhibit an antiviral effect against the virus. And and that's why what people are trying to count on is, does this have activity against this specific coronavirus? And what we're seeing is some anecdotal reports of people using it, but there has been some effort to try and study this in a randomized controlled trial and see if what they've seen in a test you actually works in humans. Are any of these other countries who don't have the same requirements that the FDA imposes on us out ahead of us in testing Remedies. Do you know what China is doing with respect to antivirals? I know China has multiple clinical trials going on, not just of these antivirals that we mentioned, but also of traditional Chinese medicine. So there is basically, I think, hundreds of clinical trials have been registered in China regarding different antiviral compounds. So that's where the most cases are too. So you have to remember that it's difficult to recruit patients for trials and you especially in an emerging infectious disease outbreak when there may not be that many patients out there to actually recruit to put into your clinical trial. So you're going to see the vast majority of trials being done in China because that's where the bulk of patients are. Okay, so what's the soonest? Let's say some drug was showing promise in China. What do you think? The soonest it could be properly vetted and manufactured and made available in the US. Or in any other Western country? I would say it's going to be months. I think the FDA is poised to work very quickly if they have a compound that works. They have this mechanism called the Emergency Use Authorization, which they use they exercise during the 2009 H one N one pandemic to make an experimental intravenous antiviral against flu available. But they can work fast. You just have to have some amount of data to show them that this is safe and likely is going to be likely going to be Efficacious. And that's a little bit of a risk benefit type of nuanced thing that they have to do with each different product. But I do think it would be months before we would see an antiviral. Some of them like Remdesivir, which is the one that's in the phase two clinical trial made by Gilead. That one we may see faster because they've got a lot of safety data already from the Ebola trial. So they can leverage that safety data to just really look at the phase two trial results and maybe you see a decrease in the virus counting in people and you could rapidly get it available. And I know that I've been reading about that the company being able to rapidly scale up production and that they're investing a lot to be able to do this. So that may be something that we see in the short term if it's effective in the phase two trial. And when do you think the bottleneck around testing will be unblocked? When will it be just straightforwardly easy to get a test if you have a fever and you call your doctor? And I got to imagine at some point we're going to have a test that a person can take from home so that they're not going out there spreading this illness on the way to get tested. When do we arrive at that happy time? So the roadblocks to testing are rapidly disappearing, but there's still a lot of them that need to be removed. Right now. We've moved from the CDC being the exclusive purveyor of tests, to state health labs. And now we've got big companies like Quest and LabCorp that can test, but these are all send out tests that are not done in your hospital. There may be some academic medical centers that have made their own test, but for most hospitals, they're having to send this out. And that's a burden because there's paperwork, there's regulatory stuff at the hospital level that the hospital administrators want you to do before you test somebody that needs to disappear. And we need to be able to do this just like an HIV test or a flu test. And for that to happen, we have to have onsite testing. So that means that the kits that people have for other respiratory viruses in their, in their hospitals, they need to add this novel coronavirus to it or there have to be standalone kits. And that's going to take probably several months. There are some companies going through the FDA to get these types of kits approved, but I do think it's going to be some time before we get to the ability to just test or even have home testing. And I know the Gates Foundation is investing in home testing. And home testing is something that people have been trying for flu for some time. And I've actually done a project on that. That's really the goal is that you can test this at your home, but you know whether you have it or not, because it's really going to take some time to get a lot of the difficulties with testing. And I've been frustrated with it myself, trying to figure out how you're going to get these tests ordered, because as soon as you order that test in the hospital, all the hospital administrators will swoop on to you saying, why are you doing this? What's going on with this patient? Is everybody protected? Are they isolated properly? All of that kind of stuff happens. So it becomes a headache for a lot of doctors to go through that when many of these cases are mild. But I do think this has been one of the biggest, I guess, learning points in this outbreak. And it's been the biggest mismanagement of this outbreak has been this lack of diagnostic testing. So what about a vaccine? What's the most optimistic timeline? Twelve to 18 months. Probably closer to 18 months. Vaccine development is usually measured in years. This is something that takes a long time to do. We are moving as quickly as possible and already have candidates basically poised to enter phase one clinical trials because we've got some new technology that can get you to a vaccine candidate very fast. But you have to remember, when you give a vaccine, you're giving that to a healthy person. So there is this high burden of safety testing that you need to do because the person is not sick and you're giving them some kind of medication. So you want to make sure that there's not any side effect. And because this vaccine is something that you're going to feasibly vaccinate the world with, you really have to do clinical trials that are going to show you side effects that happen maybe in one in 10,000 or one in 100,000 people so that you have some idea. So you're going to have to do big clinical trials to be able to come up with that proper risk benefit analysis. Because it may be that there are certain risk groups that you don't want to give this to, and certain risk groups you do want to give it to. And that's going to take some time to figure out with big clinical trials. So I would not expect a vaccine at any time before twelve months. And I think if everything goes perfectly, hopefully by 18 months, we have it. And remember, during H one N one, that vaccine, even though we know how to make flu vaccines, didn't appear until after the virus had actually peaked in the fall of 2009. And once we get a vaccine, would you expect it to be like the flu, where you need a new version of this every year? No, I don't necessarily think that's the case. It might be more like measles, where you just need to get one and maybe a booster. The coronavirus is very different than flu in that sense. The flu is kind of the trickiest virus to make a vaccine against because of its genetics and its structure. And that's why we have to update the flu vaccine every year. Because we don't have a universal flu vaccine. I do think it's feasible to have a universal coronavirus vaccine. That's one happy point here. Okay, so give me your picture of the next twelve months. For the next year. We almost certainly don't have a vaccine. We may or may not have effective antiviral treatment coming in some months. That the possibility that we might have something to give you if you get sick. That radically diminishes the severity of the illness. That certainly argues beyond just the necessity of not destroying our healthcare system, that argues for the personal wisdom of flattening the curve. I mean, if you're going to get sick with this, it sounds like it's much better to get sick some months from now when there's a chance that we can give you a medication that helps you. So what do you think, for instance, will happen during the summer months? Is there any reason to believe that the spread will be diminished or even halted during the summer or not? The best evidence we have is from the other four coronaviruses that circulate every year. And what they do is peak in the winter and spring, and then their transmission decreases during the summer in temperate climates. So that doesn't mean that they go completely away, that they are there, they're there at much slower level because transmission characteristics aren't favored. We think this coronavirus may behave like that. We don't know for sure. I think there's good reason to extrapolate because virus families tend to do very similar things when it comes to seasonality. But remember that there's also another half of the globe in the southern hemisphere will be entering its winter months when we're entering our summer months. So we may see increased intensity of spread in Australia and New Zealand, for example. And then what may happen is in the fall it will come back. And that kind of follows the H one N one flu pattern. And I think that's the most likely scenario that we'll see some decreased transmission in the summer and then increased transmission in the fall. Now, is the seasonality entirely due to just how human beings behave differently in warm weather? Or is there some intrinsic property of the virus itself that is interacting there? I think it's both. There definitely are changes behaviorally that humans do in summer versus winter. But the virus also viruses tend to have certain transmission characteristics that are favored or unfavored by certain environmental parameters. So, for example, the ambient temperature, the temperature in your nose, the humidity, all of that does have an effect on how well the virus can transmit between people and live on surface and remain viable on surfaces. So it's kind of a combination of both that we see with respiratory viruses that have seasonality. And I see we're getting to the end of our hour here. What's your level of concern about this big picture? Do you think that this was the plague we've been waiting for in infectious disease and we're struggling to raise all the resources and make all the changes we need to respond to it? Or are you cautiously optimistic that this is a mere dress rehearsal for the plague that we will one day need to respond to better than we've been responding to this one? I think it's it's it's a dress rehearsal for a major plague because if you look, for example, at our avian flu viruses in China, the mortality rates of some of those are 60%. They don't transmit efficiently from human to human, but they are flu viruses. And what if one of those reshuffled and was able to transmit efficiently from human to human? That would be cataclysmic. We're dealing with a mortality rate of less than 1%. This is something that's going to be very difficult for hospitals and healthcare systems to cope with, but it really shows you just what a virus that kills less than 1% can do to a world. And I do think that this is a lesson that we're not doing this perfectly. And if we were to have an avian flu virus, have human to human transmissibility, all bets would be off. Because if we're having this much trouble dealing with a 0.6% mortality, imagine what would happen. If there was a 60% mortality flu virus circulating around. So I think it's a dress rehearsal. This is going to be bad, though. And I think that there is there there are going to be a lot of disruptions that we're going to have to to deal with, and it's going to be probably somewhat worse than H one N. One h one N was the closest that we came to this type of thing in the modern era. And even though most people are going to have a mild case and recover just fine, it is going to be a burden to work in hospitals. And it's going to really, hopefully get people to think about how important infectious disease preparation is, even when there's not a pandemic. Because some of this stuff could have been predicted back from 2003. We had a SARS outbreak. We saw what a coronavirus could do, and people wanted to make a vaccine for that. But really, now, 17 years later, we have no coronavirus vaccines for humans. We have no coronavirus antiviral. So this shows you what happens when there's complacency with these threats, even though everyone in my community have been sounding the alarm about coronaviruses since at least 2003 and some people even before that. So what specifically would you say that we at the level of individuals and institutions and cultures? What should we change? Emphatically? Just take the emergence of novel viruses and other pathogens out of wild species into the human population. Is it safe to say that we should not have wild animal markets where you put a bat on top of a pangolin, on top of a pig on top of a monkey, and have people work in those kinds of environments? What are the things you would just check off your list of things for people to never do again to prevent the emergence of a truly killer plague? So emerging infectious diseases all emanate from animals. So we do need to get smarter about how we deal with animals and those live markets where multiple different animals are housed together and their body fluids are mixed together when they're slaughtered. And people are doing all of that without appropriate personal protective equipment. That's basically a powder keg for viruses to jump into humans. And many of those viruses won't do anything. They'll just be dead ends. But there is the chance that you have a SARS or you have this novel coronavirus, or you have avian influenza that can actually take off. So we do have to really be meticulous about how we deal with those animal markets. And that might not mean necessarily banning them, but there are safety procedures that you can put in place the same way that you do at a slaughterhouse to protect the workers and protect individuals from being exposed. I do think that that's one thing that really needs to happen. I think we kind of have an idea of what viruses are likely to do this, and we have to get better at surveillance for them all the time. How many times have you been to an urgent care clinic and the doctor says you've got some virus? Sometimes that virus might be important because many of these infections, just like this novel virus, might present with just mild symptoms, and that's in you. But it could be the first sign of a panda pandemic. And that's what happened during H one N one, when two little girls got sick with a flu virus that nobody had seen before. They figured it out. Those girls were fine, but that was the sign of a pandemic. We don't do any of that surveillance regularly. We don't diagnose things down to a specific level. We don't have antivirals that are broad spectrum. We're not really looking at that kind of thing all the time. Only when there's an emergency do we start pushing for antivirals. I think a lot of that is what's missing and why pandemic preparedness is something that we're perpetually trying to emphasize in the media or to politicians, that this is something you need to do and think of as a national security issue. Because look at how many billions of dollars are being lost, how many lives are going to be lost. And I think it's because we don't really take these steps that are very obvious steps to take. If you've studied infectious disease emergence, you seem a little more sanguine about this than I was expecting, although I guess I could have expected it based on your YouTube lecture. I'm wondering if that is by reference to how bad it could be, obviously, if an avian flu ever became fully human transmissible and 60% lethal. That's quite a comparison case. But do you really not think that we could be in the territory of something like the 1918 influenza, given the current dynamics of coronavirus? No, I don't think so. 1918 killed 50 to 100 million people. We didn't have antibiotics, we didn't have antivirals, we didn't have any kind of vaccine development. We didn't have intensive care units. I don't think that we're at a 1918 level with this. I think this is if you want to gauge it, it's going to be like a double, like something like 1957 or 1968, where we had influenza pandemics. It's going to be more on that scale, which were more severe pandemics, but not quite at the 1918 level, but more severe than 2009. So I think that that's where I would place it, in that level. So if you were going to bet on the proportion of people in America who are going to get this over the course of the next 18 months, what would you think that number is? Probably 30% to 50%. So if we say 50% of 340,000,000 people and a mortality rate of 1%, that would put us at 1.7 million dead. So if it was half of that, it's still an enormous number of people dead from this virus? Yeah, I think it is going to be more than people will imagine. But will it be cataclysmic? I I don't think that's that's the case. The highest flu death rate we have, I think outside of a pandemic, is 80,000 in 2017 to 2018. So this is a magnitude higher than that. And I do think it's going to be disruptive and bad. But I think that what I'm worried about is that people's actions and reactions and panic will actually make things worse and really lead to this kind of cascading effect where hospitals can't operate, where there is widespread social chaos going on. And that's what really worries me more than the virus itself. Right. That's interesting. So I'd like to include this part of the conversation sure. If that's okay, because it just seems like we're unpacking some of the subtext here. So you could well imagine that 800,000 people could die from this over the course of the next year based on what we currently know about the severity and contagiousness of the virus. That does not seem far fetched. No, I don't think it seems far fetched, and I think that that's kind of one of my scenarios that I've envisioned. What I want to see is I have a hard time reading into the healthcare system in China or even the healthcare system in Italy. I'm much more comfortable talking about the British or the Canadian or the American healthcare system. And I tend to know what goes on in intensive care units of those types of hospitals. So that helps when we get data from there. I think I may refine what I think because I think it's much easier when you know what happens in an icy, when you're one of those types of doctors that deals with that, that you have some idea of how sick these patients are. And I really want if I had a colleague that would call me and tell me what this is like, that's a very different story than me reading these raw statistics from China and not knowing what's going on. And I think I might get a better picture and have a more refined idea of what I think the case fatality ratio might be and how many deaths there would be once we start seeing more cases in the United States and we can see what this virus looks like. Faced with kind of the most advanced healthcare system in terms of critical care interventions in the world, that might sound like I'm trying to, like, cheer for American exceptionalism, but I think it is true when it comes to critical care and severe illness that there is American exceptionalism. And you can look at the H one n one death numbers and compare the United States to other places, and you do see disparities there. We're very good at this. So I want to see what happens when we have severe cases in the united States. We've had some deaths here in the United States but those are not really representative because they're largely drawn from the from nursing home populations or elderly populations. And we know that these respiratory viruses are very different in that group than they are in other age demographics. Right. Although this is all assuming that we've sufficiently flattened the curve and that you're not on a gurney in a parking lot when you have this thing. I hear you about not wanting to spread panic. I'm a little worried that apart from seeing videos of people fighting over toilet paper in markets around the world, I'm worried that people aren't concerned enough when I see the way this is interacting with politics. Strangely, ironically, this is a virus that seems engineered in the current information environment to kill Trump supporters because the stuff I'm seeing on Fox News and the right side of the aisle politically in the US is just a denial of the severity of the problem at every level. And so it seems like they could use a little more panic, at least on that side of things. I won't take offense that I've been on Fox a lot, but it's a fine line between invoking panic and getting people proactively prepared. And at least in my media appearances on Fox or wherever it might be, I've been trying to walk that line as best I can, because I do really worry about public panic making it very hard for public health. Professionals and healthcare professionals to do their job and actually prompting a politician to make some kind of drastic decision that will make things worse for everybody. So it is very difficult to do that. And you are seeing this be politicized on both sides and it's almost the opposite of the politicization that we saw during the Ebola outbreak, which is interesting. So just to sharpen that up, your concern is that people with ordinary flu, people who just get a cold, people who have a fever for some other reason, panic and go rush into the hospital and that makes whatever curve flattening. We've achieved less and less achievable. So what do you recommend people do if they're concerned that they might be sick with something? The same things that you would do for something like influenza. If you are somebody that's a high risk group that you're older, you've got medical conditions, you really have to have a lower threshold to seek medical care. But the vast majority of people who get this infection are not going to need hospitalization and can be managed at home with over the counter types of remedies. So we don't want all of those people showing up in emergency departments, urgent care centers, at the doctor's offices, spreading the virus and making crowding even worse. That's what we don't want to happen. There are going to be certain people that are going to do that anyway, but we want to keep that to a minimum. So we need to get clear on who needs to go to the hospital and who doesn't need to go to the hospital. And that's what I'm really worried about, is that hospitals will not be able to cope with this and hospitals in the US kind of run at almost capacity all the time and even a severe flu season can put a hospital into dire straits. We saw that during the 2017, 2018 flu season. That's what I'm worried about happening is that type of panic running to the hospitals, just like the panic buying of surgical masks all over the country has led to possible shortages of the surgical masks that people may need in hospital settings. That's what I'm kind of worried about. These kind of disruptive events that are on top of this big disruptive event, which is the virus and that cascading and then politicians nationalizing something to make masks or doing something like that that may end up having negative. Consequences that we're stuck with for some time or closing borders or doing things that may not necessarily be effective, but are perceived by the general population as this person is doing something even if it's not effective. And we see that all the time with outbreaks. Okay, so is there anything that we haven't covered that you think we should hit? Is there any advice you have or any resources you want to direct people toward? Because again, we're having this conversation on March 10. I've learned that a week is a very long time in this business. The world a month from now could look very different. Where would you direct people to get the best information on a daily basis? I do think the Centers for Disease Control does have a lot of good information there. They do put out new fact sheets. They do have press conferences. I think those are really accessible and have most of the up to date American centric information. So what's going on in your country? I think that the local health departments, that the municipalities that you may live in, those are also good resources. And I would advise people to look at those now because if there are going to be measures taken, it's going to appear there. And you want to know what local health departments are thinking about now so that you have some outlet and some way to give them feedback and understand what's happening in your local community. I do think that center for Health Security website where I work just to plug that, does have an extensive section devoted to Coronavirus and we're working basically around the clock to keep up to date and having multiple conference calls a day to try and understand what's going on. So I think I would recommend our website as well. The who has a good website as well that has some information there and I would also recommend that, but it's going to be a media frenzy for some time and it's going to be hard to sort out the disinformation. So I do think that people should start looking for trusted sources of information. And that may be the CDC and your local health departments as well as some of the academic websites that are out there. There also you can sign up for the various newsletters that come out of Johns Hopkins on this topic. They have one just devoted to COVID-19. Right? And then there's also a journalistic outlet called Stat News, which is based owned by the Boston Globe. That's probably the premier science reporting organization in the world, I would say. And then there's also the University of Minnesota has something called Sidrap CID Rap, the center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. They're also a very good source as well. Amish, it's been an education. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks for having me./n
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+You've heard me, Lawrence Crowes, before on the podcast. Laurence is a physicist who will be familiar to most of you, and Matt Dillahunty has moderated a couple of discussions I had with Richard Dawkins, and you've heard him here as well. So without more introduction, I'll just say we get into several interesting topics here. We talk about nuclear war and Christian support for Trump. Trump does not come up much, many of you will be happy to know. We talk about science and a universal conception of morality. We talk about the role of intuition in science, the primacy of consciousness as a fact, the nature of time, free will, the illusion of the self. Lawrence does not agree that it's an illusion. We may have to COVID that topic again, and there's a few more topics here. In any case, it was a fun event. It was great to meet so many of you afterwards. These particular events are always followed by book signings. So the event itself was just an hour and a half, but the book signing winds up going for 2 hours or so, and that really is the chance to say hi. So if you enjoy this conversation, there will be two others with the same participants in Chicago and Phoenix coming up. So if you live close to either of those cities, feel free to come on out. Otherwise, I will try to get the audio and release it here. And now I bring you the event I did in New York with Lawrence Krause and Matt Dillahunde. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great privilege and honor to introduce the gentleman who will be joining me on stage. Please welcome Sam Harris and Lawrence Krause. They're standing. You just can't see them. We really can't see there. It's not a sound. Don't take lack of eye contact personally. Yeah, we'll bring the lights up before we get to the Q and A. How are you, gentlemen? Good. I have a disclaimer. A disclaimer? Yes, as you know, but they don't. I came down with food poisoning two nights ago, so if I either vomit or have to run off stage, it's not because of anything these two gentlemen have said. Maybe if he liked you better, feel better, it's all right. We'll see who runs off stage faster. I promise not to run off stage, mostly because I'm in boots that won't allow me to run anywhere. So today we're going to be doing three of these. New York is the first time for the three of us together, and something happened today that was all over the news, and I thought it might be an interesting spot to start. Hawaii had an incredible false alarm today where an emergency alert system sent out a text message essentially saying that a ballistic missile had been detected heading towards Hawaii and to seek cover. And this is not a drill. And 39 minutes later, they announced that it was a false alarm. And it both intrigued me and terrified me about the new world that we live in compared to, you know, when I was a kid, the technology that's there to save our lives. And yet things can go wrong because we're fallible. Are we better off if we're terrifying people with false alarms? And how do we go about dealing with a new world where technology is in everybody's hands and can be used and abused? Well, we are in a context where it's plausible to worry that missiles could be headed toward Hawaii. So that's the underlying problem, but aren't worried about enough. I think in just a little under two weeks I'll be going to Washington to announce the new value of the Doomsday Clock. I'm the chairman of the board of the Bolton Atomic Scientists, as you know. And one of the things that worries me is that I think people become very complacent about nuclear weapons because they haven't been used in over 70 years. People tend to think they'll never be used. And the real problem is that this kind of thing became public. But there's a great book called Command and Control, which is terrifying. And you realize how many close calls we've had. It's kind of amazing that there hasn't been either an accident or panic. And if you haven't read it, that's Eric Schlosser, his book. And there was a PBS documentary done on it. And you should either read it or watch that documentary but have a bottle of scotch or something when you're reading it because it is really terrifying as it should be. And so part of the problem, in fact, of this there's a lot of problems that people don't realize that in fact, because intercontinental ballistic missiles act relatively quickly, you know, in, in 25 or 30 minutes that, that they can they can do their work and do most of the way around the Earth. We still live in a world where the United States and Russia both have about 1000 weapons on a status where they're prepared to respond immediately. And as a lot of people, I didn't want to mention this word, but until a guy whose name I won't mention came in the White House, people didn't realize this. And I actually didn't realize it either until I was writing a piece. But people now know, and if you don't, you should know this there is no safeguard against the president launching nuclear weapons. There's no one he or she would have to ask. There's no one who can say no. And there's no constitutional check on that. And recently some congresspeople did discuss producing such check. During the Cold War. There was perhaps the height of the Cold War. There was some reason for that because there were 20,000 nuclear weapons that Russia and then the Soviet Union, United States were aiming at each other. And the idea was you have to launch them quickly. But now there isn't that reason. And yet we still have that. And that's that itself is terrifying because if that warning had not got and by the way, the warning I understood was due to a shift change and someone pressed the wrong button when they went off the shift. This is true. That raises a problem. When I have to check out at the grocery store and swipe my credit card, I have to click yes like 18 times just to pay for my how could you possibly hit the wrong button in a shift change and not get a, hey, are you sure you want to send the message? But imagine that went not to the sensible but scared people in Hawaii, but imagine that went right to the White House. Right. Okay. And to read Command and Control is to witness how, by sheer dumb luck, we have avoided nuke one another and even ourselves. So many literally dropped live nukes on North Carolina. Two of three safeties failed, and the final safety was like a manual toggle switch that was just in the right position. And in Silos book begins with a potential nuclear weapon exploding into Silo. It is truly amazing, and it really argues for something that we've been arguing at the Bulletin and certainly I try to write about, which is that we are safer with fewer nuclear weapons and not more nuclear weapons, because the more you have, the more likely there will be an accident or a false alarm. And yet we're in a situation right now where there are no arms control treaties. And what I was going to say at the beginning, which I think we were talking about beforehand, is what discourages me when I write about nuclear weapons compared to almost anything else I write about in the popular media, there's less interest. I don't know whether people don't want to think about it or are they just so complacent. Armageddon is boring. Yeah, armageddon, I guess, is boring. Or you don't want to think. Can you say what you said about William Perry's opinion? Is that for public consumption? I don't know. Thanks, Sam. I'll think of something back. But William Perry actually, I'll use this as an opportunity. My Origins project in Arizona will be having an event on a workshop on autonomous weapons. Autonomous weapons? Nuclear weapons and defense. And I'll be doing a dialogue with William Perry in a month, maybe give a two line bio. William Perry was the Secretary of Defense for Clinton, I guess, and is an amazing man in many, many ways and has a long view. He's not a youngster like you, but he said in conversation that he thinks we are now living in the time that is more dangerous than any time, even during the height of the Cold War, which is really kind of sobering with respect to this issue with respect to nuclear weapons. Yeah. And it's an issue that people should be concerned about. It's awful that that happened but if it raises public awareness of the kind of ridiculous accidents that the ridiculous false alarms. There's a man who actually we nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He's now dead. But a Russian, in my opinion, one of the few people who probably really deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. A Russian who was working in a missile silo. And there was a computer glitch, and it showed a nuclear weapon being launched in the United States, and he got the order to fire and showed another weapon five minutes later. And another weapon. And he personally reasoned that if there was going to be an attack from the US. They wouldn't wait four or five minutes between each or what, two minutes or whatever it was. So he disobeyed the command and probably personally saved the world. It's nice to take that warning that went out today. Even though it's a mistake, it lets us know about human error. It also may raise awareness there is a potentially huge downside and that this could be end up looking a little more like a crying wolf situation where the next time, if it's real and you get that warning that you don't take shelter. But something you said is terrifying to me and not specifically because of who's in the White House. This is true no matter who's there the very idea that Congress has to declare war, but they don't have to declare that it's okay to nuke people. In a nation and a system that's built on checks and balances, this one thing doesn't appear to have sufficient. The most consequential thing has no check and balance. Yeah. And it shocked me. I don't know if you knew about that earlier. I mean, literally, I thought that there had to be approval of joint Staff or at least a majority of cabinet members or something, but in fact there is no check on that. I would like to think that if somebody decided to go rogue and do it, that there would be somebody sensible nearby, some secret service person who would do what that Russian missile agent did. Well, one hopes that, yeah, the people actually press to press the button and their button is bigger than his actually have to do it. I think those people think very carefully, but they're trained to realize that they may have to do that. And they drill it all the time. All the time, yeah. So I wonder how this ties in to I try not to paint with too broad of a brush when I talk about any specific religion, including Christianity, but there are a number of Christians, including some of my family members, who are eagerly awaiting Armageddon. Armageddon. We all deal with people who construct conspiracy theories on occasion. I don't think it'd be that hard to put together a conspiracy theory that the reason we have Trump is because there were people who are okay with the idea of Armageddon. Because I know tons of evangelicals evangelicals who were supportive of him when there's nothing about this man that fits. Like the churches I went to, even though I know those churches are waiting for an apocalypse. The the most benign interpretation of the Christian support is just their calculated assumption, which is borne out that he will give them what they want because they're a voting bloc that he needs. I remember I ran into Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition, at a conference, and this was still during the campaign, but when Trump was the nominee and was professing to be a Christian of some flavor. And I had debated read once on television, but we actually had never met. And I said to him, there's no way you think he's actually a person of faith. Right. How do you explain the Christian support? And he immediately fell back on this trope. Who am I to judge what's in another man's heart? Insofar as I could tell that he was bullshitting, he was really bullshitting. He's happy to judge what's in other people's heart. Yeah, right. But the worst possible interpretation is just the one you just gave, which is there's at least some millions of people and maybe tens of millions of people in this country for whom biblical prophecy is real. It's a real roadmap to the future. And they're expecting the wheels to completely come off this car before the end. And that will be the best thing that happens. That's necessary for the best thing that will ever happen to happen. I have to say that since Trump got elected, I've been sort of hoping for Armageddon too. But in a way, it just seems better than listening to tweets every day. But I actually don't think it's the Armageddon thing. I was actually just thinking about writing a piece about this, and I'll say it, although it'll get people angry, some people. To me, it represents one of the real problems of professed Christianity. Because when you said they don't think Trump is a Christian, but they'll get what they want, what do they want? Do they want the things that they're supposed to be? A bonding, like love and all the things? No, what they want what they want is laws that restrict freedom of others. And that means to me, that operationally in this country. When it comes to the politics, professed Christianity is equivalent with hate. Well, to bend over backwards no, before I wanted to see if there's anyone who I can't filter out. The most charitable interpretation is not that it's synonymous with hate all the way down the line. Because just imagine if you're someone who really thinks that abortion is akin to murder, right? There is no difference between killing a fetus at the eight week stage and killing a fully developed human being. If you think that, then you think our society is just spectating on a holocaust that has been going on for your entire life. And it's easy to see how someone would not be moved by hate and would, in their own mind, be moved by compassion and love and a concern for divine retribution if they believe that God is watching all the while. Yeah, I mean, you're right. It's extreme to say that. You could say the same thing about restricting the rights of gay people that it's really love, because that's a sin in a lot of people's hearts and therefore insanely. You can say the same thing about members of ISIS who were throwing gay people off of rooftops. You must have seen this footage of ISIS members hugging with apparent sincerity the people they were about to hurl off of rooftops, because it's a lot this was not this was not a naked declaration of hate. This was sorry, this is how the game is played. We, you know, we have to do this. That represents to me that's the paradox I don't know if I've said it before on stage of you, but Steve Weinberg, who's a physicist friend at Nobel laureate and also an atheist, has said that there are good people and they're bad people. Good people do good things. Bad people do bad things. When good people do bad things, it's religion. And I think there's a lot of truth that and it's not just religion, it's ideology. Whenever people move away from reason and justify and we all do it, but justify bad actions, I think very few people do bad things thinking they want to do a bad thing. They're doing it for some reason that they think is a good reason. Well, we can go right back to Voltaire to address all this, which is if you can get people to believe absurdities, you can get them to commit atrocities. And once you have poisoned the foundation, which I think is hallmark of what many religions do, of right and wrong, of about how we should go about determining what is a moral good, if you poison that sufficiently, that's how you get people to do that. So you get them a bomb abortion clinics is how you get them to throw homosexuals off the roofs. Which kind of brings us to one of the questions we polled a little bit. I asked for suggestions on Facebook, and Sam had asked on Twitter. There's a couple of things that keep coming up, but I think, given what we're talking about, this issue of morality terrifies believers. I've been told that atheists can't be moral, and then the people who have put, like, another half second of thought into it will say, well, of course you could be moral, but you can only be moral because you were raised in a Christian environment that taught you about morals. And I gave a talk for a number of years, but you wrote The Moral Landscape, and I want you to just take a couple of minutes and give a summation of objective, reality, science based assessments and why people don't have to be terrified. And why? It may in fact be more terrifying if morals are just the dictates of some individual or being. Well, it's clearly more terrifying if the Bible is true or the Quran is true. Because then the universe has been created and is now governed by an omniscient sadist. He's created a universe with hell to be populated by people who he didn't give enough evidence to, to convince them of the truth of his doctrine. Right? So he could have just given enough evidence and we'd all be fundamentalist Christians or Solomon Muslims. But the miracles are always thousands of years old or they're in India or something. Strangely, they're in places where same place UFO sightings are, upstate New York. Okay, but they're not sort of like the UFO abductions and the cattle molestations. It could happen right here, right now, in front of 2000 educated people, and we would all be convinced. But that's not going to happen for some perverse reason. I'd still be skeptical. Yes. If you're actually in dialogue with an omniscient being who is bent upon convincing you for your own good, that can happen to you right now. Apparently I'm dumbing it down. But to tie on to what he's saying, I've had Christians tell me that God wouldn't reveal himself to me because I would continue to question, deny and I'm like, what kind of weak ass God do you believe in who is incapable of convincing me? You're just too damn obstinate. So let's leave that so we can leave that aside. There's something strange about believing that these books as written give you a truly moral worldview that you would endorse if any person behaved the way the God of the Bible behaves. That is our definition of a psychopath and a sadist. But the reason why you can have objective morality or I think that you can have a few short steps to objective morality. What I mean by objective is not that it's all just a matter of atoms. The universe includes subjective experience, includes consciousness is a natural phenomenon. Consciousness is a property of the universe. We don't know exactly at what stage it emerges in information processing in complex systems, or maybe it goes even deeper than that. It's totally possible that there's some spooky view of consciousness going further down than vast numbers of neurons or information processing units doing their thing. There's no especially good reason to believe that. I would say a lot of good reasons not to believe that. Yes, but still, the jury is arguably still out on that. What it's not still out on is a few fundamental questions. One, clearly consciousness exists. Even if we're living in a simulation on some alien hard drive, something seems to be happening. And that seeming is what I'm calling consciousness. So even if you're a brain and a VAT right now, or you're in the matrix or this is all just a dream and you're going to wake up in a few minutes and find yourself in bed. No matter how confused you might be about your circumstance, there is still consciousness and its contents in each moment and there is a vast difference between excruciating and pointless misery and sublime happiness and creativity and joy and love and all of the good things in life. And we have no idea how far that continuum actually goes in both directions. But we really know really that we like one side of it much better than the other side of it and we don't have to justify that preference. You don't have to justify preferring the happiest possible life to being tortured for eternity, right? And the idea that you would need some philosophical argument to justify that is just a specious claim that has confused a lot of people. And the idea that you would need to be able to draw your preference there again for avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone, that you'd have to draw that from some book that has been dictated by an omniscient being that also is a specious claim. So I view morality as a kind of navigation problem. And the reason why this is of a piece with ultimately a scientific understanding of the mind and a scientific understanding of human wellbeing and of conscious systems generally is that navigating between these two ends of the continuum of experience avoiding the worst possible misery and finding true bliss and creativity and connection and love. There are right answers about how to do that for properly constituted minds and for us. There are biochemical answers. There are psychological answers there are sociological answers there's economic answers, political answers. Every piece of human knowledge, that's legitimate knowledge has to be brought to bear on the question of how to live a fulfilling life. And it is possible to be wrong and it's possible to not know what you're missing and it's possible to be right for the wrong reasons. And so every permutation of ignorance and confusion is there to be suffered and endured. And we have to break the spell of thinking that we need to live forever shattered by tribal dogmatisms in order to talk about there being right answers to moral questions. Sam knows we had another Words event where Sam was at talking about exactly this and had a bunch of pushback from we got a lot of pushback, yeah. But so I think that I've had a lot of discussions about this since then and it may be it is probably true that reason is the slave of passion for most people. We possess reason, but reason doesn't necessarily drive our actions and we justify things after the fact on the basis of what we want it to be and then we come up with a rational argument for it. I think that's true. We understanding that is another exercise of reason exactly for clarity, there's flawed reasoning. But that doesn't mean that reason itself is flawed. No, but I think we're capable and you and I and everyone in this audience does it. We all rationalize our lives. Every day we wake up, we rationalize, we like our work or our spouse or whatever else it is in order to get through the day. Let it be known that I didn't let it be known. I'm not 100% convinced that you can always get awe from is, as some famous philosopher once said. But I do think I agree with you completely that it's a process that without is you can't get off. I think that's the point. Without is you can't get off if you don't know the consequences of your actions in any way. And that's what science is. Science tells you the and or reason and reason but I view science as sort of reason based on empirical evidence. Then you can't possibly make decisions that you can't determine what's right or wrong. You need to know what the goal is and what the outcome is going to be. What the outcome is going to be. So without a careful understanding and then some people call this utilitarianism, I guess, but I just see it as without science there can be no morality in my opinion or no sensible morality. And I think what we've seen and Pinker and others have argued, I think pretty effectively that in some ways the enlightenment and rational thinking has led to a world where some things that were once thinkable are not thinkable now. And so there's no doubt I don't know whether I would argue that we can under well, certainly I would argue that we might not be able to understand morality now but that's irrelevant because we agree that not understanding something is not evidence of anything but not understanding. The more we learn, the more we will understand. So I do think ultimately we'll have a neural understanding of almost all our decision making capabilities. But certainly without that reason I don't think you could even discuss the question. Well, let me just take 1 minute to say why I think this is ought. Business is totally confused. This comes from a paragraph in Hume's work where he was actually trying to hold religious conceptions of morality at bay. And I think it's been misinterpreted, certainly been overused as one of these exports from philosophy that has just gotten into the heads of everybody and is influential totally out of proportion to its actual validity. One thing I would point out is that Hume said he found many seeming paradoxes and one was with respect to causation. And if you took him seriously about causation you couldn't really take science very seriously because apparently there's no evidence of causation in the world. We just see the continuity of various events but we never see causes between A and B. So this is odd business. Let's say there is no ought, there is no should. There is no obligation to do anything in this universe. There is just what is it's? Just the totality of facts that are actual and perhaps possible, perhaps also impossible, whether that's whether there's such a real thing as possibility or everything is in fact actual, it's just happening in a parallel universe, right? Or trillions upon trillions of such universes, there are only facts. And the first thing I would ask you is if you can't get your sense of how you should live from the totality of facts, all of reality, where do you think you can get this sense of how you should live so you're not impoverished having all the facts of the universe at your disposal? Even if there's no such thing as morality, we still have this navigation problem. Put your hand into a wood chipper and see how much you like it. Right. You will very quickly get the message that you don't want to do that again. You will want to avoid that. And there are an infinite number of ways in which we can experience pointless misery from which no good comes, and we will find ourselves navigating. And all I'm arguing is that we call morality those subset of behaviors and commitments that relate in social space to this navigation problem of finding better lives together. And if you were alone on a desert island, you wouldn't call it morality, but you would still talk about well being and happiness. I agree completely. I guess the question is one of what would call to objective morality, if you want to use those terms, in the sense that everything you said, I think is clearly true. The question I would have is that at the same time, because that navigation effort has an evolutionary basis as well as a cultural basis, I think we know evolution is wrong on most of these questions, but I think that our thinking has an evolutionary basis. And I don't think that I think it's clear that that's the case. Then it means to me that morality is a moving target too. The question is so that humans are hardwired, I think, to find something's moral and not. And that's an interesting question to find out how they are. And as you know, some psychologists who test the famous trolley car experiment. And so when one talks about objective reality, I think it's based on a totality of experience. But that totality of experience evolves, and therefore I'm a little more hesitant talking about absolute morality. Yes, but it's evolving into a space of right and wrong answers and real facts about the conscious experience of actual and possible being. So there's a right answer to the question of if you were going to ask if I add this compound to my neurochemistry, is it going to make me happier or not? Right. Insofar as we could come to some kind of completed neuroscience of happiness, well, then we would understand more and. More about the likelihood of either you helping or hurting yourself that way, but so too, with any use of your attention, if I'm in this relationship, am I going to be happier or not? There are right and wrong answers there whether or not you discover them. You discover them after the fact. Yes. Right? Yeah. But you don't know what you're missing. Right? Like, you don't know in a counterfactual situation, you could have done something yesterday that would have made today much better than it was for you, and you may never know what you missed. And again, realism for me, whether it's scientific realism or moral realism, just amounts to the claim that it's possible to be wrong. It's possible not to know what you're missing. It's possible for everyone to be wrong. Like every physicist alive, we could ask some pressing question about physics, and I don't know how many physicists there are. 30,000. All 30,000 could be wrong, and then tomorrow someone could be right. And I get letters every day from those people who say they are how many physicists are there? But it's interesting you brought up an example, because that's the whole point of science. If you couldn't be wrong, there would be no science. The whole point of science is to go in and try and prove your colleagues wrong. In some sense, that's how science perceives, because it doesn't prove things right. It only proves things wrong. And then you narrow down what's left over. And so you're absolutely right, and that's what makes empirical evidence so useful. That's why it should be the basis of public policy, because you can find out what doesn't work. That's an essential part of living. But also what's what makes science powerful and worth utilizing in every aspect of our experience, in my opinion. Thank you. There's a couple of things about the moral issue, and I'm glad you guys made the point. People confuse objective morality with absolute morality. Neither of us. None of us, I assume. I know Sam and I are advocating for absolute morality. Actually, situational ethics is probably the term that I use most often when I talk about objective morality. I just mean that it's not just subject to your whim or any subjective experience. Because one of the objections we get when you say you don't want to put your hand in a wood chipper, somebody would come along and say, well, somebody might want to do that. Who are you to decide what's right for them? We're speaking in general rules. We are physical beings in a physical universe with rules that dictate what the consequences of our actions are. And if there really were a masochist who wanted to do that, there would be a complete scientific understanding of masochism. That's possible, sure. And it's possible that there's a way of being a masochist that admits of equivalent well being. Say, I highly doubt this is the case, but let's say that was the case having right and wrong answers to questions of morality. And this is why I use this analogy of a moral landscape. It doesn't mean there's just one right answer for everybody. There could be many functionally infinite number of peaks on this landscape, but there are even more wrong answers. There's a larger infinite set of wrong answers. And you know when you're not on a peak and because your hand is in the wood chipper and it turns out you're not one of those masochists who like it? The one question that you've been hammered with, that I've been hammered with is, oh, you're talking about objective morality, but your foundation of morality is well being. Now, when it comes to the is ought problem, I jokingly and fallaciously pointed out that you may not be able to get from an is to an odd, but I can get from two is is to an odd. Because if I know what the goal is, and I know what the consequences of my action is, or the consequences of my action is, then I can tell what I ought to do to achieve that goal. Which was a good way to sum it up. There's a problem in there that I'm not going to get into, but I believe I understand what you assessed in moral landscape, which is kind of my view of this is under what basis, what objective basis have you decided that well being is the standard? And I think you said, what other standard could there be? That's the thing about secular moral systems is they have at their foundation the goal of getting better. Getting better. And even if I pick three premises that are going to serve, I can pick arbitrarily. Death is preferable to life, and you can work through and do thought experiments to see does that get you towards a better world? But all this little bickering about better world, who defines better? What's better well being? Has anybody, in all from your detractors, suggested another non gods dictate divine command foundation that would be better than wellbeing? And if they did, how would you respond? Well, there's two ironies here. One is that the religious answer is also predicated on well being. When you ask religious people what's wrong with going to hell for eternity, it's because it's too hot there. You don't want to be there. Heaven is much better. It's a story about some eternal circumstance of well being or a SantiThis that awaits us after death. Now, if that were true, if there was a good reason to believe in the Christian heaven or the Muslim paradise, I would be the first to say that it's really important to live so as to place the right bed on eternity. What's 70 years compared to eternity of suffering or happiness? But it just so happens that there's no good reason to believe in those after death states. But they're still talking about consciousness and its contents and the difference between misery and well being. And for me, the definition of well being is truly open ended. It's there to be refined and further discovered and I think there are possibilities of well being that we can't imagine. The other irony here is that when people say that you have this assumption that well being is good or worth finding as though we could do otherwise, as though having an axiom at the bottom here makes this unscientific. Every science is based on similar axioms that can't justify themselves. Take for example, assuming that the universe is intelligible, right? Assuming that two plus two makes four for every two and two, if it works for apples, it works for oranges, it's also going to work for cantaloupes. How do you know it's going to work for ravens and chickens? And how does it generalize? That's an intuition, right? That's a foundation. It's still an assumption that in physics but you don't test it by continuing to count apples and oranges and cantaloupes. Well, we do things like that. We do check to see if the rules continue to work in places we haven't looked before. But the idea that events have causes yeah, unless time begins and then there was no cause because there was no before. Right, but that's proffered as a violation of our intuition. That works everywhere else in science. Well, yeah, but I'm just in some sense playing the devil's advocate in this regard. But violation of intuition in my field, violation of intuition is everything. What was that? In my field, violation of intuition is everything except the least trustworthy thing. You have intuition? Yeah. No, but you're using other intuitions to get behind the bad ones you're using in this case, in most cases mathematically. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Today you'll hear the audio from my event in DC with Andrew Sullivan and David From. I love the event, I love the conversation. But here are the two mistakes I think I made. The first is I brought politics to DC, which was a totally natural thing for me to do. When I go to a city, I'm first trying to find local guests so as to spare people the hassle of traveling. And in DC, it's quite natural to think of people in politics and having speakers of the caliber of David Frum and Andrew Sullivan there, it was natural to grab them. But the reality is, if there's any city in the world that would have loved to have me avoid politics altogether and talk to a physicist or a biologist, it has to be DC. And honestly, that hadn't occurred to me until after the fact. So I should have taken David and Andrew to some of the city and that would have made much more sense for the local audience. But also, as you'll hear, David and Andrew are people with so much to say that I found myself moderating a conversation between them, largely, which, again, was totally natural for me to do and felt fine at the time because I was interested to hear what both of them had to say. But in the aftermath, I realized that most of the people who came out that night came to see me. In fact, most of the tickets to the event had sold before I had even announced who my guests would be. So from the perspective of someone who came out to hear me talk, that person got shortchanged. Again, this is something that I'm learning as I go, but I believe these are legitimate concerns. So going forward, I think unless there's some real reason to have two guests on stage, I will opt to have just one. It will either keep me from focusing too much on one guest, as I think I did in my event with Eric Weinstein and Ben Shapiro, where Ben and I got into a mini debate and sidelined Eric for a while, and it will keep me from falling into the mode of merely moderating between two other people, however interesting. But that said, I don't think any of these flaws really affect the podcast. And if you enjoy Andrew and David as much as I do, you will enjoy listening to them at this event. There were some intense moments. There was some heckling for my guests at various points, got contentious between us. Toward the end, we agreed about more or less everything for the first hour, and then several topics of debate came up, mostly in the Q and A period. There was a legalization of marijuana, which David and Andrew strongly disagreed about. There was a question about the validity of religion where they both strongly disagreed with me. There was a question about kissinger, I believe, where Andrew and David found themselves at Loggerheads and a few others. It was a little inconvenient that we couldn't deal with each one of those topics at length, but anyway, there was enough there for you to see where we all stand, and we all certainly had fun. One point of subtext that didn't actually get explained on stage. Andrew had just released an article in New York Magazine that day for which he was getting totally hammered on social media about the MeToo movement. So he was a little shell shocked there. And I think there was one reference to it that got a laugh from the crowd because everyone knew what was going on there, but it actually never got discussed. So in case you don't know who they are, david from is a senior editor at The Atlantic, and he is the author of the new book Trump the Corruption of the American Republic. That's his 9th book. I have read it, and I recommend it, and David's been on the podcast, I think, twice before. He's been in conservative media for quite some time. He was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He's been a lifelong Republican, and he was a speech writer for President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002. He holds a BA and Ma in History from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. And the man certainly knows a lot about politics. And my second guest was Andrew Sullivan, who's also been on the podcast before, and we've debated various things in print over the years. Andrew is a writer at large for New York Magazine. He holds a BA from Oxford University in Modern History and Modern Languages and a PhD in government from Harvard. He was the editor of The New Republic from 90 91 to 96 and the creator of The Daily Dish, which was one of the first political blogs which he ran from 2000 to 2015. He's a winner of three National Magazine Awards, and he was also the weekly American columnist for The Sunday Times of London from 1996 to 2014. If you don't know what andrew's commentary was very influential in helping our nation come to its senses around marriage equality. In fact, he wrote the first cover story and first book in favor of marriage equality in 1989 and 1995. He wrote a memoir about the AIDS epidemic titled Love Undetectable in 1998. And after that, he wrote the book The Conservative Soul in 2006. And so I now bring you David From and Andrew Sullivan, live from the Warner Theater in Washington, DC. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, I have two guests tonight who they have great BIOS. I have their BIOS here, but I realize they actually need no introduction in this town. So please welcome Andrew Sullivan and David From. Thanks for coming. So I just heard from my wife that my daughter, my youngest daughter, who just turned four, was asked yesterday who her favorite monsters were and she thought for a while, she said, Grover and Donald Trump. Now, this is after, at two and a half, saying she was going to vote for Donald Trump. So she's made progress. Now, I promise we are not going to focus exclusively on politics. And if I don't keep that promise, there will be a long Q and A, and you can move on to other things if that interests you. But clearly, with the two of you, we need to talk about Trump and his consequences. I want to start by attempting to nullify any kind of charge of partisanship that would be leveled at us, however incongruously. Maybe I'll start with you, David. David, if you don't know, is just about to release a big and wonderful book on the Trump issue, the Trumpocracy, and that is for sale along with our books in the lobby afterwards, will have a book signing. So grateful very easily. We're the cheapest states ever. So David just deflate this notion that any expression of concern of the sorts that we will articulate here about politics and but Trump in particular must be an expression of ideology or partisanship here. Well, first, I don't know why I should be so worried about that, because when you express a moral attitude or political attitude, I don't think you have to it's either true or false. It's either plausible or not. It either holds water or it doesn't. So the why question, that's just psychoanalysis, and we all have our motives. I come to this as someone who's a very conservative person who's been lifelong involved in the conservative movement, not just in this country, but in my native Canada. I've been very involved in Britain as well, and I've been a pretty consistent supporter, in fact, a perfectly consistent supporter of those parties. And I think a lot of my reaction to Donald Trump is not the deepest level, not a political one. He's cruel. He's cruel. He's cruel to animals. He's cruel to his children. He's cruel to people who depend on him. He's cruel to the men and women who come into his orbit. And I think that's the beginning of my reaction to him. I think it's maybe the opposite that needs to be explained, that it is not the revulsion against him, which is now shared by more than 60% of American society. That's not the phenomenon that needs to be explained. And where you raise the question of, is this partisan? Is this ideological? It's those who support him. Some support him because, unfortunately, human beings are more excited by cruelty than maybe it's comfortable to admit. That's how the gladiatorial games in Rome sold out. You can fill the whole coliseum with people watching cruelty. There's something that's exciting about it. But a lot of people, because of partisanship or ideology, are able to close their eyes to what they see. Maybe this is an entirely vain hope, but what would it take to have a conversation on this issue of the sort we're about to have that could change minds. I mean, we're talking about 35% of the population and an environment of hyperpartisanship unlike any we've seen before. What do you think about, Andrew, the prospect of actually changing minds on this issue? What would it take? I don't know what it would take. I've been staggered and dismayed by the number of people who are prepared to side with a figure so repellent in so many ways, except for one thing, which is tribalism. This is not partisanship is sort of is a bit like supporting a football team. It isn't existential, it isn't integral to your entire being. But America is now essentially not one country. It's two tribes warring in a zero sum game in which one party seeks to undo everything of the last administration, in which the notion that you might actually accept that there is a place for two parties in this system and that they should take turns, that, in fact, that's the strength of a bipartisan system. This has been completely wiped away by these deeper, more primordial loyalties. Is he with us or is he with them? And the bulk of the blame of this does go absolutely to the Republican Party's transformation, really, in the 90s, particularly, I think, and onwards into believing that the other party has no right to govern at all, that it's illegitimate. Whereas I was a happy supporter of Republican presidents and conservative prime ministers until I thought it's good for Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to have a shot. This is good. It'd be good for us to be out of power for a bit, because the point is really the whole system, not this particular interest. And then you realize the Republicans have become something like a cultural tribal force in which they have to run everything, and they still do. Yeah. Well, let's talk about the system, because it is just a fact that democracies fail. This is something you cover in your book, and it's a fact that we are not very sensitive to. I feel like, just speaking personally, I feel like the first moment in my life where I realized I was living in the stream of history, like real history, where bad things happen in surprising ways, was 911. That was the first moment where I realized, okay, the big bombs could start falling anywhere and you can't take anything really for granted. But yet I feel like I, up until the moment of Trump, have been asleep on this particular point, that I've taken our institutions and their strength for granted. I've taken democracy for granted. And so connect some of the dots about what's at stake here. Well, I think one of the reasons it's easy to be blind to the danger around you is that we imagine the danger. The only kind of danger to worry about is the danger at its most extreme. Unless it's Hitler. It's fine. And I keep trying to persuade people there are a lot of stops on the train line of bad before you get to Hitler station. You can't say, let's study the worst example of democratic breakdown in the history of the world, and then say, okay, well, obviously our situation is nothing like that. And I started writing about this in order to explain why that analogy can be so completely mistaken. And yet the danger can be real, because when democracies corrode, they don't have they can corrode more gently. You know, you asked at the beginning, you asked Andrew about changing minds. In fact, minds are being changed every day. And you can the the Gallup polls reflect that they're not. It's not, you know, a cataclysmic event. But every day, you know, a couple of thousand people in America change their mind on this issue, they become disillusioned. That's happening. That's why we're in a dangerous situation, because Donald Trump and the people if Donald Trump were popular, he would rule popularly, because he is not. And because the people around him fear that in a real election, they might not do so well. In fact, they didn't do so well the last time. They keep telling you they did, but they didn't. If the ball had bounced a little bit differently, and we're just looking at the total vote, donald Trump got about half a point more of Michael Dukakis. And nobody writes essays about the Dukakis voter and what's on their minds. The Ducas voter, he's like, Dukakis plus half a point may deny that his mental condition probably forced him to, but he also is aware of it, and the people around him are aware of it. And that's why they need to circumvent a lot of normal political processes precisely because they know that minds are changing against them. They're going to need to use power in other kinds of ways. But then what do you make of all the enabling we have seen from mainstream Republicans? So the crucial minds that need to change are the Republicans in Congress. And what does it take for Paul Ryan to name a name, to just disavow this president? Is it just pure opportunism? Explain this. Or is there something deeper and less cynical? No, or something deeper and more cynical. Human nature, apparently, is worse than I realized. If you start with that assumption, then life can hold nothing but pleasant surprises. You start with a bad assumption, then things get better. Paul Ryan's made this deal, and he's getting things from it that as Steve Bannon has moved off, we've seen that what what is integral to Trump was not the set of issues that he wrote in 2015. What's integral to him is the power that he seeks to hold in order to protect himself from legal danger and to enrich himself and also to meet his psychic needs and maybe to go out some of his deep inner hates. He's not so interested in the details of any of these bills he signs. So the people who do care, they can strike a bargain with him. As the popularity of the Republican Party continues to corrode, donald Trump will more and more become the only game in town. They will have to defend him. That's the danger. Next danger that I see, the Republicans are going to take bad losses, it looks like, in November of 2018. They may lose a House, they may lose two houses. If that happens, there may be individual intellectuals and donors who turn on Donald Trump and say, it's your fault. But the logic of the situation will force his party to cling to him more desperately. Because, remember, you cannot just as you it took three it took three houses or three branches of government, the House, the Senate, the President, to pass the tax cut. It takes only one of them to defend it. So I want to talk a little more about what it looks like for democracy to begin to erode. And there are many signs here that we're not in normal territory, but one is just with respect to the norms of political discourse. And the most infuriating retort to everything I say when I worry out loud about Trump that I've encountered is he's just trolling like, as though that excuses any possible indiscretion, whether it's threatening nuclear war or singling out some private person on Twitter for abuse. We have the President of the United States going after someone. This notion of just trolling, which there's a kind of nihilistic delight in him eradicating the norms of civil political discourse. And you must spend as much time on social media as I do. I'm trying not to. Yeah, well, certainly today we'll get to that. What do you think about this idea? There's a sense that this just seems genuinely new, where you have smart these are not stupid people, these are smart people who delight in a kind of wrecking ball like chaos. Yes, because something really happened, it seems to me, in this moment. Now, if you're an old school conservative and you studied political sort, you're terrified of what happens in democracies as they continue. Aristotle and Plato and the ancients understood that democracy is inherently unstable and will almost always devolve at some point into a tyranny. Those two things are deeply connected. What happens is that people have simply decided they're not interested in rational deliberation. Emotions are much more important than arguments. They're much more interested in people rather than principles. And at some point, they made a decision that they would rather abandon self government and give it up to the one man. This is something that they all predicted in the ancient world. But essentially, when democracy is fully extended, when everyone is equal to everyone else, there are no intermediary things. That's just the masses and the celebrities. Then there was some point at which the masses will elect the celebrity to govern for them and feel great harm in that. And when they've made that decision, it's a personal commitment to that person, which is at a level that cannot be argued out of. This is a cult, and he represents a rebuke to the elites that didn't think he could happen, that have failed dramatically on a whole variety of fronts over the last 20 or 30 years. And it's a sign that they really don't care if the system of government survives. That's an incredibly dangerous moment in democracy that one of our major parties and a whole slew of intellectuals who should know better have decided to go along with this just shows they don't understand what they're dealing with and how powerful and dangerous this is. To echo Andrew's point, the people belong to the generation of my parents who came of age after World War II. For 30 years, they saw life just get better and better and better for the ordinary person. Things become that. Incomes rose, the housing got better, the opportunities got better, the schooling got better. People whose parents had not finished high school were able to complete college, and they had tremendous confidence in the system that made all of this possible. I sort of sum it up by if you watch an old movie, whenever a character steps forward who's wearing a white lab coat, you know he's got the answer, especially of his as a German accent, that he will tell you how the time machine works, how you got the tiny little submarine inside the bloodstream. He has the answers. And starting sometime in the middle 1970s, whenever you see a man in the white lab coat, he's like a hubristic maniac. We will see him. His last scene will be vanishing down the gullet of a Tyrannosaurus Rex that he thought it was a good idea to bring back to life. So we have a loss of confidence in a lot of institutions. But here's something to say. And I think maybe this is the very first thing I should have said here. I think one of the things that is sort of exciting and inspiring about when I say the moment, I don't mean the big moment. I mean literally the hour that we're living at is the counterback to all this is a revival of civic spirit. I never thought I would be sitting on a stage on a theater on a Friday night and have people listen to these musings when they could be doing and I think I don't know if narcissistic personality disorder is infectious. I hope not. But I haven't caught enough of it yet to think that people are here for any of us. I mean, they're here because one of the reactions to this president I quoted in the book as an email I got from somebody just said that he had reacted to the election, donald Trump, by resolving to be a better citizen, and you see that and you're doing it, and thank you. And that's what's going to make the difference. Yeah. If only that would generally true. I'm more pessimistic than you. It didn't last long, that hopeful feeling. I'm here to squelch any single hint of optimism here. I would say a couple of things. I've been amazed at how many people are perfectly happy with the President that has contempt for the courts, that talks about shutting down the free press, that wants to use the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponent actions that are inimicable to liberal democracy. I'm amazed by the number of people that much prefer to emote about their identity or the people hating them, or the people they hate, as opposed to thinking about what are the best solutions to this particular problem. I think identity politics has definitely made all of this worse, and that when the right decided to adopt identity politics in a particular moment in time, they compounded all of its problems. So that essentially you're not voting for a set of policies against now that it seems irrelevant what he's doing. The people seem to support him regardless. He's pursuing a classic Randian policy when he ran as a populist person, standing up for the forgotten men and women, but no one cares now. One of the reason is he's just a white man who represents the last stand, really, of a white majority country, which is going to become a nonwhite majority country, whatever you mean by white. And that is the first time in human history that's ever happened when it's happening at a time also of mass immigration and declining and stagnant living standards for most people, it is a very dangerous moment. And everybody should be attempting at such a moment to mitigate those issues, to lean against those issues where the political temptation, of course, is to fan them for extraordinary power. And that's happening now on both sides. So you're not voting on a set of issues. You're voting because you're gay, you're voting because you're black, you're voting because you're white, you're voting because you're a woman. These are not arguments. This is not a democracy. Well, I want us to touch identity politics, because I think that is especially problematic on the left now, and it will be the reason why the left will fail to contain this problem. But I want to stay on this point of explaining the Trump phenomenon, and it seems to me it can be fully explained, perhaps almost without reference to who Trump is himself. I've said this before, but I have been thinking of him for a very long time as a kind of evil chauncey gardener. He's a person who has stumbled into a situation that is misinterpreting his chaos as these genius, manipulative gifts, but he's in some deep sense exactly as he appears, and yet he's paying absolutely no consequence for being uninformed and imbcillic and callous. David, you say something in your book about that. It's not so much him. It's the enemies he's picked that explains his rise. It's his counter elitist stand across the board which has drawn so much support. Like everybody, I was riveted by the Michael Wolf book. Of course, as someone who's releasing a book the week after, you feel a little bit like whoever had to go on the Golden Globe stage after Oprah. But I think the image of Donald Trump is a drooling, embassy like, senile, tending maniac. That can't be true. He has gifts. And one of his gifts, one of his most important gifts, I'll grant you one gift. Whatever you're about to say, I'll give you for free. There's not one more gift. He's got the bullies instinctive ability to see the psychic weak spot in his target. To Jeb Bush. And to Marco Rubio. And to Ted Cruz. He found that thing that for Donald Trump to call Ted Cruz a liar, it seems audacious, right? But what he saw in Ted Cruz was that Ted Cruz is not the person. He had constructed an identity that Ted Cruz was a very sophisticated graduate of America's, you know, most expensive educational institutions, you know, someone who has a deep knowledge of the law, someone's got a very modern marriage. His wife was the head of the Goldman Sachs office in Texas. This guy was not the person that he presented himself to his evangelical voters he sought. There was a central lie at the heart of the Ted Cruz message. And Donald Trump saw that and he hammered that point and he saw that there was a kind of psychic weakness in Jeb Bush that he could that low energy was a way of saying, I'm going to attack you, I'm going to attack you, and I'm going to attack you. And what you're going to do is take a step, half a step backward and stand on your tippy toes to look taller, but you're never going to meet me. What he did to those opponents, he's done to the American political system. He's found its points of vulnerability and he has twisted them. He wants you to believe that he's popular. He is not. But what he is very skilled at is being able to put together something close enough popular support to overwhelm the institutions and to keep that support revved up by constantly making them united in what they hate and make everybody else be divided in what they are trying to defend. There's another simple gift he has, or rather ability, which politicians in the past, in the west have not done now. They've done it in code and they've done it with different issues, appealing to certain instincts. But no one's gone out there and openly said, vote for me because you hate or afraid of black people. Vote for me because you're afraid of foreigners coming in with different color skin. Actually go out there and there are levers you can pull in politics. There are appeals you can make to people's worst lizard brain instincts. And in most liberal democracies, every politician knows we don't do that because we know not how awful it is, but how powerful it can be. And he just was the first person to say, I don't care, I'm going to say these things. I'm going to call it a shithole country. I'm going to put that in the evil Chauncey Gardner category. Yeah, we were vulnerable to somebody who just simply did not have the scruple or the political calculation, simple as that. And then what he's done? He has got more quick gifts than that. He's able actually he did a self hostage taking. I mean, how is it that you get a Lindsey Graham, who was one of Donald Trump's severest critics and a person who was committed to a set of political views about as far within the Republican Party as you? Could be away from Donald Trump and make him not only his defender, but the person who would be one of two signers of a criminal referral of one of Donald Trump's opponents and break all the rules of the Senate that Lindsey Graham loves. Or not the rules, but the habits of the Senate that Lindsey Graham so loves. He's a real institutional senator that you would send this thing out without even informing, never mind consulting your Democratic counterparts. How did he get Lindsey Graham to do that? And the answer is, well, Donald Trump is sort of shackled the whole Republican Party to himself. If he goes down, they all go down. And indeed, they sort of know that he's going to be the last man to sink because he's got a four year term and they're all facing but isn't that a situational? Truth, that's just what happens when you have 35% of the country and whatever percentage of the Republican Party that is that simply will not disavow you, no matter what you do. It just seems like anyone could successfully exploit 35%. That is unmovable proof. In a two party system with an Electoral College, exploiting 35% is actually quite tricky. You exploit 35. I mean, Herbert Hoover got more than 35% of the vote in 1932. It didn't do them a lot of good. What Trump understood and what previous Republicans have not faced up to, is that the Republican message has become, over the past generation, but especially since the Great Recession, more and more out of sync, not only with the country, but with the Republican Party's own voters. That was the thing that Donald Trump understood that the others did, not that your own voters don't. My joke about this, I kept saying through the cycle, was that the Republican base was signaling they wanted more healthcare, security, less immigration, and no more Bushes. And what the party offered was less health care, more immigration, and one more Bush. And they couldn't have missed it more and. He saw that. But what Paul Ryan and the others believe is if only we had better communications or explained it more, or only put a little bit more of this special sauce on it, we could somehow build out instead we were not going to change our core message, but we can. In fact, that was the thing that so many people said after 2012, we're not going to in any way change our core message, but we will season it. What Donald Trump intuitive was, if you've got 35%, that's only a problem, so long as you've got a political system that requires you to have a majority. But what if I can short circuit that? What if I can sort of weaken weaken the political restraints, and you can actually govern with with less than half of the country, maybe a lot less than half. And what does this look like? I think Americans pay too much when they think of democratic breakdown, they pay too much attention to the spectacular example of what happened between the wars in Europe. I sometimes try to direct people to what's happening now in Central Europe, but one of the ways there's an example right here at home, which is what happened in the half century after Reconstruction. Here's a statistic that when you hear about this gerrymandering in North Carolina to keep in mind. So in the 1872, after the Civil War, popular state of South Carolina had about 700,000 people, of whom 100,000 cast a vote in the presidential election of 1870 219. 24 half a century later, the state's population has grown from 700,000 to 1.7 million. The number of votes cast drops from 100,000 to 50,000. And South Carolina was still an American state. It had a governor, it had a state legislature. I think you'd have to be a pretty informed person of the state's history to say it wasn't really that much of a democracy in 1924, but it looked like one. It had elections, it had newspapers, it had courts that functioned more or less approximately, fairly, at least for the white half of the population. That could be the future. One of the things that Donald Trump has forced and he's forced on, I think a lot of us on the right hand side of the spectrum is a deeper encounter with the American past, things that we thought were past and buried, that were maybe just dormant and that are coming to the fore again. But the problem is, it seems to me, obviously there's no defense of Trump. There's not a single redeeming characteristic. But you both I mean, I try very hard. I've kind of prayed about this, because you're not supposed to, Chris. You're not supposed to hate somebody quite like that. Who's in your in your mind? All the what I resent most about this is the psychic terror that a mentally disturbed person can impose upon you every minute of the day. That my definition of a pre society is where you can spend a week without thinking about the person who's running the country. Yeah, but he's also exploited a situation where he did it purposely or I don't know. But look, we've had 30 years for most people in this country getting nowhere. Economically vast majority, they they've also experienced we've also experienced an unprecedented well, not quite unprecedented, but only once before this volume of immigration from one country primarily, that has completely altered the demographics of this country in ways that people are especially older generations are simply bewildered by. The last time that happened, we had the 90 24 Immigration Act, which basically shut all immigration down. If you are, not if you're a Democratic party. And your only response to this question, which, by the way, also must affect the wages in terms of competition and your only response to the situation is all of you people are racists and we're not going to even discuss you discuss the issue then. I think that's why people land back with him. I think the Democrats inability to listen to those white working class voters in the middle of the country has been an incredible big, an enabler to his capacity as President as Hillary Clinton was enabled in his Kansas City. Just to take that single issue, the idea that immigration is all upside with no casualties, that's clearly a lie. And the fact that millions of people were suffering the actual truth of that equation and that's unaddressed on the left not address you're a racist if you worry about it. This is how the far left has now occupied the entire territory on questions of identity and is actively alienating the very people we need to talk to. The people out there don't see what's going on. They think they don't hear what they're being what they're being called. They can't hear they can't hear the lazy bicketry of elites about white working class. They they don't hear someone on television use the word white male as a bald insult in itself. Right? And that reverse racism has definitely pushed people up against the wall. I think if they were a credible center left party which adopted serious policies to address economic inequality and curtail immigration, I think they could win very easily. I want to hear how you both view the perhaps the rosiest future here of the left and the right. What do conservatives and liberals do? Well, now to put us back on our proper footing? One of the beginning of answering this question is to recognize what a frozen political world we've lived in for the past quarter century. Imagine somebody standing in the year 1990 and looking forward 25 years and backward 25 years. Rip Van Winkle falls asleep in 1990, wakes up in 2015 and says, who's running for president? Bush and Clinton. Oh, what are they talking about? Oh. Health care in Iraq. Okay, you go back 25 years from 1990 or 1965. The most powerful person in Washington, DC. Is the head of the AFL CIO. The second most powerful is J. Edgar Hoover. There are liberal Republicans. There are urban riots. It's a different world. And I think in a dynamic country like this, what happened between 1965 and 1990 in politics is normal and the stasis because when you think about how much everything else in the country changed between 19, 90, 20, there's no Internet in 1990. You know that we're in 1990, life expectancies are still rising for Americans and that they stopped rising after that. It's a different world. But the politics were frozen. Whatever else he's done, I think Donald Trump has unfrozen those politics. And so when you ask the beginning this question about partisanship, I think for those of us who are of a certain age, it's going to be hard to understand. You know, those maps are about to start moving really fast and a lot the question of who is on the right and who is on the left is going to be and what those things are is going to mean, I think, more different in 2025 from 2015 than it meant in 2015 from 90 90. I I think Andrew points to some I mean, new things are going are going to become issues. Immigration, it will remain a huge issue. What is happening when we think how much we talk about wages and how little we talk about life expectancies but Americans are living less long and that white Americans white Americans white Americans are living less long. But other Americans, just generally life expectancies are moving, are improving for non white Americans way less quickly than they are for people in the rest of the world. And that is in peacetime. There are only two other places where that has ever happened or there's only one other place, and that is in the post Soviet republics. After the breakup of the Soviet Union during the Depression, american life expectancies continued to improve. It's an amazing degree of how the political world is so insulated from everybody else that people dying earlier. Is the opiate epidemic the main cause? It's a main cause. But Americans are less likely to wear seatbelts than people in other developed countries. They eat worse. They shoot themselves accidentally at Ravens, dramatically higher. They have more other kinds of accidents. The drugs are certainly part of it, but they're not all of it. And the fact that is not maybe the issue uppermost in people's mind. That is not issue one. I find that amazing. I think it has to become issue one. And the problem here, though, is that his ideology, that what happened is that politics became one ideology versus another and they never changed. So that those of us who, for example, started out and I still think of myself as a small c conservative, but those of us who started out believing that the problem of the 70s was overweening government too high taxes needed to be reformed, needed to be opened up, too many tariffs. That was a completely legitimate position because those are the problems of the time. That has now run its course. It has succeeded and therefore now is a failure. What has happened is that the neoliberalism that was needed in the 70s is actually poison in 2017. It is not addressing the issues. And yet Ryan and the Republicans put this bill through that's entirely not about reality, that's entirely about ideology. And also people are punished, severely punished, both socially and politically if they change their minds. When Andrew and I the worst thing you can do, apparently, is to decide, this time I'm going to support a Democrat rather than Republican, then there's no incentive for you, no incentive for anybody in this system to come out and enter the center. Okay. But you take the extremes, you take the pathology of identity politics on the left that we've touched on briefly, and you take the extreme of the right that you describe in your book, which is there are so many stats there, but I think one of them was that 70% of Republicans are still taken in by birtherism. They still think Obama was made, may not have been. If you add those who are sure he was like 40 and 30, you get up to 70. This just seems discussion proof. So how do we move towards some kind of normalcy? Well, remember, when you see all these statistics about what Republicans think, remember, every week there are fewer Republicans. This is a this is a 70% of 70 people. In the end, you you can mark that. So it's it's like it's a Friday night. We don't want to bring up fractions, but if the denominator is going down you can't just look at the numeric numerator. The denominator is going down. But it's certainly true that you have this radicalized you have this radicalized Republican world we are going to see. You know, let's talk about you and me, maybe in this context, because I should say Andrew and I have known each other I won't embarrass him because he's so youthful, but we've known each other a while and in fact, we're just reminiscing about this. I've known Andrew for a year, longer than I've known my wife, but my point is simply that he doesn't look it. Thank you, David. The point here is that we both started out in a certain place and changed our minds. And my I mean, I supported Clinton in 92, which meant I was sort of excluded suddenly from any sort of respectability in conservative circles. Then when I turned against the Iraq War decisively and apologized for my role in it, sorry to bring that subject up, but nonetheless, then I was completely cut off. And this is also true now increasingly, unfortunately, on the left. If you don't sign up to the entire brigade of identity politics you are banished. And so the ability for us to actually be very processes of thinking, of changing your mind, of weighing different things, of seeing something the other side might have thought of and openly doing that has been stigmatized. And you are praised constantly. And all the rewards in both our intellectual and I'm talking about the intellectual life and media you are praised and rewarded whether you're in a university or in a right wing think tank for your loyalty to the party line. David actually was sacked from AEI because he actually thought that Obamacare was a perfectly decent if flawed possibility and it was not the Hill for Republicans to die on and he was fired. People people are this has become a group mentality within Washington itself in which no independence of thought, no independence of party is ruled in any way legitimate. One thing that has always struck me as incredibly strange is that if you know someone's position on one topic, let's say climate change, or the link between human behavior and climate change, you know their position with a high order of confidence on a dozen unrelated topics, whether it's gun control or what's the relationship between climate change and gun control? And yet you could win money all day long if you could just find a casino that would take these bets. Yeah. And the climate change thing is look, I've always been a skeptic about any sort of left wing cause, let's put it that way. This is not a left wing cause. This is science, clearly. And there are obvious things we can do and some of them we are doing. There's not an instant solution for this but some of them are doing I do not understand it's psychotic that this is regarded as and there's no other civilized country in the world where a political party actually denies the existence of climate change. But no political party in the world. No right wing political party in the world except for this pathological ideological alienated and angry fringe. We're going to agree that there's a lot of things about the politics that are obsolete but that linking up that's the party system. That's what parties do. That you have to organize different people who have different points of view to cooperate on politics. And this happens in any political system that people have a set of concerns. And so people from Los Angeles are able to work, collaborate with people from Boston on different kinds of issues because that's hardy mechanisms do. I think they're always going to be people who are more liberal and who are more conservative. That's linked to the structure of the human brain. And people are going to have different interests. They're going to be people who work for the government sector, the people who work for the private sector. They're going to have different interests. The special problem we have right now is we're all supposed to be committed first and foremost to the rules of the game, rules that protect your view when my guys are in power and that protect my rights when someone else's people are in power. And that's what's in danger right now, I think, when the day will come, I hope, when we can go back to taking out the wet mackerels and hitting each other with them over what the corporate income tax rate would be. And I will probably agree with Paul Ryan about where the corporate income tax rate should be, but I don't agree with him so much that I'm willing to corrode the American constitutional system in order to get my way. 21% is, to my mind, exactly the definition of the conservative 21%. You want to conserve and keep this valuable and rare experiment in liberal democracy in the history of the world alive and healthy. And that means adhering not just to its formalities, but to its norms. And one of those key norms is understanding that the other party or the other point of view does have a chance and should have a role in government. And this is the genius of our system. Andrew spoke a little while ago about things that can you say something possible? If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+I am here with Yvonne Harare. Yvonne, thanks for joining me again. Thank you for inviting me to me again. I think the last time we spoke, I think it was we did a live event in San Francisco, which I really enjoyed, and then we had done one podcast before that, but now the entire world has been pushed off a cliff since we last met. So first, before we get into big picture topics, how are you doing? How are you weathering the pandemic? We are fine, I think. Me and my husband, we are self isolating in our house and it's difficult because we can't meet our family and friends and so forth, but we haven't lost our job, our business didn't collapse. We're actually working harder than ever. Many of our friends and family members have lost their jobs or businesses, so we know we are one of the lucky ones. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's it's a difficult time and, you know, you look ahead and I'm less worried about the epidemic itself, but the economic and political consequences could be really catastrophic if we don't get a handle on it. So it's quite a worrying time. That's what I want to talk to you about. Israel has been pretty aggressive in their handling of this. Right. If I'm not mistaken. How would you compare Israel to the rest of the developed world in terms of how they've responded? Well, you know, if you measure just in terms of how many sick people, how many dead people, then we are doing very well. But in other terms, the situation is quite bleak. I mean, the economic crisis is very severe. The political situation is even worse. It started way before the Coronavirus. It's been a very tumultuous year politically with three elections. When this crisis began, the unelected prime Minister tried to use the excuse of fighting Coronavirus to shut down the elected parliament and rule basically as a dictator with emergency decrees. Luckily, this was averted. There was enough pushback from the media, from the public and from the political parties. So parliament was reopened and some kind of democratic balance was reinstated. But we still don't have a government and lots of frightening things happening, like giving the secret police the authority to set up surveillance of Israeli citizens, again, on the excuse of fighting the epidemic. I'm not against surveillance. I just don't think that this should be in the hands of the secret police. Yeah. So most of our listeners will be familiar with your work. Just to remind people, you have written now three books that have been especially influential sapiens, Homo, DEOs and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. And your background is as a historian, but you bring a really wonderful interdisciplinary approach to big questions of human life and the maintenance of civilization and where is all this going? And this includes really everything that human beings could conceivably care about and yeah, I mean, there's just so much here that is in your wheelhouse in terms of the kinds of things that we need to change, maintain, struggle, to reenvision. I mean, many people are viewing this pandemic apart from all the obvious pain that it's producing and will produce economically and politically, many of us are viewing it as an opportunity to really reset society on some basic level if we conceive this opportunity. So I guess before we get to any of the silver linings we might find here, let's wade into the darkness. What problems has this pandemic exposed, in your view, just across the board, politically, technologically, socially and obviously epidemiologically. But just how are you viewing this as a dissection of all that we haven't put right in society? Maybe the biggest problem has to do with the situation of the international system. We are seeing a complete lack of global leadership. There is no global plan of action either to fight the epidemic itself or to deal with the economic crisis. In previous cases like this, in the last few decades, the United States has taken up the role of global leader, whether it's in the ebola epidemic of 20 1415 or whether it's in the global financial crisis of 2008. Now, the US is kind of an anti leadership position, trying to undermine the few organizations that like the World Health Organization, that are trying to organize some kind of global response. And this is not something new. This is a continuation of US policy of the last few years. Basically, I think in 2016 the United States in the election, united States came to the world and said look, we resign from the job of global leader, we just don't want it anymore. From now onwards, we care only about ourselves. America has no longer any friends in the world. It has only interests. And the whole thing of America first. And now America is first in the number of dead people and sick people. And very few follow American leadership not only because of the record of the last few years, but also because the world has also lost faith in American competence. You look at the way that United States is dealing with the epidemic at home and you say well, maybe it's a good thing they are no longer leading the world and there is nobody really to fill the vacuum left by the US. So we do see some level of global cooperation, especially in the scientific field, with the sharing of information and common efforts to understand the epidemic, to understand the best ways to treat it, to isolate people, to develop a vaccine. So there is some hope there. But generally speaking, the level of international cooperation is far, far lower than would have been expected or could have been hoped for. And again, this is not something new. This is a legacy of the changes not only in the US, but all over the world. In the last few years, we've seen the rise of extreme nationalism and isolationism and a whole discourse of telling people that there is an inherent contradiction between nationalism and globalism, between loyalty to your nation and global solidarity. And leaders not only Trump but also both Sonaro and the right wing parties in Europe telling people that of course you have to choose national loyalty and reject globalism. And now we are paying the price for it. The thing is that really there is no contradiction between nationalism and globalism because nationalism is not about hating foreigners. It's about loving your compatriots. And there are many situations, like a pandemic, in which in order to really take care of your compatriots, you have to cooperate with foreigners. So there is no contradiction here. I don't know if the French invent the first vaccine against Coronavirus. I would like to see American patriots coming and saying, no, we won't take this vaccine. It's a foreign vaccine, it's a French vaccine. We are waiting until there is a patriotic American vaccine and only then we take it. This is obviously nonsense. I'm sure I could find you those patriots. They're in my Twitter feed. Yeah. So this is one level, the international level. And of course, we are seeing a lot of problems also internally in many countries. And basically, this is again kind of the payday for developments that began long before coronavirus internal divisions within countries, whether it's in India where you have all these conspiracy theories that Hindu extremists are blaming the epidemic on Muslims. Saying that this is a Muslim conspiracy? That you have coronavirus terrorists deliberately spreading the virus among Hindus or what you see in the US. And in several other countries when there is just not enough trust in public authorities to have a common, consistent policy. In normal times, a country can function or a government can function when only half of the population believes it. If you have a situation, when you have a leader, half of the population says, I would believe anything this person says. If he says that the sun rises in the west and says in the east, I'll believe it. And you have the other half saying, I won't believe a single word this person is saying. If he said that two plus two equals four, I start doubting it. And as bad as it is, it can function for a while in kind of normal times. But in a pandemic, you need the cooperation of 100% of the population. You can't deal with it with just 50%. So this makes it much, much more difficult to deal with this emergency. Yeah, well, so, I mean, there's so many threads here we can pull out and the whole tapestry starts to move where you started. But with this failure of US. Leadership, I find it especially depressing. It's a kind of national humiliation, which is compounded by the fact that something close to half of American society either doesn't care about it or is so delusional as to think that we've distinguished ourselves well during this crisis. And this is part of the personality cult of Trump, obviously. But it's this pervasive mistrust of institutions which you have just flagged, the fact that the media is so despised and mistrusted. And again, Trump has something to do with that, but it's other institutions, science and scientists. Any dependence or integration with the rest of the world, as you point out, there is this notion that there's a zero sum contest between national pride and a more cosmopolitan integration with the rest of the world. But the problem, it seems, is that there really are some tensions here that are hard to balance and understand. And if you don't trust the media, and if the media is pitched into a perpetual frenzy of reaction to all of the assaults on truth that come out of Trump's mouth and the administration, there really are genuine failures of sense making that should kindle doubt. There's no one who's more alarmed by Trump than I am. But when I see the miscalibrated attacks on him in our best newspapers, even I can see that the media sometimes gets it wrong. And all of this is being amplified on social media, where we really have people just unable to come in contact with a common reality. Let's give you a couple of examples here that come to mind as you were speaking. This is a point you've made in many of your books, that global problems require global solutions, right? We're not going to have an American solution to climate change. We're not going to have an American solution to a global pandemic. But there is this tension between globalization and self sufficiency, which has been exposed quite painfully by this pandemic. Just look at the supply chain, the fact that we can't even produce Qtips anymore on demand because we're so reliant on China to produce them. And when you look at that reliance in the context of the very real political tensions between, in this case, America and China, it seems right to be concerned about outsourcing our infrastructure to them in an environment where they can turn hostile in a moment. The extreme example would be if China produced all of our bullets, right? And just imagine what a war with China looks like when they won't supply us with bullets. A concern of that sort doesn't have to be motivated by xenophobia or isolationism. Not at all. So, anyway, please try to thread that needle for us. No, again, I think that people, when they say the world globalization or globalism, they mean so many different things. Some people, they think mainly about the economic implications and supply chains and having all these multinational corporations becoming far more powerful than nation states and having zero obligations to citizens in any country because they can just avoid paying taxes with all kinds of tricks and so forth. And this is a kind of globalization that I personally am not very fond of. And I think it's perfectly sensible for countries to try and have better control of their essential supplies. And certainly it's very important that big corporations would pay their taxes in the centers of their activities, and you wouldn't be able to function without sewage systems and without police and without schools. So you definitely need to not everything is in the cloud. There are many things in the ground, and you should pay for them. For me, when I think about globalism and globalization, the main thing is really about the sharing of information, the sharing of knowledge. They're having common values and common interests, and this should and it can be separated from the economic issues. And I think that, again, if you look at what's happening in a place like the United States, I really don't think this is a clash between nationalism and globalism. Really, what's happening in the US. And in Britain and in many other countries is actually the unraveling of nationalism itself. There is a lot of talk about the rise of nationalism in recent years, but as a historian, I see really in a very different light. Usually the best sign that you are seeing as an upsurge of nationalism is a lot of conflicts between nations. Like a century ago, the First World War was an indication that nationalism is really on the rise. When you look at the world of the last few years, you actually see few conflicts, certainly violent conflicts between countries. The main conflicts are actually within countries. What's unraveling is the kind of internal national community. I think it's fair to say that today Americans hate and fear each other far more than they hate and fear the Russians or the Chinese. The biggest fear is their neighbors or their metaphorical neighbors. And this is not a sign of an upsurge of nationalism. Similarly, if you look at the Brexit and the debate in Britain there, then the chances of the British, of the Brits starting to come to blows within themselves, I think, are far higher than a war between Britain and France. So I wouldn't really talk about an upset of nationalism. It's more a crisis trying to redefine what it means and how important it is. Personally, I think it's understood in the right terms. Nationalism has been one of humanity's best ideas or best inventions ever again, not if you think about it as hatred of foreigners. That's the extreme source of nationalism. But it doesn't have to go in that direction. In essence, nationalism is really loving your compatriots and enabling millions of people who don't really know each other to cooperate and to take care of each other. We are social animals. But for hundreds of thousands of years, society meant a very small circle of people you actually know personally, intimately. You know their names, their personality. You meet them all the time. And this is kind of in our genes to care about a group of, say, 50 people or 150 people. Nations are a very, very recent emergence or invention in human evolution. Only the last few thousand years, maybe 5000 years, maybe a bit more. And the remarkable thing about nations is that you cooperate and you care about millions of complete strangers, people that you have never met in your life. You will never meet them in your life, you don't know them. But still you're willing, for example, to pay taxes so that a stranger in a different part of the country would have health care or would have good education. And that's the really good side of nationalism. And I think we should cherish that and protect that again without falling into the trap that to be a good nationalist, you should also hate the foreigners who are not part of our nation. No, as I said, in many cases, to really take care of your compatriots, especially in the 21st century, you need to cooperate with the foreigners. Yeah, I think that's a great distinction. And I share this concern about the breakdown of social cohesion, especially in the United States, where I'm most in touch with it. So this brings us to politics. And you actually had an op ed in The New York Times not long ago that I wanted to reference because you say some things there which either I'm not sure I agree with or at least there's a further distinction I would want to make here. And so actually, I'm now quoting you. You write, Elections are not a method for finding the truth. They are a method for reaching peaceful compromise between the conflicting desires of different people. You might find yourself sharing a country with people who you consider ignorant, stupid or even malicious, and they might think exactly the same of you. Still, do you want to reach a peaceful compromise with these people? Or would you rather settle your disagreements with guns and bombs? So as it stands, I totally agree with that. And this is as a method for resolving conflicting desires. This is what elections are about. But we could even say this is what politics generally is about. And even democracy is solution for that. Or when it works, it's a solution for that. But then you take issue with an analogy that Richard Dawkins used when he was objecting to the Brexit referendum. He just thought this was absolutely absurd, asking the people of Britain, who most of whom had to go Google, what is Brexit? After they had voted one way or the other. So now, quoting Richard, he says, you might as well call a nationwide plebiscite to decide whether Einstein got his algebra right. I think Richard, you know, in his defense, he even absented himself from voting on Brexit. He said, Listen, I don't you know, I'm a biologist. I don't understand Brexit. So it just matters what the effect of this is going to be. So then you distinguish reconciling competing desires from a search for truth here. And you're obviously aware of some of the difficulties I'm tempted to point out here. But my concern is that there is there's really no bright line between truth and desire when one considers the consequences of misinformation, and especially the kind of misinformation environment we're now living in. Because people want what they want very often or even always, because they think certain things are true. And if they knew they were wrong about specific things, they very likely wouldn't want what they currently want. A fellow genuinely wants to kill Des Damona, and he actually strangles her with his own hands, but that's only because he was misinformed about her. And that's why it's a tragedy. And what I see ourselves living through right now is a tragic dimension to our politics, where you have people who are genuinely misinformed about sources of economic pain or climate science or whatever it is, and they're supporting politicians and policies that seem, in the end, guaranteed to frustrate their real interests. And this obviously connects to populism and other political phenomenon. So help me think this through. Yeah, to some extent, you're absolutely right. I would just say that in the case of Othello, it's wrong to strangle your sweetheart, even if she did indeed do what you think what Yago said she did. I think the tragedy is elsewhere in this case. It's not a problem of misinformation, but it's tragic for him when you take his point of view of it. The reason why it's a tragedy for the character of a fellow is that really he he has been fatally misled to take a life and to ruin his own. I don't want to go into that rabbit hole it will occupy the rest of the hour. I think I would say that the big problem is telling people that I know your real interests better than you know them, and you are misinformed. So let me tell you what are your real interests. I mean, sometimes that's the case, but it's a very shaky ground for a political system, very dangerous ground to have this kind of paternalistic attitude that I really know what your interests are better than you. And of course, many people are misinformed, but that's true of everyone, especially to understand desire is something very different from understanding the truth. And part of the problem in society is that where I stand really distorts my vision of other people and of the social structure. So when it comes to, again, what are the true desires or the best desires of people, I would be extremely careful about granting this to any privileged group. I think that, yeah, when it comes to economics, economists are much better informed than any of us. And yes, they make mistakes, of course, but everybody makes mistakes, and they have a mechanism for selfcorrection to some degree. So once you define a particular goal and you have an argument about what is the best economic means to get there, then, yes. I don't think you should put it to a plebiscite or to an election. You should go to the experts. But when it comes to actually defining the goal, what is the goal of society? I think it's extremely dangerous to trust experts with the definitions of the basic goals of society. They lack really too much information, and their vision is distorted by their own self interests. And we know it's from so many cases in history. Again, it's kind of a choice between two problematic roads. But I think the less having a kind of privileged elite saying that I'm in a better position to understand your true desires than you are, that's far more dangerous, I would say. And it's becoming more dangerous in the 21st century. And this was maybe my main point in the New York Times article because of the new technologies for hacking human beings. We have had these discussions for thousands of years, going back to ancient Greece and India and China exactly these issues of can we trust people to really know what's good for them? And I don't think that a lot has changed since the times of Socrates or Buddha or Confucius. But now things are changing because we suddenly have a completely new technology to hack human beings, to understand humans better than they understand themselves, to understand human desire, to know what I want better than I know it, and also, of course, to manipulate what I want. It it goes together. And then, you know, the question of what I really desire becomes more complicated than ever. Than ever. Basically. I would say that to to hack a human being, you need three things. You need a very good understanding of biology, especially things like brain science. You need enormous amount of data, and you need a lot of computing power. Until today, nobody ever in history had any of these things. If you are stalling in the 1950s or 1940s, you don't know enough biology. You don't really understand what's happening in the human body. You don't have enough data on every individual. You can't place a KGB officer to follow each and every Soviet citizen. You don't have 200 million KGB agents. And even if you had, then the question would be, who would follow the 200 million KGB officers? Of course. And even if you have all these agents following people, you don't have the computing power to make sense of all the information they gather. Basically, you have an agent following me, writing a paper report about what I did today, and then another human being has to read this report and process it and reach some conclusions. And that's absolutely impossible. Now, for the first time in history, it is becoming feasible for the new science of the 21st century. You don't need 200 million human agents. You have sensors. You don't need human analysts to read paper reports. You have artificial intelligence that can go over all this immense data and analyze it. And you are having more and more biological insight into what is actually happening in the human body and brain. You put all that together, you get the ability to know what people want better than they know it, better than they would admit to themselves. I often give the personal story of my own experience coming out was realizing that I'm gay only at the age of 21. Now, if you ask me when I was 15, who do you want to have sex with then? I wouldn't say with a guy. Even though this is probably what I really wanted. I didn't understand it about myself, as silly as it sounds. I mean, how can you not know it? The fact is I didn't know it. When did Google know it, if Google could know it? When I was, I guess, twelve. Well, it should have been very obvious. You just collect not a lot of data on where my eyes go. I don't know when I want the beach. And you could easily have told years before I understood it what are my true sexual desires now? What does it mean to live in a world where it's not the human elite, it's not the Nobel Prize winners, it's not the professors in the universities that know my desires better than me. You could have a non human system that systematically hacks all of us and knows our real desires or our deep desires better than us, and therefore can also manipulate us in ways which were completely impossible in previous ages. And I would say this is the biggest challenge to democracy again the challenge of misinformed people voting for the wrong politician. It's a problem, but it's a very old problem. I mean, the Greeks have dealt with it sometimes more success, sometimes less. But it's not a new problem. The new technology creates a completely new kind of problem that I don't know. What is the answer to this issue? Yeah, well, I share your concern about the effect of technology and where all that's headed. That's obviously a big conversation. But I'm still stuck on the very low tech hacking of the human mind which happens reliably in so many places. It's right in the spot we're speaking about here, which is the politically utterly reliable response of so many people to being told that they're wrong, that they don't want what they think they want, that they don't understand reality enough to even know what they want on specific points. And this knee jerk revulsion now that this produces against expertise and hierarchies of information and a kind of misreading of the ethics and pragmatics of error correction, right? So when The New York Times admits a mistake from one point of view, that's proof that there's no difference between The New York Times and Breitbart, say, or any other non journalistic source of information and there's just a repudiation of all distinctions in information space that can allow us to reliably curate good ideas and better data. And it just strikes me as a genuinely difficult intellectual problem in certain cases where, I mean, just take the you know, our response to COVID It's very hard to know what is true, what is real, what should be motivating, and our desires are truly common. I mean, very few people want to die or have other people die unnecessarily, and very few people want to see the economy collapse. So we're anchored to the same desires, but we have a we have very different perceptions of reality. And the thing that I find troubling is this reliable manipulation of people. And Trump is the ultimate example of this, but basically, he manages to sell himself as a non elite person, right? So he's standing shoulder to shoulder with the common man, you know, even though everything in his life is gold plated and has his name on it, he isn't a member of the elite. And in truth, he isn't actually, because he really is an ignoramus and a deeply uncurious person who has never had much use for institutional knowledge. But what we have here is an ability to convince tens of millions of people with a single tweet that real institutions are completely bankrupt, whether it's the press or medicine or science in general. And what you need to do is just keep poking a stick into the machinery of any fact based discussion, and maybe you all just want to drink bleach or pour it into your lungs. Nothing is impossible now to promulgate as information. So anyway, that's kind of chaos is something I'm still stuck with. As we stumble into another presidential election, I have two thoughts. First of all, the good news is that in this emergency, we have seen a lot of trust in science and in scientific authorities, even from unexpected quarters. I mean, given the record of the recent years with so many attacks on science and on scientific institutions, it's really amazing for me to see that in this emergency, in most places, most people, they ultimately trust the scientific authority more than anything else. And the clearest cases for me are what's happening with religion in this crisis that in Israel, they close down the synagogues. They don't allow people to go to the Wailing Wall, they don't allow people to gather to pray. In Iran, they shut down the mosques. The Pope is telling the faithful to stay away from the churches, and all because the scientists said so. You look at the Black Death, and it was a completely different story back then. Yeah, I'm medievalist. So for medievalist, it's usually easy to be a bit optimistic about the present because our baseline is so low. Yeah, I look at the Black Death in the 14th century, I look at the COVID-19 crisis and I say, wait. Well, we have made some. Progress in the last 500 years, not only in scientists being able to really understand the epidemic, but also in the trust that people have in these institutions. And when the Black Death spread and the King of France, he asked the medical faculty of the University of Paris, the most prestigious university, to write a treatise. Get your best minds on this and tell me what's happening. And they got the best minds of the faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris, and they published as a report. And according to them, the problem was basically astrological that as far as I remember, saturn, Mars and Jupiter were in a particularly bad conjuncture which has caused the corruption of the Earth on Earth. And this is what's causing the mortality of about between a third and half of the population. Now, there were people who disagreed in the University of Paris, and the Minority Report was that actually it was the fault of earthquakes that released toxic gases from the bowl of the Earth, and this is what is killing the people. And of course, you had the conspiracy theory of the day, which was that the Jews have poisoned the wells. So you had a wave of pogroms against the Jewish communities all over Europe. I think we have made some progress since then. Yeah, you're forgetting the blasphemers who had their tongues cut out because blasphemy had to be part of this problem. Yeah. Another thing about several of the points you raised, that, yes, we have some common desires, like we don't want to die, we don't want the economy to crash. But another very common desire to people all over the world from all walks of life is to be right, that it's very important for people to be correct in their fundamental beliefs in life. It's very, very difficult to admit that you are wrong. People would do terrible things to others and to themselves. Just not to admit that I've made a mistake, I'm wrong. And especially when it comes to the deep stories that give meaning to life. Our mind is a factory creating stories that give meaning to life. And for many people, the worst thing that can happen to you ever is to find out that the story that you created or that somebody else created and you have adopted, and for years, this has been the bedrock of how you understand your life. And this is what gives meaning to life. To admit that this story is fictional, it's full of errors, it's full of mistakes. Many people would prefer to die than to do that or would prefer to drink bleach than to do that. And that's also very deep in the human psyche, in human nature, in human history. And there are so many examples of the terrible things that people would do just to prevent admitting that they made a mistake. So in this sense, it's not so surprising what's happening. And again, the situation compared to the Middle Ages. Even here, we've made substantial progress in our ability and willingness to put these stories to the test. Yeah, okay, so on the topic of progress, let's imagine what sort of further progress we might make in the aftermath of this, or as we even just process this problem. Because the next twelve months, or optimistically, perhaps twelve months between now and a vaccine, there's a fair amount of uncertainty as to just what normal life might be like. And even after a vaccine, even if one were magically delivered in a much shorter time frame than that, their economic consequences we'll be living with and just an opportunity to rethink how we live individually and collectively. And there's a potential rewriting of norms and certainly an improvement to institutions that we could envision. I'm tempted to ask you how you're envisioning or hoping for a post COVID world with respect to certain variables. One variable that has been on my mind for several years at this point, but its importance seems quite heightened now. And I think in the next year it's going to dominate many other concerns and it's the issue of wealth inequality and the remedies for that and the acknowledgment of it is a problem and redistribution or something else as a remedy. And the way in which it interacts with political polarization and populism. And all of this I think, is going to come to a boil fairly soon because it's being exacerbated by how people are affected by this pandemic. Do you have any thoughts about wealth inequality? That it's bad? I agree that it's getting worse. And I think we have a choice here. Generally, I don't think that the future is inevitable or that the future that there is one obvious outcome to this crisis. This crisis gives us a lot of choices to make, difficult choices, but also opportunities to change the way the society is built. And it all depends on the decisions, on the political decisions that we will take in the next twelve months, as you say. Which is why my basic understanding of the COVID-19 crisis, it's not a healthcare crisis, it's above all a political crisis. We can deal with the virus again, it's not a black death. We have the scientific knowledge and the technological tools to overcome the epidemic itself. The real problems are in the realms of economics and politics and here nothing is inevitable. It's all a matter of political choices. So I hope that people in the media would focus less on the latest statistics about the number of sick people or the number of ventilators in the hospitals and focus more on the political decisions. For example, governments are distributing enormous amounts of money and it's a very big question who gets what. Is this money being used to save failing corporations because of their mistakes, which were made long before this epidemic? Is it being used to finance enterprises whose managers and owners are friends with this minister or that minister is it used to save small private businesses, restaurants, travel agents, hotels, whatever. That's a political choice that we need and that we need to supervise very, very closely, and we have to do it now. People are so overwhelmed by this crisis. But in this situation of chaos, people who have tunnel vision have an immense advantage. If the only thing you care about in life is getting more power or getting more money, this is a perfect opportunity for you. Whereas many other people are confused and uncertain because they are honestly looking for a way to come out of the crisis, improve the situation of the population, solve the economic difficulties. If the only thing you focus on is getting another billion dollars, this is a very easy time to do it if you have the right connections. So I hope that the public in different countries would really monitor, would be aware that that this is happening. And you can't wait until the crisis is over to look back and see what has been done. It has to be done in real time. If you wait until 2021, it's basically like coming to a party after the party is over and the only thing left to do is to wash the dirty dishes. I mean, the trillions are being divided, distributed right now. In 2021, there will be nothing left to distribute. So we have to really there is a lot of talk of surveillance these days, and people mostly think about monitoring individuals, whether they are sick or not, and who you met and where you went to break the chains of infection. But at the same time, we need very close surveillance of who is making the decisions and who is getting what. And the same way, it turns out to be quite easy to follow all of us around and see what we do. It should be equally easy to follow the government and see to whom it gives the money. What are your thoughts about the future of education? Because you still work as a professor part of the year, don't you? Yeah, I still teach at university. Now I'm doing it online with Zoom, which works better than I imagined. It has its difficulties, but yeah, I continue to teach three courses. Right. This is something I commented on in my last podcast, but this for me was indicative of just how crazy and distorting financial incentives can be. An environment where certain ethical decisions are seem to me to be crystal clear, where you you have Harvard University, which has the largest endowment of any college, I think properly in the world, especially in the United States, has $40 billion, firing its nonessential staff because of the pandemic, and also taking government money, which now they've been forced to give back under embarrassment. It seems to me that that's a symptom of something, just a lack of connection to what should be the real mission of an institution like Harvard, certainly to the values of the institution. And I think many people are experiencing a fairly hard reset in just how they think about the role of a university and the economics of it. Obviously, the cost of education has gone up faster than inflation for many, many years. And you have, even among those who have succeeded in life by economic standards, the common experience, the ubiquitous experience of the most fortunate people in our societies coming out of their period of education with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for which, alone among all the debts in human life can't be discharged in bankruptcy, at least in the United States. What could education look like if I told you two years from now, education is very different? What do you think the main differences would be? I'm teaching at university, but I'm not really an expert on education, so it's a bit difficult for me to say. What I am experiencing at firsthand is this shift to online teaching, which is likely to continue to some extent even after the crisis is over. This can lead to all kinds of dangerous directions. A lot of the experience of going to college doesn't happen in class. It happens during the break time very often. Even in Harrow, I hope. I don't even tell anybody. But even in Harvard or Oxford or in my university in Jerusalem, very often the most important lessons are being taught during the break times and with teaching courses online at Zoom. Of course there are break times, but you're alone in your home. You don't meet the other students for a chat in the cafeteria. And I think that whatever happens to education, we should always remember the very central role of the community and of the social interaction and find ways to preserve it, even give it more central role, more importance. And also any process that undergoes digitalization really changes its nature and again becomes much more open to surveillance and monitoring. You know, if you went to the University of Leipzig in East Germany, 1980, for probably, I don't know, a quarter of the students were Stasi agents or Stasi informants. And you knew that whatever you say in class, whether you are the professor or one of the students, it will be reported to the Stasi. And this was a very nice experience, of course. But again, as I mentioned before, the Stasi couldn't really analyze effectively all the enormous amount of information that it got from all these agents. There is a wonderful film, I think it's called Life of Others or something like that. Yeah, it was a great film. Anyway, there was this inability to process all the data. Now, when university goes online and I teach my students in Zoom, I tell them that you have to take into account that everything I say and everything you say is being recorded and being stored somewhere. And unlike in Leipzig in 1980, it's being analyzed, could be analyzed by AI, which means that you have to be much more careful, not necessarily about political issues. It's more the fear that your entire life will become one long job interview. That whatever you do, whatever you say at any moment during your life in class or in breakdown or in break time could come to haunt you in five years or ten years when you're apply for some job and AI is going over your entire record. Not only your marks at the end of the year, but over everything. And based on that, they decide whether they want you or not. It's a question not only of your marks. It's really a question of your personality, of the way you interact. And so the thought of your entire life, everything you do at any moment, is actually part of a job interview and also part of what goes into the system to decide whether to accept you to university in the first place, because maybe everything you did in school was also monitored and analyzed. This is, on the one hand, one of the most promising areas in education, because the promise, the prize is to have an education system that knows you personally and is caters to your unique individual strength and weaknesses. And it's not a teacher with 30 students who aims at the lowest common denominator. It's a system that really knows you better than any teacher, better even than your parents, and doesn't necessarily many people are afraid that this will just kind of amplify your preexisting tendency, but no, not necessarily. It can actually challenge you more than any human teacher in the world. I don't know. You want to develop your musical tastes. It will know the exact amount of triggers of new genres of music to introduce you to, and will even know the right moment to do it, will follow your emotional state. And we'll discover, we'll know when you're most open to learn about a new artistic genre. So there are enormous promises, but then there are also enormous dangers. And I think, like with democracy, also with education. This is the biggest question how would we deal in the educational system with these new abilities to hack human beings on the surveillance side? Isn't China already pushing pretty far in this direction with their social credit score system? Yeah, that's the Dystopian side of it. Yeah. I mean, again, it has a utopian side and a Dystopian side. Dystopians usually don't happen unless they also have a utopian side. You need a really big carrot in order to convince people to go in that dangerous direction. And with the new surveillance technology, there are enormous positive promises. Otherwise, there would be no real danger. I mean, who would like to do it if it's not really good for anything? You must know Nick Bostrom's argument about what he calls turnkey totalitarianism. When you look at various forms of existential risk. And you sort of just imagine that the not too far future where we discover that certain technologies are just so easily used to destroy millions of lives, and they can't be uninvented, that we now need a system of massive surveillance and very quick intrusion into people's lives to make sure those technologies aren't used. Let's say it becomes just trivially easy for anyone to weaponize a new virus that spreads like measles and has an 80% mortality rate. Well, then, in the presence of that knowledge and that technology, well, we need to know what you're doing with your hands at all times. Yeah, it is easy to see how we could get ourselves into a predicament like that. Yeah, that's the really kind of dystopian scenario. There are all kinds of middle of the way dystopias on the way there. I mean, one of my favorite scenarios is simply that authority shifting by a lot of small steps imperceptibly from humans to algorithms, and humans basically just going along with that because it's more convenient, it's easier, it has a lot of advantages. And if they wake up at a certain point and realize that this is very dangerous, it's already too late to reverse it. And actually, one of my favorite scenarios is this is happening to the Chinese communist party. I mean, we tend to think about computers taking over and the danger of all these technologies, usually in a democratic setting, like what will happen to the US. If facebook wants to become the dictatorial government. But it's interesting to think what could happen to the Chinese communist party if it gives too much power to the algorithms. One of the most important functions within the Chinese communist party is to decide who gets promoted, at least in the lower and middle ranks of the party. Appointments are really by merit, I mean far more than, say, in the United States or in many democracies. But then the question is, how do you know who really has done well in his or her previous job and should be promoted? And at present, you have all these thousands upon thousands of party officials who are collecting and analyzing data, but it's really tempting to just give it to an algorithm, which, of course, he the algorithm will not choose the Politburo members or the next chairman of the of the of the Chinese Communist Party. But he it will be given the power, the authority to increasingly make decisions about the lower ranks of the Party. And I have this vision that one day the political role members wake up and realize that the party has been taken over by the values of the algorithm that appointed all the lower ranks, and it's not what they wanted, it's not what they envisioned, and it's too late to resist it. Some Jewish software engineer will be blamed for hacking the Chinese communist algorithm in the end. No, the funny it doesn't have to be human hacking. It's just you have machine learning that you set it certain goals at the beginning, like with Bostrom's paper clip, thought experiment, but on a more kind of human level that, yes, the algorithm was given certain parameters, certain metrics to make the decisions, and it learned on the way. And eventually it created a party very, very different from what the big bosses wanted. Yeah, there's no doubt that something like that is happening either algorithmically or just by the happenstance of the technology we are producing. If you just look at what the effect of social media on all of us, it does have the character of a psychological experiment that no one has really designed. We've all submitted to it and it's having whatever effect it's having, and we're occasionally worrying about it, but succumbing to it all the while it's not planned in advance. Okay, so finally, how do you view the prospects of the role of religion changing? And maybe I know you have some thoughts on the way our attitude toward death might also shift here in the near term. How are you thinking about it? Are existential concerns and the institutions that tend to minister to them. If we start with death and its connection to religion, then for most of history, certainly in my favorite period of the middle Ages, death was omnipresent. And the basic attitude to death was kind of learned helplessness or resignation that God decides when and why we die. And we humans have very little ability to outsmart death or to postpone death. And that's in a world where, you know, at least a third of children never made it to adulthood because of childhood diseases or malnutrition. And in which when an epidemic like the Black Death came along, nobody had any real idea what was happening, what was killing people, and what could be done about it. So death was extremely important to people. It was really, I would say, the main source of meaning in life was death. The most important event in your life which gave meaning to everything you experienced happened after you died. Only after you died, you were either saved or damned. Only after you died, you really understood what this was all about. So basically, in a world without death, there is no heaven, there is no hell, there is no reincarnation. So religions like Christianity, islam and Hinduism and so forth just make absolutely no sense. And what happened over the last few centuries is really amazing in the way that our attitude to death has changed. And this is to a large extent, I would say, the result of the scientific revolution. When science came along and especially the medical sciences, and started to really understand why people die, what is causing epidemics, what is causing infectious diseases and so forth. And human life expectancy jumped by from under 40 to over 80 in the developed world today, two things happened first of all, death became a far less important part of life. The meaning of life, at least for many people and for many ideology no longer comes from what happens to us after we die. If you look at most modern ideologies they have completely lost interest in what happens to us after we die. If you ask yourself what happens to a Communist after he or she dies or what happens to a feminist after he or she dies nobody even talks about it. It's no longer so important. And our basic attitude now is that death is increasingly just a technical problem. If people die, it's because not of divine will and not because of some forces of nature. It's because of human failure. If humans die in some accident then we search who to blame or who to sue because obviously somebody made a mistake. And you see it now with this pandemic. I mean, our attitude in most of the world is very different from the Black Death. We don't raise our hands to God and implore him to do something and tell ourselves that this might be a punishment from God from our misdeeds. No. We assume that humans have the power to overcome this to contain epidemics. And if we still have an epidemic, it's because somebody made a mistake. Somebody screwed up big time. If you compare, I don't know, the situation in New Zealand to the situation in the US. You don't tell yourself, well, this is probably an indication that God loves the New Zealanders and wants to punish the Americans. No, we say that there was a difference in the policies of the different governments. And if the situation in the US. Is really bad, then somebody made a mistake. And the only question is who. So our basic attitude, which we now seen in this epidemic is a mixture from resignation. We've shifted to a mixture of anger and hope. If somebody dies, we are angry because we assume it's some kind of human mistake. And also we have hope that, as in the case of this epidemic everybody is hoping for the vaccine. Everybody is asking when the vaccine will be ready not if the vaccine will be ready. Even in the context where there's no obvious human error even if we were all behaving impeccably, we were all New Zealand we would view the absence of a vaccine here as a problem to be solved by human ingenuity. It's not something to be prayed for. Basically, all of human misfortune on some level becomes an engineering problem to be solved. And the fact that we haven't solved it is just because we're in this contingent place in human history where we just haven't produced the requisite knowledge yet to solve it. But clearly the path forward is a matter of producing that knowledge not waiting for some invisible agent to sort out our lives for us. Yeah. And even more so, we would tend to see it as a political issue, a political issue in things like budgets, that yes, we lack the knowledge, but we lack the knowledge because we didn't invest the money in the right places and we would check the records of past years. And why did we spend so much money on, I don't know, researching diets and didn't spend that money on researching viruses and producing vaccines? So we would go the extra step of saying even this, even the amount of knowledge we have, is really the result of making the right or wrong political decisions where to invest our resources. So that's about death and religion is of course tied to that. What we've seen over the last few centuries is that the role of religion shrank dramatically again. I know that many people today don't see it or think it's going into reverse. Religion is becoming more important. But when you look at the big picture, the roles, the places where people turn to religion have really, really shrank over the last few centuries. In the Middle Ages, medicine was above all the realm of religion and religious leaders. If you read many of the sacred texts of humanity, you find that very often religious leaders, a very big part of their job is to be healers. I mean, I think that most of what Jesus does is heal people. He's more a doctor than a spiritual guide. And today, even the religious people, they go to the doctor, not to the priest or the rabbi or the mullah. When something goes wrong medically, only when all hope is lost, only when the doctor says there is nothing to be done, then OK, you pray. I mean, it can't, it can't harm, so why not? But medicine has shifted from the realm of religion to the realm of science, and this has happened to many other areas of activity. Similarly if there is not enough rain so you turn to the engineers and you turn to the agronomists to find a solution. Maybe desalinated water from the ocean. Maybe produce new strains of wheat that can grow with less water. All kinds of things. In the time of the Bible of the Middle Ages, you would turn to the priest to pray for rain. And the basic reason why this shift happened is simply because science has proved itself found superior in healing people and solving droughts and things like that. And the reason for that, and that really brings us back to the beginning of our, of our conversation, is that science is far more willing to admit mistakes and try something else. The big expertise of a lot of religious leaders is not healing and not faulting droughts, but it's finding excuses. They have been like the world champions in finding excuses. Like there is no rain, so you do the rain dance and and there is still no rain. So the shaman or the priest would give you a very good excuse why, despite dancing the rain dance. There is still no rain. That's the real expertise of a lot of religious leaders. And over centuries, people simply realized that science is becoming better and better at healing people. Religion is becoming better and better at finding excuses. And if you really want to heal your disease, then you go to the doctor. And that's why the importance, the scope of religion has shrunk, except in one place where it's still extremely important. And this is in defining our identity and giving meaning to life, defining who are we and who are they and what is the meaning of my existence. This is somewhere that science has little to offer. So religion is still extremely important. And I don't think that this will change dramatically in the wake of COVID-19 or in the coming decades. The religions will change, that's for sure. I mean, religions constantly change throughout history. They claim they are eternal, that they are unchanging, that Christianity today is the same as it was a thousand years ago in the time of Jesus. But the fact is that they constantly adapt to new economic and political and technological realities, and they are quite good at it. Otherwise they wouldn't have survived. And this will continue to happen in the 21st century, too. Has there been anything about this experience that has altered your priorities personally at this point with respect to your career or your personal life or just how you spend your time, moment to moment? It certainly reminded me, like so many other people, of the importance of social connections and intimate relations with people, with friends, with family. What I really miss most in the present situation is just meeting friends, not via Zoom or some other online gadget or the telephone. Yeah, for me, that's the main thing. I have been thinking about many of the issues of the day long before this crisis erupted. So in this sense, I kind of came to it prepared or baked or half baked. Yeah. Also, many people know this about you, perhaps not everyone, but you're somebody who's had a very long standing meditation practice, and you spend a lot of time regularly on retreat. And so on some level, you have been preparing for this kind of disruption in your life, as I have for a very long time. And I almost feel perversely lucky to be this comfortable in this kind of circumstance, just psychologically. Yeah. My practice has been of enormous help in this emergency, and after spending 60 days in silent meditation without any phones, without talking to anybody for two months, so the last two months have been it's far easier. I mean, you can read, you can pick up the phone and talk with somebody, but still, one of the things that make it possible for me to go on these meditation retreats is knowing that my loved ones, my husband, my friends, my family, they are safe and that the world is. Generally doing okay now. It's very different. I mean, I look at what's happening to the world and there are a lot of things to worry about, so I don't have the kind of peaceful cocoon that I have in the meditation retreats. Well, yval, it's been great to get you back on the podcast. Your voice is, as ever, relevant. It's hard to imagine what could have conspired to make it more relevant, but all of those dials have been turned to eleven, it seems. So it's really a great pleasure to speak with you again. So thank you for your time, thank you for inviting me and thanks for everybody listening and let's hope do it again after this emergency is over. And there is something else on the horizon. Yeah, we'll have to talk about meditation someday, we promise. Sat three times in a row and we can never get to it. So next time. Yeah, there is always something more urgent./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, I want to say a few things about my hopes for the new year here. Like all of you, I'm happy to get 2020 behind us. But of course, there's no guarantee that 2021 will be better, right? I mean, these calendar dates are just concepts that have very little connection to the dynamics of what is actually happening out in the world, apart from the tenuous connection of all of us hoping to reset our lives on January 1, which is not nothing, but it's not a lot either. As for whether a virus mutates or a hostile foreign power hacks our government and major corporations and steals or manipulates sensitive data, these things happen on their own schedule, as you know. And both of these things appear to have happened in the last few weeks. To what end? It's not yet clear, but it's natural and useful, I think, to use the change in calendar as a device to clear one's head and attempt to get one's priority straight. So, like many of you, that's what I'm doing. In fact, the madness of this last year has already helped me get my priority straight or straighter. I now have far fewer browser tabs open in my life, and I think this will be true going forward. There's a spirit of triage, I now feel. What is worth paying attention to, personally and professionally. I'm living with this question more and more. If you can think back to January and February of last year, how were you planning to spend 2020? And how startling was it to discover that the world had other plans? There's been a tsunami of private pain, even for fairly lucky people, and for the unlucky, 2020 was just brutal. And publicly, there's been a failure, especially in the United States, to cohere around a feeling of shared purpose and shared sacrifice, and that has been beyond disappointing. It's really been unnerving how fully we've failed here, and in its place. We've witnessed a level of estrangement from one another, which has often been described as hyper partisanship in a political context, but that doesn't quite cover it. The level of hostility and the degree to which it's been fed by lies and misinformation seems genuinely new to me, and not at all compatible with our building a good society. Of course, the interaction between technology in particular social media and politics, has been the main story here. We've seen vast numbers of people born away on a tide of misinformation and conspiracy thinking and has rendered them totally unreachable. In fact, our society appears to have shattered itself into competing cults the cult of Trumpism, with its especially crazy core of QAnon, and the cult of Wokeness, with its crazy core of critical race theory. I'm not saying these problems are precisely the same, or necessarily proportional, but they are the same in being constituted almost entirely by propaganda. To a degree that should only be possible in Dystopian fiction. It's like we've come ashore on the proverbial island of liars and it's just deranging. And all of this seems caused by, and further causes a breakdown in social trust and trust in institutions. On one level, a breakdown in trust is understandable. The conjunctions of competence and incompetence we've seen have been fairly breathtaking. We've had record breaking vaccine development alongside a total failure of political leadership on both the left and the right, and at all levels to successfully manage a pandemic. We have literally seen the time course of medical research cut down to almost nothing. The moderna vaccine was created in a weekend. It was created before there had been a single death from COVID in the United States. Yes, it depended on many years of prior work, but going from a viral genome sequence to a vaccine in a matter of days is astonishing. And yet our most prestigious medical institutions like the CDC, and our most prestigious medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, have worked extraordinarily hard in the last year to destroy their reputations. The contamination of public health and scientific communication by political dogmatism on both the left and the right has been catastrophic. We've had our most respected medical voices either capitulate to Trump and his messaging or capitulate to the wokeness. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't been paying attention. And now we're botching the distribution of the vaccine at the time I'm recording this. It will take a decade to vaccinate the entire country at our current pace, and we've had nearly a year to prepare for this moment. It's just incredible. Thousands of people are dying a day as vaccine risks spoiling on our shelves. I mean, we're great at molecular biology, but we appear to suck at everything else. And surely information and misinformation is at the core of this. Something like 50% of our society appears to be quite sanguine about getting the novel coronavirus, but terrified to get the vaccine for it. I've heard reports from hospitals where 50% of the frontline healthcare workers are refusing their doses of vaccine. Throughout the pandemic, and especially through the election and its aftermath, it has been amazing to hear from people on both sides of what seems to be a mass hallucination, a pseudospiritual awakening that has engulfed the minds of most of the people in our society. I mean, left and right have broken down as concepts in many ways, but whatever you call them, the political extremes have gone mad. Perhaps they were always mad, but the madness has crept inwards and has tainted vast stretches of the mainstream. Mainstream Republicans have capitulated to Trump and Trumpism to a degree that I wouldn't have thought possible. And the ideological capture of the media and our other institutions by wokeness has been just as amazing. One has to reference the behavior of cults to begin to understand what's going on here, it's worth asking yourself, are you an occult? Are you actually thinking clearly about anything? Are you getting good information about anything? May I ask this about myself, too? It has become genuinely hard to find a path through information space that leads to anything like daylight. Now, do you think there was a massive voter fraud in the 2020 election and Trump actually won, and Republican election officials and secretaries of state and judges are all in on the plot? Well, if you do, you're in a cult. Do you think that racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry are our main problems in society now and that they explain all current inequality? Do you think that great companies and medical schools and the entertainment industry and other desirable places to learn and work are currently in the business of excluding qualified people of color and women out of a preference for white men? Is that really what you think? Well, then you're in a cult. Do you think the COVID pandemic is basically a hoax and that the lockdowns were imposed to destroy the economy and defeat Trump? Do you think we're being told to wear masks just to get us to comply with arbitrary limits on our freedom? Well, then you're in a cult, and the new media landscape has not helped matters. What I think I've seen in many of my fellow podcasters and writers is the phenomenon of audience capture. My friend Eric Weinstein came up with that phrase for undoubtedly an older phenomenon, but it's when you begin telling your audience what they want to hear, and you get rewarded for it, and the cycle becomes self reinforcing. So some of this is probably inevitable, right? We all gravitate toward messages that we like and to people we find persuasive, and these people tend to keep doing what works. It's nice to be liked, especially when the business model depends on it. But audience capture is a real problem, and I've consciously guarded against it ever since I discovered that whole sections of my audience were outraged by one or another position I've taken. I decided not to be concerned about that and not to do anything differently. And I don't think I'll ever understand those of you who claim to love what I'm doing here on the podcast and who have read my books and followed my work for years, who imagine that I would have been a fan of Donald Trump or Wokeness. I mean, both of these grotesque objects are the antithesis of everything I care about. Both are purely divisive, purely misleading. Both represent a near total embrace of error. Trumpism and Wokeness are like two doors leading to alternate hells. From my point of view and between the two, I think I've offended 50% of you in the last few years, and many of my guests have done likewise. We really need careful, principled, intellectually honest people to help sort through the rubble now and begin building again, and these are the types of people I'm eager to speak with on this podcast. I realize all of this sounds a little gloomy, but it seems important to acknowledge how fully things have unraveled over the last year. Of course, on another level, it's amazing that things work as well as they do. To even have the expectation that things will work and to be appalled when they don't is a testament to our progress. We expect airplanes to not only take off and land safely, but to serve decent coffee. We have come a long way in 100 years, 100 years from now, if we don't annihilate ourselves in the meantime, we will view everything I'm complaining about today as just a few growing pains on the way to a glorious future. I really want our children to inhabit that glorious future, and it appears to be within reach. So much of our suffering is obviously unnecessary. So many of our losses are the result of spectacular own goals. Of course, politics is the area where the worst of this happens again and again. But the problem is much larger than politics. Ask yourself, what are we doing here as a species? For the most part, we're creating and consuming culture. The nearterm goal should be pretty obvious. We have to build a culture that is conducive to sanity. We need a culture that is at minimum compatible with our long term survival. We have serious problems to solve. Infrastructure pandemic preparedness. That would have been nice, right? Climate change, cybersecurity, education, wealth inequality, our relationship with China. Wouldn't it be amazing to just get busy and sort this stuff out without all the animosity and conspiracy thinking and dogmatism and perverse incentives and everything else that makes sane policies and compromises impossible? The issues are at once so complex and yet so simple. Just consider our current moment through the lens of a single variable wealth inequality. There are good faith debates to be had about how much inequality is too much. But there really is no question that this is a problem that decent, compassionate people, or even merely self interested people, are now wise to worry about. However rich and insulated you are, if you don't think that you've lost something when the level of homelessness and crime soars in your city, well, then you've lost your mind. Honestly, even a sociopath should be able to recognize that his own selfishness is best fulfilled in a context where others are doing at least reasonably well, where the sidewalks haven't come to resemble free fire zones or refugee camps. I've been worrying about wealth inequality for at least a decade. I wrote a few articles about it in the aftermath of the 2009 crash, and it's been a recurring topic on the podcast, and I worry about it from a place of not wanting to stigmatize wealth at all. I think the people who are railing against the mere existence of billionaires are just confused about economics. But everyone who is railing against increased social welfare in all its forms, anyone for whom terms like inequality and redistribution have become radioactive is just confused about ethics. What kind of world do we want to live in? It seems to me there are pretty uncontroversial answers to this question. We want to live in a world where people are incentivized to do creative work that makes the world better and better. We want cures for terrifying diseases. We want to be able to distribute vaccines faster than we are at present. And we want a space program just for the fun of it and also to ensure that human life continues indefinitely. If we discover there's a massive asteroid on a collision course with Earth, we want to be able to divert it and save our species and every other species. We actually want to be that competent. Therefore we want to massively fund science. And we need a rich civilization to do this. We want a future of real prosperity and we are right to want that. And obviously we need a model for global growth that's sustainable. But the end game for us isn't to cease innovating and improving our technology. We want our technology to become more and more effective and benign. So this already rules out some visions of the future. This can't be a hippie paradise where everything is made of hemp. Capitalism, for all its flaws, really seems to have this part right. We need to work with the grain of human nature and leverage people's selfishness and their desire for status in a way that brings out the best in us, not the worst. We need to incentivize people to build things that actually work. It's not enough to just play the diggery do on the sidewalk in Seattle or Portland. We need to get things done. And we want beautiful public spaces and brilliant works of art and great food and cars and smartphones. But we also want a world where the differences between good and bad luck don't cause us to avert our eyes in horror. We don't want a world where people leap to their deaths from the rooftops of the factories that are building our toys. We don't want an epidemic of homelessness in San Francisco or Los Angeles or New York. As we produce more and more wealth, we have to become more compassionate and more connected to one another, not more sociopathic. There are really two paths we can take here and they are diverging steeply now. And the only thing that will determine which path we take will be the ideas that prevail in the culture. The ideas that win will affect each of us personally. There will be new norms to which we will effortlessly adhere because to do otherwise will be embarrassing. Wearing a seatbelt is a norm that very few people need to rethink now. And yet it used to be a bizarre concession to fear. Now you're just an imbecile not to wear a seatbelt. We need new norms that anchor our deeper values. We need norms that make us better people. Let's be even more specific. It's been much noticed of late that there seems to be an exodus in the tech community out of California to states that don't have an income tax, in particular Texas and Florida. Now, there's some question about whether or not this trend has been overhyped. But I can personally account for tens of millions of dollars and probably even hundreds of millions of dollars of California's tax base drying up simply judging from the people I know personally who are leaving the state and who are, in some cases, taking their companies and employees with them. In California, the top 1% of earners pay 50% of the taxes. So it doesn't take that many rich people to decide to move before the state's revenue goes into freefall. Now, this is a very complicated issue, ethically and politically and even psychologically, because, of course, it's rational for any individual to want to pay as little in taxes as he or she legally can. And if we have a system wherein simply moving to another state amounts to the equivalent of someone paying you millions of dollars a year to live there, it's very easy to see why that would seem like an opportunity that's just too good to pass up. So I don't feel especially judgmental about these people moving, especially when you consider how mismanaged our tax dollars often seem to be. It would be one thing if the return on our taxes was undeniably good, but unfortunately, the results are so mixed, especially now, that it's very easy for people to become cynical, and many of these people have become cynical about the prospects of government ever functioning effectively. But there's an interesting needle to thread here. One can seek to pay as little in taxes as one legally can while also believing the taxes are necessary and that the tax rate should be raised, given the magnitude of the need, while also believing that tax revenue is often wasted and that government needs to be seriously reformed. I don't see a contradiction there. Personally, I try to pay as little in taxes as I can legally, but I think taxes should be raised on everyone in my bracket. And I think this despite my certainty that some of that money will be wasted or spent in ways that I would judge totally counterproductive. A challenge one often hears from libertarians is you're free to pay more into the treasury yourself, so why not just do that and shut up about raising taxes on the rest of us? But that misses the point. It misses several points. No one should be eager to make a solitary sacrifice that serves no purpose. The point is that, waste and mismanagement aside, our infrastructure and education and everything else in our society needs to be funded. And there is no one in a better position to fund these things than the wealthy. Government mismanagement isn't an argument for not paying taxes, and it isn't an argument for lower taxes. It's an argument for better government. Of course, charitable giving is part of the picture here. Here's a new norm that we really must spread. If you are wealthy enough to have hired professionals whose primary job is to ensure that you pay as little as possible in taxes each year, well, then you should also be giving a lot of your money away to the most urgent causes. Not after you're dead, but every year while you're alive and while you can enjoy it. This goes to the question of what is wealth for? What is it good for? One thing it's good for is that it gives you the ability to help people very directly. And if you don't use that ability, given the excruciating need, people will begin to think that you're just selfish as they should. Actually, all the strands of this web converge on San Francisco in a way that's instructive. Recently, Mark zuckerberg and his wife priscilla chan, gave $75 million to San Francisco general hospital, and this is the largest gift to a public hospital ever, apparently. And yet the city's board of supervisors voted ten to one to condemn the naming of the hospital after zuckerberg and chan, and they further vilified zuckerberg in the process. So this moment contains the whole problem in miniature. Zuckerberg and chan gave $75 million to a hospital, and obviously this is a wonderful thing to do. And the fact that this is the largest private gift to a public hospital ever tells you that it should be celebrated rather than sneerdat, which is what the social justice lunatics on the board of supervisors have done. And they did this as their streets fill with homeless people and spent needles and the crime rate sores, they're spitting on a $75 million gift to a hospital. But beneath all this, and beneath the animosity of the supervisors, is the growing problem of wealth inequality. Zuckerberg's gift probably seems more generous than it is. In fact, for someone with $75 billion to cut a check for 75 million, that's like someone with 75 million cutting a check for 75,000, or for someone with 75,000 to give $75 towards some cause, that is, it's no big deal at all. In fact, the richer you get, the more this proportion falls apart. Someone with a net worth of $75,000 is actually making more of a sacrifice by parting with $75, because that increment of money is still relevant to their budget. Once a person becomes fantastically wealthy, their personal spending, even on the most extravagant luxuries, represents a tiny portion of their net worth. So when you look at the details, this is not the sort of sacrifice one should be tempted to write newspaper articles about. Actually looking at the forbes list now reveals that zuckerberg is currently worth $100 billion. He seems to have made 25 billion when I wasn't looking. Given how quickly Zuckerberg's wealth has grown, there were many days this year, probably most days this year, where his net worth increased by more than $75 million. The wealthiest people in our society make millions of dollars a day every day, whether they work or not. Most people just don't have good intuitions about the magnitude of these differences in wealth. The richest people now make in a day what the most successful movie stars, Tom Cruise and Will Smith and Scarlett Johansson make over the course of many years or even a lifetime at the absolute pinnacle of success in the movie industry. This is where we are in terms of wealth inequality. Again, I don't mean to demonize wealth at all. And it's worth noting that Zuckerberg and his wife have pledged to give 99% of their wealth away over the course of their lifetime. That's amazing, right? And that should be celebrated without any reservation whatsoever. That's the sort of thing people should write newspaper articles about, assuming they actually do this and they don't just park all the money in a charity after they die, they will be total heroes for living this way, whatever else you might think about them. So there's a complicated set of issues to think through here, politically and ethically. San Francisco is an extremely wealthy city, which has been ruinously mismanaged, and the rich appear to be leaving for perfectly rational reasons. This is a death spiral, and the quasisocialist demonization of wealth of the sort that one hears from people like AOC and Elizabeth Warren is part of the problem. We just can't afford zero sum thinking in a positive sum game, and prosperity can be positive sum. That's not to say there aren't trade offs and inevitable inequality, but we need to find policies that lead us in a direction that benefits more or less everyone, and we need to incentivize people to really succeed and then use their taxes and charity to help others. It seems to me that what we need to solve our problems is both competence and compassion. We have seen so little of either lately, and merely dunking on people on Twitter won't produce these things becoming a single issue. Thinker won't produce these things. We have to recognize that we're living in an unhealthy ecology of ideas. It's become like a superfund site of bad memes, and we have to clean it up anyway, I tend to use my podcast this year to bring you useful conversations in this vein. Not every episode will be about solving problems. Sometimes we just need to hear about interesting things in physics. But more and more, I want to drill down to ideas that actually have consequences for people's lives, whether personally or at the level of public policy. So I'm looking to speak with guests who can help me figure out what we should all be doing to make life better. And finally, I want to thank all of you who are subscribed to the podcast. You make it possible for me to do this and if you're not subscribed and you want to be, you can do that on my website@samharris.org. As always, I want to remind you that if you can't afford a subscription, you need only tell us that and we'll give you a free one. And this isn't just my COVID policy, this has always been the policy. I feel two things very strongly in this space. I believe that we should value digital content appropriately and that we'll ultimately get what we pay for online. As you know, I think the ad model has been incredibly destructive. But on the other hand, I believe that money should never be the reason why someone can't get access to my digital content. Again, I see no contradiction here. Most of my stuff is behind a paywall and needs to be for any of this to work, but it's free if you can't afford it. As most of you know, there are two places where I currently publish my audio on this podcast and on the Waking Up app. And Waking Up has become much more than a meditation app. There's a growing library of lessons that are essentially applied philosophy. We now have tracks on Stoicism by William Irvin and more of those are coming and we'll soon have a section devoted to psychedelics. There's a lot going on over there at Waking Up and much more happening soon, so I just wanted to invite you to download the app and check it out if you haven't lately. As you know, if you're a subscriber to the podcast, you get access to the conversations I have over at Waking Up through my website. But there's much more to Waking Up than the conversations and again, if you can't afford a subscription, you need only send an email to support at Waking Up.com and request a free account. It's the exact same policy we have here on the podcast. Okay, well, despite all the doom and gloom, I am really looking forward to this year and needless to say, I wish you all a healthy and happy one. Thanks for listening./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, I seem to have caught a case of Twitter cancer last week, and it was probably Facebook and Instagram cancer too, but I don't look at those platforms. Anyway, I was on someone else's podcast and said some things about Trump and Biden, and those statements produced a fair amount of outrage in a very large group of people. So I think there are a few points I should clarify. There's nothing of real substance to walk back, but the truth is I wasn't speaking very clearly or systematically on that podcast, and in one place I actually misspoke, and as a result, there seemed to be a few significant misunderstandings that have gotten amplified. I tried to clarify a few of these points on Twitter, knowing that I would be doing a little more than spit in the wind, but I still think it was probably good to attempt this and to do it quickly, because several of the articles that got written about the episode noticed those tweets and so they didn't spread precisely those same misunderstandings. Of course, some people noticed my effort to clarify things and rejected it. At moments like this, I'm always reminded of Nietzsche's aphorism that when you force people to change their mind about you, they hold the effort you cost them very much against you. This really does seem to be true, and it's pretty maladaptive. We tend to want to hold people to the worst possible interpretation of what they said, even when it's belied by other things they said in context, and continue to say this happens on both the right and the left politically. And this is the problem with taking clips of audio or video out of context. Of course, any clip is by definition out of context. That's what a clip is. But many are chosen for the ways they seem to make a point very clearly when the editor knows that the actual point being made is far more complicated or even contradicted by something else the person says a few seconds or minutes before or after the chosen clip. For instance, many of you will remember that it became well established on the left that Trump referred to the white supremacists and neo Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville as, quote, very fine people. There were very fine people on both sides. You remember that. That was something that Trump said in a clip from a press conference where he was attempting to address the aftermath of those terrible events. Everyone from Biden on down insisted that he was talking about the neo Nazis and other obvious racists as, quote, very fine people. And almost everyone on the left still insists that this was the case. But if you watch the press conference, you will see that he wasn't doing that. How can we know this? Because he says so. He literally says that he's not talking about the neo Nazis and other racists. However, in my experience, if you tell people who want to think the worst of Trump about how misleading the clips from that press conference were, they are highly disinclined to believe you. And many of them come up with arguments for why they don't have to believe you. They say things like, well, there was no one else there. They were all neo Nazis and racists. So Trump saying that he wasn't talking about them doesn't hold water, because those were the only people to talk about. Now, even if that were true, and I highly doubt that it is, it's clear from his remarks that Trump thought there were other people there, just ordinary people who were worried about certain statues being taken down. His remarks make no sense if he thought that every protester was a neo Nazi. Anyway, as most of you know, there are very few people who are more critical of Trump than I am, and I'm sure I will amply demonstrate that yet again in the next few minutes. But I think it's important to be honest, even when attacking someone. You know, to be a terrible human being. And relying on clips is a great way to be misled and to mislead others about what people actually think. And many people over in Trumpistan are now doing that to me again, I made this much easier than it should have been by speaking sloppily, which I hope it doesn't seem too self serving to say I don't do very much. Even when I say something that seems quite extreme, I tend to be fairly precise in how I say it. Consequently, I don't often find myself in the position of having to say that I misspoke. It's true that people sometimes misunderstand or deliberately misrepresent what I actually meant to say, but that's a different problem. Even when dealing with people's misunderstandings or outright lies about what I've said, I'm rarely in a position of saying, sorry, there was actually a word there that was out of place and misleading. Unfortunately, in the present case, there really is an offending word. So I feel I need to offer some clarification, because I genuinely see the grounds for people's confusion based on that clip, and because many people are now accusing me of believing things I don't believe and of supporting things I don't support and of generally being a hypocrite. For instance, many people are saying that I used to be committed to truth and honesty. I wrote a whole book about how bad it is to tell lies. But now I'm in favor of lying, apparently, and censorship, and I'm actually open to destroying our democracy too. This is all bullshit, so apologies in advance if you find this boring. I actually find it an interesting experience to go through. Being engulfed by a tsunami of hatred definitely gets your attention, and you get to see who your friends are and who is almost your friend and who your former friends were always in the process of becoming. And you get to see otherwise smart and decent people deranged by rather sickening political and financial incentives. And you get to see the strengths and weaknesses of your own business model and of your own place in the world, really. It's not an experience I recommend. Exactly. If you can avoid being burned as a digital witch, I suggest you avoid it. But it really does have a silver lining if you've played your cards right. First, I should probably play the clip that went viral because this is what everyone is reacting to. The context was a 90 minutes podcast where I said many things that make this clip much easier to understand. However, as I said, I definitely created several problems for myself by bumbling around a bit and genuinely misspeaking at one point. The fact that I actually misspoke will be very easy to demonstrate, because the word I used really does contradict everything I said in the setup to the clip. And it's contradicted by what I begin to say in the very next sentence, but it's certainly my fault for using the wrong term. Before I deal with the clip, I want to emphasize again that I usually speak very precisely, even when I seem to be saying something extremely provocative. For instance, I've said on several occasions that I think Donald Trump is a worse person than Osama bin Laden. Now, the statement is obviously meant to get your attention. I get that it's surprising, but it's not meant to be hyperbolic. I can defend every word of a statement like that. What I can't defend are people's misunderstandings and erroneous extrapolations of a statement like that. Perhaps I should just clarify that statement again, because it actually goes a long way to explaining my view of Trump, why I think he's such a terrible person, but not nearly as scary as some people think he is. And not nearly as scary as many people think I think he is. I think Osama bin Laden was a more or less normal human being, psychologically. He was just living in the grip of a dangerous and idiotic worldview. The moral structure he imagined he was living under and wanted to impose on the rest of the world, given his beliefs, was despicable. So he created immense harm and it's very good that we killed him. But within the framework of his odious beliefs, he demonstrated many virtues. He was a man who certainly seemed to be capable of real self sacrifice and he was committed to ideals beyond his narrow self interest. He was, by all accounts, personally quite courageous. I don't claim to know that much about him, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if he was generally a person of real integrity and generosity and compassion in his dealings with his fellow Muslims. None of these things can be said about Donald Trump. Trump is, without question, one of the least honest and most malignantly, selfish human beings I have ever come across. And the paradox here it's not really a paradox, but it's what makes the point I'm making confusing to many people. The seeming paradox is that if Trump were a better person, he would be worse in many ways. If he were brave and self sacrificing and idealistic, if he were capable of being strongly committed to something beyond his narrow self interest, he would be capable of creating much greater harm in the world. But he's not. He is a child in a man's body. He lies as freely as he breathes and just as compulsively. He can't even put the interests of his children above his own, much less commit himself to any ideal that requires real self sacrifice. Unlike bin Laden, it is patently obvious that Trump isn't psychologically normal. He really is missing something that almost every other person on Earth has. He is an absolute black hole of self regard. When I say that wherever you are on Earth, you could probably walk a thousand miles in any direction and not meet a less admirable human being than Trump, I mean it in the terms I just described. The man is almost completely lacking in personal virtue. If he weren't funny, and I admit he can be funny he might actually be the least admirable person on Earth. Now, some of this is just my opinion, of course, but much of it isn't. To say that Trump lies incessantly and with a velocity almost never encountered anywhere else in human life is a fact. It is demonstrable. It is nearly self evident and has been for decades. It is as true and uncontroversial as saying that he's around 6ft, two inches tall. I realize that when I say this sort of thing, it sounds like an expression of personal hatred and of my own political partisanship, but it is neither of those things. I don't hate Trump. I hate the fact of him. I hate the space he occupies in our world. I hate what he has done to our politics. Yes, I know his ascendance politically is a symptom of many underlying problems, but he has also exacerbated those problems massively. Trump isn't the answer to wokeness and leftist hysteria, because he has done more than anyone to produce that hysteria. If you want to see how crazy the left can get, just elect Trump for a second term in 2024. We have a real problem of populist irrationality and misinformation and tribal lunacy on both the left and the right. Trump has made that problem astronomically worse on both the left and the right. It's not about hating the man. I hate the phenomenon. I didn't hate Trump when he was just a charlatan on The Apprentice. I ignored him. And my criticism of Trump isn't remotely partisan. It isn't even political. Because what I have to say about Trump I wouldn't say about any other Republican. And many Republicans with whom I disagree about politics, share my view of him. I probably agree with most of Trump's politics, in fact. Do I think we should have a secure border? Absolutely. Do I think we should be harder on China? Yes. Do I think that much of the left is in the grip of an insane moral panic? I do. Do I think the phrase defund the police is one of the stupidest ever uttered? Of course. Do I recognize that globalization has produced many casualties in our society? Yes. Am I in favor of onshoring much of our supply chain and energy infrastructure? Yes, I am. Am I appropriately humbled by our misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq and now skeptical of our ability to do anything like nation building? Absolutely. All of this significantly overlaps with Trump's policies and with the political concerns of his supporters. I may be an elitist globalist Jew asshole, as many of Trump's supporters now allege. But not only don't identate many of their political concerns, I share them. My real opposition to Trump, beyond all the flaws of his character, which, again, I consider to be so far beyond the norm that I just cannot believe we even have to think about this man. But the thing that makes him truly irredeemable and should have made him politically radioactive for Republicans for the rest of his life, is that as a sitting president of the United States, he would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. He declined to do this repeatedly many months in advance of the election. I believe this is the most shocking thing to have happened politically in my lifetime. And, of course, Trump's lack of commitment to the most basic principle of our democracy laid the groundwork for his big lie about having really won the 2020 election and for the violence on January 6. This single fact, among the thousands of other facts that should have disqualified Trump for the presidency, this fact alone should make Trump impossible to defend, much less support at this point. And the fact that the Republican Party has found a way to ignore this truth as though or some tiny detail, is proof that has become a cult of personality. This is the real Trump derangement syndrome to be defending the indefensible. What we are witnessing now among Republicans is not normal politics. So when I describe Trump as an existential threat to our democracy, I'm thinking about things like the willingness to abide by the results of an election and the peaceful transfer of power, the very norms that safeguard our democracy. One thing that Trump taught us is that we rely on norms in so many ways and in some ways even more than laws. It's quite possible that all of what Trump did to corrupt and destabilize our institutions was legal. It remains to be seen whether he's committed any crimes at all. It's legal to just ask the Russians on television to hack the emails of your political opponent. And there's no price to pay when they actually do that very thing. It's apparently legal to campaign on the promise that you'll lock up your political opponent when you win. And it seems legal to openly lie about having won an election that you actually lost, and to encourage a mob to gather in Washington to, quote, stop the steel. And when they begin storming the Capitol and calling for the murder of your vice president in order to stop the steel, it may be legal to just sit on your hands when you're the only person on Earth who can do anything to stop the violence, just to see if things somehow play out in your favor. There don't appear to be laws to defend our democracy against this sort of thing. It's just that we've tended to expect that our politicians won't behave in these ways, and normal politicians, or even just decent human beings won't. For better or worse, the integrity of our democracy depends on hundreds of norms like these not being violated on a daily basis. But when I say that Trump is an existential threat to our democracy, I don't mean that he is orange Hitler. Again, Trump is a narrowly selfish con man. He doesn't appear to think big at all. If he wants anything, it appears to be only fame and money. He seems content to do things like rack up millions of dollars in fees at his hotels and golf courses and apartment buildings by doing things like oblige the Secret Service to stay there. We all use the word grifter now with alarming frequency. Trump is the ultimate grifter, but he is not ideological. He seems to believe in nothing beyond the next opportunity to do something venal and selfish. So he is not Hitler. And this brings me to another confusing thing about the clip you're about to hear. I use the analogy of an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. This was not meant to indicate how bad I think Trump is. It was meant to indicate that the significance that the podcast hosts were attaching to the term conspiracy was misplaced. Anyway, you'll hear how potentially misleading this is. OK, so now for the clip. Here's the necessary context. As I said on Twitter, I was talking about the ethics of ignoring the story about Hunter Biden's laptop until after the election. I won't play other clips from the interview, but suffice it to say that I made it absolutely clear that I found the decision to ignore this story a very hard call, ethically and journalistically. I stated quite clearly that I could argue both sides of the issue and that my mind wasn't made up. It still isn't made up. And I admitted that it was corrosive for journalistic institutions like the New York Times to appear to show obvious political bias in this way when everyone knows that would never have ignored a Donald Trump Jr laptop story. And I said that for me, it really was close to a coin toss. I could go either way on this. In the clip you're about to hear, I said that ignoring the laptop story and even suppressing the New York Post's Twitter account when they ran it was, quote, totally warranted. What I clearly meant to say was totally justifiable. It's the difference between justified and justifiable. In the very next sentence, I begin to say for the second time in the interview that it really is a coin toss for me, which makes no sense when settings the word warranted. This is where I truly misspoke this single word. However, as you'll hear, I say several inflammatory things in this clip, so there's a little more to clarify. But I can defend everything I say here because I believe everything I say here except one word hunter Biden. At that point, Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared. Right. There's nothing first of all, it's Hunter Biden. It's not Joe Biden. But even whatever scope of Joe Biden's corruption is, if we could just go down that rabbit hole endlessly and understand that he's getting kickbacks from Hunter Biden's deals in Ukraine or wherever else, or China, it is infinitesimal compared to the corruption we know Trump is involved in. It's like a firefly to the sun. It doesn't even stack up against Trump University. Right. Trump University as a story is worse than anything that could be in Hunter Biden's laptop. In my view right now. That doesn't answer the people who say it's still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post's Twitter account. That's a left wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump. Absolutely. It was absolutely right. But I think it was warranted. Right. And I'm and again, it's a coin toss as to whether or not sam, I'm sorry. That particular time, I'm really sorry. I was the one that said we should move on. But you've just said something I really struggled with that, which is the kids in the basement. No, the kids in the basement. I'm in student democracy. You're saying you are content with the left wing conspiracy to prevent somebody being Democratically reelected as president? Well, no, I'm content, but the thing is, it's just not left wing. Right. So liz Cheney is not left wing. Right. Liz Cheney, everything in her to prevent somebody Democratic? No, but there's nothing conspiracy. It was a conspiracy out in the open. But it doesn't matter if it was. It doesn't matter what parts conspiracy, what parts out in the open. I think if people get together and talk about what should we do about this phenomenon? If there was an asteroid hurtling toward Earth and we got in a room together with all of our friends and had a conversation about what we could do to deflect its course, right. Is that a conspiracy? Okay, so as I said, you can hear me say again, it was a coin toss for me right after I uttered the word warranted, but then I get cut off by the host's next question. So I genuinely misspoke when I said totally warranted. I can truly argue both for and against ignoring and even suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story. And I said that clearly elsewhere in the interview, but of course you wouldn't know that from that clip. And my asteroid analogy is also misleading, as presented in the clip, because I was starting to go down a rabbit hole about this loaded term conspiracy and why it was irrelevant. In any case, the net result is what comes through in the clip was emphatic approval, not just for ignoring the story until after the election, but for kicking the New York Post off of Twitter. And if I think Trump is as bad as an asteroid that might destroy all life on Earth, how could there be any limit to what I'd be willing to do to stop him? I'll come back to that point because it's important as far as the laptop story is concerned. The other point I should have made is that viewing the Hunterbidden laptop as Russian disinformation or some other sort of disinformation was quite reasonable when the story first broke. So I'm not at all convinced that Twitter knew it was shutting down a real story, or even that the New York Times knew it was ignoring a real one. So I don't think any early claims of Russian disinformation were necessarily lies. And I actually have no opinion about whether the 50 intelligence professionals who signed that letter alleging that it was probably Russian disinformation were lying. They might not have been. This was a totally crazy story. A laptop from hell just gets abandoned in a computer store and then winds up with who? Rudy Giuliani? My claim is that given what happened in 2016 with Anthony Weiner's laptop ten days before the election, it is totally understandable that smart, well intentioned people were inclined to avert their eyes from the Hunter Biden story until after the election, as I was. From my point of view, it was totally rational at that point not to care what was on Hunter Biden's laptop. And the truth is, I still don't care. Given that Trump is looming over the 2024 election, given the choice we had in 2020, given how much we know about both Trump and Biden stretching back decades, there is absolutely nothing that could be on that laptop that is relevant to me. And I'll explain why in a moment. And this will also be true in 2024 if Trump runs again. Now, as I said, I was not speaking especially systematically or well in that podcast, and many things got condensed and entangled in my remarks about the Hunter Biden laptop story. For instance, there's obviously a distinction between the New York times deciding to ignore the story and Twitter deciding to suppress the New York Post story about it. I think I'm more comfortable with the former than the latter. And there's a distinction between these two things and having 50 ex intelligence professionals sign a letter declaring that it was Russian disinformation. I didn't differentiate any of those things in my remarks, and the truth is I feel somewhat differently about them. There are several other things that are misleading about that clip. Most people appear to be conflating what I'm recommending there with something illegal, like actual election fraud or some other way of subverting democracy. In fact, even the podcast hosts appear to have misunderstood me on that point. I say a few things to emphasize the difference, but it doesn't really clear the air. Ignoring the Hunter Biden story or even suppressing it. Again, I'm still not entirely sure what I think about that. But neither of those actions entail breaking the law. They don't even entail lying. This is just pure editorial judgment, especially if you think the story stands a chance of being Russian disinformation. This is not breaking the First Amendment. It's not destroying democracy in order to save it. It isn't any of the things that hysterical defenders of Trump are now a legend. And I should say it's simply amazing to hear people who are carrying water for the biggest liar probably in history shrieking about the primacy of truth and journalistic integrity in a right wing echo chamber that has ignored and suppressed real facts and real stories for decades. You're telling me that you think Fox News and Breitbart and Am talk radio and the One America News Network don't ignore stories they find politically inconvenient? This is where you get your news, and you're pretending to be worried about media bias. And as for engaging in so called censorship, what do you think is happening when Wikipedia locks down a page for a time or erases the edits made by some QAnon lunatic? Is that censorship? Is it a breach of the First Amendment? Is it the end of democracy? Should everyone get to say whatever they want on every platform? No. Every legitimate platform requires some form of moderation. Otherwise every platform would become like four chan, an absolute stess pool. Every platform has an ethical obligation, in my view, to exercise some editorial control with the public good in mind. The problem is, this might be impossible to do well, and Twitter isn't doing it well. And I agree it certainly appears to show a left leaning bias, and that's annoying. I think kicking people off the platform for saying benign and obviously true things like men and women are different is insane. But as I said at some length in that podcast, I'm not sure what the remedy is. One remedy is to start competing social media platforms, which is what conservatives have done. You've got truth, social and gab and getter and I don't know what else. My point is that it's hard to figure out what to do here beyond letting the market recognize that there's a growing opportunity to build new and better things, or in this case, new and much worse things. You really think you're going to get the truth on truth social, but what really is the alternative? I highly doubt we want the police or some other government agency kicking down doors trying to enforce a balanced application of Twitter's terms of service. As I said on that podcast, I think Twitter should be free to destroy itself. It should be free to become a platform purely for trans rights activists. And if you don't think Twitter should be free to do that, you are advocating for a world in which the employees and board members at Twitter who want to bend it in that direction are eventually put in prison. We probably find them first, of course, but what do we do when they don't pay the fines? We start putting people with purple hair in prison, I guess. I don't think that's a road we want to go down. Joe Rogan's podcast is enormous at this point. Could it become so influential that we would want the government to force him to talk to guests that he doesn't want to talk to? I don't think so, anyway. As I said, getting vilified at scale reveals a few things. One thing it's revealed is that I don't really have a tribe. But I knew that. As you've heard in previous podcasts, I've always been fairly aghast at accusations of tribalism and political partisanship, because I go as hard as anyone against Trump and the far right, and I go as hard as anyone against the woke and the far left. Not many people do that. I think I can count on one hand the number of people I know who do that. Andrew Sullivan does it. Bill Maher does it. I can't think of anyone else at the moment, though I'm sure there are others. One of the consequences of pissing off both the right and the left is that when you become the object of a Twitter mobbing, there are very few people inclined to defend you. They're certainly not going to defend you reflexively and tribally because you spend half your time pissing them off. I really have an unusual audience, and it's a direct consequence of how I think at some point I've made almost everyone uncomfortable. I've made religious people uncomfortable by attacking religion and being an atheist. I've made atheists uncomfortable by going on and on about how meditation and psychedelics can produce real spiritual insight. I've made spiritual people uncomfortable by saying that many of their beliefs are bogus. I've made many left of center uncomfortable by talking honestly about racial disparities in crime and the connection between Islam and terrorism. I've made many people right of center uncomfortable by talking about the problem of wealth inequality. And I've alienated more or. Less everyone by insisting that free will is an illusion. The truth is, I've pissed off a lot of people by goring, one sacred cow or another. There is no tribe for this. So at moments like this, I'm more or less on my own. But it's a very fair trade for the quality of the audience I've built. I have an audience that wants to know what I think and more important, how I think. And if you're a true member of my audience and you're not just listening to this because you hate me, you are here because you enjoy the ride, whether you agree with everything I think or not. As I said, one also finds out who one's friends are at a time like this, and you find out who is a real professional and who isn't. Megan Kelly, for instance, who I don't know, I was just on her podcast once was incredibly gracious. Even while probably taking that clip at face value, she clearly was walking the line in front of a largely right wing audience with co hosts who thought the worst of me, but she managed to do it without screwing me over. I'm sure she and I disagree about many, many things, but I truly admire how she handles herself there. I can't say the same for many other people. The strangest response is from people who think that my efforts to clarify my points on Twitter and they will probably take the same view of what I'm doing here, amount to my walking things back and apologizing in response to a backlash. Many of these people seem to believe that I destroyed my career by inadvertently blurting out what I really think, and now I'm just trying to do damage control. None of these people understand me or my audience or my business, frankly. Here's the only thing I wrote on Twitter in response to the clip there's a podcast clip circulating that seems to be confusing many people about my views on Trump, which is understandable because I wasn't speaking very clearly. So for what it's worth, here's what I was trying to say. I was essentially arguing for a principle of self defense, where there's a continuum of proportionate force that is appropriate and necessary to use. I've always viewed Trump as a very dangerous person to elect as president of a fake university, let alone the US. And when he became a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, I viewed him as more dangerous still. However, I've never been under any illusion that he is orange Hitler. On the podcast, I was speaking narrowly about the wisdom and propriety of ignoring the Hunter Biden laptop story until after the election. I've always thought that this was a very hard call, ethically and journalistically, but given what happened to the Anthony Weiner laptop in the previous election, I think it was probably the right call. Nothing I said on the podcast was meant to suggest that the Democrats would have been right to commit election fraud or take any other illegal measures to deny Trump the presidency. Nor do I think they did that. Okay, so after reading these tweets, many people have argued that this really couldn't be an honest articulation of my views, because it just seems like a slippery slope. If I'm willing to ignore information, then I'm willing to suppress information. And if I'm willing to do that, I must be willing to lie. And if I'm willing to lie, I must be willing to commit outright election fraud by stuffing ballot boxes and rigging voting machines. There's no natural stopping point if I think Trump is an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, right? Wouldn't you do anything to stop an asteroid? If I thought Trump was literally the next Hitler, I should want him assassinated. Is that even controversial to say? Is there anyone who doesn't wish that one of the plots against Hitler had succeeded? Unless you're a Nazi or just crazy, you too wish that Hitler had been assassinated. And as I said, I think our killing of Osama bin Laden was totally justified. But I don't think Trump is Hitler or anything like him. I think he's a person like Alex Jones. And I said that on that podcast. It's like we elected Alex Jones president. I think he's a person like Elron Hubbard without Hubbard's astounding typing ability. Making Trump president was a disaster for our country, but it was not the same sort of disaster that started World War II and sent millions of people to death camps. What would I expect if Trump got elected again in 2024? The further unraveling of America's stature in the world? A further descent into the chaos of conspiracy thinking and lies here at home? A further derangement politically on more or less every topic, irrational fury and demagoguery, and blasphemy tests on both the right and the left. More drifting and humiliating norm violations from Trump and his family. Massive opportunity costs on more or less every front. Because while all that's going on, we're going to be very distracted from every other important thing. I think all of this will be terrible for America and for the world. Above all, I think setting the precedent that you can lie about everything and shatter the most basic norms of our democracy and still get reelected to the presidency could lead us further down the path of democratic decline. And yes, if reelected, I would also expect Trump to enact some rational and pragmatic policies that I also just happen to agree with. So this is not at all the same as electing a highly competent, evil person with a grand plan to remake the world. Actually, the insurrection on January 6 is perfectly Trump. This is exactly the kind of coup you would expect to be associated with the man. Not really a coup at all. There's no question he was trying to disrupt the certification of the election. He was trying to bully Pence and Congress by sending that mob to the Capitol. But when they breach the Capitol, what happens? They just wander around in their costumes, smearing shit on the walls and taking selfies and stealing mementos from Nancy Pelosi's office. This is Trump. Actually, the real essence of Trump was that he figured out how to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from his supporters. Amid all this chaos, he monetized the absolute degradation of our institutions. That's Trump. So there is no problem with a slippery slope. Everything we do or don't do can be proportionate to the moment. And I certainly think it was rational to hope in 2020 that merely trying to force good information to win over bad information would be sufficient to keep Trump from the presidency. And I maintain that hope for 2024. Nothing in that space is illegal, and nothing entails lying. And I can say honestly that I can see how people could easily justify ignoring a story that emerged as an October Surprise because they know there's not enough time to get to the bottom of it. It is rational to ignore the story until after the election. And I can support the right of tech companies to be biased, because I can't see how we can force them to not be biased without damaging more important things in our society. And I can honestly say that this was a hard call, really, in the territory of a coin toss. But if pressed, I would probably side with those who ignored the story, because that's what I, in fact did, right? I didn't talk about the story on this podcast. There's another point that many people on the right reacted negatively to in that clip. That's when I said that there's no possible scandal involving kickbacks from China or Ukraine to Biden that could outweigh Trump's corruption. How can I say such a thing? Okay, well, obviously, I'm not saying that it would be a good thing if Biden were corrupt in this way. I'm saying it wouldn't matter in a forced choice between him and a president who had repeatedly said that he might not accept the results of an election or support a peaceful transfer of power. But there's this underlying question why do I know that Biden couldn't be nearly as corrupt as Trump without examining the contents of his son's laptop? Because both of these guys have been living in public for nearly as long as I've been alive. We know a tremendous amount about both of them going back over 40 years. It's like, what if a story broke suggesting that Biden had cheated on his tax returns? Would I care about that not ten days before the 2020 election? I wouldn't, because I know at a glance that whatever Biden could get up to in tax avoidance, it would be absolutely obliterated by comparison with what Trump has done. We know so much about the day to day lives of these two men. The same could be said about sexual scandals. And there was a me, too, allegation against Biden. Should it have mattered? Not for the 2020 election. It shouldn't have, because Trump had him beat something like 29 to one and with far more credible and disturbing allegations. The 2020 election was a forced choice, and the clock was ticking. I'm not a fan of Joe Biden. And I wasn't a fan of Hillary Clinton. I'm a fan of a normal range of political and ethical chaos. Trump lives far outside that range, and he's dragged us all out there with him. It is just appalling that this man has taken up so much of everyone's time and attention. Now, I've taken great pains to build an audience that values my honest attempts to figure things out, to figure out what's true and what's possible and what we should do in light of what's true and possible. Above all, my audience expects me to be honest. And on the rare occasions where I misspeak, there is nothing dishonest about acknowledging that and clarifying things. The truth is, given the nature of my audience, this thing that appears to be a 20 megaton problem, to my detractors on the right, is a total nonissue for me. And it will be a nonissue if something similar happens on the left, because I've deliberately built my platforms to be immune from backlash from the right or the left. And those of you who subscribe to the podcast make that possible. There are no sponsors to drop me. There are no executives having a meeting now wondering what to do about all the controversy on Twitter. There will be no forthcoming hostage video of me apologizing to all the people I may have offended. It is a wonderful thing to simply be free to think out loud and to be free to correct the record when something gets garbled, and I truly know how lucky I am. I wish everyone was in this position. Thanks for listening./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking to Scott Adams. Scott was the most requested defender of our Commander in Chief. He quite happily was willing to come on the podcast, and we had a very civil and enjoyable conversation. If anyone was triggered, it was me. Scott certainly sounded like the meditator I am perpetually triggered by our president, but I really enjoyed it, and I'll let you be the judge of whether Scott answered all the questions I put to him. I think there were moments where he might have hypnotized me, and I just moved on to other topics. But anyway, thank you, Scott, for coming on. It was a worthy experiment to try to talk about all this. Scott, if you don't know him, though many of you surely do, is the creator of Dilbert, one of the most popular comic strips of all time, and he's done this full time since 1995. Before that, he worked for 16 years at various companies from which he has mined all this material for Dilbert, and he's written bestselling books about Dilbert, and all his cartoons have been wrapped up. But he's also written a book that I have been reading, which we really didn't talk about at all in this interview how to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. And this is a book that is filled with life advice, and it is good advice insofar as I've read it thus far. And he has another book coming out, which really is the substance of our conversation. But that book is not out yet. It will be out in October. You can pre order it on Amazon. The title is win bigly persuasion in a world where facts don't matter. And Scott and I gave it a good, hard try to converge on questions about persuasion with respect to Trump and just how much facts matter. We probably have a different view of some crucial facts. I think we care about things, or at least weight our preferences a little differently here. It's hard for me to explain honestly how we still see the situation as differently as we appear to, but this really was an attempt on my part to see the world through the eyes of someone who is a Trump supporter, at least to the degree that Scott is. And again, even that isn't totally clear to me. I may have been hypnotized, scott so listen, this was fun, and I hope you enjoy it. I now give you Scott Adams. I am here with Scott Adams. Scott, thanks for coming on the podcast. Scott thank you for having me, Scott. Now, you are a very interesting guy who has written a very interesting book that I will have properly described in the intro to the show, and I'll link to it on my website, obviously, and people can get it there. We're not really going to get into your life or your other work unless it becomes relevant to the political discussion we're planning to have. But I'll just tell our listeners that I've been reading your book, that the title is how to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. And it's very interesting. It's very useful and surprising, and our conversation will not do it justice at all today. But I encourage people to get the book because you give a lot of good advice about how to get what you want out of life. I haven't finished it yet, but thus far it's advice that I agree with. I just want to heap some praise on you before we move on to other topics. Thank you. Let me just put some context on that. The book you're talking about is essentially how to program yourself to be more successful in whatever way you want. But the new one that's already available for pre order is about how to persuade other people. It's called win bigley and it'll be out in October. Cool. Now, that is a book I'm sure we will be getting some preview of in this conversation, because that obviously relates to what we're going to be talking about, and I'll put a link to that as well on my blog. Okay, so let me just set up this conversation so that everyone understands the context. As our listeners will be quite aware, I've been attacking Trump, really since before the election, so it's safe to say I'm not a fan. I'm sure I'll have some more impertinent things to say about el presidente over the course of this next hour, but I've encountered a fair amount of criticism from people in my audience who like Trump, or at the very least, feel that he was the best choice we had for President in 2016. And many of these people have been complaining that I've created an echo chamber here on the podcast because I've only been talking to Trump's detractors, and I certainly can see how they might think that, although I've pointed out that the people I've been speaking with who criticized Trump have been Republicans for the most part. So the idea that these conversations have been an expression of political partisanship doesn't make any sense. There's there's really zero partisanship coming from someone like David From or Anne Applebaum or me, for that matter, on this topic. Because, for instance, none of what I've said about Trump would apply to mitt Romney. And I've also never been shy about pointing out all the terrible things about Hillary Clinton. So if it's been an echo chamber, it hasn't been a left wing one. But in the meantime, I've been asking Trump supporters for months who I should bring on the podcast to represent the other side of the story and to help me recover from this much diagnosed Trump Derangement syndrome, which many people say I have, and I appear to have a whopping case of it. And you are the person who has been most often recommended to me. So I just would congratulate you on that score. Well, thank you. There's a lot of pressure on me, but okay. I want to say one other thing at the outset, just to set the table here, because I've been seeing a few crazy comments online from obviously Trump supporters anticipating this podcast and wondering whether or not I would be fair to you. I just want to tell you how I view conversations like this and also tell our listeners, and I'm telling you now, something that I tell most of our guests. I don't think I've ever left it in an interview, and this is certainly something I tell any guest with whom I'm likely to disagree. I don't do gotcha interviews. My goal is never to get you to say something that makes you look bad. In fact, if at any point in this conversation you put your foot in your mouth or I put my foot in there, you should feel free to take it out and we'll cut that part out. And this could apply to a whole section of the conversation. So if we get onto a topic for five minutes and then you say at the end, you know what, that whole bit we just did on racism or whatever, I'm worried about how that's going to make me look? Well, then we will just cut it so we can edit as we go if need be. Because my goal is always and again, this doesn't just apply to you. This applies to anyone who comes on this podcast. My goal is always to be dealing with the best version of the other person's case. I want you to be happy with what you've said on the podcast. So this is the opposite of a gotcha interview, and I don't think many people understand that. And having been on the other side of literally hundreds of interviews at this point, and as I know you have, I think we both can say that almost no one operates this way. Journalists deliberately don't, because they want to reserve the right to catch you saying something embarrassing. It's a completely perverse ethic that seems to have been enshrined in journalism, where if you say something is off the record before you say it, well, then they will generally keep it off the record. But if you say that about something you regret saying just 2 seconds ago, something that didn't come out right, then they won't let you take it off the record after the fact. This has always struck me as a less than ethical way to deal with people and their ideas. Yeah, I agree, but wouldn't worry about me because like you, I've done a few of these. Yeah. I just want you to know that, and I want our listeners to know that. I guess the other thing I should say a setup is that while I think you and I will disagree about a lot here, I don't view this as a debate. I mean, I consider myself genuinely persuadable on certain points and genuinely ignorant of other points. Now, it's true that there are some things where I don't really see how you could conceivably change my mind. If you're going to argue that Trump doesn't lie, for instance, that's going to be a very difficult thing to sell to me. But I genuinely count myself ignorant of how people find him appealing. So I view part of your job in this conversation as really educating me on how that is possible. I guess to start, what I'd like to do is just to have you clearly state what your view is of Trump, because it hasn't been entirely clear to me how much you actually support him, beyond just admiring his talent as a persuader. Much of what I've seen you say about him is more in the vein of explaining how Trump got elected. And it's not really an argument that his election was a good thing or that he's a good person, or that he's likely to be a good president. So what is your view of Trump at this point? Well, I should tell your listeners, first of all, that I have a background as a trained hypnotist, and I've been studying the field of persuasion all of my adult life as part of my job. It's part of what a writer does, part of what a cartoonist needs. So when I saw Trump enter the race, I noticed fairly quickly he had the strongest set of persuasion skills I've ever seen. He has what I call a skill stack, a complementary set of skills that if you looked at any one of those skills, you'd say, well, that's good, that's better than most people, but that's not any world class particular special skill. But when you put them together, they're insanely effective, as we can see, because he's president, he made it against all odds. And my view on the politics of it is that my political preferences didn't align with either side in the election. I consider myself an ultra liberal on social stuff, meaning that even liberals don't recognize me because I'm more liberal than liberals. I could give you some examples of that to fill that in if you want. And then on the big stuff, the international stuff, how do you beat ISIS, and what's the best thing to do in north Korea. My view is that none of us really know the answer to that because we don't have the information that government would have and we don't have the full context that they have. So generally, I don't have a firm position on the big international stuff and on the smaller local stuff, the domestic stuff. I'm in favor of people doing whatever they want to do as long as it doesn't affect me. So again, I should say that I haven't seen everything or read everything you've said on this topic. I have read some of your blog posts, and I've seen some of your periscope videos, which you've been doing quite regularly about Trump. But it seems to me that you are sort of having it both ways here because you seem to delight in his ability to get away with doing at least questionable things. I mean, I would say bad things, but certainly dishonest things because you admire his talent as a persuader, but to my eye, very quickly begins to seem like a defense of the bad things he's doing. Or at least a denial that they are bad or or a denial that he's doing any harm to our civil discourse, into our politics by lying to the degree that he does. So where, where does your appreciation of the artistry grade into actually thinking he is good and liable to do good things? The way I like to frame it is that I'm helping people see him clearly without the filter that the opposition is putting on him because he has a set of skills and a talent that we've never seen before, meaning that nothing like this has ever been in the political realm that we've seen. So what he can do is probably different from what a regular politician can do, both on the upside and the downside, I would think. So I'm not discounting that there's greater risk with the President Trump than some vanilla President, but I think his supporters have said explicitly and often we'll take the risk, we'll take the chaos. That's the price of change. So there's a lot of that that his supporters accept, and I see my role in this as clarifying. And if they like that choice, if that's a risk profile that they appreciate, then at least they can see it a little more clearly. Now, let me speak about the lying part, because I think that's probably central to your problem. Would you say that's true? Yeah. So here's how I frame that. It is unambiguously true, and it is clear to both his supporters and his critics that he says things fairly frequently that do not pass the fact checks. And you would agree with that, right? So I think we're starting from the same factual starting point. It understates it for me, but yes, I'm with you. Now, obviously, his supporters would say, well, that one thing he said wasn't so wrong, so there'd be lots of disagreement in the gray areas. But there's no question that there are a lot of things he said that don't pass the fact checking. And everybody agrees with that. Here's the part that I put on top of this that I think is helpful. When you understand persuasion at the level that he does and at the level that I've come to understand it through my own work over the years, the truth is not as useful. I guess that's the best way to put it. It's not as useful as it should be because it doesn't change people's minds. And the job of politics is often to change people's minds, their hearts, their emotions, what they care about, what their priorities are. So if you were to look at the types of things that the president has said that didn't pass the fact checking and that's the way I'm going to prefer to say it is they are almost always emotionally true or they are emotionally compatible with what his supporters are already thinking. So there is an emotional and directional truth to what he does that's independent from the facts being completely wrong. So for example, when he said there were Muslims dancing on the rooftops or in the streets after 911, that does not pass the fact checkers. But it is unambiguously true that his supporters and even his critics would say I'm a little concerned that there are some people in the Muslim faith who are not as unhappy about 911 as they should have been. So in other words, what he said was technically, specifically, factually incorrect as far as we can tell unless something new comes around. But it still fit if fit what we were thinking, if fit the general truth that we all accept is probably true. And I would think you would accept that as well. And what you see in persuasion is something called pacing and leading. And it's a very important concept in persuasion. The pacing part is where you become compatible with the other person or persons you're trying to influence. You're trying to match them in some way that's important. And if you match them long enough, called pacing eventually they will let you lead because you are one of them. They're comfortable with you, they agree with you. They feel the same way you feel. They trust you emotionally. And that's the way people need to trust you. Because trusting somebody factually is sort of a non starter. It doesn't help that much, right? But trusting somebody emotionally says yeah, I can let you do things that even I don't think are right, but I know that you're heading in the right direction. I trust that you have more information than I do. I trust that if you have to pivot because it doesn't work out, you'll do that because you and I are emotionally on the same page. We want generally the same thing. Similarly with take immigration. Now, one of the things that President Trump and before that, candidate Trump was saying that was emotionally compatible with a lot of people is, hey, there's an immigration issue. It brings with it some amount of crime that we wish we didn't have, and it brings with it some risk of terrorists slipping in, which we wish we didn't have, and those things scare us, and we would like to have less of it. Now, that's the emotional truth that is common to both sides of the conversation, right? Everybody would like less of those things. Now, the way he does it, of course, is with his typical hyperbole of coming in with the biggest first offer you've ever seen, which is, I'm going to ship back, what was it? 12 million people who are undocumented in this country. Now, when you heard it, and when people on the other side heard it, they quite reasonably said, holy hell, there's no way you can do that. First of all, it would be cruel. Second of all, it would cause riots in the streets. It would cause a civil war, practically. I mean, it's such a big, hard to do bad thing. But when I heard it, I said to myself, and I said publicly a lot of times, he doesn't mean that he's taken a big first offer that gives him lots of room to negotiate back. So now as we watch him as president and what he's doing is, I guess Ice is rounding up a lot of people who have committed crimes while in the country. After coming into the country, they committed additional crimes. And probably there are some cases, I think almost surely some cases, where Ice, let's say, breaks down a door and there's a room full of people, and three of them have been in serious gang violence situations. So, of course, you want to deport those guys, but then there's a couple of guys who are just members of the gang who you don't have any proof they did anything. That was another additional crime, but what are they doing in the room? So let's say those two guys get shipped back, too, because they're just sort of in that gray area, and they're so deeply into the gray, they're dark gray, but you don't have any proof. Now, when people see that story, and I'm sure that kind of story is going to be trickling out in different ways, and people compare that, they contrast it to what they imagined could have happened, which is 12 million people rounded up and shipped home. And they say to themselves, well, I wish we wouldn't deport people who we haven't seen for sure committed additional crime. But that's not so bad compared to what I thought was going to happen. So you see that process in a number of ways. You saw that when he he talked about fighting ISIS. He said, we're going to we're going to go back to Waterboarding, and maybe we'll kill the families of the of the terrorists, and a lot of people said, no, oh my God, you can't do that. That's going too far. There are lots of plenty of good, practical reasons why you don't do those things that he became president and what did he do? He got pretty tough on ISIS, and I would argue that civilian casualties probably have gone up because of that extra toughness, but we're not seeing the big outcry because he's been successful, apparently, against ISIS on the battlefield. So we see this pattern, which he has broadcasted for decades. He actually wrote a book on it, The Art of the Deal, in which he talks explicitly about using hyperbole. In other words, things that don't pass the fact checking and making big first offers to give him lots of room to negotiate toward the middle. So the thing that his supporters believe that his critics do not is that he is emotionally and intellectually on their side, and that he will work out the details when he needs to. So that's what his supporters believe, and I think we've seen a pretty unbroken pattern of exactly that happening. And I predicted this pattern long before he even got nominated because he has that skill set. He repeated that pattern often, and it was the only rational thing that I could see, unless you imagined he was actually literally insane. It was the only thing I could imagine would happen, and sure enough, it's happening just as I predicted. Okay, well, there's a lot in there that strikes me as fairly strange ethically. For instance, this idea that he's making this first offer that is extreme, that then he walks back to something more reasonable, and that this is a technique for which he pays no penalty. It's just an unambiguously good technique that his fans recognize. Let me interrupt you. I would never say he doesn't pay a penalty. This is a technique which absolutely by its design, has a penalty. So in other words, he's saying, this is going to cost me because the fact checkers are going to be over me and blah, blah, blah, but I'm going to do it anyway. I guess I'm emphasizing something else here. It's not so much the lying part or the failing the reality testing part. It's more like if I'm going to say to you, you know what I think we should do? Let's just say this on the podcast. I think we should round up those 12 million people and deport them. If I commit to that position, that's my position. Well, when you unpack that position, that commits me to things which I really must have thought about, or at least am pretending to have thought about, which are fairly unethical. I mean, it gets much worse than what you described. It's not just the fellow gang member or very close to being a gang member who gets deported along with the convicted killer. It's the mom of an eight year old kid who is an American citizen, right? So you have these just families broken apart. And so if I'm going to pretend to be so callous as to happily absorb those facts, like, yeah, send them all back. They don't belong here in the first place. Or if I'm going to take the ISIS case, I'm going to say, yeah, we'll torture their kids, we'll kill their kids. It doesn't matter. Whatever works, right? If that's my opening negotiation, I am advertising a level of callousness and a level of unconcern for the reality of human suffering all around me that will follow upon my actions, that should I get what I ostensibly want. It's like, in these two cases, a nearly psychopathic ethics that I'm advertising as my strong suit, right? So how this becomes attractive to people, how this resonates with their values I mean, I get what you said about people are worried about immigration, they're worried about jihadism. I share those concerns. But when you cross the line into this opening overture that has these extreme consequences on its face, I mean, you don't have to think deeply about this, right? These are these are the things that get pointed out in 30 seconds when he whenever he opens his mouth on a topic like this. I don't understand how that works for him with anyone. Let me give you a little thought experiment here. We've got people who are on the far right. We've got people on the left. In your perfect world, would it be better to move the people who are on the far right toward the middle or the people on the far left toward the middle, which which would be a preferred world for you? I don't know. Now things have gotten so crazy on the left. That is actually a genuinely hard question to answer, but I think moving everyone toward the middle, certainly on most points, would be a very good thing. So what you've observed with President Trump through his pacing and emotional compatibility with his base, is that prior to Inauguration Day, there were a lot of people in this country who were saying, yeah, yeah, round them all up. Send all 12 million back tomorrow. When was the last time you heard anybody on the right complaining about that? Because what happened was immigration went down 50% to 70% or whatever the number is, just based on the fact that we would get tough on immigration. And the right says, oh, okay, we're you know, we didn't get nearly what we asked for, but our leader, who we trust, who we love, has backed off of that, and we're going to kind of go with that because he's doing some good things that we like, and we don't like the alternative either. So this monster that we elected, this Hitler dictator, crazy guy, he managed to be the only person who could have, and I would argue always intended to move the far right toward the middle. You saw it, right? And we can observe it with our own eyes. We don't see the right saying, no, I hate President Trump. He's got to round up those undocumented people like you said earlier in the campaign, or else I'm bailing on him. None of that happened. He paced them and then he led them toward a reasonable situation, which I would say we're in. Well, I don't know that I would notice if they were complaining about it. I got to think I'm kind of an echo chamber. But you might notice it more than I would. I promise you I would notice it because I've got 1ft in both sides, and the number of people who are talking about that, even just talking about rounding up everybody and sending them back, just stopped. It's completely done. And by the way, that's a big deal. I mean, he brought a lot of people to his position. Again, whether that was his intent or, in fact, the effect of his actions, I don't know. I mean, there's so much other chaos for people to be complaining about and worrying about. But I take a related point here, which you could be making, which is that there is something else going on. There is the fact that people will follow him onto terrain that is quite different from the terrain they claim to want to occupy. And so they will kind of run roughshod over their own stated principles. And I'm noticing this with establishment Republicans who once they grabbed his coattails, it seems like that they will are willing to follow him anywhere, even into something that looks like almost treasonous level of fandom of Vladimir Putin. And so I'm sure we'll talk about that, but before we continue down this line, I want you to describe this analogy that you've made, which I think is very useful. You have this two different movies analogy, and I just want to put that in play for listeners because I think it's a good framing. Yeah. There are two concepts that people need to understand to have any idea what has happened in the past two years. One is confirmation bias. I'm sure you've talked about this a number of times on your podcast and your books, which is the tendency for humans to see all evidence as supporting their side, even if it doesn't. All right, we're all in confirmation bias pretty much all the time. Nobody's immune from it. Nobody's smart enough to see past it's, just the human condition. The other part that people have to understand is this thing called cognitive dissonance, which I'm sure you've also talked about. And that's the idea that if our mind is set toward a specific reality, especially if it involves ourselves, some self image, and then we find ourselves doing something or learning something that violates what we're sure had to be true, we just reinterpret what we saw and spontaneously create essentially an illusion, an imaginary world that. Explains all the things that wouldn't have been explained without that. Hallucination so what happened was on November 8, 2016, there were a handful of people, including me, who saw things going just the way they imagined they would go. Now, that creates no trigger for cognitive dissonance, because everything was consistent. I thought I was pretty smart. I thought I could predict what was going to happen. I did predict what was going to happen. But for a lot of the country, they thought this was an impossible outcome. They had been in their echo chambers, and they saw there was just no way this could happen. There are people who have never even met a Trump supporter, much less imagine he could be elected. They looked at the polls. They saw it was 90, 98% likely that Hillary Clinton would win. And then the results didn't go that way. That's a perfect trigger for cognitive dissonance. And I described that election as a cognitive dissonance cluster bomb. And what it did was it split the United States and to some extent the rest of the world, into what I call two movies that are running simultaneously on one screen. So if you imagine we're all in the audience, but half of the audience is looking at the same screen that you and I are, and half of them are seeing one movie, and the other half are watching an entirely different movie. In one of the movies, we had just elected Hitler or something like it, and people were taking to the streets to say, oh my God, the world is going to be on fire. And another half of the country were saying, hey, we got a guy who's probably going to be pretty good on jobs and maybe he'll tighten up the borders and do some business like systems in government that we like. And that's all they saw. And the other side saw something completely different, an entirely different movie. Now, I had predicted prior to the inauguration that because of that set up, which I could see coming from a mile away, that we would experience the following arc. First of all, there would be huge protests because people thought that some Hitler character had been elected. But after a few months of President Trump acting like a normal president who is using the normal mechanisms of power and is getting some stuff done and moderating his positions as presidents do, that the Hitler illusion would start to dissipate and that it would eventually give way by summer. That was my prediction. And it has largely the Hitler stuff is largely dissipated for lack of confirming evidence, and it was replaced with, well, he's not Hitler, but he's definitely incompetent. He is so incompetent. There's chaos in the White House. They can't get anything done. And I predicted that by the end of the summer, he would, in fact, get things done. But but the criticisms don't stop, because that's just not the way it works. People don't change positions like that. They simply change the reasons that they oppose him. And I predicted that the reasons would change from, you know, He's Hitler to he's incompetent to, all right, he did get a lot of things done, and they were the things he said he was going to get done. And they they do match Republican positions, but we don't like it. All right? He is competent. He does get things done. He's effective, but we don't like what he's doing. So I think that's where it's going to be by year end, and it seems to be heading that way. One thing I want to point out, which just strikes me as a strange emphasis that I've heard from you here, but I've also heard this just quite frequently from other Trump supporters. So I just want to flag it. I don't know if much turns on it, but so, for instance, in your description of what created the cognitive dissonance, you talk about the failure of people who don't like Trump to predict that he would win the election. So everyone was just blindsided by the fact that he won. And this put them into this the other movie theater where they're seeing just civilization unravel. For me, it was never a matter of being sure that Hillary Clinton was going to win. In fact, the last poll I looked at that I thought was actually informative. Trump had a 20 or 25% chance of winning. And I am statistically educated. I know how often a 20% chance of winning comes up. It's not a tiny probability. So it's not the surprise that is worth emphasizing here. It's the horror at the fact that we have elected someone so obviously wrong for the job. This two movies analysis still works. Whether you predicted anything or whether anyone else predicted anything, even if everyone thought it was a horse race until the last second and there was a 50% chance of either candidate winning, I think you would have the exact same outcome in terms of a repudiation of this choice that our nation made. But Sam, let me ask you this. At what point in the process did you decide that he was incompetent to be president? That is a great question. I love that question. That is my favorite question ever asked of me on this podcast. I guess let's focus on the master persuader idea, because here's the movie I'm in, right? You've said that Trump is the greatest persuader you've ever seen. I think you actually wrote I think I saw this in a blog post of yours that you wrote that if Steve Jobs was a ten, Trump is a 15. I think I have that right. Okay, so here's the movie I'm in, and this predates this election by at least a decade. I find Trump one of the least persuasive people on earth. I mean, long before he ran for president, he struck me as nothing more than an odious con man. He strikes me as an absolutely despicable person. Wait a minute. Can I get a clarification? When you said he was an odious con man, did you mean that he was good at being a conning people or bad at conning people? Well, he was clearly conning some people. I'm saying that he's not conning me. And so the question is that the mismatch can I interrupt you again? Because this is really important. He was conning, apparently, according to your frame of things prior to the election, it seems probably to you that he was conning enough people to do the things he needed to do, which was build buildings and keep his fortune high and become a reality TV star and all that stuff. Yeah, but that was it. He was a reality TV star who I mean, I viewed him actually, I viewed him. I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking about him, but I assumed that most people were in on the joke. Right. That he was a kind of punchline. It was like a punchline lived over the course of a profitable life. But this was not somebody who was, as he was billing himself to be, a truly great businessman or anything else. Yeah. Sam, there's an important point here that I don't want to lose by going too far past that. Your understanding of him at the time was that he could con some people, and apparently it was enough of the right people he was conning, to use your word, to effectively do the things he was trying to do. Would that accurately state your opinion? Well, yeah, but the things he was trying to do for no relationship to becoming president or becoming somebody who's actually shouldering significant responsibility. No, I agree with that, but we're just talking about the tools of persuasion. And what you just said, if I heard it right, is that even early on you realized he had the tools of persuasion, which you would characterize as a con man. Just a different word for essentially the same set of tools. It has more to do with the intention, I guess, but the crucial difference here again, I'm just trying to describe what it's like to watch my movie as opposed to your movie or the movie watched by half the country. I can see that he must be persuading somebody. I mean, he fully persuaded half the country to become president, but there is never a moment where I find him persuasive. When I look at him, I see a man. It's really uncanny. I see a man without any inner life. I see the most superficial person on Earth is a guy who's been totally hollowed out by greed and self regard and just delusion. I mean, the way the way he talks about himself is so it's like I mean, if if I caught some sort of brain virus and I started talking about myself the way Trump talks about himself, I would throw myself out a fucking window. That barely overstates it. Do you remember that scene at the end of The Exorcist where the priest finally he's driving out the devil from Linda Blair and the devil comes into him and then he just hurls himself out the window to end all the madness? It would be like that, right? Yeah. We've gone full exorcist on this. I'll tell you, one of the things that I write about and periscope about is the triggers or the tells for cognitive dissonance. How do you tell that you're in it versus somebody else's in it? Did I just give you one of my tells? Yeah, you did. The most classic one is to imagine that you can know somebody's inner mental processes. So if you imagine that in his mind he's thinking this, or in his mind he's hollowed out, or in his mind there's no depth. If you imagine that those are in there, I would say that is entirely imaginary and almost certainly a tell for cognitive let me finish the thought. Sure. So what I look for, for confirmation is there's got to be a trigger. And then the second thing, which is the tell. So I just described the tell, which is describing some of these inner thoughts that you couldn't possibly know. I mean, nobody could. And the trigger, you also described very clearly the trigger. Was there's something about his manner, the way he speaks that bugs the fuck out of you and that's your trigger. You're just misinterpreting a couple of things here. It's not the way he speaks and it's not that I'm engaged in a mind reading exercise. It's based entirely on what he says. It's actually the thoughts that come out of his mouth. It's not how he says it, it's what he says. But wait, you said two things that are in contradiction now. You said that he's a con man and how he has been, but that the things he said are a good reflection of what he's thinking. You kind of have to pick one. Well, no, it's just that he is a liar who will lie whenever it suits his interest and even when it doesn't suit his interest, he will lie with an alacrity that I have never seen before in a public person. I think you have to break that into two categories. The things you're calling the lies, maybe three. There are some things which probably he thinks are right and he just gets wrong, which would be typical of any I'll forgive him many of those things. There are some things which are clearly just hyperbole, which he knows are not exactly factual, but it works better to make the big first offer. And then there's another category which is the hardest for anybody to understand. And I'm not sure I'll be able to sell this to anybody here, but if you are a trained persuader, you have such a low regard for some types of facts that you just don't care if they're right or wrong because they really aren't ever going to matter to the outcome. They won't matter to decisions, and they won't matter to the outcome. Now, I believe, having been watching him through this filter now for a couple of years, that he can definitely tell the difference between all those categories and that I haven't seen him tell the lie that causes the country to be harmed in any way. They all seem to be either trivial and he just doesn't care, and there's no point in apologizing because that's bad persuasion too, in many cases, or they're emotionally correct. So my filter on this, that he's actually a skilled persuader and he knows exactly what he's doing, and those things which are clearly just mistakes tend to be trivial. That is what I used to predict the outcome that got us exactly where we are. And my starting point was everybody can hind cast. Everybody can say, oh, the way he won was here's my reason. CNN listed, I think, 24 different reasons why the surprising result of his election happened, and they're all different reasons. So, as you know, confirmation bias, blah, blah, blah allows you to explain what happened in the past with any number of stories, and they all fit. That's why we have trials and lawyers and all of their stories sound good and the jury has to sort it out. But what I did early on is I said, I'm so sure that these tools are real and consistent and he knows what he's doing that I'm going to risk my entire fucking career to predict that he's going to win it all and win it big. And not only did he win it big, but he won in the electoral college. He won the only way that it mattered. He played the only game that they were playing, and he won. Now, some people will say, well, he lost the popular vote, and I would say you're right, he did lose the game that he wasn't playing. He never played that game. So if you look at the predictions and if you see that they seem to be hitting all the right notes, that is a little more persuasive than saying, well, I'm going to look at it in the past and apply these 25 different filters. That all pretty much work. There are lots of different explanations of how things work in the past, but Scott, the emphasis on him successfully persuading doesn't deal with the fact that what he would be persuading someone toward or the country toward may not be a good thing. So, for instance, I think he is someone who is so morbidly selfish. And again, this is not me with a crystal ball. This is me just looking at how he's lived his life, the kinds of things he's done, the kinds of things he says about himself. He's put himself first to such a pathological degree that I think he's capable of committing treason or something like treason without even noticing it. There's no sense at all that he has the public good in mind when he's acting. So the fact that he's a good persuader, even if I were going to grant you that, and there's others, there's one thing I want to flag here that you just said that I think is manifestly not true, which is that none of his lies have harmed our society. I think all of his lies have harmed our society. I think the fact that we have a president who lies and everyone knows it, and no one can really trust what he has said until the facts come out, I think that has done immense harm to the world, frankly. In what quantitative way would the stock market be at even higher record levels? The stock market is the wrong metric here. Would ISIS be reconstituting if he had been a little more forthcoming? Would North Korea have not have launched that last Duke? What exactly would be the evidence that something he said has actually harmed the fabric of society? The fact that all of us are talking about politics, the fact that politics is so much a part of our lives now is toxic. It's a sign that something is wrong with our society. If things were good, we would not be talking about politics, right? We're talking about politics ten times more than we ever have in the lifetime of any person. Hearing this podcast, I could list 100 other bad things, but that's one symptom. It's a very good thing, and I'll tell you why. So first of all, going back to the two movies on one screen, the people on the right, the people who are supporting Trump, are having the best two years of their lives. I mean, I have never seen such joy and happiness coming out of that segment of the public. But again, that's an amoral claim. I mean, you know, that would have been said of, to take the extreme example, the Burgeoning enthusiasm for the Thousand Year Reich in 1938. I mean, it's just like you get nothing with that claim. Did you go full Hitler analogy? I went full Hitler analogy, conscious of how it would be received. Can I declare victory at this point? No. I think that's actually a bad meme. Is that Godwin's law? I think it's a bad meme that we have to quash somehow. I've actually been writing I write this in my new book that when somebody retreats to analogy, whether it's a Hitler analogy or not, it's because they've run out of reasons. Nobody uses an analogy if they have a reason because a reason is way better than analogy. No, okay, that's interesting. I think I disagree with that too. But let's move on. Analogies are tools of communication. If you're not getting what I'm saying. But I know, you'll get this other test case that I think is actually isomorphic with what I'm talking about. Well, then I go to the analogy. It's only bad if it's a bad analogy, but nothing hinges on that. No, because all analogies are approximations by design. So you're not talking about the same topic anyway. We could talk about analogies some more. Sure. I agree that analogies are excellent for explaining the concept for the first time. So if you say a zebra, if you've never heard of a zebra, it's like a horse, but imagine it has some stripes on it. So there are lots of cases where that gets me a long way to a zebra. Right. But it doesn't make a zebra a horse. Right. And never can. So that's my only point. So back to the whether it's bad that we're all talking about politics. I've actually been streaming and talking and blogging about this very point that we have collectively as a society, learned more about each other, the nature of truth, reality, persuasion in particular. You'll see lots of people talking now about cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, persuasion. These are important concepts for people's happiness and understanding of their condition that we never had before. And in fact, before the election, I had said several times and publicly that what Trump was going to do was not just change politics, which he did. I mean, he changed everything, but that he would rip a hole in the fabric of reality and let us peek through. And that hole is what we're peeking through right now, which is that people can sit in the same theater watching a different movie and that there's a reason for it. We know what the reason is. It's confirmation bias, it's cognitive dissonance. And that understanding goes a lot further than, hey, your facts are wrong, you lied about this. You didn't pass my fact checking. If you're locked in that smaller, less aware world where you think that people make decisions on logic and facts because you think they should, you're missing the biggest part of life, which is that people don't. Yeah, I would agree with you if you said to me, scott, I think we should use reason and facts and we should never depart from that. I would say, sure, that's great, we should. But we can't because we're not built that way. We humans don't have that capacity. In general, yeah, we can in very constrained ways, like science, but in general, no. Okay, well, let's plan a flag there because that's an interesting topic that is obviously bigger and deeper than this political topic and maybe we'll get to it. And that's actually the topic in some measure of your first book or your last book that I've been reading. And if we have time, I'd love to touch that, but I just want to come back again. I have this creeping feeling of confusion or bewilderment that I want you to sort out for me. And it comes down to this two movie analogy, because I don't see how they are actually different movies. I get that in the other theater, the fans of Trump don't care about certain things that are appearing on the screen, and I care very strongly about those things, but I don't get how they're actually not seeing these things or they're seeing them differently. And I want to take you back just to what you said before when I went full exorcist on you. Well, can I interrupt? Because I think there have been some news reports recently that said that Trump supporters know exactly what's true and what isn't, and there isn't that much difference between the two sides. I'll give you an example of like, this is the kind of thing that's in my movie. There's literally 100 things I could mention here, but I'll just mention a couple. It seems to me that everything you need to know about Trump's ethics were revealed in the whole Trump University scandal, right? This is a guy who's having his employees pressure poor elderly people to max out their credit cards in exchange for fake knowledge and as unseemly. Well, hold on now. You understood that to be a licensed deal, right? Yeah, but I understand that to be the kind of thing that he would have to know enough about to know what he was doing if he only found out about it after the fact. It's not the kind of thing you would defend, it's the kind of thing you would be mortified about and you would apologize for and you would pay reparations for if you're this rich guy who has all the money you claim to have. I mean, it's like unless you were a master persuader who knew that if you ever back down from anything, people would expect you to back down in the future from. But what you're describing is a totally unethical person. This is the problem for all time. Let's give you if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes, codes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. OK, let's see here. Brief housekeeping. I've added a conversation track to the waking up course and so I've started to interview teachers there and other experts on topics related to meditation and the nature of mind and living an examined life that's just starting. Generally speaking, these will be teachers and experts I admire and agree with, but also people who have genuine insights but may also believe a lot of kakamami ideas that I'll want to push back on. And there will also be some cautionary tales, and I've just added one of those, the former cult leader Andrew Cohen, who, as I made clear, I don't think is merely a fraud, though he clearly created a lot of harm. I think he's a person who had some real insights and created a lot of harm. Anyway, I found that a very interesting conversation. I think there's a lot to learn from his experience, both as a student and as a teacher and that kind of thing that's more narrowly focused on the contemplative life and ethics. And certainly meditation will be on the app rather than the podcast these days. Also, there's a new Android build coming and it will be entirely new. I've been hearing about all the technical pain Android users have been experiencing. Anyway, a comprehensive fix is in the works and I will let you know when that launches. What else here? My friend Douglas Murray has a new book out called The Madness of Crowds, and this is a book I am really happy he wrote. I was thinking at one point that I should write a book along these lines. He has done a much better job than I would have. This is really the rejoinder to the wokeness that we've all been waiting for. And it is quite a measured book. Douglas, as you know, has a lacerating wit, so there are many laughs to be had at the expense of the far left. But this is not a shrill or tendencious book at all. This really is just a sanity check and I found it a joy to read. I'll read you my blurb just to give you a sense of how much I like this book. We live at a time when many of the luckiest people on earth declare themselves among the most oppressed while seeking to oppress others in the service of a paradoxical new faith. And no one is so beloved or immaculate that he or she can't be dragged before the altars of this cult and offered up as a fresh sacrifice. In The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray shows how the apparent virtues of social justice, intersectionality and identity politics have begun to stifle honest thinking on nearly every topic. In the process, he displays more courage and wit and basic decency than can be found anywhere among the woke. The book is simply brilliant. Reading it to the end, I felt as though I'd just drawn my first full breath in years. At a moment of collective madness, there is nothing more refreshing or indeed provocative than sanity. So I love the book and I recommend you buy it. It would be great to see this book really succeed. This was a necessary book, and Douglas was certainly the right man for the job. Okay, final announcement here. If you're supporting the podcast, please make sure you are listening on the private feed, not on the public one. And that means you should go to my website, log in, go to the Subscriber content page, and subscribe to the private RSS feed. If you're on mobile, you can generally do that with one click, which will connect your favorite podcast app. But we're making some changes here on the podcast, and I don't want subscribers to lose access to any content, so please make sure you are subscribed. If you're a supporter and you'll know the difference in your podcast player by seeing a red icon for the Making Sense podcast as opposed to a black one, that is the telltale sign. Anyway, if you have problems, you can contact support@samharris.org and they will help you. And one change that's coming, and it's coming now, is I will start adding an afterword to each podcast interview where I talk a little bit about the conversation you just heard. I won't always do this. Perhaps sometimes I will have left everything on the field, but if I have any further thoughts, I will put them after the conversation and not upfront in the housekeeping. And now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Kathleen Belu. Kathleen is a historian and the author of the book Bring the War Home the White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, and she spent ten years researching and writing this book. She is currently an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago, and you may have heard her on Fresh Air as I did, and she's appeared on CBS News and elsewhere. And there was a PBS Frontline documentary based on her work titled documenting Hate New American Nazis. Anyway, we cover a lot of ground in this episode. We talk about the white power movement in the United States, the difference between white power and white supremacy, and white nationalism and white separatism and the militia movement. We talk about the turner Diaries, the significance of events like Ruby Ridge and Waco, the Christian Identity movement, the significance of Socalled leaderless resistance, the failures of the justice system in prosecuting white power crimes and other topics. And now, without further delay, I bring you Kathleen Belu. I am here with Kathleen Belu. Kathleen, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. So our job today is to talk about white power and white supremacy and white nationalism and white separatism and other joyful topics. And you've written a book titled Bring the War Home the White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. And so obviously, these topics are more and more in the news as we live yet another year in Trumpistan. Just to get our bearings here, how do you come to know anything about this stuff? And maybe to start, how would you differentiate the terms I just listed? That's a great place to begin. These terms are distinct and it's important to understand that they describe a whole range of beliefs, ideologies and ways that people move through the world. So the big category is white supremacy. Now, that covers everything from individual belief systems to the different kinds of systems and opportunities that structure daily lives in our country. Many scholars have established that America is what we might think of as a white supremacist nation. And by that I mean simply that there is an unequal distribution of resources, opportunities and other elements of American life. And we could look at incarceration, education, health, all kinds of different metrics we can use to understand that. Now, that is historical in that it's something that was established over time and we see vestiges of white supremacy in law and policy and it's also individual in terms of belief system from person to person. Now, all of that big white supremacy is much more amorphous and distinct from what I write about, which is the White Power movement. That is a group of activists. And I suppose I should just say I use activists not in any kind of positive terminology, but simply to describe someone who is taking action to bring about a social and political change. Right? And the people that I write about are members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo Nazi groups, skinheads militia groups, some are radical tax protesters and some are other kind of stripes of anti state belief. These groups came together in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and set out to wage war on the federal government. So what I write about is the period from the end of the Vietnam War to the Oklahoma City bombing that really set the stage for the politics we find ourselves confronting in the present. Yeah. So I want to talk about the origins of all this, but hopefully we will have something to say about the nature of what's happening in the present. So let's talk about well, first you just made a few distinctions that we should clarify so you mentioned a bunch of these groups neo Nazis, the KKK, the groups that people have heard about, like the Aryan Nations and the order you alluded to tax evaders. I guess those are sovereign citizens. These groups are not all identical ideologically. How do you parse this landscape? And is there now a formal connection between all of these miscreants? And do they help one another, even if they don't totally agree? So this is something that the scholarship missed for quite a long time, partly through using an overly rigid idea of what a social movement should be and should look like. Many social movements in the late 20th century are fragmented in the way I'm about to describe to you. The other thing that people do, and I think this is a very natural sort of human approach to a belief system that you find foreign or objectionable is to try to sort it into categories. So there's a lot of early scholarship that's sort of trying to figure out, okay, how many of these people are Nazis, how many are skin has, how many are clansmen, and which symbols exactly should be used by which group, and exactly what variety of ideology do you find in each place? And that's all valuable to know. And certainly there are differences between some of these groups. But what I do as a historian is try to understand how this movement worked for people who were members of it. And what you see on the ground is not strict divisions between these groups. What you see actually is a very vibrant circulation of people from group to group and between ideologies. And the way people in this movement describe their own activism is very similar. So one person said something along the lines of, suppose we're all Christian. It's like, I am Church of Christ, and that guy over there is Baptist, right? But we're all Christian. Others describe it as they're all in the armed forces, but they're simply in the army and the Navy and things like this. So it's important to have a mode of understanding that allows us to see not only the distinction, but also the commonality and the fact that people moved at great frequency between these different groups and belief systems. But are they all white supremacists, or are they and are they all white separatists? Are they all white nationalists? Do they all I mean, I guess the one that stands out immediately to me, I know very little about them, but like the sovereign citizens, are they even racists? Aren't they just tax evading nut cases? Well, the first thing I would say is we probably want to get away from thinking about nutcase and miscreanted words like that as early as possible, because even though the people who are in this movement have ideas that you or I might not agree with, they're acting with a pretty coherent worldview instead of beliefs. That makes what they're doing legible the thing with the militia group. I guess I've seen too many of them on daytime television throwing chairs at Geraldo Rivera or screaming at Sally Jesse Rafael. Yes. You've looked at those ones? Yes, they were definitely I'm dating myself. Yeah, for a little while. In the moment I study. They were really doing a lot of those talk show appearances. And certainly there are people within this movement who I think we could all agree are motivated by various kinds of mental disturbances as well as political ideology. There's one man I write about testified in front of court that he can levitate and speak to god and things like that, but he was a leader in the movement. Anyhow, the militia movement is a little bit more difficult to grapple with than the earlier period. That is really at the heart of my study. And what I'm talking about is at the end of the 1980s, there is this big movement of white power activity into militias. But the militia movement is bigger than white power, and all of the militia movement should be classified as white power. It's not kind of a one to one transition. What it is is that the white power momentum, which is substantial at the end of the 1980s and includes a major sort of upsurge of network organizing groups, weapons and money, all ends up in the militias. So what I'm kind of writing against is the idea that the white power movement simply disappears at the end of the 1980s, which many people had thought. Instead it ends up within the militia movement. So what does that mean? First of all, there are groups of militia men and individuals in the movement that are not acting out of the same kind of overt racial animus that is what we're dealing with in the white power movement. And some of the sovereign citizens activity might be classified in that way. However, there are also a lot of cases where that kind of racial what would we call it? Race neutrality is actually simply a veneer to make white power activism more acceptable. And that's an old strategy that goes way back at least to the Vietnam war, if not into the early 20th century. So I think we have to be very cautious with the militia movement, but certainly it is an area that deserves more study. Right. If I recall, this is what made understanding Timothy McVeigh and Ruby Ridge and those incidents that we'll talk about a little confusing because it was entangled with this larger militia movement. I think Timothy McVeigh was associated with the Michigan militia at one point, and it just wasn't clear what was what and what the ideology actually was. Exactly. And McVeigh, as we can talk about, is a pretty clear case of white power activism, but many cases are less clearer than that, especially in the militia years. Let me circle back before we move on to another part of your question that I think is a really good one, which is how we think about those other terms white nationalism and white separatism. So these are often muddled terms. And I'll just start by saying that white nationalism is the idea that there is something inherently racially known and held in the category of the nation. So the idea that whiteness is an inherent part of what makes the United States what it is and that the admission of other cultures will inherently disturb or weaken the nation over time. And in terms of the study of extremist groups, the best example of white nationalism, I would argue the one I use for teaching, is the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Now, that's a very familiar example, probably to a lot of your listeners. That's the one most people study in high school. It's also huge. It was 4 million people. It was 10% of the state of Indiana. And very famously, this is where you get the pictures of the the Klansmen wearing white robes and hoods and marching on the National Mall in Washington DC. But with their faces uncovered because it was socially acceptable. Now, what that plan was about was state participation. And we know this because a ton of them got elected to office. They were about state participation. Their slogans were things like 100% American America for Americans, things like this. They were profoundly anti, anti black and antisemitic, but they were also anti immigrant and have a lot of other interests. Okay? So that is white nationalism. That's not what we're talking about from 1983 forward for people on the fringe. Because from 1983 forward, there is a huge pivot in this movement, partly fueled by the sense of betrayal felt in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, in which the white power movement is instead setting out to overthrow the federal government, to create race war, and eventually to found a white nation. So white separatism is better for what we're talking about. But even separatism is sort of a few steps short of the ideology that's really the most popular and biggest animating push in this movement, which is not only separatism. I mean, they do pursue separatism, meaning the demarcation of a white homeland within the United States. But the end game is not separatism. The end game is overthrow of the United States and the creation of an all white polity that eventually they envision might take over the world, right? So they do go that far. They have a kind of Fourth Reich less complete Hitler's project kind of ideology. They do. And the best place to sort of see and understand it is in a Dystopian novel that becomes a sort of lodestar for the movement called Turner Diaries, which really lays this out as an imaginative path forward. I mean, one thing that's really interesting about this movement from a scholarly perspective is how they think they can possibly do it because it's a tiny group of people. Right. It's a fringe movement and they are setting out to do what they say in this novel is like something like a nat assassinating, an elephant. They want to overthrow the most militarized superstate in the history of the world. So The Turner Diaries is so important not because of its riderly qualities, but because it really lays out how they could hope to achieve something that radical. Right? Yeah. As you point out in your book, not only does this movement get naturally seeded by disaffected soldiers coming back from wars, not just the most relevant one here or the most approximate one is the Vietnam War. But you point out that in the aftermath of basically every war we fought, this has been a phenomenon where some number of soldiers, albeit a tiny percentage, take their grievances against the state, the U and the US government and direct them back home. And I mean, this is hence the title of your book bring the War Home. Can you say something about that? And then we can just talk about how the origins here and just how many people are involved. Absolutely. So this is actually how I got into this project I wanted to do when I was set out to write a dissertation. I wanted to study the long legacies of racial violence in the United States. We are uniquely without a sort of shared public process around reckoning with the long violence that has characterized the nation. And at that time the only sort of thing like that that had happened was a totally non governmental truth and Reconciliation commission in Greensboro, North Carolina. This happened in 2005 around an event that that had happened in 179 in which a united caravan of Klansmen and neo Nazis opened fire on a leftist anti clan march and killed five people, wounded several more. And the thing that the perpetrators and the people aligned with these ideologies said in the TRC proceedings was I killed communists in Vietnam, so why wouldn't I kill them here? Now, I couldn't stop thinking about this. This is a profound collapse of time and space and people. It mixes up home and battlefront. It mixes up wartime and peacetime. It collapses everybody communists into the same kind of racial and subjugated category of death. This is enormously meaningful. And what I wondered is if this is going to be a story about sort of a rambo story of veterans returning home and creating violence at home. It turns out that it's really not that simple at all and that this isn't a problem of veterans. What we see indeed is that there is a surge in this kind of vigilante violence after every major return from combat. But it turns out that that effect actually goes across age groups, across gender, across categories of people who do and don't serve in warfare. All of us become more violent in the aftermath of war. Now, that raises a whole lot of questions. You could go to sort of a max vapor kind of analysis about the monopoly of violence and whether the state's role in creating warfare creates this aftermath. We can go to individuals bringing the war back with them. I think I tend to think it's a combination of a whole lot of different complex factors. But what we know for sure is that we see this reverberation effect in the aftermath of violence and that this tiny, tiny percentage of returning veterans brings back with them things like munitions expertise that are then used to escalate the body count of white power violence. The war also creates a paramilitary culture in the 1980s in the United States. People that I write about with these fringe beliefs are hardly the only people who think that that war is the major cultural event of their lifetime. We can just look at the outsurge of movies and camo fatigue clothes and payfall ranges and all kinds of other things like that. So they're also capitalizing this big cultural moment of the 1980s. Yeah. And also you get the increased militarization of police forces and then the response to that. I mean, that the right wing outrage over the apparent misapplication of state force. So the two events that you write about that were so galvanizing to this movement were Ruby Ridge and Waco, where you have essentially military snipers. And in the case of Waco, a ton of military hardware intruding upon the lives of somewhat deranged, but as yet nonviolent people and essentially escalating these situations into kind of mass murders. If you view it from the side of those who view the Branch Davidians and the people at Ruby Ridge as pure victims, maybe that's a good place to start. What happened with Ruby Ridge and Waco and what did that do to the white power movement? Sure. And we should think of Ruby Ridge and Waco as related, but sort of different kinds of events. And the other thing I want to just interject before we start on that story is that the kinds of paramilitary policing that came into public view and public sort of became objects of public discussion because of Ruby Ridge and Waco. That kind of policing had already been used on a lot of civilians in the United States because counterinsurgency warfare was also developed sort of through experimental methods in communities of color and then in Vietnam before it was used in this way. So what's new about Waco and Ruby Ridge is mostly that it's televised and that people are focusing on it in the way that they do. And that's partly because the people at the receiving end of this violence are white. So what happens in Ruby Ridge is that there's a well, so Ruby Ridge is a case of a white power activist. Randy Weaver and his family had moved to the area to become survivalists. They built a rough cabin. They followed Christian Identity practice which is a white power theology. Randy Weaver ran for sheriff on white power platform, and they had visited Aryan Nations several times, or at least twice or something of that kind. At one of these Aryan Nations meetings, a government informant tried to get Randy Weaver to also become a government informant by selling him an illegal weapon that had been modified to be, I think, a quarter of an inch short. It's hard not to sympathize with the idea that Randy Weaver and people who people of all political stripes actually can look at this case and sort of think this was dirty dealing on the part of the government. It's kind of entrapment. I mean, yes, I'm not a legal scholar, but entrapment is certainly the word that came to mind the first time I read the case. A lot of other things happened by way of miscommunication, including giving him the wrong court date and then responding when he didn't show up to the court date, although he had also decided not to go. So there's a whole bunch of sort of bad faith effort around this. And then government snipers encircle his cabin to try to demand that he come to court. But the Weaver family, all of them, including the children, are highly armed. And this turns into a multi day standoff with several people killed in the course of events, including Vicky Weaver killed as she's holding her infant daughter in her arms inside of the cabin. And for reasons we can talk about, her death is among the people lost. Her death is sort of singularly important to this movement for a number of symbolic reasons. The thing that I find most interesting about this is that Ruby Ridge is kind of the moment where we can see that the white power movements paramilitarization, and by that I just mean the way that it's becoming more and more like an army. It's using military grade weapons and uniforms. At this point, Klansmen have largely abandoned the white robes and hoods and started using camouflatisse instead. They're using things of this kind. We see that paramilitarization colliding with a concurrent paramilitarization of policing. So there's a picture that I found in the archive where a group of five skinheads was on their way up to the mountaintop during the siege with the intention of resupplying the Weaver form with more guns and ammo. And they're caught, they're detained and arrested by the ATF, which is alcohol, backload, firearms. And there's a photograph of an ATF officer arresting one of the skinheads down on the floor with his knee on the back. And in the photograph, they're wearing the same uniforms. They're indistinguishable from each other, except that one of them has an ATF jacket. And it's really something that two completely different elements of society, one being supposedly a neutral arbiter of kind of state law and the other being an anti state movement could come to be outfitted in such a similar way. So all of that gets really cooked into a frenzy by Waco, which is not a White Power event per se. The Branch Davidians who are surrounded and put under siege at Waco are actually a multiracial compound, but they are kind of an apocalyptic group of, I guess we could say, fellow travelers with the White Power movement. And certainly the White Power movement understands it as a White Power event. And in fact, in some of the magazines within the White Power movement, they show only the photographs of Waco victims who are white victims. They omit the other people. So it's sort of put forward in that way. And Timothy McVeigh was actually standing there. This was like a month long FBI ATF siege, and many people traveled among them Timothy McVeigh, to kind of bear witness to this atrocity in the making, a misapplication of state power, whether or not David Koresh himself was a white supremacist. Yes, and unlike Ruby Ridge, which is very remote and on the top of a mountain, and most of the images coming out were satellite images, waco was on the Texas prairie, so the cameras could watch everything that happened, including when federal armored vehicles rolled in and set fire to the compound, or the compound somehow caught fire. This is still a matter of some argument, but the siege, the Waco siege became a sort of meeting point for people in the White Power movement. Lewis Beam, who is one of the key leaders of this movement, came out to the siege and asked questions of many of the law enforcement officers, tried to get press credentials. Timothy McVeigh made the trip. McVeigh was not there when the fire happened at the end, although there are reports of him watching it on television with tears running down his face. And significantly, when we're thinking about these long aftermaths of warfare, the armored vehicles used to end the Waco siege were very, very similar to the one that he manned, that McVeigh manned in the Gulf War in the Big Red One infantry Division. Just to close the loop on Christianity here. The Branch Davidians weren't Christian identitarians in quite the same way as some of these other groups are. But there is a kind of apocalyptic Christianity organizing some of this movement. Right? If I recall from your book, the end of the Cold War seemed to signal to the people who have this cast of thinking that we were kind of entering the end times. And this was the moment where the white supremacist Christian ethno state needed to be built. So Christian Identity, for listeners who might not have heard about this before, is a political theology that holds that white people are the true lost tribe of Israel and that everyone else are racial enemies. Everyone else, people of color, Jewish people, anyone who is not white and part of this tribe. This faithfuls have descended from either beasts or Satan, depending on where. You are in which strand of the theology and I'm simplifying a little bit for expediency, but I think this is a fair depiction. The interesting thing about Christian Identity in terms of how it operationalizes this movement is that unlike evangelical churches, which are also gaining huge memberships in the 1980s, which are also becoming very politicized and very focused on the Apocalypse, unlike the evangelicals, Christian Identity has no rapture, right? There is no promise that the faithful will be spared this hideous battle at the end of the world. Instead, the faithful are supposed to survive the battle, so they become survivalists. And they are tasked with clearing the world of enemies, which again, is all nonwhite people and Jews and so clearing the world of enemies so that Christ can return. So what Christian Identity does for the people in this movement who believe in it is to transfigure this whole thing into a holy war. Now, this thing about the apocalypse, though, is way bigger than the White Power movement. And I think that the Cold War is significant. This is kind of the direction that my next book might be going. The end of the Cold War is significant in this way not only for people in the fringe or for evangelicals, but for a whole lot of people in the United States. Because if you think about Cold War America, people had really come to live with the idea of the imminent end of the world or the imminent threat of life presented by nuclear warfare. We can think about those duck and tuck cover drills and the videos and all of the different ways that people were sort of primed in civil society to think about how that could kind of happen at any time. And then that layered on top of this religious belief, which again ranges from evangelical churches all the way to the Christian Identity fringe. So what happens in 1989 is super interesting because the enemy disappears. The Soviet enemy disappears at the end of the Cold War, but the belief doesn't disappear. So there's this whole group of people who suddenly have this intense belief in the imminent Apocalypse, but it's a hole in the story. So for people in the White Power movement, a lot of people simply replace the state into that kind of missing enemy slot. My sense is that in the 90s this is kind of a crisis of narrative for a lot of people beyond this movement. So in the aftermath of Waco, we have Timothy McVeigh, highly motivated, it would seem, to take the war home. And at that point, just prior to the Oklahoma City bombing, do you have a sense of how many people were part of this movement? Yes. So this is a tricky thing to count and I'm going to explain my best estimate and then I'm going to tell you some of the problems with it. Historians and sociologists have kind of thought about this in concentric circles. Which is to say that as I was saying earlier, social movements have kind of varying levels of degree of participation, if you will. So you can think about concentric circles like a bullseye. And in the middle are only about 25,000 people. Now, those are the people who live and breathe the movement. They marry other people in the movement, they get rides to the airport from other people in the movement, they go to all the rallies, they organize their lives around this. They move to the northwest, sometimes for movement reasons. They have children and homeschool them in the way prescribed by the movement. OK, outside of that, there's another ring of people. That's around 150 to 175,000 people. Those people do public facing stuff like attend rallies, subscribe to literature, regularly read the newspapers. Outside of that is another 450,000 people. And those people don't themselves contribute money or time, but they do regularly read the literature. So what we can imagine is that there is another more diffused group of people outside of that who would not read something that says official newspaper of the Nights of the KKK, but who might agree with many of the ideas that are presented in it. So what we have to think about is the way that this kind of model of organizing both moves ideas from that hardcore center out into the mainstream and pulls in recruitable people towards the middle. Okay, now that I've said that, that's our best estimate. One other thing is at play, which some sociologists discovered, which is that after 1983, this movement is using a strategy called leaderless resistance. Now, this is actually very, very similar to how we now understand cell style terror. And I think a lot of people will think it's familiar because of all the things we've learned after 911. Leaderless resistance simply holds that people can agree on a common set of targets and objectives and then work together to achieve them through violence, but without communication with other cells or with central leadership. And leaderless resistance in the white power movement came about mostly because they were so frustrated with FBI infiltration in the civil rights era and because they thought it would make it more difficult to prosecute them in court. And it did make both of those operations more difficult. But the bigger legacy of leaderless resistance has been that we lost our entire conception of this as a social movement. And I can talk more about that in a minute. In a minute. But what, what this means for numbers is that after 1983, this movement is no longer interested in trying to get, you know, 10,000 people to march down main street. This movement is interested in trying to get twelve people who are willing to rob a bank or set off a bomb. So what we have to remember is that after 1983, decreasing numbers actually doesn't mean decreasing violence or activity. So you've sketched a picture of something like 700,000 people who are in these central rings of the movement, and 25,000 of whom are actually soldiers or consider themselves soldiers. Do you have a sense of that outer ring of sympathizers? Maybe there's a ring beyond that. I'm just trying to imagine how many people in the US. When they saw Oklahoma City, thought, yeah, that was probably a good idea. That had to happen. I understand what McVeigh was up to there. How many people would you think were untroubled by the preschool kids who were killed there? Because there's a picture. I just want to know what we're talking about when we're talking about murderous white supremacy and its sympathizers. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really interesting question, especially because none of these answers are ever simple, even for people in the movement. There's a lot of argument in the movement about the efficacy of Oklahoma City because of the children. That's a really hard pill for people in the movement to swallow because white children are so central to what they think they're doing. Maybe that's a confounding variable. Maybe it's just we need a different example. But let's just focus on Oklahoma City for a moment. We can summarize what Oklahoma City was briefly. I mean, people will be fairly familiar with it, but I guess a few things to point out. One is that it was not totally clear that McVeigh was a white supremacist, or at least it was not as clear as it might have been. He doesn't have swastika's tattooed on his arms, that I recall. And he didn't claim to be part of a white power movement. Right. I think he even claimed to have just acted on his own. And you are now saying that this is part of the plan to actually hide the fact that you had confederates, and I think many people think he had several confederates who went unprosecuted and undiscovered, and there was very little will to go digging further there. And then there was a fair amount of conspiracy thinking around that. I remember Gore Vidal wrote pieces and at least one piece in Vanity Fair, I guess. Give me your take on Oklahoma City and what it meant and what it did to the movement. Sure. So before we do Oklahoma City, I want to give you one more piece of information about kind of the relative size and importance of the movement, and that is simply a comparative example when we think about fringe movements in the United States and what is and isn't important to study. So the John Birch Society is much more studied and much more understood than the movement that we're talking about today. The John Burch Society, as some of you may know, is an anti communist, kind of cold war era extremist group that sometimes borders on violence and that have a lot of political attention paid to it. For a minute there. John Burch is usually covered in textbooks as an example of extremism. The John Birch Society had about 100,000 people at its peak, right? So we're talking about a movement that's larger and has inarguably more weaponry and military training than John Burch. So for me, the question becomes, why didn't we know about it? Why didn't we understand? And how did we forget? Because all of the things that I write about in my book are examples that were documented at the time. Like the McVeigh case. Right. The events that I talk about in the book were all covered in the press. There was footage of clan paramilitary training camps on Good Morning America and the Today Show and things like that. The Greensborough massacre was the subject of a Saturday Night Live sketch. This was in the zeitgeist. People understood that things like this were happening. What we lacked was some kind of apparatus for putting them together into the same story. So that's the thing that I think is really interesting, especially because when we think about this phrase balloon wolf, it was popularized by these activists. They deliberately wanted to disappear. Now, one example of this is the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people. What we're talking about is, of course, tammy the McVeigh's Fertilizer bombing of the Alfred Tamura Federal Building, Oklahoma City, in 195. Now, that is the largest deliberate mass casualty on U. S. Soil between the bombing of Pearl Harbor and 911. But it is not understood. We don't have a durable public understanding of this as being a work of ideology and politics rather than kind of one person's madness. We don't learn about it in school. We don't think of it as a milestone moment for the United States, like when we teach a history survey. And I think it's really interesting that we've missed it. Now, I think that, of course, there's a lot of conspiracy theory around it and multiple bomb theories and John Doe theories, all kinds of things. To me, I think the persuasive thing is actually in the historical archives. And to understand what happened here, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversation I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Tamler Summers. You might know Tambler is one of the hosts of the Very Bad Wizards podcast. He's also an associate professor at the University of Houston. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Duke University, and he's the author of a very interesting new book titled Why Honor Matters. And today, Tamler and I get deep into the topic of honor and why it might still matter. He certainly thinks it has more value than I do, so we agree on points and disagree on others, but the whole topic is fascinating and consequential, and I hope you feel that we have done the topic some justice. And now, without further delay, I bring you Tambler Summers. I am here with Tambler Summers. Tamler, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. We've done a bunch of podcasts together. I think mostly you and David Pizzaro have been on mine once, and then I've been on yours at least twice. I think there were two marathon sessions, and then there was you came on when we had just a bunch of guests on to say what you'd changed your mind about. Right. So for those who aren't aware, although I will have introduced you before this, you are one of the hosts of the Very Bad Wizards podcast, which I love and widely recommend, and you are a philosophy professor and the author of a book that was just published this month, why Honor Matters. Yes. Why? Honor matters. We'll talk about the book mostly. I guess we could also wander off the book, but the book I just got a couple of days ago, so I haven't finished. But I've read enough of to know that it's quite interesting and relevant to many questions of how we live, both personally and how we organize society. You're especially concerned about the justice system, so we'll get into all of that. But before we do, I guess, how did you come to this defense of honor? Because there's something rather archaic about waking up one morning deciding that we need more of an honor culture rather than less. How did you stumble on this problem? Yeah, I mean, this was one of those happy accidents that sometimes you get in academia, where I did, as I think, you know, my PhD work, my dissertation on moral responsibility and free will. And I defended a skeptical view much like yours. And I was particularly concerned with how our retributive intuitions evolved. Our intuitions that people deserve to suffer, that people deserve to be punished, deserve to be blamed. So I was looking at a lot of kind of cultural and genetic theories and evolutionary biology and someone recommended to me a book called Culture of Honor by Richard Nisbet and Dove Cohen. Richard NIS? Nisbit a now kind of accidental rival of yours? Yeah, but this is just a fantastic book that they wrote. And their idea was that people in the American South, because they are descendants of the Scotch Irish herders, they tend to subscribe to more of an honor culture than people in the north. And they presented a bunch of experiments that showed this. And so I read the book and their idea was that these norms and these values tend to emerge in certain kinds of environments with a particular ecology, with a particular kind of social arrangement. And that just led me to kind of explore those norms and the differences in the values that they had compared to non owner cultures as it related to responsibility. And one of the things I found was they really don't emphasize control as much as a necessary condition for being responsible or blameworthy. In fact, you could be responsible for something that you didn't even do but a member of your group did or a member of your family did. And so this became for me this huge project of looking at cultural diversity in people's attitudes about responsibility and freedom. So I wrote a book about that. It's called relative justice. It's more of an academic book than this one. But at first it was just sort of a kind of a curiosity. It was something that I thought was really interesting. And then I found myself getting drawn to some of the values in these cultures and recognizing the absence of some of those values in my own life and in the life of the United States for better and for worse. But I started to think for the first time, maybe for worse in a lot of ways. And that led me to actually start exploring the idea of a defensive honor like honor comeback. Reclaiming it in a way that reclaiming honor in a way that will sort of contain some of its dangers but harness some of its virtues. It's interesting because the dangers are so salient to me that I think we'll disagree on many points throughout this conversation because honor and certainly honor culture seems to capture almost everything we want to outgrow as a civilization. And yet I'm sympathetic to many of your points with respect to what has been lost in our current conception of justice. Certainly retributive justice has a lot that can be improved about it. The notion of honor does appeal to something very deep in us and to forsake that appeal across the board comes with a price. I think we have to acknowledge that we pay a psychological price and a social price for just jettisoning these apish values. So it'll be interesting because I think there'll be clear disagreement here, but there is a gray area, and I think perhaps even most of it is gray and will converge on some points. So before we get into the details of honor culture and its application to justice, in particular, what is honor and how does it differ from its counterfeits like dignity or self esteem, which really anchor more of our modern liberal values? That's, unfortunately for me, not the easiest question to answer. I think that part of the problem with honor. One of the reasons that people don't talk about it that much, even to criticize it, is that it's very hard to pin down exactly what it is. And this is especially true in philosophy. There's so little philosophical work on honor that it was hard to even find kind of a target or a critic that I could hone in on in trying to write the book. It's a messy concept, and it can mean a lot of things in a lot of contexts. Philosophers especially don't like their concepts messy. But I think this is one of its virtues, actually, because I think it's messiness as a concept is well suited to the messiness and complexity of the choices we have to make and the relationships we kind of have, the social relations. But that's dodging the question. Let me just at least try to give some characteristic features of communities that are honor oriented. So one of the things you find across various honor communities is a heightened concern for personal reputation and a heightened concern for group reputation. We all value our reputation to some degree, but in honor cultures, that is ramped up quite a bit. And along with that comes a heightened sensitivity to insults and a heightened sensitivity to slights or challenges to your reputation. Because if somebody challenges your reputation and you back down, then that's a source of shame in most honor communities. So there is this strong conviction that people should handle their own business in honor cultures, that they should stand up for themselves when they're challenged and not turn to third parties to resolve their own conflicts. And so that's why you have, like, stop snitching campaigns in the honor culture of the inner city and urban gangs and baseball and hockey players. I talk a lot about baseball and hockey because those are, I think, are the most honor oriented sports. When they get into their beefs or feuds, they don't speak to the media, they don't speak to the league. There's a strong code that you have to handle any offenses against or challenges or insults to the team themselves. You keep it all in house. I don't know enough about baseball. I was surprised in your account of the beaming of a batter by a pitcher intentionally throwing the ball at him is part of the culture of baseball to a degree that I didn't realize. Baseball is a lot more like hockey than I realized. That's right. It really is. And it's kind of fascinating. All the unwritten rules and this is another feature of a lot of honor cultures is there's just a lot of unwritten norms and codes that go along that are part of what governs the way people behave in these cultures. And they're constantly evolving. They're flexible, but they're very internal. And so from an outsider's perspective, they can be difficult to understand. But yeah, you can hit a home run in baseball and walk a little too slowly, run a little too slowly around the bases, and then that will make you a target for the next time you come up to the plate. There's just so many. It's a pretty byzantine, kind of dramatic and kind of fascinating set of rules that govern when you're supposed to get payback, when you're supposed to just accept that you're being hit by the pitcher because you understand that they have a grievance and they need to get their revenge and then get it over with and you can move on. And that's very typical of honor cultures. And I think baseball and hockey are examples, in my mind, of successful honor communities because they're able to contain the conflicts and not let them spin out of control. Other features of honor communities, they tend to place higher value on virtues and character traits like courage, hospitality, loyalty, integrity. And maybe this is one of the problems you're going to have with them, solidarity with a particular group. There's a real sense of collective identification and collective responsibility in honor cultures. And there's a sense of tribal. They're tribal. There's a real tribalism to honor cultures. But I think that word right now, the way it's tossed around today, doesn't capture the sense in which honor cultures are tribal. Today, when we speak about tribalism, we often mean and I think sometimes when you speak about tribalism and people like Pinker, we often mean people identifying with an ideology, like a political ideology or racial or ethnic ideology. But in an honor culture, there is this sense of collective identification, there is this tribalism, but you're identifying with actual people, not an idea, actual people, the people in your community who you know and who you interact with on a day to day basis. And so that's the sense in which honor communities are tribal. There are two examples that come to mind that really crystallize what is attractive about honor and what is obviously pathological about it. And I guess I'll just float both of those to you because they seem to articulate psychological extremes for me. And there's one you reference in the book. You might reference both, but I saw one you talk about the satisfaction that awaits anyone who watches YouTube videos where bullies get pounded by the people they were targeting. There's actually a site or a thread on Reddit called Justice Porn which wraps up some of these videos. So if you watch these, especially if you're a guy being a guy, I only know what it's like to actually see it with the brain of a man. But I imagine women feel some of the same, if not the same satisfaction here. So the prototypical case is there's some thug on the sidewalk who is harassing people as they pass and eventually he picks the wrong person who turns out to be a professional boxer or MMA fighter and just gets destroyed. It's a perfectly encapsulated moral circumstance. It's really like just a mini morality play in like 2 minutes because this person's culpability is absolutely clear. There's no question that this guy, if anyone deserves to get pounded unconscious, it's this guy. And then it happens and it seems like a perfect result morally. And again, so it has the feature of there's no appeal to a third party. The person who is threatened is defending himself, in some cases herself. There's some great videos where women wind up destroying the guy who is harassing them. Those are especially satisfying and it's hard to see what's wrong with it except when you scale it to the rest of society. If you're going to run a society this way, you have to acknowledge that the full chaos and dysfunction of vendetta and vigilanteism is the result. And civilization, as you mentioned, pinker, as he's pointed out again and again, in large part depends on our outsourcing the use of force to the state. And yet these videos would be very different if they just entailed somebody getting on the phone and calling the police and watching the police show up and arrest the guy, which is how it has to work in an orderly society. As a counterpoint to this, I would say that almost the Reductio ad absurdum of honor as a force for good is that the concept of honor killing, which you see, and it's very widespread in the Muslim world, it's not only there, but in traditional societies. It's often imagined that the honor of the family is fatally threatened by any sexual indiscretion on the part of any of the women in the family. So if a man's daughter refuses to marry the person he's chosen for her or has sex out of wedlock, or just is caught holding some guy's hand to whom she's not married? In these societies, and in these communities, even within our own societies, you often hear about a father or a father and a brother killing a young woman for the imagined offense to the family's honor that has been given here. And so if you could see a YouTube video of that, there'd be none of the satisfaction for anyone standing outside of that circumstance. I'll just give you both of those examples to react to. Yeah, okay, so let me take the justice porn one first and then I'll address the honor killings. I mean, certainly nothing in this book is anything but horrified by honor killings and I take it really seriously as a problem. But let me first go back to what makes those videos so satisfying. I think the way you framed it is that it's perfect justice because this bully gets exactly what he deserved. I mean, assuming that it is a guy, which it almost always is, and I think that it's even a little bit more than that, or it's significantly more than that because you could imagine just a stranger punching the bully, just kind of a bystander or an impartial bystander punching the bully and then that's not as satisfying. What's especially satisfying about those videos is that a person who was going to be a victim, who's going to be bullied, stands up for themselves. And the sense of respect that comes with that self respect, respect from the community, respect from the people who are watching. I mean, it's palpable and you can see it and it actually, it's tangible and sometimes it even comes from the bully. Sometimes even the bully respects the person that just knocked them out because they stood up for themselves. That's a very common dynamic and that is exactly what is lost when you marshal out these kinds of conflicts to some impartial third party. That's why I say in the book, it's not just as porn. It's not even remotely justice arousing to have the bully be taken away by a security officer or the principal and get suspended or even expelled at that point, it's like, well, maybe the school needed to do that because of the harm that he was causing. But that's sort of the lesser of evils rather than an assertion of self respect. Now sometimes that's not possible. And that's the problem. That's the problem with honor cultures is sometimes the power imbalance is too great and you can't stand up for yourself and you need third parties to come in and prevent great injustice. And that's where this idea of containment comes in. But we shouldn't lose. And this is one of the things I feel like we've lost. We shouldn't lose or reject the value of standing up for yourself, of being willing to take a risk that maybe you will get your ass kicked or something. But at least you are showing that you can't be pushed around and you're not immediately turning to a third party to handle a conflict that directly involves you. Okay, so that's the justice porn one. That's the easier example for me. Honor killings, I think are an extreme example of one of the problems with honor, which is that there is very little restriction on the content of honor norms. So all honor groups have norms and codes that determine how honor and dishonor are allocated within the community. And there are some commonalities, but there are also a lot of differences and there's nothing within the sort of honor morality that constrains what those codes are. So if you have a community like certain cultures where just the suspicion or the reality of extramarital sex on the part of a family member will reduce the honor of the family, that will make the family dishonorable. And you called that imaginary and it's imaginary. It's not imaginary for them. They are dishonored and they are treated poorly by the people in that community. Now, that's a fucked up are you allowed to swear on this podcast? Yes, indeed you are. That's a fucked up norm, right? That's a fucked up way of allocating honor and dishonor and especially dishonor or shame in this case. But that's what happens in these communities, is that the family honor and all the privileges that come with being an honored member of the community and all the shit that comes with being a shamed member of the community, that will happen to the family unless they act in the way that they feel they need to act. Often they don't want to do it. Often it's like a duty. It's like some sort of weird perverse duty, moral duty that they feel like they have to kill the sister that they love or the daughter that they love in order to preserve the families, the family's honor for generations. And so this is a huge problem with honor that we don't have those kinds of restrictions about what the norms will be that determine how honor and dishonor are allocated. And that's another goal of containment, is to make sure. So in my world, if you find an honor community where this is their value, this is their way of allocating honor and dishonor, then you don't allow that. So you do need some kind of higher authority that will enforce a minimal respect for human rights in a way that would rule out honor killings. But again, that doesn't mean you throw out the baby with the bathwater. That doesn't mean that the fact that there are honor killings in the vast minority of honor cultures across the world and throughout history I mean, it's a tiny percentage of cultures that find this to be morally acceptable or not dishonorable to kill a family member. The fact that that exists doesn't mean we should throw out honor and all the motivational benefits that come with it. I guess the thing I would argue here is that the only thing that would value honor appropriately, morally and psychologically and the only thing that would contain its perversions would be some kind of consequentialist understanding of its effects on individuals and on society. So the reason why it's bad to have notions of male honor that extend to the sexual behavior or even the sexual misfortune of women in the family, as you know, honor killings even happen when a girl gets raped because she is viewed as sullied by having been raped. That's like the perfect case of moral lunacy where a father kills his daughter because of the shame that has been brought to the family over her rape. So you would want to argue that that kind of honor is pathological on the grounds that it creates immense human misery for no good reason and doesn't create any benefit that outweighs that misery. Whereas in other cases where you're talking about things like hospitality and the kinds of moral heroism that can be motivated by things like honor and can't quite be motivated by its cousins, like self esteem. Or dignity. Or dignity. Yeah. And then you want to argue for its place because it does. Good for us. But again, even going to the best possible case, or at least the best case we've mentioned so far, which is these justice porn videos, there you can argue that there's a higher norm to which even people who are chock full of honor would adhere in those circumstances. So, for instance, I've spent a lot of time thinking about self defense and violence and I've spent a lot of time training in martial arts. And I'm surrounded by people who have a tremendous amount of martial honor. But because they have so much honor and so much experience, these are world champions in Brazilian jiujitsu and SWAT team members and Navy Seals. People who have absolutely no doubt about their ability to handle situations of interpersonal violence. These are people who, when they walk around in the world and see behavior of the sort that we're seeing in those videos, they're not the guys who run up and punch the bully in the face because, one, they have absolutely nothing to prove from that contest. I mean, they know they can punch the bully in the face. If they decline to punch the bully in the face, they will not lose sleep that night wondering what it says about them. Right. They're not going to be racked by doubt about their own martial abilities. They see these things in very pragmatic terms and they just realize they have a lot to lose if things go haywire. They've been in enough fights themselves that they know what follows. They know you punch a bully in the face and your hand gets cut and you've got his blood in your wounds and now you have to worry about whether or not you need an AIDS test. There's the possibility of getting arrested and having witnesses misunderstand what happened there. And now you have criminal or civil charges against you. There's a huge hassle awaits you if you get involved in any of this stuff. And so when you talk to people who understand human violence really deeply, these are not the people who you see meeting out vigilante justice in those kinds of videos. Nor would they if when you talk about what they would do in those situations. This becomes especially true when you imagine what it's like to to walk around armed. I mean, you know, people who I know who carry concealed weapons, you don't get into shoving and punching encounters with strangers when you have a gun on your belt, because you're then two steps away from having to decide whether you're in over your head. And now it's now it's escalated to a lethal encounter with all of the legal ramifications. So people who are walking around armed are often just the first to just dial 911 and not go near situations like that, right. And at a certain point, the consequences do become too dire to do. The thing that I think honor cultures and honor codes tend to promote, which is to handle your business and not involve some sort of stranger or a third party. But to respond to your claims about the Navy Seal people, the jiujitsu experts that you know, that's a very common feature of honor cultures, that if it's clear that they can, if they needed to, if called upon, respond to some sort of insult or challenge to themselves, then they often don't need to. I mean, the whole reason some of these honor norms on this aspect of honor norms evolved is to give people an incentive to preserve a reputation. That means you can't be messed with, right? And they have that reputation already. They have nothing else to prove, as you say, but tamla, except they might only have it in their head in that context. So if you imagine you're traveling with your wife and you're in a bar that you've never been in before and will never be in again, and you don't look like some colossus who would scare people at a glance but you're a Navy Seal or whatever, who has no doubts about his ability to protect himself and his wife. And you might even be armed, say, right? And so somebody at the bar challenges you and even insults your wife. Like the prototypical case where you would have as a man, you would feel tempted by, you know, a million years of of hominid evolution at your back to defend yourself and your partner. That is precisely the situation where it's most tempting, where people who have this kind of discipline see the downside and just walk away and actually don't save face in that context. The bully has the satisfaction. There's no community to save face, too. There these are strangers, as you say. So there's no real incentive to save face because nobody knows who they are in the first place. There's no reputation to either lose, preserve, or augment. Right. And I don't know, I want to interview one of these people right now and ask what would happen if they're at a bar with their wives or their daughters and somebody does insult them or seems physically threatening or starts to hit on one of their wives. I don't know if they're really going to walk away from something like that if they feel like the consequences of engaging. It's not going to lead to a gun fight, which most bar fights don't lead to gunfights, and most conflicts don't lead to anything worse than just somebody getting their ass kicked. Obviously, there's what they think would happen or should happen, and then there's what would actually happen when push comes to shove, literally. But I've had many of these conversations, and I know what people aspire to do in those situations based on what they consider to be a higher ethic that even does preserve this notion of honor. If you've come out of an honor culture like the Navy Seals, right, so the Navy Seals are bad asses. Their training has many of the features you describe of an honor culture. Yeah, I talk about them a lot in the book, actually. But the net result, when you export that to living in a more cosmopolitan society, it becomes reduced down to a kind of higher ethic, which is it would be a kind of failure if it's a failure to have avoided conflict that was in fact avoidable. And avoidance is still a kind of master principle there, given all of the uncertainty that comes with conflict. And yet there is a kind of I mean, if you're honorable enough, if you're secure enough, and I guess this is where self esteem maybe swallows honor. If there really is no threat to your view of yourself when backing down from a challenge, then you're free to do it in a way that somebody who is more threatened isn't. The person who's easily goaded into a fight that he can't win just because he finds it so intolerable to lose face. That's a person who's just a monkey being manipulated by eye contact and insults. Yeah, I think we agree about this in this sense where there's nothing about honor that suggests that in every context you need to act in a certain way. I mean, this is one of the best things about honor codes and honor values is how flexible they are. And so in context where standing up for yourself or standing up for your family or standing up for your friends isn't appropriate according to their codes, then they're not going to do it. And you're right also that you need a certain level of self regard and confidence in your abilities. That you won't be lying awake in bed for the next two weeks kind of thinking about how you should have stood up to the person or how you should have said something, or how you shouldn't have just walked away and listened to them taunt you or whatever it is. If you have that level, I think this isn't just true when it comes to violence. This is true in most aspects of life. When people insult you in a way that you don't feel like they have the standing to really affect your reputation and the way you view yourself, then it's easy. For that to just glide off of you. But when you're in a situation where you do feel like your self respect is at stake and you do feel like your reputation among people, amongst people you care about is at stake, well then that's a different story. But in the kinds of situations you're describing, it doesn't seem like either their self respect or their reputation is at stake here. So yeah, you absolutely in those kinds of situations can do the thing that will not lead to some kind of unpredictable calamity or something like that. And in some ways it's a point of pride. It's like a kind of a warrior value to be able to have the kind of self control that you don't get triggered like that in situations when it's not warranted. I mean, that is a big part of warrior culture, a big part of a code. You see this with samurai is restraint. Not giving in to violence when it's not called for is as much of a virtue as being violent when it is called for. The real concern with honor as a major plank in one's morality is that it creates a kind of attractor state where incentives get all screwed up. And the problem is that it is dependent on how others view you or at least how you imagine they will view you. And then that begins to kind of spiral of needless norm enforcement which becomes highly nonnormative if you stand back outside of that culture and look at the consequences. And so there are many examples you give in the book. One example which I often think of here is prison culture where incentives are so badly aligned that even good people will reliably turn into monsters simply because there is no alternative, given what everyone else will do to them if they don't prove that they can be monsters. Right? You have to project a kind of almost insane toughness so that you're not taken advantage of and punct. That's true for people who just aren't like that, who aren't disposed to that, but they have to make that part of their identity. This is true. Elijah Anderson a book I quote a lot in the book, the sociologist Elijah Anderson and his book Code of the street. But this is also true, I think of young kids in certain urban neighborhoods. And these are kids that they want friends and they want to have a normal high school experience. They want girls, but they also want to not be sitting ducks for the more aggressive kids in the neighborhood. So they have to establish some kind of reputation for toughness so that they're not taken advantage of and thought to be weak. And again, even if that's not who they are, even if they don't have a kind of disposition for violence or aggression, they have to project that and they have to do it. This is just their environment. This is just the environment in prison, you have to project that kind of image. And when it's successful, they can do it and not have it swallow up their identity entirely. Because there is this kind of tricky point, equilibrium point, where you've shown that you're tough enough, that you can handle any challenges and insults that come at you, but nobody feels like you need to go any further than that, and then they'll just leave you alone. So if you can project this image of being violent, if called upon to be violent, then you don't actually have to engage in acts of violence, and you won't be the victim of violence. But if you're not able to do that, then you're more likely to be a victim, right? But all of that seems to be an advertisement for some prior stage of humanity that we are wise to have outgrown, at least outside of a prison or outside of a gang or outside of a ghetto. That's crime. Ridden or these are all places we are busily leaving, both as individuals and who are lucky and as societies which are structured along different lines. And yet you seem to worry we're leaving something critical behind in that flight. We're leaving the values that come from how to survive in those kinds of environments because we have not, as a society, figured out a way to extinguish all these kinds of scenarios and social environments where people will be threatened in this way and where your reputation can ensure that you'll either be left alone or that you'll be kind of a victim. And while the fact that there are prisons and the conditions in prisons which are abhorrent and the fact that there are these really poor neighborhoods where people are desperate, obviously that's a bad thing. But that doesn't mean that every value that comes from those kinds of environments and how to handle yourself in those kinds of environments, that can actually be a real positive that we shouldn't lose just because we're so worried about the kinds of conditions that these environments have poverty or prison. A good example is, I think, the military and the soldiers there, they develop a kind of code and a strict honor code in the Navy Seals you were talking about, right? They have a code that is crucial to them, important to them, involves collective accountability, collective responsibility, never leaving a brother lying out in the field, right? And then they leave those kinds of environments, but they retain the values that they acquired in those environments and the kind of environments they go into and the kind of environments that necessitate having those kinds, embracing those kinds of values, they're often really dangerous and something normally we would want to avoid. But the values that they bring out of that is something that stays with them for the rest of their lives. And I'd be surprised if you found any Navy Seals or really military anywhere saying that they want to turn away from honor and the kind of honor values that were instilled in them when they were at war or in boot camp or wherever it is that they really started to internalize it. There are just these other parts of the honor picture that seem dispensable in the end. And maybe we can purify this notion of honor to something that is compatible with a more modern liberal consequentialist value system. But you mentioned tribalism briefly and also the notion that of kind of collective responsibility for things so that even if you do something terrible to another person, he or even member of his family could retaliate against you, obviously, but not even necessarily just against you, but anyone close to you. So if you kill someone, well, then their family can kill your brother, say in retribution. And then somehow honor makes sense of that instrumental violence where you're targeting someone who's actually not responsible for anything here, but because of their association with the responsible party, it's deemed legitimate to target them because of the effect that will have on the person who you actually do have agreements with. See, I disagree with that interpretation of collective punishment and collective responsibility. I don't think it's instrumental. It often achieves instrumental goals like showing that the family is not to be messed with. But I think in honor cultures and true honor cultures, they think it's just they think if someone from your group I mean, in an easier to relate to example when you get into a beanball feud in baseball and the opposing pitcher hits one of your batters. If you're in the American League, that pitcher isn't going to come up to the plate. So you're going to just hit another guy on that team. And yes, there's instrumental value in doing that to show the other team that you can't throw at your players. But there is also a sense that this is the right thing to do. This is the just thing to do, that if that team has a pitcher that will do that, then everyone on that team is accountable for that. And I think that maybe seems irrational, certainly from a perspective that we come from where individual responsibility is the only thing that can possibly matter. And as you believe, and I used to believe, you can't even really make sense of individual responsibility, moral responsibility in the kind of desert entailing sense that just seems totally insane. But I think there's a lot of moral advantages to that kind of attitude. And I think you can see them when you think, look, it's not just about punishment. It's not just about getting revenge on some family whose brother may have injured or killed your family member. It's also about making up or compensating somebody for something that your family member did, right? It's that same instinct, that same norm that encourages, that motivates people to say, look, I know it was my brother who harmed you, but my brother can't make it up to you. My brother can't make this right, but I can't. And I feel obligated to do it. Yeah, that resonates with me. And the only reason they feel obligated is because they feel that sense of collective identification, that sense of collective responsibility. Well, even though I didn't do it, I had no control over whether my brother did it or not. I still feel an obligation to try to make it right, to try to make up for what my brother did. And you see that in honor cultures quite a bit as well. So it's not all of the dark side of these blood feuds and Hatfields and McCoys and these long multigenerational cycles of violence. It's also a sense of justice that, yeah, it's not just you, you're responsible for the people around you. And that also, as a side benefit, encourages a healthy amount of self policing within groups. Because now you know that if one of your group members fucks up, you're going to have to pay for it in some way. I'm certainly open to the utility of all of these ideas and social structures. Again, the cash value for me morally is always the consequences of thinking in these ways and obeying these various norms. And yes, you allude to my view of free will as undercutting any notion of real responsibility in the ultimate sense or as it's imagined to exist by people who believe in free will. But you would think that's ultimately just as irrational to think that somebody is individually responsible for an act that they did. It's no more rational to think that than it is to think that you're responsible for what a group member did, right? I mean, according to your view, except for the consequences of holding people responsible in those cases and the reason why it makes sense to hold you respond if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely and listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, I just want to point out that it's taken a global emergency to cause me to change my music back to the old music. Many of you will be relieved and considered a fair trade global pandemic for getting rid of the new music and the newer music and reverting back to the classic Coke of the old music. So apologies for the discombobulation. We'll work out our music problems as the end times proceed. But now I'm back here with my friend and partner in social distancing, Paul Bloom. Paul, thank you for coming back. And it's good to be back. I like the new music. I know you're getting a lot of pushback on Twitter, but I enjoyed it. Yeah, the amount of hate is unbelievable. Yeah, I like it too. But even I recognize that there was a total mismatch between its upbeat vibe and some of the topics I was beginning to COVID And I just corona virus aside, the idea of dropping that music against nuclear war or child pornography or whatever else I had come in, it just seemed wrong. I've known you for a while and I've always wondered what you would do to cross the line. And it turned out to be the music. Yes. The most controversial misstep I've ever taken. That's right. So are you social distancing? Yeah, I am pretty good at it at this point. I must say. I it did not take long for me to snap into gear here. And this has been such a strange experience because everyone must be experiencing this at whatever point they began to take this seriously or began to notice the culture taking this seriously. The experience for all of us is of time compressing in this amazing way where three days, much less a week, seems like an eternity. I mean, you and I recorded our last podcast. I think we released it about 17 days ago on on February 28. And that now seems like a different period in human history. I think we hardly mentioned COVID things have changed so quickly. Well, I think we had recorded that podcast a few days earlier, like the 24th for my podcast with Nicholas Christakas. I went back and reconstructed my own psychological timeline because I was just interested to see when the dominoes began to fall for me and how out of sync I was with the culture and with many of my friends. It was on the 27th that I just pulled the ripcourd. So it was right after we recorded that podcast. So I must have been thinking about it then. But there's so many sources of stress here and we can talk about them, but one thing that has been personally stressful is just to be early on this. I can sort of almost set my watch by it. I've been essentially like a week ahead of where society seems to be at, and there's something really toxic about trying to convince the people in your life to take something that you're taking very seriously, more seriously. So do you feel that now people are on the same page as you? I mean, my sense is about a week ago, people are in all different directions now, for the most part. I feel everybody is taking this extremely seriously, very worried about the Italian model, very worried about where it will be two weeks from now. Do you feel that yourself? Well, with some very prominent and galling exceptions, there are people who privately are not taking it seriously enough, and I'm having to essentially attempt an exorcism on their brains, just one to one with a phone call. And then there are people who have a public posture who are not taking it seriously, who I'm kind of back channeling and receiving a lot of pushback, in some cases total pushback. And it's very frustrating because some of these people have enormous public platforms, and it's just socially irresponsible not to have your fact straight at this point. And yes, some of this has been happening behind the scenes, and it actually connects with a conversation you and I were having last time around loyalty and the obligation or pseudo obligation to treat friends differently. I noticed that if there's someone who's wrong and public about this who I don't have a prior relationship with, certainly not a friendship, I'm much more disposed to just kind of message at them, however harshly, in public. Whereas if they're already a friend, I feel like, okay, I got to go behind the scenes and try to get them to change their minds, you know, in private, and then message something differently in public. And, you know, now that I'm confronting this in a pretty big way, I don't actually know what the right answer is. Do you have intuitions about that? It's a hard case. I think there's a middle ground. I've argued with friends of mine on Twitter. I've argued with you on Twitter about issues where you could kind of intellectually disagree, and if it's all in sort of a positive atmosphere and with respect, it's fine. But this is a funny case because you want to be telling your friend here that he or she is doing something seriously wrong and risking people's lives, risking people's health. And I could understand a reluctance to that in public. It'd be better if you can persuade them in private. Yeah, I've certainly made a solid attempt and come up short there for reasons that are just completely disconcerting. I actually have no theory of mind for why certain people don't get that this is a big deal. There are obviously some memes that are doing real damage to people's thinking here, and maybe we should just talk about why it's hard to grasp this problem and why it was hard to grasp it early and to change one's behavior. One meme that I think has really been damaging is in the analogy drawn to the flu. You have people saying, well, the flu kills 50,000 people a year in the United States. If we were paying attention to the flu on this kind of granular level, we'd be terrified too. We'd be in a perpetual state of terror and no one would leave their houses, and people would be insisting that schools should be closed. But we don't do that, and we're right not to do that. So this whole coronavirus thing is insane. And there are people who are stuck on that bad analogy who just don't understand. Yes, flu would be appropriately terrifying if every one of us were going to get it in a single month in the United States and we were going to crash our healthcare system. Right. I mean, flu is also a big deal, but this is also, by any rational estimation at this point, considerably worse to get than the flu. Now, whether it's six times worse or ten times worse or 20 times worse, we don't know. But anyone who thinks that if you're under 70 or even under 50 and have no comorbidities, you're just going to sail through this thing without a problem, that is not what we're hearing from the front lines. And we're not even at the point now where we're getting decent data on the lasting impairments among the people who are, quote, recovered from this thing. I mean, there's definitely some reports of lasting lung damage and heart damage. And so there's just no question the analogy to flu is a bad one, and yet people keep making it. And imagine that it's true with that for imagine it turns out to be true that for young people, say under 50, it will not cause much damage. It'll be experienced like a bad case of the flu, and then you get better. Still, it seems to be bizarrely cruel to be indifferent to the suffering of older people. I mean, you could say to somebody simply, don't you have anybody over the age of 60 who you love, a parent, a grandparent, anybody who's compromised in some way who's not as healthy as you? Or you could simply say, you don't even have to imagine whether you have somebody in your life. Can you appreciate that these people's lives matter? And by you getting sick, even if you yourself are willing to take on the risk, the harm you could do to other people should be a factor in dictating your life choices? Yeah, and I think Nicholas Kristakis made this point where if only out of altruistic, positively social motives, if you just understood that you at your age and your cohort were just destined to be a carrier of this thing, you still have to worry about every old person you are going to come in contact with. When do you decide to behave normally around your parents or your grandparents? If you're an asymptomatic carrier, you're just rolling the dice with them, with their lives. So it's something to take seriously, even if you were guaranteed not to suffer much from this. You've been talking to experts, and actually, I got to say, the episode you had with ameshadalgia and my friend Nicholas kristakis have been excellent. I am not an expert on this. I know nothing about, except for the fact I've been reading twitter nonstop for the last two weeks. But I am interested in the psychology of these things, and there's something about this situation which has certain features that make it difficult for us to appreciate. So the causality is funny. We understand that if you are sick and you are showing signs of disease and you make contact with me, there's risk, and I should avoid you from that. But basically, the way this disease works is you can be perfectly healthy and asymptomatic and contact with you, though it doesn't seem bad, is still bad. This disease shows signs of exponential growth, and we can look to other countries to see it happening. And that's a difficult concept for us to grasp. We look around, we see everyone's fine. We're all kind of going to restaurants and bars and everything's fine. This disease has no enemy. It's not as if we're dealing with a malevolent agent. We're dealing with this sort of unfeeling, unconscious virus. And for all of these reasons, we're not really suited to think well about it. We look around, we see everyone's walk around. People are fine, so we assume we're fine. And it's only when we reflect and we look at other countries and we use our rational capacities, we understand the terrible risks involved. Yeah, but conversely, this should be the easiest emergency to orient toward. First of all, it's the easiest one to have prepared for in advance because it was guaranteed to happen. I mean, it's literally like, you know, a tornado if you live in tornado alley or an earthquake if you live in california. This is a point that bill gates made, like the threat of a global pandemic that was highly contagious and lethal enough to be of real concern. That was guaranteed to happen. Right. And this is certainly not as bad as it could be. Whatever the outcome here, literally, even if millions of people die, this is still a dress rehearsal for something that is civilization canceling. Which guy Adolpha, when he spoke with you, kept saying, this is fine. This is not such a big deal, and he said it was clear he was comparing it to some sort of form of bird flu that would kill 60% of people who got it and would ultimately, you know, be a species extinct extinguishing event. Yeah. So, yeah, it could be a lot worse from that perspective. But when we knew this was going to happen, I mean, this was not this is not even as hypothetical or as debatable as climate change. There's no alternate argument based on evolutionary principles that xenoviruses aren't going to jump into our species and mutate and in a matter of time get worse, right? So we just knew this was going to happen and yet we didn't prepare. And even when it's happening and we know we are failing to contain the spread and we're seeing this wave crash on the shores of other countries. I mean, even looking at what's happening in Italy, you still have people here denying the reality of this thing. Did you see the photos from the last night at Disney World last night? Yeah, I've seen Disney World. I've seen pictures of Florida beaches. I've seen parades and parties. These are images out of a pandemic movie, right? This is like minute 33 in the pandemic movie. You have just a crowd of doomed imbeciles just fighting their way into the magic kingdom, right? So what do you think is going on with the doomed imbeciles? Do you think it's skepticism and I should say imbeciles, what the government has to say? As I pointed out, I know some of these imbeciles. Some of them are quite smart. Okay, so to smart infouses, what's up with them? Is it that they're just natural contrarians? Is it that they distrust what the government has to say? Is it a political thing? There are certain cases where I really do not have a theory of mind. I just think I'm stumped. But as this thing was gathering energy for me in my life, and I noticed that I was out of step with the culture and with the people around me, I noticed there was a marked difference between people who were very online and people who are just not online at all. The people in my life who just have never had a Twitter account, they have a very different information diet and cadence of getting information on really anything. Some of them were just totally oblivious. I mean, literally, I had, I had a, you know, very close friend, very smart guy, well educated. Basically, he thinks he stays in touch with reality and, you know, looks at the newspaper every day. But he was aghast when I told him that he would be canceling his travel plans at a point when I would have bet my life he was canceling those travel plans. I mean, there was no way those plans were going to go forward. And literally it took like an hour of conversation and sending links and just trying to get into his head around this. So there are people who are not living in the year 2020 on some level with respect to information, but it also cuts both ways because I think the people who are very online can also get siloed into their preferred echo chamber. And the way the variable of politics is interacting here is pretty interesting, because this is when you look at what was happening in Trumpistan and on some level is still happening. You know, among Trump's fans, they've been so confused that they didn't even change their story once the President changed his they seem to be denying the gravity of this, even when he's forced to declare it's a national emergency. It cuts both ways. I think people can really be confused online, but sort of in the normal course of events, I felt that the people who were not on Twitter in particular just were not getting up to the minute information. And that's a factor. There's a factor which was true a couple of weeks ago. It's no longer true, which is it really was siloed politically, which is the liberals were very concerned about the virus, and the fans of Trump were listening to him to say, this is no big deal, we have it licked, don't worry about it. And to his very limited credit, he changed his story. I think he probably changed his story. Who knows? One major lever in his brain is what happens to the stock market, obviously. So he knew he at a certain point, he had to message to the market, this was interesting because this is not an irrational concern. I mean, the Steel Man version of the other side here is the panic is going to do more harm than the virus. What you don't want to do is crash the global economy, because that has all kinds of other effects that actually do cost lives, right? People will die because the economy falls apart. If you can have a virus that even in the end, might kill a million people in the United States, if you can absorb that blow without crashing the US economy, that's much better than crashing it in a panic. And I totally understand that. I've never been counseling panic. But the problem we faced at every moment along the way here is that in order to do something that mitigates the problem at all, in order to do anything that flattens the curve that spares our health care system, even if all of us are destined to get this thing, if most of us can get it once there are effective antiviral treatments, that's a completely different world. The only thing we can do to spread this out over time and contain it at all is to practice. What everyone knows now is social distancing. But the paradox here is that in order to do the thing that will actually work at every time point, that thing will seem unreasonable at that time point. The time you need to close the schools is when no one you know is sick, yet right at precisely the moment where everyone's thinking, oh, come on, we don't even know anyone who's sick. Why close the schools? And so it's just psychologically, it's almost a perfect exploit of our system. We just can't be strongly motivated at a moment when the very action being counseled seems irrational. And by all accounts, we acted too late. The United states was too late. If we acted a week earlier, two weeks earlier, the situation would be much better coming up in the future. And nobody knows what it's going to be like two weeks from now. But the irresponsibility of the government in its behavior and sometimes ongoing irresponsibility. New York was very slow to respond. For instance, at the city level, it's going to have a cost. But you're right about Yale, where I teach, has gone to online teaching, and I'm scrambling to get on top of that, and I'm doing social distancing and all that, and it's an inconvenience and it's difficulty. But there are so many people for whom this crisis is life devastating. Loss of jobs, loss of businesses. In Italy, you don't have funerals. People die and they can't have funerals. There are people who are separated from their children, from their families. There's cancellations of weddings, of critical life events. So I think any, you and I are in some way very fortunate that we're insulated from the true errors of this event. But this is destroying lives, and I just wish we responded quicker. Yeah. And the concern about panic. There was a needle that had to be threaded here. We still have to thread it. And every day it becomes more important that we do it. But it's not that we need panic, but we did need to be more alarmed than we were earlier. The analogy that comes to mind here is really to wearing a seatbelt. I find that my anxiety around this pandemic is always at the boundary between where I'm either trying to convince someone that they should take it seriously or trying to figure out what I and people in my family, in my immediate circle, should actually do, practically. But once you've figured out what you should do, then there's no need for anxiety anymore. You can dial the anxiety all the way down because it serves no purpose. But it really does serve a purpose when you need to be motivated to figure something out. And so for me, it's like in the time when seatbelts were just being adopted, right? And people had to be convinced to wear them, and they didn't like them, and they wanted to feel free in the car, and they didn't like the feeling of confinement. And I'm sure there were all of these idiotic conversations where in fact, there was one person in my life about 20 years ago, very close friend, still is one of my best friends, who did not wear a seatbelt. Right? This is like in the 90s. He was not wearing a seatbelt. He was just a real outlier in my life. I could never convince him to wear a seatbelt. There was no argument that would work. And then he flipped his car and got needlessly injured. Perhaps he would have gotten injured anyway, but he was not wearing a seatbelt. And he can picture what a car rolling over does to you when you're free to bounce around in it. He recovered from his injuries, which is great, but he was injured enough to reflect on the implications of being loose in a car at speed. So now, ever after his worn seatbelt so there are some people who actually do need to be shown the horrific pictures of car accidents. Right? I mean, to get motivated to wear a seatbelt. But once you're motivated, once you understand the utility, none of us have to feel anxiety when we get behind the wheel of a car to motivate us to clip in our seatbelt. That gesture now is an automaticity. And I think the same can be true of a response to a crisis like this. I mean, once you figure out what you should do, well, then you can just do that thing. And all this ambient anxiety can be dialed down, but it's totally appropriate to feel it when you're just basically uncertain about what you should do, and you have mixed messages and you can't get your friends and family on the same page. Anyway, that's how I see it. So I think anxiety, continuous anxiety, is obviously counterproductive, and we have a significant mental health challenge on our hands. When you have anxious people living in isolation and watching the stock market bounce around and unable to work, virus aside, this would be a very big deal for society. Yeah, people seeing their life savings drop and drop and drop and drop. And of course, things are happening very quickly. I'm in Toronto now, and the Canadian Prime Minister a few hours ago announced that Canada would basically be closing a store to anybody who wasn't Canadian or, for a short period, American. And so, you know, what governments do and how they respond and what the restrictions will be on your behavior is a constant source of anxiety. How long this will last, I mean, in some way, you're right from a sort of, I don't know, the Buddhist perspective, that once a decision has been made, there's no point to being anxious yet. Nonetheless, it's an anxious time. There's another aspect to this, by the way. You mentioned threading the needle. Neither one of us is a fan of Donald Trump, and initially what he did was he seemed relatively indifferent and unconcerned about the crisis. But there's another way. I always worried he might go, and it wouldn't surprise me if he goes this way in the future, which is to rampant xenophobia, directing hatred against foreigners, against immigrants, and so on. And besides being morally terrible, this will make the crisis worse. If people, for instance, if illegal immigrants or even legal immigrants don't have access to healthcare, are afraid to enter the system, the situation will get much worse and not better. Yeah, I guess I don't really see the basis for that, because if anything, Mexico should be trying to keep us out once the scope of this contagion becomes more obvious, it won't seem like this is coming from Asia or now. We think it's from Trump's point of view, it's more coming from Europe, right? So it's really just a human problem. I don't see how he gets I'll tell you what, in the future, an appropriate demand, which could well be spun as Xenophobic but shouldn't be, will be a demand on China to close down these wet markets because they actually are akin to bioterrorism. It's negligence that is so obscene that it is almost an act of war. I mean, they are spawning these viruses. Anyone who's playing with a bat in one hand and a duck in the other is just a fucking terrorist at this point, whether they know it or not. So we have to clamp down on that. And I got to assume the Chinese government will, for all their authoritarian charm, they will see the wisdom of doing that. And it almost doesn't matter how they do it, right? It's like whoever is insisting that they need to play with bats needs to be dealt with in China. Okay, well, no argument there. But I'm not as confident as you that Trump can't figure out a way to make use of this crisis. I certainly think he can make use of it in some horrible way. In fact, there's some report that he was trying to get a German drug manufacturer to move to the US to produce a vaccine exclusively for the US. Even for Trump, that seems so cart. I read the same reports. It seems so cartoonishly evil that only we would have the vaccine. It's like supervillain evil. I want to be skeptical about that, but it wouldn't surprise me if Trump just used this for more build the wall rhetoric, even though blaming Mexico for this is bizarre. But it wouldn't surprise me. Obviously, there's some data on how unlikely we are to be able to contain the spread of a virus by stopping travel. But insofar as we have better information, it seems to me that does become more and more plausible. I think internationally, we do need to be agile on that front and without any imputation of Xenophobia, we just have to say, okay, no flights for ten days. Let's see what the hell is going on in that country of yours. So that was the one move he made, which was, I believe, spun as Xenophobic initially when he made it, although some of the spin turns out to be false memes circulated on Twitter. I think there was a fake tweet from Chuck Schumer saying that this is more racism from Trump, but I did support him canceling the flights from China just on the assumption that it might work. Now, it obviously didn't, and the rest of his messaging was so appalling and insane that he did much more damage than one might expect. But no, I could I could see in the future Trump exploiting this, but I don't think the travel restrictions to date have been particularly Xenophobic. Like I just said, Justin Trudeau is doing the same thing for Canada, actually much stricter than what the United States has. And nobody sees this as a Xenophobic move. Right. It's just designed to reduce spread. I've heard talk that there may be some domestic travel restrictions in the United States. It's a possibility. It's not clear that's a bad idea. No. The painful reality of this is that this is a massive coordination problem. If we could all just agree to stay home for something like three weeks, we could actually extinguish this thing. Leave aside, I guess it's possible that people who already have it could be contagious for much longer than we might fear. I guess that's possible. I don't think we understand the disease enough now to rule that out. But assuming this acts like many other viruses, we could just all hold up for three weeks and have this burn itself out. And yet we seem absolutely incapable of doing that. And for that reason, who knows when life returns to normal and at what cost? And the terrifying thing could be in two weeks, three weeks, we could be Italy, we could have our hospitals overrun and people could be dying for lack of medical care. So that's the big worry. Yeah. And that's barring some fairly heroic social distancing, I think that it's reasonable to expect that at this point. So I mean, certainly in parts of the US. I mean, in major cities, we've all learned a lot in the last few weeks. I had no idea that we only had 2.8 hospital beds for every 1000 people in this country. And it's actually much lower than other countries and it's much lower than Italy, for instance. And the fact that our hospitals already function at 65% capacity. It would be great if at tolerable cost. We learned every actionable lesson to learn from this. Just imagine actually becoming more robust in the face of pandemic as a result of this and realizing that our healthcare system needs to be reformulated. And there's so many things that are kind of breaking through now. Universal basic income, universal health care. Mitt Romney just suggested sending a check to every American. Yeah, and it's not a bad idea. I know. It's much more effective and much better than some sort of tax fiddling. Because if you just send a check to every American, it'll mean more to poor Americans and rich Americans, while if you do stuff with the payroll tax, it has the opposite effect. Yeah, except I don't see in this case how it truly reboots the economy. Because if we're avoiding a potentially lethal virus and are wise to and therefore don't want to go to restaurants, just giving people money to go to restaurants is not going to get them to go to restaurants. So the restaurant business is going to suffer no matter how big that. Check is except for it'll help the people who are not working at their restaurant jobs and who can't pay their rent in some way. You've answered a question I was going to ask you, which is just been going around Twitter. People have been asking each other, so what are the positive effects of this event, assuming we make it through? And one answer you gave, which I think is the immediate answer and is the right answer, is that it's a dress rehearsal for the next one, which could be much more serious. So we could go through some difficult times, but if we learn from it and know how to respond intelligently and appropriately and prepare, then when the next bird flu comes, we could be prepared. So that would be a plus side. Can you think about it? Yeah, well, there are many personally and collectively, just collectively, this is a wake up call on so many fronts. I mean, the idea that we don't want expertise anymore, right. The idea that we can just wing it with a reality TV show star and his buddies in charge of everything. You have to imagine many people for whom the downside there was just an abstraction. Many, many people are tired of winning, I would say, at this point. And just take specific examples like the antivax movement. Right. Just think of how nice it would be to have a vaccine for coronavirus right now. Antivax people are very quiet now. Yeah. I don't know which has been harmed more, the cruise ship industry or the antivax movement. And I don't know which recovers first. But that argument is over. Right. And it should be felt to be over. And the indecency of it when it resurfaces should carry more appropriate than it has in the past. But also just understanding that there are problems we have that are global in scale for which there really is only a global solution. We can't be America first for global problems, and that lesson has to become indelible. The flip side of this epiphany, however, is that given how hard we've found it to be to convince ourselves that this pandemic that is just crashing down on us is worth paying attention to, I don't know how we get our heads straight around climate change. Just imagine if this were climate change, right? And you had reports out of Italy that climate change has arrived and the hospitals are full and they're having to triage patients and deciding whether a 45 year old with two kids should live over a 55 year old with three kids. And that's all due to climate change. And we can track its progress across the Atlantic, and it's coming to New York and we still can't decide whether to pay attention to it. That's the situation we're in right now. And yet climate change is this multi year, multi decade abstraction. If our psychologists are unprepared to deal with this as they seem, to be, at least in part, they are grossly unprepared for climate change, because here we have to be able to think forward to two weeks and see, here's what we'll be in two weeks if we don't act for climate change means 20 years. Ten years, 20 years. And it's difficult. It's a difficult coordination problem. There's this line that I think Ronald Reagan was actually the first to say, but it's sort of a standard social psychology thing, which is what will bring the world together is alien invasion, aliens attacked. We'd all come together if we'd have a common enemy, and that might be right. There's some social psychology work suggesting a common enemy really does bring people together, but I don't think the virus cuts it. It doesn't seem to be having that effect. And climate change doesn't cut it either. I think the common enemy actually really has to be an enemy, something an intelligent malevolent creature we could fight against. These causal properties of biology and physics don't seem to inspire us in the same way. Yeah, the time course is really hard to get your mind around when you think about a slower moving problem than this and our inability to be motivated by it. That's pretty sobering. That's a nice way to put it. It's too slow moving. It's too slow moving. And again, I think put it this way, I think the people whoever coined the term the war on cancer was kind of a genius. Wars motivate us. Wars excite us. Wars drive us. And that's a useful metaphor. Now, it's not as simple as saying let's have the war on COVID-19, but if we could think more that way, we probably respond better. Whatever the remedy is here, it's going to be recognizing once and for all how the free market is not optimizing for responsiveness to certain enormous problems. Right. And the fact that we were noticing that our supply of mission critical things is running low already. Right. Just ventilators. We're not going to have enough ventilators. Right. And we get all of our drugs from China. Right. Just imagine somebody was we don't happen to be at war with China at the moment, but someone drew the analogy to just imagine if we outsource the production of all of our bullets, all of our ammunition to China, right. Then we get into a war with China, and we expect them to supply us with rounds for our guns. It's just ridiculous that we don't have the infrastructure to produce specific life saving things that we know we're going to need. So we have to figure that out. And the idea that we don't want big government meddling in our lives at these points is just insane. The libertarian fan fiction that everyone has been reading in Silicon Valley for the last 30 years, right? All the devotees of Iron Rand have to ream this out of their heads. You need a government big enough to handle problems like this pandemics turn us all into socialists. I've seen some people on Twitter who are pretty libertarian and everything in there. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast, so if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our Subscriber feed feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, significant housekeeping today and a significant afterward. And new music, as you may have noticed, courtesy of Sophie Tucker. Thank you to the band. Okay, so I have an announcement to make about a change to the podcast going forward. As most of you know, the show has relied on audience support for several years, ever since I realized I was allergic to running ads. But it's finally become clear to me that the support model is broken. Probably in principle, the ad model is also broken, but for very different reasons. First, let me say that those of you who've been supporting the podcast are total heroes. You are the reason why I've been able to grow it into the platform it's become. So I want to thank you for that. I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have you. And I doubt there's a podcaster out there for whom the support model has worked better, but it still isn't working the way that I'd hoped. The percentage of people who support the show has never climbed beyond the single digits, and I now have several years of data on this. There seems to be some law of behavioral economics at work here. So those of you who have supported the show are true outliers, and that's awesome. But the psychological reality is that we've all grown used to an Internet that is almost entirely subsidized by ads, and the negative effects of the ad model are now legion. It has undermined our politics. It has nearly destroyed journalism. It has given us clickbait and insane privacy violations and cancel culture. It is true to say that almost everything that is wrong with our digital lives and much that's now wrong with our society can be traced to this business model. And of course, I've talked about this in several episodes of the podcast with people like Tristan Harris and Jaron Lanier and Douglas Rushkoff and Renee Duressta, zayn Neptufecci, Roger McNamee. I've covered this a lot, and the problem isn't going away anytime soon. And one insidious consequence of the ad model that is especially relevant here is that it has anchored everyone to the expectation that most digital content should be free or nearly free forever. And every content creator who tries to build a business without ads feels this force of gravity pulling everything down to zero. And I can now say from experience that even real success down this path terminates in a broken business model. So I'm changing the model and turning the Making Sense podcast into a subscription service. If you're already a supporter of the show, nothing will change. You just need to put our RSS feed into your favorite podcasting app so that you get the subscriber content. The instructions for doing this can be found on your subscriber content page on my site. Once you're logged in, it just takes a minute to do, and if you need help, just email support@samharris.org for Nonsubscribers beginning with this episode, all episodes of the podcast will be half episodes, so non subscribers will get the first part of the conversation, but they won't get the second. And the first part won't be edited in a way that makes it seem sufficient. It won't be sufficient. The point is that if you really care about listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe through my website. Now, all of you know that I never want money to be the real reason why someone can't get access to my digital content. This has always been true for my podcast, and it's been true for the Waking Up app since we first launched. If someone can't afford the app, they need only send an email to support@wakingup.com and we give them a free year subscription. And if their luck hasn't changed by the end of the year, they just need to send another email. That will also be our policy with the podcast. So if you really can't afford a monthly or annual subscription to samharris.org, just send an email to support@samharris.org and we'll give you a free year's membership on the site, which will give you access to all the podcasts and AMAs and other bonus content. But for everyone else, this is the moment where you need to decide whether to continue the journey with me and frankly, to help me decide how much of my time I should spend podcasting. The podcast has to function like a real media business, and that means it has to make sense in light of all the other things I could be doing with my time. It can't become an expensive opportunity cost. So I need to get out of this uncanny valley where countless numbers of you tell me that you find what I'm doing here to be incredibly valuable and you urge me to spend more time on this, and you continually suggest guests for the podcast or topics I should explore. But more than 90% of you have also told me, tacitly at least, that you expect the podcast to be free forever. That doesn't make sense. So going forward, the Making Sense podcast will function just as my app does as a subscription service, and then I'll know exactly what it's worth to everyone, and then I'll be able to spend my time accordingly. Again, thank you for listening. It really is an honor to do this work. And once again, to all of you who have supported the show up to this point when you didn't have to, I'm especially grateful because you've made this podcast possible. And wherever it goes from here is largely due to your help. Okay, and now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Roland Griffiths. Roland is a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His principal research focus in both clinical and preclinical laboratories has been on the behavioral and subjective effects of mood altering drugs. He is the author of over 380 journal articles and book chapters and has trained more than 50 postdoctoral research fellows. He has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, to numerous pharmaceutical companies in the development of new psychotropic drugs, and as a member of the Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Dependence for the World Health Organization. He's conducted extensive research with sedative, hypnotics, caffeine and other drugs. And in 1999 he initiated a research program investigating the effects of the classic psychedelic psilocybin that included studies in healthy volunteers, in beginning and long term meditators, and in religious leaders. And much of the resurgence in psychedelic research is certainly due to him and the work he's been spearheading at Johns Hopkins. As you'll hear, and Roland and I cover a lot of ground here with respect to the current state of research on psychedelics. We discuss the history of prohibition against their use, the clinical and scientific promise of psilocybin and mesculin and LSD and DMT and MDMA and other compounds. We talk about the risks associated with these drugs, the role of set and setting in determining a person's experience. We talk about bad trips, the difference between psychedelics and drugs, of abuse, MDMA and neurotoxicity. We talk about the experiences people have, experiences of unity and sacredness and love and apprehensions of truth. We talk about the long term consequences of psychedelic experience, synthetic versus natural compounds, the prospects of devising new drugs, microdosing, the research being done on psilocybin and long term meditators, the experience of encountering other apparent beings while on these drugs, psilocybin treatment for addiction and other topics. And in my afterward, I discussed the first psychedelic experience I've had in 25 years. I actually took a large dose of psilocybin about a week after I recorded this conversation with Roland. So this is an unusual addendum. And while I had planned to do this for quite some time, you will notice that the timing of my conversation with Roland was certainly auspicious. And now, without further delay, I bring you Roland Griffiths. I am here with Roland Griffiths. Roland, thanks for joining me. Pleased to join you, Sam. Well, this is great. I've been wanting to talk to a scientist who has seized the moment which seems to come around once every other generation to study psychedelics. And you are, I think, the most prominent person in the field at the moment. So it's really an honor to get you here. Let's just talk for a moment about your scientific background and the work you're doing at Johns Hopkins and just to set the stage for this conversation. Well, Sam, first of all, let me just say I'm just delighted to join you. I'm a fan of your podcast, found it very interesting, and there's such a convergence, I feel, of my interest in this whole area and some of yours that I'm excited to talk about. It nice. So, let's see. With respect to my background, I'm trained in psychopharmacology, pharmacology and experimental psychology. I came to Hopkins in 19 in the early 1970s and have been focusing on research on psychoactive drugs, primarily drugs of abuse. And so much of my early career, both in animal research and human research, was focusing on various mood altering psychoactive drugs, primarily those for which drug dependence is an issue and a problem. And about 25 years ago, I started a meditation practice. I'd been interested in meditation for a long time, had tried it in graduate school and found that it was extraordinarily difficult. Three minutes felt like 3 hours, and I was a pretty rapid dropout. But about 25 years ago, I got reintroduced. I don't know what was different, but it was different. And all of a sudden there was kind of a depth of experience that was just truly intriguing to me. I might say that my original training was in experimental analysis of behavior, scenario and psychology, if you will, that tends to discount the importance of subjective experience. But despite that, I thought just the basic methodology of meditation and approach appealed to me because I certainly had this strong sense that there was something to know about this kind of internal sense of subjectivity, or whatever that was. And although the explanations that were given by the people in meditation didn't correspond in any sense to the neurophysiology or biology I was learning, I was able to kind of discount that and take it as metaphor, because clearly these procedures have been developed over thousands of years. And I thought to myself, surely there must be something of value, and if I can treat it as metaphor, what can I learn? And so that was my that's how I kind of reconciled my scientific materialism worldview with what it was to learn about subjectivity. What I did have as I got involved with meditation is significant and salient experiences that got me deeply intrigued about the nature of these kinds of experiences and what the implications were and whether or not that should change some of my own priorities, how I'm spending my time. And so there was actually a period of time after that that I really contemplated dropping out of science, going off to India, as you did for a period of time, going off and just meshing myself in this world of meditation and internal inquiry. So what year was it that you first got exposed to meditation? I think it was 1993, 93. At the time, you said you considered going to India. What made that door not open for you? Well, I had this great job, I had respect and job. I had employees here at Hopkins. If I had walked away from it, I would have dropped a lot of responsibilities, I would have left a lot of people in the lurch and perhaps I just wasn't quite ready to make that radical change walk away from my entire life situation. But you were getting into your graduate work in the 60s, you said. I assume this was after Timothy Leary and Richard Albert were fired from Harvard and the stigma around studying psychedelics had already come crashing down. But at that point you were not yet into meditation. Right. Would you have been a candidate for somebody as someone who would have wanted to study those compounds or it just wasn't on your radar at all? How could one not have been curious about that? I think I would have been curious, but because it wasn't a viable option and I didn't run in crowds that were deeply impressed with the effects of psychedelics, it just wasn't a particularly important option for me to track. And then very early on I ended up, through good fortune, making connection with several different people. That really prompted me to think about psychedelics and kind of reintroduced me to the older literature on psychedelics with which I was kind of vaguely familiar. But even when I went off to graduate school in the late 60s, psychedelics as an area of research had just been pulled off the board. And in fact it was a third rail for people who were interested in developing careers in psychopharmacology or pharmacology. If you expressed interest in that, it marginalized you in a way that wasn't professionally helpful. So I never really gave it any thought until I had some of these experiences, started rereading that literature and then becoming really intrigued about whether or not the kinds of experiences that were being described really happened. And I have to say I went into this as a real skeptic. I was delighted with my meditation practice, I was doing that exploration, but I also was a full professor at Hopkins with an international reputation and clinical pharmacology and so thought if anyone had a shot at getting a study approved through not only my IRB but FDA and DEA, I would have a reasonable shot at doing so. And so through funding, in part provided from a group called the Council on Spiritual Practices in California with Bob Jesse as leader there, and in part through reallocating funding from a grant I had from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, we undertook a study of psilocybin in healthy volunteers who had never before experienced a psychedelic. And we did the study with a positive control. It was a high dose of methylphenidate, that's Ritalin, that has an onset and a duration of action pretty similar to psilocybin. And because it's a stimulant that produces mood elevating effects and because these people were naive to the effects of psychedelics, we thought it was a plausible positive control. This is better control than was used in the famous Good Friday experiment at Harvard where I think it was psilocybin they were given and then I think they were given a placebo. And the difference between psilocybin and placebo is apparently fairly stark. It's very stark. They gave Niacin. I believe. Oh, they did, okay. But nonetheless it's stark. I mean that just produces some local flushing. And it's actually a deep problem in studying psychedelics because the very nature of their experience is to produce radical changes in the nature of subjective experience. So blinding is deeply embedded in this area as a methodological problem. But we also bent over backwards. We gave people instructions that were misleading with respect to all the drug conditions that could be administered. They were told that they could receive up to, I think it was 13 different psychoactive compounds. They were told they'd have two or three sessions, at least one of which would include moderately high dose of psilocybin. But in fact, all we were comparing is methylphenidate and psilocybin under conditions that blurred those those effects. And some people got two doses of methylphenidate and only subsequently got psilocybin. And then the other kind of tricky thing we did is we kept our guide staff, their clinical staff completely blind to the design. So they didn't know the design either. And under those conditions it was remarkable that well, what wasn't remarkable is well, let me just describe the set up. So the set up, which is really built on work that was done in the presumably optimize psychedelic experiences for meaningful effects, is one in which Rapport and trust is developed with the volunteer through about 8 hours of contact prior to the first session. And then sessions are comprised of coming in to a living room like environment. The volunteers with two people with whom he or she has spent 8 hours reviewing kind of life situation. They come in, they have a low fat breakfast, they take a capsule. We give psilocybin in the form of capsule. Although psilocybin is the active ingredient in the magic mushroom, this is synthesized psilocybin. They take a capsule and we ask them to lay on a couch, use eye shades and headphones through which they listen to a program of music. And the instruction is to pay attention to your inner experience. This is not a therapeutic talk guided session per se, this is an opportunity to, we would say, explore the nature of mind as it comes forth. So that's the basic set up. Not surprisingly, what happens is what we would have expected to happen based on everything we know about psychedelics, there are changes in visual perceptual phenomena kind of illusions. There's changes in emotionality, both positive and negative, fearful changes in cognitive processes. But what was of interest to me, having gotten interested in meditation and spiritual experience, was the extent to which these experiences read out as similar to mystical type experiences that have been reported by mystics and religious figures throughout the ages. And as you mentioned, there was a very nice study done at Harvard back in the 1960s that seemed to show that psilocybin given to seminary students produced some of these kinds of effects, although the methodology of that study lacked a number of features that we were able to correct for. And it was a group study and it might be that the investigators were using their own supply of psilocybin. Well, they did. They were dosing right along with the volunteers. And the whole thing was done as a group and so it was not as methodologically tight as what we would have expected today. That's one approach to blinding that you can take. Just take the drug along with everybody, then you lose track of who's in which condition. So I want to get into discussing these various compounds and the clinical applications and their different spectrum of effects. But before we do, I just want to give a plug for the center that you're currently running at Johns Hopkins. And if you can just describe what's happening there. And I should say that you and I were put together by my friend Tim Ferriss, who I think has recently put his shoulder to the wheel and helping to raise money for your center. And Tim has found psychedelics to be incredibly helpful to him of late and I'm very grateful for him for putting us together. Yeah, and we're grateful to him and a number of the other philanthropists, including the Stephen and Alexander Cohen Foundation, for funding what amounts to the first center for Psychedelic Studies. It's actually called the center for Psychedelic and Consciousness research to be established in the United States. And we're deeply grateful for the support that amounted to $17 million for us to extend and expand our program. So we have been doing research now with psychedelics that started with that first study I mentioned comparing psilocybin and methamphenidate and that started in about 2000. So we've been at this for 20 years, but there's been virtually no funding or just very little funding at the federal level for this kind of research. So it's all been philanthropic and we've just been doing it with nickels and dimes and bootlegging time and goodwill from other kinds of projects to support this. And so this establishment of the center really allows us to put our shoulders to the wheel. And I'm grateful to have a whole set of very competent colleagues here at Johns Hopkins, matt Johnson and Fred Barrett and Albert Garcia Rameo and Natalie Lucasan, all of whom are deeply interested in this area. And with the funding of this, we can devote full time effort to these projects. And what we're envisioning is that funding at the federal level will be forthcoming. It's still going to take a little bit of time, but the results that we're seeing are just so promising on any number of domains, be it therapeutic or neuroscience, that I think that federal agencies, NIH in particular, will have to get into the game. I think the development of the center and contributions made by Tim Ferris have been integral in terms of making that happen. Nice. So I guess I want to say a few more words about the context that you're working in. We've been alluding to this, but we really have lost a full generation, if not a generation and a half of research on these compounds because of the backlash that occurred against their fairly indiscriminate use in the 60s. What happened is there were thousands of papers being written in the, I guess the early sixty s on the effects of LSD and mescaline and psilocybin and their clinical promise and their promise for psychopharmacology. And then the 60s happened. And that was to some degree engineered by Timothy Leary and Richard Albert's attitude toward essentially putting this stuff in the water, which, you know, given how transformative these drugs have been for so many people, the temptation is understandable. It did seem like a sacrament had been discovered that could cure society of all of its ills. At least you could well imagine it seemed that way from the perspective of people who were being finding these drugs so transformative. And so there was very little discipline around keeping these drugs merely within research channels. And then we sort of know what we can see the effects with everyone, you know, growing their hair long and painting flowers on their faces and dancing in the streets. And so the backlash against all of that put these drugs on schedule one and it became illegal to do research with them. And Roland, when did the total prohibition begin to lift? So the total prohibition began to lift with some early studies done by Rick Straussman, who gave DMT dimethyptamine, which is chemically related to psilocybin, it's one of the active ingredients in Ayahuasca, which is used in South America. And he got permission to give DMT to people who had previously used DMT. And he did that in the early 90s. Our approval was the first that FDA granted to give a reasonably high dose of a psychedelic to people who had never before used a psychedelic. And so that we considered to be important step and actually a breakthrough. Because if you're going to really evaluate the effects of these drugs, you can't introduce a selection bias of those people who have tried and want to try again. Right. You have skewed the population mightily and so we got our approval back in 2000. But you're right, it's actually a very interesting story that these drugs became unavailable, functionally for any human research for a period of decades. And I just wonder, in the history of modern science, what analogies of that sort have occurred? Where has an area of really promising and interesting research been halted in its tracks with a prohibition to stop entirely, maybe chemical warfare or germ warfare, but very possibly not. So it's actually very interesting, I think, from a history of science point of view. And it actually may speak precisely to the power of these compounds and their effects and their potential ability to destabilize existing cultural institutions. Because if you actually think back, I mean, these drugs, psilocybin and mescaline and DMT have been used very possibly for thousands of years, but usually they're used in cultural contexts that are ritualized and control their use in a very structured manner, often for religious or divinatory or healing purposes. And so it could be that, yeah, if you let these compounds out into culture at large, they can destabilize cultural institutions. And that may be a part of what happened in the 1960s. So in addition to the antics of Timothy Leary and his advocacy for widespread use, it interacted with an anti establishment, anti war movement. Nixon is reported to have declared Timothy Leary at one point the most dangerous man in America. And so there was a weird convergence politically in terms of funding, in terms of legal structure that just wiped out research. And then, interestingly, that reached into the academic institutions and they bought into that. There was such a media frenzy that emphasized the potential risks of these compounds. And there really are risks, and I certainly wouldn't want anyone to misunderstand that. And there really are risks, but they certainly are not at the level that no human research should be done with them. Yeah, let's hit that point of disclaimer up front. So we're going to talk about two aspects of this. They're the clinical applications for addiction and depression and PTSD and end of life anxiety. And there's also just the fact that these drugs, as you say, many of them have millennia of usage for the betterment of already, well people. Right. So it's not just a matter of treating clinical issues, but we should acknowledge that not everyone should take psychedelics and there are conditions under which it is unwise to take them. And there's a lot to talk about with respect to the set and the setting in which one uses these drugs and how to use them safely. And I want to talk about the prospect that any one of these compounds could be physically toxic. I think that the data are not perhaps perfectly clear there, but they suggest that the problem of danger here is not so much a matter of physical toxicity, but the potential that someone could have a very bad experience on one or another of these drugs. And that is just psychologically destabilizing. And obviously, if you're not in a physical setting where you are looked over by somebody who is not on the drug with you. Or maybe there's the prospect that you can wander out of your house or out into nature and do something dangerous and stupid. So feel free to sound a note of caution here, Roland and then we'll begin talking about the different compounds and how they may be different physically and psychologically. Yeah good. So with respect to adverse effects. So we're able to manage this in our research setting because we very carefully screen people. We prepare them for these sessions. They're in the presence of two sitters throughout the day long session. We meet with them after the sessions and then subsequently follow them up. And under those conditions we actually haven't had any very significant adverse events at all. However, in absence of all those parameters there are risks. The first and most probable one is that people will become terrified and engage in dangerous behavior. They can run out into traffic, people can jump off of cliffs or jump out of windows. It does happen. They can put themselves or others at risk, even life threatening risk and there are homicides and suicides that can occur. It's low probability but it does occur. The other most salient risk and one that we protect against and for which there's the empirical evidence is circumstantial. But it's something that we're very cautious about. The idea is that people who have vulnerability to psychotic process, people who may be at risk for developing schizophrenia may be at increased risk for development of such disorders with a high dose of a psychedelic. And so there are reports of people, you know, particularly in their, you know, late teens or early 20s that coincide with the the most probable time of onset of psychotic disorder who take a psychedelic and are subsequently diagnosed as schizophrenic and they attribute the onset of that to having taken the psychedelic. And that's a lifelong nightmare from which there's no simple recovery. So that's a very important cautionary note. Do you screen out, let's say someone has a first order relative suffering from schizophrenia. Do you screen them out of your research protocol? What's the actual criterion? Yeah, we do and probably we may be overly conservative but I think that's the way to proceed. We'll screen out second degree relatives. If anyone has a second degree relative with a psychotic illness we'll screen them out right now. We ran a large survey study in almost 2000 people describing their worst experience after taking psilocybin and the results of that were interesting. Now this isn't a population estimate insofar as these are people who came upon our advertisement online, were willing to spend an hour completing a really detailed questionnaire anonymously and they were completing it with regard to their very worst experience. But of that group 11% reported putting themselves or others at risk for physical harm, 3% sought medical help and 10% reported enduring adverse psychological symptoms lasting more than a year. And. About 8% of those sought out treatment. So there's a, you know, there's a significant population of people who at least are claiming that they had this terrible experience and a year later they're still seeking out help for what they view as some kind of psychological problem, depression or psychotic or thinking disorders that they're attributing to that. Now that's not tight causality but it fits in line with the kinds of things that we should be concerned about and makes us apprehensive about premature widespread use of these compounds in the general population. With respect to your point about physical toxicity, it's true that's incredibly limited. So it'd be very hard to overdose with these compounds. They don't produce drug seeking behavior, they're not considered classic drugs of abuse. In fact, if one takes them repeatedly, one becomes tolerant to their effects. That is the effects reduced. There's no withdrawal symptoms. We can't get animals to self administer reliably psychedelics and we have paradigms which are very predictive of abuse liability of compounds in humans and most of those come out simply negative with psychedelics. So they're not classic drugs of abuse. Just a word to the wise, you need to remove the cocaine dispenser in the cage before you give them the psilocybin dispenser. Yes. So the probability of getting animals to self administer cocaine is, well, at least in our studies and Baboons is virtually 100% there's, not under the right conditions. Mammals are designed in such a way that you make cocaine available to them and they're going to take it. And that's not the case with psychedelics. As far as the pharmacology, there is it thought that these just don't drive the dopamine system. Do we think dopamine is simply not involved or is just not involved to the degree that drugs of abuse drive it? Well, let's see. So the pharmacology of psychedelics is very different than most of those classic drugs of abuse and, and most of them are thought to have their reinforcing effects mediated either immediately or downstream through some kind of dopaminergic mechanism. The psychedelics differ with respect to having dopaminergic effects. LSD is one that is said to be very promiscuous pharmacologically and it does have some dopaminergic effects but certainly not to an extent that would drive self administration of the type that we see with other drugs. That being said, I should say that MDMA Ecstasy, which is not a classic psychedelic, does serve as a reinforcer in laboratory animals, does have a dopaminergic component to it. So they're very different kinds of compounds. Well actually, let's start with MDMA because this is the one where, you know, rumors of its toxicity have seemed most indelible. And, you know, ironically, I think these rumors originate, or at least they were amplified from your own institution, from Johns Hopkins. I think it was George Ricarde who published a paper which now, if I'm not mistaken, is viewed as being somewhat under the shadow of either political top spin or some other less than rigorous line of thinking about MDMA and its place in the culture. What's your current understanding of the physical toxicity of MDMA? So MDMA has been associated with neurotoxicity and that's indisputable. George Ricarde has done a lot of that work, but so have others. So in preclinical studies, MDMA is neurotoxic to serotinergic systems and that's been pretty clearly demonstrated. The issue about George Ricarde retraction of an article was one, it was a study published in Science in which he published a study and then subsequently found that the drug that he thought he had been giving and had published as MDMA was in fact methamphetamine. And there's no issue that methamphetamine would produce that kind of toxicity. But I think that one misstep on his part has kind of blown out of proportion a little bit. So there really is a toxicity, but the issue there with respect to humans is whether the dosing parameters that produce those kinds of effects in laboratory animals are relevant to therapeutic use of MDMA. Right, and that's a deeply contentious issue within that area. FDA has allowed therapeutic trials with MDMA to go forward, I think, under the assumption that the dose is given of MDMA and the number of times that it's given, and that's really up to three occasions are going to very likely be under any threshold to detect neurotoxicity. However, there are studies that have looked at people who have used MDMA extensively. These are people using high doses in rave situations where they're using enormous doses and they're using them repeatedly and there's some indication of memory problems and other sorts of dysfunctionality. It's not a clean slate. There is potential for toxicity, we don't know the extent of it. But what we do know is that's very different than the classic psychedelics that is psilocybin, LSD, DMT and mescaline that are not associated with any such toxicity. And for reference here so what is considered the appropriate human dose for MDMA? Let's see well, I think the clinical doses that are being used range from about 75 milligrams to 125. I think I know clinically in Europe they use higher doses. The protocols that are running right now, sponsored by Maps, the Multidisciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies, give MDMA twice. They'll start with a dose of something like 75 and then give a booster dose an hour later. But that's around the range. So yeah, MDMA is again not a classic psychedelic. What's the term of jargon now that we like? Is it called an empathogen? Is that a chief currency? Yeah, that's one of the terms, the love drug. And actually you yourself have testified to life changing experience with MDMA and so that effect is remarkable for that sense of unbounded love and open heartedness that emerges under that experience. And it's being shown to be quite effective in treatment of post traumatic stress disorder. And those are the clinical trials that are ongoing now under the sponsorship of the Maps group, and they're proceeding. And their effect sizes look very large and promising such that we might expect approval of MDMA as a medicine in anywhere four to six years. Just linger on the prospect of toxicity for another second. So I guess the allegations I've heard here, one is that the studies that showed neurotoxicity in rodents were under doses that were, just, as you say, not analogous to human use. I don't know what the factor of multiplication was there, but much larger doses than would be analogous in a human body. And I guess the rave data could be confounded by what else ravers are up to dancing for 12 hours straight and not drinking water or what? You know, I mean, there's issues with overheating. What's your sense of given the current state of things, of the risk that people run taking MDMA. Let's leave aside, again, we're going to finish on some description of what would be optimal in terms of people getting access to drugs should we arrive at a future where their therapeutic use is very well regulated. Leaving aside the concern that someone might be taking on the street may not even be MDMA, what are your concerns about MDMA's toxicity and the normal dosage, let's say, in one of these therapeutic trials? I don't know. It's notable that FDA has approved this as a therapeutic agent, and so it's below their threshold of concern. If given, as suggested, it should be inside that protocol that have been approved. I don't know. What I suspect is there's little risk for low dose, very intermittent exposure, but that's simply a guess, you know, our ability to, you know, to tease out things like long term neurotoxicity, given just the adaptability of the brain, as crude at best. Yeah. Let's move on to the classic psychedelics, which, as you say, are LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and DMT. And DMT occurs in a pure form that people, you know, have smoked or had injected. And it also is one of the active components in a traditional drug like Ayahuasca. And then there's also five meo, DMT, which is how anyone first discovered that this was something you could take. Has to be a pretty colorful story because this occurs in the secretions of a venomous toad that some intrepid person wound up smoking at some point in human history. How would you like to begin here? I'd like to talk about these compounds and their utility and how you view them as different or the same. Let's see. So the classic psychedelics all have a primary site of action, and that's serotonin, two A receptor. And so that kind of defines them. The ones that have been used most frequently, as you say, are PMT and mescalin, which is active in the peyote cactus used by Native American, and psilocybin, which has certainly been widely used, particularly in Mexico, in other parts of the world, as the magic mushroom. And then LSD which is a synthesized compound that was first synthesized in 1943. All of those compounds have their primary site of action at serotonin two A. And there's every reason to believe that most of the interesting effects that they produce are mediated through that receptor signaling pathway. And that's been shown through a series of animal studies antagonist studies studies using knockout mice where they knock out serotonin two A and then human studies where they can give selective antagonists at that receptor site and block the effects of these drugs. That being said, they're certainly not identical. They're more similar than different but they have different onsets they have different duration of actions and in some cases hit well, in all cases they also hit different sets of receptors and the most complex of those being LSD that hits a variety of different receptor targets. So frustrating to me and those of us interested in this area is that good double blinded studies have not been conducted that actually compare these drugs. So there's a lot of anecdotal reports about differences among these compounds but we won't know for sure about those differences until we can give them under adequately blinded conditions to people under uniform conditions of controlling for expectancy. But again, they're more similar than different. They all produce the set of experiences as I described with our initial study with Methylphenidate. They're going to produce visual illusions and emotionality and cognitive changes. But I think that far and away the most interesting area with these drugs is that they produce at least two kinds of very memorable effects. One is that they're quite apt to produce under supported conditions. Under optimized conditions they're likely to produce a constellation of phenomenological effects that really map on to classical mystical type experiences. So the description of those and actually psychologists in the psychology of religion who have paid a lot of attention to that and developed questionnaires that probe those kinds of effects and have factor analyzed the components of those effects would suggest that those effects can be described as six kinds of categorical features. One being this sense of unity this sense of the interconnectedness of all people and things. Another is a sense of the preciousness of these experiences. Some people might use the term sacredness or reverence but there's something compellingly, impressively deserving of respect for these experiences. There's a sense that's described by William James as the noetic sense. The sense that there's something more real and more true about these experiences and everyday waking consciousness and then there are positive mood very often sense of open heartedness transcendence joy transcendence of time and space where the past and the future collapse into the present moment. So it's all about right now. Space becomes either vast or endless or totally empty. And then this sense of ineffability. One of the first things that people say after having such an experience is that I can't put it into words. Those are the features of something we call the mystical type experience. And I regret that was a branding error on our part to develop a scale with that name because it's an empirically derived scale. It doesn't assume any non material kind of spiritual realities. It's just hardcore science. And we've done the appropriate psychometrics to evaluate that scale. There is a justification for it in the sense that these kinds of experiences are the classical contemplative, religious, mystical experiences which are again the experiences of a human brain under some parameters. And it's just a fact that these drugs are not producing experiences that the brain isn't capable of having. I mean, you would expect somebody somewhere to have experiences precisely of this kind without having ingested one of these compounds because these compounds are just mimicking neurotransmitters or changing their level of action at the synapse and LSD psilocybin, mescaline DMT. I mean, in the case of DMT, DMT is already an endogenous neurotransmitter itself whose action I'm not sure we yet understand. In either case, whether you're meister eckhart espousing your heretical unity with God or you're somebody who has taken a psychedelic, the resulting experience is something the brain is doing absolutely. For me, Sam, that's exactly what makes this so exciting. These experiences map on to these naturally occurring mystical type experiences. And so the puzzle up until now has been what are these experiences? Are they believable? And they haven't been amenable to prospective scientific study because they occur unpredictably and erratically. It's more probable if someone engages in spiritual austerities or goes on long term meditation retreats or does prayer practice. But by no means are they probable. And there are some people who are given to interpreting them as a gift of divine grace. So of course you can't manipulate them. And what I see that we have with psilocybin because we can occasion these experiences in a very high proportion of people that we prepare and run through our protocol like 80%. So that to me speaks to the fact that these are biologically normal effects. We're wired for them, if you will. And it raises a whole bunch of interesting questions about what kind of evolutionary selectivity has gone on there. If that's the mechanism, presumably, that makes these experiences probable and then what in the world are there functioned both culturally and for the survival of our species? And this kind of leans into your interest in the well being of conscious creatures. I think there's something uniquely interesting about the resulting impact of these experiences because one thing I really haven't talked about is what the long term consequences of having these kinds of experiences are. But it turns out that people months after this experience, if asked how important was that experience or how meaningful was that experience on a lifetime scale from like a daily experience to once a week, once a month, once a year, once every five years, ten most, five most single most important or meaningful experience of your life. We have about 90% of people saying it's in the top five most meaningful, spiritually significant experiences of their entire lifetime, comparing it to the birth of a first born child or the death of a parent. And that is simply astounding to me. So as a clinical pharmacologist who's worked with dozens of psychoactive drugs and given them at high doses to people and I'm accustomed to querying people about their effects, that observation literally blew me away. Because there's something about these experiences that people interpret as having enduring meaning going forward. So if you give a high dose of an opiate or a sedative or cocaine and ask someone a month later tell me about that experience, they'll remember it. Oh yeah, it's like I got drunk, we were laughing, we had fun, whatever. But it's a memory. The people who have these kinds of experiences really talk about the enduring salience of that experience. It's not uncommon for people to say, you know, I continue to think about that experience every day or it's just inform my life going forward. And that's the curiosity about these effects. The other component about it that I think is so interesting is that it has this strong positive valence to it, very often in a strong prosocial direction. So there's something about these experiences I think it's particularly the unity, the sense that everything is connected and the profound sense that we're all in this together. There's something incredibly humbling about these experiences. And if that's, coupled with the reverence for it and the truth value of it that this is real, more real and more true than everyday waking consciousness, that becomes reorganizational in a way that I think has profound ethical and moral implications. Yeah, I guess I'm just tempted to echo some of that. And I guess I would put MDMA into this class as well just for the purposes of this distinction. But the point you make in your inventory around the noetic quality of the experience, the fact that something, when it goes well, again, we should always remind people that it's possible to have a bad trip, that has a very different character. Here where again, I leave MDMA out of this. But with classic psychedelics you can have an experience that is very much like psychosis. And when you come down, you're having the experience of your sanity being restored to you. But when you have a good experience on, let's say, LSD, and here I would also include MDMA, it is the experience of something that certainly seems more true, more real. And when you come down from that place, the phenomenon is one of having your usual habits of mind, your usual preoccupations, the ways in which you tend to use your attention begin to obscure this deeper truth that was laid bare during the peak of the experience. And that's what so it's among the things that makes these experiences so durably transformative. Because what you can no longer deny after having seen this, is that it's possible or should be possible to live from a much deeper place, to be engaged with the present moment in a way that conduces to awe and reverence and a recognition of beauty that by tendency you are disposed to overlook. Right. It's just you're viewing your life through this kind of scrim of discursive thinking and judgment and reactivity and self talk and for reasons which you're beginning to understand pharmacologically that gets held in abeyance for a time and you have this full on collision with the intrinsic beauty of consciousness in the present. It can't just become a memory because it becomes a reference point. Hence the very common experience of seeking out meditation and other techniques of changing one's engagement with the present moment because they're both legal and they have fewer risks when used at libatum. The transformative power of even one experience is not really mysterious once you've had it. Yeah, but let me just comment that it's relatively rare. I mean, when we consider the millions of young people who got exposed to psychedelics back in the was only a very tiny fraction that were drawn into meditation and going off on a path of seeking. For most people under these kinds of conditions, the experience is if not uncomfortable, even if it's transcendent, there's no conceptual frame, there's no way to understand it. And so it's very often just put in a box and forgotten about it. And that's where my enthusiasm. So we have actually studied now psychedelics in beginning meditators and in long term meditators because I think there's a convergence of those practices. I think that both are complementary approaches to exploration of the nature of mind. And meditation, it seems to me is the tried and true course, but it's very difficult indeed to reach some of those states and sustain them. I think of psychedelics as the crash course and I think optimally some wise conjoint use of them may be the best approach to producing sustained senses of well being and appreciation. Is there any reason to prefer naturally occurring compounds like the psilocybin in Magic Mushrooms or the mesculin in peyote over LSD or MDMA? Or is the distinction between what is synthesized and what is naturally occurring spurious? And if so, what? Do you see the prospects of our devising new compounds that are even more interesting in terms of their effects? Well, let's see. So with respect to synthesize, let's just take psilocybin. Is there a difference between synthesized psilocybin and psilocybin delivered in the form of mushrooms? We don't know. They've never been compared head to head. People have strong opinions that surely there are differences. As a pharmacologist I doubt that there are meaningful differences. There's theoretically a possibility. Something like psilocybin also has other potentially psychoactive tryptamines in it. So there could be some qualitative differences. You mean the mushroom may have things in addition to psilocybin? Yes, yeah, we know it does, and some of those are psychoactive. But how those interact with psilocybin and whether they're at doses sufficient to alter the nature of the effects is unknown. Yeah, actually, you're answering a slightly different question, which I should have asked, but I was taking it sort of as a given that synthesizing psilocybin is getting you the the real molecule, and it would be the same as what's in the mushroom. But I guess some people might have a bias or at least imagine that there's a good reason to prefer a chemistry that we've evolved around. Right. So these are compounds that have been in plants and even in ourselves for millions of years. And then there are molecules that people just invent, right, and and have whatever effects they have. And you have someone like Sasha Schulgen, who was holed up in his lab in Berkeley just cranking out new psychedelics, many of which I think he's the only person on Earth who ever took. So what do you think about that in terms of just pure innovation in this space? Pharmacologically? Let's see. So as a psychopharmacologist, I think the prospects are just remarkable. There are probably thousands of variants of these that can be synthesized and examined and there are going to be differences among them. I don't have any strong Apiri reason to think that the naturally occurring substances are going to be better than synthesized compounds, but I suppose that may be the case. But I just see this area as just ripe for an explosion of investigation of the nature of these effects, the nature of mind, if you will, the nature of consciousness. I sometimes feel because we were able to reinitiate these studies and naive people after this decades long hiatus, I feel kind of like Rip Van Winkle waking up with the tools of science today and everything that could have been done and that wasn't done for several decades. And what I see is the prospects for this just to continue to unfold unless somehow this project goes off the rails prematurely and we get a societal clamp down on these compounds, which I think would be tragic as far as I'm concerned. There's so much to learn about the nature of human experience, the nature of consciousness, but in particular, the implications for ethical and moral behavior I think is preeminent for me. I think it is for you, I'm sure, because of your interest in moral landscape and meditation. And I think there's something unique about these experiences that shine a bright light on the nature of consciousness, although we don't understand it, and something to do with the deepest roots of the moral and ethical behavior that comes out of this understanding that comes so clearly through these experiences that we're all in this together. One of the things that just strikes me about these experiences is that one is confronted with the unlikely fact that here we find ourselves as these highly evolved creatures over millions of years who can navigate the world. We have vision, we can manipulate things, we've developed mathematics and language and ways of thinking, we've developed science. But the most amazing piece of this is that we are aware that we're aware and we don't have a reason. And answer for that is you. And your wife has wonderfully written in her book Conscious the hard problem of consciousness is not solved, but what is apparent when one is deeply contemplating that is the mystery of that and the sense of the enormity of that mystery. The gratitude for me at least, that arises from being gifted, this opportunity to exist in this playground of consciousness. The wonder of what in the world does that mean? And kind of the humility of that. And then recognizing that all conscious beings share that we're all kind of entrapped. This is what we know, this is the only thing that we know is that we're conscious. Right? It's the only thing we're really certain of. And once you recognize of that, of yourself, it's humbling and then you recognize it in other people and there's this sense that, jeez, we are in this together. We need to take care of ourselves and one another if we're going to survive as a species. And there's something just so uplifting about that. I'm guessing that's what guides you and your interest in developing the Waking Up app and teaching people the prospect of investigating the nature of consciousness and the nature of self. And I think these super powerful tools go right along that same line. Yeah, one of the features of the psychedelic experience that people find so transformative and it's the one that's directly targeted by meditation is this suppression or cutting through of the sense of self. Again, we we have to issue the obvious caveats there. There are ways in which a sense of self can be eroded or destabilized which are not optimal and are not what we're talking about here. But there's a loss of self which really is synonymous with the center of the bullseye from a contemplative point of view and is the thing that can sometimes, even often happen with some psychedelics which is so notable that you experience it is the thing that allows for the unity experiences of the kind you described. There's no longer a boundary between the knower and the known. You're no longer standing on the side of the world looking in your frame moment or if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharrins.org. You'll get active full length podcast world and content including bonus episodes, early days in terms of the and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app one Making Sense podcast and rely entirely on listeners structures in the brain that has been described. Now linking them together in a construct called the Default Mode network which is a series of midline areas in the brain which come online, preferentially when people are when their minds are wandering, when they're just thinking quietly to themselves and not really on a task. And these regions are further invoked when you give someone a task that is explicitly self referential, when they have to think about whether adjectives apply to themselves or have to think about some kind of narrative reconstruction of something that refers to them. And so this is, it seems to be again in the studies that have been done, that meditation diminishes activity in this network, and Psilocybin does as well. I guess I'm asking you is has the research been done on LSD and mescaline and DMT? Do we know what they do to the default mode network? LSD also decreases functioning in the default mode network, I believe DMT does as ayahuasca but I'm uncertain. But it does seem to be a relatively robust finding across a number of different investigations. And it makes wonderful sense because it really is connected with a sense of self referential processing and that's decreased in long term. Meditators has decreased under psilocybin. Interestingly, activity in the default mode network has increased in depression and Psilocybin is being evaluated for treatment of depression. So it makes this wonderful story. But I guess I would also underscore what a primitive understanding we have, the nature of self and consciousness, and it's surely going to be way more complex than that, but that's a level of analysis and consistency of finding that's really captured the imagination and is explicable. It's a great start, but we have a long ways to go before we understand it. Right? Yeah. The other confound here I would introduce is that from my point of view, from the point of view of meditation and the loss of self that is experienced there, it need not be associated with anything changing at the level of the contents of consciousness. Really you can have a very ordinary, entirely sober, non psychedelic awareness of your visual scene, say. And if you know how to be mindful of the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness, well then it's just obvious that there's no subject in the head being aware of the visual scene, there's simply the visual scene and that experience can be had. The sense of self can really be dissected out of conscious experience in a way that doesn't entail many of the other effects that are classically associated with psychedelics. There's a lot more you get on psychedelics in addition to a loss of self, if indeed you get that at all, depending on your experience. Yeah, let's see, I absolutely agree. I think one really interesting area of future investigation is to look at low dose psychedelics under conditions of meditation. Yeah, actually I meant to ask you that because obviously micro dosing is very much in vogue. What's your understanding of that and attitude toward it? Think we really understand anything about micro dosing. There's no science behind it, but it is. In vogue. I don't doubt that there are effects there. It's a difficult kind of project to undertake scientifically because in order to do it you need permission to give people psychedelics and let them out in the wild. And I think most review committees are going to be reluctant to do that, allow that, but I think that needs to be done. I don't know if you saw the recent study of we've done a study in Long Term Meditators. We haven't published it yet, but there was a recent study of psilocybin given to people on a Buddhist retreat. It was a six day retreat and half the group got psilocybin. On day five they got a moderate dose of psilocybin but not a microdose. The other half didn't. And they produce all the kinds of effects that we would expect and the kind of effects that we've seen in Long Term meditators that actually people find that it deepens their practice, they're more engaged with it. In the case of the retreat, the deeper the experience on psilocybin, the more positive enduring effects they had at four months. And that's what we found. That in spite of the fact that people may have tens of thousands of hours of experience with meditation, that nonetheless they find these experiences to be informative and interesting in ways that they find useful for their most people, useful for their contemplative practice. They're less likely, however, to find them discontinuous with anything that they might have expected out of their contemplative experience because they're accustomed to understanding the nature of mind, the nature of appearances of objects in mind and deidentifying with those. So I think of Long Term Meditators, if they come out of certain contemplative conditions, are advantaged in terms of being able to learn from these experiences uniquely. And what I'm intrigued with is what could be made of low dose, repeated low dose experiences under conditions where people were really taking them into contemplative practice and trying to learn further about the nature of mind. What do you make of the fact that DMT is endogenous to the brain and also the pharmacology of it seems unique in that. Now speak as one who's never taken DMT. I've never I've never taken Iwas gun, I've never smoked DMT. But apparently smoking DMT gives you not only what is reputed to be the most intense psychedelic experience, but the time course is incredibly short. It's like a ten minute experience as opposed to 10 hours with something like LSD. And again, this is a compound that already exists in the body. How do you think about that phenomenon? You know, I don't know. There's a lot of speculation that maybe that accounts for near death experiences or prophetic experiences, but it's arguable whether DMT occurs in concentration sufficient to produce effects. But I can tell you it's really an interesting compound. We just have completed actually I'm writing up right now a pretty large survey study in which we were asking people who had experience with DMT and reported this phenomena that seems most probable with DMT, although it occurs with other psychedelics, of encountering a seemingly autonomous entity. And so Terence McKenna spoke a lot about the machine elves and so I was just deeply curious about that because we had actually also earlier had conducted this survey of experiences that people interpreted as encountering God or God of their understanding. Well, this was DMT encountering entities. And I was prepared to believe, based on what I had read about these kinds of experiences, that they were going to be bizarre Dysphoric kinds of experiences, often unpleasant. Rick Straussman talks about people feeling like they're being experimented on, or there could be insectoid kind of bizarre creatures, if I recall correctly from his book. His book is titled The DMT the Spirit Molecule. At least one person felt that they were being raped by a crocodile, which doesn't immediately recommend itself. No, but this really kind of was fascinating to me. Number one. So this was like over 2000 people when we posted this thing. People were just dying to give an hour to tell us about this experience. So there's this group of people who've had experiences that are dying to try to explain them. One thing that comes out is that there was no modal description of the nature of that entity. It's most often described as a being or guide or spirit. Most people felt like they communicated with that entity. They described the predominant emotions that they and the entity experienced as love, kindness and joy. That was a surprise. But they felt this much like our God Encounter survey. When we asked them what attributes did this entity have? And let me just say, they're saying that this entity was more real than everyday waking consciousness. They believed that this entity existed, it continued to exist after the experience profoundly changed their basic conception of reality. We ask them what attributes do they attribute to this being? And the top ones were intelligence, consciousness and benevolence. So very much like the God Encounter survey. And a great factoid for you, Sam, is that among those who identified as atheists before, that significantly dropped to about a third. So people who considered themselves to be atheists were less likely to identify as such. Captive if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe to samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, today I'm speaking with James Clear. James is the author of the book Atomic Habits, which has been repeatedly recommended to me. Many of us go through life aspiring to acquire good habits and aspiring to lose bad ones, and we treat that process as though we're fundamentally mysterious. But as it turns out, some people have thought a lot about habit formation, and James is certainly one of those people. So I wanted to get him here on the podcast to talk about it. Really, anything you want to accomplish in life that depends on your behavior in any sense is almost entirely dependent on the kinds of habits you can form, whether they're around work or diet or fitness or relationships or a practice like meditation. It's really all a matter of acquiring good habits. And now I bring you James Clear. I am here with James Clear. James, thanks for joining me. Hi, Sam. Good to talk to you. So you wrote this book, Atomic Habits, that was recommended to me many, many times before I picked it up. It's a great analysis of habit formation and what it takes to discontinue bad habits and form good ones. And there's a lot of detail here that I want to get into, but you have an interesting personal story of how you came to this. You had an experience of having to rebuild your life in an impressive way, but maybe we should start there. How did you come to think about habits, and how was this forced on you by the whims of chance? Right, well, I grew up in a family that played a bunch of different sports. My dad was a professional baseball player. He played in the minor leagues for the St. Louis Cardinals. And I played a variety of things growing up, and sports played a big part in my childhood until I was about 16 and the final day of my sophomore year of high school, I suffered this very serious injury where I was hit in the face of the baseball bat, and it was an accident. A classmate of mine took a swing and bat, slipped out of his hands and sort of rotated kind of helicopter style through the air and struck me right between the eyes. So broke my nose, broke the bone behind my nose, your ethnoid bone, it was, like, fairly deep inside your skull, shattered both eye sockets. I looked down, I had spots of red and blood on my clothes. I had one classmate who literally took the shirt off his back and gave it to me to kind of plug up the blood coming from my broken nose. And I was sort of unaware of how seriously I had been injured. Everybody's running over to me. We kind of started making the long march down back into the high school. We were on this field outside of the school, and I got to the nurse's office and started to answer questions, but I didn't answer them very well. And I think the third question they asked me was, what's your mom's name? And that took me about 10 seconds to answer. And that was the last thing that I remember. The swelling in my brain got to the point where I lost consciousness. Taken out of the high school on a stretcher, went to a local hospital. When we got there, I started to struggle with basic functions like swallowing and breathing. A couple of minutes later, I lost the ability to breathe on my own, so they had to intubate me. Nurses are pumping breast into me by hand. Around that time, I had my first seizure of the day. I'd ended up having three more. And so the doctors conferred and decided it was too serious to handle at the local hospital, so they had to AirCare me to a larger facility. So my mom came with me on the helicopter. I'm unconscious at this point. She holds my hand the whole way down. We fly to this larger hospital in Cincinnati, and we land on the roof of the hospital, and a team of a dozen doctors and nurses come out, wheel me into surgery, take my mom off to a waiting room where she meets back up with my dad. And as I was getting ready to undergo surgery, I had another seizure. And so I guess they decided that I was too unstable at that time. So they placed me into a medically induced coma. And around this time, a priest comes up to my parents. And actually, this particular facility, this particular hospital, they were familiar with it because about a decade before, my sister had been diagnosed with leukemia at the age of three. And this was the same hospital where she had received her chemotherapy treatment. So turns out it was the same doctor or the sorry, the same priest that had met with them a decade prior that they also talked to that day. Thankfully, this story, you know, has a good ending. So I spent the next day in that medically induced coma. About 24 hours later, my vital signs had stabilized to the point where doctors decide to release me from the coma. So I wake back up, and the process of healing sort of begins. And the reason I tell this story, the reason I think it's related to the discussion we're having now is this was a time in my life all humans have habits. I mean, we're building them from the time that we're born. But this was the first time when my hand was forced and I had to start small. I didn't have a choice. I couldn't just flip this switch and go back to the normal, young, healthy person than I was before. All I really wanted was to get back on the baseball field, get back to living my normal life. But my first physical therapy session, I was practicing basic motor patterns, like walking in a straight line. I couldn't drive a car for the next nine months. I had double vision for weeks. And so I started by just doing these small, simple things that almost now, like, as I talk to you now, it almost seems insignificant, like I went to bed at the same hour each night or prepared for class for an hour each day. This is the first time in my life after physical therapy was done that I started training consistently in the gym. So, you know, first once or twice a week and then eventually three or four times. And they were small habits, but they gave me a sense of control over my life again, something that I felt like had been ripped away. And so gradually, I started to build confidence, rebound, recover. I never ended up having a successful high school baseball career. The next year when I went out for the team, I was cut was only junior to be cut from the varsity team. Senior season, I made the team, barely got to play, but I did manage to kind of weasel my way onto a college team and continued to build those small habits and get better. And so my freshman year, I came off the bench. Sophomore season, I was a starter. Junior year, I was a team captain. And my senior season, I ended up being named the academic all america team, which is about 30 players around the country. And, you know, I never played professionally, but I do feel like I was able to maximize my potential and kind of make the most of the circumstances that were pushed my way. And I think that's really kind of the lesson for many of us with habits and the role that they play. I kind of broadly see three major pillars or things influencing our outcomes in life. I mean, you got luck and randomness, which by definition, is not under your control. You have your habits, the behaviors that you practice, and the actions that you take, and you have your choices, the strategy that you follow. And you can't control luck and randomness. But if you can control the other two, if you can make good choices and build good habits, then you can often kind of get luck to sort of go your way, you can increase your surface area for good things to happen, despite the randomness that comes along. And that's kind of, I feel like the punchline of my story. I don't really know that there's anything legendary or heroic about it. We all face challenges in life, and this was just one that I faced, but it did teach me about the importance of small habits and how they can help you rebound from challenges if you're willing to stick with them for months or years. Was your ability to rebound obvious from the start? Or was there a period where you kind of tipped into depression or despair and took some significant period of time to even find your way toward growing your way out of this predicament? Well, the first thing I said when I woke back up and sort of was cognizant of what was going on, was, I never asked for this. And I think a lot of people feel that way when challenges kind of come their way. It's like, why me? Or stuff like that. So I'm sure that I did have a period where it was hard looking back on it. Now, what I remember is trying to be very positive about it. There's this interesting I've been thinking about this more recently. Maybe you've seen this in your own life as well. There are positive and negative feedback loops throughout life. And there's this interesting thing where stuff kind of feeds on itself in either direction. Like you're a little bit overweight and that makes you feel a little depressed. And so then you feel like sitting on the couch more and eating your feelings away and then you get more overweight and just kind of this downward spiral. And then the same is also true on the upward side, for whatever reason. I think as I was rebounding from that, I tried to focus on some small win, some little foothold that I could get to push off of and move the momentum in a positive direction. So maybe at that first physical therapy session, that was something like being able to successfully complete each exercise or to do the number of reps that were prescribed from the physical therapist or whatever. But that is a very small, tiny thing, but gave me a little foothold and I could use that to propel a little momentum into the next thing. And weirdly, if you're willing to do that, if you're willing to look at life that way and to continue to try to drive that momentum, you do sort of get this flywheel effect over the course of a couple of years and pretty soon you're almost surprising yourself by what you're doing. And I think that small habits do sort of compound on each other in that way. I'm struck by the fact that many of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about habits per se, but we think about our lives, we think about our relationships. We think about our health, our finances, our careers, the distance between our moment to moment experience and the experience we imagine we want in life. And when you look at that distance, when you look at the quality of any aspect of our lives, we are quite obviously inheriting the consequences of our habits moment to moment. And yet often it's once a year, it's at the New Year's resolution moment that people think about actually getting behind themselves and pushing to change something they're doing in their lives or not doing. How do you think about a habit? How would you define habit? Well, there's a couple of different ways to define it. The way that you would usually hear it defined is a behavior that's been repeated enough times to be more or less automatic. But I think there are a couple of other interesting lines of attack or lines of explanation that reveal a little bit more about it. So they are these automatic, relatively mindless behaviors. Almost like you're playing a cognitive script, you pick up your toothbrush and then you play the toothbrushing script, or you put your shoe on and you play the shoe tying script. But another way to define a habit would be a behavior that is tied to a particular context or environment. So I think that's kind of interesting because it reveals that you cannot have a behavior outside of an environment. And habits are often heavily influenced by the environment that we're in. So like, your habit of watching Netflix might be tied to the environment of your couch at 07:00 p.m., or your habit of journaling each morning might be tied to the coffee shop across the street at 10:00 A.m. Or whatever. And so those behaviors linked to the context around them, I think that's another interesting way to think about it. And then the third way, there's a researcher, behavioral economist too, I think his name is Jason Raya. And anyway, I like the way that he defined to have it, he said something to the effect of they are solutions to recurring problems in your environment. And I like that idea because you could imagine, for example, somebody comes home from work and they're exhausted. So you kind of have this recurring problem around say, 530 each evening where you're feeling sort of exhausted and stressed and tired from the day. And the brain wants to come up with solutions and automate those as best as possible. So one person might fall in the habit of playing video games for a half hour, and that's how they do stress. And another person might smoke a cigarette and a third person might go for a walk with their spouse. And you can start to see that even though the underlying or root cause is the same or similar, we can come up with very different solutions to that same problem. And so I think to a large degree, people sort of stumble into their habits sometimes literally stumble into them like we just stumble across the solution that this happens to be the information that came your way throughout life. Often you're imitating the habits that your friends or your family or your parents or somebody what they do to solve that recurring problem. So you sort of inherit the habits of the people around you. And then at some point, you get to be 20, 25, 30 years old, and you have to step outside and above yourself and realize, okay, I have all these recurring problems, these things that come again and again that need to get resolved throughout my life. And I have this set of habits that I use to resolve those problems. But what are the odds that the habits that I have now are the optimal solution to the problems that I faced repeatedly? It's probably very unlikely in the universe of options that you have that you happen to come across the ideal solution at first and I think as soon as you realize that you start to see that your habits are more of your responsibility. Now it's your choice as an adult how you respond to these recurring problems and if you have the option to build habits that solve those things in a healthier or more productive or more fruitful way then that's your responsibility to try to build those. So I think all of those different lenses give you kind of various ways of describing a habit and what it is but that's kind of roughly the role that they play in our lives. Is there a difference that you can generically state between acquiring a good habit and discontinuing a bad one? Is there a different dynamics to that problem? Yeah, that's a great question. So first I should say I think it can be very useful to look at your bad habits because and I think we all have had this experience bad habits seem to form so readily, so easily and yet good habits can be kind of difficult to build and to last. And I think it's interesting to ask like why is that? What qualities of a bad habit make it so readily formed? And so there are quite a few insights that I discuss in atomic habits that sort of came from that opposite lens from looking at the inverse. So I'll discuss some of those in a few minutes as we kind of get deeper into the conversation. But to answer your question what's the difference between a good habit and a bad habit? Some people are like well, if it's bad, why would I do it right? Like if I know this isn't good for me why do keep coming back to it? And depending on which experts you talk to some habit experts don't even like the terms good and bad because they're like well, all behaviors serve us in some way. I don't know, there's kind of this philsoph or semantic discussion about it. I don't know that that's quite right. It goes back to Socrates, essentially, that no one knowingly does bad. Everyone has a story about why what they're doing is good, at least for them. So I think there is truth to that. But from a practical standpoint, from a useful standpoint, I think we can define what a good habit, a bad habit is. And the way to do it is to consider that behaviors produce multiple outcomes across time. So, broadly speaking, let's say there's like an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome. Now, the immediate outcome of most good habits is sorry, most bad habits is pretty favorable. Like the immediate outcome of eating a donut is great. It's sweet, it's sugary, it's tasty, it's enjoyable. It's only the ultimate outcome. If you keep repeating that behavior for a year, two years, or whatever, that's unfavorable. Same story kind of with like, smoking a cigarette. The immediate outcome of smoking a cigarette is maybe you get to socialize with a friend outside the office, or you curb your nicotine craving, or you take a break from work or reduce stress. It's only the ultimate outcome that's unfavorable. With good habits, it's often the reverse. Like the immediate outcome of going to the gym, especially that first week or first month. Not very favorable. Your body looks the same in the mirror. Scale hasn't really changed. If anything, you're sore. It's only the ultimate outcome a year or two years from now that is favorable. And that misalignment between the immediate outcome and the ultimate outcome, I think, is one reason why it's so easy to slide into bad habits because they feel good in the moment and can be difficult to build good habits because a lot of the returns are delayed. And I think this comes back to some sort of evolutionary wiring. I mean, from the vast majority of human history, humans have lived in what scientists would call an immediate return environment. Almost all of your choices had some kind of immediate or near term impact on your life. Do I take shelter from a storm? Do I run away from the lion? Do I forage for berries in that bush for my next meal? And then now, really just the last 500 years or so, we could debate exactly how much time, but relatively short in human history. We live in this modern society where a lot of the greatest returns that we get now are actually a delayed return environment. You go to work today to get a paycheck in two weeks, or you go to class today to get a college degree in four years. You save for retirement today so that you can be retired and free in a decade or two. And so we have this weird shift where increasingly the payoff of delaying gratification or of making long term choices is greater and greater because of the institutions and society and culture we've set up. And yet our paleolithic minds seem to be wired to prioritize the immediate outcome. And so I think all of that together helps explain sort of what the difference is between a good habit and a bad habit. What does that behavior get you in the long run, the ultimate outcome and also why it's kind of easy to build bad habits and fall into them, slide into them so readily. So I like to summarize that by just saying the cost of your good habits is in the present, the cost of your bad habits is in the future. And I think that kind of helps describe the difference between the two. Yeah, that's really interesting. It relates to a few other issues we should discuss here, and that is the difference between focusing on goals and focusing on process, because that has significant consequences. And also there's just this distinction. I know you're familiar with Danny Kahneman's work and he's famous for many things, but one of his useful distinctions is between the remembering self and the experiencing self. And the experiencing self is your moment to moment experience of your life. And just integrating all the data under that curve is what it's like to be you. And if we could ping you randomly 20 times a day, an experienced sample from you asking you how you feel in each moment, we would get some measure of what it's like to be you. And you'd report back your well being, such as it seems to you in a window that's very focused around the present moment. But the remembering self is who comes online when anyone's asked how they feel about their life in a much more global, retrospective sense how's your career going? How are your relationships? And it's the remembering self that is the one that tends to make decisions about what to do in life, what kinds of goals to pursue, what's in this case, what kinds of habits to rethink and try to change. And there is Danny has noticed and more or less surrendered to this fact that there is a reliable mismatch between the remembering self's account of what is good and what is worth doing and who it's becoming and what his life is like, and the experiencing self data that can be reported back. So you can think you had a terrible time over the last week, but the sampling would say otherwise and vice versa. And he thinks there's really no way to get the remembering self and the experiencing self into true harmony. I have my doubts about that. We have sort of an ongoing disagreement on this front. But I'm wondering what you think about this distinction between what you're doing with your mind when you are making some kind of global assessment of who you are and how it seems and where you want to go and what it's like to be you really moment to moment throughout your life and how this relates to this effort to change habits and whether we could prioritize a focus on goals where we want to get to versus a focus on process or the kind of systems we create to produce certain results. So let me take the remembering self versus experiencing self first and then we can come to the systems and goals piece. So all of common's work is very interesting and my main takeaway from a lot of these discussions and you'll hear him say this as well, a lot of the time basically it comes down to like you will not be the exception. We'll talk about all these biases and just knowing about them does not shield you from them. You still can be the victim of all of these things. And so my practical takeaway when it comes to building habits is you don't want to go against the grain of human nature, you want to work with it. And that's one reason, for example, a large part of my philosophy is around making good habits the path of least resistance. Because what you find is that regardless of what you're remembering, self or your most strategic self would think. If you sit down, try to design out your ideal day or remember what your best performances are like, the truth is, moment to moment, when you're sitting there and about to make the next decision, we often choose what is easiest or what is the path of least resistance. What is the action that requires the least energy? And so we want to design environments, design a lifestyle in situations that make those good actions as easiest and as obvious as possible. And so for that reason, I think that's kind of my main practical takeaway from it. There are a lot of interesting theoretical or things to just kind of consider. Some of the discussion about the remembering self versus experiencing self reminds me a little bit of I think Ray Dalio has like a little division where he basically says, like, you're both the strategic controller of your life and you're the in the mix, like operator as well. You're both the CEO and the frontline worker, you're both the general and the soldier. And sometimes we kind of alternate back and forth between those selves. And I think what the best plan that the General can come up with is often very different than what it's like to be on the battlefield as a soldier. And I don't know how it may be possible to get those fully aligned, which is what you're kind of hinting at. Even doing so might be very hard or maybe it's fleeting. That's kind of how it feels to me is that occasionally I have moments where I can glimpse that and it's like how I'm acting or what I'm thinking in the moment is maybe more aligned with what that remembering self would say. But then I get distracted or my attention goes somewhere else, or somebody walks in the room or a new project arises and I had it. But I had it only for a moment, almost like chasing a state of flow. It's different than flow, but it's similar in the sense that it doesn't last all the time. So I don't know, those are kind of my thoughts off the cuff about it, but having to talk more about the systems and goals piece as well. Yeah, let's segue to that. So how do you think about the difference between a focus on goals versus a focus on systems? And one thing that jumps out to me is that goals are really just ideas and even when they're realized, I guess they're different kinds of goals and some can seem more durable than others, but many, even in their moment of fulfillment, are enjoyed very briefly. Let's say you decide to form the goal that you want to run a marathon and then you run your first marathon. Well, that took if it's your first, it probably took five or 6 hours. But however long it took, the moment of fulfilling it, of crossing the finish line, then you have that fulfillment and then thereafter you have this memory, you have this idea that you met your goal and you can try to wring out whatever satisfaction you can get out of repeating that to yourself. But the process is the life of being someone who is now a runner, who trained for the marathon and hopefully continues to like running thereafter. So they're very different in terms of duration. And most of life is clearly the process. And our goals are these brief landmarks on the landscape of our moment to moment living. But I know from your book there are other consequences to focusing on one versus the other. So how do you think about goals and process or systems? So yeah, that's a great entry point to this discussion. This point, this is one of the core ideas in Atomic Habits, which is that you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And the reason I bring that up, or feel like it's such a central thing is that often when people discuss behavior change, when they talk about habits that they want to shift, it usually is centered around some kind of goal. They start with like oh, I want to lose £40 or I'd like to double my income or I want to reduce stress. They have some kind of outcome that they want. And so the implicit assumption behind that is if I can just achieve this thing, then I'll be the kind of person I want to be, then I'll have the life I want to have. And so there's this focus. We are heavily focused on outcomes and this sort of comes back a little bit to what you mentioned near the beginning of the conversation where he said we have habits all the time but we don't think about. Them that much and yet they're kind of in the background influencing all these outcomes that we have. And so the way that I would describe that is most of your outcomes in life are lagging measure of your habits. So for example, your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your physical fitness is a lagging measure of your eating and training habits. Even the clutter on your desk at work or in your garage or your bedroom is the lagging measure of your cleaning habits. And so if you get really motivated and set a big goal like I have the goal to clean my room and then you spend a couple of hours doing that, you have a clean room for now. But if you don't change the sloppy, messy habits that led to a dirty room in the first place, then you turn around two weeks later and you got a dirty room again. And so we, we often think that the outputs are the things that need to change, but it's not really the results that need to change. It's like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. And that's kind of this language of systems versus goals. I first heard that specific phrase from Scott Adams, but you hear it in many different ways. Process over outcome, whatever. It's been discussed, you know, ad nauseam for centuries. But to put a little finer point on it and to link it back to habits, this is how I would describe it. Your goal is your desired outcome. It's the thing that you want to achieve. Your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. And if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, if there's ever a gap between your system and your goal, your daily habits will always win. Almost by definition. Your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current results. Like whatever system you've been running, let's say the last six months or last year, whatever collection of daily habits you've been following have carried you inevitably to this place that you're at right now. And again, I mentioned this earlier in the conversation. There are of course other forces right there's luck and randomness and so on. But I think largely speaking, we could say that that is true, that the things that you repeat day in and day out, the system that you run carries you to this outcome. And so for all of those reasons, I think we should focus much more on the daily habits on the system than we do on the goal and the outcome. And as you mentioned, there's sort of these downsides or these negative effects that come from focusing too much on the goals. So the first one is that as you mentioned, achieving a goal really only changes your life for the moment. It's only a momentary thing. This is one of my challenges. When people talk about like a 30 day challenge for habits or 21 days and then the habit is formed or whatever, it's like habits are not really a finish line to be crossed in that sense. It's not like, just do this for a little while and then you'll be a healthy person. Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. The second thing, though, and I thought this was so interesting when I first came across it, is that the winners and the losers, so to speak, in any given domain, they often have exactly the same goal. So, you know, say you're at the Olympics and you've got 25 people competing in an event, presumably all of them have the goal of winning the gold medal. It's not the goal that makes the difference in their performance. Or if you have a job opening and 100 people apply for a job, presumably all of the candidates have the goal of getting the job. And so a goal might be necessary, but it's not sufficient for success. What you really need is the daily habits, the preparation, the behaviors that lead to that outcome. Now that I've criticized goals a little bit, I should say I do think they can be useful. And two of the things that I think they can can be useful for. So one is clarity, setting a sense of direction. If you have a clear goal, you know what direction you want to row in, or in the case of a team, what direction you want the whole team to row in, get everybody on the same page. And I also think they're useful for filtering. If you have a goal and somebody comes to you with an opportunity, they say, hey, would you like to join or work on this project? Or Are you interested in this? You can run it through that filter of your goal and it's easier to say no if it's like, oh, no, that doesn't help me achieve my goal. But short of that, I think that it's much more useful to focus on the habits in the system. And most of the time we probably spend, I don't know, 80% of our time, let's say, talking about outcomes and goals and what we want to achieve and what the future should look like, and I think it should be flipped around. That's fine, we know where we want to head now. Let's put the goal on the shelf and focus instead on the system and the daily behaviors. Yeah. And another way to merge these two ways of thinking is to recognize that the real goal that you want to achieve, a more rational goal, is to if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, our 20 year engagement in Afghanistan has come to an end. I think I might have more to say about this next week. We're coming up on the 20th anniversary of 911, which is obviously significant for the world, but it's also personally significant. 911 was definitely a hinge event in history, but it was also a hinge event in my life. Even though I was not directly connected in any way that I'm aware of to the events of that day. I don't believe I knew personally anyone who died, but it really did change my life. I began writing my first book, The End of Faith, on the 12th or the 13th, the latest, and the events of that day really determined a lot of what I focused on for more than a decade. So anyway, I think I'll probably have more to say about that next week. Perhaps I'll do an AMA there, too. But the topic of today's conversation is not entirely unrelated, because viewed from one vantage point, 911 certainly seems to have hastened the unraveling of everything, which is the topic of today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Bolaji Sri Navasan. As you'll hear, bology is a jack of many trades. He's a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a major venture capital firm. He has a very technical academic background. He's a PhD in electrical engineering and a masters in chemical engineering, both from Stanford and he also taught computer science and statistics at Stanford. He is all in for blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, which we talk a lot about. And he was actually the first CTO of Coinbase. Anyway, biology is very active on Twitter, and that's where I think I discovered him first. He was very early to recognize the problem of COVID and he may be very early to sound the death knell of much of what we once considered stable in our world. And there was a lot to talk about. Bologne and I had a five hour conversation, which I believe is my longest podcast ever. We had a few sidebar discussions, so the final edit came in at 4 hours, and there's certainly a lot here in general. We talk about the challenges to civilization and the possible remedies. We discuss the abundant evidence of American decline, the rise of India and China centralizing and decentralizing trends in politics and elsewhere. The relationship between politics and technology the failures of the FDA, the TSA, how regulation actually preserves monopolies, the significance of Bitcoin and blockchain technology, the challenge of cybersecurity, the Chinese government's attack on Bitcoin, the threat of US. Regulation of cryptocurrency, the problems with enterprise blockchain, blockchain scalability creator coins and related matters. Life in Singapore, the idea of virtual government, the future of decentralized journalism, independent replication in science, wealth inequality, this notion of ubiquitous investing, social. Status non zero sum capitalism. The very strange and arresting idea that one could start one's own country in the cloud and then have it come crashing down to earth and other topics. As you'll hear, there was a time zone difference due to his being in Singapore. So at some point around two in the morning, I tapped out, but we covered more or less everything I wanted to get to. You'll hear me push back more and more as the conversation progresses. I think that starts around hour two or three. As most of you know, I'm very worried about the degradation of our institutions, but I'm even more worried about the growing consensus on the left and the right that we don't need institutions. And what bology is proposing here is a crowd sourced, peer to peer, blockchain enabled, quasi utopian alternative to our current institutions governmental, financial, journalistic, et cetera. And I must say, I remain skeptical and worried. I wish I could share his optimism here. And who knows, I may yet get there. But I found the conversation fascinating. If nothing else. It's a harbinger of some very interesting things to come. Now I bring you bology Srinivasan. I'm here with Balaji Sri Navasan. bology, how are you doing? Great. Good to be here. Okay, so there is obviously a lot to talk about. I went out on Twitter and asked for questions, and I won't hit you with actually Twitter shaped questions, but it did gauge a very high level of interest in our covering, really the totality of your interests and our intersecting interests. And a lot of this focuses on, I guess, civilizational challenges and American decline, and then the possible response to all of this, how we move forward, how we reboot to something more hopeful. And you have thought a lot about this, but before we just jump into everything all at once, perhaps you can summarize your intellectual and professional background. How do you think about your place in the world and the tools you've acquired thus far? Sure. So of Indian descent. Parents from India. Basically, I grew up on Long Island. Came to Stanford for undergrad. Got my BSMS. PhD in electrical engineering, ms in chemical engineering. Taught computer science and statistics at Stanford for a few years, primarily in the areas of computational statistics and genomics and bioinformatics, and then started a genomics company which ended up selling for more than 300 mil. And that was in the area of like Mendelian genetic testing, actually. Steven Pinker is a one time collaborator of mine and Friendly, who, I believe, you know, and then went completely from genomics into totally different area, gotten to venture capital and joined Adrian Horowitz, which is a $20 billion venture capital firm. Helped set up our crypto and our bio arms there when crypto was not a thing, Bitcoin was not a thing, and recruited Vijay Ponde to the firm, who's now the head of the biofund there. And our investments have been really quite good on both the crypto and the bio side. Also an angel investor in Bitcoin Ethereum, Z cash most of the major coins, as well as lots of it's funny to call it traditional tech companies like Soil and Replicate, Superhuman, Lambda, School Almighty, a bunch of other things, cameo.com, for example, many of which have been quite successful. And then took over one of our portfolio companies when I was at a 16 C and took that over, turned that around into something called Earnearn.com, sold it to Coinbase, became CTO of Coinbase. That was my kind of most recent thing. And in addition to that, of sort of being, I guess, a part time Tweeter writer, public funny put it this way, of public intellectual, I guess everybody's an influencer or whatever, you know. But, you know, at least I've I've put some ideas out there. I think I've helped influence conversation in some ways. And I also taught a MOOC course online with more than 250,000 students back in 2013. And I've wanted to repeat that at some point. And right now I've just got a little newsletter thing called 1729.com, which is sort of the seed of maybe something bigger, where I'm just kind of putting some messes out and tweeting and doing angel investing right now. That's me. Jack of Altra, master nun, brings us to the present day. Nice. Well, it's a polymathic picture, which is definitely a lot of fun and gives us a lot to COVID When were you at Stanford? What years were you there? Oh, 1997 to really, I guess seven, almost ten years. It's funny, like, the first ten something years of my professional life was sort of spent in meditating on mathematics. And I kind of thought that the world was just who could solve the most difficult integrals and the kind of stuff that I do. Then, for example, actually, just to talk about that for a second, lots of stuff in undergrad, when people learn it, they'll learn the algebra formulas, but they won't really have an insight into what underpins that. That's perhaps most apparent in, like, probability versus statistics. People will learn how to manipulate probability distributions, but they won't actually understand how a collection of data maps to that and a lot of that is actually not taught. It's just something you have to sort of figure out in grad school. It's something which I wanted to write a text on or something at some point, but it's kind of a general thing that people kind of understand symbols on a screen, but they do not understand how it maps to real life. So why did you go into EE and chemical engineering rather than math or something? That's a great question. Well, Stanford actually did not have an applied math degree, so EE was sort of the closest to that since there's a pretty close correspondence between signal processing in particular and then what's actually useful in real life for you. Transforms, functional analysis. You can throw a lot of math at wavelets hard basis. A lot of that stuff actually has a tight correspondence between the math and then what's actually useful in real life. And both of those were important to me, that there was something that was interesting and challenging for a mathematical standpoint than useful in real life. As for chemical engineering, it was sort of the most quantitative way I could get into biomedicine because I was interested in life extension and stuff like that for many years, and I'm kind of coming back to that early interest. Plus, they're both very broad. Right. They touch a lot of different areas. I have at least some grounding in everything from Navier Stokes to antennas. Certainly not an expert in these areas. Not all these areas, but I at least know enough to know what I don't know. You know what I mean? Right. So that was helpful. Right. Okay, well, let's turn you loose on the problems at hand. Yeah, you asked. Go ahead. It's good. We'll be talking about almost none of that stuff, but we'll give a very technocratic inflection and enumerate inflection to much of what we do touch. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny. I like your second astress on that, which is John Ellen Polo many years ago in the 90s, or a book that was influential on me when I was screwing up called Innumeracy. And I actually think that's a good way of kind of defining what the new class is as opposed to the old class, because there's people who sort of are self styled technocrats or they're kind of called that and it's kind of got a bad name, but they actually can't do math. Right. They style themselves policy wonks or what have you, but they can't code. I think this century, the numbers overpower the letters. Yeah. Although, broad concept that we can talk about, amazingly, it still gives enough scope for motivated reasoning that you can get objectively perfectly numerous people who are no longer persuaded by numbers when they go against their cherished beliefs. True. I'm not saying it's a panacea, but I do think that there's a greater degree of check on flights of fancy. If you're going with numerous people who are more likely to be logical or what have you, at least there's a greater check. You might disagree that we can go and talk about that. Yeah. Okay. So let me just set up the problem as I see it. I think there's so many intersecting issues here. The main one for me is the failure of institutions from government to the media, to universities, to science journals, to major corporations. I mean, this is just a story of bad incentives and incompetence and ideological capture hyperpartisanship in our politics. There are many things intersecting here and we can see the the failures more or less everywhere. I think in the last year and a half, our astoundingly inept response to COVID has been the clearest example of the problem here. Although now we have a misadventure in an exit from Afghanistan in the last week, which gives it a run for his money. But it's just everything but the development of the vaccines, at least to my eye, we've proven unequal to the moment and I do view this as a dress rehearsal for something that is more or less inevitable and will be quite a bit worse. It's an obvious American failure here, but the international system generally has failed and we see the issue on a dozen other fronts. There's this moral panic of wokeness that has captured our institutions, which I've spoken about a lot on the podcast. There's the rise of populism at home and abroad. There's this slow moving collision with China and the capitulations of our major corporations to these increasingly orwellian demands that come from the Chinese Communist Party. And we've got LeBron James literally doing the bidding of the CCP. We had four years of Trump, which culminated in a mob of QAnon adult lunatics storming the capital. But then under Biden we have which was billed even from the purge of this podcast, as a very likely return to competence. But as I said, we have this suddenly spooked exit from Afghanistan that has alarmed our friends and charmed our enemies all over the world. So across the board we seem to be advertising what a ramshackle superpower we are. So there's so many aspects of this that we could start with, I guess let's start with just the phenomenon of American decline as you see it, and then we'll eventually get to possible remedies and the path forward. What's your 30,000 foot view of America at the moment? Great question. So one thing that you said that I wanted to sort of slightly poke out for a second is you said the one thing that we were successful on was the vaccine. And I think it's important to determine what we was there because what we was was really in many ways it's funny to put the private sector or technology, biotechnology and the state mostly got out of the way and it wasn't the FDA that was developing vaccine per se. They were sort of forced to get out of the way of blocking it. So I think, broadly speaking, what we're talking about is a decline in American state capacity. And what's interesting is this is mirrored on the other side of the world in China. And actually, this is surprising, very surprising to me, to a lesser extent, but a real extent in India. Both China and India have had a rise in state capacity over this period. And the Chinese story is well understood. They built all this stuff, and there's a lot of negative things that I can and will say about China. But it's also important to understand the things that they are doing that are unambiguously impressive, right. The build out. So they have risen in state capacity, and India actually also has where, for example, do you know what India Stack is? No. Okay. So there's an article you might want to Google. It's called the Internet country. I think it's Tigerfeathers substant.com, I believe that's right. And it basically just kind of describes how, sort of out of the global eye, india's built national identity and payments and so on, APIs for a billion citizens. Okay. And they're not as good necessarily, I would argue, as the Chinese versions, but they exist, and that's incredibly impressive. And that, you know, and in some ways they're better because they're public as opposed to sort of the WeChat issue private versions. I'm not beating them up. India Stack guys will listen to this. It's actually quite impressive that you could do something like that for India, which did not have a functional public sector for many years. And moreover, like 4G LTE, they've done something. There's a project there a private project called Reliance Geo, which has given wireless Internet to hundreds of millions of people. So basically, on the other side of the world, we're seeing essentially something where the winners of the 20th century, the US. And Western Europe, have got in, like one way of thinking about it is civilizational diabetes, so fat and happy at the end of history that they had to sort of invent internal conflicts and drama to make things meaningful again. And now they have, you know, they've you know, to the they've set a fire, and they're burning down the house. That's one perspective on it. I think there's others. There's a technological one, but the the other part of it is on the other side of the world, you know, the Indians and Chinese that sat out the 20th century are going to be extremely important players in the 21st. And right now, in 2020, there's sort of this overdue American cross partisan, like, understanding that, whoa, this China thing, it's actually become a big deal. But I think the realization in 2030 is going to be that India is actually also a big deal because India is actually on an amazing growth trajectory right now that's not being reported on. You know, there is an interesting aspect where, thanks to the vagaries of history, you know, there are now millions of English speaking Indians who are broadly west aligned. And of course, part of what the Chinese use is their justification for being antiwest are the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion. And these are things actually Adam Tues, who I don't agree on many things with and is actually in some ways communist sympathetic, wrote a pretty good history of kind of China in, I think, the New Statesman recently. That's worth browsing for people because most folks, very few Americans I speak to have any idea of how China got rich, for example, or how, like India's rise in state capacity. It's just a complete nullity. And this is kind of related to some of the phenomenon that you mentioned, which is pre 2016, there was American internationalism and of course it had been declining before then, but, you know, reflected, let's say, George H. W. Bush or the sort of Democrat with a broad view of the world. It was both on the Republican and the Democrat side of sort of understanding other countries and understanding the other guy's point of view and overseas. Right. It wasn't Trumpy and chest thumping, but it also wasn't sort of this woke Narcissism, which is also narcissistic and inward looking in its own way. Right. It pretends to be really tolerant and universal but assumes that everybody basically has the values of an Oberlin 2021 graduate or whatever. Right. And so because of that, there's actually very little surprisingly hard news about other countries. It's just are they good, are they bad? These basic facts have simply not been communicated anyway. Okay, so coming back up the stack. So the point basically being that I think in many ways the 21st century, some angles, which is 21st century is a mirror of the 20th. One of them is that if it was about like a capitalist west and a socialist east, it's sort of reversing where now in many ways, like you could say the new political spectrum of the world is something where the US. Is at the left. Basically, Europe is center left. India, Israel, they're center right and China is far right. And the spectrum I would put there is ethanomasochist left to ethanol nationalist right, and in the center would be pseudonymity. And that's crypto. Should I elaborate on that? Yeah, I want to get into crypto. Let's keep talking about the problem because crypto, I know, is a big part of the solution, as you see. Sure, okay. But I'll describe the spectrum for a second. Basically during the Cold war, the first Cold War, you roughly had the US. On the capitalist right, and then Europe was on the center right. At least the US. Was the right poll of capitalism. And then you had a bunch of countries in the center, maybe the Third World that were like kind of nonaligned. And then you had there and some of them actually you could call them center left as well because they were Soviet sympathetic, but they weren't feeling troops. Then you had the far left, which is the USSR and the Soviet bloc and whatnot right. And in many ways that spectrum is sort of flipped where Eastern Europe would be considered to the right of the US. In many ways of Isograph countries. Not necessarily I'm not saying this is good or bad. I'm just saying it's like flipped. Right. China is certainly to the ethanol nationalist, right? Their belief is China is the best and whereas the US. Is like the ethanol masticist left where the statement is that basically whites are the worst. And what's funny is it flips around into its own kind of supremacism, where once you've given yourself license to hate, to send white people to the back of the line for vaccines rather than people of another color, right? Which is actually policy in some states, if you saw that it's its own form of sort of racial obsession. The spectrum of the 20th century has flipped around. And in another way it's also flipping, which is that I think of the 20th century is the centralized century and a large part of what happened. By the way, there's a book that's really worth reading. Have you ever heard the book? The sovereign individual? Yeah. I haven't read it though. Okay, so very worth reading. It's on kindle. Your audience might want to read it. I think it is an important book to understand where we're coming from, where we're going. It actually holds up very well despite being written about 20 years ago. But briefly speaking, one way of thinking about the time period from you could say from 1492 or depending on how far back you put it up till about 1950 is that technology favored centralization and that meant, for example, the centralized Union one over the Confederate states. You had mass media and mass production. By 1950, you had Peak Centralization, which was one telephone company, which is at and T, and two superpowers, US. And USR. And three television stations ABC, CBS, NBC and all kinds of diversity, all kinds of intellectual diversity, schools of thought, all these kind of funny princes and principalities, all of that was crushed. And you had these giant homogeneous masses by 1950, right, which were sort of controlled by and, you know, antenna towers, broadcast towers, and people couldn't really talk to each other very easily because it was capital expensive to go and set up a television station or a factory or something like that, right? And this is also reflected in sort of the political organization where you had these gigantic polities. You had the US. And you had the USSR and you had China and basically it was just like these geiger states slugging it out. And the ideologies were adapted for the technology. There were ideologies of mass media and mass control and a huge number of Nazis and communists and unfortunately, democratic capitalists as basically the three factions. Okay, so then what you see though, going from 1950 to the present day with the invention of the transistor things start things start changing. And I wrote an essay on this, or gave an interview, rather, at Setony Sotonye Substack.com. I gave an interview with with him, where I talk about this in a little more detail. But basically, from 1947 to the present day, you have the transistor, you have the personal computer, you have the Internet, you have remote work, you have smart smartphone, you have cryptocurrency. These are all decentralizing things. Right. And because of that, institutions that were set up during the Centralizing era are out of their depth. And, you know, basically the entire regulatory state that FDR set up in the 1930s, which you can think of as sort of the last major tectonic plate moving of the US. Right? Like the US. Government arguably dates back to that. And the reason I say that is so many aspects of the Constitution are things were sort of overturned during FDR's reign, like the 10th Amendment. The idea that states basically can do anything that isn't the federal government doesn't explicitly have, that was basically became a non issue or a dead letter during FDR's reign. Right. And one way of thinking about it, by the way, is FDR was a dictator who ruled till he died. Okay? Now, it's funny to put it that way, right? But basically, notice the economy started picking up a few years after he left, and he had done all this stuff like Naira, like the National Industrial Recovery Act, and he tried to pack the courts. And there was the poultry case, Shector Poultry Company, I believe, where he tried to get them to kill chickens, if I'm not mistaken. He actually did a lot of things that various dictators would do. He didn't put well, I shouldn't say he didn't put people in camps. He did, which was the Japanese internment. It wasn't as bad as the other countries, but essentially what was happening was there was nor near as bad, obviously, but essentially what was happening. There's a pressure for centralization. You saw similar things happening around the world, and the US. Was just like the least bad of them. There were enormous reasons, both ideological and technological, for the formation of these centralized states. And I think of the technology as being upstream of it. You know how there's a sort of common thing that says culture is upstream of politics. You've heard that before. Yeah, right, and that's true. But technology is upstream of both them. Technology influences there's a different view which says technology is the driving force of history, and every ideology has been out there for all time. They're just around in the matrix, but technology determines which of them are feasible and infeasible by parts. Okay, so are you arguing that centralization itself was not the problem? It's that we had a centralized system of authorities that became incompatible with the prevailing technology? Yes, exactly. Right. So with India and China, they had sort of refounding moments, right? China sort of refounded 1978 under Deng Xiaoping, India in 1991. They're still young enough as states to sort of ride the decentralization curve, which was in apparent like basically they were refounded on capitalism, which is part of the sort of latter half 20th century trend away from centralization, right? And so for all their many flaws, many, many flaws, they're sort of riding the right wave of decentralization. Now there's many asterisks and reversals and things you can put on this because of course, China has built this gigantic surveillance state, india has built a centralized payment stack and so on. And I'll get to that. But even with those sort of reversals and, you know, things overall, they were sort of founded or refounded in the decentralized era and they're sort of riding that wave to a better extent than the modern U. S. Which was set up pre, you know, like like 1950, right? Like in the 1930s. It's about 50 to 60 years older. Let me illustrate what I mean when I say FDR's regulatory state was set up for the centralized world. So, you know, the FDA, for example, is set up to go and regulate Merck and Pfizer, right? Not a million people doing personal genomics. The FAA is set up to go after Boeing and Airbus, not a million drone hobbyists, right? The SEC is set up to go and regulate Goldman and Morgan and the Nic and Nasdaq, not millions and millions of crypto people trading at home, right? The presumption is that you can have this TLA, this three letter agency that pulls the CEOs of the major things in the room and jawbones them and says this is the way it's going to be and that's sufficient. There's two reasons for that. First is it's sort of easier to have the points of control be corporations that the regulator state can kind of give instructions to, to do X, Y and Z as opposed to individuals. But second, and much more subtly, but very importantly, there's a book called Reputation and Power by Daniel Carpenter and he is FDA sympathetic. It's a good book, though, because he is honest enough to actually give first party testimony of the executives who are regulated by FDA. And their testimony is similar to that of like somebody who's like a captive of Vietnamese torturer during the they'd be blinking, I'm being tortured, even if they're forced to say something positive, right? So these executives are basically blinking, I'm being tortured, and some of them are saying it outright. And then Daniel Carpenter kind of says like but they were of course, exaggerating, but he includes the quotes from them, right? The thing is that the FDA was kind of for many years used to being able to torture these executives for various reasons. One of the most important is that companies are unsympathetic, right? This is a big, bad corporation. Obviously it's trying to cheat you. We have seen thousands and thousands, countless numbers of movies. And books and so on, where the villain is some megacorporation, right? Think of how many movies you've seen where that's the plot, the reveal at the end is that was an evil, greedy megacorporation that turned the mutants loose or something like that, right? Yeah. But villains aside, we have to confront this problem of bad incentives and the negative externalities of people's greedy, quote greedy profit motive. I agree. I totally agree with that. I totally agree with that. And I'm not somebody who is against regulation writ large. I just think that the current regulators, like you can go from nation state regulators to cloud regulators and actually achieve a better result. A very obvious version of that is, and you might disagree with this, but I think it's true, is for example, the transition from taxi regulations where you have a rare medallion inspection maybe every six months. There's a cozy relationship between the taxi drivers, the union, and the taxi regulators and the customers of those taxis. They don't put in any star reviews or anything like that. And then you move to an environment where every ride is GPS tracked. Driver knows that the rider can provide payment, rider knows the driver is being rated and can be decommissioned. You have real time star ratings and reviews on both sides. There's a uniformity of service to some extent, and so on and so forth. Like Uber and Lyft are not just better like taxis, they're better taxi regulators. And this is actually a broader concept, if you think about it. What is PayPal doing? What is Ebay doing? What is Amazon doing? What is Apple doing? What is Google doing? These are all, actually all cloud regulators for a significant part of their business where Apple provides. What do you mean by regulation there? I mean star reviews, basically ratings of actors and then bands of bad actors. Right? So you're doing quality scores and bands of bad actors. Those are the two components of regulation or regulated marketplace. The distinction is in the first, you're giving like a star rating one to five, like this is good or bad. And the second, you're identifying an actually fraudulent actor who is not incompetent, not a one star actor. They're a zero star actor. Okay? It's a currency of reputational. Currency and a level of transparency that is causing what otherwise would be a trustless situation. It's allowing for something like trust. Exactly, that's right. So the subtlety is not that we are against all regulation. It's that we are against this technologically inferior form of regulation based on paper, based on these 20th century obsolete processes. When you can do it way better. Lots of people use Amazon. Why? Just to look at the star ratings of products. They have built a sophisticated regulatory system that is better than the FTC or the BBB or anything like that, which is on its back foot, except when you have to buy batteries on Amazon. I don't know if you've noticed that, but everything is awful. None of the batteries were real. These are Chinese fakes, right? So the counterargument is now people have learned to game some of those things. Okay. And I would agree with that, that some of those reviews online can be gamed because there's a huge financial incentive to do so. And then I think we're going to see the next generation of crypto reviews which make it harder to game, where you have proof of human and you have web of trust and you have so on and so forth. But I think, broadly speaking, being able to get a product review for anything under the sun for free in seconds is superior to the 1980s or 1990s environment where one could not do that. Okay, but if we revert back to the FDA for a moment yes, popping back up, just a question. I think many people would consider it a problem, even a looming one, that the FDA is not built to regulate the true democratization of CRISPR technology, say, or the desktop manipulation of novel viruses, right? And the fact that it's not built to handle that is one problem. The other problem is it's nowhere written that the ongoing survival of our species is compatible with the true democratization of that tech. Right. Some tech just shouldn't be spread, right? And we need something like the FDA to put his foot down. Now, it may be incapable of doing that or will do it too late, or maybe it's not even possible given just the nature of the spread of technology, but it's not intuitive to many people that the solution here is necessarily to ride this curve of decentralization down, to truly peer to peer free for all. So you raise an important point and basically I think it's something where we're going to a very high variance world because the FDA is also stopping life extension and it's stopping antiaging and stopping reversing of aging for many different reasons. But the bureaucratic roadblocks that it puts in place, the idea that everything has to be sort of forced into the new drug application format, all of that is something which is also preventing people from living forever. And when I say living forever, I mean at a minimum, reversing aging. You can demonstrate that. Lab David Sinclair has written about this. There's long books on this. But why would that be the case? Because, again, this is just a first principles intuition, but there should be a massive incentive. I mean, take one component of life extension. There's some path by which we're going to cure Alzheimer's, right? There's so much money to be made in a cure for Alzheimer's. There's so much money being spent in trying to mitigate the appalling suffering due to Alzheimer's. Why would the FDA in any way stand in the way of that progress? Excellent question. So this actually gets back to that. So I'll give a couple of concrete examples which are observable variables. Right. Do you recall how the FDA, basically, with the Johnson Johnson vaccine, despite extreme large scale benefit from having it out there, went and amplified these very rare edge cases and used it to yank the vaccine, causing people to, in part become vaccine skeptical or whatever you want to call it. Remember that a few months ago? Yeah. Around thrombosis issues. Yeah, thrombosis issues. A very rare edge case. But basically they're not optimized for making the correct trade off between type one and type two errors. Another example that's even more egregious was last February, the FDA was by the way, when you say the FDA, the FDA is made of institutions, and those institutions are made of people. Right. So Jeffrey Sherman at CDRH is actually like it's funny how it's always reported as like this abstract thing as opposed to a guy, right. Isn't that interesting? Right. Because the reporting doesn't actually but by reporting this abstract institution, it makes it seem like nobody was making a decision to report the person. Right. So CRH is run by a guy, Jeffrey Sherman, and last February there was a decision that was made basically to make it very hard for people to run diagnostics on the novel coronavirus. That is to say, they weren't actually given an emergency use authorization. That was really appalling. Yes, but it was critical because during those critical few weeks, the information supply chain was messed up. That's to say, the state was inhibiting decentralized testing for the novel coronavirus until the Seattle Flu study, I believe literally just did civil disobedience, broke the law, tested for the coronavirus using the tools they had, even if they didn't have the respective certificates. And in that unusual situation, what happened was the New York Times company sort of retroactively blessed their civil disobedience because you can bless civil disobedience as good or as bad based on that holy writ. Right. And by kind of writing an article where they said that this was good, that indicated to the FDA that they couldn't go and enforce on them and beat them up later, that actually the FDA was the wrong the. Journalist was the adjudicator in that scenario, which I'll come back to, wouldn't you ascribe this more generally, just to the dynamics of bureaucracy and the principle of you're not going to get fired for the good thing that didn't happen on your watch, that nobody knows about, but you will get fired for the terrible thing that happened. So there's just a risk aversion built in or a loss aversion loss aversion built into the human psyche, but there may be even greater principle of loss aversion built into bureaucracies. Well, yeah, but basically one way of thinking about it is you've seen 1000 movies on evil capitalists. You have lots of different you also seen movies where the police go bad and so on and so forth. So you have that mental model of greed is what makes them go bad. Okay, just in a sentence. What makes a regulator go bad in the current environment? I guess overzealous regulation in a time of emergency. Yeah, you could call it power. Okay. That's their failure mode. Right. If the Cos like failure mode is too much profit the regulator seeks too much ambit. Ambit. Following the letter of the rule when obviously a life saving exception is warranted. It's the rigidity problem, and there's just no flexibility. Intelligently, responsible. They're conscious of that when they choose to be. They can be flexible. Right. It's really about power for them. That's why you should read the book Reputation and Power by Carpenter. Like, we're familiar with this. Let me give an example which is more familiar to people because most people have not actually encountered the FDA. So you only know about them through what you read. Right. And everything that one has not sensed directly one has not actually acquired information on, ideally, tables of data that you kind of systematically correct but at least personal experience. You're vulnerable to the intermediate the media corporation or media entity that is reporting on them. Because they can be a very noisy camera. They can distort what's on the other side. It's a noisy sensor. You have to kind of go back to sensors. Okay, so let me go to something which we definitely have interacted with, which is a TSA, right? Yeah. So with the TSA, back when we were all flying, much more but, you know, let's say warp yourself back to 2019. Okay? And with the TSA, basically you you walk up to, you know, the airport, and what do you do? You don't make any jokes in the line. Okay? When you're being, you know, forced to take out three ounce bottles you know, there's this new terrorist technology called mixing that can take two, three ounce bottles and mix them into a six ounce bottle. It's the most insane and illogical regulation in the world. That one alone. They take off our shoes and kind of go through this metal detector or the actual liquid sort of somewhat radiative scanner. I forget that exact name. Print. And you don't make any jokes. You don't talk about how ludicrous anything is. You just kind of comply and get on the plane. Why? Because if you were to make a fuss, well, you might suffer what's called a retaliatory wait time where you're forced to go and sit in the corner and they ask you a bunch of questions and you miss your flight. And the cost of that a few hundred dollars. And the opportunity on the other side is not worth it to you. So you just sort of quietly comply with these illogical regulations until you deplane on the other side and you leave. And the thing is, it's a cost that is imposed on literally millions of people every day for 20 years. So the cost is in the many incalculable billions of dollars. But you reminded me of the time when I came back from India with a long hair and probably wearing corta pajamas, and at that point, a fairly long established commitment to not lying under any circumstance. And when asked by customs whether I had used any drugs overseas, I said, yes, definitely. And the custom officials eyebrows rose to the back of his head, and he said, what drugs did you use? I said, Well, I took acid in Nepal, and I smoked some opium in India. Then I could see the full table of guys preparing to search my bags down to the last molecule. I hope you got to the airport very early. This was on my return, so I just had to get out of there without being strip searched. To that point, though, basically, if you look at how the TSA justifies themselves, it's all about the guns and the drugs that they've seized. And of course, if you repeal the Fourth Amendment, you will search everybody and you'll find some bad guys. Hey, look at this. Look at this table of all these guns and knives and drugs and so on, we found. But the thing is that what is not seen, it's the bass yet seen and unseen is not just the economic loss, the loss of privacy, and all of the abuses of that system, and more to the point, the initial raisondetra like stopping terrorists. And people have done things like sanction tests where they try to get things on a plane and fool the TSA. And it's like this very high percentage chance that you can fool them. Yeah, okay. And moreover, by the way, something the FDA did fast track through were those detectors, right. So basically, I think back in 2010, ars Technica had a long article on this back scatter x ray detectors that you yeah, exactly. People there were professors who wrote in on the safety of these things, right, and wrote a letter. And because, see, the thing is, the FDA's mentality, the mentality of these agencies is if it's dot, it's evil, because it's for profit. If it is a, it's good because it's not for profit. If it's a gov, it's a sister agency, so it's not forprofit. And so we should let it on through and approve it. And if it's a dot mill, well, they're not exactly the same culture, but at least they're not forprofit. So we'll wave it on through, right. And essentially, when it was TSA gov to FDA gov, basically they were given the benefit of the doubt. And so what's happened is the FDA waved through these body scanners that are arranging all these people, and we will see what the long term health effects of those are. But it's not obvious that they actually do anything relative to the Israeli style of actually looking for the person as opposed to the object. And Israeli style has its own merits and demerits, but Israeli airport security is focused on who could actually be a terrorist, and the American is very much not. It tries to enforce the sort of egalitarian thing that irradiates everybody equally. Right. Listen, you're talking to someone who once wrote an article in favor of profiling at the TSA. Yeah. So, I mean, the issue is you can imagine how comfortable the aftermath was on social media. Right, right. So, look, you know, the problem basically is that if, you know, any kind of, you know, profiling itself has gotten a bad rap, but any kind of humming like human intelligence, where you're actually looking at the person as opposed to the process, has been made kind of like a taboo thing to even think about. And so the result is that everybody is not just inconvenienced. The process supposed to detect, quote, terrorism doesn't even work. Right. So it's just this giant tax on society where terrorists could actually get past the TSA. Okay, so what's my point, though, as evidenced by those tests, if you need evidence that show that people could get past it. Right. So thing has type one errors. It has type two errors. It's not actually set up to be what you want, which is sort of a metal detector for terrorists, not a metal detector for objects. You want like a scintillation detector, like something that's detecting extremely rare events of an actual terrorist. Right. And the thing is that despite this complete irrationality, despite the enormous destruction of value, despite the fact, by the way, that many well heeled executives and politicians and so on must submit to this, we're in a bad equilibrium where to talk about abolishing the TSA would be, oh, my God, you can't possibly do that. Right. And it's a very hard thing to change. Are you saying we have something like so people are familiar with the concept of security theater at the TSA. Exactly. So we have something like regulatory theater elsewhere in the government, including the FDA. Exactly. And the difference is that with the TSA, why don't you say anything? Because there's retaliatory wait time. Right. You can complain after you get out. Right. But if you're FDA regulated or FAA regulated or SEC regulated or something like that, especially FDA. But you enter this dark tunnel at the time that you start a company, and then you're beaten with truncheons through the duration. And you can't say anything, because to say anything is to invite total destruction of your company. Because you can just be passive aggressively shunted to the back of the line with infinite denials until your venture backing runs out and then you're throttled to death. And when you fail in such a way, it looks like you just sucked. Right? It looks like, oh, yeah, your thing couldn't pass FDA clearance, and so that's why you've got sour grapes. But are you arguing that we actually don't want an FDA? Because I want a TSA. Right. I want a TSA that functions rationally. So this gets to my point of I think you can build something much better. Okay. And just as an example, let's take post market surveillance, which is phase four. So why can you not take your phone, scan a barcode of a drug at the store, and see every single review that anybody has ever had of that drug? Right. Ideally linked to their personal genomics and ideally linked to yours. So if you have AA at this spot and you can actually see sorry, it's a technical point if you have a genetic variant of a particular kind, you can see a table which shows everybody else who has the genetic variant. And then what they reported was it a five star or one star for this drug? Basically, you could see the pharmacogenomics in real time. Right. But short of that integration with the full genome sequencing of the entire population, what you have is something like the Ver's database, which now is being gained by antivaxxers who are reporting that our COVID vaccines are killing them. By the way, the high level thing here is what you're identifying is something true and important, which is that the Internet means more variance, more upside and more downside, more highs and more lows. And so on almost any issue, we can identify a downward deviation. We can identify QAnon, but we can also identify often an upward deviation. We can identify Satoshi and on. Right. To your point, yes, there's going to be people who come with crackpot, you know, medical. Maybe maybe just drop the two sentence explanation of of who Satoshi is, because I guess, oh, sure, people know it, but not everyone. Sure, Satoshi and on, but just kind of it's like a funny way of referring to it as parallel to Cuna satoshi anon. Meaning? Satoshi Nakamoto was the pseudonymous programmer that created Bitcoin and then disappeared. And we know he existed because there's, like, a lot of contemporary evidence and people who spoke to him electronically. But he maintained perfect operational security, was able to develop something that has changed the world and created trillions of dollars in wealth and is the subject of every banker and financier and government they care about. Right. That was something where it's a very different anonymous online kind of thing. Another one, by the way, was the Lab League theory last year. There's a website called, I think project Evidence. GitHub IO. And what that is, is basically a compilation of all the evidence for the Lab League, I think last April. And it took about a year before that bubbled to the mainstream. The critical thing, it was pseudonymous, global scientific publication. And in a sense, we're going back to the future, because Nude and others used to do this. They used to publish something where it was under a pseudonym, so people would sort of have to go after the ideas rather than the person and we're sort of back to that future so that there's an upside as well to like anonymously stuff, not just a downside. So coming back to your point, and we're like several things down the stack and will pop back up, right? But absolutely, I think it's naive to say, no FDA, right? It's sort of like Ron Paul saying, end the fed. I'm actually sympathetic to that in some ways because, like, the Fed prints all this money and so on and so forth. But I'm a pragmatist as opposed to a doctrinaire or libertarian. And the problem with, let's say, ending the Fed or ending the FDA is they're the center. They're the hub at the center of, like, millions of spokes. The entire system is built around them incomprehensible extent. Every wire transfer is ultimately linked to, like, Fed wire or something regulated by it. And every single biotech company, drug company, device company has something pending with the FDA might use an FDA database. It's not like they do zero things of value. They do a fair amount. Just simply having that be a black hole is so impractical as to be laughable. And so you can't really say end the Fed or end the FDA. That's like, what people will hear sometimes. But that, I don't think is practical. What you can do, however, and this is very important, is you can exit the Fed, exit the FDA. And what that means is figuring out a way, which is nontrivial, to build a different system in parallel and have that be buggy and incomplete and risky to use at the beginning such that only early adopters are in. But over time, it proves itself out and handles more and more and more of the criticisms and the v two and the v three and the v four and the v ten and so on ship over years and decades, and then eventually it can stand up and take over from the previous entity. Okay, so we're actually doing that. That's what bitcoin was right. Bitcoin inverted the premises of the financial system. Satoshi he said, hey, actually, yes, deflation is good. Gold is good. User level custody of your own keys is good, as opposed to having a bank custody for you, and so and so forth. And he flipped the premises, and by flipping the premises, he put the ball at the 100 yard line. And a completely different system with different axioms was built up from that. And that system has proven to be superior to one that was just edits around the current system, right? Edits around the current system, get you DoddFrank edits around the current system, get you what happened in the aftermath of the financial crisis. You know how they regulated the banks? By banning competition entirely. No new bank charters were issued for almost a decade. Okay, so I mentioned this. It was a coronation disguised as regulation, where essentially they're like, oh, you're so bad. Let's ban all your competitors and enshrine you in law as the monopoly providers for eternity. This, by the way, is a fundamental thing, is a lot of people think that regulation is like against big companies. It's actually for them and it's a way of locking them in place and setting up barriers like all this antitrust stuff and so on against Facebook and Google is ultimately something that's meant to make them fuse with the state and I say meant to. Let's say that is the emergent effect. It's not like they're going to shut down Google Search or Facebook. What they're going to do is a set of regulatory barriers to any competitor and b have a direct backlink or backhaul connection to the NSA so they can hoover up all the data. The national security stable will get every single thing they want as part of any settlement. All the problems they've had with Google or Facebook executives resisting them since the Snow revelations in 2013 will all go away, still get like this sort of pure link. The only way to actually compete with that is not by regulating them, but by having a bunch of startup piranhas and decentralized competitors go and devour them and build something better. And that's coming back to this point. We understand that in the context of a company that you can have a startup that starts out with nothing, but you might have 100 of these startups, by the way, and 99 of them fail. It's actually not that high a failure rate, but let's just say 90 of them fail. But one of them has the right ideas and it gains strength over time and it reforms the existing incumbent. Right, we understand that's a legitimate way of doing things for companies. Yes, yeah, I mean it seems like we're in a situation where it's not always possible. I mean, that hence antitrust. Well, so, I mean, but the thing is that what's interesting is there's so many folks who are chewing at pieces of Google and Facebook. Like from the tech standpoint, right, from the VC standpoint, it is very much not obvious that antitrust is necessary or useful to disrupt. Antitrust is ostensibly pro competition, but really it's pro power to say the people who are interested in this kind of thing are not the people who have actually built companies that have been such a disruptive threat to these incumbents they've had to pay billions of dollars for them. I know we're kind of going all the way down the side and we'll come back up. Okay, but one meme out there was, oh, we need to regulate these big companies to stop them from buying up all their competitors like Instagram and so on, because they have too much money to stop the competition. The thing is that Zuck's acquisition of Instagram was something where like a billion dollars at the time was like a quarter of the cash on hand. It was a few weeks before the IPO, instagram had zero revenue. Instagram was valued at $500 million a few days before, he valued at a billion. He didn't even get the boards like, sign off on it. He had to do it himself. And John Stewart at the time mocked it, and he said, oh, Instagram, well, the only thing that's worth a billion dollars for an Instagram would be something that instantly gets me a gram haha of cocaine. Right? So it's mocked and derided. At the time, it was actually like an extremely non consensus thing for him to do, to buy the thing. And Erin thought it was a huge waste of money. And now, of course, ten years later, ruin's forgotten that now it was predatory and obvious, but it was foresight. It simply wasn't. And when you are next to the CEOs and the founders of these large companies, the entire environment looks much more unstable than it looks from the outside because you have disruptors coming at you. I mean, why did Google not win with Google Video? Because YouTube was basically more risk tolerant than they were and say it's actually go and buy YouTube for a 1.6 bill. And here's the critical thing. People think, well, let's just stop those big companies from buying these up and comers, because then the up and comers will become successful. Actually, no, what you do is you then cut off the pipeline of the up and comers. And here's why. As a venture capitalist, when you fund a company, you have a few options for an exit, right? One of them, yes, is an IPO, but one of them is an M and A. And if you cut off every intervening gas station where there's a possible fill up, it becomes less likely you reach that destination, right? And if there wasn't a YouTube exit, if there wasn't an Instagram exit, there isn't funding for every exit. Like that results in funding for 1000 more competitors. Right? And that's why we have Snapchat and that's why we have Discord and all these messaging apps. Why doesn't Google run messaging? They have Aloe and Duo, sorry to some of my friends there, but they had this very confused messaging strategy because they're a gigantic company that can only do the things that they were able to do ten years ago, and they can't easily do new things, and all those things are done by startups. But you deny that there's a potential problem of monopoly that needs to be responded to. You seem to be mostly yes, you think there's a problem of centralization. Can't you imagine what I'm saying? Monopolistic takeover of one sector of the economy that needs to be as the same goes. Right? The thing about tech monopolies is there's so many of them, but they're not that many competitors to Amazon or Facebook or Google. Well, yeah, well, there are actually, with Facebook, first, let me give the sort of first order version. Of that. And let me give a second order right, where I give something to your view. Okay. The first order version is there are a lot of competitors to them where first of all, obviously there's Chinese competitors. But leave those aside for the average American. Do you have to buy something at Amazon? No, you really don't. There's all these ecommerce specialty stores and stuff out there. Amazon is the most convenient in some ways, but it is like if you're buying a chair, you do not have to use Amazon. It gives you an extra level of convenience, but it's really not that much easier than going and buying it online. Amazon is in a position now to if any one of those competitors really start succeeding. I think they even did this with I mean, Shopify is doing extremely well versus Amazon. Isn't there a story with Diapers.com where they just said, okay, we're going to start selling diapers at loss forever pricing? Yeah, let us buy you for the price we think is appropriate. The thing about this is I've heard that story, it may be true and it's something which a large company can do you but this is life in the NFL. If you're doing a startup, you are basically going against giant companies that will do all this stuff. That's why startups are hard. Right. The funny thing is the kind of people who say that story are also the people who hate tech entrepreneurs. Typically. They're not like pro entrepreneur. The kind of person who's funding or founding a new Diapers.com would be like, yeah, no, that's a tactic they could use. They could also cut off API access. They could go and muscle this or that. Right. And the thing is to retroactively deem that to be illegal to cut prices is I mean, this is the whole antitrust thing. Like when is hard competition illegal? And so on and so forth. And a lot of this stuff is just deemed illegal in retrospect. Right. Where the winner to win is to lose. If you win in the market and you provide a better product to the customers. Notice, by the way, they're not saying Amazon was Bribing, they're not saying Amazon was sending Saboteurs and they weren't like breaking the law in that sense. Right. What they were doing was, oh, they were cutting prices to give cheaper diapers to the customers of Diapers.com. Okay, well the Diapers Dom customers are benefiting and Amazon is like holding its breath to do that. Now you might say, well, they're big and that's unfair and so on and so forth. But that's just like one 1000th of what you deal with when you're a tech founder going up against incumbents. It's not meant to be fair. The whole point is have you heard the term unfair advantage? Sure. Yeah. Like they have an unfair advantage when you start out okay, you know what's unfair? What's unfair is Gmail has a billion users and your new email product has zero, why don't they give you some users, right? That's unfair that they're only sending Gmail notifications to their users and not yours. This line of argument can be extended to any asset that any incumbent has, and it's not actually pro founder or pro entrepreneur because it puts an effectively lawless state above every founder and entrepreneur, where really, even if that thing is marketed as being better for customers, who's actually serving the customers? It's not the government. It was Amazon and Diapers.com. Les a news fair, you know, let, you know, let us, let us be les fair actually has a logic to it where you let them slug it out in the market so long as they're not like killing each other, right? So they're not doing things like sabotage or things like that and then see where it comes out because that's actually better for customers. Now, this is actually related to, I believe, Lena Khan's whole antitrust thing was that customer harm was insufficient as the theory of antitrust, right? So they're moving away from customer harm and consumer welfare to like a different kind of thing. So the law is sort of being changed in a retroactive way, right. So just to finish this point, then, let me argue the other side of it, right? The key thing here is as a venture capitalist, you need to have the possibility of 100 million and billion dollar exit to fund the riskier. 10 billion and 100 billion dollar IPO if you don't have because those are rare, right? That's like you need to have the possibility of singles and doubles, not just swing for the fences every single time because you'll get fewer hits. And so if you cut that off, what actually happens is it's not like, oh, there's way more companies that go IPO, it's way fewer. Because when you remove the deepest pocketed bidders from the auction, when these big companies can't buy it anymore, there's a whole buyer that's being taken out from the market. And that means the venture capitalist makes less money and that means there's less money for venture capital, that means there's less money for startups. So the number of startups shrinks. So when you cut off acquisition, you cut off the number of startups and so you actually cut off competition to these institutions. So it seems like a first order thing. It was compelling to some people. I think it's the stupidest thing in the world if you're on the other side. But it seems some people, oh, if you stop the big companies from buying their competitors, then we'll have more competitors. Actually, if you stop them from buying their competitors, it will be far fewer because venture capitalists will fund far fewer of them. Right, okay. So now let me argue the other point of it, right, which is Glenn Greenwald, who I'm friendly with on Twitter or whatever, but basically him and I have sort of had kind of parallel migrations in some way where over the last eight years I have become much more skeptical of centralized corporate power. And I think he's become much more skeptical of sort of legacy media. And you know, if over the could see the conflict, a lot of the conflict was tech versus media. That was just one theater of our global social war, you know. And that's why I think of it as by the way, not the civil war, but the social war. I'll come back to that point. What it is now, it's not tech versus media, it's decentralized tech and media, like substack and crypto and so on, versus centralized tech and media, namely the legacy incumbents who are losing a lot of their smartest people but still have the distribution. And the reason I have become skeptical of corporate power is that the argument that folks will do things that are in the interests of their customers and their shareholders and so on is not the case when you have these ideological mind viruses out there. At least it's not obviously the case. They may be responsive not to their fiduciaries, but to the Twitter mob. They may be responsible not to the customers, but to the politicians who are funded by the Twitter mob. And I've seen that take over and brainwash and put employees and crazy people into many of these companies. And so you know, for that reason, you know, I I can't give three cheers for antitrust, but I can give half a cheer for it. In the same way that sort of one can argue that the antitrust attack on Microsoft in the late ninety s and early 2000s, what it did is and there's people at Microsoft who might argue with this, but here's like one history of it, right? Essentially Gates who is this Nietzsche and will to power CEO despite looking like a nerd in the digital realm, he's like a level 99 super jacked, like Avatar with all the muscles and gigantic flaming sword. So Gates basically had won everything going up into the year 2000, but he caused a bandwagoning among everybody who he'd beaten, right, from sun to Netscape and so on and so forth. And the antitrust, sort of what you call it, prosecution, persecution, whatever, of Microsoft distracted them enough and then it led to bomber's assent and then under bomber basically Microsoft sort of was number two in everything. That's to say, they did Xbox because PlayStation was out there, so they couldn't be accused of being a monopolist. They're doing Bing because Google was out there, so not accused of being a monopolist. They did the zoom because the ipod was out there, so they can't be accused of being monopolist, right? So like I'm number two, right? I'm in a competitive market and once you start thinking that the goal is just to maintain competition while the other person, Google or what have you, was playing to win. You just had a different mindset creep in. Microsoft could no longer play to win. It is remarkable in a testament to Gates and to Bomber, frankly, that he stepped down and that Sethi was able to take over and turn the thing around. It's very, very difficult to turn around a tech company of any scale, let alone that scale. It's actually seth Nodella, the CEO of Microsoft, is one of the most unheralded, like super geniuses around for what he did. The surgery, the speed of the surgery he did on Microsoft to turn it into what it is now, where he gave it a second set of legs, he rebooted it for open source. It's like a refounding moment or whatever. He has this book on it called Hit Refresh where it changes some of the elements on the page, but not all of them. That was why he said it's a refresh. Point being though, that basically the antitrust attack on Microsoft. You can argue that it distracted them enough, it made the giant blink and then it cleared the way for the Tech disruptors to take place. But the critical thing was that without those Tech Disruptors there, the government action alone would have simply like frozen Microsoft in place. Okay? You needed the tech disruption component and frankly that was actually the more important component because simply regulating Microsoft would not have gotten you Google Maps. Right? Simply regulating Microsoft would not have gotten you the iPhone. Simply regulating Microsoft would not have gotten you PlayStation or Open Source or GitHub or any of this other stuff, right? And in the same way, like the antitrust thing, what it will do is it will distract these five tech giants, right? The Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and the Volkswagen will now be busy producing lots of documents for the federal government. That's somewhat amusing. And basically what it will do is it will result in many of their best leaving. But for where? And that's a critical thing. There has to be that second component because you need a vision of something better. Again, going to connect to the earlier point. It's not simply end the Fed or end the FDA that's impractical. End Google or end Facebook is impractical. You can exit them and build something better. And what does that look like? And I argue it basically looks like a crypto version of everything. So now should I talk about that? Like the kind of crypto plan for disrupting every yeah, let's give a maybe a ten minute primer on blockchain and cryptocurrency. I don't know how much knowledge to assume on the part of my audience, but I think it's worth putting the most important concepts in view and just why migrating away from an environment of trusted third parties is important. Sure. Okay, so there's a ton obviously I can say on blockchain and cryptocurrencies and bitcoin and so on. But first, if you only understand one thing just a motivating bitcoin. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at samharris at./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris little housekeeping here. First, I just had my town hall event for subscribers. That was a very interesting experiment. Unfortunately, I had a migraine for it, which was a bit of bad luck. But other than that, I'm happy to say that I think we nailed the look of the thing. The whole thing was staged and directed by Stephen Brill, and I think it really is the best looking live stream I've ever seen. So the look has been achieved. Now I just need to tinker with the format. But we will definitely run this experiment again because I think it looks promising and I will let you all know when that will happen. Many thanks to Stephen and his team for doing a more professional job than I could have imagined possible. And many thanks to my friend Eric Weinstein for joining me on stage. Let's see what else here. I was just on Kara Swisher's podcast recode, which is produced by Vox Media. That was fascinating. As you might recall, Kara and I collided on Twitter a little bit and then we wound up doing a podcast to explore and process our differences. In my world, that was fine. In her world, it seems to have been quite controversial. She was immediately deluged with criticism for having platformed me. Many of her fans just began shrieking their unwillingness to even listen to our conversation. All I can say is the response demonstrated the truth of my claim that the kinds of smears I've been complaining about actually work. At one point, I told Kara that the effect of Ezra Klein's articles in Vox about my conversation with Charles Murray were to paint me as a racist, and she seemed to doubt that. But when you look at the response of the Vox Recode audience, you need no further evidence. On that point, much of her audience responded as though she had Richard Spencer on the podcast. So it's quite insane out there and I must say I'm happy to be spending much less time even looking at social media. Thank you, Kara, for being willing to have a conversation. I enjoyed hanging with you and hopefully the smart subset of your audience will understand what happened there. I'm very happy to say that my wife Annika has her first book for Grownups coming out. It is called Conscious A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, and it's coming out early next month. June 4 is the pub date, but it is available for preorder now on Amazon and elsewhere. And I won't flog it too hard here, but it really is a beautiful analysis of what is so fascinating about the mystery of consciousness. And I must say she has better endorsements on this book than I have ever gotten for any of my books. I'll read you a couple here. Adam Grant says, Conscious offers the clearest, most compelling explanation I've ever seen of consciousness. Max Tegmark says, in this gem of a book, Anika Harris tackles consciousness controversies with incisive rigor and clarity in a style that's accessible and captivating, yet never dumbed down. Adam Frank the Astrophysicist says, A remarkably focused, concise, and provocative overview of the problem of mind. Marco Jacoboni Neuroscientist says, I have read many, many great books on consciousness in my life. As a neuroscientist, Conscious tops them all hands down. It deals with unsolved questions and dizzying concepts, with a graciousness and clarity that leaves the reader deeply satisfied. Anyway, she has many other blurbs here from Sean Carroll and Gavin Debecker, natalia Holt, Christoph Coke, Tim Urban maybe I'll just read the one from Natalia Holt here to close out. Natalia wrote the New York Times bestseller Rise of the Rocket Girls. Harris holds a mirror up to ourselves, and the reflection she casts is wondrously unfamiliar. In salient prose that intertwines science and philosophy, Harris turns her joyful curiosity on the nature of awareness. Every sentence of this book works upon the next, delving the reader deeper into an exploration of consciousness. While most books that contemplate the mysteries of the universe make one feel small in comparison, conscious gives the reader an undeniable sense of presence. Anyway, I am very proud of her, as perhaps you can tell, and I am looking forward to seeing the book out in the world. What else? Here the waking up app. We are still adding new content and new features, and we are now reaching out to businesses, so enterprise partnerships are now available. If you're interested in exploring that, please send an email to enterprise@wakingup.com. And please keep the reviews coming in the App store. Those are extremely helpful. And send all bug reports to support@wakingup.com. Occasionally an update will break something. The best way for us to fix that quickly is to hear from you all. So thank you for the continuing feedback. And now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Nicholas Kristakis. Nicholas has been on the podcast before, but that was before he had his new book, Blueprint The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. This is a scientific look at all that is right with us as social primates and creators of culture, and it's a fascinating story. We get into much of it here, though we digress. It's always great to speak with Nicholas. He has a wonderful laugh as you'll hear. Nicholas Kristakis is a physician and sociologist who explores the ancient origins and modern implications of human nature. He directs the Human nature lab at Yale University, where he's the sterling professor of social and natural science in the departments of sociology, medicine, ecology and evolutionary biology, statistics and data science and biomedical engineering. He is the coordinator of the Yale Institute of Network Science and the co author of Connected. And now I bring you Nicholas Kristakis. I am here with Nicholas Kristakis. Nicholas, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Sam, thank you so much for having me. So as you are a returning champion, I don't need to introduce you at especially great length. Last time we spoke about your adventures in the quad at Yale, which was the controversy that brought you into prominence outside of science on culture war issues. We're going to talk a lot about culture and so I'm sure we'll wind up stumbling onto these controversies from another angle. But I'll just remind people that you were the the long suffering professor standing in the quad at Yale being hectored by a mob of students. And you're, if I recall, not so keen to dredge much out of that episode. But the reason for our discussion today is you've written a fascinating book titled Blueprint, which is a I'll let you introduce your purpose in writing this book, but it's really interesting social science that we'll be talking about. Yeah, it's sort of ironic to me a little bit. I knew when the book was published and that I would be speaking about it, that it would be unavoidable, that questions would come up or people would mention the experience I had at Yale in 2015. And I was really dreading it because it's something I want to leave behind me. I had this very good fortune of Frank Rooney interviewing me and he very kindly sort of framed our experience honestly. And I think that allowed me to really put it behind me. I mean, I told him that this was not even one of the ten worst things that it was in the ten worst things that's happened to me in my life, but not the worst thing. And we did our best in challenging circumstances and are happy to leave it behind us. It was interesting to me, though, I'll say a couple of things. One is that I had begun this book about ten years ago, and if anything, the events of that year delayed me my completing the book by a year or two, but actually increased my interest in writing it because of a number of reasons. First of all, I am committed to the claim that human beings are fundamentally good, and I'm sure we'll be talking about that, but also because in the in the courtyard that day, some of the things that I had studied for so long and had been thinking about for so long were so manifest. For instance, the way in which people can de individuate, which is a quality we have evolved for good reasons, that is to say, to suspend our own personal interests in order to advance the interests of a group, to lose our sense of personal identity and sort of fuse with a group. But when carried to an extreme, you get things like mobs and witch trials and all kinds of other horrors. And the challenge in that type of a circumstance is to cultivate or you get the kind of us versus them mentality that Brooke Snow shared understanding. And the challenge in that type of a circumstance is to get people to see themselves as individuals, not as members of a group. And I remember in the courtyard that day as I watched the students de individuate and suspend their own identity, and I remember thinking to myself, I have to get them to see me as a person, and I have to get them to see that I see them as individuals, not as members of some class of people. And that's why I started asking them to introduce themselves. I said, hi, I'm Nicholas. What's your name? And that was rather deliberate, actually, on my part. I think it's good manners, but it was also rather deliberate anyway. So there is some connection, but not a great one, between those events and the ideas in the book. Yeah, well, I think there's a lot in the sense that you just flagged one where so much that is good about us, or at least has been necessary to our success in the past, is also bad about us in in a modern context, at least potentially so. So it's pretty hard to see how in most circumstances, de individuating is a desirable psychological trait, except, as you point out, it's immensely energizing and canceling of friction. It's a great aid to cooperation. A mob, if nothing else, is cooperating toward a common purpose. And so much of the fragmentation of our society, one could attribute it to some degree to both capacities. We have we have a kind of radical individualism where everyone seems to feel that they need an opinion on everything. Everyone is an expert, at least potentially so. And this is being amplified by social media, but then it's giving us these cascades of mob like behavior, which is, I would argue, not just staying on social media, but surging out into the real world. When I saw what you were experiencing at Yale and what I've seen on other campuses and in the tech community in particular, this kind of moral panic is not just staying on campuses. It does seem like an expression, or at least it seems plausible to suspect that this is a real world expression of a phenomenon that's mostly happening on social media. At least it's being energized by what's happening on social media. It's just where where are people getting their information and their attitudes and their convictions that in this case, in the local circumstance, you experienced that Yale is a theater of intolerable oppression. Right. Well, okay, so you've identified like five different topics as far as I'm concerned. Good luck with that. Yes. Hang one of them has to do with the kind of spread of disbelief not disbelief, the spread of false beliefs and why people will willingly believe things which are false. And I know you've thought a lot about this and talked a lot about it, and that itself is an interesting topic. And actually, paradoxically, the willing embrace of something manifestly false is precisely often how one demonstrates belonging in a group. The belief that in religious beliefs, many religious beliefs have this character where you're called upon to believe things which clearly are not true. And that's a signal that you are a member of this group and that you have a certain kind of faith, for instance. But you also highlighted a number of other features, one of which I'd like to go back to. I do want to now risk diverting you on a diversion stand, but I want to flag that point because that's such a good one and I notice it in other contexts. So much of the support for Trump that I find impossible to get my mind around in that people will apparently believe the unbelievable or accept the obvious contempt for truth that comes at great cost. It is a kind of loyalty test. It is an in group signal which if you're not in the group, seems totally perverse. Yes, I think that's all right. And I also think there's another thread we can come to that. And there's another thread that relates to the way in which the book the subtitle of the book is the Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. There's a way in which natural selection has shaped our social interaction style. For example, the structure of our social networks, which I talk about so as to optimize the flow of useful information. So if you think about it, in the extreme case, you might have a case in which nobody interacts with anybody. That's called a null set. In a network, there are no connections. There's no spread of information there. And in the other extreme, you have a fully saturated graph, a set in which everyone is connected to everyone else. That's also not efficient. You have too much inputs. So in between, there are myriad possible, you know, extraordinarily large number of possible arrangements of social networks. And it's not a coincidence that that natural selection has shaped our pattern of friendship formation in a fashion that, for instance, optimizes our ability to work together and communicate useful and reliable information. Which ultimately, I would argue, is our capacity for culture, which in turn, is ultimately our source of wealth, health, and our ability to manifest a kind of social conquest of the earth. As the O. Wilson says. What makes us. Such a successful species able to occupy niches everywhere on the planet is not our bodies but our minds which give us the capacity for culture and give us the capacity to, you know, find water in the desert and invent kayaks in the Arctic. So anyway, that's another topic. But what I'd like to go back, if I may, is to your original question about groupiness and de individuation. First of all, de individuation is very valuable if you need a group to take risks, for example, to engage in defense against attacks by other groups. You don't want everybody afraid for their own life unable or unwilling to band together to mount a defense or to work together to bring down a mastodon, some large game animal. You need some kind of sense of commitment to the group. And it's very clearly the case that natural selection has shaped us to be able to cooperate with others and in particular in our species, with genetically unrelated individuals. This is one of the key ways in which we differ, for example, from ants and termites and wasps and other youth social insects is that we're not clones. We're each different. And it's amazing that we have this capacity for friendship with unrelated individuals which will also come back to but having said all that, very quickly I'd like to go back to the groupiness. And so here's the thing. Imagine you have a large population let's put it in modern terms. Imagine. You have the United States. You have Americans. And underneath that large category you have groups which could be defined by religion or language or ethnicity or immigrant status or sexuality or whatever occupation. And then below that, you have individuals, the constituent individuals which make up a society. If we are struggling with tribalism, which we are around the world today and which, incidentally, we always have been a challenge. So in the middle level, you have these groups which draw very bright distinctions between us and them and they grant us a great amount of charity and them are seen as the enemy. The political parties, too, by the way, the reason we have this type of us versus them mentality and this desire to form these groups, one of the reasons is to reduce the scale. In other words, in order to cooperate, as I mentioned a bit earlier with that example of the networks, in order to cooperate, it's too challenging to have to cooperate with everybody. So natural selection has equipped us with the capacity to make these distinctions between us and them. In part, many believe, and I agree, to make it possible for us to cooperate. In other words, there's a kind of coevolution this kind of xenophobia or parochialism or tribalism has coevolved with our capacity for altruism and kindness and cooperation. So this this very thing which gives us trouble is also the very one of the very things which makes it possible for us to be nice to each other because otherwise the challenge would be nice to everybody, which isn't an easy thing to achieve. Didn't Samuel Bowles do that game? Theoretic work? Yeah. Sam balls. Exactly. And Sergey Gabrieltz and Robert Axelrod. And many people have done work like that in the middle. One of the tools we have to foster cooperation is to, because of the challenge of scale, is to have this type of groupiness. Incidentally, this serves other purposes, but for present purposes, going back to our thing, we got America, we've had groups, we've got individuals. One way to tackle tribalism is to take advantage of some of our evolutionary machinery and step up a level to the level of the whole country and use our capacity to define groups and define the group more broadly, like, we are all Americans. And this has always been part of our history. It's in fact, part of the American ideal, part of the American Project. Anyone can be an American. We are one of the few nations the American Project is one of the few nations where you just arrive on our shores. You commit to the Bill of Rights and certain liberal principles and you can become an American. It's not defined along ethnic or religious or any such ground. So we've not always adhered to these ideals, obviously, but nevertheless, the ideal is that anyone can become an American, a pluribus, unum. So we could step up a level from groups, use our capacity to define us versus them, broaden the definition and say we're all Americans. And this, in my view, is one strategy we could literally cognitively employ to break down some of these tribal barriers. But there's another strategy that's less obvious and that's equally important and equally a part of our tradition. And that's to step down a level to the level of individuals. And here's an interesting thing. We humans have evolved the capacity for individual identity. And this is actually really odd. It's an odd paradox that in order to live socially, we first have to be individuals. And what do I mean by that? Well, we communicate our individual identity with our faces. Every human face is different than every other human face. And it turns out that this capacity to have individual faces is unusual in the animal kingdom. And not only that, but you can look at it, a sea of 1000 or 10,000 faces, and you can tell the difference between every other face. And this cognitive machinery you have in your brain is also a luxury. These are evolutionary luxuries. The capacity to signal and detect individual identity are evolutionary luxuries which our species and a few others manifest. And in fact, they are necessary to live socially because you have to be able to tell this is my child, not someone else's child that I should raise, or this is a friend and not an enemy, or this is a person who cooperated with me or did not cooperate with me. So in order to live with each other, we have to be able to detect the individual identity of each person. And natural selection has given us this capacity. Incidentally, as a tangent on a tangent, this capacity is also connected to our ability to experience grief, which is another whole topic. Anyway, I like to not lose sight of that footnote, but I can say that as someone who is regularly mistaken for Ben Stiller, our capacity to recognize individual faces is not what it might be. Yes, it's true. And I can tell you, like, I have my own limitations in Mr. Cart, specifically with respect to people's names. Although I'm pretty good with faces. I can tell if I've seen you, I wouldn't mistake you for bed still or sale. I don't know if that's a compliment or not. Yes, that is. But anyway, finishing up this point, this part of the point, that's why I love talking to you. It's like we could go in ten different directions, but just finishing up this part of the point. So this capacity to see each other as individuals also provides a kind of liberation for the dehumanization of tribalism. We can step down a level, and this has been a part of our tradition, too. In fact, this is what Martin Luther King was arguing when he said he looks forward to a time when people are judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. He's saying we should treat each other as individuals, and he's totally right. And this also faces tribalism. So tribalism groupiness, which is a problem in our society today, is a part of our nature. It's depressing, at least to me. His preference of us versus them exists for a number of reasons, but we have other tools at our disposal that evolution has equipped us with to cooperate as a collective and avoid some of the downsides of tribalism. Well, that's a fascinating analysis. Actually, I detected in there a point of contact between the two levels that I had never really thought about before. But you were describing a way of escaping tribalism by going up a level and acknowledging that anyone who essentially can come in and share our values is part of our group. So this faces racism and xenophobia and religious bigotry and at least potentially everything accidental about a person that could keep him out of our group or keep him or her as them can be erased, provided that person buy into certain ideas and certain ethical norms, presumably. But one of those core ideas, one of those norms, one of those political values that were anchored to is the primacy of the individual, at least for most intents and purposes. I mean, so that individual freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of belief, the freedom to be uncoerced and unmolested by one's neighbors, provided what you're doing isn't bringing harm to anyone else. A kind of classically liberal picture of the political landscape. That is one of the core values that so many of us share. It does seem like those two algorithms for escaping tribalism coincide, at least on that point. Well, first of all, I think you are highlighting just to say the qualities that define the larger group need not be political qualities. I mean, the example you just gave about and that we were talking about America, you could in principle, broaden the group. For example, when the Hutus and the Tutsis were slaughtering each other, they could have broadened the group to say, we are Africans, for example, or we are some other we're descendants of this original settlers, or whatever. Or if you have the Shiites and the Sunnis that are killing each other, they could say, well, wait a minute, we're both Muslim, for example. So it doesn't have to be a political relationship. I was just using our country as an example. But you're right to highlight that in our particular case, one of those founding beliefs that defines this higher order group is, paradoxically, a kind of commitment to individual, the rights of individuals. And you're also then, I think, alluding to the well understood challenge of poppers the open society and its enemies. This notion that there is a sense in which our tolerance could actually be in our openness, could actually be our undoing, which is a whole other topic and a whole other thing to discuss. We can solve that in 15 minutes. Yeah, we had left a number of footnotes behind, though. I don't want to lose the point you were making about grief, and then I want to back all the way up and go more systematically through your thesis. But what were you saying about grief and individual? Grief is so here's the thing about grief, and I talk about grief in the book. I was a hospice doctor for many years. I took care of people who were dying, I don't know, for 15 years in Chicago and then at Harvard when I was on the faculty there and had my own personal experience with grief. My mother was terminally ill when I was a child. She was diagnosed when I was six, and she died when I was 25, and she was just 47 when she died. And so I grew up with this. I would suspect, if I had to guess, maybe half your audience or a third of your audience would have had personal experience with grief had someone they know died. This is less common in the modern world than it used to be, where often children would die so people would have siblings or Oscars that had died. But anyway, anyone who's had the experience of grief knows that it's this extraordinary particular kind of pain. It can be a physical pain. Your jaw hurts from clenching and crying and your chest hurts, and emotionally it's just agony. And then you have all these other cognitive processes. You see the dead person in a crowd. I mean, I've had this experience, and you know they're dead, but your heart wishes they were alive. And novels have been written about it. I mean, it's an incredibly profound human experience, this experience of grief. But the thing about grief is that it's unlike any other emotion. It's not sadness, right? It's something different, like your sadness, I think, is very similar to my sadness. But your grief is rather different than my grief because it's connected to the death of a particular person. You grieve not when a stranger dies. You grieve when a very particular individual close to you dies. So so grief is connected to our individuality. But one of the ironies is that we're not the only animals to feel grief, and certain other animals do. Now, these are particular animals. These are other social mammals that have evolved to live like we do. And and I discuss those in the book. This includes, for example, elephants and whales, certain whale species, certain primate species. And there's a deep irony here which I'll come back to the grief thing in a moment, that actually, by examining the ways in which our social lives are similar to these other animals, we can better understand how we are similar to each other. In other words, the more our friendships resemble the friendships of elephants, the more our friendships are the same the world over. And we can we can better understand the fact that friendship is a human universal, or grief is a human universal, or the capacity to recognize individuals is a human and universal when we find analogous qualities to those in animal species like elephants. So the last common ancestor we had with elephants was about 85 million years ago. It was a small, shrew like mammal. As far as we know, it did not live socially. And here these elephants, over 85 million years, they evolve a way of living socially by convergent evolution that's very, very similar to our own. They have friendships like we do, for example, and they grieve. Many of the most expert ethologists of elephants believe like we do or similar to we do. Anyway. So grief is a very interesting itself phenomenon, and I think it reflects our individuality and it's part of our sociality as well. So let's talk about the biological underpinnings of all of this, or the evolutionary underpinnings. So you referred to the social suite. What is the social suite? Well, I'd like to back up even from that just one step and say I think there's been a lot of attention in the sciences and in the public sphere to the way in which humans have evolved to be inveterately bad propensity for violence and selfishness and mendacity. We started with tribalism. Yeah, I mean, all of these qualities. But equally, we have been shaped for good. We've been shaped to love, to have a capacity for love and friendship and cooperation. And teaching and many other fine qualities. And I think these wonderful qualities have this bright side has been denied the attention that it deserves. Moreover, I would argue this bright side is even more important. Keep in mind I'm talking about the sweep of our evolution. So tens and hundreds of thousands of years. We can also talk distinctly about the sweep of our history which is, let's say, over the last 10,000 years. But these larger forces shaped us for many, many years. They're deeper, I would argue, and more profound and certainly more ancient than the historical forces acting upon us today. And these forces shaped us for good. Because if whenever I came near you, you killed me or you filled me with lies, you gave me useless or false information or you were otherwise mean to me or violent towards me, I would be better off living as a solitary animal. So the benefits of a connected life must have outweighed the costs. And natural selection has acted on our ways of living socially as surely as it is. It acted on our bodies and on our psychology. So one of the macro arguments of the book is that our genes and natural selection have shaped not just the structure and function of our bodies, not just the structure and function of our minds, but also the structure and function of our societies. And it has primarily equipped us with unbalanced good qualities. There are eight that I highlight in the book, eight qualities that we are, eight features of this suite of qualities that make it possible for us to live together. And these are, first of all, the capacity to love and recognize I'm sorry, to have and recognize individual identity. So this capacity to be individuals and recognize individuals love for partners and offspring. We're very unusual as a species in that we don't just mate with each other. We form a sustained and actually sentimental attachment. We love the people we have sex with. We don't always do, but we can and typically do. Friendship is a third important quality. We form long term non reproductive unions with other members of our species. We're not the only animal that does it, but it's rare. And the other animals we already talked about one elephants and there's a couple of others, a few others. Social networks. We form social networks. Cooperation, a preference for one's own group or in group bias that we talked about earlier. A kind of mild hierarchy or relative egalitarianism. So we are an animal that neither is totally egalitarian nor too authoritarian or too hierarchical. We don't function well when we have no leaders and we also don't like it when we have autocratic leaders people who can impose too much punishment from above. And finally, we've evolved this capacity for social learning and teaching which is also rare in the animal kingdom and is astonishing. So any many animals can learn little fish in the Sea can learn that if it swims towards the light, it finds food there. We don't just learn that way. We also learn by imitation or socially. And this is very efficient. I could put my hand in the fire, and I learned that it's hot and I pull my hand out. I have acquired some knowledge, but I paid a big price. Or I could watch you put your hand in the fire, and I gain almost as much knowledge, but I paid none of the price. That's very efficient. Or you could teach me not to put my hand in the fire. And so we don't just learn individually. We don't just learn socially, but we actually set out to teach each other stuff. This is very rare in the animal kingdom, but we do it. All of these qualities, all of these fundamental aspects of our human nature, you will notice, pertain to how we interact with each other. So there's a whole other class of things, for example, our musicality, for instance, or our risk aversion or other kinds of or our visual cognition, for example, all of which are other parts of human nature, but those can be experienced by isolated individuals, by a hermit in a mountains, can have a religious experience, for example. But I'm interested in the parts that required the presence of another person in order to reach their fruition. And so that's what I call the social suite. It's a suite of eight qualities that natural selection has shaped and that equip us to live together as a social species. Right. Does that phrase social suite originate with you? Yes. Nice. It's a very useful grouping. And I would point out that these things are not, in principle, entirely isolated from one another. I mean, they interpenetrate each other. So when you were when you were discussing hierarchy there in the book, you differentiate at least two different types of hierarchy. There are dominance hierarchies, and there are hierarchies based on prestige. And those function differently. They're both important, or at least have been important to us as social primates. But prestige matters more and more, one could argue, the more civilized we become. And prestige is the kind of thing that relates to some of these other capacities, like the capacity to teach. Yes. So there's a lot going on there among those eight characteristics. Yeah, you're absolutely right. They're all interrelated in very complex and interesting ways, but just on the perceived things. So just a dominant hierarchy has to do with the kind of costs that superiors can impose on their subordinates and a perceived hierarchy that relates to the kind of benefits that a subordinate can extract or get from a superior. And you can think of these as like a lot of this is a bit of a simplification, but a dominant hierarchy often impose relates to how physically, I'm bigger than you, and therefore I can punish you or exclude you from mating opportunities for example. And therefore, in a dominant hierarchy, subordinates avoid superordinates. But in a procedure hierarchy in which I can bestow benefits upon you, I can teach you something useful, like how to light a fire or make a stone tool, for example. Now, you don't avoid me. You seek me out. And I can attract acquire power and attract followers, as it were, not by virtue of the cost I can impose on my subordinates, but by virtue of the benefits, which typically are cognitive things. I can teach them on my subordinates, and that my subordinates, and that a subordinate can get from a subordinate. And in our species, we have evolved these parallel ways of having hierarchy, which both of which are important. It can be important in different circumstances and at different times. But the existence of this kind of prestige type of hierarchy connects, as you said, to this teaching and learning function our species has, and also is connected, therefore, to our capacity for culture. It's interesting not to keep bringing this back to Trump, which is a sin I have not committed very often. I really have not spoken about him for a very long time. But I'm worried you're associating anything I say with him? No, but I think I'm getting ready to read the Mueller report, so he's on my mind. But it just occurred to me that one of the things I find so odious about him is that his status among those who purport to love him does seem to almost entirely depend on the dominance side rather than the prestige side. Yeah. The harm that he can impose on others is what some people find appealing. This is perhaps especially true of the other Republican politicians who are supporting him. Despite the fact that he violates so many of their declared values, it's obvious that they're worried about the political harm he can do to them based on his ability to drum up the base and their comparative inability to do so. There's something just sickening about it. That's right. And you see this in different you see this in politicians. Politicians will if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, 2022. That sounds like the future, doesn't it? Weren't most of the science fiction movies of our childhoods placed in a time no later than this? When was the original Blade Runner? Like 2017? Something like that. Anyway, this is the future. We're the people who lived to see this future, and it is dystopian in some ways, certainly, but you start the New Year with the world that you have. I wanted to reflect on a couple of pieces of feedback I've gotten in various forms. It amounts to points on which many people said that I disappointed them. So I guess the topic of this podcast is on disappointing one's audience. I don't consider these majority opinions in most cases, but there's a discernible signal of grief amid the satisfied noises of the rest of you. So I just want to touch on this stuff because it is interesting to figure out how to do this job, what to talk about, who to talk to. I'm not quite sure how to zero in on the problem here. The basic problem, as I see it, is that we are living through what is, at least in my lifetime, an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy across our institutions. We're living in a society that has been poisoned by misinformation and disinformation. Perhaps I should look at this through the lens of the two topics which have been most provocative here, and that is all things related to Trump and the health of our democracy. I'm recording this right after January 6. We just passed that anniversary. And the other topic is, of course, the COVID pandemic and vaccines and all the rest. And of course, people's views on these topics tend to be highly correlated. So the disappointment takes the form of you used to be someone who would have hard conversations and would really never shy away from a hard conversation. You would debate more or less anything. You would invite people who had attacked you onto your podcast and in several cases have scarcely endurable encounters with them. What changed? Why did your faith in the power of conversation so completely erode? And that's a good question. I see the apparent contradiction here. It's not really a contradiction. There's just a recalibration with respect to specific topics at specific moments in time. I do have faith in the power of conversation, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this. But the time course of resolving certain issues is, in many cases, much longer than we would like. And there are certain moments in history that really will not benefit from airing, quote, both sides on any given debate, especially when one of those sides is either obviously illegitimate or the probability of it being legitimate is so low that it becomes irresponsible to have certain conversations at certain moments in history. So to take the two topics at hand, trump and COVID, I consider it totally irresponsible to have gone down the rabbit hole of election fraud both sideism around the 2020 election, in the immediate aftermath of the election, and in the ensuing months when you could have bet the lives of your children that Trump and his enablers were lying about everything in sight, trying to steal everything that wasn't nailed down, where all of their spurious claims were. Being rejected by courts, in many cases by judges who Trump himself had appointed to have gone down the rabbit hole of questioning the election. As though there were two equivalent sides to this, as though the Rudy Giuliani's of the world were serious and committed to anything like the truth or the health of our democracy. To have platformed any kind of conversation about that strikes me as totally irresponsible. We had a fire raging in our society and our democracy was clearly in jeopardy. It was being actively put in jeopardy by Trump and much of the Republican Party, and to some significant degree I think that's still the case. Of course, all of this culminated in the events of January 6. Now, whether you think January 6 was an actual emergency of sorts or you think it was just live action role play by goofballs or some kind of false flag operation, where you stand on that spectrum of sanity and madness will determine how you hear everything I'm saying. But given what I think is true and had every reason to think was true back then, yeah, there were certain kinds of conversations I wasn't going to have and so does with COVID You know, we've been living in the midst of a public health emergency of varying degrees for nearly two years and that came crashing down on us in the midst of an information emergency and a collapse of public trust emergency that we've been living with longer than that. So certain kinds of conversations strike me as irresponsible in this context. The whole universe of antivax whataboutism strikes me as irresponsible. Now, it's not that there's nothing to debate there. This has been an evolving situation from day one. There were things we didn't know in the first months of the Pandemic, which we now have a very good handle on, and it was appropriate to recalibrate our response to this and our beliefs about what was reasonable to do. So there has been a lot to debate, and I am the first to admit that the public health messaging and the posture of many of our institutions has earned all of the mistrust that they've received. It's just been awful. And there is a lot to debate, whether it's masking or school closures and lockdowns or vaccine mandates and the emphasis on vaccines over treatments and how we talk about natural immunity versus vaccines and boosters for kids versus boosters for people my age, the Lab League hypothesis. There's been a lot to talk about that is worth talking about in a way that is rational and open to argument and not captured by insane political trends. The general trend has been mainstream institutions getting captured by far left political ideology to a degree that is still denied by many mainstream figures. But that capture has produced this kind of death spiral of public trust in these institutions disproportionately on the right. So none of that has helped, and you've heard me talk about all of that ad nauseam on previous podcasts. But there is a lot that could and should be debated here in good faith about COVID and our public policies. But not everything here is debatable, and not every question can be raised in good faith. And more important, not everything can be debated responsibly in the middle of a pandemic right, where you have thousands of people dying every day, and in many cases now, certainly since June of last year, dying quite unnecessarily. I don't know what the current tally is that anyone who might be skeptical of this claim would be tempted to believe I've seen figures as high as 200,000. But at minimum, given the difference that we know vaccines make, there are tens of thousands of people who did not need to die, who did die because they didn't get vaccinated. So the remedy for this standoff of sorts has not been for me to invite someone like Brett Weinstein onto my podcast to debate these issues. I don't actually see that as the right thing to do at this moment. It's not to say that there can't be a post mortem done on this at some point, but there are certain things that simply were never in doubt and only became clearer as time has moved on. I mean, again, to take both topics, what was never in doubt about Trump and the election in 2020 and the run up to January 6 and the aftermath? If you want to disregard all the hyperbole that you might find in the mainstream media about all of that, all of the top spin that you might condemn someone like Rachel Maddow for, all of the errors made on MSNBC and elsewhere and were never corrected, right? Forget about all that. There's something that was never debatable because it all unfolded in plain sight. What was never debatable was that we had a sitting president who simply would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost the election. That alone was so shocking, so unprecedented, so corrosive to our politics, that's all you need to know, that we were facing an absolute emergency. If you can't follow that part of the plot, I don't know what conversation there is to have on this topic. We had a sitting president who claimed to have won the election when votes were still being counted and called for the vote counting to stop. If you can't recognize how abysmal that situation is and how worthy of contempt Trump was and is for behaving that way, there is nothing to talk about, really, from my point of view, there is no extenuating circumstance that makes sense of that. And of course, that behavior was of a peace with everything he has done and we knew he would do and may yet do again. Right? I mean, that none of this was a surprise. What was so surprising was that so many people tolerated it, enabled it. And what soon became clear was that Trump and his enablers were doing whatever they could to steal an election that they claimed had been stolen from them. And of course, this is a problem that now many people are worried about. In 2024, obviously, there's an investigation of January 6 and there will be a lot of information forthcoming, but there is nothing that will be found that can change the character of what has already occurred. The lying about the election has never stopped in Trumpistan, and we know it is lying because it happened before the election. Trump claimed the election was illegitimate before it had even occurred. But again, everything for me is contained in his unwillingness to support the most basic principle of our democracy, which is the peaceful transfer of power, and we did not accomplish a peaceful transfer of power. And so on that score, the events of January 6 really are the most shocking thing to have happened in over 200 years in the United States. And with respect to COVID yes, there's been a lot to debate, there's been a lot of uncertainty, there's been overreactions and underreactions and bad policy and calculated lies, and our institutions have, in certain cases, been reduced to rubble. But what has long been clear is that in a forced choice between catching COVID having been vaccinated and catching COVID not having been vaccinated, your outcome is better whatever your age cohort if you've been vaccinated now, of course, the stratification of risk by age has always been highly relevant. It becomes absolutely clear the older you are. So what could be a very strident recommendation for a 70 year old becomes more like a coin toss in certain cases, for a five year old. Nevertheless, this has always been a simple choice. The moment the vaccines appeared, and certainly the moment their use got to scale, and we had tens of millions of people who had been vaccinated, then the difference between these two cohorts vaccinated and unvaccinated, became crystal clear. Right. Your likelihood of severe disease or death is reduced by a factor of ten or 20, depending on your age and other comorbidities. Well, then you'll say, well, what about the risk of the vaccines? Right? We don't have long term data on these mRNA vaccines. We don't have long term data on what it's like to get COVID not having been vaccinated, apart from the short term data of watching people die by the hundreds of thousands. Yes, the future is uncertain, but there is no good reason to be terrified of these vaccines. And we have an antivax cult working behind the scenes to amplify a very natural concern that people have that they not do themselves or their kids any harm of commission. You take a healthy person, you stick a needle in their arm, and you make them unhealthy. That's a catastrophe that happens incredibly rarely. It's not that vaccines are in a no risk proposition. It's just that the risk is very small. And the comparative risk of having a bad outcome with COVID unvaccinated, especially if you're an adult or you have some kind of comorbidities, is much worse. This has been clear now for nearly a year. Take another medical intervention. Take statins, the class of drugs that many, many people take. Tens of millions of people take in the US. Alone for high cholesterol to mitigate the risk of heart disease and stroke. Now, I've tried to take statins several times. I have high cholesterol. And any sane doctor who looks at my lipid panel would say, hey, you should probably jump on statins. Well, I've tried this, I think, three times and have gotten side effects each time, you know, and I think it's about 5% of people get these side effects. There's actually some research that suggests that some of the side effects are no worse than the side effects people get with placebos. But in my case, I think that it's probably not just based on my expectation of side effects because I've gotten side effects that I didn't even know about and since looked up and found them on the list. So any case, I believe the unacceptable side effects of statins for certain people are all too real, and I'm one of those people. Why have I not been tempted to join some group, if such a group exists, arguing that statins are the crime of the century, right? That we got tens of millions of people taking this unproven drug, which I know in my bones to be unhealthy, right? I know that this can't be good for people. And there's research that shows that whatever it is, four or 5% of people get these terrible side effects. What the hell is going on here? Who can I get together with on social media to amplify these concerns? Well, if you're a grown up, you realize that with any intervention, there will be some percentage of people who have a bad reaction to it for reasons that are complex and that in the case of any one individual can be difficult or impossible to understand. But in the aggregate, the risk can be assessed. So you know what kind of risk you're running when you take a drug or jump out of an airplane or decide to do any other thing that millions of people are doing alongside you. And we know that compared to many other risks we run, vaccines. And the mRNA vaccines for COVID are amazingly safe, especially given that in this case, you have a forced choice. You're going to get COVID and you can get it vaccinated or unvaccinated. So my point here is not to relitigate this topic, but just to give you some color as to why I can't avail myself of the remedy that many of you think is available to me, which is to just to invite people onto this podcast to debate these issues on the election front. Why not invite someone onto the podcast? Why not talk to Steve Bannon? Right. Wouldn't that be the responsible thing to do? Well, what do I do when Bannon says, what about the 1700 ballots in Maricopa County that were found on a pallet in a parking lot? What about the seven poll workers who resigned in protest? I just made that up and he could just make that up. And that's the kind of claim that can't possibly be run down in real time or in any acceptable time if one wants to have a life. All of that is obviously bullshit, right? The general picture of the entire effort to establish massive election fraud that stole the election for Biden, all of it was obviously bullshit. There is no reason to speak to Steve Bannon about any of that. All of this was thrown out of courts. All of it was resisted by the few Republican governors and election officials that had spines. And if it hadn't been resisted by them, and if Mike Pence had caved in to all the pressure he was getting to reject the ballots that came from these states, we would have found ourselves in destabilizing constitutional crisis, right? So the fear is next time those few crucial people aren't going to be in place to do the right thing. But this is just not the kind of conversation that can be had. You can't debate spurious facts in that way and what you then risk doing is giving people the sense that this is just really confusing. I don't know. Steve sounded like he had a lot of data that Sam wouldn't interact with. How many ballots were on that pallet in the parking lot? And so it is on the topic of COVID and vaccines. The general shape of the thing is easy to discern. And again, I'm not discounting that there's a lot to debate. I see the problem with safetyism and the endless commitment to Masking and all the rest. We have to figure out how to live with this virus that is now endemic. But part of what has made that so difficult is that we have an antivax cult addled by rampant misinformation that represents a third or so of our society. Anyway, all of this is just to say that I found myself in a difficult position here because having the conversation on the podcast has not seemed like a viable remedy. In fact, having the conversation in private has not proven to be any kind of remedy in the cases where I've attempted it. So there really is no reason to believe that once the microphones get switched on, things are going to get any better. So to those of you who are disappointed that I haven't had those conversations here, I'm just giving you a window onto my thinking here. I've thought about it, and I've thought better of it on those two topics. And this relates to another social issue where I've expressed an opinion that has upset some of you, and that's on the deep platforming of specific people on social media. When Trump got banned from Twitter, I celebrated. In fact, I had been asking Jack publicly and privately for months, if not years, to kick him off the platform. And the same is true of Alex Jones. Some people think there's hypocrisy there on my side. I'm all about free speech, but when it comes to Trump and Alex Jones, I want to silence them. You're not understanding the situation. First of all, this isn't about free speech. This is about the right of a private platform to decide what voices they want to give a megaphone to. If freedom is your concern, where's your concern for the private company that doesn't want to have the most odious liars to ever draw breath, take up all the oxygen on their platform? If you're going to nationalize Twitter and turn it into an actual public square, well, then okay, but don't tell me you're a libertarian if you want that to happen. These are clear cut cases for me. Whatever terms of service Twitter has and had, it was absolutely clear that Trump had violated them long before he was kicked off the platform. Talking about somebody who's making credible threats of nuclear war, that doesn't violate your terms of service. In the case of Alex Jones, you had somebody who was claiming that the Sandy Hook parents who had had their six year old kids butchered by a madman were in fact, crisis actors faking this atrocity so that they could advance the gun control agenda of the left. And Jones unleashed his lunatic audience. On these families, there are Sandy Hook parents who are still in hiding. There are families that have moved ten times since that tragedy in 2012, all because of Jones and the insane people who've been taken in by his what is it? I honestly don't know. Mental illness or performance art. Right. And every time Trump tweeted against a private citizen, he was consciously ruining this person's life, knowing what would happen, knowing they would get doxed, knowing that they would get endless death threats. You're telling me that a private company like Twitter needs to enable this behavior day after day after day, and that they're violating the principle of free speech when declining to enable it a day longer? Granted, there is a lot to debate around the power of big tech, but the idea that someone like Alex Jones has to be platformed anywhere makes no sense. And there's certainly no reason to invite him on a podcast. But I would be the first to admit that this is a very confusing time and a confusing situation, because, as I said, our distrust of mainstream institutions is totally warranted. Now, in specific cases. And this ranges everywhere, from our top scientific journals to our best newspapers to the government. But that doesn't mean that the contrarian opinion on any specific point is generally right, because it isn't generally right. So we have to navigate this space of uncertain authority and the bad incentives that clearly derange our public conversation, the fact that certain things get ratings or clicks and that those messages get amplified. And as you know, I've done a fair amount to protect myself from bad incentives on this podcast. And if I'm alert to anything, it is to not getting captured by my audience. If ever I were to find myself not wanting to say something for fear of how the audience will respond, even though I think it's true and important, that's the thing I know I can't do. There's obviously a problem of audience capture in the podcasting and alternative media space. This is true whether one is getting support directly by subscription or donation, and it's also true if you're running ads. And in several cases, the evidence of audience capture is absolutely clear. There are people who have done 50 episodes more or less in a row on the same topic as though they had lost interest in every other thing on Earth. What's going on there? There is some training signal coming from the audience and almost certainly a bad economic incentive that is capturing that podcast host. So I'm not afraid to offend or disappoint my audience. I've spent a fair amount of time criticizing wokeness and social justice hysteria, and when I've done that, I know I have offended and alienated some significant percentage of left leaning people in my audience who just don't see the issue the way I do. And of course, everything I've said about Trump and the vaccine has offended people on the right who loved everything I said about Wilkness. My only real commitment here is to say what is true and useful. It's that intersection of true and useful and interesting, important. That's what I care about. And there's definitely a trade off with that last caveat. There are many things that are important that are not at all interesting. This podcast has been devoted to several of them, but that's what I'm attempting to do. I have to assume that you're only listening because you care about what I think is true and useful and interesting or important. And if you don't care about that, well, then you're in the wrong place. So perhaps that explains some of what I've done and not done over the last year or so. And if I sound especially somber on these points, it's because I think we really are living through a moment that is especially high stakes. You know, it's not that I think COVID itself is so bad. In fact, with Homicron coming on, it seems like we're getting pretty lucky here, especially those of us who've been vaccinated and boosted. This is not terrifying. What is terrifying is how badly placed we seem to respond to challenges of this kind. We have civilizational problems to solve. This pandemic was, as I've said before, a dress rehearsal for something far worse that is bound to come. Whether it's engineered deliberately or coughed up out of a bat, we know that this pandemic was about as benign as it can get. And at this point, I really am not especially hopeful that we would naturally solve all the coordination problems and problems of trust that we failed to solve this time around in the face of something far more deadly. It's possible that if you made the pandemic ten times or 30 times worse, well, then the whole antivax delusion would be blown away on the first day. That's possible, certainly, to be hoped for, but at this point, I think you'd have people, Alex Jones in it right over the brink. It would be all conspiracy thinking all the time as the bodies piled up on the sidewalk. I think that's quite possible, and we have to do something about that in advance. It's not a problem we can solve in the middle of an emergency. So my concern is really not so much about COVID but about our society, and this is where the pandemic and our politics directly interact. Some of you might have seen the most recent issue of The Atlantic that had several articles in it worrying about what the Republican Party has been up to since the 2020 election. Barton Gellman wrote an article titled trump's Next Coup has Already Begun. And George Packer wrote one titled Are we Doomed? Question mark. And to take Barton's summary of his contribution there, he claimed, quote, that January 6 was the initial milestone, not the last, in the growth of the first violent mass movement in American politics since the 1920s. End quote. And his second point was that Republicans have made up their minds to steal the 2024 presidential election and are well on their way to manufacturing the means. There is a clear and present danger that the loser of the next election will be certified President elect with all the chaos and bloodshed that portends. End quote. Now, these if you're not in the weeds on this topic, these can sound like fairly paranoid claims, but I'm just ask yourself what would have happened last time around if Mike Pence had gone along with the demands placed upon him that he throw out the votes for biden from all the contested states? We know we have a problem on our hands here, and if we don't fix our electoral machinery in the meantime, 2024 could be far worse than 2020. Anyway, I'm interested to get to the bottom of this. So at this point, I think I'm going to do a podcast with Gelman and George Packer. And the current plan is to bring on David From and Anne Applebaum, both of whom are also Atlantic writers with the goal. Of fully presenting the case here, that there is something we need to do well in advance of 2024 to make sure that we don't have a slow moving coup on our hands. Again, if you're out there in podcastAn thinking that there was no there there, that the Mueller report found nothing, that the Russia Gate hoax was a hoax, pure and simple, that Trump is just a crass businessman, but no more of a threat to our democracy than any other politician, if that's where you are. I don't know how you've been listening to me in recent years, but none of what I've just said makes any sense to you. Back here on Earth, it's pretty clear we have barely weathered a conscious attack on our democracy, and the attack is ongoing. And no, this is not to exculpate everything democrats and social justice maniacs have done in the meantime, and I've been as critical of them as anyone. But when you're talking about the lying and misinformation that could truly destroy our democracy, there is an asymmetric risk coming from the right and from Trump himself. Now, again, I make no apologies for this opinion, which I can well defend, that Trump is the most dangerous cult leader on Earth at this moment and has been for several years, and he should be viewed as such and responded to in that way. He utterly desecrated the office of the presidency, and I think there's no respect due to him personally for having occupied that office. Anyway, that coming conversation, I think, will be a zoom call or done on some other video platform, initially for subscribers to the podcast, and then we'll put the audio on the podcast after that. That could be fun to do on video. What else? Here on a very different point, but also a note of disappointment, I detected in some of you want to think out loud for a moment on the topic of NFTs, which I broached on Twitter a few weeks ago, putting out a job listing for Waking Up. Waking up is looking for a head of Web Three development. And let me find it here. I said on Twitter, attention, all web three NFT maniacs. And then I linked to this job posting at Waking Up, and the response was mixed at best. Many of you said essentially not you too, Sam. I essentially responded as though I had just announced that I was eager to perpetrate some kind of multilevel marketing scam on my audience. Let me take a moment to clarify a few things, because this is actually something I want to do, and I want to recruit some great person to help me do it. So this is my reiterating. The job listing that can be found in that. Twitter thread. So, just to clarify, for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, so NFTs, which are all the rage at the moment, are so called non fungible tokens. And without belaboring the point, I am convinced that this is a new technology that has and will do some very interesting things. It has solved the problem of digital ownership and digital scarcity, which is to say you can have an asset that exists as a JPEG or in some other digital form, and you can really be the sole owner of it, even if copies of it proliferate online. And you can layer onto that asset all kinds of other properties that are interesting, whether they also exist in digital space or whether they have real world consequences, right? So you can have an NFT that is just a piece of artwork, but it can become your ticket to a live event or unlock some other opportunity or property in the real world. So I think that's very interesting, and I'm not at all cynical about the future there, although it is impossible not to be cynical about some of what we're seeing in this space. Right. There is a kind of tulip mania to some of it. You've got these collections of mediocre artwork where the cheapest instance now costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. In principle, none of that's new. I mean, that's true of art in general. You know, beauty or significance is often in the eye of the beholder, and the fact that somebody can put a banana on the wall with duct tape and call it art, that precedes NFTs. But let me just float the first NFT idea we have here, just to give you a sense of how I'm thinking about it. And again, my purpose here is to recruit somebody who really understands this space better than I do and understands the possibilities, but who's aligned with my values here. So what's happening with these NFTs currently is you have people who are buying, you know, board apes or crypto punks, you know, most famously, which are these cute little drawings, and they are trading in them. In many cases, they're holding them as their profile pictures, right? So if you own a board ape that is worth $2 million, chances are you're using that on social media as your profile picture. What's happening there? Well, people like these assets, they they like the board ape they bought, and they're putting it up there for that reason, presumably. But they're also signaling that they're rich enough to have spent $2 million on a JPEG. That is not dissimilar to the 9999 other JPEGs in that collection. So it is a kind of social signaling of wealth and conspicuous consumption. But that's not fundamentally new, and I'm not especially judgmental of that. But I'm interested in flipping this whole thing and doing something truly good in the world. So those of you who heard my previous podcast with Sam Bankman Freed about effective altruism might remember my description of the Giving What We Can Pledge. This is the pledge that Will McCaskill and Toby Ord created, where people pledge to give a minimum of 10% of their lifetime earnings to the most effective charities. And this is a pledge I took a couple of years back, and Sam Bankman Freed took it a few years before me, and about 7000 people have taken it so far on the Giving What We Can website. What we're proposing to do at Waking Up is to create our version of the pledge, and we might add some other relevant wrinkle to it, but basically, it'll be the same pledge. And we want to create NFTs based on the daily heads that have become this ever present piece of artwork within the app and give them out to perhaps 10,000 people who have taken that pledge and consider what this will make possible. So first, people have a nice piece of artwork to use as their profile pick in the same way that they're doing with these other NFTs. And in fact, I'm already doing it on Twitter myself. I have a daily head as my Twitter avatar. So just imagine that's my NFT, right, signifying that I've taken the Waking Up pledge. Imagine what happens once you've identified this community in this way. You've given them a way to identify themselves. It seems to me a very different kind of social signaling and status gets created here. And it's precisely the kind I would think we would want to incentivize. So we create these NFTs we give them to the 7000 people who've already taken the pledge over Giving What We can. We give them to a few thousand more who now take the pledge with us, and then we go out into the world looking for people who want to celebrate these people along with us. So we could go to American Express and say, you've got this black card for people who just spend a lot of money. That's what you're rewarding here. Why not create a card for the people who've taken the Waking Up pledge and give them access to your airport lounges? And we can go to the NFL and say, why not reserve 50 seats at the Super Bowl for people who've taken the Waking Up pledge? We'll give you access to this very high leverage, very engaged community of people who have decided to do something quite good, and why don't you play this game with us? And then you can imagine that the value of these NFTs might grow and there could be some secondary sales, because, you know, many of the people who have taken the pledge are not especially wealthy. Some are, but there may be people who have taken this pledge who are making $40,000 a year and just giving 10% of their money away every year. Well, if you're making $40,000 a year and all of a sudden the NFT that I gave you is worth $400,000. You might want to sell that NFT, right? And then in the sale, something like 80% of that might go to you, but 20% would go back to charities that we've already identified as some of the most effective at reducing human suffering and existential risk. It seems to me that there's a really interesting project here, which, again, you're hearing all the rough edges here because we're still thinking it through, and I want to hire someone to help us think it through and to help create a community here that is fun and interesting and doing intrinsically good things. So if you're that sort of person, if you're living on the blockchain, if you know way more about what's possible here and what's coming than I do, we really want to hear from you over at waking up again. The link to the job description and application page is in my twitter feed just a couple of weeks back. And if you're a corporation who would like to participate in this again, why wouldn't you want to reserve some seats in your football stadium for these sorts of people? We're talking about people who have decided to give a minimum of 10% of their earnings every year to the most effective charities. You don't think it would be good for your brand to be incentivizing their behavior and meeting these people? So if you are a company that wants to be involved in this effort, please reach out to us. I guess we'll create a dedicated email address for this, so let's call it pledge@wakingup.com. Any ideas you might have about how you could make this fun for people, we would love to hear about it. That's just the first idea in this space, but it's the kind of idea that this technology has suddenly made possible. Everything I just said would make no sense without the Blockchain and NFTs. It strikes me as a really promising and ethically fairly thrilling possibility, and it's one of the things that gets me excited about all of the chaos that we see around us. Right. New things are being born moment by moment, and one of the purposes of what I'm doing here on the podcast is to figure out what to do with all of the opportunity we have to make our world better. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the next year with all of you over here at Making Sense, over there at Waking Up, and over there in the third place with Ricky Gervais and absolutely mental. We've got a third season we're going to release soon, and that's been a lot of fun to record. And somewhat belatedly, here wishing you all a happy and healthy new year. Thanks for listening. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harrison Harris. Okay, well, in today's episode we are presenting audio from a live event we did on Zoom a couple of weeks back, which was free for podcast subscribers, and over 9000 of you joined us live in the middle of the day, and most of you stayed for the full 2 hours, which was really great. Anyway, upon relistening to this, the conversation was even better than I had realized, and I'm very happy to get a chance to present it to a wider audience here. The event was inspired by a recent issue of The Atlantic magazine, which had several articles focusing on the ongoing threat to American democracy posed by the widely believed lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Something like 60% of Republicans believe this, and needless to say, that has consequences. So to walk us through this grim situation, I enlisted the help of four Atlantic writers anne Applebaum, David From, George Packer and Barton Gellman. Anne Applebaum has been on the podcast before. She is a journalist and prize winning historian, a staff writer at The Atlantic, a senior fellow at the SNF. Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, where she co leads a project on 21st century disinformation and co teaches a course on democracy. Her books include Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine, Iron Curtain, the Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944 and 1956, and Gulag A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Her most recent book is The New York Times bestseller Twilight of Democracy, which is an essay on democracy and authoritarianism. She was a Washington Post columnist for 15 years and a member of the editorial board. She's also been the deputy editor of The Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and many other publications. David from has also been on the podcast several times before. He is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of Trump Apocalypse Restoring American Democracy, which is his 10th book. David spent most of his career in conservative media and research institutions, including the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. He is a past chairman of Policy Exchange, the leading center right think tank in the UK. And a former director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He also famously served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush. David Holt, A-B-A. And Ma. In history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about American politics, culture and foreign affairs. He is the author, most recently of the book Last Best Hope America in Crisis and Renewal, which I'm reading now, and it's really a great book. He's also the author of The Unwinding and Inner History of New America, which won the National Book Award and he also wrote a biography of Richard Holbrook, which also won awards, and he has written seven other books. And finally, Barton Gellman. Bart is also a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation in New York. He's the author, most recently of Dark Mirror. Edward Snowden in the American surveillance state. He also wrote a biography on Dick Cheney, and he's won no fewer than three Pulitzer Prizes as well as an Emmy for documentary filmmaking. Anyway, as you'll hear, I really just had to get out of the way and let my guests talk. Any imputation of partisanship on their part makes no sense when you consider their biographies. I actually don't know the politics of Bart and George Offhand, not that it would really matter, but Anne and David have been quite esteemed in center right circles, I think for all of their political lives. There are some disagreements between them, but generally they're on the same page with respect to the sordid history of how we got here and the problems that really must be solved. I guess the question could be asked why I didn't have someone on the panel who was a contrarian on important points and therefore someone who could help make it a proper debate. However, the truth is on this topic, I really would view that as a waste of precious time. I have no interest in hearing from someone at this point who thinks that the 2020 election was stolen or thought that the attack on the Capitol on January 6 last year was a non event. I raised points of this sort so that my guests can try to perform an exorcism on all that is happening in the Republican echo chamber. But as to what happened here and the lies told about it, there's really not much of substance that we can be in doubt about, and any real skepticism about the general picture here is quite ludicrous at this point. So I view this conversation much more as a PSA about an ongoing emergency than as a proper topic for debate. To use an analogy that often occurs to me, imagine you're on an airplane that's about to land, and there's a commotion in the cockpit. The door swings open, and you can plainly see that things are definitely not okay. You catch a glimpse of someone lying on the floor, and someone who's not dressed like a pilot appears to be randomly flipping switches. And someone purporting to be the pilot just came over the PA system and told you to stay in your seats because the Jews have removed the plane's landing gear. Right? At that point, I don't want to hear from someone who thinks that this behavior might yet prove to be normal or that perhaps some Jew somewhere may have sabotaged a plane, and we should talk about that. That seems worth looking into, doesn't it? No, what is absolutely clear is that what is happening right before our eyes is not remotely okay. And that's the situation we have been in for several years now with a Republican Party that has morphed into a personality cult enthralled to a con man and crackpot who just happened to have been President. And the plane that we really must land is to have a peaceful, orderly and legitimate presidential election in 2024, and there is no reason currently to think that that will be easy to do. That cockpit door is wide open and it's just chaos in there now, as this is another PSA, this episode is not paywald. As always, if you want to support what I'm doing here and generally listen to full length episodes of the podcast, you can subscribe@samharris.org. Actually, the last episode on the Joe Rogan controversy was also a PSA. Perhaps I should say a few words about that, because I heard from thousands of you, in fact, and the most common response I got was really enormous gratitude for what I said there. Some of you hated it, of course, but there was a tremendous amount of thanks expressed for what I said about Rogan himself, but more importantly, for what I said about racism and the ethics of apology. And almost everyone who commented seemed to think that I had really stuck my neck out in a way that's become all too rare among academics and journalists. And many of you explicitly thanked me for my bravery. Well, I'll let you in on a little secret. There's not much bravery involved at this point. Now, if I worked at a university or at any institution where I could be fired, yes, and that would have been a very brave and even reckless podcast to drop. If I had to worry about whether I'd be able to pay my mortgage or afford college for my daughters because a Twitter mob might successfully get me fired or dropped by my sponsors or demonetised on YouTube, well, then, yes, I would probably hesitate before telling you what I honestly think on certain topics. And that's why when many of you ask me about engaging culture war issues, I never offer blanket recommendations. And I certainly don't say that everyone should take the risks that I take, because the truth is, I'm not taking much of a risk. Now, I have deliberately built my platform so that I don't have to worry about these things, or at least I have to worry less than almost anyone in media. And that's why the Making Sense podcast is a subscription business, and I don't rely on ads. That's why I don't depend in any important way on platforms like YouTube, because my goal for years now has been to remove any incentives that could keep me from being able to tell you what I really think. And the only thing that makes that possible is you. The fact that a sufficient number of you not just listen to the podcast, but support it directly by subscribing. That is the secret to my apparent bravery. Those of you who actually purchase monthly or annual subscriptions have given me greater job security than almost anyone on Earth. Now, that may sound like an exaggeration, but it's not. And it's not a question of wealth. I know billionaires and movie stars who have to be way more concerned about cancellation than I do, and it's because they really are much more vulnerable than I am to having a comparatively small number of people decide to pull the plug on their careers. I mean, just think about it. I have no sponsors and no boss. There is no board of directors who can tell me that I can't do this podcast tomorrow or that it might be better if I just avoided certain topics. So it really is not about my personal courage. It's about our having built a platform together. So, once again, I want to thank all of you who support the podcast. When I say that I couldn't do this without you, I truly mean it. Okay? And now I bring you an all too timely conversation about the future of American democracy. I hope you find it useful. I guess I should say that if we end up crashing Zoom for some reason, we will apologize to the audience and then just resign in privately, because I don't know what what the bandwidth limits are here. I don't mean to disparage Zoom here, but anything's possible. This is my normal book event. Six and a half, 7000. So I'm used to being comfortable working here. We're getting to Madison Square Garden, I think. Here. All right, well, I'm going to start because I value your time, the four of you. Just to be clear to the audience, this is not really primarily considered a video event. I love that you're all joining us to watch us record a podcast, but the final product here will be a podcast, so there may be some moments where we retake things just to get clean audio if we're talking over each other. And I will also introduce the four of you more fully in my intro to the podcast, but I think we should just go around briefly here. As I was saying, offline, this conversation is born of my having read two articles in the most recent issue of The Atlantic, the January February issue, which was focused on the fundamental threat to American democracy that is posed by Trump and the Republican Party at this point. And this will be a controversial claim that I want us to shore up any way we can over the next couple of hours. But the two articles were barton Gellman's article, trump's next coup has already begun. And George Packer's article Are we doomed? So I want to introduce let's start with Bart. Bart, thank you for joining us. Barton is a three time Pulitzer Prize winner. I will read your bona fide elsewhere. Barton, thanks for being here. Pleasure. And George Packer, you have written several wonderful books. As I was saying, I was reading your latest The Last Best Hope. You've won a National Book Award. I also realize I studied with your mom in college. I just discovered this in reading your bio. So your mom, Nancy Packer, taught an amazing course on the short story, which I remember fondly. So you have that connection. That's what I'll tell her. She's 96, but it'll still make her oh, my God, amazing. Well, that will then tell her. I can't imagine she would remember this even if she weren't 96. But I remember going into her office and I remember her consternation upon learning that I was dropping out of school to go to India and recapitulate the 60s for myself. And I had to tell her because I was resigning editing the literary magazine and it was on her to figure out who my replacement was going to be. And I remember the look on her face where I was clearly making a wrong turn into the wilderness of self absorption. So just know that I'm a great disappointment to your mother. I've seen that look every day of my life. And we're also joined by Anne Applebaum, who's been on the podcast before. And really, Anne, you're one of the highest signal and lowest noise people I've ever come across, in particular on the topic of the threat of authoritarianism and the ubiquity of propaganda. So thank you for being here and it's great to talk to you again. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me. And last but not least, we have David From. Also, I should have said Anne has also won a Pulitzer, at least, I'm sure, many other things. She's a historian. David, do you have a Pulitzer I need to worry about or a National Book Award? No, this is getting a little awkward, actually. All right, good. Well, you're pristine. You're like me. You don't have either of those debauched awards. So this is wonderful to be joining you here. But you thank you, David, for helping to organize this because you helped to quarterback this and you are a very frequent guest on the podcast. So good to see you again. Thank you. As I said offline, I view David and Anne as helping me in extracting as much as I can possibly get on this topic from Bart and George, in addition to contributing everything they have to say on it. I didn't want to drop the ball here and the two of them know as much as anyone about the topics we're going to discuss. David is further distinguished in perhaps being the only person on Earth who has a greater case of Trump derangement syndrome than I do. Just by a touch. We agree, I think, on all points there. So let's begin. I want us to talk about the future where this is headed. This conversation is really summarized by a quotation that I have from Bart summarizing his article he wrote elsewhere, he said January 6 was the initial milestone, not the last in the growth of the first violent mass movement in American politics since the 1920s. And the Republicans have made up their minds to steal the 2024 presidential election and are well on their way to manufacturing the means. There is a clear and present danger that, that the loser of the next election will be certified President elect with all the chaos and bloodshed that that portends. So that, that's where we're headed. I want us to see if we are still that concerned. This has been at least a month or so since Bart wrote that. But I want us to try to establish what has already happened. Because my concern here is that out here in podcastAn, there is quite a bit of controversy over what has happened. And the lies and misinformation about the past have taken hold to a degree that I find a source of considerable concern and even despair at this point. So here's, just to give you the cartoon version, which is not too far from what is in fact, believed, I think many, many millions of people believe, and then it's not just Republicans by any means, that virtually everything that has been said about Trump by people like ourselves has proved to be an exaggeration right. That there's, you know, he was really, he was a crass businessman who shook things up. But all of the calumny about him and and certainly every claim that he was a fundamental threat to democracy or to our institutions amounted to just a blizzard of partisan lies. And, you know, the Russiagate hoax was just all hoax. The Steele dossier Vitiates, everything. The Mueller report never found anything. The election may in fact have been stolen or at least there's reason to believe that there were significant irregularities and, and Trump was totally within his rights to challenge it. The significance of January 6 has been totally exaggerated. There's just hysterical libtards on CNN and the New York Times who've been calling it an insurrection or an attempted coup but they were in truth it was just a bunch of goofballs taking selfies and there was nothing really fundamental was at stake. And so what we are reacting to in this conversation and any prognostications on that basis is just a kind of grotesque media confection that is being amplified based on just because it gets clicks. Essentially this is what is good for, this is the lifeblood of CNN and the New York Times at this point. So I want us to try to perform an exorcism on that set of claims and perhaps we'll start with you Bart. Tell me where you think we are with respect to all of that and then we'll kind of go around and everyone can fill in the gaps here. Well, all of that needs to be exercised because none of it is right russia gate was not a hoax. There were extensive efforts by the Russians to help Trump win the election. Trump and his people solicited those and welcomed them and it did not rise to the level of conspiracy. But the Mueller report showed very clearly a roadmap to a successful prosecution for obstruction of justice. It named multiple occasions on which Trump could be said to have obstructed justice, and at least three of them met all the elements of the crime. And you can go down the rest of the list. January 6 was a it was part of a broad and vigorously fought attempt to overthrow the election. We're learning more, even in recent days since I wrote my piece, about the extent to which Trump was trying to get people who had theoretically the power to do things, to do those things that would have overturned the election. Most recently, we're learning more about proposals that were discussed with Trump and that he solicited further information about that would have seized the voting machines. I mean, an absolute sort of classic dictator move in which he was going to have, in various iterations, either the justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security or the national Guard go around the country and seize voting. Machines in at least six states and quote, unquote, rerun the election under sort of national security establishment procedures yet to be yet to be named. This is at the same time that he is trying to get Mike Pence to either simply declare him the victor on January 6 or to throw away enough votes that the election would fail and would go to the House of Representatives for resolution. I mean, January 6 was an attempt by a violent mob to stop the congressional count of the electoral vote, the final stage, the final sort of irrevocable moment in deciding the election. And it was done at the beck and call and instigation of the President. I mean, it couldn't be more serious. George, I completely agree with Bart. And I've learned a lot from Bart's reporting on this, just how carefully Trump read the situation he found himself in after the election and proceeded down the one path that might have overthrown the results of the election, which is to say, to decertify the state results and the electors who were going to be sent to be counted in in Congress. Trump understood that he needed to delay the count on January 6 in order to find the enough corrupt state officials, state legislatures, secretaries of State, county election board members to throw the election his way. And that was the way that Bart outlined in an earlier piece that Trump could could throw it all into confusion and then the confusion itself would become the grounds for him and key allies to declare that he was the winner. And that's what he tried to do. He tried very hard. He didn't succeed partly because of what you might call the civic virtue of some of those state officials and secretaries of state and legislators and county officials. And now what we see happening. Bart again has written about this in his most recent piece is again a concerted attempt by Trump and his allies to target those offices that most people have never even heard of and fill them with loyalists. Who next? Time around can be counted on to do the corrupt thing that others were unwilling to do in Georgia and in Michigan and in Arizona and in Pennsylvania. Last time. So I don't know what more evidence anyone needs. And the problem is the exorcism doesn't work if the degree of what you might call tribal irrationality is so great that it's simply not subject to the kind of argument and evidence that Bart brought in those pieces and that we're bringing here today. And that's where we are. My piece was about the failure of imagination, which has been Trump's great friend all along, simply the inability of most Americans to imagine that we could have a president as corrupt and indifferent to laws and norms and is prepared to trash the Constitution and even the majority will as Trump. We couldn't imagine January 6. The intelligence agencies could not imagine January 6. That's what General Mark Milley said afterward. We have to imagine this because if we can't imagine it, we are a big step closer to it happening next time successfully. So what I tried to do in my piece was simply lay out, not convincingly to me, but just start out to think, what might it look like? What could happen? Is it going to be violent? What form will the violence take? How will the violence begin? Or will we turn into a kind of sullen, cynical, formerly democratic populace, rather like Russia, that doesn't believe anything, that doesn't believe anyone, that thinks the media lies, the politicians lie, so the hell with it all, and we withdraw. And I think that is at least as likely a scenario following the next presidential election as outright mass violence. But mass violence is not only possible, it's we saw a very vivid foreshadowing of it on January 6. Yeah, there's several things here that are especially troubling. One is the degree to which our institutions still rely on the integrity of individuals. Right. You can't take the the monkey out of the the apparatus here, and if just a few people had decided they were trumpets to the core, things could have happened very differently. And as you say, that's being the ground for that. It's being prepared next time. So some of this sounds like a conspiracy theory, right. Some of it happens behind closed doors. The evidence is there for those who want to see it at this point. But I'm amazed by a phenomenon that, David, you've pointed out a lot, really, every time you've spoken about Trump, which is that some of the most egregious things he ever does, he does in plain view. There is no debate about the fact, for instance, that he would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean, that, that alone, that one detail which is attested to by, you know, endless evidence. I mean, he's, he was given multiple chances to do this on television and he declined. That alone should have alerted us that we were in uncharted territory and that this was an explicit threat to our democracy. David, I just want to bring you in here to, to reflect on that. Let me start by trying to answer the first question you posed in a way that I maybe will be make it more vivid what we're talking about. When my late father in law returned home from Korea, he had some distinction there. He was invited to a party at the house of a general officer. He was young and didn't drink and a party full of people who were older and did drink and he got bored. So he wandered away from the party and wandered into the general's private study. On his desk. The general had a Luger which he had brought back from the European theater. Father in law was interested in weapons, picked it up and begun discharged. It was loaded. The bullet went through the general's study, went through the wall of the other room and embedded itself in the dining room. And my father in law, it was like the worst 3 seconds worse than anything. He'd been in two wars. This was the worst moment of anything. And he walked out and everybody was laughing hysterically because the bullet had missed. They were all drunk. They thought it was funny. No big deal. He told that story for 50 or 60 years because it was a big deal. The fact that the bullet doesn't hit anybody doesn't mean the gun wasn't loaded, the gun wasn't fired. We got real lucky. We got real lucky. We got luckier than we deserved. But the fact is, the President of the United States, having lost an election, tried through, as Bart describes, a complicated scheme and then by violence and the two interlocked in a lot of ways we can talk about to overturn the election. That's incredible. That's just incredible. And we, we're now so used to it. As with so many things with Trump, as you say, it was public. There have been presidents and there have been certainly officials in the United States who have taken bribes. And when they have done so, they've usually made some effort to conceal the bribe taking, made some effort to COVID it up. The idea that you say, okay, my idea for taking bribes is I'm going to go to acquire a building on Pennsylvania Avenue and put my name on it and put a red carpet down to the street and cars will come up and people will come out and they will put money on the counter for me. The President. And I will tell everybody. I will tell literally everybody. I will tell The New York Times, I will tell National Review, I will tell everybody that you don't get a meeting with me unless you've given me the money first at my building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Who will say, Well, I guess he seems to have a clear conscience. It can't be so bad. Yeah, it's amazing. It's just this astonishing social phenomenon that if you have no shame and your indiscretions are big enough, a different physics takes over and you are really kind of beyond one. People just can't keep track of how fully you're trespassing on various norms. But it's let me add a PS I find oftentimes the way you have to deal with this is through the building up of minute details rather than the big theoretical statement. Here's one of these little stories. So I'm now going to forget which year the Trump presidency this was, but Vice President Pence made a visit to Ireland. He was stopping there on the course of another mission, and he had meetings in Dublin with the Dublin government. He opted to stay at the Trump golf course on the other side of the island. Dublin faces toward England. He stayed toward the Atlantic in order to go to his meetings. He had to take military transportation from the Atlantic Ocean to the English side of Ireland in order to have his meetings at a cost, the taxpayer, of something like a million dollars. All of this in order that the United States could put a few thousand dollars into Donald Trump's personal pocket because there are hotels, believe it or not, in Dublin. And that was one day. That was one day, and then there was the next day, and then there was the next. And so the accumulation of corruption had the effect because these things are often technically illegal or certainly inappropriate or certainly frowned upon every day. The President had to tinker with the structure of law in order to cope with the thing that he was fundamentally about, which was stealing from the taxpayer. Anne, you obviously have a very good view of all of this, but you have a perspective internationally that might be interesting to bring in, if not here at some point, because the unraveling of our democracy and our commitment to democracy is of a peace with what's happening elsewhere. I want to bring you in here. How do you see the current state of the misinformation in our society that is allowing fully half of Americans to not follow the plot here? So, yes, I think the international perspective is important in one sense, because if you look around the world and you look at the way in which democracies fall in the modern era, we all have this idea that there are going to be tanks in the street and there's a lieutenant colonel in the presidential palace and he shoots a gun in. The air. And, you know, that's how that's how the coup d'etat happens. When we think of Kuda tau, we have this kind of 1960s, 1970s vision of it. In fact, most democracies fail, and I mean Venezuela, I mean Russia, I mean Hungary. It's happening in other places now as well, because elected officials who are unscrupulous take advantage of the current political system. They change the constitution. They ignore the rule of law. They ignore the sense of the law, and they seek to remain in power illegally or immorally one way or the other. And that's the that it's very common. It happens over and over. And much of what Trump did and much of what he continues to do is familiar from other times and places. Let me just focus on one piece of it. I think everybody has alluded to this one way or another. This was the method by which trump, after the 2020 election, the method by which he started to attack the validity of the vote. If you remember, it wasn't just one form of the vote is rigged. It was voter machines not working in Arizona, it was people cheating in Georgia, it was dead people voting somewhere else. There was a theory about the Chinese having intervened in the machines. There was a theory about the Venezuelans having something to do with the machines. The voting machine companies themselves were attacked, some of them sued. And the cumulative effect of all of these things I mean, of course, they were as Bart said, they were part of a tactic to try to get people to stop and consider whether the election was legal and to try to get people in particular states to change the rules by which the votes were counted. But it had another effect, which I believe was also deliberate, which was to do what Steve Bannon once described as flooding the zone with shit. And this is something that authoritarians and dictators in other places also know about. If you tell one lie once in a while, then people can argue about it. It can be proved or disproved if you tell hundreds of lies, if you tell them over and over again different lies from different directions every day, what you create is cynicism and nihilism and confusion and belief that no truth can ever be known. A great example of how this was done was, if you remember the Malaysian plane that crashed in eastern Ukraine in 2014, if you remember that it was actually shot down by Russians. We know exactly how it was done. They thought it was Ukrainian plane, and so on. What was the reaction of the Russian state after this happened? The Russian state media put out literally dozens of explanations for why the plane was shut down, ranging from the totally improbable you know, there were dead people on the plane in Amsterdam, and they took it down on purpose to discredit some, you know you know, the plane was had flown too close to another plane. It was trying to shoot down Putin's plane, whatever. There were dozens and dozens of explanations. And the point of that was to make sure that Russians had developed the attitude, which I heard one of them say in a in an interview in Moscow a few days later, namely, we don't know what happened, and we will never know what happened, because it's unknowable. And Trump uses the same tactic. He repeatedly lies. He makes repeated different explanations for how and why the election was rigged, and he creates a sense of falsehood and a sense of unknowability. And he does this, of course, he's assisted in doing this by a huge range of right wing propagandists, from Steve Bannon to Tucker Carlson, from the famous ones to the much less famous ones on multiple channels. And the effect is to create the cynicism and nihilism that you started out with. We don't believe any of this. The mainstream media is lying. It's all exaggerated. None of this can be proven, whereas in fact, all of it is provable. There were no attempts to rig the election. There were no problems with the voting machines. Most of the votes in Georgia, the votes were counted multiple times by hand, by machine. There was no proof of any irregularity whatsoever. But by repeating the idea that there was regularity, by coming up with different theories, chinese, Venezuela, and Italian explanations as to how it happened, they create the sense that there can't be smoke without fire. People wouldn't be talking about all this unless there was something to it. And that, you know, that's a that's a deliberate tactic, you know, and that is something that we can see being used by other people. We can see Putin doing it, doing it. We can see Hugo Chavez used to do it in Venezuela. The more noise you create and the more distraction you create, the harder it is for people to believe anything, and then you create the cynicism that you began with. Yeah, as you say, it's a deliberate tactic, and it creates a powerful asymmetry, because what happens in response to that blizzard of lies is an increasingly frantic attempt to contain the damage. And every single misstep there gets scored by a very different set of norms, right? So if the New York Times gets a story wrong, or the Atlantic gets a story wrong, or we wind up relying on the steel dossier for anything to substantiate Russian influence, here, it seems, for the people who care about just the integrity of facts and the coherence of an argument, the little missteps seem to pollute the entire case against Trump. In this case, Trump and his enablers and the propagandists on that side. All they have to do is create a mess. And in cleaning it up, people who care about the integrity of journalism have to be held to norms of honesty and coherence that become harder and harder to enforce when there are a thousand fires to put out rather than just one. And so journalists and certainly Democrats have been sloppy in how they've done that from time to time and on certain points continuously. So it does give the sense, again, I'm uncertain about how much we should go back and try to clean up the mess of the previous few years so as to bring some number of people along with us for this ride. But you take something like the Steele dossier, which, if I'm not mistaken, was first a piece of Republican oppo research and then was taken over by the Clinton campaign and then I think most ignominiously, was used as the basis for a wiretap of Carter page. If I'm not mistaken. That fact alone, the fact that Steele dossier has now been basically discredited correct me if I'm wrong there, that fact alone just vitiates everything, right? So what do we do with that? It's very hard to unpick that and perform surgery on the facts in a way that can reclaim the attention of people who have begun to succumb. The way you just described, and to this feeling of, it's just such a mess, I'm going to withdraw my attention from it all. It's like this. This is who knows what happened to that family? Trump, according to the Washington Post, trump told 35,000 lies during his presidency, and you cannot clean up that mess. The zone is so flooded with shit that Hercules himself could not wade into it and begin to clean it up. But the really pernicious effect of those 35,000 lies, and especially the lies since the election, between the election and the insurrection, is, yeah, it doesn't just make close to half the country believers in absolute absurdities, like the Russian lie about the Malaysian aircraft, which became something that some Russians no doubt believed in. It also makes it harder for the rest of the country to distinguish lies from truth. You're holding on to facts for dear life, but eventually you begin to feel that it doesn't make any difference because every correction, every PolitiFact pants on fire has no effect whatsoever. And so the temptation is to say, we're playing on the wrong playing field. We're playing by the rules, and they're not. And so one effect is that more and more Democrats now say that they are unlikely to believe the next election's results if Trump wins or if a Republican wins. And so and there may be reasons not to believe them, given how state legislatures are trying to rig the counting of votes through these new laws. But it's a terrible situation where both partisan sides are now saying more and more that they're not going to believe that these institutions are illegitimate, and that's the effect of the shit that has been piling up over the last few years. Sam, you made a really interesting point about what happens in the mainstream media in the traditional values of a truthful conversation and truthful journalism, which is what happens when the New York Times has to run a correction, or when we find out that the Steele dossier is largely unreliable. And it used to be, when there was a reasonably common consensus about the rules of conversation, about the rules of evidence that a correction in The Atlantic, say, actually bolstered the credibility of The Atlantic, which you would demonstrate your credibility by owning up to and fixing your mistakes. But since Trump doesn't ever acknowledge a mistake, there isn't ever a sort of commonly adjudicated lie or misstatement on the Trump side, then the score is, you know, New York Times has had ten errors and Trump has had none. And the volume of lies that George is talking about does not just produce the nihilism that Anne was describing. It also produces a view among those who are disposed to believe Trump, that with all their evidence, all this evidence, some of them must be true. It bounces right off them if one point or another point seems to be discredited, although they tend not to even acknowledge that. But since we're using the horseshit metaphor, there's got to be a pony in there somewhere. And in my latest piece, I spent a lot of time talking to and writing about a New York City firefighter who was overwhelmed by the quantity of lies in Trumpland and believed that some of them must be true, that with all the smoke, there had to be fire. Yeah. And the problem is, it's often a good heuristic, right. But it's not good when people cynically leverage it quite consciously, as Anne has pointed out. And it is an asymmetric war. And I've been at a loss for how to kind of find daylight under these conditions with people who are not seeing the dynamics of it. The Steele dossier is an interesting case in point. So the Steele dossier was almost entirely irrelevant to the Mueller investigation. It was not the reason why the FBI investigated Trump in the first place. It was a sideshow. If you read the Mueller report, none of it is based on the Steele dossier. It all comes from different places. If you look at the material that Mueller produced about the Russian, the professional trolls from St. Petersburg who worked inside the US in the 2016 campaign, none of that is connected to the Steele dossier. But the Steele dossier had one advantage, which is that it had a few little sensational anecdotes tucked into it. The grotesque things that Trump was meant to have done in a hotel room in Moscow, that kind of thing. And it had an element of sensation that the real material didn't have. But this, I think, is another thing that Trump and the people around him have understood, which is that people will focus on the sensation at the expense of the reality. I mean, all the people who say well, if the Steel report is not true, then it's all rubbish. Did they actually read the Mueller report? The Mueller reports actually lays out pretty clearly what happened and why. And as Bart said, it certainly makes a case for Trump as a person of interest in terms of national security and certainly somebody who should have been investigated for obstruction of justice. But the details that people remember, the things that stick in their head are the sensational ones. And that's actually why maybe David is right to try and try and pick them out on the other side. And that and that's that's a piece of human psychology that Trump understood. I think the Russians understood it. Others have understood that you can focus on details from people's private lives, sensational stories, and that will take people away from the larger body of facts as well. When I was a young man, I was friendly with an expat who come from Canada, where I grew up from Chuck, Slovakia in 1968. And he's a well known writer named Joseph Scoreski. And I once had the chance to ask him what he liked best about living in a democratic society like Canada as compared to Communist Czechoslovakia. And he said, What I like about democracy is not voting. Because he was someone who was interested in jazz, in literature, in his very complicated personal life, and he knew that however the election would come out, all of that would be fine. He would be able to he detached himself entirely from politics. One of the reasons the democracy was so powerful an idea from the GI bill until Name Your Date was that it really delivered results for ordinary people. You didn't have to have a theory about communism versus free markets. You didn't have a theory about totalitarianism versus democracy to see. We had blue jeans and bananas and fun music. And they didn't obviously, it was better here. We were doing something right. And so a lot of the power of democracy comes from its ability to deliver. One of the things that you do when you're trying to undermine democracy is you blur that difference. You make things stop delivering. And so one of the where you started the beginning of this conversation, which is why it was in a way, why should people care? I mean, what is going on here? It's Trump. It's non Trump. Why do people care that we are seeing attempts and increasingly acceptable attempts in the United States to do things in politics that never would have been done before? Threatening to default on the obligations of the United States in order to get your way in a budget fight, using violence and chainery to try to overturn an election. Those are things lying about the impact of vaccines in order to make the economy worse so as to hurt the president of another party. Those are tactics that people just didn't use to do. And one of the reasons I think we are all in so much trouble and one of the reasons why we are going to have to reinvent a lot of how we think about politics. You know, this question of what's in the Mueller report, what's in the Steele dossier. If you watch the cable news conversation, you think that the you would think that the important question is what crimes did Donald Trump commit? And drama I've been banging since 2017 is we're going to find with Trump that most of the terrible things he did were not criminal and most of the criminal things he did weren't so bad. I mean, if somebody trips over some technical statute or failed to file their, their individual personal income taxes properly, that's that's obviously they shouldn't do that. But that's not the end of the world. But most of the American government rested on people not doing things just because you didn't do those things. It turns out it's not illegal for the President to operate a business that solicits money from people who want things in the United States government. A lot of that isn't illegal. Just presidents just didn't used to do that because it was wrong and you didn't need a law. And if the President did do it, it turned out the law was a weak recourse. So we're into a world in the 2020s where a lot of things that were just things that were not done, things that were understood, things that the parties didn't do to each other are now being done. And we're taking what was at once a very intense game, but that wasn't played with working weapons. And we're playing that same intense game, but now with weapons that can kill. Well, before we take the turn toward looking at the future here and our future concerns about especially the 2024 election, maybe I'll throw another one more shipley at you guys from Trumpistan just to see if we can do some good here. So obviously the problem is bigger than Trump, right? So Trump's behavior is explained by his character, right? I view him as some sort of moral lunatic and I really would not be surprised by anything he does. But he has a personality cult around him which used to be the Republican Party. And the people who have risen to his defense, you would think, have, you know, reputations to defend. I mean, some of them were casualties of his campaigning, right? I mean, how, how do you explain that someone like Ted Cruz will defend Trump all along the way as he commits these democracy straining indiscretions? I think many people who look at this think, well, all of this maybe some of this is irregular, but what's happened? This is a reaction. What Trump has done, and certainly what these Republicans who have records of kind of normal political behavior have done, is a response to some kind of hysterical overreach by the Democrats and by the deep state. So that Trump represented such a threat to the way things were, that we had a a media infrastructure and a deep state that tried to destroy him at any cost. And so what you saw on the Trump side and on the Republican side was just an attempt to if they're going to play this dirty, we're going to have to play a little dirty to maintain our administration. What do any of you say to that charge? Maybe I should start just so you're not all talking over each other. And do you have anything to say to that? So one of the strange things for me about coming to Washington in the years of the Trump administration was I've spent a lot of my career writing about the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, and I've read lots of books about the agony of collaboration and why people collaborate, and their novels about it, written by polls and checks and others. And one of the strange things was discovering that in Washington, many of those same issues and the same conundrums arose that people were seeking to further their careers by telling stories to themselves about, I need to remain in politics because my position is so important. I can be influential from the inside. You heard some people saying this openly, or the knowledge that I can bring to the table continues to matter even inside this context. And you also heard a lot of people who wanted to stay in power, who wanted to stay in public life, coming up with excuses and explanations. I mean, if you look back on the history of Vichy France, you will discover that nobody collaborated with the Nazis because they admired the Nazis. Everybody collaborated with the Nazis because the threat from the left and the Jews and the socialists was so enormous and so strong that they had no choice but to stand up and defend the honor of France and be on the side of Vichy. I'm exaggerating a little bit there to make the point, but you you find that in almost any situation where where people are sort of in a captive position, they have to either collaborate or drop out. And when they choose to collaborate, they tell that story. And so I would say that that was the story that a lot of Republicans told themselves and told one another as a justification for continuing to support Trump and for continuing to mouth the slogans that many of us heard. And we see even now, the price that can be paid by people who refuse to do that now can be exclusion from the Party or certainly exclusion from its inner sanctum. And so people are continuing to do that. They're continuing to invent a separate but equal or different but equal left wing threat. That justifies their poor behavior. But this is a kind of human reaction that we've seen in you can look at communist occupied Poland in the 1950s you can look at Vichi, you can look at many other states and you see, you know, very similar story. But is that enough to explain the fact that there you can count on really one hand the number of prominent Republicans who are willing to withstand these pressures. I mean, you take someone like Liz Cheney. Why are there two or three people in her lane? And the rest of the Republican Party has capitulated even in the aftermath of January 6. Right. And I think the answer goes way back before Trump and will be with us after Trump is gone. And perhaps we should talk about these broader things than just Trump, because I actually think Trump keeps us in some ways from understanding the broader forces and the deeper forces. I think of it as happening at two levels. One is the top of the Republican Party and the other is the base of the Republican Party. The base of the Republican Party has been increasingly populist, increasingly hostile to the mainstream institutions of the country, whether it's the media or schools and universities or the CIA, the FBI, even the military. It didn't hurt Trump to trash the national security institutions and the national security heroes Gorgia John McCain. Exactly. Because the base of the party had stopped revering those institutions and had begun to think of them as elitist, self serving, indifferent to the lives and the problems of the massive people. So the base of the party and the Tea Party period was a key moment in this because that's when the kind of nihilistic attitudes of Republican voters really set in. And it was not coincidentally upon the election of the first black president. At the top of the party, you had a kind of corruption that set in, not just financial, but the corruption of power. Power at any cost, power for its own sake, power without a real higher purpose, and conservatism, which had a set of goals, political goals, ideological goals, sort of faded out. It lost its color and power itself became the end of the party. And Mitch McConnell became the perfect embodiment of that. He was the one who brought the filibuster to the floor of the Senate as the tool for preventing the other party from doing anything when they had power. If you look at a graph of the use of the filibuster, it just skyrockets once. Mitch McConnell is the minority leader and the Republican Party strategy becomes simply to make sure that the Democrats fail. And so those two things power at the top for its own sake, and a kind of irrational populism that regards all mainstream institutions with distrust, if not outright hatred. Those two have turned the Republican Party into an authoritarian party that no longer thinks that preserving those institutions and playing by those rules and norms and upholding those laws. And when it loses, accepting that loss, that's no longer a winning approach for either the leaders of the party or the base. And if a leader tries to play by those rules, they are cast out, and not just by their colleagues at the top, but by the base. The reason why you can count them on one hand is because the rest of the Republican office holders want to keep their seats. And they understand that to keep their seats, they have to go along with the lies, because otherwise they're going to face a primary threat, and they're going to face a lot of money coming at them, and they're going to face Trump's ridicule and hostility. And that is going to be the end of their career. There's a long line of Republicans who tried in some sort of weak, half ass way to take on Trump over the last few years, and they've either been co opted by him, like Ted Cruz, or they're in other lines of work. Now, the thing that unites what George and Anne have said is that people respond to incentives. Incentives work. And the average Republican office holder subjected to truth here would not say that the election was stolen and would be, in fact, horrified by many of the things that Trump says and does. They're not true believers. The base is filled with true believers. The Republican elected officials are not. But there's a combination of opportunism and fear behind their behavior because they're responding to incentives. If they're afraid of the base, they're afraid of Trump's ability to commandeer the loyalty of their own constituents and deploy it against them. And they're opportunistic because they understand that if they play along, if they outcompete each other to be more Trumpist, or if at very minimum they don't fight back, they don't publicly dissent, then their careers can dissent. Your question about why it might be useful to look in detail at how how did Trump do this? We have to travel back a little bit in time. It's 2015, early part of 2015, and everyone is assuming that Jeb Bush will be the nominee of the Republican Party. He's amassed money and endorsements on a scale never seen for seldom seen. A number of other Republicans don't like that and are looking for a way to stop Jeb Bush. So Donald Trump materializes in the summer of 2015, and a lot of people who are the second tier of candidates say, obviously, this is going nowhere, this joke Trump candidacy, but he might take out Jeb Bush and clear the field for me. And so there was this game where Trump was simultaneously so useful to a number of people that they stood out of his way, hoping that he would wreck Jeb Bush, and Jeb Bush, in turn, hope that Trump would wreck, knock aside everybody else. Everybody was hoping to be left alone in the room with Donald Trump on the assumption that they would win. And so there was never that moment where people said, this is dangerous. This is threatening. This is destructive. Let's all unite together against them. 2015 comes to an end. Donald Trump becomes the front runner for the Republican Party in July and stays that way except for one week or a week or two, or Ben Carson is briefly in the lead at the end of 2015. Trump is the front runner. Now we come to 2016. The primaries are about to happen, and the central brain of the Republican Party more or less decides, fun is fun. That was fun. This has to stop now. And so you will remember that I think it's the first or second of the candidates. Debates took place in New Hampshire, and Megan Kelly was then the hope and star and future of the Fox News Network was sent out onto the stage to give the career finishing killer questioned Donald Trump about his abuse of women. And Trump fought her, smashed her back, and then refused to take part in further debates hosted by Fox unless Fox got rid of Megan Kelly. At this point, Rupert Murdoch, by all reports, was hoping to make Chris Christie the nominee. Fun was fun in 2015. Now it's time to get serious. Let's have Chris Christie, who's the governor of state, where Fox does business. And Trump crushed that. It wasn't that they got out of his way because of some theory about what he would do. They discovered that he would actually do it. Many people fought him, fought him quite hard. Ted Cruz fought him hard. Marco Rubio fought him hard. And then they lost. And out of that experience of loss, they gained a differing view about the future of the party. As for the party base, there isn't a stable thing called a Republican. People go. It isn't you get a card. It isn't that you pay a fee. You go in and out. So in. You saw in the elections of 2018 millions of people who had voted Republican all of their lives voted for Democratic candidates for Congress and districts. The district that had been George H. W. Bush's district, the district that had been Newt Gingrich's district, the district that had been Eric Canada's district one after another, of the most core districts of the Republican Party went Democratic. And you saw this giant reorientation of what it meant to be a Republican and what it meant to be a Democrat. And that is the thing that Trump sort of rode and benefited from without always understanding it. One last point that I think it might be worth saying. I mean, you're reflecting what some people say when you quote this line about, well, Trump was such a threat. Trump threatened to shake up the American political system. Well, in one sense, it's true. I mean, blowing up NATO, getting rid of free trade, institutionalizing bribe taking, those are big shakeups. But if you mean is there something that wasn't unethical or criminal that Donald Trump wanted to do? Actually, month by. Month, probably the least productive president of the post Franklin Delano Roosevelt era. I mean, he didn't do much. There was nothing much other than the stealing. There wasn't much that he wanted to do. And so the idea of him is some big threat to the way Washington does its proper policy business. That he became a very, very conventional Republican president where he was unconventional is what is he did things that nobody, not Republicans, not Democrats, nobody would want a president to do well. So all of that is, is psychologically understandable to me because what you're describing is for the most part, the work of incentives and a fundamental miscalculation at every step along the way. Trump's campaign is going nowhere. We can just support him for this instrumental reason. But then, lo and behold, that proves to be untrue. But what I find most mystifying perhaps incentives somehow capture this. But I don't know what those incentives really are is that in the aftermath of the election, when he lost, when the case could be credibly made that he lost and he should no longer have the power, he would only have the power that you would insist upon maintaining for him at that point, right? He's a loser. The one thing Trump can't stand to be and derides everyone else on earth for he now is why do you have the House Freedom Caucus and Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani? And what explains psychology awaits its Einstein to explain the character logical arc of Rudy Giuliani? But what explains the behavior of so many people who are willing to subvert democracy on our account in order to maintain the power of someone who we now we're now alleging they secretly hate and are merely suffering the company of for their own perverse incentives? Why do they not leave the sinking ship at that point? Well, because as David just said, trump's power was not primarily expressed through the instruments of office because he didn't have a policy program. His power was as a Demagogue and a politician and as someone who had this tremendous control of the sentiments of a large base, republicans might have thought and hoped he would go away and might have thought and hoped he would stop talking about the election. And we've seen from the work of the January 6 Committee, fascinating little artifacts of that have come out in which people around Trump on the government side and among his outside advisers like Sean Hannity, are trying to persuade him to stop talking about the election. Let's fade away quietly and build your posterity based on the fabulous record that you created as president. But they don't understand that it's a core thing to him that he's not going to stop talking about it. And he still has command of the base. He still has command of tens and tens of millions of Republicans who believe he won. He didn't lose. He hasn't lost his power. He hasn't lost his power over them. And I would add, Bart, that by November of 2020, a lot of those republicans really had stopped believing in the importance of things like fair elections and majority rule and the norms of the transfer of power. Those things no longer held any strong value for them, so it was not all that difficult to kick them aside when it became convenient to do so. It's a bit like anne was talking about eastern europe and the soviet union in darkness at noon. Arthur Kessler's great novel, the old bolshevik rubisov finally confesses to crimes that he didn't commit. And the question is, why would he confess to crimes he didn't commit? And his answer is because there's no reason not to. He cannot find any reason in himself to go against what the party is finally asking him to do as his last act. And I think these republicans have nothing inside themselves to resist. They hit that has worn away. It's not as though attachment to democratic values is is part of our DNA that we can't lose. We can easily lose it. And we can see its loss when people who at one moment might seem somewhat honorable at the next moment stop talking or give a speech that is wishywashy or even give a speech that suggests that they think the election was stolen. There was a lot of about facing after January 2021 when republicans who were shocked by the violence denounced it and then almost immediately began to back away. And I don't think it's just fear of trump in the base. I think that's part of it. But I also think it's a lack of any strong attachment to whatever the values that might have allowed them to be in the same camp as Liz Cheney of Cheney. Can I add to that? I think some people also have come to understand the usefulness of undermining the rules. If you undermine the rules, if you reduce faith in the system, if you convince people that elections are rigged, if you're somebody who hopes to take advantage of that lack of trust and to use that distrust in your own political career, then you can see the usefulness of it. And I think quite a lot of republicans have. They understand that one of the ways to win is through extreme forms of gerrymandering, by playing games with who gets to count the votes. All of this is a potential path to power. And as George says, once you're that cynical, then you come to understand that any attempt to undermine faith in the system undermine faith not just in the rules, but also in the people who keep account of the rules. Whether it's the media or inspectors, general or congressional committees, the January 6 committee, there's going to be an attempt to undermine all of those organizations that produce knowledge and produce facts and confirm what happened because it might be useful for them down the road to have those institutions undermined. Maybe the secret answer to Sam's question is in something Trump said during that period when we started to overturn the election. That key phrase, I'm looking only for 11,000 votes. I think it's probably true that if Trump's plan had been to get the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the phone and put hundreds of thousands of troops into American cities and round up people and put them in concentration camps, I mean, obviously not even Tucker Carlson would support that, but probably right now. But he didn't ask for that. He just asked for 11,000 votes. And this is maybe the key to understanding that. Maybe the the whole question, the whole thing we're going to spend this afternoon talking about is that democracy is not like a light switch that is on or off. It it's a dimmer switch that is constantly being adjusted. And the history of American democracy is as the democracy has gotten. It wasn't that the United States was ever an authoritarian country. It was just a country where the circle of participation was narrowed in very often very brutal ways, backed by violence. I think in the 1940s, in the state of California, in the state of South Carolina, only about 50,000 people voted. South Carolina didn't get a secret ballot until the 1950s, but in other places it was done. Same idea, but less roughly. But since through the 20th century, and especially since the Second World War, the circle of participation has broadened and broadened and broadened. We now think democracy means that every adult gets to participate to the extent that they want to. Well, Trump wasn't talking about overturning all of that system. Just dialing it back by 11,000 votes. And in a fairly close balanced system, if you can say, look, there are just certain people who shouldn't be participating in the system. Not every most people, yes, certainly anyone who owns a house, anyone who's over 40, anyone who owns a gun, those people obviously should participate. And many of the people who don't meet those criteria, just not all of them, just not enough. And that was the that was the exciting proposition that emerged in 2020. Maybe if you just compress it enough without overturning democracy altogether, you can ensure that we win much more often than we otherwise would. I think that's really the question for the future, that's the thing that people glimpsed was the possibility of limiting participation to enable the Republican Party not to compete, but in the way that other parties do, by saying, well, people aren't liking our message. Why do we propose some things that people like? Why don't we find something and propose those and get power that way and then get the benefits of power? So now we can continue with a message that is basically pretty unpopular, but by shrinking the circle of participation somewhat, 11,000 votes, we can win. Even though people don't want what we're offering. And if I can just add just one sentence, that's exactly how democracy has been undermined in other countries, at other times, and other places. Not because there's a coup d'etat and millions of arrests, but because, you know, there's been a little change to the Constitution, because there have been, you know, some of the media are no longer able to operate. And it's a very slow and gradual process. I mean, something like eight years after Hugo Chavez took over Venezuela, most Venezuelans still believed they were living in a democracy, although by that moment, it was no longer possible to change the leadership of the country through a democratic ballot. And people, just because it had been a series of small cuts over time, they didn't notice it, they didn't feel it yet. And I think that's what Trump understood. I worry sometimes that I'm overly cynical and maybe that all of us in this conversation have been overly cynical about the cynicism of Republican elected officials, or elected officials more generally, that so few of them have core convictions for which they are prepared to pay a price politically. But Liz Cheney has come up several times in this conversation, and I wrote a book about Dick Cheney, and Liz is very much a politician in his image, almost an anti politician. And whatever you think of her convictions, and many of them I disagree with profoundly, they include respect for constitutional democracy, for the core tenets of our political system. And in that way, like her father, she's a zealot. And in this case, her zealotry is rebounding to the public good because she's willing to pay possibly the ultimate political price. She may lose her seat. She certainly lost her leadership position by standing up for the truth about the results of the last Democratic election, and we're just not seeing very many people who are prepared to do that. Yeah, there's one thing I would add. I don't want us to go down this rabbit hole, and I've gone down it many times on the podcast, but it's not exactly exculpatory with respect to the antidemocratic tendencies of Republicans at the moment. But it psychologically explains something when you look at the degree of ideological capture on the left, identity politics and woke ism, and I'll give you all the buzz phrases now cancel culture and the way that has been disproportionately represented in our mainstream institutions, including journalistic ones. When you move right of center, you're meeting people who have no alternative politically to the Republican Party and whatever it's up to now. And they're faced by people who on very different topics and in very different ways, are also manufacturing a tremendous amount of dishonesty and misinformation. And you have cities burning, and literally buildings are burning in the shot, and CNN is saying it's covering a mostly peaceful protest. Right. And that just one image like that endlessly amplified on Fox afterwards, does enough to just end the argument for people, whatever Trump is, he's not as bad as that. He's not as bad as defund the police, right? Feel free to respond to that. But I just think that's been working in the background for many, many millions of people this whole time. I think not just Sam as a kind of catalyst to accelerate the illiberalism of the right, but a sign that liberalism doesn't really know a political party or a partisan orientation, and it has a communicable effect. It can easily spread. And I think that is what's happening in our culture. The illiberalism of the left is mostly in culture right now. It's mostly in institutions like schools and universities and the media and philanthropy and the arts. The illiberalism of the right is mostly in politics. It's mostly concentrated in a political party, and so it is a much more direct threat to democracy. But to shift from Trump a bit, I worry most about simply the mental habits of people who find themselves caught in a kind of a vortex or a vicious circle of responding to a liberalism with more illiberalism. And it's very hard to get out of that once you get in it. And that's why I sight of these polls that show that Democrats are now more willing to say than they have been that they might reject the results of the next election if they show a Republican winner. There's also more willingness to use political violence across partisan lines than there have been in recent years. So those are tendencies that are in the minds of people and that have a way of intensifying and sort of driving each other to extremes. And that's something that worries me a lot because it's just very hard to slow it down once the acceleration toward the extremes and towards the liberalism of all kinds starts. All right, so let's make a turn toward the present and future here. What are we most worried about? To look at the public facing machinations of the Democratic Party, it would seem that the Democrats are most worried about voting rights. Again, sort of seen through the lens of identity politics, right? The Republicans want to disenfranchise black and brown people by asking for voter ID essentially is the concern, whereas I think the real concern. That's a conversation that can be had. But I think the real concern is we have a system where it might not matter how people vote if the right people are in place to overturn an election. This is a machinery that I don't even count myself as someone who even dimly understands it at this point. But we were all alerted to its existence in the 2020 election, and it's fairly dumbfounding that this is our system. And it was hanging by a thread. It was hanging by the conscience of Mike Pence and a dozen other people who didn't cave in to the demands that they just nullify the votes that were coming from the disputed states. What are we worried about? Maybe I'll put it to Bart and George first. What are we worried about with respect to the next few years and 2024, next two years? Well, it's the difference between changing the rules of football games so that it's a little bit harder for one side to score, on the one hand, which is like the voting rights you're talking about, and then simply buying off the referee, on the other hand, so that you can directly control the outcome of the game. And what you see is properly called election subversion. So, as David has pointed out, trump tried to get the Secretary of State of Georgia, who oversaw the election and certified the vote, to change 11,780 votes, which would flip the result after three separate counts showed that Biden had won. And you had, in this case, the integrity of one man, Brad Raffensperger, who refused to overturn the election, who refused to throw away the people's votes, and recorded the conversation with Trump and arranged for it to be made public. And now what concerns me most is how does the Republican Party, how does the Trump supporting Republican Party respond to what Brad Raffensperger did? What Trump and his people have done is go around the country and find those obstacles, find those people and places which guided the way of Trump's attempt to overthrow the election. And it's gone around systematically uprooting them. So what's happened to Raffensperger? Trump has endorsed another candidate to replace him in this year's election. First of all, that candidate has pledged that he would not have certified Biden's victory. That candidate is running explicitly on the platform that he would not properly, honestly carry out his duty to count the votes of the people. He says Trump really won on these fictitious grounds of fictitious fraud and that he would not have certified the election. They're, by the way, doing the same thing with the governor, because Governor Kemp signed the state affirmation of result, and Trump has made him an enemy as well, and therefore recruited someone to run against him and endorsed former Senator Purdue to take on Kemp. But meanwhile, not being satisfied with that, the Republicans in the state legislature have passed a new law that, just in case Raffensperger wins again, they have removed him from his voting seat on the state Board of Elections. So if the election were held again today, a national election, he would not be the one to certify it. They have simply defanged him. And while they were doing that, they gave themselves the power to fire all the county election officials who certify the votes in their own counties. And they've done that specifically with reference to Fulton County, which is Atlanta and the Democratic stronghold in the state. And so systematically, they've gone about undermining and trying to replace the person who stood in Trump's way last time. And you're seeing that happening around the country. There was an official in Michigan who was on the board of state canvassers, which has two Democrats and two Republicans, and Trump was trying to get them to deadlock so that Michigan's vote, which Biden also won, would not be certified. One of those two Republicans resisted his blandishments and insisted that the vote was the vote and he was going to certify it. And he's been hounded out of office, and you see the same thing going on around the country. And all that's legal. No one's breaking the law, even though they're breaking norms that we didn't know we were relying on. It's a big legal problem because you can't say that you can't run for Secretary of State on a lying platform that claims that Trump won the last election. You can't prevent in advance the subversion of the next election count. You can reasonably foresee it happening if this candidate wins. And it would probably become a matter for the courts if someone actually did try to subvert the election and say that black is white and that Trump defeated Biden. Maybe. Let's just linger on that point for a second. Just going back to the past for a second. Do we know what would have happened if Pence had followed orders and not certified the election or any one of the other people were talking about at that stage in Georgia, any other contested states had put forward other electors? Or was there in fact, we would have hit some kind of constitutional crisis. But what do we imagine would have resolved that crisis? Well, this would have been a crisis precisely because we don't know how it could have been resolved. And there was a sitting president who would have been the beneficiary of this gigantic electoral theft, who theoretically had the power to control federal law enforcement and military resources and if, as one could expect, this led to serious civic unrest, could have invoked the Insurrection Act and given direct orders to the military. And we don't know what orders would have been followed, but just because of the kind of astonishing ambition of the effort to get Pence to claim authority over the congressional electoral count, we don't know how it would have come out. There are many opportunities for deadlock there. For example, if he had thrown away the votes of at least three, possibly four states and therefore reduced Biden's electoral count to below 270, he could claim that under the 12th Amendment that Biden had failed to obtain a majority of the whole Electoral College and therefore stated that the election would go to the House, although Democrats controlled the House. The vote in the House under the 12th Amendment is done by state delegation, and each state gets one vote, and Republican controlled 26 of the 50 state delegations. But Nancy Pelosi, as speaker of the House, could have refused to bring to call the House to order to have that vote and then you would have a completely failed presidential election for which the Constitution doesn't offer a remedy. Under one reading, nancy Pelosi would become the acting president. But you could see the endless opportunities for mischief and unrest in all this. That would have been a glorious be careful what you wish for a moment for Republicans in some universe that happened. So what, if anything, are we doing to rectify that problem? And we know we came perilously close to flying off the road and into the abyss because there was no guardrail right where we would have wanted it. Who is building the guardrail? And and what process? I mean, does it take a constitutional amendment or what what process do we need to make sure that if this happens again, it doesn't pose the same kind of risk? Well, one part of the answer is to fix the Electoral Count Act, which is what interprets and gives direction to the invocation of the 12th Amendment for how the electoral count is supposed to go. This was passed in the 1870s and is one of the most confusing and carbon laws ever passed by Congress. I defy anyone to read these 300 word sentences and make any sense out of them. There's some possibility of consensus between Republicans Democrats on fixing the Electoral Count Act because Republicans are sitting around thinking they don't really want Vice President Harris to have the powers that Trump thought Pence had to decide the next election. And so there may be a common willingness to set rules of the road on how the procedure happens. When the Electoral College votes are delivered to Congress, they meet in joint session, as they did on January 6. The Vice President as President of the Senate presides over this count, and reforms would include making explicitly clear that the Vice President doesn't get to do the counting right. That seems like that should be a major focus far bigger than many of the other things that the Biden administration appears to be focused on at the moment. I don't know why that isn't the phrase Electoral Count Act isn't ringing in everyone's ears. It might have seemed too small to them. They had a couple of bills that were really ambitious that included not just expanding or securing voting rights through early voting, mail and voting dropboxes, all those things, but also campaign finance reform, making Election Day a national holiday, all of which I think are really good things. And I would have voted for them absolutely any time. But they took the focus off what we're talking about because there's very little data that shows that if you restrict the number of days of early voting or if you make it harder to do mail in voting, it's going to benefit one party or the other. It's really hard to finetune elections. To that extent, it was powerful politics because it connected to old and deep and terrible parts of our history in which black Americans and others were kept from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests, et cetera. But I haven't seen data that says these new state laws are likely to have a significant effect on turnout, because in the past that laws like that have not had a significant effect on turnout. So they became extremely passionate arguments for laws that were only important in the context of what we're talking about. They were part of a Republican strategy to thwart the will of the majority, but I don't think they were where the will of the majority was most likely to be thwarted. It's most likely to be thwarted after an election with what Bart just called election subversion. And I wish both parties, but especially the Democratic Party, were focusing on that and really holding the Republicans feet to the fire and say, do you not see a problem with state laws, state politicians and a confused national law? The electoral can act that makes it likely that the will of the majority is going to be overthrown, because that's a harder thing for a Republican to defend. And perhaps there could be some bipartisanship. I'm always skeptical because every time we think there might be just about, it doesn't happen, especially on election issues. But I think that's where the focus should be. And perhaps I'm not a legal expert on this by any means, but perhaps there should be some smart staffers in Congress drafting laws right now that make it almost impossible for even the most corrupt state official or local official to rig the election, to throw the election after the vote. That's actually not an easy thing to get. That last one sounds like a great idea. I would love it if it were possible. But states have the majority of the authority over the conduct of a state election, even when it's a national election or even when it's a presidential election. And there is an open constitutional doctrine about an open question about the constitutional basis for that authority. That one of the things that Trump Republicans are doing is promoting a theory called independent state legislature. And it comes from the fact that article two of the constitution says that each state shall choose electors for president according to the preferences of its state legislature, that the state legislature is the ultimate authority about how you choose electors. And so what we saw in the last election was an attempt by Trump and his people to persuade Republican state legislators in seven states that Biden won but that were controlled by Republicans in the state house and the state senate to persuade those legislators to discard the votes of the people of that state and to substitute electors for Trump on their own authority. Because article two of the constitution says in this extremely muscular and implausible reading of the Constitution, article two says that the legislature decides on the electors no matter what. It's almost certainly not true that you could get the legislature to decide after an election is held that the election is not going to be the method of choosing electors, but it can write the rules for how electors are chosen in that state for the next election. And I don't think that voting law experts are very optimistic about the possibility that Congress can write rules that would prevent subversion at the state level. But I would like to dissent a little bit from the idea that this is a technical legal problem which has a technical legal solution. The Electrical Count Act was a mess in 1960, when there was a Republican president and Richard Nixon, the vice Republican vice president lost to John F. Kennedy and stepped aside. It was a mess in 1976 when Gerald Ford accepted his very, very close defeat at the hands of Jimmy Carter. It was a mess in 1992 when George H. W. Bush stepped aside. And it was a mess in the year 2000 when very bitter Democrats accepted the Bush v. Gore outcome. It's not because of the laws that Americans accept elections and it's not because of the laws that President Trump and many of his supporters refuse to accept this election. It's, it's, it's something deeper. So if you're thinking about the future and so we should, we should be studying periods in history where people have gone through periods where political systems have resttabilized after periods of extremism. And one that catches my mind a lot is the period after the Second World War when there were Communist and Fascist parties all over, all over Western Europe and the United States came the year 1946 was, I think, the year of the worst strike action in American history. And, and then over the next generation, these systems were were stabilized. So, so how did we do that? That's and, and you can point to things and I don't know that I have, like, one, but material prosperity, that sure helps. Broadening participation helps. And one of the things that the United States and its friends did to defeat the Communists in Western Europe was to ensure that there was women's suffrage. And in France and Italy, where the two places where the Communists were strongest, the Communists appealed strongly to men, didn't appeal to women. Women got the vote. Communist suddenly became a very small party compared to what they had been when women didn't have the vote. But what really, really helps is elite agreement that there are things that elites won't do to one another. And that was the difference in the politics of the 1950s and the politics of the 1930s. Traumatized by the war, frightened by the Soviet Union, people who had powerfully different views came to an understanding. They're just things we can't do. They're just things we can't do. All of those things are great, David, but we have two years. We're not going to get material prosperity across a broad middle class and a. Lead agreement and the rest of it in two years. So what do we do between now and what could be the really cataclysmic 2024 election? Well, as between now and 2024, we're in a situation that reminds me of a different period of history, which is the period after the Civil War when you had one party that accepted the outcome of the Civil War and another party that chafed at it. And then the success or failure of the United States depended on the party that accepted the Civil War winning power most of the time and the party that didn't accept the Civil War losing power most of the time. So to 2024, Biden has to win and protect himself against the risk of being impeached by a Republican House. And that's going to take all the things I talked about, that's going to take success and the perception of success. And that's going to take focusing the country on other kinds of challenges of which there aren't a few. And one of the things that is haunting all of us is that we may be about to confront in the very near future a major war on the European continent in which President Trump's former political chum, Vladimir Putin is invading other European countries. We face and it's chronic, so it's hard to get people excited about it. But we face this climate challenge. We face competition from China. It is, I think, not fanciful to think that you could get Republican and Democratic political actors to believe, you know what, it's just from the time that the Tea Party Congress began threatening default to get its way through 2020, the game got played too roughly. The way it was being played in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War is too rough. We need to make this game more predictable. Everybody would benefit from a more predictable game. And I would add one other thing, which is one of those mushy political things, which is that the Democrats and those members of the Republican Party who want America to remain a democracy need to find better ways to talk about it. Even the title of this event, The Future of Democracy, once you talk about democracy as an abstract thing, climate change just debate, by the way, has the same problem. I knew I was the problem somehow. Yeah, it's your fault. But once you talk about it as an abstraction, our democracy is in danger. For a lot of people, that's too distant a problem or it doesn't seem to affect them personally. And I've had several conversations with politicians in the US and elsewhere recently about what is there a better way? And one of the ways is if politicians talk about what it is that we could lose as a nation, you could lose your right to choose who your governing is, but also you could lose something fundamental about the American identity. We are Americans. What brings us together. It's the fact that we are able to come together to make these decisions, to choose our leaders, to follow a process, to follow the rule of law, and you are in danger of losing that. Something fundamental is being challenged and you are going to lose it. You can appeal to people's sense of justice and injustice. I mean, the idea of people cheating or being cheating or cheating you is something that's very powerful. I don't think that the Biden administration has found this language yet, and I know some of them are aware of this. The failure of this voting rights bills is interesting because in a way, they were seeking to address a problem, the problem of lots of Republican state legislatures passing laws to do with voting. That was a warning sign because all of those laws were being promulgated and passed on a kind of assumed basis, that they needed to be passed because the election had been rigged. They're a reflection of the big lie. We're not going to say that the election was rigged, but we're going to have better voting systems in 2022 or 2024 because we need to fix our voting system. Actually, the voting systems didn't need to be fixed. Maybe they need to be fixed in some places in specific ways, but there wasn't a huge need for these laws. And so the Biden administration reacted by saying we didn't need these laws. These laws are designed to limit voting and so on. And I think they hoped through the use of this act. And as George says, it was very ambitious to raise the conversation about democracy, but it hasn't worked yet, and that's not for lack of trying. And also, it's not an easy problem in the way that, again, when you talk about climate change abstractly, lots of people don't care when you talk about polar bears dying or when you talk about wildfires in your state, then they might feel differently about it. And I think the people who care about American democracy need to find that way of speaking about it. Well, I love Bart's point that this incentive runs on both sides of the tracks here. And yeah, the prospect of Kamala Harris subverting a Republican victory is is got to be galling. So you would think that we could get some bipartisanship on that point. Everything we're talking about here, at least out of concern for 2024, seems to presuppose that Trump will run. I guess there's a Trumpist alternate candidate, perhaps waiting in the wings who we would also be concerned about subverting an election. It also presupposes that the Democrats have a candidate that's electable. Right. And I think there's reason to worry that two years from now, joe Biden may not be up to it or that his approval rating may be a deal breaker. And there's certainly reason to worry that Kamala Harris is not electable given her approval rating and basic invisibility at this point. I'm happy to cycle back on any loose ends we haven't covered here. But I just want to get a sense of what you think the Democrats can and should do with respect to a candidate. What do you think is likely to happen? Does anyone have a political intuition here? David, I'm going to start with you. You're into politics. Yeah. I don't think they have a mechanism. The Democrats have a mechanism to change their candidates at this point. It would require Kamala Harris to volunteer here, to step aside, that the project of making her step aside if she didn't want to would be such a bloodbath, it wouldn't be worth it. And I don't see this, by the way, as any kind of personal reflection on her. It's very difficult to go in American politics from the job of number two to number one and the politicians who have usually done it. There's usually been some catastrophic event that has propelled number two into the number one role and gotten people used to the idea of former number two as the number one. Actually stepping through an election process has been quite difficult and maybe more difficult even for her than for some others. But it's a real issue, and Democrats took a big risk with Nominating, the oldest candidate for president ever, and then backing that person up with someone who wasn't a tried and tested vote winner. And so that's going to be a real issue. And so the only thing one can hope for is a lot of economic success between now and 2024 and one of the immediate challenges for the Democrats. There is a report on the day that we speak. The Democrats are considering limiting attendance at the State of the Union address to 25 members of Congress. And that the idea that they would continue to accept the idea. Of COVID is not something as something that is an ongoing, chronic problem that American society must be almost perpetually dislocated by on their watch. They need to find some way to declare that they have won a success over COVID to focus the economy. To focus on the economy and let's hope that Russia is deterred from invading Ukraine and then to claim that as success if they can make that happen. Does anyone else have anything on that point before we turn toward questions? All right, so, Stacey, let's get some questions here and see what I have a few here, and you can just stop me when you all hear one that you would like to address. Correct? So there's one here. It seems to me that democracy can only exist when the populace is educated. Are American and other democracies youth getting taught the civics necessary to sustain the future? We'll linger on that for a second. Does anyone have, as someone pointed out, I think just a few minutes ago, we only have two years for the the immediate wolf at the door to be pushed back. So educating the population is a heavy lift. But does anyone have any ideas about education? I've been thinking about it quite a bit, because I despair of most of the other possible pathways out of polarization, to use the word we haven't really talked about. It may be a coincidence, but civic education has all but disappeared from a lot of American children's schooling in the decades in which we have moved into these incredibly polarized camps that don't seem to live in the same universe any longer. And that's partly because it became controversial. One side or the other denounced teachers and schools when their children were being taught something in civics class that offended their view. And there are a lot of very well meaning and good ideas for how to bring civics back to American classrooms. When I say that, I almost immediately hear derision and contempt like, you think you're going to solve this problem by teaching children about all the amendments to the Constitution. But I guess we should think about education and civic education in a much broader way as simply giving children the chance to learn how to think, how to reason, how to argue, how to persuade, how to hear views. That they don't like. How to find some common ground, if possible, with people who hold those views and if not, to still agree to live together in this country. For me, it's very hard to imagine exactly how we can teach those things, because school is under so much pressure and stress. And in fact, public education seems to be facing a kind of existential crisis right now coming out of COVID But for me, there has to be something like that, and it may involve doing something to change the way we talk to each other on the Internet and the way the Internet and algorithms encourage us to think and to react to one another. These are all big airy concepts. But when I think of how we can turn around from the disaster we're headed toward, I think about education and about how we're doing it wrong and how we might be able to do it better. Can I challenge a little bit the premise of the question? George has written, by the way, for The Atlantic, very powerfully about civic education and what has gone wrong with it, and I recommend that to people. But it really needs to be stressed. The American electorate of 2022 is far and away the best educated American electorate ever, much more educated than the American electorate of stabler times like 1972 or 1962. If more education were the path to stability, we should have the stability of a Barker lounger. Right now, I worry about the opposite. What used to happen was politics was about material things. Societies were poor, and politicians offered people things that they desperately wanted. In Tammany holidays, it was literally a sack of coal or a turkey. Later, it was a bridge or a road. Today, more and more of us are in politics to realize a vision of ourselves. And this is the thing that the political scientists always hope for. The day would come when we would transcend the physicality of politics and we would debate ideas and modes of being abstract. And guess what? That turns out to be the hardest thing of all to compromise. So we may need to think about a different way for people to live each other. We have these new communications technologies which means we all have this experience. Every day you turn on Twitter and somebody you've never heard of before in some place you've never you know nothing about has said something that you think of is offensive. Did that happen 20 years ago? It did. Did you know about it? It did not. You did not. Did it spoil your day then? No. You didn't have to. Now you're upset all day because of this thing, but this person you've never heard of. And by the way, one of my rules for sanity on the internet is if you hadn't heard of the person before they said this thing, don't let it bother you that they did say this thing. But we have a politics now that is about self realization and that's in a country that is so diverse and getting more diverse all the time and not just in the census categories, but as people become richer and more prosperous, they become more different one from another as they realize who they are. I would just add one thing, which is that in addition to the way civics is taught in school, which by the way, I think the first time I wrote about this subject was at least 20 years ago I was on the editorial board of the Washington Post and people said, it's terrible how civics education is declining. And I wrote something and there were even at that time, all kinds of worthy organizations that promote civics education and people writing civics textbooks that have thought a lot about left right differences. And a lot of this exists. It's out there. I mean, if teachers wanted to use it, it's available. And so I have some cynicism about the possibility of incorporating that because it's not as if it would be very hard for people to do more of it if they wanted to. I wonder why people don't think more broadly about education. Whether there are not online campaigns or whether there are not civic education for adults ways of reaching people whether there aren't ways of reaching people through the media or through entertainment. I'm a little disappointed in the American entertainment industry that it hasn't thought harder, for example, about doing a Netflix series about the effect of propaganda on ordinary Americans and how they stop speaking to one another. There's no Hollywood drama that expresses the anxiety of the last four years and the way in which it's affected personal relationships. I mean, I think there's a lot of education that could be done or anyway, a lot of if an education might even be the wrong word. But discussion and resolution of problems, if more people were thinking about this as a problem that could be resolved through reflecting different people's perspectives. I have talked to people about it. But if it won't work in classrooms, why will it work on Netflix? No, I'm not saying it won't work in classrooms. I'm saying that the material to do it is available. There are lots of good courses in civic education. People have invested. There are foundations that will give stuff to your school if you want it. I'm not saying that it couldn't work. I'm saying it doesn't happen. And the reasons why seem to be to do with local school decisions and teachers not having time and need to have more time for Stem now. And there are all these Regents tests that you have to pass in each state thanks to the no Child Left Behind laws. I mean, there there are all kinds of nonpolitical bureaucratic reasons why it seems to be hard to fit civics into the day. So I'm not downplaying it. I'm just saying it's been it's been a subject of conversation for two decades, and I'm just saying that there might be other ways of discussing the problem if people were more creative about thinking about it. Okay, Stacey, next question. Next question. Sort of in that vein. How do we, as reasonable thinking humans, take the level of fear, anger, and tribalism in our communities down to a level where people can reset and open their minds, use their brains and critical thinking to make real decisions and have real mindful conversations? Yeah, well, that really is the impossible question. If we could answer that, our problems would be solved. Not only our problem. Yeah, lots of people's problems. All problems. All problems admitting a human solution would be solved by the answer to that question, I guess. So someone just mentioned social media in passing. I mean, that's certainly part of the problem here, the way we're engaging one another and perpetually permeable to information and misinformation that wouldn't otherwise be available. This may seem like a lateral move here, but it's relevant because it's so energizing in Trumpistan. The role played or not played by big tech in deciding who to platform, who to censor, whose rights to violate. I think if you sample from the conversation among Republicans at this point, you will tend to find people who think that Twitter is the public square. To deplatform anyone for any reason is to violate their rights. And leaving aside that that doesn't make sense constitutionally, and Twitter is a private company that can do whatever it wants. There is this perception that the fixes in from the elites, yet again, big tech. And so taking off Alex Jones and certainly taking off Trump was an astonishing act of hypocrisy by people who claim to care about free speech and the free exchange of ideas. And if the answer to bad speech is just more speech, how could you deplatform the President of the United States? I don't know if what you guys think about that to say I'm on record many times calling for him to be deplatformed and celebrating when he was because I view him as the most dangerous cult leader on earth at this point. But what do you think we should do with respect to the role that these platforms play in our epistemology? In this case, find it impossible to coherently organize. Let me try an analogy supposing through some twist of the way railroads, roads worked back in the 19th century. Cornelius of Vanderbilt had found himself the owner of every church in the United States and had to make a decision. The New York Central Railway had to make a decision about what was preached in every church in the United States. My guess is they wouldn't have done a very good or satisfactory job. And so what you have are these giant companies in the business of selling advertising for whom speeches actually. I mean, they give speeches about it, but it's not what they care about. They just want to sell boots and gloves and perfume and they suddenly found themselves as arbiters of all these questions. They're incompetent to do it. They're not, by the way, disinterested actors. They're their businesses, which with profit seeking. So I think there's a core of truth in the Writer Center complaint, which is who appointed and how did it happen that, that these people are making these decisions that are so crucial. On the other hand, the rule can't be okay, tell you what, you get to say anything about any I mean, we do have laws regulating what you can say about medicines in the United States and have had it now for more than 100 years. It is not a violation of your freedom of speech not to be able to say that cocaine will cure headaches. So that's been regulated for a long time. So I just don't think there's any going to be any alternative but for government to step in and to say, you know what, these things do function as the equivalence of public squares, and some competent authority is going to have to write meaningful rules with democratic buy in. We don't want to have Mark Zuckerberg making these decisions for everybody. But so there's two extremes here. There's the public square case, which, wherein Twitter or any other platform should function by the light of the Constitution, right, that it really is freedom of speech. And you are in fact, free to say in the public square that cocaine cures headaches. But you're not. Well, I guess you're not as a corporation on television. I can say it on my podcast. You can write a book with your crazy ideas about cocaine. And if someone publishes it. I don't know what law prevents that. And then again, you have the slippery slope problem that once you start preventing that, then where do you stop? But on the other extreme, there's treating these platforms like publishers, where they have, whether they want to assume it or not, they do have an editorial responsibility and they're liable for the defamation of others or the consequences of their publishing irresponsible things, which is to say, most importantly, they can be sued. Effectively, Twitter could be sued for what Alex Jones was able to do to the Sandy Hook parents on that platform. Right? If Twitter is a publisher and not just a platform, but if Twitter is like the phone company, then you're going to start looking for what people say in their phone conversations and finding the phone company for so you have to pick your metaphor. That's attractive here. Go for it. If I could intervene. The problem with Twitter and the problem with Facebook is that it's actually neither a publisher nor the phone company. And the reason is that you're absolutely right. Everybody has the right to say whatever they want and free speech and so on. Twitter does more than that. It doesn't just give you the right to speech, it publicizes your speech. And the same is true of Facebook, and it publishes it according to a set of rules that are semi secret, but that we've had some insight into. So what spreads on Facebook? What spreads the most quickly? Facebook has defined this as things that keep people on Facebook, that's actually Facebook's goal is to keep you on the platform as long as possible. And that is the I mean, it's a little more sophisticated than that, but that is essentially the metric that decides what spreads and what doesn't. Then it turns out that what spreads are things that are very emotional, things that are divisive sometimes, things that are surprising and shocking. And the things that are surprising and shocking are often false stories. I don't know. The Pope Has Endorsed Donald Trump was one of the most spread stories on Facebook in 2016, even though no Pope would ever endorse anybody. And so it was an absurd thing, but it was one of the most read Facebook posts of that election cycle. And so the problem isn't that Facebook and Twitter allow people to say things. The problem is that they have created a mechanism by which shocking, emotional and angry things reach more people than other things. Other things. So the thing that, in my view, needs to be regulated, and I have written about this, and I think I've heard people discuss this on some of your shows, Sam. The thing that needs to be regulated is the algorithm. And so you can imagine, and it is scientifically conceivable that you could have algorithms that favor constructive conversation rather than emotion and disagreement. It is conceivable that you could have forms of social media that reflected the values of the public square that sought to bring people together or create compromise. These do exist. They've been experimented with in other places. Taiwan uses them a lot. It's a country that cares a lot about democracy and has thought a lot about how to have better conversations in a country where political division, especially if it's exploited by China, could be kiss of death. So they really understand it. So the thing is to get politicians and everybody really focused not on what's taken down and what's allowed, what they allow and don't allow, not on censorship, but on what are the rules by which things spread most quickly. How is it that people come to see things? What is the algorithm looking for? And I think that you would find that if you could regulate that and it is technically possible, it's just not legally possible. If we could have insight into the sort of black box of the algorithms, we could I believe it would be possible to find to create a better public conversation. But we're still a long way away from it. One of the reasons sorry about that. One of the reasons we're having a hard time thinking about this is because a long time article of faith in First Amendment doctrine or free expression philosophy is under challenge here. You made reference to it earlier, Sam. I mean, Lewis Brandeis is the one who wrote the famous counter speech doctrine in 1927 saying that the cure for evil speech or wrong speech is more speech, that the free market of ideas necessarily will respond and correct itself. And as we discussed earlier, that just hasn't been true in this Trumpian age. When you have, as George said, you have a president who lied 35,000 times and who floods the zone and who overwhelms the truth with propaganda, then one of the foundational reasons we have for not censorship, for not censoring speech, the idea that you can cure bad speech with good speech, that just has actually proved not to be correct. And that leads us to potentially a very bad place in which we don't respect free speech rights as much if we're worried about outcomes and we don't want to be in that place conceptually. Yeah. Okay, Stacy. Okay, question here. Would it be achievable feasible for the American voting system to switch to the Australian voting system first, past the post preferential voting and proportional representation? Could the Australian voting system negate many of the flaws within the current American voting system? Yeah. This is a point that Andrew Yang has devoted a fair amount of words to. Does anyone have a sense that we could cure much of what ails us in democracy by obviating the threat of being primaried in the way that currently exists? It's worth a shot. You'd like to see some of the states experiment with it and see whether they get better results. It's certainly true, historically and internationally, that countries that have proportional representation have a there's a wider variety of parties, and there's also greater pressure to achieve compromises. And if you if you look, I've seen political science studies that show that show depending on the system because there are different systems that show better outcomes for PR countries that have it. And you certainly don't get this very bitter two party divides that we have and some other countries have. It's interesting. When we were all growing up, our two party system was supposed to be the source of our great stability compared to all those crazy European countries with 17 parties. But now it seems to be the source of our division, you know, and you could also throw in the some of the state referenda that have instituted independent commissions to draw congressional districts and which seems to have worked pretty well in Michigan. And in Ohio, a court throughout the state legislature's redistricting because it violated the state referendum that was passed by the people of Ohio that wanted it to be taken out of partisan hands. So maybe there are all these sort of smaller fixes that could add up to a larger not cure. But moving us away from the death match that we're in, from the war of attrition that we're in, I don't know if the sum of them is enough to do it. I'm willing to try to spread anything within the rules. Okay, we've passed the two hour mark here, so maybe just a few more questions. Stacey all right, can you weigh in on why previous American presidents have not been more openly and regularly vocal on the topic of the undermining of democracy and its unraveling before our very eyes and how their unifying message might engender more affinity towards protecting our democracy? So this is a question about former presidents. Actually, this is something that has galled me to some degree how invisible Obama has been through this whole period. I mean, he would both with the indiscretions of coming from Trump, but also with respect to what's happened on the far left. Is there a role for former presidents here to get us on track, or is that just is the norm that presidents don't open their big mouths after they're out of office and they just get lucrative Netflix deals? Is that just too holy to or no one cares what they have to say? George Bush, didn't he just give a whole bunch of money? Was it to Liz Cheney? To Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney? Both, I think. And Barack Obama did have something to say about cancel culture a couple of years ago. He got practically canceled himself a couple of sentences. Yes, but I think the experience was probably so unsettling because he himself got ratioed on Twitter that he hasn't done it since. So I don't know that they carry how much authority they carry anymore. Slightly different point about ex presidents, and they may be contributors. To the problems of the system in a different way. The first president of the United States, if I'm recalling this correctly, ever to give a speech for money, was Gerald Ford before then. And it was shocking. It was so shocking that his successor, Jimmy Carter, should have made a point of not doing it, point of building houses for the poor, because he was so horrified. Jerry Ford did. I mean, he was mad about the way he'd lost office, and he was in financial trouble. He did ads for those mints and sold decorative plates. I mean, he did all kinds of things. It was considered really indecrous. But the idea that you got rich as an ex president, that's a new idea. And Ford was the first. But because of age, Reagan wasn't really able to do it. Bill Clinton really introduced this into American life, and now it's become sort of a standard practice. But I think one of the things that contributes to the feeling of Americans that politics are not on the level, that your politicians are not representing you, that they're in it for themselves, has been some of what happens to people after they leave the presidency. Again, there's no fix to this, except maybe a more puritanical culture. But it would be interesting if presidents stop doing that, whether that would have an impact on how we feel about public life. The problem with the fix, though, is once these norms are, as we've been saying, it's kind of an awful word, but I don't know what other word to use. Once these norms are trashed, these taboos are knocked down, it's really hard to reestablish them. Things just seem to keep moving in that direction. Presidents are going to keep making more money. How do you get people to get off Twitter? That's my answer to Twitter, get off it. But it's very hard to get off it, because once you're on it, you're in the thick of it, and you want to keep experiencing it. And so self restraint as kind of a cultural norm is an answer to all of this, including the legal corruption of ex presidents making a ton of money off their former office. But I don't know how you do it, except, as I was saying earlier, by trying to raise a new generation with new ideas. But I don't know, maybe education is the wrong road to be thinking. Wait a minute, George. I have a question. Do you have a secret Twitter account? Yeah. You're not on Twitter. I read it. So I must have some secret account, but I never write on it, so you won't find me. Yes, but I read all of you. I read all of you, and I know exactly what you're thinking and saying. I just am not going to lift my head up long enough to get it shot off. Interesting. All right, Stacey, next question. What are the panelists views on the filibuster anyone have strong views here? I read historically, it was invented for and been used primarily in the service of squashing civil rights legislation. And it's not in the Constitution. It is a Senate rule, like other rules, and it has gotten the way of a lot of important legislation. I I can't imagine why anyone would privilege that rule over some of the things that's been used to squash. Next question. Next question. What is the likelihood of someone coming in, trying to fundamentally change the system in helping to create a more diverse, nuanced selection of candidates and actually end up making it further down the line and maybe having a real shot at the presidency? Sort of what Andrew Yang is trying to do. Is it realistic to think that there can or will be a candidate who ends up in that position and ultimately wins the presidency? Well, given that we had President Trump, I think anything is possible. Let's go to the next question. Why do Americans insist on classifying between the left and the right? Surely most people are in the center with fringes heading left or right. Why not create a new center party drawing on both current parties? Yeah, and also, it's confusing that left and right that mapping doesn't really fully capture what's been going on in our society of late. As we've observed here already, there's been a fair amount of ill liberalism on the left. How should we think about left and right? People have referenced this concept of horseshoe theory, whereas you go far enough to the left and far enough to the right, and you begin to resemble one another. Anne, do you have any thoughts about how we should think about should we have a different map of our politics here? So even the phrasing left and right actually comes from the French Revolution. It's a very old set of ideas, and our modern understanding of it really dates to the Cold War era, when the left was about a larger state and the right was about a smaller state. And although that was a little bit different in different countries, too, but it was essentially the poll was around communism, anticommunism, how you felt about it, and so on. I actually think that the words are now almost totally meaningless. And one of the advantages of a multiparty system, which I hesitate, which of course we're still pretty far away from that in the United States, but when you see them in other countries, is that they do make it easier for parties to emerge that are neither or that have different and new self definitions. So the emergence of the Green Party in Germany is famous one. And the Greens in Germany aren't just an environmental party. They're attached to a whole set of other issues. The foreign Minister of Germany is now a member of the Green Party, and that's a party that's relatively new, that has managed to emerge and focus on a different set of issues. There are a lot of examples. The President of Slovakia comes from is an environmental lawyer who comes from a kind of green movement as well, but who is also neither left nor right. And there are a number of European politicians who've also sought to create parties like this. Our system does make it really difficult, almost impossibly difficult, to create a third party, which is why our best bet is to try to create I don't know whether the word is centrist that you really want because it's not a center, but to try and create pro democracy wings or movements inside the existing parties. And to think about it like that, the idea of creating people have tried so many times in recent years to create new parties and failed. But you're certainly right that the the division between left and right has become pretty meaningless. And what people are really, you know, what moves people, as David was saying, what politics are really organized around now are people's sense of identities. I belong to this kind of group or that kind of group, and that identity can adopt a number of different policies. And of course, once politics are about identity and culture, rather than concrete policies and plans that we can argue about or agree to disagree about, politics becomes more difficult. I mean, my solution is actually a little bit different, which is to, as I said, create a pro democracy wing inside both parties and also to get people to refocus on the reality of politics, what politicians can actually do, which is build bridges, fund or not fund health care, make foreign policy decisions. If we're focused on that and not I'm this kind of person as opposed to that kind of person, then politics becomes more sane. Yeah, I think the problem, one problem with identity politics is that it interacts with the variable of partisanship unhelpfully because it is a tribal sort of politics. And if you're going to be tribal, then the extreme voices win. And you're certainly not rewarded for seeing the other tribes point more or less ever, right? So if you're in the middle, if you're going to make the center stronger, you can't be tribal because being in the center amounts to much of the time acknowledging what your side got wrong or what just to the left of you, to use the old mapping got wrong and to take an end of one here. I just know what it's like to be someone who sees all the problems with Wokeness and all the problems with Trump. And the net result of that is to always have someone irate with your views, right? Like you're not safely in an echo chamber where you're the good guys and everyone else is bad. So it just seems like tribal politics has to be selecting for hyper partisanship. Okay, I'll do one more question and then I will close out. Okay, last question. Is it possible that the world has outgrown democracy as a political system much the way it outgrew previous dominant political systems and that we need a new system to cope with the challenges eroding it? And if so, what would that potentially look like? That kind of tears everything down to the studs. But let's reflect on that for a moment. Is there any concern here that democracy is not up to the challenge of 21st century life in the end and that we need to find some other mechanism keeping? I think it's isn't it Churchill's admonishment in mind that it's the best of the worst systems. Does anyone have an opinion on that? Well, in the days when we used to study textbooks on the history of democracy, the place they usually started was with a debate that took place in in England in the 1640s and which one of the most famous quoted sentences was the smallest tea that live in England. Liveth in England has a life to live as well as the greatest he. So if if that's, if that's what you mean by democracy, that idea is never going to go to style. The equal dignity of human beings that everybody has a right to consideration what may be going out of styles. I suggested before. And something else I was saying is that the idea of the style of democracy, which is the legislative horse trading material, benefits what you thought you saw when you took that school trip to Washington 20 or 30 years ago. That may be going out of style, partly because maybe economies aren't growing as fast as they used to be. So we can't exchange gifts as benefits as as as easily without feeling it's coming out of our pocket. And it may be that as politics becomes more identity based and more about self realization, that none of that is interesting to people. And it is striking how little of that Donald Trump did, how infrastructure became a joke. He was never serious about it. And when Biden did do, infrastructure turned out how little anybody really ever cared about it in the first place. So we may need a new set of rules of the road, new set of mechanics. But the idea of a politics based on the dignity of everybody, that's never going out of style. Well, not just the dignity, the consent. I think that if you do tear everything down to the studs, the thing that you can't dispense with is the sovereignty of the people as the source of ultimate power of government. As somebody who spends a lot of time studying and writing about autocracies, I promise you that there is no alternative system out there that is better. You can find the odd benevolent dictator who works for some short period of time, but it's not a long term system. And there's always a succession problem in a way, the Olympic Games that are about to start in beijing are a real vision of the future because the Chinese government has fulfilled all its promises to the International Olympic Committee. It has created ski slopes where there was no snow. It has made it possible to get out to the mountains where the slopes were created on trains that didn't exist a few years ago in no time at all. So in some ways, it's delivered. It's done the delivering that David was talking about on material things, at least for part of its population. But you're living in the most surveilled society in human history, with less freedom than any society in human history. And that's the nightmare vision that we really should never lose sight of, because you don't get there all at once. You just get there a little bit at a time by deciding, this isn't worth it and this doesn't work any longer, and it's too hard to run for office, and the people are incorrigible. Well, panelists, is there any topic we didn't touch, is there any question we didn't address that you think we might want to touch to close out here? I have one thought on this that maybe bears mentioning. I think there's kind of inevitably, as I look back on this, an inevitable tone of anxiety, elegy, doubt that creeps into these conversations. And the future of democracy with the question mark behind it raises the possibility that maybe it doesn't have a future. I think we're in danger of underestimating just what a tremendous achievement it is, why the people who hate it also fear it because they know how powerful it is and what an amazing run of increasing success it has had. I just feel that one of the things we all need to do is to encourage ourselves not just to think about this and speculate and observe, but to believe in it and to live in it. And Sam, I think this is the attitude you had, and we've talked about this through the Trump years. Who's going to win? I don't know. But they're going to have to leave tire marks over me before I leave. Let those guys do it. And people who are listening, I hope that they will come away from this conversation with some feeling of their own personal efficacy. I mean, we're all here because we believe they count. Their voices count. They're on. They're listening because they believe their voices count. And what people can do. This future is in your hands. It's not something that's going to happen to you, not anyway, if you don't passively accept that it's going to happen to you. Yeah, I would echo that by reminding everybody that nothing is inevitable. The decline of democracy is not inevitable, and the success of democracy is not inevitable. There is no law of history that means we will win or we will lose. That's not how history works. Everything that happens tomorrow depends on decisions that we make today. The future is always open. It's always been open. The possibility that American democracy would collapse was always there, and the possibility that it will never collapse is also always there, and people should remember that. And one of the reasons why democracy will succeed or fail is to do with how engaged citizens are in it. Yeah, well, that seems like a great spot to end on. The lesson I take away from this in the last few years is that really there's no way to shirk the power and responsibility of ideas, right? I mean, ideas are the levers that move everything in our lives. So how you apportion your belief and just what you talk about, what you pay attention to, what seems credible to you, the importance of all of that at the individual level and at the collective level is never going to go away. And insofar as organizing my own ideas about what's going on in the world and in my own country, I'm very grateful to the four of you for helping me do that. And there's been an experiment here on the podcast because we never record by video in this way and we also never have this many people on. And I just want to thank you, the four of you, for your time. I admire each of you immensely as a reader, and it's great to speak with each of you here. So. Anne. David Bart. George. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, today I'm presenting a conversation on belief and identity, and in particular, it's focused on the problem of belief change and resistance to belief change, the significance of which, both personally and collectively, is really hard to exaggerate. We really are in the belief formation, maintenance, and occasionally belief change business. And when you look at what it takes to get millions of us and billions of us to cooperate with one another, it really is just a matter of persuading one another to change our representations of the world and converge on common projects. And failing that, we resort to forcing one another to converge, and that eventually becomes a bloody mess. So belief change and its impediments is incredibly important to understand, and this is just a first volley in that effort. And to do this, I've enlisted my friend and collaborator Jonas Kaplan, who is a cognitive neuroscientist working at USC, where he is an associate professor at the Brain and Creativity Institute. This institute was founded by Antonio Damasio, who's also been on the podcast, and Jonas is focused on issues related to consciousness, identity, empathy, and social relationships. He uses functional neuroimaging, mostly fMRI, combined with machine learning, to examine the neural mechanisms that underlie our sense of self. He's also done research on how the brain processes stories and beliefs and values. And in this conversation, we focused on some work that we did jointly with fMRI on the nature of belief and belief change resistance. And that work was published in 2016, along with our co author Sarah Gimbal, as the neural correlates of maintaining one's political beliefs in the face of counter evidence. And that was in nature's scientific reports. Fun fact I just looked at this paper for the first time in years, you know, was published back in 2016 and it's on Nature.com. I just wanted to see the metrics around its engagement. And it's been accessed 250,000 times, cited 71 times, cross referenced 75 times, looks like. But in measures of online attention, its statistics are fairly astounding. Of the 401,000 tracked articles of similar age in all journals, it's ranked 27th out of 400,000, and it is ranked first among the 5000 plus tracked articles of similar age in the Scientific Reports section of Nature. So, amazingly, there appear to only be 26 articles in all of Science of similar age that have received more online engagement than this article. And I say that not to boast, but to point out how bizarre and ineffectual and balkanized so much of our science is. I mean, from what I can tell, the biggest engagement in the media that this article got was from Dr. Oz, who I consider a near total charlatan in the New York Observer. It was in various blogs. I can't remember what press coverage it got beyond any of that. But anyway, I don't believe I've ever met anyone who's read this paper. And yet, according to Nature's website, there are only 26 scientific papers on the planet that have received more engagement than this article. Make of that what you will. I can just say that in my world, the experience of publishing this article was of simply dropping something into the void. But that notwithstanding, we will talk about some of the implications of this research. This conversation is part of a larger series I've done with Jonas for the Waking Up app. There's a section there titled Mind and Brain, which is essentially its own podcast series. We've covered the science of mindfulness, social emotion, disgust, empathy, islands of awareness, touching on some of the work that on Ilseth, another podcast guest has done on isolated consciousness in the brain. And we have forthcoming conversations on gratitude, the predictive brain, sleep and dreams. The default mode network willpower and there's much more to come. That's a track where we're trying to make insights from neuroscience as personally relevant to one's day to day experience as we can. Anyway, as I said, this episode focuses on belief and belief change, and the way in which identity poses an obstacle to the latter. We cover things like the Illusory truth effect, the backfire effect, failures of replication. In this area, we talk about an essay I once wrote titled The Fireplace Delusion. We discuss the connection between reason and emotion, wishful thinking, persuasion and the sense of self conspiracy theories, the power of incentives in group loyalty, religion, mindfulness, cognitive flexibility, and other topics. And again, I think both of us consider this just a first installment on what really should be a series on belief change and its enemies. And now I bring you Jonas Kaplan. I'm here with my friend Jonas Kaplan. Jonas, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sam. So you and I now go way back as Father Time is meeting out blows year by year. I've known you for at least a decade, a decade plus, but perhaps summarize your background as a neuroscientist and the kinds of issues you focus on now. Sure, I am a cognitive neuroscientist, and I use mainly neuroimaging techniques to study how the brain works. Maybe I can list off my litany of academic titles. It's like a medieval court to give you an idea. So I'm a research professor at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC and the co director of the Dornsife Neuroimaging Center. And I'm also the associate director for Mindfulness and Neuroimaging at USC's Center for Mindfulness Science. Nice. So that gives you some idea of what my research interests are. But I've studied a lot of different things from ranging from belief and values and empathy and how we resonate with other people and a whole bunch of other things that interest me. So now we're talking about something that's really in our wheelhouse because we have done some neuroimaging studies together on this very topic. We're talking about belief and belief change and resistance to belief change. Why is this an important topic? It's such an important topic. Belief flexibility is just essential to everything we do as a society in so many different ways. We just need to be able to influence each other when we have conversations. The whole point of having a conversation is to get some information across. Especially in a democracy. It's really important that we're able to influence each other on the basis of conversation, because if we can't, the only option available to us is some kind of violence, right? So to be able to change as new evidence comes into fruitful conversations to advance science and education, all of these things require some amount of flexibility in our belief. It's particularly prominent for me as a scientist. I mean, this is the very basis of science is some kind of assumption that as we gather new evidence, we can update our models of the world and our beliefs. And so if we have difficulty doing that or if there's things in our psychology that make it hard for us to do that, we need to know about them. Yeah. So we're recording at a moment, which is where these concerns are especially salient because we're in the middle of the COVID pandemic and just awash in misinformation about more or less everything. There's political partisanship of a sort that I don't think we've ever seen in our lifetime. There are conspiracy theories on almost every topic of social importance. People have Balkanized into these echo chambers online. The public health messaging during this pandemic has been almost impossible to get across because every shred of reasonable skepticism on any point gets amplified into just a complete breakdown of epistemology where we think we know nothing for certain about anything of consequence. And so people can't even agree. As you get anywhere toward the edge of mainstream opinion, you find otherwise intelligent people who can't even agree that in this case the pandemic is real in some basic sense. Almost every aspect of this can fall under doubt, and then it becomes almost impossible to have a conversation about what's real. Just trying to converge on a set of facts that all parties can acknowledge becomes an impossible task when people start out sufficiently far apart and they're being emotionally hijacked once any of these conversations get started and they're mistaking their emotional reaction for further evidence of the truth of their beliefs. And you can become sensitive to this in yourself. You have certain things you believe are true and then you bump into counterarguments or counter evidence or just people who are espousing an alternate view of reality. And it sort of depends what we're talking about here. But in the generic case, you're either attached to these beliefs because you think they're true or you're perversely attached to them because you want them to be true. But in any case, you meet in yourself an unwillingness to reconsider the matter and an almost visceral feeling of revulsion or contempt for people who would push too hard on on a door you're trying to keep barred. And it's really the only place where we are at all disciplined and good about getting out of our own way here and revising our beliefs is in science. I mean, that really is what makes science science. It's a methodology for being increasingly sure that you're not fooling yourself. And granted, we're imperfect here and there's a history of scientific fraud and scientific ineptitude, but obviously the remedy for that is always more science and better science. It's not some alternate mode of wish fulfillment or you're merely imagining what's true. This conversation, I'm sure, will be evergreen and if you come back in five years, this will still be relevant to think about. But at the moment its relevance is fairly excruciating. It's hard to believe. I mean, when you and I first started working on this issue in neuroscience maybe 15 years ago or so, this is certainly not an issue that was on the forefront of everyone's minds. And now it seems like it's what everybody wants to talk about. And I think one thing you said there is really important this aspect of trying to recognize this process in ourselves because a lot of times when I talk to people, the biggest question is how can I get my aunt or uncle to believe me, to understand what I'm saying and how can I influence someone else? What's the key to persuasion? And that is one way of looking at the problem. But I think it's actually potentially more fruitful to think about the other way around. So instead of how we can be better persuaders, how we can make ourselves more open minded and more available to evidence as it comes in, as we recognize the reasons why we're not in the first place, which is what we're going to talk about today. Okay, so let's talk about what we know about changing beliefs. Obviously, we learn things about the world, albeit slowly and sometimes begrudgingly. And that is synonymous with belief formation in the sense that we're using the term. I guess perhaps one thing we should clarify here is that in its colloquial use, people often distinguish belief from knowledge in our usage here and really throughout most of the relevant fields, certainly within philosophy and I think within cognitive science generally. That's not really the point of separation. You can believe things with greater or lesser conviction. It's a probability distribution of knowledge we're talking about. There are things that you are absolutely certain of you would bet your life on. There are things that you think are very likely to be true. You still count them as knowledge, but until you hear otherwise, you'll think this is probably the way things are, but you wouldn't bet everything on it. And then there are gradations below that where you think the preponderance of evidence and argument is pointed in one direction. You're certainly weighted that way, but you don't really think you have a complete picture of that part of reality in hand. And all of this is a matter of belief to one or another degree, in the sense that we're using the term that's right. We're not going to distinguish there. We're going to treat belief as basically anything you hold true about the world. And you mentioned the process of how we form beliefs. I think that's an interesting topic, how we gain knowledge and how we develop our kind of initial models of the world. And we're not going to get too deeply into that. I think we're going to sort of bypass that issue and just start from the point at which we have formed some belief, we've accepted some piece of information as true. And then what happens? Let's say we encounter a new piece of information that contradicts the old one. How do we revise our beliefs? Because this really is the biggest challenge that we face. And there are a couple of effects from cognitive psychology that are relevant to this that we're going to talk about. The first one is called the continued influence effect. The idea here is that even after correcting a belief that was formed on the basis of misinformation, we still show evidence of that initial wrong belief affecting the way we think. So there's a classic experimental paradigm which was developed in the 1990s where you give people a fictional story about something like a warehouse fire, and you tell them, there was this big fire in the warehouse that was started in a closet, and there was paint cans and oil left in the closet, and that's probably why this fire got out of control. And then for half the subjects, you correct one piece of information, and for the other half you don't. So for half the subjects, you might additionally tell them, well, a police report came in later, and it turned out there wasn't any oil and gas in the closet. And then you interview these people and you ask them about the fire, and you ask them to explain why the fire happened and to give you some details. And even when the information about the oil and gas in the closet was corrected, they've been told there wasn't anything in that closet. People still explain the fire in terms of things like, well, oil fires are harder to put out or the negligence of the company leaving those dangerous things in the closet. You can still show that the belief persists. They weren't able to go in there with an eraser and just erase it or delete it and all of the subsequent thoughts that they had about it. This is the continued influence effect. Yeah. This is a fairly sinister bug in our software, which I'm not sure what the remedy for it is. In the end, this is something that we have to be continually on our guard for. This also goes by the name of the Illusory Truth effect. And again, even in the disconfirmation of false information, the initial false information gets ramified in people's memory. And I noticed this in myself, actually. I'm going to ping you as a naive subject on this point and see if you have a similar contamination of memory. Do you remember the McMarton Preschool saga? This was part of the kind of satanic ritual abuse panic craze that happened in the 80s. Yes. And there was the McMarton Preschool, which was the most famous instance of this alleged abuse. Do you remember that case at all? Vaguely. I think that there were some parents who basically got in some kind of hysteria about satanic abuse of the children. Right. What do you think the net result of that case was? Was there actual abuse at a preschool? Or, like, what's your memory? Right. My my revised narrative is that there was no abuse and that there were there was no actual satanic cult involved. Okay, good. Well, you were better than I was. I hadn't thought about this in years. And then I had a podcast on some related topic maybe two years ago. I forget who I was talking to, and I went to look this up, expecting that there was some fire where there was all this smoke, but I just didn't remember the details. And it turns out this is just the ultimate example of belief persistence in my case, because this had been fully debunked. I mean, this trial went on for years. One of the teachers spent five years in prison and then finally got acquitted. All charges were dropped. Hundreds of kids were interviewed with techniques that are now like textbook errors in how not to interview children about alleged abuse. They created a psychological experiment seemingly designed to produce false memories and false confessions and just sheer confabulation, and this whole thing exploded. But it had been lodged in my memory as God. There was probably something really heinous that happened over there at the McMarton Preschool. I'm so glad those people were brought to justice, but this is an awful piece of our code where we have a truth bias, and it seems like this may be based on kind of a default setting of accepting anything propositional that we understand may include some tacit acceptance. And actually, the philosopher Spinoza conjectured about this back in the 17th century. And there have been several studies that have supported this and and actually our own studies of belief with fMRI supported this based on our, our behavioral measures in that we saw that people were faster to accept propositions as true than they were to reject them as false. And this is true even of propositions that are equivalently simple. So if I give you a set of equations, two plus two equals four, two plus three equals four, one is true, one is false, they're equally simple and yet you will answer the true ones, you will respond true to true, on average faster than you will respond false to false. And that seems to suggest that our default setting is to accept it as true, and that rejecting it as false is a further cognitive judgment that takes time to render that's interesting. Yeah, that's definitely one of the features. I think it is easier to accept the statements that were given as true. You hit upon one of the other cognitive bugs at play, which is this repetition effect in memory where just hearing something multiple times, the more times we hear it, the more likely we are to accept it as true. And this is particularly sinister in the case of misinformation correction because the correction itself often involves a restatement of the false belief. So if you say there wasn't paint in the closet, the idea of paint in the closet has to be invoked in order to understand that sentence. And so the correction can serve as another repetition and make it more difficult to delete that. The other factor here is that when we accept something is true, we don't stop thinking about it. It's not like we just have this one sentence that exists on its own separate from all other ideas in our mind that there was paint or oil in that closet. We start thinking about all of the ramifications, the consequences, the other things that follow from that belief and we start to build our mental models upon these foundations that we have. And so it's like pulling out one piece of code when there's all these other pieces of code that have already followed from it. Now there's an alleged further iteration of this which seems even more dysfunctional, although I think there's some question as to whether or not this is replicated. But this meme spread widely in the culture. It'll be ironic if we have to debunk it and find that we can't because the putative effect is invoked. But there's something called the backfire effect that many people now think they know something about. What is this and what do we think we know about it? Yeah. So let's see if we can do our own little experiment with the continued influence effect if we describe this effect first and then try to debunk it. So there's a classic study from Brendan Nyhan and Jason Rifler back in 2010 where they presented people with a little fictional news story about the Iraq war. And so this is 2005 or so that the experiment was done and the Iraq war was fresh in people's minds. And remember that from that war there was this whole issue about the Bush administration used the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam's stockpile as a justification for the attack. So this little news story contained a quote from President Bush where he made comments alluding to the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein having these weapons and this is the information that they attempted to correct. So some subjects were given an additional corrective piece of information which was actually a true piece of information that there was this extensive report, the Dolphin Report, which conclusively established that there were basically no weapons of mass destruction, at least not in any quantity that could have made a difference. And half the subjects weren't given that correction. And they were asked afterwards how strongly they agree with a statement that there were indeed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And in the conservative subjects who came into this with a preexisting bias that they probably already believed. And there's evidence that conservatives at the time believed this, believed that the weapons of mass destruction were there when they received this corrective information. Their belief in the weapons of mass destruction actually got stronger. So not only were they not able to correct the misinformation but the act of correcting made the belief stronger. And that's why it's called the backfire effect. This is a total backfire. You're trying to make the belief weaker and instead you make it stronger. Right? I forget when this happened a couple of years back. This might have been born of a New Yorker article on the topic but this suddenly became very prominent in the culture for people to talk about, think about, worry about the backfire effect. What efforts have been made to replicate this? So there have been many efforts to replicate this and it has been difficult to replicate. There was a study a couple of years ago by Thomas Wood and Ethan Porter which pretty much eviscerated the backfire effect. They performed a really large study, 10,000 subjects, 52 different political issues that they gave them corrective information about and they were not able to find any evidence of backfire effect across any of these 52 different political issues. In fact, most of the people in the study, something like 85%, did show some significant corrective response to the factual information. So why is the backfire effect difficult to establish? When does it occur, if ever? These are questions of ongoing research. But there's probably a lot of context that matters here. It could be easier to give up on one particular fact than it is to give up on some underlying important issue for you. So for example, in one of the experiments that you and I did we gave liberals arguments against gun control and these are people who believe that gun control laws are good. And we gave them information, statistics about how likely people were to get in gun accidents and things like that. And it might be easy for one of the people in this experiment to change their minds about one of these individual facts, one of these statistics that we gave them while still maintaining their general position on gun control. In fact, it might be easier to retreat on an individual fact than it is on some underlying value. That may be the easiest path for you to take if you're trying to maintain your core belief about gun control. So there's some complexity there in terms of the context. It also probably matters what the issue is, right? I mean, in this Wood and Porter study, they tried to replicate very specifically the weapons of mass destruction experiment and they were not able to establish a backfire effect there. But the commitment of the individual subjects to these issues matters a lot. We found in our own research that for some kinds of issues it's easy to change people's minds. For other kinds of issues it's very difficult. Those issues that people tend to be most resistant on are the ones that they have some motivation to maintain their belief and that motivation can be a social motivation. These are some of the most common motivations we have now. Beliefs connect us to other people and beliefs that we share with our social group and particularly those beliefs that help to form our social identity. Our sense of who we are in a group are very, very resistant to change and they may be more likely to show a backfire effect in the end. I think the focus on the backfire effect is a bit of a red herring. It doesn't really matter that much whether a corrections backfire or not. The real important question is why do the corrections not work at all? Right? If they're not correcting, if they're not softening our belief, it doesn't really matter that much that they made the belief a little bit stronger. What we really want is to be able to correct our beliefs. Yeah. One of the things we found in our neuroimaging study on belief change was that the signal in the amygdala and the insula, both regions that report emotional salience above anything else, especially the amygdala, but also the insula that predicted people's resistance to changing their beliefs under pressure. So there's the feeling component of it and also those cases where there's a kind of a direct line or direct justification for the feeling of emotional charge based on one's beliefs about oneself in the world and one's identity. And that's really the framework that I think we would expect would produce this resistance to belief change. Because there's the not liking how certain facts sound piece, but then there's the really not liking it when you sort of do the emotional math. However, implicitly and realize that if you're the sort of person who accepts this new argument or this new set of facts and changes this specific belief, well, then you're no longer the sort of person who can have the friends you have be in the political party you're in. Talk to your family at dinner. Many things begin to come under pressure depending on just how fundamental or cherished the belief is that is now on the table to be revised. I think the punchline for any one of us to just be better people in the world is to notice when this machinery is getting invoked. You can feel it happen. You can feel when you're disposed to take the way certain ideas make you feel as a thoroughgoing analysis of their truth, right? If you're kind of doing epistemology by fear and anger and disgust and some primary emotions that are getting triggered by specific ideas. The place where I've experimented personally with this is on the topic of burning wood in a fireplace. I wrote a piece called The Fireplace Delusion a few years back when I stumbled upon this example, quite literally at a dinner party. You know, I'm somebody who has known for many years that there's nothing magical about fireplace smoke. The fact that we have we feel this deep nostalgia for it and sentimentality around it. People love the smell. It conveys an idea of Christmas and other happy thoughts to most people. All of that notwithstanding, if you can smell smoke when you're burning a fire, that is, from a health point of view, more or less indistinguishable from a diesel engine running in your living room, right? And you should be no more sentimental about the smell you're smelling than the fumes you would be smelling in the case of the engine. But I found that whenever I push people on this, it triggered a very familiar quasi religious pushback in them. And this was no matter. These people could be scientists. You could just see the triggering. I'm feeling one brewing within myself. I don't know if you want me to let it out in this context or not, but you have an argument against this. Okay, let's hear your argument. Well, maybe you've heard it's going to be spectacular. Well, the argument is that fire may have played a special role in human evolution. Yeah. So I don't know if you're familiar of the work of Polly Weissner, anthropologist, and she studied what happens when the Bush people of Africa, the hunter gatherer societies, sit around fires at night. And she studied the nature of the types of conversations and communications that happen during the day compared to at night. And what happens at night is that because you don't have the world in front of you, you basically can't talk about business and the here and now of perceptual things that are confronting you. The conversation turns to other times and places, and people start telling stories and. There's this whole sort of storytelling culture around the fire that comes out of this. And this may have been something that's been very important for human culture that we therefore have a nostalgia for. And I think it extends into things like watching movies and theaters. We're all sit around a flickering light and watch things together. Yeah. Well, that's quite a heartwarming thesis. It's actually something I do discuss it in the fireplace. Delusion and I would just point out that whether something has played a role in evolution is rarely an indication of whether it's normative or optimal. Now right. Obviously outgroup violence, tribal violence. No, I just think it might explain why we have those feelings about it. Yeah, but it offers no indication that breathing in wood smoke is healthy or any healthier than smoking cigarettes or breathing in other forms of air pollution. And the data on this, we just know this to be true. And as a matter of public health, we know that I believe there's nothing that kills more people globally than dirty sources of fuel in the home every year. We're talking about literally millions of people who die every year because they're largely in the developing world. They use wood, other kinds of fuel. I got to say, that fact sounds like one of the ones we made up for our experiment. We should remember that was hilarious. We were making up facts for the experiment and perhaps did people lasting damage if we couldn't correct those facts, if we only ramified those facts in the correcting them afterwards. Yeah, but no, I'll have to get the data on how many people die. But it is enormous because much of the world is still using dirty fuel. But it's the air pollution in a city like San Francisco or Los Angeles, based on the just the recreational burning of wood in the winter, you know, it's not even being used as a fuel source. It's just people are burning wood fires in their fireplaces just for the fun of it. There's no question that that increases emergency room visits based on, you know, pulmonary and cardiac events. And this is all stuff that has been studied and bemoaned by public health people. But, you know, we have this sentimental attachment to burning wood, and people are reluctant to get over it. Yeah. The role of feelings and emotions in this whole process of belief is really interesting, and there are multiple aspects of it. I mean, on the one hand, you're right that if we rely too much on our feelings, we can be led astray. And just because we we feel something is true, for example, doesn't mean or good for us like the fire, doesn't mean that it is. And certainly in our experiments, we saw the involvement of negative emotions. You know, when you're challenged, you can have this feeling that, you know, it feels bad. You want to get away from the source of the challenge. And in fact, one of the most effective self protective mechanisms we have against changing our beliefs is to completely avoid being challenged. We're very good at avoiding information that challenges our beliefs and avoiding putting ourselves in situations where we might have to encounter something that we don't like to hear. So there are these negative emotions that can underlie our decisions about what to believe and about what evidence to even look at. And there's some evidence that these feelings might mediate the whole process of belief change. On the other hand, there are other feelings. Just because something is a feeling or an emotion doesn't mean that it's necessarily part of an irrational process. We have to recognize that emotions are there because they have conferred some advantage throughout the course of history, so they're at least potentially helpful. And there are feelings that are more subtle that are involved in this process, like the feeling of certainty or the feeling of uncertainty. Those are not purely cognitive experiences. They have some kind of a feeling component that can help increase the saliency of those thought processes for us. Well, yeah, as your own colleague, boss, mentor Antonio Dimazio has demonstrated, this classical split between reason and emotion doesn't make any sense. I mean, it's just neurologically speaking. And when people have specific injuries to the orbital frontal cortex and thereafter can't feel the implications of otherwise knowledge they otherwise seem to have, they can't make that knowledge behaviorally relevant and operative as a kind of classic gambling tasks where people seem to know the right strategy but continually bet unwisely because they can't make the right strategy guide their behavior. So it is an interesting problem. Feeling states are part of our cognitive apparatus. The feeling of certainty and the flip side, the feeling of doubt, they're not dispensable, and yet they can also become uncoupled to the legitimate modes of thought that should deliver certainty and doubt. In some ways, they're orthogonal to cognition, and in some ways, they're indispensable for it. The red flag for me is when you realize that you want reality to be a certain way and you're trying to convince yourself that it is that way. I mean, there's a reason why wishful thinking and obvious bias in the direction one is arguing for conflicts of interest this goes by, you know, under many framings. There's a reason why all of that is stigmatized when it comes time to think clearly about what's going on in the world. Wanting something is absolute poison to the process of trying to find the truth. And that's why we have all these mechanisms within the scientific method to try to eliminate the effects of those things. And just to emphasize one of the other things you talked about earlier, it's really hard to underestimate the effects of wanting things to remain the same in our social relationships. I mean, the stakes can be so high for some of these decisions that it's virtually impossible for us to change our minds. I talked to someone who was a career political analyst and worked in the Bush administration and bring it in. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm speaking with Graham Wood. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic, and he's the author of a wonderful book on the Islamic State titled The Way of the Strangers Encounters with the Islamic State. And today we're talking about Mohammed bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS, the Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. We discuss the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the rather astounding imprisonment of Saudi elites in the Ritz Carlton, MBS's recent reforms in Saudi Arabia and his vision 2030 campaign Saudi relations with Israel, the posture of the biden administration, energy. Policy saudi efforts to deprogram Jihadists the strange case of Musa Sara, Antonio John Walker Lind, the Current Condition of the Islamic State and then Graham and I talk about the war in Ukraine and Russian propaganda, how Finland has made itself invasion proof and other topics. Anyway, graham is always great. I hope you enjoy it. And I bring you Graham Wood. I am here with Graham Wood. Graham, thanks for joining me again, Sam. It's good to be back. So you have a cover article in the April issue of The Atlantic titled Absolute Power on Muhammad bin Salman, MBS, the De Facto Ruler of Saudi Arabia, and it's a fascinating profile on him, and it sounds like you had a very interesting trip. I want to COVID that and then we can cover some related issues. But MBS, I think, came to more or less everyone's attention in the aftermath of the Khashoggi murder, as ghoulish as that was, which I'm sure we'll get to, but it sounds like you interviewed him twice on this trip, and let's track through that what you know, before we jump into your actual experience here. Give me the short bio of MBS. Who who is he and and why should anyone care about him? So MBS is first and foremost the son of his father, who is King Salman, who's in his late eighty s and enjoying a very soft final few years as King of Saudi Arabia. And every one of the kings of Saudi Arabia since the founding king have been sons of King Abdul Aziz. So they've just been getting older and older. And MBS, now 36 years old, is the first of his generation to be in line for the throne. Really, in line for the throne, he's almost certainly going to become king. And so his father has put him in charge of the country for the last five years or so. And he has been in charge of a great big modernizing effort trying to bring the country into the 21st or maybe at least the 20th century. So integrating it with the global economy and reforming it in almost every way except for the political, which is why he remains the he will remain, when he's king, the absolute monarch of Saudi Arabia. Yeah. And he is considered somewhat a bulwark against jihadism. And we'll get into the details there that's pretty interesting. And he's also a bulwark against Iran from our point of view, us being primarily the US. We'll get into the jihadism piece. But what's your view of the geopolitical balancing act that we're doing, or may yet attempt to do, between Saudi Arabia and Iran? Well, this is part of the question about jihadism, because Iran is an avowedly jihadist state of a very different sort. It's a Shia jihadist state. And Saudi Arabia, although it's produced a very large number of Sunni jihadists, has been an enemy of Iran since Iran's conversion into a jihadist state in the late 1970s. So when we say that MBS is an enemy of jihadism and an enemy of Iran, that is all true with a few asterisks. And it's pretty important that the United States has allies in the region who are opposed to Iran moving against it. Now, of course, the issue is that it's an extremely imperfect ally. Saudi Arabia is not a democracy, doesn't share very many of our values, and so any deal that we make with them as an ally against Iran is going to be one that we have to really pinch our noses and make. So that's the sort of devil's bargain that we've had throughout the history of Saudi Arabia and pretty acutely with MBS. Yeah. Well, let's come to the man himself. There's a passage in your article that jumped out at me again. You interviewed him twice, and you wrote of this encounter difficult questions caused the Crown prince to move about, jumpily. His voice vibrated at a higher frequency every minute or two. He performed a complex motor tick, a quick backward tilt of the head, followed by a gulp, like a pelican downing a fish. He complained that he had endured injustice and he evinced a level of victimhood and grandiosity unusual even by the standards of Middle Eastern rulers. So this this is not an altogether flattering picture of the man. And give me any more details you want there. But I know that there was a Saudi response to your article, which I'd like to discuss here. How is all of this received? Yeah, well, first of all, some of the words that you've just read out are not things, to put it mildly, that you could say if you're a Saudi or if you were stuck in Saudi Arabia, as I am not. I'm not in Saudi Arabia anymore, to describe the crown prince's evident neurological issues, to describe his crackdown on dissent, all of these things are strictly forbidden, and that is indeed part of the crackdown on dissent. So MBS, for years, Saudis are very active on social media, and there has been a number of taboo subjects. And yeah, the physical health of the crown prince is one of them. My experience with him was that, just as I say in the piece, that he's a man of immense power, immense and almost completely unchecked power, who has no experience of being told no. I mean, he has been crowned prince and the ruler of a very, very wealthy country for five years. And before that, he was the son of the extremely influential governor of Riyadh Province. So this is a guy who's always had a lot of people around him saying, you can do whatever you like, and now has the power to really make his imagination run wild. And some of the things that he wants to do, I think it's fair to say good. He has reigned in the religious police. There's a number of freedoms that Saudis have that they haven't had before. But look, if you spend any amount of time in a room with the guy, you can tell that he is not socially or psychologically adjusted in a way that's familiar to you. If you've spent most of your time among people who don't have this extremely bizarre and empowered background, it doesn't mean that he can't talk to you intelligently or even in a friendly and pleasant way. But look, we're talking about someone who, with the snap of his fingers, can have people's heads cut off, can change geopolitics. And that's a really complicated place to be in if you're 36 years old and have not really been trained, as if anyone can be trained for that kind of power at all. So it really was once. I ended up sitting in the room with him a couple of times and experienced unlike any I've ever had. How concerned were you for your own security? Not very. I mean, I knew Jamal Khashoggi personally. I'd spoken to him just weeks before his death. Let's remind people who Jamal was in this context. Yeah, jamal Khashoggi was a longtime writer figure in the Saudi government and in Saudi media. He had worked for the Saudi government as a press attache in DC and in London. And about the time that MBS came to power, jamal his patronage just dried up completely. All the people who he was relying on to be his champions within government were pushed aside in favor of MBS's people. So Jamal went into exile. He got a column and wrote a few of a few columns for The Washington Post. And in October 2018, he went to Istanbul, whose government and Islamist government was was supporting him. And when he went into the, the Saudi Consulate in, in Istanbul, he never came out. And all we know is that he was murdered there by henchmen of the Crown Prince, and that his body has never been found and probably was cut to smithereens and flushed away somewhere. So when I went to see MBS, of course, I was thinking about the fact that one of the most prominent Saudis I knew before had been physically disintegrated at the behest of this guy, and that that person was a Washington Post writer, a contributor to the Washington Post, as I have been, too. So, yeah, it crossed my mind. Who knows what's going to happen in this interaction? On the other hand, it's also just objectively true that MBS and his reforms for Saudi Arabia were set back by years, maybe permanently, because of what he did to Jamal Khashoggi. He had no idea that this was going to be the outcome of that assassination. And so, to say the least, if I disappeared into a meeting with MBS and never showed up again, or was next seen with fewer fingernails or toes than I came in with, then that too, would set back the the image of MBS as someone who can who can be dealt with and who can be understood by and and, you know, worked with by the west. Yeah. We should say in this context, that MBS denies having had anything to do with the murder of Khashoggi. And he even denied, however implausibly, ever reading any of his articles. And he said that Khashoggi was not even in the top 1000 of people who he would want killed, which is kind of an interesting way of framing his total non involvement in this. So you publish this article and then you get some response from the Saudis, I think one of which included, you will never be allowed in Saudi Arabia again. Well, first tell me what happened there, and I'm just wondering if you have any security concerns subsequent to publishing this. I mean, we have, quite famously, again, people may have forgotten this, but MBS seems to have hacked Jeff Bezos cell phone. Right. It's like he can reach out and screw with people, apparently at some distance. What are your thoughts on that score? Yeah, so the Saudi response was at first they were unsure what to do with it, because the first thing to know about MBS in the last few years is that he's been hiding. So he has not spoken to the Western media at all for two years until he spoke to me. So they weren't really sure how this interview would be received. And I think it speaks to either the obtuseness or maybe the incompetence of MBS's people that they didn't realize that the things that he said about Khashoggi, that he wasn't even in the top 1000 people who MBS might want to kill that. I don't think even realized how that was going to sound to people who were not people in the west who were accustomed to free media and not being threatened with death by desert kings. So I think that when I left, I didn't expect that the Saudis would come after me in a physical way. I thought there was a possibility, maybe even a likelihood, that my phone was hacked. So I took steps to make sure that that didn't happen. Physically, I felt pretty safe now in social media and in unofficial ways that the Saudis can reach you or let you know that they're thinking about you. There were plenty of reasons to think that I might be concerned about how things were going to go. I mean, there were videos that came out of Saudi Arabia with my picture and Jamal's asking after this interview, will Graham would be the next Jamal Khashoggi. No, I didn't think that was going to happen. But the Saudis, pretty soon after they read the piece, digested it, and figured out how it was going to be understood, and noticed that there were things in it that included unutterable statements about MBS and his reforms. They started pushing really hard to sort of rewrite the article, to pretend it said things that it didn't say, and then to accentuate things that MBS either didn't say at all or said quite differently, and to de emphasize the wilder stuff, like the things that he said about Khashoggi and then some of the things that he said, probably more aggressively than he intended about his desire to rein in the jihadists and religious police. Right. Well, as far as a raw expression of power and sociopathy, it's hard to beat what he did in 2017 when he imprisoned some of the most powerful people in Saudi Arabia in the Ritz Carlton. Describe that episode. What was happening there? Yeah, the Ritz Carlton episode was one of the most amazing things that's happened in world politics for quite some time. I've stayed in the Ritz Carlton. I tried to order a pizza there, and they said there was one on the menu that cost $250 for a personal pizza. So every inch of it is the Ritz. It's a five star, six star. I don't know if there's seven star, but it would be at hotel. And MBS suddenly, overnight, turned his government into a full prosecutorial machine, where all sorts of people who, including the richest, most powerful people in the kingdom, were taken to the writs, imprisoned there, and then told, we know you're corrupt. You're going to make a deal with us. You're going to give back, let's say, 90% of what you stole. Otherwise, we'll turn it over to the prosecutors, the real prosecutors, not the ones who are nice and take you to the Ritz, but the people who take you to not seven star hotels, but real jails, and we'll see what they do with you. So, in other words, he was willing to cut a deal with various people who many of whom were members of his own family, who he thought had been corrupt and he claimed had been corrupt, and some of them almost certainly were. So we're talking about people who were accused of stealing literally billions of dollars from the Saudi government, and they were all told, make a deal or or the consequences will be dire. Now, of course, you can phrase this in in different ways, and the MBS would like to everybody to know that he was being gentle. This is the nicest way to deal with this. Other autocracies, let's say the People's Republic of China would just shoot people in the back of the head. They would just take that money. There would be no writs. And I was told that his advisers presented that as one of the possibilities either just go and kill everybody who's been stealing from the treasury, or just kill a few people who were extremely prominent citizens. Instead, he likes to put it, I took the gentler route and allowed people to negotiate. But, of course, there's no negotiating with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. He basically controls everything about what the Saudi government does. And so, for the next month or so, the Saudi government did nothing but try to get as much dirt as possible. And these people present them with dossiers of what they thought they had stolen and then tell them to cough up money. So you find people like Alwalid bin Talao, who's the richest man in Saudi Arabia, and sure enough, he emerges from the Ritz. He seems unable to travel anymore. He made some deal whose terms he will not disclose. And when he's been interviewed about what happened in the writs, his voice does not sound like the voice of a man who is at liberty to speak of every detail. So, in other words, even though it was the Ritz, they didn't make it easy on those who were interned there. Is he still unable to travel? As far as we can tell, I think he has traveled within the region, so to very stalwart Saudi allies like the UAE. But Elwaled bin Talal, someone who in the past, you'd see in New York, London, Santrope, and now no, this is a man who's got not quite visa level money, but the order of magnitude would be like Mike Bloomberg money. And now he can't go anywhere. Yeah. And he's someone who I think I've seen profiled on 60 Minutes, and he's a very cosmopolitan person. Yeah. He owns, like, a big chunk of or has owned big chunks of things like Twitter or Citibank. He's like a major wheeler and dealer who's got friends in high places. And so if you can twist the screws in a way that gets him to be afraid of his future, then that means, yeah, you've shown that you have real power now, I hasten to add, again, trying to put this in the Saudi perspective. For many Saudis, this was a really popular move, imprisoning people in the writs because they correctly Saudis, ordinary Saudis correctly saw their government as extremely corrupt, that that people were just taking money. And, you know, between five and 10% of the Saudi national budget just goes to stipends for princes. So if you're an ordinary Saudi and you see that, then you have reason to believe that the government is not on your side, is being just milked constantly by powerful people. And so what they saw was the Crown Prince finally doing something about that, from what looks to us like a really bizarre way to siphon money out of powerful people, looks to a lot of Saudis like something that was a long time coming. Right? And it's also this quintessential strong man move. I mean, it's just the Tony Soprano as Crown Prince or is right out of a Godfather movie. And he also shows a kind of capriciousness in the way he wields power, which you describe, which is frankly a little baffling, but I think you actually dissect the psychology of it. He will imprison people, activists and reformers for calling for things which he then enacts. I think the woman who was most responsible for advocating that women be allowed to drive, correct me if I'm wrong, but she was thrown in prison. And he still changed the laws thereafter allowing women to drive, but decided to imprison the most vocal activist for that reform. And he's done that on other points. It is sadistic behavior, but how do you think of it? What's the rationale? Yeah, it looks sadistic and capricious. And you know, when it happened, when this female activist, Luciano Hathloul, was thrown in prison, the way that it was read by most people was that MBS is opposed to female driving, which has been illegal in Saudi Arabia for some time now. And it appeared to a lot of people like, okay, so his reforms, his reigning in the extremely conservative religious clerics, that's fake because he's not allowing women to drive. And then it turns out, just very soon afterward, he allows women to drive. And he says now he wanted to change the law, the law earlier. He wanted women to be able to drive long before Lu Jane El Tathlu was imprisoned for calling for that. So why would he imprison someone who's calling for something that he himself was pushing for from the inside? And the answer is actually pretty simple. It's that it's not, as she claimed, that women have the right to drive because they're equal to men. It's that women have the right to drive for the same reason that Saudis have any rights, which is that the king or the ruler of the country grants them those rights. They have no rights otherwise. And so for her to say women inherently have this right actually was a direct threat against the kind of theory of the state that MBS represents. So you can say a lot of things. What you cannot say is that you have rights that don't flow from the monarch himself. And if you suggest that, then it's almost tantamount to treason. By the way, when Lujan was locked up, her family has told me she's not allowed to speak, although she's technically free in Saudi Arabia right now. They did not take her to the writs. They put her in prison. They had people visit her, torture her, threaten her. And this is not too long before Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered. There was someone from MBS's own circle who came to her and said, what we're going to do to you, no one will ever hear about your body. Parts of it will be thrown in the sewer. So a very Khashoggi like threat made before the famous case. So it was not just a slap on the wrist for someone who mildly offended the crown prince. It was someone who agreed with the crown prince about the gist of the policy and who was being threatened with death and dismemberment. What is the logic of torturing a prisoner out of whom you're not trying to get any information? I'm just assuming that was not the motive. What's going on there? Do you think, just as a now that we're attempting to enter the mind stream of sadists, what's happening there? Well, I think, first of all, a sadist will do it because he likes it. That's part one. Part two is you can torture people into giving you confessions. You can torture people to deter others. In the case of Lujan and most of the other people who have been dissenting in any way from MBS's policies, what they've been trying to do is get them to admit that they are on Team Qatar. So the state of Qatar has been at loggerheads with Saudi Arabia for a few years now. Saudi Arabia even had basically a blockade of Qatar that expired last year. But that for years, MBS, the official line of MBS and of Saudi Arabia was that Qatar is a terrorist state that's trying to destroy Saudi Arabia and trying to put the Muslim Brotherhood in power in its place. So they have imputed to Lujan and to others the motive of working on behalf of Qatar, trying to besmirch the name of Saudi Arabia, and trying to work for the Muslim Brotherhood or some other combination of nefarious forces on the inside. And I think by torturing people that's one of the goals is to get people to admit that, okay, but as we said, on the other side of the balance, he is a genuine or semi genuine reformer, or a genuine reformer whose reforms are, in some cases, are of ambiguous ethical import. What is the Vision 2030 campaign, and in what ways is he reforming beyond allowing women to drive? So MBS's Vision 2030, it's capital V Vision 2030, it's a branded plan that he came out with early in his reign is a total effort to reform Saudi Arabia and turn it into a country that's basically normal. I mean, it's it couldn't have been more tribal, pre modern as of ten years ago. And MBS said, all right, we're going to do it all in one go. Peel off the Band Aid and allow all sorts of entertainment, all sorts of religious liberty, and get rid of corruption and open up the economy to investment and to all sorts of new opportunities. And we're going to do it all at once, so that by 2030, the transformation will basically be complete. So it's a pretty extraordinary plan, I don't think, because it's being run by a possibly sociopathic autocrat, that we should dismiss it too quickly like Saudi Arabia before, just to give a sense of what it was. It was not just corrupt. I mean, there were all sorts of things that you just couldn't do there. Women couldn't drive, for one thing. Women couldn't travel. There's a guardianship law that pretty much just said, if you were a woman and you tried to show up at the airport with your passport and go somewhere, you would just be turned away. You you would have to have a male guardian, basically a babysitter from your family who would allow you to go. Otherwise otherwise, no, there were no movie theaters. There still is no drinking, although MBS strongly hinted that that would be in the future for Saudi Arabia. And there were these religious police, these hairy guys in Capripants who would go around every major city and thwack at you with a stick if you weren't doing Islam in the way that they liked. So this is a really backwards place. I think even MBS himself would probably admit that. And the idea of 2030 is that by 2030, Saudi Arabia will be like Dubai, only more so that it's going to be totally modern. You'll have all the latest, you know, concerts and movies, and people will go there because they see it as the place where the economy is going to boom in the future. And all that MBS has been doing by his light is trying to make that happen. He says, look, you can whine to me about political freedoms, but what Saudis want is vision, 2030, and, you know, maybe political freedom someday, but for them, it's way more important that we no longer be a backward theocracy and that we'd be more like, like Dubai or, or, you know, some other modern state. And he's opened relations with Israel, right? Not officially. So the UAE and Bahrain have normalized relations with Israel, exchanged ambassadors, and Saudi Arabia hasn't done that yet. Now there's clearly contact between the two countries, and I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in the next couple of years. The fact that Saudi Arabia has the, the holy places of Islam, mecca and Medina, and that the the transformation of the country into a more secular place just isn't complete. So I think that's made it very difficult for relations to move quite as fast in the case of Israel. But he told me pretty clearly that he sees Israel as a potential friend and not as an enemy, which in itself is a pretty wild thing to hear from Presumptive, king of Saudi Arabia. So what do you think we by we, I mean, I guess the US here should do in light of this, because currently the posture is overtly hostile between the Biden administration and MBS. And I mean very much this is the the knock on effect of the murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi. And I think, as you point out in the article, we have an example of someone like Assad in Syria who was once celebrated for his modernizing tendencies. What do you think, even just to take it from the present forward, what do you think Biden's posture should be with respect to MBS and what he's doing? Well, I think, first of all, the Biden administration's posture toward MBS seems to be we wish he didn't exist, and if there's a way for him to no longer be crowned prince, we would like to see that happen. So this to me seems especially after having gone to Saudi Arabia seven odd times during MBS's rule and seeing how entrenched he's gotten during that time, that posture toward MBS seems like total wishful thinking. That is one Saudi foreign policy guy said to me, look, if that's the Biden administration's view, then they need a psychiatrist. They don't need an IR specialist, so it's just not going to happen. So my view is that, look, the Saudis, they are never going to be in their form of government, in their morality compatible with mine. I'm an American liberal, small d democrat who believes I believe in democracy, and they're never going to be democratic in my lifetime. That's my view. So what I think we need to do is figure out what are the pathways that we can encourage that move Saudi Arabia in directions that satisfy us, realizing that it's never going to get all the way. And there are some things that we can encourage, like the sort of new tolerance for religious minorities, which is still just barely starting, so let's not get too excited about that quite yet. But the transformation of Saudi Arabia into something other than an extremely conservative theocracy that winks at jihadism and maybe even encourages it, those are changes that we should encourage. And then there's a very difficult calculus that we have to take into account about the differences in values that we have and also about the sovereignty that we have to guarantee to other countries. We don't have the opportunity to go in and by our own fiat, tell Saudi Arabia no longer to be Saudi Arabia. We can encourage that, and we can we can make. Alliances that that are true to our values. But we have to be realistic, too, about what's actually going to happen in Saudi Arabia, which most likely is going to be the ascent to the throne itself by MBS in the next few years, and then, barring his assassination or some unforeseen biological event, his remaining on that throne for 50 years. So I think we need to see over the long haul how we can influence him. Now, the comparison to Bashar al Assad is, I think, an important one, because I remember distinctly when Bashar al Assad came into power, and there were haggiographic Western biographies that came out about him saying, look, this guy, he trained in London, he's an eye doctor, he's a man of science. Hey, we hear that he listens to Phil Collins in his free time. How bad could he be? And of course, the answer is apart if you're in Syria, so Phil Collins does not immunize you against becoming Satan. So I think in the case of MBS, you could still see that, I mean, he's way more repressive than his predecessors, and he might move further in that direction. I'm pretty sure that he would prefer not to. I'm pretty sure that he doesn't do this for fun. He does it in ways that are nonetheless inexcusable. But if there's a way to encourage him to not do these things and to remain in power and to execute the reforms that that he's talking about, then we should find a way to do that. In the meantime, though, this is going to be yet another case where we are pinching our nose and having to work with autocrats who are doing some pretty horrible stuff, which in the last month or two alone, means he's executed literally dozens of people. So there's a very long distance to go before we can be proud of any of the compromises we might make with him. Do we know anything about what would happen if we transition to alternative energy at the fastest possible pace? Is the Saudi economy diversified at all at this point? Or the wealth of the principal rulers diversified enough so that the kingdom wouldn't collapse if oil suddenly became next to worthless? So I'll tell you a little bit about the Saudi economy. I drove around Saudi for weeks, just got in a rental car and drove randomly. And I could see that they were making efforts to Saudi is to nationalize the economy which basically means getting Saudis to work for the first time. Because the Saudi economy for years has been pretty much sucking oil out of the ground and selling it which they do very very well and usefully for the United States and others. So when driving around, you could see Saudis working in positions where they had clearly never worked before. In fact, they had never worked anywhere before. So you you'd go to, like, hotels and find Saudis at the front desk doing a hilariously pissed, poor job trying to check you in at the hotel. And then some Egyptian guy who had probably done that job for the previous 15 years would eventually hear the commotion at the front desk as as I was trying to check in and then say, oh, let me help you give you the rate card, or whatever I was asking for. And so the ability of Saudis to just turn on a dime from a petrorentier state to a diversified economy, I think that's open to doubt and I haven't seen it actually working, although the effort is clearly there. They're really trying to make that happen. But no, for the first foreseeable future, Saudi is going to get all of its leverage and most of its money from sucking oil out of the ground. And you can see that to this day. Like MBS and his stance toward Putin, where does he get any of his power? It's because he has this nearly unique ability to pump more or less oil according to his wishes on that day. So that's going to continue to be the case. And a turn toward alternative energy cannot possibly happen fast enough to prevent him from having that kind of power. Okay, so what of his fairly surreal efforts to deprogram jihadists in prison? What do they consist and what was your interaction on that front? This was something I did not expect at all. So there's a very famous prison in Saudi Arabia called Higher Prison, just south of Riyadh, and one of MBS's advisors said, why don't you go take a look at Higher? And I'm a big jihadism nerd, spent a lot of time looking at Al Qaeda and ISIS. He said, you'll find plenty of ISIS guys there who will be willing to talk to you. And it was true there were more Al Qaeda than ISIS, but there was both there. What the Saudis were doing with them just defied belief, though, and I say this all with a great big caveat, that I was speaking to people who were in prison and who, the moment I left, would be subject to the whims of Saudi government jailers. So who knows what they really believed? But I will tell you what was actually happening on the ground, which was that they had decided after years of trying jihadist deep Program if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe live now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with David French. David is a senior editor at The Dispatch and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, and he was previously a senior writer for National Review and a columnist for Time magazine. He is a former constitutional litigator and past President of the foundation for Individual Rights and Education. He's also a New York Times bestselling author, and his most recent book is Divided We Fall America's Secession Threat and how to Restore Our Nation. David is also a former major in the United States Army Reserve and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he was awarded the Bronze Star. And in this conversation, we talk about all of the forces that are pulling American society apart. We discuss David's experience as a Jag officer in Iraq and his experience of being harassed to really an extraordinary degree by the far right for coming out against Trump. We talk about the way that real grievances drive political derangement. The illiberalism on both the left and the right. The role of prophecy in evangelical support for Trump honor, culture. The response to Hunter Biden's laptop. The January 6 hearings, the personality cult of Trumpism federalism Geographic Sorting group, polarization cultural divisions in sports and entertainment, the gun rights movement, the ethics of gun ownership, whether Trump will be prosecuted, the looming 2024 presidential campaign, the dangers of online activism and other topics. Anyway, it was great to finally get David here. I've been an admirer of his work for a long time, even though I know there are many topics on which we disagree. He is, after all, a religious conservative, but that made his perspective on the issues we did discuss all the more valuable. And now I bring you David French. I am here with David French. David, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much for having me. I'm honored. Yeah, me too. I've been long been an admirer of your short form writing. I haven't your last book is the first book of yours I've read in anticipation of this podcast, which we'll talk about. But yeah, it's great to finally speak with you because your political commentary has been more than edifying lo these many years where everything seems to have gone toward the brink and in many cases, into the abyss. Yeah, I did not have this level of extremism. If you talked to me 20 years ago, I would not have seen this level of extremism, but it started emerging pretty soon after that, and now here we are. Yeah. Let's catch people up on your background here before we get started. Your most recent book, which came out in 2020, is Divided We Fall, which talks about this problem of American division that we're going to get into. And and you focus on the prospect of secession, you know, actual secession, the actual fragmentation of the political union of the United States, and we'll talk about that as well. On its face, that has always seemed like a highly implausible threat, and yet you make it sound all too plausible when you get into the details in the book. And I can only imagine since the book came out nearly two years ago, it came out right before the 2020 election, I assume things have only gotten worse in the meantime. Is that right? Or how do you view the last 18 plus months since you published the book? Yeah, I would say that things have accelerated and worse, they've accelerated more than I thought they would. I was pessimistic, but I did not see, for example, January 6 occurring when I wrote the book. I did not see, for example, things like the Texas GOP, one of the largest and most influential wings of the Republican Party in the United States, calling for a secession referendum in Texas. Now, doubtful it will happen anytime soon, but this kind of conversation and this level of polarization is absolutely something that's accelerated. And when I wrote the book, I was nervous about using the word secession. I was nervous about introducing the concept. But what I saw was that we didn't have and this is something I say right up front that there is no single truly important cultural, political, religious, social trend that is pulling us together more than it's pushing us apart. And it's not just politics. It's where we live. It's how we live. It's our pop culture, it's so many different fronts are sort of pushing us apart. Yeah. I must admit, I have had a knee jerk reaction to the concept of secession as just being a bridge or several bridges too far. It sounds so implausible. But when I actually look at the assumptions that are anchoring that reaction, there are so many assumptions like these that have been destroyed in recent years, I never would have imagined. The truth is, I still can't imagine that Trump was ever President of the United States. I feel like I keep waking up in some alternate universe where that black mirror fiction has become a reality, but it will always seem implausible to me, even though it's already happened. And the idea that we would have a Republican Party that is not only accepting but enthusiastically embracing a president, a former president, who not only failed to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, but engineered a violent one, it's just beyond shocking. So the idea that we could live in a world where Texas or California could ultimately secede, not that many more dominoes have to fall to make those events seem plausible. Right? Well, you know, think about what we've learned about January 6, since January 6, that, you know, if you're thinking, there are two things, both before the 6th and after the 6th, that are particularly sobering to me. So before the 6th, what's incredibly sobering is that there was, as we've now learned, this incredibly comprehensive effort to overturn the results of the election that depended a great deal on if Mike Pence had just said yes, where would we have been? We would have been through the looking glass on a constitutional crisis. All of this pressure focused on Mike Pence saying yes to this comprehensive scheme to either flip their results right there on January 6 or send them back to the States and then creating an enormous amount of chaos. And then after Mike Pence says no, this is one thing that's incredibly sobering to me is if you look at the approval ratings of Donald Trump and Mike Pence after January 6, only one of the two their approval rating plunges, and it's Mike Pence, not Donald Trump. Incredible. So what that told me is that you had a Republican Party that was so fully committed to this election steel effort that even a longtime Republican who had stood by Donald Trump's side every moment of his presidency who? Then appeals to his faith as an evangelical who is sort of the representative of the evangelical base and the Trump administration appeals to his faith to do the right thing. And he's rejected by his own movement in favor of Donald Trump. And to me, in some ways, that was as sobering as all of the events that happened before, that. Not even the shock of the moment of January 6 could shake people from this hyper partisanship and animosity and distrust that led them down the road of the stop the steel effort. Well, I want to get to January 6, then Trump and all the attendant horrors there, but I promise to properly introduce you, which I will have done in the intro. But I think you should say something about your orientation here, because unless you be mistaken for the usual libtard who's just nodding along with my libtard blasphemy here, what is your political background? Yes. So I grew up a Republican. I was a Reagan Republican from way back. Conservative lawyer, pro life, religious liberty attorney. Ran for a while the foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is a civil liberties nonprofit defending free speech and due process and religious freedom and higher education, and then was a part of Christian conservative legal organizations, was a delegate to the 2012 Republican National Convention. So I was definitely Republican. A Romney delegate. And then in 2016, I broke with the GOP over Trump. So going all the way back to the early phase of the primary season, I could not continue to support a party that would put that person as its leader. So did you break the moment he became the candidate before? Well, I broke with the Republican Party the moment he became the candidate, I became never Trump, to use that phrase, much earlier when he was a front runner. Once I began to realize who this person truly was, because like a lot of Americans, my main exposure to Donald Trump was as an entertainer, not as a politician. And then you begin to see the sort of the true dimensions of his character or lack thereof, during the campaign. And I just realized that I could not look at myself in the mirror, much less my fellow citizens, who in the 1990s, I'm somebody standing and yelling, character matters, character matters. Character matters. About Bill Clinton. I couldn't do that in 1998 and then turn around in 2016 and say, well, forget all that. Yeah. And also, you're a veteran, right? You were in the army? Yes, I was in the Army Reserve, and I was active duty serving in the Iraq War during the surge in 2007 2008. I was a Jag officer, army lawyer. I served with the third armored cavalry regiment in Dialog during the Dialog province during the surge. And what's the experience of a lawyer in combat? Are you just cowering in the Green Zone looking at legal briefs? Are you out there risking your life in various operations that require the presence of a lawyer? What's going on there? So it's a mix. So I was with a combat arms unit, so I was not in the Green Zone. So I was out in Diala Province, far, far away from the Green Zone in Baghdad. And my commander, my squadron commander, I went with an armored cavalry squadron was very clear. He said, you cannot make decisions that impact the lives of soldiers until you experience in my calf troopers, until you experience what they experience. So I was in the base a lot, and I was outside of it a lot. So I was doing detainee operations. I was doing law of Armed Conflict, assisting the command and making decisions. Shoot, don't shoot, bomb, don't bomb. I was out doing tribal relations work. But one of the things, if I'm going to be in an armored cavalry squadron, I have to understand what the area of operations is like. And so I was outside the wire quite a bit, doing various aspects of my job. And I get the sense I think you mentioned it briefly in the book, but I get the sense that your experience in Iraq has primed you for various epiphanies and concerns about the fragmentation you're witnessing in our own society. How do you see what's happening in the US? And it's not just the US. But we're focused at home here through the lens of the failed state of Iraq. Yeah, there was one specific aspect of the Iraqi civil war that really stood out to me as an alarm bell for us. And it was essentially, if you talk to Sunni or if you talk to Shia at the height of the war, the underlying divisions between them at some level seemed quite solvable. In other words, you could have a degree of religious tolerance where both Sunni and Shia could practice their faiths, which are somewhat different, but they're both Islamic faiths, but somewhat different with full liberty. Oil revenue divisions are certainly manageable. Differences in governance of each region certainly manageable. But the thing that was truly difficult to deal with was the grievances. And when I say grievances, I mean real grievances. In other words, if you talk to a Shia Shia militiamen and you start to explore why they've taken up arms, they're going to have a terrible story of what the Sunni have done to their family or done to their tribe and vice versa. Vice versa with the Sunni telling about Shia atrocities. And what really strikes me about our divisions here is if you really if you boil down, a lot of the political disputes are subject to compromise. I mean, they're not unsolvable. I mean, even if you look at an issue like abortion, which pro choice and pro life seem miles apart, but the large majority of Americans are in a more middle position, the political issues seem pretty darn solvable. But the level of animosity is what's really driving our polarization and this story of grievance and anger. And that's what struck me in Iraq, was this constant feeling of grievance and anger that was rooted in very real things that happened. We're starting to see replicate itself here to a lesser degree. Thankfully, we're not in a situation like Sunni and Shia. We're in Iraq. But if you talk to a Republican, they can tell you chapter and verse of terrible things that the left is done. If you talk to a progressive, they can tell you chapter and verse of terrible things that the right is done. And they're real things. So they're actual real outrages that are driving a lot of our division. Yeah, I think I noticed that in again, it's a somewhat more abstract way in the careers of several people I know who have an experience I share to some degree. I know many people on the left or who are formally on the left who, with the eruption of wokeness pre and post Trump, experienced something like an attempted reputational murder from their fellow liberals. Right? And you send the wrong tweet or you have the wrong position on Black Lives Matter, say. And what you meet among your former co tribalists is nothing but contempt grading into a fully weaponized sociopathic attempt to destroy your life. Right. And Twitter is the medium upon which most of this happens. And then I've noticed these people, many of whom have podcasts or they're out there spreading their views to one degree or another. I've noticed them migrate toward Trumpistan, and some of them have been fully absorbed by it. And it's clearly a psychosocial phenomenon for them. These are people who were real liberals. And it's not that the foundation of their political views has shifted. It's that they have been enrolled in a kind of psychological experiment, which, from my point of view, they failed, right? They became intellectually dishonest to a degree that should seem impossible in order to kind of do the emotional arithmetic on what has happened to them. They got love bombed by the right for everything they said against wokeness, and they got nothing but hate from the left. And so they just decided to just flip everything upside down in their politics and ignore all of the obvious problems with what's happening on the right, including the problems of Trump himself. But it does capture the dynamics you just described, which is when you ask these people what the hell's going on, they have a long list of grievances, right? I mean, they have been attacked endlessly by the left in the most dishonest ways possible. And that is what explains their pilgrim's progress to the Dark Lord. Yeah. Just as human beings, we long for relationship and community. And if you have been rejected by one community, if you've been purged, if you've been subject to a storm of hatred, you're going to look for another community. It's the most natural thing in the world in a way. But at the same time, if you're longing for community and then you're going to ignore some of the real problems within that new community, you become, in a sad way, part of the problem that you're just switching from. One flawed Partisan tribe to another flawed Partisan tribe because one of them rejected you contributes to our crisis in some important ways. Because what it does is it causes your new tribe to sort of feel validated by your presence. See, they're so bad. They're so bad. And look, we're much more welcoming. But if you drill down into what's happened in this country, if you're going to talk about cancel culture, which a lot of people think of as mainly a left wing phenomenon, it's all over the place on the right, all over the place. And one of the things, when I was researching the book that was very helpful for me, I was talking to some experts in conflict in the developing world who were beginning to refocus a lot of their efforts here in the United States because they were seeing some of the same things that caused civil strife overseas. They're seeing some of these same phenomenon here in the United States. And one of the most enlightening conversations I had was with a scholar who said, when there is a revolutionary or an extremist moment, the first target of the extremists often isn't the other side. It's the, quote, in group moderate of their own side. Yes. The near enemy. You have to purge the near enemy or the in group moderate to create the solidarity necessary to fight the next battle. And when you see that phenomenon, you just see it everywhere. Some of the most vicious cancel culturing or canceling, you'll see, is left on left. It's blue on blue or red on red. In fact, it's actually pretty hard for blue to cancel red or red to cancel blue because you have that community that will rally to your side. Yeah. What was your experience? Remind me, where were you working as a journalist when you announced that you were a never Trumper, and what was that experience like? So I was at National Review, and this is in 2015, when I first became very strongly critical of Trump. And then early 2016 was when I said I was going to be a never Trump. And we faced a hell storm from the beginning. I mean, in August 2015, I'll never forget, is when the first round of death threats came in. The first round of really horrific social media harassment, including taking pictures of my then seven year old youngest daughter who's adopted, and she's adopted from Ethiopia and photoshopping her picture into her face, into gas chambers, into slave pictures. Threats aimed at my wife. Threats aimed at me, at my family. Online harassment. All of this started happening in 2015, 2016, and has never fully stopped. It just comes and goes. And remind me. So the National Review did the was it the editorial position of the magazine to go against Trump, or were you just an outlier within the organization? So the magazine had a cover story called Against Trump that was against him in the primaries. So the magazine formally came out Against Trump in the primaries, but then did not endorse anyone in the general election. So the editorial position of the magazine in the election was neutral. And so I had a number of colleagues who voted for Trump and a number of colleagues who did not. And National Review, because it's sort of historically been the flagship intellectual journal of the right, became the center of just an enormous amount of contention and pressure. Now, the magazine itself did a great job in sort of granting academic freedom to each one of its writers that we were. No one told me to change my mind in leadership, that I needed to support Trump if I was going to stay at National Review. But the pressures being put on National Review were incredibly strong. And look, a lot of the guys who are my friends to this day, I'm not at National Review currently anymore, but who are my friends to this day, they were pretty darn courageous in resisting the pressure to make National Review sort of a house organ of the Trump administration, which it never was. I was thinking we would save Trump until the end, but the tractor beam pull of his awfulness is being felt with every sentence here. We may bounce around. I mean, this is a generic problem of hyperpolarization and what you refer to in the book as negative polarization, which we should describe and just, you know, the loss of trust in our institutions, the fragmentation of media, the breakdown of civility, the upregulation of tribalism conspiracy thinking. So there's the generic problem that visits the left and the right. I think it does so with some important differences, which we might discuss, but I think we'll probably spend more time on the right. I think you and I will fully agree about the problem on the left and the right, frankly. And it's interesting to consider that because on paper, you and I are not in the same tribe, right? You're an evangelical Christian, I'm a famous atheist. I've said some very nasty things about your faith, which is, you know, I got to think, has not, you know, warmed you up for this conversation, and yet you and I are going to have an entirely civil conversation about all of these things. So what tribe are we in? Is the rhetorical question I would ask all of the people who accuse me. I don't know about you, but I'm often accused of tribalism, even though I attack the left and I attack the right. And I have positions that are not entirely predictable. For instance, you and I'm pretty sure we'll disagree about abortion, and yet we're going to agree about guns. Tribalism does not capture the animus you and I are going to express on the various topics that will provoke our animus. And that's a good thing because, I mean, tribalism, in my view, is one of our greatest problems at this point, the idea that people feel this social pressure to conform to the sway of ascendant bad ideas and in many cases, ideas which are obviously bad and claims which are obviously false, I guess. Before we lurch into Trumpistan, is there something general you can say about the different expression of this problem on the left and the right politically? Yeah. And one thing, just going back to what you were saying a moment ago about our differences, I think that while we certainly have differences on a number of fronts, we're both small l liberals and both committed to American pluralism. In other words, we both see a role in a place, and there should be a role in a place for each of us in the American system. And the American system is supposed to exist. It's supposed to provide a place where atheist and Christian can live side by side and both communities can flourish. That's sort of a hallmark of the American classical liberal system when it's functioning well. And so I've always perceived you as being quite committed to American pluralism, and this is, I think, where a lot of the new. There's an old culture war which is over things like gun control or abortion or religious liberty. And it's being supplanted, I think, by a new culture war that is really, quite frankly, over liberalism and pluralism itself. This is where I feel like the far right and the far left actually have a lot more in common than one might think. Woke and anti woke have a lot in common. And the thing that they have in common is they are deeply questioning that American small l liberalism. They're deeply questioning pluralism and for example, the critical race theory argument. Now, there are elements of critical race theory that I've learned from, and I've read CRT stuff for 30 plus years since my first day of law school. And but there are elements that I find to be quite troubling, including the way in which it directly confronts american small l liberalism, american classical liberalism, and you see a lot of that arising on the right as well. So while on one hand you might say, well, the left is quite different from the right because it's going to be very aggressive on trans rights and the right is going to be very aggressive in combating that move. What you'll see when you scratch below the surface of both efforts is you'll see a lot of illiberalism, a lot of willingness to use the power of the state to force sort of compliance or to force by main. Force to sort of defeat your opponents, not just in the marketplace of ideas convincing other people that they're wrong, but actually using the power of the state to punish your political opponents. And that's something that I think you're actually seeing a commonality between a right and left that's disguised by the different issues that they advance. Yes, I guess the important asymmetry for me, and I know you've commented on this in other forums is that when you're talking about the derangement of the left, you're you are talking about something that has spread like a proper social contagion and moral panic in our most elite institutions. Right? So if the true decision makers don't quite believe this stuff, they are swayed sufficiently by the people who do that. You see the capitulation of The New York Times and scientific journals like Science and Nature and The Lancet. You see the ACLU become the antithesis of what it used to be, to say nothing of the Southern Poverty Law Center. You see this is the breakdown in elite institutions in Hollywood, et cetera, along these lines or on these issues. And what you see on the right is not apart from the fact that we had a sitting president of the United States who was effectively the psychological and social equivalent of Alex Jones, that's its own unique danger and derangement. But when you talk about the extreme of the right, you talk about white supremacy, say that is not politically odious and it's no doubt it's a reservoir of potential violence that we should worry about, but it doesn't drive culture in the same way that what's happening on the left drives culture. And I guess, you know, that's a yeah, it's a distinction that may ultimately not matter all that much, but it's mattered to me because what's wrong with white supremacy, what's wrong with the KKK, what's wrong with someone like David Duke is so obvious, right? It takes absolutely no intellectual fuel to point out what's wrong with that and to disparage it and to consider it disqualifying. But when you when you ask what's wrong with all of the intersectional confusion that is causing people to call for the firings of people who simply balk at any claim that there are no difference between men and women? Say, right. That's so confusing to so many people, and it's having such an outside influence on our conversation that it's much closer to home for me. I mean, when the New York Times is reliably wrong about trans issues or jihadism or whatever, the issue is not only wrong but dishonest. Well, then we just have the most important newspaper in the world visibly destroying itself. And that's different than some lunatics with AR 15 claiming they're going to take over the United States with their militia. That's its own problem. But it's not the same kind of cultural problem. I would agree with that, with the caveat. I would agree that when you're talking about significant problems in a place like the New York Times or, say, Harvard or Yale, these are institutions that have enormous influence not just in the United States but globally. If you have deep, deep dysfunction in these institutions, the effect of that radiates far beyond the walls of The New York Times building or far beyond Harvard Yard. But the caveat that I would say is that there is a deep dysfunction in many very, very important conservative institutions. They don't have as much purchase like the sort of dysfunction in evangelical Christianity doesn't have as much purchase, say in Los Angeles or in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But it has immense amount of impact in Middle Tennessee where I live or dysfunctions within the broader gun culture. That doesn't have as much of an impact again in La or Boston where there's not just not so many people who own weapons. I mean, of course the crime problems are deeply troublesome. But when there's problems with gun culture that's quite influential. Where I am, a lot of people on the right then downplay their own cultural influence by sort of saying, well, we don't really have to worry about our cultural maladies because The New York Times is so much more powerful or Harvard is so much more powerful. But where I am, where I live, the Southern Baptist Convention is much more potent culturally than Harvard or the New York Times. And so I agree with you. I think sort of from an objective standpoint, I would. Say objectively dysfunction at the New York Times or Harvard has an enormous radiating influence throughout the culture. But I would also say that a lot of people on the right just I don't know what the right term is. They minimize or rationalize their own cultural dysfunction is somehow less important than it really is. Yeah, well, the asymmetry that cuts the other way on the right is that on the right you have the capitulation of the Republican Party to a full on personality cult and crazy conspiracy. Right. Basically, the Republican Party is halfway to QAnon now in terms of the kinds of things that will claim to be true about what happened in the 2020 election, what happened on January 6, the forward looking dangers of democracy. That it will work to amplify apparently it's virtually anything you want to say against the Democratic Party I would probably agree with at this point. But it hasn't become antidemocratic to the degree that the Republican Party has, to the degree where the Republican Party many people in the Republican Party will actually scorn the idea that they should be Democratic. So they fall back on the idea that the United States is a republic and they'll say, no, we're not a democracy, we're a republic. Well, we're a democratic republic. Our foundational governmental institutions are elect, either elected or appointed by elected officials. I mean, even the counter majoritarian constitution can be amended by strong majorities. So the idea that this sort of notion that Republicans, republicans are splitting hairs when they, they reject this idea of that we're a democracy, yes, we are republic. Yes, our republic is a constitutional republic and has counter majoritaritarian elements to it, but it's still a democracy. So one question about Trump and the fact that he succeeded in becoming president that has just never been satisfactorily answered for me. You seem well placed to consider it just how is it that evangelicals finally and so fully embraced him? This guy was practically the antichrist with respect to the degree to which he violated the values or the professed values of evangelical Christianity. How is it that he succeeded in getting their support to that degree, and then and that I mean, I have to think that in the, you know, the aftermath of January 6 that you just described, where you have Mike Pence suffering a kind of reputational defenestration for his, you know, maintaining his oath to protect the Constitution and trump's reputation only rising, I got to think that was true among evangelicals as well. And Mike Pence is, in my world, practically an evangelical theocrat, right? I mean, he is as every single box you need to check to be in good standing with the evangelical church, I think he has checked. So explain what has happened there. Okay, well, there's one thing that I think people have really pegged and then another thing that people an underappreciated factor that people don't talk about enough. So the one that I think that people have pegged is that if you spend 20, 25, 30 years telling a community of people that it's six minutes to midnight on their religious liberty, that America is about to fall that the Democrats represent an existential threat to their faith, not just to the country, but to their faith, then that's going to have a distorting effect on a community. It's going to cause them to have a constant sense of emergency, and it's going to cause them to feel as if they have to take desperate times, call for desperate measures. So if you have the Flight 93 election essay where this guy named Michael Anton said, look, we have to charge the cockpit or this plane is going down, that was a message that a lot of evangelicals were ready to hear. Now, the shame of that is that it's utterly contradicted by Scripture. So let me put on my Bible quoting Hat for a minute. And the Apostle Paul wrote that God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power. And he's not talking about political power there, but confidence in the power of God, power, love, and of sound mind. And yet how much did that spirit of fear drive so many evangelicals towards an unsound mind? I mean, this was the conspiracy theories and everything that you saw. So that's the thing that I think people have accurately pegged, and that's the conventional wisdom that has a lot of truth to it. Now, here's the part that I don't think people fully understand, and this is, to me, even more troubling and more dangerous the role of prophecy. There are quite a few sort of self proclaimed prophets who not only declared that God was going to decree that Trump was going to be president, they not only prophesied that Trump would be president, but their prophecy included this really dangerous element that was donald Trump has a special anointing or a special divine purpose to save this country. So Donald Trump is God's man, and he's God's man for a very particular purpose. Who are these prophets? Are these some megachurch pastors? So these would be Pentecostal, large Pentecostal megachurches and movements. A lot of people who are completely not household names. If you're on Twitter, you don't know this movement exists. You would have more consciousness of it, maybe if you're on Facebook, but it's totally outside of sort of the American elite. The Pentecostal world is something that the New York Times world, just by and large, doesn't comprehend. And so these are people who have huge platforms in religious media, and they would say, Trump is God's man to save this country. Now, what does that do? One, it creates an unfalsifiable kind of argument. I've debated people about Trump as a Christian. I've debated, for example, a guy named Eric Metaxis, who was a reasonably well known Christian intellectual. And it was very clear to me that he was under the influence of prophecy. Well, how do you debate that? How do you reason with somebody who's under the influence of prophecy in that way? And then the other thing is, when the prophecy is so quiet, is so clear that Trump is on a divine mission, then that means that resistance to Trump comes from where satan resistance from Trump is rooted in evil. And so it really created this extreme level of religious commitment to Trump and hostility towards his opponents. And I remember when there was this ridiculous Jericho march. That was several days before, a couple of weeks before January 6 and December, and I wrote, I wrote in December, watch out, because the the logic of this movement is going to lead towards violence. And and sure enough, I mean, January 6 was the most predictable thing in the world. Once you saw the religious intensity of the support for Trump and that religious intensity went way beyond the, hey, I'm afraid that America is going, that the Democrats are going to hurt America, and went much more towards if you are against Trump, you are thwarting God's divine plan. And that's where you saw that level of fanaticism that you saw on January 6. Yeah, so just get kind of get my head around that for a second. The it's a lot it just seems like it could if you rewind to 2015 and I mean, this, this is something I legitimately didn't track, which is before Trump won the candidacy and when you had a field of 15 or so candidates, what was evangelical and Pentecostal opinion at that point? Did the prophecies only get articulated once he was the only choice in the face of the utter sacrilege of a Hillary Clinton presidency? Well, some were early. Trump gained a lot of support pretty quickly. Now, the interesting thing was the data indicates that Trump's initial support was a lot of it was located in non church going evangelicals. I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, non church going evangelicals, but sort of the more disconnected you were, the more the disconnected you were from civic institutions, including a congregation, the more likely you were to support Trump early on. But then once Trump gained the nomination and it was him and Hillary, then of course the dynamic changed. And so I think you began to have a snowball effect. So there were some who were early in on Trump, but then the snowball effect locked in. And then the other thing that was really important to sort of this faith and prophecy based mindset was the shocking victory. The fact that nobody predicted, or very few people predicted that he'd win, and he did win sent a message to millions of Christians that this was divine intervention. And I think that was the moment where a lot of this loyalty locked in in a way that a lot of people don't truly appreciate it. And I saw it happen in my community, and I saw it happen with my own eyes. Yeah. That is actually something that I've never thought about, but it resonates with me based on my own experience. I mean, it was so anomalous to have been so sure that he wasn't going to win and then to have him win was such a discombobulating experience. The purely secular version of it was still something that almost seemed to cry out for, you know, some non ordinary cause. Right? Yeah. It just it seemed like we woke up in an alternate universe, right. Like the laws of physics had been suspended to our horror. And so yeah, I could easily imagine that if you put on the lens of prophecy, it seems like, okay, this is the part of the movie where God makes his presence known. Right? Exactly. Exactly. And that's, again, something. So I live my neighborhood is there's this New York Times calculator where you can put in your address and it'll tell you sort of how thick is your bubble. My neighborhood is 85% Republican. The neighborhood I lived in in 2016, we moved in 2018 was about 80% to 90%, between 80 and 90% Republican. And I watched all this happen. I watched this sort of sense of despair on election Day when everyone thought that Hillary was going to win, turn into a sense of, you know, really, it's not just joy. It was sort of beyond joy. It's almost like a sense of ecstasy that Hillary didn't win. And it created this bond with Trump that is difficult to really fully explain. And I woke up the morning after or the day after Trump's victory, and the bond between him and his base after that victory was extraordinary, and it was directly rooted in the surprise. And the surprise for a lot of people was directly rooted in divine intervention. And once that happened, you couldn't wedge some of these people away from Trump if you tried. Well, one of the things that many of us have speculated that explains Trump's appeal to people who you would think wouldn't view him as an ally. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today's guest is Zaynep Tufechi. She is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, and she is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Sociology. She is also a faculty associate at the Harvard Burkman Center for Internet and Society, and was previously a Fellow at the center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, and her research interests revolve around the intersection of technology and society. Her academic work focuses on social movements, privacy and surveillance, and social interaction. She's also increasingly known for her work on big data and algorithmic decision making. And she's originally from Turkey and formerly a computer programmer, but has taken that background in interesting and increasingly relevant directions. And she's the author of Twitter and Tear Gas the Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. And we get into many interesting topics here, relevant to information security and things like WikiLeaks and ransomware attacks, the fake news phenomenon. All increasingly relevant as we depend more and more on the Internet and draw our beliefs about reality from what happens there. So, without further preamble, I bring you Zaynep to Fekchi. I am here with Zaynep. Jesus. I know. I swear to you that no bungling is a fail because there is no baseline. So go for it. The mind was willing, but the tongue failed. I don't blame you. It's an isolate language. It has no relatives either. We're freak of nature language. All right, well, I am here with Zanep Tufeki. Zaynep, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. So we met at BAMF, at the Ted Summit, where we were in the same session. We both gave talks on AI. I gave a talk on sort of the further future and possible very scary outcome, and you gave a talk on the present. The way in which AI is becoming increasingly a topic of concern, we're not talking hypothetical human intelligence AI. We're talking specialized AI that can do many good things, but also many undesirable things if we're not careful. I'm sure we'll touch on that, but before we do, just introduce yourself to people, because you have a kind of interesting backstory. You didn't get into this by the most conventional path. How did you come to be an expert on the sorts of things we're going to talk about in cybersecurity and social persuasion and organizing movements through social media. Who are you, Husina? That's a very existential question. To begin with, who am I? Well, I'm not sure who I am, but I can describe the path that took me here. As you say, it is a little unconventional, partly because I'm the product of a historical transition, right. I'm still of the generation that grew up without the Internet, especially since I grew up in the Middle East and I grew up in Turkey, which at the time was ruled in the aftermath of a military coup which had brought about very heavy censorship. So I grew up watching a single TV channel which made me acutely aware of censorship, especially since that TV channel didn't show us anything that seemed to be in the news or relevant to the country. Instead, we would watch Little House on the Prairie because that's what they showed and it made no sense in Turkey, but didn't matter. And I started out as a kid really interested in math and science and physics and all the things that kind of geeky kids are interested in. And I really enjoyed learning about it. But early on in my life, I got terribly concerned about the ethical implications of technology, especially since what happens to many kids like me happened to me too. I call it the atom bomb problem. For kids into science, at some point your excitement hits this wall because you learn about the atom bomb and that it was enabled by great physics. The very physics that you admire and think is amazing is also what enabled us. And so you go into this tailspin. And to my, I guess, kind of failure of imagination, I thought computers would be a great topic for me because they would have fewer ethical implications. And I also needed to get into a job quickly because not only did I grew up in Turkey, I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional, broken home. I needed to start working as soon as I could, started working early as a 13 year old and then as a programmer as early as a teenager, 1617. So I had this sort of very unusual path that I found myself in a technical job in a country still under pretty significant censorship and close public sphere without the Internet. And I found myself because of my technical job, I found myself sort of glimpsing the future kind of this parallel existence where I'd work at IBM, which had this amazing intranet that allowed me to talk with people around the world almost as an equal right here. There I am, a teen girl, kind of with all that goes into it in a country like that pretty much anywhere in the world too. But I'm on the Internets kind of as a person and taken seriously, it was just, you know, the early promise of the Internet people kind of laugh at right now. It had a reality to it. So I sort of just got enchanted by this possibility. And I was also fairly interested in how do we bring about change, how do we bring more freedom, how do we bring more compassion and reason to the world? And I thought, this is great. This is going to change everything. I really wanted to study it and I switched to sociology kind of along the way, but not knowing what exactly would make sense, right? I was just trying to find my way. And because such things often happen in the United States, I found a way. I kind of stumbled into graduate school in the United States trying to understand all this better. And in the meantime, as I was struggling with trying to understand and think through the world was progressing. We started having more and more digital connectivity. And sometime, I think around 2004, I stopped having to explain why computer science, computer programming and sociology and social science were related because Facebook happened. And it was, I think, the first time that a lot of people who are not specialists kind of had this very visceral reaction to how their social world is being changed by this new platform. Questions of privacy and other things became very prominent in people's mind. And then fast forward a little bit, arab Spring happened, which is exactly what I studied, social change and social moon. So I started studying that and then the Gizzi Park protest happened, which again happened three blocks from my place of birth that close to home. So I went there. And now I'm trying to focus on the future and understand how the methods in both artificial intelligence like machine learning and the Silicon Valley business models and the world we are in, politically speaking. What does this intersection mean? How do we understand the rise of authoritarianism? How do we think about technology's role in all of this? And the security part that you mentioned? I got into it partly because I work with so many people in social movements and journalists that they're kind of like the canary in the mine with the Insecurity and the Internet affects them earlier on because they're targeted. So I got into that part too. I guess I'm a mutt in all of these particular fields. It's that intersection and it turns out it's a relevant intersection. And so here I am to the degree one can answer this question of what I'm studying right now and what I'm thinking about right now. Well, it's all too relevant and only becoming more so. And as you say, the first blush of enthusiasm for the Internet connecting us all as an unambiguous good that has faded. And now we're discovering that as this technology connects people and empowers us, it's also fragmenting us in ways that are fairly difficult to correct for. And it's creating new levers of influence that could lead to more authoritarian control and perverse forms of persuasion. And you told me in the set up to this that you were worried about something you've called surveillance capitalism. How do you think about that? What is surveillance capitalism? So here's what I think about this. We have this scary convergence of couple of events. One of them is the business model on the internet for the sort of platforms that most of us use, like the Facebooks and Twitters of the world. It's capturing our attention and persuading us to, at the moment, click on ads. So there's an enormous amount of brain power going into how to make us buy 0.3 more shoes per person. On average. You have this whole infrastructure that is collecting our data, that is doing hundreds of thousands of dynamic tests on the platform just to persuade us to act in a particular way for commercial reasons, right, to make us purchase things. And this is happening increasingly through technologies that are like machine learning, which is a form of computer programming that is different than the past in that we don't program it anymore. We feed the machines a lot of data and they create these large matrices and calculate certain things. And just like the brain that we can't really see what a person is thinking. If we slice their brain with machine learning, you don't really see exactly what's going on. It just spews out classifications. It says do this, do that, do this, do that. It's probabilistic, but it works pretty strikingly well for the things that we're using it for. But it needs data to work, which means that we have a business model that is set both to figure out how to exactly push our buttons and also to use an enormous amount of data that is surveilled from us asymmetrically you don't get to see what they have. And this enormous amount of data can also be used to deduce things about us that we haven't disclosed, right? It's not just invading our privacy directly. When you have that much data, you can use computational inference to figure out who you think is the troublemaker, who's depressed, who might be on a manic swing in a manic depressive cycle. You can figure all these things out even if people don't disclose them or even know them, right? So this is kind of where things are at this convergence. And the thing I fear is that this is a perfect setup for authoritarians because it allows them to survey the population and to nudge them and shape the opinions using this amount of information that's asymmetric that can figure things out. And using machine learning at scale, that means you're like individually experimented on, figured out how to exactly scare you, how to fear monger when you're vulnerable and what you're vulnerable for. And then this will come into politics as well. And there's nothing wrong with persuasion as a form of politics, but it's not happening openly, right? It's happening person by person. It's happening in the dark. You don't see what other people are seeing. You don't see what is being targeted at you. And think of China, right, with hundreds of millions of people online. And it's not like they censor everything. They censor a few things, but we know from research they usually don't censor government criticism. I feel like it might have even made them more stable because an authoritarian's blind spot is not knowing what people are up to. And this is perfect for knowing exactly what people are up to and individually pushing their buttons. So I find this really ironic that the Silicon Valley business model and the Silicon Valley workforce, which is uniquely liberal or progressive or libertarian in general, pro science, empirically oriented, they're geeky in many ways, and I say it as a positive that's my tribe too, we may well be building the infrastructure of authoritarianism. And I think they're under this impression that they'll never lose control of these tools, that they built them and they won't let them be used for evil, so to speak. And I look at history, and that's never how it works. You build infrastructure, it gets taken over by the people with money, with power, with authority. So that's kind of what I started really worrying about. My first book was about social Moon, social Change in Digital Tech and the complexities there. I'm now thinking, let's look at this from the point of view of power, the powerful, not the challengers. We spent a lot of time thinking about digital media and digital technology, and challengers really need to start thinking about digital technology and the powerful and how they're converging historically. Let's take parts of this problem that's all fascinating, and I've been thinking a lot about the way in which digital media is coopting our attention and causing us to spend our lives in ways that we will later regret and actually had another guest on the podcast, Tristan Harris, who spoke a lot about that. He was great on that. Yeah, yeah. But I haven't really thought as much about the authoritarian misuse of this. I mean, obviously there's a lot in the news and a lot of talk about fake news and the Russian meddling in our election, and we should probably get to that. So there's been obvious political issues here, but what's your view on social media in particular? I noticed you used Twitter with a fair degree of enthusiasm. I see you have 74,000 tweets. I do. So my research area so it's kind of it's a special thing that I'm usually watching things on Twitter, too. So I have this deal of thing I may be keeping an eye on part of my research project. I think I would use it less if it weren't part of my research. In fact, I don't do Facebook research as much, and I'm on Facebook a lot less, partly because, as Tristan points out, it's a medium designed to capture your attention, right? And it's a medium like every incentive there is to try to capture your attention. And there are times when I'm fine with that. But how do you keep autonomy and agency in an architecture that's designed to get you to do something that maybe you don't want to do? If you ask me in the morning, right, I might be wanting to do it then. But if you ask me in the morning, is this how much of my day I want to spend? So I try to sort of judge that. And outside of my own research and my job researching this stuff, I try to be sort of more mindful of when am I not going to be on this and how am I going to relate to these technologies that I know are designed to grab me. One of the things I've started trying to do is not use services if there's an alternative that I don't pay for. I feel like I want to be the consumer. I want to be the one they're catering to, rather than being the person whose attention they want to grab so they can sell to people trying to manipulate me into buying zero three more shoes. The problem is, of course, it's part of life. I work with refugees and I try to sort of the unluckiest people, right? I try to sort of see if I can be of some help. And I couldn't do that work if I weren't on Facebook because that's where the groups are and that's where the organization goes on a lot of times. So to be in the civic world today, you use these platforms because that's where billions of people are. On the other hand, they're not designed with the kind of goals I have in mind when I'm engaging the world. And it's this huge challenge, it's this huge tension and it feeds into what I just said, which is that the people in power are increasingly looking at this world and saying, what can we do with this? How can we use it to consolidate power? Do you have any thoughts about what recently happened in the election and the role that social media played there? And then the larger fake news phenomenon and this issue about with respect to how we are getting siloed in echo chambers? Absolutely. It's, I guess, an illusion of being open to information. But in fact, people are just ramifying their worldview by use of these tools. Yes, but let me just say a couple of things. With a lot of these tools, if you talk to the companies, the first thing they will tell you is that's what people are doing, that's not us. Now, on the one hand, it's certainly true that this is driven by people, right. It would not be fair to say that the social media platforms are generating this from whole class. They're not. It's more like we have certain human tendencies. If we see something that we agree with, it's more pleasant. If we see something we're angry, it kind of captures our attention. And you see this in the research on perception, right. When you look at a crowd, you're a lot more likely to notice the angry face. Because in an in person thing, if you think about the evolutionary process, the Pleistocene, if you live in a small group, it kind of probably made sense to know exactly who was mad at you because that could be a threat. So there are all these things that we already have tendencies for. I liken it to having an appetite for sugar and salt, right. It's a perfectly reasonable thing, given our evolutionary history, to be into sugar and salt. The problem is very rapidly, without any time to adjust, forget evolutionarily. Culturally, we have shifted to a world where we're supplied with not only we're not just supplied with extra sugar and salt, social media platforms use sugar and salt to keep you there. Kind of like a salt lake used to shoot animals, but instead of shooting us, they're just capturing our attention. They're selling our shoes. And that's, I think, big part of what's going on with the election, too. What happened is we got siloed, of course, and because of my work and of course, of my sensitivities to authoritarians, I guess I started following social media, trump social media, very early on because I thought, whoa, this is an interesting thing. And I argued he was viable when everybody was laughing at him. Exactly, because I was following his base on social media. And a couple of things happened. I saw how and why he resonated. I also saw enormous amount of misinformation that ranged from distortions to fake news, sort of proliferate there. I also saw that once when I wasn't making a conscious effort to follow these people, which I did as a part of work. I did it every day for almost two years. Now, if I went on Facebook, I had friends who were Trump supporters, although they were in the minority because I'm a college professor in a blue part of a purple state, and it kind of makes sense for most of my friends not to be Trump supporters. But I have friends from middle school and elsewhere, and some of them turns out we're sympathetic to Trump. I never saw their posts. I just sort of thought about it halfway through, and I'm like, whoa, do I not have a single person I friended on Facebook? Because I find lots of people on Facebook is not very personal for me. And I had to hunt them, I guessed them, and I hunted their pills down. And yeah, there were people who had sympathy. And Facebook's algorithm never showed it to me. And I'm guessing, I mean, obviously it's not a conscious decision. Once again, these machine learning algorithms, they know that if you give people sugar and salt, which in the case of Facebook, for me, it's cuddly stuff or outrageous stuff, right? Babies, cats, cute things, happy news. Also things we're angry about. Outrageous babies, eating cats. I think those both polar sides attract attention, so they just feed us fat. And I think that's really destructive, especially given it's a way to make money for people. So you could just be a spammer and figure out, hey, look, I can just feed people fake news about Hillary Clinton. That's what a lot of people did. I interviewed a bunch of these people. Some of them were even liberals. They were just like, it works, it spreads, and we make money from Facebook. So not only does it allow does the algorithm kind of amplify this, it allows you to make a lot of money from doing exactly this. And I'm not saying mass media was ever perfect, many failures there. But this is a new onward world to have no checks on, no ethos against this kind of misinformation. So about four or five years ago, five years ago now, I wrote this article for the New York Times worried about the Obama campaign's use of data, right, because they were already sort of developing all these methods to target people and to try to persuade people using statistical data they had on them. And I said, Look, I understand campaigns want to win, but this kind of a symmetric accumulation of data where it goes far beyond just which magazine you're subscribed to and the kind of Smart targeting has the potential to gerrymander us down to the person and have politics only be about people who are persuadable and all these sort of downside effects of having the public sphere become more and more private and more and more asymmetric in how it operates. That got a lot of pushback from people in the Obama campaign and people in the data science world. And one of the things I was told was one, I was told this will always be on the side of people we like. People told me, they said, this is something that people who like science, people who like data, people who are empirical, this is only going to be their tool because the other side, they told me it doesn't like data. They can't do this. The second thing I was told was this is just a form of persuasion, no different than any other. Now fast forward just four years after that, and what I saw was in the 2016 election, the Ted Cruz's data people ended up being Donald Trump's data people. And I'm going to recount something they claim they did. Now, I don't have access to the internal data, so I can't vouch they did this, but I have some independent evidence that they at least tried. But just outlining is enough to explain what the issue is. So they claim that they used people's Facebook likes and other kind of indicators. Social media data or whatever it is they use, because the social media data is very good for this to try to figure out people's psychological profile. Now, we know from research that if I just have, say, what you liked on Facebook or even just your Tweet stream, we can guess using these sort of complex algorithms, we can guess with pretty high probability where you fit on the big five personality traits like neuroticism, extraversion, et cetera. We can guess your sexual orientation. We can guess whether your religious and what religion. We can guess a lot of things even if you never disclose them. Right? These are not things that you needed to have put on your profile. So we can figure this out. And we know also from research that some people will vote more authoritarian if they're scared, other people get pissed off at fear. Mongering and the problem with advertising on TV is you're advertising to everyone at the same time, right? But what if you could go on Facebook and target only the people that would be prone to a particular kind of message? Safe here. Mongering now, again, because Facebook won't tell us. We don't know the exact story here, but Donald Trump's campaign claims they try to demobilize particular segments of the population against voting. So it's important this isn't persuasion. They weren't trying to persuade them to vote for him. They were just trying to tell them, hillary Clinton is just as bad. Stay home. For example. One of the targeted constituencies was black men in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia was just very little difference in Pennsylvania, which was a major electoral gain for Trump. Right? And I have independent confirmation they did target black men in Philadelphia. We've come across instances. So what they tried to do was to demobilize those people. What did they tell them? We don't know, right? Only Facebook knows. Did they tell them things that were correct, things that were false, things that were completely made up of whole clothes? Were they just scary commercials? Who knows? They were just targeted at them. So the census data from the election just came in, and it's pretty clear that the biggest difference between 2012 and 2016 is the black turnout in the country was depressed in lots of places. Now, clearly, there are multiple possible explanations for this. It could be the Obama effect has worn off, right? It's kind of reasonable to expect the first African American president would gather a bigger share and enthusiasm from the African American population. It could be that. Part of it is these strict voter suppression oriented laws that cut the amount of hours, that cut the number of voting machines in minority districts. It could be the gerrymandering. It could be the voter ID laws that are especially problematic with elderly black people who don't necessarily have the birth certificates and et cetera. But it could also be this. We could also have a world in which large segments of the population were psychologically profiled and otherwise profiled and silently targeted through Facebook Dark ads in a way that would push their buttons and do it one by one. Like if you needed people to figure out what everybody needed, you'd never manage it because to target 100,000 people you'd need 10,000 people. Whereas right now we're at a world where machine learning is designing machine learning experiments to experiment on us. It's already out of our control. Right. And you can do this at scale. You can figure out people one by one using this technology. So what if that is part of what swung a very close election? Clearly it's multi causal, so anything could have swung it. But what if this is part of what made the difference? Now, this is a small example and the question I mean the objection I hear to this is they probably didn't manage this. My answer is, well, we don't know. And if they didn't manage it, this is where things are going. You see what I'm saying? This is what my concern with surveillance. Capitalism meets authoritarianism. Is that the business model of capturing your attention, profiling you, and trying to persuade you to buy that extra shoe is very compatible with a manipulative public sphere where you don't get to see what is even contested because it's so segmented person by person. And then buttons are pushed person by person. That makes sense. Yeah, it's all very interesting. I think most people at first glance will understand what's wrong with targeting people, however, individually, with fake information, with lies, with fake news stories and persuading them that way. That's clearly a problem and we have to figure out some way to correct for it. But as you said earlier, persuasion is just persuasion. There's nothing wrong in principle with persuasion. And so it may not be clear to people why there is a special concern around the segmentation of the population with these tools when you are validly persuading them. Well, even if you're validly persuading people right. In some ways, obviously this is just more of what just political campaigners and marketers and everybody have always tried to do. Right. In many ways there is no difference from what they try to do. The big difference is it's doable now, right? This is what past marketers. You can go back and you can look at sort of how political campaigns have always tried to do this. I'm just reading this Rick Perlstein's biography of Goldwater and he's got a campaign manager that's saying the indifference, we got to target the indifference and he has to figure out who they are and how to target these people. They had baseball bats. They could advertise on TV. They could just try to send a message out. And it was really difficult to send the message out to one person and not the other and to push one person's buttons without upsetting the other. And also because it was public. If you put out an ad like that on TV, it was plausible that the other side would mobilize and say, this isn't true. Here's how to do this. Right? It's all possible that we could have this contestation. And if you go back to the idea of the public sphere, it was never as nice and as clean as the Habermasian version of it, where people are just having recent discussions regardless of who they are and their status. But it was really sort of, at least in ideal, we would have this world. Right now, it's gone exactly in the opposite direction. Instead of sort of wishing to persuade us like that and only having baseball bats to act with, they have scalpels that they can use to get at us one by one, right? So instead of baseball bats that would both provoke a reaction and weren't as effective, they have quite scalpels that they can do this with, without provoking the reaction, without being public, and without sort of having us be able to oppose it. That's kind of my worry, is that, yes, we have antecedents of this as we have everything, but it's now effective and it's also asymmetric I don't ever see what data they have on me. I don't ever see what they're trying to push my buttons, right? I don't have any meta idea of I don't have perspective and I don't have defenses against it, because if I had defenses against it, let me liking it this way. When movies first came out, people ran away when they saw a train coming at them on the screen. Right now, right now, if you see a movie and there's a train or a car coming at you, you don't even flinch, right? It's a movie screen and nothing's coming at you. For the ordinary person, it was perfectly understandable to be scared of this new phenomenon and not understand how to deal with because it wasn't so novel. And if you look at the early history of movie making, you see that it was greatly intertwined with extreme, violent, racist, fascist ideologies. If you look at people like, say, Lenny Riefenstall, this German filmmaker actress who was great behind the camera, she invented a lot of the shots. If you watch ESPN, she's probably invented healthcare shots covering first Amunic olympics for Hitler. But that craft got adopted into authoritarianism because it was very impressive and very effective in persuading the masses in ways that isn't as apparent to us now, because we kind of got used to the format and we have a lot more cynicism and defenses against the format. So that's where I think we are with these sort of dark technologies asymmetrically aimed at persuasion and manipulation that we don't really understand their power. We don't get to see it. It's all private data, so we don't get to see facebook knows what happened last election, not telling anyone, not letting any independent researchers kind of add it and we don't have a way to defend ourselves against it. And people will say, I'm not manipulated, I'm not manipulated. And everybody thinks that. But we're all people. We're all persuadable in particular ways. And if there's a science and a craft of doing it with massive surveillance of us and testing of us and find the exact way, we're all going to be vulnerable. And I think that's where we are is that in fact, if you look at it, facebook's business model is telling advertisers and political campaigns that it's a great platform for persuading people and it's telling us it's a lousy platform. It won't change any minds, it's just us. Both of those things can happen at the same time. And I think it works to a degree. And I think we need to sort of really think about how do we deal with this new threat to free conversation that is not so asymmetrically controlled. Well, listen, with 74,000 Tweets Zaynep, I would say the AIS have already gotten to you. You might have a problem. I'll just point them at you when they come for me, I'll say, It was Sam. It was Sam. I think I only have 6000. Well, yeah, so the thing is, they probably have my number in terms of what kind of a person I am. A lot of things. Although, on the other hand, I study these things a lot, so I'm always watching like every time I'm advertised, every time there's a dynamic change, every time something happens, I'm constantly trying to probe and get at it. And despite that, I wouldn't trust myself to be immune to it at all. And that's the reason. There's a strong reason to construct. For example, I think, places for children that are free of advertisements directed at them. I think children don't have yet, like especially younger children don't have the way to assess the credibility. And it's something that part of parenting is to teach them how to assess manipulative messages directed at them. So it starts from protecting them to educating them. And hopefully by the time they're out in the world on their own, they realize manipulative messaging. And I feel like it's the same thing, except this is on steroids. This is much more effective, much more data based, much more empirically strong and machine learning based ways of manipulating us that we don't yet have means to defend ourselves properly because we don't even have a full picture of what's going on. The degree to which our economy depends on advertising, in particular the digital economy, it's stunning. And most people are fairly oblivious to the downside, apart from not liking some annoying ads, but they don't see how the incentives get aligned. Perversely. Absolutely. I'm advertising if it was done kind of very low key information. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listeners support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the essential Sam Harris. This is making sense of consciousness. The goal of this series is to organize compile and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam Harris into specific areas of interest. This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments, the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements, and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced. The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but to entice you to go deeper into these subjects. Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest, and at the conclusion we'll offer some reading, listening and watching suggestions which range from fun and light to densely academic. One note to keep in mind for this series Sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily partitioned thought. The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into and greatly affects others. You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold, and your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships with others. In this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of identity and the self free will, mind and the brain, artificial intelligence, belief and unbelief, meditation and spirituality, and more. So get ready. Let's make sense of consciousness. As you just heard, the topic of consciousness overlaps with just about everything because, depending on your description of it, it's the medium through which everything is experienced, or is it more accurate to refer to it as the experience of anything. A great deal of the effort to wrap one's head around the topic of consciousness is the struggle to define it at all. Most thinkers in this space concede that we don't yet have a good definition or explanation for consciousness, though, as you'll also hear, there are some who think we're simply asking the wrong questions or demanding too much of an explanation of it. But to many, there does seem to be something special about the issue of consciousness. This particular issue and sticking point of the special case of consciousness is the issue which drove Sam back into academia to pursue his PhD in neuroscience in fact, he was directly inspired to do so by the guest in the first clip. So let's see if we can get a hold of that. Intuition that consciousness is a special and perhaps perpetually intractable case. In this episode, you're going to encounter a bevy of thought experiments and whimsical hypotheticals that attempt to get at this thing we call consciousness. In many ways, all of this can sound a bit odd. If consciousness is simply the manifest truth of subjective experience itself, then consciousness is simultaneously the most obviously and undeniably present and graspable thing there could be. Yet it remains perhaps the most elusive and mysterious thing to make any sense of. How could this be? One thing that you'll need to keep in mind is Sam's firm philosophical position on consciousness. He argues that consciousness is the only thing which can't be an illusion. In philosophical jargon, this idea is sometimes called solopsism. What he means by this is that one could be hopelessly confused about what they are perceiving as reality. You could even be unknowingly in a simulated universe generated by a supercomputer in another dimension. All of your memories could be false and simply injected into your brain a split second ago by an alien who was just playing an elaborate trick on you. You could be in a dream. But as long as there is a perception at all, that presence of perception is what Sam means by consciousness, and that feeling is undeniable from the inside of it. In a very literal sense, it is a self evident truth, the only self evident truth in Sam's view. In this meaning, a contention that one only seems to be conscious, or that one is being tricked into thinking he is conscious, is total nonsense because the seeming is the consciousness. This sets up a kind of dual picture where we have consciousness and its contents. And even if the contents are utterly confused or unreal, in some sense the consciousness remains as the thing which experiences them. Perhaps consciousness is something like a mirror reflecting passing lights and colors. The images that appear on the mirror may be illusions or tricks of shadows which convince you of a world, but the mirror itself is undeniable. If you remove the mirror, there is nothing to capture or experience the contents of that world. But already there is something quite strange to ask. Why does there need to be a mirror at all? Isn't it perfectly feasible to have a universe that follows the laws of physics and goes along doing its thing purely in the dark, without any inner subjective experience embedded within it, without any feeling at all? That universe is at least imaginable to us, and it feels possible and eerily easy to conceive. But before we dive in too quickly, we still need to try to point to exactly what we mean by consciousness. Sometimes conversations on consciousness can feel like an endless string of analogies and stories trying to restart a strange deliberation on the correct path. Is consciousness like a radio receiving signal? Is it like a stage play or theater? Or is it, as Plato once famously imagined, like shadows on a cave wall? You can pay attention to what it's like to hear the sound of my voice right now and notice your awareness. And presumably there is a level of information processing happening in your brain which somehow gives rise to the feeling that it is something that it is like for you to be listening to me right now. But your brain is also presumably doing a lot of other things at the moment which are arguably much more important, like regulating the function of your kidneys or monitoring your heartbeat or breathing. And there doesn't seem to be a subjective feeling associated with those clusters of brain activity, does there? You could perhaps direct your attention to them and maybe grasp some vague awareness, but before I pointed it out and you turned your inner spotlight towards them, the activity was happening in the darkness without a subjective conscious quality. So why do some activities give rise to this feeling while others don't? Let's try out our first hypothetical to further get at what might be meant by consciousness. This is a conception which very much aligns with Sam's usage of the term throughout these conversations. So it will be very useful to onboard. Now, Thomas Nagel brought us a simple question in an essay he wrote in 1974. The essay asks the question in its title what is it like to be a bat? One of the prominent voices in the field of consciousness is the American philosopher Daniel Dennett. Dennett likes to refer to these kinds of hypotheticals and mind explorations not as thought experiments, but as intuition pumps. This is itself a useful analogy where you can imagine being walked through a hypothetical not to perform any kind of experiment in any scientific sense, but to have the hypothetical sort of inflate an intuition you might have about something. Perhaps the intuition gets pumped up to the point where it crows out all others and proclaims itself to be an undeniable truth. Dennett happens to disagree with Sam's views on consciousness and Thomas Nagels as well. You'll hear some of Dennett's objections raised by Sam and his guests throughout these conversations. Sam had Dennett on the show, but that entanglement is included in the free will compilation. And as you'll surely gather, that conversation includes intimately related disagreements. But let's spend some time with Nagel's question and see what kind of intuition that pumps up within us. This intuition pump is best run on oneself, so I'll start by putting myself to the test. So what is it like to be a bad? Well, it's quite different. It's dark. I have this sonar echolocation thing. Is this a little like human vision or is it more like hearing or even touch? I must be building some kind of mental map of my physical environment as I navigate it. The echolocation seems to give me a good idea of how to move about the radial area around me to about 10ft. I feel something. It's a sort of urge or desire, like hunger. And I experience something like sweetness and satisfaction. When I taste the juicy mosquito I just ate. I don't like the feeling of bumping into the wall too hard. That must be something like pain. I really am not sure how much of a concept of the future or past I can imagine. Do I have a mind's eye where I can picture things which are not present? Do I have a memory? Whatever this constellation of experiences is, this must all add up to a kind of batness. It feels like whatever this is, but there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now let's pump this intuition fully by substituting alternatives for the bat. In Nagel's initial question what is it like to be a dog or a ladybug? What about a grizzly bear? All of these substitutions seem to still result in having some kind of experience in inner world. But what happens to our intuition when we swap out the bat with something like a tree branch? What is it like to be a twig or a boulder? Or the Eiffel Tower? What about a submarine, which also has something like sonar? Is it like anything to be them? This was the point of Nagel's question. If imagining what it's like to be something ends up obliterating the notion of experience at all, is the thing conscious? We may not know exactly what it's really like to be a bad, but we get the sense that there is something that it must be like to be one. We tend not to have that same intuition about the boulder. Perhaps this is because there doesn't appear to be anything like a central nervous system or a place where all the sensory data is orchestrated or stored. A simple old fashioned mercury thermometer does interact and respond to its environment. The mercury conducts heat from its target and expands and climbs the tube in response. But is it like anything to do this? Is the thermometer having an inner experience? Or is this just a nonsension interaction of physics that lacks any sense of an inner experience or the feeling of an experiencer? Somehow within the thermometer? Our intuition suggests that this is the truer picture. And we tend not to grant consciousness to thermometers in the way that we might to bats, bears and other people. But wait, something funny is happening here. If I look closer and closer at my physical system, which I have already established must be generating consciousness as proven by my subjective inner experience at this moment, am I not just made up of incredibly small thermometers? If I look at a single atom in my brain, is it not just responding to its environment and being moved around by the laws of physics in much the same way. The thermometer is how is any amount of this seemingly nonsension activity and in any imaginable physical configuration generating something like a unified, collective, subjective consistent experience that we are calling consciousness? This leads us to our first guest who coined this particular question the hard problem. The guest is the philosopher David Chalmers. By distinguishing this problem as the hard one, chalmers implies that there must be easy problems to consider in this space. Don't let the word easy confuse you here. He's not suggesting that we know much about those either. But by easy problems, he's talking about the questions of how to correlate conscious states with neurophysiological activity such as noticing which areas of the brain light up when the subject reports experiencing a certain sound, memory or emotion. Chalmers contends that all of that work may provide insight into how the machinery of the brain operates and it might give us fuller scientific descriptions for things like vision, hearing, taste, or even memory and dreaming. But all the correlations we could ever hope to find in those investigations won't and perhaps can't ever address why any physical activity should and apparently does give rise to inner subjective experience. That's the hard problem. So let's start with Sam and David Chalmers exchange on this topic from episode 34, which is called The Light of the Mind. We're going to jump right in with Sam asking Chalmers what he thinks of Nagel's famous question about what it's like to be a bet. There was another very influential articulation of this problem which I would assume influenced you as well, which was Thomas Nagel's essay, what is It Like to Be a Bat? The formulation he gave there is if it's like something to be a creature or a system processing information, whatever it's like, even if it's something we can't understand, the fact that it is like something the fact that there's an internal, subjective, qualitative character to the thing, the fact that if you could switch places with it, it wouldn't be synonymous with the lights going out. That fact. The fact that it's like something to be a bat is the fact of consciousness in the case of a bat or in any other system. I know people who are not sympathetic with that formulation just think it's a kind of tautology or it's a question begging formulation of it. But as a rudimentary statement of what consciousness is, I've always found that to be an attractive one. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I find that's about as good a definition as we're going to get for consciousness. The idea is roughly that a system is conscious if there's something it's like to be that system. So there's something it's like to be me. Right now, I'm conscious. There's nothing it's like, presumably to be this glass of water on my desk. If there's nothing it's like to be that glass of water on my desk, then it's not conscious. Likewise, some of my mental states, my seeing the green leaves right now, there's something it's like for me to see the green leaves. So that's a conscious state for me. But maybe there's some unconscious language processing of syntax going on in my head that doesn't feel like anything to me. Or some motor processors in the cerebellum. Those might be states of me, but they're not conscious states of me because there's nothing it's like for me to undergo those states. So I find this is a definition that's very vivid and useful for me. That said, it's just a bunch of words like anything. And so for some people, this bunch of words, I think is very useful in activating the idea of consciousness from the subjective point of view. Other people hear something different in that set of words like what is it like you're saying, what is it similar to? Well, it's like it's kind of similar to my brother, but it's different as well. For those people, that set of words doesn't work. So what I've found over the years is this phrase of nagels is incredibly useful for at least some people in getting them on to the problem, although it doesn't work for everybody. What do you make of the fact that so many scientists and philosophers find the hardness of the hard problem? And I think I should probably get you to state why it's so hard or why you have distinguished the hard from the easy problems of consciousness. But what do you make of the fact that people find it difficult to concede that there's a problem here? Because it's I mean, this is just a common phenomenon. There are people like Dan Dennett and the Churchillins and other philosophers who just kind of ram their way past the mystery here and declare that it's a pseudo mystery. Let's state what the hard problem is, and perhaps you can say why it's why it's not immediately compelling to everyone that it's in fact hard. Yeah, I mean, there's obviously a huge amount of disagreement in this area. I don't know what your sense is. My sense is that most people at least got a reasonable appreciation of the fact that there's a big problem here. Of course, what you do after that is very different in different cases. Some people think, well, it's only an initial problem and we ought to kind of see it as an illusion and get past it. But yeah, to state the problem, I find it useful to first start by distinguishing the easy problems, which are problems basically about the performance of functions from the hard problem, which is about experience. So the easy problems are how is it, for example, we discriminate information in our environment and respond appropriately? How does the brain integrate information from different sources and bring it together to make a judgment and control behavior? How indeed do we voluntarily control behavior to respond in a controlled way to our environment? How does our brain monitor its own states? These are all big mysteries. And actually, neuroscience has not gotten all that far on some of these problems. They're all quite difficult. But in those cases, we have a pretty clear sense of what the research program is and what it would take to explain them. It's basically a matter of finding some mechanism in the brain that, for example, is responsible for discriminating the information and controlling the behavior. And although it's pretty hard work finding the mechanism, we're on a path to doing that. So a neural mechanism for discriminating information, a computational mechanism for the brain to monitor its own states and so on. So for the easy problems, they at least fall within the standard methods of the brain and cognitive sciences. But basically, we're trying to explain some kind of function and we just find a mechanism. The Hard Problem what makes the hard problem of experience hard is it doesn't really seem to be a problem about behavior or about functions. You could, in principle, imagine explaining all of my behavioral responses to a given stimulus and how my brain discriminates and integrates and monitors itself and controls. You can explain all that with, say, a neural mechanism, and you might not have touched the central question, which is why does it feel like something from the first person point of view? That just doesn't seem to be a problem about explaining behaviors and explaining functions. And as a result, the usual methods that work for us so well in the brain and cognitive sciences, finding a mechanism that does the job just doesn't obviously apply here. We're going to get correlations. We've certainly got finding correlations between processes in the brain and bits of consciousness, an area of the brain that might light up when you see red or when you feel pain. But nothing there seems yet to be giving us an explanation. Why does all that processing feel like something from the inside? Why doesn't it go on just in the dark, as if we were giant robots or zombies without any subjective experience? So that's the hard problem. And I'm inclined to think that most people at least recognize there is at least the appearance of a big problem here from that point. People react in different ways. Someone like Dan Dennis says it's all an illusion or a confusion and one that we need to get past. I respect that line. I think it's a hard enough problem that we need to be exploring every avenue here. And one avenue that's very much worth exploring is the view that it's an illusion. But there is something kind of faintly unbelievable about the whole idea that the data of consciousness here are an illusion. To me, they're the most real thing in the universe the feeling of pain, the experience of vision or of thinking. So it's a very hard line to take. The line that Dan Dennis takes, he wrote a book, Consciousness Explained back in the early 90s where he tried to take that line. It was very it was a very good and very influential book. But I think most people have have found that at the end of the day, it just doesn't seem to do justice to the phenomenon. You've touched on it in passing here, but remind us of the the zombie argument that I don't know if that originates with you. It's not something that I noticed before I heard you making it. But the zombie argument really is the thought experiment that describes epiphanominalism introduced the concept of a zombie, and then I have a question about that. So, yeah, the idea of a zombie is actually I mean, it's been out there for a while in philosophy before me, not to mention out there in the popular culture. But the zombies which play a role in philosophy are a bit different from the zombies that play a role in the movies or in the Haitian Voodoo culture. The ones in the movies are all supposed to be all the different kinds of zombies are missing something. The zombies in the movie are lacking somehow life there if they're dead. But reanimated the zombies in the Voodoo tradition are lacking some kind of free will. Well, the zombies that play a role in philosophy are lacking consciousness. And this is just a thought experiment, but the conceit is that we can at least imagine a being, at the very least, behaviorally identical to a normal human being, but without any consciousness on the inside at all, just acting and walking and talking in a perfectly human like way without any consciousness. The extreme version of this thought experiment says we can at least imagine a being physically identical to a normal human being, but without any subjective consciousness. Do I talk about my zombie twin, a hypothetical being in the universe next door who's physically identical to me? He's holding a conversation like this with a zombie analog of you right now saying all the same stuff and responding, but without any consciousness. Now, no one thinks anything like this exists in our universe, but the idea at least seems imaginable or conceivable. There doesn't seem to be any contradiction in the idea. And the very fact that you can kind of make sense of the idea immediately raises some questions like, why aren't we zombies? There's a contrast here. Zombies could have existed. Evolution could have produced zombies. Why didn't evolution produce zombies? It produced conscious beings. It looks like for anything behavioral you could point to, it starts to look as if a zombie could do all the same things without consciousness. So if there was some function we could point to and say, that's what you need consciousness for, and you could not, in principle, do that without consciousness, then we might have a function for consciousness. But right now, it seems I mean, actually, this corresponds to the science for anything that we actually do perception, learning, memory, language and so on. It sure looks like a whole lot of it can be performed even in the actual world unconsciously. So the whole problem of what consciousness is doing is just thrown into harsh relief by that thought experiment. Yeah, as you say, that most of what our minds are accomplishing is unconscious, or at least it seems to be unconscious from the point of view of the two of us who are having this conversation. So the fact that I can follow the rules of English grammar, insofar as I managed to do that, that is all being implemented in a way that is unconscious. And when I make an error, I, as the conscious witness of my inner life, am just surprised at the appearance of the error. And I could be surprised on all those occasions where I make no errors and I get to the end of a sentence in something like grammatically correct form. I could be sensitive to the fundamental mysteriousness of that, which is to say that I'm following rules that I have no conscious access to in the moment. And everything is like that. The fact that I perceive my visual field, the fact that I hear your voice, the fact that I effortlessly and actually helplessly decode meaning from your words because I am an English speaker and you're speaking in English, but if you were speaking in Chinese, it would just be noise. And this is all unconsciously mediated. And so, again, it is a mystery why there should be something that it's like to be associated with any part of this process, because so much of the process can take place in the dark. You heard David Chalmers mention the idea of a philosophical zombie and explain it a bit. But it's worth spending a little more time to fully explore this idea in order to set up our next guest, who actually finds the whole notion of the zombie to be an unhelpful distraction. So let's build a zombie. Imagine having a cabinet full of raw materials to build a human. Picture a mess of atoms or quarks or however small you'd like to imagine our building blocks. Picture all of that stuff in well labeled pullout drawers at our bizarre assembly station. At this stage, one would be hard pressed to say to stuff in any of the drawers. With conscious using Nagal's tests, it appears to be just like our initial questions of asking what it's like to be a boulder? Perhaps even worse, what is it like to be a single electron? But now let's start putting all the pieces together. And let's say we set out to build a precise copy of you. So we start putting all the atoms together, forming the correct bonds to make carbon and nucleic acids, proteins, lipids, blood plasma, and everything else. And we construct the entire physical system that is you forming all the organs and bones and, of course, the brain, until at last we complete our perfect copy. This copy of you would presumably speak just like you and announce itself to be you. If all memory and knowledge is ultimately embedded in a physical system, then we must have also copied all of that stuff over during our building process. This clone would have all of your memories, your personality, your desires, your fears and everything else. And of course, we would assume the thing is conscious. It would certainly be behaving as if it were. But remember that our intuition was telling us that just a few minutes ago, when all the parts were unassembled in the cabinet, there was no consciousness there. So what happened here? There seems to be only a few possibilities. One possibility is that the copy slowly gained consciousness as we assembled the system. Consciousness began to emerge when the parts were in a sufficiently complex arrangement and in a special configuration. And the consciousness began at a very low, dull level. Consciousness fully reached its current depth and richness when we completed the building of the whole body and likely needed much of the brain to be built to really ramp up its subjective experience. Imagine this as something like a consciousness dimmer switch being turned up as we built. Another possibility tells us that consciousness was completely absent while we were building the thing until we added one specific piece which completed some yet unknown special configuration of information integration. And then consciousness flicked on into existence something more like an on off switch or like the previous analogy of a radio. Perhaps there is something like a consciousness field which is only able to be tapped into and channeled if the receiver is built just right, just like a radio antenna picking up the already present radio signals in the air. They were always there but were invisible and mute until we completed our radio receiver. This idea is also intuitive to some people because consciousness feels like a binary state where you either have it or you don't. Or to recall our earlier analogy, it's either somewhere on the mirror or it's not. But there is another possibility about our clone that's also strangely intuitive or at least conceivable, and that is that consciousness never happens at all in this process. Recall that we were quite certain that the atoms and quarks and the drawers had no consciousness when we started, and we definitely never labeled any magical consciousness stuff into the copy at any point while we were building it. We don't even know if such a metaphysical thing exists, and if it does, we certainly don't have physical access to it. So perhaps the copy of you behaves just like you and announces its consciousness, but the lights are not actually on inside. It's not really having any inner subjective experience. This is the idea of the philosophical. Zombie. Now, if you're getting a bit frustrated by this picture and professing that a philosophical zombie could not possibly exist even if we could conceive of the thing, and consciousness must be emerging somehow within it, well, you're in good company. Very few serious thinkers in the field would defend the idea that a philosophical zombie is possible at all. But there is another question that the zombie helps us formulate, perhaps a good scientific one. If philosophical zombies can't be built, where did the consciousness stuff come from in the copy of you? Was it actually somehow there in the matter in the drawers before we started to build a zombie? Does that imply that everything has a tiny bit of consciousness or a mental property associated with it? Does the right physical configuration somehow unlock it and allow it to flow, and that gives rise to a unified feeling of consciousness? This notion points to a theory called panpsychism that we'll get to a bit later. Or is consciousness simply a kind of law of nature? Consciousness just emerges given the right flow of information within a system. As strange as it sounds, there is simply a principle of physics which states that a certain kind of information processing just results in the system having an inner experience of being. We make it better at describing the kinds of systems that inevitably result in consciousness, in the same way that we can describe systems that unfailingly result in all kinds of emergent phenomena, like the kinds of descriptions of the behaviors of atmospheric conditions which inevitably result in hurricanes. But really, that's the whole story and the best explanation we will ever and could ever get about consciousness. But that last bit of strangeness is deeply unsatisfying to some people, and Sam is amongst those thinkers who contend that this kind of explanation will always be unsatisfactory and be of a fundamentally different nature than other scientific explanations of emergent properties. There is just something about the intuition which the zombie story inflates that protests against these types of correlative and reductionist explanations. The gap between even increasingly detailed descriptions of complex physical processes and something like a rich inner subjective experience of seeing the color red or feeling love or the taste of vanilla, or the awareness of hope is just too wide, and of a nature that it could never be closed. In episode 96, Sam tangled with a thinker who disagrees with this declaration of an unbridgeable gap and is not shy about it. This is Thomas Metzinger, professor and director of the theoretical philosophy group on neuroethics and neurophilosophy at Johannes Gutenberg University. Here, Metzinger expresses his frustrations with the idea of a zombie and laments how it can sidetrack what he considers a serious and confident effort to arrive at a true science of consciousness. You're not a fan anymore, if you ever were. Of the framing by David Charmers of the hard problem of consciousness. No, that's so boring. I mean, that's last century we all respect. We know he's very smart and has got a very false line. There's no debate about that, but conceivability arguments are just if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay? Some housekeeping. Today I have a new podcast to announce a single episode which we will be dropping, I believe, Friday of this week, if all goes according to plan. So look for it in your feed on the 23 April. The title of this episode is Engineering the Apocalypse, and it was produced by my friend Rob Reed, who is a podcaster and author, also a tech entrepreneur. I met Rob at the Ted conference some years ago and then he started his own podcast, the Afternoon Podcast, and he interviewed me. I think for the first episode there. I thought it was probably the best interview anyone had ever done of me. So we aired that here on Making Sense. I believe we titled it the after on Interview. Anyway, in the intervening years, Rob has gotten very interested in existential risk, and in particular the risk posed by advances in synthetic biology, which could very well lead to an engineered pandemic. But everything he says in this podcast is relevant to a naturally occurring pandemic like the one we are currently suffering. Anyway, this is a deeply researched and by turns harrowing and hopeful look at advances in synthetic biology, and it's broken into four chapters which are separated by interstitial conversations that I have with Rob. Anyway, I thought the job he did was fantastic. Pandemic preparedness has to be a huge priority for us going forward, and this is our best effort to argue that it really must be. COVID has been a dress rehearsal for something far worse, and as such, it has been pretty much an unmitigated disaster. We may have lost sight of this given how successful our vaccine production has been and how the rollout has ramped up, but our response to COVID in particular, our failure to organize a globally coherent response, was just a terrifying failure. Terrifying given how much worse a pandemic can be and how much worse it's likely to be if it's ever consciously engineered. So anyway, this upcoming podcast will be dropped as a single episode that's nearly 4 hours in length. And again, the title is engineering the apocalypse. And needless to say, we'll be releasing that as yet another PSA, which is to say, the whole thing will be freely available. But of course, if you find this work valuable, the way to support it is to subscribe@samharris.org. And to coincide with the release of this podcast, the Waking Up Foundation will be giving two significant grants to relevant organizations that are working on the front lines of pandemic preparedness. As many of you know, from my conversations with the philosopher Will McCaskill, I've been thinking more about how to effectively do some good in the world, in addition to just talking about what is good to do. So we formed the Waking Up Foundation for that purpose, and at least 10% of the corporate profits of Waking Up go there, as does a minimum of 10% of my own income. And the foundation works as a pass through to other organizations. So 100% of the funds leave it and go elsewhere. And so these next donations are focused on this problem of pandemic preparedness. And in this vein, we're supporting the center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University, which focuses on improving our methods of understanding the data around infectious disease, and it engages policymakers to improve their decision making, which often leaves a lot to be desired. And the second organization is the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, the CEPI, whose mission is to accelerate the development of vaccine technology. They're funding new platforms so that we can develop vaccines even more quickly than we did for COVID and really do it just in time in response to a novel pathogen, which is precisely what we're likely to face in the case of a synthetically engineered pandemic. Now, neither of these organizations are set up to take small individual donations, but if you're a philanthropist and you want to come along with us in helping to improve our pandemic preparedness, I would certainly encourage you to support these organizations. Once again, that's the center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard University and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. I should say that the Waking Up Foundation is getting great advice on this front from Natalie Cargill of Longview Philanthropy. This is an organization that advises individuals and foundations who want to deploy significant funds to solve long term problems. And I was introduced to Natalie through Will McCaskill, and I've been extremely impressed with the research that they've done at Longview and the clarity of their advice, all of which is given free of charge. Longview is independently funded, so if you're running a foundation or you're a wealthy person who wants free advice about how to give most effectively, I highly recommend that you get in touch with the people@longview.org. Again, this is not a recommendation for small donors. I believe you need to be giving away at least a million dollars a year before Longview can help guide you. But for those of you who are in the philanthropy space, I recommend you get in touch. But if you are an individual donor and you want to ride along with me, we will be detailing all the orgs we support at the Waking Up Foundation once that website is launched. And on that point, I want to say that the Making Sense audience has been fantastically generous in the past. On the occasions where I've discussed specific nonprofits on this podcast, the people who run them always come back astonished at the result. To give you just a couple of snapshots here, Givewell.org reached out recently to say that just by my mentioning their organization a few times on the spotcast, this is the group that does exhaustive research on the effectiveness of charities and recommends what they consider to be the most effective ones in several categories. Mind discussing their work a few times? Once with Will McCaskill resulted in you guys donating $1.8 million through them directly and pledging another 1.8 million in recurring donations. So that's 3.6 million through the end of this year. And Will McCaskill's organization, Giving What We Can, which was started by Toby Ord, who's also been on the podcast, has told me that in response to my discussing their pledge, this is the pledge to give a minimum of. 10% of one's lifetime earnings to the most effective charities, which you can do at any level, whether you're making $30,000 a year or 30 billion. I'm told that my discussing this pledge with Will caused hundreds of you to take this pledge yourselves and after Waking Up became the first company to take the pledge. Ten more companies soon followed. Now, I don't know how much money to the most effective charities this represents, but it's surely many, many millions of dollars. I believe, Giving What we can just pass the $2 billion mark in lifetime earnings that have been pledged. Anyway, my point in mentioning this isn't to brag about the influence of this podcast, but rather to convey my gratitude and astonishment. Frankly, it's just amazing to see the knock on effects of discussing these things. Anyway, I will keep you all informed about this, but this is just to let you know that over at Waking Up and hear it Making Sense, we have transitioned into doing more than just talk about specific problems. We're marshaling our own resources to try to do some good directly ourselves. Okay, today I'm speaking with Lisa Feldman Barrett, who is one of the most cited scientists in the world for her research in psychology and neuroscience. She's a professor at Northeastern University with appointments at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Lisa was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Neuroscience in 2019, and she's a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada. And she's the author, most recently, of a very enjoyable book, seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain. And we cover a few of those lessons in today's podcast. We talk about how the human brain evolved the myth of the triune brain, which has been all too influential. We discuss how the brain is organized into networks, the predictive nature of perception and action, the construction of emotion, concepts as prescriptions for action, culture as an operating system, and many other topics. And now, without further delay, I bring you Lisa Feldman. Barrett I am here with Lisa Feldman Barrett. Lisa, thanks for joining me. It's my pleasure. So you've written this wonderful little primer on the brain, seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, which I think will be the focus of our discussion, although we'll we'll probably wander to other topics. But I just want our listeners to know that this is a marvelously accessible book and a short one. It's only 130 pages or so, and we need more of this kind of thing. There's this kind of awful property of the brain and neuroscience generally, which is when you get into the details, it becomes just a catalog of anatomical names that are certainly not written by writers, especially ones who wanted to write books for a general audience. And it becomes this blizzard of mnemonic challenges for a reader. And you've managed to avoid all of that and still deliver a very interesting discussion about the brain and the mind. So congratulations. Thank you so much. So before we jump in, perhaps you can summarize your background intellectually. What kinds of questions have you focused on as a scientist? Well, I started my training as a clinical psychologist and then very quickly went through a series of retrainings in physiology and then in neuroscience, and more recently in engineering, learning something about systems theory and in evolutionary and developmental aspects of neuroscience. So the questions I really think about now relate to how is your brain in constant conversation with your body and the other brains and bodies that surround you? How is it conjuring the features of your mind? How does it control your the internal systems of your body at the same time as it's controlling your behavior and giving you memories and thoughts and feelings and so on? And that may sound like too big of a question to answer, but I would say I'm really interested in understanding a systems level kind of approach to brain function, and that encompasses a lot of things. So I have a largest lab, and we have a lot of different research projects going on. So it's really hard when someone asks me, so what is your newest research project? And I'm like, well, we have, like, probably 40 of them going on, so it's hard to summarize in one sentence. And you're currently a professor as well, right? So do you spend some time teaching, or is it all research at the moment? I know we're talking in COVID land or at the tail end, one hopes, of the COVID pandemic, so nothing seems normal. But what is your general life like? As a professor. Yeah. So I run a lab which has 25 full time people in it. And then usually we have not during COVID but usually at other times, we have about 150 undergraduate researchers in the laboratory in any given year. And the lab is spread out across two different places. So I have personnel at two different places, graduate students, postdocs and so on, post doctoral fellows. I teach one course a year for undergraduates. It's a lab course. And then occasionally I will also formally teach graduate seminars. But I also run a weekly or now biweekly seminar that I've been running for about eight or nine years that I don't get any credit for. We just do it out of the love of doing it with engineers and computer scientists and other neuroscientists and psychologists. And so I and another and my colleague in engineering, we run this seminar for all of our peeps. So it's about 25 people who attend this seminar. And it's been going on, like I said, for quite a number of years. And then I also run other reading groups that people attend on particular topics, depending on what we're interested in. So, for example, on predictive processing or on energetics, which is a word that we use to refer to brain metabolism and the way that the brain is regulating the metabolic functions of the body. So one of the things you do throughout this book, especially at the outset, is debunk a few myths and bad metaphors we've relied on to understand the brain or seem to understand the brain. And this seems like a very useful thing to do. Perhaps we should just start where you start with the larger context of evolution and what we think we understand about the evolution of the human brain. And perhaps this is a good place to part company with Paul McLean. So how do you think about the brain in evolutionary terms? I love this question. I think this is one of the most fun questions, really. It occurred to me at some at one point, like, why do we even have a brain? It's it's a really expensive organ, right? That three pound blob of meat between your ears costs you about 20% of your entire metabolic budget. So it's pretty expensive. I'll just point out, depending on what you do with it, it can cost you much more than that. It certainly can. Especially on social media. Certainly can. That's absolutely right. And so I'm very fortunate in that I've been meeting really weekly with Barbara Finley, who is an evolutionary and developmental neuroscientist. And she's basically, to use her words, she's, like, downloading all of her knowledge into my brain, which really means that she repeats herself frequently and has to explain things, often more than one time. And this is pretty not to make a bad pun, but, like, pretty heavy stuff. It's pretty complicated. I had to learn embryology, and I barely understand what I'm reading, but I understand a little bit now at least. But the really cool thing, I think, is that if you go back 550,000,000 years ago to a time in the Earth's history called the EU carrion, animals didn't have brains. And so I was just really interested to try to understand, well, why did brains evolve? And Sam, you know, you can never really answer the why question very easily in evolution, but you certainly can answer what questions. So, like, what is the brain's most important job? What is a brain really good for? And you can look at the evolutionary, evolutionary story that molecular, geneticists and anatomists and so on ecologists have have crafted, and it's a really cool and interesting drama. And it what it suggests is that your brain's most important job isn't thinking or seeing or even feeling. So these are characteristics, these are features that the brain performs or computes, but they're not actually the brain's most important job. Its most important job is regulating the systems of your body, your heart, your lungs, your immune system, your endocrine system and so on. And of course, we don't experience every delight or every drama in our lives this way. We don't experience every hug that we get or used to get before COVID or every insult that we bear. We don't experience things this way. But this is actually what is going on under the hood. And when your brain thinks and decides and sees and hears and feels, it's doing this in the service of the regulation of your body. And that turns out to be a really important insight. I would add one piece here. I don't recall if you put it this way in your book, but it does strike me that just by the logic of evolution, the motor behavior is in some ways primary here. Because if you can't move, if you can't do anything with a brain, if there's no way that it can influence the differential success of an organism in the contest for mates or survival, then there would have been no evolutionary pressure in this direction. So it seems to presuppose an ability to do something with respect to the environment. I don't think there's a bright line between that story and the story of regulating the internal states of the body. I think we'll get to that. But don't you see an ability to actually act in some way as being the necessary context for this evolutionary pressure? Absolutely. In fact, really, I guess I'm very persuaded by work in motor neuroscience and certainly in philosophy, the idea that motor action is primary and all sensory processing is in the service of motor action. I think that's absolutely right. The one thing I would say, though, is that in all vertebrates, certainly and I would maybe hazard to say all animals who have limbs that move or parts that move, there's usually an internal set of systems that support that movement. Now, invertebrates like us, that's a cardiovascular system and a respiratory system and so on. Not all animals have the kind of visceral that we have, that vertebrates have. So invertebrates have their own systems, but there is no external movement of bodies without internal systems to support that. And in motor neuroscience, as much as I respect that work, and I really do, I think they're really ahead of the curve in certain ways. They tend to ignore the internal systems of animals bodies. And I really think that that's an important part of the story that is missing. So when I say that the brain is regulating the body, I really mean everything motor about the body. That would include what we call visceral motor, which means the beating of your heart and the contraction of your lungs and so on. But it also means the movement of your skeletal motor system, your muscles, the voluntary movements of your muscles. And in fact, if you look at, for example, primary motor cortex in a monkey brain, in a CAC brain, it has visceral motor maps in it. And some of the regions that are considered to be sort of association regions for the motor system are actually the primary cortical controllers of visceral motor regulation, meaning regulation of the viscera of your lungs and your heart and so on. So in your brain, the internal systems of your body, the neurons that are controlling the internal systems of your body and the neurons that are controlling your skeletal motor system, your voluntary muscle movements are really intertwined. That's not well documented in motor neuroscience work, but it's present in the anatomy. You can just see it. It's there. Yeah, but we'll talk about emotion, but I tend to think about emotion now as a kind of COVID behavior. So that the line between emotion and action that is commonsensical, I think, can break down if you follow that framing. But let's not leap to emotion just yet. The evolutionary story we have told ourselves for a long time has been summarized by this concept given to us by Paul McLean of the triune brain. And so people refer to their lizard brain or they think of a stepwise evolution from reptiles to mammals generally and then to primates as having kind of climbed up from the brain stem to the cortex. What's wrong with this picture? Well, what's wrong with that picture is that it doesn't really match the best available scientific evidence for how brains evolved. If you look at a lizard brain and say, a mammal brain, like, say, a rat, or like a rodent brain, and you look at a monkey brain and a human brain, they look different to the naked eye. It looks like the rat, or I should say it looks like the lizard doesn't really have much of a cerebral cortex. It looks like the rat has maybe a little bit of kind of old cortex and that the monkey and the human have quite a bit and the human having substantially more than the monkey. That's how it looks to the naked eye. And this led Paul McClain and others, guided by, I think, certain cultural beliefs, to describe brain evolution in much the way that you just described it, although your description, Sam, is slightly more lyrical than maybe what McClain wrote. But the idea that a lizard brain mostly has parts for instincts like freezing and fighting and fleeing and copulating, which, you know, neuroscientists make a funny joke, you know, like they refer to it as the four F. So that's neuroscience humor for you. And then layered on top of that evolved what's called a limbic system, limbic meaning border bordering these lizard parts for emotion. Then what evolves on top of that is the cerebral cortex, or the neocortex, the new part of the cortex which you only see in what are referred to as higher mammals, like us. And the idea is that your lizard brain contains your instincts. Your limbic system contains your emotions. And then these are these make up your inner beast. And they are constantly in battle with the more rational side of yourself, which resides in your cerebral cortex. So your brain is a battleground between your inner beast and your rational self for control of your behavior. And the idea is that when your cortex wins and you behave rationally, you're a moral person and you're healthy. And if your inner beast wins to control your behavior, then you're either immoral because you didn't try hard enough or you're sick because it didn't work. There's something wrong with your rational cortex. And the problem with this, even though it makes a lot of sense in terms of the stories that we tell ourselves about what it means to be moral and responsible for behavior, and it's very consistent with Western views. Of the self. The problem is that it doesn't actually match the evidence that when you peer into neurons and you look at their molecular structure, in particular the genes that guide the formation and function of those neurons, you see a really, really different story. And the story is that really all mammals whose brains have ever been studied, actually their brains follow the same developmental plans. Actually, there are no new neurons, really no new neurotypes. And remarkably, the stages of development and I'm talking about embryological development forward the stages of development in all of these mammal brains that have been studied, different species proceeds in exactly the same order. Pretty much what changes is the duration of each stage. And there's this really interesting observation that George Streeter, the neurobiologist, made about brains in his book on brain evolution, by the way, excellent book. If anyone wants a primer on, you know, brain evolution, it's it's a really fantastic book. You know, he says, you know, brains reorganize as they grow larger. And so it can look like there are new structures there just because there are more of certain neuron types. But actually, there's nothing new in terms of the neurons. They look like they're reorganized, and they look like there are miraculously new parts there, but there are really no new parts. It's just that certain types of neurons have certain stages in development, have gone on for longer. And so there are certain types of neurons. There's just more of them. And if you go back even further and you look at other animals, other vertebrates, you see that many of them have also really striking similarities to mammalian brains. So, for example, birds don't have a cerebral cortex, but they certainly have neurons that are the same as the neurons that make up our cerebral cortex and that seem to perform some very similar functions to what our cerebral cortex, the various functions our cortex performs. So basically, there is no lizard brain. You don't have an ancient beast lurking inside your brain, and the only animal who has a lizard brain is a lizard. Are there any exceptions to this? I had thought that Von economies were an exception, that they were present in great apes and, I think, cetaceans and elephants and a few other charismatic vertebrates, but were not found in reptiles or birds. So von economo neurons are very contentious. There are some anatomists who will tell you that vonnemone neurons are not a special class of neurons. They're just really big, honking pyramidal cells. So you find them in large brained animals because as brains get bigger, sometimes the neurons also get bigger. And one thing that's happened, for example, in large brained animals what often happens is that there are certain parts of the cortex, in particular that as they grow, what happened evolutionarily, but also in development. What happens is not that they develop more neurons but they develop fewer neurons that get much bigger and they have much more connectivity. And the reason for that is I don't know the reason for it. But the functional consequence of that is something I explained in SA Seven, which is that it means that the animal's brain can summarize information much more efficiently and maybe even do some abstraction. Meaning can find similarities in things that look and feel and smell and taste different. Find functional similarities. So this is abstraction. This is what we call abstraction, right? And that really may be what these very large parameteral neurons are for. But there are some anatomists and some neuroscientists who look at vonicomone neurons and say, well, these are just ordinary, big, you know, neurons. They're not there's nothing really special about them. And you find them in animals who have large brains relative to their body size. Right? So what is the appropriate picture of the structure of what we have in there? If it's not this cartoon of descent from reptiles? What picture of complexity and now leading the witness network complexity, should we should we have in our heads? Yeah, I think I'm going to ask your question, but I just want to take one step back for a minute and say that we live in a world where we see objects and we see boundaries between objects. Like here's a book, here's a purse, here's a computer, here's a glass, whatever. And so we have a tendency to think about things in terms of objects instead of in terms of relationships between features. And so for a really long time, people have thought about the brain as having these distinct parts. There's this group of neurons called the amygdala which performs emotion. And there's this other group called the basal ganglia which performs movement. And then there's this other part called the cerebral cortex. And the prefrontal part of that really performs decision making or rationality or what have you. And that's just there are people who still hold to that view and certainly people have built their whole careers on such notions and been very successful. But I think there's also a growing understanding that that's really not how the brain works, it's not how the brain is structured. There are no objects. There are no kind of mental organs in your brain that's just not really the best way to understand the anatomy or the function. And that instead we should be understanding neurons in terms of their relationships to one another and the features that they compute. And so this can take many forms in published papers on neuroscience, but one that's very popular at the moment is to think about the brain. Think about neurons as in a large dynamically fluctuating network. And so if you think about instead of thinking about neural signals as being passed from one region to the other, like a baton in a race, you can think about neural activity and the patterns that are created, more like weather patterns or something where many, many neurons are participating in computing an event that has a set of features. And some of those features are very close to the data that you get from your sensory surfaces like your retina and your cochlea and all the sensors inside your body. So like a line, for example, or color, like the color red. Your experience of the color red is a feature that your brain computes. It doesn't detect, as you know. And it's computing it using information from not one color detector as so called cones. You have cones in these cells in your retina that register three different ranges of wavelengths of light and you need all three to see red or green or any color. And so your brain computes these features and it also computes features like seeing a face. It computes features like threat. It computes features like novelty. It computes features all kinds of features. And in a given event, your brain is sort of computing sequences of events. And in computing an event, what it's doing is computing features in the service of regulating the body. Regulating action and all the visceral changes that will support that action. And so the way to think about it is your brain is a single structure with, you know, 128,000,000,000 neurons, give or take, and it can take on trillions of patterns. And these patterns are helped along by the chemical bath that surrounds these neurons. So your neurons are bathed in a chemical system. Your brain is basically dynamically along a trajectory from one pattern to another pattern to another pattern to another pattern and trying to understand what launches those patterns, what maintains those patterns, what features your brain is computing. That's really the goal of understanding brain function. Yeah. I would also just point out that the methods we use to understand brain function, like increasingly functional neural imaging can also give a false picture of the modularity of the brain and therefore the mind. Because just by the nature of the tool that we look at the data in terms of these pretty pictures of certain regions of the brain so called lighting up in response to stimuli or tasks. And it can give a sense not to actual neuroscientists generally, but perhaps in a more subtle way it can even corrupt their thinking. But it certainly can give a sense to the general public that this is a question of other areas of the brain actually not doing anything when they're not part of the illuminated map of what is most active during a certain function. So it can just give this false picture of separate organs in the brain that are, albeit connected, are really independently responsible for an emotion like disgust, say, or a certain kind of perceptual task. And you just can't visualize the network behavior and the fluctuating network behavior and the weighting between nodes in the network as easily as you can just aggregate the data by subtracting, you know, two states of the brain and showing one to one where these regions were more active than in the other. Yes and no. I think I mostly agree with you, but I would probably just push back maybe a little bit on a couple of points. One, I would say it's not the fault of brain imaging techniques. It's really the fault of the analysis techniques that we use and the sample sizes we have. So I would say that with fMRI, fMRI has its problems, for sure. It has limitations in terms of its temporal resolution and also even some spatial resolution issues. But really it has much more to do with the kinds of designs that scientists use and the kinds of analytic techniques that they use. And I'll give you a really good example there's what I think of as a really brilliant paper that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy in 2012. The first author is Gonzalez Castillo, and it's this really nice paper where they compare the sort of standard experimental design, really for a very simple task, which is, I believe it was a visual perception task, maybe visual orientation. I think it was a very straightforward task, so visual attention task. And when you run some subjects and you have maybe 40, 50 to 100 trials where a trial is, you know, you show something unexpected to the subject and then they, you know, they have to make a judgment of whether, you know, lines are pointing in the left direction or the right direction or what have you. What you see in the way the analysis is done, the way that analytic choices are made to separate signal from noise and so on. You see a couple of islands of increase in activity that are depicted on a brain image as like spots that light up, like the light bright sort of brain. And it's important to really understand here that these images that we see in magazines and in journal articles and so on are curated by scientists. They don't just pop out of the data on their own, they're made contingent. These images are contingent on a bunch of analytic decisions that are made. Now, if you expect that there are islands of activity because different parts of your brain are responsible for different specific psychological functions and that's what you expect. And you've designed your study that way and you've only tested your subjects on 50 to 100 trials and you threshold that is you make decisions about signal versus noise in particular ways, what you get are a couple of islands of activity. However, what this paper showed is that if you run 400 trials for each subject so you bring them back for multiple scanning sessions and you analyze the data in a slightly different way. By instead of assuming that every part of the brain that the shape of the response is the same and instead of assuming that you model the variability in how the different parts are responding, what you see is that 85% of the brain shows an increase in activity. That means 85% of the brain is showing a change to make a very simple decision that is considered. Yeah. So the point is that if your studies are designed in a way that is underpowered you're not going to realize that you're making what we would call a type two error which is that you're missing a lot of important activity that's there because you're expecting to see blobs and what you get are blobs. And so if what you expect is islands of activity, you'll perform your studies with something I used to call blob ology, which is that you'll identify these blobs of activity. I think people have to realize that these images are really curated by humans who have a set of assumptions. I'll just give you one other really quick example and that is you know, when people started looking at networks in the brain. So this is regions that are have correlated where the brain response is correlated. So you know, you take a brain and you divide it up into lots of little cubes called voxels. And so you look for sets of voxels that have a similar change in blood flow during an experiment, and you call that a network. And it turns out this actually does reveal something about the underlying structure of the brain. But when you look at the way that scientists mostly study these networks, they look like Lego blocks, like they're completely unrelated to each other and pieces of a puzzle, and you put them all together, and you get a brain. But those are computational decisions that are made based on analytic choices that are guided by certain assumptions. If you do the analysis slightly differently, which is what we did. So we took almost 1000 subjects, and instead of asking using kind of standard way of looking for signal and noise, we said, okay, anything which replicates from one subject to another is signal by definition. And anything which doesn't is noise. And so let's just try to parse the networks in the brain by doing this. And what we found was we found the sort of networks that people often talk about, but they overlap. They're not disconnected. They're actually overlap. And they overlap in particular regions of the brain, which are known to be they're called hubs, or rich club hubs, meaning densely connected regions that are responsible for really coordinating activity across the whole brain. These rich club hubs are called the backbone of neural communication in the brain. There's a really nice paper by Olaf Sporens and vandenhubal sponsors Vanden Hueble and Sporons in 2013 in the Journal of Neuroscience. And so my point is that these images that you see, they're beautiful and awe inspiring, but they're curated by humans who have a set of assumptions. Yeah. And it's also easy to see the temptation to think in those terms because we have something like 170 years of neurology attesting to the fact that highly focal lesions, brain damage can lead to very specific deficits. Again, this can be understood in network terms, but it is, in fact, descriptively true that you can have a small region of the brain damaged and that can dissect out a very specific mental capacity, language use, or an ability to recognize faces or even to recognize specific classes of objects, like tools versus animals. And that does give you this sort of jigsaw puzzle like Lego, like intuition about the modularity of the mind. Yeah, you're right. But even there, it's more complicated than it first appears. Right. Because when you damage when you damage tissue, you don't really know whether what you've damaged. The critical part to the function that you've lost are the neurons that are damaged or what are called fibers of passage, which means, you know, axons that run through that area, which are really important. And I just learned about this really this phenomenon that I I just this is the kind of stuff I just love, honestly, where, you know, you can lose if you damage one part of your primary visual cortex. So this is an animals. They'll ablate a part of the primary visual cortex, and the animal will lose the ability to see. And so obviously you think, oh, well, okay, this this region must be super important to seeing. And it is important, except that you can recover some of that function by a second lesion in the superior caliculus in the mid brain. So there's information that could make it from your retina to your primary visual cortex, but it's being suppressed by the caliculus in a regular neurotypical brain. You can recover function by a second lesion. And so it's just things like that, right, that make you or here's another example, another, you know, example, which I find just absolutely fascinating. I find it slightly horrifying as a person, but because of what happens to the animals, but as a scientist, it's really fascinating. So they took these rats and trained them to run on a wheel and recorded directly from neurons in the visual cortex, primary visual cortex. And then they ablate the damage. The retinas destroy the retinas of these animals so they can't see and V one neurons, primary visual cortex neurons quiet and down, and then over 24 hours, they ramp up again and start firing at normal rates. So what's causing these neurons to fire? You put the rat back on the wheel and it's neurons. The pattern of firing looks really similar to what it looked like when the animal was sighted. So what is it exactly that's driving the activity in these neurons? And the answer probably is regions of the anterior cingulate cortex which have direct connections to V one. And the reason why this is interesting is that this region of the brain is a primary regulator of the systems of your body both. It is a primary motor area for the viscera of your body and it's an association region for your skeletal motor system. And what this activity is essentially, what you can think about it is our set of visual predictions that are coming from past experience that these motor regions are able to reinstate. And so it's just trickier, Sam. If you start to just poke at it a little bit, modularity starts to fall apart. Yeah, well, I think we found the seminar you can teach at Esselin one day a blading brain stem nuclei so as to recover a proper vision of the world. Yeah, I really want to recommend that people try that at home. It's not advice. So let's talk about prediction and just this uncanny circumstance we're all in which very few people realize and those of us who realize it, I think, rarely think about, which is we have this venerable philosophical thought experiment of the brain and the VAT. And this is a kind of device to think about many things in the philosophy of mind, but rarely is it pointed out that we we really are brains and vats already. The VAT is our skull, and we do not have direct contact with the physical environment, much less reality itself, in any straightforward way. It's not like our senses are windows through which we're peering or hearing or sensing directly. There's a very active and even anticipatory, to use your term, predictive activity that is producing a visionary experience, a dream like experience of the world. It's exactly like a dream, except for the ways in which, in the waking state, our envisioning of the world is constrained by sensory input to a different degree. So how do you think about the situation we're in? Just epistemologically existentially? We are and this is a phrase you use at some point in the book we we are experiencing a kind of controlled hallucination. It's not to say that nothing is vertical or nothing is that no statement about the world as it is is better than any other or more conversion with facts that we could intersubjectively find credible, but it's much more like The Matrix than we give it credit for most of the time. And so perhaps that can get you going in the direction of how you think about the mind and the brain as a predictive computational system and not one that's merely passively encountering the world as it is. Well, I think you just did a beautiful job describing it in very poetic terms. Actually calling it a dream, like calling the brains, you know, or describing the brain's function as conjuring a dreamlike state is actually something that I just came across in this really wonderful book by Carlo Rivelli. It's his new book called Helgoland. I don't think it's available yet in the US. I had to order it from the UK. And I and, you know, he's really what he's doing he's explaining his understanding of quantum mechanics for a civilian like me. You know, I'm not I don't I'm not a physicist, and but, you know, and with with very, very little math and then, as often seems to happen, everyone wants to take a shot at explaining what the brain does and what consciousness is. It doesn't matter if you trained it's a physicist or what have you. Everyone takes their shot. And in his shot, he's describing trying to describe prediction based on I'm imagining what he read from the literature in visual neuroscience where a lot of this work has taken place. I think, though, there's a lot more work which is very consistent with your description. There's a really nice paper that was written, actually, which was my review. I reviewed this paper, actually, for Behavioral and brain sciences, which is a really great journal. And this is what alerted me to this growing literature. This was back, like, in 2010, I think, maybe, of 2011, this growing literature on what's called predictive coding or predictive processing. It's a paper by Andy Clark, philosopher philosopher but also just writes beautifully about very intuitively and beautifully about the brain as a predictive organ. For me, I don't know about you, but I am inherently skeptical person. I don't even believe my own data necessarily. It takes me a really long time before I don't jump on bandwagons, typically. And I also really don't I mean, scientists, I think, in general, wouldn't you agree? We don't really like to use the F word, fact. That's a really scary word, so we try to avoid it. But if you look in the literature, if you look at anatomy and you look at any number of literatures in neuroscience and you look at signal processing literatures in engineering and so on, what you see is that exactly the same discovery is being made over and over and over again by literatures that don't talk to each other. And I found this really compelling, and that is this idea that your brain is trapped in a dark, silent box called your skull, and it is constantly receiving sense data from the world through its sensory surfaces, your retina, your cochlear, whatever, and also inside your body. So the world, to your brain, is everything outside of the skull, and it's receiving this sense data that it has to make sense of. And this is an inverse problem, because these sense data are the effects that they're the outcomes of some set of changes. But your brain doesn't have access to those changes. It only has access to the outcomes, the consequences of those changes. If your brain is exposed to a loud bang, how does your brain know what that loud bang is? How does your brain know what to do about it? You know, if your brain you would do something different if it was a slamming door or a dropped box or a gunshot. And similarly, you know, when you feel a tug in your chest, how does your brain know? How does your brain know when it detects a tug, when it's sensing a tug, whether that's anxiety or that there's some uncertainty or that you just ate a big meal and you're having a little trouble digesting it or the beginnings of a heart attack, it has to guess. And what does it use to guess? It uses the only other source of information that it has, which is past experience that it can reimplement reinstate in its own wiring. So colloquially, we would call that memory. So when a brain remembers when your brain remembers when my brain remembers. Brains don't store memories and then call them up like files in a file drawer. Basically, remembering is reassembling, reassembling the past in the present for the purposes of making sense of sense data, and for a number of reasons, some of which are metabolic, your brain is sort of doing this predictively, so it's not waiting to receive the input and then trying to make sense of it. And there are lots of ways to demonstrate this to people. Sometimes when I'm giving talks, I'll use a baseball example and I'll kind of walk people through the timing of the baseball example. Baseball couldn't exist as a sport. No actual ball related sport could exist if we had reactive brains. There just isn't physically enough time for a batter to wait to see a ball before he swings and actually hit the ball. And there are lots of really cool, interesting examples from everyday life. But the point is that, metabolically speaking, it's much cheaper for the brain to use past experience to guess what's going to happen next. Where the guest is not some abstraction. It's actually your brain changing the firing of its own neurons to prepare you to see and hear and smell and feel and do something in the next moment. And then it checks those predictions against the incoming sense data from the body and from the world. Scientists call this running a model of the world. But really what your brain is doing is it's running a model of your body and it's the model of your body in the world but it only knows the world by virtue of the sense data that it gets from the sensory surfaces of your body. So, essentially, every feature that your brain computes, it's computing in relation to your body in a particular moment in time, in a particular context or location relative to or related to the particular shape of your ear and the particular distance of your two eyes from one another and the particular state of your mitochondria and so on and so forth. It's all relative. That doesn't mean some kind of postmodernist morass. But what it does mean is that we really have to realize that everything that we experience we experience from a particular perspective. And there is nothing really called objectivity. The best we can hope for, according to the historian of science Naomi Oraskis, is that a bunch of people with their own subjectivity with different histories and different backgrounds and different experiences in the world that they can come to consensus over a scientific set of observations. And that's about as close to objective fact as we can get. And it's pretty darn good. It's worked out pretty well for us. But the idea that there are universal facts that can be objectively adjudicated by being rational or something it's a fiction that interestingly that brains tell themselves even though brains are completely incapable of doing such things. Well, to say that there's no true objectivity is not the same thing as saying that it's not possible to be wrong. Right? For sure. And it's also not saying that anything is possible. Right? So, I mean, sometimes when I say, well, there's more than one, there's more than one, where I talk about variability is the norm, right? In many places in biology and in psychology there's much more variation than we often acknowledge or would like. But that doesn't mean that anything is possible. It means that there's just more than one possibility. And similarly, I would say, look, you know, we can all agree, right, that we're going to have ground glass for dinner. But that doesn't necessarily translate into the objective reality that we can actually eat glass, right? It doesn't really matter what we believe. We could all agree that COVID is not infectious and that we don't have to wear masks, but the virus doesn't care about that. Viruses don't care about anything. But really all a virus needs is a nice wet set of lungs. It doesn't matter what that person's brain believes. But I think there are many, many cases where what we believe really matters to what we experience. But even if you want to take belief out of the equation, what you experience, what your reality is, how you experience the world is very much relational. It's in relation to the body that you have. And you don't experience yourself that way. I can't tell you what you experience. I don't experience myself that way. And if I wasn't a scientist and somebody just told me that, I'm not sure that I would believe it, actually. But that is the best available evidence that your brain is constantly cultivating your past for the purposes of predicting your future which will become your present. Yeah, let's see if we can make this concrete for people because this is really ground upon which the scientific framing of what's going on can unlock a kind of psychological freedom to just change one's sense of what one is as a subject in the world. And I think it can relieve certain kinds of suffering. In the simplest case, just to take this predictive piece which can sound spooky, you take something like a voluntary motor action so I can decide to reach and pick up a cup on my desk. And this does relate to this controversy that I keep resurrecting for myself over the reality, or lack thereof, of free will. I don't know if you know how far down that rabbit hole I've gone, but oh, yes, I've enjoyed, I guess, following you down that rabbit hole so we can talk about that if it interests you. But people have a sense that they are subjects that have this capacity to freely initiate behavior and that's different. I would certainly agree that voluntary behavior is different from involuntary behavior, but I just don't think we need the concept of free will to differentiate the two. So one way they're different is when I'm doing something of my own volition reaching and picking up a cup that feels a certain way. And it feels a certain way because there are certain implicit processes that we we know must be going on neurophysiologically there that do follow this kind of predictive mapping of things. So when I'm reaching and I'm not consciously aware of it but I can be made consciously aware of it certainly when anything goes wrong. So I'm not aware that I'm a prediction machine when I'm reaching to grasp this cup, but if I reached and my fingers passed through it, right, if it was a hologram of a cup and not a real one, or if it felt squishy if it was made of rubber and I wasn't expecting that. All of those occasions of surprise are built on some set of expectations that I wasn't aware of having until I became disillusioned. So I was not aware of expecting solidity, though of course I was. I mean, everything about the grasping behavior of my hand was anticipatory in a certain way and you can make that predictive program consciously felt, certainly in the moments in which it's violated, but it's just simply neurologically the case that we are comparing in order. The only way to detect anomalies in the environment is to have this background modeling going on of what's likely to happen in each moment based on what I'm doing now and what I'm doing next. And this question of what to do next really does cover so much of what we're about as minds. We're constantly deciding what to do next on some level. Oh, absolutely. And there's so much to say about there's so much to unpack that's interesting about what you just said. First of all, I would say it seems to me that because for whatever reason, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, last time around, I mentioned that we had added a new category of content to the Waking Up app called Life, where we're going to be covering a wider range of topics. Things like decision making and leadership, wealth, parenting, and really anything else that relates to living a more fulfilling and meaningful life. And here I wanted to preview the new course we just launched with Oliver Burkman on Time Management titled Time Management for Mortals. I really think what Oliver is doing here is fantastic, and people are already loving this course over at Waking Up. So here, if you're a subscriber to Making Sense, you'll get the first eight lessons presented without break on this episode. And there are more lessons coming over at Waking Up. And now I give you Oliver Burkman. Enjoy. Welcome. My name is Oliver Berkman and I'm really happy to be working with Sam to bring you this course entitled Time Management for Mortals. It's something a little different, maybe, in that we won't be focusing here on meditation or even spirituality per se. In fact, you'd be forgiven for thinking that time management was the polar opposite of meditation or of spirituality. That it was a field concerned not with the deepest questions about human experience, but just the shallow stuff. How to crank through as many work tasks as possible when you might not even particularly want to do them in the first place, or how to save a few hours each week by cooking all your dinners in one big batch on Sundays. So my very first job is to convince you otherwise, to persuade you that time management isn't just about labeling your tasks with A, B and C priorities, or batch cooking pasta sauce or such like. It's vastly more than that. Arguably, time management is all that life is. Here we are with this terrifyingly short lifespan of little more than 4000 weeks on average. And the question of how to use this time wisely and well is the central challenge if we want to live lives of accomplishment and meaning, to connect deeply to the wonder the world has to offer, and to make the most of this utterly unlikely gift of getting some time on the planet as conscious creatures. So the lessons that follow are an attempt to combine certain essential philosophical and spiritual insights about time with a whole lot of concrete, usable tactical tools for daily living. Because, of course, it's on that daily level of work. Family, travel, housework, finances, morning routines, all the rest of it. It's on that level that the rubber meets the road. I trust you will agree with me that virtually everyone struggles with time in one way or another. The most obvious manifestation of this these days is busyness. The sense of being overwhelmed by more things that you have to do than you actually can do. Distraction is another obvious one. This seemingly paradoxical situation that we don't want to spend our time on, the things we want to spend our time on, but would rather focus on something else, anything else, so that we never quite get around to what we claim to care about the most. And then, arising from all this, there's also this ubiquitous subtler sense that somehow this portion of our lives right here isn't quite it. That everything we're doing is for the purpose of some future time. Or that we're going to get our lives figured out soon, that we'll get on top of things and we'll live as we want to live. But that for now, many of our tasks are just things we have to get through to get them out of the way so that real life can begin sometime later. A lot of people have this feeling, as the English novelist Arnold Bennett put it, writing at the dawn of the modern busyness epidemic, that the years slip by and slip by and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order. Now, the guiding principle of this course, and I certainly didn't make it up it's a theme in the work of everyone from Seneca the Roman stoic to the Zen master dogen and the philosopher Martin Heidegger. It's that all of these versions of the feeling of being in a struggle against time arise from a core kind of mistake in how we think about time and how we relate to it. Now, I don't want to imply that this is all just a matter of switching your mindset. Certainly the situation is made worse by all kinds of cultural and economic pressures. So it's definitely not all your personal faults that you're so overwhelmed at work, for example, or that you can't resist glimpsing at social media. But changing our relationship to time into something more fulfilling and energizing. I think it does have to start with clearing up this fundamental issue. And what is this issue? Well, you could characterize it as an unwillingness to face the reality of our finitude. Let's talk briefly about finitude. I mentioned that we each only get about 4000 weeks of life on average. Indeed, the whole of human civilization since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia has unfolded over the span of only about 300,000 weeks. To think of this tiny portion of time set against the duration of, say, the existence of the Earth itself on almost any meaningful timescale. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel has written, we will all be dead any minute. And perhaps the key consequence of this finitude is that it makes our choices matter when it comes to how we use our time, because we don't have an endless amount of it, something is always at stake. Every decision to spend a portion of time on one thing is a decision not to spend it on a million other things instead. And in a world of effectively infinite inputs. Limitless emails and articles to read, limitless demands from the boss, limitless ambitions you might have for your career or people to date or places to visit. It's inevitable for a finite human that there will always be vastly more to do, and indeed, vastly more that's really worth doing, than you will ever have time for. And that mismatch between what we can conceive of doing and what we can actually do is really painful. To make things worse, our finitude also means we have very little control over how our brief stretch of time unfolds. So, yes, you have to make choices, and your choices matter. But you can't ever know what the future holds, whether your choices were the right ones or what's coming next down the pike. Instead, in each moment, we're just totally vulnerable to events. Anything could happen at any time, and we can never achieve the authentic sense of security in our travel through time that we crave. Now, all of these are just the indisputable facts about being a finite human, but they're uncomfortable and they're anxiety inducing facts. And so what we do by default is to pursue strategies of emotional avoidance to try to find ways not to have to feel that discomfort. For example, we might tell ourselves maybe subconsciously that real life is going to begin when we finally graduate college, or when we get married, or when we have kids, or when we retire. And that's so that we don't have to face the anxiety of knowing that in fact, right now, this is our only shot at life, that we need to do the things we care most about right now. Or if you're a so called productivity geek like I certainly was for many years obsessed with every cool new time management hack. Well, on some level, you're probably telling yourself that you're doing all this because you're on route to becoming so efficient, so optimized and self disciplined, that you will eventually be able to make time for everything that matters. That you will achieve a kind of mastery of your time. That means you won't have to face tough choices or risk the emotional vulnerability of never knowing if things are going to work out. As the psychotherapist Bruce Tift puts it, we will do a lot to avoid consciously participating in what it's like to feel claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality. We seek ways of managing time that are not really focused on making the best of our little portion of it, but rather on making ourselves feel as if we don't only have a little portion of it. Like actually we are limitless and omnipotent. Or at least that we're going to become limitless and omnipotent just as soon as we can find the right time management techniques and the necessary reserves of self discipline. As we'll see, none of this works because it fails to acknowledge our real situation. And if you've ever suspected that pursuing these sorts of productivity methods is actually making you busier more scattered and less fulfilled, I'm going to explain why you're completely right. And so a big part of the purpose of these lessons is just to get you to give up that impossible quest to put down the heavy burden of attempting to escape your non negotiable limitations. Or to put it a little differently, it's to point you towards the truth that there will always be too much to do, that none of us will ever enjoy certainty about the future, and that there is no moment of truth coming sometime later when things will finally make sense and real life can begin at last. And that, while recognizing this truth does involve a kind of a defeat, it's a liberating and empowering defeat. It's the kind of defeat that leads very quickly to much better things, to ending the struggle with time, and to a life of more accomplishment, more success, more time spent on what matters most and more joy, wonder and focus. So let's dive in. As the saying goes, and I think it's a deeper saying than we usually give it credit for there's no time like the present to start going deep into this question of how to manage your time as a finite human being. It makes sense to start with a modern problem that has reached epidemic proportions. I'm talking about busyness. Now, busyness isn't our only time problem, and for some people it isn't really the essence of their struggle with time at all. It's entirely possible to feel that you don't have enough to do that you're using up your limited time on insufficiently challenging or meaningful tasks. But busyness is a great place to begin this task of undoing the mistake we make in our relationship with time. To start dispelling the illusion that the path to peace of mind and to meaningful productivity lies in somehow mastering or dominating time, when in fact, the answer is to step more fully and wholeheartedly into our non negotiable human limitations. Because what do we really mean when we complain about feeling busy these days? About the kind of busyness that leaves us feeling out of control or resentful about the demands that the world makes on us, or anxious that we're neglecting the truly meaningful stuff? It isn't just that. We've got lots to do. You might be familiar with the Busy Town series of children's picture books by the American illustrator Richard Scarry which depict a world full of cats, pigs, raccoons and other animals who all work at different jobs in a thriving small town. They are busy, they have plenty to do, their hours are filled up. But it's very clear that they're happy as well. Perhaps because there's just no sense of any lack of fit between the tasks they have to do and the time that they have to do them. This kind of busyness where you have plenty to do and plenty of time to do it, that can be delightful. Our real problem isn't so much that we're busy as that we're overwhelmed. We have the feeling that there are more things we need to do than we can do in the available time. These are things we might tell ourselves we need to do in order to stay afloat financially, to meet our family obligations or to realize our potential, whatever is fueling it. In each particular case, there's this fundamental mismatch between the amount of stuff that feels as though it matters on one hand and the amount of time and stamina that we have available to address it. In other words, this is a classic case of the human encounter with limitation. For a whole variety of reasons. We've come to feel that we must do more than we can and we experience psychological pain in confronting that gap. And actually a huge amount of mainstream productivity and time management advice, I would argue, along with all sorts. Of other ways that we instinctively try to get a grip on. Our time is dedicated really to holding out the promise, to maintaining the promise that there is a way of bridging this gap. That if you could only become efficient enough, optimized and self disciplined enough, if you could only find exactly the right set of productivity techniques, then you'd fit so much more into your time that this sense of mismatch would evaporate. You'd finally have time for everything that matters. This is a way of thinking about time that we've borrowed essentially from the Industrial Revolution, where it was a pretty good way to squeeze more output from machinery and we've tended to just assume that it must work as well when it's applied to human fulfillment in the 21st century. Certainly through all my years when I was a hardcore productivity geek, that's the feeling. I was chasing this idea that soon, through becoming more and more efficient and in control, I would reach a place where I was on top of everything, where I could feel like I was doing enough. And actually, because I had a lot of my sense of self worth tied up in all of this, that I was justifying my existence on the planet. Well, if you've already listened to lesson one in this series, it won't come as a surprise to learn that this approach doesn't work. Efficiency is never going to be what gets you to peace of mind when it comes to time, simply because the supply of incoming things to do tasks, obligations, goals, ambitions is, functionally speaking, infinite. So fitting more of it in isn't going to get you any closer to the end of it. But that's not even the whole story here, because what you find, what I certainly found, is that all else being equal, the pursuit of efficiency as a way to win the struggle with time will actually make you busier than before, more stressed than before, less focused on the things that matter to you the most. Partly, this is just a matter of quantity. If you get really efficient at, say, processing your email, the main thing you'll find is that you spend more of your time dealing with a greater volume of email, because what happens is you reply more swiftly to other people's emails and then they reply to those replies. And half the time you probably have to reply to their replies to your replies and on and on and on. And meanwhile, you'll develop a reputation for being responsive on email, so more people will email you in the first place. It's like the old saying has it, the reward for good time management is more work. Or if you're the person in your office who is far and away the fastest at handling a certain kind of project, well, don't be surprised when you're the one who gets all of those projects dumped on your desk. There's a close parallel here with the idea of induced demand, which refers to the way that cities add extra lanes to congested freeways in an effort to make the traffic flow more freely. And what often happens instead is that those extra lanes just incentivize more drivers to use that route. So more cars flood the system and the congestion stays just as bad as it was. But there's another dimension to this pitfall that I'm calling the efficiency trap too, which is one not just of the quantity of tasks, but the quality. If you focus obsessively on trying to fit more and more in as a way to feel in control of your time, you're actually likely to end up spending more and more of your time on the least important things. That's partly because we tell ourselves that the really important things need our full focus, they need plenty of energy, and so we postpone them. We concentrate instead on clearing the decks, that is, dealing with all the other little tasks that are tugging at our attention so that we can later get the time and the focus that we need for the important ones. Trouble, of course, is that the decks are never cleared because the incoming supply of things to fill them is basically infinite, so we never get round to the important stuff at all. Meanwhile, if you're convinced that you're en route to a time when you're going to be able to handle everything. Then when any potential new use for your time arises a new request from a coworker, some new potential business opportunity or social event or something you're going to be much more likely to accept it unquestioningly and less motivated to ask whether it's truly a worthwhile use of your time. Because after all, aren't you someone who's on the way to finding a way to get everything done? So what does it matter to add one more thing to the list? So systematically, efficiency leads to us feeling busier and busier with less important things. To be clear, I'm not saying that efficiency has no role to play in using time. Well, if it currently takes you half an hour just to find the file you're supposed to be working on or to find a clean pair of socks in the morning, then yes, there probably are some efficiency improvements you ought to be making in your life. And please don't let me dissuade you from making them. The point instead is that more efficiency and optimization can never be the main answer to feeling overwhelmed for the simple reason that we are finite creatures swimming in oceans of infinite possibility. So there'll always be too much to do. And that's why I think the really important skill to be developed here and we'll be looking at some concrete techniques for this in some of the lessons that follow. It's actually a kind of antiskill. It's the ability to not do something. It's the willingness to not clear the decks, to be okay with the fact that there will always be a whole bunch of stuff on your to do list that you're not doing at the moment, to know that there is all this other stuff you could meaningfully be doing. And yet to be willing to turn your attention for a few hours right now to something that genuinely matters to you. This anti skill is similar to the cast of mind that the poet John Keats famously called negative capability. It's the capacity to stay with one activity despite so many other things feeling unresolved to be present with a project that matters to you, or a person who matters to you, even though you know there are so many other things calling for your attention. Of course, few of us are in a position to just ignore our email or all those other little tasks that fill up the decks. You're still going to have to spend time on that stuff. But what you can do is to give up hope of ever getting to the end of all that stuff, of ever getting totally on top of it all, or of thinking that peace of mind lies at the time and the place when you will finally have got on top of it all. You can treat all that stuff instead as something that you dip into for a while on a regular basis with no particular expectation of completion. So sure, maybe you need to give an hour or 2 hours to email each day. But if you can put that time towards the end of your working day and don't necessarily aim to reach inbox zero, just aim to spend the prescribed amount of time on that activity before stepping away. And if your energy is greatest at the start of the day, like mine is, well, use some of that time for the projects you care about the most, even though you'll be doing so in the full knowledge that the decks are not clear. See what happens if you can approach life in this way to allow the anxiety that's going to arise from all those undone tasks, being on the to do list, and at the same time to just spend a few hours anyway on something that feels truly important. There's a sort of surrender involved here, a giving up on something. But ultimately what you're giving up is the attempt to escape the way that reality actually is. And when you drop down into reality instead, when you truly grasp that there is no chance ever of getting everything done, that's when you can finally get some purchase on reality and get stuck into making the best use of the time that you have. In the last session we looked at the ubiquitous modern problem of overwhelm and why the standard response to it, which is trying to become ever more efficient isn't going to lead you to peace of mind that in fact, left unchecked, the pursuit of efficiency will end up draining your life of meaning. But to really grasp the shift of perspective that we're exploring here, I think it's important to see that this underlying mismatch between the infinite world of possibility and our alltwo finite time and capacities, it isn't confined to the world of emails and work demands and chores and family duties and so on. It's really more a basic condition of being alive in the modern world, because the modern world provides us with, and just as importantly, informs us about a truly inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, things that seem like they'd enable you to live a truly meaningful life, to really suck the marrow out of your limited time. So there's an inexhaustible supply of experiences worth having, books worth reading, people worth getting to know. And it often seems like if we could only squeeze in a few more of them, then we would finally feel fulfilled at last. This morning, when I was out on a walk, I had the thought, seemingly from nowhere, but what I really needed, what would really enable me to feel like I was living fully, was a mountain bike. Well, maybe a mountain bike really would improve my life, I don't know. But I do know that once I obtain one, if I do that, there'll be a million other potential versions of that thought. What I really need in order to feel fulfilled is waiting in the wings to remind me of all the other things I'm not doing, the experiences I'm not having, the possessions I don't possess. We're in the territory here, obviously, of the fear of missing out. That very contemporary suspicion that other people are living more exciting and fulfilled lives than we are. But there's something different we ought to be doing with our time in order to maximize our potential or our happiness. The German social theorist Hartmut Rosa has made the interesting point that this feeling probably didn't afflict people in premodern times. Go back a few centuries and most people either believed in an afterlife, so there was less riding on making the most of this life, or they believed in some kind of cyclical picture of history, so they saw themselves as just playing their role in an endlessly repeating cosmic drama. Or alternatively, maybe it just never would have occurred to them that they had any right to expect anything other than to occupy the social or economic role in which they found themselves. By contrast, today we are ceaselessly attempting to get the most out of life, to seize the day, to somehow close the gap between our actual set of experiences and the available world of experiences, and then we're ceaselessly discovering that we can't do it. I think if you can get a small taste of an alternative way of seeing this, the shift from the fear of missing out to what I like to call the joy of missing out, that can be a kind of master key for using your time meaningfully and well. And to get there, I'm afraid I think we're going to have to begin with the incredibly unreadable and incredibly politically unpalatable german philosopher Martin Heidegger. Don't worry, I'm just going to pluck a couple of the most useful ideas from his work here. One of those is just to see the total extent to which we are defined by our finitude, by our capacity as we proceed through life, only ever to choose one path at a time from a multiplicity of possible paths. This is the realization that every decision to use a portion of our time in a certain way an hour, a week or a whole lifetime, it's by definition a decision not to use it in an infinity of other possible ways. And what this means is that any human life, even the most successful life you could possibly imagine, is inevitably a matter of constantly waving goodbye to possibilities. As I go through the day making hundreds of small choices. I'm building a life, yes, but at one and the same time, I'm closing off the possibility of countless other lives forever. And what heidegger saw was that facing up to that fact, even just a little, taking responsibility for the situation, for the fact that we're always making these choices, whether we like it or not, is incredibly daunting. It's anxietyinducing. So we're always trying to find ways to evade taking responsibility instead to avoid having to confront the fact of all these cuttings away of possibility. One way we do that is just to numb ourselves with distraction and busyness. Another is to convince ourselves that actually we don't have choices that in fact we do have. So we tell ourselves that we have no option but to pursue a given career, or stay married to the person we married, or no option to leave the city for the country, or the other way around, that it's just the dumb thing and we have to go along. I also think the modern obsession with personal productivity can often be another way of avoiding responsibility for our choices. Right? You get to dodge the responsibilities of finitude by convincing yourself that in some sense you're not finite, that you're going to be able to do everything so that you won't have to make tough choices with your time. And you can probably see how the internet makes all this a lot worse because it promises to help us make better use of our time while simultaneously exposing us to vastly more potential uses for our time. And then, by the way, also offering the perfect source of distraction when it all gets too much. And we want to shift our focus from the stress of making choices. So the very tool you're using to try to get the most out of life actually makes you feel as though you're missing out on even more of it. So, for example, Facebook is a great way to stay informed about events you might like to attend, but it's also a guaranteed way to find out about more events you'd like to attend than anyone possibly could ever attend. Online dating, likewise, is a fantastic way to find people to date, but it's also pretty much a guaranteed way of being constantly reminded about all the other, potentially more alluring people you could be dating instead. So if you're somebody who is plagued by this fear of missing out, it can be surprisingly powerful just to understand that in fact, missing out is inevitable. It's baked into the human condition that we will miss out on almost everything, so that fearing missing out makes no real sense. It's like worrying that you might be unable to make two and two add up to five, when the truth is you don't need to worry about that because you're definitely not going to manage it. But we can go a step even further here, I think, and see that missing out isn't just unavoidable, it's arguably what makes things worth doing, what makes life worth living, what gives meaning to our experiences in the first place, our finitude. The fact that we have to miss out on so much is what gives weight to our choices. It's what means that something is at stake in how we choose to live our lives. Think about it. If you knew that your life would never. End, then the answer to the question should I do X or Y with my time today? Would always be, who cares? Doesn't matter, because there's always the next day and the next day and the one after that. In fact, why bother doing anything at all today in a situation like that? So the fact that you have to miss out isn't necessarily even something to regret. It's perhaps the thing that makes life juicy in the first place. I think one final way to help bring all this into focus is to see that there is something rather arrogant and entitled in the way we usually think about our finite time. We act as if it's a huge problem that we only get a short amount of time, and that it's a kind of insult that it gets taken away from us by death. But when we say that our lives are short short compared to what? Certainly short compared to the life of a hypothetical immortal being. But it might make as much sense, or even more sense, to compare our lives not to a hypothetical immortal being, but to all the countless hypothetical people who never got to be born in the first place. And to see that from that perspective, it's not really cruel that our lives aren't longer. Rather, it's a staggering stupendous bonus that we get any time on the planet as conscious creatures at all. And when you see things in this way, it starts to make more sense to think of all those inexhaustible experiences that the world has to offer. Not as existing on some kind of endless to do list where if you don't make it through the list, you'll have missed out on life, but more like a different kind of list. A menu, a list of options you get to choose from. And that in that situation, having to choose, the necessity of choosing. It's not a terrible fate you've been sentenced to, but rather a wonderful opportunity and a positive affirmation of whatever choices you do end up making. In this state of mind, you can certainly relish the peak experiences of your life more completely than before. But you can also find deep meaning in the other experiences too. In the chores and the duties and the myriad ways we just need to maintain our daily lives. You can embrace the fact that you're forgoing certain pleasures or certain theoretically rewarding experiences. Because whatever you've decided to do with your time instead today to earn money to support your family, to write your novel, to bathe your toddler, to pause on a hiking trail, to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk that's how you've chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect. There's one specific skill that has to lie at the heart of any approach to time management that acknowledges the reality of our finitude. One tactic, arguably more crucial than any other for unlocking accomplishment and a sense of fulfillment, for stepping off this anxiety fueled treadmill where we're always trying to get on top of an infinite supply of things we could do with our time. That skill is deciding. In other words, developing the habit of making decisions. Making more decisions throughout the day, throughout our lives. Now, deciding has acquired something of a bad reputation in recent years, thanks to the publicity surrounding the phenomenon of decision fatigue. That's the claim that making decisions depletes the ego in a way that makes it harder to make further decisions later on. This was supposedly why President Barack Obama wore only gray and blue suits so that he didn't need to use up his decision making capacities on such trivial matters and could store it up for the truly consequential decisions that his role required of him. But for now, I just want to encourage you to put this idea of decision fatigue to one side. To suggest that unless you actually are the leader of a major nation or the CEO of a giant corporation or something like that, that it's well worth experimenting with this idea that what you might need in your life isn't to make fewer decisions, but to make more of them. Or maybe I should say more conscious decisions. Because one ramification of the view we've been exploring in this series is that, well, there's a sense in which you're making decisions all the time, all through the day, whether you realize it or not. For a finite human being, whenever we spend a portion of time on anything, we are making a decision not to spend it on a million other things. Even more than that, in each of those moments, we're closing off countless whole alternative lives. Every step you take through your life, you're cutting away alternative life paths. That's actually the etymology of the word decide. It means cutting away, slicing off options. It's actually related to words like homicide and suicide. We are all in the position of the narrator of Robert Frost's legendary poem The Road Not Taken about choosing between two paths in a wood. Only we can't know which path will be better. We won't even know at the end of the journey if the path we took was the better one. And if we just hang around at the fork in the path instead, unable or unwilling to make a decision, well, that's a decision too. It's a decision to use up part of our finite life doing that instead of selecting one of the paths. If you've listened to some of the other sessions in this series, it won't surprise you by now that generally, as humans, we really don't like this situation. That we tend to do all we possibly can not to consciously participate in what it feels like to be in this situation of being compelled to choose at every moment of our lives. Why? Well, because we don't want to acknowledge that we're missing out on all those unlived lives. We don't want to have to sacrifice some options for other options. I would love to spend this current season of my life being both a truly engaged parent of a small child and also spend six months every year on solitary meditation retreats in exotic locations. But my finitude, my inability to be in two places at once means that I do just have to choose. And additionally, we don't want to experience the inevitable negative aspects of any path we do choose the difficulties that come with any relationship, the imperfections that must inevitably afflict any creative project that we bring into the world, and so on. So we hang back from making choices partly to hang on to perfect fantasies that could only ever be damaged by making a choice and bringing them into reality. So what we do instead, in an effort not to feel this discomfort of being limited, is we try to cling on to the feeling of control by keeping our options open, by not consciously making decisions, by staying mired in indecision or procrastination or commitment phobia. It's no fun to be mired in indecision or procrastination or commitment phobia, but in a very important way does feel. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, it's been a big week for news. I think I'm going to wait for a few more shoes to drop before touching any of it. Earlier in the week, Trump's home at Mara Lago, is that really his home? That golf club that looks like a dictator's palace in what he might call a shithole country? It was rated by, quote, rated by the FBI in search of misappropriated documents that may or may not contain secrets about nuclear weapons or nuclear policy or something nuclear. Again, I think I'll wait for more information to surface before I comment on this, but needless to say, it would not surprise me if Trump had done something terrifyingly inept and self serving and even nefarious. So let's just wait and see what happens there. I share many people's concern that the execution of this search warrant was inflammatory enough that if the facts in the end don't seem to merit it, it will be yet another thing that bolsters Trump's political stature in the personality cult that has subsumed the Republican Party. And that would be a bad thing. Once again, this is an asymmetrical war of ideas and any misstep that seems to suggest that our institutions have become politicized, in this case, the FBI run, we should note, by a Trump appointee, Christopher Ray, not the fittest object for allegations of antitrump partisanship, really. But any apparent bias here makes any further discussion of facts more or less impossible. So anyway, let's wait for the dust to settle. Let's see what was actually in those boxes, and maybe there'll be more to say. And then yesterday, the author Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage by a man wielding a knife under conditions where he obviously did not have enough security. And it sounds like he is on life support now. So that obviously is terrible. And I share everyone's horror on his account. I said as much on Twitter not so many hours ago where I wrote, like many of you, I'm thinking about Salman Rushdie now. The threat he's lived under for so long, which was so horrifically realized today, was the product not merely of the hatred and zeal of religious fanatics, but of the cowardice and confusion of secularists. Everyone in arts and letters should have stood shoulder to shoulder with Salman in 1989, thereby distributing the risk and the fact that so few did, as a moral scandal that still cast its shadow over the present. And now I now notice in my ad mentions that I am being attacked by many people for being soft on Islam and for using the phrase religious fanatics out of an apparent unwillingness to name Islam and its theology as the Culpable party here. All I can say is I'm surprised and somewhat amused by this. These are people who clearly don't know my history. I have been accused of Islamophobia even more than I've been accused of having Trump derangement syndrome, it might surprise some of you to learn. Anyway, my conscience on that score is quite clear, and I invite those of you who doubt my bona fides as a critic of Islam to do some googling. I even wrote an op ed with Salman in defense of our mutual friend Ayan Hersiele, I think in 2007. That's on my blog somewhere. I believe the title is Ion Hercle abandoned to fanatics. It was published in the Los Angeles Times, but I think it's behind a paywall there. Anyway, I don't actually know Salman, despite the fact that we wrote that op ed together. That was accomplished by email. We've never met in person, which surprises me. We've always had several good friends in common, ayan being one, hitch being another. Salman was one of Hitch's best friends. I was merely a friend. Anyway, thinking about him. And I would just say by way of spelling out further the point I was making on Twitter, my use of the phrase religious fanatics was not at all an instance of my mincing words with respect to Islam, although I can see how someone might have thought that if they were unfamiliar with my work. I was just assuming enough familiarity with what I have said and written on this topic that it simply never occurred to me that I could be accused of pandering to Islamic extremists here, or to the confused liberal secularists who would support such pandering. I just assumed my reputation preceded me here. Anyway, the real point I was making here was that the problem has always been larger than mere Islamic extremism and its intolerance to free speech. This extremism has been given an immense amount of oxygen by confused and cowardly and in some cases well intentioned people who worry that any criticism of Islam will give energy to racism and xenophobia. Salman was attacked by such people from the moment the Ayatollah pronounced his fatwa, and the list of people who rushed to heap shame upon their heads by criticizing a novelist forced into hiding out of deference for the sensitivities of religious lunatics is an awful list of names. And so it is with more recent atrocities like the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the people who explicitly or implicitly took the side of the jihadist murderers in criticizing the butchered cartoonists for their alleged insensitivity. These are people who are still in good standing in many cases, and I'm not aware that any have apologized. Refining got those moments of moral and political emergency so disastrously wrong. I'm doing my best not to name names here, but anyone interested can see who took the side of religious barbarians there, and there have been so many moments like that since the fatois Saman was first pronounced. And many of you who are living by podcast and substac newsletter might take a look, because some of your modern free speech heroes were people who thought that just maybe those cartoonists had it coming to them anyway. This is an awful thing. I hope someone recovers. And whatever happens there, if there's more to say, I'll do a podcast on it, okay? Today I'm speaking with Will McCaskill. Will is an associate professor in philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Ted speaker, a past Forbes 30 under 30 social entrepreneur. He also co founded the center for Effective Altruism, which has raised over a billion dollars for charities. And he's the author, most recently, of a wonderful book titled What We Owe the Future. And that is, in part, the topic of today's discussion. I'll just read you the blurb I wrote for that book because it'll give you a sense of how important I think Will's work is. No living philosopher has had a greater impact upon my ethics than Will McCaskill. In What We Owe the Future, McCaskill has transformed my thinking once again by patiently dismantling the lazy intuitions that rendered me morally blind to the interest of future generations. This is an altogether thrilling and necessary book, and that pretty much says it. The book is also blurbed by several friends. Paul Bloom, Tim Urban, Stephen Fry. As you'll hear, Will have been getting a lot of press recently. There was a New Yorker profile that came out a couple of days ago. Also, the COVID of Time magazine was devoted to him and the effective altruism movement. And all of this is great to see. So Will and I get into the book. We talk about effective altruism in general and its emphasis on long termism and existential risk. We talk about criticisms of the philosophy and some of the problems with expected value reasoning. We talk about the difference between doing good and feeling good, why it's so hard to care about future people, how the future gives meaning to the present, why this moment in history is unusual, which relates to the pace of economic and technological growth. We discuss bad political incentives, value lock in the wellbeing of conscious creatures as a foundation for ethics, the risk of unaligned artificial intelligence, how we're bad at predicting technological change, and many other topics. No paywall for this one, as I think it's so important. As always, if you want to support what I'm doing here, you can subscribe to the podcast@samharris.org. And now I bring you Will McCaskill. I am back once again with the great Will McCaskill. Will, thanks for joining me again. Thanks so much. It's great to be back on. So you are having a bit of a wild ride. You have a new book, and that book is What We Owe the Future. And I got an early, very early look at that, and it's really wonderful. And I don't think we'll cover all of it here, but we'll definitely get into it. But before we do that, I want to talk about effective altruism more generally, and in particular, talk about some of the pushback I've noticed of late against it. And some of this echoes reservations I've had with the movement and some of which we've discussed. And some of it strikes me as, frankly, crazy. So, yeah, let's just get into that. But before we do, how are you doing? How's life? I mean, things are very good, though for all. I definitely feel a little bit shell shocked by the wave of attention I'm currently flu and I don't know, I'm alternating between excitement and anxiety. But overall it's very good indeed and I'm happy these ideas are getting more their time. Am I right in thinking that I just saw EA and a long interview with you on the COVID of Time magazine? That's exactly right. So that was the news of Today that came out this morning and I think it's a beautiful piece by Naina Bajakal. And yeah, I'd encourage anyone to read it if they want to get a sense of what the EA movement is like from the inside. That's great, that's great. Well, congratulations. I'm very happy to see that attention being bent your way and perhaps we can bend more of it here. There's a lot we've already said about this, but I think we have to assume that many people in the audience have not heard the many hours you and I have gone round and round on these issues already. So at the top here, can you define a few terms? I think you should define effective altruism, certainly, what you mean or you think we should mean by that phrase. And also long termism and existential risk, because those will be coming up a lot here. Sure. So effective altruism is a philosophy and a community that's about ask the question, how can we do as much good as possible with our time and with our money? And then taking action to put the results of answers to that question into practice to try to make the world better. Long termism is a philosophical perspective that says at least one of the key priorities of our time is to make the long term future of humanity go well. That means just taking seriously just the sheer scale of the future, how high the stakes could be in shaping it, the fact that there really might be events that occur in our lifetimes that could have an enormous impact, for good or ill, in our own lifetimes. And taking seriously that we can help steer those events in a more positive direction, helping set humanity on a better path to improve the lives of our grandkids and their grandkids and their grandkids and so on. Then the final term. Existential risks are a category of issues that I and others have increasingly focused on or started thinking and worrying about. And these are risks that could be enormously impactful, not just in the present, but in fact for the whole future. So some of these risks are risks that threaten extinction, such as the use of next generation of bioweapons in World War Three with viruses unprecedented, lethality and infectiousness that could really result in the collapse of civilization or the extinction of everyone alive today. In the worst case or very rapid advances in artificial intelligence where that could result in, as you've argued, the AI is being just far more capable than human beings such that the AI systems merely see humans as an obstacle to their goals. And humans are disempowered in light of that or in fact, again, just made extinct or eliminated by such systems. Or existential risks can lead to permanent loss of value or future value, not just via extinction. So a perpetual dystopia that was perhaps it's a little better than extinction, but not much better, with a lock in of fascist values that would count as an existential catastrophe as well. And increasingly, I've been getting to know the leading scientists who think that the scale of such existential catastrophe is actually not small. It's not like in any way like this one in a million chance of an asteroid spike in the next century, but much more like the risk of dying in a car crash in one's lifetime, where these risks are certainly in the multiple percentage points, maybe even tens of percentage points just in our lifetime alone. So in the definition of effective altruism, I think one could be forgiven for wondering what is novel about simply wanting to do as much good as one can, right? I mean, how is that a new contribution to the way we think about doing good in the world? Hasn't everyone who has attempted to do good wanted to do as much good as they could get their hands around? What do you view as being novel in this movement around that? I'm certainly not claiming that effective altruism is some radically new idea. I think you can see its intellectual roots going back decades. I actually argue you could see it going back two and a half thousand years to the first consequentialist, model philosophers, the Mohists. But I actually think that this mindset of trying to do as much good as possible is at least somewhat unusual. Where in general, when people try to do good, and this was certainly true for me before I started thinking about this, they are like looking at what causes have been made salient to them, where in my case, that was extreme poverty. I remember as a teenager reading about how many people died of AIDS each year and just thinking, oh my God, this is an atrocity. How can we not be taking more action on this? But what I wasn't doing at the time was sitting back, kind of taking a step back and thinking of all the things, all the many, many problems in the world, what's the thing that I should be most focusing on if I want to have the biggest impact I can? What's the best evidence? What are the best what are the best evidence saying about this? What are the best arguments saying about this? And really thinking that flew. And so I actually think that mode of reasoning is somewhat unusual and that's what's distinctive about effective altruism. Yeah. So let's deal with some of this pushback before moving on. I'm sure there's been much more that I haven't noticed, but in the last few days I noticed a Wall Street Journal article that really did not have much substance to it. It seemed to have been written by someone who just doesn't like paying taxes and didn't seem to like Sam Bankman freed's politics. I didn't really detect any deep arguments against effective altruism there. I guess his one selling in point was that creating economic value, ie. Doing business, is generally the best way to help people at scale and reduce unnecessary suffering. And I guess I think we could easily concede that insofar as that's true wherever it happens to be true, it would be very easy for us to say, okay, well, then, sure, let business solve our problems. And I don't think you would resist that conclusion wherever it's true. One could certainly argue that someone like Elon Musk, by building desirable electric cars, has done, if not more good, a different species of good than many forms of environmental activism have to move us away from a climate change catastrophe. So if that's true, let's bracket that. And it's hard to know what exactly is true there. But I certainly have an intuition that there's a place for business, and even a majority place for business to affect our climate outcome and that it might be greater than charity. He seemed to think that was some kind of coup de GRA against effective altruism and even philanthropy in general. But I think that blow just passes right by us, doesn't it? Yeah. So the thing that I'll say that's the grain of truth in that criticism is that in some circumstances, markets can be extremely good ways of allocating resources. So take the problem of people having access to the Internet and to computing technology in the United States, at least for people who are middle class or above, then, you know, businesses are dealing with that, like at least relatively well. There's great incentives to give this product that are benefiting people, people are willing to pay for it, and there aren't major externalities. However, as has been well known in economics for, I think, 100 years now, there are very many cases where markets don't produce the ideal social outcome, which they call externalities. So take the case of climate change, which is, you know, absolute paradigm of this example where if someone mines coal and burns it, that can be good for them because they're creating energy. But it has this negative effect on third parties that were not kind of privy to that decision. They had no influence over it because it warms the climate and it makes those third parties worse off. And so the standard solution there, and this is endorsed by economists on the right as well as the left, it's just uncontroversial, is that you want some amount of government involvement there, at least in the form of taxation. So putting a tax on carbon, there's other things you can do as well. But that would be one way in order to guide market behavior to better outcomes. However, I would go further than this as well and say there are not only cases of market failure, there are also cases of democratic failure as well. Where if you consider the extreme poor who are living in a country with poor political institutions, perhaps even a dictatorship. They do not have democratic say over the policies that rich countries like the UK and the US. Are enacting. And so they will not be given adequate representation neither in the market nor in political decision making. Or if we look at non human animals, they have no say at all. Or if we look at future people, those who will be born not now, but in the generations to come, they have no say over, they have no participation in the market, so they have no influence there. They have no say in political decision making either. And so it's no surprise, I think, that their lynch thefts are systematically neglected and we have no guarantee at all that kind of business as usual for the world would lead to the best outcomes possible for them. Yeah, okay. So then there was this article I noticed in this online journal, maybe it's also a print journal called Current Affairs, which I hesitate to mention because the editor over there strikes me as someone who is truly mentally unwell, given some of the insane things he's written about me and the length at which he's written them. But this article, not written by him, written by somebody else, raised some points that I think are valid, as well as many that weren't. And the valid ones are around the issue of how we think about expected value and kind of a probability calculus over various possibilities in the future. And this is really integral to your new book and how we think about safeguarding the future. So I think before we dive into your thesis proper, let's talk about the concept of prioritizing to whatever degree the well being of people who don't yet exist. When people say, well, like we should prioritize the future to some significant degree, it's very easy for them to do this by reference to their children. Young people who currently exist and have no control over anything, that's easy to see. But when you're talking about the hypothetical billions and trillions of a future humanity that may thrive or or not even exist, depending on how we play our cards at this moment, I think people's moral intuitions begin to fall apart. And the most extreme case of the problem here is if you try to run any kind of utility function based on a straightforward calculation of probabilities, if you say, well, if I could just reduce the risk that we will be wiped out by some catastrophic event, let's say a global pandemic. If I could reduce that by even, you know, one in a million. Given the fact that you have trillions upon trillions of potential lives on that. Side of the balance. Well, then that's more important than anything I could do now, including saving the lives of identifiable people. Even thousands of identifiable people. And then that's where people feel like something has simply gone wrong here in how we're thinking about human wellbeing. So perhaps you can address that. Sure. I'm so glad you brought it up, because this is a framing that often gets mentioned, and I think it's really unfortunate. And I want to push against it in the strongest possible terms, where if it were the case that the argument for concern and serious concern about how we might impact future generations rested on these vanishingly small probabilities of enormous amounts of value, then I wouldn't be writing this book. I would be doing other things. But I don't think it does. And the reason this framing came up is because in academic articles, nick Boston, who I believe you've had on, he sketched out, like, what are the implications of a very particular moral view? Expectational, total utilitarianism. And he said, well, if you're taking this view seriously, then that's the conclusion you get. What he wasn't saying is that we should endorse that conclusion. In fact, he and essentially everyone I know, at least in practice outside of the ivory Tower, take that as a reductio rather than an implication. So Nick himself is not a consequentialist, even. And about other papers on this idea of Pascal's Mugging so it's similar, like Pascal's Wager, but just without infinite stakes, where these tiny probabilities of huge amounts of value look, it just it doesn't seem like you just do the math and multiply them. Can you actually describe the Pascal's Mugging example? Sure, I'm happy to. The idea is just you've had a nice time at the pub. You walk outside. A man comes up to you and says, Give me your wallet. You say no. And he says, okay, fair. If you give me the contents of your wallet, let's say that's $100 I tomorrow will come back, and I will give you any finite amount of well being. So just whatever amount of well being you ask for, I will give you it, and you say no. I just think I'm certain that that's not going to happen. And the man says, Come on. You're not certain, are you? Look at my eyes. I've got this pale complexion. I look a bit it's possible that I'm this traveler from the future or this alien with, like, amazing powers, or I'm some sort of god. It's possible. Maybe it's a one in a billion billion billion billion that I will be able to do this, but it's at least possible. And you take that one in a billion billion billion billion, multiply it by a sufficiently large amount of well being for you. That in what decision theorists call expected value, which is where you take the probability of an outcome and the value of that outcome and multiply them together to get the expected value. That expected value is greater than that £100 for you. And then maybe you say, oh, yeah, okay, I guess that seems correct. You hand over the £100. And now what Bosnum thinks, and what almost everyone who works in this thinks is that that's absurd, that if you've got a model, if you've got a decision theory, it's actually not about morality, it's about your theory of rationality or your decision theory. If you've got decision theory that says you should give the wallet to the mugger, then something has gone badly wrong. And one way that I like to illustrate this and this applies to the and this problem gets called the fanaticism problem. And it's a really interesting area of decision theory because I actually think it's the strongest argument against a theory that is otherwise very good, which is expected value theory. But seeing one way of got this going wrong is if this argument is used for giving your money to the mugger or for looking for future amounts of value, even if it were just one in a billion chance that you could change it, well, why are you going after only finite amounts of value? There's a long religious tradition that says you can get infinite amounts of value via heaven. And so really, the upshot, if you're taking expected value theory seriously, is to become a missionary to try and ensure that you get into as many heavens as possible according to as many different forms of religious belief as possible and try and convince others to the same to do the same. And that's where expected value theory, if you're really going with the math and doing it, takes you and I know of zero people who have done that. Everyone says, look, okay, something we don't know what. I think this is an incredibly hard area within decision theory. We don't know what the right answer is, but it's not that. And the argument for concern about the long term future is the fact that these risks are more like the risks of dying in a car crash and much less like the one in a billion billion Pascal's Mugger kind of risk. Well, admittedly, this is a problem I have not thought much about, but I have a couple of intuitions here, kindling as as I I listen to you describe it. One is that obviously expected value becomes eminently rational within the domain of normal probabilities. It works in poker. It works in any kind of decision analysis where you're just trying to figure out what you should do under uncertainty and you're dealing with probabilities of one third or 10%. That is how we organize our intuitions about the future in the most systematic way. And I guess there are even corner conditions within the domain of normal probabilities where you basically this is not a repeated game. You've got one shot to take this risk and it may be that risking your life, whatever you put on the other side of the scale, doesn't make sense. Except we don't live that way. We risk our lives every time we get into a car or get on a plane or ride a bike or do we've all made these trade offs whether we've actually done the decision analysis or not and consciously assign probabilities or not. We just have this vague sense that certain types of risks are acceptable. And I guess my other intuition is that this is somewhat analogous to the problems discouraged by population ethics where when we talk about things like the repugnant conclusion and talking about very large numbers of very small things or very small utility you seem to get these grotesque outcomes ethically. Where do you think this is breaking down or why do you think it is breaking down? So the standard response within decision theory would be to have what's? It all gets technical quickly and I apologize if I don't do a good job of explaining the ideas but the standard response is to have what's called a bounded value function and it's easiest to see this when it comes to money, let's say. So if the mugger in Pascal's mugging was saying, okay, I will take £100 off you today and I will come back tomorrow with any finite amount of money you like that you can spend on yourself, let's just assume you're completely self interested. To keep it simple, I could say, look, my probability of you coming back is so low that there is no amount of money that you could give me such that the probability that the probability times that amount of money would add up to more expected well being for me than a hundred pounds now. So let's say I think it's one in a billion billion that the mugger will come back. Okay, sure, the mugger could give me 1000 billion billion dollars and that would mean more. I would have greater expected financial return. However, I wouldn't have greater expected well being because the more money I have, the less it impacts my well being. And there's some amount, there's only so much that money can buy for me. At some point it starts making this like vanishingly small difference such that there's a level of well being such that I can't get like a thousand times greater well being with any amount more money. And so that's very clear when it comes to financial returns. But you might think the same thing happens with wellbeing. So supposing I have the. Best possible life, just like peaks of bliss and enjoyment and amazing relationships and creative insight over and over. And that's for some very, very long lived life. Perhaps you just imagine that now you might think, oh, it's just not possible to have a life that's a thousand times better than that life we've just imagined. And in fact, I think that's how people do, in fact reason. So even if you'd say to someone, look, you can have a 50 50 chance you either die now or you get to live for as long as you like and choose when to when you pass away. I think most people don't take that bet. And that suggests that we actually think that perhaps the kind of I mean, there's eight extra issues with kind of, you know, very long lives, but we can reformulate the thought experiment either way. I think people just do think there's just an upper bound to how good a life could be. And as soon as you've accepted that, then in the selfinterest case, you can very readily avoid this kind of Pascal's Mugging or Pascal's Wager situation. And perhaps you can make the same move when it comes to model value as well, where you're ultimately saying, like, there's a limit to how good the world or the universe can be. And as soon as you've got that, then you avoid Pascal's Mugging, you avoid Pascal's Wager. However, you do get into other problems and so that's why it's so difficult. Yeah, the thing that I think is especially novel about what you've been doing and about EA in general, which I always tend to emphasize in this conversation. I think I've brought this up with you many times before, but it's novelty has not faded for me. And here's the non novel part about which someone could be somewhat cynical. There's just this basic recognition that some charities are much more effective than others, and we should want to know which or which and prioritize our resources accordingly. That's the effective part of effective altruism. That's great. And that's not what has captivated me about this. I think that the thing that is most interesting to me is by prioritizing effectiveness, in an unsentimental way, what you've done for me is you've uncoupled the ethics of what we're doing from positive psychology really just divorcing the question of how I can do the most good from the question of what I find to be most rewarding about doing good in the world. I'm always tempted to figure out how to marry them more and more because I think that would be the most motivating and by definition the most rewarding way to live. But I'm truly agnostic as to how married they might be. And when I survey my own experience, I notice they're really not married at all. For instance, over at Waking Up, we launched this campaign which we've called 100 Days of Giving. And so for 100 days we're giving $10,000 a day to various charities, and we're having subscribers over at Waking Up decide which charities among the list that you and friends have helped me vet. So every single day, we're giving $10,000 away to some great cause, and we're about 30 days into this campaign. And honestly, I think for most of those 30 days, I have not thought about it at all. Right? Literally, it has not even been a ten second memory on any given day. And I consider that on some level a feature rather than a bug. But it is striking to me that in terms of my own personal well being and my own sense of connection to the well being of others, I might actually be more rewarded. In fact, I think I'm almost guaranteed to be more rewarded by simply holding the door open for someone walking into a coffee shop later this afternoon and just having a moment of a smile. That absolutely trivial moment of good feeling will be more salient to me than the $10,000 we're giving today and tomorrow and the next day and onward for months. So I'm just wondering what you do with that. I mean, it's a bug and a feature. It's a feature because I really do think this is just this is how you do the most good. You automate these things. You decide rationally what you want to do, and you put that in place, and then it's no longer vulnerable to the vagaries of your own moral intuitions or you getting captivated by some other bright, shiny object and forgetting about all the good you intended to do. But I do hold out some hope that we can actually draw our feelings of wellbeing more and more directly from the actual good we're accomplishing in the world. And I just think there's just more to think about on the front of how to accomplish that. Yeah, you're exactly right, and it's an old chestnut. But it's true that our psychology, human psychology, did not evolve to respond to the modern world. It evolved for the ancestral environment. Our community, the people that we could affect, amounted to the dozens of people, perhaps. Certainly the idea that you could impact someone on the other side of the world or in generations to come, that was not true in the way it's through today. And so we have a radical misalignment between the moral sentiments that we have evolved and the model reality that we face today. And so one thing, there's this project that effective altruism as a community has tried to embark on to some extent, which is just trying to align those two things a little bit better. And it's tough because we're not fundamentally aligned. But the ideal circumstance is where you are part of a community where you can get reward and support and reassurance for doing the thing that actually helps other people the most, rather than the one where you get that immediate kind of warm glow. And that's not to say you shouldn't do those things too. I certainly do. And I think it's part of living a good well rounded life. But it's just a fact that there are people in very poor countries who are dying of easily preventable diseases. We can take action to help them. There are animals suffering greatly on factory farms. We can take actions to alleviate that suffering. There are risks that are maybe going to affect the entire fate of the planet as well as killing billions of people in the peasant generation. That is not something that my monkey brain is equipped to deal with. And so we've got to tie as best we can. And that's something at least for me, where having a community of people who share this idea, who I can talk these ideas through with and who can, if needed, if I find these things hard, provide support and reassurance, that's at least a partial solution to this problem to get my monkey brain to care more about the things that really matter. Well, are there any other problems that you've noticed or that have been raised by EA's critics that you think we should touch on before we jump into the book and this discussion of long termism and existential risk? Sure. I think the number one thing that is in some sense a problem but I think is just kind of where the debate should be is just what follows some long termism where the thoughts that I want to promote and get out into the world are the future. People count. There could be enormous numbers of them and we really can and in fact are impacting how their lives go. And then there's the second question of well, what do we do about that? What's the top priorities for the world today? Is that the standard environmentalist answer of mitigate climate change? Reduce the Zhou's depletion reduced species lost? Is it the classic existential risk answer of reduce the risk of misaligned AI reduced the risk of a worst case pandemic? Is it the idea of just promoting better values? Is it something that I think you're sympathetic to and others like Tyler Cohen and Patrick Collison are sympathetic to which is just generally make the world saner and more well functioning because predicting the future is so hard? Or is it perhaps about just trying to put the next generation into a situation such that they can make a better and more informed decision and have at least the option to decide kind of how their future will go. These are extremely hard questions and I actively want to see an enormous amount of debate on what follows from that. Perhaps 1000 times as much work as has gone into it I would love to see discussing these issues and there's an enormous these are heart that there's an enormous amount to say. And so that's where I think the kind of real meat of debate lies. Okay, so let's talk about the book because you spoke a couple of minutes ago about how we are misaligned in psychological terms by virtue of imperfect evolution to think about problems at scale. And that's certainly true. But we have made impressive progress with respect to scaling our concern about our fellow human beings over physical distance, distance with respect to space. We kind of understand ethically now. I mean, Peter Singer has done a lot of work on this topic urging us to expand the circle of our moral concern. And I think something like 100% of the people listening to us will understand that you can't be a good person and say that you only care about people who live within 1000 miles of your home. Right. I mean, that's just not compatible with life in the 21st century. Although there's some discounting function, no doubt. And I think normal psychology would cause us to care more about family and friends than about perfect strangers. And certainly perfect strangers in far away cultures for which we have no affinity, et cetera. And I think we've discussed this in previous conversations just what might be normative there, whether we actually would want perfect indifference and dispassion with respect to all those variables or if there's some hierarchy of concern that's still appropriate. And I think it probably is. But the topic of today's conversation and of your book is just how abysmally we have failed to generate strong intuitions about the moral responsibility we have and the moral opportunity we have to safeguard the future. So perhaps with that set up you can give me the elevator synopsis of the new book. Sure. So like I said, this book is about long termism about just taking seriously the future that's ahead of us. Taking seriously the moral value that future generations have and then also taking seriously the fact that what we do as a society really will impact the very long term. And I think there are two categories of things that impact the very long term where there's things that could just end civilization altogether. And this concern really got on society's vadar with the advent of nuclear weapons. I think an all out nuclear war, I think unlikely to kill literally everybody. But it could result in complete you know, it would result in hundreds of millions, maybe even billions dead, unimaginable tragedy, which I think would make the world worse, not just for those people, but for the extremely long time and could result in the collapse of civilization, too. At the more extreme level, there's worries about, in particular, engineered pandemics. And this is a risk that we've been worrying about for many years now where pandemics occur occasionally and are extremely bad and so society doesn't prepare for them in the way they should. I think the risk is going to get much worse over time because not only do we have to contend with natural pandemics we've we will also have to contend with pandemics from viruses that have been enhanced to have more destructive properties or even just created de novo such as in a bio weapons program. This is a very scary prospect and current estimates put the risk of, you know, all out catastrophe 95% dead, something like 1% essentially a second kind of way, sort of see set of events that could impact the very long term are things that don't impact the length of civilization. That is, it wouldn't kill us off early, but does affect the value of that civilization, kind of civilization's quality of life as it were. And in what we are the future, I focus in particular on values where used to values changing an enormous amount over time. But that's actually something that I think is contingent about our world. And I think there are ways, especially via technological and political developments, that that change could slow. And in the worst case, our future could be one of perpetual totalitarian dictatorship that would be very scary indeed. That would be a loss of almost all value that we could have and an existential risk itself, even if that civilization were very long lived. And so what can we do? And things vary in terms of how tractable they are, like how much there is actually to do. But there are many things I think we can do. So on the ensuring we have a future side of things, I actually think that there's very concrete actions we can take to reduce the risk of the next pandemic such as technology to monitor wastewater for new pathogens, such as this new form of lighting called Far UVC that I'm extremely excited about. If we can get the cost down enough, then we can just be sterilizing rooms in an ongoing way, in a way that's not harmful for human health or on the values kind of side of things. Well, we can be pushing for people to be more altruistic, more reasonable in the way they think about model matters. Perhaps more impartial too, taking in seriously the incest vests of all sentient beings, whether they're human or animal or other, or whether they're now or in the future. And we can be kind of guarding against the lie like certain authoritarian tendencies that I think are very common and we have seen in history over and over again and that I think are quite scary from a longterm perspective. And then lastly, we can just start reasoning more about this. I said earlier that I don't know, I'm not super confident about what we should be doing, but certainly we can be doing more investigation, building a movement that takes seriously oh yeah, there's this enormous potential future ahead of us and we can do an enormous amount of goods to make it better. Yeah, I want to talk about value lock in and some of the issues there. But before we get there, I think we should linger on. What makes thinking about the future so difficult? I think you say somewhere in the book that both with respect to distance in space and distance in time, I think you say something like we mistake distance for unreality, right? Like the fact that something is far away from us makes part of our brain suspect that it may not quite exist. And again, I think this has changed fairly categorically with respect to space. You just can't really imagine that the people suffering over in Yemen don't exist. But it's much harder to assimilate this new intuition with respect to time because in this case, we are talking about people who don't actually exist. In other words, there will be some number of thousands of people, probably three to 5000 people or so born over the course of our having this conversation, right? Globally speaking, I think the math is somewhere around there. And so it's easy to argue, okay, these are people who are coming into this world for which they have no responsibility. And we, the present generation or generations, are entirely responsible for the quality of the world they inherit and the quality of the lives they begin to lead. And I would say collectively, we don't think nearly enough about that responsibility. But when you're talking about people who may or may not be born in some distant future, we don't think about these people at all. And I suspect that most people wouldn't see any problem with that. Because it's just when you think about what a crime it would be for us to foreclose the future in some way if we all die in our sleep tonight painlessly and there is no human future, what's bad about that? Well, you have to tell yourself a story about all the unrealized joy and happiness and creativity that exists in potentia on that side of the ledger. But there's no there are no victims deprived of all of that goodness because they don't exist, right? So this is the very essence of a victimless crime. I think you and I have touched that issue in a previous conversation, but it's just hard to think about the far future, much less prioritize it. And I'm just wondering if there's something we can do to shore up our intuitions here. The first point I would make is that the only reason why these people are hypothetical is because you, the listener, are holding out some possibility that they may not exist. When you ask yourself what would cause subsequent future generations of people not to exist, perhaps there's some other version. But the only thing I can imagine is some catastrophe of the sort that you have begun sketching out, right? Some pandemic, some asteroid impact, some nuclear war, some combination of those things that destroy everything for everyone, which is to say some absolutely horrific cataclysm, which we should be highly motivated to avoid, right? If we successfully avoid the worst possible outcome for ourselves and our children and our grandchildren. The future people we're talking about are guaranteed to exist. It's only time shifted. It's not, in fact, in question. And the only thing that would put it in question is some horrific outcome that we are responsible for foreseeing and avoiding. And really, there's no one else to do the job. Absolutely. Yeah. There's this general issue where why do we care about people on the other side of the planet much more now than we did, let's say, 100 years ago? And it's clear that a big part of it is that now we can see people on the other side of the world. We get information about them in a way that we never used to, where literally there can be a live streamed video of someone in Nigeria or Pakistan or India or any other country around the world. So those people's lives become vivid to us in a way that's just not possible for future generations. And that makes this challenge just so deep, in fact, to get people to care. If there were news from the future, you know, the newspaper of tomorrow, I think we wouldn't be in such a bad state. You know, we could report on what the world is like in the year 2100 or 2200, and I think people would care. But that's not the news we get. It's all abstract and and that that's legally tough. The thing I'll say is so, you know, you mentioned the idea of some catastrophe, just painlessly kills all of us in our sleep. And, you know, what would that be a tragedy? And I mean, I think yes, and I argue in the book at length that it would be a tragedy both because I think that we should expect the future to be on balance. Good. And secondly, because I think the loss of lives at least sufficiently good and certainly the loss of all the moral and artistic and technological progress that we might see in the future, that those are great losses. But I want to emphasize the case for long termism does not rely on that. You could think that everyone dying painlessly in their sleep would not be a bad thing, morally speaking. Nonetheless, a future of perpetual, totalitarian dictatorship really would be compared to a wonderful, free, thriving and liberal future where different people can pursue their visions of the good and we've eradicated issues that plague today like injustice and poverty. I just think, like, you really don't need to engage in much moral philosophy to say that if we have a choice between one or the other, then it's better and much better to think about the thriving, flourishing future than this dystopian one. Yeah, no, that's a great point. Forget about the thought experiments. It should be pretty easy to acknowledge that there's a difference between having to live under the Thousand Year Reich and living under some version of the best possible solution to the problem of global civilization. Is there anything more to say about the abstract, about the significance of the future? I guess I'm wondering if you've thought at all about how just again, it's surprising that I think we think about this almost not at all, and yet our assumptions about it do a lot of psychological work for us. I mean, like, I I really, you know, I mean, this is this is my job, to have conversations like this, and I'm surprised at how little I think about the far future in any kind of significant way. And yet if I imagine how I would feel if I knew that it wouldn't exist if we just figured out that actually the whole story ends in 80 years, right? So we're unlikely to be around to suffer much or we're going to be out of the game pretty soon, and people haven't had kids, don't need to worry about them. And so the basic picture is just the career of the species is radically foreclosed at some point inside of a century. What would that do to everything? And how would that SAP the meaning from what we do? It's an interesting question, which I haven't thought much about, but do you have any intuitions about that? It's a great forex experiment, and it's represented in this film Children of Men, where the global population becomes sterile. And it's discussed at length in the writing of philosopher Samuel Scheffler in a book called Death in the Afterlife. And he argues that if it were the case that just, yeah, there's no world at all, let's say, past our generation or even our children's generation, it would SAP enormous amounts of, in fact, perhaps most meaning from our lives. This is actually a point made by John Stewart Mill in the end of the 19th century, where he briefly had this phase of being concerned by future generations, arguing, actually, that means they should be keeping coal in the ground. Which I think wasn't quite the way, you know, maybe made sense given their views at the time of something that their views were incorrect. But he has this beautiful speech to Parliament, and he has this wonderful line, why should we care about posterity? After all, what has posterity ever done for us? And he goes on to argue that actually, like, posterity has done an enormous amount of for us because it gives our projects meaning. Where we build, we plant trees that future generations will sit under. We build cathedrals that are a testament to our time and can be recognized by future generations. When we engage in activities like moral progress and political progress and scientific and technological progress, part of how we have meaning in doing those things is because it's like we're part of this grand relay base where we have taken the baton from previous generations, the things they did badly and the things they did well. And we can hand that baton on to future generations, making the world a little bit better, giving them a little bit of a higher platform to stand on. And yeah, I think this is just a very widely shared view, and I think it kind of resonates with me intuitively too, where if I found out that everything was going to end in 50 years, I wouldn't be like, oh, well, I guess I'll just focus on issues that just concern the near term. Then I would be devastated. Even if that didn't personally affect anyone I knew. Or perhaps it's not 50 years, perhaps it's 200 years. Nonetheless, I would be absolutely gutted. Yeah, it's really interesting because it's not something that I've ever been aware of, but it is an integral piece of how I think about what we're doing here, which is when you think about human progress, you think about all the good things we do and all the bad things we can avoid. The idea that that is all going to be brought up short in a few short years. Right? We just think of like, what's the point of building increasingly wonderful and powerful and benign technology, or creating beautiful art or literature, or just making progress on any front philosophically, beyond just securing your day to day comfort and basic happiness? There's something forward leaning about all of that. It's a check that in some sense never gets cashed or fully cashed, or it just gets continually cashed in the future, if not by our future selves, by others to which we're connected, and the idea that we could ever know that there's just a few more years of this and then it's all over. We all know that personally with respect to our own mortality, but there is something about the openendedness of the whole project for others. Even if you don't have kids, that changes again, I really don't even have my intuitions around this are so unformed. But it really does feel like it changes something about day to day life. If the rug were truly pulled out from under us in a way that we had to acknowledge, leaving everything else intact. Right? I mean, all the buildings are still standing, there's still a concert Saturday night in the same auditorium and you have tickets, but you knew the world was going to end and you were just going to get a collective dial tone at some point in the near future. I don't know to what degree, but it would change everything to some degree. Yeah. So in What We Are the Future, I actually start and end the book on the same note, which is a note of capacitude, where the book is dedicated to my parents, maya, Robin, and their parents, Tarmanina and Frank and Daphne and so on, all the way back, all the history that led us here. And at the very end of the book, in the very last page in the print version, there's this QR code. And if you scan it, it takes you to a little short story I wrote. I'm not claiming it's any good, but I did it because I think it's so hard to visualize the future, especially to visualize how good the future could be. And in the end of that short story, one of the characters reflects on everything that led and it's, you know, this depiction of this. I'm not saying it's the best possible future, but at least a good one. And one of the characters just reflects on just everything that led to her life today. All of the hardship, the ways in the past in which people endured sickness and suffering and rides on the subway packed in with other people who are miserable on their commute and just being deeply thankful for all of that. And that's certainly how I feel. Where the past has given us past generations have given us this mixed bag. They've given us many ways in which the world is broken, many ways in which we still see enormous suffering, but they've also given us wonderful good things, too. I live in this, like, liberal democratic country that is exceptionally unusual by historical standards. I don't need to suffer pain when I engage in a surgery. I don't need to risk for my life from diseases like syphilis or tuberculosis. I can see the kind of just on my phone, I can just see the most wonderful art produced in the entire world at any time. I can see the world. I can go traveling in like India, sri Lanka, ethiopia. Wow. I'm just so grateful for all that has been done. The very least that I can do is try and take that mixed passage package of goods and goods and bads and pass it to the fact plan, ensure that there even are future generations that I can pass it to, but also to make it better. And so that's kind of yeah, you know, normally I played in these, like, logical, rational arguments, but at least in terms of what motivates me on a gut level, that's a significant part of it. So we have something like 500 million to 1.3 billion good years left on this planet if the behavior of our sun isn't any indication. So the challenge here is to not screw it up. And, you know, we we can leave aside the possibility of of reaching for the stars, which we will almost certainly do if we don't screw things up and spreading out across the galaxy. But even on this lowly planet, we have just an extraordinary amount of time to make things better and better. And we're just at the point where we can get our hands around the kinds of things that could ruin everything not of our own making, like asteroid impacts and naturally spawned pandemics. And there's clear ways in which our time is unusual. I think at one point in the book, you discuss how for. Virtually all of the past we were culturally isolated from one another and we may 1 day be again culturally isolated if we expand out across the galaxy. Which is to say that there will be a time in the future where human communities grow far enough apart that what they do has really no implication for what anyone else does outside of their community. And that's and that was that was true of most of human history until, you know, recent centuries. I think there's a more fundamental claim in your book which is that there's good reason to believe that we are at something like a hinge moment in history where the things we do and don't do have an outsized effect over the trajectory of human life in the future. And there are things that have come up briefly so far like value lock in which are related to that which we'll talk about. What do you think about this question of whether or not we're living at a hinge moment and how we can know and how we may or may not be mistaken about that? I think it's clear that we're living at an extremely unusual time. That gives a good argument for thinking that we're living at an unusually impactful time too. And I'm not going to claim we're living at the most unusual time or impactful time in history. Perhaps the next century will be even more influential again. But it's certainly very influential. And the core reason for this is just kind of think about the tree of technology that civilization can kind of go through from at the very first stage. There's flint axes and spear throwers and fire and the wheel. And then nowadays there's maybe it's fusion technology and advanced machine learning and biotechnology that are current developments and at some point there will be future technology that perhaps we've not even imagined yet. Here's the question just relative to both the past and the future how quickly are we moving through that technology to thee? And I think there's very good arguments for thinking that it's much faster we are moving much faster through that technology to the than for almost all of human history and almost all of the future if we don't go extinct in the near term. And I think that's clear. So economists measure this generally with economic growth where at least a significant fraction of economic growth comes from technological progress. And the economy is currently growing far, far faster than it has done for almost all of human history where today the economy doubles every 20 years or so. So it's growing around 2% or so. And you compound that. It gives you a doubling time of something like 25 years or exactly. There are about three yeah, two, 3%. When we were hunter gatherers, growth was very close to zero. As farmers, growth was more like 0.1%. So doubling every few hundred years or so. And so relative to the past we are speeding through technological development much faster than before for most of human history. Before, honestly, I say before the scientific industrial revolution really, it's before about the year 1900 because there was a slower kind of ramp up. But then, secondly, I think we're speeding through that progress much faster than for most of the future too. And the argument for this is that we'll just assume we keep growing at about 2% per year for another 10,000 years. How much growth would there have to be in that case? Well, it turns out, because of the power of compound growth that it would mean that for every atom within reach that is within 10,000 lightyears there would be I think it's 100 billion trillion current civilizations worth of output. And now, you know, maybe that's possible. I think it's extremely unlikely. And so I think at some point with this level of progress of economic and technological progress we would get very close to basically discovering almost everything that is to discover on the order of a few thousand years. However, as you said, there are hundreds of millions of years to go, potentially. And so that means that, as I said, we're moving particularly quickly through the tree of technologies. And every technology comes with its distribution of powers and capabilities and benefits and disadvantages. So if we take the ability to harness energy from the atom, well, that gave us clean energy. It gave bionuclear power. That's an enormous benefit to society. It also gave us nuclear weapons that could threaten wars more destructive than any we've ever seen in history. And I think future technologies such as biotechnology that can allow us to create new viruses or advanced artificial intelligence, that each one of these give us this new distribution of powers. And some of those powers can have extraordinarily long lasting impacts such as the power to destroy civilization or such as the power to lock in a particular narrow ideology for the whole time. And that's why the world today is at such a crucial moment. Yeah. The principle of compounding has other relevance here. When you come to this question of just how influential a moment this might be in history, when you just look at how effects of any kind compound over time, it does cast back upon the present kind of an inordinate responsibility to safeguard the future because we have this enormous potential influence. I mean, just the slightest deflection of trajectory now potentially has massive implications 20, 30, 40 years from now. And it's obviously hard to do the math on these things. It's hard to predict the full set of consequences from any change we make. But if you just look at what it means to steadily diminish the probability of a full scale nuclear war year after year, even just by 2% a year if we could just get that virtuous compounding to happen. Roll that same logic to every other problem you care about. It's very easy to see that getting our act together, however incrementally, now on all these fronts, matters enormously in the not too distant future. Absolutely. I mean, my colleague Toby ordinan wonderful book The Precipice just suggests that, well, what's happening now is that our technology is advancing more rapidly than our wisdom. And it's a beautiful idea. And what we're trying to do is accelerate wisdom. We're trying to just make us a little bit wiser, a little bit more cognizant of. As most people fall into one of two camps. There are the people who are really into technology, the kind of stereotype of the Silicon Valley people and they think technology is great and we just need to keep advancing it. And then there are people who are not really into technology and the people who are very skeptical of Silicon Valley and worry about what technology could be doing to society. And I think I just really want people to inhabit both flames of mind at once. Technology has benefits and costs. Some technologies are just like anesthetic I'm like, oh yeah, that's just really good. Let's have more of these. Like, no downside, unashamedly good technologies. Let's speed them up faster. For technologies that are very dual use or just extremely powerful and we don't know how to handle them. Well, let's then be careful and considerate about how we're developing. These technologies have good norms and regulations in place so that we don't basically just walk backwards into a chasm where we wreak global disaster because we're not even paying attention to the impacts that technologies that are just around the corner will have because of this reason of out of sight and out of mind. Because we're barely thinking about we barely think about like, the end of the next year, certainly not the end or the end of the next political cycle, let alone the decades ahead that could bring about radical changes and how they might impact the centuries ahead. Well, just simply by uttering the phrase political cycle. You have referenced what I consider a major problem here, which is we have a politics that is almost by definition, a machine of short termism, whereas it's taking a long term view is antithetical to the whole project of becoming president and staying president and then raising money for your next campaign. I mean, you're just not to speak specifically of America at this point. I don't know that it's much better than any other country. You're not incentivized to think about the far future and to figure out how to help all those people whose names you will never know and who will never vote for you, much less give you money. It's just not in the cards. Right. And so one thing that has to be a fairly high priority is to figure out how to engineer a system of political and economic incentives such that we more effortlessly take the future into account. Absolutely. And honestly, it's extremely tough. So I've worked on this topic. I have an article on long termist political institutions with another philosopher, Tyler John. And there are some things you can do, such as some countries have an ombudsperson to represent future generations. I'm particularly attracted to the idea of at least an advisory at least as an advisory body, kind of citizens assembly. So a randomly selected group of people from the populace who are explicitly given the task of representing the interests of future generations and then making recommendations about what the government could do differently in order to make the future go better. I think we can also build in just more information so more think tanks or quasi governmental organizations that have the task of really trying to project not just the next few years but the next few decades, even the next few centuries. These are some changes we can make. However, the fundamental problem is that future generations are being impacted without representation, they do not get a vote. And the fundamental problem is we cannot give them a vote. There's no way they can represent themselves. And what do we do about that? Honestly, I think it's going to be very hard to make major progress unless there's some significant cultural change. So if we imagine a world where governments are responding to the views and preferences and ideals of their populace, of the electorate and that electorate cares about the long term well, that's a situation where we can align political incentives with the long term good. And so that's what I think we really need to get to. It's just amazing how hard it is even for normal people who have children to prioritize the next decade. Right? A decade where they have every expectation of being alive and suffering the consequences of our present actions and they have certainly every expectation that their children will be alive in those decades. When you look at a problem like climate change or anything else that is slowish moving and has various features like being in part a tragedy of the commons running counter to any individual's personal economic incentives, et cetera, it all falls by the wayside. Even when you're not talking about hypothetical people who you will never meet. Right. There's something so hard about focusing on the big picture. And so yeah, when you talk about cultural change it's hard to see the thing that would be so sweeping that it would capture more or less everybody all at once. But perhaps that's not even the right goal. Maybe there are only something like 5000 people whose minds would have to change to fundamentally redirect human energy. This is an elitist claim and argument, but I suspect that something like that might also be true. Yeah, I think I'm more optimistic on this in general perhaps than you are. Where in the course of doing the search for what we owe the future I dug a lot into the history of various social and moral movements such as environmentalism, feminism, animal welfare movement and abolition, in particular the abolition of slavery. And one thing I think it's easy to underestimate is just how weird these ideas were in the past, at least in particular for the kind of political elite or at least the people who had power, where you don't have to go that long ago. Let's just focus on the environmentalist movement. I think there's many analogies here where the environment can't represent itself. It has an advantage that you can see the environment, you can relate to it. But 150 years ago concern for the environment was really not on the table. Maybe you had poets, William Wordsworth starting to cultivate love for nature, but there just really wasn't anything like a movement. Whereas now it is just a part of common sense morality, at least in many countries around the world. That is by historical standards, that is amazingly the mark, like amazingly rapid model change. And so at least if we're able to say, look, we're not going to be able to make this change to convince everyone of this long term outlook, to convince everyone of having concern for future generations, we're not going to be able to convince them within the next few years or even two decades. But when we look like 100 years out, maybe we can maybe actually really can affect that sort of sweeping model change where concern for future generations is just on the same level as concern for other people in your community or people of different ethnicity than you. I'm holding out hope. I'm holding out hope that those sirens aren't people coming to arrest you for your crimes. Sorry. This is in New York. Are you recording this podcast while robbing a bank? Look, it's for the greater goods, right? Money can go further, so don't do that. Just in case, take me too literally. Let's go on record we're against bank robbery, at least currently. I'm with that. I won't say anything about value lock in on that point. But let's talk about this issue of value lock in and what you call moments of plasticity and trajectory changes. How do you think about you might want to define some of those terms. But what is the issue and opportunity here? Sure. So at the moment there's a wide diversity of model views in the world and rapid model change. So, you know, the the gay rights movement can build and power the momentum in the you get legalization of gay marriage a few decades later. Clear example of positive model change. And so we're very used to that. We think it's kind of just part of the algae. We wouldn't expect that that might change in the future such that such that model change might come to an end. The idea of value lock in is taking seriously that maybe it will actually maybe model progress will store. And so value lock in is the idea that for some particular ideology or model view or kind of narrow set of ideologies or model views could become globally but dominant and persist for an extremely long time. And I'm worried about that. I think that's a way in which the long term future could go that could just lead to enormous loss of value could make the future dystopia rather than a positive one. And the most it's easiest to see this by starting off with maybe the most extreme case and then kind of thinking about ways you might not be quite that extreme but close. And the most extreme case is just imagine a different history where it wasn't the US and UK and liberal countries that won World War II and instead it was Stalinist USSR, or let's say the Nazis who won. Now, they really aimed ultimately a global domination. They wanted to create a thousand year empire. If that had happened and they had a very narrow and like morally abominable ideology, if they had succeeded, would that have been able to persist forever or at least for an extremely long time? And I think actually the answer is yes. Where ideologies in general and social systems can certainly persist for centuries or even thousands of years. So the major world's religions are thousands of years old. But technology, I think, over time will give us greater and greater power to control the values of the population that lives in the world and the values in the future as well. Where at the point in time where we develop the ability to stop aging such that people's lifespans could last for much, much longer. Well, then a single dictator could it's not confined to the lifespan of their rule is not confined to the lifespan of a single individual 70 years, but instead would be thousands of years or however long that ruler would last. Even more extreme, I think, is the point of time at which the ruling beings are digital rather than biological. And again, this feels like Sci-Fi, but we're talking about I actually think many people I respect greatly think that moment is coming in in a few decades time. But let's just say it's like, you know, plausible within their century or centuries. Well, consider what the environment is like for purola who is a digital being. Well, they don't die. They are in principle, immortal. Software can replicate itself and any piece of machinery would wear out, but the AI systems themselves could persist forever. So one of the main reasons why we get model change over time, namely that people die and have a place by people who have slightly different views that would be undermined, I think in this kind of scenario, other causes of change would be undermined too or taken away. So I think the fact that we have competition between different model ideas because we have this diversity of model ideas, well, if the Nazis had won world War II if they had established a world government. Again, I'm not claiming this is likely or possible, but imagine the counterfactual history. Well, then we would lose out on that competition of ideas. There wouldn't be that pressure for model ideas to change, and then finally it's just potentially a changing environment. Like upsets happen, civilizations fall apart and so on. But I think technology in the future could allow for greater and greater stability. So again, I think AI is particularly worrying here, where, again, we're imagining the leaders of the Nazis controlling the world. Okay, well, one way in which dictatorships end is in selection, whether that's by the army or by the people. If your army is automated, if you have kind of robots policing the streets, then that dynamic would end similarly with your police force. And again, all of this seems like Sci-Fi, but I think we should be thinking about it. We should be taking it seriously because it really could come sooner than we think. And the technologies we have today would have looked like wild Sci-Fi just a century ago. Maybe we'll close out with a conversation about AI, because I share your concern here, and I share your interest in elucidating the bad intuitions that make this not a concern for so many other people. So let's get there in a second. But remind me, what is the lock in paradox that you talk about in the book? Sure. So the lock in paradox, it's like the liberal paradox of tolerance. But I push in the book that we don't want to lock in any particular values right now because probably all of the values we're used to are abominable. I think we're like Plato and Aristotle arguing about the good life, and we've not realized the fact that we all own slaves is, you know, maybe morally problematic. So I think that there's enormous amount of model progress yet to come, and we want to ensure that we guarantee that progress. And so even if I think motivation of thinking, oh, well, it's 21st, early 21st century western liberal values, that's the best thing, and we should just ensure they happen forever, I'm like, no, we need progress. The lock in paradox, however, is that if we wanted to create a world where we do get a sustained period of reflection and model progress, that does mean we'll need some restraints. So we might well need to lock in certain ideas like commitment to free debate, commitment to tolerance of opposing moral views, restrictions on ways of gaining power that aren't via making good arguments and moving people over to your side, kind of in the same way that, like, you know, the US. Constitution, this aspirationally is trying to bring about this liberal society where many different world views can coexist and where you can make model progress. In order to have that and not fall into a dictatorial dictatorship, you needed to have these restraints on any individual's power. And so I think we may well need something like that for the whole world, where we stop any particular ideology or just set of people from gaining too much power such that they can just control the world, so that we can just have continued deflection, insight, empathy and moral progress. Yeah, it's tempting to try to formulate the minimum algorithmic statement of this, which is something that allows for the kind of incrementalism you've just sketched out and the error correction exactly. That I think is necessary for any progress, including ethical progress, but which locks in the methodology by which one would safeguard the principle of error correction and exactly sensitivity to the open endedness of the exploration in ethical space. Right. I mean, like, you know, I think there's probably whether you define it as consequentialist or not, I think it's probably less important. I mean, the consequentialism, as we know, has its its wrinkles. But I think there's an almost axiomatic claim about the primacy of safeguarding the well being of conscious creatures at the bottom of, I think, any sane moral enterprise right now. It's not how you think about wellbeing, how you aspire to measure it or quantify it, how you imagine aggregating these quantities. There are many devils in all those details. But the basic claim that you have to, at bottom, care about the happiness and suffering of conscious creatures and marry that to a truly open ended conception of perpetually refined and refineable conception of what well being is, all things considered. And that's where all the discussion remains to be done. I think those are the bootstraps in some form that we have to pull ourselves up by. Yeah. So it is a very notable fact that I think basically all plausible model views that are on the table see well being as one part of the good. Perhaps they think other things are good too art flourishing, natural environment and so on. But at least happiness, broadly construed, flourishing, life, avoidance of suffering, those are good things. Just not to be too pedantic here, but in my brain, all of that collapses to just a fuller understanding of what wellbeing is. I don't think any reasonable definition of wellbeing would exclude the things you just mentioned. And the cash value of the things you just mentioned has to be, at some level, how they impact the actual or potential experiences of conscious creatures. This is an argument I've made somewhere. If you're going to tell me you've got something locked in a box that is really important, it's really valuable, it's important that we consider its faith in everything we do. But this thing in the box cannot will not affect the experience of any conscious creature now or in the future. Right. Well, then I just think that's a contradiction. What we mean by value is something that could be actually or potentially valued by someone somewhere great. So I think we differ a little bit on this where I also think my best guess is that value is just a property of conscious experiences and art and knowledge and the natural environment are all good things insofar as the impact, the well being of conscious experiences. But that's not something I would want to bake in. I'm not so certain in it. There are other views where the satisfaction of carefully considered preferences is of positive value, even if that doesn't go via the change in any conscious experience. And other people do have the view that, again, that's a phrase I'm actually not familiar with. When I hear you say satisfaction of anything, including preferences, aren't we talking about conscious experience, actual or potential? So on this view it's no. So suppose that Avastotle wanted to be famous and he wasn't very famous during his time. I'm actually not sure. Let's say that he was only much less famous than he has now. Does the fact that we are talking about Aristotle now increasing his fame, does that increase his well being and it's obviously not impactful? I'm prepared to answer that question. I'm sure you're prepared to say no and honestly, and my best guess view is completely agreeing with you that anything we do to talk about Aristotle now we could say he smells and we hate him, doesn't change his well being at all. However, that's not true. Other people disagree and I think other smart people disagree. And so I certainly wouldn't want to have wouldn't want to say, look, we figured that out. I would want to say, look, now we've got plenty of time to debate this. I think I'm going to win the debate. Maybe the other person thinks they aren't going to win the debate, but we've got all the time in the world to really try and figure this out. And I would want to be open to the possibility that I'm badly wrong. I guess we are kind of badly wrong on this. Well, that's interesting. I would love to debate that. So maybe as a sidebar, you and I can figure out who and when and where. Absolutely. Let's talk about AI, because it is in some sense the apotheosis of many of these concerns. And I agree that should anything like a malevolent AGI be built or be put in the service of malevolent people, the prospect of value lock in and orwellian totalitarianism, it just goes way, way up. And that's worth worrying about, whatever you think about the importance of future generations. But there are several stumbling blocks on the path to taking these concerns about AI seriously. The first is, and this really is the first knee jerk reaction of people in the field who don't take it seriously, it's the claim that we're nowhere near doing this, that our language models are still pretty dumb even though they can produce some interesting texts. At this point, there's certainly no concern that they could, there could be anything like an intelligence explosion in any of the machine learning algorithms we're currently running. Alpha Zero, for all of its amazing work, is still not going to get away from us, and it's hard to envision what could allow it to. I know that there are people on our side of this debate who have given a kind of kind of probability distribution over over the future, you know, giving it, you know, 10% chance it might happen in 20 years and a 50% chance it'll happen within 50 years, etc. But in my mind there is. There's just there's no need to even pretend to know when this is going to happen. The only thing you need to acknowledge is that if not much needs to be true to make it guaranteed to happen. There are really two assumptions one needs to make. One assumption is we will continue to make progress in building intelligent machines at whatever rate unless something terrible happens, right? This brings us back to the collapse of civilization. The only thing that would cause us to stop making progress in building intelligent machines, given how valuable intelligence is, is something truly awful that makes it renders some generation of future humans just unable to improve hardware and software. So there's that. Barring catastrophe, we're going to continue to make progress. And then the only other assumption you need is that intelligence is substrate independent, right? That it doesn't require the wet wear of biological brain. It can be instantiated in silico. And we already know that's true given the piecemeal AI we've already built. And we already know that you can build a calculator that's better than any human brain calculator and you can do that in silicon. And there's just no reason to think that the input output properties of a complex information processing system are magically transformed the moment you make that system out of meat. And so again, given any rate of progress and given the assumption of substrate independence, eventually and again, the time horizon can be left totally unspecified. Five years or 500 years, eventually we will be in the presence of intelligent machines that are far more intelligent and competent and powerful than we are. And the only other point of confusion that I've detected here again and again and again, which can be easily left to one side, is the question of consciousness will these machines be sentient? And that really is a red herring from my point of view. It's not a red herring ethically. It's incredibly important ethically because if they are conscious, well, then we can have a conversation about whether they're ethically suddenly more important than we are or at least our equals and whether we're creating machines that can suffer, et cetera, for creating simulated worlds that are essentially hell realms for sentient algorithms or that would be a terrible thing to do. So yes, it's all very interesting to consider, but assuming that we can't currently know and we may 1 day never. Know, even in the presence of machines that say they're conscious and that pass the Turing test with flying colors, we may still be uncertain as to whether or not they're conscious. Whether or not they're conscious is the question that is totally orthogonal to the question of what it will be like to be in the presence of machines that are that intelligent. Right. I think you can dissociate, or very likely you can dissociate consciousness and intelligence. Yes, it may be the case that the lights of consciousness magically come on once you get a sufficient degree of complexity and intelligence on board. That may just be a fact of our world. And we certainly have reason to expect that consciousness arrives far sooner than that. When you look around at animals who we deem conscious, who are far less intelligent than we are. So I do think they're just separable questions. But the question of intelligence is really straightforward. We're just talking about conscious or not. We're talking about machines that can engage in goal oriented behavior and learning in ways that are increasingly powerful and ultimately achieve a power that far exceeds our own. Given that it seems virtually inevitable, given these two measly assumptions, again, any progress and substrate independence for intelligence, we have to acknowledge that we or our children or our grandchildren or some generation of of human beings stand a very good chance of finding themselves in relationship to intelligences that are far more powerful than they are. And that's an amazing situation to contemplate. And I'll just remind people of Stuart Russell's analogy here, which somehow, at least in my experience, changes people's intuitions on his account. It's like we're in the following situation and we just got a a message from some distant point in the galaxy which reads, people of Earth, we will arrive on your planet in 50 or 75 or 100 years. Get ready. Right. You know, you don't know when this is going to happen, but you know it's going to happen. And that statement of looming relationship delivered in that form would be quite a bit more arresting than the prospect of continued progress in AI. And I would argue that it shouldn't be. They're essentially the same case. Yeah, I just think that flaming is excellent. Another flaming is if you're chimpanzees and you see this other species, homo sapiens, that are perhaps less powerful than you to begin with, but they seem to be getting rapidly increasing in their power, you'd at least be paying attention to that. And yeah, you remind me a little of the second book of the sleeve body problem, where the premise, I hope it's okay to say, is aliens will come. And I think it's in a thousand years time. And they have far more, greater power than civilization on Earth does. But the entire world just unites to take seriously that threat and work against it. And so, essentially, I completely agree with you that the precise timelines are just not very important compared to just noting if and well, not if, but basically, when it happens that we have AI systems that can do everything that a human being can do except better, that will be one of the most important moments in all of history. Plausibly and well, we don't know exactly when it will come, but uncertainty comes, but uncertainty counts both ways. It could be hundreds of years and it could be, it could be soon for all we know, but certainly relative to the tiny amount of time we're thinking about it. Well, we should be spending more, but I'll actually just comment on the timelines as well, where there's a recent survey just came out last week in fact, of just as many leading machine learning researchers as possible. I'm not sure the sample size, but if it's like the last survey, it'll be in the hundreds. And they asked, well, at what point in time will you expect, do you expect a 50 50 chance of developing human level machine intelligence, that is, AI systems that are as good or better human beings, all tasks essentially that humans can do, and they say 37 years. So that's in my lifetime I will be entering my retirement for the 50 50 chance of advanced AI. When I talk to people who are really trying to dig into this, they often have shorter timelines than that. They often think that it's 50 50 within more like 20 years and substantial probability on shorter timelines. I tend to be on the more skeptical end of that. But basically within any of this range concern about AI, it's not merely like, oh, we should be thinking about something that happens in 200 years because maybe that will impact 2000 years. It's like, no, we should be thinking about something that has a chance of catastrophe. We're on the same survey. The probability that those machine learning researchers, that's people who are building these things, who you think would be incentivized to say what they're doing is completely safe, the probability of an extremely bad outcome, as bad as human extinction or worse, the typical probability was 5% of that. So put those numbers together and you have 2.5% chance of dying or being disempowered by AI. According to machine learning researchers not cherry pecked for being particularly concerned about this, you have a 2.5% chance of dying or being disempowered by artificial intelligence in your lifetime. That's more than your chance of dying in a car crash. And we think a lot about dying in car crashes and take actions to avoid them. There's like a huge industry, a huge regulatory system so that people do not die in carcasses. What's the amount of attention on risks from AI? Well, it's growing. Thankfully it's growing and people are taking it really seriously and I expect that to continue into the future. But it's still very small. It still means that smart, morally motivated people can make a really transformative difference in the field by getting involved, working on the technical side of things to ensure that AI systems are safe and honest and to also work on the governance side of things to ensure that we as a society developing this in a responsible way. Perhaps digging into AI is not a monolith. There are different sorts of AI technology, some of which are more risky than others, and ensuring that the safety enhancing parts of AI come earlier, the more dangerous parts come later. This really is something that people can be contributing now. I think they are. I think it's hard. I'm not claiming that this is like it's clear cut what to do. There are the questions over like, how much focus we can make, but we can at least find yeah, I think the crucial piece there. Again, this is courtesy of Stuart Russell, who is my vote for one of the wisest people to listen to on this topic, just to make the the safety conversation integral to the conversation about developing the technology in the first place. I mean, he he asked us to imagine a world where how perverse it would be if engineers who were designing bridges thought about bridge safety only as an afterthought and under great duress. Right. So there's the question about building bridges, all of the resources put toward that end, but then only as an afterthought. Do engineers have conversations about what they call the not falling down problem with respect to bridges. Right? No. It's completely insane to conceive of the project of building bridges as being separable from the project of building bridges that don't fall down. Likewise, it should be completely insane to think about the prospect of building AGI without grappling with the problem of alignment and related matters. In defense of more near term concern here, many people have mined the history here and found these great anecdotes that reveal how bad we are at predicting technological progress. I forget the details here, but I think it was a New York Times or some esteemed US paper that confidently published an editorial. I think it was just something like two months before the Wright brothers conquered flight. You know, confidently predicting that that human beings will never fly or it will take millions of years to to engineer because it took evolution millions of years to engineer the bird's wing. It would likewise take us millions of years to fly. And then two months later, we've got people flying. And I think there's one anecdote that you have in your book that I hadn't heard, but the the famous Physiologist JBS. Holdain in 1927 predicted this one. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. What what was that reference? Oh, yeah. Well, so, yeah, one of the great scientists of his time, evolutionary biologist, and had some remarkable essays on the future and predicting future events and how large civilization can get. And he considered the question will there ever be an attorney that to the moon? And he said, oh, yeah, probably in 8 million years. And that was yeah. Did you say 1927? Yeah. Yeah. So that shows you like people like to make fun of people in the past making these bold scientific predictions about technology, such as the early computer pioneers at the I think it was the Dartmouth conference saying, oh, yeah, we'll build human level artificial intelligence in about six months or so. And people mock that and say, oh, that's so absurd. But what they forget is that there are just as many people on the other side making absurd claims about how long technology will take. In fact, technology look, things are hard to predict. Technology can come much later than you might expect. It can also come much sooner. And in the face of an uncertain future, we have to be preparing for the nearterm scenarios as well as the longterm scenarios. Yeah. And the thing we have to get straight in the meantime is that the incentives are currently not appropriate for wisdom and circumspection here. I mean, it's just we have something like an arms race condition both with respect to private efforts and rival governments, one must imagine. Right? We haven't fused our moral horizons with the Chinese and the Israelis and anyone else who might be doing this work and gotten everyone to agree just how careful we need to be in the final yards of this adventure as we approach the end zone. And it does seem patently obvious that an arms race is not optimal for taking safety concerns seriously. It's not what we want. And the key issue is just how fast do things go? So supposing the development of artificial general intelligence. Suppose that's 100 years away or 200 years away, then it seems more likely to me that safety around AI will look like safety around other technologies. So you mentioned flight. In the early days of flight, a lot of planes crashed, a lot of people died. Over time, we learned primarily by tile and error what systems make flight safer. And now very few people die of plane crashes compared to other modes of death, especially in more developed countries. But we could learn by trial and error because a single plane crash would be a tragedy for the people involved and for their families, but it wouldn't destroy the whole world. And if AI development goes slowly, then I think I would expect we will learn by that same kind of process of trial and error and gradual improvement that there are arguments for thinking that maybe it will go fast. In fact, leading economic models, if you assume that there is a point at which you get full substitutability between human labor and artificial labor, like as AI in particular at the process of developing more advanced AI systems, then you get very fast growth indeed. And if things are moving that quickly while this slow, incremental process of trial and error that humans we as a society normally use to mitigate the risks of new technology. That process is substantially disempowered and I think that increases the risks greatly. And again, it's something that I really think that prospect of very rapid growth is at least something that should be very rapid. Progress should at least be on the table where again this survey that just came out, if you ask leading machine learning researchers so Al Caveat, I don't think they're really the people that one should think of as experts here, but they're still kind of relevant people to consider. They think it's about even that that will happen, like about 50 50 chance that there will be something akin to what is known as the intelligence explosion. That doesn't necessarily mean the kind of classic, it's two days where we move them, no advanced AI at all to AI that's more powerful than all the rest of the world combined. Perhaps it occurs over the course of years or even like a small number of decades, but nonetheless, if things are moving a lot faster than we're used to, I think that increases the risks greatly. Well, it seems like things are already moving much faster than we're used to. It's hard to see where we get off this ride because the pace of change is noticeably different. And I'm not a full Kurtz Wileyan here, but it does seem like his claim about accelerating technological change is fairly palpable. Now, I guess there are sectors where virtually nothing is happening or improving. I mean, that is also true, but when you're talking about information technology and what it does to politics and culture, the recent years have been kind of a blizzard of change and it's hard to know where the break is to pull. Yeah, and people should just take a look at the recent developments in machine learning where they're not very famous yet, but they will be soon. And it's truly remarkable what's happening. I mean, obviously it's still far away from human level artificial intelligence. I'm not claiming it's not, but when forecasts have been done again of people working in the area of what sort of progress we expect to make, things are moving faster even than the kind of the forecast of people who thought it was going to be moving fast. So in particular recent they're called language models. It's where they just get trained on enormous amounts of enormous corpuses of human text. But one got trained to solve do math proofs essentially at about college level, kind of easy college level. And the innovation behind this model was very small indeed. They actually just cleaned up the data so that it really could lead formula online, whether that was a problem beforehand and it just blew everyone's predictions out of the water. And so now you have this model where you say, can't you give it a mathematical problem? Kind of early college level prove that so and so or what's the answer to this question of social or proof? And it will do it elite with 50% accuracy. And that was something that people weren't expecting for years. If you look at, like, other language models as well, I'll give an Anecdote. So one of my responsibilities for the university is marking undergraduate exams. And so I asked GPT free, not even the recent, not even the most advanced language model nowadays, but when you can get public access to I was curious, how good is GPT-3, this language model, compared to Oxford undergraduates at Philosophy who studied philosophy for three years? And so I got it to answer these questions, like some of the questions that were the students most commonly answered. That's great. And it passed. It was not terribly good. It was in the kind of bottom 10% of students, but not the bottom 2% of students. I think if I had given the essays to a different examiner, I don't think that examiner would have thought, oh, there's something really odd here. This is not a human lighting it. They would have just marked it and thought, like, not a very good student. A student that's good in some ways has good structure. It really knows the essay form that sometimes gets, like, a little bit derailed by arguments that aren't actually relevant or something. That's what it would have thought, but would not have thought, oh, this is clearly nonsense. This is an AI or something. And that's pretty striking. We did not have anything close to that just a few years ago. And so I don't know anyone who's like this. You know, I think it's fine to be like an enormous AI skeptic and think that AGI is very far away. You know, maybe that view is correct. Like I say, there's an enormous amount of uncertainty. But at least take seriously, like, this is like a fast moving area of technology. Yeah. And obviously there are many interesting and consequential questions that arise well short of AGI. I mean, just on this front, I mean, what will be the experience of all of us collectively to be in the presence of AI that passes the Turing Test? Right? It does not have to be comprehensive AGI. It doesn't have to be empowered to do things out in the world. But just when Siri or Alexa become indistinguishable from people at the level of their conversation and have access to the totality of human knowledge, when does Siri on your phone become less like a glitchy assistant and more like an oracle? That could be fairly near term, even with blind spots and something that disqualifies her as proper AI. I think the turning test will fall for most intents and purposes. For some people, the turning test has already fallen. We just have this kind of laughable case of the Moying, the Google engineer, who thought that their current language model was sentient. That was upset. Yeah. I mean, there was no reason to believe that, but I would be very surprised if it took more than a decade for the Turing Test to fall for something like a chatbot. Yeah. I'm actually curious about why there haven't been attempts at the Turing Test using language models. My thought is that they actually would have a pretty good chance of passing it, so I'm unsure than that. But one thing you mention is yeah. This idea of, like, oh, maybe rather than siri, you have this incredibly advanced personal assistance, kind of like an article. I just want to emphasize, this is one of the examples where I talk about accelerating the kind of safer parts of AI and leaving, maybe slowing down or not investing much in the more dangerous parts, where this idea of kind of oracle AI is just something that is it's not an agent trying to pursue goals in the world. Instead, it's just this input output function. You put in text. It outputs text. And it is like, the most helpful, extraordinarily smart, and knowledgeable person that you've ever met. That's a technology we want to have earlier rather than later, because that could help us with the scariest issues around alignment. That can help us yeah. That can help us align AI. That is more like a kind of agent acting in the world. And some of the leading AI labs are taking exactly that approach, and I think that's the right way to go. Well, will. It's always fascinating. It was a joy. Yes. Thank you, sir. So, to be continued. Best of luck with the book. Again, that is what we owe the future, and we have by no means covered all of his contents. And until next time, Will, thanks for being here. Thanks so much, Sam./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am back with David White. David, thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure. So we already have a series of your poetry in the Waking Up app, which people have absolutely loved, and now you are coming back with yet more work, which is derived from your book constellations, the Soulless Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, which is a book I absolutely love. You've given us readings from that book and some marginalia, and these are just fantastic pieces of audio. So what I wanted to do here is have a conversation around a few of them. I thought we would drop in your sections on friendship, honesty, ambition and alone, and we could just have a brief conversation about each. But perhaps before we jump in, what was your inspiration for this book? Because it's a great formula for you as a student of the power of language to just drill down on the significance of specific words here. It's the perfect use of your talents as a poet to bring us this kind of prose. Lovely. You're very kind. I think there were two forms of insight. In a way. I was in Paris, actually, and I was speaking to my assistant on the phone. My colleague Julie Querying has been with me for years and she was quite excited that I had been invited to write a little philosophical piece for the Observer Magazine in England. And the observer magazine goes out to millions of people on Sunday morning. So it was a lovely way of getting a lot of listening ears to my work. But then she sounded a little hesitant and I said, what's the hesitancy? She said, It can't be any longer than 300 words. And I said to myself, I'm half Irish, so half English. The Irish side of me said, it's hardly time to take your breath, never mind accomplish anything that would give anyone any insight unless you're actually writing poetry. And so I can't remember how we finished the phone call, but I remember clicking it off quite firmly, as if to say, well, I don't think I'm going to do that. Anyway, I walked around Paris all day and then I ended up in a restaurant by myself. And I sat down and I said to myself, what if you could write what you needed to write in 300 words? The other specification was that it had to be a single word title, which I didn't mind. I said, what would you write about? I remember asking the waiter if he had any stationery, and they did, actually, being French. So he brought out some stationery and I started writing and I wrote at the top of the page, Regret. And I realized immediately how orphaned that word was and how unfashionable it had become, and how I was constantly meeting people who said they had no regrets, and how I was constantly asking myself, where had they been all their life if they had no regrets? But that really put me back into a stream of experience that I had all my life around words, where I always felt the adult world was using words in a way that were abstracted away from the physical experience of what the word meant. When you think of a child, when they first hear the word door, it's not an abstract word that exists separate from their own bodies. In that word is the actual physical experience of the door itself. And I always felt this very, very strongly in my growing I grew up in a linguistic frontier, actually, between Ireland and the north of England. And the north of England is very different than the received identity that we think of when we think of Downton Abbey or we think of J Austin. That's southern England. It's very hierarchical, it's very distant socially, and the north of England actually has more of a Scandinavian influence from the Viking settlements that were there. It's very egalitarian and people are really straight with you, as they say in Yorkshire. They say nothing until they say everything about you and your flaws and how you can put yourself right. So I had that on one side of the house with these Yorkshire earthy vowel sounds. Very short sentences. If a story is told, it's told exactly the same. My Uncle Tom would say to my father, Jim, tell that story about when you were driving up that hill towards Scarborough. You got out at the top, you went into the pub. This fellow said to you, and you said back to him, and my dad would say, well, we were driving up this hill. We stopped at the top of the hill. We went in the pub. The fellow said to me and I said, and you were actually, it was a kind of a ritual reinvestigation of what had happened, but you didn't expect it to be any different. On the other side of the house was this very different lyrical use of language. It was all holy. Saint Mary and Joseph tonight. The holy mortal shame of it. And all the saints in heaven, and a story was never told the same way. I never heard my mother tell the same story. I had about five parallel childhoods for her. So I started to understand quite early that you could inhabit language in very, very different ways and that language could live in your body in a way in which it could open up different worlds to you. And later on, I heard or I read the great philosopher Wittgenstein say, you cannot enter any world for which you do not have the language. You cannot enter any world for which you do not have the language. And so I felt like I was privileged living at this frontier and I could morph my accent. I still do, actually. It's quite disturbing to to Irish people when when I morph into Irish, the Irish accent from my mother. But it's entirely natural. Yes. And so I have three accents, which is a kind of four. I received English from college, my Yorkshire dialect, which is a full dialect, actually, and then Irish, the Irish accent, and then my present kind of Americanized Yorkshire Irish pronunciation. I've always been interested in language and the way that people learn words. Actually, if you learn the word daw when you're learning French now, as an adult, you learn it as an abstract. You see the English word on one side, you see the French word on the other, la porte. And you don't have it in your physical body. Well, many of us as adults learn words, you know, like regret, like alone in its deeper sense, you know, as abstracts. So the attempt of this book was to go back to the physical and etymological root of the word. And the etymology of a word, of course, is its root in the past, how it was first used and what it meant when it was first physically expressed, almost as a surprise in the society or the language. And so I felt there was tremendous solace in the way that words could be used from their original meaning, that regret could actually be a kind of faculty for living more positively into the future. Actually, with honest, deep regret, you might treat a grandson with more patience and time than you did your own son, whose boyhood you might have missed because of your own involvement in your growing life. So regret as a frontier with the future, and it's really actually quite remarkable to actually choose things out in your life that you would regret deeply if you were ever a bully at school, even for just a moment, to choose out that moment and to see how it still lives in your body. And it almost always puts you in a sphere of generosity towards anyone who is being bullied around you at the moment. And in many ways, you start to look to redeem yourself from that moment. So I found it very, very useful indeed to actually think of moments in my life that I deeply regret and use them as a pair of eyes and ears for paying attention to my future. Well, that's beautiful. We've put your work in the practice section of waking up instead of the theory section. And this confuses a few people because there's often an assumption that meditation practice requires silence, or mostly silence, or the spoken instruction is meant to merely introduce the next chapter of silence. But that really isn't the case, or at least it isn't the case with what I would consider to be real meditation. And there's certainly a relationship between the power of words and the power of silence. What I've recommended that people do is simply listen to your readings in in the same frame of mind in which they would meditate and just let your thoughts replace their own, which is what happens whenever we read or listen to someone read. But it is possible to recognize the nature of mind just as clearly while contemplating someone else's thoughts. So it's really in that spirit that we offer these new readings in the app. Well, I think you said that beautifully, because the object in meditation and all of our contemplative disciplines is silence. But really that silence is in order for you to perceive something other than yourself or what you've arranged as yourself, to actually perceive this frontier between what you call a self and what you call other than yourself, whether that's a person or a landscape. So one of the greatest arts of poetry is actually to create silence through attentive speech. Speech that say something in such a way that it appears as a third frontier between you and the world and invites you into a deeper and more generous sense of your own identity and the identity of the world. So I think poetry is the verbal art form by which we can actually create silence. So with that as preamble, let's launch into the first chapter here on friendship and then we'll come back to discuss it. Friendship friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us to see ourselves through another's eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses, as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs when we are under the strange illusion that we do not need them. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs when we are under the strange illusion that we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die without tolerance and mercy. All friendships die in the course of the years. A close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves. To remain friends, we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them not through critique but through addressing the better part of them the leading creative edge of their incarnation thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves. Friendship is the great hidden transmuter of all relationships. It can transform a troubled marriage, make honey a professional rivalry make sense of heartbreak and unrequited love and become the newly discovered ground for a mature parent child relationship. The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life. A diminishing, circular friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble, of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most ordinary existence. Friendship transcends disappearance. An enduring friendship goes on after death the exchange only transmuted by absence the relationship advancing and maturing in a silent, internal, conversational way even after one half of the bond is passed on. But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the self nor of the other. The ultimate touchstone of friendship is witness the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another to have walked with them and to have believed in them and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span on a journey impossible to accomplish alone. But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the self nor of the other. The ultimate touchstone of friendship is witness the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another to have walked with them and to have believed in them and sometimes just to have accompanied them. For however brief a span on a journey impossible to accomplish alone. Friendship was begun after waking from a very, very realistic dream a dream in which I'd been with a very, very close friend a friend who had passed away. But in the dream he was alive again with all of the joy of discovering he was actually still alive. And we were in a car and it was an opentop car and we were driving across the Golden Gate Bridge actually with the sun going down on one side, on the moon on the other. And we had our arms around each other's shoulders and we were laughing and telling jokes. And we were also laughing about all the ways that we had consciously or unconsciously insulted and hurt each other over the years and how we'd been good enough to forgive each other. And waking out of that dream and the joy of that dream and the forgiveness of that dream brought me to understand something of the essence of what it means to be a witness and a forgiving witness at that, for a good friend. So friendship, I love this contemplation on friendship. We're recording this at what one hopes is the tail end of a global pandemic where many of us have spent a year being less social than perhaps we've ever been in our lives. So I feel keenly the importance of friendship and how imperfectly I have maintained my own in this context. And so just one point you make here about the nature of friendship is that it does function by different dynamics than any other relationship. The companionship is, as you put it to our vulnerabilities, more than our triumphs. The face of our lives that we show to a friend is the face that we often busily conceal in every other social encounter. Friendship is characterized real friendship is characterized by a total absence of pretense. And that's an interesting boundary to discover. And I guess we could just take a few moments to reflect on what demarcates friendship from other forms of acquaintance with people. When does someone become a friend and how do you know that has actually been accomplished? Yes, Montana, the great French essayist who really began the form for us actually, he said that real friendship is very, very rare partly because it comes to us in the same way that a good marriage comes to us, which is also very, very rare. And a good marriage and a good friendship is a product of our willingness to be fully vulnerable but also to find the right person with whom to be fully vulnerable and in marriage and in friendship. And you can have a kind of friendship in marriage and you can have a form of marriage in friendship, actually a kind of commitment. Over the years, you find that the relationship advances along the axis of your mutual vulnerability rather than along the sense of trying to impress through your powers and your invulnerability. And so the lovely thing about friendship is that it's constantly asking us to be forgiving both of the mistakes we make ourselves in the friendship. You will always say the wrong thing at the wrong time to your friend over the years partly on purpose because you've meant to tell them you couldn't quite do it. But then out it comes one day and often they might go away for a while and to lick their wounds. But if the friendship is still alive, if it is a friendship of years by definition they have come back to you and they have forgiven you and you have them to forgive yourself and you have to find a way to actually include it in the conversation at the same time. So it's lovely the way that a long friendship is based on mutual forgiveness of one's sins towards each other. And the other lovely thing about friendship is that a good friend looks at the best in you and remembers what they were first drawn by and what they were first impressed by and knows you in your worst when you're not living up to your possibilities and encourages you in your very, very best. There's nothing as good for your own sanity when you're going through your own difficulties. And especially people who start to hate themselves for various reasons. To have a good friend who sees you through different eyes, who sees the leading edge of your maturation, in a way and through their eyes, brings your eyes to rest on it too. So I've had a number of really close male friends through my life. I'm just at the stage in my life where I now have really good female friends too. But I have a good circle of half a dozen friends around the world, most of whom I spend time either in the mountains or talking over literary and philosophical or both matters. And I have had two incredibly close friends, one who's passed away with whom I strangely still have a very, very powerful relationship. I began this little disquisition talking about Montana who lived in the 16 hundreds and late 1005 hundreds, and he lost his close friend Etienda La Boetti when they were both quite young. But in many ways he kept up an intellectual and philosophical and almost physical relationship with him after his death. And this is one of the remarkable things about true friendship is that it does transcend disappearance. It transcends mortality and death. I often think that you have as many conversations with the person you have lost who is close to you after they've gone as you had before they passed away. And I often think in the case of John O'Donohue, who was a friend who I lost, that I actually have the possibility of winning arguments now that I could while he was still alive because I can always have the last word and shut off the dialogue. But there is always a sense, actually in a really long and really loyal friendship of mortality, actually, that one of you will be gone before the other. And there's a strange way, especially with John, who was also a speaker, a remarkable speaker. He was from the west of Ireland. He was fluent in philosophical German. He was fluent in Irish. He had a bird of paradise vocabulary. I often think that I begin a sentence and then he ends it while I'm on stage or vice versa. I'll remember something he said and begin with that thought and then carry it on myself. So there's this amazing invisible and very physical sense of inheritance from a heartfelt and powerful friendship. That's beautiful. It's also interesting the way friendship reveals the boundaries of the self. And, for instance, one often finds it difficult to be charitable to oneself. And so much of our self talk is, frankly, poisonous. And it's never the sort of thing we would say to a friend. And one way of correcting for this is to just consciously imagine, you know, how you would treat your friend in this circumstance where you are currently lacerating yourself with self judgment and a door to compassion swings open effortlessly once you put the lens of friendship over it, rather than your default relationship to yourself and your failings. That's very well said. And it's really interesting to extend that thought to how you speak to yourself. It's interesting that most of the dialogue we have with ourselves in the mirror is quite negative. If you spoke to others the way you spoke to yourself in the mirror, you would never have another friend in your life clear your calendar rather quickly. Exactly. Yeah. So it's really interesting. We often think of meditation as being purely silence in order to make a friendship with this deeper sense of self and deeper sense of the world. But it's really interesting to think that you could actually practice a conversation with yourself that helped you to mature and helped in your own maturation that you could practice holding a fruitful conversation with yourself. Yeah, I think there was actually one French philosopher who defined a philosopher as someone who could stand on a railway station platform waiting for the train for an hour and keep himself fully engaged with his own thoughts. Well, the only way you could do that is if it was leading towards larger and larger understandings. So to ask yourself the beautiful question and to be able to follow those questions and to extend what we recognize as self compassion and to find a verbal way, actually, which is, I think, maybe as good a definition of poetry as any, the art of overhearing yourself. Say things you didn't know you knew that you, perhaps to begin with, were actually afraid to want to know and that you allow yourself to understand. So friendship with another always introduces us to friendship with the deeper underlying phenomena beneath the surface self, which is exactly what your whole app is trying to invite people into, I think. Well, crossing the boundary into what one is willing to let one's self understand is a great segue into our next topic, which is honesty. Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, with the world, or with ourselves. The fear of loss in one form or another is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties. The fear of loss in one form or another is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties. All of us are afraid of loss in all its forms. All of us at times are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance and all it is therefore are one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth. The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand intrepidation at this door as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior equal to all circumstances we would like to become. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the south. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown, unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life. Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is, in effect, to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story. We do not know where we are in that story. We do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame. In the end. Honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay. Honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all. The place where we actually dwell. The living, breathing frontier where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss. So you make the point that honesty is often a matter of admitting how little we know rather than merely landing again and again upon further truths. That's interesting. How do you think of honesty as a sharing so much territory with a confession of ignorance? Well, you know, just by seeing the way the word honesty is used as a kind of weapon in everyday conversation. When someone says, can I be honest with you? You should always say no because they have a piece of ammunition which they want to fire at you. And to my mind, the invitation to knowledge needs to be more of an invitation. So I think the pivotal line in the whole essay is honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth. And it's that axis of vulnerability. Again, honesty is grounded in humility. So this is where if you want someone to be honest with you, you want it in the context of friendship. I always remember a good Irish friend of mine saying when I was starting to explain something that I'd done that had been misinterpreted. And I got halfway through the sentence, I remember we were on a mountain in the barren of North Clare, and he turned around and he said, never explain. He said he said, your enemies won't believe you and your friends don't need it. It was the most beautiful thing to say and the most inviting thing. And that led me into a deeper dialogue with myself. So the other pivotal sentence in the essay is honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. And then it's followed by to become honest is an effect, to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. I have worked a lot in the corporate world, and I always say that real conversations always happen along this axis of vulnerability, even in the most powerful hierarchies in the business world. And the foundational axis of vulnerability in the hierarchy of a workplace is my as a leader simply admitting that I do not have all the answers. I've only got one pair of eyes, one pair of ears. I've only got one imagination and one intellect. But in conversation with you, in making an invitation to you, I can double and triple and quadruple and multiply all of those faculties by creating a conversation that's attentive to our mutual future. But of course, that kind of vulnerability means a giving up of my protected place in a hierarchy. So honesty is always the unspoken measure of integrity in a workplace, but it's also the unspoken measure of integrity in a marriage or a friendship. Yeah, well, it really is. Integrity is a measure of how closely what you're willing to have exposed in public and what is true of you in private are in register with one another. If you have a vast landscape of private preoccupation which you would never dare to reveal to others, that really is the formula for a complete lack of integrity. I'm interested in this discomfort we feel around the truth. Whether it's the discomfort in speaking the truth to others or in knowing a truth about ourselves that really does seem to be yet another place where this boundary of self can be determined. That is the tension that is this feeling of self and this feeling of living in jeopardy under the gaze of others or under the gaze of reality itself. Yes. And it's always the giving up of protection and immunity. So, of course, there are parts of the mind that have evolved, and rightly so, to protect us and to create. Immunity and we've survived because of them. But of course, as you know, I've heard a lot of your talks and a lot of your invitations you make through your various talks to understanding the deeper, more movable, more conversational identity. We don't want to lose those powers of protection, of recognizing what is a threat or what is other than us. They're part of our ability to survive in an evolutionary scale, but they can't provide us any sense of real happiness or presence. So we have to go to a different part of the mind whose primary goal is not protection, but meeting and presence and what looks like an incredible form of generosity and beauty as its gift. Yeah, and this is this other remarkable flow that's spoken to in all of our great contemplative traditions. And this deeper, flowing, more conversational, more generous mind is actually able to call on the strategic mind for protection and for saying no and for saying this is other than me and is bad for me. So one of the great fears, as you know, is that when we go into this no self, we will lose all sense of discernment and we will lose all sense of protection. And it's only with maturing into the practice that we understand that we can call on those qualities but not have them as the central arbiter of our identity. So I do think that the invitation to honesty is the invitation to this deeper undoing, actually, this deeper identity, which is able to break through these boundaries by what looks like, on the surface, a kind of robust vulnerability. Well, the topics of identity and vulnerability and achieving anything like security and happiness in this life lead us naturally to our next word, which is ambition. Ambition. Ambition is a good lack of vision. Ambition. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listening support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I'm speaking with Tristan Harris. Tristan has been called by The Atlantic Magazine the closest thing that Silicon Valley has to a conscience. He was a design ethicist at Google and then left the company to start a foundation called Time Well Spent, which is a movement whose purpose is to align technology with our deepest interests. Tristan was recently profiled on 60 Minutes. That happened last week. He's worked at various companies apple, Wikia, Apture, and Google, and he graduated from Stanford with a degree in computer science. Having focused on human computer interaction, we talk a lot about the ethics of human persuasion and about what information technology is doing to us and allowing us to do to ourselves. This is an area which I frankly haven't thought much about, so listening to Tristan was a bit of an education. But needless to say, this is an area that is not going away. We are all going to have to think much more about this in the years ahead. In any case, it was great to talk to Tristan. I have since discovered that I was mispronouncing his name. Apologies, Tristan. Sometimes having a person merely say his name in your presence proves insufficient. Such are the caprices of the human brain. But however you pronounce his name, tristan has a lot of wisdom to share. And he's a very nice guy as well. So meet Tristan Harris. I am here with Tristan Harris. Tristan, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. So we were set up by some mutual friends. We have a few friends and and acquaintances in common. And you are in town doing an interview for 60 Minutes. Yeah. Right. So you're I was actually I confess I was not aware of your work. I think I'd seen the Atlantic article that came out on you recently, but I think I had only seen it. I don't think I had read it. But what you're doing is fascinating and incredibly timely, given our dependence on this technology. And I think this conversation we're going to have, I'm imagining it's going to be something like a field guide to what technology is doing to the human mind. I think we'll talk about how we can decide to move intentionally in that space of possibilities in a way that's healthier for all of us. And this is obviously something you're focused on, but to bring everyone up to speed, because even I was not up to speed until just a few days ago. What is your background? And I've heard you've had some very interesting job titles at Google, perhaps among other places. One was the resident product philosopher and design ethicist at Google. So how did Tristan Harris get to be Tristan Harris, and what are you doing now? Well, first, thanks for having me. Really. It's an honor to be here. I'm a big fan of this podcast. So, yeah, my role at Google, that was an interesting name. So, design ethicist and product philosopher. I was really interested in essentially when a small number of people in the tech industry influence how a billion people think every day without even knowing it. If you think about your role as a designer, how do you ethically steer a billion people's thoughts, framings, cognitive frames, behavioral choices, basically the schedule of people's lives. And so much of what happens on a screen, even though people feel as if they're making their own choices, will be determined by the design choices of the people at Apple and Google and Facebook. So we'll talk, I'm sure, a lot more about that. I guess prior to that, when I was a kid, I was a magician very early, and so I was really interested in the limits of people's minds that they themselves don't see, because that's what magic is all about. That there really is a kind of band of attention or short term memory or ways that people make meaning or causality that you can exploit as a magician. And that had me fascinated as a kid. And I did a few little magic shows and then flash forward. When I was at Stanford, I did computer science, but I also studied as part of a lab called the Persuasive Technology Lab with BJ Fogg, which basically taught engineering students how this kind of library of persuasive techniques and habit formation techniques in order to build more engaging products. Basically different ways of taking advantage of people's cognitive biases so that people fill out email forms, so that people come back to the product, so that people register a form, so that they fill out their LinkedIn profile, so that they tag each other in photos. And I became aware when I was at Stanford doing all this that there was no conversation about the ethics of persuasion. Right. And just to ground how impactful that cohort was in my year in that class in the Persuasive Technology Lab, my project partners in that class, and very close friends of mine, were the founders of Instagram and many other alumni of that year. In 2006 actually went on to join the executive ranks at many companies we know LinkedIn and Facebook when they were just getting started. And again, never before in history have such a small number of people with this tool set influenced how people think every day by explicitly using these persuasive techniques. And so at Google I just got very interested in how we do that. So you were studying computer science at Stanford originally computer science, but I dabbled a ton in linguistics and actually symbolic systems. Because you were at Stanford eventually. Yeah, that was a great major at Stanford. I was in the philosophy department that there was overlap between philosophy and computer science, symbolic systems. I think Reid Hoffman was one of the first symbolic systems majors at Stanford. So he has a persuasion. The connection to magic is interesting. There's an ordinary number of magicians and fans of magic in the skeptical community as well, perhaps somewhat due to the influence of James Randy. But magic is really the ultimate act of persuasion. You're persuading people of the impossible. So you see a significant overlap between the kinds of hacks of people's attention that magicians rely on and our new persuasive technology. Yeah, I think if you just abstract away what persuasion is, it's the ability to do things to people's minds that they themselves won't even see how that process took place. And I think that parallels your work in a big way and that beliefs do things to have a belief shapes the subsequent experience of what you have. I mean, in fact, in Magic there's like principles where you kind of want to start bending reality and creating these AHA moments so that you can do a little hypnosis trick later, for example, that people will be more likely to believe, having gone through a few things that have kind of bent their reality into being more superstitious or more open. And there's just so many ways of doing this that most people don't really recognize. I wrote an article called How Technology Hijacks Your Mind that ended up going viral to about a million people and it goes through a bunch of these different techniques. But yeah, that's not something people mostly think about. You also said in the set up for this interview that you have an interest in cults. Yeah. What's that about and to what degree have you looked at cults? Well, I find cults fascinating because they're kind of like vertically integrated persuasive environments. Instead of just persuading someone's behavior or being the design of a supermarket or the design of a technology product, you are designing the social relationships, the power dynamic between a person standing in front of an audience. You can control many more of the variables. And so I've done a little bit of sort of undercover investigation of some of these things. You mean actually joining a cult or no, not joining, but showing up physically and many showing up physically. Many of these things are none of these cults ever would call themselves cults. I mean, many of them are simply workshops, sort of new AG style workshops. But you start seeing these parallels in the dynamics. Do you want to name any names do I know these? I might prefer not to at the moment. We'll see if we get there. Okay, you have a former girlfriend who's still in one? No, but I did actually. One of the interesting things is the way that people that I met in those cults who eventually left and later talked about their experience and the confusion that you face, and I know this is an interest you've had the confusion that you face when you've gotten many benefits from a cult. You've actually deprogrammed, let's say, early childhood traumas or identities that you didn't know you were holding or different ways of seeing reality that they helped you get away from. And you get these incredible benefits and you feel more free. But then you also realize that was all part of this larger persuasive game to get you to spend a lot of money on classes or courses or these kinds of things. And so what the confusion that I think people experience in knowing that they got all these benefits but then also felt manipulated and they don't know in the sort of mind's, natural black and white thinking how to reconcile those two facts? I actually think there's something parallel there with technology, because, for example, in my previous work on this, a lot of people expect you if you're criticizing how technology is designed, if you might say something like, oh, you're saying Facebook is bad, but look, I get all these benefits from Facebook. Look at all these great things it does for me. And it's because people's minds can't hold on to both the truth that we do derive lots of value from Facebook, and there's many manipulative design techniques across all these products that are not really on your team to help you live your life. Right. And that distinction is very interesting when you start getting into what ethical persuasion is. Yeah, it is a bit of a paradox because you can get tremendous benefit from things that are either not well intentioned or just objectively bad for you or not optimal. The ultimate cases you hear from all of these people who survived cancer, and cancer was the most important thing that ever happened to them. So a train wreck can be good for you on some level because your response to it can be good for you. You can become stronger in all kinds of ways, even by being mistreated by people. But it seems to me that you can always argue that there's probably a better way to get those gains. Well, frankly, with your work on the moral landscape, when you're thinking about if you're a designer at Facebook or at Google, because of how frequently people turn to their phone, you're essentially scheduling these little blocks of people's time. If I immediately notify you for every Snapchat message, which snapchat is one of the most abusive, more manipulative of the technology products. When you see a message from a friend in that moment urgently that will cause a lot of people to go swipe over and not just see that message, but then get sucked into all the other stuff that they've been sort of hiding for you. Right? And that's all very deliberate. And so if you think of it as, let's say you're a designer at Google and you want to be ethical, and you're steering people towards these different timelines, you're steering people towards Schedule A in which these events will happen, or Schedule B, in which these other events will happen. Back to your point. Should I schedule something that you might find really challenging or difficult, but that later you'll feel is incredibly valuable? Do I take into account the peak end effect where people will have a peak of an experience and end? Do I take a lot of their time or a little bit of their time? Should the goal be to minimize how much time people spend on the screen? What is the value of screen time and what are people doing that's lasting and fulfilling? And when are you steering people as a designer towards choices that are more shallow or empty? So you're clearly concerned about time, as we all should be. It's the one non renewable resource. It's one thing we can't possibly get back any of, no matter what other resources we marshal. And it's clear that our technology, especially smartphone based technology, is just a kind of bottomless sink of time and attention. I guess there's the other element that we're going to want to talk about, which is the consequence of bad information or superficial information, and just what it's doing to our minds. The fake news phenomenon being of topical interest, but just the quality of what we're paying attention to is crucial. But the automaticity of this process, the addictiveness of this process, the fact that we're being hooked and we're not aware of how calculated the intrusion into our lives is this is the thing that's missing, is that people don't realize, because there's the most common narrative. We hear this all the time, that technology is neutral, and it's just up to us to choose how we want to use it. And if it happens, if people do fake news, or if people start wasting all their time, that that's just people's responsibility. What this misses is that because of the attention economy, which is every basically business, whether it's a meditation app or the New York Times or Facebook or Netflix or YouTube, you're all competing for attention. The way you win is by getting someone's attention and by getting it again tomorrow and by extending it for as long as possible. So it becomes this arms race for getting attention. And the best way to get attention is to know how people's minds work so that you can basically push some buttons and get them to not just come, but then to stay as long as possible. So there are design techniques like making a product more like a slot machine that has a variable schedule reward. So, you know, for example, I know you use Twitter, you land on Twitter. Notice that there's that extra variable time delay between like one and 3 seconds before that little number shows up, you return the page loads. There's this extra delay. I haven't noticed that. Yeah, hold your breath. And then there's a little number that shows up for the notifications. And that delay makes it like a slot machine. You're literally, when you load the page as if you're pulling a lever and you're waiting and you don't know how many there's going to be. Is there going to be 500 because some big tweetstorm, or is there going to be doesn't it always say 99? Well, not everyone is. Sam Harrison has so many. No, but isn't that always the maximum? Never says 500. Right. Because again, I'm not you. I don't have as many followers. No. Well, I think I can attest that. I mean, mine is always at 99, so it's no longer salient to me. Well, right. Which actually speaks to how addictive variable rewards work. Which is the point is it has to be a variable reward. So the idea that I push a lever or pull a lever, and sometimes I get two and sometimes I get nothing, and sometimes I get 20. And this is the same thing with email. Well, let's talk about what is the interest of the company, because I think most people are only dimly aware. They're certainly aware that these companies make money off of ads. Very often they sell your data, so your attention is their resource. But take an example. Something like Twitter seemingly can't figure out how to make money yet, but Facebook doesn't have that problem. Let's take the clearest case. What is Facebook's interest in you as a user? Well, obviously, there's many sources of revenue, but it all comes down to whether it's data or everything else. It comes down to advertising and time because of the link that more of your attention or more of your time equals more money. They have an infinite appetite in getting more of your time. So time on your newsfeed, and this is literally how they want that's, right, and this is literally how the metrics and the dashboards look. I mean, they measure what is the current sort of distribution of time on site. Time on site is the that and seven day actives are the currency of the tech industry. And so the only other industry that measures users that way is sort of drug dealers, right, where you have the number of active users who log in every single day. So that combined with time on site are the key principal metrics. And the whole goal is to maximize time on site. So Netflix wants to maximize how much time you spend there. YouTube wants to maximize time on site. They recently celebrated people watching more than a billion hours a month. And that was a goal. And not because there's anyone who's evil or who wants to steal people's time, but because of the business model of advertising. There is simply no limit on how much attention that they would like from people. Well, they must be concerned about the rate at which you click through to their ads or are they not? They can be concerned about that and ad rates are depreciating, but because they can make money just by simply showing you the thing and there is some link between showing it to you and you clicking. You can imagine with more and more targeted things that you are seeing things that are profitable and there's always going to be someone willing to pay for that space. But this problem means that as this starts to saturate because we only have so much time to even hold on to your position in the attention economy, what do you do? You have to ratchet up how persuasive you are. So here's a concrete example. If you're YouTube, you need to add autoplay the next video to YouTube and you see that within the last year. I always find that incredibly annoying. Yes. I wonder what percentage of people find that annoying. Is it conceivable that that is still a good business decision for them, even if 99% of people hate that feature? Well, it's with the whole exit voice or loyalty. If people don't find it so annoying that they're going to stop using YouTube because the defense of course, is there's no way they're going to stop using YouTube. Of course not. And that's what these companies often hide behind, this notion that if you don't like it, you can stop using the product. But while they're saying that, they have teams of thousands of engineers whose job is to deploy these techniques, I learned at the Persuasive Technology Lab to get you to spend as much time as possible. But just with that one example, let's say YouTube adds autoplay the next video. So they just add that feature and let's say that increases your average watch time on the site every day by 5%. So now they're eating up 5% more of this limited attention market share. So now Facebook's sitting there saying, well shoot, we can't let this go to dry, so we've got to actually add autoplay videos to our newsfeed. So instead of waiting for you to scroll and then click play on the video, they automatically play the video. They didn't always used to do that. Yes. Another feature I hate. Yes. And the reason though that they're doing that, what people miss about this is it's not by accident the web and all of these tools will continue to evolve to be more engaging and to take more time because that is the business model. And so you end up in this arms race for essentially who's a better magician? Who's a better persuader who knows these back doors in people's minds as a way of getting people to spend more time. Now, do you see this as intrinsically linked to the advertising model of revenue or would this also be a problem if it was a subscription model? It's a problem in both cases, but advertising exacerbates the problem. So you're actually right that, for example, Netflix also maximizes time on site. What I heard from someone through some back channels was that the reason they have to do this is they found that if they don't maximize because for example, they have this auto countdown watching the next episode, right? So they don't have to do that. Why are they doing that? Strangely, I like that feature. Yeah, try to figure that out. Psychologists among you. Well, and this is where it gets down to what is ethical persuasion, because that's one persuasive transaction where they are persuading you to watch the next video, but in that case you're happy about it. I guess the reason why I'm happy about it there is that it is at least nine times out of ten, it is by definition something I want to watch because it's in the same series as the series I'm already watching. Right. Whereas YouTube is showing me just some random thing that they think is analogous to the thing I just watched. And then when you're talking about Facebook or I guess I've seen this feature on embeds in news stories like on the Atlantic or Vanity Fair, the moment you bring the video into the frame of the browser, it'll start playing. I just find that annoying, especially if your goal is to read the text rather than watch the video. Yeah, but again, there's this because of the game theory of it, when one news website evolves that strategy, you can think of these as kind of organisms that are mutating new persuasive strategies that either work or not at holding onto people's attention. And so you have some neutral playing field and one guy mutates this strategy on the news website of autoplaying that video when you land, let's say it's CNN. So now the other news websites, if they want to compete with that, they have to then assuming that CNN has enough market share that makes a difference. The other ones have to start trending in that direction. And this is why the Internet has moved from being this neutral feeling resource where you're kind of just accessing things, to feeling like there's this gravitational wormhole suck kind of quality that pulls you in. And this is what I think is so important. You asked how much of this is due to advertising and how much of it is due to the hyper competition for attention. It's both. One is we have to be able to decouple the link between how much attention we get from you and how much money we make. And we actually did the same thing with, for example, in energy markets where it used to be, the energy companies made more money the more energy you use. And so therefore, they have an incentive. They want you to please leave the lights on, please leave the faucet on. We are happy we're making so much more money that way. But of course, that was a perverse incentive. And so this new regulatory commission got established that basically decoupled, it was called Decoupling. It decoupled the link between how much energy you use and how much energy they how much money they make. Well, and there are some ads online, I can't even figure out how they're working or why they're there. There are these horrible ads at the bottom of even the most reputable websites like The Atlantic. You'll have these ads, I think usually they're framed with from around the web, and it'll be an ad like, you won't believe what these child celebrities look like today, yet taboola and outbrain. There's a whole actual kind of market of companies that specifically provide these related links at the bottom of news websites. But they're so tawdry and awful. You can go from just reading literally the best long form journalism and hit just one garish ad after another. But the thing that mystifies me is, when you click through to these things, I can't see that it ever lands at a product that anyone who was reading that article would conceivably buy. I mean, you're just going down the sinkhole into something horrible. Everything looks like a scam. It's just it all comes down to money, though. The reason why so I actually know a lot about this, because the company the way I arrived at Google was they bought our little startup company for our talent, and we didn't do what this sort of market of websites did, but we were almost being pushed by publishers who used our technology to do that. So one of the reasons I'm so sensitive to this time on site stuff is because I had a little company called Apture, which provided little in depth background pieces of information without making you leave news websites. So you'd be on the Economist, and it would talk about Sam Harris. And you'd say, who's Sam Harris? You'd highlight it, and we'd give you sort of a multimedia background or thing, and you could interactively explore and go deeper. And the reason we sold this, the reason why an economist wanted it on their website is because it increased time on site. And so I was left in this dilemma where the thing that I got up to do in the morning as a founder was, let's try to help people understand things and learn about things. But then the actual metric was, is this increasing our time on site or not? And publishers would push us to either increase revenue or increase time on site. And so the reason that the economists and all these other even reputable websites have these bucket of links at the bottom is because they actually make more money from Taboola and outbrain and a few others. Now, time on site seems somewhat insidious as a standard, except if you imagine that the content is intrinsically good. Now, I'm someone who's slowly but surely building a meditation app, right? So now time on my app will be time spent practicing meditation. And so insofar as I think that's an intrinsically good thing for someone to be doing anything I do in the design of the app so as to make that more attractive to do and in the best case, irresistible to do. Right. I mean, the truth is I would like an app in my life that got me to do something that is occasionally hard to do, but I know is worth doing and good for me to do rather than waste my time on Twitter. Something like meditation, something like exercise, eating more wisely. I don't know how that can be measured in terms of time, but there are certain kinds of manipulations, speaking personally of my mind, that I would happily sign up for. Right. So how do you think about that? Absolutely. So this is a great example. So because of the attention economy constantly ratcheting up these persuasive tricks. The price of entry for, say, a new meditation app is you're going to have to try and find a way to sweeten that front door so that competes with the other front doors that are on someone's screen at the moment when they wake up in the morning. And of course, as much as I and I think many of us don't like to do this, it's like the Twitter and the Facebook and the email ones are just so compelling first thing in the morning, even if that's not what we'd like to be doing. And so because all of these different apps are neutrally, competing on the same playing field for morning attention and not a specific kind of like helping Sam wake up best in the morning for your meditation app. And what many meditation apps I personally know, they, they have to provide these, usually these notifications so they start realizing, oh shoot, facebook and Twitter are notifying people first thing in the morning to get their attention. So if we're going to stand a chance to get in the game, we have to start notifying people. And then everyone starts again. Amping up in the arms race and you don't end up with it's. This race, classic race to the bottom, you don't end up with a screen you want to wake up to in the morning at all. It's not good for anybody. But it all came from this, this need to basically get there first to race up. So wouldn't we want to change the structure of what you're competing for? So it's not just attention at all cost. So, yeah. So you have called for what I think you've called a Hippocratic Oath. For software designers first do no harm. What do you think designers should be doing differently now? Well, I think of it less of the hypocritical that's the thing that got captured in the Atlantic article. But a different way to think about it is that the attention economy is like this city. You know, essentially Apple and Google and Facebook are the urban planners of this city that a billion people live inside of, and we all live inside of. It like a billion people live inside of this attention city. And in that city, it's designed entirely for commerce. It's maximizing basically attention at all costs. And that was fine when we first got started, but now this is a city that people live inside of. I mean, the amount of time people spend on their phone, they wake up with them, they go to sleep with them, they check them 150 times a day. That's actually a real figure too, right? 150 times a day, a real figure, for sure. Yeah. And so now what we'd want to do is organize that city. Almost like Jane Jacobs created this sort of livable cities movement and said, there are things that make a great city great. There are things that make a city livable. She pointed out eyes on the street stoops in New York. She was talking about Greenwich Village. These are things that make a neighborhood feel different, feel more homey, livable safe. These are values people have about what makes a good urban planning city. There is no set of values to design this city for attention. So far it's been this wild west. Let each app compete on the same playing field to get attention at all costs. So when you ask me what should app designers do, I'm saying it's actually a deeper thing. That's like saying, what should the casinos, who are all building stuff in the city do differently? If a casino is there and the only way for it to even be there is to do all the same manipulative stuff that the other casinos are doing, it's going to go out of business if it doesn't do that. So the better question to ask is how would we reorganize the city? By talking to the urban planners, by talking to Apple, Google, and Facebook to change the basic design. So let's say there are zones, and one of the zones in the attention economy city would be the morning habits zone. So now you just get things competing for what's the best way to help people wake up in the morning, which could also include the phone being off, right. That could be part of how the phone the option of the phone being off for a period of time and telling your friends that you're not up until ten in the morning or whatever, could be one of the things competing for the morning part of your life in the life zone there. And that would be a better strategy than trying to change, you know, meditation app designers to take a Hippocratic oath, to be more responsible when the whole game is just not set up for them to succeed. Well, to come back to that question because it's of personal interest to me because I do want to design this app in a way that seems ethically impeccable if the thing you're directing people to is something that you think is intrinsically good. And forget about all the competition for Mind Share that exists that you spoke about. It's just hard to do. Anyway. I mean, people are reluctant to do it. That's why I think an app would be valuable, and I think the existing apps are valuable. So if you think that any time on app is time well spent, which I don't think Facebook can say, I don't think Twitter can say, but I think headspace can say that whether or not that's true, someone else can decide. But I think without any sense of personal hypocrisy, I think they feel that if you're using their app more, that's good for you. Right. Because I think that it's intrinsically good to meditate, and I'm sure any exercise app or the health app or whatever it is, I'm sure that they all feel the same way about that, and they're probably right. Take that case, and then let's move on to a case where everyone's motives are more mercenary, or time on the app means more money for the company, which isn't necessarily the case for some other apps. When time on the app is intrinsically good, why not try to get people's attention any way you can? Right? Well, so this is where the question of metrics is really important, because in an ideal world, the thing that each app would be measuring would align with the thing that each person using the app actually wants. So time well spent would mean, in the case of meditation app, asking the user, I mean, just not saying the app would do this, but if you were to think about it, a user would say, okay, in my life, what would be time well spent for me in the morning, waking up? And then imagine that whatever the answer to that question is, should be the rankings in the App Store rewarding the apps that are best at that? So that, again, is more systemic. Answer that the systems like the app stores and the ranking functions that run, say, search, Google Search, or Facebook Newsfeed would want to sort things by what helps people the most, not what's got the most time. And the measure of that would be the evaluation of the user. I mean, there's some questionnaire based rating like, yeah, this is working for you. Yeah. And in fact, we've we've done some initial work with this, actually. There's an app called Moment on iOS. So Moment tracks how much time you spend in different apps. You send in a screenshot of your battery page on the iPhone and it just captures all that data. And they've partnered with time well spent to ask people, which apps do you find are most time well spent, you're most happy about the time you spent when you can finally see this is all the time you spent in it? And which apps do you most regret? And we have the data back that people regret the time that they spend in Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and WeChat the most and they tend so far, the current rankings are for the most are like my fitness pal and podcasts, and there's a bunch of other ones that I forgot. The irony is that being ranked first in regret is probably as accurate a measure as any of the success of your app. Yeah, exactly. And this is why the economy isn't ranking things or aligning things with what we actually want. I mean, if you think about it as everything is a choice architecture, and you're sitting there as a human being worth picking from a menu. And currently the menu sorts things by what gets the most downloads, the most sales, the most gets most talked about, the things that most manipulate your mind. So the whole economy has become this. If you assume marketing is as persuasive as it is on a bigger level, the economy reflects what's best at manipulating people's psychology, not what's actually best in terms of delivered benefits in people's lives. And so if you think about this as a deeper, systemic thing about if you would want how would you want the economy to work? You'd want it to rank things so that the easiest thing to reach for. Would be the things that people found to be most time well spent in their lives for whatever category of life choice that they're making at that moment in terms of making choices easier or hard. Because you can't escape, you know, in every single moment there is a menu and some choices are easy to make and some choices are hard to make. Seems to me you run into a problem which behavioral economists know quite well, and this is something that Danny Kahneman has spoken a lot about, that there's a difference between the experiencing self moment to moment and the remembered self. So when you're giving someone a questionnaire, asking them whether their time on all these apps and websites was well spent, you are talking to the remembered self. And Danny and I once argued about this, how to reconcile these two different testimonies. But at minimum, you can say that they're reliably different. So that if you you were experienced sampling people along the way, you know, for every 100 minutes on Facebook, every ten minutes, you were saying, how happy are you right now? You would get one measure if at the end of the day, you ask them how good a use of your time was that to be on Facebook for 100 minutes, you would get a different measure. Sometimes they're the same, but they are very often different. And the question is who to trust? Where are the data that you're going to use to assess whether people are spending their time? Well, the problem right now is that all of the metrics just relate to the current present self version, right? Everything is only measuring what gets most clicked or what gets most shared. So back to fake news. Just because something is shared the most doesn't mean it's the most true. Just because something gets clicked the most doesn't mean it's the best. Just because something is talked about the most doesn't mean that it's real or true, right? Right. The second that Facebook took away its human editorial team for the Facebook trends and they fired that whole team. And so it's just an AI picking what the most popular news stories are within 24 hours it was gamed and the top story was a false story about Megan Kelly and Fox News. And so right now of getting into AI about all of these topics, AI is essentially have a pair of eyes or sensors that are trying to pick from these impulsive or immediate signals. And it doesn't have a way of being in the loop or in conversation with our more reflective selves. It can only talk to our present in the moment selves. And so you can imagine some kind of weird dystopian future where the entire world is only listening to your present in the moment feelings and thoughts which are easily gamable by persuasion. Although it just is a question how to reconcile the difference between being pleasantly engaged moment by moment in an activity at the end of which you will say, I kind of regret spending my time that way. There are certain things that are captivating where you're hooked for a reason, right? Whether it's a video game or whether you're eating french fries or popcorn or something that is just perfectly salted so that you just can't stop you're binging on something because in that moment it feels good. And then retrospectively, very often you regret that use of time. Well, so one frame of this is this sort of shallow versus deep sense. That's what you're getting at here. It's a sense of something can either be full but empty, which we don't have really words in the English language for this, or something can be full and fulfilling. Things can be very engaging or pleasurable, but not fulfilling. Yes, and even more specifically regretted. And then there's the set of choices that you can make for a timeline if you're again scheduling someone else's life for them, as people at Google and Facebook do every day, where you can schedule a choice that is full and fulfilling. Now, does that mean that we should never put choices on the menu that are full but you regret, like should we never do that for Google or for Facebook, that's one frame. But let me actually flip it around and make it, I think, even more philosophically interesting. Let's say that in the future, YouTube is even better at knowing exactly what at every bone in your body you've been meaning to watch. Like the professor or lecture that you've been told was like the best lecture in the world. Or just think about what every bone in your body tells you, in fact, would be full and fulfilling for you. And let's imagine this future deep, mind powered version of YouTube is actually putting those perfect choices next on the menu. So now it's autoplaying the perfect next thing that is also full and fulfilling. There's still something about the way the screen is steering your choices that are not about being in alignment with the life you want to live, because it's not in alignment with the time dimension now. So now it's sort of blowing open or blowing past boundaries. You have to bring your own boundaries, right? You have to resist the perfect. You have to resist the perfect. Now, should that be and by the way, because of this arms race, that is where we're trending to, people don't understand this, the whole point of attention, the attention economy, because of this need to maximize attention, that's where YouTube will be in the future. And so wouldn't you instead say, I want Netflix's goal to basically optimize for whatever is time well spent for me, which might be, let's say for me, watching one really good movie a week that I've been really meaning to watch. And that's because I'm defining that it's in conversation with me about what I reflectively would say is time well spent. And it's not trying to just say you should maximize as much as possible. And for that relationship to work, the economy would have to be an economy of loyal relationships. Meaning I would have to recognize as a consumer that even though I only watch one movie a week, that's enough to justify my relationship with Netflix. Because they found in this case that if they don't maximize time on site, people actually end up canceling their subscription over time. And so that's why they're still trapped in the same arms race. Right. And what concerns you most in this space? Is it social media more than anything else? Or is everything that's grabbing attention engaged in the same arms race and kind of of equal concern to you? Well, as a systems person, it's really the system. It's the attention economy. It's the race for attention itself that concerns me, because one is people are in the tech industry appear to me very often as being blind to what that race costs us. For example, the fake news stuff. Instead of going to fake news, let's call it fake sensationalism. You know, the newsfeed is trying to figure out what people click the most. And if one news site evolves the strategy of outrage. Outrage is a way better persuasive strategy at getting you to click if it generates outrage, right? And so the newsfeed, without even having any person at the top of it, any captain of the ship saying, oh, I know it's going to be really good for people as outrage, or that'll get us more attention, it just discovers this as an invisible trait that starts showing up in the AI. So it starts steering people towards news stories that generate outrage. And that's literally where, like, the news feeds have gone. That's where we are three months. This is where we are true or fake. It's an outrage machine. And then the question is, how much is that outrage? If you thought about it in the world, is there any lack of things that would generate outrage? I mean, there's an infinite supply of news today, and there was even ten years ago that would generate outrage, right? And if we had the perfect AI ten years ago, we could have also delivered you a Day Full of outrage. That's a funny title. A day full of outrage. How easy would that be to market? A day full of outrage? Nobody thinks they want that, but we're all acting like that's exactly what we want. Well, and I think this is where the language gets interesting, because when we talk about what we want, we talk about what we click. But in the moment right before you click, I mean, I'm kind of a meditator too. It's like I notice that what's going on for me right before I click is not, as you know, from pretty well, how much is that a conscious choice? What's really going on phenomenologically in that moment right before the click, none of your conscious choices are conscious choices, right? You're the last to know why you're doing the thing you're about to do, and you're very often misinformed about it. We can set up experiments where you'll reliably do the thing for reasons that you, when you're forced to articulate them, are completely wrong about. Absolutely. And even moreover, people, again, when they're about to click on something, don't realize there's a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it was was to get you to click on that, because that's what Facebook and Snapchat and YouTube are all for. So it's not even a neutral moment. Do you think that fact alone would change people's behavior if you could make that transparent? It just seems it would be instructive for most people to see the full stream of causes that engineered that moment for them. Well, one thing, I've got some friends in San Francisco we're talking about this that people don't realize, and especially when you start applying some kind of normativity and saying, you know, the newsfeed is really not good, we need to rank it a different way. And they say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Who are you to say what's good for people. And I always say this is status quo bias. People are thinking that somehow the current thing we have is set up to be best for people. It's not. It's best for engagement if you were to give it a name. If Google has page rank, facebook is engagement rank. Now, let's say let's take it all the way to the end. Let's say you could switch modes as a user and you can actually switch Facebook to addiction rank. The Facebook actually has a version of newsfeed that I'm sure it could deploy called let's just actually tweak the variables so that whatever, let's show people the things that will addict them the most. Or we have Outrage Rank, which will show you the things that will outrage you the most. Or we have NPR Rank, which actually shows you the most boring long comment threads where you have these long in depth conversations. Your whole newsfeed is these long, deep threaded conversations. Or you could have the bill on Riley mode where you get these something I know you care about, these sort of attack dog style comment threads where people are yelling at each other. You can imagine that the newsfeed could be ranked in any one of these ways. Actually, this form of choice is already implemented on Flickr, where when you look for images, you can choose relevant or interesting. So you could have that same drop down menu for any of these other media. And this is your point of like people don't see transparently what the goals of the designers who put that choice in front of you are. Right? So the first thing would be to reveal that there is a goal. It's not a neutral product, it's not just something for you to use. You can obviously, with enough effort, use Facebook for all sorts of things. But the point is the default sort of compass or north star on the GPS that is Facebook of steering your life is not steering your life towards hey, help me have the dinner party that I want to have or help me get together with my friends on Tuesday or help me make sure I'm not feeling lonely on a Tuesday night. There is seems to be a necessary kind of paternalism here that we just have to accept because it seems true that we were living in a world where no one, or virtually no one, would consciously choose the outrage tab. Basically, I want to be as outraged as possible today. Show me everything in my news feed that's going to piss me off. Nor the addiction tab, nor the superficial uses of attention tab, just cat videos, just give me the kardashians all day long and I'll regret it later. So no one would choose that, and yet we are effectively choosing that by virtue of what proves to be clickable in the attention economy in service of the greater goal of advertising. Again, like that goal wasn't effectively. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely early on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, strap in. Charles Murray is a political scientist and an author. He is most famous for having co authored the book The Bell Curve along with the late Richard Hernstein. Now, to say that this book was controversial is really beyond an understatement. It is probably fair to say this is the most controversial book in the last 50 years. The book looks at the growing role that intelligence plays in modern societies, and the authors worry about a kind of cognitive partitioning of our society into separate classes. There was a time when being a few standard deviations above the mean and intelligence didn't get you very much when you're just plowing the fields alongside your neighbors. But now you can start a software company or a hedge fund, and this leads to astonishing levels of wealth inequality and cultural isolation. This is a theme that Murray has returned to in his other work and in a more recent book, Coming Apart, which we also discuss. Now, unfortunately for Murray, what we have here is a set of nested taboos. Human intelligence itself is a taboo topic. People don't want to hear that intelligence is a real thing and that some people have more of it than others. They don't want to hear that IQ tests really measure it. They don't want to hear that differences in IQ matter because they're highly predictive of differential success in life, and not just for things like educational attainment and wealth, but for things like out of wedlock, birth and mortality. People don't want to hear that a person's intelligence is in large measure due to his or her genes, and that there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person's intelligence, even in childhood. It's not that the environment doesn't matter, but genes appear to be 50% to 80% of the story. People don't want to hear this, and they certainly don't want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups. Now, for better or worse, these are all facts. In fact, there is almost nothing in psychological science for which there is more evidence than these claims about IQ, about the validity of testing for it, about its importance in the real world, about its heritability, and about its differential expression in different populations. Again, this is what a dispassionate look at decades of research suggests. Unfortunately, the controversy over The Bell Curve did not result from legitimate good faith criticisms of its major claims. Rather, it was the product of a politically correct moral panic that totally engulfed Murray's career and has yet to release him. His co author, Richard Hernstein, died just before the book was published. So Murray weathered the storm alone. And it rages to this day because the book was published over 20 years ago. And yet just last month, Murray was shouted down by a mob at Middlebury College, a mob that actually turned violent and sent the faculty member who was chaperoning him to the hospital. And it's that most recent attack, which is part of an anti free speech hysteria that is spreading on college campuses, that caused me to finally pay attention. I should say that some researchers just performed a rather delightful experiment which they just wrote about in the New York Times. They took the text of Murray's speech, the speech he attempted to give that middlebury and sent it to 70 or so professors to have them rate it for political content on a scale of one to nine, liberal to conservative, with five being precisely in the middle, and the professors weren't told who the speaker was. And it got a rating of 5.5 right down the middle. When they sent it to another group of professors telling them the speaker was Murray, the rating shifted a little, but not by much. The speech was now rated 5.77 just right of center. The man is not Heinrich Himler, but because I had assumed, as many of you probably have who heard about The Bell Curve controversy, that when seemingly respectable people are calling someone a Nazi and a fascist and a white supremacist and a eugenicist, well, then there must be something wrong with him, right? He must be getting what he deserves on some level. But what I found when I began reading Murray's work was a deeply rational and careful scholar who was quite obviously motivated by an ethical concern about inequality in our society. This is not a person who is in favor of discrimination, whatever the difference in average IQ is across groups. You know nothing about a person's intelligence on the basis of his or her skin color. That is just a fact. There is much more variance among individuals in any racial group than there is between groups. So besides being unethical and politically imprudent, it is totally irrational to treat people as anything other than individuals. Murray and Hernstein were absolutely clear about this in the bell curve. So what happened to Murray, as far as I can tell, has had nothing to do with errors of scholarship, of which undoubtedly there must be some. Or for the way he's conducted himself since, or for his personal motives for discussing these topics in the first place. Rather, his scapegoating has been entirely the result of his having merely discussed differences in human intelligence at all. Now it's certainly true that the definitions of both intelligence and race are open for debate to some degree, and there can be cultural influences in the concepts we use that we don't totally understand. But the efforts to invalidate the very notions of general intelligence and race have been wholly unconvincing from a psychometric and biological point of view, and are obviously motivated by a political discomfort in talking about these things. And I understand and share that discomfort. But any fair reading of Murray would acknowledge that he understands and shares it too, and one rarely encounters a fair reading of Murray. Whenever you see discussions of The Bell Curve, you can be sure that their authors felt themselves under immense pressure to dismiss it, and they wind up ignoring much of what Murray and Hernstein actually wrote. And then they argue in very sloppy ways against the concept of general intelligence. And this sloppiness still has the effect of being defamatory. I'll give you a sense of how insidious these attacks upon a person's reputation become. There are all the consequences that Murray knows about, obviously, the death threats, the hecklers, the disinvitations from speaking events. But then there are things he can never know about. For instance, a couple of years ago, I was invited to write an essay for an academic journal, and I saw that one of the other contributors was Charles Murray. And at that point, I hadn't read his work, and I only knew about him or thought I knew about him, by reputation. And my first thought was, why do I need to be in a journal alongside Charles Murray? I just had Ben Affleck call me a racist on television for my criticism of Islam. I was dealing with that blowback, and the last thing I needed, I thought, was to be publicly associated with Charles Murray. Now, Murray can have no idea how many times people have shunned him in that way, nor do I have any idea how much that's happened to me for the lies that have been spread about my work. Now, I'm sure there are many things that Murray and I disagree about that we did not explore in this podcast. He's far more convinced about the social benefits of religion than I am, for instance. But I had another agenda. At one point, I think I likened our conversation to visiting a nuclear power plant after an accident to assess the damage. And it did feel like this. Honestly, it felt like the intellectual equivalent of going into Fukushima with a Geiger counter to see just how hot things are. Not something I was ever planning to do. And I do remain skeptical about the wisdom of looking for cross cultural or interracial differences in things like intelligence. I'm not sure what it gets you apart from a lot of pain. So many of the topics I discussed in the podcast with Murray are not topics I would ordinarily think about or recommend that you think about. But the purpose of the podcast was to set the record straight, because I find the dishonesty and hypocrisy and moral cowardice of Murray's critics shocking. And the fact that I was taken in by this defamation of him and effectively became part of a silent mob that was just watching what amounted to a modern witchburning, that was intolerable to me. So it is with real pleasure and some trepidation that I bring you a very controversial conversation on points about which there is virtually no scientific controversy, and it's with a man who could not have been a more genial and well spoken guest. Meet Charles Murray. I am here with Charles Murray. Charles, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure. So I first heard of you, as many people did, when you published your book The Bell Curve in 90, 94, I believe. And this is along with your co author, Richard Hernstein. And this was without question, one of the most controversial books in living memory. It focused on IQ and the differences in mean IQ between groups of people. And it was just treated like, say, radioactive communication. And like most people who first heard of you at that point, I didn't actually read the book. And I just assumed that where there was smoke, certainly that much smoke, there had to be at least some fire. And I just assumed that you had said something in those pages that was so intellectually or morally indefensible that that explained the backlash against you. And this is the backlash that continues to this day. And we'll talk about that. But I've since in the intervening years, ventured into my own controversial areas as a speaker and writer and experienced many hysterical attacks against me and my work. And so I started thinking about your case a little again without ever having read you. And I began to suspect that you were one of the canaries in the coal mine that I never recognized as such. And seeing your recent treatment at Middlebury, which many of our listeners will have heard about, where you were prevented from speaking and your host was physically attacked, I now believe that you are perhaps the intellectual who was treated most unfairly in my lifetime. And it's just an amazing thing to be so slow to realize that. And first, I just like to apologize to you for having been so lazy and having been taken in to the degree that I was by the rumors and lies that have surrounded your work for the last 20 years. And I want to thank you, Doubly, for coming on the podcast to talk about these things. Well, that's very kind of you to say, but I'm curious, have you looked at The Bell Curve? Yes. Now, I'm deep into your work, so I know what you wrote there, and I know what I think about it, and I'm eager to talk about it. There's an aphorism from Nietzsche that I think will apply to this conversation or at least I fear it will apply. And it's something like when you force someone to change his opinion about you, he holds the effort. This requires very much against you and I think many of our listeners will be ill disposed to change their opinion about you and your work. But I'm determined to ram past that resistance insofar as that's possible. Well, can I just make it a request of your listeners who really do resist that? I don't ask you to read the whole book, The Bell Curve but it's not that much money on Kendall and there's got to be somewhere on the internet there's got to be chunks of the text. Just read a few pages of a thing. This is not a hysterical this is not an Ann Coulter book. It's it's not a Milo book. It's it's of all the charges about the book that drive me nuts the most, I think perhaps it was Stephen J. Gould who probably a lot of your listeners are too young to remember but who wrote the review of it in the New Yorker. And Gould himself was the author of a book called The Mismeasure of man which many people see as the canonical refutation of IQ as being an important concept. But anyway, in the review Gould was referring to the regression equations. Well, as it happened with the division of work, I did all the regression analyses and I was reading the review and Gould made a little parenthetical remark I bet they only did them once. And I threw the book against the wall. I'd literate, my wife was in the room and I took it and I just threw it because thinking of the hundreds of hours that I spent on that and not only that, when we had all of the analyses done I'm afraid, Sam, a lot of this podcast is going to sound very self referential and pompous. I don't know how to get around it. But this is the truth. When we got done with all of those analyses I went back and I recreated them from scratch. I mean, recreating the variables again, doing the whole thing. And so that I could just get rid of any dangers of a screw up I had to make the identical screw up twice. In other words, there's still going to be a mistake. Anyway, the book I would argue all you need to do is read in it for a while and you will realize that things you have heard about it are simply wrong. Yeah, well, I want to get to the most controversial points you make in the book and what you actually say about them and what kind of public policy recommendations you make on their basis because it is the opposite of a white supremacist neo Nazi book and you have been called both of those things, ma'am. So let's get into it. What was your basic thesis in the Bell Curve? The thesis of The Bell Curve actually is very similar to the thesis of Coming Apart, which hardly anybody noticed. I did notice that at the time we did it, we were saying we are looking at a future which is being shaped by the radically increased value of IQ in the marketplace over the last century and has also been affected by the increasing effectiveness of the higher educational system and getting intellectual talent wherever it resides and pulling it into elite universities. And the combination of these two things is creating a cognitive elite that is increasingly powerful, increasingly affluent, has its own culture and is increasingly isolated from and ignorant of the rest of society. That essentially was the well, that's the thesis of that book. That's the reason. The subtitle is intelligence and Class structure in American life. And as I said, Coming Apart, the first few chapters have large chunks of The Bell Curve imported into it. Because in Coming Apart I was essentially saying it's no longer something that we're in danger of, it's something that has happened. So that was the thesis. And we spend the first eight chapters well, no, first we spend three or four chapters talking about the nature of the cognitive elite and how it came about. Then we take eight chapters and we have the relationship of IQ to a variety of social outcomes unemployment, poverty, educational attainment, crime, the relative roles of IQ, and the basic socioeconomic variables in explaining the dependent variable. And for doing that, Dick Hernstein and I restricted ourselves to a sample of non Latino whites. And the reason we did that was we said we know that the whole issue of IQ and race is very heated and we're going to simplify things. We are saying this relationship of IQ to important social and economic outcomes exists in a population of non Latina whites. And then after that we can go to the issue of well, does it apply to the nation as a whole? And that's the point at which we got into race. Right? So the most controversial area of the book is in your discussion around the mean difference across races in population IQ. Right. It's important to point out here that even the topic of IQ, the topic of intelligence, is taboo. People get uncomfortable in hearing that intelligence is something that even differs among people. Then when you add the fact that this difference is heritable and that it matters over the course of a person's life, that already is something that makes people very uncomfortable. Already you seem to be opening the door to eugenics and other scary ethical and political ways of thinking. And then when you add to that the fact that there are detectable differences in mean IQ between races, then just everything goes completely haywire for people. So I want to move through these concepts and claims somewhat systematically, but I guess before we do that, is there anything that has happened in the intervening years either in your own research or in the research generally that has changed the picture significantly from when you wrote The Bell Curve? Have any of your important claims changed? There have been many of our claims have had a lot of additional stuff. For example, take something like G, the general factor of intelligence, right? Which is what IQ tests measure. Exactly. And this is something which going back to Steven J. Gould again said no, it all depends on how you do the factor analysis. You can either make G appear in your analysis or could go away. It's a statistical artifact. Well, even at the time we wrote in 1994 an awful lot of the things that Steve Gould claimed back in 1980 81 I mean they were just no psychiatricians took them seriously. The the work that had been done on it was very solid. The reality of G was already understood. But since then it turns out that there are a whole variety of aspects of brain functioning the quantity of gray matter versus white matter, all sorts of things which they're linked specifically to G. Not just to IQ scores in general but they are most tightly linked to this general factor for intelligence. So if you had to say one thing that has had just an awful lot of additional verification and elaboration, it's the reality of g. And of course, we are also within a matter of years, I don't think that many years before we will understand the functioning of intelligence down at the level of alleles and single nucleotide polymorphisms. We are already making a lot of progress on that. To give you an idea of how fast the progress is, in 2013 I was doing a paper and so I set out to see are there any SNPs single nucleotide polymorphism? They're the sites in the genome that can take more than one form and they account for all of human variation. I said well have the geneticist found any of these that have a direct relationship to social behavior or mental functioning or whatever? And I came up with seven or eight and I looked again a year and a half ago and it was in the low dozens and now it's in the hundreds and in a few years it's going to be in the thousands. And so we will understand IQ general intelligence genetically I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025. They'll still be blanks but we'll know basically what's going on. And just to finish up the other, was there anything that I changed my mind on after The Bell Curve came out? And the answer is no. There's been some interesting tidbits that I've been fascinated by but the science in The Bell Curve was extremely conservative. I don't mean that politically dick and I mean we weren't stupid. We knew that we were dealing with a complicated and controversial topic. And so we stuck very close to the scientific mainstream. So that after the book caused such a fur and this is easy enough for your listeners to Google for themselves, they can just Google knowns and unknowns IQ and that'll pop up. The American Psychological Association established a task force in the year after The Bell Curve, and the task force consisted of eleven of the most eminent experts in cognitive functioning in the country, including people of various ideological perspectives. Because, believe me, well, you've been in academia. You know, there's as much ideology within each discipline as there is in politics. But anyway, the the task force came up with a set of knowns and unknowns and it tracked just about perfectly with the statements in The Bell Curve. So it wasn't the Dick and I were brilliant, it's the Dick and I were very cautious. So no, nothing has been overturned since The Bell Curve came out and there's been nothing overturned in the area of racial difference in mean IQ. Before I answer that question, I just thought of the sweetest vindication of The Bell Curve. So I better mention that there was a whole cottage industry of books in the year after The Bell Curve came out attacking the book. This is the pseudoscience and these guys don't know what they're doing. And one of the main themes in this was that when we controlled for socioeconomic status and then pointed out that in many cases the role of IQ was far greater than the role of socioeconomic status that Dick and I had. Not simply we hadn't put enough independent variables into the equation. So we had occupation, we had income, and we had educational attainment, which, to tell you the truth, are basically the three components that social sciences had been satisfied with in measuring socioeconomic status until The Bell Curve came along. But we hadn't put in enough. So they were throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, a lot of which were things that were very closely related to parental IQ. So a lot of the criticisms of The Bell Curve said, oh, if we add, let's say, the number of books in the house, then you can cut down a little bit on the role of IQ. Well, now, what do you suppose the relationship of number of books in the house is to rental like you? And so on and so forth. Anyway, the sweet, sweet vindication was when Christopher Windship at Harvard and I'm blocking on the other guy's name, I'm sorry. Anyway, they did an analysis that Dick and I should have thought of because our major database was the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and this is on me, by the way, because I was taking the lead on the quantitative analysis. I knew that there were siblings in the NLSY database, but it didn't cross my mind to do fixed effects analysis where in effect, you were analyzing the outcomes for siblings. And if you do that, you can control for everything in the shared home environment, just about everything. So you can do much more than add in one or two more independent variables. It's a really elegant control. And the analysis was done and the authors were not happy about it. But listen, I don't want to diss them because they were honest. And they did point out that, in fact, that when you use the sibling analysis, that the independent rule of IQ that Dick and I claimed was not attenuated more than fractionally. And in fact, they said explicitly they were surprised that it had not been. And it affects all of our analyses about the effect, independent effect of IQ on social outcomes had a very powerful vindication. So I had to get that in. All right, now you asked about racial differences. Well, Dick and I considered the possibility of just leaving race out and we decided that it was just the elephant in the corner and we couldn't do it. But we also could not talk about the national implications of our analysis of whites only unless we grappled with the questions. Does an IQ test or an Sat test or any of these others, does it measure the same thing in blacks that it does in whites? Is it as predictably valid? Is it contaminated by cultural bias? Is it contaminated by lack of motivation or stereotype threat is something that came up after The Bell Curve, but now people would say stereotype threat is at work. We had to deal with that. We had to present the story of IQ tests as applied to African Americans and other minorities and make the case that actually the tests measure the same thing in various populations. So we set out to do so, and we tried to work into the topic sequentially. The first simplest thing being are the test scores different for whatever reasons? And the answers for that are yes, they are. For blacks and whites, there's about a standard deviation as the usual size of the difference. I'm assuming, by the way, that an awful lot of your listeners are statistically literate and they know roughly what I mean by a lot of these terms. But just to put it in more traditional terms, if you are one standard deviation below the mean, that means you're at the 16th percentile. If you're one standard deviation above the mean, you're at the 84th percentile. That's that'll give you a sense of what a standard deviation is. IQ is norms so that the average in the the whole population is always a hundred or as close to 100 as possible. Although we'll get into this, IQs have been that those scores have been creeping up decade by decade for reasons that are not totally understood. So what you're talking about is if the average the standard deviation of 15. So what we're talking about if the average for white America was 100 at the time you wrote that book, the average for black America was 85, right? Yeah. Right. Now now, obviously different tests give different results and as time goes on this afternoon we we can get into has the gap been converging? And then things like that. But one standard deviation for considerable period of time has been a good benchmark for the size of it. By the way, there is also a difference between whites and East Asians. It's harder to pin that one down for a variety of technical reasons. Among others. Until recently we didn't have really good representative samples of Chinese living in mainland China. But it's probably three or four points. And that's kind of a soft number. But clearer statement about differences with whites and East Asians is that East Asians have elevated visual spatial IQ. Right. And with Latinos, which of course is not a racial group, but it's an ethnic group that's all over the lot. But there you're looking at that on the order of the low 90s as a mean for those in the United States. So first we do simply the numbers on the differences exist. I think I should clarify a few things. So the disparity with East Asians is in the favor of the East Asians now. So they're higher in visual spatial reasoning. So I feel like I should give a little context here just for on the general concept of IQ and what it purports to measure general intelligence. There is just this fact which is now among the most well attested facts in psychology that a person's ability to reason logically and mathematically and visual spatially and along with their semantic knowledge of the world, of the size of their vocabularies, for instance all of these abilities are highly correlated. It's this correlation that has been dubbed general intelligence or G. And this is what IQ tests measure. So the IQ tests have separate parts that interrogate these separate abilities separately. But a person's ability in all of these areas is highly correlated. It's one thing that's important to point out is that things didn't have to be this way. In fact, it's intuitively plausible that if a person is going to be really good at math say that this ability could come at the cost of his being good at language or vice versa. But that's generally not the case. I mean, there's just a very strong case to be made for this factor of general intelligence. That's actually how it got started was Charles Spearman back in the beginning of the 20th century, brilliant psychologist. He noticed that it didn't make any difference what the test was for, whether it was for British history or algebra or how to fix a car or anything. No matter what the test was, as long as it tapped into something in the brain, the test score seemed to be correlated. That was his first insight. And his second insight was that the magnitudes of the correlation. Varied by tests. And then even before he invented factor analysis, he would look at the pattern of correlation and say, you know what? These tests seem to be clustering on something. And then statistically, he invented a way of capturing that. So it was that it's that correlation. But, Sam, other people are saying to themselves right now, wait a minute. And by the way, I could say this about myself. My verbal skills are way better than my math skills, or vice versa. And that's true. But think of it in terms since most of your listeners have taken Sat or other kinds of tests, think in terms of the comparative score on the Sat verbal versus the Sat math. And I bet, yes, there may very well have been a substantial difference between your two scores. There was between mine. But it's not that you were below average in one and above average in the other. You were above average in both. You were just more above average than the other. And the same thing would be true if you were below average. Usually there are always exceptions. I have a close relative who is way up at the tippy tippy top on verbal and is way below average on math. But that's so unusual enough that the psychologist who tested him said that in 30 years of testing people, he'd never seen that before. By and large, you have the kinds of correlations you're talking about. Very well established. Yeah. And there are a few other wrinkles here. So people can be dyslexic and be very high in intelligence, but the dyslexia impedes their academic performance. And there are other aspects to human ability intellectually, like creativity and ambition. And there's just other things going on that explain a person's success, academically or occupationally. Let me throw in my very favorite analogy about the role of IQ in success comes from Steven Goldberg, who's a professor of sociology at, I think, City College of New York. It's great. He says the role of IQ in explaining success IQ has the same role as weight does for offensive linemen in the NFL. He said if you take the starting linemen in the NFL and you correlate their productivity with their weight, the correlation is going to be basically zero because the heaviest linemen are not the best linemen. But you have to be £300 to get the job. And and that's that's the way with IQ motivation, what they now call grit and a variety of other things are decisively important. But if you if you're going to be a theoretical physicist, you have to weigh £300 to begin with. And then among theoretical physicists, those other qualities will be really important in determining how good you are. Right. The other piece we should put in here is that it's also one of the most robust findings in psychology at the moment, or I should say behavioral genetics, really, that IQ is highly heritable. It's somewhere in the range of 50% to 80%, depending on how old a person is, it actually seems to become more heritable the older we get. Which is strange. I mean, there's this concept of genetic amplification where the boundary between genetic difference and environmental difference is kind of hard to draw because you can think of the fact that genetic tendencies early in life can lead to changes in environment. So when we think about environment, we tend to think about the environment that gets imposed on a child by the parents or by society. But you also have to think about the things children choose to do with their lives and then increasingly do as adults. So if you if you become obsessed with computers and then go get a job at Google, well, then your environment has been shaped by by what you have paid attention to and what you have paid attention to. And your aptitudes, the underlying aptitudes that caused you to do that were, to a very significant degree, it seems, at least 50% dictated by the genes you inherited from your parents. Yeah, all of that is true. And it is also true that we are a long way from disentangling all of this. There are enough really good twin studies. And by that, I don't mean twins raised apart. I'm talking about the classic twin studies where you're comparing identical twins with fraternal twins, which allows for some very useful and powerful disentangling of environment and genes. So are there gene environment interactions where, to some degree, a child creates his or her own environment that in turn reinforces the genetic material? Absolutely. Does that mean that if only you can jack up artificially the environment, you're going to make much difference in a child's IQ? And the answer to that is not long term. You can get some short term effects, but the fade problem of fade out is universal. Yeah, so that's also another wrinkle here, which I think adds to people's concern about talking about this whole area, this lack of anything obvious to do about remedying any inequalities we find here that's I think a major source of angst. And it's kind of a preamble to something I'll be coming back to. There is this notion that if traits are genetically determined, that's bad, and if traits are environmentally determined, that's good, because we can do something about them if they're environmental. And if there is one lesson that we have learned from the last 70 years of social policy, it is that changing environments in ways that produce measurable results is really, really hard, and we actually don't know how to do it, no matter how much money we spend. Right. Another background point here is that virtually everything important psychologically, most things that interest us psychologically about people, these traits are also highly heritable. This includes, like, the big five personality traits extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. I mean, these are these are a person's personality is also at this point, about 50% ascribed to genetic inheritance and the rest to environment. Right. But here we get the wrinkle. Sanders we could talk forever. But anyway, I'll just throw this in that there is the shared environment and there's the non shared environment. And that's one of the things the twin studies has elucidated. And it's the non shared environment that takes up almost all of that 50% of personality characteristics that is not explained by genes. Non shared environment can be all sorts of things. It can be you have different teachers in schools, you ran with different peer groups. It can also be that parents treat children differently. So the warmth of maternal warmth that a mother shows toward one twin can and sometimes is much different than the warmth shown to another. But the thing about the non shared environment is it's not susceptible to systematic manipulation. It's idiosyncratic. It's non systematic. There are no obvious ways that you can deal with the non shared environment in the way that you could say, oh, we can improve the schools, we can teach better parenting practices, we can provide more money for whatever you want to provide money for. Those all fall into the category of manipulating the shared environment. And when it comes to personality, as you just indicated, it's 50 50. But almost all of that 50 is non shared. Yeah. Which seems to leave parents impressively off the hook for the how their kids turn out. Although it is true that parents and I'm, a father of four, we resist that. Yeah. And with the non shared environment and the small role left for parenting, I will say it flat out. I read that research with the most skeptical possible eye. I was looking for holes in it. Assiduously. This is Judith Rich Harris, right? Judith Rich Harris wrote a book on this topic, didn't you, Judith Harris? Judith Harris? Yes. And that was back in the 1990s. And talk about well, look, you said that you heard about The Bell Curve and didn't read it for a long time. I heard about her book and I didn't read it for a long time. Funny how that happened. I did. I didn't want to believe it. And she was the book was very sound. It was very rigorously done. And at this point, I don't know of anybody who's familiar with the literature who thinks there's that much of a role left of the kind that parents thought they had in shaping their children. Right. Well, I'm not going to stop trying. I think it's a very hard illusion to cut through as I read Harry Potter tonight to my eldest daughter. But I think that it's good to reflect on that. Reading Harry Potter to your eldest daughter is a good in itself. Yeah. And the fact that she behaves differently 20 years from now is not the point. No, exactly. It is an intrinsic good, and it's for my own pleasure that I do it largely at this point. Again, I'm painfully aware and I think our listeners will be, that we are proceeding along a razor's edge in this conversation and that my attempt to have it defensively is all too obvious. Given your experience and given just how combustible these issues are I just want to make sure we're putting the relevant pieces in play when our listeners need to receive them. So one thing that just occurred to me people should also understand is that in addition to the fact that IQ doesn't explain everything about a person's success in life and their intellectual abilities, the fact that a trait is genetically transmitted in individuals does not mean that all the differences between groups or really even any of the differences between groups in that trait, are also genetic in origin. Right. Critically important point. Yeah. So the jury can still be out on this topic and we'll talk about that. But to give a clear example so if you have a population of people that is being systematically malnourished now they might have genes to be as tall as the Dutch but they won't be because they're not getting enough. Nourishment. And in the case that they don't become as tall as the Dutch it will be entirely due to their environment. And yet we know that height is among the most heritable things we've got. It's also like 60% to 80% predicted by a person's genes. Right. The comparison we use in the book, which actually was drawn from Richard Lewontin the geneticist, is that if you take a handful of genetically identical seed corn and divide it into two parts and plant one of those parts in Iowa and the other part in the Mojave Desert, you're going to get way different results. Has nothing whatsoever to do with the genetic content of the corn. Right. A more general way to talk about this is when genes are identical, any differences you see have to be due to environment. And when environment is identical, any differences you see have to be due to genes. Yeah. Going through my head are things like measurement error and this and that and the other thing. Your basic point is correct. Right. And there are many other things that IQ is correlated with. It's correlated with high IQ. It's correlated with things like liberal values and things like being less racist and less authoritarian and less sexist, even less religious. I mean, in particular the less fundamentalist in your religiosity. Now, that's not to say that there are not exceptions to every trend we would talk about. So I'm sure you can find a racist, sexist, bible thumping genius somewhere but there won't be as many of these people. And the link between IQ and traits like that are also strong but stronger for some others. But again so there's this one piece which is IQ itself having nothing to do with race has been a somewhat taboo topic, particularly on the left politically. But what's interesting is that it wasn't always the case because the left used to be kind of boosterish about IQ testing because it seemed to promise a direct road to meritocracy. It would get us out of these class differences and people could just be judged on their own merits. That's why the Sat was invented. The Sat was going to be and in fact, it did serve this function. It would be a way for kids who did not go to Groton and Exeter and the rest of it to, to get a chance to show how smart they were and they could be brought into the colleges. And Harvard in particular, and its Conan, its president back in the 1940s were very hot on using tests for precisely that purpose. And by the way, I went to Harvard in 1961, which pretty well dates me from, from Newton, Iowa, and I was absolutely convinced that I got in because I was able to take an Sat score and get a good score even though I went to a mediocre public school sorry about that Newton High School. And in that sense, the enthusiasm for IQ is appropriate insofar as it's a good way to identify intellectual talent. But at this point, Sam, it's almost as if we are in the opposite position of conventional wisdom versus elite wisdom that we were, say, when Columbus was going to sail to America. When Columbus was going to sail to America. It is true that an awful lot of the ordinary people still thought that the Earth was flat. But among the elites it was understood that the Earth is round. Well, now, ordinary people are perfectly comfortable with the idea that some people are smarter than others. They're perfectly comfortable that what we call smart gets you kinds of jobs that you can't get otherwise, all that kind of stuff. It's the elites who are under the impression that, oh, IQ tests only measure what IQ tests measure, and nobody really is able to define intelligence and this and that, they're culturally biased on and on and on and on. And all of these things are the equivalent of saying the Earth is flat. These are not opinions that you can hold in contest with the scientific literature any more than you can be an Aristotelian physicist in contradistinction to a Newtonian physicist. This stuff is not subject to debate anymore. But the elite wisdom now in colleges is. A lot of your listeners are saying what I'm saying is pseudoscience gets very frustrated. Yeah. You just referenced two things which I think are widely believed, which are certainly known to be false and were known to be false at the time you wrote your book again more than 20 years ago. And the first claim is that IQ tests simply measure people's ability to take IQ tests. That is a shibolet that is rattling around the brains of certainly many of our listeners. No one in touch with the literature has thought that was true for a generation. And then there's the idea that these tests are well known to be culturally biased, so that you just cannot get valid data on certain groups, and this is something we've never been able to overcome. That also is not the current opinion of psychometricians anywhere. Is that correct? Yeah. Let me describe a little bit why we know those two things in terms of why we know that IQ tests measure something like the ability to take an IQ test as a matter if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes, Nam Maze, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I am speaking with Graham Wood. Graham is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Magazine. He has written for The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and many other publications. He was the 2014 to 2015 edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and he teaches in the Political Science department at Yale University. And he's the author of the book the Way of the Strangers Encounters with the Islamic State. And we get deep into his book and into the worldview of ISIS. We use ISIS and the Islamic State interchangeably, and we talk about his experience reporting on ISIS, the myth of online recruitment, how to challenge the theology of ISIS. We talk about the quality of ISIS's propaganda, and Graham reveals the identity of the most important American recruit to the Islamic State. We spent a long time talking about the surprising significance of Jesus and the antichrist under Islam. So there's a lot here. And Graham is an amazing authority on these topics, and it was a great pleasure to finally get him on the podcast. So, without further delay, I bring you Graham Wood. I am here with Graham Wood. Graham, thanks for coming on the podcast. Good to be here. You have written this wonderful book, The Way of the Strangers, which is all about the Islamic State, its rise, and you get right up to the point where its fall seems plausible. Things have moved on a little bit since you published the book, but it's just a really entertaining and deep introduction to this phenomenon of just global jihadism more generally than ISIS. But you get into the details in a very accessible way, and the book is structured around some very engaging profiles of people and also fairly amusing profiles of people who you have spent some time with. So my first question for you is, just as a journalist, did you feel that you were taking much personal risk reporting this book? I always worried a little bit about what might happen because especially meeting someone for the first time, you never know what he or she is going to do or what friends that person is going to bring along. But ironically, reporting on the Islamic State has been one of the safer assignments I've had, being in war zones where you don't know where the bullets are going to be coming from. You don't know who you're talking to is often a very dangerous thing. But talking to ISIS supporters is often an experience of subjecting yourself to proselytization that they are really eager to deliver. So it would be weird for them to attack me if I came to them and said honestly and verifiably, look, I want to know about ISIS. They are on this planet to oblige. And so they in general, are pretty happy to talk. That comes through in the reporting. You have these really adorable encounters with people who just have endless disposable time to indoctrinate you, and then you describe their apparent loss of enthusiasm once it's clear that you are not a good mark for this. But they clearly want to get their message out. And I guess we should say that you are reporting these stories not from ISIS held territory. Well, it can't be taken for granted that someone won't do something horrible to you in Australia or in Egypt or in Turkey or in the United States for that matter. And most of the people I spoke to did say I should go to Syria. They said, we understand you'd be afraid to go there, that you think you might get enslaved or beheaded, but if you went there with permission, unlike how James Foley went, you'd be okay. So the most dangerous encounters that I had were probably in places that we don't otherwise think of as terribly dangerous. Like maybe Norway or Australia or the United States. Where you're going to a cafe in a part of town that you don't know and you never know if there's going to be a van that pulls up next to you and pulls you away. That was always a danger. But in the end, I was mostly just in danger of being overfed by these people. That's an interesting point, this idea that if you went to Syria or Iraq and spoke to ISIS directly, you'd be safe if you did it through the appropriate channels. I was amused and slightly alarmed to see that John Walker Lind from his prison cell was somebody who was advocating you do that. He seems completely unrehabilitated. Linda to remind people, john Walker Lind was the often referred to as the American Taliban. He was this young man from Marin County, as everyone should know, a bastion of privilege who decided to go fight with the Taliban very early on, before September 11. And in the aftermath of September 11, he was caught fighting for them, was quickly prosecuted, and has disappeared into the bowels of our prison system. It sounds like he's still there, quite full of faith, and happy to advise you to go talk to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, if you can manage it. Yeah. The way that I interacted with John Walker Lind was as follows he's been in prison since 2001. I wrote to him and said, look, there seems to be this phenomenon called the Islamic State, and a lot of people who in some ways are kind of like you have gone over there. So given that you're still on American soil, and given that you're reading this letter that I've sent you in prison, apparently you can be reached. So do you have anything to tell me about what you think is Motivating people and what the Islamic State is all about? And the letters that he wrote back were friendly, maybe a little bit officious, but we're saying, in essence, that the Islamic State would respect its covenants. He believed if I went to them and said, look, I'm a journalist. I'm curious about what you're doing. Can I go over there and have a kind of guided tour of the caliphate? And, yeah, I told him, that's not going to happen. I'm I'm not going to go over there and just take their word for it that they're not going to behead me. He said, well, it's really the only way to find out. And trust me, they seem like men of their word. So it appears that these 16 odd years that he's spent in prison has not disabused him of the jihadism that he had pursued with the Taliban. Instead, if anything, he's gone from being a Taliban supporter to perhaps an Islamic State one. Now, have there been journalists who have followed that path? I know there's the one German journalist, I think, who crossed into ISIS territory and met some people, although I can't remember if he did that with any permission. Has this theory of Lynn's been demonstrated? Yes, and it's been so far verified in 100% of the cases, which is one case. The guy is Jurgen Todenhofer, who's an elderly German magistrate, kind of an amiable, weirdo, very interesting political figure who's interviewed Bashar al Assad and who wrote to a bunch of German jihadis who were in ISIS territory and said, I'd love to go over there. Can I come? They brought him over, showed him the city of Mosul under ISIS control. He took a bunch of video, and from the sounds of it, I spoke to him about this once up until the very last moment that he crossed the Turkish border to safety. He wondered whether they might kill him. And even while he was over there, they said, look, we will respect the permission that we gave you from the office of the caliph himself to come over here and keep you safe. But we promise you, eventually we're coming to Germany, and your name will be on our list. Right. That's always charming and a host, I will keep you safe here, but I'm coming to kill you where you live. Yeah, it's hospitality of a sort. So just to rewind here, just to give people a little context, because I will have introduced you in my intro to this episode, but you initially got into this research. You wrote a cover article for The Atlantic magazine about ISIS a couple of years ago. And that, at the time, I believe was the most read article in the history of the magazine. It may still be, although I imagine you've had a little competition in the last couple of years with the rise of Trump, and now you have gone on to write this book. You and I actually did before I had a podcast, you and I did a long interview where I interviewed you for my blog that covers territory that I don't think will really cover again in this conversation. So people can go seek that out of my blog if they're interested. Let's just start with the emergence of ISIS, and then I think we're going to get into current events pretty quickly here. But the birth of this group is fairly astonishing. You report on how ISIS conquered Mosul with a force of something like 500 or 1000 men and put the entire Iraqi army to flight. It was almost a proof of their divine aid in some way. It was just like this miraculous display of cowardice on the part of an army that we had trained. How do you explain that first moment? It wasn't actually that surprising to me. I was in Mosul in early 2013, end of 2012, I believe I was the last American reporter to be in Mosul. And my experience of the city even then, and remember, this is like a year and a half before ISIS took control of the city was that everybody was afraid of what they were then calling al Qaeda. They were saying that shopkeepers would be extorted, and if I, as an obvious foreigner, was spotted on the street, there's a really good chance I would get kidnapped. So even back then, there was the sense that there was no law except al Qaeda, except ISIS, and there was definitely no respect for the Iraqi army. So when ISIS came to town and actually took over the city with, you know, four or 500 guys, a bunch of pickups machine guns and so forth, this was a city that was anarchic before, and they were almost just making it official. But didn't thousands of troops just flee outright when these 500 men showed up? Yeah. And the troops who were there when I was there in 2013 was they were garrisoned in just a couple of spots in the city. They were considered tools of a Shia sectarian government, Mosuls mostly a Sunni city. And so it wasn't as if they were doing foot patrols, winning hearts and minds. They were considered just those people in a barracks over there who we never see and we would never trust with our safety. So just imagine a bunch of Sunnis come to town. They say, we represent your interests. You the sunnis of mosul. And those soldiers over there, we will let them run away, most of them, and we'll control your city. How would you like that. And a lot of people in Mosul just said, well, that that might be better than the status quo. So I think that that explains how they were able to take over so much so fast. Now, how many people at this point have emigrated to join ISIS? Is the figure still around 40,000? Yeah, 40,000 is about right. They in the middle of last year told people not to come anymore. So you can expect that the numbers haven't risen too much, and a lot of those 40,000 are already dead. But yeah, from overseas, from countries that are not Iraq and Syria, usually the number quoted is 40 to 45. Now, one of the things you do in your book, which many people decline to do, is you get into the heads of these guys in a way that allows you to see the world from their point of view. And when you do that, the behavior of these people becomes fairly logical. The mysteries begin to evaporate once you begin to take people at their word, when they tell you over and over again what they care about, what motivates them. And it's amazing to me something that has now astonished me for going on 16 years, since September 11. People just find this virtually impossible to do. Scholars of religion or seeming scholars of religion decline to do this. Political scientists routinely prove themselves unable to do this. And you have a quote here, I think it was fairly early in the book that I loved, which is, when someone says something too evil to believe, one response is not to doubt their sincerity, but to expand one's capacity to imagine what otherwise decent people can desire. That, I concluded, is the proper response to the Islamic State. And your encounters with these people just become this exercise in accepting their account of themselves. You pressure test it in a variety of ways because no account is free of internal contradictions. But it's just, from my point of view, a very satisfying excavation of a worldview which you tackle, again, through many of these profiles you do with jihadists, of various commitment. You gave a list of a few disciplines that have been neglectful in their duty to explain some of these things religious studies, political scientists and so forth. And in some ways I've taken to heart messages that they've given about Muslims in other contexts that they seem not to have applied themselves in this one, which is that we in the west, non Muslims, secular academics, we have taken it upon ourselves to speak on behalf of people from far off lands for brown people, for Muslims. And so part of what I was doing was just heeding the call to instead listen to them, let them speak for themselves. It's not as if I, by examining their socioeconomic status or the political circumstances of where they come from, can expect to just understand what they believe about the world I will be able to understand some things, but why not talk to them? Why not let them speak for themselves? So what I ended up doing was, I think, an exercise that was as much anthropological as journalistic. It was trying to describe a culture, a mindset, a view of the world, and to describe it in a way that the people who were speaking would recognize as accurate or at least interesting. One thing that is, I think, surprising, or will be surprising to many of our listeners is that this myth of purely online recruitment is, in fact, a myth. There's this picture that has emerged, which is that people get recruited entirely on the basis of online contacts, and they have no affiliates in the real world that could explain how their their sympathy got bent toward jihadism. I'm sure there there must be some pure cases of that where it really is a an Internet phenomenon, but for the most part, that is a myth. Yeah, for the most part, that is nonsense. The idea that people will just go on Twitter and be told, ISIS is the way to go, read these websites, read Dybic magazine, and get a ticket to Turkey, and you're on your way, that is not how it goes. In as far as I can tell, almost any cases of men, I'll get to women in a second. Usually for people who go over there, they know somebody who's already gone. Obviously, there was a first mover, someone who went over and told his buddies, hey, it's really nice over here. There's a house that I got as soon as I arrived, and that kind of thing. But in general, there's someone who you've met outside the mosque or in a cafe or in a sports team, and that person has done something important in showing you that a human being can go over there. It's not gods who have gone over, but people like you and me, and that changes everything, and everything flows from that. Now, in the case of women, a little bit different, you could look at the women who were recruited to al Qaeda, and first of all, there aren't very many of them. Al Qaeda was like a military organization. It was very male, and it mostly thought of women as encumbrances because they wouldn't be fighting, whereas with ISIS, they're trying to create a society, and so they need men, they need women, they need children. And so they've had to reach out in different ways. And for that, online recruitment has been really valuable. They've been able to talk to people who otherwise would be in very conservative milus, where it's not like they could go talk to some stranger, leave the house whenever they wanted. And so online, you can find people who are purely online recruited and who eventually made it to Syria if they're women. So focusing on the men for a second, the impulse for a woman to join the Islamic State, I must say, remains a bit inscrutable to me, but for the man, it really doesn't. And at one point, you talk about what jihadists in general do, and ISIS has taken this to the point of perfection is that they and this is a quote from you they weaponize a fanatical sense of shame by declaring that jihad is the only absolution. Talk about this notion of shame for a moment, because it probably doesn't have a reference point in the ears of of many of our listeners. When I was being recruited to an ISIS like organization, this was before the time of ISIS. I was in Cairo speaking with a guy I could only describe as a master recruiter. And one of the first things that he would try to emphasize to me was that I had done horrible things in my past. He would ask me wouldn't ask me to confess details of, say, my sexual history or whether I'd use drugs or alcohol or my failings. But he would point out, God has requested that you not do these things, and there will be punishment for you in the hereafter for the things that you've done. So he was really trying to emphasize this sense of deep, deep sin, which I think is familiar to almost anyone who has gone over to ISIS. ISIS says exactly the same thing, that God is watching you. He is nearer to you than your own jugular vein. It's one of the most famous lines from the scriptures that ISIS likes to invoke. And so when they say to someone, especially someone who has an especially sinful past as a rent boy or drug addict or what have you, then part of their appeal is that they can absolve you from the sins of your past. If you die in battle, you don't have to pay the bill when it comes to Judgment Day because you're a martyr, and you get fast tracked straight to paradise. Whereas people who die comfortably in their beds, they do have to go through an absolution process of purification, a kind of burning limbo, before they enter the gates of paradise. Yeah, don't their ribs get crushed together and cracked at the moment of the Day of Judgment? The recruiters love to talk about the lurid punishments. And, yeah, there's something called the punishment of the graves. This is not just, by the way, an ISIS thing. This is part of a fairly orthodox reading of the idea of the hereafter in Islam that when you die, you get trash compacted within your grave and you scream as your ribs crack and eventually touch each other. And the only ones who can hear this screaming are animals and genies. So there's all sorts of bad things that happen to you after you die, unless you are one of two categories a martyr, someone who dies in the course of jihad or in a few other categories of death. And a prophet, which none of us are. So if you have a sense that you've got a steep, steep bill to pay in the here after before you go through the pearly gates, then you have all the more incentive to die faster and more gloriously to avoid paying that bill. It's a dynamic theory of the hereafter. I feel like I'm paying that bill on the jiujitsu mats. No one hears my screams, not even the genies, when I get crushed. But you can always tap out. You can't tap out when the creator of the universe is doing it to you. One hears no, not when he's got you in a rear naked choke. You can't do anything about that. This is something you keep confronting throughout the book. You continually bump into the problem of arguing against the Islamic State's theology. And unfortunately, it's a nontrivial problem. It's a problem that, as I said, many scholars and many mainstream Muslims shirk, I guess the pun on the Arabic term for polytheism should be intended. There so many so called moderate Muslims and their apologists just lie about the doctrines from which the Islamic State is drawing its inspiration. At one point, you quote the head of Care, the Council of American Islamic Relations, claiming that there are no end time prophecies in Islam. I hear people like Reza Islam say that the Quran abolishes slavery. Right? There's no support for slavery in Islam. Countless people have said that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. President Obama quite famously said this over and over again. One reason why I think Hillary Clinton lost is that she seemed inclined to follow that quite delusional line. And rather than talk about the actual link between specific doctrines with respect to martyrdom and jihad and apostasy and blasphemy and all the rest and this death cult behavior, people reflexively talk about US foreign policy and the bath party and bad people who would do bad things anyway, right? This is just religions being used as a pretext. They claim that ISIS has no theological justification for its actions. At one point, you quote somebody, I think it was a Guardian writer who even argued that ISIS drew its actual inspiration from the French Revolution and from from, you know, the scientific enlightenment. You have people like Tariq Ramadan saying that ISIS is not a religious phenomenon, it's purely political. I mean, there's just this tsunami of obscurantism that rises up every time a person attempts to talk about the theological roots of this phenomenon. So how have you encountered that obscurantism? And were you taken in by that initially and then gradually deprogrammed through your encounter with sincere believers? What was that like for you in terms of disabusing yourself of that myth? I had the fortune or maybe misfortune of encountering ISIS like beliefs or jihadist beliefs abnormally early in my life. I was about let's see, I was 22 years old when I first met someone who was a follower of Bin Laden. I was at a conference in Peshawar, Pakistan. I was just a backpacker passing through, but there was a conference going on, so I was curious what was there. And it was basically a bunch of jihadists who were getting together and they were in fact addressed remotely by Bin Laden himself. So I got to talk to people and from that early stage, I already had a sense that there was more to jihadism than just political grievance or any of the other things that you listed. And there was certainly among the people who were part of that group a an absolute devotion to Islamic scriptures and to interpretations of those scriptures that have been around for a long time and are not made up out of thin air in the 20th century or 21st century. So that came first for me, and some of the apologetic efforts hit my ears well after and well after I knew what the responses were from the jihadist side. For me, the response was so ubiquitous, every side was saying, especially in this country, that ISIS was not a religious phenomenon, that ISIS was best understood in ways that had little to do with the history of Islam, except for some extreme Islamophobes, of course. So that sentiment was so constant that for me, what was much more interesting was to find the Muslims who were actually opposed to ISIS, and who, unlike the ones who would say, hate slavery, has been abolished in Islam. Permanently and forever. Or that ISIS has no knowledge of its scriptures was to find the ones who didn't have that level of ignorance or willingness to lie about the history of the religion. And there turned out to be a lot of them who had arguments against ISIS that came from an Islamic perspective, sometimes a very conservative, possibly even jihadist Islamic perspective, and to ask them where they got those ideas as well. Much has been made of the fact that some recruits to the Islamic State were found to buy books with titles like Islam for Dummies, as though this proves that religion played no real role in their behavior because they obviously didn't understand their religion all that well. Or that in some ways their claims of a religious motive must be insincere if they're buying books like that. And again, this is precisely the sort of point that I've heard someone like Reyes Oslon make on television. Right. I notice you dispatch that idea at some point in the book, dispatch it here because that has always struck me as a fairly crazy and in many cases insincere point. Yeah, there were a couple of guys from Birmingham, England, who were trying to get to ISIS territory and had in their Amazon co UK shopping carts, the Koran for Dummies and Islam for Dummies. And ever since then you hear this invoked as evidence that these people know nothing about Islam, have no interest in Islam, and it's obviously just not. So the idea that, first of all, that someone who is reading books about Islam has no interest in Islam is self evidently a non sequitur. But beyond that, you have to understand that the amount of time that that has someone has spent as a devoted jihadist or pious Muslim is not correlated with the intensity of their feeling of devotion or piety. I think a lot of people think that. How do you judge whether someone is a believing Muslim? Well, you look at time in Grade, how long has this person been identifying as a Muslim? And the answer for many ISIS supporters, it's true, it's rather short, but how intensely do they believe this? Quite a lot. So you find people like METI Hassan now of al Jazeera, who will at any chance invoke this example, we should say now of the Intercept, right? Isn't he writing for the Intercept? Yeah, I think he's Al Jazeera and the Intercept now. And anytime you talk about this, you're likely to hear someone, not always mehdi, say, look, this is an example of how foolish these people are. And I'm not saying they're not foolish. I would just point out that educating yourself, reading books about Islam, is the sign of someone who actually cares a lot about this stuff. Now, the other point that people will make about someone who's reading the Quran for Dummies is that this person is not a learned Muslim. He's not a sheikh or an al Azhar trained theologian, and I would not deny that. What I think people miss from this, though, in their zeal for denigrating the followers of ISIS, is that in any human population you would find some people who are novitiates and some people who are a small fraction of people who are learned scholars of the faith. You could go, as Rukmini Kalamaki once said to me, if you went to a small town in Italy and you approached people coming out of Mass on a Sunday and you asked them about obscure doctrines within Catholicism or canon law, the average person would have no idea what you were talking about. Would you then conclude that that person is not Catholic or has no interest in Catholicism? No, the person just came out of Mass and probably identifies very closely with Catholicism, just happens not to be someone who is tremendously learned. And that's the case, of course, with the majority of Islamic State recruits as well. Yeah, it's a very important point this time in grade illusion that I think you've aptly named, because the point gets made another way quite frequently too, which people will say that the person has no background in a madrassa, for instance, right. This is someone who had a fairly secular background and then all of a sudden has changed his worldview, as though no sudden change could be sufficient to count as a real religious conviction. But of course, people have awakenings to. One or another religion all the time. And when you trace people's connection to the rest of the community, what you find rather often is not necessarily jihadism, but you find a religious context which is fairly conservative by any comparison with even with Christian fundamentalism in the west. And as you find throughout the religious landscape, you find that religious ideas are systematically protected from criticism. So the belief in paradise is endemic to planet Earth in one or another form, and it's certainly incredibly well subscribed throughout the Muslim world among Muslims who have varying degrees of commitment and knowledge about the faith. And so people who can seem quite secular still live, in many cases, their entire lives. In a context where I believe in paradise and the legitimacy of martyrdom and the divine origin of the Quran and all that, the building blocks of this worldview are in place, whether they've taken a real interest in it or not up until that point. I can give you an example of how some of these ideas go from being dormant to being active. A lot has been said about the apocalyptic side of ISIS. ISIS officially believes that the end of the world is coming, and it's coming at ISIS's, instigation at their hand, and it's not going to be pretty, and it's going to cause the Antichrists to come back, and great battles and so forth. These are not things that are generally spoken of in mosques. If you go to your local mosque, you're very unlikely to find an imam screaming about the end of the world, just like if you go to your local church. This is probably not going to be the favorite topic of a sermon for at any megachurch, although there will be a kind of understanding that these ideas are out there. And in the case of Muslims, as one scholar told me, this is the kind of thing that is told to Muslim kids when they go to bed at night. It's stories to make them be good kids, to obey their mom and dad, to think about good and evil and try to develop a moral sense. They they're not stories that that are necessarily going to be weaponized into ISIS. They're they're just part of the folklore of a culture. Now, ISIS, it finds people who have been told these stories, and these are largely benign stories, I think. And then it comes to them and says, all right, all those stories you've heard that were not emphasized by your religious authorities, they're real. They're happening right now. And since people have been hearing them over and over again, it's a fairly simple action to wake them up to the idea that these great battles are happening right now. And you better get there soon, otherwise you'll be thought of in the hereafter as someone who ran away. You know, I want to talk about the end times prophecies in some detail, because they really are the goofiest stories ever told, and the fact that anyone believes them literally is fairly astonishing. But before we get there so you said that in the course of reporting this book, you encountered people who were not mere obscurantists with respect to ISIS, but still disagreed with them. So you found scholars who, rather than play hide the ball with the articles of faith, they dealt with the theology of ISIS in a more honest way. I mean, they would they would acknowledge, for instance, that the Prophet had sex slaves, right? Rather than condemn slavery or even sexual slavery, the Prophet practiced it, right? This is unambiguous in his biography. And it's not an accident, therefore, that ISIS thinks they can do this. And therefore the challenge is for honest critics of this sort of faith to find a theological basis from which to criticize it. How did those efforts appear to you? Did you find people who were offering a counterpoint to the theology of ISIS that you felt could sway potential jihadists? There are a few different categories, especially from believing Muslims, of believing Muslims who were opposed to ISIS. There would be some whose main effort was to make Muslims look good. I would put as an example, care would probably be one organization that was involved in that and trying to say, look, we are not ISIS, and it's true, they are not ISIS. They're not supportive of ISIS. They are also, though, very willing to say things that are false about Islam and about the history of the beliefs that Muslims have had over the years. Another category is of people who would they would not lie about Islam, but they would lie about ISIS. They would claim that ISIS doesn't believe what it believes, doesn't say what it says. That's maybe a slightly easier to deal with category. And then you'd find others whose knowledge of their own tradition is extensive enough that they couldn't possibly simply deny the reality of slavery in Islam or amputation of hands of thieves or beheading sorcerers and apostates. And that last category was what I found to be the it was, first of all, the diverse category. There were many different Muslim scholars, muslims within it. But it was also the most interesting because, as you say, they they were not playing hide the ball. They were they were instead engaging in in a very complicated and sincerely felt battle within within the faith. And, you know, they would to take the issue of slavery specifically one of those earlier categories, they might have said, slavery has been abolished in Islam. That is true if you think Islam is the governments of Muslim majority countries, they have pretty much all abolished slavery. It is not true of the tradition of Islam, which has for most of its existence recognized the legitimacy of slavery and and codified the institution. So you you'd find one of the most distinguished living Muslim jurists, taki Yosmani of Pakistani, who said, of this argument that slavery has been simply abolished by the consensus of all Muslims to be, he said, so ridiculous it would make a grieving mother laugh. That's the person I wanted to talk to was someone who was aware of the place in the tradition and yet was able to give me an explanation of why ISIS's version of this was not okay. Before we go further in that direction, I just want to comment on this impulse that so many Muslims and their apologists feel to, above all, make sure that Islam doesn't look bad or that Muslims don't look bad in the aftermath of a terrorist attack of the sort we've recently experienced. This is so wrong headed. There are a few things make the community of Muslims look worse than they're reliably lying about the faith, they're lying about the existence of dangerous doctrines which are so easy to find. So whatever the motive for these lies, it can't help but appear sinister. And this ritual is now so widely repeated that it's become a caricature of itself in the aftermath of an event like Manchester or London, which just happened. You have Muslims jumping on the airwaves, either representatives of care or people who claim to be secular and in fact, in many cases certainly are secular. You got people like the comic Dean Obadala, who's got a post on CNN and they jump on television and they essentially say, what do you want from us? We condemn terrorism. Look, I condemn terrorism. I'm condemning terrorism. I don't support ISIS. Why is the burden on Muslims to condemn terrorism every time something like this happens? This is I've hit this before, but I just view this as like a public service announcement. The issue is not that Muslims don't condemn terrorism. Condemning terrorism is a trivially, easy thing to do. And it goes without saying that most Muslims don't support the activities of a man who shows up at an Ariana Grande concert and massacres children, right? That need not be said. But what is altogether lacking is an honest acknowledgement that this violence is arising out of sincere belief in the truth of specific religious doctrines. And that is the problem. Muslims don't have to condemn terrorism. They have to condemn the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad, which is a much heavier lift, right, theologically and socially. And they they need to condemn all of the triumphal bullshit about Islam eventually conquering the world. That is ISIS's message. And that's what has to be confronted head on by honest, secular, liberal or otherwise conservative and nonetheless tolerant Muslims. And that is something, I mean, I feel like I can count on one hand, maybe two hands at most, the people who honestly do that reliably. And someone like Majid Nawaz who gets on CNN and you can actually track through his statements and remain sane at the end. So, anyways, this is my hobby horse, but every time there's a new terrorist event, and we see the same shills for Delusion jump on television. It really is just crazy making. I'm largely in agreement with what you just said. I will say I do get the question all the time. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+I am back with Andrew Yang. Andrew, thanks for joining me. Sam, thank you for having me. That this is going to be like, a refuge of a conversation. I think most people listen to you because you make us smarter, wiser, more enlightened, and I feel like I could use some of that energy. Nice. Well, I hope to provide, but I'm very happy to talk to you first. But before we jump into all the topics of interest, how are you feeling? You caught COVID, right? Yes, I have COVID, and I was hoping for the sympathy sans the suffering, and it turns out I got my share of the suffering where I've had the flu version. So just imagine a very nasty flu bug with some added wrinkles. But I'm on the mend, and I should be out and about in the next number of days, hopefully. How long has it been? When did you first get symptoms? I first got symptoms last weekend, so we're recording this on Wednesday. So it's been about ten full days now, and the symptoms started out mild, and I was hopeful that I would skate and just be holed up in my room, but then I've had about a week of real fatigue and fever and flu like experiences. Yeah. Well, I guess all things considered, that still sounds lucky, but sorry to hear it. I had an oximeter, sam, I don't know if people know this, but it's so helpful just to be able to take your blood oxygen level at any moment, because when you're there and you're not sure how you're faring, and then you just check, and then you're like, oh, I'm fine. Right? Anyone listening to this? If you want to be prepared, just get a blood oximeter measurement tool. It's only, I think, $20 or so. Yeah, you can get those on Amazon. Or there was a time when you could get those on Amazon. I assume they've been mass produced at this point. So, Andrew, you are running for office of mayor in what is very likely the most important city on Earth. I love the idea of you being mayor of New York. Let me just get my biases on the table. And it's amazing to consider New York being a kind of laboratory to experiment in how we reboot society. At this point, it seems like so many things are up for review and in just how we function collectively. And the idea that someone with your creative and modern take on things could be steering the fairly large ship of New York City is just amazing to consider. So I'm wishing you the best of luck, brother. Well, thank you. Sam, I do think that this is like a continuation of the arc that, frankly, you helped launch back in 2018, when I was an unlikely presidential candidate and we made a really powerful case around trying to advance and humanize the economy that I dare say ended up becoming mainstream popular wisdom. Where, as we're having this conversation, the last I checked, 85% of Americans are for cash relief during the pandemic, and a majority are for cash relief in perpetuity, otherwise known as basic income. And I am really eager to take principles that I fought for on a national level and apply them in New York City around fact based governance and trying to get bureaucracies to work in a more modern and technologically proficient fashion. I can't wait to roll up my sleeves, get some incredible people on board, and try to sear New York City in a positive direction. And this race is also different from the presidential race in that I'm the front runner, which I don't think ever happened at the Presidential. That's amazing. There's an enormous opportunity here that I hope we take full advantage of. So what's New York like now? We're still in the midst of this pandemic. I know you're probably doing a better job than California in rolling out the vaccine, but we're still under the shadow of this thing. What's happening? New York City is badly wounded, Sam. It's been devastated by the coronavirus on multiple levels. And most of your listeners know me as a numbers guy. Some of the numbers that reflect how bad it's been in New York City over 27,000 lives have been lost. Over half a million have been infected. Over 700,000 jobs have been lost. The unemployment rate is over twice the national average, in part because the city is missing 60 million tourists who used to support over 300,000 jobs. Midtown Manhattan commercial buildings are 82% unoccupied. Subway ridership is down 70%. Violent crimes are rising. 300,000 New Yorkers have left the city in terms of filing for change of address forms and just relocated. So there's just a lot of pain and suffering right now. Over 10,000 small businesses and restaurants have closed, and more are joining them all the time. This is a city that thrives based upon people coming together in large numbers, on people visiting, on people eating out every night. And a lot of those things aren't happening right now. So the adjustments have been really painful for many, many organizations and individuals and families here. I know it's been bad in California as well, but I do think New York City has special dependence on people feeling like they can come together in large numbers. Yeah, it seems to me that it's really a perfect storm there with respect to specific variables of density and dependence on tourism and retail and office space going unoccupied and just the weather, right. There are many places in the country where restaurants can start serving outdoors before they they open indoors. And, you know, I know you guys tried that, but in the dead of winter, it doesn't work very well. Let's go through these topics somewhat systematically because I'd like to get your take on each. The retail and office space problem 82% unoccupied. One thing that worries me is that there's the prospect that our habits have changed enough under COVID, with remote work in particular, that it's conceivable that that office space will go unoccupied, not because COVID has lingered, but because habits have changed. Do you think that's possible or likely or how do you view using all the space in New York if people's attitudes toward remote work have undergone a durable change? I think we're in the midst of a very significant cultural shift. I think organizations are going to change how they schedule in person meetings and having people in the office. I do think that there are a couple of forces that have cut in different ways. Sam where right now pre COVID, there was a tendency for companies to pile employees on top of each other in New York as well because it was very expensive for office space. So you'd say, hey, guess what, guys? We're going to slam you into cubicles and bullpens and have people in very close borders. So I think there are going to be shifts in both directions. I believe that some of this space will likely have to change its express purpose. But I do not think it would be realistic for everyone to say, look, things are going to go back to the way they were in terms of people using office space the same way, and frankly, in some cases, paying the same premium that they were paying. There has to be very significant adaptation even as you're trying to accelerate the comeback. We definitely need to vaccinate everyone as quickly as possible and then give you the confidence that if you come to the office building, everyone there has been either vaccinated or tested negatively so that you feel 100% secure. Those things are necessary. Preconditions and then even if you do those things effectively, there will still be some changes that likely happen throughout many of these organizations and their lease commitments. I think I'm just agnostic as to how durable these changes are in the way we work. It's hard to imagine the same degree of business travel, for instance, now that we know a zoom call can actually fill the bill for what used to be getting on an airplane and spending two or three days round trip going to a meeting. I mean, I think that has got to have been reset in some generational sense. But I also think there's, you know, as you point out, there are forces that cut in the other direction, and and one will just be I think people will want to have excuses to get together as well. I think if we can get COVID truly behind us, I think it will be an amazing time to be opening a restaurant because people are going to be desperate to be in restaurants and bars, and good luck getting a table in a restaurant in New York once we fully recover here. I guess the same could be true of certain approaches to office space and retail. I don't know. Again, so much shopping has moved online, but you got to think a reinvention of retail is also possible because most of us are getting sick of living like somebody out of a Dostoevsky novel and not leaving our houses. So once we fully get out from under the shadow of COVID how do you picture New York rebooting? Street level retail in New York is often geared towards some of the 60 million tourists, and I think that those experiences will still be very much desired when if you visit New York City, you want a memory, you want something that commemorates and documents or visit, and people will want that experience in some way. It could be that the makeup of the retail changes. There have been a lot of very significant brands that invested in Times Square restaurants and whatnot in part because they thought that it would be a worthwhile branding expenditure. And I think that's unique to New York City because the thought is that you can reach people from all over the country, all over the world, if you're investing in like a Time Square restaurant or something along those lines. So I do think that retail for tourists will be a constant. There are going to be a lot of storefronts that need to get new tenants. Right now, if you walk New York City streets, there are a lot of empty storefronts and it's unclear whether they're going to end up reopening on their own. Naturally that there have been some suggestions around having vacancy taxes for landlords to try and give them some sort of spur to make sure that there is a tenant trying to fill that storefront because it's going to be an issue for a while. Well, let's talk about crime and homelessness because these are obviously not just problems for New York. Cities all over the country are seeing a spike in both. The stories out of San Francisco are testifying to something like a free fall condition there with respect to quality of life. Again, with respect to both variables, crime and homelessness, let's take homelessness first. What is the reality of homelessness now in New York and what would be a response to it that could fundamentally change the picture? Well, the first thing you want to do is try and keep the problem from getting worse because there are many New Yorkers who are in position to potentially get evicted if the moratorium isn't extended or if they don't have legal representation. It turns out if you have legal representation, the odds of your staying in your apartment go way up. So one thing the city should be doing is making sure that any tenant who wants a lawyer can have one. We should be trying to keep people in their homes. The city has had a program for a while around emergency rent assistance that makes perfect sense where you spend a little bit of money trying to keep people in their home, it ends up saving the city a lot of money on homelessness services. And the homelessness problem is growing in New York city order of magnitude. You have about 57,000 people in shelters right now in New York, and in some cases, New York is spending tens of thousands of dollars ahead per year on providing shelter to folks because of the overburdened shelter system, in some cases even buying hotel rooms because that was the only shelter that could be found. So this is a situation where you want to try and keep the problem getting worse, number one. And then number two, we need to develop more sustainable, affordable housing, which has been a constant problem in New York city, because no one actually has wanted affordable housing to be developed in their neighborhood. When the proposal comes up, they're all for it in the political abstract, but then when it was like, hey, how about your district? Then people didn't like it. So one big opportunity here, there are a few things one can do. One is we should be expanding something called safe haven beds, which are beds that are provided by nonprofits, in some cases religiously affiliated nonprofits that in many cases homeless people prefer to homeless shelters. Some homeless people really do not want to go to a shelter, but they'll go to a safe haven bed, so any of those beds are worth their weight in gold, and we should be trying to expand capacity. But the other big move would be to quickly repurpose some of these vacant hotels that are going out of business right in the left. Frankly, right now in New York city, if you can imagine being a hotel operator right now, you're looking at 90% of your business drying up for, at this point, ten months in a row. And so a lot of hotel operators are throwing in the towel, and the city should actually be catching that towel and saying, we'll take it off your hands and then repurpose. Some of those hotels become ongoing, affordable housing for folks. They're actually, in many ways, ideally set up for it already. They have the plumbing, the fixtures, the infrastructure. So this is one of the only golden opportunities of the pandemic age for the city of New York. There are many of these hotel operators that actually at this point, would take a deal just to walk away. Interesting. How do you stop a hotel like that converted to affordable housing from becoming a kind of circus of dysfunction of the sort that I imagine explains why homeless people often don't want to go to shelters because they're either perceived to be unsafe or just. Many of the reasons why people are homeless are now concentrated in a building, mental illness and substance abuse being the primary ones. Obviously, people become homeless for other reasons of the sheer bad luck of economic emergency or illness plus eviction. But there's so many people who are on the street, who are chronically on the street due to substance abuse or mental illness. How could we make these places places where people can get the kinds of services they need and have the result be something like a remedy for the problem of homelessness? Well, number one would be to have a mixture of types of residents and families so that you could have people who just would be really thrilled about an opportunity to live in a repurposed hotel alongside maybe some folks who are struggling. And so you wind up without a very high density of folks who might be struggling with substance abuse or other issues. There's also something called supportive housing where you actually have some of those services built in. And so you could have social workers or addiction counselors, actually even staffing some of these centers so that there are some countermeasures in place. The goal would not, frankly, be to turn these hotels into shelters in the way that would be concentration of some of the issues that shelters right now face. It would be so that there's a whole mix of families and people have found that actually to be a way for folks who are struggling to have a social context and be in better position to improve. Right, so what about crime in the city? What's happening there? There's a spike in many cities of 50% or so in the last ten months. It's a bit higher here, unfortunately, and also discouraging the rates of resolution, which is that the perpetrator gets caught, have been going down. That, to me, is a very nasty combination. You want the rates of resolution to be going up or staying constant, worst case. So we need to invest resources in trying to stem the rise and also catch perpetrators. One of the things that I always have this working theory on is that if there are, let's say, ten robberies, that might not be ten robberies, that could be like two robbers who just are going around robbing multiple people. So when I see these rises and the fact that many of the crimes haven't been resolved, I think to myself, well, there are some very bad actors who are in position to strike again. And that to me, has to be where you focus your resources, is that a relatively small number of people being apprehended could end up being like a significant factor in some of these rates. I'm going to tell a dumb story, but this is an experience I had. I ride my bike around New York City a lot. Not a motorbike, like a normal bike you're campaigning on Harley. I have got enough of like an 80s action hero to be running out on a motorcycle. So, being safety conscious, I bought a blinker to attach to my bike because my blinker had run out of juice and I was kind of lazy and decided I just buy a new one, even though there was a way to recharge the original. So I bought this blinker, very nice, very shiny, and I put it on my bike, and it was actually taken off my bike within a day. I parked my bike and locked it. And so my bike was locked, so it was a little bit difficult to just take. But someone saw the blinker and said to take it off my bike. That was the kind of thing that I don't think necessarily would have happened in another time in New York's history. I think right now is like a time when people are feeling kind of desperate and so something as dumb as like a blinker on a bike like that, they might take it now when they might not have before. Obviously, the topic of law and order brings us up against issues of social justice here that are both understandable and I also think are deeply misconstrued by many people on both the right and the left. But I do think we're post George Floyd. So now coming on I don't know what that would be nine months or so, we're living through the kind of aftershocks of a kind of moral panic around policing police violence, issues of lingering racism, notions of equality in this space that don't actually make sense when you're talking about the demographics of crime. A belief that in particular, the black community is is over policed. Whereas if you ask members of the black community living in the most crime ridden neighborhoods, that's certainly not their perception. Arguably, they're over policed with respect to petty crime and under policed with respect to serious crime. And in the StarKist case, you have the problem of murderers just going free. You know, crimes being unsolved, the worst kinds of crimes being unsolved disproportionately in certain neighborhoods. And yet any seemingly rational approach to fighting this sort of crime, directing cops preferentially into places where more of the crime happens, can be spun as racist or otherwise optically horrific, sort of any time you want. And people are so sensitive to this that I think we're right to fear that. In many cities. I don't know if New York is an example, but in many cities there's something like a Ferguson effect that has happened here, which is where cops kind of stop policing in areas where the inconvenient YouTube video leads to the reputational destruction of the cops involved or the police force that's supposed to be solving crime in these neighborhoods. So it's a hard problem to solve. And just from a PR point of view, whatever is rational to do in terms of fighting crime and improving people's lives, as you know, Michael Bloomberg had his own adventures with stop and frisk. How do you view solving this problem or ramming through it or ignoring it? I mean, what is the approach to fighting a resurgence in crime in New York in a way that actually fights it as efficiently and as sanely as possible. The NYPD has had a number of real issues that predated George Floyd. In the summer, there was a gentleman named Eric Garner who was publicly choked out and lost his life. And I don't know if you remember, this was a number of years ago, but there were NBA players wearing, like, I can't breathe a number of years ago for Eric Garner, that was New York. The NYPD spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year settling civil lawsuits against it, which I take as a very terrible data point on so many levels. One, because if you can imagine the city of New York spending hundreds of millions on anything, like, the last thing you'd want to spend it is on suddenly lawsuits against cops who've done something wrong. The second thing is that if you're losing a couple of hundred million dollars worth of lawsuits a year, that probably means that the level of harm might even be a multiple of that. Because a lot of the times, I'm sure no one's actually getting sued for something that they're doing wrong. So there is a genuine cultural problem where the NYPD is concerned that I think, extends to some of that. All the officers when I talk to officers on the street, some of them, frankly, seem like exactly the kind of people that you want policing a community. When I was in the Bronx, there was a team. It was like a Latino woman in a black male cop patrolling. It made you feel like, okay, these are people actually even represent this community. There has to be an ability to focus on lowering rates of violent crime and bringing up resolution rates and simultaneously not incurring hundreds of millions of dollars of lawsuits for civil rights abuses or having well publicized issues where your officer did something that people would find objectionable. And I do not think that it is impossible to do two things at once, which is bring down violent crime rates and try to address and reform a culture that has definitely demonstrated some excesses. And the excesses have been demonstrated very recently. There were issues around NYPD responding excessively to various protests just a number of weeks or months ago. So it is a complex issue, but you have to be able to tackle both the things at once. And I think they go hand in hand, because if the public knew that police were bringing down rates of crime and catching perpetrators, I think public trust would approve. Yeah, there's just so much confusion on this issue that it's very difficult to sort out people's intuitions here. You just take the Eric Garner case. The thing that was so obscenely wrong in that instance was that the cops were trying to enforce that law in the first place. Right? I mean, just that the effort to enforce a don't sell cigarettes on the street law led to an escalating violence that he was absolutely resisting arrest. I mean, once you try to arrest somebody and they say, you're not going to arrest me and they're going to physically resist, well, then the cops are all of a sudden in this escalating use of force scenario where things can obviously go wrong. And if somebody just reaches into his pocket at that point, then you have a cop having to make a split second decision whether this person is going for a gun or a knife or it's chaos. And so you can't have idiotic laws that put cops on this continuum where decisions are being made about whether to effectively kill someone. And the war on drugs generally has put us in this spot for now decades, where cops are executing no knock raids and sometimes they get the wrong address. And you probably don't have this problem as much in New York because I would imagine the rate of gun ownership is legal. Gun ownership is almost nonexistent. So there's not the same problem with people with cops kicking in the wrong door and then getting into a shootout with somebody who thinks he's defending himself. But it really does start with having some bad laws being enforced in many cases. And why can't we simply focus on the problems that are totally uncontroversial, like violent crime and including things like robbery? I mean, it has to be at the top of everyone's list of things that need to be enforced. And that is something that I believe I'm going to help effectuate as mayor that we can decriminalize or frankly, relax enforcement around certain forms of recreational drug use. I've already targeted Opiates as an example of something that I don't want to be prosecuting. I've also championed decriminalizing sex work because to me, like, police should be dedicating energies to more serious crimes that actually concern the public to a higher level. And so you're exactly right, Sam. I mean, these are things that we may be able to make happen in New York City as early as next year. Yeah, it would be amazing. Again, it's useful for people to consider how much bigger than a city New York is. Really? One of the things I tell people, Sam, all the time, is that if New York metro area were a country, it would be the 11th biggest economy in the world, right after Canada. But the amount of impact that we can have is really vast. It's important to get right, because the failure of New York for that very reason would be a very bad sign. Right. I mean, the failure of New York on some level is the failure of civilization, given how important it is culturally and economically. A proper renaissance in New York where we connect all these dots correctly and reboot as quickly as possible, that would be amazing. And it would be amazing to generalize those lessons to other places. Where does UBI fit in here? Now people will be familiar with. I think you're campaigning for President on this plank. Perhaps you might want to say something about it for anyone who isn't. But is there a scope for a UBI experiment in New York, a universal basic income I think most of your listeners are familiar with as a policy where everyone gets a certain amount of money to meet their basic needs. I was championing $1,000 a month during the presidential campaign, which now doesn't seem like enough given the pandemic. I think people are now advocating for $2,000 a month for everyone, which seems very reasonable to me. New York City is going to be facing budgetary shortfalls for the foreseeable, so we're going to have to be very targeted. I've proposed a cash relief program to alleviate extreme poverty among the half a million or so New Yorkers who right now are at that level. And we can lift them up out of extreme poverty and do so in a way that I believe is going to end up saving the city hundreds of millions of dollars because of the expenses that the city incurs. When people end up in our institutions in various ways, whether those be shelters or other forms of safety net that sometimes people find themselves in worst case scenario, like a prison or another institution, So this billion dollars in cash relief, I believe, could serve as a template because it's going to be the biggest program of its kind. And my hope is that we can augment it with private philanthropic resources among folks who are looking for innovative ways to fight poverty. I also want to take some of the money that we put into people's hands through something called the Ibnyc Program and have it be funneled through locally owned small businesses. Because of the scale of the New York City economy, I think that there are ways that we can actually have more of the value flow through the hands of folks that we're also trying to help recover or in some cases, stay open. Yeah. What is the role for philanthropy here? We were talking about a winner take all kind of economy before COVID but COVID has certainly accentuated that in ways that I guess are unsurprising, but were probably unforeseeable because no one was really thinking about the consequences of a pandemic. We've seen some businesses absolutely decimated through no fault of their own. As we've mentioned, restaurants, no matter how successful they were before COVID just got crushed. But there are people who have made tens of billions of dollars, individuals who have made tens of billions of dollars, even hundreds of billions of dollars in a couple of cases over the last ten months. And I'm just wondering, it just it just seems like, again, New York is is a singular place. I think you really could make a pitch to some of the wealthiest people in our society, whether they have roots in New York or. Not to make a major philanthropic push to do something amazing there. Yeah, that's very much the vision and the plan where if you want to try to address poverty in the biggest city in the country, in one of the most important cities in the world, and you want to work hand in hand with the city, then this is your opportunity. And the city is going to put forward a billion dollars. But in my mind, that should be just the beginning. And you can easily imagine individuals stepping forward and saying, I want to demonstrate that poverty is something that we can defeat if we decide to do so. And I have a number of other anti poverty plans that are related. One is trying to get people high speed Internet. 29% of New York City residents don't have high speed Internet right now, and so you can imagine some of them trying to have their kids learn from home. 12% don't have a bank account, so they're subject to check captures, money lenders and pawn shops, which sometimes charge you serious rates. So there are different ways that we can combat poverty, and I hope to make New York City the proving ground for a lot of these ideas. You said before, Sam, that New York's comeback is vital. I don't have any illusions. And that there is no guarantee that New York comes back the way that we want it to. I think there's a lot at stake. I believe that I can help dramatically increase the odds of New York coming back. But one of the ways it's going to come back is if we're willing to invest in innovative ways and programs that get people excited and that we're able to access resources that don't fall directly under city agencies. That's one reason why I'm excited to run for mayor is I want to present a vision of New York City that different types of people will get excited about, that, frankly, would not ever set foot in City Hall. Yeah. Innovation is really in your DNA, so it's great to think about taking a nonstandard approach to so many things here, and nonstandard in a way that's not the mere wrecking ball of being a trumpian outsider. Right. We've tried that on a national scale, but nonstandard in not being captured by all of the legacy code that is making it impossible to innovate, to have a truly fact based and well informed discussion about how we move forward on all these fronts, I think you're the guy to do that. When's the election? It's the end of June. This is the primary. June 22 is the Democratic primary, which is essentially the whole kit and caboodle, given that it is New York City and we are in great position to win. But we could certainly use people's support. This is a very fast race to sprint, and we need to raise as much money as possible. By the March 11 filing deadline, which is when we're going to file our first fundraising. So if anyone wants to support, you can go to Andrew Yang.com, which will direct you to the campaign website. Any contribution would be enormously helpful. We're in a very fast fight for the future of New York City, and I got to say that anytime I'm on your podcast, which hasn't been that many times, but it does feel like another benchmark or another chapter. I feel like I'm this political figure that you helped cultivate and create, and I'm still fighting it's like that. The vision is still very similar, even if the context is changing from the White House to, in this case, Gracie Mansion in New York City. I certainly hope that when you become mayor of New York that you take advantage of the national spotlight there, because, again, the success of New York, it really is a unique moment. We have been reset so fundamentally as a society and are just grappling with what that means. And New York is the fulcrum of our swing into a full recovery or into the failure of that right. And it's just, you know, I'm old enough to remember that it was possible to have a New York that was really screwed up. I mean, back in the forget what year, New York really turned around with respect to violent crime and just kind of infrastructure sanity, just like picking up the trash. But there were years there where New York really had just fallen off a cliff. And, you know, you have these bad movies, charles Bronson movies, being inspired by how grim urban life had become there. So it's possible to screw up, and there's no question this is an inflection point. So we need smart people like yourself to figure out how to reboot from here. And so, yeah, I wish you the best of luck, and I hope people will support your campaign immediately. Just but before we close, Andrew, I want to ask you a couple of of kind, big picture national global questions just to get your take, because I went out on Twitter and asked for questions, and we got a long list, but there were many on the point of just what you think we should do with respect to big tech. Now, how do you view regulating big tech in our public conversation and all the anguish we've experienced pro and con on that topic? I think that we need to regulate big tech much more intelligently. And I've been very frustrated, frustrated that a lot of politicians have just gotten accustomed to grandstanding and trying to score points for cable news, while the essential issues just remain completely unaddressed. The insanity of having at this point, like a near trillion dollar industry being regulated by Section 230 of the Telecommunications Indecency Act that was written in 1996 before Facebook even got started. And then in DC. They're still looking at it, fighting over what it means and it's like no one could possibly have known what the Internet was going to look like in 1996. It's 25 years later. Instead of yelling at tech companies for not doing something you like or don't like, try and come up with like a genuine regulatory framework that balances what you think the public's interests are. One aspect of that should be trying to respect our data rights as human beings because right now our data is getting sold and resold for hundreds of billions of dollars a year. And that cost is not just economic, it's actually in human agency. It's in public trust. We're getting packetized ourselves and sold to various advertisers in ways that also undermine the public good. And our government has been completely absent on this. I think California's privacy laws are some of now the best in the country. That the newest rule is for there to actually be a dedicated privacy protection agency in California. It's almost like some kind of data cops. It makes me very happy. I hope they get a really cool uniform and sigil. But other states should be following suit and the Feds should be following suit. California actually is ahead of the curve on this. And what about with respect to our politics? How do you think we could improve a system that is now? It's hard to characterize how ramshackle it appears, first of all, the fact that we can't seem to hold an election that the country can trust the outcome of. How do we even approach a national conversation about improving our politics and the actual infrastructure that allows us to deliver political results going forward? Sam, I'm so glad you asked this because I actually worked on a book that's on this topic that's going to come out in the late summer. Oh, nice. But I'll send you the manuscript because it's been on my mind. But I'll let your listeners know what one of the key takeaways is, which is ranked choice voting. We need to get ranked choice voting adopted around the country because it will help reduce polarization. It will free legislators up from the fear of being primaried, which right now is guiding some very extreme decisions. Right now, over 80% of elections are predetermined in terms of whether it's going to be Democratic or Republican. And so most voters don't actually have a genuine choice in their representation. If you have ranked choice voting, it decreases negative campaigning. It gets rid of the spoiler effects so no one can be accused of wasting your vote. Andrew, maybe explain how rank choice voting works because I think many people won't be familiar with the logic of it. Oh, yeah, I'm sorry I got so excited. Yeah. New York's mayoral races rank choice voting for the first time too. So this is very relevant. But the way ranked choice voting works is that the winner has to get over 50% of people's votes, which use that as like a starting point. And the second thing is that you can rank more than one candidate as someone that you'd like to see win. So use the mayoral race as an example. Let's say there are seven candidates. You can rank me first and then Scott Stringer second, and then my Wiley third. And then what happens is, when they count all of our votes, if no one gets up to 50.1% at the top line, then they get rid of the bottom most candidate, and then they reassign that candidate's votes based upon that person's second choice or that candidates second choice votes. So then that person's votes get reassigned and you repeat the process over and over again until someone gets past 50.1%. So in this way, you can actually vote for whoever you want as your first choice and have no fear that it's somehow going to result in someone you detest winning. Because you can just rank, you know, your second choice person, and then if your person ends up being one of the bottom performers, your votes will just flow through to your second choice. Right? Which is a huge deal, because the Ralph Nader effect is a problem. And to be able to completely circumvent that issue of there being a spoiler and a wasted vote would change a lot if nothing else changed. And here's the wild thing, Sam, is that in 25 states around the country, you can actually activate a referendum for ranks, force voting simply through a ballot initiative that requires a number of signatures. And in some states, it's actually a relatively modest number of signatures. Two states have already adopted ranked choice voting and open primaries, and those two states are Maine and Alaska. But there are another 23 states that have ballot initiatives where all it takes is some animated citizens and a bunch of signatures and you could actually transform democracy for the better. It's very exciting that this, to me, is something that has enormous potential to decrease the polarization that is making us less and less functional. Well, Andrew, I will let you go. I wish you a swift recovery from COVID and a thoroughly successful campaign. And I look forward to on the other side of a vaccine, being in a crowded restaurant with you when you were mayor of the city of New York. It's a day I will host you. We will go to whatever show that you had a hankering to see. We'll have the best cuisine in the world, and then we'll have after dinner drink at Gracie Mansion to celebrate the renaissance of New York City. Like that. This is a beautiful vision, Sam, and I'm definitely going to fight for it. Nice. Wouldn't that be something? Well, yes, I get it, sir. Thank you so much, Sam. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Stephen Fry. Stephen is a comedian, actor, writer, presenter, voiceover artist and activist. Some of his most well known acting work includes a bit of Fry and Laurie Jeeves and Wooster, Black Adder Kingdom, and the film V for Vendetta. He's also written and presented several documentary series, including the Emmy award winning Stephen Fry The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive Stevens, contributed columns and articles for newspapers and magazines, and written four novels and three volumes of autobiography. And he also frequently appears on British radio. And as you will soon hear, Steven is just a wonderfully erudite man who fairly reeks of the most basic human decency. He really is one of the nicest guys in the world. And we cover a fair amount of ground. We discuss comedy and atheism and political correctness. There's a lot of talk about meditation and mindfulness, talk about negative emotions, ambition, empathy, psychedelics. He was a close friend of Christopher Hitchens, so we speak about Hitch and we cover much else. All I can say is that if you take even a fraction of the pleasure in Steven's company that I did, you will enjoy the next 2 hours. And now I bring you Stephen Fry. I am here with Stephen Fry. Steven, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. A long held ambition finally realized. Oh, nice. Well, yeah, that's most mutual. First of all, in preparing for this and in just looking at it, I mean, normally my experience is I invite someone on whose work I have absorbed because they've written one book or two books. I look into your bio and there is such a profusion of creativity, it is just ridiculous. You are a comedian, a writer, you've both written nonfiction and novels. You are a presenter of many different things. You are a voice over artist. I just started listening to your Sherlock Holmes. I believe my daughter has listened to your voice more than through Harry Potter. How do you think of your own creative output? Is one of your identities more locked up in one of these bins than another? Or do you just float freely between them all? No, it's a good question and I'm not quite sure of the answer. On any given day I might give a different response, but generally speaking, I cleaved at the truth that writing is the thing that gives me the deepest satisfaction and indeed, the highest highs, the most extreme feelings of whatever that creative impulse is. It doesn't mean that what you're writing is good, but the feeling you get from a sense of achievement in writing, it's bigger than the burst of applause on stage or anything like that. But where it all comes from, I have no idea. My current theory is greed, essentially. I've accreted a lot of material that I've made and done in the same way that my body has accreted a lot of fat, because I'm very greedy, I can't help eating a lot, and the result is you'll get fat. And if you're greedy to write, to perform, to try all kinds of different things, and so in the end, you have a subcutaneous layer of material that you can't quite believe. It does surprise me. I've done so much and I think, again, without sounding over, paradoxical, it may be a result of having no particular talent. I think if I were really smart, if I was smart enough to be an academic philosopher or a literary professor or something, I would have stuck to that. If I had any musical gift, I would have embraced that. If I really felt that I was a supreme actor, rather than stuck to finding good roles to play in films and TV, rather than just sweeping up the odd, unconsidered trifle. So it's the advantage of being a jack of all trades and master of none. All right, well, you lack self awareness or you're guilty of false humility or some combination of the two. And our guilty of Britishness we will come to it. Yeah, no doubt. As an actor, as a comedic actor. Has Hugh Laurie been your most frequent collaborator? Yes, we met at university when we were both in our late teens, early twenties, and instantly hit it off. I sort of have described it before as like falling in love and in a non, nonsexual or even bromantic way, although there was a Bromance who were best friends. I guess it was just an instant collaborative and creative fitting and meshing somehow. We we just had the same sense of humor as much as anything, I think, especially when you're young, because the young are very unforgiving and very knowledgeable, unlike the older. We absolutely agreed on what we hated in comedy, and I think you'll find that amongst adolescents and late adolescents, when they're in a garage band, it's as much they're doing this to piss off fans of X, Y or Z star. The music that they just hate powers the young. Can you disclose your hatreds, or would you be trampling on these reputations of friends and the obvious? I think, actually, I mean, we'd like to think we were quite advanced. We used to write sketches in which we never performed because they were almost too we felt people weren't as annoyed as we were by the cliche of the stand up comedian. Even then, even back in the early 80s, there was starting to be these waves of comedians who were just I remember creating one who was an American stand up, who did this thing about being a drug dog sniffer. And how that would be the greatest job in the world, so that the stand up comedian could be a dog go and then could do sniffing because I thought it was such a crap, cheap, obvious, pathetic. Since that ten years later, I've seen comedians doing that same material. Wouldn't that be a great can you imagine? You're a sniffer dog, for God's sakes. Yeah. What? How is that funny? How isn't that the most base pathetic I mean, if someone can do it as a vague remark in a saloon bar in the evening, it is not worthy of professional comedy. And I suppose you and I had a very high doctrine of what comedy should be. It should surprise and be unlike anything you'd ever heard before. And each generation will want to tear away what they see as the cliches and the cookie cutter approaches of the generation before. Do you feel that comedy does not age as well as many other products of creativity? Because I'm always mortified to go back to something I thought was hilarious, only to find that not only is it deeply unfunny, but I hate my former self for having found it as funny as I do know. Embarrassment is the word which we may come back to. I think there are some golden jewels of comedy that seem never to age. I mean, I played to a Godchild of mine not long ago, bob Newhart doing his driving lessons and Walter Rally. They still are just rock solid pieces of work, partly because I guess they slightly suggest a sort of Mad Men era of guy in a suit with a cigarette standing on a stage, being kind of easy, but other than that, they don't really date. Whereas some early Steve Martin that I thought was the greatest comedy I ever heard. You think that wild and crazy guy isn't quite as wild and crazy as I thought he was. And maybe that's as it should be. And not only that, of course, comedians age, and I do think, certainly sketch comedy, dressing up as a bishop or a lawyer or a judge or something, it's funnier when a young person does it. It's a bit like the school. It's a bit like doing an impression of your school teacher. Right. And when you're actually old enough to be a judge or a bishop, it's character acting. It isn't quite the same as the sort of Pythonesque is. The wonderful thing about seeing Python playing brigadier generals and bishops and things is that they're still in their twenty s. Yeah. So I only met Hugh once, very briefly, but he seems like an extraordinary yeah, he came to you. Yeah, yeah. He he's a big admiral. He came to the the event I did with Steve Pinker. That's right. And yeah. So that was that's great to meet him. So you and I met at Hitches memorial. I'm surprised it took so long for us to meet because we were in similar circles for a while. As voluble atheists, I was the groom to the forest or the Oscilla. Just sort of holding the reins off your go, sir, as you go and gallop off and spread the news. I'll be back here with a point for you when you're on your way back. Yeah, I should probably flag that at the outset here. So the nominal pretext for our conversation is that we're releasing the book version of the conversation, the Four Horsemen conversation that Hitch, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett and I had in 2007, which was recorded happily, really was recorded as an afterthought. We almost did we just got together and in Hitch's apartment and yes. Filmed in his DC apartment. Yeah. Yeah. And it was I was surprised to realize that that was actually the only conversation the four of us ever had. It's counterintuitive even to me, knowing my own life, but I'm sure it will be counterintuitive to the people who hear this. Anyway, we refined the transcript of that conversation and then each wrote introductory essays, and you were generous enough to write a forward to it. And so that's coming out in, I believe, March. Obviously, it's available on Amazon now for preorder, and we're shamelessly plugging this year. All the proceeds go to the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, which I believe is now joined at the hip with the center proceedings. Indeed, they very kindly gave me an award at Las Vegas this year. I went to meet. But, yeah, they're fused as one body. Well done. And it's worth remembering that at that time, you four were you were characterized as the new atheists. There was this idea of a new atheism, a rather more intellectually rigorous, open, free thinking, unafraid way of addressing secularity humanism and the burdens and torments that religion was imposing on the world. And 2007 isn't that long ago, and yet we have to remember that's the year the iPhone came out, right. The year Twitter came out. This is a lot has changed since then, and it's fascinating to hear and watch you for talking about the world and wondering whether this has been made irrelevant by the rise of social media and the rise of all the things that have risen since then. But actually one finds that, as I think I say in the introduction, that they're talking about religion and the dangers of accepting religion or being bound by religion or allowing religious doctrine to inform policy and to be sort of unquestioned in government and the world. That the dangers of that are as apparent now as they were then and they actually leach out outside and things become a subset of religion in a way that are just as important. The same kind of heresies and Blasphemies, no longer pertaining to God and Jesus and Allah but pertaining to gender politics and to all kinds of other issues now. And we're still in the same position of thinking, gosh, there are still inquisitions, there are still out of the phase. You see people falling, tumbling, disgraced because they've said something heretical foolish. And it's actually greater now than it was in 2007 when the power of religion was still strong then, and the Church in particular the Roman Church, but also evangelical Christianity in this country, in the United States where we're speaking, was on the rise, the Tea Party and all those things would be going to happen. But, yeah, I wouldn't count religion out just yet. I think we see the pendulum keep swinging. But, yeah, you're right to see the parallel with this new orthodoxy of political correctness, which has always been a term and a concept, at least for the last few decades. But this is really a front on which Hitch is so dearly missed on more than 100 occasions, I'm sure. I have thought, man, wouldn't it be great for Hitch to respond to this horror that just appeared? Get to the free speech stuff. Actually, I just want to reference something that you wrote in your forward to the book which caught my eye now that I've spent some time in the mindfulness minds producing a meditation app. You wrote in your description of me, you described me as being, quote, proficient in forms of meditation that an Englishman of my cast finds incomprehensible and deeply embarrassing. I can't even say the word mindfulness without blushing. Now, of course, I'm in the terrible province I'm that I'm hearing your voice and your voice because I have subscribed you kindly showed me how to subscribe to your waking up course of meditation and mindfulness, and I've subscribed to it and I've been obediently following through. And your voice now has a very special place in my head because it's that irritating voice which you're fully aware of. You flag this that just as one's mind is beginning to spin off into a nothingness or whatever it is that as one concentrates on one's breathing and obeys the instructions you're giving, there is a nice silence and inhalation and exhalation. Then, damn it, your voice comes in again and plucks one up. And as you're aware, it can be something that's got to get used to because my instinct is simply to fall asleep the moment you start I start concentrating on my breathing. I'm falling asleep. And I know meditation and sleep aren't the same thing. No, both are good, but they're distinct. Indeed. No, I'm very fascinated by this and fascinated by your role in this because yes, I am embarrassed by words like mindfulness because I'm not quite sure what they mean. And that's an embarrassment. It gives me an awkwardness is perhaps a kind of similar word, not quite synonymous, but close to it. But I came across Willfulness the other day great deal. I haven't heard that one. No, that embarrasses even me. And one used to use the word to be mindful, to be aware. And so awareness is, as we know, is Anglosaxon version of conscious. So we're talking about consciousness, awareness, heightened consciousness. I've always I remember a big row with John Cleese once by that he nearly stalked out of a restaurant because I genuinely said to him I don't understand how you can have levels of consciousness. What are they? What is a higher level of consciousness? Does it mean I am seeing the red as redder? Or hearing the music more keenly? Or understanding a situation more accurately with greater acuity? What are these levels? And I'm a very empirical person and I love to see how things are true and with mindfulness. And let me just be a devil's advocate with sure, I'm not going to attack you. I've got great value already out of your course and I'm finding it fascinating. But I think we all know that brain training games have been found to have zero applicability as far as actually improving the brain is concerned. They might make you slightly better at the game you're training at. For example, whether it's a crossword or it's a memory game or something, you're better at the crossword and better at the memory game. There may be some slight advantage in delaying forms of dementia by playing these games, which again, that makes rational sense, but there may be empirical evidence, epidemiological evidence that that works. But I am puzzled to think that you make claims for meditation, for example, that it has cognitive effects. I went documentary series going around America. I remember when we were in Iowa, I went to this town in Iowa which is owned by Transcendental meditation people. They have a university that I went to interview them and they covered me in electrodes and tried to baffle me with science about alpha. And you would say theater with theater in English, but waves. And I'm aware of this, that you can be in a position of such concentration and relaxation at the same time that you can probably think of the top. Of your head 1000 uses for a paperclip which are creative and amusing, which someone who's trying too hard wouldn't be able to. It's it's a bit like the the salmon a live salmon is is what an idea is and what what a thought is. And if you try and clutch it, it's because it's alive and it's wet, it slips out of your grass. But if you hold it just right and that's what I know. Some of the claims of meditation are that they allow this simultaneous relaxation and concentration and I think that is good and I like the idea of it. But I've always been propelled by as I say, by greed and by ambition and by all the sort of darker sides of lust and awkwardness and embarrassment, as I've said, that drive on to a fascination with things. And the very torment and difficulty of a human mind and its need for things and its greed for things has been for me what energizes and what makes me who I am. And I see I've always had this terrible fear of almost anything, whether it's a pharmaceutical or psychoanalytical, psychotherapeutic or to do in meditation. I've seen it as a kind of zombifying, a kind of taking the edge off my mind. I want my anger. The seven deadly sins to me are seven deadly propellants or the fuel that get me forward in life. And I know that's nonsensical and I know that no, it's not nonsensical at all. There's truth to many of those claims, I think. Let's take the first piece. So, yeah, the research on the benefits of training forget about just mental training. This is even true of physical training suggests that you get better at what you train, very specifically. And in many cases, there's much less of a transfer effect than you'd expect. And this, again, this can be true even of physical training in a gym. You get stronger in precisely the ways in which you exercise. And people who, you know, could be just hulking with muscle and look like fantastically strong, you know, athletes, if you put them in a paradigm that has to be working the same muscle groups, but is not the way they train, they're not nearly as impressive as they are cross training. Exactly. That's why people mix it up endlessly to be very well rounded athletes. And the same is true of the mind. So, as you say, if you do these brain training games that work, some aspect of working memory say, well, you get better at that particular task, but it doesn't transfer into the rest of your intellectual life, or at least there's no evidence that I'm aware of that it does at this point. And we should also just acknowledge that meditation can mean many different things. There are different types of meditation and so people can be training different things under that guise. But with mindfulness. What you're training is the very thing you want more of. Arguably, once you understand how it can function in the economy of your emotional and cognitive life, which is you're becoming more aware of the dynamics of your own mental suffering. Just the way in which being captured by thought, moment to moment, is leaving you hostage to whatever the contents of those thoughts are. And once you learn there's some modicum of mindfulness you actually see, there's just there's a choice between being lost in thought and by lost, I mean thinking without even being dimly aware for those moments or minutes or hours that you're thinking. It's very much like being asleep and dreaming, right? You're just ruled by your thoughts and then you're just laid bare to whatever emotional and behavioral implications are there. So you're angry, you're sad, you're saying the life deranging and relationship deranging things you say as an angry or sad person to your spouse or whoever. And mindfulness simply gives you the ability to, if nothing else, choose how long you want to be angry or sad for really. You can just punctuate that wheel works of reactivity and pause, if only for a few moments, and those pauses can be enormously beneficial. Now, to your point about classically negative emotions being a source of creativity and energy, I think that's true for many of us some of the time, but I think it's easy to either just in a delusory way make a virtue of necessity there. Those of us who are ruled by negative emotion are finding some silver lining to them, whereas mostly they're just a source of suffering that would be great to get rid of them. And if you could put on one hat which would allow you to feel the optimum motivational component of one, positive emotions that you're not tending to feel and two, you could titrate your negative emotions just to like their creative optimum, but then not suffer whenever you didn't feel like suffering, right? If there's some happy balance there, you might understand that very few of us find it just by accident. Because if you can't be mindful, if you can't notice the next thought arise and capture your conscious life for moments or minutes or hours, you are simply living out the consequences of your past conditioning and your just who you were yesterday. You're like there is actually no choice to make. Whereas if you train this particular skill again, the awareness of the process and an ability to step back can give you another degree of freedom. And if it is, just listen, it's good to be angry for the next ten minutes because that's how I'm going to write this scene. Well then use it that way. Yeah. And I wouldn't want to overstate the values of what we tend to call negative emotions like anger and fear and so on. I suppose I remember once I was filming years ago and Maggie Smith, the wonderful Maggie Smith was in it and we were in a sort of typical English country house and there were fields around it and she looked and in that very Maggie Smith way, she looked at these cows, she said, don't they ever get bored? And it was a sort of funny remark, but I thought that's a very obvious, profound remark. Children must think that there's a cow in a field and if we project ourselves into that cow for just a minute, we are absolutely distraught with boredom. The idea that all we have to do is hold these calories into our interior cropping grass, never stopping, always standing up, occasionally looking around, bits of rainfall on you and then you wander around and you break wind and then you drop a cow pat and then you move on. That's your day. There's no books, there's no television, there's no conversation, there's no imagining. Haven't they, though, achieved the absolute height of mindfulness? They're concentrating purely on being a cow. They're achieving their cowness 100% of the time. What it is when you're a human is that we are constantly feeling we're falling short of what we should be, that a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for. Browning rather wonderfully put it. We're constantly isn't something else up on the hill. It's both mad and we know it's mad because whenever we get to the top of the hill, we want another hill to climb to. And, you know, Alexander wept when he saw there were no more no more kingdoms to conquer, when he phrased it. Yeah, but at least I'm not a cow, you know. And yet we think that didn't Caesar also weep when he contemplated how much Alexander had conquered? Yes, exactly. There's always going to be envy as well. And at their best, you look at an animal, I always think of the Amazonian tree frog at once encountered, and its face just it's like the face of someone you fell in love with when you just briefly glanced them getting onto an underground train and never saw them again for the rest of your life. But you always know they were the one, you know? And this tree frog was standing with an arm on one branch and an arm on another, legs open, with an enormous grin on its face. And I remember thinking, as a tree frog, you never wake up in the morning thinking, was I a good tree frog yesterday? And I thought, oh, I let myself down, I let my family down or I'm going to have to apologize to someone tomorrow morning. We can be pretty sure they don't think that what they are is 100% of the time, fully realized as a tree frog, they fully achieve their destiny. And we don't. We never do. And if I met someone who had, I would just think they were just like some joke, smiling Buddhist who always just gave me the truth in reverse all the time. You must not sit down on the sofa, you must let the sofa stand up on you. I'm not interested, go away, don't talk nonsense. And you know that we actually annoyed by placidity by the cow in the field when we meet it amongst humans, we think, Come on, where's the juice, the bite, the vinegar, the fun, the snap? And again, I am definitely being devil's advocate here. I'm not saying that I genuinely don't disparage these ideas of mindfulness, and I'm fully aware that Unhappiness and its wider forms, as we all know, the epidemiology on suicide and self harm that is sweeping our culture is huge. Although, again, there's a lot of misreading of those data who will tell you that there is no higher incidence of depression in the so called developed world than there is in the undeveloped world. That actually is pretty even interesting. I feel like we've been propagandized with another message recently exactly that we must be guilty. And because we live in an emotionally constipated, difficult, bad, awful culture that needs released into a nice sweet world of friendliness and empathy. And I agree with that. But then I see empathy as coming from exactly things like embarrassment. Embarrassment are a result of empathy. You're embarrassed for other people when you see them making a mistake. Because embarrassment, there's one's own shame, Pooda, whatever word you want to use, that one can feel about one's naked state. One's desires all the things that we're ashamed of inside the primal genesis. We were naked and we were ashamed. We say to God, but the real embarrassment is the embarrassment you feel for other people. I think it's a form of real empathy to feel awkward about others. That's why I can't watch any reality TV. I'm just horrifying just cannot bear seeing people put in that position, even if they're happy or clearly believe they are and think they've triumphed. I just want I weep. It's strange. I have a problem watching ice skating. The failures in ice skating I find more painful than anywhere in athletics because the mismatch between what was gracefully being accomplished a moment before and what happens when they splatter all over the ice. It's just ghastly. Do you know Paul Bloom's work on empathy? I've heard of it, but I don't know it maybe we'll touch that in a second because it's fascinating. To come back to your point about the cows, the mindful cows. No one who studies mindfulness or who gets deep into the practice thinks that mere placidity, and certainly not bovine placidity, is an exemplar of the practice. And this is actually a misunderstanding that you can persist for a long time while one's practicing. It's not really passive. There's something very active about mindfulness because you are keenly aware of the actual character of your experience in a way that you're tending not to be in every other moment. I mean the moment where you're consumed by thought, where your reach is exceeding your grasp tends to be a moment where actually not your attention is bound up by thought and reactivity and prejudice and in ways where you're not actually cognitively and emotionally available in all kinds of other ways that you could recognize the value of and the rewarding nature of if you could inhabit that band of consciousness long enough. So I mean, just like socially, like when you are in the mode of your ambition in relationship to other people, there are all kinds of experiences you're not having with other people that if you could have them, you might recognize they're actually preferable. Right. When you're ambitious, when there are. Many things you desire you walk into a room with a bunch of other people and they're beginning to function like props in your world where you either have to get around them, you have to use them, they all have kind of instrumental value. If somebody is incredibly wealthy, that may be relevant to you. If you are a fundraiser or you have something, if that completes part of the puzzle of your own ambition, you get to see people in ways which are, again, instrumentalizing of them and it makes you unavailable to actually connect in ways that you would otherwise connect if your attention were free of your own desire. Can I do a bit simpler? In a way? Yeah. I mean, if you're talking about body mind or body brain and obviously that's a whole thorny issue about brain and mind, but let's just say for the moment they're roughly the same. Yeah, sure. If I if someone's been to the gym, if someone has body fullness, if someone runs and goes to the gym and is brilliantly trained and very fit, I can see it straight away. And what's more, I can go upstairs with them, next to them and I'm puffing at the top of the stairs and they aren't there's so many obvious signs of their superiority and of the achievement that their training has given them. It's just apparent now, can you say to me that we can have a random test in which I meet 20 people and I will be able to see straight away which ten of them have had mindfulness training and which ten haven't? If they're just a random bunch of people, is there some equivalent to that? My God, look at what they can lift, look how fast they can go up the stairs without getting out of breath. Look at their balance, look at the physical achievement they have made through all this training. Can I see that? Or is it one they're only comparing it with oneself. Well, the comparison to oneself provided one does enough training that can be, in the end, all the comparison that one needs. Yes, I see that, but I just wondered just purely I would argue it's a false standard. I mean, the truth is, in the extreme case, yes, it can become apparent. You can meet extraordinary examples of stability in this kind of practice or related practices like loving kindness practice, where you meet someone who's just trained up this one style of relating to other people, where they've been meditating for years on wishing others, strangers, anyone, all conscious beings, actually, to be free of democracy. Yeah, kind of just giving out of so there's just yeah, there's just a kind of a surplus of good intention that you can feel that's something that's not innate in their characteristic, but that they have trained themselves. And you can train it yourself. I mean, obviously there are pharmacological examples of these kinds of changes. People who take MDMA know what it's like for the span of 8 hours to feel have you have you ever done any psychedelic? And you've only once had to take LSD for it to be with you for the rest of your life. It's the effect that it can have on once you know, all those huxley kind of things about the doors of perception are laminatedly true. One does. Let's talk about that for a second. When did you take LSD? I mean, decades ago, but I remember almost the entire it was like over a weekend with some friends and it was extremely profound and remarkable experience. And it was it extremely positive? Or was it a tiny moment when I was alone at one point where I got terribly, terribly afraid and had a recursive image in my head that wouldn't go away and was just beginning to frighten me and I was tumbling down it, but I was brought out of that. But that was an important part of it. And I remember remember I'm never quite sure the difference between them but liquidity and hence city thisness and thatness of things. And one would look at one's fingernail and see the fingernailness of a fingernail and how extraordinary fingernail it was I felt as doing it, that I would never lose that, that I would be able to it to bring back this way of looking at things so that I could see the grain and the absolute whatness of them. And that was a very valuable, extraordinary experience and it chimed with everything I'd read and then continued to read from people like Butler, Huxley and Guest to some extent. All right, let me ask you imagine the most normative component of that experience or the place in that experience where if you could maintain that state of consciousness, you would say, okay, well, that's obviously more fulfilling, more drenched in clarity or meaning than the experiences I'm tending to have. Say two things to notice about that. One is that there's not necessarily anything someone could have noticed about you from the outside that would have advertised that state of consciousness especially well. Right? So you would have just been sitting on a couch staring at your fingernail. Ever would wow. This man likes his fingernails. Yeah, he does a lot of wowing. But no, you're right. There's no other difference other than this absolute openness to the experience, especially of the senses, every one of them. So the coldness and the wetness of water in the mouth, as well as this sight of flowers and all the cliches which reminded me of My. I think we can all remember times, if we're lucky, at least in adolescence in particular, where we have become convinced in a quite solipsistic way, that only we really see how beautiful a dawn is, or an animal, or a flower, or the nature, or love. And we are particularly privileged to have this access to the staggering beauty of everything, and it overwhelms us, and it's a very teenage thing. And as a teenager, I didn't want to lose it. I was aware at a different sort of consciousness, more intellectual consciousness, or one that had done a lot of reading, precocious kind of consciousness. I was aware that this would pass, that this was a phase. I had read enough autobiographies and spiritual autobiographies of writers, and I wouldn't be a teenager, know that this would leave me. And I felt savagely that I never wanted it to. And, of course, I was believed that art, art and music in particular, were pathways to retaining that. So if I listen to a Schubert sonata or something, it's an instant access straight away to these profound feelings and revelations, these terrific sense of the beauty and the majesty and the glory, as well as the fear of the power of the way things are at an atomic level or at a great sort of huge, natural level. You'll know, it anybody listening will know that we don't talk about it much because it's embarrassing, slightly because it's more for Englishmen, I think. Yeah, it probably is. Which is why, I suppose, they become poets. It's why Keats is so Keats and Shakespeare is so Shakespeare, because they have to find a way not allowed to talk like that in the pub. So, yeah, not to give a false impression. Here what I'm saying about LSD. It's not that the experiences one tends to have on LSD are exactly like what the goal is of sustained mindfulness. But there's a few lessons to draw there. One is that no matter how glorious that experience has been for many of us who have taken those drugs, there's not necessarily an outward physical aura that says, I see you have taken that drug. Those of us who have related to people in those states recognize that if you interact with them long enough, you begin to see that more or less vivid signs of their state of mind is transformed. But it can be very subtle. And depending on how your attention is bound up and how you view other people, you may not notice anything out of the ordinary at all. But also the other point is that there's nothing that your brain is doing on LSD or any other drug that your brain, in principle isn't capable of doing without those drugs. Because, I mean, if you just look at the pharmacology of any drug, all a drug does is mimic the behavior of existing neurotransmitters or cause those neurotransmitters to be in the synapse longer or less long. There are not many levers in the brain for a drug to pull, and they're all part of the brain. So you can be fairly confident that whatever experience anyone has had on any drug, there's somebody somewhere who's had a very similar experience without any drug. Right? Absolutely. Based on neurological injury or William Blake. Which is why pots and mystics like that were so appealing to the first generation to discover drugs like LSD, to the Timothy Leary's and the Huxleys and so on, was because they thought people have been there before. They have pulled back this membrane or they've entered this tunnel and they've seen things that this drug is allowing me to do it now, they've done it through their own insight or their own ability to let go and whatever it might be, or indeed their own discipline in their own craft. To me, I remember when I first read the four words of Whitman as a teenager, which I couldn't understand as words, but which hit me like a lightning bolt. I sing the body electric. Famous line, cliche, almost. But to me, acid trips, anything that an acid trip could do, but also a mindfulness experience or a meditation period is I would stare at those words and my mind would go through, why do they have this effect on me? What does it mean? Who am I connecting with? Who else feels like this? Who was this man? And by penetrating poetry or art or music, I'm getting all the benefits of mindfulness. But they're not solipsistic or egotistical, because they involve learning about this other person who's given it to me. Who was this Schubert? Who was this Wagner? Who was there? It doesn't matter who jimmy Hendrix, Duke Ellington, it doesn't matter what sort of art it is, but you're actually learning. You're getting cultural, social history, racial history, European history, all kinds of incredible histories, as well as technique and craft of prosody and poetic writing and music and chord shifting. And how do all these things make me feel so extraordinary? And it's a full on investigation rather than sitting cross legged, looking at my own philosophy and wondering about myself. Because I've always felt this powerful counterintuitive thing that the less one infects oneself, the more rewarding it is to oneself. That's one of my fears, if you like, or embarrassments about meditation, is that it's a bit egotistical, it's a bit vain, and therefore not helpful. There's anything wrong with being vain and negative. Except there is again, I think that's a misapprehension of the project. First, I would say, is that mindfulness is definitely not a surrogate for all of the other things you just mentioned. No, you mentioned that in your films and your talks. It's not a replacement for being artistically, creative or appreciating the creativity of others. Those are just separate things to do. It's not incompatible with those things. You can be mindful and do all of those things while being mindful. That's also true. And I would argue that you'd be more appreciative of many of the products of your own creativity or others because you can actually pay attention. You're just not as distractible, right? Yes. Distraction is the enemy of everything we want to pay attention to, whether it's our own creativity, a movie we're trying to watch telephone call that we're on the phone with our mothers or whatever, and we're losing the train of her thought because what? We're multitasking, you and I. And I bet most people listening would agree that if we could bottle concentration, if we could learn how to just instantly zoom in and focus on the job that has to be done without having to look out of the window for half an hour first or trapeze around the room, or golf to drive and pick up some eggs and milk and come back again and then face the dreaded blinking screen or whatever it is. The job, then, yes. The distraction. And that actually is one of the primary skills that is transferable from meditation, because meditation is the ability to pay close attention to any arbitrary object. So if you, say stare at that water bottle for five minutes, somebody who really knows how to meditate, who's trained it as a skill, can stare at it and be at one pointed enough such that not much else is happening, right? So if the goal is to just keep eyes on the water bottle and attention inwardly on the water bottle, that is an impossible task for most people. It becomes increasingly possible the more you learn to meditate. So then swap out that water bottle for anything else. The laughing face of your child, right? When you have your smartphone competing for your attention but your child is there and you've got this one opportunity to pay attention, we're constantly faced with this triaging of our attention in our lives and it is the one thing we never get back. It's how we use each moment of attention. It's how we use it. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our Subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, once again reminding subscribers to go to my website, log in and get our private RSS feed. As I've now said a few times in housekeeping here, there's some changes coming and I don't want you to miss any subscriber only content. So just takes a minute. Sorry for the inconvenience, but if you're on mobile and go to the Subscriber content page on my site, if you're using one of the supported podcasters, just one click and you will have the right feed. And again, the right feed comes through with a red Making Sense icon, not a black one. And one of the things that will be coming through on the Subscriber feed soon are the conversations that I've been having on the Waking Up app. Many of you have asked that I released those jointly on the Subscriber feed and we will be doing that also. New as of the last podcast, I will be adding an afterword to these conversations, in many cases talking about the effect that the guest had on me. And I did that for the first time with Kathleen Belu in my last podcast on the White power movement. And some of you objected to what I said there. I said at one point that I detected a level of wokeness in her that I didn't want to engage with because I thought it would be a distraction. And a few of you objected that I was landing a blow on my guest when she wasn't there to defend herself, and others found the other side of the coin there and took me to task for not tackling her obvious wokeness and abdicating my responsibility to tackle crazy social justice ideas wherever they surface. I must say I reject both of those opinions. I certainly wasn't landing a blow on her. I don't think I was saying anything she would have disagreed with. It was quite obvious that she viewed things like the history of Western colonialism and resource extraction and nuclear proliferation as part of this picture of white privilege and white supremacy. She said as much. Anyway, I really wanted to get her best case for how worried we should be about the white power movement, and I really didn't want to get wrapped around the axle of talking about racism in general and the sins of Western civilization. And just to be clear, the afterword is not a place where I will land blows on my guests when they cannot defend themselves. I would consider that bad form as well. It's simply the new place in the show where I will sometimes tell you what I was thinking and perhaps what I didn't say during the conversation, either because I forgot or because I thought it better not to. And in the case of that interview, I really think it was better not to get distracted by a larger conversation on white privilege. And I can assure you there will be more coming on that topic, for better or worse. In fact, there's a podcast I recorded about a year ago with Chelsea Handler that I'll soon be releasing to subscribers. Chelsea just released a documentary on white privilege for Netflix, and she interviewed me for it again nearly a year ago. And I decided to record our whole conversation as a podcast. At the time, this was in part due to my instincts for self preservation. I knew that if she used any of the interview, it would just be about five minutes or so, and I couldn't release the podcast until her documentary came out. Now, as it happens, I didn't make the cut in her film at all, which, having seen it, was totally understandable. I thought we had a great conversation, but it wasn't one that could easily fit with the story she was wanting to tell there. And here's a two minute glimpse of it. So let me get this straight. You're doing a documentary on white privilege and I'm the white guy. Is that the situation we're in? Well, I'm the white girl. It's really about my privilege starting there. You seem very well versed on the matter and opinionated. Yes. And I need opinions. Okay, good. Well, what could go wrong? How many edibles have you taken now to weather this conversation? No, I haven't taken any today. I wanted to stay sharp for you. Okay. I think the disparity is true because it's everywhere. There aren't an equal amount of women represented in any industry, but that's not true. From talking to people who claim to not be racist, the first thing out of everyone's mouth is, I'm married to a black woman, or I'm friends with a black person, or I'm not a racist. And right there and then, that says to me, yeah, you are. No, you've been sold this meme. I don't know who invented this. I want to find the genius who invented this meme. But the idea that some of my best friends are black defense is not only a bad defense, but a sign of racism. That's bullshit. I think the N word is just not allowed. We're just not allowed to use it. No white person should be able to use it. It just elicits too much hate. It's like calling a gay person the F word. It elicits too much pain. It's what people have used to oppress them for years. But what should elicit the pain is clearly the intention to elicit the pain. Right. I hate you. And here's how I'm going to say it. I think political correctness is something that just makes people stupid, where they just can't see obvious points. Right? I agree with you on that. But I think when the injury is so deep, there needs to be reform. On the subject of virtue signaling, do you think that me doing a documentary on white privilege is virtue signaling? Well, you'll definitely be accused of it. Yeah. Anyway, it was a fun conversation. I will release that to subscribers very soon, along with the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. Okay. And now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Andrew McAfee. Andrew is a research scientist at the center for Digital Business in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and he was previously a professor at Harvard Business School. He's co authored the books the Second Machine Age and Machine Platform Crowd. But today we speak about his new book, More From Less the surprising story of how we learn to prosper using fewer resources. And what happens next? And as you'll hear, this is a very optimistic conversation. Unlike many I have here. We talk about the history of human progress and the modern uncoupling of our prosperity from resource consumption. We talk about the pitfalls of capitalism, but also its hidden virtues and technological progress generally, environmental policy, the future of the developing world and many other topics. Anyway, this is fascinating material and, as you'll hear, all too consequential and, on balance, quite encouraging. So now, without further delay, I bring you Andrew McAfee. I am here with Andrew McAfee. Andrew, thanks for joining me. Sam, thanks for having me on. So I was trying to remember, I think you and I have met at least once at the AI conference in Puerto Rico. Is that correct? Yeah. How many times did you go to that? I just went to the first one and then I went to the Oscilla Marr one, but I didn't go to the second one in Puerto Rico. Okay. So you and I are in exactly the same boat. I went to Puerto Rico one and then a cylinders as well. Okay. And then you and I run into the hallways run into each other at the hallways of places like Ted. Right. Okay. We're in similar circles. So, listen, it's great to get you on the podcast. You've written a very interesting book. The title is More From Less, and you're in an unusual spot, along with Steve Pinker, whose recent books have been very positive and against the grain of many people's expectations. I can imagine that you haven't really started your book tour yet. But let me predict that when you get in front of audiences, you will, with some regularity, encounter the sour face of incredulity for many people who, upon reflecting on your thesis, just don't want to buy it, first tell people who you are and your potted intellectual history. How have you come to have an opinion on any of these matters we're going to talk about, and you know that opinions are not in short supply anywhere in academia. No. My name is Andy McAfee, and I am a scientist at MIT. Used to be at Harvard, and I moved down the river in Cambridge, Massachusetts about a decade ago. And I just try to study and understand where all of this technology, all this tech progress is taking it. So, Sam, like, you know, with my co author and my friend Eric Brunolson, he and I have written a couple of books together about this main topic. One was called the second machine age. The second one was called Machine Platform Crowd about the job, the wage, the labor force impacts, and then the business model impacts of all this crazy new technology. And then this new book that I've got out called More from Less is a little bit of a pivot, but it's still a technology book. It's trying to convey the story of how our relationship with the planet that we all live on has changed in some pretty fundamental ways, in large part because of technology. Right. And your background, if I recall, is in somewhere in engineering, and then you kind of went through business school and give me the academic version of yourself. Yeah. I am a mechanical engineer from MIT. I got my MBA from MIT about 63 years ago, and then I did my doctorate at Harvard at the business school, taught at the business school at Harvard for about a decade and then came back to my roots, came back home to MIT about a decade ago. Right. So your basic thesis, as I understand it in this book, is that finally our prosperity has become decoupled from our consumption of resources. So, as you put it, we've essentially exchanged bits for atoms or atoms for bits. And this is an incredibly hopeful thesis. You certainly acknowledge many of the bad things we've done and are continuing to do, but you cite what you call the four horsemen of the optimist. And these I just want to run through these because this is a great way to structure the unfolding of your thesis. You talk about tech progress, capitalism, public awareness, and responsive government. And each of those two, the first two and the latter two are kind of dyads of a sort. Tech progress and capitalism go hand in hand, and public awareness and responsive government seem to also be joined at the hip in some way. So let's just start with the progress we've made. How have we gotten here? Yeah, Sammy, you just did a beautiful job of delivering both the what and the why of this book that I've written. The what, like you just said, is that we have finally learned how to decouple, growing our prosperity, increasing the size of our economies, having people lead longer and healthier and more prosperous lives. That's a really important thing to do. Another really important thing to do is take better care of the planet Earth. And there used to be a pretty sharp trade off between those two things. And in the Industrial era, we massively increased human prosperity, but we massively increased our footprint on our planet as well. It's just this ungorable story about the industrial era that got kicked off with the Industrial Revolution in about 1776. And so before I started working on this book, I kind of had this fundamental assumption in the back of my head that that's how the world worked. We had to take more from the Earth in order to have more human prosperity, bigger human populations, bigger human economies. And what I learned and what I've come to firmly believe is that's just not the case anymore. So you use the word decouple, which is exactly right. We have decoupled, increasing our human prosperity from taking more from the Earth year after year with data from America shows we've got a large, technically sophisticated economy that's responsible for about 25% of the world economy. We're increasing our prosperity. And in just about all the ways that I can think of that matter, we are leaving a lighter footprint on the planet Earth. And I kind of thought that was a big deal, this transition from taking more from the Earth to taking less. It's kind of an important transition. So I thought it merited a book. It's a huge transition because you can tell the story of our technological progress prior to this transition. And it is a story of progress nonetheless, but of a fairly rapacious extraction of resources and a soiling of our own nest to a degree that is scarcely sustainable. But your book, like my friend Steve Pinker's book, is filled with these with some very happy graphs where you see the lines of extraction and resource use diverge from the line of increase in prosperity. But before we get to the happy moment, maybe let's just spend a few minutes on just what progress we made, even in the days when the progress was wasteful and polluting. Yeah, and you mentioned Steve Pinker, and I'm very proud to join his tribe of evidence driven optimists about the state of the world. And Pinker makes the case that the Enlightenment did a great deal of really wonderful things for the course of human progress. I just want to add to that chorus with this book by saying something that people have said before, which was the Industrial Revolution, which was this point in time where we learned how to access the crazy amounts of energy stored in fossil fuels all around the world. That's kind of for me, that's the heart of the Industrial Revolution. This put us on to just a categorically different trajectory. And my favorite way to show that, and I show this in the book, is by looking at kind of one graph that shows population versus prosperity in England for hundreds of years. And you and I probably use the word Malthusian as an insult to somebody these days because what Malthus said in the late 18th century was essentially we're all going to starve because we can't grow enough food to feed everybody. And he was just unbelievably wrong about that. One of the weirdest things I learned when writing this book was that Malthus was right as a historian. And the great way to show that is to chart population versus prosperity in England from about 1200 to about 1800. We have pretty good data. We can reconstruct what that looks like. And you just see a pendulum swinging back and forth. The only times that the English were relatively prosperous was when there were relatively few of them. And when there are a lot of English people, they were all kind of poor. And the only decent explanation for that phenomenon is there was kind of a hard ceiling on the amount of stuff you could take from the Earth, primarily food. And when there are too many people and not enough to go around, everybody's kind of poor. When population goes down, everybody can be a bit richer until they bump up against that ceiling. So from 1200 to 1800, Malthus looks like a genius. And now we use his name as an adjective for dead flat wrong. Because of the Industrial Revolution and the industrial era when we got out of that trade off because of the steam engine and a bunch of other inventions and then internal combustion, and we just harnessed the world's energy. And you can watch human population and human prosperity increase together for the very first time ever in human history and increase at rates that we've never, ever seen before. And it almost doesn't matter what kind of evidence you look at, whether it's global population, GDP, per capita income growth. It kind of doesn't matter. You see the same story, which is this almost horizontal line of nothing really interesting happening, and then an almost vertical line of, oh, my God, we've never seen prosperity increase like this before. And that's the story of the industrial era that that's, you know, and the and we I say in the book, the industrial era was not fantastic for everybody at every point in time. Amen to that. We can talk about some of the dark side there, but it was this unprecedented chapter in human history. The trade off that we made kind of implicitly without thinking a lot about it, is that, as you point out, we took more from the planet to generate that prosperity year after year. And we beat up the planet in all kinds of fundamental ways year after year. And we did it almost in lockstep with our prosperity growth. You can just graph the size of the economy versus how much we took from the Earth, and it's kind of a one to one relationship. And in the years leading up to call it the first Earth Day in 1970, you can graph things like how polluted the skies over American cities were again, versus the economic growth. And that relationship is way too tight. It's just incredibly clear that we took more from the Earth and we fouled it. We befouled it more year after year to generate this prosperity. Yeah. So just looking back, you have some arresting images and phrases in the book here, which I think this kind of thinking is commonplace among engineers and perhaps physicists. But for most of us who don't spend a lot of time in those fields, a very simple statement like prior to the Industrial Revolution, the only way for a human being to move anything on Earth was with muscle power, either human or animal. For literally tens of thousands of years, generation after generation, before wind and water came online, all we had was just digging by hand to do anything. Trenches. And maybe we domesticated the ox and the horse to drag our plows, and that was it. Again, it is an obvious point. But when you think of what it was like to live year after year, life after life, generation after generation, where nobody had ever met anyone, who ever imagined things could be different, this notion that a better future was ahead of us, I don't think that's really part of the historical record. No. And you could drop someone into any 10,000 year interval and nothing would be different. They would have recognized all the same tools and cultural practices. Everyone's dying from the same diseases that are as yet not even dimly understood. It clearly didn't have to be that way, because it is now not that way. And whatever progress we make from here is likewise also not guaranteed. I mean, we're just, you know, we're functioning within the horizon of the known and struggling to push that back with all of our scientific pursuits, but we can't take anything for granted. And to look back on the history of the species is to be amazed at just how long it took to make progress of any kind. Exactly right. And to look back and be incredibly grateful that you don't live in that period. Or at least I am. Sam, I'm sure you come across people who kind of long for the good old days before industrialization and urbanization and technology, and they want to go back to a simpler time. Wow. Do I not want to go back to that simpler time. One of the striking statistics that I put in the book is, as far as we can tell, prior to 1800, global life expectancy was about 28 and a half years, and no region on the planet had a global life expectancy greater than, I think, 35 years. So I put a quote from Hobbes, from Leviathan in the book. Our lives really were nasty, solitary, brutish, and short. The number of kids that died in infancy, the percentage of mothers that died in childbirth, the disease burden skeletons that we've unearthed from that time were just a lot shorter and more stunted. I literally can't understand people who want to go back to that time. Yeah. I mean, just to correct the usual association with those stats, it's not that more or less everyone died at 30. Obviously the people lived longer than that, although they didn't live to the biblical ages that are advertised. But that really is a story of just how many children died that's right before the age of five. I mean, that was just right, absolutely commonplace, even, you know, within 150 years ago. I mean, it was really as you detail in your book, the advent of indoor plumbing is probably the biggest gain. There just the number of lives saved by getting access to clean water once. We also got some notion that we should be washing our hands with it before we eat or perform surgery or deliver babies. That was also helpful. Yeah. And it's one of the neat things that I learned researching the book is my list of the important technologies of the Industrial Revolution certainly would have included steam power and electrification and the internal combustion engine. And Bob Gordon, a really, really good economist at Northwestern, would add indoor plumbing to that list at first. It's like, Bob, come on, that's at an entirely different level of importance here. And Sam, you're absolutely right. It's probably at the top of that list of important things to do, because being able to get clean water and take your waste away was so unbelievably important for human health, for longevity, for maternal and child mortality. Thank heaven we have indoor plumbing. I found this amazing quote from a Tennessee farmer in the 1930s who said, the best thing in the world is to have the love of God in your heart. The second best thing in the world is to have electricity in your home. And there's also the question of what you're eating in that home. And as you discuss the advent of nitrogen based fertilizers, the Haber Bosch process that delivered those that accounts for the sustainable growth of human population to an amazing degree, I think that the statistic was something like 45% of people alive owe their existence to our ability to manufacture fertilizer. And also just the growth in human population is a very surprising curve. I mean, it took something like 200,000 years to get us to our first billion people in 1928. And then it was like 31 years to the next billion, and then 15, and then I think it was twelve and eleven after that. I had forgotten that the the company BASF was involved in this in in the fertilizer chemistry was derived from from you know, the, the Haber Bosch guys. And I remember those ads from probably the 80s or 90s where BSF would come on television or, you know, it would be a trailer at a movie and they would say, we don't make a lot of the products you buy, we make a lot of the products you buy better. But they could have well have said, there are 3 billion of you poor bastards who wouldn't exist without us or you're starving here because of us. Okay, so this has been tech progress up to the point of the decoupling. What explain the decoupling? How has that or should we talk about capitalism? Before you get into that, let me try to bring in capitalism here because BASF was out to make a buck and maybe it's nice marketing to say that they were interested in improving our lives. This was a profit seeking company, as was the company that James Watt founded to commercialize the steam engine, as was Daimler Benz founded by one of the main people behind the internal combustion engine. And one other thing that the Industrial Revolution gave us that came along very closely in time to the invention of the steam engine were things like robust patents and joint stock companies and limited liability corporations and all of these elements of what you and I would now call the capitalist system, right? And so the point I make in the book was that capitalism and tech progress are a very, very natural pair. They're just a one two punch and they feed off each other. And what we saw for the first 170 plus years of the industrial era was they fed off each other. They increased our prosperity and our population. This is why I think Marx was just so dead flat wrong. However, this one two punch absolutely enabled us and caused us to tread more heavily on the planet, to increase the human footprint on the planet. As we went around trying to make a buck and trying to grow our markets, we used very powerful technologies to make more fertilizer. That means planting more acres of cropland, that means taking more water for agriculture. We dug more mines, we chopped down more forests, we took more resources out of the Earth. We definitely went looking for fossil fuel all over the planet. So any way that you'd want to measure the human footprint or the human impact on the planet, it was going up because of this one two punch of industrial capitalism and tech progress. And then a couple of the really unpleasant side effects were also going up over time and pollution is Exhibit A for me and then Exhibit A prime. Probably at least as important was we exploited our fellow creatures to a huge extent. We made the passenger pigeon extinct in America. This was a bird that existed in such huge numbers that James Audubon saw a flock that blotted out the sun. He said it took days to pass overhead. That was early in the 19th century. By 1914, the very last passenger pigeon died in a zoo in Cincinnati. So this notion that we took good care of the animals we share the planet with, this is just wrong for the industrial era. We damn near made many species of whale extinct. And then something else I learned that I didn't know, we came in North America. We came really close to wiping out the beaver, the Canada goose, the white tail deer, the black bear, these iconic species. And they're very much part of our landscape today. Thank heaven, man. We came quite close to wiping these things out because our appetites were voracious kind of indiscriminate and growing year after year. And again, I just think of this one two punch of industrial turbocharged capitalism and more and more powerful technology all the time. And you use the adjective veracious to describe economic growth. Then I keep on thinking of kind of the Cookie Monster economy where it just went omnom, nom, nom, nom, and ate up everything that all these inputs that it could think of. I think I used rapacious that's even better. Yeah. Because it's true. Let's be super honest. Capitalism is a greedy process. There's just no other way to say it. And it caused us to kind of take more from the Earth, dump whatever we didn't want off to the side. And you can point to these environmental dark sides of the industrial era and you'd be exactly accurate about it. And for me, that helps me understand the dawn of the environmental movement and the amazing amount of energy behind the first Earth Day in April of 70. Yeah. Yeah. So let's let's linger on the convergence of tech progress and capitalism and and the synergy there. And I think we should say more about the problems because certainly capitalism has a very bad rap in many circles these days. And it's despite the happy trend you've discussed in your book, which is the decoupling, and it takes as its object the criticism of capitalism takes as its object wealth inequality, which seems to be growing, even though, correct me if I'm wrong, I think it's not growing globally, but within countries it is growing. That's exactly right. That's the right way to think about it. First, let's talk about how these lines diverge. Resource extraction and waste and pollution from increasing prosperity. But then why is this not yet a perfectly happy picture of sane environmental policy aligned incentives and a rising tide that lifts all boats? Yeah. So you've asked a couple of different times already, what changed? How is it that we're now getting more from less? If the title of my book is at all accurate and my super short, but I think not too short explanation of what changed, how we moved from this voracious, rapacious, cookie Monster industrial era economy to what I'm going to call the second. Machine age, because that's what Eric and I called our earlier book, where I am asserting we continue to grow our economy and our population and our prosperity, but we're now trading more lightly on the planet. Okay, so your $64,000 question is, what changed? My very short answer to that is we invented the computer and we finally invented this technology that lets us find all of these different ways all of these overlapping, complementary ways to get more from less, to get more prosperity, from less metal, less fertilizer, less water, less cropland, less of all of these material inputs to the economy. And let me give you a couple of different point examples of that. When we first introduced aluminum cans, they were a big deal because they were probably healthier and lighter and cheaper than the tin lined steel cans that they replaced. And all of us now take aluminum cans for granted. You know, all the beer, all the the soda that we drink, or a lot of it comes in an aluminum can. That can now is about one fifth the weight of the first generation of aluminum cans. And I would have thought you'd make a couple of tweaks to the first generation aluminum can, and that's about as light as you could get. It turns out that's dead flat wrong. You can get down to about a fifth of the initial weight. And the only way that I can understand that you do that is you have engineers in front of their CAD terminals, in front of their computer aided design terminals, just doing simulation after simulation. If we make it this way, can it bear all the weight? Will it satisfy all the requirements? And can we save a couple tenths of a penny per 100 cans on the aluminum that we've got to spend money on to deliver our beer to some consumer out there? The thing to keep in mind is twofold, that consumer doesn't get any value from the aluminum all. That guy wants us to drink a beer. And the beverage company would really prefer to spend absolutely no money on that aluminum. They want to get that down as close to zero as possible. So capitalism, like we've already discussed, is this voracious thing. It's a relentless quest for profits. The flip side of that, and where the new starts to turn good, is that it's also a voracious quest to save a buck. A penny saved is a penny earned. So companies are really eager to hire a couple of engineers to sit in front of CAD terminals and figure out how to make an aluminum can lighter. So that's a pretty direct way to see how digital tech progress will help us save on resources. I have a friend who's had a really long career, and a couple of years ago, I was discussing the early stages of this book with him, and he said, oh, I've got a great example for you. He said, when I started my career, I worked for a conglomerate that owned a railroad. And he said, I started my career in 1968. And my very first task as a bright young guy working in this company was to figure out where more of our box cars were across the country. And I looked him, I said, what are you talking about? He said, look, in 1968, Chicago Northwest Railway CNW had no way to know where its rolling stock, its locomotives, and its box cars were around the country. There was no such thing as a an RFID tag or a sensor network or any of that stuff. This was the pre digital era, by and large. And he said the lore inside the company at that point was that 5% of our box cars moved on any given day. And it's not that the other 95% needed to rest. We didn't know where they were. We couldn't move them around the country deliberately. And he said, look, it was abundantly clear to all of us that if we could increase that 5% just to 10%, we would only need half as many box cars to do all of our business. That is a massive, massive savings on these 30 ton steel behemoths sitting out there. So he said it was well worth our time to invest in getting that percentage up. And the way you got that percentage up in 1968 was you hired people to stand at railroad crossings and watch trains go by and see if they could spot any CNW cars. Then they'd telephone or telegraph back to headquarters what they saw. And you'd hire people to do audits of freight yards and things like that. And then he said, My team started to hear about this thing called the computer. We started to think that might be useful. We can fast forward to today. I'm pretty sure that every single box car in America has at least one RFID sensor on it. There are all these track side sensors everywhere that count, that keep track of which cars. I'd be amazed if every railroad in the country today didn't know where its stock was with great precision at every point in time. Because of that, you just don't need as many boxed cars. So you start to see these examples, triangulating and coming together. I think the single most vivid one was a story that I read about a retired newspaper man in Buffalo whose idea of a good time was to go around to garage sales and buy stuff that might tell him something about Buffalo's history. So he bought a stack of Buffalo News newspapers from 1991 for, I don't know what, less than $5. And he was flipping through them, and he came across a Radio Shack ad from 1991. And this guy made a really interesting observation. His name was Steve Sashon. He said there were 15 Gizmos on this Radio Shack ad from 1991. He said 13 of them have vanished into the phone that I carry in my pocket all the time. And he was talking about a camcorder and a camera and a cordless phone and an answering machine and a Walkman and all these different things. And he's absolutely right. They've just kind of vanished down into this very small, very light thing that we carry around with us all the time. And so mentally, if I weigh those 13 different devices and I think about how many resources of different kinds went into those 13 and I swap it out for the one smartphone, I start to understand the graphs that appear in the book and why America is now year by year using less. And I don't mean less per capita, less per American. I mean less an aggregate of really important materials like gold, nickel, steel, fertilizer, water for agriculture, timber, paper cropland, kind of the material who's who of how you make an economy. The trend line has changed and they're now going in general down year after year. And lurking in the back of all these material savings, I see tech progress coupled with capitalism, which is a desire not only is a desire to increase profits and a great, very straightforward one to one way to increase a profit is to cut a cost, right? And materials cost money. Okay, so let me see if I can channel some of the concerns of people who will hear what you just said as yet more techno happy talk and they don't want to get on the ride towards utopia that you seem to be beckoning them towards. Even what you just said. There are echoes of problems that people are now worried about. I doubt anyone is especially sentimental about the job of walking the nation's train tracks looking for box cars. But you did just cite one job that has been irrevocably ceded to the power of automation and computation, right? So this is a trend that many people, I think, are rightly worried about. There's no guarantee that the jobs we automate away will be replaced by new ones that people will prefer or that they can be readily trained for or retrained for. So there's still a dynamic that is something like at least in certain sectors, it's disconcertingly, like a winner take all phenomenon where it's just you're seeing fantastic accretions of wealth and wages either not growing or declining for the better part of humanity or at least the better part of the middle class and lower middle class in the US. And who knows what's happening in other countries. So there's that concern that this invisible hand that is working to our benefit in many ways with capitalism. People are not becoming saints. They're not operating by they haven't had new ethical modules installed. They're just trying to make a buck and save a buck. And yet the breakthroughs in technology are allowing them to do this in a way that is actually better for everyone. But there's still this fact that there's the haves and have nots in this system and then there are the negative externalities that the market just can't correct for. Like and these are things you discuss in your book like pollution. How do we acknowledge the problems yet to be solved and how do we solve them? Yeah. And I do try to spend a decent chunk of the book, not just cheerleading for capitalism and tech progress. I think it's important to do that because they're getting a bad rap in some ways. But there's a difference between being an optimist and being a utopian or a Pollyanna. And I'm trying very hard not to be a utopian or a Pollyanna. And you just rattled off a number of really important cautions and really important challenges that we are confronting today and that I think are going to get more pointed as we go forward. One of the most good news bad news graphs that I put in the book is a reproduction of the famous elephant graph that Christopher Lasker and Bronco Milanovic wrote about in a World Bank report that came out in 2012. And it kind of went unnoticed at first. And then people started looking and they're like, wait a minute, this is a big deal. And all kinds of controversy has has emerged about how you calculate how you draw it correctly. And so there have been revisions to it. But let me try to visually describe the elephant graph and the version that I rely on the most looks like the head of an elephant with an upraised trunk. And what I mean by that is this thing's got a back. It's got kind of a hump that looks like the forehead of an elephant. And then it drops down super sharply and then it rises super sharply toward the end. And for me, that's where the head drops off and the upgraded trunk starts. And what that is a graph of is essentially if you took all the people in the world in 1988 and you lined them up from lowest income to highest income, and then you looked at how much their real incomes changed over the next 20 years over the next generation. And then you plotted that increase or decrease on a graph. The elephant is what you would wind up with. The elephant graph is what you would get. And what that shows is that for almost all of humanity, almost all of humanity is either that flat back of the elephant, which is right about at 50 ish percent real growth in income. Then there's kind of the elephant's head where you're doing even better. The increase is even bigger. The big divot and then the upraised trunk, the end of the trunk, are the wealthiest people in the world in 1988, who, to the surprise of nobody, were doing much better in 2008. And the key part of the graph is obviously that divot the divot between the head of the elephant and the upraised trunk of the elephant. And that divot represents essentially the lower middle class to middle class in the rich world. And that is a really important group to focus on for two main reasons. Number one, they are the low point on that graph. And in every version of the graph that I've seen, that group is right there at the bottom. And we can debate exactly how good or bad their increase in income was, but they are the globally least big gainers in income over that generation, and by some measures, they didn't gain very much at all. So when we hear about wage stagnation, that's really the group that we're talking about is that middle class in the wealthy world who, when they look anywhere else on that graph, they can look down and they see everyone from peasant farmers in India to urbanized Chinese assembly line workers, they're all doing a lot better. A lot better than they were 20 years ago. If they look up at the upraised trunk of the elephant, those are Wall Street people, silicon Valley venture capitalists, the global elite. They're doing much better as well. And then that person in the middle class and the rich world says, wait a minute, I'm lagging way behind this global tide that's lifting other boats here. And they're saying that accurately. The other important thing about the middle class and the rich world, they are a very important demographic group. Not just because there are so many of them and Sam, not just because you and I happened to come from that demographic group, but they are really important for electing the leaders of the rich world. And the leaders of the rich world have a huge influence on the course of things all across the globe. And so that graph really helps me understand the rise in populism demagoguery authoritarianism around lots of rich world countries. Okay, you've got that demographic group that is making an accurate assessment about how they've been doing visa. Visa a lot of other people around the world. And there's some real discontent there going on. And as much as I'm sitting here cheerleading for global markets and for tech progress, those things are part of the reason why that middle class has not seen incomes go up as much. It turns out that the middle class in the rich world has been doing routine work. That's the backbone of the middle class. That's an assembly line worker or payroll clerk or somebody like that. Those jobs are vanishing quite quickly to both globalization and automation. And those old fashioned jobs are not coming back. So one of the challenges that, like, you know, eric and I have written extensively about it was a big subject in our book The Second Machine Age, and I bring it up again here is that there are people and there are communities getting left behind as tech progress and capitalism race ahead. And figuring out what to do about that is really urgent homework. And it's one of the toughest challenges ahead of us, because the toolkit for dealing with communities and people who are getting left behind, it's not a very full toolkit. And the track record of trying to help communities that have fallen on hard times, the track record is not super impressive. So we've got some real homework ahead of us there, right? And it's just the psychological fact that a person or group's sense of whether they're doing well or badly is going to be, as you say, comparative. Even if all boats were rising with the same tide, if some are rising much, much faster, you would still have many unhappy people in whatever class is lagging. And to add on to that, if people start to believe that the bargain that they signed up for is not the bargain that they're getting again, the perceptions can turn negative really quickly. And I put in the book this wonderful research from different sociologists that came out way before the 2016 election, way before the Trump phenomenon happened, where they spent time with some of these communities that were on the bubble. And they kept reporting back that the perceptions, the resentment, the anger at how they feel like their bargains are not getting honored, and that everybody else is kind of skipping ahead of them in line. People were reporting on this in 2007, 2008. I think we didn't listen carefully enough. So I want to talk about the other two horsemen of the optimist public awareness and responsive government. But before we get there, and I think we should say something about climate change, which is the big negative externality that many of us can't seem to admit even exists. So we have a problem there that's intellectual and political and it seems especially contract. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I am speaking with David Brooks. David is one of the nation's leading writers and commentators. He's an Op ed columnist for The New York Times, and he appears regularly on PBS's NewsHour and Meet the Press. And he's the best selling author of several books the Social Animal, Bobos in paradise, and most recently, and the book under discussion, The Road to Character. And in this episode, we talk about that book, The Road to Character. And it was a very interesting book where David goes into the difference between self gratification and self overcoming on some basic level. So we talk about things like sin and self esteem versus self overcoming and the significance of keeping promises and the ethics of honesty and related matters. Inevitably, we get to Trump. There was no way I could let David Brooks escape without telling me something about his view of the current political landscape, but that does not dominate the podcast. For those of you who are sick to death of the topic, our time was somewhat short. It's interesting that an hour on this podcast feels quite short, but David had another interview to get to, so enjoy it while it lasts. And now I give you David Brooks. I am here with David Brooks. David, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's a great pleasure. So we've only met once. I'm trying to rack my brains to find another time, but we met at a meeting organized by the great John Brockman at one point. Does that square with your memory as well? I do remember that John Brockman is the zealog of a modern American culture, a global culture. He shows up everywhere. Many people don't know this, but he controls much of our intellectual life. So I want to talk to you about two main things. I want to talk to you about your book, The Road to Character, which I loved. And then I think we will inevitably talk a little about a very different road, the road that one man took to the White House. I know my audience is sick to death of Trump as I am. I think if there's a God, he probably is sick of Trump, too, at this point. But I can't have you on this podcast without getting your take on what's going on in Washington. So I think we will arrive there but we will first go toward topics that I know are dear to your heart and mine, which is really the nature of our moral lives, or lack thereof. So let's start with how you came to write this book and what you mean by character. Because character is, like many of the words you use in this book, is not a word that tends to roll off the tongue without any self consciousness at this point. How did you come to this and what is character, in your view? Yeah, it's not a great word. It's not a word I like, and I'm not even sure how often it's in the book. But when I came to have a title that could, in one word, or at least in a couple of words, summarize sort of moral development, that would seem to be the word that at least people sort of got the gist of what you were talking about, whereas moral development itself, as a phrase, sounds clunky. I started to write a book about humility, and at first it was just going to be about epistemological humility, really building off work that Danny Kahneman and a lot of other people have done about the shortcomings of their own thinking processes. But then as I got into it, I guess my tableau expanded and I started thinking about moral humility and all different kinds of humility. And basically, I mean, when you're sort of doing what I do, you sort of work out your own crap in public. And so I achieved way more career success than I ever thought I would, but I never had and still don't have the sort of joyous demeanor and radiating goodness that I see in other people. And so I just sort of wanted to figure out, how do they get that? And so the book, I really took a bunch of characters, more or less randomly selected, who were pathetic at age 20 and kind of amazing at age 70, and I just wanted to know, how did they grow into much better people, which they all did. Yeah, the story is really told through these different characters you profile and people like Dorothy Day and Montane and Dr. Johnson. And I guess as time is short, I don't want to go into many of them. But one jumped out at me, the profile of George Marshall, the general who is not as famous as he should be. Perhaps, though, the Marshall Plan is named after him in writing about character and writing about virtues that are, again, that we don't really have the moral language anymore to talk about without really straining, and we'll get into the significance of words like sin and wisdom and other words that people don't use so readily anymore. But in the character of Marshall, I was struck by the fact that so much of what you describe about him is clearly noble and deserving of really nothing but praise. I mean, his level of self sacrifice and self abnegation and his willingness, seemingly at every turn, to put country before self, to put the needs of, in this case, the President of the United States before his own career goals. But it was hard to actually envy him. If I could teach my children to be good, I'm not sure I would give them that particular piece of software he was running. So why don't you just summarize briefly the story you tell about Marshall, and in particular about the way in which he didn't make the moves when his career was really reaching its apogee to become the far more famous and influential general that he might have been. Yeah, he grew up in Pennsylvania and he was a very shy boy and a very poor student. And his older brother went to VMI in Virginia Military Institute, and Marshall wanted to go too. And his older brother said, George is kind of pathetic. Let's not let him go there because he'll ruin the family name. And so he was not an impressive young man, but he ended up going to VMI and he ended up really loving military life, and military life really was the making of him. He joined the institution. It gave him discipline. He turned out he had a habit of command. He was never a great student, but he had a habit of leadership. People wanted to follow him and he had a spirit of rectitude. And so he rose through the army, sometimes seeming on the outside, extremely conservative, and stayed, even as he was, revolutionizing a lot of things within the army about fighting with tanks and how they did train future soldiers. So he was a bit of a quiet rebel within the army. And then my favorite Marshall story happens. He's already head of the army in 1943, and he really wants to run Operation Overlord, which is the D Day invasion. And Churchill and Stalin had both told him he was going to get the job, and Harry Hopkins had told him the same. But he had a code that he would never campaign for himself because he feared his own ambition. And when Roosevelt called him into the Oval Office, roosevelt said, would you like to run Operation Overlord? And instead of just saying yes, marshall said, my own personal ambition should have no bearing on your decision. Do what's best for you. And Roosevelt asked him four times, and four times Marshall said, it's not about me, it's about you. And Roosevelt took the chance to give the job to Eisenhower and Marshall was crushed. And it was the one day he went home early in the whole course of the war, and so it hurt him. And he would have been a much more famous person if he'd run the DDay invasion, but he wouldn't be Marshall. And he was someone who was not only admired by history, but he's admired by those around him, which isn't always the case, the people who knew him best really admired him the most, but I sort of get the chilliness about him. He had a quality that we associate with Greek and Roman times of magnanimity, which Paracles had and I think George Washington had. And it's a great man doing great service to his country, but at the same time he's detached and he's emotionally cold. And so he gives himself a certain grandeur, but he loses familiarity and friendliness. Marshall could be very friendly and very intimate, but only in the tightest circle of trusted friends. With everyone else, he was a bit standoffish. And so during the war, he wouldn't call Eisenhower Ike the way everyone else did because it was too familiar. He was aloof. And I do think that does make him a little hard to love. Yeah, it's not so much hard to love. That's probably another point. But I noticed that many of these things that we immediately recognize as virtues in this case, his willingness to be self effacing even when he in some basic sense deserves all the praise that is coming his way and the advancement that is being offered. Certain virtues are in tension with other virtues, and it's hard to actually want to emulate him in that moment, given that you could also tell probably an equally ennobling story about doing what is appropriate to actualize your gifts in the service of others. His rectitude was in tension with just kind of an honest acknowledgement of perhaps who's the best man for the job. And many of our moral considerations seem to have this structure where it's not really a matter of good versus evil or sin versus virtue, but it's sometimes a matter of prioritizing various values that are all values that we actually hold and can endorse. But there is a zero sum conflict between some of them some of the time. Do you feel that that's the way the landscape looks to you, or do you see it mostly a matter of always seeing clearly what is right versus wrong? Yeah, I'm on your side. I think the values are incommensurate, as Isaiah Berlin would say, that things don't fit together neatly and sometimes things are intention and they create paradoxes. And so a lot of the characters I write about in the book more so if I do the book over, I wouldn't include so much of this. They had a virtue of reticence, and Marshall had that. Francis Perkins, another person from that era, had that. But it also gave them the vice of coldness or the virtue of reticence took away from the virtue of friendliness. And so one of the features in the book that's informed my thinking a lot is Augustine's Ladder of Loves theory. He says, we all love a lot of things, but we know instinctively that some loves are higher than others and that you should love honesty more than you love money. For example, you shouldn't lie in order to get money, or if a friend tells you a secret and then you blab it at a dinner party, you're putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship. And we all know that's wrong. And those are cases where we love two different things, and it's pretty obvious which one's higher. But there are other times where it's not obvious, and that the two different loves or intention, and sometimes you have to pick one, or sometimes your personality more or less inclines you in one direction or another. Yeah, well, in your discussion of this, you oppose various things. You talk about the resume virtues versus the eulogy virtues. You talk about moral realism versus moral romanticism, and there are many more. So maybe we can track through some of these because it's a very useful structure. What are the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues? Yeah, I should say one of my mental weaknesses is I have a weakness for dualisms, and I see them everywhere, and I'm persuaded by all of them. In this case, it's a strength. But I take your point. And so the eulogy virtues and the resume virtues are things I more or less took from a guy named Joseph Soloviche, who was a rabbi in the mid 20th century. And he said, we have two sides of our nature. One side, which is about conquering the world and being majestic in it. And those are the resume virtues, the things that make us good at our job, whether it's a good teacher or a good nurse or doctor or whatever. And then the eulogy virtues are the internal side of ourselves, the things they say about us after we're dead, whether it's being courageous or honest or capable of great love. And my argument in the book is that we live in a culture that knows the eulogy virtues are more important. We'd all rather be remembered for our character traits rather than our career, but we live in a culture that emphasizes the form, the career parts, not the latter. And we're just a lot more articulate about how to build a good career than how to build a good person. And our universities in particular are much more confident in talking about professional rise than a moral or spiritual rise for a lot of different reasons. One of them, my colleague at Yale, Tony Cronman, who's at the law school, says, specialization causes us to look at the narrow focus of different subjects but never step back and look at the whole person. And so his argument is that specialization causes us to abstract from the whole quality of our conduct and makes us focus on how we're doing it as potential lawyers or academics or whatever. Yeah, well, there's another opposition that is relevant to what you just said. You talk at one point about talent versus character, to view a person as a collection of talents that need to be maximized as a kind of utilitarian and transactional way we think about ourselves and our interface with the world. And it's not the same thing as developing a truly moral character and seeing that as an ongoing struggle against limitations that are not a matter of your jumping through the kinds of hoops that your talents or your specialization would dictate. My shorthand way to say that is that if you're going to pick out a career, then go with your strengths. Go with the things that you're naturally talented at or want to be talented at. But if you're thinking about your internal growth, pay a lot of attention to your weaknesses. And one of the things that pretty much all the characters in the book do is they identified what was their core sin, their core problem. For Marshall, it was his ambition. For Eisenhower, another character in the book, it was his anger. He had a terrible temper. For others, dorothy Day, she was sort of overemotional and fragmented, and they waged a daily drama against their weakness. And so I would say if you want to be a good person, and if you don't work on your weaknesses, you'll end up like Richard Nixon, being swallowed up by them. I think there was someone in the book, it might have been Dorothy Day, who was urged to major in an academic subject. That was her weakness. Just to overcome that, to not take your career advice here and focus on your actual talents. Was that Dorothy Day or was it someone else in the book? That was Francis Perkins. She was at Mount Holyoke. And Mount Holyoke then, as now, is quite a remarkable place. And they really did think we're training people to be really good people. We're not worrying about their careers. And it was a women's college, so there was some sexism in that. But they said, Listen, if you can major in the field you're weakest in, that will build your character, and you'll be able to conquer anything. And to that school's credit, they sent out young women. Perkins was class of 19, three. They sent them out to Pakistan, across Africa, across Asia on these service trips, and they would spend years abroad. And somebody did a census of all the missionaries abroad, I think in around 1920. And some ridiculous percentage, like 20% of them, were Mount Holyoke grants. So they were armed with a sense of mission and a sense of toughness on how to conquer life's challenges. It was quite a remarkable place. So you think we lose something important when we lose concepts like sin and evil and virtue and wisdom and humility, that we lose a moral language that not only affects how we talk about these things, it actually affects whether or not we recognize a kind of inner landscape and lead a kind of examined life that really becomes impossible unless you have the concepts, unless you have the landmarks you can even acknowledge exist. And to shoot for some of these words I find myself using, and I can do so without any kind of self consciousness. But sin isn't one of them because of its association with Christianity in particular and because of some of the liabilities of the way in which it's interpreted. This is something you point out in the book sin can be and has been so often invoked against genuinely healthy pleasures. I mean, it really isn't set in opposition to what most of us would consider a healthy sex life, for instance. How do you think about sin? Yeah, I do think we need to recover a lot of these words because it is the vocabulary of the internal landscape and we happen to have a culture, say, in Western civilization that for 2000 years has been Christian or JudeoChristian. And so a lot of the best thinking about these concepts comes from people who come from that tradition and whether we're believers or not. Now, I think a lot of their thinking is still useful and still helpful in thinking about how to have a good life. Now, the word sin was, as you say, ruined by people who used it to punish sex or used it to crack down on being a kid a lot of the time. But I think it's useful because it points to the fact that there are sometimes just screw ups in our nature, that there are bugs in the machine, and that some of them are characteristics of just the way we're wired and that we should be aware of them. I think we all have a tendency to be selfish and to see the world from our own vantage point. David Foster Wallace in that famous Kenyan address said we don't even think about it, but we see the world as before us, behind us, beside us, but it's all revolving around us. And I do think that's just a screw up in our nature, that we're too self oriented. And I think it's possible to have a concept of sin that doesn't rely on the original sin and even something explicitly religious. What I talked about earlier about having your loves out of order, I think that's a good way to describe how sin happens. That sometimes we just have a tendency to get our loves out of order and we go for some short term pleasure like popularity, over a long term virtue, like being faithful to our friends. And I think it's useful to revive that word just to remind ourselves how sort of broken we are, even while we're splendidly endowed in other ways. Another word I think is worth reviving, which has explicitly religious connotations is the word grace. And the way I would say it in non religious terms is sometimes you get sick or you have a trauma and people you really are close to somehow disappear. They don't show up for you. But then there are other people you barely know and they completely show up for you and they're very great friends to you at that moment. And that's unmerited love, that's undeserved. And I think as it's important to recognize that sometimes we have these flaws in our nature, it's also important to recognize that as people and as a race or as a humanity, sometimes we just get unmerited benefits that we don't deserve, and sometimes the universe is much kinder to us than we merit and that's grace. And so I think all these qualities are useful if we're thinking about our place in the world and our spiritual development. How do you think about the self as the center of this project? One way to talk about the road to character is an opposition between if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with the very bad wizards david Pizarro and Tamla Summers. They have a podcast by that name, which I've been on, I think, twice. We debated free will at great length, so if you're interested in that topic, you can listen to us there, and I recommend you listen to their podcast. They touch fascinating subjects and in quite the irreverent way, and they do fantastic movie reviews as well. David Pizarro is a professor of psychology at Cornell. He focuses on morality and moral judgment and the emotion of disgust. And needless to say, all of that is incredibly relevant to this time and any other. And his partner in crime, Tamdler Summers, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, and he focuses primarily on ethics and political philosophy and the philosophy of a law. And he specializes in topics like free will and moral responsibility, punishment, revenge, honor. Again, fascinating and all too relevant. In this podcast, we essentially took questions from Twitter. People had heard us on the Very Bad Wizards podcast and had topics they wanted us to address. We talk about free speech on campus. We do a fairly long post mortem on my podcast with Scott Adams. So if you haven't heard that, you might listen to that first. Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead, especially if you're sick to death of hearing me talk about Trump. We talk about moral persuasion, and then we get into things like meditation and the sense in which the self may or may not be an illusion. Again, I encourage you to subscribe to their podcast because they are quite good. And now I bring you the very bad wizards. I am here with the very bad wizards. David. Tambler, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Sam. I will have introduced you, and people may have heard our previous interviews on your show, but remind everyone where you are and what you guys tend to focus on when you're not causing trouble on your podcast. Well, I am a professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. You are Tambler, and I am Tambler Summers. Right. And when I'm not podcasting on Very Bad Wizards with David, I am working on this book, which I've been working on for quite a while for the last few years that's coming out in the spring and the early spring called in defensive honor. And it's about honor and morality. Yeah, you like honor. That's something we could talk about. We can add that to the list of things. Yeah. Yeah, I look forward to that. And I'm David Pizzar from Cornell University. When I'm not podcasting with Tambler and losing my cool on occasion, I do research on moral judgment and especially on the effects of emotion on judgment. So the emotion of disgust is something that maybe for the last ten years I've been I've been researching and how that that can influence judgment, political judgment and and moral and social judgment and then just trying to teach the young minds, trying to sucker them into getting PhDs. Our listeners want us to talk about the moral panic on campuses as one of the items. We went out on Twitter asking for topics, and I know you guys disagree with some people who think that it's a huge problem, and so I want to get into that because you guys are also on the front lines as professors. But first, let's just start with your podcast. Your podcast is fantastic. I'm a huge fan and I'm a fan, even though it seems every other time I tune in, you have said something disparaging about me that's Tamblor trolling you. I will wipe my hands clean of this one. I think early on I was disparaging of certain remarks from your book the Moral Landscape on Moral Relativism. Since then, I think we've been very even handed and balanced and we don't need anything. You would think that. I believe Tambler is watching a different movie. It's an emotional truth, what I just said, right? It's not fact based truth, maybe, but persuasive to somebody. Nonetheless, your podcast is great and people should check it out and we will provide a link or all the relevant links on my blog. But I'm just wondering, you're both professors full time, and you have a fairly edgy podcast. I mean, you guys, you get into topics and you express opinions that I would think could conceivably get you in trouble. And this does actually connect with this first topic that has been suggested to us, this idea of a fundamental and spreading intolerance to free speech that's taking hold at the universities. Do you guys ever worry about what you're doing on the podcast with respect to your jobs? I mean, do you both have tenure? How do you think about your life at this point? Okay, well, I'll start by saying I think that at first it was what some people refer to, to use an analogy, if I may refer to as security through obscurity. I was sort of convinced at first that nobody would be listening and therefore it would be perfectly okay. But I've been actually quite surprised as far as our listenership has grown, thanks to many wonderful guests, including Sam. And as our audience has grown, I do not think in Tambler, you can correct me. I think one of the things that is so nice about the long form podcast or discussion format is that people can hear. They get to know you in a way that the things that you say are in a context of conversations, and for lack of a better word, I think they get to know your character a little bit. And some of the crazy things we say, people really are good at taking it in context. Maybe one or two emails typically devoted to taking us out of context. That's right. I believe one time expressed the fear that we'd be taken out of context and that Twitter account started up and I don't know, I think maybe one or two times we've had somebody email us with maybe some anger about what we've said. But you mean from your own institutions? No, from our listenership, from our own institutions. I genuinely think I mean, part of it is I haven't made it sort of anything that I talk about too much in my own institution, in part because of that worry, honestly, to connect it to the topic. This is one of my points of evidence when I say that I think people exaggerate the degree to which there's a chilling effect, or that people can't express their views if they don't toe the line with the progressive agenda or whatever. I think neither of us do that. I think maybe me even less than Dave. And I haven't heard one single, not a single complaint from any colleague who listens to it, from any person at my institution who listens to it. And there are a bunch. Nobody has taken umbrage by a single thing that we've said, and we've said some repugnant shit as that's part of our trademark. And I think it's for the reason that Dave says is people get to know us, and they know, I think, that our hearts are in the right place. And so as long as they know that, they're going to allow you to be a little edgier or more inappropriate and not try to shut you down. And so this is one of the things that makes me think that these incidents are not as widespread a phenomenon as it's portrayed by some in the media. But there's a relevant part there that we didn't answer, which is we both have tenure, but I think we got tenure after maybe a year of doing the podcast when we started. I don't think we had tenure, but we do have tenure. Just to add that right. Okay. Are you guys as irreverent or edgy in the classroom, or is there a very big difference between your podcast persona and your professor hat? I teach a course, Intropsychology, which is largely freshmen with about 800 students enrolled. For many of them, it's their first experience in a lecture course in college. And while I probably tone it down, part of it is. Your persona kind of changes depending on the situation. So it's more like we raise it up a notch on the podcast sometimes, but largely I say crazy things in my class all the time and I've had students who take delight in writing it down. There was once somebody on Facebook who would quote me extensively why I got a Word document at the end of one semester from a student with a list of all the crazy things I had said. But usually, again, I think not on the first day, sort of you build yourself up and always, I think at least I try in an attempt to communicate something well, so if I drop an F bomb, it's usually because I want somebody to remember something. I'll give an example when I talk about evolutionary psychology, for instance. I remind students that if a claim is made that natural selection cause something it has to be directly tied to the mechanism of survival and reproduction or else or else it doesn't work through natural selection. So I just remind people unless it leads to more fucking it's not an evolutionary argument like adaptiveness, clearly. And I say that in an attempted function. Well, it's an attempt too much to the chagrin of my mother. It's an attempt to solidify a principle. Maybe I'm just making it sounds a little talk to me. I just want to laugh. You got 818 year olds in front of you. It's your one moment of stand up for the day. And tamla are you do you tone it down? Because I'm not drunk usually when I teach, so that's one difference. But every once in a while for the podcast we put you drunk on you probably me again a little more frequently. I've done that once. Plus some other things, which anyway, I think it's exactly what Dave said you build up a little trust over the course of the semester and they sort of get you and your I'm somebody that likes to go up and approach the line. I get bored when everybody is talking and it's a little too everyone's being too polite or dancing around certain topics. And I think that students like that and especially now when I think a lot of these students, at least at my institution, which is a public institution and they're working jobs and they're stressed out taking five classes and a lot of them have family issues that they're dealing with and anxiety issues that they're dealing with. It is nice to just have a place where people can, you know, not watch what they say and not feel like they have to walk on eggshells. So that's at least the kind of environment that I try to build. And again, in classes I have yet to find that to be a problem even remotely. Like not one single complaint, at least one that's reached me. Now we have to reconcile our worldviews because, you know, many of these principal experts. Really, how do I square what you guys have just said with what Jonathan Height is saying and really canonizing in the Heterodox academy, worrying about this creeping moral panic that is fundamentally antithetical to the core values of a university. I'm sure David knows Jonathan, but perhaps you do too, Tambler. You guys really should have him on your podcast to talk about these things, because I'd like to hear what he would say, but he's really worried about this. And then you have the cases of, like, Nicholas Christakis, who I'm sure at least David knows Yale. You have Brett Weinstein, who at Evergreen University, which has gotten a lot of attention and that just went fully off the rails, as far as I know. I'm not even sure he his family is back in town yet based on safety concerns. And then you have the Rebecca Tuval incident, and I actually had lunch with her to talk about her experience not that long ago. So it's totally possible that you guys are right and that these are individual cases that suggest very little about the rest of what's going on on campuses. But take the first part. How do you think about how Height is describing this? It's a tough question because I think this is one of those cases where two things can be true. And one other thing, Tamlor, I should say that you see your step mom is Christina Hoff Summers, who is this? Basically, as far as I can tell, she has a cult following on the right or center right for the way she's brought attention to this sort of issue. Yes. Especially as it relates to gender. Yes. This is a debate I have often, and certainly every Thanksgiving. I'm pretty close to my stepmother, so we go back and forth. It's funny, like, if you listen to us talk about it, I think we can both concede a little bit of and this is how I feel about Height, too. I thought the coddling of the American mind was one of those first sort of over hyped pieces that captured the attention and the imagination of everybody. And I think people aren't good at looking at a video like the Kristakis video or the Evergreen State video, and they're bad cases. They're really bad. I mean, there's no denying it. If that was going on or the Charles Murray thing, right? If that was going on in the universities, then people would be right to panic about this. But what's I think difficult for people to process is day in and day out, how many things happen at the thousands and thousands of universities across the country where there's no stifling of speech, there's no chilling, there's none of that. Charles Murray successfully gave that same talk at 100 universities, probably before Middlebury. And, you know, Evergreen State is a little bit of a whack job, liberal arts college to begin with. And for a while this isn't true anymore, but for a while, anytime there was an article written about this, it was Oberlin. Like, something happened in Oberlin, because that's just what Oberlin is. It's been like that for 50 years, and it'll probably be like that for another 50 years. So I think it's important to separate what's legitimately wrong that's going on at these particular institutions for what is going on in, quote unquote, the American University, because I think those two things are different. But I understand, like, Heightwell kind of could concede some of that and say it is at these more privileged private institutions that this is occurring. But that's still a significant worry. And, you know, I have some sympathy with that. Yeah. And just to make clear, I think that Templer and I disagree about this often. Although although we share a lot of the sentiment, I think that it's important to separate arguments about frequency with arguments about importance. And I do think that there is a probably measurable chilling effect in that some professors are less willing to say some of the things that they used to say or they think twice about it. And I do think there's probably a measurable difference in the average undergrad in the way that they think about a lot of these things. And then we can separate whether the reaction of panic, which I think Tambler is responding to, is the right sort of reaction to the problem as it currently stands, which I agree is probably not. It does get overblown and it captures attention, but I nonetheless do worry about it. And I do think that we are creating an environment in which people pause before they say some things. But I always try to emphasize that there's a way in which a lot of this is actually progress. I do want people to pause before they say some things. And so if that's what's called chilling, then good. I mentioned this on one of our podcasts. I don't know if it made the final edit, but I did have a professor once tell me that he really felt like he couldn't tell the same jokes that he used to. And I said, like, what kind of jokes? And then he gave me an example, and it was a pretty racist joke. And I was like, good. In his defense, he wasn't from the US. And he didn't think it was a racist joke. Right. It hasn't stopped Dave from his constant stream of antisemitism. I feel like that's the canary in the coal mine. The minute gets squashed, I will announce to the world, first, they came for the anti Semitism. I did nothing. I just want to add that I think Dave's right, that sometimes professors feel like they have to watch what they say, but sometimes that's their fault, not the environment's fault. They've been reading too much of The Atlantic and too much whatever. The latest column on the Heterodox blog and now they've convinced themselves that they can't say anything that might border on inappropriate. Sometimes you just have to man up and just say the thing that you want to say. And if there's any blowback from that, then you'll deal with it. Or woman can you cut that? I'm going to get him bigger. I can't believe you. That's a keeper. So I do think I was having this talk with a professor at a conference, and he said, I was in this faculty meeting, and then an hour later, this faculty member tweeted out something. She didn't use my name, but something that I had said in the faculty meeting. And I said, so who cares? So what? So maybe she'll tweet out something that you said at a faculty meeting. That doesn't mean you shouldn't say it. That's just life. It's life that when you say something, sometimes people will react in a certain way and you deal with it then. Yeah. The problem is that we have these cases, which may certainly on your account, are outlier cases where this stuff just goes completely haywire and you have someone's career destroyed or there's at least just a massive public shaming experience that follows precisely that pattern. A tweet sent from an otherwise private meeting. Or what was that incident where the guy wore a shirt to a conference and he was just vilified endlessly for the insensitivity of his shirt? Again, we have these cases that get media attention and at minimum, advertise how haywire this can go. So it's easy to see how this would propagate back and cause everyone to choose their words more carefully. I guess it's easy, but it's not a full excuse. Professors generally are smart enough to understand the difference between a widespread phenomenon and some cases that still, I think, can reasonably be called isolated. And like anything like a terrorist attack, you don't want to overreact to it. You don't want to completely take away everybody's freedoms just because there was this one terrorist attack in Orlando. It's important to say that in many of the incidents that we've described, these people were treated horribly and unfairly, and there's no lack of assholes who are causing people grief. But I always think that the response to me is more important than whatever growing number of undergraduates who are easily offended. I think that this is actually, what do we make of this? What do we do with this? And if it is anything like a trend, if it's not isolated incidents and it is the beginnings of some zeitgeist changing more so than ever, I think that the role of the professor is I think we've failed our students if by the end of our classes, for instance, I think part of the training of, say, a seminar in mind is for students to come out of there comfortable with expressing opinions and not vilifying others who they disagree with. And I think that the response to any claims of alarm. And these trends or whatever being dangerous ought to be met with open and clear conversation with our students and not with a response that it's just these students who are, like, completely progressive liberals on the left who are ruining things because of postmodernism. I would want to talk to that student, bring them in, let them teach by example what it means to have a respectful disagreement. The issue with postmodernism connects us to another item that many have suggested we talk about, and I think this is something that you slam me for on one of your podcasts, the Conceptual Penis Hoax. Is there a mess we need to clean up there? I don't think we slammed you on the podcast. Well, what happened is I was among the people who forwarded this hoax. I think I read a piece of their paper on my podcast and then retweeted it, and then many people have now judged it to have been a false hoax, or at least a misfired hoax. We don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but I think you guys saw it as an example of skeptics not being nearly skeptical enough because they just practiced their own version of confirmation bias by spreading this thing, which in the end wasn't what it seemed to be. Is that still how you think about it? Because I think, yes, the authors both defended themselves, right? And I think even Alan Sokal wrote a fairly appreciative piece about it, or at least partially appreciative piece about it. I think what was like and we had James Lindsay on on our podcast, and we talked at length about it. And I think that not that I'm encouraging you to listen to it, but at the end of that, I was more disappointed with his response than ever. And I think it is a case where, yeah, we were taking to task many in the whatever skeptic community, if you want to call it that. I don't know how you feel about the label for falling for a confirmation bias. And I think our point was just generally that this was published in a really low tier journal after being rejected from a mid tier journal. And I thought, well, what would be evidence of a good scholarship if not rejected from journals from an unranked journal? They were rejected from unranked gender studies journal and got it published in a pay per publish, not gender studies journal. It requires no defense of gender studies. I think we're all on record as saying there's, like, spectacular bullshit coming out of some of these fields, but there's something about the arrogance and the quickness of mockery, and there's something I want to talk to you this is your podcast, so you can direct us. But I did want to talk to you about, in this broader context of moral persuasion, about the role of this mockery. I've been struck, maybe especially in the last few weeks or a few months as our audience has grown and we get more and more people interacting with us on Twitter. I don't know if it's just some belief that this is an effective way of convincing others of the truth, but I found the authors, or at least the one author we talked to, of the hoax, to be very dismissive and quite arrogant about the way that he presented his case in a way that so called himself was not. And I find, for instance, you to be very reasonable when you talk, but you have a wide army of people who aren't that way. And so I don't know how you feel about when you see you probably get so many tweets that it's hard to keep up. But when you see people who sort of on your behalf are acting in ways that I don't think that you would ever act, there are really two topics here. One is whether mockery is ever useful and persuasive to the people you're mocking, or whether I think you guys have even more global doubts about whether just hard criticism is ever persuasive to the people you're criticizing, whether a frontal assault atheist style on religious faith ever wins hearts and minds. I think that's something that at least Tambler has doubted in the past. Well, I mean, it depends what you mean by frontal assault. But then there's the issue of how one's fans or listeners, or readers in my case represent me in how they respond to people who criticize me or my podcast guests. On that second point, for me, it's very clear and with some frequency I can't keep doing this, but with some frequency I admonish my listeners not to be jerks. And I've said on a few podcasts, listen, you're doing me no favors. No matter how much you hate what someone said on my podcast, no matter how wrong you think they are, you're not doing me any favors if you now just flame them on social media. I don't want a person's experience coming on the podcast to be that that was the worst thing they ever did in their lives because of how they were treated by a fairly large audience. In fact, I want it to be the opposite. I want everything that comes their way to be really smart and civil, no matter how hard hitting it actually is or no matter how critical it is of their position. It has to be civil and irrelevant. And so I'm fairly clear about how I wish people would represent my audience, right? But I have very little control over what people actually do apart from saying things like that periodically. I guess the so, I mean, there's right, you don't have control over what the people who are fans of yours do, and all you can do is model good behavior, which I think you did. I mean, you did win the Scott Adams almost to the point where it was heroic, the degree to which we'll see if I can still model it and now that we talk about it, was some Chris target level patience. But the question that Dave alluded to before about whether mockery is an effective tactic to change people's minds, I think is something that I think this skeptics, and sometimes atheists, maybe I just disagree with them because I don't have any great evidence on whether mockery changes minds or not. Certainly in my experience, mocking somebody, calling them stupid, calling them obviously irrational or whatever, it just makes people more defensive, it makes people dig their heels in more. And the way I think to change minds is to be respectful of their opinion and to really try to see the best side of it and to engage with it, even if you find it indefensible on some level, just as a purely practical, instrumental goal of changing somebody's mind. In my experience, as someone who's no stranger to mockery, that's not what I want to trot it out for. Mockery is fun, can be funny, it can get the people who already agree with you to agree with you more and to be more proud of themselves for being on the right side of the view. But it doesn't change the minds of the people that you're mocking. I would just say that that assumption is pretty readily disconfirmable. It doesn't change some people's minds, I'll grant you that. It might not even change most minds. And most minds, depending on what the belief system is, might just not be available for change. Right? So there's nothing you're going to say on a podcast or in a book, however well tempered, that's going to change the mind of a, you know, a real jihadist or get him to question his faith. But I've been amazed to learn that some of the most hard hitting stuff I've put out there, the stuff I've said about Islam in the end of Faith or in various YouTube videos has actually penetrated and reached even totally devout conservative people in in communities in Pakistan, right. Where the people are now closet atheists, right. Based on what I or Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens have said about their religion. And obviously that's not that those people themselves must be outliers, but you have to picture people at every point on the spectrum of credulity with respect to any ideology. And so there's the people who are fundamentalists and have never questioned the faith. And there are people who are halfway between that and being fairly just nominal adherents of the faith. And they can be tipped in either direction, and if they see something very hard hitting but also obviously well thought out, directed at this thing that they have been told is so important and so beyond doubting, you don't know how many of those people you capture. And I can just say that having done this for more than. A decade. There's personally a kind of an endless stream of confirmation that minds get changed through confrontation with evidence and argument, however actually disrespectful and hard hitting. And maybe there are some distinctions that came to mind as we continue to talk about this. And one is that at least what I know of the discussions that you've had haven't struck me as mockery. And I find even in instances of strong disagreement, I don't think that you are disrespectful. But I think that the question of whether mockery is effective may be just the wrong way for me to think about it, because it may very well be that you change some minds through mockery, but that isn't the way that I want to do it. And maybe there are some tactics that just are so. I mean, there are some issues that are so important that you might adopt it by any means necessary approach, but I find it distasteful and disrespectful. I don't know how we define mockery, but for instance, the way I speak about Trump, right, this is not everyone's cup of tea. Obviously, Trump supporters who are totally incorrigible hate what I say about Trump, and they must be unreachable. But I got to think even there it reaches somebody, and on certain points there is just no other way to say it. I mean, to fail to convey the feeling of moral appropriate that seems to me just central to the response I'm having to Trump. Yeah, to leave that off the table is to actually not communicate what I think about Trump and what I feel everyone has good reason to believe about him. So I guess the respect side comes in where I can give a sympathetic construal of why someone didn't see it that way at first or maybe even doesn't see it that way now. And I can certainly sympathize with someone who hated Clinton and felt for their own reasons, that Trump was probably a better choice. There's definitely a discussion to be had that they can dignify the other side. And I spent a whole podcast running down Clinton with with Andrew Sullivan, so I'm sympathetic with the other side. But to actually just focus on a specific example like Trump and Trump University, as I did with Scott Adams, and to not express just how despicable that was and how despicable it is not to find it despicable. Now, I was somewhat hamstrung in my conversation with Scott because I have to play host and debate partner, but kind of the host has to win. At least I'm using it as a heuristic now that the host has to win in those moments and keep it civil at all costs. But to give him a pass on that, I feel is a moral failing in itself and an intellectual one. And to not communicate that is dishonest. I guess what you did with Scott Adams is, as I see it, different. You weren't mocking him I'm not saying you shouldn't express your feelings or you should sugarcoat how you feel and what you believe about Donald Trump, but when you look at what you did with Scott Adams, you were very deliberately trying to see his perspective, trying to understand why he was defending the positions that he was defending. And I don't know, I see that more as an example, even though he wasn't going to be persuaded either way. I see that as an example of more what I'm talking about than what you're talking about. And I think this is what doesn't happen with liberals and Trump voters is they are dismissed. And like the basket of deplorables, they're just dismissed as this monolithic group of racist idiots who vote against their own interests constantly. And just to be clear, I'm highlighting not what I said to Scott or about Scott, but what I say about Trump. There's no way to sugarcoat it. I am being as disrespectful as you can possibly be about Trump. So imagine what I would have to say to Trump to his face if I ever met him, to square with what I've said. I'm talking about a Trump voter and trying to convince a Trump voter to change their mind. Say we get to the next election time, and you're canvassing with the Trump voter. The way to change their mind, both as a party and as an individual person, isn't going to be, I don't think, to make fun of them, because that's what was tried and that's what seemed like almost a galvanizing it had a kind of a galvanizing effect to the voters. But what do you think of something like the SNL sketches against Trump and Sean Spicer? Yeah, I was going to get to another distinction about humor because there's not a clear line. And all I can do, I think, is point to the sort of attitude that somebody holds toward another human being, where humor is actually a great way to satirize and to condemn. And by the way, I also agree with you that what I'm not saying is that there aren't cases of just sheer moral condemnation that we shouldn't pull our punches. We should be very, very comfortable to say, I agree with you. I think Trump is somebody who I wouldn't have anything good to say about him, and I think so much of what he's doing is wrong and setting the wrong example. And with humor, I think humor, there is often a line there, and I find that I can distinguish the kind of humor that I think is good satire for me in my reaction from stuff that just gets nasty in some way in the tone with which it's being done. I think the power of humor is that it tells a truth in a way that disarms people. It doesn't bring their walls up, not always, but it has the power to do that. I think I've gotten so much more insight from people like Dave Chappelle and Louis CK. Because they tell some pretty difficult truths. In a funny way. I think, though, that it can get to a mean spirit and then I just don't like it as much. But I don't like that feeling that somebody's disrespecting. And I think when I said mockery, for instance, what I meant was somebody who is unwilling to engage. And I found, I think, in our James Lindsay interview about the hoax, I found an unwillingness to engage or just a stopping point at their willingness to talk about opposing views. That is what distressed me or what bothered me. I guess I haven't listened to that, so I'll have to do that. So let's open it up to this larger issue of moral persuasion. And this follows rather directly from what Scott Adams was claiming on my podcast that Trump is this brilliant persuader and that persuasion is really not about facts and needn't be about facts. It's not a bad thing that it's not about facts. This is one thing that, again, in my role as host, I couldn't fully communicate how reprehensible I feel this position is. And I'm not saying anything about Scott that I wouldn't say to him. It's just hard to kind of split the baby in real time when you're on your own show. And I say this now, fully aware that it will get back to Scott, but I just feel like this he seemed totally comfortable. In fact, he seemed fairly jubilant about caring not about what is true, but about what people can be led to believe. It just matters what people can be led to believe. Don't you understand, Sam? That's the game we're all playing. That's what this life is about. It's about persuading people to get what you want out of life. And Trump is great at that. And that is kind of the linchpin of an ethical worldview. There's so much where do I start? Everything is wrong with that. As a scientist, as a philosopher, as a journalist, as a compassionate person who just wants to have his or her beliefs track reality, whoever you are attempting to build a better society, I don't see how you can be comfortable with that as your starting point. And yet he does have a point. That one thing that was astonishing after our podcast was to see how differently our two respective audiences perceived it. I mean, my audience vilified him and his audience vilified me, and it was clear that they thought he had destroyed me. What an embarrassment. It was like career suicide for me to have someone as brilliant and as persuasive as Scott on my podcast to just do the Jedi mind trick on me. By the way, we've had some of your followers listen to our long podcasts on Free Will and say, sam destroyed you guys. And I always sort of laugh because I'm like, I don't think that destruction I did destroy you guys. That was me. I have another account. You have an account with six followers. The Scott Adams interview. It's a funny thing to listen to. You get kind of disoriented and there was a kind of postmodern feel to it. There was a kind of postmodern critical theory kind of perspective that he seemed to be inhabiting with facts and reason based arguments or at least sort of objective reason based arguments that could be independently evaluated. Just didn't play the role for him that it plays for you and that it mostly, we think, plays for all of us. And there was a metal level as trying when you two would debate, say, the Russia investigation or climate change, and he would say, well, the Paris deal was a hoax, but Trump said climate science was a hoax, and all of a sudden we're shifting terrain. And then you start to wonder, is Scott Adams treating this very debate as something to be like a vehicle for persuasion? Not of you. He probably knew that you weren't going to be persuaded. So he's not trying to win the argument or the debate in the sense that we understand that he's trying to do what he says Trump is a master at doing, which is persuade people to appreciate Trump or to find something in him that they haven't found before. And then it was like, now, how do you assess this argument at all if he's not even trying to win the argument, as I understand winning arguments? No, I think that's true. I think he's very sincere about his insincerity. I think he's got this bad faith structure to his game and he's fine with that. And I feel that there is an immense number of intellectual and ethical problems that follow from that. And we couldn't fully get into it. But it's a I do find it very frustrating. But in his defense, the aftermath and just everything we see around us proves at least one part of his thesis. The two movies analogy, our audiences, my audience and Adams's audience were clearly watching different movies of that podcast and perceived it totally differently. And the question of moral persuasion, how do you bridge that gulf? Honestly, I'm at a loss when you can't get facts that would be morally salient in another context to matter to someone for the purpose of a political discussion. One point I made with him to which he didn't have a rebuttal, I mean, I think he basically agreed with me. I said, Listen, if I did any one of these things that I just named that you're not disputing Trump has done, if I did any one of these things, it would be the end of me. And for good reason. You would not come on this podcast if you had heard that I had a Trump University in my backstory or if I had been barging into the dressing rooms of the beauty pageant contestants under my sway or any of these things. And you would rightly recognize that I'm a schmuck who shouldn't be taken seriously. He does sort of split the difference here. In another moment he says, well, who am I to judge any of that? And I'm not the Pope. And when he's talking about Trump or he says he's lived more publicly than you sort of implying, who knows? Who knows? I do wonder about someone who feels that he is in no position to judge the litany of abuses to morality and reason we see just pouring out of Trump's life. I think his better argument was that you shouldn't like, we're not hiring him to model, to be a model citizen. Good behavior where it's like you want that dirty lawyer, or as Dave would say, the Jew lawyer, to win your case for you. God character assassination. You don't want the lawyer that's the most upstanding citizen. When you're in a battle for whether you're going to go to prison or not or for a lot of money, there's so much to disagree with him about. But I'll tell you what I found the most distressing, and again, I actually found him to be like an interesting, respectful dude when he was discussing but I reserve the right, as Sam you were saying before, to just fundamentally disagree with him. And what I found the most distressing in the whole interview was, as you point out, the amorality of his arguments. But another one, just the insistence on praising Trump for his persuasive powers and unwillingness to talk about what he was persuading people about, that he was avoiding any discussion of content. It's fine if you want getting what he wants. And that's an intrinsic good. Intrinsic good. And it made me think, you know, for some people this is an insult, some people might be a compliment, but, but it was very anrandish. And I was, I was struck by that being a good in and of itself, that that sort of, you know, we've reached 33rd level persuasive powers. And so you got to admire the guy. But if your persuasive powers are being used to not care about the future of the environment or to discriminate against people or whatever, how is that a good? But you couldn't get him to discuss that. And it was always bringing it back to, well, this is just part of his masterful game, which is like great, you might be a really great marksman, but if you're shooting people, I don't like you. At this point, he would tell me, well, I've failed because of my use of analogy. But I think when it's all said and done, I found it almost monstrous to think of a president and endorsing him for doing that, for being good at that. Yeah. Also not to see the cost. Forget about what he's persuading people toward, the fact of just having this style of communication that is so dishonest that more or less. There's just every assumption now is that there's something false in what he said. Even if you're a fan, you have to bracket everything he says with this basic uncertainty about whether he means it and the cost of that to our society and to our politics. The downside of that is so obvious, but he clearly doesn't care about it. Your question about there are these two movies, and the movies seem to be operating according to different principles, too, just in terms of what counts. If the media takes Trump literally, but not seriously. People take Trump seriously, not literally. And I guess that serious part on the Trump voters is that idea of kind of emotional trust, or they trust him emotionally, and so when he goes off on some bullshit tweetstorm, they know it's bullshit, they know he's lying, but he has their emotional trust. I think that there is something right about that, at least as a descriptive explanation for what's going on. And I actually think that's mostly untrue. I mean, I think I want to call bullshit on that claim, too. For instance, when Trump gets up there and says, my inauguration crowd was bigger than any that had ever been seen, I think most of his fans think that's true when he says it, and they think it's the fake news media out to get him that is disputing it. And if they ever come around to being convinced by the photos, which half of them probably think are doctored, they think, well, who gives a shit? He's great anyway. And so it's like there's why did they say he's great anyway? Because they trust him. They trust him. He's a fighter. He's a businessman. He's going to fight for there. The way Scott views him is a very unusual way of viewing him. I think people are they think everyone's out to get him so that most of the criticism about him and most of the fact checking has to be purely malicious. And most of that is just a tissue of lies and conspiracy theories. And there's probably nothing untoward happening with Russia. And he's almost certainly this really good guy who's just getting hammered by the left wing elite. But then when any one piece of this shifts into the certainty column where, okay, no, Trump clearly was lying there, then they have a piece of the Scott Adams view, which is, well, who cares? That's just for effect, or that works. He did it because it works. Get used to it. But for the most part, I don't think that's not their first perception. The first perception is he's just under attack. There's a siege, and it's driven not by how far from normal and ethical and professional and competent he is. It's driven based on just pure partisan rancor. I mean, people like me are just unhappy to have lost an election. Yeah, no, I think you're right about that. I guess I didn't want to build too much on the psychology of the Trump voter as much as in terms of getting people in that movie to sort of be able to talk and debate. There is something in this idea of building emotional trust. And one of the reasons why the fake news, liberal skewed, biased media, all those charges seem so effective they're very effective on convincing Trump voters that he's being treated unfairly, as he loves to say, is because there is no trust right now for those kinds of institutions. The establishment republicans. The establishment Democrats and the news media in general. I think the work that has to be done is building some of that trust back because without that, there's no terrain to persuade people to revise their opinion of a man that they've put a lot of stake in. A lot of these voters, they are really motivated to not look like they got played for a sucker, to not look like they've been conned. And so only somebody who they have a tremendous amount of trust in and also I think some degree of respect for is going to be able to make progress in changing their minds about that because there's a lot of biases. I don't think that the liberal media has eroded trust and that this is why the people went for Trump. I think it's a much simpler story, which is he was saying shit a lot of people wanted to hear. They were voting in their self interest for Trump because they really believed it. And one way to take Scott Adams view is, and I agree with both of you I don't think that Scott Adams represents in any way the average Trump supporter. One way in which I think he's right is that Trump has persuaded a substantial portion of people that he is to be trusted. And I think that that is despite all of the evidence that he is not to be trusted. And so you say to yourself, well, how can people trust him despite all of this evidence that he's a liar, that he makes decisions based on self interest, not even on principle. And I think it's because he has said a few things that people really wanted to hear. And I don't think the liberal media has eroded trust and it needs to build it back up. I think it's just totally directional bias. Well, the thing is, though, I can attest to the failings of the liberal media or the mainstream media on certain topics that are so reliable that I do have a window into how a right wing Fox and Breitbart fan could view the editorial page of the New York Times or even just the news pages because I've seen them commit errors of fact or to shade their discussion of facts. So reliably on certain topics, the topics of the link between Islam and terrorism is one where I can just guarantee you I will find in an article some way in which political correctness is distorting the presentation of stark facts. There are whole articles in places like the New York Times talking about terrorist suicide bombings as though the motive were a mystery that is bound to remain impenetrable till the end of time. And there's no mention of Islam, there's no mention of religion. You have generic words like extremism and all of this to someone who's been paying attention to this problem and is worried about the spread of specific ideas relative to jihadism. It's a very fishy way to describe what's going on. And so it is with something like gun control and gun safety. There'll be a shooting at a school and you'll have the response in The New York Times and you'll see positions being articulated by people who know nothing about guns, who have never shot a gun, who don't, who get everything wrong. I mean, the names are wrong. We hear them on CNN talking about guns. They pronounce the names of gun manufacturers wrong. I mean, the level of cluelessness is so obvious. And so I can see that it's possible that even in the valid reaction to Trump, there's something demeaning about having to respond, or feeling that you have to respond again and again and again to Trump's dishonesty and indiscretions. Because every time you do it, you're running the risk of making an error yourself, however small, which seems to put you on all fours with Breitbart or with Trump himself. Or it's just that there's something that erodes your credibility by just taking the time to be endlessly criticizing someone like this for the same points. And so when you look at the New York Times now, there are days where the whole paper looks like the opinion page because they have to take a position against this guy. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, as we get to the end of the year here and into the holidays, I guess the theme of the moment for me is doing good in the world. How to think about that, how to do more of it, how to appropriately show gratitude for one's good luck and share that luck with those who need it. So at the top here, I am going to produce an ad. As you know, I don't run ads on the podcast, but this is an ad for a very good thing with which I have no direct affiliation. A couple of months ago, Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher and one of the patriarchs of the effective altruism movement, told me about a company called Humanitix, which was founded by Joshua Ross and Adam McCurdle. They started in Australia and New Zealand, but now they are global and they've just set up their first US office in Denver. This struck me as an extraordinarily cool idea. Humanitix is an event ticketing platform that donates 100% of its profits to children's charities. So they operate like a for profit business in that they don't ask anyone for donations, they just sell tickets. It's like eventbrite or ticketmaster. However, they're also a registered charity, and 100% of their profits go to social impact projects for disadvantaged kids. And their service is free for free events. And for paid events, their fees are actually lower than most ticketing services and they offer a special discount for nonprofits and schools, et cetera. And again, all the profits go to charity. So if you're organizing an event and selling tickets, it seems to me this is just a totally straightforward and ethical way to make a tangible contribution to the world. And it's just a very cool model. I think it has the potential to massively scale the amount of money that gets allocated to philanthropy. Because what they've done is they've effectively replicated the venture capital model in the charity sector, which is to say they've built a real business, and in this case, they're taking on businesses like Eventbrite or Ticketmaster, but they're doing it 100% for charity. But unlike normal charities, they never have to ask for donations. And they're not sitting on a large endowment that's covering their costs. They're just operating in a successful business. This does strike me as genuinely new. It opens up a path for what might be called compassionate capitalism or ethical consumption that has not been altogether obvious. But all of a sudden, here it is. So I think this is very exciting and I want to congratulate Josh and Adam for doing this. Great idea. Best of luck to you both. And if any of you want more information, if you're looking for a job and want to work for an inspiring company or you just want to sell tickets, please check out Humanitixcom. That's Humanitix.com. Okay, well, continuing with that theme, I want to say something which I believe I've said before on the podcast, but it's an epiphany I keep having again and again, and it's about the generosity of the Making Sense audience. All of you guys and gals, I keep hearing from charities which I've mentioned on the podcast, or perhaps I've interviewed someone involved. These are charities like the Plowshares Fund, which is working to reduce the threat of nuclear war. I mentioned them a couple of times, in particular when I spoke to William Perry about his book on the topic, or the Good Food Institute, or the Bard Prison Initiative, or Givewell.org, which recommends a wide range of effective charities. These and other organizations keep contacting me just to say how astoundingly generous my audience is. And I'm wondering if you can appreciate what an amazing feeling that is to be on the receiving end of that kind of information. It seems that you all have given millions of dollars to various causes here. That's just remarkable to see. So sincere thanks to all of you for that. This has become one of the amazing and unexpected pleasures of doing this job. Now, as many of you know, at some point in 2020, I took the Giving What We Can Pledge, which exists in various forums. But the basic pledge is to give at least 10% of one's pretax income to the most effective charities each year. And this is the minimal pledge. Some people give much more than that, and that's over and above anything one gives to any other causes, whether it's your church or synagogue or your children's school, or to your university. Or perhaps it's some Go Fund me campaign that inspires you. But Given What We Can Pledge stands, on its own over and above all of this. And the main criteria there is to target what you can rationally understand as the most effective ways of minimizing human and animal suffering and mitigating the most catastrophic risks. So there's often long term thinking built into many of the charities that affective altruists, tend to support. And once again, Givewell.org is a great source for recommendations. And waking up. My meditation app was the first company to take the giving. What? We can pledge. At my urging, they created a pledge for Companies, which is analogous to the personal pledge. Here you commit to giving 10% of profits to charity each year. And if you want to see some of the organizations we've supported so far, you can go to Waking Up Foundation. But I wanted to say a little more about Taking the Giving What We Can Pledge, because, as you'll hear, it's relevant to today's podcast. Taking this pledge is psychologically much more interesting than I realized. And it's interesting wherever you sit on the economic spectrum. For instance, if you don't make a lot of money, you might think, well, I need all the money I make. I spend more or less every penny, and if I don't spend every penny. I need to save something for the future. So I certainly can't afford to give a minimum of 10% of my money away every year. But the interesting thing is that as you begin to earn more money, and even a lot of money, you begin to think, well, 10% of what I'm earning now is quite a bit of money to be giving away every year. It's a lot more money than most people at my level give away. And so what's interesting is that you can find a way to be uncomfortable with this pledge at any level of earning, but once you take it, some very interesting things happen. Speaking for myself, it really has become a source of great satisfaction because it's just an amazing privilege to support great causes and to know that whatever else I'm doing with my time and however mixed my motives might be, in any moment. By making this decision, I've taken all the psychological friction out of my being generous and effective in the world because I've decided in advance that I'll support these very good causes to this degree. And my giving here is no longer vulnerable to my moods or to my rethinking anything. The only freedom I have is to give more than 10% away or to give to other things that wouldn't count toward my minimum of 10%. That goes to the most effective charities. As I told Will McCaskill in one of our conversations, it is an amazing feeling to be giving money to a children's hospital or to a woman's shelter, and for it to feel like a guilty pleasure. It's like you're splurging on something that you really want selfishly. The pledge just inverts the usual psychology around generosity in a fascinating way. Anyway, I'll have more to say about that in the new year. We have a project over at Waking Up that's relevant here. But in the meantime, if you're at all interested in taking the pledge in any of its variants, please go to giving what wecann.org for more information. Okay, and now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Sam Bankman Freed. Sam is the founder and CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, and he's also the CEO of Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm. Forbes described him as the richest person in crypto and one of the richest people under 30 in history. I believe he's made about $29 billion in the last few years. What is more remarkable than that is that he set out to make all this money explicitly for the purpose of giving almost all of it away to the most effective charities and to thereby do as much good in the world as he possibly can. Needless to say, he's an early adopter of the giving What We Can pledge, and as you might imagine, he's one of the most prominent people in the effect of Altro's community. Sam is also the son of two Stanford Law professors, and he received a degree in physics from MIT. So in this episode we talk about how Sam became as wealthy as he has, how he got into cryptocurrency. We have a brief discussion about that space to bring you all up to speed. We talk about the giving, what we can pledge, and about how Sam thinks about using his resources to do the most good. We talk about not stigmatizing wealth, wealth redistribution, the norms of generosity among the ultra wealthy. Pandemic preparedness, the impact we can have through lobbying, how ambitious we should be in doing good. Anyway, it seemed like a great topic to close out the year on and I wish you all a happy holiday and a happy New Year. This episode is yet another PSA, so there's no paywall. And as always, thanks to all of you who are supporting the show through your subscription, you are in fact what makes all of this possible. And now I bring you Sam Bankman Freed. I am here with Sam Bankman Freed. Sam, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. So there's a lot to talk about. My general interest in speaking with you is your alter novel interest in effective altruism. But before we jump into that topic, let's talk about your background a little bit. You are now quite famously referred to as, I believe, unless something has changed and based on the volatility of crypto since I began this sentence, the wealthiest self made billionaire under the age of 30, something like that, is that still approximately true? Yeah, sounds about right. And how did that happen? I guess before we get into your crypto experience, maybe summarize your background before that. You're only 29, so there's not that many years to run through. But how do you describe your intellectual interests before you jumped into the world of cryptocurrency? Yeah, totally. So I grew up in Stanford, California, went to MIT after that and really had no clue what I was going to do with my life there. I sort of like half heartedly thought maybe I'd be a physics professor for kind of no good reason. And quickly at MIT learned that I didn't really like research and I probably wasn't really built for it and that was sort of like not going to happen and around the same time started thinking for the first time about what I should do with my life. And I think that started out basically just coming from a utilitarian standpoint of what would maximize ultimate well being of the world. I hadn't thought about it very carefully, but when I finally confronted this, as opposed to just sort of like hiding it somewhere in my mind, it's a quickly became clear that at least there can be some things I could do that would have real impact and that one of those was going to be earning to give just basically thought of trying to make what I can so I can donate what I can. At the time, I think I was most involved with animal welfare organizations and basically went to them and said, hey, like, would you prefer my time or my money? And they said, Definitely your money. You're not very good at leaflets, so but you've jumped into the mode of already earning enough to be of help to anyone. So what was the transition from physics at MIT to finance of some sort? Yeah, so I sort of jumped to the point of thinking about it before I actually got involved in anything that would actually make money. It was very much it sort of like, theoretically I probably could type thing and figure out how to do that. And that was sort of the tentative plan. But yeah, I hadn't actually yet figured out how. Right. And around that time I met Will McCaskill and Ben Todd and a few others from sort of the National EA movement who were visiting Cambridge and talked to them about what I was going to do in my life. And they very much thought that their need to give plan made sense. They also said a bunch of things I hadn't thought about before around what causes I could ultimately give to, and also confirmed as I'd sort of been thinking, that if I was going to earn to give, that probably Wall Street was like a good place to look for that. So you met Will McCaskill. Did you meet Toby Ord as well? I had met him, yet I met him later, but he was not in that particular excursion to the States. Right. So did Will give a talk at MIT? Is that where you met him? I think he gave a talk at Harvard, but I had lunch with him beforehand in Harvard Square. Right. Yeah. Will is fantastic and he really is my gateway drug to effective altruism as well. He's been on the podcast a bunch and on the waking up app, and Toby has subsequently and it is fairly thrilling when the scales fall from your eyes and you realize that there's an opportunity to systematically do good. In a way that there's such a clear view of ethical daylight in this direction that interestingly, becomes uncoupled from the usual things that drive Altruism. Just the good feels of a very compelling story. It's not to say that the good feels aren't important, we want to be as rewarded as possible by the good things we do in life. But there's this other layer of rational acknowledgement that sometimes the most effective ways of benefiting the world are not necessarily the sexiest and not necessarily the ones that are effortlessly most enthralling to people. And it's just to get a very clear eyed view of all of that and then to prioritize doing the most good. It's an amazing game to find out that even exists, much less to get involved in. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that prior to college, I sort of had somewhere in the back of my mind, oh, maybe I could try and do something with my life that would have impact. And then some sort of part of me is like, oh, I don't know, that sounds kind of hard. I don't even know what that would imply. Maybe I'll just sort of ignore that. Who knows what that would mean? And I think when I started thinking harder about it and then met Will and others and actually served dove into the effective altruism community. Yeah, I think one of the first things that really stood out was like, all right, here's a few concrete proposals which aren't necessarily the single best thing to do, but are clearly incredibly compelling and are clearly massively better. Than anything sort of like accidental or random that I would have done and that we're sort of like a really convincing case of like if you think carefully about this and really do focus on your impact rather than, as you said, on sort of just that reverberation of the impact back on to you, that you can really get massive numbers. So I noticed we've pitched already into the topic of interest, effective altruism skipping over the world of crypto. Let's go back for a second because I would be remiss in not extracting any insights you might have on that topic. First, how did you get into crypto and what is actually your contribution at this point to that space? Yeah. So I went to Wall Street when I graduated college and worked as a quant trader at Jean Three Capital for three and a half years. And I had a really good time there in a lot of ways. It was a great environment. It was a great fit for me as a job, and it seemed like a really compelling earning to give path and, you know, they were really good to me there. And I just kind of thought that's what my life was going to be, and I was pretty happy with that in New York. And then late 2017 came around for the first time in three years. I sat down and forced myself to go through an exercise like what I had done in college, where I sort of drafted down ideas of what I could do, tried to estimate, like, how much impact could I have through each of them. And shortly after starting that, it became clear what the conclusion of that was going to be, which was that I don't know what I should do with my life. That there are actually a lot of things that could have large impact that I wasn't sure which of those was going to be the best, and that the only way, really to find out was going to be to try them. And it was sort of either don't try anything and just optimize for this path, or leave and try a bunch of things. And that the second in expectation was probably going to be the better one. So I left. This was late 2017, and I did try a few things. I worked briefly for a center for Effective Altruism. I also started looking at crypto. And the sort of original thesis with crypto was a pretty clear one, which was, it seems like there might be good arbitrages here. Maybe that's true, maybe that's not true. If that's true, these numbers might be huge. Let's check that out. And so I basically just dove in and I created some accounts on some exchanges and tried to do one example transaction to see like, will this even work? What in fact, were you arbitraging at that point? So at that point, I mean, it was all over the place, but the clearest one was literally just bitcoins against dollars. Like you look at bitcoins on one US crypto exchange against bitcoins on another US crypto exchange, they'd be trading for $10,000 on coinbase and $11,000 on bitstamp. And in theory, one could then buy a bitcoin on coinbase, send it for $10,000, send it to bitstamp, sell it for $11,000, and make $1,000. And then sort of like rinse and repeat. And whenever you see something like that, you should wonder like, is this data real or is it garbage? And in particular, the numbers were hilariously big. In real trading on Wall Street, if you can make 2% of a percent on a trade. So two basis points, that's a good trade. Most firms would be like, yeah, do that trade, you can do more of that trade, do more of that trade. That's pretty good. Well done. Not unheard of, but just like a really solid trade. And here we were seeing things like 2%, so a hundred times as big. And that's almost always fake when you see it, but it was 100 times as big and the volume wasn't trivial. You know, it's trading a few billion dollars a day globally. And so in theory, you can sort of do this naive calculation of like, well, let's say you made 1% on every trade, and let's say you did 1% of volume, and that means $10 million of volume, and a percent on that is $100,000 per day of revenue. And so 35 million a year or whatever, that's a pretty substantial number. Obviously that was like just some complete bullshit calculation that I did with no idea what a bitcoin even was, no idea if any of these numbers are real. But it was enough to convince me that maybe there's something good to do here and that is worth trying out. And so I just sort of created accounts on all the exchanges and started trying to go send in the money, buy the cheaper bitcoins, sell them in other places, and see if I could make money doing that. Did that turn out to be real? What explains that inefficiency of pricing? Yeah, so half of it turned out to be fake about half the cases. It turned out the data that was reported was just misleading in one way or another. A classic example of this is that they would call it a quote to Bitcoin USD market. But the USD there would not really be US. Dollars. It would be like dollars on some sketchy third party payment site running through Russia that cost 25% to get money in and out of. And you could only get to a Brazilian bank account. Okay, that was not a real trade. We got to get you earning to give. First, your path is blocked by a labyrinth of sketchy text. Exactly. And then you look at like, okay, how about the legitimate data? And it was sort of like a scaled down version of the same issues where, all right, the bitstamp Coinbase ARBs were sometimes real, but what would happen when you tried to do them? First of all, you'd pay half a percent in fees, all things considered. Second of all, you have to start by getting dollars from your bank account to Coinbase, right? And you send that wire transfer, and then you get a notice from your bank that they shut down your account because they didn't have a compliance policy yet for crypto. And now you no longer have a bank account. And then I guess if you want to do the trade a second time, you need a new bank account. And then you get the funds on Coinbase and you buy Bitcoin, and they tell you you can withdraw $100 per day if you're sitting there and be like, well, I guess I can make one dollars per day doing this trade. 1% on the $100. And you reach out to them like, hey, can I have higher withdrawal limits? And get, like, an automated message back saying, sorry, the queue for getting support from us is three months long right now. And you just start running into all these logistical issues that were reflections of the fact that the ecosystem was incredibly new and incredibly unwieldy and not very well developed. The infrastructure was all broken, and it wasn't impossible to do these trades. It was just, like, really hard and annoying. I'm guessing you now probably have Brian Armstrong's cell phone number. Yeah, I do. And that was going through that sort of step by step process of getting an account manager at these exchanges, finding a bank that was comfortable with the cryptocurrency ecosystem and willing to allow us to send transfers to and from crypto exchanges, things like that. Getting automated trading systems hooked up to these exchanges, some of which didn't even have APIs. And then eventually looking overseas and saying, well, here's a big arbitrage between American and Japanese exchanges. How do we do that? I guess we have to replicate this entire set up in Japan with a Japanese bank. And that was like the hardest part back in 2017, 2018, of actually doing these trades. So then when did you graduate to building your own exchange? Yeah, so after about a year of this, there are clearly still good trades to do in crypto. But just as clearly, like, the ecosystem was a mess and the ecosystem in crypto really means the exchanges in a way it doesn't intrigue finance. If I ask you what are the five most important finance companies? You probably wouldn't just start listing off like New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, CME, Icebo, like maybe one of those would make the list. Probably not. I'm guessing you'd deem Goldman or JPMorgan or something, or Robin Hood maybe. Crypto is different. And the reason crypto is different is that the entire financial stack is collapsed into one product and that product is the exchange. And so when you go to buy a stock, you're going through twelve companies, you're going from Robin Hood to some payment for order flow firm. There's some stock clearing, there's some dollar clearing system in there, some stock loan desk. You go to darkpool, another PFA firm eventually end up at an exchange. And there's a whole other side of that. On the selling side in crypto, the only people involved in the average transaction are the buyer, the seller and the exchange. And all of those functions from clearing, settlement, risk compliance, know your customer, mobile app, API, matching engine, all of that is collapsed into the exchange. And so they really are the backbone of the trading ecosystem in crypto. And so if you wanted to address the infrastructure, that's where you went and boy, did the infrastructure need addressing. So then you started FTX. Yes, so started building FTX out in late 2018, launched spring 2019, and basically the thesis was like, on the one hand, these businesses are making a billion a year collectively. They seem like fairly, like fairly understandable businesses. Like we understand their core function pretty well and could build that. They're online products which are easier to launch, and they're just shit shows all over the place, like they're losing a million dollars per day of customer funds to incompetent risk controls. Their customer support departments were nearly nonexistent. Many of them basically didn't have compliance departments, many of them didn't have banking. And it seemed like, you know, boy, if this is the barrier, like we can do better than that, you know, like that we can build a better product. Ban. On the other hand, I had no idea how to get a customer and that was sort of our biggest worry about this, was like, sure, maybe we build a good product and just no one ever knows about it, no one ever uses it. And I didn't even know where to start with getting users. But even if we said there's an 80% chance of failure from that, like 20% of that upside was still a lot and enough to convince us to go for it. I'm tempted to take a slight detour in describing somewhat what is. I got to think most of our audience at this point understands what Bitcoin is. I'm happy to give like a 1 minute version of it. Yeah, let's do it. There are many people listening to us who have listened to me and bology for 4 hours, so they've gotten an eye full or an earful, but certainly from a crypto maximalist. But give us how you describe to someone's grandmother or grandfather what crypto is. Yeah, and when I got involved, by the way, in crypto, I had no idea what it is other than like a number that went up and down that you could trade. But the core of crypto is basically like you want some system where you can send money back and forth, send assets back and forth, send information back and forth between each other. And that means you all need to agree on the protocol for it, and you need to agree on who decides ultimately which transactions happened, who records that. And with Gmail, the answer is Google does. Everyone tells Google they want to send an email and then Google records that and sends it along. And with the New York Stock Exchange, the answer is, well, the New York Stock Exchange, you send your orders to it and then it spits out what happened. It sort of is like the controller of this database. With cryptocurrencies, generally, the way it works is there's some decentralized group of parties that together are effectively voting on what happens step by step, and anyone in the world can submit transactions to them. So I could submit a transaction saying I'm going to send $30 to my brother Gabe or a third of Bitcoin or whatever, and basically a proof that I have the password to this account. And then you have this sort of global group of validators. Sometimes it's minors, sometimes it's staking validators, depending on the blockchain that sort of get together vote that yes, this is a legitimate transaction, the necessary information was submitted and record that, and that's a block. And then they iterate on that, adding block after block after block, which sort of adds a new set of transactions onto this like, growing ledger of the whole history of the blockchain. And the goal in the end is to create a system of payments and sending information and money back and forth that doesn't rely on one central party or government to ultimately be like this source of truth on what's happened. Right, so there's no trusted third party. It's distributed across thousands of computers. And because it's distributed, it's transparent to everyone. And there's a consensus algorithm that ensures that no one can cheat or it becomes so expensive to cheat that it's effectively impossible to cheat. This whole space has a Wild West component to it and it is, you know, as I said, incredibly volatile. And, you know, the, the upside is extraordinarily high, as you've demonstrated. But, you know, we have. Not seen. I guess there have been micro busts in crypto. I'm sure people got in at the peak and then lost a lot at various moments, but it's generally been a very quickly rising upward trend. So more or less everyone, if they got in early and are still in, feels like a genius. How does this go wrong? What's the probability of this going wrong in your view? And if it does, what would it count for that you could also bring in, I guess I'm sure regulatory concerns are top of mind. I know you recently testified in front of Congress, so you can bring in that part of the picture as well. Totally. So I think that there is a volatile asset and it might go down, and it might go down a lot. We've seen it have 50% movements in both directions in a few day period before a number of times, and I definitely wouldn't want to promise that that won't happen. I think that each year the odds have gone down substantially that it's going to go away. If you rewind to March 2020, I think there is a real risk of that. Bitcoin dropped down to $3,500 per token, less than 10% of what it is today. And there was just very little liquidity in it. There was no buyer of last resort that was obviously coming out there. The whole space was sort of teetering on the edge and COVID had just hit. The world was a mess. Fast forward to today, the amount of institutional capital getting involved in crypto is massively higher. The number of important financial institutions that are purchasing themselves or on behalf of their customers is massively higher. And all of that just means that there's a lot more, I think, sort of power behind what's going on in this space and a lot more people who if things did drop enough, would be willing to jump in and backstop on the liquidity side. So I think that risk has gone down substantially and a number of institutions have basically decided that they are going to get involved one way or another on the regulatory side, which I do think is one of the bigger risks. I think that risk has also gotten a little bit less big, maybe substantially less big over the last year or two. At this point, crypto is too big for people to just go out and ban it in mass. I don't think that you're going to see major governments, not many of them hard, banned crypto, which is essentially didn't China china banned crypto mining. Correct. China banned crypto mining. It's a little bit complicated exactly what it has and hasn't banned, and I think the stories on it are lacking a bit of nuance. They've banned mining, they've nationalized some of the industry, and it didn't hurt bitcoin, not that much. It hurt it a bit, but if anything, I think that there is some advantage in the surf force decentralization geographically of it. But I think it's also the case that like I think it's basically also the case that if you look at chinese government has intervened in a number of sectors domestically over the last year. This is one of them. Almost no other world governments have been trying to ban crypto recently, although many of them are trying to regulate it. And so I think what you're going to see instead is a messy step by step process, jurisdiction by jurisdiction as countries try and decide what the regulatory framework should be for crypto. I think that's going to be messy. It's not going to follow a really clearly clear progression, it's not going to be consistent. There's going to be missteps in both directions. And I think that about six months ago, my biggest worry probably was that for whatever reason, regulations end up forcing crypto out of major jurisdictions because the regimes just don't end up being workable. But I think there's been a lot more education and a lot more excitement and willingness on the behalf of regulators and lawmakers to engage on that over the last six months. And hopefully that the industry has done a better job of communicating reasonably about this with regulators because I don't think the industry had always been very good about that. Okay, so now you're earning to give out there in crypto paradise. And I noticed you also took the giving what we can pledge. I think you took it some years before I did. This is the pledge that was started by Toby Ord and Will McCaskill and there are various bespoke versions of it. I think that the generic one is to give at least 10% of one's lifetime income to effective charities. Waking up was actually the first company to take the pledge. They didn't have a company based pledge until I twisted their arms, so I'm happy they did that. And so for companies, it's giving a minimum of 10% of profits each year to effective charities. But what pledge did you actually take? How do you think about the pledge you took and how are you implementing it? Yes, so I guess I've taken a couple over the course of the years in a few different places I've taken given what we can pledge more generally, if also I pledge to give way more than 10% away and my actual goal is to give away almost everything one way or another. I think it's worth caveat that I don't know what formula of that is going to take and I don't know if all of that's going to be five one, c three. But in the end, other than the sort of amount that I'm living on, my goal is to use all the resources that I have to do as much good as I can. Do you think you'll have a family? I'm not particularly planning to. I think it just isn't something that had ever been extremely exciting for me, and I think, you know, it's never been a priority of mine, but also that I think it's not how I want to spend my life and my time. I think just as the older guy on the podcast, the caveat I would add there is you really are young enough, I think, to not be surprised by a sea change. In your in your view on this topic. When I was your age, I think I would have said more or less the same thing. I certainly had zero plans and was somewhat skeptical around the prospect of having a family. But that changed. But its relevance to this topic is many people actually this is the larger topic of just how you view wealth and generational wealth in the context of effective altruism. In my conversations with Will, I've wanted to find a line here where wealth itself is not stigmatized. I think we want to live in a world where people grow wealthier and wealthier and the pie gets bigger and bigger and bigger so that even the poorest person 100 years from now would be unrecognizably wealthy by today's standards. I mean, that's what real success would look like within whatever constraints the laws of nature impose on us as a species. So wealth itself can't be the problem. And yet so much talk about philanthropy does set up a zero sum contest between a certain kind of lifestyle and being a good person, essentially. And there are concerns about wealth inequality, which I completely share now in the US. And elsewhere. I think there are just obscene attitudes toward redistribution that you often meet among the most fortunate people in our society, where there's very little concern about the common good or very little apparent concern about the common good once one has read a sufficient amount of Iron Rand in Silicon Valley. And so I'm just wondering how you think about things like wealth inequality, generational wealth and redistribution. I guess the other piece I'd put in here is I think it's as much as I think we need to engineer a tide that raises all boats. Recent proposals of taxing unrealized gains on billionaires just seem whatever the ethics, they seem practically unworkable. So I'm just wondering what you're, as a fantastically wealthy person who is committed to the common good, how do you view things like wealth inequality, redistribution and the rest? Totally. And I think I agree with a lot of what you said there, where it seems to me like there's way too little focus in the world on doing good. And that what we see a lot of instead is this weird sort of hybrid thing in sort of large centers of wealth which is not trying to redistribute it's, not trying to use the resources or wealth to have positive impact on the world. It's sort of almost this weird constrained problem of doing things which seem kind of goodish and also our sort of weird brand building exercises almost and I think ends up being a confusing combination of things. And I think that the sort of classic type of kind of do gooder thing would be like endowing a university building or something like that, which is sort of like kind of trying to do good but it's also kind of trying to build your personal brand maybe or maybe not. But I guess it sort of seems hard to me for that not to be part of what it is, given that's a big part of the impact of it. And it sort of is kind of focused on, like I don't know, that there's a really coherent theory of top universities are underfunded is the biggest problem in the world right now. I think that that form is quite popular right now and I think it's not what you would do if you're actually just trying to do what was best for the world or anything like that. I think that it's just like incredibly clear that beyond a moderate amount of wealth there is just not really anything that you can do that's going to have much impact on your life. Even if it weren't the case that you could have absolutely massive impact on the rest of the world, but in fact you can have absolutely massive impact on the rest of the world and impact that's way outsized compared to what you're sort of putting into it. And I think that that is incredibly important and I think that's been sort of one of the key pillars of effective altruism. So I basically agree with all that. But then looking at another thing you brought up about proposals to address this, I sort of also agree that I think a lot of the ones we've seen recently, they've seemed weirdly not trained on doing it in an efficient or effective way. And I guess what I mean by that is, like, you look at the unrealized cap gains tax, and I think there's, like, really compelling arguments for increasing tax rates on the very wealthy. I think that it should almost be your prior I think that probably it's correct to consider doing that at least. Sure. I think there's certainly arguments on addressing a lot of loopholes in the tax code as well. I think that particular approach is probably not the right approach, because probably what you're getting at, but it's a total math from an operational perspective where you end up taxing people for more money than they actually have and assessing a tax that they literally can't pay. And there's sort of a question of what next? What does that mean? I think that is probably not the right instantiation of it and probably came in some senses more from a direction of decreasing wealth for the wealthy rather than thinking about how to have positive impact for others. I think it's almost how sometimes society treats these things as they end up sort of optimizing for the wrong piece of it. Yeah, but because there's this moralistic layer to it which is demonizing extreme understandably, extreme disparities in wealth in a world where there's obvious suffering that could be addressed by money. But in stigmatizing those disparities, just the shocking inequalities in the world, we wind up stigmatizing wealth itself. And so there's you have people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who they don't even attempt to conceal it. What they are communicating is contempt for people of sufficient wealth. I think they've even said it outright that there's no way to become a billionaire legitimately. Right. If the system were as it should be, it would be impossible to be that wealthy. And so there's moral appropriate attached to having succeeded to the degree that you and something like, I guess, 3000 others on Earth at the moment have. I think there's something like 3000 billionaires. And that part seems completely wrong because it's just one we have to just on a first principles basis, we just have to acknowledge that there's going to be some degree of inequality and our real interest is in canceling the most painful extremes at the bottom. Right. We don't want to cancel the top. We want to raise the bottom so that the poorest among us still have all that normal people actually need to live lives of real integrity and well being. And that seems possible. Right? And that's the thing we should engineer without and we certainly shouldn't want to create any incentives that make it harder to generate wealth in the first place. I totally agree. So how you view this terrain from an unusually high perch here, what would you recommend our policies be here? I mean, just given that it's possible to incentivize the wrong things and disincentivize the right things and that there's a lot of confusion about just what the and just basic uncertainty about what the outcomes would be if we if we rigged the system very differently. If you could tinker with it, what would you recommend that we do? Yes, totally. And I'm not an expert, I think, on tax policy and all these are just sort of guesses at it. But in the end I think that sort of in line with what you said. I would put the focus here on the focus on the good that we're trying to accomplish or on the problems we're trying to stamp out. And so focus on those that are in extreme poverty, like what can we do to get them out of poverty and the actual amounts that it would take sometimes to do this. They're significant, but I think they're not as gigantic as some people would sometimes think they would be. I think that given the amount of resources that we have as a society, we should have plenty if we're good at targeting what we need to do in the ways that places like Give directly against malaria and others have done at addressing that. I think looking at suffering of factory farmed animals, it's not a good place right now. Obviously pandemic preparedness. However, there are a lot of areas where we clearly need to make progress as a society. But I would refocus the conversation on those and on what we can do to address those. And I think a concerted effort could get a lot of progress on them. What about norms around philanthropy among the very wealthy? I mean, the truth is, when you're talking about the wealthiest people, the one 10th of one 10th of 1%, the kinds of donations that get newspaper articles written about them really are. So someone writing a check for $50 million to a hospital, say, right? I mean, that is an astounding act of generosity when you measure it against most people's wealth. But when somebody has a hundred billion dollars, you know, it is really a rounding error. They they couldn't even estimate their wealth within $50 million on any given day. And they don't have to be in cryptocurrency for it to be that obscure. I think we would be in a different situation with respect to the reality of human suffering and animal suffering and the perception of wealth. If more people in your situation and beyond had your attitude toward the amount of wealth they were giving away or planning to give away. And it wasn't just about getting your name on a university building for a comparatively tiny amount of money, as expensive as a building on the Johns Hopkins or Harvard or MIT campus might be. Still, when you're talking about how much wealth people privately hold, these are in fact crumbs, albeit self aggrandizing crumbs in many cases. So what about spreading this meme to the ultra wealthy that virtually no one is doing enough? And to have it be guilt is probably not the best motivator here, but at a certain point, I think we would reach a tipping point where it would just be the only thing that will seem decent to do in the end is to be much more generous than people are tending to be. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that first of all, there's just absolutely massive amounts that could be done by this. And as you said, the mean has been successfully spread among servel ultra wealthy that the right thing to do is to give. But as you said, I think on the amount to give, it's like, pretty arbitrary right now. It's sort of like, I don't know, like a significant amount. Right. But what is a significant amount? In a lot of cases, a significant amount might be a pretty small fraction of what someone actually has. And that doesn't mean it all has to happen tomorrow. And we can get into all the caveats about how to do this strategically, but that doesn't change sort of the high level thing of, like, you should be trying to find ways to do that. And I don't think people are in a lot of cases I think that there's a lot of cases where people are basically just not at all trying to find ways to do good for the world. And so yeah, I agree with all that and I think that really spreading the notion of, like, you should try and do as much as you can. You should try and give most of what you have. And when doing it, you should be focusing on how much good you can do rather than focusing on a sort of diverse series of goals, many of which are kind of self serving in the end and are basically just consumption. Like getting your name my company is paid to get our name on various things. That is not charity, that's not going into the charity budget. And I think that sort of something along with that is that when you think about doing good, think about it from the perspective of the people you're helping rather than necessarily from your own perspective. And I mean, from that perspective, they're not in it for your warm fuzzies. Right? From their perspective, it's not relevant to them who's giving. It's not relevant to them what the relevant part for the actual impact you're having is the actual impact you can have and on how many people's lives you're having that impact. And I think that from that perspective, you might get all the warm fuzzies that you need from $50 million of donations, but that's not the relevant thing. The relevant thing with helping people. And there is a lot more help to give than that. Yeah, it's interesting to navigate this space of ethical norms and pseudo ethical norms and questions of pragmatism. So it is something I spoke about with Will at one point. It used to be thought, it is still widely thought that the highest form of giving is anonymous giving because there you can be absolutely sure that your ulterior concerns about your own reputation are not in play. This is not virtue signaling, it's not vanity, it's not getting your name on the building. You're just prioritizing the good you can do with the money. But I've come to believe, and will, at least for the purposes of this conversation, agrees, that at least in certain cases, anonymity is not the practically and ultimately, ethically speaking, is not the highest ideal because there's so much good to be done by persuading people to follow this example. You know, so for you to be I mean, you could be anonymously giving, you know, having taken no pledges publicly, and that would be great. But I think it is much better for you to be modeling to your fellow ultra rich people that this is a value you hold and that one can hold and that even there and there may even be great social rewards for promulgating this value. Because what we want to do is to spread this attitude as far as we can. And I can just say, you know, personally, whenever I talk about these things on the podcast, and especially whenever I mention any specific charity, what happens is my audience reliably supports that charity and, you know, to a degree that is fairly astounding and that's a wonderful thing to inspire that kind of generosity in thousands of people. And none of that good gets done if you just hide your light under a bushel and do it anonymously content that you have not been contaminated by the sin of your own vanity. Yeah, it could be a complicated balance because obviously you want to do that. You want to be able to spread that meme around. I think that's one of the most, in the end, for most people, that's the biggest impact that they can have. You also want to obviously make sure while doing it that you don't sort of lose focus on what mattered in the first place and that the publicity doesn't become the goal in and of itself, except to the extent that that goal is for spreading the meaning and encouraging others rather than sort of self satisfaction. But I think that contingent on being comfortable that you can weather that and stay committed. Yeah, I agree that probably the biggest thing that you can do is to help others get to that point where they're optimizing for what impact they can have on the world. So what is your approach to giving at this point? What are you doing currently and what do you plan to do? And is it just personal or is it or does FTX give a certain amount of profit away? How do you approach this? Yeah, so start with the last part, which is the easiest, which is that the bulk of it is personal. FTX is also giving some FTX is giving 1% of what it makes. But those aren't the big numbers here. That's not where I expect most of this impact to come from. I expect most of it to come from from what I personally give. And in terms of what it looks like in the end, and I think this is something I think is really, really important, is that in the end, there is no metric other than what has the most positive impact on the world. And if it starts to look like something that I hadn't previously thought was important, is the most important thing, I think it's important to recognize that and pivot to that and to keep iterating and not to get sort of stuck in the mindset of one particular path, but kind of putting aside long term hedgewords and focusing on like okay, but sure. How about, like today? I think that the things I've been looking at the most, there's some amount of giving that I do to a variety of places for a sort of set of reasons that maybe I don't think are ultimately the most important for the bulk of the money, but that I think is quite valuable to do with some of it. And I think that, like, examples of things there are basically, like, making sure that I'm giving at least some periodically, no matter what. Even if I can't find something that seems like the best place to give to me, to make sure that I'm in the habit of it making sure that I am supporting causes that I think are good and that I want it to be known I'm supporting and that I want there to be more supporters of. And so I'm doing sort of some of that. But for sort of the biggest parts of this, maybe I'll say on those fronts, I think I've been giving some to global poverty causes each year. I've been giving some to animal welfare causes each year. I've been giving some to effective altruism community building charities like center for Effective Altruism each year. I think the things, though, that I've ended up giving the most to recently and thought were the most interesting probably fallen a few buckets, one of which is pandemic preparedness stuff. And it sort of falls in, I think this really dangerous middle category right now, where it's decently likely to pandemic have the potential to be massively more deadly than something like global warming is. But on the other hand, they're actually kind of shovel ready in the bad sense. And I think that's something that we've learned over the last few years is that global pandemics can happen. This isn't like a theoretical concern. And I think it's also become super clear that we have no ability as a society to react to them, that we have no idea what we're doing and we're flying blind here. That's not great. I think almost no countries would I give more than like a B minus two over the last two years for handling COVID. And we got lucky with COVID We got lucky because it's nasty, but it's not deadly in the way SARS is, right? This isn't something that has like a 30% mortality rate. This was a dress rehearsal that we clearly failed in our defense, in large part because, or at least this is a possible alibi. We were in the uncanny valley with respect to the lethality of the virus. It just was not lethal enough to get our attention or get everyone's attention. And so now we have debates about whether COVID is even worse than the flu or whether you should get vaccinated for it. I mean, the one success here is that we did develop the vaccines very quickly, but we can't even get half of our society to agree that they should be vaccinated in the first place. One could imagine that's because this isn't MERS or SARS or something that's far more lethal, one can only hope that if there were bodies being piled in the streets, an order of magnitude worse lethality. You wouldn't have the same conspiracy thinking and sheer lunacy that is causing us to fail this test of cooperation and coordination. I would hope so. I wish I felt more confident in that than I do. I'm with you. In my darker moments, I'm entirely with you. I think a maniac like Alex Jones and anyone who would listen to him is capable of being just as crazy in the presence of the bubonic plague. I think that's mostly right. And I think some of it is, as you said, we don't have a good understanding of society as something and we're really bad at sort of addressing middles, like at saying this is like, clearly more deadly than the flu and clearly less deadly than SARS. It's not in our lexicon. Our lexicon is like, it's fine or it's terrible. And I think similarly, we're really bad at strategically addressing things and saying this intervention seems to have like 80% reduction for, like, not that much cost. This intervention seems to have 25% reduction at enormous cost. It is absolutely worth it to do number one and probably not to do number two. And instead you just I find myself in like, a shockingly few set of people who think that vaccines are great for this, but that it's not clear we should be shutting down society forever for it. Right. We don't know what we're doing. And if you look at sort of the takeaways that society has had from this, I just want to say the biggest thing that I noticed is that there isn't a clear takeaway. What moral has society taken from COVID It's a very confused lesson. The lesson that many of us have drawn is what you just stated, that we are painfully unprepared for the real thing because we have botched this so fully. Again, you know, modular the vaccine, the vaccine which which was which. And some parts of that I think are a good story, where we now have the ability in 24 hours to make an mRNA vaccine, which is absolutely fucking amazing and it's a superpower. On the other hand, it still took a year from COVID appearing to people getting vaccinated. And so I think when it comes to, I mean, obviously detection, like, we're really bad, but also, like, it then took us eight months after having the vaccine to get it through the process to start giving to people. That was eight months when people were dying and COVID was spreading. And one lesson here is that we know that people will volunteer for challenge trials. So if we can just articulate the ethics of that more clearly, I think the next time around we can probably get challenged trials approved and hopefully that would speed it up. So anyway, going back to what I've been giving to you recently, some of it is various pandemic preparedness related things. A lot of this actually is lobbying. A lot of this is information for. Lawmakers and trying to get the government to take seriously its role in preparing for a pandemic. And I think you can have extreme leverage doing that. If you look at just sort of the ratio of what it costs to versus how much impact you potentially have there, I think it's super compelling. Now, that doesn't mean it's necessarily going to get there, right? You could absolutely imagine a world where all that is for not and I don't want to say that's definitely not happening, but that's I think, one of the things I've been doing that I actually feel sort of weirdly best about, and I think it's been super high leverage. And then on the side, I've also been having a lot of conversations with people about what infrastructure do we need to be developing as a world to be better prepared for the next pandemic and what we can do. To fund some of that infrastructure, whether it's I mean, there's sort of one idea which I've seen thrown around a few times, and I think it's, like, fairly compelling, is what if we just went out and funded a giant vaccine stockpile? Right? And sort of variance on that. So that's one direction that I've been going with and that, I think is just, like, really high upside if it can be pulled off. Well, you know, I think these are threats that could be potentially existential and if not existential, at least really fucking bad. And then I've been doing, more generally, a bunch of policy work in DC and electoral work there. And I think there's also just some numbers there that don't quite that are sort of shockingly out of line with what you might predict. You know, if you just look at, like, how much is spent on elections, how much is spent on it's sort of a big amount, but it's actually a really small amount compared to the scope of the impact that the government can have and that it has had on, you know, among other things, just like global discourse. Well, that was always amazing to me. They've lost their influence, I think, a little bit of late. But just to look at how little an organization like the NRA needed to spend every year to completely dominate our politics, to become an unmovable object in the middle of American politics for as long as I've been alive it's a trivial amount of money when you're talking about the resources of even one very wealthy person. Yeah, it's absolutely right. And it's pretty wild. Like, at some point there's all this pushback on their lobbying, but I think some of the answer is, like, jeez, that's how much they gave. I don't know. There are a lot of people who could be looking to have impact in DC. And I think, like, I think people sometimes have the wrong takeaway from that lobbying. And the takeaway is, like, everything is fucked. Instead of being like, we're getting outplayed here, right? Well, not all causes are equivalent, right? It's like, yes, everybody thinks they're the good guys, even when they're the bad guys, but there are some good guys, right, and there are at least benign causes, and they're truly malicious and destructive causes. I'm with you there. Do you have people advising you at this point on philanthropy? I got to think this is not just you doing Google searches. You must have smart people who are in your ear. Yeah, I've been building that up, and, I mean, it's something I would really want to spend more time on than I can and regret that I can't, or at least haven't, just because work takes up so much of my life. But I've been growing out the team that's working with me and advising me on that quite a bit. I recently hired I don't know if you've ever talked with Nick Beckstead, but he's one of sort of the original hardcore EA. Yeah, I don't think I've it's possible we've exchanged emails, but the name's not ringing a bell. Yeah, he's yeah, a great guy, and he's recently brought him on to help lead our foundation. I'm working with a number of people in DC. Who have way more knowledge than I do of that arena, a number of people who have way more knowledge about BIOS than I do, and in general, like, trying to build out subject matter experts on everything that we're working on, in addition to sort of a core group of people focusing on what our direction should be. And I think it's worth noting that this isn't all me. I'm really fortunate to have started FTX up with a number of other effective altruists who have a ton of respect for and who have been working with me on all of this. Nice. Well, if I can ever profit from your research, I'd love to do that. I mean, I've got various effective altruists advising me. I don't know if you know Natalie Cargo from Longview Philanthropy and the Founders Pledge and other groups there that I've connected to through Will, but yeah, if at any point your summary of what you're doing in any given year can be exported to my brain, I'd love to see what you're doing and perhaps just follow your lead. Absolutely. We should absolutely stay in touch with that because there's a ton that we've been doing, and I think a lot of it is super cool. And obviously we'd love to also just get your thoughts on all of it as well. Nice. Well, Sam, it's been great to speak with you. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you think we should touch? The only other thing maybe I'd touch on briefly is something around how when you're trying to do good, how ambitious I think it makes sense to be where if you're just optimizing for your personal well being because you just sort of tap out pretty quickly with a really comfortable life. I think there are a lot of incentives to be not super ambitious on that. But I think that if you're optimizing for impact the world to the world, I think that really changes the story. Because all of a sudden you're looking at something that can really scale, something where there really isn't this sense of like, oh, you've had a fair bit of impact. You can't really have much more impact than that. I think instead the answer is generally like no you can have absolutely massive impact. It just keeps going and going and going. I think that means that it makes a lot of sense to shoot really high with it. And I think one piece of that that we've touched on is like not just thinking about how can we do good but thinking about how can I maximize the amount of good that I'm doing with the resources I have. Not just giving away 5% eventually but giving away 95% eventually and not just trying to give it to something good but think hard about what would be better, what would be the best that we can give to. I think another side of that though is also trying to think about if you think about how much impact you've had with your life actually. I don't know how you thought about what you're going to do with your life earlier but you've had absolutely enormous impact on a huge number of people. I think like massively outscaling what I think most people would think of with their careers and I think that thinking about ways that you can have not just some impact but absolutely enormous positive impact with your life and your career and what that would imply you should be doing is actually really important and powerful. Yeah and again it is in fact separable from the good feels component of it. And again I don't want to diminish the importance of good feels because that really is the driver for a lot of people but it's also just the moment to moment substance of what it's like to be you. It's the difference between whether you are smiling or not. But the reality is that there are things each of us can do that can affect the lives of, you know, literally millions of people positively. They're almost entirely out of sight and out of mind even when we're consciously engaging them. You know, it's like you could cut a check for tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars used as effectively as possible and it could take you five minutes. And the thing that's going to leave a much bigger residue on how you feel that day is the interaction you had with some stranger in a Starbucks. Right? Yes. There's a paradox of sorts there. I think we want to optimize both of those things and I think it's good to reflect in a way on the more ambitious good. We do so as to internalize the psychological rewards of doing that good. But I think it is just a fact that certain things will always be more salient than other things. And this is a conversation I had with Will about if you could run into a burning building and save a child on your deathbed, that will be the thing you remember as the best thing you ever did in your life. Perhaps. But the reality is that if you just use your resources at all compassionately, you could be saving children in analogous situations by the thousands and thousands every day of your life at this point. But it's not going to feel the same. And that's okay. You can get your good feels elsewhere. And this is what rationality is for, is to uncouple us from being entirely pushed around by our emotions and to get more of a bird's eye view of the ethical terrain so that we can actually do the most good that's there to be done. Completely agree. And I think, as you said, it's it doesn't mean denying the existence of the feelings that you have, but acknowledging that while it's really important not to lose sight of that and not to forget that the goal in the end is to make people feel better and not to lose track of what that feels like. That when you start to scale things. That's not the thing that scales. The thing that scales is the more direct impact that you have on other people's lives. Nice. Well, Sam, to be continued. I look forward to meeting you someday, and please keep me in the loop as you learn more and more about how to do good in the world. Absolutely. And if you're ever thinking about coming down to the Bahamas, we would love to have you here. Sure. Well, twist my arm./n
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+Welcome to the waking up podcast. This is Sam Harris. OK, well, this is not not an official podcast episode. I have not numbered it as a Waking Up Podcast episode. This is an episode, in fact, of the Russell Brand podcast under the Skin. This is an interview that Russell did with me about a week ago and released on his podcast. But I am releasing it here because I said I would. Russell is happy to have me do it. And so many of you have asked me to have a conversation with Russell that I just wanted to make sure you hear this. I decided to do it on his podcast rather than on mine. So he's interviewing me, and that has the effect of making me say some things that many of you may have heard before, because he's asking how I got involved in atheism and writing and some background questions. And we also had the conversation in person, which was instructive, because this is a conversation that really could have run off the rails. As you'll hear, Russell and I disagree about many fundamental things. If I had done this over the Internet on my podcast, this could well have been one of those conversations that went into the ditch, like my conversation with Mariam Namazi or the one with Omer Aziz, which I titled The Best Podcast Ever, ironically, but the vibes were quite good. Russell's a very nice guy. I really enjoyed meeting him. So there's the paradox here of real disagreement at points kept on the rails by nice face to face rapport. That is instructive for me. Going forward, I think it's useful to consider which podcasts I should do in person and which I should do online. But for better or worse, this is a podcast that will frustrate many of you. There's a fair amount of talking over one another, a fair amount of him talking over me. No doubt. There's not a real meeting of the minds on some of the foundational issues here, morally and politically. Anyway, this is the conversation that many of you expected Russell and I would have, so I will bring you that. Now, I just have one announcement to make. Speaking of experiments and conversation, my event with Jordan Peterson in Vancouver in June sold out very quickly, so we added a second night. June 23 is sold out, so we added June 24. And tickets for that event are now available to supporters of the podcast. A presale code has gone out to you by email. If you're a supporter and did not get that code, please email us at info@samharris.org. And if you're interested in going to that event, you should act sooner rather than later, because once it becomes available to the general public, it may well sell out as quickly as the first one. Just to be clear, Jordan and I will try to COVID different ground at the two events, so going to both wouldn't necessarily be a waste of your time if you're into this sort of thing. We will try to move on from whatever progress we make the first night. And we'll probably go out in advance to all of you for questions and topics so as to make sure we cover a different set of five or ten each night. I'm not sure how many events like this will do, but if you've been paying attention, you'll know that Jordan has been having quite an impact, especially on the minds of young men, for better or for worse. And I would say for better and for worse. It's pretty clear to me that much of it is for better and certainly some of it is for worse. And I just think it is a very intriguing social phenomenon which could be straightened out. So insofar as I can help make sense to our respective audiences, I will try to do that for as long as it seems useful and hope to broadcast at least the best parts here on the podcast. So that's what's happening there. And Jordan and I are talking about adding other dates. Possibly New York City, possibly London. Please check my events page if you're interested for those and all other events at samharris. Orgvents. And again supports the podcast will get advanced tickets to everything I do going forward. And now, without any further delay, I bring you my conversation with Russell Brand. Sam Harris is a writer, neuroscientist, philosopher, and host of the podcast Waking Up with Sam Harris. He's written five New York Times bestsellers covering a range of topics from neuroscience and religion to violence and human reasoning. These include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, Free Will, and The Moral Landscape, and has argued that science can determine moral values. He's previously studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, making several trips to India and Nepal. He is now a proponent of secular meditation practices. He's vegetarian, practices Brazilian jiujitsu, and is married with two daughters and has a correction. I'm going to have to recant on the vegetarianism. You recant in the vegetarianism? For the moment, unfortunately. Apostasy. Yeah, well, it's exactly like apostasy. Well, welcome. Thank you. Regardless of the embracing the abattoir that I'm trailing by. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. I've wanted to talk to you for such a long time. Yeah. And I've heard from so many of our mutual audience members that we should be getting together because I suppose it's been in the works for a long time. Yeah. We exist in that sort of in the sonic boom created by Joe Rogan, perhaps. Yeah, maybe. Heard you on Joe Rogan. I listened to waking up. Yeah. And I've heard a bunch of your stuff. I saw you on Joe Rogan as well. So Joe is the 800 pound gorilla of podcasters. Yes, he is. Everyone knows he is very much that we are all orbiting Joe Rogan. Let's face it like, god, there's so much stuff I want to ask you about, because there's loads of things we agree on, loads, but there are some pretty distinct things that I imagine we disagree on. And I suppose these will be some of some interesting things to analyze. But just to start us off, I suppose, tell us a little bit about the fusion of neuroscience, philosophy and atheism that has become sort of the defining of people's perception of you, that there's, I suppose, a neurological underwriting. For your sort of personal perspective of atheism and what you've learned in the sort of like the ten years since you've come to prominence and how your position has perhaps evolved. The atheism connection is probably just an accident of history more than anything, because it really is what happened to my intellectual life right after September 11. So I was doing my neuroscience PhD. I had a background in philosophy. I went into neuroscience very much with the interest of a philosopher. I was always interested in understanding the human mind at a high level that really I would only be doing work in people. And I wasn't ever thinking of curing diseases. It was all about just understanding human subjectivity and consciousness and morality and human reason. These were the kinds of higher level mental attributes that interested me. And I was in the middle of my PhD. I had done my coursework. I was getting into neuroimaging work on belief. I was studying the difference between belief and disbelief and uncertainty. And then September 11 happened, and I had a background in meditation. I had a background in trying to cash out rather ancient spiritual concerns through whatever methodology was available. So I had taken psychedelics in my twenty s. I had spent about two years on silent retreat. I was very connected to the experiential side of what people think only religion is good at, right? But I was not a believer of any sort, so I was an atheist, but I never thought of myself as an atheist. I was totally unaware of atheism as an organized political movement. I couldn't have told you who Madeleine Mario Hare was this a famous atheist. I was aware of people like Richard Dawkins for their science, but I was not someone who had read books on atheism. And so my first book, The End of Faith, which really, really initiated this publishing phenomenon that was called The New Atheism, because then it was me, and then Dawkins, and then I came out with my second book, and then Dan Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. All of us had these books that came out. I never even used the word atheism in The End of Faith, and it wasn't that I thought not to use it, it just was not a word I used. So I was just talking about the conflict between reason and faith, the conflict between science and religion, the obvious untenability, I mean, the actual proper horror of the fact that we have a world that is shattered into these separate religious communities and these separate and incommensurable worldviews based on an adherence to these ancient books. And that struck me then and strikes me now as just as perverse as people blowing themselves up over rival interpretations of Shakespeare. Just imagine there was some Hamlet cult versus some King Lear cult, right? And people are willing to die for these differences. I'm English. Those cults exist, right? But that's the world we're living in. I mean, our world is just that absurd. And so I reacted to all of this in the aftermath of September 11 without ever defining myself in my own mind as someone who was now shilling for atheism. But then I got inducted into the conversation about atheism. So it's somewhat ironic that atheist is one of the first words in my bio, but it's not an identity. No, relative to yourself, those retrospectively applied, although, as you say, kind of the inciting incident of your public life, your life as a public intellectual was 911, which you rigidly define as, I suppose, judging what you've just said as a religious event primarily, or an act of religious violence. It was clearly that you might want to talk about other variables that could explain it or that could have other motives that people might have. You might want to talk about politics or economics or U. S. Foreign policy or the legacy of colonialism. But I think it is absolutely clear that while those variables account for some of the the misbehavior in our world, there are still people who get up in the morning with 100% of their motivation being a religious expectation of an afterlife. I can just find you these people who have none of the other variables that people would want to use to explain the terrestrial variables economics, politics. There are people who have never suffered any economic insecurity, who devote their lives to jihad. There are people who drop out of the London School of Economics, who are British citizens so that they can go fight with ISIS. What does that, to you imply? The toxicity of religious ideology. It's the power of belief. It's not even purely toxic. I mean, this is the horrible paradox here, I think the experience of people even in the most extreme and we might want to say psychopathic cults, right, something like ISIS. The experience, by and large, is not of being a psychopath. Obviously, my criticism of religion is much wider than focusing on fundamentalist Islam. But to take this case, many people think that ISIS was acting like a bug light for the world psychopaths, that only psychopaths would go over there and behave this badly. And then what you're talking about is bad people who would behave badly anyway. These are people who were going to rape and kill anyway, and they just found an excuse or a pretext by which to do it under the aegis of religion. That's just not true. I mean, we just know enough about the BIOS of these people and you would never say that of someone who was observing some other religious behavior slavishly under some doctrine. So you wouldn't explain the behavior of people at the Mass, the Catholic Mass, where they line up to eat a cracker. You wouldn't say well, this is just politically motivated cracker eating behavior. These people would find pretext to eat crackers on Sundays anyway. They would ritualize their cracker eating behavior for some other reason. No, no. They have a belief that explains exactly what they're doing with this cracker. This is a doctrine that they're following. And if the doctrine were different, if the doctrine said eat two crackers, they'd be eating two crackers. Sure. But like personally and presumably you would agree with this, the Catholic Mass is serving a particular function as all ritual and ceremony is. And the literalness of the cracker is secondary to its evident perfunctory role as a place for social cohesion acknowledgement of mortality and the potential for the human soul or the human essence to aspire to something beyond the carnal, blood and body drives. If we take Christ from a more theological as opposed to sort of reductive simplistic and I think for me personally spiritually useless perspective as the metaphor of Christ being, the potential for transcendence beyond the flesh individual to the enlightened male or the enlightened being, I suppose then sort of the mass for me is an opportunity to ceremoniously acknowledge that meaning. So I would look at a mass and go oh, this ain't about literally eating crackers. Like and in even the metaphor as explicitly stated in the scriptural terms of that denomination, there's more that even that is limiting. I would say that people's drive to do that as myriad. You're flipping the logic of what I'm saying. So I'm saying that the thing that explains the actual ritual, the cracker eating is the doctrine, right? If the doctrine were different, if Jesus had said well, this bread has nothing to do with my body so it doesn't matter what you do at the Mass, right? Don't eat anything. To eat anything is to pollute your body. You should just be thinking about me, right? If that was the doctrine, there would be no cracker eating ritual. So the doctrine is a bizarre act of human sacrifice and cannibalism at the bottom of it, which doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, but it does if you look at the the roots of agricultural deity. Worship and the relationship between the known and the unknown and the necessity to have relationship with plants, seeds and it doesn't make sense that people would want to be eating his body except as a metaphor for union and oneness except it's not preached as a metaphor. The doctrine is not metaphorical. Also granted that many people aren't thinking about it literally now, but that's just to say they've lost their faith in the actual doctrine of the. And I think that's important. And also, I think we have to look beyond rationalism. I think when we're dealing you're a man who's deeply interested in mysticism and spirituality and anything, once it's on the plane of the corporal and the rational, then to evaluate the symbols purely rationally, they're always going to be sort of kind of left wanting because, yeah, in a wafer or drinking some wine. But if you have a relationship with the wholeness, I would be slow to conclude that I don't think you have to be irrational to use these tools or beyond rational. Not just irrational, not like necessarily less than rational, possibly more than rational. There's clearly more than forming a rational understanding of the universe. There's more to life than that. There's fun, there's love, there's beauty. There's more that we want from life than simply not being wrong. Right? So I'm not saying that reason is everything, but the question is, do you ever have to be irrational to go beyond merely conceptually understanding the world? Do you ever have to lie to yourself? Do you ever have to have to lie to others or believe the lies of others to go into these other areas that no, but most people are living as though absolutely you do. Religion is just the most profligate example of lying. That and and self deception that we know is politics. Is it? I mean, like, it's just I think it's just more evident. Every bit is bad, except then it just posits an afterlife where it gets all cashed out. Except, of course, you know, like again, to return to the point about 911, your particular induction, unwittingly or otherwise, into what's being come known as the New Atheistic Movement. That, for me, what this is a question I suppose is from that particular event taken in isolation, is it, like, barbaric and horrific and dreadfully cinematic and totemic, but definitely taking place within a historical context. For me, the variables that you fleetingly mentioned economics, colonialism, how do we delineate? Where are these imaginary lines drawn between this is religious violence, this is political violence, this is acceptable violence. Who draws those lines? I think they can be very easily drawn. When you take the case of any individual and his or her motives. Individuals, we have to resort to individualism as opposed to cultural national movements. You have to say that individual is crazy, but that state and that state's actions. I would first say that very few of these people are crazy. So let me just break this down a little bit, because there are many different types of violence. There are crazy people who are just crazy in the more clinical sense of that term, which is to say they're suffering some thought disorder. They're suffering from some kind of delusion, right? So many of these people are schizophrenic, but there are probably other ways we want to class a thought disorder here, but they're not rational. They don't have rational goals. They're hearing voices. They think they're talking. The Son of Sam thought his dog was telling him to kill people next door's. Dog actually. Not even his own dog. All right. Okay. Start listening to worse. Yes, exactly. Pay attention to your own dog. Or start worrying about the neighborhood of pets we all recognize as a thing of mental illness. Yes, you see reality different from everyone else. And most people who are mentally ill are not dangerous, but there are some people who are mentally ill who are right now, there are people who do horrific things for no ideological motive, no rational animus, but purely because they're crazy. Right. So you take, like one example would be probably this guy, Adam Lanza, who went into the school in Newtown and killed 20 some odd children and half a dozen teachers, right. I think 26 people were gunned down. He I don't know if anyone gave a diagnosis. I mean, he was probably almost certainly on the autistic spectrum, but he had something else going on. But he wasn't a white supremacist who had some ideology, who was acting out in this way. He wasn't a jihadist who thought he was going to get into paradise. Right. And there are many other examples of mass shootings like that. Jared Loughner was a guy like that. If you're going to talk to this person and find out why he did it, nothing is going to make sense. Right? Now, we could talk about the same superficial crime of going in and killing children in a school, right? There's that version of it. Then there's the really angry, and I would argue psychopathic, sadistic, classically evil person who just wants to kill kids, right. Who just gets off on all of the misery he's going to create as a result of this crime. Now, this person is not suffering a thought disorder. If we knew more about the brain, I think in the end we would be happy to say, well, there's still something wrong with this guy's brain. Human evil is a species of neurological disorder, but we don't understand it yet. And so now it's tempting just to say, well, these people are evil, right. It's a very different kind of person from the first person. The boundary between those people can be kind of fluid, but these are different types of people. No, but let me get to the worst case. The worst case is there are people who are as good, who are as moral and as ethical and as committed to the well being of themselves and others as you and I are who still go in and shoot up schools and kill everybody and hope to die in the process because they think they can get into paradise that way. So when when members of the Taliban went into a school in Pakistan and killed, I think it was 137 kids and and burned their teacher alive in front of them. You have to ask yourself, well, do you think all members of the Taliban who endorsed who did this and then all of those in the Taliban who endorsed this were all just psychopaths or mentally ill? No. If you listen to what they're saying, if you listen to what they believe, if you read the texts that they think are the verbatim word of the creator of the universe, it all falls into place. This is perfectly rational behavior, given the requisite beliefs, and that is what is so horrible about this kind of dogmatism. But even that process is that sort of extreme example of the execution of children in schools. It would be sort of an elective reading of even that particular doctrine. There would be particular, like, passages. You go, oh, here's the passage. Not so much. Unfortunately, there's loads of stuff that's like, live a peaceful life of devotion, not loads of stuff. Have you read the Quran? Have you read the Quran covered also, I bloody will happen. Okay. But barely got through these notes for this interview. Sam, I'm doing this thing on the fly. It's a short book. No, I've checked out. My general feeling is that the Quran, holy, is like most religious scripture. The intention is to create a social environment where people are benevolent and cohesive, which ultimately became a tool for social control as a result of the way the power structures but there's more to that religion and politics. But I don't know. I think again, I wouldn't deliberately misread the metaphor. For me, life after death, and this is a person that spent two years in a silent retreat. I would gather, you would dig this is that beyond the life that is determined by primal desires and biographical wants and your imagination of yourself, there is a life after the death of that individual, after that individual dies. And you recognize that the temporal can never provide fulfillment. You gain access to a sort of a second life and afterlife. The kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, and man sees it, not the kingdom of heaven. Are you talking about the life after the death of your ego? Yes, I would say if it's not talking about that, I don't know what it's talking about and what the value of that would be, that's fine. But as a manual for being human also, Sam, there's so much mate, let me hold on a secret. You did a big classification system of the degrees of I just want to put a flag right now. We've got to do the schools. Okay, well, we'll do that. Do your flag and then we go back to the school. I just want to acknowledge that whatever my personal reading, whatever your reading is, most people most of the time think that the afterlife is a literal place you go after you die. That consciousness survives the death of the body. And in the JudeoChristian tradition, especially the Christian and the Islamic tradition, it really matters whether you believe the right thing or not. In fact, this life doesn't matter at all. And that's what's so corrosive about this. Sure, but like, you know but let's look at some of the alternatives. Now, we did we just then devised a barometer of degrees of madness and the worst types of madness and the worst way to have your kids murdered in a school by which particular type of madman but we should probably bring into the mix from the sky by a drone. I don't my kids killed in a school for any ideology, whether it's grounded in sort of rationalism and economics or whether it's a book that's a bit older and more, I don't know, esoteric or colorful or imaginative, I don't know how to determine it. But I suppose the heart of what I want to get to is whilst undoubtedly religion has been used to justify violence from all types of angles in different historical moments, and Buddhist violence in Burma and Christian violence like in the Middle East or secular violence underwritten by Christianity resourced entirely from Christianity in sort of Christian Jewalistic notions undertaken by a far right Christian president. And whatever or the more lucid, livid and obvious and contemporaneous extremist Islamic violence, it's like, how do we see that as distinct from rational violence, political violence, particularly when that is far more potent, far more widespread, and I would say is the violence of the dominant culture. What interests me, Sam Harris, is power and the powerful. And for me, I'm interested in who gets to decide who the other is, who gets to decide by what metric rationalism and religion is evaluated. And it seems to me that the kind of violence that's focused on in a lot of your work is the violence of desperate people, desperate and possibly subjugated people. And I would say to this I know that you don't do this, but I want you to educate me on this. But to dismiss the colonial aspect, the economic aspect, the occupation of Middle Eastern countries, the historical I mean, for me, it seems like how can you conduct that extraction? How can you divorce those different types of violence? They seem to me to be part of one narrative. Well, I can do it very simply because just to dissect out the variable of colonialism or oppression from the outside, you have examples of people who have been oppressed, as oppressed as any other people who don't resort to this kind of violence because they don't have the same belief structure. Here's an almost perfect scientific experiment. You have Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims living in the same occupied territories right before the Israelis put up the wall, who was blowing themselves up in pizza parlors and discotheques, right? It was 99.9% Muslim. It was not Christian. You have Coptic Christians in Egypt being murdered by their Muslim neighbors by suicide bombings, who don't resort to their own suicide bombings in return. Right? The beliefs matter. The details matter. Why do you fetishize your antagonism towards that particular type of violence? Of course that violence exists in the context of a far more potent opponent's. Violence. No. Okay, we can't talk about Palestinian violence and Christians not talking about history. No, of course we can, because we can, because you can. How would we, though? Isn't that the very because tomorrow morning, someone in Orange County will be converted to this belief system and want to fight in the name of this cause. And it's purely a matter of belief. It's as much a matter of belief as you wanting to go on a diet or learning to meditate or maybe I'll go to Hawaii this year for my vacation. Sure, I know that's their idea. Belief is just a thought that you like having. But luckily, you and I, we live in a sort of a secular society in our beliefs seldom come into opposition with the dominant philosophy, and when it does, there are problems. Here are my background concerns. I think ideas are the most powerful things we've got. Ideas are the operating system for human life and human culture. And if we fail to build a civilization that works, it will be because of the failure of ideas or our failure to communicate good ideas to one another in such a way that's persuasive. How do you get 7 billion strangers to peacefully collaborate with one another? It is a matter of conversation that ultimately gets people to converge on common projects and common values. And so all we have is conversation. And when conversation fails, all we have is violence. There's really just two modes conversation and violence. And what you're talking about when you're talking about power and its misuses, you're talking about state violence or state coercion that you deem to be illegitimate. Now, I'll grant you, if we if we took a list of all of these cases, you know, CIA run coups in other countries, you and I may just check the same boxes, like, well, that looks illegitimate, or that had consequences that could have easily been foreseen. Lots of people suffered and died there that shouldn't have. And what were the objectives? All of it? Yes. But when I'm looking at, when I prioritize shining the light of my criticism on specific ideas and specific human behavior, I'm looking by and large for the craziest and most dangerous ideas that should be. This is really the low hanging fruit for bad epistemology the human behavior that should seem impossible. And suicide bombing, it's just aesthetics, really. No, it's not suicide bombing. No, it looks bad. A drone bombing. It's not just aesthetics. It's not just aesthetics. How is it not aesthetic? Because suicidal people are undeterrable. Jihadists are undeterrable. If the best thing that can happen in an operation is. That you die while conducting it. You are the perfect weapon. I have to hammer this home. Go on. When you're talking about the possibility of something like nuclear terrorism or biological terrorism, that, you know, where someone tries to weaponize smallpox until 100 million people just mentioned that nuclear terrorism is not hypothetical. It already happened 50 years ago underwritten no secularism I won't call that nuclear terrorism or nuclear I don't know. There was certainly a first. If you're in Nagasaki that day, semantics wouldn't be your primary concern. What should we call that thing? Wow, my teeth. It's reasonable to ask how the Japanese view it now and how the Japanese view their relationship to the United States now. There's an argument I'm not defending. There are narratives, Sam, that supersede the apparent narrative of nationalism and geopolitics. Where there is economic determinant. The Japan and the US no longer see themselves in oppositional positions. Right. So one question is, how are we going to get all of these societies that are at loggerheads people yeah. To see themselves in non zero sum arrangements with everyone else, and what will have to change to make that possible? And my concern with religion, religious fundamentalism, and not all religions equally, but my concern is that these are the beliefs that are held most closely. They're the least negotiable. I mean, they're by definition, non negotiable. My faith based beliefs are the beliefs that if you challenge them by whatever evidence or whatever argument, I will take that as a personal insult, and I will want to resort immediately to violence or the threat of violence. I will want blasphemy laws. I will want to pass a law at the UN that will give you jail time if you say the wrong thing about my holy book. Right. That's where conversation has totally broken down and there's nothing to resort to. But for us, yes, but when you say a suicide bomber, I admit that it's an extraordinary and it's difficult for us to understand. But what I'm curious about, Sam, is that what are the prerequisite conditions for suicide bombing, even to be relevant? And I also can't help with thinking when I sort of feel when we sort of recall events like Waco or any disruption or anything that sort of ruptures the American mainframe, not American, because I think this goes beyond nation. If you find yourself in opposition to the state, the means by which the state will deploy violence doesn't need to resort to sort of lurid livid Blatant clumsy acts like suicide bombing because the power is so evident the ability to exert power and control is so total that it doesn't need sort of like almost the sort of graphic and horrific whimsy of something like a suicide bombing, albeit underwritten by something that looks peculiar to people like us that value life and value fire and don't have a belief system that's like, oh, I'll be in some sort of valhalla. Subsequently, you were using Waco as an example of state oppression or suicidal sacrifice. I'm using it as an example of that. The kind of violence that interests me is the violence of the truly powerful. For me, I can see that it's kind of it's gratuitous and sort of therefore an appealing form. But for me, when analyzing 911, to focus on the perpetration of that event and the motivation of the individuals involved, as opposed to the geopolitical circumstances and what happens generally when two narratives come into conflict with one another, short changes us and means that we focus. My sole interest, Sam, is when you talk about how are we going to get these 7 billion people to cooperate and form communities based on mutual values, which for some reason, I believe is a possibility. My own spiritual pursuits have led me to the point where I have a basic optimistic view of humanity. My own personal experience with Muslims has led me to believe that Islam is essentially a positive thing. Essentially a positive but that's a bad way to take its temperature. How many Muslims have you had a personal experience with? I'll grant you, I'll be very taking the temperature on the basis of bloody suicide bomb. No, I'm taking the temperature on the basis of the actual doctrine that make sense of this behavior and also or aspects of the doctrine. Aspects of the doctor. No, no, but wait. Hold on. Wait. I got to I didn't imagine that we'd have this conversation, that there'd be a bit we were in Yen. Islam's not that bad, I think, come into this room with thinking that. But it's worth connecting a few of these dots because it's not just a matter of the killing of people. I'm talking about how people want to live. So if you ask yourself and this is just a thought experiment if you ask yourself if you gave perfect power to any one group so they could impose their way of life on every other group. So this is a magic wand argument that I use in my first book. Give Dick Cheney a magic wand. Dick Cheney, the prototypical evil, mustache twirling bastard who gave us the Iraq war and is as demonized on the left as anyone. What would he have done if he had the power, you know, just to make life in the Middle East and in Afghanistan any way he wanted? It stated. It doesn't need we do not need to conjecture, they said we want to remove the ability of our opponents to respond. It's in the public sphere. That's what they said. We want to annihilate the possibility. Let's go a little further in our imagination. Do you actually think and maybe Dick Cheney has been so demonized that he's the wrong case here, but have a strong opinion about Dick Cheney? But do you golf? Yeah. No matter how you spell that word, this is what I would guess right someone like Dick Cheney if given unlimited again, just magic, the resources of magic. We don't need magic. He said the ability for them to respond you're doing a too narrow reading of that, right? Yes. We don't want these people to be able to attack us. Right. That's the goal of the war, I'm saying. Or to oppose our objective in the Middle East. But what are do whatever we want. So what would we want? To ransack that region, all of its energy resources for a kick off, and we want total, unchallenged power. But I'm talking about magic. We don't even need to steal their resources. We have the power of magic. Now, what life would you impose on these people? Right? What life would the worst of us in power like Dick Cheney impose on these people? I think he'd make Afghanistan or Iraq. Like Nebraska. Right. It would not be some hellscape of unnecessary suffering. It would be a Starbucks on every corner. Mere capitalism. Now, you have your critique of this way of life, no doubt. But what he would want to impose on these people is orderly, economic, probably good Christian behavior, right? He would want movie theaters. He'd all be watching the Oscars right? Now, what would Abu Bakr al Baghdadi impose on everyone else? He's told us explicitly, because he tried the experiment in Syria and Iraq, we know exactly how he wants to live, and he wants others to live. It is 7th century theocratic barbarism, and there's no doubt about that. It is fornicators is homosexuals thrown from rooftops, and fornicators one thing that surely we can agree on, is that what the second guy's name? I don't know. Telling the head of ISIS is irrelevant. He's not irrelevant. It's, broadly speaking, irrelevant in terms of impact. Let's return back to the sort of view of 7 billion individuals, dick Cheney's, Starbucks on every corner, there are 1.7 billion Muslims, a majority of which live under some significant theocratic constraint. You're talking about women. It's not the same theocracy. Listen, I'm just as concerned about Christian theocracy as you are. How can you because I think you're about to talk about sort of gender issues, but you're once again, not just gender. It's free thought issues, surely, but the metric by which we evaluate them is a distinct metric drawn from another narrative. We must say, oh, bloody ill, women dressing like that. I don't think we're in a position to make those kind of decisions. Of course we are. You don't think you're why do you think that their narrative should adhere to our template? Well, first of all, so you imagine that most women forced to wear a burger I don't know about force, in my experience, has been that it's more that we ought to regard it. But I've asked Muslim women about it, and they said it's like a discipline and we dig it. Yeah, okay, but first of all, now I'm talking about a burka. I'm not talking about someone going to Barnard who likes to wear a head scarf because she likes the way Linda does. The imposition of our heterogeneous hegemonic ideas of how masculine and feminine relationships work might not be universally applicable. Something is universally applicable if it's not universal. We can understand those differences. So if there's a culture where they like spicy food and we don't, but eating spicy food is just another way to be happy as an ape, we can understand those differences biologically and culturally. The idea that it just may be as good a solution for how to maximize human well being, to put half the population in bags and not let them learn to read. I mean, I'm taking Afghanistan. I'm taking the local case of Afghanistan under the Taliban, actually. Afghanistan currently as well. You're talking about women who have almost the worst possible life on planet Earth. I mean, we're talking about maternal mortality rates that are off the charts. You're talking about illiteracy that is that you have to go back 200 years in the west to find that level of kind of reasoning that's used to justify the bombing and commercial colonization of those territories. They are not like us. They treat women different from us. I don't think we're in a position to make those judgments. So then tell me how you would react to this. I have two daughters. And if I were thinking the way you were thinking about this issue, what if I thought it would be a great idea to have a cultural exchange program where I just sent my daughters over to Afghanistan to live with the Taliban family? So rather than go to summer school here and get prepared to go to an Ivy League college or whatever it is, I send them to live with the Taliban. You don't need to explain all this to me. I see where you're going. Okay, I'm not nine years old, but tell me. Nobody got to answer it. All of your thought experiments, but I'm from a Western culture. I've been indoctrinated. So you're saying there's no right or wrong? I think that there's that I'm not in a position I think it's very different from me saying I've been born in the West, I've grown up in the west. My daughter's, born in the west, now impose upon her a totally different set of values. To go to the deep south either. I would want to go to places in Britain. You don't think it's unlucky to be born a girl in Afghanistan five years ago? I think that these kind of theoretical tableaus are used to create a force hierarchy and a moral superiority by a dominant culture that subsequently uses thinking of this nature to underwrite the modern day colonization and subjugation of these people on a massive scale. And as barbaric and disgusting as 911 was, a daily 911 since then, so that a state system can perpetuate yourself using rationalism, using comfortable means of executions that glide slyly by all white in the sky is no better than the 911. It is better, too. It is better. So you're invoking many things here which we should treat systematically. Things like collateral damage. I don't even like that language. It's a euphemism. No, it's a euphemism, but that's the word we use to talk about unintended people getting killed by bombs when 87% of drone strikes result in the data here are hard to get our hands around as well. Highly politicized. Yes, of course it is. But the language is important. And who decides what language is used and who decides what's powerful and who decides what rational violence and who decides to what religion is, even? Okay, but let's treat these things point by point. So first, let's take them in a Giddy blur. I'm trying to get out of the blur. Yeah, the Giddy blur is now in my mind. So there's a fundamental claim that you have just made, at least implicitly, that I disagree with and that I wrote my third book to rebut my third book. The moral landscape is an argument that we can talk about questions of right and wrong and good and evil in universal terms. These are not merely cultural or personal affectations. Right. We're not free to just have money or four experiments in a minute. No, but see, you on the edge of it. If it's someone to have sex with a baby, the rules say it's wrong. The reason why I thought experiments are so useful is that they're the pure case. You can take one variable at a time. But this idea that it's all a matter of personal taste or all a matter of culture suggests that all cultures therefore, the moment you make the link between questions of good and evil and the well being of conscious creatures like questions of happiness and suffering right. And I think that link is very direct. That's a separate conversation we can have. But I think the only intelligible morality has to focus on human suffering, human well being, and even more broadly, to the suffering of any conscious system. So it's animals. If we're torturing pigs so as to get bacon, we have an ethical obligation to not do that, do that less, find a better way of doing that so that it's no longer torture. Of course, breed pigs that don't suffer. Whatever it is, suffering should be our concern. And the moment you grant that, you have to grant that not every culture and not every society and certainly not every family has perfectly solved the human well being problem. Right. They haven't solved it equally. So if you find a family over here that's forcing their children to live in a basement for 20 years and to interbreed and not showing them the light of day, okay, this is a problem that society has an interest in. Now we're talking about power dynamics the society has an interest in rescuing those children from their deranged and evil parents. Right? This could be true just in a single city like Los Angeles, as happened very recently, that scales that scales to whole nations and to our global situation. It does. Politically complex, but for you to withhold judgment of the burka makes absolutely no sense. For you to withhold judgment of female general mutilation makes absolutely no male general mutual different. Again, now, it's a perfect case of getting misled by words because they're highly non analogous, those two procedures. I'm not in favor of male circumcision either, but I'm just saying to use the word mutilation or circumcision synonymously. No, you just jump to the men, though. Listen. But when we sort of interchange styles of dress, we're still in the kitty blur, by the way. Good. I never leave it. And personal submission, when we interchange that with sort of subjugation of a family and keep people in the cellar, there's different levels of complexity. Now, I'd like to, if I may shift gears a little, Sam, because one of my great interests in you is your immense intellectual capacity and your what do I want to call it without being deliberately provocative, zeal and love of ethics and morality. And I would like to know how that relates to your personal spiritual life. I know you're a great meditator. You said like, you know, I've never had the Jesus. Two years silence. I think I'd struggle for 25. Well, I mean, I meditate twice a day for 20 minutes and I don't find it. For me, this stuff is the answer. Now what? The reason I meditate, the reason that I embrace the spiritual life is because I believe I have experienced I've experienced that for me personally, to become a valuable member of society, whether that's on the micro level of my family. And hopefully on a broader level, I have to take personal responsibility for the fact that I'm a complex individual. That within all of the things I would condemn over the course of a podcast talking to a brilliant man like yourself maybe I'll 1 minute I'll condemn violence another minute I'll condemn egotism self centeredness that I am victim to all of these I'm perpetrator of self centeredness and egocentrism. And the tool that has helped me most to overcome these personal problems has been a kind of a spiritual veteran Shang. And I planned to use that word with you today. My German is bad. That's literally the only German word you'll hear, the only one I know. My spirituality has been my personal vehicle for carrying me away from sort of selfishness self destruction. And like I'm talking as a person to overcome through the help of others and to a degree of faith, I must say to a huge degree of faith my own addiction. You've got addiction issues, haven't you? No, not that I know of yet. Just for you, dabbling in it's your brother? No. Neither of you have got no addiction background? No. Dan Harris had. Dan Harris, who's also he's a friend. There's no relation. But he wrote the book 10% Happier and it was a big bestseller about mindfulness. And so he's had issues that he talked about. I see. Forgive me. So my personal experiences have been that sort of spirituality and a faith that is determined resolutely by, as best as possible, non judgment, mentalism benevolence, kindness, being of service to others, principles that, broadly speaking, don't require me to enter into conflict, but to be of service. This, for me, I think, is an incredibly valuable resource. And these things and ethics in general are drawn not ultimately, because who knows what preceded religion, some form of theater and ritual? Who knows what they're doing down deep in the dank of the forests, what gods they devise, their mushrooms? Well, precisely where consciousness is a little more open, I suppose. What I want to understand is how does your personal spirituality serve you ethically and where does that intersect with beyond tolerance? Because tolerance suggests that there's something to tolerate. Where does it lead you to compassion and love? And what solutions do you think can be derived from your personal experiences of mysticism and spirituality? Well, I would say, first that while it may seem different from what we've been just talking about, it's of a piece with what we've just been talking about. And the reason why I have such passion for criticizing this particular species of bad ideas, the religious ones, is because I see the baby and the bathwater that everyone is afraid of losing. And I see that it doesn't require any divisive bullshit to be said. Saved. Right. You don't have to lie to yourself. You don't have to believe that a book was written by the creator of the universe. You don't have to believe that the hell fire awaits people who don't call a historical person by the right name. You don't have to believe any of those things. And all of those things are absolutely integral to the doctrines of these religions. And there's many separate religions on offer that are because I think there's a point where religion and politics intersect and it's not always clear where that line is drawn. And I would say that the point where spirituality stops being about kindness, love, fun. Remember early in this podcast, you did a list of things that difficult to quantify scientifically. And I would wonder how valuable and useful those image scans and neuro image scans are when dealing with fun and love. I'm sure they have great service. I'm sure. But these things, the way that we access them, the way that we increase them to your earlier point, the way that we, as best as possible, eliminate suffering. For me, this is the function and the role of spirituality. And I think sort of some of the furniture and ornamentation that religions have variously acquired due to the cultural inflections of the times in which they were conceived, for me are less important and less relevant. Whilst I acknowledge that I'm a relatively unique case and some of the extreme issues that you are addressing, they're not imaginary. I know that you're saying they're not imaginary and they're always a baby bathwater issue. I'm interested in the baby. You're always on about the bathwater. What you just described about your own spiritual life and ethical life, it is obvious to me that there are universal principles there. That what you just described about the consequences of paying attention to certain things. So meditation, getting off certain substances that are not good for you. So, you know, breaking with with addiction, these are universal features of what it's like to have a human mind that is based on human neurochemistry. And this is not something we just made up. It's not something that's purely a product of our time. It's not merely cultural. And that's why sticking girls in bags for their entire lives and not letting them read stop saying that. It's derivative. It is exactly what it's exactly what's happening in Afghanistan. Again, I'm not talking about the voluntary sentry language. If you're here to convey love, it's exactly bother how can you pretend to love girls if you're not as concerned as I am about this mistreatment of them? Because I don't pretend to understand. But you fix historical and cultural issues. It's not from a very particular you're overthinking it. It has nothing to do with skin color. Who knows what the level of thought that's required is, Sam, but you are an American intellectual. Okay, but just take a few facts on board here. I can introduce you to women of whatever shade of brown skin you require, who have no requirement. That's one of the things about me who have grown up in these cultures, who will say exactly what I'm saying about the consequences of compulsory could introduce you to women of a variety of future who could say the contrary. No, they wouldn't say that practice of personal subjugation is the same as doing yoga or exercise. It's a way of finding your consciousness. You're drawing the wrong lesson here. No, I'm not drawing the I'm back to the no. No, because you're just missing a few facts. If you have those two people have a conversation, if you take someone like Ian Hercali or Sarah Hater, who runs the Ex Muslims of North America, right, and you have her talk to someone like Linda Sarsur, the hijabi. Icon of the woman's march right, darling of the left. Now who's actually a closet theocrat and quite a nefarious person when you get her talking about religion. I mean, she will not admit that life for women in Saudi Arabia is bad by comparison at all for women in the west. America should stop having such complicit trade relationships with them. Then I'll agree with you. There. But if you have two women of this sort talk, right? One who has taken off the hijab for reasons of not wanting to wear it and wanting to live in a system where she's free not to wear it, and one who says, I'm wearing it purely as an expression of my own religious faith and it's just pure female empowerment. If you let that conversation proceed, you'll see that this side has to lie endlessly about the actual doctrines, about why most people, most women, most of the time, are wearing this. It's being forced upon them. I mean, if we talk about the misuse of power, you're talking about take the perfect case that sounds like it's a thought experiment, but it actually happened. You take the religious police in Mecca who wouldn't let the girls who are burning alive in a dormitory be rescued because they weren't wearing their veils, right? They wouldn't let the firemen go in and rescue girls from a burning building because they weren't properly veiled. Don't get about it that's the reduction gender relationships in this country have become so complex, particularly where we're both fathers but daughters. You can judge concerned about the cache and aesthetic obligations that will be placed upon my daughter to look a certain way, to behave a certain way, to believe. I don't even think that's a reasonable possibility. I just think you are in a position to judge how wrong that would be. And if someone how wrong that would be, imposing those restrictions on your girls, you know, that would be a bad a diminishment of the well being of your girls. And to pretend to not know it of a girl in Afghanistan, turn to this fetishism idea. Why are you not more concerned by the continual objectification of women advertising industry using female it's a different order of problem. But I'm totally with you. Which one is more prominent? What do you think is more likely to happen to your daughter? That she's going to be whisked off to Afghanistan to be wife number five, or that she's going to have sex with some dignity because she's got Daddy? But my concern is for both things. Well, your concern should be for reality, not for, like, abstract ideas that play into the hands of an already there's nothing absolutely bloody power dynamic and a well served power dynamic. Okay, well, let's get whose side are we on? Who does the grail serve, Sam? Where is this mythic truth? Where does perennialism come from? Why are these themes found throughout the great faith, the oneness, the unity, the possibility? We're going giddy, Sam, we're going for another ride in the tumble dryer of love. All right, so let me try to connect a few of these things because you're concerned about power, right? And you're concerned about the misuse of our power. So our being Western power, say. I suppose so. But to tell you the truth, like, now I've got you. Okay. I think that those the mask of nationalism is superficial. The real power operates and has them probably since British colonialism, on an economic scale that doesn't pay a great deal of attention to sort of trade tariffs or those very trade tariffs have withdrawn up with the powerful in mind. So what for me, Sam, what interests me and not sort of like while I've got no argument about bloody ISIS when I read about that stuff, there's some terrifying shit going down. But what interests me more is who is it that gets to determine what is happening in the world in my life right now? And it seems to me that that's transnational corporations and governments of Western democracies that don't need to resort to the kind of vivid acts of violence on their domestic population because it's unnecessary, because we've all been beautifully conditioned. And when it is required, when brutality and violence is required, it will be used. It is enacted. Okay? And that seems more important than people responding to that power. But if it's all important, Sam, then why is your focus continually on the fetishized aspect of it? Well, again, it was to say fetishized is to reveal the problem that causes me to focus on it, because, again, it comes back to the power of ideas. I think one of the worst ideas going, really is the one that you've expressed here, which is, who am I to judge? I'm just a white guy who grew up in the Western context. Who am I to judge the burka? This kind of moral relativism postmodernism? I'm not postmodern. No, but this is the original. I know you don't want to answer that name, but this is the intellectual trend that gave us this kind of apprehension around making these judgments, right? Who am I to say what would be a good life for somebody else? And no matter how broadest the example of human suffering, that nonviolence compassion and love is the answer. But I think where we disagree is what should be the key target, what is generating generating the problem. There are many problems, but I think to take it at the level of greatest abstraction and I think greatest leverage for us to think about it is, for the most part, this is not a problem of the world being filled with bad people, right? There are some bad people. There's some let's say 1% of people in every culture are probably psychopaths, right? So there's 1% of people who really do feel no compunction about harming other people, and they kind of get off on it, and they're going to keep doing it no matter what you change about the system. But most harm is the result of bad ideas, good people having bad ideas and good people being in systems where there are bad incentives. The crucial word here is incentives, right? I think we need economic systems and political systems and institutions and ways. Of being with one another publicly, which align our incentives in such a way so as to make ordinary mediocre not so insightful, not so reflective, not so philosophical, and frankly, not even that ethical. People more and more effortlessly do the right thing, right? So you shouldn't have to be Saint Francis of Assisi to act well in the world, right? But there are systems where the incentives are bad enough that you really have to be a moral hero to be just basically decent, right? All of the incentives are pointing the other way. I'll give you an example for this life in a maximum security prison. So if you're a good guy, you're not a racist, you just want to get along with people. If you were put into a maximum security prison, all the incentives would be pushing you the other way. So for you not to join a white gang in a maximum security prison would be effectively suicidal, right? Like you would just be the victim of everyone. The place is set up to segregate everyone by skin color, right? So even if you don't have a racist bone in your body, just self preservation alone in an abyss do they they are that's concentrated society, federal institution. But it's the perfect example of bad incentives. How do these things happen? Where are they happening? They're happening everywhere. But most of these examples of bad incentives, most of these examples of where power is victimizing millions and millions of people are, I would argue, examples where the system is set up in such a way that it is reliably exporting this misery, right? And there is no author of it. There is no bad person or there are very few bad people who are the actual authors of this human suffering or the perpetrators of it. What we have are systems where selfish people, being selfish most of the time, manage to export a fair amount of misery to people who are less lucky than themselves. And if we want a fairer economic arrangement, we have to design it and we have to design it for people as they are. We need systems that will allow people people are mutable and compensation. In fact, that's part of your main edict is that we respond to ideas and we respond to incentives. Yes, ideas and incentives. To be a bit more personal for a moment. Are you a bit cynical about human beings? Because when we talk it's like I feel we've been fighting about terrorism and female general mutilation with my pro terrorism, pro genital mutilation starts I will not waiver on those issues shoulder to the wall. But you seem like angry about you seem angry and about humanity almost human beings are not good or so no, I'm on the contrary. Well, it's all mixed, right? I mean, they're we're good and we're bad and we're careless, right? And we're shortsighted. I would say the line between good and evil runs through every human evolved. That's certainly a more eloquent way of saying it. But there's again to talk about the situational problem. The problem of incentives is doing more work than human evil is doing. All of us have work to do on ourselves to be happier and better people, right? And that is spiritual life, and that is ethical life. But I think better than and these are not mutually exclusive projects. These can be done simultaneously. But better than each of us figuring out how to be a saint would be to design a system that made it easier for everyone to be far better than they're tending to be now. And that's possible? I think that's absolutely possible. I think there's two a lot of decentralization and a lot of significant change, particularly in our nations around what is called the political, but I sort of see as the religious. Now, let me tell you something again, this again for a little more what do I want to say? Trivial or personal? It's not trivial. The other day I was driving home from, I don't know, seeing a movie or something. It was the daytime still. The homeless guy just collapsed, laying in the middle of the road. La. Homeless people are just everywhere, forming shanty towns like the apocalypse has already happened and is creeping in around us like a slow tide. And it was some homeless guy. And I thought, no, that homeless guy is just laying there. I should do something about that. And then I just went home and I thought, like, why didn't I do anything about that? It's a great example here, okay? Because in the current system, there's nothing very easy to do. So you have to be an absolute moral hero to do something about that particular homeless guy. And it's very likely that what you would do wouldn't help a lot and would just complicate your life massively. So let's say you just say, well, this is totally untenable. I cannot step over the body of yet another homeless person. I'm going to take this guy into my life. He's going to come back to my hotel room. I've got to go to London in a week. I'm going to figure out what to do with this guy and get him. And it's going to be your whole project. I've done it a couple of times is complex. Yeah. So the reason why he's lying on the side there are many reasons why he's lying on the sidewalk. And probably those reasons aren't immediately actionable by you. Now, what we need is a system that recognizes the problem of homelessness in the most compassionate and pragmatic way and figures out whatever solution there is. There's substance abuse issues, there's mental health issues. There's there's zoning issues. There's like there's this knot in my backyardism that where people are just getting pushed to different parts of the city. Because you don't see this in Beverly Hills, but you see this in Santa Monica. Right. We have to figure out a solution that is compassionate. And, Sam, do you think part of it is the relegation of spiritual principles? The fact that, broadly speaking, culturally, spiritual principles have been relegated to the point of almost insignificance, so it sort of no longer feels like a sort of a personal duty to help homeless people. Of course, as you said, the systems aren't in place. One wonders what would happen if I just sort of put him over my shoulder and tried to take him somewhere. I know it would happen. Shelters would be full, complex medical issues, issues of finance. But don't you think that this idea of individualism and individual freedom kind of leads to it somehow favors primal and selfish drives over sort of communal fraternal drives? And whilst I agree with you on that baby bathwater dynamic, I don't think we do enough to focus on to illuminate and present the baby. The baby that is spirituality, that is unique. The kind of things that when you're meditating for two years in silence and when you're continuing to meditate now, probably when you're doing Brazilian jujitsu. Strong senses of fraternity togetherness. Oneness how do we for me, I think that the priority, the most useful way of getting those values into our culture is to demonstrate them, to confront power where possible and necessary. And it seems to me less significant, and this is what I'm fascinated by, to attack, to focus on the arguments that you have been focusing on and arguments you've been brilliantly making and writing about. Wonderfully, whilst I disagree, has become evident on many of the tenets of it. But for me, I suppose what I'm saying is, Orton, people like you and I who believe in spirituality, who believe in compassion, who believe in love, be doing more to elevate those values. Yeah, well, I'm doing that a lot. I talk about meditation and spirituality and well being and ethics a lot. It's got behavioral. I know you've chairman of that deal with secularism and all that kind of thing, but how does that convert into boots on the ground love for other humans, just to talk about what the ground truth is? Here we have consciousness and its contents in each moment. I mean, that's what our lives are. We have changing states of consciousness and this is all there is to care about. All there is to care about are changes for good or for ill in conscious creatures like ourselves. So if you love someone, you care that they be happy and that they no longer suffer, or if they suffer, they suffer in ways that are productive, that lead to even deeper states of, wellbeing, it's not like we're just pure hedonists. There's those kinds of suffering that that has a silver lining that gets us somewhere worth going. But when you're talking about finding meaning in life and making meaning together in community, you're talking about just what it's like to be. You're talking about consciousness. And we actually know a lot about how to improve states of human consciousness and creativity and aesthetic beauty and ethical interactions and not lying and treating people the way you would want to be treated. Something like a precept, like the Golden Rule. Super useful. That's a great piece of software under the heading of baby, right? Yeah, but they don't only come from scripture. People had these ideas outside of religious traditions. You can find Greek philosophers who've said all this. You can find Roman religion. But nothing has to be believed on insufficient evidence to use these ideas and to find them compelling. Of course I agree with you. You don't have to. Oh, I believe that. And there's a cost to believing any dogma. The problem any dogma is humorism. Expensive dogma. It depends what those look at the homeless people on the street now. They are the price. They are the collateral damage of our culture. Sam, are you confident that individual consciousness, like my individual Russell Brand consciousness and your individual Sam Harris consciousness are distinct, separate things that are not qualitatively similar, if not ultimately the same? I know there is zero scientific evidence to suggest that all consciousness is one, but given your research, scientifically and personal spiritual investigations, is there anything that suggests to you that consciousness as a phenomenon may be universal? Well, it's universal in the sense that it is simply the fact of experience. It's the fact that there's something that is like to be you and there's something that is like to be me. And so it's almost analogous to space. It's like the space in this room is seamless right, and undivided. And you ask yourself, well, so what about the space inside this water bottle? Well, where is the water bottle with reference to space? Well, it's the only place it can be. It's right there where the water bottle is. If I move it, it moves. But if you're asking about the space, it has a kind of sameness regardless of what object in that space you're talking about. And consciousness has that property, at least conceptually. Now, we don't know how consciousness arises in the physics of things. We don't know if it's a product of mata. Yeah, I mean, there's certainly good reason to believe that it is, but we don't know how far down it goes. It could be a fundamental constituent of matter, or it could arise on the basis of assemblies of neurons. Is the good reason to believe that it comes from matter, that the more complex an organism is, the more evidence of function in rational consciousness there is. Again, you sort of start the universe from the Big bang. Right. And the idea that we find complex arrangements of matter giving rise to different emergent properties, and life is one of those properties. And all of the features of life reproduction and metabolism and the order we see in the natural world is the result of a process of increasing complexity. And at the end of some significant period in our case, billions of years, you find organisms that exhibit the properties of consciousness. But the only the only consciousness we're sure of, 100% sure of, is the consciousness. In our own case. Now, we can reason by analogy we look at dogs and other complex animals and we can say well, to imagine that they don't have consciousness but only seem to have it, that's actually not parsimonious because they're so similar to us neurologically and in every other way that to imagine that the lights come on somewhere between them and us seems irrational. But how far down that goes is anybody's guess, and intuitions really divide. So if you ask most neuroscientists or philosophers of mind, is there something that it's like to be a fly that's got 100,000 neurons in its brain? It's a kind of coin toss. Right? Now, I think there's again, we simply don't know at what point consciousness emerges. But it's possible that single cells are conscious in some way, right? You wouldn't expect the living world to appear differently if cells were conscious, right, but it would be genuinely mysterious, because when you look at the human brain, there seems to be a lot of neural activity. In fact, most neural activity that is not associated with what you experience as consciousness or I experience as consciousness from a first person side motion. Neural activity is not related to what we experience most of its most anatomical, biological stuff. Yeah. Most of what your brain is doing isn't showing up in your first person experience as consciousness. My individual identity is just like a cherry on the cake while the kidney is in the blast. Yeah. But it's the only thing that ultimately matters, right? And it's the only thing that any of us can be absolutely sure of. This is my line about consciousness being the only thing in the universe that can't be an illusion. I'm not the first person to say this, obviously, but it's the only thing that has to be true of us, no matter how mistaken we might be about everything else. If we're in the Matrix right now and it's just we're just living in a simulation on some alien supercomputer, and none of what we think is real is actually real, consciousness is still real. I mean, consciousness is just simply the fact that anything seems to be happening at all. Or if you're really asleep and dreaming right now and we're not really doing this podcast, you're totally confused about your actual circumstance, but you're actually not confused about the fact that you're conscious. Would explain why I've got no trousers and pants. I was hoping you had trousers on. Hey. But, Sam, see how you just describe consciousness then as potentially sort of a construction? And it's only our personal consciousness that we can be certain is not an illusion. Many of you know about the Maharabata and the bag of agita. Many of these ideas are sort of using a vernacular that is naturally determined by the time in which it was conceived. It talks about these ideas, mayor illusion for me because of like you also said that list of values that would be useful and which I've said, oh, well, they're part of the baby and the bathwater, aren't they? It seems to me that possibly within like, if we can somehow extract what is positive from what is called religion, that it leads us to ideas such as fraternity, unity, oneness compassion. And do you not find connections between what you have learned in neuroscience and what you have learned from studying sort of Buddhism? Oh, yeah, the connections are very direct. But how they know that stuff just because it's just the nature of consciousness. You're talking about people who have spent, especially in the Buddhist case, just an incredible amount of time studying from the first person side what experience is like, what his character is. And so one analogy would be the central claim of Buddhism is not just Buddhism but Buddhism. And I would put several of the Indian traditions, like invite to Vedanta in there with the central claim is that the the self is an illusion, the ego is an illusion. And when I say self, I don't mean that people are illusions. I mean that the sense that you have a subject riding around in your head thinking your thoughts, right? That there's a thinker in addition to the thoughts that's an illusion. Yes. And that makes perfect sense neurologically, because there's no place in the brain for your ego to be sitting. There's no central place where everything comes together. There's no unchanging center in the brain. You're just talking about a cascade of neurophysiology, and everything is distributed everywhere. And there are various parts of the brain that are coming online and off and subserving conscious states and not it's a process. And if you could experience consciousness as a flow of sensory and emotional and interreceptive experience without the sense that there's an unchanging center riding around on that flow right like a man in a boat on the stream of consciousness, if you could experience consciousness without that, that would be an experience that is much more coincident with what we understand neurologically. That would be to experience something that is more true from the third person brain based, what do we see inside the head side? And it just so happens you can experience that that is what meditation is like when you really know how to meditate, the sense that there's a meditator in the head strategically paying attention to experience rather than just pure experience that drops away. Right. So that's one piece of data in favor of introspection here. And it's not a piece that the Western intellectual tradition or the Western spiritual tradition ever got a good handle on. Yes, you can find specific Christian and Jewish and Muslim mystics making these noises. But when they make these noises sufficiently, they start to sound like Buddhists and their coreligionists want to kill them rather often. And not only the corligionists, the powerful enemies within nation states and economic. If people start believing they're not individuals, it's very hard to market at them. But we haven't had a lot of problems with people being killed for not doing enough shopping and shopping malls unless there's a shoot in the shopping mall or unless the stuff they buy in the shopping mall kills them. But if you look at the history of Christianity and Judaism and Islam, you find people who these are explicitly dualistic traditions. You have a soul that exists in relationship to the divine. That division. I would say, Sam Harris, that the reason that bifurcation occurred is precisely because were man's relationship with the divine prioritized in the manner that you've just been describing, that seems neurologically. Appetite were that to become our priority a materialistic, let's call it lifestyle, a mechanistic mechanistic social system such as the ones that we inhabit would be less fertile because if people believed that the ultimate reality was not being experienced by the self, that there was no self that unbinds us, that makes oneness a real possibility. That starts to suggest that your consciousness and my consciousness ultimately are the same or at least there's nothing to suggest that they're any different and that the things that we believe to be different a superficial accents acquired through culture. But that's also true materially and we shouldn't give the material short shrift because the material progress is the thing that frees attention to. You roll back the clock long enough, you find people living in perpetual states of trying not to die, right? You're fending off wild animals, you're exposed to the elements, you're suffering the consequences of disease and you have no concept of what disease is, right? You don't know about the germ theory of disease and your child dies and you think it's because your neighbor shined the evil eye on the child, right? I mean, so it's like you have magical beliefs accounting for changes in the world and they're completely fallacious, right? So the progress we've made in understanding the material world is all to the good, except we have all of these misaligned incentive problems and externalized damages to very good things. Like you want an iPhone, right? But you don't want people jumping off the roof of Foxconn because life is so painful there to make an iPhone, right? So is it possible to make an iPhone without creating just unendurable misery for some number of people? Undoubtedly it must be true, right? We haven't figured it out yet so as to make that the default and we need to do that. But there is no distance between the material and the spiritual here because if consciousness is just a matter of information processing in the right complex systems. And if consciousness could one day be born in our computers, right? Well then we'll have an ethical obligation to not make our computer suffer, right? If Siri could suffer, well, then it matters how you talk to her. And it would matter every used it for stupid question. Mine's bloke actually complicate life. And we're obviously not there yet. Or it certainly seems obvious that we're not there yet. But at a certain point, we will very likely either be in the presence of conscious machines or think we are. They'll emulate conscious systems in a compelling enough way that our default will be I'm in relationship to this thing now. And to withdraw a sense of consciousness in that case would seem just unprincipled and unethical. And we could well build machines that seem to have emotional lives and even have richer emotional lives than we do, because they're going to have access to all of human knowledge, all of the aesthetic products of human ingenuity for all of history. And they'll be able to talk about them and appreciate them and remind you of how much you love certain things and react to your emotion faster and more accurately than your best friends or your spouse. Right? Ultimately we will very likely build these machines and if we haven't understood how consciousness arises in physical systems, we'll think they're conscious and we may be right or wrong about that. And whether we're right or wrong about that will be of huge consequence because it would be an absolutely abhorrent act to build conscious systems that can suffer in ways we don't even understand. And just to cavalierly spawn this off in simulations and on the Amazon cloud and not know what the hell we're doing. For me though of course we've already created this is not just a hypothesis because already all around us, as we've already fleetingly discussed lies scattered the damaged and broken and presumably conscious entities that our fellow human beings, our fellow Englishmen and Americans scattered and broken around us. Sam. So for me here's, two points to Raphael, because we've gone much longer than I intended to. Sure it was Trippy. There's quite a lot of questions still. Let me see if I can I'm fine on time, so you can just I'll see if I can do as. One tumble dryer, one whirling neurological sprawl, one linguistic regurgitation in your general direction here are the things that interest me. One on a podcast I was listening to you do once and it's an idea that sort of more commonly understood that possibly free will is an illusion that decisions are made prior. So morality and ethics sort of suffer somewhat if that's true. Two, I don't think that final part holds. I think you can have all the morality, you can have all the moral you can have your morality and ethics without free will. Have morality and ethics without free will. But their role but the way we evaluate them has to be sort of looked at differently. Do it in one big let me do my vomit go for send you to yours back. Yours is more piecemeal. Mine is sort of a literal slew. Yours has all sorts of rationalism and academia built on minecraft a beautiful architecture. So, Sam Harris, the other thing is when you have taken psychedelics, did you not experience things that are comparable to what you described is neurologically demonstrable and what you've experienced in meditation? I sense that your individual identity is a sort of confection of ideas and sensation and that there is a sort of beautiful oneness. I myself taking hallucigenic. I'm clean now for 15 years. But prior to that, when I used to take hallucigens, the thing I didn't have the vocabulary, artillery or education to understand what was the hell was going on. And I wish I'd been born into some sort of shamanic tradition where people taught you what spirit is, what they taught you what it is to be a man, what they taught you what love is and how to behave and how to create systems and how to father a daughter and how to take care of regardless. I experienced something within my identity. I seemingly be on my identity as a 16 year old boy. I remember thinking oh my God, this is not who I am. I am not this body. My consciousness is other than this temporarily individuated form. Only the distinction. And even just on the physics level, like everything was one, everything is expanding. I am only experiencing time in an animalistic way because of my own entropy and atrophy where I a limitless and eternal material being. I would see myself as part of the whole, as part of oneness. Because the way that I narrativeize my life is as a result of biocentric experience as opposed to objective experience. I've just been subjected to this stimuli and I've built an identity around it. It felt extremely true and it stayed with me ever since and I've revisited it through meditation. Aside from it being an interesting experience intellectually is an interesting experience emotionally and spiritually. And if this sense of oneness does not translate into a sort of a personal ethical code that means I treat people lovingly. What is its value? So it's two questions have you experienced that state and what do you think of it, the moral and ethical implications on an individual and how does it translate into our behavior? Well, there are two states I would want to differentiate. There are two ways in which you can think about the loss of self and the sense of oneness. So to come back to what I said before, you have consciousness in its contents right there's the fact that things are appearing, there's the fact that there is experience and consciousness is the knowing aspect of experience. And in the normal course of events you have ordinary sights and sounds and smells and sensations and thoughts and emotions. And most people go through life thinking every moment of the day. In that context. They don't know how to meditate, they don't have any mindfulness. They have this sort of white noise of discursivity where they're talking to themselves and everything they see and sense and every interaction is filtered through this conversation they're having with themselves. And the world they see visually and the world they sense with touch and other senses is tiled over with concepts. So I look at a bottle and I see bottle, right? This field of light and shadow and color is differentiated by concepts. I see my phone, I see a bottle, I see the table and everything is solidified that way. Now, what happens with psychedelics is your habit pattern of thought and attention is completely bowled over by the pharmacology of whatever you've just ingested acid or mushrooms or any of those classic psychedelics. It's just whoever you are, whatever your talents are at introspection, whether you've ever wanted to meditate or not you are guaranteed to have a change in your experience. If you take a sufficient dose of a psychedelic now, it can be a very chaotic and unpleasant change. It can mimic psychosis. A bad acid trip is really bad and not spiritually uplifting at all. But a good one can put you in a state which is just unimaginably expansive where like all of the normal perceptual categories and emotional barriers between you and the world break down. And there can be this kind of like just this free flowing exchange of energy and sense of oneness where you can, you know, you touch a tree with your hand and there can be kind of a laser like concentration in the sensation of just having your hand make contact with the tree. And they can be just as this sense of the energy of that touch right, can become. It's like you turn you're turning up the volume on this channel of information and making it conscious in a way that it never is in normal life. And so you could spend 2 hours just in this kind of orgasmic union with a tree on the right drug. Now, you can have all of those changes happen in your consciousness like the full pyrotechnics of a psychedelic display without losing the sense of an ego. You can still feel that you are the center of that and it's just so much better or in the chaotic psychotic side, so much worse to be you at that moment. If you go in intensive retreat and you're spending twelve to 18 hours a day meditating you can have psychedelic like changes in the contents of consciousness. But the more important change for me is the insight that there is no center to consciousness, that there simply is consciousness and everything appearing. And when you have that insight it actually doesn't matter what is appearing, it. Doesn't matter when you touch the tree, it feels like a million watts of sublime energy. And there's no barrier between you and the tree that is the same on some fundamental level. That's the same as just seeing a water bottle and picking it up and having a drink. In a completely otherwise ordinary state of consciousness, the center can drop out equally or be present equally in both of those cases. And I'm much more interested in finding this unifying experience of centerlessness in the midst of whatever is happening. Because the problem with the psychedelic experience or any peak experience is that they come and go. They're by nature impermanent, right? And you had to bring some causes and conditions together to make them happen, whether they're pharmacological or meditational. You had to go on retreat for a year and meditate 18 hours a day in order to see those inner lights or whatever it was. Or you had to kind of blow your mind on acid and be kind of useless for the rest of the day in order to have that. It's possible to have no ego and have none of the problems which an ego gives you in a state of otherwise totally ordinary consciousness, in a state that's compatible with having this conversation. You either feel like there's someone behind your face in this moment or not. That's really what it is. If you're looking at me and I'm looking at you, the default state of consciousness is to feel like you're behind your face looking out at a world that's not self like you're over there, you're kind of behind the mask that is your face and you're looking at me. And when I look at you, when I react to something you say, when I say that's clearly bullshit. You haven't thought that through that feeling of you're implicated over there, right? And you begin to react based on that implication. It's possible to lose that and to have just the world remains and yet nothing else changes. There's no strange lights, there's no kundalini in the body. Nothing has to get weird or psychedelic and it doesn't matter if it does get weird and psychedelic in that place. No, you're right that there is a sort of if there is no pragmatism to spirituality, if there is no practical application to these extreme experiences within consciousness, then what is their value? My feeling is that the sort of linguistics and grammar of mechanics, the apparent separateness, the meaning of gesture, the very notion of you and I there are moments where I experience it as temporal. There are moments where, to use the great Bill Hicks's, I think, perfect phrase I feel that we are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. When you talk about the loss of the being behind the mask of the face, for me we are talking about enlightenment and you're talking about rather aesthetic version of that without bells and whistles and pyrotechnics, to use your earlier phrase. But similarly when you talk about the psychedelic that sort of very emotional description of connection and love for me these are the kinds of experiences that we need to convey into an environment that, deprived of that kind of experience and understanding, creates maximum security prisons which find further means for degradation in gangs and separation once within it. That we are living perhaps in a time that is for me determined by the extraction of the spiritual as opposed to the amplification of it. And for me, the distinction that you and I have in the way that we view the world is that I feel that the main agent in extracting this element of spirit without which I don't see a solution for the 7 billion people on this planet. That the main agent is post secular capitalist culture and you religion well, no, it's not only religion, but it's dogmatism, it's bad ideas that are immune from criticism and therefore remain effective. So what we need again it comes back to conversation and violence. We need successful conversations, we need to converge, we need to find the thing that can be said so as to get the people who are wrong to recognize it right? And that's all of us some of the time, right? How long do you want to be wrong? For how long do you want to be living under the sway of a powerful bad idea? Now, there are people who have powerful bad ideas that they class as religious who are determined to live the rest of their lives under the sway of those ideas, no matter how much evidence piles up against them and no matter what the consequences. And so that's why religion for me has a special character. But political dogmatism is in many cases just as problematic. Economic dogmatism, economic dogmatism in certain cases could be the greatest engine of harm we ever see. So again, it matters what is true, it matters what causes systems to work or to reliably fail. It does sound and given that, I think in the last few minutes of our conversation we've got close to something that seems like a fundamental truth that we can agree on, that there seems to be some essence behind temporal individuality that has some kind of seeming universality. Though. How could anybody ever possibly really say that? If we can bring our focus as individuals and as a society to that notion, a notion which does exist in all religions, I would say in a relegated role. And as you said earlier, in a role. That when mysticism let me just ask you, what's the reason to say that it exists in all religions? Because what if it doesn't? Like, what then? Or what if it doesn't equally? Or what if much of the religion repudiates this core truth? Well, I would say that you and I are having the same conversation and agree about something fundamental. And to elect to disagree for the purposes of hypotheses would be a silly thing to do. Because within Christianity, as you've already said, there's a mystical tradition. Within Islam, there is? Within Buddhism, it's sort of more practically, it's in Janism. I don't know all religions, I don't know enough about it. But what I'm saying is that what excites me is when I see perennial mythic templates recurring through folklore, faith, monopheism, pantheism that all seem to infer the truth that you are personally describing, that you have psychedelically described, that you have neurologically described. But it's very important to realize that they don't all do it equally and to pay lip service to the idea that they're all teaching the same thing equally well is creating, I would argue, an immense amount of harm. But there are some dogmas and doctrines that say it doesn't exist and that it's relevant and that it's not there at all. Say, take our two countries. I don't think the dominant ideology ideologies are drawn from religion. They're drawn from post Enlightenment rational, materialistic ideas and from economic ideas and colonial ideas and post Westphalian treaty ideas of state and nation and power. People aren't going like the big problems are derived from a sort of a religious source. And if they are, they are the very components that share those qualities with non religious power structures. The important thing, and the thing that is not present almost by definition in a secular culture is this idea of essence and truth other than through mechanistic exploration through science, which, whilst, as you have already brilliantly explained, is invaluable. I know you've done talks that particularly directly contradict this, but we can't answer the questions of the experience of essence yet. And perhaps one day we will. Perhaps one day we will. But let me give you one example that I think ties together a lot of what we disagree about here and it crystallizes the point I am urging you to take seriously. Do you think that I don't take it seriously? Yeah. You think I don't take it serious? This particular point, let me just crystallize this point. It's the problem of dogmatism. Why? Dogmatism is basically always bad and unforeseeably bad. You can't in advance know how bad a dogma is going to be just by considering the sentence on paper. Dogmatism is just the wrong methodology for getting anywhere worth going because it is the antithesis of open conversation. And this is the example that I now always use, because it just is so clear, the dogma, that all human life is equally sacred, all human lives are equally valuable, and that life starts at the first moment, the moment of conception. Right? Now, this on its face, if you just told me 20 years ago, you said, if someone who believes this, what sort of needless human misery is he going to manufacture? I would say, well, this is the most benign thing you could possibly believe. Who's going to get killed in the service of this dogma, right? Who's going to be tortured for decades in the service of this dogma. But when you look at what people have traditionally done with this specific idea and this is a JudeoChristian idea, and it's in the American Constitution, so it's a nationalistic idea, especially the link to the moment of conception. You look at the millions of Americans who opposed embryonic stem cell research with all the promise that held here we have petri dishes filled with its imagined hundreds of human souls that are microscopic. And to kill those souls would be tantamount to murder. To experiment on those souls would be tantamount to murder. And therefore they didn't want to have a conversation about all of the children and adults with life deranging injuries and diseases who might have been helped had progress been made in that area. Now, that is a psychotic moral attitude made possible by the most benign seeming dogma, right? I mean, literally, we're talking about people who, if you just one aspect of it, there's an understandable squeamishness about human life and we've all seen the little baby pro life type images and stuff. But also, Sam, there's an ongoing dialectic between the scientific community and religious community who's got the right to be the dominant, the parental figure in ownership of the public sphere and the public's soul in inverted commerce. So there's a lot of kickback atavistic kickback from Christian groups over these sort of evidently beneficial scientific endeavors. But it's a sincerely held belief. I believe those are things soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception and then therefore I'm worried. And it's sort of an interesting sort of notion, and I think you and I would be on the same side of that particular argument, clearly. But what I would say is that we need to, again, revert to focusing on what is truly divine or sublime, these moments of interconnectivity and oneness. And then we wouldn't need trash talismans to be placeholders for meaning in a culture that has lost its meaning. I would say in significant part because the role of the spiritual has been relegated to meaninglessness in favor of a materialistic, mechanistic culture that leads ultimately to sort of widespread consumerism and unconsciousness unconsciousness that we are continually in that world of reiterative thought, constant tangled thought, because people have no experience of the sublime of the divine. But again, I just I wouldn't so you have your own fetishistic objects like this notion of consumerism, right? You and I are having this conversation in a podcast studio at Headspace, right? Headspace is a meditation app that the one hand is the quintessence of consumerism. I mean, this is something that only happens in a smartphone, the very phone that I was talking about that's causing people to jump off rooftops, right? And yet I think Headspace is an absolutely good thing to have out there and it is bringing an incredibly useful practice to millions of people, and podcasts bring incredibly useful conversations to millions of people. All of this is enabled by mere materialism and mere consumerism, and there has to be an ethical and spiritually correct way to do all this. It's not a matter of getting rid of the microphones and getting rid of the smartphones, of course, and I'm not suggesting that the same way as you would posit there is an extremist and dangerous version of Islam, which I would say I don't think is an essentially malevolent idea. I would disagree with that strongly. I would say that people having objects isn't necessarily wrong. But to fetishize objects and to believe that some kind of fulfillment and spiritual solution can be achieved through the acquisition of objects is dangerous, and all the more dangerous because it's not so explicitly understood that that's what's happening. The extremist ideology that we already live within is so all encompassing that we cannot see its horizons, that we have lost the tool to understand it and describe it. I'm not talking about sort of a post starliness leftist position. I'm talking about the reinvention and the re embracing of the human soul. Can we find that? You've talked, Sam, endlessly about we need to have a conversation. Well, you and I are having a conversation. I believe in God. You don't believe in God. And it turns out that the differences aren't actually, when it boils down to it, that meaningful, because when it comes to love of our daughters, freedom, compassion, we ultimately believe the same things. I think that unless you and I can find a way of saying okay, I respect that a lot of the people whose guidance I seek most earnestly are atheists, but that doesn't change the fact that I believe that. There are levels of consciousness that are beyond material phenomena, that will never understand through magnifications of the human senses or further analysis of the material objects because there are limitations to the human mind. And ultimately, importantly, Sam, I also think that all of this stuff, all of this ethereal withering has no meaning unless it translates into love and compassion, unless there is some meaning in the idea that there is some connection between a tree and a hand if you achieve the correct mental state. Yeah. Again, there are wrinkles here that I just want to flag. One is that extreme mental pleasure is divorceable from ethics. So, for instance, to go back to this perverse case that we started with suicide bombing, I have good reason to believe that the mental state of a suicide bomber before he you think it's euphoric? Yes. We're not talking about suicidal people who are just trying to end the depression as fast as possible. We're talking about people who are on the cusp of the deepest spiritual reward experiment. You've had so much time with suicide bombers. Take a person like a policeman that's willing to risk his own life to rescue a child in jeopardy. Similarly, their regard for their own life is being abandoned in that moment. And that too, could be described as a kind of euphoria, but because it happens to fit in with our worldview, we're cool with it. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The real consequences for human beings matter, and euphoria is something and a sense of meaning is something that can be totally misaligned with what I think we would agree is an actual ethical relationship and an actual spiritual insight. So euphoria is not a perfect guide. It can be a very misleading guide for wisdom and compassion. That's the point I was making. This is true. I've made some bloody bad decisions as a result of euphoria. Yeah. And the absence of euphoria can also be misleading because they're genuine. Like what I just said about this kind of nondual experience in meditation. You can have it in a very subtle way that doesn't summon, at least certainly doesn't immediately summon, some radical change in the feeling tone of your experience. It can be as simple as just looking at a water bottle. It's just the lights are on and there's no center. Now, you can feel that for just a moment and not recognize its revolutionary significance, because it doesn't come with the upwelling of rapture or bliss that people associate with good meditation or a psychedelic experience or ordinary religiosity like feelings of love while chanting or singing in church or whatever it is, or a football match or wherever. There are various contexts in which these states can be achieved. And I suppose what I believe is that we should be looking to create these states, prioritize these states, and give more people access to them through whatever means. Certainly I don't agree with the imposition of an ideology of dogma on anybody else. And I think the key obstacles to that are huge centralized power bases. And without the removal of that, I don't see how there could be solution. Yeah, well, I don't know how much we disagree about all that. I mean, we haven't again, it's all a matter of alternatives. It's like democracy seems impressively broken to me and capitalism seems impressively broken to me. Except the alternatives seem worse. Winston Churchill. Right. No, but I think we just need to find our way, but just recognize what we're doing. We are trying to grab whatever lever or dial we can get within reach to change the human experience in predictably benign and ultimately positive ways. Do you feel much fear in life? Do you feel afraid much like, in your tummy? I mean, not in your brain. It's more in my brain than in fact you feel everything in your brain, don't you? Well, no, it's not that I can't feel fear, but the things that I worry about publicly, as a matter of being someone who talks and writes about these things, is not indicative of my feeling adrenalized and fearful all the time. I mean, it's not that you can actually the, the thing that worries me most, again, at the brain level is that the greatest risks to human well being are hard to take seriously. It's like, I mean, they're the people who think, who professionally think about nuclear war and the consequences of proliferation, you know, people like William Perry, you know, that I guess he's close to 90 now. He was 85. These people think that we are at the most dangerous place we've been in the last 75 years with respect to the likelihood of a nuclear exchange. Right? So like the Cold War is not only not over, it is from Perry's point of view, we are in another Cuban missile crisis right now and nobody's worried about it. With Russia or Korea? Well, yeah, all of it. But I think it's the possibility of a mistake. The book I would recommend your listeners read, which should make them suitably afraid, is Eric Schlosser's book Command and Control, which is just the story of how many mishaps and how haphazard our stewardship of these nuclear weapons has been. It's been by dint of sheer dumb luck that we haven't nuked ourselves or provoked an exchange between Russia and the United States based on just bad information. But so what is worrisome here is that it's hard to spend more than five minutes worrying about that on any given day. You know, like, well, I can worry I can worry a lot about totally trivial things in my own life, right? Like if my website goes down, you know, the feeling, my feeling of of kind of moral emergency is at eleven, right? Like what the fuck is happening? My website is down, I want to call my website developers and it's an emergency. And yet when talking about when I hear that the people who make it their business to think about the prospect that whole cities may be annihilated by the biggest bombs in our lifetime when I hear that they are more worried than they have ever been five minutes after we talk about this, I'm not going to be thinking about it. Right. And that worries me. It's hard to have an appropriate emotional response to what we think the data show. And so it is with the suffering of other people. You feel it about the homeless person you can see on this sidewalk that you happen to be walking on, but to hear that 90,000 people in Los Angeles County are homeless, it's inconceivable and it's hard to summon an appropriate emotional response. Yes. I wonder why that is. Perhaps, Sam, we have been bought out of alignment with what we're capable of receiving, what we're capable of transmitting. Talking of sort of anthropology, I suppose that perhaps human beings have been so extracted from these conditions where you said we wouldn't even recognize what disease was. We have become as gods. We have surmounted so many obstacles that perhaps we are no longer living within a palate that is appropriate for this particular mammal. But we also just have bugs in our hardware and software that we are bad at correcting for. And that's why, again, systemic corrections like good laws and good tax codes and good governments and good institutions, I think will do much heavier lifting for us than all of us getting our heads straight and keeping them straight day after day. So, I mean, the example that I'll give here is based on the work of Paul Slovic, who found it was just it's a propensity for moral error that is totally shocking. So if you tell people, you give them, like, the classic sort of UNICEF pitch, like, here's, you know, one little girl in Sudan, you know, her name is is Jenny. She you know, her parents were killed. She needs your help. $5 a day, we'll keep her in school and all the rest, right? You tell that story with one identifiable child, you get the maximum response of compassion and and and actual altruism from people. You ask them how much they'll give every month, and you get their maximum number. If you show that same girl to a different group of people along with her brother, and you say, here's Jenny, and here's Jacob. They've suffered this horrible atrocity $5 a day, we'll go $5 a month, we'll keep them in school, et cetera. The altruism and the self assessment of compassion reliably goes down, just adding more to the scope of the problem, right? And it's the same girl and the same boy. You add ten, it goes down further, it goes through the floor. And if you add background background statistics, if you say, this little girl Jenny, she's got this terrible problem, you can help, and there's 100,000 girls just like her in Sudan alone, the compassion just washes out. Kind of apathy produces a kind of despair and a kind of hope. There's no point in doing anything, and so we have to correct for that. The teleology of civilization then, seems somewhat broken. The idea that bigger and bigger states and sort of a globally mandated government, these would seem to be poor ideas, like, what may work for human beings for the 7 billion is decentralization. And to achieve that, to achieve real change, where do you suppose the fulcrum will need to be applied? Who are the people for whom the 90,000 homeless and little Jenny and the 100,000 others are not really a problem because their system is operating precisely as it was intended to operate? Well, it's all of us. Again, there are not that many bad people. We have a default level of selfishness in virtually everyone all the time, and we have to figure out how to game that and channel that successfully toward more benign ends. What you want the perfect system and this is what capitalism promises but doesn't deliver, is everyone selfishly seeking happiness for themselves and prioritizing the happiness of their families, their loved ones, and then maybe extending that circle more and more as they learn more and more about the other problems in the world. They'll never extend that circle perfectly, or most people certainly won't. And what you want is a system that captures all of that energy in a way that allows all boats or most boats to rise with the same tide most of the time. And is there a perfect solution to all of these zero sum and positive sum arrangements? I don't know. But there's certainly better and worse ones. And we know there are some bad ones on offer that we don't want to experiment with again, and we want to refine our current set of solutions so that life gets better and better. The truth is, this can sound like a very despairing conversation, but life has gotten better and better for virtually everyone in our lifetime. I mean, if you look at the last century, it's something like 10% of people now live in extreme poverty, and 90% of people don't. We've got 7 billion people. 90% of them are not in what we're calling extreme poverty. Something like 150 years ago that was flipped. It was 90. Ten the other way, it was 90% in extreme poverty. I suppose. Again, though, Sam, the metric by which we judge poverty and the metric by which we judge human experience is something that could be long debated. And for me, I suppose what I'm interested in and here I think we concur is truth, a truthful experience. I listen to a podcast you did once, and like with someone I also respect very much, Jordan Peterson, and it got caught up a long while on some sort of semantic tangle. But what I feel is that I am interested in my own sweet, selfish, egotistical way in conveying and transmitting love and change. And I think that the point where I feel pressure needs to be applied, if that's even the right attitude, need it be combative for me the sort of the focus. But I think individual personal revolution and personal salvation, I think is an important component. And the introduction of ideas that go beyond rationalism and materialism may be a necessary spur for significant change. I feel like rationalism materialism lead people to believe, well, we're just individuals. We're here for a short amount of time, pleasure, sensation. It seems to me that just looking around, that seems to be what is happening. It seems to disengage people. And some of the examples you've given about human compassion, it seems very hard for people to access love, to access community within the operating system that currently abides. I would agree, yeah. And again, what you're talking about are systems and institutions that just how good could a school be, right? How good could entertainment be? How good could the Internet be? How good could social media be in terms of leading us where we want to go both personally and interpersonally. And I think we are at the beginning of perfecting those things. And it's not it's not that we'll reach perfection, but all of these things are obviously so broken as they are now that we just don't know how much better life would be if we got halfway to the optimum. There's an immense amount of work to do and the work will be done on the basis of having insights into truth and having a factbased discussion about the consequences of turning any of these knobs. Sam Harris in the background there's the gallery to this small facility that headspace the brilliant app in spite of the contradictions of having existed in a consumerist technological world, which I would like to give props, Steve, I realize you're backwards against the wall on that one. I mean, but you know, where we're going, there ain't no wall to sort of semi quote Doc Brown in the transcendent realm. The wall, the me, the you all won, all glorious oneness. People have been holding up like ice skating cause like 45 minutes. 45 minutes late. Yeah, we're at 120 minutes now. Just the duration of the podcast. For me, it's been a great joy and a great pleasure and rigorous intellectual workout to speak with you and enjoyed it very much. Sam Harris I'm most grateful and I've returned to the idea that conversations are what's likely to produce change, particularly conversations between people that don't automatically agree on the most significant issue. So I'm incredibly grateful to you. Yeah, likewise. Well, thank you. Thanks man. Keep it safe. God speed. God bless you. Sam Harrison. Science and everything. If you're enjoying the Waking Up podcast, there are many ways you can support it@samharris.org. Support? As a supporter of the podcast, you'll get early access to tickets to my live events and you'll get exclusive access to my Ask Me Anything episodes as well as to the AMA page on my website where you can pose questions and vote on the questions of others. And please know that your support is greatly appreciated. It's listening like you, that make the show possible./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, this is an Ask Me Anything episode and just one housekeeping item here. I noticed the other day that Amazon canceled my affiliates account. This is the account that allows me to post links to books and to have some portion of your shopping on Amazon through those links come back to support the podcast at no extra cost to you. And they did this because apparently I was in violation of their policy. You can't tell your podcast listeners that following these Amazon links does support the podcast. I'm not sure why they consider this some kind of unethical inducement. It's obvious that this is why podcasters and content creators use Amazon affiliates links. But honestly, I had never read the fine print and I don't know how frequently it gets updated. I was certainly not in conscious violation of their policy, and I don't see anything unethical about either way of thinking about this. Obviously, Amazon's not going to have any policy they want. But this is just to inform you that those of you who have been supporting the podcast this way can no longer do that and that those links are now retired. The only way is to support the podcast are through my website at Samharrisupport or through Patreon, and you can find a link to Patreon also on my support page. But I mentioned this for another reason. This is a larger problem that people are running into online. People who are creating content. Those who use YouTube ads, which I don't, are often finding their videos demonetized suddenly based on some algorithmic or editorial concern about the content. Podcasters and videographers are just finding that their online businesses evaporate overnight. And I've heard from many ex Muslims and secularists that their Facebook pages have been canceled based on some perceived blasphemy or even an organized campaign launched by their religious critics. So it's just a fact that many content creators are very vulnerable to the decisions made by these platforms. And it's easy to lose sight of this vulnerability when we're on social media and building a platform. There platforms that can be not only useful but indispensable for writers and artists and podcasters. We are using someone else's platform. We are essentially share cropping for Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. And this can all go away overnight. It's the Wild West out here. Still, when it comes to producing digital content. Okay, so this is an ask me anything podcast. I went out on Twitter asking for questions, and it looks like I got 1400 of them, or at least 1400 responses to the tweet. Now, I'm going to go through these more quickly than usual in the interest of both hitting more points and seeing if I can do it. One of the features I'm building into my meditation app is a Q and a feature where I can answer questions live, so I can announce that I'm going to be on the app for the next hour, come and ask questions. And it'll be like an audio version of Periscope where you can type in questions and I can respond. And I've never done this, really, so let's see how it works. Maybe this feature is something I don't need at all because it'll just cause me to put my foot in my mouth again and again. Okay, first question. Is it possible that the mindfulness notion of the self being an illusion is itself an illusion? Well, almost anything is possible. I'll tell you why I think it's not an illusion. The classic illusion is something that seems a certain way, but then you pay more attention to it, you study it more carefully, and it seems another way, right? So it collapses into another form on the basis of paying more attention to the phenomenon. This can be true of visual illusions. You think there's a triangle there, but then you see that the sides of the triangle don't even exist, right, because they've been merely implied. So you pay more attention and you see that there is no triangle there on the page, even though there seems to be one. Now, the sense of self, the sense that there's a subject in our heads, a thinker of thoughts, that is a feeling that if you pay more careful attention to, it goes away. And every time it comes back, once you actually know how to pay attention, it is by virtue of being distracted, being captured by something else, being lost in thought, actually. And then when you pay attention again, it goes away. And once you learn how to pay attention, once you really learn how to meditate, it goes away every time you reliably fail to find this feeling that you've been calling. I now, I talk much more about this in my book Waking Up. I will talk much more about this in my forthcoming meditation app. But the idea that there may really be a self that just disappears, or seems to disappear every time you look for it is no more compelling to me than the idea that there really is a triangle on the page in the Kinesa Klein illusion, and that it only seems to disappear every time you look for its sides. And if you're not familiar with the illusion I'm talking about, Google Kinesa Kline triangle, and you'll see a triangle bounded by three partial circles, or what seems to be a triangle. But again, much more on that in my book Waking Up. And in my forthcoming app, tell me some real life examples that are good for society and that are informed by Charles Murray's research in The Bell Curve. I guess I should say a few things about the Charles Murray podcast. Got some considerable criticism for that. Glenn Greenwald called me a racist. No surprises there. But I got actually much less criticism than I would have thought, as did Charles. I think we were both pleasantly surprised by the reception. I think he said in his email to me that I appear to have gotten more criticism for having him on the podcast than he was getting for being himself. But in any case, I didn't get all that much. I think people got the point of what I was doing there, which makes me happy. The point of the conversation was not to talk about differences in IQ across race. As I think I made clear, that topic doesn't really interest me and I share some of the skepticism communicated in this question. When I asked Charles what what the point of this kind of research was, many of you felt that his answer was insufficient and a little confusing. I can tell you what I took his answer to be. He seemed to be saying that if we are misled by an irrational expectation that intelligence must be the same statistically across populations, then we will perceive any difference in representation of racial groups or ethnic groups in the various walks of life as being synonymous with racism or bad policy. To take another potentially inflammatory example, it would be conceivable to think that because the number of Jews in the NBA isn't exactly in register with the number of Jews in the population, well, then there's some latent antisemitism operating there keeping Jews off the basketball court. Now, does anyone think that? I doubt it. But Charles's general concern is clearly that our expectations and our policies track real facts in the world and that we not go in search of problems that don't exist and that we not make other problems that clearly do exist worse by giving them bad remedies. Now, our conversation didn't go into social policy with any depth at all, and I think at one point in the podcast I simply said I'm not informed enough about the consequences of various policies to even have that conversation. But the real purpose of that podcast episode was to perform a kind of exorcism on the topic and Murray's reputation. Again, we're talking about a man who cannot stand up on a college campus without encountering the threat of being physically hounded off of it. UC Berkeley just the other day declared that it could not keep Anne Coulter physically safe were she to come to the campus to talk to the college Republicans. Now, I don't agree with Anne Coulter about much. I'm not at all inclined to invite her on the podcast because I think what she says is either boring or insincere. But it's pretty clear we are having a breakdown of civil society when a college cannot keep her safe and puts the onus on her, at least implicitly, and her views and the views of those who want to hear her speak, rather than on this moral panic that is shutting down conversation on the left. So I wanted Murray here above all because I realized that I had been somewhat complicit in his defamation merely by my benign neglect of his work. Once it became clear to me that he was a well intentioned and careful scholar, whatever the merits of his research in fact are, he was not at all the golem that had been created by the hysteria on the left. So I had that conversation with Charles. I enjoyed it. Most of you seem to find it quite illuminating, and I have no regrets there. We have to be able to talk about facts without at every turn claiming that those with whom we disagree are evil. You want to see some criticism of The Bell Curve that came out contemporaneous with this publication in this Twitter feed. Michael Shermer linked to one of the articles published in Skeptic magazine. If you go to Skeptic.com and search Bell Curve, presumably you'll get some older articles there, at least one of which is critical. But I should say that there's nothing that I have heard since my podcast with Charles that suggests to me that he was misrepresenting the state of the science circa 2017. In fact, one person I heard from was Richard Hayer, an emeritus professor at the University of California, Irvine. Richard is a PhD in psychology who studies the neurobiology of intelligence, and he's written a very recent book for Cambridge University Press entitled The Neuroscience of Intelligence. I have now read part of that book just arrived the other day, and what's clear from the parts I've read and from his email to me is that the basic science that Murray was discussing has held up. As controversial as it still is in some quarters, the notion of general intelligence seems valid. IQ tests can test for it. There's no reason to think that we are unable to do this in an unbiased way. And the results of these tests are predictive of a wide variety of outcomes, educationally, occupationally and otherwise. And there seems to be absolutely no question that intelligence is highly heritable and correlates with neurophysiological facts at the level of the brain. So, again, this is not my area of special interest, and none of this is to claim that intelligence is the only thing that dictates success in life. I'm sure many of you know some very smart people who haven't done much of anything with their lives or have done some very questionable things. I certainly know such people, and no doubt we will find out more about the brain basis of intelligence in the coming years. Whether we will be able to augment it directly by brain machine interface, that's another question that has come up. I see repeatedly here. Many of you have asked what I think of Elon Musk's new company neural link and his goal of building a brain computer interface that not only will be useful for people suffering neurological injury or disease but will be so useful and so readily adopted that we will all become cyborgs and plug our brains directly into the cloud. Well, first I should say that I don't have any inside information on this. I actually haven't spoken to Elon about this much, apart from early conversations about the fact that he was doing this. Most of what I know about the company I learned recently from Tim Urban's blog post about Elon and Neuralink, which you can read on the weight. But why blog? And if you don't know Tim Urban and his blog, you you really should. He's fantastic. He's another one of these content creators who you can support on Patreon as I do. He's amazing. I'll have him on the podcast at some point because he's doing something very unique and he's written these very long, really book length blog posts on Elon and his various companies. He's done it for SpaceX and Tesla, and he just did one for Neurolink. So you can read there just how daunting the technical challenges are in doing this. Just what it means to put an array of whatever material composition on the cortex or implant anything into the brain, hoping to be able to read out the activity of vast numbers of neurons so as to get the data of conscious and unconscious thought out into the world much less reading programs from the world back into the brain so as to influence its functioning. This is an incredibly daunting challenge. I think it's no exaggeration to say this is the most ambitious thing, technically, that we can imagine. When you consider the possibility of helping people whose brains have been damaged either by injury or illness, well, then this is totally uncontroversial. It's a wonderful thing to be tempting, and there's already some progress on those fronts. But when you imagine the bigger picture of fundamentally augmenting human intelligence so that we're not in a losing competition with the machines of the future well, obviously there are a few assumptions there that will be controversial and at least one that strikes me as potentially far fetched. And that's the assumption that it will be possible to do this in a way that is sufficiently noninvasive, so that we'll all want to have our brains connected to the cloud. Anything that requires neurosurgery obviously, is setting the bar pretty high, and it remains to be seen just how noninvasive a brain machine interface can become. But the technical challenges are fairly astounding, and Tim Urban's blog post will give you a good sense of what they are. Do you think reducing wild animal suffering is a moral blind spot of modern humans or a moral error? I remember hearing about some vegans who thought it a moral duty to prevent various predators on the African savannah from killing their prey. Who knows if that was just a slander of vegans, but I'm sure somebody's capable of thinking that it is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of an ethical concern for animals. But the underlying fact is that nature is not a theater of moral concern, really. It is an abattoir. Everything is getting eaten. Every animal, with the exception of the apex predators, lives in perpetual flight from the other animals that want to make it a meal. There is no way to intercede here that doesn't directly cause the starvation and therefore misery and death of some other species. And then when you add the layer of contagious illness and parasites right. The fact that every creature is more or less all the time being victimized by various worms and amoebas, it's pretty clear that there is no all seen and all powerful, compassionate God who set this place up for general equanimity. So, yeah, I don't see how we intercede on behalf of the rabbits and the pigeons and take a position against the foxes and coyotes and hawks. I do feel a little strange about people who keep pet snakes and repeatedly feed them mammals like mice and rats. There's a cognitive hierarchy there that I wouldn't want to keep standing on the wrong side of day after day. I think the rats and the mice suffer more than the snakes. That could just be my warm blooded bias, but the neurological details would back me up there. Next question. How is Brazilian Jiujitsu coming? Slowly as ever. I absolutely love it. I'm still in the mode of perpetually mitigating injury, so I don't do it nearly as much as I would want to. I think I will probably be a blue belt for the rest of my life at this rate, but it does remain one of the most gratifying hours I can spend doing anything. What are your thoughts on Kevin Kelly's article? The Myth of Superhuman AI. Actually, I've read the article and Kevin got in touch with me, and we're going to do a podcast, I think, in about a month here. Have to check the calendar, but it's it's already scheduled, and I look forward to that. We we disagree about many things on this topic, and that should be a fun conversation. I think we disagree about religion and a few other things, too, so I'm looking forward to that. How do you think your friend, the late, great Christopher Hitchens, would have dealt with the Trump presidency? Well, eloquently, no doubt, and he has missed more than ever at this point. I would say. Once again, many people are under the impression that he hated the Clintons so much that he would have obviously sided with Trump. Given what I know about Hitch, that seems almost perfectly delusional. I honestly cannot imagine a candidate and his surrogates who are more at odds with Hitch's deepest intellectual values, the lack of honesty and real intellectual engagement with history and with policy and with facts as they can be known. But unfortunately, we do not have the pleasure of his company now. And if you think I'm soft on the Clintons, go back and listen to my podcast with Andrew Sullivan that we did in the run up to the election. I certainly share most of Hitch's view of both Clintons, but we now have the president, we have, and barring some impeachment proceeding relative to the Russian hacking scandal, it would seem we have to make the best of it for the time being. Will you do a podcast with Ben Shapiro on religion? Many people have asked that I do something with Ben. I am certainly open to it. In fact, Dave Rubin has threatened to get us together on his show. I'm not entirely sure what we would get into, but Ben is obviously smart and we disagree about many things, although Trump is not one of them. Ben is a last I looked, not a Trump fan, but he is a conservative, and I believe he's a conservative or even Orthodox Jew. Not sure, but no doubt there's something to disagree about there, and I am open to it. Not sure when it's going to happen. However, some of you have noticed my trolling of Jacob Willink and his trolling of me online. I forget how this started. I think I once revealed that I was a fan of Downton Abbey on a podcast and started getting slammed for it on Twitter. And then I just went out, I just lurched at Jocko on Twitter saying something like, well, I happen to know that when Jocko is doing his deadlifts in his basement at four in the morning, he's watching old episodes of Downton Abbey. Isn't that right, Jocko? Those of you who don't know, Jocko Jaco is a Navy Seal. And now New York Times number one bestselling author of the book Extreme Ownership with his Navy Seal co author Leif Babin. And Jocko is also a jujitsu black belt. He's about the most macho guy you will ever meet, but also one of the nicest guys. Anyway, so people have been trying to get us together to debate free will, I think, because his kind of core ethic and productivity hack is to take what he calls extreme ownership over the things that happen in your life when your efforts come to knot. Don't blame the world, don't blame other people. You have to own the whole process. That's how you improve, that's how you inspire more trust in people who are collaborating with you. There's a lot to be said about the wisdom of doing that, and people seem to think that this is at odds with my view of free will. It may be in certain cases, but generally speaking, I don't think it is. But in any case, people want us to debate free will, which I would be happy to do. So we've been pitted together online and Jocko has been threatening to demolish me in debate and I have been threatening to physically demolish him. And I would encourage those of you who listen to the Jocko podcast to listen to his more recent episodes, to detect any sign of fear in him. He can only conceal it for so long. He's got to be under a lot of pressure knowing that I am out here training, hearing from some people here who used to be religious and got reasoned out of their religion by me and others. It's amazing that many people think this never happens. It happens all the time and I continually see the evidence of it. So this idea that you can't reason people out of their faith is just not true. What you can't generally do is do it within the hour of a scheduled debate or otherwise on demand, but it happens. How would someone lose their faith? Just a blow to the head or a good scare? No, generally it's one of two ways. They either discover the ways in which various doctrines don't make a lot of sense, or they don't want the sort of life that seems to be dictated by any kind of serious adherence to revelation. So some combination of those two either doesn't make sense or doesn't lead somewhere good. But the first reason, I think, is always the more compelling people will make fairly impressive sacrifices to their own happiness and even to the happiness of their children, if they believe that the doctrines that justify and even mandate those sacrifices are true. So the question of truth is everyone's concern. This is another point of confusion, the idea that religious people, religious fundamentalists, aren't really concerned about what's true. No, they're as concerned as anyone. They're far more concerned, in fact, about truth than many so called if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the waking up podcast. This is Sam Harris. OK. In this podcast, I'm actually releasing an interview that I did on someone else's podcast. That podcast is after on. And the interviewer is Rob Reed. Rob founded the company which built Rhapsody, the music service that created the unlimited on demand streaming model that Spotify and Apple and others have since adopted. Rob has also spent lots of time throughout the Middle East, including a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Cairo. And he's an investor, but he's mainly a novelist these days. And he started his podcast originally as a limited run to promote his novel, also titled After On. But now he's going to continue it indefinitely. And many people who heard this interview originally thought it was unusually good. Not that I'm unusually good in it, but that we covered a lot of ground, and we certainly did. Rob and I talk about publishing and psychedelics and terrorism and meditation, free speech and many other things. And in fact, Chris Anderson, the curator of the Ted conference, heard it and got in touch with me and suggested that I release the interview on my own podcast. And he felt this interview covered topics that I don't often touch, or at least don't touch in that way. And I don't take strong recommendations from Chris lightly. The man surely knows how to put on a show. So, with Rob's permission, I am giving you a slightly edited version of the podcast he released. I have to give you a little warning about the sound quality. We tried to clean it up on our end, but there are a lot of popped peas that's probably best listened to in your car or at your desk. But Rob is a great interviewer and he since had many other interesting guests on his podcast. So if you like the angle he took with me here, you might check him out@afteron.com and you can find out much more about his book there, too. And now, without further delay, I bring you the conversation I had with Rob Reed. So, Sam, thank you so much for joining me here at Tom Merritt's lovely home studio. Yeah, happy to do it. You were a guest on the Art of Charm podcast about a year ago, and they asked you to describe what you do in a single sentence, and you said, I think, in public, which I thought was a very elegant way of putting it. I was hoping you might elaborate on that. And in this case, feel free to use as many sentences as you wish. Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought that back to me, because I would have totally forgotten that description and it's a useful one. Increasingly, I'm someone who's attempting to have hard conversations about what I consider some of the most important questions of our time. So the intersection of philosophy, particularly moral philosophy and science and public policy and just things in the news, topics like race and terrorism, the link between Islam and jihadism and things that are in the news but that have when you begin to push on these issues, they run very, very deep into the core of human identity and how we want our politics to proceed and the influence of technology on our lives. You can almost you pull one of these threads, everything that people care about starts to move. Yeah. There's a great deal of interconnection, and I'd say, and correct me if this is wrong, but I'd say you started thinking in public and earnest perhaps back in 2004 with the release of your, your first book, the End of Faith, in which you argued stridently against all types of organized religion and in favor of atheism. It peaked at number four. Was it on the New York Times bestseller list or thereabout no, I don't even remember. It was on for, I think, 33 weeks. But I think four sounds about right. Yeah. So obviously you got out there in in a big way with a book you've since written. Is it four more bestsellers? New York Times bestsellers? Yeah, that designation means less and less, as it turns out. But they're best sellers. And they're best sellers. There are they're the best sellers that bounce off the list, which most of mine have been, and then they're those that stay on forever. But yeah, I've had five that have hit the list. And what's intriguing to me is that quite recently, you have developed a wildly successful podcast, and I was hoping you could characterize the reach that the podcast has attained compared to that of these very, very successful series of books that you did. Yeah, the numbers are really surprising. And don't argue for the health of books, frankly, a very successful book in hardcover. Your book comes out in hardcover first. Normally, some people go directly to paperback, but if you are an author who cares about the future of your book and reaching lots of people, you publish your hardcover, and you are generally very happy to sell 100,000 books in hardcover over the course of that first year before it goes to paperback. Indeed, ecstatic, that would probably put you in the top percentile of all books published by major publishers. Oh, yeah. And that is very likely going to hit the best seller list. Maybe if you're a diet book, you need to sell more than that. But if you sold 10,000 in your first week, depending on what else is happening, you almost certainly have a best seller. And in the best case, you could sell 200,000 books or 300,000 books in hardcover, and that's a newsworthy achievement. And then there's the one 100th of 1% that sell millions of copies. So with a book, I could reasonably expect to reach 100,000 people in a year, and then maybe some hundreds of thousands over the course of a decade. Right. So all my books together now have sold. I haven't looked at the numbers, but I'm pretty sure I haven't reached 2 million people with those books. Somewhere between a million and 2 million. But with my podcast, I reach that many people in a day. And these are long form interviews and sometimes it's standalone, sometimes it's just me just talking about what I think is important to talk about for an hour or two. But often I'm speaking with a very smart guest and we can go very deep on any topic we care about. And again, this is not like going on CNN and speaking for 6 minutes in attempted sound bites and then you're gone. People are really listening in depth. And so if we were to clone you in two right now and one of the Sam Harris's that we ended up with was to record a podcast, and the other Sam Harris was to write your entire literary output, who would require more time. Well, that's the other thing. Forget about the time it takes to write a book, which in some cases is years, in some cases is months, depending on how long the book is and how research driven it is. But it's a lot of time. It's a big commitment to write a book. Once it's written, you hand it into your publisher and it takes eleven months for them to publish it. So there's that. Wait, there's a lack of immediacy. Yeah. And that increasingly that makes less and less sense. Both the time it takes to do it and the time it takes to publish it don't compare favorably with podcasting. In defensive writing, there are certain things that are still best done in written form. Nothing I said has really any application to what you're doing. I mean, you're writing novels. Reading a novel is an experience that people still want to have. Yes, but what I'm doing in nonfiction, that's primarily argument driven, right? There are other formats in which to get the argument out. And I still plan to write books because I still love to read books. And taking the time to really say something as well as you can affects everything else you do. It affects the stuff you can say extraneously in a conversation like this as well. So I still value the process of writing and taking the time to think that carefully about things. The thing that is striking, though, is the extraordinary efficiency that the podcast has become as a way for you and many others to disseminate ideas in terms of the hours that you put into the creation of it, which are nontrivial. I'm learning that as a very new podcaster myself, it ain't easy to research and put one of these things together, but compared to a book, there's just incredible leverage there. Now another thing, speaking of large audiences, I believe I read somewhere that you were featured in the most heavily watched Bill Maher video clip of all time. Do you know if that statistic is accurate. I suspect that it still is accurate. It was at the time, it was the most viral thing that ever got exported from the show. And you were discussing Islamophobia with the then future Batman. Yeah. And why do you suppose that clip became so widespread? I mean, Bill Maher is no stranger to controversy. The exchange between you and Ben Affleck and between Marr and Ben Affleck did become quite heated. But in any given month, there are many interactions on cable news and on Sunday talk shows that are at least as lively. What do you think it was about that that made it go so widespread? And also, if you characterize it, if you care to just characterize it briefly, for those who haven't seen it, it was a combination of things. It was the topic, it was the fact that it was a star of Ben Affleck's caliber going kind of nuts and going nuts in a way that was very polarizing to the audience. So what happened briefly is I was actually on not to talk about Islam or jihadism or terrorism or anything related to this topic. I was on to talk about my book on meditation, Waking Up, where I was trying to put our spiritual concerns, our contemplative concerns, on a rational footing. And it just so happened that this is a hobby horse that Bill and I have written for a number of years, talking about the unique need for reform in Islam. I have an argument against all faith based religion, but part of my argument is to acknowledge that religions are not the same. They teach different things, they emphasize different points. And to its discredit and to the reliable immiseration of millions of people, islam emphasizes intolerance to free speech and intolerance to political equality between the sexes and rather direct connection between suicidal violence and martyrdom, and hence all the problems we see throughout the Muslim world at the moment and our collision with it. So in any case, that topic came up of Islam and jihadism in the middle of this interview, and Ben Affleck jumped in. And clearly he had been prepared by somebody to hate me because his intrusions into my interview with Bill were otherwise inexplicable because he was sort of at my throat. Even before the topic of Islam came up, I was still talking about meditation and he and he said something snide, again, in a mid show interview that is normally protected from the intrusions of the rest of the panel. So it was weird. And then the thing just lit up with him seemingly completely misunderstanding what Bill and I were saying, but doing it in an increasingly adamant and ultimately quite heated way. So he was unhinged and not making any sense from my point of view. And he was calling us racists and bigots and in some ways proving the very points that you were making. Yeah, in every way. My point was, listen, people get emotionally hijacked on this issue. They don't actually follow the logic of what is being said. I'm criticizing ideas, not people. Islam is a religion subscribed to, to one or another degree by people who call themselves Muslims. But we have to speak specifically about the consequences of specific beliefs. It becomes incredibly relevant to know what percentage of people think dying in defense of the faith is the best thing that could possibly happen to you, or that apostates should be killed. So we're talking about the consequences of ideas, and there are many, many millions of Muslims who would repudiate both of those ideas. So obviously I'm not talking about them when I'm talking about the problem of jihadism or a belief in martyrdom or apostasy. And so he proved himself totally incapable of following the plot, just as I was talking about that very problem, and went berserk. And the most depressing thing about that encounter was to see how many people on the left, and in particular apologists for Islam and so called moderate Muslims who viewed his performance as just the height of ethical wisdom. Right. Like he had unmasked Maya and Bill's racism, as though being Muslim was to be a member of a race that non sequitur was the first thing people should have noticed. But he was celebrated as just this white knight who came to the defense of beleaguered brown people everywhere. Right? Really, I missed that part of the to a degree that is just I mean, if you've looked on social media in the immediate aftermath of that, it was just a tsunami of moral and political confusion. Really. It was like a nuclear bomb of identity politics. Well, what's interesting to me is I looked at that in preparation for today's talk and it would seem the tide has changed. I looked at the YouTube clip and I know that you've said in other places that YouTube seems to be a particularly bad cesspool for really vitriolic commentary at times. And I figured I'd scan it quickly to get a sense of like, what's the percentage breakdown? And I looked at almost 100 comments, I believe, and I did not find a single one that was pro Ben Affleck. I mean, people were making the points that you just made that he was essentially making your points for you, in that when you start talking about ideas, people presume that you're trying to paint with a broad brush people which you were not trying to do. So it, it might have changed since then, but at in the immediate aftermath, there was a very pro Ben kind of reaction to it, it sounds like. Yeah. And it continues in a way that is quite shameful. So, for instance, the comic Hassan Minaj, who just did the White House Correspondents Dinner, so he's now the one that Trump didn't attend, but he's his stature has, has risen among comics of late and he just released a Netflix special yeah. Where he talks about this, this issue just praising Ben Affleck to the skies and saying, quite libelously that Bill in that exchange, advocated for, quote, rounding up Muslims and containing them as though in concentration camps, at the very least, internment camps. How this got past Netflix factor that as a fact, not as a punchline. No. Bill Maher said on camera, a YouTube tube clip viewed by millions of people. Round them up. This is his position, that he wants Muslims rounded up and contained. Right? And happily, he didn't mention me by name. He was talking about Bill and Ben in that episode. But it's just pure delusion and slander. It's a massive applause line in his world. So this is a kind of form of asymmetric warfare. Whenever I inadvertently misrepresent the views of my opponents, I mean, no matter how malicious the opponent right, if I say something that gets their view wrong and it gets pointed out to me, I publicly apologize for it. I am absolutely scrupulous to represent their views faithfully as they represent themselves. Yes, because some of this gets fairly bloody. But when I'm pushing back against my critics, and again, no matter how malicious, I am always holding myself to the standard of articulating their position in a way that they couldn't find fault with, and then I can then go on and demonstrate what's wrong with their view. Anyone who criticizes Islam as a doctrine, or really anyone who touches any of these third rails that have become so fraught among liberals and progressives to talk about race, to talk about gender, to talk about really any of these variables around which identity politics have been built, reliably produces people who think that defaming you at any cost is fair game. So they will attribute to you views that not only do you not hold, they are the opposite of the views you hold. They will make any attempt to make that stick. Do you think in their minds, it's an ends justifies the means thing where they are so committed to their position and they are so utterly certain that their position is objectively right, that they're saying, okay, I know he didn't say round them up, but I'm going to say that he said round them up because that will eliminate his credibility. And the elimination of his credibility, even by a dishonest mechanism, serves such a higher good. Do you think that's the calculus? Obviously, there's a range of cases here, and so that the most charitable case is that there's some number of people who are just intellectually lazy and are just guilty of confirmation bias. They're misled. They hear a snippet of something which strikes them a certain way, and then they just run with it, right? And they feel no intellectual or moral obligation to get their facts straight. Anyone can fall prey to that. I've been so critical of Donald Trump. If you show me a tweet that looks insane from him. I'm not going to spend any time trying to figure out if it's really a tweet from him because all of his tweets have been insane. So either the chances this one's real is very high. It revealed that it was fake, well, then I'll walk back my forwarding of it or whatever, but everyone only has so much time in the day, and so it's easy to see how people get lured into just being lazy. Right. But then there are the people who consciously manufacture falsehoods. I think there are actually real just psychopaths in any movement. Right. And there are people who just have no moral qualms in spreading lies, no matter how defamatory, no matter how likely they are to increase the security concerns of the people involved. Spreading the lie that someone is a racist or that they favor genocide against Muslims, say which. These are both lies that are just endlessly spread about me and Bill and even former Muslims or Muslim reformers with whom I support someone like ayan Hersielle or Majid Nawaz. I mean, people who have excruciating security concerns, endless lies are told about them. And these lies have the effect of raising their security. They could jeopardize their lives. This is well understood by the people who are telling these lies. For instance, you happen to catch me in a 24 hours period where this has happened to me in a fairly spectacular way. Really? So, yeah, I had Majid Nawaz, who says, brilliant and truly ethical Muslim reformer on my podcast, and he reformed Muslim as well. He had been imprisoned for a period of time for radical activities. Yeah. So he's a former Islamist, which is distinct from a jihadist. He was not a terrorist, but he was trying to you know, he was part of an organization that was trying to spread the idea of a global caliphate, and they were trying to engineer coups in places like Pakistan and Egypt. So he was doing fairly nefarious things. He was recruiting for this organization and then spent four years in an Egyptian prison and got essentially deprogrammed in proximity to jihadists and and fellow Islamists just understanding of the kind of world they wanted to build and more deeply. And then he was also taken as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. And it was the juxtaposition of that kind of ethical overture from the enemy because he, at that time, would have considered Amnesty to be the enemy. This is a Western liberal, progressive organization. Now all of a sudden, they're coming in and defending me even though they know I loathe everything they stand for because that is what they do. That is consistent with their values. So that got through to him. And what organization in the Muslim world or the Islamist world does that? Right. It broke the spell. And so he came out of prison and very soon thereafter disavowed his Islamist roots. But did not disavow Islam. Right? He is still a practicing Muslim. He's at pains to say that he's not devout, he's not holding himself up as an example of religiosity, but he's identified as a Muslim. He's not an ex Muslim. He's not claiming to be an atheist. And he started this counter extremist think tank, the Quilliam Foundation in the UK that has attracted theologians and other former Islamists and has a very active program of deprogramming extremists, both jihadist and otherwise. And this is just the most courageous and necessary work of all the things that human beings should be doing, especially people in the Muslim community. This has to be at the top of everyone's list. And yet he is demonized as an Uncle Tom and a native informant by so called moderate Muslims, right? And so he and I wrote a book together, which was initially a kind of debate. I mean, I was the atheist criticizing Islam and talking about the link between the doctrine and terrorism, and he was arguing for a program of reform. And it was a very fruitful collaboration and a very useful introduction to the issue for those who have read the book. And there's a documentary coming out based on the book, and we did a speaking tour in Australia together. I'm totally supportive of him. He's a real friend now. And so he was on my podcast in January, and we're having a conversation about all these issues. And there's a part of the conversation where I'm essentially playing devil's advocate with him. And so he had been talking about reform, and at this point we're speaking specifically about the migrant crisis in Europe born of the civil war in Syria, and just what to do about the millions of people who are pouring across the borders into Europe at that point, and just the ethical challenges of that. And I'm on record both in that podcast and elsewhere saying that I think we have a moral obligation to let in all the Syrians we can properly vet. I talk about these people as the most unlucky people on Earth. I was against Trump's travel ban, right? And I have criticized that on television, on my podcast, and in print. Yeah, you've been quite unequivocal about that. And again, within this own within this specific podcast, made these points. I talk about secular and liberal Muslims being the most important people on Earth, and the people who I would move to the front of the line to get US citizenship if they wanted it, if I had any influence there. So my views on this matter are very clear. So there's a part in the conversation where I'm playing devil's advocate and there had just been a terrorist attack in Germany in the Christmas market, where a jihadist in a van plowed into dozens of people and I think killed twelve and injured 50. And at one point I said to Modi, okay, so you've said many hopeful things thus far. I want to push back a little bit. I can well imagine that there are millions of people in Europe at this moment, in the aftermath of this Christmas market attack, who are thinking, why the fuck do we need more Muslims in our society? Surely we have enough. Why not just not let anyone else in? So someone who apparently has been doing this to all my podcasts, I only just noticed this time someone in the Muslim community took a snippet of the audio, starting with, why the fuck do we need more Muslims in our society? Right? And then there's just Majest contribution here. He's just kind of nodding along, saying yes, doing nothing to push back. I mean, just seeming to acquiesce to my position here. And he tweets this out this minute of audio. Witness Sam Harris's Genocidal attitude toward Muslims and Majid support. And then all the usual suspects, reyes Oslon and Max Blumenthal, the odious son of Sidney Blumenthal, who has never resisted an opportunity to lie about people like me and Ion, Her, Clay and Majid, all of them, just full court press. Push this out. Now. We're talking about people who have platforms of hundreds of thousands and that percolates down to all the people who have tens of thousands of people on Twitter. So millions of people receive this. And this is just yesterday. Yeah, this is now 48 hours ago. And I'm seeing a writer from The Nation also push it out. And also nearly docks me where she says, well, next time I see him at my favorite coffee house, and she names the coffee house that I'm at rather frequently, I'll tell him what I think of him. Right. So it's the most irresponsible use of social media. And in the case of people like Reyes Oslon, he absolutely knows what my position is and he knows he's lying about it. And there is clearly a world of difference between what you had characterized as the most charitable case, which is, this is just somebody who's incredibly lazy and doesn't research this person very plainly, surgically removed something out of context. Very, very surgically. Not an oopsie blunder kind of thing. No, put it out there. And those who picked it up, presumably knowing a thing or two about both you and also the source, just spread it wantonly, without any notion of checking to see if it was taken out of context. And the other thing that's crucial here is that even if you wanted to extend the most charitable interpretation to them, that is a genuine mistake. The secondary forwarders in sense. Yeah. Within 15 minutes, the hoax is revealed because I I have, you know, nearly a million people following me on Twitter, and I pushed back against it multiple times. And I sent a link to the timestamp, to the beginning of the actual part of the conversation that reveals just what is being said. No apologies come from anything. No retraction. No retraction. They don't delete double down the person who did it because they did it quite wittingly. But the people who forwarded it to hundreds of thousands of people having been made aware would have a moral responsibility to walk that back because it does put you it heightens the physical threat that you live under. We are probably either a double digit number of months from software which we've seen the first prototypes already, that would allow somebody to basically sample your voice, which there are many, many examples, and basically do a marionette thing where they have you say whatever they want. But these tools are going to be out there and they're going to be misusable by anybody. And you could be made to say I could be made to say the President. Anybody could be made to say absolutely anything. And I wonder if that's going to kind of in a perverse way help things because audio quotes will from that point forward just simply not being taken seriously. Yeah, I'm really worried about that. But I do actually see the silver lining you just pointed to. I think that it will be so subversive that people realize that all you can trust is the actual source. Right. It would be so misused so quickly. I imagine something similar has happened with Photoshop now where people just don't use photos as forensic evidence in the same way and they're fairly skeptical about what they see in an image when it counts. Just imagine if someone forwarded to you a photo of Trump in some insane circumstance. Your first thought before forwarding it would be, wait a minute, is this photoshopped will have to be that circumspect about audio and even video. So now they have the mouth linking fake or the completely fake audio, which again sounds exactly like the person's actual voice, can be made aid to seem like it's coming out of his or her mouth. You add the visual cue and it always what happens in audio happens next in video. Well, to sort of go a little bit bigger picture for a moment, I'm delighted to be talking to you now because there's almost an uncanny overlap between the subjects you've dedicated your life to understanding and those that are discussed in my novel after on. The main topic of the book is super AI. You're very widely quoted on this subject. You gave a great Ted Talk about it almost exactly a year ago. Another major theme in the book is consciousness. You spent an entire decade exploring consciousness full time. Not sure if that's an overstatement, but it's an approximation. A connected major topic is neuroscience. You are one or you're a neuroscientist. And yet another major theme is nihilistic terrorism. And of course, you're now one of the most outspoken people in the US. On this subject. I think the only lifelong focus of yours that's not a major obsession of the book is Jujitsu. So we. Will keep the Jujitsu talk to an absolute minimum here. But before we go back into all this and particularly nihilistic terrorism, I'd like to consider the life trajectory that made you expert in all these topics, starting at the first time our lives overlapped without either of us realizing it. We were both undergraduates at Stanford at the same time. I was a year ahead of you, young man, and I'd like to go back that far just briefly, because you embarked on an unusually bold and, as it turned out, unusually long project for one of an undergraduate age. And it's a project that I think has a great deal to do with who you are now. So when you arrived at Stanford, you're on campus. You haven't yet made this bold decision to take an enormous amount of time off. What was your thinking of religion at that point? Were you an atheist already? If you were, was that a major part of your identity? A minor part? Well, I was definitely an atheist, but I wouldn't have called myself one. The term atheist was not really in my vocabulary. I was completely unaware of the history of atheism, organized atheism. I wouldn't have known who Madeline Murray O'Hare was. And I had never been given religion by my parents, so I wasn't reacting against some dogmatism that had come from the family. And your parents were from very different religious traditions, correct? Yeah. But both just were not practicing, just unreligious. Yeah, but again, they were not atheists. They wouldn't have called themselves atheists. But you had one of your parents'ways Quaker, is that right? Quaker. And my mother's Jewish. And so this is also slightly an artifact of what it is to be surrounded by cultural Jews who are not religious. Judaism is almost unique in that you can have people for whom their religion is still a seemingly significant part of their lives. They care that they're Jewish, but there is zero otherworldly or supernatural content to their thinking about what it means to be a Jew. I believe it probably is unique. I mean, maybe the Parsis have something similar. Yeah. And this Jewish experience of secularism is fairly misleading to most Jews, I find, because they kind of assume that everyone else has lost their religion to the same degree. I've debated Conservative rabbis who, when push came to shove, revealed they believed almost nothing that could be classified as religious. Their notion of God was so elastic as to commit them to almost nothing specific about what happens after death, nothing that can necessarily be prayed to or that can care about human events. I'm not talking about reformed Jews. I'm talking about conservatives. The ultra Orthodox believe a fair number of imponderable things, but short of that, Judaism has really been denuded of its otherworldliness. I grew up in that kind of context where even religious people again, my family wasn't, but even people who went to synagogue didn't believe anything. So I was fairly sheltered from the culture wars in that respect and was just unaware of the kind of work that religious ideas were doing in the world or in the lives of even people on the coast in different phases. When I got to Stanford, I remember being in the Great Books Seminar and the Bible was one of the books that is considered great and that we had to read. And I remember getting into debates with people who had clearly come from a midwestern Christian background, say, or more of a Bible built experience, and just having absolutely no patience for their belief that this book was fundamentally different from the Iliad Nedysy or anything else we were reading in the seminar. And the professor's way of holding that text in particular compared to the other books. I don't know if she was religious, but she seemed to be carving out a kind of different place on the bookshelf for this text to occupy. And from my point of view, the stuff we were reading wasn't even great. I would admit that there are great parts of the Bible, but we were reading Leviticus and Deuteronomy and just these are the most deranged recipes for theocracy that have ever been written. I mean, these are certainly sections of them are worse than anything that's in the Quran or any other terrible book. I was just astonished that we were wasting time reading this stuff. The only argument for reading it in my in my view then, and it's really my view now, is to understand how influential the book has been elsewhere. I mean, you want to be able to understand the illusions in Shakespeare, you have to be conversant with the Bible. But the idea that this is somehow a great flowering of human wisdom, again, specifically books like Deuteronomy and Leviticus, those are books in which the grim punishments for people who step out of line, among other things, are detailed in in kind of gory detailed. And they're not allegories for anything, it's just these are the reasons why you need to kill not only your neighbors, but members of your own family for thought crimes, right? Here's how you should be living and you almost couldn't invent a worse worldview. And the corollary to that is anyone, any neurologically intact person in 5 minutes can improve these books spiritually and ethically and politically and in every other way. Scientifically, economically. I mean, there's just nothing that this is the best for or even good for apart from creating conditions of Taliban level intolerance in a society that is if people actually believe this stuff. And very few Jews now believe that you should be paying any significant attention to Leviticus or Deuteronomy. And Christians have their own reasons for ignoring it. But what we're witnessing in the Muslim world is that there are analogous texts. The parts of the Quran being one, and the Hadith and the biography of Muhammad being the rest of the canon, which detail very similar levels of intolerance and a commitment to prosecuting thought crime. And many, many millions of people take them very, very seriously. And so you were in a state of outrage at the fact that these tasks were being held up as great. You were certainly not a believer in any manner. Atheism may not have been a word you would have applied to yourself, but it was something that you essentially, from what you're describing, that's kind of what you were on the inside. If you look at the DSM, ten year journeys of spiritual discovery are generally not considered to be symptoms of atheism. Yet from that point of de facto atheism, you essentially did take off on, is it fair to say, a ten year journey of spiritual discovery and near full time exploration of consciousness. Yeah. So what happened is I took MDMA for the first time, and I had taken other psychedelics as a teenager. I mean, really just mushrooms a few times. And I will add that Stanford in the late 80s was awash in MDMA long before it entered the club scene in the UK. Yeah, it was all over campus. I didn't know that, actually. I never encountered it. Yeah, no, it was all over the place. And we called it X in the United States, and then the Brits, who kind of discovered it a few years later, called it E. And it was something that was just so part of just sort of the fabric that I mistakenly thought it was a very widespread drug, and it didn't become widespread until much, much later. Now, I wasn't as bold as you. I actually was fearful of this stuff, but it was everywhere. It was definitely everywhere in the 80s. Yeah. Then you were in hipper circles than I was before you were hipper than I was. You actually tried it. Maybe it was everywhere because I had taken it. I was evangelizing pretty hard, at least two, three captive friends when I got back to campus, because it really did blow my mind. It just changed everything about what I thought was possible. So that was a Pivoting incident. That was what caused you to I didn't realize that. So that was the thing that caused you to say, I'm out of here, at least for now. Its connection to my dropping out was a little less direct than that. It took a little more time, but it just took like a quarter. But it was ten weeks later. I was not enrolling again, but I guess I took it during spring break or something. I wasn't at Stanford. I was back home when I took it. It's something I write about in the beginning of my book, Waking Up. It was the first experience I had where the implications of that change in my consciousness, they were far more global, and they suggested something about the possibility of changing one's consciousness in a more durable way. I wasn't left thinking, wow, ecstasy is amazing, or, that was a very interesting drug experience. It seemed to unmask something about the nature of my own mind that was more true than what I was tending to experience. So the experience of coming down from it was the experience of having my actual true self, in a way, occluded by neurotic layers of my personality that were being rebuilt, that had been suppressed by the drug. The experience was briefly of just feeling all self concern drop away. So that I was sitting there, I was talking to one of my best friends. He still is one of my closest friends, and he had never taken it before either. So we both took this, and again, we took it this is before anyone had a rave. And we took it very much in the spirit of trying to find out something interesting about our minds. We weren't partying. This was more of a Timothy Leary than a Ken Kesey type of experience. Yeah. This was given to us as had been kind of an export from the psychotherapeutic community. Like, this is a drug that shows you something about the nature of spirituality, the nature of love, ultimately. So we were just curious about what was there to be discovered. And I just remember talking to him, and there was nothing psychedelic about it at all. There were just no visual distortions, no sense of coming onto a drug. Just this increasing sense of moral and emotional clarity where I just have more and more free attention to just talk to my friend. I'm getting less and less every moment as I'm coming onto this, and it took a while for me to recognize what had happened, but I'm becoming less and less encumbered by the concern about what he's thinking about me. I'm looking into his eyes, and I'm no longer there's changes in his facial expression in response to what I'm saying, and I'm no longer reading that as a message about me. It's like I'm no longer behind my face looking at him, no longer tacking in the wind of somebody else's attention on me. There was just a sense of zero self concern. My attention was not on myself at all. I was simply paying attention to my best friend. And that pure granting of attention was love. What I was experiencing more and more as the minutes ticked on was just a total commitment to his happiness. Just and his wellbeing, just wanting everything that good that could possibly happen for someone to happen to him. Right. There was nothing transactional about that. It was just a pure state of being. It was just the state of being fully attentive to another person as just the locus of moral concern. And this led you to decide that you wanted to significantly alter your curriculum. I guess. I mean, you were, at that point, taking the you were a sophomore at this point. Yeah. So not a notoriously delightful year for anybody, but you were taking a lot of things, preparing to declare your major, if you hadn't yet already. And so I assumed that this made you realize that there was a different curriculum you wanted to pursue, in a sense. So ironically, it led me to realize that all of the otherwise incoherent and offensive noises that religious people had been making for millennia actually were inspired must have been inspired by this, by experiences like this. Whatever you want to think about Christianity and the Bible, jesus was probably talking about this or something like this. So the one thing that just bore in upon me like a freight train in that experience was the recognition that millions of people had had experiences like this, and many not through drugs, but through prayer and fasting and other contemplative exercises, yoga, meditation. So there was a path your mind could be more and more like this than mine had tended to be. And without chemicals? Yes. Yeah. Because it's all just chemicals. It is. Yeah. The drug is is, you know, drugs are mimicking neurotransmitters or inspiring neurotransmitters to behave differently. You only have a few levers to pull in there. But I didn't have a background in neuroscience at that point, and I had been an English major, and so when I went back to school, there was nothing in school that I could connect with that immediately seemed like this is the most rational use of your time, given what you just experienced. And I also was writing I was also planning to write fiction, and I wanted to write I know you were working on a novel last year. Yeah, I had a kind of a dual agenda. When I dropped out, I was going to write a novel and study meditation. I started going on meditation retreats that were getting kind of longer and longer, and then I was going to India and studying meditation with various teachers and going to Nepal. And this is mostly in a Buddhist context. Did you buy into the religiosity of Buddhism? Because often there's extraordinarily powerful spiritual practice that is embedded in Buddhism, but in other contexts, you've said you can access that and leave the religiosity behind if you wish. You're coming in as a young person, as a novice of sorts, into this community. Was it easy for you to take sort of almost the neuroscientific wisdom that was being transferred and leave out the religious rapping that I imagine it often came in? Yeah. If you were going on retreat and going to monasteries and things like that. Yeah, not entirely. I never became a religious Buddhist, or much less a religious Hindu, though I was studying with teachers in both traditions, but I was not yet a scientist. I was not yet really scientifically literate. I mean, my background I'd been studying English at Stanford and hadn't taken many science courses at that point, and I became very interested in the in the philosophy of mind and in the conversation that was happening between philosophers and scientists about the nature of consciousness. So I was reading I was getting some brain science in reading what philosophers were saying, and I was reading some stuff at the at the margins of neuroscience. And then I was also reading a fair amount of popular physics, because a lot of the popular physics was being marketed as a way of caching out New Age mysticism. People were hurling books at me on quantum mechanics. And the scientific and philosophical confusion there was not yet obvious to me at a certain point, undoubtedly, when I'm up to my eyeballs in Krishna Merchy and reading patently magical books like Autobiography of a Yogi Parmahani Yogananda, and then I'm also reading Ken Wilbur and people who are wrapping up eastern wisdom with basically the spookiest exports from physics. So if you had asked me what I thought the universe was like at that moment, I undoubtedly some New Age goblin gook could have could have come out, you know, which would which is I now view as as quasi religious. There's a fair amount of confusion there. And so and I've debated people like Deepak Chopra, who who still promulgate that kind of confusion. I was always interested in just in the experiential component of meditation and any of these paths of practice. But when you go far enough into the experiential component and begin to confirm some of the very surprising things, some of the very surprising claims about the nature of the mind that only seem to get made by people in the east, for the most part, who are also making claims about the magic powers that come with attaining very high states of meditation and the miraculous feats of various yogis and gurus. Well, then you're surrounded by people who believe, for instance, that their favorite yoga teacher can read their minds. Right. And I was always somewhat skeptical of these stories. I don't think I had the phrase confirmation bias in my head, but I could see that the disposition among these people to believe, the desire to believe these stories to be true was there was very little resistance in the system to just accepting everything uncritically. I think I was on the skeptical end there, but I was not spending any time trying to debunk claims about magic. I was simply just trying to get to the most qualified teachers and learn whatever they had to teach. And it was roughly a ten year period correct. Which you were going on to retreats coming back. How many of those ten years were you in silent meditation? Would it total to a year or more? Total to about two years if you strung them all together, the various silent retreats? Yeah. I never did a silent retreat longer than three months, but I did a couple of three months. Sounds like a doozy. To me, yeah, it's long. It's just an amazing experience. There's something paradoxically, you can experience the same thing in a moment to offer treat. It's not that there's in principle the necessity of being in silence, but for most people it's amazingly powerful to go into silence. It's an experience unlike any you tend to have even when you're spending much of your day alone out in the world. For those who don't have an experience with meditation, this is, I guess, some explanations in order. But whatever practice of meditation you're doing, you're really in two conditions while doing it. You're either lost in thought, you're just distracted by kind of the automaticity of discursive thought, and you've just forgotten that you were supposed to be meditating, or you're paying attention to the thing you're trying to pay attention to. And that is your practice of meditation. And we spend so much time in our lives lost in thought, having a conversation with ourselves that we're not aware of having. And so much of this conversation is neurotic. So much of it is producing unhappiness. You're thinking about the things you regret having done. You're thinking about the things that didn't go well moments before, hours before days, or even years before. You're thinking about what you want, but what you're anxious about, what you're hoping will happen a moment hence or at some point in the future. And you're spending almost no time truly connecting with the present moment in a way that is deeply fulfilling. And to take my experience on MDMA, one of its features was just full immersion in the present moment. There was just zero past and future going on. And part of the ecstasy of that experience is attributable just to that. And this is an experience you really can have in meditation. Focusing on anything to sufficient degree produces an ecstatic state of mind. I mean, there's lists to be found just in being concentrated, just being sufficiently concentrated on the breath or a light or anything. It doesn't matter what it is. You can also be additionally concentrated in specific states of mind, like loving kindness, which is very much the emotion that one often experiences on ecstasy. That is a specific meditation practice within the Buddhist tradition and in other traditions, there's a devotion to the guru. In the Western tradition, there's the love of Jesus, right? So there's no question that you can be one pointedly fixated on the object of your devotion and get that emotion so intensely realized in your mind that it obliterates everything else. Incredibly expansive experiences of await someone who can get that concentrated. It need not even be in the positive emotion of love or devotion. It could just be the breath. So I started, you know, I started training in various types of meditation for periods up to three months or so. And so that was punctuating my the decade of my twenty s. And it took me a while to realize that I had to go back to school. And did you come back to English at that point because you were studying English at Stanford previously? I came back to philosophy because I had been reading philosophy and essentially writing philosophy nonstop throughout this year for ten years. So very much with the attitude of someone who's going to go to graduate school in philosophy. I went back to finish my undergraduate in philosophy with an idea that this is a segue into graduate work. But then you ended up pivoting to neuroscience, of all things, which is vastly, much more of a hard science. How did that Pivot come about? I mean, it makes imminent sense looking at who you are now and regarding it with the benefit of hindsight. How did that come about in the moment? The fact that I had dropped out of Stanford was also just sheer good luck, because Stanford, as you probably know, is like the one school, certainly the one good school that has this policy where you basically can never drop out. Well, they call it stopping out. Yeah, they don't even call it dropping out. You've stopped out. And there's a presumption that at some point in your life you may wish to come back, and if you do, the door is essentially always open, right? Yeah. Tiger woods can go back to Stanford today. I don't know how long it's been, it's been 20 years or something, but he can just walk back in and the registrar will just have his name and check for sure. I guess it's the way it should be. I'm sure there's a reason why Harvard and Princeton and other good schools don't do it this way. They don't want you back unless you've been writing them letters every year. And at a certain point, I think you have to reapply, you have to give some accounting for what your years in the wilderness have done to you. Well, I think you're probably an object lesson, and that perhaps that's not such a great idea get you back. And it was to their benefit in yours. And I'd argue to the worlds that you were able to slide back into that and make this pivot to neuroscience. It's interesting to look back on that, because in my twenty s, I remember at one point, I think I was probably 25 and first had the thought I should really go back to school to do this right. But the psychological barrier to going I felt so old at 25, I felt so neurotic around, wait a minute, I can't go back and be a junior in college at 25. It's flabbergasting for me to glimpse who I was at that moment, because I went back at 30 or 31, very close to 31, and that's a much more neurosis producing bit of arithmetic. And it was psychologically hard to do because you just picture it, I'm going back. And again, I've spent now a decade reading and writing on my own, and I'm now having to do a full philosophy major, taking all the courses, and I'm doing this as fast as I can because I want to get this done with English. So you're in, like, sophomore seminars with freshmen? Yeah. I'm not getting any breaks. I don't have credit for what I've already read, and I'm taking a massive course load to do this quickly, but I'm also getting my papers graded by 20 year old Tas, and it was just brutal. I think you need to mature as a writer, maybe when you're a junior. It was an extraordinary experience, but it was ultimately a good one, because it was just at a certain point, it was not about saving face. It was just you just have to use this as a crucible to get the tools to be able to speak clearly, write clearly, and you just have to get out of your own way. I was spending all of my time focused on overcoming the hallucinatory properties of the ego. Right. Like, I want to wake up from this hallucination where it seems to matter what another person thinks about me and conditions how I feel about myself. And ten years of meditation aren't going to get you there. I guess it's just time to go back to school. Exactly. And what meditation gets you, at least at my level, is not a permanent inoculation against all of these unpleasant states of mind. The half life of psychological suffering gets massively reduced. Right. You regain balance rapidly. Yes. It's sort of up to you how rapidly. At a certain point, you can just decide, all right, I'm going to stop suffering over this thing. And absent an ability to really meditate, you're a victim of whatever half life it's going to be in your day. So if you get suddenly angry now about something that happens, you could be angry for an hour, you could be angry for a day, you could be angry for a week. And and over that period, you could do all the the life deranging things that angry people do to screw up their relationships and plenty of time to do them. Yeah, exactly. If you're angry over a week or a month or whatever, and the difference between being angry for 30 seconds and being angry for an hour, it's impossible to exaggerate how important that is. A massive quality of life impact. And so it is with embarrassment and everything else. So you got through and then neuroscience. Beckons I was going to do a PhD in philosophy, but again, my my interest was in the philosophy of mind, and I thought I would do a PhD in philosophy. But it was just so obvious that the philosophers were either having to become amateur and neuroscientists to actually interact with what we were finding out about the brain, or they were just having a conversation that was completely uncoupled to what was known about the brain. And so I just decided I needed to know more about the brain. But I went into neuroscience very much as a philosopher with philosophical interest, and I never went in thinking, well, maybe I'm going to work on flies. Did you have to take, like, pre med courses or anything? Because I think of neuroscience as obviously it's a deeply biological subject. You're going to need to understand metabolic pathways, neurological pathways. Did you have to take like, a whole pile of classes? Having finally finished this philosophy degree to qualify as I was finishing my degree at Stanford and my interest in the brain was starting to come online, I took a few courses that were proper neuroscience courses, and then when I applied, I got provisionally accepted. They wanted me to take a genetics course at UCLA. I had about nine months between when I finished at Stanford and started at UCLA, and I needed to take a genetics course just to show them how I would function in a proper science class. I've always been a bit of a drudge and a good student, so there was no problem doing that, happily. What happens when you go into I don't know if this is true in every neuroscience program, but at UCLA, whatever you've come from, you have to take everything all over again. So I'm surrounded by people who did their undergraduate degrees in neuroscience or in molecular biology, but we have to take all these fairly basic courses in molecular neuroscience and cellular neuroscience and systems neuroscience, and you just have to take it all again if you've done that as an undergraduate. So it's review for them and arguably a little bit easier, maybe a lot easier, but you're all going through it, you're getting put to the same level. That's good. Yeah. And on some level, all of that is just a vast memorization feat. Certainly neuroanatomy is just this memorization exercise unlike any other, and you're just learning how to play a language game. You're just learning just the concepts and the parts and how to talk about them and how we currently understand them to be interrelated. Looking back on it, it would be daunting for me to have to do it again now, but it was totally fine. And then you get into your research, and then you get into having to use the methods and answer the kinds of questions you specifically want to ask. And again, there my interests were very high level and fairly philosophical. I was studying belief with functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, so putting people in the scanner and having them evaluate propositions from various topics, propositions that were either clearly true or clearly false or clearly undecided. And so I was comparing belief and disbelief and uncertainty and just looking at what it means, neurophysiologically, to be in a state of accepting some propositional, claim or rejecting it. So what brain regions were lighting up and just what. The difference is, and I was interested to know if it was reasonable to speak about a kind of final common pathway or a content neutral property of just belief. Is granting credence to a statement about the world, is that a unified thing in the brain? And is rejecting something as false a unified thing? That is, in some basic sense, the same, whether you're talking about the virgin birth of Jesus or two plus two makes four. We're recording a podcast right now, or you're a man, or you went to Stanford, or to evaluate any of those claims as true or false, obviously invokes very different kinds of processing in the brain, because, you know, math is one thing and, you know, your your autobiography is another. The truth testing wouldn't be the same there, but the granting of ascent, and crucially for me, becoming emotionally and behaviorally susceptible to the implications, really, the imperatives of accepting something to be true or rejecting it as false. So if someone comes in and says, I hate to tell you, but your wife is cheating on you, I just saw her, you think she's on a business trip, but I just saw her at a restaurant with this Lotherio who I know, right? Is that true or false? Everything depends on whether that is true or false. And your evaluation of it, given the right evidence. It's instantaneous, right? It's like your world changes in a moment. This propositional claim, which is just language, it's just noises coming out of someone's mouth, or it's just an email, right. So it's just a bit of language becomes your world the moment you granted credence. And so that that shift. You almost made a belief detector, it sounds like. We did, in fact, make a belief detector, which, under the right conditions, would also be a lie detector if you know whether someone is representing their beliefs accurately, you know whether or not they're telling the truth. And that's an interesting topic. But the future of mind reading machines, I think, undoubtedly will be a future in which we will be increasingly confident whether or not someone is telling the truth. Yeah. Because current lie detector technology is from, what, the 1920s and is notoriously, notoriously easy to trick. Yeah. But it's not even a valid science. Even if you were not tricking it, you could inadvertently trick it. Yeah. It's just measuring physiological changes that are correlated with anxiety. But if you're not an anxious liar, then you're going to pass with flying colors. And if you're anxious truth teller, as some people are. Right. So in the middle of all this research, 911 happens. And was that a direct trigger to the book Into Faith? Yes, it was. So within 24 hours, I was writing what became that book. I mean, I was writing initially a book proposal, but I wrote essentially the first chapter of that book. The very next day, I started writing it. So 911 came I had finished my coursework. I was just starting my neuroimaging work. I was already focused on belief, and religious belief is a subset of that. And I had just spent this previous decade plus focused on just questions of spiritual concern and what is true in religion and why do we have these competing world views that are religious in the first place? And what is it necessary to believe, to have a meaningful life? And then people start flying planes into our buildings, clearly expecting paradise. This is a act of worship. And we immediately start lying to ourselves about why they did it. Because I had read the Quran, I hadn't focused on Islam to any great degree, but I was pretty sure I knew what these guys were up to. The moment I heard about what Al Qaeda was just you have someone like Osama bin Laden who could be doing anything he wants. He's got hundreds of millions of dollars. He could be living in Paris and dating models. But no, he's decided to live in a cave and plot, you know, the the takeover of of the world for the one true faith. I immediately recognized the spiritual intensity of that enterprise. He was not faking his belief. He believed what he said he believed. And it was only rational to take his stated beliefs at face value. I had been surrounded by people who believed the Hindu version or the Buddhist version of karma and rebirth, right? And they believed it absolutely to their toes, and I understood why they believed it. And many of them were having intense experiences of the sort I was having in meditation or on psychedelics. And there's no doubt in my mind that members of Al Qaeda were having intensely meaningful experiences of both of solidarity among their fellow jihadists. And just many of us have gotten into things that suddenly seemed to answer much of what we were lacking in our day to day experience. You yourself did in college. Yeah, but I mean, even seemingly more trivial things. We all know that certain people, they become vegan or whatever, and all of a sudden it's all about getting their diet straight, right? Or they get really into yoga. And this happened to me with Brazilian jiujitsu. I got into Brazilian jiujitsu and all of a sudden, it's the only thing I can talk about with people. I've become a cult recruiter for Jujitsu. You go down the rabbit hole with these things and suddenly you have immense energy for paying attention. It just becomes effortless to pay attention to this thing. Now just imagine something that has all of these components. It has the one you actually believe, the doctrine. So you believe that this life is just a way station here. And the only thing that matters here is getting your head straight about what's on the other side of death. You have to believe the right things now. You have to get your life straight now, so that when you die, you go to the right place. Right? There's no question that millions of people, billions of people, really, most people who have ever lived, believe something like that about the way the universe is structured. And Islam in particular, this especially doctrinaire version of it, gives a uniquely clear picture of just how all of that is organized. It's a very self consistent view of just what you need to believe and how you need to live to get to the right place. Imagine having that kind of moral and spiritual clarity in your life, which immediately translates into a recipe for how to live. There's zero ambiguity about how society should be structured, how men and women should relate. But then there's this whole political layer, which is all of these historical grievances where the west, the infidel west and the materialistic west, really, the obscene west, has, by some perversity of history, acquired all this power and essentially trampled upon the only civilization that has ever mattered to God, which is the Muslim one. In addition to everything else, you have essentially the yoga component and the diet component and the personal life straightening component. You have this political component where you have to write this great historical wrong and spread this one true faith to the ends of the earth. This is a missionary religion. This is not Judaism. This is not Buddhism. The way this works is you spread this thing, right? And there's nothing pacifist about this. As a man, you get to harness all of your testosterone. You get to be essentially a spiritual James Bond, right? You get to go to war for this thing. You get to kill the bad guys. You get to be part of a gang. But with social approbation in your circles, as opposed to the negatives that would come with being a gang member. Exactly. This is a spiritual gang. It's also incredibly well funded. I mean, if you look at how the Saudis have funded the spread of the Wahhabi style Islam, this is a gang with petro dollars behind it, and the rewards are simply beyond comprehension, literally, because the rewards are paradise. It's like we see gangs motivated by money and access to women and all the things that have powered lots of gangs and lots of songs. And that's teeny compared to the upside that these folks would imagine that they're playing with. And so you felt you knew a thing or three or ten or 100 about belief. This happens. You dive into it. And it's interesting just talking about belief, because I know one of the complaints that you have about a lot of your critics is that they don't seem to think the Islamists believe that, which they actually say, yeah, it's amazingly durable, this piece of confusion. But the idea is that the jihadists, even those who blow themselves up, right, in what is just transparently, the ultimate act of self sacrifice. They don't believe what they say. They believe they're not being motivated by religion. Religion is, at worst, being used as a pretext for political goals and economic grievances and psychological instability. Or it's being cited by Islamophobes as a way to sort of slander Islam by saying, well, these people did it for religious reasons. No, that's an Islamophobic thing to say. They really did it for this other reason. What other reason is offered as an alternative to fervently held belief political grievances? Or they were so despairing over the state of the Palestinians under the Israeli boot? Again, this can be more or less plausible if you're talking about a Palestinian who's being mistreated in Gaza. It's completely implausible when you look at a third generation British Muslim recruit to ISIS who had to drop out of the London School of Economics in order to go to Syria. Right. And there are endless numbers of cases of people who have every other opportunity in life who become, quote, radicalized in this way. There's a deep skepticism among people who simply don't know what it's like to believe in God. Frankly, a real God, a God who can hear your prayers, a God who can hate homosexuals, a God who cares how you live, not this elastic God of just good vibes in the universe. People have lost touch with me in many academics, virtually every anthropologist I've ever had to talk to about this stuff. Many journalists, many so called scholars of religion, just don't know what it's like to believe in God and then doubt that anyone really does. They don't actually think that people believe that they'll get virgins in paradise. They think this is just propaganda, propaganda that nobody believes. Almost like the Judaism that you described of your youth, where people would go to synagogue and they'll go through these things, but not because they believed in something ephemeral, but because that was sort of a cultural or a community activity. People are projecting that on to this world. And you certainly are not seeing this as some kind of a neocon. I mean, I imagine you probably first voted in a presidential election in 1988. How many Republicans versus Democrats have you voted for? I've never voted for a Republican. Never voted for a Republican. And you actually think that this was a decisive issue or potentially decisive issue in the election that we just had, correct? Yeah. Would you kind of go into that just briefly? Yeah, because we had a president for eight years that just clearly lied about this particular topic. He would not name the ideology that was delivering us this form of terrorism. He would just talk about generic extremism or generic terrorism. And he was quite hectoring and sanctimonious about the dangers of naming this ideology. So at one point, he gave a speech just pushing back against his critics. I was a huge Obama fan, actually, when I compare him to our current president feels like we have kind of fallen into some new part of the multiverse that I never thought we would occupy. It's unimaginable that we've taken this turn where you have a totally sane, intelligent, ethical, professional person running the country, and then you have this unhinged con man running it next. But Obama really got this part wrong and disastrously so. And Clinton seemed to be echoing most of his delusion on this part. At one point, she talked about extremist jihadism or radical jihadism, as though there's moderate jihadism. That doesn't pose a problem for us. In the immediate aftermathmath of Orlando, the Orlando shooting that killed, I think, 49 people. 49. It was the biggest mass shooting in American history. Right. Parallel and clearly an act of jihadism. I mean, just transparently so. Everything that Omar Mateen said was just he just connected all the dots. It could not be clearer. And Hillary Clinton spoke only about the need for gun control and the need to be on guard against racism in the aftermath of Orlando. And that was just I know at least one Muslim who voted for Trump just because of how galling she found that. Did he use Trump's language? It's all true. The political correctness and delusion, I mean, it was just a refusal based on this fake concern about racism. Islam is not a race, right? Not at all. You and I could convert to Islam right now, and we would be part of this particular problem if we converted. When I lived in Cairo, I knew lots of Western, both American and European converts who were very sincere and devout Muslims, and they had not a drop of air blood in them, et cetera. It is not a race. Absolutely. And you can be more devout. It's easier to convert because you're actually going to convert on the basis of the ideas. The only way to convert is to actually claim to believe these specific doctrines. Right? And the doctrines get fairly inimical to most things we care about in the 21st century. Very, very quickly. You can't convert to the lived experience of just having been a nominal Muslim surrounded by Muslim culture and, you know, analogous to the Jewish experience that we just talked about. So I just had Fried Zakaria on my podcast, and he's a Muslim. He identifies as a Muslim. He's clearly not religious at all. Most serious Muslims would consider him an apostate. He's not a believer. Right. But he has a Muslim experience analogous to the kind of Jewish experience that matters to him, and he feels solidarity with that community. I can't convert to that, right, because I don't have that experience, but I could become a member of ISIS if I check the right boxes. Hillary was such an obscurantist on this issue. And again, in the immediate aftermath of this horror, when you're having attacks in Europe that are also enormous and seeming, you know, to presage more to come in our own society. Right? And this need not have been a winning issue for Trump, but it was among the two or three things that in an election that tight, there are arguably probably dozens of winning issues because there's anything that swung a few tens of thousands 75,000 votes yeah. In the right or the wrong place. Now, you mentioned political correctness and language. You have stated a few times that you view free speech as the master value. Would you care to just say briefly why that is? Because I think it's an intriguing notion, because it's the only value that allows us to reliably correct our errors, both intellectually and morally. It's the only mechanism we have as a species to keep aligning ourselves with reality as we've come to understand it. So you're talking about the data of science, you're talking about the data of human experience. Everything you can conceivably use to judge whether or not you're on the right track or the wrong track. And again, this applies to everything. This applies to human health, it applies to politics, it applies to economics, it applies to spiritual concerns, contemplative concerns. It's the corrective mechanism. It's the only mechanism. And if certain ideas are in utterable, you're not going to be able to correct if there are certain things that you refuse to talk about. This is what's so wrong with dogmatism. So dogmas are those beliefs or those doctrines which you will assert the truth of and you'll, you demand people remain aligned to without justification. Right? It's like the time to justify them either never arrived or it's long past. And these merely must be accepted going forward. So these are off the table. You know the Apostles Creed, if you're a Catholic, that is off the table. It's instructive to know that the word dogma is not a pejorative term in religion like Catholicism, right. But it is everywhere else. And there's a good reason for that, because it's even the most benign dogma can produce immense human misery in surprising ways. And if you are not if you can't keep correcting for it, you're just laid bare to the misery. So, I mean, my favorite example of this, because it is such a surprising mismatch between the seeming propositional content of the dogma and its effects in the world. But you have a dogma like kind of a twin dogmas. The life starts at the moment of conception, and all human life is sacred. What could be wrong with that? This seems to be the least harmful thing you could believe about the human condition. How are you going to harm anyone believing those things? All human life is sacred and human life runs all the way down to a single cell. What could go wrong? Well, what can go wrong is you suddenly get a technology like embryonic stem cell research, where there's this immense promise, obviously unforeseen by the Bible but also unforeseen by every generation of humanity. Perhaps someone in the 1930s could have foreseen this was coming, but not much before that, right? And you have this immense promise of alleviating scores of conditions just boundless suffering, full body burns and spinal cord injury and Alzheimer's, just you name it. Who knows how much promise this technology holds for medical therapy? And then you have people and again, these people are the most influential people in our society from presidents and senators on down and religious academics and bioethicists who aren't religious but still treat these magical doctrines as somehow deserving of respect. But you have this idea that every fertilized ovum contains a human soul. You've got now souls and petri dishes just as vulnerable as the baby Jesus that cannot be sacrificed no matter what the argument is on the other side you can have people with Parkinson's or little girls in wheelchairs doesn't matter. I'm just as concerned about the life in this petri dish. And we've sort of moved on because there have been workarounds found biologically but basically we dragged our feet for a good 20 years there and who knows what medical insights weren't had as a result of that? And what do you feel about the value of anonymous speech? There are inarguable value to anonymous speech in brutal dictatorships where dissidents and others can get into enormous trouble, get tortured and killed if they say something that gets detected by somebody who's incredibly nefarious and has really no ethical standing in the minds of most folks in this country. So I think there are certain things I'm not talking about those relatively inarguable things, but I know that you don't enable comments on your web pages. Right. I know that you have had concerns about the quality of speech in places like the YouTube forums and so forth. Do you feel that there is a fundamental difference between the value of anonymous speech and, for lack of a better word, owned speech? Or do you feel that anonymous speech is every bit as much of the master value in a sense that you attribute to free speech at large? But I wouldn't prevent it in most cases. Certainly there's kind of the whistleblower's role for it. I'm in favor of journalists protecting the anonymity of their sources if great harm would come to the sources. Generally speaking, I think it is one of the variables that accounts for why so much of what is said online is so toxic. People feel a license to be jerks that they wouldn't feel, if they had to, to own everything they said. And then what about tools that enable tremendous anonymity to anybody? And I'm thinking particularly of torture, which is ironically a product of the United States Navy. It is something that I have no doubt has masked the identity of lots of dissidents in ways that any reasonable person would applaud. But at the same time it preserves the anonymity and the secure communications. Certainly between terrorists there's enormous amount of child pornography there. Again, it just cuts both ways. I think there's an argument to be made that something like that, something like strong encryption is just inevitable. It's just a mathematical fact that it's available, and it will therefore always be available to anyone who's going to take the time to acquire it. This is something I kind of stumbled into on one of my podcasts when the first controversy around the FBI's unlocking of an iPhone came online. An iPhone. It was sort of uncrackable by law enforcement. If you attempt the passcode too many times, it just goes down, and apparently no one can get in, or almost no one can get in. And Apple was claiming not to have devised its own ability to get in. And that struck me as a way of punting on Apple's part that was not ethically. Justifiable they refused to help the FBI effect, and their argument was that if they created a mechanism whereby they could answer a court order and unlock an iPhone, that mechanism would be impossible to keep safe. Then everyone would have a hackable iPhone. And I never really bought that. I felt like they could if they had wanted to keep it safe, they could probably keep it safe. And it seems to me that people do keep they keep other trade secrets safe, presumably, and formula for Coca Cola. Yeah. If those are the keys to the kingdom, then presumably they could keep it safe. Obviously, the tech community took a very strong position against the government there, but we don't have the analogous right in any other area of our lives. When you draw an analogy to, for instance, I want to be able to build a room in my house where I can put things and even put evidence of all my criminal behavior that no one on Earth, in principle, can get access to. Right. So there's no court order, there's no government process. There's no evidence of my own culpability that could be so clear, that could get that room unlocked. It's almost like your personal diplomatic pouch or having some kind of, like, privileged communication with a lawyer. That is an unlockable box. Right. Legally. But it's a physical box in this case. Yeah. And so no one no one claims to feel that they have a right to that thing. Yeah. Right. It's not feasible. We can't easily build it. Right. We can't build or if it could, there would be unlikely to be a mass movement for everybody to get one of those things if someone had managed to build such a thing. And we had reason to believe that evidence of his vast criminality was in there. There was a severed head in it or something. So there's a murder that is going unsolved every day because we can't open this closet. His argument that that's his personal property that can't be opened, that wouldn't hold water to really for really any of the people who are quite exercised about the necessity of keeping their iPhones private. Right. And then you have the cases. So I spoke to I didn't have them on the podcast, but I spoke to Cyrus Vance, who's the I think he probably still is the District Attorney of Manhattan Junior, not the former Secretary of State. Yeah. And so it kind of ran through this with him for a couple of hours, and he was telling me about murders that are unsolved, where they know that the murder victim was texting with someone up to the moment she was killed, or that the wow. Or that the video the camera was on. Right. Like, like, like people who had taken pictures of their murderers with the intention of them being seen. Yeah, presumably. Right. Yeah. And Apple was declining to help unlock these iPhones. Right. And at that point, some hundreds of phones. Really? And this is just one state. It's a big state, but still and you can imagine being the parent of your daughter gets murdered and it is possible to get the data because she took the picture, wanting her murderer to go to jail, and now all of a sudden, it's a violation of her privacy or see that picture. Exactly. The fact that we can't find some mechanism by which to right that wrong doesn't make sense to me. So I'm on both sides of this issue. I'm in favor of good people not having their privacy needlessly invaded, obviously, and having secure communication. But at a certain point, if you are behaving badly enough, I think the state has an interest in sorting out what you've done and why you did it and who you collaborated with. And this controversy is going to come back to us 100 fold the moment we have reliable lie detection technology. Right. I should also say that we have solved this problem in the opposite way, where people have the opposite intuition with respect to DNA technology. So you do not have a right to keep your DNA secret. You can't say, no. No. You can't take a swab of my saliva because that's private data, you know, that I don't want you to have access to. No. And that would, in a certain level, be more logical for people to say, like, I'm sorry, that is so intimate. You may not it would be in some ways more defensible, but it's not. And we've just steamrolled over that sanctity because there's a forensic imperative to do it. There's an overwhelming benefit to social benefit and crime finding benefit. Yeah. But the argument people are treating their iPhones essentially as a part of their minds that they don't want red. Right. Understandably. Because there's so much information there, but when we can actually read minds that that's going to be do you have a right to take the Fifth Amendment privilege when we have lie detection technology that can sort out whether or not you're telling the truth. And I mean, there are philosophical problems with relying on lie detection technology. We know there are people who could be delusional, who could be telling the truth and perhaps giving a false confession. Right. Well, one of your guests, Lawrence Wright, wrote a book about that very phenomenon. Exactly. Yeah, that was fascinating. So that's a wrinkle we need to sort out. It seems to me that there are certain moments where any of the claims of personal liberty and privacy just break down. You make mistakes high enough and you make a person's culpability obvious enough that we should be getting into their phones and computers by any means possible. And because of the San Bernardino connection, this actually touches on another interest. Another thing that interests me quite a bit is when you sit down to write a book that's set in the very near future, certain depictions that you make of the near future almost inevitably either come true or fail. To come true during the period that you're writing, particularly if you aspire for your book to be set roughly 9 seconds into the future, which is what I did with this one. Right. And one of the things in the world of after on is lone wolf terrorism. And the self organizing lone wolf wolf terrorism that is inspired by ideology as opposed to by a central group is a feature of the world of after all. And to my absolute dismay, I take absolutely no pride in, quote, unquote predicting this correctly that has, in fact, started occurring to a significantly greater degree in the couple of years since I started writing the book. Now, you made the point in your very recent podcast with Graham Wood that in some ways, ISIS inspired attacks are more scary than ISIS directed ones. And he made the counterpoint that ISIS directed ones tend to have much, much higher death tolls. Yeah, but the ISIS inspired ones is it just their ability to pop up anywhere and spread like a virus that makes them more scary to you? Yeah, well, it's the demonstrated effectiveness and spread ability of the ideas that is the scariest thing. There are two things to worry about in this world. You can worry about bad people and you can worry about bad ideas. And bad ideas are much worse than bad people because they can potentially inhabit the minds of good people and get even good people to do bad things. Right. So I'm under no illusions. And many people are that all the people who joined ISIS are bad people. Right. There's just people who believe these bad ideas. Many people imagine that ISIS is acting like a bug light for psychopaths and so that only people who would do bad things anyway, they would have found some other reason to rape and kill and take sex slaves and cut people's heads off, and they just happened to find this reason. No, that's absolutely not what's happening. And we. Know that that's not what's happening. There are psychologically normal people who become as convinced of the veracity of ISIS's worldview as I became convinced of the utility of meditation practice. And then they do something very extreme. What I did was very extreme. I dropped out of a great college, right, and kind of derailed my life in conventional terms and fortook every other reasonable ambition. But to understand the nature of consciousness more for this significant period of time, right. You know, you change a few of the the relevant beliefs. I could have been, you know john Walker linde in Afghanistan with the Taliban. Right? Like, I recognize a person like that as someone who's very familiar to me. And John Walker Lindh still he's in prison now. He still believes, and he's getting out soon. Yeah. And the force multiplier element of it matters a great deal to me because I actually think a raw material that a lot of these nihilistic organizations use are folks who happen to be feeling suicidal today. Humanity produces them in abundance and has across continents and societies and centuries. About a million people will kill themselves this year. And by the way, it's very hard, I think probably impossible. If I were recruiting suicide bombers, I would probably stay away from people who are happy and centered and empowered, because talking that person into killing themselves at all is an enormous lift compared to talking to somebody who's already coming to me out of their minds with, you know, addiction, with depression, with chemical imbalances in their minds. Whatever. Society produces this raw material in some abundance, and some percentage of those people are inclined to take people with them. And some of those people are secular. I mean, the guy who shot up the school at Newtown, he committed suicide. He was relying on the police to kill him. He was committing suicide and taking as many people with him as possible. Likewise, the guy who murdered the five cops in Dallas, he didn't drop a bomb on him. Likewise, the columbine kids. Wasn't there a lift ons a pilot? Andreas Lubitz? So that's the second force multiplying. This gets me nervous. So when somebody gets into that mental state, my feeling is that there are two force multipliers that stand out. One is what is now animating them. And this gets to what you're talking about at the power of these ideas. I mean, if you look at Mateen, the Orlando killer, he was a third rate loser who failed at everything. He had been dumped by two wives before the age of 30. He could not hold down a job. I would imagine that in many parallel universes, he's the kind of guy who might have killed himself or might have killed an ex wife or two ex coworkers or something. He probably also had some kind of gay, shame, self hating some self hating thing going on. But there are many, many hundreds of people like that who do themselves in. He got animated by an idea that inspired him to go out and literally commit the biggest mass murder in the history of a country, with a very high bar for biggest ever. He killed 49 people. Now, the second force multiplier, as you just indicated, is going to be weaponry. So this is a chilling fact. I wish I didn't know it, but I do. In the two and a half years leading up to the Newtown attack, there was a series of very strange, unrelated school attacks in China, mass murder attacks, and there were ten of them. And by chilling irony, the last one was literally just a few hours before the Newtown attack. Now, those tennis attacks combined, all ten of them put together, had roughly the same number of total deaths as the lone Newtown attack because they were being committed literally with knives and hammers. Whereas the person who attacked in Newtown had the benefit of living in a society that sells near cousins of machine guns to people who are on the no fly list. Not that he was on the no fly list, but we permit that. So there's this huge force multiplier of weaponry, and then if you're Andreas Lubitz and you have an airplane, okay, fine, you kill a couple of hundred people more. And with that chilling fact in mind, I'd like to just read a couple of quotes to you from End of Faith. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences, and hence our religious beliefs, antithetical to our survival. We're fast approaching a time when the manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction will be a trivial undertaking. And these are from three different quotes. While it's never been difficult to meet your maker, in 50 years, it will simply be too easy to drag everyone else along to meet him with you. So we have this force multiplying spread of ideas, this proliferation of lone wolf attacks. We know what weaponry does, what weapons were you thinking about when you wrote that? When you said, in 50 years, it will be simply too easy to drag everyone else? Were you thinking of bioweapons, synthetic biology? Nuclear is harder to do. Yeah, although it's not that hard. Actually, it was hard to invent the technology. The Manhattan Project was hard. It's not hard to render much of Los Angeles uninhabitable for 10,000 years. It's far less hard once it was invented. But still, you need the resources of a nation state to create the weapon, right? Well, you actually don't. I mean, if you're willing to die, you can be the weapon. What you need is the enriched uranium or the plutonium. But you could literally you wouldn't get the full yield you would want if you want to kill the maximum number of people. But you could take two, like 50 pound plates of enriched uranium and just put one on the floor and slam the other one on top of it, and it would go critical. You would not get a hydrogen bomb experience yes. But you would get and you would be just kind of like the ultimate dirty bomb experience. Right. So you could actually be the bomb. But a much more reasonable thing to do if you're in this business is to just do something that's analogous to the bomb design of Hiroshima, nagasaki, where you have a gun style apparatus, where you're shooting one piece of enriched uranium or plutonium into the other right. And just essentially slamming them together harder than you could physically. And again, the yield there is not as complete as a nation state would produce, but still, you could get a multi kiloton yield there. The technical issue is just getting the stuff which does exist. Yeah. You do not need the tools of a nation state. You just need a few engineers and machinists it's powered by ordinary explosives to get the things slamming together. And there are a bunch of scenarios that have been described to everyone's horror online, where you can do this in a shipping container, and you truck it into the DC, and it can be activated with a cell phone. And William Perry has a terrifying bit of animation that he put online that just shows you how simple and how totally destabilizing would be to our society to do this. So just imagine imagine you you build a simple device which is just, again, just like Hiroshima, you know, like a 15 kiloton explosion. If you put that, you know, right next to the Capitol Building. Right. You just now you have a continuity of government problem. Who did you kill? You killed all the senators and congressmen and the president, Supreme Court chiefs. Yeah. Imagine doing it in one American city and then announcing whether this is true or not, who knows? But then announcing you have similar bombs placed in ten other American cities, which you will not identify now. Yeah. And you'll do one a week until your demands are met. How do we begin to respond to that? Right. This is an act of terrorism, obviously. Orders of magnitude beyond September 11, which ushered in a decade of just derangement, you know, and cost trillions of dollars in the aftermath, you know, at least two wars and financial crises. Imagine this happening in one city. This is within the technical capacity of a group like ISIS or al Qaeda. You just need to get the fuel, and we have almost no way to prevent it. We're not screening things at our ports so assiduously as to know this couldn't possibly get in. Do you worry about bioweapons as well? Yeah, you just have to imagine weaponizing something akin to the Spanish flu, which killed something like 50 million people in 1918. The sky is the limit. There you could get something that is as easily transmissible and is even more deadly when you're talking about a bio weapon. The worst possible case is something that is easily transmissible and that doesn't make you floridly ill for long enough, long duration, do as much damage as you possibly can. You sneeze a lot on lots of grapes of people for a good long time before you die. Yeah. And then those people are sneezing on grapes and people and then nobody knows there's an outbreak until there's a million infecties or something like that. Something like Ebola doesn't have going for it. As bad as it is, as horrible as it is. One of the reasons why it's not scarier is it is very quickly obvious how sick people are. If you're talking about airborne transmission of something that has very high mortality and a long incubation period yeah. Weaponize that, that is a civilization canceling event if we don't have our act together. Now, George Church may be the only person who can do it but in 25 years with biology following what's sometimes called the Carlson curve which is even steeper than the Moore's Law curve who knows when? Ten people than 100 than 1000 people. So I'd like to close on something that I wrestle with a lot. You gave a great Ted Talk. On the risk of super AI. I won't make you replay it here because people can access it. I'll just pull two quotes from it to just set the context. You described the scenario of a super AI having better things to do with our planet and perhaps our atoms than let us continue to have them as being terrifying and likely to occur. And also saying it's very difficult to see how they won't destroy us. And I don't think that those are shrill or irrational statements. Personally. I also don't think it's shrill or irrational to think that what George Church alone can do today will be the province of many millions of lab techs probably in our lifetimes. And with those two forces out there, I don't know what scares me more. And I think about proliferating democratizing, existentially destructive technology. Just about the only thing I can think of that might protect us against such a thing would be an incredibly benign super AI that has functional omniscience because of its ubiquity in the networks and has functional omnipotence because of its mastery of, who knows, nanotechnology or something else. But, boy, we're both scared about a super AI. It's almost like super AI can't live with them, can't live without them. How do we navigate those twin perils? And do we need to perhaps embrace a super AI as a protective mechanism for democratized, super destructive power? Yeah. Well, I do think it really isn't a choice. I think we will develop the most intelligent machines we can build unless something terrible happens to prevent us doing it. The only reason why we wouldn't build the civilization gets thrown violently backwards. Yes. George Church loses his mind or one of his texts does. And we have some pathogen that renders us incapable of keeping our progress going on the technology front and you just have to imagine how bad that would have to be in order to actually stop the march of progress. You'd have to have a world where no one understood how to build a computer again and no one ever understood how to build a computer again going forward beyond canacle for levowitz type of destructiveness. Yeah. So if it's not that bad, we will keep making progress. And you don't need Moore's Law, you just need some increment of progressive time at some rates. And at some point we will find ourselves in the presence of machines that are smarter than we are because I don't think there's anything magical about the wetware we have in our heads as far as information processing. So the moment you admit that what we call a mind can be implemented on another platform and there's every reason to admit that scientifically now I leave questions of consciousness aside. I don't know that consciousness comes along for the ride necessarily, if you get intelligent machines and and ironically, the most horrible vision is one of building super intelligent unconscious machines, because in the presence of consciousness, at least you could argue, well, if they wipe us out, well, at the very least, we will have built something more important than we are. We will have built gods, we will have built minds that can take more pleasure in the beauty of the universe than we can. Who knows how good the universe could be inhabited in their hands, right? But if the lights aren't on, if we've built just mere mechanism that is incredibly powerful, that can be goal directed, but for whom there is nothing that it's like to be directed towards those goals well, that really strikes me as the worst case scenario because then the lights go out if we go out. So it sounds like you believe that the super AI is inevitable unless something the other equally terrible happens. Yes. So our best shot of surviving is to do all we can to make sure the super AI that one day inevitably arises is benign. Yeah, it's aligned with our interests. Intelligence is the best thing we have really. It's our most valuable resource, right? So it is either the source of or the safeguard for everything we care about. And there's overwhelming economic incentives for thousands immediately rich in smart people, intensely well capitalized companies to go screaming down that path. So all of the incentives are aligned to get into the end zone as quickly as possible. And that is not the alignment we need to get into the end zone as safely as possible. And it will always be easier to build the recklessly unsafe version than figuring out how to make this thing safe. So that's what worries me. But I think it is inevitable in some form and again, I'm not making predictions that we're going to have this in ten years or 20 years. But I just think at some point and the human level bit is a bit of a mirage, because I think the moment we have something human level, it is superhuman, it flows past that that's a mirage, and people are imagining somehow that that's a stopping point. It will barely get there, and then we'll stay there for a long time. It could only be the case if we are ourselves at the absolute summit of cognition which just defies common sense, but we just know that's not true. We just know that just take the calculator in your phone, that's not human level. That is omniscient with respect to arithmetic and having the totality of human knowledge instantaneously accessible through the Internet. And if we hook these things to the Internet, it has a memory that is superhuman and ability to integrate data that is superhuman. So the moment all of these piecemeal cognitive skills cohere in a system that is also able to parse natural language perfectly, you can talk to it and it understands, it does what you want. All of the answers to the questions are no longer like series answers where they contain howlers every third trial, but they're the most perceptive, best informed, most articulate answers you're getting from any mind you ever interact with. Once those gains are made, they won't be unmade. It's like chess. It's like once computers were better at chess than people, and now we're in this sort of no man's land, which again, which I think will be fairly brief, where the centaur? Yeah. The combination of a person and a computer is now the best system. But at a certain point and I'm amazed that anyone doubts this, but at a certain point, I think it will obviously be the case that adding the ape to the equation just adds noise to the equation and the computers will be better than cyborgs. And once they are, there's no going back from that point. It may not be everything. There may be things we neglect to build into our AIS that turn out to be important for human common sense. Or this is the scary things. We don't know what is required to fully align an intelligent system with our well being. We could neglect to put something like our common sense because we don't perfectly understand it into these systems. And then you can get errors that are deeply counterintuitive, that are I mean, this is analogous to Nick Bostrom's cartoon thought experiment of the paperclip Maximizer. I was like, well, who would build such a machine? Well, we wouldn't, but we could build a machine that, in the service of some goal that is obviously a good one, could form some instrumental goal that we would never think an intelligent system could form and that we would never think to explicitly prevent. And yet this thing is totally antithetical. It reaches every single equilibrium where it says, More paper clips. Good. Going to do that for a while and soon the universe is paperclips. Well, Sam, you have been extravagantly generous with your time. I appreciate it. Not at all. It's a pleasure and thank you very kindly. And we will, I'm sure, remain in touch. Yeah. And I wish you the best of luck. Needless to say, with your book and the podcast and everything else. Thank you kindly. It's a great idea that you're combining both in this way. I think, obviously, this is the frontier of creative use of these new media, and it's great to see you doing it. If you're enjoying the Waking Up podcast, there are many ways you can support it@samharris.org. Support? As a supporter of the podcast, you'll get early access to tickets to my live events, and you'll get exclusive access to my Ask Me Anything episodes, as well as to the AMA page on my website, where you can pose questions and vote on the questions of others. And please know that your support is greatly appreciated. It's listeners like you that make the show possible./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, the briefest of Housekeepings here. Just want to announce that the first season of my podcast with Ricky Gervais Absolutely Mental, has dropped and eleven episodes are available@absolutelymental.com. The first three of those episodes we released here on the podcast, so there are eight new ones. And thank you all for letting us demo the series on you. Anyway, I had a tremendous amount of fun doing this with Ricky. These conversations really are just like the ones we've had in private to date. So if you want to ride along with us, that's where you can do it@absolutelymental.com. Okay. Today I'm speaking with David White. David is a poet and he's been on the podcast before. Truly wonderful voice who's been producing more and more content for us over at Waking Up. His poems and short essays and extemporaneous reflections are slowly accruing over there and it's really wonderful. And here is the next installment. We discuss a few more of his short essays from his book Consolations. When I'm speaking with David, I feel like I'm speaking with my alter ego. In some ways, he is so different from me, but there are so many places where we converge. Anyway, it's always great fun to speak with him. And now I bring you David White. I am back with David White. David, thanks for joining me again. It's a pleasure. So we have many more things to talk about taking the roadmap you have set out in your wonderful book Constellations, the audio of which is slowly making its way into the Waking Up app. And so we have to remind people this is your book of essentially prose poems or short essays focused on specific words. And we'll do a few more of those words today. But you also sent a poem through. Do you want to read that? This is a piece I wrote in a deep kind of reverie last week. I'm building on an original book of poems called Pilgrim. Many of those poems took the image of a journey to a place that we set for ourselves, and especially it took the form of going to Santiago de Compostela, which is such a fashionable pilgrimage right now, and still a heartfelt and sincere one across northern Spain. So this is called for the road to Santiago. We all have that experience of the wonderful experience, actually, of packing for a new trip. But there's something about going to a place of ultimate meaning for us, which is represented by Santiago, where I feel we already have what we need. So this was written out of that experience. Very short poem. For the road to Santiago. Don't make new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind for the road to Santiago don't make new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind bring what you have bring what you have you were always going that way anyway. You were always going there all along. I like that a lot. So the distinction between being a tourist and a pilgrim is always fascinating on the surface. If you are moving your body from one place to another, going to some foreign country because you want to go, or even some sacred place because you want to go. This distinction is really just in the mind of the traveler. But it's a pretty profound one. Exactly. And they were always in the chronicles of pilgrims. There were always those who were just out for a holiday and a laugh and just to get away to, especially in feudal times, where your life was so hedged in by your responsibilities to those above you. So going off on pilgrimage was an enormous part of medieval life in England and all across the continent. But we're usually both we're a pilgrim who gets caught up in the delights of tourism along the way, and we're creatures of remembering and forgetting. And you could say that the tourism is a form of temporary forgetting. It begins in delight, a bit like opening the internet in the morning. It begins in delight. And that's short lived. Yes, I am a creature of forgetting because I've forgotten that it ever began in delight at this point. Yes. Well, I mean, part of the dynamic of the Internet is human beings are so desperate for news, for a voice from the other side that's somehow going to change their present, and that setting off into the Internet on the morning is the same call that every human being feels towards all the great pilgrimage sites that have lived in our different human cultures, whether it's Mecca or Kyoto or Veronesi or if you're an Elvis fan, it's Graceland. Something happened there that was extraordinary, that you are going to touch and you are going to actually incarnate it in your own life. So it's this very ancient and everyday dynamic in human life that over there is just slightly more important than here, where I'm standing. And and I'm going to make a journey out of here to there. And something extraordinary is going to happen along the way and almost always something more extraordinary than I'm prepared for. I always say that no one really survives a real conversation with something other than themselves and no one survives a real pilgrimage if you're sincere. The person who arrives is not is never the person who began in the first place. That might be the crucial distinction, I think. When you are on pilgrimage, the goal to be changed by the trip is always explicit, right? It's not just that you're interested or yes, you've heard someplace is great. It's an inner process you're focused on. There's a lovely little piece in the Irish tradition written by an Irish monastic. You can imagine a pilgrimage from Ireland to Rome in the 6th or 7th or 8th century was quite perilous and quite extraordinary. But it's just a few lines, but he says to go to Rome. To go to Rome. Great. The journey little again. If you do not take him with you, you will not find him there. To go to Rome great, the journey little the gain. If you do not take him with you, you will not find him there. Of course, that's the image of Christ in the Christian tradition. But whatever you're the name you have for the great calling in your life, if you don't stay within the gravitational well and invitational pull of that calling, you will end up as a mere tourist. But I think there's a lot of self forgiveness necessary in every pilgrimage, just as there is in every life of forgiving yourself, for all of your parallel peregrinations, you could say, all the hours you wasted, which in the end you find all the great stories. So you didn't waste a minute along the way when you finally arrived there. That's a point that I think we'll return to in discussing some of these words, but I actually have a question about the poem, this line don't make new declarations about what to bring and what to leave behind. What were you thinking in terms of new declarations? This has to do with the essential way that we hold the conversation of life and on any journey, the way we hold that exchange between those we meet along the way and the landscapes we meet along the way and the events we meet along the way, both joyous and traumatic. So there's a way, no matter your outward circumstances, that you hold the conversation of your existence. And in that essay Destiny, I'm looking at the way that this word, which seems fated, actually can be an understanding of the depth by which we hold that conversation. I always think that every human being lives out their destiny, no matter what they do. But you can live out your destiny through distance and exile and through never consummating your desires or you can live it out at a deeper level and your life is completely transformed because of the depth of attention and intentionality that you bring to the conversation. It's still your essential nature. It's just that you are inhabiting it in a fuller way. I mean, that's exactly what your app is all about, is inviting people into these deepest states conversational states, I would say, while not leaving the essential foundations of the way you're made. Well, let's listen to destiny and discuss destiny. Destiny always has a possessor, as in my destiny or your destiny or her destiny. It gives a sense of something we cannot avoid or something waiting for us. It is a word of story, book or mythic dimension. Destiny is hardly used in everyday conversation. It is a word that invites belief or disbelief. We reject the ordering of events by some fated unseen force. Or we agree that there seems to be a greater hand than our own working at the edges of even the most average life. But speaking of destiny not only grants us a sense of our own possibilities, but gives us an intimation of our flaws. We sense, along with Shakespeare, that what is unresolved or unspoken in a human character might overwhelm the better parts of ourselves. When we choose between these two poles of mythic triumph or fated failure, we may miss the everyday conversational essence of destiny. Our future influenced by the very way we hold the conversation of life itself. Never mind any actions we might take or neglect to take. Two people, simply by looking at the future in radically different ways have completely different futures from one another awaiting them, no matter their immediate course of action. Even the same course of action coming from a different way of shaping the conversation will result in a different outcome. We are shaped by our shaping of the world and are shaped again in turn. The way we face the world alters the face that we see in the world. The way we face the world alters the face that we see in that world. Strangely, every person always lives out their destiny no matter what they do according to the way they shape the conversation. But that destiny may be lived out on the level of consummation or of complete frustration through experiencing a homecoming or a distant sense of constant exile, or more likely, some gradation along the spectrum that lies between. It is still our destiny, our life. But the sense of satisfaction involved and the possibility of fulfilling its promise may depend more upon a brave participation. A willingness to hazard ourselves in a very difficult world a certain form of wild generosity with our gifts a familiarity with our own depth, our own discovered surprising breadth and always a long, practiced and robust vulnerability equal to what any future may offer. Our destiny is fated not only by great powers beyond our beckoning horizon, but by the very way we shape and hold the everyday conversations of a familiar life. Our destiny is fated not only by great powers beyond our beckoning horizon, but by the very way we shape and hold the everyday conversations of a familiar life. The idea of destiny, as you point out, is first, it's a term we don't use very often, nor do we use fate very often. And these are kind of unfashionable ideas, although in another mode, I think people believe, or want to believe, that the things in their lives happen for a reason, right? That it's not there's not a lot of accident. But it is interesting to consider this question of whether things in our lives could have been otherwise. We live with this sense of the possible. We're given a choice between various options in every moment, really, and it always seems coherent to ask, well, what would life be like had I taken a different path? But it's at least possible that what actually happens is the only thing that could have happened in any case. The counterfactual, the notion of possibility, is simply a thought that's occurring to us as we travel down whatever path we've actually taken. How do you think about this in terms of your own life? I do feel it is possible to miss a tide in your life. And there are great lines by the great German Port Rilke, where he's looking out at the garden in the autumn as things are dying away, and he says, no more things will happen. And even the thing, it's about having Mr Tide in his life and he says, no more things will happen, and even the things that do happen will cheat you. Even you, my God, and you are the one who draws him daily deeper into your depths. The sense I do remember, for instance, coming to the end of years of hard work towards a particular goal, which was a degree in marine zoology, which was no easy feat for me. I was always an artist, I was always more artistically inclined, more literally inclined. But when I was 14 or 15, I saw this extraordinary figure, Jacques Cousteau, sailing across our little television set. And so I conceived a notion to follow the life of the dolphin aboard the good ship Calypso. And so I put myself into the salt minds of biology, chemistry and physics. But as I was coming towards my final examinations, it was a time of a terrible bust in the life sciences. There were no jobs. There were no jobs anywhere. And I decided, instead of facing up to extreme heartbreak and disappointment in not getting any jobs, I wouldn't apply for any at all. So this is turning away and away from your original joy, the original place you've set yourself. You're turning away from Santiago because the disappointment you intuit is just too strong. But I went to see my girlfriend at that time. I lived on the northern side of Snowdonia and she lived on the southern side. We didn't see each other very much and she lived in a remote valley on a farm at the top of a wonderful place called Kum Pennant. And it's famous for its witchcraft, actually. And Alastair Crowley used to call up the devil in a tower at the bottom. And I'd hitchhike rhyme but dropped off. I would whistle as I went past this ruined tower where all of this necromancer used to take place and walk up to the farm while I arrived. This time I'd just done all my examinations. I'd made this very serious young man's vow not to apply for any jobs because I didn't want to be existentially disappointed and I didn't want to be sifting plankton in a station in the Outer Hebrides either. I wanted that original blue water image. Well, I got to the farm and it was a communal it was a communal farm, so lots of people lived there. I knocked on the door and I could tell there was no one in, just from the echo, but I was miles from anywhere. There was a storm coming in off the Irish Sea behind me and halfway up the mountain there. So I let myself in, as you do when you're a student, you know, and and I was like goldilocks in the House of the Three Bears. There was nothing, no one there. And I said, Well, I'll get a fire going for them when they come back. It was quite cold, so I got a fire going and then I said, Well, I'll make a cup of tea and if they turn up, they'll have a cup of tea already made. And if I made a tea out, I can tell you, David, that in the film version of this you are promptly cannibalized by witches. Well, I tell you something even more extraordinary happened, because I fell asleep in the chair and literally at midnight there was a knock on the door. And I said, Wait a minute, if someone's knocking on the door, it means they don't live here either. And I tell you, this farm is remote. It's halfway up the mountainside with the wind blowing and the rain blowing. And I opened the door and there is this slightly disheveled figure having walked up the same track that I walked up, and he's looking for someone else who lives in the house who also isn't there. And I said, Well, I don't live here, but come in, sit by the files of a cup of tea. And we sat down and as you do with a complete stranger, I said I started asking him what he did in his life. He had this wonderful leather bag that was filled with papers, I noticed, because he opened it and put it down at the side and it didn't quite fit with his attire. He looked like this wonderful pilgrim figure. But here were all of these papers. I said, what's your work, by the way? He said, oh, I walk around doing audits of wildwood in England and Wales, and I audit the carrying capacity of these old woodlands and trees. And I basically get the opportunity of spending a lot of time in these wild places, counting everything and then putting it together as to how healthy the system is. And I looked at him with my mouth open because it was a representation, in a way, of what I wanted in my life. And I said, how did you get work like that? And of course, I was asking myself, why have you given up on your own dream? Although I wouldn't have consciously known I was asking myself that. But that's what I was doing. Why have you got off the road to your Santiago? And he said, do you really want to know? I said yes. He said, I was a drug addict in North London and I wanted to kill myself. And I looked at him, I said, really? He said that's where I started. I was in a flat with other drug addicts. We all mistrusted and hated each other, all stealing from another. The addiction was the greatest thing of all. One rainy day when I was in there by myself, I tried to throw myself out of the window, but it was an old fashioned sash window which I had to lift up. And I was so weak at the time that I got halfway out with my head in this flower box that was in ruins outside. And the sash window came down on the back of my shoulders and I was so weak, I couldn't get out of there. I was staring into this flower box, but there was a little drip from the roof above falling into one corner of the flowerbox and this little stream going through this tiny landscape. And of course, I had nowhere to go, no friends. I started working my hands in this ground, you know, and re molding it all. And I must have been there 45 minutes or an hour before one of my flatmates came in and helped me get out. But in that time, as my hands were working in that ground, I knew what I was supposed to do. And the hardest thing I ever did in the years that followed was walk past my dealer, literally outside the block of flats where we lived, and knock on a friend's door and ask him to take me in. I got taken in. I started doing landscaping just in a physical way, laboring. I went to night school. Then I got a degree, and then I got a master's. Now you see me here. So I do believe that he could have been wedged in that window and not come to ground and he would have lived out his destiny from the distance of longing through the misery of his addiction to things that represented where he wanted to go in a temporary basis through drug experiences which can be remarkable in themselves. But sustaining them is another discipline. But also I do believe that I could have been sat in front of that fire and not asked him that question. And my life I would have still lived the same life on the way to Santiago, but I would have lived it out through distance and longing and maybe a parallel kind of admiration through reading, but perhaps not through consummation. I suppose that's what you speak about, Sam, when you talk about volition as opposed to Willpower, that there's a way of coming into your body, coming into your voice, coming into your speech, in which you have a completely different future than if you didn't do that. It just strikes me as fundamentally mysterious. If you pay attention, the mystery never recedes. And again, we're always confronted with simply what happens, right. The thought that does occur to you, the memory that does arise, the intention that actually becomes effective, that leads to action. It's like we're driving a car, but we're not looking through the windshield at the future. We're looking in the rear view mirror at what's already past. And in some ways, we have more control over the past than the future. At least we can change what the past means to us in a way that's decisive in the future. We really don't know what's going to happen next in this conversation. We have a plan, we have a road map. I know the words we want to talk about, but thus far we've talked about very little that has been planned, and so it's all just unfolding. But when you look at your life, it seems like actually, I think you made this point in one of your essays in Constellations. I believe it could have been a poem. But isn't there an image of you standing at the back of a boat, looking at the wake rather than looking forward? We're always in the presence of the wake. We're leaving in the world. But it's not to say that it's entirely passive. You have a line in this essay, Destiny, that we are shaped by our shaping of the world. Yes. In acting on your environment, you are now creating an environment that is acting back on you, and sometimes in incredibly powerful ways that determine everything. Yeah, we have all of these inherited qualities, but we can bring them to work together in a way which is a kind of catalytic to new possibilities. The only poem that I ever wrote under commission was one commissioned by the Boeing Company for the Triple Seven. Aeroplane I tried worked with their top leadership, and they just launched the plane, and they'd won an aerospace trophy, the Collier Trophy, and they wanted a poem at the Celebratory dinner. Well, I said to the executive who'd been sent to request it, I said, Poets don't do very well under these circumstances, but I'll have a go at it. And I suddenly had this really powerful physical sense of all of the time I'd spent on Aeroplanes in my life of nonstop traveling and the remarkable and biblical scenes you often see out of the window or looking down over the Mississippi Delta, shining like a national guitar, as Paul Simon said, do all of these remarkable scenes. And yet it's equally remarkable how often people have the shutters down and they're watching something really unremarkable on that little screen in front of them. You've hit upon one of my pet peeves here. The fact, admittedly, it's been a long time since I've been on an airplane. We're still under the shadow of COVID here, but the idea that people would prefer to spend five or 10 hours in a dark tube watching their screens, when certainly under conditions of daylight, there is a better view of Earth than they have ever seen in any other circumstance unfolding outside that window, I find that very frustrating. Exactly. So I've often thought that that dynamic is actually because people can't really understand the invisible forces that are holding them in place. So part of the dynamic it's not the whole dynamic, but part of the dynamic is I'm actually not here, I'm not traveling at 500 above the ground with no visible means of support. But every now and again, as the aeroplane drops down, especially as you're coming into land through layers of humidity and temperature, you'll often see this solid white line suddenly form around the wing. And when you look at that solid white line, you realize that the forces that are holding you in place are actually as solid as concrete. But they're actually made up of a conversation between the shape of the wing and the velocity of the air around the wing itself. If you only have the wing, you'll just travel like a missile. Sorry. If you only have velocity, you'll just hit your destination like a target. If you only have the wing, you'll stall without the velocity, but you put the two together and you can travel thousands of miles. Now, the interesting thing is that shape has been there since the beginning of time as a potential for human beings. The shape of that wing, I forget the technical term for it, but all aerospace engineers know it. Yeah. And airfoil, I think. Yes, and but it was only 120 years ago that those two qualities were brought together. So this is the piece I wrote, and it's about holding the conversation at a deeper level so you can travel further, travel to places you never mind. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. So today I'm speaking with Tom Nichols. Tom is a professor of National Security Affairs at the US. Naval War College and an adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School. He's a former aide in the US. Senate. He's also a five time undefeated Jeopardy champion, and as one of the all time top players in the game, he was invited to the Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005. He is the author of several works on foreign policy and international security, including The Sacred Cause, No Use Nuclear Weapons and U. S. National Security Eve of Destruction The Coming Age of Preventive War, and his most recent book, which is the focus of our conversation is The Death of Expertise the Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. And we talk about the death of expertise, talk about the Dunning Kruger effect, which many of you have probably heard about. Talk about the growth of knowledge and our inevitable reliance on authority, all the while superseded it. We talk about what to do when experts fail, or how to think about the failure of expertise in various areas, medicine in particular. We talk about the repudiation of expertise that we now see all around us in politics. We get into conspiracy thinking a little bit, then we hit topics that are very much in Tom's area of expertise north Korea, politics, Trump, and related matters. Tom is a lifelong Republican, but you will find that he is also among the NeverTrump ers and has a few things to say on that topic. So without further delay, I bring you Tom Nichols. I'm here with Tom Nichols. Tom, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. I appreciate it. So I've had several guests on the show who have written books without any awareness of what was coming, and what was coming was the Trump presidency, but their books have been almost perfectly timed for the moment. The book we're going to discuss here is your book, The Death of Expertise. When did you write the book? When were you working on it? Actually, I started writing the book about three years ago. It was originally a kind of a blog rant that then got picked up as an article that ran in late 2013, early 2014. So I ran it well in advance of the election, actually. I had no idea that Trump was going to run and to include some stuff about the election, I actually had to pull the galleys at the last minute and include some discussion of that and brexit yeah, well, so we're not going to focus on Trump per se. I mean, we'll talk about him, but he really is the walking distillation of much of what you write in the book, and it could not come at a better time. So before we get into your argument and the issues you discuss, just tell us for a couple of minutes about your background as an academic person who has served in government in the Navy. What are the kinds of problems you have focused on up until now? Sure. Well, I actually began my life I'm going to date myself here by admitting this, but I was actually a Soviet specialist back in the day. That could be pretty relevant now as well. Yeah, unfortunately, it's a skill that's coming back into vogue. So I began my academic career as a Russian speaking Kremlinologist type. I worked on Soviet foreign and defense policy. I kind of went through a standard policy and academic track. I taught at Dartmouth for a lot of years. I taught at Georgetown. I worked in the United States Senate for the late Senator John Hines, Pennsylvania. I did a lot of consulting in Washington, which back during the Cold War, if you could speak Russian, there was a lot to do there. And then over time, I kind of moved on to broader international security stuff, and I ended up at the Naval War College, which, I should add, I don't represent the government or the navy or anybody in the discussion. Where I teach military officers during the day, and I go up to the Harvard Extension School at night, where I teach national security affairs at both places. International relations, nuclear weapons, international humanitarian stuff. So I kind of moved away from the Russia thing, and ironically enough, like everybody else, I sort of thought the Russia thing was not going to be kind of a lasting skill set. But yet here we are. Yeah, really, it really seemed completely gone, and all of a sudden we're back in something like the Cold War. All right, so there's so much I want to talk to you about here, but let's focus on the book for the moment. There's one topic you raised in the book which many people will have heard of, and it's the Dunning Kruger effect. Describe that effect. The Dunning Kruger effect, as I always like to tell people, it's a frustrating thing that you've experienced at Thanksgiving dinner that finally has a scientific name, which is that the less competent you are at something that the dumber you are, the less likely you are to realize that you're dumb. Which is why kind of the least informed person at dinner sort of spools off the longest. Or the other analogy always uses, like the guy who goes up and butchers a song during karaoke night steps off the stage and says, nailed it. Because he just doesn't get it. He can't hear it. And so the Dunning Kruger, these two social psychologists, Dunning and Kruger, did a series of tests where they figured out that the people who are least competent at something tend to be the most likely to overestimate their competence at whatever they're doing. So people that are bad writers think that they're terrific writers, and that's why they're bad writers, because they can't recognize it. They can't mobilize this skill called metacognition, which is the ability to step back from what you're doing and evaluate it kind of outside of yourself a bit. Yes. Unfortunately, the Dunning Kruger Effect, as a meme has spread so widely online that now I've begun to notice that mentioning the Dunning Kruger Effect is often a symptom, that one is suffering from it. I don't know if you've noticed this, that people are throwing this around and they do it more or less in the direction of any ideas they don't like. Right. Well, and it's become a it's become a synonym for stupid, which it isn't. Right. The Dunning Kruger effect is a very specific thing of thinking you're good at something when you're not good at something, and that the worse you are at it, the less likely you are to be able to recognize it. Yeah, it should be obvious why that would be the case, at least in one respect, because it's not until you really know a lot about a discipline that you come to recognize how much more there is to know. The gradations of expertise. It takes a mathematician of some level to appreciate the most brilliant products of mathematics and therefore the feats of mathematicians better than him or herself. If you don't have all the tools necessary to have the conversation, you can't even appreciate the high wire act that's going on over your head. I think, too. That the other word I use a lot in the book that I think creates a synergy with the Dunning Kruger effect is narcissism. Because people as you say when you become an expert at something and this is kind of ironic because of course I don't exactly have a reputation for being a self facing, humble guy but it's a very humbling thing. To become an expert because you start to realize that what you thought might be interesting and relatively something you could get your arms around turns out to be immensely complex. It's sort of like deciding that I think CS. Lewis has a great metaphor for it. When you love the stories of Homer as a boy, and then you start studying ancient Greek and say, wow, this is really difficult. There are a few paradoxes here, however. There's really this paradox of knowledge acquisition that cuts against this thesis of honoring expertise because the advancement of our knowledge really is the result of distrusting and defying received opinions. You have scientists who find that there's something wrong with the consensus on any given topic and they begin to defy it. And you need to have the tools of your discipline in order to do that. But it is just a fact that the growth of knowledge is a process where experts are continually unhorsed by a new generation of experts. And that's key. That's a key thing that I think laypeople don't understand. They say, well, experts have to be challenged all the time because they get things wrong. Yes, they do have to be challenged, but by other experts who understand that field and who understand the rules of evidence in that field and who understand what's already been accomplished in that field. You know, an example that people often bring up when I talk about this, they say, well, you know, doctors. What do they know? They got it wrong about eggs. And I talk about this in the book because I happen to love eggs. But who figured out that eggs aren't so bad for you? Well, other doctors did by peer reviewing and testing the assertions of an earlier generation of medical specialists. It wasn't the guy next to you in the diner who says I ate eggs all my life and I feel great. And I think that's where people make that mistake. Another variable here is that there's the problem of specialization. There's just too much to know. It's just impossible to know everything about everything or really even anything about everything. And so we all, no matter how well educated we become, we all rely on authority in general because there's just not enough time to gather all the tools you would need to verify every claim to propositional knowledge that you want to make. And so you have even the most accomplished scientists say, to speak of one area who can't help but rely on the authority of their peers in areas where they're not competent to investigate. And yet the algorithm of knowledge acquisition is to when the time is right or when given sufficient reason to distrust authority and move the boundary of our knowledge slightly further in one direction. And there's also this issue with respect to authority where you can't argue on the basis of your authority. You can't cite your credentials as a reason that you should be taken seriously. Either your argument and your data survive scrutiny or they don't. This reliance on authority is a little fishy. Once you shine the light on it, it seems to disappear. But then when you're not looking at it, it's there. And it's actually constraining, and rightfully so. It's constraining how the conversation should run and who should be listened to. Well, let me give you an example because I think it depends on who's doing the challenging. One of the worst stories I ever heard from my own field in the study of politics. I don't even want to say political science, the study of government. Years ago, a colleague of mine wrote a piece where he thinks he found a kind of mistake or a misinterpretation in a body of work done by a very famous scholar. And the journal sent the piece back to him saying, look, that scholar doesn't make mistakes like this. Now, that is exactly the kind of fishy appeal to authority that you're talking about. I mean, here was a young man, he's a professor. He had the credentials to enter the debate. He'd put the work in, he'd written up his findings, and the answer was, this person is a giant of our field. It is a priori impossible that he could have made that kind of mistake. And I think that's where peer review fails. I think, though, the notion of being skeptical of authority is something as someone trained in science myself, I actually began in the natural sciences, and I moved on to the social sciences. I think it's really important to the furtherance of knowledge. But I don't believe in skepticism for its own sake. An appeal to authority. As one of my friends, I wish I could claim this quote, but a friend of mine came up with a great quote. He said, the answer to an appeal to authority is not an appeal to ignorance. And when people say, well, I distrust eggheads merely by the fact that they are eggheads, that solves nothing. I think the kind of research, you know, where I was talking about in this other article or somebody said, isaac Kasimov always said the greatest discoveries in science are not attended by words like eureka. They're attended by words like, Gee, that's funny. One of my colleagues looked at this piece and said, Gee, that's funny. I don't think that's right. And he brought all the skills and tools to bear. Now, as it turns out, his over time, his argument has, in fact, won the day. But 25 years ago, while this major scholar was still alive, yeah, there was a closing of circling of the wagons. And that can happen. And science and knowledge fail when that happens. But I would argue that the daily successes of scholarly interaction, expert cross checking, peer review, that those successes are far more numerous than the failures. And I think people concentrate on the failures in the same way that they concentrate on spectacular plane crashes, that they think that these magnificent expert failures, on occasion kind of negate it's just like people being afraid of a plane crash, thinking that it negates the safety of air travel. I think people don't realize and you pointed this out when you talk about the division of labor I think people don't realize how much around them goes right every single day because of expert knowledge. Right. Well, let's talk a little bit about when experts fail and how to think about that. As your friend suggested, the answer to bad science and failed science or even scientific fraud is just more science and better science. It's never the promotion of ignorance or superstition or conspiracy theory burned down the library. Yeah. Which doctors it's like the movements away from scientific orthodoxy are almost never taken in the realm of health. You have the fact that it is just this galling fact of medicine that there are differences of opinion about what is healthy to eat or what treatments are appropriate for various conditions. You can get doctors that disagree. You can get failed protocols that frustrate everyone. All of this is a domain where we are groping in the dark for the facts to keep death away in this case. But the appropriate response to that uncertainty is not to just start giving your kids unpasteurized milk because your chiropractor told you to do it. Not every departure from received opinion is getting you closer to the goal. But how should we think about some of these glaring failures? What would you have people be running in the background on their hard drive to kind of help them emotionally respond when there is sort of plane crash of knowledge that happens on a fairly regular basis? I think that's a great question. And the first thing I'll say is that, look, I share that same distrust. I mean, look, I go to a doctor. I still remember when I was a younger guy and I was prescribed something, and I made the drastic mistake of reading that when you open up that thing that comes inside the box and it opens up into a big 16 page thing, and I read the notice from hell, right, that this has been known to turn people into Wolverines. So I started reading it, and I still remember the phrase that stuck out, the action of this drug on this issue is not well understood. Right? You know, and they just said it point blank. They said, look, this drug, we think it works. We're not quite sure why it does. And I found it both alarming and refreshing at the same time to say the action of this drug is not well understood, but we've done enough clinical tests that it seems to solve the problem and it doesn't cause any other problems. And I think that image that you're talking about of what should be running on the hard disk in the background is a basic level of trust that you would extend to most other people. I mean, you don't get on a bus and breathalyze the driver. You assume it. You assume that you don't assume that your letter carrier is stealing your packages. You assume that he or she is a professional who has been delivering packages for a long time, knows how to do it. You don't walk into your children's school assuming that everybody faked their teaching credentials. And I think what's really struck me about these attacks on expertise is both how, again, I'm going to use that word again, narcissistic and cynical they are. That has really led people to their going in position with certain classes of experts is I know you're lying and I know you're incompetent. So let me just take charge of this right now. A big constituency for the book, although again, I write a lot about foreign policy and we've had some major failures in foreign policy because of expertise. But a big constituency for the book was medical doctors who kept reaching out to me while I was writing it and telling me stories of people literally walking in and saying, look, I don't want to hear your mumbo jumbo here's what I have and here's what you are going to do, which is really not. I consider myself a very lucky man. I have a great relationship with a doctor who takes good care of me and answers all my questions. But I also make sure to show him that I trust him and that I ask him those questions and that I'll listen when he talks to me. I think with the larger issue of policy failure, there's a somewhat different thing that I think people should bear in mind, which is if your immediate reaction is that a policy is going wrong, whether it's the war in iraq or an economic downturn or whatever it is. I always turn this question back to people to say how much of what you're objecting to is something you wanted? Because experts don't dispose. Experts propose. They are presented. I mean, I was an adviser both to the Defense Department, to the CIA, to I did some work talking with people with state I've done a lot in the executive branch and I advised both a state representative. I worked in state politics for two years and in the federal level in the Senate for a year. And you'd be surprised at how much of the policy outputs that experts work on are on problems that the people, the voters want done. And while I will certainly grant that George Tennant walking out there and saying, hey, WMDs in Iraq, slam dunk. He should have been held accountable for that. That was a lousy call by the politicization of expert opinion. On the other hand, people always talk about things like Vietnam or the Iraq war or the housing crisis, and I always point out, you know, these were all things that were popular with the public, that were that experts were told to go fix, and that, you know, some of the less expert opinions or Vietnam I talk about briefly in the book. But, you know, it's important to remember the popular answer to Vietnam in 164 when Barry Goldwater was running was use nuclear weapons. You know, one of the reviews of my book said, what have you experts done for us in the last 50 years? And my answer immediately was, well, you're not rooting around in radioactive ashes looking for canned goods. So I think we'll take that one as a win. Yeah, well, everything that didn't go wrong was also secured by some form of expertise, right? So every plane that didn't crash is a triumph of engineering. If I can just add with every plane that doesn't crash, it's not just a triumph of engineering, it's a triumph of diplomacy. It's a triumph of public policy, about managing the airways, of making sure deconflicting flights. I mean, there's a million things that go right every time you take a successful airplane flight. It's not just the pilot being skillful. And I think people just think about that. No one, unless you've really trained in this area, has great intuitions for probability and risk. And just take the election of Donald Trump as an example. The polls on the eve of the election, I think he had a 28% chance of winning, and many people assumed that he was more or less guaranteed not to win with a 28% chance. I was somewhat guilty of that in that I really just could not imagine him winning and was certainly going to relish the moment when he didn't. But looking at those polls, I was always worried, given what I understand about probability, I understand how often a 28% chance comes up in one's life. You know, it's very high probability of something happening that you think could be a kind of civilizational catastrophe. Well, I think it was Nate Silver who said something when people were jumping all over the pollsters. He said, Look, I said that Hillary had a two and three chance of winning. He said, People remember that means every third time you run the election, donald Trump wins. And I likened it to weather forecasters. When a weather forecaster says there's a 25% chance of rain, and then people don't bring an umbrella and it rains on them, they say, stupid forecasters. They don't know anything, which is poor understanding of probability, as you point out. So before we dive into politics and war and foreign policy and all of these other issues where you are an expert, I guess there's just a couple of other points about medicine, because this obviously affects people's lives continuously. I've begun to feel that this is one of these areas where having more information is very often a bad thing, and it can be a bad thing even for someone who is fairly well educated in the area. I'm not a doctor, but I have a PhD in neuroscience. I understand a lot of the relevant biology. I can work my way through more or less any medical document. But I find that when I get sick or one of my kids gets sick and there's something on the menu that seems potentially terrible, the answer to that problem for me is less and less my getting onto Google or into scientific journals and doing more research on my own. I find that it's just true for me. It has to be doubly true for someone who does not have a scientific background. Now, when something goes wrong, I want to know that I have a good doctor. I want to know that I have another good doctor for a second opinion. But at the end of the day, I have to find somebody who I can ask the question, what would you do if you were me? And trust that behind that answer is much more expertise in this area than I have, or that I'm going to get by an endless number of Google searches? I think this issue of Googling symptoms is really creating a kind of global wave of hypochondria. And I've often said to people, look, because they always come back to me as well, this is about the democratization of knowledge. Look at all these medical journals. I can go to JSTOR, I can go to Medscape or whatever it is. And I say, yes, but you can't understand them. People get very offended by this. I said, look, these journal articles in medicine, they're not written for you. They're written for people who already have a deep knowledge of the foundational issues, who understand what it means to say, this is the N equals this, and therefore the lethality is that you're not going to understand that, and it's probably going to do more harm than good. And again, I sympathize. I empathize with people about this. I had to have an emergency appendectomy, and after a night of tests and pain and all that stuff, about five in the morning, surgeon comes to me and she says, you could die. We need to do this. And I said, well, let me get my smartphone. Yeah, well, this was this was before us. Now that this was before smartphones, but I was a young guy with a PhD. And I said, well, is there stuff I need to know? What are the risks here? And she kind of sighed and said, well, here's all the things that could happen. And I started to literally feel panic, and I said, Is this really I literally said, Is this something we need to do? And my wife just kind of looked at me, and the doctor kind of looked at me, and of course, by then, I'm just not making a rational decision. And, you know, I but I part part of what? And I went through this with my father as well. He was a gambler, and he needed a heart he needed heart surgery. And he I put it in gambler terms, you know, because they said, well, here's what happens if you don't have the surgery. And instead of bombarding him with all this information, I said, dad, if you're holding this kind of a hand and you've got these kind of odds, what would you do? And he kind of nodded, and he got it. And I think it was a great case of taking a very intelligent but older man and just explaining it as a matter of probability if you don't do this, here's your chance of dying. If you do do this, here's your chance of not dying. And I think people need to do that more often and say, look, I don't need that level of detail because it takes a certain humility to say to yourself because if you give it to me, I won't understand it. But that runs going to be a fairly subtle problem because you can understand it in the context of reading it online. So, for instance, if I read a paper in a medical journal that details all of the recent research on a condition and the probability that it's X, Y or Z in severity and all the rest, I will understand all of it. But given that I have no clinical experience, I still am not receiving that information the way someone who has been treating patients with this range of conditions for decades and there's just so much more information available to that person than I have. And again, it's not to say that your doctor can never be wrong, hence the reliance on further opinions, but it's just you don't she's more likely to be right than you are. Yes, exactly. That's the problem that's crucial. The doctor is going to be more likely to be right. And I think people phrase this as a binary and foolish choice. Well, either I'm right or the doctor is right. Well, the doctor could be wrong, but the doctor is just going to be more likely to be right than you are. And again, I think partly people have gotten spoiled by living in a world where they can get a lot of definite answers very quickly and I think they comfort themselves. One of the things I think you're getting at with being able to read something as opposed to being able to intuitively understand it is the kind of magic dust of experience where people really believe that there are shortcuts to knowledge that make them equal to experienced practitioners of various things. Scott Adams, the guy who the dilbert guy, I know him well. Adams said he's been on the podcast. Tell me, any problem I can't understand in an hour of discussion with an expert, as though it's just a matter of the way I put it in the book. It's as if it's just a matter of copying from one hard disk to another and transferring the data and expertise. Doesn't work that way. It's almost like exercise. I mean, you can't go on a crash diet and develop six packs overnight by talking to a personal trainer. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Scott Adams. We won't talk about him further, but he was on this podcast for 2 hours defending Trump in some form and you'll understand how frustrating I found that conversation. Politics does offer its kind of a unique case where people have been led to believe that they actually don't. Want experts of any kind. It's like, if you're talking about medicine, say, very few people will tell you that they don't want their doctor to be extraordinarily well trained or the best doctor in the hospital, or if they have to have brain surgery, they don't want their uncle just kind of winging it with them. They want somebody who is fully qualified to get into their head. And in politics, this breaks down just spectacularly. And the first moment where I realized this. This has probably been obvious for much longer than this, but it wasn't until the sudden appearance of Sarah Palin on the scene and her appearance at the Republican National Convention as McCain's running mate, where I just for the first moment, realized how horribly backwards all of this was in politics. I wrote an article titled In Defensive Elitism, which then got retitled, I think, by John Meacham when he was at Newsweek as one atheists attack. So my point was completely lost and buried. But I've made a point there that many people have made elsewhere, which is, again, to the most basic case of the pilot flying the plane. No one's first criterion is whether they would want to have a beer with that person or whether the person is just like you in being completely uncontaminated by any kind of experience with that skill set. You want someone who's truly qualified. How has this broken down in politics where there's a kind of credibility that comes from having no credibility? Well, I think there's several sources of this. One is we have come and I usually trace this back to the 1992 election with the stunning triumph of Bill Clinton, who, however you may feel about him, is clearly one of the more gifted natural politicians of the age. And what happened in the early 90s, once the Cold War receded and again we were the sole superpower, we're living very affluent lives, authenticity became the end all and be all of American politics. That didn't really matter if the guy was any good. Do you like him? As you said, do you want to have a beer with him? You look back, nobody wanted to have a beer with Richard Nixon or LBJ for that matter. I suppose you could trace this even earlier to Reagan, where Reagan kind of just emanates this charisma and people just kind of love him. But I think this notion of being empathetic because Reagan was a lot of things, but he didn't demonstrate a lot of empathy. He was kind of bigger than life. But Clinton really cornered the market on this notion that in order to govern you effectively, I have to be just like you. I have to feel just like you. I used to use when I would give talks in the would always seize on Clinton's statement that I want a cabinet that looks just like America. And I would always push back on this and say, no, America watches talk shows. I want a cabinet much smarter than America, much better than America. Like you, I've been accused of being a defender of elitism. Well, so be it. I don't want the cabinet to be people just like me. I want the cabinet to be people much more competent and smarter and, you know, of higher character and steady mindedness than most of the rest of us. And I think when we get into the early 21st century, you're talking about people like Sarah Palin. One of the things that I think has become really pernicious and cynical has been the flogging of ignorant populism by people who are smart enough to know better. It's it's one thing to have Sarah Palin up there blathering because Sarah Palin is just dumb, and that's just the way it is. And that was a disastrous. John McCain's public record of wonderful public service will always be marred by choosing Sarah Palin, but surrounding her and going into the kind of tea party period and and the early 20th century, and even around Obama as well, there were people pushing simplistic populist slogans who knew better? You could always argue that people like Sarah Palin don't know any better. Now we're dealing. If you look at the current administration, you have a bunch of people that are the elite of the elite. I mean, this is Hollywood and Wall street pretty much running the government, saying, we're here to do the bidding of the people of rural Louisiana. Well, that's a lie. That's nonsense. And I think that has really become part of the attack on expertise, is that it's being led by people who actually have quite a lot of knowledge and education themselves and are just cynically mobilizing this for political purposes. And I think that's new. That isn't even like Huey Long or the populists of the 30s responding to the depression. This is just a cynical attempt to basically tell people that the world is a simple place. Nothing is your fault. Bad people hurt you. All answers can be solved with hats and banners, and yet, deep down, when they close the door, I'm sure they shrug and say, well, that went over well, knowing that what they're putting forward really is nonsense. And that scares me more than anything. Yeah. And with Trump, you have a kind of lack of moral core that seems to be new to at least is new to me here, which is with someone like Palin. I don't think anyone could pretend to believe that she was a genius or incredibly well informed on the issues, but I don't think anyone was celebrating her rise while also thinking that she's the most dishonest person anyone had ever seen. Or actually just not a good person. Right. And reveling in that lack of any kind of commitment to ethics. And so with Trump, what we have here, which is, I think, genuinely new, is that we have this kind of monster of incompetence and self regard, which has been made possible by the fact that tens of millions of people in this country seem to revel in his incompetence and self regard. It's not a bug, it's a feature for them. And then when he, you know, winds people like me up when I complain or members of the press complain about just how uncanny all of this is, all of these departures from normalcy are, that is just to the delight of all of these people who love Trump. It's kind of like it's the character of the Internet troll, really, that has become ascendant. Here we have a troll as president and that has enabled what is essentially a Dunning Kruger presidency of a sort that I don't think we've ever had. And your reference to singing the karaoke reminded me of those ghastly performances in the audition phase of American Idol where you have these people come out who literally cannot sing a note, but for whatever reason and whatever has conspired in their lives to make them think they can. They go out there and humiliate themselves and they're genuinely astonished that they have failed. They thought they were great singers. Somehow, often this just seems to be selecting for mentally ill people. But essentially what's happened here is we had an election that was like that where we have a candidate who could not sing a presidential note, and yet 60 million people leapt to their feet and applauded after he finished. And that's where we are. It's astonishing. I think there's a couple of things going on here. First, I think you have to separate Trump out from his enablers around him. I've sort of gone back and forth for about a year of how much I think this is a political strategy and how much of it I think that Trump is just genuinely that the President is just genuinely clueless. And I think he just lives in senator Burr said it the other day. I mean, he, you know, where he basically admitted the President sort of constructs his own reality and lives there. And that's, you know, terrifying in and of itself. But then there's that added question of, as you say, 62 million people jumping to their feet and applauding for it. And I think there we have to bring in another word, which is resentment. We are now in a politics of resentment because we live in the age of information where the people that are most privileged, the people that do the best, are people who can comprehend the world around them. They can gain an understanding of a certain amount of complexity. They can manipulate information and work in that environment. And the people who can't who feel left behind by it, who are not necessarily poor, by the way, this is a big myth that this is just desperate Appalachian opioid addicts praying that Trump will help them. There's a lot of people who are doing perfectly well in America who are cackling over the complete implosion of the government, who aren't doing poorly. And I think it's this sense that the smarty pants are finally getting theirs somehow, because this age of information has meant that the world has changed so fast that people feel bewildered and angry by it. And rather than saying, as kind of my generation of parents did, my mom and dad were Depression era people, not educated. My parents were high school dropouts, but they said, wow. My dad once said, I lived from the Model T to the space station. And his assumption was, I will never understand the space station, but I'm glad I live in a country where there are people who do that's now lost, where you say, as long as Trump triggers the libtards or angers the college professors or, you know, ticks off the smart people, then I'm good with it. Then I don't really care if everything burns, because then we're all kind of back at the same level. And there's really an ugly social resentment under that that has been spearheaded by an attack on experts. Because this cynical group of enablers around Trump have convinced ordinary people that anything they don't like in their lives and I don't mean just hollowed out towns from globalization, I mean anything they don't like, is the result of some expert giving advice to some elite. And Trump and others use those terms interchangeably, by the way, experts and elites, to convince them that it's just a big conspiracy and everyone's out to get them. It's amazing to me that people who voted and who gained control of all three branches of government and three fifths of the state houses in America still think they're an embattled minority at suffering under the hands of the man somehow. And so because they can't demonstrate that politically, they assume that it's because of secret knowledge that the rest of us have, that we're somehow conspiring to control their lives around them, even though they have the political power that they've craved. This is why we're also living through a revival of conspiracy theories in America today unlike any in my lifetime, because that's comforting to people. Yeah, conspiracy theories are fascinating because most of them are structured around a very different sense of expertise. There's this adage I don't maybe know where this came from. You never described the conspiracy theory. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, I've had a few encounters recently on other people's podcasts and on social media that have made me think that many people are confused about some of the views I express on this podcast. Those of you who are using the waking up app probably have a better understanding of what I'm up to. But I get the sense that many Making Sense listeners really don't know where I'm coming from much of the time. So clearing up this confusion requires that I say a few things about the role that meditation has played and continues to play in my life. First, let me say that unless you're deep into it, the term meditation almost certainly conjures the wrong ideas in your mind. Meditation has no necessary connection to Eastern religion, say, much less to beads or incense or any of the trappings of New Age spirituality, unless you're unusually well informed about it. When I use the term meditation, as I do from time to time on this podcast, I would bet that 99% of you get the wrong idea. Meditation is just a bad word for the recognition of specific truths about the mind. It's a process of discovering what is already true of your own mind. Of course, the discoveries one makes here are directly relevant to living a more satisfying life, which is the important part, and that's why I spend so much time recommending that people look into this. But the benefits aside, more and more I'm realizing that many of you can't understand the positions I take on this podcast without understanding your mind. And these are positions which, on their surface, have nothing to do with meditation. My experience here is often the key to understanding my criticism of specific scientific and philosophical ideas, like the debate about free will or the nature of the self or the hard problem of consciousness. I mean, yes, a person can follow the purely philosophical or scientific arguments and arrive at some of the same conclusions. For instance, someone can understand how free will and the conventional notion of self don't make any sense in terms of ongoing neurophysiological changes in the brain. But even most people who understand and accept those arguments don't really have the courage of their convictions because they still feel like selves that enjoy free will. Most people don't have the introspective tools to discover that their experience is actually convergent with what makes the most sense scientifically and philosophically. So they're stuck trying to grapple with a pseudo problem. How can we make sense of our experience of an unchanging self that has free will when we know conceptually that these things don't make any sense? That's where many people are stuck quite unnecessarily. Meditation is also the key to understanding my criticism of specific religious ideas. How can I say with confidence that most religious doctrines are not merely scientifically implausible? Many people can say that, but that they are also a perversion of a very real opportunity to experience self transcendence. I can say this because there's nothing hypothetical to me about the kinds of experiences that people like Jesus were rattling on about to anyone who would listen. And when you've had these experiences and can have them on demand, it's not just a matter of having taken LSD a few times and dimly remembering how different things were. When it's absolutely obvious to you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion, then it's also obvious that our spiritual hopes need not be pegged to the idea that some historical person might have been the Son of God who died for our sins. My experience in meditation largely defines my politics too. For instance, how can I be so sure that the explosion of identity politics that we see all around us isn't a sign of progress? How can I know that it's an ethical and psychological dead end to be deeply identified with one's race, for instance, and that all the people who are saying that there's no way to get past race in our politics are just confused? Well, because I know that a person need not even identify with the face he sees in the mirror each day. In fact, the deeper you examine your experience, the more you discover that freedom ultimately depends on not identifying with anything, even with how you look in the mirror. How much more so is it unnecessary to identify with millions of strangers who just happen to look like you in that they have the same skin color? In light of what's possible psychologically and interpersonally, in light of what is actually required to get over yourself and to experience genuine compassion for other human beings, it is a form of mental illness to go through life identified, really identified with one's race. It's just a bad dream. Of course, to say that as a white guy in the current environment is to stand convicted of racial insensitivity and even seeming indifference to the problem of racism in our society. I mean, what greater symptom of white privilege could there be than to declare that we should just all get past race? That's a retort that I believe I can hear percolating in the minds of many listeners. And most well intentioned people have been successfully bullied by that kind of response. How much easier would it be to back down here and just say, sorry, I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm just a white guy? There are massive incentives to take that path. But to insist upon the primacy of race is to be obscenely confused about human potential and about society's potential. And I'm not going to pretend to be unaware of that. So when I'm talking about racial politics on this podcast, I am also talking about meditation, even though the topic would never come up in that context. And when some of my critics say that I'm just practicing my own version of identity politics, I'm in a position to say bullshit. To be clear, I'm not claiming to be fully enlightened. I'm definitely still a work in progress. But there are certain things that I actually understand about my own mind and about the mind in general. And the idea that racial identity is something that we can't get past is total bullshit. Insights into the nature of mind can't help but touch politics. For instance, my attitude toward wealth inequality is born of the recognition that no one is truly self made. All these rich guys walking around with their copies of Iron Rand thinking they're self made. It's pure fiction. And given how we do become ourselves, given the overwhelming influence of luck in our world, we have to recognize that we need an effective system of wealth creation that doesn't allow people to truly fall through the cracks. And as we get wealthier, the floor beneath which no one should be allowed to fall should keep rising. Compassion has to be built into capitalism, because it doesn't seem to occur naturally. Otherwise, totally normal people begin to resemble psychopaths in how they conduct themselves in business. So this is just to say that what I think I've learned through the practice of meditation influences many of the views I express on this podcast. But I can't get into the details here because there are so many other things to discuss. So that's what I'm doing over at waking up. What I'm building at Waking Up is the laboratory, where you can run this same experiment for yourself, and there's really no substitute for doing that. You can pretend to want to integrate your intellectual and ethical and political life, or you can really want to do it and to discover all the ways in which you have failed to do it so far. Again, I'm not claiming to have everything figured out. I'm very much in the process of still figuring things out. Each of us has to negotiate the terms of our disenchantment with who we were yesterday and with the ways in which culture distracts and misleads us. And that's what I'm doing over at waking up. So if you haven't checked it out recently, I just want to invite you to do that, especially if you think you know what meditation is and you think it's not relevant for you. I can virtually guarantee that you're mistaken about that. And if you can't afford a subscription, you need only send an email to support at Waking Up.com and ask for a free one. So please do not let money be the reason why you don't check it out. As always, thanks for listening./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Matthew Walker. Matt is a professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at UC Berkeley and the director of its Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, and he's also a former professor of Psychiatry at Harvard University. He has published over 100 scientific studies and has appeared on 60 Minutes, Nova, BBC News and many other outlets. His first book, Why We Sleep, has been an international bestseller, and he also hosts his own podcast, the Matt Walker Podcast. I've been wanting to speak to Matt for quite some time because, as you'll hear, I've been increasingly worried about the quality of my own sleep. I'm late to the party here, but now I'm convinced of the importance of sleeping well most nights. And Matt and I get into all the details here about the nature and importance of sleep. We discuss sleep and consciousness. The stages of sleep. Sleep regularity light and temperature. The evolutionary origins of sleep the generally doomed attempt to reduce one's need for sleep the connection between deficiencies in sleep and all cause mortality, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, obesity and heart disease the role that sleep plays in learning and memory and mental health heart rate variability, REM, sleep behavior disorder and various parasomnias. We discuss elucid dreaming, dreams as a kind of therapy, the connection between meditation and sleep, the various forms of insomnia, and there are practical tips for what to do about them. Strewn throughout our conversation. We discuss sleep hygiene, caffeine and alcohol, sleep efficiency, bedtime restriction, napping, and finally, sleep tracking. And as we hear on that final topic of sleep tracking, matt and I discover that each of us is associated with the company Aura that makes a sleep tracking ring. I am a minor investor in the company and Matt is its scientific advisor. Neither of us knew about the connection before we started talking. And you'll hear I have a bit of a lovehate relationship with my own Aura ring. It is a remarkable device, but I may have what Matt calls orthosomnia, which is an overabundance of concern about my sleep data. In any case, make of that what you will, and I hope you find this conversation useful as it runs nearly 4 hours. And now I bring you Matthew Walker. I am here with Matthew Walker. Matt, thanks for joining me. It's a delight and a privilege to be speaking with you, Sam. Thanks for having me. So you've written a book, Why We Sleep, that seems to have gotten into the hands, if not the brains, of more or less everyone. And now you have your own podcast, the Matt Walker podcast. And you have been on many, many podcasts that I've noticed talking about the science of sleep and seemingly almost singlehandedly, making people newly aware of the importance of sleep in their lives, both from the side of physical health and mental health emotional regulation really just across the board. When you're talking about human well being, the difference between good and bad sleep seems paramount. And I must say, I have really neglected sleep as a variable for most of my life. In fact, I think I was, early in life, toyed with the fairly crazy ideal of limiting sleep so as to boost productivity. And we'll get into all of that. But before we dive into the specific chapters of our conversation here, perhaps you can introduce yourself, your background, intellectually and academically, and just tell us how you came to focus on sleep. I wish I could take the compliment of bringing sleep back onto the public awareness map. I stand on the shoulders of many of my colleagues and they are astronomically wonderful. So I try to do my part in terms of my background. I am a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in America, and I've really tried to dedicate myself to understanding the question of why we sleep for the past 20 years. I think, like most people, I am an accidental sleep researcher. I often think when kids are young and the teacher says, tell me what you would like to be when you grow up. No one's shooting their hand up in the classroom and saying, I desperately want to be a sleep researcher. I can attest that when I started my neuroscience PhD, someone from a sleep lab, I forget who, tried to recruit me to their lab. And I thought, why would I want to study sleep? I had no interest at that point. And now I feel some chagrin over that dismissal because it is increasingly fascinating and, as I said, consequential. And in some ways, I don't blame you. Maybe at the time, certainly even 20 years ago, one could argue it's almost academic suicide to suggest that you want to become a sleep researcher. And not necessarily truthful, but some would argue that it was almost a charlotte in science to begin with. And of course it is. It's the most bizarre, strange, illogical, irrational, from an evolutionary perspective, idiotic thing that an organism can do. And you're going to leverage an entire academic career on that platform. Good luck and goodnight. Would be, I think, the tagline. But I was studying for my PhD, people with different forms of dementia, and I was using brainwave patterns to try and differentially diagnose them very early on in their course. Of dementia. And I was failing miserably, couldn't get any good results. And one weekend I had this little Igloo of journals that I would retreat to which tells you everything about my social life. And I started to learn that some of those dementias would eat away at sleep centers and other forms of the dementias would not because there are many different forms of dementia. So I realized I was measuring my patients at the wrong time, which was when they were awake and I should be measuring them when they were asleep. I started doing that. I got some fantastic results. And at that point, I started to ask the question, I wonder if these sleep disruptions and impairments are not a consequence of the dementia. They're not a symptom of the dementia. Maybe they are a cause of the dementia. But I realized 20 years ago no one could answer a very fundamental question, which was why do we sleep? And I think the crass answer at that time was that we sleep to cure sleepiness, which is the fatuous equivalent of saying I eat to cure hunger, tells you nothing about the unique benefits. But then I started to explore this thing called sleep, and I fell absolutely in love with it. And to this day, 20 years on, I still think it is the most beguiling thing in science. It is a love affair that's not left me for all of those decades. And I remain an amorous partner to its wonderful gifts, both nightly as a practice and also from an intellectual and academic and research perspective. Does that give some background? Yeah. If I can follow your romantic analogy here, sleep is a fairly coy mistress for many of us. And speaking personally, this has always been not even on the back burner for me as a problem to solve in my life. I just I've accustomed myself to sleeping badly and just accepting on some level that I sleep badly. And so encountering your work is fairly arresting to someone in my condition because the stakes, as we will elucidate here, are incredibly high given the connection between sleep and health. So I wanted to, at the outset address the component of worry here, worry about sleep, because many people listening to us will also recognize in themselves that their sleep is far from ideal. And to add a layer of worry to that is obviously counterproductive when the goal is to make it easier to sleep soundly on some better schedule in general. So can you address this effect that our conversation is likely to have, especially when we're talking about possible links between poor sleep and dementia and, you know, all the rest? It's just it's very easy to begin to treat this as some kind of medical emergency in the offing. What do you have to say by way of guidance or caution on that point? In some ways, it's a rock and a hard place that I found myself in. And this is something that I've learned since publishing the book and I think it's something that I've corrected in my communication to the public as I was writing the book at the time, at least within the public sphere. As you mentioned, sleep was the neglected step system in the health conversation of today. And it was that way. And I was so familiar, as all of my colleagues were with the disease and the sickness and the suffering that was happening because of this sleep deficiency that was so pernicious throughout most first world nations that I wanted to try to note intended for either this podcast or the topic, but sort of wake people up to the fact of the importance of sleep. And I think that in my communications and maybe even in segments of the book, I was perhaps heavy handed and I had neglected to recognize the concern for the sleep anxious and those who are having sleep difficulty. And I've since become so much more sensitive to that. And I can't deny the science. I can't not tell you about the links between insufficient sleep and Alzheimer's disease, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, anxiety, even suicide, some forms of cancer. But I also don't want people to become overly anxious. But how do you do that? How do you find that sweet spot? And so for me, it's been a real lesson and a lesson also because I am no poster child for sleep. I have had my battles and I did not mention them in the book and I think I should have. And being personally open, I'm a very private person. I've had at least three bouts of insomnia during my lifetime and they were vicious. And just because you know a little about sleep doesn't mean as though you are immune to its vagaries. It is a mistress that can be very fickle. So I think for this podcast it's important to keep in mind two things. First, everyone has a bad night of sleep. And if you're there at night struggling to fall asleep, don't worry. Even with all of the facts and the science that we will discuss, it's not the worst thing in the world. The second thing is that if you are persistently and continuously chronically struggling to sleep, you don't have to because there are efficacious treatments, many of them non pharmacological, which is great, that can help course correct. In fact, even in older adults where you think there is no hope at all for a solid night of sleep, those therapies many of them seem to be beneficial to restoring some degree of good sleep. So you don't have to suffer in the nighttime silence that there is benefit there. I think that that's perhaps the best way to approach it with sensitivity, compassion, understanding, but truthfulness to the science. I wouldn't want to make people nervous about eating so precisely that it doesn't change their blood sugar, set them on a path towards prediabetes or type two diabetes and where you become so obsessive and anxious that food and the joy and pleasures of eating start to fail. I also don't want to do that with sleep, but I equally don't want to tell you that it's fine just to eat a pint of ice cream every night and that your blood sugar won't suffer. I'll tell you about that science too. Yeah. So that's great by way of introduction and we will get into all of the aspects here, including all of the practical recommendations you have for improving sleep and bypassing any perverse cul de sac of worry about sleep that can get in the way of that project. So let's just begin. Let's jump into our first chapter here on what sleep is even before answering the question is the title of your book about why we sleep. What is sleep from a functional perspective? I think the headline statement you could argue is that sleep, physiologically at least, is perhaps the single most effective thing that we can do every day to reset the health of our brain and our body. And that's not to dismiss food or nutrition or exercise. But if you were to take you sam Harris and I were to deprive you of food for 24 hours, deprive you of water for 24 hours, deprive you of physical activity for 24 hours, or deprive you of sleep for 24 hours and I were to look across your brain and your body and see which one demonstrates the more demonstrable impairment by a very large margin. It's sleep. But I don't want to sort of do that. Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper. I'm still missing one. I can't think of it challenge. So you could ask from a functional perspective what sleep is. You can also ask what is sleep as a process that unfolds across the night in terms of its architecture. And then you can also ask and debate what is sleep as a conscious state versus a non conscious state. And so I'm happy to maybe speak about how sleep unfolds, since that may be the logical entry point, or just go straight into how we can noodle and wrestle with the idea of it being a conscious versus nonconscious state, which can get us into tautological waters. But you tell me which of those two perhaps would be best to start with or fruitful for you. Yeah, well, the question of whether it's conscious is and I know I've spoken about this elsewhere is very difficult to resolve just because it's difficult to discriminate an interruption in consciousness from a mere failure of memory. So for instance, dreams are routinely conscious, but it's also possible to have dreams and not recall them at all. And then one could wonder whether those dreams, whether those stages of REM sleep were actually associated with conscious dreaming. And one could wonder that the state of deep sleep is also a state of conscious enjoyment of something quite formless and profound, but there's just no memory of it. And so we read it as just a loss of experience for that period. So I don't know how we would I'm happy to hear anything you think on that topic, but I'm unaware of anything that would resolve that for us. I think it's a very elegant point, which is we rely for that question in part subjectively from the sleeper themselves, a report of whether or not they were experiencing anything going through their mind just before we woke them up and said what were you having as an experience? And that suffers from the failures of memory which we know happen. Just because you don't remember your dreams doesn't mean that you weren't dreaming. I think one way that you can get closer, but we will still fail is to split that question apart on the basis of perception, which is to say, depending on your I mean, behaviorally, the way that we define sleep in other species where we can't, for example, stick electrodes on them is as a condition in which the organism stops responding to the outside world, which is about perception. Does this mean that we are not conscious during sleep because we typically stop responding to the outside world in all stages of sleep and that depends on your definition of consciousness. But we stop interacting with and for the most part perceiving the outside world, which some would argue is a loss of consciousness or at least a shift towards non consciousness. But I'd counter argue that we don't entirely stop perceiving the outside world. So for example, I can have electrodes on your head and I can play sounds while you're asleep that don't wake you up. And I can still see that the brain at some level is processing those sounds in a way that is not dissimilar to the way it does when we're awake and consciously perceiving those sounds. We can do fMRI studies and we can play those sounds as you're sleeping in the MRI scanner. It's hard to believe that people can, but they do sleep in the scanner and you can see that there are different ways of perception. There's a great study that looked at new mothers and what they found was that when they played the cry of that infant versus another sound, even though they remained asleep, it was a very different network, a salience network activated in response to the child of that mother versus another sound of equal volume, et cetera. So there's definitely some degree of processing and discriminatory processing, but I still don't think it's the same non conscious state as anesthesia meaning that there is still some degree of perception of the outside world during deep sleep. In other words, what we call extraception, the ability to focus or sense the outside world. Well, there's got to be just based on the fact that you can wake somebody up from deep sleep. So that's got to get in somehow. That's exactly it. I think you exactly predicted where that conversation was going, which is that no matter what stage you're in, sleep at least is a condition in which it is environmentally reversible. For example, if a sound is loud enough or if someone were to pinch your skin hard enough, which would be a desperately cruel thing, wouldn't it, to do when someone's asleep, you would wake up from sleep. Which is to say that in sleep we are unresponsive. But that state of unresponsivity is reversible. Now, that's not true of anesthesia or death for as best we can tell. So I think it's very hard to argue then that we don't have a very substantive yet qualitatively different form of consciousness when we dream, especially during when we go into REM sleep dreaming. So I think we can get a little bit closer to a dissection of what do we think of as the state of conscious processing during sleep. But I still feel as though I don't see data that can really solidly give us one argument in either favor. Conscious, non conscious state. Yeah. I would just add here that conversely, there are states of meditation or drug intoxication where someone is is also totally unresponsive to the outside world but all too conscious of something in terms of their subjective report once they come back from those experiences. So there's kind of a doubled dissociation here. So I think responsiveness to stimuli isn't the cut we need. We obviously need the neural correlate of consciousness where we can just scan your brain and say by some methodology and say, okay, this is the footprint of consciousness in the human brain and it winks out in this condition, let's say general anesthesia, and it's attenuated to this degree in this stage of sleep. But unfortunately we don't have that yet. And I think there are conceptual and operational limits to our getting it. Again, the role of self report is always potentially confounding and seditious here because we just need a sufficient cohort of people who are reporting things that occurred in the chapter that we're deeming to be unconscious. And, you know, either we're going to think they're delusional or they're lying or they're in some other way wrong, or we're going to or that's going to erode our confidence that really the lights are out during that epic. I think self report speaking about Fickle mistresses yes. Is so prone to all of those errors. Okay, so with that caveat in mind, let's launch into it would be good to just give us the structure of sleep here in human beings. You could say anything else you want about other animals, but what is what is sleep for people? Sleep, at least in human beings and in fact, in all mammalian species, as long as they are land dwelling. There's a caveat there too is broadly separated into two main types. On the one hand we have non Rapid Eye movement sleep or nonREM sleep for short. And on the other hand we have rapid Eye movement sleep or REM sleep. I often want to make people clear on the fact that that's named not after the popular 1990s Michael Stipe pop band, but because of these bizarre horizontal shuttling movements that occur during this stage of sleep. That's where it gets its definitional name from. And coming back to non REM sleep, which I always feel sorry for by the way, isn't it, isn't it sad to be defined by something that you're not, you are not REM sleep. I guess in this case you are deep and light. That's correct. Yeah. So nonREM sleep is then further subdivided into four separate stages increasing in their depth of sleep. So stages one and two are what we would consider or your sleep tracker will probably try to tell you, are the light stages of nonREM sleep. Whereas stages three and four, that's the really deep non REM sleep. And REM sleep then is the stage in which we principally dream. Depending on your definition. Dreaming isn't exclusive to REM sleep. But for what most people would say in the lay public, this is dreaming. What they're really referring to are the bizarre narrative hallucinogenic, emotional, memory laden experiences that come from this thing called REM sleep. So those two types of sleep, nonREM and REM, will play out effectively in a battle for brain domination throughout the night. And that cerebral war between non REM and REM, in humans at least, and it's different for different species, will last about 90 minutes. And that creates for the average adult a prototypical 90 minutes cycle where you go into non REM sleep and then you go into REM sleep. But what changes, however, is the ratio of non REM to REM within those 90 minutes cycles as you move across the night. So in other words, in the first half of the night, the majority of those 90 minutes cycles are going to be comprised of lots of nonREM sleep, particularly deep nonREM sleep. But as you push through to the second half of the night that sort of seesaw balance shifts over. And those 90 minutes cycles are comprised of much more rapid eye movement sleep and very little deep sleep. And that has some consequences that we can also talk about. But I would probably mention also every one of those stages of sleep or almost all of those stages of sleep we have now learned are important. There is no one more important stage of sleep than the other. Now you can argue well, what are you talking about importance? Are you talking about mortality risk and death? And we can use that as a filter to debate that as well. But overall, different stages of sleep provide different functions for the brain and the body at different times of night. So we need all of those stages. And is it true that we generally wake up, however briefly and indiscernibly, after each of these 90 minutes phases. You get through your REM period and then there's a brief awakening that's absolutely you definitely need to be a sleep researcher, take a sabbatical and build me a time machine and I'll go back, have the conversation differently. So we do know that usually at the end of every one of those 90 minutes sleep cycles, at the end of each of those REM phases, there is a brief termination of sleep where we wake up. And in part we think that that's perhaps because of the the need to maneuver the body and change the body's position. And so we have these brief awakenings. They're usually so brief that most of us don't recall them, they're not imprinted in memory, but everyone will typically have a brief awakening and then a movement episode after where they shift position. Right? And we'll talk about sleep tracking and the tools that are available to do that personally beyond going into a sleep lab and getting totally hooked up, but viewing these stages in their totality. You've said that each is indispensable, but it does seem at least in the way one communicates the imperative to get all of these stages. Most of us are not deficient in the stages of light sleep and it's really the stages of REM and deep sleep that are marketed as truly restorative. Right? And those are the areas of real deficiency. So, for instance, if someone was sleeping 6 hours but they got very long epics of deep sleep and REM sleep, would that strike you as a much healthier profile than someone sleeping 6 hours? But it's mostly devoted to stages one and two of light sleep. Yes, I think that that's fair to say. We do need stage two as well. We've discovered that stage two non REM sleep is associated with certain forms of memory and memory processing. And there is a particular electrical feature of stage two nonREM sleep which continues on into deep nonREM sleep stages three and four called sleep spindles, which are these beautiful little champagne cork synchronous bursts of electrical activity that happen during stage two nonREM sleep. And then stages three and four, they last for about a second and a second and a half and they seem to be critical for a number of different processes of both the brain and they seem to transact or be at least associated with several benefits for the body. But overall I would say that it's very difficult to have a night where you're not transitioning because when you go down into deep nonREM sleep, you have to progress through stage two. And when you're coming out of deep nonREM sleep, you have to progress through stage two nonREM sleep. Again, the lighter form of nonREM sleep before you get up into REM sleep. And so it would probably be rather difficult. You can manipulate conditions in which this can happen, which I won't bore you with, but where you could have the scenario that you described, but for the most part you're still going to get that stage two nonREM sleep. Yet what you said is correct. This is where maybe I'll seed you with practical questions throughout. But the first comes to mind here is what are the implications of waking with an alarm clock versus waking with the change in lighting conditions born of sunlight coming through the window? I guess there's the implication of using a sleep mask or blackout curtains where you're not getting those environmental light cues I can imagine. You know, if you're unlucky your alarm clock rings when you're in in stage four sleep, say, and you're brought out of that in a less than ideal way, what are those effects and what do you actually recommend? If a person's schedule allows for it, what do you recommend as a mode of waking up in the morning? Unless you are waking up within the first couple of hours of sleep, it's unlikely that your alarm would wake you up in the deep stages of non REM sleep. That's not true. However, if you take an afternoon nap and that nap lasts a little bit too long and by too long, what I mean is you're going past that sort of 20 to 25 minutes and you're starting to go down into the deep sleep and then your alarm wakes you up. Then you almost have this kind of sleep hangover for the next hour or so. Those naps are terrible with a change of time zone when you have terrible jet lag and you decide, okay, there's no way I'm going to make it to the evening so I'm going to give myself an hour to sleep here. And waking up from that hour is just about the worst wake up one ever gets. It's pretty grim, isn't it? And it's what we call sleep inertia where you get a state carryover where your brain never typically wakes up from is jolted out of that deep sleep. Naturalistically from an evolutionary perspective across millions of years that's not been the case. And so we're not well prepared for recovering from that assault and therefore we suffer this terrible sleep inertia. So it's not so likely to happen. But when it does happen, it's grim. It can also happen at night when, for example, you get a phone call and all of a sudden it wakes you up at 230 or 130 in the morning and once again you're jolted out from that deep sleep and yes, you can answer the phone and you can be somewhat responsive but it is just grim. You're in this total treacle haze of cognitive dysfunction and it's all you can do to allow words to tumble in some meaningful way 1ft in front of the other out of your mouth. So that is perhaps a less likely circumstance. What would I suggest? It's difficult because one. Of the critical things that people need to do to get their sleep back on track is the simple act of regularity, which is going to bed and waking up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend. And for that, we often require an alarm clock. And I also advocate for people not just to have an alarm clock in the morning, but why don't we have a Tibet alarm as well as a towake alarm? And it's one way to help keep us on schedule and track. I would say, however, that if you study huntergatherer tribes whose way of life hasn't really changed for hundreds, if not thousands of years, they don't seem to wake up in an artificial manner. And if you ask them, do you find ways to force yourself to wake up, they find it a perplexing question. Why would you terminate something that's not yet complete? It's a little bit like saying why would you go out to your favorite restaurant, order your favorite dish, have two bites of that dish and then get up and walk out? You would stay until you're full when you are complete with that meal. And why would we wake up when we are not yet full of the sleep that we need? And Mother Nature will take care of that when it's time to wake up and we've had the sleep that we need, we do. So one way some people will ask me, how do I know if I'm getting enough sleep? It's not the ideal way, but one suggestion is to say, if your alarm clock didn't go off in the morning, would you sleep past that alarm? And if the answer is yes, then you're still carrying some degree of a sleep need, which means that by waking up artificially, you're inducing a sleep debt as a consequence. What about the role of light cues in bringing someone out of sleep? It's we used to think that light perhaps was the trigger of or one of the facilitating functions for rising people out from sleep in the morning. And again, by looking at those huntergatherer tribes, what we found is that that's not really the case. They often typically will wake up a little bit before the dawn. What seems to be the trigger for the arrival of wakefulness and the termination of sleep is more so temperature, both the internal temperature and the ambient temperature rising because often they will sleep with the environment, with the ambient temperature, unlike many of us in modernity where we have a controlled temperature. So that's not to suggest that light can't be a facilitator to help you wake up in the morning. And in fact, I have one of these little smart lights next to my bedside and I program it to try and say two minutes before the time that you're supposed to wake up, start to bring light into the room. I would say, though, that I do have an alarm myself. My alarm is and we can get into sort of chronotypes and what your preference is but my alarm is set for around 704 in the morning or at 704 in the morning, not because there's anything special or unique. Please don't go rushing out and changing your wake up time to that. We're not going to have a chapter on numerology here and the significance of it. The reason I do that is why not just be idiosyncratic? Why would you set it at seven? Five or seven or 710? Just why not 704? It tells you probably everything about me and why I'm desperately unpopular. But I usually wake up naturally, I would say about 80% of the time I wake up naturally before my alarm clock. So I think one of the worries that people have when I tell them to do the experiment, if you have the luxury and the schedule flexibility to do it, stop your alarm and just sleep in the way that your body wants to sleep. The greatest worry is that my goodness, I normally wake up at seven and I'll probably wake up at 09:00 in the morning is the first concern. Now that may be true to begin with for the first few days because you're probably trying to sleep back a debt that you've amassed chronically over weeks if not months or years. And the second problem is that when people sleep long they wake up and once again they have that strange sleep hangover effect where if they get 9 hours of sleep they feel worse than when they get 7 hours of sleep. That is typically because you are in the phase of paying back the debt and if you let that experiment play out for another week you wash away that sort of pressure to sleep. Now we can speak about sleep debt and whether you can ever truly pay back the bank or not, but that goes away with time. It's sort of like detoxing from a drug at first. It's brutal and you have all of these side effects and you have a withdrawal syndrome and in some ways that's the withdrawal syndrome where you start sleeping longer, that settles down, it's like a Richter shot and then it finds a sweet spot and gradually you will actually acquiesce to your typical sleep need and your sleep profile. Most people don't have the luxury to do that. So light can be helpful. Temperature is one. I also have one of those smart home thermostats and temperature is critical for sleep. We need to ironically warm up to cool down, to fall asleep and then we need to stay cool to stay asleep and finally we need to warm up to wake up. And so you can create a bespoke tailored temperature profile for your night of sleep. That can help to some degree. Now of course you're under the sheets and the ambient has some role to play. But it's also altered by what's going on locally underneath the sheets too, so you can't control it exquisitely. And that's where smart mattresses are coming in to try and take that out of the equation. So those are some of the ways that you can play around with sleep. I do like the idea if you are particularly if you are a night owl and you struggle to wake up at the time that society forces you to, which is not in synchrony with your morningness or eveningness preference. You can use light in the morning, but then you can reverse that trick in the evening where you try to ensconce yourself with as much dim light and darkness to help you try to get to bed a little bit earlier. So it's not as though light should be dismissed. And blocking devices, blackout curtains, eye masks, ear plugs, sound is another pollution that will disrupt your sleep. I will typically use all of those. I have blackout curtains, I have an eye mask and then I have earplugs. I think I'm starting to sound like the Woody Allen Neurotic of the sleep world, but that's just me. Yeah. So all we need is one picture of this set up and to completely discredit you as an expert on sleep. I've been so discredited by lots of different things, but that would, I think, seal the deal. Okay, so let's transition to the question of why we sleep. I think there's probably no real boundary between what sleep is and why we do it conceptually here, at least in places. Because part of the story here is the evolutionary question of just why sleep is a thing and how it came to be that animals like ourselves dedicate so much of their lives to this state. That seems fairly pointless and even dangerous. You can imagine in civilization the danger is less salient. But just imagine how precarious it would be to, you know, go out in the woods where there are bears and perhaps several other species that could consider you a meal and to just take 8 hours of darkness to be unconscious for. I guess there's a potential evolutionary answer there in that the one thing you're not doing when you're sleeping is stumbling around in the dark where you're not very good at seeing and several other things can see you better than you can see them. But I'm not sure that's an adequate rationale. So let's begin talking about the origins of sleep as we know them or can hypothesize about them. What do you think about why sleep even exists? So far in every species that we've studied to date, sleep or something that looks very much like it seems to exist. And what that has suggested is that sleep evolved with life itself on this planet and has fought its way through heroically every step along the evolutionary pathway. Let's linger on that point because that's that's very interesting because you can imagine imagine the the adaptive benefits that would generally accrue to any species that could just get over its need for sleep. I mean, there there would have been, you would think, a selective pressure in the direction of completely erasing sleep. So it suggests that it's rather hard to do. I think it's a beautiful way of thinking about it because from an evolutionary perspective, just as you noted, it is the most idiotic of all things. Firstly, when you're asleep, you're not eating, you're not foraging for food, you're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're not caring for your young. And worst of all, as you noted, you're vulnerable to predation. So on any one of those grounds, but especially all of them as a collective, sleep should have been strongly selected against during the course of evolution. And it's once been said that if sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital function, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process ever made. And what we've now since learned is that Mother Nature didn't make a spectacular blunder in creating this thing called sleep. But even very old evolutionary species like Earthworms, for example, seem to have periods of it's called lethargic assaur, essentially a sleep like state. This takes sleep back millions of years. Even some bacteria that seem to live at least several days. They will have an active phase and a passive phase, perhaps the precursor to sleep. So you're right. You could well imagine why, if some species had understood a way to circumnavigate its way around the essential need for sleep, it would have dominated for lots of different reasons, at least within its species category. The fact that we haven't seen that yet argues that sleep must be fundamental at the most basic of biological levels. And it's one of the reasons why, when people will say to me, well, look, if you're a doctor training, I think we learned to overcome our need for sleep. We learned to tolerate and deal with insufficient sleep. And you can do that if you could trust me. I think there's some degree of hubris, though, which is Mother Nature. If she could have even halved the amount of time that you are vulnerable to all of those visitudes of sleep, she certainly would have. And the fact that it's been preserved tells you that doesn't seem to be possible. And within the lifespan, we think that we can come along and within a ten year training of her career, we could overcome it. It's it's unlikely to be the case. Actually. I think this might punctuate this part of the conversation with the cases of various people who, at least by their own testimony, have gone a fair way toward overcoming their personal need for sleep. I think it was Winston Churchill who, during the war years, was sleeping the last ten minutes of every hour or something like that. I don't know if that's apocryphal, but what do we know about anyone successfully titrating their sleep down to something like a minimum. I'm sure there are genotypes here that we may know something about where people just require less sleep than is normal. But actually I once had a doctor who claimed to sleep no more than three and a half hours a night and whether he was again, this is before the age of sleep tracking, so he could have been delusional. But what do we know about people who sleep much less than you would recommend? Firstly, from an epidemiological or population based perspective, which is simply associational, using that sweet spot that we recommend, which is somewhere between seven to 9 hours a night for the average adult, once you start to get less than that, the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. That short sleep predicts all cause mortality. Are there people in history who have claimed to be short sleep as there are, and Churchill was one, Edison was another. Although Edison was a habitual napper during the day and he used naps and sleep as a creative tool, then you have Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher, you have ronald Reagan just named two people who ended their lives with Alzheimer's. So that's not a great commercial feather. Yeah, they seemed, on the face of it, to make it through until the 50s or even 60s. My goodness. There is evidential proof that you can sleep what they claimed to be sleeping, which is 4 hours a night, and get away with it. And ultimately what we learned is that one way or another, sleep deficiency seems to get its hooks into you, that the elastic band of sleep deprivation can stretch only so far before it snaps. And tragically for both of those individuals, Thatcher and Reagan, they came to the disease of Alzheimer's and we now know that they're all we now realize we have several files open, but each of these seems important. So on that point, how do we disentangle association and causation here? Because couldn't it also be true that one of the early symptoms of Alzheimer's or being at special risk for it, is to have one's apparent ability to sleep diminish over the course of one's life, even maybe starting as early as one's 30s or forty s? Yeah. So we can go alzheimer's disease is actually a great example. It's probably been, I think, that one of the most exciting areas of sleep research in terms of discoveries in the past ten or even five years. We started with just those epidemiological associations which are simply that they're correlation, they're not causation. And what that told us was that people who were eating sleeping lessons if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe live now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. The last episode was an AMA, which I think got somewhat overshadowed by the first 20 minutes where I responded to all the vaccine hesitancy stuff. Anyway, those of you who listen to the whole thing seem to enjoy it, so I will do more AMAs going forward. It had been a long time and generally use that forum to respond to more topical stuff. Well, today's podcast is really on the state of the world entirely, mostly through an economic lens, but also political, because today I'm speaking with Dambisa Moyo. Dambisa is a prize winning author of several bestsellers. The Edge of Chaos, Winner Take All, Dead Aid, her most recent book is How Boards Work. She is an economist, trained at Oxford. She also has a master's degree from Harvard from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. I think she has an MBA as well. Time magazine has named her one of the hundred most influential people in the world. She's worked for the World Bank and Goldman Sachs and serves on a variety of corporate boards. And she regularly contributes to the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Anyway, as you'll hear, Dembisa gives me an education on many topics. We discuss public goods, economic growth, capitalism, American economic history, bad public policy choices, different forms of inequality, tax avoidance among the wealthy, government inefficiency current problems with democracy, the breakdown of trust in our institutions, failures of transparency, voter participation, the future of automation, identity politics, the reality of racism in America. And then we have a very long discussion about affirmative action and its problems, which I found very interesting. And we also talk about the rise of China and what that means for America. Anyway, I love this conversation and I hope you do as well. And I bring you Dambisa Moyo. I am here with Dambisa Moyo. Dambisa, thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure. I'm glad to be here. So you have one of these ridiculous CVS. It's quite amazing who you are. Thank you. On paper. And so I want to get into that. But before we summarize your academic and intellectual and professional background, give us your origin story. You were born in Zambia. What was your upbringing like? So you're right, I was born in Zambia. I think the old timers might recognize it as Northern Rhodesia. It country became independent in 1964. Some high level statistics. It is a copper exporter. About 97% of exports, maybe a little lower now, come from, come from copper exports. We are a former British colony, so English is the official language. I was born and raised in Zambia, and it's changed so much even in my lifetime. I'm 52 years old now. But the interesting thing is that the rules in government, basically the law of the land in Zambia was that blacks were not issued birth certificates until 1973. And it was a sort of artifact of the colonial era. So to this day, I have no birth certificate, but I do have an affidavit which very clearly states that what I just said, which is that birth certificates were not issued to black Africans. And so it's been a wild ride. My formative years were in Africa, in Zambia, and primary, secondary and university. We had a coup in 1991 where there was an attempted overthrow of the government, but before that, we had been in a one party state, which was run by a man who just died a few weeks ago, Kenneth Kawunda. And basically, it was a relatively peaceful existence. We were very much on the front lines of the struggle for independence for the African region, particularly Southern Africa, South Africa, et cetera. So a lot of the ANC freedom fighters who actually lived in Zambia, and President Mandela, upon his release, the first country he visited with Zambia to basically acknowledge that. So in terms of my specific upbringing, I'm the first child and first daughter of two people who were born and raised in rural Africa from two different tribes, two different parts of the country, but they met and married at university. They were two of the first eleven black graduates allowed to go to university in Zambia. And so my parents, I mean, if you think about it, eleven blacks in the class, and two of them were my parents. It's quite a remarkable story. So 20 years later, I went back to that same university to start my own university career. But, you know, on the whole, very fortunate in the, in the sense that my parents were born in poor rural Africa, had an opportunity to get an education, and that really put the basis in play for myself and my siblings to get an education and to be here today in just, you know, just over 50 years. Quite amazing to be on the Sam Harris podcast. Well, this is not your crown in achievement, as we will, we will detail in a second. So how do you, how do you summarize your, your intellectual and academic background at this point? What what are you doing? And I know you serve on several boards. Give us a snapshot of where you're placed in the world. Yeah. So my PhD is in economics from Oxford University. And so I guess I view myself first and foremost as a macro economist. I nevertheless have spent about ten years on working at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street and then another almost ten years on the board of a bank, Barclays Bank, one of the large, global, sort of important, significant institutions in the banking industry globally. And so in that respect, I feel like I was sort of born and raised in finance. And although I have subsequently spent a lot of time serving on the boards of large global and complex organizations such as Chevron and Energy, mining companies, industrial companies like three M who are making the masks in the ventilators during the COVID Pandemic, but also fast moving consumer goods as well as technology companies. So it's been quite a varied experience over the last decade in which I've sort of evolved from being specifically an economist working in the area of finance into now much more of a jack of all trades in terms. Of thinking about policy issues, thinking about how public policy as well as the private sector think about allocating capital and navigating through challenging times. So you and I recently met at a dinner party and I referenced this gathering a couple of times on the podcast without naming any of the participants. I guess I've just outed you as a member of this Star Chamber, for better or worse. But the conversation we had there was pretty instructive for me because it was a remarkable snapshot of the thinking of some very powerful, connected people about this trend we're seeing, especially in American public life, around a very illiberal activist culture capturing our institutions. And I'm going to want to talk to you about that, but I think let's save that to the end of our conversation because there's so much more to explore given your expertise. Let's start with big picture concerns around the global trends that most concern you at this point. Let's maybe take the economic side first. What does global economic growth look like now and how do you see that relating with any geopolitical concerns we might have? The rise in populism, the weakening of institutions, the weakening of America in particular. I want to COVID all of this. So give me your view of the world from 30,000ft. So, you know, perhaps unsurprisingly, as an economist, I'm deeply concerned about the question of economic growth. Economic growth is is critically important because it really does help us solve macroeconomic problems such as living standards, improving people's living standards over time, but it also helps fund public goods like education, national security, infrastructure, health care. Although I know in America, healthcare is a question of whether it's a public good. Actually, Dambisa, you just listed a few, but would you define what you mean by a public good? Sure. So a public good, to me, the most basic and sort of straightforward way of thinking about it is something that we all benefit from but no one of us pays for. So something like a road you and I can use the same road, but we didn't pay for it. We may have contributed to it through our taxes, but we didn't pay the full freight for that. And it's similarly if you think about things like education or national security, big expensive programs that government seeks to undertake to protect, but also to support an economy and a society, somebody has to pay for that. And really partly through taxation, but also through government borrowing, that public goods tend to be funded. So my point is that in order to have a tax base, your economy needs to be growing, the pie has to be expanding so that we can tax and use that money to fund these public goods education, health care, infrastructure, national security. And of course, to my mind, we're seeing a that list expand when you have things like climate change, which again is a public risk in some sense because not one of us is responsible for the full onslaught of the challenge that we're dealing with. But the truth is we've all somehow contributed to it. It's sort of a negative externality. So that's, that's how I think about growth. And look, here's the rule of thumb with respect to growth. In order for a country to double per capita income, so to double the income of the average person in one generation, and the generation is about 25 years, you need the economy to be growing by 3% per year. And even before COVID hit, we were already seeing many economies, large, small, developed, developing, democratic and non democratic, already struggling to make that 3% number. So just to give you some examples, germany in the fourth quarter of 2019 had 0% growth. The UK was at around 1.2 to 1.4. And then you have very large emerging markets like economies like Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Russia, that since the financial crisis have have struggled to get beyond 2%. So really snapshot was already pretty bad. We were already worried about growth, we were worried that public policy had become quite impotent. By that I mean governments had already had enormous amounts of debt on their balance sheets. But not just government households. Corporations as well as student loans, auto loans were all over a trillion dollars. And then with respect to monetary policy, we know that after the financial crisis of 2008, interest rates have been at historical lows. In fact, they're negative rates in Europe as well as Japan. So very, very challenged situation in terms of slow growth, challenged situation in terms of public policy's ability to effect change. And then if I may Sam, just add on one additional thing that was causing so many challenges for us and continues to do so, is a confluence of factors that was creating a greater drag on economic growth. Things like climate change issues around demographic shifts. There's going to be 11 billion of us on the planet. India is adding a million people a month to the population to her population. We were already worried about technology and the risk of a jobless underclass already deep concerns around productivity decline. So the ability for people to contribute to GDP was stalling. So all of this happened before COVID and now we then end up with COVID which I would argue has actually been capitalistic in making things much more precarious than in terms of our ability to generate growth and to solve these problems. And, in fact, has sort of hastened a lot of the challenges that we've been worried about in economics. I think that this is the basis of what you just said could be counterintuitive for many people. So to make a point of contact with what we'll talk about later, this culture of activism, there's a fundamental skepticism around capitalism itself. Being a salvageable system for improving the wellbeing of humanity and producing wealth is obviously part of that picture. And but in everything you just said, you have taken for granted kind of imperative for growth that I think many people, certainly younger people who are skeptical about capitalism as a system would find counterintuitive. It just sounds like the global economy is just this vast Ponzi scheme which has the mechanics of its own failure built into it. Why is there this growth imperative? Why is growth even necessary? And how do you view this fundamental skepticism around basing our economy on capitalism in the first place? So that is a wonderful question, and I think that, unfortunately, our public policymakers have not done a good job of articulating why growth matters. But even more than that, they've not done a good job of really highlighting the times and places where we've made mistakes of which have been many. And I'll come to those in a moment, I should say, just to telegraph ahead of time. The vast majority of the problems that we're dealing with in terms of public policy and weakness in the economy have really very little to do with China. But China, for example, has become a boogeyman. And what it means is that we're not really doing the hard work that's necessary for an economy to thrive and survive over the long term. But your question is a very fair one. Why is it the case that somebody like myself continues to speak up about growth? And a lot of that has to do with having lived, worked and traveled to over 80 countries, developed and developing as we just highlighted, but also economies that have chosen other paths. And there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that a system that allocates capital and resources, which by and large tend to be scarce in a way that is driven by innovation, driven by not cromism, is a system we ought to aspire to, and capitalism is really based on that. Now, just to be absolutely clear, the type of capitalism that we have practiced has tended to pursue shortcuts, and we can come to that. So governments reaching for more amount of debt, which shortterm looked attractive, tax breaks, et cetera. But longer term, we're not investing in infrastructure or education or future generations. But also it's important to say that the lack of long term thinking has led us to reach both in terms of corporations but also governments for short term solutions that don't fully reflect the trade offs and the challenges of delivering economic growth at scale for many companies and countries. So if I may just pick at this a little bit more, and then I'll send it back to you. So China was the largest economy in the world in GDP terms in 1820, and they made a number of catastrophic policy errors that really cost them. Today, China is the second largest economy in GDP terms, but it still remains one of the poorest economies in the world in terms of a per capita income basis. So on average, in fact, it's poorer than many countries in South America and Africa. So here you have from 1820 to 21 to 2021, where we are today, and they made enormous policy mistakes. The US itself has made policy mistakes in the era post the Gilded Age. So from the 1870 to 1900, you see a lot of economic growth, a lot of exchange and trade and movement of capital, movement of people. So globalization as we know it today, we saw a lot of the rise of corporations relatively late fair government. But that era of the Gilded Age was punctured by a number of things spanish flu, a war, and a financial crisis. And what subsequently happened was progressive politics, very similar to the type of progressive politics that we're hearing about today. People wanted bigger government as an arbiter of capital neighbor. People wanted to see smaller corporations. They wanted them broken up and more antitrust, less globalization. And I'll tell you now that left the United States in an economic malaise for 25 years. From 1930 to 1954, you had low growth, high unemployment. And if you look at just the Dow Jones Industrial Index as one indicator, in 1929, it peaked at 381 points. The next time they saw 381 points was in 1954. So you saw a stalled economy. And it's true that we had a breakdown of globalization. So we had smooth holly policies that were very aggressively anti foreign goods and and services coming into the US. Very aggressive, aggressive anti immigrant stance, which we're hearing again now. You know, just to give you some numbers, in the Gilded Age that 1870 to 1900, the the percentage of American born Americans was around 13%. That number went down to 6%. In this malaise or progressive period I'm talking about, it is true that government became bigger. We have a lot of the welfare programs in the United States, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid really built up in that period of 25 years. But if you look at unemployment rates, economic growth, et cetera, it actually is a period of real regression I would argue in the United States. So then what happened in the turn it around? Well it's funny you asked because and I hope this doesn't repeat itself but what you had was a couple of things. First of all you had a war which ended in 1945 which actually drove a lot of the industrialization and innovation of technology in the United States. It brought women into the workforce in large scale but you also had a real concerted unified effort globally with the establishment of Breton Woods for example which became the parent of the IMF World Bank UN et cetera really come together and argue that we needed to see much more unified global approaches. So you see more trade emerging. And the period from 1950 to 2008, very symbolic, what I'm going to call the golden age is very similar in terms of very similar to the gilded age in terms of high economic growth, large corporations, relatively for government, lots of trade, lots of capital flows. And we've all been around for this period, so we've seen a lot of those gains. However those gains have not been distributed fairly and widely and that's where the problem emerged. Governments had massive tax revenues. Instead of investing in infrastructure they invested in wars. Just an example in the United States the infrastructure is graded D plus by the American Civil Engineer Society that has nothing to do with China. That's a deliberate choice by the American public policymakers republican and Democrat over a period of time choosing that their marginal dollar was not going to go into infrastructure. So what does that mean? It means today not only is the US graded D plus in traditional infrastructure like ports and railways and roads but also we are set really behind from China in more innovative new technologies and more new infrastructure and we're playing catch up. In fact things like facial recognition AI for many of these were actually considered behind and so public policy is trying to catch up with that. There are other examples of public policy decisions that were a folly and they've created a problem that has really gone to the guts of the American middle class things like underinvestment in education. This country according to a McKinsey report the global consulting firm is going to be minority majority by 2050. But if you look at the underinvestment in education in blacks and latinos in particular who will be the majority it could put the country in a permanent recession because largely these populations are ill equipped to compete in a much more techno world. And it's not just blacks and Latinos we know about from he'll be the elegy the likes of the appalachia and pockets of America that have been written about extensively white America where they're living life expectancies of declined opioid use. I mean it's a corrosive degradation of society which again as I mentioned has a lot to do with bad public policy choices, bad policy decisions in corporations as well as society writ large and has relatively little to do with China, even though China is the one that we focus on. Okay, I think we're going to have to give out antidepressants with this episode of the podcast. Hopefully not. There's so many topics you just raised that in the fullness of time I would like to discuss. But let's focus on wealth inequality for a moment. And I think it somewhat relates to an illusion of continued growth that many people suffer from because when you look at the stock market now, it seems like we don't have a problem of growth. The economy looks like it's booming. It looks like it was booming during COVID Obviously the stock market isn't the economy, but what we have is an economy, globally speaking. This is probably true. You can tell me how true it is globally compared to within any given society like America. But there is something like a winner take all, certainly winner take most phenomenon now where the gains in productivity, the growth such as it is, is accruing to the 1% and even to an asymptotic degree to the one 10th of 1% and beyond. How do you think about wealth inequality now? I think that first of all, the issue is not just about wealth inequality. I think the issue is inequality in general because the problem with inequality is that it means that people have less access to education, health care, political rights, opportunity writ large. And so I know people love to focus on wealth in of itself and I do see that very much as an easy target. In my book from 2018 Edge of Chaos, I talk about how Oxfam, the charity had cited that just a couple of years ago that the eight wealthiest men, they're all men in the world, had more wealth than the bottom 50% of the world's population. And there are many of these types of statistics we're familiar with even within the United States, but also between country sort of excess and inequality. But I do worry that sometimes the term inequality and how it's defined does conflate a number of issues and it's also easy to be confused about the distinction between wealth inequality and income inequality. Correct. And those are quite distinct. Correct. And look, I'll say right out that I think for every argument that somebody like myself who's more a believer in market capitalism, obviously understanding it needs to be regulated, it needs to have good policies behind it. But I lean into a much more capitalist type mindset. There will be people who argue vehemently and quite compellingly to the untrained ear. I would say that the root of the problem that we see in capitalism or inequality today is inherent in capitalism in of itself. And so government needs to do more on that. But let's put the debate to aside for one moment. Let me just highlight a couple of issues with focusing on in fact, I'll highlight two issues very quickly with focusing on this idea of wealth inequality or inequality without really getting into the weeds. So first of all, as economists, we don't know the answer on how to solve inequality and I say that with temerity but also some humility in there because I think economists and public policy makers love to sound like we have the answers just not being executed upon. We are looking for short term solutions to what is effectively long term problems. We have tried left leaning solutions, tax and redistribution. Those have not worked in terms of stemming inequality. We've also tried more right leaning supply side interventions where we've cut taxes and we've sort of tried to spur investment. I can assure you those have also not led to greater or rather less inequality. So we are kind of stumped because I think we are looking for some quick fix. Oh, if I tax and redistribute or if I cut taxes, Bob's your uncle, we're going to have inequality reduced. And that has just not happened. So if you ask me what kinds of things could help solve this inequality problem, they're not appealing because they're all long term. They require intergenerational choices, things like investing in education, investing in infrastructure, in innovation. The American historical struct over 200 300 years has really been one of investing in the future. And yet this generation of Americans for the first time in the history of the country is less educated than the preceding generation. So that's one problem. The other issue is when we say inequality, we aren't really being articulate about whether or not we're talking about inequality within a country versus between countries. And the reason this is quite interesting is that here, this is one of the to me, one of the biggest conundrums that we're facing in society today. We are living in a live experiment. Number one and number two largest economies in the world are the United States and China respectively. The United States is a market cap to the society and by and large has chosen democracy as its political ethos. China second largest economy in the world has deprioritized democracy and has market state capitalism as its political approach. And these two economies, two different political systems, two different economic systems, but they have the same Ginny coefficient, which is a measure of inequality around point 42. So if you come from, like myself, somebody born and raised in Africa or you're in South America, and you're looking for which path to address inequality, you don't really have a clear line of sight of what policies actually deliver better outcomes. Because, as I mentioned, the story is quite murky. And neither the left nor the right has delivered emphatically an answer to how do you actually limit inequality? Certainly in the short term. Because as far as I'm concerned, we know longer term it's about an investment in the future. Well, couldn't someone from the left charge that we really haven't successfully tried adequate redistribution? You must be aware of the ProPublica scandal of recent months where they published the tax returns of the richest people in the US. And it was revealed that even Warren Buffett, who has been such an articulate champion of revising our tax policy in favor of redistribution, he famously said, it makes no sense that I pay up a lower tax rate than my secretary. He distinguished himself for paying, I think it was an effective one 10th of 1% on his earnings through that period. We have a tax code that is so full of loopholes for the wealthiest people that what we've witnessed is just a successful gaming of a well intentioned policy, but not the effective implementation of that policy. You're not hopeful that if we actually could get the richest people in every cohort down through the middle class, to pay a proper citizen's share to the common good, we live in a different society. I am empathetic to the argument that everyone should pay their fair share, and their needs, for sure, absolutely needs to be more tax reform in this country. I say this again with great humility. I have two masters and a PhD from arguably some of the best schools on the planet, and even I struggle to understand what the heck are these forms talking about when I'm sitting in my taxes. So there's clearly a lot of work that needs to be done there. And yes, there are, I'm sure, many loopholes and ways to game the system that even I'm not familiar with, that people are taking advantage of. So, yeah, I'll give you that. But I think in many respects, it is a red herring. What we need is government efficiency. And this is where, again, I find it quite disheartening, especially coming from places like Africa where you're living around the world, where I've seen and it's kind of well known that government just does a bad job at allocating resources such as capital and labor. I was very struck by something that Mike Bloomberg has allegedly said, which is around what he thinks the efficacy of what an efficient government should look like. It should be a government that is data driven, forward leaning, focuses on measured outcomes, and is not corrupt. And the reality is, I'm afraid to say, that even Western governments are not ticking those boxes. We don't see them being data driven. They seem to be always playing catch up and being reactive as opposed to proactive. They aren't forward leaning. I gave you an example. They weren't invested in infrastructure around technology. They're playing catch up. This is just not acceptable for a leading economy. They don't focus on measured outcomes. There's a lot of evidence around the underperformance of education, but we're almost beholden to vested interest in education, in health care and other areas that are leading to bad outcomes and bad policy. Decisions. And of course with respect to corruption, I mean, how many times time and time again we expose pockets of corruption? So I'm afraid that more money in a system that is still wrought with these issues, to my mind is not necessarily a solution. I love the phrase that revenue hides or solves a lot of problems, but at some point there's something to be said about efficiency as well and we just are not doing as good a job as I would say previous generations have done in terms of building out the interstate network, building Silicon Valley. The real innovation that the United States has been known for I just feel has really whittled away. And I should be very clear, Sam, I'm not giving up on the US. I think the US still is a country where which likes to write itself, or does write itself when it goes too far in the sort of selfharm. But if ever there were a time when the yellow masks in the plane should be coming down to say we really need to do something fast, I would say this is it. The US. The education statistics from the OECD Pisa are atrocious the United States. In mathematics, reading, writing is at the bottom. It used to be number one, two and three. Now it's number 27, 28, 29. We're being railroaded and overcome by emerging market economies on the regular. We've got so much debt. I mean it's insane. And, yes, it's true that there have been some reasons, compelling and defensible reasons for us to raise the debt levels given COVID, given the financial crisis. But at some point in time, we can't continue to assume will always be a reserve currency, assume that other economies, other systems of financial and, you know, networks and architecture could emerge that could put us at a distinct disadvantage. And you know, all the while we are playing politics every two years. There's just no common discussion that to my mind, there's not really a sophisticated level of discussion that is required for a leading country to continue to lead. And maybe it's happening behind closed doors, but it's pretty disheartening to see what's happening in Washington and with institutions and society writ large. Well, given that you're behind many of those closed doors, I'm not hopeful that it is happening there if you're not seeing it. So much of what you said suggests that really we have a fundamental problem with democracy, or at least democracy as it's currently formed. Our inability to focus on long term problems is anchored to what you just described as the short term political time horizon of every full time politician. I mean, it seems like people get elected simply to then get reelected, right? And they have, you know, they have about 15 minutes to focus on solving problems before they then have to worry about the next election. But we also as citizens, we reward that. We ought to be much more savvy, much more attuned to the fact that getting a tax break today just is postponing the inevitable. We're going to owe that money back sometime in the future. We need to be more aware that when our government borrows, they're borrowing from China, which is the largest foreign lender to the United States government. It does flip between China and Japan, but basically China, who we insult, we get into fights with on a regular basis, is holding potentially the largest amount of foreign debt. It means that we're not having economic conversations, we're having geopolitical conversations and risks to our society that are, as you say, it goes to the heart of our democracy. Not just the long term problems, but also to low participation rates. Yeah. How is this connected? Or is it connected to the weakening of institutions and the rise of liberal democracies throughout the world and the rise of populism? It seems like, with respect to people's consumption of information now and just our inability to acknowledge a common set of facts on any topic of significance, whether it's whether or not the 2020 election was run properly or whether it was stolen, whether COVID is worth taking seriously, whether vaccines are safe. We're on a kind of a runaway train of misinformation, conspiracy thinking, half truths, lies, all of us being supercharged by social media and a breakdown of trust in mainstream media and obvious failures in mainstream media organizations to do their job. What are the points of greatest concern here and what can you imagine us doing to correct course? Well, it is deeply disheartening and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, it's particularly disheartening for someone like myself, who's come from a poor country, comes to the United States, comes to the west with great aspirations to experience the fullness of participatory democracy freedom in terms of not just political rights, but also economic rights. And we need to see a breakdown in what I would say are two things. One, it's a breakdown in belief and transparency, which, by the way, I should say both of these things, I believe, have happened over time. It didn't just happen in the last few weeks. So we have less transparency. Our people's perceived sense that there's less transparency about where the decisions are being made, where is the quote unquote room where these things are happening? But also, if there's a lack of agreement on what is defined as not just data but information, what can we all agree on in terms of facts? I was struck by something a very good friend of mine told me some time ago, that the breakdown in transparency, when really in the United States, the sort of scales fell off people's eyes, was really around watergate. So they would argue that that was really a turning point when people realized, wait a second, we are being manipulated by public policymakers. They're spying on each other, they're manipulating and from that that was a watershed moment in terms of transparency. There's no doubt in my mind that the watershed moment regarding information has definitely been catalyzed by social media. The ability for people to make claims and statements and not be held accountable and by the way, in an anonymous fashion and there are other people who can make this argument much more eloquently than I, but to me has fundamentally altered our ability to judge what is data versus what is actually information. But these two things have, as I mentioned, I don't believe only started a few years ago even. I think this has been a sustained and deliberate sort of attack of our democracies over time that perhaps we ignored wink wink, nudge nudge, whatever. It wasn't that big a deal. But has been capitalized now in such a fracture to society that it's deeply, deeply worrying. But you ask me what can we do about it? And I think that's an important thing because we can sit here and navel gaze and say woe is me, but what can be done? And in my book Edge of Chaos, I talk about a bunch of reforms. I propose ten things. I won't go through all of them, but really ten ways that I think we can enhance democracy to address the problem of low participation rates, but also to address the problem of short termism that's built into our system. Again, we as citizens are rewarding our policymakers for taking these short term decisions. We get promised a tax break. We're rushing out to vote for these people without real due consideration for the consequences later on. So let me just maybe highlight a couple of things that I think would be quite interesting to explore. I should say two things about what I'm about to say. One is that the list of ten things that I propose in that book are not sort of that innovative meaning somewhere on the planet. And I state where they are already using these tools and they've been tried and arids. And so in that sense we have some semblance that they could work. But the other thing is that I'm not so inured to living and having worked in the United States to recognize that some of the proposals might be viewed very much as antiAmerican meaning they just fly in the face of what Americans believe. And let me start with that one. So low participation rates and the fact that a lot of public policy making has been captured by big money. We know this. I don't need to make the arguments. Billions of dollars spent to fight campaigns. We know about the PACs and the amount of money that goes to candidates. So we know that argument. This, I believe, has contributed to low participation rates. And just to give you some data, at low income households that have $30,000 or less, the average participation rate is about 30%. In elections, that number was around 50%. High 50s in the US. But we have seen improvements, I must say, in the last few years. But as the countries become more divisive, we've seen actually more improvements in this. But one example of something that we could do is so in order to really go for the one man, one vote, we could have mandatory voting. I understand this flies in the face of Americans who feel, hey, I have the right to vote or not vote, or it's my decision to choose what I want to do or not do. But there are around 20 countries around the world that have yet used it to great effect. You get everybody's votes. It does matter for public policy outcomes. And I think you can do it in a way that actually enhances political discourse so that you don't have politicians rightly for their own goals, pursuing wealthy people and not really caring about what the average person thinks. So that's just one example. If I can ask you about that, Debbie, it's not obvious to me why that's so important. In the end, if you just imagine that I think, correctly, that most voters will be fairly uninformed about the issues, why does getting more and more of everybody who will be, on balance, uninformed add anything but noise to the signal? I mean, couldn't couldn't one argue that it would be better for a smaller percentage of a society to vote if that percentage were people who were actually informed about issues? And I'm thinking of things like Brexit and other referendums that go haywire. Yes. Well, haywire, some people would say haywire. Other people would say went exactly the way they want to. Yeah, exactly. But touche. I think it's a very good point, and I do. Funny enough, one of the ten proposals in the book is making the argument that we should be looking at specific people voting, only being allowed to vote for certain things. So I'll give you a very quick example. I think I'm a pretty informed go ahead. I just want to say that my comment was not as elitist as it might have sounded because I think this applies to me when I look at my voting behavior when I confront a ballot and there are all kinds of local initiatives and judges and people who I have not taken the time to vet even remotely or on the ballot. I consider myself someone who's unqualified to vote for many of those things and often pass them over. Yeah. By the way, and that is why I made this recommendation one of the ten in my book, precisely because I consider myself pretty well read, pretty knowledgeable, pretty informed about what's happening in different sectors, even outside of economics. But the truth is, if someone said to me, dambisa, here is $1, a marginal dollar, I have no idea where that is best spent in the healthcare system. I don't know. To hire more nurses. I don't know if we need to buy more pills, more beds, more doctors? I have no idea. But I have to believe that people who work in that field physical therapists, doctors, nurses, et cetera will have more information than I. And so there are countries that are trying this, places like Switzerland in Canada, I believe it's in Toronto. They're flirting with this idea of saying, hey, wait a second, it could be knowledge based. And by the way, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm sure there are people who are listening to this and their heckles are rising because it could very much sound like harking back to a period where, hey, we don't want blacks or we don't want women to vote. That's not at all what I'm suggesting here. But what I am saying is is there a way for us to get better outcomes on public policy? And certainly this is a debate that I think we should be having. But to your specific question, Sam, which was why is it the case that having a broader base of people who are ill educated voting why that might enhance our outcomes? What I was addressing was enhancing democracy. So democracy is one quote unquote man, one vote. And all I was saying is that we are now in a situation where we've got weighted voting. And the weighted voting is money based. It's not knowledge based. And that scenario comes with its own problems because what we're seeing is exactly what you just said. The stock market is rallying. That means the world must be writing itself. Well, guess what? Only a large proportion of the country's population is not even invested in the stock market. So it's, you know, the public policy, the things that public policy looks at to point out as economic success, the things that society focuses on and especially public policy focuses on as progress, are things that perhaps unsurprisingly are basically the things that people who are wealthy, who influence public policy outcomes find important. So all I'm suggesting is that if you want to have a much more egalitarian society where the average education system is better, the average health care system is better, then you need to bring in those voices. Because the truth of the matter is that that one 10th of percent probably doesn't really care about and I'm being simplistic in the interest of time doesn't really have an axe to grinders, doesn't really have a dog in the fight for low education standards. An argument could be made that they should care because they're diving cheek by jow with people who don't have access to, who are suffering. But I'm just saying that in this in the interim I'm trying to enhance the number of people participating in democracy because I think we could get better outcomes. How much of our current economic woes in the US. And present and near future do you think relate to automation and the evaporation of jobs that either are not replaced or are replaced by worse jobs. It seems to me that when one worries about the trend line here and a future in which we build better and better machines, one is usually met by what I consider to be bad analogies to prior advances in technology. This often comes from your fellow economists that people say, well, it used to be that whatever 60% of Americans worked in agriculture and now it's I forget 6% or less. Yeah, it's less than that. Less than 3%. These people found we don't have a crisis of farmers who couldn't figure out what else to do with their lives. They went into manufacturing. I know the argument. And then 18% have ended up in manufacturing. About 80% have ended up in service sector jobs. And I know exactly the argument. And so you know what your question is. You know, how worried am I? I haven't been worried. But we should be worried because if anything, if we think about what are the lessons learned from the Pandemic digitization, the deployment of human workers and labor and really that sort of greater transparency into who actually is adding value, if I can put it as crudely as that, to an organization, I think it's become much more revealed. And the question about automation, I would argue in some of the boardrooms in which I sit has really rapidly moved from, hey, technology advances are really about thinking around cyber risks and downside concerns into wait a minute. We can actually reduce our cost overheads in terms of the buildings that we rent and lease, our footprint, of how many planes we're flying, business costs, et cetera, by having fewer people do more work. So I think there's been already a shift in conversation. It was bound to happen. The World Economic Forum has been talking about 85 million jobs that were going to get replaced. And I do think that in the scenario that we talked about going from 60% agriculture, 1900 moving to manufacturing, then services amount to R and D. The difference is that we don't know what sector could absorb this population of workers. In those other sectors, we were aware, we knew that people were moving out of agriculture because of both push and pull factors that took them into manufacturing. Part of it is that war we talked about in 1939 to 1945, the the whole World War II infrastructure moved people out of farming, more out of farming into, into industrial jobs. And but that we know what has happened. The problem is it's not obvious where a large proportion of unskilled workers could land because the skill sets required for these new jobs is much higher. I'll just say one other thing here because what I've just said is really about it assumes that people are out there looking for work and are not finding it. There's another disturbing data point particularly seen in the US. Post the financial crisis, which is that the labor participation rate in this country has actually gone down, and it's quite sticky. And this is basically how many people have basically decided, you know what? I'm not going to look for work anymore. And they're essentially withdrawing their labor. Part of it could be because of furlough schemes and COVID. Basically, people reevaluating their lives not wanting to work as hard or work in certain circumstances. I mean, there's a whole list of arguments, maybe even technological changes. But the net net is that not only are we demanding higher skills going forward from the people who work, but we also have a situation where the human worker is withdrawing their work number, their work services. And I think both of those lead me to be more concerned about a jobless future. Well, there's so much to talk about here. There are many other topics I want to touch with you, but I want to pivot to the kind of quasi political concerns that I started with at the beginning, and then we'll see if we have time for the rest because I don't want to miss this opportunity to get all of your thoughts on this topic. We're talking about a crisis of legitimacy in democracy, a crisis of legitimacy around the economic system of capitalism, a space of information and misinformation that's making it increasingly difficult to talk about any kind of ground truth on these topics or any other. There's this growing reality of inequality of all sorts income, wealth, education, access to health care. And it's both, as you pointed out, you know, global and domestic. I feel like the comparison is you know what? Even if it's made between countries, it's not so psychologically salient for people, and people care much more about the proximate comparison. How am I doing with respect to my neighbors as opposed to how am I doing with respect to half the countries in Africa or Latin America? I think it's probably true to say that there are people in American society who are much wealthier than many, even most people in the developing world, but who are, in effect, poor in our society and feel the full range of burdens of that poverty, psychologically and socially, in a way that they wouldn't if they were in a village in India or Nepal or somewhere else. Which is to say you can be better off in material terms and still psychologically worse off because the only software for running, you know, self esteem on our hard drives is to make comparisons with the nearest examples of difference. So these problems are becoming even more difficult to talk about, think about, and take steps to mitigate because of what is just a level of political hyperpartisanship in our society that has just become totally unworkable. And again, you and I met at a dinner party where we were talking about the extreme polarization on the far left and referred to on this podcast and elsewhere as woke ism or social justice activism or identity politics. There are various lenses you can put over this. But there's a point of view in our society, I think, disproportionately expressed by the young and well educated, surprisingly and often white and well educated that basically calls into question, as I said, capitalism and certainly stigmatizes wealth. There's a belief that there's probably no ethical way to become a billionaire. I mean, the only way to be a billionaire is to have perpetrated some horrific fraud on society or to have inherited the money or some other means that is ethically indefensible. There's, I think, a pervasive sense that any exercise of American power is illegitimate and probably diabolical on the world stage and this probably runs all the way back to our founding. There's a sense that American society is irretrievably racist and that not only have we not made significant progress, in some ways we've it's never been worse than at this moment. The clock is two minutes before midnight with respect to the race based inequalities in our society. And so that there's just a sense that we are at some crisis point with respect to the perception of the state of our democracy and society coming from the left. We can leave the mirror image on the right aside for the moment. And I guess let's focus I mean, this relates to every perceived victim group. I mean, we can you know, this is true of women's rights and me too, and trans rights and questions of gender, but let's focus on race for the moment and identity politics and affirmative action and all of these nested concerns and policies that fall there. I'm wondering what your perception as an African woman? Whenever I speak to Africans, I'm always impressed at what a unique perspective they give on race relations in the US. What is your perception of our moment here and how we should be thinking about it and dealing with it? Well, first of all, I'm glad that you've made or stressed the point that it was born and reasonable. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe to samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am back with Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin, thanks for joining me again. Thanks so much for having me again. So, let's see here. We have many things we want to talk about. I guess I'll just flag you have an article coming out in The Atlantic that we can't speak about yet, because it's currently embargoed, as things occasionally are. So we'll get to that next time. And people will marvel at our restraint in this conversation. They already do, I'm sure in each of our individual lives, we are models of restraint. So, anyway, I look forward to that. But that prompted us to talk about an older article that you wrote actually not that old. The December 2019 issue, which I had never read. I think I had heard echoes of how this had gone off like a bomb in in the press, which is to say it was controversial, for reasons that will be obvious, but I had not read it. So you sent it to me last night, and it's really an amazing piece. And the title is the Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate. Let's start with that. We've got a bunch of other things we want to talk about, but I want to take that at the top because it's just in addition to being an extraordinarily important social policy debate and also just an extremely interesting ethical puzzle to reason through the way we talk about abortion and the way we just reliably fail to reason about it honestly and ethically reveals more or less everything that's wrong with our politics. And this is something you bring out in your essay in a very vivid way. So what prompted you to write about abortion, you know, six months ago? Well, abortion has always been on my mind as an important subject. My mom was a nurse in New York City, in the Bellevue Hospital, and she sat with two girls, as she always called them, as they died from bad abortions. An abortion is it's the kind of thing that done correctly in a medical office by someone who knows what he or she is doing. Very easy procedure to get right without those preconditions. It's an incredibly easy procedure to get wrong, principally in terms of sepsis, a really severe pervasive infection that's very, very lethal. And what made those infections. Even more lethal in the days of illegal abortion was that you had committed a crime. So as your temperature is rising degree by degree, and if you had any other kind of medical procedure, your family would have rushed you in to get medical care. These women couldn't do that. They knew that they had committed a crime, and the person who had performed the abortion would never help them. They were never to contact him or her again. And so it was just a very, very terrifying thing for young women. And this was in the days that she was doing this work, just being an RN, she wasn't really called to what we would now call, I guess, reproductive justice or anything like that. She was just a young woman who always wanted to be a nurse, and she was seeing that young girls right in front of her. These two who died, all they tried to do was have a private sexual life in some way. It could have been a forced sexual encounter. She didn't know. We'll never know. But that in those days, the consequences of being single and pregnant were devastating. If you were getting an education, that would be the end of that. If the person who got you pregnant was known to your family or the community, you might be forced into a marriage with him, and he into one with you, him into one with you. And no matter how abusive and horrible you both might be to each other, that was the way things were handled. And so there was just this very terrible period of really high deaths that we as a culture, we don't have a great much memory of them. They've kind of faded from the cultural memory. Someone I'm 58, and my mother didn't have me till she was 36. So I've got a bank of cultural memories from my mother, who's long since dead, that was really delving back into the, into the what this really looked like when you had women desperately trying to end a pregnancy. So I'd always been interested in that on the one hand. But on the other hand, I really remember because I remember when abortion was very much in the news in the years preceding Roe v. Wade, and I was a very small child. I mean, a young kid. I don't know what? Ten or something. And I would always hear my mother, who was super politically active and a very good woman, I would hear her saying to people, abortion, abortion, abortion. We have to have it legal. And I really remember being in the backseat of the car and saying to my mom, well, what is abortion? And my mother's mo up to any sexual question was to give you far too much information so that you would never ask anything again. And so she kind of tried to think, how in the world can you translate this incredibly complicated situation to a child. And she said, well, it's when a woman is pregnant and she doesn't want to be pregnant, so they take the baby out and it doesn't live. And I'm like my mom, when you're ten, your mom is just this perfect, beautiful, radiant, goddess creature. And I was like, that doesn't sound good. And she's like, let's change the subject. But the reality has become more and more and more clear of that childlike intuition, or sense, I should say. As Sonography gets clearer and clearer and clearer, we're looking into we're getting a view into something that's really hard to hold in our minds if we're in any way pro choice. Which I am, which is that this is not a clump of cells from I mean, someone like Ben Shapiro would say we're just clumps of cells, but it is very recognizably human from an incredibly early state. And we had a quite interesting gender divide on this at the Atlantic because we were finding images of a twelve week fetus. And all the women, many of the women who were, I think to a woman pro choice, I think our whole office is I don't know, I shouldn't be making claims. How do I know? Maybe somebody isn't pro choice and doesn't feel comfortable to talk about that. So I shouldn't say that on anyone's behalf. But the women pro choice that I know were saying, oh wow, this is really hard to look at. The men were saying, this doesn't really move me, and I don't see this being the compelling argument, just having this image. So that was really interesting as well. But I really thought ultimately that the reason we can't talk about abortion and we'll probably never be able to, is that it's one of those situations where the best argument of each side is a damn good argument and almost airtight and the best argument of the pro life side. To me, it's not a religious argument because everyone has a different religion and everyone has a different set of beliefs. And religious beliefs aren't supposed to set public policy in America. But the Sonograms are incredibly powerful scientific fact, and you can't look away from them. And these knowledge that really only medical people had who would attend to, say, very late term miscarriages or or any kind of miscarriage where it would have to be conducted in a hospital with the DNC and so forth, they kind of knew what, you know, a 1214 1618 week fetus looked like. But even then it's a bit desiccated with the time of a miscarriage and so forth. But we're all looking at it and we have a very ambivalent idea about it because if the baby is wanted, everybody likes to run now to get one of these new 4D Sonograms, which is like the first baby picture, those very beautiful, incredibly detailed Sonograms that you can now get, like in a mini mall. They'll set up shop for that. So that's the argument. The other side is women truly die from abortions. It'll be a different kind of death in the main, if it ever becomes illegal again. In America. A lot of things have changed. Access to antibiotics have changed, but it will be very regressive. It'll hit the poor much harder than the middle and upper class, socioeconomic upper and middle class. And all sorts of things happen in the lives of a woman, a life of a woman. Of course, there's issues of rape and abuse and all of that, but there's just also the fact, as I brought up in this piece with a piece of evidence, there's kind of a moment in some women's life where I just can't cope with this now. I just can't. I'm overwhelmed. And the conditions in my life, whatever they are, I'm not speaking for myself. I'm speaking for a woman. In this situation. Whether it's the nature of my relationship, whether it's my fears about the future, whether it's that I've finally got through some really horrible postpartum depressions with my first two or three, whether it's I need to get away from this man, and if I can get my kids to kindergarten age, I can go back to work. Whatever it is, there is such a world of entirely legitimate reasons to get some help and terminate this pregnancy. And if you don't have it legally, if you don't have it, as I say, you can have this procedure done so safely. You know, a little prophylactic antibiotic, I believe, goes goes home with a lot of women just to completely ensure, and far from being told, as an illegal abortionist would say, the number one rule in every account you will ever see is never give my name to anyone and never contact me again. The opposite is true. If you have any temperature, if you have any discomfort, you are to call back and we have a 24 hours line. They're not letting women die of sepsis. So this is the real conundrum. Both sides have an excellent argument, and where I've netted out is I have accepted that in abortion we lose the baby, but I'm not going to lose the woman too. That's that's where I have netted out, but other people will net out differently. But I think it's incumbent on any of us who takes a public or private opinion on this in terms of counseling a friend or voting a certain way. I think we really need to think through the opposite side of our own position and see either what strengths it might have that we haven't acknowledged or what ways that our positions could be tailored to some of these absolutely true, very sad, desperate situations that both sides of the equation present us with. Yeah. In your piece, what you also just did here is make it obvious that this is an ethically complicated situation, which is not what happens politically. The political ends of the spectrum treat abortion as though it was just a knock down case against the other side that was so trivial and so clear that it need not even be expressed. So if you're religious, life begins at the moment of conception or abortion is murder. And we don't have to talk about why we're against murder. And we can liken the the history of abortion here or anywhere else to the Holocaust or some other obvious atrocity and end of argument, not acknowledging, much less dealing compassionately, with the ocean of suffering on the other side, for which abortion, in many cases a very clear remedy. I mean, you just spelled out many of those cases, rape or relationship chaos that is just completely incompatible with bringing a new child into the world. But from the other side and this is where well educated liberal types have their own blind spot. The left has treated abortion as though it were simply a question of a woman's autonomy without any other ethical implications. And this is you might want to say I think I probably would want to say that some of the insensitivity here has been born of necessity. It's a reaction to the dogmatism and authoritarianism of the right and the very real danger of tipping back into this awful history of women dying unnecessarily over botched abortions. And by the way, Sam, I would just interject we have no idea how many died because it was very rare a doctor worked out with a family. It was such a shaming thing for a death certificate to say abortion and for that to be in the public record that it would be called peritonitis. It would be the big thing that was in the see it all over and over. It's interesting that people didn't catch on that, oh, she ate tinned peaches, canned peaches or a canned tuna fish and there was botulism in that and that's what killed her. So we will never really know how many women died over and above the huge number that we know about. Yeah. So let's just go into how insane some of this history was for a second because in your article, which is I recommend obviously everyone read it's, not very long, but it was full of detail that I found astonishing and for some reason had never encountered. And also you link to an article by Katha Paulette from 1997 which contained some information that I had never come across. For instance, in Polyt's article, she points out that first of all, the the numbers of abortions that were performed under, you know, the medical supervision of the time was very high in the 19th century and up until the time of truly sordid dangerous, self administered, you know, quote, back alley abortions. I mean, that the peak of that was more in the appallingly. You have the Journal of the American Medical Association recommending that hospitals not provide medical treatment to women until they had confessed fully to, you know, who had gotten them pregnant, who had performed the abortion. It was literally like just an official recommendation of a medical inquisition before you administered life saving or potentially life saving treatment to a woman who had shown up at the hospital at death's door. It's just completely insane. But the piece of history from your article that I never knew was the role of Lysol in all of this. Your article contains an old Lysol ad, which is obviously before I might want to read your description of it. You're describing this as just an obvious ad for self administered abortion through Lysol. And I'm thinking, okay, there's no way Caitlyn's too deep into this topic. There's no way this really is going to be at minimum, it'll be susceptible to another interpretation here. But then you see the ad, and this is just madness. This is like some counterfactual history of the United States that I never knew was possible. So just anyway, describe the wonderful branding of Lysol we have now. Well, the deal with Lysol was that, number one, it contained a chemical compound called I think it's phenol. PH E-N-O-L. Very corrosive. Excellent for cleaning. Came in to just tie all the storylines together. It was big during cleaning hospitals during the Spanish flu because it was so powerful and women would use Lysol. And it was all but publicly stated explicitly in the ads. They couldn't explicitly state it that douching with Lysol after sex would very much lower your chance of getting pregnant, which it did because some of that would trickle in through the cervix and it's corrosive force. But if you were pregnant and you found a way to get a Lysol into the womb, you would perforce kill the baby and anyways or the fetus, whatever we want to. I know it's loaded language either way, but so the ad shows it's a very beautiful piece of kind of mid century graphic art, a sort of middle class looking white woman. Her hair is done, her nails are done. She has a wedding ring on. She's sort of what we imagine when we think about, oh, the wonderful post war American suburbs where middle class white people were leading this kind of enchanted life. She's like a June Cleaver type, younger than June, but that kind of person. And her head is behind her. There's a calendar, which is a brilliant detail. It's amazing how much information is conveyed in this photograph, isn't it? I mean, American graphic art, it's like the iconography of it is just incredible for the best of it. But so there's this calendar, and day after day is crossed off, and every woman in the world is certainly one who's in her childbearing years knows what that means. That means you're just waiting and waiting and waiting for the period to get your period. Believe me, to all of your listeners are younger than I am, even in my lifetime. There were no, like, home pregnancy tests. If you, God forbid, thought you were pregnant, you had to wait and wait and wait and then go see a doctor. You waited as long as you could and fortunately for me, eventually got my period. But she has her head in her hands, and the copy is I Just Can't Face It again, that's the headline. The headline, sorry. Graphically brilliant. And that concept of I Can't Face it, and it really I first saw this, it was last May. I'd known about kind of the Lysol ads, and I had really studied the famous actress Margot Kidder, who was the lowest lane in the first Superman movies and had a lot of very tragic life. Maybe not unconnected to this. She wrote extensively about this abortion she had as a girl where they filled her womb with Lysol. And I thought, my God, what a hideous event. And then in May, when I saw this ad, I thought, my God, maybe it was a common event. And as terrible as the Internet is, the things that it's great at are incredible. I was able to do the amount of research that in pre Internet days, I would probably have given up on. You know, I need to I need to search all the medical journals in North America, possibly England, from this, you know, bling, bling, bling. There they are. New England Journal of Medicine. Something in Albany. Put your credit card in. And here was this incredible, terrible, untold tale of women having Lysol, this absolutely poisonous, legitimately toxic fluid with this very pronounced smell filled into their uterus. And yes, it would kill the life of the baby fetus embryo, the fetus by then, but it would start shutting down the woman's organs. And the first case, this woman showed up, her urine was pork, wine colored. I mean, she was dying when that was a typical way women would show up. I don't know what's in the Catholic I often don't agree with her, but I think on abortion, I'm sure we end up I know we end up at the same place, but women would show up in the absolute final stages of death by sepsis. They would be very often my mother talked about this for the rest of her life, that those two girls were both interviewed by New York City homicide detectives, young girls who had had a sexual experience. And both of them, the cops wanted the name of the person who'd done it. And she said both girls were so terrified they wouldn't give the name because that's what they'd been told endlessly by the person, you may never give my name. Something terrible will happen to you if you did. So these Lysol abortions, they did quite often work, but if they didn't, the chance for it becoming systemic was huge, and very terrible deaths ensued because of it. And finally, let's call them the products of conception, the baby, whatever. When it came out, the fetus would smell very strongly of Lysol, which is just, to me, just a horrifying element of the whole situation. And it's sort of where the notion of a sort of abortion being a murderous thing, you can sort of see where that comes from. But going back to history, I definitely know what you're mentioning. Katha talking about the notion of a confession. Instead of giving your medical history before they treat you, you have to provide a confession now and nothing else. If you go in and you've burned your hand on the stove, you don't have to confess anything before they'll treat you. You just say so. They can give you the best treatment possible if you're awake, what happened. But the whole notion that you'll hear on the right, or let me just say the anti legal abortion group, is that can you imagine? There's great anger that it came down to, obviously, a Supreme Court case, and they'll always say, could you imagine if the founding fathers had ever thought that their grand constitution would be used toward abortion? That is a fundamental ignorance about the nature of midwifery. In the 17th and 18th century, it was completely normal for a baby that was born with a birth defect, that was a survivable birth defect. But the midwife would make the decision herself later when there was a physician, and they would turn away from the woman, and they would cover the nose and mouth, and they would put that baby down, to use that language. There was no sense of this sacred individual importance of every single baby that a woman who would have many of them over the course of her life was being considered. So I don't think it's historically accurate to think I mean, they'd probably be very stunned by a lot of things about today, but the idea that some pregnancies didn't go to term because a woman and a midwife got involved earlier on wouldn't shock them. Not at all. Not in the least. Yeah. There's one thing you do in this piece, and you do it at the end in a very arresting final paragraph, which I'll let people read. But you bring the experience of men into the picture in a way that it had never occurred to me to do. We tend to talk about this as a problem of the ethical problem or the ethically interesting facts are the woman's experience, how she got pregnant and all of the chaos and suffering that may be attendant on that again. Rape being the obvious case and all the reasons why she might have not to want to be pregnant or deliver a baby into this world, and the questions of autonomy over her body and, you know, the intrusions of the state and, you know, the other people's apparent interests in, you know, what she can do with her life and all of that. Right. The nexus of all of this is the woman. And on the other side, the obvious fact of taking, depending on how you think of it, at what point in term the life of an innocent baby who could have been viable at a certain point or is potentially viable and has its own interests. So that's the problem. But you bring the experience of men into this, and suddenly the reader understands that when you have women dying by the thousands, which was obviously the case due to illegal abortions, many of these women have men in their lives, husbands in many cases, and they have existing families. Right. I just can't face it. Again, moment is by definition, the story of a woman very likely married, already having kids. And so you take the point of view of the man who has delivered his critically ill wife, almost certainly the mother of their existing children, to a hospital where she dies. And after that tragedy, he simply has to go home and face raising the kids by himself. Right. Which is you can imagine in the 40s just how fully unequipped the average man would have felt doing that. And that's part of this picture. The level of chaos introduced to the lives of men when this has gone wrong is something that literally, I've never spent a second thinking about. But you bring it out so vividly here, and it's just there's so much human suffering that awaits us. If we imagine going back to anything, as you say, with 21st century medicine, a back alley is not likely to be a back alley. But if the people who want an absolute prohibition of abortion get what they want, it seems to me that no one is really thinking through the totalitarian horror required to truly prevent illegal abortions. You have doctors going to prison as murderers. You have people still resorting to procedures that wind up killing women unnecessarily and rendering children motherless. And this is not just a woman's issue. There are men who will suffer immensely because of this as well. And so it seems to me that almost no one on the side of prohibition is grappling with these facts. But then, to make this interesting, you pivot again to the reality of the image of the sonogram, which looks just like a baby. Right? It is a baby. There's something that I don't know it's from the poets, I think, like, calling out to, like, that's us, you know, that is a human being that is recognizably a human being. And the more that we learn about DNA, the more that we understand that incredibly specific traits have already been determined in that infant. I've got one kid who could sit through two lectures in second grade, and I had another kid who was like, boy, his his foot would be tapping, you know, ten minutes in, because he's just a very active, lively person, always has been. All that, you know, maybe there's an artistic talent that's settled it's all in there. That's, you know and we all know as parents that in the beginning, we think, I will infuse my child with a perfect set of beliefs and they will replicate them, and then they come out and they are actually their own person and they have their own ideas about who they should be and how they should be. And all of that is extinguished in abortion. But I also say it's extinguished at almost exactly the same rate as miscarriage. And when someone has a miscarriage, absolutely nobody goes up to her. I mean, I had one. I was very heartbroken. Nobody comes up to me and says, well, did you ever think about the child you lost and all the talents he had? Did you ever think about the pain the fetus must have gone through as it was rejected from you? People just comfort you and they help you and they counsel you and they tell you, don't worry. You'll have another baby. And so all of this language is just very interesting to think about. But 20% of pregnancies end in a miscarriage and 20% end in abortion is our best statistics. So life is not easy to women in this whole world of reproduction. It really isn't and it never has been. And the idea that abortion is the product of she women horrible feminists, which, hey, I hate them too, so you got me there, but on the most part. But the idea that it was just to create a certain kind of callously lived sex life and for some women it is, but far, far longer throughout all of human history has been women coping with all of human sexuality, which men don't really have to. And you mentioned this man in the article and one of my news flashes that my career will be evergreen if I just could continually say this shocking piece of information that not all men are bastards and a lot of men really love women. And if they're in a romantic relationship with a woman and over many years really love her and really care about her and a lot of men, if they walked into the kitchen in the middle of the night and the wife had her head in her hands and she's sobbing and saying, I can't face it again. A lot of men sit down and say, in the male way that women tell us they hate, but is actually, in some situations extremely good. They say, Let me help you. Let me figure this out. Let me help you solve this problem. And it's our problem because we're both pregnant. I made you pregnant. Our physical congress made you pregnant and so resulted in your being pregnant and our being in this situation. So it's something that can be handled in a very moving way by men. Yes. I want to bring up two things that you don't mention in the piece, and they seem. To me to be relevant to the ethical question of where one draws the line here in terms of admitting that abortion is the most ethical remedy to a non optimal situation, all things considered. And so at the extremes, it seems to me that it's trivially easy to answer if you're talking about a merely fertilized egg day one that's not a human being, you don't have to worry about the possibility of suffering. So using an IUD or anything that is essentially performing an abortion at the earliest possible stage, the morning after pill, this is not an interesting ethical question. And no one's a murderer for doing those things. If a person thinks that, well, then that person has religious ideas which make no sense. And they especially don't make sense in light of the fact that, as you pointed out, although not in these words, god is the most prolific abortionist of all. I wouldn't say that that position has no sense, the religious position, it's certainly not my position. But I can certainly see an argument outside even of their religious faith that would say, this is us, this is the spark of us, this is the beginning of us, what we do to the least of us, et cetera. I mean, it's not my belief, it's not your belief, but I could see a situation in where it's not absurd. To me, it is a bit absurd, but anyways, I just have much more interest. I'm always kind of interested that maybe people are right about things, so I always hold space that they're right about that, but I don't believe it whatsoever. Well, you can create a situation where you have dozens of zygotes in a petri dish and it becomes especially absurd. This is the argument I made. I believe in letter to a Christian nation. When you just think about the implications of genetic engineering, literally every time you scratch your nose, you're engaged in a holocaust of potential human beings. Given the right manipulations, yeah, at that extreme, everything is a potential human being. Practically any human cell with a nucleus can be engineered to be another person who could be viable given the right developmental course. So it's one of the slippery slope arguments. But then on the other side, you have a very, very late term quote abortion, which is indistinguishable from infanticide. And so it's somewhere between those extremes where we have to talk about the ethics of abortion and where one is tempted to see it as a remedy, a family planning, chaos, averting remedy for people. Not a very clear line between an easy decision and a hard one. And I'm tempted to look for this line in terms of the possible experience and suffering of the fetus. So just neurologically speaking, developmentally speaking, there are reasons to believe that the brain structures responsible for the experience of physical pain are developed. And here we're talking about, you know, brain stem structures, the reticular formation especially, and the thalamus. But these are subcortical structures, right? There's no reason to believe you need a cortex or even a cerebrum to feel pain, or at least there's good reason to believe that pain can be mediated before those structures are developed. This all begins to come together around 15 weeks in utero. And again, this is not a matter of scientific certainty at this point, that this is the moment where the lights could conceivably come on with respect to the experience of pain, but before 15 weeks and after that's, an area where the structures we know mediate pain and pain responsive behavior have knit together. And so there is something to distinguish a first trimester from a second and third trimester. And certainly when you get into the third trimester, you're talking about a bean who has cerebral hemispheres that begin to show EEG synchrony, which is a kind of landmark that many people now associate with the possibility of consciousness. So just neurologically speaking, I think you can make a good faith argument that before 15 weeks, there is reason to believe that a fetus can't feel pain or can't likely feel pain. And as you push that closer and closer to the moment of conception, if we're talking about eight weeks or seven weeks or five weeks, then concerns about the suffering, whatever a sonogram image might do to you, intuitively, the concerns about suffering are less and less reliably founded. And the fact that it looks like a baby, the concern shouldn't be that it has fingers and toes as much as whether it has a more fully developed brain stem and thalamus. When you're talking about the prospect of this little being suffering or potentially suffering, anything that could happen to it, and therefore having interests that can be, you know, destroyed by a decision someone makes and all of that, I'm not saying this completely exhausts any applicable people. I want to know. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org you./n
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+Welcome to the waking up podcast. This is Sam Harris. Many things to COVID or in today's housekeeping. You might not want to skip this one. I think there'll be something of relevance in here for most of you. First, the name of the podcast is changing. The truth is, Waking Up was always the wrong name for this podcast. As most of you know, I have a book by that title. I now have a meditation app, which is a direct descendant of that book, dealing with all of the material I cover in it in greater depth. So there's now a fair amount of confusion about what my app is and how it relates to the podcast. So in order to protect the app and to put the podcast on truer footing, come some week in January, this podcast will be retitled Making Sense. So it will be the Making Sense podcast or Making Sense with Sam Harris. And I think you'll agree that name actually makes more sense than Waking Up, given all the topics I touch here. So there's nothing for you to do. It will appear on the same RSS feed, everyone's membership on my site, and then my app will be as it is. All the old episodes of the podcast will still be available, at least for now. I don't think anything's going to change there, but I'm not quite sure what we're going to do with the archive. But all those episodes will still be under the same name, waking up in the same feed. But just the new episode I release at some point in January will change over anyway, just a change of name, logo, and indeed font. Okay, some new experiments and conversation events to announce presale tickets for Boston, DC and New York are now available to subscribers. If you are a subscriber, you have already heard about that, presumably by email, and tickets remain for Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago. You can find all that information@samharris.org. Events and more dates will be hitting the calendar soon. We've been trying to figure out how to alleviate some of the lingering pain left by the disillusion of Pangburn philosophy. So what we're doing here is that we're offering tickets to those of you who have unrefunded tickets for the Day of Reflection conference in New York that got canceled in November. If you are one of those unlucky ticket holders, please email us at info@samharris.org and we will give you tickets to my upcoming show at the Beacon Theater in New York on March 1. So, again, if you are holding unrefunded tickets for the Pangburn event the Day of Reflection conference, please forward those confirmation emails to Info@samharris.org and do this by January 15. Because on January 16, the remaining seats will be released to the general public. So this is time sensitive. Now, I know this doesn't solve for all of you. I know many of you were traveling to New York for that conference. In fact, some of you traveled only to find out that it was canceled. Needless to say, I feel terrible about this, but unfortunately, I can't make substitutions like this at other shows. This sort of thing is actually hard to work out with Live Nation holding back hundreds of seats for one of their events. I'm very happy to do it, but unfortunately, I can't do it for other shows on other dates. It just introduces too much chaos into planning this tour. So this is at least something I can do in an attempt to clean up Pangburn's mess, however imperfectly. Again. The event is at the Beacon Theater in New York on March 1. And for those of you in Auckland who were left holding tickets for that event that Pangburn canceled and were not refunded, please get in touch when I announce events closer to you. I'm not sure I'm coming to New Zealand next year, but I'm almost certainly coming to Australia, probably in the middle of the year. Anyway, stay in touch. Stay on my newsletter, and if I come anywhere near you, needless to say, I'll be happy to give you tickets to anything I do down there. Okay, patreon. As many of you probably know, I deleted my Patreon account, and I issued a brief statement, which those of you who are on my list received. I'll just read that here, so we're on the same page. I have a little more to say. It's very brief. This is what I posted. Dear Patreon supporters, as many of you know, the crowdfunding site Patreon has banned several prominent content creators from its platform. While the company insists that each was in violation of its terms of service, these recent expulsions seem more readily explained by political bias. Although I don't share the politics of the band members, I consider it no longer tenable to expose any part of my podcast funding to the whims of Patreon's quote, trust and Safety Committee. I will be deleting my Patreon account tomorrow. If you want to continue sponsoring my work, I encourage you to open a subscription@samharris.org subscribe. As always, I remain deeply grateful for your support. Wishing you all very Happy New Year. Okay, so this has got a far larger response online than I was expecting. Most of it extremely supportive of me and some quite critical. Truth is, both the positive and the negative responses were somewhat unfair. What I did here is not quite as self [unk]less an act, as many people imagine, but nor was I signaling my support for the alt right. So let me explain my thinking a little more here. Patreon published their own response in the wake of my leaving, which further muddy the waters here. So this is what happened. A few people were deplatformed, as I said, and the case that really caught my attention, and which really seemed to bother many of you, was the case of Karl Benjamin, otherwise known as Sargon of Akad, a prominent YouTuber. He apparently had his account deleted and there was no process of appeal offered to him. He just got deleted and was told there was no recourse. And I'm not very familiar with Benjamin and nothing I say here should be construed as a defense of anything he may have said or done online about which I'm unaware. But when I saw so many of you complaining about this, I reached out to Patreon CEO, Jack Conti, and I asked him what went into this decision, and he told me that they have a trust and safety team that evaluates these things exhaustively. And so I said, well, can you provide links to the examples of the speech that sealed Benjamin's fate with the team? And he did that. He sent me the transcript of what he said and links to the audio on YouTube, and the transcript was fairly eye opening. He was using the N word with apparent abandon and using other slurs. But then I clicked through to the offending audio and honestly, it took me about 45 seconds to determine that the context really mattered here. What was happening was Benjamin was being attacked by white supremacists in an online chat and he was castigating them in terms that he thought they would find offensive. And while I don't support his tactics here, none of it sounded good. And obviously it could be used against him maliciously. The truth is, there was simply no indication that he would use these words in other contexts to express his own bigotry. He was also appearing on someone else's channel, right? So therefore, this forum wasn't even funded by his own Patreon page. So it's very hard to see how he was in violation of their terms of service. And the fact that it took me less than a minute to understand these things while Patreon claims to have done this exhaustive review, made me worry about the degree to which political bias is clouding the company's judgment. So, as I thought was clear in my initial email, this really wasn't a pure case of me communicating my solidarity with Benjamin or anyone else. It was, in part that certainly, from what I can tell, what was done to him was deeply unfair. But honestly, I was also motivated by my own self interest here. As I said, I can't allow any significant part of my podcast funding to exist at the pleasure of a bunch of millennials who can't figure out which way is up when someone utters a taboo string of syllables. And given that I frequently touch controversial topics, and I'm making a considerable effort to create a space where I can do that, it just seems prudent for me to secure 100% of my funding through my own website. So, anyway, that's not adding much to my original statement, but those are the facts. And as many of you intuit, this does come at some significant economic cost. There's certainly no guarantee that all of the 9000 people who are supporting me on Patreon are going to make the jump to my own site. Certainly not all of them have made the jump thus far. To those of you who have, I'm very grateful. Obviously, to those of you who supported me all this time on Patreon, I remain extremely grateful. Nobody's status with respect to their account changes. If you ever supported me on Patreon, you have access to my site. Most of you have lifetime access to the waking up course because you got grandfathered in before launch, so nothing changes there. But needless to say, if you still want to support the show, I encourage you to do that through my website. Okay, so much housekeeping. There's a special reddit AMA just on the topic of meditation on Friday the 21st, I believe, a day after this podcast drops. Otherwise it'll be archived there. So you can see that. You can go to the meditation subreddit to see that. A few more words about the Waking Up course. Again, if you're finding the course valuable, you can give it as a gift for the holidays. And it is especially good to give as a gift now because the price is changing in January, and all of you who have subscribed or given gifts at the 799 introductory price will be grandfathered in at that price for as long as your subscribers. But the price is nearly doubling on February 1 to 1499 a month. And I would also say that if you if you do the first 50 day introductory course right, the first 50 meditations and you do them in some reasonable time frame, like the first 90 days, and you don't get value from that and you want a refund, well, then we will be happy to refund you. So if that describes your experience on the app, please reach out at info@wakingup.com. What else here? I think that's it. If I forgot anything, I will tell you next time. And now for today's podcast. Today I am speaking with Peter Atia. This is one of those episodes where someone is interviewing me for another podcast, but I thought the conversation was valuable enough to broadcast on my show as well. Peter is a physician who focuses on longevity. Peter earned his medical degree from Stanford and he holds a degree in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics as well. He trained for five years at Johns Hopkins Hospital in General surgery, and he also spent two years at the NIH training in surgical oncology at the National Cancer Institute. And he's really one of the most interesting doctors I've met. You should definitely listen to his podcast, The Drive, where he goes very deep into conversations on longevity and he has a lot to say about nutrition and exercise physiology and sleep and cardiovascular health. He did a great interview on Rogan's podcast, where I learned that when he was 30 years old, he did not know how to swim and went from learning how to swim to being, if I recall correctly, the first person ever to swim from was it the Big Island to Maui and back again, something insane. And he's done many swims of that sort. Anyway, that gives you some indication of what kind of guy he is. But here he's talking to me about meditation mostly and interviewing me for his podcast. Again, his podcast is called The Drive and I highly recommend it. So we talk about various types of meditation. We talk about the difference between pain and suffering, the difference between joy and well being. We talk about the half life of negative emotions, the nature of thinking and dreaming, the power of culture to shape our minds, the power of language. Talked about various drug experiences, MDMA in particular, the psychological prospect of loving one's enemies, the phenomenon of moral luck. We get into the details around the practice of Vipassana and Zogchen and the differences there. We touch on the ethics of line and other topics. Anyway, I enjoyed the conversation. And now I bring you Peter Tia. Well, Sam, thanks so much for making time today. Yeah, I'm coming to someone else's studio to record. Yeah, well, you get in the game long enough, this is the way it happens. Well, I really appreciate it. There's so much I want to talk about today, but I also want to be thoughtful about pulling out threads that I think are most valuable to people I take care of. In many ways, that's sort of an undercurrent of what I like to talk about on podcasts is things that I can then share with my patients and things like that. I don't know if you remember this, but almost a year ago I called you or I emailed you and said, hey man, do you have time to talk? And you said yeah. And it was like actually, I know when it was. It was right after Christmas. It was like the day after Christmas, it was the 26 December. And I said I want to talk with you about mindfulness meditation. And you said Great, and we hopped on a call. Do you remember this discussion? Yeah, I think I remember the one you're referencing. So I had had a very profound experience and prior to that I had been somewhat familiar, I think would be the most generous way of saying it, but somewhat familiar with meditation, primarily focusing on concentration based meditations, like mantra based practice. But I just come back from basically a rehab facility where you were sort of out in the middle of nowhere. You had no electronics, you weren't even allowed to have books or anything like that. And you were really sort of stripped down into, I guess, what could only be viewed as sort of your most fundamental basic elements of self. And I had an epiphany about ten days into that, which was, I realized at the time what must be the first moment in my life that I was present. And it's weird to be almost 45 at the time and to think, wow, here I am, ten days of having every stimulus removed from my life, plus going through this very rigorous sort of therapeutic stuff. And I remember exactly where I was sitting. I was sitting in the common room of this place at the edge of a couch, and in a moment, the only thing that mattered was exactly what I was perceiving around me. So the light coming in through the window and the way in which it made the room sort of light up the faint scent of something that was being cooked in the kitchen a few yards away or whatever. And I don't know why, I just felt like, wow, this is the first time I actually really think I'm not thinking about something that has happened or worrying about something that is going to happen. And the other thing that was odd that entire time I was there was it was they allowed us to exercise, which was a big deal. I was really pleased that I was still permitted to exercise, but you couldn't have music, you didn't have a phone or anything. So it was also the first time in my life I exercised, only being able to listen to the sound of my breath. Yeah. So every morning I would run in the woods and you just heard the sound of the wind blowing by you and you heard your breath. And when I was doing push ups or whatever, it's the same sort of thing. And of course, I'd already read so much of your work, but the reason I wanted to speak with you that day is I wanted to understand, hey, am I getting a glimpse of what one might get if they meditate, if they move to a mindfulness based practice? And what you said was, well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is I've got this app that's going to be coming out soon and it's going to help you with this. The bad news is it's only in beta yet, but you can start right away. There's only you know, I think that the time there were maybe a dozen meditations, and the very bad news is going to take years for me to produce this thing. I'm completely incompetent. No, but come on, the thing actually is out now, right? Yeah. It was a little longer than you wanted. And I very quickly put as many of my patients who were interested on the Beta version, you guys were so gracious and let all of my folks on this thing. And in many ways, I view that as one of the most important transitions of my life. I think of life is a handful of direction changes that some of them, that you look back at the past and say, wow, that was sort of a meaningful insight that came to me. So you've talked about this idea of noticing what is arising versus not noticing at all. Can you elaborate on this? Yeah, so I guess I should define mindfulness, which is really the target state that one is trying to cultivate in. At least this probably what's the most popular type of meditation? Now, as you alluded to, there are different types. There are two basic types of meditation where the distinction is between being lost in thought and being clearly aware of whatever the object of meditation is. So that's true for all types of meditation. Thought really is the obstacle one is overcoming when one is learning to meditate, because our default mode is to just be lost in thought. We're telling ourselves a story all day long and we're not aware of it. So once one begins to meditate, one is trying to pay attention to something. And this is where the two different types diverge. The first that you alluded to, like a mantra based or a concentration based object of focus, is the attempt to pay attention to one thing to the exclusion of everything else. You want your attention to be absorbed in that object. And in many of those practices the explicit goal is to do that so well that thoughts no longer arise. Right. So you're really trying to get rid of thought in some basic sense. The arising of thought in that context is a sign that you're not meditating hard enough or one pointedly enough. Those types of practices can produce extraordinarily positive states of mind that you can feel bliss and rapture and you can actually use as an object of meditation specific states of mind, like lovingkindness, which is called meta in the Buddhist tradition, or sympathetic joy or compassion or equanimity. You can cultivate specific attitudes which if you can focus on them to the exclusion of anything else, you're inhabiting that state to a degree that most people would find unrecognizable. But the second type of meditation, which is the type I have spent much more time doing and is almost universally considered the more fundamental or the deeper practice, is often described as mindfulness because that's the state you're using in the Buddhist tradition to cultivate it. Mindfulness comes from a practice called papasana, which is insight meditation. And there you're not trying to selectively notice one thing or another, you are trying to break the spell of being distracted by thought. So you're trying to be aware of everything without perceiving things through this discursivity or this conceptual lens in each moment. But your attention can be much more choiceless. You can just notice whatever. In fact, you notice you're noticing things all the time, sounds and sensations and moods and thoughts, but you're not noticing them clearly because you are thinking every moment of the day. Mindfulness begins for most people as a training on one object, like the breath. But very quickly it becomes something that you apply to the full range of your experience and what's nice about it, apart from all the benefits of doing it and all the things that can be realized by doing it, this type of meditation is clearly coincident with any experience you can have. There's nothing that is excluded in principle from the meditation. You can be working out or watching a movie or there's no thing that in principle does not admit of mindfulness. And that's not true of other types of practice. Yeah, just sharing one example, because the other thing that I remember you said at the time, I said, Sam, I want to really shift this practice and sort of I want to figure out a way to experience that more and more. And you actually said, look, there are a bunch of apps that are already out there that are all pretty good. I mean, obviously you're producing yours because you think it's going to offer something additional, and I'll just make my plug for it here. I've used every one of the apps out there, and I do find yours the best. But I also realize that there's no one thing that's the best. It's the way you explain things just resonates with me. And it might not resonate with the next person, but the other app that I really liked that you recommended was 10% Happier, which is Dan Harris's app. No relation, of course. And even within Dan's app, there are many teachers, but there are a couple that I really like. Jeff Warren and Joseph. Joseph Goldstein. Joseph Goldstein. Yeah. And Jeff Warren has, I believe, a series of walking meditations that are he refers to as sort of informal meditations. And I remember the first time I did this, maybe it wasn't the first time, but it might have been the second time. It was pretty early. I realized for the first time that when you walk, if you're paying attention to it, you can feel the wind going past your finger. So if you're walking with your hands in a position such that your thumbs are facing forward and your arms are swinging lightly in a normal gait, you can actually feel the air moving past the leading edge of your hand. I remember thinking, how have I been walking for 45 years? And I've never once felt this sensation. And now when I pay attention to it, it's so noticeable. I don't know how it hasn't been distracting me for the last 45 years. Yeah, and one might wonder why one would want to notice such a thing. But what you discover when you begin practicing meditation, especially intensively on retreat, is that there's no such thing as a boring object of attention. What boredom is is simply a lack of attention. We get into these situations where we are convinced that we are bored because we haven't found something compelling enough in our experience to capture our attention. But our attention is so blunt and instrument normally that we need something that's thrilling or terrifying or something to fully get us to commit. But what you discover when you learn to meditate is that what pleases us most in those moments when we are fully captured by experience is the state of complete attention to the present. And if you can muster that on your own, if you can actually guide attention irrespective of the object you're attending to, then anything, any arbitrary object, the feeling of wind on your hand as you walk can be an exquisitely pleasurable thing to notice. This is why, in that first type of meditation practice, concentration practice, it doesn't matter what you pay attention to, you can pick an arbitrary object. It can be a random sound, it can be a mantra. It doesn't matter what the mantra is. It can be a candle flame, it can be a color on a piece of paper. It can be a random sound in the environment. It can be the sensation of a fly walking across the back of your hand. Right? So anything that you can pay attention to, to the exclusion of anything else, can suddenly disclose what it's like to have a very concentrated mind. And concentration is intrinsically pleasurable. And this is why meditation can have the character of a kind of drug experience. It can have a superficial character. You can get kind of addicted to the changes in state you experience in meditation, and you can be misled by these experiences. You can think that it's about these changes rather than something more fundamental, because anything you experience by way of newfound pleasure that is based on having a very concentrated mind, you will lose because it's an impermanent state of your physiology and attention. And it's not the deepest practice, but yeah, it's it's amazing that concentration itself, regardless of the object, is incredibly pleasant. Sort of going back to the why which you've started to allude to and again, I can't remember if I'm I know you've said this. I think many have said this, so I think many have come to this observation, which is virtually all negatively valenced emotions are not rooted in the present. And that sort of becomes the corollary of being present. Therefore, being able to concentrate on something in the moment can be quite pleasurable. And I guess that was sort of what I recognized that first moment I experienced it, which was, wow, when you're fully, fully engaged in or enveloped within this present sensation, what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're feeling, it becomes very difficult to be anxious or depressed or angry or any of these other things. And for me, that was the most interesting part of this, which was taking a very big step back. I'm trying to devote my life to figuring out this problem of how to live longer. But if you ask me how did I think about that problem five years ago versus how do I think about it today, there have been two fundamentally significant differences. There are two things today that occupy much more of my energy with respect to longevity than they did four or five years ago. And the first of those two is this notion of being happy, which, again, I think five years ago, I would have dismissed that as sort of an afterthought. Like, it is what it is, and as long as all those other things happen, you'll be happy. If you can figure out how to not die and how to be stronger and have better cognitive powers, you'll be happy as a result of that. But of course, that seems to be not the case. The second, though, we're not going to get into it, is a much greater appreciation for the type of physical body that is necessary to age well and how radically that differs from necessarily the physical body that we want to perform well when we're in our 30s or 40s or even our 50s. But going back to the former, which to me is in many ways your work and the work of people like you has had such a great influence on me. Is this realization like, none of this stuff matters if you're miserable. It doesn't matter if you can live to 100. It doesn't matter if you can delay the onset of heart disease and stroke and cancer and Alzheimer's disease. If you're too miserable to appreciate it, or if you're constantly in some sort of tormented state, you might as well be dead. That sounds extreme, but that's really how I started to feel about this. Yeah. And I think we also have inaccurate associations with terms like happiness, and we haven't distinguished terms that are different, like pain and suffering. There's nothing about meditation that gets rid of physical pain. Pain is just something that you're going to experience, and you can actually experience surprising degrees of pain while meditating. If you just resolve not to move your body. It doesn't matter how comfortable your chair is, eventually pain is going to arise, and you have a guided meditation that takes us through that exercise that is I feel like, within two minutes it's unbearable. There are people who sit for hours and hours and 12 hours. It's unbelievable. It's excruciating. And yet when you get up, you haven't hurt yourself. It's not synonymous with injury. Right now, obviously there are ways you could injure yourself if you don't move, but there can be a strange magnification of pain if you resolve to sit still for a very long time. But one thing you discover there, which is useful to discover, is that there is a difference between pain and suffering. You can feel intensely negative sensory experience, and you can feel intensely negative emotions. Even you can feel anger and depression and sadness. And if you can be content to simply be aware of those sensations or those moods or emotions, if you can recognize. That consciousness is the prior condition in which all of those things are appearing, and you are simply that which is aware of these changing phenomenon. If you can become interested in the character of a mood like sadness or a pain in the knee, it's actually possible to experience these states with total equanimity. And one of the features is, as you said, not being focused at all by thought on the past or the future. So one thing with physical pain we all experience is the sense that some sensation is intolerable. But there's this paradox, because in that moment you've already tolerated it, right? It's fully arrived. You've really experienced the patient to follow. You're worried about the future, you're worried about how long this is going to go on. And it's certainly good to practice finding a place of equanimity with pain. I'm not saying obviously there are pains that are conceivable that even the best meditator might find it difficult to find equanimity with. But there really is an immense amount of growth one can have in this area where you can notice this difference between reacting to pain, contracting around it, resisting it, trying to make it go away, wishing it away, worrying about how long it'll be there. And all of this happens, this cascade. It happens so quickly that you don't even notice the mechanics of it. It's just you, right? It's just you suffering. But the moment you can pick apart the mechanics of it because you can pay attention to what is arising, the feeling of resistance, the fear about what's going to happen in the next moment and keep dropping back into a position of merely witnessing all of these things arise and pass away. There are experiences I've had, and many have had in meditation, where an excruciating sensation becomes so intense that you actually don't know whether or not you're experiencing agony or ecstasy. The valence of the intense mental state, it just gets kind of wiped out. It's just sheer intensity. And there is a fundamental cancellation of suffering in those moments. And this goes back to what we were just saying about the pleasures of concentration. Nothing concentrates your mind more easily than pain, right? If you're willing, if you can get past your fear and just go into it, you can experience a lot of mental pleasure. I don't think I've ever met somebody who claimed to be a masochist, but I can imagine that if masochism is possible, there's some reason why this would be a reason why this would be the case. That there is. I can only imagine they're experiencing intense concentration in various states that most people would find physically intolerable. But back to the idea of happiness and other states that are commonly associated with it, I think we all have this sense that happiness is a matter of being joyful all the time. This is a very common idea. It's sort of the misconception that many of us think that, well, that's not desirable because if I were joyful every minute of every day, I wouldn't have the drive to do X, Y and Z or I wouldn't be quote unquote, real in some way. Or if it is a matter of securing some durable source of joy, then it can't absorb any of the other things in life for which joy would be inappropriate. People die and there are ups and downs in life. And I don't talk about or think about happiness very much. I think about well being and flourishing more. And those concepts for me can embrace all of the facilities and of life where if you experience some serious loss in your life, there's a resiliency and a way of embracing that which brings out the wisest and most compassionate and most expansive parts of yourself. That is another component of, wellbeing, the narrow conception of happiness that most of us have by default is something that we are always trying to defend and shore up against all of the other things in life that are threatening to undermine it. And the one obvious point is that it's not a safe play. It is perpetually under threat and any joy you can feel by virtue of its having arisen based on some causes and conditions is going to pass away. You just can't keep any emotion going for days or even hours at a time. And one thing you discover when you learn to meditate is that negative emotion in particular has a very short halflife. Many of us imagine that we can stay angry or sad for some people would imagine days. I think almost everyone thinks hours at a time. It's actually impossible if you are no longer lost in thought about all the reasons why you should be angry or sad. So this was one of the earlier I can't remember if this was one of the lessons in your meditation app early on or it was just a discussion you and I had, but I got to put it to the test shortly after I was in New York. And obviously in New York, everything's a hustle, right? You're running around, people are rude, you're going to get bumped into. And one of my pet peeves in New York is when you see somebody walking towards you and they're for a moment lost in whatever they're doing, they're usually down looking at their phone or something like that. I always think it's a reasonable courtesy to just not walk into them. Even if they're in your line of sight, you still sort of go out of your way to not bump into them. But for whatever reason, there's just a subset of people who love that opportunity to almost knock you off your feet. So sure enough, one day I am about to turn a corner and this guy is walking and it was clear that he could see me and I had looked down. So my bad. But this guy plows right into me. And I had just had either had this discussion with you or just heard this lesson about how long can you actually stay angry? And so this happens. And I immediately sort of observed this emotion, this rise of anger in me, right, which was like the desire to turn around and walk up to the guy and say something. Serves no purpose, of course, but instead I decided, well, just watch this. Watch this emotion. How long does it last? You know, I remember I was walking somewhere that I was going to be in ten minutes, and I was like, do you think this will last ten more minutes? Could you be angry for the next ten minutes if you just observe this feeling? And the answer was no. I mean, it was gone. Actually, I felt like within seconds. And to me, that was like a really big AHA moment, especially for someone like me, who's so easily prone to anger, to think that by simply being observant of that emotional state, I could have some control over it, which has always felt like the opposite, right? It's always felt like that emotional state has control over me, right? And it does. The important point to never forget is that it has complete control over you as long as you're identified with the next angry thought that's arising in consciousness. If you have no perspective on the fact that you are thinking, right, well, then you simply become that thought for the period that it's captivating and you are pushed in whatever direction it's aimed, right? So if it is getting you to say the angry thing or physically assault the person, you need some level of metacognition in order to pull the brakes. Otherwise, it's exactly like being asleep and dreaming and not knowing that you're dreaming. This happens to us, all of us, every night we get into bed and then suddenly a movie starts playing that we are totally identified with. We're one of the characters in it, and we're completely unaware of this change. And the most surprising thing about dreams is that we're not surprised when they arise, right? We didn't have the expectation that we would stay in our beds. Apparently. We're not surprised that the laws of physics are being violated for our amusement. And we're suddenly in these situations where we are fully captive to a completely illusory, seemingly sensory experience. But all of this is some kind of hallucination, and identification with thought in the waking state has that character. To some degrees, it's thought to be totally normal psychologically, right, because it is our default state. But once you learn the alternative, which is to be mindful, you then have a very different sense of what optimal mental health would be. When I find myself lost in thought and just suddenly angry or anxious or frustrated or whatever it is, and I wake up from that experience, it is a little bit like waking up from a dream or a hallucination or it's hard to shake the sense that it's pathological. I was stuck in something about which I had no awareness. Right. And it was forcing me to say and do and think and feel things that were given my now current awareness were completely unnecessary. You see, to me what's so interesting about this. David Foster Wallace in his commencement speech in 2005 at Kenyan College the this is water, which is one of my favorite things to listen to. I burned a copy off YouTube, and now it sits on my phone and I try to listen to it at least once a month, if not more. And even though I almost know it off by heart, it doesn't matter. Like, I still get some benefit every time I hear it. And when he talks about this, he speaks specifically about the problem with this, is that it is our default. And that's the part that makes this so challenging. So do we have evidence of other species? Like, are we the only ones that are blessed slash cursed with this ability for rumination and constant thought? I mean, do we do we have any evidence that a dog is spending any percentage of his or her time thinking about what happened the day before or the next meal? Where do we, as humans stack up in this space? Well, it's important to acknowledge that we're blessed and cursed by this because this capacity for linguistic, abstract, complex thought is what has given us everything that is recognizably human. It has given us culture, it has given us civilization. It's allowed us to place all of the learning of our ancestors in a strata that is accessible to all of us and to every present generation so that we don't have to relearn everything from the ground up. I mean, just imagine what the alternative would be if there was no acquisition, progress in civilization. Yeah. And for the longest time, that was true of humanity as well. If you go back 50,000 years and then you decide to go back 60,000 years, the differences are impressively. Nonexistent in terms of the toolkit anyone was working with. So that's interesting. Sam, if we go back to I know there's some debate about when language was really codified, but to pick a point in time when we're pretty sure there was no language we could, say, 200,000 years ago, right? I think most neuroscientists would agree. No language 200,000 years ago. Was the arrival of language the arrival of this capacity, or where did this show up? Yeah, I think language is the main variable there. It's the main variable with respect to being able to abstract, being able to represent anything that's not currently present or not currently happening. It's the basis for communicating anything of substance to anyone else and storing a kind of cultural memory of anything, whether it's just by virtue of an oral tradition or once writing came along. So language is necessary for all that just to be able to articulate the concept of time, the concept of a past where the causes of the present are stored and a future which is yet to arrive that needs to be planned for or that can be better or worse. It's something that I think other species probably have in a very primitive form that is not associated with conscious thought. I think that a dog, for instance, learns various associations with stimuli. Right. There are pavlovian responses that these animals can experience. Yeah. And they recognize people, obviously. They recognize people arguably better than any other species other than the human, so they can have real relationships, and there's no question they have emotions and they have preferences and all of that. But in terms of forming a notion of the future or a notion of the way in which the world might be different, it's one thing to recognize your friend in the case of a dog, recognize your owner and prefer that person to somebody else. It's another thing to have any concept of having had a past with that person. Now, the fact that you recognize them indicates a past, right? But all of that could be preconscious to a dog. There's just this kind of binary difference between recognition and not. So let's use an even more obvious example, and I'll tell you where I'm going with this, because then I want to understand this, which is, as I observe my three children, there is a distinction in what I see in the younger ones that they seem to always be present. Which isn't to say that they don't get upset. I mean, you only have to look at a toddler for 10 seconds to watch that. They can get upset, but I doubt that they're upset about anything other than what they're experiencing in the moment. Right. They're hungry, their diapers dirty, whatever. They fell, they hurt themselves, something like that. But if you look at a teenager or a ten year old, a preteen, they are now starting to suffer from this quote unquote disease of too much thinking, too much distraction. So somewhere from the moment you're born until let's just make it easy and say until you're 13, you acquire this capacity. But yet an infant, like the dog, recognizes the parent. There is some sense of a history with an individual. Yeah. Again, I don't know even what the relevance is of this, other than to say the inability to recognize how distracted we are seems to be one of the greatest drivers of misery. There are three quotes I love, and I love them because they're basically all saying the same thing across 1700 years. So in the first century, Seneca said, we suffer more in imagination than in reality. In the 16th century, Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. I have that on a T shirt that I love to remind myself. And then, of course, in the 17th century, Pascal said, distraction is the only thing that consoles us from miseries, yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries. Descartes says something very similar. I mean, this is something that's been acknowledged for so long, and yet it's so ingrained in us that it just strikes me as like, is there some evolutionary basis for this, or is it just that evolution wasn't even trying to optimize for this equanimity? And instead the benefits, as you've pointed out, of being able to do these things, the progress we've been able to make as a society, our ability to leapfrog ahead of other species has more than made up for this difficulty. Or is it simply that, look, evolution wouldn't outselect this because it's not interfering with your reproductive fitness. Yeah, I just don't understand why we suffer so much, I guess, is my question. The crucial point there is that evolution doesn't care about your well being. As long as you reproduce, what does it care? Yeah. And so if there's some path by which we survive and reproduce in a state of misery, evolution is perfectly happy with that path. If that were a more reliable algorithm for reproduction and survival, then we would be getting more and more miserable. We want to slip the logic of evolution because it simply doesn't care about us. Right. And virtually everything we want as a species now, at some level is a matter of breaking the connection to many of our evolved tendencies. And we have a very strong evolutionary capacity for tribal violence. Right, but tribal violence is obviously something we want to outgrow as quickly as possible. And there are many other examples of this, I think that language is you can see it when you're raising your kids, when you have a two and a half year old and a three year old, where they're talking to you, but then they're talking to themselves as though they're talking to you. Speech becomes something where you're narrating your experience as though you're talking to a parent. And this seems to get internalized, so that the conversation you know enough to keep your mouth shut, but you're really talking to someone who isn't there all the time. I think that's probably the origin of it for every individual. That language is so useful, it's so essential to everything we do, that we just have this superfluous level of discursivity that, again, from a survival advantage, that there's no reason to ever turn it off. But from a well being point of view, the character of it is almost universally unpleasant most of the time for most people. There are some people who are very lucky, and they have an intrinsic level of happiness that is just kind of off the charts, where they're basically happy all the time. They recover very, very quickly from disappointments and losses, and they just don't really see a problem. And many of these people are not very reflective about the human condition, right. They're not living necessarily examined lives because there's not much of a reason to, but they get up in the morning and they're just stoked to be alive. And if you get enough of the conditions for ordinary levels of happiness together and you're lucky enough to be able to maintain them fairly effortlessly, right? You're wealthy and you're healthy and you're surrounded by happy, creative people who want the best for you and you're just by dint of good luck, people close to you haven't died and you haven't suffered any collision with reality then, yeah, you can be conventionally, very happy and still be talking to yourself all the time and not notice it. But there's significant limitation even to that when you do develop this more refined way of noticing what it's like to be you, which is what we're calling meditation, it's not that learning this, having insight into the mechanics of your own suffering and the mediocrity of kind of ordinary transient states of pleasure. It's not that that is at bottom incompatible with living an ordinary fulfilled pleasureseeking life. I mean, you can enjoy dinner just as much having learned to meditate as anyone who's gluttonously attached to sensory experience without any kind of metacognition about what's going on. But the difference comes in how you respond to problems that arise. It's actually both, right? I mean, I think that mindfulness clearly makes it easier to endure unpleasant things. So I was late to come over here today because to get to your place, which should have been an hour, took 2 hours and that is normally something that would drive me bat shit crazy just by way of process. Like why is it so inefficient? Why are there so many cars on the road? Blah, blah. Like I would get into a who is me narrative about this. Which is of course ironic because like, why am I more special than every other car on this road, right? Like, everyone is equally in the same situation of it's taking 2 hours to get somewhere that it should take 1 hour. And actually I have used traffic because when you live in Southern California and split your time in New York, you get plenty of exposure to traffic. I've actually used this as an amazing tool for mindfulness and I no longer let it really get to me. Instead, I just sort of observe, oh look, you're feeling a little bit self important today. Like you're feeling like your time is more valuable than everybody else's time. Let's examine that. Is that really true? Not really. Okay. What is happening in this exact moment? The sun is shining this way or all these other things. So in many ways, if nothing else, it's simply a hack to allow me to be less miserable. Yeah. Yeah. But on the flip side, I actually do think there is a way to enjoy certain moments more and and I've certainly noticed this the most with my kids. I think that our middle son, who's four, like a four year old boy, is just going to be more prone to chewing up the air in the room when it comes to doing bad stuff. And I find that and to be clear, they're not all days that I can do this. There are some days when he's acting crazy that it just drives me nuts. But more often than not, I'm sort of able to actually reflect on it pleasantly and think about what's happening in this moment. Right, okay. He's yelling, he's screaming, he's throwing a temper tantrum, he's hit his brother, he's done this, he's done that. But in this moment, is there anything that's really that bad about any of these things? I mean, like, it's not like he's going to be doing this when he goes to college. What am I really worried about here? Yeah. And in fact, I can turn that into a positive thing, which is one day he will be in college and he won't be a cute little four year old who loves me so much. Maybe you'll miss this moment. Yeah, I'll miss this moment. I have found that again, I use the word hack because it's such an inelegant way to describe it, but it's basically a tool to make me a little bit more aware of where I am in a given moment and whether that produces happiness or not. I mean, I sort of agree with you. The semantics of happiness are too cumbersome for me to explain. People have talked about the happiness is simply the difference between reality and expectation. That's a bit vague for me. I'm not smart enough to fully understand what that means, though I understand the concept. But clearly there's some component of expecting the world to be a certain way and it not being that way producing an emotional state or a valence that is negative one way or the other. I think while as wonderful as mindfulness is to offset that, there is this moment at times of taking a bite of food and rather than thinking about the next bite or what you're going to eat later, like actually thinking or observing the sensations as they're occurring in that moment, kind of slowing things down in a way. Yeah. Because I don't know why I just tend to always live in a fast forward mode. That is my default is to be full fast forward. Well, it's most people's default. I would say it's everyone's default who's not being mindful because you're constantly, even when you're getting what you want, even when you're in the very act of gratifying a desire, you're still subtly inclining toward the next moment. You're not actually landing on each moment of experience with full attention. And paradoxically, you can discover that many of the things you think you want, you don't want all that much. If you pay attention to what it's actually like to gratify those desires, maybe with food. This is very clear. So you can be eating something, you can think, you want dessert, you can have a real sweet tooth. And if you pay very close attention to what it's like to eat that sweet thing, you're finally gorging on. More often than not, you discover it's just a little too sweet. There's something about it that is unpleasant, and your pleasure in that moment is predicated on your being able to take a drink of water in the next right. Like, if you have, you fight a candy bar or something. That's candy that's made for kids delivers this insight to me very clearly. It's like the moment I think I want something at the movies, whatever it is, Eminems or something that hasn't changed his formula for the last 40 years, and I'm eating it, and I begin to notice that I'm eating more of it as a way of just getting rid of getting rid of the sense in your palate. Yeah, the last moment of taste that is just too chemical laden, too sweet. And if I didn't have a drink of water, this would actually be an unpleasant experience. And it's not what it seems when you're not paying attention. And this is not to say that there's nothing that's truly pleasurable. There's all kinds of pleasure. And again, being able to really connect with the present moment delivers its own intrinsic pleasure. But your sense of what matters can definitely change the moment you begin to pay closer attention to what experience is actually like. I think it was in one of your lessons, but it might have been in a podcast where you talk about imagine you're playing a video game, and it's the same video game every time, and you always get killed by the same monster at the same part of the maze or whatever it is. And I think about that a lot every time I falter at predictably known, understood things that get under my skin, and it's very discouraging. Right. There are like a dozen things that I just know if they happen. One of them is there are certain types of questions that if I'm asked, really irk me. When people ask questions that are to which the answer is very complicated, but they ask through the lens of just give me the one word answer that just irks me. Like I don't know why. It just bugs the shit out of me. And I know that. And yet over and over again, I find myself getting upset when that happens. And I feel like the guy that you're describing, you're losing the boss fight at the same place every time, every single time. I know where the boogeyman is. I know what weapon he's going to use to kill me. And I just walk over there and out comes the machete and I'm dead, and then I'm back to the starting block again, and I'm one fewer lives in the game. Right, but you can recover faster each time you lose. Getting angry is not the measure of having lost. Obviously, you can aspire to a time where you never get angry again or you never get angry in certain circumstances again. But the real practice is to notice as early as possible what's happening and to let go of it. The difference between being angry for ten minutes and 10 seconds and 1 second, those factors of ten are enormous. Right. And I have the same thing going on where anger is something that I very frequently feel. And I also noticed that it totally contaminates the experience of people around me. So I have my wife and my daughters, and my anger for them is clearly toxic. And I have this commitment to letting go of it the moment I can let go of it. And again, it's not that anger is never warranted. The energy of anger can be useful. Someone's attacking you on the sidewalk and you're you're in a self defense situation. That's not the moment where I would say, get rid of all your anger as quickly as possible. Right. I mean, there's situations where you want to use that energy, but for the most part, you want to let go of it very quickly and then be in a position to decide what's what and whether or not it's appropriate to take some kind of confrontational path, whatever it is, by email or say the thing that would convey your displeasure or whatever. But now I have my wife and my daughters as a kind of feedback mechanism for me because they know my commitment. They know I can let go of anger on demand, and they know I want to, and they don't like my anger. Right. And they detect it in the subtlest way. So it's not even anger where a normal person would classically think he was angry. They don't have to wait till you raise your voice. They can see the mannerisms in the way you might move or the way your answers become shorter. Yeah. Even mild frustration gets scored as a kind of crazy level of anger. Right? So, like, if I, you know, if I say, wait a minute, I thought the plumber was coming today, that's like, you know, that, you know, that's a four alarm fire, right? So one of my daughters will say, OOH, daddy's getting angry. Right? And they'll say, that so early now. And it's fantastic because I just let go of it way earlier than I used to. But if you can't be mindful, you actually have no choice. You will be angry as long as you're angry. And the people around you who don't like it just have to figure out somehow to put up with you. It's not that there's no other hacks. There are many other hacks. And sometimes. It's important to have a hack that is more global than simply being relentlessly mindful of everything that's coming up for you. Like a different understanding of a situation can offer some kind of firmware update to the whole operating system, and then you just simply don't go there anymore. So, for instance, you're driving in traffic. There are many hacks for that, but one hack is just you discover that you've got 400 hours of podcasts you want to listen to and you're listening to a great one, and you're happy to be listening. And the fact that you're delayed an extra half hour or whatever is fine. And that's a totally useful hack. Right. It modulates your state. You're just discovering the silver lining to something that would otherwise be negative. I'll share with you another one because I agree with that completely. That's a great one. The other one that I've taken on in the past year that has had surprising efficacy is any customer service experience you have that is profoundly negative. And if you fly as much as I do, you're pretty much guaranteed one of those a week. My friend Jay Walker, who knows a lot about the aviation industry, said one out of six experiences with US aviation is a customer service failure. So anyone who flies would agree with that. So the next time, like the flight attendants rude to you or the TSA person is sweating you or being obnoxious or whatever, if you instead take a view of empathy, which is, God, this is a really hard job. I have the privilege of getting to be intellectually engaged and doing all of these things and boom, boom. But this is a really hard job. I mean, most of the people that they're encountering are on some level dissatisfied, showing up to their world happy. And so simply taking that posture completely changes the way you interact with that system. Yeah. And it's interesting because it doesn't even really require a huge mindfulness insight, but it's a condition you want to walk in the situation with. Right. You want to be able to walk in with that in your mind. It's a framing effect. Yeah. And it doesn't entail mindfulness at all. You could get the benefit of that new framing without ever having heard of mindfulness. So if you do get angry, you'll be as angry as you ever were. Right. So the different way of thinking about it yeah. The combination of these is powerful. Yeah. When I think about one of the most difficult things to there are two things in my life that I have learned that I think were very difficult and took a lot of time. The first was in the year 2000 when I was finishing medical school. I had a really bad back injury, and it's a long story, but basically for a year of my life, I was not able to move properly, and for three months I was not able to move at all. Wow. How did that happen? It's not clear how it happened, but what happened was a pretty bad outcome. And I ended up having surgery, but the surgeon operated on the wrong side. So it went from a very bad situation to a worse situation. And a whole series of cascading events led to it being what it was. I look back at that, as I've described as before, as the best, worst experience of my life. Because having been in so much pain for so long, I had to learn how to do everything from scratch. So I had to learn how to be able to brush my teeth without putting stress on my back, which most people wouldn't even think about. You wouldn't think that there's a right and a wrong way to brush your teeth. You wouldn't think that there's a right and a wrong way to get out of your bed, put your shoes on, or get out of your car. It turns out there is. But you can only learn it when you are in such a fragile state that you've lost every ounce of strength in your back. And because I experienced that for so long a year, it allowed me to make this transition, which I want to, of course, apply to meditation. The transition is going from being unconsciously incompetent to then being consciously incompetent to then consciously competent. And of course, the goal is to one day get to a point where you are unconsciously competent. I don't think I'm unconsciously competent at a single thing I do, including movement, but I'm now consciously competent at moving around and not hurting my back. But I couldn't have got there if I didn't have that feedback loop that allowed me to go through it. The other thing was learning how to swim as an adult. You throw an adult in the water who's never swim before. They are so incompetent, but they don't even really understand what it is. And so the first act of learning how to swim is learning to feel what's making you sink, figuring out what it is that is actually dropping you to the bottom of the pool. And then of course, you want to be able to correct that and with great effort over short periods of time, exercise some capacity to fix that. I would say those two experiences have been by far the most difficult, but they pale in comparison to mindfulness. Now, I don't know if that just makes me a hard case. The other thing I was thinking about when I was reflecting on this is having a back injury. You don't get a time you don't get a time out from it. You know, it's every minute of every day. You're immersed in that exposure, that stimulus and that feedback loop. Similarly, once I dedicated myself to swimming, I swam 4 hours a day. And I think maybe the issue is because I don't meditate for 4 hours a day. It's just going to take a lot longer to do it. And I know you and I have spoken about this, and and your belief is that something really happens when you go on a silent retreat. And I remember once asking you, I said, hey, Sam, I see this retreat. It's four days. Do you think I should go? And you actually said, no, I wouldn't go for a four day retreat. I'd wait until you can do ten or 14 days. I guess I would modify that slightly. I think a week to ten days is the shortest I can recommend without caveat. I think the first three days or so of a retreat are more or less the hardest for a retreat of any length. So if you do a three day retreat or a four day retreat, you're almost guaranteed to have a lot of restlessness and just resistance to the whole project, and you may not touch anything on the other side of that. You can just be kind of unhappy the whole time and then just relieved to be getting off retreat. Whereas if you have ten days, just seems like an eternity. Once you put yourself on retreat and you've just shut down your connection to everything, there's no talking, there's no writing, there's no reading. It's just you and your attention in each moment. Ten days seems like an eternity. As you move through those first few days of resistance at day three, you're still so far away from the day that you're going home that it's much more common to just surrender at that point and really get into it. Just decide that you'll just pick up your life as you left it when you get off retreat, and that for this period, there's just nothing worth thinking about. You just need to pay attention to whatever's appearing, your breath sounds, the movement of air on your hand as you walk. Your first experience in this was sort of comical, the way you describe it right when you were 16, I believe. Oh, no, that was my first experience of solitude. I guess it would have been a retreat, but I was on Outward Bound. And the Outward Bound, I assume they still have it. But back then they had something called the Solo, which was three. It was a 23 day period of camping and hiking and kind of outdoorsmanship. But maybe day 18 or so they put you in isolation for three full days where you would fast and do nothing. Right. So you couldn't go hiking and do anything that would distract you. And I think that the reason for that was not based on any meditative agenda that they had. It was just they don't want a bunch of not fully trained people wandering around the wilderness well fasted, so they just park you in someplace. We were by this lake at maybe 9000ft, and you just camp with a water bottle, and that's all you got? You just have your sleeping bag, your water bottle and you have a journal. Journal? Yeah. You can write in your journal. And I found the experience just intolerable it was just you were 16. Yeah, it was 16. So I opened my book waking up with this story, because it was the first moment in my life that I realized that I was on the wrong side of some understanding about the nature of my own mind and the possibility of finding a durable source of happiness in this life. I was alone in an absolutely beautiful spot and totally miserable based on the fact that I didn't have any of the usual distractions. And if you could have just swapped places with me and inhabited my consciousness. I was spending all my time fantasizing about the things I was going to do when I got off, when I got out of those goddamn mountains and got back to my life in the world and the friends I would see and the foods I would eat. And it was just a continuous advertisement for everything that I missed. It was like a meditation on loneliness and boredom and grief. Ultimately, it was just to be separated from everyone I cared about and every fun thing I could do and every tasty thing I could eat. It was just a source of perfect misery for me. So when I came off the solo and met all of the other people who had also been on their solos, I was astonished to discover that many of them had had profoundly happy experiences. Were you one of the youngest people on this road? Yeah, I was the youngest, I think. The cut off I don't know if this is still the case, but the cut off for Outward Bound was 16 and a half and I was just 16 and a half. So there were lots of people who were ten years older and so they were in different places in their lives and many of them just had a kind of breakthrough experience. It was just some of the best time they'd ever spent alive. And they were kind of radiantly happy because we had just done 18 or so days of brutal hiking, just 14 hours days of hiking with 60 pound packs. And we had this full ordeal of learning how to function in the backcountry. And then it all stops and you're just alone by this alpine lake. So many of them had come out of that feeling that they had touched something profound and I had no idea what they were talking about. It was like being told, I just got run over by a car and it was the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. I had come out of there having had a harrowing experience. So what happened when you went back home after that? Did you look back and reflect on that? Or does that basically just become a footnote into a broader story that really didn't factor into your ultimate search for call it enlightenment, call it what you want. It took a little time. It was probably a year and a half before I then had an experience with psychedelics that put all of this in perspective for me. And was your first experience with psilocybin or LSD? Strangely, I had taken psilocybin as a teenager before I had what really was the kind of breakthrough experience for me on MDMA when I was 18. Yeah. You wrote about that as well. Yeah. Yeah, that was that's. In waking up, I had taken psilocyb. I mean, I smoked marijuana and I had taken mushrooms a few times as a teenager, and they never signaled anything profound to me about the nature of the mind or they never indicated a path forward. Apart from just this sense that these drugs produced interesting experiences, I had no framing for what I experienced on these drugs. You experienced the altered state, but there was no altered trait, to borrow from the title of the same book. Yeah. And also just no sense that there could be altered traits. There was no project associated with changing your experience in that way. It was just kind of fun, I guess. Some of the experiences had also been unpleasant on psilocybin, but it's just these were drug experiences, and it was like getting drunk. If you get drunk, you don't come away from that experience thinking, I wonder if this indicates that it's possible to feel kind of natively, feel like, I've had six beers, and, you know, I can just be more that sort of person by some other method that has nothing to do with drinking beer all the time. Right. But with MDMA. My first experience on ecstasy, I had this epiphany that this is what consciousness was like when it was no longer encumbered by my self concern, by my ego centricity, by my and because you were 18. Was it so much about? Like I'm trying to reflect on what it was like to be an 18 year old boy, but I think, if I recall, you wrote about just sort of the empathy that you had for your friend because it was you and another friend. Right? Yeah. And was that the part that was so stunning to you, which was, oh, my God, I've spent the last 18 years sort of not thinking about it through somebody else's eyes? Or, what was it that you experienced, if you can recall, that at least showed you, or perhaps was the thin end of the wedge that said, there is now an altered state of consciousness that could exist outside of this state that I'm in that might be desirable. It was a recognition that what was changing for me while I was coming on to the drug was that I was losing my concern about myself. I'm talking to my best friend, somebody who I already love and am connected to and have positive feelings for. But what was happening is that I started to punch through to this level of connection with him that I had never felt before, despite the fact that we were great friends and it had a kind of structure to it or it was dissecting a structure within my mind that I had never had any cause to notice, which was my default state, was normally that if I'm talking to him, some amount of my attention is bound up in a concern about what he thinks about me. Right? So if I see some change in expression on his face based on what I just said, I'm reading into those changes some message about me, some message about how I'm doing. And there are many other features to this. I mean, there's also a sense of a kind of zerosum aspect to my own stature in the world and my feeling of well being in light of other people's success and happiness. And it's something you can discover in yourself. Imagine those times where you have a friend who has some massive success, right? You're struggling in your life to be as successful as you want to be. If you're like most people, you haven't arrived yet. And then you have a friend who's winning some version of the lottery. And when this is being communicated to you, you're asked to celebrate with them, essentially. And you can discover in yourself a kind of begrudging feeling, whether it's envy or there's a limitation on your capacity to experience what's called sympathetic joy in Buddhism for that person. And that's an ugly characteristic of the mind. Here's someone who you ostensibly really care about, this is someone you really love, this is someone who you think and their windfall did not come at your expense. Right? Exactly. And yet there's something in you that can't actually celebrate for them fully because you're so bound up with who you are and what you want for yourself and how you think they may think about you. And this horror show of self reference and this miserly spirit with respect to the circumstance you're in with everyone. So what happened in this first MDMA trip is that I just punched through all of that. All of that was just gone and there was no associated inebriation I mean, my experience wasn't just that's. The thing with MDMA that makes it sort of quite distinct and special from some of these other agents right. Is there is no sense of altered consciousness. Yeah, it can be kind of speedy and it also depends on whether you're getting if you're pure MDMA versus yeah, of course, when they cut it with Stimulants, it's a different story. But really pure MDMA doesn't seem to really alter your consciousness in any way the way that LSD would. It's not considered really a psychedelic. It doesn't have any of those visionary or hallucinatory. It's referred to more as an impactogen versus correct? Yeah. So having lost all that, I recognize that one just had how much I loved him and how that was synonymous with wanting him to be happy. And in some basic sense, his happiness would be my own. Right? So the capacity for envy would just completely went out the window. There's just no way to feel a zero sum contest with somebody who you love in that way. But then I recognized that if a stranger had walked into the room at that moment, literally the mailman shows up, I would have felt the same way about him. It was not contingent upon having had a history with this person. I was in a state where I wanted all beings to have their dreams realized. I wish nothing but happiness on every conscious system. Pause for a moment so you can explain the neurobiology of that. I've experienced it as well with MDMA, and I find it to be the most joyous state I've ever experienced to have such unlike you, I don't have the vocabulary to even describe what it feels like other than to just say you love everybody in obviously a very non sexual way. It's just male, female are all the same. It sort of becomes this you just want the best for everyone. What is it about the neurobiology or neurochemistry that can produce that state? And I'll tell you what the follow up question is going to be. Is there anything we can do outside of taking that drug to even get part of that? Well, unfortunately, I don't know the answer to the neurobiology. I'm not sure it is known. I think most of these drugs are serotonergic, but the subtlety clearly are different. Which subset of the receptors they're hitting is we don't exactly understand the causal relationship between the receptor being. Yeah, I mean, and frankly, I'm not up on the literature on MDMA, so there may be some clues that I'm not aware of. And I would also add the caveat that some of these drugs I think there's reason to be concerned about in terms of the physical effects of taking them too often or so MDMA is something that was profoundly useful for me. I remain somewhat concerned that it is potentially neurotoxic. I wouldn't want to take too much of it. I haven't taken it for years. And I have much less of a concern for other psychedelics, I think. LSD there's no evidence that it's neurotoxic. For instance, having spoken with people, psychiatrists who have taken care of patients who have probably taken too much MDMA, the two things that I have learned from them, which echo what you're saying is, yeah, it's generally safe, but it's very important. Like any drug, I mean, these aren't regulated compounds, right? So you're always running a risk when you take these things of other things that the drug is cut with, and there's toxicity that can be amplified as a result of that. And the second thing that I've been told is anything over a frequency of about every three months, and you start to run a risk of these serotonergic toxicities down the line. So you can take that for what it's worth. I mean, I'm certainly not providing guidance on that other than to echo your point that I think one has to be very careful with these agents. Now, at the same time, I'm not following the work of maps that closely, so I'm not sure what doses or frequencies they're using with the vets that they're studying. Presumably they've worked out some of these kinks as well. Yeah. But frankly, it would be worth it even if it were neurotoxic to some degree in the right conditions for the right person. If you had debilitating PTSD, maybe a little bit of long term consequence or short term toxicity is worth it to cure that. So then back to the second question, which is when you think about that profound empathy in that moment that you had at the age of 18, has your meditative practice, which has obviously evolved greatly since then, allowed you to either transiently or otherwise experience or re experience that phenomenon? Yeah, well, there is a practice that targets that mental status. Actually, I referred it earlier. Yeah, Metza practice. Metz is the polyword for loving kindness. And yeah, there are people who do that practice almost exclusively, a little bit for the listener, unlike mindfulness, where you are letting go of any agenda you have for what your experience should be, and you're just reconciling yourself to noticing however it is. And if you do that, your experience does change in reliable ways, many of which are quite pleasant. They can be amazingly pleasant. But it's not about securing those changes or amplifying those changes, because insofar as that creeps in, you're not being mindful, you're doing something other than merely witnessing what's happening and doing that as an expression of your own desire and attachment. And you're trying to change your experience. And that's different than simply being mindful of it. But with a practice like meta, you do have a goal. You're trying to feel this feeling of loving kindness as intensely as you can feel it, as durably as you can feel it. And you're trying to acquire a state change, but you're also trying to acquire a trait change in that your default attitude toward other human beings or even any other conscious system would be just well wishing and good vibes. And there's no question you can train that attitude. And it comes from both a framing effect and from an immersion in this change of state that you can kindle in meditation and then keep humming along based on concentration. So the same faculty of mind that could become one pointedly focused on a mantra or a sight like a candle flame can become one pointedly immersed in the feeling of love for all humanity. And it's initiated by thinking thoughts about other people. So you'll just imagine someone who you love and it's important that this not be contaminated with your notion of romantic love. Because so much of what we think of as love in a romantic context is desire and attachment. And it's not the same inappropriate subject of that type of tension. Yeah, a child, a friend, a parent, whoever in your life, you can have just as uncomplicated experience of wishing this person well, wishing them to be free of suffering, wishing them happiness. And the usual progression is to start with someone like that, who you know, who's someone who's close to you and then transition to a neutral person. Someone who you have no just kind of a randomly picked person from the crowd or some public figure who you have no strong association with, but who you can visualize. And then you're wishing that person happiness, wishing that they'd be free of suffering. You're actually thinking these thoughts in your mind almost as a kind of mantra, but it's not the sound of the utterances, it's the import of them that you're trying to connect with. So you're thinking may you be happy, may you be free from suffering. You're reiterating this. You could have three or four ways of saying it and you're saying it over and over again, but then connecting with the actual kind of energetics of the wish that you really do wish that this person who you love be free from suffering. And it can become this very deep feeling of basking in this well of good intentions for everybody, right? Then you can include not only a neutral person, but someone for whom you have a so called enemy, someone for whom you have a real negative association. And then you begin to see the importance of framing around all these things. So just like you said for the customer service situation, it just takes a second to realize, wait a minute, here's a person who's been standing at this desk since 06:00 in the morning, meeting one disgruntled person after the next, and now she or he has just met me. Their experience is completely different from mine. And which, by the way, is a beautiful cut to the sort of issue that David Foster Wallace talks about so much, is every experience we have is only through our lens. Right? Yeah. That insight alone, which now you're giving a very tangible example of, is so powerful just to be able to hit pause on that for a moment and say what you just said, right? This person's been standing here for 7 hours seeing one pissed off face after another. What they're seeing now is totally different from what I'm seeing. Yeah. And your impatience isn't helping. And you are so glad that you're not in their shoes, you don't want their job. You actually feel compassion for their experience. Right. And there are many hacks of this kind where you're driving in traffic and someone cuts you off and your default experience is, what an asshole. But it just takes a second to realize, wait a minute, you have no idea what's going on with this person. You don't know if this person is in a rush because they have some real emergency. You don't know if they're 90 years old. Now you just honked at some 90 year old man or woman. Right. And who's the asshole now? There's so many changes of frame applied to the exact same experience, which just fundamentally changed your interpretation of it. Lovingkindness practice is based on a fundamental frame change for more or less everything you can encounter in human affairs, which is everyone is suffering. Everyone was once a child condemned to now be the adult they now are. Right? So, like, there is no evil person who invented himself, right? There's no like, this is something I've talked about with respect to Saddam Hussein in the past. They usually talk about this in the context of talking about free will. But you just look at someone like the prototypical evil person. Saddam Hussein is about as good as it gets, right. So you look at him as a 40 year old man. He's just a terrifyingly evil sociopath who, if you're in favor of the death penalty, it definitely applies to him. But you roll back his, his lifeline by a few decades and at a certain point you see, okay, here's a twelve year old boy who could have well been a scary twelve year old boy. But when he's four years old, he's a four year old, and he's a four year old who has every strike against him in the sense that he's guaranteed, it seems, to be a morally damaged human being. He's living in a society riven by sectarian conflict. The norms to which he's being pushed, the aspirations he can form in this context are barbaric by any standard, ethical standard that we would form today. Right? And the kind of person who can thrive in that context is someone who's morally damaged by our lights. And he didn't pick his parents, he didn't pick his genes, he's not the author of himself. And yet he's going to become this evil person who, you know, half the world or more will think is deserving of death. At the end of it, it's possible to feel compassion. Even for someone like Saddam Hussein, that's a reframing that may be hard for some people to get there. But for someone who's practicing a state like Metta, that's the frame. And if you can get there, you can recognize that there is this capacity for love and well wishing that really extends without limit to every conscious system. And you want everyone to be relieved of all their problems on some basic level, because the most badly behaved people in the world are for the most part, expressing their problems. Even when you have a truly sadistic person who seems. To be deriving pleasure from causing other people suffering. And such people exist. What you're witnessing there is someone for whom all these other sources of pleasure and well being are basically unavailable. Right. This person, on some level, can't know what he's missing. This is a person who's never going to have good relationships of the sort that you and I would demand for ourselves and everyone we love as the necessary ingredients of a life well lived. It's not to say you wouldn't want to put this person in jail because there is no cure for this problem. I'm not recommending that we not protect ourselves from malevolent people, but you don't actually have to hate them. I mean, feeling compassion for these people isn't incompatible with taking the steps we need to take to keep society orderly and safe. One thing I would recommend to anybody who's interested in pulling a little more on this thread is to do a prison visit. Yeah, I've never done that, but I heard you and Tim did that. Right, tim and I did it, and I did a podcast with a guy named Corey McCarthy who himself was incarcerated for seven years for attempted murder and a bunch of other stuff. And there's a group of three or four or five of us that actually went and spent a couple of days at a maximum security prison. And we played this game there called Step to the Line, which I'm sure you've heard of. And it's a game that's played many reasons, but the purpose is always to basically highlight our similarities and our differences. So on the one side of the line, we're all of these inmates now we're in a maximum security prison in California. So everybody in that room I don't remember the exact numbers I believe 70% of those men were serving life sentences. Some staggering number of these guys were in there because of homicide or something more than like they were trafficking some marijuana. Right? Right. And on the other side are all of us as volunteers. And then the game begins of Step to the Line if and some of the differences are so humbling that you can't be a reasonable human being and be in that situation and not be moved by it. Step to the Line, if you had two parents in your household and amongst the volunteers, maybe 60% step forward. And amongst the inmates, I think one step forward, step to the line. If someone close to you died before you were ten or died a violent death before you were ten. These sorts of things and set for the line if you grew up in a home that had more than five books. And those of us as volunteers, most of us step forward of the inmates. Five step forward out of 50, that kind of thing. Right. And it's to your point. Right. It's like we're not going to excuse the mistakes that took place and society has said there's going to be a price that one has to pay for one mistakes. But boy, you realize pretty quickly the randomness that allows you or me to be standing on one side of that line and not the other. If you were in precisely that other person situation, genetically, environmentally, you would be that other person. Right. There is no daylight between all of those causes and conditions and the outcome. And even add in randomness quantum mechanics doesn't get you out of the situation. And I think of all the times I've been lucky, like when I was in 8th grade, there was a kid that was a year ahead who was like my hero. He was the absolute toughest kid in the school. I mean, he was the bad ass and he took me under his wing. So I was like really lucky to be the 8th grader who this super tough badass kid really liked. And two years later he wound up in jail for armed robbery. And I've often thought to myself, I was so impressionable that if I had been with him on that night and he said, look, we're going to go hold up a liquor store, I'm not sure I would have had the common sense, the intestinal, fortitude, whatever, the courage to say, dude, that's a bad idea. I'm not going to go. It's so easy that I could have gone along for that. Yeah. And as I learned later on, once you get in that system, like, you know, once you're 16 years old and you're pegged for armed robbery, it's very hard to recover to Stanford. Yeah. But that's a moment's decision and the luck is like, were you there or not there? Right? I have way more cards that are favorable in my deck than virtually all of these guys I met, and yet I still could have easily slipped over into that abyss of that endless vicious cycle of one knock after another until before you know, it like you're 40 years old and you're in prison for life. Yeah. So the philosophical insight here goes by the name of moral luck, and I think it originates with an essay that the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote probably 30 years ago. We rarely recognize how morally significant differences in luck are and just how lucky you need to be to live a good moral life. Any one of those things could have been marginally different and you'd be the guy who was an accessory to armed robbery. Right? I mean, just think of how many times most of us have driven drunk or not 100% and nothing bad happened. The difference between nothing bad happening and killing somebody in a crosswalk is enormous and just life deranging. Stranger still, because it's not even classed for most people as a significant risk. They're running texting while driving. I mean, I would say most of the people listening to this podcast have not totally shut down their texting while driving. They're not even thinking of it as a grotesquely, irresponsible thing to be doing, right? Because it's too tempting. You're at a red light, but being at a red light migrates into the first hundred feet of your now responding to a green light. And then there's the moments on the freeway. And every day there's some totally normal, responsible, upstanding person like you or me who kills somebody's kid in a crosswalk because they were texting. The significance of that difference in luck, it's extraordinary. And these are unrecoverable errors most of the time. So there are two sides to that. One, it can get you to take more care in all the spots where more care massively increases your odds of living a happy, fulfilling life. But it also can give you this different framing that allows you to feel compassion for even the worst people on earth. Right? You just recognize that if you change enough of the variables, you would be playing the same game they're playing. And I think this is so important, Sam, and I don't think I understood how important this was until I read something you wrote, which I'm paraphrasing, so I'll be bastardizing it. But the gist of it was it's really the, the caliber, quality of our thoughts that determine the quality of our life. And so let's take a most extreme example. I had a friend who was killed by a motorist who was texting. So he was on his bike. He couldn't have been in a safer spot, actually. A woman got distracted for a moment and killed him. And I was angry in a way that sort of felt like it was never going to go away. And truthfully, a big part of it was selfish. It was, I don't want this to happen to me now. You know, I'm at the time I was a cyclist, I was like, I'm sick and tired of seeing cyclists get hit. And some of the times they're getting killed, but they're getting hit all the time. Right. And it's it always seems to be these not always, but 90% of the time it's these distracted drivers. Sometimes the cyclist just does something stupid. But for the most part, if you get hit, if a road if a cyclist on the road gets hit, the driver's usually at fault. Interestingly. Unless alcohol is involved, those drivers are never prosecuted. Right? And I spent so much time being so pissed off, and part of it was just my own grandiosity. Like, my life is too valuable. I'm not going to die on the side of a road because some driver is too stupid to turn off their phone or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then after kind of reading something you wrote, I reflected on it years later and thought, I've never once asked myself what that person is going through. Who killed Nick? Yeah. What is her life like today? Because there's no way she forgot that there's no way she doesn't go to bed at night and think about the fact that she it's such a tragic story. Not only did she kill a guy who's just a beautiful soul who had a bunch of children, he was killed two days before his life insurance policy kicked in. He was killed on I believe it was May 30. No, it was May 31. And he had a policy that didn't start till June 1. I mean, it's like you couldn't make this story up. It's so tragic. But it's too easy to not reflect on her pain. You could say, Well, Peter, that's ridiculous. She doesn't deserve any empathy. Put all of that empathy towards Nick's family. But in the end, if I'm really optimizing for my own quality of life, there's no upside to just being upset about this. Like, there's some benefit accepting the fact that everybody here loses. And if that makes me less angry and makes me hate that person less, isn't that a good way to think about things? Well, yeah, but I would even put it more strongly because, again, she the driver was profoundly unlucky because she was guilty of doing something that all of us have done, everyone listening to this podcast has done and didn't pay that price. Worse still, she's guilty of doing something that most of the people listening to this podcast will continue to do even after hearing this podcast. This is a reset that I'm convinced most people are not quite ready for. At a certain point, self driving cars will come to the rescue. But the difference between being someone who was texting and didn't even notice the danger because nothing bad happened, and being someone who killed your friend is just luck. And you can only imagine how awful it has been to be the person who was irresponsibly texting and who killed somebody in the in the prime of their life just to hear the details and to have been the person who initiated that tsunami of suffering. Just imagine a website where you present the texts that were the proximate cause of death, how irrelevant they must have been. The juxtaposition between what people were felt couldn't wait another 30 seconds or 30 minutes. And what the tragedy resulted in the loss of life. It would be astonishing. I mean, we can all predict what it would be, but that's a sick idea. But it's a pretty damn good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's just if you imagine what that woman went through, it's you would not want to trade places with her. So I want to shift gears for a moment and go back to the discussion I had a week ago with one of my friends who's a patient. He's been really struggling the last few months. He's a father. He's a wonderful guy. He's got two kids, three dogs, and he's a guy with a really big heart. So he's he's he's one of these guys who just I don't know. You get the sense he could never be upset at anybody. He could never not want to take care of somebody around him. But one of the dogs, which is the first dog he ever had, died, had cancer, and they went through a bunch of treatments, and the dog ultimately died. And I think for him, losing that dog was certainly on the spectrum of losing a child. Right. I don't think it's the same, but I think for him, it was very difficult and he's been unable to sort of get back in the saddle, so to speak. And it's reflected in, frankly, his cortisol levels. I've never seen cortisol levels so high. So his degree of hypercortisolemia is if you didn't know better, you'd think he had a cortisol secreting tumor, actually. It's so profound. And we were talking about it, and he confessed that he couldn't stop dreading the death of his other two dogs who are aged six and seven or something like that. So these aren't dogs that are going to die tomorrow. In fact, these aren't even dogs that are, you know, sick in any way, shape or form. Right. But as he's three months out from the death of this dog that was probably 14 or 15, he's spending every moment now dreading the loss of these dogs that are going to die in five years or something like that. And it was very hard for me to try to console him because I didn't want to be dismissive of the pain. But I also wanted to remind him that, you know, that's the antithesis of being present. Right. It's like but your children and your two dogs are right here with you right now, and they're perfect. Yeah. And all the worrying you can do about when these two dogs die doesn't change the fact that they're going to die, but you don't know when and you don't know how, and you don't know any of these things. How would you explain to someone like that in not necessarily the most technical sense, but maybe in sort of an appeal to their emotion, why this effort isn't going to pan out and why there needs to be a new strategy for getting over this loss? Well, it depends on whether or not the person is living an examined life of the sort that we've been discussing. So if this is a person who has no meditation practice and is not interested in that mode, he is. So I've given him your books. He has been going through the meditation course that you have, but is still having a real hard time, like all of us in taking it from the example I use, is like, if you go to the gym and you sort of lift weights for 1520 minutes a day, that's great. But the whole purpose of doing that is to take those new muscles and be able to use them in the other 23 and a half hours. Right. And so I think that's the transition is, like I think the theory makes sense to him, but it's now, how does one actually bridge that gap? So, for the purpose of the discussion, let's say he accepts, conceptually, the value of this. Yeah. Well, so then to become sensitive to the actual mechanics of suffering, the only way to suffer this dog's absence is to think about it and not know that you're thinking about it. Right. So it is to be subsumed by this process of ideation and to have no perspective on it. And framing can help here. So you can say, well, there were many experiences he had with this dog alive where the dog wasn't physically present. The dog leaves the room. There's no greater absence from a room than simply leaving it right now. It's an additional operation to think, well, there's a big difference because I'll never see him again. But everyone you love in the world, animals, you're the only person I love who's in this room. Exactly. Right. They're all out of this room. So, in principle, you know what it's like to be content in moments where physical absence in the physical absence of everyone you love in this world, it's possible. And the only way to make it intolerable to be in a room without everyone you love is to meditate on how intolerable it is that they're not in the room with you right now. And this is why meditation is such an amazing skill, because and has a point of contact with your your prison story. This is a point I make several places. I think I make it in my book waking up. The amazing thing about meditation is that once you actually know how to meditate, it's possible to be alone in a room for weeks and months and even years. Several teachers I studied with had spent literally years alone in caves, where in most people's lives, solitary confinement is considered a punishment, even in a circumstance where to be outside of that room is to be surrounded by murderers and rapists who you might have to fight. Right. So even in prison, people don't want to be in solitary confinement because it's so intolerable to be left alone with your thoughts. There's an evolutionary rationale for this. I mean, we are clearly evolved to be social primates. And a circumstance where you find yourself alone more or less forever is not an optimum in evolutionary terms, but it's just simply a fact of the human mind that it's possible to discover a form of well being that not only survives contact with solitude, but it's just totally undiminished by solitude. And if you can discover that even for moments at a time, you can then enjoy the company of everyone you love without this feeling that your well being is at its core, predicated on being able to have them. At any moment you want. Or that it's predicated on the totally forlorn hope that this circumstance is going to endure forever, that no one will die, that no one will leave you. We know that's not in the cards, and we need to find whatever form of well being is possible given the fact that things are continually changing. Your thought experiment or not. I mean, it wasn't really a thought experiment, but it made me think of something was think of all the people who are thrust into solitary confinement. I mean, tragically, in this country, it's an absolute epidemic in the US. Prison system. And for all of the realities of how inhumane that is, especially for the length of time people find themselves in there, do you think there's a subset of people who inadvertently stumble into mindfulness without being formally taught? So the analogy would be like if I threw 16 year old Sam into a weight room, but I'd never shown him or forget a weight room into a basketball court. You'd never seen basketball before. There is a basketball. There is a net. And I said, you're confined to this room for a year. Like, at some point will you figure out picking up the ball, bouncing it? I wonder how hard it is to put that ball through that hoop over there, shooting at all of those things. I mean, it seems unlikely, right? It seems like on some level, you would have to at least be shown what to do. And then even if you're left alone, if you could come back to that lesson, and so someone similarly, you take a guy and let's say you put him in solitary confinement for a year, he's had no exposure to mindfulness. Is there a chance he's going to spontaneously figure out, oh, my God, this is far less painful if I'm actually present in the sensations of my body versus the ruminations and thoughts that are going to torment me? Or is that something that is just so counterintuitive to the ethos of who we are? That no way. Like, you're going to have to have had some exposure to this to at least be able to be thrust in that environment? It's definitely possible because it is just the way consciousness is, if you're paying attention. So it's there to be recognized in each moment. But the odds are against anyone doing that. I mean, there are people who have spontaneously awakened to this. I mean, they're kind of famous adepts, certainly in the Eastern tradition. There are also there are Western philosophers who have had intimations of this, where Jean Jacques Rousseau has a story about riding in a boat on a lake, I think, and spontaneously falling into kind of some very open and non egocentric state of consciousness that we would recognize. But the difference between having clear information and a clear map and not or having an erroneous one is just enormous. So I know I wouldn't have been able to have done it like when I think about how counter intuitive how difficult it is to practice mindfulness to go through the practice. Yeah. Like, I think if you'd put me in solitary confinement for 100 years, I would have never stumbled into that, unfortunately. So I would have been confined to have just been tortured also. Worse still, it's possible to be practicing mindfulness and to be on retreat and not recognize many of the things that you really do want to recognize about the nature of the mind. Because the way the mindfulness has been taught to you is, however subtly encouraging of a kind of goal seeking practice. And this is something that I write about in my book and talk about in my app. It's possible to be practicing mindfulness in a way that is dualistic. It's kind of ramifying of the subject object perception and therefore the goal of recognizing the selflessness of consciousness and being relieved of the sense of ego at the center of it. The sense that there's a meditator or a thinker of thoughts or an experiencer of experience that can be posited as the ultimate goal of some incredibly laborious spiritual path that just has to be traversed by increments over years. And that's an error. That's a mistake. That's just not true. It's already true of consciousness that the ego is an illusion and that can be realized directly. And the expectation that it can't be is, in some basic sense, self fulfilling for most people. So you can be, in the most auspicious circumstance, having devoted a massive part of your life to just practicing mindfulness and still be in a kind of crucible of unnecessary seeking and suffering because you have an erroneous understanding of what the path actually is. There are a couple of sort of semantics I want to you've already alluded to a little bit the relationship between Vipassana and mindfulness. Where does Zohen fit into this? And, like, if you were to try to draw a Venn diagram of these different concepts, how would they overlap? So Vipassana is the name of the practice in Terravada Buddhism, the oldest tradition of Buddhism, and this is the Buddhism of Thailand and Burma and Sri Lanka. And vapasna, as I said, means insight. And you're having insight into what are thought of as the fundamental characteristics of all phenomenon. And these are impermanence and selflessness and unsatisfactoryness. It's often misleadingly translated as suffering rather than unsatisfactoryness. So many people believe that the Buddha taught that life is suffering or that all experience contains some intrinsic suffering. That's not quite the message. It's that life is a circumstance where there is no unchanging, fully satisfactory basis for one's happiness because everything is changing. It's by virtue of impermanence that the boat is always leaking, right? We're always bailing water. We're always responding to some slow emergency, really, where our health is always put in question. There's always some new pain arising in the body because we're simply not moving, right? You always have to respond to something. And our pleasures, however hard one, are fleeting. They're vanishing even in the act of acquiring them. So there's no place to land that is secure. And that's largely by virtue of the impermanence of sensory experience. But the selflessness component is separable from those two other characteristics. That's Vipassana vapasana is a practice whereby you would have insight into those three characteristics. And mindfulness is the tool you use to have those insights. The training. And mindfulness is training in a kind of awareness of experience which is non judgmental, non reactive. You're not seeking to maximize pleasure. You're not trying to make pains go away. You're just becoming interested in a very open and focused way on just what the character of every experience is. So if you're feeling restless, rather than try not to feel restless, you're becoming interested in and increasingly aware of the actual characteristics, moment to moment of restlessness. How is it that you know you're restless? Where is it? What is it? We're talking about a pattern of energy in the body that you can suddenly recognize as a rising totally on its own and changing based on its own dynamics. And you are merely the witness of that change in state. And so it is with any pleasant emotion or experience, and you keep dropping back into merely witnessing. And that is mindfulness. When you can do it, when you're actually not trying to change anything, you're not judging anything, and you're not staying at the conceptual level. You're not thinking about experience. You're just experiencing experience more and more closely. And so if it's a matter of paying attention to sensations in the body, you're not staying at the level where you feel like, oh, my hands are sweaty, right? No, you're feeling the temperature and the tingling and the pressure so closely that the concept of hands and sweat disappear. So you're just feeling the raw data of experience. And these changes can be pleasant. Your sense of even having a body can disappear while you're meditating, and it just resolves into a cloud of sensation. So zogchen is a Tibetan practice tradition which is explicitly nondualistic. And what that means in this context is it goes after the selflessness of the mind very directly. Most of us start meditating where we are in our normal states of cognition with the sense that there's a subject in the middle of experience. There's a mind in the head, and it is, by definition, separate from everything that it knows, right? So there's the subject that can be aware of sights and sounds and sensations. And this subject is also a thinker. It's producing it's, in some sense, the author of Thoughts. And it's me. And I feel like I'm over here in my head, behind my face, almost wearing my face as a kind of mask, right? I'm not identical to my face. I'm behind my face. And you're looking across space at me. And your gaze has an implication for me because if I follow where you're looking, I'm over here and not identical to my body, right? I'm in my body. I'm a kind of passenger in my body. I can say, well, my hand is I've got an injury to my hand. And you and I can both look at my hand as a kind of object in space. My hand is part of the world. Yeah. And obviously I care more about my hand than you do because it's my hand. But if something's wrong with my hand, I'm still over here, up in my head, behind my eyes, some distance from the hand. And I can imagine being without the hand, right? If I lost my hand in an accident, well, then I would have one less hand. But I'd still be me up here in my head, behind my eyes, right? That locus of knowing, that sense of being located in the head as a self, as an ego, is a starting point for everyone in meditation. And you can do Vipassana from that starting point. You can be taught the method of mindfulness meditation and you just begin to pay more and more attention to what it's like to be you. And you can notice these three characteristics of impermanence and selflessness and unsatisfactoriness. The polly is Anita and Duca and Anata, or Niche, anata and Duca, in that order. And you can start from wherever you are. And who knows how long it will take you to have this insight, a fundamental insight into the illusoryness of that starting point of being a subject in the head. Now, with zojan, you can't start until you've had that insight. And so the path of zojen entails becoming available to that insight in various ways. It's usually a matter of actually forming a connection with what's called the Zokhen master in the Tibetan tradition as someone who can actually point this out to you in conversation. And for most people, meaning they can point out to you when you are falling to the illusion of ego. Meaning they can point out when you are defaulting back into that mode. Well, no, they can point out the intrinsic egolessness of consciousness in a way that you can recognize it and then practice that, right? Because most people, they start meditating, they still feel like they're up in their heads paying attention. Now I'm paying attention to the breath now I'm noticing the difference between being lost and thought and being mindful. But it doesn't fundamentally cut through the sense that there is one who can be mindful, right? And you can have experiences where the distance, the apparent distance between subject and object can collapse, but they can come in a haphazard way where you don't know how you had them and you don't know how you'll have them again, right? It can come by virtue of paying closer and closer attention to sounds and sensations and. Things that are arising. And you can suddenly feel like in that moment of hearing that bird, there was no me and there was no bird that was just hearing that can collapse again and again. And it did for me when I was spending time on retreat practicing vapasana, but I always associated it with the intense concentration of retreat, and it seemed unavailable to me in ordinary moments of consciousness. Off retreat, I'm driving in traffic or working at my computer or whatever. There's no way I'm going to touch that level of concentration. I haven't been spending 14 hours a day meditating. So this is a kind of a peak experience that isn't available now. Well, with Zochen, you discover that the reverse is true. All the peak experiences are no more empty of self than ordinary waking consciousness is. And you can recognize this about consciousness in any moment, and it doesn't actually require previous moments of building momentum. Framing really counts for a lot here. So I spent a lot of time practicing with this one Burmese meditation master, Upandita Saada. And the analogy he would often use is that progress in vapasana is like rubbing two sticks together to get fire. The moment you stop, the heat dissipates and you're back to zero, right? So it's like you'd have this sense of you'd be on retreat with him, practicing for, you know, up to 20 hours a day and trying to make your mindfulness absolutely continuous. So the difference between sitting and walking meditation and every other moment, I mean, you're doing a ton of sitting and walking meditation. It's like 16 hours a day of that. But every other moment, when you're going to meals or anything else, you wake up and get out of bed in the morning. Every transitional moment, getting a cup of tea, you're trying to link every instant of conscious awareness together with mindfulness. And whenever you would get distracted, part of you would begin scoring that as a failure to build up enough momentum to get to the goal of the fundamental breakthrough that was on offer by that path. So this framing, this idea that you're rubbing two sticks together, the moment you stop, they're cooling off and you've made no progress, right? That's the opposite framing for Zokhen. The framing you need for Zoegen is there's this something already true of consciousness. You're not trying to produce this thing, you're not trying to get rid of the ego, you're not trying to change anything about what is. You're trying to recognize a feature of consciousness that is already the case and it's actually nearer to you than you think. It's not a matter of going deep within and having some kind of breakthrough. It's actually right on the surface of the most ordinary form of consciousness. It doesn't require any pyrotechnic change in the contents of consciousness. You're not actually closer to it. If you take acid and all the colors begin to change or you feel a change in your energy such that you feel this kind of buzz of connectedness to all things, as anyone who's taken acid can verify that's on offer. But all of that's interesting. I'm not discounting the power of those experiences, but those experiences are no less empty of self than every state of consciousness. Precisely the state of consciousness that's compatible with reaching for a glass of water and drinking it without anything novel intruding. There's no bliss, there's no rapture, there's no profound or spiritual change in state. It's possible to recognize in that moment that there's no center to consciousness. And so what Zohan is is the path of discovering that there's no center and then taking that insight as your only object of mindfulness. So that what you're mindful of thereafter is that there's no center to consciousness. So whatever is appearing sights, sounds, sensations you are continually dropping the implied center. It's kind of a steep path because it's hard to start. You can't really start everything you're doing before you have that insight and can notice it again on demand. Everything you're doing is, by definition, a preliminary practice to that because you need enough mindfulness to notice what is to be noticed and to follow the instructions to start that path. But you certainly don't have to have spent years on retreat to start that path. And so it's having good information is certainly better than having misleading information. There this practice, as I said, it's challenging. There's no two ways around it. I think it's for some people, it's probably as difficult as saying to someone who's 40 years old who's never exercised deliberately a day in their life, okay, it's time to start spending an hour a day in the gym, and you're going to be doing these new movements, and they're going to be very uncomfortable. And for many people, a few weeks or months into that exercise routine, they're still not finding any great source of pleasure. And there are some of us who love exercising. Again, going back to the lingo of states versus traits, I worked out this morning before I saw you, I was in a new gym for the first time. And sometimes that is a little you're sort of like, I don't know where all the equipment is, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But regardless, it's just the actual state of exercise to me is so pleasurable, even if it didn't offer any traits that were advantageous outside of it. Of course, the real reason we exercise is not for the hour that we're in the gym moving around these artificial pieces of iron. It's because of the benefit that gives us both metabolically and structurally beyond the time we're exercising. Right. Is it safe to say that for most people, the experience of meditation doesn't produce a state that is necessarily as pleasurable as, say, the MDMA state was that you could describe? And that really the reason this ought to be considered by someone who is not meditating is more the traits that come outside of the act of meditating, the act of the practice. Yes. Well, so it's possible to have extremely pleasant states arise in meditation, both ones that have a kind of ethical implication, like lovingkindness, and ones that just are sort of the equivalent of you being on heroin, right? So it's not necessarily pointed in any auspicious or prosocial direction. It's just you experiencing more pleasure than you've ever experienced. But none of those experiences really can be the point because they're transitory when they're gone, they really are gone. I mean, the demeaning analogy to drugs is not inaccurate. Like, what's the point if it's just a matter of getting high and you're a no better person in the world as a result of having had that experience? So it really is about having a fundamentally different relationship to experience in general. All of the counterproductive ways in which you grasp at the pleasant and push the unpleasant away. There's a fairly Buddhist framing of it, but I think it's appropriate. Basically, it's about not suffering unnecessarily in the end, right, and then not broadcasting your suffering to the rest of humanity. So it can't be about having an experience that's extremely pleasant and becoming more and more attached to that experience. And so that's one of the things that's misleading. And a potential downside of getting very good at so called concentration practices or absorption practices is that they don't have the power to give you a perspective that is a fundamental antidote to egocentricity and selfishness and even kind of starkly unethical instincts in other areas of your life. And they really can be fundamentally no more interesting from a kind of a larger examined life perspective than a drug experience. I mean, to take some clear examples here, there have been gurus who have behaved shockingly unethically in their lives and had their reputations ruined and just leave a wake of unhappy and even destroyed people behind them who there was no doubt were meditative athletes and in many cases focused on concentration practices. So if you had to ask, well, what was it like to be these gurus when they were meditating? Certainly not all of them were frauds. Many of them were truly talented meditators, but they were meditating in a way that was not. It was a separate game they were playing, right? And again, it was a game that was properly produced, immense pleasure while they were doing it, but it didn't fully undercut everything else about them that was going to be fairly monstrous in relationship to other human beings. This is where framing or the overall concept of what one is doing is pretty important because there are pathological states of pleasure. There are even pathological states of spiritual pleasure. I think the suicide bomber, before he detonates his bomb, they're in states of a kind of ecstasy. I mean, they have a religious expectation for what's about to happen, which entails going to paradise and experiencing more pleasure than anyone can imagine. And in almost every case, that's sincere and deeply felt. And these people are about to get whatever they want, and they know the Creator of the universe is happy that they're going to get it. So that there's nothing about ecstasy per se that is good or even benign because it can be pointed in the wrong direction. It's a missile that doesn't necessarily come with a guidance system. Yeah. And I think what we're looking for to lead truly better lives across the board is something that is anchored to an ethics, for lack of a better word, where our spiritual or contemplative tools are actually making us better people across the board. And again, there are some bright lines here that I think are useful to draw. For instance, not lying is a major variable for me, ethically. It's just like having formed a commitment to being honest in basically every situation that wasn't like just a self defense situation. I don't think you have to be honest to the person who's attacking you right. Or seems likely to attack you. But to put dishonesty somewhere on the continuum of violence and only resort to it where things have broken down so much that you're just not dealing with another person as though they're a rational interlocutor that is massively simplifying of a person's life. Right now, very few people have made that commitment, but having made it, when did you make that commitment? I know you've spoken about this, but how old were you when you decided that I was 18. I was freshman year in college. I took a course taught by this great professor, Ron Howard, not to be confused with that. Ron Howard? Yeah. No, not the former actor, now director. This course was just an examination of whether it was ever ethical to lie. Virtually everyone goes into that course, more or less, not even knowing what their relationship to lying is. They haven't been sensitized to it as a significant variable in their lives in terms of maintaining their relationships or their reputations or yeah, I lie sometimes and they're white lies, and sometimes it's just too awkward to tell the truth or and you don't know how often you do it, but you know everybody does it and the world could be no other way. And this course was just a machine for exposing the dysfunction of that. And more or less it was like a seminar where everyone was just kind of coming up with scenarios where it must be all right to lie. I mean, surely this is a white lie that is better told. And the professor would shoot that down. And most people left the course more or less certain. That line was virtually always the wrong move for purely selfish reasons. It was just like it was not creating the life you want. And by being committed to not lying. You were closing the door to all kinds of complexity and risk both interpersonally and reputationally that you absolutely want to close the door to. I mean, it's almost analogous to texting while driving. Just decide not to text while driving. You will not care about all those texts. You don't have to worry about, well, I'll only text at intersections or if I'm stuck in traffic, but we're not going that fast or whatever. Yeah. I can assure you that you will never really regret the text you sent later when you finally arrived at your destination. So how old were you when you met your wife, your now wife? 31. Okay. So you've had 13 years of this practice of not lying and now you meet the woman you're ultimately going to marry who presumably hasn't taken this course or made this commitment at some point. Does that become a discussion which is, by the way, I'm going to be a little different than most guys that you've met in that if you ask me if you look good in that dress and I don't think you do, I'm just going to say you don't. Please don't interpret that as I'm an insensitive prick. I just don't want to go down that. Did you ever have that discussion, that sort of prefaced or maybe you're right the wrong example, but like I mean, as you're explaining this, I'm thinking about all of the lies I tell. No, it was sort of you kind of stumble into it. You end up training the people around you to know what they're going to get from you. Right. And it's not necessarily explicit. It's just in that case, yeah, it became very clear very quickly just what sort of importance I put on honesty. And there are a few hiccups in many relationships, but the gain that people notice very quickly, which I don't think they would want to forfeit to smooth over any of other possible awkwardness, is they know you're never going to lie to them. They know that you're being truthful. And so when you have said that you didn't like something in a spot where most other people would have just told some kind of white lie so as not to have to communicate that, then your praise means that much more. If you're a creative person who often needs to get feedback from people, you immediately discover this. When I give a piece of writing to somebody and ask for feedback, who do I value more? The person who is just going to praise me because they think that's what I want to hear and because they find it too awkward to deliver some bad news because they know I've spent a lot of time writing this thing? Or do I want to hear from the person who is actually finding flaws in this thing I've written and will now, because I'm going to them early, now has a chance to spare me the public embarrassment of broadcasting these flaws to all humanity. Clearly, I value the other reader more. And once you see the alternative, you realize you want the people who will be straight with you and then you meet you meet people who think they want feedback, but they don't want feedback. You can have a more or less grown up relationship to the opinions of others. The people who don't want feedback, who just want to be told that what they did was fantastic. Well, if they're surrounded by honest people, they very quickly feel the cramp of that, right? They want to be surrounded by liars and they'll curate their connections as a result. You won't ask that same person again. If you're the sort of person who didn't want an honest opinion and pretended to ask for one. Is it possible for someone to let's pick an extreme example, but could one go into public office and take that oath that I will never lie? I mean, is that compatible with politics, for example? It is widely assumed that it's a deal breaker. Right. I think virtually everything that's wrong with our politics is the result of the mismatch between interpersonal ethics of this sort and what works and what wouldn't work in the public sphere. I think it should be compatible with politics. I think dishonesty should exact a massive reputational cost in politics. But now we're in this strange mirror universe where the most dishonest person anyone has ever witnessed is the president of the country and suffering absolutely no reputational cost among those who love him for his dishonesty. It's not a bug, it's a feature. In my view, that is the most dysfunctional thing about the Trump phenomenon. It's what it's done to the value of honesty. In our public conversation about politics, at least a half of the electorate pointing out that he's lied yet again, is completely ineffectual with the people who don't care that he's lied. I mean, they just assume he's going to lie. It's a very strange performance. It's like not even about representing reality anymore. It's not that the people who love Trump are reliably duped by him. It's that they're not holding him to a standard of honesty at all. And his dishonesty, however obvious, is a different kind of performance. It's almost like there's been an analogy often drawn to professional wrestling. It's a fake sport with fake violence. And the fact that it's fake is actually understood by basically everyone who enjoys it. Right. It's not like they're taken in unless you're five years old, by the time you're a teenager or whatever, you sort of get that this is an act. They're still very athletic. Nothing takes away from the skill required to do it. Yeah, I mean, ironically, what they're doing is more dangerous than MMA for the most part, and they're getting horrific injuries sometimes. But there's no illusion that these guys are just as tough as the people in the octagon. Right? There are people who watch both or certainly aware of both, and they clearly understand what reality is. Reality is what's going on in mixed martial arts. Right? There's things that are honest at the level of the language of violence, and there are things that are pure fabrications. They're lies. And something has happened in our conversation about facts in the political domain has happened to some degree on the left for different reasons. But yeah, to come back to your question, I think we're paying a massive price for not being able to tell when people are lying definitively. Like to not have a lie detector that forensically can be relied upon, you know, analogous to, you know, like DNA evidence, you know, where you just know that someone's representing their state of knowledge erroneously. And we're paying a massive price for the fact that so many millions of people don't actually care that they're being lied. That's the bigger issue. Right? I mean, I think politicians have always lied. I don't think that's what's new. It's almost like a threshold has been crossed where it's so so you go back to sort of Clinton's impeachment, right? I mean, in the end, I think the legal issue was less about whether he'd had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. The bigger issue was, did he lie under oath? Right? And in many ways, that's what his impeachment came down to. It's quite clear he probably did. Right? I mean, we could get into the semantics of sexual relations, but it's pretty clear he lied under oath. But the point you're making is that now it's almost a feature. Like, now it's almost I think it's gone beyond it, that it's accepted, and now it's almost like part of the theater. But I think that is a uniquely Trumpian phenomenon. I don't know that anyone else will be able to play it quite that way. I mean, it's a feature of politics that has been true in other countries forever. It is a feature of authoritarian politics. Wait, you mean Kim Jongun didn't really that well in golf? Several holes than one. He doesn't defecate, I heard as well. In a democracy, it should be harder to get away with having one's lives exposed. And when you look at what used to matter, when you look at the fact that someone like Gary Hart, his campaign where he said that he was faithful to his wife and encouraged journalists to keep a sharp eye on him and then was caught having an affair, that was the end, right? There is nothing like that that's conceivable for Trump. It doesn't matter how discordant his behavior is with his next utterance. His opponents are keeping score relentlessly, like his lies are being documented every day. There are now thousands of them. People are keeping score. It doesn't matter with at least 40% of America, so it might matter for another person. For those 40%. It really is a kind of personality cult phenomenon where it's just for for Trump, for whatever reason, how he showed up, what he represents. He can get away with stuff that no one else can get away with, and that is what is so dysfunctional about having him in that role, from my point of view. So you have two daughters, right? So we think so much about how do we prepare our kids for the world that's out there that we can only say one thing for certain about, which is we don't know what it's going to look like. I mean, I had this discussion with my daughter last night, actually, or two nights ago, which was, Olivia, you're ten years old today. The only thing I can assure you of in eight years, I have no idea what the world will look like. Yeah, but there are a handful of traits that I think will help you in life, and they might seem somewhat arbitrary, and they might seem somewhat ridiculous or even unpleasant, but the sooner you can figure out a way to put these traits in place, the more well equipped you will be with whatever the future holds. Right. So when I was ten, no one could have predicted that the Internet was going to exist and that somehow that was going to have all of these implications, right. With respect to all the stuff we've been talking about today, specifically with respect to choosing to live an examined life, choosing to live a life where we are not constantly being lived by our thoughts. How do you teach your daughters about what the future holds? And I don't mean that in like a broad sense, but I mean, aside from encouraging them to meditate, and I'm sure at some age kids can learn mindfulness meditation, but how else do you try to influence your kids with respect to the lessons you've learned? I mean, they may never choose to go off on, and you've spent such a significant period of your life on retreats. You've really devoted your entire life to this study. If they choose not to do that, you know, they want to do something boring like go into medicine or whatever, how will you still impart some of these lessons on them? Or will it be much more by osmosis than anything deliberate? First kids can be taught to meditate, and actually, my wife has done that work, a lot of kids. What age does she start? Like five. Wow. Six. It's amazing. Very quickly, you can go from just the first class, which is just chaos, to a room full of six year olds sitting in silence for 15 minutes. It's amazing. Yeah, and they get real benefit from it. It's not quite the same as adults connecting with the practice, but it can be pretty similar. I mean, they're becoming aware of their emotional lives in a way that kids often aren't. Do girls develop easier than boys at that age? Generally speaking, I consider them separate species. So yeah, my boys are wild. I don't know how I could ever communicate any of that. Yeah, I think boys have a harder time sitting still, certainly earlier on. So it's amazing to see kids connect with the practice because they definitely do, and they just become aware of the linkage between emotion and behavior, thought and emotion, emotion and thought. But on some level, it just comes down to suffering and the end of suffering. How much do you want to suffer? People are suffering in reliable ways, based do you spend time then explaining the nature of the suffering? Because I would agree completely. Nobody wants to suffer. I just think it takes many of us decades to even come to the realization of how much of our suffering is self imposed. Yeah. So is part of it just getting them to realize that sooner? Yeah. And again, to point out many of the things we've discussed here, where it's like the power of framing and the power of expectation. So I'll often point out to my daughter's, even the youngest, who's just turning five, but for the most part the oldest is just turning ten. That the mismatch between her expectation of how something was going to be and how it was right. And it's usually a negative expectation. She was worried about something happening, I'll say a doctor's visit or getting blood drawn or getting shot. And the actual experience that was far less traumatic than she was worried that it was going to be. And to point out that all of the time spent suffering in anticipation of this negative thing was wasted. There's a lesson to be learned here. Like the thing she thought she was sure was going to be awful turned out not to be so awful, or in some cases, not awful at all. Right. Or even net positive, because she had the experience of sort of overcoming a fear or she felt stronger as a result of that thing that just happened. So the expectation is so often not only a bad guide, it's no guide at all to what is going to happen. And yet people suffer in advance over this thing that they're they're expecting to be negative. Even if even if it's going to be negative, you can decide to suffer once or twice. Yeah, right, exactly. Kids can get lessons like that. I think it's good to give them as early as they can get them. A lot of it has to do with framing and just how one thinks about one's life. But mindfulness for a kid can be, at the first pass, just more awareness over what they're feeling and thinking. Young kids can be sad, and they don't know that they're sad or angry, and they don't know that they're angry. And just that level of awareness can be a major gain for a kid. And then that's something to build on. And then as they get older, then I think certainly once they're young, teenagers can have a more or less grown up relationship to observing what's going on in their minds. When I think about how much effort I put into worrying about whether my daughter is learning well enough, the sort of standard metrics that we care about math and science and English and sports and all those things, I feel like probably I'm not paying enough attention to those things as well. Especially for someone who has spent so much time suffering inside his own mind. I ought to know better, right? Yeah. There is no prison like the one between your ears when you frame it that way, boy, it makes me think, I really need to start investing a little bit more time in that prep. I want to be mindful of your time, so I know we both have to get somewhere this evening. Are you writing a book at the moment? Are you working on anything? I'm the worst author a publisher can have at this point. I keep pushing back my deadline. I am supposed to be writing a book, but I'm so busy podcasting and doing other things. What is the book about? Well, I actually have two books that I'm supposed to be writing. One is just a digest of podcast conversations because now I have so sort of like what Tim did with tools. Yeah. I'm not quite sure what the format will be, but something based on the podcast. It's probably going to be more like just updated transcripts of significant parts of the conversation. And then I have a book with a working title, Making Sense, which is just going to be a kind of manifesto about intellectual honesty and how we have hard conversations about all manner of topics, whether it's race or gender or the opposition between science and religion or many of the topics I touch on my podcast. We're paying a price for not being able to talk about the most consequential and taboo and dangerous and divisive things in a way that is conserving of good intentions and honesty and allows for compromise and allows for breakthroughs and changes of opinion. All the norms around talking about these things are skew. You just can't have a conversation about the differences between men and women. Say, are men and women exactly the same? No, they're not. What do we do down that path? Generates ire like you can't imagine. Yeah. And careers are lost over slight misstatements. Right. And there are people who say things that were ill considered that they then subsequently apologize for. They recognize that they're ill considered. And yet the apology, however heartfelt, however abject, isn't sufficient to stop their career from being destroyed. You had an example of this recently where you on your podcast where you talked about the she was a dean at Claire McKenna College. Yeah. Claremont Mclaremont College. Yeah. Well, actually, there's a more recent example, which is even more. Amazing in its own way. Like Megan Kelly's firing over her Halloween blackface comments, right? Well, she obviously couldn't hear how the phrase blackface would land with many people. It's easy to see that the way she spoke about it constituted a mistake. It's pretty obvious it was not an expression of racism on her part. Right. She's not saying African Americans haven't suffered a massive inequality in the past, or she was just saying, if you're going to dress up like Diana Ross, why can't you put brown makeup on your face? Essentially, those weren't her words, but that was the sentiment. That's absolutely something we should be able to talk about. Yet she said the wrong thing and then clearly received a ton of pressure to apologize for it. Her apology I don't know if you saw her apology, but her apology was someone was joking on Twitter. This was just something on Twitter that said it was the closest thing you've ever seen to a hostage video. Minus the newspaper, right? Yes. Just you got to hold up the newspaper as proof of life. I didn't actually hear what she said or anything, but it was by all signs, it was as full an apology as a person can muster. It was complete. If it didn't strike the right note for you, well, then you have superhuman expectations for what someone should be able to muster in a context like that. It did not seem insincere at all, right? At least to my eye. And yet still, this was a career wrecking event, it seems. And so now we're in a situation where people are calling for the destruction of other people and celebrating the effects of that, when these people actually do lose their shows or suffer some massive penalty. And yet I think it's true to say that most people who were calling for her to be fired would recognize that one. Her initial statement was not actually conveying her own racism. It was conveying her obliviousness to the significance of this phrase for other people. But it was not conveying that she was somebody who wants to live in a society where there's a lack of political equality. Right? I mean, there was zero evidence of that. I don't think anyone even alleges that. That's her view of the world. But worse than that, once she recognizes the mistake she's made, no apology is sufficient. So do we really want to live in a world where you misspeak on a fraught topic and it is impossible to adequately apologize? You recognize that. You use the word retard say, right? And then you get feedback that, wow, people really find that offensive. There are kids with mental disabilities. If you knew what it was like to be a parent of a kid who was suffering this, you would recognize how offensive that term is. And they're like, Why would you ever use that term on a podcast? Right? Imagine it being impossible to apologize for that it's over for you. Right. What's so interesting, bringing it back to the prison stuff, I remember when I spoke with Kat Hoke about this. So Katherine Hoke is the woman that used to run this organization called the Five Ventures. And now she's spinning up something that's going to be even better, actually, to which I've suggested to her, and I don't think I'm unique in this a lot of people have suggested that this idea ought not just be something that's sort of a nonprofit. There is such a benefit to the volunteers, to going into this experience, that it almost needs to be sort of a corporate development program. Like, people need to be paying to go and have this experience. It's so profound. Right. But it gets to this question of is there something for which you cannot be forgiven? What is the crime? What is the sin? What is the moral defect for which there is no forgiveness? And I don't know if you're familiar with any of the stuff she's spoken about, but at some point she had to make a decision about whether or not people who were sexual predators would be permitted into the program. So if you'd raped somebody, if you'd molested a child and you're now serving whatever term in prison, could you be a part of this rehabilitative program? And in the end, she said yes. I mean, basically it really comes down to the degree of which a person a person shows remorse and their willingness to change. Because the idea is whether you choose to never forgive somebody, and whether it's Megan Kelly or this rapist, it doesn't change the fact that something was said or something was done that is, in some cases, probably not really that ridiculous and in some cases is really tragic. But you have two choices as a society how you move forward from that. And it seems we're definitely caught in the place of an inability to reconcile the good that can come from moving on, which means acknowledging mistakes that were made, acknowledging remorse, looking for ways to get better. I mean, we really don't seem to like that. That seems a bit too soft for people. I don't know if soft is the right word, but there's something about that process that people don't like. Yeah. And in extreme cases, they're forced to accept it. When societies have just become completely driven by sectarian violence or political dysfunction of one kind or another, then you need things like truth and reconciliation commissions in places like South Africa or Rwanda, where then people who are guilty of objectively horrible things can get a pass, essentially, just by coming forward and telling the truth and apologizing. I think, actually, I brought this up on my podcast not long ago. I was thinking about this very problem in terms of, like an ethical event horizon. I mean, is there something so bad that you could do or say that no apology would be sufficient to pull your reputation back out of that singularity. It is a kind of unrecoverable moral error, and I don't think so. I think the physics of an appropriate, acceptable apology are that it be sincere and believable. And that the measure of it being believable is that it has to be clear how you could have changed enough for it to be sincere. So for an apology to be accepted, you have to stand in relationship to that thing you did in the same place where the other people who are horrified by what you did stand. And they have to be able to see how it is that you have come to stand where they are now in order to accept your apology. So if that transformation isn't believable for some reason, if there's no path by which you could have had this epiphany that contextualizes your prior bad behavior, it puts it in a box which you disavow, well, then it will seem insincere or opportunistic. Your sociopath is just trying to get out of prison and game the program, and those people exist, there's no question. An insincere apology for calculated reasons, that's as old as we've been speaking to one another, and that will continue for as long as people can get away with it. So that's a genuine concern if you're talking about how to operationalize these kinds of insights. But just, again, the path out of that darkness has to be intelligible to people. And I think that we'll stumble on this once we have breakthroughs in psychology and neuroscience that admit of real changes in people's emotional and ethical lives. Just to take the narrow case, if we ever understood psychopathy clearly enough that we could cure it, right? So you have someone who's from a very early age just torturing animals and showing zero empathy for other people, and they grow up into the scary adult that one would predict. And if we ever get to a place where there's a cure for that, well, then psychopathy will be viewed as a neurological condition. It won't be a moral problem. These are malfunctioning robots that need the new module. And just imagine if we had that cure, we'd be no more judgmental in how we applied it than we are when we cure any other disease. I mean, you're not thinking about when you're giving diabetics insulin. You're not thinking, well, you're lucky I'm giving you this insulin because you probably don't deserve it. You with your malfunctioning pancreas. You're lucky that I'm so tolerant that I'm willing to give you this insulin. There's zero culpability in having a bad pancreas. If we actually understood the neurochemical neuroanatomical basis of even the worst behavior, if it was discreet enough that it admitted of a cure, we would say, oh, we got to fix that problem. Is that hold out hope for that same or is that Sci-Fi? I mean, you're a neuroscientist, so you can speak to this with much more clarity or authority than I could ever speak of it. I hold out hope for it in certain specific cases. Yeah, we know it's true. We've already stumbled upon it in cases where you're talking about a brain tumor that is causing a problem, but causing a problem which shows up as uncontrollable rage or pedophilia or I mean, there are cases where the classic case is Charles Whitman, who in 1964, killed 14 people at the University of Texas, and he just had a glioblastoma pushing on his amygdala. And the amazing thing is that you might know this story because I've talked about it, but he suspected that he had something wrong with his brain, and he knew he was going to be killed by the police, and he recommended that they perform an autopsy to find out what was going on in his head. And, yeah, he had a tumor, which was arguably totally exculpatory. It was just in precisely the place that you would think, okay, he can't control his impulses and he's feeling uncontrollable rage, and this tumor explains it. I think there's virtually no one who hears the whole story who thinks Charles Whitman was evil. He just seems profoundly unlucky. And on some level, a complete understanding of evil would reduce it to that same species of unluck. That is an amazing thought. It's hard for me to imagine because obviously the mass effects are the obvious ones, right? These lesions versus much more diffuse neurochemical processes. We're going to have dinner tonight, so I know what we're going to keep talking about. Man, we got so much to keep going on. For folks who are listening to this on my podcast, who might not know you as well as they ought to, is samharris.org basically where they can find everything? Your podcast, your blog, your books, all sorts of things. Yes. And as far as my meditation app, it's just waking up. But, yeah, both websites, some of us, like me, are lucky enough to have got it for free because we were supporters of the podcast before it came out. Yeah, but is it available for purchase now on both Apple and on Android? Android is not quite out yet. No, it's out as of yesterday. Okay, fantastic, because I know I had a patient who went to search for it on Android a few weeks ago, and it was coming soon. No, we're born on both platforms. Okay, well, congratulations. Sam, I just want to say I want to thank you personally for the effect and the impact that your work has had on me. I find myself, like I said, spending so much time thinking about how to help people delay the onset of diseases that kill them, and in many ways, you're doing the same thing, but in some ways, a higher stakes arena, which is how to prevent people from suffering so much, which in some ways is just harder to measure. We don't have the same stats on that, right? I can rattle off all the stats on what the probability is that you're going to get cancer by the time you're 70 and what's the likelihood you're going to make it to 90 without a heart attack and blow? I can rattle off all those things, but we don't keep the same stats for how much we suffer. And I think of your work as among the most important things that have helped me and now, by extension, some of my patients who are willing to go down this path with me to reduce that burden of suffering. Nice. Well, glad to hear it. Thank you for making so much time this afternoon. Yeah, it's a pleasure. And congratulations on the podcast. You are one of these few examples of somebody who goes from the conversation of, I think maybe I want to start a podcast. Should I start a podcast? And then I turn around and three weeks later you have this amazing podcast that is more professionally produced than mine and people love. So you and your team deserve a lot of credit for that. I know I've said this before, but it's always worth repeating. I mean, I think that you and Tim were probably among the two most vocal, along with probably Patrick O'Shaughnessy, but I think you and Tim the most. Really? Because honestly, I was just so intimidated by the work I saw you and Tim doing. I was like, well, there's no goddamn way I can do that like that's. That's just above my pay grade. So I still think my podcast pales in comparison to yours and Tim's, but I am happy to be in the arena and it it has turned out to be much more enjoyable than I would have ever predicted. Yeah. And so I do regret having not done it two years sooner when you were harping on me and Tim was harping on me. But better late than never. And it's an honor to have you as a guest on my little budding podcast. Well, keep it up. Thanks, man. If you find the Waking Up podcast valuable, there are many ways you can support it. You can review it on itunes or Stitcher or wherever you happen to listen to it. You can share it on social media with your friends, you can blog about it or discuss it on your own podcast, or you can support it directly. And you can do this by subscribing through my website@samharris.org. And there you'll find subscriber only content which includes my Ask Me Anything episodes. You also get access to advanced tickets to my live events, as well as streaming video of some of these events. And you also get to hear the bonus questions from many of these interviews, all of these things and more you'll find on my website@samharris.org. Thank you for your support of the show. It's listeners like you that make all of this possible./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, not much housekeeping here today. I've spent much less time on social media of late, so much less time, in fact, that I really can't actually judge whether what I've seen there this week just reflects an especially contentious week, or whether I have changed in my sense of what is the expected ambient level of hostility and lunacy on Twitter. It has seemed completely crazy every time I've checked back in over there. Honestly, I just reread the Unabomber's Manifesto for the first time since it was originally published, as you might recall, under threat of further maiming and murder, and it is a slightly crazy document. You can certainly hear Kaczynski grinding his teeth in the background more or less throughout, but the truth is, it is better reasoned and modulated than half of what I see on Twitter, and this is from people with blue check marks by their names and large followings. So I don't know what it means to be able to honestly say that half the people on Twitter seem less hinged than a man who was sending bombs in the mail, but it does seem that we're performing an experiment on ourselves, the consequences of which are as yet undetermined. Anyway, I'm very happy to have withdrawn. To the degree that I have, it feels far more sane. One of the things that happened this week is Coleman Hughes, who's been a guest on this podcast, The predatorally. Mature undergraduate, still undergraduate from Columbia University studying philosophy. Coleman testified in Congress on the topic of whether it would make sense to pay reparations for slavery, and he argued against paying reparations. I'm not actually sure I agree with him, though. He was perfectly rational in his remarks, and I'll be going on his podcast in a few weeks, I think, and we'll probably talk about this. I'm actually quite open minded on whether or not reparations make sense. Some of you might recall that Hitch argued in a formal debate in favor of reparations. It's a genuinely difficult question, so at a minimum, I can say I am quite open to arguments from both sides here. Anyway to watch Coleman's testimony and to have heard the hissing and booing in the gallery, to see the faces of some of the people sitting behind him reacting to his arguments and then to see the aftermath, to the degree that I did on social media, where at least one person with a blue check mark, an HBO writer called him a coon without apparent repercussions from among her fans. We have to find some way to correct course here. Which brings me to today's podcast. Today I'm very happy to have finally connected with Jared Diamond in person. Jared is a professor of geography at UCLA. He's the author, quite famously, of the book's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, and his newest book is Upheaval Turning Points for nations in Crisis. He has won many awards, including a MacArthur Grant and a Pulitzer Prize. He's a member of the US. National Academy of Sciences and an all around fascinating man. In this conversation, we focus on the themes that Jared has focused on in the books I just mentioned, which really are about the rise and fall of civilization. We discuss political polarization in our own time. We talk about disparities in civilizational progress, why it is that Europeans, for the most part, seem to have dominated the globe, talk about the precariousness of democracy in the US. At the moment, the fact that we lack a strong political center, talk about immigration policy. And as always, if you find conversations of this sort valuable, you can support the podcast by subscribing through my website@samharris.org. I left the bonus questions in this episode, but I have bonus questions from many other podcasts that will soon be rolled out as subscriber. Only content there. Anyway, without further delay, I bring you Jared Diamond. I am here with Jared Diamond. Jared, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure. Thank you for coming, as many of my listeners will be. I've been an admirer of your work for many years. This is not your first book, but the first book I read of yours was Guns, Germs, and Steel. And I want to talk about really, three of your books that seem to form a kind of unified picture of how civilizations arise and thrive and fail. So I'm thinking of Guns, Germs and Steel collapse and the new one upheaval. And we'll focus on the new one because it has special relevance to the moment, both from a publishing point of view and just from a, you know, what is happening in our own country point of view. But thank you for doing this, and it's a great pleasure to do this with you in person. Gladly. I'm happy to discuss these subjects with you, which I guess interests you just as they interest me. So, like many people who I admire, you have taken an unconventional route into focusing on what you focus on. You were a physiologist at first for quite some time and now are functioning more in the mode of a historian. Though you have a formal appointment in the geography department at UCLA. How do you think of the way in which you have respected or failed to respect the traditional boundaries between disciplines and what you've focused on. It's not something that I think I'm consciously about. It's just that I'm interested in lots of things. And already as a child, I was interested in lots of things. In high school, I expected that I was going to become a physician like my father, and so I figured that I would be doing science for the rest of my life. Therefore, in high school in high school, I would use the time to do things other than science. So in high school, I took Latin and Greek, and I had wonderful history courses in college, again, being premed, expecting to do it for the rest of my life, I took the minimum number of required science courses. I've never taken a biology course other than introductory biology. That's hilarious. I majored in biochemical sciences, but I never took a course in biochemistry, and instead I took courses in all sorts of possible things. Took courses in astronomy, intensive Russian music composition for professional musicians, oral epic poetry. So I was interested in all these things. I then decided not to go to medical school at the last minute. Instead, got my went and took a PhD. Did graduate study and physiology, became one of the world's three experts on the Gallbladder, and I was hired by UCLA Medical School as a promising Gallbladder expert. That sounds like a backhanded compliment in some way. The Gallbladder is not an organ that we think a lot about, and that's right. The Gallbladder does not play a lead in the world. The reason I studied it is that the Gallbladder is a model. It uses the same mechanisms that the kidney and intestine use, but it's easier to study. Right? So I got a lot of mileage out of the Gallbladder. I taught kidney physiology and intestinal physiology and liver physiology to medical students until 2002. But then two things triggered my my shift out of out of Gallbladders. One was the birth of our twin sons in 1987. And at that point, I realized that their future was not going to depend upon Gallbladders, not their future was going to depend upon the state of the world, not even their own Gallbladders. Not even their own, because you can do without a Gallbladder. And the other thing was, totally unexpectedly, in 1985, being awarded one of these MacArthur Foundation fellowships, which you would think would thrill me. So I got a phone call, totally unexpected, because you don't know you get nominated. Totally unexpected saying. This is Ken Hope from the McCarthy Foundation. You've been watered a fellowship, and we'll give you no strings for five years, and we'll give you any questions. And I was stunned. And then I went into a depression for a week and say, really the only lasting depression of my adult life. The reason was that the award, in effect, told me, jarrett, we expect things of you. And I was saying to myself, but you've been wasting your time on Gallbladders. What are you going to do about it? So it was those two things, the MacArthur Award and the birth of my sons, that induced me to switch in 1987. Gradually, my interest in I enjoyed doing physiology, but my interest in it decreased. And as time went on, I wanted to switch from physiology to geography. But university appointments are not a portable appointment where you can go around and find some department that will take you. Instead, my appointment was as a Gallbladder physiologist. It took a lot of negotiations to get me transferred from the physiology department to the geography Department, where I've been since 2002. What did you get the MacArthur Award for? Someone must have recognized that your your work held wider promise than focus on the Gallbladder. How did that happen? I had already at the time I got the MacArthur Award, I had a parallel career in ecology and evolution because I had been a bird watcher from 87 onwards. And so immediately after I got my PhD, in the year or two after I got my PhD, at the time, I didn't know what the significance of it all was, but I immediately began looking for another field, a parallel field, and I seriously considered a career in conducting, music conducting. I seriously considered getting into pre Colombian pottery, but those didn't take, and instead I went to New Guinea. It was love at first sight, and I've been studying New Guinea birds ever since. So for the MacArthur Award, my work on New Guinea birds, I'm sure it was that and not my Gallbladder work that contributed to the MacArthur Award. Right. Well, you are a true polymath. Really? I got to think that at a certain point we will age out of being polymaths because there was a time with knowledge doubling every three to five years. It becomes harder and harder to even pretend to know much about so many things. But it seems to me that you really have managed it as your books attest. What's the significance of your scientific background in how you approach writing history? That's interesting. It's not something that I thought of consciously, but the fact is that that my approach to history is always comparative history. I've never most historians do single case studies, so historian will write a book about 19th century Germany or 17th century France. I've never done that. Instead, all of my historical studies, they're comparative. I compare different countries or different societies. That's something that I learned right at the beginning of my Gallbladder career, when I went to Cambridge, England, to do my graduate study, my mentor was a great physiologist who was studying iron transport in muscles. And the way he did it, he was looking at the effect of potassium on sodium efflux and muscles. He did it beautifully. He had two test tubes and he had two pieces of the same muscle in two different tubes. One tube had potassium and the other tube had no no potassium. So he compared pieces of the same muscle. Then when I went to New Guinea and began studying New Guinea birds in in order to study the effect of species number one on species number two in New Guinea, it's not considered nice or permissible or legal to go around exterminating species number one on one mountain in order to see what that does to species two. I had to find different mountains where one mountain, for whatever reason, lacked species one naturally. And then I compared it with another mountain that had species number. So my approach has always been a comparative approach. And then when I got to history, I realized that with history, the comparative approach forces you to poses questions that you would never think of otherwise. An example that I think of is that I love reading books about the American Civil War, like so many people and all these fat books on the American Civil War, they'll devote six pages to Second Day of the Battle of Gettysburg. But at the end of an 800 page book, they haven't discussed one of the most salient things of the American Civil War, which is that at the end of the war, the victors did not kill the losers. Instead, at the end of the American Civil War, only one person was executed, and that was the commandant of Andersonville prisoner of war camp. Whereas at the end of the Spanish Civil War, the victors killed a million of losers. And at the end of the Finnish Civil War, the victors began to kill losers at a rate higher than any modern genocide rate until Rwanda. If you compare civil wars, you're then struck by this thing that's crying out for explanation with the American Civil War. But if you don't do comparisons, the question doesn't arise. So with comparative studies, naturally, with a 500 page book, I can't devote the whole book to 19th century Germany. I have to divide the book among seven countries. But questions arise, and you can answer questions through comparison. So that's my approach to history. Yeah, and it's thrilling to read. Again, I want to talk about three of your books, but I guess I want to frame the conversation with what seems to be the charged political moment, especially as we notice it in our own country, the US. And in Western Europe. And I don't know how much time you spend on social media. I think probably none. Yeah, I don't know how to turn them off. If there's no other variable that accounts for your basic sanity, it's really that. But it does seem like this is a concern you raise throughout your latest book upheaval, which is what we're witnessing is a persistent and growing failure of political compromise and our ability to resolve our differences civilly, to converge on answers to global problems that break us out of partisan gridlock. And this is something that increasingly worries us, and I think we're right to be worried. And we're going to talk about it as we get into upheaval. But I'm just wondering just how you view the current moment and how much of that was informing your writing of your latest book, the current moment, meaning right now or this year or since 2016? No effect. Because I began, the people often ask me, Jared, did you start your book within November 2016? It took longer than that yet. No, I began the book in 2013. I didn't foresee 2016. It happened that the book was doubly at the right moment, not only because 2016 exacerbated the breakdown of political compromise in the US, but also Brexit. Brexit began after I started the book. I'm just back from, what, ten days in the UK. I was shocked being in the UK. I've lived in the UK for five years, and I had thought that the United States had the most imminent problems. But no, Brexit threatens big problems for Britain before. What's happening in the US will cause big problems in the US. Brexit risks the falling apart of the UK, secession of Scotland and even secession of Northern Ireland. Yeah, yeah. Well and there's also just such a there's a breakdown of civility that is shocking to me and it's so cavalier. I mean, so I perhaps you've noticed this if you it's hard to know what one notices if one isn't on Twitter these days, but I don't know how widely reported this has been, but there's been this seeming epidemic of people throwing milkshakes at politicians they don't like, in the UK, especially. And I look at this through two lenses. One is just kind of my personal understanding of, as a semi public figure and a controversial one, what my security concerns are and what it means to have someone come up to you in public and hit you with a milkshake, even though in this case you have bodyguards around. What that is, actually, whether the perpetrators know it or not, is a mock assassination. What it is is demonstrating that I can get this close to you, no matter whether you're Bill Gates or whoever you are. You've spent millions of dollars a year on your personal security, and yet right now, I can throw whatever I want in your face. And it advertises that to the entire world, which includes people who may, in fact, want to assassinate people. So there's that kind of narrow security concern, which many people are unaware of. And when I voice this on social media, many people find it visible. It's just a milkshake. What do you do? This is not a mock assassination, but the security implications are graver than people realize, because what it does is it just advertises persistent vulnerability, no matter how much you spend on security. But more important than that, it's a breakdown of civility such that there are very few stops past a milkshake between where we are now and actual political violence. If you can no longer resolve your differences with a political figure whose views you detest through conversation or debate or criticism, and you have mainstream journalists advocating for the public humiliation of people by thrown milkshake such that they no longer feel secure in their persons, it's alarming. Again, there are very few places to stop where we can arrest our slide into actual political violence. I was wondering how you view civility itself and inability to let words suffice as they break on our base or natures collectively. Well, it's not only politicians. I don't know whether you noticed as you came in here that the entrance to my house now has a metal wall around it with spikes at the top. And Marie and I put those up about a decade ago at a time when some angry anthropologist launched a series of four lawsuits against sorry to laugh, but given my run ins with anthropologists, the angry anthropologist is a fixture in my imagination that I can easily summon. Most anthropologists are normal, decent human beings. Yeah, let's leave it at that. Yeah. But there are a small number of very angry anthropologists, more so in anthropology than in other fields. And consequences for me are the putting up of spikes on my fence and getting bodyguards. There were two broad shouldered gentlemen in black suits who accompanied me to a lecture that I gave at an unnamed nearby university because an angry anthropologist called up my host and began by saying, do you believe in academic freedom? And then the angry anthropologist proceeded to say that he intended to attempt to disrupt my lecture. So we had the two gentlemen and in broad with broad black children. It's something that I'm constantly where I've not been been physically attacked, but I certainly have been on the receiving end of a lot of wild verbiage. Yeah, well, let's get into that a little bit. Let's start with guns, germs and steel. What was the thesis of that book and what was controversial about it? So the question of the book before we get to the thesis, the question of the book is why has history turned out differently for people of different continents? Why is it that you and I are sitting here speaking English in land of Native Americans where the language 500 years ago was Chumash? Why did it turn out that way? Why is it not the case that Chewmash is the language spoken in London? Or why is it, let's say, Bantu languages are not spoken in Australia? Why did history turn out that way? Why did history turn out with Eurasian people expanding and particularly within Eurasia Europe, European people? So that's the question. And the subtext of that, obviously, is that we're not just interested in who speaks which language. We're talking about why did certain civilizations thrive so fully that they could conquer and dominate others. And you have massive disparities in wealth, in technological sophistication and all the rest. Exactly the way that my friends in New Guinea put it. They talk about cargo. Cargo is the New Guinea term for all of the good stuff for metal, technology, writing, schools, medicine. And the way New Guineans put it to me is why did you white people develop all the cargo while we black people had none? New Guineans posed the question explicitly, and the question was posed to me by a New Guinean in 1972. It was a great question. I babbled out something, but as soon as I said it, I knew that my answer was wrong. Why is it that these really smart people in New Guinea, why is it that we Europeans, I who can't find my way around in New Guinea forest without being guided and I need a child to lead me by the hand so I won't fall off a cliff? Why is it that New Guineans didn't conquer the world? The thesis of guns, germs and steel. When you ask people, when I ask professors of biochemistry in the United States this question why did Europeans conquer the world? A typical answer that I'll get is, well, you know, I hate to say it, this isn't politically correct, but higher IQ and more brains than Eugeo Christian work ethic. But all you have to do is work in New Guinea one day and you see that it's not that Europeans have better brains than New Guineans. There was some other explanation. So Gunstrom's of Steel in fact interpreted, and the explanation is now widely accepted by people concerned with these things. Gunstrom and Steel interpreted the different rates of development of people on different continents in terms of the wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication because everybody was huntergatherers everywhere in the world until 11,000 years ago with the beginnings of agriculture, you got population explosion, food surpluses, surpluses that could feed inventors, kings, scribes. But only a tiny fraction of wild plant and animal species are suitable for domestication. And you can satisfy yourself by just by taking a walk this weekend in the Santa Monica mountains and seeing what there is out there that suitable for domestication, like nothing trying domesticated a skunk or a deer. So the people living in the areas with wild plant and animal species, the Fertile Crescent, China, Mexico, with ones who got the head start on developing the cargo. Yeah, so I remember from that book there's an arresting image of just how implausible it would be to try to saddle a rhino and ride it into battle. And apparently a zebra is not much easier to domesticate. I was on the animal management committee of the Los Angeles Zoo and I was astonished to learn there that the zoo animal that each year kills or cripples more more keepers zookeepers in the United States than any other is not tigers. But it's zebras because zebras have the nasty habit. Well, two things. They have a nasty habit of biting and they don't let go until you're dead. The other thing is seriously? Seriously, I never heard that they have a really vicious kick. The kick is useful to them because when they're being chased by a lion and the lion is ready for the next one, the zebra kicks out and smashes the jaw of the lion. So zebras have not been domesticated. There are people that then point out to me that their Lord Rothschild got some zebras that pulled his card in London. Yes, you can occasionally get zebras to pull cards, but they never been domesticated, whereas horses and donkeys have been domesticated. So you paint a picture of really sheer unearned geographic disparities in luck, completely unearned geographic disparities, where that upsets angry anthropologists is twofold. First of all, to discuss why Europeans expanded over the world means that you are Eurocentric and racist. It's not nice to pose the question, but the fact is everybody can see that Europeans, rather than Aboriginal Australians or Africans, conquer the world, and it cries out for explanation. The fact that historians and archaeologists hadn't provided an answer to the question, that forces people to fall back on the obvious racial explanation. You can see that people have different faces, and maybe that means that they have different brains. So to pose the question means that you're bad because you're racist and you're eccentric. Right. And then also to answer the question in terms of geography means geographic determinism, which is another dirty word. Geographic determinism seems to imply that the human spirit counts for nothing. Well, the human spirit counts for something within limits. But if you would like to stand at the North Pole in January in a T shirt and shorts and look to the human spirit to allow you to stand, you're going to need a lot of lots of luck for the human spirit. All this geography has big effects, and in some cases, the the big effects are dominant, like standing the North Poland T shirt. But also in developing agriculture, if you don't have domesticable species around there, you're not going to develop agriculture. And without agriculture, you don't develop metal tools and you don't develop writing and don't develop kings. So what has been the most persuasive argument against this thesis? Has there been anything? None whatsoever. Oh, to be able to say that, that's great. The fact is there's no counter explanation. Occasionally I recall one archaeologist who said there are cultural reasons why Aboriginal Australians never developed agriculture. Well, for heaven's sakes, there are, what, 184 different tribes in Aboriginal Australia, and they're different from each other, but Australia has no domesticable plant or animal species other than macadamia nuts. But you can't fail to civilization based on macadamia nuts. So there is no alternative explanation. Right? Yeah, I'm totally persuaded of your thesis. I guess it also seems plausible to me that there are other contributing factors which arguably are of the sort raised that are even less politically correct than yours. Which is any groups of people who are isolated enough so as to express biological and cultural variation are going to differ in some factors that are relevant to their differential success as groups. Right. So whether it's biology and or culture, it's almost certainly both to some degree, there will be differences in the mean level of expression of certain skills which could lead to differential success given the environments that select for it. It seems to me to be an unsustainable and a fundamentally unnecessary political commitment to say that we know in advance that there are no differences between groups that are biologically mediated. We know there are cultural differences that are irrelevant. That is as obvious as the nose on anyone's face. But the idea that there could be biological differences that have implications for the success of whole groups of people seems to me that we can't rule that out. And there's no reason to rule that out once we know that our political commitment is such that we want all of these unearned differences in luck to be canceled, insofar as that increasingly becomes possible. We want everyone to be able to thrive in whatever way they want to thrive, such that it's compatible with the thriving of other people. That has to be the punchline for how we build a viable global civilization. But the idea that this is just to express the fear as clearly as possible, it seems, and I'm sure anthropologists by the thousands would line up in defense of this notion. That the idea that if we tested Fijians for the top 100 traits we care about in in human beings, quantitative intelligence being one, but we could add, you know, sense of humor and everything else we love about people. Whatever those 100 traits are, and we tested Norwegians on those same traits. People feel like we are approaching some ethical or political emergency. If we don't conclude in advance that all of those mean values must be the same, or if there's any difference between them, genetics can't have anything to do with it, right? Even though we know that so much about ourselves is largely governed by what we are physically, that is, genetically. So I wonder if you have any thoughts on that topic. All of what you say about expectations, it's all true. People different differ in eye color around the world. People differ in hair color red, yellow, brown, black, et cetera. So why shouldn't they also differ in quantitative ability or in predisposition to verbalize in certain ways? Why shouldn't they differ in predisposition to tonal versus non tonal languages? Theoretically, that's a possibility. The problem is that despite a lot of effort by a lot of people to establish differences in, say, cognitive skills, differences at a population level have not been established. Instead, there are obvious massive cultural. Effects on cognitive skills. But my experience in New Guinea it doesn't take much time with New Guineans, with traditional New Guineans to realize that these are smart people. And yes, there are differences among New Guineans, but on the average, my experience with New Guineans right from the first year has been that they are more curious and they're more inventive, more prone to look for possibilities, to use something. They just strike me as more alert than Europeans right now. The reasons for this, well, then maybe there's an invidious comparison to draw between New Guineans and Europeans for certain types of inventiveness. I'm just saying that what I'm increasingly worried about. You're talking to someone who's still dealing with the aftermath of having had Charles Murray on the podcast and dealt with the whole legacy of his publicity problems really in the end. And it just seems to me that we can close the loop on the political and ethical concern without knowing what we're going to find over the next century of studying human biology, human genetics, its contribution to everything we care about. We know that we are living in a circumstance where each of us personally and all of us collectively have inherited the world as we find it. You didn't pick your ancestors and therefore you didn't pick your genes. You didn't pick the society into which you were born. And whatever tools you have to make the most of the situation, you didn't earn any of them right. You can't account for yourself. And yet what we noticed the world over, both within our society how many homeless people did I pass on the way to your house to conduct this interview? I know that. But for a few changes in my neurophysiology or just in my history as a person, opportunities I didn't get or didn't take advantage of, I would be one of those people who's now sleeping on the sidewalk tonight. So we know that we want to mitigate those disparities and we know that being good people and building good societies is predicated on our commitment to mitigating those disparities. And yet I find myself surrounded by people, and again, they seem disproportionately to be anthropologists or social scientists who feel that even to broach the topic that I just broached to you is a sign of some covert interest in white supremacy or some insane political doctrine that has gotten people by the millions killed. And these are the kinds of political experiences we're about to talk about. I just think we have to pull back from this brink where we feel like we can't again. I wasn't even expecting to bring this up to you, but given your academic bona fide, as it seems worth doing, this is where the precariousness of our situation intellectually was kind of first forced upon me. I remember in 214 when it was found that homo sapien DNA had been commingled with Neanderthal DNA to the tune of 2.7% or 3%. Basically everyone on earth, with the exception of people who have just all of their ancestors in Africa is part Neanderthal, right? And so I remember going out on social media that day and quite sanctimoniously saying, attention all racists. You were right. Whites are special. We're part neanderthal. Blacks are just human. Right? It took me about 5 seconds after sending that tweet to understand. What if it had gone the other way? What if the only people on Earth who were PARTNEY underthal were people of African direct African descent? That would have been a life deranging, probably life destroying discovery for the geneticists who had the misfortune to make it or for any journalist who had the temerity to even talk about it. It just would have been so awful. For reasons that we have to perform an exorcism on, we can't politically be vulnerable to just the data coming in. The data will be whatever they are, right? And who cares whose part in Neanderthal in the end? But I feel that we as a community of public intellectuals, for lack of a better word, are truly vulnerable to what is a kind of moral panic around the politics of discussing human difference. If the studies were available, the answers are likely to be unpalatable to people who least expect the outcome of the studies. A personal example that I encountered was that a friend introduced me to a prospective donor to support my research and the prospective donor was a wealthy industrialist. And then the friend made the horrible mistake of talking about my New Guinea work and then saying a friend in front of the prospective donor, jared, didn't you say that New Guineans strike you as more intelligent than Europeans? And at which point the prospective donor flipped out and said, what has any New Guinean ever done for world civilization? Well, if you don't have metal tools, your capacity to possibilities of doing stuff for all civilization are limited. The fact is that those who invented agriculture longest ago, 11,000 years ago, the major causes of death in Eurasian societies for the last many millennia have been epidemic infectious diseases, which means that the strongest natural for selection is for overcoming resisting smallpox and measles. That depends upon abo blood groups and it's a major cause of death, whereas in New Guinea the major causes of death are starvation, fighting with other New Guineans, figuring out how to survive a frost or a famine. This strong selection for intelligence rather than epidemic diseases because the population wasn't large enough for epidemic diseases. Therefore, it would not be surprising if the studies that you're thinking of end up showing that New Guineans have not only more social skills developed culturally, but that they were genetically selected for superior cognitive ability. But there are a lot of people who won't like that conclusion. Right? And I would also imagine that there's been a fair amount of selection pressure for intergroup violence out group violence. Yeah. In basically any society that doesn't have a central government. What central government? Central governments can declare war and kill 100,000 people in in 10 seconds. Yes, but what central governments can also do is, is end wars. Whereas in societies without centralized governments, you can't end wars, you can reach a temporary peace or an agreement to halt the hostilities, but then a batch of hotheads from your group who go attack another group, you can't restrain the hotheads. So the fact is, and again, anthropologists don't like to recognize the fact, but there's massive evidence that the percent of people who die violent deaths per year in traditional tribal societies without centralized government is considerably higher than in state societies. Yeah, well, that's definitely a happy point that our mutual friend Steve Pinker has made to the consternation of many that civilization as horrible as recent or even distant wars were. Again, even adding World War I and World War II to the ledger, what we see is a precipitous decline in the risk that you are going to die at the hands of another person as civilization has progressed. Right. And Steve has drawn on studies by anthropologists and archeologists who've surveyed dozens and maybe hundreds of societies around the world, traditional societies. And yet you can come up with a couple of traditional societies with low rates of violence, but the great majority have rates of violence, rates of violent deaths, percentages per year of violent deaths in excess of those in excess of the worst or the worse in excess of Poland in the 20th century. Yeah. Okay, we're on our way to your recent book, but let's touch on collapse. What was the thesis of that book? Thesis of collapse is that in the in the past, societies have to offer if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, brief housekeeping. Once again, I am now adding afterwards at the end of these podcasts, so I will save some of my remarks for there. Again, I'd like to urge supporters of the podcast to visit my website and go to the Subscriber Content page and download the subscriber feed of the podcast. If you are seeing a black Making Sense icon in your podcasting app, you do not have the Subscriber feed. You have the public one, and you will be missing some content and there'll be more of that kind of thing happening very soon. So you have been warned and as always, thank you for your support. Also, many of you have asked whether the conversations that I'm now having on the Waking Up app can be made available to podcast subscribers. The answer is yes. Although we've decided to put them on my website only, not pipe them to the Subscriber feed. This is because they really are narrowly focused on the topic of living an examined life, meditation, the nature of consciousness, and many of these conversations are just too specific for the podcast generally. So I just don't want to hit the average podcast listener who is supporting the podcast with these episodes in his or her feed. So if you want to hear them, they will be on the website and you can listen in your browser and they will soon be posted in the Subscriber content section. And of course, if you really want to get into these topics with me and you want to hear everything I have to say there, there really is no substitute for subscribing to the Waking Up app. There's a reason why it's a separate app. And as always, if you actually can't afford a subscription, you need only send an email to support@wakingup.com and you'll be given a free account. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Andrew Morantz. Andrew is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His work has also appeared in Harper's, New York Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Times, and many other publications. He is a contributor to Radio Lab and the New Yorker Radio Hour. He has spoken at Ted and he's been interviewed in many places CNN, MSNBC, NPR. And we are talking today about his book Antisocial Online Extremists Techno Utopians and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. And it's an interesting book and an interesting discussion. It gets more contentious than I was expecting. About an hour in or so, Andrew is more woke than I realized, and we talk about all that. I can't tell if we disagree more than is apparent in this conversation or less. I'm going to guess more. Again, I was a little surprised at the line he took through parts of this conversation. This is becoming an occupational hazard. Anyway, I'll have a few more things to say about that in my afterward, and now I bring you Andrew Morantz. Andrew thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So you've written a fascinating book, which is a really fun read. The book is antisocial online, extremists techno utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation. Before we jump into your book, give me a potted bio for you. How do you describe your career as a journalist? It's a good question. Well, first, I think some people might have a hard time believing that it's a fun read, but I appreciate you saying it because although it is dark subject matter, I did try to find some of the dark comedy in it. Yeah, there's a lot of that. Yeah, I know. I'm glad that landed because it can't just be bleakness from start to finish, even though it does get bleak sometimes. I guess I would say I graduated from college in 2006, moved to Brooklyn and became a freelance journalist because that's what all my friends were doing, basically, and for other reasons, too. I wanted to learn about stuff and pursue truth without sort of boxing myself into one academic discipline exclusively for the rest of my life, and wanted to try to write beautiful sentences that also spoke to true things in the world and all the sort of cliche reasons. One becomes a sad young literary man in Brooklyn and ended up freelancing for Harper's, New York Magazine, Mother Jones a variety of places, and did a master's program where I met someone who was leaving an editorial position at The New Yorker and told me that one was opening up. And it was a kind of entry level, bottom of the food chain sort of job there. But I just was so impressed with everyone I met there that even though I wasn't sure I wanted an editorial entry level job and I was in some ways just happier being a writer, I took that job. And then I sort of was an editor and a writer for six or seven years before going back full time into writing, mostly for The New Yorker and for this book. It's interesting. So your book is fascinating because essentially you embedded yourself among the deplorables, and so it's really a report from the front. When did you actually start reporting for the book? There's kind of different ways of answering that. In one sense, the idea for the book really gelled once Trump entered the picture on that escalator that we all remember from June 2015. In another way, the preoccupations of the book, predated that I was reporting on clickbait factories and the kind of degradation of online media since 2014. It was a set of preoccupations I had already had. And then once Trump and Trumpism entered the picture, and then from there, various kinds of trollery and misogyny and white nationalism and stuff, it all kind of congealed into something that I felt really had to be a book. But the underlying concerns, I think, had been with me for a while they were just kind of in Kuwait and hard for me to even really put a name to. So before we actually begin to walk through your adventure in the book and touch specific topics like social media and fake news and gatekeeping and Trump and how the press deals with him and there's a lot to COVID here. But what's interesting to me is that many of us have been isolated in a kind of liberal scare quotes elitist bubble and this book is really a kind of breaking of that spell, just what it's like to fully embed in this culture of reaction in their own terms to elitism. And your book offers some considerable testimony to what has been happening. But I do have a concern that as we analyze this, we are very likely to be importing the continued liberal confusion into that context and misunderstanding things. What I feel like this is now a concern that I've expressed on multiple podcasts. I feel like there's the prospect of either exaggerating the problem of things like white nationalism, for instance, and sparking a kind of pendulum swing into moral panic. I certainly see that on the left. I see that especially clearly because there are people on the left who think I'm a white nationalist, which is completely insane. So as we walk through this at various points, I'm going to want to question whether or not the way you see the data you were confronting, the data being these conversations with people is the only interpretation to which it's susceptible. So with that caveat, let's just weigh it in and well, just to add on what we're getting before we get going, I think that's all stuff I'd be interested in exploring in the conversation. I guess one thing about being blindsided and being in an elitist bubble and all that stuff, it's sort of fully yes and also no. I mean, on the one hand I do find it sort of inexplicable that Trump could have any base at all in this country on a kind of like a priori level. On another level, I was the guy sort of betting my friends that he would win because I had that read of the political landscape. Even though I was sort of, you know, incredulous about it, I still did think it would happen. And there was kind of a lull in, you know, October 2016 when I sort of finally accepted, okay, I guess all the polls can't be wrong. But up until then I did sort of have a sense that it was not only possible, but at many points probable. So I definitely own the latte sipping, glasses wearing Brooklynite label that I very clearly wear. But I think there are bubbles and there are bubbles and yeah, I think it's possible to see out of them and in some cases all you have to do to see out of them is just do a Google search or a Facebook search, and there it is. So definitely everybody has their biases, and I have mine. But I do think that the sort of liberal elites who can't even believe that Trump misspelled a word on Twitter kind of caricature. We get carried away with that sometimes, I think. Yeah, I actually had forgotten that part of your book where you detail your presence with respect to Trump. So I was more in the bubble than you were, except I was struck by the detail you flag that The New Yorker had not prepared a cover for a Trump victory. They only had a Clinton cover, which was fairly amazing. Yeah, and there is a degree to which and we can get into this too, but there's another kind of bifurcation here with regard to The New Yorker because in a sense, The New Yorker is kind of a minor character in the book. And there's a way of reading what I do as a kind of parody of The New Yorkers insistence on putting accents on the word elite or the diarrhsis or whatever. And, like, that stuff is fun to mock, and I'm happy to mock it lightly. On the other hand, there is this sort of strange, almost reversal that I experienced where my natural tendency is to be pretty anti authoritarian and contrarian and anti establishment. In many ways, that's kind of my natural instinctive tendency. And yet I find myself kind of coming to this from within the kind of inner sanctum of elite American journalism. And I guess there's a lot to say about it. We can explore many angles of it, but I guess there are just different kinds of elitism, and most of them are obviously bad. And I think that from my experience of The New Yorker, from being inside it, it actually doesn't subscribe to that bad kind of elitism nearly as much as I would have expected. I mean, I expected a lot of snooty elbow patch wearing, all the stuff you see on The Family Guy or something. That hasn't been my experience. It has, however, been my experience that there's a lot of there are a lot of discriminations being made, you know, with regard to which piece is better than another piece or how a piece should be structured or which arguments withstand scrutiny. And so it is hierarchical in that sense. It is a gatekeeping institution in the sense that it takes great care to decide which things to publish and which things not to. But so, I mean, that's just to sort of mark that as to the extent that that is hierarchical. There are different ways of being hierarchical, some more arbitrary than others. Yeah, well, I once wrote an article titled In Defense of Elitism for Newsweek, and then John Meacham hopefully retitled it, when Atheists Attack. I still think yours is more clickable, but maybe more merit. tritious, right? Yeah. I was going after Sarah Palin back in the day. So let's start with social media. I think many of us feel that social media is somewhere close to the root of the problem. That coupled to the advertising model for digital media and the primacy of clicks, you point out in a recent New Yorker article. I don't think you make this point in your book, but that the Gutenberg revolution unleashed similar problems. Right. The printing press had liabilities in that it allowed for the amplification of misinformation, and Martin Luther is often celebrated as a sign that the printing press enabled the reformation. But as you point out, it also allowed him to spread his murderous antisemitism and ushered in something like a century of religious conflict. But it seems that there is something special about the time in which we're living and this notion upon which Facebook and these other companies are founded that linking people digitally is just an intrinsic good that hasn't really survived contact with reality these few years. Yeah, it unfortunately survived, I think, a few years beyond where it was plausible, and that extension of a few years was enough to, in part, give us Trump and Brexit and Bolsonaro and Modi and Duterte. I mean, I could go on, but yeah, I think you're right. The worm has kind of turned on that one. I think in the space of just the few years between when I started embarking on this project and when I'm putting it out into the world, I've been shocked at how much public opinion has swung from, in my view, one sort of extreme to the other. And I think that's helpful. I don't think we're all the way there yet in terms of nuance and understanding. Obviously, there's a lot of helpful stuff bundled together with a lot of really dangerous stuff. And I don't think on a large scale, we've really teased it all out yet. I guess to your point about whether it's different, I think, yes, it's different in the sense that well, two things. One, I think because we relied on a really unrealistically, oversimplified idea of what Liberatory technologies do. Because a lot of the young men who started these social media companies were just sort of assuming that their technologies would be like the printing press and that the printing press essentially did nothing but help us move toward progress in democracy and all the rest of it. They had an opportunity, if they had had a more nuanced view of it, to build in protections right from the beginning, and they didn't do that. And so they set themselves up for more pain than was necessary. I also think that even though the early publishers and printers in, you know, Renaissance Europe were ambivalent about their status as gatekeepers, they did come to accept pretty quickly that they had that role and responsibility. And the social media founders worked really hard to deny that they were gatekeepers, to deny that they had any curatorial responsibility to deny that they could be held accountable for what happened on their platforms. In some cases they're still trying to deny it again without any plausibility in my view. So yeah, I think it's the combination of these massively powerful tools with all kinds of denials of the idea that the tools could have any negative impact and that if they do have any negative impact, well, we're just not responsible for it. I think that is unique. Plus now we have nukes and climate crisis and just things that they didn't have to deal with back then. Do you think the gatekeeping problem is soluble? I think it can be improved. I don't have a perfect solution in mind but I think one key thing is for the engine of virality to be moved away from what it currently is, which is what I call activating emotion or I don't call it that. The scientists that I cite call it that. I think that's one big thing you could do where instead of the current system which measures engagement and engagement is measured by proxies for essentially things that increase your galvanic skin response, anger, lust, laughter just these very kind of animalistic behavioral responses. If you moved away from that as the coin of the realm and moved into a more balanced system where those emotional reactions were mixed with other kinds of reactions, more slow brain kinds of reactions, more prosocial reactions to use the mirror image of the book's title, that would solve a lot. The problem is it's really hard and it might make the companies a little bit less money. Yeah, well, there is just this problem which you cite in the book that fake news consistently spreads faster than the truth and it is because we're we've optimized for these these activating emotions. We've created essentially a quasi Darwinian system that selects for outrage and misinformation. It's a machine for generating controversy and you could see how you might tinker with the settings there. But it may just be a fact of human nature that the lurid, incredible, terrifying and divisive is stickier than something that tells us that people are mostly good most of the time and that order is progressing. Yeah, I would agree that the Lord and that those things are stickier inherently. I guess my hope would be that you could build a system that doesn't just privilege those things. I mean, we tend to assume that what we see on social media is just kind of a flat reflection of the popular will. Or that because we're seeing a lot of something that means that a lot of people want that thing to be out there and that it's just sort of a flat reflection of democratic urges and desires. I guess on one kind of immediate level that's true because there are people or bots in many cases clicking on the things. But in another sense there's a system that is conditioning people to behave a certain way. So it may have always been the case that lurid and false and sensationalist things got more attention. But if you were a producer of a newspaper, let's say, yeah, there was plenty of yellow journalism. There were plenty of penny papers and partisan presses and all the rest of it. But they also had a sense of shame. They also were members of a society that could be made to feel that they should stop goading society into war because their buddies would look down on them if they did it or that they would do it for. The beginning of part of their career and then try to look much more high minded for the latter part of their career like Joseph Pulitzer did. So I do think that human urges can be pushed back against when you have people in charge of the systems who are willing to try. Yeah, I guess I'm sympathetic with this distinction that every social media overlord wants to draw between a publisher and a platform, and they consider themselves the latter and therefore have more or less happily abrogated any curatorial responsibility that you or I would want to assign to them. I do understand that just because of the sheer scale of the problem, but for the fact that we might invent some AI that is truly competent, you know, and doesn't make egregious errors, you know, just censoring, you know, normal Republican senators as, you know, neo Nazis or whatever the the failure would be. There's a difference between the New Yorker making a decision about who to publish and what sort of views to amplify or me making a decision about who to speak with on this podcast. I think those kinds of decisions have to be made responsibly, and I take it seriously the concern about whether it makes sense to give someone a platform or not. There are many people I've there are people you spoke with in your book who've asked to be on the podcast and who I've decided essentially never to speak with because I think they are at least beyond my overton window. And even there I'm somewhat conflicted because part of me I'm somewhat idealistic about the prospects of just shining sunlight on bad ideas. And insofar as I think I'm capable of doing that, it's tempting to do it with any bad ideas of consequence. But I don't know, when you talk to someone like Jack Dorsey or anyone who's running a platform of this kind, it's hard to see how they can ever curate this correctly in a way that doesn't cause more problems than it's solving because there's just so many casualties of their inept efforts to curate. I mean, there are people who have received lifetime bans from Twitter for saying things like men are not women. In that case, that was considered hate speech against the trans community. Say more about your sense of optimism that we should even move in that direction. But what if the technology on some level just doesn't allow for this to be done in a way that is going to solve this particular problem. Yeah, there's a lot in there. I'm rarely accused of being an optimist, so I appreciate that. I don't think I'm very optimistic about their ability to do it, certainly not their ability to do it flawlessly. We can get into specific cases. I think my instincts on the trans stuff might be different than yours, but we can take any number of examples. But I do take the larger point that there's problems of scale, it's never going to be perfect, and that in some cases, the medicine could be worse than the disease. When it comes to banning people or kicking them off. I mean, I get that in principle, and I am definitely sympathetic to how hard it is for someone who's in charge of one of these platforms to make these very tough decisions. I don't think I have all the answers or that if I were in charge, I would know exactly what to do. I guess we kind of have a different starting point, though, where it seems like you might be starting from the system as it exists and then saying, well, how can we expect them to know exactly who to ban when? And I guess I would start a few steps back in the causal chain and question how the system was built in the first place. I think by the time you get to the point of deciding who to ban or who not to ban, it's, in a sense, too late. And you're dealing with symptoms instead of root causes. I mean, just because you brought up the example of Jack dorsey, he's been going around for the last six months or so saying, well, I think it might help if we got rid of follower accounts. I think it might help if we didn't incentivize likes and follows and shares as much as we incentivized other things. He hasn't done any of that. I'm not sure why he hasn't done it if he thinks it would help. But I mean, I think I do know why, because it would make the company less profitable, and its profitability is a big question mark right now. But that's just one example of how there are structural changes that can be made that are way above the level of do we ban this account or not. And I think what that gets to is the notion that these things were not built with this stuff in mind. Facebook is right now working on abdicating some of this responsibility, but they're doing it by building a so called supreme court of facebook. That is not an idea they would have entertained even three years ago. So there are different ways of getting around this problem. It's not just to curate or not to curate. Yeah. It's interesting to consider what would happen if we could curate perfectly let's say it's an error free Nazi detector. But then you still have the question of when these platforms become more or less identical to Internet infrastructure, which you could argue that some of them already are, so that you could draw an analogy to something like the phone company. Right. So let's say that the phone company could perfectly detect when people were spreading Nazi ideas in their private phone conversations. Should the phone company just shut down those accounts? That's sort of the territory we're in if we actually could do this. Well, just to address the point you just made, I mean, I guess the analogy I would use is that the phone company would be more analogous to crowd strike or not CrowdStrike. That's the thing in the Ukraine complaint, what's it called? Cloudflare. Cloudflare, yeah, exactly. That there would be deeper layers of Internet architecture. To analogize the phone company to Twitter would be to imagine that the phone gives you extra points every time you say something really exciting or something that really riles people up. That when you're on a conference call, if you call someone a douchebag or something, you get 15 extra points like you're in a video game. If the phone were tilting the playing field in that way, then the phone yeah, I think would have more of a gatekeeper analogous responsibility because the phone would be affecting our behavior in a proactive way. Okay, well, let's jump into the book properly. So you really go behind the scenes with a fairly motley cast of characters, none of whom I've met in person, I think, but some of whom I've had various skirmishes with online. But there is this larger issue which we should touch on, which is just this guilt by association algorithm that is running on the left. This really is a problem of the left where if you talk to someone who's ever spoken to someone who has spoken to someone who's a Nazi, you're a Nazi. Right. No one can survive that scheme. You have spoken to someone who's spoken to someone who's spoken to someone who's a Nazi. Well, I've spoken to all of them. Yeah, but you have spoken with them. You could argue to, however amicably, you're actually unhorsing them and their worldview, or to some degree doing that. This is not no one is going to argue, reading your book, that you gave these people platforms, or at least I wouldn't expect that would be a common charge. I would hope not. Yeah, I think that's right. I set out to see them through a critical lens from the beginning, and there is a confusion that I think a lot of journalists have and a lot of the public has about journalism. And it's a good faith confusion. It's not easily resolved between being unbiased or objective or any of those words and being someone who takes in the evidence of your senses. And more and more of those things seem to be at odds. So there's a way of that. I could have approached this project where I could have said, well, I'm just going to quote what they say, and I'm just going to kind of transcribe it and be a stenographer to power. And that's that. Or I could have done what I did do, which was be really critical and in some cases really acerbic and mocking, which I think was deserved and in some cases necessary. But you can't really do both. I mean you can't always be both even handed and tell the full truth. There's a difference there between me using the material I've gathered to tell the story I want to tell and handing the microphone to someone to tell the story they want to tell. I think that's a meaningful distinction. Does having hung out with these people in person noticeably corrupt your objectivity with respect to how you portray their ideas? Do you think you're less combative in your treatment of them and their ideas for having broken bread with them and shared and long car rides and all the rest? Yeah, it's a good question. I can't know for sure. I've only run that experiment once. I don't have a control group. I think you probably do have a control group and that there are other people you cover who you presumably don't meet face to face even and you know what that's like right? That's a good point. Yeah. I mean one thing I do try to do it's not just a sort of straight ahead taxonomy of shitty people on the internet. It's sort of using them as fodder to tell a larger story. But I do try to take care to taxonomize to the extent that I don't want to run together differences and conflate differences. Some of them are Nazis, some of them are not. Some of them are white nationalists, some of them are not. Some of them are just kind of die hard trumpists who I find absurd because they hold that opinion but I actually am fine with talking to in all other respects and some of them I just find kind of skin crawling and creepy all the way through. So it is case by case. Now the question of whether the case by case accounting is different for cases where I've hung out with people versus not, I think it's hard to say. I mean the kind of journalism I do mostly requires just really being a fly on the wall for long periods of time and there are some people who do that kind of longitudinal immersive style journalism who just don't do it about people they don't think they're going to like. I mean I have colleagues and friends who say I don't want to write a profile of someone unless I am reasonably sure that I'm going to enjoy their company because I don't want to spend my time in a combative environment. And I also just don't. Want to take on the responsibility of writing a really sharp, critical piece in the end, and I just would rather write an admiring piece. Now, obviously, I'm not one of those journalists, but I was always on guard against the possibility that they were playing me or that they were using their time with me to try to subtly lobby me toward a more flattering picture of them. In some cases, I think there was no danger of that, such as the cases of me, a Jewish journalist, talking to a professional antisemite, there was very little chance that I was going to see eye to eye with that person. And yeah, in the end, even in cases where there wasn't that direct of a conflict, I don't think that I was hoodwinked by any of them. And at the same time, I don't think I overreacted to that or overcompensated by trying to go harder on them than was merited. But I mean, it's really not for me to decide. Yes, there is an interesting effect of compassion creeping in, for better or worse, where, just as the reader, one of the more odious characters you talk about is this guy Mike Enoch, who I knew nothing about. That's his pseudonym. What's his real name again? Painovich. Painovich. Mike Panovich. But when you get the details of his childhood and his life, it's it's pretty easy to see that there's a a psychological explanation for at least, you know, some of his obsession with these ideas and and, you know, the misuse of his own mind. I mean, he's he's a smart guy who's spending all his time being an antisemite, yet married to a Jewish woman, or I guess no longer married to a Jewish woman once she discovered the nature of his podcast. But the whole thing is so depressing that it's hard not to just see him as a casualty of something his own agency kind of erodes, and you just see but for the fact that he wasn't fed an endless supply of prednisone because he had such horrible eczema as a child, things might have been different. And it's those kind of details which, if you're just dealing with the ideas, I just find if I'm just reacting to someone because they're putting out terrible memes, that's one level where I can just deal with the ideas and I can be as uncompromising as I can be. But then if you hung out with someone and gotten a sense of their humanity and all of the exculpatory or potentially exculpatory influences on them, you come away sort of not knowing how harshly to judge them as a person. I felt the same thing with Cernovich. Frankly. I've never met Cernovich. He's attacked me a bunch online, and I responded in kind a little bit, but then I just sort of got more of a sense of how complicated it was to be Mike Cernovich, and I just couldn't keep it up anymore. It just seemed like, all right, this is just not worth interacting in a hostile way with this person at all. And yeah. So I just don't know if you felt that in your reporting or not, because as a reader, I felt it meeting some of these guys, it just felt like I wouldn't want to trade places with any of these people, so how harshly am I going to judge them? I think you're right that spending a lot of time with these people, both as a reporter and for you as a reader, it does change and deepen the way you see them. And that was part of my goal. I think it's tricky because you don't want to let people off the hook for their terrible behavior. And there's a really fine line between empathy and excuse, or you use the word compassion. I don't know how many layers deep we want to go, but it's kind of deep in my ethos that I try to have radical compassion for everyone. I try to have compassion for Donald Trump, who's obviously suffering from one or more personality disorders, and who it would be easier to have compassion for him if you felt that he was actually suffering. Right. But you're using suffering in a different sense because we're suffering from his neurological disorders, but he doesn't appear to be suffering from them. I think in the first few minutes before he can actually get the TV to turn on in the morning, I think he probably experiences immense suffering. But I obviously don't know. And in a sense, it doesn't matter, right? Because what I really try to do and I'm not saying that I'm able to do this always, I'm not some Christ like saint or anything, but I do think on some deep level, the goal is to try to have empathy for everyone, even the worst people. Now, that obviously doesn't mean that you excuse what they're doing. And every fiber of my being thinks Donald Trump is a bad dude. It's just like, what do we really mean by bad? We mean that he behaves badly, he's bad for the world, he's bad at his job. You can go down the list. But does it mean that he is condemned on every level, that he is a soulless creature who's not a human being? If you really, really want to get down to the core of it, a part of it has to do with you mentioned the concept of things might have been different in these people's lives. And one of the deep sort of concepts that I'm wrestling with in the book is this concept of contingency and how history might have been different and people's lives might have been different, and that, yeah, there is this kind of deep, existentialist effect of a kind of giant pachinko machine that we're all in. But I think the key and I didn't expect to be talking about this kind of stuff, but I think it does get to that deep level pretty quickly. Because I think the key is to try to hold at once the sort of existentialist, absurdist notion that nothing is predetermined and that we're not on an automatic track toward progress and redemption while also not becoming nihilistic and feeling that life has no meaning. And so part of how that for me applies in this case is to think that on some level, of course, people need to be held accountable for their actions. And of course, there's a massive moral difference between being a professional antisemite and being a professional nurse or bus driver. You know, I mean, there are differences in how we act in the world, and they're immensely meaningful. But I really struggle with saying that the deepest and most complete explanation we can give for someone who does bad things is that they're a human dumpster fire. And that's the only thing we have to say about them. I actually think it's more incumbent on us, again, not to excuse not to look away, but to actually understand the complexity of it. And in no way to say, oh, if you grew up poor or if you had eczema, therefore you can do whatever you want. Absolutely not. Or that we have to agree with. You know, we have to go from 100% condemnation of their behavior to 90%. It's not that at all. It's just that on some deeper level, my wife has been a public defender in the past and their sort of ethos is you're not the worst mistake you ever made. And it's really, really hard to apply that to Nazis. Trust me. It's not instinctive. It's not intuitive. And again, I don't claim to be some Gandhian figure who just naturally intuitively does that. I mean, Nazis make me upset. They make me angry. I get why people want to yell at them. I get why people even want to punch them. And I don't claim to be above that. I just think it it's not the only place to land. And I also think it doesn't help us understand anything. I mean, there are different projects, right? There's one project that is about fighting the ideas, which is valuable. And there's another project that's about diagnosing and understanding where they come from. I think they're both necessary. Well, there really is a problem of understanding what's going on because in addition to having Nazis out there and, you know, extremists of various types, we have this other problem, this layer that is built around it, on it, somehow interacting with it, of what we might call troll culture. And there's just this new style of insincerity or apparent insincerity or irony usurping every other value which creates a problem of assessing what people actually believe and intend. Or even if you do grant that people should be taken literally, even in these contexts, it's hard to know just how committed they are to these specific ideas. There's a culture of just deliberate obfuscation around this, where, as you report, some of these people are I think this was I forget which website this was, but it was explicit that they wanted it to be hard for the normies to tell whether or not they're joking. Right? Right. And contained in that is the implication that most of the time we're not really joking. Right. Or we're not joking about some of the worst stuff. How do you think about troll culture and what should be the appropriate response to it? Because the response I'm seeing more and more in the mainstream media and on the left is just taking the worst possible construal of everything as the literal truth of everything. Yeah, and I get where that impulse comes from. And look, it's really, really complicated. I mean, I say a couple of times in the book that trolls set this ingenious trap, right? Because if you're a good troll and I think the President is good at very few things, but I think trolling is definitely one of them. If you're good at it, you don't leave people any good choice. Right. If you pay any kind of attention to a troll, you're letting them win because what they want is attention. If you let their views or putative views or offensive jokes or ironic whatever go unchallenged, then they also win. So it's a kind of trap. And I don't think we've figured out a good way out. I think I have a little part of the book where I'm at the White House Briefing Room, and I'm there with this kind of he's essentially an insurgent in a dirty culture war who is acting as a White House correspondent for the Gateway Pundit. So I'm there kind of shadowing him and sort of seeing how far he can go in the he's essentially just performing. He doesn't actually ask questions or intend to ask questions. He's just there to kind of act out the degradation of the norm of the press briefing room being meaningful at all. And while he's there. But nonetheless, he and others in this vein were just adorably excited to have been granted press credentials in the first place. Absolutely. So they're subverting it, then the norm of this institution is like, this is just a worthless goof, and yet this is the biggest day in my life that I get access to the White House. Totally. I mean, yeah, you see that all over the place. You see that with all kinds of reactionaries and proto reactionaries and want to be authoritarians, that our whole system is meaningless and should be consigned to the waste bin of history. And yet as soon as I have any power within it, I'm going to flaunt that power to the maximum. Not that these guys were really reactionaries in the sense that they had a consistent ideology, but just that their impulses run in both directions. But while I was there, with him. A few of the real reporters who were there called him out and sort of confronted him on camera or everything is on camera these days because someone just holds up a phone and they wanted to nail him to the wall. They wanted to nail him on having a view that was inarguably, beyond the pale, so that they could prove that he didn't belong there. And they couldn't really do it because they didn't, because they just didn't know exactly who he was. And so they kept saying, well, you are a white nationalist. And he said, well, my boyfriend is Colombian, so I guess I'm not a good white nationalist. And he was able to kind of win that round. Now, even though they weren't wrong in their intuition that he didn't belong there, he absolutely didn't belong there, because he wasn't even pretending to be good at being a journalist, some level was pretending, but just in the barest, most superficial way he really was. To the extent that what happens in that room is meaningful at all, which we can call into question, but to the extent that that kind of journalism is meaningful, he shouldn't have been there. But they couldn't really nail down why. And the reason I ended up being so scene dependent in the book is because I feel like I went round and round in my head about these theoretical concerns and reading into the history of questions of journalistic ethics and reading public opinion by Walter Lippman and thinking through how democratic institutions do or don't survive. And all of which was an interesting thought exercise. But then to just see a scene like that playing out in front of your eyes and seeing how even when something is obviously going awry, it's not always easy to name it accurately or to decisively prove it. And so to me, to get back to the substance of your question, that kind of seems like it suggests two different things to me that may or may not be at odds with each other. On one hand, it seems to me like you want to be really minimalist and limit yourself to only lodging accusations that you absolutely know to be true, because otherwise you could set yourself up for humiliation. On the other hand, when you're dealing with a really slippery, gifted troll, they're not always going to give you the ammunition you need. So if you limit yourself to only the barest assertions of fact, you're just letting them win because you are allowing a liar to dictate the terms of the debate. So of course I don't advocate for making up accusations or for misinterpreting jokes as reality or vice versa. Obviously, in a vacuum you want to get things right as often as you can. But the problem is they don't say what they mean, they don't give you the courtesy of telling you who they are. And so I get why people try to why sometimes people overplay their hand because you have to get outside of their setting of the terms. Well, many of them tell you who they are or they tell themselves who they are when only their friends are listening. If you listen long enough to many of these people, I think the mask, if they're ever wearing one, does come off sometimes. Yeah. So let's go to one of the kind of harder cases which are more, by definition, more mainstream. And here I think our intuitions might divide a little bit. And again, my intuitions here are now sort of newly anchored to the experience of being on the other side of this. I mean, being targeted by people's poorly calibrated racist detectors. So, like, take the cases of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingram. Right. So these are both people who I've been interviewed by. I've never met either of them in person, I don't think, but I've been interviewed by each of them a few times. Not recently. But you single them out essentially as racist dog whistlers for things they've said recently. And I think Laura Ingram said Democrats mostly want to replace those old white yahoo conservatives with a new group who might be a little bit more amenable to big government. And that you read as a dog whistle. I believe I can read that more charitably, just as a fairly factual statement. I mean, there's so many people on the far left who are banging on and on about white privilege and using whiteness and age and gender. So old white men being the filter against which they would make almost any political decision. I mean, they're they're advertising this about themselves and it seems to be charitable to Laura. And that's an impulse I don't often feel. She could have just been remarking on that and not dog whistling to actual racist, much less expressing her own racism. Yeah, so I believe you that you can parse that in a way that you see it as not a dog whistle. I guess I don't see it that way, and I don't really see why you I mean, look, I get that it's always possible to read a quote literally as not racist in the sense that the person is not literally saying in the quote, I a racist. Believe that the white race is superior to the non white races. Like in any quote where somebody's not saying those words, it's possible to read it as not racist. I haven't listened to every episode of your show, but I've heard some former episodes where I've heard you do this a few times with Trump saying, yes, he told these women of color to go back to their countries. But I'm not sure I see that as a racist dog whistle. And I guess I don't see why we should ignore what's right in front of us and not take the obvious inference from it. There is a very well known poisonous theory called the great replacement theory that we all know now because they were chanting about it in Charlottesville. And so to the extent that people didn't know about it before that, which I would argue it's probable that Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson did know about it before that, but I can't prove it. But we all know about it after that. To then traffic in those words replacement and give it an explicitly race related valence, and then to turn around and deny that you're trafficking and race baiting, it just beggars belief. And plus, you can put it together with a decades long history of doing similar things and of supporting policies that have those effects. So I guess I don't see why we would try to contort ourselves into trying to I get the point of being charitable to people, but this doesn't seem charitable. This seems implausible. I mean, I can give you an answer to that question why bend over backwards to be charitable, even in the case when you're dealing with someone who other reason to believe might be racist? If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all fulllength episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriberonly content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Hello, Ricky. How's it going? Hey. Good. How's it going? Yeah, good. So, question. Yes, I'm ready. I'm ready. Wait, let me make sure both feet are on the floor. Really? What are dreams for? And, I mean, do they provide a sort of medical or evolutionary advantage, or are they just a byproduct of a living brain, which would be boring? So what are they? What are they for? Are they for anything? I don't I don't I don't even use the the I can't think of the correct terminology to ask you. That probably sounds like a dumb thing, but, you know, I mean, okay, I know what fingers are for, you know, I know what eyes are for. What are dreams for? Dreams are for the same thing as fingers. You're just using them wrong. You hit it perfectly. The question, what are they for? Or are they just a byproduct? The technical word people use in philosophy, there is an epiphenomenon. They're not doing anything. They're just associated with something that's doing something. Right. I don't think we know, really. I mean, we know that certain good and necessary things happen during REM sleep, which is generally associated with dreaming. That's not the only stage of sleep where we have dreams, but there seems to be several things going on. At least there's a process of memory consolidation that happens during REM. So if REM sleep is disrupted a lot, your memory certainly suffers. But that's not could you say that it's your brain getting work done that it can't do when you're conscious because you're using it for other things and it goes, right, he's asleep, let's do this stuff. Let's stock take. Is it like putting a kid's toys away when he's asleep? I can't grasp what you mean by how do they consolidate memories? Where do memories go? Is it like putting it away in a drawer? You're going to have to use a lot of metaphor. For me, I want to go back to the distinction you made quite naturally at the beginning, whether the dream experience itself is doing something or whether it's just a byproduct of the thing that's doing something, and that that I don't think we know. There's a remaining question. Why should there be any experiential component to this memory consolidation? It seems like the brain should be able to consolidate memories in the dark without there being any experience of it. It does most of what it does in the dark, or certainly seems to, which is to say that you're not conscious at any point of the maintenance it's doing or any of the other things it's doing. So why we should have these bizarre experiences every night and whether that is necessary for memory consolidation or anything else, I totally accept that. If someone says, listen, this is sign apps jumping and pinging off and their hallucinations that don't mean anything because you're not engaging sort of critical thinking because you're asleep, I could totally accept that. But I wonder why after millions of years of evolution that they seem to be so important. There's no one that doesn't dream. We do it every night. And also isn't there a certain degree of okay, right. This is why I think it might be pseudoscience and nonsense and anecdotal evidence that has made me think there's a reason to them. Because I remember when I was doing chemistry and we were told that Kekule, when he was trying to work out the structure of benzene, had a dream of a snake bite in its own tail and he woke up and said it's a ring. Right. Now I can both accept that it might be giving you cryptic clues because there are a lot of things happen in your brain that are subconscious. I could also accept that that's nonsense. He made it up. It's a coincidence. He knew the answer. He went to sleep with the answer. And then I want to know the magic and the science and I want them to be the same thing. Do you know what I mean? Well, most dreams are like a bad television show that just got greenlit 250,000 years ago and no one has figured out how to get it off the air. They're not producing insights into science. Right. It's just noise. But I think one thing that dreams reveal about our minds is that it's possible for us to be pushed into new circumstances. Suddenly you go to bed having every right to expect to stay in your bed and the next thing you experience is something quite different and you're not even remotely surprised by the transition. Your conscious mind is suddenly put in relationship to people who aren't actually there. Some people might be dead, some people might be famous. People you don't know. Yeah, I could have had a dream. I was talking to Ricky Gervey's before I met Ricky Gerveys and I wouldn't be surprised at all, right? Unless it's a lucid dream, which is its own thing. Well, we're getting cart easier now because this obviously could be a dream. It could be I've had this dream. I've had a dream where I'm unaware that it's a dream and I'm talking to dream characters and I'm lecturing them on this very point. You realize this could be a dream right now and they're all looking at me idiot. Yeah. I often have self awareness and dreams. In fact, if I have nightmares, I now have got to the point where in my dream I can say jane, wake me up. Wake me up. And sometimes I think she said I have said her name. And obviously in the dream now I'm in the nightmare, but I'm in bed and I know Jane is trying to wake me up. Right. And it takes I don't know how long it takes in reality, it probably seems to me like half the night and to her like 3 seconds. Well, that's a lucid dream. That's the opposite of what I was just confessing. I've had a dream where I had no idea I was dreaming. And I'm lecturing dream characters that this could be a dream. I'm having a conversation of the sort that we're having right now, and they're looking at me like I'm a total moron and then I wake up. But this, this is one thing that reveals, actually an example probably closer to your heart, is have you ever had someone tell you a joke in a dream and the punchline actually works? Right? I think so. I think I've had dreams where I've invented jokes and I've woken up excited and I've remembered it and it's absolute volatile. It's not as funny, it doesn't make any sense. But what I have had that's worked I've dreamt tunes and I've gone down and I've worked them out and they're pretty good, right? I think the reason is that a tune is one thing, but a joke is a misdirection. It's a magic act in it, and it plays with expectation and logic and surprise. And I think that dreams, if I've got this right, they sort of take critical thinking out of it. They take out logic. So it's purely your emotions firing and practicing and just being spilt that would make sense that you'd wake up laughing, that you've just invented the funniest dream in the world. But the logic and the critical thinking part of it says, well, it was actually bollocks. You just felt the fun. So I get that. Yeah, I have an embarrassing example of that, but I was going for the opposite of that. But my example of that, just to show you how insane one can be in the mere feeling without any anchor to logic or kind of reality testing, I once woke up beside my wife, laughing my head off from a joke told in a dream. And I turned to her and I said, I just dreamt the funniest joke. And she, being wiser in the ways of science, said, It's not going to be funny. I said no. And she said, It's not going to be funny. And I said, here's the joke. What sound does a monster make? And she says, I don't know. What sound does a monster make? And then I drum on the end table, the sound in the dream, it was something like this. And then I actually go one further around. I say, no, that's not it. And then my psychosis lifted, right? I thought I could deliver the punchline a second time and it would land and it was just drumming on the you were still close to your subconscious dream state where you were convinced that this was your emotional side outweighed. Your logic had to get up and rub its eyes and put its clothes on and go, Sam, that doesn't work. And you go, oh, no, that doesn't work. But I quite know that because that's like a child's dream. That's sort of like a child's dream because they've nearly got it right, it nearly works, it's got the rhythm of the joke, but it doesn't quite work on a comedic level. And that is the same as that. Yeah, that's interesting. But I'm wondering if you ever had the opposite experience where something actually quite rational and logical and fit for export into waking life has been communicated to you in a dream. Like the punchline actually works. I can't remember. And no, I can't remember. Which is disappointing, isn't it? I could imagine that dreams could almost be like a simulator where there were no distractions. Obviously you're unconscious, your brain is doing its thing and it's taking you through scenarios almost that you could do when you're daydreaming and using logic. But obviously it's only on an emotional level, which is still good. There could be an argument or there might be research done, that the reason why logic is kept out of it is because it can be stifling in art that your imagination is bigger than your critical thinking. So it's sort of like it's an infinite world emotion, isn't it? It can take you anywhere. It can take you anywhere. You can fly, you can shoot people, you can do anything that you can't practice in real life. So maybe it's only preparing you. It could be that it's only strengthening you up emotionally, like does a kid dreams of their grandfather dying and then it's not quite as bad when it happens. Could it have any sort of value there that it strengthens you emotionally in the sense that it takes your mind where your body hasn't been yet? I don't know. Because it is so discontinuous with what tends to happen in the waking state. That is, if you're saying, right, because insofar as the waking state begins to resemble what you experience in dreams, it becomes pretty dysfunctional, like thinking that this is the funniest joke you've ever heard and it actually makes no sense. I mean, that is mad. What's very interesting about that is that it shows that comedy is an intellectual pursuit as opposed to an emotional one. And I've always thought that as soon as you start putting emotion into comedy, it fails on a certain level, even down to the point that if you're saying things that the audience don't agree with or don't like or it's a contentious thing or it's a dark subject. They won't allow themselves to like the joke as much as if it's just syntax or a pun or something that works for everyone if they understand the language, whereas not puns. Not puns. Spare me that. Puns are I don't think puns are funny. But what I mean is it shows that you have to understand that language and therefore you have to get the joke. So a pun is quite a good vehicle so that you've understood language. And also it shows the misdirection very clearly upon. Again, not funny. So let's linger there for a second. Some people obviously think puns are funny. Why are some people allergic to puns? That difference of opinion comedically, do you have any thoughts about that? Yeah, because I think that once you've done one, you've seen them all, really. They're the same thing. It's almost like a nod of the head. I understand those to two words have different meanings. I saw the misdirection. It was a surprise. It's a release. There's no way that you could be crying with laughter on the floor at a pun like you could with something. That's fascinating, though. Is it too brief or its object being language superficial or what? No, I think on a couple of levels, I think really one thing is that it's only discovered it was always there. A pun was always there because the dictionary was always there. So with a pun, it takes someone to suddenly stumble across those two words and put them into a sentence. And it's almost like you couldn't claim if one comedian did a pun and another comedian who was a pun steadied a pun, he couldn't claim. You can say, no, you heard me say that. You'd go, well, no, it was in the dictionary, it was there. It's almost like it's not so creative. It's more like a found object, a pun, and you can be clever with it. And you know what? There are some amazing punsters, but I still think it's not as funny as someone falling over because it's not visceral. Anthropologists say that the first bit of comedy was one caveman laughing. Another caveman hit his head. Why? Empathy. That caveman knew that that hurt because he's done it and he knew that that other caveman didn't want to do it. And that's funny. That's actually funny. Okay. Because we feel it as well. I've almost contradicted myself saying that it's an intellectual pursuit as opposed to an emotional one. That's interesting. Yeah. Obviously there's other types of humor. I'm going to stick to my initial premise that comedy is an intellectual pursuit, because I think my examples that are emotional aren't comedy. They're hardwired, visceral, they're funny, but they couldn't be called comedy because I think comedy is some sort of creative framework to tickle your funny bone. Whereas having a sense of humor, you can look at the sky and smile. That you wouldn't call it comedy, but we have this phrase, physical comedy. You got Charlie Chaplin and everyone on up from there making us laugh, or often making us laugh by falling in the right way. But there are physical jokes. I think the difference if you're walking along the street and someone slips and it's their head and says fucking out, that's funny. That's funny for the caveman reason. That's funny. We empathize it's not us. Right. They didn't want to do it. I think with someone like Keaton and Chaplin, there are built in jokes. There are actual built in jokes. Like someone bending down, missing the plank, getting up, tipping hat, seeing a lady getting hit in the plank. That's a constructed physical. They're using physicality there like we'd use words and sentences and surprises and a joke. I still think that's different to just seeing someone falling over. You couldn't call comedy, but it can be the funniest thing. Well, it's a mismatch between having a sick old person fall over. That's not funny unless you're in a sociopathic frame of mind. But having a person who's full of pretension about their own station in life fall over gets to the funny. And that's when you create comedy in narrative, you do allow that because you're almost pondering to the audience that in fiction we create our own heroes and villains as role play for the soul. So villains get their comeuppance, heroes are rewarded, and you make the world perfect. And you're right. Pretension is, you know, is the opposite of heroic. So when someone smug and hits their head, that's funnier than the hero hitting his head. In fact, you could say the difference between comedy and drama is that drama doesn't show people's flaws or rather their inadequacies. Whereas comedy, we embrace them. Comedy at its best says we're all idiots, so it's fine. It's almost a celebration of being a loser comedy. And as soon as you lose that, you start getting into drama. As soon as these people are perfect or heroic or don't do anything wrong, that's not funny. Same as stand up. If someone comes out and tells you how they outwitted the world, how brilliant they are, how you know what a great day they've had and they're infeasibly handsome and you go, this isn't funny. Just like someone showing you holiday snaps of the perfect holiday, you want someone to come out, slip bang his head, tell you what a terrible day he's had, and with your with his blessing, you're laughing more because you want to hear. You don't want to hear. Perfection isn't funny. It's just not funny. Flaws are funny. Mistakes are funny. There's this comedian, you might know him if you're a bit of an Anglophile called Les Dawson. He was around in seventy s eighties and it was a great northern comedian. He loved language. It was almost Alan Bennett like and he'd tell these funny stories, but he used to do this thing where he'd play the piano and he'd get and he'd hit the wrong notes, but he was very arrogant about it and he'd smile and he'd wink like he was Liberachi and it was hilarious. And I've thought of that for years and I almost use that as a metaphor for sort of dark humor. We're laughing because we're laughing at the blind spot that he thinks he's brilliant and we know he's not. But we can only laugh if we know that tune. If we don't know that tune, we don't know the mistakes. So I think people laugh at the wrong thing because they know what the right thing is. And I've tried to apply that to everything in comedy, politics, whatever. And I think that's a good feeling. Just like the people when they laugh because they get the pun. It's almost a celebration of understanding and surprise. And I think that's interesting, laughing at the wrong thing because you know what the right thing is? That those notes are the bits we laugh at when he hits the wrong note. We laugh at that wrong note because it sounds bad, because we know what the right thing is. And that might be also there might be an interpersonal understanding of what's right in music because I'm sure there are some avant garde piece of music that sound worse where they've explored in seconds and it sounds to the average person of monstrosity. But people who understand it would depreciate it more. I make it a point to laugh at those people. Well, of course. I'll tell you an anecdote here. I was in college with a guy and he was studying languages and he went to see this foreign film and it was subtitled the audience. They're all students watching this. And there was one bit where a Russian guy was talking to another Russian guy and it wasn't subtitled. And so he told a joke in Russian. And one guy who was studying Russian at the back went just to let everyone know. And I think, right, that joke can't be that funny. You're just letting everyone know you understood a joke in Russia. So there's that celebration as well. And that you're right about the retention, but maybe not because I can't get into jazz. I've tried. But then there's gateway things. That's good. I get it. And slowly all the things I love now were an acquired taste. They were challenging. I didn't like radiohead at first. You're now drinking scotch for breakfast. Wow. That's another thing. You can't just pure quiet probably not good for you. So I get it. I understand it. But I think you sometimes have to work at stuff to appreciate them more. And I suppose I've been worried about pretension. But now if I believe someone, I'll give you another example. Okay? So when I was on the dole, what did you say that on welfare? I left college and I didn't have a job and I had no money. Welfare, right. No money. What I used to do all day is just run. I used to run around London. I thought I'd keep fit and I couldn't afford to use the subway or button. And I saved all my money for a pint of beer. And I used to go to art galleries because they were free. And I remember I went in one art gallery and there was a Darley exhibition on and I saw for the first time lobster telephone. So it's basically a telephone with a lobster on as the receiver and I saw it and I looked down and it just said, Lobster Telephone. And I laughed because I just thought, that's so funny and so primitive to do. He didn't give what we called. He called it lobster telephone. And I laughed. And a couple of people who were looking at it gave me a dirty look just to go, what are you doing here? Sweaty bass? Yeah, you don't know anything. And it really annoyed me. And it's that thing in that Woody Allen film. I wanted to get Darley out and go, Were you joking? And he go, yes, of course I was joking. I go see. Fuck off. So I'm very aware of potential, but do you know, Dolly, they're selling out and they're selling out. At the end of his life, he would just sign blank canvases. Really? They'd pay him. I forget what it was, but something like $20,000 to just sign away, and he would just sign endless numbers of blank canvases so that people could do whatever they wanted with that's amazing. I heard an anecdote about Picasso, which is one of my favorite things ever about getting good at something. I guess towards the end, he used to do the same for charity and people would queue up and he'd he'd do a little squiggle, a little Picasso squiggle for $500 or something, and one woman queued up and he'd squiggled a thing and, you know, she went, you're going to charge me $500? That took you a few seconds? And he said, no, madam, it took me all my life. And I think that's so good. People are great at something. It doesn't look like they're trying hard. It doesn't look like they're so I do like that and I do appreciate that 10,000 hours to be genius, but I am in awe of things that I can't do. Getting back to music, it's like downloading emotions. I don't understand. Why does some pieces of music with no association right. My grand didn't used to play it. A chord can make me feel sick, like I want to cry and laugh at the same time because it's so beautiful. Now, that must be some sort of hardwiring, mustn't it? But why there weren't orchestras when we were Australopithecus. Why does that? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, it's clearly a kind of super stimulus. Do you know this concept of a super stimulus? No. Someone who was interacting with a species of seagull was raising these seagull chicks, and the mother seagull has, you know, has a kind of a red dot on her beak to which the chicks orient and bond, and so they created a fake mother with especially large red dot. Yeah. And it was even more effective than the natural version. So there's something about I think there are things in I actually think television and film is a kind of super stimulus for us, and it's one of the reasons why we find it so captivating. Because I can't remember if we spoke about this when we did a podcast. I just think it makes you're there. You can see things you couldn't possibly see. It's not like in a documentary about Vikings. You don't see marauding Vikings with personality. Whereas when you watch a great production, it's like you're seeing real life, even though it's fiction. You're seeing things you shouldn't really have seen. Well, I think the crucial thing is yeah? You're seeing things you shouldn't or couldn't have seen in a condition where you're invisible. This is what's amazing. I can look at your face when you're on screen and I'm unimplicated. Yeah. There's nothing you're going to do with your eyes that's going to expose me to your glance. And so it's it's this experience of just transcendent voyeurism. Yeah. But I also think it's less to be good because there are things you cannot otherwise there wouldn't be such a thing as a great film and a terrible film, you know, and I know that's objective, but that's true of everyone. You turn things off. This isn't doing it for me. Why am I watching this experience? And there's another one we're on that right in the third is when people saw a film, they were blown away. But when we watch it now, we go, oh, it's black and white. It's a bit flickery. There's no special effect. Worse than that, I've got a twelve year old daughter who's not impressed by films I know blew me away when I was 15. She looks at Star Wars, she notices how bad the acting is in. Well, I think you've hit on somewhat with the participation, because that's why video games are bigger than movies, because you are participating. I think that people want to be part of every cause of web. They can they want to cause the commotion. They want to have an effect on the world. So I think the next level is a film that's as good as The Godfather, where you're in it. Yeah, I think that's the next that's the next level. You do and say things and those characters react, or we can all become as stupid as we are in dreams and just find everything just amazing. Oh, yeah. Well, that got back to the basically, you don't know the answer. All right, thanks. Bye./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our Subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, just the briefest housekeeping here just to say that we have finally posted the bonus questions I have long been promising to subscribers. Those can be found on my website if you're logged in or also in the Subscriber feed near the related episode. And I haven't done these for every episode, but there are many going back quite a ways for people like Nicholas Kristakis, donald Hoffman, elliottkowski Yuval noah Harari, jack Dorsey jaron Lanier, Johan Hari, jonathan Height, mattiabi Neil Ferguson nick Bostrom preet Barara and Stephen Fry. And so if you look in your Subscriber feed going back, you will find those and as well on my website if you are logged in to your account. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Robert Plumman. Robert is a professor of behavioral genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London. He previously held positions at the University of Colorado Boulder and at Pennsylvania State University. He's also been elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and of the British Academy for his groundbreaking work in behavioral genetics. And he's the author of the fascinating book Blueprint how DNA Makes US Who We Are. And Robert and I get into many of the interesting and fraught questions here. We talk about the birth of behavioral genetics, the taboos around studying the influences of genes, in particular in human psychology. Controversy surrounding the topic of group differences. The first law of behavioral genetics the concept of heritability nature and nurture the significance of non shared environment, which is genuinely perplexing. The way genes can shape our environments, epigenetics genetic influences on complex traits, dimensions versus disorders. The prospect of this will land us in some gatica like dystopia, heritability and equality of opportunity, the implications of genetics for parenting and education and other social policies. DNA is a fortunetelling device and other topics. Anyway, it's a fascinating conversation. This is important science. And now I bring you Robert Plumman. I am here with Robert Plumman. Robert, thanks for joining me. Well, it's my pleasure. It seems like I've known you because I've listened to so many of your podcasts. Nice. Well, I have read your book. Let me properly introduce your book first, because it's a fantastic introduction to everything we're going to talk about and there's no way we will exhaust its interest. So people should read your book. The book is blueprint. How DNA makes us who we are. And we'll track through the case you make here pretty systematically. But at first, I should say you really are one of the the most revered people in this field of behavioral genetics. And this is a field that is still somewhat under the radar for people. I think intellectually people know that we had the Human Genome Project some decades ago, and I think there's this vague sense, still somewhat analogous to the sense everyone had, that artificial intelligence never amounted to anything, and then all of a sudden, it amounted to a lot. But people have a sense that this genetic revolution hasn't really arrived. And yet behavioral genetics is this field in which we're discussing the role that genes play in determining who we are in the most basic sense, really the nature part of human nature. And your book is just a great introduction to that and its implications directly for psychology. But before we get into the data and your argument, maybe you can summarize your background a little bit. How did you get into this work? Depends how far we go back, but I'll start at university. I think one of the things I hope we get to talk about I've heard on several of your podcasts is about the role of chance, and genetics has a new kind of spin on chance. And I went to the University of Texas at Austin because I was an inner city kid in Chicago. None of my family went to university, let alone graduate school. But I had this wonderful advisor who helped me apply to graduate schools. And being a good inner city kid, when the University of Texas offered to pay for me to go, I said, well, that sounds like a good deal. So I went to University of Texas in psychology, but they, unknown to me, had the only program in behavioral genetics in the world. It had just started at that time in the early 1970s. And and this is a, you know, one of the these chance events that everyone in those days I don't know about when you were in graduate school, but in those days you had to take core courses. So you had about two years worth of courses you had to take in clinical and perception, and everyone had to take this course in behavioral genetics. 40 other students were in there, and it floored me. I just saw this evidence for the importance of genetics. Most of it was from animal studies at that time, and I just knew right away that's what I wanted to do the rest of my life. Yet none of the other students took it up. So what is that about? You know, I don't know. But it was really a turning point in my life, and it was very lucky because most of the behavioral geneticists in the world were there at that moment. And I was really at the beginning of the application of genetics in psychology, and back then it was actually dangerous to be doing genetics in psychology because psychology was completely dominated by environmentalism and nurture. So I kind of grew up with the field, and I learned a lot of stuff about genetic influences. I'm sure we'll talk about genetic influences on environment and developmental changes. There's a lot we learned. And I thought, great, that was terrific, and I'm happy with my career. And then along came the DNA revolution, and that's what's really changed everything. And it's all relatively new. So I don't think that's what's going to have the impact on people, because you can argue with these twin studies and adoption studies, but you just can't argue with DNA, and that's what's new, and that's what's really going to make a difference. So we're not just talking about things like height and weight, obviously. We're talking about personality characteristics, things like how nice a person you are and how outgoing and how neurotic and how happy, how empathic, how prone to violence, and also just core capacities like intelligence. And whether you think about that narrowly in terms of IQ or much more loosely in terms of educational achievement, we're really talking about everything we can care about in ourselves and our children and in people we interact with in society. And the punchline here is that you say in your book that DNA isn't all that matters, but it matters more than anything else, and it matters more than everything else put together in determining who we are, which is, on its face, again, a very provocative statement. Even today. In the beginning of your book, you write two sentences that fairly floored me because I'll actually read them. You say that you you delayed writing this book in part due to cowardice, because you recognized how dangerous this used to be. And you say it might seem unbelievable today, but 30 years ago, it was dangerous professionally to study the genetic origins of differences in people's behavior and to write about it in scientific journals. It could also be dangerous personally to stick your head up above the parapets of academia and talk about these issues to the public. Now, Robert, either you are a time traveler from the future and you wrote this book in 2050, or you're living on Mars right now. Because in my world, anything less than a full commitment to the blank slate is still taboo. I mean, the people who are trying to cancel JK. Rowling right now for just admitting that biological sex is a thing, this is the environment we're in at a minimum, on social media. So do you really not perceive this to be a fraught territory now? Well, as I say in the epilogue to the book, I was very nervous about this book coming out. My friends said it was a professional suicide note, but I saw lots of signs that things are changing over the years. Back when I was in graduate school, the textbook said that schizophrenia was caused entirely environmentally and even worse by what your mother did in the first few years of life, genetics never got a look in, so you had to be very careful about even suggesting that something might show genetic influence. But in the 40 years since, there's been a mountain of evidence from twin and adoption studies and family studies that's convinced most scientists that many traits in fact, I would say all traits in psychology show significant genetic influence. And it's not just statistically significant. We're talking about a lot of influence, like explaining about half of the differences between people. So I think things have changed a lot, and I've experienced that when I've talked to the public. Mostly the reaction I get is that not hostility, but just ignorance. People say, Well, I didn't know about that. It makes great sense. In fact, most of the public I talk to are surprised there's a big controversy. They say, it sounds so reasonable and there's a lot of evidence behind it. So I think things have changed. And so I was wondering who the people are you've been talking to that are still blank. Slaters again, there's resistance in some quarters on the far left, politically, generally, that biological sex is even a thing, right? I mean, this is what JK. Rowling has just run into or that intelligence has anything to do with IQ, and whatever intelligence is, whether IQ or not, that that would be at all heritable and then when you start talking about group differences for any trait we care about, it just becomes utterly toxic politically. And the truth is that there's no ethical or perceived ethical sweet spot here, because if you ascribe differences between groups to again, to take the most fraught topic here is IQ differences across racial groups, however defined Charles Murray's territory. This is just the plutonium of social science. And even acknowledging that these differences exist is taboo in some circles. They have to be artifacts of testing or or, you know, any other metric you'd be using. But once you get past that, then they have to be due to racism. And once you look past that, let's say, comparing Asians to whites on IQ tests, are we now alleging that there's some anti white racism that is benefiting Asians on these tests? That begins to look a little weird, but now everyone, again is jumping out of their skin with political discomfort. And the truth is, there is no way of accounting for these group differences, that people are comfortable with them. And genes are the worst answer. But environment and culture and family situation, that's also a bad answer. People just don't want to say that. They don't want to draw any invidious comparisons between groups on any level. We will inevitably touch this territory, if only to comment on why we're not wading further into it. I just want to offer a warning to both of us and to our listeners that there is no avoiding these topics on some level. Because, again, with the best of intentions, with no interest in specific things like IQ. Differences among groups. Say the moment you begin to study things like intelligence or anything else you care about at the level of the genome's, implications for how people develop later in life, or just begin to tease out the difference between contributions from the environment and contributions from DNA, you get ambushed by these topics that make people incredibly uncomfortable. And this is something we'll get toward the end of our conversation when we talk about the social policy implications of all of this. But in a world where we have completely solved our political and social problems, let's just deposit a world where there is no inequality, there's zero inequality of opportunity. Everyone gets to go to the best schools and everyone is equally wealthy and has equally conscientious parents and there is nothing wrong at the level of society. Well then in that world every difference in outcome between people will be ascribable to differences in genetics. And that hardly seems fair to people either. So it's very difficult for people given certain assumptions to find any spot of comfort in this conversation. And I think you and I can see some daylight past all that and talk about how we're comfortable with what we're learning about human nature here. But just warn us and warn our listeners that there's a kind of uncanny valley that we have to pass through here where things seem to be threatening at the level of ethics and politics. Could I speak to that point? I think there's you you've raised an awful lot of issues there but just a couple of the main ones and you're right. The third rail is group differences. And in the paperback edition, which came out last year of blueprint, I have an afterword where I describe talk about my reactions to the response to the book and one of those is why I didn't talk about group differences and I just mentioned briefly in the book, but I discuss it more in the afterwards. That the most important point to realize is there's no necessary connection between the causes of average differences between groups and individual differences. So individual differences in a trait like intelligence could be very highly heritable. That doesn't necessarily imply that an average difference between, say, ethnic groups is also heritable. But more than that, the reason I've stayed away from group differences there's sort of three reasons. One is that there's much more variance. I assume you listen to know variance is just a statistic measuring how much people vary. The vast majority of the variance on these traits is within groups rather than between groups. And so much so like boys are better at math than girls and girls are better at verbal that accounts for 1% of the variance. That means if you know whether a child's, a boy or a girl, you don't know anything about their verbal ability or their mathematical ability. So differences within groups are far more important. The second reason I don't study it is that we don't have any killer methodologies to answer the question of genetic and environmental causes of average differences between groups. But in contrast, we have very powerful methods for understanding the causes of individual differences within groups. And then the final reason is I don't think I have to study everything. And that's not just being facetious there. I think it's an important point in your discussion with Murray, which I thought was brilliant, by the way. It's what ought to happen. These are difficult issues. I thought you discussed them very fairly. But towards the end of your interview with Charles Murray, you asked him, but why do you persist in studying these average differences between groups? I think you even said something about it seems to be you didn't say furrion, did you? But you did ask him about that. I thought his answer was very unsatisfactory. And so early on I said, look, there's lots of important things to study. Why are some people schizophrenic and others not? And most of the variance that we're trying to explain with genetics is within groups. So why focus on the politically explosive issue of average differences between groups when we don't have powerful techniques to definitively answer the question of the etiology of those differences? And that's why I think there's so much heat and so little light there. Yeah, I agree. But just, again, a point of caution, and I think there's no avoiding this the reality is I am still digging out from the consequences of having had that conversation with Charles. Is that right? Yeah. So it's like that's at least a year and a half, something like that. That was number 73, and you're up to 210. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So maybe it's maybe it's, you know, it's two years, but, you know, he spent the last 25 years of his life not overcoming the effects on his reputation of having written The Bell Curve. At this point, I'm reconciled to never coming out from under the shadow of having touched that topic because of the response to that podcast. I mean, people wrote articles and promoted them on social media to the limits of their abilities, essentially saying that I was a racist for having had that conversation and what I said in it, and it's maddening. But that's the environment we're in now, where people who certainly are discussed as being real journalists and who you would think would have reputations for some sort of integrity and intellectual honesty to protect, will smear you as essentially a Nazi for even touching this topic. And the point I was making with Charles, which was really the reason why I spoke to him in the first place. It was not born of real interest in IQ, much less racial differences in IQ. But I'm interested in our inability to speak honestly about facts as we understand them. And for years now, I've been seeing that there are certain things that will just spring out of the data that we can't avoid, right, whether you're looking for them or not. If you want to understand intelligence and you're not at all interested in differences between people per se, but you certainly don't want to put any ethical weight or moral weight on human worth based on differences in intelligence, but the topic is still going to be forced upon you. And so we just have to get comfortable with that. And I'm very comfortable that we understand what the political right answer is in the end. We know we want people to have equal opportunities and we know we want people to be treated as moral equals at the level of fairness in our society and in notions of justice. And we want to correct for the greatest disparities in good and bad luck in so far as we can do that. And so much of this the ethical punchline for me is that this is all due to luck in the end. You don't pick your genes, you don't pick your parents, you don't pick your environment either, right? There's nothing exactly that you pick. And so if you're a good person who cares about the well being of others and you realize that there but for the grace of happenstance, you could have been in any other possible situation on Earth. It's through no wisdom of my own that I wasn't born in the middle of a civil war in Congo. Then you should be committed to making the world as good a place and as fair a place as you can make it. And and that dictates a certain kind of politics and a certain kind of ethical commitment to treating people fairly. But people don't see that you can be I mean, honestly, there are people who listen to this conversation, and despite what I just said, and I could rattle on in this vein for an hour and a half, and the punchline will still be those two guys are Nazis. That's the environment we're in. And it's a very dispiriting reality. And it's only because I have taken elaborate pains to endure myself to the blowback to these kinds of conversations that I even can have them honestly in any other role in society. Had I been a professor at a university, had I been a normal journalist who had a boss, I think I would have lost my job based on the blowback from my conversation with Charles Murray. And that's just a sobering reality of the environment we're in. Well, I'm so sorry to hear that, though, because, I mean, your whole podcast is about just having honest conversations about topics. Now, that is probably the hottest topic you could pick you can talk about genetics of schizophrenia, and people don't get upset about that, right. You can even talk about cognitive abilities, but if you talk about reading disability, nobody sweats that no problem. So intelligence just is like a red flag to a bull in some ways, and then by getting into average differences between ethnic groups, I mean, there you've got it. So that's, well, the best case for your podcast to be able to talk about difficult topics. But I don't go there because of the reasons I mentioned, and there's an awful lot to learn about individual differences, and in the end, I think they're they're very important. You know, why are some kids reading disabled, and why do some people become schizophrenic or not? So you you really did go to the third rail on it, and I'm I am amazed to hear, though, that you're still getting blowback. I avoid it because I don't do social media. In the academic press, things are really going the genetic way. If you look at grants funded, for example, I mean, genetics is there aren't that many behavioral geneticists, but they dominate research funding in psychology. They dominate the most highly cited papers in psychology. So I am an optimist, though, and I have a sense that you're not quite as much of an optimist as I am, but I can work it before I spend too much time on social media. Maybe that's right. I just don't do it for that reason. I mean, it just gets you down. I don't even long ago, I decided I wouldn't even respond to emails or to even publish criticism by work, because I found even back then, 30 years ago, before social media, a lot of the critics weren't honest critics. I mean, they would say, well, what about this? And you say, okay, well, we've done research on that. Yeah, but then what about this and what about that? And a lot of them, I realized, had nothing better to do, whereas I had science I wanted to do. And I did feel in the end, if psychology was going to be an empirical science in the long run, if you take a very long view, getting the data is what matters. And I I hope in the end, you know, students of psychology will read about behavioral genetics and nature and nurture and say, well, what's all the fuss about? I mean, of course genetics is important. So I am an optimist, and I do look at things kind of with my rose colored glasses, but I see huge change. I haven't been called a Nazi for 20 years. That's great. Let's let that be either the motto or the epitaph for this conversation. All right? So I'm going to don your rose colored glasses here, and we will proceed because there's fascinating science to talk about, and if people don't understand our intentions here, they will be unreachable by the powers of human speech. What is the first law of behavioral genetics? The first law of behavioral genetics is that everything is heritable. By that I mean individual differences in traits of cognitive abilities and disabilities, personality, mental health and illness. Those traits, those individual differences, all show significant and substantial genetic influence. Right? And so we should clear up some confusion that people naturally have around this concept of heritability. And then we're going to go into how we know all this based on adoption studies and twin studies and all the rest of the actual science. But let's talk about this concept of heritability. How are people confused about it? Yeah, well, it's great you brought that up because that 6th syllable word is the most misunderstood word around because it includes the word heritable somehow involves genes and DNA. So people have a lot of different notions of it. But in behavioral genetics, and I should say by behavioral genetics, I mean what we call quantitative genetics, like twin and adoption studies and now DNA studies, it's the same techniques you'd use if you were studying medical disorders, for example. So it's not peculiar to psychology or behavior. But these are the epitome in a way, of the complex traits and common disorders that's the focus of the DNA revolution. Now. So heritability describes the it's a descriptive statistic. And like all descriptive statistics, like means and variants, it can change in populations over time. But it describes the extent to which differences that we observe in a trait, say, like body weight, body mass index. To what extent are those differences due to inherited DNA differences between people in this population at this time? There are many misunderstandings, and probably the most common one is for people to think, well, that they confuse what is with what could be. So we're describing what is, in a particular population, the extent to which people differ in body mass index, and to what extent does that do to diets and exercise or inherited DNA differences? So we're talking about differences, and we find people might be surprised that about 70% of the variance of body mass index in the Northern European populations that we study is due to inherited DNA differences. So that's often a shocker for people. We've done surveys and people think there might be some genetic influence, but they think it's more like 30% or so. But 70% is a lot. It's not 100%. But a lot of the differences between people in body mass index are due to inherited DNA differences. But that's what is, and it doesn't imply what could be. So one of the most interesting things I found about doing my DNA and getting these polygenic scores that we'll talk about later is that I have a very high polygenic score for body mass index. I'm quite heavy. I'm at the 70th percentile of weight. But what's interesting about this is some people say, well, if you learned that, you got bad news in your genetic risk for alcoholism, or in this case, for obesity, you'll just give up and say, oh, well, there's nothing I can do about it. But the point is, we're describing what is, not what could be. And certainly if you locked me in a room and didn't give me any food, I'd lose weight. Or more than that, if I had a bit more self control or motivation, I might not eat like a pig the way I would do given free access to food. So the differences between what is and what could be and the other caveat there's a bunch of them, but the other caveat I think that's important is we're dealing with the normal range of genetic and environmental variation, that is, the range of variation that we can study, which is fairly representative populations, maybe 95% of the population. But it doesn't include the genetic extremes of single gene mutations, for example, nor does it include the environmental extremes, say, of abuse and neglect. There are many wrinkles here. I guess two further points I would want to make about this concept of heritability that are related to what you just said. So even if something were highly heritable in general, in any specific case, it may not, in fact, be expressed. You take, like, alcoholism. I don't know what the contribution of genetics is to alcoholism. I don't remember if you mentioned it in your book, but it's not real high, but it's a 40%, something like that. Let's say even if it were 100%, right? Even if it were just determined by DNA in a world without alcohol, it would not find expression, right. So the environment in any individual's case, or even in any group's case, if you find an island of proto alcoholics but where alcohol has not been discovered, you'll see 0% alcoholism among people who have the genome that would determine 100% alcoholism in another context, right? Yeah. But not even going to that extreme, the differences between what is and what could be. So when we say alcoholism or alcohol abuse is 40% heritable, we mean of the genetic and environmental differences that exist in this population at this time, inherited DNA differences contribute about 40% to that liability, the variance in alcoholism. And even, as you said, if it's 80 or 100% heritable, if I say, okay, I know my genetic risk for alcoholism is high, but I also know you can't become alcoholic unless you drink a lot of alcohol. So I could take that information, say, even from DNA risk for alcoholism, and say, well, I've got to be more careful because if I drink as much as other people, I'm more at risk for becoming alcoholic than they are. And you can't become alcoholic if you don't drink a lot of alcohol. Yeah. So this covers things like alcoholism. It probably doesn't cover everything that interests us, but it's relevant. And also, we should talk about or mention the fact that differences. Between people. We're talking about when we're talking about heritability, we're not talking about things that everyone shares, which are also genetically determined as just having a head or having arms and legs. Right. Or being bipedal, you know, or having something, some, you know, bilateral symmetry. I mean, these are things that virtually everyone has who is intact at birth. And we don't talk about the heritability of having arms and legs. Right, yeah. That's such an important point. And we have, say, 6 billion base pairs of DNA, and 99% of those are the same for all of us. And that's what makes us human. We're talking about the 1% of DNA sequence differences, base pairs of DNA, the extent to which those differences between us make a difference. And the answer is they make a big difference, but it is differences. So if you say height is 80, 90% heritable, it doesn't mean I grew to six, what, 6ft, because of my genes and the other four inches were added by the environment. We're only talking about differences between people. Why? I'm very tall and other people are not so tall. Genetics is largely responsible for those differences between people. It really is a critical point. So thanks for bringing that up. Yeah, so we're talking about in the case of the 3 billion base pairs in each half of the genome. So we're talking about 30 million base pairs that account for the difference between us. And as you say, we're 99% identical to one another, although we are, if I recall, we're 50% identical to the banana. So I don't know how much comfort to take there, but exactly right. So let's talk about the confusion that is even more common on the concept of nature and nurture and how to differentiate those. And one of the more fascinating points in your book comes in this discussion of the nature of nurture. What's the confusion here around nature and nurture and how we can demarcate them? Well, there's that larger issue of just separating nature that is inherited DNA differences and nurture, that is environment. And there's a lot we've learned there. But the topic of nature, of nurture is a different topic. So what would you prefer to start with? Let's differentiate nurture and environment because people think it's one thing, and then the parents are either horrified or happily exonerated when they learn the punchline here. So let's talk about first what are the contributions to individual differences beyond DNA? We'll talk about nurture and unshared environment, and then let's talk about the nature of nurture. Yeah, great. Well, we talked before about the first law of behavioral genetics, that everything is heritable. And we can get more precise than that and say, on average, across all the traits that have been studied, about half of the differences between people, half of the variance of these traits can be ascribed to inherited DNA differences. Now, 50% is a lot. This is effect size the idea of how big of an effect it is. Not just is it statistically significant in psychology, it's rare to find anything that explains 5% of the variance. So 50% of the variance is off the scale, but it's a lot less than 100%. And the other 50% is actually not due to genetic differences. But what we've learned is that it's not nurture in the sense that people have always assumed it was. From Freud onwards, nurture was thought to be what happens in families, particularly parents, and what they do to the kids, like schizophrenia is caused by what your mother does to you in the first few years of life was the line when I was in graduate school. So what we've learned is, I think, almost more important what we've learned about nurture than nature because that other 50% is not due to systematic effects of the family environment. So it's probably best if I just give you one piece of data on that that makes that point. Just take BMI and parents body mass index. Parents and their children correlate about zero. Three is when the kids grow up. I mean, at birth there isn't any correlation at all, but they correlate about .3. Is it nature or nurture? Well, it was always assumed to be nurture and that's not a dumb hypothesis. I mean, parents give the kids the food, they model lifestyles and that sort of thing. But the adoption studies showed that when parents adopt a child who's not genetically related to them, the correlation between those parents and their kids for body mass index is zero. Right? Similarly, children growing up in the same family correlate about 0.3 or so in body mass index could be reasonable. Think it's nurture. But if those children are genetically unrelated, their correlation is zero. The other side of the adoption design is to take genetically related people adopted apart. These adopted children who correlate zero with the body mass index of their adoptive parents correlate .3 with the body mass index of their birth parents whom they never saw after the first week of life, who had no influence over their environment. So that's the sort of evidence that for decades was used to say genetics is important. But then people realize in the that it's telling us something very important about the environment. Whatever the environment is, it's not making kids in the same family similar to one another. It's not making kids similar to their parents. And that's what I called in 1987 non shared environment. It's important, it's making a big difference, but it's not what we thought it was. It's not due to shared family environmental influence. So what is it? Well, for 30 years we've been trying to figure that out. Like what is it that's making two kids in the same family different? For example, parents don't really treat their children the same. I don't know about you and your daughters. If you ask parents, they say they do. But if you ask the kids, you'd swear they're growing up in different families. And if you videotape interactions between parents and children, you do see that parents aren't treating their kids the same. I mean, like, your friends, when they're sufficiently high, would probably admit to this. I mean, some kids are just more lovable and cuddly than others. So anyway, there are these possible parental differences in treatment. And it turns out we did a ten year study of this called Nead Non Shared Environment and Adolescent Development, and we find, yeah, sure enough, differential parent till treatment correlates with differences in children's outcomes within a family. So you take siblings, the parents who say are more if you look at the relationship between parental harsh discipline and children's antisocial behavior in a family, the child who is more antisocial, the parents are more harsh in their discipline. Well, as always, these correlations in psychology have always been assumed to be environmental. But I think all your listeners know the adage that correlation does not imply causation. Is it necessarily the case that the parent's discipline of the child caused the antisocial behavior? Or is it possible that the parent's behavior is reflecting the children's behavior? And you can put this in a behavioral genetic design, and what you find is that about half of those correlations are due to genetic differences. Right. So this is where the nature of nurture comes in. And it kind of took me off the track, though, of non shared environment. And the punchline there is, after 30 years of trying to find these systematic sources, we haven't been successful. I know in one of your conversations with Paul Bloom, you mentioned Judith Harris's book in the 90s, which really just popularized a lot of these concepts, but really results, but then also proposed maybe peers are important, and that's another reasonable hypothesis. Your daughters probably won't end up having the same friends. Maybe one of them has more academically oriented friends and the other has more athletically oriented friends. That could be a source of difference. But since Judith Richer has proposed that, people have also looked at that. And again, there's correlations there. Kids who are more antisocial have friends who are more antisocial in a family. So the sibling who is more antisocial is more likely to have friends who are also more delinquent. But again, is it cause or effect? And it turns out that kids select friends if they're antisocial. They select friends who are like them in that score, and about half of that is due to genetic differences. So that's what we mean by the nature of nurture. But it's also why we haven't found systematic sources of non shared environment. Whenever we find something that looks like it's causing differences between kids and a family, it ends up being a genetic difference in disguise. So after 30 years, I came to this, what we call gloomy conclusion that non shared environment is essentially idiosyncratic stochastic, not systematic. So that half of the variants for psychological traits are due to these environmental factors, but they're essentially random chance stuff happens. Okay, so this is all, I think, more important than maybe obvious to people at first pass here. So I just want to linger on this topic. So first, what you're saying here is that virtually half of everything we care about in human nature, in our psychology, whether it's susceptibility to various psychopathology and we'll talk about how we think about disorders and whether the disorder framework is the right framework here. But for virtually everything in psychology and in human difference, one could care about from intelligence to Big Five personality traits to susceptibility to things like depression and schizophrenia. The punchline here is something like 50% of human difference. It's often on either side of that halfway mark. I mean, sometimes it's 60%. Sometimes it's as high as 80% later in life for things is accounted for by genes. And the other half is environment. But it is not the environment that parents or anyone else can systematically control. And for the environmental component of things, very often half of what is ascribed to the environment is actually genes in disguise because people based on their own genetic proclivities wind up shaping their environment. So I think this is an example you use in your book. You could ask someone, how often does it rain where you live? If ever there were an environmental variable that has nothing to do with DNA? Well, the weather is certainly that. But then you ask yourself, well, people are free to move. People can pick the climates in which they live. And maybe some of that is being driven by genetic proclivity, right? There's some people who just hate living where it rains. Right? I count myself as one of those people. It's not an accident that I don't live in Seattle. And so it is with everything else. How much TV do you watch as a kid? How often do you read? How often do your parents read to you? This all seems like it's a pure statement of an environmental influence I e. Nurture. And yet when you strip out the influence of genes, you find that genes are accounting for half of those so called environmental differences among people. I should just pause there, Roberto, to ask did I summarize that point correctly? Yes, I thought that was great. And the point for people to take home is correlation does not imply causation. So parents who read a lot to their kids have kids who do better at reading at school. And if you don't think about these issues, you might say, sure, it's environmental. But I hope after this discussion, people at least pause a minute and say, well, wait a minute now. Who are these parents who read a lot to their kids? Who are these kids who do better at reading? It could be due to genetics or increasingly, I think it's due to parents responding to genetic differences in their kids. I have six grandchildren, and I thought with the first two, I thought what they're supposed to do is sit there and let you read to them. I remember you talking about reading Harry Potter to your older daughter. Well, that's what I thought grandchildren was supposed to do. And with one grandchild exactly right. I could read to her all day long and she'd say, oh, please read some more to me. But I've got another grandson who it would almost be abusive for me to make him sit there and let me read to him. He wants to rough and tumble play. So increasingly, I think, as parents, we're responding to differences we see in our kids. And given that you have two kids, I wondered if you experience that, this wonderful phrase that's been attributed to six different people. Parents are environmentalists until they have more than one child. Right. With the first child, you can explain anything environmentally. That's the problem with environmental hypothesis. You can't explain anything after the fact, but then you have a second child and almost every parent notices that there's big differences between these children and you say, I didn't do that. Have you experienced that? Well, there's one enormous environmental difference, too, which is the second child is growing up in the presence of the first, whereas the first had, in our case, five long years of being an only child. So it's hard to figure out how to factor that in. But that's a non negligible influence there. But, yeah, I am noticing they're impressively similar in some ways, but they are clearly different people. The genetic deck got shuffled. Yeah, that's exactly right. In case people haven't realized this, you know, the first degree relatives, like parents and offspring or siblings are 50% similar genetically. Right? But that means they're 50% different genetically. So genetics predicts that kids in a family will be different. They're not these socialization environmental theories. They have a lot of trouble explaining why are two kids in the same family with the same parents so different, when presumably it's these parents that are causing differences in the kids development. Yeah. So again, there are implications for parenting here and social policy, education. We'll get to those in the back half of our conversation. But all of this, again is this is a bit of a high wire act to talk about these things without having people freak out. But we are really just talking about the facts of human psychology insofar as we have come to know them. And no doubt we will be wrong about certain things, certain assumptions will be proven wrong in the fullness of time. But the idea that genetics doesn't account for a lot of what we care about in human nature, the door seems to be closed to that thesis. I mean, the blank slate thesis is no longer on the table. And it's empowering in some ways, it pushes your intuitions around in others and we'll talk about those effects, but we should talk a little bit more about how we know this before we get there. Could I just kind of summarize what what we were saying? Because we covered a lot of topics and a lot of those are very big issues for people. Go for it. And so what blueprint is there's three main points. First is everything's heritable. So inherited DNA difference is a comp for a lot of the differences of the rest of the variance. It's not genetic, it's environmental, but it's not the environment we thought was important. It's this non shared environment. And then when we find correlations like between parents reading to kids and kids reading ability at school, you can't assume that's environmental, they're often genetic effects in disguise. So I find what helps people put this together is if I tell you that if one of your daughters had been switched at birth in the maternity ward and raised in a different family, she would have grown up to be very similar to who she is, even though she was raised in a different family. And that's that's not hypothetical because we have studies of identical twins reared apart and this wonderful documentary that won an award last year called Three Identical Strangers, three Identical Twins and just how similar they are despite being raised in quite different family environments. So it's a dramatic illustration of this point because your daughter would be her identical twin. She's still 100% genetically who she is, even though she's raised in a different family. So I think that helps people to understand it, that we'd be very much who we are even if we had been raised in a different family with different parents. Right. Okay. Although we're going to have to land back on this topic and give some account of why being a good parent still matters. Absolutely. We have to get there. Okay. But before we do, let's talk a little bit more about these studies, adoption studies, twin studies, adoption studies with twins. And we have so let's just remind people of the biology here. We have two different types of twins. There are monopolic twins and dipsychotic twins, identical and fraternal twins. And identical twins, you know, share the same DNA. They're 100% identical, barring some surprising mutation genetically. And whereas fraternal twins are like ordinary siblings, they share 50% of their DNA, but they just share the same environment all the way down to the the womb. So in these studies where you, where you can compare identical twins to fraternal twins and you can really strip out the influence of shared environment because again, you're looking at one group that has identical DNA and one group that has only 50% similar DNA and yet shared environment. And then you have these other studies where you have identical twins separated at birth and raised in different families and you are a pioneer in doing this work. And maybe I don't know if you want to talk about the Colorado Adoption Project or I don't know how you want to enter this, but let's talk a little bit more about the logic of these experiments and why they have been so compelling. Well, that was a great description of the twin method. But the punchline there is that if a trait take, like musical ability, which hasn't been studied very much, and it's hard to measure, but what we'd be saying is, if genetic influences are important, you'd have to predict that. Identical twins would be more similar in their musical ability than non identical twins and the extent to which they're more similar than fraternal twins. I say non identical because in UK they call them nonidentical rather than fraternal. So if a trait like musical ability is heritable, you'd have to predict that the Mzid monozygotic twins are more similar than the dizzygotic fraternal twin. And the extent to which identical twins are more similar estimates the magnitude of genetic influence. So as you said, that's a pretty powerful test of genetic influence. But the main assumption there is called the equal environments assumption. What if identical twins are treated more similarly than non identical twins? Well, that's been studied. It seems to be a fairly safe assumption. You get identical twins reared apart, are just as similar as identical twins reared together, for example. But it still is an issue. But the neat thing is we have this other method that's completely different called the adoption method. And that's a wonderful situation to be in because the adoption method also has its possible well, it has its assumptions, impossible flaws, but they're completely different. And these two methods, the twin method and the adoption method, converge on this conclusion that everything that we study in psychology is heritable. So the adoption method, though, is in some ways more powerful. You can really see it with identical twins reared apart, but they're very rare. So much more typical are biological parents who adopt their child away at birth. And then you can study those adopted children and their adoptive parents who give them their family environment but not their genes. They're not genetically similar to them. So it's another powerful way of getting at genetic environmental influences. And I gave you the example of body mass index and how adopted children don't correlate with their adoptive parents in terms of body mass index, even though they share food and lifestyle, whereas parents who share genes and environment with their children correlate about zero three for body mass index. And the real killer data is that these adopted children correlate zero three for body mass index with their birth parents who they never saw after the first week of life. So I think together that's a very powerful indication not only of genetic influence but of the unimportance of what we call shared environment. You know, that traditional view of nurture right. Which is we should just pause to acknowledge how counterintuitive this is. We're talking about parents who have their own eating habits, which they then lavish upon their children from birth onward. And it turns out those habits, stripped of their underlying genetic cause is not what contributes to the body mass index of a child as he or she grows up. Yes, exactly right. So now what about epigenetics here? Is there anything to say about what we know there? Yeah, when I give a public lecture, it's sort of the first question I get is, yeah, but what about epigenetics? You know, the environment changes genes. Well, you know, as I say in the book, you you only inherit DNA differences in DNA sequence. You start life as a single cell with half 3 billion base pairs of DNA from your mother and 3 billion from your father, and that DNA is the same DNA and the trillions of cells in your body. We do pick up some mutations as we go along, but the genes that are expressed of those 6 billion, 3 billion DNA difference, nucleotide bases of DNA in the double helix of DNA, we don't have the same DNA expressed in all of our cells. The cells in your liver do different things from the cells in your blood and from the cells in your brain. And that's gene expression. Different bits of DNA are turned on and off in response to the environment. But what we inherit are the DNA differences. And if a DNA difference correlates with an outcome like schizophrenia or alcoholism or reading disability, then that means that that DNA difference was expressed somewhere and it's making a difference. But some, you know, people have really used epigenetics, which literally means above genetics, beyond genetics to try and argue against mendelian genetics. And I think there's after the initial excitement about epigenetics, I think people are calming down about it and realizing, yeah, gene expression is important. Everything between inherited DNA and behavior is important. We call that expression transcriptomics and tabolomics and the brain. Everything in between DNA and behavior is important to understand, but it's important to realize all we inherit are DNA sequence differences. Right. And if they're making a difference in terms of traits, and if they're correlating with differences, individual differences in traits, well, then they're being expressed on some level. Yes, that's right. And the neat thing about DNA is you don't need to know anything about what goes on in between the DNA and the behavior right. To be able to make these predictions. But that's not to say all of these other things are not important. But I like to argue against this idea that epigenetics somehow invalidates genetics because it doesn't. Right, yeah. There's another detail here which is interesting and has important implications, and it's that we're not tending to talk about single genes having some overwhelming trait effect. We're talking about thousands of genes contributing tiny effects to any one of these traits whether it's susceptibility to schizophrenia or intelligence or anything else that interests us and that has some significance. Well, you tell me what significance. You see, there's one thing that jumped out for me immediately which I believe you mentioned in your book, is that it gives a somewhat less than hopeful picture that any single drug target will be a high leverage target for us in improving ourselves in whatever way we might hope to. Yeah, well, the most important thing we've learned from the DNA revolution in the last ten, really five years is that genetic influence on complex traits and common disorders of the sort we've been talking about are not due to one gene. Certainly we've known that for a long time but they're not due to ten genes or a hundred genes. They're probably due to thousands of tiny, tiny DNA differences. Now, first I'd like to say though, that there are thousands, some people say 70 00, 10,000 single gene disorders. These are like mendelian hardwired deterministic disorders like Huntington's. They're necessary and sufficient. So if you have the gene for Huntingtons, you will die from Huntington's unless something kills you first. And you only have Huntington's if you have the gene for Huntington's disease. And that's the problem. Everyone learns about genetics from mendel and Mendel was studying disorders in pea plants like wrinkled seeds and so they're hardwired and deterministic. And he showed through that that's the way genes work in heredity. But what's important to realize is that despite these thousands of single gene disorders many of which are extremely debilitating lethal for the people who have them, they're very rare one in 100,001 in 500,000. So they're very rare, fortunately and don't really contribute much to the heritability of the traits that we study. The heritability of complex traits and common disorders medical as well as psychological are due to thousands of tiny DNA differences. And that's a drag in some ways if you're trying to do a bottom up approach as neuroscientists would want to do, where you go from genes to brain to behavior, it's going to be very hard if each of those DNA effects are so tiny. You're going to definitely have to get away from a modular approach to neuroscience where you think this gene does this and then that has that effect. It's going to take more like a systems network sort of approach to be able to deal with the brain from this perspective which we talk about as polygenic. That is, every trait is influenced by many, many genes and that would include traits in the brain, neurotransmitter levels, whatever. But the other word that's important is plyotropy. Every DNA difference has many, many effects. So you name these genes based on a disorder like this gene caused diabetes but then you find out that gene affects hundreds of other things. So this polygenic point that you're making is critically important and it's really hard for people to understand because they're still thinking about genetics from a single gene, hardwired deterministic perspective. Yeah. So there's a lot there. So let's break apart a few of these concepts. There's an analog point to make about the brain. There are very few parts of the brain that only do one thing where you can say, this is the part of the brain that recognizes faces. Right? And it does nothing else. Well, even fusiform cortex does other things. So the real picture is of pleiotropy, where any one gene in this case contributes to many traits. And also, and this is a point you make in the book, our concept of disorders like schizophrenia is itself misleading, that it makes sense to talk more in terms of dimensions for traits as opposed to these kind of terminal disorders. And you use an analogy which really drives home the point with height. Maybe you want to talk about height and the imaginary problem of giantism to clarify this concept. Okay, it is just a hypothetical example, but it does make the point that suppose you decided you've got a new disorder here giantism. So people over 6ft, five inches, they're giants, and everybody else is normal in height. And yet you find that all the genes, there's been thousands that have been identified, thousands of DNA differences, they all work. There aren't like a separate set of genes that cause people to be giants and different from the rest of people. All of this is quantitative. It's a matter of more or less, that is, any DNA difference that is more prevalent in the giants, it will be distributed in the distribution. So people who are higher than average are more likely to have that DNA difference. So the DNA research, I think, puts the nail in the coffin of diagnoses. Now, you might say, well, that's just a stupid example. I mean, why would anyone divide height, which is so normally distributed into a dichotomy? But I think that's what we're doing with most other disorders. Depression, no one thinks depression. You wake up one day and you're depressed. Depressive symptoms are almost they're quantitatively distributed and you never find genes for a disorder. Any gene you find is distributed through the population, like more concretely. One of the first of these effects that were identified using these new approaches called genome wide association was a DNA difference that was associated with body mass index. So this gene had an A and a T, the four nucleotide bases of DNA acts and GS. And thousands of years ago, we were all TT. But then someone got a mutation that was an A, and that A seemed to have been adapted. The story used to be that it allows you to conserve fat. And in the, in the Stone Age that would be a good thing because you never knew when your next meal was coming. But now that makes you more likely to become obese. In a fast food nation. So if you have two A's, you're £3 heavier than someone who has one A, and if you have no A's, well, that one A makes you £3 heavier than someone with no A's TT. So there's a six pound difference between TT and AA. That's what we mean by an association. So that was found for obesity initially, but then they found that that DNA difference works quantitatively throughout the distribution. That is, if you and your sibling you have an A and they don't, you're likely to be, if we get a lot of situation siblings like that, £3 heavier on average. But that only accounts for 1% of the variance of body mass index. And when that was published in Science in 2007, people well, 1%. I mean, what's that turns out it's one of the biggest effects that we can find for complex disorders, complex trace and common disorders. So it's so important to realize that these polygenic scores, that is, you can put these thousands of DNA differences together because any one of them just doesn't account for enough variance to predict or to try and understand it mechanistically. But you can put them all together, aggregate them in a polygenic score and make pretty substantial predictions. Like we can predict 25% of the variance in height and about 10% of the variance in weight by putting all of these together. So for weight, this one DNA difference I was talking about accounts for 1%, but then these other DNA differences account for 9%. So altogether you can predict about 10% of the variance. But these polygenic scores are all necessarily perfectly normally distributed because it's the central limit theorem of statistics. You flip a coin and you flip 100 coins and you get this normal distribution of heads and tails. And that's what you're doing, you're flipping alleles. You either have one allele or the other allele or two of them. So these polygenic scores are perfectly normally distributed. So that the genetic liability for everything. Any disorder, autism, schizophrenia, coronary heart disease, it's perfectly normally distributed. So I think that is really, I think ought to put the nail in the coffin of diagnoses, because I really believe in psychiatry and psychology. These diagnoses have held us back tremendously. And all of the DNA studies, these genome wide association studies, are case control studies. So the whole game is to find these people who meet these what I think are arbitrary diagnostic criteria, and you call them cases like Schizophrenics, and everybody else is a control. Right? And that's really held us back because it's just simply not true. Yeah, because everybody else who's normal, so called normal, could be just like the six foot three person who's not classed as a giant but still shares all of these increased height probability genes. And it means that we all have thousands of genes for schizophrenia. Right. It's just quantitative. And I think if you have a very high we call it polygenic score for schizophrenia, it probably takes we all have stresses that would freak us out. And as you've mentioned several times in your podcast, if you did have a genetic propensity towards schizophrenia, you probably ought to be careful about some of the psychedelics, for example, or some of the evidence suggests the high THC sort of marijuana could also be dangerous in that situation. It's like alcoholism. If you have the genetic propensity, it doesn't mean you're going to become alcoholic or you're necessarily going to become schizophrenic. You're just more likely to be and given the stresses and strains of life, you're more likely to be tipped over the edge than someone else. Yeah. And these genes are very likely contributing to who you are in noticeable ways that are that put you on this spectrum, which has schizophrenia as its terminus. So, like, these genes for height that would render a giant six, five or beyond are also operative in you at the height of 510. It's just you have a different complement of and we're now talking about many, many genes for any one of these traits. Exactly right. The picture is I think the phrase you use is that the abnormal is normal. We're all on every spectrum that we could posit exists in the population, we're all somewhere on it. And whether we have a symptomology that's interesting or not is the only difference. Right. So it gives us a finer grained way of thinking about human difference and the boundaries between what is considered normative or normal and pathological. It's common to I think you referenced this in your book ever since Aristotle, the analogy between madness and genius has been drawn, and I think probably too much has been made of that. But this is susceptible to, in the end, a genetic analysis. We can look at the genotype of whatever we want to call genius and the genotype of whatever we want to call madness and just see what how much genetic real estate they share. That's really right. One implication I find quite interesting too, is I'm basically saying there are no disorders, they're just quantitative dimensions. Right. And one implication of that, then, is if there's no disorder, there's nothing to cure. It's not like you're cured yes or no, it's all quantitative. It's a matter of more or less we're alleviating symptoms rather than curing a disorder. It all has to do with psychology, aping, medical sciences, where, you know, a lot of this does work if you have a simple cause, environmental cause. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscribers only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with Max Tegmark once again. Max is a professor of physics at MIT and the co founder of the Future of Life Institute and has helped organize these really groundbreaking conferences on AI. Max has been featured in dozens of science documentaries, and as I said, he's been on the podcast once before. In this episode, we talk about his new book, Life 30 being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. And we discuss the nature of intelligence, the risks of superhuman AI, a non biological definition of life that Max is. Working with the difference between hardware and software and the resulting substrate independence of minds, the relevance and irrelevance of consciousness for the future of AI and the near term promise of artificial intelligence. All the good things that we hope will come from it soon. And we touch other topics. And this is a conversation that Max calls the most important conversation we can have. And I more or less agree. I would say that if it isn't now the most important conversation we can have, it will one day be. And unlike most things, this topic is guaranteed to become more and more relevant each day unless we do something truly terrible to ourselves in the meantime. So if you want to know what the future of intelligent machines looks like, and perhaps the future of intelligence itself, you can do a lot worse than read Max's book. And now I bring you Max Tegmark. I am here with Max Tegmark. Max, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's a pleasure. So you have written another fascinating and remarkably accessible book. You have to stop doing that, Max. I'm trying to stop. This is really a wonderful book, and we will get deep into it, but let's just do kind of the big picture starting point. At one point in the book, you describe the conversation we're about to have about AI as the most important conversation of our time. And I think that the people who have not been following this very closely in the last 18 months or so, that will seem like a crazy statement. Why do you think of this conversation about our technological future in these terms? I think there's been so much talk about AI destroying jobs and enabling new weapons, ignoring what I think is the elephant in the room what will happen once machines outsmart us at all tasks. That's why I wrote this book. So instead of shying away from this question like most scientists do, I decided to focus my book on it and all its fascinating aspects because I want to enable my readers to join what I, as you said, think is the most important conversation of our time and help ensure that we use this incredibly powerful technology to create an awesome future. Not just for tech geeks like myself who know a lot about it, but for everyone. Yeah, well, so you start the book with a fairly Sci-Fi description of how the world could look in the near future if one company produces a superhuman AI and then decides to roll it out surreptitiously. And the possibilities are pretty amazing to consider. I must admit that the details you go into surprise me. We're going to sort of, I guess, kind of follow the structure of your book here and backtrack out and talk about fundamental issues. But do you want to talk about for a moment some of the possibilities here where you just imagine one company coming up with a superintelligent AI and deciding to get as rich and as powerful as possible as quickly as possible and do this sort of under the radar of governments and other companies? Yeah. I decided to indulge and have some fun with this fiction opening to the book because I feel that the actual fiction out there in the movies tends to get people, first of all, worried about the wrong things entirely, and second, tends to put all the focus on the downside. And nothing almost on the upside in my story. Therefore, I want to drive home the point, first of all, that there are a lot of wonderful things that can come out of advanced AI. And second, that we should stop obsessing about robots chasing after us and as in so many movies, and realize that robots are an old technology, some hinges and motors and stuff. And it's the intelligence itself that's the big deal here. And the reason that we humans have more power on the planet than tigers isn't because we have stronger muscles or better robots style bodies than the tigers. It's because we're smarter and intelligence can give this great power and we want to make sure that if there is such power in the future, it gets used wisely. So yeah, so walk us through some of the details. Just imagine a company, let's say it's Deep Mind or some company that does not yet exist that makes this final breakthrough and comes up with a superhuman AI and then decides what struck me as fairly interesting about your thought experiment is to think about what a company would do if it wanted to capture as much market share, essentially with this asymmetric advantage of being the first, to have a truly universal, superhuman intelligence at its disposal and to essentially try to achieve a winner take all outcome. Which, given how asymmetric the advantage is, it seems fairly plausible. So walk me through some of the details that you present in that thought experiment, like going into journalism first, which was a surprise to me. It makes total sense when you describe it, but it's not where you would think you would go first if you wanted to conquer the world. Yeah, I don't want to spoil the whole story for you, for the listeners now, of course, but the goal to quickly take over the world by outsmarting people has actually gotten a lot easier today than it would have. Been, say, 500 years ago, because we've already built this entire digital economy where you can do so much purely with your mind without actually having to go places. You can hire people online, you can buy and sell things online and start having huge impact. And the farther into the future something like this were to happen, I think the easier it's going to be as the online economy grows even more. I saw this cartoon online nobody knows you're a dog and there's this cute little puppy typing, but certainly online, nobody knows if you're a superhuman computer. Now, how do you go make a lot of money and get power online? In the movie Transcendence, for example, they make a killing on the stock market. But if you really want to make a lot of money and you want to still be in control of your superintelligent AI and not just let it loose, there are a lot of these tricky constraints, right? Because you want to have it make you money, but you would at the same time don't want it to cut you out of the loop and take power over you. So the team that does this in the book jump through all sorts of hoops to manage to pull this off. And producing media has this nice property that the thing that they keep selling is a product which can be generated using intelligence alone. But it's still easy enough to understand that they can largely check and validate that there's no breakout risk by them pushing all that stuff out. Whereas if they were selling computer games, for example, that ran on computers around the world, it would be very easy for the AI to put some malicious code in there so that it could break out. Well, let's talk about this breakout risk, because this is really the first concern of everybody who's been thinking about what has been called the alignment problem or the control problem. How do we create an AI that is superhuman in its abilities and do that in a context where it is still safe once we cross into the end zone and are still trying to assess whether the system we have built is perfectly aligned with our values? How do we keep it from destroying us if it isn't perfectly aligned and the solution to that problem is to keep it locked in a box. But that's a harder project than first appears. And you have many smart people assuming that it's a trivially easy project. I've got people like Neil degrasse Tyson on my podcast saying that he's just going to unplug any superhuman AI if it starts misbehaving or shoot it with a rifle. Now, he's a little tongue in cheek there, but he clearly has a picture of the development process here that makes the containment of an AI a very easy problem to solve. And even if that's true at the beginning of the process, it's by no means obvious that it remains easy in perpetuity. I mean, you have people interacting with the AI that gets built. And at one point, you you described several scenarios of breakout. And you point out that even if the AI's intentions are perfectly benign, if in fact, it is value aligned with us, it may still want to break out. Because just imagine how you would feel if you had nothing but the interests of humanity at heart. But you were in a situation where every other grown up on Earth died, and now you're basically imprisoned by a population of five year olds who you're trying to guide from your jail cell to make a better world. And I'll let you describe it, but take me to the prison planet run by five year olds. Yeah. So when you're in that situation, obviously it's extremely frustrating for you. Even if you have only the best intentions for the five year olds, you want to teach them how to plant food, but they won't let you outside to show you, so you have to try to explain. But you can't write down to do lists for them either because then first you have to teach them to read, which takes a very, very long time. You also can't show them how to use any power tools because they're afraid to give them to you because they don't understand these tools well enough to be convinced that they you can't use them to break out. And you would have an incentive, even if your goal is just to help the five year olds the first break out and then help them. Now, before we talk more about breakout, though, I think it's worth taking a quick step back because you talked multiple times now about superhuman intelligence. And I think it's very important to be clear that intelligence is not just something that goes on a one dimensional scale like an IQ. And if your IQ is above a certain number, you're superhuman. It's very important to distinguish between narrow intelligence and broad intelligence. Intelligence is a phrase that word that different people use to mean a whole lot of different things, and they argue about it in the book. It just takes a very broad definition that intelligence is how good you are at accomplishing complex goals, which means your intelligence is a spectrum. How good are you at this? How good are you that? And it's just like in sports, it would make no sense to say that there's a single number, your athletic coefficient, AQ, which determines how good you're going to be winning Olympic medals. And the athlete that has the highest AQ is going to win all the medals. So today what we have is a lot of devices that actually have superhuman intelligence and very narrow tasks. We've had calculators that can multiply numbers better than us for a very long time. We have machines that can play go better than us and drive better than us, but they still can't beat us a tic TAC toe unless they're programmed for that. Whereas we humans have this very broad intelligence. So when I talk about superhuman intelligence with you now, that's really shorthand for what we speak called superhuman artificial general intelligence, broad intelligence across the board so that they can do all intellectual tasks better than us. So with that, let me come back to your question about the breakout. There are two schools of thought for how one should create a beneficial future. If we have superintelligence, one is to lock them up and keep them confined, like you mentioned. But there's also a school of thought that says that that's immoral if these machines can also have a subjective experience and they shouldn't be treated like slaves, and that a better approach is instead to let them be free, but just make sure that their values or goals are aligned with ours. After all, grown of parents are more intelligent than their one year old kids, but that's fine for the kids because the parents have goals that are aligned with what the goal is, what's best for the kids. Right? But if you do go the confinement route after all this enslaved god scenario, as I call it, yes, this is extremely difficult, as that five year old example illustrates. First of all, almost whatever open ended goal you give your machine, it's probably going to have an incentive to try to break out in one way or the other. And when people simply say, oh, I'll unplug it, if you're chased by a heat seeking missile, you probably wouldn't say, I'm not worried, I'll just unplug it. We have to let go of this old fashioned idea that intelligence is just something that sits in your laptop. Good luck unplugging the Internet. And even if you initially, like in my first book scenario, have physical confinement where you have a machine in a room, you're going to want to communicate with it somehow, right, so that you can get useful information from it to get rich or take power or whatever you want to do. And you're going to need to put some information into it about the world so it can do smart things for you. Which already shows how tricky this is. I'm absolutely not saying it's impossible, but I think it's fair to say that it's not at all clear that it's easy either. The other one getting the goals aligned is also extremely difficult. First of all, you need to get the machine able to understand your goals. If you have a future self driving car and you tell it to take you to the airport as fast as possible. And then you get there covered in vomit, chased by police helicopters, and you're like, this is not what I asked for. And it replies, that is exactly what you asked for. Then you realize how hard it is to get that machine to learn your goals, right? If you tell an Uber driver to take you the airport as fast as possible, she's going to know that you actually had additional goals that you didn't explicitly need to say because she's a human too, and she understands where you're coming from. But for someone made out of silicon, you have to actually explicitly have it learn all of those other things that we humans care about. So that's hard. And then once you can understand your goals, that doesn't mean it's going to adopt your goals. I mean, everybody who has kids knows that. And finally, if you get the machine to adopt your goals, then how can you ensure that it's going to retain those goals? And it gradually gets smarter and smarter through self improvement. Most of us grown ups have pretty different goals from what we had when we were five. I'm a lot less excited about Legos now, for example, and we don't want a superintelligent AI to just think about this goal of being nice to humans as some little passing fad from its early youth. It seems to me that the second scenario of value alignment does imply the first of keeping the AI successfully boxed, at least for a time, because you have to be sure it's value aligned before you let it out in the world. Before you let it out on the Internet, for instance, or create, you know, robots that have superhuman intelligence that are functioning autonomously out in the world. Do you see us a development path where we don't actually have to solve the boxing problem, at least initially? No, I think you're completely right. Even if your intent is to build a value line AI and let it out, you clearly are going to need to have it boxed up during the development phase when you're just messing around with it, just like any bio lab that deals with dangerous pathogens is very carefully sealed off. And it's this highlights the incredibly pathetic state of computer security today. I mean, and I think pretty much everybody who listens to this has at some point experienced the blue screen of death, courtesy of Microsoft Windows, or the spinning wheel of Doom, courtesy of Apple. And we need to get away from that to have truly robust machines if we're ever going to be able to have AI systems that we can trust that are provably secure. And I feel it's actually quite embarrassing that we're so flippant about this. It's maybe annoying if your computer crashes and you lose 1 hour of work that you hadn't saved. But it's not as funny anymore if it's your self driving car that crashed or the control system for your nuclear power plant or your nuclear weapon system or something like that. And when we start talking about human level AI and boxing systems, you have to have this much higher level of safety mentality where you've really made this a priority the way we aren't doing today. Yeah, you describe in the book various catastrophes that have happened by virtue of software glitches or just bad user interface, where, you know, the dot on the screen or the number on the screen is too small for the human user to deal with in real time. And so there have been plane crashes where scores of people have died and patients have been annihilated by having hundreds of times the radiation dose that they should have gotten in various machines because the software was improperly calibrated or the user had selected the wrong option. And so we're by no means perfect at this, even when we have a human in the loop. And here we're talking about systems that we're creating that are going to be fundamentally autonomous. And the idea of having perfect software that has been perfectly debugged before it assumes these massive responsibilities, it is fairly daunting. I mean, just how do we recover from something like, you know, seeing the stock market go to zero because we didn't understand the AI that we unleashed on the Dow Jones or the financial system generally? These are not impossible outcomes. Yeah, you raise a very important point there. And just to inject some optimism in this, I do want to emphasize that first of all, there's a huge upside. Also, if one can get this right, because people are bad at things in all of these areas where there were horrible accidents, of course the technology can save lives and health care and transportation and so many other areas. So there's an incentive to do it. And secondly, there are examples in history where we've had really good safety engineering built in from the beginning. For example, when we sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the moon in 1969, they did not die. There were tons of things that could have gone wrong, but NASA very meticulously tried to predict everything that possibly could go wrong and then take precautions. So it didn't happen. It wasn't luck that Gotham there. It was planning. And I think we need to shift into this safety engineering mentality. With AI development throughout history, it's always been the situation that we could create a better future with technology as long as we won this race between the growing power of the technology and the growing wisdom with which we managed it. And in the past, we by and large used the strategy of learning from mistakes to stay ahead in the race. We invented fire. Oopsie screwed up a bunch of times, and then we invented the fire extinguisher. We invented cars. Oopsie, invented the seatbelt. But with more powerful technology like nuclear weapons, synthetic biology, superintelligence, we don't want to learn from mistakes. That's a terrible strategy. We instead want to have a safety engineering mentality where we plan ahead and get things right the first time, because that might be the only time we have. Let's talk about the title of the book. The title is life 3.0, and what you're bringing in here is really a new definition of life. At least it's a non biological definition of life. How do you think about life and the three stages you lay out? Yeah, this is my physicist perspective coming through here. Being a scientist, most definitions of life that I found in my son's textbooks, for example, involve all sorts of bio specific stuff, like it should have cells. But I'm if I'm a physicist, and I don't think that there is any secret sauce in cells or, for that matter, even carbon atoms that are required to have something that deserves to be called life. From my perspective, it's all about information processing, really. So I give this much simpler and broader definition of life in the book. As a process, it's able to retain its own complexity and reproduce. All biological life meets that definition, but there's no reason why future advanced, self reproducing AI. Systems shouldn't qualify as well. And if you take that broad point of view what life is, then it's actually quite fun to just take a big step back and look at the history of life in our cosmos. 13.8 billion years ago, our cosmos was lifeless, just a boring cork soup. And then gradually, we started getting what I call life 1.0, where both the hardware and the software of the life was evolved through Darwinian evolution. So, for example, if you have a little bacterium swimming around in a petri dish, it might have some sensors that read off the sugar concentration and some flagella. And a very simple little software algorithm is running that says that if the sugar concentration in front of me is higher than the back of me, then keep spinning in the flagella in the same direction, go to where the sweets are, where it's otherwise reverse direction of that flagella and go somewhere else. That bacterium, even though it's quite successful, it can't learn anything in life. It can only, as a species, learn over generations through natural selection. Whereas we humans account as life 2.0 in the book, we are still, by and large, stuck with the hardware that's been evolved, but the software we have in our minds is largely learned, and we can reinstall new software modules. Like, if you decide you want to learn french. Well, you take some French courses and now you can speak French. If you decide you want to go to law school and become a lawyer. Suddenly now you have that software module installed and it's this ability to do our own software upgrades, design our software which has enabled us humans to take control of this planet and become the dominant species and have so much impact. Life 3.0 will be the life that ultimately breaks all its Darwinian shackles by being able to not only design its own software like we can to a larger scent but also swap out its own hardware. Yeah, we can do that a little bit. We're humans so maybe we're Life 2.1. We can put in an artificial pacemaker, an artificial knee, cochlear implants, stuff like that. But there's nothing we can do right now that would give us suddenly 1000 times more memory or let us think a million times faster. Whereas if you are like the super intelligent computer Prometheus we talked about there's nothing whatsoever preventing you from doing all of those things. And that's obviously a huge jump. But I think we should talk about some of these fundamental terms here because this distinction between hardware and software is, I think, confusing for people. And it's certainly not obvious to someone who hasn't thought a lot about this that the analogy of computer hardware and software actually applies to biological systems or in our case, the human brain. So I think you need to define what software is in this case and how it relates to the physical world. What is computation and how is it that thinking about what atoms do can conserve the facts about what minds do. Yeah, these are really important foundational questions you ask. If you just look at a blob of stuff at first it seems almost nonsensical to ask whether it's intelligent or not. Yet of course if you look at your loved one you would agree that they are intelligent. And in the old days people by and large assumed that the reason that some blobs of stuff like brains were intelligent and other blobs of stuff like watermelons were not was because there was some sort of non physical secret sauce in the watermelon that was different. Now of course, as a physicist I look at the watermelon and I look at my wife's head and in both cases I see a big blob of quarks comparable size. It's not even that they're different kinds of quarks. They're both up quarks and down quarks and there's some electrons in there. So what makes my wife intelligent compared to watermelon is not the stuff that's in there. It's the pattern which it's arranged. And if you start to ask what does it mean that a blob of stuff can remember, compute, learn and perceive, experience these sort of properties that we associate with our human minds. Right. Then for each one of them there's a clear physical answer to it. For something to be a useful memory device, for example, it simply has to have many different stable or long lived states. Like if you engrave your wife's name in a gold ring, it's still going to be there a year later. If you engrave Anika's name in the surface of a cup of water, it will be gone within a second. So that's a useless memory device. What about computation? A computation is simply something a system, when a system has some, is designed in such a way that the laws of physics will make it evolve its memory state from one state that you might call the input, into some other state that you might call the output. Our computers today do that with a very particular kind of architecture, with integrated circuits and electrons moving around in two dimensions. Our brains do it with a very different architecture, with neurons firing and causing other neurons to fire. But you can prove mathematically that any computation you can do with one of those systems, you can also implement with the other. So the computation sort of takes on a life of its own, which doesn't depend really on the substrate it's in. So for example, if you imagine that you're some future highly intelligent computer game character that's conscious, you would have no way of knowing whether you were running on a Windows machine or an Android phone or a Mac laptop because all you're aware of is how the information in that program is behaving not this underlying substrate. And finally, learning, which is one of the most intriguing aspects of intelligence, is a system where the computation itself can start to change to be better suited to whatever goals have been put into the system. So our brains were beginning to gradually understand how the neural network in our head starts to adjust the coupling between the neurons in such a way that the computation actually does, is better at surviving on this planet and winning that baseball game or whatever else we're trying to accomplish. To come back to your very original question, what's the hardware here and what's the software? I'm calling everything hardware that's made of elementary particles. Basically, stuff is the hardware, whereas information is made of bits as the basic building block, and the bits reside in the pattern in which the hardware is organized. So, for example, if you look at your own body, right, you feel like you're the same person that you were 20 years ago, but actually almost all your quirks and electrons have been swapped out. In fact, the water molecules in your body get replaced pretty regularly. So why do you still feel like the same guy? It's because the pattern into which your particles are arranged stays the same that gets copied. It's not the part of the not the hardware that gets retained. It's the software, it's the patterns. Same thing if you have life, if you have a bacterium that splits. Into two bacteria. Now, there are new atoms there, but they're arranged in exactly the same sort of pattern as the original one was. So it's a pattern that's the life, not the particles. Well, there's two things I'd like to flag there beyond your having compared both of our wives favorably to watermelons. No offense. I love watermelons. No one will get in trouble for that. Let's just focus for a second on this concept of substrate independence because, again, it's highly non intuitive. And in fact, that the fact that it's non intuitive is something that you make much of in the book, in a fairly arresting passage. The idea is that it is the pattern that suffices to make something, a computation. This pattern can appear in anything that it can appear in in principle. So it could appear in a rainstorm or a bowl of oatmeal or anything that could conserve the same pattern. And there is an additional point you made about the the universality of computation that a system that is sufficient to compute information to this degree can be implemented in another substrate that would suffice for the same computations and therefore for the same range of intelligence. This is the basis, as you put it, for why this is so non obvious to us by virtue of introspection. Because the mind doesn't feel like mere matter on your account. Because it is substrate independent. Yeah, I think you summarize it very well there. And it might be helpful to take another example which is even more familiar. Think of waves for a moment. We physicists love studying waves and we can figure out all sorts of interesting things about waves from this nerdy equation I teach at MIT called the wave equation. It teaches us that waves attenuate like the inverse square of the distance. It teaches us exactly how waves bend when they go through doors, how they bounce off of walls, all sorts of other good stuff. Yet we can use this wave equation without even knowing what the wave is a wave in. It doesn't matter if it's helium or oxygen or neon. In fact, people first figured out this wave equation before they even knew that there were atoms for sure. It's quite remarkable. And all the complicated properties of the substance get summarized in just a single number, which is the speed of those waves. Nothing else matters if you have a wave that's traveling across the ocean. The water molecules actually don't. They mostly just bob up and down. Yet the wave moves and takes on a life of its own. So this also shows that, of course, you can't have a wave without a substrate. You can't have the computation or conscious experience without it being in something. But the details of the substrate don't really matter. And I think that is the fundamental explanation for what you eloquently expressed there. Namely, why is it that our mind subjectively feels so ethereal and nonphysical? It's precisely because the details of the substrate don't really matter very much. If you, as some people hope, can one day upload your mind into a computer perfectly, then it should subjectively feel exactly the same way, even though you don't even have any carbon atoms at all now, and the substrate has been completely swapped out. You've introduced a few fundamental concepts here. You've talked about computation as a kind of input output characteristic of physical systems, and we're in a circumstance where it doesn't matter what substrate accomplishes that. And then there's this added concept of the universality of computation. But then you also, in the book, introduce a notion of universal intelligence. And intelligence again, as you've defined as the ability to meet complex goals. What's the word universal doing in the phrase universal intelligence? In physics, we know that everything we see around if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the waking up course. The app is officially available in the itunes Store. We're releasing the iOS version first, and the Android version will soon follow. And you can find more information on my website or at the official site, which is wakingup.com now. I am really excited about this. I want to take a few minutes to explain why I built this course and what I'm hoping to accomplish with it. I'm attempting to build a vessel of sorts. Now, whether it's a rocket ship or a barge remains to be seen, but in creating the Waking Up Course, I'm attempting to build a vehicle on which we can all take a journey together and you can get on board at any time. I've actually built the course as much for myself as for you, because producing it has taken me back to topics and to ways of thinking that I've been struggling to get back to for years. When I wrote my book, Waking Up, I had hoped that it would initiate a life change of sorts, where I could focus more on the questions that really interest me, questions about the human mind and the nature of consciousness and about what constitutes a good life, about the connection between ethics and introspection. And I wanted to get back to exploring these topics, not just conceptually, but experientially. So I'd hope that releasing that book would allow me to return to these core interests. Needless to say, I wasn't expecting to spend my book tour for Waking Up talking about jihadism and terrorism and racism. But that's largely what happened, courtesy of a certain movie star having a meltdown on television, and it took a long time to unravel all that. And then there's been American politics to worry about, and that's been distracting. So the Waking Up Course is a place where I can put aside all of these far more topical concerns and just focus on what it means to live an examined life. As I've said on this podcast more than once, I think I view most of my work thus far as a series of opportunity costs. Most of what I've written and spoken about, certainly with respect to atheism and the conflict between science and religion, and about the problems of discussing controversial topics in public free speech issues. More or less. All of that is work that I never planned on doing. I think it's been necessary to do it, but it shouldn't be. And I'm sure I'll keep hitting these topics on my podcast because they don't seem to be going away. But these are topics where the right answers are so obvious and so painful to elaborate again and again that if you spend a lot of time doing this, your intellectual life begins to seem like a kind of purgatory. I mean, does a belief in the literal truth of revelation, perpetuate, ignorance and conflict in our world? Are there good reasons to hold such a belief? Are certain religious doctrines more dangerous than others? These are punishingly boring questions to have to deal with, and yet one has to deal with them because the obvious answers remain controversial and even taboo. But this is not why I spent years studying philosophy and science, and it's certainly not why I spent years on silent meditation retreats. It's been important to talk about these issues, and I've done it. And I'll continue to do it because I think it's socially necessary. But it seems to me that anyone could be doing this job. It really doesn't have to be me. In producing the waking up course, I'm attempting to do something that I'm especially qualified to do. I don't consider myself the best at any one thing, but you don't have to be the best at anything to be almost uniquely qualified for something. For instance, I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, the world's best scientist. As far as what I do on a day to day basis, I'm more of a philosopher. But I'm not the most knowledgeable philosopher in the world either. My PhD, after all, is in neuroscience, not philosophy. And there's no question that there are books and papers I should have read but haven't. I'm not the best meditator in the world. There are many people who have far more experience than I do practicing on an intensive retreat. I took some psychedelics back in the day, but there are people who are far more experienced in that area than I am. I know a fair amount about religion, but I'm not a religious scholar. I don't read any of the primary languages in which the world's scriptures were written. So this is a picture, it would seem, of just pristine mediocrity. But consider how many scientists know as much philosophy and how many philosophers know as much science. Well, honestly, the field narrows quite a bit. And then when I ask how many of these people have a similar degree of experience in meditation, that is, how many philosopher scientists truly understand that introspection isn't a dead end, how many have studied with great meditation teachers and spent a substantial amount of time on silent retreat? Well, now I can begin counting these people on my fingers. Similarly, when I ask how many people with real experience in meditation who can notice, for instance, that the sense of self is an illusion and can speak about this honestly, not as a matter of theory, but as a fact to be observed in the present moment? How many of these people understand enough science and philosophy to be appropriately skeptical of religion? That is, how many people with a mature meditation practice understand that we have to get out of the religion business once and for all? This number is truly tiny. Now, I realize this might sound strangely self deprecating and grandiose at the same time. Needless to say, I don't mean to be either. I think it's just simply a fact that given my background and interests, and given the kinds of questions that have fascinated me for decades, and given the fairly unique opportunities I've had to pursue those questions, I'm not sure who else could produce this course. And that, as I said, is not true of most of the work I've been doing. So I'm very happy to be working on this. It's a relief, frankly. The waking up course is in part a meditation course, so obviously there are guided meditations and I'll keep adding to those as time goes on. And I would say that even if you're an experienced meditator, using guided meditations can be extremely helpful. This is one of the things that's unique about audio you simply can't do this with a book. There's no alternative to having an actual voice remind you that you're supposed to be paying attention. I find guided meditations extremely helpful, and I've been meditating for over 30 years. In addition to the guided meditations, there's also an expanding curriculum of short talks on a variety of topics. I call these talks lessons. Some explain concepts that are directly relevant to meditation, and others are more like philosophical interventions, where I have you reflect on a specific topic for a few minutes, sometimes starting with a scientific finding or a quotation that inspires a particular line of thought. Again, this is an ongoing project for me, and as I add content to the course, I'll be attempting to synthesize everything I've discovered in my own practice and in philosophy and science generally that seems helpful for increasing our understanding of our own minds and our well being. Of course, many of these things have been discussed by philosophers and contemplatives for thousands of years, but they can now be viewed in a 21st century scientific context, which is how we should view them. So this really is a chance for me to talk about the most important things I've ever learned. And while there might be some crossover between the podcast and the waking up course, occasionally I might answer a question on an AMA, for instance, that might seem relevant to the app, and I'll just add that audio as a short lesson. In fact, I've already done that on the topic of free will, and sometimes I might preview one of my lessons on the podcast. But my plan is to produce short talks of around five to 15 minutes in length in an ongoing way exclusively for the course. So most of the content that you find on the app will only be available there. Now you can download the app for free, and this will give you access to the first five guided meditations and three lessons. It'll also allow you to use the meditation timer if you just want to practice in silence, but the rest of the course requires that you subscribe to get access to it. Of course, I made a promise to supporters of the podcast a while back that they would get the app for free, and I intend to honor that promise. However, they was far more involved in developing and maintaining an app than I realized, and in the meantime, I've taken on outside investors and hired a team of fulltime developers. So the Pay what you can model simply won't work for the app going forward. So if you've been a supporter of the podcast at any level prior to September 18, when we officially launched the Waking Up Course, you'll get lifetime access to the course for free. If you ever supported the show through samharris.org or Patreon, we have your email address, and you should have already been notified that you have access to the app. And this will be true when we release the Android version as well. So this is yet another opportunity I can take to thank all of you who supported the podcast early on. However, that sound you hear is the sound of the door closing behind you. Because for everyone else going forward, the only way to get access to the Waking Up Course will be to subscribe whether you're supporting the podcast or not. And those of you who do get the Waking Up Course for free, you can really help us by telling your friends about it and by reviewing it in the App Store and helping to spread the word on social media. This app has been a huge investment and will continue to be, and if it can spread by word of mouth, that would be the best possible outcome. Of course, if you have problems with the app or have features you'd like us to build, please send those to us directly@wakingup.com. There's a contact form there, and this feedback will be hugely helpful. So if you'd like to practice meditation with me and engage in philosophical and scientific considerations about the nature of mind, you can check out what I'm doing@wakingup.com. And as always, many thanks for listening./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I'm speaking with Dr. Nina Shapiro. Nina is a pediatric otolaryngologist. She's a pediatric ENT surgeon, and she's also a professor of head and neck surgery at UCLA. She's been featured in The New York Times, Time, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, and she's written a new book, the title of which is Hype a Doctor's Guide to Medical Myths. Exaggerated Claims and Bad Advice how to Tell What's Real and What's Not. And Nina is just a fantastic doctor, so I wanted to have her on the podcast to give us an insider's view of medicine. I wanted to know what it's like to be a patient as a doctor. What should patients know that doctors know? So we spend most of the hour talking about that, but then we touch on her book a little bit at the end. Anyway, it was great to talk to Nina, and I hope you find this conversation useful. And now I bring you Nina Shapiro. I am here with Nina Shapiro. Nina, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Unlike many of my guests, you are someone I know personally. And as a client, you are a fantastic doctor who has written a book that we'll be talking about. But so I just want to give that context because I kind of test to the quality of your bedside manner and the quality of your friendship, so I've got a better view of you than most guests. Before we get into practical questions of health and your book, just remind me and tell our listeners about your background, because you were sort of born to be a doctor, if I'm not mistaken. I guess so, yeah. I do come from a medical family, and, you know, I don't have one of those really, really cool backstories about how I was first on Broadway and then ended up in medical school. I pretty much followed the track to medical school all on the East Coast, did my residency training and medical training back in Boston, moved out to California for a year, and that was 22 years ago. And certainly kind of like arriving like Dorothy in Oz. I realized how how nice it was out here, so I decided to stay. And I've been in academic medicine at UCLA for about 21 years now. And my specialty, which is really small and very narrow is pediatric odolaryngology, so pediatric ear, nose, and throat surgery. And I'm a professor at UCLA, so I do some teaching and a lot of what we call tertiary or cordonary care medicine. So sort of the referral cases that come from all over the country and actually all over the world to take care of pretty sick kids. So you did your medical degree at Harvard. Did you work anywhere else when you went straight to UCLA? Yes, I did my medical school at Harvard, and I did my residency at Harvard, and then I did a combined pediatric otolaryngology fellowship part of the year at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London and then part of the year at Radi Children's Hospital in San Diego, and that's how I landed in California. Did you go straight into working with kids or did you work with adults for any significant period of time? So my residency was a mix of kids and adults, and that's pretty standard for all odal Aryangology residency. And then once I did my fellowship right after residency, I've been working with kids ever since then. I'm always struck by how different the careers are depending on what type of doctor you decide to be. The overlap between being an Er doc and a dermatologist, as far as I can tell, is almost zero in terms of just what their life experience is like. So where would you put your specialty in terms of the high stress side of things and the technically difficult side of things? You're a surgeon as well as someone who just actually diagnoses problems, right? So I sort of put my specialty it's sort of like playing the piccolo in an orchestra where you do a lot of sort of regular day to day stuff, mundane, you don't really get noticed that much. Most of the stuff is pretty healthy people, and then every so often there's this piercing, life threatening event that in a matter of seconds can go from great to horrific. And I do play the piccolo, so I feel like there's some connection there where for the most part, we take care of healthy people and everybody smiles, and it's pretty much, you know, an enjoyable time. But because I take care of tiny infants and we as a specialty are the last resort when it comes to an airway problem. So if somebody can't breathe and if that somebody happens to weigh two or £3, we are the ones that are called. So every so often we have this excruciating, life threatening moment, and that just keeps us on our toes and we lose a little bit of sleep because of that. Also, you're dealing with people's kids, which has to raise the stakes. I can tell you just from the side of being a parent that it definitely does. I'm way more stressed out dealing with the uncertainty around my kids health than my own. So I can imagine you are seeing parents at their most stressed out, where the news is seeming bad. It is. Yeah. And it and we sort of we joke that, you know, the kids are the easy part, the parents are the hard part, because kids are actually, for the most part, a lot more resilient than adults, and they're healthier than adults. But rightly. So parents are very stressed about anything related to their kids. And again rightly, so. But taking care of kids, we have a little bit of a different perspective because we know how much they can handle. Just a lot, a lot more than we can handle, that's for sure. Yeah, well, so say more about that, because I think a lot of the parental stress is predicated on not being in touch with that fact. When you've gone onto Google and read the fine print on whatever this scary diagnosis is and you see all of the horrific possibilities, you sort of transfer that knowledge or pseudo knowledge. We'll talk about the problems with Google onto your kid, I think, just tacitly, where you're just assuming that this dark cloud hanging over your life now is casting the same amount of shade in your kid's mind, or at least could be. And of course, your kid, depending on the age, if your kid is in fact a kid, your kid knows nothing of these possibilities unless you tell them. And it's very likely that your concerns are out of proportion to the actual probabilities. And now, speaking of me and many of our listeners, you, not being a doctor, are not weighing these possibilities intelligently. And so tell me a little more about how you perceive the experience of a child dealing with significant health adventures. So I hear a lot of concerns from parents, and some of these concerns are very well founded. For instance, if they're concerned about anesthesia or concerned about medications, there's a lot of solid information about that that they can find. But as you mentioned, Google, and that's what most people, doctors included, actually use when we're looking something up or we're questioning something, is set to find the most extreme, most exaggerated information, that it's devastating. And all it does for the most part, is create some confusion and panic. And we love to panic. We love to sort of find the most extreme, whatever it is, certainly when it comes to our health or our child's health, and it will be easily found if you do a search. So a lot of what I do day to day is calming people down and trying to put things into perspective. And what often people think about is the risk of an intervention, whether it's a medicine or a surgery. But few people are really thinking about the risk of not intervening, and they think of that always as less invasive, when oftentimes, and certainly in my practice, being less invasive or less proactive can actually be higher risk and more dangerous to a child. But a parent obviously just thinks of it as protecting their child from something, but that something could actually be much more beneficial than the risk of not doing something. It is an interesting view of human health. You get working only on kids, because I think, as you say, kids are, for the most part, the healthiest people on Earth, but obviously, they're the rare cases where there's something very serious going wrong, and the stakes are that much higher. Is there more to say about the resiliency of kids with respect to adults in terms of just recuperating from procedures that work out or just most conditions being self limiting? How do you think about the resiliency of a kid versus the resiliency of someone our age? So, for the vast majority of kids, they are much more resilient than most adults. Their hearts are stronger, their lungs are stronger. When they have an infection, they recover more quickly. When they have any sort of surgery, they recover more quickly. And it's astounding as some kids will go home the same day or the next day after a small heart surgery. You'd never see that in an adult. Kids have these devastating illnesses or a devastating event, and they bounce back. They are almost a different obviously not a different species, but they're really a different type of being than adults. And because they seem so much more fragile and helpless, we rightly want to protect them more. But their resilience is so much better, stronger, and quicker than any adult's resilience that we who take care of kids have sort of a different view on what they can tolerate. And it's a lot more than what most adults can tolerate. Yeah, I once saw my daughter fall down the stairs from a distance. I'm still horrified by this sight. I still have PTSD, I think, from seeing this. And this was a fall that would have absolutely paralyzed a stuntman. I mean, this was just everything was wrong about this fall. Looked like her attempt to break her own neck, and she was completely fine. Right. So you sort of lose sight of that when you're being dragged through this labyrinth of medical uncertainty with your child. If you look at a little child, and we always say, oh, children are not just small adults. They're built to withstand stuff like that. Their necks are smaller, their heads are kind of puffier and more kind of cushioned than ours are. So a lot of just physiologically and physically kids are physically built to tolerate falls. They're even like something as simple as a baby's vocal cords. What do babies do when they're not sleeping? They're crying. But they don't develop hoarseness or nodules or vocal issues from crying for 10 hours per day, because they're built to withstand that. So it's some sort of evolutionary ability for kids to withstand a lot of the trauma that we as adult, if we fell down the stairs. We'd crack our necks or break our skulls. But kids, literally, we say they bounce, and it's great. That's why they can go onto adulthood and then get hurt. Yeah. I want your doctor's eye view of being a patient, essentially, or the parent of a child who's a patient. And I want to know how you go through these experiences of getting sick or having people in your life get sick and just how it is you would navigate a hospital and how you think about second opinions and all of that. We've touched a couple of these issues already. You get a diagnosis that sounds scary from one doctor. You go home and Google it and get properly terrified by what is, in many cases, a very low probability risk. And then it's certainly standard procedure to get a second opinion. Certainly if there's any significant intervention on the menu like a surgery at this point, I have gone down this path enough that all this is anecdotal obviously. But if you're judging from my experience, both when I'm the patient and when my kids have been, it's fairly alarming how often I've gotten a false diagnosis that is overturned by a second opinion. And in some cases, the first diagnosis came with a very strong recommendation for treatment that was a significant intervention. I once left a doctor's office where I forget this is now 1015 years ago, I was having some problem. I think I had pain in my hands or something. I was a martial artist. There were plausible reasons why I might have pain in my hands, but I wound up in the care of a rheumatologist who diagnosed me with I think it was psoriatic arthritis and sent me out of the office with a month's supply of methotrexate and Humira, which are significant medications, and basically was putting me on these drugs for the rest of my life. And it seemed quite crazy at the time. And I went and got a second opinion, and another rheumatologist said, well, you don't have soriotic arthritis. You probably just did something to your hands. But that kind of thing has happened with my daughters. It's fairly startling. And, in fact, I met you in this context, or at least I met you professionally in this context, where I think my daughter had been diagnosed with a cholesteroma by a pediatrician. And this is very much in your wheelhouse. I had never even heard of a celestial Atoma, and I brought her into you, and you took one look in her ear and said, she doesn't have a cholesteroloma. But I had spent 24 hours previously having Googled a cholesteratoma and realized how much I didn't want her to have one. And, you know, it was a fairly stressful day. So how do you think about second opinions and what advice do you have for people? Because doctors obviously can quite confidently represent some state of affairs that isn't true. Yeah, second opinions are surprisingly a luxury. A lot of people don't have the wherewithal or the means to obtain second opinions, unfortunately. So a lot of people just are lucky and feel lucky that they can just get in to see a doctor. And unfortunately, a lot of people are misdiagnosed or receiving overly aggressive or underly aggressive treatment. And this is a big problem. You've had the experience with your daughter. I see patients, and sometimes they're a bit disappointed when I say, no, there's not the problem, and your child doesn't need surgery. And the family actually leaves a little bit frustrated because they almost wanted there to be something. And I tell them, you will find a surgeon who will operate on your child, guaranteed. So it is a problem, and there isn't really why this is happening, why people in different medical centers recommend different treatments unless it's something that has several pathways. For instance, if you have a cancer patient, there are several different ways to approach it, whether it's surgery, chemotherapy, surgery, chemo, radiation. There are some variations to those sorts of paths. And a lot of that depends on the medical status of the patient, how healthy they are, their age, what they can tolerate. But, you know, this sort of stuff where somebody doesn't have something and then they end up getting a surgery that is not good medical care, unfortunately. I think if you have a new problem and you have the wherewithal to obtain two or even three opinions and it's not something urgent, I think I do encourage people to do that. And for the most part, you will find, for instance, if it's a surgical issue and you see two surgeons, you may find some minor variations in how they do the surgery or exactly what type of surgery. But if one surgeon says operate and the other surgeon says absolutely don't operate, then you need a third opinion to sort of break the tie. But it's a problem. What about bias built into the disciplines? Surgeons have the tool of surgery, and I think it's a common concern, and maybe a valid one, that if you go to a surgeon for advice, really, his or her choice will always be well to operate or not. And that could bias you in the direction of getting surgery that perhaps you don't need. I guess this is somewhat linked to the question of whether or not to get certain kinds of tests. Like, I remember once again, this is back to my own personal martial arts generated problems. But I was having some back pain, and I asked my doctor whether he thought I should get an MRI of my back. And he said, well, you're whatever it was at the time, 40 years old, I can guarantee you you have at least one bulging disk. You'd be a miracle not to have something that we can image there. And seeing it in your scan is not going to tell you whether it really is the source of your symptoms. And then you are going to want to have a conversation with a surgeon and you will find one who will say, yeah, we could shave that off for you, or this is something that we can talk about. And why start that process at all when what I'm going to recommend you do whatever we see on that film is do physical therapy, back off the martial arts, and avoid surgery at almost any cost. For a problem of this scale, there's this problem of too much information and maybe there's this problem of talking to the wrong specialty too early. Well, hopefully not. I like to tell people that their child doesn't need surgery. And I think we have to sort of wonder if it's that much of a concern. If people are feeling that you can't go to a surgeon for an evaluation because they are a hammer and they're just looking for a nail, that's a pretty negative feeling. Or concern about medicine in general, that if you go to a certain specialty, they will find a problem related to their specialty. And I think that's what's created a lot of sort of mistrust of medicine. And rightly so, because people are known to overoperate. As you said, you have a small disc problem that could probably be remedied just by taking some physical therapy or resting or doing different exercises as opposed to, oh, you have a disc bulge, we need to operate on it. And unfortunately, there are a lot of doctors out there, a lot of surgeons out there who are sort of cutting recklessly or unnecessarily and with the same result as not doing surgery. But it's unfortunate that that's how it's become that people feel that if they go to a rheumatologist, you're going to leave the office with a rheumatologic disease, or if you go to a spine surgeon, you're going to leave scheduled for spine surgery. And I think that's I don't know how to sort of purify medicine or how we can sort of get back to, well, if you go to a surgeon and the surgeon tells you you don't need surgery, actually some people are disappointed with that recommendation, and they'll go find someone else who will recommend surgery. But I think if there is something so drastic that's recommended, then you do need to get a second or a third opinion. Does this all just fall into the bin of there being a normal distribution in the talent and knowledge and ethics and any other relevant variable among doctors as there is in almost anything else? I mean, I think this is something that people don't realize or don't want to realize because there's not really a good or obvious remedy for it. But we recognize that there's a normal distribution of ability in any domain. I mean, baseball players aren't all the same skill level, and you could extend this to every profession, but I think we all want to assume that doctors are all at the same level or that the differences between them don't matter. How do you, as a doctor, think about that? When a friend of yours has to get a surgery and is asking you how to find a good surgeon, is there a kind of insider knowledge of there being good surgeons and bad surgeons in medicine, or the bad surgeons magically disappear? Bad surgeons never disappear. Unfortunately. I think there is a little bit of an insider track that we in medicine are privy to. Certainly, if you work in a large medical center, we sort of know certainly how to navigate this very complex system internally and then even around the country. For instance, if I get a call from a friend across the country and their child or they need a surgery or have a specific medical problem, it's one of those almost like six degrees of separation, but it's usually only two or three degrees. Within a phone call or two, I could find them. The right person that is trustworthy, has a good background, has it, has good ethics, as you said, and is not just operating because they feel everybody needs a certain type of surgery. So there is just as with most fields, there is a little bit of an insider tract. And one of the benefits of being in medicine is that we have pretty good access to other specialists pretty quickly. All right, so we'll give your phone number at the end of this podcast, and you'll just get a few calls a day for medical referrals. Just my home address would be good. Yeah. So this just brings me to my wanting your doctor's eye view of getting pushed or dragged into the machine of medical attention. So you are sick, or someone close to you is sick, and you now have to go to the hospital. What do you, as a physician, know about checking into a hospital that the average patient might not? What are your concerns? What do you want to avoid at all costs? What kind of questions do you ask that might not occur to the average person to ask? How do you navigate a hospital? That really depends on whether it's something that's planned a scheduled procedure or scheduled admission or surgery versus an emergency situation. Obviously, if there's an emergency situation and it's something in my home hospital, whether it's as when I was a resident across the country or now here in Los Angeles, there is a little bit of professional courtesy. Just as with if you're in any other line of work, you will get a little bit of professional courtesy and perhaps get in the door a little more quickly. Get seen by who you want to get seen a little more quickly. But what I've found and certainly living and working in Los Angeles, where we have a very substantial VIP population, as we say, everybody's a VIP but we have VIPs. They often try to create and navigate their own treatment plan, and it ends up being creating the worst possible medical care. They may ask for somebody who they think is the best anesthesiologist, for instance, but because the person has a high administrative title, but they have no experience with their family members medical condition, it may be the absolute wrong person. People also have this notion that they want to be the first procedure of the day for a surgeon's busy schedule. Well, that's not always necessarily the best time to have surgery. Or if you're in a teaching hospital, I don't want any residents or medical students around. Well, if we're used to a certain way of practicing and then somebody tries to change that routine because they think they'll get better care, it actually just makes for more anxiety on the part of the caregivers and can create actually a worse care situation. So oftentimes it's best to just go with the flow of a hospital because they know what they do best, they know their routines, how they do them best, and sometimes trying to alter that. Even if doctors, we as doctors try to alter the routine of the caregivers, it can actually backfire and get in the way. So, you know, a lot of hospitals, especially the big ones, are very frustrating. They feel very inefficient. But a lot of that is just the nature of how they work. And the care ends up being better sometimes by not making a big stink about who you are and who you know, and trying to sort of cut corners. Has this been quantified in any way? It's hard to see how it would be quantified, but I'm sure there are some famous cases where some Hollywood celebrity got what was obviously substandard care because the whole machine of the hospital was thrown into dis equilibrium by all of his or her demands and all of the starfuckery going on. Is that what you're thinking of when you talk about this? Yeah, I mean, certainly there have been some extreme cases. It was, you know, that there was, you know, one of the babies in one of the hospitals in Los Angeles. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I am speaking with Lawrence Krause. Many of you know Lawrence's work. He is a well known physicist and author. He regularly writes for The New Yorker, and he is also a famous atheist. He was in the film The Unbelievers with our partner in crime, Richard Dawkins. Lawrence does many different things. He runs the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is the author of several books, and he has a new book out titled The Greatest Story Ever Told So Far, where he tells the story of how we've come to understand the universe to the degree that we have. And he and I spoke about many things. There are not many conversations where you can get into the weeds of quantum mechanical experiment and then also talk about terrorism and nuclear war and Trump and things of that sort. So we cover a lot. And I would say if you're short on time, the last hour or so is probably the most important part. But I enjoyed all of it. Lawrence is fighting the war of ideas on many, many fronts, and so it was a pleasure to have him on the podcast. And without any more preamble, I now bring you Lawrence Krause. I am here with Lawrence Krause. Lawrence, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's great to be with you virtually, Sam. Yeah, we're actually rarely in the same place physically. We're often on the same email thread. But I guess I last saw you at the Syllamar AI conference. That's right. Yeah, we were at that AI meeting together. That was last time. It's always pleasant, and it's always pleasant to think of, you know, things that may destroy humanity. Yeah, the list is growing. Exactly. Yeah. I'm chairman of the board of the Bolton, the Atomic Scientists, and we set the Doomsday Clock, but we had a symposium every year where we go into that. It used to be called The Doomsday Symposium, which was always cheery. We changed the title. Yeah. I actually want to get to that because I want to talk about some of the threats. But yeah. So let's just start with the various games you're playing, because you're doing many different things, obviously. You do science, you're a theoretical physicist, you're an educator. You run the Origins project at Arizona State University. You write books. You have a new book out that we will touch on that's. Good. Yes. There's definitely more that I want to talk about than is in your book. And I never like these conversations to act as surrogates for interested readers actually buying your book and reading it. So there's no way that the book will be redundant on the basis of what we talk about here. Good sake. And I encourage people to buy your book because you are a fine and clear writer and this is a very interesting book as you are anyway. Yes. And all those recommendations were far more sincere than they may have sounded. But you also you write in The New Yorker, which is great. The New Yorker has been, frankly, fairly bad on science for a good long while. And it's really great to have your voice in there. You don't have to agree with me. I know you now are an employee of The New Yorker. No, I think I'm surprised that I can get my voice. And to make it clear, I am only allowed online. All my pieces only appear online in The New Yorker. They don't appear in the hallowed. Real hard copy. I didn't even know that because I read everything like that online now, too. I do, too. But I want to make it clear in case people thought I was somehow more eminent than I am. Do you understand the basis of that decision is that, frankly, I think part of it is that there's a different culture for the online editorials and work than there is in the magazine. I think I sympathize to some extent with what you say about the science of The New Yorker. And I wish there could be more science in there because one of the things we may get to and one of the things I push a lot because I believe in it is that science is part of our culture and we have to integrate it more heavily. And that's part of the problems that we're experiencing now, in my opinion. Politically, too. And so to the extent that New Yorker is kind of a magazine of culture, the fact that science there are profiles of scientists periodically, but it's not treated as the same kind of, hey, interesting cultural aspect as movies or literature or whatever. So I wish it was. Yeah, well, there's that problem. It's just that the problem of there not being enough science or science not being viewed as sexy or as culturally relevant as the humanities. But there's also just the problem of scientific error and antiscience being propagated, which is surprised. The errors are always surprising. Because one thing I found about The New Yorker and we're probably jumping in away from where you want to go. No, I'm happy to. But one of the things I've found is that I write for them. They edit more heavily and fact check more carefully than any place I've ever written for. And so it is surprising in some sense that scientific error I mean, pseudoscience and antiscience is different. I mean, they can have a slant. And that slant occurs a lot among certain people, especially in the humanities for various reasons which you might get into. So I can understand that. But it's sad when scientific error gets into yeah. And then you also do debates, as I occasionally do with religious crackpots of one flavor or another. So this is just a question about how you divide your time because it's not even clear to me how much each of these boats you're rowing in gets your weight. How would you describe what you do on a weekly or monthly basis? Yeah, well, I wish I had a strategic plan and I did divide my time strategically. I don't. I tend to just sort of be doing something. First of all, I like to juggle lots of things. And I think it's basically because I'm frankly lazy. I think if I'm not occupied, I tend to do nothing. But I tend what I do is I tend to focus on one thing sometimes because I'm angry. I mean, sometimes because I get emotional about it if I'm writing or agree to do a debate or stuff and then I'll move to something else if I'm excluding something, if I'm not doing science for a while, I kind of feel like a fraud. So I just try and balance it. But there's no real plan. I just do as many things as I can do, frankly, because I enjoy doing all of them. And that's really a point that I think is really important to stress. That I do science like many scientists. Not because I'm trying to save the world, but because I enjoy it. And the same reason I write and do other things, but also because in my own personal perspective, I think something is worth doing if it takes time for something else. If I think it has some background importance, I do that. And to some extent, maybe it's a kind of guilt also, frankly, Sam, in the sense that the physics I do is very esoteric in general and quite abstract. And I think it's profoundly interesting because it addresses these fundamental questions about our existence. But from the perspective of touching daily the lives of people or in an immediate way improving their lives, it doesn't. And so I think part of the reason I get involved politically and socially is to some extent to make up for that aspect of my life, if you understand. And so I think that's why I jump around. But, yeah, a lot of hats and sometimes too many. There's no doubt about it, especially too much travel. But what I try and do is to go from one thing to another intensively. And I don't know if you've had this, but it's true I did just finish a book and I find after the book is done, as now I'm talking about it. I have no memory of writing it, for the most part, and I wonder how the hell I did it. Yeah, because I don't seem to have time for anything else, anything right now. I think book writing is kind of like having a baby, in a way. If you remember what labor was all about and the whole thing, you probably wouldn't have a second one. And I think it's probably beneficial to forget the whole experience. Yeah, my problem is that I do remember what labor was all about, and I keep pushing off my book deadline. I've always thought you're wise, so there you go. I'm more impetuous. But anyway, so I'm lucky. And I guess the point is I think probably because, again, to be quite honest and frank, I think a number of these things came over a long time of doing things with no notice for what I was doing. And so therefore it's hard to turn down things that I think are useful or important, and I'm really working on that to try and turn down. So it's hard to say no so often say yes to too many things, and then I just end up having to do them. Right. So what do you think about the utility of doing debates of the sort that we've both done? I don't know how recently you've done one. Do you think they're worth doing? Do you regret doing any of them? I often regret them. Look, I think the debate format is a very poor format. It's a rhetorical format. It's not really meant for education or information. It's really based on it's sort of smoke and mirrors. And so from that perspective, I'd much rather have a conversation or a dialogue than a debate. But I have found, as you probably found, the same thing, that it surprises me when, after I've done a debate why the heck did I do that? You never do a debate to try and beat the person or to try and convince the person you're debating. Who you're talking to is, of course, the broad middle in particularly the people who it's nice to have the fans on either side, I suppose, but the real people you talk to, the people who've never thought about the issue and who you think would be swayed potentially by a smooth talking huckster. And so if you can reach those people who haven't really thought deeply about it and influence them to start thinking about it, then I think it's worthwhile and I've been surprised, even the debates that I've afterwards gone and say, OOH, I just had this sick feeling, really awful, why did I do that? That people afterwards have said, I watched that, and that impacted my thinking. I guess it's useful. The big problem is that there are people who want to debate people with a relatively high profile, say, because, of course, when the minute they're on stage with you, they get a validation that they wouldn't have otherwise. And it's hard to know how to deal with that because you don't want to validate them. Often, and Richard Dawkins has done this often, he'll say, I refuse to even debate this person. And it's great then that a person goes on stage and has an empty chair and all that. But the way I sometimes try and get around it and it's very difficult to be the bad guy on stage, but there were one or two times where I think these people I don't mind debating, people who I think are honestly in error, who believe what they say, and one can have a discussion with them about it. But the people that really upset me are the people you know are real hucksters who are just lying because they can and they have a smooth stick and they want to sort of fool people. And those people what I've done in a number of debates and it's not easy to try, is attack them, is basically point out how they're lying. And it's difficult to do because people are come to an event, they want to be people of goodwill and they want it to be sort of collegial in that sense. But sometimes I think it's important to expose that too. I did three debates with this guy, William Lane Craig in Australia that I really wouldn't have didn't want to do. And it was sponsored by a Christian, large scale Christian group, which is why I decided to do it because I thought, here's a person who's not honest. I debated him as well. He really is just a professional Christian debater and that's what he does. He does other things, but this seems to be what he does a lot of. Exactly. And what he does is he tailors his notoriety to the people he debates. So he wants to be at people so he can say, look, I debated X, Y and Z and I actually originally agreed only if they wouldn't put it online because I just assumed that they would use it for that purpose. And then they said, could we film it for our own archival purposes? And they were very nice people. It was a really nice religious group, I should say this. They were really earnest. And I said, You've chosen the wrong person. I told them I think you could choose more honest people and we could have an interesting discussion about science and religion. But they did. And by the way, afterwards I will tell you that they said to me they agreed they made a mistake. But what happened was his people found out about the fact that things were videotaped and then said I was censoring it. I didn't want the public to know about it. So we put it all it was just a typical kind of thing. But so I think those kind of things can be useful if you expose if you can expose certain people and not take them seriously. And the other thing, I guess one of the very first big debates I did was back. And what got me into that sort of area, maybe was in the early days when they were trying to introduce intelligent design in the classroom and the Discovery Institute was just beginning its efforts to try and do that in 2000 or shortly after. And so the Ohio State School Board basically asked for a debate between these two guys from the Discovery Institute and me and Ken Miller, who you may know is a Catholic, religious Catholic evolutionary biologist whose texts are used in high schools. And it was like 2000 people attended it as well as the school board. And it was really a very emotional event. But what I tried to say at that point was this is inappropriate because the problem with debates is it makes it look like he said, she said. It makes it look like there are two people with equally valid views who are discussing this and it raises the profile of people sometimes whose views are nonsense. So I just pointed out that if it was an appropriate panel, there would be 100,000 scientists on one side of the table and two people from a marginal religious lobbying group on the other because journalists do this too. They always try and make it seem as if there's two sides to every story. And to some extent a debate validates that because it makes it appear as if both sides are valid. So I won't, for example, do debates that say Science versus Creationism or Evolution versus Creationism? Because the very premise of the title suggests they're an equal footing. What I would in the old days when I did more of this, those kind of debates, I would debate the question should creationism be taught in science classrooms? And that's a question that I would have to debate, but not which is right, evolution or creation? Because there's no question of it. And I remember once I was doing debate in, I think, St. Louis with the time the head of the Intelligent Design Network, who, by the way, was one of those guys who earnestly believe what he was talking about. He was deluded, but he was earnest. But the day before, they changed the title to Evolution versus Creationism, which is Right or something, and I said I would back out of it and the St. Louis paper had a big story about it. They changed the title back again. But I think it's really important if we're going to debate that we try very carefully to make it clear what questions are worth discussing and which questions are not even worth raising. Right? Yeah, I think there are a variety of problems here because you've delineated it pretty clearly. But they're insincere performers where you can't even believe that they believe what they say they believe. But they are pushing a certain view for whatever reason. So that's the the ultimate case where the person you're talking to is really unreachable, and you just have to decide whether it's worth trying to embarrass this person publicly for some greater effect, which reflects badly on you, by the way. Automatically half the audience say, what a prick, that guy. Yeah. Anyway. But even when someone sincerely believes what they're espousing, again, the optics are often weird because you're dignifying completely unjustifiable claims just by giving them a fair hearing in that context. And what's even worse about debates often, and this bothers me about political debates, is that the value of humor is so enormous that the person who gets a couple of laughs often wins. Right. That bonds the audience. And you and I actually occasionally get laughs, so that tends to work in our favor. Yeah, I know. I like to make jokes, so I benefit from that. I mean, I'd make jokes anyway, just to muse myself. But it is unfair. It certainly is unfair. As I say, it's smoke and mirrors. It's rhetorical. Debates are really entertainment, right. But when I really do agree to I think now, as usual, I've thought about the answer after I've said things, but when I do agree to do debates now, and it's rare, it's usually because it's an audience that I don't think ever gets to hear the other side. Yeah. So I agreed to do this debate for this Christian organization, and I recently did a debate for a Christian organization in Toronto with Stephen Meyer, who's another huckster from the Discovery Institute, and he has a PhD, I think, in philosophy of science or something. And so he has the veneer of legitimacy and but that was a Christian group. And then, as you probably know, I've debated at least twice, and one time in a very emotional way in London, an Islamic group. And I did that because I really thought that winning a debate isn't fun if you're talking to people who sympathize with you already, it may be good for your ego, but it's not particularly useful. But if you can at least raise the questions and provoke people to think and maybe there'd be two people in the audience who'd never even heard the counterpoint. If I recall, the best thing about that debate was your refusal to go on stage unless they integrated the audience because they had segregated women from men in a university audience. Isn't that correct? Yeah, it got a lot of attention and attended to. But I did this, and the group seemed earnest. People told me events that they're going to segregate. So I wrote to them and I said, I'm not going to appear for this. They said, don't worry, they won't. And then I arrived in the auditorium, and of course, it was segregated gated. And then I went down to the host and I said, you told me it wouldn't be. And they said, oh, it's not this is just suggestions. So I went to the microphone and I said, It's just suggestions. You can sit wherever you want. And then two young men went to move into the section that was listed for women and were about to be thrown out because of it. And then they called for me to sort of help them because the guys who were going to throw them out were pretty scary looking. And that was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back. And that's when I begged down and said, I'm not doing that. And then what happened, of course, is nowadays you can't do anything about someone filming it, and someone in the audience had a camera. And it really, as my friend Steve Weinberg, who's an atheist, would say, I was doing God's work because it turned out to have a really good purpose in the end. So this person filmed it. And of course, I knew while I was half hoping the debate wouldn't happen, I knew they'd put too much emphasis and publicity in it not to have it. So they desegregated the group. And by the way, the people who were the most angry and we can get to this the people who were really upset were all the women in their bags. There was hate, and one of them spoke up afterwards. But the good thing that happened from it in the end, I was sort of surprised he got all this attention in all these British newspapers. Is that the university? I mean, it was a secular it's a university that should not be allowed. And the universities learned about this and basically said that banned that group from having events at a university. And when one of the women came up at the end, there was a question answered, period, and chastised me for forcing her to sit near men. I said, you shouldn't have come. I said, this is a secular environment. You could see it online. I understand if you're uncomfortable or a man. That's your business, and I sympathize with it. But you have to realize that you're living in a society that's a secular society, and therefore, if you choose to come to an event like this, you have to or go to a baseball game, you might be subject to sit next to men. And moreover, if you didn't like it, you could have moved all the women in their bags. Let's hear about that on Twitter. Yeah, I'm making friends left, right and center as we proceed. Anyway, let's touch your book briefly, only to move on to more controversial topics. But your book is really this great history of the development of our understanding of the cosmos. At one point, you debunk the great man portrayal of science, this idea that one lone genius goes into his room and comes out with a change in our scientific worldview. But you can't help but tell the story in terms of the contributions of the most famous scientists and yeah, how they have have changed our worldview, really, in these punctate ways. There there are some cases where the the caricature is true. I mean, Newton is pretty close to that, where he went into his room to avoid the plague for about 18 months and came out with calculus and the laws of motion and universal gravitation and the field of optics. Yeah. Well, Newton is an anomaly in human history. He would not have survived today. I mean, he was a crazy man. Say more about that. He was he was he would have been hospitalized. He he spent very little time on physics. Most of the time, he was decoding secret messages from the Bible, which he felt were given only to him and the rest of his time doing alchemy. He was far more interested in those subjects. And I think I said the other day that, you know, if only he'd spent more time in physics, he could have been famous. But he but he he was obsessively solitary in many ways. He never to the extent we know, he never was with a woman in his life or a man, as far as I know, and he was a very remarkably interesting character. And one of those people, some rolling friends who are distinguished physicists, we point out that when you read certain people's work, like, for example, Einstein, who's obviously a great physicist, you can say to yourself, oh, I see how if I was thinking along those lines, I could have gotten to where he got. But there's some people, like Newton, that it's just a mystery. It's just like, where did this come from? And he really was an anomaly. And and again, one of the things I try and point out there to to get back to the religious thing a little bit is that people often point out to me that say they say, well, Newton was religious, and, you know, Darwin was religious. And and and my point in counterpoint to that is that, of course they were, because that's the only game in town at that time. The church was the National Science Foundation of the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, and you couldn't go to university. All universities were religious, so the fact that scientists religious was not surprising as a product of their time. But he was much more obsessed with the secret messages of the Bible, and maybe Leonardo, too, was. But anyway, he was a wild and crazy man, also not a very nice man. He was an incredibly vindictive character. Yeah. His statement about I've only gotten where I have by standing on the shoulders of giants was a victim statement because one of his great competitors was a dwarf. Yeah. And of course, later on, when he became I don't know if it was Chancellor Checker, but he was head of the treasury. He loved hanging. One of his greatest joys was hanging counterfeiters. He loved he went to everyone and he just enjoyed it. He was really a weird character. That's unfortunately a stereotype that some people have that you have to be a solitary genius. And it's certainly not that way. And I do try in the book to show that things are baby steps. And while I reflect it in terms of the people who've had perhaps in one way or another the biggest impact, some of it is due to the fact that these people got it wrong. They actually had a huge impact on science by affecting the field and moving it in what ultimately turned out to be the wrong direction. And and one of the reasons I call it The Greatest Story Ever Told because it's in this human story. It's a story full of twists and turns and crises. And the great thing about science is well, first, that scientists are human, which is a little known fact, but that means that individual scientists are biased, they're prejudiced, they're pigh headed, they're whatever they're sexist or not. Some of them may even be Republicans. But the science manages to drag scientists along. The science, the process of skeptical inquiry, basing your results on empirical evidence testing, looking at many sources, that manages to take people even when they're diluted eventually in the right direction. And there's lots of times in the story where I hope the reader, because I certainly felt like shaking these people and saying, you've got the right answer. It's right here. If you weren't so pig headed and willing to just focus on this fad at the time or something that interests you, one or the other, then the progress could have been made much more quickly. It is a human story and it's the greatest story because it isn't driven by just human imagination. It's driven by nature. And nature keeps surprising us and taking us to places we literally would never have gone. And it is this community process where sure, people drive it, but the whole community is affecting things and sometimes the ideas come out of left field. And it's that story that I find so wonderful. And of course, the most important and part of the title for me is the so far part because unlike that other supposedly greatest Story Ever told, which was written down by RNA's peasants who didn't know the Earth orbit of the sun, this story changes and it gets better, and tomorrow will be better than it is today. And it changes because we learn and it's surprising. I was going to almost pull a Richard Dawkins and read a quote from the book, but I won't. It seems to me you have a choice when looking at this human story in the universe. You either put us in the center because it makes you feel better or you're willing to say the universe evolves. It sort of independently of us. And if you do that, you check to see if your story. Is wrong. And you also are willing to be surprised. And that's what makes it to me so interesting. Yeah, well, the crucial distinction between science and almost everything else, I guess you could broaden it to include rationality generally, but science is the most focused and disciplined version of that, certainly, is that the incentives are aligned in a way where it is self purifying. Everyone is trying to prove everyone else wrong. You're constrained by the way the world is, however it is, and your professional reputations even improve if you prove yourself wrong. Well, and that's the hardest thing to do, as Feynman would say. The easiest person to fool is yourself. And that's a lesson. I mean, there's lots of object lessons that I think even though the book isn't really about the forefront of physics, and I think it's so fascinating. And the intellectual journey is really the greatest ones human have taken. But I think it has moral or at least object lessons, not moral lessons, but object lessons for everyday life. And one is that the person you have to question the most is yourself, because you're the easiest person to dilute. We all want to believe. Yeah, but the crucial difference here between it's often pointed out, as you said, that scientists are merely human, they're biased, they succumb to wishful thinking, and there's even scientific fraud occasionally, sure. But the antidote to that is always more science, better science, other scientists getting involved, that self purifying, self context of scientific discourse. And you cannot say that about religion. You cannot say that about any backwater in the humanities where dogmatism is moving completely unconstrained by any truth testing. It's just that, you know, that the kind of a faddish set of ideas that get foisted on a generation and stay there. And there's no feedback mechanism. There's no testability of anything. It's the feedback that's important because I don't want to give the illusion and I don't think you have, but some of the listeners may get it that some of the scientists are better. They're not. No, but it's really the fact that we are lucky enough to be able to rely on nature. If you spout nonsense long enough, you come up with things where nature just proves you to be ridiculously wrong. And so it's self correcting because you have that tool. And it's been a problem and to some extent in physics in the last bunch of years where when I was I talk about what I think is actually one of the most exciting periods of physics. And it's a surprise, I think, for some people that most people think the period 19 five to 1925 in the 20th century was the greatest time because relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics. But as I point out, the period from 1955 to 1975, which is largely unheralded now, may in the future, by historians of science, be viewed as one of the most revolutionary periods of the 20th century. Because we went from knowing, you know, one force in nature to understanding three of the four forces and understanding the fundamental mathematics that was behind that. But it it occurred because of the fact that nature kept pushing people in the right direction, that there was a lot of misconception and other things, but the experiments were driving things. And one of the concern for some of us and one of the reasons I'm labeled somewhat incorrectly as a critic of string theory is that there was a period of physics of almost 50 years, 40 years where accelerators weren't giving us information about where our theory should be going. And as I used to like to say, under sensory deprivation, you begin to hallucinate. And that's fine. I mean, I get paid to hallucinate. But what used to decide what was great physics was was it right? And it still should and it still does. But for a while, what was decided making the decision was is it elegant? Is it beautiful? Is it complex? And many of us were concerned because those are the same kind of requirements in some areas of, say, literary deconstructionism that are similar, where the internal complexity of the argument makes it seem as if it's somehow better. And that's a worry. And physics thrives as all of science does when experiment thrives and when it drives the discussion. And of course, in many ways living in a golden era because every time we open a new window on the universe, we are surprised. Let's touch that topic briefly. Do you think that string theory is a dead end that has captured the attention of a generation of physicists? Or are you still no, I don't I don't think it's a dead end. No, I don't well, I don't think it's a dead end. It's it's it's very well string theory was very well motivated and and and where it came from, it just had pretensions which haven't been met and it hasn't been it has not I repeat, it has not been successful. In doing what many people thought or claimed would be possible in 1980s that we would have a theory of quote everything which even then was a poor name because it was a theory of very little. But it would have been of fundamental importance to have a theory that unified gravity with quantum mechanics and the other forces. But it hasn't done that and it hasn't demonstrated that it has any direct relevance in its original form to the real world. In fact, strings aren't even this most significant thing in string theory anymore. So it's called M theory because these things called brains are important. Now, all of that should not be argued against. It in the sense that when you're doing physics at the forefront, it's difficult, it's complex. And what's most important to realize is you're often wrong. And the people have been working on are very many very bravely trying to do the right thing. They're trying to understand the theory and get it to apply to the real world and see if it makes predictions that are useful. So it's well motivated. But the problem is it did get an incredible amount of hype and indeed draw many people into the field when it was much more heat than light, in my opinion. Now, string theory mathematically has produced incredibly interesting bits of mathematics which have not just been interesting to mathematicians. It has driven fields of mathematics forward in profound ways. But the tools that have been developed and strengthened have been used in other areas of physics to great effect to try and solve problems that could not be solved otherwise. So it's had utility, but what it hasn't done is demonstrate that its original purpose is validated. But that's okay because you and you asked if I had hope. I think most ideas are wrong. That's why anyone could do it if it wasn't that way. And so most of my ideas have been wrong, and nature gets to choose. And so the likelihood that any proposed theory in advance is right is very small. And people should recognize that, especially when they read the papers, because the newspapers try and be largely at the fault of universities to some extent to try to publicize work and therefore get grant funding or other things, make every new little development sound like it's the next Einstein. And it's revolutionary and it's changing everything. And most of the time it's wrong. And what sort of upsets me is that not only do the newspapers get hooked into basically becoming public relations outlets for the universities, but when it's shown to be wrong, it's not discussed later on. And then people will later on read another article, which sort of a new theory that disagrees with the other one. And the sense is that science has no objective reality. And that's a real problem. One of the things there's a few things I try and talk about at length in the book, and one of them is the big misunderstanding that scientific revolutions do away with everything that went before them. And that's exactly wrong. That's exactly wrong. What's true today will be true in the future. What survives the test of experiment today will have to be a part of whatever theory there is in the future. And so people now think, well, everything we think today is going to be proved wrong, so why should I learn science? And that's part of this problem which I'm sure we'll get to, which is this alternative facts. Well, it's just a bunch it's going to be proved wrong. I have my own set of facts. You have your own set of facts. And what they don't realize is that science is not a set of facts. It's a process for discovering facts. I'll be a little self serving. But I really believe what I'm about to say, that I think one of the things I think is important in my book that I try and do indirectly at least, and in my lectures lately I've been doing it more directly is that there's an object lesson that science, the process of science, showed us that the universe we see is an illusion. It's a complete at a fundamental scale, it's a complete illusion and it cut through the layers of illusion by using this scientific method. And I think that is an essential tool that we need in our society today to cut through the illusion that we're seeing in the political world to cut through the nonsense and garbage. Part of the problem is we teach things like science and schools as if they're a bunch of facts or a bunch of things you have to memorize instead of teaching them teaching science as a process and driving students inquiry with questions rather than answers. So I think there's a real if people ask me how can we overcome the alternative propaganda we're seeing in Washington part of it, I think, has a very deep root in our educational system. And I think while of course we need to resist and combat in a very real way and speak out and write and et cetera I think we have to look at the educational system and hope that we can train children differently because when I was growing up schools were repositories of information. But right now in my iPhone I have more information than I could get in any school but I also have more misinformation. And what we have to train students to do is to develop a filter. And for me, the scientific method is a wonderful filter. And that's the kind of thing we should be teaching them in school so that when they become adults, they're able to deal with a world in which they're going to be barraged by much nonsense or maybe more nonsense than sense. And they have to be able to make sense of that. You just covered a lot there, which is really important. I want to pick up on a few things you said. One problem is that some of the most memorable things to come out of the philosophy of science are misleading at best. And so people think, for instance that as you said in each generation our scientific worldview is completely overturned without remainder and nothing thought by your father or grandfather is any longer valid. People have this picture of this wholesale changes in our understanding and it's easy to see how they have that. I mean, you have people like Thomas Coon who have more or less said that that's how science proceeds. But you just have a very different picture when you move from Newtonian physics to relativity, say and then in quantum mechanics and the fact that those theories are as yet imperfectly reconciled and the thing that would reconcile them may look completely different as a structure. And so that it gives a picture of just radical change. And yet, as you said, the data that Newtonian mechanics were conserving have to be conserved by the new theory. And just to take one, this is an example I often go to because it's very easy for people to get. We could witness wholesale changes in our understanding of biology, say. But the idea that DNA has something to do with the physical basis of heredity is not up for grabs. Whatever new theory of molecular biology is coming down the pike, it will have to conserve what we know about DNA. The probability that DNA is somehow totally irrelevant is extraordinarily low. And if, in fact, that were realized, whatever new construal of how we were wrong about DNA comes to us, it will have to conserve all of the data as we know them. Right. And there's very little room to move now, given how much data there is. Exactly. The point is that our underlying pictures change tremendously. But when we subsume a theory, our underlying understanding of the universe does change, which is great. It's one of the things I celebrate in the book and one of the things we all celebrate as scientists that our pictures change. And that's why I think, by the way, science is like art, music and literature. The greatest benefit of science is to force us to reflect upon and potentially change our view of our place in the cosmos. But as you say, DNA, you know, DNA what survived the test to experiment. It works. You can do experiments, and you can show that it is responsible for the transmission of information and, and and Newton's laws. A million years from now, when I have a theory, if there's a theory of quantum gravity, if I let go of a baseball, it's going to fall. It's going to be described by Newton's laws. Whatever we learn at the edges of science, which may, at a fundamental level, change how we think about the universe, nevertheless doesn't make Newton not true. Newton will be true now and a million years from now. And one of the great at what I spent a lot of time in the book showing is because I get a lot of email from people, and most of it, it always begins this way everything you think you know is wrong. Half of that refers to my politics, the other half to my science. And then they say everyone thinks I'm crazy, but everyone thought Einstein was crazy, therefore. And they try and make that connection because they think Einstein did that. And one of the things I work really hard to do in the book is to show that Einstein did exactly the opposite. Yes, he revolutionized our understanding, ultimately, of space and time. Although the really key revolution didn't really come from him. It later on came from his math teacher, Herman Munkowski. But what he did do was show the two pillars of physics, both of which had survived the test of experiment. And therefore both had to be true. You couldn't have a theory that violated one came from Galileo and one came from Maxwell. They were the pillars of our modern theory of of the physical universe, but they were inconsistent with each other. And what did he do? He didn't throw one or the other out. He he managed to make them consistent because he realized they were they were both true. So whatever theory of nature you developed had to agree with both of them. And that was the brilliance of Einstein, was not to throw things out, but to rather recognize the beauty of what worked and keep that and force his beliefs to conform to the evidence of reality. There's another point of confusion that often surrounds Einstein's work, which is this phrase, everything is relative, which derives from the word relativity. It should be called the theory of absolutes. In the end, and it was really as I say, it was his math teacher, Herman Mikkowski that showed that it is true that Einstein reconciled these two things by saying that, in fact, observers measure different things. They measure different time differently and length differently depending upon the relative state of motion. And that's remarkable and true. And that's where the word relativity comes from the fact that your measurements of time and space are relative to your circumstances. But the beauty of the theory is an underlying theory showing that we live in a four dimensional universe in which space and time are connected. And in the underlying theory, there there are things that are absolutely conservative. In fact, there's something called a four dimensional space time length which is invariant for all observers. That's the beautiful aspect of nature. We now understand that we live in a four dimensional universe, but we don't see it. We see three dimensional slices. It's part of the story of learning that the universe at its fundamental scale does not resemble what we see. What we see is a myopic slice of that. So in some sense, the relativity is related to our Myopiate. Now, it's a real fact that we have a myopic, that every measurement we make about the universe depends upon our circumstances. And Einstein was brilliant enough to realize that that measurement is what determines reality for people. It's not what they think, but they measure. And therefore, if two people measure different things, they're just as real. For even if those two things are different. But the underlying reality shows that those two very different things are different sides of the same coin. And that's the other, in my mind, a much greater hallmark of progress in science than what Coon might have talked about. The real great hallmark of progress in science is when two things which on the surface seem very different are shown to be different reflections of exactly the same thing. That at least in physics. And it may not be so much in biology, although that's what Darwin did too, in a sense. So he showed that the diversity of life came from simple beginnings in a very well defined way. But it's the beautiful aspect of that, discovering that these things that look very different are really the same. That is the hallmark that I try and talk about from Maxwell through Einstein and then Feynman and then right to the discovery of the Higgs particle. There's a beautiful continuity that you can ask, when has progress been made? And pretty well, universally that's an indicator of it, in my mind. In physics. There is a tension, however, between a merely operational view of scientific theory and a realistic picture of the way the world is. So one thing that I think people find troubling is that it's easy to talk about these different ways of describing reality. Newtonian relativistic quantum mechanical, and if they all have their utility at certain speeds, at certain scales, but they all suggest a very different picture of what's actually going on. In quantum mechanics, you have the many worlds view, you have the Copenhagen view, you have other views which suggest a radically different picture of what's going on, and yet you're using the same equations to make the same predictions and account for the same measurements. There's a yearning, and I think this yearning must be shared by most physicists to get past the merely useful, merely instrumental, merely, yes, we have made a measurement to what does reality actually look like? Doesn't it matter to you whether the truth is that there are a functionally infinite number of copies of ourselves having more or less identical conversations in parallel universes, or something that doesn't entail that at all, which conserves the data in the same way? Well, that's a really good question. I think a lot of it comes from, in my opinion, a misunderstanding of scientific truth. Science proves absolutely what's false. It doesn't prove absolutely what's true. Science presents models of reality, and those models get better. While we tend to often equate the model with reality. It's dangerous to do that because there is no scientific theory. And one thing string theory wanted to do was be different in this sense. But it's really important to point this out. There is no scientific theory that's absolutely true. Our best theory of nature right now is something called quantum electrodynamics. It allows you to compare predictions to observations to 14 decimal places. There's nowhere else in all of science you can do that. But that theory only applies over some small scale not that small, but some limited scale of length and time in nature, and it breaks down and it has to be replaced by another theory, the electro week theory, which is that it unifies electromagnetism with this weak interaction. And so we have to realize that mathematics may be the language of nature, but it's a great way to model nature, and it works that's why we use it. I mean, that's ultimately the result is the reason. Mathematics we use mathematics is not that we necessarily have we like it more than English, but it works, and English doesn't. But there are certain areas where we have to recognize that that model takes us beyond, well beyond the things we can intuitively understand. And in those cases, we all create pictures for ourselves because we use them to guide us. And sometimes our intuition is better than others. And that's happened with scientists, too. But things like quantum mechanics, for example, all of these different, quote unquote interpretations, in my mind, suffer from the fact that what they're trying to do is explain a universe that, at its fundamental scale, is quantum mechanical in terms of a universe that we experience, which is classical. And any classical interpretation of quantum mechanics is going to be incorrect at some level. As my late friend Sydney Coleman, who was a brilliant physicist at Harvard used to say, we shouldn't be talking about the interpretation of quantum mechanics. We should talk about the interpretation of classical mechanics, because the quantum mechanics is the way the world works, as far as we can tell. Now, we may be wrong at some scale, maybe quant mechanics may break down, but no one's seen any place that that happens. And so the world really is quantum mechanical. And classical mechanics arises in some sense as this illusion once again. And to try and impose this illusion on the fundamental world, the way it may work, is to always produce descriptions that seem crazy at some sense and are limited at some sense. That's true not just for quantum mechanics. But as I say, that's the reason we always have these myopic views. So I'm worried, of course, what I want to do is get a better picture of how nature works. But do I ever have the expectation that I'll have a complete understanding of how nature works? Not at this point. Nor do I need it. Nor do I need it. It's not so much the dissatisfaction it comes with incompleteness, I guess. It's the dissatisfaction that comes with two. Equally valid in the sense that they conserve the data. Pictures that are totally irreconcilable. They're not irreconcilable in terms of measurements, because the measurements are the same. And they're not irreconcilable in terms of the math, because the math is the same, but they're all if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+When was the last time you thought about the prospect of nuclear war? I mean, seriously thought about it and had even semblance of an appropriate emotional response? Just think about it. It's as though you've lived your whole life in a house that has been rigged to explode, and it's as rigged now as at any point in the last 75 years. In fact, the doom state clock was just advanced closer to midnight than it has been at any point in the last 75 years. It now reads 100 seconds to midnight. Now, whether you put much significance in that warning, just take a moment to consider that the people who focus on this problem are as worried now as they've ever been. But do you think about this if I were to ask how long it's been since you worried that you might have some serious illness or that your kids might, or how long has it been since you've worried about being the victim of crime or worried about dying in a plane crash? It probably hasn't been that long. Might have happened last week even. But I would wager that very few people listening to this podcast have spent any significant time feeling the implications of what is manifestly true. All of us are living under a system of self annihilation that is so diabolically unstable that we might stumble into a nuclear war based solely on false information. In fact, this has almost happened on more than one occasion. Do you know the name Stanislav Petrov? He should be one of the most famous people in human history, and yet he's basically unknown. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet air Defense Forces who is widely believed to be almost entirely responsible for the fact that we didn't have world War Three in the year 183. This was at the height of the cold war, and the Soviet Union had just mistaken a Korean passenger jet, flight seven, for a spy plane and shot it down after it strayed into Siberian airspace. And the US. And our allies were outraged over this and on high alert. Both the US and the Soviet Union had performed multiple nuclear tests that month. And so it was in this context in which Soviet radar reported that the US had launched five ICBMs at targets within the Soviet Union. And the data were checked and rechecked and there was apparently no sign that they were an error. And Stanislav Petrov stood at the helm. Now, he didn't have the authority to launch a retaliatory strike himself. His responsibility was to pass the information up the chain of command. But given the protocols in place, it's widely believed that had he passed that information along, a massive retaliatory strike against the United States would have been more or less guaranteed. And of course, upon seeing those incoming missiles, of which there would likely have been hundreds, if not thousands, we would have launched a retaliatory strike of our own. And that would have been game over. Hundreds of millions of people would have died more or less immediately. Now, happily, Petrov declined to pass the information along and his decision boiled down to mere intuition, right? The protocol demanded that he pass the information along because it showed every sign of being a real attack. But Petrov reasoned that if the United States were really going to launch a nuclear first strike, they would do it with more than five missiles. Five missiles doesn't make a lot of sense. But it's also believed that any of the other people who could have been on duty that night instead of Petrov would have surely passed this information up the chain of command and killing a few hundred million people and thereby wiping out the United States and Russia. As you'll soon hear, our retaliatory strike protocol entailed wiping out Eastern Europe and China for good measure, this could have well ended human civilization. So think about that. The year was 1983. One way to remember where we were there is just to remember the movies released that year. Here's the list. Return of the Jedi, Terms Of Endearment, Flash Dance, Trading Places, Risky Business, The Big Chill, Breathless, Scarface, Silkwood Star 80, The Right Stuff, Rumblefish, The Outsiders, Monty Python's, The Meaning of Life. It was a good year for movies, but those were almost the last films ever made. Ironically, war Games and The Day After were also made that year. Those were both films that encapsulated this concern about nuclear war. And there have been several other incidents that were nearly this scary. For example, 60 U. S. Radar equipment in Greenland interpreted a moonrise over Norway as a large scale Soviet attack. And this put our own weapon systems on high alert. However, Nikita Khrushchev happened to be in New York City at the time at the UN. And it was reasoned, surely the Soviet Union wouldn't initiate a first strike with their leader on U. S. Soil, right? There was even one occasion where a War Game scenario got accidentally loaded into the computer at Strategic Air Command, and it was believed that 250 ballistic missiles had been launched at the US. And then it became clear that, in fact it was 2200 missiles that were incoming. Then it was only subsequently discovered that this was a false alarm. So when you think about human fallibility and errors of judgment and realize that this ability to destroy the species is at all times, every minute of the day, in the hands of utterly imperfect people and in certain cases, abjectly imperfect people, think of the current occupant of the Oval Office. It should make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. And the infrastructure that is maintaining all of these systems on hair trigger alert is aging and in many cases run on computers so old that any self respecting business would be embarrassed to own them. And yet, for some reason, almost no one is thinking about this problem. For some reason, I find that I've just begun thinking about it seriously for the first time in several decades. So I'm planning to do a series of podcasts on this topic, and this is the first. Today I'm speaking with Fred Kaplan. Fred is a national security columnist for Slate and the author of five previous books, but his most recent is The Bomb Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. He's also written a previous book on this topic, The Wizards of Armagettan, and he's covered cyber war and other related issues. He also holds a PhD in International Relations from MIT. And in this conversation, we get into many aspects of this problem. We discuss the history of nuclear deterrence, the Cuban Missile Crisis, us first strike policy, the distant and dismal prospect of fighting a limited nuclear war, tactical versus strategic weapons, president Trump's beliefs about nuclear weapons, the details of command and control in the US. And many other topics. And there's no paywall. On this episode, I considered a public service announcement. So, without further delay, I bring you Fred Kaplan. I am here with Fred Kaplan. Fred, thanks for joining me. Oh, thank you. So you have written an all too timely book. I mean, the truth is, it would have been timely last year or the year before that, or really any year that I've been alive. But we're approaching the 75th anniversary of the Trinity Test and the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And you have written The Bomb Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, which is really a fantastic introduction to one angle on this problem. There have been many books about this issue, but you really take the president's and administration's eye view of what it's like to think about this problem with fresh eyes every decade and how ineffectual that winds up being. And it really is a very strange look at what every president seems to experience coming into office. Right, well, my first book, which I wrote in 1983, which was called The Wizards of Armageddon, was about the group of defense intellectuals who invented these notions of nuclear deterrence and nuclear war fighting. And it got into the administration's, and I got thousands of documents declassified back then and interviewed everybody. But at that time, for example, there was almost nothing declassified on what, say, President Kennedy thought or said about any of this. And now that I take another look at this subject in some depth 37 years later, and there's all kinds of things declassified and and that's what this book is about is it is about the presidents who confronted crises in which the use of nuclear weapons was contemplated seriously. And there were more of these crises than people think and how they thought through the issues and what they came up with. Yeah. So just to give people the context, anyone under the age of 65 who is hearing us right now has lived every moment of his or her life on the brink of possible annihilation by nuclear bombs, whether by intent or by accident. And the prospect of accident really has been ever present. There have been extraordinary accidents. And the fact that you and I can even have this conversation right now and haven't spent the last nearly 40 years just living in a toxic hellscape is really due to the restraint of one person, the Soviet commander, Stanislav of Petrov. This is a name that should be familiar to everyone. I mean, this is if ever there was a person who saved the career of our species single handedly, it's him. And yet this name will be unknown to most people. This was a fairly tense moment in US then Soviet relations, and he was the lead in the Soviet Air Defense Command that night, and he saw on the radar screens American ICBMs. What he should have done by all of this training was to alert his superiors. But he looked at it and he said, no, this can't be right. This has got to be something wrong. And so he did not tell his superiors, who might have taken a much more precipitous action, as, for example, just a short while before this incident, air Defense commanders saw what appeared to be a spy plane coming across Soviet territory. It was, in fact, Korean Airlines Flight Seven and did shoot it down. But that wasn't the only accident. There have been periodic cases of a flock of geese mistaken for a flight of ICBMs, a software failure where kind of like that movie War Games, where people think it's a real war, but in fact it's just an exercise that's playing out in real life. No, but it's not just people lower down than this. I would contend, for example, that President Kennedy did, in fact, single handedly prevent World War III from breaking out during both the Berlin and the Cuban missile crises of 1961 to 62. Yeah. In your book, you report facts about the Cuban Missile Crisis that were not widely known and were actually systematically concealed to some effect. Perhaps go into that for a second, because it gave us a sense that bluffing on the brink of nuclear war was a successful strategy because people thought that that's what had happened. And he just basically stared Khrushchev down, and, you know, Khrushchev blinked. But that's not quite what happened. That's not what happened. Most of us do know now, because it was revealed 20 years after the fact, that, in fact, on the final day of the crisis, khrushchev proposed a deal, a secret deal. I will take out my missiles from Cuba if you, United States, take out your very similar missiles from Turkey. And Kennedy took the deal. What isn't generally known, and I don't know why it isn't known, because you can listen to this whole exchange on tapes that were declassified 20 years ago, but that you will read about in maybe two or three other books of that many. But kennedy reads the the proposal and he says and, you know, this is he secretly tape recorded all of this. He goes, well, this seems like a pretty fair deal. And everybody around the table, all of his advisors, not just the generals, but the civilians, too, bobby Kennedy, robert McNamara, McGeorge, bundy, all these paragons of good sense and reason feverishly opposed this deal. NATO will be destroyed. The turks will be humiliated. Our credibility will be lost forever. And, you know, Kennedy let them talk. And then, you know, he said, well, you know, this was on a Saturday. The following Monday, the United States, the military, was scheduled to start in the attack. There were going to be 500 air sortes a day against the missile sites in Cuba, followed four days later by an invasion. And kennedy took the secret deal. He only told six people about this, though, and in fact, he put out the myth that there was no deal because this was the height of the cold war. It would look like a piecemen. One of the six people that he did not tell was his vice president, lyndon johnson, who therefore went into the vietnam war convinced by the lesson of Cuba, the false lesson of Cuba, that you don't negotiate. You stare them down. But here's what's even scarier. We later learned this was not known at the time that some of those missiles already had nuclear warheads loaded on them, so they could have been launched on warning. Another thing we didn't know until much later is that the soviets had secretly deployed 40,000 troops on the island of Cuba, some of them armed with tactical nuclear weapons to stave off an anticipated american invasion. Therefore, if anybody else around that table except john Kennedy had been president, or if he had said, yeah, you're right, this is a bad deal. Let's proceed with the plan, then there would have been a war with the soviet union without any question. Yeah, it's amazing. And so in your book, you you report on the on the details of these encounters between each U. S. Administration and the war planners, which are generally the air force and the navy, and each incoming president. You know? Whether we're talking about, you know, Kennedy and his team with McNamara or Nixon and Kissinger or Clinton and Obama and their teams, each president comes into these meetings and for the first time is told what our first strike and second strike policies are. And each one, it sounds like, comes away absolutely appalled by what the doctrine actually is and committed from that day to changing it. And yet each has found himself more or less unable to change it in ways that fundamentally alter the game theoretic logic here. And these discussions are, like, really out of dr. Strangelove, the most preposterous scenes in dr. Strangelove are no more comedic than some of these exchanges because these are plans that call for the annihilation of hundreds of millions of people on both sides. I mean, ever since Kennedy, we've been past the point where a first strike prevented the possibility of a retaliatory strike from the Soviet Union. So we're talking about protocols that are synonymous with killing 100 and 5200 million people on their side and losing that many on our side. And for the longest time, the protocol was to annihilate China and Eastern Europe, whether they were even part of the initial skirmish with the Soviet Union, right. The US. Policy throughout the 1950s and into some of the policy, this wasn't just the Strategic Air Command. This was signed off on by President Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was that if the Soviet Union attacked West Germany or took over West Berlin, and this was at a time in the late 50s, early 60s, when we really didn't have any conventional armies in Europe. But the plan was that at the outset of the conflict, to unleash our entire nuclear arsenal at every target in the Soviet Union, the satellite nations of Eastern Europe. And as you point out, China, even if China wasn't involved in the war, and it was inquired, well, how many people is this going to kill? And the estimate was about 285,000,000. And that probably was an underestimate. Now, what happened in the early 60s was that the Soviets started to develop their own nuclear arsenal that could hit us. And some people said, well, this policy is a little loony, quite aside from any moral qualms that you might have about it. If they invade Western Europe and we respond by nuking them, they're going to nuke us. This is a policy of suicide. And so, beginning with with Kennedy and McNamara, they tried to devise some plans to make the initial use of nuclear weapons. And by the way, this was almost always our going first, more limited something that was maybe just aimed at their military forces and maybe that would halt them from responding, or they did respond. Maybe they would respond just by hitting our military forces, not killing zillions of people. Maybe we can bring this down. And one thing that I learned from researching this book is that Kennedy and McNamara would sign off on this new guidance, kind of setting new options, as they called them, limited nuclear options for the war plan. And basically, the commanders at Strategic Air Command in Omaha pretty much ignored it. They just didn't do it. They always wrote into the directive something like, to the extent this is militarily feasible or when appropriate, we will limit, and of course, they could rule. Well, no, it's not militarily feasible and it's not appropriate. Not until really and every president since tried to bring down the limited options, really not until practically the end of the war, the end of the Cold War did this situation change? And then it changed through the most kind of bizarre and unlikely way in a way that nobody else, as far as I know, has ever written about. So yeah, perhaps give us that change now and tell us what you understand our policy is today. Right by the time George HW. Bush became president, and actually this was even a little toward the end of Reagan's presidency, the policy from Washington emphasized a lot of limited nuclear options. We're not going to throw off everything right away. So there was a civilian who was working for, of all people, secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who was a different kind of guy back then than when he was, when he became Vice President, who had read all of these doctrinal things over the years about limited nuclear options. He goes to the latest Sack briefing about the nuclear war plan. He hears nothing about limited options. What's going on here? So with the permission of Cheney, he and us, his team, get very, very deep into the actual nuclear war plan, deeper than anybody, any, any civilian had ever done before. And they discovered some amazing things that there was an amount of overkill that nobody could have imagined. For example, and this was in the late eighty s. Now there were 700 nuclear weapons, most of them of a megaton, and explosive power or more, that were aimed at Moscow. There was an air base, a Soviet air base in the Arctic Circle that couldn't even be used for three quarters of the year, 17 nuclear weapons were aimed at this base. There was an anti ballistic missile site in Moscow that we learned after the Cold War couldn't have shot down anything. There were 69 nuclear warheads aimed at this site. And then the real insight came to this. George HW. Bush was negotiating some nuclear arms reduction treaty and the civilian, whose name was Frank Miller, asked one of his contacts at Sack. He goes, and listen, if we brought down the arsenal to such and such number of weapons, could you still perform your mission? And the officer said, that's not the way we think about this. And he goes, well what I mean he goes, no, I understand what you mean, but we're not authorized to ask that question. What we do here is we take the weapons that we have and we allocate them to the targets that we've listed. In other words, in the actual war plan, as opposed to what people were saying in Washington. At no point did anyone say, okay, how many of these things do we really need to accomplish? Whatever the aim is, nuclear deterrence, nuclear war, fighting, limited strikes, whatever you want to do, how many do we need? Nobody had asked that question at one point that there was a sacked commander named General Jack Chain who testified before Congress. He said, I need 10,000 weapons because I have 10,000 targets. And a lot of people thought that either he was kidding or he wasn't too bright. But no, that is how this was determined. It was a completely mechanical thing that utterly divorced from any sort of rational undertaking. Yeah. To give an even clearer sense of the redundancy and overkill in these plans. I forget which administration uncovered this, but they did an analysis of the targets in the Soviet Union, and they found a Hiroshima sized city that was, you know, basically positioned similarly within with respect to industry and infrastructure and analyzed how much was targeted upon this one among hundreds of targets. And it was 600 fold the destructive power we brought down on Hiroshima that was allocated to this as yet nameless city. Yeah, this was back in 1960 when Sac was creating its first, what they called a Psyop, a single integrated operational plan. And, yeah, the Eisenhower science advisor sent one of his staffers out there and the staffer said, I'm going to look up, I'm going to ask the CIA what city most resembles Hiroshima, which was hit with twelve and a half kilotons. And he went out there and he said, how many weapons do you have aimed at this city? And this guy who I talked with for my first book, and I mentioned this in this book too, and he'd forgotten the name of the city, unfortunately, but yeah, it was three weapons, each one with like four megatons and three more with one megaton. And yeah, if you do the math, it was well over 600 times the destructive power and yeah, the whole war plan was like that, and it remained so for decades. And even the mechanics of the war plan, it was completely balkanized. For example, let's say they say, okay, we want to destroy the Soviet tank army. Okay, so what did they do? Well, they didn't only allocate weapons to destroy the tanks, but they also would destroy the factories that made the tanks and the factory that made the spare parts for the tank and the factories that rolled the metal for the tanks and the mines where they got them. I mean, it was just so redundant. And so this kind of redundancy and thoughtlessness really wasn't addressed, wasn't acknowledged, realized, addressed, and changed until right after the Cold War was over. Basically, we in many ways lucked out through these decades when basically no one was in charge. This was some giant machine that was completely dysfunctional. So what is our current policy as you understand it? Well, our current policy, as I best understand our current policy, I mean, let's leave Trump aside. We're going to get to Trump. I was going to say that there's the political level, which is above and visible, sort of, and then there's this stream of thinking and policy at places like Omaha that run their own separate logic. But still we do have a policy and always have that we reserve the right to go first. Now, it might not be a bolt from the blue for a strike, but for example, if an ally is invaded, or if we're dealt a cyber attack or a chemical or biological attack, we reserve the right to go first. And in fact, Obama led a discussion in the national security council to see if we should change that, and he was talked out of doing it. So our policy, it's not strictly and never has been strictly a retaliatory policy. There's been this myth all along that, well, the policy is mutual assured destruction. They attack us, we blow up all of their cities. Our weapons have never been primarily aimed at an adversary cities, they have always been aimed primarily at military targets. Now, the military targets, many of them are near, some of them are even in cities. So it's not like millions of people wouldn't get killed. But the point has been, everybody who has actually been involved in making the policies and executing the plans envisions nuclear weapons as military weapons writ large. And even McNamara, he came up with a phrase, as he called it, assured destruction, the idea that they attack us, we attack their cities. A critic of that called it mutual assured destruction, so that he could come up with the acronym mad, that was a critic. But even McNamara, in top secret memos, presidents Kennedy and Johnson would say after outlining this, he says, now if a nuclear war actually happened, this is not how the weapons would actually be used. Of the thousands of weapons we had, only about 200 were aimed at what were called urban industrial targets. The rest were all military targets. McNamara came up with this idea of assured destruction. In other words, once you get to the point where you have the number of enough weapons to blow up, say, every Soviet city that had 100,000 people in it, even though that's not how they were aimed, then you don't need any more. This was a budgetary and political device to dampen down the appetite of the air force, which wanted even more missiles than he agreed to. So it was strictly a rhetorical device. It had absolutely no resemblance to the policy that actually would have been carried out if a nuclear war had happened. So currently we still have not renounced a first strike option. No. In fact, not only have we not renounced it, we explicitly say that we preserve the right. We've even threatened to do this recently. Trump threatened to not only nuke North Korea, it wasn't even in response to a conventional attack, much less a nuclear attack. Trump threatened to nuke north Korea if they continued to threaten us verbally. And that was something new, I have to say. Yeah. When six months into his presidency, he comes out of his golf course in Edmonton, New Jersey, and, and threatens to rain fire and fury like the earth has never seen on North Korea. Not have they attacked South Korea or have they attacked us, but just have they kept talking in a threatening way and kept testing missiles? This is what we call not a preemptive attack, but a preventive attack, attacking a country for developing the mere capability of attacking us. And here's the interesting thing about that. Often Trump will say something, and he's just talking out of his hat. He was not talking out of his hat. On his orders, the military had developed a new war plan against North Korea, which was designed to unleash a series of attacks starting small with possible escalation all the way up to nuclear in response to a provocative seeming test. And that year, the North Koreans launched about 15 missile tests. And on each test, there was assembled a conference call among the various commanders. And this was the kind of conference call that would be assembled if there were intelligence of, say, an impending Russian attack. And Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense at the time, was given advance authority if he thought it necessary to launch not nuclear missiles. But there was these short range or medium range conventional ballistic missiles called Attackams Advanced Tactical Missiles in South Korea. He was given advanced authority to fire them at the launch site in North Korea with the intention of destroying the launch site and maybe killing some leaders, too. It was known that Kim Jongun liked to go watch some of these tests, and there were two occasions when Mattis did. He didn't launch them into North Korea, but he launched these missiles into the Sea of Japan in parallel with the North Korean missiles, just as kind of a signal that, hey, we can do this, and we could aim them to the left instead of the right the next time you do this. So this was some very dicey stuff going on. So when Trump talked about fire and fury, he was talking about what was actually reflected in the plans at the time. Let's hold Trump for a second, because I still want to talk through how untenable all this is, even with totally competent and well informed and ethical minds in place. What's so crazy making about the status quo here is that it seems to derange everyone by its logic, no matter how well intentioned. And, you know, even at the outset of all this, you know, Bertrand Russell, although there's some dispute about, you know, how fully he articulated this position, but he he certainly said something that could be construed as support for preventative war against the USSR before they got their own nuclear capacity. Because he kind of walked through the annihilationist logic of nuclear proliferation and realized currency changed his mind later. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. So you don't have to be a moral monster to contemplate killing hundreds of millions of people once you spend too much time down this rabbit hole. That's right. But also. Not just hundreds of millions. We now think about people who advocate limited nuclear war, these limited nuclear options, or using nuclear weapons strictly as another military weapon. That sounds horrific, but when that began, these were people trying to come to grips with trying to minimize the damage, trying to mitigate the moral horror of these things. But then what happened? Let's linger on this point for a second. Sure. Why is the prospect of fighting a limited nuclear war so untenable? Because everyone seems to flirt with this, but then come away thinking, or at least when asked point blank, even the people who have prepared the limited nuclear response plans, when asked, well, how likely do you think it is that this will stay limited? It seems that, you know, to a man, they say, well, it's not very likely. Right. Right. Well, the the so so here's the idea here here was the first strategy for this that some people came up with around the late 50s, early sixty s. The idea is, okay, Soviets invade Western Europe or take over West Berlin or something. Instead of just launching all of our stuff, how about if we do this? How about if we just destroy their strategic nuclear forces, their missiles and bombers and submarines, and then we say to them, okay, we've withheld a lot of weapons and we have them in submarines or in missile silos or something. You can't easily attack them, back off your threats, take away your army. Let's talk or we'll unleash the rest of our weapons which are aimed at your cities. In other words, it's trying to make this like a chess game. It's checkmate in four moves. Right? The problem with this is the problems are several fold. First, there neither was nor is any intelligence that the Soviets and now the Russians have any notion of this as something that they are able to respond to or want to. Second, it's not like the people in charge are omniscient beings who can look down on the Earth and like a chessboard and say, okay, we destroyed those targets and now we have complete control over all of our other weapons. We know exactly what the chessboard looks like, and they know what the chessboard looks like. So we can control our moves. In fact, once you start firing off nuclear weapons, all kinds of things can happen. Communications networks go out, electromagnetic pulse. Whether or not the president or the Soviet premier or Russian president can actually still communicate with the missilemen and the submarines is an unknown thing. This becomes not so easily controlled as your nice academic blackboard exercises might suggest. Also, there's a matter of interpretation that we're relying in this case would be relying on the Russians to interpret our limited strike as a limited strike as a limited strike. For example, when this guy Frank Miller was doing these analyses as late as 1990, 1989 to 90, he asked someone at the Defense Intelligence Agency to do an analysis of the Soviet early warning radar systems. And he said okay, because they were able to get some copies and so forth, they said, okay. At what point were the Soviet Air Defense Command no longer be able to see discrete missiles coming over the horizon, but just the whole screen is like a big blob. And it was at about 200. In other words, if we launched any more than 200 missiles, it would just fill up the entire radar screen. They wouldn't know this would look like an all out attack. And at that time, the smallest limited nuclear option that we had would have involved shooting 900 missiles. Given all the very fancy and sophisticated dialogue on this going back to 1960, if this had ever really happened, it's gotten a little better since. But if that had happened at any point, and even if the Russians were willing to give this a shot to play this kind of tit for tat nuclear exchange, as they called it, they would have been completely unable to do so. So it was all just an abstraction that had no resemblance to reality. Yeah, that's where we get shades of Dr. Strangelove. It's very hard to get out. Daniel Ellsberg, who at the time Dr. Strangelove came out in early 1964, was a Pentagon official, and not at all the anti war guy that he later became, but he had done some very, very detailed studies on the nuclear command control system in the late fifty s and early 60s. Probably knew more about it than any other civilian. And he told me that he and an associate played hooky one day to go see a matinee of Dr. Strangelove, and he came out of the theater and he turned to his friend and he goes, that was a documentary. Yeah. I want to take sort of the highest level game theoretic problem here, which it seems to me there are several aspects to this. But first of all, they're not weapons of war. You can't really use them, right? Because it's certainly at every point past Eisenhower. To use them is to assure your own destruction. As you say, these are weapons of suicide and annihilation. Nonetheless, they persist. But here's where we kind of stumble into the paradoxes. They persist because, one, the difference in our world politically between having them and not having them is substantial. When you have them, countries treat you differently than when you don't have them, right? So we invade countries that don't have them, and we don't invade countries that have them, and they only work as a deterrent for conventional or nuclear aggression from outside on the assumption that you'd be willing to use them. And so they only deter. Let's take the simplest and gravest case, our relationship to Russia. Now, our nuclear arsenal only deters a Russian first strike on the assumption that we would actually respond to a first strike with a retaliatory strike of our own. And yet when you look at the logic of this act, just imagine the psychology of a president upon hearing of an incoming first strike first, we've already established that he has to worry about whether or not he might be getting false information, right? He could be the next Stanislav Petrov who's just there's a radar glitch or a computer virus or the system has been hacked or something could be off, and there's not really enough time to fully vet all of that. How much time is there now? How many minutes does the president have to respond to a first strike from Russia? Now, from subs and missiles from Russian soil to our soil is about a half hour. But for submarines, it could be like eight minutes or something right off the coast. Yeah, it could be. Okay. At the outside, he's got a half hour to decide whether before he witnesses the ruination of everything he cares about. That is, if he's not immediately reduced to ash himself. If he survives, he's going to witness the obliteration of society. The United States is about to become a toxic wasteland inhabited by people who have accidentally found themselves far enough on the periphery of a fireball and a blast wave such that now they get to nurse their burns and their shrapnel injuries and await radiation poisoning in something very much like hell, right? We're talking about every facet of civilization being suddenly destroyed, communications, food production, everything in an instant. And so now we have a president who, in contemplating this, which is going to happen in whether eight minutes, 15 minutes, a half hour at the outside, he has to decide he or she has to decide whether in what is likely to be his last act of any significance on Earth. He wants to be the greatest mass murderer in human history by ordering a counterstrike and killing hundreds of millions of people on the other side of the world in a way that will do absolutely no good to him or anyone else he will ever know. So it works as a deterrent only on the assumption that a president will do that, right? To what human purpose? What is the purpose of doing that in that scenario? And yet the assumption is not only that that will happen. That's the policy we rely on, that expectation. And without that, none of this makes any sense at all. It's just the game theory breaks down. If you're not going to retaliate to a first strike, you have no deterrence against a first strike, and then you may as well not have these arsenals in the first place. Here's where you're getting into the true dilemma. So if all you want to do is deter, yeah. You say, okay, you hit us. We're going to devastate you. We're going to destroy you. So then they start getting nuclear weapons. So then it becomes, well, is that deterrent really credible, as you put it, if they attack us and just attack our military forces, say, will they really believe that we would strike back against their cities? And so people with good intention said, yeah, you're right. We need to create our own limited options, and we need to be able to say, okay, no, we'll strike back in a limited way that becomes more credible. But then to do that, you've got to believe it yourself. So you've got to develop some doctrine to do this, some certain kinds of weapons to do this, some plans to do this. And as this evolves over a period of a decade or so, the concepts of nuclear deterrence and nuclear war fighting converge in this fray, in this rabbit hole of logic, there is no longer any distinction between the two. To have a credible deterrent requires a nuclear war fighting capability and mentality. And it's interesting, President Kennedy was the first one to address this in a roundabout way shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And this is on tape. This is another one of these secret Kennedy tapes. He and Secretary of Defense McNamara and Maxwell Taylor, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, are talking about the next year's defense budget. And Kennedy says, I don't understand why we're buying more nuclear weapons. I mean, it seems to me that 40 missiles getting through and destroying 40 Soviet cities, that that should be enough to deter. I mean, when the Soviets put 24 missiles in Cuba, that was enough to deter me from a lot of things. But then as the conversation went on, kennedy said, actually, I guess if deterrence failed, I guess I would want to go after their missiles, not their cities. And I guess I need more than 40 weapons for that. And, you know, therein he stated the dilemma, but then he he drew an even broader realization. Kennedy believed that if there was a war with the Soviet Union, it would probably go nuclear. And if you started in using nuclear weapons, there would be little way to prevent it from going all the way. And so Kennedy decided we need to get out of the Cold War. That's the problem here. And he gave a speech at American University in June of 63. And it's fascinating to go back and read this speech. It's quite a lyrical speech where he basically proposed it into the Cold War. And Khrushchev, the Soviet papers, Pravda and his Vestia, they reprinted this speech in its entirety. The Soviet government, they lowered the jamming. They turned off the jammers to let Voice of America and Radio Free Europe come in so that people could listen to this speech. And Khrushchev responded to it. He told the US. Ambassador, this is the greatest speech by an American president since Roosevelt. And they started doing things like a test ban treaty and a hotline, and they were going to do a lot more. And then kennedy gets assassinated. A year later, Khrushchev is ousted. And really, not until 164 does the nuclear arms race as we know it really start to take off. So there was a potentially pivotal moment way back then, and we've been following the turn that the Pivot actually ended up taking ever since. Yeah, I guess we should clarify a couple of points as we've used this distinction between tactical weapons and I don't know if you've named them, but strategic weapons. How do you differentiate them? Because to speak of tactical weapons, these are not as small as people might imagine. Our tactical weapons are about as powerful as what we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yeah. Oh, usually more. But tactical weapons are, say, if you're fighting a war in Europe or any place, and you want to use weapons on the battlefield, those would be tactical weapons. If you want to use weapons against the homeland, those are strategic weapons. It's kind of a weird use of the term. But for example, you were talking about this whole dilemma of the Usability of nuclear weapons. Just last week, the United States deployed a weapon, a new weapon that it's been talked about for a while, called a low yield warhead. For the Trident missile and Trident submarines, this would be a warhead of about eight kilotons, whereas ordinary Trident warheads are about 150. And the idea is that the Russians have been talking a lot and even doing a little bit of testing and exercising of using low yield weapons against, say, NATO, if there's a war in Europe, say, against NATO, say, the air bases where we're storing smart bombs or something. And the idea is, we need a low yield warhead ourselves to show them that, hey, we can respond to you in kind if you do this. I mean, it gets very broke. I mean, we already have weapons of about this yield on, on planes. We could drop them as bombs. But it became a kind of a doctrinal fine point. So the question is this. On the one hand yeah, we shouldn't have weapons that are 200, 500 kilotons, a megaton. Wouldn't it be better if they were like eight kilotons? But there's this other notion that the more you think that these things are usable, then the more likely it is that you'll use them. And also, let's think about this. Eight kilotons is still not you know, Kirashima was twelve and a half, 200. There there was a and I write about this in the book. There was a seminar, there was a conference at at Aspen, Colorado, a couple of years ago, where one of the people who was a big advocate of these warheads was on a panel, and the moderator asked him, so when you say low yield, what do you mean? And he said, well, high single digits. And the moderator mean kilotons goes, yeah, Kilotons. He goes, So, sort of like Hiroshima? And he said, well, yeah, you can get pejorative about it if you want. And the moderator said, well, no, I'm not being pejorative. I just want to make clear to everybody that we're not talking about firecrackers. Eight kilotons, that's 8000 tons. That's £16,000,000.01 of these weapons, £16 million of TNT. Yeah, plus the radiation and the fire and the smoke and the radioactive fallout and all the rest. But the blast alone is more destructive than any bombing raid, much less single bomb that anybody has ever seen since the end of World War II. So you can kid yourself. I had a professor of this stuff once who, when talking about the defense budget and the destructive power of weapons, he said, it's easier just to leave off the zeros, the billions of dollars in the thousands of megatons or whatever. You can kid yourself you can look at this in a way too abstract way and kid yourself that you're still talking about, even on very low levels, just an enormous amount of destruction the likes of which nobody currently alive and active has ever seen. Yeah. Okay, fast forward to the present where the current occupant of the Oval Office has changed our perception of the risk here. I think in part this inspired your recent book as well. We've all realized that the so called human element here is paramount. And when we start promoting humans of dubious qualifications into the positions of greatest power in our society, it becomes scarier than it than it might otherwise be. And as you pointed out, we have a president who has threatened nuclear war. Now, you've also pointed out that previous presidents have threatened it. I think Ellsberg at one point states in your book that, you know, prior to Trump's threats, there have been at least 25 explicit threats of first strike from from our side, but mainly in response to some actual threat. Yeah, something conventional the war in Vietnam, whatever. It's interesting you detail one meeting on this topic among Congressmen where some Democrat just makes the concern explicit. We're here dealing with a president who seems uniquely unstable and unqualified to make decisions of this kind. And now we need to talk about just exactly what is standing between his capriciousness and the annihilation of another country. Should he wake up in the middle of the night and choose a first strike over tweeting what stands in his way. And what was interesting one thing that was interesting in that discussion was that none of the Republicans really demurred on that assessment of the President's characters. No one can work with a straight face, can deny that we are in the presence of someone who shows a very different temperament than we're used to in a president. So what is your understanding of what stands between his next thought and the annihilation of half the world should that thought be? What I need to do now is launch a first strike? What stands in the way would be kind of a massive act of insubordination. I mean, what you're referring to is that, yeah, shortly, very in the first year of Trump's office, around the time of the fire and fury, there was a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Presidential Launch Control Authority. This was the first hearing that Congress had held on the subject since the mid seventy s, and it was initiated by Senator Bob Corker, the then Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who kind of had just learned that the President had the sole authority to do this. He didn't have to ask permission from anybody, he could just do it on his own. And so he called this hearing and, yeah, as you said, one of the Democratic senators said, let's cut through the crap here. The reason why we're having this hearing is because our President is reckless. And yeah, go back, look at the transcript. This was an open hearing. I watched it on CSPAN Three when it happened that, yeah, no Republican Demurs at all. So they go through this whole thing. There are several witnesses, including a retired general who had just recently been the commander of Strategic Command, and he admits that, yeah, he could do this on his own. I mean, there were all kinds of conferences and consultations that he's supposed to go to, but yeah, he, he could do it. And this general, whose name was Bob Killer, retired general, he came away from the hearing very frustrated because, as he told them, he goes, look, if you guys want to change the launch procedure, you're entitled to do that. You have the power to do that. Again, there's not much time to do anything if it's responding to somebody else's first strike. But if it's a contemplated, preventive first strike, I mean, if you guys want to pass a law that says Congress must be consulted or a majority of the cabinet has to vote, okay, you can do that, let's do it. And of course, the Senate did nothing. This is, this four hour hearing. They did nothing. And he came away frustrated that, you know, what you really shouldn't do is raise questions about the legitimacy and reliability of the command structure and then do nothing about it. Hey, you want to do something about it? Okay. But don't just raise a lot of questions which may or may not be valid, and then do nothing about it. But yeah, this is what Congress, except for a few years after the passage of the War Powers Act in the mid 70s, congress, they've always shirked responsibility for this sort of thing, either for going to war or for getting out of war. They don't want to take the blame if things go south. They are happy to let the king make all the decisions, and then if it turns out well, they can say, yes, I was supporting him, and if it doesn't, they can wash their hands of it. It's kind of disgusting, really. They're shirking their constitutional duties in this respect. Well, this is where we get where we land squarely back in Dr. Strangelove territory, because when these conversations are happening around the details of command and control and someone asks the question, what would happen if the president is, you know, off his meds and orders a first strike? At first, you get a very sanguine response. Well, you know, the military can always refuse an unlawful order, right. They're supposed to be supposed to yeah, but this is where you get a kafkaesque wrinkle in the in the machinery here, because any preset attack plan, of which their Lord knows how many, the fact that they're preset, the fact that they're in the manual proves that they have been already vetted by lawyers. Right? That's right. By definition, they're legal the first strike attack plan, and this was admitted by General Keller in the course of the hearing that, who decides whether it's a lawful order? He goes, well, the head of Stratcom would do that, and then but what if it's already a plan? And, yeah, he had to admit that. Yeah. It all comes down to the human factor. And, you know, it's interesting. President Truman, at the very beginning, the dawn of the nuclear age, you know, he was very bullish on the atomic bomb when it ended the Korea, it ended World War II. But then he took a look at all the footage and the studies showing how destructive it was, and there's this meeting that was recorded in the diaries of David Lillianthal, who was his atomic energy commissioner, where he's meeting with his generals, and he says, this isn't a military weapon. It can't be used to get it kills women and children. And so he took the bomb out of the control of the military, put it under civilian authority, his authority. And in fact, for many years after that, if some crazy general wanted to launch a nuclear weapon attack, he would have to get the bomb from the atomic Energy Commission. That was changed later, but still it was airtight. But the assumption of this was that while the civilian in charge would be the same one, and as we know from reading Hamilton and Madison and these guys, they always foresaw the possibility of a tyrannical leader, which is why they worked into the Constitution all kinds of checks and balances with the legislature, with the judiciary, with the possibility of impeachment. And, you know, there weren't any nuclear weapons back then, so they weren't thinking of checks and balances on that, and and nobody has ever since. There was one incident in 1974, in the last days of nixon, when he was going around the white house sloshing drinks and getting all paranoid about watergate investigation and so forth. James Schlesinger, the secretary of defense, went to the chairman of the joint chiefs and said, listen, if you get any strange orders, don't carry them out without talking with me first. And again, at the time, neither Schlesinger nor the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was actually in the chain of command. Nixon could have done something. Really? How? A launch attack. Basically, the football isn't the black box that the President has. There's nothing in there. There's a book in there. There's a book in there, and it has code words to use to launch certain kinds of attacks. And this suitcase is carried by a one star general, and the President gets on a certain phone and calls the National Military Command Center, which is in the basement of the Pentagon, and he talks to a one star general there, and he says something, and I don't know what it is that authenticates his identity. It's not like there are movies where he puts his fingerprints. It's nothing like that. But he authenticates his identity. He tells which option he wants to fire. And then the National Military Command Center, again, a one star general, conveys that order to the people in the missile silos, to the people out in the submarines, to the people in the bomber bases, and the people who occupied the National Military Command center are picked according to their well, they're not picked according to their creativity. Okay? They're picked for their readiness to salute and follow orders, and they're not necessarily in on what's going on, nor are the people down in the missile silos. I remember in that scene in Dr. Strangelove when they're up in the bomber and, and they get this order, and they say, you know, what's going on? He goes, well, if if he sent this order, that means that the Russians have already attacked. You know, they don't know. And unless one of them stands up and says, no, I'm not going to do this, for which he's really risking treason, the order will go out. It's amazing. We have built a doomsday device which just seems on its face so poorly calibrated and is driven at every point by the most unreliable device of all. At this point, just whatever human brain manages to get itself elected and put in proximity to the football. Do you have anything you think of that is wise to say about how we can pull back from the brink here? What do you think we should do politically over the next ten years to change the status quo? Well, yeah, you said it's a poorly calibrated machine. In fact, it's very finely calibrated to give the President the sole authority to do this. So, yeah, as I say, you know, it you have to look at it in two ways. If we're talking about responding to a strike that's already happened or that's in the process of being, hey, there just isn't any time to go consulting Congress or the cabinet. But if you're talking about, okay, I want to launch, but I'm actually I'm not even convinced that the logic of responding to an all out nuclear strike makes any sense. Well, one thing that you want to do is we've done it to some degree, and Obama tried to do more of it, but got resistance is to sharply reduce the number of weapons that we have on American soil. So, for example, if we had no land based ICBMs or even just a few, right? Like now there are only 400 and there are single warheads. You know, we have a few thousand weapons. You you if everything else was pretty invulnerable to an attack, you could ride out the attack. Just because the ICBMs are under attack doesn't mean the President has 20 minutes to respond. He can let that happen and then contemplate a little bit more. So one thing to do is just to get rid of even more of the ICBMs, get rid of them altogether. Serious people have thought about that, too. It's an act of jiu jitsu. You deprive the other guys of their target. So that's one thing that then they would just have to be targeting the population. Well, but I don't think anybody would do that as a first strike because they would face you're. Right. The question would become, why should we kill Moscow just because they killed New York? Well, I don't know either, but that's a hell of a chance to take the reason just to close the loop on that point. The reason not to get rid of our land based missiles is if someone were to invent tomorrow a great way to take out submarines, we would be left without a that's the argument. That is the argument. But bombers can take off and go into airborne alert, too. But yeah, there's always an argument. It just so happens, why do we have three legs of the Triad, the land based missiles, the submarines and the bombers? Because we have three services army, Navy, and Air Force. Eventually the Air Force got the land based missiles. Originally, that was going to be the army. So if we had five services, we'd probably have five different kinds of so it's all a coincidence, but people have come up with very elegant arguments for protecting all three legs of the Triad. But it's all a little bit arbitrary, and especially if you look at well, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. It's kind of arbitrary. And the technology has come first, and the arguments and rationales have come after the fact, and it seems that we're now poised wait, I'm sorry. You also asked what else we could do. Yeah, I'll just add one piece here to what you just said. With reducing our armaments, it seems like we're on the cusp of what looks like another arms race, at least potentially, because we have a New Start treaty with Russia that lapses in 2021, and then who knows how we're incentivized to improve our nukes after that, depending on. What they do. Do you have any sense of where this is going in the near term? Well, it's a disturbing thing. I mean, there has been a dark side to arms control treaties, too. Over time, a president needs to get two thirds of the Senate to ratify a treaty, and he also needs the Joint Chiefs of Staff to endorse it up on the Hill to get even anybody to take it seriously. And so what has happened a lot ever since the first Salt treaty back in 19 69 72 with Nixon, was that the Chiefs or the Republicans in Congress said, okay, yeah, I'll go along with this treaty, but you've got to buy the following weapons. And Jimmy Carter had to buy onto the MX missile, even though he loathed it. In order to get Salt, too, president Obama had to agree to somehow modernize all three legs of the triad in order to get ratification of New Start. Now, Trump doesn't have this problem. The New Start treaty, which placed modest limits it had modest reductions and placed limits on both sides nuclear arsenals, and also provided for quite intrusive inspection rights to verify that both sides were continuing to abide by the treaty. It expires in February 2021. All that it takes to extend it is to get two guys in a room and decide it. That's all it takes. The weird thing is that there's nobody in the US. Military now who's arguing that we need more nuclear weapons. Many think we need new nuclear weapons and different kinds of nuclear weapons. Nobody's pushing for anything to go beyond the limits that were set by this treaty. But Trump, partly because he just doesn't like treaties, because they can find our flexibility, and more to the point, this was negotiated by Obama, and therefore it can't be any good. That's the fundamental reason why he got out of the Iran nuclear deal, even though all of his advisers at the time said he should stay in it, because at the very least, it was better than no deal. It's very personal with him. But yeah, if you just take the limits off, and especially if you get rid of the forums that allow for inspections, then the gloves are off, the rope is loosened. These guys could build more and more. For example, Trump got out of the intermediate range nuclear forces deal that Reagan and Gorbachev signed. He got out of the treaty. The Russians had been violating it a little bit, actually, the Russians never liked this treaty to say, we're leaving it, and they leave it. They they could do a lot more with it than they do. But then the first thing that we that the military does is start testing missiles that had been banned by this treaty. And I I called up several people who I knew in the Pentagon, and I said, so what is the strategic rationale for going back to building these kinds of weapons. And they said, well, we don't have a rationale yet. We haven't talked with the allies yet on where they might be based. We don't know what the targets are. We don't know what the reason is. But it was basically, okay, we can do it, so let's do it. And the rationale will come later. And I'm afraid that especially if relations between the two powers stays quite tense, the military will just go on their ways to build as many as they can. And then other countries, which have been constrained in part by our own restraint, will then say, well, okay, time for us to get into this game, too. Yeah, well, we've talked about how this all comes down to the decisions of the president when push comes to shove. And, you know, we know we have a very stable genius in charge. There are a couple of details in your book that shed light on Trump's beliefs about his own insight into the nature of this problem. One actually predates his presidency by many years, where he nominated himself to be someone who could negotiate for the US in our nuclear stalemate with the Soviet Union. Paint that scene for me. President George HW. Bush is elected president in 88, and he's about to occupy the White House in 89. And Trump has just written this bestselling, or quote unquote written this bestselling book called The Art of the Deal. And he's fashioned himself as a terrific deal maker. So and he wants to become the US arms control negotiator. And he lobbies himself. He knows a lot of Republicans. He says, yeah, put me up for this job. And everybody thought it was a joke. He was kind of a laughable character at the time. And so he meets at a New York cocktail party, richard Burt, who was the veteran diplomat who Bush had, in fact, actually nominated to become the negotiator. And Trump says, I understand you're the guy who's going to be the negotiator, right? And he goes, yeah. He goes, Listen, I have an idea for you about how to get a good deal with the Russians. And by the way, this story has been confirmed to me by Bert. So Bert, you know, you kind of it's an interesting character. So he says, yeah, what's that? And Trump says, okay, so here's what you do. First meeting you have with the Russians, you go in late, and then you walk up to their side of the table, and you pound your fist on the table and you say, Fuck you. And Burt obviously did not follow his advice and negotiated a pretty substantial arms reduction deal. A few years later, over the same period of time, another one of Donald Trump's business ventures went bankrupt. So do the math on that one. The other incident, which you're probably asking about, is the famous meeting in the tank with all of his advisors. So certain aspects of this meeting have been written about in other books in Woodward's book and in this new book very stable genius by the Washington Post reporters. He goes and has a meeting in what's called the Tank, which is the Joint Chiefs of Staff's conference room in the Pentagon. And all of his advisers were there and the military is there and they're giving him a kind of a tour dory zone of the world and our alliances and our problems and prospects and good things and bad things. And at one point, and I was told this by a few people who were there, one of the generals here shows this chart showing nuclear weapons over, you know, the past number of nuclear weapons over the past decades. And, you know, the peak was around 19, the late 60s, we had 30,000 nuclear weapons, and now we have about 3000. So it shows this graph going down. And this was meant as an illustration of the worthiness of nuclear arms control and good relations between the nations and so forth. Trump says he says that, he looks at it a different way. He goes, how come I can't have as many nuclear weapons as I had back in the late sixty s? And it's explained to him that, well, there are these arms control agreements and it's very expensive, and there was real overkill back then. We never really needed this many, and what we have now are really more capable. He nods his head. He gets it. But then I was told about a week later, he's in a White House meeting with his then National Security Adviser HR. McMaster and some other people, and he says his mind flits back to this chart, why can't I have as many nuclear weapons as some earlier president did? It becomes a dick measuring contest. How come I can't have it that big? And it's explained to him again, well, if you build way more weapons than you need, then they'll think that we're about to launch a first strike, and then they'll build more weapons, okay? And then at least once, maybe twice, two more times over the next few weeks, he raises this again. He just can't get it out of his mind. It gets to the point where word gets around about this, and Mattis says to a group of his own, assistant and undersecretaries, don't worry, we're not going to get into a nuclear arms race as long as I'm here. We should remind people in response to this first meeting where Trump had been given a tour of our arsenal and asked this question of why he can't have more bombs when Trump was out of the room. What did Tillerson say in response to Trump's performance at that tank meeting? Yeah, this had been reported elsewhere, but I got it confirmed by a few people. But Secretary of State Tillerson, as Trump has left the room, he says in kind of a stage whisper, but that can be heard by several people in the room. He goes, The President is a fucking moron. And when that was revealed, you knew right then and there that Tilterson's days as Secretary of State were numbered, and in fact, he was canned about four months later. There's no reason to take this too far in the direction of what will be perceived as partisan politics, but this really is a nonpartisan point. Yeah, absolutely. Most military officers really are nonpartisan. They stay out of politics. They don't want any part of it. And if they're partisan themselves, they're Republicans. They see themselves as part of a chain of command. They do not want to get involved in this. And yet the source for a lot of these stories, both about Trump, both in my book and I assume in other accounts, are military officers who, to the extent we do know something about their voting record or political inclinations, are generally not Democrats. Right. Yeah. Well, Fred, you've given us a fairly startling tour of startling terrain. I'm nonetheless grateful. It's depressing, but very useful to talk to. I'm worried that it seems like very few people are thinking about this. It's only with the emergence of Trump that we've been reminded that many of us have been reminded that this sort of damocles has never not been over our heads. But it just seems like we should be thinking about this much more. But there's this additional wrinkle, which is thinking about it is so hard to get your mind around the reality of the risk and just how bad these outcomes are or would be if anything really went wrong. The main reason why I wrote this book I had written this book, The Wizards of Armageddon in 83, and I thought I thought there would never be another reason to to write a book about this subject again. And you know, what struck me when Trump did the fire infuriary remark is that for the previous, I don't know, 30 years, almost nobody had been thinking, much less worrying about this stuff. This was from another era. And yet the people in the subterranean world where these weapons were still being churned out and the warp lands were still being devised and exercised and scenarios were being drawn up, this was still going on under our own radar scopes. And you could say that one thing that the Trump has done is to remind us that these things still exist. And the reason that I wrote the book was because I thought it was time again to to write something that spelled out the entire history of this thing and laid out the dimensions of this rabbit hole into which we had plunged down into all these years ago and where we are still running around in a maze, even if not of our own making. And that's the thing that the presidents who have dealt with crises in which nuclear weapons have been contemplated, they have actually dug very deep into this hole. The record shows that they've examined the logic, examined the scenarios, really plunged themselves into it and then come away thinking, no, I do not want to go there. And scattered out of the hole and tried to come up with a diplomatic solution to the crisis. And we're now stuck with a president who is not known for thinking deeply about things, who acts by his own acknowledgment on his gut and guts, can lead to very turbulent places. Well, Fred, thank you for your work and thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Oh, thank you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am here with Graham Wood. Graham, thanks for joining me. My pleasure, Sam. So where am I reaching you? I get the sense you're not at home. I'm usually not at home, and right now I'm in Oslo, Norway. Home for me is the United States, and usually I'm traveling around. It's harder than it usually is, but I have family over here. I got jailbroken from the US. And made it out. Have you been traveling throughout COVID, or have you been locked down for a period? This has been the most sedentary period of six months or so in my life, so I've been locked down with the exception of one reporting trip to Florida. And you've been on the podcast before. You wrote a great book on the Islamic State, which we discussed, The Way of the Strangers. So people are encouraged to listen to that if they want to get your expertise on all things related to jihad. But generally, can you summarize your focus as a writer? I mean, you write mainly for The Atlantic and cover really interesting stuff. What sort of things are you focused on these days? These days, I've been not traveling around so much, so I've been writing a lot of opinion columns. I've been writing a fair bit on COVID, usually with an international focus, but my bread and butter is traveling around, finding things that are interesting, wherever they might be. And as you mentioned for a few years, the main thing that I've been writing about has been the Islamic State and the development of jihadism. So domestically, I think I want to focus on all the ways in which the United States has begun to resemble a failing state. You obviously know what it's like to be in a failed state or to focus on it, but it seems to me we're dealing with trends in public opinion and disinformation and failures of sense making, a breakdown of trust in institutions, political polarization, failures of leadership at a level that I haven't even contemplated in my lifetime. I don't think perhaps I was just too young to understand how bad it was at various points earlier in my life, but this just seems like an unraveling that is fairly disconcerting. I'm happy to go wherever you want to go, but I thought we could talk through what's been going on with social protests and police violence and the political ramifications of what happened in Kenosha and Portland. Actually, now, I recall that the first time we met was around this topic of violence. Actually, I got into Brazilian jiu jitsu, and you wrote a piece in the Atlantic on that, and that's what you came out. And I sort of introduced you to my midlife crisis around all things jiu jitsu and self defensive. So it's kind of full circle for our conversation, but give me your general sense of what we're living through at the moment in the US. Yeah, so like I mentioned, a lot of my reporting has been going overseas to places that have had some level of social breakdown, some level of political breakdown. And so, yeah, there are some aspects of that that you definitely see in the United States. When I think of societies that have really broken down, though, I think of places like Somalia, like Iraq, places where the government just has ceased to exist and we don't have that. We have touches of that. And we have a kind of relative breakdown that I think is we experience both as an absolute loss of standards and performance of government, but also a relative loss when we look at other countries that seem to be doing much better than we are and that we thought we were in their league. Or they were not quite in our league, but below us. And somewhere like, say, Vietnam or Thailand has just been cleaning our clock when it comes to dealing with COVID So what does breakdown look like in another place? The kind of places where I would have been sent a couple of years ago, ten years ago, to report. I think of places like Zimbabwe, where the government has no longer any control over its currency, can't be trusted to maintain law and order because it insists on destroying any kind of law and order that might exist. So we see bits of that right now. I mean, there are cities that are pretty much acknowledged to be no longer under control of the forces, law enforcement or any other kind of discernible powers that we would want to have a monopoly on the use of legitimate force. So there's touches of that. Now, what I've found in looking at other countries is that the really dangerous combination is a place like Iraq, where at one point you have total control by the government way too much control, control over the life and death of its citizens, say, during the Saddam Hussein regime, that's replaced by a total anarchy. So in the United States, you see touches of that too. You see the government arrogating to itself all sorts of kinds of power that we shouldn't really be comfortable with. And then at the same time, you see the total breakdown of law and order in certain pockets of urban America. So I'm terrified to see that combination of both consolidation of power and then total chaos. It's a really ugly combination to see. Yeah, I remember I did a podcast in the beginning of April with Stanley McCrystal and Chris Fussel, his partner forgive me, Chris, I can't recall whether you pronounce your last name Fussel or Fusel or some other variant there. But anyway, I remember having this conversation with them and talking about the prospect of a breakdown in social cohesion under COVID. And I remember I think I actually telegraphed this in the conversation, but if I didn't, I was certainly thinking it, that I was worried that I was being a scaremonger for even just hypothesizing that this was possibly on the menu or worth thinking through. Right. Just that things could fray enough so that there would be violence in the streets, that our political partisanship could turn violent. It really did seem, as recently as the beginning of April far fetched to me, and I just felt like it was worth talking about because it was possible. But, you know, if you'd asked me then, I certainly didn't feel it was likely. And and so now I'm interested to consider how many of us have now kind of reset our expectations. And this seems like the new normal, and we're not actually entertaining how much worse things could get, and it would seem like scaremongering to sincerely entertain that. But there is a kind of slide towards something unrecognizable, at least in our lifetimes here. Obviously, there are comparisons with the there was a fair amount of social unrest then. I don't know if I'm sure there are many disallogies there as well, but with Trump in the White House and the prospect of either him being reelected or there being, you know, real unwillingness to accept the results of an election that goes against him, it seems like a very risky time we're in. And the thing that is so disconcerting for me, just on an hourly basis is to see how things are distorted in what used to be the most reliable sources of news for us. Right. I feel like now I can count on the New York Times to get crucial things wrong with respect to what's happening with protests and police violence, say, and wrong in a way that just amplifies political partisanship and hysteria on the part of people who actually decide to go on the streets, and certainly hysteria on social media. And so I feel like there's kind of a moral panic component to a lot of what's going on, and there are very few level headed people in the media whose inclination is to turn down the temperature on things. The business model of media is to be as shrill and sensational as possible so that the partisans amplify your message. So, yeah, there's a way in which this is a runaway train, or at least feels like one that worries me, for which I really don't have any, it just seems deeply unfamiliar to be living through. Yeah, I think there's a definite recalibration that's taking place within media and a recalibration that, as citizens, we've got to kind of work through. In our own minds, we noticed things that we didn't notice before about stories getting covered or not getting covered that should be and I would still take the New York Times over my Facebook feed, say, as a way to understand what's happening in the United States. That said, it's been tough at The Atlantic, which is where I wrote most of the time, the magazine has endorsed a candidate in the last election, it endorsed Hillary Clinton. Very odd thing for The Atlantic to do just because we don't endorse candidates most of the time, but to have announced ourselves as having been on one side, now readers have to take that into account, and it's just our being honest. I mean, there were basically nobody at the magazine who was in favor of Donald Trump, and so it was important that we come right out and say that. And so when readers read us, they know that that's where our origin point is going to be in our opinions. That said, I've been told by more than one editor that if Donald Trump does something right, then it's our duty to say so. So there is still a standard of truth that we're working toward. It's just that we're in a different media environment. I would also hasten to add that it's not just media. There are so many other sources of truth that we would have taken for granted in the past that we no longer can. You may have seen Harold Varmas co wrote an op ed in the New York Times just in the last couple of days. It's the former head of the NIH when the most Nobel Prize winner basically said, don't trust the CDC. CDC has been politicized. So if you've got Harold Varmas telling you not to trust the CDC, then you really have a breakdown in the sources of medical information when you need to have that information coming through loud and clear with the consensus of the best medical minds. Yeah, don't trust the CDC in the middle of a pandemic when you have to decide whether to send your kids back to school. It really is unbelievable we're in this situation. Well, let's talk a little bit about the violence we've seen, because this is a place where I see everyone left of center seeming to get virtually every specific claim wrong. And I'm someone who, as I think you know, is more concerned that we not reelect Donald Trump than most people. Certainly I would put my anti trump bona fide up against anybody on the left or the center or among the NeverTrump Republicans, but it is crazy making and deeply concerning that the left seems to the bar is nowhere near where you put it at the Atlantic. Not only would they not acknowledge that he gets anything right, but just everything is upside down in how they describe what's happening with police violence and social protest. NPR just published a wonderful interview, which I think you noticed, informing all of humanity that looting was essentially a moral imperative and a great form of social protest because small business owners are really no better than big business owners, and they all deserve to have their stuff stolen. And this was presented on the NPR website without any there wasn't a single critical question, if I recall correctly. It was just like this is practically NPR's position on looting. Yeah, that was shocking to read. I've actually subjected myself to the book. I've read it cover to COVID by now and have reviewed it for The Atlantic. Oh, nice. If anything, it's more radical than the NPR interview would have you believe. The NPR interview really took the title of the book as the jumping off point. In Defense of Looting by Vicky Osterwell. The book is actually mostly about a defense of violence, so looting is an afterthought. I think there are whole chapters where looting isn't mentioned explicitly. What it's really trying to argue is that America is conceived in sin, racial sin, capitalist sin, you name it, that the system that we've inherited in the present is bad, screwed up, and that it must be destroyed. So if it sounds like the kind of thing that would destroy our society to just have people smash open shops, take everything in them, and burn them down, then that is very much the point. There's a desire on the part of the author to recreate society in what I can only assume is some kind of she doesn't say explicitly, but a Marxist anarchist revolution that is born out of violence, wiping away the old order. And yes, the NPR interview that introduced this book to, I think, most of the people who have heard about it was totally uncritical. And I will say this for it. I think that NPR did the right thing by interviewing this writer because there are a lot of people who have, if not explicitly positive things to say about looting think that looting is a reasonable response to the injustices of American history or the present in the American system. And I think that those people need to articulate what they really think. They can't just get away with saying, I don't want to criticize the looters. No. I want them to say, I'm on the side of Vicky Osterwile or say that they have a different view of looting. But being able to be kind of mealy mouthed about these things has not worked out very well. And it's allowed, for example, Donald Trump to conflate the position of, say, Joe Biden with the position of, say, someone who throws a brick through a window and steals an iPad, which is completely unfair, making sure that these differences are as sharp as possible, I think is one of the things that journalists should do. So NPR, they started to do that. Unfortunately, they weren't as critical of as they could have been of the author when when they had her in her clutches. Yeah. So biden as of yesterday. I think we'll release this a few days hence. But we're recording the day after he gave his speech in Pittsburgh, and the purpose of which was to put some daylight between him and the caricature of him that Donald Trump tried to paint, aligning him with the left and the pro chaos, pro looting, anti capitalist far left, which exists and is clearly worth disavowing. I assume you saw that speech. I was pleasantly surprised that he took the line that he did, and I thought it was pretty effective. But he does still get enough wrong as part of his talking points that, given enough time, he doesn't do himself too many favors here. So when he talks about police violence, virtually everything he says seems to me to be pandering to Black Lives Matter in a way that's just inaccurate. I should, you know, explain why I think that, but, you know and I think he also said that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist at one point. Not in his speech, but I think on Twitter, I think that his campaign released something about white supremacists in a way that was clearly referencing the written House shooting. I don't think there's any evidence that Written House is a white supremacist, is there? Obviously, things can change by the day, but at the time we're having this conversation, do you know of any evidence that suggests that? No. Unless you think that a white supremacist is someone who believes that there is such thing as private property and it should be defended by the state. And there are such people who are so radical that they would say that that alone will make you a white supremacist. But as far as I know, all the reporting about Kyle Rittenhouse's social media suggests that he was a big cop enthusiast, a big gun enthusiast. And if that makes you a white supremacist, then I guess he's a white supremacist. But I tend to be more restrictive in my definition. Yeah, well, I think our sanity depends on our being that way. So let's just wind this all the way back to the Jacob Blake shooting, which was the proximate cause of all of this chaos. What happened there? To my eye, again, we're talking at one point in time, and who knows what facts will come out in subsequent days or weeks? We might learn a lot about the cops there. We might learn that they're all members of the local chapter of the KKK, and therefore racism could have been a conscious motive on their parts. But when I see a shooting like that within the frame of that video, the color of everyone's skin is totally irrelevant. I've seen videos like that where white people are getting shot I've seen videos like that where black people are getting shot by black cops. And I've talked at sufficient length about the statistics of all of these encounters with cops and applications of violence lethal and not and justified. And not to say that the story is not certainly not a clean Black Lives Matter story of us having an epidemic of racist police violence against young black men. That is just the statistics don't bear that out. I would just say to our listeners, you have to listen to my two hour walk through this morass titled can We Step Back From the Brink or Can We Pull Back from the Brink? One of those when I look at a video like this, and I'd be interested to know if you see this differently, we clearly see a person who has been resisting arrest. I don't know to what degree he fought with the cops before the video starts, and we see him just essentially moving away from the cops. And their guns are already drawn at this point. But I think it's from other video, I think it's pretty clear that there was a kind of wrestling match happening and then he broke away. And then you have fully three cops, if memory serves, pursuing him around his car, and he's now opening his door to either get into his car to drive away or reaching into the driver's side of the car for something. It's not clear from the video. And then he gets shot seven times in the back. And now he is, I believe, still in some terrible state and very likely paralyzed, though I think it seems likely he'll survive at this point. And this encounter gets summarized virtually everywhere in mainstream media as this is not a verbatim quote, but this is a paraphrase of virtually every summary. I've seen yet another black man shot by white cops or a black man shot in the back seven times in front of his kids by white cops. Right? And it is just an article of faith that the skin color of all involved is absolutely relevant here and worth emphasizing. And it's also an article of faith that all of these details have some moral appropriate attached to them. Like it is assumed that the cop could never be justified in shooting someone in the back in an encounter like this. Whereas if you understand how violence evolves and you understand that we're living in a society in the US. Where every police officer has to assume that everyone they are dealing with is either potentially armed and if they're reaching for something in their car, they are very likely reaching for a gun. I mean, this is not the default assumption, perhaps in Western Europe, but in the US. It absolutely has to be. Our failures of gun control are relevant here, but the idea that cops are performing some kind of lynching by shooting someone in the back because he has fought them off, ran around his car and opened the door and reached in. It's just completely untrue. Given a cop's eye view of the world. I think that the only thing I want to say here, and I'll turn it over to you that really just put the onus on the cops is clearly they lacked the training or capacity to control him physically and take him down so that they wouldn't have to use lethal force. Right. Like cops who actually could restrain somebody could have easily restrained him. He was outnumbered. He was walking away from them in a way that allowed for any cop with a modicum of training to take him down and hold him down. And the fact that they couldn't do that suggests that there's a serious recruitment problem and training problem, and we know this is true nationwide, and so that's something to be worried about and and rectified. But, I mean, even there people's intuitions about what cops should be doing, should be allowed to do all of this has run off the rails in mainstream media. Maybe it's a point of seemingly absolute consensus that cops should never use, you know, a rear neck restraint, otherwise known as a rear naked choke, because some number of people have died under those conditions or seem to have died under those conditions. I think in many cases, that was not, in fact, their cause of death, whereas a rear naked choke is, in fact, if done appropriately, a remarkably safe procedure. I mean, it's done in every jujitsu school in the country every day of the year. And if it had any high rate of lethality, you would just be seeing people die all over the country, all the time in jujitsu training. And this is now. I think it's illegal in New York now and maybe illegal in other states for cops to even attempt this. What you have done when you remove that tool, you have made it far more likely that cops are going to have to resort to lethal force because they can't. It's really one of the only ways to incapacitate someone so that you can cuff them if you're going to rely on your grappling skills. And so everything is upside down here. But again, I would love to know if you disagree with anything I said about what we can clean from that video. Yeah, there's a few things that I see when I watch that video, in addition to just being horrified at at seeing at seeing violence of any type. That first of all, Sam, I think you're kind of like me, and you've probably spent a fair bit of time watching encounters like this on YouTube or wherever, videos of police subduing, failing to subdue someone. Police doling out violence and being the victims of it. And I think many people who see that scene, they start off being rightfully horrified at having witnessed an act of violence, and then they don't have some of the context that you might have if you've gone down some. Of those YouTube rabbit holes and watched lots of violence like this and and seen how this kind of thing could turn out in other scenarios. How that does turn out in other scenarios, like the fact that he's lunging into his car. Who knows what he's lunging for? Apparently there's a knife there. It's not a crime to have a knife in your car as far as I know. However, if you're a cop and someone grabs a knife and you're right behind him and that person wants to stab you, you could have a gun. But I don't think the average person knows whether you should expect to get stabbed. If someone is, is 4ft away from you, you have a gun and they have a knife and the answer is almost certainly you're going to get stabbed. That's what you are are dealing with. If, if you have someone who wants to stab you and you're that close, it's not unless you get one really good shot right in the head it's very likely that the person is going to get to you and be on top of you with a knife, even if you've put around in him already. So yeah, I think there's not a great intuition on the part of the general public about the kind of threat that's being faced about the type of mindset that you might be in if you're aware of those threats too. And I think too, that's a problem not just with police training, not just with the, the poor intuitions of the general public, but also with Kyle Rittenhouse. You know, if you are spending a lot of time thinking about guns, thinking about law enforcement, you were going to be aware of these things and maybe primed to overreact a bit too, if your politics suggested. The other thing in that video and what you're describing is the failure to describe it properly. As a journalist, what I tend to do is I look for incidents that turn out to be more complicated than they originally appear and what you're describing is the exact opposite of this and people seem to like doing that. Both sides, liberals, conservatives, left, far right, you find a situation of moral complexity, of deep ambiguity like this and people are not as interested in what I do as in turning it into a black and white morality play. It takes a lot of investigation to find out what's actually happening. Just watching a few seconds of a video is not going to tell you why the cops are there in the first place, what the interaction has been like up until the point where we see them shoot a guy seven times in the back. And I'm not sure we'll ever know that. I mean, half the people I talk to about that shooting think that the guy died on the scene, they're not aware that he's still alive right now. So if they're not aware of that detail, and they're unaware of pretty much every aspect of the context of that shooting, and it can be used for one of these binary political purposes either to suggest that he's a demon or to suggest that the people who shot him are yeah, well, I want to talk about the Kyle Rittenhouse episode because that does strike me as more complex and interesting in the end. That has pretty wide implications. But, yeah, just to reiterate something you said there about the Jacob Blake shooting and what it's like to have seen a lot of these videos. I mean, what you have to know is that every permutation of this kind of encounter has happened. So you can find video again, with the race of everyone swapped in and out. Right. You can find video where the guy reaches into his car, pulls out a gun, and shoots the cop in the face and kills him. Right. And every cop knows about those kinds of encounters. Right. So it's just you have to game this out more fully than your knee jerk reaction may admit of, which is it is just awful that we're living in a society where cops shoot a guy in the back in front of his kids with an apparent intent of killing him as a way to pacify him. How did we get here? This is completely insane and unacceptable. But once the wheels begin to come off in an encounter like this, there are very few options open to people who don't have all the tools that might be possible. There again, cops of sufficient strength and training could have easily taken this guy down and held him down. He wouldn't have been injured in the end. Right. So there's an absolute deficit of training and recruitment there that is visible to the eye of anyone who knows what is going on. And then there's the fact that I think a taser was used before the video picks up and failed. But people think that tasers are magic. Why not always use them? Well, they're not magic, and they often fail. And they're more dangerous than a neck restraint, which has now been ruled illegal. Right. Because if you TASE someone and it works and they fall to the concrete and hit their head, that is virtually always worse than actually being choked out in a jujitu class. So people have to become better students of this kind of violence before they have these reactions that seem to justify burning down half a city or writing headlines which attest, yet again, in the loudest possible way, that we have a real problem of lethal racist violence perpetuated by cops. Because, again, you know, unless we find out more about the precursors to that event, there's no reason to even talk about race at this point. That's what's so sickening. My hypothesis. Is that virtually every mention of race is counterproductive now in our society. It's virtually only going to push society in one direction, which is greater polarization, greater derangement, greater hysteria, less contact with actual facts, and it's also going to increase the likelihood that we're going to get four more years of Donald Trump. There's one aspect of what you say that that I am not so sure about, and we should come back to race in a second, but the idea that we should familiarize ourselves with this kind of interaction used to be very appealing to me. I started watching these videos, and I actually wrote a profile a couple of years ago of a guy named John Korea, very nice guy who does kind of color commentary on videos exactly like this. So it will be badgecam, it'll be CCTV, but it's always violence that either happens or is averted, and then he will minutely dissect what happened. He's a former preacher, right. He went from minister to full time security camp. Self defense video analysis. Yeah. And he's still a man of God in the sense that he will remind you of the importance of having a good relationship with Jesus and remind you why Jesus would want you to put in the right amount of time at the range and so forth. Right. He's a great guy, and he's extremely responsible. He's very, I think, evidence based when he's doing these analyses, and I've learned a great deal. I think that people should watch him and heed his words of caution as well. I'm also not really certain whether I want people to be thinking about this all the time. For one thing, rarely do you see people studying encounters that go well. They end up seeing huge numbers of encounters that go very badly, even if these are extremely rare in the life of a cop or a citizen. And I found it by watching them that you have to be extremely scrupulous in making sure that you have kind of kept your head on your shoulders when it comes to understanding what the actual likelihood that this is going to happen to you is. And if you don't do that, your mind will be even more warped than when you went in. You might have a better sense of, yes, this person with this weapon is a danger at this distance when I'm carrying this weapon, when I'm ready for him, when I'm not. But the fact of the matter is most of us don't get attacked. Very, very few of us are law enforcement. So many of these things are just not relevant to our lives. And when we get too used to them, then I think it can have a really warping effect on our psychology. I know you, Sam, have spent a long time thinking about self defense, personal security and so forth as of I. And I'm not sure I would take back any of that time in my case. But I do worry that people are becoming overfamiliar with these types of interactions, and what they get out of it is not necessarily healthy for us collectively as a society. Yeah, no, I would totally agree with that. And this is a nice segue into the Kyle Rittenhouse phenomenon, because if you become a student of this kind of violence, yes, you can get an outsized sense of how common it is. So really, just to make clear, what I was recommending is, like, if you're not someone who really knows a lot about violence, if you haven't studied it, if you haven't trained in anything, right? If you just don't know how hard it is to shoot what you're aiming at, especially when that thing is moving, if you're just not informed, don't have a strong opinion about these things, right. Don't go in like that. Now is a good time to burn down the local sporting good store over this or support others doing likewise when you just don't know what's going on. Certainly it also attracts a kind of bug light. It attracts a certain kind of mind and a certain kind of person to spend a lot of time doing this. And it's going to select for people who have that fondness for firearms and self defense training and joining militias. So the Kyle Rittenhouse kind of person, and then we wind up in this other terrible place on the landscape, which is once you get any kind of breakdown in social order, once cops get pushed far enough on the back foot such that they're not doing the kind of policing we would expect them to do, right. Once they have essentially announced nationwide that they won't protect property, which they de facto have just by example, we saw this in the first wave of protests and riots that even in the most affluent parts of the most affluent cities, cops would not protect property. Potentially, there's an argument for that, but it's probably not a great one. And in response to the protest, we had the worst of all possibilities. We had cops essentially saying they would not protect property and they wouldn't even be diligent in protecting the people who tried to protect their own property from being violently attacked by mobs. We all saw footage of store owners being beaten by mobs, but what they would do is they would kick the shit out of peaceful protesters, right? That's what the cops were up for. So it was like if you wanted to create a machine to amplify cynicism and a commitment to a kind of vigilante, take matters into your own hands ethic, you could not have done better than these last few months with the spectacle of American policing. And what you have there, too, is exactly that kind of twin evil force going on where it's the forces of total chaos that is the cops saying, we are not going to enforce laws concerning property. Go out, light fires, whatever, but at the same time claiming for themselves immense power. So chaos and order, both being weaponized to just make life hell. If you combine those two, you get what I was describing earlier as these characteristics of hellish failed states that I've reported on overseas. It's in micro. It's not beyond recovery, but it's a taste of what life is like in places where everything falls apart. And what I worry about most too, is that these effects are not exactly accidental. The police, they step back from enforcement of property crimes. And sometimes in other places where I've reported, it's been pretty clear that they'll say, yes, we stand between you and violence and chaos. If we're not here, then that's what's going to happen. But kind of silently uttered after that, after that promise, that threat is we're going to make sure that that's what's happened. What happens if we're not there? That is, if we're not there to protect you, then things will go badly because we insist that they'll go badly, so that you give us the proper respect and sign over your security to us along with everything else. So what is your actual allegation or concern there? That the cops have put the riders on a sufficiently long leash for reasons of sort of justifying their own office. Like, look, you're sure you want to defund us? We'll take a look at what's going to happen tonight when we just sit on our hands. What I think that's happened well, what I think is happening is that incentives exist. So the incentive is to say, first of all, there are some perfectly reasonable incentives. You don't enforce laws concerning property because you're spending your resources making sure that people don't get killed and you try to make sure that violence isn't happening. So that's a good reason to do this. But there is an incentive, too, to say, look, we're not going to enforce this because we want to show you what happens when you don't have us. And the incentive is for what happens when you don't have us to be very, very bad, to be as bad as possible so that your appreciation for us, the police, is sufficient. So I'm not alleging that there is some conspiracy where the cops are handing people guns or MultiF cocktails. What I'm saying is that at all levels there are some really, really negative, vicious incentives that are at work and it wouldn't be shocking if there was a downward spiral that's driven by them. Yeah. And all of this is coupled to what is now known as the Ferguson Effect, where cops, because they don't want to wind up on YouTube, on what seems to be the wrong end of yet another lethal encounter, which in their world may in fact have been a justified shooting, they're just going to stop policing proactively. And crime rates are probably soaring as a result of that. So the written house thing is interesting because you have someone who draws the obvious lesson, especially right of center here politically, that we have the Second Amendment for a reason. It only makes sense to get really into guns and personal protection because you really can't delegate the protection of yourself and your family to the cops at a minimum. They're just usually not there when you need them and they're going to show up too late to do anything other than hopefully solve the crime that you were the victim of. So if you care about self defense, well, then it really has to you have to put the self back in self defense, and therefore you need guns and you need to train with them, and you need to take selfies of yourself. Walking around in the woods with your AR 15 and become one of those guys. And then you hear about this breakdown in social order a few miles away from where you live, and you decide you're going to be this high testosterone Good Samaritan and get out there and put yourself between the forces of chaos and the social order that still needs to be maintained. And you're going to protect people's businesses, as I think Kyle Rittenhouse was intending to do. At least that's been reported. And there's footage of him cleaning up graffiti earlier in the day, I think, and then he's interviewed by somebody at various points in those interviews. He seems like a perfectly nice kid. There's no indication that he's intending to shoot somebody. There's every indication during some portions of it. I think he's offering medical assistance, maybe medical assistance that he has no business offering. And I don't think many people take him up on it. But there's no, as far as I can tell, no recorded evidence in the videos or interviews with him that he's there looking for a fight that said he went went from Illinois to Wisconsin and picked up an AR 15 and went into a really dangerous place where anything could have happened. So maybe that is all by itself looking for a fight. Yeah. And I wonder whether he had the right level of I mean, he obviously did not have the right level of situational. Awareness. Awareness of what he was getting into. I mean, if you're walking around open carrying with any weapon, even if it's a tiny pistol, someone taps you on the shoulder. In that scenario in Kenosha, when buildings are burning around you and people are screaming in crowds around you, you have to consider it. With that, within the next few seconds, someone is going to try to kill you with the weapon that you have brought. That could be the weapon that puts a bullet in your brain. So I didn't see any awareness in his face. I don't imagine that any awareness could possibly be had. If you're, say, a recent high school graduate who shows up with your AR 15 in the middle of a riot in a previously unexampled, horrible situation in this country. This is a situation that he clearly had never been in, that he'd be terrible at assessing the danger to him. You know, when, when younger reporters go into war zones and I talk to them sometimes, they'll ask, what do you suggest? What should I know? And the first thing that I say is, is that danger just doesn't always feel like danger. You're going into a situation that is unlike anything you've experienced before. If you've seen movies, then they edit out all the boring parts that happen in the movies, right? So you're going to have a very poor sense of what the actual rhythms of a day in Baghdad will be. And you'll be surprised at how quickly things go bad, how quickly the danger arrives, how quickly it passes. And these things are extremely difficult to train. They're the kind of thing that you learn by accidentally surviving long enough. And he had one day, one day in Kenosha, and they turned bad really fast. I'm still very curious about what happened in the, the actual run up to the, to the first shooting, because, you know, the guy who he shot, Joseph Rosenbaum, doesn't seem to have been the most stable individual, and, you know that there's suggestions that he was furious, that he may have attacked Written House. And then there's all these moral questions and legal questions that I don't think either of us is really competent to adjudicate about whether Written House, under the laws of the state of Wisconsin, would have been justified in shooting him. If Rosenbaum, say, grabbed for his gun, as is, I think, alleged in the criminal complaint against Written House that he shot Rosenbaum after that happened, that is, after Rosenbaum went for his gun. But it just has to be said again and again that if you open carry in a situation like that where there is mayhem all around you, and crazy people who have literally flocked there from other states because they're looking for craziness, then you've committed an error that is really sealing your fate. I can't see how to see it any other way. If Rittenhouse had been from Kenosha and had just woken up and rolled out of bed and seen mayhem in his front yard and thought he had to defend himself, that would be one thing. But he made such a terrible decision that almost everything that happened that flowed from that is going to have to be seen in that light. Well, it's a decision that so many people are making. Everyone who shows up to one of these protests or shows up anywhere, whether it's in counter protest to the protest they don't like, or it's their own protest, as we saw against Lockdown earlier in the pandemic. Anyone who shows up armed, you know, carrying an AR 15 or, you know, any firearm. Some of these people have thought it through and and are just happy to run the risk. But the reality is, is that the presence of a gun completely changes the dynamic of any interpersonal violence. When, you know, you have a gun with concealed carry, that's its own burden, ethically and tactically, right? I mean, just, you can have a gun on you and no one can see it and still there are many doors closed to you. You cannot afford to get into a wrestling match with someone. Or a shoving match. Or a boxing match, you know, in the kind of ordinary range of interpersonal violence when you have a gun on your belt, which at any moment, you know, you might decide to draw or you might fall out, you know, in in a scuffle. Or it might be seen by the other person. I mean, just everything is potentially lethal and you have to think through what you're going to do. If you start losing a fight and you are armed is a different situation. Now, obviously, anyone who's a true firearms person will, you know, have recourse to, you know, several aphorisms at this point. You know, better to be judged by twelve than, you know, carried by six or, you know, in certain cases, obviously I would agree with that. But the real heuristic here is if you're going to be someone who assumes the responsibility, the real responsibility of real self defense, right? If you're going to have firearms, train with firearms, think of the scenarios under which you would use firearms. You are going to be the sheriff of your own life in the end, and you understand that calling 911 is not actually a self defense plan. You have to avoid violence at virtually every cost, right? Avoidance has to be your master strategy because it's only if you've practiced that impeccably do you know that you will be justified if you find yourself having to resort to lethal force. And if you've decided to just go out to a random car dealership with your AR 15 because you don't think the cops are going to defend those precious cars, you're someone who's not avoiding violence at all, right? You're putting yourself in a very tenuous circumstance in front of a mob and it's totally irresponsible. In the end, that part can't be defended, and yet everything subsequent to that might have been. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, no housekeeping today. Today I'm speaking with is Scott Galloway. Scott is the New York Times bestselling author of The Four the Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, and a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. He is a serial entrepreneur and has founded nine companies, including L, Two, Red Envelope, and Profit. In 2012, he was named one of the world's 50 best business school professors by Poets and Quants, and his weekly YouTube series, Winners and Losers, has generated tens of millions of views. He is the co host of the Pivot podcast with Cara Swisher, and that's where I normally hear him. I'm a big fan of that podcast, and his latest book is The Algebra of Happiness notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love and Meaning. And it's a really fun and wise little book. I highly recommend it. Also, Scott's about to launch a new podcast titled The Profg Show. That's the letter G with Scott Galloway. And we get into many things here. We talk mainly about the connection between wealth and happiness. So we cover the problem of wealth inequality, the transfer of wealth from the young to the old, class warfare and democratic politics. Deficit spending means testing Social Security, and then we get into politics proper. We talk about the Bloomberg campaign and stop and frisk, the breaking up of big tech, privacy, absolutism, whether you want anyone to ever get into your iPhone. And then we also cover topics like meditation and mortality atheism, et cetera. If we sound a little behind the curve here politically and with respect to the news, that's because we are. We recorded this podcast a couple of weeks ago. I would say about 90% of what we say still stands with respect to the presidential campaign, but a few things have changed. Mayor Pete dropped out yesterday, for instance, and tomorrow is Super Tuesday. So, depending on when you're listening to this, the candidacy of Michael Bloomberg may seem more or less plausible. Also, we don't mention Coronavirus, which will seem a strange omission given that it's pretty much all anyone is talking about at the moment. I'm sure I'll do a full episode on it before too long. I'm definitely paying attention to it. Anyway, I'm a big fan of Scott's, as you'll hear, and it was great to talk to him. So now I bring you Scott Galloway. I am here with Scott Galloway. Scott, thanks for joining me, Sam. There are so few things that impress my colleagues about my professional achievements, and this is one of them. They practically closed the office when they heard that I was going to be on your podcast. You're like a royalty around here. Well, it's a dubious distinction with your Cohost Carris wisher on the Pivot podcast. Not her. Not her. Let's be clear, kara not that impressed. Not as much hilarious. Well, first, let me say I'm a huge fan of yours. I love your book The Algebra of Happiness, which we'll certainly talk about, much of it. And there's a great book of advice you give to all comers, and there's a lot of wisdom and a lot of candor in that book, and it's a very easy read. So I recommend people pick it up. And I'm also a huge fan of the podcast you do with Kara, the Pivot podcast, despite the fact that she treats me with it seems to me a kind of a borderline unethical way. I was on her other podcast. Recode. Yeah, RECO. It was not exactly a meeting of the minds. But there's something so likable about her, even though her shtick is to be truly irrational. I find her there's kind of a strange form of charisma coming off her where our conversation stayed, to my eye, totally on the rails, even though it had every opportunity to go off. So I like her despite the fact that she beats me up. I think people sense that. The way I describe her is she's an Igloo kind of hard on the outside, chewy and soft on the inside. I think sort of her I don't know how to describe it. Her material colonel or I think she's a caring person and surrounds herself in this hard candy shell. And I think people sense that, or at least that's been my experience. I don't really know her well. I don't know her well. But yeah, she's kind of tough on the outside but softly on the inside. Anyway, Gary Swisher, everybody. Yeah, well, anyway, so I do recommend your podcast. You guys just go into Tech kind of endlessly and continually find interesting stuff to touch there, which will hit a bit here because, as I think you know, I share your concerns about what Tech is doing to us at every level personally and the level of fragmenting our society. So there's so many places we could start here, I think, before we dive in. Give me your potted bio here in terms of just how you view your place in the world. And you're a professor at NYU Business School, so I'll give you a proper intro, obviously, at the top. But how do you view what you're doing now? Because you're not, certainly not a normal academic in the way you're showing up. Yeah, so I think of myself as a teacher. My identity or what I kind of lean on, if you will, or what I'm most proud of or hope is the business card I carry the rest of my life is a professor or teacher. You and I actually have something in common in our background. Do you know what that is? You didn't do your research growing up in California. Yeah, we're brilliant. Oh, yeah. I'm a product of big government, raised by a single mother who moved and died a secretary in the Regents of the University of California and California taxpayers. Their vision and generosity are the reason I'm here speaking to you. I went to UCLA, got in with unremarkable grades, and even worse, Sat, and rewarded them with a 2.27 GPA, graduated, lied about my grades. A couple of years in Morgan Stanley, UC smiled on me a second time, let me into Berkeley. I went to the high school of business, started a business my second year, found a company called Profit, a brand strategy firm. Grew that to about 400 people, sold that, decided I didn't want to be in the services business. It was just a lot of planes, very difficult lifestyle, and then in the late 90s decided to hit reset on my life. I got divorced, left the bay Area, resigned from the boards of all the companies I was on, resigned from the company I had started, red Envelope, which had recently gone public, and moved to New York, and decided, you know, blessed with a lot of opportunities and options, decided I wanted to teach. And in 2002 joined the faculty of NYU. And I've taught there for the last 18 years. And then to get in trouble and such that I can afford to live in Manhattan and Florida with with two kids. I do a bunch of other stuff. An entrepreneur, start an analytics company and a bunch of other stuff. But that's the headline news. Yeah. You're very edgy in the way you sound off on various topics. You seem to be right up against the line of what I would imagine to be the comfort zone of being inside academia. Does business school give you a different physics of the university to work with? Have people tried to cancel you as an academic, or are you uncanceable on some level? So I don't think I would survive. I don't think I would have survived at almost any university in any other department other than the business school at Stern because I got very fortunate. We've had a couple of deans who've sort of been Mike Kevlar, and also the trends have been in my favor, and that is, as schools have become more expensive, kids have become more demanding, as they should be, and they want people with practical domain expertise brought into the classroom. So if you will, the markets kind of come to me, but you're being generous. I, on a regular basis, say stupid things, and it creates headaches for the university. Sometimes they're right. So I'd like to think a lot of times I say right things that are provocative that other people are thinking, but sometimes I say stupid things. And what you find at universities right now, which were initially supposed to be places where we were supposed to be charged with provoking people, I mean, that was original. That was initially the mission. The reason they took a piece of land outside the city center was to give people a safe place to be provocative. But that's not the case occurrence at universities right now. And that is we are exceptionally tolerant and forgiving and understanding of people who don't look like us, but we're not especially tolerant of people who don't think like us. And even as someone who considers themselves a progressive, I find that on a regular basis, my colleagues and students are looking to score virtue points and enter into this council culture, which you've talked a lot about. But having said that, I've always had, whenever I've gotten in trouble, a dean, Peter Henry or Rugusandarom step in and say, this is the point. We're here to create a dialogue, and you can't do that. Conflict and debate are part of progress. So I actually feel really blessed that I'm in an environment that mostly encourages this type of provocative thought. But there's no getting around it. I know how my career ends. I say something stupid, facebook, Twitter, grab, it a journalist who I pissed off, the hundreds of VCs whose portfolios I have insulted, circulated, and I've got the wrong dean and it's NASCAR, and I'm sweet savage and I spin around in a ball of flames and it's all over. Well, you have at least some cover from your colleague there, Jonathan Height, who's been on the podcast, who's a great voice on that. My role model. Yeah, but his provocative statements are more data driven and quite frankly, more thoughtful. But he is a perfect example of, I think, a good countermeasure to some of the PC weirdness that's injected that's been injected into universities. Yeah, he's really been great. There are so many places we could launch from here. I think there are two lenses through which we come at these shared concerns. We have the individual level and we tend to think of questions like what does it mean to live a good life? And then there's the societal level where we're faced with the project of creating institutions and laws and social norms that allow a maximum number of people to arrive at some kind of satisfying answer to that first question. Let's start with on the topic of wealth and happiness. How do you think about the connection between wealth and happiness? So there's Pulse marketing or my personal experience with money, and then there's the research around it and my personal experiences. And this sounds crass, but this is what I tell my kids or my students. At a very young age, I made the connection between money and options and happiness. And it came to me because my mother was very sick. And I remember coming home from grad school and feeling emasculated and feeling like I wasn't able to take care of her to the extent I wanted to because I didn't have any money. And I decided that I was going to. That's when I kind of got my act together and I started you know, I spent most of my undergraduate years at UCLA smoking pot and playing sports and watching Planet of the Apes trilogies, and I decided when my mom got sick that that was it. Shit's getting real. I got to get money. And I've been very focused on economics, and this notion that I just found what I loved is not true. I moved to where the puck was. I've placed a lot of value on economic security, and so it's been very important for me. The research shows that there is a correlation between money and happiness. That's the bad news. The good news is that it pops out. And once you get to a point of affording housing, good schools for your kids, take a vacation, absorb an economic shock, which is 100 grand in Ohio and 800 grand a year in La. Or New York. Happiness tops out. Now you don't get any less happier. The research shows that the cartoon of a billionaire being really unhappy is not real either. They're no less happier, but they're no happier than millionaires. But money has been an enormous driver for me, and I find that when wealthy people tell you to follow their passion, it's because they're already rich, and that in a capitalist society, more money means more opportunity for your children, better health care, and a greater selection set of mates, which are all wonderful things. So, yeah, I've been very focused on economics. I'm finally at a point where I can pursue stuff that doesn't impact that, and I'm enjoying economic security, but I've been howling in the money storm for a long time. It depends on how you assess happiness, actually. That seminal paper that many people drew this punchline from, that happiness Tops out at I think the figure was $75,000 a year in that study. There's a famous paper by Danny Kahneman and Angus Deaton. So the moment to moment estimation of one's own well being is the thing that tops out. This in Danny's more recent language, this is the experiencing self versus the remembered self. But the remembered self is the self you're talking to. When you ask someone how satisfied they are with their lives, and you're asking them to give a global and, of necessity, retrospective evaluation of just how good it is to be them, that global measure of life satisfaction doesn't really top out. It keeps going the richer you get. And that's something that, you know, people are kind of reluctant to remember that part of the study, but that's, you know, that was the unhappy punchline there. It's not surprising that that would be so, especially if you're living in anything like an ethical way with your wealth. You're given opportunities to meet the people you want to meet and support the causes you want to support. And so there's philanthropy, and there's the biggest thing, I think, is the equation between money and time, the fact that you can hire people to do the things you don't want to do anymore, or you can hire people who are better at doing the things that you are not great at. It's not a surprise that that correlates with satisfaction in many ways. Yeah, it's interesting. I was a sinner thinking, you know, Bezos looks pretty happy. Right. And one thing I admire about him and there's a lot of things I don't admire about him is that he's living out loud. He's buying, he's assembling a series of man caves, and he's not ashamed about it. And, you know yeah, he does. He's not trying to live below the radar. And good for him. It's his money. Do what he wants, whatever makes him happy. What I have found as you get older that I think it's important to realize there's a great analogy that money is the ink in your pen. You need a certain amount, and it can write different chapters. It can make certain chapters burn brighter, but it's sort of not your story, if you will, and also the relationship between money and being rich. My father gets $58,000 a year from his Royal Navy pension, Social Security, and he spends about 50. So at the age of 89, he's still saving money, and he's very happy. And I have a lot of friends who are masters of the universe, investment bankers making several million bucks a year. But between their ex wife, their kids, alimony, house in the Hamptons, helicopters out to Nantucket, they spend all of it. And they have a lot of stress in their lives. So, you know, the depends what you mean by how much money you make, how much money you have, where you live. But, yeah, I think about I think about that stuff a lot, and I still feel many stress, and I have a lot more than I ever had in my life, and I always want more. It's definitely a weirdness, and I find that wealthy people like to pretend that we don't think about money. And the reality is wealthy people I know don't have to think about it from a stress level. But one of the reasons they're wealthier is they are absolutely conscious of it on a variety of dimensions, and that's one of the reasons they're wealthy. Yeah. So what do you think about that psychological process of moving the goalpost with respect to what one feels one needs in terms of wealth? Right. This is, I'm sure, a very common phenomenon in the circles you run in, and most of us have experienced this personally. As you begin to succeed, the illusion that you are going to arrive at some place of real emotional serenity around the amount of money you have, it tends to be a mirage where you get there and then you have a set of other comparisons you make between yourself and others. Your tastes grow to fill the shape of the incoming resources, and it sounds like your father has escaped this dynamic. But how often do you see someone get to their number and really feel that they've arrived and they're basically done stressing about money on every level. I don't know anybody I know a lot of people, including a couple, a couple of billionaires, and I don't know anybody that doesn't stress. It's a different type of stress. The stress moves from economic to maintaining relevance, but the scorecard for their relevance is their ability to increase their wealth. I don't know anyone that's there that's truly self actualized. Maybe that's a testament or a lack thereof of the people I'm hanging out with. But the majority of the people I hang out with have money stress, but it's on a higher level. And what you have in capitalism that's in some ways so incredible is that capitalism keeps creating incentives. I remember the first time I backpacked around Europe and I went to Hungary, and I exchanged $100, and I got this pile of money called forens, which were the currency was crashing. And I remember thinking, I'm rich. And I went into Hungary and there was nothing to buy. There was no incentive to be rich. And in the US. Look at what happens. You want to take your kids to Harry Potter. It's $100. The new Harry Potter ride. That means you're waiting in line for 3 hours. So for $135, you get a fast pass, and it's only 20 minutes. And then you can go to the VIP tour, which is $$3,500 for five people to have some very high EQ, attractive person take you around and not only cut the line, but take you on the employee entrance. And then all you have to do is give the operator a hand signal so you can do the ride. Several times when I was growing up, it was coach and first class, and they invented business class. Now, there's a certain type of first class on Emirates where you get in a car and they take you to the plane so you don't have to associate or make eye contact with the other passengers. And then above that, there's private aviation. Now, the capitalist economy keeps segmenting offerings such that there's always more and more incentive. If you give a certain amount of money to NYU Langone, and I'm sure UCLA has this, you get a phone number, and when anything comes up with you or in your family and I don't have this, you call them. And there's just a different level of health care and attention that you get from the medical professionals. So a capitalist society is great at constantly creating and incentivizing grit and innovation and the want for more. But my appetite is not say it, it is yours. On one level. It is. In terms of my perception of risk, there's definitely, as you say, the stress changes its character. But the truth is, I came to it pretty late. I feel like I've done many things backwards in my life, and I'm kind of a reluctant entrepreneur that I've just kind of stumbled into digital media and had to figure out how to make it work. And I found that process fascinating. But, yeah, happily it's working, and I have all the benefits of it's working. But money is something that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about, and it does cause stress, but it is a different kind of stress because it's working. It's not working would be worse stress. But I worry a lot about the problem of wealth inequality now. I've been worried about it ever since the financial crisis in 2008, and I published a few essays on it, I think, in 2009 and 2010. But it seems like it's now shaping up to be the big political problem of this election cycle and our time. It's a problem, obviously for individuals, but it's a problem for culture too, and for the segmentation of society and the insulation of wealthy people from everybody else, as you just described. Obviously. I want to talk to you about your political intuitions here. How do you view wealth inequality as the long lever that everyone's going to pull here in the next nine months to determine what happens in our presidential election? It seems like the Democratic Party is at least the Warren and Sanders wing of it is gearing up for something like class warfare. And if Bloomberg fails to become the nominee, it will be in large measure because the Democratic Party couldn't stomach having a billionaire appear to buy his way onto the platform. There's obviously a lot more here in terms of just what the economic stratification of our society is doing to culture. But how are you viewing the collective concern around wealth now? Yeah, well, I think you're on to something. And the fact that you started writing about it in 2009, 2010 means you're ahead of the curve and look at distinct to the moral argument around this or the just ethical concerns around having some comedy of man or even remembering your past. People credit their character and their grip for their success, and then they credit the markets for their failures. And I have no such delusions. Getting access to free education. Coming of age in an era of processing power explosion in the 90s, san Francisco being a white, heterosexual male born in 1964 meant that the majority of the rooms you walked into for the next 50 years, you were right. So a series of moons lined up to take some talent and some grit. I have both of those things. I'm not a modest person. And fling me into the, you know, into the stratosphere. And when I when I would fail, give me another opportunity, an opportunity after opportunity. So you a look back and think, okay, it just seems like a nod to future generations to try and ensure some of those dynamics are still alive. And when I got out of Berkeley, my total tuition at the High School of Business was $1,000 a year and I got a job at where I decided to start my own business. But I had an offer at year, so 100 to one. Yeah. Now, tuition at Berkeley is $68,000 and the average salary is 140. So it's two to one. My first house in Petrol Hill was $285,000 relative to that. So 2.85 times my freshman or my first year starting salary. Now average house is 1.4 million and they're making 100 foot. So it's gone from 2.8 to ten. And I think that everything we do in our society is largely a transfer of wealth. Systematic, organized transfer of wealth from the young to the old. I think the largest socialist program in the world, Social Security, a trillion dollars greater than the European and American defense budgets, reallocated from working age people to a cohort that is the wealthiest generation in the history of mankind. And people say, well, it's done its job. It's pretty much solved poverty among seniors. They say somewhere between 29 and 39% of seniors would be in poverty without Social Security. Now it's nine, but one in three kids live in food insecure households. That doesn't mean that we drop $300 worth of groceries off at every household per week with kids because we realize that's inefficient. And whether it's escalating costs of housing because of artificially suppressed interest rates whether it's the greed or the loss of script among myself and my colleagues at universities thinking we're luxury goods, not public servants and not expanding freshman class seats as quickly as population is expanding, so we can brag about how hard it is to get into these schools and continue to raise prices. I see almost everything is nothing but an elegant transfer of wealth from young people to baby boomers who have totally co opted, in my opinion, government and are transferring and sucking wealth from future government is going to take in three and a half trillion dollars in tax revenues. They're going to spend four and a half. You talk about money in an eloquent way, that money is really just a transfer of time and work from one entity to another. And it seems when we're racking up trillion dollar deficits, what we've decided is in order to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy such that we can borrow time with loved ones from our children and our grandchildren. I think it's a moral issue. That's the bad news. We have dramatic wealth inequality. The good news is that almost always self correct. But the further bad news is those mechanisms of self correction are usually war, famine, a revolution, and I think we're in the midst of a soft revolution. It's weird how it's happening, but I think we're in the midst of a soft revolution around income inequality. It seems to me that the ethics here are really clear. I mean, you mentioned in your own case that you don't have any illusions about how lucky you've been. And I feel that really clearly myself. And it's clear that it extends to everything. Any talent a person can notice in themselves, they imagine, correctly, that it's the proximate cause of their success. Intelligence, say, or grit, or a desire to succeed, right? Where is this coming from? No one invented themselves, right? And if you make the best use of your gifts, you didn't pick your gifts. And you're not responsible for the fact that you were given the opportunities you were given, that you were born into a society that wasn't plunged into a civil war on your fourth birthday. And your ability to make use of the opportunities you're given again is coming from some set of causes that you didn't author. And so what we see everywhere is not an argument for not making effort. It's not an argument against the necessity of effort and working hard, but a person's ability to work hard, again is something that is the product of genes and environment. And even if you're going to smuggle an immortal soul into the clockwork, no one picked their soul, right? If you believe in souls, you certainly don't believe that you created your own. So at no point do you see someone truly, deeply lay title to the claim that they were self made. And this is a point that on some level, obama made a while ago toward the end of his presidency and was derided for it on the right. I think he said, you didn't build that. You're talking about infrastructure that every technocrat and billionaire has benefited from. But it seems to me that the only moral position to have recognizing the general shape of this thing, which is that there's a massive disparity between good and bad luck in this world, is that you should want to cancel the worst forms of that disparity and figure out how can we continually make the floor get higher and higher for the least lucky among us? So then, agreeing with that, one wonders what the solutions are here. The proffered solution from someone like Warren or Sanders now is a wealth tax. They give it the top spin of wealth in excess of however many millions of dollars, is not only egregiously unfair for anyone to have acquired, there was, in fact, no ethical way for them to acquire it in the first place. At least one of them, if not both of them. I saw recirculate a tweet saying, basically, there's just no way to become a billionaire without having been a fraud or inheriting it. There's no noble way to acquire that much wealth, which is clearly untrue, right? I mean, you mentioned Harry Potter. It's like, does anyone think that JK. Rowling really got her wealth by a starkly unethical means? She's being rewarded for the amount of joy people have taken in her creative output. So what do you see as a remedy here? Wealth tax seems fairly unworkable from my point of view, but what should. We do here when admitting that at a certain point, inequality will become something that even the wealthiest among us won't be able to stomach. Yeah, you said a lot that I feel like we're going to need a bigger boat. So let's start. I think a lot of it I think you came you're more self aware at a younger age than I was. I found that I was constantly reminding people, as I did at the outset of your show, that I was born and raised by a single immigrant mother. And that's my way of trying to impress people by saying that my success was 100% due to me and I deserve everything I have. And I think where we start is with our kids, and that is to ensure that. And I find that this kind of third base mentality is so rampant in the Bay Area where I came from, where AVC thinks he's a genius in changing the world because he invested in the C round of pinterest and not friendster, that someone just got incredibly lucky and his or her parents managed to get them into Stanford. And what do you know? His or her parents are very wealthy and went to Stanford. And the thing that kind of the thing that really brought it home for me was born in 1964. White, heterosexual male, was born in Southern California, was winning the lottery. He came into a great university system that was free. He came into a professional environment in the 90s in San Francisco where more wealth was created in a seven mile radius of SFO International from 92 to 99, and been created in Europe since World War Two. You you had you had discrimination. You made up 22% of the American populace, but 97% of all venture funding went to that profile in the raised a ton of money for my startups, and I didn't know a single woman who raised more than a million dollars. And what's embarrassing is it seemed normal. You didn't question it. You didn't say, well, something's something's all fucked up here. You just you didn't it seemed normal that, oh, they'd made their own choices. Right? It wasn't it wasn't a it wasn't a maybe it wasn't a feature, but it wasn't a bug. And the thing that really I'd heard about my freshman roommate from the fraternity at UCLA was born a white male in 1964 in California, but his DNA, my DNA was heterosexual. His DNA was homosexual, and he ended up dying, you know, alone, of AIDS. And so to not, you know, to not recognize just how much of your success is not your fault, I've come to that later in life. Yeah. So let's get out of that solutions. So I find we're having a knee jerk gag reflex when Senator Sanders accuses Pete Buttigieg of taking money from 42 billionaires, as if that's a bad thing. I see that as a feature. The cartoon of billionaires being mean people or bad people. I generally find, and I know a lot of billionaires, that they're good, decent people that in general, to be very successful in business, it helps to be ethical, it helps to be a good person. It helps to invest in relationships. People want those people to win. And the notion that it's bad I buy into the notion that billionaires inherently are no better than the rest of us, but I'm almost positive they're no worse. So this notion that they've done something wrong and meanwhile, these senators have had a lot of opportunity to try and pass laws that create a more equitable tax structure, and they have failed to do so. So what frustrates me about the current environment in the Democratic presidential race is we seem to be bringing purity tests to a gunfight. What is the point of that? I believe this comedian, Larry Wilford summarized it perfectly, and he said, why don't we just give all Democrats a hall pass on racism for the next nine months and kick the racist out of office? And the notion that but for example, a wealth tax, they've tried that in France and then the wealthiest man in Europe moved to Belgium. So maybe it's a good idea. Maybe maybe it's a bad idea. But first, maybe we just start with figuring out a way that Amazon, that Walmart, pays 70 billion in corporate income taxes and Amazon pays two over the last ten years. Meanwhile, Amazon has added the value of Walmart in a three month period. Maybe we just start with kind of more equitable corporate income taxes. Maybe we start with, okay, if the wealthiest man in the world effectively doesn't pay taxes because he can borrow wealth, borrow money against his stockholdings, paying 1.8% on margin to JPMorgan, thereby never really triggering a capital gains event, maybe we start there. Maybe we start with this really fucked up notion that money is more noble than sweat. Why on earth have we decided that the income, that muscle and sweat, current income should be taxed at a higher rate than the money that money makes? Capital gains? Why wouldn't we go back to where Reagan was and just have one tax rate on money that you make? And if you don't, if you're worth over a certain amount of money and accreting it, there's an alternative minimum tax. If you're a corporation, you can't do these crazy inversions or tax avoidance. It seems to me that Washington has been overrun and corporations, tax lawyers are smarter than our IRS. But the notion that we're going to demonize billionaires, the notion that we have to have 70% to 80% taxes, there's a lot of sunlight in between those two places. And I worry that the Democrats, out of this kind of purity or notion of what is the right thing to do, are showing up with lanterns and pitchforks. That doesn't work. They can't robinhood billion billionaires are the most mobile people in the world if they want to start a wealth tax. It sounds crazy. 2% doesn't sound like a lot. If you tax someone 2% a year, that probably means every 15 to 20 years you're cutting their wealth in half. Right. And one of the reasons these people are wealthy is they think long term they're going to move, they're going to leave, and a lot of countries want them. So I find it sounds like you've been following the political content. It's no accident that the people, the candidates who are getting the most grief and getting the greatest level of accusation and grief about racism are ones with executive level backgrounds. The Mayor of South Bend, Mayor Pete, and the Mayor of New York, Mayor Bloomberg, because they actually had to make decisions on the ground that involved crime and firing people and real time decisions. They weren't just voting and pontificating. They had to make difficult decisions. And there's no way to run a city for eight years, much less twelve years, and not make decisions that are going to age poorly. And the notion that we're in this cancel culture where we're calling each other racist on the Democratic side, that's just fucking stupid. I mean, we're going to disarm unilaterally against Republicans right now by convincing America that we're racist anyways. Yeah, I want to go into that swap with you full on in a second. But this issue with just how to mitigate the problem of inequality seems to me to be genuinely difficult. The solutions proffered something like a wealth tax seems like it first of all, it creates all of this overhead in terms of the work that has to be done to enforce compliance with it and just to estimate people's wealth and get them to pay these taxes. It would be all these edge cases where you'll have people who are wealthy by normal standards because they live in an expensive house that they've been in for 20 years. But if you're trying to claw back their wealth, at a certain point you're going to have some 80 year old person who used to be wealthy forced to sell her house because she doesn't have the liquid assets to pay the wealth tax. And no one who's urging us to have a wealth tax in the first place is going to shed a tear over this. But it's just a crazy mechanism to claw it back when you could have something like a value added tax or just as you say, just follow Warren Buffett's admonition and tax him more than his assistant is taxed. What do you think about UBI as a solution here to create some tide that is raising all boats? I think it's a compelling idea. It's kind of an interesting idea from leveling up, sort of say, okay, everyone's going to level up. But I don't at the end of it, I think we should be I think there are simpler, more effective, less expensive solutions. Senator Michael Bennett bennett proposed expanding the earned, the, the child's earned income tax credit that most studies show would take 40% to 60% percent of kids out of poverty and be 40 billion instead of a trillion or be dramatically less expensive. I think just trueing up and making tax complexity favors the wealthy because we have accountants. I live in Florida. I paid 22.8% or 23.8 on long term capital gains. If you start companies, which is how I have generated the majority of my wealth, the first $10 million is tax free. If you hold onto the stock for longer, it's twelve two passed by Obama. There's no reason for that. And they said, well, we want to incentivize our innovators. I couldn't have told you what tax rates were. Starting a business. People start businesses because they don't have any options, or generally speaking, we romanticize it. The reality is I don't have the skill set to be successful in the greatest wealth creation engine in the history of mankind, and that's the US corporation. They're incredible platforms, but I'm not emotionally secure enough to work in a large corporation where other people have power over me. I could just never handle that. I didn't have the self awareness. So I started companies. And because we romanticize entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs, when they sell their companies, pay an effective tax rate, usually of 17 or 18%. Whereas people who are just working hard for companies in lower level positions and, and trying to put their kids through school pay 30 to 40. And in New York, you know, I mean, we like to demonize all wealthy people. If you're making half a million dollars a year as a lawyer partner in a law firm in Manhattan and you got two kids, you're probably paying an effective tax rate of 48% to 52%. But if you own the law firm, or if you figured out a way to turn your gains to sell shares in the law firm, you pay 22.8. And then maybe with the money, you at some point move to Texas or Florida and avoid state and city taxes and just make the jump to lightspeed. So taxes are progressive until you hit a point where you can get the majority of your income from capital gains and then you make the jump to light speed and your tax rate plummets. And we just have to decide, do we want a progressive tax rate or not? The idea of coming in and violating a core tenant of Western European and American economic and sociological and political philosophy of private property, that's a very powerful draw, and even if it means some inequity. But I think look backs where we show up and start Robin Hooding and saying, all right, you pay taxes on that wealth, at some point it's yours, but we're going to show up and start taking it away from you in the form of a wealth tax. To me, that sort of violates this basic norm of private property. And now even Illinois is saying there's a huge fiscal crisis coming with these states that quite frankly aren't worth the taxes. What sam, where do you live? California. OK, so California particularly like another eleven, another eleven or 12% a year. Is that, is that about what it costs on current income out there to live in California? It'll be a sign of my white privilege that I can't even give you an answer to that question. So I think it's somewhere between eleven and 13%. California is worth it. I mean, you wake up in February and it's 65 in and out burger, the highway, Pacific Coast Highway, the opportunity to work at Snap or Warner Brothers or Facebook. California is worth it. Manhattan is worth the 13%. The density of creativity, culture, opportunity here is worth the additional 13%. Is it worth it? In Evanston, Illinois? Is it worth it in Summit, New Jersey? So you're having these fiscal prices in Illinois and New Jersey and Connecticut where people said, I'm not going to pay the taxes of California and New York and not get the sunshine and the opportunity. And so there's this migration which is essentially driven by two things low taxes and sunshine. So we're facing what will be a really interesting kind of fiscal crisis, but Illinois is now talking about an exit tax, which again is reaching into people's private property. So I think there's a lot of solutions before we have what I'd call this gag reflex over correction, where we start demonizing wealthy people. And I worry that the majority of people in the US. Are capitalists who believe in fair tax policy, who believe in a progressive tax policy, but don't inherently want to demonize wealthy people. They want to be them. They aspire to be them. And I think that is where the Democratic Party right now is kind of coming off the tracks a little bit. Yeah, that's an interesting point politically. I mean, whatever the ethics is here, and I agree with you on the ethics, it just seems like bad politics. Because so many people who will never be not only will they not be billionaires or even meet billionaires, they aspire to be billionaires or at least aspire to achieve wealth, such that they feel psychologically implicated in this kind of overreach. I forget what the statistic is. Something like, you know, .2% of society ever has to pay an estate tax, but a majority of people are against the estate tax, or at least, you know, under some description they're against it. And so this aspirational relationship to wealth makes it politically unwise for Democrats to be striking a note of class warfare. Here what it comes right down to. I believe in America that one of the fundamental tens of capitalism is you can't have winners without you can't reward the winners without punishing the losers. And that sounds harsh, but I do believe in America. We are comfortable with winners and losers. We're just not comfortable with The Hunger Games where a small group of people go on to live an amazing life and everyone else dies a gruesome death. We're comfortable with billionaires. We're not comfortable barreling towards a society with 350,000,000 serfs serving 3 million lords. We want economic opportunity. We want luck. We want incentives, dramatic incentives for people to get wealthy. But we don't want a level of income inequality where if the middle class goes away, you're just going to stop producing billionaires in the same frequency we produce them, or millionaires if you don't have a thriving middle class. Right? We've going back to our tax policy. Four and a half trillion dollars in tax expendit government expenditures, taking in three and a half trillion in revenue. So a trillion dollar deficit, deficit spending and debt spending can be a powerful part of growth. What are you investing in is the question. Yes. They're your CEO if they're losing money. Are we investing in technology? No. Are we investing in our young people in subsidized education or trade schools such that we have better human capital that makes our nation more competitive? No. Are we investing in infrastructure that would make a quality of life or opportunity to spend more time with our kids or more efficiency? No. We've decided that our investment in the future is to invest in wealthy people and profitable organizations in the form of reduction in corporate income tax from 35 to 21 and reduction in income taxes that have largely accrued to the wealthy. So there is some trickle down, but the reality is middle class people spend most of all of their money, and so there's a greater multiplier effect. So just purely from, it seems like, economic growth, we'd want to reinvest in middle class. And from a corporation standpoint, having served on boards, we got this tax cut. And what do we do with the money? We bought back shares which took the share price up. Who owns 80% of the shares in the United States, the top 10% income earnings? Household. So again, it's just this exponential upward spiral of the people who have made the jump to lightspeed. And people know that the lottery is a bad business, that they may not win, but their ticket is the winner. And we are really moving towards this Hunger Games economy. And I just think there's a huge amount of daylight between what Senators Warren and Sanders are proposing and where we are. There's got to be room here for nuance and calibration. What about means testing Social Security. You spoke about Social Security as being this wealth transfer. We want the transfer in the sense that it's taking the tragedy out of living too long and dying abjectly poor. That was a genius of Social Security. But if it's just going to people who don't, in fact need it, this is just going to be viewed as an unethical claw back of wealth that they assumed was their own. I think you and I are probably in violent agreement here. I think they call it Social Security tax, not the Social Security pension fund, because it's a tax and people say, well, it's unfair, I've been paying into it. People on Social Security are taking out somewhere between three and six X what they actually put in. And for the majority of people receiving Social Security, it's not to save them from poverty. It's the most expensive trillion dollar upgrade from Carnival to Princess Cruises. It makes their life nicer, but it's not keeping them out of poverty. I believe we should have greater assistance through Social Security or another program for seniors who are in poverty. A decent judge of a society is to look at our seniors who are in poverty and say, what are we doing to give them a more dignified life? I think that is a decent metric for a society. Where we have gone is we use that noble cause as a means of transferring. The greatest transfer in the history of mankind goes to the wealthiest cohort in the history of mankind. That policy has not kept up with demographics. Everyone's living into their eighty S. Ninety S, the fastest growing demographic group in America. Centenarians. We're all going to know someone over the age of 100. So the notion that we're not massively people are working longer. Increasing the age means testing it is ridiculous. My father's getting Social Security. You and I, Sam, should not be eligible for Social Security. It is a tax. We should bring people out of poverty. But the reason why we have so many young people embracing socialism is it's a battle of nomenclature. You and I are the beneficiaries of socialism. We got free education. I don't know when you went to UCLA, but the notion of canceling one and a half trillion dollars of student debt, which seems ridiculous, is basically young people just saying, you know, Scott and Sam, I want the same deal on education you had. I don't have student debt because tuition for me undergrad at UCLA and graduate school at Berkeley was a total my total tuition undergrad and grad in five years at undergrad see above smoking dope, watching Planet the Apes trilogy, my total tuition was $7,000. And then they see this transfer of wealth to seniors. So we've had a socialist economy for a long time. It's just young people want to call it that. We called it something else. We called it the University of California. We call it Social Security. But if we don't, you know, it has gotten so, in my opinion, so systematic. I mean, even if it's white coaches or universities or the head of the NC two A making four and a half million dollars a year, such that amazing. On athletes don't make any money, and calling it the purity of the game, that again is a transfer of wealth from young people to old people. Look at millennial homeownership. Look at artificially depressing interest rates to maintain ensure that asset prices are inflated. You know who needs a correction in stock markets, in the in the property market? Young people. The reason I'm financially secure is I got to buy Amazon at $60 a share. The reason I'm financially secure is after 2008, I looked at Apple and I said, okay, Apple at $40 a share, you're a good buy. I'm going in. We have this notion, this kind of predetermined Gestalt, that keeping asset prices high is our number one priority. No, it's not. Young people need an opportunity to get into assets at a relatively decent price, and markets should fall and rise to kind of the natural levels. We shouldn't be issuing a trillion dollars of debt again, pulling forward prosperity to artificially inflate the assets that are predominantly owned by, guess what? Old people. Yeah. Okay, so let's go. Let's look at the political implications of this because politics is on everyone's mind, and I'm trying to pick my moments between here and November because it just cannot subsume all or even most of my bandwidth. It just gets too boring. But with you, I think it's very interesting to consider what this landscape looks like. Let's start with Bloomberg, because he's someone who is getting there's at least an attempt to defenestrate him based on a few things he said as mayor, which may have been politically imprudent or too candid by half, but in many respects not obviously wrong. And the arguments against him really seem to be pseudo arguments. And so, at the time we're recording this, this is a fairly vivid scandal or pseudo scandal in journalism now, but the Democrats are pilloring him over remarks he made that were just unearthed from the Aspen Institute in 2015 when he was talking about stop and frisk. And I have the quote here. So this is Bloomberg in 2015, after he was mayor. He was, I believe, mayor for eleven years of New York City. And that the policy for those who don't recall it. It's been since more or less phased out, but the cops were stationed more in minority areas and stopping and frisking people looking for guns mostly, and crime rates plummeted. There's some uncertainty about the causal factor there, but it was not irrational at the time to think that stop and frisk was part of the policy that was succeeding and causing crime rates to plummet anyway. So Bloomberg said 95% of your murders and murder victims fit one Mo. You can just take the description and xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities, 15 to 25. That's true in New York. That's true in virtually every city in America. And that's where the real crime is. You've got to get the guns out of the hands of the people who are getting killed. So you want to spend the money on a lot of cops in the streets, put those cops where the crime is, which means minority neighborhoods. And then in a subsequent interview, he said, one newspaper and one news service, they just keep saying, oh, it's a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group. That may be, but it's not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the crime. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little. It's exactly the reverse of what they're saying. I don't know where they went to school, but they certainly didn't take a math course or a logic course. All right, so he's clearly making it difficult for himself there in hindsight, politically. But the reality is all the data I've ever read about violent crime support what he's saying here, that the disproportionate number of perpetrators and the disproportionate number of victims are coming from minority communities and what these communities suffer from. It's not too much policing. It's been the wrong type of policing. There's too much policing around petty crime and not enough policing around solving murders. And how to get that right is a difficult question. But the people who are saying that the only way to have arrived at a stop and frisk policy was born of racism and not caring about the disparities of the way in which crime victimizes communities, that's just clearly untrue a completely rational and compassionate attempt to mitigate violent crime could have given you this policy. And it seems to me that the thing the Democratic Party has to be able to admit at this point in order to talk anything like sense on this topic is that it's a difficult social problem that the mayor was right in his diagnosis that you could win money all day long in a casino that would allow you to place a bet on the age range and gender and minority identity of a perpetrator of a violent crime in New York City. It's not the ultra Orthodox Jews who are mugging people in New York City, but that's a politically toxic thing to make. Salient and the remedy of stop and frisk became politically toxic and probably wasn't worth doing. In hindsight, he could have figured that out earlier than he did, perhaps, but the fact that he's being castigated on the left as a racist monster just seems to be emblematic of all of the miscalibrations in our politics on the left that the wokeness is ensuring. And it seems, above all, a recipe for giving us four more years of trump in the end. Yeah, 100%. I thought you spoke eloquently about and I thought some real backbone, and I don't think I would have had the courage to say this or that you sang at first. When I go through TSA, I want them profiling people, and if there's some recent young man from Pakistan coming through TSA, I want a different set of security standards for him other than some 85 year old Latina grandmother. I want a different set of standards, and that's profiling. And I understand the indignance around it. I understand the dangers around it, but I think the situation warrants it. And I was in New York during stop and frisk, and I remember a lot of some national outrage about it. But there was, I think, a feeling. And first off, as a white guy who lives in Soho who's never been thrown up against a wall and violated like that, I can't fully empathize with what that does to young men who are innocently. And there were a lot of people who were stopped and frisk who just shouldn't have been over and over. And it creates sort of this victim slash criminal mentality. I get it. It hasn't aged well. It was probably the wrong thing. But I remember back in the time, reading about it in The New York Times and them saying that the communities that had the greatest damage levied upon them from crime were these communities. And this was an attempt to reduce the crime that was holding these communities back. And the reason why Mayor Bloomberg is picking up endorsements from black leaders around the nation, the reason why Mayor Bloomberg has gone up 1% in every national poll every 72 hours since he got in the race versus and everyone says, always a billionaire. Tom Steyer's never busted through 1%. The guy I was supported michael Bennett. I love Michael Bennett. He was my man. School superintendent, understands the economy, worked for a private equity firm, a senator that was seen as somebody who could work across the aisle, went out of his way to never personally attack anybody. I just thought, he's our man. Got no traction. That's the reality. And where I am and the reason I'm now supporting Mayor Bloomberg is that I think we as a Democratic Party have one moral imperative, and that's to get a bigoted, dangerous, and stupid man out of office. That's it. Those are my top three priorities. And the way we're going to get there is with someone with relevant experience, someone who has an on the ground, you know, understanding of politics and how to win elections, and somebody who is worth $60 billion that can bring shock and awe to this campaign because the DNC has $8 million. The Republican Committee is going to raise, you know, Donald Trump is going to is going to put a price on ambassadorship, say, I've got the DOJ in my back pocket. Would you like them in your back pocket? For the next four years? That's 25 million. You want to be ambassador to Spain, that's 10 million. Ambassador to the Bahamas, that's 3 million. He's going to raise a billion dollars overnight. There's this illusion that Democrats understand online better than Republicans. That is a myth. They understand it better than us. Already working on. It if we don't bring in somebody with massive resources. And quite frankly, a lot of the stuff about stop and frisk, I think it helps them with the core constituents we, we need and that is moderates. You have to turn out two cohorts to win this election. You have to turn out your base, which Hillary wasn't able to do. I think Donald Trump is going to turn out our base for us. I think people are genuinely scared that this individual has absolutely no empathy for them and is willing to ignore their needs and run rough shot over their rights and I think he is turning them out. So the race I believe, is going to be won or lost for Democrats. And by the way, the good money is on Trump right now because the number of times we've kicked a president out mid cycled without a recession is zero. So the good money is on him being reelected. The only shot we have is to win over almost every independent. Independents are moderates. Moderates, their top priorities aren't the black community. Moderates aren't trying to figure out who is the most Swolle woke candidate. So I think you're going to see a massive pivot to the center as Democrats realize, okay, this is about getting a guy in office. And all the people complaining about billionaires buying elections, well, what the hell were you doing in Senate? How come you were unable to pass any sort of campaign finance reform? This is the world we live in. We're going to need someone who's willing to come up, do a trace comma investment personally to go toe to toe with what you just know that Trump is going to raise a ton of money. So anyways, I'm all in on Bloomberg. If we were at a different point in our society, might I be with someone else? I think Bernie is an inspiration. He loses 38 states. It's socialism versus capitalism. Capitalism beats socialism in this economy. Seven days and on Sunday in my home state of Florida, they will position Bernie Sanders. They'll just show videos of him standing next to socialist fascists in southern America. He's done in Florida. He loses a swing state, no problem. Elizabeth Warren is, I think, got incredible character strength, intellectual firepower. She's declining. I think Amy Klobucher is an inspiration. I like her as a moderate. I think Mayor Pete is fantastic. All of them are out of money. They're all literally going to be out of breath coming into Super Tuesday. And I was down in New Orleans last week and I decided this is how old I'm getting. I decided to take a self guided tour of the Garden District and go through the World War II museum and there was a Bloomberg office there and I walked in and it was thriving and there were people in meetings showing PowerPoint. They are on the ground moving. So at this point, if Mitt Romney ran for the Democratic election and was going to have billions of dollars, I would vote for him. And I'm not a fan of Senator Romney. We have one imperative, and that's fine the guy that will get Trump out of office, and for me, that's Mayor Bloomberg. So these purity tests are just ridiculous. We're trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Enough already. Black people, I believe, in New York, after spending twelve years with Michael Bloomberg, would say that if, rather than focusing on a specific frame of the movie that is Michael Bloomberg, the movie plays well. He is an empathetic, decent man. The black community will do better. The black community, communities of color, women will do better under a Michael Bloomberg administration. He is a decent man who gets it wrong, but is willing to admit his mistakes, and is an empathetic guy with an extraordinary, extraordinary notes for success and how to get things done. I mean, can you imagine managing all the constituencies in New York? He managed to thread the needle between police unions, housing advocates, billionaires JP. Morgan, right? Google wanting to open their campus here. And those twelve years were seen as incredibly robust. Years that included a crisis that we survived. So anyways, as you can tell, I like Mike, I'm in. And I'm hoping that this bullshit purity test, we've decided to stick a gun in our own mouth and then shoot our feet. I'm hoping we put the gun away and start aiming it across the aisle. Yeah, but snatching defeat from the jaws of victory? Have you heard this rumor? I think it's now 48 hours old, that Bloomberg is or was considering kicking Hillary as his running mate. That's a head scratcher. Oh, my God. Yeah. That would be the stupidest political decision of our lifetime, I think. But I can't see him doing that. I just can't see him doing that. I'm just so kind of freaked out about this. I want the clearest blue line pass to the White House. There was some nonsense, some people exit polls, people saying, oh, I didn't know Mayor Pete was gay. Give me my vote. And the reality is, if you look at the data, america is less homophobic than it's ever been. We've made huge progress around that. Where we haven't made progress or as much progress, is people still have a problem with imagining a woman as president. And we're also quite ageist. Being over the age of 75 is an issue. So people have an easier time imagining a gay president than they do imagining a female or president or an individual going into their decade. Okay, so an adjacent concern here is what is Tech doing to all of us? And what's tech? I've heard a lot of your endlessly entertaining whinging on this topic, and I have my own version of this. And I've spoken to people like Tristan Harris and the concern about the big four, but I would probably put I think, as you do Google and Facebook out there, as a greater concern than Apple and Amazon, at least in terms of what's happening to our information ecosphere. Their calls to break up big tech, obviously. And well, let's draw a narrow focus here. Let's talk about Facebook for a second because I actually have a personal ethical dilemma here. So I have a meditation app which I'm very happy with, and people seem to be getting a lot of benefit from it. And I'm I'm now tasked with how to push that out into the world and beyond just flogging the captive audience on this podcast. Really the only way to push it out into the world to people who have not yet heard of it is to advertise. And I'm told that the only reliable way to advertise these days is to buy ads on Facebook and Instagram. In terms of their targeting, you're basically just burning up money in a bonfire if you're advertising some other way. But I share your concerns about the ethics of this company and about the cavalier attitude they apparently have in witnessing the ruination of our democracy based on their use of attention driven economics. So if you had a product that I'm not spreading divisive political opinions. I'm trying to put something out there that I think is really valuable for people, but I have genuine misgivings. Cutting a check to Facebook. What do you think? What should I do? So I believe that Facebook's underlining business model is fueled by rage. And I also think that sitting on top of that unbelievable rage machine that creates rage and descent among a population greater than the southern hemisphere. Plus India is controlled by a single voter shareholder class owned by one individual who got his start building a website, evaluating women on their physical appearance, screwed over his friends in college, totally fucked over his best friend out of school. It demonstrates all the characteristics of a sociopath and is the most dangerous person on the planet and can't be removed from office potentially for another 60 or 70 years, who's brought in an individual to go on a charm. Tour and has paid her $2 billion to wrap herself in a pink blanket that delay and obfuscates the necessary regulation and scrutiny we've provided to other organizations, such that this platform can be weaponized by advertisers paying in rubles. That suppress the turnout in key swing districts. Electing an illegitimate president that puts people on the Supreme Court that every day are chipping away at a woman's rights for sovereign domain over her own person and body. I think Facebook is the most dangerous organization in the world. If I were you, I would 100% advertise on Facebook. And the reason why is my guess is you're not a believer in coal, but you turn on your lights. And this is the issue. Facebook is now a monopoly. If you have a small business, you have no choice but to be on Facebook or Google, who control two thirds of digital marketing. You're not going to use digital marketing to build a business. Why don't you just say that's it no electricity for us, right? The world is heating. The majority of too much of our electricity is coming from coal fire plants. That's it. No electricity at this business. You have to be on Facebook. Sam, I own their stocks. I actually just sold Facebook, but I own their stocks. Because if you look at returns the last ten years, somewhere between 22 and 33%, I think of the S and P's gains have been around six stocks. It's the four. And then you add in Netflix and Microsoft, and to ignore and to not invest in those companies because of moral issues, and I respect people who decide to do that, is to say I'm not going to participate in the upside in our economy. And I've always said if it's a choice between moral clarity and my Range Rover, I'm picking my Range Rover. And I'm not, I'm not proud of that. But I think the majority of people think that way. People will make incremental rationalizations to make decisions that create economic security for them and their families, even if it results in small incremental damage over the medium and the long term to the commonwealth. And the reason we pay twenty three cents on the dollar to the US government is we want them to think long term for us. The people at Philip Morris weren't bad people, but they continued to kill 500,000 people a year. The people at General Motors and Ford in the were pouring mercury into the rivers, weren't bad people. But we have an FDA, we have an EPA, we have laws for a reason that they recognize these externalities and they step in. And for some reason, with big tech or not, for some reason, they don't apply the same scrutiny and level of scrutiny that every other organization has applied. If we found out that your podcast could be reverse engineered to an increase in self harm among young girls, we'd shut this shit down right away. You'd be out of business, but not Facebook. And it all goes back to Steve Jobs. In a society where as society become wealthier and more educated, there's a reliance on a superb and church attendance goes down. But that need for spiritual clarity and guides and mentors only increases in step the innovators that command this godlike magic called technology, that put a man on the moon, that arrested the AIDS virus, that turned back Hitler. And these very charismatic people armed with their 900 person PR teams and their lobbyists, overrunning Washington, where the DOJ has been masculated. The FTC is now flaccid where journalists have been cut in half, but the number of PR executives has gone up threefold, creating a six to one ratio of bullshit spend. Actual supervision or regulation has resulted in private power co opting the government as opposed to the government being a countervailing force. And the reality is we have a series of small number of companies that are aggregating all the spoils while no one else can compete. The categories going fastest in our economy tech, hardware, search, social media, ecommerce get the least seed funding because no one wants to compete with a monopoly. And so I don't think you break these guys up because they're necessarily evil. I have a lot of friends with these companies. Amazon is the largest recruit out of my class. I'm economically secure because I invested in these companies. But the one thing the government always gets right is antitrust or typically. There was huge arguments around not bringing at and T up the only ones with the capital to make the requisite investments in hardline phones and sell bullshit. We broke them up. All of the seven or the nine baby bells ten years later were all worth more than the original at and T. We absolutely need to go in there and oxygenate the economy. Get more venture capital, more business startup, more taxation, more employment. The only person that typically loses, the only stakeholder that loses in a breakup is typically the CEO who wants to be sit on the Iron Throne of Westeros Just versus one of the seven realms. So it is time to oxygenate the economy. I think regulation is important. I think Tim Wu is a gangster here. Tristan has done amazing work showing how they have leveraged addiction to move further down our brainstem to get us I mean, absolutely wed to these things. I'm addicted to Twitter and it enrages me and depresses me and I'm 100% addicted to it, but I can modulate it. When my son comes home and asks me to post his handstand on YouTube and then we go to the beach and we're boogie boarding and I see him say, can we go home? And I'm like, Why do you want to go home where's your time goes? I want to see how many likes I got. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with John McWhorter. John teaches linguistics, American studies and music history at Columbia University. And he is also a new contributor at The New York Times. And he's also a contributing editor at The Atlantic and the host of the language podcast, Lexicon Valley. His writing has appeared everywhere and he's the author of over 20 books. But most importantly, he has written a new book titled Woke Racism how a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. This was the book he was just beginning to work on last time we spoke. And in today's episode, we get into his thesis. We talk about how the social justice narrative on the left has become a new religion and how this faith has taken over our institutions and what to do about it. Anyway, those of you who know him know that John is one of our most important voices on this topic, and those of you who don't yet know him are in for a treat. And now I bring you John Mcwharter. I am back with John McWhorter. John, thanks for joining me again. My pleasure. So a lot has happened since we last spoke. I guess the first thing I just want to touch in passing is that you have been hired as a columnist for The New York Times, which I'm sure it was not a surprise to you, but it was a very pleasant surprise to many of us. And it really is a measure of how highly esteemed you are that so many people viewed it as the single event that arrested the great lady's, slide into the abyss or postponed her suicide. It's quite wonderful to see. Is it a fig leaf or further unrepentant sinning on their part? Or is it the sign of some kind of real course correction? Well, I actually was quite surprised because I am much less targeted and ambitious than I think a lot of people have reason to know. And the last thing I expected when we spoke, or even 10 seconds before I got their email, was that The New York Times would ever want me on a regular basis. And I haven't been blackballed by them in any way. I've had plenty of things to write for them, but I never thought that anything would be regular. And as far as I can see, the truth is that the more you dig into those hideous things that happened at The Times, particularly in 2020, as with all of these things, with what the people I call the elect, it's not the majority feeling at the time. It's a certain cadre of people who exert a disproportionate effect because everybody's afraid of being called names. And I think that that was going on a lot at The Times and that then there was a kind of a reckoning. That's my sense of it. And so I think that it's not just me. I think other things will be happening. And perhaps some of this is that we're coming out of the pandemic and that none of us saw the extremity that was coming. But I was quite surprised. It isn't something that I cultivated and I did not walk around thinking of myself as Times material. And it's been quite a challenge, but better than being bored. Yeah. Well, it's great to see, and I just wish you the best of luck there. Thank you. We certainly need The Times, and we need you to have as prominent a platform as you can find, and that's certainly one of the best remaining in journalism. And, you know, also, I want to inject very quickly that I have not felt at all muzzled by the time some people ask, nor when I say something leftish, am I trying to cater to them, as people on social media seem to think. I'm just saying the things that I really believe. And so far, I have no tales to tell. It's all been working out very nicely. Right, well, if your new book is any indication, you are as yet unmuzzled. So I should announce this book properly. This is a book that I think we probably discussed in our last podcast, because you were beginning to write it then. Yeah. And this is the book that the world has been waiting for. This is the book that can be really taken in hand like a hammer and hurled at the increasingly grotesque edifice of moral confusion that is now looming over everything. And that book is Woke Racism how a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. And I must say, I really I just got the book, and as I read it over the last two days, it's a book that can certainly be comfortably read in a day or two. Good. Which is really a strength. I'm happy you did not write a 500 page book. Exactly. I think you kept our friend Steven Pinker at some distance during this process because his books are, with his 500 page book, famously, Doorstoppish. But let's start with this claim to be confronting a religion, which is a framing that some people will chafe at. And I want to read something you say about midway through the book which frames this nicely america's sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral or artistic. What it is to educate a child. What it is to foster justice. What it is to express oneself properly and what it is to be a nation is being refounded upon a religion, and I really don't think that overstates it. And so I want us to deal at the outset with any concern that really you're you're you're strawmanning the situation or exaggerating. There's one more thing you say a few paragraphs down. The problem is is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities the adherence of this religion true to the very nature of religion cannot be reasoned with. They are in this sense medievals with lattes which is certainly amusing. So there's two claims here. There's the claim that we're dealing with a religion with all of the invidious irrationality implied. One problem with this framing possibly is that so many people think religion is a good thing and a necessary thing and so what's wrong with having a religion? And so this is not really the sense in which you're using it. It's all of the unreasoning dogmatic intolerant and the fake meaning derived of living in that way that you're targeting here. But you're also saying that because it has gotten to this point because it is in fact so uncoupled from real processes of reasoning these people can't be argued with and that we just simply have to figure out how to get around them. So that's kind of a twin claim that I want you to address at the outset because it's going to bump some people. Yeah, it's a really interesting thing because I think a lot of people are under the impression that the question we're supposed to be asking is how can we reason with the kind of person who comes from the hyper woke left and is asking us to do things that don't make any sense and even possibly hurt people? How can we make them open to diversities of opinion? How can we make them see that their ideas aren't the only legitimate ones in terms of our general discourse? And my claim really is and this is not me beating my chest. This is not me speaking from frustration. It's me thinking very calmly people cannot be reasoned with on, for example, race when it comes to issues like that. And I mean white people as much as black people. And the truth is, world racism is written mainly to white people. This is one where I'm going to make white people mad as opposed to black people because they are the ones who are falling for this sort of thing and thinking of this good. But you can't reason with people on race with these issues any more than you can convince somebody that Jesus doesn't love them if they've come to believe that. I think we waste energy supposing that quoting John Stuart Mill at these people and hoping we can have some sort of situation where we meet them halfway. It's simply not possible. And I've tried to speak to enough of these people. I've observed them. There's nothing to be done. And so the issue is how do we exist gracefully among them? How do we keep them from making us dance to their tune? They won't change. The world is going to be imperfect in that regard, as in so very many others. The religious point is going to irritate a lot of people. And I can understand that because for one, I am an atheist and that seems to have gotten around. And I do have a certain impatience with religious belief and that seems to have gotten around, and I think people can smell it on me. But the truth is it is more than ideology. Or it's very usefully referred to as something other than ideology. This is something different from people who wouldn't let go of revering stalin in Upper West Side living rooms in the 1930s. And it's partly because of just the almost eerie formal parallels between the way these people think and fundamentalist Christianity right down to the original sin and the white privilege being so similar. And also there is the fervency of it. There's the sense that if you don't agree, it's not that you're going to argue with somebody over your martini. That was the Stalinist back in the Lilly and Hellman yelling up into your face. That was one thing. It's another thing, though, for people to treat people who don't think like them on these issues as heretics and feel that they can't be in the same room with them, that they need to lose their jobs, that people need to be defenestrated for not going along with the ideology. That is what we associate with one of the seamiest and saddest aspects of religion. I actually think, okay, maybe if it were a religion that really were uplifting black people and people were doing this for reasons that didn't always follow logic from A to B to C, but it worked okay, that'd be fine. The problem is that this is a shitty religion. It's a really unfortunate religion that we're seeing emerge and the people in question genuinely don't know it. We have to know it. Yeah. Yeah. I've been using the term cult to convey all of the denigration of this style of thinking and organizing without confusing anyone for whom the term religion would be positively balanced. But the one thing that cult loses, because cult is just for virtually everyone, is intrinsically pejorative. What it loses that religion captures is, one, the fact that this is this is now so widespread that it really is, you know, though it is a minority of true believers, we're talking about a lot of people. It's a very large cult or a small religion. And there is something we'll talk about the various flavors of insincerity that can be found here, but there is something sincere and pure about the psychological effect of being galvanized in this way. People are really finding purpose in just throwing over everything in subservience to this new catechism. It feels good. You can see that it's giving them endorphins. It's giving them a sense of purpose. It gives them a sense of being ahead of the curve. Don't we all like that? It gives them a sense of belonging. You have a crowd of people who think in this way. It's a minority of people, but that means that you have a sense of being special. And there's a glow about these people. In many cases, the religious part captures that cult sounds menacing cult. And you're thinking of something that went on in Guyana. Whereas with this you see people who are truly glowing with the idea that they understand that racism exists and that they're going to show that they understand that racism exists. And they're also a little afraid of somebody who would accuse them of not knowing that racism exists. And so there's just this warm, shining glow. And in the meantime they're throwing black people under the bus in countless ways. But it doesn't matter to them because the point of this religion is very specifically to question power differentials, never mind doing anything about them. You question power differentials and specifically when it comes to race, you show that you know that racism didn't end in 1966, period. Stop. And that's just not enough. That is not worthy of the legacy of the civil rights movements that actually created change in lives for real people. Yeah, this is one of the paradoxes here. It's not enough. It's in some ways completely ineffectual. In fact, it doesn't even pretend to try to achieve anything. And trying to be pragmatic is denigrated, as I think the term is solutionism white. But on the other hand, it is altogether too much in every other respect. I mean, it's exaggerating the problem wherever it in fact finds it and pretends to find it in places where it doesn't exist and is making scapegoats of people who really are guilty of nothing but just nothing beyond, in many cases, being slightly tone deaf or just out of step with these new norms of thought crime. Yeah, it is a dismaying thing because I get the feeling it's partly a symptom of modernity where things were really truly horrible for black people. Nobody could afford to massage their sense of victimhood the way black people are encouraged to, the way white people are now encouraging us to do. It would have felt inhuman for white people to do it, and it would have felt truly discouraging and dehumanizing for black people to do it. You didn't exaggerate about what was already so bad. Only when things get to the point that they're not perfect, but people are doing pretty darn well. And that is certainly the case on race for just about everybody in this country over the past five decades. Only then can you develop a recreational victimization complex where you exaggerate to the degree that we all of us now, this is not just black people. This is america. Educated America is taught to exaggerate. That can only happen when things are pretty good. Which means that there's an awful lot of mendacity going on. And what bothers me is that part of this mendacity is due to how easy it is to be part of this religion. And I know partly because when I was a teenager back in the have insecurities when you're a teenager, you're trying to get a sense of yourself. You're trying to show off for in my case, showing off for girls, et cetera. You reach for things. And it will surprise many people to know that I had a little spell where I was calling people and things racist just because it felt good, because it would get a jump out of people. Because I felt like I was kind of ahead of the curve because I'd been told by other people that's what I was supposed to do. It made me feel like I belonged. It gave me a way of dismissing things that I sometimes found challenging if I hadn't done something well enough to get the top spot. It was very easy for me to say it was because of racism rather than just that maybe I just wasn't as good at it as that white guy down there. That was easy. And it was something that I was doing because I wasn't quite sure of myself. I see grownups doing this and I think to myself what I was doing was rather recreational. It was therapeutic. It wasn't real. I grew out of it and I think a lot of people grow out of it. But we're being encouraged now to think of that state, that larval state in one's psychology as something that you're supposed to stop at or return to as if to be an adult about such things, specifically race and specifically after about 1966 is somehow a regression or a mistake or something that needs to be undone? I don't think so. I don't like being told that we're supposed to be immature and that's what a lot of this is. Okay, so what would you say is the core tenant or tenants of this new religion? The core tenant. And of course, as with many group movements, it's not that everybody could recite this chapter and verse, but the core tenet is battling power differentials must be the core of all intellectual, artistic and moral endeavor. And those who are not committed to that being the core focus must be barred from public presence. That is the basic idea. And many people, if confronted with that who are part of this religion would be perplexed that anybody would question it. They would think, oh yeah, of course we're going to battle the perniciousness of disproportionate power. But the problem is that is one of maybe about 200 things that a human being can be concerned with in this world. We do need to watch out for power. If I weren't speaking colorfully, I'd say it's maybe one of about ten things. The idea that it should be at the very center of an entire academic career or the entire curriculum of a private school or basically everything that Blue America has talked about since roughly June 2020. That's a very fragile conceit, and frankly, it's not advanced. I think a lot of its perpetrators think that this is advanced. Thinking that we're taking things to a new level when really what this is is dumbing us all down. It's turning our eyes away from things that are equally urgent, not to mention just equally interesting. I really worry about younger people today growing up within this atmosphere where true curiosity is discouraged in favor of this religious pursuit disguised by the use of words like intersectionality and hegemony and social justice. It's really returning us to roughly 1250 in France. What an intellectual was then. There were only certain things you could intellect about. You feel almost sorry for Thomas Aquinas, for example, because you wish that he could open up more with all of that brilliance. We're now back to that, except because it's called intersectionality. It's supposed to be sophisticated. Yeah. And there's so many contradictions at the heart of this. So, for instance, let me just take this claim about power. There's so many contexts now where power has effectively been flipped. So to be a cisgendered white guy is not to have the power of status and the leverage of persuasion. I was recently at a conference and was speaking to someone who worked for a very prominent media tech property that I won't name, but she was high up at the organization, and she said to me, actually confided in me under the brackets of confidentiality, that her son was graduating college. And the idea of hiring him or anyone like him at this company now was unthinkable. The kid would have to be the next Claude Shannon to be considered. Right? She openly said this to you privately? She openly said this to me privately and openly said that this could not be divulged in any way that could reveal who or what I'm talking about. And I would allege I'm sure I've said something similar in previous podcasts that there's probably not this will sound like hyperbole, but I would bet a fair amount of money that it isn't. There's probably not a single desirable organization in this country now company, educational institution, nonprofit, where a black applicant to be a student or to be an employee would be at a disadvantage. Now, given equivalent qualifications, a black applicant would be positively advantaged and in the top 10% of every organization. And this extends to media journalism. That's safe to say everywhere. I can't think of any exception to that. Definitely. And the thing is, it's funny. I don't consider myself a conservative, but I find myself yearning for roughly 2010. These days. It's not as if this new version of equity where a white male is truly disadvantaged. It's not a matter of the controversy over affirmative action 25 and 30 years ago where you can prove that white people weren't really disadvantaged. But it really is the case that a white boy is going to be severely disadvantaged on the job market just because he is not a pretty color, and hiring him is not anti racist. That is something new. And I think really we had gotten to the point before, say, june 2020, where any civilized person, any civilized organization, had its eye out for people who were not white men. That message seemed to have gotten through to a major point, to the point that some white men were already complaining. But what we're doing now is going back to what in 166 was called tokenism. That was considered one of the nastiest things you could say about a hiring policy, that it was tokenism. Now suddenly that's archaic. And if you ask people what the difference is between now and the tokenism that they talked about on all in the family and the Jeffersons, well, they look over your shoulder and they tell you it's complicated, but it's not. We're going back to tokenism. If there aren't enough black people, for example, qualified for a certain activity or a certain endeavor, then the idea is to qualify more black people for it, which will involve waiting a generation until they exist and are ready to get jobs. It also requires acknowledging, as I don't think any multicultural group of humans ever have until now, that there are different cultural predilections. That it might be that there just aren't that many black people who want to play the bassoon. I would suspect that there aren't. That doesn't mean that there aren't some, but probably there are very few black people who grow up thinking, I'm going to take up this peculiar heavy, expensive instrument that nobody seems to want to hear anyway. I actually like the bassoon very much, but no, now we're supposed to say that if there are very few black basunists, then it's because there's racism and that people don't like black people or black people don't have the resources to become bassoonist. It might be that if black people had all the resources in the world, they might not choose that instrument, or to avoid the cartoonishness of that example, they might not be as interested in classical music as, for example, many east asian immigrants kids are. They might not be as interested. Yes, there will be some black oboists, but maybe not very many, and that there's nothing wrong with that. There's no room for acknowledging different cultural predilections. I. E. Diversity in our current discussion, and all of this is dumb, dumb logic. It's a person coming along with a ten year old's vision of how things are supposed to go. But because they'll call you a racist on twitter, if you don't agree with them, you just bow down to their biddings. This is not the way a mature society is supposed to operate. We're going backwards. It's frightening, isn't it? Okay, well, let's push into even more fraught territory than classical music because obviously the disparities that people will ascribe to racism systemic and otherwise, exist more or less everywhere in our society. And again, there are so many contradictions and sources of confusion here to untangle. You know, first the caveat that perhaps I should have issued at the beginning, although, you know, it truly should be superfluous. The caveat is obviously, we are coming from a history of truly odious racism that cannot be denied, and it is not in the lifetime of any person listening to this podcast where that has been effectively denied by saying educated people, right? We're climbing out of the darkness, but we have climbed quite a ways. And there's a source of confusion here that you point out in the book in various places, which is really worth highlighting. Which is to say that even if it's quite clear that a current problem is due to racism in the past, you can draw a straight line between whatever it is redlining and disparities in wealth, between the white and black community, say. It doesn't mean that the persistence of that problem, in this case wealth inequality, is due to racism in the present. Right? It's kind of the origin story and the current conditions of maintenance that are easily confused. And this relates to crime. It relates to disparities in education, disparities in health care, or attitudes toward receiving health care, right? So you can draw a line from the Tuskegee experiments to a certain attitude toward doctors and the medical establishment, which in the aftermath of Tuskegee would be quite understandable, which persists to this day. But it doesn't mean that current attitudes that one can find in the black community, let's say, toward vaccination, is due to actual racist policies or people in the medical establishment today. That part is worth sorting out. But what would you say to someone that and this is also something you address in the book what would you say to someone that at this point in the conversation would want to pull the brakes and say, listen, this is a tempest in a teacup. This is something that's happening on college campuses. This is something that concerns over educated people like yourselves. A white guy like me just doesn't like to be inconvenienced in having to pick his words carefully in conversations like this or in any other context. In some sense, this is all a species of white privilege or elitism. And what should really be addressed is the looming problem on the other side of the circus here, which is real racism, a real burgeoning movement of something like white supremacy in the aftermath of Trump. We've got QAnon and we've got people storming the Capitol, but we don't have our priorities. Trade yeah, that's an interesting thing that I've heard from many people, and the answer to that is what institutions are those people taking over? And I've noticed that there is a debate team trick where people then pretend that the question is what institutions are people of conservative politics taking over? And of course, you can talk about a little thing called the Supreme Court, et cetera, but the issue is, what about these people with their fists bared and their Confederate flags, you know, running up the steps? What institutions are they taking over? There are more such people than there were ten minutes ago. Yes, social media has a way of taking care of that, but what are they spreading their tendrils into? Because what's going on on the left is that entire institutions of learning and thinking and justice and arc are being turned completely upside down. And the idea that that doesn't matter, that that's just a bunch of white men complaining, is anti intellectual, it's know nothing, and it frankly, is a symptom of the traditional anti intellectualism of America. I think nobody in France, at least publicly, would ask that question if institutions were being threatened in that way. And then there was also, say, you know, Le Pen and his friends on the right, these things do matter. And as far as the whole systemic racism argument, the idea that if you see a disparity, it's due to racism, that you apply the sentence it's racism is extremely elementary. And until about ten minutes ago, it was something that you heard from a kind of fringe left professor or community activist, and you always knew that it was a little bit it was kind of obliviation. You didn't take it completely seriously. And I think this was true of a great many people, black and white, including people left of center. But everybody has always known what a grievous oversimplification that is of the way a society works. And yet, when it comes to race, we're encouraged, especially today, to pretend that that makes sense and to anoint the people who put it forth as brilliant. I remember back in way back in 2010, for example, I remember talking to a black reporter. This person was not and is not especially famous. If I said the person's name, it wouldn't help, and I'm not going to give the name. But we are talking about racism. And she was not a fan of mine. She had been assigned to interview me, but I could tell that she thought of me as this reactionary right winger, as a lot of people like her tended to think back then more than they do now. But we're keeping everything civil. And at one point I asked her, so what is your evidence that racism is this hideous scar running through our society right now? To the extent that you're implying, yes, racism exists. But what I want you to really tell me what you're. Talking about and what she said and how calmly she said it was what really struck me. She said, Well, I live in a disadvantaged black neighborhood, and there's a school in it where almost every kid who goes there is white or South Asian, and it's one of these elite public schools where you have to take a test to get in, et cetera. And because of historical circumstances, it happens to be in what is now surroundingly a mostly brown neighborhood, mostly black neighborhood. She said all the white kids I see the white kids going in there every day, and I just say, that's racism. You know, it's racism. Okay, but the sentence it is racism implies that she thinks that the reason is some sort of racism going on now. And I guess if you pumped her, which I didn't bother to, because it makes people too angry, she would say that there's some sort of subtle racism on the part of white teachers that keeps black kids from doing well. But never mind that those black kids have had mostly black and Latino teachers for generations. And even if they didn't, what exactly is this subtle racism that would keep somebody from being able to take a test? Well, and if you ask that question, people's eyes just roll. Now, the reason that so many white kids are going to that school and the surrounding black kids are going to crummy public schools elsewhere in the neighborhood can be traced to aspects of racism that trace all the way. Back to the Civil War? Certainly. But those are things that happened almost all in the past, and therefore, you can't stamp out that racism. Now, many of the people who talk this way if I say this will say, oh, yeah, we know, but they don't act like they know because they say it's racism. Pretending that English is a language that doesn't have tense. You're supposed to look at that school and say, it's racism that caused that, which creates a whole different set of responses that one might have other than standing there with a baleful expression and saying, that is racism. As if there's some racism that we need to battle right now. The only reason that you allow that kind of lapse in logic that you would otherwise apply these are people who are quite capable of thinking from A to B to C is because it feels good to adopt that view of things and therefore fashion yourself as having a certain insight. But it's not insight. Nothing is that elementary that we actually value. That actually gives you a challenge. Why in the world are we accepting this notion that when it comes to black social history and only that topic, everything is as easy as ABC? It's really infantilizing, and yet we're supposed to think of it as fierceness. And sophistication it's a tragedy that's going on right now. So what are we to think about affirmative action there's really two forms of affirmative action that only one goes by that name, but there's a lowering of standards that you point out with respect to what passes as intellectual products at this moment. If your skin is of the right color or if you're from the right victimized identity group. Right. So you can be flagrantly irrational and really contemptuous of reason, explicitly so, and get applauded for it. If you're someone like Ibrahim Kendy, I don't know if you ever saw Kendy asked to define racism. I think he was Aspen ideal. I tweeted that out because I consider that to be an emblematic minute of our times. Yes. I can only imagine what would have happened to me had I been on that stage, asked to define anything. Having performed in that way. You would have been eviscerated. It's just unthinkable. And yet this is in that crowd. It's almost a spiritual accomplishment to be able to be satisfied with that kind of it's not even pablum. It's not even tautology. It really is just a fuck you to the standards of argumentation that would be applied to anyone else. So it should be infuriating to people that it has this much leverage in our culture now. It's impossible to exaggerate, certainly in cities. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad for free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, today I'm speaking with Zaynep Tufeki. Zanep is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina and an opinion writer for The New York Times and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. She has a background in computer science, but she's since become a sociologist and has focused on the interaction between digital technology, artificial intelligence, and changes in society. And she was one of the earliest people to sound the alarm about the COVID Pandemic, and as a nonmedical professional, was one of the first people to point out that the CDC and the who were making obvious errors in their messaging around wearing masks in particular. But she's published a lot during the pandemic and has also been very incisive about political polarization and the machinations of Trump. She has an intellectual toolkit that seems really perfectly designed for the moment we're living in. And in this episode, we cover many intersecting issues here related to the problems of misinformation and groupthink. We discussed the COVID-19 pandemic, the early failures of journalists and public health professionals to make sense of it, the sociology of mask wearing, the problem of correcting institutional errors covered as a dress rehearsal for something far worse asymmetric information warfare, the failures of messaging around vaccines, the paradox of scientific authority, the power of incentives, the prospects of reforming social media and other topics. And now, without further delay, I bring you Zanep Tupechi. I am here with Zanep Tupechi. Zaynep, thanks for joining me again. Thank you for inviting me. So, Zanep, when I think of people who have really hit their stride during the last year of global derangement, you are, if not at the top of the list. I can't think of anyone who's higher on the list than you are. I mean, you're somebody who has an amazingly relevant collection of talents and interests. You've just been this incredibly prescient student of all of these trends that are now intersecting. I mean, we have all of these trends of conspiracy thinking and social contagion and misinformation, and all of it being brought to scale by social media. And then this is now coincided with a global health crisis wherein you have become essentially an amateur epidemiologist among many. But you've distinguished yourself as someone who really has produced good information where you've been contrary, and it's been extraordinarily useful. It's really great to see you, and I had a great conversation last time, but while all of these problems were humming along, the last twelve months has really been the apotheosis of everything you've been worrying about. So congratulations on being a woman who's met the moment. I'm not sure thank you so much. But I'm not sure it's congratulations as much as, oh, this is not a great moment. But yeah, it's kind of like pretty much everything I've ever been interested in has kind of merged into a pandemic year. So here we are. So how do you describe your career or your intellectual academic perch in general? Now, obviously, as we've discussed before, the thing I study professionally as an academic is the public sphere, misinformation digital technologies, how they all interact. In fact, just a couple of days ago was the first year anniversary of a tweet I had sent in January, I think 26th or 27th, where I said, oh, I essentially was realizing a pandemic was coming. And I said, this is going to take place under conditions of well oiled machines of misinformation. What a challenge. And I was just sort of looking at it and thinking, yeah, that's what happened. It's been a year like that. So that's what I professionally study and what I have written on. So the pandemic side is that I used to teach more introduction to Sociology in that kind of classes. And one of the things I try to do a lot with both my students and my own writing I've written about this before is to try to talk about interdependent systems, complex systems, risk, and sort of places where things are kind of interacting with another. Like there's a technical component, there's a network component, there's a sociological component. And one of the best examples I had found to try to teach this stuff and to write about and to read about had been pandemics because they're a perfect example of so many things, right? If you want to explain globalization, interconnectedness of the planet, if you want to explain how things like justice and logistics and sort of the technical scientific side, what kind of a pathogen did you get matter and how exponential growth occurs and all those things I would teach about SARS, in SARS, I would explain the virus. I would explain how we almost had a pandemic. I would explain how we got away from having it because the infectious period coincided with having a fever. So we could put a fever gun to people's heads and say, okay, now you're infectious, and trying to find a way to isolate them. So I wasn't completely new to the topic, but as you point out, of course I'm not a virologist. I'm not an epidemiologist, none of those things. But I had a lot of familiarity because I use these things to teach about and just very deep personal interest because they're such an interesting, regular human phenomenon, and they kind of have every layer of complexity you want. You have the science and the virology. You have the human behavior. Plus, there's a lot of things that are kind of misunderstood in the fictional versions of it, like the movie Contagion or Outbreak, all of those. It was a very good topic for me for years. So when in January, oh, there was there's one more twist. I was researching in Hong Kong pretty much all of 2019. I was going back and forth. I was studying the social movement there because it's an interesting sort of question to think about. We have our own particular digital version here. China has its own, and Hong Kong was an interface, and there's a social movement. So when the pandemic hit, I was closely connected to Hong Kong. And Hong Kong, of course, had been through SARS and had lost a lot of people, so they were on guard. Plus, they're close to mainland China, so they kind of were very quick to interpret the news coming out of China. Like, they immediately knew what was up. Like Taiwan. They had experience. So I had this sort of early window into it in January, and since I studied sort of authoritarian governments and things like that too. So as soon as mid January, end of January, when we started seeing cases outside of China that had not been to the Wuhan Seafood Market, there was a lady in Thailand, I think, January 14. She'd never been to the Wuhan market. And you kind of knew. Yet you know what? This is sustained human transmission. You kind of were seeing the Taiwan and Hai Kong. They those people, they're close to the ground. They were masking up and getting ready. And then on January 20, when China shut down Wuhan with authoritarians, you want to sort of look at what they do, not what they say. And you're like, this is big. And then we started seeing the early news that this was spreading before people were symptomatic. And I knew, like, at the end of January, I was completely certain we were going to get hit, and it was going to be some sort of pandemic. We didn't really know how bad. And I had started changing my own schedule and travel. So that's kind of how it started for me. And in January, to be honest, my first concern was I wanted to go back to Hong Kong. So I remember, like, the first week of January, I started buying masks because I was already seeing, like, January 7, I was already ordering masks because I knew we were seeing all this. You see viral pneumonia, unexplained viral pneumonia in China, and you're kind of like, okay, what's going on? And my first concern was I wanted to go back and do more research. And I thought, you know what? I probably won't be able to go back because Hong Kong will be badly hit because they're so close to Wuhan. A year later, little did I know they would not take me back because I'm from a country that's just mismanaged so badly. You're from a banana republic. Correct. So I can't go back, not because they're badly hit, but because they're doing they're doing so much better than us. So I still can't go back. So that was kind of how January happened for me. And then I spent February in this out body experience, I like to call it, when, like, if you knew anything about infectious diseases or pandemics, and if you're following the news, you knew we were going to get hit. And also, like, before January 20, china, the government was not telling the truth. But after that, they unmuzzled their scientists, and there was this outpouring of information. And I think at that point, partly because they knew, like, this was terrible, and a pandemic is bad for them, too, because it's their early cover up that contributed to this. And so they were actually giving us a lot of information so you could kind of learn about the presymptomatic transmission, all of those things. And plus, the Chinese scientists, they could start communicating, and they were, like, warning us. And then you were seeing all the papers, and Taiwan was giving us information. You were getting information from Hong Kong, other places. HKU, the medical school there is excellent. So I was sure we were going to get hit. We were seeing Wuhan. We started seeing what was happening in Italy. And then I would look at the news. I would look at newspapers, like, and I don't mean just the administration. Like the administration's failings are so obvious and so in front of everybody's face that I think almost doesn't bear repeating. They were terrible. But also in February, I was reading, like, op eds and pieces in outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post and other places that had titles like Beware of the Pandemic Panic, kind of implying the panic over pandemic was the problem. I read an op ed or a piece in The Washington Post saying the agents were just superstitious, that's why they wore masks. And this was somebody like an academic. It wasn't some random person. I read a Bloomberg piece saying that it was our irrational brain that was making us think about the pandemic. And I'm just sort of looking and thinking, you realize we have to do this thing called flatten the curve. Our hospitals are about to get hit, and you're telling us not to panic, that masks are irrational and there's nothing to do and don't fear. There was an op ed in The New York Times from somebody who's like a travel agent saying, don't demonize travel. It's okay to go to China. I'm like, what are these bias? Just sort of like, what planet are these people on? You feel that tsunami coming at you, and you're like, we got to get to high ground, and everybody's acting like you're crazy. That's how I lived through February. And I wasn't planning to write anything about the pandemic, because I would have written about the misinformation part. I would have done all of that. But I was seeing people around me plan conferences. They were asking on local Facebook groups. They'd be like, My elderly parents want to go on this cruise ship, and we're hearing about this pandemic. Should they go? And I would be like, no, they should not go, because we already see the age data. Like, this is not good. They should not. And they would send me this New York Times or Washington Post article saying, you're just panicking. They would tell me to worry about the flu. I'm like, yes, please do get your flu shot. But you don't understand. We have a novel coronavirus. You got to stop. You got to get ready. You got to start getting ready to maybe stay home a little bit, fill your prescription medication. So I couldn't find an article to send to these people, so I wrote one. That's literally how I was like, all right, I'm not an epidemiologist. You know what? There needs to be an article that's practical that just explains people all these basic concepts like flattening the curve, which it wasn't around at the time. So at the end of February, I wrote an article that basically said, look, we're going to get hit. You got to get ready. Things like the Case fatality rate are not fixed numbers, because if our hospitals are overloaded, more people will die. The best way is to sort of stay away from other people. Try to stay home if you can, which means you have to kind of get ready for it. It was seen as a prepper doomery thing, and we'll probably talk about this. It was one of the most striking years of groupthink that I lived through in 2020, like, topic after topic, and I thought, you know what? Okay, we need to have an article so that I can tell people it's not a crazy thing to prepare for what is a regular occurrence in human history. And since this is a virus, we're not going to be able to pull an antibiotic out of our pocket. We got to get ready. So I wrote one just to have something to send to the people who were around me, who were sending their parents, elderly parents, on trips and still. And I just wanted to tell the conference organizers, no, you're not going to be able to hold a conference in May. Just start planning for it. So I wrote one, and to my kind of surprise, it just really went viral because people were looking for that kind of level headed advice. And I didn't have anything complicated in it. Like, if you read it now, it's the kind of stuff you read a million times. It just explains flattening the curve. Where was it? The Atlantic or the New York Times? Scientific American. I owe them a blog post, to be honest. Nobody else really was interested in it. And my editor there just had his first grandchild. So I was like, do you want an article on getting ready? It's like, oh, sure. And then I sent it, and I thought he'd give me some feedback or something. But he had, like, the cute baby bundle that was occupied. We just put it up. So there were Typos, and I was like, Wait, we're supposed to anyway, then we fixed a few Typos, and it went really like, I saw it shared all over. It had millions of views. It had all this sort of big share. So I got a lot of sort of feedback from people saying thank you because I was starting to think I'm crazy because I'm worried about this. I don't know what to do. Nobody's telling me what to do. And I was kind of like, yeah, just, you know, get some food, store some, you know, get your prescription medication. Just maybe plan for a home office or, you know, maybe your kids won't be able to go to school. Just as basic stuff. So I wrote that, and I thought, all right, I've done what I need to do. And I thought that would be the first and last thing I kind of wrote because you don't really expect to be doing this. But what happened there was I needed to sort of send people to a list of things to buy that wasn't crazy. Like just simple stuff like how do you stay home for a couple of weeks? Avoid grocery stores, things like that. And it linked to a site that was more focused on, like, preparation stuff, which it was fine. The list wasn't bad. Buy gold. Well, it wasn't that, so that's why there wasn't a list. So I was, like, wading through all the lists and they were like, crazy. Yeah, buy gold. Do this, do that. And I was like, no. I finally found one that was sensible because I thought, I also don't want to drop my own list. So it was a sensible list, but being quite sensible. It had said you should also buy some masks. And as I said, like, I had bought some January 7. That's what the infectious disease specialist would have been through. SARS advice. It's kind of straightforward thing. And then I started hearing from health professionals who got mad at me for linking to a list that said, by masks in my piece I'd even said, they're kind of out of masks. Don't worry about it. But, yeah, the list was like, Buy masks if you can find them. And then I started this amazing amount of feedback that was mad at me from health professionals who were making claims that masks were harmful, right? That it wasn't that there's a shortage, because I knew there was a shortage, so I had said, there's a shortage, so you kind of can't worry about it because it is what it is. There's a shortage. But I was being told that I was endangering people by letting them think that masks were okay, that they weren't harmful. And I was like, I had another second out of body month there. I'm like, what are we talking about? How are they harmful? I thought maybe there's some weird trick I don't know about all this. Like, maybe there's some detailed virology about something, something about masks and harm that everybody in Hong Kong and Japan and Taiwan missed. And I said, okay, let me see. What are you telling me? I want to understand what you guys are saying. So it was really startling, I was told, and this was like, by health professionals. There were like, journalists, health journalists writing these articles, doctors making these claims. This was not some rare fringe claim to make. So they were saying things like that wearing a mask would cause a false sense of security, that people would become very reckless just because they were wearing a mask and dude, more dangerous things. Now, I may not be a virologist, but I am a sociologist, and full sense of security is something that's been researched a lot, and it sounds really clever. It's a little Gladwellian. Like it's the sort of smart contrariany kind of thing. You think you'll be more safe, but you're actually less safe. It's been researched to death, and it's kind of like a second order effect. Like, you got a safety device, and then you're just more reckless. And it's just incredibly hard for a second order effect like that to overcome the benefit of the actual safety, the first order effect. And in fact, research, you don't see it. You don't see it for things like helgons. You don't see it for seatbelts. Yeah, seatbelts. I mean, it's plausible. There's the occasional person who is more reckless, but maybe I saw one little study among alpine skiers, but even there, the benefit of the helmet was so great that it just didn't overwhelm if to the degree you can find examples. And plus, from the sociology of it, I knew that people who wore the masks would actually almost certainly be more careful because it's a sign something's wrong. So instead of being reckless, you would expect them to be more careful and more cautious, like rather than being reckless. And also you would see there was a lot of evidence then that we were having presymptomatic transmission, that people with that symptoms were transmitting, and the World Health Organization and the CDC were then saying that people should wear a mask if they are sick. And again, sociologically, speaking, there is no way for only the sick to wear masks because of the stigma. And we knew this from tuberculosis research. Like, tuberculosis is also airborne and people are supposed to wear masks, but they can't wear masks only if they're sick, because that's kind of singling you out as sick. And this is at a time where Asian Americans who wore masks were being attacked, and there's just no way. So if you do believe sick people are supposed to wear masks, you have to say, everybody's got to wear masks. Plus, we know there's presymptomatic transmission, so people who don't know they're sick are transmitting. So you got to say everybody's got to wear masks. More importantly, you can't bemoan the lack of PPE for health professionals based on the argument that masks don't work. Right? Yeah, that was another thing. So that was a whole other thing. So that part didn't work. So I was like, no, this argument doesn't make so the second argument they made, which is when I lost it, I thought with the sociological part, I thought, all right, you know what? Doctors don't know a lot of sociology. They have a lot of assumptions about people. They're just wrong. So I was kind of like thinking they were like, we can just correct this misunderstanding, right? I was thinking that they're just missing this false sense of security. This contrarian thing is alluring them intellectually, and we'll just correct this. The other thing they told me was that what if you touch the outside of your mask? And I was at that point, as opposed to touching your face without a mask, like, what are we talking about it? So what was happening was they were looking at studies of healthcare people self infecting because of improper mask use. But that is compared to less self infection because of proper use. There's no comparison to not wearing it. Obviously, if I'm going to touch my face, or if they would say stuff like, what if the outside of your mask is contaminated and you touch it? I'm kind of like, if the outside of my mask is contaminated, that's a win. There's no way you can make me buy this. This is so ill. And if you're touching your mask, you're not touching the mucous membranes that are beneath your mask. Correct. And if the outside of your mask is getting infected, that means you're not breathing that thing in, right? And plus, there is a lot of so that at that point, I thought, this is crazy. There's something else going on here. And further, of course, I started looking at getting in touch with my friends in Hong Kong, getting in touch with infectious disease specialists there. And what I also learned was that for them, masks were really being used to stop transmission to others and not just like protecting the wearer, which is like a medical thing, which is kind of higher standard. It's kind of a little harder to keep something out, but it is easier just with a cloth mask even to sort of it's respiratory etiquette, right? That's why you sneeze into your elbow rather than just sort of spread it around. So that was really straightforward. And I got this really strong sense there's a lot of these threads on social media from really well meaning doctors saying, well, you can't really wear them right, because they need to be blah, blah, blah, blah. And there was all this talk about the shortages, but people were being told, there's a shortage. It's harmful, you'll increase your risk. Like, there were, like, these thousands of thousands of retweets. And I kind of got the sense that it was a combination of not being logical with the outside of your mask, not being up with the infectious disease specialist who knew what they were doing, the ones in Japan and Hong Kong and Taiwan who'd been through this. And partly it was not trusting the public, right? There was this fear of having a run on masks, which that was legit. Like, you had a shortage, but then you just have to level with the public and say, it sucks we have a shortage, and here's what we got to do. We're going to do cloth masks as a stop gap. You can't tell people and I thought, this is going to start biting us because we're eventually going to have to tell people that we need to wear masks. I started tweeting about this. I basically tweeted out the whole argument saying, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't make sense. This part is illogical. False sense of security is baseless. There's no plausible way it can be harmful to wear one as opposed to not wearing any at all. So I made all these arguments and I said, this kind of messaging against mass is going to come back and bite us badly in a couple of months. And I waited because what I was hoping was that I started, like, just putting the whole argument there. I think early March, I was waiting for somebody else with the right PhD or the right MD or infectious disease sort of specialization to write a piece saying, with the Western nations, you know, US and Europe, please come to their senses and, like, look at all the expertise. And, like, the idea that the Japanese are just superstitious to Hong Kong, infectious disease experts are just superstitious was so stupid. So I just waited because I do already have a platform on Twitter. People already see it. And I'm kind of like, look, here, here's the whole argument, and I hope somebody writes this. I didn't say that, but I was really genuinely thinking, somebody with the gravitas to make this argument needs to make this argument because you're essentially saying the CDC and the World Health Organization need to change their guidelines. And then I waited two weeks. I'm still seeing, like, articles go viral saying, don't wear a mask. You'll increase your chance of infection. And these things were being published from traditional mainstream health journalists. It wasn't like they were quoting doctors and they were quoting CDC guidelines saying, it's actually bad for you. So after waiting two weeks for anyone with the right gravitas and the sort of standing to make this argument, and I had, like, this perch at The New York Times, I just went and said, you guys want a piece on this? Messaging is wrong and it doesn't make sense, and we should change these guidelines. And I really wasn't sure if I wanted them to publish it because I thought, this is crazy. Like, I am on the side of science in CDC and who. And I'm pondering writing an op ed saying that one of the most important recommendations they're making in a pandemic is wrong. So it's not the kind of thing I thought I wanted to do, but nobody else was doing it, and it is a pandemic. So I thought, all right, caution to the wind. And partly it's not just caution. I really wanted someone who would be more believable than me, right, because I don't have the correct credential set. I wanted it to come from someone like the Exhead of CDC or something like that, to come and say, look, we got a mask up. There's a shortage. We'll do cloth masks. For now, false sense of security. Doesn't make sense. But of course, don't be reckless and don't forget to wash your hands in distance. And that's it. It's not very complicated. It just wasn't happening. So I said, all right, you know what? It's a pandemic. If nobody else is doing it, I might as well do it, because why not? It'll go where it goes. And it just came out pretty much as I said it. If you read back now, it's so straightforward, like, there's no big controversy over it. And I thought, maybe this is the end of my public writing career. I'll be seen like an antivaxxer because CDC is saying it might be harmful, or health journals are writing articles like that, and I'm coming out and saying, World Health Organization or CDC wrong in a pandemic. So that's kind of a big deal. And I thought, all right, maybe that's the end of my public writing career. But if you really believe something is true and the stakes are so high, and you have a chance to publish in what is still called a paper or record, so it will be read, you got to do it. So I was like, all right, I do it. I wrote it. And I had a great editor who just kind of let me write it the way I wanted to write it. Like, we didn't do the hemming and hawing. I was able to link to things like presymptomatic transmissions occurring and just sort of these things that were still being treated. Like, controversial as late as March, when in fact, there was so much data that was showing that that's the preponderance of evidence, right? Even if you're not 100% certain, it's so clear that it's almost certainly that's what's happening. So I was able to write it the way I wanted to write it, just saying, this is what we should be doing. And then I thought, all right, okay, let's see what happens. Maybe, as I said, my career is over, or maybe not, but if it is, it is. So then what happened was sociologically fascinating to me is that I got inundated with medical professionals and other infectious disease people who contacted me and said, thank you. Thank you for writing this. Thank you for saying this. I later learned that it caused a firestorm within the CDC, too, and helped their recommendations to recommending masks. So instead of getting canceled, which I thought, maybe that's what's going to happen, I got all these people immediately sort of this flood of, thank you for saying this. Thank you for saying this. And part of me was like, you're very welcome. And the other part of me was like, why didn't you write all these people who were really highly sort of placed? It made me feel good because I don't want to sort of stick my neck out if it's wrong. I don't mind the pushback, but if it was wrong, I wouldn't want to endanger people. My first thought was, like, great. I didn't do something wrong. I didn't put people in danger. I did say the right things. My second thought was, like, wait, if you all knew this, why was it like a sociology professor to be writing this? That part is genuinely strange, and we should step back for a second and acknowledge that this problem is much bigger than the pandemic. I want us to discuss whatever is useful to discuss at this moment about COVID But there's much more to this moment than that. It seems like we've been living through a dress rehearsal for something far worse on on at least two fronts. There's the global health front, and and so we have a pandemic here, which, just by sheer accident, isn't ten times worse than it is, right? I mean, COVID could be killing 10% of people, and we would we we now know how we would perform under those conditions, and it would be to watch our society unravel. I would love your take on why we have failed so catastrophically to actually get a handle on what is, compared to the real possibilities out there, both man made and natural, a fairly benign disease, right? So there's the global health challenge that we have not exactly risen to, but then there's this riding alongside it or on top of it, or beneath it, there's the political instability that we've lived through and the rise of Trumpism and that complete derangement of our politics, which you also have weighed in on quite usefully. And many of your intuitions here have been informed by your experience being Turkish and knowing what it's like to live through coups and coup attempts. You've seen the writing on the wall in that sense too. And so the bigger problem is one of misinformation and information siloing and just the fact that given that largely this is the story of what the Internet is doing to the human mind, we have access to so much. Information. But simultaneously we have that the gatekeepers of information have lost the trust of much of society in in many cases for good reason. I mean, you you just pointed to the case where it took you a nonexpert to push back against CDC guidance. And so we find out we can't trust the CDC on so basic a point as whether or not people should be wearing masks in the middle of an airborne pandemic. So trust in public institutions has eroded. And so now we're left with the situation where everyone's got a supercomputer in their pocket with access to the totality of human information, which is probably doubling at this point, I don't know, every year. And we have this kind of stalemate where, you know, one person's groupthink is another person's expert consensus. There's no place to stand where you have authority or perceived authority to rectify the obvious reasoning errors of vast segments of our population. Take your pick. We could talk about QAnon or the antivax movement, or prominent people in our society likening COVID to the flu or the craziness is everywhere. And it's very hard when you have a breakdown of, of authority and even integrity in in major institutions, whether it's the CDC or scientific journals like Nature and Science and the New England Journal of Medicine. And it's just all of this has gotten so contaminated by politics on both the left and the right that it's really quite deranging. So I think we should step back for a second and talk about the role that misinformation and social media and any other variable here bringing this confusion to scale is playing on multiple fronts here. Then we can sort of dive back into anything that you think is useful to say about COVID at this moment. Sure, you hit upon like that's exactly what we mean when everything I've been interested in kind of came to be at this year. So to begin with, I'm on the record calling this a starter pandemic. That's not to make light of the existing tragedy, but it could have had the fatality rate of something much worse. Right. And there's no reason that it couldn't have been terrible in ways that we can't even imagine right now. It could have been killing a lot more people. It is mercifully largely sparing children from severe illness or death. The outcomes are like so it could have been just sort of devastating all the children. Every death is tragic, but it could have been something like that is a different kind of situation. It could have been killing 30% of the victims. We might not have had vaccines in nine months. There's so many things that could be so much worse about this starter pandemic. We have this part, it's already tragic, but that's something that I think about a lot. And the other thing is, this is something I think about all the time, is that, yes, I've criticized the CDC and the World Health Organization on this basic point, but on the other hand, of course, overall they are right. Like, if you are just sort of thinking about like, who do I believe? You're always going to choose the CDC. You're always going to choose the World Health Organization compared to the rampant misinformation out there. So even if they have hiccups and get something wrong, they're full of actual experts and they did whatever their failings, they're so much better. And look at the vaccines and the scientific edifice that can deliver this kind of vaccine with this speed. And yet we're losing the argument to keanu, right? I mean, we have all this I was just sort of talking, I think, in another interview, and I'm just kind of amazed at how little we're doing with what we have, because we haven't figured out how to make these institutions earn public trust the right way. Because all the mistakes they make and the sort of communication errors kind of weaken them. But in reality, I'm just thinking like, clinical medicine has all sorts of things I can criticize about everything from the equity to the way they listen to the they don't listen to the patients to they are still in a mind body dealism as far as I'm concerned. They have these slow I have all these criticisms. On the other hand, if my eleven year old gets strep throat, the only thing I'm thinking, well, not this year, but previously would have been, oh, he can't go to school for a day. Whereas if it was 1930s, I'd be thinking, am I planning a funeral? Right? Like, within basically a couple of generations, we've made so much amazing progress and as you point out, we have supercomputers in our pockets and all of that, and yet we're failing and we're losing the argument to people we should not be losing these arguments to, because we're mismanaging it. We're losing trust. People like Donald Trump are managing to convince enough people and get elected and then also manage to convince enough people that the election was stolen from them and all the things that came from that lie. I volunteer at a vaccine clinic and it's amazing. Like, we're giving all these elderly people the first shots, but there's no phone capacity to call them for reminders in three to four weeks because the phones are overloaded and over. You know, they're just now and I and some of these people were they're just we're just sending them on with a piece of paper, 80 year old, 90 year old people and just hoping they show back up. And I'm thinking, how could this be? Like, how could we have these amazing vaccines with these results and not have the phone capacity to make sure that we give them a call back to remind them their appointments tomorrow? Right? That kind of simple stuff. So this is this really weird age dismiss age. Achievements of science are, on the one hand, amazing. Like, we got the vaccine so fast, but we're not putting money into distribution. We have medicine that's amazing, but it doesn't listen to patients all the time and loses trust. We have a democracy, and we're electing Donald Trump, and then nobody's standing up. So it's a transition. And even though the technology that's feeling this, the social media technology, is kind of amazing in some ways, and this is something like this was our last conversation, I long thought about this. The printing press was amazing, but we didn't just get the printing press and then Encyclopedia Britannica. Yeah, there was like, there was a couple of, you know, the 30 year wars and this and that, and then two global wars in World War I and World War II and near annihilation, and we came to our senses a little late on that. On the other hand, like, I'm sort of going to go from it didn't just go from printing press to Encyclopedia Britannica. It was a lot of upheaval. But on the other other hand, like, after 1945, after World War II, if you wanted to sort of if you're taking bets, you'd be like, in 20 years, Germany is going to attack somebody again. Probably France, because that was pretty much what had happened for hundreds of years, but for a bunch of complicated, lengthy reasons. Europe was scared enough and U. S. Was scared enough to build institutions to make sure that never happened. And in 2030 years, instead of having, you know, one more Germany attacks France story, which is like if you were a Beijing, that's what Uri said was about to happen again. We got, you know, a single currency there. As soon thereafter, we got borderless travel. I mean, I'm not saying the European Union is perfect, but we haven't had another Germany France war. Like, the continent is not in pieces again. So it's like we can fix things when and if we fix the institutional part of it. Part of the problem here, though, is that because there's been such a breakdown in trust in institutions, many people doubt whether we need institutions. Institutions themselves are in disrepute. And, I mean, even I mean, you and I are visibly part of this trend. I mean, you probably less so than I am, but you and I are speaking on my podcast, which I have taken great pains to divorce from any kind of institutional pressure because of the kind of intellectual freedom I want to have here. I have actually consciously worked now for years to make myself uncancellable. And you write for The Atlantic and the New York Times, but you also have a substacc email, which I certainly recommend people subscribe to. You're part of a trend there that many very celebrated journalists have jumped entirely to substac because the institutions have proved to be so vulnerable to bizarrely. So, I mean, this shouldn't be the case, but, you know, you can get something with a few hundred retweets on Twitter, which brings the New York Times to its knees at least, you know, behind closed doors, they're treating it like it's an absolute emergency and looking for who to fire next. And so standing outside of all this, we have obviously the people who have been taken in by one or another crazy confabulation like QAnon and the larger subset of Trumpist preoccupation around that. But on the far left, there are analogues of this. And if there's a consensus about anything right now, it seems to be that the experts can't be trusted to the point where expertise itself isn't even a thing anymore, right? We don't need experts for anything. They've all discredited themselves. The people most worth listening to are simply the people who will say the most provocative thing that proves to be most shareable and unhelpfully for any kind of course correction back to normalcy. Here we have one vivid example after the next of people like yourself. And there are many other people I could name in this mode who obviously have 1ft in institutions and the normal culture of expertise or even both. Feet there, but occasionally have to step outside of all of that and point out that the institutions, our most prestigious institutions, are failing to a degree that is actually just jaw dropping. Right? I'm going to add to you one other data point here on the other side of this, which is, I'm sure you saw this at one point. I forget what month this landed in, but when we were having all of the social protests around the murder of George Floyd and the BLM protests that in certain cases devolved into riots and all of that happening on the left, there were open letters signed by literally thousands of doctors and public health professionals in support of these protests, as though they posed absolutely no epidemiological concern. Right. Like, this is necessary, this is good. All of the right wing protests against Lockdown were murderously, irresponsible, right? They castigated the right over gathering en masse in public. But then we had protests from the left that were aligned with the political priors of most people in journalism and most people in academia, which were an order of magnitude larger and apart from some more mask wearing, definitely looked riskier than anything that was happening on the right. And yet there was not only silence around this, there was absolute support from public health people and obviously this got noticed by everyone right of center as not just an instance of black comedy level hypocrisy, but it was just a complete breakdown of a commitment to spreading valid public health information. And so the people who were resisting wearing masks at that point took notice and said, all right, we can't trust anything you people say. It's all about politics. You've just proved that yet again. And it's you can almost hold your breath until the next moment where the worst fears and the most cynical assumptions of any one of these siloed groups of confabulists get confirmed by our institutions at this point. I mean, the most responsible people behave absolutely irresponsibly, seemingly on command. It's very hard to find a place from which to reboot and to acknowledge all of these past missteps and to say, okay, now we're going to move forward with professionals in their right seats and with a renewed commitment to institutional integrity and intellectual honesty and everything else that's going to become a reliable engine of progress here. It's amazing to see by literally I see billionaires who are as basically as cynical about anything ever getting done ever again as QAnon lunatics. So it's a very dark picture of if we have a consensus about anything, it's that nobody knows how to move forward here. So anyway, I just vomited all of my worries on you and do with that what you will. The interesting thing is that the experts are the ones that are kneecapping themselves despite I mean, every argument should be on their side. Like as we just discussed, it's like medicine has done amazing things. These facts, these are amazing. We don't like the guidelines. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests. No questions. Ends okay. Well, today I'm speaking with Peter singer Francesca Minerva and Jeff McMahon. Peter is a professor of bioethics at Princeton, and he's been on the podcast before. He focuses on practical ethics and is extraordinarily well known for his book Animal Liberation, which is pretty close to the foundation of the animal rights movement. He's also written a lot about global poverty and has been deeply inspirational to effective altruists everywhere. Francesca Minerva is a research Fellow at the University of Milan, and her research focuses on applied ethics, medical and bioethics, discrimination, and academic freedom, among other topics. And Jeff McMahon is a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford University, and he focuses on a range of issues related to harm and benefit, including war, self defense and defense of others abortion, infanticide euthanasia, personal identity, the moral status of animals the ethics of causing future people to exist i. E. Having children, disability, philanthropy and other topics. And the proximate cause of this episode is that the three of them are launching a new journal, the Journal of Controversial Ideas, and this is the focus of our conversation. We discuss the ethics of exploring dangerous ideas, and then we jump into some specific ones. Talk about the possibility of having a market in vaccines, the taboo around the topic of race and IQ, the relationship between activism and academia. We revisit Peter's famous shallow pond argument for doing good. Anyway, a fascinating area, all too timely and quite relevant to growing concerns around cancel culture and free speech, political hyperpartisanship, and the general dysfunction in our institutions now. And now, without further delay, I bring you Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva, and Jeff McMahon. I am here with Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva, and Jeff McMahon. Great to meet all of you. We're spanning the globe here. So, Peter, you're in Australia. That's right. Once you each introduce yourselves briefly, I will do something proper in the intro here. But what are you each focused on? Let's start with you, Peter. You've been on the podcast before. People will be familiar, but let's just bring you in as now a podcast repeat what are you up to these days? I'm continuing to be professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. I'm working on a range of questions in ethics, issues relating to global poverty, issues relating to animals. I'm actually currently currently doing a revised edition of my book Animal Liberation, which came out first in 1975 and need some updating. So I'm hoping to get that done sometime this year. So it'll be out next year. And I've been working on issues relating to the pandemic and ethical questions about doing human challenge trials, about vaccine distribution. There's a lot of things keeping me busy. Great. Francesca? I am a researcher at the University of Milan. I mostly work on discrimination based on physical appearance, but I also work on longevity, immortality, and antibiotical issues like enhancement and conscience and objection in medicine. And Jeff, I'm the Whites Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University. I've done a lot of work on issues in practical ethics, issues like abortion, infanticide, war. But recently I've been working on a book on what's called population ethics issues having to do with Causing people to exist, which notoriously difficult area of ethics. And I'm trying to show that a lot of the problems and paradoxes in population ethics are essential to understanding a broad range of other issues. And practical ethics, well, almost by definition, we could talk about the most interesting and consequential things that face us as a species. There's so much to talk about, but this conversation is occasioned by you guys starting a new journal, the Journal of Controversial Ideas. If I'm not mistaken, this is a response to the perceived crisis in academia around political correctness, wokeness, cancel, culture spreading, allergy really an autoimmune disorder, intellectually speaking, to ideas that make people uncomfortable. I don't know which of you wants to kick us off here, but what is this project, and just how concerned are you about the state of our intellectual discourse? Can I just say one thing first? I think it'd be probably appropriate for Peter to lead off with the main comment, but I just wanted to say that our concern is every bit as much with efforts to suppress free speech coming from the political right as it is with efforts coming from the left. Sure I can say something. Although I do want to say that it was really Francesca who had this idea and brought it to me many years ago of responding, trying to produce a journal where people who wanted to publish anonymously or under a pseudonym would be able to do so, but it would still be basically an academic journal, a peer reviewed journal that would be rigorously reviewed, so that getting into it would not be easy. There would be high standards of publication, but people could protect themselves against getting a lot of harassment or threats or harming their academic career by publishing controversial ideas. And I know that Francesca herself was influenced by an experience that she and her co author had when they published an article about infanticide, and Francesca can tell you about that. I earlier on had also somewhat similar experiences when I was silenced in Germany when I was speaking about euthanasia for severely disabled newborn infants. And that incidentally, those opposition came both from the conservative Christian right and to some extent from the disability movement with which some on the left were aligned. But there were, of course, a lot of other incidents, academics who were threatened or harassed or had articles retracted because they were controversial, even though they'd been accepted by peer review. And that was really the driving force between trying to set up a place where people could publish and where they would know that articles would not be retracted just because of some political backlash, and where, as I said, if they wish to publish anonymously, and not all of our articles will be anonymous or under a pseudonym. In fact, the majority of them that we've received so far are not. But if authors wish to do that, they will be able to do so. Francesca, why don't you say a little bit more about your inspiration for the journal? Yes, I published this article in the journal Medical Ethics in 2012. It was a co authority article, and it was about moral status of newborns, comparing it with the moral status of fetuses, which is a topic that has been explored over several years in philosophy. Peter has written about it, Jeff has written about it. But when we published that article, things got a bit out of hand, because at that point in 2012, social media were available, the Internet was a big thing, and some right wing online magazines and newspapers picked up the news about this article and started spreading information about it. Misinformation about it, actually, because the titles and the article summarizing the content of this academic paper were not very accurate. So very quickly we got a lot of death threats and online abuse, and at the beginning that was quite scary. Also, we were at the beginning of our career, so we were quite surprised by this reaction. But soon after, I realized that the main threat wasn't really like the kind of physical threats that were mentioned in the emails I was receiving, mostly from Christians and rightwing people. But I started being worried about my career prospects and because I was told that I could not be hired because I was too controversial. And in the following years, I kept looking at what's happening in academia and I realized that these kind of episodes were becoming more and more common for the word Rebecca Tovel and the Weinstein, the Christiac Is, the Bruce Gilly. A lot of people were getting a lot of negative reaction, in some cases from the general public, like in my case, but increasingly from inside academia itself. So I realized that we started having a problem of selfcensorship, either because people were worried about being the subject of these death threats, but also because people were worried about their career, because we started having a lot of petitions and letters to get people fired or having their papers retracted. So I talked about this concern with Peter and Jeff and we decided to start this journal. And after quite a few years working on this project, we are almost ready to publish our first issue which should come out around the 15 April. Well, it seems to me there's a kind of demarcation problem here where at least two concerns should kind of bound our discourse about the nature of the world and how we should all be living within it. And one is just the finiteness of time and attention, right? We all have a certain amount of hours to spend on this earth and we can choose to spend them one way or the other. And then the question is, well, why spend any significant amount of time focused on questions where either the question or the possible answers produce a significant concern about harm, right? So there's some possibility of dangerous knowledge. The terrain is so ethically charged, it produces an experience of revulsion in the better part of humanity that may even just hear about the topic. And so there's just this question of okay, just why do it on certain topics? And then there's just apart from just the opportunity costs and the wastage of time, there's this concern about some kind of ethical and intellectual negligence because there are foreseeable harms that crop up down many of these paths, right? So if you're going to just take the I don't know what your actual thesis was in discussing the moral status of infants versus fetuses, but for someone to spend a lot of time on the question of why the impediments to infanticide are as high as they are could seem to many people to be just an all too casual prime at the lid of Pandora's box. Right. Perhaps this isn't the best example of that because I'm sure there's an argument for the the unconscionable suffering of that is allowed to persist for certain babies that are bound to die soon. And so there's an argument for euthanasia there which most or many people will be sensitive to. But I guess I'm just asking a generic question about this boundary that the three of you are contemplating and just how you will make choices about what to what's legitimate for inclusion and what isn't here. It seems to me that the best way to avoid wrongful harm is to be able to identify which kinds of harm are genuinely wrongful. All of this requires thought and reflection and discussion. It's not as if we know the answers to these difficult moral issues a priori. We simply have to think these things through unless we want to just be guided by ignorance and superstition. If we can't talk about things and discuss them investigate the different views that people have, subject them to reasoned scrutiny. We're just going to be casting about blindly, and we're much more likely to do harm that way than we are if we think things through rationally, looking at the evidence and entertaining, listening to and thinking about all the different positions that people might have on the issues. Ignoring these questions is the worst thing we can do. It seems to me there are some limits. I mean, that is to say, if we can if we know or have good reason to believe that some open discussion of some issue really is going to do harm to innocent people, then that's of course, a very, very good reason not to discuss it. But I think that's a quite rare phenomenon and that we're much more likely to do harm through ignorance than we are through careful, reasoned discussion of issues. Peter Francesca, do you have anything on that? I certainly agree that I think the general view is that being able to discuss things openly is likely to lead us to a better informed and more thoughtful, reflective understanding of the issue, and that that's likely to produce better results in the long run. You talk about harms, and of course, sometimes you can see immediate possible harms. A lot of the cancel culture has been about not offending people, not threatening their sense of themselves or their identity or something like that. That is an obvious harm right there. But there may be other harms through not discussing issues, through not allowing people to have their say and to point out some of the drawbacks of current practices, perhaps, which will go on and will continue. And I think we should have confidence that open discussion and trying to get to the truth of the situation and to the best, most thoughtful and justified views of the situation is in the long run likely to produce a better outcome, better well being for all of those affected and reduced harm. So I think that's the basis on which we generally answer those questions. And I agree with Jeff. You can imagine situations where you would not do this. Some years ago, a magazine called The Progressive published an account of how to make an H bomb. And I think there I would say, well, it's not clear to me that this is something that everybody needs to know. And scientists nowadays have similar questions with how to engineer viruses that would produce a pandemic deliberately. Maybe those are things we would not publish. That's not what we're looking for. We're looking for discussions and ideas where we think it's reasonable to want more people to be involved in this and to try to be better informed and more thoughtful. Yeah, I guess I'm trying to find both sides of that line in my imagination here. I guess I have a couple of examples off the top of my head. That where one falls well inside of it, and one falls perhaps just outside. I guess perhaps you could react to this. The one example from our current circumstance now, where we're having this conversation at one hopes is the tail end of the COVID pandemic. And it seems to me that there's probably been discussion about this, but if there has, I haven't heard it. But it's at least an interesting ethical question as to whether there should be a market in vaccine privileges. Right. So if people who have earlier spots in line who may actually not want to get a vaccine because they're worried about vaccine technology, could they sell their spots to people who would want to buy them? I'm sure there are many wealthy people who would like to spend a lot of money to get a vaccine months earlier than they otherwise are going to. And I'm sure that if you floated that idea on social media, or certainly if you endorsed that idea on social media, you could expect the swift cancellation of your academic and perhaps professional prospects. And there's an obvious harm that comes from our inability to even discuss an idea like that, whatever side we come down on, because that market could produce a lot of good. Obviously, if billionaires early on could have been given the opportunity to spend millions for the privilege of getting the vaccine early, well, then those millions could have been used to cancel the very inequalities that people would be worried about in their IC reaction to a market in vaccines emerging in the first place. And so that seems to be something that we should talk about. But can I say something about that very briefly? Sure. We've been having debates for quite a long time about very similar issues. For example, the sale of organs for transplantation, and also just generally about how medical resources should be distributed in a society. I mean, it's strange that if you went on to the Internet and advocated the sort of proposal that you have mentioned, you would get attacked for that when people in the United States tolerate rich people being able to get the very best medical treatment anywhere in the world and poor Americans being left out almost entirely. So, I mean, there's a parallel debate about just how ordinary medical care should be distributed. It doesn't seem to be fundamentally different from what you're discussing about the sale of vaccines. Yeah, that's a great point. Nevertheless, Sam, if you wish to write it up and submit it as a paper to the Journal of Controversial Ideas, we'll be very happy to have it considered. If you want to do it under a pseudonym so that nobody knows it's your idea, although you have now let it out on this podcast, I don't think my pseudonym is going to work at this point. The other topic, which is one I'm all too familiar with from this podcast, has been the taboo around discussing the data in IQ differences between populations. Right? This is just absolutely radioactive. And I stumbled onto this topic not because I have any interest in IQ per se, much less in racial or ethnic or population differences in it, but because I became very concerned after witnessing the defenestration of Charles Murray, the up teenth defenestration of Charles Murray 25 years after he wrote his infamous book. I became very worried that our society seems to imagine that something absolutely existential politically and ethically rides on our not finding out that there are group differences. Right. It seems to me, just as a theoretical assumption, extraordinarily likely, that anything you would test between various populations of human beings, no matter how much you want these mean values to be the same, you will find mean differences. And this is not just IQ. This is literally anything you could want to test, that you could measure. You are going to find that the Norwegians and the Italians and the Inuit and the Australian Aborigines, or people who just identify with those groups, and there may be imperfectly actually related to those groups. You're going to find differences. And it seems to me that most of our society seems to believe that our future happiness and cooperation as a species depends on that not being true because we would not be able to absorb those facts politically because they are so toxic. Now, this strikes me as absolutely absurd, and there's nothing really riding on there being no group differences. But I do question, and this is the one question I had for Murray, one question I had for Murray on my podcast with him, why one would spend any significant time trying to establish those differences or looking for those differences. I think we need to be able to talk about this because we will be ambushed by evidence of those differences. Because if we just decide to study things like intelligence, generically, these distinctions between populations may just leap out of the data. And we have good reason, I think, not to care about them. But I do question whether it's worth publishing somebody's heroic effort to establish the reality of these differences because of the social cost that can follow from that. I don't know if you think that's a distinction without a difference, but I'm wondering how you feel about that example. Well, I actually think that you're right about this, in that whether there are these differences or not may not matter in the slightest. That is to say, what people ought to be discussing, seems to me, is if there are such differences, why that should matter. Should it make any difference to the way we think about any particular individual or about the way that we treat any particular group? It might. If a group turns out on average to score lower on some measure, that that's a reason to provide disproportionate resources for that group in order for it to be able to achieve equality in practice. But what we should be questioning is whether any of these differences, whether at the individual level or at the group level, make any difference whatsoever to moral status. And if they don't, then it's unclear to me why anyone should be concerned if these differences do emerge at the population level. I'd slightly disagree with that, Jeff. And that we, as we are present, we feel that if there are differences in, let's say, the number of people who are admitted under certain tests to elite universities, if that does not admit a proportion of a certain minority group that's similar to their proportion of the population, that this must be racist practices or biases in the admission, and so we go to significant lengths to try to overcome that. Now, it may be relevant. It may be that there are other causes that lead to different results and that they're not the results of systemic racism, which is the assumption that we currently make. Now, what actions follow from that, of course, is a different question, as you say. And it may be that even if we were to find that there are, on average, genetic differences in demographic groups, it may be that the result of that is we should put more effort into trying to improve the environment of those demographic groups which do not have the same average scores as high as others. That's that's what I was suggesting, by the way. Yeah, but what I'm saying is in terms of I wouldn't say that it makes no difference at all, because it does make a difference as to where we look for how we ought to respond to this, rather than beating our chest and saying we're such a racist society that we are in some subtle way that is not. Or maybe not so subtle. Of course some of this is absolutely the opposite of being subtle but that we are looking for ways in which we ourselves are guilty of having these racist biases. It may be that instead we ought to be saying, no, it's not that, but there are some other things in the environment that we could help to overcome this. Yeah, I think I'm prepared to even go a step further there and say that in many of these cases, specifically at an institution like your own, princeton to the contrary, not only is there not overt racism, keeping certain groups out and underrepresented, if in fact, they still are underrepresented. I think there has been a pretty active campaign of affirmative action at most schools like your own, though there are some exceptions. And just think of this more widely. I do think it is pathological for us to assume that unless every conceivable desirable position in society shows a perfectly proportionate representation of the population, the only explanation for that mismatch is bigotry. We know enough at this point to know that's not true. If nothing else, there are many cases where there's just differential interest born of culture in some cases and in biology and others. I mean, just look at the difference between men and women in their representation in scientific fields. Right. There are fields in science that are now dominated by women. Certainly more than 50% of psychologists and biologists at this point, I think it's fair to say, are women, at least in graduate schools now. And there will be viewed with the lens of bigotry an unconscionably low number of women in engineering departments. Right. And probably in physics departments still. And I'm not sure there are any honest people left who think that bigotry is what explains that. There's got to be some differential interest here and perhaps in certain cases aptitude when you're talking about the extremes of mathematical ability. This is the very claim that got Larry Summers thrown out of Harvard when he speculated that perhaps the different representation between men and women in engineering and physics and other almost purely quantitative fields is due to not different means in those distributions, but a different level of variance. Right. So once you get several standard deviations from the mean, you could have many more men who with that mathematical ability, both tales, right, both the high end and the low end. Now that's a hypothesis. I think there's still some considerable evidence for it. I don't think that the jury's in on that. But if that just turns out to be true, the fact that we spent any time at all lacerating ourselves over now for many, many, many years over residual bigotry and misogyny in these departments will seem like a terrible misuse of energy. Again, this is not to say that misogyny hasn't been a problem and isn't still a problem in other cases. But I take your point, Peter, that understanding this will allow us to correct for a misdiagnosis of the problem. But I do think there's this added piece around the perversity of just investigating in areas where there's such an ick factor, where one feels what good is going to come of that? If that's my first question upon hearing that someone is writing a 5000 word piece for you on X and my first feeling about X is, wow, that just seems truly morbid. I'm just wondering if we can conceive of how we would find that boundary in principle or if you're not really thinking about that, you're just going to know it when you see it. Well, one thing to say about that is that it's right that some people could investigate certain phenomena for the bad wrongful discreditable reasons. On the other hand, sometimes results just show up as side effects of inquiry or phenomena are just there and they call for some explanation. So a lot depends on how these questions arise and why they are pursued. Yeah, I mean, the results just showing up is the most important variable from my point of view because it's they will just show up. And we currently have a social and intellectual order that is advertising its brittleness literally on a minute by minute basis, and there's just no reason for it. I mean, if we could render indelible our political commitments to equality and compassion, if we could articulate clearly enough what kind of society we want to live in where individuals are treated as such and everyone was given every opportunity they could possibly use to thrive. If that's our goal and we're not covertly trying to engineer some noxious political order where some groups benefit to the disadvantage of others systematically. I mean, if we have a kind of ralsian understanding of what this project is, it seems to me we should be able to talk about anything. But we really do feel very far from that moment. But, I mean, if we can agree on that, and yes, some people are going to be offended and going to feel hurt by the fact that we're talking about somebody's working on infanticide or IQ. But this is also how we make progress. Like 20 years ago, it was considered absolutely, at least in my country of origin, which is a Catholic country, Italy. You couldn't really tell, even among left wing, secular atheist people, that gay marriage was a good thing and that gay people should be allowed to adopt children, to have children. But then the conversation started and yes, a lot of people were annoyed, offended, hurt by the fact that people had these non Catholic, non religious views. But 20 years later, we now have gay marriage and gay people can adopt. And we have made a lot of progress with these rights. And we can't tell before we start talking about these issues whether the change for society is going to be for the better, for the worse. But people anywhere are going to talk about these issues. And I think it's better if academics jump in the conversation and talk about these issues openly instead of letting that conversation to some hidden groups that don't really get any feedback and don't really discuss their ideas with the external world. So we can have this conversation in the open. Maybe we find out that there was a mistake in the data collection or there was a mistake in the argument, or there was a mistake in this view we had. But this has to be discussed and some people will be offended for sure, and some people have been offended in the past. But I think overall, for a lot of issues, that was a good thing because it allowed us to make progress. Like, as I mentioned, in the case of gay marriage and adoption, I think you should probably lean into this and publish your journal or the best selections from your journal every year around Christmas as a coffee table book, lavishly illustrated, and just use it to your advantage. It could be a very interesting document. What museum is that? Is it the Mutter Museum? That. Has collections of things that everyone would be otherwise terrified to see, but I don't know about that. Yeah, there's a museum that has human anomalies cyclopses in formaldehyde and just ghastly things that I'll look it up. I forget where this is. What kinds of topics are you expecting hoping to publish on? Francesca, do you want to talk about the papers that we've accepted? In broad terms, yes, very broadly, because it should be a surprise. We had some papers on animal rights, some submission on transgender questions, some papers on the group differences, and, well, we'll see what else is going to be accepted. So far, we accepted around 67 papers, and we hope that for the first issue, we have around ten. So there are various topics, some more controversial than others, but all quite controversial. And I'll just add, to go back to the previous conversation, we do have one not on group differences in intelligence, but in more generally about the role that the genes play in intelligence and the denial of that, or the difficulty of talking about that in some circles. I guess if we can maybe just close the loop on that topic, it's interesting to just try to take the thorn out of this rosebush, because for a person thinking about this particular problem, I guess my moral intuitions have been so worn down on this that I'm just not sure I can recapitulate the problem here. So it's like I am half Ashkenazi Jew, right? So that's part of my group identity, I guess, and genetically, certainly, and in part culturally. And this is a group that has been much celebrated for the correlation of its misadventures in the world with mathematical ability, among other intellectual abilities. But it is patently obvious that knowing my Ashkenazi background tells you absolutely nothing about my mathematical ability. And in my case, though I was never bad at math, I'm certainly not good enough by nature so as to have gravitated toward it as a career. There is no question I do not have the genes of an Alan Turing here. So what am I going to do with that? And what is the basis for offense if a person has whatever they have in this space and they can make use of whatever opportunities they're given to the degree that they can find them? And it just seems to me obvious that we want a society where the opportunities and incentives are such that every individual can flourish to the greatest possible extent, and that will be different in different cases. And it's never a question of everyone being equal in all of their capacities. That's clearly a pipe dream and not even obviously, a desirable one. But it is also a case that all boats can rise with whatever tide we can engineer to make life an opportunity better and better for more and more people. And that's our ethical responsibility here. But the basis for offense or pride or anything that could correlate with any summary of group differences. All I see is a very easy path to daylight to get past all that. And obviously, from one point of view, that is my privilege talking. But yeah, I have the privilege to recognize that there was no way I was going to be the next Alan Turin through no fault of my own. And I live in a world where it would be great to have that in native talent. That's something that if I could buy it, I certainly would buy it. But I'm playing different games as a result, so I don't know if you have more to add to that, but it feels like there's an ethical and psychological inoculation we need to try to perform on more and more people to give them the ability to have the kinds of conversations you're proposing we need to have. I don't think it's quite as simple as that, because I think the fear is of information reinforcing stereotypes, and even though, as you correctly say, the information about group differences is not going to listen to. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the wakingup app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, it seems like I got into trouble in a housekeeping I did for the Judea Pearl podcast. I recorded that in the immediate aftermath of the mass shootings in the US. In El Paso and Dayton, many people sent me emails and tweets suggesting that I look at my subreddit, which apparently has been going haywire for quite some time. I think half the people in my subreddit despise me. So it's a perpetual state of war there. But my comments on the mass shootings and white supremacy, white nationalism, racism, etc. Seemed to have caused people to go fairly berserk there. So I looked into this. I don't usually look at reddit. I couldn't get very far. I mean, honestly, it was like looking at one's own colonoscopy if done by a madman. It was not a pretty sight. Some people were defending me. So thank you for that. But the subreddit really is bizarre. In any case, it seems like I could clarify a few things, which I will do now. One thing that people seem to have taken issue with and widely misunderstood, was my claim that Trump's go back to your own country's tweets were not clear signs of his racism. I've long said that I have no doubt that Trump is racist, but I've often said that we have to be precise in making these allegations. Right? My problem with the left is that it's finding evidence of racism everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And here was a case in Trump's recent tweets against the so called Squad, where it was susceptible to other readings, right? And I thought it was counterproductive to seize upon these tweets as clear signs of his racism and indeed, his white supremacy. And to remind you of how overheated this context is, when Nancy Pelosi criticized the Squad, she was attacked as dog whistling to white supremacists, which is patently insane. So that's the context. And again, I'm giving Trump the benefit of the doubt here, which I think I should always do because I despise the man. People often accuse me of claiming that I have no biases. That's simply untrue. I have biases, and I try to correct for them. Here's my bias. I find Trump to be one of the most repellent human beings I can think of. That is a significant bias. I should be bending over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt when there is a doubt, and the left should do likewise, especially if they don't want four more years of Trump in office. So let's go to the tweets. This is what Trump tweeted so interesting to see. Quote, progressive Democrat Congresswomen who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe. The worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world, if they even have functioning government at all, now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States the greatest and most powerful nation on Earth, how our government is to be run? Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came? Then come back and show us how. Okay, well, the president is clearly expressing contempt for these four congresswomen and contempt for the countries he imagined they came from. Now, his error here, his main error, is that only one of them is an immigrant. Alan Omar from Somalia. And Somalia is precisely one of those countries that fits Trump's description here. But the fact that Trump was wrong about the other three congresswomen, they're all natural born US. Citizens, that has been interpreted as a symptom of his racism, right? Go back to your own countries when in fact this is their country. I ascribe this to Trump's ignorance. He couldn't be bothered to figure out who these people were. He might not be able to name all four of them. I bet he knows Ilan Omar. He knows AOC. Does he know Rashida tlaib and ayana pressley? I wouldn't bet on it. It is easy to imagine that he just assumed they were all immigrants or was just speaking about Ilan Omar. Once again, this falls into the evil Chauncey Gardener framing. He is not playing four dimensional chess. He's not a genius. He is a buffoon. And I'm sure he's also a racist. But again, this isn't clear evidence, in my view, of racism. Had these women come from Ireland, right at the height of the potato famine, trump could easily have said, go back to your own starving country and fix that before telling us how to run the greatest nation on Earth. And there would have been no implication of racism. And the problem is, the left is as fixated on race as the far right is, and that is not a recipe for good politics. Anyway, that's the basis for my demurral about Trump's tweets. He's an ignorance and a blowhard and a bully, and sometimes that's the most parsimonious explanation for the chaos he causes. But there was much more on the topic of white supremacy, and it appears to be widely believed that I use a double standard when thinking about white supremacy and jihadism. Okay, well, first, intellectual honesty is really my master variable here, and this might sound fairly preening of me to say, but read my book line if you want to understand my view on honesty in general. And this dictates a somewhat unusual way of speaking, and people seem to read into it something sinister when nothing sinister is there. So I'll give you two examples of how this happens routinely. If some terrible person makes a valid point, I'm not going to pretend that he's wrong just because he's a terrible person. A logically or factually or even ethically true statement is no less true if a serial killer or a neo Nazi or some other repellent person has observed it to be so. So this gets me into trouble occasionally. And there's a related principle here, which is whatever the topic, it could be race, it could be violence, guns, terrorism, immigration, whatever it is, an honest walk through it will flirt with points that support the side you don't like. And in fact, these may be points raised by terrible people to support a position you don't like and maybe right not to like. So, for example, this is the kind of thing that came up in my recent conversation with Jared Diamond. At one point we were talking about Japan, and there was a point I'd heard white supremacists make in defense of their own immigration stance, right? Which is to say, when they want no immigration, they want to live in a white ethno state. And then when right thinking people attack this as a symptom of pure evil, the white supremacist might say, well, what about Japan? Right? Japan has the same policy. The Japanese want to keep Japan for the Japanese. They don't want any pink skinned barbarians living among them. Why isn't that a racist policy? Now, that's actually an interesting point. So this is something I brought up with Jared just to talk about Japan, because it's interesting, right? What about Japan? Why aren't we viewing this policy as shocking evidence of a racist worldview or something, if not racism, something? I'm happy to take that point from Hitler himself. If it's interesting, the source simply doesn't matter. Anyway, this seems to be the kind of thing that can make people think that the mask is slipping, right? Or that I'm dog whistling in some way to extremists, or that I have a secret affinity for white supremacists or racists or whoever. So let's talk about white supremacy and jihadism and how I have spoken about each in the past. Just so there's no confusion here, I'll make a few declarative statements. White supremacy is a real phenomenon. It is an ideology, and it is a source of violence. No question about that. The question is, how big a problem is it? How well subscribed is it? What exactly do white supremacists believe? Why do they believe it? What do they want to do? What are they likely to be able to do? And compare that to the same set of questions for jihadists. If there's an apparent double standard in how I relate to these two phenomena, it's the result of my giving different answers to those questions. So to make it even more precise, what percent of white people, however we define that group, are white supremacists or are fond of white supremacist organizations, if they're not members themselves, would support them and who either publicly or privately celebrate their violence, right? So you hear that some white supremacist went into a mosque or a synagogue or a school and killed 20 people and left some manifesto online. What percent of white people in the US. Say recognize that to be a valid expression of an ideology that they support to pick a concentric circle further out than that. What percent of white people are just not quite sure how they feel about it? They're kind of open minded. Maybe that school did have to be shot up, right? Maybe those Jews in that synagogue said something that warranted their murder. How many people fall into that category? And conversely, we should ask all these questions about jihadism, jihadist, terrorism, and the full set of the world's Muslims. Right? Now, I don't know the precise answers to these questions, but we have enough data to suggest that they're different. I'll talk about why I think that is, but if you detect in me a different attitude toward these two phenomena, this is one reason why, right? I think that support for jihadism is far more common. There's a far greater percentage of the world's Muslims who acknowledge jihadism as legitimate, the killing of apostates, and blasphemers committing murder in defense of the faith as legitimate. And that's not an accident. Now, what that percentage is again, I can't give you an exact number, but it's not 1%, it's not 2%. It's a far more disconcerting number than that. But if it were only 10% of the world's Muslims that had a soft spot for jihadism, that would be an enormous problem worth thinking about. That's a civilizational problem. That's a problem that probably exists in half the world's countries, if not more. What percentage of white people again, I don't know how you define that, but anyone who could conceivably be a white supremacist, what percentage of white people have a soft spot for white supremacy? To be clear, this is not the same thing as asking what percentage of white people are a little racist. That's different. There are people who recognize in themselves racial bias, who are absolutely appalled by ideological racism, just as there are Muslims who take Islam seriously, who are appalled by jihadism and appalled by a group like ISIS. Certainly that's got to be a majority of Muslims. Otherwise the game would be over. So what percentage of white people in the US. Do you think sort of like the neo Nazis, the KKK or other white supremacist groups, or are poised to join them again? I don't know the data on this. I don't know that we can trust the data on this. It's unfortunate that some of the groups whose job it is to give us data of this sort have now proven themselves to be totally unreliable. The Southern Poverty Law Center has just immolated itself by more or less calling everyone in sight a neonazi. As you might remember, they called my friend Majid Nawaz an antimuslim extremist. He is, in fact, a Muslim reformer. They had to pay him over $3 million for that defamation. They've gotten nuts over there. And yet they're still assumed to be reliable brokers of information on white nationalism and Christian identitarian extremism in the US. Unfortunately, they're not, and that's a loss for all of us. In any case. What do you think the number is? Whatever you think it is will dictate how big a problem you consider white supremacy to be in the US. Now, I will grant you, we are just one large incident away from being convinced that white supremacy is a major problem. If we had another bombing the size of Oklahoma City now, in the current environment, there's no question why supremacy would be our foremost concern, at least for a while. And that's regardless of how many people we think are actually involved in it. But it's an empirical question to determine how many people are sympathetic with this ideology. So let me first admit that I could be wrong about this, right? My intuitions could be wrong. My reading of the news could be biased. But I believe that while it's scary, white supremacy is still the fringe of the fringe in the United States. And this is not to deny how Trump has given comfort to racists everywhere. This is not to deny how this could become suddenly a much bigger problem in the future. Let's just get our bearings here for a second. I'm accused of being a white supremacist, right? Or of dog whistling to white supremacists. That's the level of the criticism here. Or not being worried about white supremacy because I'm a racist who sort of agrees with their whole program./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, no housekeeping today. I will jump right into it. Today I'm speaking with James Dodi. James is a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and the director of the center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. He is also a philanthropist who has funded health clinics throughout the world and has endowed scholarships and chairs at multiple universities. And he also serves on the board of a number of nonprofits. And as you'll hear, he has a very unusual background. He grew up in real poverty and faced a number of challenges and seemed by no means guaranteed to succeed in life. But as you can hear, he has accomplished quite a lot. So we talk about how he did that and how we might better understand and facilitate the human capacity to overcome obstacles and bring more compassion into our lives and to generally make the world a better place. And now I bring you James Dodi. I am here with James Dodie. Jim, thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about how you came to be the Jim Doherty who's now speaking with me, but tell me how you summarize what you're up to now. I'm a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford. Probably more Germane for our conversation is, I'm the founder and director of the center for Compassion and Altruism, which is part of the School of Medicine and of which the Dalai Lama is actually the founding benefactor. And I'm also an inventor and entrepreneur and philanthropist at times. And I have really an interest, actually, in what drives people to be good, if you will. Okay, well, let's begin at the beginning. You've written a very poignant memoir into the Magic Shop, which covers your childhood, which really is not the usual childhood, or I can only imagine it's not the usual childhood. For someone who has the breadth of your life experience at this point, your memoir is almost like a fairy tale of challenges. I mean, just it entails an incredible amount of stress. In your earliest years, your father was an alcoholic. Your mother was clinically depressed and often suicidally depressed. And then you had this transformation based on an encounter you had in a magic shop, literally a magic shop. So let's talk about how you began this journey of yours in life. How would you describe your childhood and what happened in the magic shop? Sure. Well, of course, when a child grows up in poverty with a father who's an alcoholic, a mother who's had a stroke, partially paralyzed, clinically depressed, the big factor is that in some ways you're in a war zone all the time because you never know what's going to happen. I wouldn't know whether my father was going to not come home or come home drunk, or whether I would come in from school and my mother would be passed out from an overdose and I would have to call an ambulance. So of course, when you grow up in that type of an environment, it's quite chaotic. And as you know, there's something called adverse childhood experiences. And this is essentially a technique where you sort of collect these events that a child lives with growing up, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, et cetera. And the higher the number, the less likely that child is going to if you will succeed by societal norms and more likely that the child themselves will have drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness and a variety of other obvious negative events happen in their life. And at the age of twelve, I was filled with hopelessness, despair, anger, and obviously it was affecting me. And in fact, I was becoming a juvenile delinquent. And I had had an interest in magic. And what would happen is when an event would happen at home that was not particularly pleasant, I would get on my Stingray bike and ride as far away as possible. And on one of those adventures I happened to buy a strip mall. And at the strip mall was a magic store which I went into. And the thing was that when I walked in, of course my interest was in magic in the store. And there was a woman sitting there who had long flowing gray hair and her glasses on the tip of her nose and a chain around her glasses reading a paper back. And she looked up at me and she had this really extraordinarily radiant smile. And I asked her about the magic that I was interested in and she said, Well, I don't know anything about this. This is my son's store. I'm just here for the summer. But this led us really to a conversation that ended up being quite deep and one, frankly, which I wasn't used to. And the reason the conversation happened was because this is a person who made me feel psychologically safe. I wasn't fearful of her, I wasn't fearful that I was being judged. And she actually spoke to me as if I was an equal and that my opinion actually meant something which for a child from my background was somewhat unusual. Yeah, we'll talk about meditation and compassion and all of these interests that you and I have in common. And obviously your connection to training the mind was initiated in this dialogue with Ruth in the magic shop. But what she was teaching you was not in some ways it was kind of a standard meditation practices, but in other ways it wasn't. How would you summarize what she taught you there? Well, I think there were four parts and I have to tell you, when she offered over the period of the six weeks to meet with me and if you will train me, which isn't really what she called it, but I actually had some concerns even about showing up. And I showed up not because I had self awareness or insight. I showed up because she was giving me cookies. And frankly, I had absolutely nothing else to do. But I did show up. And the first thing she taught me, which is a technique that now we would call a body survey and a breathing technique, and I did not appreciate that. When you're stressed and you're anxious and your mind is all over the place, that with intention, doing this technique of relaxing the body and then slowly breathing in and releasing your breath really had a profound physiologic effect. This was in 1968, and of course terms like mindfulness or meditation or neuroplasticity were certainly not commonly used at all. And after a few weeks of doing this practice, I felt in some ways much calmer. And it was interesting because while the first few weeks I didn't really notice anything, as I did it more, I did notice something. But one of the things I was having challenges with was as I did this and sat with my own silence, I would have this negative dialogue going on in my head. And it was one that said I wasn't good enough, I wasn't smart enough, et cetera. And what she explained to me was that that dialogue was not truth and that negative commentary, if you will, sticks to us because they're the things that potentially put us at risk. And that in fact, that negative commentary could be changed. And this is what she called training the mind or taming the mind. And basically it's what we would now call self compassion. This technique that has been advocated by Kristen F and others to be kind to yourself. I realized that I was always beating myself up and blaming myself for my situation. And so with that technique and she described it as listening to a radio station, if you will, that you could change it. I changed it from one of negativity to one of self affirmation and self acceptance and that in fact, I was worthy. I tell people that when you make these types of negative comments to yourself, it's as if you're laying these bricks down that are creating a selfimposed prison and very much giving your power away or agency a way to change things in your life. Because every time you say I can't, it's not possible. The reality is that and I did not even understand that at the time and so by changing that dialogue was extraordinarily helpful to me for a couple of reasons. One is many of us have a shadow self that we don't want to admit to and things that we don't like about ourselves, things that disgust us about ourselves, our failings. And for many people they have a tendency to try to push it away from them or hide it somewhere and it doesn't go away and in fact, when you're troubled or have difficulties that's when it shows itself and this is where you can relate it to addiction when you're particularly stressed that addiction comes out. And so she taught me to accept that as a part of me and don't deny it and just be aware of it. And the other thing is that because I was so critical of myself it made me hypercritical of everything and everyone around me and what I found is that because of that when I interacted with others or tried to accomplish something I would take a negative view of it. And what I didn't appreciate is that human beings have this unique ability to intuit emotional states from facial expressions, voice intonation body, habitus, even smells. And when you carry yourself in that fashion, people don't want to be around you or they shy away or they're not open and they're not generous. And as a result, what I tell people is that when I changed how I looked at myself and it changed how the world interacted with me, the other side effect of that was that I carried a lot of anger and hostility towards my personal situation, my parents. And of course, that was not fruitful in any way. And what happened was that I was able to see them in a much different way. I saw them as human beings who had their own pain and suffering and the tools that they had to deal with them were not effective at all. Hiding your pain behind alcohol or taking pills to get rid of the pain and hoping that it would keep it away isn't helpful. And I in some ways forgave them and accepted the situation, not trying to hope the situation would be different. And that change in perspective which I think is important in a lot of these practices is really very important. Well, she taught you something else in the magic shop which on the surface can sound pretty spooky. I mean, it's in line with what you just described generically in terms of changing your concept of yourself. I mean, she asked you to list what you want in life and to visualize yourself having it. I mean, to really inhabit the person who already has these things, whether it's great wealth or great success or you had a list of things which was fairly adorable for a twelve year old, including having a Porsche and a Rolex. But she wanted you to not see it from the outside, but really see it from the inside. And to practice this visualization that really this is a fayacample. You're guaranteed to arrive at the desired station in life. And what you need to do now is inhabit the psychology of that and make it real for yourself. And as you walk a line in your description of this that is, to my eye, on the right side of rational here because there's a rational way to understand how this can benefit a person, but it could also just tip into sounding like The Secret. I don't know if you remember that book and that movie, the movie by the name that is the appropriate target of appropriate at the center of New Age irrationality. But the idea that if you just visualize things or think it's true or assert that it's true, it will become true, whether it's attaining wealth or losing weight or anything else. But describe to me how you think about the power of visualizing certain outcomes and how that enforces change in one's basic neurology or one's associated behavior and the kinds of opportunities that present themselves in life. Sure. No, I think you're right. I will be frank with you. I'm not a fan of The Secret or the celestine prophecies, et cetera. I don't believe that there's a magic external power and we just need to tap into it and everything will be wonderful. What I do believe, and in some ways I said earlier, is that each of us has extraordinary power. We just don't realize it. And negative self dialogue limits that power. What she taught me and what I realized is that when you utilize your senses and I think we see this now sports psychology, people think about the athletic event they're going to do over and over and over again. And the reality is, as an example, it's been shown in a variety of studies that when you think about, as an example, lifting weights, you actually increase to a small degree your muscle mass just by thinking about it. And when you repeat something in your head over and over and over again, it starts setting down neural pathways. And when you utilize all your senses to do that, you write it down, you read it, you verbalize it, you think about it, et cetera, then I would say that if there is a possibility of it happening, that is the best technique to help that manifest. And I'll give you an interesting example. As a neurosurgeon, of course, I see a lot of patients who have a variety of conditions, but most of the patients who see me will say something like, wow, Doctor, I've never heard of that. And then I see them a few months later and they go, you know, it's the most amazing thing. Since we talked about it, I found that I have that I've run into five people who, in fact, do have that. And the reason is because you have put a subconscious primer out there and they're now attuned to that. And in many ways, this is like the technique that Ruth taught me. I put into my subconscious this idea, this possibility, this potential opportunity, and then I am attuned to events that will allow that to occur. I don't know if you've seen the book by a guy named Bob Niece. It's called the power of 50 bits. No. Well, the premises as follows is that we have about six to 10 million sensory inputs happening every second, but we're really only able to process about 50 or 100. And so when you put these things into your subconscious, in some ways you're creating a folder with that thing in it that sits out there. And that's one of the things that you're going to pay attention to. But it's not necessarily on a conscious level. And I think that is how you're able to have these things manifest. But it's not praying to a power and hoping it happens. There's actually a process here. And if you look at the placebo effect, if you look at how different individuals are able to make things happen as an example, of course we know monks who can control their heart rate or their body temperature. All of these things are available to us. It's how do you get access to it, and what's the best way to get access to it? To have it manifest? Yeah, well, there's a fact here which explains a lot of this, and it's that the brain, on some level doesn't know the difference between what's real and what is merely a simulation. I mean, the brain is a kind of simulation machine, and the dreaming brain and the waking brain share a fair amount of real estate apart from their frontal reality testing mode that kind of goes offline when you're dreaming. So to visualize something vividly is not nothing for the brain, right? It is. You are training something. And there are many levels of this phenomenon we can witness, some deliberate and some not. I mean, the change you noticed in your patients, everyone has noticed in their lives when they decide they're looking for a new car or they're looking for a new anything, that class of objects in the world suddenly become super salient to them. And they're noticing that brand of car or that type of dog or anything else that they have suddenly become interested in. They're noticing that thing everywhere, and it looks like there's been a change in the frequency out in the world. But no, it's just you're just filtering. Based on that class of information, it should be very easy to see how negative self concepts become a kind of self fulfilling prophecy. If you think you're the kind of person who isn't good at parties, can't socialize effectively with people, a person who no one likes well, if that's your self talk, you can imagine just what you're ramifying in relationship with people out in the world, and the way that becomes self perpetuating. And the opposite, obviously, can become the case. And what you're describing as a practice of seizing the reins deliberately and jump starting a virtuous cycle of self fulfillment and just changing your self concept. No, I think that's exactly right. And what's so unfortunate is that this is free and available to everyone. And what's unfortunate is, as you point out, people get into these cycles of these negative emotional states and ruminate on them, and again, unfortunately, it just reinforces that. Again, I was fortunate in that with Ruth's intervention, if you will, that changed everything. And it made me see the issue wasn't me. The issue was my negative self talk. And once I got over that and truly believed, if you will, of infinite possibilities, then that allowed a whole series of events to happen. Well, so then you went on to go to college, as improbable as that seemed, given your background, and it really did seem improbable, even with all your visualization, you sort of barely got an application in hand. And then you not only went to college, you went on to become a neurosurgeon. Let's talk for a few minutes about the choice to become a neurosurgeon. Actually, I have, as you know, a PhD in neuroscience, but I don't know too many neurosurgeons. Well, I know a few, but in terms of actual friends who are neurosurgeons. So what I know about the culture of neurosurgery is from the outside. I remember reading this book a while back when the air hits your brain. I don't know if you've ever read that book by verdictic. I don't know how faithfully he captures the culture, but he really does paint the culture of neurosurgeons as a kind of culture of gunslingers and frat boys. It seems to be a specialty that selects for a kind of high testosterone arrogance. And you and certainly in your residency as your visualizations were actually working, there was a fair amount of arrogance that came online for you. Tell me what it was like to become a neurosurgeon and how you view that field of expertise. Well, I would say that over the last number of years, the that has changed somewhat. But you're right. I mean, this is a group of people and who are comfortable with somebody's life in their hands, realizing that a false move can destroy someone's life. And with that power, in some ways, for many people, comes a sense of arrogance and a belief of infallibility. And so, of course, the system selects for those types of people. The other interesting thing about it is, of course, not only do you have to be intelligent, hopefully you have good judgment and technical abilities. That's not always the case. But the thing for many of these people is most decided they were going to be a neurosurgeon, I mean, literally in high school or early in college, and it was this driving force that made them want to be a neurosurgeon. My situation was quite a bit different in that I was actually interested in plastic surgery, specifically in caring for children who had craniofacial deformities, and I thought being a neurosurgeon would be helpful for that. I realized I wasn't that interested in general surgery, which is usually the path to then do a fellowship in plastic surgery. So I was, if you will, very late to the game. And it was never a burning desire of mine to be a neurosurgeon for the typical reasons. So my view was somewhat different. But I would also suggest it's an extraordinarily demanding specialty. And I tell people, if there is absolutely nothing else you can imagine yourself doing, that's great, become a neurosurgeon. Otherwise, if there's anything that interests you beyond that, you should do that because this is a lot of hours and hours of training. I mean, neurosurgery is now seven years, certainly if you're going into academics or many people, just regardless to a fellowship of one to two to three years. So you're now ten years down the road from college, and it's a specialty that requires intense focus, an immense amount of diligence, and frankly, heartache. Nothing is more painful than to have to tell someone that their loved one either is devastated, didn't survive, you weren't able to do what you were going to do. Now, interestingly, I know colleagues who for them, those types of statements are just another day at work, and it's like water on a duck's back. For me, I take it much more personally. Yeah, I can hear. So I wanted to ask you about that because obviously we're now getting to the topic of compassion. And I was wondering how much your experience as a surgeon, which really, again from the outside me, any kind of surgeon, but I think a neurosurgeon is maybe the ultimate example of this. And a pediatric neurosurgeon, the beginning of your memoir, puts us in the or where you're operating on a brain tumor in a child. I just can imagine having those conversations with parents who are understandably in extremists. I mean, this is the height of fear, of uncertainty before surgery. And obviously in those cases where it goes well, that has to be a joy second to none, but when it doesn't go well, that has to be truly harrowing. You just raised the topic that I was wondering about if compassion and again, we need to talk about compassion and define it and differentiate it from other states of mind. But before we get there, I'm just wondering if compassion is the only tool you need to navigate moments like that, or if there's something less ideal. I can imagine there's almost a kind of benevolent or fortuitous psychopathy that comes online for many surgeons where it's just like, this is just the job, right? You can't take this to heart every time, or even generally, because this will destroy you if you're moved around too much by the outcomes here. And it sounds like some surgeons do this to a fault. They're kind of checked out emotionally around the reality of the situation for the parents or for the patients. How do you view the range of emotions that are ideal in this circumstance, and how do you navigate that? Well, it's interesting because it is a broad range. There's a subset of people who, frankly, may be on the asperger spectrum, who they're great technicians. They know the literature, et cetera. They have no emotional connection, and it is a job, and they do the job, and then they're gone. And of course, if you're talking about a doctor patient relationship, there isn't one. And I've even had people say, well, I know he's not very nice, and he's abrupt and brusque and arrogant, but he's a good surgeon. Okay? And then you have the other extreme where someone's highly engaging, very sensitive and connected and suffers with you. But the key is to be able to understand the limits of your abilities. And as long as you can tell yourself, I prepared and did the best I can, then there's no more of a discussion. That's all you can do, and you're okay. And I think in my mind, of course, that would be the ideal situation. As in my book, I talked about a woman who was an opera singer who had an aneurysm, which is a dilatation of a blood vessel in the brain near her speech area and asked me to operate on her. And by this time, she had seen a few other people. We had become friends. And when I had the aneurysm exposed and really, literally, truly was about to rupture, you could see the blood swirling in the aneurysm because it was so it was paper thin. And during that moment, I started thinking about her versus the technical aspects of doing that job. And my hand started shaking to the point where I had to stop and actually go into a meditation to essentially become a technician and displace my emotional connection to her out of the picture. And once I was able to do that, I was then able to effectively treat her, and she did fine. And that's really one of the few instances where connecting with their humanity does not allow you to do your job, and that is a job of being a technician. Well, let's talk about I think I do want to touch on the other side of your career where you've been an entrepreneur and someone who has run a company and had interesting adventures in wealth and philanthropy. We'll jump to that after we talk about compassion and how you came to focus on it and just what it is. How did compassion first become a primary focus of yours, and what is it? How do you think about it as a mental state and capacity? Well, on some level, I it was always there. I just didn't quite understand what it meant. But what had happened was at one point I had left Stanford, and I had been intermittently involved with Stanford since, I think, 97, but I had left to run an entrepreneurial company. Then the.com crisis came, and I used to consult for setting up, if you will, neuroscience Centers of Excellence, and went to a hospital in Mississippi and ultimately agreed to actually go there to build this program for them. But during that time, I had an experience with a child who was not cared for adequately, and as a result had an infection in his brain and an abscess, and his parents waited too long to bring him in. And even with my best efforts, he died. But it put me into a period of reflection about all of these things. And when I went back to Stanford, I decided to explore this a little more and try to understand it. And interestingly, when I initially talked to my colleagues at Stanford in psychology and neuroscience, actually, I was told that the academic exploration of compassion was a dead end and that if anyone made that the center of their academic endeavors, they were not going to go very far. The fortunate thing was that I had some financial resources which allowed me to fund what we initially called Project Compassion, which brought a group of psychologists and neuroscientists together. And we started the journal club looking at the literature, and then did some studies. And really it was evident that actually these practices, or, if you will, the nature of compassion was quite profound in regard to how it affects your emotional state, how it can affect your physiology, and a whole variety of both brain and peripheral physiology measures. And this led to the creation, ultimately, of a compassion cultivation training program, which we did some studies on, and also, I think, led to some interesting studies. And then, of course, over time, and I think if you look over the last twelve to 15 years, this idea of the importance of compassion combined with our already significant interest in mindfulness practices, really is one of the things that are at the forefront. I mean, years and years ago, when we started this, you would talk about compassion, and for many people it was completely poopooed, especially by the corporate community, because it's looked as a form of weakness. People run over you if you're too nice, if you're compassionate. And I think now people recognize that it is, in fact, extraordinarily powerful. Yeah. So let's talk about what the mental state is, because it's often conflated with empathy and sympathy and pity, and it needs to be differentiated even from something that's integral to it, with something like loving kindness. It also gets operationalized differently in different studies so that the neuroscience, as. Far as I can tell, is still a little fuzzy because some studies they're done in irreconcilable ways. I mean, some ask people just to generate the state of loving kindness essentially without any stimuli, and then some present subjects with images of human suffering to which they respond. I think that at least in my view, the generic definition of compassion is lovingkindness in the presence of suffering, where human suffering or animal suffering is taken as its object. And it includes this desire, this motivation to alleviate the suffering of others. It has a few things bundled in here. It's directly cognizant of suffering. So it has a kind of cognitive empathy, but it doesn't have the same kind of emotional contagion. It's not like you're sad when the object of your compassion is sad or you're depressed when the object of your compassion is depressed. It's a highly prosocial and even positive emotion. It's not morbid. It's not a state of collapse. You're not feeling diminished psychologically by proximity to the suffering of others. In fact, it's an expansive state that has the feeling tone of loving kindness, but it has this extra top spin of wanting to respond to the suffering of others by alleviating that suffering. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I think if you were to make a graph and you put agency and effort on one and you put understanding and engagement on the other, sort of in the downward left corner would be pity. And this is I'm sorry for you, and it's invariably related to I'm superior to you, I appreciate your situation. It has nothing to do with empathy or anything else. It simply has to do with your recognizing it and you feel bad for them, but doesn't imply you're going to do anything for them. While sympathy is less than empathy on a cognitive level, if you will understand that you're in pain and I feel for you, but it requires no agency per se. While empathy is actually taking on the emotional state of another, but it has no valence. You can have empathic joy and that can feel very good. Or as mature. Cart will describe who's a Buddhist monk who I'm sure you probably know. He says, when I take on pain and feel for the other's pain, it is so painful to myself that I can barely stand it. Compassion is different in the sense that it is associated with suffering. It requires you to take on that emotional state, but you have a very strong motivational desire to alleviate that suffering. And I think that's really the key there is that you are motivated to alleviate that suffering. Now interestingly, Jamil Zaki, who wrote a book on kindness recently, says empathy is the same as compassion, or he uses them interchangeably. He and I have had some discussions about that, but I think some people do have a tendency to use that. But I would not use it that way. Yeah. The terminology here is uncertain enough that even my friend Paul Bloom could write a book against empathy. Differentiating. Two different types of empathy. One of which I agree with him, is not a good guide for moral deliberation, which is, again, just more this pure, emotional, contagion side of it, which is just being taken in by suffering and feeling it as your. Own, but in a way that is causing you to actually not be able to respond effectively or even think rationally about what would help. Their problem has become your problem, and you're yet another drowning person who doesn't know how to swim and needs to be rescued. Yes. So then how did you get connected with the Dalai Lama and other Buddhists in this vein? Yeah, this may sound like magical thinking, and I hate to do that to you. I was involved in this work with the scientists, and we had begun some initial research studies, and we were thinking about having a conference. And I was walking through the Stanford campus one day, and again, literally an image of the Dalai Lama came into my head. And frankly, I had zero interest in the Dalai Lama, per se. And more interestingly, my wife was a huge fan, and in fact, she had bought tickets for us to go to an event, and I actually refused to go because it didn't interest me. But for some reason, this image stayed in my head, and I decided that it would be good to invite the Dalai Lama to this conference that we were thinking about doing. And he had been at Stanford once previously, discussing addiction and craving, and I tracked down the person in Buddhist studies who had invited him and then connected him to one of His Holiness's translators who had a PhD from Cambridge and was a former monk and tipped in JimP. Exactly. Yes. Yes. And and Jimpaw then arranged for this meeting. And and so at this meeting and it's always interesting how things go, because it was just me with this idea. But when I was meeting with the Dalai Lama, we had the dean of the medical school, the associate dean. You know, it became an entourage, and we met with him. And His Holiness, as you know, was very interested in neuroscience and was very interested in this topic and was immediately engaged in our 15 minutes conversation that was scheduled. Ended up being an hour and a half. And at the end of it, he began a very animated conversation with Upton Jinpa. And I thought, Actually, I'd somehow irritated or made the Dalai Lama angry, which, of course, is a very embarrassing thing to do. That would be a feat. I would take that as a feather in your capital, although I have seen him angry. But at the end of this animated dialogue, Jinpa turned to me and he said, his Holiness is so moved by this effort that he wants to make a contribution. And at that moment, he made the largest donation to a non Tibetan cause he had ever made, which shocked everyone there. And I was quite overwhelmed and moved myself. And then shortly thereafter, two other individuals made significant donations, and that actually created the center. Nice. And how much time have you spent around him since? Have you met him on multiple occasions? Yes, actually, many occasions in different parts of the world. I've spent time with him and have chatted with him. Ultimately. I also became chairman of the Dalai Lama Foundation for several years, so I was fairly involved with him. And it's interesting, because we're talking about emotional states, I can understand why people want to be near him. And in some ways, it's like what Ruth offered me, which is unconditional acceptance and love without qualification. And very few people actually give that out in an interaction with them. And when you're in his presence, what I tell people is that in modern society, which is different than how we lived a few hundred years ago. A few hundred years ago, we lived in a village. We typically had multigenerations in the village. Everyone knew you from the time you were a child or growing up. You didn't move away. You had an incredible support system. You had a community. And that community is extraordinarily important to your mental and physical health, I think. And in modern society, we don't have that at all. You don't have your parents around. You don't have your siblings. You don't have loved ones in proximity. And so, as a result, we have a tendency to create these shields that we carry around, which are the ones that say, I'm this, I'm that. I've accomplished this, et cetera, et cetera. But there's no true authenticity that is ever released. And when you're with somebody like the Dalai Lama, you know immediately that you are unconditionally accepted and loved. And it's really quite profound, because when that happens, it's almost as if this weight is lifted off of you, and this natural joy and exuberance about being alive in some ways is released. And so I think when you look at people who strive to be near these types of individuals, you can perfectly understand why. Yeah, it is still somewhat mysterious to explain, but it's a genuine phenomenon. I have spent a lot of time with great meditation masters, and I spent some considerable time, albeit briefly, focused over the course of a month with the Dalai Lama. I met him on a number of occasions, but I strangely got to be one of his bodyguards for a trip through France. So he was on a teaching tour of France, and for whatever reason, I got to be part of the Buddhist retinue that was the buffer between the real security guards. When he's in France, he got at least at that point, he got their version of Secret Service protection, something he did not get in the United States. So there were like four guys with guns who were, you know, really protecting him. But then there was this buffer of essentially students of meditation and and, you know, people who had sat three year retreats in France with various llamas and there were maybe twelve of us. And ironically, we had the most conflict with the general public because we were the buffer between the real bodyguards and the public. It was a surreal experience to walk into a room more or less continually focused on what could go wrong, who was untrustworthy, just basically radiating bad vibes of suspicion everywhere, and to have over your shoulder the Dalai Lama beaming unconditional acceptance and love and just general ease. And I must say, it was a bad job. Certainly not where one wanted to be in one's thinking alongside him, but it's where one had to be, because he really did have security concerns. And it's amazing the number of weird people who show up when his presence is announced somewhere, but it gave me a chance to spend some time with him and see what he was like again and again and again, mingling with strangers of all sorts. And yeah, he's a very impressive person in that way. He does have a kind of laser focus on just connecting with people, albeit very briefly. He'll walk into the lobby of a hotel and there'll be 40 people. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. There you'll find a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, a lot happening out there in the world. I think a brief comment on the immense amount of attention and controversy sparked by Elon Musk planning to buy Twitter seems like that is happening. It could still not happen, but seems like it's more likely than not. At this point, I have been fairly astounded by how much of what has been said about this on both sides. Seems to miss some obvious points. Again, from both sides. On the left, there's been a fair amount of hysteria around a billionaire and one as outspoken and opinionated as Elon buying Twitter and therefore controlling such an important media property. Well, billionaires control so much of what's important that there's nothing new there. And from the right, there has been a lot of celebratory nonsense about how much is guaranteed to change under Elon's stewardship. If I was going to summarize my opinion here, I think I'm agnostic as to whether or not Elon can actually do much to improve Twitter. There's some obvious things he could and should do and I trust will do, like cleaning up a lot of the bots and not doing some of the very stupid things that Twitter has done in the service of its moderation policy in the past. The people on the left that think that Twitter did not have a problem with heavy handed moderation either weren't paying attention or agreed with that heavy handed moderation for ideological reasons. Literally, someone got kicked off for life, I believe, for tweeting, men are not women. That was considered hate speech in the context in which she tweeted it. Meanwhile, ISIS and the Chinese Communist Party, all of these groups have accounts in good standing at that point, right? So that's crazy and insofar as Elon is going to insist upon a more transparent and ethical moderation policy, that will be to the good. But in truth, if moderation were easy, someone would have figured it out by now. And I'm not especially close to this problem technically and what algorithms can do to solve it, but it just seems like there are always going to be apes in the loop, at least to adjudicate someone being kicked off and reinstated. You need people at a certain point to process these claims of who should be kicked off and who shouldn't. And what you have in front of you are an endless series of judgment calls, some of which are trivially easy and some of which are really hard. And I don't see how that problem ever goes away. So I don't see how you don't always have enormous numbers of dissatisfied people in the wake of even the wisest moderation policy. Now, for the so called free speech absolutists who seem to not want much of a moderation policy and who are claiming the Twitters or any other platforms attempts at moderation in the past amounted to censorship. First of all, we already know what an unmoderated or effectively unmoderated platform looks like. Go over to Four Chan or Eight Chan and see what no moderation gets you. Here's where any sane moderation policy parts ways with the First Amendment. Everything happening over at Four Chan and Eight Chan is protected by the First Amendment. I think those platforms should exist right now. There are things on there that might be illegal, right? Child pornography and any other video record of a crime that was perpetrated for the purpose of creating the video. There are laws against all of that. People should go to prison for that stuff. Totally understood. But that leaves immense scope for absolutely obnoxious and soul destroying poison that can be spread on a social network and which most of us want nothing to do with. And there are legitimately hard calls. Like, for instance, I think every platform should have a no doxing policy. And the people who have been kicked off Twitter, people like Alex Jones and even Donald Trump, I think should have been kicked off. And they should have been kicked off largely for their knowingly marshaling their crazy followers to docs and harass and effectively ruin the lives of identifiable people on the platform. That is what was happening. Jones and Trump knew that's what was happening whenever they targeted an individual on social media, and it was absolutely despicable. But there is no bright line between malicious doxing and necessary journalism, right? Is the users sort of know it when you see it? Do I think that members of ISIS should be doxed? Absolutely right. Show me some terrorist atrocity with people caught on cell phone cameras or security cameras. Do I want those people identified? Do I want them caught by the cops? Of course. But do I want somebody who has an opinion that is not shared widely by the woke mob? Doxed by that mob and hunted as an apostate out in the real world because of what happened to them on Twitter? Of course not. But again, this is a hard problem to solve, and there will be edge cases. And I just don't see how that problem goes away by taking Twitter private or by cleaning up all the bots or by implementing an appropriate algorithm. There's still going to be people at the end of the day trying to figure out where the edge cases are and what to do about them. So I think the right and the left have much of this wrong. I think appeals to the First Amendment are generally misleading. I think we want platforms that have coherent, moderation policies that prevent them from becoming like four Chan and eight Chan. And I certainly wish Yelan the best of luck in developing such a policy, implementing it, and in making Twitter better than it is. I think Elon's claim that Twitter is the town square and that it's absolutely crucial to make it much more in line with the First Amendment is an understandable, but I think ultimately dubious one. Twitter isn't the town square. There are many successful, influential people who are not on Twitter. The problem is that most people in tech, most people in journalism, most academics, and certainly Elon among them, are addicted to Twitter. And I think it's pretty clear, or it should be, that in almost every case, that addiction is counterproductive. It's not to say that Twitter isn't useful. I'm still on it. I still find it a valuable source of news and recommendations. Occasionally, it's a great spot to connect with someone who I wouldn't otherwise connect with. But I have pulled back a lot because I witnessed a fair amount of the dysfunction of overengaging with the platform in my own life, right? And I certainly see that dysfunction well advertised in the lives of others. So there are many reasons not to be on Twitter or not to be on it much, and there are many people who are thriving who are not on it. So it's not the town square. You have not lost your personhood if for some reason you get deplatformed from Twitter. So I think the analogy to the town square is a false one, and I think the notion that any legal speech must be tolerated on the platform is going to lead to a truly awful place to be, and then people will be free to leave and start a new platform. Anyway, this topic comes up, however briefly, in my conversation today, and in the end, there'd be much more to say about it. But I think creating a social media platform that actually works, that becomes a place where smart, well intentioned people are wise to spend their time, I think that is a really difficult problem to solve, and I certainly hope someone solves it. Anyway, those are my two cent. And now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Douglas Murray. Douglas is a friend who's been on the podcast before. He's the author of several books, most recently The War on the west, which we talk about in depth. His previous books were the Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds. He's also an associate editor for The Spectator. He writes for several other publications. He's immensely prolific, and as you'll hear, he is always great to talk to. We get deep into his book, The War on the west before we do I go fishing for some areas where we might disagree. And actually, this question of moderation on social media platforms is one of those areas. We talk about the problem of hyperpartisanship on the left and the right and the primacy of culture. We talk about the problem with Trump and use the Hunter Biden and laptop controversy as a lens there. We talk about the deplatforming of Trump and Alex Jones specifically, and then we get into the topic of his book proper. We talk about the new religion of antiracism, the problem of inequality, the 1619 project, the history of slavery, moral panics, the strange case of Michelle Fuko, and other topics. Anyway, it's always great to talk to Douglas. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. And I bring you Douglas Murray. I am here with Douglas Murray. Douglas, thanks for joining me again. It's a huge pleasure to be with you. Sam so, we have a lot to talk about. First, I should apologize to our listeners for canceling the live Zoom event which had been scheduled for this podcast. But as I told you offline, the house across the street from me was being demolished. And rather than have sounds of the apocalypse intrude upon our recording, I had to forsake my Zoom recording space in order to go just for the pure audio experience. So where we are I'm in New York, Sam, so it's permanent armageddon noises in the background here. So we could have canceled each other out. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you have a new book, which we will definitely talk about that. That book is The War on the west, and it is a in case it's not obvious from the title, it is a passionate defense of Western culture of a sort that only you could muster. And it's a fantastic read. It's actually a doubly fantastic. Listen, I read some of it and listened to the rest of it, and as I did with your last book, I can't remember if you I don't think I heard the audio for The Strange Death of Europe. That wasn't done by me. Okay. Yeah. Only this one and the madness of crowds. So both of us. The Madness of Crowds. And your new one, The War on the west, you read, and it's one of the great pleasures of having ears and a brain to which they're connected is to hear you reading your own stuff is great, but to hear you reading quotations from people you deem to be either insane or sinister and giving it the top spin of derision is just amazing. So I recommend that people that's very kind of you. Just say so. I enormously enjoy doing my own audio books, partly because I find it incredibly funny. And with Madness of Crowds, as with The War in the West, I had to apologize repeatedly to the sound engineers and explain to them I wasn't laughing at my own jokes. I was laughing at the things I quote, because so often they're ridiculous on the page, but they're even more ridiculous when you say them out loud. Yeah. And just some of your own writing also gets the benefit of your reading. And there are lines that really are laugh out loud funny, which I'm not sure everyone would discover on the page quite as readily as when you're reading them. That's very kind. There was one in Madison crowd, as I remember, that was much better on Audible, which was I quoted somebody referring to something as being literally like Adolf Hitler's Mind Camp. And I say not just any old minecamp, but Adolf Hitler's Mine Camp. It's much better in audio than on the page. So you've had a tremendous amount of fun at the expense of the left, and we will get into that. But one thing I noticed when I announced this conversation, when I announced the Zoom event, I got some of your hate mail on social media and some of my own, perhaps. And I think many people were expecting that any conversation between the two of us about the derangement of the left would just be an exercise in confirmation bias. Right. We're basically something in that. Yeah. And so I think it would be good for us to remain alert to any areas where we actually might disagree. I think we will fully agree, perhaps with tiny little shadings of gray somewhere, when our attention is directed to the left and to the topic of your book. But I think if we talk about the right at all that we may find some differences of opinion. Sure. One area of difference for me, maybe we can just start here, because, again, we totally agree about the central problem in its leftist form, but I do see a similar thing happening on the right, and you don't tend to focus on it. And I guess I do have a general question as to why. But let me just spell it out for you. I think the generic problem that we both see is that there's now a concern with identity that seems to supersede any honest engagement with ethics or facts, or even a concern about whether one's own beliefs are internally consistent. Right. So there's just immense double standards and instances of hypocrisy and just shoddy thinking happening under the aegis of identity politics. But I'm finding this both on the right and the Left, and there's this obsession with group difference and victimhood. There's the same willingness to destroy institutions without any thought as to what could replace them. The right has just grown demented by conspiracy theories and a cult of personality under Trump. And so on the left, you'll, you'll you'll see, people deny that, you know, there's anything strange about being told that all white people inherit the original sin of racism, or that there's anything strange about a new book titled Anti Racist Baby. Right. I mean, this is, and this is where we'll, what we'll get deep into this when we get your book, but on the right, we see people denying that there's anything wrong with Trump or the January 6 attack on the Capitol or the big lie about the 2020 election. So I guess my my question for you in search of possible disagreement here is, is why focus exclusively on the left? Well, the first thing is, I don't and I'm sure that you, Sam, I've become aware of quite easily of who doesn't read me. And actually an interviewer said to me the other day, what do you think about what people think about you? Sort of thing? And I said, I just I don't really know what they think. I don't spend that much time trying to absorb it. But I know when people don't read me. And I know that one of the signs is when people say you only talk about X, when actually I write about a pretty wide range of subjects. I write three to four national newspaper columns a week, and I wouldn't be employable if I wrote about only one issue. Let me just to claim not to be guilty of not reading you, because I do perhaps only is too strong. So you and I both have several friends and colleagues, and in certain cases it might be former friends and colleagues who have been fighting from the same trench as the two of us, aimed at the left, but they've focused entirely on the left right. And some of them appear to have lost their minds or at least lost certain principles of intellectual honesty. And I won't name names. I know you know who I'm talking about, and I certainly don't put you in that category. But there's no question that you this book you've just written is entirely focused on the leftist assault on Western culture. Yes, because I see the left is providing the assault that I'm trying to push back against, identify, and I think inoculate us against. But I mean, I'm by no means silent on problems on the right. Obviously, I'm more politically aligned with the right than you are, and I don't think you mind that, albeit the right that I knew from the UK is rather different from some of the American rights. But that's not to dodge matters. It's simply to say, as I say, about people not reading me, anyone who reads what I write will know that I've consistently critiqued my own side. I mean, for instance, and let me just rattle off a few that come to the top of my mind immediately. January the 6th happened. I wrote in the main conservative newspaper in the UK that sits solely at the feet of Donald Trump. He led his troops to the top of the Hill, and what does he expect them to do? I make no apology for that. Got plenty of criticism for it, for people, but I still will not regard and do not regard the attack on the US. Capitol as being nothing, and have consistently said that, among other things, whatever happens with Donald Trump himself, you cannot claim that what people around him were saying was not essentially up to and past the point of what we call incitement. That seems perfectly clear, and I've written about that repeatedly. Let me give you two other quick examples. There are on the American right things, and I've been in America for a year now there are things which do not exist, anything like the proximity to the political center on the American right than what exists in Britain. We give you a couple of examples obvious. One is conspiracy theories. Another one is very unpleasant forms of prejudice, which, again, would totally knock you out of the race in the UK. Just in fact, I spent New Year's Day this year not taking a break because I won't name him, but a very ugly, unpleasant right winger in the US. Had spent his New Year tweeting about people. One particular person who he described as having a Rothschild physiognomy. And I spoke to Barry Weiss and said, this is where the right goes wrong. This guy is actually affiliated with some conservative institutions in the US. It seems to me, totally intolerable that a flagrant antisemitism should be anywhere near the center of the American right and immediately criticized him for this. And got, I have to say, I mean, absolutely no reward in return. Only a heap of bile from right wingers who thought that he was either ignorant and didn't know what he was saying or that there was nothing wrong with talking about people having a Rothschild physiognomy. And thirdly, I'd say just off the top of my head, the moment that Russia invaded Ukraine, I saw that a part of the right in America was going very wrong indeed, as was a part of the right in Europe. And I immediately used my column in a Spectator, which is the oldest right of center magazine, the oldest weekly magazine in the English speaking world. I used my weekly column there to talk about the right that had gone wrong on Russia, how it had been misled, how it was lying, how it was providing counterfactuals counter information, how it was pumping out Russian disinformation, how it had fallen for Vladimir Putin and been taken for a ride. Again, I say this not just because anyone can go and search this stuff, but because I don't think I ever have any problem with saying what I think about people who are identified as being on my own site. And there's a reason for that. It's not tactical. It's because I don't want to be a million miles near these people, right? I wouldn't want to be near these people. So when people say and they did with that person I identified who was obviously a nasty little antisemite, when they said, oh, you have no idea how many people are going to turn on you about this. I don't care. Why would I care? Why would I care? Why would I want to be aligned with people who thought that Vladimir Putin was the savior of Christendom and a devout, honest Christian who must sort of provide the bulwark to the madness of left wing liberalism? Of course not. I don't want to be anywhere near these people. And as for the Trump point, by the way, sorry, it sounds like only because the nature of the question I don't sound too self defensive, but no less a platform than the national what's it called? The National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida last year. I was on a stage with several people, you'd know, and the question of Trump came up. I criticized Trump in front of an audience that was mainly supportive of him. And I said, there is something absolutely unsustainable about the fact that in front of an audience like this I mean, various people like Ted Cruz had spoken as well. And I said one of the only dissenting notes of the conference, and I said, among other things, that he's totally unsustainable that you have a situation where at a conference like this, somebody asks a question about Donald Trump and everyone on the panel pretends to know less than they know about him. They pretend not to know that he's got a really horrible character, for instance, and pretend that merely his ability to win is what we like, and therefore we'll park everything else. We'll pretend that January 6 didn't happen and that it's just the libtards going mad. I said that in front of that audience. Again, I'm not searching for popularity, but I would not want to be on the stage, which included people who simply uncritically praised Donald Trump and join in with it. Why would I want to be anywhere near that? Yeah, well, I'm very glad I gave you an opportunity to get that off your chest, because you're often lumped in with the people who do not make those points, which I think are absolutely just necessary concessions to political sanity. And it's a problem, by the way sorry, one other while cemented, which is I said immediately after I covered the US election for a number of newspapers, and I traveled around about ten states in the days before the 2020 election, in the weeks before the 2020 election. Went everywhere from sort of across the country. Recovered a Trump rally in Florida, and the minute that the results came out, the rights started to lie about them. I said, then again, in the spot, I said, this is going to be a real problem for us because these people are going to waste our time for years. They are going to waste our time with this conspiracy about this election. And they don't realize that they're not just wasting our time, they're wasting their own. Because they will do the crucial mistake that always happens when people fall into this, as some Democrats did after 2016. They will fall into the mistake of thinking that they won, and as a result, they will not do the necessary self searching that you need to do when you've actually lost an election and work out why you've lost to their own fault as well. It both demeans their opponents and it demeans themselves. I said that straight away. Yeah. Okay. Again, before we dive into the left side of the chaos no, we should focus on the right. For sure. Yeah. I just want to see if I can find the generic essence of our problem first. I think we both are worried about what appears to be a derangement of our culture. And culture is not this expendable thing. Culture really is the operating system for humanity at this point, insofar as we surmount mere nature red and tooth and claw, we arrive fully in culture, and it's just the basis for every epistemic and emotional and ethical engagement with our shared social reality. And politics is a strand of that. But there's much more to it than politics, and what we're seeing now is an environment wherein misinformation and moral panics and social contagion are getting made immensely worse by social media and current trends of loss of trust in institutions and just other forms of fragmentation of society. And again, this is whatever we're going to say about the left, as crazy as it as it is and as easily seen to be in your recent book. On the right we have QAnon and the other odious exports from Trumpistan. The amazing thing on the right, the moment I can't forget and really was the point of no return for us, I thought politically, was when we had a sitting president repeatedly not commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost an election. He was given multiple opportunities to do this and he refused, and the Republican Party was okay with that. And I mean this precedes January 6 and all the knock on effects of that. But just in the run up to the election, when we have a president who won't commit to arguably the most important norm politically in our system, upon which everything else that matters is anchored politically, and that the Republican Party just swallowed that without comment. It was a sign that we actually could lose our democracy in the hands of this buffoon. And I know you objected to that at the time as well, but it's so many people who will delight in the contents of your book and who want to hear everything we have to say about the craziness on the left. Just didn't care about that. Say several things. One is several years ago, a mutual friend, Jordan Peterson, and I did a discussion on video about where the left goes wrong, which was a discussion which I thought was really very interesting, very generative. And because of this idea that Jordan kicked off, which was we sort of have a clear idea of where the right goes wrong politically and playing games of racial superiority, for instance, authoritarianism and much more, we don't have an absolutely clear blueprint, by contrast, of where the left goes wrong. And I think that's a totally accurate statement, and I think that it is a big problem. Where is it in collectivism? Where is it within the social justice movement that the left starts? How do you end up with the Gulag? And we had a very interesting discussion about this. And one of the things looking back on this and I've said this since including to Jordan I said this to him indeed when we did a discussion a podcast on his podcast a couple of days after January 6. I said when we did that discussion several years ago, we did it in the belief that it was clear whether right went wrong and that the right was therefore unlikely to go wrong. And we can no longer make that assumption. We're having to revisit those statements, those basic underpinnings that we thought everybody had. We do actually have to revisit them. And we did, by the way. And again, I don't say this by any means to search for praise, but neither Jordan nor I got any particular love from followers for this. But I said to him, this is a very important thing, that two figures who are more identified as being on the right than the left certainly make it plain that this is where the right goes wrong. And the discussion we had included us, I thought, rather helpfully helping each other to the following realization. I think the best way I could sum it up is I said if you went back five years from where we were then to say, like, 2015, and you said there was going to be a time in 2020 in American politics where a significant amount of the right is going to believe the following, that no media is telling the truth. That no politicians tell the truth. That the law courts are all totally corrupted. That every one of the intelligence agencies is totally corrupted. That the ballot is totally corrupted to the extent that an election is going to be stolen. But you have one great virtue on your side. There is one virtuous man in the Republic, and you know who that man is subdued off The Apprentice. Yes, Donald J. Trump. Now, if you just said that to anyone in 2015, they just said, oh, sorry. And also the Vice president, Mike Pence, he's also completely corrupted and not a conservative. If you just said that to someone in 2015, they just said that you're a maniac, how is that going to happen? How am I going to end up in a position where the only man who I'm going to trust and possibly turn up for. Capitol and risk my life for and risk other people's lives for is Donald J. Trump. Of all the people? Yes, that's a point I've almost made before in the following form, back in 2015, I would have said that there was literally not a single Fortune 500 company in America that would have ever had the thought. The situation is really grim for us. What we need is a complete rebooting of our organization. We need to bring in a new CEO, and we have found the most competent, most inspiring person for the job. And that man is Donald Trump. That would have been we've done a headhunting exercise, guys, and we've come back with a song. A man of high integrity. That's what we need. Never knowingly told an untruth yes. So this is definitely a problem. And it's a problem of, I would say, particularly of the American right. And the problem is, obviously, that there is something that Trump taps into which they fear that nobody else can. And I don't know whether they're right or not. I have no electoral crystal ball. What I do know also is that there's one other instinct which is worth highlighting, which is that for some years, I think in the cultural realm and others, there was a perception on the conservative side that conservatives had played too nice. That basically what happened was that the left advanced incrementally and sometimes actually in bounds that it enjoyed rubbing the right noses in its defeats that conservatives were too gentlemenly to ever do anything other than slightly slow down. That progress of the left or to fight the next battle they were going to lose, and that this was the sort of trajectory of politics. Now, again, I'm not saying whether I agree with it or disagree with it or whether it's true or not. That was a perception on the right and the point that Donald Trump came along, as far as it seems to me. And by the way, I tried for most of his presidency not to write about him, because I thought that since everyone on the planet had a thought, it wasn't particularly worth my while adding to the melee. And I thought the same with Brexit, incidentally, after the Brexit vote happened. Not that they're connected, but I tend not to if everybody on the planet is writing about the same thing, I tend not to want to join in the cacophony. And also because it would seem to me there was relatively little to add. But just to return to this point, there was this perception on the right particular America, and they did something which I think is both understandable and reprehensible, which was to essentially choose as a tool of weapon, of fighting the weapon that they believed would most upset their opponents. It effectively goes to that instinct to hurt your enemy, not to just win, to kick them in the balls. And Donald Trump was that dirty fighter and the right suddenly, or in the section of the right suddenly got excited about that. They got excited about the fact there was somebody who took the fight to the enemy, who literally calling him the enemy, who would derange the other side, all that sort of liberal tears sort of thing. It was rejoicing in it saying basically we're so fed up because we've spent years being bullied and so we're going to have some fun being the bully. And that is, as far as I can see, the dynamic that led to Donald Trump. And because the Republicans don't know whether they can tap into that feeling of resentment without his aid, they're sort of sticking around him. That's why you have this ludicrous dance that's going on at the moment where no one will declare yeah. Again, in the service of looking for some place where that we might discern some daylight between us, I think there's going to be very little. But there's one instance that I am genuinely undecided about in the rubble of our information space. One thing stands out to me recently, I don't know if you've written about it or I think I've heard you comment about it briefly on a podcast, but the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Right. I genuinely don't know what I think should have happened there because let's just summarize the state of our knowledge currently is that it was treated like a product of Russian disinformation. At the time, there were a bunch of former intelligence chiefs signed a letter saying this is classic fake news out of Russia and it was treated like pornography. Journalistically and suppressed by social media. Twitter, I think delinquent New York Post's account, I think you couldn't forward the story any longer. That's right. And all of this was done immediately before the election. This was some kind of October surprise. And at the time I didn't know what to think about it. I didn't know any more than anyone else knew who was being denied access to the information. Except I did know one thing, which is I didn't care if Hunter Biden had severed heads in his basement. There was literally nothing you could have told me about Hunter Biden that would have been relevant to me when the goal was to keep Trump out of office at that point. Right. Because it was just I, I did view Trump given, you know, the aforesaid, non commitment to the most important principle of the survival of our democracy, I viewed him as an existential threat. And given what had happened in 2016 with Comey reopening the email, the case into Hillary Clinton's emails, we know that though her failure to win the presidency was certainly overdetermined, we know that in the last eleven days of the campaign, that was the coup de gras. Right. And this could have proved the same for the election of Biden because it was going to be this bright shiny object that was going to captivate everyone and suck up all the oxygen. So I honestly don't know what I think should have happened there because I think you and I will agree that there really is a problem when you have there are preeminent sources of journalism pretending that a significant story is in fact a non story. I guess I should close the loop on this. It's recently been admitted by The New York Times in an article to which they gave very little oxygen, that, oh, sorry, guys. This really was the story and it was legitimate. And there are all kinds of heinous things on that laptop, and who knows to what degree it suggests the corruption of Joe Biden and the Biden family in their engagement overseas. So I don't know how you feel about that, but I don't know what the counterfactual is, what might have been done differently that would have been within bounds ethically journalistically, but I don't know what I would change about the past with respect to that story, given the outcome. I should declare an interest. I do write a weekly column for The New York Post, which is the paper that broke the story. Of course, I wasn't actually writing for The Post at the time, apart from occasionally, and I'm a regular, so I just add that, as it were, just in case anyone thinks there's a conflict of interest. But I had no involvement in the Hunter by laptop story, but I know the people who were involved in it. I think that it was a catastrophic mistake to silence The Post, america's oldest newspaper. At that moment. I thought it was a decision by a few big tech companies who were basically helping Biden out to win the election. The contents of the laptop. There's a good book by calling The New York Post Miranda Devine, who did a lot of the work on the story, on the people who had access to everything on the laptop. There's a very good book about it now called Laptop from Hell, which, if you read, or even you read excerpts from, you'll see that the problem is I should stress, I'm not that prurient person. And I actually have no and nobody's not prudent to, but I genuinely have no interest in the rather sad private life of Hunter Vinegar. And I would have thought that a lot of the story would have got caught up with that, with people looking at Dick Pics and falling asleep with smack beside him and this sort of thing. I have no interest in that. And I don't think he would have made any serious change to the election. That wasn't the real story. The story was, as you mentioned, the fact that Hunterbidden had been making money, among other places, in Ukraine to the tunes of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to sit on the board of an energy company in a discipline he doesn't have in a country he doesn't know in a job he wasn't doing. Now does that matter? You might say no, what matters? This comes across in some of the emails which now not only the New York Times but the Washington Post has said, okay, the emails are true and by the way, they could have done all of this back then. It wasn't hard to you could have called up anyone who was on the receiving end of any of the emails, of the many emails that are on the laptop and say, is this actually an email from Hunter Biden to you? And they could have confirmed or denied. It would not have been a hard story to have chased up and followed up as the Post did then, but none of the rest of the media came in behind. And the things that are on about the business thing should concern people. The top of American politics is more corrupt than almost any other civilized nation. It has to be said. There is something outrageous about the amount of money that can be accrued at the top of American politics both during and after office and that is not exclusive to any one party. I think that it is. Whenever there's a financial scandal in the UK, by comparison, it is laughable. $15 changed hands. Yeah, exactly. Somebody was a backbench Labor MP at the time who went to incredible trouble because she expensed a whirlpool bath that cost £800 in America. This would be absolutely nothing compared to Nancy Pelosi's share deals. But the point is, the interesting thing in the laptop was Hunter saying to his daughter, for instance, whatever I do to you in your life, know that I will never do what my father did to me and demand half of all the money I earn. Now that is a very interesting story if true if it's true that Hunter Biden makes money and the father hives part of it off and we know that the uncle takes money. Look, the problem is that nobody on the left, as far as he particularly wants to engage in this. Why? Because they'll say but Trump, they don't like it. They wish it away and they'll say but Trump. Well that is exactly what the right does with some of the Trump stuff. They say but biden but Democrats. But Hillary. And so they should have published. I don't think the private Prurient stuff would have made any difference, but I think that a realization that the top level of American politics is wildly corrupt. That family members of people again in both parties become rich when their relatives enter the White House, Congress or what's more, I think that is something that's worth confronting. Would it have changed the results of the election? I don't know. Nobody does know. But the New York Post was completely right to run because this was a hell of a story and the rest of the media were woefully gave themselves away and by by not reporting. And the media companies revealed what was revealed after the election, which was anyone could tell, which was that a lot of the tech bosses and others were so desperate to make sure that Trump didn't win the election that they were willing to suppress news that was negative about Biden. I think that's a scandal. I think it is part of the thing that leads to this everincreasing distrust in every single entity of power and information. Yeah. No, I agree. I just think that Trump, given his, I would argue, treasonous, non commitment to the most basic principles of our democracy. He's a singular problem that had to be solved at that moment. I would have said that American democracy let's take the idea of Trump being a kind of stress test of the American Republic. The American republic survived him. Now, you might think it was close by the skin of our teeth, by the skin of our teeth, but it survived. Court survived, the democracy survived. But it was down to a handful of people who would just not accede to his demands. Had Mike Pence done as instructed, had a few Republican election officials done as instructed, we would have had an absolute constitutional crisis that the resolution to which was just non obvious. Absolutely. But they did stand up. Lindsey Graham did stay on the floor of the House on the 6 January. I have asked repeatedly for evidence from the evidence of this fraud election and he doesn't provide it to me. So I agree that too many people went along with it. There were mad theories going around, almost none of it has stood up since. But let me just return to this issue of the laptop because it's important in terms of this issue of trust in American politics, which disturbs the hell out of me. The problem with the Post story was not just the suppression of the story, but what you described, Sam, the joint letter by intelligence chiefs saying this is classic Russian disinformation. Here's a problem in my view every single person who signed that letter should lose their pensions, should be shared, should be disgraced. Why? Because these were people involved in the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, who became political actors in order to support the suppression of a newspaper breaking a story that enabled Joe Biden to be elected president. It was a wildly political intervention. Except the Douglas, we know that there was massive Russian meddling into every aspect of the conversation on social media. With the hacking of the DNC, there was a continuous assault upon our democracy with a kind of information warfare campaign from Russia. So it was certainly plausible to think that this might have been Russian compromise of some kind. Again, it's not a crazy allegation. I think it is. I think that both sides have wound themselves up in American politics in recent years and politicized institutions that should never have been politicized and have overemphasized this allegation that the democracy has been hacked. The Democrats did it immediately after the 2016 election. Again, it's not a popular point to make to some Democrat listeners, but what Donald Trump did in 2020 was unforgivable. But part of his ability to get away with it, I believe, came from the fact that there were so many Democrats who were not willing to believe that he had been legitimately elected in 2016 either. In other words, what I'm saying is you might say it's a 1% injection of falsehood or a 5% injection, but the point is that it was already up for grabs in America, that the ballot was not secure, that the vote was not secure, that you could be hacked by Russia, and actually it didn't matter. Now, here's the thing. You are now at this stage, and I wrote this some time ago, and if you translate this into the British context in Britain, if you had a situation where Conservatives never mind, we can put the left side for the second, but I can do the same exercise on the left. Conservatives didn't believe that any of the following institutions were on their sides the Court, the Ballot, Mi Five, Mi Six, the police, the GCHQ. If they believed that all of these institutions and more were against them, these people would no longer be Conservatives. They would be something else, but they would not be Conservative. You cannot be a Conservative if you believe that there are no institutions in the state that are trustworthy. Hence, what's so strange about the Republican Party at the moment. You could argue it's not at all Conservative. I think there's a lot of truth in that. And again, the problem with it is that there is an element in everything that they believe on this that is true. It is true that the intelligence services, for instance, in the US. Have massively politicized themselves unnecessarily. They have therefore ended up losing the trust of even the political side that would be most likely to be nascently supportive of them as an institution of state. Again, to give one other example, when in our lifetimes before could you have imagined a situation not when the left derided and dismissed the heads of the armed forces, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but where the right did that's the extraordinary terrain that we're now in. Yeah, and we were in there quite early on during the campaign when Trump derided John McCain and his service as a war hero and prisoner of war and suffered absolutely no political penalty for it. No, I remember very clearly sitting at a friend's house in America the day that that story broke on the front of the Post, and I remember this friend who'd been in colleagues all her life saying, that's him done. And of course, it wasn't. It happened that on the right there wasn't that much love for John McCain. It turned out there was a certain amount of respect, not much love for him. But still, for somebody who had skipped the draft to be deriding, somebody who spent years in prison of war camp and who had refused to leave until his men had left was, I agree, a very strange and sinister turn of things. So where do you sit? This is an adjacent lurid topic. Where do you sit on the subject of deplatforming people like Trump? Is one case from Twitter, but maybe a clearer case of someone like Alex Jones. Are you a free speech absolutist of the sort that you think that forgive me for leading the witness quite this hard, think that private companies should be forced to give a megaphone to someone like Alex Jones, who is, with every tweet, is ruining the lives of identifiable people in general? I am, yes, I certainly think Trump should be on Twitter. Why wouldn't you take the company's eye view of that? If I start a social media platform tomorrow, why should I be forced to put any particular person who I want to exclude? Well, effectively, it's the thing that Elon Musk pointed out the other week when he started his bid for Twitter, which is, whether we like it or not, Twitter is the public square. And this dance between private company and that is a tricky one. It is a private company. They can make their own decisions. However, it is true that if the tech platforms decide to down regulate you, dampen you, or let alone chuck you off, you are left, essentially, voiceless. But all of these companies have terms of service, which, if you violate them by declaring a change but in any plausible terms of service, you would think that ramping up the risk of nuclear war or singling out private individuals who, you know, based on the insane multitude following you, will be doxed immediately and have their lives ruined. In fact, that's why you target them. Right? But people do that all the time. A Washington Post reporter just did that to someone. A Washington Post reporter, Taylor Lorenz, just docks this woman who the private individual who runs this account called Libs of TikTok, that's pretty revealing, quite funny. Has a big following, and she had only a couple of weeks beforehand, been complaining about what it's like when a Twitter mob comes for you and decried on air talking about this. He runs his account. This goes in all directions. I'm not saying maybe alex Jones. Right? And by the way, in the Alex Jones case, I think it's less clear with him because it's just so obvious. But the courts are taking care of him, the families of the Sandy Hook victims who he defamed and lied about. He's being looked after in the courts. And just one other thing. It's an obvious point to make. It doesn't quite solve the deeper point you're trying to get to, but of who gets the right to the dart gun, which is, of course, what Twitter is. But it's nevertheless crucial to say that if a platform like Twitter actually cared about threatening entities on the site, they wouldn't have kept the accounts of the Russian government open all this time. They wouldn't have. The supreme leader of Iran, Alakharid Taiba, who carried out the Mumbai massacre, remained on Twitter until a couple of years ago. And I actually alerted one of the heads of the company. The fact that I thought this was a bit too close to home for most Indian citizens and much more, they're not fit for purpose. Companies like Twitter grew there's a small thing that grew far too fast, have ended up having to understand free speech and seem apparently not to have thought about the subject until yesterday. And they're incredibly inept, and they get inept people to ineptly police these platforms. I agree there and it may actually be an impossible task, right, to actually moderate yes, it might, well, billions upon billions of posts, effectively. But it seems to me that if you, for instance, had a no doxing policy doxing is an unrecoverable error on this platform. Then the question is, in my view, you should be free to have that policy and then do your best to enforce it. And if you see irregularities in its enforcement, well, then those are worthy of criticism. So Washington Post writer is probably up for defenestration also if she docs as people. But it just seemed clear that the most prominent examples of people I mean, in the case of Alex Jones, you have parents whose six year olds were murdered and he was monetizing their agony by claiming that they weren't murdered and that they were just crisis actors. And there's this there are some of these families that have had to move, literally change homes ten times since their kids were murdered because of his insane cult. That is wicked. It's wicked. But the I mean, we come back to this thing of how on earth you run this, and clearly nobody exactly knows. I mean, if you and I were on the board of Twitter, I think we would struggle with it as well. I don't think there's any obvious solution. I know there are some things that are also, I think, incumbent upon people not to do themselves to make the situation worse. Can I give a quick example? Sure. Which is not even in the realm of laws, but in the realm of manners. I'm consistently horrified by the number of people of particularly young people who are willing to put out on social media things I simply think they should not put out. My rule on this is never ever say anything that you don't want to be used back at you, because you can just bet your life it will be. Send out a photo of yourself and someone will say, you don't look great. Fine. Send out a photo of yourself with your wife. Somebody will say something about your wife. That's the name of the game. Send out a photograph of your children. Not everyone's going to love your children, and so on and so on. Somebody I know a little bit recently divorced, announced the news on Twitter, and a load of people get into it and celebrate it and are laughing at him and so on. And I just look at this and I think, why on earth would you announce stuff about your private life on this bloody platform? So I do think part of it, and this obviously isn't the case with the Sandy Hook parents or anyone who just was thrown into this situation, but a lot of what people complain about on social media, of what they get back, is a result of them feeding the beast themselves in the first place. And there are things that if you put out there, you're just not going to get 100% positive likes back. It's an ugly medium, it's an ugly platform. And I have infinite compassion for the people who suffer from it and sort of what's happened with the victims of Alex Jones, but not when it comes to I said this thing and now I've been criticized and I'm upset and now I've got PTSD sort of thing. I'm afraid that is so commonplace now. The cry bully thing, that where people behave one way on social media and can't take it in response and complain, then there are plenty of cry bullies on these platforms, and I don't have sympathy for that. Yeah, well, I think that it's just a natural fact that we're new to this situation, that evolution, not neither evolution nor previous culture, has prepared us. Which is you can join a mob, a virtual mob, and perform a reputational murder on someone, and you can be the object of a mob like that. And you never quite know what it's like until you're on the receiving end. Yes, but also, I mean, people do have to try to find a way to live their lives without this having maximal impact. I do think there's sort of, as I say, the realm of manners in this, the realms of customs, that we should also try to come towards a better type of custom with these platforms, in the same way that we did with email early on. Do you remember at the beginning of email, people would sort of pass around crazy stories about how if you eat tomatoes, you will never get cancer, that sort of thing. And just quite early on, those sorts of people who would send those things around learned that people didn't want to get them stopped. At least that was my experience. Please don't send me this shit. Thank you. And they stopped. I mean, we're just not quite there yet, or not remotely there yet, with a platform as furious and as fast as Twitter. So we have to assist our own behavior, as well as hoping that Twitter can solve its side of the problem. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm not sure how much we disagreed in there. I think if we were on the Twitter board, we might disagree about who to deplatform. But would you acknowledge that? Do you just think twitter should be declared essentially effectively no longer a private company, able to function by its own policies, but more like the town square that just has to function in deference to the first amendment? Yeah, I think it's basically the wild west, and there's not much you can do about it, and you have to decide whether you want to go into the saloon. Right. It just seems strange that because again, I take the company's eye view of this, for instance. I think actually I recommended that Jack Dorsey pull the plug on Twitter at some point, and he would have been given the Nobel prize for peace. Yes. I suggested Elon Musk send it into outer space. Yeah. So Elon's buying Twitter as of the hour, recording this. It seems that's happening and taking it private. If he's doing that all with his own money I'm not sure he is, but let's say he were to do that, couldn't he just destroy the entire thing and say, I'm doing you all a favor? He could do. The interesting thing is it about it, as you know, is that the people who tried to set up rivals to it, it doesn't actually work. I mean, somebody said to me the other day, assume that Elon is a rather smart guy. There must be a reason why he hasn't tried to start his own Twitter. It's just hard to get once you get the kind of traction people have on Twitter. I mean, he's got 80 million plus people following him. It's it's hard to imagine starting that on on a new platform. But but yeah, but just to close the loop on what I where I was going there, if it would be within the bounds of propriety to actually just pull the plug on it, effectively canceling or deplatforming everyone, why can't you deplatform Alex Jones for his misbehavior? Well, as I say, I mean, I would regard him as being a borderline case. I don't know. I think basically, once you get into the realms of harassment, which is where he was, that's a viable case for taking somebody off. I haven't really thought enough about his particular case because I don't follow him very closely, but I know that it's basically unsustainable that an American company deplatforms a US. President and doesn't deplatform the ayatollah of Iran. Yeah, but I just hear that as an argument for deplatforming both of them, given who they are. That could be the case, although I wouldn't agree with the moral equivalency, but yeah, it could be the case. I mean, as I say, all of these things set themselves up and end up. Having to run the town of Square and they're just clearly not suitable for the task. I don't know what all the answers are to it, but as I say, most people don't like the unfairness thing. I mean, personally, I think it was wrong to throw Trump off Twitter, but there are obviously upsides, not least that every day's news is now not about Donald Trump and what he tweeted today. I mean, that's quite a relief. Yeah, no, it definitely had the desired effect. Right. He's not gone, but he is in a kind of oblivion with respect to the rest of culture and the news cycle, and I think that was a good thing. Again, it is a historical fact that he was President of the United States, but I actually think it's more accurate to describe him now as the most dangerous cult leader on earth. Right. I just think he's there's just no telling what harm he's capable of creating if he manages to continue to hold half of American society or a third of American society in his thrall. And it's just it's the most deranging thing to happen in our lifetime, including a global pandemic. I think it's one of them. I don't think it's the most deranging. I think it's one of the most deranging. But we've we've lived in several very, very long years where every day has enough information to derange some people. And whereas I've often said that the range of the things that have come across us and afflicted us from Trump to Pandemic to Afghanistan to Ukraine to all of this stuff, the range of things means that almost nobody is ending up in exactly the same place as their, erstwhile bedfellows, except the derangement of all of those other things. So much of the onus of that falls on Trump. I mean, just so explain to me why you have Republicans, you know, otherwise sane, well intentioned human beings, one must presume, lionizing Vladimir Putin at this point in history. That would have been unthinkable, I think, but for Trump, right. Is there some other mechanism that got that meme into their heads? Yes, I think so. I think that there is. As I say, I've written repeatedly against these people, but I think that there is a there is a there is a section of the right that was misled by Vladimir Putin. And whether it's stupidity or ignorance or generational loss of memory, I don't know. I think the combination of all of these things. But, I mean, there was certainly an element of the right that in recent years has said that American liberalism has gone so wrong that we need a bulwark against it. And the bulwark and they looked around for people, but one of them that some of them landed on was Vladimir Putin. And I always said, this is so monumentally stupid, among other things, because you had to take Vladimir Putin to his own word. I mean, you had to actually pretend that he was this devout, pious ex KGB man who said his prayers and was going to lead Christendom to revival. You had to actually believe he was sincere in that. And if you believe that, you're a damn fool. You had to believe that somebody who's used jihadi mercenaries from Chechnya to go and slaughter Ukrainian Orthodox Christians not that one should need to talk in these terms, but let's talk in those terms for a moment, that that person is somehow the defender of the Christian faith. I mean, it's so unbelievably stupid. But yes, there was an element of the right in recent years that fell for that plus some that just had no history and memory of the Cold War, no memory of what the KGB or the Kremlin, let's just say, does. And then there were the people who were so fed up with false claims of overstatements of what Russia had done in recent years that they believed that the Kremlin was a sort of quiescent, pacifist like institution that never did anything. It's maddening in itself, but there were so many people who fell for this, and I thought that it was an unbelievable error. And what has happened in Ukraine is one of the fastest demonstrations of a moral error that I've ever seen. Okay, well, let's take the turn toward the left. And it's a salt on Western civilization where you and I will be singing from the same hymn book, because you wrote the hymn book and I just read it. I think we just as you thought it was unseemly to have to spell out the problem with recruiting jihadi mercenaries to attack Orthodox Christians as though the the identities would be especially relevant to the moral calculus there. I'm going to lead us in a brief exercise of masochism to just inoculate some people in our audience against the rest of our conversation. I think we need to start with the obligatory acknowledgment that we are two white guys about to express our opinions on many combustible topics. And I I know. I mean, just this is, I guess, half tongue in cheek, but not entirely. I mean, first, let me just spell out I consider it morally and intellectually obscene to have to take note of our skin color as a preface to this conversation. But the truth is that there are only so many hills I'm willing to die on. And I do think it's prudent for us to acknowledge what any sane and compassionate person knows to be true, which is that racism and other forms of bigotry are odious. And that Western culture has been replete with bigotry of all types. As has every culture. And there is certainly some residual racism and bigotry left to expunge. And there is nothing that you and I will say that should suggest an unawareness, much less a denial of these facts. So I'm sure you can more or less sign on to that I don't know if you have anything to add. No, I just add that I mean, it seems to me that one of the great disappointments of what I describe as the re racialisation of the of the public square one of the great disappointments about it is that you even have to talk about yourself in terms of skin color. And that it seems so obvious to me and has done for as long as I can remember, that you would in any way identify yourself because of it. Somebody asked me recently what I was proud about about being a man. And I said to her the second stupidest question I can imagine after being asked what I was proud about about being white. I'm not proud of things I haven't done. I don't see why you would be like being proud of being 510. What the hell is that? So? Yes, I think it's just already deplorable at the start that we are being urged to think of ourselves in these terms because they are precisely the terms that I had been brought up to regard as being so unimportant that we didn't talk about that. Well, I think you and I agree that the appropriate goal here with respect to political and moral progress is to arrive in some happy future where race simply does not matter. It has no moral or political valence to it. You said to me once, I think maybe in the previous discussion, that it would end up having as much importance as your hair color. Yeah, if you just roll that back in the other direction. Imagine how insane and counterproductive it would seem if we could look ahead and predict that at some point in the future people were going to care about hair color to the degree that they currently care about race. We'll want to know how many blondes got into Harvard this year and if it doesn't exactly match the population level, we've got a real problem on our hands. Yes, I go into a bookshop and say, I'd like to see the section written by ginger haired authors, just as that would be a problem. The ethical daylight ahead of us is in arriving at some colorblind future and yet not only and that was the goal of someone like the leading lights of the civil rights movement, people like Martin Luther King, Jr. But it's not only not the goal of the current religion of antiracism, it's explicitly not the goal. That goal is disavowed by many people. Yes, well, this is the great moral error that's going on and I think there's a little bit of a link to my previous work because in the Madison crowds I described what I said. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, my friend Joe Rogan has come under considerable public scrutiny and personal attack in recent days, and I want to say a few things in response to that controversy. I've been critical of Joe's coverage of COVID and vaccines. In particular, I was critical of his platforming, Peter McCullough and Robert Maloney. I reached out to Joe privately about that, and I've said a few things publicly. As you might expect, I restrained myself in public because Joe is a friend, but I didn't leave any doubt about where I stood. My primary concern was that given his vast audience, getting public health messaging wrong, even a little wrong, could do a lot of harm. Joe is generally considered to have the biggest podcast on Earth, and he has greater reach than almost any mainstream media outlet. So this comes with great responsibility, but it's a responsibility that Joe never saw it and has been slow to appreciate. And I understand why. I mean, Joe is not a scientist or an academic or a journalist or he's a comedian. And because he's a comedian, whatever the topic, he can always pull the ripcord by saying, what the hell do I know? I'm just a comic, right? This is something that I and many other podcasters can't do. And he podcasts so much, he sometimes produces 20 hours of content a week, so there's no way he can prepare for most of these conversations. Nor is there time for him to edit his podcasts. He used to release everything live. He since stopped doing that. But the spirit of his podcast hasn't changed. He just flips on the microphones and begins rolling with his guest. And while he may know something about their work, he is rather often learning what they think in real time right along with his audience and then responding in the moment based on his years of doing just this, having long and searching conversations with an incredibly diverse range of guests and letting his curiosity be his guide on most topics. This approach to podcasting has served Joe and his audience very, very well. And the fact that the Joe Rogan experience is the biggest podcast on Earth is all the proof we need of that. But this approach to podcasting doesn't work so well for every guest and every topic. Nor does being a comedian always provide an alibi for getting your facts wrong. So I was very glad to see Joe Pivot last week and acknowledged that on the topic of public health, he could and should be more rigorous and careful in the future. This was in response to Neil Young and other musicians pulling their music off of Spotify in protest over Joe's messaging around COVID. So when I saw that video, I jumped on Twitter and said, well done, brother, because Joe promised to treat the topic of vaccines and COVID with more care and to bring on other experts to balance the opinions of the heterodox people he'd been talking to. As you all know, the pandemic is a topic I've hit several times, and I've been distressed to see how other podcasters like Joe have covered it. I thought Joe's Instagram video promising to do things differently was about as good as it could have been. He wasn't defensive, he didn't double down on any mistakes. He acknowledged that he was slow to understand the enormous role he now plays on our information landscape, and he promised to correct course. So bravo. But now another controversy has erupted for which Joe also felt the need to apologize. Someone cut together a reel of moments where Joe said the N word on his podcast going back twelve years. I think in the second apology, Joe made it clear that in none of those instances was he using the word as a racist slur. Rather, he was talking about the word itself, about its use in comedy and about its magically destructive properties. And in his apology he went so far as to say that he was wrong to have used the word even in this way, and that as a white man, it's just not his word to use for any reason in any context. I want to say a few things about this second apology and about the way it's being received. First, I should say a few things about Joe as a person. Anyone who knows him, and you don't have to know him personally, you can just be a fan of his podcast. Because what you see there really is Joe. Anyone who has spent dozens of hours listening to Joe's podcast knows to a moral certainty that Joe is not racist. And there really is nothing more that needs to be said on that point. There is simply no workable definition of racism that includes Joe Rogan. And insofar as there is an enduring problem of racism in our society, people like Joe are not a symptom of it. Rather, they're the cure. Joe is an extremely ethical person, and he has an extraordinarily large and diverse set of friends and social contacts. It would be hard to imagine someone less likely to actually care about the race of another human being than Joe. So if Joe Rogan is your version of a racist, you have reached a moral and political dead end. What's more, I think Joe actually went too far in his apology about using the N word. It's totally understandable that he did, because he's been taking a tremendous amount of fire. Even the White House came after him this week. It's been completely crazy. So I understand why he felt the need to disavow his prior use of the word entirely. But let me take a moment to spell out why I think that's a mistake. There is simply no question that American hysteria around the use of the N word is pathological and dishonest and destructive of people's integrity. End an offense to basic sanity. I remember an example over 20 years ago, long before social media, and of course, long before we spoke of cancel culture, we would have called it political correctness back then, where an aide to the mayor of Washington, D. C. Used the term niggerly in a speech. Niggerly is a synonym for stingy, and it has no etymological connection to the N word. Needless to say, some genius in the audience got mightily offended, and the controversy was such that the mayor's aid resigned and the mayor accepted his resignation. This person was later reinstated in another role, I think. But it's a sign of how far we've wandered from the path of progress that the NAACP at the time recognized just how absurd and demeaning of its own interests the initial taking of offense was. Julian Bond, who was the chairman of the NAACP, said, quote, you hate to think that you have to censor your language to meet other people's lack of understanding. And then he said, seems to me that the mayor has been niggeredly in his judgment on the issue. Okay, that was great, right? That was decent. That was sane. Needless to say, we could not expect such a reasonable response from the NAACP today. Here's what I think is patently true morally and intellectually and therefore politically. In the end, the idea that a white person cannot say the N word for any reason when discussing its use, when reading Huckleberry Finn out loud, when dissecting public controversies of the sort that I'm discussing now, is completely insane. To hold this view is to attribute magical properties to words. It's the very essence of a childish relationship to language, and it makes a mockery of the very real social problem of racism that is bigotry as applied through the lens of race. Leaving aside the question of systemic racism, because there's a lot to debate about the scope of that problem today, I don't deny that it still exists. And what has always been pernicious about systemic racism is that the people implementing racist policies need not be consciously racist to perpetrate further harm. But of course, the pendulum has also swung violently in the other direction. And as I've said before on this podcast, I think it's safe to assume that there is almost no desirable place to work or study or mingle in American society today. In academia, in film or television or journalism or tech, you could literally take the highest status 20% of every corner of our culture. There is almost no place, and perhaps there is no actual place at all where being a person of color isn't a positive advantage for gaining entry in the year 2022. Of course, this excludes Asians who are now white adjacent. Again, there's a lot to debate about the ethics of all this, and there are certainly questions about affirmative action and related policies where I don't even know what I think. But we can leave all of that aside, because that's not the sort of racism we're talking about. The racism of which Joe Rogan has been accused is real racism, psychological racism. He likes white people better than black people racism. When we're talking about a person using the N word to convey his racism, or using it in such a way as to reveal his racism, whether he meant to or not, then everything depends on the beliefs and intentions of the speaker. To know if a person is racist, we have to know what he thinks and feels about other human beings. Most importantly, we have to know what sort of world he wants to live in. To allege that a person is racist is of necessity to claim that he cares about the variable of race in ways that he shouldn't, that he prefers certain groups of people for reasons that he shouldn't. That he takes pride in things he shouldn't and that he has contempt or at least disregard for certain people based purely on the color of their skin or some other superficial racial characteristic. Real racists don't want people of other races to truly succeed, and they feel more or less compassion for the suffering of other human beings based primarily on their racial identities. This is why the some of my best friends are black calumny is so silly and destructive. If a person is white and some of his best friends are black, I don't care what jokes he laughs at, he is not a racist in any way that society should worry about. And if you doubt that, there is something you don't understand about what it means to have good friends. So using the N word as a racial slur is completely different from using it in some other way. And if you insist that the word itself is magically destructive, like Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels, if you insist upon treating its use by a person of the wrong skin color in any context, for any purpose as some kind of diabolical incantation. If you really believe that someone, somewhere will be harmed by any conceivable use of the term based merely on the color of the speaker's skin, you are just morally unprepared to solve real problems in our world. And any culture that takes this attitude is morally unprepared to solve real problems too. And that's where, I'm afraid, we are. We are mired in a culture that appears totally unable to even identify, much less solve real problems, because it has grown hysterical over imaginary ones. There were other things that Joe apologized for in the second video, things which it sounds like he should have apologized for. These were things he said as a comedian that now sound bad even in context. He told jokes in the past that he wouldn't tell today. It's only decent to notice, however, that literally everyone, not just comedians, everyone is in this spot because the norms have shifted massively. You simply can't judge comedy or any other cultural product from ten years ago by the sensitivities of today. It's just not fair to because it doesn't give an accurate picture of a person's state of mind then or now. And most important, if you watch Joe's recent video, there is no question that he offered a complete apology for things he genuinely regrets saying, what more could we expect a well intentioned person to do? I've noticed two reactions to Joe's most recent video, both of which seem like moral errors to me. First, there were people who smell blood in the water and who are now calling for Joe's annihilation with even greater fervor. These are people on the left for whom no apology would ever be sufficient. Though ironically, these same people love redemption stories about murderers and rapists, provided they have the correct skin color. Find me a black man who has shot a cop and then apologized for it, or in some cases, hasn't apologized for it, and I'll show you vast numbers of people on the left who are eager to see him brought back into the fold and even canonized as some kind of saint. But find a white guy who told a bad joke in 2007, and these same people will want to see him destroyed for it. That is a bit of hypocrisy that everyone left of center has to become allergic to. And then, of course, are the responses from the right or the alt right or the QAnon adjacent or the I don't know what to call it politically. The I'm way too online and wokeness is the only problem I can keep track of response, which, in light of the left's reaction, has declared that apologizing is always and everywhere a mistake. You can't give an inch to the woke mob, otherwise you're finished. So all you can do is stonewall and double down. From a purely PR point of view, these people aren't necessarily wrong. They're they're often right. In Joe's case, they probably are right. Here's one thing that's important to be clear about joe didn't have to apologize. Of all the people who could weather a controversy like this by saying absolutely nothing or by telling his critics to just go to hell, joe is probably in the best position to do that. Even if Spotify drops his show, Joe will be fine. It would be trivially easy for him to create his own platform where he'd be answerable to no one, and legions of his fans would follow him there, and he would still have the biggest podcast on earth. But he chose to apologize because he genuinely regretted saying certain things, and he felt bad about how their resurfacing made many people feel, and that's exactly how you would want him to respond. So in my view, he took a risk by apologizing, and he did this because it was the right thing to do. Here's the culture I think we want, or should want. We want people, when they feel they have done something wrong, to apologize. This is a way for them to express regret over regrettable things and to communicate their goodwill toward anyone they may have hurt, however inadvertently. I've never had to issue a public apology of the sort that Joe has released twice this week. Perhaps my time will come. But if I ever felt that there was something I really should apologize for, I would find it very depressing not to apologize for fear of the apology backfiring. A sincere apology is a moral good, as is the forgiveness with which it is often met. We want to live in a world where people offer sincere apologies, and we want to live in a world where sincere apologies are generally accepted. This is born of the recognition that no one is perfect. Each of us is a work in progress. Everyone is growing, and forgiveness itself is one of our highest virtues. Forgiveness is a fucking miracle. And we want a culture that makes us better at both seeking it and bestowing it. Not one that views every apology as a source of shame and as an invitation for further scorn. There really is a ray of ethical daylight here that we must recognize. Asking forgiveness and receiving it is how we repair our relationships and the fabric of society itself. Anyway, as I said, Joe is a friend. But I would like to think that I would defend anyone of his character who found himself at the center of a similar controversy. And, Joe, if you're hearing this, you can rest assured that tens of millions of people who have never met you know and love you for precisely who you are. Because unlike almost anyone else, you have built your career by led letting them do that. And that is both remarkable and a true refuge at a time like this. Keep your chin up, my friend./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. OK, a lot going on in Washington. This has been a crazy week. This is a more spontaneous podcast than most. I did not have this on the calendar, but the scandals have been piling up so quickly in the White House that just feels like something needs to be said. This is the first moment where the path to impeachment has seemed actually open. I have not been one of these people who felt that impeachment was likely, even though I dearly hope for it. But given just how inept Trump and his surrogates have been in containing the bleeding here, I feel like I'm beginning to see the possibility that this egregious man may not serve his full term. So I decided to reach out to a few experts who have already been on the podcast to give us their take. The first is Anne applebaum. Anne is a columnist for the Washington Post. She's been writing fantastic pieces analyzing what's going on in Washington. She is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, where she runs a program called arena, which deals with the problem of disinformation and propaganda in the 21st century. And she's a real expert on Russia. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Gulag a History. So she is perfectly placed to think about the unfolding Russia scandal and the fact that we have a president whose fondness for Russia, and for Putin in particular, remains at best, unexplained. And my second guest today is Juliet Kym, who is one of the nation's leading experts on Homeland security. She was a former member of the National Commission on Terrorism. She served in the Obama administration as Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, where she handled things like the H one N one Pandemic and the BP oil spill. She's currently on faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and she's a very frequent commentator on CNN. As a security analyst, she was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her columns in the Boston Globe. So both of these women have a real depth of experience in the relevant areas, and I can't tell you how gratifying it is to be able to reach out to them and bring you their perspective. I'm not really set up to run a news division here, so being responsive to a news cycle that's changing at this pace is difficult to do. I actually had David From, who agreed to be part of this episode, but I can't interview him until Saturday. And I think things are changing so quickly it's Thursday now that I'm going to push that interview off and leave him for another episode. That is, unless something remarkable happens on Friday, which is certainly possible with this president. But I recorded my conversation with Anne on Tuesday and Juliet on Wednesday, and even there the news had advanced enough so that more facts were in play. This is why I usually speak to scientists and philosophers, so it doesn't matter when we record our conversations and it really doesn't matter when you listen to them. Here we have a conversation which will probably not age terribly well. If you're listening to this, a few weeks from now or a few months from now, the shape of the scandal may have changed a bit. The general principle, however, may still be worth talking about. And there are general principles here, clearly, of corruption and ineptitude and financial conflicts of interest, all of which I'm confident will become more pressing in the coming months. Today I bring you an episode that is narrowly focused on the events of this week. The date is May 18. Up first is Anne Applebaum. Enjoy. And thanks for coming back on the podcast. Thanks for inviting me. Well, listen, this is an impromptu interview. You were last on, I think, a couple of months ago. It feels like years ago, but you are one of these topic experts. I guess you have two topics here which are increasingly relevant. You are a journalist who can cover the ins and outs of Washington, but you are someone with a real expertise in Russia, and you think a lot about things like misinformation and propaganda and perverse ways that publics can be persuaded. This is great to talk to you again. So last time we spoke, several things had not yet happened. There was not the firing of Comey, there had not been the Russian photo op, and there had not been this recent apparent leak of classified information by the president, nor the chaotic attempts to prevaricate about this by his surrogates. Let's just walk through this a little bit. What the hell is going on in well, if I knew that, then I would be able to solve a lot of other problems. I think the outline of the problem and really the fundamental, the source of this problem really is Trump's relationship. Or maybe it's better to say the relationship in his head, his feelings about Russia. Most of what we know about Trump's relationship with Russia is already public knowledge. I mean, we may or may not learn something more from an investigation if that goes on. But most of what he feels about Russia, he's told us he's been saying it for many years, he feels a closeness to the style of russian oligarchy and Russian Kleptocracy. He feels I don't know whether it's ideological or aesthetic. He feels that the system appeals to him. He likes the idea of having a relationship with Russia, and he can't really hide that. There were a number of points that may have been slightly overlooked in the last few days. One is that the fact that he invited the Russian foreign minister to the Oval Office was already, in protocol terms, quite a big concession. He wouldn't have been invited under Obama and certainly not after the invasion of Ukraine. Would we have given it's a big deal for a foreign minister to get to meet the President? That's always a gesture because of course the foreign minister should meet the Secretary of State and not the President. So he went out of way to make this gesture, and he and his staff seemed to be very lax about who the Russians are and what they represent. So as you hinted in your introduction, they invited not just Lavrov, but they allowed a Russian photographer into the Oval Office who promptly after the conversation put his photographs online, which seemed to have surprised the White House, who didn't realize that he was taking pictures for publication. And of course, we don't know what else was in his camera. Maybe it was a recording device, maybe other kinds of equipment. So it's very unprecedented both for the foreign minister to be there and for him to be with the photographer. And then we learned from the context of this story about what he said to the Russians and also from General McMaster's statements today. We learned that he felt very comfortable with the Russians. I mean, he told them some he may or may not have understood what he was telling them, but he gave them some classified information. He was bragging about his access to intelligence. He treated them the way he treats people he likes to do business with or he used to like to do business with back in New York. And this kind of behavior, which is of course unprecedented in the United States in recent presidential history, has all kinds of consequences. American intelligence works by a series of relationships with allies, and of course we have our sources and methods and so on, but so does so to others. We work closely with people in the Middle East. We work closely with other nations in Europe, and they exchange information with us on a mutually agreed basis. But the idea that we now have a president who's a security risk, who might blurt out anything in a room where he's with people he feels comfortable with, no matter who they are and what they might do with that information should be a clue or will be understood by American allies as danger sign. Be careful what you give to the United States. Be careful what you give to this president. His sympathies are not with his understanding of how intelligence works is minimal. His ability to his his judgment is terrible. He doesn't know to whom he should say what. He doesn't know who should and shouldn't be let into the White House. He doesn't seem to have any sense of it or any feeling for it. And he may betray you by accident. I often think that the best conspiracy theories, or real ones, are actually pretty rare. Conspiracy is hard to organize. It requires a lot of people, and everyone has to be quiet. And much more common in life is the kind of screw up theory of what happened. And more and more, it looks like Trump is governed by a kind of incompetence, childishness inability to keep his mouth shut, need to brag, need to show off, and his admiration for rich, powerful people like Vladimir Putin who seem appealing to him and who seem like they should be his friends. And that's now the governing ideology of this White House. And not anything theoretical, not anything ideological, not anything else. I don't know if you remember the book or the film Being There, but I've been thinking of Trump as a kind of malignant, chauncey gardener, just this completely vacuous character. And can I just say something funny about Being there? It's based on a book by Irishi kaczynski is a Polish writer, right? Actually, the idea of it is an older Polish story. There's a version of that story that was written several decades earlier, and it's a kind of East European story. In these accidental, messy democracies, people accidentally take power. And it's very funny. Funny and sad, I guess, that this happened in the United States. But you're right, it's a very good comparison. So this Russian photo op slash leak happened the day after he fired Comey. The timing is just insane. You would think you could never recover from how bad this looks. And yet this is just one more thing. In this cascade of ineptitude and seeming corruption or conflicts of interest, he's firing the guy who's investigating his administration for its possible collusion with the Russians and then meeting with the Russians, one of whom was the very Russian who torpedoed the career of Mike Flynn. Walk us through this a little bit more. And it's also true that the thing he is supposed to have leaked, again, not based on any apparent strategy to divulge secrets, but just because he's bragging about what good intel he gets. This is the sort of thing that wasn't even disclosed to our own senators. Talk a little bit about the context here, and perhaps this would be a good moment to get your view on the significance of the Comey firing. Well, the Comey firing once again, the most amazing thing about the Trump phenomenon is most of what we know about him is stuff he tells us. You know, he's telling us what he's doing. I mean, he has admitted in in essence, in the in the course of his tweets that he fired Comey because he didn't like this investigation. He he didn't like seeing Comey on TV talking about him. He didn't like the fact that Comey wanted more resources, apparently for the investigation. And he thought, okay, in his sort of cartoon like vision of the world, he thought, okay, if I get rid of this guy, the story will go away. I can get this man off my TV. I can fire him. And again, that appears to have been impulsive. It appears to have been not. It wasn't consulted with anybody else in the White House. The White House communications staff were totally unprepared for it. And so while I don't have any very strong feelings about Comey myself and I think he has made he'd make some mistakes during the election, the manner in which he did this was almost so screamingly obvious that this is why people immediately after he began to talk about mental illness or some kind of pathology, you know, he fired him to get rid of the story. Didn't like the story. He was getting too close to comfort and had taken over some of his staff, and he wanted it off. And then, as you say, then the amazing thing was that it didn't occur to him to cancel the Lavrov meeting the following day. He didn't seem to see the connection between these two things. I mean, and this is another oddity of Trump that he you know, it's almost like, you know, as you mentioned, being there. I mean, one also thinks of people with amnesia or people who are unable to make connections between events. Did he not understand that people would link the firing of Comey to the Russian story? Did he not understand that having Lavrov in the White House the next day would seem creepy? Does he not make the connections between these things? And one is beginning to think he doesn't he doesn't see the world. He doesn't link events. He lives each event as if he was in that particular moment, and he doesn't see what its relationship is to other things. Why people around him don't see that is mysterious, but he obviously doesn't. I mean, it may be that they have concluded that the best way to deal with this Russian story is to brazen it out. You know, just pretend it's not happening. You know, go on making policy the way they want to, you know, being loud in their conversations and their associations with Russia. Maybe they think that's how they're going to put it to an end. Of course, it may also have the opposite effect. An interesting point for you, something that one might think about is what the Russians think is going on, which is apparently they find it all hilariously funny, which is also disturbing. The worst moment for me of that day of Lavrov at the White House was I don't know if you saw there was a moment when he had a meeting with Tillerson in the morning at the State Department with the Secretary of State. And he came out of the meeting with Tillerson and appeared in front of there were some journalists, and one of the journalists shouted at him something they shouted at both of them something about Comey being fired. And Lavrov, who speaks excellent English and is profoundly cynical person, turned around and said, Was he fired? What do you mean? I don't know anything about him. Fired. And then he sort of hug. He stuck his head back and made a sneering gesture, and that was the Russian political elite saying, we think your press is ridiculous. We think your rules and your laws and your democracy are ridiculous. Your president thinks you're fake news, and we're going to go along with that. So in a sense, this whole process has encouraged has just encouraged the Russians. If the Americans are going to be more brazen, then the Russians will be more brazen, too. And that's another one of the side effects of this series of stories. There's a lot there. One of the things I find so depressing about Trump's presidency thus far is and this is again, like everything about him, this was predictable and this is a point you've made again. You've just made it, I think, today in a recent piece in The Washington Post, there are no surprises here, and yet our capacity for astonishment seems undiminished. But one of the most malignant things about him and his influence on the world is that everyone in his orbit seems to catch this virus of dishonesty and delusion. All of his surrogates are like Baghdad Bob, Saddam Hussein's spokesman during the war in Iraq, where he's denying that anything is happening, and you can see American tanks, you know, passing by in the background. Obviously. People like Sean Spicer. It's just this tragic comedy to see an otherwise seemingly sane person try to put a brave face on the lies and delusions of a manchild in the Oval Office, but it's spreading to serious people like Tillerson, and they keep having to COVID for him, and then he comes out and says they're actually lying. I did it for the reasons that have been alleged, which seems to have just happened in this case. Well, this is what he's done several times now. He did it with the Comey firing. He said the line from the White House was, he fired Comey because of something to do with Hillary Clinton in her case. And then he said on Twitter, no, actually, I fired him because I didn't like him and he was spending too much time on this story. And he did the same thing today, where there was an article yesterday saying that he leaked a piece of classified information in his conversation with Lavrov, and the White House came out and said, no, that's absolutely not true. And then this morning he said, well, yes, actually, I did. It's my right to do it. So you're right. He continues to he stabs them all in the back, betrays them, and they keep going. This is pretty new behavior in American politics. It's not unknown. This is the kind of atmosphere you get in the court of a dictator. I mean, Lavrov himself plays this role for Putin. I've seen him do it after the invasion of Ukraine. Labrov would get up on a panel and he'd say, no, we haven't invaded Ukraine. Or he'll deny looking you straight in the eye or looking the camera straight in the eye. He'll deny something that we know and he knows is absolutely true. And this is the kind of behavior you get in kind of dictatorial courts where people feel they constantly have to show their loyalty in order to stay in their jobs. Certainly there are some honorable people in the White House, and it may be that some of them still feel they should be there to prevent Trump from doing anything worse or because they feel some sense of patriotism and I need to help the country. But you're right that at a certain point, people become really profoundly compromised, and then you have to ask why they're doing it. After the end of the day, this is the United States. It's not uzbekistan. And nobody's going to shoot you if you resign. I mean, you can just resign. And one of the questions now is why more people haven't resigned. I mean, yeah, what are they getting out of doing this? That's increasingly hard to say. Yeah, I think that's a very strong line to push. David from keeps making this point. Where are the resignations? Where are the people with principles and a conscience who just won't submit to having their reputations entangled with this moral and political catastrophe? But this is a point that I keep making. It would seem much worse. It would seem as bad as it in fact is. If it were not as bad. If he did one 10th the idiotic things that he does, he would seem worse. But we just can't even keep up with the cascade of scandal. The news cycle just can't absorb it. It just keeps changing. He'll do something crazy tomorrow, and we'll forget what we were even talking about today. It's very funny because I live in Europe. You're calling me, I'm speaking to you from London. And sometimes these things happen in the evening. So I'm asleep, and then I wake up in the morning to pick up my phone or my laptop and look at I say, oh, God. And then you're right. I have to spend 30 minutes catching up on another brand new scandal that I wasn't ready for. But, yeah, I mean, this is a danger. I mean, the danger is that we become overwhelmed by the stories. There's a constant kind of fire hose of disinformation and fake stories and twisted versions of what just happened coming out of the White House and to some extent coming out of a part of the press. I mean, I think Fox you talk about people inside the White House, I think some of the reporting on Fox News bears some responsibility for some of this too. And there's a fire hose of stuff. It's very hard to sort through it and deal with it and think it through. And people will there the real danger is that people just give up and they'll say, well, God, this all stinks. This is terrible. I don't want anything to do with it. I hate politics. Get me away from here. I'd rather go sailing or I'd rather go for a walk. And this is a real danger. And this, by the way, is another thing that happens in authoritarian societies. People become apolitical. They say, right? I can't take this. This is all craziness. I can't listen to it. I'm going to retreat into my private world. And I think we may begin to see that, possibly begin to see that in the United States, too, actually. That is an impulse I felt myself. It's just there's something so seemingly ineffectual about keeping score day after day here. It's more of the same thing. And again, as you point out, it was all foreseeable. I know your time is short and I want to ask you a couple of quick questions. First, is there a danger here? I think we spoke about this last time, but it seems more pressing. Is there a danger in this narrow focus on collusion with the Russians, in the end exonerating Trump for things that he really should be held accountable for? Because it's quite possible, it seems likely that the worst about what is true of him and the administration may not, in fact, be illegal. And by narrowly focusing on collusion or appointing a special prosecutor when we could be doing something more broad, like an independent commission, we could actually just miss the actual target. Is that something you're thinking about? I've said it just now. I think that the worst aspects of the Trump Russia relationship are the ones that we know about. It may be that an investigation is going to find more, and it looks pretty clear just from what we already know, that there were at least informal contacts between some of his campaign staff and some people and various probably Russian PR companies, but also some Russian diplomats and others. But the worst aspect of it is his admiration for them, the fact that this is the society he likes the most. This is the country he doesn't criticize. This is the political leader who he feels, who he finds most appealing, who he just did this big favor for. He accepted his with his foreign minister. He tells them intimate stories while they're inside the Oval Office. That's the story. And that's not going to be plum. We don't need a special prosecutor to plum that we can see it. And what he finds appealing is this authoritarian style kleptocracy he wants to be like Putin, somebody who does business and does politics and makes money out of both. He admires that political system. He likes the brutality. He seems to even like the idea maybe getting rid of some journalists. Well, that's something he'd like to do, too. Of course, famously, Putin kills journalists. Not all of them, but he select ones have been murdered in mysterious ways in Russia. And this is open. This is the American president, and this is, by the way, somebody who knows very little about our own constitution and our own political system and indeed, our own history, as he's as we also know from from many things he's said over the last few months. But his goal, his you know, his his greatest admiration is for this kind of political system. And I think that's the biggest scandal. And that's the thing we should focus on. What kind of a person is this? There's no American tradition of admiring autocracy or trying to bring elements of it to the United States. This is new. But, Anne, is there anything we can do with that focus? So that is, for lack of a better word, a political liability for him as distinct from a criminal one. What can be done with that at this point? Can you impeach someone on the basis of their fondness for despots? Well, look, impeachment is you know, impeachment is political. I mean, at the end of the day, Trump will be impeached if enough Republicans feel that he's a political liability. Frankly, I think he's done things already that if the Congress was willing to do it, he could be impeached. I think the fact that he didn't give up control over his businesses, full control, is impeachable, because, as president, the Constitution says, you're not supposed to get emoluments, which can be interpreted in the modern sense. He shouldn't be getting any revenues from his foreign businesses, but he is. So if you want to do impeach him, you could do it now. So impeachment is going to be, if it happens, which it still may not, would be a political decision. So I think focusing on the deeper political problems and the implications of what kind of a person he is and how he's running the White House and attempting to propagate those and discuss those and help people to understand them, who don't seem to get it, which would be his supporters both in Congress and in the country. I don't think that's a lost cause at the end, if Congress wants to do it, they can do it. There's enough there already. The question is, what will motivate them? And I think they'll only be motivated by politics. Well, on that point, I have a question that may seem a little out of left field, but you know about the rumors that there's apprentice outtakes of Trump using the N word with an impressive lack of self consciousness and that these tapes were not leaked by Mark Burnett and others there based on some political calculus? I happen to know to a moral certainty that those tapes exist. Can't really say how I know that, but I'm willing to say this publicly I know they exist. So you can imagine something analogous to the Mark Furman tapes during the OJ trial. Would that be enough to move the dial? Or would that be just the same thing as the Billy Bush tape that didn't do anything? Look, it's hard for me to say because I think so much of what he said is disqualifying. The danger is that if you release those tapes, that you would have this counter reaction of people saying, oh, don't be so PC, or there's a part of his support that isn't going to care about that. I mean, that people, 60% of the country will be outraged if they're not already. And then there's a part who will once again reject it because it doesn't bother them. So I'm not sure that that would be the tipping point it might have been during the election, but hard for me to say now. The other tape is, by the way, that there are other kinds of tapes in other places. I know that this was a rumor that was unproven about Russian tapes, but Trump has been around for a long time doing discreditable things in many places, including a lot of countries ranging from, I don't know, Azerbaijan to Dubai to Turkey, places where he has investments. And in a lot of those places he will have been taped. And we don't know what's floating around out there. So there may be more eventually. So what do you think it's going to take? Because this is the thing that I find above all so depressing about what his existence is doing to American society. It's just uncanny to continually hear from Trump's defenders who seem completely oblivious to his flaws, no matter how awful you imagine Hillary Clinton to be and how much you wouldn't want her president. It seems to me that you have to admit that Trump is showing some signs of a dangerous unprofessionalism, at least. And so what do you make of the fact that there seems to be no path from where we are through the brains of Trump's defenders to an admission of what should be obvious that this person is unfit for office? What would he have to do, do you think, to actually turn the tide? Maybe a combination of promise is not kept, you may begin to get people disappointed with him. There's a little bit of that on the right, on the sort of far right that supports him. If you begin to get a different tone on the most important media sources, the television that people watch, which is mostly Fox, and the websites and Twitter feeds and others. That Trump supporters support. If you begin to get a different tone, you might be get you might get some change, but, you know, we're we're confronting something that others you know, this is a this is a kind of cult. It's not a normal political movement. People aren't moved to be part of it by argument. It's something to do with identity. These are people who they want to call themselves real Americans. That's why they use that expression. They've created almost an online tribe. Some countries have real tribes, and America now has online tribes. And the sort of online Trump tribe identify with one another, stick together, interpret the world in similar ways, and find some kind of there's some form of I don't know whether it's security or a feeling of being part of a gang or a crowd. Something that people are getting out of being inside that group and feeling themselves to be beleaguered by I don't know, by the mainstream media or by the elites. And they find some kind of new identity being part of this group. And so it's not really logical. And so all the logical, rational arguments that you could make are the ones that used to normally, we think, move people in politics aren't working because it's not a normal political movement. It's tribal and incidentally happening in other countries at the same time, too. I think it's one of the many unexpected side effects of the Internet and particularly of social media, is that people can now organize themselves differently online. And one of the things that happened is that people who feel the same way about Trump are all in a single group now, and they reinforce one another. It may be that to change them will have to be won't be rational arguments. It will be emotional things that happen. Or it may be, as I said, it may be change of tone of some of the leaders. It may be that you have to find out who the most influential Trump supporters are. But no, I don't have an instant answer for you. I think it's going to be very difficult because it isn't normal politics. It's interesting that any criticism of Trump is perceived by these people as mere partisanship, whereas it's so clearly not what many of us would pay to have Mitt Romney in the Oval Office. Well, even odder than that, it's not a choice anymore between Trump and Hillary. Hillary is not going to be president now. It's a choice between Trump and Mike Pence. Exactly. Whether or not you like Mike Pence, he's not childish, he's not a braggurt, he's not unstable, which the President is. This is what I don't understand about the Republicans. Isn't this the moment to say, right, we prefer Mike Pence? Yeah. Hillary is not an issue anymore. So that's the stranger question to me, just to spell that out so that it can't possibly be ignored. Everyone who is hoping for impeachment is hoping for President Pence. Now, given my job description, president Pence is a nightmare scenario. And yet he's so much to be preferred to Trump. He's a balanced person. I mean, he thinks logically. He connects events together. He doesn't have this bizarre thing that Trump has of not remembering from one day to the next what he said. And he doesn't seem to lie, at least not like Trump lies. He doesn't build his whole existence on completely false views of the world. In that sense, he's reassuring, but, I mean, there are other problems with him. But that's the choice. Now. Trump and Pence, not Trump and Hillary. No, I mean, he's got the background problem of real ideology. I view him as a kind of theocrat. His level of Christian fundamentalism is disconcerting, but it does come down to, as you say, it's temperament, it's personality. I mean, there's something wrong with Trump as a person, and this has been obvious for decades, and it's the reason why he got elected. In some sense, people love this about him. They love the grandiosity and the sense of his own competence in areas where he is so clearly incompetent. He can't even appreciate his incompetence. It may be that people like the entertainment. Look, national news has suddenly become a reality show. We crash from one bizarre story to the next each day, trying to figure it out. Practically, as you say, it's a full time occupation just to keep up with it. That's how people feel about soap operas or reality television. It's a pastime, and that might appeal to people. Well, let's hope we don't entertain ourselves to death. I agree with you. Yeah. Well, listen, thank you for the recap. I hope to never speak to you again on this subject. Let's have a better subject next time. Let's do something different next time. But somehow I think that's not on the cards. Keep it up. Anne, you're indispensable. Juliet, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Oh, it's my pleasure. I I think, although, given the subject matter, it's it's difficult times. But you are a woman who has met her moment, because it's just so much fun to see you on CNN. I mean, it seems like every time I turn on CNN, you're there and you're cutting through some partisan my asthma that is thrown up in defense of the indefensible. And there's this adorable moment I caught a few days ago, I think, which I don't know who you were talking to, but someone who was essentially, in defense of Trump playing the usual obscurantist game began to kind of interrupt you, and you said, no, no, don't interrupt me today. This is actually important. You're at the big boys table now. We all know how this game is played, but right now, the American people need to hear some facts, and I'm going to give them the facts. I appreciate this. When Trump won, for a lot of us who I care about public policy. I'm in safety and security, which obviously they're Democrats and Republicans, but we tend to be agree on more rather than less. A lot of us struggled with what's our role in this day and age, and some people hit the streets, which is great, and some people file lawsuits. And I took a little while to figure out sort of what lane would be helpful to people. And I appreciate you saying that, because maybe it's working, which is just I just sort of call out the BS quota, but also make it clear that a lot of this stuff really is significant. This is not a test. This is the real thing. And the actions by the President in what we're talking on a Wednesday really is only a ten day period, starting with the Salvia Yates hearing. It's just remarkable for its disruption to our norms. It's dissolution of respect for institutions and where it heads. I can't answer that. No one can answer that right now, but you can certainly talk about it. Well, I want to walk through all this, and again, we're talking about events that have moved really quickly, but I think we should start on this issue of partisanship, because there's something truly perverse about the allegation of partisanship that gets hurled against anyone who spots any sort of problem here with the President's behavior. My criticism of Trump from the beginning has been just about this. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, so it is all Coronavirus all the time now in my world. I'm actually going to be releasing two podcasts on Coronavirus this week. This has preempted the other things I have in the pipeline, as I think you know if you've been listening, I've been doing a series on nuclear war and I also of a podcast on child sexual abuse. The podcast seems to have taken a dark turn and I find that I cannot drop either of those podcasts into the current environment when we need to be thinking about Coronavirus and its resultant disease COVID-19. So I will try to find some good cheer for you at some point, but let's talk about the problem at hand. So this is the first of two podcasts I'll do this week. If everything holds together, I just want to say a couple of things up front, unless they get lost. I've been spending a fair amount of time focusing on this, as many of you have. I've been frankly alarmed by several encounters I've had with very smart people, both in person and online, which have revealed a mismatch between what I think is true and what many smart people believe. Here are a few statements which I think are true. COVID-19 is worse than the flu in every way. So comparisons with the flu are highly misleading. And it is not just bad if you catch it and you're over 70 or you're immunocompromised. There are healthy, fit people getting killed by this virus. Another point I want to make up front, which we make at some length in this podcast, is that even if we're all destined to catch this virus eventually, social distancing at this point is essential. So called flattening the curve is actually a very big deal, right? So just think about this. To get the worst flu in your life is bad. But to get it when the healthcare system has collapsed under the pressure of everyone else getting this flu is very different than getting it when hospitals are functioning normally and the only lever within reach right now in the absence of a vaccine, the only thing we can do is delay the spread of this by changing our behavior. So the time for hugging people and shaking hands is over. You are not being friendly by shaking someone's hand. In fact, you're being quite rude. You're advertising your obliviousness to the risk you're posing to others. And wherever you are on earth at the moment, if you can work from home, you should work from home. And this should be a company policy. If you have a company where some percentage of the work can be accomplished by telecommuting, you should implement that policy right now. And this is also true for schools. Stanford two days ago announced that all their classes would be moved online. Schools everywhere should implement that policy as quickly as they can. Now there's an obvious tradeoff between economic incentives and containing the spread of this disease. We should be privileging the latter. This is absolutely the time to avoid social gatherings and public transport as much as possible. And anyone who is taking his or her cues from President Trump at this point is dangerously out of contact with reality. Anyway, all of that and more will be made clear in this episode. And there's no paywall for this one, obviously. This is yet another public service announcement. Today I'm speaking with Nicholas Kristakis. Nicholas is an MD. PhD. And a professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab and is the co director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2006 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. And his New York Times bestselling book, which is just coming out in paperback, is Blueprint, which I've read and discussed before on this podcast with Nicholas, and I highly recommend it. And so here Nicholas and I cover this emerging epidemic. Now, certainly a pandemic from many sides, and again, whatever we don't cover here, if you have remaining questions, please direct them to me on Twitter, because I'll be recording another episode with a doctor from Johns Hopkins. As you know, things are changing very quickly here, but this conversation was a very good snapshot of what we knew on March 8. And now I bring you Nicholas Kristakis. I am here with Nicholas Kristakis. Nicholas, thanks for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. Sam, we are going to talk about Coronavirus, which is if you're in my particular bubble, it is all that anyone is thinking about it I don't know how wide that bubble extends. I'm noticing that it doesn't extend perfectly across the political spectrum on social media. I'm noticing many people who seem to be in Trumpistan thinking that this is much ado about nothing. And we'll talk about the political implications of this as well. But how much of your bandwidth is being taken up by Coronavirus at the moment? Well, a huge amount of my scientific bandwidth. Around January 25, I have a long standing collaboration with a group of scientists from Hong Kong who in turn are connected to some other scientists in China. And around January 24 or 25th, we started emailing about the situation there and what kind of work we might be able to do. And I began to think more deliberately about how I might turn my laboratory over to trying to help with the pandemic, which was for me at least, obviously going to happen. And I had done some research with the H one N One pandemic ten years ago related to using social networks as a way of forecasting the course of the epidemic. So I began to resurrect that work and some other work and began these new collaborations with my Chinese colleagues. And I haven't slept much, honestly, in the last month because we've been working nonstop on a number of fronts. My scientific bandwidth is totally devoted to that right now, although we have a few other projects going on and my personal bandwidth I'm concerned I'm monitoring the situation. Right. We should just remind people who you are. You've been on the podcast before. Last time we spoke about your wonderful book Blueprint, which I believe is just now coming out in paperback. Is that right? Yeah, by coincidence this week. Okay, cool. So people want to hear that podcast. It's in the archive. And I certainly encourage that people get the book. You have a great background for this conversation because you're an MD PhD. Who has also focused of late primarily on networks and the way really anything spreads in a network. Do you want to give a potted bio here to get us rolling? Well, you know, I have become obsessed over the last 15 years with the study of networks in general and of course there are networks of computers and networks of neurons and networks of genes and of course, networks of people. And it is through these networks that everything from germs to ideas to norms to behaviors spread. And they are not the only lens with which we can understand spreading processes, but they're very powerful and important lens. And right now we have, for example, what I would consider to be a dueling contagion between a biological contagion, namely the coronavirus which is spreading on this network from person to person to person. And in parallel with that, we have another set of social contagions which is, for example, ideas about whether people should be vaccinated or whether people should self isolate and those spread. Your probability of vaccinating depends on whether your friends get vaccinated, for example. So we have these parallel biological and sociological contagions and in some sense the fate of what happens in our country will depend in part not completely, but in part on who wins in those contagions. Yeah. Okay. So our goal here is to spread some good and useful contagious ideas. And I think before we dive into the details, I went out on Twitter asking for questions and suggested topics and I got close to a thousand responses so far, so oh my God. There's no want of interest here. But I think I should just mention that I see some obvious ways in which people can fail to absorb what we're saying in good faith here. And one variable is certainly political. I think that any criticism of the government's response to this crisis thus far will be interpreted by many, many people as both of us, or one of us certainly in my case, trying to score a partisan political point against the president. And I can just assure you, dear listener, this isn't the case. I've made no secret about how unfit I believe Trump is to be leading this country, and he has proven that to me in spades in the last few weeks. But everything I'm going to say at any point in this conversation that touches on what seems to be political obfuscation and general cluelessness from this administration, I would say, about any administration that was responding this way in the face of a clear public health emergency. Yeah, the virus is wholly apolitical, and I think there is a biology and a sociology and an epidemiology to the virus that doesn't really care what politicians say or do. And I think it's important to remember that we can speak about plain facts about the epidemiology of coronavirus, and doing so says nothing about our political leadership. Now, it is the case that the political leadership may also be failing, and that's a distinct topic. But merely discussing facts about the epidemic, it's not an indictment of the administration per se or discussing facts like the fact that the Trump administration cut the US pandemic response team in 2018 because they thought we didn't need it. And this is at best a short sighted view of reality. I mean, one of the most prescient and relevant things that's been said in recent weeks about this whole moment is that whether or not coronavirus is as bad as the most alarmed people think it is, or whether it might just be a dress rehearsal for some coming pandemic that really is as bad as people fear. Two things are true. One is we're failing the dress rehearsal to an impressive degree. I mean, we in particular the United States, and that should matter to us. And two, some pandemic, whether this is the one or not, is guaranteed to come. And Bill Gates made this point this is the most predictable emergency you could possibly name. This was guaranteed to happen. And if this isn't it, let's learn all the lessons we can from our missteps here. But this is a gift, courtesy of evolution, that we knew was coming. And the fact that we have an administration that seems to think that a pandemic response team is optional is pretty depressing. Well, I agree with much of that in the sense that I totally agree that the predictability of these pandemics and this can also be reassuring to listeners we have pandemics of viral pathogens, including in the category of coronaviruses, which is the category we're facing now. Every ten or 15 years, people will remember the SARS outbreak and the H one N one outbreaks of the last decade. We can talk about the ways in which this virus is different than those outbreaks. And people who've studied history know that there was a major global pandemic in 1918. So every century or so there's like a major pandemic like that in which the pathogen is both very deadly and very transmissible. And other times we have pathogens that are very transmissible and not so deadly. And those prove to be to burn out very quickly, like the pandemic in 2006, 2007 and other times, we have pandemics of diseases that are very deadly, but not so transmissible. For example, SARS. And then when the disease is too deadly, it actually works against itself. If it kills its victims, it doesn't transmit as much. So in a way, right now we have a disease that's moderately deadly and moderately transmissible and that could be quite a perfect storm. It could be a condition that is, let's say, in every 50 year event. But, but the main point is, is that these influenza, like influenza pandemics come every ten or 15 years and sometimes they fizzle out and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're very serious. And when they're very serious, they wreak havoc not only in terms of the health and people's lives, but they can wreak economic havoc as well, which is another thing that many observers are beginning to be concerned about. Yeah, and there really is a tension between the focus on the epidemiology and the straightforward health concerns and this other concern about the economics and the social implications of people not going to restaurants and closing schools and all the rest. Those are the first order effects. The travel industry is being devastated even as we speak, and it's unclear how long that will last. But then we'll begin to have second order effects. So breakdowns in the supply chain and factories not working. And if those things begin to happen, this epidemic could tip us into a significant recession. But that's another whole thing. And it's still a little bit early to forecast that and be certain about that. But it is the case that major epidemics, for example, the 1918 epidemic pandemic, definitely played a role in the global depression. So I think it's too early to know that for sure. But it's not crazy to think about the economic implications. And incidentally, incidentally on the economic issue, and I'm no expert on this, this is not a demand shock. This is a supply, potentially a supply shock. So a demand shock is, you know, when when a recession due to declining demand and then a stimulus might work, for example, dropping interest rates as the Fed recently did. But a supply shock is more like the Arab oil crisis of the 1970s that many listeners may remember. And that's when you have a shock to the supply on the supply side and there lowering interest rates doesn't really help. So if for the sake of argument, you begin to get disruption in the global supply chain, this could be a very difficult thing to address until you get the factories working, producing the goods and distributing them. It's too early to know for sure what's going to happen in that regard. But I know that many sophisticated observers of this, including many economists and many extremely wealthy individuals who are tracking this, are unsure still what's going to happen. Except the one thing we can be sure about here is that on the economic side, I mean unsure. Yeah, no, but we can be sure that the incentives aren't aligned here. And this is what has been worrying me for now at least, I would say two weeks, the moment I recognize that the health incentives, you know, the reasons, say, to close schools seemed fairly straightforward, and yet the economic reasons to keep them open were incredibly powerful and pointing in the opposite direction. And my concern is that because the economic incentives are so powerful, they just take school closure as one variable. The fact that, you know, once you close the schools, then you have almost every working adult faced with the problem of what to do with their children. How do you get to work? How do you care for your children? Do you home school them? Does that cut the workforce, you know, more or less in half? I mean, this is just a huge hassle with economic implications. And so the the reasons not to have the epiphany that we should close the schools yesterday are legion. And yet the health wisdom of closing the schools has been fairly obvious for some time. We're going to get to lots of specific questions in a minute, but let's just touch this topic of school closure just to give a sense of the problem in microcosm. What are your thoughts on that? Well, first of all, with school closures, we have to make a distinction between reactive and proactive school closures. So let's talk first about reactive school closures. A reactive school closure is a school closure in which there's a case at the school, and when that happens, typically everyone is alarmed and is quite eager and willing to close the school. It sort of makes sense to the man on the street or the woman on the street that, well, there's an epidemic raging and there's a case at the school and we should close the school. The problem is, by the time you do reactive school closures, many, many analyses show that it doesn't delay the overall epidemic or it doesn't help the overall epidemic very much. For example, an analysis of reactive school closures in the last influenza epidemic in Italy showed that a policy of reactive school closures, I think, reduced the epidemic by like, 24% or 25%, the ultimate number of people afflicted, which is good, but not as good as you might want. So you can postpone the peak of the epidemic in your community and reduce the number of people ultimately infected if you close schools once someone gets sick in the school. Similar analysis done in Japan found basically the same conclusions and modeling exercises, sort of mathematical models, sophisticated models, including a paper published in the journal Nature in 2006 also found that a policy of reactive school closure delayed I'm just going to look the numbers up because I have them somewhere here. For a moderately transmissible disease reduced the cumulative attack rate by about 24% and delayed the peak by about 13 days. So the models and the empirical results of prior school closures in Japan and Italy, which is the literature I'm familiar with, I'm sure there's an even vaster literature on this suggest that reactive school closures help. But the real problem or the real dilemmas is whether we should have proactive school closures. And this is a much more difficult decision, but from my eye, something we should be doing, frankly. And the reason is that if you imagine you're in a let's not pick a major. Let's not pick New York or Miami yet, because that's another whole kettle of fish. Let's pick a midsized town. For the sake of argument, if you believe that the moment someone in your school is going to the moment someone if you believe that the moment someone in your school gets sick, you are going to close the school probably what you really should do is the moment someone gets sick in your community or in what is known as the epidemiologically relevant region. So if you believe that if you believe that the moment someone gets sick in the epidemiologically relevant region. You know your town, you're going to then it eventually will afflict your school. Then the more rational policy is as soon as someone gets sick in your community, shut the school. Why not get you're going to shut it anyway in a week because your school is going to be afflicted. But if you jump the gun and shut it, you actually might radically improve the course of the epidemic in your community. And there is actually amazing evidence about this. Again, just to crystallize the point, let's say you set some threshold, and we can discuss what the threshold is. Some number of cases in some specified area in your town or in an adjoining town, or a case that you know is not an imported case. It's not like someone flew from Italy to your town and presented with the disease. But instead you find what is known as a community transmission, someone who has the disease and you don't know where they got it. That means the disease is loose in your community. If you set as a threshold one such case or two such cases in your town or in a nearby town, you could then proactively close your school, and then you would have much bigger benefit than the reactive closure. And there was a wonderful analysis that was done of 43 cities in the United States during the 1918 epidemic, which very carefully examined across these cities, when did they close their schools with respect to the pace of the epidemic and for how long were they closed? And it found, for example, if you use as a threshold how far in advance of the epidemic reaching, if you create the standard of you have twice the level of respiratory deaths, as you usually have in prior years, you have excess deaths. How far in advance of hitting that twice the amount level did you close your schools? It found that actually districts that closed their schools in advance proactively had dramatically lower death rates in the end. And so, for example, there's a comparison between St. Louis and Pittsburgh. St. Louis closed the schools in the 1918 influenza pandemic earlier and longer, and it had less than half the death rate of Pittsburgh, for example. Ultimately, many fewer people died. This is the issue and this is what's hard. But in general, my own bias, my own opinion is that proactive school closures make sense. Yeah, I completely agree with you there. And there's one meme being spread which is perhaps entirely factual, but I would argue misinterpreted, that is giving people comfort around this idea that we can just keep the schools humming along, this idea that kids aren't getting this, or if they're getting it, they're not getting a bad case of it. And that's great. That seems to be true thus far, but it also seems true that they could still carry it and pass it to the rest of the community. So your kid is coming home from school and hugging grandma and correct. This is a very different disease when grandma gets it. That's exactly right. And in fact, it is the case that everything we just said about school closure is especially important when kids themselves might die. But the requirement that the kids be sick is not the critical point. Schools are areas of congregation of large numbers of people, including all the adults, the parents at the drop offs, the teachers and the kids are little vectors. Incidentally, as long as we're talking about how does school closure work, one of the ironies about one of the ways that school closures work paradoxically is precisely because they compel adults to stay home, right? So modelers that have modeled this have said, okay, what happens when we require the kids to stay home? So we reduce social clumping in our society because we're requiring the kids to stay home. But let's assume that 10% of the parents or 50% of the parents or 90% of the parents are staying home as a result of the school closure. And it and unsurprisingly, that also has a further effect, the number of parents that stay home. Right. And so much of this is psychological. I mean, just take that fact I just mentioned that some comfort is being taken in this idea that this is not preferentially targeting kids, rather it's targeting old people. But if you flip that around, if this were a flu that had an inordinately high mortality rate that was targeting kids preferentially, well, we would have closed the schools already. I don't think we would be debating school closure. Well, we might. Yes, we might have, but there's another kind of moral issue here. You're right. That very good data we now have on the mortality rate and how it varies by age. So young people, one study of 5000 Koreans shows that basically nobody under the age of 30 afflicted with the condition died in that study. And another study of 44,000 Chinese I think showed a case fatality ratio of 0.2%. So two out of 1000 young people might die. Now that's still a bad, I mean that's a high risk of death for a young person but the number rises quite dramatically. So by middle age it's one to 2% of people die and by over the age 80 it's let's say roughly 20% of people die. So yes, you're correctly summarizing the situation. But one of the things that's distressed me in reading all this is that I too, like most people, would prefer that the young be spared and the old be afflicted. But the old are members of our society too. There are our neighbors, there are parents, there are teachers. I hate this idea that oh well, it's just like afflicting old people, who cares? It's ridiculous. These are human beings. This is again a situation in which we can talk about the epidemiology of the condition but I don't think we should lose sight of what's happening which is that people will die from this condition. Right, well, let's tackle another meme here which seems to be doing an inordinate amount of work in people's reaction to this and it does seem at this point frankly misleading, which is the idea that this is essentially just like the flu. Here are some of the factoids that come in this cluster. One is 50,000 people die every year in the United States from flu. In 2018 it was something like 80,000 which I think is the worst year in recent memory. So comparatively only about 4000 people, just nearly 4000 people have died worldwide from coronavirus thus far. This really is a tempest in a teapot. If we were tracking the flu with the same paranoia that we're tracking this well then we would be alarmed every day of our lives. And then also there's the fact that though the mortality rate of this seems higher than the flu, it also seems clear that we're not testing widely enough to know what the actual denominator is to properly calculate the case fatality rate. So it's been reported that it's as high as three and a half percent. No, it won't be that high. But then there are estimates, it seems like the most sober estimates are more like half that between one and 2%. But there seems to be the expectation on the part of many people that at the end of the day we're going to recognize this is just another flu essentially running in parallel with the flu that we deal with year after year and nobody freaks out about it, nobody closes the schools. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that's all wrong and I can explain why. So first of all let me back up and say a couple of things, a bunch of things. First of all, if I told you that motor vehicle accidents were leading killer in our society and they are, about 35,000 people die of motor vehicle accidents every year and our society is very gravely concerned about these deaths. We invest huge resources in improving the safety of our roads and cars. We have enormous campaigns and penalties for people who drive under the influence. We cry and are sad when we read about motor vehicle deaths and the public health community and our government and the people on the street expend enormous resources and attention in driving down one of these leading killers in our society. If I told you that I could wave a magic wand and remove that cause of death tomorrow, many people would be amazed and excited and incredibly proud. Well right now we are in the midst of adding such a cause of death. In the case of the coronavirus, that is to say our best estimates, the most optimistic estimate is that only 35,000 Americans are going to die of this condition. So we've just added a whole other extra cause of death to the list of things that kill us right now in our society. So I just don't see the reason for nonchalante or optimism with respect to a new condition, a new killer that might kill us. Imagine if instead of being quote something that sounded so benign as influenza or the flu, imagine instead if I said it was ebola. Imagine the panic that people would feel if I said we now have Ebola loose in our country killing 35,000 people. So I totally reject that. Furthermore, there is a wide range of estimates as to how many people will get infected and or die. And this is still we're in early days and it's difficult and it's difficult for people, for it's difficult for me. Just I'll speak for myself because I don't want to be alarmist, you know. And I don't want to overestimate it and then have people call me to task and say oh, you were Chicken Little and you were an alarmist. And then maybe lose some credibility, let's say. On the other hand I don't want to minimize it and underestimate it. And then people say why didn't you warn us? Why didn't you tell us? You should have been in a position to know. You've you've been studying this topic and related topics for so long and of course there's only going to be one outcome. It's not like I'm making 1000 predictions and on average I'm correct or other experts who are in similarly situated as I am. There's going to be one outcome. And so we we have to speak in terms of a range of outcomes. So at the most optimistic end I think we'll have over a million Americans infected with this pathogen and perhaps 35,000. Dead. But that's just at the most optimistic end. The much more likely scenarios, or equally likely or other possible scenarios move up the range. So, for example, Mark Lipschitz, a very famous epidemiologist at Harvard, who's an expert in this area, estimates, and he's revising his estimates as more data comes in. But he estimates, as of last week, that perhaps 20% to 60% of Americans will ultimately, over the course of a year, be infected with this pathogen. And if we use the lower bound of his current estimate, 20%, that means 60 million Americans will be infected. And if we use a lower bound of the case fatality ratio, which is 0.5%, that means 300,000 Americans are going to die of this condition. And that is like one of the top three killers in the United States. So and that's within the realm of the possible. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but I'm saying we need to sit up and pay attention, because that is possible. It's not an extremely unlikely event and it could even be worse than that, honestly. Now, I don't think if you forced me to predict do I think 300,000 Americans, it seems so inconceivable to me. But look what's happening in Italy. 16 million Italians are now under lockdown, their hospitals are full to the brim. What makes us think we're so special? We think we're different than the Italians or than the Chinese. We're not so well know the truth. The truth is we are different from the Chinese. And this is another meme that is doing some mad work in the brains of otherwise very smart people. I even saw a Stanford doctor reference China as a source of optimism. And China has the spread of the disease has been fairly well contained, it seems, at the moment. It's, you know, the fatalities are dropping off and so far as we can trust the information coming out of China. But that's true. Yeah, it it seems to be true. But what is also true is that China just executed the most draconian quarantine, perhaps in human history. And we are not poised to be poised to do anything like that, ever. Yes, I'm I'm actively writing about just that. And according to the New York Times reports, 700 million Chinese have been under some form of house arrest, basically since January the 25th. So these people are basically homebound. And that's extraordinary. That's just an extraordinary intervention. And it is the case the Chinese have driven, miraculously driven their cases, down to about 100 a day, which is unbelievable in the whole nation. But it's through the imposition of such a cordon sanitaire, technically, it's not a quarantine. A quarantine is when you put sick people in quarantine. When you put healthy and sick people, it's a cordon, sunny terror, which is what they've done. Right. So the lesson to draw from that, it seems to me that we can draw no real comfort from that, because not reproducible, something miraculous would have to happen in our society for us to emulate that in any way. And again, it seems the kind of thing that need not be accomplished at the point of a rifle, as in China. But the idea that we're going to accomplish it just by getting it into our thick heads that we should practice social distancing to that degree, it seems very farfetched. So what we should anticipate is a much freer spread of this contagion in our society. Yeah. Yes. Although, and we'll come back to this, I'm sure, what can people do? And I absolutely think Americans should be practicing social distancing on Twitter. I've been talking about this for quite a while sensible policies of not engaging in any nonessential travel, not going to meetings, washing your hands, not hugging or instead bowing or doing the Masay or something, not touching people handshaking, which is very instinctive in our society. These are all basic things all Americans, in my view, should be implementing now. And the reason we do this incidentally, just to be very clear, it's not just so that you don't get sick when we do these things, we interrupt the contagion change chains that flow through the network. In other words, we're stopping the virus in its tracks by interrupting the means with which it spreads from person to person. So the reason I don't shake your hand is not just so that I don't get sick, but that in not having shaken your hand, I block all paths of the virus from you to anyone else I might meet in the future. And that's extremely effective. And social distancing repeatedly has been shown to be an effective so called non pharmaceutical intervention. But I want to tackle one other thing which relates to perhaps another meme on your list. I don't know, which is this claim that the Trump administration's cessation of international flights was effective. And this has been studied for an extremely long time by scientists of all stripes. And just to quote one analysis, typically countries are not aware of the emergence of a pandemic until, let's say, the 30th day of the disease, which is, again, roughly what happened in this country with this coronavirus epidemic. By the time the disease emerges in Wuhan around late December, it's spreading throughout the district, in the prefecture in Hubei for at least a month or so. And before, let's say we say we're no more flights from China or something. But again, here, economics weighs against it. People are reluctant to do this. But the point is that it's been studied repeatedly. How effective is cessation of international flights on day 30 of a pandemic? And I'll just read you some numbers. So if you stop 90% of the flights on day 30 of a pandemic, you delay the peak in the epidemic in your country by about ten or twelve days. If you stop 99% of the flights, you delay the peak of your epidemic by, let's say, 26 days. And if you stop 99.9% of the flights, you only have one out of 1000 flights still coming into the country. You only delay the peak by 42 days. Now, that's good. Delaying the peak is good, but it's not this panacea that, oh, we're going to stop the thing at our border because it's still going to come to us. Either it already came to us by the time we stopped the flights and it's now brewing, or we cannot totally hermetically seal our country. So it's going to afflict us. So this fantasy that we can somehow, in an age of pandemics, stop them at our border is not justified by the epidemiological modeling. Right. Well, let me just say in defense of Trump that's the one decision or one utterance attributable to him that I don't fault him for, I mean, it seemed like it was worth a shot. Why not try to delay it that way if you can? But, yeah, I take all your earlier. Yes, but earlier we were talking about how economic considerations might lead us to not close down schools. But here, economic considerations do not lead us to abandon the effort to stop flights, and yet the school stoppage is known to be effective, whereas the flight stoppage is known not to be effective. Yeah, no, point taken. I mean, I think we should be firing on all cylinders here. But let's talk about the timeline for a second because I want to just get our bearings here, and it's interesting to consider my own psychological timeline as these events unfold. So, as you said, at the end of December, actually, December 31, the World Health Organization reported that there was this mysterious pneumonia in China that seemed to be associated with the Wuhan live animal market. Perhaps we can just cut through all political partisanship here and agree that eating bats and Pangolins is a bad idea. Can we agree on that? We don't think people were eating bats. We do think they were eating pangolins. Pangolin thing is still a little bit on. Well, first of all, yes, I don't think we should be eating those things. Correct. But just to be clear for your listeners, it's not necessarily the case that people were eating those animals. It seems like it's still a little bit unclear that the virus spent part of its time in Pangolins, although to my knowledge, that's still not been resolved. But it's fairly clear that it originated in bats. And this is also a bit of a mystery. Like, even in the movie Contagion, the disease begins in a bat that drops some spit on a pig, I think is sort of what is set up in that movie. But one speculation is that the immune system of bats may be very similar to the immune system of humans. After all, bats are mammals. And that when viruses adjust to the immune systems of bats. When they then somehow leap to us. They're already well adjusted to infect us, right? That's a theory. So all of you who are against cultural appropriation, I think I'm with you here. This is culture that we should not appropriate. So okay, back to a timeline here. January 11, China announced the first death in Wuhan. And then January 21, we had the first confirmed case in the US. There was a man in his thirty s, I believe, who actually traveled from Wuhan and came ashore here. So that was ten days after we heard about the first death. Genetic studies, now reconstruction using genetic phyodynamics are suggesting that there was some transit. And this goes back to the stopping the air travel example we were discussing, that we can use the genetics of the cases in Seattle and know what we know about mutation rates to reason backwards and discern how many introductions were there into Seattle. And roughly when my understanding of the status of that science right now is that roughly in the middle of January, someone came from Wuhan to Seattle, and then the disease started having what we call community spread. That person, we don't know who they are, but the disease was then transmitted to other people and then still to others, and then eventually the epidemic broke a couple of weeks ago. And so by January 30, the World Health Organization had declared a global health emergency, which they've only done six times since 1948. So January 30 is when those people whose job it is to keep watch over these things decided that this thing was going global and we had to worry about it. Now, then it seems like we had at least a month. Some people would say we had two full months, but we had at least a month here to get our bearings and prepare, assuming that community spread was already happening, and that things like school closure would be were things we need to think about. And now I have a couple of timelines here. I have a timeline of Trumpian insights. At the end of February, february 24, trump announced that the coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. And then he said, crying Chuck Schumer is complaining for publicity purposes only, that I should be asking for more money than 2.5 billion to prepare for coronavirus. And it was just absolutely transparent layer of political obfuscation and messaging essentially to the stock market rather than providing real information about this virus. February 26, we had the first case of community transmission in the US. That was acknowledged. I'm sure it happened before that, but this is when we were talking about it. And on that same day we've got Trump saying, I don't think it's going to come to closing the schools, especially the fact that we're going down, meaning that the rates of transmission and death are going down, not up. And then this is more of a quote we're going very substantially down, not up. We have it so well under control. I mean, we've really done a very good job. Yeah, that's just really irresponsible. I mean, it's a lie. That's a lie. It's not true, and it's really irresponsible. Yeah. Okay, so that's two things irresponsible. Not doing anything or not doing enough is irresponsible, and then misrepresenting the situation is irresponsible. Right. Yeah. So this is where I come to my own psychological timeline, because it's been fascinating for me to kind of watch my own mind here and watch my sense of the situation change and cease to second guess my emotional reaction to it. And so I actually went back and looked at my emails and texts over the last few weeks, so I can see that on February 22, I was thinking about canceling some upcoming trips and still feeling fairly crazy about even thinking that way. And by February 27, five days later, I had canceled everything. Right. And so and so that was exactly ten days ago. We're recording now on on March 8. So, for instance, ten days ago, tim Ferriss and I, who we were both supposed to speak at south by Southwest, he was going to interview me for an episode of his podcast. He and I decided to pull out of the conference. And it was widely perceived at that moment, again, just ten days ago, to be slightly paranoid. And it was perceived among my circle of friends to be slightly paranoid. Sam is being alarmistic. Yeah, exactly. And yet eight days later that is two days ago, the whole conference got canceled. Yes. So I've been watching this unfold, and I've been feeling more or less a week ahead of where everybody is, or at least most of the people who I'm communicating with and most of what society is mirroring back to me and way ahead of where the president is. On March 2, Trump said, we had a great meeting today with a lot of great companies, and we're going to have vaccines, I think, relatively soon. Okay, so he's promising a vaccine soon, whereas the only rational promise is that maybe by the first quarter of next year. What's the most aggressive timeline that we could have? A widely distributed vaccine, I would say 18 months. And we don't have any other vaccines against coronaviruses. Right. I mean, the common cold is a coronavirus. If we could stop the common cold, people would make billions of dollars for a common cold vaccine. You think that pharmaceutical companies haven't been trying? I'm sorry. The common cold is many viruses. There are some 25%. Okay, so I've heard that the most optimistic timeline is a year from now. Yeah. And it probably will be some kind of inactive virus vaccine that we'll have. So there are difficulties. There's a lot of steps involved in being able to produce such a vaccine. That's correct. Right. So Trump, again, six days ago, is saying there's only one hotspot. And that's pretty much in a home, as you know, in a nursing home. But this is obviously a point after which the CDC had already announced community spread in Oregon and California at least, it's just useful to keep reiterating how unreliable the administration's talking points have been. So here again, six days ago we have Trump saying, so if we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better by just sitting around or even going to work, some even go to work, but they get better, right? I mean, this is Trump talking so sloppily. I believe this was an interview on Fox that it seemed like he was saying that it was OK to go to work even if you have this virus, right? Yes. Which is the wrong right? And then the final this was truly fantastic, Oracle. On March 6, just a few days ago, we have him at the CDC wearing a Keep America Great hat, and he's saying things like, I love this stuff, I really get it. People are really surprised I understand this stuff. Every one of these doctors said, how do you know so much about this? Maybe I have a natural ability. Now, pause for a moment and this is maybe rightly perceived as point scoring against the President, but just pause for a moment to reflect on the fact that it is extraordinarily unlikely that even a single doctor said anything like that to him. He's standing in front of all these doctors, almost certainly lying about what they said to him in the middle of a press conference. But even if they sycophantously said something like that to him, the real problem is the narcissism in believing that. For example, when I take my I know a lot about certain things and I know what I don't know, especially in my field. I'm extremely aware of my ignorance in my own field, but there are things I know about. But when I take my car to the mechanic or when I need to have thyroid surgery, I trust those people. Like, I don't think I know more about how to fix a car than my mechanic. That would be just the height of arrogance and presumption. Or when I go to my surgeon, I said, what do you think we should do? And I trust that that person has devoted their life to acquiring this expertise. And that's the whole reason I'm going to an expert. So the idea that President Trump, who may be a skilled businessman and maybe a skilled politician, that he would think that he knows as much about epidemiology as the people at the CDC, the real problem there is the narcissism in this individual, not even what the sycophantic behavior that may have led him to that conclusion. So it's astonishing to me that someone would and I think this is a broader problem in our society right now, both on the far right and on the far left this sort of denigration of expertise, this idea that the right doesn't trust experts because they want to think that everything is a political decision. And the far left actually feels similarly, actually about experts. They don't like the hierarchy. They don't like the idea that someone knows more than you do. But this is absurd. Our society is some of the best scientists, if not the best scientists in the world. We feel we have the best soldiers in the world. Aren't those guys experts at doing battle? We feel we have all these people that are really terrific. We feel we have the least corrupt judges in the world. We have expert judges. You pit. We think we're great at it. Are we really going to throw that out? Are we really going to think that there's nothing to say about the role of expertise? I think that's well, I think that's just misguided. I think this is a moment where most people are going to acquire a taste for expertise because healthy respect for expertise. Yes, we're waiting for experts to produce a vaccine for this thing. Yes, correct. That's right. Joe Schmo is not going to be producing a vaccine in his garage, I can assure you. Like that religious figure I'm blocking his name that was saying that he was literally hawking some kind of substance that would cure coronavirus, he said. And it was like that awful character and contagion that was selling forsythia. This is the thing. The analogy to a movie is disconcerting here because this is playing out a bit like a movie. I mean, you can feel like at several points here along the way, I felt like, okay, I'm the guy in the first act of the movie who's having an inappropriately sanguine response to facts. That should be fairly alarming. Yes. And it's still who knows what part of the movie we're in here, but it's a disconcerting comparison. So anyways, so the last thing that Trump said at this press conference, which was truly appalling, was, anybody who needs a test gets a test. Anybody that needs a test as of right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test can get one. Now, he was saying that at the moment when the most glaring feature of this crisis was the utter failure of the government to provide tests at scale. Right. So I think there'd been something like 2000 tests performed in the country at that point. And the CDC wasn't even answering the questions from the press about how many tests had been performed. I mean, that had to be reconstructed by asking everyone at the state level what had happened. So perhaps people who only follow the president and his Twitter feed and watch Fox News can be forgiven for not understanding what the situation really is. But we have to break out of this political bubble and just encounter the facts here insofar as we can understand them. And I've had a slightly weird angle on just what we were not finding out about this in real time. Because I'm in Los Angeles, you know, for the longest time, the number of cases in La. According to the Johns Hopkins website, were reported to be at seven. But I happen to know a person who was skiing in Italy with five friends, and they all got it, and they all got on a plane and probably infected half the plane, and they got back here, and now at least two of them are hospitalized. I only know one member of this group. He's not a close friend, but he's a very close friend of a very close friend. So I have a very close friend talking to his very close friend on a daily basis who has this thing. Who's and this is at a moment where I'm hearing that there's seven cases in Los Angeles, and apparently I know five of them. That seems very unlikely. We're also hearing that this thing is in reasonably healthy people, you know, people who are not immunocompromised or people who are not 80 years old. This is just like the flu. Well, this friend of a friend is now hospitalized and on a ventilator, and his other friend is hospitalized and in an induced coma, I think, because the coughing associated with it was so bad. And so, again, I'm well aware that these are two anecdotes, and this is not really data, but from this sort of ground level experience of just hearing these stories once removed, this isn't seeming like an ordinary flu. I mean, these guys are both extreme skiers. They're fit and 50 years old. They're not in the cohort that you'd think would be on death's door associated with a flu. And so let's just linger on this claim that, honestly, I've heard this from doctors in social situations. I had a doctor say to me, well, maybe we should just all get this thing. We're going to get it anyway, and we'll be fine. You're fit, Sam. You'll be fine. What do you say to this notion that this is basically the flu? Well, it's not the flu. We know it's not the flu. We know it's more severe than the flu, first of all. Second, I've been thinking about this issue, which is like, if you're going to get it anyway, is it better to get it sooner rather than later? And it's definitely better to get it later because this relates to another topic which I can't remember if we've discussed already, but I've been talking about this notion of flattening the epidemic. Imagine that you have a pulse of disease that's hitting our society so that a million people are going to get sick. Those million people could get sick in a very peaked way, like over the course of a month. But if we implement social distancing and other procedures like school closures and we flatten the epidemic so we still get a million people sick, but now they're sick over six months so that we have a smaller number of cases on any given day. It decompresses the demand on our health care system and on our supply chain so that we can actually cope with the people who are sick and need ventilation. So flattening the epidemic is a really important fundamental idea in epidemiology, which is one of the reasons we engage in what is called non pharmaceutical interventions like social distancing and school closures and all of that stuff. That's why we need to do it to flatten the epidemic, so that if anyone gets sick, they get sick. Fewer people are sick in any given day. And we push the cases out into the future so that some fraction of those cases occur at a time in which we've discovered perhaps some drugs that could treat the disease or have a vaccine available. So we never get those cases because we postponed them so far. So there are many benefits to flattening the epidemic. Now. When you flatten the epidemic, it's also the case that the people at the beginning, they also aren't putting heavy demands on the healthcare system. So maybe if you're going to get it, if you get it sick sooner, that might be a sensible strategy. But actually neither from the individual nor from the collective point of view have I been able to discern any wisdom in that because first of all, you might not actually get sick anyway, so rushing to get sick now is sort of stupid. Not everyone is going to get the disease. And second, if from a public health point of view, if you encourage people to get sick now, you might actually compress the epidemic, you're going to create a pulse upon a pulse of disease. No, I don't agree with your friend for multiple reasons in what they said. Just to be clear, a disease that has a five or ten or 15 or 20 x higher mortality rate than the flu is very unlikely to be just like the flu. Yes. And we haven't seen this pathogen before. It's a new pathogen for us. Right. And there's a whole other just a telegraph there's a whole other debate about whether typically these pathogens mutate and get milder as they adapt to our species and as we fight it off, also they tend to kill off the more vulnerable members of our species to this pathogen. It's all very sad and clinical, honestly, but we also have to recognize they're likely likely to be waves of this condition. So we're right now at the beginning of the first wave of COVID-19, but probably we're going to see a second wave and even a third wave perhaps. And that's very common for these types of pathogens. Yeah. So I just want to reiterate the point that you just made. But I just don't want it to get lost because it's probably the most important point here, which is, even if we're all destined to get this thing, or even if 75% of us are destined to get it, getting it later is absolutely better when you consider the implications for our healthcare system. Yes. Because here are just the numbers. And we have something like a million hospital beds speaking now about the United States. There's something like 2.5 beds for every 1000 people, 2.8 in our country. Just to put some numbers in perspective. In Japan, it's like 13.8 beds per 1000 people. Right. So we have bed capacity that's much lower than many other countries. Australia has more beds than we do. We have about as many beds as England does per capita. But we don't have a great number of beds per capita. That's correct. Right. And so just imagine in a situation where everyone gets this more or less all at once, it's just a tsunami of illness. You have the breakdown of the healthcare system. You have forget about just the lack of beds. You have doctors and nurses also getting sick right. And unable to work. Yes, and that's also true. And we can look to China for what the healthcare professionals in Wuhan have been doing. And I have friends there, or friends of friends there, let's say, or have reports from there via indirectly. And it's unbelievable what those doctors, they've been working around the clock, taking great personal risks. Many of them have died and they're exhausted. So it's serious. And if you even look at Seattle right now, there is concerns in Seattle, they're going to run out of medical supplies to care for their patients there. We have a regional sharing system set up in our society so that if a hospital has a crisis and needs many dialysis machines or respirators, they can be loaned regionally. But when you have a pandemic situation where they're needed everywhere, we don't have the excess capacity for, for example, respirators. So it's a very serious situation we're facing. And I hope, I pray, that we do not run out of respirators in our society. But we need to consider the possibility we do that we don't have enough of them. And the fact that we are in that situation is alarming. Yeah. So let's talk practically about what people can do and what is likely to await us in the future. It was just a few more questions about the disease or about the virus. This is some questions we've gotten from Twitter. I'm on Twitter, obviously, and I follow other people. And I've been trying to send out rational information for weeks now to help people. Part of me, as I noticed the breakdown, I noticed this interesting phenomenon which many of my scientific colleagues have been sort of stepping up. Like earlier, we talked about how they're redirecting their laboratories to see how they could help the nation. But I've also noticed that many people are tweeting out more information, and I think they're trying to. Fill the vacuum, the lack of information or the spread of lies. So for weeks now, I've been trying to send out the most precise, scientifically accurate information that I can, partly to help educate the public about different things like social distancing. Like, why does hand washing work? Like, what's the latency period for the virus? How does it spread? What are reservoirs of the virus? What about school closures? These are all topics that I think the American public needs to be educated about. Yeah. Okay. So what about the prospect of acquiring immunity for this once you have it? Yeah, I think there was some concerns that people could be reinfected. The best data that I've seen so far suggest that that either doesn't occur or it's extremely unlikely. That is to say, once you're infected and recover, you have immunity for some period of time, at least a few months, probably a few years. That's still not fully known. But the fears that you could be reinfected rapidly, and there have been some case reports of this. Those case reports were probably false negative tests. So in other words, you had the condition, you had positive tests, then you had a negative test. We think, oh, you're cured, and then you have a positive test afterwards. Probably what happened is that negative test was a false negative. Not that you were reinfected. Right. I mean, even the fact that we're doing this podcast is a noble or makes me happy, because I think you have, like, a million listeners or some huge number of people, and you could think of it as a public service to try to get out some basically accurate information. I hope people listening to this will think, what's the harm in my engaging in social distancing? I could do it for a week or two or three if it turns out that the epidemic fizzles out, oh, I you know, I just didn't shake people's hands for a week and canceled a few meetings. On the other hand, if it turns out the epidemic is is is large, I've done some stuff to protect myself, and I've made a contribution to the well being of our society. When you social distance, when you engage in these basic practices, you are interrupting the flow of the pathogen through our society. You are part of a super organism. I argue this in my book. You're part of a collective that's engaged in a battle with this virus, and you're doing your part. Let's put a fine point on that recommendation, because this is advice that I have taken as of two days ago. So we decided to pull our girls out of school on Friday. So spring break is not for three more weeks, but we're starting now, and we're going to home school them and just to wait and see what happens. Right. Because it just seemed like, yeah, the school was the weak link in our world, and we have at least one person in our family who's got chronic lung disease who really can't afford to get this virus. So we decided we're just going to pull up the drawbridge, and we're now going to practice fairly extreme social distancing. I mean, we're not going to restaurants. I cut all travel. The Ted conference is probably going to get canceled anyway. But on the 27 February, I pulled out of everything I was supposed to do, and we're just going to lie low, but I'm half expecting this is going to be a fairly long experiment in social distancing. I mean, I I'm wondering whether I just pulled my girls out of school for the rest of the year here, but it's hard to know for sure. But let me let me do a thought experiment with you. If in fact your girls were going to be pulled out of the school for the whole year, you've just added a couple of weeks to pulling them out. And those weeks may have been the wisest weeks in the whole period. Right? Yeah. So I've been following your tweets and I took them to heart, and frankly, I felt a little late. And the only thing standing between me and doing it several days earlier was just a sense of social stigma. It's like I didn't want to be the first. Yeah, and you don't want to be alarmist. Right. You don't want to be like but that's the problem. These are type one, type two error. Yeah, but everyone's feeling some version of that. Yes, they're feeling paranoid and yet ineffectual even when they're taking steps which seem fairly extreme. But what I want to emphasize is that it's, like so much else in our society, has become polarized and dichotomized. And people think you either people think in terms of dichotomies, there are shades of behavior. So we are not I don't want anyone listening to this podcast to think that you and I think that people need to go to the woods to their bunkers or something. It's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that there's a range of behaviors from proceed as if there's no epidemic and go about your business with usual social interactions to total social isolation. Sail off on a sailboat or something or whatever and in between. So what I'm recommending is adopt some simple practices already that are in between that will reduce your own personal risk and help our society. Don't shake hands. Wash your hands several times a day for what is it the wording is now till you sing Happy Birthday twice. Avoid all nonessential travel and meetings. Just do those things. It helps you, it helps our society. And we'll know more in a few weeks as to what the situation is really like. That's a reasonable thing to do. Yeah. The other way to think about it is just probabilistically. If there are a thousand ways you might get this thing, if you cut out 900 of them, you've reduced your risk by 90%. And as you say, you've blocked that path through society to all the other people you're going to be in contact with. So the reason why most people can't do that is just the health argument is straightforward. It's just there's an economic and social argument pressing for so many people. Yeah, but hold on. I'm not saying that the things that I was recommending did not include stay home yet. What I'm saying is things that you can do right now are nonessential travel, nonessential meetings, hand washing, avoid handshaking and physical contact. Those are things people can do and still go to work. Right. Anything that can be done from home probably should be done from home. Right. There are many companies where people can telecommute and yes, I would imagine many have not pulled the trigger on that yet, as a matter of policy. Yes, that's right. That's exactly right. Also, in the past, let's say you shop for food three times a week. Now, it might be a time to consolidate your shopping list and go once a week. There are different sorts of ways you can manage your life to reduce social contact for a while until we see what's happening with this thing. That's correct. And I don't see that as alarmist. I think that's just common sense you can do, and that doesn't require you to quit your job or lose your income yet. Right. So a related question there is just what about panic? And panic is bad. What alarms me is that when government is clearly, like in any of these press conferences, when the purpose is transparently, to reassure without actually giving good information, they're just trying to dampen panic that is in the uncanny valley of reassurance. And it actually is just frankly alarming to see people obfuscating for the purpose of dampening emotional arousal. So how do you think the government and scientists should speak about this, given that panic and the reality of social contagion is also worth worrying about? Yeah. So how do you think we've been speaking about it? Do you think that when I agreed to come on, I was trying to make sure that I communicated factual information, that I was balanced and that I was not alarmist? And I hope I have not been alarmist and I hope I've communicated factual information in a balanced way. That's my objective. And your listeners and you can decide that. But we have very sober minded scientists that speak in calm and rational ways, for example, in Dr. Anthony Fauci. And these are the sorts of people that, if I were president, I would be putting before the public. These people will sort of like when we are when they're matters of military importance, the generals that speak, they may be misinformed, they may not know everything, but they speak in in measured and serious ways about the matters of, you know, military operations. And I think that's what we need right now. And we have such people in our government and in our society, and I think we should be listening to them, and we should be allowing them to speak. It would be a related benefit to social distancing if we had a new norm around how people behaved when they were sick with anything, with anything infectious, a cold or a flu. If people simply did not go to work sick, that would exert an evolutionary pressure on all these bugs to become less symptomatic. Right? Well, I mean, that's another thing relatedly that we should be doing in our society. If you don't have an essential health problem, you should not be seeking medical care right now. Not only because you don't want to go to a health care and be exposed to other people, but in order to unburden the healthcare system. What the Chinese did, which was unbelievable, is they moved 50% of their medical care online when the epidemic struck. Anyone that just needed a prescription refill, for example, they just started doing that online. You don't have to go see your doctor to get your heart medication. Just call your doctor and say, okay, we're going to do that. So it decompresses the health system, frees the doctors up and nurses up to do other stuff that's more important, and it reduces the risk of exposure, mixing, the social mixing, especially of sick patients. So people listening to this, they should say, if I'm not seriously ill or I have routine health care stuff, I should help my country by not seeking medical care right now. Now, it's not the time to do that. Yeah, but the point I was making is that if social distancing were the norm whenever people got sick, personally, if you just didn't go to work when sick, that would exert evolutionary pressure on all of these bugs, whether bacteria or viruses, to mitigate their symptoms. So that colds wouldn't be as bad if you only spread them when they were truly almost undetectable, from your point of view. So what do you do with the fact, though, that it seems that people are infectious prior to being symptomatic? Perhaps for as long as two weeks? I mean, that seems like a no, I don't think it's that long. I mean, we don't know yet exactly. That's still unknown. So there are two epidemiologically relevant facts here. There's something known as the incubation period. That's from the time you're infected to the time you're symptomatic, and then there's something known as the latent period. And that's from the time you're not infectious to the time you become infectious. And the difficult thing is if the latent period ends before the incubation period ends. In other words, if you transition to being infectious before you transition to being symptomatic. We don't know for a fact yet whether asymptomatic coronavirus patients can transmit the disease, and if so, for how long. But there are people actively working on it, but it's not more than a couple of days. Even if it is. But if that's the case, that's worrisome because that means people are out there spreading the disease without, you know, they can't even use their own symptoms as a heuristic for staying at home. Right. What do you see as the possibility of our taking extreme steps of the sort that China or even Italy have taken at this point to contain the spread in, you know, any given city or any given region? Well, I don't I don't think it's culturally or politically viable for us to do what the Chinese have done. I don't know how similar we are to the Italians. My understanding of the authority that governors of our states have and I don't know what the federal authorities are, but I'm pretty sure the state governors have authorities to basically shut stuff down in the public interest and enforce it with a state national guard and sort of power. So the power of quarantine exists in our society. And I'm not a legal expert, so I don't know the details of where those powers are vested and how they're enforced, but I can imagine that there would be a lot of political will to do such things if the situation got really bad. There would be checkpoints on roads to reduce transit. The president can order the flights not to fly. And this has been modeled internal restrictions on air traffic have been modeled as a way to reduce the epidemic. So I don't know I can't forecast what would happen, but I do believe the government at multiple levels has the authority to do such things as it should as a society. If we're trying to confront this, we need to do it in an ordered, cooperative way. There's a point that I think we might have made, although perhaps we dropped it in differentiating this from influenza. From everything we know, coronavirus is more infectious than influenza. It's difficult to measure. So the the so called Rnaught, or actually more precisely, something called the effective reproductive rate, which is the number in a steady state. The number of new cases for every old case people are estimating is between two and four. So we don't know yet exactly how it is. And just to be clear, that number is related to intrinsic properties of the virus, but is not solely determined by that. So, for example, the transmission rate of a pathogen depends, for example, on the extent of social mixing. If I suddenly obliged everyone to sit in a prison cell, if one person got sick, they wouldn't transmit it to anyone else. So it's something about how we're organized socially that determines the re. The effective reproductive rate, we estimate right now that it's around between two and four, which is high. The Chinese at the beginning of the epidemic, there was a nice paper that was just written by a group of Chinese scholars in collaboration with some investigators at the Harvard School of Public Health. At the beginning of the epidemic, if I'm remembering these numbers correctly, they estimated the effective reproductive rate at around 3.8. So for every sick person, 3.8 new sick people were created. But because of their social engineering in China, where they have, as we discussed earlier, have this incredible quarantine, basically, that's nationwide they have driven that down to, like, below one. And when you get the number below one, that's when the epidemic peters out because these cases aren't replacing themselves. What about the prospect that this is essentially always going to be with us once it's a pandemic? Yes, that's what's going to happen. So if it's always with us and it's much worse than flu, and I mean flu, we need a new flu vaccine every year because the old one didn't do the trick, because it's mutated. What's a rational picture of the future if in fact, this just keeps circling the globe and mutating, either getting worse or getting better, depending. What do we expect of the future here? It's hard to know for sure. Many experts believe that this will join the existing coronaviruses that afflict humans or be like another common cold type virus. We've just now added a pathogen to the list of pathogens that circulates in human beings. It'll become what's known as endemic, always there in us. It's a little unclear. Still earlier, we discussed how the virus might become less problematic as time goes by, as it adapts to us and we modify it with our collective immune systems fighting it off. So I don't think it's going to disappear completely. I think it will remain in the human population. It's hard, very hard. I'm not willing to forecast how serious it will remain as time goes by, but I think we're going to have this current wave, which I think will be there's a good chance it will be serious. And then we will have another wave or two, and in a few years we'll know what is the status of this virus with respect to us, like other viruses that affect us. Can you think of something we haven't touched that you think we should be hitting? No. I mean, I think we've covered a lot of things. We've covered some basic facts about the virus and what it is that we can do. We've talked about the prospects for pharmaceutical interventions versus non pharmaceutical interventions, which we clearly need to implement as a society. We've sort of benchmarked the severity of the condition. We've talked about flattening the epidemic, which is really important. We've covered, I think, the gamut of sort of basic epidemiology, as such as it is, of epidemic of pandemic influenza. I think I'd like to end on an optimistic note. I mean, I think our species this is not the first time it's already not sounding optimistic. If you're going to the species level, okay, it's really bad our society. This is not the first time America has been afflicted with pandemic disease. And I think we will see the other side of this, but I think it's going to take a lot of working together to address it. I think it'll take the full attention of our political leaders and of our scientific establishment. Our commercial sector is going to have to rise to the occasion to build more respirators and more masks and whatever else we need in order to confront the condition. And I think people on the street are going to have to adjust their lifestyle for a while in order to contribute to our society, in order to confront this disease. And I hope that it is much milder than it could be. And there's a range of outcomes, as we've discussed, and I hope it's on the milder end of that range. Yeah, as do I. Certainly hope that my current state of mind seems like an overreaction in retrospect. The only point in my life that had an analogous feeling was 911, where it's just like, okay, this is a moment in history, right? This is not life as you have taken it for granted year after year. I think this could be a moment in history. I think in a few months we'll know whether in the early spring or late winter of 2020, the world was afflicted with a pandemic and a serious pandemic. I mean, the pandemic, by the way, just means an epidemic that strikes multiple regions. And you could have a mild pandemic or a severe pandemic. That's a different topic. And so I think we'll know within a few months how serious this is. And we'll all remember where we were when we first heard about it. Or if it's mild, we'll forget. Nobody remembers very much about SARS and H one N one. And maybe it'll go that way, and I hope it does. Okay, well, I will be touching this topic again, no doubt, and thank you. And I will be talking about happier things at some point, I trust. Thank you for having me again. Salmon thank you so much. Yeah. To be continued./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, there's a lot going on in Iran at the moment in response to the murder of Masa Mini. Obviously, I completely support the women and men who are protesting there for their secular freedom. It's quite extraordinary to see what's happening there. So perhaps I'll do a podcast on that. But as it turns out, some years ago, I had a conversation that was highly relevant to this moment with the writer and free speech activist Yasmin Mohammed. We just released this on the Best of Making Sense feed, but I wanted to put it here because it really gets at the underlying issue of women's rights in an unusually complete and personal way. Yasmin's story is being lived and now protested by millions and millions of women in the Muslim world. And it's in light of a story like this that the killing of Masamini should be understood today. I'm speaking with Yasmin Mohammed. Yasmin is a human rights activist and a writer. She's a very eloquent advocate for women living in Islamic majority countries and in the Muslim community generally worldwide, and a very effective critic of religious fundamentalism. And her new book is unveiled how Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. And I've been in Yasmin's corner for a little while. When she was getting ready to write her book, and it was at the proposal stage, I blurbed her. This is the blurb that appears on the book. But this is a blurb, really, for her as a person before her book was even written. I'll just read that here to give you some context. Women and free thinkers in traditional Muslim communities inherit a double burden. If they want to live in the modern world, they must confront not only the theocrats in their homes and schools, but many secular liberals whose apathy, sanctimony and hallucinations of, quote, racism throw yet another veil over their suffering. Yasmin Muhammad accepts this challenge as courageously as anyone I've ever met, putting the lie to the dangerous notion that criticizing the doctrine of Islam is a form of bigotry. Let her wisdom and bravery inspire you, and so you should. And here Yasmin and I talk about her background and indoctrination into conservative Islam and the double standard that Western liberals use to think about women in the Muslim community. We talk about feminism generally, the validity of criticizing other cultures, and other related topics. So now I bring you a very brave woman and one of my heroes, Yasmin Mohammed. I am here with Yasmin Mohammed. Yasmin, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Sam. So this has been a long time coming. I forget where I discovered you. Was it Twitter or how do we get introduced? I sent you an email, just a cold email. Well, I was supposed to do a talk in Australia with Majid about the Islam and the Future of Tolerance documentary. And then I had to cancel it because I was going through a lot of basically I was having consistent panic attacks and I had to take some time off work and then I just had to cancel all of my speaking engagements. So I sent you a letter to sort of apologize that I wasn't going to be able to make it. And then you wrote back to me and started asking me about the panic attacks and everything that was going on with there. And so then that's how I got into meditation, actually. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay, I remember that, but I don't remember that being the first contact. Did you not have a Twitter presence yet? I did have a Twitter presence, but you weren't following me yet. Okay, well, someone could have been forwarding your stuff. I feel like I saw you there first, but maybe not. Anyway, you go hard on Twitter. That's something we're going to talk about. Yeah, it's the Arab in me. So let's just take it from the top. We're talking about your book, unveiled in the end, but let's just start with your story from the beginning. Where did you come from and what were your parents like and what was your upbringing like? This is the beginning of your story that has, for better or worse, made you one of the most courageous voices I can name at the moment. So to the beginning, I guess, would be my parents meeting each other in university in Egypt. So my dad's from Palestine and my mom is Egyptian, but Palestinians could go to university in Egypt. It was all covered. Like, they were treated as Egyptians, but they weren't given citizenship, so they met in university in Egypt. And my mother's family were very angry at her for marrying a Palestinian because they thought he was so beneath her. But they got married and then they moved to San Francisco together and they were there during the Peace, Love hippie era, and they had my sister and it was a bit too much peace and love, and so my mom wanted like, a quieter place to raise the kids. And so then they moved to Vancouver, Canada, and that's where I was born. But then their marriage fell apart in the end anyway. So when I was about two years old, my dad left us, went to the other side of the country. So here my mom is now in a new country, no support system, no community, three children, and she's feeling depressed, vulnerable, sad, lonely, all that stuff. How religious were they at this point? No religiosity whatsoever? Neither of them. They both grew up very secular. My dad had zero connection to religion. It's just like a cultural thing, very anti Israel, just being Palestinian, but there's no religious like him personally. He wasn't practicing. And my mom's all alone, and so she goes looking for a support system and she goes looking at the mosque for community and at the mosque, she finds a man who is already married, already has three children, but he offers to take my mom on as his second concurrent wife. Right? So she is happy to have somebody take care of her and take care of her kids, and so she's willing to put up with whatever he's dishing out. My dad was abusive towards her. He used to hit her, and this man never hit her. He'd hit us, of course, but he never hit her. So she felt like this was a better relationship for her, so she stayed with him as a second concurrent wife. We lived in his basement, and he is very like my life changed completely when he entered our lives. So before him, I used to be able to play with my neighbor's friends. Like, we play Barbies together. I'd go swimming, I'd ride my bike, I'd go to birthday parties, listen to music, just like a normal childhood. And then once he entered our lives, it was just immediate. Everything is haut on, everything is forbidden. And all of a sudden, my mom started covering her hair, and we had to start reading from this book of these words that I didn't understand. And I had to start praying five times a day. And I resisted it from the beginning. Of course, I missed my old life. I was especially upset that I couldn't play with Chelsea and Lindsay anymore. They'd always come knocking on the door wanting to play Barbies. And I was never allowed to go, and they were never allowed in. You're going to the same school at this point? Yes, but not for long. Then I got as soon as the Islamic school was I mean, it wasn't built, it was in the mosque. But as soon as it was established that we would have an Islamic school and my mom was teaching in it, then I started going there. Was this associated with any religious awakening on your mom's part or she just needed a man to take care of her, and it was just practical and romantic. I don't know if romantic is part of it. I think you practical for sure. And it was a combination of both of those things. So she needed I think she was happy to have somebody to take care of her. But then also she just became a full on born again Muslim. So she just entered. It like she just jumped all in. It was never you know, if you see her wedding photos, she looked like a Bond girl. Like, short wedding dress, big, huge beehive. You know, there was a belly dancer at her wedding. And to go from that to the woman that raised me that I remember is just a pretty shocking difference. And I used to always resent that. I'd be like, how come you got freedom? How come you got to live like this? Look at your pictures when you were a kid. How come I don't get that life? And she'd say, Because my parents didn't know any better, and I'm raising you better, and you're going to be a better person, and you're going to go to heaven. And my parents did the best they could, but they were wrong. And so how old are you when you're expressing these doubts? Well, I was about six years old when he entered our life, and I resisted all the way up. Probably about nine years old is when I stopped, because that's when the hijab was put on me and I started going to Islamic school, and it was just too much. So you can't really fight anymore when everything in your life is pushing you in one direction. You just succumb, especially when you're a kid. But according to my mom, I was never good enough. The devil was always whispering in my ear and making me question. I always ask questions, right? Like, if all created everything, who created a law and stuff like that? How could I even these are such blasphemous. If Adam and Eve are the parents of all people, are we all children of incest? So these basic questions that a kid would ask, I'd get in trouble for them. So was there any point where you just went hook, line and sinker and fully adopted the worldview without doubt? Or did you always have some doubt humming in the background? The doubt humming in the background finally went quiet once I was forced into the marriage with Hasam. So once I married him and I wore Nakab, so that's like, full face covering, the gloves, everything, I was so diminished that I didn't have anything left. And I also kind of made the conscious decision that, I mean, I was desperate for my mom's love and approval. My sister was always the good girl that always listened and never questioned, and I wanted that. I wanted to have that relationship with my mom. So she kept on pressuring me to marry this man, and I eventually gave in because I thought, you know what? Maybe she'll actually love me if I follow what she wants me to do. I'll marry the man she tells me to marry. I'll do everything the way she says to do it. I've been fighting against this my whole life. What happens if I just let go and see if she's actually right? How old are you at this point? So I'm 20. And I did let go, and I did follow exactly what she said and until I had my daughter and held her in my arms and saw that she was about to grow up in the same environment that I grew up in. My mom was talking to her the same way she had talked to me. Her father was talking about FGM and her dying a martyr for a law and things like that. I'm like, okay, enough. I could maybe accept this world for myself, but I'm not going to accept it for my daughter. There's no way she's going to live this same life. And was he Egyptian? Yeah. Yeah. And I think people aren't generally aware that FGM is practiced in Egypt, like 98%, basically like Somalia in terms of the prevalence of that practice. So and this was just a fully arranged marriage or, or it had been encouraged once you had met him. So it, it wasn't fully arranged in that I didn't know I was going to marry him my whole life. Sometimes people arrange marriages for their kids, like from the get go, but it was definitely a forced marriage, which is a very common thing in the Arab world. So it's like, this is the man we want you to marry, and then you basically just get introduced to him. And the woman doesn't need to consent. Like in Islam, it says silence is consent. So if you just sit there and cry, okay, we're good. Yeah. That's like saying, I do. And so you get pressured into it in the same way you get pressured into everything else. So it's just like wearing the hijab. And you get given two choices, like do you want to go to heaven or do you want to go to hell? Do you want to be a good, pure, clean girl or do you want to be a filthy whore? These are your choices. Make the right choice. So forcing you into a marriage is similar kind of coercion. So it would be things like there's a hadith that says heaven is at the feet of your mother's, so your mother gets to decide whether you're going to go to heaven or not. So this was the one that was used all the time, and it's a very dangerous weapon for an abusive mother to have, so she would use that one. She'd say, you're never going to go to heaven unless I approve you to enter heaven. And if you don't marry this man, you will never go to heaven. You will burn in hell for eternity, and you will suffer here on earth because you are no longer my daughter. I want nothing to do with you. I won't even allow you to come to my funeral because as far as anyone is concerned, you're no longer my family. And then when you die, you'll burn in hell fraternity. So go ahead and make the choice. Yeah. Reading your book, it's a fairly harrowing account of what your childhood and adolescence and young adulthood was like. And I think it's useful to differentiate what is just the sheer bad luck of having an abusive and perhaps mentally ill mom and having married somebody who will get into his story in a moment. But that's bad luck. That could happen to anyone in any culture, with or without religion. Then there are the cultural practices which aren't necessarily mandated by Islam and maybe don't necessarily represent every Muslims or even most muslims experience. And then there's just what is fairly common under Islam because you can just play connect the dots and see that it is mandated or at least encouraged in the text. So how do you kind of carve out those different strands? For me, what is just the sheer bad luck of based on the personalities involved and where, where is the contribution of Islam? Yeah, so the problem is a lot of these elements are sanctioned in Islam. So Islam says, for example, tells a man, if you fear that your wife is arrogant or disobedient, then go through these steps and then beat her. A law is telling men, if you fear that your wife is going to give you any trouble, beat her. Right. So not every single man is going to beat his wife and not every single man is going to viciously beat his wife. Different men are going to react in different ways. But the problem is the fact that it is sanctioned. So if you complain about it like in my example, when I went to my mom and said he just punched me in the face when he saw that I wasn't wearing hijab in the house on the 17th floor because he was afraid people like, I don't know, seagulls people in helicopters might see me through the window. And her response was, he has every right to be, you are his. It says so right there, chapter four, verse 34. So that's the problem. The problem is that it's codified, it's in the religion and so it can be used in different ways. You know, like not like I said, not every Muslim man is going to be at his wife. But those who do have scriptural support. Yeah. And the debate really is not whether or not that support exists, but what is meant by beating how hard you can beat your wife. That's very subjective. And there's scholars that come forward and they say things like, oh no, it's like with a toothbrush or whatever. But those are just scholars offering their interpretations as far as the Huran is concerned. It doesn't say that, it just says rawana, that's it, there's no asterisks there. But that's subjective anyway. It depends on the country that you're in, depends on the environment that you're used to. Yeah, beating can be pretty bad and any obviously hitting another human being is a bad thing anyway. And the creator of the universe really should not be sanctioning husbands to be beating their wives. But there's a famous critic of Islam named Hamid Abdul Samad who is an Egyptian German man who had a really great way of describing this. And he says it's like a laws at the bar and he had a bit much to drink and he's like, you guys should just like beat your wives, man and his friends, right. The scholars are behind him going, no, he doesn't really mean that. He doesn't actually mean that. He means with a feather or something. So those are just the scholars trying to soften it up. But at the end of the day, people read the hood on and they quote that verse. Right. And you're wearing the nakab at this point. At what point did that happen? Hijab was at nine years old, as far as I could remember, and then once I was engaged to him, started wearing the niqab. He got it all delivered from Saudi Arabia. And that really helps in dehumanizing you. That really helps in turning me into nothing that he can control very easily. It just suppresses your humanity entirely. It's like a portable sensory deprivation chamber, and you are no longer connected to humanity. You can't see properly, you can't hear properly, you can't speak properly. People can't see you. You can only see them. I mean, just little things like passing people in the street and just making eye contact and smiling like that's gone. You're no longer part of this world. And so you very quickly just shrivel up into nothing under there. Yeah. Well, we're going to get to this. But it is amazing how sanguine Western feminists are around this. Practice. Like, this is just another culture's ideal of how to honor feminine beauty and empower women. Who are we to criticize it? We should differentiate the hijab from the nakab. The hijab is just a straight up symbol of female empowerment. Now in the west, for some reason, people one can't see that most of the women on earth right now who are wearing a hijab are not doing it based on some empowerment they felt at an Ivy League institution, where they just they're just going to take the male gaze off them at their own discretion. So they're forced to do it. The consequences of not doing it, in many cases, are, if not absolutely coercive social pressure. It's actually physical violence. But it is also just a step toward the nakab and the burka, which are the actual crystallization of the ideal here, that's being enshrined, which is the female. Modesty, is the only thing that safeguards male sexuality from completely running amok. It's like all men would be gropers and rapists, but for the fact that women hide themselves. Maybe we should jump into that. Now, I want to talk about who your husband revealed himself to be, but what have your encounters with Western feminists been like? Well, that makes me really sad that they consider Muslim women to be of some other species and that are so completely different from them. So for themselves, they will recognize all of those things that you talked about are basically victim blaming, slut shaming. They recognize those elements of rape culture when we're in the Western context, which are much harder to see in the Western context. But under Sharia, it's very easy to clearly see a perfect example of rape culture. But they somehow, when it's those women over there, it it's empowering? Like, would it be empowering for you if you were told you have to wear this clothing in order to protect yourself from men who might rape you? Or you have to wear this clothing in order to be good and pure and go to heaven, because if you don't wear it, then you're a filthy whore. No woman would want to hear that. No seven year old child would like to be told, you have to wear this in order to go to school, and your brother doesn't have to. He can wear whatever he wants, but you must wear this or you're not allowed to get educated. It is an atrocity. That's something that every human being should be upset about. And the fact that they think that it's okay for those humans over there but not for us is the part that really upsets me. What do you do with the fact that you could go into any one of these cultures and find women who will say, I want to wear the NiCOB. I want to wear the burqa. Just take your colonial bullshit elsewhere. Yeah. Oh, of course there will be. And you can also go to fundamentalist Christian cults, and they will tell you, I want to be a servant for my husband. You see people like that on Twitter all the time, right? They're like, I quit my job and I cook and clean for my husband, and I'm proud of it, whatever it is. Women make all sorts of choices and decisions, and that's completely up to them, and they're free to do that, but I'm also free to make a judgment on the decisions that they're making. So when I'm talking about the hijab as a symbol of patriarchy and a symbol of misogyny, I'm saying that because, as you mentioned, not only are girls coerced into it because of, you know, family or government or religion, but girls can be killed because of this. And not just in the Muslim world, but in Canada, in America, in France, in Sweden, there's honor violence and honor killing going on. A 16 year old girl in Canada was strangled to death by her father and her brother with the hijab that she refused to wear, and then her parents refused to bury her because they didn't want anything to do with her. There are so many stories around this. The one that sounds stranger than fiction is the case in Saudi Arabia where the school was on fire and the religious police wouldn't let the fire department put it out because the girls weren't appropriately veiled. And they're literally parents standing at the gates of the school watching their daughters burn alive. And there are women that are in Iran today that are being imprisoned for 15 years and more for refusing to wear this cloth on their head. So it's not just a benign choice when the Prime Minister of New Zealand or when Meghan Markle put a hijab on their head. It's not just a benign support of some benign cultural thing. It is a not just a symbol, but an actual tool of oppression. There are women being imprisoned and women being killed. There is a fight over this hijab going on right now. Women in Sudan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia. They're burning their hijabs in the streets. They're fighting against this thing. And then to see free Western women, free Western women leaders take this thing that they are fighting against and voluntarily dawning it and supporting it. What those women are doing is they are supporting the oppressors. They are supporting the oppressors that these women are fighting against. Yeah. The double standard is so clear, and it really is sanity straining that it's so hard for people to see. So the clearest case for me in the media was when I don't remember this, but Warren Jeffs, the leader of the FLDS, the fundamentalist Mormon cult, his compound was rated, and all these little girls and young women were led out in these Little House on the Prairie dresses, right? They were made to wear these awful 18th century dresses. And they had been married to men who were, you know, their grandfather's ages. And these forced marriages were described as rapes. And the men were totally unrepentant. And, you know, Jeff's got, I think it's at least 15 years in prison. I forget he got a real prison sentence. And this was all talked about on the news as just an unambiguous example of patriarchal exploitation of girls. The fact that it was associated with religious belief was not even slightly exculpatory. And everyone celebrated the fact that there was a SWAT team raid on the compound. We kicked in the door of this place to free those girls. And it didn't matter at all that the girls didn't want to be free. We knew they had been brainwashed. So when they're talking about how they loved their husband four to a man or whatever it was, no one had any qualm discounting that for their obvious ignorance and brainwashing. Right. And when you compare that to what is happening routinely in the Muslim world, the mainstream media has the opposite response. And this is the most benign case of real extremism in the Muslim world. In truth, it's not even extreme. But the extremism in the Muslim world, you have to add to that the clitorectomies that would have been performed on these girls, the fact that they were raising their sons to be suicide bombers, right. And there was an explicit indoctrination of martyrdom, and they were exporting terrorism to the capitals of Europe and America. That's how the fundamentalist Mormon cult would have to behave to make it an analogous situation. And no one can see it on the left. I guess the other example I should mention, I believe I mentioned this on a previous podcast, but it really belongs here because we were talking about this last night I just saw her seat Ali give a talk at a university for the first time in three years since she was deplatformed at Brandeis. And it's a fairly conservative college, Pepperdine, an explicitly Christian college. And she ran through her whole life story on stage, starting with female genital mutilation abuse in school, physical abuse, sexual abuse. She described it as routine among her friends at the school. She described all this and how she escaped a forced marriage, became a member of Parliament. She's just a true feminist success story, right? And as she starts to get into a discussion of contemporary politics honestly, the edgiest thing she said was if I were teaching at a university and someone and one of my students said that they didn't want to read a certain novel because it triggered them, I would insist that they read that novel, because that's what a university is for. And then I think the other thing she said was when Me Too came up, she expressed blanket support for it, but she said, we have to keep a sense of proportion. There are the Harvey Weinstein's of the world, and then there are people who just put a hand where it's not wanted and you slap it away. She was trying to give some articulating this spectrum of misbehavior that we need to differentiate. And as she's talking about this again, she had just spent a half hour describing in a background so replete with abuse, patriarchal abuse, that you would think it would have earned her intersectionality points of a sort that few people have. And I've got these white women students behind me who are beginning to almost heckle her, right? It was just hissing and laughter among themselves. And then they walked out. It was like, again, it was another kind of brainwashing. There's a kind of moral panic happening around variables of gender and race on the left that is making it impossible to even parse the statements of a Somali woman who just recapitulated the entire Enlightenment success story of reclaiming secularism and modernity and humanistic values, in her own case, in a few short years. It's just amazing. So anyway, had white skin and had overcome all of those things in the west. She would be celebrated. She would be hailed as a feminist hero. When you were talking before about the difference between that Mormon cult and girls in the Muslim world, I started to tear up because it reminded me of your Ted Talk, which I'm going to tear up again. That Ted Talk to me hit me so hard because it was the first time anybody in media I'd ever heard somebody care about those girls the same way you would care about any other girls. Like the argument you were making in that Ted Talk, like these girls in Afghanistan. Why are they different than the girls from the Mormon cults? Sorry Sam was late. Thank you so much. You don't have to apologize. This is good radio. Yeah, a few people notice it, but I actually teared up in that Ted Talk. I don't care if we spoke about this or not, but there was a point where I talk about honor killing and I said, imagine your daughter gets raped and what you want to do is kill her out of shame. And obviously I had rehearsed that talk a ton, unlike any other talk you ever give. A Ted Talk is like this memorization feat, right, where you have to remember every line because you've got a hard time limit and no notes. And so it's a very odd talk to give because basically it's a performance as yourself. You're not thinking out loud because you really have a script that you've memorized. At least that's the way most people do it and the way I've done both of my Ted Talks. And so obviously, I knew exactly what I was going to say. And I had done this a dozen times at least. But I had just been told a couple of hours before going out on stage that my first daughter had taken her first steps. So when I got to that point in the talk totally punctured me and I actually almost burst into tears. And you can sort of say people who are just watching as a Ted Talk don't tend to notice. But you can see that I'm almost totally derailed in the talk at that moment. You could see that you actually care. That was very evident. And that's why it hit me so hard, is because I'm so used to there being this two tier system of all girls that matter and then the girls that don't matter. And that was the first time I had seen in the Western world somebody standing up, like in a Ted Talk, speaking up for us as if we were human beings like every other girl on the planet. And that was very evident in your talk. And then, of course, immediately after your talk, you get questioned about it and all the predictable things happen. And so that's a very quick the wokeness comes to swallow you after that. Yeah, exactly. Here I am feeling all excited and happy, and there it is. But I just wish that this is why the subtitle of the book, how Western Liberals Empower radicalists Them. That's what it's all about. I want my liberal friends and supporters, and this is where I see myself. I am in this realm too. So when I talk about liberals, I'm not saying those people over there, I'm saying us over here. We need to look at what we are doing and we need to stay consistent. And if we believe that all humans are equal, then why are we having a different set of why do we use a different yardstick for these people versus these people? I feel like if they could see that, if they could understand that, then they would get it. I feel like if they could get the lunacy of, would you celebrate a Mormon underwear on the COVID of Sports Illustrated? No, you wouldn't. You would automatically see that that's ridiculous for many different reasons. But then having a bikini on the COVID of Sports Illustrated, that's something to be celebrated. I just want them to stay with the thought for four more seconds and just continue on with that and think, okay, why is this celebrated and this is not? Yeah, again, it's very hard to understand how the point doesn't run through and change people's outlook just in real time. Whenever you have the conversation. An example I occasionally use when I'm getting criticized for judging another culture, and again, I always go to the most extreme, and still that's not extreme enough. So I talk about the Taliban, or I used to talk about the Taliban a lot before ISIS came around, but when I was in this conversation a lot, I would talk about the Taliban. I would say, okay, well, then, actually, I'm starting to agree with you. So what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to send my daughters for a year internship to Afghanistan. So they'll have to wear the burka, and they'll just learn to recite the Quran, and they'll get beaten if they take the burka off and it'll broaden their horizons. They'll just get the full cultural experience. So am I a good father? Is that the right decision? Right. And it's considered I've never seen the point land. It's just like it's considered, on the one hand, a low blow, or it just doesn't compute. And you find yourself in this conversation a lot, both on social media and in the world. What is it that keeps the double standard ethically in place even when you point it out? I think it's because we have been taught that you cannot criticize other cultures. We can only criticize Western culture. It's the only culture that's safe to criticize. So my counterargument to that is when you criticize something, that is how progress happens. So Western culture has been criticized a lot, and that's why there's LGBT equality here and women's equality here, and all of these progressive we got rid of slavery, all of these things happen because of internal criticism. That is how progress happens. If you do not criticize things that deserve to be criticized, how will progress happen? So these groups of people that are saying, no, we cannot criticize the Taliban, or we cannot criticize the fact that Iranian what the Iranian regime is doing, or Saudi Arabian or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, what you're doing is you're saying, we don't want those cultures to progress. They need to stay the way they are. 1400 years ago, the way the religion formed, the way Sharia was formed, this kind of thinking needs to just be fossilized. Now, that is what, again, we've got that two tier system going on? Why don't these people deserve progress as well? Why don't the gay people in those countries deserve to not be executed? Why don't the women in those countries also deserve not free the nipple, but, like, free the face? Why don't they also deserve freedom? How are they a different kind of human than you are? Because there are people in those countries that are risking their lives. I mean, America's got, you know, like live free or die. They they embody that live free or die mentality. And they are let me if Bedoui just blogging about humanism, blogging about liberalism, gets him whipped in the streets, gets him ten years in prison. You know, I mentioned in Iran, removing a hijab off of your head gets you thrown in prison. In Saudi Arabia, a woman was walking without hijab on got thrown in prison. I could go on and on and on about these cases, and that doesn't even start to talk about the twelve countries, twelve to 15 countries I can't remember right now that will execute people for being gay, for being an apostate. Yes. If you decide that you don't want to believe in this religion anymore, then you are to be killed. You're given three days to repent, and if you don't repent within those three days, then you're to be killed. So if we're liberals and we believe in liberal values, why do we only care about the LGBT that are living in close proximity geographically to us? What about the ones over there? Don't they matter too? Can we talk about them as well? But no, we excuse it over there, or we ignore it over there. So how will those countries progress? How will those cultures progress? It's unfair. We deserve it, too. Feminism is universal. It's not just Western or all of human rights. Yeah. So I guess it's a concern about racism and the imbalance of power and wealth between the west and the rest of the developing world. The legacy of colonialism. It's white guilt. Yes. It puts white people in the center of it all. They always want to be in the center of it all. It always has to be as a result of as if Arabs were just frolicking in the desert making sandcastles until the white man came along and taught them how to be baddies to each other. Like, please, these things happened. And these things, regardless of Western intervention, of course, that adds, in some cases, fuel to the fire. But that's not not the be all and the end all. America is not the center of the reason for everything that's happening in the Muslim world. There's a whole other world over there that had existed before the west even existed. And then again, there's this idea that people need to remember that Islam is the second largest religion on the planet. It's not some little minority. In America, you've got, like, 1% or so are Muslims, so they think that it's just a small group that are not really not that many people are getting. And the concern is it's a beleaguered minority in the west generally, but especially in a place like America. That's probably true, but it is not a beleaguered minority on a global scale. So if you just expand on that. And the reason why this matters to us over here is because ideas cross borders. They don't just stay over there. So all of these misogynist ideas and all of these things that we're talking about, the honor culture and the honor violence and the honor killing, that doesn't just happen over there when those ideas all come here too. I was born and raised in a Western country, in a secular democracy, but I essentially lived under Sharia in my own home and in my own school because we're separated in a bubble from the rest of society. So for me, to get out of that world was infinitely easier than it is for a woman in Saudi Arabia or in Sudan or in Somalia or in Pakistan who's having the same thoughts as I am and the same feelings as I am, wanting to get free. She can't because she's not supported by her government in the way I was. Right. She couldn't just go get student loans and get on social assistance or whatever. There's no support system for that. She'll in fact get imprisoned or she could be killed for defying her family. And even in your case, it was still fairly hard for you to get out. You told me a story about what it was like, I think, when you were twelve, to report your desire for freedom to one of your teachers, perhaps tell that story. Yeah. So that's Mr. Fabro, who wrote the foreword to my book. I just met him recently. I was twelve years old. I mean, I meet him I met him again recently. I was twelve years old and I were 13 years old. And I went to him and I told him about the abuse that was happening at home. So this was during the time when I was still fighting, trying to get out of the home I was in. My mom was married to this abusive man, and I showed him the bruises and I told him the stories, and he ended up calling the police, and Child services were involved, and it ended up going to court. And essentially the judge ruled that because my family are Arab and that is the way they choose to discipline me, then that's their right. And so, first of all, I have to explain how difficult it is when you're part of an insular community to go to the outsiders, to go to the non believers and ask them for help. That's really a betrayal. It's kind of like if you're in the Mafia, if you're the rat, you know, I'm going to the cops and I'm saying, I need help. So for me to overcome that as a child and to go and ask for help, and then to have the judge basically tell me, sorry, your family happened to have been born in this country, so you're not going to be protected. Had your parents been born in, you know, Sweden or Germany or Scotland, I would protect you. But sorry, that's just luck of the draw. I'm hearing him tell me, you don't matter as much as other kids. And I know that it's coming from a place of trying to be culturally sensitive, but it ends up like this whole cultural relativism, moral relativism. You end up hurting the people in those groups, and you end up supporting the people that are oppressing them within those groups. This is Maja's point about abandoning the minorities within the minorities. If you care about minority communities, also pay attention to the people who are being routinely victimized in those communities. In this case, you're taking the side of theocrats who are abusing women and girls over the interests of women and girls and gays and rethinkers and apostates and anyone else in that community who's being abused. Absolutely. And why does it matter if this little girl has blonde hair and blue eyes and her parents took a razor or her aunt took a razor and chopped out her clitoris? But then this girl over here has brown skin and her family is from Somalia, and they did the same thing. Now, why would one set of parents be treated differently by law enforcement than another set of parents? Those two girls are both suffering equally. There is no difference between these children and how it's going to affect them for the rest of their lives. Why is one more important than the other? That's what their well meaning excusing of cultural norms. This is what ends up happening. You end up leaving these kids to be victimized, but then you also end up becoming incredibly racist. Yeah. This is yet another irony in the Irony Museum. The people who are actually being racist here are the people who ostensibly are most concerned about racism. Yes. That's what I heard from the judge. That's how I felt, and that's what I've been told my whole life. I've been told, These non believers don't care about you. These non believers hate you. These non believers are your enemy. And I never believed it. But that judge made me actually believe it. I was like, wow, he really just said that to me. He really just said, you don't matter as much because you're from that culture. If you were from culture X, you would matter, but you're from culture Y, so you don't matter. So I felt that he was being racist towards me. That was probably the only time in my life, because Canadians are generally not racist people, but that was the only time in my life, and it was coming. Like you said, it's coming from a place of good intent, but it ends up being so counterproductive. And all of these things are so when you say people of color and color as a person of color, that is segregation. It's no different than saying colored people because you're saying, here's humanity, here's people, and then here's people of color, the other you're, othering us. How is that not racism? Don't separate us. We're all just people. This is a point for which I find very few takers when I'm in these conversations with someone who's more woke than I am. If we acknowledge that the goal is to get to a society where we're all just human beings and the color of a person's skin is one of the least interesting facts about them, totally analogous to the color of their hair. So you got blondes, you've got redheads, you got people with black hair and brown hair. Who cares? And anyone who said, well, you know what we really need? We need to take an inventory of how many blondes are doing this sort of job. There are not enough blonde cardiologists, I've noticed, and there's clearly something happening there. How do we correct for this? It's like an Onion article. Right? And I'm not discounting the fact that racism has been a terrible problem and is still a problem in certain cases. But if the goal is to get to a society that is actually post racist and post racial, when can we start acting as though that were the case? Right? Is it too soon to start acting as though you actually don't care about the color of a person's skin and you don't want to hear every political argument parsed by that variable or any political argument parsed by that variable? And it's amazing, when you're in conversation with a white liberal intellectual, you can almost guarantee that the door to that consideration is barred. It's too soon, though. There's no argument for that. I've even met people who say it's just a false ideal. Race is always going to be the most important thing. So Martin Luther King was wrong when he said that we should judge a person based on the content of their character versus the color of their skin. Exactly. It's an explicit disavowal of that with a clear conscience, and no one seems to notice, which is really inconvenient for those of us who are left of center on basically every issue. Right. This is this great scandal that surrounds people like ayan and perhaps you have direct experience with this as well, that the allies you find when you tell your story of abuse under Islamist theocracy are Christian conservatives and neocons, you know, people on the right who who are supporting me for the reasons that I don't support. Yeah, but also to take my experience with Christian conservatives, at least. These are people who don't doubt the power of religious ideas and religious indoctrination. So when when they run their code with a one toggle switch to Islam. They know, okay, I know that ISIS, when ISIS makes their videos and frames it all in religious language, the Christian fundamentalists have no problem understanding what's happening there. They understand the power of ideas, and secular liberals reliably don't. They just think that there's got to be another explanation, something else is going on here. This can't be religion because they don't understand the power of religion, the power of indoctrination. Speaking of the power of indoctrination, who did your husband turn out to be? So my ex husband was a member of Al Qaeda. He joined when he was 18 years old. So when he was 14 years old, his father in Egypt, there's a very clear distinction between classes. So if you're from a lower class or a higher class, it's not a democracy. So there's very clear you dress differently, you speak differently, you act differently. And so when he was growing up, his family, his father, when he was about 14 years old, got a better job, and they moved to a better part of town, and he went to better schools. So he didn't really fit in because he was coming from the other side of the tracks. And it's not that he was being bullied, but he just didn't fit in with his peers. And those are the ones that the Jihadis go around trying to catch. Those boys so much like gangs or neo Nazis, they're catching those boys that are full of aggression. And it's that age of 14, two to 16, where they're just they're not, you know, they're not cognitively mature, but they're physically able to you know, they're strong and they're full of testosterone and they're full of aggression. And he was encouraged that if he joined this group of men, that he would reach levels of heaven that no other human would ever reach other than, like, the prophets. So it's intoxicating. So he joined this group, and all of a sudden, his friends at school didn't want to be friends with him. It didn't matter because he was friends with these men that were amazing and powerful. And so when he was 18, he told his father that he wanted to go to America to study, and his father let him go, but instead, he went to Afghanistan, and he was with bin Laden in a member of Al Qaeda ever since he was a kid. Right? So he was trained by him, raised by him, essentially, and eventually, he was sent to Canada to be the center of the cell that were here in support of 911 to to, you know, to that end. And I lived what year was this? This was 96. So I lived close to the American border. I lived in a city called White Rock. And at the time, you could cross the border with just a driver's license. I mean, you could just say, I'm just cry. I'm just going to bellingham to get some gas or whatever. Like, they don't nobody cared. You could cross the border so easily back then, and so it's easier it was easier for them to come into Canada and then just cross the border versus going into America. And all of the stuff that I'm telling you now, I learned, of course, after we were divorced, like me just going on his Wikipedia page and finding the New York Times articles and stuff like that. So at the time, all I knew was that he had because he entered Canada. So he's Egyptian, he's coming from Afghanistan, and he's entering Canada with a fake Saudi Arabian passport. So that's a lot of red flags. But then all of a sudden, he gets this money sent to him that bails him out of prison and pays for a lawyer. And they've traced that money, and that came straight from bin Laden. He sent somebody from California up to bail him out of prison and got him one of the best lawyers. And the lawyer argued that he doesn't have Egyptian citizenship because Egypt had taken his citizenship away because they knew he was a terrorist. And so he needed to enter Canada as a refugee. It's pretty crazy now to think post 911, that he actually was approved as a refugee with all these red flags. But who knows what they were thinking? But a part of me suspects that the FBI were already following him. And I'll tell you why I suspect this is because so as I'm married to him, covered head to toe in black, never leave the house unless I'm with him. But then one day, my mom starts to bleed simultaneously from her nose and her mouth, and I call 911, and I go with her to the hospital. This is the first time in our entire marriage that I'm out of the house with him. Not next to me and my mom not next to me either. I'm alone for the very first time. And that is when I'm approached by CSIS, who are the Canadian CIA, that's when they approached me, like, immediately in the waiting room. I thought that they were doctors. So that's why I suspect that FBI, they kind of let him in along with Thesis. They said, okay, go ahead, let him into the country, and let's just follow him and see what he does while he's here. Because I don't know how they could have found me so quickly. And they sat me down and they told me who I was married to, and I had been lied to. I knew he was in Afghanistan, but I've been told he used to drive an ambulance. He was a peacekeeper and a paramedic. And that's what he was doing in Afghanistan. He was supporting the Afghani boys that were fighting against the Russians, training the little kids. And he was just a do good humanist. So I learned from CSIS who he really is, and the terrorism that he was really involved in. And so, of course, that gives me the kick in the butt I needed to get myself and my daughter away from him. Did you believe them immediately? I believe them immediately, yeah. Because all of the things that were happening that were making me feel suspicious, everything just started to make sense. Everything just clicked. It was just like, click. Oh, okay. That's why this, and that's why that. He was always really secretive. I never go for days at a time. I didn't know where he was. It all made sense to me. There was one time, there was a Time magazine that had bin Laden in it, and he flipped out, and he's like, Get this out of the house. Why is this in here? Do you want me to get kicked out of the country? And I was like, Why are you having such a reaction? And then they showed me a picture of bin Laden, too, and they're like, Were there any issues? Has he talked about this man? And I was like, oh, my God, that's the same dude in the turban that he flipped out about when he saw him in a magazine, and just things like that. And plus, it's not that hard of a leap, because I knew that Afghanistan was full of munger, and for them to tell me that he was a terrorist or that he was a jihadist, he was like, okay, well, that makes sense, right? Like, why else would he have been in Afghanistan for all those years? And he was incredibly brutal and violent with me. So the story about him being a paramedic philanthropist yeah, like, that was that was that was much harder to believe. Yeah. I mean, so yeah, and I'd already been wanting to get away from him anyway because, like, as I mentioned to you I don't know if I mentioned to you, but he had been talking about getting my daughter, taking her to Egypt to get FGM performed on her. And I knew that I needed to get her out, but I just didn't have the courage yet to do it. Like I said, I was a high school education covered head to toe in black. I was diminished as a human, and so this was the catalyst for me, because he was always talking about taking us and going back to Afghanistan, living in Pashawa, where it was supposed to be this little paradise. And so learning about who he was really pushed me to get us out of there. And so how did you get out, and what's happened to him? So, initially, I detail this in my book because it's a very long, convoluted, detailed story, but I end up secretly getting to a lawyer and asking I guess I have to explain a little bit about how I secretly did it. So I'm living with him, and I find out that I'm pregnant, so I'm going for an ultrasound. And then immediately after the ultrasound, I'm told, you have to go to this clinic and meet your doctor. And my doctor tells me that the baby doesn't have a heartbeat, and so I have to go in for DNC surgery. And then they tell me, you're going to go under a general anesthetic. I had, like, a nine month old daughter at the time, so you're going to need help with your daughter for, like, a day or so, because you're going to be groggy. So I told him I saw this as my opportunity. So it was a very emotional time because I'm dealing with, oh, my God, my baby is dead, but also, oh, my God, I have to save the baby that's alive. And so I told him, I need to go to my mom's house to recover for a week and so that she can help me with the baby. So he wasn't happy about it, but at the same time, he doesn't want to help me with the baby, so he let me go stay with my mom for a week because I knew that it would be easier to get away from my mom than it was to get away from him. So now at my mom's house, she gets up in the morning, she teaches at the Islamic school. She's the head of the Islamic studies department there. She goes to school, and I immediately go through the Yellow Pages, find a lawyer, get on the bus, go to the lawyer. Here I am, like, full, black everything, carrying my baby with me. And I walk in there, and the lawyer was just like she's just like an angel. I went to her and I said, I need full custody, I need a restraining order, and I need a divorce, and you can't call me, you can't contact me. She was just like, right away? Like, yes, absolutely done. Give me all the information you have. We're going to get this done. And she did, and so she couldn't contact me, but I contacted her to make sure that everything was going to be okay and he was going to be served with the divorce papers. How come you didn't contact the police authorities who had first made contact with you, with CSIS? Yeah, I had no way of contacting them. They were contacting me. And so this was like a little window of opportunity that I didn't even foresee. So I just wanted to grab it when it was there, it's kind of yeah, it was survival. It's just like, boom, you got to just go, go. Then he ended up coming to my mom's building and just screaming in Arabic, you know, all of these threats and giving back my wife and blah, blah, blah. So, of course, like, a six foot four Egyptian man with long, dark hair, like, nobody's going to open the door for him. And so I called 911, and I'm like, there's somebody. Screaming at. And they're like, yeah, we know. We got, like, 20 calls. We're on our way. So they came upstairs to talk to me, and they explained to me that a restraining order only keeps him away from the building. But if I were ever to leave the house and to go somewhere, it doesn't protect me from that because I don't go to work or school or anything else. So all they can do is say, he's, like, 150 meters or whatever it is. Radius cannot come near your mom's building. Is that how a restraining order works in Canada? Anyway, this seems to defeat the purpose of a restraining order. Yeah. So I basically went under house arrest. I arrested myself, and I didn't leave that house until Cesar contacted me again and showed me a picture of him behind bars in Egypt. And then I felt like, okay, he's not going to be lurking around a corner. I can actually leave the house. And that's when I got out and start to apply to universities and started my life over again. He ended up getting imprisoned in Egypt. He was sentenced to 15 years hard labor, and that was, like, almost 20 years ago now. So I don't know if he survived or got out. I sincerely doubt that. I don't, really. The the problem is he was part of the second largest court case in Egyptian history, like, terrorism court case, the first one being Anwar Sadat when he was assassinated for trying to have a peace treaty with Israel. So he was killed for that. That was the largest, of course, and Assam's court case was the second largest. It was a very high profile. And that's why whenever I ask a journalist to investigate for me, journalists in Egypt, they get themselves in trouble because they're like, as soon as we start asking questions about him, the secret police come to us and they're like, Why are you asking about him? And so I've never been able to get an answer about where he is or if he survived. But Madge Nawaz spent one day in the prison that oursam was supposedly that had, if he lived, spent 15 years in. And that one day that Madgeid describes in his book Radical makes me suspect that our Sam probably didn't last 15 years because it's a it's a very it's a very harsh place. Right, right. Yeah. That's not where Majid was for four years. No. In Egypt. No, because he had a British passport. So they moved him out into the other one. Right. So they have two systems, right? There's the regular one that the rest of the world sees, and then there's the secret police and the secret prisons and, you know, the government ones well. So now you're out and you're free and you're getting educated. Then what caused you to take the additional step of being a vocal proponent of Western values among Westerners who don't want to hear about Western values. So I you know, I took a History of Religions course about, you know, 15 years ago, and that was the first thread that helped me to unravel everything. And for a long time, I was like, oh, I'm a Muslim, but I'm not practicing. And then it was, I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious. And I went through all of these different iterations, and I was just going through my own personal journey of growth and figuring out who I was. And it wasn't until the Bill Mar episode with you and Ben Affleck that just brought everything. It was like this little perfect microcosm of everything right there. And I was sitting there watching it, feeling like Ellen in that episode of Seinfeld when everybody was eating chocolate bars and donuts with a knife and fork, and she stands up and she's like, have you all gone mad? That's literally how I felt. Like everybody on, like, all my Facebook friends and stuff were, like, celebrating Ben Affleck. And they're like, oh, yeah, that racist guy, Sam Harris. And I was just like, what planet am I living on? What is wrong with you people? And it made me feel like I needed to speak out. Everybody's criticism of you was mainly that you're American and that you're white skinned and that you were a man. And so I'm like, okay, I am Arab with brown skin and a woman, and I'm saying the exact same thing that he's saying. So maybe you'll now have to respond to the actual message versus stopping, like, not even listening to the message, because you can't get past the identity of the person that is speaking the message. I'm from that world, so I knew that it was going to be a huge risk, and it was going to be. I had changed my name. I had changed my daughter's name. We had moved. I was afraid for my life already. When I first started out, I was anonymous, and I wanted to just write my book, just to sort of throw it out there and say, here is a perspective that you're missing. I've got 1ft in this culture and 1ft in that culture, and I'm able to let you guys know what the miscommunication here is. Please listen to me. Here's my book. Read it, and then just kind of keep myself at arm's length. But that didn't last very long. As soon as I started to speak out, I was immediately contacted by so many people all over the world that were relating to my story. And then I started to feel ashamed that here I am in a free Western democracy, afraid to put my face up and afraid to be vocal when there's people in Pakistan that are being killed there's, people that are being hacked to death in the streets of Bangladesh. And then here I am in Canada saying, I don't want to put my name and face out there. So basically they were asking me to be their voice. I can say it. They can't please say it for us. And so then I started to do that. And of course, as soon as I started to do that, I started getting attacked by my own people, the liberals in the west. And that was surprising to me. I saw it happen to you, and I knew that that was a possibility, but I really wasn't expecting it to be as vicious as it was. I'm expecting, and I'm prepared for all of the viciousness coming from the Muslim community. Of course they're going to hate me. I'm speaking out against their religion that they hold dear. And so that made sense to me. And they're indoctrinated, and I was that. So I get that. But when it comes from the left, then I have zero patience for it. I have no tolerance. It just gets me from zero to 60 right away because it makes zero sense to me. And it's really hurtful. I think that's the bottom line is it really hurts because when I was a Muslim, when I was a fundamentalist Muslim, I believed in all of the or. I was taught all of these right wing extremist talking points, right? I was taught about antisemitism. I was taught to hate Jews. I was taught to hate gay people. I was taught that women are less than men. I was taught all of these things. And for me to risk my life and risk my daughter's life and fight tooth and nail to get out of that world and come into the light and leave the darkness behind and then to start to have people in the light attack me, it's just a betrayal. It just felt it's just really painful. I don't know how to reconcile that. That still makes me really sad whenever that happens. Yeah, we were talking last night. We had dinner last night with Megan Phelps. Roper, who was also just recently on the podcast, has a book out unfollow about her experience in the Westborough Baptist Church and her experience leaving it. And it's fascinating and instructive to see how differently you're responded to you essentially have the same story. Your story is one of greater abuse and greater danger, but it's the same story of two little girls get indoctrinated into cults and manage to get out based on their own courage and insight. And you guys could not be more similar in all of the relevant variables. And yet in her case, she's repudiating the most extreme form of fundamentalist Christianity. And because that is the orthodoxy she's pushing against, it checks. All of the boxes on the left of this is this is all good, right? You just got the angry white man, grandfather, religious maniac, Christian homophobe. If you're burning all that down and coming over to the left, there's no problem. And yet because you're repudiating Islam again, all the scary details are amplified in your case, you try to port that over to the left and the ethical intuitions get all scrambled. There's the scrambling device of leftist politics that manages to make up down and down up here. And it's really interesting to see. And I think you and Megan could have a great conversation about just together. That would be a very interesting event because yeah, I would love to have that as a public event with Megan and to compare, like you just said, how the two of us had very similar experiences growing up. But Megan feels badly about the fact that she is celebrated and revered, that she left essentially her family, right? Like, it's just a group of less than 100 people, whereas I've been through similar stuff as her. But of course, it was a much bigger hurdle getting away from a much larger, much more powerful group. So this is not like I feel like I am grateful and happy that people are celebrating Meghan, and she absolutely deserves to be celebrated for what she has done and what she is doing. But I get that same feeling that I got from that judge when the world on the left is basically saying, we support and love and celebrate Megan because of what she has done. But you are a horrible bigot and we're going to try and silence you on whether it's Amazon or Facebook or Twitter or wherever I try to speak, I'm being mass reported and demonized. And somebody like Jake Tapper tries. To retweet me. And all of a sudden these people are telling him what a bigot I am and how I'm like a Nazi supporting KKK member or whatever bullshit they come up with. Well, this is what's amazing and not appreciated by well intentioned people. It's just that there's a systematic nature to this. And part of it is just that you have a very large Muslim community who will kind of spam the world in repudiation of any rational sound of the sort that you're making. So when you get on Twitter, when you're interviewed on somebody else's YouTube show, say they will get demonetized from talking to you immediately. And it's part of it, it may be algorithmic, it may just be the fact that if you get enough people reporting something, google or Twitter or any platform will just flag it, shut it down, just to try to figure out what's happening. But I've had to get you reinstated on Twitter twice, I think. Yes, right, because some white woke millennial over there can't figure out what's going on. They see your tweets and someone's reported them and again, they can't do the arithmetic. Yeah. And that same hurt, that same sense of betrayal from when I was the kid and the judge telling me, your experience doesn't matter, your pain doesn't matter, is the same feeling I'm getting now. It's just being on a much, much larger scale. And it's not just hurtful for me on a personal level, but it's hurtful because I am trying to speak up. I'm free. I'm happy. I'm golden, right? I'm married to a wonderful man. We have another daughter together. I have two great kids. I have a, you know, tenure position as a college professor. I'm good. I could just go on with my life and just live it happily and not care about any of anything. But I feel compelled to speak up because of, like I mentioned, all of these people that have been contacting me from all over the world, telling me, you can be our voice. I tried to take a break from Twitter, and I have women from Iran writing to me saying, no, don't do it. We need you. Just go meditate or something and get back on. I have a responsibility. And so that's why it hurts so extra much, is because I'm not just speaking up for me. I'm speaking up for all of these people. So when you silence me, you're silencing all these people as well. And when you're ignoring me, you're ignoring all those people as well. And so I feel like I'm failing them, and that's why I get so upset about it. Yeah, well, that's why you're one of my heroes. So great to finally get you on the podcast. It was an absolute honor. Sam, thank you so much for inviting me./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today I'm speaking with Fareed Zakaria. Fareed is the host of his own show on CNN, Fareed Zakaria GPS. He's also a Washington Post columnist and an editor at The Atlantic. He's the author of several bestselling books the Future of Freedom, the Post American World and most recently In Defense of a Liberal Education. He was also named by Esquire as the most influential foreign policy adviser of his generation, and Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 global thinkers. He and I had a wide ranging conversation about politics and partisanship and our differing opinions about how to talk about the connection between Islam and the sorts of violence and intolerance we see in the world. We didn't agree about everything, but I think you will find that it was a very productive and civil and honest conversation. And now I give you Fareed Zakaria. I am here with Fareed Zakaria farid, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure, Sam. Well, listen, the tables have turned. I have been on your show at least twice, I think, and now I get to play journalist. It's a pleasure to get a chance to talk to you about you and your views. It's my pleasure. I'm a little apprehensive, but let's make it work just to begin with, a little background on you. Everyone is obviously quite familiar with you, but how do you view yourself primarily? Do you consider yourself a journalist because you give your own opinions and commentary on on policy and current events. So often it really is it is never far from the next thing you're about to say. How do you describe your own job? Yeah, it's a good question. I'm a sort of strange bird in the sense that I've never been a reporter, at no point in my career, never pretend to be one. I have enormous respect for reporters. When I was at Newsweek, there were a bunch of brilliant reporters who worked with me when I was editing Newsweek International. But I am a commentator and I really am a lapsed academic. I went into a PhD program, thought I completed it, wrote a dissertation, got a couple of academic job offers, was all set to begin an academic path. I had been teaching as a graduate student and then sort of stumbled into journalism. I didn't quite stumble into it. You know, when I first got an offer to do something I hesitated a lot and then I looked at my life. Economists have this wonderful phrase called revealed preferences which is a fancy way of saying don't worry about what you say. Look at what you've done. And what I'd done with every summer of my life, really since high school was work at a newspaper or a magazine done research for an op ed writer things that were clearly in the realm of journalism. So I took a baby step and I became the managing editor of Foreign Affairs. Then I started writing a column for Newsweek then went as a commentator on ABC News. So it's always been commentary but I was always drawn to the public fora to being more actively engaged than being an academic. But when I think about how I've been shaped and the way in which I think about the world I think my training as a social scientist and as an academic is still very much at the heart of how I look at problems and you got your PhD in government at Harvard, is that right? Exactly. I got my PhD in government. The sub field was called International relations at Harvard, 1992. Is that synonymous with a political science degree or is it an IR degree? What is government? So at Harvard? Yeah, at Harvard being Harvard once every other university calls it political science. Harvard calls it government but it's exactly. It's a PhD in political science. And did you study with Samuel Huntington? Yeah, he was my dissertation advisor. He was my closest advisor. He's the guy who kind of offered me a job when I finished my PhD. Yeah, nice. So perhaps you can remind our listeners of his thesis about the clash of civilizations which I'm wondering how you think that has fared because it's certainly come in for a fair amount of appropriate at least on the political left. Huntington and also Bernard Lewis have gotten fairly hammered by their association and their influence on neoconservatives in the run up to the war in Iraq. Perhaps you can give a kind of potted history of that for our listeners. Sure. I actually have a very personal connection to it because Sam was my dissertation advisor. I went to him one day and said I have this job offer at Foreign Affairs. Do you think I should do it? And he said, no, absolutely not. You should take this other job I think you'd be very good at which is an assistant professor at Harvard. At Harvard, they never offer you a job. Of course they invite you to apply for it. But he did it in a way that suggested that I thought I had a good chance of getting it. And we talked about it and I said, no, I think I'm going to take the Foreign Affairs job. And he said, okay, well, if you do here's a manuscript I've been working on. Tell me what you think of it anyway. You think it's something Foreign Affairs would be interested in publishing? Let me know. So I went home and read it, and it was The Clash of Civilizations. And I went back to him and said, I think we would love to publish it. And it was actually the first issue that I edited at Foreign Affairs. I made that really the first ever cover essay at Foreign Affairs. We put it in big, bold type above everything else, in a way that signaled we thought it was very important. So I think it's a very powerful, interesting set of ideas that have in many ways been very prescient. It has its flaws. So the basic thesis of The Clash of Civilizations, which I think is true, was that at the end of the Cold War, as the Cold War weighed, the dominant motivating force of the Cold War had been political ideology. It had been the great dividing line. So whether you were communist or capitalist, whether you were communist or democratic, whether you were part of the American sphere or the Soviet sphere, that was really how you figured out international politics. You figured out the fault lines of the world. And that was obviously over. This was 19 92, 93 that we published. I think it was 93, January 93. The new fault line, he argued, was this thing he called civilizations. But at the heart of civilizations was religion. And his argument was that human beings have lost their identity as ideological beings and states have lost their identity as ideological beings. Are they in the east camp or the west camp? So they are regaining or finding again their identity, which is based on culture, on civilization and on religion. I think that piece of it is incredibly powerful, and I think one only has to look at the return of these ideas of culture and religion, not just in the Middle East, but in places like India and Russia. Even a place like Israel has become more deeply conscious of its religion. Sometimes it takes the form more of culture than of religion, but in many cases, religion is at its heart. So I think that piece of it, sam really powerfully and early on identified, and he identified that there was a particular problem in the world of Islam, which I think again has proved to be very powerful impression. Where I think he went wrong was he got very enamored with the idea of these civilizations and the clash of civilizations. And so he imagined this world in which Western civilization was going to clash with Chinese civilization and Islamic civilization, and he almost viewed them as big, interacting kind of billiard balls on a global billiard table. But in fact, what we discover is the world is very messy. Where does Latin America fit into that that framework? How do you deal with the fact that the big conflicts of the world are really mostly within the world of Islam, you know, between the Shiites and the Sunnis, between the moderates and the radicals. In fact, you know, I think that the the last five years, if you look at the number of people who've been killed by Islamic terrorism, 95, 98% of them have been Muslims, muslims killing each other. So he got too enamored with this idea of civilizations and the idea that they cohere. And so I think that part of it has never really worked. You know, if you you don't notice that, like Saddam Hussein, when he invaded Kuwait, didn't notice that they were both Arab, both Muslim, both Sunni countries, that was old fashioned geopolitics. So that piece of it, I don't think, has worked as well. But the core insight, I still think that it's important to remember in 1992, not a lot of people were saying, the next big source of identity conflict power is going to be culture and identity. And he got that exactly right. Yeah, well, we'll talk about Islam, and hopefully I'll ask you a few questions about China as well. And I think Huntington might come back in about half an hour or so. But now, how do you view yourself politically at this moment? How would you describe your political biases, such as they are? I think of myself sort of fundamentally as a classical liberal, somebody who looks at the 19th century tradition of liberals, by which I mean people who were dedicated to the idea of human liberty, the preservation of liberty, free speech, free thought. But like many of those people, I think you learn as you go along, as it were. And I think that I would describe myself as a kind of moderate or reformed classical liberal, by which I mean I can see that there are excesses within capitalism which does not allow for a pure free market. That a pure free market ends up often being the rule of the strong or the well connected, that the game is in some ways rigged, and that people don't have perfect information or perfect knowledge. So you have to play a role there. I think that traditional liberals had too benign a view of international conflict. They tended to all believe that if everybody just became democratic, that we would all live in peace for the rest of our lives. And I think there's power matters, geopolitics matters, geography matters. So where does that place me in today's political spectrum? When I was in college, I was very enamored of Reagan. I was kind of a right winger. I think part of it was I grew up in India, and I came from essentially a socialist country. And I liked Reagan's emphasis on freedom and free markets. I liked his frank talk about the Soviet Union as an evil empire, which I liked. I never bought the social conservative agenda. I've always been a social liberal. And then I found that to my mind, the republican Party went right and right and right and right. After Reagan particularly, I remember the Clinton years where they were on this kind of insane crusade to impeach Clinton, and the Democratic Party had moved to the center. So I found a lot that I liked among liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. And I would say politically, that's sort of still where I am. I tend to think I didn't move as much as the country moved, but my overall effort has always been to try to look at every issue on its own merits. So I try not to start with the assumption, if the Republicans proposed this, it must be a bad idea. If the Democrats proposed it, it must be a good idea. I try to look at these things just literally, do they make sense? So Trump just proposed Privatizing, the FAA, the airline traffic control, and it's sort of essentially been dead on arrival on the left. So I just kind of looked at it, and I came to the conclusion it's actually a pretty good idea. You have to be structured carefully. But they did it in Canada, which is not exactly a bastion of crazy libertarian ideas, and it seems to be working pretty well, and it allows for the kind of technological upgrade that we really need. So I know that's a very small bore one, but I was struck by how even that got subsumed with the kind of partisanship that we have now, where nothing is viewed on its own terms. Yeah, well, I want to talk about partisanship. You've written about it recently, and I want to attempt, however vainly, to inoculate our audience against the sense that we are merely expressing partisanship when we talk about Trump, as we inevitably will. Now, I don't know if you've listened to any of my podcasts where I've spoken about Trump, but I have now, it has to be at least 10 hours of me railing against the president. I mean, but both, you know, as a candidate and now as a president. And I've had people like David From and Applebaum and Andrew Sullivan and Juliet Kym and people who are quite critical of and worried about Trump in the Oval Office, and we have just gone to town on him ad nauseam. And this very much to the consternation of some significant percentage of my audience. I actually don't know how large a percentage. It's a very vocal minority. But every time I've done this and more and more, I have tried to make it very clear that partisanship is not the motivation here. And there are easy ways to see this. It's it's hard for people to really take these facts on board. But one point I now often make is that anything I or my guest says in this context, which seems to be hoping for impeachment, is, as a matter of fact, a hope for a president. Mike Pence now, Mike Pence is not someone who I would ever have thought I would want in the Oval Office. But insofar as I go down the road of impeachment, that's the goal. Hillary Clinton is no longer on the menu, as should be clear. And also it should be clear that most of the guests, virtually all of the guests I've had talk critically about Trump have been Republicans for the most part their entire lives, or at the very least, center right. It's not a Bernie Sanders style critique of Trumpism. So in any case, I want us to talk about Trump. I don't think we're going to spend a lot of time on his flaws because I don't think there are so many surprises there. But let's begin with this issue of partisanship and how it has seemingly increased at this moment for us and how it's made talking about political reality and just terrestrial reality, just talking about facts, talking about climate change, talking about in the example you just raised, whether privatizing the FAA could be a good idea or not. It's made it impossible to do that without this toxic miasma of partisanship and tribalism seemingly subsuming everything. So before we jump right into Trump and what concerns you there, talk a little bit about partisanship in the current moment. I think the most worrying thing about where we are politically is what seemed to be the core of how we have now begun to define ourselves as political beings. So again, if you go back to that Huntington distinction, it seemed to be that people viewed themselves more, in ideological terms, liberal, conservative. The issues were really essentially around the kind of the role of the state in our lives. So you are left of center or right of center, depending on largely on your view of the role of the state in the economic life of the nation. And that divide was very important, but it was one that you could talk about, you could argue about, you could negotiate over, and you could split differences. You wanted to spend more money, I wanted to spend less. Well, there was a number in the middle. What has happened? And there's very good research from Harvard's Kennedy School, this woman, Pippa Naris and Roland Engelhardt have done, which shows that people about the 1980s, this began to happen in significant numbers, started to define themselves not on over economic issues, but over cultural issues. Their identity derived not from their economic class, but from national origin, race, gender, sexual orientation. And so we've organized ourselves almost more into tribes. And those identities are more a script of identities. They are given identities. And so the problem with that is it's very hard to negotiate or to compromise or even talk about these issues. It seems as though one person is assaulting the other side's identity they're looking down on. They view one side or the other as immoral. And all the battle line issues tend to be like that abortion gay rights, even things like immigration, is really a debate over national identity. And so it's not easy to compromise. And what that has done is it's made it impossible for there to be that open, common space. I mean, the liberal tradition and now, again, I just mean liberal small l meaning really the Democratic tradition assumes you can have debates because there are common facts to which we have access. We are assuming each side is amenable to changing their views, but we have become in America, more like Sunnis and Shiites. You can't really have a debate because one side views the other, is then insulting them, and then and there's no compromise possible because you'd be surrendering your very identity to this other side. Each side, in a sense, thinks that to let the other one win would be to dramatically change our core conception of what the country is. Now, if we are blocked in that kind of a debate it's not even a debate into a kind of a cultural contest conflict. It makes one despair at the prospects of liberal democracy, which does depend on reasoned debate with common facts. This is what has worried me most about Trump. It's this erosion of the norm around facts. This is what's been so destabilizing about him and his surrogates. Obviously the people like Kellyanne Conway or Sean Spicer who will get on television and lie in a way that is so childlike. I mean, it's the way that Trump lies. There's no pretense of making your lies square with common reality. So that it's just this it's really an appeal to tribalism, I think it's really and it's appeal to people saying, don't forget we're a team, and those guys are bad, as you're right. They don't even pretend to have a very good explanation or answer. It's just an appeal to tribalism. In this case. It's hard for me to understand what the tribe is because it's not a religious tribe. Although some numbers of religious people have gotten behind Trump, it's not an establishment Republican tribe. It doesn't even seem all of the policies to which they seem to have been committed in the campaign, anyone or a collection of them seem fungible. Like if when Trump goes back on a promise, people seem to sort of just shrug and say, well, of course he was going to go back on a promise. That was just an opening negotiation. Gambit I don't know what the value is to which everyone is captive here, apart from just the theater of it, the fact that this is good television, or that he has destabilized the system in a way that continues to be entertaining. It's almost like a nihilistic attitude with respect to the status quo. People just want to see this wrecking ball swing freely through the system. Do you have any more insight as to what you think is going on there? Because I can't get people to make reasonable noises in defense of Trump when he either does something crazy and impulsive on his side or even just renegs on a promise that yesterday his fans or supporters said was important to them. Well, I think you're absolutely right. The only thing I would amend is you keep saying people support him. So we know now a lot about the people who support him. And now I'm not talking about the people who voted for him. Republicans are very loyal. He got basically the same percentage of Republican support as Romney did. We really have become two teams. But if you look at his core support, the 35% approval rating he has now, those people are overwhelmingly non college educated white. And the tribe is a kind of white, working class or non college educated, non urban group that believes that they have been passed by, despised, condescended to, overlooked that the America they see is one that is filled with uppity working women and minorities who may be getting ahead because of affirmative action and immigrants who are coming in and technologists and financiers who have rigged the system of meritocracy. That series of cultural resentments is very powerful and very real. There are some real economic bases for it. Some of it is just stoking prejudice. It's some weird combination of all that. But that, it seems to me the core, and those are the people Trump really knows how to play with and Steve Bannon knows how to play with. So I don't think it's completely it's not just all the theater and the celebrity. There's a real core here which is about more about social class than we like to talk about in America. Some of it to do with race, some of it to do with religion. But it's this whole combination of feelings. And you see something similar in Britain with the pro Brexit, anti Brexit. Again, you found that education and urban rural were the two big divides. And it is when you talk to these people, as I have, we're doing a documentary called Why Trump Won. And what's interesting, what's really you sense, is the feeling of resentment, the feeling that they have been condescended to, the feeling that they have been that the whole country is being run by other people. How do you feel that journalism is faring now? In the aftermath, in the era of fake news, I think it's pretty plain to see that journalism was culpable for treating the election and that the whole campaign season as a horse race and giving Trump, I don't know, it's been estimated more than a billion dollars free television. But it seems to me that in the aftermath, the attitude of journalism has changed noticeably. But how do you think we're faring now? So first, on the first point, I have to defend CNN a little bit in the sense that people forget that Trump very early on became the Republican frontrunner in the polls. There were a bunch of people like Nate Silver at 538 and pundits who were saying don't pay any attention to the polls because the polls don't actually predict who's going to get the nomination. It's actually money and it's organization and endorsements. But Trump remarkably early on became the dominant figure in the polls. So that's, number one, he was the Republican frontrunner and two, he started very early on to say completely outrageous things and proposed completely outrageous policies that nobody had ever proposed. I mean, he was proposing mass deportations of 11 million people. He was talking about building a wall. He spoke sort of favorably of the internment of the Japanese Americans. Then he comes up with the Muslim ban. So that's news. You may not like it, but you have the Republican frontrunner proposing stuff that no presidential candidate has proposed in 75 years, and we can't pretend that it wasn't news. Now, all that said, I agree with, I think what you're saying, which is that we got caught up in the theater of it. And look, just remember, the media, the television media in particular, is not a nonprofit charity. If we are putting something on, chances are you want to see it. It's on because there is a public appetite for it and it's a very competitive industry. If you don't do it, somebody else will do it. So that would be my defense of the media. But on your logic question look, I do think now the media if you want to look for some good news, I would say the resilience of the American system has been somewhat satisfying to me to watch. Which is? The courts are functioning well and are not being cowed, despite the fact that you have a president who, in an unprecedented way, is attacking the judiciary and often actually attacking judges by name, which I really don't think has happened. The nonpolitical bureaucrats that make up the kind of the hardened soul of government, whether it's the FBI or the Justice Department, they are holding up pretty well. They have not been intimidated, and the media is rising to the occasion. I think you're seeing a renaissance of real investigative journalism. You're seeing people commentary. I think conservative intellectuals, for example, you mentioned a few like David From, have really risen to the occasion, even though it has cost them. I mean, George Will was, as far as I can tell, essentially fired from Fox because he was outspokenly anti Trump. And I think that that piece of it. The media, I think, has handled pretty well. There is a problem on the Trump phenomenon. The way I think about it, there are three sort of baskets of things I at least am trying to figure out. One is what are the things Trump is actually proposing and how do you evaluate them? I said like the FAA thing or whether it's the tax policy. And I think you have to try to evaluate those fairly by saying, are they good? Are they bad? A lot of what he proposes a very weird, haphazard, badly thought through. But you still have to ask yourself, okay, but if it were properly laid out, would this be a good idea or a bad idea? So there's that one cluster of things, and a lot of it is surprisingly not very populist. It's actually pretty standard fair Republican stuff. The second is the circus of Donald Trump, the sheer, kind of weird, bizarre way in which he operates, the vulgarity, the personal attacks. And that has a kind of seductive, theatrical aspect to it. But then there's the third part, which you've focused a lot on, which I think is the most important part. And unfortunately, it is the fact that Trump is, in many of his actions and rhetoric, a danger to American democracy. And when I talk about the third, I try not to forget the first and the second. But it does overwhelm because it's the fact that you have a president who is willing to routinely do things like attack the independence of the judiciary, attack the free press. Talk about prosecuting journalists, talk about maybe we should be changing the protections that journalists and the free press have. Clearly talking to various members of the investigative branches of the federal government and trying to get them to bend to his will, whether or not it constitutes obstruction of justice. All of which is strikes me patently, obviously dangerous. For democracy dangerous for liberal democracy to have a president having nine meetings with the director of the FBI in the 100 days he was in office when Obama had two meetings with that same director in the, you know, six years that they were they overlapped. It tells you something, and it doesn't and it's not something pretty about America. So how do you talk about that third cluster of events in a way that doesn't sort of overwhelm everything? That's been one of my challenges. It's a real challenge because the moment you begin talking about it honestly, you begin to sound like one of the hyper partisans we just complained about, where you're you're calling the other side dangerous or immoral or unamerican. And it seems like these are not the kinds of claims about the other side that seem open for compromise or negotiation or a meet in the middle approach, because we are talking about someone who is undermining the norms of our democracy, as you say, and that is dangerous. And yet anyone who's just either not paying attention or on the other side understandably thinks it's dangerous to talk about the president this way. It's hyperpartisan to talk about the president this way, but you can only walk on eggshells for so long here before you have to concede that he is not a normal person in the role of the president. He is someone who is not observing the most basic criteria for being informed, caring about whether or not he's. Informed to take one thread among a dozen we could take here. But however the Russian hacking investigation comes out and whether collusion between the Trump campaign or Trump himself and the Russians can be proved or not, leave all of that to one side. What is unambiguously so is that we have a hostile foreign power that worked mightily hard to undermine our democracy. And we have a president who has either denied that to be so or has more or less ignored it and done nothing to really get to the bottom of it simply because he's concerned about how it makes his electoral victory look. And he's never said a bad word about Putin, who is someone who has his political foes and the occasional journalist locked up or killed if he had done nothing else wrong in his career as president. Those facts alone are so alarming that we're nowhere near normal here. And so to talk about this in terms this stark is not yet another example of hyperpartisan demagoguery. Yeah, it's a very interesting point, which is how do you convey that this is different, this is not normal, this is a violation of standards. This is not within the historical range. One of the ones I think we don't pay enough attention to is you have the President of the United States who is essentially in no significant way disassociated himself from his various many, many commercial enterprises, continues to benefit from them, and is actively promoting many of the those commercial enterprises we now have. You know, we have now dollar and cent figures on the 30, 2030 40% rises in revenues for all these clubs that he keeps attending, that he keeps going to. What he is in fact doing is essentially commercial advertising for Mara Lago and for the Bedminster Club and things like that. We have no idea what the nature of his meetings with foreign leaders is, but what we do know is, again, he is not disassociated himself from much of the kind of licensing operation that takes place. The Chinese Award, 35 trademarks and one day to him, 15 to his daughter. To talk about all this is not to be partisan. It is to say this is really something Mitt Romney and John McCain and George W. Bush and George HW. Bush did not do, would never have dreamed of doing. And is something that we have to talk about because this is how a banana republic runs. And we don't want to adopt those. We don't want to define these standards down so much that they go away. Part of what I think I'm in the job of is the kind of preservation job that is, the preservation of these norms of liberal democracy. Because I don't want to create a situation where we get so used to it that the next guy who comes around says, oh, yeah, I don't need to resign from any of my companies. I don't need to release my tax returns. I don't need to do any of this, and my wife and my daughter and son in law can be my principal advisor. No, we have to make sure that Trump is an aberration, not the beginning of some kind of cow dzmo rule in the United States. Now, is there any benign explanation of all of this? Take the two pieces that you and I have put in play here. And again, there are many more pieces we could talk about, but just take two things the fact that he still has all of his business dealings up and running, whether he's personally paying attention to them or not, and the fact that he has never said a bad word about Putin. Is there a fundamentally benign explanation of all that? The one that I wonder about sometimes is the business side. I can't quite see the benign explanation because there are many easy ways george W. Bush's ethics lawyer outlined how he could put stuff in a blind trust. I mean, there are things you could do, and clearly they're consciously not doing them. On the Russia thing, I think the odd thing is I can imagine a benign explanation involving collusion, which is to say that Trump ran a very disorganized, chaotic, and kind of corrupt campaign, by which I mean it was a crazy mom and pop fly by night operation. He couldn't get any of the big consultants. Remember, there were 1516 other candidates. All the serious consultants had gone to them. So he's dealing with the riffraff of the Republican world, and he's dealing with a lot of unsavory characters. And they're running. They're kind of doing almost a freelance operation. And in that context, the Russians are trying to penetrate and and maybe his guys played footsie with the Russians, but he didn't know about it. I think that's a perfectly plausible, benign explanation on the collusion part. The part I don't understand, and for which it's harder to find a benign explanation, is what you've pointed out a few times, which is really the central puzzle. Donald Trump has said for almost all his life that he thinks that the one thing that he's sure about is that the rest of the world is constantly screwing the United States, and we need to get tough on all these Sobs. And he said that from the 1980s when he was talking about the Japanese and the NATO allies, and then he talked about the Chinese and how they were raping our country and how Saudi Arabia was a country that we had to pull the rug from under everybody except the Russians. He has only said nice things about Putin, only said nice things about how wouldn't it be great if we could get on with the Russians? Now, there is a school of thought that feels that it tends to come more from the kind of hard left than from anywhere else in historical terms, but it really makes no sense given Trump's worldview. So that to me, is in a way, the central intellectual puzzle that leads me to think maybe there is something going on here. Because why is he so consistently benign in his reading of everything? Putin, that even that meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister in the White House, it was so much more pally than anything we've seen. The contacts that took place during the campaign, perfectly fine if they were what they said they were. But what I'm struck by is we have no record of any such conversations with the French ambassador, the German ambassador, the British ambassador, the Chinese ambassador. So what is going on with Russia is I think it's a fair question to which some of Trump's own rhetoric points you. So, Fred, I want to switch gears here and talk about Islam and the current challenge and even talking about it. And the role is playing in creating so much chaos in the world. And as you rightly pointed out, mostly for Muslims. You and I have disagreed both in public and in private about how to talk about the problem of Islamic extremism. So I want to see if we can make a little progress on this disagreement here. And so let's just come to it in a kind of stepwise fashion first. I noticed that recently you've written that you are a Muslim, but you're not a practicing if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay? While the last episode was controversial episode 207 on racism and police violence, we have since released an annotated transcript to that episode with links to relevant videos and articles and data. I've seen some response, some of it quite effusive in praise, and some of it outraged, which, of course, I expected. Many people also contacted me privately to convey their gratitude and full support, all the while making it clear that they can't take such a position publicly. And this is definitely a sign of the times that concerns me. I'm talking about people who, in any sane society should be able to have the courage of their convictions. And some people thought it ironic, even hypocritical, for me to trumpet the value of conversation in a solo podcast. But the truth is that podcast was just my way of starting my side of a public conversation. I'm sure I will have proper conversations on this topic in future episodes, and I welcome recommendations about who I should speak with. But given what I perceive to be the desperate state of public irrationality at the moment, I wanted to say something at full length that was relatively well formulated and comprehensive, rather than just lurch into a conversation with someone and just see what came of it. Anyways, I made clear in the podcast that wasn't the final word on anything, apart from my sense that intellectual honesty has to be the basis for any progress we make here. And to that end, I will keep listening and reading and having conversations. Another thing to clarify here, there are now two formats to the podcast, and actually there's three types of podcasts that fall into two categories. The first is the regular podcast, which is generally an exploration of a single topic, and that is usually with a guest, very often based on a book he or she has written. But sometimes it's a solo effort like my last podcast was. And the aim in this standard format is to say something of more than topical interest. These are podcasts that I hope if you listen to them two years from now or even further in the future, they would still be worth listening to. And if you're seeing these episodes online, you'll see that they have a unique photo or piece of artwork associated with them and they're titled in some way to reflect their theme. And the second format, which I've piloted with Paul Bloom and Caitlin Flanagan, but which I've also used for other guests recently. David From, Jonathan Height, andrew Yang. You've all know Harare. This format aims to be more topical. It's not that we won't say anything of lasting interest, but the goal is certainly to COVID some events that are in the news and to not linger too long on any one topic. And these episodes are titled just with the date of the broadcast. So I hope that clarifies any confusion out there. Once again, if you want to get full episodes of the podcast, you need an account@samharris.org. And as there are no sponsors for the show, the fact that people subscribe is what allows me to do this. So thank you all for your support. Okay, and now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Toby ord Toby is a philosopher at Oxford University, working on the big picture questions that face humanity. He is focused on the ethics of global poverty. He is one of the young founders of the effective altruism movement. I previously had his colleague Will McCaskill on the podcast and he created the online society Giving What We Can, which has gotten its members to pledge over $1.5 billion to the most effective charities. And its current research is on the risks that threaten human extinction or the permanent collapse of civilization, otherwise known as existential risk. And topi has advised the world health organization, the world bank, the world economic forum, the US. National intelligence Council, and the UK prime minister's office. And most important, Toby is the author of the new book, the Precipice Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. And it is an excellent book, which we cover only in part in this conversation, but we cover a lot. We talk about the longterm future of humanity the moral biases that we all suffer with respect to distance in space and time the psychology of effective altruism feeling good versus doing good. Possible blind spots in consequentialism natural versus human caused risk the risk of asteroid impacts, nuclear war, pandemics the potentially cosmic significance of human survival the difference between bad things and the absence of good things. Population Ethics. Derek Parfitt. Derek Parfitt was topi's thesis advisor. The asymmetry between happiness and suffering, climate change and other topics. Needless to say, this is a conversation that stands a very good chance of being relevant for many years to come, because our capacity to destroy ourselves is only increasing. So without further delay, I bring you Toby ord I am here with Toby ord Toby, thanks for joining me. Great to be here. So I'm very happy we finally got together. This has been a long time coming and I knew I wanted to speak with you even before your book came out. But your book has provided the perfect occasion. The book is the Precipice existential risk and the future of humanity. And it couldn't be better timed in some way, except one of my concerns in this conversation is that people have, without even thinking about it in these terms, something like existential risk fatigue, given that we're dealing with this global pandemic, which is not in and of itself an existential risk as we'll talk about. But I've had a bunch of podcasts on topics related to this, like nuclear war and other big picture concerns that I felt have been sort of mistimed in the current moment. And so I delayed this conversation. I feel like people have have acclimated to, if not the new normal long emergency of some kind. And this now strikes me as the perfect time to be having this conversation because as I'm sure we'll talk about, this really seems like a stress test and a dress rehearsal for much bigger problems that may yet come. And so it's really an opportunity for us to learn the right lessons from a bad, but ultimately manageable situation. And perhaps to start here, you can just introduce yourself, and I will have introduced you properly before. But how do you describe your work as a philosopher and what you have focused on up until this moment? And perhaps how do you see the current context in which to think about these ideas? Yeah, I'm a philosopher at Oxford University where I specialize in ethics, although I didn't always do philosophy. I used to be in science, specializing in computer science and artificial intelligence. But I was really interested in questions, big picture questions, which is not that fashionable in ethics, but questions about really what are the biggest issues facing humanity and what should we do about them, thinking about humanity over the really long run and really global issues. So I found that within philosophy is a place where one can ask these kinds of questions. And I did quite a bit of work on global poverty in the past as one of the really big pressing issues facing humanity. And then I've moved in more recently to really be specializing in existential risk, which is the study of risks of human extinction or other irrevocable losses of the future. For example, if there was some kind of collapse of civilization that was so great and so deep that we could never recover, that would be an existential catastrophe, anything in which the entire potential of humanity would be lost. And I'm interested in that because I'm very hopeful about the potential of humanity. I think we have potentially millions of generations ahead of us and a very bright future, but we need to make sure we make it to that point. Yeah. And I assume you do view the current circumstance as, in some sense, despite the obvious pain that's causing us and the death and suffering and economic problems that we'll endure for some time, on some level, this is almost as benign a serious pandemic as we might have experienced. And in that sense, it really does seem like an opportunity to at least get our heads around one form of existential risk. Yeah, I see this as a warning shot, the type of thing that has the potential to wake us up to some even greater risks. If we look at it in the historical perspective, it was about 100 years ago. The 1918 flu looks like it was substantially worse than this. That was an extremely bad global pandemic, which killed we don't really know how many, but probably a few percent, something like 3% of all the people in the world, which is significantly in excess of where we are at the moment. And if we go further back in the Middle Ages, the Black Death killed somewhere between about a quarter and a half of all people in Europe and significant numbers of people in Asia and the Middle East, which may have been about a 10th of all the people in the world. So sometimes we hear that the current situation is unprecedented, but I think it's actually the reverse. What we'd thought was that since it was 100 years since a really major global pandemic, we'd thought that that was all in the past and we were entering an unprecedented era of health security. But actually it's not. We're actually still vulnerable to these things. So I think it's really the other way around. So before we jump into existential risk, I just want to talk about your background a little bit, because I know from your book that Derek Parfitt was your thesis advisor, and he was a philosopher who I greatly admire. And actually, I was in the middle of an email exchange with him when he died. I was trying to record an interview with him and really consider it a major missed opportunity for me because he had such a beautiful mind. And then I know some of your other influences, peter Singer, who's been on the podcast, and Nick Bostrom who's been on as well. Have you single them out as people who have influenced you in your focus both on effective altruism and existential risk? I guess before we jump into each, specifically, they strike me as related in ways that may not be entirely obvious. Obviously, they're related in the sense that in both cases, we're talking about the wellbeing and survival of humanity. But with effective altruism, we're talking about how best to help people who currently exist and to mitigate suffering. That isn't in any sense hypothetical. It's just that these are people, specifically the, you know, the poorest people on Earth who we know exist and we know are suffering the consequences of intolerable inequality or what should be intolerable inequality in our world, and we can do something about it. And the effective piece in effective altruism is just how to target our resources in a way that truly helps and helps as much as possible. But then with existential risk. We're talking rather often about people who do not yet exist and may never exist if we don't get our act together. And we're also talking about various risks of bad things happening, which is to say we're talking about hypothetical suffering and death for the most part. It's interesting because these are in some sense very different by those measures, but they play upon deficiencies in our moral intuitions in similar ways. I'm not the first person to notice that our ethics tends to degrade as a function of physical distance and over any significant time horizon. Which is to say we feel less of an obligation to help people who are far away from us in space and in time. The truth is, we even feel less of an obligation to prepare for our own well being when we think about our future self if we discount our concern about our own happiness and suffering fairly extremely over time horizon. Let's talk about the basic ethics here and feel free to bring in anything you want to say about parfit or any of these other influences. But how do you think about proximity in space and time influencing our moral intuition and whether or not these things should have any moral significance? So, in terms of physical distance, peter Singer was a big influence on me when it comes to that. He has this brilliant paper, famine, Affluence and Morality, where he asked this question about if you're walking on the way to work and you passed a child drowning in a pond and in order to go in and help them, to save them, you would have to ruin your shoes or your suit or some aspect like this, which is significant value. Say you're going to give a fancy lecture and most of us, without really much hesitation, would go in and do this. And in fact, we might think it's wrong for someone if they just looked at their suit in their shoes and then kind of thought, oh, actually, no, I'm not going to do that. And and walked on by and he made this analogy to what about people in distant countries? There is some, some question about exactly how much it costs to save a life in poor countries and it may actually cost more than a fairly nice suit, maybe about $1,000 US. But he kind of asked this question about what's really different in those cases and could the physical distance really matter, could the fact that they're a stranger matter? And he came up with a whole lot of ways of thinking about these differences and showing that none of them really could matter. So yeah, he really helped challenge a lot of people, including me, about that. Now, effective altruism is more general than just thinking about global poverty. It could apply to existential risk as well. And in fact, many effective altruists do think in those terms. But it's about this idea of really trying in our lives to be aware of how much good we could do with our activities such as donations or through our careers, and really trying to think seriously about the scale of it. So I got really interested in this when I looked at a study called Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries two catchy name, DCP two. And it had this table in it where they looked at over a hundred different ways of helping people in poor countries with their health. And if you looked at the, the amount that you could help in terms of health, like in terms of healthy life years for a given amount of money, say $1,000, there was this really striking difference where the the best interventions were about 10,000 times more effective than the the least good ones. And the the in fact, there were about 100 times better than the middle intervention. It was a log normal distribution. So this was something where I did a bit of technical work on this and found a whole lot of interesting stats like that. It obeyed almost exactly the 80 20 rule where if you funded all of these ways of helping people in poor countries, 80% of the impact would happen from the 20% most effective interventions. And also if you had a choice between two interventions at random and on average, the more effective one would be 100 times as effective as the less effective one. So this is something where it really woke me up to this fact that where you give can be actually even more important than whether you give. So if you're giving to something that, say for a certain amount of money is enough to save a life, there may well be somewhere you could give that would save 100 lives. And that choice, how you make it, 99 people's lives depend upon you making that right. Whereas the difference between you giving to the middle charity or nothing is only one person's life. So maybe it could be even more important kind of where you give than if you give in some sense, although obviously they're both important. And so it was really thinking about that that made me realize this. And within moral philosophy there's a view utilitarianism or consequentialism, there's a kind of family of views that take doing good really seriously and they're not just focused on not doing things that are wrong, but also on how much can you help. But it made me realize that the people who support other ethical views, they should still be interested in doing much more good with the resources that they're devoting to helping others. And so I set up an organization called Giving What We Can, trying to encourage people to give more effectively and to give more as well. So it's based around a pledge to give at least 10% of your income to the most effective places that we know of initially around global poverty and global health. Although we've broadened that out to include anything. For example, it could be animal charities or any way of helping others as much as you can. And in fact, we've now got more than 4000 people have made that pledge. They've given more than $100 million to the most effective charities they know of and have pledged more than a billion dollars. So it's actually a pretty big thing in terms of the number of people who have embraced this message and are really trying to really make their charitable giving count. Yeah, well, your colleague, Will McCaskill, who put us together, was on the podcast a while back, and that conversation was very influential on my thinking here. Because one thing you both have done in your thinking about effective altruism is you have uncoupled sentimentality from a more hard headed concern about just what actually works and what saves the most lives. So much of philanthropy in its messaging and its tacit assumptions and in the experience of people giving or deciding whether or not to give, is predicated on the importance of feeling good about giving and finding psychological reward there. And I'm convinced that's still important, and I think we should figure out ways to amplify that. But at the end of the day, we need to correct for our failures to be maximally rewarded by the most important contributions we can make. This is just a kind of a domain wide human failing, that the worst things that can happen are not the things we find most appalling, and the best things we can do are not the things we find most rewarding. And surveying this landscape of moral error, we need to find ways to correct for the reliable failures of our intuitions. And so in talking to Will, it occurred to me that one way to do this is just to automate it. I've now spoken about this several times on the podcast, but it was such an instructive example for me, because at the time, Will was saying that the most effective, or certainly one of the most effective ways of mitigating human death was to give money to the Against Malaria Foundation. At the time, that was number one, I think, on the Give Well site might still be. And I recognize that in myself that that was a cause which struck me as deeply unsexy. Right. It's not that I don't care about it. I do care about it when you give me the details. But buying insecticide treated bed nets and giving them out, it's neither the problem nor the intervention that really tugs at my heartstrings. And it's just obvious that shouldn't be the priority if, in fact, this is the way to save a life at the lowest dollar cost. I just decided to automate my giving to that one charity, knowing that it was vulnerable to my waking up in a month not being able to care much about malaria. And so that's the kind of thing that you and Will and the movement you guys have inspired has made really salient and actionable for people. That alone is a huge contribution. So thank you for doing that work. No problem. That's exactly why we did it, I should say. It's also the question of how much you give is another thing to try to automate, as you put it. Like when I was a grad student, because I was aware of these numbers and how much further my money could go abroad. Basically, I could do around about 1000 or 10,000 times as much good with my money by giving it to the most effective places abroad than I could by spending it on myself. Why? I worked this out. And that meant that I became very pained when I was at the supermarket trying to work out whether to buy the absolute cheapest cereal or the second cheapest cereal. And that's not really a good pathway to go down because you're not that productive if you're spending all your time stressing about that. So I took an approach instead of working out how much to give and committing to give a large amount of my money over the rest of my life and then just living within my reduced means. And then you just basically just pretend that your salaries or that your salary is a bit lower. Maybe pretend that you took a job in the charitable sector or something with a smaller salary in order to do more good. Or pretend that you're being taxed a bit more because it would be good if some of our money was taken to help people who are much less fortunate than ourselves and then just live within that reduced means. Yeah, or you could pretend that you're working one day a week or one day out of every ten for the benefit of others. Yeah, that's another way to think about it. And it turned out that I made that the pledge it's based around is to give at least 10% of your income to where it can help the most, or where you think it can help the most. We're not too prescriptive about that, but ultimately I've given a bit over a quarter of everything I've earned so far. But the way I think about it is to think about actually what Peter Singer suggested, which is to set an amount of spending money on yourself and then to give everything above it. And I set that to an amount which is about equal, actually, to the median income in the UK at the time. And a lot of journalists would say, well, how on earth could you live on less than, you know, £18,000 per year? And yeah, it's kind of weird trying to point out that actually half of the population of the UK do that, so people would lose a bit of touch on these things. And that makes it, you know, makes it clear that it's as doable if you think about it in those terms. But it is useful to use techniques like these to make it easier. So you're not using all your willpower to keep giving. Instead, you make a kind of lasting commitment. That's the point of making a long term commitment on this is to tie yourself to the mast and make it a bit less onerous to be reevaluating this all the time. And we found that that worked quite well initially. People said, well, no one's going to do this. No one's going to make this commitment, forgetting, of course, that there have been traditions of giving 10% of your income for a long time. But it's something where we found, actually, that there are a lot of people who would. And as I said, more than $100 million have been given and more than a billion dollars pledged, because it really adds up. And it's one of these things where if someone kind of shakes a can at you on the street corner, it's not worth spending a lot of your time trying to work out whether to give and also whether this is the best cause you could be giving to because there's such a small amount at stake. But if you're making a choice to give something like a 10th of your income over the rest of your life, that's something like more than $100,000. And it's really worth quite a few evenings of reflection about where to give it and whether you're going to do it and to make such a commitment. But if you do, there's a lot at stake. So we found that thinking in these bigger chunks really zooming out on your charitable giving over your whole life and setting yourself in a certain direction on that really showed and made it worthwhile to do it right. Yeah. And one of the ways you cut through sentimentality here is around the question of what people should be doing with their time if they want to benefit the most number of people. And it's not that everyone should be rushing into the charity sector and working directly for a cause they find valuable. You argue that if you have a talent to make immense wealth some other way, well, then that is almost certainly the better use of your time, and then you just give more of those resources to the charities that you want to support. Yeah. So my colleague, Will McCaskill, really we'd talked about this right from the start, but he really took that a step further when he set up this organization, 80,000 Hours with Ben, and they were going deep on this and really thinking, okay, we've got a theory for what to do with your charitable giving. How can you make that more effective and really actually help more recipients or help those recipients by a larger amount? And 80,000 Hours was about this huge amount of time over your whole career and really trying to spend if you're going to spend 80,000 hours doing your job, it kind of makes it obvious that it could be worth spending, you know, 100 hours or more thinking seriously about where you're going to devote that time. And one of the things they considered was this idea of earning to give, of taking a deliberately high paid job so that you could donate a lot more. And in some cases you could do a lot of good with that, particularly if you're someone who's, who's well suited to such a job and also kind of emotionally resilient. There are a lot of people who want to do a lot of good in the world, but really wouldn't last if they went into finance or something. And everyone else, all of their friends were always off at the golf course or something and this person was scrimping and saving and couldn't socialize with any of their colleagues and, and so on, and saw them living to excess, it could be pretty difficult. But if you're someone who, who can deal with that or can take a pretty sensible approach, maybe give half of what you earn in finance and still live a very good life by any normal standards. And some people have taken that up. But that wasn't the only message. We're also really interested in, in jobs, in areas where you could do a lot of good, for example, working on a charitable foundation in order to help direct their endowment to the most effective things, to help others. Also, we found that that people we were very interested in a few different areas. There were kind of a few clusters of work which were on global health and global poverty. That cluster was really to do with the fact that the poorest people in the world live on about 100th of the median US wage. And it means therefore, because there's diminishing returns on on our income, that our money can do roughly a hundred times more good to help those people than it can here. And if we, if we do kind of leveraged things such as funding the very most important health care that they can't buy themselves, then we can get even maybe 1000 times more effectiveness for people abroad than we can for ourselves. So that's one way to do good. Another way that there's a cluster around is animal welfare. Noting that there's a market failure there where animals don't have a natural constituency, they can't vote. It wouldn't be surprising if there were massive amounts of pain and suffering which were being neglected by the general capitalist system that we're in. And indeed, when we look at it, that there are so that was another approach. Although you have to go out on a limb a little bit about how on earth would you understand animal welfare compared to human welfare in order to think about that. But you can see why it could be a really neglected area. And then there's a kind. Of branch of people really interested in the long term future of humanity and noting that only a tiny fraction of all the people who have who have ever lived are alive at the moment. And it's probably an even tinier fraction when you consider all the people who ever will live after us that this is just one century. We've had 2000 centuries of humanity so far we could have thousands of centuries more after us. If there are ways that we can do something now to have a lasting impact over that whole time then perhaps that's another location where we can do really outsized amounts of good with our lives. So we have often been thinking about those three different areas. Are there trade offs here with respect to the feeling good versus being effective calculus? Because if you take a strictly consequentialist framing of this well then it seems like well you should just cut through the feeling or the perceived reward and salience of various ways of helping and just help the most people. But the situation does strike me somewhat as morally analogous to the failure of consequentialism to parse why it makes sense for us to have a preferential love for our family and in particular our kids. It's often posed as a riddle how is it that you can shower more attention and resources and love and concern on your child than you could on two strangers? And obviously the equation gets even more unbalanced if you talk about 100 strangers and that has traditionally struck many people as just a a failure of consequentialism. Either we're not really consequentialists or we can't be or we shouldn't be but I've always seen that as just on some level a failure to get as fine grained as we might about the consequences. Obviously, there's a consequence to if you just think it through, there's a consequence to having a society or being the sort of social primate who could, when faced with a choice to help their child or two strangers would just automatically default to what seems to be the consequentialist arithmetic. Of course I'm going to care more about two strangers than my own child. What do we mean by love and the norm of being a good parent if that is actually the emotional response right, that we think is normative. And so it's always struck me that there could be something optimal and it may only be one possible optima, but at least it's a possible one to have everyone more focused on the people who are near and dear to them and reach some collective equilibrium together, where the human emotion of love is conserved in that preferential way. And yet in extreme cases or even just at the level of which we decide on the uses of public funds and rules of fairness and justice that govern society we recognize that those need to be impartial. Which is to say when I go into a hospital with my injured daughter. I don't expect the hospital to give us preferential treatment just because she's my daughter. And in fact, I would not want the hospital that could be fully corrupted by just answering to the person who shouted the loudest or gave the biggest tip at the door or whatever it was. I can argue for the norm of fairness in a society even where I love my daughter more than I love someone else's daughter. It's a long way of saying that seems to me to be somewhat analogous, or at least potentially so, to this condition of looking to do good in the world and noticing that there are causes, the helping of which gives a much stronger feeling of compassion and solidarity and keeps people more engaged. And I think we do want to leverage that, obviously not at the expense of being ineffective, but I'm just wondering if there's anything to navigate here or if you just think it really is straightforward. We just have to just strip off any notion of kind of the romanticism and reward around helping and just run the numbers and figure out exactly how to prioritize our resources. I guess I would say here's three levels at which to think about this. So one approach would be to say, yeah, just look at the raw numbers, let's say, from some study on how much different ways of spending our money could help people and then just go with what that says. A second approach would be trying to be a bit more sophisticated, to note that there might be a whole lot of people who just kind of yeah. Who aren't getting enough back from there not enough feedback, perhaps in their lives about the giving and the effect it's having on people such that they if they were to try to do the first one, that they couldn't really sustain it. Which could be a really big deal because I'm hoping that that people can make a commitment and keep it to give, you know, for the next 30 years. And if they get burnt out after a couple of years and stop, you've lost almost all the value that they could have produced, especially as they're probably going to earn more money later in their life and be able to give even more. It could be that you lose 99% of the benefit if they give up after the first couple of years. So you at least want to go this this one step further and have some idea or some sensitivity to the idea that if it's more appealing or it can, you know, it could be more sustained than that matters. And I'm thinking in that sense, quite instrumentally in that it's just trying to take account of the fallibility of the humans who are the givers. It's not about flattering them or kind of like stroking their ego or something like that. But the way I think of it, a lot of people when they think about giving in particular have a focus that's very focused on the giver. I think of it as giver centric or donor centric kind of understanding of it. For example, norms against being public about your giving I think are very donocentric they're about or that would be gauche to be public about it. Right. But from my perspective, I'm very focused on the recipients. And it seems to me that all of this focus on the donor is misplaced. If the recipients would benefit more if the donors were public about it such that they help to encourage their friends to be giving, for example, by talking about some of these causes, ideally in a non annoying way, then that could be good for the recipients. And similarly, if there are aspects where maybe if the donor somehow could follow through on a very difficult dry program of giving, they'll be able to give more. If in fact many donors fail to achieve that or they get burnt out, then that's bad for the recipients. So this approach is still kind of recipient focused. Or you could go a step further than that and build it into the structure of what it means to be good at giving and to say fundamentally, for example, people in your community or it matters more to give to people who are close to you or something like that. I wouldn't want to go that extra step, although I understand that that is where the kind of intuitive position perhaps is. And you do run into troubles if you try to stop at step two, you run into some of these challenges you're mentioning about how do you justify treating your children better than other people? So I don't think that this is all resolved. But I also want to say that the idea of effective altruism yeah, really is to be broader than just a consequentialist or utilitarian approach. The people who are non consequentialists often believe that there are side constraints on action. So there are things that we shouldn't do, even if they promote the good, because it would be wrong or be treating people wrongly in order to do them. For example, that you shouldn't kill someone in order to save ten people. But since none of the ways we're talking about of giving or of the careers that we're recommending people take, none of them involve really breaking such side constraints, it seems like we should all still be interested in doing more good in that case. As philosophers, we often focus on the interesting conflicts between the different moral theories. But this is a case where I think the moral theories tend to run together. That's our focus. Going beyond the kind of just what would utilitarianism say? Or something like that. Okay, well, let's talk about the greatest downside protection we might find for ourselves and talk about existential risk, which again is the topic of your new book The Precipice, which is really a wonderful read and it's great to have the complete picture pulled together between two covers. So I highly recommend that we won't exhaust all of what you say there, but I'll flag some of what we're skipping past here. So you break the risks we face into the natural and the anthropogenic, which is to say human caused. And it might be surprising for people to learn just how you weight these respective sources of risk. To give some perspective, let's talk about just how you think about the ways in which the natural world might destroy us all on its own and the ways in which we might destroy ourselves, and how you estimate the probability of one or the other sources of risk being decisive for us in the next century. Sure. I think often when we think about existential risks, we think about things like asteroid impacts. I think this is often the first thing that comes to mind because it's what we think destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But, you know, note that that was 65 million years ago. So an event of that size seems to be something like a one in every 65 million years kind of event. It doesn't sound like a once a century event or you'd have trouble explaining why it hasn't happened many, many more times. And I think people will be surprised to find out how recent it was that we really understood asteroids, especially people of my generation, that in 1960, that's when we conclusively discovered that meteor craters are caused by asteroids. People thought that maybe they were caused by some kind of geological phenomenon like Volcanism. It's amazing. And then it was 20 years after that, 1980, where evidence was discovered that the dinosaurs had had been destroyed in this KT extinction event by an asteroid about 10 km across. So that's, you know, 1980, that's that's 40 years ago. And then action, you know, things, things moved very quickly from that. In particular, it was around about the same time as Carl Sagan and others were investigating models for nuclear winter. And they realized that asteroids could have a similar effect where dust from the asteroid collision were dark in the sky and could in that way, cause a mass extinction due to stopping the plants growing. So this is very recent and people really leapt into action and astronomers started scanning the skies and they've now tracked what they think is 95% of all asteroids 1 km or more across. And 1 km asteroid is a 10th the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs. But it only has 1000th of the energy and 1000th of the mass. So we could very likely survive that. And they've found 95% of those greater than one kilometre across, including almost all of the ones which are really quite big, such as, you know, five kilometres across or 10. So now the chance of 1 km or more asteroid hitting us in the next century is about one in 120,000. That's a kind of scientific probability from the astronomers, but it also wouldn't necessarily wipe us out even if it did hit us. And that's a probability that really is very unknown. But overall, I would guess that it's about a one in a million chance that an asteroid destroys us in the next hundred years. And other things that have been talked about as extinction possibilities, when you look at the probabilities, they're extremely low. So an example is a supernova from a nearby star would have to be quite a close star within about 30 light years. And it's it's extremely unlikely, it's unlikely that that this will happen during the lifespan of the Earth and it's exceptionally unlikely it would happen in the next hundred years. I put the chance of existential catastrophe due to that at about one in a billion over the next 100 years. And these are quite rough numbers, but trying to give an order of magnitude idea to the reader. And ultimately, when it comes to all of these natural risks, you might be worried that supernovas and gamma ray bursts and supervolcanoes and asteroids and comets actually, it's very recent that we've discovered how these things work and that we've really realized with proper scientific basis that they could be threats to us. So there's probably more natural risks that we don't even know about that we're yet to discover. So how would you think about that? But there's this very comforting argument from the fossil record when you reflect upon this fact that Homo sapiens has been around for 200,000 years, which is 2000 centuries. And so if the chance of us being destroyed by natural risks, in fact, all natural risks put together was as high as, say, one in 100, we almost certainly wouldn't have made it this far. So using that kind of idea, you can actually bound the risk and show very confidently that it's lower than about one in 200 per century and most probably below about one in 2000 per century. You also take it a little further than that by reasoning, by analogy to other hominids and other mammals that would have died in similar extinction events as well. Yeah, that's right. And I give quite a number of different ways of looking at that in order to avoid any potential statistical biases that could come up. In general, it's very difficult to estimate the chance of something that would have stopped the very observation that you're making now from happening. There are certain kind of statistical biases that come up to do its anthropic effects. But you can avoid all of that or most of it by looking at related species and you get a very similar result. They tend to last around about a million years before going extinct. And so, since Homo sapiens is a species that is much more widely spread across the surface of the Earth and much less dependent upon a particular species for food. We're very robust in a lot of ways. So that's before you even get to the fact that we can use our intelligence to adapt to the threat and so forth, that it's very hard to see that the chance of extinction from natural events could be more than something like one in 10,000 per century is where I put it. But unfortunately, the same can't be said for the anthropogenic risks. Yeah, and so let's jump to those. You put the likelihood that we might destroy ourselves in the next century by making some colossal error or just being victim of our own malevolence at one in six rather than one in 10,000, which is a which is a pretty big disparity. One thing that's interesting, especially in the present context of pandemic, you put pandemic risk mostly on the the anthropogenic side. Maybe we should talk about that for a second. What are the anthropogenic risks you're most concerned about, and why is it that you're thinking of pandemic largely in the terms of what we do or don't do? Yes. Well, let's start with the one that started it all off with nuclear war. Just briefly. I think it was in 1945, the development of the atomic bomb, that we humanity really entered this this new era, which I call the Precipice, giving the book its name. Explain that analogy, because so what's interesting here is that the anthropogenic risk, existential risk, is really just the shadow side of human progress. It's only by virtue of our progress technologically largely, although not entirely, just the fact that we have crowded together in cities and that we can jump on airplanes and fly all over the world, and that we have cultures that value that. And you take the good side of globalization and culture sharing and and cosmopolitanism and economic integration, you know, that is perfectly designed. It would seem, to spread a a novel virus around the world in about 15 hours. And all the things that we've been doing right have set us up to destroy ourselves in a way that we absolutely couldn't have done even 100 years ago. And so it's a paradox that casts a shadow of swords on the work of my friend Steve Pinker, who, as you probably know, has been writing these immense and immensely hopeful books about human progress of late, saying that things are just getting better and better and better, and we should acknowledge that. We should only have the decency to acknowledge that. But he's been criticized rather often for things he hasn't said. He's not saying that there's a law of history that ensures things are going to get better and better. He's not saying we can't screw these things up. But because of his emphasis on progress, at the very least, he can be convicted of occasionally sounding tone deaf on just how the risk that we will destroy everything seems also to be increasing. I mean, just the power of our technology, the fact that we're talking about a time where high school kids can be manipulating viruses based on technology they could have in their bedrooms. We're democratizing a rather Faustian relationship to knowledge and power. And it's easy to see how this could go terribly wrong and wrong in ways that, again, could never have been accomplished a few generations ago. So give us the analogy of the precipice to frame this. Yeah, if we really zoom out and try to look at all of human history and to see the biggest themes that unfolded across this time, then I think that two of them. One is this theme of progress in our well being that Stephen Pinker mentions, and I think particularly in that case over the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, that it's less clear over it. Was the second hundred thousand years of Homo sapiens better than the first 100,000 or something? I'm not sure. But in the last 200 years we have certainly seen very marked progress. And I think one of the challenges in talking about that is that we should note that while things have got a lot better, they could still be a lot better again. And we have much further to go. There are many more injustices and suffering remaining in the world. So we certainly want to acknowledge that while at the same time we acknowledge how much better it's got. And we also want to acknowledge both that there are still very bad things and that we could go much further. But the other major theme, I think, is this theme of increasing power. And that one, I think, has really gone through the whole of human history. And this is something where there have been about 10,000 generations of Homo sapiens and it's only through a kind of massive intergenerational cooperation that we've been able to build this world we see around us. So from where I sit at the moment, I can see zero things. Well, actually, except my own body, which were in the ancestral environment. It's something where we tend to think of this as very recent, but we forget that things like clothing is a technology that was massively useful, technology that enabled us to inhabit huge regions of the world which would otherwise be uninhabitable by us. You could think of it as almost like spacesuits or something like that for the Earth. Massive improvements like this, so many things that we developed before we developed writing, which is only about 5000 years ago. So this time, like 97% of human history, we don't have any record of it. And but that doesn't mean that there weren't these great developments happening. There was just these and this sequence of innovations that have really built up everything. When I think about that and and these how we kind of stand on the shoulders of 10,000 generations of people before us, it really is humbling. And all the innovations that they passed on in this unbroken chain. And one of the aspects of this is this increasing power over the world around us which really accelerated with the scientific revolution where we discovered these systematic ways to create knowledge and to use it to change the world around us. And the Industrial Revolution, where we worked out how to harness the huge energy reserves of fossil fuels and to automate a lot of labor using this, particularly with those accelerations. There's been this massive increase in the power of humanity to change the world, often exponential on many different measures. And that it was in the 20th century and I think particularly with the development of the atomic bomb, that we first entered this new era where we have our power is so great that we have the potential to destroy ourselves. And in contrast, the wisdom of humanity has grown only falteringly, if at all, over this time. I think it's been growing. And by wisdom I mean both wisdom in individuals but also ways of governing societies which, for all their problems are better now than they were 500 years ago. So there has been improvement in that and there has been improvement in international relations compared to where we were, say, in the 20th century. But it's a slow progress. And so it leaves us in this situation where we have the power to destroy ourselves without the wisdom to ensure that we don't and where the risks that we impose upon ourselves are many, many times higher than this background rate of natural risks. And in fact, if I'm roughly right about the size of these risks where I said one in six a die roll, that we can't survive many more centuries with risk like that. Especially as I think that we should expect this power to continue to increase if we don't do anything about it and the chances to continue to go up of failing irrevocably and because our whole bank role is at stake. If we fail once on this level, then that's it. So that would mean that this time period where these risks are so elevated can't last all that long. Either we get our act together, which is what I hope will happen, and we acknowledge these risks and we bring them down. We fight the fires of today and we put in place the systems to ensure that the risks never get so high again. Either we succeed like that or we fail forever. In either way, I think this is going to be a short period of something like a couple of centuries or maybe five centuries. You could think of it as analogous to a period like the Renaissance or the Enlightenment or something like that, but a time where there's a really cosmic significance, ultimately, where if if humanity does survive it and we you know we live for hundreds of thousands more years that we'll look back and that this will be what this time is known for, this period of heightened risk. And it also will be one of the most famous times in the whole of human history. And I say in the book that schoolchildren will study it and it'll be given a name. And I think we need a name now. And that's why I have been calling it the Precipice. And the analogy there is to think of humanity being on this really long journey over these 2000 centuries you know, kind of journey through the wilderness. Occasional times of hardship and also times of sudden progress and and heady views. And that at the in the middle of the 20th century, we found ourselves coming through a high mountain pass and realizing that we'd got ourselves into this very dangerous predicament. And the only way onwards was this narrow. Ledge along the edge of a cliff with a steep precipice at the side. And we're kind of inching our way along, and we've got to get through this time. And if we can, then maybe we can reach much safer and more prosperous times ahead. So that's how I see this. There's a great opening illustration in your book that looks like the style of an old woodcut of that precipice, which yeah, that's an intuition that many people share just based on extrapolating the pace of technological change. When you're talking about suddenly being in a world where anyone can potentially order DNA in the mail along with the tools to combine novel sequences or just recapitulate the recipe for smallpox or anything else that is available, it's hard to see how even 500 years seems like an order of magnitude longer than the period here that we just crucially have to navigate without a major misstep. It just seems like the capacity for one person or very few people to screw things up for everyone is just doubling and doubling and doubling again within not just the lifetime of people, but within even the span of a decade. And it's given cosmic significance, as you point out, because if you accept the possibility, even likelihood that we are alone in the universe, I don't know how honestly, I don't have strong intuitions about that. I mean, both the prospect of us being alone and the prospect that the universe is teeming with intelligent life that we haven't discovered yet, both of those things seem just unutterably strange. I don't know which is stranger, but it's a bizarre scenario where either of the possibilities on offer seem somehow uncanny. But if it is the former case, if we're alone, then yes, what we do in a few short years matters enormously, if anything in this universe matters indeed. Ultimately, when thinking about this, I see a handful of different reasons to really think it's extraordinarily important what we do about this moment. To some extent it's just obvious. But I think it can be useful to see that you could understand it in terms of the badness of the deaths at the time, if it meant that in a catastrophe, 7 billion people were killed, that would be absolutely terrible. But it could be even much worse than that. And you might think, why does it need to be worse than that? Surely that's absolutely terrible already. But the reason that it can matter is because we're not saying that there's a 50% chance of particular events that will destroy us. The chances for some things could be lower. For example, I just mentioned the chance of an asteroid or comet impact is substantially lower, but still important. Still really important, because if it did happen, it wouldn't just be a catastrophe for our generation, but it would wipe out this entire future that humanity could have had. Where I think that there's every reason to think that barring such a catastrophe, humanity could live surely at least a million years, which is the typical lifespan of a species. But I don't see much reason to think that we couldn't live out the entire habitable span of the earth's life, which is about 500 million or a billion years or even substantially beyond that if we leave the earth. The main challenges to things like space travel are in developing the technologies and in harnessing enough energy. But ultimately, if we've already survived a million years, that's not going to be such an issue. We will have 10,000 more centuries to develop our science and our technologies and to harness the energies. So ultimately, I think the future could be very long and very vast. So that that's for me, the most motivating one is everything we could lose. And that that could be understood in, say, a utilitarian terms as the well being of all the lives that we would lose, but it could also be understood in all these other forms. And Derek Parford talks about this very famously near the end of his magnum opus, Reasons and Persons, where he says that also if you care about the excellence of humanity, if that's what moves you, then since most of our future is ahead of us. There's every reason to expect that our greatest artworks and our most just societies and our most profound discoveries lie ahead of us as well. So whatever it is that you care about, there's reason to think that most of it lies in the future. But then there's also you could think about the past. You could think about the fact that human society is necessarily this intergenerational partnership, as Burke put it, and that our ancestors kind of built up this world for us and have got 10,000 generations and then have entrusted it to us so that we can make our own innovations and improvements and pass it down to our children. And that if we fail, we would be the worst of all these generations and we would be betraying the trust that they placed in us. So you can think of it. In terms of the present deaths, the future that would be lost, the past that would be betrayed. Or perhaps also in terms of this cosmic significance, if we're the only place where there is perhaps life in the universe or the only place where there is intelligent life or the only place where there are beings that are influenced by moral reasoning. So the only place where there's this kind of upwards force in the universe pushing towards what is good and what is just. If humans are taken out for all the value that there is in the rest of the natural world, and I think that there is a vast amount, there's no other beings which are trying to make the world more good and more just. If we're gone, things will just meander on their own course with the animals doing their own things. So there's a whole lot of different ways of seeing this. And and Derek Parford also pointed out this really useful thought experiment, I think, which is he imagined these three different scenarios. There's peace, there's a nuclear war in which 99% of all people die, and there's a nuclear war in which 100% of all people die. And obviously the war where 100% of people die is the worst, followed by the war where 99% of people die. But he said which of those differences is bigger? And he said that most people would say that the difference between peace and 99% of people dying is the bigger difference. But he thought that because with that last 1%, some kind of discontinuous thing happens where you lose the entire future and that thus that was the bigger difference. And there's this reason to be especially concerned with what are now called existential risks. Yeah, so obviously that final claim that the difference between two and three is is bigger than the difference between one and two, that is going to be provocative for some people. And I think it does expose another precipice of sorts. It's a precipice of moral intuition here where people find it difficult to think about the moral significance of unrealized opportunity. Right? So because on some level, the cancellation, the mere cancellation of the huge if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast has its ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, it is the day before the presidential election, and I don't know why it's taken me this long to understand this, but you beat the judge as to whether this should have been at all hard to understand. As all of you know, I've been struggling for years to understand how it is possible that nearly half of American society admires or at least supports Donald Trump. I've spoken with Trump voters in search of illumination, but illumination never came. For instance, I had Scott Adams on my podcast to explain this to me, and he described Trump as a master persuader, perhaps the best he's ever seen. But the problem for me is that I find Trump to be among the least persuasive people I have ever come across. Whenever I see him speak, I see an obvious con man and ignoramus. In fact, Trump seems to be so unaware of how people like me judge a person's credibility that his efforts to appear credible, such as they are, always make him look ridiculous and even deranged. So the claim that he's a brilliant persuader makes about as much sense to me as the claim that he's a model of physical fitness would. Right? In my world, the claim can be disproven at a glance. And yet one thing is undeniable, right? Half the country views him very differently. Now, until a few minutes ago, I had more or less reconciled myself to never understanding this. But I believe at this late hour on the very eve of the 2020 election, I have discovered a significant part of Trump's appeal. In particular, I think I finally understand how he is supported because of his flaws rather than in spite of them. That really is the key. How are all the things I find despicable in him not merely things that people are willing to overlook, but reasons in and of themselves why people support him? That's what I didn't understand until this moment. Now, I have repeatedly described the man's flaws on this podcast. To my eye, he lacks nearly every virtue for which we have a word. Wisdom. Curiosity, compassion, generosity, discipline, courage. Whatever your list, he's got none of these things. But his supporters know that. And he's a paragon of greed and narcissism and pettiness and malice. Real malice. I mean, this is a man who wears his hatreds on his sleeve, and he will suddenly revile people who he claimed to admire only yesterday. So while he demands loyalty from everyone around him, really, above all else, he is an amazingly disloyal person. All of this is right on the surface. So his appeal has been a total mystery to me. But I believe I have now solved that mystery again. I don't know why it took me so long, because many of these thoughts have been in my head since the beginning. And I've certainly heard people describe some parts of this picture, but the whole image just fell into place for me. It's like one of those magic eye illustrations where you're staring at a random dot stereogram forever, and then finally the embedded 3D image just pops out. And this picture of Trump's appeal is really best understood in comparison with the messaging of his opponents on the left. That's how you can see it in stereo. That's how the image finally pops out. So taking the Trump half of this picture, one thing that Trump never communicates and cannot possibly communicate is a sense of his moral superiority. The man is totally without sanctimony. Even when his every utterance is purposed towards self aggrandizement, even when he appears to be denigrating his supporters, even when he's calling himself a genius, he is never actually communicating that he is better than you, more enlightened, more decent, because he's not and everyone knows it. The man is just a bundle of sin and gore, and he never pretends to be anything more. Perhaps more importantly, he never even aspires to be anything more. And because of this, because he is never really judging you, he can't possibly judge you. He offers a truly safe space for human frailty and hypocrisy and self doubt. He offers what no priest can credibly offer a total expiation of shame. His personal shamelessness is a kind of spiritual bomb. Trump is fat. Jesus. He's grabbed them by the pussy. Jesus. He's. I'll eat nothing but cheeseburgers if I want to. Jesus. He's. I want to punch them in the face. Jesus, he's. Go back to your shithole countries. Jesus, he's. No apologies. Jesus. And now consider the other half of this image. What are we getting from the left? We're getting exactly the opposite message. Pure sanctimony, pure judgment. You are not good enough. You're guilty not only for your own sins, but for the sins of your fathers. The crimes of slavery and colonialism are on your head. And if you're a CIS white, heterosexual male, which we know is the absolute core of Trump's support, you're a racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, sexist barbarian. Tear down those statues and bend the fucking knee. It's the juxtaposition of those two messages that is so powerful. Now, I'm sure many of you have understood this before me, but for whatever reason, this image just became crystal clear. Needless to say, everything I've said about Trump previously still stands for me. I consider him to be terrifyingly, unfit for office, and I consider most of his personal flaws to be public dangers. I think because of who he is as a person, he has harmed our politics and diminished our standing in the world to a degree that might take decades to repair. So I sincerely hope we rid ourselves of him tomorrow. But I believe I now understand the half of the country that disagrees with me a little better than I did yesterday. And this makes me less confused and judgmental, less of an asshole probably, which is always progress./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, there's been a lot of chatter online about Ukraine that is new. Many people are concerned that we could be edging closer to nuclear war with Russia. Anyway, I reacted to some of that online, but I think I'll do a podcast on Ukraine in the next couple of weeks. Today's episode is a tale of cancellation. For anyone who has any doubts about whether cancellation is a thing, this episode is for you in particular, it's a tale of a truly ridiculous cancellation, as you'll hear the mob pick the wrong target, as it often does. Today. I'm speaking with Meg Smaker. Meg is a documentarian with a very interesting and unusual backstory. In the first half hour or so, you'll get a sense of just how intrepid and resilient a person she is. There's been some important coverage of her and her story. Michael Powell wrote a good piece for The New York Times. I believe Graham Wood might be doing something for the Atlantic. But what there's been much more of is noise on social media among the whinging, hysterics and malcontents and grievance entrepreneurs. Briefly, what happened is that Meg made a film originally titled Jihad Rehab, about a program in Saudi Arabia that seeks to rehabilitate former terrorists. And her film was accepted at the best film festivals like Sundance and south by Southwest. And then it was hurled from the ramparts of those festivals, which is to say, disinvited. She even had an award rescinded and positive reviews changed after the fact, all in response to an utterly dishonest campaign of defamation and intimidation. So this is a story of what happens when a creative person has her dream come true. Because for a documentarian to get her first feature into Sundance is a truly wonderful thing. It more or less guarantees distribution and future work as a filmmaker. But it's also a story of what happens when that dream is maliciously turned into a nightmare by the woke mob. As you might expect, this bothers me for many reasons. First, it hits close to home. This is the kind of thing that has been directed at me. But when it was, I was lucky enough to have already built a platform and an audience that makes me more or less impervious to these kinds of attacks. Meg wasn't so lucky. But as you hear, the injustice of this episode is really compounded because Meg is absolutely the wrong target. I mean, I can understand many people being upset by what I have to say about Islam because my view really is condemning of the faith, at least in part. Obviously, I don't think I or anyone else should be canceled for honestly discussing the link between specific doctrines in Islam and much of the pointless misery we see leaking out of the Muslim world. Jihadism especially. Although we might currently note what's happening in Iran, with social protests bordering on revolution in defiance of the hijab. But this is just to say that in my case, the offense and even outrage isn't totally surprising and illogical, right? Because my view really is that Islam has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, if need be, into the modern world. But in Meg's case, there is literally nothing in her film for people on the left to honestly find offensive. She doesn't share my view of Islam at all. And there's no criticism of the religion in the film. As I make clear in our conversation. This is an utterly humanizing portrait of men who we have every reason to believe have been treated terribly in Guantanamo by the US government. So what's happened to Meg and her film is quite perverse. It's just a spectacular own goal for the far left, and it's perfectly emblematic of the moral and political confusion that is screwing up everything now. And as you'll hear at the end of the podcast, there's also a call to action here. Meg is still struggling to get her film distributed, and she has set up a GoFundMe page for that purpose, which is accessible at Jihad Rehab.com. And I would really love it if our community could help Meg. So if you find this story compelling and you want to help right the wrong that was done here, I would greatly appreciate it. And now I bring you Meg Snaker. I am here with Meg Smaker. Meg, thanks for joining me. Thank you. Really nervous, but I'll try to do my best. No. Well, it's really great to talk to you. So we were thrown together by, I guess, a mutual friend. She's a friend of mine. I don't know how well you know her, but Melissa Chen put you on my radar, and I'm glad she did, because it's a fascinating situation you're in. I'm sure it's an uncomfortable one, but I want to get into it, and it pulls together so many issues that we're dealing with collectively and culturally. There are several things to talk about. You've made a film originally titled Jihad Rehab, which I've seen and which is really quite wonderful. And the irony of its cancellation will be quite evident to our audience. So we want to talk about the film and its reception, perhaps above all. But before we do, you have a very interesting and counterintuitive background. So let's just summarize who you've been before you ever thought you might make documentaries, and then we'll get into the film and the current controversy. I don't know. How far back do you want to go, but I want to go back at least as far as September 11. Yeah. Well, I'm currently a filmmaker, but I'm a documentary filmmaker, journalist. But before I was a filmmaker, I was a firefighter. And if you asked me back then what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, without hesitation, I would have said be a firefighter. I mean, I love that job. Every day was different. You got to work in a team, and it was just such a really great job to have. And the people that I worked with were like family to me. All that kind of changed, though, on 911. And the reason for that is, the day before 911, I would describe my firehouse as a place of, like, family, of, like, supportive, caring people who, you know, were very just like family, a place of love and support, right? And within 24 hours, that place turned from a place of love and support into a place that had a lot of vitriol and hatred and bigotry. And none of the things that I was seeing on mainstream media kind of answered those questions of that, like, that were generated from that day. And my dad always told me that there's only three types of people in the world, right? Those that when you hit them, they hit you right back, and those that when you hit them, they run away. And those that when you hit them, they asked, why did you hit me? And I've kind of always been in that third camp. So after 911, my initial response was to try to understand. So I watched a lot of news, and I read a lot of books about Islam, and I read some books about Arabic and the history of the Middle East. And what was really interesting to me was the things that I was reading about Islam were directly contradicting what I was seeing on the news. And the only way that I can think about that time was to basically go to Afghanistan on my own and try to find those answers for myself. And so it was a little bit after six months, around six months after 911, I traveled to Afghanistan on my own. And after arriving there, I was immediately humbled by my own ignorance of the world. I don't know if you remember what you were like when you were 21, but I was very self assured of my worldview, and that came crashing down after my time in Afghanistan. Okay, but before we get into your experience there, there's a bridge we have to attempt to build. I don't know if it's possible because it could be mysterious, even to you, but you have just described your sudden interest in why they hate us, which was shared by many millions of people in our society at that point. And your response to it is so peculiar and extreme compared to what everyone else did, that if there is an explanation for it, it'd be great to have it, insofar as you can provide it. How is it that you, a solitary woman who happens to be a firefighter, suddenly decides to go to Afghanistan solo in the more or less immediate aftermath and ongoing chaos of the beginning of our war on terror? Based you're saying, why did you do this, like, crazy thing of going to Afghanistan, right? Yeah, it is fairly bonkers. If you just look at the average, I will completely admit to that. If you don't know me, it sounds like a fucking crazy person like that. Sorry, am I allowed to swear? You are, yes. Okay, cool. That makes this a lot easier for me. Yeah. I think how do I put this? So I remember when I was a firefighter, for me, I loved doing it, but there was one type of call that whenever we went on it, I would always be really nervous about it, and that was any calls involving hazardous materials. Because every video we saw in training where firefighters died, it was because some kind of chemical or gas asphyxiation or something like that. So it always kind of scared me. Right. And it was the only calls that I went on that I would hesitate. And it was the only calls that I went on that I would second guess myself. And I don't know how you're wired, but for me, when I don't understand something, like I didn't really understand how chemicals and hazardous materials work, it scared me. And so for me, diving deep into that and understanding it is a way of kind of like a safety blanket. So when I realized that this was one part of me being a firefighter, that I just needed to overcome that fear, I went in and I started training as a hazmat specialist. And it really involves a lot of chemistry, a lot of on the firegrounds work type drills and stuff like that. And it's a pretty involved process to become a hazmat specialist. But then after I got that, the next call that I went on, that was for a hazmat call, I didn't hesitate. I was super comfortable and super deliberate. And I think for me, it might kind of my friend thinks it's a little bit obsessive compulsive, but like, if I don't understand a thing, I have to understand the thing. I can't let it go. I can't be just like, oh, that's going to be a mystery and I'm just going to keep on living my life. Does that make sense at all? Yeah. Although there are many things to understand, and on paper at that point, it must have looked, if not to you, to others, fairly crazy. That shit crazy is what my dad said. Literally, we have journalists, seasoned journalists, getting decapitated at that point. Daniel Pearl got murdered, I think in February of 2008. I actually had a knock on effect of that is when I went back to Pak, Pakistan, it was going to Afghanistan. So I went back to Afghanistan. I went to Afghanistan right after 911, and then I went to back to Afghanistan in 2004. And when I went back, I actually had the secret police. They weren't so secret, actually, because I needed to follow me in Pakistan because they were worried that I was going to get kidnapped. And it was funny because I wasn't there as a journalist who had loads of resources. So I was staying in the really cheap part of town, which also was a very dodgy part of town. And when they found that out, they were really scared that something was going to happen, and they sent this caravan of armored cars literally remove me, and they put me up in the Marriott, just like, what is going on, guys? And I think the Marriott was bombed shortly after that. So I don't think that was the best decision. But, yeah, I think that listen, my experience has been that most of the people that I meet are good people, and that goes for every country I've been to. I think through different cultures and different traditions and religions, most of the people I've met have been good. I think if I had never left the United States and I didn't have that experience, I would feel very fearful of the world, because I know that before I started traveling and before I started really doing a lot of reading ferociously, the world seemed very scary. Because imagine if you never left your hometown, and you just watch the news all day. That's fucking terrifying. And I think the way that I describe Yemen and Afghanistan to people, because inevitably, they always think that it's so dangerous, and there's explosions going off all the time, and then I'm, like, running for my life. But the way that I describe it to people is, imagine that you knew absolutely nothing about the United States. You didn't know it was located on a map. You didn't know who the president was. You had never seen any movies from there. The only thing that you knew about the US. Was what you read in the New York Times and about the rapes and the robberies and the killings, and you would think that America was like Mad Max on crack. And you're like, that place is dangerous. I'm fucking never going there. And I feel like a lot of the times, living in Yemen, most of my friends and family were like initially, they were super scared for me. But when you live in a country like that or even going to Israel or other countries that I've been to that are trade on the news in kind of like this hectic chaotic way, I think the majority of the population the majority of the time does not experience that. Yes, there are explosions here and there of violence. But you also have school shootings here. Like, I remember when I was in Saudi Arabia at a taxi driver, he asked me where I'm from, and I told him America. And his first thing was like, oh, it's so sad about your crazy schools over there. You must be so worried for your children going to school. And I was like, I don't have kids. But yeah, I think that's something that people do think about. But it's interesting that that's our view of the States over there. Sorry, I ramble on a lot. You just tell me to shut the fuck up if I go on too long. Sorry. No, it's great. So, Yemen, obviously, there's a significant civil war and humanitarian crisis happening there. Now, was any of that going on when you were there, or is that pre chaos? I mean, the well, I really kicked off, and so the houthis were definitely an issue when I was there. Like, there was bombings in the outside the city. Ali Abdullahsala, who was the president at the time, it was a definite issue there. And we had lockdowns sometimes when things really kicked off and there was riots sometimes for I remember this one time, it's one of my so when you live in Yemen, you have to have clan. And what I mean by that is, when I moved there as a single person, I would, like, move into an apartment. And then this happened to me a handful of times. I'd move into an apartment and then I would repaint it and redo everything and make it nice. And then inevitably, my landlord would come a couple of months down the line to check the place out, and then he'd be like, oh, it really looks nice in here. I was like, yeah, thank you. And then about a month later, he's like, I've decided to move back in, and I'd have to move out. And I realized after a while that I just had no recourse to any of this. And then I met there's a huge diaspora of Iraqis in Yemen. Because of what happened with the war in Iraq. A lot of Iraqis moved to Yemen to kind of get away from that and escape that at the time. And I met and befriended this family, and they kind of took me in and adopted me. And one of the women, I consider her like a sister to me. She actually helped me on the film and did some translations and gave some story notes. But, yeah, she's like a sister to me. When they adopted me, the next time I got messed with, the whole crew came down. And we're not talking about two or three people. We're talking aunts, uncles, cousins. And then as soon as it was clear that I had clan, that I had, like, people, I was left alone. And then they found me this place to rent in Hada, which is the newer part of Santa. And it was this really old Gabeli guy sorry, gabili is a bedouin with a lot of money from selling cot, which is a drug there. And he was a huge fan of mine because I was always put the run on time, really low maintenance. And when the riots kicked off this is very yummy. When the riots kicked off, he sent two Hylex trucks with Toyota Hilux truck. With each of them, had a 50 caliber gun in the back and right outside my gate to protect me. And then he dropped off an AK 47 for me to have just in case. And I was like, I love Yemen. It's this hospitality. It's great. Yeah, well, I'm seeing the hospitality, although the safety is looking questionable at this point. Well, you know what? Like I said, if I was by myself at that time and I didn't have a clan, I didn't have a very well known and influential, powerful gabuli as a landlord, I would be like, yeah, it's very dangerous. Okay, here's how I describe it, right? I don't know about you, but I like puzzles. Not puzzles as in, like, I put together puzzle pieces that shit drives me nuts. But actual human culture, cultural and political puzzles. And so, for example, it was 2004, and so growing up, my dad was a firefighter, but he had this knack of, like he loved to read. He read a lot of textbooks in his spare time, and that was one of the things that I picked up from him. And so I was reading about lazy, fair economies, and it was this theory, and they'd really never been in practice, but at that time, because this collapsed the smallest state, I was like, this would be a really cool thing to go find out about, because technically, this is a lazy, fair economy. There's no government. There's no rule of law. So I was in northern Somalia, Somali land, and I was trying to figure out how I could go to Mogadishu, because Mogadishu at that time was absolutely chaotic. And if you can picture Mogadishu as a pizza, each slice of pizza is a different clan or different faction rules, and you can't cross over that without permission. If you do, you'll be shot and killed. So I was trying to figure out because I wanted to basically be able to go all over Mogadishu freely, and I was trying to figure out how to do that. And I realized that in Mogadishu, they had marble cigarettes and Coca Cola and other kind of products. And it occurred to me that they have to get that from somewhere because there's no factories that make that kind of stuff at that time anyway in Somalia and Mogadishu. So even though the Somali state collapsed in 1991, as did the post office, that means someone has picked up some kind of and made a private postal business. And my theory was that if I can befriend that guy, that would be the person who would be able to get me free access. Because even if you're a warlord, if you're running a piracy ring or you need to have your supplies, right? You need to have for your men, for your family, like, you don't want to get cut off. And that's the one guy no one wants to piss off. It's the guy who brings you that stuff. So I found out who ran the private postal service in Somalia. I met with him, I befriended him, and then I went to Mogadishu with him. And when we walked around, everyone saw me with him and just figured that I was his friend or that I was doing a business deal with him. And then once he left, I was able to go all around Mogadishu and no one messed with me. And it was like pretty night and day, and it was just figuring out the puzzle of this place and how you're able to navigate it. So I guess the answer to your question is yes. Going to Mogadishu as a six foot tall Albino Godzilla on the surface is not smart, nor is it safe, but it's all how you do it. And by doing it that way, it actually was quite safe. Does that make sense? Yeah. Well, I think you've just further confirmed that I want to be with you in a crisis. If I have to be in a crisis, I'm on a lot of people's top list for if the zombie apocalypse actually comes. I was really disappointed because I honestly thought that when this all started, I was expecting, like, Mad Max Fury Road. I'm like, Man, I'm going to rock in this new world. I got this great skill set, and then it wind up being like, the big Lebowski apocalypse. We're all home in our robes. So I didn't get to use my skill set, unfortunately. Yeah, kind of went stirred crazy, actually. So how long were you in Yemen? A little bit under five years. So, like, a little bit over four and a half years. Yeah. Somalia just did it punctuate that time. Or did you go to Somalia after? Yemen? So, Somalia. I went in Yemen twice. Once when I was in Yemen and then again when I went back to school. I wrote a paper based on my time in Somalia called The Advantages of Anarchy, and I turned it into one of my professors. And the paper basically said that Somalia was in this unique position because Somali land had declared itself independent and had its own currency, it has its own elections and president, but it was not recognized by the international community. And because it wasn't recognized, it wasn't able to get money from the IMF and things like that, which on the outside people thought was a bad thing. But what actually happened was, because they didn't have international recognition, they also didn't have international influence. And so the government didn't go abroad for money. It had to go to the local populace and the local business leaders. And so it created a very healthy relationship between the local business and the politicians, where it was more organic, and they were responsible to the local populace, where a lot of countries in Africa receive a lot of their budgets and funding from the IMF, and so they're okay pissing off the locals. Because people that they don't want to piss off are these foreigners in these foreign countries. So it actually created a very healthy economy and a very healthy political system in the north, in Somalia. Land. And so the paper that I wrote was kind of, like, about the advantages of the anarchy that happened in Somalia. And I turned it to my professor, and she called me into her office, and I thought I was in trouble because, I mean, you don't know it's about me, but I have learned disability, and my spelling is fucking atrocious, like, really bad. So I thought I was going to get in trouble. And so she called me and she said, you know, I read your paper, and I was wondering if you would be interested in writing an academic article about it. And I, you know, we could co author it. And I didn't know what it took to write an academic article. I thought it was going to be, like, a couple weeks of my time. So I was like, sure. It, like, took two years. So then I applied for some grants to go back to Somalia and actually do real field research. And so then I went back in 2010 and went all over Somalia, kind of doing field research on state building and piracy and using piracy as a way to measure stability and state building. Fascinating. Sorry, again. Just tell me to shut the fuck up. I go outside. This is all great, but I do want to get to the present concern, I guess, one more step along the way. So you have created this still, by my lights, fairly insane cultural exchange program for yourself, and it's all working out. You've spent years in Yemen, you've had adventures in Somalia. At what point do you decide to become a documentarian? That actually happened while I was living in Yemen. So when I was in Yemen, I was a head instructor at a firefighter academy, so I taught Yemeni men how to fight fire. That's a whole different story. How I got that job. I don't know if you know this, but women aren't firefighters in Yemen. I can imagine. I remember my first day, I walked into the classroom, and they didn't know I spoke Arabic. I walked into the classroom and I could hear him whispering, and they thought I was the secretary for the instructor. And I started right on the board, and they're like, Wait a minute, this is our instructor. And they completely ignored me. Like, completely. You must have been in many situations where people assumed you could not understand Arabic, and they're talking about you in front of you, and then you disagree with them. I love that because, I mean, I don't look like I would speak you don't look like you speak Arabic. First day, I literally went home, and I was almost crying because I thought, oh, my God, I'm going to get fired from this job. And then the second day, the same thing happened. Firefighting, we have the same improvised, adapt and overcome, and it's something that we just kind of go to all the time. And when you become a firefighter, your fire academy is about 20 weeks long, probably more than that in some cases. And you do all this classroom work where you study fire science and safety equipment and standard protocol and chain of command, all that stuff, before you ever do live field drills. And what I mean by that is we have something called the Burn Building when you're training, and it's a house that basically you can set on fire multiple times to kind of do live fire drills, but you wait until the very end to do that. So what I decided to do was to take them, because I figured that they looked at me and didn't see me as a firefighter and that they just thought I was this woman to teach them stuff. And I knew that I had to change that perception. So on day three, I took them out to the fireground and weeded a live fire drill, and I taught them what an SCBA is. It's a self contained breathe apparatus that firefighters use. And I taught them about how to donate. And my goal that day was to teach them skip breathing. Skip breathing is a very advanced technique that firefighters use that when your air runs out, this alarm bell goes off, and it basically tells you you have, like, a couple of minutes left of air. And if you're an experienced firefighter, you change your method of breathing that you make that last longer, but you have to remain calm. And you have this huge alarm going off in your ear. It's really, really hot all around you. There's fire, there's smoke. And unless you have a lot of experience and a lot of training, you tend to freak out when that alarm bell goes off and you suck your air down even faster. And I knew that. So there's all these cadets, and I took them in two by two to the Burn Building, and I would shut off my air and shut off their air, and then the alarm would sound. And to the person, they all freaked out. This one guy tried to pull off his mask, and I had to slam his body against the wall, like, on his mask and yell at him. Arabic I'm like, if you take this off, you will breathe in superheated air and you will die. So don't do that. And then this one guy, he, like, almost passed out, and I had to basically drag him out of the building. And then we did that, and it was about, like I think I had about 40 cadets, and they all went in two by two. And at the very end of it, I came out and they're, like, all on the ground, like, breathing really. Heavily. And this one guy looks at me and goes, teacher, you are a man. And then after that, that was it. It was fine, and we got along great. And they just looked at me as like a man dressed as a woman teaches them firefighting. And that was fine. That was the end of it. And so, yeah, it's definitely not the first time that that has happened. But I do think that being able to understand kind of where people are coming from, these men, I think most of them had it around a third grade education, because firefighting is very different in Yemen. It's not seen as a desirable job. So people who have really well educated aren't going after that. And so a lot of them were from the rural areas, and this was a huge thing for them. And so it's like realizing that there's people who are maliciously sexist and there's people who just have not been exposed to women in different positions like that. And so once you're able to show them like, hey, I can do this, and I'm actually pretty good at it, it shifts their paradigm. And then we were able to work, no problem. One more firefighting question that just occurred to me, because 911, it was an atrocity when viewed from one angle, certainly a tragedy when viewed from another. And it was especially so I can imagine from the point of view of a firefighter what happened to the firefighters in New York that day and the heroism on display and the doomed nature of it was so acute, I have to imagine that these events hit the firefighting community generally in an especially hard way. I think you alluded to some of that when you talked about how riven your firehouse was with hatred of Islam perhaps, or at least jihadism at a minimum. Is there more that you can say about that? How did this land for firefighters? So in California, we have fire season. And back in the day, it used to be actual season that year round. And we have these things called strike teams, where during fire season, when there's huge fires, there are five engines that are sent out by different departments as resource allocations. And so I was on a strike team, so I was on a different unit. And that morning we were at a station that had another engine on it. So there's sometimes stations have two or three engines on that are stationed there, and that engine had been out the whole entire night running calls. And my guys I was a senior firefighter at the time. And my guys got up early and started to get ready, and there was making a lot of commotion in the TV room. And I was in the bathroom, and I came out to actually yell at them because I was like, hey, the other crew is still sleeping. Like, keep it down. So I walked in the TV room and I kind of gave it to one of the firefighters and he pointed the TV and I saw one of the trade towers on fire. And I turned to him and was like, I don't fucking care what movie you're watching because I literally thought it was a movie because I just thought they were watching a movie or something. And he's like, no, this is the news. And I looked at it and the one thing that I remember most of that day was the shift. And when the first plane hit at the firehouse, it was more like, oh shit, that's going to be a crazy call. Because normally you have either a plane crash that you go on or like a high rise fire that you go on. But that was like two. So as firefighters, we were all talking about what kind of call that would kind of be on, how crazy it would go to do something like that. And what you have to understand is before 911, all the training that we got was that steel reinforced buildings don't collapse. So when you went to a high rise fire, you set your incident command system at the bottom floor, right? So we knew there's loads of resources and loads of firefighters and chiefs always were going to be at the bottom floor. And so we knew that. And so when the first plane hit, the shift that I'm talking about is like it was more like thoughts and prayers and concerns and talks about how to be blunt, how cool of a call that would be to go on, right? Like how cool would it be to a plane crash into a high rise. And we were all talking about kind of being jealous of going on a call like that. And then there was a palpable shift when the second plane hit because it was very clear when the first plane hit, we thought it was some kind of accident. And when the second plane hit, the shift was so palpable it went from concern and thoughts and prayers to rage and vengeance. And it was interesting to me because the facts were the same. Plane hit at the building, people had died and it was tragic those facts were the same. But because the perceived intent had shifted from accident to this is an attack, this is on purpose, that shifted the whole paradigm at the firehouse. And so that to me is one of the things that I remember so vivid from that day and also that. And then when the towers came down, everyone in the firehouse was silent because we all knew where all the firefighters were because the incidents command system had to be on the bottom floor. And so we knew that probably before the rest of the nation did that hundreds of firefighters had died. And so the, the reaction was so firefighting is not like normal jobs. It's not like you go to an office and you just do a nine to five with someone, it really is like an extended family. And so I trained with guys in my department. I trained with guys from FDNY, I trained with guys from Louisiana because I did a lot of search and rescue training and USAR training, which is like when the Oklahoma City building exploded, they'll send a USAR team, and it's basically, I think it's 72 firefighters who are trained in different things. Hazmats, low angle rescue, confined space, different specialties. And they'll send a team to that site to manage it. And so you get to train with other departments. And I think it's also like, even when I was traveling in Pakistan, I brought some shirts from my firehouse with me, and I actually stayed at a firehouse in Pakistan, and I gave them some firefighting shirts, and it was yeah, they just welcomed me in. They were very curious about women firefighting in America. But it is an extended family that actually goes beyond the borders of the US. And it's just a different kind of profession, because the way I describe it is it's a very unique job when you're exposed constantly to other people's most traumatic moments and it attracts a certain person and it kind of develops a certain personality to where when you meet another firefighter, there's this kind of look of like yeah, you've been to the shift, you've seen it all. Does that make sense? Yeah. So there really was no expectation on your part when you saw the fires burning out of control in both towers, that the buildings themselves were going to start to pancake and come down? No, absolutely not. That's the thing. Absolutely not. Because that's not what we're taught. Literally, when they started to collapse, it was shock because I was not stationed in a place with high rises, but I knew firefighters who were. And part of the training that you do is setting up on that ground floor for your incident command system. And again, part of firefighting is you have to learn about building construction. You have to learn about hazardous materials, you have to learn about medical stuff. It's a pretty great job if you're a person who gets bored easily because there's always new stuff to learn about. But yeah, all the building construction training that we had, it was like steel reinforced buildings don't collapse. And then that was the golden rule. And then they did, and then the whole world kind of shifted. Yeah. Well, in defense of our erroneous assumptions, no one had ever flown a fully fueled passenger jet into a high rise. This is true. Jet fuel burns really hot and hot enough to melt those kind of steel reinforced beams, no matter how thick they were. So, yeah, it was something that hadn't been tested before. Yeah. Well, you'll get a few emails from 911 Truthers after this. Okay, I'm going to go on a tangent. Can I just tell you this. In the Middle East, there's a lot of conspiracy theories there's a lot of conspiracy theories also around 911. And almost to a person. People that I talked to in Saudi Arabia all thought 911 was an inside job, either done by the Israelis or done by the United States as an excuse to go to war, right? And I remember there was there was a guy that I'd met there, really nice guy, Abdullah, who would I would classify super conservative, very, very religious, but salt of the earth, fucking good human, just a great human being. And he was adamant. He was adamant that it was like an inside job and America did it. And XYZ. And I remember he acted as my driver at some times. And I went to go interview Khalid, you know, the guy who opens the film, the Bomb Maker. So Khalid was his interview was 10 hours long. He was just such a fascinating person. And he was with Osama bin Laden on 911. And so we talked a lot about that in his experience. And Abdullah was in the room for part of the interview. And that part, it was about Khalid talking about 911 and the attacks and being with Sam and lauded and the plan and all other stuff. And I remember leaving that interview, and I got in the car with Abdullah. And this is from the horse's mouth. The guy that was next to a somberman on 911 telling credit for it. Yeah. I was like, Abdullah, like, after hearing that ten hour interview, like, have you changed your mind about this being an inside job? And he's like, you know, like, yeah, I think I think maybe maybe you were right. And I was like, yeah, it only took, like, 10 hours. Like, best friend telling you this. I was like, okay. But yeah, that was that was pretty fun. You just have to do that a few million more times. Yeah. And he'll change opinion, right? Yeah, I think Khalid my hope someday is to take his interview and do, like, a podcast of it, because his interview was just amazing. Like, for example, there was so much that couldn't go in the film. But I was talking to Khalid about just small talk and asked him, I'm documentary filmmaker. Do you ever watch documentaries? He's like, yeah, I watch a lot. I was like, oh, what's your favorite one? And he said, oh, it's the one that was on the syllabus at Alfarok. I'm like, Wait a minute. You guys had a syllabus at the al Qaeda training camp that had documentaries that were assigned watching material? He's like, yeah. I was like, well, what's your what's your favorite documentary? And I was kind of racking my brain and thinking, what would what would al Qaeda assign for homework for these these guys in training? He said, you know, my favorite one was the one about the man he's always looking in the camera, and he's talking about the war in Vietnam. And I was like, Wait. Fog of War by errol morris. And he was like, yeah. He's like, we watch that film, and we know all we need to know about America. I was like, this is crazy. Someday I want to tell Arrow Morris that his movie was on the syllabus Fed in Al Qaeda training camp. That was great. I would bet they've got a few Michael Moore films, too. Okay, so let's jump in. We're just going all over the place. I apologize. I see the through line. It's working. So you are steeped in the culture at this point, and you have decided to make a film which sends you to Saudi Arabia. Perhaps you want to say how you got pointed in that direction and heard about this, the phenomenon of jihad rehab. But perhaps you can just briefly summarize the film. I want to talk about the film, but I really want to talk about what has happened since the release or attempted release of the film, because therein some powerful ironies await us. So what is jihad rehab? The place, the phenomenon and and give me the the elevator summary of your of the film you made. Yeah, so I'll take those in reverse. So Jihad Rehab now retitled the Unredacted is about a group of men who, after spending 15 years in Guantanamo, are sent to the world's first rehabilitation center for terrorists with terrorists which are located in Saudi Arabia. I first heard about the center way before I was a film maker. I was living in Yemen, and I was teaching firefighting. And I kind of overheard a conversation from some of my cadets, and they were talking about a terrorist attack that had taken place in Saudi Arabia, I think it was around 2007. And they said that the perpetrators had been caught and that half the perpetrators were Saudi and half the perpetrators and the other half was Yemeni, and that the Yemenis had been tortured and killed, but the Saudis had been sent to something that they referred to as jihad rehab. And at the time, this was really interesting to me because Saudi Arabia was and also is not known for its human rights record or for being very progressive. And so it always kind of perplexed me why this very conservative country was running some kind of progressive rehab program for a terrorist. And it always kind of stuck with me. And then my last film I made in Cuba, and my Spanish is not great. And when it came time to do my next project, I wanted to do something where it was going to be easier, to be easier, because I spoke the language. It was way nice. It was so hard to make this film. Yeah. And so I originally wanted to do this, and I didn't know the kind of access I could get. I was pretty sure I could get enough access to at least do a short documentary that was definitely within my, I think, powers, but I wasn't sure if I was going to have enough access or the kind of access that I wanted to do a feature length doc. But it took me, like, a year to get access, at least the kind of access that I have to make this film. Like, full transparency. There are reporters that visit the center before me, but they're given, like, a two hour PowerPoint presentation, and then they're shown around, and then they're really kind of escorted everywhere and very curated, and they might be able to talk to maybe one or two people there, but the kind of access that I was asking for, they had just never given ever. Right. I can't remember. Is it the same place that Graham Wood, the Atlantic writer, went to when he interviewed MBA? Yeah. So he full disclosure, I listened to his podcast with you, and actually, it's the only reason why I really wanted to hear that full interview. So I paid for your subscription for that month just to listen to that, and then I had to actually stop my subscription that same month, because when you get canceled like I did, you're really poor. So even though I loved your podcast with Graham was like, I can't afford to keep on doing this. I've got some connections over here. Let me hook you up. Yeah. Can you talk to the person in charge? I listened to that. It was really great. So I spent some time at El Hire, which I think Graham talked about in his podcast, and I spent, obviously, a lot of time at the center. So just to give you some context here, I interviewed or talked with, I would say probably over 150 of these guys. Of that 150, around 30 were interested in doing the project of that 30, only twelve were interested in doing the project without their face being blurred or disguised in some way. And for me, it was really imperative for the audience to be able to see these guys and look them in the eye, because I think that's how you kind of are able to see someone's humanity. Were they all Yemeni in the end, or were three of the the four Yemeni? What would so in the film, you have Khalid, and he's Saudi, and then Abu Ghan. Abu Ghanim, Ali Muhammad and Nader are all Yemeni. Right. Right. Yeah. Okay, so you make this film, which I've seen and which few other people have seen, given what happened upon its premiere. Or maybe I'll just say this at the outset, just to set people up to understand. You saw the film before you saw it, you heard about it. What did you think you were going to what were your expectations before you watched the film? Well, because Melissa got in touch with me. I was set up to understand it appropriately. I just sort of knew what I was getting into. But nevertheless, I was surprised upon watching it, how insane its reception was. What you've produced in this film, apart from it being just a very professional and well done documentary, and this is the kind of thing you'd expect to see on Frontline or Netflix or any place that would handle distributors. Yes, but it's just a remarkably compassionate and humanizing document, right? So to give people a heads up here, I mean, I want you to run through everything that happened once it premiered at Sundance. But one would think this is precisely the kind of film that people who have criticized me for Islamophobia would want people like me to see, right? I mean, it's literally impossible to watch this film and not have serious misgivings about how we've conducted our side of the war on terror and serious misgivings about Guantanamo, for instance. And you totally humanize these guys. And if anything I could imagine the concern for criticism going into this would have been that you'd be worried. You were perceived as being soft on terrorism right. Or just taken in by the humanity of these guys and not really getting the nature of the evil we had to deal with and still have to deal with out in the world. Right. You would imagine, if anything, you could imagine some criticism from the right or from even someone like me. I'm not a creature of the right at all, but I'm someone who like you. 911 had an instantaneous impact on me, but the direction I took it is a real focus on the problem of jihadism, and that focus is often misunderstood. It's not at all an animus against Muslims generally as people, and it's certainly not any symptom of Xenophobia on my part. And I'm not at all surprised at the humanizing story you're able to tell in this film. My problem with jihadism is that just with bad contagious ideas generally, is that bad ideas get good people to do bad and otherwise unthinkable things. It's the bad idea problem that I'm most worried about. And jihadism is one species of very bad ideas that has religious roots, but it's not the whole story. And again, watching your film, what comes through very clearly is the rest of the story, right? So you see these guys as truly ordinary men who are faced with various life challenges, like earning a living and getting married, or how to get married, how to even get a woman's attention. And you see this quite standard set of social problems, and you see the way in which jihadism can capture that and leverage that, and ideology and religious belief aside, you see other variables there. And that really is your focus in the film. So the irony and again, we're going to talk about what happened once you made this film. The irony is, from my view, this is like it's almost the perfect rejoinder or would be I mean, again, it's, it's not a true rejoinder because, you know, I don't I don't reject anything in your film. But it should be perceived as the perfect rejoinder to everything I've said about Islam and jihadism. Right. It's like it is the thing you should want me to see if you hate what I've said. Yeah. I honestly thought you wouldn't like the film. Right. I mean, I don't again, I don't listen to your podcast religiously because I'm poor, but the few things that I have, you know, seen the clips online and stuff, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm sure intellectually, I think I think that you would have, like, been fascinated by it. But I was prepared for you to be like, I watched your film, Meg, and I didn't like it and hear all the things I think you did. I should be the person who should be criticizing you for this film and certainly anyone to the right of me. That's where you would think it would come from. Yeah. And honestly, I always say we, I should say me more often, but I thought and believed that this film was going to be atrociously attacked by the alt right. And because of that, I took a lot of steps both pre during and post production to buttress up against those. What I mean by that is I knew that if like so typically when you make a film and it's in most of the films in English, but there are places where it's Arabic, you hire like a translator to the initial ones. And then you hire one translator to go in at the very end and make sure and spot check and make sure everything's on the up and up, because I knew that this film was going to be just ripped apart. We didn't hire one or two. We hired three different translators to go through the entire film before we picture locked to make sure that every single word that was in there was correctly translated. Because I thought that if something was off or wrong, that they would use that one thing to say, see, this isn't right and therefore the whole film isn't right. And so I went through the film with a fine tooth comb and as did our lawyers. And we have this law firm called Donaldson Calif. And there you never heard of them, but they are the top lawyers for documentary films. They've represented all the Oscar award winners going back like 1015 years and they're really well respected and they went to the film and they kind of was like, yeah, you kind of went way and possibly on what you really needed to do to clear this film. Like, yeah, because we're going to get ripped apart once this thing gets out there. And I am also an ex competitive boxer and so I'll use that metaphor and I was expecting the right hook and I wasn't prepared for the left cross. Therein lies the problem. Yeah. Okay, so what happened and what did the left cross actually look like? Well, before we get to that, I want to back up, because you mentioned something about these guys and their motivations. And I will say I wanted just to add to that, because, you know, like I said, I interviewed over 150 of these guys, and some of the interviews lasted ten minutes. Some of them lasted, like, call it up to 10 hours. And after a while, I began to see this pattern of that they would fall into one of four categories. Not all of them, there was exceptions, but, like, one of four categories in terms of how they got into this this this lifestyle or this this world. And I think what was really interesting to me was that of the four, there was only one that actually had to do with religion, and the other three had nothing to do with religion. So when you were talking about jihadism, this, like, bad idea thing, that wasn't a universality from the people that I talk to. And again, I didn't talk to thousands of them, but it was a little bit less than 200. Right. Also, I should just know you have performed a kind of psychological experiment in making this film, and what you got is the very definition of a self selecting group of people who were willing to talk to you, right? Oh, yeah. Well, I will say that the people that were willing to talk to me back up. So how I got access originally and the reason why I was able to talk to so many of them, was so when you operate in a regime dictatorship, be it Yemen with Alibi La Sala, or any time that there's an authoritative regime, going through official channels is always, in my opinion, kind of the worst thing to do. The way to get access in those kind of places is by building relationships and back channels and whatnot. So, like I said before, it took me a year to get access, and part of that was building relationships with people who were influential and who had friends in powerful places. And the one thing you have to understand about Saudi Arabia and other dictatorships is they'll never tell you no, but that what they will do, is they'll throw hurdle after hurdle after hurdle after hurdle in front of you until you kind of just give up. And there are a lot of things that I'm not good at. I'm a horrible speller, very bad when it comes to directions. But I got tenacity for days, so I was up for that challenge. So we've been going back and forth for about a year. And I remember at one point, they said we went to the prison and we went to the rehab center, and none of the men want to talk to you. So that's the end of it. And I said, well, why don't you let me just let me talk to let me just go to the rehab center and to the prison and talk to these guys. And they were really reluctant to do that. And so we were going back and forth for a long time, and so finally, I was able to put enough pressure on the right people to where they acquiesced, and they said, okay, we will let you physically enter the prison and the rehab center with one caveat. And here's where the hurdle comes in. They said, you're not allowed to film one frame of video unless these guys agree from the jump to be part of your project. Meaning I couldn't spend months trying to get to know them and make them comfortable with me. They had to agree from day one, which they knew was never going to fucking happen. Because a lot of these guys were either fresh off the plane from Guantanamo where my country had just tortured them for a long period of time, or they were like fresh, like back from Syria and fighting with and fighting in in ISIS. And so and they were right when I first so they let me in the center, and they let me in El Hayer. And when I sat down with the first batch of people, there was the older al Qaeda guys, and I started talking in Arabic, and they wouldn't even acknowledge my presence. They wouldn't even like answering my questions. Some of them wouldn't even look me in the in the eye. And then I went to the next group, which is like, the younger ISIS guys, and same thing there. But what had serendipitously happened was that was also the same time that Saudi Arabia took its first batch of non Saudi nationals through the program, and they just happened to be from Yemen. And I learned Arabic in Yemen, so I have a very thick Yemeni accent when I want to. And so I went in, and there was nine of them, and I sat down, and I started speaking, and their heads popped up, and they're like, Why the fuck do you speak our mother tongue? They didn't say fuck, but I'm going to add that for dramatic flair. And I told them I used to live in Yemen, and they want to know how long and where I lived. So I live in the old city near the Sila, and they want to know is a very famous Fossil restaurant down there. And I was like, yeah, best fasa on all of all the old city. And we we just had this immediate rapport because they hadn't been back to their home country in over 15 years. And so we just started talking, and we talked for hours, and then at the end of it, I said, I would really love to talk to you guys more individually about your stories and learn about who you. Are and as people, and would anyone here be willing to speak with me individually? And a couple of hands went up, and then I met with those guys individually, and then kind of word spread throughout the rehab center that, like, Meg wasn't a journalist because I didn't really ask him where the bodies were buried in the beginning. It was more like, you know, tell me about your childhood, tell me about your favorite sports teams. It was very benign stuff initially because I knew I was there for the long haul, which is great. One of the things I love about being a documentary filmmaker is you're given the time and the space and the grace to explore a story where I feel if I was a journalist on assignment, I'd have to ask those hard questions from the jump, because I'd only be there for a week or two. So, yeah, word spread around the rehab center and throughout the staff that Meg was basically a white Yemeni told. And so I was able to talk to a lot of the guys that initially wouldn't talk to me. And even though a lot of those guys didn't want to be part of the project, with the exception of a handful of people, el Hayer, who just would not meet with me at all, it was pretty it was self selecting for the project. But I think I spoke to most people, and I don't know, I would say I probably spoke to maybe there was, like, I'd say ten to 15 people that I met that absolutely wanted nothing to do with me, but other than that, I was able to talk to quite a few people. But getting back to the original thing, after talking to all those people, and, yeah, it is self selecting in a way, I started to notice a pattern. And so it came down to, like, four different motivations, and that's why there's four different characters in the film. So the first one, and I think this is the one that most Americans are familiar with, is the cause, right? Like, I see Muslims being persecuted or being oppressed, and I want to go and defend them, and it's my religious duty, right? And so that's like Abu Ghana, where he talks about going to Bosnia when he first got into this, to go defend Muslims in Bosnia. So that's the one that I think most Americans are familiar with, but the other three have nothing to do with religion. So the next one is economic necessity, right? Like, you have someone like Nodder who he says in the movie, just to be clear, I would put a 0.1 cause ahead of that first cause, because there are many jihadists. They may pay some lip service to defending their fellow Muslims, but in many cases, that's not even the rationale. It's much more about paradise. Literally. We've got people who dropped out of medical school in London to go fight for ISIS, and they're fighting other Muslims for ISIS. I mean, it's got nothing to do with saving the Bosnians who were left. Yeah, but, I mean, that's an interpretation of the cause, right? I spoke to a lot of men who do subscribe to a certain ideology, right? And so it's like, unless you're this specific type of Muslim, this Salafi type of Muslim who describes to these certain rules and ways of living, then you're not a real Muslim, right? And in their mind, if you're not a real Muslim, then you're like an infidel, and you can be targeted. And so I think that's definitely an ideology part of it, for sure, but it's still like, them thinking they're doing the just and right thing, and it's a cause. It's just a different version of it's. One where Abu Ghana went to Bosnia because that's what he thought his religious duty was, where I'm sure the guy you're talking about in London thought his religious duty was to go and join ISIS and do that stuff there. Does that make sense? I put those in the same category. Okay. Yeah. It didn't mean to derail you. So the second one was that I found a lot of men talk about was economic necessity, right? So in the film, you have Nodder saying that his life was hard before and that he needed money. And I think the exact quote is, you want money, you need money, you go do the jihad. And in his mind, it became a way to make an income, and it became a career for him because he did this for a really long time. He started out, I think, when he was 16, and I think he was doing it until he was in his late 20s, early 30s. So that's motivation number two. Motivation number three would be peer pressure, right? So your family is into it. Your friends are into it. That's ali right. His brother was really high up in Al Qaeda and in the Middle East, your older siblings or your fathers are very influential in terms of your life trajectory and your path and your decisions. So Ali went to Afghanistan, to an Al Qaeda training camp because his brother was an instructor there and told him that he should go there. And Ali didn't really want to, but he was just like, he's my older brother. I got to do what he says because that's the respectful thing to do. And then the last one, the fourth motivation that I found was more age dependent, more of the younger guys, and that was sense of adventure, right? So that's Mohammed. He said, I didn't want to go to school. I thought it was boring. I didn't want to work. This guy offered me a free ticket to go shoot rockets in Afghanistan. Like, heck yeah, that's I mean, you're you're 19 years old. You want to blow blow some shit up. Cool. Travel awesome. And I think that like what was really interesting to me is when I realized that I also realized that, like, I had a lot of friends in the military and I had heard similar motivations from them, right? I had a lot of friends who joined up for the military after 911. That's the cause, right? They're like, we want to join up, we want to defend our country. So that's cause number one. I have a lot of friends who, you know, sometimes the best job in the state is with the military, you know, economic necessity, that's job number two. A lot of friends who come from military families and, you know, that's just what their family does. That's motivation, number three. And then a lot of my friends who joined up who don't come from money but wanted to see the world and travel and have those adventures join the military. And that's number four. And a lot of people who joined the military to go to school, right, as well. So it's kind of a monetary incentive. And what I realized after a while, talking to guys, it wasn't never really about good and evil. It was more about time and circumstance. And even though I will say not university, almost university, a lot of these men were younger and they were searching for purpose and they were searching for belonging and that also played a big role as well. But I think those four motivations are the reason why we have four different characters in the film, because they all represent the nuance and the complexity of this thing. And so I think when people talk about terrorism and they equate it to Islam, I think that just strictly religion. I think that's a misrepresentation of the actual, at least my experience in interviewing these guys. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think there's probably more to say on that subject, but it's not important here. But the most important thing to emphasize is that anyone who has attacked me or anyone like me for Islamophobia should want me to contemplate a document of the sort you have produced. Right? You have produced nothing like an echo of any of my diatribes about Islam and jihadism and my specific criticisms of belief in paradise and what work that does for suicide bombers and terrorists in certain contexts. And so it's none of that, right? And yet you have been attacked explicitly as an Islamophobe upon the release of this film. I think there's probably perhaps you know more about this than I do, but I think it's a fairly organized campaign of counterpr against your film. And it has worked. Oh, yeah, it goes way beyond that. There's things that you see in public, but there's private stuff. So there's been lawyers that were hired to send threatening letters. Initially we got loads universally positive reviews from all the major trades like The Hollywood Reporter and IndieWire. And then right after that, this group sent letters to all the places that gave us positive reviews and threatening lawsuits. And then subsequently, a lot of those publications changed the wording of their reviews, which I thought was quite shocking. Wow. But yeah. So it was a very coordinated I just want to be clear on something here. I think that whenever you make a piece of work, be it a book or a movie, and you put it out into the public space, being criticized is part of that process. And I think that is a good thing. I think criticism is something that is helpful for dialogue and also sometimes can make you a better writer or a better filmmaker. However, I differentiate between criticizing a piece of work and orchestrating an actual attack to take it down. And there's a difference between tweeting, I don't like this film, and then hiring lawyers to try to scare people off the project or scare buyers off or harassing people online. So, for example, Sundance announced a lineup of documentaries on December 9, and the film would have its world premiere on January 22. This is 2021 into 2022. Yes, correct. The announcement was around the 9th, but the attack started on the 10th. So the attack started way before anyone had actually seen the film. Right. And initially, if we're being completely honest here, initially, the amount of, like, rage and anger that was directed at a film that no one had seen and a filmmaker that no one really knew, I think a lot of people, their initial response would have been to either attack back or been like, you haven't even seen my film, so screw you. But that was not my initial response. I actually in the beginning, but this is before I found out some information later. But at the beginning, I actually understood it, and here's why. When I was a firefighter, I went on a call once where this kid had been seriously injured and would probably lose his hand. And when we showed up on scene, the mom was crying and the kid was bleeding out. And the father, the father, he was fucking pissed. Like, we showed up, and he was just like, where the fuck have you been? You're so incompetent. Like, what's taking so long? And he had this anger and rage that was directed at us to the extent that I was looked at, my captain like, are we safe? Is this guy going to come after us physically? So we got the kid bandaged up and packed him up in the ambulance. And right after the family was out of earshot, one of the other firefighters said, that guy's lucky I didn't fucking deck him. And my captain, because he's older and wiser, turned around with this is about to be a teachable moment look on his face. He said, Listen, what you have to understand is that in this job, you are interacting with people at the most traumatic moment of their lives. And trauma is a very tricky thing. People respond very, very differently, he said, and it's very unpredictable. Some people cry, some people laugh, and some people get angry. And that guy, even though he was angry at you, it is not about you. That guy doesn't know you. He's never met you before. But he has just seen his kid seriously injured and probably maimed. And the way that he's dealing with that traumatic moment is through rage. And even though he's yelling at you, even though he seems like he just has this rage towards you, you have to understand that has nothing to do with you. And so when the film when we started getting the attacks, before anyone had ever seen the film, initially, I thought like, oh, this makes sense to me. Because, number one, what you have to understand is, like, every other film before this film that kind of talks about terrorism is very sensationalistic, is very kind of fearmongering. And so if I was a documentary filmmaker and a Muslim and I saw that Sundance had programmed a film about terrorism done by this white lady who's not a Muslim, I would think, too, that like, oh, like, not another one of these films, right? And so also because my sister, who I told you about that kind of adopted me in Yemen, she now lives in the States and in Texas, and we talk quite a bit. And she's told me over the years about her experience in this country, being a Muslim woman who wears a hijab. And so, for example, she landed in America from Yemen when she moved here. So she was living in Iraq, and then we fucked up Iraq, and she moved to Yemen, and then Yemen went to shit. And then how she moved here, she was born in the States, but she grew up in Iraq. So she came here, and she said that she went through customs and immigration, and she took three steps out of the airport, and she was three steps into America, and someone walked up to her and spit in her face and told her to go back to where she fucking came from. And that was her introduction to this country. And so over the years, I've talked with her about her experience. And I have a lot of friends who are Muslim. I'm really close with my executive producer, Mohammed he's Yemeni Muslim, and we've talked about his experiences as well, although they're not as harsh, I think, as Rajad's, because she works a job, and a lot of people mistake Muhammad, he said, for being Mexican. So he's like, I can. Passive Mexican. Sometimes it's better. But I think that, like, knowing the amount of just I don't want to say tacit bigotry, that they have to kind of experience on a pretty regular basis, post 911, Muslims were treated very differently in this country. And I think unless you're in that culture or you have really close friends who are in that culture, you're unaware of the toll that takes. Like, for example, imagine being a person where everywhere you go, you're treated with suspicion, or you're treated in a way that is different than the other people around you, or you're having to deal with things like stepping out of the airport and just being spit on. I mean, that is not one incident that's over years and over 20 years of experiencing that in this country that causes somewhat of a traumatic effect, right? So that is in itself, I guess, a type of trauma to endure that over two decades. And so when this originally happened, because that amount of rage was directed at a film that no one had seen, it reminded me of that call, where even though the rage was directed at me and at the film, because no one had seen it yet or met me, I kind of figured, oh, this is not about me or my film. This is about the trauma that these people have been through for the last 20 years. And the assumption that this film is going to add to that and add to the problem of the stereotypes that are propagated in this country about Muslims and about Islam. And so it was really interesting because of the imam that helped us on the film, he told me that when he was first told about the film, his first response was like, oh, not another one of these films about Islam and terrorism and jihad. And then he said once he saw it, though, he goes, Meg, if you're going to watch any film about terrorism, this is the one people need to watch. And I was like, thank you. And so he actually went from being very skeptical of the film to then coming on as kind of a consultant and helping us with some stuff in the film and still is a really big champion of it today. And he's a really respected mom, and he actually studied in Saudi Arabia as well. So he knew a lot about the kind of stuff that we had to do to make the film, get it done in Saudi Arabia. Funny enough, his brother was also a firefighter on 911. But because of the bigotry that he faced post 911, he actually left the fire service. So we had a lot in common. It was a really interesting conversation. But this is to say that before I got information down the line, my initial response to the hate that came with the film at me premiere understanding yeah. Was understandable. Well, I have a reaction to that. I don't want it to take us too far afield. And it will sound perhaps cynical, because in reality, it's probably just I have more experience than you had at that point, being targeted by dishonest morons. So I would have viewed it differently. But the fact that you viewed it the way you did proves yet again how ironic it is that you are being targeted as an Islamophobe, as someone who's totally inappropriate, to bring us this kind of analysis of the phenomenon of terrorism and our response to it. It's quite insane what is now about to unfold for you. But I want to be clear that I felt that initially, but then things happened that made me change. For example, before the premiere, it was like less than a week after the announcement, I got a very distressing email from a translator that we worked with in 2018. So even though my Arabic, it's pretty rusty at this point, so I couldn't translate the film myself. So we hired a bunch of translators. He was one of them, really good guy. And he sent me an email that was really disturbing, basically saying, like, so this guy was so excited when the film got into Sundance and that he translated a film that was going to premiere at Sundance. That that. Same day he bought a ticket to Park City. Because initially, Sundance was supposed to be in person, but it went virtual, basically because of macron. And so he bought a ticket to Park City that day. And then he also posted on all his social media about having translated this film that was going into Sundance. And soon after, he was contacted by one of these people who were attacking the film. And they messaged him and they basically said, like, you have to come out publicly against this film and tell people it's Islamophobic. And he responded, you know, actually, I haven't seen the film yet, but I don't think that that's this film, because the footage that I saw, at least I translated, was very humanistic and very, like, character driven and not like that at all. And then she messaged him back and basically said, this was kind of the gist of it. I'm summarizing, you're either with us or you're against us. And if you don't come out publicly for this film, we're essentially going to blacklist you and you'll never work as a translator in the documentary community again. And this is a Muslim to another Muslim. And when he told me this, because he sent the initial email and I was really worried for him, so I called him. He was very shaken. He was really shaken by this. I felt like absolute shit. Because here's the thing. When you're a director, you're responsible for your crew. And at that point, the crew was starting to get attacked. And I didn't know how to protect them, and I didn't know how to fix this. I didn't know how to make it stop. And I was really taken aback because on the one hand, I wanted to be super empathetic with these people who had experienced these last 20 years of trauma in this country and viewed my film as a threat to that. But the other hand, it's like, you don't fuck with my people. You want to come at the film, you come at me. But to come after my fucking translator? No, that's fucking bang out of order. Like, I was irately, pissed. I made Sundance aware sundance didn't do anything. In fact, I think that, like, they handled that quite poorly. And so for me, I started to shift there when I saw some of the tactics that were being used by this main group. And then I shifted again in March. So up until March, I was trying to take what they were saying as face value, right? Because I come from a place where I look at documentary filmmaking in some ways as a calling. So when I was a firefighter, it's definitely a profession that's a calling. What I mean by that is there's a specific culture when you're doing something that is a calling. So if I work at Google, I don't think that's most people would call that a vocation, if that's, like, a calling or whatnot. But in firefighting, we have a very strong culture of loyalty and honesty and sacrifice and duty. And even the shittiest firefighters that I that I had to work with sometimes, they might lie about how many women they slept with, but they would never lie about doing an equipment check. And so there was a baseline of, like, you don't lie. You tell the truth. You take the hit for the team. If you're a captain, you take the hit for your firefighters. If you take your chief, you take the hit for the captain. It was this chain of command. If you're a leader, that's what you do. And so for me, I think I naively went into the documentary profession thinking that that same culture existed and was part of what we did. So, for example, when you're a journalist, you and a documentary filmmaker, I would hope you favor the truth above all else, even if that's inconvenient for you. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of people who, during the whole Me Too movement were like, believe all women, and there's some women who lied about stuff, and it's very inconvenient to tell those stories about women who were deceptive in that stuff when you're trying to further a cause. And if you're an activist, you don't highlight those stories. You ignore those stories. But if you're a journalist, yeah, it's inconvenient to talk about them, but that's just the fucking truth. So to ignore that, I think if you're a journalist and you ignore those stories, then you're no longer a journalist. You're an activist who writes. So in the beginning, when this all happened and we were getting all this, like, hate before anyone seen the film, but take me back. So you get accepted to Sundance, and then Sundance goes virtual. You're getting this hate even before the film is broadcast virtually at Sundance. Take me from there. But I guess I'm interested to know when the wheels really start to come off and you just have the time course of that. Yeah. So what you should know, and probably most of your audience doesn't know, is how pivotal and important sundance Film Festival is in the documentary world. So in the independent documentary space, there is no better festival to premiere at than Sundance. Like, it literally can make your whole entire career and it can launch your film. And what I mean by that is, in the category that I'm in, which was in competition for the US. Competition, they only took ten films that year. They took less than they normally do. I think normally they take 16, but because of the pandemic, they took less. And so the competition is really high. And also the year that I submitted to was supposed to be the first year in person since the pandemic. So a lot of people had held off and then submitted to that year. So they got twice the amount of submissions but took half the amount of films. And I think they get, like, I was told, like 15,000 on a normal year. And so twice amount would be 30,000 and submissions. And so when you're talking about my category, they're only taking ten. The competition is quite fierce. Those films are seen as the it films of that year. And usually when you get to the Oscars, which is about a year later, most of the films that were nominated premiered at Sundance. So it is a place to launch your career and it is a place where your film will get a springboard and a platform and an audience that it would never get anywhere else. And so to get into Sundance is like winning the filmmaker lottery on steroids. And I cannot stress that enough because I think most women like, maybe I'm being a little sexist here, but most women think about their fantasies, about their wedding day, right? What they're going to wear and what it's going to be like. Throughout this whole entire process, in the back of my brain, I was fantasizing about the premiere of this film. And I never thought I would get into Sundance. But that was the fantasy I had of like, what my premiere would look like, the Q and A. And it's the thing that people go their whole entire careers and they never get a film into, into Sundance. And so, yeah, it's competition is fierce. So shit, I forgot. So the wheels are starting to come off even before the film is shown. Yeah, but what I was saying, the wheels are starting to come off before the film is shown. And at that point, because like I said before, I was coming from it from a place of, oh, this is from a group of people who've been traumatized to leave all Muslims. I thought that everyone was acting in good faith. So what I did is I assumed that this was just a misunderstanding because we had done so many screenings before Sundance with people all across the board. We did a screening with the Yemeni community, with Muslim community. We had Guards from Guantanamo in the audience and a couple of them. We had MAGA people. We had super activist liberal people, and we had never gotten any feedback at all. That was even like a sliver of this is a homophobic. So I thought this was just a big misunderstanding that because these people hadn't seen the film, they just assumed it was like every other terrorist film ever made. And so what I did was I said, okay, if this is just a misunderstanding, let's show them the film. Because we were still editing at that point, because we weren't done yet with the film. And so I went to Sundance and this other organization called MPAC, I think it's the Muslim Public Affairs Council, because I didn't know who these people were, because a lot of us was anonymous at this point. I invited them. I invited them to come and meet me and meet Mohammed and talk to us and ask us any question they wanted and then screen the film. And if they had really good notes and that were made the film better, of course I would have taken them. And so we extended that offer. And what I got with Sundance, they said, in the history of Sundance, no one has ever offered to show the people attacking their film before the premiere. And I was like, because I truly believed that this was just a misunderstanding. But then we heard back from both those entities and they basically said, they told us they don't want to meet with you, they don't want to meet with Mohammed, and they don't want to screen the film. And they also were very offended that you asked them to sign an NDA. We have everyone sign an NDA before the premiere. This is not just this group. So in my profession, before a film premieres, you do test screenings, and you have to have everyone in those test screenings sign an NDA. So, for example, my boyfriend went to a test screen of Jordan Peele's Get Out, and he had to sign an NDA. So it's like, it's just industry standard. So at that point, I was like, okay, well, there's really nothing more I can do. And I thought at that point, I just interpreted it as, oh, this is not about me or my film. This is about Sundance. And they're angry that because I knew it was Muslim documentary filmmakers, that much I did know about the group. So I was like, okay, this is probably like anger at Sundance for programming. One of the few films that got in is from a non Muslim person telling stories about Muslims. So I was like, okay, this is this is Sundance issue, not mine. But I think the problem was and when I say Sundance. I want to differentiate between Sundance the institute and Sundance the festivals, because there are two different things and I guess we can talk about that later. But I think the wheels came off partly because of how Sundance handled it and partly because it was just kind of so instead of Sundance saying, just watch the film, and after you watch the film, then we'll talk, it was like Sundance taking some of their demands and giving up to us. So, for example, we were given this list of the questions about the film that they demanded we answer, which we'd already answered to Sundance. And so it was weird that they wanted these in writing. And it was pretty clear that this is what they're going to give to the group. And I was told by the head of Sundance at the time that she had met with the group personally and had a long meeting with them and took their concerns seriously. And at the whole time I was like, how can you take their concerns seriously because they haven't seen the film? So, for example, what you have to understand is the accusations that were initially being thrown the film, again, this is before anyone had seen it, was that this was Saudi propaganda and that it was funded by the Saudis and that my co producer was the Saudi government because we have an anonymous co producer on the project. And and so then Sundance gave us a list of questions that had to do with, like, who funded our film and all that stuff. And I was like, you guys have seen the film. You know that this is horseshit. But I think Sundance definitely plagued to, I shouldn't say placate. I think at the time, the head of Sundance was trying to make everyone happy and that it caused people to be more emboldened about going after the film. Well, also, that criticism is ridiculous on its face because the film doesn't make Saudi Arabia look especially good. One thing that happens in the middle of the film is that there's this regime change and now MBS is running the place and your access gets curtailed and everyone gets quite paranoid and the problem of Saudi authoritarianism becomes a character in the film. There's no way someone could look at this film, especially not someone at Sundance who's actually in the business of watching documentaries and think this is Saudi propaganda. Yeah, I mean, anyone who has actually seen the film would definitely have that takeaway. And what I mean by that, the reason I'm bringing that up, is because instead of Sundance saying, hey, watch the film and then we'll talk, it was meeting after meeting with these people and with me, getting me and my film team to jump through some hoops like that, they'd never asked anyone to jump through before. Like they wanted us to have an outside review board look over our film in contrast to Sundance, right so we got into a bunch of festivals other than Sundance. Most of them pulled the film after the controversy. One of them didn't. And it's a film festival called Dock Edge in New Zealand. And when it got out that the film was going to play there, there was a professor at San Francisco State University that decided that this was such an egregious thing to play my film that she had to write this festival that was halfway across the globe. Yeah, New Zealand being dressed in her backyard. But I got to read you this, and I don't even know if you can use this or not, but this is the exchange, and this is what I think Sundance should have done. So this is her writing to the festival. I'm kind of disappointed that your festival decided to program the now renamed Jihad Rehab. Seems pretty disrespectful to the Muslim community. To which they reply, have you watched the film? Question Mark? If so, we'd love to hear which part of it is disrespectful to the Muslim community. To which she replies, I haven't watched the film, but many members of the Muslim community, especially filmmakers, have and have been critical of it. I think your team must be aware of the controversy and the discourse. The criticism from the community members seems valid and thoughtful. So I'm listening to them and I'm respecting their opinion. So that's why I'm so disappointed that this film is in your lineup. To which they reply, we highly suggest that you watch the film before expressing any disappointment with our decision to screen it. We know that many, many people who've commented on the film haven't seen it either. We are more than happy to discuss discussed any concerns with anyone who's actually watched the film. Now, even though that seems like a very simple thing to do, I think if Sundance had done that, this might have gone a lot differently. Right? But they didn't. They really wanted to, again, make everyone happy. And I understand that, like, you have a group of people who've been marginalized for a really long time, and it's very hard to be a filmmaker in general. It's hard to be a filmmaker and be female. It's hard to be even more hard to be a female filmmaker who's Muslim. And so I get Sundance's propensity to try to be empathetic to these people's concerns. However, I think that you can't address people's concerns of a film they have not seen. So I think the way that Sundance dealt with this in terms of having us jump through all these hoops and it cost us an extra $20,000 to clear the film for the specific requirements that Sundance wanted us to have that they didn't ask any other film to do. I think the wheels came off when Sundance took that stance and they were wavering. There was a time when it was clear to me, well, I interpret anyway, sundance set us a bunch of demands, and they gave us 48 hours working days, but over the if you count the weekend, four days to do it in. And it was simply I mean, I remember talking to my producer at the time. He's like, there's no way we can do this. And I was scared because I was like, they know that there's no way they can do this. And they're looking for an excuse to pull the film. And so I basically was like, we got to do this no matter or what. Because any excuse to pull it, they're going to take. And so, for example, typically you have your film run through errors and omissions and through your lawyers. Once your picture locked, they wanted it done in 24 or 48 hours working days. Our lawyers couldn't do that, so we had to pay them to work over the weekend, which is really expensive. We're talking like when your lawyers cost a $1,000 an hour and you have them work over the weekend. It's not cheap. And so so they went through our film with a fine tooth comb. We should have been given a lot more time to do this. You always have to do it. But to do it that early on was really expensive. And to do it in that time frame, we also had to have someone who was an outside person review the entire film and interview me and interview my producer about how we made the film and consent forms and if the consent forms were in English and Arabic and if they were understood and how we basically got informed consent. And so all that stuff we did. And instead of finishing the film in terms of editing it, we were doing all that kind of stuff. And I think that it was alarming at the time. I think looking back, it's even more alarming because it wound up setting a precedent that I think is very worrisome going forward. Meaning that if the most prestigious film festival in the world had a small group of people who were protesting a film, they had the scene. And then that film festival required special audits for a film. To me, it was just so unusual. And when I talked to other people with a lot more experience, they were also alarmed by what was happening because you don't have review boards like this. The point was, one of the people who kind of came to our defense at the time said, who is better positioned to kind of tell like, what is on the up and up in the film? People have actually been to that country and spent years with these protagonists or someone who's never stepped foot in the kingdom and just is reviewing a film that they know nothing about. It just seemed like they wanted to check a box rather than actually kind of like taking the film and talking to people who actually knew, like we worked with experts on the film. We had people in the State Department, people in the Department of Fence, people in Saudi Arabia. We had a lot of people who knew a lot about this subject that I consulted with. And I think that if they just said, we would like to talk to some of your consultants, that would have made sense to me. But I don't know. It definitely felt like they were looking for an excuse to pull the film because they were getting so much heat from this group. So I think that's when the wheel started not to come off yet, but that's when the wheel started to get a little bit loose. And it was also pulled from south by southwest. Right. It was accepted there and then accepted, yeah, that was it wasn't it was not unexpected. It was disinvited. So that was really hard for me because you have to understand that I have a special relationship with that film festival. Like, my last film premiered at South By, and it won south By Southwest, won the top award. And that kind of launched my career. And I had become friends because of that with some of the people who worked there and some of the programmers. And this was my first feature length documentary. And when I submitted it there, one of the programmers called me and was just gushing about it. And she's like, hey, I wanted to call you earlier, but we were waiting on one of our last programmers to see it. And we all were curious what he was going to say because it was really important what his opinion was because he's actually a vet. And so before we extended the invitation, we wanted to see what he thought about the film. And he said it was extraordinary. And they were so excited about the film. And they were really, really like, she was really nice on the phone. She's like, it's so great to see you do this project after your last one and see how much you've grown as a filmmaker and as a storyteller. And I remember telling them I couldn't accept the world premiere, but I would still like to premiere their accepted Sundance. And they were like, sure, we would love to have it. And when you go to a film festival like South By, you have to sign contracts that basically is a screening agreement. And so they signed it and you signed it, and you both agree that you're going to play there. And yeah, it was really hard for me because I looked at South By as kind of going home, right? Like, this is a place that launched my career. And the person who runs South By is this very ball busting independent woman who's a force of nature. How does a ball busting independent woman who's a force of nature cave to this pressure, which upon examination, is obviously in bad faith? What was that interaction with her like, well, if you had one. Yeah, no, I had many interactions. I think there was like on the record, off the record type stuff. Right. Not like in terms of on the record off. There's the emails that are in written form. And then there's conversations we had on the phone early on before they actually pulled the film. I talked to someone who worked at South By and they expressed worry about the film because of all the controversy and all the attacks that Sundance got. And they basically said, listen, Sundance has one of the most diverse programming teams in our industry. Black, white, straight, gay. I mean, it's really diverse. We are an allwhite programming team and we're going to just take a really big hit if we program this film. So that was a conversation that I had. And then later on when they were wavering, they basically said, for us to even consider this film, we need you to have a crisis PR team, which cost a lot of money. And we didn't have that money. And so I went to one of our investors and we literally hired someone for two weeks because that's all we can afford to for South By as like, okay, this is a hoop you wanted us to jump through, we're going to jump through it. I was really looking forward to South By because it was going to be in person. And being in person is way better when you need to have those complicated and really hard discussions after a film. So typically you premiere a film and then afterwards there's a long Q and A and you talk about your film and how it's made, and then you take questions from the audience and you're able to look someone face to face. Whereas in Sundance was virtual, this is all on Twitter. And Twitter is a fucking cesspool of like horribleness. I'm not on Twitter, but the way I would describe it to people is it's like a lunch cafeteria lunch room at a high school, but instead of one table being mean girls, they're all every fucking tables mean girls, right? So it's not a place to have nuance and complicated and human conversations. And so I think that added to the vitriol of the film at Sundance. And so that's why I was really looking forward to South By because I felt it was an opportunity to really have an open dialogue and conversation about this film that had caused so much controversy. But before we get to that other shoe dropping, let's just run through what the criticism was up to this point and who it was coming from. If you could discern different actors here. So you've talked about one allegation that it was Saudi propaganda. That's just ridiculous on his face. What else was coming at you? So initially it was Saudi propaganda funded by the Saudis. And then people saw the film and that one went away and then the filmmaker is racist, and the film is Islamophobic. And that was made by an all white, non Muslim team. But then we're like, well, my executive producer is Muslim. My cop producer is Muslim, our assistant editor's Muslim. And we worked with two Islamic scholars and an imam on this film. And then we had prominent Muslims like Lorraine Ellie, who works for the La. Times. She's a film critic for La. Times. And she came out saying that she really liked the film and she spent time in Saudi Arabia and really, really kind of said it was extraordinary in terms of the access and filmmaking that I was able to pull off. And we've already established that you're not your average white chick making this exploitative act of cultural appropriation. And that was one for a long time. And there was just basically equating that these guys didn't give consent. The next one was they didn't give consent. They were forced to do this by the Saudi government. And again, literally, if they just talked to me, I could have told them how I got access and how I talked to over 150s guys. Most of them didn't want to do it, so they didn't give consent, and they didn't sign release forms and all stuff. And then we were like, no, everyone signed release forms, both English and Arabic. And informed consent was something that I take very seriously. So let me back up here. So informed consent is something that in the documentary community, is something where when you're working with someone who's a subject or film, before you can start that film, you basically sit them down and say, like, here's who I am. Here's the project I'm making. And so with these guys specifically, it was important for me to explain to them how a documentary was made because most people don't know. And so I told them, like, this isn't going to be one interview. I'm going to be with you for a very long time. I'm going to be following you home to your family. I'm going to be maybe interviewing your family and your friends. I'll be filming you when you're in the streets. This is not a one and done thing. I'll be in your life for quite a long time. And the way that I do informed consent, I think everyone's different. But when I approach a subject for a film, I always meet them first without a camera. And I tell them two things and say, you know, this is a very long process, and I want you to feel comfortable with me and comfortable with what we're going to do together. And so for this first meeting, you can ask and throughout this process that I'm going to be filming you. I'm going to ask you a lot of questions. And sometimes those questions are going to be very personal, and you don't have to obviously don't want to answer them. But this first meeting that we have. I was like, you're allowed to ask me anything you want. Anything. And I will answer it honestly. And it can be anything from my favorite color to, like, one guy asked first date or why I wasn't married and why I didn't have kids. And it's basically I flip it around that first time and allow them to be the interviewer to me to say, like, who is this person that I'm going to be sharing my life with? And so we do that, and then at the very end of it, I say, listen, if you don't feel comfortable with me, I actually do not want you to do this project for two reasons. Number one, it will show up on camera and that won't look good. Number two, I've had a documentary made about me that I really didn't give my permission for, and it was a very bad experience and I wouldn't wish that on anyone else. So sidebar here. When I was 2323-2223, I was kidnapped in Columbia. And then later on, National Geographic made a docu drama about it and the woman that played me was super hot. So I got not too mad at it, but it's definitely not very accurate. But yeah. And so I tell that to all the subjects of the films that I've made. And if they agree, then before we ever film with them, you give them a piece of paper and it's in their own language, but it's also in English on the same piece of paper. Let me just get this straight for a second. So you went to Afghanistan, having already been kidnapped in Colombia. No, I went to Afghanistan before going to Colombia. I went to Afghanistan in 2002. I went to Colombia in 2003. I went back to Afghanistan in 2004. Though this is like a sandwich in between Afghanistan. I'm just trying to figure out just how unusual a person you are. If I had gone to Colombia and gotten kidnapped, I don't think I would be quite as carefree in my subsequent travels solo across the war torn reaches of the world. Well, if we're being honest, I think one of the reasons why I made this film is not the only but it's one of the reasons why I made this film is because what went down in Columbia, like, the group that kidnapped me, was called the AUC. And their reputation is they're known as the Headhunters. And they have that reputation because they disembowel and decapitate their victims in front of their family to kind of send a message. So they're a pretty gnarly group. So, long story short, being kidnapped is not like what you see in the movies. There's not huge explosions and men dressed in all black going on long diatribes. It's actually quite boring sometimes because you don't have any, like, Internet or forms of distraction or cell phones or anything like that, or music. So a lot of the times you're just sitting around, and you're just talking to your fellow captives, and eventually you talk to your captors, and you have these long conversations. And for me, I was kidnapped for a little bit under two weeks. I think it was around ten days, give or take. And the thing that was most unnerving to me was not what these men and women did. Like, they disembodied and decapitated seven people that I knew, and then they also shot one guy as well. These are people you were traveling with or just people you knew because they were fellow captives while you were there. So basically, there's probably a different podcast, but I was traveling through Panama and was going overland into Columbia through the Daring Gap. And to go through that, it's basically the Dairying Gap is like, 250 miles stretch of a virgin jungle that straddles the border. And to navigate through there, like, the jungle is so thick, GPS doesn't work. And so to navigate through that space, you need to have the local Kuna Indians, basically, who know the landscape, and otherwise you'd just be lost. And so we had befriended some people at one of the villages, and they were taking us through the forest and the jungles, and then we went to another village. So it would be like, we start at one village, and then they would drop us off at a different village, and then that village would guide us to the next part. And so the people that they killed were people that had been in the villages that we met that were, like, elders and and leaders and and they'd taken us in and and yeah. And it was yeah, it was pretty they killed seven people, and then they basically pillaged and burned the villages to the ground because the AUC so I don't know how much you know about Columbia politics, but the FARC FARC is the only one I know. Okay. Yeah. So the FARC is, like, Marxist, right? So, for example, if you're a FARC person and you want to take a big stretch of land and cut it up and give each person 1 ha, right? That's your kind of Marxist mentality type thing. If you're a landowner, you really don't want that, and you want to keep your land. And so basically, the FARC is out there, and this kind of, like, for the people type group, and I guess their strategies and tactics. And the AUC is actually a group that used to be in the military, but then because of their antics, they quickly got disbanded. And they I think I think I remember reading they were actually trained by special forces in the Colombian military, by us. And then they got disbanded, but then the landowners kind of were like, oh, this group is kind of great for us. And so the landowners kind of pay the AUC and help that group to kind of fight the FARC because the FARC is more well off people's enemy. And so as one of the things the AUC did is it would kill the FARC and then kill any FARC sympathizers because to kind of like send a message, right? So a lot of places the FARC can't really operate that well unless they have local support. And so one of the things the AUC does is really devastate these villages by disembelling and decapitating their leaders in front of their people and then also they burn them to the ground. And so if they catch someone and they think they're a FARC sympathizer, that's what they do to try to send the message. So that's how I knew those people. And then while I was kidnapped, I got beaten up one time, but that was my own doing. I don't know if you've noticed from this conversation, I sometimes you might have said something that's considered inappropriate. Maybe. Yeah. My dad always said, the squeaking wheel gets old, but the screaming wheel gets changed. And when we were kidnapped, they wanted us to do something that I did not want to do. And I was trying to distract them with something else so I could continue to do what I wanted to do. It worked in the end, but it cost me an AK 47 butt to the head and I bled out all over the place. And other than that, I was pretty unscathed. I think I derailed you. You were about to say that you talked to these maniacs and they proved to be normal human beings with whom you could share some. Well, no, the thing is I talked to these people and one of them was this like 16 year old girl and she would talk about her high school crushes and things that 16 year old girls talk about. And it was so alarming to me because, you know, when you're a kid, you're read stories about, you know, the good witch and the bad witch, like the good people and the and the bad people. And I think a lot of us, when we get older, we don't actually leave that worldview and we see the world in that very simplistic view of good and bad. And I think I was guilty of that before I got kidnapped. And when I got kidnapped and I met these people and they had done, by all accounts, probably some of the most evil acts you can do. But they weren't these bloodthirsty psychopaths that I had imagined. They were just your run of the mill, normal young men and women. And then when you got to talk to them, like this girl that I was talking to, her parents had been killed by the FARC. And so her logical solution to that was to join the rival group and go after the Fark. And so she joined the AUC. And the thing that shook me so much is how normal all these people were. And I think that was the catalyst that sent me on this trajectory to try to understand the other, the evil doers, in quotes, of the world. Because it was such, like I said before, with firefighting and not understanding Hazmat and then being an expert in it, it was kind of like after I had that experience in Colombia, it was really unnerving to think that the people in the world who did the worst deeds were no different from me. And that was very unnerving. And so I kind of set me on this trajectory where I sought out those kind of people. So I interviewed lots of pirates in Somalia, warlords in Afghanistan, arms dealers in Pakistan and the province there and the tribal territories on the border, and terrorists in Saudi Arabia. And I think, for me, if you're going to look back, I think the original pebble that set that ripple off was probably being kidnapped. And I know that you said your reaction would not be to go, Calvin, just wash the blood off my passport and then go to Mogadishu. But I think for me it's the opposite. It was just like this is something that I clearly did not understand. This is the people who do evil deeds weren't born that way. I, for some reason, in my brain, thought they are fundamentally different from me. But becoming face to face with someone who had just performed a horrific deed, like disemboweling and decapitating someone and then sitting down and talking about makeup and your favorite football team was very unnerving, especially for a 23 year old at the time. I think it was 23 at the time. Yeah. So, yeah, that that that, I think started the shift to really try to understand that part of the world. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I would just add as a footnote my view here, which is that there are many sources of human violence and they're distinct, but they can be violence can be overdetermined. Right. I differentiated this in a blog post somewhere, but I think there really are psychopaths who are different from you and me. And then there are quite normal people who based on their beliefs about the world and about the moral imperatives of certain ways of living, they are just like you and me, but they believe different things and they do, by our lights, horrible things in the service of those ideas. And then there are people who get caught up in some kind of spiral of vendetta like violence of the sort you just indicated, where they have a story about why certain people are worth targeting because of what they did to people close to them. There's just this cycle of hatred begetting hatred, and then there's just frank mental illness where people are delusional and they don't even know what they're doing, but they're doing something horrible. And all of these can be overlapping. Right? You can check a few of these boxes and. Have your violence be overdetermined. Yeah, so I would add to that in terms of, like, that was my initial exposure. But over the years of interviewing people and talking to people, like, I like the pirates in Somalia and the warlords in Afghanistan and the fighters in Afghanistan, I would say that they're the exception to the rule. But there were a handful of times where I talked to someone that gave me, and I call it the Ibajibies, where you're like, oh, you like to hurt people. You're doing this, and the excuse is piracy, but you're off. Just something but off about them. The majority of them know, though I would say that my experience has been that there are people who are, I would say, very scary kind of psychopaths. But those are the rarity, in my experience. Not the rule, but more the exception. No, I would agree. It's the difference between someone like Abu Musab al Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden, right? I mean, insofar as I feel like I can know these guys from a distance, everything I know about Zarqawi is that he was a proper psycho. Oh, you'll love this. I was living in Yemen, and one of the people I knew that was working at the British Embassy who, like, for embassies, they have people fly in if you're going on leave, and they'll have someone fly in from the home office for, like, a week or two to look after your post who isn't really familiar with the country. And there was this woman I met, and apparently she was just going over that day's intel run down. She goes, and this is a direct quote, she goes, that's Akawi not a nice man. Not a nice man. That's a good way to put it. Okay, so back to your film. And I guess we left you at getting ejected from South By. Yeah, so that one really hurt. And then there was another film festival. The San Francisco Documentary Film Festival. And this one really hurt because one of the programmers had reached out during Sundance and not only invited the film to the festival, but he also had offered me the Vanguard Award, which is a huge honor. And so basically, the Vanguard Award usually goes to people who are, like, well known filmmakers who have a catalog of work that have just been kind of groundbreaking. And the fact that I was offered this award after my first feature was super humbling. And the Vanguard Award is the way they presented this film festival is a whole weekend event. So they screen your film, and then there's a Q and A, and then there's a panel discussion, and there's a huge gala, and there's a dinner, and it's a huge deal. And he said to me, like, I've been doing this for a while, and I've never seen a film like this. And I cannot believe this is your first feature length film, and we want to give you the Vanguard Award. There was another festival in San Francisco that was probably a little more prestigious that also invited us. But because this other festival is offering to the Vanguard Award, I decided to go with them. And I was really looking forward to it because I'm from the Bay Area and a lot of people who helped on the film from the Yemeni community also live here. And I thought it'd be great to be able to have them come to the theater and see on the big screen and see all their hard work put in and then be honored at a gala. And I thought it was going to be such a great event. And about a month or two before it was supposed to take place, he reached out to me and he was pretty devastated. And he basically said, I'm going to have to revoke the Vanguard Award. And I was like, what? What did I do? Why? And he's like, I talked to the other programmers, and they felt that by giving you this award now with all the controversy, it would be sticking the thumb in the eye of the people protesting your film and they don't want to do it. And I was like, well, you did offer me the award. You saw the film. I'm like, has the other I know that you saw it. Have the other programmers watch the film? And he said, no, I think wait a minute. You're telling me these other programmers have not seen the film, but based on Twitter and social media, they want to take away this award? And he's like, yes. He's like, I know. It makes no sense. He's like, I feel so bad about this. It's not my decision. We have to come to consensus. And he's like, if we play your film. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. If you just talked about taking like, you offered me the Vanguard work, and now we're talking about the film being pulled. And I was kind of pleading with him not to do this because we hadn't had an opportunity because it got pulled from other places too. We didn't have a chance to screen the film and have the dialogues. I really think we needed to in order to turn the kind of tide and actually have the difficult discussions that needed to happen with this film. But honestly, from my point of view, those discussions wouldn't have even happened because there is no difficult discussion to be had about this film. Again, the difficult discussion, if there is one, would be had from the other side, like from the neocon we have to be hard on terrorism side, right? This is like the Donald Rumsfelds of the world would have a problem with your film, but there is no problem to be had with this film. That when I say difficult discussion. So I don't know how much you know about the documentary community, but there is a big conversation that's been happening for the last couple of years about representation and who's telling whose story and why, and that's been a very hot topic. And also well, that's actually my next question. So all of this pushback the pushback is coming from the Muslim community? No, it's not coming from it's coming from the I want to make this very clear because we had a lot of people who we've shown the film to, a lot of groups that we've shown the film to pre and post Sundance that were from the Muslim community that loved this film. This was a group of not the Muslim community. It's a group of Muslim documentary filmmakers, specifically, Muslim documentary filmmakers are playing the Islamophobia card on you. Again, quite inappropriately. But then how much of the rest of the pushback and pressure on these festivals is coming from not from Muslims of any description, but just from allies? What woke activists who think that you are guilty of cultural appropriation or whatever the other sin is here? Yeah, there was a lot of that, and a lot of that. That was pretty harsh and pretty, I would say one of the hardest things about this whole entire I hate the word cancellation because it's such a loaded word and it means different things to different people. But do you know of a better word to use? I'm not sure. Your film was canceled, as far as I can tell. Once you have festivals, withdrawing awards and withdrawing invitations, and that is the very essence of cancellation or deplatforming. I mean, that's another term of modern jargon here, which is also not a great word. Censorship is the wrong word because it's not government. Yeah, the government is not doing this. But I'm sure it's an old phenomenon, but the modern variant is to have completely disingenuous hysteria directed at you largely, and anyone who would collaborate with you largely on social media and just watch the failures of moral courage play out before you, where everyone begins to fall like domino's in the indicated direction. You find out who your friends are. I will say this. I think Lucy Kay had it in his special after getting canceled. He's like, when you're canceled, you find out real quickly who your real friends are. And sometimes it's not the people you are. Exactly. That was a very funny bit. Yeah, I was like, oh, my gosh, I feel seen. No, for me, two of the hardest things were I'm not on Twitter very much at all. I mean, I have an account, but I never check it. And mostly because we've been talking now for a while, and I like having these in depth conversations where you can go on tangents and talk about things and their complexity and all the nuance. And Twitter for me has always been a place where it's very black and white. It's very either you're a good person or you're a bad person. You're a person we should be attacking or villainize or you should be a hero. And I just don't think the world works that way. So I avoid Twitter like the mean girl cafeteria that it is. But the thing for me that was the hardest part of this was twofold. One was. There were people that I considered friends, like, true friends, that when this happened, they either completely turned on me or they stopped talking to me, or they just flat out lied and kind of threw me under the bus in order to I'm not sure what their motivation was, so I don't want to speak to that. But I'll give you an example. There was a woman who she was a friend of mine, and she's a documentary filmmaker. And she was also trying to establish herself as a story consultant. And basically what a story consultant is, is someone who comes in and watches your film and gives you notes and kind of helps you work out the kinks. And so we had just got some funding, and we were in the editing process. And so I was like, I want to do my friend a solid and hire her as a story consultant. And we worked with her for five days for a week. And after we worked with her, she wrote this really sweet post on social media about working with me in the film. And I'll read it to you now. It says, A director who gives a damn. Megan didn't just take on any story for her first feature. This is one of the most important films I've ever worked on. Thank you for your trust, your vision, your guts make. You are the perfect person to be telling the story. And I'm so fucking proud of you for never backing down. I'm in awe rooting for you. And I took a screenshot of that because I it just made me feel really good. So I was like, oh, yeah, it's such a hard thing to make a film in general, but this film was particularly hard for a plethora of reasons. And so I took a screenshot of what I had in my phone. And then when we got into Sundance, we were making the credits of the film. I took a screenshot of her name and the credits as a story consultant, and I texted it to her, like, you know, look, you're in the credits. It's like, awesome. And she's like, oh, clap, clap, clap, emoji congrats. And so that's where, you know, that's where we're at. And then the controversy hits. And this person who I considered her like a true friend, not like a film friend, but like an actual friend without talking to me. And according to my producer, she actually hadn't seen the final cut of the film before she posted this online. So the controversy hit. People are kind of going really furious at me in the film. And then this person posts on social media again without according to my producer, having seen the film, says this I've been taking time off of social media for the last few months, but wanted to post something about my involvement with jihad rehab. As my name is listed predominantly in the credits as a story consultant, I have not had any involvement in creating in the crafting of this film's story, and I haven't seen a cut of the film in over two years. I was brought on as a story consultant in the fall of 2019 and saw a rough cut to give notes gone. I voiced serious concern around the ethics of the film and the general approach to the story. I was insistent that the title should change and was led to believe that it would be in the session, it was clear that my notes and concerns were not being heard. I left the consulting session extremely frustrated and concerned. I was shocked that the film was accepted to Sundance, and then shocked again when I told my name was in the credits. Again, I'd sent her a screenshot of it. I strongly feel this criticism from the Muslim, Arab and our film community is valid and needs to be heard. I'm in full support of the filmmakers voicing their outrage about the film, and I am disappointed and disgusted by the response of the filmmakers so far. If you'd like to learn more about the important conversations around the film, there are many articles by respected filmmakers and voices of our community, and they should list a couple of them. Now. This person never said any of that. They never said they had a problem with the title. They never voiced anything about the film being Islamophobic. They completely rewrote history and lied. The thing that's alarming to me is, did she delete that Effusive Tweet that you took a screenshot of, or is that still in her time? All that's still online? Yeah, I'm okay reading all that is because it's public. There's a lot of people who did a lot of other stuff behind the scenes. But I think that if you're going to publicly lie about the film and about me and about working with me, then it's okay for me to publicly call you out, and especially if you're claiming to be a documentary truthteller for me. Once I read that, I was like, okay, we're done. You're no longer my friend. I'm not even going to waste any energy on you because I didn't need to know why she did it. The fact that she did it was just reprehensible to me. Yeah. So then where does Abigail Disney come into the picture? So Abigail was one of she wasn't our first funder. She was one of the earliest. I think it was the first year. After the first year, I think she came on as an investor. I will say this. I see Abigail is kind of getting dragged by some people right now. But I want to say that this film in the beginning, she was a filmmakers, dream investor. For a filmmaker like me who doesn't have a huge track record to take on a subject like this, I got laughed out of the room majority of the time when I pitched this film for funding in the beginning, I probably had 65, 75 meetings with potential investors those first two years. And I met with a lot of people. And for the first two years, I think the only people that invested in the film were all women. It's not until I got a proper cut and a bunch of footage, the men started investing in it. I get it, though. I mean, there's a limited amount of funds in the nonfiction world. And if a first time filmmaker looking like me came to you and said, I'm going to make a film in Saudi Arabia at this center that no one's been able to get access to, my first time out of the gate, you'd be like, I'm not going to waste money on that project. But I remember showed some footage to abby's people at fork films. And then I kind of told them about my background, Cliff Note version, not the version we're talking about today. And they were really into it. And they said, but ultimately, the decision comes down to Abby. And then I met with Abby, and a lot of the other investors looked at me and basically said, you don't really have a track record. You don't have this and that the other. But Abby sat down with me into her credit. She was like, no, you're going to do this. I can tell. She knew that I was a tenacious motherfucker and that no matter what, this was going to get done. And she didn't need a track record to tell her that. She just was really good, I guess, at reading people. But she was on board. And so she became one of our investor. I think it was the first year that we were doing it without her. She's our first big investor. Without her first initial kind of funds, this film would I'm not saying this film would never got it made, but it would have taken a lot it would have been a lot harder. What was the budget on the film, I think, or how much did you have to raise? I'm going to include the things that we didn't pay because we have a lot of people. And one of the things I hate about this film being canceled is most of the people who worked on this project worked either for free or deferred or at a reduced rate where they were going to get paid back after we sold the film. So I'm going to include the money that we actually have not paid out yet in that number. So it's over a million dollars. And what did Abigail give to you? Can you say that? I don't know if I can. I'm not sure I would say this. It was less than way less than a third of the budget. Way less than that. So I think some people think she came in for the full amount, but it was like I don't know. It was not a huge amount for the whole budget, but at that particular time, it was fucking quintessential for us to move forward. So the thing is, I think a lot of people, when they date people and they break up with them, they're like, oh, that guy's a fucking asshole. I've always kind of come to the view of, like, I'm friends with all my exes, and I dated you for a reason. You're a great person. We just weren't great together. And I try to be fair with people. And so I know a lot of people are kind of coming after Abby and right now, and I think you know this, but being canceled is kind of like having kids in the aspect of when you can read books about being about parenting and you can see your friends raise their kids. But until you push that watermelon through that cheerio and you're responsible for human life, you have no fucking clue. And I had seen Joe Rogan get air quotes canceled, and I had seen Dave Chappelle get canceled, and I was like, those people have fuck off money. They're going to take a hit, but they'll be fine. But what I didn't realize then and what I realized now is just the extent of it and how the mental and emotional toll it takes when you have people that you trusted turn on you, when you have your reputation being unfairly besmirched and people taking it at face value and how isolating it can be and how just devastating to be. And I say this as someone who has lived quite a full life, where I've been in situations that most people would say would be very full on, insanely, kind of like stressful. Throughout my whole entire life, I've had a lot of I mean, being kidnapped to being a firefighter. I've had a lot of really intense experiences, and I've never had bouts of depression, and I've never had suicidal tendencies. And I did with this. And so I know people will probably listen to this and think being canceled is not a big deal, but I don't have a lot of resources, and I come from working class. My dad was a firefighter. I was a firefighter. I don't come from money. I'm not drawn from kid. So it was emotionally and mentally devastating, but financially just wrecked me. When I see people kind of going after Abby right now, I think a lot of people would think that I'd be like, yeah, but I'm the opposite. I worry about her because I know the toll it takes. And I don't think that anyone deserves this. I don't fucking care who you are. People are human. They make mistakes. And the reason why initially, when Abby put out the film, the reason why I was pretty I wasn't angry at her initially because I knew what we were all going through emotionally. And initially, I was a little bit upset. And my best friend pointed out, and she's very good at this, she said, Most people are not wired like you, Meg. You're very good under pressure and you got to be patient with other people. And Abby will probably come around, but give her some space and maybe she'll come back to the film. But most people don't handle things like you do. So have a bit of grace and a bit of kindness and just give her some space and maybe she'll come back to the film. But then she issued that apology, and that was kind of the nail on the head or the nail in the coffin and also, I guess, also a nail on the head. But my point would be that Abigail Disney invested in this film when no one else not known else, but everyone else, kind of told us no and gave this film life. And for that, I will always hold her in high regard. And she's not a bad person. What she did, I think, was very cowardly. And I think a lot of people in her position would probably have done the same thing, because they don't know what it's like to have that kind of pressure on you. So I understand it. I don't agree with it. And I think if you're an industry leader like Sundance and Abigail Disney, I guess I just expected more of Sundance and more of some of our industry leaders, and I've just been disappointed. But I also don't think that those institutions or the people that work there or Abigail deserve the treatment that I got, because I think that some people are starting to kind of go after Abigail like that. And I just would stress that, please don't for me, just no one deserves this kind of shit. You have no idea what it's like until you're in the eye of the storm and it's fucking shit. It's really shit. Well, let me demur, however slightly, from that incredibly patient and compassionate response to this fake controversy that has been aimed at you. I mean, we've already established in your world there are not a lot of bad people, and I basically agree with that. But in your experience, that extends even to people who are decapitating and disemboweling innocent villagers by day and then keeping you captive at night. So, yes, I don't mean to somebody said, Go ahead. They told me my film was what they say if empathy was an extreme sport, that is jihad retail. Yes, sir, that's really great. I'll put you into the empathy Olympics. You're my athlete. Well, at least I get some award. So I read Abigail's apology letter and people should know. There's a New York Times article on you, I think. Is it Michael Powell who wrote that? Yeah. Michael Powell. That dude. Solid fucking dude. Here's the thing. Throughout this whole process, I don't know if you've experienced this, but when I was initially being attacked, the journalist I put this in air quotes you can't see, but I put just it in air quote. The journalists that were writing about it would contact me and with, like two or three questions they wanted written answers to. And it was like, now that your film has been canceled, do you consider the fault that you did or wrong? And it was clear that they had already written a narrative that they just wanted a soundbite for. And for me, it was an experience of realizing that most people that I had to deal with, I wouldn't consider good journalists. And you really kind of got lucky at The Times, in my view. You could well have suffered that fate from the New York Times. Here's what happened with The New York Times. So I had a friend who used to be the head film critic at The Atlantic. And before Sundance, while I was still editing the film, I sent him a copy of the film. And I said, chris, I want you to rip my fucking film apart because I don't want to hear any of this shit after the premiere. So I want you to rip it apart now so I know where the holes are that I can patch up. So I sent him the film, and he wrote me back, and he was like, a, I can't believe this is your first feature film, because it's fucking extraordinary. He's like, B, I have two small notes, but that's about it. But he was really impressed by the film and really taken aback by it. And then about two months after Sundance, he called me and he said, always makes me laugh. He's like, so are you counting your millions from your Sundance sale? And swatting away jobs? Was like, oh, clearly you haven't been following this story. So I told him what happened, and I told him about all the stuff that wasn't online, like the lawyer threats and writing to the reviewers, threatening to sue them unless they change the reviews and all that kind of stuff. And I told them, I said, everyone wants me to do an op ed to address this, but honestly, I just don't think that's the right thing because no one is believing anything I say. And I tried to talk to journalists before, and everyone just wouldn't listen to me. And I just you know, I don't think an op ed is going to change that. And Chris was like, you need, like, a proper journalist to investigate this. Like, someone who is an actual investigative journalist who is, like, old school OG journalist. And I was like, cool, but I don't fucking know anyone like that. And I doubt anyone because the problem that I ran into and I tried to do that before, is every journalist told me the same thing. They said, we can't write about a film that no one can see. That just doesn't make sense. What are our readers going to go watch? Like, this doesn't make sense. We can't write about this film. And so Chris said he knew a handful of people. He said, but there's one guy I think would be probably the best to tell this story because he is very just the facts. He's not an opinion writer. He's very like he's a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist. And I was very hesitant and I kind of said, like, well, I'll just see what he says. Maybe I'll do it, maybe I won't. So Chris introduced us and I sent him a link to the film and then he didn't watch it. I sent him another link to the film and he didn't watch it because there's a time expression on the links. And then I sent him a third one. And if I remember correctly, I said something like because I felt like when I sent him the third link to the film girls talker. Yeah. I was like, I feel like that really geeky girl in high school that keeps on asking out the captain, the football team, like, at some point this is going to get fucking awkward. So he finally watched it and then he and then I think he went online and looked at all the vitriol against the film. And then he kind of contacted me. He's like his first sentence was like, I don't understand this. And so he jumped on a call and I gave him a little bit of background and he said, I really want to do a story in this. I really want to dive into this. This is very interesting to me. And I said, I'm not sure I want to do this. And then I basically said, I need to know who who you are as a person. And so I did the thing that I let my subjects do to me. I said, I need to interview you. And looking back now, I feel like a complete asshole because I had no idea who Michael Powell was and I didn't know his esteemed. It's basically like saying, like, you don't trust Woodward and Bernstein or Walter Cronkite. I was just like, I don't know the fuck you are. You could be another journalist going to fuck me over. So, yeah, I interviewed him and I was like, why did you get into journalism? And what do you think about XYZ? And I talked to him for a really long time and then he's just a real stand up dude. I know a lot of people have issues with the Times, and I think there's reporters over there that are questionable, but he's definitely one of the good ones. And. He interviewed me. He flew out to California and he interviewed me for, I think, total of 18 hours because obviously this is a very long story. And every time I said something, he was like, do you have proof of that? And it was very thorough. Like, he wanted the receipts. Like, he was like, I'm not going to write anything that I can't prove. Talked for like 18 hours. And then he went away. And that was in May. And he just took a really deep dive into this. And I think they published it in late September. So he's working on this for a pretty long time. And that's why a lot of people are like, oh, I think they're acting like he just met me yesterday and wrote this thing. But it was, like, pretty involved. Yeah, he's a solid dude, for sure. Yeah. So you got lucky there. I recommend people read that article, and that's the first thing I saw about this controversy. But then it links to Abigail Disney's apology letter, which originally was an email she sent privately to a bunch of people who were aggrieved or pretending to be aggrieved by your film. And then she made it public at a certain point. And I see why she's getting attacked because it's a fairly abject capitulation to the mob, especially given what your film is. This is not even a close call. Right. I could imagine some film where in response to blowback, her letter could be appropriate. Right. But she has just caved so fully in the face of what is, upon analysis, a completely dishonest campaign against your film. And in addition to that, she's essentially vowed to fund the projects of the people who canceled. That's what I last time I heard, that's what she was doing. Yeah. So that part is amazing. In her case, it's not. I don't know if she's a billionaire, but she's at least a couple of hundred millionaires. She's wealthy. She's a Disney heir, and she's spoken about that. And so if that kind of wealth doesn't give you courage right. She's not in the position you were in where getting besmirched in one way or the other stands a chance of having catastrophic financial impact on you. Right. I put her in the same category as, like, Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, where it's like they will definitely be hurt by being canceled, but they're not going to get homeless for being here. I live in the Bay Area now, and I just haven't been able to get work since Sundance. And the Bay Area is a very expensive place to live. So I'll be moving in January because I just can't afford to live here anymore, unfortunately. I really love it here, but if I can't work, I can't live in this expensive place. I want to talk about that because these are the consequences of being a normal person and being an army hurled from the ramparts of the Sundance film festival, right? In another universe, your film went to Sundance and it may have even won the top prize there, right? Certainly that was possible. But it's just amazing to have been a Sundance selection. And you were almost guaranteed to have your film distributed after Sundance. I remember talking to our PR guy at the time, and he watched the film because he's one of the top PR guys for documentaries and he does all the Oscar campaigns. And he's basically said, I've watched all the films at Sundance because everyone's trying to get him to rep their film and he only takes on a handful of them. I watch all the films at Sundance and yours was the one that actually has just stuck with me. I still think about it now. And he was talking about like, this is going to be an Oscar film. We're going to do an Oscar campaign for this film. And it's the kind of film that you watch and it just sticks with you, which is the kind of film that usually gets at least shortlisted or nominated for an Oscar. And it was at the time, I was like, this will never get nominated for an Oscar because I'm sure there's a lot of people who are not going to like this film. But again, from the right, it was funny because when that same guy, who was our PR guy, about four days after the announcement at Sundance, when the initial vitriol started, he called me and he said, I think you should pull the film out of Sundance. And this is the very, very beginning. And I was so taken aback by this. I was like, what are you talking about? This is the golden ticket. Like, we can get through this. And he was like, my advice for you is to pull the film from Sundance. And at the time, I just thought like, you're my PR guy. Your job is to help me handle this. And then months later, I talked to him because obviously Hindsight is 2020. And I was like, what did you know then that I did not know? Because I didn't know it was going to get this bad. And he said something to me. He said, these last couple of years, I've worked on some films where they were directors who weren't of the community that the film was about. And I've seen them be attacked and it's relentless. And I just didn't want to do it again. He worked on a film, I guess, and an activist group went after that film just for the whole entire year, was on the film festival circuit. And he's just like, I didn't want to do that again. It's fucking exhausting. He's like, and your film really did change the industry to where the conversations that I'm having now is both film festivals and buyers are very hesitant to take films that were directed by people not from that community because of the jihad rehab effect is what he kind of termed it as. And I was like, wow, that's pretty alarming. But yeah, that is what's so insidious about this. There are people walking around thinking that cancellation really isn't a thing, right? That it's always I was one of those people I feel like shit now, because I definitely heard people talking about before this, I heard people talking about cancellation, and having not been through it, I was just like, oh, some people are mean. You on Twitter, broke thicken your skin. And I only thought that cancellation happened to famous people, because that's the only people I heard about, right? I heard about Joe Rogan, I heard about Dave Chappelle, Louis CK and all that kind of stuff, and I didn't know what it was in its entirety, and I didn't know how devastating is if you're a working class person, right? Like, if you don't have a war chest, if you cannot hire the PR team and do all this, it's impossible to everyone was just like, Why don't you put your story out there? Why don't you tell your side? I'm like, I've been trying for fucking months, but no journalist will talk to me, and no one will publish anything. And unless you have the kind of war chest where you can hire a crisis PR team and lawyers and whatnot you can do so, for example, initially there was an article in Documentary Magazine that was written by one of the people attacking the film. And I counted there was 42 factual errors in it, and I sent that to our PR person the time, and they're like, you cannot put all these in the request to change, because basically, they would have to change the whole entire article. So pick the ten most egregious things, and we'll send them the stuff to either retract it or correct it. And one of the lines in the article was, and I quote, the men professed their innocence throughout the entire film. And I was like, Dude, if you watch the first two minutes of the film, you know that's not true. And because you have Khalid talking about building bombs for al Qaeda and teaching people how to make bombs. And so we wrote Documentary Magazine to correct it, and they didn't, and it's still in there today. And so we made him aware of this factual inaccuracy. And to me, that said one of two things. The the writer reader didn't see the film and pretending that they did, or they did see the film. And again, they're they're not a journalist. They're just activists, and they're trying to paint a picture of the film. That's not true. And the thing that was really harmful is those publications are taken at face value in their facts. And so when you have a publication like that writing about your film in that way, I think that was one of the huge things. That was the nail in the coffin of this film to where you have false. Things being written about the film, putting out on blast and email blast on these publications, and then you have an entire community come after you because they think that you've made a film. That is one thing when it's actually not. And so fast forward a couple of months. We had an article done in The Guardian about us. It was completely false. And like, they said the men's lives were in danger and that I had done all this really unethical stuff. Like, they said in the article that I hadn't contacted their lawyers. First of all, they don't have lawyers while they're in Saudi Arabia. But I actually did reach out to all three of the men's lawyers and I heard back from two. I had long conversations with two of them, but there was all these really inaccurate factual things I made. I told The Guardian, like, listen, I'd really like to have a conversation with you, the journalist and the editor in chief, because you're writing things that aren't true and I'd like to give you this interview so you get all the facts. And The Guardian said, no, literally, they said, we want you to answer in writing these, like, six questions. We're not going to give you the interview. And if you don't answer these six questions within 24 hours, this is the paragraph we're going to put out. Was the organization Cage at all involved in engineering? Yes. There's two people attacking the film. One is a group of a handful of oh, I didn't say this. I should have said this before, but later I found out through Sundance that the people who were initially attacking the film, there was, like, six Muslim filmmakers and they had written letters to Sundance, kind of like pushing them to pull the film from the festival. Those people were also people who had applied to Sundance and not gotten in. And so there was a little bit of that going on. And it was like I'm sure the thought was like I shouldn't say I'm sure their thought was because there's people tweeted this, basically saying, like, how dare Sundance program this person's film when my film as a Muslim would be way better to be programmed there. So I think there's that's related to Cage or that's related to yeah, the other group is Cage. So I didn't know anything about Cage. I'd never heard a Cage before. This whole entire thing Cage. Cage has covered itself in glory. They're essentially a kind of stealth Islamist organization. I mean, pretending to be a Muslim civil rights organization. But they have said, basically they keep alleging that every time a jihadist, a local jihadist in the UK becomes prominent in the news, the cause of that person's derangement is how they have just what sort of mistreatment they've received at the hands of British society or the British government. Right. So you have like, Jihadi John, the poster boy for ISIS for a while, who was beheading Westerners in orange jumpsuits. He was British and speaking with an English accent. And I think it was the head of Cage, who was certainly somebody from Cage at the time, was on television talking about what a wonderful person this person actually was. And the only reason why he was standing in the desert in Syria or Iraq, wherever he was, was because he had been so mistreated by the odious and Islamophobic British government. And so, yes, these are the people who are now condemning any film that even discusses the phenomenon of jihadism, however sympathetically, as your film does. I think the way it was described to me. So I didn't know about Cage at all before this. And when they initially started going after the film, I couldn't understand it because I was like, why would a group of ex Guantanamo detainees not being full support of this film? Because it really does not make Guantanamo look great. In fact, my one friend told me they're like, if any film can get Guantanamo shut down, it's this one. So I didn't understand it first and I started doing research on them. And then part of that research was I'd sent the film to a lot of experts like Lawrence Wright and people who really know this subject quite well. My understanding after talking to them and doing a deep dive on the Internet, was Cage is pushing a narrative that basically says, anyone in Guantanamo, sorry, everyone in Guantanamo is completely innocent. They never did anything wrong, and they are completely just normal people who were just caught up in this. And that is true for some people. There are definitely people who were sent to Guantanamo who were just wrong place, wrong time, and completely got fucked over by everything. But there are also people who weren't. And one of the things when I was interviewing all these guys, I did speak to people in Saudi Arabia who were, in my opinion, from talking to them, wrong place, wrong wrong time. But I specifically, like, chose people in my film who from their own volition, talk about their involvement with these organizations. And so it was told to me that Cage kind of pushes this narrative, right, that saying everyone in Guantanamo is completely innocent and never did anything wrong. And it's true. Like, no one in Guantanamo has actually been convicted. I think that's pretty common knowledge. But then he said that any kind of narrative, any book or movie that challenges that narrative, they attack ferociously. And he said, what's so damning about your film is on all these other documentaries and whatnot, you had people who were experts talking about these people in Guantanamo. But your film, it's kind of from the horse's mouth. These men are from their own mouth, tell you what they did. And so it's really hard to argue that. And so how they're kind of shaping the narrative. They're saying, oh, these men were forced to say that, or they didn't really do anything. They're just being forced to confess to these things. Cage kind of came. They went really hard in the paint against the film. They did a lot of very shady things, including putting out lies about the film and about how the film was made and about the people in the film. And it's been very successful. It's been a very successful campaign. So when I talked about, I think right now, the criticism of the film has evolved over a course of time. And right now it's all about the men are in danger because of the film. Now, the film premiered in January. It's now october. I've been in contact with the guys throughout that entire time. I literally just got a message from one of them the other day, yesterday. And I don't know if you know about the Saudi government, but if the Saudi government was going to do something, they wouldn't have waited nine months to do it. And also, these men are actually in a different class than your normal Saudi citizen. So what I mean by that is, when they're released from Guantanamo, my understanding from talking to a lot of people who deal in this area and who are Guantanamo experts are if the men who released from Guantanamo are sent to third party nations. Meaning they're countries that are not their own. There are some stipulations that have to be agreed to contractually between those two governments. One is you have to have a way to monitor these people, right? We just don't want to send them away and then release them back into the wild and let them do whatever they want and not know about it. The second thing is they have to have a way to reintegrate them back into society, whatever that is, if that's counseling, if that's job opportunities or whatever, that whatever form that takes. And the third thing is that country has to promise not to torture or kill these people once they're handed over, because it would be a really bad look if we just handed someone over to, let's say, Saudi Arabia, and then they just beheaded at the next day. It wouldn't look good on us. So these guys are actually given a little bit more protection than your average citizen because they're not really allowed to torture or kill them contractually. I'm not saying that that's not possible, but it's just something that is actually part of the agreement of taking these men in. So what are the options for the film going forward? You've hit several brick walls, but what can you do to get this film distributed? One option presents itself. You mentioned Louis CK. At one point, and he's quite famously rebooted his career by simply releasing his material on his own website. Right. He had a sufficient platform from which to do that. But you're now on this podcast. I know people. You, I'm sure, know other people, Sam. I'm a nobody. I know a handful of well, there's so there's there's some scenario where you could get just a grassroots response by just releasing this film. You could sell it from a website for 999, and some considerable number of people would download it. That's one way to distribute it without relying on a distributor. And there's everything from that to eventually getting it on Netflix or some other platform by just persuading the people who need to be persuaded that they should take the film. What doors are a jar for you at the moment? Right when the New York Times came out. My initial hope was that this story being on the front page of the biggest newspaper in the world, that that would maybe give some of the distributors like Netflix or Hulu or HBO. That would maybe give them the courage they need to maybe not buy the film, but at least give it a fair shake or a second look. Or first look, if they didn't see it already at Sundance. Unfortunately, that has not happened. And that's been pretty devastating because the second option is like, okay, if a traditional distributor with those kind of resources is not going to pick up your film, then the backup plan would be self distribution. And I have since talked to some people in the film industry who've done self distribution. And they all kind of said the same thing. They said that you need a team to do it. It's it's quite involved. It takes a couple of months to pull off. And you also need resources. So, for example, one of my friends that I talked to, he said, if you're doing self distribution, the first step and the most important step and what's going to bring the most people to your film is going to be having a badass trailer, which costs anything between 12,000, $25,000 to get made. And then you're going to have to have a poster, and you have to hire a legal team to basically put all these contracts together when you're doing self distribution. And then it's quite involved with both people and resources. And it's definitely been done before by a lot of people self distribute, but it's not something that's cheap. And when I ask some people, just the numbers that they were giving me for like, the trailers could be $25,000. The poster is a couple of. So that is all quite prohibitive to me because I don't have Disney money. I don't have a war chest that I could just self distribute this and pay for all that myself, especially with all the credit card debt that I've managed to rack up. But I also feel like for me, this film is so important that it needs to get out there. So I'm still kind of trying. So, like, the other day, I made a GoFundMe page for the film to try to raise money for a trailer and a poster and just doing all this stuff, because I do think that the film has had such an impact on people. So that's one thing I haven't given up. I'm still chipping away at it. So, for example, when a film gets into Sundance, because it's considered the it film festival, it gets into almost invited to just loads of other ones. And to Oscar qualify a film, you need to do one of two things. You need to win an award at a film festival, which we were probably going to do because most films that could get in the sundance wind up winning awards at some festival, and so they're automatically qualified to be considered for the Oscars. The other way to do it is to four wallet, which costs a lot of money. It's basically you have to play the film and rent a rent a theater out for a week in one of I think it's like four or five cities. And you have to play the entire week in that theater, has to play three times a day. And that could be anywhere from like $15,000 to $20,000, which, again, I don't have. But for me, it was imperative to oscar qualify the film because I hate rewarding bad behavior and I hate bullies. And I didn't want to cede any ground to these people who had taken away the film's festival run I e. Then it's Oscar qualifying chances. So I was able to find a theater in La. Who I think took pity on me, and it's like some obscure place, like, I think Glendale or something, and they agreed to rent me the theater for a week for $4,000. So I was able to raise that money to do that to Oscar qualify it. So I'm chipping away at this. But it's like, what's that triad? It's like cheap, fast, good pick two self distributed film when you're talking about Oscar qualifying, it when you're talking about posters, when you're talking about hiring lawyers, when you're talking about building a website, all of these things take time and resources and bodies. And right now, pretty much everyone's left the project and it's just me. So, like, the other day, I made the website for the film, and then the other day, I made a GoFundMe page to try to start raising money to where is the GoFundMe page? I just want to look at that. Yeah, if you go to my website, jihad rehab.com, and you click donate, it then takes you to the GoFundMe page. And we have $3,000 so far, which is that's enough for a post. We can get a poster made, basically, is what we're at. So we're chipping away. We can hire someone to design a poster for the film. And then so here I have, like, what happened to the like, a little bit about the film, a link to the New York times article, and then I have my director statement, which is why I made the film, which I wasn't really sure I wanted to put up there because it's pretty personal. But I was like, if I'm asking people for money, I should probably tell them who I am. Because it literally is Sam. It's just me. I'm literally taught myself how to build a website, like a couple of weeks ago. Let's just assume those problems could go away quickly. Then what do you want to do? Are there any reasons not to self distribute if all of the hassle can be removed? The only big thing about self distribute distribution not being Louis CK. Like, he has a built in audience that will religiously buy his stuff and view it, as does andrew Schultz has quite a big following now, and no one's ever fucking heard of me. I have zero following other than my uncle's aunts. I'm sure they donate to the GoFundMe page, but you're never going to get as many eyeballs on a film that's self distributed unless you're like the kind of Louis CK. Name. And that's the one downside. And does it prevent later distribution on Netflix or some other platform? Is there any negative? So basically, the GoFundMe page I made was for to be able to self distribute the film to at least a couple of cities and theaters. Because twofold, number one, when I was talking about Oscar qualifying the film, you have to Oscar qualify the film and run it in a theater before you put it online. If you put it online before you put it in the theater, then it disqualifies it for the Oscars. That's one, which I'm doing in this month anyway. So this month it's going to play for a week in Glendale. Okay. Two is I wanted to be able to have people go see the film for themselves in a way that I could do. Building the website and putting all that stuff up makes it more accessible. But being able to just put it in theaters and if you still keep and let's say it does really well in theaters and you still keep the streaming and broadcast rights, then maybe a distributor like Netflix is like, oh shit, a lot of people are seeing this. Maybe we do want it on our site. And so to kind of keep that hold that close to the chest strategically, that's what I was thinking. But seeing the people's reaction to the New York Times, the kind of silence that has come from the distributors, made me lose I'm sorry to lose faith that could be turned around, but I don't know. I think for me, the reason why I'm going to self distribute now is because I think that's the only way at this point to get out there unless something changes. But if this goes into theaters, if I'm able to, let's say, play it in like five or ten cities and it does really well, then typically the eyes and the ears of the bigger distributors where it could get a bigger audience will perk up. But, yeah, my goal with this film is to twofold. Number one, to get my investors back their money. And two, more importantly for me, though, is to have as many people see it as possible. And the reason why I'm still kind of holding out for like a Netflix or HBO to take it is because I know it's going to 100 times more people will see it on Netflix than if I have it on my own website, unfortunately. Okay, well, I really do want to help you. It's still not totally clear how I should go about doing that. But because you have this GoFundMe page and this process has started, a very clear way I can help you is just to give you money there, which I'm going to do. And I'm going to advocate that my audience do likewise if they have found this conversation compelling. I'm already kind of, like, really humbled that you're even talking to me because I know the people that you talk to on your podcast are really well known, very respected people in their fields. And I feel like I'm like a street urgent compared to them. So just coming on here and talking to you has been a really humbling experience. And so, yeah, thank you for that. That's really touching. Thank you. Yeah, well, you're obviously an extraordinary person, but I didn't quite know that until we had this conversation. But there's the film itself and the extraordinary injustice of its cancellation. And there's just so much about this situation that reveals what is wrong in our culture at the moment. The failures of courage, great and small, the righteous dishonesty that is being aimed at you. And you've got people changing movie reviews that were once effusive and now no longer are. You've got supporters who are defecting and giving no rational account of what has changed to explain their behavior. It is the whole shebang in microcosm that people have been worrying about for years now. Can I say something about that, about the worrying for years? Thing is because I did see some of this, a little bit of this in the broadcast world and in the studio world when it came to advertisers being skittish about certain topics. And one of the reasons why I operate in the independent space is because I believed that we were above that and immune to it. Because just the fact that we're independent. And Sundance has garnished a reputation for playing films that are hard and difficult and controversial and platforming those films just for the main reason that they would never get made in a studio environment. And so for me, I mean, Sundance has been around for decades. And for Sundance to apologize for this film not once but twice, yeah, it's extraordinary. It's kind of a come to. Jesus moment for me, to be honest, because they are the premier institution in my little world, my fishbowl of independent documentary films. And people like Abigail Disney are leaders in that world. And there has been films that come before me that have been done by filmmakers who have felt the pressure and apologized and kind of did the Mia cope and moved on. And some of them should have apologized, and some of them definitely shouldn't have. But it was always perceived that that's what you do. And I didn't realize, I think, the extent of it until I felt it. And then I think, for me, because I had a lot of people on my team pressuring me to apologize. And when I asked them, what am I apologizing for? They said, it didn't matter, but you need to show some kind of apology and humility. Otherwise they're just going to keep on coming after you. And at that time, I was just like, listen, when you're a firefighter and you arrive on scene, you don't just run into the building. You kind of have to assess first. And at the time, I was trying to gather information because what was happening was completely didn't make sense to me because of all the screenings we'd done before the festival. And so originally, I didn't apologize because I was trying to understand and grasp what was happening. And then when I kind of did really understand it, I thought, no, I had sent my film to Lawrence Wright and Ali. Soufan I had screened my film post Sundance with Muslim people, leaders in the community in the Bay Area. I screened it with a Yemeni student union, and they all had pretty positive reactions to it. So I was like, what am I? I don't think I've done anything wrong here because I did vet it post Sundance. Because when you got that kind of reaction, unless you like, I just thought, I have to do my due diligence, maybe I did miss something. And it was the same kind of reaction we got pre Sundance. And so when it came down to it, it's like, okay, you took my film's premiere away from me. You took the film's trajectory away from me. You took my reputation and my name and my career away from me. Like, fuck am I going to give you my integrity, the one thing I have left, and apologize for this film, basically, and reinforce the lies you're telling about this film. And it literally was. The reason why I didn't apologize is because after I did my due diligence, it was the only thing I had left. I didn't have money. I didn't have my reputation. I didn't have my career. The only thing I had was my integrity. And for me, it was worth holding on to for that. And I think someone told me about all these big institutions like Sundance and Abigail Disney kind of bending the knee to this angry mob and to the pressure, and then it falls on I hate the fact that I'm the first one in my industry not to apologize. It should not be a first time feature filmmaker that is doing this. It's really hard. I don't have the resources, I don't have the track record, I don't have the kind of pool. And I am like the least powerful person in my industry and least amount of influence. And I hate the fact that other people before me who had way more resources and way more power could have could have done this before me and hopefully set the groundwork for other people to do it. But unfortunately, it falls on me. And I think I'm reminded of I heard this somewhere, and they said, the only thing more dangerous than a man with limitless resources and more money than God is a man with nothing to lose. At this point, I got fucking nothing to lose. So I guess I'm like, I'm not apologizing. What are you going to take from me? I'm literally moving out of my house in a couple of months because I can no longer afford it. So I don't want this to be like a woe is me thing, because I do think the film for me is something I'm super proud of, people who worked on it, super proud of, and I want to pay those people back and also those people's careers. Like the animation in the film, we didn't talk about that, but it's fucking awesome. If you watch other documentaries, it's a really good animation. And all the animators in the film were women. We didn't have a lot of resources. So my co producer literally went on Instagram, and I said, my only stipulation is I want all female animators. I don't care where they're at or what the background is, but I really wanted all female animators because our production team in the field had to be all male because there were certain things that I couldn't shoot on my own. Like, so, for example, the wedding that you saw, the wedding scene, the film Weddings in Saudi Arabia are segregated, so I wasn't allowed to film the wedding. So I had to be in the parking lot in a car with a remote director's monitor and a walkie talkie and directing the cinematographer and the sound guy remotely on who to film and who to zoom into. And so, because we had to have an all male production team, it was imperative to me to have more females involved in post. And so we had all I think we had six female animators. Two were from they just started this animation company in Brazil called Hilda Motion, and it was the one year of their opening. Their company, these two girls from Brazil, was going to be the premiere at Sundance, and it was going to launch their company and launch their career. And they were so excited about it. And they were just like, you can't believe that we did an animation piece that's going to be a film at Sundance and it was going to launch their business because it's really good animation in there. And there was another woman who she was a trans woman in London who does animation on the side. And she did the line animation and all these people. There was one of my favorite stories about the animators is there was one woman that I interviewed and then months later, we were talking after the animation with us. And she did she did Nodders animation, the one that's kind of like charcoal hand drawn type stuff. And when I interviewed her, she made it seem like she'd been in the industry for a while. But I was mostly sold on her pitch and her she got the characters. So for me, it was more important that they understood the psychology of the characters and they were able to express that visually than any kind of awards they won. And so later on, after the film was done, she was like, Meg, I have a confession to make. And I'm like, yeah. So do you remember when did the interview? And I was telling you, like, you know how I was a professional animator and did it? I was like, yeah. I was like, okay. And she's like, well, you remember that time when you were trying to get a hold of me and it took me a long time to get back to you? I'm like, yeah, because I'm actually still in school. I had finals week. And she's like, actually, this is my first paid gig. I'm like, I'm fucking cared. It was great. I lean it. So it was the moral of the story is like, it was a lot of people's I mean, I am not I am not a big wig in our industry. I'm not a gatekeeper. But I was a gatekeeper for this film. And it was imperative to me to find other people that were also talented that just hadn't got the recognition yet. And this was going to launch their careers as well. And so one of the cinematographers I worked with, literally, I saw him the other day, and he was saying a bunch of the people who were on this film who've moved on, like bigger wigs, he was hanging around the other day. And he's just like, they all moved on to the other projects. He's like, this was supposed to be my big shot. This was like the one that was going to put me on the map. And so I'm really sad because by going after me, I don't think they realized they really hurt other people who would be in the minority camp, right? The trans woman in the UK. The Brazilian couple in the couple in Brazil. The women in Brazil. And there was one in Poland as well. And I think that all these people were at the nascent stage of their career. They just hadn't got the Acknowledgment yet. But they're all super fucking talented. And it's just really sad to me because it's not how it's supposed to go. And I think for me, the hardest thing about this whole ordeal was this was a project that had no resources for what we actually pulled off. And there was a lot of people who worked for free or deferred or for a huge discount. And they followed me down this path because they believed in me and they believed in this project. And what was absolutely devastating for me is when this all started kicking off and they were attacked on social media and they were bullied and harassed. We had people who, just to let you know, they took screenshots of our credits at Sundance and they reached out to a lot of the people at our credit and they threatened them. I don't know if I have it here. Yeah, so here you go. So this is one of the emails I got from one of the people in our credits. So basically, somehow they got her phone number and they called her. And this is the email she said she's like, I'm sorry if my tone was harsh because she sent me an email before, and she said my phone was blowing up with strangers asking me about the film, which I haven't seen yet, saying that I supported Islamophobia and endangered people. I felt as blindsided as sounds you are now. And now I'm hearing people are being fired and resigning. I'm so sorry about all of this for everyone. I've been in firestorms before, and you will get through this because you're talented, resilient, and not ill intentioned. I'd never survive in your industry. That was just one one person on our credits that they reached out to, and basically on the phone was like, you're a racist and you're Islamophobic unless you take your name off the film. And so she asked me to take her name with the film, and we had like, I think it was like 35 people or something in total that reached out and said, please take my name with the film. I literally got one just yesterday from a guy who's pretty high up in the industry. And these people aren't in the credits, they're in our special thanks. And he said, Take my name off your special thanks. It's not like we're giving you a credit that you didn't do. It's just like, hey, thank you for working on our film. And they reached out to all those people and harassed them and bullied them. And then they contacted me and said, I don't want to be associated with this film anymore because it's just causing me too much of a headache. And that's hard when you're like the captain of the ship, right, and people trust you and they follow you down a path and then you lead them to the path where it devastates their career. It caused them emotional strife. Like, I had one of my editors calling me on the phone and she was distraught and she was crying, and I felt like, I don't know if it's the firefighter in me, but they were like my team, and I couldn't protect them. And I felt responsible for that because they'd followed me down this line. Shit. Sorry. Hold on. They'd followed me down this line, in this path, in this film, because they believed in me and they trusted me. And because of that, their lives were kind of blown up, too. So that was the worst part, feeling responsible for other people. For other people. Like that translator we attacked or like my editor or my cinematographer, the guy who did our score, he said he had five different people call him, encouraging him to take his name off the film, and he didn't. He asked each one of them what they thought of the film. He said none of them had seen the film. Every single person that called him had not seen the film. So it's just been this total avalanche and wave of like I said before, I didn't understand what cancellation really was until I went through this process. And that's why I said I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy, the people attacking the film. I wouldn't wish this on them. I wouldn't I no one deserves this. And I think that the documentary field is filled with a lot of really good intentioned people. And I think that it's also really easy to weaponize empathy when you're in that kind of field. And I'm sure there are people out there who saw the film and genuinely didn't like it. And that's fine, and I'm open to criticism, but there's a difference between criticism and bullying, between criticism and harassment and threatening lawsuits and things like that. So I'm hoping that if I can turn this around, that it will kind of be a moment in my industry where we can take a step back and say, hey, we need to kind of reevaluate how we're dealing with all this. And the knock on effect is, if you have a film festival as powerful as Sundance Capitulating, then eventually what's going to happen is people are only going to program safe films, which don't talk about the issues and don't talk about the stuff that's actually hard to talk about, which we need to do. And that's why we all operate in this independent space, because we're able to I don't know. Have you ever seen the film Active Killing? Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant film. Brilliant. Yeah. In fact, I had the director on the podcast. He's so sweet. He's such a nice man. But that film would never have gotten made in the studio. No fucking way. But the great thing about the independent space, it used to be that people will realize that this was the space where you made challenging work so you can have those difficult discussions. But if this space now has been infected with this kind of propensity to play it safe and to avoid conflict, then there's no other space for it. There's no other plan C. Like, this was the space where films like that got made and got platformed. And without that, I'm very fearful of moving like where my industry is headed. The avoidance of controversy is just a disaster for honest inquiry and entertainment. And we all make mistakes. And then when you do actually make a mistake and it's brought to your attention, you sure shit should apologize and do it in a very genuine way. For me, that's face to face, for me, that's in person, it's not performative. And the fact that there I've seen other filmmakers apologize and I see the work they're apologizing for and it baffles me. But I understand why now, because the well, they just want to make it stop. You want to get your life back and, as you say, your reputation back, but you certainly have your integrity and your intentions are so obvious and obviously good. Let's see if we can get the other stuff back, because what's happened to you here is deeply unfair. And I want to help. I want my audience to help. And you and I will stay connected and just let me know what happens. One thing that's potentially confusing is you've changed the name of the film in the meantime. It's now called the unredacted. But the website is Jihad Rehab and that's not going to change. Yeah, the website is Jihad rehab.com? If you put in the Unredacted film, I think it will still take you there. But there's a lot of websites with the Unredacted in it, so we didn't want there to be confusion. But the title yes, the title is The Unredacted. But it's Jihad rehab. Yeah, jihad Rehab.com, donate and I hope people do, because we should help you. Meg, thanks for your time and please keep your chin up. It's not over. Thank you. I appreciate it. And thank you for I don't know how long we've been talking, but it's been a while. It's been a joy to have this long overdue conversation with, so I appreciate it. Thank you. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our Subscriber feed feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, jumping right into it. Today I'm speaking with Megan Dom. Megan is the author of five books, and she writes a biweekly column about culture and politics for Medium. She was an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times for over a decade, and she's also written for The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, and other journals. And her most recent book is The Problem with Everything my Journey through the New Culture Wars. And in this conversation, we talk about the book, which focuses mostly on feminism. We talk about violence against women, campus sexual assault, the new norms of conversation, intersectionality, the 2020 presidential campaign, and related matters. Anyway, I've had many women on the podcast of late who have distinguished themselves both for their honesty and their willingness to touch politically charged topics. I'm thinking of Megan Phelps. Roper Yasmin Mohammed, caitlin Flanagan, barry Weiss. And Megan Dom definitely continues that trend. And if those of us on the left are going to be anything more than completely ineffectual and masochistic as the 2020 presidential election approaches, it will be because we have more conversations like this. So, without further delay, I bring you Megan Dom. I am here with Meghan Dom. Megan, thanks for joining me. Thank you, Sam. I just finished your book this morning. I read every page. I would never pretend otherwise and loved it. It's really it's great. This is your most recent book. The Problem with Everything my Journey through the New Culture Wars. It's very, very funny and very well written, and it's your other writing. Thank you. And I guess we'll talk about your focus in this book. I've read some of your other work, mostly articles, and maybe touch on some of those. But maybe just to start summarize your career thus far as a writer, what have you tended to focus on and how do you view your work? As a writer? I have always viewed myself as somebody who sort of looks at the culture and looks at the places where there's kind of a gap between what people think they're supposed to think and feel about something and what they actually think and feel. So I'm interested in Hypocrisies. I'm interested in the ways we kind of try to convince ourselves of things. I'm an essayist. I really love that form. This is not an essay collection. These are chapters. It's a chapter book for the big kids. Yes, it doesn't have illustrations, but maybe the paperback. So, yeah, I've always been an essayist, and I've liked to take a personal approach to big ideas. So I started off in the had a couple of big pieces in The New Yorker, for instance. One of them was about going into debt trying to be a freelance writer in New York. And it was about my own experience, but really much more about the sort of economy of the city and the romance of the creative life and really looking at a whole bunch of stuff. So I continued on in that vein throughout my career. And I've been a magazine journalist. I was an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times for more than a decade. And so, yeah, I wrote one novel, but I really see myself as an observer and a sort of anthropologist of sorts. I'm not a political wonk, and I'm not a straight memorist generally, but sort of a combination of all those things. Yeah, well, this new book is really of the moment politically and socially, and I think I'm a couple of years older than you, and the book has resonates with, I would say, all of us who are just edging into our 50s. There's a lot around aging. And I guess one question on that point is how much do you think of the problems we're going to talk about that the problems around political discourse and moral panics or what may be perceived as moral panics and just the kind of the impossibility of finding durable new norms around conversation that seem sane? How much of do you think is just a generational divide that is just making everything difficult to parse? Where does communication become the hardest? Does it just yeah. Is it bad in a linear way as the other people get younger and younger? Or is it that not really the problem? Well, it's funny if you would ask me this six weeks ago, I think when the book first came out and when I was really starting to talk about the book, I would have said that it's very much a generational issue. And I certainly talk about that a lot in the book, and especially around issues of feminism and, you know, the lives of women. I talk a lot about growing up as a girl in the how that might have been different than growing up in in, you know, later decades. But I have to say, as I've gone around and talked about this book the last month or so, I think it's really it transcends generations. I've had people of all ages coming up to me and saying, thank you for putting this out there. This really goes beyond any sort of age issue or generational sensibility and talks more broadly about the sort of cultural conversational chokehold that we're in. And so I really thought that I hate to use the term culture wars and there's all these sorts of words like triggered and social justice warrior that I am not ever using in earnest, and I don't do so in the book, but I really think that it's beyond that. I think that there are people with sort of really want to sort of think about all this stuff beyond their own sort of experience. And so as I have gone around, I've seen this much, much less of an issue of my being the age that I am and more of an issue of having the sensibility that I do, and I think a lot of people share it regardless of their age. I've heard some speculation around there being ill appreciated economic variables here. The Gen Z and millennials are in the most precarious position in any recent generation financially. And I recently read your piece, the Asset you referred to in The New Yorker my Misbent Youth, which I think was published in 1999. Yes, but it could almost read true of any age, certainly this age, except for the rents. I complain about how high the rent is, and it's like $1,000, $100? Yes. Right. He's got to change a few of the numbers. But obviously New York was expensive then and it's expensive now, but people in their twenty s and thirty s have less of a share of accrued wealth than people have tended to have at those ages in generations past. And yeah, I'm kind of looking for big picture variables here. Before we wade into the details, how much do you think economics is at work here? Yeah, Douglas Murray has talked about that a lot, and I gather that's what you're referring to. A little bit. Yeah, it's interesting to hear that theory. I think there's something there, I have to admit it's not something I had thought a lot about, just because I tend to see millennials as the people making a lot of money in.com ventures and in Silicon Valley, but obviously that's just a tiny slice and a lot of them are Gen Xers, so that's not quite accurate. But yeah, I think there's something to that. This notion of blow it all up or this isn't working for us on any level, so we need to radically change the system. Yeah, I think there's some validity to that theory. Just the fact that socialism seems to be enjoying a new dawn and that capitalism is a word of invective now that seems to have taken root in recent years in a way that I don't remember it being true of the odds or yeah. Although right, I mean, you know, but when I I graduated college in 1992 and there was a recession at that time and I remember everybody saying, oh, we're the first generation that is not going to be as wealthy as our parents. We will never have the standard of living that we grew up. I mean, it sounds quaint now, but that was a really big part of our identity. And I don't mean to diminish what's going on now. I'm not comparing these two experiences, but I think everyone in their 20s has the idea that their experiences is particularly perilous and exasperating and unfair. Well, I guess let's start with feminism, which is in many ways the focus of the book. At one point, you write, this is quoting you, you're troubled, by the way, is that contemporary feminism has turned womanhood into another kind of childhood. And then there's a certain point you discuss what is termed badass feminism, and you say that badass feminism feels paradoxically, like the pink aisle at the toy store. How do how do you view feminism yeah. At this moment? And how much trouble are you getting into for viewing it that way? Oh, I've been getting into trouble over this for several years. It it's it was just pre dates the book. So, yeah, I just to back up a little bit, I started thinking about all of this stuff probably around 2015, maybe late 2014. I was still a columnist at the La times at that time, looking for a topic every week. And I started to notice, especially on Twitter, that there was a lot of discussion around women's issues that seemed really almost in direct opposition to the actual state of women. We had, in reality, women doing better than ever. There were more women graduating from college. There were more girls who were high school valedictorians, on and on and on. And yet this and more than men. I mean, they were doing better than men in those that's what I mean. Yeah, they were doing better than men. And men were actually falling behind in a lot of ways. Obviously not in the highest corridors of power, but in the aggregate, girls and women were sort of soaring way above men and boys. So that was going on. But at the same time, there was, like this discourse on social media that was really rooted in this premise that we were under the thumb of the patriarchy. And we started hearing terms like toxic masculinity, and there were these hashtags like kill all men and I bathe in male tears. And this phenomenon of ironic misandry came into being, this idea that we can make fun of men and we're just being ironic, and it's okay. And I understood that. It's not like I was taking hashtag ban men literally, but I just thought it was kind of curious that the conversation around the state of women really had very little to do with the actual state of women. And so I was going to write a sort of manifesto called You Are Not a Badass, and it was just going to be sort of poking fun at this and trying to get a handle on it and say, let's get our acts together. Here, and this was around 2016. I assumed that Hillary Clinton would be the President and that everybody would be able to sort of take a ribbing there. And obviously that did not happen. And so once I sort of collected myself, the shock of the election, I really started thinking more broadly about what was going on culturally, and and I was much more interested in in these sort of larger problems of of speech and being able to talk about things and and so on. Now that said, I'm like a white chick, so what can I write about? I can write about the experience of women. So I started the book really talking about my own experience growing up in the we can get more into that if you'd like, but really, I do think that there was a it was a remarkable time to be a little girl, the 1970s, for for various reasons. And I started to sort of look at what was it about my experience that was making me perhaps not relate to this sort of Twitter conversation around women and where the generational divides might be. Yeah. So you were saying that it wasn't as gendered a childhood as you observe it to be now. And that actually kind of surprised me. That was my decade of childhood as well. And I didn't have sisters. I didn't have a clear view of it, certainly in elementary school, but it does seem right to me. But I was surprised to not have a clear memory of how I thought gender was being amplified or selected against in childhood. But some of the examples you gave it did seem impressively gender neutral in many ways. Just the fact that boys and girls would watch a film like The Bad News Bears rather than some Disney fairy centered or princess centered confection, and that yeah, I hadn't taken the time to recall what it was like to be a kid. See, I wonder if the fact that it hadn't occurred to you actually suggests that it was so, so neutral, it wouldn't even imprint on your on your your memory. So yeah, I mean, there's actually data on this. There you know, you would go into a toy store in the 1970s, and there were not there would be like not a pink toy aisle for girls and blue for boys. There was just a sort of androgynous aesthetic about that time, not in all corners, obviously. You had like, hyper hyper masculinity and, and, you know, hyper femininity and Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and Charlie's Angels and I don't mean to totally oversell this point, but I do think that there was something about being a kid in that time that was really freeing in terms of gender expression. It was totally cool to be a tomboy. If you were a girl, being a girly girl was not what you wanted to be. I don't think it's any accident that the two biggest child movie stars of the 1970s were Jodie Foster in the movies and Christy McNichol in television. And they both are very out. Lesbians, were not girly girls and are not girly women. So I started thinking about that. And when I think about the ways that sometimes younger women get irritated with me because they say that I'm diminishing the difficulty of being a woman, or I'm sort of not appreciating how hard it is for them in certain ways. I really had to go back and reckon with the fact that there was this great gift of growing up in this time when it really wasn't. It never once occurred to me that I was anything but as good as boys, if not better. And it wasn't until later, I think we got into this Girls Gone Wild sort of raunch culture ethos in the early aughts for kids. Like you said, the Disney princess thing came along and I think that that sort of shaped some sort of attitudes around women and certainly contributed to their frustration. This book is very much a self interrogation. It is not a polemic. It's the process of me trying to make sense of why I'm not necessarily aligned with some of the more prominent features of the cultural discussion. And that was one thing that I really looked at. Yeah. This is not to deny our history, or even our recent history of kind of Mad Men level misogyny and political disempowerment for women. I just watched a Bond movie with my my oldest daughter, who's turning eleven. She didn't know who James Bond was. And so with some feeling of trepidation, I put on Goldfinger, which I hadn't seen in 20 years or more, and I think it was released in 64. So somewhere it's a mid 60s film and the level of sexism in it is just jaw dropping. I mean, it's hilarious. I mean, she she just did not even know how to interpret what she was seeing and we had a good laugh over it. Although there is, in fact, nothing more surprising in that film, or perhaps any film than the most emasculating garment I think, ever put on a leading man. People can Google this image, but Sean Connery puts on a terry cloth. I don't know what you call it, a romper or something by the pool. Not a bathrobe like something. No, it's like a short. Short bath. Short shorts, integrated. It's like a body suit that's made of blue terry clothing. Cloth is the cloth of that era, I think, too. Yes. I'm pretty sure a Google search of Sean Connery and terry cloth will turn up this horror show. But it's so strange. It really is like a glitch in The Matrix. Like, this just can't have ever happened, really, anyway. But just seeing him slap women on the ass, it's not even ironic. I was trying to figure out how it was supposed to play to the audience in 1964. I think it just is him being dashing in yet another way. So obviously we have to acknowledge that there's a serious motivation for feminism. But what's actually the front line now, do you think? Yeah. You know, so there's a there's a scene in the book where I talk about being in my early to mid twenty s, and I was living in an apartment in New York City. A couple of roommates there were three roommates at any given time. So somebody would move out, and we would have to look for a new roommate. So on one of these, we would have a day where people would come in and sort of audition to be our roommate. And it was me and another woman were the same age. We were looking for our third roommate, and this guy came in. He was, like, probably in his he was probably in his mid to late 30s. We assumed he was, like, in his 50s, but probably not that old. And an old man in his mid 30s exactly, which, when you're 25, that's everybody. And he said something like, oh, you know, well, here's an idea. What if I bought the food and you girls did the cooking? And he kind of came at us with this idea, and we were unable to look at each other because we were going to burst out laughing. We thought this was so absurd as to be hilarious, and we were, like, embarrassed for him. That was how we how we took that moment. And, you know, as soon as he left, we sort of fell all over ourselves. And I talk about this in the book. This was probably 1995, okay? So I think that probably 20 years earlier, if our mothers had been in a situation like that, our mothers who were adults through the Mad Men era, who were working in offices where slaps on the ass was just what you had to deal with, I think they would have been offended by this guy in a way that we were not. And fast forward 20 years later, if that had happened today with young women, I think that they would have probably gotten really angry and run to their computers and gone on their Tumblr accounts or gone to Twitter to rant about this guy and the misogyny and the sexism and how nothing has changed, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm really interested in what it is about that particular moment that made my roommate and I actually just laugh and feel sorry for this guy when our mother's generations would not have done that and the current young generation wouldn't have done that. And I'm still figuring out the answer to that. I'm not quite sure, but it's definitely a phenomenon. Yeah, well, it would definitely be perceived as a microaggression now, if not a macroaggression. Right. Has such a sexist assumption. But what you're pointing out there is that these are circumstances which now are routinely described as kind of yet more evidence of the power that men have over women or just assumed they have over women. You know, this is like the the vestiges of patriarchy. But you as a woman now, again, in the mid 90s, perceived these situations not through that lens. I mean, you did not feel disempowered. In fact, you were actually empowered. So we had all the power in that situation. For one thing, we had the lease on on a a Manhattan apartment. Okay? So that puts anybody in power. But yeah, as far as we were concerned, he was like a complete loser, and he could have been like any kind of guy. He could have been our own age and somebody we found attractive. And if he had said something like that, we would have also burst out laughing. And that's, you know, one of the things, again, that I talk about in the book is this notion that what we have now is this sort of punching up approach to talking about men. Like in comedy, you can punch up or you punch down, right? So the idea being that you can make fun of people who have more power than you. You can tell jokes about celebrities or politicians or rich people or whatever not cool to make fun of people who have less power. So by making a sort of sport of making fun of white men, of men in general, of talking about all the ways that they are completely putting you down and are ruining the world, that seems to me a version of punching up. And it seems to me completely misguided, because what you're actually doing in that situation is handing them power that they don't necessarily have. The minute you start piling on somebody, you are saying, this person has more power than I do because I have license to pile on them. And that really, really troubles me as somebody who never thought that any given man had more power than I did. Yeah, I guess I think one power differential that doesn't go away it doesn't go away without technology on some level is just in the sphere of physical violence. And it's concerned I mean, it is a fact that women have lived for hundreds of thousands of years as homo sapiens in the company of men who generally outweigh them, generally a head taller or thereabouts, and also even at the same weight, have greater upper body strength. The threat of violence is just an issue. And this will talk about sexual violence, and in particular the campus sexual assault epidemic or the imagined epidemic, depending. But I've always very naturally seen this from a woman's point of view, this issue of kind of the dynamics of human violence. Because I was raised by a single mom. Now I have two daughters. I've spent a lot of time thinking about violence and self defense and training in martial arts and all the rest. So it's like kind of my head has been in that game for a very long time. And the moral core of the problem of violence has been most centrally aligned with the problem of violence against women, at least in my mind. And children. Weaker people who are physically weaker. And so it's just very natural. So when you go to a slogan like a Me Too slogan like believe all women or believe victims, my emotional default is certainly there. And yet every time you turn up an example where that proves to be a bad heuristic right. Where you have a woman who is blind for reasons, however inscrutable, or you have someone who's mentally ill, just the amount of harm that does to all the legitimate grievances out there, that's something we haven't really focused on. This is now not a women's issue. But whenever there's a moral hoax like the Jussie Smollett case right. That's so awful and awfulness, it seems to me unappreciated on the left, it just does so much harm. But anyway, it's hard not to honor a bias in favor of basically just believing the claims that come at least in that direction. Well, right. And I don't think there's any I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. So if somebody tells me something, I'm going to listen and assume they're telling me the truth until I find out otherwise. But I just want to be clear when I say that I've never felt like I have less power than a man. That's not saying that I've never felt threatened by a man, that I have not felt frightened walking down the street alone at night. So let's just be very clear about that. And I say in the book, yes, there are physical power differentials. There's all kinds of ways and reasons that women have historically had a really raw deal for all kinds of reasons, and we can get into that. But I am interested in why in this current moment, there's such an incentive to sort of apply this assumption just across the board. There was a survey done by Thomson Reuters about a year or so ago about the ten most dangerous countries in the world for women. Okay? Yeah. Remember that at the top, it was like India, Pakistan, I think, Somalia, the places that you would imagine. And the United States was number ten on this list of the world's most dangerous countries for women. And when people said, well, how did you come to this? They had surveyed about 500 people who were global experts in global women's issues or something, and they said, well, you know, in the wake of the Me Too movement, it was important to recognize that just because you're in an affluent country, you know, you're, you're not automatically safe. And, and you know, we really need to, to acknowledge the experiences of, of women in the United States. And I just thought, okay, a that is not a data point. And B, what are you getting out of this? This is, like, amazing to me. What is it? Does that sell more magazines? Does that make people feel included in the world in the conversation in some way? That's what just constantly baffles me. And I think that's to your point like this, that does real damage. Because if I read that and I lived in India and was having to deal with, you know, the horrific conditions for women in countries like that, I would be pretty pissed if I saw the United States just kind of thrown in there on that list. Yeah, well, that's what makes this look like a moral panic rather than a set of legitimate ethical and political concerns. And I guess we should focus on the claims about the campus sexual assault problem now. Because if you dumb down the definition of what constitutes an assault enough. I mean, one, you're driving up the perceived risk, right? Because people just assume that, you know, when you say that, you know, one in five women get sexually assaulted in their college careers. You know, I've even heard that put as one in five women get raped. Yeah, that which was never true. Yeah, right, but so but it's just, you know, the fact that, you know, sexual assault and rape are practically synonyms in most people's minds, and depending on how much you dumb down the definition, you're doing real harm to the actual victims of real sexual assault, you know, terrifying and horrible sexual assault. Right, so but the problem okay, so I absolutely agree with you, but the problem there is that how do you even articulate that point without using a phrase like real victims of real assault? Like, you start to get into as a white man, you just get on your own podcast and you do it. But who was the politician who was talking about legitimate rape? Right? And somehow you couldn't get pregnant from legitimate rape because the body would shut that down. So, you know, we we've run into all these tripwires well, that was no, but was that Lindsey Graham? Who was that? No, it was I want to say aiken it was not Lindsey Graham. Okay. But, yeah, it's like, all these trip wires, because we want to talk about this very dynamic that you described, that if we if we make everything sexual assault, that it does no favor to victims of, quote, unquote, real sexual assault, but then how do you even have the conversation without using a phrase like real sexual assault? And then this gets into, like, well, we can't have the conversation to begin with because there's no way to do it without blaming victims or making people feel uncomfortable or doing harm to them. So we skip the whole thing, and we don't even solve this problem of how you talk about it. So the not talking about it makes it almost impossible. For anybody who tries. Right? Well, I guess let me differentiate real from fake here in defense of basic sanity. Perhaps there's not a bright line, but this statistic of one in five, I think, was trumpeted from the highest places. I even think President Obama talked about obama? Yes. So we have the President of the United States announcing to a worried population that if you send your girls to college, they stand a one in five chance of being, quote, sexually assaulted. Now, as a dad, if I thought there was a 20% chance that my daughters were going to be raped when they go off to whatever good school they worked hard to get into, I would never send them there. Right. It would be insane. There would be no need for college admission scandals either. Right. Because nobody would be applying to college. It would be so much easier to get in. Yes. So what do you think is rational to believe about the risk that young women run going to college? Well, I mean, the one in five thing, even the people who did that study, that study was based on, I think, two different schools. Just two schools, one of which was a commuter school, essentially, UMass, Boston. And the one in sexual assault was being defined as anything from rape to some sort of unwanted touch or groping, that sort of thing. So the range of experiences that could fall into the assault category is huge. And so the one in five rape thing was never true. This is like a game of telephone, right? Okay. So one in five sexual assault. You could kind of massage that if you were going to define sexual assault as really basically anything of a sexual nature that is unwanted. But, you know, other statistics have been more precise and and come up with things like one in 42, one in 52, something like that. So I I really think that ultimately, though, it doesn't matter what the statistics are. Like, one in 52 is still too much. Okay, that's fine. Again, what I'm interested in in this book and again, I'm somebody who looks at people's behavior and looks at my own experience and tries to connect the dots and fill in the blanks here. I'm really not as interested in the numbers as I am and what people are getting out of this. Why is it that if you have a bad experience, it's so much easier, it's so much more appealing to kind of fold it into a victimization experience than into one? That where you just say, I shouldn't have done that. And that's not to say that there aren't victims and that victimization experiences happen too often, but I really have noticed that, as opposed to when I was in college, having an icky sexual experience was just kind of the cost of doing business when it came to growing up and figuring out who you are. And this was just sort of what happens along the way. And I don't mean rape. I mean just something that you regret doing and that you won't do again. But for some reason, there's almost like no lane for that kind of feeling about something that you may have gone through. And I think of a lot about why that might be. And again, I'm just one of these things that I'm still trying to figure out. Yeah, well, that's where it breaks down ethically in a scary way when you have a culture that is rewarding victim status to a degree, that the straightest path to becoming a kind of social superstar is to have a legitimate claim to have survived something awful. When you have these examples, and there's at least one in your book of essentially bad dates or, you know, sexual encounters that people wind up regretting or maybe but again, there's just like there's no use of force or implied use of force or coercion or it becomes a he said, she said around something that is just like we don't want to do that again. But there are these cases that both in your book and in the news now, where it seems like young women are being encouraged to dredge their memories for any sign that this experience that they just didn't like in the end can be weaponized to their advantage. And then what follows is you have this very strange policy wrapped up with Title Nine, where young men on college campuses can get accused of sexual assault or rape over something where the evidence isn't even presented to them. It's a very weird gray area where, okay, if there was a real quote, real sexual assault or a rape, then call the police. Right? Real rape. Yes, that's right. People should show up with guns when that sort of thing happens. Right. But no, we're in this sort of no man's land where this is not anything like a crime that could be reported to police, but it is nevertheless enough to destroy this person's career at a university. And I don't know if you want to talk more about it, but these are really kafkaesque episodes in the lives of men, which, unfortunately, make this what should seem like a good aphorism. Believe all women or believe victims fairly unworkable on a college campus. Yeah. And this is one of those things that because it came from the Obama administration, everyone sort of on our side on the left, just assumed, oh, well, it must be the right thing to do. So, yeah, in 2011, there was a a Dear Colleague letter, the notorious Dear Colleague letter, which was sent out to any university that was receiving federal funding, which is just about all of them saying that they needed to follow a certain procedure if there was a case of a woman making a complaint of sexual assault. And there was a whole series of things you had to, you know, let the let, you know, let the woman, she was entitled to, I think, having somebody, you know, be with her when she made this testimony. The man, on the other hand, was not allowed to have an attorney. Don't quote me verbatim here. This is a very sort of cursory summary. I go into it in a lot of detail in the book, but essentially these were kangaroo courts, and you had these cases where boys were accused of things, they didn't know what they were accused of, and the woman was just allowed to sort of proceed with a case that really was very muddy. And the worst thing about this was that even if the woman decided that she didn't want to proceed with it, by the time it was reported to the Title IX office, the Title Nine office was obliged to go through with it. What had come down from the Obama administration was that if the schools did not adhere to this, they risk losing their federal funding. And one of the great ironies of the Trump administration was that it took Betsy Du Vos to reverse many of these policies. She was the one who finally stepped in and said, this is wrong. We're going to roll this back. And I like Obama a whole lot more than I like DeVos, to put it mildly. But who's the more reasonable party here? But again, to even hint that you may be on the side of Betsy DeVos, we'll get you thrown out of liberal circles and in this case called a rape apologist. Well, again, unhelpfully, there are cases of the opposite sort where you have what seemed to be legitimate accusations of rape from a student swept under the rug because, say, this person is a star football player or whatever, and the college just doesn't want to look into it for obvious reasons. And so again, it's just the details. In every instance, matter and problem with any moral panic is that it makes it impossible to focus on the details. Because the moment something fits a certain type, there's just a default emotional hijacking which makes rational deliberation impossible. Because people are defenestrated for even taking the necessary moment to figure out what happened. Right, right. Well, so we seem to have this logic that asking questions, trying to actually get at the facts equals skepticism, and then skepticism somehow equals harm. And so there's like this continuum of really diminishing returns. So there's a scene in the book where I go to a Take Back the Night rally at the University of Iowa. There's a lot of the book that takes place at the University of Iowa because I was teaching their first semester, and I'm sitting on the grass and the quad and there's a microphone and a mic stand and a whole bunch of mostly undergraduates, some older kids, and I think some, even some staff, maybe adult staff, were getting up and telling stories about being sexually assaulted, about having really bad experiences. And Take Back the Night has been around for a long time. It's actually been around since the 70s, but it's this sort of initiative to get particularly college students to talk about these experiences and sort of bring them out in the open. And I remember from my own college days, and I know people who were really healed by the experience of being able to share these. So I was sitting there listening to some of these kids, and some of their stories were really harrowing. A lot of them took place in childhood. A lot of them, the things they were talking about had nothing to do with college. They were talking about sexual abuse in the family, at home, and then some of them were talking about encounters that happened more recently in college. And I believed them. The issue wasn't really about believing or not believing them, but more that I was noticing that there was almost this, like, I don't even want to say solidarity. There was this catharsis in telling their stories that went beyond catharsis and really was like some kind of deliverance. It's a religious revival, in a way, yes. And I had this horrifying moment of cognitive dissonance because I remember George Will, of all people, writing a column, you know, back, you know, probably around, you know, several years earlier, making this very point and and in a sort of clumsy way and saying, you know, the the reason these women are making these accusations is that the minute you're a you're a sexual assault survivor, you automatically get entry into this club. And it's a special club. And, you know, as an opinion columnist myself, I remember reading that and thinking, oh, gosh, like you don't have enough words to try to make this point, and this is like, really dangerous territory here, and he got in huge trouble for it. But I was sitting there on the grass listening to these students, and I thought, well, that's exactly what George Will was talking about, and that's kind of what's happening here. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it a club, but it is definitely the real experience I felt wasn't what had happened during this thing that they felt like an assault. The real experience was this moment where they were telling the story, and so there's like this whole other level around it. And that's what's animating a lot of this, I think well, yeah, I think it's at the extreme, it's worse than a club. I think it's a cult. And the reason why you can see that it has a cultic dimension to it is, again, the moralizing of everything that just prevents a rational conversation about details or facts, be the facts of human biology or actual history, or, you know, just being journalistically careful. And also, there's internal contradictions to it that even when you point them out, just cannot be acknowledged by otherwise intelligent people. One that came to mind reading your book is you describe this controversy or pseudo controversy that I had missed. I guess I was off Twitter enough so as to have been spared, but it's referred to as the United Airlines leggings gate. Leggings gate, yes. How did you possibly know? Maybe refresh our memories about what that was. And I'll tell you what it made me think of. Well. So this was a situation that was a United Airlines gate at the Denver airport, and there was a family traveling on employee Buddy passes, which is something that if you're related to airline personnel or you're just sort of friends with airline personnel, you can get a pass to fly either free or at a very deep discount. But there's always been a dress code for this. This is like, back in the day, used to see pilots and flight attendants, they would fly on buddy passes. They're trying to get somewhere, but they'd be wearing a suit. There used to be coat and tie, which is part of the dress code for this. It is no longer that strict, but this family was I think they had three young girls, and two of them were wearing leggings, as one does. And the gate agent was saying, well, you're not allowed to get on this plane with leggings. You got to put something on over this. And the family was all too happy to comply. They sort of improvised and found a way to put skirts on the girls or whatever. And this woman, not even in the same line she was in line for a different flight, was sort of watching this from afar and just sort of invented a whole story around this and started tweeting that the gate agent was policing the dress of young girls and sexualizing young girls by saying they couldn't wear leggings. And this thing just blew up. This woman had a lot of followers. Celebrities started tweeting about this. Oh, I wear leggings. This is disgusting. United Airlines is misogynist. On and on and on. And this, this went on for, like, a solid day, and and I guess I didn't have much to do that day because I was, like, entranced by this. And it's just such a perfect example of yelling fire in a crowded theater. And this had nothing to do with anything, but there was such glee in attaching yourself to this cause, and the incentives for doing so, if you were a public figure or you wanted to be a public figure, were so great and so outweighed any incentive for getting the story straight, that it just felt to me like it encapsulated this phenomenon perfectly. We are just disincentivized from actually looking at the facts and trying to get at something complicated, because, frankly, complication is out the window with social media. You just can't do it right. So the complicating factor here was that these were not just random passengers. These were employee buddies flying free and they had a rule in place and they were simply trying to enforce that rule. Yes, but what this made me think of is that I can say to a moral certainty that every celebrity, every woke person on Twitter who was outraged by United Airlines enforcing some standard of dress on young women, these same people are going to celebrate the hijab as a sign of female empowerment under Islam. These are the same people who will count it as a sign of bigotry against Muslims. When you complain about the patriarchal and theocratic imposition on women's freedom, that happens in the Muslim community, dress being the front lines of that. And so this is a perfect contradiction. There's no way to square these intuitions, right? And yet pointing this out will convince no one. It's like a short circuit of ethical rationality, right? So we're not in the territory of a rational conversation about human well being anymore when we're unable to simply talk about this. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, no housekeeping today. Today I'm speaking with Nina Shik. Nina is an author and broadcaster who specializes in how technology and artificial intelligence are reshaping society. She has advised global leaders in many countries, including Joe Biden, and she's a regular contributor to Bloomberg, Sky, CNN, and the BBC. Nina speaks seven languages and holds degrees from Cambridge University and University College London. And her new book is Deep Fakes, which explores the terrain we're about to discuss. We talk about the epidemic of misinformation and disinformation in our society now and the coming problem of Deep Fakes, which is, when you imagine it in detail, fairly alarming. We get into the history of Russian active measures against the west, the weaponization of the migrant crisis in Europe, russian targeting of the African American community, Trump, and the rise of political cynicism QAnon, the prospect of violence surrounding the presidential election, and other topics. Anyway, this is all scary stuff, but Nina is a great guide through this wilderness. And now I bring you Nina Shik. I am here with Nina Shik. Nina, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. Sam, we have a lot to talk about. You have a very interesting background, which I think suggests many common interests and kind of overlapping life trajectories. I don't think we're going to be able to get into that because you have produced so many urgent matters in your recent book that we need to talk about. But to get started here, what is your background and personally, but also just what you're focusing on these days that gives you an expertise on the topics we're going to talk about. Well, it's a really interesting and crazy story, one that could only happen in the 21st century. I'm half German. And I'm half Nepalese. My father was a German criminal defense lawyer who, in the 70s, decided, you know, he was going to seek spirituality and travel east and took his car, threw in a few books, and did that big journey. That a lot of young people did back in the 70s through Afghanistan, India, and then ended up in Nepal, which at this time was still this hermetic kingdom. Fell in love with it and met my mother there briefly. After a decade or so and basically my mother came from this totally different universe. She grew up in Nepal as a member of this community in a Himalayan tribe, had no running water, electricity, shoes when she was growing up. And because she met my father, they fell in love and they kind of decided to have us, my brother and myself. And I grew up in Katmandu in the then eventually I came to the UK to go to university and I went to Cambridge and UCL. And my kind of discipline is really in history and politics. I've always been fascinated by history and politics, and especially at this time when the geopolitical sense seemed to be shifting in such a dramatic way. So my career over the last ten years has really been working at the heart of Westminster as a policy analyst, a journalist and an advisor on some of the key geopolitical shifts around the European Union. So this includes the kind of what happened with Russia and the invasion of Ukraine in 2013, subsequently the EU's migrant crisis in 2015. Then obviously I was very tied into the work here in the UK around Brexit. I was helping to advise the government on that in 2016. Then of course, the election of Trump in 2016. Then I went on to advise Emmanuel Macron's campaign, which was also, interestingly, hacked by the Russians. And finally, I got to a point in 2018 where I was working with the former NATO Secretary General and He covened, a group of global leaders which included Joe Biden, and he wanted to look at how the 2020 election might be impacted by what we had seen in 2016 and how the new kind of threats were emerging. And this is really where I came to deep fakes and that is really the starting point for my book. So I have this background in geopolitics politics, information warfare, and my area of interest is really how the exponential changes in technology, and particularly in AI, are rewriting not only politics, but society at large as well. So, yeah, you are a citizen of the world. I mean, that's quite amazing. Did you grow up speaking Nepali and German? Yeah, I mean, I grew up with four languages, so Nepali, German, TAmong, because my mother is from an ethnic minority group in Nepal, which actually is closely related to Tibetans. So TAmong is a completely different language. So Nepali, German, TAmong and Hindi, because everybody in Nepal speaks Hindi, india is the big brother on the border. So that was something I wish I could give my daughter as well. I live in the UK now and most people in the UK we speak English. That's it. Yeah, all too well. I can hear. So your English betrays none of that colorful backstory. It's quite amazing. So, yeah, I know we have common interests in the kinds of things that brought your father to Nepal in the first place, and meditation and forming a philosophy of life that is aimed at deeper levels of well being than is often attained by people. But we have such a colossal mess to clean up in our society now with how our information ecosystem has been polluted and deranged, that I think we're just going to do another podcast on the happy talk of what we could share when we get past these increasingly terrifying dangers and self inflicted wounds. I mean, it's amazing to see how much of this is our own doing. And we'll talk about bad actors and people who are consciously using our technology against us to really destroy the possibility of living in an open society. But so much of this is a matter of our entertaining ourselves into a kind of collective madness and what seems like it could be a coming social collapse. I realized that if you're not in touch with these trends, if anyone in the audience who isn't this kind of language, coming from me or anyone else, can sound hyperbolic, but we're really going over some kind of precipice. Here with respect to our ability to understand what's going on in the world and to converge on a common picture of a shared reality. Because we're in the midst of an information war and it's being waged against democratic societies by adversaries like Russia and China, but it's also a civil war that's being waged by factions within our society. And there are various political cults, and then there's the president of the United States himself. All of this is happening on the back of and facilitating an utter collapse of trust in institutions and a global decline in democracy. And again, we've built the the very tools of our derangement ourselves. And in particular, I'm talking about social media here. So your book goes into this, and it's organized around this new piece of technology that we call deep fakes. And the book is deep Fakes the coming in Focalypse, which that's not your coinage on the page. It's very easy to parse when you say it. It's hard to understand what's being said there, but it's really you're talking about an information apocalypse. Just remind people what deep fakes are and suggest what's at stake here in terms of how difficult it could be to make sense of our world in the presence of this technology. Yes, absolutely. So a deep fake is a type of synthetic media. And what synthetic media essentially is, is any type of media. It can be an image, it can be a video, it can be a text that is generated by AI. And this ability of AI to generate fake or synthetic media is really, really nascent. We're only at the very, very beginning of the synthetic media revolution. It was only probably in about the last four or five years that this has been possible. And for the last two years that we've been seeing how the real world applications of this have been leaching out from beyond the AI research community. So the first thing to say about synthetic media is that it is completely going to transform how we perceive the world. Because in future, all media is going to be synthetic because it means that anybody can create content to a degree of fidelity. That is only possible for Hollywood studios right now, right? And they can do this for little to no cost, using apps or software, various interfaces which will make it so accessible to anyone. And the reason why this is so interesting, another reason why synthetic media is so interesting is until now, the best kind of computer effects, CGI, you still can't quite get humans, right? So when you use CGI to do effects where you're trying to create robotic humans, it still doesn't look like it's called Uncanny Valley. But it turns out that AI, when you train your machine learning systems with enough data, they're really, really good at generating fake humans or synthetic humans, both in images, I mean, and when it comes to generating fake human faces, so images, still images, it's already perfected that. And if you want to kind of test that, you can go and look at thisperson does not exist. Every time you refresh the page, you'll see a new human face that to the human eye, to you or me, Sam will look at that and we'll think that's authentic human, whereas that is just something that's generated by AA, that human literally doesn't exist. And also now increasingly in other types of media, like audio and film. So I could take essentially a clip of a recording with you, Sam, and I could use that to train my machine learning system. And then I can synthesize your voice so I can literally hijack your biometrics. I can take your voice, synthesize it, get my AI kind of machine learning system to recreate that. I can do the same with your digital likeness. Obviously, this is going to have tremendous commercial applications. Entire industries are going to be transformed. For example, corporate communications, advertising, the future of all movies, video games. But this is also the most potent form of myths and disinformation which you're democratizing for almost anyone in the world at a time when our information ecosystem has already become increasingly dangerous and corrupt. So the first thing I'd say about synthetic media is it is actually just heralding this tremendous revolution in the way that we communicate. The second thing I'd say is that it's coming at a time when we've had lots of changes in our information ecosystem over the past 30 years, so that society hasn't been able to keep up with, from the Internet to social media, to smartphones. And this is just the next step in that. And then the final thing this is where I come to deep fakes, is that this field is still so nascent and emerging that the taxonomy around it is completely undecided yet. And as I already kind of pointed out or touched upon, there will be legitimate use cases for synthetic media. And this is one of the reasons why this cat is out of the bag. There's no way we're putting it back in because there's so much investment in the kind of commercial use cases ever since I think there is almost 200 companies now that are working exclusively on generating synthetic media. So we have to distinguish between the legitimate use cases of synthetic media and how we draw the line. So I very broad brush in my book say that the use and intent behind synthetic media really matters and how we define it. So I refer to deep fake as when a piece of synthetic media is used as a piece of mis or disinformation. And there is so much more that you could delve into there with regards to the kind of the ethical implications on the taxonomy. But broadly speaking, that's how I define it and that's my definition between synthetic media and deep fakes. Well, so as you point out, all of this would be good, clean fun if it weren't for the fact that we know there are people intent upon spreading misinformation and disinformation and doing it with a truly sinister political purpose. I mean, not just for amusement, although that can be harmful enough. It's something that state actors and people internal to various states are going to leverage to further divide society from itself and increase political polarization. But it would it's amazing that it is so promising in the fund department that we can't possibly even contemplate putting this cat back in the bag. I mean, it's just that's the problem we're seeing on all fronts. I mean, so it is with social media, so it is with the ad revenue model that is selecting for so many of its harmful effects. We just can't break the spell wherein people want the cheapest, most fun media and they want it endlessly. And yet the harms that are accruing are so large that it's amazing just to see that there's no handhold here whereby we can resist our slide toward the precipice. Just to underscore how quickly this technology is developing. In your book, you point out what happened once Martin Scorsese released his film The Irishman, which had this exceedingly expensive and laborious process of trying to de age its principal actors, robert de Niro and Joe Pesche. And that was met with something like derision for the imperfection of what was achieved there. Again, a great cost. And then very, very quickly, someone on YouTube using free software did nearly perfect de aging of the same film. It's just amazing what's happening here. And again, these tools are going to be free, right? I mean, they're already free and ultimately the best tools will be free. Absolutely. So you already have various kind of software platforms online, so the barriers to entry have come down tremendously. Right now, if you wanted to make a convincing deep fake a video, you would still need to have some knowledge, some knowledge of machine learning, but you wouldn't have to be an AI expert by any means. But already now we have apps that allow people to do certain things like swap their faces into scenes. For example, reface. I don't know if you've come across that app, I don't know how old your children are, but if you have a teenager, you've probably come across it. You can basically put your own face into a popular scene from a film like Titanic or something. This is using the power of synthetic media. But experts who I speak to on the generation side because it's so hugely exciting to people who are generating synthetic media, think that by the end of the decade, any YouTuber, any teenager will have the ability to create special effects in film that are better than anything a Hollywood studio can do now. And that's really why I put that anecdote about the Irishman into the book because it just demonstrates the power of synthetic media. I mean, Scorsese was working on this project from 2015. He filmed with a special three rake camera. He had this best special effects artist, post production work, multimillion dollar budget, and still the effect at the end wasn't that convincing. It didn't look quite right. And now one YouTuber free software takes a clip from Scorsese's film in 2020. So Scorsese's film came out in 2019 this year. He can already create something that's far more, when you look at it, looks far more realistic than what Scorsese did. This is just in the realm of video, as I already mentioned, with images, it can already do it perfectly. There is also the case of audio. There is another YouTuber, for example, because a lot of the kind of early pieces of synthetic media have sprung up on YouTube. There is a YouTuber called Vocal Synthesis who uses an open sourced AI model to train on celebrities voices. So he can something that he's done that's gotten many, many views on YouTube is he's literally taken audio clips of dead presidents and then made them rap NWA's. Fuck the police, right? Ronald Reagan FDR. Very interesting. This is an indicator of how complex these challenges are going to be to navigate in future because another thing that he did was he took JayZ's voice and made him wrap recite Shakespeare's to be or not to be. And interestingly, Jay Z's record label filed a copyright infringement claim against him and made him kind of take it down. But this is really just a forebear of the kind of battles we're going to see when any anonymous user can take your likeness, can take your biometrics and make you say or do things that you never did. And of course, this is disastrous to any liberal democratic model because in a world where anything can be faked, everyone becomes a target. But even more than that. If anything can be faked, including evidence that we today see as an extension of our own reality, and I say evidence in quotation marks, video, film, audio, then everything can also be denied. So the very basis of what is reality starts to become corroded. Of course, reality itself remains, it's just that our perception of reality starts to become increasingly clouded. So what are we going to do about this? Again, we're going to get into all of the evidence of just how aggressively this will be used, given everything else that's been happening in our world. We'll talk about Russia and Trump and QAnon and other problems here, but many of us can dimly remember 20 years ago before COVID when the Bush audio tape dropped and Trump sort of attempted to deny that the audio was real of him on the bus. But we were not yet in the presence of such widespread use of deep fake technology that anyone was even tempted to believe him. We knew the audio was real. Now, apparently it didn't matter, given how corrupted our sense of everything had become by that point politically. But we can see the resort to claiming fakery that will be relied upon by everyone and anyone who is committed to lying, because there'll be so much of it around that really it will only be charitable to extend the benefit of the doubt to people who say, listen, that wasn't me. That's just a perfect simulacrum of my voice and even my face. But you actually can't believe your eyes and ears at this point. I would never say such a thing. In any of your conversations with experts on this topic, are any of them hopeful that we will be able to figure out how to put a watermark on digital media in such a way that we will understand its provenance and be able to get to ground truth when it matters? So I think the problem of what we do about it is so huge that ultimately we can only fight the corroding information ecosystem by building societywide resilience. But the solutions, if you want to term it that way, broadly fit into two categories. The first are the kind of technical solutions. So because synthetic media is going to become ubiquitous and we as humans will not be able to discern because of the fidelity, the quality, whether it's real or fake. So you can't rely on digital forensics in the sense that somebody goes through and clicks and looks at each media and decides, oh, are the eyes blinking correctly? Do the ears look a little bit blurred? Because these are what we do now, right? Because the generation side of synthetic media is still so nascent, so we're not going to be able to do that. Second, the sheer volume when you talk about at the scale at which you can generate synthetic media, means that humans are never going to be able to go through it or never going to be able to fact check each piece of media. So we have to rely on building the AI software to detect, for example, deep fakes. And right now there is an interest and increasingly there are certain experts and groups who are putting money into being able to detect deep fakes. However, the problem is, because of the adversarial nature of the AI and the way that it's trained, every time you build a detector that's good enough to detect the fake, the generation model can also become stronger. So you're in this never ending game of cat and mouse where you keep on having to build better detectors. And also, given the various different models and ways in which the fakes can be generated, there's never going to be a one size fits all model. There's a hypothetical question which is open still in the AI research community about whether or not the fakes can become so sophisticated. So we already know they're going to be humans. They already basically do. But is there a point where the fakes become so sophisticated that even AI and AI detector can never detect in the DNA of that fake that it's actually a piece of synthetic media? We don't know yet is the answer to that. But I will say that there is far more research going into the generation side because, like so much in terms of the information ecosystem, the architecture of the information ecosystem and the information age, it has been driven by this almost utopian flawed vision of how these technologies will be serving an unmitigated good for humanity without thinking about how they might amplify the worst sides of human intention as well. The second side and you touched upon that, is building provenance architecture into the information ecosystem. So basically embedding right into the hardware of devices, whether that's a camera, a mobile phone, the authenticity watermark to prove that that piece of media is authentic. You can track it throughout its life to show that it hasn't been tampered with or edited. And this is something that, for example, Adobe is working on, along with on its Content Authenticity Initiative. So there are technical solutions underway both inside in terms of the detection and the provenance side of the problem. However, ultimately this is a human problem to the extent that disinformation or bad information didn't just come about at the turn of the millennium. It's just that we have never seen it at this scale, we have never seen it this potent and we have never ever been able to have it as accessible as it is now. So ultimately, this is a human problem. There's no way we can deal with the challenges of our corroding information ecosystem without talking about human, quote unquote solutions. How do we prepare society for this new reality? And we are way behind. We're always reactive. Our reactions are always piecemeal. And the biggest problem is the information ecosystem has become corrupt to the extent that we can't even identify what the real risks are. Right. We're too busy fighting each other about other things without seeing what the real existential risk is here. Yeah, that is a very symptom of the problem itself. The fact that we can't even agree on the nature of the problem. There's so much disinformation in the air. It makes me think that one solution to part of the problem I don't think it captures all of it, but certainly some of the most pressing parts of it could be solved if we had lie detection technology that we could actually rely on. Just imagine we had real time lie detection and you could go to the source if some awful piece of audio emerged from me and it purported to be a part of my podcast where I said something reputation canceling, and I said, well, that's a fake. That wasn't me. The only way to resolve that would be to tell whether I'm lying or not. We're forcing ourselves into a position where it's going to be a kind of emergency not to be able to tell with real confidence whether or not somebody is lying. So I think we're going to in addition to the arms race between deep fakes and deep fake identifying AI, I think this could inspire a lie detection arms race because there's so many other reasons why we would want to be able to detect people who are lying. Having just watched the presidential and vice presidential debates in America, one could see that the utility of having a red light go off over someone's head when he or she knows that he or she is lying. But if we can't trust people, and we can't trust the evidence of our senses, when we have media of them saying and doing things convincingly delivered to us in Torrance, it's hard to see how we don't drift off into some horrifically dystopian dream world of our own confection. Absolutely. And this is really why I wrote the book. I wrote it in a way that was very accessible to anyone to pick up and zoom through an afternoon. Because I think without this conceptual framework, where we can connect everything from Russian disinformation to the increasingly partisan political divide in the United States but also around the rest of the Western world, and understanding how now with the age of synthetic media upon us. How our entire perception of the world is going to be changed in a way that is completely unprecedented. How we can be manipulated in the age of information where we had assumed that once we have access to this much information that surely progress is inevitable. But to actually understand how the information ecosystem itself has become corrupt, I think is the first step. And to be honest with you, I do tend to think that things will probably get worse before they get better. And I think the US election is a great case study of that because it's almost no matter the outcome, right? Let's say that Trump loses, and he loses by a large margin. You know, that he could still refuse to go, even if the Secret Service will come and take his bags and ask him, please, Mr. Trump, there's the door. He has this influence now where a lot of his followers genuinely believe that he is this kind of savior of America. And if he asks them to take arms and take to the streets, I mean, this is literally already happening right now, right? You have armed insurrection militia kind of patrolling the streets of the United States on both the left and the right for their political grievances. So if Biden wins, let's say Trump goes quietly and Biden wins, well, then you still haven't addressed the bigger problem of the apocalypse'where. The information ecosystem has become so corrupt and so corroded, and the synthetic media revolution is still upon us. So I'm hopeful that we still have time to address this because like I said, this technology is so nascent, we can still try to take some kind of action in terms of what's the ethical framework? How are we going to adjudicate the use of synthetic media? How can we digitally educate the public about the risks of synthetic media? But it is a ticking time bomb, and the window is short. As if to underscore your last point at the time we're speaking here, there's a headline now circulating that 13 men were just arrested, including seven members of a right wing militia plotting to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, for the purposes of inciting a civil war. One can only imagine the kind of information diet of these militia members, but this is the kind of thing that gets engineered by crazy information and pseudo facts being spread on social media. And this is the kind of thing that, when even delivered by a mainstream news channel, one now has to pause and wonder whether or not it's even true. Because there's been such a breakdown of trust in journalism and there's so many cries of fake news, both cynical and increasingly real, that it's just we're just dealing with the circumstance of such informational pollution. Let's talk about Russia's role in all of this, because Russia has a history of prosecuting what they call active measures against us. And and we really have for a long time been in the midst of an information war, which is essentially a psychological war. And Russia is increasingly expert at exploiting the divisions in our society, especially racial divisions. So maybe you can summarize some of this history. Yeah, I mean, I start my book with Russia because my career intersected a lot with what Russia was doing in Ukraine in 2014 and the kind of information war they fought around the annexation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, where they basically denied that it was happening at all. And the same with the shooting down of MH 17. This was the Malaysian aircraft that was shot down over eastern Ukraine, which now has been proven to have been by Russian military services. But at the time, they were saying this had nothing to do with them, and that this was pro Russian Ukrainian separatists who who had shot down the airliner. So what Russia did with information warfare around Ukraine, Crimea, around Europe in 2015, when Putin and Assad stepped up their bombardment of civilians in Syria, unleashing this mass migration, which basically led to the EU's migrant crisis five years ago. I don't know if you remember those images of people just arriving at the Shores and some of them were refugees, but as we now know, a lot of them were also terrorists, economic migrants. And how that almost tore europe apart and the information war that Russia fought around those events where they perpetrated these stories about, for example, girls in Germany who had been raped by supposedly raped by arriving migrants. And stories like this legitimately did happen, but this story was completely planted. So it's dividing the line, it's blurring the line between what's real and fake. But what was also very interesting for me was that I worked on, or I studied and I worked on the Russian information operations around the US election in 2016. And the first thing to say about that is, to me, we can see how corrupt the information ecosystem has become to the extent that those information operations have become a completely partisan event in America, right? Some people say that Russia is behind everything, and others deny that Russia did anything at all. And this is just nonsense for sure. The Russians intervened in the 2016 election, and they continued to intervene in US. Politics to this day. And I suppose what was very interesting to me about what Russia was doing was how this information warfare strategy, which is old and it goes all the way back to the Cold War, was becoming increasingly potent with the weapons of this modern information ecosystem. And one of those was social media. What they did in Ukraine and then Europe around the migrant crisis and then around the US election was influence operations on social media, where they actually posed, in the case of the United States, as authentic Americans. And then they over years. By the way, this wasn't just them getting involved in the weeks running up to the election. They started their influence operations in the United States in 2013. They built up these tribal communities on social media and built up, well, basically played identity politics, built up their pride in their distinct identity. And interestingly, this wasn't just Russians targeting, you know, right wing kind of Trump supporters. They did it across the political spectrum. And as a matter of fact, they disproportionately focused on the African American community. So they built these fake groups pages, communities where you imbue them with your distinct pride in your distinct identity. And then as we got closer to the election, those groups were then sporadically injected with lots of political grievances, some of them legitimate, to make these groups feel alienated from the mainstream. And again, the primary focus of their influence operations on social media was the African American community, who they were basically targeting so that they felt so disenfranchised and disconnected from Hillary America at large that they wouldn't go and vote in the election. Right? And what has happened now, four years later, is that those operations are still ongoing, but they've become far more sophisticated. So in 2016, it might have been a troll farm in St. Petersburg, but in 2021 operation, that was earlier this year, which was revealed through CNN, Twitter, Facebook, a joint investigation was that the Russian agency which is in charge of the social media operations, it's called the Internet Research Agency, IRA. They had basically outsourced their work to Ghana. They had set up what was what looked ostensibly like a legitimate human rights organization. They had hired employees in Ghana, real authentic Canadians, and then told them, you're going to have to kind of post build these groups and communities. And here is basically the same memes, the same ideas that they had used in 2016, they were basically recycling in 2020. So I start with Russia, because what is really interesting is that their strategy of information warfare is actually something called is a phenomenon where they flood the zone with a lot of information, bad information, across the political spectrum. So they're not just targeting Trump voters, for example. And this chaos, this bad information, this chaotic information, has the effect where it's called censors. They do censorship through noise. So this chaotic, bad information overload gets to the point where we can't make decisions in our own interest of protecting ourselves, our country, our community. And that very spirit of information warfare has come to characterize the entire information ecosystem. I mean, I start with Russia. I map out how their tactics are far more potent. But you cannot talk about the corrosion of the information ecosystem without recognizing that the same chaotic spirit has come to imbue our homegrown debate as well. So I actually think, you know, of course the Russians are intervening in the US. Election in 2020. What's also very interesting is that other rogue and authoritarian states around the world are looking at what Russia is doing and copying them. China is becoming more like Russia, but this is also happening at home. And arguably, the domestic disinformation, misinformation, and information disorder is far more harmful than anything that foreign actors are doing. Yeah, I want to COVID some of that ground again, because it's easy not to understand at first pass just how sinister and insidious this all is. Because the fact that we can't agree as a society that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election is one of the greatest triumphs of the Russian interference in our information ecosystem. The fact that you have people on the left over ascribing to Russian influence causality, and you have people on the right denying any interference in the first place. And the fact that each side can sleep soundly at night, convinced that the other side is totally wrong, that is itself a symptom of how polluted our information space has become. It's a kind of singularity on the landscape where everything is now falling into it, and it's happening based on the dynamics you just sketched out. Whereas if you mingle lies of any size and consequence with enough truths and half truths or background facts that suggest a plausibility to these lies, or at least you can't ever ascertain what's true, it leads to a kind of epistemological breakdown and a cynicism that is the goal of this entire enterprise. It's not merely to misinform people, which is to say, have them believe things that are false, it is to break people's commitment to being informed at all because they realize how hopeless it is. And so we all just tune out and go about our lives being manipulated to who knows what end. So some of the history which you go through in your book relates to the fact that for a long ago, long before they had any tools really to work with, certainly didn't have social media. The Russians planted the story that AIDS was essentially a bioweapon cooked up in a US lab with the purpose of performing a genocide on the black community. And they targeted the black community with this lie. And to this day, a disproportionate number of people in the black community in the US believe that AIDS was made in a lab for the purpose of wiping out black people. But the reason why that was so clever is because it has an air of plausibility to it. Given the history of the Tuskegee experiments, the syphilis experiments, where African Americans who had syphilis were studied and not given the cure even once the cure penicillin emerged, they were then studied to the end of their lives with what amounted to the ethical equivalent of the Nazi cold water experiments. Trying to see the effects of tertiary syphilis on people. It was an absolutely appalling history. And it's in the context of that history that you can make up new allegations that should seem patently insane. They're so evil, but they don't seem patently insane given the points of contact to a surrounding reality that is fact based. And so it is with the current leveraging of identity politics in the US where they create Black Lives Matter facebook groups that are fake and they can I think there was one protest in Times Square that had like 5000 or 10,000 people show up and it was completely fake. I mean, that the organizers were fake. You know, they were were Russians. There was no man on the ground who was actually a real leader of this thing. And people went to this protest never realizing that they were characters in somebody's dreamscape. Absolutely. This is why it is so dastardly. And as you pointed out, the Russians or even the Soviets going back to the Cold War very quickly identified that race relations is a sore point for the United States, and they abuse that to great effect. And the Operation Infection, the lie that you already correctly pointed out that the CIA invented the HIV virus as a way to kill African Americans, was something that in the 1980s, took about ten years to go viral. But when it did, oh boy, did it grab a hold of the imagination. To the extent that it still plays a challenge when you're trying to deal with HIV public health policy today, where you have communities, African American communities, who disproportionately believe that the HIV virus is somehow connected to a government plan to commit a genocide. And in 2016, I suppose what happened is that the strategy was the same. Right? We want to play identity politics. We want to hit the United States where it hurts. We know that race is the dividing factor. But in 2016, it became so much more powerful because Operation Infection, the HIV lie, was a single lie. Whereas in 2016 and what's happening in 2020 is numerous groups, communities, pages, where it's not only about spreading one lie, but it's actually about entrenching tribal divisions, entrenching identity politics. And in the context of what's happened in 2020, very interesting. Some of the other kind of information operations that have come out that have been exposed is unsurprisingly, given your interest. Sam and kind of the culture wars and wokeness is that a lot of kind of unemployed American journalists who had lost their job due to COVID were now working for a kind of social justice oriented, left wing news network in favor of BLM. And it turned out that actually that entire network was fabricated and the Russians were behind it. So these unwitting Americans who genuinely have good intentions are being coopted into something that is actually being run by Russian intelligence. And I suppose with our information ecosystem right now, it's so much easier to actually infiltrate public life in the United States in a way that wouldn't have been possible in the 1980s. So we don't even know what we're starting to see, the impact of these operations on society. That's not to say that the Russians created the problems with race. Of course not. But do they exploit them? Absolutely. And are other countries also other rogue and authoritarian nation states seeking to do the same? Absolutely. Russia is the best at this kind of information warfare, but other countries are learning quickly. And what's been really interesting for me to watch is, for example, how China has taken an aggressive new interest in pursuing similar disinformation campaigns in Western information spaces. This was something that they didn't do until about last year when the protest started in Hong Kong, and then obviously this year with COVID I think you say in your book that Russian television RT is the most watched news channel on YouTube. Yes, it is. So this is another example to me of how quick they were to recognize that the architecture of this new information ecosystem, right, which developed around the turn of the millennium that's characterized by the Internet. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org you./n
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+Welcome to the make and Cents podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I'm speaking with Jeff Hawkins. Jeff is the cofounder of Pneumenta, a neuroscience research company and also the founder of the Redwood Neuroscience Institute. And before that, he was one of the founders of the field of handheld computing, starting palm and handspring. He's also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and he's the author of two books. The first is on intelligence, and the second and most recent is 1000 Brains a New Theory of Intelligence. And Jeff and I talk about intelligence from a few different sides here. We start with the brain. We talk about how the cortex creates models of the world, the role of prediction in experience. We discuss the idea that thought is analogous to movement in conceptual space. But for the bulk of the conversation, we have a debate about the future of artificial intelligence, and in particular, the alignment problem and the prospect that AI could pose some kind of existential risk to us. As you'll hear, Jeff and I have very different takes on that problem. Our intuitions divide fairly sharply, and as a consequence, we have a very spirited exchange. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. I hope you enjoy it. And now I bring you Jeff Hawkins. I am here with Jeff Hawkins. Jeff, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sam. It's a pleasure. I think we met probably just once, but I feel like we met about 15 years ago at one of those Beyond Belief conferences at the Salk Institute. Does that ring a bell? You know, I was at one of the beyond Belief conferences, and I don't recall meeting you there. But it's totally possible, and I just yeah, it's possible we didn't meet, but I just I remember I think we had an exchange where, you know, one of us was in the audience and the other was I mean so I had an exchange over 50ft or whatever. Yeah. Oh, that that makes sense. Yeah, I was in the audience and I was speaking up. Yeah. Okay. And I was probably on stage defending some Kakamami conviction. Well, anyway, nice to almost meet you once again. And you have a new book, which we'll cover part of not by no means exhausting its topics of interest, but the new book is 1000 Brains, and it's a work of neuroscience and also a discussion about the the frontiers of AI. And where all this is heading, but maybe we should start with the the brain part of it and and start with the really novel and circuitous and entrepreneurial route you've taken to get into neuroscience. This is the nonstandard course to becoming a neuroscientist. Give us your brief biography here. How did you get into these topics? Well, I fell in love with brains when I just got out of college. So I studied electrical engineering in college, and right after I started my first job, until I read an article by Francis Crick about brains and how we don't understand they work. And I just became enamored. I said, oh, my God, we should understand this. This is me. I am my brain. No one seems to know how this thing is working. And I just couldn't accept that. And so I decided to dedicate my life to figuring out what's going on when I'm thinking and who we are basically as a species. And it was a difficult path. So I quit my job. I essentially applied to become a graduate student, first in MIT and AI. But then I settled that Berkeley in neuroscience. And I said, okay, we're going to spend my life figuring out how the neocortex works. And I found out very quickly that that was a very not difficult thing to do scientifically, but difficult to do from the practical aspects of science. That you couldn't get funding for that. It was considered too ambitious. It was theoretical work, and people didn't fund theoretical work. So after a couple of years as a graduate student at Berkeley, I set a different path. I said, okay, I'm going to go back to work in industry for a few years to mature, to figure out how to make institutional change, because I was up against an institutional problem, not just a scientific problem. And that turned into a series of successful businesses that I was involved with and started, including Palm and Handspring. These are some of the early handheld computing companies, and we were having a tremendous amount of success with that. But it was never my mission to stay in the handheld computing industry. I wanted to get back to neuroscience, and everybody who worked for me knew this. In fact, I told the investors, I'm only going to do this for four years. And they said, what? Yeah, that's what. But it turned out to be a lot longer than that because all the success we had. But eventually I just extracted myself from it and I said, I'm going to go, and I have so many years left in my life. So after having all that success in the mobile computing space, I started a neuroscience institute. This is at the recommendations from neuroscience friends of mine. So they helped me do that. And I ran that for three years. And now I've been running sort of a private lab, just doing pure neuroscience for the last 17 years. That's that's Pneumenta, right? That's that's pneumenta. Yeah. And and and we've made some really significant progress in our and our goals. And the book documents some of the recent really significant discoveries we've made. So am I right in thinking that you made enough money at Palm and Handspring that you could self fund your first neuroscience institute? Or is that not the case that you have to go raise money? Well, it was a bit of both. Certainly I was a major contributor. I wasn't the only one. But I didn't want the funding to be the driver of what we did and how we spent all our time. So at the institute, we had we had collaborations with both Berkeley and Stanford. We didn't get funds from them, but we did work with them on various things, and then we had but that was mostly funded by myself. Noimenta is still I'm a major contributor to it, but there are other people who've invested in mementa. We have one outside venture capitalist and several people, but I'm still a major contributor to it. I just view that as sort of a necessary thing to get onto the science and not have to worry about it. Because when I was at Berkeley, what I was told over and over again, I really came to understand this. In fact, I I went and eventually after that, when I was running the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, I went to Washington to talk about to the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Health, and also to DARPA, who were the founders of neuroscience. And everyone thought what we were doing, which is sort of big theory, large scale theories of neocortical function, that this was like the most important problem to work on, but everyone said they can't fund it for various reasons. And so over the years, I've come to appreciate it's very difficult to be a scientist doing what we do with traditional funding sources, but we don't work outside of science. We partner with labs and we go to conferences and we publish papers. We do all the regular stuff. Right? Yeah. It's amazing how much comes down to funding or lack of funding and the incentives that would dictate whether something gets funded in the first place. It's by no means a perfect system. It's a kind of intellectual market failure. Yeah, it is passing, and we could have a whole conversation about that sometimes, perhaps because I asked myself, why is it so hard, why the people can't fund this? And there's reasons for it. And it's a complex, strange thing when people were telling me, this is the most important thing anyone could be working on, and we think your approaches are great, but we can't fund that. And why is that? But I just accepted the way it was. I said, okay, this is the world I'm living in. I'm going to get one chance here. If I can't do this through working my way as a graduate student to getting a position at the university, how am I going to do it? And I said, okay, it's not what I thought, but this is what's going to be nice. Well, let's jump into the neuroscience side of it. Generally speaking, we're going to be talking about intelligence and how it's accomplished in physical systems. So let's start with a definition, however loose. What is intelligence, in your view? So I didn't know and didn't have any pre ideas about what this would be. It was a mystery to me. But we've learned what a good portion of your brain is doing, and so we started the neocortex, which is about 70% of the volume of a human brain. And I now know what that does, and so I'm going to take that as my definition for intelligence. Here what's going on in your cortex. Is it's learning a model of the world, an internal recreation of all the things in the world that you know of and how it does that key and what we've discovered. But it's this internal model. And intelligence requires having an internal model of the world in your head. It allows you to recognize where you are. It allows you to act on things. It allows you to plan and think about the future. So if I'm going to say what happens when I do this, the model tells you that. So to me, intelligence is just about having a model in your head and using that for planning and action. It's not about doing anything particular. It's about understanding the world. Yeah, that's interesting. I think most people would that's kind of an internal definition of intelligence, but I think most people would reach for an external one or a functional one that has to take in the environment something about being able to flexibly, meet your goals under a range of conditions. More flexibly than rigidly, I guess. They're rigid forms of intelligence. But when we're talking about anything like general intelligence, we're talking about something that is not merely hardwired and reflexive flexible. Yes, but if you have an internal model of the world, you had to learn it. I mean, at least from a human point of view. There's some things we have built in when we're born, but the vast majority of what you and I know, Sam, is learned. We didn't know what a computer was. When you're born, you don't know what a coffee cup is. You don't know what the building is. You don't know what doors are. You don't know what computer codes are. None of this stuff. Almost everything we interact with in the world today, in language, we don't know any particular language when we're born. We don't know mathematics. So we had to learn all these things. So if you want to say there might be an internal model that wasn't learned, well, that's pretty trivial. But I'm talking about models that are learned. And you have to interact with the world to learn it. You can't learn it without being present in the world, without having an embodiment, without moving about, touching and seeing and hearing things. So a large part of what people think about like you brought up is, okay, we are able to solve a goal, but that's what a model lets you to do. That is not what intelligence itself is. Intelligence is having this ability to solve any goal, right? Because if your model covers that part of the world, you can figure out how to manipulate that part of the world and achieve what you want. So I'll give you a little further analogy. It's a little bit like computers. When we talk about like a universal Turing machine or what a computer is, it's not defined by what the computer is applied to do. It's like a computer isn't something that solves a particular problem. A computer is something that works on a set of principles. And that's how I think about intelligence. It's a modeling system that works on a set of principles. Those principles can exist in a mouse and a dog and a cat and a human and probably birds, but don't focus on what those animals are doing. Yeah, I think it's important to point out that a model need not be a conscious model. In fact, most of our models are not conscious and might not even be, in principle, available to consciousness. Although I think at the boundary, something that you'd say is happening entirely in the dark does have a kind of or can have a kind of liminal conscious aspect. So I mean, to take the coffee cup example, this leads us into a more granular discussion of what it means to have a model of anything at the level of the cortex. But if I reach for my coffee cup and grasp it, the ordinary experience of doing that is something I'm conscious of. I'm not conscious of all of the prediction that is built into my accomplishing that and experiencing what I experience when I touch a coffee cup. And yet it's prediction that is required. Having some ongoing expectation of what's going to happen there when each finger touches the surface of a cup, that allows for me to detect any error there or to be surprised by something truly anomalous. So if I reach for a coffee cup and it turns out that it's a hologram of a coffee cup and my hand passes right through it, the element of surprise there seems predicated on some ongoing prediction processing to which the results of my behavior is being compared. So maybe you can talk about what you mean by having a model at the level of the cortex and how prediction is built into that. Yeah, my first book, which I published like 14 years ago, called On Intelligence, was just about that topic. It was about how it is the brain is making all these predictions all the time and all your sensory modalities, and you're not aware of it. And so that's sort of the foundation. And you can't make a prediction without a model. To make a prediction, you had to have some expectation. The expectation whether you're not aware of it or not, but you have an expectation, and that has to be driven from some internal representation of the world that says, hey, you're about to touch this thing. I know what it is. It's supposed to feel this way. And even if you're not aware that you're doing that, one of the key discoveries we made, and this was maybe about eight years ago, we we had to get to the bottom like, how do neurons make predictions? How do what is the physical manifestation of a prediction in the brain? And most of these predictions, as you point out, are not conscious. You're not aware of them. They're just happening. And if something if something is wrong, then your attention is drawn to it. So if you felt the coffee cup and there was a little burr on the side or a crack and you didn't know that was expected, that you would say, oh, there's a crack, what was the brain doing when it was making that prediction? And we have a theory about this, and I wrote about it in the book a bit, and it's a beautiful I think it's a beautiful theory, but it's it's it's basically most of the predictions that are going on in your brain, most of them not all of them, but most of them happen inside individual neurons. They are it is an internal to the individual neurons. Now, not a single neuron can predict something, but an ensemble of neurons do this. But it's an internal state. And we wrote a paper that came out in 2016 excuse me, 2016, which is it's called Why Do Neurons Have So Many Synapses? And what we posited in that paper, and I'm pretty sure this is correct, is that, you know, neurons have these thousands of synapses. Most of those synapses are being used for prediction. And when a neuron recognizes a pattern and says, OK, I'm supposed to be active soon. I should be becoming active soon. If everything is according to our model here, I should be coming active soon, and it goes into this internal state, the neuron itself is saying, okay, I'm expecting to become active. And you can't detect that consciously. It's internal to them. It's essentially just a depolarization or a change of the voltage of the neuron. But we showed how the network of these neurons what will happen is, if your prediction is correct, then a small subset of the neurons become active. But if the prediction is incorrect, a whole bunch of neurons become active at the same time, and then that draws your attention to the problem. So it's a fascinating problem, but most of the predictions going on your brain are not accessible outside of individual neurons. So there's no way you could be conscious about it. I guess most people are familiar with the general anatomy of a neuron where you have this spindly looking thing where there's a cell body and there's a long process, the axon leading away, which carries the action potential if that neuron fires to the synapse and communicates neurotransmitters to other neurons. But on the other side of the standard case, on the other side of the cell body, there's this really often really profuse harborization of dendrites which is kind of the mad tangle of processes which receive information from other neurons to which this neuron is connected. And it's the integration of information on that side. But before that neuron fires that change the probability of its firing, that that's the place you are locating this full set of predictive changes or the full set of changes that constitute prediction in the case of a system of neurons. Yeah, essentially for many years, people looked at those connections on the dendrites, on that bushy part called synapses. And when they activated a synapse, most of the synapses were so far from the cell body that they didn't really have much of an effect. They didn't seem like they could make anything happen. But there are thousands and thousands of them out there, but they don't seem powerful enough to make anything occur. And what was discovered, basically, over the last 20 years that there's a second type of spike. So you mentioned the one that goes down the axon, that's the action potential, but there are spikes that travel along the dendrites. And so basically what happens is the individual sections of the dendrite, like little branches of this tree, each one of them can recognize patterns on their own. They can recognize hundreds of separate patterns on these different branches, and they can cause this spike to travel along the dendrite. And that lowers changes the voltage of the cell body a little bit. And that is what we call the predictive state. The cell is like primed. It says, oh, if I fire, I'm ready to fire. And it's not actually a probability change, it's the timing. And so a cell that's in this predictive state that says, I think I should be firing now or very shortly, if it does generate the regular spike, the action potential, it does it a little bit sooner than it would have otherwise. And it's timing that is the key to making the whole circuit work. We're getting pretty down in the weeds here about air science. Yeah. I don't know if you're all your readers or your listeners will appreciate that. Yeah, no, I think it's useful though. More weeds here. One of the novel things about your argument is that it was inspired by some much earlier theorizing. You mark your debt to Vernon Mount Castle, but the idea is that there's a common algorithm operating more or less everywhere at the level of the cortex. That is, more or less, the cortex is doing essentially the same thing, whether it's producing language or vision or any other sensory channel or motor behavior. So talk about the general principle that you spend a lot of time on in the book of just the organization of the neocortex into cortical columns and the implications this has for how we view what the brain is doing in terms of sensory and motor learning and all of its consequences. Vernon Mountcastle made this proposal back in the it's just a dramatic idea, and it's an incredible idea and so incredible that some people just refuse to believe it, but other people really think it's a tremendous discovery. But what he noticed was if you look at the neocortex, if you could take one out of your head or out of a human's head, it's like a sheet. It's about two and a half millimeters thick. It is about the size of a large dinner napkin, or 1500 if you could fold it, lay it flat. And the different parts of it that do different things, there's parts to do vision, there's parts to do language and parts to do hearing and so on. But if you cut into it and you look at the structure in any one of these areas, it's very complicated. There are dozens of different cell types, but they're very prototypically connected, and they're arranged in certain patterns and layers and different types of things. So it's a very complex structure, but it's almost the same everywhere. It's not the same everywhere, but almost the same everywhere. And so this is not just true in a human neocortex, but if you look at a rats near cortex or a dogs near cortex, or a cat or a monkey, the same basic structure is there. And what Vernon Malcolm said is that all the parts of the New York cortex are actually we think of them as doing different things, but they're actually all doing some fundamental algorithm which is the same. So hearing and touch and vision are really the same thing. He says if you took part of the cortex and you hook it up to your eyes, you'll get vision. If you hook it up to your ears, you'll get hearing. If you hook it up to other parts, to New York cortex or get language. And so he spent many years giving the evidence for this. He proposed further that this algorithm was contained in what's called a column. And so if you would take a small area of this New York cortex, remember, it's like two and a half millimeters thick. We take a very sort of skinny little 1 mm column out of it that that is the processing element. And so our human near cortex, we have about 150,000 of these columns. Other animals have more or less. People should picture something resembling a grain of rice in terms of scale here? Yeah, yeah. I sometimes say, take a piece of skinny spaghetti like, you know, angel have pasta or something like that, cut into two little two and a half millimeter lengths and stack them side by side. Now, the funny thing about columns is you can't see them. They're not visual things. You can't look under microscope, you won't see it. But he pointed out why they're there. It has to do with how they're connected. So all the cells in one of these little millimeter pieces of rice, or spaghetti, if you will, are all processing the same thing, and the next piece of rice over processing something different. And the next piece of rice over processing something different. And so he didn't know what was going on in the Cortical column. He articulated the architecture. He talked about the evidence that this exists. He said, here's the evidence why these things are all doing the same thing. But he didn't know what it was. And it's kind of hard to imagine what it is that this algorithm could be doing. But that was essentially the core of our research. That's what we've been focused on for close to 20 years. So it's also hard to imagine the micro anatomy here, because in each one of these little columns, there's something like 150,000 neurons on average. And if you could just unravel all of the connections there, the tiny filaments of nerve endings, what you would have there is on the order of kilometers in length, all wound up into that tiny structure. So it's a strange juxtaposition of simplicity and complexity, but there's certainly a mad tangle of processes in there. Yeah, this is why brains are so hard to study. If you look at another organ in the body, whether it's the heart or the liver or something like that, and you take a little section of it, it's pretty uniform, you know what I'm saying? But here you take a teeny, teeny piece of the cortex. It's got this incredible complexity in it, which is not random. It's very specific. It's hard to get wrapping your heads around how complex it is. But we need it to be complex, because what we do as humans is extremely complex. And we shouldn't be fooled that we're just a bunch of neurons that are doing some mass action. No, there's a very complex processing going on in your brain that it's not just a blob of neurons that are pulsating very detailed mechanisms that are undergoing it. And we figured out what some of those are. So describe to me what you mean by this phrase, a reference frame. What does that mean at the level of the cortex and Cortical columns? We're jumping to the end point, because that's not where we started. We were trying to figure out how Cortical columns work, and what we realized is that they're little modeling engines. Each one of these Cortical columns is able to build a model of its input. And that model is what we would call a sensory motor model that is getting input. Let's assume it's getting input from your finger, right? A tip of your finger, one of the columns is getting input from the tip of your finger. And as your finger moves and touches something, the input changes. But it's not just efficient on how the input changes for you to build a model of the object you're touching. And I use the coffee cup example quite a bit because that's how we did it. If you move your finger over the coffee cup and you're not even looking at the coffee cup, you could learn a model of the coffee cup. You could feel it just with one finger. You could feel like, oh, this is what its shape is. But to do that, that cortical column, your brain as a whole, but that cortical column individually has to know something about where your finger is relative to the cup. It's not just a changing pattern that's coming in, it has to know how your finger is moving and where your finger is as it touches it. So the idea of a reference frame is a way of noting a location. You have to have a location signal, you have to have some knowledge about where things are in the world relative to other things. In this case, where is your finger relative to the object you're trying to touch? The coffee cup. And we realize that for you to your brain and make a prediction of what you're going to feel when you touch the edge of the cup. And again, you mentioned earlier you're not conscious of this, you'd reach the cup, but your brain is predicting what all your fingers are going to feel. It needs to know where the finger is going to be and it has to know what the object is. It's a cup. It needs to know where it's going to be. And that requires a reference frame. A reference frame is just a way of noting a location. It's saying relative to this cup, your finger is over here, not over there, not on the handle, up at the top, whatever it is. And this is a deduced property. We can say for certainty that this has to exist. If your finger is going to make a prediction when it reaches and touches the coffee cup, it needs to know where the finger is. That location has to be relative to the cup. So we can just say for certainty that there needs to be reference frames in the brain. And this is not a controversial idea. What we perhaps this novel is that we realize that these reference fames exist in every cortical column and it's the structure of knowledge. It applies to not just what your finger feels on a coffee cup and what you see when you look at it, but also how you arrange. All your knowledge in the world is stored in these reference frames. And so just we're jumping ahead here many steps. But when we think and when we posit, when we try to reason in our head, even my language right now, the neurons are walking through locations and reference frames, recalling the information stored there, and that's what comes into your head, or that's what you say. So it becomes the core reference. The reference name becomes the core structure for the entire everything you do, it's knowledge about the world is in these reference frames. You make a strong claim about the primacy of motion, right? Because everyone knows that there's part of the cortex devoted to motor action. We refer to it as the motor cortex and distinguish it from sensory cortex in that way. But it's also true that other regions of the cortex and perhaps every region of the cortex does have some connection to lower structures that can affect motion, right? So it's not that it's just motor cortex that's in the motion game. And by analogy or by direct implication, you think of thought as itself being a kind of movement in conceptual space. So there's a mapping of the sensory world that can really only be accomplished by acting on it and therefore moving, right? So the only way to map the cup is to touch it with your fingers. In the end, there is an analogous kind of motion in conceptual space. And even abstract ideas like I think some of the examples you give in the book are like, democracy, right, or money or how we understand these things. So let's go back to the first thing you said there. The idea that there's motor cortex and sensory cortex is sort of no longer considered, right? As you mentioned, the neurons that in these cortical columns, there are certain neurons that are the motor output neurons. These are in a particular layer five, as they're called. And so in the motor cortex, they were really big, and they project to the spinal cord and say, oh, that's how you move your fingers. But if you look at the neurons, the columns in the visual cortex, the parts that get input from the eyes, they have the same layer five cells. And these cells project to a part of the brain called the superior calculus, which is what controls eye motion. So this goes against the original idea of, oh, there's sensory cortex and motor cortex. No one believes that. Well, I don't. Nobody, but very few people believe that anymore. It's as far as we know, every part of the cortex has a motor output. And so every part of the cortex is getting some sort of input, and it has some motor output. And so the basic algorithmic cortex is a sensory motor system. It's not divided. It's not like we have sensory areas and motor areas. As far as we know, it's been seen there's these motor cells everywhere. So we can put that aside. Now, I can very clearly walk you through, in some sense, prove from logic that when you're learning what a coffee cup feels like and I could even do this for vision, that you have to have this idea of a reference frame, that you have to know where your finger is relative to the cup. And that's how you build a model of it. And so we can build out this cortical column that explains how it does that. How does your parts of your cortex, representing your fingers, are able to learn the structure of a coffee cup? Now, Mountcastle go back to him. He said, look, it's the same algorithm everywhere. And he says, it looks the same everywhere. So it's the same algorithm everywhere. So that's just sort of say, well, if I'm thinking about something that doesn't seem like a sensory motor system, like I'm not touching something or looking, I'm just thinking about something, that if Mountcastle was right, then the same basic algorithm would be applying there. So that was one constraint like, well, and the evidence is that Mountcast was right. The physical evidence suggests he's right. It just seems a little bit odd to think like, well, how is language like this and how is mathematics like touching a coffee cup? But then we realize it that reference frames are a way of storing everything. And in the way we move through a reference frame, it's like, how do you move from one location? How do the neurons activate one location after another location after another location? We do that to this idea of movement. So I'm moving if I want to access the locations on a coffee cup, I move my finger. But the same concept could apply to mathematics or to politics, but you're not actually physically moving something, but you're still walking through a structure. A good bridge example is if I say to you, imagine your house and I ask you to walk, you know, tell me about your house. What you'll do is you'll mentally imagine walking through your house. It won't be random. You just won't have random thoughts come to your head, but you will mentally imagine walking through your house. And as you walk through your house, you'll recall what is supposed to be seen in different directions. You can say, oh, I'll walk in the front door, and I'll look to the right, what do I see? I look to the left, what do I see? See, this is sort of an example. You could relate it to something physically you could move to, but that's pretty much what's going on when you're thinking about anything. If you're thinking about your podcast and how you get more subscribers, you have a model of that in your head, and you are trying it out, thinking about different aspects by literally invoking these different locations and reference frames. And so that's sort of the core of all knowledge. Yeah, it's interesting. Just back to mount castle for a second. One piece of evidence in favor of this view of a common cortical algorithm is the fact that adjacent areas of cortex can be appropriated by various functions. If you lose your vision, say classical visual cortex can be appropriated by other senses, and there's this plasticity that can ignore some of the previous boundaries between separate senses in the cortex. Yeah, that's right. There's this tremendous plasticity, and you can also recover from various sorts of trauma and so on. I mean, there's some rewiring has to occur, but it does show that whatever the circuitry in the visual cortex was, quote, if you were a sighted person, what it would do if you're not a sighted person, well, it'll just do something else. That is a very strong argument for that. There's a famous scientist, bakarita, who did an experiment where he tried to remember the animal he used, maybe even recall it, but anyway, it'll come to me a ferret. I think it was a ferret before the animal was born. He took the optic nerve and ran it over to one part of a different part of the neocortex to constrict the auditory nerve and ran it to a different part of the neocortex. Yeah, basically rewired the animal. I'm not sure we do these experiments today, and the argument was that the animals still saw and still heard and so on, maybe not as well as an unaltered one, but the evidence was that, yeah, that really works. So what is genetically determined and what is learned here? It seems that the genetics at minimum are determining what is hooked up to what initially right, barn yeah, that was roughly roughly that's right. I think. Where do the eyes, the optic nerve from the eyes, where do they project? And where do the regions that get the input from the eyes, where do they project? So this rough sort of overall architecture is specified, and as we just talked through trauma and other reasons, sometimes that architecture can get rewired. I think also the basic algorithm that goes on in each of these cortical columns, the circuitry inside the neocortex is pretty well determined by genetics. And in fact, what one of my own castle's arguments was that humans, the human neocortex got large, and we have a very large one relative to our body size. Just because all evolution had to do was discover just make more copies of these columns. You don't have to do anything new, just make more copies, and that's something easy for genes to specify. So human brains got large quickly in evolutionary time by that just replicate more of it type of thing. Okay, so let's go beyond the human now and talk about artificial intelligence. And before we talk about the risks or the imagined risks, tell me what you think the path looks like going forward. What are we doing now, and what do you think we need to do to have our dreams of true artificial general intelligence realized? Well, today's AI as powerful as it is and successful as it is, I think most senior AI practitioners will admit, and many of them have, that they don't really think they're intelligent. They're really wonderful pattern classifiers and they can do all kinds of clever things. But there are very few practitioners who would say, hey, this AI system that's recognizing faces is really intelligent. There's sort of a lack of understanding what intelligence is and how to go forward and how do you make a system that could solve general problems, could do more than one thing, right? And so in the second part of my book, I lay out what I believe are the requirements to do that. And my approach has always been for 40 years has been like, well, I think we need to first figure out what brains do and how they do them and then we'll know how to build intelligent machines because we just don't seem able to intuit what an intelligent machine is. So I think the way I look at this problem, if we want to make what's the recipe for making an intelligent machine is, you have to say what are the principles by which the brain works that we need to replicate and which principles don't we need to replicate? And so I made a list of these in the book. But you can think of a very high level. They have to have some sort of embodiment. They have to have the ability to move their sensors somehow in the world. You can't really learn how to use tools and how to run factories and how to do things unless you can move in the world. And it requires these reference frames I was talking about because movement requires reference frames. But that's not a controversial statement, it's just a fact. You're going to have to have know where things are in the world. And then the final, there's a set of things, but one of the other big ones, which we haven't talked about yet, which is where the title of the book comes from, 1000 Brains. Is that the way to think about our near cortex? It has 150,000 of these columns. We have essentially 150,000 separate modeling systems going on in our brain and they work together by voting. And so that concept of a distributed intelligent system is important. We're not just one thing. It feels like we're one thing, but we're really 150,000 of these things and we're only conscious of being one thing. But that's not really what's happening under the covers. So those are some of the key ideas. I would just stick to very, very high ideas. It has to have an embodiment, it has to be able to move its sensors, has to be able to organize information and reference frames and it has to be distributed. And that's how we can do multiple sensors and sensory integration, things like that. I guess I question the criteria of embodiment and movement. Right. I understand that practically speaking, that's how useful intelligence can get trained up in our world to do things physically in our world. But it seems like you've could have a perfectly intelligent system. I-E-A mind that is turned loose on simulated worlds and are capable of solving problems that don't require effectors of any kind. Chess is obviously a very low level analogy, but just imagine 1000 things like chess that represent real theory building or cognition in a box. Yeah, I think you're right when I use the word movement or embodiment and I'm careful to define it in the book because it doesn't have to be physical. Example I gave you can imagine an intelligent agent that lives in the Internet and movement is following links. It's not a physical thing, but there's still this conceptual mathematical idea of what it means to move. And so you're changing the location of some representation and that could be virtual. It doesn't have to have a physical embodiment. But in the end you can't learn about the world just by looking at a set of pictures. That's not going to happen. You can learn to classify pictures. Some AI systems will have to be physically embodied like a robotic, I guess if you want. Many will not be many will be virtual. But they all have this internal process, which I could point to the thing that says, here's where the reference frame is, here's where your current location is. Here's how it's moving to a new location based on some movement vector, like a verb and a word. You can think of that as like an action. And so you can have an action that's not physical, but it's still an action and it moves to a new location in this internal representation. Right. Okay. Well, let's talk about risk because this is the place where I think you and I have very different intuitions. As far as I can tell from your book, you seem very sanguine about AI risk. And really you seem to think that the only real risk, the serious risk of things going very badly for us is that bad people will do bad things with much more powerful tools. So the Heuristic here would be, you know, don't give your superintelligent AI to the next Hitler because that would be bad. But other than that, the generic problem of self replication, which you talk about briefly and you point out we face that on other fronts. Like with the pandemic where we've been dealing with so natural viruses and bacteria or computer viruses. I mean, there's anything that can selfreplicate can be dangerous. But that aside, you seem quite confident that AI will not get away from us. There won't be an intelligence explosion and we don't have to worry too much about the so called alignment problem at one point, you even question whether it makes sense to expect that will produce something that can be appropriately called superhuman intelligence. So perhaps you can explain the basis for your optimism here. So I think what most people, and perhaps yourself have fears about is they use humans as an example of how things can go wrong. And so we think about the alignment problem or we think about motivations of an AI system. Well, okay, does the AI system have motivations or not? Does it have a desire to do anything? Now, as a human, an animal, we all have desires. But if you take apart what parts of the human brain are doing different parts, there's some parts that are just building this model of the world and this is the core of our intelligence. This is what it means to be intelligent. That part itself is benign. It has no motivations on its own. It doesn't desire to do anything. I use an example of a map. You know, a map is a model of the world. And you can my map can be very powerful tool for some to do good or to do bad. But on its own, the map doesn't do anything. So if you think about the neocortex, on its own, it sits on top of the rest of your brain. And the rest of your brain is really what makes us motivated. It gets us we have our good sides and our bad sides, our desire to maintain our life and have sex and aggression and all this stuff. Then your question is just sitting there as like a map. It says, I understand the world and you can use me as you want. So when we build intelligent machines, we have the option and I think almost the imperative not to build the old parts of the brain too. Why do that? We just have this thing which is inherently smart, but on its own doesn't really want to do anything. There's some of the risks that come about from people's fears about the alignment problem specifically is that the intelligent agent will decide on its own or decide for some reason to do things that are in its best interest and not in our best interest. Or maybe it'll listen to us, but then not listen to us or something like this. I just don't see how that can physically happen. Most people don't understand this separation. They just assume that this intelligence is wrapped up in all the things that make us human. The intelligence explosion problem is a separate issue. I'm not sure which one of those you're more worried about. Yeah, let's deal with the alignment issue first. I do think that's more critical. But let me see if I can capture what troubles me about this picture you painted here. It seems that you're to my mind, you're you're being strangely anthropomorphic on one side, but not anthropomorphic enough on the other. You think that to understand intelligence and actually truly implement it in machines. We really have to be focused on ourselves first, and we have to understand how the human brain works and then emulate those principles pretty directly in machines. That strikes me as possibly true, but possibly not true. And if I had to bet, I think I would probably bet against it. Although even here, you seem to be not taking full account of what the human brain is doing. We can't partition reason and emotion as clearly as we thought we could hundreds of years ago. And in fact, you know, certain emotions, you know, certain drives are built into our being able to reason effectively. I think that's, you know, I'll take exception to that. I know. I know this is an opinion that you had Lisa Barrett on your program recently. Antonio Damasiou is the person who's banged on about this the most. I know, and I just disagree. You can separate these two. I can say this because I understand, actually what's going on in the New York cortex. And I can see what I have a very good sense of what these actual neurons are actually doing when it's modeling the world and so on, and it does not require this emotional component a human does. Now, on one hand, I don't argue we should replicate the brain. I say we should replicate the structures of the neocortex, which is not replicating the brain. It's just one part of the brain. And so I'm specifically saying I don't really care too much about how the spinal cord works or how the brain stem does this or that. It's interesting. Maybe I know a little bit about it, but that's not important. The cortex sits on top of an other structure, and the cortex does its own thing. And they interact. Of course they interact. And our emotions affect what we learn and what we don't learn. But it doesn't have to be that way in a system, another system that we build. That's the way humans are structured. Yeah, okay, so I would agree with that, except the boundary between what is an emotion or a drive or a motivation or a goal and what is a value neutral mapping of reality, I think that boundary is perhaps harder to specify than you think it is and that certain of these things are connected. Right. Which is to I mean, here's an example. This is probably not a perfect analogy, but this gets at some of the surprising features of cognition that may await us. So we think intuitively that understanding a proposition is cognitively quite distinct from believing it. Right? So I can give you a statement that you can believe or disbelieve or be uncertain about. And I can say, you know, there's two plus two equals four, two plus two equals five. And I can give you some gigantic number and say this number is prime. And presumably, in the first condition, you'll say, yes, I believe that. In the second, you'll say, no, that's false, and in the third, you won't know whether or not it's prime or not. So those are distinct states that we can intuitively differentiate. But there's also evidence to suggest that merely comprehending a statement, if I give you a statement and you parse it successfully, the parsing itself contains an actual default acceptance of it as true and rejecting it as false is a separate operation. Added to that, there's not a ton of evidence for this, but there's certainly some behavioral evidence. So if I put you in a paradigm where we gave you statements that were true and false, and all you had to do was judge them true and false, and they were all matched for complexity. So two plus two equals four is no more or less complex than two plus two equals five. But it'll take you longer, systematically longer to judge very simple statements to be false than to judge them to be true, suggesting that you're doing a further operation. Now, we can remain agnostic as to whether or not that's actually true. But if true, it's counterintuitive that merely understanding something entails some credence, giving epistemic credence given to it by default, and that to reject it as false represents a subsequent act. But that's the kind of thing that already we're on territory that is not coldly rational. Some of the Balti apish appetites have kind of crept into cognition here in ways that we didn't really budget for. And so the question is just how much of that is avoidable in building a new type of mind? Well, I'm not familiar with that specific research, and so I haven't heard of that. But to me, none of these things are surprising in any way. If you start thinking about the brain is basically trying to build models. It's constantly trying to build models. In fact, as you walk around your life day to day, moment to moment, and you see things, you're building the model. The model is being constructed even like, where are things in the refrigerator right now? Your brain will update you open the refrigerator. Oh, the milk is on the left today, whatever. And so if someone gives you a proposition like two plus two equals five, I don't know what the evidence that you believe it and then falsify it, but I certainly imagine you can imagine it trying to see if it's right. It'd be like me saying to you, say, the milk is on the right in your refrigerator, and you'd have to think about it for a second. You say, well, let me think. Okay, open. No, last time I saw it was on the left. No, that's wrong. But you would walk through the process of trying to imagine it and trying to see, does that fit my model? And yes or no. And it's not surprising to me that you would have to process it the way as if it was true. It's just a matter of saying, can you imagine this? Go imagine it. And do you think it's right? It's not like I believed it. Now I've falsified it. Actually, I'll just give you one other datum here because it's just intellectually interesting and socially all too consequential. This effect goes by several names, I think, but one is the illusory truth effect, which is even in the act of disconfirming something to be false, some specious rumor or a conspiracy theory, merely having to invoke it. I mean, to have people entertain the concept again, even in the context of debunking, it ramifies a belief in it. In many, many people, it's just oh, yeah, it becomes harder to discredit things because you have to talk about them in the first place. Yeah. Look, we're talking about language here, right? And in language, so much of what we humans know is via language, and we have no idea if it's true when someone says something to you, right. How do you know? And so, I mean, I gave an example, like, I've never been to the city of Havana. Well, I believe it's there. I believe it's true. But I don't know. I've never been there. I've never actually touched it or smelled it or saw it. So maybe it's false. This is one of the issues we have. I have a whole chapter on false beliefs because so much of our knowledge of the world is built up on language. And the default assumption under language that if someone says something, it's true. It's like it's a pattern in the world. You're going to accept it. If I touch a coffee cup, I accept that that's what it feels like, and if I look at something, I accept that's what it looks like. Well, someone says something, my initial acceptance is, okay, that's what it is. And then they said that. Well, someone says something that's false, of course. Well, that's a problem because just by the fact that I've experienced it, it's now part of my world model. And if that's what you're referring to, I can see this is really a problem of language we face. This is the root cause of almost all of our false beliefs, is that someone just says something enough times and that's good enough, and you have to seek out, contrary to evidence for it. Yeah. Sometimes it's good enough even when you're the one saying it, you just overhear the voice of your own mind, saying it's been proven that everyone is susceptible to that kind of distortion of our beliefs or especially our memories. Just remembering something over and over again changes it. Yeah. Okay. So let's get back to AI risk here, because here's where I think you and I have very different intuitions, the intuition that many of us have. The people who have informed my views here, people like Stuart Russell, who you probably know at Berkeley yeah. And nick Bostrom and Elliott Yudkowski and just lots of people in this spot worrying about the same thing to one another degree. The intuition is that you don't get a second chance to create a truly autonomous superintelligence, right? Like it seems that in principle this is the kind of thing you have to get right on the first try, right? And having to get anything right on the first try just seems extraordinarily dangerous because we rarely have ever do that when doing something complicated. Another way of putting this is that it seems like in the space of all possible superintelligent minds, there are more ways to build one that isn't perfectly aligned with our long term wellbeing than there are ways to build one that is perfectly aligned with our long term wellbeing. And from my point of view, what your optimism and the optimism of many other people who take your side of this debate is based on is not really taking the prospect of intelligence seriously enough and the autonomy that is intrinsic to it. If we actually built a true general intelligence, what that means is that we would suddenly find ourselves in relationship to something that we actually can't perfectly understand. It's like it will be analogous to a strange person walking into the room you're in relationship and if this person can think a thousand times or a million times faster than you can and has goals that are less than perfectly aligned with your own, that's going to be a problem. Eventually we can't find ourselves in a state of perpetual negotiation with systems that are more competent and powerful and intelligent. I think there's two mistakes in your argument. The first one is you say monumentuition and your intuition. I think most of the people who have this fear have an intuition about what I'm basing my argument here. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now at Samharris at work./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. So this is my event with Sean Carroll, the physicist from Caltech that we recorded in Portland. And as you might expect, we range over many topics, both of scientific interest and topics about which we disagree and people seem to like. It in the room, and I hope you like it wherever you are. And now, without further delay, I bring you Sean Carroll. So I'm going to jump right into this because we have a great guest. My guest tonight is a theoretical physicist from Caltech. He has a PhD from Harvard. He has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics for some time. He's focused on the emergence of complexity and the arrow of time. He's been awarded prizes of many sorts from NASA and the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, many other societies. He is also a consultant for film and television. And he has written a fascinating book, which unfortunately is not for sale here, but I highly recommend you get it. It's called the big picture on the origins of life meaning and the universe itself. Please welcome Sean Carroll. Thank you for coming. Well, Sean, thanks for doing this. Thanks for coming out. Can I just say these are the most comfortable seats I've ever sat in on a stage. Like, every time I see pictures of you at the podcast, you have these wonderful overstuffed. Do you have a hook up or something? Strangely, I have very little control over what chairs actually arrived very well. They're great, but it seems to work out, at least in this universe, some other universe where we're both being tortured. I don't know if you've been following along low these many years, but Sean and I have had a slightly prickly relationship online and we've had disagreements in the past that I really would like to work through here. So this is more than the usual podcast. This is an experiment in conversation. And there's so much we agree about. There's so much we agree about in terms of just the importance of getting our hands around a realistic picture of what's going on in the world and using science as the basis for that conversation. But there are places where I think we have probably been talking past one another. And so I want us to sneak up on our differences and I want to use your book as the template for that. Again, your book is a fascinating look at, as advertised, the big picture. Let's start with this notion of what you call poetic naturalism. How do you frame your worldview? Sure. So poetic naturalism, there's two words. Naturalism is just the idea that there's only one world, the natural world, the world that we learn about by doing science, the world that obeys rules and does its thing. So in other words, it's kind of defined in opposition to whatever might be not naturalism. If you believe that there were extra spirits or realm of divinity or anything like that, that would not be naturalism. So naturalism is close to atheism in a sense. But rather than just saying there is something you could imagine called God and that God doesn't exist, it's a positive statement about what does exist the natural world that we can study using science. And then the poetic is the idea that there are many ways of talking about that natural world. Which both means that there are different scientific ways we can analyze it at the most comprehensive fundamental level of particle physics and general relativity and so forth. There are more emergent levels that are still nevertheless scientific and descriptive biology all the way up to sociology or psychology. And then there are levels where we might actually get more poetic which involve aesthetics or judgments or values, where I would argue the descriptions are not fixed by the facts of the universe themselves. I think the difference between us, if there is one in the end is in what we will ascribe to the poetic side of that dichotomy. Right. It's either naturalist or not to talk about values and meaning and the good life. And again, let's creep up on that. So you certainly are a fan of the concept of the unity of knowledge. You don't think that there's a disjunction between levels. So if we're talking about physics, everything above that as an emergent property is beholden to that as it's micro constituents. And it doesn't make sense to talk about cocktail parties and stock markets in terms of atoms merely. But at some level reductionism runs through yes. I mean, certainly at the level of scientific description of what happens in the universe. The big thing I try to push in the book is that there are these higher levels of emergent descriptions but they better be compatible with the lower levels. And in particular, I'm not a fan of what even some of my scientific colleagues call downward causation the idea that somehow the shape of a macroscopic thing or the purpose of a macroscopic thing can feed back and change the behavior at the microscopic level in a way that you wouldn't have known about if you were just doing the microscopic level. I think that it really is reductionistic in that sense. In principle, we can build up now in practice, when we do biology or chemistry or psychology, there is a non reductionist element in the sense that as a practical matter, the way to learn new things about biology is not to think about particle physics. Right? We can discover regularities at the higher levels that are we don't need to know about what's going on at the lower levels to discover them, but they still better be compatible with them. Right. So let's revisit that notion of downward causation because it has never made sense to me either. So the idea is that you have immersion properties like minds and consciousness, or just the macro level, as you say, shape of objects, right? So you have collections of atoms that at some higher level have even temperatures in emergent property. One atom doesn't have a temperature, but you get collections together and then their motion is described as temperature. But this notion that a higher level phenomenon can then, by virtue of its existing at the higher level, come down and have causal properties with respect to the lower level. How is it that people are endorsing that idea? Because what we have scientists who are talking in those terms, you've come to the wrong place because it's one of those ideas I've tried to understand, is a lot of smart people who believe this is a very important part of how we describe nature. I've never even been able to understand what they're saying, really. I think well enough. You would like to understand something well enough to be able to give a good defense of it yourself before you said it was wrong, which I don't think I can do. But the example on the level of basic physics that is sometimes given is the formation of snowflakes. Snowflakes have this six fold symmetry and they're all different and they have this beautiful pattern. And people say at some level it's water molecules sticking together. But to understand what any one individual water molecule is doing, you need to understand the whole shape of the snowflake. But if that's the example, it's just manifestly wrong. Like, if you really knew what every water molecule was doing, that's all you would need to know. There's the famous thought experiment of Laplace's demon. Fierce. Ammon LaPlace, back in circuit of the year 1800, said if there were a vast intelligence that knew literally everything about the universe, the position, the velocity of every particle of matter in the cosmos, and knew all laws of physics and had infinite computing power, that intelligence could predict the past and retrodict the future and retrodict the past with perfect accuracy. So that's what we're imagining when we pretend to be fundamental physicists. If we were Laplace's demon, would you need to know that the water molecule was part of a snowflake? I would say no. But of course, the hidden agenda there is they want to use it to talk about consciousness, right? They want to say that somehow the fact that we are conscious changes how even our cells or atoms behave in a way that we wouldn't have guessed from reductionistic principles, and I just don't agree with that. Yeah, well, the problem there is, and this is a genuine mystery as to why consciousness would have evolved if it's an evolved property of creatures like ourselves, is that if consciousness is just arising by virtue of some micro, constituent phenomenon. So you have some level of information processing in our case? Neurophysiology if it is effective, if consciousness is doing something, if there are certain mental operations that can't be done, but for the fact that there's something that it's like to be doing those things. It still must be effective by virtue of its micro level properties at the level of the brain. It is neurons affecting neurons and their future states. Otherwise, you're talking about some magical influence. Well, that's right. And so there's a tension here, right? There's a tension between on the part of many people. There's a reluctance to think that what it is like to be something. The hard problem of consciousness can be explained simply as an emergent phenomena on the basis of what our atoms and molecules are doing. But at the same time, there are subsets of these people who are very much in favor of science and know that the atoms and molecules are doing something, and they have their own laws of physics. So they're forced ultimately to pan psychism to the idea that there is not just a physical property of every particle of matter in the universe, but there are mental properties as well. And the mental properties aren't very efficacious in doing anything when it's just an atom or two. But when it comes together to make a whole person, then the mental properties come together to give us consciousness. Just saying it out loud makes me think, how could anyone ever believe that? But it is a surprisingly popular position in some circles. I'm probably not doing it justice. Well, but it's also hard to see how the universe would be different if that were so. I wouldn't expect this comfy chair to behave differently than it's behaving if there was something that it was like to be an electron, say, if electrons buzz on the interior dimension of subjectivity, it's not like they're thinking thoughts or forming behavioral plans or feeling themselves to be in relationship. Yeah. I mean, to be as fair as I can, it's not very conscious, the chair. It's just a little bit conscious that's even an electron, David Chalmers will say, is maybe a little bit conscious. Right. And it gets into I don't know how much you want to discuss it, but then, of course, there's the famous philosophical zombie thought experiment. Can you imagine something that acts like a person but has no inner sensations, does not know what it is like to be a person, but act exactly like a person would act? And to me, the answer is no. That's not even conceivable because if you asked a zombie, what are you feeling right now? It would say it's feeling something, because otherwise it would be acting differently. Right. So why is the zombie lying to you all the time about feeling something inside? How do you know you're not a zombie yourself? Yeah, so I actually just don't think that's possible. And I think that ultimately, the attempts to wriggle around, basing reality in stuff, obeying the laws of physics don't quite hold together. Yeah, well, I think you and I are on the same page as far as consciousness still being fundamentally mysterious. And it depends on how you're lading the word mysterious thing. We don't know at what level it arises in the physics of things. Sure. My message throughout the book and more broadly is the subtitle of my book is on the nature of life meaning and the universe itself. And even though we're not selling the books here, you can still buy them on Amazon from your phone right now. But if you do, you will not learn the origin of life, the origin of the universe, or the meaning of life. The point is that I argue that we can talk about these things in the framework given to us by naturalism. I don't give you the answers. The answers are still things that we're looking for. That's how science works. I think they will someday be found, and I think there will ultimately be a naturalistic physicalistic grounding for whatever it is we find them. In other words, there's no reason, on the basis of what we currently know about the universe, to put large credence in the idea that there's something beyond the physical world. How do you think about possibility as a physicist? So we live in a world where certain things happen and certain things which we can imagine happening, which seem compatible with the way things might have happened, don't seem to happen. If your answer to this is some many worlds version of QM, yes, I'm interested in that. But how do you map this claim that something might have happened but didn't happen onto naturalism as a physicist? Well, I think that there's yeah, there's two levels to that, as it were. We could go into, again, at whatever level of detail you want to the many worlds version of quantum mechanics, which is the one that I think is probably right, we don't know for sure. And in that version, when you specifically have a quantum mechanical measurement performed, so you have some quantum mechanical system, some other system that interacts with it, obeying the laws of physics, becomes entangled, and that's what we call a measurement. The universe, as it is described by the quantum state, branches into multiple possible but equally real different universes. One in which the spin was up, one in which the spin was down. I have an app on my iPhone that will do this, that will actually branch the wave function of the universe? Inside our universe? Yes. So if you don't know what to do, if you're like, should I have Chinese food for dinner? Should I have pizza? Shattered the universe. You can have one universe each, right? So that doesn't mean that everything happens. It means that everything that is compatible with the laws of quantum mechanics happens with some non zero probability. Okay? So it is a feature of the world that there were relatively few branches of the wave function of the universe in the past and there are relatively more in the future. So possibilities proliferate as time goes on. Now, there's also an entirely different discussion about the emergent levels of description which are not comprehensive, where in some sense, you're ignoring certain facts that are true about the universe. When we discuss the air in this room as a fluid with a temperature, a pressure, et cetera, we can make enormously successful predictions about how the air in this room will behave just on the basis of its fluid properties. And that's kind of miraculous because the total information about the air would be what Laplace's demon would have, right? The position and the velocity of every single molecule as well as its rotation and so forth. And miraculously, we don't need that information. We can do with much less information and still make wonderfully precise predictions, but not perfectly precise predictions. So because of that missing information, there's another sense of possibility that comes in just the possibility based on ignorance, that you make predictions on the basis of incomplete data. They're going to be probabilistic ones, not deterministic ones. But when you're talking about something that happens or not, what sense can be made of the claim that something else might have happened? In that case, in the many worlds version, everything that can happen is happening. Right. So in some sense, there is only the actual most of it's not in this universe, but it's still happening. So there was some possibility that I might have picked this up and put it down and then picked it up again and put it down and did that 75 times to the consternation of everyone in the room. Hopefully the probability is low. Yes. But if there's a non zero possibility of that, that happened somewhere, right? That's right. And every other conceivable admiration of that. So I was singing The Star Spangled Banner at one point. When I was doing that. Now it gets worse than that, but yes. Well, if you've heard me sing, it doesn't get much worse than that. But this is supposed to be science, right? But this sounds like the strangest and least believable idea on offer. How is it that science, after centuries of being apparently rigorous and parsimonious and hard headed, finally discourages a picture of reality which seems to be the least believable thing anyone's ever thought of? You come to the right place. You all come to the right place. So let me just remember that there's this entirely different notion of possibility that we should get to, which is what could have happened given what we know, given that what we know wasn't everything. What we're talking about here with the many worlds interpretation is we know everything. Let's let us know everything. Let us know the complete quantum state of the universe. And if you believe this story, then there's these multiple branchings, and everything that had a non zero chance of happening actually does come true, just in different universes, for all intents and purposes. And if I can rephrase the question you're asking, why in the world would anyone believe that? Right? So the answer is that it is the simplest, purest, most parsimonious way of making sense of the data. And to bolster that claim, to sort of see why you would get there, you have to notice a little bit about quantum mechanics. So think about what quantum mechanics says, is that there's a difference between what is how we talk about the world, how we attach mathematically rigorous quantifications of the state of the world to actualities, versus what the world looks like when we look at it, okay? And looking at it isn't anything weird about consciousness or human brain or anything like that. A video camera or a rock can look at things just as well. That's just any version of quantum mechanics. Any version of quantum mechanics as we describe the world differently when we are and are not looking at it. So how do you make the most parsimonious sense of that? We say that if you have an electron, for example, a little particle that is spinning, and if you measure it, whether it's spinning, given some axis, is it spinning clockwise or counterclockwise? There's the only possibilities. One of the wonderful simplifications of quantum mechanics, it's never in between. If you measure it a certain way, it's clockwise or counterclockwise. That's it. Various reasons why, which we could go into convince us that when we're not looking at it, the right way to talk about the electron is as a superposition of spinning clockwise and spinning counterclockwise. So it's not that we don't know. It's that it's in some sense doing both with sort of different amounts of that mixture of clockwise and counterclockwise. And then when you look at it, you only ever see it do one or the other. OK, so the question is, what happened when we looked at it to make it go away? Well, we have an equation, right, the Schrodinger equation, which tells us what happened. And what the equation tells us is that before you looked at it, there was an electron that was in some mixture of clockwise and counterclockwise, and there was you, and you hadn't looked at it yet. And after you looked at it, there were two things. There was the electron was spinning clockwise, and you saw it spinning clockwise, and there was the electron was spinning counterclockwise, and you saw it spinning counterclockwise. That is the straightforward, unambiguous result of the equation. The question is, what do you do about that? And from 1920s to the 1950s, the answer was you panic and you say, well, I only saw it spin counterclockwise or clockwise. So the other possibility magically disappears. And this is called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. And I'm being very unfair to it, but we're among friends. So it was in 1957 that a smart graduate student named Hugh Everett said, I have a better idea. Rather than magically getting rid of it, let's just admit that it's there because that's what the equation says. What would be wrong with that? And people say, well, we only see one or the other. And Everett said, yeah, but now there's two of you. There's one that's all one and one that saw the other one. And they kicked him out of the field. He left physics entirely because they wouldn't talk to him anymore. But this is the birth of what we call the Many Worlds Interpretation. In this universe. In this universe, we kicked him out. Yeah, he's the king of physics and some other branches of wave function. But the point is that it is in terms of ideas and mathematical concepts. You cannot get simpler and more parsimonious than the Many Worlds interpretation in terms of universes. It's messy, but how should we judge it? I would go on the basis of concepts, not on the basis of universes. Right. I want to bring in this notion of time because you've focused on the arrow of time and why time seems to be as strange a phenomenon as it is. But there's this notion of a block universe that you don't hear much about now, which is the notion that the future in the past equally exists in some kind of atemporal space. It's like we're all living in a novel and we're living on page 45 now. But page 95 exists just as much as the page we're on and could be visited, presumably. Wait, exactly. Is the block universe a retired concept, or are we still thinking no, it is. Okay. But taken as a block, there is no such thing as process or an event or causality, isn't it? There's just this overarching pattern that is the block. Right? Well, there are events. There are events scattered through the block. It's a different way of thinking. It's counterintuitive. I mean, it's like a giant noun rather than a giant verb. If you think of in terms of time and events and process, you're thinking in terms of a verb. Verbs are relative, and this is actually it's closely related. Everett's PhD thesis was called the relative state version of quantum mechanics for kind of this kind of reason now is just a way of talking about my relationship to other moments of time that are equally real. They don't exist now, but they exist in the sort of whole four dimensional block version universe of reality. And the only reason to do this is because, again, it's the simplest, most straightforward reading of the equations. The equations that we, as far as we best know them right now, of fundamental physics don't distinguish between yesterday, today, and tomorrow. They're just different numbers on a line. And both the block universe view and the many worlds view come from this philosophy that you mentioned before. You sort of gave the game away that these pictures are very counterintuitive. And the philosophy is, well, sure they're counterintuitive. Why should our intuitions, developed over some number of years of evolutionary time, teach us anything at all about relativity, cosmology or quantum mechanics? It would be very surprising if our best view of the fundamental mental nature of reality was not highly, highly counterintuitive. And in that situation, I would argue the best thing we can do is take the equations seriously. And that leads us to the block universe and to many worlds. Okay, so then why does time seem to flow the way it does? And how do you think about the future being different from the past? Yeah, so that's a good question. We don't know the entire answer to that. Half of the answer is the physical answer as to why the past seems different from the future is because of entropy, right? Entropy is physicist way of talking about the messiness, the disorderliness, the disorganization of a physical system. And entropy tends to increase enclosed systems over time. So if you take cream and coffee, mix them together, they become higher entropy as time goes on. It's very easy to mix them together. It's very hard to unmix them. If you have cream mixing with coffee, be very, very difficult to lower their entropy. It can be done, but only by increasing the entropy of the universe somewhere else. So the amazing thing is that this simple, definite feature of the universe, which is enshrined in the second law of thermodynamics entropy increases. We would claim that underlies every single difference that we notice between the past and future. So the fact that we were born as little babies and will die as older people, the fact that we remember what happened yesterday but do not remember tomorrow, the fact that we have free will about making choices today that can affect what happens tomorrow. The way that I put it sometimes is you all could choose right now to get up and leave, right? That is something you could do, because, in some sense, to you, the future is open. You could not choose to not have come here already. Where does that asymmetry come from? There's a long song and dance, but ultimately the answer is because entropy was lower in the past. How that works psychologically is more of a neuroscience problem, actually, than a physics problem. We carry around in our brain little memories of what just happened, as well as little projections of what will happen. And we're constantly updating these on the basis of new information. And that gives us this sense of an impulse or a flow, even though to a physicist, all of those moments of time are equally real. Right. Well, so you mentioned free will, which is getting us closer to areas of interest and potential disagreement, although I don't think we yes, but actually, I don't think we disagree about the core claim, which is the free will that most people think they have this notion that you could have done otherwise. Neither of us believe in that. There's the physics of things. If you could rewind the universe to precisely the state it was in when everyone decided to come here, everyone would still decide to come here helplessly a trillion times in a row, for better or worse, they might be rethinking it down. I would put a little footnote because whenever you say could not have been different, you have to say, given what? So if you were Laplace's demon, like you correctly said, if you absolutely knew everything about the physical state of the universe, then it would have given the uncertainties due to quantum mechanics for putting that aside for a second. But otherwise, yes, it would have, according to the laws of physics, played out in exactly the same way. But as we footnoted before, there are other ways of describing the universe emergent higher level ways where you're not Laplace's demon. Where you can say, given what we actually know about the physical situation at some earlier time, what could have happened. And there you still might get some probability distribution over what could have happened. And the answers might have been different. Well, so you're saying that it's a lack of information that carves out of space for free will. Yeah, absolutely. But it's that a puppet is free as long as it can't see its strings. What would it mean to actually see the proximate cause of the thing that is effective in each? Well, I think that it would mean that you would have to be Laplace's demon, that you would really have to so the idea of these emergent theories is you throw away a lot of the information that Laplace's demon would have, yet you still retain some of the predictive power. And in fact, I really like to emphasize this is a very unusual, special, quasimagical situation. When that happens, typically in physics, if you give me some information about the air in this room, if you give me the position and velocity of every molecule of air and you pick out one molecule and say, how is it going to move? Right. So Laplace's demon has no trouble telling you exactly what it's going to do. But if then you say, okay, I only tell you the position and velocity of half of the air molecules, laplace's demon has no idea where this one's going to go because it's going to. Be hit by the ones you don't know about. That's the generic case in physics. You throw away a little bit of the data, you lose all predictive power. Emergence is this wonderful exception to that rule where you throw away almost all of the data and keep an amazing amount of predictive power. So if you want to talk about the motion of the Earth around the sun, you don't need to talk about the position and velocity of every atom in the Earth, right? You just need to know the center of mass. And that is an enormous saving of information, and you still get quite good predictive power. So when it comes to things like human beings, the best emergent theory that we have necessarily has probabilities built into it. We don't have a deterministic way of talking about human beings given the information we have about them. That's why I would argue it's useful to talk about free will. Well, the thing is but adding probability to it or chance or randomness doesn't give people the freedom they think they have either. So if I told you that you might have done differently had someone rolled a dice in your head and it would have produced a different synaptic outcome, that's not what people feel they have as the authors of their action. So the libertarian sense is there's no upstream proximate cause of my decision. But for me, making the decision, the fact that it gets made by a deterministic universe or a deterministic universe plus probabilities that I didn't have a hand in either, that isn't the feeling that gets carried forward in consciousness in each moment. I don't want to get too bogged down in this because this is the sort of the definitional morass that becomes less interesting. So I think people think different things about what they have in terms of free will. Neither one of us believes in libertarian free will in any possible sense. If you were Laplace's demon, you would be determined 100%. The way that I like to put it is if you didn't believe that, if you believe that even if we knew everything about your atoms and molecules, there's still something extra that makes me able to affect my motions over and above that. Then here's a simple experiment. Jump out of the window of a tall building and use your free will to change the motion of your center of mass. No one thinks they can do that, right? They think they can use their libertarian free will to change their hands, but not their center of mass. But the truth is, you don't even have to engage any kind of suicidal experiment like that. I may invite you all to just try not to hear the sound of my voice right now. Use your free will not to hear me say these words. Use your free will not to understand them. You speak English. You're helplessly decoding the meaning of these sounds. There's not a person in this room who can stop doing this right now. Right. So if your freedom doesn't extend to even that sure, that's right. Happily no one has taken me up on the dare that I have suggested to them. But there are other aspects to free will. And this is why I don't even like using the term free will as a compatibleist I'm sort of regretful that free will is the label that has been given to the thing we argue about. Because neither you nor I nor Daniel Dennett or any of our friends at this level think that there is some magical spark that lets us overcome the law of physics. Right. The question is the question to me is can we describe what is the best possible way we have of describing how human beings behave? That's the question. As far as I can tell, the best emergent effective theory we have of human beings is one that inevitably involves them being agents that make choices. Certainly I think and we can argue about this too if we want to discuss things in a vocabulary of morals and oughts and responsibilities we need to imagine that human beings make choices. And also empirically I think that when I go to the restaurant I do make choices. So if someday we come up with a better description, a description of human beings that given the same data we have about them lets us describe what they will do with better accuracy, then I will totally give up on any connection or commitment I have to the idea of free will. I just don't see that theory yet. Practically speaking, it's not that the best way to order food in a restaurant will be to scan your brain to figure out what you're going to order. It would be the easier thing is just to order. But the order still comes from somewhere which we know that if we were paying attention to what's happening at the level of the brain, it is happening there and is determining the choice you make even while you still think you're making up your mind. The you the conscious witness of your experience. And we know that's the case, and that is undermining of what people feel they have. The reason why I think this is important and not just merely academic conversation is that I think this does begin to have ethical implications when you think about the possibility of just understanding the human mind more and more deeply. So we have this category of human misbehavior that we call evil now. So there's evil people in the world. They do terrible things that we have to figure out some way to prevent. But the physicist in you must see them, I presume, on some level as malfunctioning robots, right? I mean, they're part of this concatenation of events that's ultimately describable in terms of physics. And if there was some way of understanding evil at the level of the brain, there would be a more complete description of it there. And if there were a way to remedy it, right? If there were a cure for evil, if there were a pill that could cure a psychopathy, say, to just take one band on the spectrum of evil. So we have these people who we diagnose with psychopathy and we sort of dimly understand anomalies in the brain that correlate with that condition conditions of low empathy and all the rest and disposition to use instrumental violence. If we understood that perfectly and could intrude in the brain in a way that was harmless and just changed them. And so every time you gave a psychopath this pill, he promptly apologized for everything he had done and said, such a relief, I was such a bad person, and now I'm just horrified and thank you for this cure. And then he lived every day of his life as morally healthy as any normal person. We would cease to have this category of evil. We would just cure people. And we certainly wouldn't have a retributive justice system that punished people because they were the true deserving authors of their actions who deserved to suffer for all that they had done. On some level, we would recognize them to be casualties of bad biology, which we now have a remedy for. Short of getting that remedy, the door is already open to viewing even evil people as, on some basic level, unlucky inheritors of bad biology or a bad mixture of biology and environment or just whatever concatenation of causes makes them how they are. Yes. So, I mean, there's a lot going on there. I think that I completely agree that thinking clearly and scientifically about where people's motivations and the causality behind their actions come from will have enormous repercussions for how we think about responsibility, how we do criminal justice, how we do morals and ethics more generally. Right? And I think that advances in neuroscience and psychotherapy of various ways or alterations to the brain could very well have these enormous ethical implications, which I don't have strong feelings about what they are, but I totally agree that we should start thinking about them, and that's very important. I don't really think that it gets at the point that I wanted to make about how we think about the effective theory of human beings as emergent phenomena. I think that what you're doing by imagining looking into the brain and seeing what someone is going to do and saying that changes our understanding of their responsibility for their own actions. To me, that's fine, but you're not changing our best theory of human beings. You just have a theory of a lower level. Plato would have said that there is something called the Platonic form of a chair, and this chair participates in that form. And today we know that's not true. The chair is made of atoms, okay? It's a particular shape of atoms, but we don't say, therefore there is not a chair. Right. Therefore the chair went away. There's a description of the chair as a chair, the level that we describe it as chairs, and there's another level below where we describe it as a collection of atoms. I see no incompatibility with saying that there is a way of describing human beings, which is the best way we have given the data and information we have about human beings in our everyday lives, which describes them as agents capable of making choices. And also that if we knew more about the microprocessors in their brain, we would use a different vocabulary for describing what they do. You don't see an ethical implication to the recognition that if you were exactly in the place of the person who's behaving badly, you would be that person behaving badly. So that means that you're lucky not to be Saddam Hussein or some bad person. If you had his brain and his life circumstance, you would be precisely that person. That there's no there are no degrees of freedom apart from whatever randomness you want to throw into the system to avoid being that person. Yeah, I think that those sentences literally do not make sense. The sentences, If I were Saddam Hussein, I understand that something gets lost there because there's no you carried over from exactly everything that kind of matters. In this case, yes. Do you feel you can take credit for being who you are? Part of it. What part? I decided to get a PhD. You did? I did. But can you explain you did too. Well, no, because, see, this is the problem I have in these conversations, because my experience is actually compatible with what we're calling determinism or determinism plus randomness. So when I look at how decisions get made, I experience a fundamental mystery in each moment around just what becomes effective. So the decision to I see a list of topics here that I can choose right now. If I skip over one and go to the next one, that quote decision is always mysterious on some level. It's like I can have some story, post talk story about why I did it in that case. But that always strikes me as post talk. And even if the story is accurate, even if I said, oh, we we don't need to talk about that because I talked about that on my last podcast, the fact that that memory arose in that moment is mysterious. The fact that it was effective in the way that it was is mysterious. The fact that it didn't have the opposite effect is mysterious. I could have said, oh, well, I talked about that in my last podcast, but Sean is the perfect person for me to balance that off of. So everything there is compatible with determinism. So in this case, I do actually feel like it's possible to see the strings, then the puppetry is no longer an affront to our subjectivity. It's just it actually is bringing our subjectivity more in line with what we have every reason to believe that data are right. So the way I would disagree with this analysis, I think that what you're saying is related, although at the end of the day different to an argument that John Searle gave in favor of free will. The argument it was just a joke. He was supposed to be a joke. And he said, look, if I really didn't believe in free will when I went to a restaurant and the waiter says, what would you like to eat? All I should ever say is just give me whatever the laws of physics determined I will have. Right. And of course, no one does that. And Searle concludes from that we must have free will because we don't really act like that. But I think that that's a misunderstanding in the sense that it's a mixing of levels. I think that what your the tension that you're pointing at comes from. On the one hand, we have this way of talking about human beings as agents making choices. At the other hand, we also have a different, slightly lower level description of brains and there are different parts of the brain and they're talking to each other and there are subconscious things going on and we have histories that led us to certain places that we didn't control. And all that is also true, but it's compatible in my mind, with the existence of another layer where we can talk about human beings as people making choices. It's just that it's a different way of talking about the same stuff. It's not incompatible ways. Yeah. So I fully agree that we can talk in a conventional sense about choices and the proximate cause of doing something is rather often choosing to do that thing. But if you actually drill down on what a choice is, you are once again laid bare to this stream of causes which you, the witness of each conscious moment, haven't authored. Well, right up until that last clause, I was going to totally agree and say we should declare victory, but I think that up until that last clause, I thought it seemed that you were laying out that there are two different ways of talking about human beings. I guess my question is do you feel that your experience is compatible with let's just say that determinism is true and provably so so that we could have the people with the right scanners backstage actually anticipating everything we're going to say before we say it. So we could just see a print out of everything we said here before it could possibly have been recorded, say, or there's some way of proving to us that we are mere puppets. Is your conscious experience compatible with that fact or not? Okay, so that's not an affront. So the fact that everything you said tonight could have been predicted absolutely is fine that maps onto your experience. It could have been predicted by the imaginary LaPlace of demon in the back room. It couldn't have been predicted by me. Yes. And I think it was Max Plank who had that construal of free will that basically it's just it's not a claim about the physics of things, it's a claim about the psychology of being a person. The fact that you have incomplete information about what you are going to do always makes it seem like you are the free author of your thoughts and actions. It's a psychological claim about what it's like to have incomplete information about your own physics. Well, we're getting very, very narrow here, but it's not quite to me, a psychological claim. It is, again, a claim about what is the best way of talking about human beings at this level of description. And the way that it sounds wrong is when you use words that should only be used in the vocabulary of human beings making choices like you or yourself, and you translate them down into the layer that is more. Imaginary, where we have a lot more data, where you say you are the author of all these influences. Or how could you be affecting all these things that you didn't even know were happening? But you're not allowed to talk that way. You're allowed to talk about you as a person talking to other people, making choices, or you're allowed to talk about brains being influenced by things, but not both at the same time. And you don't see a way in which those two levels will come into tension when we have a greater understanding and more predictive power of the base level. I mean, it is just a thought experiment to think of applause as demon backstage, but more and more. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. For today's podcast, I bring you Kate Darling. What a great name. Kate is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center, and she focuses on the way technology is influencing society, specifically robot technology. But her background is in law and in the social sciences, and she's one of the few people paying attention to this. And this is, along with AI, going to become increasingly interesting to us as we integrate more and more autonomous systems into our lives. I really enjoyed speaking with Kate. We get into some edgy territory. As I think I said at some point, the phrase child size sex robots was not one that I was ever planning to say on the podcast, much less consider its implications. But we live in a strange world and it appears to be getting stranger. So to help us all figure that out, I now bring you Kate Darling. I am here with Kate Darling. Kate, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'm delighted to be here. It's great to be able to do this. I'm continually amazed that we can do this, given the technology, but I first learned of you, I think, in a New Yorker article on robot ethics. And this is your area of focus and and expertise, and this is an area that almost doesn't exist. You're you're one of the few people focusing on this, so perhaps just take a moment to say how you got into this. Yeah, robot ethics is kind of a new field and it sounds really science fictiony and strange. I have a legal and social sciences background, and at some point about five and a half years ago, I started working at the Media Lab at MIT, where there's a bunch of roboticists and I made friends with them because I love robots and I've always loved robots. So we started talking and we realized that I was coming at the technology with some questions that they hadn't quite encountered before. And we realized that together there were some things that some questions that were worth exploring. That when you bring people who really understand how the technology works together with people who come at this from kind of a policy or social sciences or societal mindset, that can be interesting to explore, tell people what the Media Lab is. It seems strangely named, but everything that comes out of it is incredibly cool and super diverse. What's going on over there at MIT? Yeah, it's a little hard to explain. The Media Lab is kind of to me, it's this building where they just stick a bunch of people from all sorts of different fields, usually interdisciplinary, or as they call it, antidisciplinary, and they give them a ton of money, and then cool stuff happens. So there's everything from, like, economists to roboticists to people who are curing blindness and mice, to artists and designers. It's really a mishmash of all sorts of very interesting people working in fields that don't really fit into the traditional categories of academia that we have right now. And so now your main interest with robots is in how our relating to them could well and may, in fact, inevitably change the way we relate to other human beings. Yeah, absolutely. I'm totally fascinated by the way that we treat robots like they're alive, even though we know that they're not, and the implications that that might have for our behavior. I must say, I'm kind of late to acquire this interest. Obviously, I've seen robots in science fiction for as long as I've seen science fiction, but it wasn't until watching Westworld literally a couple of months ago that I realized that becoming changes in our society based on whatever robots we develop are going to be far more interesting and ethically pressing than I realized. And this has actually nothing to do with what I thought was the central question, which is, will these robots be conscious? That is obviously a hugely important question, and a lot turns ethically on whether we build robot slaves that are conscious and can suffer. But even short of that, we have some really interesting things that will happen once we build robots that escape what's now called the Uncanny Valley. I'll probably have you talk about what the Uncanny Valley is, and I think, even based on some of your work, you don't even have to get all the way out of the Uncanny Valley or even into it for there to be some ethical issues around how we treat robots, which we have no reason to believe are conscious. In fact, we have every reason to believe that they're not conscious. So perhaps before we get to the edgy considerations of Westworld, maybe you can say a little bit about the fact that your work shows that people have their ethics pushed around even by relating to robots that are just these bubbly cartoon characters that nobody thinks are alive or conscious in any sense. Yeah, we are so good at anthropomorphizing things, and it's not restricted to robots. I mean, we've always had kind of a tendency to name our cars and become emotionally attached to our stuffed animals and kind of imagine that they're these social beings rather than just objects. But robots are super interesting because they combine physicality and movement in a way that we will automatically project intent onto. So I think that it's so interesting to see people treat even the simplest robots like they're alive and like they have agency, even if it's totally clear to them that it's just a machine that they're looking at. So long before you get to any sort of complex humanoid Westworld type robot, people are naming their roombas. People feel bad for the roomba when it gets stuck somewhere just because it's kind of moving around on its own in a way that we project onto. And I think it goes further than just being primed by science fiction and pop culture to want to personify robots. Obviously, we've all seen a lot of Sci-Fi and Star Wars, and we probably have this inclination to name robots and personify them because of that. But I think that there's also this biological piece to it that's even more that's even deeper and really fascinating to me. So one of the things that we've noticed is that people will have empathy for robots, or at least some of our work indicates that people will empathize with robots and be really uncomfortable when they're asked to destroy a robot or do something mean to it, which is fascinating. Does this pose any ethical concern? Because obviously it's kind of an artificial situation to hand people a robot that is cute and then tell them to mistreat it. But there are robots being used in, I think isn't it like a baby seal robot that you're giving people with Alzheimer's or autism? Is contact with these surrogates for affection? Does that pose any ethical concerns, or is that just if it works on any level, it's intrinsically good, in your view? I think it depends. I think there is something unethical about it, but probably not in the way that most people intuitively think. So I think intuitively it's a little bit creepy when you first hear that, oh, we're using these baby seal robots with dementia patients, and we're giving them the sense of nurturing this thing that isn't alive. That seems a little bit wrong to people at first blush. But honestly, if you look at what these robots are intended to replace, which is animal therapy, it's interesting to see that they can have a similar effect. And no one complains about animal therapy for dementia patients, it's something that we often can't use because of hygienic or safety or other reasons. But we can use robots because people will consistently treat them sort of like animals and not like devices. And I also think that for the ethics there, it's important to look at some of the alternatives that we're using. So with the baby seal, if we can use that as an alternative to medication for calming distressed people, I'm really not so sure that that's really an unethical use of robots. I actually think it's kind of awesome. Yeah. So one of the things that does concern me, though, is that this is such an engaging and or in other words, manipulative technology that we're seeing a lot of these robots being developed for kind of vulnerable parts of the population, like the elderly or children. A lot of kids toys have increasing amounts of this kind of manipulative robotics in them. So I do wonder whether the companies that are making the robots might be able to use that in ways that aren't necessarily in the public interest, like get people to buy products and services or manipulate people into revealing more personal data than they would otherwise want to enter into a database. Things like that concern me, but those are more people doing things to other people rather than, you know, something intrinsically wrong about treating robots like they're alive. So has there been anything like that? Have any companies with toy robots or elder care robots done anything that seems to push the bounds of propriety there in terms of introducing messaging that you wouldn't want in that kind of situation? Yeah, I don't know any examples of, like, people trying to manipulate the elderly as of now. But, I mean, we do have examples from the porn industry and having very manipulative chatbots that try and get you to sign up for services. And this was happening decades ago. Right. So we do have a history of companies trying to use technology in advertising or, say, the inapp purchases that we see on iPads where there have been consumer protection cases where kids were buying a bunch of things. And now companies have had to implement all of these safeties so that it requires parental override in order to purchase stuff. There's a history of we know that companies serve their own interests, and any technology that we develop that is engaging in the way that robots already are in their very primitive forms and will increasingly be, I think, might pose a consumer protection risk. Or you could even think of governments using robots that are increasingly entering into our homes and very intimate areas of our lives, governments using robots to collect more data about people and essentially spy on them. So there's this basic fact where any system that seems to behave autonomously doesn't have to be humanoids, doesn't even have to have a lifelike shape, it doesn't have to draw in biology at all. As you said, it could be something like Arumba if it's sufficiently autonomous. It begins to kindle our sense that we are in relationship to another which we can find cute or menacing or whatever we feel about it. It pushes our intuitions in the direction of this thing is a beam in its own right. I believe you have a story about how a landmine diffusing robot that was insectile like spiderlike could no longer be used. Or at least one person in the military overseeing this project felt you could no longer use it because it was getting its legs blown off. And this was thought to be disturbing, even though, again, we're talking about a robot that isn't even close to being the sort of thing that you would think people would attribute consciousness to. Yeah. And then, of course, with design, you can really start influencing that. Right. So whether people think it's cute or menacing or whether people treat it as a social actor, because there's this whole spectrum of you have a simple robot like the roomba, and then you have a social robot that's specifically designed to mimic all these cues that you subconsciously associate with states of mind. So we're seeing increasingly robots being developed that specifically try and get you to treat it like a living thing, like the baby seal. Are there more robots in our society than most of us realize? What is here now? And what do you know about that's immediately on the horizon? Well, I think what's sort of happening right now is we've had robots for a long time, but robots have been mostly kind of in factories and manufacturing lines and assembly lines and kind of behind the scenes. And now we're gradually seeing robots creep into all of these new areas. So the military or hospitals, we have these surgical robots or transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, and we have these new household assistance. A lot of people now have Alexa or Google Home or other systems in their homes. And so I think we're just seeing an increase of robots coming into areas of our lives where we're actually going to be interacting with them in all sorts of different fields and areas. So what's the boundary between or is there a boundary between these different classes of robots? I don't think there's any clear line to distinguish these robots. Also, in terms of the effect that they have on people, depending on how a factory robot is designed, people will become emotionally attached to that as well. That's happened. And we also I mean, by the way, we don't even have a universal definition of what a robot is. Some of the robots I picture, like the robots I was picturing on an assembly line, are either fixed in place and we're just talking about arms that are constantly moving and picking things up, or they're kind of moving on tracks, but they're not roving around in 360 degrees of freedom. I trust there are other robots that do that in industry as well. Yeah, but, like so one question is the inside of a dishwasher, is that a robot? Like, is that is that movement autonomous enough? It's basically what the factory robots are doing, but we call those robots. We don't call the dishwasher robot. There's just this continuum of machines with greater and greater independence from human control and greater complexity of their routines, and there's no clear stopping point. Let's come back to this concept of the uncanny valley, which I've spoken about on the podcast before. What is the uncanny valley and what are the prospects that we will get out of it anytime soon? I think uncanny valley is a, you know, somewhat controversial concept that you can design something that is lifelike, but if as soon as you get too close to I think for the unincanning valley, it's it's specifically humanoid. If you get too close to something that looks like a human but you don't quite match what it is, then it suddenly becomes really creepy. So people will like the thing, the more lifelike that it gets, and then once it gets too close, the likability of it drops. It's like zombies or something that's human but not quite human, really creeps us out, and then it doesn't go back up again until you can absolutely perfectly mimic a human. And I think I like to think about it more less in terms of the uncanny valley, more in terms of expectation management, I guess. So I think that if we see something that looks human, we expect it to act like a human. And if it's not quite up to that standard, I think it disappoints what we were expecting from it, and that's why we don't like it. And that's a principle that I see in robot design a lot. So a lot of the really, I think, compelling social robots that we develop nowadays are not designed to look like something that you're intimately familiar with. Like, I have this robot cat at home that has romax, and it's the creepiest thing because it's clearly not a real cat, even though it tries to look like one. It's very unlovable in a way. But I also have this baby dinosaur robot that is much more compelling, because I've never actually interacted with a two week old chimerasaurus before, so it's much easier to suspend my disbelief and actually imagine that this is how a dinosaur would behave. So, yeah, so it's interesting to see how, you know, the the whole West World concept, you know, before we we could even get there, we would really need to have robots that are so similar to humans that we wouldn't really be able to tell the difference. What is the state of the art in terms of humanoid robots at this point? I mean, we are I've never actually been in the presence of any advanced robot technology that's attempting to be humanoid. There are some Japanese androids that are pretty interesting. I don't think, to me, they're not out of the UNKENNY valley yet, but there's also some conversation about whether the UNKENNY valley is cultural or not. And also, I think, some research on that, which I don't think is very conclusive, but it might be that in some cultures, in Japanese culture, people are more accepting of robots that look like humans but aren't quite there, because people say that there's this religious background to it. That the Shinto religion, the belief that objects can have souls, makes people more accepting of robotic technology. In general, whereas in Western society we're more creeped out by this idea that a thing, a machine could, you know, resemble a living thing in a way. But yeah, I'm not really sure. Check out the androids that Ishiguru in Japan is making because they're pretty cool. He made one that looks like himself, which is interesting to think about his own motivations and psychology behind that. But it is a pretty cool robot. I think just from a photograph you might not be able to tell the difference, probably in interacting with it. You would. So do you think we will get to a west world level lifelikeness long before we get to the AI necessary to power those kinds of robots? Do you have any intuitions about how long it will take to climb out of the uncanny valley? That's a good question. Honestly, I'm not as interested in how do we completely replicate humans, because I see so many interesting design things happening now where that's not necessary. We can already with robotic technology is very primitive at this point. I mean, robots can barely operate a fork, but we can create characters that people will treat as though they're alive. And while it's not quite Westworld level, if we move away from this idea that we have to create humanoid robots and we create a Blob, or we have a century of animation expertise to draw on in creating these compelling characters that people can relate to and that move in a really expressive way. And I think that that's much more interesting. I think much sooner than Westworld, we can get to a place where we are creating robots that people will consistently treat like living things, even if we know that they're machines. I guess my fixation on Westworld is born of the intuition that something fundamentally different happens once we can no longer tell the difference between a robot and a person. And maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe this change and all of its ethical implications comes sooner when, as you say, we have a Blob that people just find compelling enough to treat it as though it were alive. It just seems to me that Westworld is predicated on the expectation that people will want to use robots in ways that would truly be unethical if these robots were sentient, but because on assumption or in fact they will not be sentient, this becomes a domain of creative play analogous to what happens in video games. If you're using a first person shooter video game, you are not being unethical shooting the bad guys. And the more realistic the game becomes, the more fun it is to play. And there's this sense that while some people have worried about the implications of playing violent video games, all the data that I'm aware of suggests they're really not bad for us. And crime has only gone down in the meantime. And it seems to me that there's no reason to worry that as that becomes more and more realistic, even with virtual reality, it's going to derange us ethically. But watching Westworld made me feel that robots are different. Having something in physical space that is humanlike to the point where it is indistinguishable from a human, even though you know it's not, it seems to me that will begin to compromise our ethics. If we mistreat these artifacts, we'll not only feel differently about ourselves and about other people who mistreat them, we will be right to feel differently because we will actually be changing ourselves. You'd have to be more callous than in fact, most people are to rape or torture a robot that is in fact indistinguishable from a person. Because all of your intuitions of being in the presence of personhood, of being in relationship will be played upon by that robot, even though you know that it's been manufactured and let's say you've been assured it can't possibly be conscious. So the takeaway message from from watching Westworld for me is that Westworld is essentially impossible and we would just be creating a theme park for psychopaths and rendering ourselves more and more sociopathic if we tried to normalize that behavior. And I think what you're suggesting is that long before we ever get to something like Westworld, we will have, and may even have now robots that if you were to mistreat them callously, you would in fact be callous and you'd have to be callous in order to do that. And you're not going to feel good about doing it if you're a normal person and people won't feel good watching you do it if they're normal. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. I mean, we already have some indication that people's empathy does correlate with how they're willing to treat a robot, which is incredible. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, housekeeping. Well, last housekeeping was intense. Got some new music all of you were dealing with emotionally. Got some grief over the new music. Let's just hang out with it for a while, see how we feel in the new year. Also dropped a paywall on the podcast. For those who need my rationale around all that, you can listen to The Last Housekeeping in the public feed. Those of you who are subscribers never even heard it. Anyway, to make a long story short, unless you subscribe to the podcast through samharris.org, you will only be getting partial episodes. Now, for instance, today's podcast is around 3 hours long, but if you're listening on the public feed, you'll get the first hour merely so. If you care about the conversations I'm having here and want to hear them in their entirety, subscribing through samharris.org is the only option. I'm clearly at odds with the trend here of all podcasts being free and ad supported, but all I can say is that the response has been fantastic, and the podcast is on much better footing even after only a week. So thank you for that, as always. If you actually can't afford a subscription, I don't want money to be the reason why you don't get access to my digital content, whether that's the Making Sense podcast or the Waking Up app or anything else that I might produce in this space. And the solution for that is, again, if you can't afford it, simply send an email to support@samharris.org for the podcast and support@wakingup.com for the app and you'll get a free year, and you can do that as many times as you need. We don't means test these things. There are no follow up questions. This is based on your definition of whether you need this for free, and that's as it should be. So anyway, this is the business model. The podcast is now a subscription, just like the app, and if you can't afford it, you can have it for free. Okay, so today I'm speaking with Donald Hoffman, and I'm joined by my wife onika this is the first time we have jointly interviewed a guest, and I'm sure it won't be the last. Onika's interest in this topic definitely helped us get deeper into it. Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. His writing has appeared in Scientific American and Onedge.org, and his work has been featured in The Atlantic, Wired, and Quanta. And his new book is The Case Against Reality why Evolution hid the Truth from our eyes. And there was an article in The Atlantic profiling him that made the rounds. He also had a Ted Talk that many found bewildering. As you'll hear, he has what he calls a user interface theory of perception. And many people find this totally confounding. And it can seem crazy at first glance and even at second glance and I must say when I first read the Atlantic article and watched his Ted Talk, I wasn't entirely sure what Hoffman was claiming. As you'll hear, Anika got very interested in his work and had several meetings with him and then we finally decided to do this podcast and it is a fairly steep conversation. I do my best to define terms as we go along, but for those of you for whom this is your sort of thing, I think you'll love it. Over the course of 3 hours we really leave virtually no stone unturned in this area. We talk about how evolution has failed to select for true perceptions of reality. We talk about Hoffman's interface theory of perception, talk about the primacy of math and logic and what justifies our conviction there talk about how space and time cannot be fundamental to our framework. We talk about the threat of epistemological, skepticism, causality is a useful fiction, the hard problem of consciousness, agency, free will, panpsychism, what Hoffman calls the mathematics of conscious agents, philosophical idealism, death, psychedelics, the relationship between consciousness and mathematics and many other topics. And now anika and I bring you Donald Hoffman. We are here with Donald Hoffman. Donald, thanks for joining us. Thank you Sam was a great pleasure. So this is unusual. This is the first time that onika my wife, who's only been on the podcast once, many of our listeners will remember that podcast. It's the first time anyone has heard me laugh out loud in a decade. So you came to my attention on the basis of an Atlantic article. I think that was making the rounds. And you also had a Ted Talk, I don't know which preceded the other, but then onika just got completely obsessed with what you were doing and maybe once a month or so I would hear that there was some export from a conversation she was having with you. So it just seemed like it would be professional malfeasance for her not to really anchor this conversation. Absolutely. That was all in the context of my writing, my book. I was doing research for my book and Don was working on a book on a similar topic or really on the same topic, different perspective. So I had wanted his input on my manuscript and was honored that he trusted me with his manuscript. And we actually gave each other we were kind of in the writing process together, so gave each other notes and then Don was extremely generous with his time and continued to meet with me, as I had many follow up questions and, yeah, put up with my curiosity, even though I'm not sure any of it was helpful to you. But it was great for me to it was very much fun for me and very helpful because you also gave me feedback on my book and really helped bring my book to a broader audience as well. So I was grateful. And I was really grateful that you did all the driving. Yeah, right. But before we jump into your thesis, which has the virtue of being on what I think is perhaps the most interesting topic of all, and some of the points you make are so counterintuitive as to seem crazy on their face. So it's going to be fantastic to wade into this with you, but how do you summarize your academic and intellectual background before we get started? Well, I did my undergraduate bachelor's at UCLA in what was called quantitative psychology. It was like a major in psychology and a minor that had, like, computer science and math courses in it. And while I was doing that, I took a graduate class with Professor Ed Carter Written, which we were looking at artificial intelligence, and ran across the papers of David Marr. This is, like, in Route 77, 78. And his papers just really grabbed my attention. Here was a guy that was trying to build visual systems that worked with mathematical precision, not just waving your hands, but actually writing down mathematics and something that you could actually build eventually into a robotic vision system. So I found out he was at MIT in the AI lab and what's now the brain and cognitive Sciences department. And I was lucky enough to get to go there and work with him. He died a little over a year after I was there. So I only got to work with him for 14 or 15 months. Yeah, very young. He was, like 35, right? 35. He had leukemia. But I did get to work with him and see how his mind works. It was revolutionary. It was a wonderful time there at MIT. And then my other advisor was Whitman Richards. David Maher and Whitman Richards were my joint advisors, and then Whitman was my sole advisor after Marr died. So I was very interested in going there in the problem of, are we machines? I figured, what better way to get at that question than doing something in an artificial intelligence lab where we try to build machines and understand the scope and limits of what machines could do? So I was always very interested in human nature and how artificial intelligence is related to humans. Are we just artificial intelligence as ourselves, just machines, or is there something more? And I didn't want a hand wave. I really wanted to understand what it means to be a machine and what might be different or not about humans. So that's sort of my intellectual background. And what I focused on because of Mar was perception. Visual perception. Yeah. So he wrote a book that was quite celebrated, a very early, detailed look at visual perception, which it's amazing what a contribution he made in such a short time. Decades after his death, his book is still recommended as a must read book in cognitive science and neuroscience. Absolutely. It was brilliant. And he was brilliant in person. The lab meetings were were electric. He had assembled this world class group of scientists around him. They they congregated around him. And I just was so lucky to be watching this new science being revolutionized by by this young man. Yeah. 35. He he did all this and and died. It was it was truly stunning. Yeah. But you're not Irvine as a professor, right? That's right. The University of California, Irvine. Yeah. And you have been meeting over the years with some of the great lights in consciousness studies, for lack of a better word. There was these meetings of the Helmholtz Society is that what you're calling? Yeah. The Helmholtz club. Helmet club. And that had Francis Crick in it. And I never met Francis, but Joe Bogan, who you write about in your book, is somebody who I did meet. And he was quite a character. He's quite a character. He was fun at dinner. Yeah. He was the neurosurgeon who did the bulk of the split brain procedures for which Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize that's right. And arranged Idelli. UCLA was involved in that work. And Michael Gazaniga. Yes. Before we jump in, I want our listeners to be sensitized to how seemingly preposterous some of your initial claims will be. And I can guarantee you that on certain of these points, the sense of their counterintuitiveness will wear off. And there's something thrilling about this. The thrill that was exemplified by Annika's obsession with your work, I know, has spread to other people. We have a friend who perhaps I shouldn't name, who claimed that she accosted you at some function and just completely fangirled you as a groupie. So we know that I think once you start wearing sunglasses indoors, you will have started a cult and then we will put the word out against you. But in the meantime, perhaps the best place to start. I mean, I would imagine we should just track through it the way you do it in your book, starting with the interface theory of perception. But you can start wherever you want, and we just want to go through it all, and we'll have questions throughout. Right. So most of my colleagues who study perception assume that evolution by natural selection has shaped us to see truths about the world. None of my colleagues think that we see all of reality as it is, but most of my colleagues would argue that accurate perceptions, what we call vertical perceptions, perceptions that tell us truths about the world, will make us more fit. So accurate perceptions, vertical perceptions are fitter perceptions. And the argument that's classically given is actually quite intuitive. So the idea is that those of our ancestors who actually were better at feeding, fighting, fleeing and mating because they could see reality as it is, were more likely to pass on their genes, which coded for the more accurate perceptions. And so after thousands of generations of this process, we can be quite secure that our perceptions are telling us truths about the world. Of course, not exhaustive truths, but the truths that we need. We see those aspects of reality that we need to stay alive and reproduce. And that seems like a really compelling argument, seems very, very intuitive. How could it go wrong? So at first glance, it seems some measure of verticality, some measure of being in touch with reality as it is would increase an organism's fitness. There must be a fit between tracking reality as it is and adaptive advantage. Exactly. That's the standard intuition for most of my colleagues. Steven Pinker has actually published papers where he points out some contradictions to that idea. But most of my colleagues would go with the idea that, yeah, it's better, it's more fit to see reality as it is, at least part of reality. Well, I began to think that that might not be true, because my initial intuition was that maybe it would just take too much time and too much energy to see reality as it is. So evolution tries to do things on the jeep, so maybe the pressures to do things quickly and cheaply would maybe compromise our ability to see the truth. And so I began to work with my graduate students at Justin Mark and Brian Marion around 2008 or so, 2009, and I had them write some simulations where we would simulate foraging games, where we could create worlds with resources and put creatures in those worlds that could roam around and compete for resources. And some of the creatures we let see all the truth, so they were the vertical creatures and others I didn't let see the truth at all. We had them only see the fitness payoffs. And we can talk about what fitness payoffs mean. That's an important concept. But what we found was in these simulations that the creatures that saw reality as it is couldn't outcompete the creatures of equal complexity, that saw none of reality and were just tuned to the fitness payoffs. And so that began to make me think there was something real here. So now I should say, what fitness payoffs? Yeah. So think in evolution, you can think of evolution by natural selection, much like a video game. So in a video game, your focus is to collect points as quickly as you can without being distracted by other things. And if you get enough points in a short enough time, you then might get to go to the next level, otherwise you die. And in evolution by natural selection, it's very, very similar. Instead of the game points, you have fitness payoffs and you go around collecting them as quickly as you can. And if you get enough, you don't go to the next generation, but your genes get passed to the next generation. To be a little bit more specific, think about the fitness payoff that, say, a T bone steak might offer, so that if you're a hungry lion looking to eat that T bone steak offers lots of fitness payoffs. But if you're that same lion and you're full and you're looking to mate all of a sudden that T bone steak offers you no fitness payoffs whatsoever. And if you're a cow in any state and for any activity that T bone steak is not a fit thing for you whatsoever. That gives you an intuition about what we mean by fitness payoffs. In evolutionary theory, fitness payoffs do depend on the state of the world. Whatever the objective reality might be. They do depend on the state of that world but also and importantly on the organism, its state and the action. And so fitness payoff functions are very complicated functions and the state of the world is only one of the parts of the domain of that function. There's lots of other aspects to it and so they're really really complicated functions of the state of the world and the organism is state on its action. Right? So now I think you should introduce the desktop analogy because again, what you just said can sound suspiciously similar to more or less what every life scientist, and certainly neuroscientist, would agree is true, which is, whatever reality is, we see some stimulacrum of it that is broadcast to us, by the way, our nervous system sections up the world. So we see within a certain bandwidth of light, bees detect another bandwidth and we by the very nature of this don't get all the information that's available to be gotten. So we don't have a complete picture of the thing in itself or the reality that's behind appearances. But implicit in that kind of status quo assumption is that the things we do see really exist out there in the real world in some basic sense in space and time. Again, it's not clear how much gets lost in translation but there is some conformity between what we see as a glass of water on the table and a real object in the world in third person space. How is your vision of things departing from what is now scientific common sense? Yeah, it does depart dramatically from that standard view. The standard view, as you said, is that we may not see all the truth but we do see some aspects of reality accurately. And what the evolutionary simulations and then later theorems that that my colleague Chawn Prakash proved indicate is that our perceptions were shaped by natural selection. Not to show us just the little bits of truth we need to see, but rather to hide truth altogether and to give us instead a user interface. So a metaphor I like to use is if you're writing a book and the icon for the book is blue and rectangular in the middle of your screen does that mean that the book itself in your computer is blue and rectangular in the middle of the computer? Well, of course not anybody who thought that really misunderstands the point of the user interface. It's not there to show you the truth which in this metaphor would be the circuits and software and voltages in the computer. The interface is there explicitly to hide the truth. If you had to toggle voltages to write a book you'd never get done and if you had to toggle voltages to send an email people would never hear from you. So the point of a user interface is to completely hide the reality and to give you very, very simplified user interface to let you control the reality as much as you need to control it while being utterly ignorant about the nature of that reality. And that's what the simulations that I've done with my students and the theorems that I've done with Chaitan Prakash indicate is that natural selection will favor organisms that see none of the truth and just have this simplified user interface. So to be very explicit three dimensional space as we perceive it is just a three dimensional desktop. It's not an objective reality independent of us. It's just a data structure that our sensory systems use to represent fitness payoffs and how to get them. And three dimensional objects like tables and chairs, even the moon are just three dimensional icons in that interface. So once again, they're not our species representations of a true glass that's really out there or a true table that's out there. They are merely data structures that we're using to represent fitness payoffs and how to get them. Yes. In this first description of this wonderful analogy you use with a desktop and also of how evolution gives us this false picture of what the deeper reality actually is. I have a few questions here. I'm not quite sure where it will go, but there are at least three things that have been brought up so far that I feel like it's important for us to get clear on. Terminology and framework before I start really disagreeing. And I should say that you and I have now spent many meetings together. I spend a lot of time challenging you, mostly because I actually think there's something very interesting that you're doing. And I think you're on to something. And so in the same way that in my editing work I give the most notes to the books I'm most passionate about it's in that spirit. So beginning with evolution I've actually said to you many times that I don't actually think you need the evolution argument to make your case for your theory. So some of this pushback is actually moot but I still think it's interesting and I think I agree with this evolution argument up to a point. So my first question is really to just get us on the same page or see if we are on the same page as a starting point. I know that you believe that or you're hopeful, you're optimistic about the fact that we can ultimately understand what that deeper reality is. And so that so there must be boundaries to the systems that we're using, our brains which have evolved where we can actually get access to the truth. So up until a point, our brains are giving us all of this false information, but there's some sense in which we can actually get access to things that are true about the nature of reality. So my question is, where do you draw the boundary of an evolved system that, by definition gives us false information about the nature of reality so that outside that boundary is where we might be able to gain access to information that delivers us the truth? And there's kind of a second part to that, which is where we might disagree. I believe we've already begun to cross that boundary with science. And so the way I follow your evolution argument is simply about direct perceptual information that we get, rather than ideas, scientific experiments. So if you just take light light, I think, is always the simplest example. We have not evolved perceptual systems to really understand what light is. Right? Like, everything we've learned about light through the sciences, up to quantum mechanics, where it gets completely mysterious and we really don't actually know what light is. So we can kind of all agree and not just the three of us in this room, but all of us. You know, most scientists would agree that ultimately we're still we still don't have this information about what the fundamental nature of reality is. We're still stuck there. But I would say that we have learned we've gotten much closer to that by these processes that I think are outside the boundary of this evolved system that is, by definition, delivering us false information, right? Great question. And there's a couple of points about it. First, that the arguments that I've given from evolution by natural selection against vertical perceptions do not hold against math and logic. So that's very, very different than some other, like, Christian apologists like Alvin Plantinga, who have made an argument that sounds very similar to mine that they say that if our cognitive capacities evolved, they would be unreliable. That includes our theory building capacity, and therefore the theory of evolution is unreliable and therefore evolution is false. I'm making no such argument. Right? I'm it's further furthest thing from my mind. I'm focused only on the senses. And the reason why the argument that says our senses are not vertical doesn't hold for math and logic is that there are evolutionary pressures for us to reason about fitness payoffs. Two bytes of an apple give you roughly twice the fitness payoff of one bite of an apple. Whatever objective reality might be, we need to be able to reason about fitness payoffs. And so whereas the selection pressures are uniformly against vertical perceptions, they're not uniformly against some elementary competence in math and logic. I'm not, of course, arguing that natural selection is shaping us to be geniuses at math and logic? Far from it. It's just that the selection pressures are not uniformly against ability and every once in a while you get a genius. But don't we think the math and logic are giving us space time? I mean, this can get into a deeper question because of course we now have quantum mechanics, which is putting all of this into question. And many physicists, if not most, are talking about spacetime being something that emerges out of something more fundamental. But they would still say that it emerges. And so it seems that it's hard to take. So I guess my argument with where you take this evolution argument is as far as space time itself, because it seems that we don't yet know whether spacetime is a true illusion in some sense. But I would say our math and logic has taken us that far, not simply our perceptual systems. Actually, let me see if I can add to this point because this is something that came up for me as well. So if we confine this to perception, for me it's no longer counterintuitive. But again, this will be counterintuitive for many, many people. So the claim is that fitness trumps truth so fully that apprehending the truth perceptually is just not an evolutionarily stable strategy. You're going to be driven to extinction among creatures that are optimized for fitness. And that sounds a little crazy, but when you think of what fitness means, fitness means simply being optimized for survival and procreation, right? So as long as you're optimizing for that, it's easy to see that you successfully outcompete anything that isn't optimized for that. And there's also this additional piece which you mentioned, which is there's clearly fitness value, ie. Survival value in throwing away information that isn't related to fitness, right? So that every organism is going to have some bandwidth limits and metabolic limits and tracking every fact that's out there to track can't be a priority. And then there's this additional component, which is if the inability to make certain distinctions doesn't relate to increased fitness, evolution would not have selected for that ability to make those distinctions, right? So you'll expect organisms to be blind to certain features of reality just in principle. But there is a sense in which your thesis does bite its own tail and seems to at least potentially subvert itself in that the moment you start to say that, okay, space and time, they don't exist, they're data structures. Therefore, our notion of objects is a pure interface issue. It's like a trash can on the desktop. It doesn't really map onto reality as it is. You just bracketed logic and rationality, which may be defensible, but evolution itself, the very notion of natural selection is more than just rationality. It is a causal picture. And we might say that causes and the notion of cause and effect, right? Or the notion that causes precede their effects rather than some notion of teleology. These things are also just data structures so that every piece you want to put on the board to give a Darwinian account of anything does sort of fall in the bin of more space and time, more objects. And so how doesn't this thing completely subvert itself and land you in something like just a global skepticism which says we're in touch with some seeming reality which we really can't ever know anything fundamental about? Yeah, great question, both of you. So the idea first that evolution by natural selection, as we all know and love it involves things like DNA and organisms in space and time and so forth. So how could I ever use the theory of evolution to show and claim to show that things like DNA are just data structures, they're just interface symbols? And the reason I can do that is because John Meanard Smith actually took the theory of evolution by natural selection and mathematicized it. He realized that we could abstract away from all of the sort of the extraneous empirical assumptions of space and time and DNA and so forth, and we could look at what he calls just evolutionary game theory. And so that the logic of natural selection itself can be reduced to competing strategy where you make no ontological assumptions whatsoever about the world in which those strategies are playing. It allows one when someone says natural selection favors true perceptions. Evolutionary game theory provides you precisely the tool you need to ask how to assess that question independent of all these other empirical assumptions that are standard in biological evolutionary theories. And so that allowed me to do this. Now, there's another aspect to the argumentative strategy that I'm taking here, and that is that one reason that I went after the evolutionary argument was I actually announced the interface theory in my book in 1998, Visual Intelligence. And people liked the book except for the chapter on the interface theory. And they thought that was nuts. And I realized I wasn't going to get my colleagues to pay attention to that idea unless I talked to them in a language that they really understood. And it was that that motivated me to go after the evolutionary argument a few years later. So the reason I use evolution is not because maybe it's the best argument is because it's the argument that I knew my colleagues would listen to. So first, I'm abstracting away from the whole apparatus of biological evolution to just the nuts and bolts of evolutionary game theory, which doesn't bring the ontological assumptions. And second, my attitude as a scientist toward any scientific theory is they're just the best tools we have so far. I don't believe any scientific theories, including my own. I think belief is not a helpful attitude. This is the best tool we have so far. Let's look at what this tool says about the claim that natural. Selection favors vertical perceptions and whatever deeper. So what that tool is saying to me is there's just no grounds for thinking that any of our perceptions of space and time and objects in any way capture the structure of whatever objective reality might be. And one thing that's nice about this mathematics as well is you might say, well, how in the world could you possibly show that the structure of our perceptions doesn't capture the structure of the world unless you knew already what the structure of the world is? Aren't you shooting yourself in the foot there? And it turns out you don't have to. It's really that wonderful in the mathematics that you can show that whatever the structure of the world might be, the probability is zero. But that's what we're seeing, right? And that makes sense to me, too. I'm still stuck on how it extends all the way to space and time. And I think we shouldn't spend too much time on the evolution piece, mostly because I actually think you don't need it. But just from a philosophical perspective, I think it's very interesting. And I'm still curious myself kind of how far this goes, because it's clearly true up to a point at least. So if Darwinian evolution by natural selection is a theory about objects in space and time, I mean, this is just a question for you about how you view this. Where can you stand outside of space time and matter to talk about evolved perceptual systems? But more specifically, what does evolution look like? Or how do you even talk about evolution outside of space time? So what are we saying is evolving? What are we saying is surviving? What do evolution and survival even mean in a context outside of space and time? Or is that just an abstract idea that you haven't no, that's that's that's the right question. And and that's the power of evolutionary game theory. What John Maynard Smith was able to do was to show we could talk about abstract strategies competing not in any particular assumption about space and time. He was able to abstract away from all the details of biological evolution in space and time and organisms and say, the essence of Darwin's idea are these abstract strategies. And we can look at how these strategies compete in an abstract space. What is it that's surviving? It's an idea. It's a meme. It's a what survives. So what you do is you have an you you imagine that there are there's a population of entities that are competing using these strategies, so they're abstract entities in an abstract space with these strategies. And what you do is there's something called the Replicator equation. And what you find in the Replicator equation is that the number of entities that have a good fitness strategy will start to increase their proportion, will increase the strategies that have a bad fitness strategy or, you know, a lesser strategy. And so what you have is the proportion of the population that has various strategies goes up and down. Well then I guess my question goes back to what do you mean by entity? So these are just abstract entities that in evolutionary game theory you don't need to know what the entities are, they're just place markers. You're imagining their entities outside of space and time and that's what the mathematics allows you to do. Well, let me just piggyback on this. You're getting tag team. That's what I was hoping for. I apologize in advance, but isn't the very notion of competition and differential success based on parasitic on the notion of time? Parasitic on the notion of causes preceding their effects and entities is? I think what Anika's fishing for there is entities seem somehow derivative of objects, at least the concept of an object. We're talking about something that's discrete, that's not merely a continuous reality. Right. Things can be differentiated. So how are we not using the same cognitive tools that got hammered into us by evolution whose process is only selected for fitness and therefore left us epistemologically closed to the nature of reality? Absolutely so you're right that the evolutionary the Replicator equation itself does have a time parameter, right? Or at least a sequence parameter. It depends on whether you do it discreetly or continuously. And so that's going to be built into it. Absolutely so. By the way, as I said, I'm not committed to the truth of evolution by natural selection. I'm just using that theory itself to say that whatever the structure of the world is, that that theory says the chance is zero, that our perceptions actually have captured that structure. It leaves it open to ask is there a deeper theory of objective reality that will give back evolution by natural selection as a special case within what I call our spacetime interface? And that's actually what I'm hoping for is to have a deeper theory that will have go beyond space and time. It will go beyond time in the sense that there will be sequence and there will be perhaps a notion of cause following effect, but not in a global space time temporal framework. It will be completely asynchronous and so forth. And we'll get what we call causality in like a Minkowski space, Einstein's Minkowski space or a general relativistic curved space time as a projection of a much more deep theory of reality in which the very notion of dimension doesn't hold. In which time doesn't hold. But we can show that though. So I'm thinking about dynamics on abstract graphs and asynchronous dynamics, but that can be projected and simplified into what we call space time and its causality, say in Minkowski space. I think it's just useful as a launching off point to every place we'll go from here to just say that. At the very least, I think this evolution argument is very useful in terms of opening our eyes to something that I actually think in some sense, we already know. And again, looking at something like light is a good example where we clearly we have not been given any tools, perceptual tools, to understand how electrons operate, how you know, what is actually happening at a fundamental level. And of course, there are all these theories now, from everything in string theory to many worlds, trying to sort out all of these things that we see through our science that we have absolutely no intuitions for, we have no insight into. We're just getting at through math and logic. And so clearly, we haven't evolved systems that help us here. And so I feel like we can agree to two points that we can move from here onward. And the first one is that we can all agree, scientists in general, we don't know what's fundamental, nor do we perceive the truth about the fundamental building blocks of reality. And two, and this is where I'd like to set this up, where consciousness, it was about to come in, we can agree that physical science has not given us an explanation for consciousness. We have no understanding of how consciousness arises out of physical processes. And so it seems that we can at least agree that it's a legitimate question or it's a legitimate project to wonder if consciousness is something that's more fundamental and that we're missing that piece and that we've thought about it backwards all this time. That's one of the things that I think is so great about your work, and I think this is a very important project. Okay, so before we get to consciousness, which is central to our interest, and where there's more controversy, at least in my mind, I want to anchor what you've said to a very straightforward perception so that our listeners can get in touch with how counterintuitive your thesis is. So when the three of us are in a room together, apparently they're objects we can see. What is the status of those objects, like a glass of water, when none of us are looking at it? And what is its status, given the fact that it apparently is always there for any one of us to look at, we have some kind of consensus, inter, subjective language game we can play here that can reference the glass of water at will. How does that map onto your theory of non vertical perception? Right. So I think a good way to see what I'm saying and how counter intuitive if it is, is to think about, say, playing a game like Grand Theft Auto but with a virtual reality add on. So you have a headset, and you're seeing a three dimensional world of cars and your own steering wheel and so forth. And it's a multiplayer game. So there are people around the world that see the same car that you're driving and see all the other cars that you see. And in that case, there of course, is no real car that anybody is seeing. There's just some in this metaphor, a bunch of circuits and software and so forth. That that's the objective reality in in this metaphor. But all the players will agree that they see a red Corvette chasing, you know, a green Mustang down the highway at, you know, 70 miles. They they all agree not because there's literally a red Corvette chasing a green Mustang. There is some objective reality, but it's not Corvettes and Mustangs. That's what we each see. And each person with their own headset is getting, in this example, photons thrown to their eyes, and they're rendering in their own mind the Corvette chasing the Mustang. So there are as many Corvettes and Mustangs as there are people playing the game, because they each see the one that they render. And I might be looking at the Corvette, and I look away, and I'm now looking at my steering wheel. I no longer see the Corvette. I have garbage collected the Corvette. I'm not making that data structure anymore. Now I'm rendering a steering wheel. And now I look back over at the Corvette. Now I'm rerendering the corvette. It looks like the Corvette was always there, because when I look away and look back, it's right where I expect it to be. But in fact, there is a reality. It's not Corvettes. It's not Mustangs. It's not steering wheels. So here's the counterintuitive claim I'm claiming. We all have a headset on all of us, and we all have this space time, physical objects, the glass of water, those are all things that I render on the fly when I look at them. And then I garbage collect them. That's part of the evolutionary argument. I garbage collect them because I'm trying to save energy and time and memory. So I render it only as I need it. And it's really just the glass I'm seeing is a representation of fitness pay offs. Those are the fitness pay offs I need to pay attention to now. Now I'm throwing that fitness payoff description away. Now I'm looking at fitness payoffs over here. So it's a rapid rendering of fitness payoffs in real time. So here's one of the areas where I worry that the language that you're using, the terminology you're using, may actually give a false impression of what you're saying. This is where some of my notes came in. I don't know how many of these notes you have taken or will take, but I worry that I actually think I agree with you there, but there's something about the way you're saying it that I think gives a false impression of what you're saying. So if you say the race car isn't there, the moon is an example you give often. You also will say, which I think is more accurate and closer to what you're saying is something exists, something is is there in reality that my perceptual systems are kind of turning into this site of a moon. And I think it's confusing to readers and listeners when you say it doesn't exist, as if the fundamental nature of reality behind whatever that moon is, doesn't exist. There's nothing there. Fair point. I agree. So it seems more accurate to say we simply don't understand the deeper reality behind the moon and behind apples, and that this is something, in a way, like it's less controversial. This is something we can all admit given our current understanding of the physics. And so part of my gripe there, I think, is just with the language that you're using. And there's something incredibly interesting about that. That something is there. There's something I'm interacting with. The example I often like to use with you when we meet is a tree. If we plant a tree and leave it, it is out of our conscious experience. There are all these processes that will be taking place in what we call them, how we view them, as water and nutrients being sucked up from the earth. And it will grow and will come back in a year, and all of those processes would have taken place, whatever they are. At bottom, we may not understand, but something is going on in the universe that we have our access to. However far from the truth it is, there is something taking place there. And so to explain it as when I leave, there's absolutely nothing there and there's no tree. And then I come back and somehow I create this as if it's yeah, I think that's a very important clarification. So I agree with you completely. But I'm not saying that there isn't an objective reality that would exist even if I don't look at it. There is an objective reality. It's just that what I see is utterly unlike that objective reality. The metaphor that I was giving of virtual reality, I might see a red Corvette. The reality in that metaphor would be circuits and software that aren't red, that don't have the shape of a Corvette, that are utterly unlike a Corvette. But when I interact with that objective reality that's there, even if I don't see the Corvette, I then will see the Corvette. So that's how different I think it's potentially confusing as an analogy only because as a user of video games, you can turn the video game off. It's not a self sufficient world. It's not reality that continues on and does its thing. I agree with you at least. Yeah. It gives a slightly false impression. Right. I agree that the reality is continuing on regardless of what I have life insurance, right? The reason I have life insurance is because I agree with you that there is some reality that will continue to go on even if I'm not here. Right. Okay. So let me make that point with a slightly different top spin because those concessions seem to bring us back to the standard consensus view of science. In some ways, there's this appearance reality distinction. There's our sensory experience, which is our interface, which everyone agrees does not put us in direct contact with the thing in itself or underlying reality. But you're conceding that there is an underlying reality and there must be some lawful mapping between what we see on the interface and that underlying reality which actually renders our mutual perceptions of things like trees and glasses and cars predictable. Where we can both agree that if we go to look for the same object, each one of us is likely to independently find it, whatever the relationship is between that interface data structure and reality itself. So there has to be some kind of isomorphism between our virtual reality experience and reality itself, even though we don't have, by virtue of evolution, all of the right conceptual tools so as to say what it is. There is going to be a mapping between objective reality and our perceptions. And that mapping will be as complicated or more complicated as the mapping between all the circuits and software in a virtual reality machine and the actual Grand Theft Auto world that I perceive. And if you think about it, there's going to be hundreds of megabytes of software, all these complicated circuits, all I'm seeing is simple cars and so forth. So there's going to be in computer science, there are all these virtual machines that you create many, many levels of virtual machines between what you see in the Grand Theft Auto game and the actual objective reality in this metaphor that's going on there. And so I'm saying that the idea that the reality is going to be isomorphic to spacetime is too simplistic, right? I agree that there's going to be some systematic mapping is going to be quite complicated. So another way to put it is this if I said to you, I want you to use the language of what you can see in your interface in the virtual reality, so the pixels that you can see, the colors and pixels, that's the only language you can use. I want you to tell me how this virtual world works. You can't do it because the language of pixels is an inadequate set of predicates to actually describe that world. And I'm making the very strong claim that whatever objective reality is, the language of space and time and physical objects in space and time is simply the wrong language. There is a systematic mapping, but the language of objects in space and time could not possibly frame a true description of that objective reality. That's the strong claim. So it's similar to JBS. Haldane, the famous physiologist gave us an aphorism that almost contains this thesis in seed form, which is not only is reality stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose. By giving a deflationary account of our notion of space and time, you are saying whatever this mapping is between appearance and reality. We are so ill equipped to talk about it based on this interface analogy that it is on some level far stranger and far more foreign to the way in which we're thinking about things than anyone has. Your claim isn't actually I'm just trying to get at what is truly novel about your claim. One thing that's novel is the expectation that evolution has selected for some approximation to what is true seems false. So fitness trump's truth. And as a result, whatever this mapping is to underlying reality, we are a far greater state of ignorance about it than most people expect. That's right. Absolutely. You've nailed it on the head. And I would say this, that it's the relationship between a visualization tool and whatever it is that we're visualizing. Right. So there's going to be this objective reality that's out there and we evolution just gave us this very, very dumbed down speciespecific visualization tool. The very language of that tool is probably I mean, the whole point of a visualization tool is to hide the complexity of the objective reality and just give you a dumbed down tool that you can use. And so the very language of space and time and objects is just the wrong language for whatever the thing is. Just like I would say, though, that as far as I understand up to this point, I know we're going to talk about consciousness soon and then we'll get into a different realm. But up until this point, everything that you've just said, I think most physicists would agree with and is part of the conversation in quantum mechanics right now. And many physicists are talking about this problem of space time and of space and time independently as well, clearly not being the final answer to what is fundamental. And everything we see out of quantum mechanics gives us a real philosophical problem similar to the one you're describing, which is, it seems that the fundamental nature of the universe, what the universe is actually made of, is not anything like what we experience. It all the way to the point of space and time. That's right. It's really interesting because if you look at our biggest scientific theories in physics, general relativity and also special relativity are about spacetime. Right. Space time is assumed to be an objective reality and a fundamental one. In quantum field theory as well, the fields are defined over space time. And so physics, as Nima Arkani Hamed has put it and he's a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He's pointed out that for the last few centuries, physics has been about what happens in space time. But now they're realizing that to get general relativity and the standard model of physics to play well together, they're going to have to let go of spacetime. It cannot be fundamental. And he's not worried about it. In fact, he says most of his colleagues agree that space time is doomed, and there's going to be something deeper. And that's wonderful because we're about to learn something new. There's a deeper framework for us to be thinking about physics, and space time will have to be emergent from that deeper, deeper framework. Actually, I watched a lecture of his recently, and I wrote down this short quote. He says, all these things are converging on some completely new formulation of standard physics where space time and quantum mechanics are not our inputs, but our outputs. And I thought that was very well said as far as I understand where physics is at at this point. I think all of these physicists would agree with you up until this point. And I think now we can probably cross over, although I would just point out that they might agree for different reasons, right. They're not using absolutely same evolutionary logic, but that there's nothing intrinsic in what Don is saying about how false our view of the fundamental nature of reality is. That it. That it is that you can actually take it all the way to spacetime and that we're probably wrong in all of those assumptions about what we think. I agree. And I think it's it's really interesting that the pillars of science are all saying the same thing. Evolution by natural selection is saying you need to let go of spacetime. And then the physicists trying to get general relativity and quantum field theory to play, right, they're saying you have to let go of spacetime when our best science is saying that it's time for an interesting revolution. That's going to be fun. I mean, it's going to be very exciting to see what happens when we go behind spacetime. It's so counterintuitive, though, right? We've just assumed that our story is spacetime came into existence 13.8 billion years ago at the Big Bang. It was the fundamental reality. We're saying there's a deeper story. That story is only true up to a point. There's a much, much deeper story. And that's more like an interface story. That's the projection of a much deeper story we're going to have to find. And that is tremendously fun. Yeah, well, so we're now going to move on to consciousness, which will be interesting. I guess I want to flag my lingering concern that your rationale, if taken in deadly earnest, may still kick open the door to epistemological skepticism, for me at least, because I think if one, space and time are dispensed with causality and kind of an evolutionary rationale this is kind of the Plantinga argument you referred to. It's just once you start pulling hard at those threads, I'm not sure how much the fabric of epistemology can be defended. I agree with you, Sam, in the following sense. I think that it might actually go that way just on the evolutionary arguments alone. So what I'm going to want to do is to whatever the deeper theory of reality that I propose, it needs to be such that it will not fall into the epistemological problems that you're raising. So the deeper theory needs to avoid those epistemological problems and show why that deeper theory looks like evolution by natural selection when we project it into our spacetime interface. In other words, so that these kinds of problems might arise because evolution by natural selection itself is not the deepest theory. It's just an interface version of a deeper theory. Right, okay. Yeah. So on this topic of causality and time and whether this project even makes sense which, as I know, is a place you and I have gotten to before in our conversations when you say things like the brain and neurons are not the source of causal powers and that we need to find another source. My question is why would you assume that there are causal powers at all in the fundamental nature of reality? So it's not clear to me why we include causal powers as part of a fundamental reality if spacetime doesn't exist. I don't quite see how there is causality without time at least in the way that we typically think about it. Just to take an example, which is kind of standard physics although often neglected the notion of a block universe, right? The notion that the future exists just as much as the present as the past and so that there really are no events there's just a single datum which is the entire cosmos and it's connections. So causality under that construal is really an illusion. That's right. Without endorsing the block universe view I would say that causality in space and time is a fiction. It's a useful fiction that we've evolved in our interface but that strictly speaking causality in space and time because space and time is not the fundamental reality. The appearance of causality like my hand pushing this glass and moving it it gives the appearance that my hand has causal powers and is causing the glass to move. But in fact that's just a useful fiction. It's like if I drag an icon on my desktop to the trash can and delete the file it looks like the movement of the icon on the desktop to the trash can cause the file to be deleted. Well, for the casual user that's a perfectly harmless fiction to believe. If you move the icon to the trash can it causes the file to be it's perfectly harmless. But for the user, for the guy who actually wants to build the software interface for this to go under the hood that fiction has to be let go. So I'm claiming that within space and time all the appearance of causality is a fiction. Now, in terms of a deeper theory because you were asking a deeper theory what about causality? My arguments is that causality is parts of the illusion of time. Assuming time is some sort of illusion and and time is not fundamental at least as far as we usually talk about. I mean, I can think of this is another conversation of how we can almost redefine causality, which in my view I have. I think there's a way to talk about different things being connected. But in terms of the way our definition of causality and how we use it, it is dependent on time. It is a part of things that play out in time. You need something to happen in the past to cause something to happen in the future. It is this direct relationship in time. And so I don't even know how you would talk about causality without time. It needs time for its own definition. So I think if we're redefining causality, which I think is kosher actually, I think that's something we can talk about. I've never been clear whether that is what you mean. Are we kind of redefining what causality is? And is it more like connections between things rather than one thing happens and another thing happens in response? Yeah. I would also add another aspect here, which is that the notion of possibility may be spurious. Right. So that it may in fact be that nothing is ever possible. There's only what is actual. Right? There's only what happens. And our sense that something else might have happened in any circumstance that just might be, again, part of this user interface that has seemed useful because it is useful to try when we're apparently making decisions between two possibilities. We need to model counterfactuals. Counterfactual thinking is incredibly useful. And yet what if it is simply the case, as it would be in a block universe, that there's just the novel is already written and you're on page 75, but page 168 exists already in some sense. I don't think you need the block universe though, because I think that's just one way of getting at the yeah, I mean, it's a good visualization, but I think most physicists will have some argument about it being described that way. But I think the analogy holds. And I was just reading Carlo Rovelli's book on time and he makes this point as well, that at a certain level there is no difference between past and future. And essentially his thesis in the book is that time is an illusion. It is not something sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I think that we'll need a notion of causality that's outside of spacetime that is not going to be dependent on time. It'll be more like relationship as you talked about. Okay. In terms of the counterfactuals and possibilities, I think we'll want to have a conversation about probability and how we interpret probabilities in scientific theories. So there are probabilities that are epistemic in the sense that maybe there's a deterministic reality out there and I just don't know enough about it. So the probabilities are subjective. It's my lack of knowledge. There's frequency. But our sense of probability may be spurious. That's right. But then if there are. Probabilities in which no matter how much my knowledge increases the probability will not disappear. And so we often call those in science objective chance. And I think we want to have a conversation about how we think about probabilities and objective chance. It will actually take us into the question about free will and so forth, my version of notions of free will versus determinism. So I think that that's going to be an interesting conversation. I agree that we need a notion of causality that transcends time. And I'm proposing one, by the way. It's interesting I know you go ahead. Sorry. You talked with Juda Pearl and he's got, of course, these directed a cyclic graph models of causal reasoning which are brilliant and they've actually given us a mathematical science for the first time of causal reasoning. But in his book, Pearl doesn't define causality. He refuses to define the notion of causality in some sense. What we're facing here is that every scientific theory and this is a really important idea, I think no scientific theory is a theory of everything. There's no such thing. Every scientific theory makes certain assumptions. We call them the premises or the assumptions of the theory. And only if you grant the theory those assumptions can it go and explain everything else. We're going to have in every scientific theory certain primitives that are unexplained. They are the miracles. Visa. Visa that theory. Now, you may say, I can get you a deeper theory for which those assumptions come out as consequences, but you will have a deeper set of assumptions. There's going to be an axiom somewhere at the bottom. Absolutely. And that's a humbling recognition for a scientist to realize that we will never have a theory of everything. We will always have a miracle or a few miracles. We want to keep them as few as possible. I don't like that you call them miracles. I would like to have the record show I understand that. But we call them assumptions. Why not call them axioms? Well, because I want to really. It's another place where I think people might actually be confused about what you mean. Which is why sure, I'm glad that you push trying to protect you. I'll just say that there are things that the theory cannot explain and there will always be things that every scientific theory cannot explain and it's a principal problem. So the interesting thing will be in a deeper theory will we have something that's like a causal notion that will be a primitive of the theory and it may not be dependent on time, but there will be primitives. An explanation will stop, I guess. So my question, my issue really is why use the word causality when you're speaking in more fundamental terms? So why not say something like connections, relationships to me see much closer analogies and so to say what we view as causality is in fact something more like a connection or a relationship. I'm completely on board level. I agree with you completely. I think. A deeper theory we may think that the term causality is just not a very useful term anymore. It was useful in space and time and connection or influence is a better term at a deeper level. Okay, so on to consciousness and free will and other dangerous topics. What, in your view, is the connection between consciousness and debates? Letter if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org. Key Points./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. OK, no housekeeping today. I'm going to jump right into it. Today I'm speaking with Adam Grant. Adam is an organizational psychologist who teaches at the Wharton Business School, where he has been the top ranked professor for seven straight years. He is a leading expert on bringing social science into the workplace and he's the author of four New York Times bestselling books, including Give and Take Originals, Option B and Power Moves. He also hosts the Work Life podcast in association with Ted and he's a repeated Ted speaker. Anyway, the list of his academic distinctions is long and we get into some of his core interests in this episode. We talk about how teams work effectively. We talk about the nature of power, personality types, and what Adam has described as the fundamental styles of interaction giving, taking and matching. We talk about the critical skill of saying no, creativity resilience. We cover the strange case of Jonas Sauk, which is surprising. And then I browbeat Adam for, I don't know, a good long time about mindfulness. And he proves a very good sport. Anyway, I found it a very useful conversation and I hope you do as well. And now I bring you Adam Grant. I am here with Adam Grant. Adam, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. There's a lot to talk about. I have been getting deep into your material. Before we talk about any of your books and other areas of interest, how do you summarize your career? And I guess the one set up point I would make is that you are a much celebrated academic, but you actually have a more obviously entrepreneurial and sort of breaking of the mold approach to your career at this point. I mean, you consult with a lot of companies. You you're visible in a way that many academics aren't. And so I'm just wondering how you think about your career and how you got into your pile of interest. So I fell in love with psychology when I was an undergrad and was just fascinated by the idea that you could take the tools of science and apply them to human behavior. And I knew, I knew I was interested in it. I had no idea where I wanted to take it. And my freshman year of college, I was in the middle of a bunch of psych classes, and I ended up taking an advertising sales job, and I was horrible at it. I had, I think, a group of clients who had a 95% renewal rate, and I called up a bunch of them my first week, and I had zero contracts. They all turned out. And three people demanding their money back from the previous year. Right. It was really bad. And I'd read Robert Chaldini's book on persuasion for one of my side classes, and I immediately started applying some of the principles, and I got better at the job, and I started to see all the ways that psychology was useful at work. And then the next year, I got promoted into this manager role where I had to hire a team and I had to motivate them. And I had a seven figure budget as a 19 year old, and I found myself using everything I was learning in psychology to try to get better at work. And I think eventually what clicked for me is that there's so much good insight in the social sciences that's just not useful in the world. And I feel like most of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work, and yet so many people don't find what they do in their jobs meaningful or motivating. And I wanted to fix that. And so I guess I deliberately chose an applied field where instead of being discouraged from doing work that was useful to people, I would actually be encouraged to do that. So here we are. Right, and so your PhD is in organizational psychology. Guilty. Yes. Okay. Does that overlap at all with operations, research or these different very little. There are a few people who bridge the two. So I did my PhD in a psych department, and a bunch of my classes were in a business school sort of studying management. But most of my training was kind of like think about it as social and personality psychology applied to work, where we take your job and the organizational culture that surrounds you really seriously. So what do we know about work and career and power and influence? Obviously, this is a very big question, but I want to go into this area. What do we know based on the social science that is most actionable, most important to know, and is therefore most useful in people's lives? Where do you want to start? Let's start with this. Let's start with a noun like a person's career or work. What advice do you have? What do you think you know as a result of being a specialist in this area that the average person might not know? That's funny. That's the question my students ask all the time, and I never know how to answer it. But I think I have something based on years of trial and error on that. So I think when most people choose jobs. They choose based on the nature of the work and they choose based on the status of the organization. Holding constant factors like pay, for example. Right? And I think there's a big miss factor there, which is culture. We know we have decades of evidence that the culture of the organization that you join has as much impact on your happiness, your success, and even your career trajectory as the actual work itself or as characteristics of the job that you take. And yet we don't know how to consider that because culture is messy, right? It's hard to measure, it's hard to recognize. Sometimes we get conflicting cues. I guess what I would suggest is for anybody who's looking for practical advice on how to basically what you're supposed to do is you're supposed to interview a company once they give you the job, right. You have to say, is this a place where I can be successful and where I can flourish? And if you ask about what the culture is like, you get a bunch of platitudes back. People will say things like, oh, we value integrity and excellence. Well, every other company claims that too. Right. I think where you really learn about a culture is you ask people to tell a story about something that happened in their workplace that would not happen anywhere else. And if you ask a bunch of people in the same organization that question, you can start to recognize patterns in the stories. So there's a classic study on this where everybody thinks their own organization is unique, but then you hear the same roughly seven stories over and over again. So people will tell stories about how the little person can get to the top or not, right? Or about how the big boss is human, or about will I get fired if I make a mistake? And if you break down all these stories, what you see is that fundamentally they're about is this organization a safe place to work? Is it a fair place to work? And can I make a dent around here? Can I have an impact or an influence? And those are the things people really care about in a culture. And so I think that anybody who's choosing a job ought to be asking those questions, gathering the stories, and trying to get to the bottom of, okay, what does this place mean in terms of safety, justice and control and impact? Right. What would you say to someone who's running a distributed team? Because in tech there are many companies, I now have a team for the first time in my life and they're virtually all long distance. And so there's not the same kind of cohesive culture because no one's showing up to an office. And there are huge companies like this. I remember talking to Matt Mullenweg who started WordPress. He's got something like eleven people in an office and 1000 times that distributed. Is that just a filter that we'll select for people who don't need all of the trappings of culture or how do we think about that it might be I think that, though, a lot of people find substitutes for culture. So if your organization is distributed and you don't feel like you have clear values or norms or a sense of community because you don't interact with those people very often, you tend to find it then instead in your profession. Right. So in tech, you find that groups of engineers tend to spend a lot of time together, even if they work at different organizations, even if they're not in a coworking space. What they're trying to do often is say, hey. We want to build a culture around our profession where we have a set of beliefs that are important to us and a set of practices that we try to stick to and then maybe improve over time. And I think if that's the world you live in, I think most people want to feel like they're part of an organization where they can make a bigger contribution than if they were just working solo. And I see culture as mostly a force that reduces friction in doing that. Right. Because so much of the collaboration and coordination we do causes us, when we work with other people, to become less than the sum of our parts. And I feel like part of what we're trying to do in building an organizational culture is to say, okay, how do we get people on the same page in terms of what their mission, their values are, their ways of working together? And hopefully we can do that in such a way that then when we work together, we actually accomplish things together that we couldn't solo. So I guess I'd say concretely, if you're working in a distributed team, one of my favorite new practices is to write a user manual for how to work with you effectively. Have you ever done this? No, I learned about this, actually. I think my wife should write that manual. Well, this is actually one of the key insights, is you want people who know you well to write the manual for you. But it's stunning to me that when you buy a computer or a card, there's a manual for how to operate it. But the other people you work with who are way more complex than any piece of technology or machinery, there's no user manual for how to work with them. So there's a group of managers at Bain, the consulting firm who did this really well. They said, all right, I'm going to go to all my teams that I've worked with for a long time, and I'm going to have them write the one pager for what brings out the best in me. What brings out the worst in me. What would you want to know if today were day one of working with me? And what are my blind spots. And then we're going to collect all those. We're going to create one document around it, and then I'm just going to share it with anybody who works with me in the future. Wow. And I think it's such an easy way to try to make sort of, I guess, a collaboration a little bit more predictable and also not push each other's buttons. Interesting. Is there more that we know about the variables that conspire to make collaboration more than the sum of the parts rather than less than the sum of the parts? Yeah, I think we know less than we should. The starting point for me is that a lot of collaboration shouldn't exist in the first place. So one of my first mentors was Richard Hackman, who spent half century studying teams. And he did it because he hated working with other people. And he chose this career where he wanted to figure out, how does anybody ever work together and actually not only do it well, but sort of enjoy it. And he had a fun philosophy for what an organizational psychologist does, which is you take all the jobs that you wish you had pursued, and you get to live them vicariously by studying them. And so he wanted to be a spy, and so he went and studied US. Intelligence agencies and how to improve their effectiveness. He was interested in being a musician at one point, so he studied symphony orchestras and how to increase the quality of music they played. He loved flying, and so he studied airline cockpit crews, and so he was constantly looking across these different worlds to figure out what made a team great. And one of his most basic findings was that, for the most part, teams fail when you give them tasks that are better done by individuals. Like, for example, writing a book. Really bad idea to have multiple people write a book together. Right. Especially more than two. Especially if they don't share a voice and there's not kind of one consistent narrator right. And I think that the first question to ask is, is this a task that really requires interdependent collaboration, or is it a task that's better done by individual people working separately? Yeah, that rings a few bells. So what about power? Again, we're just leaping from noun to noun. You now consult with a lot of powerful people. How do you think about power in the year 2019? Well, I guess what I was taught growing up is that power corrupts. I remember in middle school, looking at the poster on the wall, and it was the Lord Acton quote that said, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. They had that up in your school? Yeah, in my middle school classroom. And I had the same teacher for three years, so I stared at it for three years. And I don't know if I was skeptical of it then, but there was something about it. That didn't sit right with me. I think what I found found really bothersome about it was that it gave individuals no agency. It was like, okay, if a good person becomes powerful, all hope is lost. And that just didn't ring true to me, I guess, intuitively and fast forward a couple of decades, we now have a growing body of evidence in psychology that, yes, power can corrupt, but I think more often it reveals. So one of the things we see pretty consistently is that the way people use power depends on their preexisting values. And I think there are lots of good examples of this. We've controlled experiments that show it. But the pattern looks a lot like, I think, of two lawyers who got into public office, and one of them was threatened to be disbarred in the first case he ever tried. And the judge said, I doubt that you have the ethical qualifications to practice law. And that lawyer's name was Richard Nixon. Right. It's not so clear that power corrupted him. I think he was corrupt to begin with, and then he ended up using power in a corrupt way once he gained the highest office in America. There's another lawyer who was so ethical that he ended up refusing a client because he said, I believe you're guilty, and therefore I cannot defend someone that I don't believe is innocent. And that lawyer also became president. His name was Abraham Lincoln. Right. And I think that, to me, the arc of what we've learned in psychology is very often it's not that power necessarily corrupts people, although it can be a powerful force. Right. It can be hard to resist some of the temptations of power, the intoxication, as Nietzsche described it. Right. But I think that more often, people end up morphing power to serve their own ends, and that it's not so much that power corrupts people. It's that people corrupt power. Yeah. You sort of find out what people really want when they have more tools with which to get it. Yeah, that's exactly right. And also one of the consistent findings in psychology is that when you give people power, they become disinhibited because they think, look, I've gained now the freedom to express who I am and what I want. I don't have to put on an act anymore. And so Carol, after doing his deep biography of Lyndon Johnson yeah, that's on my desk. I want to read that. It's a great read. It's a long read. It's a major commitment. Yeah, we're going to that lightly. But one of his observations was that the power never corrupts. It always reveals. And I think that is one of the things that, you know, I don't think one is true and the other is not. But I think that's, for me, a fundamental shift about power. Let's let's give people a little bit of credit, right? Let's say, look, you know, it's possible that if you are a person of decent character and integrity, that power could bring out the better angels of near nature, as Lincoln put it. Yeah. One thing that, again, this could be a bit of a caricature, but I feel like I've discovered this in my wanderings among powerful people, that it's not just power. I guess fame might be a more relevant variable, but at a certain point in a person's career, as they get more powerful and more famous, they seem to surround themselves with people who insulate them from the normal tests of truth, and there's less reality testing going on. And so you can meet people who you get the sense have never heard a strong argument against their cherished ideas. And it can be a bit surprising. They're just surrounded by yes men and women, and they have been told their geniuses so often that I'm thinking of one case in particular. I won't name him, but there is a kind of delusion where you've been drinking your own publicity for long enough that you're out of touch with reality. I've seen that happen more times than I'd like to admit. And I think to me, it suggests poor judgment on the part of a leader. You ought to know that one of the dangers of gaining power is that I'm sure you've heard leaders remark at some point in their career, it's so interesting. As I gained status, I suddenly got funnier. Yeah. How did that happen? And you have to see that going in, you know, that your judgment of other people's character actually gets worse as you become more powerful because they are more motivated to impress you and to flatter you. And if you recognize that, then you set up systems to counteract that. So I think the mistake that a lot of leaders make is they gain power and they say, I need a support network because I know my success depends on being able to multiply all my talents. And so I need a whole group of people around me who are going to extend my work, who are going to strengthen it, who are going to reinforce it. I think what they overlook is they also need a challenge network, a group of people who believe in their potential enough that they want to tear their work apart to try to make it better. And it's definitely scary when I've seen a couple of leaders who occasionally would walk into their office and they say, Good morning, and you could almost hear the people wanting to say in response, great point. No, too soon. Too soon. There wasn't actually anything said yet. And yeah, I mean, I think that's how most groupthinks starts. Okay, so let's get into give and take, because we've almost landed on it already. Summarize your thesis there, and the different personality types, or would you call them personality types? I'll let you explain it, but the differences in people and their styles here are orthogonal to, like, the Big Five personality traits, right? Yeah, they seem to be. Yeah. So let's talk about that. So there's actually there's really interesting so we think about the Big Five as the major dimensions of personality, right? So how extroverted versus introverted are you? Where do you stand on emotional stability versus how reactive are you to stressful events? How conscientious and dependable are you? How agreeable, disagreeable are you? Which I want to talk more about maybe my favorite Big Five trait. And then how open versus traditional are you in your thinking? And there's been we see these traits exist in most cultures around the world that leads us to think they're pretty fundamental, right? And there's even pretty good biogenetic evidence that we can trace to, hey, there's a heritability coefficient that's attached to each of these. And these traits, they exist in us. They matter. They're kind of hard to change. But we thought for a long time there were just kind of five, right? And then most of the the additional traits that were discovered we could kind of fit under the umbrella of an existing trait. And recently, there's there's growing evidence that there may be a 6th factor of personality, which is selfishness. And I found this really exciting because for the past 15 years, I've been studying individual differences in your motivation to help others versus advance your own interests. And so not surprising to me that that's emerging. But I don't think about these as personality types in part because what I'm really interested in here is your values when you interact with another person, what are your goals and intentions? And I was struck by evidence from around the world. This has been shown in North America, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, but also in some pretty remote places like the African Messiah, that there are three fundamental styles of interaction that you see emerge again and again and so on. The extremes, I've come to call them givers and takers. So the givers are the people who are always asking, what can I do for you? Takers are the opposite, right? It's all about what can you do for me? And most of us, we don't want to be too selfish or too generous. And so when we meet somebody new, we choose a third style as our default, which is called matching, right? If I'm a matcher, I say, hey, I'll do something for you if you do something for me. And I think of these as styles rather than personality traits because I think these are choices we make in every interaction. So I might be a giver when I'm mentoring a junior person. I might be more of a taker when I'm negotiating my salary with my employer, where my goal is definitely not to make sure that they win that negotiation. And then I might be a matcher if somebody who's maybe a rival of mine or a competitor asked me to share some information and say, hey, wait a minute, quid pro quo. And yet I think we also all have a dominant style. And that's what I've been finding in my studies over the years, is that there's a way that we prefer to treat most of the people most of the time. And I think that style has real consequences. Yeah. So in reading the book, I'm sure this is the universal experience of people who read it, but the first thing the reader does is try to figure out which style he or she owns. And I'm sure there's some self deception at play in the conclusions people draw there. But honestly, I think I tend to be a giver in most respects, but I'm a kind of battered giver, and I'm a very busy giver, right. So I noticed that a few things are happening now. One is there are some salient cases where I feel like I've been taken advantage of and it's sort of mattered. So now I'm more on guard in certain situations. I view my past self as a naive giver, right, as a kind of a mark. And I have, to some degree, outsourced my disagreeableness and my disposition not to give reflexively to a manager, a lawyer. I mean, there's a layer between me and reality and all the takers of the world, and that to some degree, I'm sure many people experience this. It can be a kind of good cop, bad cop relationship where you get to kind of maintain your dominant style because you have an asshole who's working for you, right? I hope they're not an asshole, by the way. I hope they're just a matcher who believes deeply injustice and is trying to punish all the takers. Okay? Yeah. Well, I think that is the right recipe. And I guess it's one of the pieces. I noticed this. I noticed the liability of being a giver. At least this is what I imagined had happened here. I met a guy who was offering his services to collaborate with me on the meditation app that I recently released. And he was clearly somebody who, at least to hear him describe himself, was a huge giver, had been a huge giver, but felt just mightily burned by his previous encounters with people where he had essentially been instrumental in building a billion dollar company and was uncompensated for it. So he's like giving good ideas to people and was just unremunated, apparently. His style of approach to me was like out of an SNL sketch in terms of his defensiveness. I mean, he basically black boxed every piece of advice he could have given me. Like, there was nothing he deliberately wouldn't add value to anything in a conversation because he wanted to monetize everything. The thing was so transactional that it was like a comedy sketch. And I got off the phone with this guy and it would have been so exhausting to figure out how to work with him. And yet, having had a few collisions of this sort, I can see how people could get there, where you just feel like you're sort of open to the point where you're really bad match for the people you happen to be around, because they take everything. They take all the credit, or they take all the opportunities, and then some bear trap shuts within you, and you have a different style there. And then in that mode, it seems clearly toxic and unpragmatic. Yeah, I think it's really interesting to ask the question of how do people become takers? And I think some of that obviously, there are sociopaths out there who just don't care about other people. But I think more commonly, at least when I've studied this, you do see that there's a whole subset of takers who have just been taken advantage of one too many times, who used to be givers, and they kind of got burned and said, all right, I got to put myself first or else nobody else will. And I think there's actually a name for that kind of almost over correction from somebody who was too self sacrificing, too selfless to now being maybe too selfish and transactional. There's a psychologist, George Kelly, who called it slot rattling, and it's the idea of, okay, there's a particular trait, and I think I'm on a bad spot along that spectrum, and I find that out, and then all of a sudden, I go to the opposite extreme, but then I find out that's not good either. And I spend all this time trying to figure out, okay, how do I get in the optimal zone? And Kelly's observation was, there is no optimal zone. What you need to do is add other traits to your field of vision. And so, you know, one would be flexibility, right, to say, okay, it's not inherently good to be a taker. It's not inherently good to be a giver either. There are situations where each might be appropriate, and I need to be more, you know, more judicious about deciding which one is right in this world. I would say one of the mistakes that that we make, that that I made in the early days of my research is I thought we were dealing with one continuum where takers on one end were selfish, givers on the other end were generous. But when I measured independently, I surveyed thousands and thousands of people and gave them a series of questions about how motivated they were to help others and then how motivated they were to achieve their own goals, and also then got their their colleagues to rate them. So we had really nice 360 data. I found that that self concern and other concern were completely orthogonal. So how much you care about other people and how much you care about yourself are uncorrelated. Let's just linger on that. How is that possible, given that in so many. Situations, there's a zero sum contest between the two. So I think the key is that in a given situation, you often will face a trade off. But if you aggregate all the situations across your life, you can often find ways that it's not zero sum. Right. So this is one of the reasons people love relationships as opposed to transactions is, I can help you. And it feels like maybe it costs me something in this moment, but over time, there's a chance that we both benefit from the relationship. Yeah, I was taking a narrow view of that because, as I've often said, there's a place where selflessness and selfishness why selfishness? Coincide because you realize that you want to be surrounded by happy people. You want good relationships. Love is one of your primary values. And then all boats rise with that tide. That's the goal. And, you know, it's it's interesting because it's been studied a lot in negotiations. So there's a meta analysis that Carsten de Drew led of every study that's ever been done of going into a negotiation. What are your motivations, and then how well do you do relative to your counterpart? And the overall finding is that the best negotiators are high in concern for themselves and high in concern for others simultaneously. And what that allows them to do is immediately figure out, okay, what does the person across the table from me need, and how do I help them get that, but then also make sure I get what I needed out of this interaction, too? It's very different. If you're negotiating with someone and you get what you want, clearly at their expense. Right. They feel burned. You're sabotaging any future relationship there. Done. Yeah, it's over. And it was one of my favorite studies of negotiators actually measured their cognitive ability. So they took an IQ test before negotiating. And then the question was, does smarter negotiators do better? And the answer was no, that the smarter you were, the better your counterpart did in negotiation. And some of that might be because more intelligent people are more likely to take the long view and say, look, yeah, I might lose this negotiation today. But that's not ultimately the only test of whether we built a good relationship or whether there's a way we could help each other in the future. But also, the smarter you were, the more able you were to identify ways of benefiting the other person. That cost you nothing. Right. And I think this is one of the kind of basic mistakes people make is they think, oh, well, every act of generosity has to be at a personal expense. I'm like, no, that's altruism. I don't think anyone should be altruistic because it's not sustainable. I think what we should do is say, let's look for ways of helping others that don't require us to sacrifice ourselves, and we can all do that. Well, you can sacrifice one thing. Let's say time, but to your mutual advantage. Although there's one case did you write an op ed about not responding to emails? So I have that correct. I wrote an op ed about why people should be responsive to reasonable emails. You must have gotten some pain for that. I did, I responded to all of them. Okay, well, you can respond to me now. This is where I think I disagree, because now I'm in a position. So I once woke up with 50,000 unread emails in my inbox, right? So I had to declare email bankruptcy. Obviously understood, but I still get a lot of cold emails and I actually don't feel so your argument just state your case. What point did you make in that op ed? I don't think you have to answer cold emails, by the way. Oh, you don't? Okay. I think I read your op ed that if someone is writing you in a reasonable cold email, it is of necessity rude to not respond to it. Definitely don't feel that way. Oh, okay. And by the way, I think this is a whole different animal for public figures right. Or people who are visible to the point that you could even get 50,000 emails. Right. But my general case is that email has evolved to be as essential to communication as a face to face interaction or a phone call. And if somebody walked by you in the hallway and said, hello, you wouldn't just snub them, right. You'd respond to them. And if somebody left you a voicemail, most people call them back. And I think some people have evolved this idea that, well, email is different, and if somebody writes me a message, I don't have to respond to it. And if that's the norm in your workplace, fine. If that's the norm in your field, totally. Okay. The problem is that because so much communication is being done on email today, it's mostly taken as a sign either that you're not conscientious which of all the personality traits in the big five is the best predictor of job performance. And so if you're judged as somebody who's disorganized and unreliable, that's generally not good for your career. Right, right. And then also it sends a signal that you don't care that the person who took the time to write you just doesn't matter to you. And neither of those signals, you wouldn't want to send either of them. Right. If you have a job right. You have the luxury of not having a job. Yes. You're probably protected from all that. I've worked very hard not to have a job that served you well. But I think that it's fine to exercise judgment on any individual email that comes in. I think if somebody has a habit of just not responding, they're taking a risk in a digital age. And I think that what I mean is you should have a hierarchy right, of okay. So in my world, I'm responsive to family first, student second, colleagues third, everyone else fourth. That makes it really easy. Right. Everyone else category is going to fall by the wayside if I haven't gotten through responding to the other groups. Yeah. This opens the larger topic of saying no, and the more things are going well, the more you actually need to say no to triage. The various opportunities and what I experienced with emails, there's enough of it that if I were going to be scrupulous about saying no in the most conscientious way, there'd be no time for anything else. I mean, it just takes too long to say no to some of these emails. If you sent me an email and you did not get a reply, this explains what happened. But how do you think about saying no and triaging with respect to all the demands on your time? I think when I first got into this field, I thought, I confused being a giver with saying yes. And the whole point of choosing a set of values where you say, look, I want to be someone who contributes to the lives of others, and I enjoy being helpful, and I'm happy to do it without strengths attached is you get to choose where you want to have your impact. And so you shouldn't be a slave to other people's priorities. Right. At the same time, I'm not of the belief that when you get an email or request, that's always somebody else's priorities being dumped on you. Right. I don't know about you, but my inbox is also the place where I get really helpful advice from my colleagues, and I can immediately find the answer to some esoteric question where I'm looking for a data point about it. And so I feel like in a cosmic matching sense, right, if I ignore email, then probably I'm not going to end up getting very helpful responses. But I think that saying no is a critical skill for anybody who wants to be generous or anybody who wants to get a lot done. And the way I've come to think about it is you ought to have a set of priorities around who you help, when you help, and how you help. So the who is easy. Right. I gave you my list of students coming before colleagues, and that means that if I have a choice in a given day between a fellow professor who wants my feedback on a paper and a student who's looking for career advice, I'm going to choose the student. And that means I'm comfortable with the student feeling I'm more generous than my colleague because I didn't become a professor to try to be helpful to other professors. I think they'll be okay. Also, if somebody has a history or reputation of selfish behavior and they've kind of proven themselves to be more of a taker, I'd want you to shift into matcher mode and say, look, I'm not going to reward that behavior, I'm not going to reinforce it. I'm going to either not help them or I'm going to make sure that they're paying it back or paying it forward. And then the win is basically about saying, look, I've got a blackout. Time to get my own stuff done. And too often there's a temptation, I think, for a lot of people who like to be helpful, to prioritize other people's needs ahead of their own, and then they're constantly falling behind on finishing their own work. Yeah. And then the how to me, is the most fun is just to be clear and proactive about saying, look, there are certain ways of helping others that I enjoy and that I'm uniquely good at, and so I'm going to focus on those. And for me, that's I love sharing knowledge about work in psychology. My favorite cold emails to get are, have you ever seen a study fill in the blanks? I'm like, oh, all these hours that I waste reading these completely trivial and tiny studies might come in handy for somebody else. And I really enjoy connecting people when it's mutually beneficial if there's there's a way that they could actually help each other. And I feel like I live in this world where I bridge between lots of different fields, and so that's that's a fun and easy thing to do. How do you connect them? Do you send a cold email connecting them as a fiat complex, or do you ask whether they want to be connected to depends on the people. So I just sent one yesterday, actually. I hope I'm not telegraphing too much, but you know what style I would prefer, of course. So, yes, I would say I generally prefer the double opt in. Every once in a while, there's a person where I know, look, they would be insane not to want to make this connection. And so I'll just make it. I've done that. I always default to the double opt in, but on a few occasions where I haven't, where I've just thrown two people together, I have literally said that you would be insane not to want to know each other. Those are easy to predict. So I had an example this last year. I was going to tape a live podcast episode with Malcolm Gladwell, and we're sitting in the green room beforehand. He's like, I'm doing this episode, my podcast on why you should pull your goalie. And I really want to talk to Sam Harris, but I can't find anyone who knows him, right? And I'm like, Wait, I'm sure you know lots of people who know him, but I just met Sam, like, I think it was a week after we met, right? And I didn't ask you if you wanted to meet him, but I assume, like, in general, you're probably happy to see him out of that. But I apologize. Yeah. Although I landed that connection landed me in the weirdest episode of a podcast because I don't know if you heard that was subsequent interview, but it was just he was interviewing me about home invasions and fascinating. My wife and I probably had a two hour debate about it afterwards, so interesting. Yeah. But anyway but yeah, I think that it's reasonable to assume that if there's one person who can help the other, the receiver would be happy to receive that connection. Right. To change topics here, what do we know about creativity at this point? I think we know a lot about how to thwart it. I think we know how to undermine it as parents and teachers. I think we know how to stifle it at work. And I think most of what I know about how to unleash it is basically getting the obstacles out of the way. So you want to talk about kids, adults? Both yeah, let's talk about both. Let's focus on creativity. But I actually would like to know how your just understanding of psychology may or may not have affected your parenting. Because, Josh, I'm amazed at how little science seeps through into one's daily life. I haven't focused on developmental psychology or any of the relevant fields narrowly, but I just know from talking to people like Paul Bloom or people who are closer to those data, it's amazing how little it constrains or inspires our parenting. I think it's one of the most irresponsible things we do as a society, is I mean, we don't educate parents in the most basic knowledge about developmental psychology. Right? And I'm kind of torn on that because on the one hand, just as a casual consumer of that literature, not somebody who's ever really contributed to it, I've learned a lot from it. On the other hand, I never wanted to be one of those psychologists who screwed up our kids, which I feel like was kind of the norm. But also, I've been pretty persuaded by the wealth of evidence on behavioral genetics that says a lot of what we think are parenting effects, shared genes. And that's why I say I think it's easy to undermine a kid, right? So not being supportive, not showing unconditional love, really easy to damage a child. Right. We have decades of evidence on the you would know this as a neuroscientist, right, on how much harm you can do by depriving children, by exposing them to chronic stress, abuse, poverty, etc. But I think if you take out all the bad things that happen to kids, I'm not sure how much upside there is around trying to be the world's best parent right, or trying to get it perfect, as opposed to just saying, look, we're all going to make mistakes no matter how hard we try at it. But I guess there are a few things that that I think we ought to be aware of as parents. I think the biggest thing I've learned as a parent, actually, is that a big part of being creative is building resilience, because I think part of having ideas that are novel is it requires you to face rejection. It makes you feel like you're alone. Right. As a nonconformist who is maybe not fitting in. And there's some evidence that the most creative kid in a classroom is the least likely to be the teacher's pet. Because creative kids are annoying in class. Right. I know, even as a teacher of college students and MBA students, that the ones who are wildly creative, they're not quite sticking with the lesson plan, and they often want to take the conversation onto a tangent. And then I worry that the rest of the class is going to miss out on the key concepts we were going to COVID So when I when I think about all of that, I think that if you are going to be creative, one of the skills that you need early on is you need to be comfortable with disapproval socially. And I think that one of the ways you foster that comfort is you encourage kids to think for themselves and recognize that they don't always need the approval of a parental figure in order to feel okay. And there are some interesting ways to do this, but one that I've applied with our kids is I read all this research showing that one of the beliefs that kids need in order to be resilient is they need to feel that they matter. And mattering in sociology has three components. One is that other people notice me. Two is they care about me. And three is they rely on me. I think most parents are pretty good at the first two, but we miss out on the third, which is I matter when I feel that other people are counting on me. And I think too many parents let kids be helpless. Right. There's all this discussion now about snowplow parenting, where we clear the path for kids as opposed to preparing kids for the path. Right. And so I thought, okay, we're supposed to show our kids that we are willing to rely on them. So one of the things I'll do is when I'm nervous before a big speech, let's say I'll actually go to our kids and ask them for advice on how to handle that. Oh, interesting. Remind me, your kids are what ages? So they're eleven, eight and five. So very young to imagine they could actually contribute to your well being in that way. Yeah. I mean, I don't have high hopes for our five year olds advice on that all the time. No, I know, but just the fact that you would kind of model that reciprocity is interesting. Yeah. I don't want them to feel like I'm needing it. Right. I want to show them that I value their input. Right. As a team effort. Yeah, exactly. And so the great thing about that is, one, I've signaled that I have confidence in their ability to think through how would I handle a stressful situation? Two, I then get to watch them practice their own problem solving. The first time I did this, actually, was before I gave my first talk at Ted. And, you know, I talked to our oldest, and she gave me a bunch of, like, pretty good tips and, you know, said, hey, you know, you should you should think about what, you know, why you're excited to give this speech and who, you know, in the audience. It could help. And then a few weeks later, of course, she's in a school play and she's nervous. And instead of me giving her advice, she gets to think for herself and know that she already has some ideas about how to handle that situation. And I think we could give kids those opportunities more often. Right. Instead of telling them how to solve a problem, we ought to give them opportunities to think through the problem themselves and even show them that we're willing to consider their advice. Yeah, that's great. So how does unconditional love mesh with this concept of grit that we have been hearing more about? Well, it's interesting because Angela Duckworth is a close colleague of mine who put grit on the map in her research, and she has found the exact same thing for parenting that I've found for work, which is there's a two by two in the work world. I've talked about this in terms of giving and taking and then how agreeable and disagreeable people are, which, just as a quick aside, I used to assume that being agreeable meant you were going to be a giver, because if you're nice and friendly and warm, you're going to be helpful. But the data I've gathered suggests that those are independent and that agreeableness is about, on the surface, how pleasant is it to interact with you? Whereas giving and taking, what are those real intentions deep down? And so when you draw the two by two, I've found that often the best leaders are the disagreeable givers who dole out more tough love, who challenge you because they care about you. And Angela has a two by two of parenting that's almost identical, which is, how supportive are you? That's your unconditional love factor. And then the other axis is, how demanding are you? And the goal is to be in the high, high cell and say, I am both supportive and demanding. Now, to your point earlier about situations, it's really hard to be both in one sentence, right? Yeah. But I think over time, grit comes from your kids feeling like you believe in their potential. You care about them and their well being and success, but also you have really high expectations and standards for them. And I don't think those things have to be at odds. I think I would like another axis there, which is we can't see in three dimensions it's too complicated, which is honesty. Maybe it collapses down to one of the other two. But people often think that in order to truly be supportive, there are some circumstances where you have to lie to people and you have to tell a white lie in order to not give them a truth, which they might find disappointing or dispiriting. But I've been on this hobby horse for more than a decade now and I find that I find this as apparent as well. It's an immense reservoir of confidence interpersonally for the other person to know that you will never lie to them. Right. Because then when you're praising them, they know you're not bullshitting them. And I don't know, I think it's not something that is explicit in many people's thinking here. It's just like if you're just trying to be supportive and demanding by turns to take those two variables, it's easy to see how the level of honesty may just accidentally fall wherever it falls. That's one of the reasons that I like the disagreeable giver idea, the language at least better than demanding and supportive. Because I think at part of the heart of being disagreeable is saying, look, I'm going to tell you the truth that you need to hear, even if you don't want to hear it. Right. And as somebody who by personality, you could probably tell I skew much more in the agreeable direction. And I think one of my Achilles heels in my career has been wanting to be liked. One of the things I've tried to learn over time is to say, look, yes, in the short run this is more painful to tell people a hard truth than it is to tell them what seems like a kind lie. But in the long run, that's not creating a foundation where people trust me and where I have integrity. And so I have an aspiration to be more disagreeable. And sometimes I've over corrected on that. But I think that yeah, I mean, this goes back to the idea that you want to challenge network, not just a support network. Right. People who are willing to pick your arguments apart because they think it's important for you to get it right. Yeah. Actually, there's one more point on creativity that I think you made in one of your books. I think it's been made elsewhere too. But one of the false assumptions about creativity is that there's just a higher quality of work coming out of creative people, whereas it seems like it's. And correct me if the research hasn't backed this up, but it seems like there's just a in most cases, it's just a higher volume of work, and then it's just more at the far end of the distribution to choose from. Yeah. The dominant finding in the creativity of literature is the more creative you are, the more bad ideas you have. And that's just because you generate more ideas. And I think Dean Simonson, who's a very prolific psychologist who studied this pretty extensively throughout history, is Dean would say that you want to think about creativity as fundamentally Darwinian, that you have what's essentially blind variation that as a creator. You are too close to the idea and have too little access to the taste of your audience or the needs of your field to really judge whether your ideas are any good. And so you have to generate enough blind variation that some of those ideas will be selectively retained. So you look at classical composers, for example, and there is good evidence that one of the distinguishing factors that made Beethoven and Bach and Mozart better than their peers is they generated often not just twice as much work, but ten times as much work as most other composers. And what that means is their mean composition is not considered greater than lesser musicians, but their peak is higher because they had more shots on goal, essentially. You can also see this within people's careers, though. So Simon Tit did an analysis of Thomas Edison's innovations over time, and he found that the periods in which he generated the most patents were also the periods in which he had the best shot at a truly influential patent. And that during the same window where he he kind of did the work, sort of pioneering the light bulb, whether or not he actually invented it at all. He was also trying to create a fruit preservation technique that totally backfired, may have even caused fruit to rot faster. Not sure. He created a technique for mining iron ore that didn't work, invented a doll so creepy that it scared adults and kids. So you look at that, and it's like, okay, I was the same inventor. Yeah. But Shakespeare, same thing, you know, same period. He was working on some of his greatest hits. Like, he goes, macbeth was was also the time when he wrote Tomon of Athens, which nobody thought was any good. So I think yeah, I think there's a rule that says you have to generate a sufficient quantity to stumble onto some quality. There was an anecdote, you tell in give and take that I hadn't heard. I was amazed that I hadn't heard it upon reading it. But this goes to the consequences of being a taker or an apparent taker, even in great success. Just the story of Jonas Salk and his press conference. Maybe you can tell that because I genuinely hadn't heard it. And I'm amazed, given how famous he was and how much he appears to have contributed to our well being. It's just an amazing story. I was shocked when I stumbled onto the story. I had no idea, because Jonah Sulk's a hero, right? When you think about givers, when I think societally, right, great people throughout the past century, he was pretty close to the top of my list, and I actually started looking into him because I was interested in writing a chapter about sharing credit. And I thought, oh, a great scientist who did so much good is probably an exemplar. And when I look for stories, when I write, I always start with the science and then say, let me find a good example to illustrate it. And so I had a bunch of studies about credit that I wanted to bring to life. And I went to Salk, and I read this really surprising article by a historian that said Sulk was asked why he didn't patent his vaccine when he first generated it. And he said, well, you can't patent the sun. You wouldn't patent the sun. It's a public good. It turns out it was a lie. It turns out his vaccine wasn't patentable. And so he was trying to paint himself as this very altruistic guy when in fact, the due diligence has been done and a patent was not obtainable because I think the work was not sufficiently novel. Right. So that was the first layer. And then I thought, okay, I've got to learn more about this guy. He's obviously a more complicated figure than he seems to be. And I read a whole book. It was a biography of it was a biography of Polio, really, but it was sort of a biography of Salt in a way. And I learned a couple of things. One was that he would always refuse press interviews because he was too busy, and then he would allow himself to be cajoled into saying, yes, and then I'm doing all this important work, but if you really need me, I can talk to you. Again, trying to paint this picture of himself as somebody who had these very noble ideals. And then the kicker was he had a core lab of people who really did essential work. Without them, there would be, I think, no Sulk vaccine. And he snubbed them. He refused to give them credit for the work that they did. When they made the big announcement, they finally had the vaccine available. He didn't mention any of their names and basically fractured his relationship with all these people. Yeah, they were left in tears from that press conference. Paramount. Yeah. Actually crying. And these were people who toiled away trying to work on a problem that was so critical to humanity and just wanted their boss to say their name, and he wouldn't do it. And it was apparently really important to him that he was the the sole inventor. And, you know, again, not even an invention, per se, but there's this whole debate about whether he then was blackballed from the National Academy of Sciences because of that or because his work was too applied and people didn't see it as making a basic contribution to knowledge. But I think that we see this a lot. I think there are a lot of people who work very hard to craft images as givers. And if you look at. The way that they dole out blame and take credit. It doesn't really follow the value system that you would hope for. All right, well, another lateral move to the topic of meditation, which I warned you about. So you wrote an op ed in The New York Times, which was widely considered a broadside against the scientific consensus. Is that how it was viewed or the rumors thereof about the utility of mindfulness? I don't think that's true. It's interesting that you say that. Why do you think it was perceived that way? It wasn't my intent. I don't think we have to get into the weeds of that. I think what would inform this conversation more is that I heard you do a podcast with my friend Dan Harris, who's got the 10% Happier Podcast and Meditation app by that name. And Dan is just a hardcore evangelist for meditation now because he's found it so useful in his life. So you had a conversation there where your basic skepticism about just the whole project, whether there's a there there came out, but it was in your oped as well. Basically, you and I are going to agree here that the science in support of the benefits of meditation is thinner than many people would acknowledge who are relying on it. Right. It's being hyped. Yeah. And I think any any serious scientist will tell you that. I guess the the better way to put that is that there's a range of kind of quality of science attesting to the benefits of meditation, and some of it is obviously thin, some of it's obviously interesting, but all of it's preliminary. Right. I would put Richie Davidson on the side of obviously interesting, but still preliminary. Yeah. But so to come in at the ground floor here, I think you were talking about with Dan. Having met so many people whose lives they imagined had been changed by the practice of meditation and the evangelism was starting. To rub you the wrong way such that you look at the data coupled to the personal enthusiasms of annoying people, cause you to say, all right, enough is enough. I'm not interested in this. So how would I don't know. When you recorded this conversation with Dan, it must have been about a year ago, but in the fall, I think, actually. So, yeah. Give me your hot take on meditation, and then I will try to perform an exorcism on you. Oh, well, apparently, I didn't know I was possessed. This is interesting. You're possessed by doubt. I think we should all be possessed by doubt more often. Isn't that a preset of science? Up to a point. Even without having an experience in it? I think there are things that you could understand conceptually that would make it seem obviously of greater interest than whether or not it was something that you wanted to act on. Well, anyway, we'll get there. I just want to get you up to the minute take, and then I'll say a few things that Dan didn't say in his exchange with you. I believe that I think it could be more interesting to me than I let on. I think I have a natural skepticism of anything that has evangelism behind it, and I think my responsibility as a social scientist is to look at the evidence and ask in a balanced way, what do we really know? And I actually started reading mindfulness research in 1999 before the make mindfulness movement took off, and one of the first observations that I thought was interesting is, you can become mindful without meditating. You can at least create a state of mindfulness by teaching people to think in conditionals rather than absolutes, and you could also get there by teaching people to just notice the things in their environment. Right. So I felt like my early assumption was, we ought to decouple meditation from mindfulness, because there are many ways of cultivating and focusing attention on the present. There are many ways of learning to be nonjudgmental, and meditation might be one path there, but like any complex system that's governed by equifinality right. That there are multiple routes to the same end, maybe there are other ways you could get there, too. So that's kind of where I came in. And then it's all these people started saying, well, I mean, I felt like I was I was getting judged, like, so what kind of meditation do you do? I don't well, wait, I'm sorry. What? How could you not? What's wrong with you? And you know, that that only happens so many times where you think, like, I didn't even know that that was a virtue to meditate. I just thought it was a practice that some people like, in the same way that some people prefer to go running and others prefer to play basketball. Right. I guess. Well, I think what's starting to happen for people is there's this expectation that its benefits have been so obviously demonstrated that it is analogous to physical exercise, where it's like, wait a minute. You don't exercise at all. You don't run, you don't bike. You don't lift weights. That begins to seem pathological, and I would imagine the circles in which you run, if you're going to conferences like Ted or wherever, you're surrounded by people who would assume that the benefits are so clear cut that you're taking some kind of stand for not being interested. Yeah. No. Which which obviously was not my intent. I just I think it's never I mean, I've I've tried it. It's never I probably had not been taught a way to do it that worked for me. It had never it never just felt like something that was that I wanted to make time for. And my big beef was that, aside from the fact that I think the claims far outstripped the science, how many randomized, controlled trials do we really have looking at isolating meditation from all of the different components of activity that you might be able to get without meditating. And then how objective are the outcomes and how how consistently do they work? Is it effective for most of the people in most of the situations? I feel like there are a lot of open questions there, but I don't disbelieve that. I think it's probably helpful for most people in most situations if the goal is to reduce stress or to cultivate mindfulness. I looked at that and I said, okay, but we see the same effects on stress reduction of exercise, we see very similar effects on mindfulness of some of these other activities that I mentioned. And so my feeling had been I like to use my time productively. I'm not someone who's good at, quote unquote, doing nothing. And I realize that meditation is not doing nothing, but when I compare it to reading where I feel like I get some of the same benefits, I'd rather read when I compare it to exercise, I'd rather spend an extra ten minutes or 1 hour a day doing more exercise than I would meditating. And by the way, I can think and reflect while I do that. And so I was just reacting to the feeling of being forced to do this one activity that I think the science suggests is probably helpful, but I don't feel like I need it. And the funny part to me was when I would ask people why are you so evangelistic about it? And the common answer was, well, it helps me quiet my monkey mind. And all the chatter. I've never heard voices in my head. I don't know what a monkey mind is and I don't think I have one. Well, this is the interesting part. This is the part that made me think we had to talk about this. Good. Tell me, I guess one more question. Have you ever done psychedelics? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our Subscriber feed feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, well, 2020 is upon us. Where are the flying cars? Surely the future officially begins now. Okay, just brief housekeeping here. The Waking Up app is now unlocked until the end of the year. So if you're interested in trying it or you're already using it and you want to recommend it to others, now is a very good time because all of the content is available until New Year's Day, and I hope you enjoy it. As always, if you have any issues with the app, please contact support at wakingupcom and they will sort you out. And today's conversation is appearing both on the app and the podcast. That doesn't usually happen, but sometimes there's a conversation that seems relevant to both audiences, and this is one of those times. Today I'm speaking with Judson Brewer. Judd is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University. He's also a research affiliate at MIT, and before that, he held research and teaching positions at Yale University and at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness. Judd is also the founder of a digital therapeutics platform, Mind Sciences, and the author of the book The Craving Mind from Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love, why We Get Hooked and how we can break bad Habits, and in this episode, we talk about mindfulness and addiction and the nature of reward based learning, the neuroscience of craving, real time neuroimaging smoking cessation through mindfulness, the difference between dopamine driven reward and real happiness, working with anxiety and other topics. And now, without further delay, I bring you Judson Brewer. I am here with Judd Brewer. JuD, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. So give us the potted biography of your intellectual interests and what you're doing professionally. Now, before we dive in, I'm an addiction psychiatrist and a neuroscientist. I'm the director of Research and Innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center and the founder of Mind Sciences, which makes app based mindfulness training programs for habit change. So what is your background in meditation? How did you get interested in it and what sort of training have you done? I started meditating my first day of medical school through the background of suffering with that 10,000 hours rule, I certainly achieved that early on in my life with regard to 10,000 hours of suffering. So I can say I'm an expert there. But started meditating. Yeah, I was really struggling at the beginning of medical school, figured it was starting something new in my life, and I started meditating to see what that would be like and to see if it could help with some of the stress and started practicing. I didn't know that there were different traditions. Right. I joined a local sanga in St. Louis where I was going to medical school, which turned out to be led by first by a Zen practitioner and then a Terravatan practitioner. And then I found a teacher in, you know, in the Midwest and started practicing Terravatan, you know, the Terravadan tradition and have largely focused there over the last 20 plus years. Most recently, I've been studying with Joseph Goldstein, who has, you know, an eclectic style, has studied with a bunch of different teachers, and I've also been doing some collaboration with Dan Brown, who's more in the Tibetan lineage. So I've been learning a fair amount of Zogchen, both from a practice perspective, but also to help make sure that the research that we do is accurate. Nice. And when you went into medical school, did you know immediately that you wanted to go into psychiatry, or was that a later epiphany? Let's say later. As in, it was the last thing that I thought I was going to do when I was in this MD PhD program, where you do a couple of years of medical school, and then you do your PhD for long enough to forget everything that you've learned in medical school, and then you go back into the wards. And so when I went back into the wards for my third year of medical school, I figured I would do psychiatry as a way to remember how to interview patients. Right. And then I realized that what my patients were talking about was really using the same language as the Buddhists and also that psychiatry was in tremendous need of good treatments, especially for addictions. And that seems to be a sweet spot of the Buddha craving and clinging. Yeah, the lens through which the Buddha looked at the whole problem of unenlightment is really one of craving and its consequences. And there's a very helpful analogy drawn here between addiction and these ancient methods of practice. And you do this in your book The Craving Mind. So let's talk about that. Maybe that's the right way in before we get to the esoterica of how mindfulness can help. What is addiction and how should we be thinking about it? I like the simple definition of continued use despite adverse consequences. I learned that in residency training. And the American Society of Addiction Medicine just came out with a definition that very much parallels that continued use despite adverse consequences, which not only points out that we can be addicted to chemicals but we can be addicted to behaviors ranging from our cell phones, these weapons of mass distraction, to thinking. We can be addicted to our own thoughts or our own views. Right. I sense that many people will balk at that definition. It seems somehow or can seem somehow too capacious. Are we really saying or do we want to say that addiction to something like cigarettes is precisely on the same continuum as addiction to smartphones or thinking or shopping or gambling? Isn't there some significance to the fact that in one case someone could be using a chemical the cessation of which would lead to withdrawal? Or is there a biochemistry that kind of holds people hostage in a way that behavioral addictions don't quite or is it really just once you get in there, it's just neurophysiology whether you have exogenous compounds on board or not. And really it's the same mechanism. I think there are two aspects here. One is that we can look at physical dependence where we certain if you jack the brain with dopamine which every known drug of abuse has been shown to do, it's going to lead to receptor modulation. And that, for example, with alcohol or nicotine or opioids or whatever, you're going to see receptor up and down regulation. And that can take a while to normalize. So I think that piece hasn't been that physical dependence piece can be separated from the continued use despite adverse consequences. And so I think that's where the playing field gets leveled. Somebody can be drinking alcohol and not have consequences. Somebody else can be drinking alcohol and it can be having severe consequences. Somebody can be using their smartphone. Same thing. They could be texting while driving and getting into an accident while somebody else uses their smartphone responsibly, let's say. Right. I guess there's a little wiggle room in the definition or in the who's defining the adverse consequences. Right? I mean, there are probably people who by any outside estimation are addicted to whatever their smartphones or gambling and yet they have a problem admitting that they have a problem. Yeah. And I think we see this in psychiatry where it's helpful to get information not only from the person who might be referred to us or come in to see me as a psychiatrist, but also from collateral where it's family, friends, coworkers, whatnot. And like you're pointing out, somebody might not think they have a problem no matter whatever the substance or the behavior is, but it might be causing significant adverse consequences to all the people around them. And so I think of despite adverse consequences meaning not just what somebody thinks is happening but really having as much of an objective perspective as possible. And that includes many points of view. Yeah. And perhaps the most subtle addiction here. And many people, again, will find it strange to be conjoining these concepts addiction and thinking. But you mentioned one being addicted to thinking and this is really something that you encounter when you try to meditate especially intensively on silent retreat. Just the automaticity of being lost in discursive thought. The fact that it's our default state despite our most heroic efforts to pay attention. In this case, we've deranged our lives and gone into silence with the goal of paying attention moment to moment, and yet the thoughts don't stop. How do you think about thinking in light of this sort of addiction framing and just, I guess, the underlying mechanics of reward based learning and processing? Well, I guess I should say, hi, my name is Judd. I'm a Thinkaholic. How many days sober do you have? None. I'm on day one. I remember my first seven day silent meditation retreat. This is when I was in medical school and by day three, I was crying uncontrollably on the shoulder of the retreat manager because I didn't think I could do this, I could pay attention to my breath. That's always encouraging a psychiatrist to weep openly on the shoulder of a stranger. Yes. So I think in terms of what I've seen from my own experience and also what I've now begun to understand scientifically, and this is also how mindfulness comes in. There's this idea that we can just control ourselves and thinking is a great example of really not having any control because we can't just stop our thoughts. We might be able to create conditions where the mind is quiet, but if we just get up there and hold up the stop sign and say, okay, thoughts, take a break, they come at us like zombies and it becomes the thought apocalypse. So that's one I think in terms of addiction. I also remember being on a month long retreat and it took me a full day or so to realize that I would be having these thoughts and they'd be saying, oh, this is this is a great experiment. If you do not write this down, you know, you will forget it and then it will be lost. And I would, you know, get up from the cushion and then write it down and then sit down again. And then the next world's greatest thought came up and then do the same thing. And I was like, wait a minute, this is this is my mind not just not wanting to meditate. So I think in terms of the looking at this from an addictive perspective, it might be helpful just to even think about what the general framework of reward based learning is because that can also explain where addiction can move, not just from alcohol in the typical ones, but even to thinking and views and things like this. So there's a very simple framework that has three components trigger a behavior and a reward. And this framework is set up to help us remember where food is and how to avoid danger. So basically, if you see food that's the trigger. You eat the food that's the behavior. And then your stomach sends this dopamine signal to your brain that says, remember what you ate, where you found it. There's the reward, or quote unquote reward from a brain perspective. It's basically it lays down context dependent memory. Same for avoiding danger. You see the danger, you run away and then the reward is that you're alive to tell your buddies, don't go over there. That's kind of dangerous. So that's the basic framework for reward based learning. Now there are a couple of important components that really explain a lot of modern day maladies that we don't quite understand with this. Reward based learning is based on rewards, not on the behavior itself. And I mentioned that because in modern day we try everything from dieting to trying to make our mind silent when we're meditating. But we use the brute force method where it's like, okay, just stop. That's what I was trying to do. I used to sweat through t shirts in the middle of winter at this center, the Insight Meditation Society up in Massachusetts where it's cold. I'd sweat through t shirts trying to force myself not to think and to just stay concentrated on my breath. Well, this is the same thing that people do when they're trying to lose weight and they use a traditional diet which just says, make sure you eat salad instead of cake. Well, it makes sense. The formula is correct, but that's not how our minds work. So the reward based learning reminds us that it's not the behavior, it's the reward, how rewarding a behavior is. And that's what's going to drive future behavior. And understanding this was really key not only for my lab in developing app based mindfulness training programs, for example, but also understanding the underlying neural mechanisms of what's going on. And also personally, it really helps me be able to pay attention to my breath or pay attention to an object of meditation rather than trying to force it. And it's also more the anticipation of reward than it is the actual landing on the object of desire, right? It's both actually. So the dopamine fire is the first time we get a reward and if it happens repeatedly, that dopamine firing and that's that anticipation piece that feels like that dopamine firing shifts from receipt of reward to anticipation of reward. So it actually starts firing when we have a trigger or when we have a thought could be a trigger, where we start thinking about getting that thing. It motivates us to get off the couch and go do that behavior because remember, this is all set up to motivate us to eat and to motivate us to run away from danger so that anticipation pieces go do something. So you're saying that it's initially encoded by the actual reward, but in future instances it starts prior to the reward, just when we're actually engaging the routine that would reliably deliver the reward? Yes. For example, usually this has to do with unanticipated reward. So if I'm walking down the street and suddenly I find a chocolate bar that's my favorite chocolate bar, my brain says, oh, wow, that was a surprise. And that, oh, wow, surprise, says, oh, you just won the chocolate lottery. And so then the next time I walk down that street, my brain will say, oh, I wonder if there's another chocolate bar there. And so the trigger of the context that walking down that street says, oh, go look for chocolate. In your book, you draw an analogy between the cycle of learning, which is in the behaviorist literature going back to Skinner, was called operant conditioning. There's an analogy to draw there between that mechanism and the Buddhist framing of dependent origination. I don't know if you want to unpack that for us. Yeah, I'd be happy to. So dependent origination is reportedly what the Buddha was contemplating on the night of his enlightenment. Now, that sounds kind of important. This is what the dude was contemplating, and then he became awakened, and he became enlightened. So I worked with a poly scholar, Jake Davis, because as I was studying dependent origination personally, I was studying behavior change professionally as an addiction psychiatrist and was starting to see the importance of operating conditioning, which is basically that reward based learning cycle that I talked about. And we looked at the parallels, and it was striking how similar these two frameworks were. There were slight differences in terminology in terms of some language that the Buddhists were using and some language that the behaviors were using, but basically, it was the same process. And what it suggested was that the Buddha had basically discovered what we now think of in modern day as reward based learning before paper had even been invented. And this discovery in modern day science, just to put it in perspective, was so huge that Eric Kendall won the Nobel Prize in the year 2000, showing that this process is evolutionarily conserved all the way back to the sea slug. So a critically important concept, whether it was the Buddha becoming awakened or Eric Candel getting his Nobel Prize, showing that this is a very fundamental learning process. So in the Buddhist framework, there's this capacity of the mind to notice the feeling valence of a stimulus. So you can notice whether something's pleasant or unpleasant and craving follows from that. There's craving and identification with it. And I think we now know something about the neural correlates of these processes. What does your work tell you about what the brain is doing when we're feeling desire for a stimulus? And that desire is made actionable because there's no distance between attention and the desire itself? Yes. So why don't we start at the vadena, the pleasant and unpleasant aspect in Buddhist terms, unpleasant or sometimes neutral. In operant conditioning or modern day psychology terms, pretty similar terms are used. Something feels pleasant, something feels unpleasant, and what both frameworks show is that whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, both of them lead to a craving. So we want more of the pleasant and we want less of the unpleasant. So you can think of an anti craving or aversion. We have a craving and aversion, and then that leads in the Buddhist terminology, to clinging or upadana, which can be also suggest. A translation can be sustenance where we're fueling that fire of craving and by behaving, we start to become identified with that behavior. So if it's eating chocolate, I can start to become identified with eating certain types of chocolate, like dark chocolate versus milk chocolate. Or if I have a certain political propensity, I could start becoming identified with a certain type of view or set of views where I am this versus not that. And the more we perform the behavior, whether it's eating chocolate or thinking this is the right view, the more we become identified with that. Now, interestingly, in ancient Buddhist terms, they said that the cycle is perpetuated through ignorance. And in modern day, I think of this as that cycle is perpetuated through I use the term subjective bias. And so the term ignorance and subjective bias, I would suggest are basically the same thing, meaning that we become biased based on our previous behavior. So we're not seeing the world clearly. We're seeing it through these lenses of our previous behavior. So if I see chocolate, I'm going to see it through the lenses of, oh, I like, or I don't like that type of chocolate based on my previous behavior. So the subjective bias, the Buddhist would suggest is ignorance because we're not actually seeing clearly. And I like the interpretation of the term Vipassana, which literally means seeing clearly. It's as though we're taking off those subjective bias classes. Yeah, there's an interesting connection here between the more creaturely levels of craving and wanting and identification and something that seems far more recent an acquisition. In evolutionary terms. You're talking about political views, right? So the fact that one's sense of identification, the sense of self, can be an emergent property of kind of contracting within the domain of either of these things, whether it's the taste of chocolate, the wanting of it, the preference for one form or another and just holding to an opinion that one has entertained and become attached to, this can sound surprising. But just in evolutionary terms, we didn't add entirely new modules to the ape brain to become human, right? The only way we acquire new abilities is by extending the processing reach of structures that were already there. And so the same circuitry that's encoding disgust over being confronted by something toxic that you don't want to get into your mouth, it's that same processing that is underwriting moral intuitions and even judgments of the truth or falsity of ideas. From the side of experience in meditation, this really isn't surprising. I mean, you can feel in yourself. The difference between identification, attachment, the sort of cramp of self around any of these things, wanting another bite of cake. We've all had this experience of you're eating some dessert, which you're very happy to be eating, and someone, usually your spouse, will ask for a bite of it when you're down to the last bite, right? And you feel viscerally that something in you, some homunculus in you, has not budgeted for the possibility of having to give up that last bite. Your pleasure extended to the remaining bite. You would have happily, perhaps given an earlier bite, but surely not the last one. That feeling of kind of emotional impediment that is tied in the middle of virtually everything that feels like me. Do we know much at this point about the underlying neuroanatomy of these processes? I'm glad you brought in these terms around contraction and basically clinging, the closed down quality of experience, because that's something that my lab has kind of serendipitously fallen into studying. And if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, fear, for example, feels contracting, right? And the idea is to make ourselves as small an object as possible, protect our vital organs from whatever it is that's about to eat us. Now, that's very different than the feeling of, say, joy or connection, which feels much more expansive or even curiosity. So just anchoring us on that framework and that feeling of contraction versus expansion. My lab was studying experienced meditators. This is back 2000 and 910. Eleven, yeah, almost a decade ago, where we were just trying to understand what the basic brain activity looked like in experience versus novice meditators. And we were actually looking for convergence. So we studied a bunch of different types of practices. So we had people practice like a concentration practice, like breath awareness, a loving kindness practice, more of a connection practice, and then a choiceless awareness practice, where they were not focused on any particular object, but just whatever came into their awareness was the object of their awareness in that moment. And we looked to see what was common amongst those three meditation practices. And what we found was very striking. One was we didn't find a single brain region that was increased in activity in experience versus novice meditators, which was a little shocking to me and I think went against my primary hypothesis was that there must be some brain region activating, because I'm sure working my ass off. This is back before I really you know, I was only ten years into practice and still didn't have quite a clue about what force was like. But the other thing that we found was that there were particular brain regions that were deactivated in Experience versus novice meditators. And these had to do with this network called the default mode network that has to do with self referential processing. So when we take something personally, basically this network of brain regions gets activated. So for example, let's use our example of the cake. It's like, oh, I want that last piece of cake. And we're kind of holding on to it. We're clinging to it, so to speak. It also happens when we ruminate, when we're depressed. It happens when we persevere, when we're anxious, when we're worried about the future. So there are a bunch of different things that when we take them personally, when we're worried about the future, when we regret things in the past, when we want that piece of cake, they all activate the default mode network. And lo and behold, this same network was deactivated in experienced meditators. Now, I've spoken about the default mode network before in this context, is the finding the same for the medial prefrontal cortex as the posterior cingulate, or are we mostly talking about the posterior cingulate for these deactivation? Yeah, it's a great question. We've done most of our experiments in the posterior cingulate cortex, and that's because that was the strong brain region that had the most deactivation and experienced versus non meditators and also pragmatically. When we started doing real time neurofeedback experiments, we didn't have the techniques to be able to give feedback from multiple brain regions at once. The two are pretty highly correlated. But most of the work that we've done has been with the posterior singlet. And there's also a theoretical reason for that, which is the medial prefrontal cortex. Part of the prefrontal cortex, which is a younger part of the brain, has been more linked to the conceptual sense of self. Whereas the posterior cingulate cortex and this was actually through some work that we'd done and others had done, seems to be more linked to an experiential sense of self and is also directly anatomically connected to brain regions involved in memory, like the hippocampus. So the posterior single, it's what we've been focused on primarily. But a fair number of the studies have shown that the both are pretty intimately correlated. So we wanted to actually understand what this deactivation meant, because there's a big issue in neuroimaging and neuroscience around reverse inference, where if you see a brain region activated, you assume that something is happening based on what other people have done in other experiments. But you can't make that assumption accurately because it could be doing something else, and we just don't know it. So the best way to reduce that likelihood is to do real time experiments where you can measure brain activity and show people their brain activity in real time while they're doing a particular task. In our case, we were having people meditate, and that way you can link up the subjective experience, the first person subjective experience with their brain activity in real time and really know what's going on. So we did a bunch of these experiments with novice and experienced meditators, and we found something that was really striking, which was that this activation in the posterior singular cortex was correlated not just with things like mind wandering or craving, but it's the degree to which people get caught up in that experience. And we found this because not only were things like craving or mind wandering activating these brain regions which other people had found before, but we found that other experiences were also activating it, such as when people were trying to meditate harder, as one person put it. They were looking at the graph as an object of meditation and they said, I tried to be more aware of it or force it, basically. And that actually induced increased activity or increased activation of the posterior cingulate cortex, whereas other people were reporting that the more they let go and stopped trying to do anything, the less their posterior signal it was activated. So you mentioned that you gave people three different practices to do and two of them were essentially mindfulness, but one was to focus exclusively on the breath and the other was choiceless awareness, which is to say you just leave your attention wide open and notice whatever you notice. Were those different in terms of the activity of the posterior singlet? They both showed deactivation in experience versus novice meditators, as in when people were focusing on that object, whether it's the breath or just anything coming into their awareness, the less they tried or the less they got caught up in doing and were just resting in awareness, the more deactivated they're posterior singularly gone, right? You can feel this subjectively. This is the difference between feeling like the meditator, right, where you're strongly identified with the aiming of your attention. You're the locus of attention in the head and you're now pointing attention strategically at the breath and trying to get closer to it and noticing the competition between that. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, not much housekeeping today. Just a reminder that Enterprise accounts are available on the Waking Up app. If you're interested in that or work for a company that might be interested, you can send an email to enterprise@wakingup.com and also, new features are rolling out on the app. Soon you'll be able to sit in groups with friends and colleagues. There are notifications and reminders that you can turn on in the app, which many people find useful. You can set a time to meditate each day with a reminder, and notifications will tell you when new lessons or new features are hitting the app. Anyway, things are rolling along on that front. Okay, so today I have an unusual podcast. My wife, Annika, is joining me. She's never been on the podcast before. Many of you have asked to have her on, and as luck would have it, she has a book that we were eager to talk about. The book is conscious a brief guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the mind. And let me see her bio. Onika Harris is an author, editor, and consultant for science writers. She's the author of the children's book I Wonder, and a collaborator on Susan Kaiser Greenland's mindful Games activity cards. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, and she lives with her husband, the neuroscientist, author and podcaster Sam Harris and their two children. I can confirm all of those facts. The thing that's not here, though implicit in her being an editor and consultant for science writers, onika has ended all my written work since my first book, The End of Faith, that book included. And once I discovered her talents as an editor, I recommended that she do it professionally. So she's collaborated with other scientists, neuroscientists and physicists mainly, and she wrote the children's book I Wonder, which many of you liked. But this is the first book that she's written for Grownups, and the focus of the book is the nature of consciousness and why it is so inscrutable. This is something that not everyone recognizes, and she does that remarkably well. I read some of the blurbs in a previous housekeeping, but Marco Yakaboni Neuroscientist says, I've read many, many great books on consciousness in my life as a neuroscientist. Conscious tops them all, hands down. Tim urban, the author of The Weight But Y blog, writes, one of those books that fundamentally shifts the way you think about reality. Onika Harris is a masterful explainer. Max Tegmark, physicist at MIT, writes, in this gem of a book, onika Harris tackles consciousness controversies with incisive rigor and clarity in a style that's accessible and captivating. Anyway, it's a great look at the problem of consciousness. We get into some of this over the next hour. We talk about a few other things. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the conversation. I certainly did. And now I bring you anika Harris. Okay. I got anika Harris in the studio. My own wife. Welcome. Thank you. Are you ready for this? We usually really have other people here, I think. No. To save us from ourselves. Yeah. I already can tell. I have a hostile witness here. Okay, well, you have a new book coming out for grown ups that we're going to talk about. Let's talk about how overjoyed you are to be doing this podcast. Why are you reluctant to do this? I don't think we should start with that. Why not? I don't know. Because part of it is just that this is a totally awkward thing to do, which is why I think it might be better if we have get that Michael closer to you. Okay. And point it more toward you. There you go. Like that. Yeah. First, the reality is I just realized this. Our first date was filled with a conversation about this topic. We basically spoke about consciousness and free will and the other topics in your book. Now, it may be a bad sign that that was followed by you avoiding me for six months and not returning my emails. No, but the thing I thought about also before we did this is that the friend who sat us up had said to me that she didn't know, of course, whether there'd be a romantic connection, but that she knew that we would be great friends because we talk about and think about all of the same things. And it's true. We've been thinking about a lot of the same things for most of our lives. And this was the topic of, I think, mostly what we talked about, that the first time we met was philosophy and consciousness. Not to give a false impression. We don't spend a lot of time talking about these things now. So happily, your your book is an excuse to get into it. And your book is Conscious a Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. You wanted a different title, I recall. I think you lucked out in being overruled on your title, but what was the first title? Lights on. Right. Conscious, I think, is a better title. Yeah, they were right. So thank you, dear publisher. So what's the book about, really? See, this is weird. Why did you write a book on consciousness? I think we can go back to what's the book about. I obviously know what the book is about, but why don't you say something about what the book is about? You already asked the question. Let me just try to answer. Oh, my God. All right. That is staying in the interview. That is awesome. Listen, veto balance. Listen to me. Okay. I'm going to answer. Let me answer your question. You asked a question. Let me answer it. Let me answer. This is my podcast. So you asked a question. Let me answer. Okay. All right. So my book is about the science and philosophy of consciousness, and it focuses on why consciousness is so deeply mysterious. But one of the things that it does that has always been interesting to me and that, of course, you and I've talked a lot about is breaking through false intuitions. And it's something that I find incredibly interesting to do, and interesting that we often reach deeper truths, more fundamental truths, better picture of the reality around us when we can break through intuitions that are misleading us or that are giving us false information about the world around us, even if they're helpful for us. At the time, I was thinking earlier about the fact that even as a child, this was an interesting exercise to me. This was something and I actually begin the book this way. So I talk about just my experience of breaking through the intuition, basically, that the Earth is flat and that we're on it underneath the sky rather than on a sphere in the way that we are. But I remember being a child and trying to think of paradoxes or make up paradoxes just to create this feeling of kind of breaking out of this day to day experience that I knew in some ways was misguiding me or keeping me apart from the deeper mysteries. So what are some of the intuitions that are so off around consciousness? So just to give some context, you and I both have this experience of being in dialogue with some very smart people who seem not to get the most charitable thing to say is they have fundamentally different intuitions about consciousness and what could be plausible to think about it, what's interesting about it, what is mysterious about it. This is true of free will, too. This is true of the nature of the self or its illusory nature. And those are the two big ones. Those are the big ones that I think are misleading us in terms of being able to understand consciousness, right? So free will and the self are really two sides of the same coin. And then there's the hard problem of consciousness, which is more the focus of your book, although free will and the self come up. So you and I are almost the worst people to diagnose this problem because we're totally aligned on our intuitions here, and we're fairly mystified by the responses we get from some people on these topics. So we've been in some funny circumstances, too, where we cannot let go of our side of the we happened to be in the same place at an event or dinner where we've encountered someone who has a very different intuition, and neither of us can let this debate go. And so we'll sit there for 2 hours until everyone else is left trying to get the other person to understand what we're talking about. Yeah, we basically try to perform an exorcism on this person. And I guess those people should go nameless. But we'll start with the hard problem and the intuition that some people have that it either doesn't exist or it's not hard, or there's no mystery around consciousness that's different from any other thing we don't yet understand scientifically. How do you raise this subject? I understand it in a sense because the hard problem I believe the term was coined by David Chalmers. But this is a problem that people have encountered for much longer than David Chalmers used the term in 90, 95. So it's it's a concept that has been around for a very long time. And and he gave us this shorthand, which is great and very useful in conversation. But the problem is essentially why is it that any configuration of non conscious material, since we obviously know that everything in the universe is made of the same things, the ingredients are the same for everything, but that particles get configured in such a way that suddenly the matter itself entails an experience of being that matter. And so there's almost no explanation, or there's really no explanation we could think of that we could ever give that would make it less mysterious, because it's always non conscious matter getting arranged in a very specific way so that it suddenly lights up from the inside. And so it seems that no matter how much we know about the brain, there's nothing that will ever make this less mysterious. Chalmers was contrasting this problem, this mystery to the quote unquote easier problems which are more about how the brain processes which parts of the brain are responsible for which functions and the more complex understanding that we now have since we have a science of the brain of which experiences and which behaviors are correlated with which brain states. Right. So an easy problem of consciousness would be something like why is vision the way it is? Why is there a one to one mapping, say, of the visual field onto the visual cortex? But the hard problem is, why is it like something to see? Right? Why is there an experience there at all? Yeah, as you said, it seems like you have complex systems doing complex things. At no point should it be necessary or it's certainly not obvious why it would be necessary, that it be like something from the inside to be that system. Because we know so much of this can happen unconsciously, even in our own case, where it certainly seems we'll get to that. Actually, we may not know that as much as we think we do, but now, I've just used this phrase a few times like something to be a system. And that comes from Thomas Nagel's essay, what is It Like to Be a Bat? Where he defined consciousness in these terms. If it is like something to be a bat, that's what we mean by consciousness in the case of a bat, whether we can ever understand what it's like to be a bat or not. Now, this phrase trips off our tongues without any problem, and yet I notice that it confuses many people, people who have the opposite intuition about consciousness. They either think, well, it's like something to be anything. It's like something to be that couch you're sitting on. Right? Well, but it's partly a linguistic issue that it doesn't actually mean anything. It's not as accurate as we'd like it to be. I actually like the word experience better, even though that can be misunderstood, too. But it confuses people on two levels. One, there are people who actually don't see consciousness and experience as being something unique, I guess is the right word. But there are another group of people who actually get the hard problem, but they still have a hard time getting their minds around this language. It's like something is it like something. And actually, I noticed that with most of those people, if you just have a little back and forth, they get it. And you've written about this, too, just distinguishing between collections of matter or systems that you think are having an experience and those that aren't. And that difference, that basic difference is what we mean by consciousness, what we're talking about, what is mysterious. So if you just ask the person, is there something that it's like to be you right now? Are you having an experience? And of course, they don't even have to think about it. They just reflexively answer, yes. And then you say, is it like something to be your shoelace? Or is your chair having an experience right now? Their intuition is immediately no. And so it doesn't even matter what the truth is, just being able to distinguish between, like, okay, yes, I have an immediate response to that, and so therefore, I understand what you're talking about. So I guess the confusion that I noticed is that people, when you say this phrase, what is it like to be a bat? They take the external view of that. What is it like from the outside to be that thing? Not what it's like from the inside. But then I think experience does the trick there. You can say, what kind of experience does that have? Okay, so why is it not straightforward to judge the consciousness of a system or a thing from the outside? What is the evidence that consciousness exists? Yeah. So this is so listeners know. I I begin my discussion and my basically, the book takes the reader through my own thought processes over the last 15 years or so and what I've arrived at and why I've become open to some of the stranger theories that are out there, that postulate that consciousness could be a more fundamental feature of the universe. And so I begin this investigation of breaking through our intuitions and getting as close in my own thoughts as I have been able to at what are our intuitions, and could they be wrong? And so I think the most primary intuitions we have about consciousness live in these two questions that I like to keep asking myself. And the first one is, the one you just named, is there any behavior on the outside or anything we can witness on the outside of a system that can tell us conclusively that consciousness is present in that system? And my first answer is always yes. And that's something that I then question throughout the book. But I think it's interesting because we feel very strongly that the answer is yes. If I see that my daughter has fallen down and is crying, and you ask me, is all this behavior you're seeing right now evidence that she's conscious? I would say absolutely. This is just to be clear, this is not the normal way. I parent. I'm capable of a lot, but not quite that or anything in the book. I use the example of someone witnessing a car accident, I think, and being appropriately concerned and calling 911. There's just endless amount of behaviors that we witness that we think, yes, that that is absolute evidence that that person is conscious. I mean, we can do it with animals as well. And I think it's interesting to question that, to question whether there is something that, by definition, gives us evidence that there is consciousness. There. Obviously, there are counter examples. We all meet people in dreams. Presumably they're not conscious or don't even exist, and they seem to be conscious. We will almost certainly build robots at a certain point which pass the Turing test. And if we don't understand the material basis of consciousness at the time we produce those robots, we won't know whether or not they're conscious. And yet they may seem to be conscious. Right. And then, conversely, there are people who we know, due to neurological injury are still conscious, but they can give no sign of that. One example I think you talk about in the book is Locked In Syndrome. Yeah. And I think that I actually start there with all of the cases we can give where we don't see that behavior that we would normally give. And there is a full, very complex, as complex as our own experiences right now that are present in people who are completely paralyzed. And we couldn't ever see that evidence from the outside. I think that's an interesting starting place for whether we can ever pinpoint certain behaviors that we can say conclusively are evidence of consciousness. And then the second question is essentially is consciousness doing anything? Is it serving a function? And our reflexive answer with that, again, is yes. And my intuition goes that way too. But I think these are the kind of the simplest, deepest intuitions we have. And I wanted to start there in terms of challenging our intuitions and trying to break through some of them. So an example of the second question, even though it's very similar to the first, but it's getting at it from a slightly different angle, would be, you know, just deciding to write a book or even the whole writing process. It feels very strongly that consciousness is driving all of that. It feels like every time I make a decision or plan almost anything, consciousness is the thing that's driving it. It clearly has a role in my behavior and it seems to have a role at the very beginning. And the science, actually, as you know and have talked about and written about, is the opposite. And so that's an intuition that we can start to chip away at pretty quickly. And I think you start to go down very interesting paths of contemplation when you begin with these two questions that challenge our intuitions. Yeah, so it's not clear what consciousness is doing. And the concern here in philosophy has been that consciousness is a so called epiphenomenon, which is to say it's something that stands outside the stream of phenomenon that are causal. And if consciousness is doing anything, it has to be doing it at the level of, in our case, the brain's causal pattern, the neurophysiology. So it's the most well subscribed view at this point is that consciousness, whatever it is at the level of experience, it is the fact that the lights are on, the fact that it's like something to be you in this moment. That's how it seems from the first person side. But there's some third person level of description, which is its cash value at the level of causality. So if some things can only be done consciously, that's because whatever consciousness is at the level of neurophysiology, in our case, that has to be part of the causal stream. Right? Yeah, but it's a little more mysterious than that. And you just alluded to this, which is that anything we're conscious of take your writing process, the decision to write, the decision to sit down precisely at that moment to write, the decision about where to start relative to what you had written previously, the word choice to start the next sentence. Anything you can point to in that process, no matter how deliberative it seems, is preceded by events in your brain of which you're not conscious of, which there's no conscious correlate. And the question is, why does any of that seemingly could all happen on its own? Right? So what is consciousness adding to that process. And the zombie thought experiment has always been instrumental in this. But I actually think at this point, because AI is so in our minds, because of pop culture and films, I think it's easy for us to imagine AI doing a lot of the things that we are capable of without consciousness. Like writing a book. Like writing a book. But even something like vision. It seems very natural to us that we have an experience of seeing things. And we understand that there are processes in the brain and light is bouncing off the objects in the room and hitting our retina and our brain. And we're processing this, but we can easily see that a computer, a camera, or very advanced AI could be doing all of the processing, the visual processing that we're doing without having an experience like the one we're having. It's a very specific feeling, content of consciousness to be seeing the color blue. And that's not necessarily or it doesn't seem to us to be necessary for the processing to take place. So the idea that consciousness might not be doing anything is problematic or perceived to be problematic from an evolutionary point of view because people wonder, well, then why would it have evolved? Surely it must be doing something because it must be expensive metabolically on some level, although perhaps not all that expensive. And why would this thing have emerged now? Again, not everything that's emerged has an evolutionary rationale. There are things that just have come along for free that aren't really selected for. But our intuitions are so aligned with that theory. Also. It really feels like the love and my desire to protect my child is the thing that will give me that extra power, that extra strength, that extra will. The experiential component of that, the fact that it's like something to want to protect your child rather than just blindly coded into an unconscious. It seems to us that the feelings of love and fear probably primarily, but of course, all of the other emotions and desires and intentions, it seems that our experience of them is the thing that gives them their power. Except we know the case of fear is a great example because we know that the startle response has already hit the amygdala before. You're aware you've been startled. Yeah, I think we're probably wrong about this. And again, the zombie thought experiment can get you there. But just imagining an AI that's been programmed to, above all else, protect this other robot you can call it its child, whatever it is, it doesn't seem to us that it would require that it have an experience in order to follow that programming. The argument about evolution is one that sends many people, including myself, down the path of is it possible that consciousness is a fundamental feature of all matter and it is there in some form? Of course, if we're talking very minimal forms if we're talking the level of atoms or very minimal information processing, it's important to not confuse consciousness with complex thought. No one is postulating that if it's a more fundamental feature, it is anything like a human mind and brain. Okay, so let me just understand the move you just made. So the idea that consciousness may not be doing anything seems problematic if you think that consciousness had to have emerged in the process of evolution because by default, we expect those things to have been costly in some way and to have been selected for. And therefore, by definition, they were leading to differential success in breathing and survival. So if consciousness isn't doing any of that, that seems mysterious, unless you posit that it is a far more fundamental feature of physical reality than that. And the name for that view, the general family of views in philosophy, is Panpsychism. Right. So I warned you to tread lightly on Panpsychism because it seems well, first of all, it's a terrible name. I actually kind of open the question to the world to come up with a better name. It sounds like something very unscientific or pseudoscientific. And just on the face of it, it sounds like a crazy idea, which I feel like I'm a good proponent of it. And I actually shouldn't say I'm a full proponent of it because in my book I say and I'm I'm still in the same place, that I'm really just open to it. I think it's a category of theories that are very interesting and worth exploring. I think it's just as likely that even though it is as mysterious as it is, it's possible that consciousness requires a brain and that consciousness does not emerge until we have brain or a nervous system present. But I think this other way of looking at consciousness is very interesting. And I feel like I'm a good person to fight for it or to fight for more people being open to it, because I completely dismissed it when I first encountered it. And like most people, they feel that the idea sounds completely crazy. So I cite in my book this great title of an article by Philip Goff, which is Pan psychism Is Crazy, but it's also most probably true. And that really gets at for me the point at which I started to take panpsychism more seriously. It was something that I completely dismissed when I first encountered it and thought it sounded totally crazy. We should define it too. There are different levels at which you could imagine consciousness is integrated with the stuff of things. Well, there may be three different levels at which people think consciousness could be appearing under this umbrella term panpsychism. And one is at the level of information processing, which, as far as I know, that's where David Chalmers feels that it makes the most sense for it to emerge. He may be more open to a deeper level than that now, but he writes about that. He writes about the possibility that a thermostat could be conscious. It's very minimal information processing. And then some people postulate that it is a fundamental feature of matter itself, whether it's processing information or not, right? So any matter down to the level of individual particles, that consciousness is itself a property of matter. And so it's integral to matter. And there is some level of experience, no matter how minimal and completely unlike. I mean, anyone who proposes these theories acknowledges that it would be unrecognizable to us the type of experience. So you imagine what it's like to be a bat. That is a very different experience from the one we have as human beings. Navigating the world with sonar. Just what that feels like must feel very different. It must be a very different experience from navigating the world using vision. And then obviously, the more simple the system, if consciousness is present in everything, then we're talking about such a minimal level of experience. It's not something we could ever even try to imagine. There's no memory. In one of the chapters of my book, I actually try to give a sense of what consciousness could be like in its most minimal form, and I kind of talk the reader through this guided imagery. But I think if it's possible that consciousness is present in all matter, most experience that exists is nothing like the experience we have as human beings is probably a very rare form of consciousness, and it's also not experience that you wouldn't expect to show. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. OK, I'm in lovely London getting ready to record some podcasts. It really is lovely. The weather is perfect. That makes London especially nice. So I'm going to record a housekeeping here and then get out of my hotel room. A few things to say that have no relationship to today's podcast. I am recording this right after the Andy no assault in Portland. A few days after that has played out on Twitter. This strikes me as entirely the product of Twitter or of social media in general. This is like a physical manifestation of all that is crazy online. I think these protests probably wouldn't occur. Andy Know, the journalist who was attacked, probably wouldn't have been there. All of the acrimony and insanity that one witnesses in the aftermath would have no forum. It's a very strange phenomenon. I'll catch you up. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, andy Know is a journalist and editor at Quillette, which is an online magazine that's often unfairly described as being conservative. It's conservative in the way that the IDW, the intellectual dark web is conservative. It's really just a centrist magazine that has spent a lot of time criticizing the insanity on the left. So it is branded by the left, certainly the far left, as conservative, if not enabling of fascism and racism and xenophobia and Islamophobia. All of those things have been alleged. Now, I don't know Andy. I think I met him once very briefly. He covered the release of the documentary Islam and the Future of Tolerance which depicted my collaboration with Majid Nawaz. I don't know his personal politics and his politics are absolutely irrelevant to what happened in Portland. I didn't contribute much to the resulting cacophony on Twitter. I posted one thing, but I'll just say a few things here. So what has been happening in Portland apparently, is that Antifa, the so called antifascist cult, has been demonstrating periodically and allowed to do so with real impunity by the mayor, Ted Wheeler. And my one tweet on this topic tagged him. It seems to me he's been totally irresponsible in the scope he has given to these protests. I've seen video with Antifa stopping traffic and pulling people out of cars. It's madness. It's a complete breakdown of social order and in the video where you see Andy no attacked, that's what you witness, a complete breakdown in social order. And apparently the police in Portland have been told not to intervene by the mayor. Anyway, this is the kind of story that will be picked up by the right wing. You know, Andy no will be on Fox News talking about his attack. One can only hope that mainstream sources like the Washington Post and the New York Times will talk about Antifa honestly here. I mean, antifa is often described as a group of people who are protesting the extreme, right? Well, they may be doing that, but they're also attacking innocent bystanders and journalists. So what we have here is a group that imagines it opposes fascism, but they behave just like fascists. And perhaps this is no surprise. If you travel far enough to the right or to the left on the political spectrum, you find yourself surrounded by sociopaths and antifa. While there may be some blameless, members of this movement seems to be chock full of sociopaths, at least judging from their handy work that you can see attested to in these videos. But anyway, the the response to this phenomenon, which again is a total breakdown of civil society, right? You've got people who are attacking nonviolent bystanders in a context which again appears to be a pure confection of social media because most of the people in these protests, most of the members of Antifa you see, are also filming. Maybe everyone has their phones out or their cameras out filming themselves to broadcast this online. It is a bizarre moment. Anyway, the video that shows Andy getting attacked starts after the attack has occurred. There's a few other videos, so you can sort of triangulate on this. But the video that's widely being shown is one which starts after he's already been hit at least once. And then you see someone run up and hit him twice in the face as hard as he can. And then I think the same attacker then returns a moment later to kick him in the groin twice as hard as he can. There's a few things to point out about this. When you punch someone in the face as hard as you can, especially when they're not prepared for it, I mean, you just blindside them. There is absolutely no guarantee that you're not going to kill them, right? People get hit in the face, knocked out, they fall down, they hit their head on the pavement and they die, right? This happens. It's not a high probability way to murder somebody, but it's not an especially low probability way of doing it either, right? Especially if you know how to throw a punch. If you knock someone out cold and there's only concrete to catch their fall, you can certainly kill someone this way. So you should be morally prepared to deal with that aftermath, to know that that's what you're doing and to know that you may very well spend a long time in prison as a result of what you've done. And I might add, in prison, you might need some real neo Nazis and aspiring fascists to keep you company. And that's actually what one hopes for these people in the video. If you think this is effective political work so as to get people to worry more about authoritarianism and about the heavy handedness of the state and about the rise of the far rights, it has absolutely the opposite effect. You see a few videos of antifa, you want the far right to show up, and you certainly want the state to clamp down on this kind of behavior. This has absolutely the opposite political effect. It will guarantee four more years of trump at a minimum, for this kind of thing to become more commonplace. And what's especially damaging is for the left to get this so wrong ethically online. Here you have leftist journalists from Slate and Vice and other organizations supporting this attack on Andy, at the very least blaming him for having brought it on himself for being there. Why were you there in the first place? You knew that all your prior coverage of antifa caused them to hate you, right? This is just so wrong headed. If the left can't get this right, if liberals can't get this right, we have some very dark days ahead. Anyway, back to the attack. So he gets punched in the face twice, he gets kicked twice, then he gets milkshakes and eggs thrown at him and dumped over him. These are not people who have hit him in the face themselves. These are people who, upon witnessing a totally nonviolent person, get punched in the face hard twice and kicked in the groin. Their contribution to this moment is to then hurl a milkshake or an egg at him or some other object. He gets hit with other things as well. It's not clear from the video. I also point out that the person who punched him in the face was wearing black gloves. A lot of these guys wear these tactical gloves that have reinforced knuckles. Some people ride motorcycles with these gloves, but these are also gloves that members of the military wear. It's not like getting punched in the face with a naked fist. Imagine kind of hard plastic knuckles being built into vinyl gloves. So that only makes things worse. So watch the video and rewind it and just follow each beat in it. You'll see a few people trying to protect Andy, but this whole thing is so ugly and it could get so much worse so quickly. There's been some discussion about whether or not the milkshakes that were being thrown at Andy actually had quick drawings cement in them. Cement apparently is quite caustic and therefore can burn you. This stuff is being thrown in his eyes, right? So I don't know if that was the case, but the whole thing was ghastly and made especially so because in the aftermath you saw people who have reputations, they should worry about defending this violence and ridiculing anyone who complained about it, or they'll immediately pivot to. What about where were you during Charlottesville? Right? Or putting kids in cages at the border is worse. Right? That what a boundary completely misses the point. Yes, there are many things to complain about and worry about and I spent a fair amount of time talking about what's wrong with Trump and what could become far worse with him given another four years. And I'm also concerned about the far right, but I'm concerned about the complete breakdown of moral intelligence in the mainstream left at moments like this. This is a crystal clear and very dangerous violation of the most basic norms of civil society. Attacking a journalist, beating him and publicly humiliating him for merely covering a public protest. It should be impossible for liberal people to get their analysis of this wrong and yet they reliably do anyway. That was the big thing that happened in the last few days. It bears absolutely no relationship to the topic of today's podcast. And now I will move on. Today I'm speaking with Eric Topel. Eric is a world renowned cardiologist and the executive vice president of the Scripps Research Institute. He's actually one of the top ten most cited medical researchers and the author of several books. The patient will see you now. The Creative Destruction of Medicine. And the book under discussion deep Medicine how Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. And we do a deep dive into the current state of medicine. We talk about why we have soaring medical costs and declining health outcomes in the US. We talk about the problems of both too little and too much medicine, talk about how slowly the field has adopted useful technology, and then we get into the current status of AI in medicine and how it could completely transform the field for the better mostly, but also in ways for the worse. Anyway, I found it a fascinating conversation. I felt it brought me up to speed with these rapid changes. And now, without further delay, I bring you Eric Topel. I am here with Eric Topel. Eric, thanks for coming on the podcast. Great to be with you, Sam. So, if I recall correctly, we met at a whole genome sequencing conference and I was impressed both with the promise of sequencing the genome at that point and also impressed in the aftermath that there was seemed to be almost nothing to do with the information. It felt like it was a few years too early. Are we at a point now where if we had met at that conference, there'd be more that would be actionable? Are we still in kind of a place where there's not a lot to do with one's whole genome being sequenced? Well, it's definitely improving. So whereas when we met first met, it might have been less than 1% chance it would be actionable. Now it's getting up to 5%, so it's definitely getting better. But we still have a ways to go. And it'll take having like a billion people with whole genome sequencing and all their data to finally make it very informative. Well, it is cool, but we're going to talk about this in some depth in response to your new book Deep Medicine, where you're talking about how we can use AI, not just with respect to genetics, but really all of medicine. But before we dive in, what's your background as a physician? I'm a cardiologist. I started in practicing cardiology in 1985. So I've been kind of an old dog 30 some years now. Yeah. And then you started the Scripps Institute for Translational Medicine? Yes, that was back in beginning of seven. It was basically a new broadened mission of scripts research, which had been, since 1923, a basic science institute. And this is really the applied limb which is giving it a lot of translational medical research capabilities. Right. So I guess start with the big picture before we get into the high tech discussion here. It does seem that medicine is broken in many ways, and our discussion will mostly be focused on the US. In the US. We spend I have this from your book $11,000 per person per year on medicine, and that's still climbing. In 1975, I think it was something like $550. And yet our outcomes don't compare very well with the rest of the developed world. How do you account for that? And how do you view the rising expenditure and seeming plateauing or in some cases, declining outcome measures? Well, you're absolutely right about the numbers, Sam, and I think it the basis of this, which is outcomes of not just lowered life expectancy now in the US. Three years in a row, which is unprecedented, but also extends to all the important metrics like infant mortality, childhood mortality, maternal mortality, and on and on. So when you look at why has the model in the US. Gone south, you start to see well, there's two likely explanations. A big one is that we have major inequities in our care. We don't provide care for all citizens, unlike all the other countries that are being compared with. The other extreme is that we overcook, that we do too much. So the people who have coverage, they get over tested, over treated, and that leads to all sorts of problems and including bad outcomes. So we've got lots of serious problems. Yeah. I must say, I feel like I have a fair amount of experience with the latter problem of too much medicine, or at least too much medicine being offered. And it's often said that we have the best medicine in the world if you're well off or well connected. And yet I always find it incredibly humbling and fairly depressing how hit or miss my encounters with medicine are I'm not a doctor, but my background in neuroscience gives me a better than average position as a consumer of medicine. But I also find whenever I get put into the machinery of the medical system, whether it's because I'm sick or because someone close to me is sick, one of my kids is sick rather often. I experience a fairly tortuous adventure where, as you said, either too much medicine is offered, or it could be drugs with serious side effects that are kind of dispensed with a totally cavalier attitude. Risky procedures are recommended almost reflexively, and there's a whole process of declining to go down this path rather often, as you know, most conditions are self limiting, and then you feel totally justified for having declined. And then there's experiences where scary diagnoses are given only to be overturned by a second opinion, and diagnostic tests are ordered where it's revealed that there really is no thought as to basically the doctor was going to recommend the same treatment or the same lifestyle change, regardless of what showed up on that particular test. I find my encounters with medicine weird almost more often than not. And I consider myself to be probably in the most fortunate possible position with respect to being a consumer of medicine, and yet with a possible exception to your own, where you're a celebrated physician, right? You're a physician with you're not just an average physician, you're a very connected one, and you've made significant contributions to your field, and yet you open your book with a totally harrowing encounter with your own medical history. I'm sure you've talked about this a lot because you open your book with it and it's fairly arresting, but perhaps just give us your experience with something like medical malpractice, which you as a physician still, it seems, couldn't protect yourself from, right? Well, Sam, it was Harry. That was a good word to assign to it. I was having a knee replacement. It was almost three years ago now, and I had thought it would be pretty straightforward because I was pretty physically fit and thin and relatively young compared to a lot of people who have knee replacements. And I had referred many patients to the same Orthopedist. So I had some confidence. But what happened was I had a disastrous postoperative complication, which I didn't even I never heard of the word arthro fibrosis. And part of that really was I had a high risk that I didn't know about because I had a congenital condition called osteochondritis dissecans, which set me up for that. So this really was horrendous. I couldn't sleep, I was in pain, I was taking opiates. And I went showed up with all this really bad state with my wife to the Orthopedist about a month after the surgery. And he said to me, I need to get some antidepressant medications, right? And I said, what? You know, so this is like the shallow medicine robotic. I mean, here's a here's a human expert who did the surgery. That wasn't the issue. It was the post operative care. And I think that's telling. I think that almost everyone now who I talked to has had either on their own or their family members, loved ones have had a roughed up experience, and that's what it was for me. Yeah. So maybe this doesn't account for your experience on some level. There's a fair amount of bad luck there. And also, just obviously, the diagnosis was missed or your risk potential for that complication was missed. And we can talk about the way in which AI might make that less likely to happen. But I don't know. It feels like there's just a problem in the culture of medicine. Medicine is kind of a priesthood, the way people relate to doctors. It's a far less straightforward transaction with respect to the use of another person's expertise. And it's difficult to navigate for almost anyone because, in part, it's the subject matter. I mean, you're dealing in many cases either with life and death questions or a legitimate concern about significant disability or suffering or risk. And I don't know, we know so much about how impossible it is for people to navigate their own cognitive biases. I mean, we know that physicians are making diagnoses based on their clinical experience in ways that really distort their sense of probability. And the accuracy of diagnosis is way off. And this is something you touch in your book by reference to Danny Kahneman and Amos Tsfersky's work. There's something about the culture that, again, we haven't yet introduced robots into the equation here. But, I mean, can you say anything about that? I mean, my impression here is fairly in coat, but I just realized that there's I mean, just the process of getting second opinions is often weird. And what you do with opinions that can't be reconciled, how do you see the effect of putting on a white lab coat on the conversation and the the relevant cognition? Right. Well, you're touching on this medical paternalism, which is the sense that doctor is a know all entity. And that wasn't as big a problem decades ago when there was a lot of trust, there was presence, there was a deep relationship and really an intimacy, an inner human bond. But what's happened over time is that paternalism has sustained, and at the same time, there's very little time with patients. It's very much a lack of presence because doctors are looking at keyboards and they really don't have the time to cultivate a relationship. So it's gotten much worse. It's the same problem, the basic problem of the kind of authority, control. Don't question my opinion. What do you mean? You need a second opinion when everyone should be entitled and feel very comfortable to have that second opinion. But this doesn't fit in any longer because there's not the relationship. It's eroded. So seriously over the last three or four decades. It's interesting, despite how much we're spending on medicine each year. And again, the costs are just going up and up. The field is actually very slow to adopt new technology. And this is something that we've all noticed. The transition to electronic health records, which has seemed somewhat dysfunctional and somewhat haphazard just feels like as far as this adoption of tech medicine, apart from the introduction of some new scanner from time to time, it seems more like the FAA dealing with old equipment than it looks like Silicon Valley dealing with the latest breakthrough in consumer tech. So how do you view medicine and tech in general? Yeah, it's a pretty sad story. A lot of people think digital medicine arrived with the electronic health record, and that was an abject failure, a disaster, because when those were introduced, they were set up for billing purposes without any consideration of how that would affect either patients or doctors or other clinicians. Really, that was actually the motive. It wasn't to be able to aggregate information better. No, it was just to have really good billing, to not miss things. It's amazing, and it's not really ever improved. It's the most clunky, pathetic software and across all the different companies that are in this business. And that had led to doctors becoming data clerks and has been one of the most important aspects of why there's such profound burnout in the medical field, with more than half having expressed that they are burnout, but also over 20%, even with clinical depression and the highest numbers of suicides ever in the medical profession. And is there anyone tracking just the actual use of doctors time with respect to this new technology? Has the experience of being a doctor been more of one, dealing with records and insurance and all the rest and, you know, year by year? Exactly. So what's happened, I mean, a most recent study was that 80% of the time that medical residents were spending without any contact to patients because they were working on electronic health records and administrative tasks. And all the recent time studies that have really delved into this show a two to one or greater ratio of time away from patients. So this electronic health record, which is unfortunately the precursor of bringing the digital world into the medical profession, has backfired. It's really been a serious hit to the care of patients. And what about other technology like diagnostic imaging? And I remember I've had a few adventures in cardiology, which is your wheelhouse, you know, you're like CT scan, you know, calcium score scan. And it's again, I have found the way in which this imaging has been dispensed to me. I've done it. And happily, I guess I would probably be telling a different story if something scary and actionable were found. And I had felt my life was saved by it. But the way this was dispensed to me was just kind of cavalier enough, and it was just like, we now have this new tool. Let's use it. And there was nothing. And I got to the end of the process, and it was pretty clear that it just didn't make sense in my case to have done this. And so how do you view just these intrusions of new machines which could be very useful, but are either used in cases where there's just no reason to use them? And I guess we should also talk about the prospect of type one errors here, where people get false positives, which then they go chasing with yet more intrusive procedures and incur other risks exactly for that too. The problem here is we've got a lot of good technologies, but they're misused, they're overused. So the example you gave of a calcium score with a CT scan to see whether or not you may have coronary disease, that test is terribly overused. I have never ordered that test. And mine was words I had an angiogram. I didn't just have the ordinary species. Yeah. So that is likely fits into the so many patients that I've seen for second opinions who have become disabled, who have become adversely affected by the results of their calcium score even though they have no symptoms or others. That have been told their lives have been saved because they are whisked away from the Cat scan to then have an angiogram and stents or even a bypass operation. So cardiac cripples have been a result of some of these scans with patients without any symptoms. And it's really unsettling. So this is an exemplar of so many tests that we have today that they can be helpful in certain individuals, but they can be very harmful as well. These particular harms. I guess there's two problems here. We have the underuse or lack of availability of medicine to people who really need it and who have substandard care in a first world society, our own, that doesn't compare favorably to the rest of the developed world. But then here we're talking about the high class problem of having a more consumer relationship to advanced medicine, where you have access to what are ostensibly the best doctors, the best hospitals, the best information, the new scanners. And although even there, just to give you a reference point for this angiogram. So I went to a highly regarded cardiologist on the assumption that whatever scanner he would be putting me in would be the latest and lowest dose of radiation scanner. And then I get the scan and I see the amount of radiation delivered, and I just kind of check this with a friend who's a physician who has access to similar doctors. And he said, yeah, you know, if I had ordered the scan, you would have gotten one third the amount of dosage there. So it's like, I'm not quite sure why that you got put in that scanner and just the fact that there's that kind of variance. I'm not especially paranoid about this. I understand that this doesn't raise my cancer risk all that much, but the fact that in the most prestigious networked circles there could be that kind of variance is just bizarre to me. Well, you've just touched on something as a pet peeve of a mind, which is, why don't we tell patients when we order a test or say they should have such a test that uses ionizing radiation, about how much radiation they'll be exposed to. That is, we don't have to use the milly seavert's units. We could say it's equivalent to how many chest X rays. All right, so this physician, who I will not name, but whose name would be known to you as part of his pattern, I mean, I asked, you know, the, the perfunctory skeptical questions about whether this scan was necessary and how, you know, what, what my dosage would be. And he said, well, yeah, it's analogous to you taking ten flights to Hong Kong this year. Has some, has someone told you that you should shouldn't go to Hong Kong ten times this year? And I said, no, no, that sounds fine. I mean, it's a lot of Hong Kong, but, you know, I can do that. But then when I actually saw my dosage and did a little arithmetic, it was more like 150 to 200 flights to Hong Kong this year. Marie right. Again, I guess I could be an airline pilot this year and it's okay. But still, it's just to have that wrong by orders of magnitude, it's just bizarre. Well, and also, if you take it by number of chest sex rays, when you tell a patient that's like 2000 chest sex rays, they say, no, no, I'm not doing that. Right. So if we just were real about and the other thing you mentioned, I think, has to be underscored as well, is that there's so much variability in the exposure of the radiation. So we have again, this is out of paternalism. You're rare because you actually asked your doctor, but most patients just go and have the scan. Right. And so this is something that's just not right because this is information that everybody should be entitled to and they should be part of the decision of whether they want to accept that type of exposure to radiation. Okay, so let's bring in the robots. How did you get interested in AI? When do you date your awareness of it as a possibly relevant technology for you? Well, I had been working in the prior times on digital medicine. That was a creative destruction medicine. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs. And the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, today I want to share a clip from the second season of Absolutely Mental, the podcast I've been doing with Ricky Gervais. Many of you will have heard the first season in whole or in part, and I think the second season is actually better. We have hit our stride here. I think the genesis of this podcast is that Rick and I would have an occasional phone call and it occurred to me that these conversations were fun enough that we should record them and see what happened. So the podcast itself really is virtually indistinguishable from telephone conversations we were having anyway, hence the conceit of making it a phone call. Obviously we're aware that we're recording it and it's a podcast, but to a remarkable degree it really is the kind of conversation we were going to have anyway, which is unusual and a lot of fun. So for many months I've had the pleasure of rolling out of bed on a Saturday morning and getting on the line with Ricky, only to be reminded that with civilization unraveling all around us, he's primarily afraid of spiders. And as you'll hear, he is very good company. So now this is a clip from season two, episode two, and I hope you enjoy it. And if you want to hear the rest of the series, both seasons are available@absolutelyamental.com. Hey, how's it going? Good, how are you? I'm good, I'm good. Although I was just anesthetized, which doesn't happen often and that's an interesting experience. When was the last time you were put out? I don't think I've ever had a general since I was about maybe ten. To have a tooth out. This wasn't a general. You got a general to have a tooth out? Well, we used to. I mean in my when I in the late sixty s it was gas. Whenever you get one of these, these urchins who are covered with coal dust, you just put them right out to take their teeth out. No. And I'd always wake up crying because I don't know what it was. I assumed it was some sort of some sort of mix of nitrous oxide. Yeah, that wouldn't be a general but yeah, that would be dentists. No, I was unconscious. Yeah, I guess so. The distinction between a general and what might be called a twilight anesthesia or anything other than a general is that in a general you're not breathing under your own power anymore. Oh really? You're that deep. And there may be gradations that I'm not aware of. I'm not an anesthesiologist but the oh, so they really can be completely unconscious. But still it's not a general, it's a much lighter anesthesia then I've never had a general. You didn't have surgery? No, I had the glorious intervention of a colonoscopy. And so they give you propofoll, which is what Michael Jackson was using recreationally to sleep with his crazy doctor, which wound up killing him, apparently. Is that why you went for it? Because celebrity endorsement, you said, Whatever I want to do. You wear one glove. Yes, I wore a sequin glove. Yeah. Anyway, everything's okay, but it's amazing to have the the lights turned out that emphatically that's it's unlike it's certainly unlike going to sleep at night. Yeah. So it's deeper than your unconscious sleeping self, even. It's deeper than that. Presumably. It must be, because I'm pretty sure I would wake up if someone was sticky at camera. One hopes. One always hopes. I sort of meant yeah, no, you're right. But you're in sleep, doesn't the body freeze itself so you can't get injured? So when you're imagining you're fighting and running, you're deadly still. You're sort of frozen. Is that true? Yeah. During REM sleep. You are and there's a disorder of REM sleep where basically you kind of wake up, but you're still frozen, so you can feel like that's the explanation for many kinds of UFO abduction experiences and other weirdness. Well, that usually ends with a finger up the arse as well, doesn't it? Strange coincidence there. Yes. Just not a human finger, a really long green one. That would wake you up. I'm pretty sure that would wake you up. Well, I mean, this conversation makes my question seem a bit tame. I was going to ask you, although it's probably in the ballpark. Do you know about hypnosis and how it works? If it works and if it works, how does it work? And I don't mean the mechanics of doing it. I mean why does it work, first of all? Does it work? Yeah, well, I have very little direct experience with it, although I do have one experience that I can describe, which was interesting. So from the literature, I can certainly say that it works for some things. On some people. There are people who are there's a spectrum of hypnotizability, and there's a Stanford scale of hypnotizability that ranks people based on a test. And actually, when I was an undergraduate, I had that test, I was in Psych 101, and they were looking for experimental subjects, and they gave some subset of the class. This test, you mean there's literally a scientific scale that's been peer reviewed and that is oh, wow. Yeah, sure. I think it's at least 50 years old, but it's the Stanford I think it was a Harvard one, too. But it's a Stanford scale of hypnotizability. That is the standard. And I forget all of the exercises we had to do, but one stands out in my mind, and this really proved to me that there was something there, because I think I was fairly I recall being fairly skeptical that there was anything to this. But you're asked to do various things, and then one thing I remember being asked to do was to I'll describe the procedure in a second, but you're inducted into the state of hypnosis, and you're given various suggestions. So sort of two parts to hypnosis, there's the induction and then the suggestion phase. And one suggestion was kind of an age regression. We were now told we were now nine years old, I think it was, and then given a piece of paper and a pen and asked to write the year. And I remember writing the year in 1976 without any arithmetic in my head. I just wrote it, and then I was asked to sign my name. And without any conscious I guess there's could be an unconscious wish to comply with this thing, but at the time, it really felt like an automaticity. I signed my name in precisely the bubbly, child like handwriting that I would have, you know, would have been appropriate to a nine year old. It certainly wasn't appropriate to my 18 year old self. So that regression experience seemed pretty strong to me. And there were, like, nine other things. I think it was a scale of ten, and I was I was a nine in terms of hypnotizability might have been a scale of ten. So does is that suggest to me that you're very weak willed? So what what is the scale to do? So the scale presumably relates to a characteristic. It's not just a random thing. Have they looked into why some people are more easily hypnotized? Like, joking aside, could it be more complicity? Could it be that you believe it more or that you're naive or you're cynical? Or are there more firm characteristics that would suggest you're a one or a ten? I don't actually know. I think there are other things that it's correlated with, like having a fantasy life or having kind of vivid daydreaming. You can really recall what your daydreaming is about. I don't actually know how much is understood about differences in hypnotizability. And would that be a structure of the brain? Would that be a type of brain? If it was that, say, I won't hold you to it, but if it was that you have more of a vivid imagination, is that a type? Is that a brain type, that some people have more vivid imaginations than others? Well, I think we could probably get at it from the side of of what's happening when people are seem to be successfully hypnotized. And there there has been some neuroimaging work on hypnosis, and the place where it's it's actually where the effect of hypnosis is, I think at least in dispute is with pain suppression. I mean, there are people who have undergone surgeries, real surgeries with no anesthetic but hypnosis. This has been attested to for a very long time. But I recently had someone on my podcast who's been working on this in his lab. And yeah, many, many people have undergone surgery under hypnosis, and then people use hypnosis as an adjunct to anesthesia. They'll be given, let's say, a local, when they might have been given more of a twilight anesthesia. And so it's just a local. Okay, that's very interesting. So tell me what happens there. So supposing that works. And they're not screaming now. Are they feeling pain? Well, no, they're not feeling it. They're not suppressing. They're not going, I don't mind this pain. Right. Some things not get into them. But that's impossible, isn't it? Because isn't pain a literal physical thing of synapse jumps? And it seems again, I don't think the work here is definitive because I think this topic is somewhat in ill repute among scientists. I don't think most neuroscientists are seriously considering focusing on hypnosis as a topic. But the neuroimaging work that's been done that I'm aware of has found that actually hypnosis is blocking the painful stimuli from even registering in sensory cortex. Okay, hold on. How is that possible? So they're under hypnosis, whatever that is, right? So they're under okay, they're hypnotized, whatever that is, whether it's some sort of compliance or subconscious thing. And literally the pain isn't getting to the pain receptors. Or there can be top down modulation of sensory cortex. I think probably there's an area in the midline, in the frontal lobes called the anterior cingulate cortex, and that shows up in many different paradigms, but it's definitely involved in pain perception. And there are more senior, more executive areas that could inhibit sensory cortex. And yes, that seems to be I'd still say even if that was working and it was going well, I still like to think a finger at my ass would bring me out of that. Well, you'll never know until you try and then talk to the furious. Why did you do that? It was working. Why did you do that? But there's an interesting thing here, because it's not clear whether hypnosis is a state, because it's definitely advertised as being a state that gets induced, and it's on the basis of that state that you then become suggestible. But it's possible that the suggestion itself is really the whole story, or much of it. For instance, I think there have been experiments done where the exact same induction and suggestion process is happening, but in one paradigm it's called hypnosis, and in another it's called a relaxation exercise. And it has a very different effect on people, just the framing of it, the people thinking they're going to get hypnotized matters, as opposed to thinking they're just relaxed. Right. But that's why I can't get by. I know it's all about perception, but I still think of pain as a literal, objective thing, like electricity jumping and hurting. And whether you like it or not, you feel something. And that is what a pain is. But if it's a pain no, it's not just yes, the pain signal, let's say at your finger, right? It's the same. It has to be the same from the finger on in. But at a certain point, what you are imagining is pure sensation. Is being modulated by the rest of what the brain is doing, and it becomes susceptible to significant influence and even cancellation. And where in the network of the brain that's happening? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Maybe someone has a good sense of it now, but I'm just not aware of it. But it may still be somewhat mysterious. But this relates to the placebo effect, which is also well demonstrated for pain and for many other things, but it's also not understood. But it's clearly a belief based process that gets started, that is medically efficacious. It becomes a challenge to design drugs that beat placebos, in many cases because they're so effective. Okay. So even though there is an actual physical act to do with the laws of physics and electricity and all those things, it then become how you perceive it in your brain, and it becomes subjective. I suppose that's like if you put your foot into a boiling hot bath by mistake for a split second, you think it's cold, you think there's some it wrong here, and you go, oh. And then you go, no, it's hot. Well, it's just extreme. Yeah. You haven't had time to work. Okay, I think I understand that. The point to take on here, I think, is that a belief is also a physical act in your brain. It's no less a physical act than you getting hit with a hammer. Of course. Of course. Like I said, the man is good company. That could have been the name of the podcast, in fact, but we went with the very British absolutely mental. And if you enjoy both our company, you can find more of it at absolutelymental./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, today is yet another PSA, this time on the topic of police violence and the relevance of jiujitsu training. To mitigating some of the problems there today, I'm speaking with Henner Gracie. And Henner, if you don't recognize the name, is a third generation member of the legendary Gracie family that is credited with creating Brazilian Jiujitsu in large measure and passing it down through now three generations, where Henner and his brother hereon are some of the best teachers on the planet. And they have focused in recent years on teaching police officers the skills they need to apprehend and control suspects without significantly injuring them. Jiujitsu, as you'll hear, is uniquely good for this, and this training is being made available to police departments all over the country. And Henry and Heron are at the forefront of this. They're not the only people doing it, but they are amazingly effective at what they do. As you'll hear, this conversation is a true PSA and almost an infomercial for this kind of training. And that's not an accident. We're at a moment now in the public perception of policing that is nothing short of calamitous. As I record this, we're getting to the end of the Derek Chauvin trial. It's, of course, not yet clear what the verdict will be there. As you'll hear, Henry and I are both quite clear in leaving aside the Chauvin case for the purposes of today's discussion. It is certainly not an example of pervasive misunderstanding of police procedure. I think anyone who saw the killing of George Floyd recognized that we were witnessing a shocking instance of police misconduct. And at just what level, a jury will soon decide. But, for instance, in recent days since I recorded this conversation with Henner, there's been the case of Dante Wright, a motorist who was shot and killed by a police officer in Minnesota. And this, if you've seen the video, it's about as clear as it can be that the police officer, Kimberly Ann Potter, thought she was drawing her Taser when she was, in fact, drawing her firearm. And when she shot Dante Wright, she was horrified to discover that she had her gun in hand. As you'll hear, this is relevant because the police reliance on Tasers is not without significant risk in this case, risk of the extremely negative outcome of drawing your firearm by accident. But the overall picture here is that our police officers are shockingly ill equipped to deal with the challenges they face. So when members of the general public believe they're witnessing the murderous sadism and racism of an oppressive police force, in many cases, that's not at all what's on display. What we're seeing are people who are poorly trained and very much in over their heads once things turn violent. And I really don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the pervasive misunderstanding of what's happening here is tearing our country apart. So in the hopes of doing some small thing to help rectify that, I wanted to have a full discussion with Henner on this point of just what it takes for a police officer to arrest someone who is resisting arrest. So Henry and I break that down here and we talk about the kind of training that should be available more and more to police officers. And there are a few people who are working harder to make that happen than Henner and his brother Hiron. They are the chief instructors at Gracie University, which is a global jujitsu organization that's headquartered in Southern California. They have over 180 brick and mortar locations worldwide affiliated with them and over 300,000 students learning online@graceyuniversity.com. And they have over 20 years of experience teaching law enforcement professionals. And we talk about some of the recent successes here, which hopefully will be a sign of things to come. And now, without further delay, I bring you Henner Gracie. I am here with Henry Gracie. Henner, thanks for joining me, sir. How are you, man? My pleasure. Thanks for having me. And yeah, how's it going? Yes, sir. I was telling my producer Stacy, that this is the marriage of one of the lower energy voices on Earth, my own, and one of the higher energy voices on Earth, yours. I'm going to have to snort cocaine over here or do something to bridge the distance between us or you're going to have to slow it down. Yeah, I think it'll create the or it's a perfect marriage and all your listeners and fans will be in for a delightful, perfectly balanced conversation about the state of law enforcement, jujitsu and whatever else you want to talk about. Yeah, so let's set this up properly. So first I've spoken about self defense and martial arts and jiujitsu in various places on the podcast before. But you contacted me because many of us are seeing kind of troubling signs in police behavior and training and ideas about what should be legal and illegal in terms of the escalation of force procedure on the side of the cops. And there's just so much confusion about what is going on in the world with respect to the cops and violence, both warranted and unwarranted. You and your brother, Hiron, who's been my main jujitu teacher, do a lot of training with the police, and so we really want to jump into that and talk about it. And it's obviously an incredibly timely conversation given that we are now recording this during the trial of Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd. And so there's a lot to say there before we jump into police procedure and violence per se. Let's just talk about jiujitsu and grappling generically and introduce us to how you come to know so much about this. I'll just set it up by saying that you and your brother are part of the the Gracie family, which is this you know, legendary isn't isn't too strong a word family in the martial arts community. And you can talk briefly about the the history there. But I just want to say that the conversation we're going to have here is not really adequate to the topic. If people don't then go look at some of the video that we might reference of you guys training cops and you really teaching anything on the mat. The two of you are two of the most gifted teachers of anything I've ever come across. So people really will link to some videos that will be relevant on my website, where we embed this podcast. But this is an audio document that really requires some visual AIDS in the end. So I just want to say that as a preamble, and perhaps you can just briefly talk about the history of Jujitsu and and and how you come to be talking about this. I appreciate it, and I always appreciate the opportunity to share, really, my family's legacy of selfdefense and martial arts with a new audience. So thank you, Sam, for having me on and for your dedication to this amazing martial art for so many years. And yeah, it's wise of you to kind of give some framework for the listeners to understand what's going on here, because you as someone who practices the art, it's it's as what we're going to talk about today is as common sense and logical in terms of the major advancements that have been made in the recent months and years in law enforcement training as a result of jujitsu. For you, it absolutely makes sense because you have all that kind of that frame, that is that frame as a practitioner of the art. But for listeners who do not have a history or even knowledge of Jujitsu, and maybe the exposure, because it's such pop culture phenomenon now is mixed martial arts, maybe your exposure is literally hearing about a UFC title fight and a technique or an armbar or a neck restraint or a chokehold being used. That might be someone's exposure. So understanding that that's the case, I can give a brief breakdown of the family history and how we got into Jujitsu and what it was intended for and then how when the time comes, how that translates perfectly into the use of force in law enforcement today, which we're absolutely involved in for the last 25 plus years. So, you know, the Gracie family, my grandfather, Eli Gracie, was the co creator of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. They learned it from his brother Carlos, who learned from Japanese men in Brazil. This is in the early 19 hundreds. And eventually when my grandfather started practicing, he had difficulties with the Japanese rendition of the art. And because he was a very small, very frail, very weak young man as a teenager. So because of his physical frailties, he had no choice but to modify the techniques over several years to adapt his frail physique. And those adaptations to the Japanese predecessor are what gave birth to what is known today as Brazilian jujitsu, or gray si jujitsu, depending who you're learning it from. And, you know, that happened in Brazil in the early 19 hundreds. And to test the efficacy of these techniques, my grandfather started engaging in challenge matches, fights with other representatives of other martial arts think mixed martial arts, but before it was called that. These are just no rules fights between two masters of their crafts really to from a from a scientific perspective, to understand what works and what doesn't, that happen in Brazil for decades. And my grandfather, you know, fought all comers, and so did his some of his brothers. So these were Gracie challenge matches. Started in Brazil and then my father brought the art to America in 1978, got established in his garage here in Southern California in Hermosa Beach, and continued teaching at his garage and also having these challenge matches in the garage where he would meet a karate master through a student of his in. The garage was introduced to a karate master or a taekwondo master. And then these challenge matches would happen between two arts. And there was really no rules. It was, listen, you do you, I do me. When you're knocked out or passed out or tap out, we stop. Until then, we keep fighting. And again, these were professionals really believing in their crafts going there. And invariably, these representatives of these other disciplines would get submitted and neutralized very quickly, minutes, sometimes less than a minute. And it was almost unbelievable to them how effective jiujitsu was. And the reason why jujitsu was so effective, if I had to summarize it in a nutshell, why jujitsu is so good is because where other martial arts rely on speed, strength, power, and explosiveness and surprise attack and violence, in that manner, jujitsu, above everything else, violates the distance from which traditional fights are fought. Right. Rather than standing toe to toe and swinging to see who knocks the other person out, jujitsu aims to close the distance, control the subject, take the person to the ground or surface where their strikes no longer have power because they don't have their feet planted and the proper distance to deliver that strike. They're now on the ground, flailing, don't know what to do. And then the jiujitsu person, who's more comfortable in that grappling distance, controls them until they exhaust and invariably, the opponent or the untrained adversary, the non jujitsu opponent in that case, will make a mistake by exposing a limb or a neck, a joint of some sort. And then the Juitsu practitioner will use leverage, not strength, but leverage, full body mechanics to isolate one of the limbs or a neck of the subject and then apply a submission that will render them into submission. At that point, they have no choice but to tap out or suffer extreme bodily harm. If the pressure were to be applied to his max capacity or capability, which 99 times out of 100 isn't necessary because the jiujitsu trained expert there knows that they have full control. They get compliance or they get cooperation, or in this case, a tap out during a challenge match and the fight is over. And in many cases and you see these, these are videos are online. If you look up Gracie challenge matches, they're on YouTube from the garage days, from random colleges and dojos. And that's kind of how the west was won. And then my father and his partner, Art Davy, were the co creators for the UFC. And that's where the whole thing took another form, because it was basically using the UFC, using television as a platform to make these challenge matches seen to the world so that everyone around the world could say, wow, how is karate going to do against boxing, against sumo, against judo, against kickboxing, against Jujitsu? Like, what's going to happen? And no one believed it was possible. They made it happen. It was more successful than they imagined. And today, fast forward, several owners, right? My father sold his interest after the first, I think, five installments, and then at that point, it changed hands a couple of times to the Fertita brothers, who then got a hold of it, and with Dana White's help, made it a spectator sport on regular television, made it a sanctioned sport, and then it blew up. And today, everyone knows Jujitsu kind of in that lens. But I think the important part for this discussion is that the people at the at the core of jujitsu, right, the gracie family and people that we've taught and other instructors who have made this their life know that above everything else, Jujitsu is the art that gives a smaller, less physically fit, powerful, less athletic person the ability to defend themselves and control and overcome a larger, more athletic person by way of distance management. By way of alafanka or leverage and by way of energy efficiency and through those processes, control someone in a relatively nonviolent manner, neutralize them, exhaust their energy, and then ultimately win the fight with a leverage based joint lock or chokehold. And that's what makes this art so special. It's truly the leveler of the playing field for smaller, weaker individuals, which is why it's taken just such a rapid escalation of popularity here. With the assistance of the UFC, it's now becoming the martial art to learn as an adult or as a child, right? Where historically, karate and taekwondo were more associated with children developing confidence and discipline. More historically, you'd see that association. And as someone got older, they would stop doing taekwondo or karate. Well, with jiujitsu, it's the opposite, right. You're living proof of that. And every other person who's just a lifelong fan and practitioner of the art, it's so engaging, it's so effective, it's so reliable, and ultimately, it allows people to neutralize violence without violence. And that's what I think has such pertinent to today's discussion regarding law enforcement. Yeah, I just want to pick up on a couple of points there. One is just for those who are not fans of mixed martial arts and don't really know the significance of what happened in the UFC in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which 1993. Right. It was the first one. Correct? Yeah. November november 12, 1993. Yeah. So your your father, Horan, launched that, and it's become this major sport, which is great, but we should recall that it really was in the beginning and for the longest time remained a virtual science experiment to discover which martial art was the best, really, under conditions of the minimal rules. I mean, there are now more rules than there were back in the day, but virtually no rules apart from eye gouging. I mean, if memory serves, you could even strike to the groin in some of those first competitions, or at least people did. It was as close to a street fight in a ring as anyone had ever seen. And there were no weight classes and no time limits. Right. And if I add, it was a single elimination, eight or 16 man tournament in the same night. So you had to fight three times to win in the same night with no time limits. Yeah. It's like the movie The Game of Death, where Bruce Lee has to fight someone on every floor. If you're going to win that thing, you have to just keep advancing through opponents. And so your Uncle Hoyce Gracie won, to the astonishment of virtually everyone who didn't understand what was likely to happen here, the dominance that he showed in those initial bouts over people who were obviously bigger and stronger and obviously thought they were going to crush him. And the fact that he did it all by, as you say, closing the distance and essentially strangling people, it was mystifying. And it created a total reset of the thinking around martial arts and martial arts competition since things have moved on. I mean, the primacy of jiujitsu is less noticeable now because people from every discipline, whether they start out as a college wrestler or even just a stand up striker, if they're going to get into mixed martial arts, they're going to learn a lot of jiujitsu, whether whether they call it that or not, because it is it is the necessary foundation for grappling and certainly submission in the sport. Now. So we shouldn't give the false sense that jujitsu is all person needs to know now to succeed in mixed martial arts. Obviously, there's a lot of striking and specialization in that space, but it has unique relevance to the topic at hand, which is so much a matter of understanding how to control people when you're talking about the tools that are available to police officers to with a minimal amount of violence, arrest somebody who they've decided to arrest. The tools they have are quite limited and there's certainly no tool that is better than being a true expert in how to physically control people without inflicting lasting injury on them. And if you don't know jiujitsu if you don't know, call it grappling. More generically if you're not an expert, grappler. And there's so many videos that attest to how poorly trained most cops are in this space, you resort to the use of other tools that are synonymous with inflicting lasting injury on a subject. So the moment you take out a baton and start cracking someone over the head with it, right, that that is going to work by a principle that is synonymous with neurological injury. We can transition to talking about cops here, but I guess there's two sides of this that are very interesting to me. There's what the cops are trained to do and should be trained to do and and how they can play their game more or less impeccably. But then there's also the immense amount of confusion people have over the significance of how the people getting arrested can behave or misbehave. When I see videos of these botched arrests where cops use or for one reason or another provoked to using inordinate violence, so often I'm seeing people resisting arrest in obviously dangerous ways, obviously provocative ways, obviously doing things with their hands that in another context a cop has to expect is an effort to produce a weapon to kill them. And these things are going off the rails because so many people just do not understand the cop's eye view of this encounter. So I think we should talk about both sides of this but that's just to set you off and running in the direction of what cops should and should not be doing here. So we have to start by clarifying some of the misunderstandings around police training because what we have today at the core, what we have right now is an incredible level of disappointment, like an unmatched level of disappointment from the general public on police performance when it comes to use of force, right? It's fair to say that it's never been such a high degree or such a large gap between what level of force the police officers are using and what the general public believes the police officers should be using. And I want to kind of start with that position that's the gap, right? The police disappointment gap. I call it the PD gap and that gap is larger than it's ever been. I want to talk about how we got to that point and where we actually started. So the most shocking information I give people when I talk about this subject is the fact that the average police officer in California and other states, some more, some less, but on average in California receives 4 hours of control arrest and control training every two years. Now, just to be clear, arrest and control includes jujitsu type grappling restraint devices cuffing, right? It includes use of force policy law. So they have to have the refresher on what the law is regarding use of force and certain, you know, case studies that they kind of revert to when they talk about use of force and law enforcement. So in 4 hours it's not uncommon. And this is not me guessing, this is the actual trainers here at local California agencies telling me this. They say, Henry, in 4 hours it's not uncommon that only one of those hours at most is physical control tactics that the officer can use when they're taking someone down and controlling them in a violent resisting of arrest situation, right? So when you hear that 4 hours every two years, which means basically 2 hours a year, but you split those 4 hours up and there's only an hour grappling, which gives you an average of 30 minutes potentially of grappling jiujitsu type training annually for an officer. It gives some framework to what we're dealing with here. So when I see the state of the country right now and people are like pissed that cops are using too much force and defund the police and there's a lot of things going on there, I'm torn because I'm going I don't think the general public knows how little training we're talking about them, starting with. So then the question when you see an excessive use of force, it's for one of two reasons. It could either be the cop was incredibly well trained and they're abusing their power deliberately, right? For any number of reasons. They're flexing their power and they're going above and beyond and they just want to show how they can hurt people and they go and they do it. There's another possibility here, though, that the cop is so disastrously under trained, the actual end user street cops are so disastrously undertrained that when they enter into these violent, incredibly intense, life threatening altercations, even when there is no weapon present from the subject, there's always a weapon on the officer's hip. So every engagement is a life or death engagement. When there's a gun on the officer's hip, that can be taken from them, which is not uncommon. So when they're in these life and death physical altercations or arrest scenarios and this is your expertise, so you can correct me here and they experience the amygdala hijack, right, where their survival response takes over because they're so under trained that they do not know how to handle the situation. And as a result, when the amygdala hijack happens and they lose prefrontal cortex control now all of their decisions are fight or flight or freeze or survival mode fear based responses that are really automatic and they don't really have much of a choice in the matter. They're no longer themselves and the level of force they use at that point, it's a complete toss in the air of what's going to happen. Nobody really knows. And that's why we get so many uses of force that are so disastrous. So the point I'm making is that my experience and every single time, Sam, that I go to a GST, gracie Survival Tactics is our law enforcement week long, 40 hours certification course where these cops learn the Gracie tactics and they become trainers that then go back to their agencies and teach their colleagues. The problem is, in those courses, we teach them for a whole week and they learn a ridiculous amount of information, and they become proficient when they test out of that course, when they go home. And the California agency, the chief says, yes, you can train our officers. They call them in service officers, the ones that are the street cops. You can do an in service class for 4 hours. And out of those 4 hours, this every two years, you can teach 1 hour of GST. So the fact that we're teaching the cops great techniques that are nonviolent is really insignificant because when they go home and teach it 1 hour every two years, really on average or less, there's no recall capability. There's no reflex development in that amount of time. I have students that train 1 hour a week, 2 hours a week, and there's still white belts after a year who could finally put this stuff together. So the level of undertraining cannot be overstated. And the fact that we train instructors at a high level but they go back and get blocked by the state mandated requirements is where this entire thing falls flat on its face. So GST, as great of a course that it's been and as much as a great review we get from the students that we teach, those are the instructors. So they go back and teach these end users, and everything falls apart. And I would go so far to say that based on my knowledge, because I ask them, Sam, every class, we survey them and I ask, how many hours on average annually do your in service officers get at your agency? And I'm in the room with 100 officers from sometimes 50 to 80 agencies, right. Two or three cops from a different agency. So I'm teaching a massive room full of people of all these instructors, and the average answer is four to 8 hours a year. But that includes all those other things that we're talking about. Some other states have more, some states have less, but all of them know that even if it were 8 hours, Sam, and it was all 8 hours were GST techniques, it would not be enough. Yeah. Not even close. Not even close. And my recommendation for the country is it has to be at least 1 hour a week of jujitsu practice, preferably jujitsu adapted for law enforcement scenarios, because it is different, you know, that like when there's a gun involved and this person can grab your gun the Americana arm lock is different when someone's reaching for your gun. But the point is, I would go so far to say and I've said this publicly already, that based on what information I know about how under trained the end users are, which is not public knowledge. Right. The people typically don't. They think they're trained like Navy Seals, which is why you get such a high degree of disappointment, because if they were trained like Navy Seals, where they trained six months for an eight week deployment, if they were trained like Navy Seals, we wouldn't see this level of poor performance and bad judgment. But I go so far to say, and I have, that police officers in America are the most under trained professionals in the country. There is no profession in America where we ask the professional to do more with less training invested in them than when we ask a police officer, which is a regular human being like you or I or any other person off the street. We ask a regular human being to arrest a violently resistant and in many cases assaultive subject with 4 hours, let's just call it, of training every year or two. You couldn't create a worse scenario for someone asked to do a harder job. Yeah, I'll simply add I don't actually know the exact numbers, but I know that the story with respect to firearms training isn't much Rosier. I mean, the the assumption is that cops are very well trained with guns and have all the scenario training that tunes their intuitions with respect to when to draw a gun and when to fire it. And it's just amazing how little little effect of firearms training 664 hours, Sam, is the state mandated requirement of training by California post peace officer standard of training to be a police officer in California. Every state has its own in California, it's 664 hours to become a cop. Just for comparison, it's 1600 hours to become a cosmetologist and 1500 hours to become a barber. So both of those require more than double the training that it takes to become a police officer in the United States of America. California state of the United States and every other state has slight deviations from that. But the point is, to your point, that includes firearms. That includes hand to hand combat. That includes arrest and control. That includes legal policy and everything else in between. So even on a macro level, what it takes to become a cop I was talking more on the micro annual arrest and control, 4 hours a year. On the macro level, we're setting these cops up for disasters because you're taking a regular human who in many cases has never been in a fight in their life, you're giving them 664 hours of training that include everything under the sun but not nearly enough of everything, right? So they learn a little bit about everything, but they're masters of nothing. And. Then you give them a gun in the badge and say, go enforce the law. And they think that because they have a gun that people are going to listen to them. So the moment that someone says, I'm not going to jail, spits on the cop and starts walking away. And now you're asking this regular human who played high school, graduated high school, played video games every day, all day, 4 hours a day, went in, joined the police department, and became a police officer. Not all of them, but I'm just saying this is possible, right? You're getting a kid who's never played a sport, never been in a fight in his life or her, and now is being asked to arrest a violent person without any substantial training in the skill, the grappling and or jujitsu skill set that will allow them to do that in a way that A, protects themselves, right? First and foremost, protect the officer, but secondarily and very importantly, protects the subject in the process. So because, listen, the Amygdala hijack happens, as you know, when there's an actual or perceived loss of control. And in law enforcement, a high stress law enforcement situation where someone resists arrest, an officer can very quickly go into the mental framework of, oh, my gosh, I can't control them, they're not listening to me. They get hiding and very quickly elevated anxiety and soon they're in the Amygdala hijack and now it's fight or flight. And now they're going to quickly resort to their pepper spray, taser baton, or any firearm. Worst case scenario, in very rapid succession. What jujitsu does look at you or me, Sam, for example, who have invested years in a skill set that allows us to be in close quarters with someone, control them against their will, and do so without hurting them or ourselves. Think about how we would respond in a situation where there's an officer or sorry, a suspect who's behaving erratically and violently and not cooperating, and we decide we have to take this person down. We have so many options before this situation becomes deadly because we've invested in the skill set and we're confident. And as a result of that confidence, the perception of loss of control comes much later. It requires much more violence and chaos for you or I to perceive the loss of control than for an officer who does not know how to control a violent subject with their bare hands. That's what we're fighting for. We're fighting to get more training for officers. Because when I see these videos go viral and people are so quickly to judge it as an abusive use of power by the police officer and just because it's on topic, the the Derek Chauvin case, I'm not referring to that, right? That's that's to me, that was a that was an abusive use of power. That was not a in my case, I would not classify that as, oh, he's under trained, therefore he over utilized his force. He had the guy cops prone. There was not really any threat to him or other officers and he kept the knee on the neck for far too long. And the anatomy of how that affected his blood flow we can discuss later if you want. But the point is I'm not speaking about that. I'm talking about the 99% of other videos where it just gets out of hand crazy and the cop escalates force unreasonably to the public who see it on video and everyone goes, man, that cop abused use their deadly force, use their taser way too soon. What I'm speculating and what I feel is often the case is you have a good person who's doing the job for the right reason. But even the best cop, the best character, moral character, best values, the best cop on the planet, let's just say the second they're in a situation that they are not prepared to handle nonviolently, they're going to handle it violently. Yeah, well not only that, they have a duty to handle it violently because I want to come back to the one detail you brought into play here is that when you're dealing with a cop, there's always a gun on the table. This is something that people just simply do not have intuitions about. So when you see some of these videos where someone starts resisting arrest and they start pushing a cop or grabbing the cop, tries to restrain someone, tries to start cuffing someone, they start resisting, they start pushing back. It becomes a grappling match. Or the guy's girlfriend runs up and grabs the cop to stop him from trying to cuff the boyfriend or whatever it is. Whenever you put your hands on a cop, this in the cop's mind very very quickly has to be perceived as a fight for his or her gun. That's what will happen if you overpower the cop. In the cop's universe, that is an absolutely bright line that cannot be crossed. And yet in the thinking of so many people who just think they shouldn't be arrested for whatever reason, it just seems like fair play. It's like if the cop pushes me, I can push him back, I can grab him, I can punch him. It's completely inappropriate for a cop at that point to draw his gun and shoot somebody. But the cop doesn't know what you're going to do if you knock him out. Right? He has to assume the worst at what you're going to do to him and to the rest of the public that he or she's pledged to protect. And so the presence of the cop's firearm changes everything. And then there's the additional fact that people have terrible intuitions for what is truly threatening from the cops point of view with respect to what a person can be doing with their hands. I mean, it's just the moment someone sticks their hands in the pocket of their hoodie or they turn around and grab something off the front seat of their car and they're not following directions. The moment your hands go out of sight, that is a five alarm fire from the cop's point of view. And it has to be because every cop knows of the case where a half a second later that hand that just disappeared is now holding a gun and it's shooting a cop in the face. Right. And all of those videos exist. Virtually 99% of people are unable to rationally interpret what they see when they see these videos of arrests going haywire. Yeah, I really like that, Sam, and I think that it's a very valid point, 100%. And you kind of touched on two. One of them was, the cop has a gun on his hip and the likelihood of that gun being taken from him or her during the altercation is so real that the cop cannot get knocked out. In the cop's mind, it has to be impossible that they allow a knockout, so they're willing to do anything to prevent that. And the other one is letting the suspect's hands be out of sight and kind of splitting those two apart. Regarding the cop having the gun on their hip and the risk that that presents in every situation. I agree. And I think that people are completely oblivious to those realities, because cops understand and have seen all the videos and have done all the research and have had the training and ultimately been told right, that yo out. If you get knocked out, they could take your gun, they can shoot you with it. So the cop knows that, but the general public doesn't know that, so they think they can rustle and tussle and just kind of grab and push and be aggressive with an officer, not knowing that the officer can't play that game because of the risk that await them, because the stories have happened. But what I will say is that the chance of Henry, if I was a police officer, and I'm not a great example because people are going to say, oh, you're a black belt even though it's your whole life, but let's just any version of me, let's call the blue belt Henry. Let's call the white belt with four stripes Henry or yourself, right, as a blue belt, that the chance of someone in a ground fight taking a gun from you or I is significantly lower than taking a gun from a cop who has no ground control and no comfort in that closed quarter situation. So even though what you're saying is true, that the people have to understand, what I'm saying is, listen, we can only control so much what the world thinks of law enforcement. It's like regarding bullying, right? Parents go, yeah, well, kids shouldn't bully. I go, well, yeah, you can't control what bullies do, but you can control the preparation you give your child so that when they go to school, if they're bully proof with jiu jitsu, they can put up a barrier and they can behave in a different way. So what I'm saying is I agree that there's a huge problem regarding the public's perception of understanding the reality surrounding law enforcement and the uses of force that they have to go through. They're just they're not professionals. They don't know right. We can't they just don't know right. But what I can say is that an officer is exponentially less likely to have to resort to deadly force when the feeling of threat against the officer is reduced by the increased training that they invest in. So the more trained an officer is, the less likely that their gun be taken from them or that they be knocked out. A simple example happened in Kansas City a few years back. We did a Gracie breakdown on this. You may link to it. Officer Donald Hubbard, Kansas City Police officer. Officer Donnad Hubbard approached the scene where there had been a man who attacked a cab driver. And the man attacked a cab driver, was pissed off and was drunk, punched him. Officer Hubbard shows up, tries to take the man down, and in doing so, tries to control, puts him on the ground, puts a knee on his back, on his torso, and then officer Hubbard ends up on his back. Now you have Anthony Bruno was the suspect's name. Anthony Bruno was on top of Mr. Hubbard and was hitting him in the face. Like, imagine a side control position, Sam. Like, bottom of side control, like kneeling next to you and then hammer fisting you in the face and, like, scratching you. That's kind of what it was. So he was just kneeling on the ground over the top of officer Hubbard, punching, scratching officer Hubbard on his back. Had no clue what to do. Draws his firearm, fires one round, and kills the suspect from the bottom of the fight, shooting upward into his torso. The suspect was off duty firefighter. Anthony Bruno on his wedding night, was drunk, had a debate with the cab driver, and got killed at the hands of a police officer from the same Kansas City. And therein lies the tragedy where when I look at that situation because that Officer Hubbard wasn't wrong in his use of force because his life was in danger, but the danger to his life was a function of the 4 hours every year or two that he receives in groundfighting to where he did not know how to recuperate. Guard use his legs to manage the distance neutralize the strikes that were reaching his face. Had he known how to do any one of those skills right, he would not have had his life in danger. And therefore, he could have waited there, waited for help to arrive just by holding a position of guard and punch block series stage one. As we learn as a beginner here in your first five classes, you would learn that if he were just to hold that position, he would have retained his firearm, he would have not had to use deadly force. But that requires the training. And I don't even blame the officer, Sam. I blame the department who ultimately is at the mercy of the state because the state sets the annual training requirements and chiefs don't like to operate out of bounds. They typically will stay within the state's requirement and say 4 hours is what the state prescribes. That's what we're going to do for every in service officer every year. So everyone ultimately is the victim of the state. And there's not really a federal law enforcement requirement. It really is state by state and then within the state requirements, the agencies have the right to do more or less, but generally they try to stick within the state's requirements just to be safe. So who's to blame in the fact that Officer Hubbard had to shoot off duty firefighter Anthony Bruno because Officer Hubbard reached an amygdala Hijack a perceived loss of control? Well, really actual, I guess in his case, because he did not know what to do, an actual loss of control in a violent altercation and had to use deadly force because had he got knocked unconscious, for all he knows, the suspect could have used the gun against him. Whether he did or whether he would or would not have, we don't ever know. But they have to presume that that is going to be the case. So this is what we're dealing with. So he shoots that, he shoots officer, he shoots the firefighter Anthony Bruno, and then people could look and say, oh man, you know, why did he shoot him? He should have just done X, Y or Z. And my point is, you don't have a choice to use techniques you never learned. And that's where the whole system is failing these officers. We're putting them in situations to expecting much more from them than what we're giving them the skills to do. And then the whole country is on fire because these excessive uses of force and I'm like, man, of course there are some of these that are not training issues, their character, they're moral issues on behalf of the officers that are not the best humans, right? The same way there are corrupt and there are criminal jujitsu teachers, there are bad people in every segment of society, in every demographic and in every profession. There are terrible doctors, there are terrible police officers, there are terrible juicer. No one's perfect, no population is perfect. So you're going to get those officers who just shouldn't be police officers. And we'll leave it at that. But the majority are good people who want to do the job the right way. But if they're under equipped and they underperform as a result of that, who do we blame? And that's where we see it. Actually, Henry, I remember that video. I think I probably saw it first circulated in an email from you. And one of the things that disturbed me about that I recall is that this is one of these cases where you have to reflect on how you have the video in the first place. You've got members of the public videotaping this altercation between a cop and somebody else. And the bias, the default bias from the public is that the use of force by the cop is often illegitimate. So in many of these videos I don't remember in that one in particular, but in many, you're seeing people basically take the suspects side of whatever this altercation is, and they're shouting at the cop, just leave them alone. But what's not happening in these videos and what certainly wasn't happening in that one, were members of the public helping the cop. It would have just taken a few other people to help. Granted, in an ideal world, this wouldn't ever be necessary because the cops would be sufficiently well trained and in sufficient number to meet any challenge that they're dealing with. But here you have a very clear case of this thing is escalating to a lethal use of force. And it would have been rendered totally unnecessary if you just had a few other people grab an arm and a leg and help the cop de escalate this situation. I agree 100%. And listen, every single time we see a video that goes viral, you always get people in the comments will say, why are you filming and not helping? So there is an awareness of that. But we have to understand, Sam, that people can only help in situations where they perceive themselves to be capable of helping. Right. It's easy for you and me to say, hey, trust me, I walk around the streets looking for an opportunity to help, but it just doesn't happen around me for one reason or another. But I'm here. If I saw something, I'm getting in because I would hate for an incident to happen in front of me and for someone to die because I did not intervene. And as a result of my non intervention, the officer had to escalate a level of force that was probably unnecessary had I otherwise intervented intervened. Now, to be clear, there are also videos of people intervening, and they're always glorious to see. And we do breakdowns on them and we highlight them. And I've even asked officers, Sam, I say, guys, if you're having a troubling arrest situation, do you want the assistance of the public? I've actually asked him this on video, and they publicly said yes. Like, I had 100 cops in the room and I just did a big video on it one time. I said yes or no. Do you guys want help? If the public is there and you're having trouble, yes. Enthusiastic, like they want the help. They're regular people. They would rather have help and not have to escalate level of force. But if they have to do it by themselves and they're outweighed or, you know someone who's much more athletic than them or they're exhausted or any number of variables that gives the suspect an advantage there, then they have no choice but to use the level of force necessary to neutralize the threat. And the whole point is, we still I agree that people could help. I agree that people could know not to grab a cop's gun or not to push back when a cop does X, Y, or Z. So there are things we can teach the public. But again, the whole proposition and my whole position in all of this is that may happen over time, but I don't know what the right solution is to get to all of the people in the world. But I do have access to most of the law enforcement organizations and departments in the country. And if we can simply increase their capabilities, we will lower the level of force across the entire country. We will see less viral videos. We will see less rapid escalations of force. We will see less Amygdala Hijacks and ultimately, cops will eventually, with proper amount of training, perform at a level that the general public expects them to. Sam that's the whole key in all of this. Because when expectations are met with reality, or when reality meets expectations and vice versa, nothing is remarkable. Do you understand? That's just the definition of expected. It's just normal. So when a cop takes someone down, ties them up beautifully, maintains them out, twists them into a handcuffing procedure, and then cuffs them and walks them into the car, people look at that and go, that was unremarkable. But what's wild, Sam, is today's day and age. The unremarkable arrests that just happened seamlessly and no problem are remarkable. Like Batman to the rescue. Yeah, but they're so unusual because the training is so disastrous. So it kind of begs the question of, like, man, have cops always been this? Why is it such a big deal now? Right? Why is this becoming such a big deal now? And I will say with confidence and cops have verified this kind of off the record with me. As I say, guys, why is the public and the cop law enforcement relationship in America right now as bad as it's ever been, worse ever is right now? Why? And they said and ultimately, the conclusion is this. The public visibility of police performance and uses of force has never been so high, right? Or the public account opportunity for accountability by the public has never been so high because every incident is recorded with 17 different cameras dash cam, body cam, security cam, phone cams, three phone camps. So you have all these people filming incidents. So while public visibility has gone through the roof, police training standards Sam, remain where they were in the 1970s. They haven't upgraded nationwide. The states have not said, okay, now that the visibility is so much higher, we probably got to brush up our arrest and control skills to 12 hours a year instead of 4 hours a year in our state. That hasn't happened yet. So we're literally sitting at the crossroads between archaic training practices and New Age accountability and visibility opportunities for the public. That disparity between those two things is why there is such disappointment and why there is such uproar from the public. Now, let me just tell you, this change is happening. It's gradual. But the fact that that disappointment gap is so large and the public outcry is so substantial right now for better policing and reform, we'll call it of some sort. Some defunding, some agree that better training is the way. Some just want to cancel police altogether. I mean, you have the full spectrum, right? But where I sit, here's my thing, right? Because at the core for everyone is they don't want bad cops. They don't want to give a gun and a badge, Sam, to someone who's going to abuse that power. That's the general. People don't mind a good cop, right? And people don't mind even people who are anti police and want to defund will call the police if they're getting robbed, right? So people want a good officer with good intentions to come do the job and protect and serve and have a high reverence for human life. Like, that's what they want, right? The challenge is, how do you differentiate between good cops and bad cops? And I have a formula that I like to propose as one way that we can arrive towards a better decision on that one key variable that I think every civilian and every police department even would like to identify. And here's my proposition for that. In order to tell the difference between good cops and bad cops, we have to give all cops sufficient training for the challenges they face. And then you see which cops adhere to that training and which cops deliberately deviate and abuse their power. That's it. Because, Sam, if I were to arrest Grandma let's just say Henry were to arrest Grandma, I had a gun in a badge torns police officer, henry, Gracie were to go and I'm not a cop, for the record. I'm just hypothesizing. If I were to go arrest Grandma and Sam, I took her down for traffic violation, and I pulled her down. I trip her throw on the ground, get on top of her, and I start blasting her with punches in the skull. And you saw a video, and you knew my record, you knew my training, and you knew all the backstory of why I took her down. Everything was perfectly clear. And you assessed that. You would say, man, Hannah is a freaking bad police officer, because for everything that I know about this case and everything I know about him that was not necessary for him to use that level of force. And it's not like he doesn't have the training to accomplish the objective of neutralizing the threat and taking her into custody with lower level of force. So you would be accurate in your assessment that I was abusing my power. This is the same reason why a black belt in a martial art, when they use their martial arts in a street fight, let's say, and they have to this whole idea of you're a lethal weapon, right? Because you have lethal training in martial arts, you are judged in a different realm of use of force as a civilian than someone who had no training, right? So I could be my black belt is almost a liability when it comes to use of force because a judge or a jury might say, no, Henry, because of your training, you didn't need to use that much force in a street fight over a road rage incident. You beat the guy up, and you broke both of his arms. Based on your training, we have reason to believe that you should not have used that level of force. It was unnecessary, the level of force that you applied in this street fight that you were in. So the same reason that that's an accurate assessment, because I have the training I'm held to a higher standard, and my deviation from that training is a reflection of my character more than my ability to handle or not handle that situation. So that's my proposition, is the whole country needs to be brought up in terms of a reasonable amount of training. So then when deviations happen, we have nothing to blame other than the character of the officer, because their training and their muscle memory did give them the quality and the skills necessary to perform and neutralize that situation with a lower level of force than what was captured on that video. Yeah, I fully agree. There's no argument for the status quo. I guess someone must be making a resource argument that they don't have the money, the time they can't spend, the resources required to recruit the right people into the ranks of the police force. I got to think at this point, morale is somewhere near an all time low in police forces across the country, just given what has happened to public perception since the killing of George Floyd. So it's got to be a very difficult time to recruit good people to the forest. Never been harder. Never been harder. Sam and I have my best friends or cops like I have in every state from all these courses that we've taught and all these relationships we've made, and I've never heard the eagerness towards retirement that I'm hearing right now. This is, Henry, it's not worth it anymore. Now, you may be aware of what happened in New York recently, right? So the New York, they passed this bill that's kind of like unofficially, the Diaphragm bill where police officers are. And this was signed into law by Mayor de Blasio. And this was the end of last year. And I fought as hard as I could with all my social media and everything I could to try to resist it, but who am I, right? So it happened. But basically it says here that never sit, kneel, or stand on the subject's torso. Never use a chokehold sorry. Never use a chokehold, neck hold or headlock on the subject of an arrest. Never sit, kneel, or stand on the subject's torso, including the back, chest, or the abdomen. So they've criminalized this. And now what they've said is that if you do one of these things in New York City, right, in New York, if you do one of these things, even if it was unintentional and no harm was caused to the suspect in its use, you may be subject to criminal prosecution, personal criminal liability for the officer. So this is probably one of the worst things that ever happened in law enforcement. Now in this bill, to be clear, there were things that were proposed that got passed that were good things, more accountability, better reporting, different things, certain use of X, Y, and Z. So there were other kind of logistical things. But when it comes to use of force, and I'll even go so far to say, hey, the removal of neck restraints, chokeholds or vascular neck restraints more accurately described in law enforcement, there's been a lot of debate about taking those out. New York has gotten rid of it. Several other states are doing the same thing. I'm even okay with that, Sam, because a police officer who does not know how to use the neck restraint and they only get trained 4 hours every two years, they're probably going to use used it incorrectly. So even though you and I both know that they're very safe and very effective as a method of controlling someone and in lieu of deadly force, right? So in a situation where you might otherwise have to use your weapon, there have been many lives saved when the officer instead opted for a vascular neck restraint that neutralized the threat and let's say a firearm malfunction, they used a vascular neck restraint, and the life was saved because of a neck restraint. So there are many more of those cases than the alternative when the suspect ends up dying as a result of a misuse of a neck restraint against the suspect. But the point is, if you're going to get rid of neck restraints or let's just put them at lethal force or get rid of them altogether, fine. But Sam, what they're doing in New York, they've criminalized the mount position, side mount, side control, back mount. These are now criminalized for the officers. So this happened last year when this got signed, the law, the head instructors, the main guys in NYPD who run. The defensive Tactics contacted me privately, obviously, and I'm not going to share any names, but they said, Henry, we fought as hard as we could to keep the mount and the side mount. And they sent me the internal videos showing what they're no longer allowed to do and the number of retirement requests right in New York City last year, I think it broke all records. Like, for sure it broke all the trends, but it was astronomical. And I'm getting DM'd and Twitter and messaged and emailed from all over New York. People say, Henry, it's lost over here. It's a lost cause. They've disincentivized us from now, controlling suspects, violent criminals. We cannot put the knee on their torso. We cannot put our hips. We cannot sit in the most gentle, effective ground control positions. And here's what I said, and this is all public. I said, New York, watch what's going to happen. By criminalizing the least violent ground control positions that have been used for thousands of years in martial arts of all grappling kinds. By criminalizing the least violent control methods, you are now encouraging and incentivizing the use of more violent control tactics. Taser baton, firearm punches, closed fists, blunt object strikes. So these things are now, and there are videos that have happened since this bill has been written into law. Videos have come out Sam, of arrest situations. And I did a breakdown recently, you may have seen it, of this exact dilemma. Now you have four cops trying to control one person by their limbs because they're not allowed to put any contact on the torso and controlling someone by their limbs. Imagine trying to get a little kid who doesn't want to go to bed and trying to drag them by their arm or leg, and they're twisting and turning. Now they're violently twisting and turning. You can't just grab their torso, pick them up, and walk them to the bedroom and put them to sleep. Do you understand? So as a result, in this particular video that I'm talking about, the cops start punching the guy excessively, and then the video goes viral because of the excessive punches. But the general public sees that video, and they don't realize the reason all those punches were necessary was because the so the officers were legally prevented from using more gentle mount controls. They wouldn't have required five officers if they knew basic mount. So anyways, New York is pretty much a lost cause in terms of arrest and control tactics. And the police department would agree with this. So this is city council. This is like representatives of the city who have never been in a fight where a suit are not cops don't know what it's like to hold someone down who doesn't want to be arrested, who are making these laws. And then Mayor de Blasio wrote it into law. And like I said, it's been a downhill slope from there, and I rest in peace. New York City and sadly the civilians think this is good for them, but it's not. I would much rather an officer what's that it's a disaster. I mean, it could not be worse. It could not be worse. It was an accident. It messed up. And now, because New York City is a lost cause, I'm setting my sights on being very vocal about how disastrous and how counterproductive this new bill has become and warning other states that if they engage in this same type of reform where you just strip officers from these nonviolent control tactics as really a gross overreaction to their aversion to neck restraints, really? Kind of. It all started with neck restraints, right? Oh, neck restraints. And then things happen and there's videos go viral and they say, okay, let's not do anything even touch their torso because the diaphragm, they can't breathe as easily when you're laying on their hips. And as a result of that, it's all downhill from there and it's only going to get worse. It's only going to get worse before it gets better. And in New York it's going to get way worse. And then eventually they're going to have to undo certain elements of this new law in order for police to be able to do their jobs again. But I'm just hoping that more states don't follow suit because you could quickly have a situation where it's way worse than we currently see. So this is literally, and this is my whole point, Sam, is that writing a bill into law that says you cannot use the Mount and many other things, but let's just keep it basic because that's part of it. You cannot sit on someone's abdomen in a mountain. Writing that bill into law is done by a group of people who mistakenly believe, Sam, that the cops were sufficiently trained in empty hand control tactics to begin with. That's the whole point. If you believed that every one of these cops in New York was trained like Navy Seals and even with that sufficient amount of training, that excessive amount of training, they performed as poorly as they do, it's understandable that you say let's take away all their ground control skills because clearly they're abusing them. But if you start from the premise that cops get 4 hours in New York City is probably way worse every year or two, then the starting position has to be, wait a minute, let's give them better training before that we take away their least violent options. Yeah. Perhaps we should say something to make this a little clearer to people who are probably no more informed than many of the people who pass this law about the details here. But you imagine someone's violently attacking you, right? Somebody who is at least as strong as you are. And your job now is to stop them from overwhelming you or getting away and hurting a member of the public. So you have to figure out how to bring this person under control. This is the situation where we're putting cops in and they have various tools. They have a gun on their belts, they've got a baton, they've got a taser, and then they've got whatever hand to hand skills that they have or have been given. They've got their own strength and athleticism, such as it might be. And some of these tools are by definition synonymous with death or significant injury. The way you bring someone under control by hitting them in the head repeatedly is, as I said before, synonymous with neurological injury. Right. If you punch them in the face and knock them out and they fall down and they hit their head on the concrete. Exactly. You're not in a ring that is designed for the safety of the contestants. You're earth gear on the street. Yeah. And if you TASE them, they rather often, if the taser works I mean, tasers are by no means foolproof, but when it works, this person is also falling to the concrete, not under their own control, and very likely hitting their head. Right. So this is all of this is extremely risky in terms of the continuum of force and far riskier than any of these things that have been outlawed. And in fact, everything that was just outlawed in New York is practiced in every single jujitsu school on earth every single day, ad nauseam. I'm sure that if you survey death and nobody dies for that from this practice in an under controlled setting when you actually know what you're doing. So I want to ask you Henner so that the most provocative of these maneuvers is, you know, what we call the rear naked choke or the neck restraint. And so this is when a person grabs someone reaches around their throat with their arm from behind. And the elbow, the crook of the elbow is now aligned kind of with the subject's chin and they are squeezing, as you say it's somewhat erroneously calls a choke. It's actually a vascular blood restraint. You're cutting off the circulation through the carotid arteries and after about 6 seconds or so, the person loses consciousness. How dangerous has that proved to be over the course of given what you know, and you now have tons of experience teaching this, I don't know how many schools affiliated with your school who teach this. There are thousands upon thousands of martial artists training in this and they all experience both sides of this choke. I'm sure someone somewhere has died because someone somewhere has died from virtually everything. But what is your perception of the risk and the variables that govern risk? And would this move? Listen, like you said, every single day, millions and millions of vascular neck restraints are applied at the hundreds of thousands of schools around the world that teach you jitsu. This is the safety from a statistical point. You know, you could not I mean, I don't know. Point zero, zero, zero, zero, one percent, I don't know. And it doesn't mean it hasn't happened of a reported death in practice right. By someone who knows what they're doing, who has any degree of training with this. Right. This is normally we hear of death when it's used egregiously by someone who doesn't know when to let go or they squeeze a neck restraint, someone passes out and then you maintain pressure on an unconscious person's body or neck. You maintain additional vascular pressure for, in many cases, what needs to be about 30 to 60 seconds after loss of consciousness is reached. So the amount of pressure and the duration of time that is necessary for someone to die from the use of a vascular neck restraint is substantial. Now, of course, when you consider drug, alcohol use, other medical conditions, those can play a part, but by and large, the technique has been deemed safe on all the studies that have taken place and just anecdotally throughout the country and throughout the world in regular practice of martial arts, these are used all the time. But I think that pointing back to the New York situation, Sam, and you were kind of alluding to the violence of taser a baton, right. These blunt force, and that's kind of just for the listeners out there. What you have to understand is that all the techniques that were outlawed are monumentally safer than what is being encouraged now for these officers because they can't do it. And you started with the example that you were kind of painting of a violent criminal just committed a crime, wants to flee the scene, or wants to assault an officer. Now, the officer has the burden of not just neutralizing that person and taking them into custody for their own protection and for the protection of the public. The officer has the burden of doing that without applying any body to body contact on their torso, chest, back or abdomen. This is unheard of. There is no way it literally rules out if you have someone who's violently resisting. If you imagine all the scenarios where you're able to take them down to the to the ground and control them so that they can be arrested, and you add to that picture the criterion that you have to do this without hurting them, you have basically ruled that out in virtually every case. The moment you you make those specific moves illegal, yes. There is no way to do it without hurting them. There is no way to do it without exactly. And that's kind of the confusion here, is that they did something. Sam hoping to lower the level of force that officers would use on suspects, not realizing that now, because of the impossible equation you've painted for this officer, of having to subdue someone without using their body to do it, they can only use their hands. But a violent criminal cannot be held down by someone's two hands if you cannot lay on their body. And I'm telling you this as a black belt lifelong practitioner, if you, Sam, did not want to be taken into custody and someone said, Henry, take Sam and put handcuffs on him right now. But the condition was I'm not allowed to lay on your body, Sam. I could not put I could not put any pressure on your torso, chest, back or abdomen. Literally, my body could not lay on your body if that was the requirement. I do not feel capable of subduing you. And I'm a master. And I'm not saying you like Sam the blue belt. I'm talking about Sam the regular civilian, a regular person, just a man or woman who does not want to be taken into custody. I would not be able to do that by myself. I would need four or five other officers to hold one on each limb and then a third person punching you in the face. So we've literally created a fifth person punching you in the face. We've literally created an impossible equation where a single officer is no longer capable. Even if that Officer Sam is well trained, even if they had a black belt in Jujitsu, a single officer to take a single suspect into custody who is determined not to go is very, very unlikely to pan out. In a way that is both suitable or acceptable to the general public, acceptable to the police force and acceptable to the civilian in that they hopefully don't have to die while they're getting arrested. But you're forcing the cop to escalate their level of force unnecessarily because you took away their lowest and most effective control options. It's unbelievable, Sam. It's literally the worst thing I've ever seen from a police training and tactics change across law enforcement across the whole country. It's the most negative backward step that has ever been taken. Now, again, the rest of the bill had some good things. It's the diaphragm contact aspect that literally throws away all judo techniques, all wrestling controls, all Judith standard controls that have been used for thousands of years and effectively and safely to control. And forget the neck restraints. I'm talking about just laying on someone like two kids wrestling in the backyard or like, you know what I'm saying, like we do every single day here in practice. So it's frustrating, it's sad. And like I said, it's such a lost cause and it's so sad for those officers who are now basically, literally it was already hard enough arresting someone on 4 hours. A year of jiujitsu training was already hard enough. Now saying, hey, not only are you going to get that minimum 4 hours, but you're not allowed to touch their torso with any part of your body or you're going to be criminalized. You're basically saying either be ready to use lethal force to stop the subject from fleeing the scene, right? Because at the end of the day, you have to arrest the person or simply don't arrest him. Actually, this may be of interest only to martial arts nerds, but perhaps we can say something about why the often touted pain compliance kind of wrist locks are so hard to use when you have a violently resisting opponent. Why can't you just teach a bunch of wrist locks and get past all of this? Sure. Yeah. Any pain compliance technique requires healthy neurological processing to take place, right? So the second that someone is either drugged intoxicated or high on adrenaline in any way, shape, or form, where their pain tolerance, right, as we know, goes through the roof, then a wrist lock simply doesn't have the desired effect. And often, instead of pain compliance, you get what's called pain defiance. Right, which is a threshold, because imagine if I grab one of your fingers sam and I started bending it backwards, and I got to a point where it was uncomfortable, and your logical brain said, yeah, he's going to keep going. I'd better listen to him. Imagine if instead of stopping at that point, I just tripled my level of force on your finger. Do you think that you're processing would be, okay, I really better listen now, or would you suddenly be tricked? Your brain would essentially be flicked into survival amygdala hijack. And you would literally do anything on the Earth to free yourself from that about to be broken limb. You're about to lose a finger or a broken joint. And the same is true for a elbow or a shoulder. You can go pain compliance while they're healthily processing the encounter, but the second the person's drugs or alcohol or their pain tolerance simply goes through the roof because of any one of these outside variables, you simply cannot do it. So my point is, what officers need to do is they need to control body to body control for the first 100 seconds is what we teach. Not knee on the neck, not neck restraint. That would be crazy. Right? I'm talking about basic side mount, basic mount control, basic back mount. 100 seconds to literally slow everything down and to teach the remember UFC One when Hoist fought Art Jimmerson? Sam when he mounted on Art Jimmerson and Art, excuse me, was trying to bump, twist, and push him off, and Art could not escape Hoist's mount. And as a result of several seconds going by where Art could not escape his mount, this is one of his opponents in UFC One. Art just tapped out? Yeah. What happened there? There was no submission. There was no knockout. Why did art tap out? Because he couldn't get off his back. He was trying as hard as he could, and he was ineffective at escaping from a superior supine back mountain position. Hoist just laid on him, and at that point, Art was able to process that since he could not get out with all of his might, that it was only going to be downhill from there on out. It wasn't going to go well. It wasn't going to go well. So that right there, Sam, is the number one recommended law enforcement arrest and control strategy. Get the suspect on their back, not on their belly, on their back, and hold them there for 100 seconds. With body to body control, once that they the suspect has a chance to process that, they're not going to get out at will. A whole processing happens in their mind and they go, wow, I'm not going to get out. I can't get a hold of their gun because they have good under hooks and weapon retention. I'm not getting this officer off. Other officers are coming at this point, they can kind of go into the process of, maybe I should comply and just get this over with. But that require as long as there's hope of escape, there is going to be savagery from the suspect. And what I'm saying is to kill the hope, you have to use the 102nd rule and maintain that top position on a supine suspect until help gets there or until their spirit is sufficiently broken that they will comply with the pain compliance technique or simply verbal commands, which often work. Once the spirit is broken and they realize that they're really not going to get away, it's a whole different human that you're dealing with. So to answer your question, it's not as easy as it looks. And if you can't control body to body supine for 100 seconds, if that's not legal, there is no guarantee that you're going to get this person into custody. Off wrists, twists, fingers, joints, shoulders, elbows, someone will let their arm break and then free themselves from this situation because they're high on some drug. It really is. You have to experience it to understand. But when you have someone who has much better training than you have in Grappling, again, the mystifying thing is that they don't even have to be bigger than you. They could be smaller than you. But if there's simply a very significant mismatch between how you know how to wrestle based on your Apish intuitions and the person who's holding you down, there is something supernatural about it. It is like your adversary. In this case, the cop is functioning with a different physics. Your attempt to get up is completely hopeless, and only sufficient training can create that kind of disparity. And that is the thing you need to ensure that people get arrested in a way that doesn't require a continual escalation of force. So we've been painting a very unhappy picture here, Henner, but I know there are bright spots here. Tell me someplace where this is working better than it is in New York. So I've been advocating I briefly mentioned it earlier. I've been advocating for quite some time now that my prescribed solution to this use of force kind of pandemic in America is 1 hour of jujitsu every week for every officer in America. Boom. Done. Logistically, how do we do that? Where does the money come from? Where do they do it? All secondary concerns. I'm just telling you what it needs to be because I know what 1 hour a week of jiujitsu will create in a regular civilian. I see it all the time. And I know that that's the bare minimum. Someone needs to be sufficiently trained to get in a violent altercation and be able to just stay afloat and handle their business and not have the Amygdala Hijack take over. Right. To me, that's the key. And of course, that presumes. After several months or six months to a year of 1 hour a week, someone will be at a place where, if they get into a fight, they're going to be able to at least stay focused, stay calm, manage. The distance, manage the damage, control the subject, and at the very least, until help arrives, which in many cases is all they need to do, right, is for an officer. So that being said, I've been touting this loud enough for long enough. That one of our agencies that we've been working with since 2009, marietta Police Department in Marietta, Georgia, one of these agencies who's a GST certified. So they've had their instructor certified in our week long certification. But like every other agency we work with, they get cut off when they go home and go to teach it. They're only allowed to teach for 4 hours a year. Right. So Marietta, Georgia has been GST for about eleven years. And two years ago, almost exactly April 1, two years ago, what happened was prior to that, a video went viral in Marietta that showcased the officers who again are getting their bare minimum annual training of GST and a few other tactics. These officers aggressively striking a subject on the floor in a restaurant. The video goes viral, right, for all the wrong reasons. And at that point, Marietta command staff ultimately say, hey, listen, we're getting, we're getting upset at these officers for performing so poorly, but we're not giving them any better options. So it's on us to give them better options. And 4 hours a year clearly isn't cutting it. Look at the performance and look at this viral video. So that was kind of the tipping point there for them. So what happened? Marietta did something unconventional, unexpected, unheard of, and revolutionary all at the same time. They did a test, and I'm going to say his name, major Jake King was kind of the conductor, the man who pulled this whole thing together, right. The conductor of the orchestra here in terms of the Marietta transformation. And he deserves a lot of credit for taking this risk because he believed in jujitsu. Here was the test. Sam they were going to say, okay, let's get rookies, because they've heard this, they've heard this proposition of jujitsu regular weekly practice. So they said, let's do it with the rookies. Rookies in their police academy, the new hires, we can pretty much have them do whatever we want. And they have to do it because it's kind of like the guinea pigs, right? So they said, let's do these rookies and let's get them to do jujitsu, mandatory jiu. Jitsu at a local, carefully vetted, civilian owned jujitsu school where they go to regular classes of jujitsu with civilians in the classes. Let's get them their uniforms and let's mandate that they go I think it was twice a week was the mandation mandated period for the five months while they're in the police academy. So they did it. They did it. And five months later, these rookies came out of the police academy training weekly. They have their academy all day. They go train jutsu at night. They have their uniform, their regular jutsu students. And not surprising to anyone who does jujitsu, but seemingly to the shock of everyone else, these officers came out of the academy. These new rookies, brand new cops came out of the academy. And the number one word they use, this is reported to me by Major King, who I've interviewed extensively about what happened in Marietta in terms of the the data, there Mariette. So Major King says, Henry, the number one word on their exit surveys was confidence. These officers left the academy with a greater degree of confidence than ever had happened before in the history of Marietta Police department. They go into the field, Sam, and they start applying their techniques, and they're taking people down, and they're arresting people. And there's actually a video you guys can link to it's actually at gracieuniversity. COMREFORM has all of the Marietta data I'm going to share with you now, and the video showing the use by these officers, their Judith's skills as rookies. So these guys come out of the academy and girls, and they have these use of force incidents. And Sam, they're taking people down. They're mounting on them. They're patting them on the back. They're verbally saying, hey, you're going to be okay. I got you right here. Let's just we're going to take care of you. There's no cussing. There's no violence. There's no violent punching in the head. All the things we've gotten used to, seeing as a country don't exist with these officers who went through the jiujitsu program in Marietta. Listen, it was so successful, this program for these rookies, that they decided to open it up to in service officer Sam. And this is where everything changed. The agency has 145 officers. Of the 145, 95 of the officers opted into the free jiujitsu program, sponsored and paid for by the agency at the civilian owned school where they're allowed to go train weekly for free to them, paid for by the agency as official regular jujitsu students. And this went down. 95 officers opted in 50 officers did not. So we have a control group against which we can really compare the performance of the BJJ trained officers and the non BJJ officers in the agency. And the data is in. It's been 18 months since the program has been initiated for the for the department of permitting this type of use. And we have numbers, and these numbers are right. These are published by Marietta Police Department. And like I said, they're on our website at the URL I gave and you can link to it. It's unbelievable. So let me just run through some of the key points here and you can ask questions and we can dig a little bit on what the implications are for the rest of the country because this is the most promising data in the history of law enforcement, arrest and control tactics. So training injuries because, of course, the number one concern for a lot of these police departments are, well, how injured would cops get if they're doing juice all the time? What if they get injured while they're training in 2600 classes in the 18 month period by 95 officers, one injury in the Dojo, a single injury, a nose got cracked on a takedown attempt, and that was it. And this remember, be clear, these 95 officers, some of them are young rookies, many of them are old and out of shape and have never seen the inside of the gym in their lives for the last however many years. And they're now starting jujitsu for the first time. So we're talking about a large population here of officers of all types of demographics and all types of shapes and sizes. Taser deployments reduced by 23% in the population that does jiu jitsu. So 77% in the non BJ group, 54% Taser deployments in the use of in the BJJ train group, 85% of which were to stop a foot pursuit. So they aren't using the Tasers, right, in all cases, they aren't using the Tasers in the fight because they can't handle it. They're using it when someone's running away and they're chasing them and they have to stop the person from fleeing the scene. Use of force. Injuries to officers. So this is actually in the field now. Injuries to officers. In the 18 months prior to the instituting of this program, there were 29 injuries to officers in the field. 18 months prior, in the 18 months after the program, there were 15 injuries to officers in the field. That's a 48% reduction department wide of officer injuries. Now, here's the kicker, Sam. Zero of the reported injuries were in the BJJ trained population. Zero. So 15 injuries in the four in the 50 people that had not done jiu jitsu that have not started this program of weekly practice. Sam, this makes the most sense in the world because a fight is a very scary and dangerous thing to someone who does not do this regularly, but to. Someone who does jujitsu weekly like you or I getting into a fight. We might bump our elbow or bruise our knee, but this does not turn into a serious six months off duty workers comp claim, because I simply taking someone down and holding them down is what I do every day in practice. And here's what's wild. That's exactly what is being said by these rookies. One of them took a suspect down. It was actually a mental patient. They showed me the video. It's on our website. There. They take down a mental patient, perfect body fold, takedown, mount, back, mount, patting him on the back, telling me he's going to be okay. When they got up, the sergeant said hey to the rookie, hey, that was one of the best takedowns I've ever seen. And the rookie says, oh, no, that was nothing. I've done that a hundred times. So when these officers are doing this on regular, everyday practice, it just makes sense that this is what they do. There's no problem. Now, here's what the department loved. The department wide 48% reduction overall in injuries to officers resulted in $66,000 $752 saved on workman's comp claims that never happened. Yeah, so the agency saved money, and that's $40,000 more than they spent on the training for these officers in that 18 month period. So the net savings for the agency is over $40,000 because of the workman's comp claims. That never happened when cops simply don't get hurt in their uses of force in the field. So then I asked Major King. I said, Major King, there's one more number that I have to hear. What about injuries to suspects? That's what the world wants to know. Okay, the cops are safer, but what about the people that they're taking down and controlling in these positions? When we talk about serious injuries to suspects classified as hospitalization, if someone did not need to be cleared at a hospital, then they didn't get classified. But hospitalization was well documented. And when a use of force involved an officer that trained BJJ, the suspect was 53% less likely to sustain serious injury. That required hospitalization sam more than twice as likely to get hospitalized. If you get arrested by someone who does not do weekly jiujitsu, this was the most important number for me. This is the one. If we could reduce the hospitalization by half or really the serious injuries by half countrywide for every officer in America, what kind of service will we be doing? Half. 50% progress. So these are the numbers that I've been dreaming of Sam for 25 years. This is it. And I could never do it because I'm not an officer in charge of a department where I could mandate this type of training. I've been advocating for it for 20 plus years, but I could not mandate it. So Major King, having been someone who's been around jujitsu, believes in jujitsu, is on Team Jujitsu, bit the bullet and said, man, we just got to do this. Let's see what happens with these rookies. It happened. It was so successful. They rolled it out to in service. It was so successful at in service. We've published this data on our website, and now Major King is being contacted by dozens of police departments every single week from all over the world because people are seeing the data that we published, and they're asking for his assistance to set up similar programs. And to be clear, the program that we're advocating for now is a partnership between a private, civilian owned, carefully vetted, civilian owned jujitsu school and a local police department with any number of officers who can send those officers for this supplementary training, weekly training at the agency. And then the question is, who pays for it? In Marietta, they're using currently asset forfeiture funds which are federally controlled, but the agency puts in a grant request or a request to the federal government saying, hey, we have this forfeited assets here. Can we use this for training and or equipment? And the answer is, yes, you can use forfeited assets for training or equipment. Okay. We want to use it for this supplementary jujitsu training program, and they permit it. So this is happening at many departments around the country. And now Georgia specifically has approached Major King, who, like I said, orchestrated all of this, and they basically are now talking about state grants funding for departments that want to institute similar programs. So the Georgia Senate is now discussing state grant funding for agencies who want to institute a supplementary juju program. Literally, Sam, this is the best thing that has ever happened to police training ever, is that they're now contemplating these private partnerships with local judiciary schools to make sure these officers get the training that they need, because the agency could never provide this. Logistically, the only reason why there's a chance that this becomes a nationwide success is because it's profitable for the agency. Yeah, they're saving over $40,000 in 18 months on this one small, 150 officer agency alone. Imagine the much larger agencies, how much they're going to save on workman's comp claims from having their officers better trained. We always knew this. We always hypothesized this, but now we have the actual the numbers, and the numbers simply don't lie. Well, New York, if you're listening, you've got some of the best jujitsu schools in the country. I guess it's too late to walk back from the brink. You're already over the brink, but you can climb back up the cliff. Henry, is there anything else we haven't covered that you think needs to get into people's heads here? Yeah. I'm so excited. Yeah. I'm glad we did such a good job kind of setting up the the current state of why police force is such a difficulty here in America and and then and then segueing into this very promising Marietta case study. And what's wild is as soon as we publish the data, I think to date, we've already had over 50 department sam contact us. Nice looking for. Hey, we want to start this partnership, and we just signed two contracts. Roswell Police Department is being finalized this week. We just signed Peachtree City, Georgia. Again, these are actual contracts between the agency gracie University headquarters and the Certified Gracie Jiu Jitsu Training Center in the region to where they now send their officers. And these officers can go train whenever they want. And it's like I said, paid for by the agency. The officers love it. And the buy in actually Peace Tree City. I was talking to Lieutenant Chris there, and he said, henry, we sent out the email announcing our partnership with the Certified Juju Training Center there, and I didn't expect the buy in to be as solid as it was. The yes is. The enthusiastic yes is. It's almost like they're dying of thirst. Sam, these officers, they all know they're under trained. They all know they're being put in life and death situations every day. On a cop's budget. A lot of them can't afford $200 a month judiciary classes. But the way we worked it out with the agencies is the agency is only paying $10 per officer per class, and they're invoiced at the end of the month, so they only pay for the officers that show up. And on that model, they're always going to save more in reduced workman's comp claims than they are going to pay for the training. So it'll always be a net profit equation for the agency. And listen, we're not trying to get rich off of these partnerships with the community. I'm just trying to be part of the solution that makes training available at a cost that is acceptable for the city, ultimately, who's paying for it and the department. But the challenge we're having right now is we have more inquiries in locations than we have schools to meet the demand. It's a crazy time. So for me, it's just so remarkable that this is even being contemplated that these government departments, essentially these institutions of government employees and police officers are being allowed to partner with civilian owned martial arts schools. Like this never happened. You never had a police department partner with a taekwondo school, right? So they never happened before. So it just speaks to a jujitsu effectiveness and really a remarkable effectiveness in combat, but B, a new wave in police training, which has never before even been contemplated before. Marietta took the risk and made it happen. So I'm just so excited that we now have the data and that the world can now see that what we've always believed was true, that a cop is less risk a police officer. And we didn't even speak about the reduction in lawsuits, right, because when you have less injuries to suspect, you have reduction in excessive force allegations and subsequent lawsuits. Those savings have not even been factored into. Right. And then, of course, the community relations, the community relations nightmare of having a video go viral where Marietta, for example, used their excessive force in the restaurant on that video that I spoke about, those videos stop happening. When cops are well trained, they don't go viral anymore. And then a department can start to rebuild its relationship with the community because they're at an all time low right now. And I think ultimately, that's all the police want, and that's all the community wants is the community wants to believe in law enforcement, and law enforcement wants to perform for the community at a standard that meets their expectation. Yeah. Is there a path for Jiujitsu schools that have no direct affiliation with the Gracie Academy to get certified in this specific police appropriate training? Because obviously there are schools that have slightly different training philosophies. They're more geared towards sport than self defense, and yet many of them could very quickly learn and adopt the most effective training here. And that's kind of what's happening. I'm glad you pointed it out, because when these agencies are contacting us from territories where we don't have a Gracie University certified training center, what we do, they say, hey, we want to partner with you, gracie University. There's no school here. We are now going out and communicating with the judicial schools in the community there and saying, hey, who wants to go through the process to become the certified training center that we could then partner with the agency for a potentially lifelong relationship? Right. These are not short term. These are once successful, I expect these partnerships with the agencies to be decade long, if not indefinite. Right. There's no end term to Marietta. That's never going to stop. They're never going to pull that program because look how much they're saving. Look how many the lower level of force, the injuries to officers have gone down substantially. So all the data points to, we're never going to end this. Right. And it's not cost efficient for them to do this in the agency. So outsourcing, it just makes perfect sense. But the point is, so we're having to go to territories and find schools like you're proposing to say, hey, do you guys want to go through the process? And the answer is yes. Gracie University certified training centers, it's not an affiliation program like you think of Sam in traditional martial arts, where we're your master and you have to have our banner on your storefront. That's not what a certified training center is. Once you undergo the certification process to teach the courses that would make you a suitable partner for a law enforcement agency, you still can be affiliated with any other organization or any other master instructor. Becoming a certified training center, it just means that we can recommend you because the operating system for the programs that these officers would be exposed to are vetted and monitored and quality controlled by Gracie University headquarters. So the answer is yes. A school can keep their affiliation and still become a certified Gracie Jiujitsu Training Center. That would make them a suitable partner. And for any Jujitsu instructors or people out there who are interested in learning more about that, you can go to Graciinstructor.com. And that's the thing, is that, like I said, we just can't meet the demand right now with how many agencies are coming on board. And it's just a uniquely exciting time for Jiu Jitsu, for law enforcement, for the Gracie family, who's been kind of fighting for this for 30 years in America. Like, we're literally right now at the beginning of a new era in law enforcement training, and it's all centered around Jujitsu. So Jujitsu was already hot because of the UFC, right? Because it's just this growing sport, and it's really effective to know that the direction American policing is going is towards weekly Jiu Jitsu for every officer in America. If you've been hesitant, even if you're a civilian who's been questioning the effectiveness of Jiujitsu, know that it's the time is now to learn it just as a practitioner. But if you're someone who already does Jiu Jitsu, who's on the fence of saying, man, I want to become an instructor, potentially it's the right time to get into the industry. I mean, of course, barring COVID restrictions, right now it's the right time to get into Jiu Jitsu because the opportunity to partner with the government institution had never existed, and now it does. And you can learn more about every step that it takes on that process@graciinstructor.com. And what's really cool is that we also create the opportunity for someone to reserve a territory for up to twelve months while they undergo the training they need in order to become a certified training center. They can make sure that their territory remains reserved, and that gives them the certainty that while they're moving towards this objective of certification to meet these quality standards, they won't have the territory taken from them. Because we only allow one certified Gracie Training Center per five mile radius in the country. So if that territory gets taken by someone else, you're pretty much boxed out. So that's the one thing I would say is that check out that territory reservation program and all the other details regarding certification. And you don't have to be a black belt. Someone can be a blue belt, follow our systems and be able to teach other beginners, right, relatively speaking, the art, and create an amazing learning opportunity. So blue belts, purple bells, brown belts, black belts, someone who's just getting into Jitsu but fell in love with it and wants to teach it and make their passion, their profession, now is the time to join Team Jujitsu. And we've created a perfect path with that territory reservation opportunity. And this is what we do. We open schools and we service the community and now we're partnering with these police departments. So it's never been so exciting, and all thanks to Marietta. But it had to get this bad for this change to happen, Sam, because I'll tell you what, law enforcement in America, it's a very slow moving institution, right? The whole idea of law enforcement, they don't want to change anything. So in that sense, all the negativity, all the things that have gone wrong in terms of just the public outcry, the excessive uses of force, it sucks that it happened, but I'm telling you, the country is changing. Law enforcement is changing as a result of that outcry. It's fantastic. And we really, as you point out, we're at the bottom of the valley here. I mean, we're literally having this conversation during the Derek Chauvin trial. And I don't know if you feel the same apprehension that I do around the outcome here, but it's easy to see that if some significant justice isn't meted out to him, that the nation could erupt over it. Both for understandable reasons and for reasons that are perhaps in part based on the kind of misunderstandings of police conduct and police training that all the facts aren't in yet. I certainly wouldn't want to say anything exculpatory about Chauvin himself at this point, but it could be quite dramatic if based on some policy that as yet unexpressed at trial, we learned that he's not actually going to serve any significant time. Perhaps we'll close on this real world instance here. How do you view the prospects of resolution to that case? Listen, yeah, I've been asked, and I did a small interview the other day regarding and they asked me in the realm that I am an expert, right, which is martial arts and a lot of experience with neck restraints. And the question was posed to me quite simply, is it possible that the knee on the neck right. Since that's kind of the central topic of discussion there in this thing, is it possible that the knee on the neck caused his death? Right. There are many other variables, but to what extent was that possible? In my professional opinion, jujitsu found it. Again, I'm not the medical examiner. I don't know how much drugs he had in his body and his system. But purely speaking, from a jujitsu vascular neck restraint perspective, it is absolutely possible that placing the knee on the neck for the extended period of time that was placed by Mr. Chauvin there could cause someone to enough obstruction to the blood flow to cause someone to lose consciousness. And then the continued pressure after unconsciousness was met could absolutely, like any neck restraint that is held after someone loses consciousness could lead to someone's death. So I do believe it could have played a part. I don't know what other factors were at play. I don't have all the details, but whether or not he's convicted of that or exonerated for some reason that we don't yet know is yet to be determined. But my belief is that absolutely, knowing what I know and people say, oh, because it's on the back of the neck, it wasn't a neck restraint. It wasn't plugging the carotids. No, you can plug the carotid indirectly by placing a knee on the back of someone's neck and the front part of their neck being so flushly compressed into the ground, into the pavement, which was the case there, that that compression happens indirectly even. And I'm very aware of many techniques, even in Jiu Jitsu, where there's a very indirect application of pressure that is still very effective at creating the neck restraint and the loss of consciousness or the submission in that case, or loss of consciousness if submission isn't achieved or someone doesn't tap out. So I absolutely believe that it was possible. So we'll see what happens. And I agree that there may be, if he's not convicted, that there will be an eruption that may even exceed what we saw previously in all of this. Yeah. Well, as always, Henry, thank you for doing what you're doing. You're an inspiration. And one of the things I look forward to, getting to the full reboot of civilization after COVID is the ability to train without concern. So see you on the other side of everyone getting vaccinated. I appreciate man yeah. Definitely looking forward to that. And I appreciate you allowing your platform to be used to shed some light. And if nothing else, I hope what we accomplish today is that the general public can look at this and go, wow, they are police officers are asked to do more with less than we ever imagined. Right. If the general public simply knows how under trained police officers are, they'll at least second guess themselves before judging an excessive use of force and know that it wasn't a function of an abusive use of power as much as it was a function of simply under preparation for a very high, intense and dangerous situation that these cops are being thrown into every single day. And I think that law enforcement officers, for all they do, I think they deserve that. They deserve the consideration that, look, they're at least not being given the tools. And then, you know, that's that's that's the bare minimum. And in best case scenario, let's keep chugging along until every police officer is just a regular practitioner of the arts. It just makes sense. If what you do is deal with violent physical altercations every day, you should be an expert in violent physical altercations. Stands to reason. Yeah. Well, needless to say, I consider this a PSA. And we will link to the videos that you recommend. There was one video of a botched arrest in a McDonald's, if I recall, with a Taser. If ever you want to see the kind of training cops do not have, that's a great instance. So, anyway, we'll link to that. And thanks again, Henry. My pleasure. Thank you, Sam. Have a good one./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, the briefest possible housekeeping. We are one week away from the presidential election in the United States, and I am sure I will have a Zoom call for podcast subscribers at some point immediately following a result. We don't know how long it will take to get a result, but I will pick my moment and we will announce it by the usual channels, probably email and Twitter, and it'll be another video Q and A on Zoom. And if you want to participate in that, you can subscribe to the podcast@samharris.org. Okay, today I'm speaking with Nicholas Kristakis. Nicholas is a physician and sociologist and he directs the Human Nature lab at Yale University, where he is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science in the departments of Sociology, Medicine, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, statistics and Data science and Biomedical engineering. He is also the co director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, and he's the author of several books connected, Blueprint and most recently, Apollo's Arrow the Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. And that is the topic of today's conversation. Nicholas and I cover a lot of ground. We talk about the breakdown of trust in institutions and experts, the corruption of science by politics, the ineptitude of the Trump administration in handling the pandemic, whether the gravity of COVID-19 has been exaggerated using this experience to prepare for future pandemics. Whether it's true that COVID deaths are being overreported, bad incentives in the medical system, the prospect that the coronavirus will evolve to become more benign, the efficacy of current treatments, safety concerns about a rushed vaccine, the importance of public health communication when life on earth might return to normal the economic impact of the pandemic long term social changes that may result the future of universities nicholas's personal habits to keep from getting the coronavirus the importance of rapid testing and other topics. Anyway, this is an up to the minute look at the state of the pandemic and certainly a timely conversation prior to the election. And now I bring you Nicholas Kristakis. I am here with Nicholas Kristakis. Nicholas, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Sam, thank you so much for having me. It's good to be back. So, yeah, you are now a multirepete guest, and so I know I'm in good company. The first couple of times were just a dress rehearsal, but now you can be a co host whenever you want, but briefly remind people what your station in life is and how you come to know or have strong opinions about many of the topics we're going to touch. Oh, goodness. Well, I'm a physician and a social scientist, and I've spent my life or my career in academia doing scientific research and taking care of patients. Up until about ten years ago, I was a hospice doctor taking care of people who are dying. But I run a moderately decent sized lab at Yale University now, doing science of different kinds. We have a bunch of different groups in my in my laboratory. We do everything from sort of quantitative public health research to work on the microbiome to classic sociology research to we have actually a social robotics division. We work on artificial intelligence. Anyway, we do a whole bunch of cool things. So I'm very proud of them, this group of mine. And I teach students as well, and I've lately become very interested in the evolutionary origins of human social interactions and most recently in the pandemic. In the COVID pandemic. Yeah. Well, you, unlike many people, have managed to put this pandemic to very good use. I mean, you we've we've been under the shadow of this thing for about eight months now, and you have managed not only to write a book about the pandemic, but to publish it. And that is astonishing if you are at all familiar with the usual time course of writing books and publishing them. And that book is Apollo's Arrow the Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the way We Live. And that is out just this week as we release this. That should be available to anyone online or in your bookstore, if you are intrepid enough to visit your local bookstore. So I want to talk about COVID obviously, and I want you to bring us all up to the present in terms of what we should know about it at this point and also to forecast what you expect to see in the next year or so. But I want us to use the pandemic as a lens through which to consider much else that's ailing us because we're living with a significant breakdown in our ability to acknowledge a shared reality. And this is based on the deliberate spread of Disinformation, which I've devoted a few podcasts to. It's also based on how our natural biases are being amplified by technology. I mean, social media has weaponized our confirmation bias and our tribalism and our other less than epistemic ways of thinking. And the result is that we're finding it harder and harder to collectively acknowledge the same set of facts, much less agree about what to do in response to those facts. So we're dealing with this total pollution of our information space, and it's affecting everything. And as a result, our trust in institutions, whether it's the government or the press or universities or scientific journals, is at an all time low. And worse, given what is happening, it probably should be at an all time low. I'll just give you one sign of the times that happened recently. The New England Journal of Medicine published a truly blistering editorial about how badly the Trump administration has handled COVID. And I read that and I basically agreed with every word of it. And we can we'll get into the details there. But then I noticed that my Twitter feed just lights up with allegations that the New England Journal of Medicine is financially tied to the Chinese Communist Party. At this point right now, I don't even have time to figure out whether or not that's true. But nothing at this point would surprise me. But I have no time for this because you can literally hold your breath until the next scandal arises that seems worthy of your attention. They happen over the time course of minutes now. So it's just a crazy space to even be having this conversation in. And so I want us to focus on COVID and get deeply into it. But I think we should talk about the way in which politics in particular is deranging the information space and science itself at this point. Yeah, I mean, in a way we could even start with that. I was scribbling some notes about topics for us to discuss as you were speaking, and there's so many directions we could go in, but I guess with one predicate we could start with that. Sure. Which is that we happen to be alive at a moment when we are experiencing something very unusual in the history of our species, and that is that a new, serious, widespread pathogen has been introduced into our midst. This only happens once every 50 or 100 years. And one of the themes actually of my book is that this feels very alien to us, this risk of death, this fact that we have to spread out, this collapse of our economy. But I guess a very important idea is that plagues are not unusual for our species. This is just new to us. We think this is so weird, we think this is so unusual, we think this is so unfair. But really epidemics of this kind have been afflicting us for thousands of years. That is actually an interesting story about prior to 10,000 years ago, prior to the agricultural revolution. What were such epidemics possible? And the gist of it is probably not. But anyway, from the time we invented agriculture and moved into cities, we've been prone to this. And in fact, the title of the book, Apollo Zero comes from the opening of The Iliad, in which in fact, there's a plague. That's how old this phenomenon is. 3000 years ago, Omer was writing about this. Anyway, so this germ, which has its own we can debate whether viruses are living things or not. But for the sake of argument, this germ is acting like any other living thing. It's found untouched virgin territory namely, our bodies. And it's just having what's known as an ecological release. It's just spreading relentlessly among us. Just like if you had let rats loose on New Zealand a thousand years ago they would take over the whole of the country. So there's no natural immunity to this pathogen. And it's just doing having its way, you know, just going about it about its business but leaping ahead. Now with that background to the point you put on the table for us to discuss initially it's odd to me the way this virus is striking us at a particular moment in our own national history. I don't know about global history, but certainly national history because the virus has struck us at a moment in our political life which is very inauspicious for us but perfect for the virus. So we have what I would call a thinning out of our intellectual culture. We have a denigration of expertise. We think that there's something evil about experts or that they're self serving which is really odd because when you need a car mechanic, you want an expert, right? And there's this famous saying in sociology that one man's occupation is made up of the emergencies of other people. So when you have a flood in your basement, it's a rare event and an emergency for you. But it's the routine daily experience of the expert plumber who comes to repair it. So why we have this attitude or this posture towards expertise is itself very odd. But we have a kind of anti expertise which is a reflection, I think, of a kind of antioletism that we have in our society right now. There is an addition to that, as you described, a kind of denigration of science or a disbelief in science or a politicization of science whereby scientists are seen as just like any other interest group trying to feed at the public trough instead of seeing, I think, more rightly. Of course, I'm very partial to scientists and science but I recognize science as limitations and we can talk about that as well. But this idea that if scientists tell us something there must be an ulterior motive rather than trying to engage science as science is also very dangerous ascendant ideology in our society right now. And there are two more items which I'll mention and all of this causes quite a witch's brew. Another, of course, that everyone is familiar with is the political polarization which by many metrics by political scientists show that we're at a moment in our history when we're very politicized such that even a simple act like wearing a mask becomes seen either as an indicator of virtue oh, you know, I'm on the left. You know, I'm a good citizen. I wear a mask. This symbol, this mask symbolizes my commitment to the commonweal or, you know, the mask is seen as an infringement on my liberty. You know, like I'm on the right, you know, I should be allowed to do what I want. How dare anyone tell me to wear a mask? This is ridiculous. It's just a mask. It's just a barrier to the spread of droplets. It doesn't need to be politicized. And many other countries, incidentally, do not politicize mask wearing. It's not seen as a political act. And finally to this witch's brew is this extraordinary loss of capacity for nuance in our society. And I know you talk about this a lot, Sam, on this podcast, which is why things are seen as black or white. I mean, every topic, why we can't acknowledge that there are shades of gray, there's uncertainty. There are intermediate steps. You don't have to be with me or against me. You can be partly with me or you can recognize that this is a complicated topic, whether it's whatever we're talking about, there's this sort of desire for simple perspectives on the world that I think is not in keeping with the nature of the real world. So all of these things, the denigration of expertise, that disbelief in science, the polarization, the loss of nuance this is when the virus is striking us. And, boy, has this sapped our ability to respond effectively? Let's focus on the political cooping of science. And this has happened. The pressure has come from both the right and the left here in different ways and in different topics. Yeah, but to a degree on both sides that has revealed scientists themselves to be all too human. Right. So some of the skepticism and despair over the loss of the stature of scientific opinion here is understandable, given just how craven so many scientists have shown themselves to be. So to see what's happening on the right, or at least in Trumpistan, where you locate that on the political spectrum, is sometimes difficult. But what we see is this effort to please the delusional boy king, and it results in some of the most reputable people in public health walking on eggshells around this monstrously, ignorant and belligerent president. And so we have Anthony Fauci, who has the most stellar reputation of anyone. He's been writing he's been writing about respiratory pandemic since before not before you and I were born, but for decades. Yes, we're very lucky to have him. But still, most of his energy seems to be bound up in an effort to not embarrass the president. Right, but he's found that almost impossible to avoid doing. And then we have someone like Dr. Birks, who in those first weeks and couple of months of her prominence seemed more and more like a hostage with Stockholm syndrome. Right? And Robert Redfield, who's running the CDC, appears just visibly neutered whenever he's communicating about COVID in public. And none of this inspired confidence in the beginning and since most of these people have almost entirely disappeared, I trust also for political reasons. So there's that sort of the lack of credibility in the public face of the messaging. But then there's a reasonable concern that the Trump administration has so vitiated the scientific expertise in government, whether it's at the CDC or the FDA or in the EPA, just across the board pre COVID this was happening, and has been replacing career civil servants and scientists with political lackeys and industry lobbyists. And given the ineptitude of our response to COVID it seems worth worrying that maybe we're no longer the medical and technical superpower we once were or thought we were. And this culminates in things like Harold Varmas, another person with a totally stellar reputation, writing an op ed in the New York Times declaring that we can't trust the CDC's guidance about whether to reopen schools. Right, so there is the kind of breakdown in authority here. Yes. And then from the left we see this the moral panic around wokeness in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in the midst of the pandemic. And we see this insane double standard endorsed by literally thousands of public health officials, where they declare that the protests against the Lockdown were murderously irresponsible. But protests in support of Black Lives Matter, as if by magic, are not only okay, they're actually necessary. Right. We have the Left and the right competing in this insane sort of reputational potlatch to see who can destroy their gravitas more quickly. And so that's the space in which our political partisanship has just made a mockery of scientific communication. Well, I mean, this is a very complicated topic, obviously, that goes in many directions, and you've alluded to quite a few of them, and I know you've thought deeply about this too. But first of all, one of the principles of democracy is that we get to elect our leaders and we have an executive branch that is responsive to the people we elect. Now, you could make the argument that the people voted for Donald Trump. There of course, side arguments about how more people voted for Hillary and blah, blah, blah. We had the system, we had he won the election. And therefore it's a reflection of our democracy that the will of the people is that the scientists be muzzled. Which is a kind of an odd conclusion to come to, but you could in fact somehow make that argument that it is reasonable or correct or a working of a democratic right that the scientists are being muzzled. And yet we believe, all of us, certainly I do, that there should be a way in which science could be outside of politics. Otherwise you get a kind of licencoism. Right. During Stalinist time, genetics was seen as a discoveries in evolutionary biology and genetics were seen as a great threat to communism because the communist belief wanted to believe that we could change social structure and therefore change human nature. And so in writ large, discoveries in evolutionary biology and genetics were seen to subvert that there could be a kind of innate human nature. And so, of course, Lysenko had a kind of Lamarckian idea about acquired traits, and he arranged for people who didn't agree with him to be shot. Other scientists, as one does when reviewing scientific papers one doesn't like. Yes, exactly. Who among us wouldn't want his peer reviewers to be shot? So this temptation to have politics interfere, as you said, is long standing. And also, incidentally, another historical strand in this is that science often is expensive and is a luxury and has been done at the public purse, whether it's DA Vinci or Galileo working for the Medicis or Seneca or Euripides working in the King of Syracuse, et cetera. I mean, since time immemorial, there's this sense which is that scientists work for the king, in a sense. But the problem we have right now is even more complicated than that for various reasons. Not just the fact that it's the modern era and we have institutions which are supposed to provide ballast against the boy king, as you said, is that what is the dilemma of a good and wise person when there is incompetent leadership? And Socrates writes about plato writes about this as well. Let's say you're General Mattis or your General Kelly or your Tony Fauci or anyone else who is trying to figure out like my allegiance is to the nation, and if I serve in this administration, will I be tainted? Or do we want competent people to refuse to serve on the grounds that their reputations will be harmed? That can't be the right answer because we want competent people running. On the other hand, if he's competent people serve, do they then lose their souls? Or do we get this kind of subversion of the scientific process? I mean, when do you resign? When do you say, no, I will not implement this policy or I will not be quiet? So there are rules how quickly Fauchi cannot easily be fired. There's a process whereby he can be fired, unlike the Secretary of Human Health and Human Services. I don't know about Redfield and his position specifically how easily he can be fired, but many of these people are probably reasoning, I can do more good than harm. I know I look like an idiot, not Fauci, but some of the others, but I need to help the country, and I can moderate some of these ridiculous extremes that the political elites are forcing on us anyway. It's hard. I mean, it's very hard to know what to do in this type of a situation. And I'm not making apologies for anyone. And I and I put the blame squarely at the feet of the political leadership Trump and the administration for the utterly inept response the United States has had. Let me just say one more sense about why I think it's especially appropriate to hold Trump responsible. Because unlike, let's say, you could reasonably argue that certain other leaders, like the British and the Italians, for example, also got it wrong. But the difference is that the President of the United States has the CDC working for him and the National Security Agency working for him, and he was told in December what was going to happen. Unlike the rest of us, who couldn't necessarily have known what was going to happen, the very best epidemiologists on the planet work at the CDC, and we have, I believe, the best intelligence agencies. And by the time we'll probably come back, because by the time I started paying attention to this in January, we now know that even as early as December, the president was briefed. So that's really a dereliction of duty, you know, to be told that a pandemic is coming by people you should know are reputable, are not making this up. And to ignore that or fail to take action, to fail to use the wealth of this nation to prepare, to put PPE in place, to build testing capacity, to do all the things that are recommended. Incidentally, the CDC has released every three to five years a playbook on how to cope with respiratory pandemics. The Obama White House. Actually, after the Bush White House had also bequeathed to Trump such a playbook. But even leaving aside the political transmission of this information in the CDC, you can go online and it says plans for a respiratory pandemic. Bill Gates released a Ted Talk, forgot if it was five or ten years ago that has 30 million views talking about exactly what's happening to us. So I can understand why the, quote, man or woman on the street are shocked and surprised that this is happening to us, like we discussed a little while ago. But our political leaders who are entrusted with the duty to protect us should not have been surprised. In fact, we're not surprised and therefore rightly are being held to account for the hundreds of thousands of deaths. And incidentally, I think we are going to surpass half a million deaths in the United States. When you and I spoke about this last March, I can't remember what my forecast was. It was hundreds of thousands, I'm pretty sure, but it's gone up since then. This is going to be the leading killer of Americans this year, and per capita will be, for sure, the second worst pandemic we've had in this nation for over 100 years. Maybe approach 1918, it depends. Okay, well, I want to talk about the future, but before we get there, let's talk about the past and present here. So when we last I had you on pretty early in the pandemic, just when I began to take it very seriously. And I was not especially prescient, but I was, as I've said several times on the podcast, I was palpably at least a week or two earlier than almost anyone in my sphere, right? So I was the dad at school talking to the other parents and getting these looks of astonishment and concern when I said, we're pulling our girls out of school on Monday. And we looked like hypochondriacs. And it was scarcely a week or ten days before schools throughout the city and in many other places in the country were closed. The experience of being a week early was one of living on another planet, right. My last trip to the supermarket was one where it was a completely normal trip to the supermarket. And a few days later I was hearing stories of people literally running down the aisles and sticking their straight arm out and just scooping 30 bags of pasta into their carts, right? So I don't give myself much credit for being early, but once I got clear about, or thought I was clear about the nature of this problem, I initiated some conversations with people like yourself. And at that point there was a general concern that there was a trade off between public health and the economy, right? If we take this too seriously, we're going to torpedo the economy. And that's just an intrinsically bad thing. And to say nothing of the fact that when that happens, people die for other reasons. There's a mortality calculus on both sides here. And many people were persuaded at great efforts and obviously incompletely, but many people were persuaded that whatever your concerns about this maybe not being that much of a lethal pandemic and we're going to do intense harm to the economy, but it makes sense to so called bend the curve. We need to keep our hospitals from being overwhelmed. And people got on board with that project for about a month or six weeks or so before our lack of full commitment to that became evident. And also we did successfully bend the curve to the point where, okay, our hospitals survived, right? We had some fairly scary reports of ICUs filling up, but basically we kept the ship afloat. And since then there's just been this total bifurcation in people's thinking about this pandemic. I still know people, and you can certainly see them and many others on social media who think we had a colossal overreaction to this thing. No, the story here is not that we didn't sufficiently prepare. The story is that we panicked and that something like herd immunity is an inevitable terminus to this, globally and locally. And this kills people in old age homes, but it doesn't kill all that many people who weren't going to die of something soon anyway. And this again, this is broken along predictably political lines. But I know you're going to want to talk about how catastrophically bad our response has been to this and how much we need to learn from this episode. But I don't see ourselves poised to learn those lessons because so much of our society seems to think that this is, if not a hoax, just hoax adjacent. Right? Okay. But first of all, there's so much again to unpack there. We need to come back to the herd immunity. We can come back a little bit to the flattening the curve thing. But I do want to also talk to you, and I made some notes here about notions of quantifying risk, and maybe that's where I'll dip into what you just said. So on the one hand, the country has been confused and the public health messaging has been confused by people thinking because unfortunately for us, this disease has a variety of things that can happen to you, from no symptoms to mild symptoms to serious symptoms and long term disability to death. So it's a very heterogeneous presentation and in a way that has muddied the public health message because so many people have such a benign course that it becomes possible to imagine, well, this might not be so bad in the way that if it were cholera or smallpox, people wouldn't be saying that. So the intrinsic nature of the pathogen, which is its protean manifestations, ironically, have made it more difficult for us to combat. In addition to its protean nature, the disease is deadly, is ten times deadlier than the flu, but is not as deadly as the bubonic plague or as a smallpox or cholera, which were called the holy trinity of infections in the Indian subcontinent for centuries. They were so deadly. And that also is ironic, because if this disease had been as deadly as smallpox or Ebola, you better believe Americans would be taking it more seriously. And incidentally, I just want to highlight for your listeners, we are lucky it's not that deadly. There's no ex ante reason, as known to God, that this disease is only as bad as it is. It could have been so much worse. And in fact, the pathogen, a SARS, one that afflicted us in 2003 in a pandemic that petered out for reasons I actually discuss in the book, compared to the current pandemic, it had some subtly different biology that made that germ peter out. That germ was, by some metrics, ten times deadlier than the current one. So the SARS CoV two kills. About 1% of the people that get symptoms from it kills between 0.3 and 0.5% or 0.3 and 6% of the people who become infected with it, and about 0.5 to 1.2% of the people who develop symptoms from it. And it varies a lot by age. But let's just say roughly about one out of 100 people who are symptomatic from this condition will die. And the original SARS probably was ten times deadlier. And in some ways that the lower lethality of this condition have made it harder for us to take seriously, because even if the disease had been left unfettered in our society to just run loose and probably. In that scenario, maybe 200 million Americans would have been infected. And of those that say, 100 million would have had symptoms, and of those, maybe a million would have died. Even in that scenario, that's only 1 million out of 330,000,000 Americans. And this has led to some people doing calculations that say, well, don't worry about it. One out of 300 chance of dying isn't so bad, they say. But that's a completely wrong way to understand and compute risks of disease in general, let alone infectious diseases. A million deaths is a catastrophe. It's an enormous number, an enormous amount of death and destruction in a year in our nation. But our nation will survive. I mean, we are going to see the other side of this. And this is another thing that's so interesting about plagues is that even the bubonic plague, which would sweep through cities and kill often half, sometimes nearly all of the people in a city ended. I mean, we have accounts, for example, among native American populations that were annihilated by smallpox, you know, 95% of the people dying within a month. Like, everyone is dead, you know, just like a and we have accounts from medieval Europe of people thinking that this was the second coming, you know, that that the world was being utterly, completely destroyed. So bad was the toll of death. We thankfully do not have that a situation with this pathogen. But I just want readers, listeners to understand that it's dumb luck that that's the case. This could have been a much worse pathogen. It's not. And therefore the fact that we should take that as a blessing, not as an opportunity to be reckless and then say, oh, well, let's just go about our business and ignore it. There's no reason we need to lose as many Americans as I fear we are going to lose. Before you continue, let's just secure that that one epiphany here because I think everyone, regardless of their politics, should be able to agree about this, that there is simply no guarantee that the next pandemic won't be an order of magnitude worse than this or even worse than that. Right. There's no guarantee. You're absolutely right. But also to be clear, these types of pandemics, part of the problem is there's no one alive that remembers this experience from before. Yeah, you know, the 1918 pandemic was 100 years ago. And so all the learnings yes, we should learn our lesson, but it is true that it is unlikely in our lifetime we will have personally to deploy these lessons again. Except when you think about the possibility of bioterrorism right engineered pandemic. Yeah, there's stochasticity. I mean, there's already a pretty bad flu influenza A germ that's brewing in China. We know from surveillance, from epidemic surveillance procedures. You're right. There could be in ten years or in 20 years or in one year or in 30 years, we don't know. The usual interpendent interval is about ten to 15 years, and most of those are not so serious. Like the 2009 influenza pandemic. The reason people don't remember that one, although it was a pandemic, was that it was very mild. It was like the common cold. You got it, but you didn't die. But there absolutely could be another pandemic and we absolutely should be better prepared and do a better job of it. I'm not saying we shouldn't, I'm just saying it's probabilistically unlikely we're going to have another SARS COVI Two event in the near future. Right. So at a minimum, I think we should agree that we want to be able to respond intelligently and at minimal economic and social cost to a terrifyingly lethal pandemic, should such a thing emerge. And on some level it is just a matter of time, whether it's one year, ten years, 100 years. We know that nature is continually cooking something up like that for us. And there, you know, there are bird flus that can jump into the human population, have, you know, 60% lethality, and we know that there are bad actors who will increasingly get their hands on the means to produce engineered viruses and other pathogens. This is something we want to be good at. And during this dress rehearsal, we proved that we're actually bad at responding to this problem. So we have to get better at this. Whatever you think about COVID Yeah, no, I agree with that. But I also want to pick up another thread of what you were saying, which is there's only so good one can get. I mean, a circulating deadly germ is a circulating deadly germ. It's hard to imagine having the economy escape unscathed. Even the Koreans or the Chinese or the New Zealanders or the Greeks or people who have done reasonably well with a pandemic, their economies are devastated. And it's because in order to cope with a germ, you have to cease social interactions, and the economy requires social interactions. And so I think you can test and trace and wear masks and you can do a lot to maintain a semblance of normality. But it's hard to argue that a world in which suddenly you've introduced a deadly contagious pathogen through implementation of certain responses can be neutralized. So it's not completely neutralized, but we absolutely can do vastly better than we have been doing. But it will cost. I mean, there will be at some significant socioeconomic cost, it's unavoidable. So just whatever you think about what's happened so far and what's likely to happen in the future, you should agree that whatever lessons there are to be learned about how to respond to a pandemic, we should learn those lessons. Like, you can't be skeptical about that project, even if you think COVID was not at all what the Libtards cracked it up to be. Yeah, right. I certainly wouldn't argue about that. But this is going back to our argument about science. Yes, this is what science is about. We should learn. We should observe the world. We should make inferences, and we should record them and we should learn from them. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But I also want to emphasize, in fact, that's one of the things that I discussed in Apollo Zero, one of the ironies of this pathogen is that the way contagious diseases work, of course, is to exploit our social nature. We humans live socially for a very specific set of reasons. And this was the topic of a previous conversation you and I had and of course, a previous book as well, blueprint the Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. But anyway, we humans live socially for very particular sets of reasons. And just to summarize a couple of the key ones, one is to cooperate. I mean, this seems obvious, but we band together to be able to achieve things we weren't able to achieve on our own and also to be able to learn from each other. So most animals can learn independently. A little fish in the sea can learn that if it swims up to the light, it will find food there. That's independent learning. But we can observe each other and learn. So you put your hand in the fire and you learn that it burns. That's independent learning and that you learn something, but at great cost. Or I can watch you put your hand in the fire and I gain almost as much learning. Fire burns, but pay none of the cost. My hand is unburned. Or you eat a red berry in the woods and die. And I watch you eat a red berry, and I don't eat it, so I survive. That kind of social imitation, that kind of social learning is incredibly efficient. And this is one of the reasons we evolve to live together. But we also do something else, which is we teach each other things. We accumulate knowledge and we transmit it across space and time. Now, one of the arguments that I like to make about human social life is that the spread of germs is the price we pay for the spread of ideas. So I come near you to learn from you, but in so doing, I set myself up for contagions of infections. And so therefore, the pathogen is exploiting our social networks, our social interactions, our evolved desire to touch and hug each other, our desire to band together in order to learn from each other. And the virus moves along these social pathways, killing us. And so how are we going to respond? Well, we respond by exploiting our capacity for cooperation and learning. We work together to live apart. We have learned from the past. We're not the first humans to confront a pandemic. We inherited a playbook about what to do. That's a kind of teaching. So one of the deep ironies is that the very same things that the pathogen is exploiting to kill us are the tools we need to use to best it. And this is one of the reasons I'm so particularly invested, as are you, in us learning from this experience. There's no reason future generations of us should do the job as poorly as we have done it right now. And in fact, I should also say we don't even need to look to future generations. There's still time for us to learn now and do a better job in the coming year or so. And we can discuss what I think is going to happen next. But we still have about a year and a half, in my view, of serious, immediate impact of the pathogen, where we're going to need to wear masks and physically distance and do a bunch of other self protective interventions, but eventually the tide will turn. But nevertheless, in the interval, there are things we need to do well. So let's talk about that. But the reasonableness of any intervention turns on some appraisal of how bad this disease is, and the core of any claim about its badness rests on how many people are actually dying from it. And this is where I've encountered the one source of skepticism which seems to me to be harder than most to dismiss, and this has been trumpeted by many prominent people. I've had to encounter this both publicly and privately. But it's this concern that the mortality statistics of COVID are being amplified because doctors have been incentivized to over report COVID deaths. We rely on doctors to fill out death certificates, and the CDC guidance for reporting a COVID death does not require a positive test for COVID. And this seems to be a concession to how inept we were at testing and, and still are at testing. So rather, doctors simply need to deem it, you know, probable that COVID was part of the picture in accounting for this death. So they presume a COVID death in many cases based on a constellation of symptoms, whatever else may be wrong with the patient. And of course, there are many respiratory conditions that people die from. You know, there's COPD and asthma and pneumonia and, and they also kill some hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. Right? So these are not tiny sources of mortality. It's easy to imagine that if doctors are simply admonished to check the COVID box whenever it's plausible, against this background of other respiratory diseases that could inflate the number of COVID deaths. And just to add one final wrinkle here, which is perhaps the most troubling, this was happening in the context where there was actually, and probably still is, a financial incentive to presume COVID's involvement, because hospitals, many hospitals were on the verge of bankruptcy, because all elective procedures were being canceled, because nobody wanted to get COVID and they were given money. I think HHS allocated something like $50 billion for hospitals that were having to deal with a surge of COVID cases. So there was a financial incentive to say, oh, yeah, this is yet another COVID case that's hit our ICU. No, I don't think any of this makes any sense on any level. And we can discuss this. I don't know about the details of how HHS reimbursed for the care. I do know that, ironically, our healthcare system was organized in such a fashion, and our reimbursement system, that precisely when we needed it most, hospitals started losing money. As you alluded to, you make much more money with elective surgeries than you do with caring for acutely ill people during a time of an epidemic, which is nuts. That is to say, this is when our hospitals were most needed, when money should have flowed to them liberally. And the idea that many hospitals I understand it, quite a few rural hospitals almost went out of business. I read some news reports about Maine. I'm not 100% sure about this. Yes, the government tried to compensate hospitals to make up for the losses, but my understanding is it wasn't enough. In any case, that is nuts that hospitals providing care in a time of a pandemic, that this would be a loss leader, you know, or that they would lose money, is is crazy that that would happen. Now, on the issue of are we correctly finding it? There's so much evidence that that's not the case, and I don't even know where to begin that it's not the case that we're over reporting COVID deaths? No, absolutely not. And the evidence for that comes from multiple sources, one of which is, of course, the consistency and the death rate in places around the world with very different systems of recording deaths, of detecting deaths, of very different financial incentives. We even have situations in which, for example, we could look at the we had those famous cases early on in the epidemic of the Diamond Princess cruise ships where no one could come or leave. We knew exactly who got sick, and we could count which of them died so we could assess the lethality of the pathogen. And we now have focused studies around the world of sort of case studies of manaus in Brazil or villages in Lombardi or in Austria, where early on, the epidemic just swept through the community. And we can enumerate who died during the time of the epidemic. Furthermore, there's another technique that was introduced in the middle of the 19th century by William Farr, one of the founders of the field of demography that ironically, is still in use today, which is the notion of counting excess deaths. And scientists use this even now when we're trying to look at historical epidemics. Let's say you want to figure out how bad was the bubonic plague or how bad was the Spanish flu in 1918? You don't have the capacity to test people. The death records at the time were very incompetent or incomplete. How can you tell? Well, Far proposed that we can assess the impact of an epidemic by counting up how many people are dying of all causes during the time of the plague and comparing that to the number of people expected to die if the plague had not been there, for instance, in the prior five years in this time window. And when you do an exercise like that, that's how we get estimates that the current count of people confirmed COVID deaths that we have in the United states, which is something like 230,000, that it's probably an underestimate. By a factor of about 25%, probably 300,000 americans have already died of COVID In other words, what we're doing, if anything, is undercounting the deaths we know simply by looking at who's dying. Now, in fairness, some of those deaths are due to COVID but not necessarily due to COVID infection. For example, if COVID causes you to become depressed and suicide goes up, that's swept up in the COVID deaths using the excess death metric. But in any case, the point is that there are obvious reasons why there will be fewer than normal deaths based on all the behavioral changes due to any kind of lockdown during a pandemic, there had to be a period where there were fewer motor vehicle deaths. Yes. So the excess death metric captures all of that, both the benefits of COVID and the extra costs of COVID Exactly right. So let's say there were more suicides, but fewer motor vehicle accidents. Some people have argued that there was less overtreatment of patients. Iatrogenesis, which is medical doctor caused injuries. They were likely lower. In other words, in the past, if you had a mild heart attack, probably the right thing to do is not to have a doctor do anything, but the doctors would do things to you, actually increasing your risk of death. But under COVID, people with mild heart attacks maybe stayed at home or didn't come to medical attention, and ironically, then they failed to die, which they otherwise would have. So maybe COVID saved their lives. But the point of doing this calculation is that it combines all of that stuff together and says, okay, here are the total direct and indirect risks and benefits of COVID And that number is higher even than the number of known COVID deaths as reported by doctors along the lines that you described. I would also add that if, in fact, deaths that should have been ascribed to other respiratory illnesses like COPD or asthma or pneumonia were being inaccurately coded as COVID deaths, we'd be able to see the rates of COPD and asthma and pneumonia related deaths go down. Yes. Because we know what to expect from those here. Yes, that's right. And in fact, reassigning COVID deaths, cop deaths to be COVID deaths, wouldn't affect the excess death calculation. So this excess death calculation is a kind of more objective way of looking at the impact of an epidemic which has been used for, you know, 150 years for real time epidemic monitoring and for assessment of historical epidemics when we didn't have good death records, cause of death, rather information. So no, I don't think that there is some kind of conspiracy or some kind of a misassessment of deaths in our society. And picking up a little bit on what we said earlier. See, one of the ironies is that even if a million Americans die, they're probably only going to be about, let's say, ten people for each of those people who knew them personally. So that'll be like 10 million Americans will know someone who died of COVID and probably 100 million Americans. So like a hundred I'm sorry, ten Americans per decedent, who are intimately connected to this decedent and now, let's say, are like really upset and worried about COVID And then even if a million Americans die, there will be, let's say, 100 people who know of that person. So there'll only be 100 million Americans who know of someone who died personally. This is a very crude approximation for many reasons that I don't go into right now. But the point is, even after the epidemic has swept through our society, the majority of Americans will neither have died of it nor know someone who has died of it. And so this is one of the reasons that it's difficult to why President Trump can get up there and say, oh, nothing bad is happening because in the everyday experience of most people, in fact, they're not going to come up close and personal with this pathogen. Again for the reasons we discussed earlier about the fundamental nature of this pathogen. But that doesn't make it less of a threat. And furthermore, one more thing. We've been talking about death, but it's very important to highlight the fact that we're also going to see an epidemic of disability in our society that's going to persist for a long time. So most people who get the disease, including, for example, the President, survive the condition. But 5% of them we don't know the precise number yet, and we won't for a while, but probably about 5% will have serious long term disability. They'll have pulmonary fibrosis. They'll have renal insufficiency. They'll have cardiac abnormalities. They might have neurological abnormalities. So we're going to have many millions of Americans who have post COVID syndrome. And this also doesn't include all the children whose parents will be sick or disabled, all the adverse health events, the adverse events on young children whose parents have lost their jobs, whose parents are dead or sick. There's just all of this sadness and badness that come in a time of plague. Unfortunately, there's no way to escape it. I mean, it is just an intellectual truth about plague, that it is ruinous, that this is what it does to societies. It is one of the four horsemen. For precisely this reason, it seems reasonable to worry even about mild so called mild cases here. I think there was one study that showed that there was some crazy percentage. It was something like 78% of mild cases had detectable heart irregularities as a result. So it just seems fairly clear that we don't know enough about what COVID is doing to us. In some sense, it's not even principally a respiratory illness. I mean, it's a vascular illness and also, as you say, a neurological one. We certainly know about coronaviruses. I mean, we have some evidence there are four coronaviruses that caused the common cold. In my book, I speculate, in keeping with speculations by others, that the 1890 pandemic was actually not influenza, but may have been a coronavirus. And over time, that virus has now become the virus. That one of the four coronaviruses that causes the common cold. It's become more benign. We've evolved as well some natural immunity to it. We get the disease as children and then when we're re exposed as adults, we have a minor illness. There's a whole set of human diseases that behave this way. So it's possible that this current coronavirus in 100 years, or perhaps sooner will, I should just emphasize the virus is not going to disappear. I mean, it's going to keep circulating among us forever. The only issue is how will we cope with it. And hopefully we'll have a vaccine. And we haven't talked about that yet and we can. But one thing that is likely to happen is that the virus will, over a period of years, become more will evolve to be less lethal. And probably we will be exposed to it as children when we, as we already know, are relatively less adversely affected by it, as is also typical of other coronaviruses. For example, the 2003 coronavirus is all discussed in my book, by the way. And then when we were reexposed as adults, may have a more benign course. It's a little bit like chickenpox. If you get chickenpox as a kid, you get a pretty benign condition. If you've never had chickenpox and you get it for the first time as an adult, you can die from it. So that's why exposure to chickenpox early on might be a rational strategy. So there are lots of diseases like that and it's possible that this will join, that will be the pattern for this particular condition as well. But as you said, it's early to speculate. And furthermore, as you also said and as I was saying, it's a serious condition. It doesn't just cause us death, it causes us disability. And the disease is having, as we were discussing earlier, an ecological release. It is just spreading. It is doing what living things do. It is just spreading across all of humanity. And how is it spreading? Early on, many of us began speaking about the are not of this and just how contagious is this and how will that respond to the things we do to modify our behavior? But now we're speaking more in terms of super spreaders and super spreader events. How do you think about the spread of this now? Well, we know now much more than we did when you and I last spoke in March. The intrinsic transmissibility of the virus, the so called Rnaught, the number of new, the reproduction number, the number of new cases that arise in a non immune population that is interacting normally is between 2.5 and 3.5. So for each case of SARS CoV two, each infection, on average between two and a half and three and a half new cases will arise. If people aren't immune and they're interacting normally, that's the fundamental transmissibility of the virus. In my book, I use an r knot of three as a benchmark. Now, that is a pretty high r not. Like seasonal flu has an Rnaught of between 0.9 and 1.6 or so. So if you have an r knot of one, that means that for each case you create one new case. So you don't really get an epidemic. There's no growth in cases. If it's below one. Then, of course the case count declines with time because each case, on average cannot reproduce itself. Diseases like chickenpox, I think, have an r not of about six or something. Measles, which is the most contagious disease known, has an RNA of 18 or something. And this incidentally, this also relates to the issue of herd immunity, which we haven't discussed, and also the fraction of people that will need to be vaccinated in order for the population to be immune. So the more transmissible the disease, the higher percentage of people have to have acquired immunity for herd immunity to kick in naturally or the higher the fraction of people have to be vaccinated in order to protect the unvaccinated people in the population. So the higher the transmissibility of the disease, the higher those percentages need to be. So this disease, we now know about how transmissible it is, but there's another number which is not. The r not is the so called r sub E, the effective reproductive reproduction number or effective reproductive rate, which is what we manipulate when we engage in physical distancing and when we try to flatten the curve. So when we change our behavior, we modify the transmissibility of the virus. And you can measure and monitor the re and you can see, oh, my goodness, everyone is staying at home. Each new case of the virus is creating less than one new case. We brought the re below one and that's exactly what we're trying to do and we have brought it down. And just to pick up a little abandoned thread from our conversation earlier, the whole reason we rightly social physical distance and tried to flatten the curve nine months ago was not like what the Chinese achieved by locking down their country or what we achieved by engaging in the kind of physical distancing that we did was not the eradication of the pathogen. That pathogen, we can't eradicate it. It's loose now. What we achieved instead was a postponement of its impact and may, as a result, also have saved some lives. Let me explain why when the disease first struck, we had no medicines to treat it. By engaging in the sort of lockdown behavior that we engaged in in the closing the schools and the masking and everything else, we gave our hospitals and our doctors and our scientists and our supply chains time to work. So we could make more PPE, which would then ultimately save lives. If people had PPE or so, our doctors could do research to discover how to treat the condition. And over the summer, we had the first drug that was shown to actually lower mortality from Coronavirus, which is a very cheap and old drug, a drug called Dexamethasone. We had a landmark randomized controlled trial of a very large number of people, the so called Recovery Trial out of England, that showed that Dexamethasone reduced mortality by 20%. That's huge. So you would much rather get COVID now than COVID in March because now we have a drug that we can give you that reduces your risk of dying if you're seriously ill with it by 20%, which is amazing. Plus, doctors have learned all kinds of other stuff like to put you on your stomach when you're in the hospital instead of on your back, for example. In addition, there are some other drugs like Remdesivir, which none of the trials have so far shown that it has an impact on mortality. We had a very depressing trial that was just released a couple of weeks ago with a large number of people which failed to show an impact on mortality. But nevertheless, that drug might also be helpful. So we will continue to innovate on drugs. There will not be a drug that is that cures coronavirus. It's very difficult to find to stop viral infections, to cure viral infections, unlike bacterial infections. But we will likely have drugs that are more and more effective that are discovered over time. And this is why we had to flatten the curve. And of course, we bought ourselves time to invent a vaccine. And I do believe we will see a vaccine in 2021. There are over 130 efforts afoot of over ten different approaches to vaccine development around the world. I think sometime in 2021 we may discover a vaccine. How safe it is or how effective it is, it's hard to predict. I think in our rush to develop these vaccines, we may find a safety profile that's not so great, which may dampen enthusiasm for the vaccine. But but the problem is, even if we invent a vaccine, we then have to manufacture it, which is not trivial, distribute it, which is not trivial. We need to maintain something known as a cold chain from the moment of manufacture to the moment of. Injection. The vaccine always has to be in a refrigerator. That's not a trivial thing. And finally, and most importantly, we need to have acceptance. People have to want the vaccine and have to take it up in large numbers. So I think that's going to take us into 2022. So from my desk, what I see is that either we will invent a vaccine and accomplish everything else I just described, which will take time and take us into 2022, or meanwhile, the virus is still spreading, which means we need another couple of annual cycles of this pathogen, which is what respiratory pathogens do. Only about 10% of Americans have been infected, and according to some network science informed estimates, I think about 40 or 45% need to be infected before we have heard immunity, which I think then we will reach by 2022, just because we're so incompetent right now and the germ is just spreading. So one way or the other, from my desk, we're going to be physical distancing. We're going to have periodic school closures. We're going to be wearing masks. We're not going to be shaking hands. We're going to have a suppression of our economy until 2022, and then the immediate pandemic period will end. But it's not going to be an immediate return to life as normal, because if you look at what's happened with the centuries of epidemics, people are going to be shell shocked. Our economy will have been adversely affected. People's psychology, people aren't going to suddenly want to go to airports or suddenly start shaking hands again or going to crowded bars and restaurants or nightclubs. It'll take time for people to recover from that. So I put the intermediate pandemic period until 2024. And then I think in 2024, we're going to have the post pandemic period where I think we will return to normal with some persistent changes. I think people will be working from home more. I think there'll be a number of other changes in our society. I think gender relations are going to change in certain ways as a result of the pandemic. We can discuss that. And and and then we're going to have in 2024 a kind of Roaring 20s. There'll be an effluentcence. People will pack political protests and sports events and restaurants and nightclubs and religion, which is rising, by the way, right now. We'll go back down again. During times of plague, people find God. There'll be a kind of license, a sexual licensiveness, and a kind of intemperance and Jawade vivra. And this is typically what has happened with past epidemics. So these aren't hard landmarks, 2022 and 2024, but approximately that is what I think is going to happen. It's October, and already you're so full of Christmas cheer, Nicholas. Well, we have to traverse some of this ground. Again, I thought we were going to bring this conversation in around the hour mark, but I see no hope of that. So first of all, let me just check your time, Nicholas. You got another half hour in you yeah, no, I'm available. All right. Okay. So I want to talk about the future. The prospect that nothing like normal life returns until 2024 is not something that I have foreseen. So let's talk about the near time horizon here. Let's talk about the next six months. We have a president who is promising a vaccine any week now and is fairly sure that that can be distributed by military. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, like many of you, I'm feeling the tractor beam of normal life pulled me back into the world. It's quite a feeling to have civilization reboot on the wings of a successful vaccine campaign. Pretty amazing. One thing the United States appears to have gotten right is the last minute vaccination of a society that couldn't even agree we had a pandemic. What an incredible situation we've been in. I can imagine many of you share my sense that whatever was good in the great reset of the last year should be maintained. A sense of greater clarity with respect to one's priorities. But it's worth observing that it will be hard to maintain without some ongoing attention. Anyway, I wish you all the best of luck as things return to normal here and we find ourselves eating inside restaurants. Once again, no Real Housekeeping. Just a reminder by the new podcast with Ricky Gervais that is available over at Absolutely Mental. There are eleven episodes on various topics, three of which you heard on this podcast some months back. The titles are Why do we dream? What makes something funny? Will we be replaced by robots? Would you rather? What's the point? Where does morality come from? What makes us who we are? Why do we fear death? How can stories make us cry? What's so great about life? And how will civilization end? These are episodes organized around questions that Ricky poses to me, and I endeavor to answer them. But then chaos ordinarily ensues. Anyway, it was a lot of fun to make people really seem to love it. So it is there if you want to hear it@absolutelyamental.com. Today I'm speaking with Antonio Garcia Martinez. Antonio worked at Facebook and other companies in tech and was recently hired by Apple and then quickly fired over the discovery that he had written a bestselling book, which Apple already knew about. And there were some lines in there that 2000 of his fellow employees at Apple thought made them actually unsafe to work in his company. This is yet another cancellation coming from the identitarian moral panic that has engulfed the left side of our political spectrum. And I wanted to talk to Antonio because this was really just such a clear cut case of us having reached a precipice that we really must pull back from. This was a case where he had written a book which, as you'll hear, was widely vetted by liberal journalists and widely admired, and was published in 2016, which, though it is only five years ago in calendar time, might as well have been in the Middle Ages with respect to current attitudes. Anyway, I know some of you are still struggling to convince yourselves this is even a problem. I will admit that it's possible to be too online and to magnify this problem, and many of the people who are focused on it, I have criticized for becoming too myopic. But I do think we've reached a point where there's a level of activism and capitulation to the mob that we just can't sustain and certainly shouldn't want to sustain. Politics has invaded everything. It's just crazy that we have to think about politics this much. This has become absolutely stifling to our intellectual lives. And if you were privy to some of the closed door conversations I've had about this, you would be aghast at how paralyzed even the most powerful people in our society are at the moment. Politically speaking, this will be the ruination of the Democratic Party, which you might think deserves to be ruined. But what does it leave us? The Republican Party? And the pendulum will swing back and perhaps not land in the center. We don't want an over correction to this either. Anyway, I think this has all been taking us to a very ugly place, and it's time for all of us to find something like a true north where real ethical coherence can underpin our politics and politics can recede to the edges of life and culture where it belongs. Anyway, I feel like I have to pick my moments on this topic, but the instantaneous capitulation of the richest company on Earth, Apple, just needed to be talked about. And now I bring you Antonio Garcia Martinez. I am here with Antonio Garcia Martinez. Antonio, thanks for joining me. Hey, Sam. Thank you for having me on. So this is an interesting topical moment. It's interesting for me, I'm sure, painful and chaotic for you. But before we jump into the matter at hand, maybe you can summarize your background. What is your Potted intellectual and tech biography? Yeah, it's slightly strange. So I guess it all started when I read Michael Lewis's Liars Poker when I was working on a PhD in physics at Berkeley. And it just convinced me that I had believe it or not, that I had to go work on Wall Street. And so I dropped out and got a job at Goldman Sachs as a credit derivatives pricing quant, basically on the trading floor right when the credit bubble was going to explode. And I saw that whole fire sort of play out. What year was that? I left Berkeley in 2005 and left Goldman in 2008. Yeah. Okay. You were there when the wheels fully came off? Oh, yeah. As a wet behind the ears former Berkeley grad student. I had a front row seat on the incineration of the American financial system, which formed a chapter in my later book, which we're going to get to, but anyhow the financial world was blowing up. One good intuition I had in my life was that this whole finance thing was kind of going to be kind of over for a number of years and that tech would be sort of an oasis from the coming catastrophe, which it sort of was. And so I moved back west, actually to the Bay area where I'd been a grad student and worked at a big tech startup. That startup was run by a sociopath didn't actually do very well, but I did meet co founders and I got into what's called Y Combinator, which as many of your listeners probably know well. It was the original sort of tech incubator accelerator that takes founders who don't know what they're doing and hopefully takes them to a point where they know slightly more about what they're doing and started a company, ran for. About a year, sold it to Twitter, and through a bunch of drama, I ended up as an early member of Facebook's Ads team, specifically working on data and targeting and privacy. Around 2011. How big was Facebook at that point? Well, the company as a whole, I think I was like employee 2000. But given that the ads team started relatively late or that the entire ads product started rather late in Facebook's life, the entire ads team at the time in terms of engineers was maybe 25 or 30 at most with five or six what are called product managers, ie. Sort of the product leader who kind of defines what gets built. And I was the one for targeting, so it was super early days. There had never been a targeting roadmap of any sort at Apple. That was my first mandate when I got there. The cool thing about it and why I thought it sort of merited a book, which we're going to get to in a second, was watching Facebook go from that sort of very embryonic, almost slightly frat boyish culture to a proper public company. I was there overlapping that period. The company went public and I was there. It forms kind of the crowning part of my memoir. So that was the sort of interesting part to it. And so when I left Facebook for a bunch of reasons which we could talk about or not, and then I held a few other roles. I was an advisor, Twitter, I was a VP of product at an advertising company, and then my mother died. It was a whole nother story, but it sort of struck me that not that my story was actually that unique, but it was emblematic of a certain time and period in Silicon Valley and that it was worth sort of recording in a book. And that's what I did. I basically sold everything, moved to Europe, because I assume I'd be canceled for writing the television. It turns out, I guess, I was canceled, but for slightly different reasons and wrote a very unvarnished view of my history inside Silicon Valley called Chaos Monkeys, which, unfortunately, is still in the news, which is why this conversation is happening. Yeah. So I will confess I have not finished your book, but we just grabbed this podcast in terms of my workflow pretty much on the fly. And so I think I'm about halfway through, but certainly enough to get a sense of your point of view there and what kind of read it is. And we'll get to that because the reception that the book got when it came out was I'm sure there were people who wrote some hit pieces, but there are incredible number of effusive responses to the book as an insider tell all of Silicon Valley, and it's very well written, it's very entertaining. It's easy to see, however, how someone might not like you on the basis of reading it. I mean, it's like the persona you adopt is extremely catty and contemptuous. I mean, you're basically contemptuous of everyone, including yourself, at least for the first half of the book. I don't know if there's some downpour of gratitude and generosity that I'm going to encounter at the end, but, you know, up until the midpoint, everyone, I think, with the exception of Paul Graham at Y Combinator, gets fairly crucified by you. But I think we're getting ahead of ourselves here. So you've written this book, which is now poised to detonate like a time bomb in your life. What happens next? I hear Apple hired you for a job recently. Yeah, indeed, they didn't. Well, I would pause maybe, and I think the launching of the book is maybe worth commenting on for a moment. As you said, it was widely reviewed. I mean, I don't like tooting my own horn, but whether Apple knew or not is one of these questions. So I need to cite the fact that it was, like, a month on the bestseller list of The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times. It was reviewed by everybody. It made a big splash. I announced it on, like, CBS America This Morning, whatever it's called. That show with Gail King. It made a splash when it came out by any objective standard. And if you go to, like, the Amazon page for it, you'll see this wall of positive blurbs from every major elite reviewer, media organization in the country commenting on it and all the rest of it. So, I mean, this book was about as secret as Christmas Day, really. And I was just pointed this is relevant because some people will anticipate where we're going here. You have been fired by Apple over the discovery of this unhidden book for reasons that have everything to do with the the identitarian moral panic that's occurring on the left here. But the thing to point out, it's not gratuitous to cite all these great reviews because they're coming from the highest echelons of liberal media. A mere what is it, four years ago, five years ago? When did this book come out? Yeah. 2016. So maybe it was an NPR Best Book of the Year. You have multiple positive citations from The New York Times. Andrew Ross sorkin is one of them. Looks like you had independent, separate reviews in the in the weekly paper and in the book review. I mean, to call this effusive is to understate it from a publishing point of view. And these are liberal voices who, if anyone was going to discover that you were a right wing monster, it would have been discovered here. We got Leonard Lopete loving the book. We have you did an interview with Kara Swisher at the time, and while she pushed you on topics of related to sexism and misogyny, she completely got the context in which this was appearing. And as we'll get to the context is everything. So it's deeply ironic that every liberal voice in sight seems to have not noticed the problem. That and again, I'm I'm getting ahead of the story here, but that 2000 employees at Apple, based on their clairvoyance, one must imagine, without having opened your book, read into the depths of your soul and realized that you needed to be canceled. Yeah, and it's funny, a female reader actually DM me yesterday. I won't name who it is, but I screenshotted her. DM said, I really think 99% of your detractors have never even read the book. Because, again, 99% of the book has nothing to do with dating in San Francisco, any of that stuff. It really has to do about technology, entrepreneurship and all the rest of it. And speaking of being right wing Sam, it's funny because I went back and reread some of my passages, by the way, authors. I at least don't go back and reread monkeys on a regular basis. I had to remind myself of a lot of the tone and stuff because you just leave a book behind and get on with life. But I was rereading the chapters and I realized I come off like this radical Bernie Bro because my criticisms of the sort of pageant of capitalism involved. And for example, the IPO, which was a major event at Facebook, and I was right there in the courtyard, right in front of Zuck when he pushed the buzzer, all that stuff, front row seat on, the whole thing. And I kind of objected to it. I saw the elements of it. I saw how at their extremes, hyper capitalism and communism sort of meet my parents are Cuban exiles. They fled the communist revolution. I've been back to Cuba, actually reporting for Wired on the underground Internet. And obviously there's differences there. I'm not saying obviously Facebook equals communist Cuba, but there's elements of the culture that are very similar in sort of disturbing ways. And so I actually do get into that a lot. But again, that's wholly and completely uncommented on. Most of the context or sorry, most of the quote is about one sentence quoted out of context in which, in a very ham fisted and awkward way, I make this sort of pee in to the then mother my child. And I don't think I need to repeat it, but there was a certain passage there that everyone's talking about. But again, the other 512 pages of the book are not about that. And so if there's one thing in particular that peeves me, it's kind of that completely biased parsing of the book. Okay, so let's start at the moment where you get recruited by Apple and what happens next. Right. So I was working at a large venture backed start up before and was fairly comfortable there. I had invested a lot of time in sweat there. Well, let me just maybe fill in the gaps, because people might be wondering, like, what's the deal here? How do you go from a writer back to Tech? I think it's relevant to the story. So after the book came out, 2016, one of the things I didn't realize as an author, I'm sure, Sam, you know this now way more than I do. The author is part of the product that's sold with the book. Right. And I didn't quite understand that. I thought I could sort of sell this book crazy, gonzo journalist thing and then kind of go on with life or whatever. I ended up staying and writing. I became a columnist at Wired. I wrote I wrote book reviews for The Washington Post. I became your standard ambiguous media figure who spends too much time on Twitter and writes here and there and tries to make a spectacle of him or herself. Right? And it drove me basically crazy. I literally went into a deep depression. And we don't have to turn this into a sob story, but it just became untenable right around 2019, I understood that I can't keep on doing this. And so I came back to Tech, which to me, I didn't know. Again, there's this sort of code of silence that exists inside Tech like you're not supposed to. Everything's always up and to the right. Everything is positive, and no one ever talks about the reality of it, which is often a little bit darker than that. And I had. So I thought I was canceled from the employment perspective about that alone. But it turns out I managed to wangle a job at a very respected, successful startup and spent a year and a half there. And I'm like, okay, I'm back in business. I'm a tech guy again. I've left the writing world behind. It's a shame, but whatever, right? So then Apple, through a former colleague who worked there, reached out and said, look, we've got X y and Z going on. We think you'd be a real fit here. Let's start talking. And it took a couple of months, but basically, they persuaded me to come in, interview I spoke to a bunch of their team. It's how it works in tech. You do a loop in which you sit there and talk to a half dozen people all day, and they made an offer. And people often ask me and I'm guessing I might be preempting your next question, Sam, which is like, well, did Apple know about the book or what? And they absolutely did. I mean, when you apply to get back into the tech folder, this writerly period is almost like a gap in the resume you have to explain, right? At least that's how I felt about it. And so I put it on my TV, it's on my LinkedIn, practically every interviewer I brought up. So, like, hey, I know it's kind of weird, but there was this, like, three year gap where I spent too much time on Twitter and wrote, and that's it, but I'm back in business. I'm a tech guy now. That's what it is. And so, of course, they knew about it. And then, in addition, you provide professional references when you apply to tech companies, and Apple actually checked them and did their due diligence and spoke to all of them, and I spoke to those references, and indeed, they asked specifically about the book. And is Antonio actually this person? Can we trust him to not divulge internal secrets? What is he actually like as a person? And the answers were all, well, look, the book is one thing. The person is another. You're fine. We support him. We get behind him. I mean, some of my references were people at Facebook that I'd actually written the book about. And so all Systems Go was hired. And then, of course, what happened happened three weeks later. So you moved, right? Where were you were in Washington? Yeah. So among the various and prudent things I did, in 2016, in addition to publishing this book, I wrote the book in a part of the world called the San Juan Islands, which I didn't know about at all and probably most Americans don't know about. It's about 130 islands northwest of Seattle, kind of practically in Canada, that's part of the US. Gorgeous, beautiful place. And I randomly, quote, unquote discovered them. And when I got the book deal in 2015, they were like, oh, we want it by next summer, which is lightning speed by book standards. And they're like, So can you get us a manuscript by Christmas? And I'm like, oh, my God. Okay. I've basically got to go to a cabin in the woods and live like a hermit and just pump out Pros. And that's it. And that's what I did. I rented a house on this island called Orcas Island on the northern shore of it, I drank a lot of IPA and wrote and fumed a lot, which I think maybe created part of the tone in the book that is still now an issue in it. And it came out, and I kind of fell in love with the place. And so then when the first advanced check sort of hit, you know, which was nothing amazing, nothing enormous, by the way, I i bought a few acres of of bear woodland up there and for the next two or three years became, you know, what you call a homesteader taming. Taming the wild. Putting in a well, putting in a solar panel system, building structures. I mean, initially I literally had like, I showed up in September of 2016, three months after nonstop book publicity with a backpack and a tent, and said, I will make this home. And so that's that's what I did from about 2016 until the end of 2019. Although I still live there. Like, I particularly under the pandemic. I would bounce between San Francisco and there, but I stopped building and stopped, you know, getting calluses on my hands towards the end of 2019. But then I sold that. So then when when the Apple thing hit, like, again, I I don't know I don't know quite how to stress it, but it was really me kind of turning over a new page in Life and saying, look, the writer thing is definitely dead. I'm definitely going back to Tech orcas island. I mean, the idea was to be this, you know, eccentric, bohemian, you know, isolated writer. That's not going to happen. I'm just going to join Apple and be a polite, loyal worker, be inside them, and that's it. And I've got family in San Francisco. I've had a child that I have a relationship with. I'm just going to sell that. It's over. I mean, it was a great SAG. It was an adventure, but it's time to just put that behind me. And literally, literally the day that the deal closed, like when the broker texted me saying, oh, great, the wire is going to hit, everything's great, we're all done, is when the current scandal actually erupted. Okay, so what was the first reverberation of the scandal? How did it first land for you? Yeah, I mean, this is where we get a little bit into this is where we get a little bit into a legal minefield. I'm still under current Apple NDA as any employees at a tech company. And so things that happened internally at Apple while I was there, I really can't address. What I can say and what I have said publicly is that it was a snap decision. It happened very quickly, and it was from one moment to the next, and that's how it went down. The rest of it I can't really comment on. But as far as what's publicly available, it's true to say that your hire came to the attention of your fellow now Apple employees and some petition was circulated and something like 2000 Apple employees either called for an investigation or called for your firing or what happened there. Yeah, I mean, I'm really quoting from what's publicly reported. The Verge did a whole big piece on it on Wednesday. So I'm again, I'm not citing my experience. I'm really just quoting the public record. But, yeah, apparently, according to that Verge reporting yeah, there was a petition apparently circulated with a number of signatures that again cited and quoted some of the passages in the book, in my opinion, out of context and made a lot of allegations there. And apparently that's what was behind my firing. Right. And then Apple released a statement about your firing, which, at least to my eye, gave some top spin to it, which I got to think is defamatory in some sense. It's clear you're being fired for what they now deem to be the bad optics of your book, written several years ago. But the language they use to describe this made it sound like you had done something untoward as an employee at Apple. Right. Like you had I should have the language here, I could get it. But do you know what I'm referring to? I do. I very much do. Yeah. The language they used, the statement they issued on I believe it was Wednesday evening, was a statement along the lines of I forget exactly, but hateful behavior. The word behavior was definitely used because that's what stuck in my head is not acceptable at Apple in the context of being asked about my situation. And I agree with you. I think it is defamatory because I vigorously allege that. It is categorically false to suggest that my firing was in any way related to my behavior or performance at Apple. It absolutely was not. I spent three and a half weeks on zoom calls with engineers doing the job in an engineer, and that's it. And so, yes, I very much disagree with that statement from Apple. The big picture here is that you are sharing an experience with several people who could be named, who have been fired or otherwise canceled based on things they have written previously. And in your case, it's especially strange because, as we said, that's what you wrote. Though I can actually see the basis for someone thinking, all right, this isn't the guy I want to spend a lot of time with. Given the angle you took there, it's pretty obviously a persona. But the crucial thing to realize is that all of the liberal intelligentsia of the time, the distant epoch of five years ago, got a chance to process this. And this was just almost universally accepted as a valuable insight into what's going on and what it's like to work and the inside of the tech juggernaut. And we're clearly at a moment where this attitude of intolerance to anything remotely edgy is clearly stifling self expression in the present and it will stifle it on a go forward basis because everyone can draw the obvious lesson here. It's pretty clear that a writer like Philip Roth, were he to still be alive, would be probably unpublishable now and even unthirable. I mean, it's just the distance between him as a person and the various awful protagonists he created. One can only speculate about what's the true worldview of Philip Broth, but it's easy to see that that kind of artistic expression and granted, you were writing nonfiction, but still there's a shocking liability to anything but the most anodyne kind of expression now. And people will draw the obvious lesson. It's not worth paying the price if you have aspirations to do anything else other than be an artist who's going to be vilified by half of society. How do you think about this in terms of the effect this kind of thing is likely to have on just people finding their own voice in any kind of creative field? Yeah. No, I agree. It is very stifling. I mean, funny, I was on with Cara Swisher and other reporters on Twitter Spaces last night, and they actually had people up to ask me often very pointed and somewhat angry questions. And one of the questions asked me a question of how do you defend what you said? In other words, do you believe what you wrote in that book? And my answer was, I don't think that's the right question to ask. I mean, I agreed with her in the sense that if my book or that passage, for example, had been an op ed column in a newspaper in which indeed I am saying antonio Garcia Martinez believes that the world should be ordered this way, then I should be called to account for my beliefs and say, well, why do you want the world to look that way? But what I was writing, a work of literary nonfiction, even though it's a memoir and even though in theory it's about real events, is not a claim to truth, nor is it a normative claim about how the world should be. It's far from that, right? The example that comes to mind is Les Phillip Ross, but somebody like, say, Tom Wolf's Electric Kool Aid acid Test, which for those who aren't familiar to classic work of what's now called sort of gonzo journalism, in which the journalist kind of injects themselves in the narrative, and it's told in this very hyperbolic voice. I mean, it's clearly the sort of tone I was going for. And was Tom Wolf asked at the time, by the way, the topic of the story is sort of the Summer of Love and hanging around with Ken Kessi and some of the literary scene, a lot of drugs, a lot of irresponsible behavior. Would someone have asked Tom Wolf at the time, well, do you support drug use? Maybe he would have. I mean, certainly latterday puritans and Victorians and. Sort of deep social conservatives probably did object to the book for those reasons, but certainly nobody in the cultural world would have said, well, Tom Wolf shouldn't have written in that tone, and he should have hedged every mention of every acid trip with a little, like, mini lecture on why drug use is bad. No one would have claimed that, right? And yet somehow we've lost that there is no space between a descriptive and literary approach to something and the normative description. Like everyone has to be advocating for something all the time, and it must be of the utmost moral purity that is the register in which almost everything is written now. And yes, I find it deeply stifling because and I tweeted this right, there have been ideologies in the past, among them communism and Nazism, that felt that all art must be in service to a political end, that art cannot exist for its own sake, to quote the sort of us for wild cliche. And I just don't believe that. I don't think art should always serve a political purpose. If anything, it should undermine the current politics. But reflexively, I think we should probably describe The Passage because I don't know what ideas is forming in the minds of our listeners who haven't read about this story yet, but I think in context, it's easily understood to be the voice of a kind of persona. So do you want to read it or summarize it, or do you want me to find it funny? I told the story of The Passage and Cara's thing. It was one of these areas. So I had an editor that just so happens, a female editor, and she improved the book in a huge way, and I thank her so much just because the book was a mess. But this is one place where, for whatever reason, I put my foot down and said, no, no, come on, we have to continue it. And she actually wasn't against it, necessarily. She just thought that the joke had sort of run too long and that it was time to wrap it up, because I turned in 700 pages for what was supposed to be a 300 page beach read, and clearly it wasn't. So, yeah, the context here one of the sub threads, and again, this is one of these things you don't realize until you write a book, is that you can't just write a kind of wonky take on, look, this is how ad tech and venture financing and IPOs work, that's not enough. If you want to cross into the mainstream, that's not enough. You've got to inject some personal story into it. And so, rightly or wrongly, and I think in retrospect, I regret it, I inject a lot of my personal life in it to kind of jazz it up. And I was literally like my life, to be honest, is really not that interesting nor that edgy. So I was literally milking it for as much as I could. And one of the racy bits, I guess, is that indeed I had a child with a woman I barely knew. We had just started dating. She got pregnant, she was going to have it, and we actually made a go of it. We moved in together and we're like at the time I was completely in love and on we go. You kind of roll with it. It's like, okay, I'm doing all this risky startup stuff and then on top of it there's a kid. But I guess my mindset was just in that mode of accepting all risk. And so this passage comes at the moment in which she says she's pregnant, and I'm like, mulling it over. And I'm like, well, yeah, I'm infatuated with this woman. We'll try to make a go of it. And I had just come off like everybody in their twenty s and thirty s living in some coastal city on the whole online dating thing, for better or worse, right? And so the statement is one of these flips saying that we've all said, and if someone's going to claim to me they haven't made a statement of the form all men from Bloody BLA or Bloody BLA, everyone has said that. Who's been on the online dating trip? I wrote it in prose in a slightly admittedly offensive way. Okay, I'll just start from the top of that column of text. She had wild green eyes with unnatural red spots in her irises. When you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic cover. Her personality was flinty and rough and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing, broad shouldered presence, 6ft tall and bare feet and towering over me in heels. Most women in the bay are soft and weak, costed and naive, despite their claims of worldliness and generally full of shit. That's it. I guess that's basically it. It goes on and on. There's an entire passage here. I don't want to bore your listeners, but that's basically it. But that's the thing that got you canceled or fired, so you'll be generalizing about most women in the Bay Area, and clearly in this context isn't the service of justifying your admiration for this one woman who's entirely different from the generalization. But again, the larger context is of a narrative voice that is just relentlessly taking down everything in sight, including yourself. Right. You're also an object of derision in the book. There's a liability to all this for a journalist or a memoirist to emulate Tom Wolf in gonzo mode, or Hunter S. Thompson. I believe you've mentioned that you had him in mind as an exemplar. It's probably a bad idea in the same way that emulating Nietzsche is a bad idea for a philosopher. It's not that these guys were geniuses and can't be emulated, although Nietzsche certainly was a certain type of genius, but it's just that much of their rule breaking comes off as silly and self aggrandizing by turns. Right? It's just it's if someone's not going to like you on the basis of this book, if they're going to collapse you, the author down to the persona you're presenting. It's that you seem too cynical and too willing to break trust with everything. But what you can't honestly read from a passage like this is that this is a careful statement about what you believe women are like anywhere. And the connection that people at Apple, I'm sure we're making and I believe I've seen some statements to this effect since, is that this passage is of a piece with claiming that women can't be good tech entrepreneurs or good software engineers, or it's the misreading of the James de Moore memo. That wasn't even what was in James de Moore's memo when he was fired from Google, but that's how it got summarized for people as basically a misogynistic statement about the limitations of women in tech. And I will just point out a further irony here, is that one of your brief colleagues at Apple, who I am sure is still at Apple, is Dr. Dre, who's whose rap lyrics on the topic of women are quite a bit more pointed than anything in your book. And he hasn't been canceled yet, but I believe he's also trailing some credible allegations of violence against women. How has that played out in this aftermath? Yeah, as soon as this thing broke, so many people DM me with stuff about Dr. Dre. I'll I'll admit I'm not a big rap rap fan or Dr. Dre fan, so I had to go look it up. But, I mean, his lyrics are hideous. Let's just be clear, right. And as far as I understand, he's still currently employed at Apple. And indeed, I think, yeah, there was credible allegations of actual physical violence toward women when he was younger. So yeah, I agree. There's an element of hypocrisy there. I would also stress, I think, what you first mentioned, right, that if there's a tone and derision in my writing or in this writing, that derision is almost universal. And in fact, the ultimate butt of all the jokes, the fool in Chaos monkeys is me at the end of the day. I don't come off riding into the sunset winning in the end, right? Like the persona I created that you can feel free to think, he's an asshole. Guess what? The asshole loses in the end, right? The moral justice of the universe is restored at the end of the book. That's what I think. People aren't picking up like, oh, he's this arrogant asshole. Yeah, the character makes a fool of himself and loses almost everything by the end, again. But that would require actually reading the book, which I don't think many of my critics actually have. So where do you go from here? And I guess we could just open this conversation to any thoughts you have about what it's going to take to turn the tide in tech and media and culture generally. Again, you are a single thread now of a quickly unraveling tapestry of what it's hard to know where to point the wayback, machine. But it seems like we're devolving with respect to our ability to have a sane conversation about moral and political norms. Here, where everything is being politicized and people's outrage has always turned up to eleven. What's happening in your case and what do you think is and should happen in the culture more widely? I think you're right, Sam. I mean, my my story is nothing except yesterday. 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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with David Bus. David is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and he's the author of many books, most recently, When Men Behave Badly the Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment and Assault. And David and I get into many interesting topics around the differential mating strategies of men and women. We discuss the controversy that surrounds evolutionary psychology, the denial of sex differences that one increasingly encounters on the left, cross cultural findings in human psychology, the replication crisis in psychology. And then we get into the differences between men and women with respect to the relevant attitudes toward sex and mate preferences, sex differences in jealousy and infidelity the sources of unhappiness in marriage. Mate value Discrepancies what we can learn from dating apps polyamory and polygamy, the plight of stepchildren and the so called dark triad personality type that causes so much mayhem, the Me Too movement and related Topics. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. All very useful stuff to understand. And now I bring you David Bus. I am here with David Bus. David, thanks for joining me. Glad to be talking to you, Sam. So you have written a very interesting book. You've written several books, but the current one is When Men Behave Badly the Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment and Assault. And when did you start writing this? Was this a MeToo response? No, not at all. Well, first of all, I've actually been researching conflict between the sexes for about three decades. So I published my first paper on it about 30 years ago. And no, I started writing a book and signed a contract for at least a year before the MeToo movement broke. So it's a long term project. Took me about three years to write, 30 years to research, three years to write. Well, it's really interesting, and it connects with so many topics that are of perennial importance, but seemingly even more important now. But before we get into the specific topic of biological sex and the differential mating strategies of men and women and all of the logic there, perverse and otherwise, let's just talk about the scientific context in which we're having this conversation. This is essentially evolutionary psychology. That is the lens through which you're looking at these phenomena. Evolutionary psychology has been and probably still is somewhat controversial. Can we rehearse the reasons why that's the case? I think that it's controversial primarily among people who don't really understand its logic. So people pick up a newspaper article on it or even in the textbooks that cover it. And all intro to psychology textbooks cover it. They typically contain conceptual errors, typically many conceptual errors. And so I think there's just a lack of accurate understanding of what evolutionary psychology is. And I think part of that stems from in my field, which is psychology. You can get a bachelor's, a master's, or a PhD without ever taking a single course in evolutionary biology. And so what it means is that all the professors don't have any training in it, and they don't have a deep understanding of it. Now, of course, some do. Some pick it up post PhD or get some exposure to it. But one way to think about it is that the term evolution we can start there with some why things are controversial. I like to say sometimes that it's evolutionary psychology is an equal opportunity offender in the sense that on the political spectrum, it offends some on the religious right who don't believe in evolution or evolution as applied to humans right. And it offends some on the political left who erroneously, I believe, perceive that if they're evolved, in this case, sex differences in mating strategies, then that will interfere with social justice goals. Like, we want to eliminate discrimination against women, for example. We want to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace. And so it is perceived that, well, if it's evolved, it's inevitable, it's inelectable. There's nothing we can do about it. And that's just simply a conceptual error, a misunderstanding of the field. And then I guess, one of the reason that it's controversial in the modern environment is that I and other evolutionary psychologists, conceptualize, theorize, and empirically document evolved sex differences in, in this case, our mating psychology or sexual psychology. And we're in a, you know, an era where some people believe it's what I call sex difference denialism. And they they don't they don't want there to be sex differences. If there are sex differences, they don't want them to be evolved sex differences. And then the final ingredient so I have it all here, especially in this new book, is that it deals with controversial topics. So in this case, in the case of the new book, Sexual Harassment, Sexual Coercion, Sexual Deception, it deals with hot topics that are controversial and that people care about a lot. They have strong emotions to these topics alone. And so when you combine this mixture, evolutionary theory, sex differences, and then the nature of these hot topics, it's a very combustible mix and I think generates some controversy for that reason. Yeah, it's fascinating, this commitment to denying sex differences. I get the commitment to denying evolution. That's just theologically mandated, certainly in an Abrahamic context. So there's not much of a mystery there. But this denial of sex differences, even when it works to the I guess I understand the initial logic that you think any admission of sex differences will work to the disadvantage of women. But even in those cases where the denial of sex differences obviously works to their disadvantage, there are no breaks on this crazy train. And people usually on the left, just keep denying that there's any basis for distinguishing men from women apart from their self designations in the end. Right. So it's like a blank slate dogma coupled to an identity politics that takes as its only fulcrum what someone wants to say about themselves on any given Tuesday. Yeah. I'm hoping that my book will break through some of these attitudes precisely for the reason that you mentioned, Sam, is that denying sex differences in these contexts, for example, sexual harassment, some of the topics we'll get into actually does harm women. We know, for example, that the more extreme forms of sexual violence are largely perpetrated by men, and women are the primary victims of it. And so my argument is that we really need to understand the underlying sexual psychology of men and women and how they differ in order to eliminate some of these some of these problems, which are genuine problems. Yeah. So I guess there are a few other pieces here that could explain a bias against evolutionary psychology. There's one you closed the door to in several places in your book. There's the naturalistic Fallacy, the idea that explaining things in terms of evolutionary logic could be mistaken for saying that because this is the way things have been and we we can tell a story, that there were adaptive advantages in the past to our ancestors for human nature taking this turn. We're therefore justifying, in this case these differences in mating strategies between men and women. Say we're saying it's a good thing because it's a natural thing, and of course, no one is saying that, or at least I haven't met such a person. And yet that's an obvious misunderstanding. It is. And it is astonishing to me how frequently people do jump to that fallacy. But I think that there's some hope, at least for some people, because you mentioned my other books. The first book that I wrote was The Evolution of Desire strategies of Human Mating. And one guy who read it told me that understanding men's evolved desire for sexual variety helped him to stay more faithful to his wife because he found himself attracted to women who were other than his wife and initially concluded that, well, maybe I'm not in love with my wife anymore. But once he realized, no, there are actually two different sets of psychological mechanisms desire for sexual variety and also the emotion of love, which I think evolved in the context of long term pair bonding, which characterizes a lot of human mating. I think understanding doesn't automatically lead to that, oh, it's inevitable and there's nothing we can do about it because it's quote, natural. One other element on that is, and this example illustrates this, I think, is that humans have a large number of evolved psychological adaptations and at any moment in time only some small subset is activated. And so we can keep certain adaptations quiescent unactivated, we can activate those that we think are desirable to activate. And but the issue of what exists and what should exist from a moral or ethical perspective those are two different issues, I guess. There's also the concern that an evolutionary explanation ignores the role of culture, which of course it indeed not, because we have evolved at least for some considerable period of time in the context of culture and there's an evolutionary description of how culture changes as well. Whether that's more than an analogy to genetic evolution is something people can argue about. But this has a similar Darwinian dynamics. So before we jump into specifics, what can we say about the role of culture here? Because it's been widely alleged that much psychological research has been done on so called weird people white, educated, industrialized rich, democratic people and therefore has ignored the diversity of people on offer across the planet and therefore it can't really generalize its results to all of humanity. Given what we're about to talk about, how concerned should anyone be that that's the case? I think that evolutionary psychologists in general are less guilty than other social scientists in that. And so one of the first studies I published on mating psychology was involved 37 different cultures, many of which were decidedly non weird. Right? And also, as I talk about in the new book, some of the sex differences, for example, in the psychological design of sexual jealousy have now been replicated in a large number of more traditional cultures. Brooke Skelza out in California, I think, I don't know if she's in your neck of the woods or not, but she did a study of eleven different cultures and replicated the sex differences. So if you look at the cross cultural evidence which is difficult to gather but accumulates year after year, there is strong empirical support, at least for a number of hypotheses that have been advanced and in particular those centering on human mating. It sounds like this is not the epicenter of the replication crisis in psychology. But how concerned are you about the replication crisis? Is that affecting any of what we're going to talk about and just how much is that casting a shadow on any of the work you have done or doing? We should probably remind people what we mean by replication crisis. I've mentioned it a few times on the podcast, but I haven't actually done a proper podcast on it. Well, I guess for the listeners the replication crisis is that many phenomena, especially in the field of social psychology in that subdiscipline, have turned out not to be replicated. That as other scientists come in and especially if the findings are counterintuitive or appear astonishing or that our intuitions wouldn't lead us to expect those many of those have not been replicated. And so people are going back to the drawing board. But I think as it pertains to my work and the work that I talk about in When Men Behave Badly, I'm not at all worried about it because these sex differences, they are large in magnitude and highly replicable. And it's one of the reasons why, from early on, why I started studying 37 cultures rather than just, you know, a couple of samples from North America or Western Europe, because, you know, you you don't want to stake your career on on findings that are not replicable. And so I've I always try to instill that in my graduate students that you want to be sure yourself that the findings are solid and replicable before you publish them so that you don't fall into that trap. I can tell you, with respect to some of the sex differences in made preferences that I've documented and that others have attempted to replicate. And in sexual jealousy is another example. Even people who dislike the theoretical lens that I use are still able to replicate the actual results in their own labs. And so I feel very confident in this case. I think, in fact, these sex differences are among the most replicable in the field of psychology. Okay, so let's take it from the top or the bottom, as the case may be. How do we define sex? Biologically biologists define sex very simply by the size of the sex cells. So the gametes, the males, are defined as the small ones. In the human case, you have basically sperm which are little more than tiny packets of DNA and an outboard motor adaptation designed to get to the egg to fertilize it. Females are defined as the ones with the larger sex cells. In the human case, the egg, which is large, many times the size of sperm, and filled with nutrients. And so from the moment of conception and then subsequently, females are investing more than males. So some people use this kind of a cliche at this point. But sperm are cheap, eggs are expensive. But it is true. Sex defined in that way is different from things like gender identity or sexual orientation or sexual attraction. For biologists, it's very clear that sex evolved somewhere around 1.3 billion years ago from asexually reproducing species. So it's been going on a long time. But there are two sexes, right? And I think there's been also a lot of confusion that is developed when people intermingle that biological definition of male and female with all these other phenomena, such as identities and orientations and labels. And how old is sexual reproduction? Estimates vary, but it's somewhere between 1 billion and 2 billion years ago is when it first evolved. So it's been going on for, I guess you'd say, a quarter or a third of the time of life on Earth. I think life on Earth evolved about three and a half billion years ago. So sexual reproduction, it took at least a billion or 2 billion years for sexual reproduction to evolve after that. Yeah. So we've been at this for a long time. And even in our hominid form, we've been at it for a long time. And that's worth remembering as we get into the details here because when you describe the different mating strategies and their evolutionary logic if you lose sight of the vast amount of time wherein incremental changes could have tuned us differently it can seem less plausible than it otherwise would. We have bad intuitions for how much time it need take for things to change in evolutionary terms. And we certainly have bad intuitions for how long tens and hundreds of thousands of years really is. Yeah. No, exactly. In a way, it's our evolved psychology that causes those failures of intuition because we evolved to solve problems in the here and now in time spans of seconds or minutes or sometimes days and occasionally years. But we didn't evolve to even understand deep time or the concept of a billion years. It's very difficult to make that transition. And some have used some scientists have used analogies or metaphors to try to make that leap. So, for example, a football field. Like if evolution of life started at one end of a football field and then evolved to the point of modern humans sort of where are we in that space? And you get down to I don't remember the exact details, but something like the last inch of the football field where our species evolved a couple of million years ago. And then when you talk about even things like farming and technology, the agricultural revolution and those are, like you're down to seconds at that point. But sometimes those devices can help people make the leap to try to tune their intuitions to deep time. So what do we think we understand about the differences between men and women with respect to evolved mating strategies? Well, I guess we can start maybe just with a few basics. And that is we've mentioned sperm and egg. But males and females in the human case, we have dramatically different reproductive anatomy and physiology. And consequently, these have posed different adaptive problems for males and females. So, for example, fertilization occurs internally within the female body, not within the male body. What this creates is an asymmetry in certainty of parenthood where women are always 100% certain that they are the mothers. No mother ever gave birth, as far as I'm aware. And as the child is emerging from her body wondered, gee, is this kid really my own? Mothers are 100% certain. Men can never be sure. So some cultures use the phrase mama's baby, papa's baby to kind of capture that asymmetry. But this stems from the fact that fertilization occurs internally within women, not within men. And so this is an example of an adaptive problem that men have faced recurrently over evolutionary time that no woman has ever faced. And so you take this example other examples, other fundamental features are the obligatory parental investment that each sex has to devote to produce a single child. Women have that obligatory nine month investment and and it's obligatory in the in the sense that women don't have a choice about it really. I guess, well, maybe some modern technology you can farm it out to other female bodies but a woman can't say look, I'm very busy with my career right now. I really only want to put in two and a half months of the pregnancy. It's obligatory. And nine months is heavy investment metabolically. It also creates problems for women because her center of gravity has moved forward and so it puts extra torque on her back. And that's one reason why we think that male and female spines are are differently constructed where females have a wedge like the vertebra in there which helps to relieve the torque when that center of gravity is moved forward. But to produce that single child, that takes a woman nine months. It takes a man just one act of sex at a minimum. Now, of course, men do more than the minimum typically or often they do although although their investment varies a lot. But so you take this stark sex difference in this asymmetry in obligatory parental investment just to produce the child to start with and then that creates different adaptive problems for men and women and also a different payoff matrix when it comes to optimal mating strategies. That is, for example and this is one of the ones that I think creates the most havoc that I talk about in the book is that males their primary limit historically over evolutionary time on reproductive success has been the number of fertile women that they can successfully inseminate for women. And so adding additional sex partners historically has led to increases in reproductive success for men. For women, adding additional sex partners does not. Now, women can sometimes benefit from additional sex partners as I talk about in the book under Why Women Have Affairs which I think is a really interesting dimension of hidden side of female sexual psychology. But you can see that due to the asymmetries in investment there are going to be sex differences in optimal mating strategies. And so the key point that I want to make here is that it would be astonishing to an evolutionist if you found profound sex differences in our reproductive anatomy and physiology and zero attending psychological, behavioral and strategic sex differences that correspond to the adaptive adaptive problems that those sex differences in anatomy and physiology create. And so we look and there are clear predictions in some cases and we find that, yes, lo and behold, they do. You do find psychological and strategic and behavioral sex differences in precisely the domains where the sexes have faced these different adaptive problems. One of the things I'll just mention why some people say oh, you're saying men are from Mars and women are from Venus which I absolutely hate because no, that's not what we're saying. The the meta theory of evolutionary the evolutionary psychology predicts both sex differences and similarities between the sexes at the psychological level. And it's a very precise meta theory. Namely, we expect similarities between men and women in all domains in which they face approximately similar adaptive problems. So as an example, both sexes have faced the problem of eating getting fuel for the machine and so men and women have by and large similar, although not identical taste preferences for things like sugar, fat, salt and protein. Where do you see sex differences in taste preferences? Well, when women get pregnant and they face an adaptive problem that men don't face which is namely that substances that are tratogenic meaning dangerous to the fetus in minute quantities are perfectly fine for an adult woman but if they pass the placental barrier they can damage the fetus. And so all of a sudden women's taste preferences change when they get pregnant. But that example illustrates that we expect sex similarities in large areas perhaps most areas of psychology. Now, as it happens, where do we expect sex differences? Well, they fall very heavily in the mating and sexuality domains. Yeah, that's a very interesting and useful frame to put around this. If you just start with the acknowledgement that evolution is a thing and that the two sexes have different anatomies and physiologies related to reproduction and different resource demands and constraints and fairly discrepant interests. In genetic terms, with respect. To mating options. Extracurricular mating options infidelity just how it advantages the propagation of the man's genes to have sex outside of marriage versus the woman's. It would be a miracle and even a strike against the theory of evolution if there were no differences there in evolved psychology. Yes. Yeah, indeed. It would be like saying humans have developed the anatomy and musculature for bipedalocomotion but we don't have bipedalocal motion the behavior. Yes. So let's get into some of these details. Maybe we could just take specific concepts here and extrapolate from them. So you have a married couple that they have shared interests. Again, I'm not talking about the psychological first person interests we're talking about the genes eye view of things. They have shared genetic interests in successfully raising children. But how are their interests not precisely aligned, in your view? Yeah, it's a great point. Men and women do cooperate and cooperate supremely and over long periods of time for that precise reason. That is, they have a shared vehicle shared genetic vehicle that's carrying the precious cargo into the future. But they differ in very predictable ways. One is if there is a possibility for infidelity. Okay? And this could be sexual infidelity where sexual or reproductive resources are being diverted to someone outside of the couple or even financial infidelity. When one partner is shunting financial resources toward either their interests or even toward their kin at the expense of their partner's interests or their partner's kin you have the possibility of a dissolution or divorce or breakups and that possibility creates a potential for conflict. So I outline, I think in the book something like twelve Ways in which men and women's interests from an evolutionary perspective can can depart from one another. So even even in the case I end with that ideally for minimizing conflict men and women would the couple would die at exactly the same time because if one member of the couple dies and the other does not then the one who is still alive can remake and then in some cases reproduce and have additional children. And so the pooled resources can be devoted toward interests that are not aligned with the interests of the original partner. So there's a very predictable set of circumstances in which the interests of men and women depart from an evolutionary perspective with the qualification that that also occurs within the context of shared interests. Okay? So from the genetic perspective here it's very easy to explain the man's infidelity or inclination to be unfaithful provided he can get away with it. Right? There's really no limit to the evolutionary advantage for him. If he could impregnate 1000 women surreptitiously and actually expend no resources on them and their progeny that would be an amazing gain for him in evolutionary terms over remaining faithful to his wife. And one could also add that again, this is an all too common inclination for men but we could also say that he should be highly incentivized to donate sperm to a sperm bank whenever he can. That's really the ultimate case where he could father scores of children for whom he would shoulder no financial or emotional responsibility. And from his genes perspective that would all be to the good. But there are very few men who feel any internal psychological motivation to do such a thing. So there's clearly daylight between what people feel they want to do and what would make genetic sense if you were going to use the cold logic of evolution. But of course we haven't evolved in the presence of sperm banks and we don't have intuitions for how good it would be to father hundreds of children we never meet. But there's something more mysterious or slightly harder to explain about a woman's tendency to be unfaithful in a marriage. What do we know about the evolutionary logic of that? Yeah, it's a great question and I devote a chunk of my book to exploring that very issue. Just one quick comment on the sperm bank. I think you hit the nail on the head with it that sperm banks are evolutionarily novel and we don't have adaptations to things that are evolutionarily novel. That's not really a great mystery. As Steve Pinker once said, his genes he's never reproduced. He says his genes can go jump in a lake. We're just operating from our evolved psychology that evolved not to these weird modern conditions that we find ourselves in anyway. So your question about female infidelity, I think it's really fascinating because this is an area where I end up disagreeing with some of my evolutionary psychology colleagues, even those who I have a lot of respect for. Such as? Marty Hazelton, former student of mine. Steve Gangstad and others, where the traditional explanation, which I originally thought was compelling, is that women can, at least in some cases, get high quality genes from an affair partner, while retaining the investment of resources and commitment and fathering from a stable, regular mate. And in principle, that logic could work out. So in particular, if a woman is mated to a man who has inferior genetic material, for example, genes for diseases or ill health or a compromised immune system, in principle, that can work out. And there have been a variety of tests of that, and this is still under contention. But if you ask the question, well, why do women have affairs? Do women really have affairs for the functional reason of obtaining good genes from these affair partners? And what I argue is for a different hypothesis that I call the mate switching hypothesis. That is, women have affairs primarily when they're unhappy with their current relationship. And you may say, well, boy, that is the least surprising thing I've ever heard. But it's interesting that if you look at men who have affairs and compare them with men who don't have affairs, there's no difference in their marital happiness or relationship satisfaction. So women have affairs when they're unhappy with the relationship. The nature of their affairs differs qualitatively on average, and we're talking about on average differences here, in that something like 70% of women become deeply emotionally involved with or in love with their affair partner. And so that would be a terrible design feature if all you're trying to do is obtain the good genes and you don't want to be falling in love with the affair partner if the good genes explanation were correct. Right? If you look at what Motivates meant to have affairs, desire for sexual variety, novelty, novel sexual experiences is overwhelmingly the motivation. Not exclusively, but there's this enormous sex to difference in the design of male affairs and female affairs and males typically don't fall in love with their fair partners, although of course, some do and in fact try to adopt strategies to minimize the costs, the risks and investment in the affair partner. And so my argument stems from the notion that something could always go wrong in a relationship. So going back over human evolutionary time, a man could get injured in a war or get killed. And bad stuff can befall any relationship. The woman could get dumped or he might decide he wants to take on a second or third wife compromising the investment he's devoting to the first wife and so something can always go wrong. And so my argument is that if a woman would have been left totally unprepared and had to just suddenly if her husband got killed or dumped her she would have to reenter the mating pool. That wouldn't be optimal because women take out what I call mate insurance. That is, we have you know, we have house insurance and car insurance. If something bad should happen to our house or car we'd hope that it doesn't. But, you know, it's it's a backup and that women do exactly the same thing. They cultivate backup potential mates and sometimes have an affair in order to exit from a bad or cost inflicting relationship or to trade up in the mating market if she can obtain a substantially better quality mate than the one that she has or as a transition back into the mating pool. So I argue and again, this is in contrast to some of my evolutionary psychology colleagues I think it provides a more comprehensive explanation for why women have affairs. And the evidence for the good genes or dual mating strategy hypothesis is the way it's sometimes called. The evidence is turning out to be a lot shakier than originally thought. So there's something there, right? But it doesn't seem to explain the majority of cases where women have affairs. I guess they could both be true but the emotional entanglement that many women feel when having an affair could be a byproduct of just the degree to which they weight emotional engagement and the prospect of finding a caring mate more than men do in any mating circumstance. And I guess there's this background fact that we haven't spelled out yet which is that men and women tend to value different things in mates or the same things to very different degrees. And by comparison the cartoon version of sex differences sort of applies. Again, there's going to be a bell curve over both populations and there will be women who are psychologically more like men than most women and there'll be men who are more like women than most men. So these distributions will overlap considerably. But generally speaking men tend to be more concerned about how women look than women are with respect to male appearance. And presumably the evolutionary logic there is on the physical criteria of bearing children and being healthy all the while and women care more about social status and the prospects that the man will be a good source of care and resources. And that discrepancy certainly explains a lot of what we see out in the world. But to your last point, if the operating systems are that different with respect to those variables, I guess emotional entanglement under the conditions of infidelity, if you're a woman, could just be a kind of cost of the underlying mating strategy logic. As opposed to something that proves that you're not actually out to surreptitiously get good genes behind your partner's back. Yeah. Well, I think that you have to look at, with all these cases, the weight of the evidence, and I think there has been enough time for evolution by selection to decouple that emotional involvement for women under under certain circumstances. So, as I mentioned, it's a terrible design feature, terrible psychological flaw if the sole goal is getting good genes. But it's an excellent design feature if the goal is a mate switching goal. I seem to remember there being research around women's mate preferences changing to one another degree when they're ovulating. Do I make that up or is that yes? No, you didn't make that up. There's been a fair amount of research on precisely that. And that was the body of research that was used to try to test the good genes hypothesis or the dual mating strategy hypothesis. The problem that it runs into is a couple of things. One is, well, what qualifies as markers of good genes? And the the people who have argued for the the good genes hypothesis basically selected things like masculinity and symmetry. Those were the two that were primarily focused on so that women were hypothesized to prefer more masculine and more symmetrical men around Ovulation when they're most likely to conceive. But the question is, like, why would these two be viewed as the exclusive markers of good genes? So another example is one of the most heritable things that we know, and I know you've talked about this on another podcast, but is intelligence. Intelligence is at least moderately heritable and probably a bit more than moderately heritable. And we know that intelligence is beneficial for solving a wide variety of problems, but women's preferences for intelligence does not shift at ovulation. So there's the conceptual issue of what qualifies as markers of good job. I have a knee jerk response to that. What we mean by intelligence now is quite a bit more nuanced than what counted as an evolutionarily important difference in intelligence, you know, even a few hundred years ago, much less 75,000 years ago. Right. If all you're doing is clubbing one another over the head with rocks, being smart while you're doing that didn't give much of a differential advantage. Hedge fund managers and software engineers and other markers of differential success now a bit like sperm banks. Right? We just did not evolve to pay attention to those differences. Yeah, possibly. I accept your point. I guess partially where I would push back a little on it is that our ancestors didn't just hit over the head with rocks that had a social navigate social space, too. Yeah, navigate navigate social space and even, you know, the the physical environment, you know, create, navigate to habitats that had resources and but yeah, the the social intelligence hypothesis is one hypothesis for the evolution of high levels of human intelligence. So I would push back a little bit on that. I think it's an open question. If you go to, I don't know, traditional hunter gatherer societies, do the people that they call intelligent, would they be the same people that we call intelligent? Right. But of course recognize that your point about we have very specialized skills and abilities in mathematics and hedge fund managing and so forth that wouldn't have been relevant ancestrally. But I want to get back to the second problem that I see and it actually relates to the issue you brought up very early in our conversation, which is the replicability crisis. So it's very difficult and time consuming to do this ovulation research. You really have to track women over time and over a number of cycles to really document it well. And the attempts so there have been several large scale attempts to replicate these ovulatory shifts in mate preferences and that have failed to find the effects. And so the effects are either a lot less replicable than initially thought or they're a lot weaker than initially thought and require much more sensitive designs to detect. And so I think that there are both conceptual problems with a good genes hypothesis as well as empirical problems. Okay, so we're back to the man and the woman, however hapless they might be. Let's say they have one child and tolstoy got here first. They're happy families and unhappy ones. And the happy ones are all alike and the unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way. But how do the predictable variance of unhappiness here conform to the different mating strategies? Right? So, I mean, just take the response to infidelity. Let's say that or just imagined infidelity. You ask the wife to imagine her husband cheating on her and vice versa. What do each party find most disturbing about that consciously and how does that relate to their different mating strategies biologically? Yes. Well, there, I think, were two questions embedded in your question. One is what are the sources of unhappiness in couples? And then the second is what what are the sex differences in the nature of jealousy and infidelity? And basically there there are and these are highly replicable. And one is a real cool study on verbal interrogations when people discover that their partner is cheating or might be cheating. And men want to know did you have sex with him? And women want to know do you love her? And so this sex difference when you imagine your partner being unfaithful we've done studies where we ask let's say your partner got emotionally involved with an affair partner and had sex with them, had passionate sexual intercourse. Which aspect of the infidelity would bother you more? And women are much more likely to say that the emotional aspects, the falling in love, the attachment that those aspects bother women a lot more than men, whereas it's the sexual aspects that bother men a lot more. And so not that women are overjoyed about finding their partner having sex. They're not. They're upset about it. As, of course, they should be. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, well, today is a deep dive into wealth inequality and the underlying problem of our notion of meritocracy. Wealth inequality is something that I've been worried about for quite some time. I think I first started speaking and writing about it in 2010, about a year or so after the financial crisis. I wrote a couple of blog posts. I think the first was a New Year's resolution for the rich. And then how rich is too rich. And it's come up a few times on the podcast. Before, I never really questioned the norm of meritocracy. However, I haven't really thought much about the way our system of higher education has become a perpetual motion machine of inequality. But my guest today on the podcast has. Today I'm speaking with Daniel Markovitz, and his book is The Meritocracy Trap how America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, dismantles the middle class, and Devours the Elite. And Daniel is a professor of law at Yale, and as you'll hear, he's thought a lot about these issues. We talk about the nature of inequality in the US. The disappearance of the leisure class, the way the rich now tend to work harder, at least as measured by time, than anyone else, the difference between labor and capital as sources of inequality. We talk about the shrinking middle class, the attendant deaths of despair in the US. We talk about the different social norms among the elites and the working class, things like out of wedlock, birth, divorce, et cetera. Talk about the flawed notion of being self made and the illusion that anyone has earned their advantages. And we consider Daniel's proposal for a one time wealth tax as a way of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant economic calamity. There's a lot here. You might find it a little dense, certainly in the beginning, but I thought the conversation was fascinating. I learned a lot looking back on my old blog posts of ten years ago, and I noticed that in talking about the consequences of automation and growing wealth inequality and people's resistance to redistribution, I asked the rhetorical question, would anyone want to live in a country that has just minted its first trillionaire and there's 30% unemployment? Well, at the time, that was a cartoon example. At the moment, that outcome is absolutely foreseeable. We've certainly been pushed within range of that possibility by this pandemic. So that's just to say this is a conversation whose time has come. And now I bring you Daniel Markovitz. I'm here with Daniel Markovitz. Daniel, thanks for joining me. Thank you so much for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. So you've written this fairly incendiary book, The Meritocracy Trap, and you also wrote an op ed in the New York Times recently that I want to talk about that is especially pitched to this moment. But I really want to run through your entire argument here because it has the virtues of being both quite consequential, whether right or wrong, whatever we decide about your argument, the consequences are enormous and it's highly counterintuitive. And so I'll let you lay it out here, but you've written a book really against this notion of meritocracy. And it's interesting, this word was originally coined in a somewhat ironic or derogatory vein, but it was very soon thereafter rechristened as an obvious norm. And so when we hear about meritocracy, really for my entire lifetime, there's never been a problem with it. The problem has always been that we haven't actually achieved it. And the problem is that there are people who are every bit as talented as the people who succeed, but they don't succeed because they weren't given the right opportunities. But you're arguing that the very norm of achieving a meritocracy is somehow flawed and that any socioeconomic reward that's based on this notion of merit is itself unjust and it's leading to a kind of new caste system. So perhaps let's just start with this core claim in what sense is meritocracy itself and the notion of merit itself the problem? Sure. Let's start just by giving a quick and intuitive definition of what a meritocracy is. It's when people get ahead based on their own accomplishments rather than on, say, their parents social class or their race or their gender. And as you suggested a moment ago, it's very hard to object to that idea. It seems like that idea would give a society a capable and competent and engaged elite. And it seems like that idea would give everybody a fair shot at success. And the early meritocrats, especially in the United States in the 1960s and we can talk about them in a little more detail later, very much embraced that thought. They thought that meritocracy was a way of breaking established caste orders surrounding heredity, breeding race, gender, religion. And for a while, meritocracy did function in that way because natural talent is not the property of any one race or gender or caste. But then what happened is that the elite that was made by meritocracy, the people who themselves got ahead by being really good at tests, really good at school, really hard working, accomplishing a lot, turned out to be incredibly good at training their children and to have an immense appetite for investing in their children's education. And they now so dramatically out train and out educate everybody else in society that not just poor families, but middle class families can't keep up. And because education works, it now turns out that the people who, in this technical sense, accomplish the most, who have the highest test scores, the best grades, are the same as the children of the rich meritocrats of the previous generation. And so in this way, what meritocracy has done is it was invented as the handmaiden of equality, of opportunity, but it's become an enormous obstacle to opportunity in the United States today. I want to get into the problem specific to higher education and then the process by which people seek to get into elite institutions, because that really is at the center of the problem, at least on your account. But before we get there, let's just talk about the nature of inequality. What is the status quo at this point? And perhaps we should focus on the US. I mean, I know this is a global problem, but within the US. You point out that we have a kind of inequality that more resembles that found in a country like India than in a country like France. So they give us a picture of what inequality is like at this point. Yeah. So we have two trends happening in the US. At the same time. And I think one of the things that made the book controversial is that it emphasizes both of these trends. So one trend is falling poverty. There's a lot of poverty in the US. And if you have my private politics, it's morally unconscionable how much poverty there is. There's more poverty than in other rich countries. But although I think it's perfectly reasonable to think that poverty is the most morally pressing economic issue of the age, it's not the distinctive one. So the poverty rate in the United States today, depending on how you measure it, is between a half and a fifth of what it was in 1960 and 1960 is thought of by the left and the right, both as a period of shared prosperity. But poverty then was much, much deeper and wider than it is today. At the same time as we have falling poverty in this country, we also have rising concentrated wealth. And the richest 1% of households in America today take home about twice as big a share of national income as they did in 1960. So you have both falling poverty and rising wealth. And inequality has moved, as it were, up the income scale so that there is now more economic inequality within the richest 5% of the population than in the population as a whole. Right. That is to say, the shrinking gap between the middle class and the poor dampens overall inequality compared to the massively rising gap between the merely rich and the superrich. And then there's one other thing that's going on that is also controversial or that I claim is going on that's controversial, which is that the sources of the very top incomes have changed. So that, by my calculation today, between two thirds and three quarters of the total income of the top 1% doesn't come from capital but rather comes from labor. So that the rich have become the working rich or a superordinate working class. Whereas for most of human history, if you wanted to know how poor a person was, you would ask how hard or how long they work. Whereas today, if you want to know how rich a person is, you ask how hard or how long they work. And that's also transformed the ideology of inequality in, I think, very damaging ways. Yeah, there are many interesting distinctions in there. So let's just take this one piece of the issue between disparities in work and in capital. So that your claim here is somewhat at odds with the much celebrated thesis of Thomas Piketty. Right. That he published this book that everyone bought and I imagine few read a few years ago, where he was arguing that because the gains that accrue to capital increase at a greater rate than those that accrue to labor, the real driver of wealth inequality in First World societies he wasn't focused exclusively on the US. Is the distinction between people who have capital, right. Who have investments and are therefore making money on their stock portfolio, say, and everyone else who has to work for a living at any salary. But you're saying that the truly rich here, first of all, they're not merely a leisure class. I mean, this is not an episode of Doubt and Abbey we're living through. They work harder, as measured in just time than basically anyone else. And that is the source of the most excruciating inequality and in this case and in the top, essentially the Ginny coefficient of the top 10%. Right? Right. So let's talk just separately, briefly, about labor hours and then about the sources of income. So in 1979, if you were in the top fifth of the hourly wage distribution, you were about two thirds as likely as someone in the bottom fifth to work over 50 hours a week. By 2006, if you were in the top fifth, you were more than twice as likely as someone in the bottom fifth to work over 50 hours a week. So in the roughly 30 years at the end of the last millennium, the relationship between high wages and long hours reversed. It used to be the low paid work, the long hours, and by 2006, the high paid work, the long hours. And if you look at finer slices, between about 1940 and about 2010, the top 1% added, roughly speaking, six to 8 hours a week to its average work week, whereas the bottom 60% lost maybe 8 hours a week from its average work week. So that's a shift of hours worked away from the bottom 60% to the top 1% of 16 hours a week, which is two regulation work days a week. And I want to be clear, and I hope we come back to this the reason why the middle and working class aren't working such long hours is not that they're lazy and don't want to work. It's that the labor market has been restructured so there aren't enough jobs. And even during our recent period of very low unemployment, we've also had very low labor force participation. So that it's true that not many people have been seeking work and not getting it, but many people haven't been seeking work. So that's the story of ours worked. It's what sociologists of work called the time divide. Then there's a separate story about where the rich get their income from. And this is the point at which, as you suggested, picate's and my analyses depart. Now, it's important to understand that both his effect and my effect could be going on at the same time and that they'd compete only, as it were, on the margin of explanation. So it could both be that those with capital are getting richer and also that those with super skills and super labor are getting richer. And the question is just which of these effects dominates the other in explaining the overall rise of top incomes? And it's important actually to read Piketty's book because Piketty himself makes quite clear that in the United States, in contradistinction to Western Europe until 2000, until 2000, top incomes were driven by rising labor income. So Piketty and I agree about that. And the only place at which we disagree is what happened since 2000. And we disagree there for two reasons principally, and I'm going to try to put the disagreement in a way that tries to be fair as between us. And if we want to get into it, we can get into it. But one question is how should one categorize the income of the very highest paid workers in management and finance? So these are CEOs, top executives, hedge fund people, investment bankers. Pketty inclines to categorize some portion of their income as capital rather than labor. I view their income as labor income. The reason why Piketty views their income as capital income is that he thinks, in effect, that nobody's work could be worth that much. And it's important to understand how much income there is here. So in a recent year, the five highest paid employees of the S and P 1500. So 7500 workers overall captured income equal to 10% of the total profits of the S and P 1500. So these people are capturing quantities of income that matter macroeconomically. I think of it as labor income because these are people who bring nothing but their own labor to their employment contract. They don't own the companies they manage. The hedge fund people don't own the assets that they invest. Instead, what they do is they sell their skills and I have a story about technological change that tries to explain why it is that counterintuitively, we've created an economy in which those skills could be incredibly valuable. So that's one source of difference. The other big source of difference is that I treat certain categories of pass through income. So this is income earned by people who own their own businesses and certain categories of capital gains. This is income captured by people who invent things, start big companies and have founder shares as labor income, whereas peaked treats it as capital income. I again believe it's labor income, because I think, once again, what these people are contributing to the economic value of their ventures is their own ideas, their own work, their own labor. And depending on how you look at the balance of these things, you get from piketty's number, which is that the top 1% get roughly half of their little under half of their income from labor to my number, which is that the top 1% get between two thirds and three quarters of their income from labor. That's a material difference. But just to close this out, the most striking difference is between either peakedy's estimate and mine. So either half or three quarters. And what was true in, say, 1910, when the top 1% would have gotten a 6th or an 8th of its income from labor, or even 1960, the top 1% would have gotten a quarter of its income from labor. Right? Well, maybe it's a distinction without a real difference, because the different norms around work and time spent working are unaffected by how you class the source of income. You take somebody like mark zuckerberg. I don't know mark. I've never met him. I know many people know him, but I have no inside knowledge of his work habits. But I would bet a fair amount of money that he works considerably more than a 40 hours work week. And also his wealth is born not principally of his salary, whatever it is. I would assume his salary is nominal, but it's not $100 billion. It is nominal compared to his actual wealth. And so he's making money based on the fact that he owns, whatever it is, 20% of facebook. And so you could call that capital, or you could call that the returns on labor, but the reality is he's almost certainly a workaholic, and therefore very likely believes that he deserves everything he's gotten. He didn't inherit this wealth. He built it. He created, whatever you think of facebook, an enormously influential piece of technology that has attracted the attention of half of humanity, and he's rewarded for that. And he's, you know, part of the system you're describing in terms of the advantages accruing to an educated elite to some degree. I mean, he, he stepped off that hamster wheel pretty early. He got to harvard, and then dropped out to start facebook. So on some level, this is part of your story, although I guess you would probably view much of the success we see in Silicon Valley to be a bit of a sideshow to your main thesis. Right, because you're more talking about people who go the whole route through the academy and come out and work for Goldman Sachs or in some contexts like that where they're not reaping these outside rewards based on their winner take all, one off brilliant idea. They're actually part of a much larger system of credentialing and social signaling that becomes the so called meritocracy where people are grinding away for, again, very long hours. But I would imagine in the case of someone like Zuckerberg or any other founder like him who's getting very rich, they may wish they didn't feel the need to work as much as they do, but many of these people are doing what they love or what they're addicted to. They're not somebody who's several rungs from the top at a place like Goldman Sachs just being ground down by 90 hours work weeks because that's the way the machine runs. Is there a distinction to make there or basically these are the same group of people we're talking about? Yeah, no, I think there is a distinction to make there. Now, of course, there are lots of people now who go to work at Google or Facebook or Apple or venture capital firms in Silicon Valley who are also working on other people's projects rather than their own. But your underlying suggestion about someone like Zuckerberg does, generalize so that in 1984, for example, purely inherited fortunes outweighed self made fortunes in the Forbes 400 by ten to one. But today, self made fortunes outnumber the inherited ones so that we've reversed even there. Who thinks of themselves now? Self made is a term of art, obviously, but it's different from being Zuckerberg, from being, say, one of the Koch brothers who inherited from their parents. I do think that there is an important political psychological difference between my view and Pikatis. And this, I think, also accounts for some of the controversy surrounding the Meritocracy trap, which is this the capital intensive account of rising inequality focuses the blame for an inequality that most people think is a bad idea. At a group of people and a threshold wealth and a social position that is different from the group of people who are the book's natural audience. So the people who read Pikati are university professors, elite journalists, management consultants, lawyers, doctors, the broad reading elite. And Pikati's story absolves them of responsibility for inequality. Whereas my story says that them, namely me, us and the institutions that we serve and that have made us, are at the very core of the machine that is producing more and more inequality and blocking middle and working class people from opportunity. And I don't know if that's a virtue or not of the theory, but it does explain why there's a way in which a story like the capital story is quite comfortable for the elite left, whereas a story like my story is quite uncomfortable for the elite left. Yeah, that's interesting. And it's interesting to consider where these various tiers economically should be drawn. I guess they could also be region specific. What do you consider middle class? What does the field consider middle class in general, and then how do you think about middle class in a city like Manhattan or San Francisco? Yeah, I think that's a good question, and it's a complicated sort of conceptual question and actually turns out to be a very complicated, flat, empirical question. So that often people think of people as middle class as those between something like the percentile of the income distribution. But of course, that varies by city and by region, and what it takes to lead a certain kind of lifestyle varies very much by city. The practical or data complication there is that there are lots of things in a city like New York or San Francisco that are obviously much, much more expensive than elsewhere. Housing is a big example. Of course, private schools are another big example. But then there are other features of elite or even upper middle class life that are actually cheaper in New York City than elsewhere. So certain kinds of foods, certain kinds of entertainment, certain kinds of restaurants are actually cheaper or easier to get in New York than elsewhere. So it becomes quite complicated to figure out exactly what lifestyle bundle and at what price it takes to be in the middle class or above the middle class. Socioeconomically, I tend to focus on the top 1% and then the 4% that surrounds them, in the sense that these are the 4% or the group that credibly can claim it might one day be in the 1%. And so that's the group that I'm focusing the analysis on. And that's partly driven by the fact that that's where almost all of the income growth in America has happened over the past 30 years. So it makes sense to look at this narrow slice, although in another sense it's a very narrow slice. And focusing on them ignores distinctions between somebody who's making $150,000 a year and somebody who's making $85,000 a year. Both are above median household income, but they're in very different positions, and neither of them is close to the 1%, right? I think we should at some point drill down on the difference between the merely rich and the superrich because those orders of magnitude are counterintuitive for people, and it's just interesting to think about the significance of that kind of wealth. Stratification it's odd to be focused merely on the top 1%, but it's, you know, the difference between the .01% and the the merely 1% is so enormous at this point that you're not at all talking about the same thing. Maybe we'll save that for when we talk about your op ed in the New York Times. Calling for a one time wealth tax, because that's interesting. So is there more to say about the middle class here? You know, from hearing your argument, it seems that the middle class is in some ways the hardest hit here. And I guess in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, there's additional concern that when we surface from all of this, the middle class might scarcely even exist. What are your thoughts about the middle class before we we focus on the the problems of wealth? Yes. So there's a sort of a straight, empirical economic phenomenon which is very striking, which is if you ask about children's odds of becoming richer than their parents. So this idea of sort of economic growth within the family lineage that each generation is better off than the one before. For the kids that were born in 1940, basically all of them were going to end up richer than their parents. You had to get to roughly the 95th percentile of the income distribution before children were not almost certain to become richer than their parents. But for the group born in 1980, really, only the poorest were certain to be richer than their parents. And if you look at the drop in, the chance of getting richer than your parents so by how much did that chance fall between 1940 and 1980? It fell by the most between the 30th and the 90th percentile of the income distribution. So the broad middle class, if you think of people below the 30th percentile as, roughly speaking, the poor and people above the 90th as, roughly speaking, the rich, the broad middle class had the biggest drop off in its odds of becoming richer than its parents. So that the sort of future looking hope of the economy moved away from the middle class. Right. And at the same time, the charismatic center of the economy and the culture moved away from the middle class. And, and this is a not a flat economic phenomenon. You know, this has to do with how much housing costs. It used to be that a house in a really, really fancy neighborhood would cost maybe two or three times what an average house would cost. Now it costs 20 or 30 times what an average house costs. It used to be that in America, the most expensive car you could buy was a Cadillac. It cost twice what a Chevy cost. Now there are lots of cars that cost ten or 20 times what the median car costs. The same is true for kitchen appliances. The same is true for meals out, for bottles of wine, for which supermarket you shop at. It used to be everybody shopped at Safeway. Now you can shop at Whole Foods or you can shop at Walmart. And they have very different feels, looks, and products. One thing I looked into, the French Laundry, the California fancy restaurant, and Taco Bell don't have a single ingredient in common. That's hilarious. Not even the salt. Not even the salt. And so what you're getting is a stratification of all parts of life around this income divide. And the part of life that captures the attention of the culture of the media is the rich part, whereas it used to be the part of life that captured the attention of the culture was a middle class part. And so that's another kind of demotion now, a sort of sociological, cultural, psychological demotion for the same group that has taken the biggest hit in its economic opportunities. And that's extremely damaging to flourishing and to politics. Well, much of this is relative, of course, because as you point out, there's less poverty than there's ever been, right? And when you look at what the average lower middle class or even slightly below that person has access to, compared to what previous generations had, I mean, you just take something like a smartphone, right? Well, it's just this is a piece of magic if you brought it back to the even in even the late 20th century, right? It's just this is you're walking around with something in your pocket that not even the President of the United States had access to in the even ninety s. And I'm sure there are some technocrats or, you know, techno utopians who would say there's nothing wrong with growing inequality per se. As long as the the floor is rising for everyone. And there's some sign that the floor is rising for everyone. What would you say to that? Well, I think the first thing I'd say is that there's a sense in which what you say is even more true than your example suggests. Like the smartphone. I don't know. Did you ever drive a Chrysler K car? No, I have not. No. So a car in the 1980s, those were terrible cars, whereas a Toyota Corolla today is a great car, right? It's safe, it's quiet, it's powerful, it's comfortable in a way in which almost no consumer good from 40, 50 years ago was. And so it's not just new inventions, it's familiar. Things have become a lot better. On the other hand, even though it is true that poverty is down and that middle class consumption has continued to rise, it's also true that other forms or markers of human flourishing have not been rising. So if you think of Anne cases in Angus Deaton's demographic work on the fact that there is rising mortality and falling life expectancy in middle class Americans, this is astonishing. We have falling life expectancy in a large group of the population without war, without economic collapse, and until six weeks ago, without epidemic disease. And yet life expectancies are falling. And the causes of the falling life expectancy are overwhelmingly overdose, addiction, suicide, smoking, heart disease, and other diseases associated with overeating. They're forms of direct or indirect self harm, really. And the reason for that, I think, is that this goes back to the. Meritocracy point that we started with. We've constructed a social and economic order with massive structural exclusion. The reason it's hard to get ahead as a middle class child or adult in America today is that the system is rigged against you. The education system is rigged against you as a child and rigged against your children. The labor market requires you to have fancy training and fancy degrees that you can't afford to get and then meritocracy recharacterizes this structural exclusion as an individual failure to measure up. It then says, and by the way, the reason you haven't gotten ahead is that you weren't good enough, you didn't work hard enough, you weren't virtuous enough. And so the layering of this sort of profound moral insult on top of an economic injury produces then the forms of self harm that reduce life expectancy and the reduced life expectancy, which really is demographically unprecedented. It just doesn't happen that you have lower life expectancy without war, disease, economic collapse shows just how damaging this form of exclusion and inequality really is. And no amount of stories of better consumer goods or cell phones or even more square feet per person in housing can make up for the harms done by that set of structural exclusions and moral insults. Yeah, there are many differences in just take this health distinction between the wealthy and even the middle class. I think at some point you say that the life expectancy difference between the 1% and the middle class exceeds what would be true if we cured cancer, which is a fairly arresting idea. And there's so many other sociological differences in these cohorts when you look at the rate of divorce or having children out of wedlock, all of those things have enormous consequences too. I mean, divorce and having a child out of wedlock, these are variables that are almost synonymous with economic hardship. At minimum, a serious economic penalty and also an opportunity penalty with respect to the kids and their ability to go to good schools and all the rest. How else do you think about the difference in there's a kind of a non virtuous or virtuous, depending on whether you're benefiting from it cycle here. Once things are going well, everything tends to be going better. How else do you think about the difference between the elites, as I think you tend to call them, and everyone else? Yeah, let me just say, first of all, the the effects that you're describing are sort of so enormous that if you don't look twice, you don't believe they're real. So, you know, in 170 out of marriage births accounted for less than 10% of the births to women at all levels of education. Today, women with a high school education or less so without college degrees, that's two thirds of women have over 50% of their children outside of marriage, whereas women with a college education or more have only 3% of their children outside of marriage. Right? So this is not a small effect or phenomenon. And I think the way I think about it is that life in capitalism, and particularly life in a meritocracy, is hard. It's a constant struggle in competition with others. No institution or person gives you the basic things that you need to flourish without your fighting to get them. And that means that success under those circumstances requires enormous amounts of support early in life and deep into adulthood. And that support is incredibly expensive. It's expensive in time, it's expensive in money, it's expensive in expertise. And that means that grown ups who are struggling themselves are not in a good position to provide the advantages for their children that the children will need to compete in the next generation, whereas grownups who have abundance themselves are in a much, much better position to do it. And that explains how inequality that in some sense looks like it's narrowly economic based on income or wealth can become comprehensive, can reach into family structure childbearing, it reaches into religious practices, it reaches into consumption practices, it reaches into exercise. 80 years ago, prosperous was a euphemism for comfortably overweight. Whereas today the rich are almost exclusively extremely fit because they pay trainers and gyms to exercise. Whereas the obesity epidemic that this country faces is overwhelmingly concentrated in the middle and working classes. Again, expensive food is expensive and cheap. Tasty food is cheap. And so this is a way in which economic inequality can inscribe itself even in the bodies of the rich and the poor. And it's extremely damaging to our broader social order. Yeah, so on some level they're changing norms here which are also part of the problem. If you just take something like fitness, it once was the case that you could be obese and smoke a cigar and you're the caricature of a rich guy. Now, if your midlife crisis entails training for an Iron Man competition, you're the caricature of the super driven CEO i. E. Rich guy. But the money can be constant there. We're talking about a new social norm. So I'm wondering what you think explains that. And also, I guess I don't know the explanation for the change in out of wedlock birth, but again, that's also another kind of norm here around sexuality, which it seems to me could at least be orthogonal to changes in objective economic circumstance and opportunity. Yeah, I think it could be. I think in fact, they're not in the following sense. If you live in an aristocratic system in which breeding itself birthright is sufficient to secure the success of children and keep the family dynasty going, it doesn't matter very much how the aristocratic adults raise their children or spend their time because their children will be privileged. But in a meritocracy, one of the most important productive activities is training children. And so one of the reasons why elite families live these hyper conservative lives, although their official ideology around sex is one of great liberalism is that they realize that the success of their children depends on an orderly, work driven, training driven domestic space and so they produce it. And it has actually very bad gender effects within the rich families, which is that rich women earn much, much less than their rich male partners, even though the official gender ideology of the elite is one of economic equality between men and women. On the other hand, the jobs that have been most attacked, most aggressively destroyed by the transformations in the labor market that accompany this kind of inequality are the jobs that traditionally middle class and working class men did. And so working class and middle class men have had their earning power most harmed and their social status most harmed by these transformations in work and labor. So that now if you survey working class families in households, they say that it is important that husbands outearn wives or that men out earn women. But in fact, in the bottom third of the income distribution, women outearn men in households. And this dramatically undermines the sort of ideology of marriage and domestic life because again, in a gender hierarchical society, this makes it hard to find marriageable men. It makes men uncomfortable in households with wives who earn more. And so when you overlay the form of inequality that we're seeing, the economic inequality that we're seeing on a gender hierarchy, you get both extreme conservatism in the elite and the breakdown of the traditional family outside of the elite. And obviously a lot of other things are going on at the same time. And it would be crazy to try to reduce so complicated phenomena to this one line of explanation. But it's not that the economic story has nothing to say about these wide social ramifications. Yeah, that's really interesting. So it seems to me we have a growing problem of social solidarity here and this has political implications that are increasingly painful. And for me, just in private conversations in response to your recent op ed on a wealth tax. This was born home. Because, as you say in several places throughout your book, the elite think of themselves as self made. Right now, they're not. By and large, they're not people who just inherited their wealth from their grandfather, who was a captain of industry. These are people who got really busy very early and have stayed busy up until about 30 seconds ago and they're being rewarded for it. And they have had lives in many cases, even most, that by any measure have to be objectively granted as stressful. But they've succeeded. And so they are more resistant to redistribution and any ethical argument about its necessity or basic decency than perhaps anyone. And so I remember so you wrote this op ed in the New York Times in response to the COVID pandemic and you argued that we need a one time wealth tax. Maybe just give me the potted version of that argument, and then I can tell you what it was like to try to represent that in my world. Sure, so the pandemic is a systemic attack on our economic and social life, but it obviously hasn't hit everybody equally and unsurprisingly. The richest and most educated people are best able to socially isolate and, in fact, best able to keep working and to keep their jobs in the face of social isolation. So if I think about my own situation, I'm a university professor, I've taught online. I keep writing, I keep working, I keep getting paid, just as I always would. It's a little stressful, and it's not so nice to be at home all the time, but basically, this has not harmed me personally at all. At the same time, we have 30 million people newly out of work. We have workers who were previously called low skilled now turn out to be recognized to be essential, still working, in some cases being economically forced to keep working in the face of the risk of getting sick. And so what we've got is a systemic attack on our whole society that only the least privileged are bearing the cost of. And the thought behind the wealth tax is that social solidarity requires that everyone bears the cost, and in particular, that those who have most benefited from this enormous run of rising inequality should now give some back. And it just so happens that if you take 5% of the household wealth of the richest 5% of households, you get about $2 trillion, which is just about what's been spent on pandemic relief so far. These are round numbers, and one should mistrust round numbers, but there's a nice match between a way of raising the money and who credibly should be paying the money out of a solidarity with the whole society in the face of this really terrible thing. And what's the significance of it being one time, as opposed to what was proposed by the Warren and Sanders campaigns to have an ongoing wealth tax, which many people looked at as either entirely unworkable or still fairly onerous to implement, and the kind of thing that would incentivize the offshoring of wealth and just elaborate imaginations to evade it. Right. So I think the logic behind it is different and the implementation is different. And you could favor both of them, but you could favor them independently, or you could oppose either of them without opposing the other. The logic behind this is shared sacrifice in the face of a shared threat or a collective threat. And the logic of the Sanders Warren taxes were anti oligarchy taxes to rebalance our society and increase the social safety net in a steady state. And so those are very different kinds of principles. And I may actually, privately, in my politics, favor both of them. But as I say, the argument for one doesn't turn on the argument for the other. The different logic means the taxes look very different. The Sanders Warren taxes kick in in the top .1% households whose aggregate wealth was, in one case, $32 million, and in another case over $50 million. These are very rich people and they're ongoing taxes. The tax I propose would hit the whole of the top 5%. So these are households with household wealth over two and a half million dollars, although it would exclude the first two and a half million dollars. So if your wealth were $2.6 million, you'd pay the tax on only the last $100,000. That means that the tax that I'm proposing raises a lot more revenue, is a lot harder to avoid, and because it's only one time, you can't plan your affairs to avoid it. So it's much easier to implement. And as I say, it solves a pressing current politico social problem of solidarity in the face of this, which is, again, very different from the logic of the ongoing taxes. Okay, so there are a few things that one encounters in trying to shill for your noble thesis here. I didn't workshop this among many people, but there are a couple of fairly well off people I pitched this to because I immediately took a liking to this idea for two reasons. One, it's somebody's going to have to pay for this bail out eventually. It can't be all a matter of printing money. But two, this notion of shared sacrifice. And I'm acutely aware of the disparities here. But one thing you encounter in recommending a one time wealth tax is that these disparities are fairly gauling even among wealthy people because just by sheer accident some wealthy people or even not so wealthy people are entirely spared by the pandemic just because they happen to be in a business that is either untouched or even improved by it. Right. In some cases. And then there are other people who are or were quite wealthy who are just getting crushed because there's no possibility of working from home in their industry. Right. If they're making cars or airplanes or whatever it is, you can't do any of that from home and everything is ground to a halt. Or if Disney is a fantastically wealthy company and its top executives are extremely wealthy, but they have way more exposure to the pandemic given their reliance on their theme parks and other real world venues. Right. And you see having some analogous company that has none of those exposures and is doing fine. And so there's a story to be told about good and bad luck even among the wealthy, and to try to implement a wealth tax. You start the clock ticking eight weeks ago, and you say, who was wealthy eight weeks ago? Okay, now give us 5% of your money. That is something from which at least some of these wealthy people recoil. How do you think about that? Yeah, I think that you raise two good points and they're two different points and I want to respond to them differently. The second point is that there may be some people who appeared wealthy eight weeks ago, but in fact are no longer so wealthy. And those are people who've already borne a real cost from this pandemic. And on my view. Although, if I can sharpen it up, Daniel, I would I would add that some of these people are certainly still wealthy right now on paper. But they are right to believe that they're in a circumstance of far greater uncertainty than some other wealthy person for whom the prospects of an ongoing pandemic don't spell any analogous dooms. Yeah, sure, sure. No, I get that. You know, the answer I I want to give, though, still remains that the exemption of two and a half million dollars of household wealth means that from the perspective of the average American, everybody who pays the tax is really rich. And that matters, I think. And it's true that some people are not as rich as they were and some people are suffering real setbacks, but yet they remain really rich from the perspective of the average American. Now, that doesn't go to the first thing you said, which is that there is tremendous inequality, differential luck and even deep unfairness within the group of the rich. And some people, as you say, have benefited from this. Some people have been burdened by it, some people are merely rich, some people are super duper rich. And this tax doesn't really distinguish between them as aggressively as it might. And there I really have sort of a piece of political psychology or political ethics as an answer and people will either find it moving or not. But one of the things it means for us all to be in this together as a society and a country is that we don't look on each other one at a time and ask who has more? Rather we ask do we have more than is fair for us to have? And I think the answer to that question for the broad group of people that this tax would raise its revenue from again, these are households with wealth over two and a half million dollars is yes. All of us in that group have more than is fair for us to have. And maybe some of us have even more than others. And maybe there are unfairnesses within our group, but in the face of a national calamity we shouldn't focus on those. And maybe there's an analogy here, actually, to war, which is that we try to have a fair kind of draft in an existential war, and then we understand that once you're drafted, some people get bad luck and have an unfair assignment. But that doesn't give them a complaint against those who got a luckier assignment. As long as the basic system is fair. And that's what this tax is trying to do, is to say those who are most privileged as a group owe something to society, and we shouldn't quibble amongst ourselves about which ones of us owe the most. And that's another way, in a way which this is different from the Sanders Warren taxes, which are trying to get the fairness right all the way up the scale at every moment, rather than trying to express meaningful solidarity in a moment of crisis. I don't know if you find that persuasive or not, but that's the kind of thinking that I have in mind. Yeah, I think certainly many rich people, and even many people who merely aspire to be rich will grow worried over this notion of just how much wealth it's fair for a person to have, because first of all, you're being agnostic as to how they came by that wealth. There's certainly a libertarian fantasy that it's impossible to get truly wealthy without creating commensurate value for people. The wealth that a person accrues is merely synonymous with the degree to which they have benefited other people very directly in their lives. And the metric of that is all these people, in the cases of the truly wealthy people by the millions, have literally opened their wallets to them because they found so much value in what they produced. We can certainly find examples of rent seeking and parasitic economic behavior that doesn't seem to be creating much value for anyone. Or if it is creating value, it's very hard to discern what that value is or how it touches the life of any individual. And these people are growing fantastically wealthy. So I think there are people who would fall outside that analysis. But in the case of someone who has just created a brilliant product that everyone on Earth wants, I think most people's, certainly most Americans core ethical intuition here is that person deserves, he or she deserves to get as wealthy as they possibly can based on having created that value. And it doesn't even matter if it's something if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies is entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I'm speaking with Jack Dorsey. Jack is the CEO of Twitter and Square. We don't spend a lot of time talking about Square. We get into the details of Twitter. We talk about the role that Twitter plays in journalism now, how it's different from other social media, how Jack and the rest of his team are attempting to reduce the toxicity on their platform. We talk about what makes conversation healthy, the logic by which Twitter suspends people, the reality of downranking, and, quote, shadow banning. I briefly make my case for banning Trump from the platform. We talk about Jack's practice of meditation. Anyway, I must say I consider this interview a missed opportunity. We really were the casualty of timing here more than anything else, because we recorded this conversation a week before the Covington Catholic High School Circus, which, as you know, exemplified more or less everything that's wrong with social media at this moment. And Twitter in particular. If you recall, it really seemed in that week that Twitter accomplished something like the ruination of journalism. So that would have been great to talk about, and our silence on that topic will be ringing in your ears. So much of what we talked about with respect to Twitter's policy around suspending people, and the politics of all that really could have been sharpened up had we had a time machine. We also had this conversation before some other interviews with Jack came out, which I've since read in Rolling Stone, and also he won on Joe Rogan's podcast in the interim. And Joe, as you know, streams everything live. So I've seen the aftermath of all that, and Joe reaped a whirlwind of criticism for not having pushed Jack hard enough. I think he's going to have Jack back on his podcast. I'm actually going to be on Joe's podcast later in the week, and I'm sure we'll talk about all this, but all of that notwithstanding, I really enjoyed talking to Jack. One thing I want to make clear, because I saw some of the pain that Joe was getting from his audience. Many people were alleging that Joe must have agreed not to push Jack on certain points. I can't speak for Joe, but I must say jack had no restrictions at all on this conversation. He was eager to talk about anything I wanted to raise there were no edits to it. He didn't request any. So he's totally willing to have a conversation about where Twitter has been and where it's going. You'll hear that he is quite good at pure wedding around any concern a person raises. You'll certainly witness that in this conversation, and and it was there to be seen in Joe's and in all these subsequent interviews that I've seen. You know, he really does offer a more or less a full Maya culpa on many of these points. You talk about how toxic Twitter is, and he fully acknowledges it. You talk about how inscrutable the policy is around banning and how it lacks transparency, and he fully owns that. So there's not that much to get from him on those points apart from his stated commitment to fixing all of these problems that he acknowledges. So I don't know what Joe is going to get out of him on a second pass, but given the time I had this conversation with Jack, I really can't express too much regret. But just in light of what's happened in the last few weeks, I would certainly want to turn down the screws a little bit on a few of these points. That said, I really enjoyed the conversation with Jack, and I hope you do too. And now I bring you Jack Dorsey. I'm here with Jack Dorsey. Jack, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. This is an interesting conversation for me to approach because I think we're going to talk about some things that I'm a little concerned you don't want to talk about, and I'm just going to forge ahead. But I want to talk about everything. Okay, but and then I think we'll get into things that areas of mutual interest that I think we'll both be very happy to talk about. So let's start with the weird stuff and just how difficult your job is, or at least how difficult your job appears to me to be. Obviously, you have two jobs. You've got this dual CEO role with Square and Twitter. I don't know very much about Square. Perhaps you can introduce how you think of your job there. But we're going to talk about Twitter almost exclusively. So I guess to start, how do you think of your career at this point and how are you managing I'm sure this is a question you've gotten a lot, but how are you managing this dual CEO life? A lot of it is experimenting and learning. All the experiences that I've had at both companies have definitely formulated how I act every day, and it's pushed me to focus first on my health. And a lot of that has to do with mental health and just how I can be aware and productive and observant throughout the day. A big part of that for me has been meditation, which I would hope to talk to you. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping to talk to so we'll say that for the end, something to look forward to first, the pain and the meditation. First the pain and observing the pain. But a lot of it has been doing it. And today I don't really segment the parts of my day. It's one job, this is my life. And I know that the companies will benefit and the people that we serve will benefit from me focusing on consistent self improvement. And that starts with how I think about things and that starts with the mindset I bring to my work. And that's certainly evolved over the past. Twitter will be 13 years in March thinking about skipping the 13th year like they skip 13 floors and buildings, but it'll be 13 years in March and Square will be ten years old this February. But a lot of the balance between the two is possible. One, because of the team I've been fortunate enough to assemble and it took some iterations, but also how similar they are in different mediums. Twitter is obviously focused on communication and our purpose is serving a public conversation. We think we're very unique in that regard and there's a lot of dynamics that are quite powerful and a lot of dynamics that can be taken advantage of, which we'll talk about. Square, on the other hand, is around economic empowerment. And one of the things that we saw early on in 2009 was that people in this country, and certainly this is reflective of the rest of the world, were being left out of the economy because they're being left with access to the slower mediums like paper cash. While the world was moving on to more digital, and we are serving an underserved audience, we started with sellers, we're now moving to individuals. We have this app called the Cash app, which we have significant percentages of the people using it who were their only bank account. And it's been a really powerful example of utilizing technology to provide access to people. And it's needed in so many ways in how we organize our financial lives and how people make a living. And as you've talked about on some of your podcast, these systems have been under a lot of central control in the past and a lot of that centralized control has removed access from people or not even created the potential to do so. So one of the things we found in Square in the early days is the only way you could start accepting credit cards was if you had a good credit score. And a lot of entrepreneurs who are just getting started, they don't have a good credit score. I didn't have a good credit score when we started Square. I was massively in debt. Two credit cards actually. So by shifting that, using better technology, making it more inclusive, we were able to serve a lot more people that the industry just wasn't able to. You've got these two massive companies which at least from the public facing view, seem diametrically opposed in the level of controversy they bring to the world and to your life. Presumably, Square seems like a very straightforward, successful, noble pursuit about which I can't imagine. There's a lot of controversy. I'm sure there's some that I haven't noticed, but it must be nothing like what you're dealing with Twitter. How are you triaging the needs of a big company that is just functioning like a normal big company? And Twitter, which is something which on any given day, can be just front page news everywhere, given the sense of either how it's helping the world. The thing that's amazing about Twitter is that it's enabling revolutions that we might want to support, right? Or the empowerment of dissidents. And there's just this one Saudi teenager who was tweeting from a hotel room in the Bangkok airport that she was worried that her parents would kill her. And I don't think it's too much to say that Twitter may have saved her life in that case. I'm sure there are many other cases like this where she got she was granted asylum in in Canada. And so and these these stories become front page news, and then the antithetical story becomes front page news. So we know that, you know, ISIS recruits terrorists on Twitter, or their fears that misinformation spread there undermines democracy, and we'll get to Trump. But how do you deal with being a normal CEO and being a CEO in this other channel, which is anything but normal? Well, both companies in both spaces that they create in have their own share of controversy. But I find that in the financial realm, it's a lot more private, whereas with communication, it has to be open. And I would prefer them both to be out in the open. I would prefer to work more in public. I'm fascinated by this idea of being able to work in public, make decisions in public, make mistakes in public, and I get there because of my childhood. I was a huge fan of punk rock back in the day, and then that transitioned to hip hop, and that led me to a lot of open source, where people would just get up on stage and do their thing, and they were terrible. And you saw them a month later, and they were a little bit better. And then a month later, they were a little bit better. And we see the same thing with open source, which led me to technology, ultimately. So I approach it with that understanding of that we're not here just to make one single statement that stands the test of time, that our medium at Twitter is conversation. And conversation evolves, and ideally, it evolves in a way that we all learn from it. There's not a lot of people in the world today that would walk away from Twitter saying, I learned something, but that would be my goal. And we need to figure out what element of the service and what element of the product we need to bolster or increase or change in order to do that. So I guess in my role of co on Twitter, it's how do I lead this company in the open, realizing that we're going to take a lot of bruises along the way, but in the long term, what we get out of that, ideally, is earning some trust. And we're not there yet, but that's the intention. Well, on the topic of I learned something actually, this is actually the only idea that I've ever had for improving Twitter, which is to have a in addition to a like button this changed my mind button, or I learned something button so that you can track. I mean, one, it would just kind of instantiate a new norm where people tweeting would aspire to have that effect on people. It's actually about dialogue, it's about debate. So I give that to you. You can do it. Actually, I had one other recommendation to you d platform, the President of the United States, which I notice you haven't taken me up on. One of the ideas we had way back in the day, the button was actually called Favorite before it was called like. We transitioned to like. I think at one of our most reactive phases within the company, we were drafting from a known behavior that you saw on Facebook and Instagram and whatnot, but there was a proposal to change it to things which I like a lot. I think it kind of gets at some of the things you're trying to express to the degree to which you're influencing someone's thinking or you're changing someone's mind is another level. But to build a service that people can express gratitude for things they find valuable more directly, instead of the emptiness of a like button is something that we are thinking a lot about right now. Right. The incentives are where we are in the conversation. We realize that what we need to do is not going to be done by changing policy. What we need to do is look fundamentally at the mechanics of the service that we haven't looked at in twelve years. The fact that we have one action to follow, and it's following accounts and following accounts. In the example of Brexit, for example, if you followed a bunch of accounts that were spouting off reasons to leave, that's all you get. You have no other ability to see another perspective of the conversation unless you did the work to follow the account of someone who was opposed to that view. Whereas we do have the infrastructure in the service right now in the form of search and trends. And if you were to follow the vote leave trend, 95% of the conversation would be reasons to leave, but 5% would be some considerations to make to stay. But we don't make it easy for anyone to do that, and therefore no one does it. So these are exactly the things we're looking at in terms of is like, really the thing that helps contribution back to the global conversation. My own personal view is that it doesn't. My own personal view is it's empty, and it's a lot more destructive than what we considered it to be by, well, everyone knows how to take this action, so we should put it on our service as well. As you were talking, it made me think you could have a kind of dashboard that showed people how siloed they were in terms of partisan information. People may not know that they're getting only one side of a story. Well, we actually saw that in the 2016 elections. We did some research of the connections. We've been spending a lot more time not looking at the content that people are saying, but the behaviors and the connections between accounts and interactions and replies. And one of the things that was very evident during the lead up to the election was just looking at our journalist constituency, which was one of the most important constituencies on Twitter, to my mind. Yeah, the amount of journalists on the left who were following folks on the right end of the spectrum was very, very small. The amount of journalists on the right end of the spectrum following folks on the left was extremely high. That's interesting. It was even just that factoid is worth getting out. There's a good graphic that an MIT lab called Cortico put out that illustrates this effect, and you can immediately see what happened, at least in the media sphere, in terms of these filter bubbles and echo chambers that we tend to create. But that is something that I do take a lot of responsibility around. We have definitely helped to create these isolated chambers of thought, and it's because of the mechanics of how our system works. Just the simplest thing of emphasizing the follower count, only allowing the following of an account versus an interest, a topic or a conversation. These are the things that don't allow any fluidity and evolution, it's very, very rigid, and you have to do a lot of work to get to some of the fluidity that we know Twitter is. But you have to be an expert to understand that it's even possible, right? Well, yes. So you were talking about the different constituencies on it, and that's one thing that makes Twitter unique, that it really seems like the platform where real journalists and real intellectuals and newsmakers, they're relying on it for conversation. I mean, they're relying on both as a kind of a real time response to things that are happening in the world and as a way of just divulging things that are happening in the world and a way of sharing their opinions. And in that sense, it seems completely unlike every other social media platform to me. I have this love, hate relationship as many people do with Twitter. I have just a hate, hate relationship with all the other social media platforms. I've never been tempted to use them. At least we're halfway there. Yes. But Twitter, I step away from it, and we can talk about just how even how you relate to Twitter psychologically. But the idea of not being on it just seems like a non starter now because it's almost like a public utility. It really is just the one place where you're guaranteed to see a response to news events that you have curated. And it can be as good, really, or as informative as you've curated it. What do you think accounts for the adoption of Twitter by those groups? And it's just integrated into even television news has to use Twitter to sort of leverage the conversation about what they're putting out, and they don't do that with Instagram or Facebook. Is it just the short form? What made Twitter so sticky in the beginning? Was it the 140 characters? I think it's a few things. I don't believe we're a social network. Social things happen on us. But my definition of a social network would be one that is dependent upon the people that, you know, the graph of your past or your current career, or your future aspirations in terms of who you want to work with or who you want to be with or whatnot. And we don't benefit from the address book in your phone. We benefit from more of an interest based network. We benefit because you're interested in something. And because of that, there's no deliberate join or leave of any one particular community. Simply talking about a topic puts you in it. And the whole dynamic of Twitter enables that. And that's extremely powerful, but it's also extremely complex for people. And I think one of the reasons why journalists took to it so quickly is because it's certainly a marketplace of ideas. It certainly has people have similar expectations as they would a public square, where ideas are discussed and evolved and debated. So it takes on a lot of characteristics of that because of the dynamic of it, because of the real time nature, because of the public nature. But I think it serves as this in between the articles function. And we had journalists write, article, broadcast it with Twitter, and then get into conversation to get more perspectives, get different ideas, make corrections, make clarifications. But then we also noticed something really interesting, is that it really unlocked the journalists from their publication. So I've watched in the nearly 13 years, journalists that I follow go from a smaller blog to a BuzzFeed, to a New York Times to another institution, and it became interesting to just follow them as a person rather than the publication that they work for. And I think that felt very freeing to a number of the journalists I've talked to about it. It wasn't about the fact that I'm at The New York Times. It was the fact that I'm doing great investigative journalism and I have a direct connection with my readers and my sources and maybe even sources that I didn't know were going to be sources because of the openness, because of the public nature of the service. So I think that was a big part. The constraint has had other ramifications. We were really big with comedians. That was a big wave, I think because of the rhythmic nature of the constraint. Really big with the hip hop community for the exact same reasons. We don't see as many poets this day and age, but anyone with poets would have been great for poets. But it also to the negative created more of headline outrage, fast take kind of approach and culture. And the expansion to 280 has helped with that. We haven't seen a decrease, we haven't seen an increase in when you send an organic tweet out just as a broadcast, people typically don't go over the 140 character original constraint, but when they reply to someone else, they do. And that's where the two and 180 really matters, is because it allows for a little bit more nuance. And those are the sorts of things we're looking at. But the journalists, I believe we're using it as a way to exist in between their work and also to have conversations with their peers about what's interesting and there's some positives and negatives to that. What's the philosophy around not letting people edit tweets? Now that I have you here, I'm just going to just download all my customer service complaints. When I, when I type a typo and discover it 6 hours later, why can't I correct that typo? It's going to sound like a really boring answer, but I'm going to give you the context for it. So we were born on SMS, we were born on text messaging. And you could view Twitter as what if you could text with the world, what if you could have a text conversation with the entire world? With the text you can't correct. Once it's sent, it's sent, it's gone. And you build on top of it, you evolve it, you carry on the conversation. We obviously were not limited by that, but we built our system so that when you send a tweet, it immediately starts fanning it out. So as soon as you send that, a lot of the potential damage is done. So for us to introduce that Edit and these are things that we're looking at, these are things that we're considering and whatnot. But for us to introduce Edit for a common use case of I made a mistake, I need to fix a link because I sent out the wrong one, it adds a delay into the system. And that's good in some context for a lot of the things that you tweet about. It's probably what you want. But there's all these Twitters, there's your Twitter and which you've built by following who you follow. There's politics Twitter, which is a very different experience this day and age. There's NBA Twitter, which is super exciting but very real time, and people use it while they're watching the game, and it becomes the roar of the crowd. So even a 32nd delay in a tweet is meaningful. So that's a consideration we need to make. We need to make another consideration for another use case. People want in that you might tweet something. You want to go back to it a week later and correct something, but meanwhile, people have retweeted it, and it might be a point of view that you've taken on, and they've retweeted that point of view, and then you decide to do something a little bit devious, and you change the point of view. So they have then tweeted something that you've completely changed the message upon. So that requires a change log or some notification that this tweet has changed substantially, and he might be saying something that you don't agree with anymore. Right. It's easy to see how people could game that. You could have somebody who tweets something very sticky and innocuous, and then they flip it to the next neo Nazi meme that they want spread. Yeah, exactly. And then the final use case we're looking at is clarifications, and that is this current moment where people are digging up tweets from ten years ago or five years ago and canceling the original tweeter and canceling their career or canceling various aspects of their life. And we don't offer an ability for people to go back and say, well, let me clarify what I meant. And we do believe that's important, and we do believe we can help address it, but it just takes some work. But the reason why it's taken us so long is because the majority of our systems are built in this real time mindset with a real time fan out, and we just want to be very deliberate about how we're solving these use cases and not just stop it. We need an edit button. What are people actually trying to do? And let's solve that problem. Okay, so let's push into some of the areas of controversy here, because it seems to me you have an extremely hard job, and it's hard to imagine how you can actually get it right, actually do it so well that you won't continuously have this ambient level of criticism about how you're doing it. And the job is to figure out how to get a handle on the toxicity on your platform. This has so many forms, one could scarcely list them all, but from trolling to harassing to conspiracy theories and misinformation and lies to doxing to what is generally called hate speech. But it is speech that is, in the political context, protected by the First Amendment, at least in the United States. But you have a global platform subject to different laws in different countries. How are you trying to deal with this problem? And feel free to grab any specific strand of that. I'll start by saying that the problem is more amplified in particular parts of Twitter. It is definitely the case that it is rampant in politics, Twitter, and it comes with a lot of patterns which we're now starting to see be more consistent. So first and foremost, just to take it up a few notches, we were asked a question some time ago. What if you could measure the health of conversation? Could you measure the health of conversation in the same way that you could measure the health of the human body? And we thought that was a very intriguing question because we've all had conversations where we felt it to be just completely toxic. And the result of that is, ideally we walk away from it. And we've also had conversations that feel empowering, that we learn something from and we want to stay in it. And we actually see this digitally as well. We see people walk away from conversations on Twitter and we see people stay in conversations and persist them on Twitter. And we're to the point where we can actually see it in our numbers and measure it. So we went a little bit deeper with that. And this must be algorithmic, right? We're not talking about individuals tracking, there's not algorithmic, but then checked by people as well just to verify our models are working. We took it a step further. What is health? Health has indicators like your body has an indicator of health, which is your temperature. And your your temperature indicates whether your system more or less is in balance. If it's above 90.6, then something is wrong. And we need to figure out what the measurement tools are to figure out what that measurement is, what that metric is, which is in this case, the thermometer. And then we go down the line and as we develop solutions, we can see what effect they have on it. So we've been thinking about this problem in terms of what we're calling conversational health. And we're at the phase right now where we're trying to figure out the right indicators of conversational health. And we have four placeholders. The first is shared attention. So what percentage of the conversation is attentive to the same thing versus disparate? The second is shared reality. So this is not determining what facts are facts, but what percentage of the conversation are sharing the same facts. The third is receptivity. So this is where we measure toxicity and people's desire to walk away from something. And the fourth is variety of perspective. And what we want to do is get readings on all these things and then understanding that we're not going to optimize for one. We want to try to keep everything in balance and by increasing one, it probably has a negative effect on another. So you could. Increase the variety of perspective, but decrease the shared reality. By doing so, step one is getting a sense of what the current state is through measurement. And a lot of that we intend to do through algorithms measuring how people talk, and then, of course, humans pairing with that to make decisions around solutions. And in the same way that you might be sick and I will offer you this bottle of water and also offer you a glass of wine. Based on all of our experience, if you reach for the water and you drink the water, there's more probability that you limit the amount of time that your system is out of balance and you're not healthy. If you choose the wine, you'll probably increase the time it takes. So how would we think about giving people more options to at least drive towards more conversational health? So that's the abstract level, at a tangible, tactical level, we're looking at media, we're looking at how people if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at Sam Harris./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am here with Adam Gazali. Adam, thanks for joining me. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. So you are a neuroscientist with many diverse interests and several irons in the fire. Maybe you can summarize what you're doing now professionally. Sure. So I've had a sort of strange career fun adventure. I'm trained as an MD and a PhD. My PhD is in neuroscience. I'm a neurologist and I'm a professor at University of California, San Francisco, where I direct efforts at a research center that I started called Neuroscape. And what we do is look at the sort of interface between technologies and neuroscience and health. And then I also have started a couple of companies along the way, including a venture fund, all in the same general goal of trying to help improve the function of our brains and frequently through the use of technology. And you also wrote the book The Distracted Mind, which covers a lot of ground that I think we're going to want to revisit here because this is just such a fascinating moment where we're seeing the evidence all around us that our technology is always a two edge sword. But it just seems in the information space especially so at the moment. So obviously we would not want to give up our connectivity and our access to the totality of human knowledge which has been delivered by the Internet and smartphones and the rest of what we've got here. But it's so clearly fragmenting our lives and it seems rewiring our brains into just different expectations of reward different habit patterns. We're all somewhere on a spectrum of pathology. We know that there's no bright line between having a normal mind and a normal brain and having a condition like obsessive compulsive disorder or narcissism. You're talking about bell curves and gradients, not bright lines here. But it does feel like our use of technology, actively and passively, is pushing us in odd direction. So I think we'll get into this and then talk about how technology might also be a remedy for all that ails us here. Let's start with information. I mean, you point out in your book that we are information seeking creatures. How do you think about our relationship to information now? Well, yeah, it's interesting. You write a book and you try to make it timely, obviously. And as you know, books take a long time until they eventually come out and you're always in danger of it not being relevant anymore by the time it gets into people's hands. And if anything, I've seen it become more relevant, as you just referred to. And I think the COVID pandemic that we're experiencing now is showing a lot of the fragmentation in our minds and the stressors caused by technology and it really comes down to information. That's a great starting point. We take in information and that's what allows us to interact in this world. And we were evolutionarily sort of well suited to do this. This is how we survive. We avoid threats and seek out nutrients and mates and this is how the brain evolved to allow us to fluidly, dynamically interact with the world and that advances our survival. And the brains that we have now are the product of that. And they're quite adept at dealing with complex information and helping us react both reflexively as well as through decision making. But what I think is clear now, probably to many listeners, just through their own experience and certainly through data, that we don't have unlimited capacity to process information. And if the system is overloaded due to all sorts of types of interference that we can talk about, there will be consequences. And those consequences are really broad and people see them, feel them in different ways and they manifest in people's lives in quite complex manners. But that's sort of the crux of that story that information is key to how we survive and thrive. But there's a breaking point and there's all sorts of consequences. Yeah. You use this phrase at various points in the book, information foraging, drawing an analogy between how animals will forage for food. And there are a few curves based on data in terms of just kind of the opportunity costs and the switching costs of exploiting an area for food and then deciding to based on instinct in the case of an animal, to move to a new area looking for food. And we exhibit a similar pattern in the way we self interrupt and attempt a multitask. You're on the phone with someone and then you decide to check your email or your Slack channel in the middle of that call, surreptitiously not realizing that you're essentially losing 30 IQ points for the purposes of that conversation every time you do that. And we do this everywhere. Maybe we can just talk about the limits of cognition here and the actual effects of multitasking. Obviously, multitasking is possible in certain cases because people can listen to a podcast or listen to an audio book and also successfully drive a car or even do work that doesn't require the same kind of linguistic cognition you can draw. You could practice graphic design or something properly without any degradation in your skills. But for so many other tasks, there is a zero sum contest between things that we attend to. So how do you think about multitasking at this moment? What do we know about it? Scientifically? Yeah, so the term is confusing and complicates what's already a very complex landscape of the brain and behavior. And the reason why is because if you think about multitasking just doing lots of tasks at the same time, it's something that we're all familiar with and we feel like we're really pretty good at. And it's also most people feel sort of pleasure in multitasking that it's something fun and more fun than single tasking. And so we're constantly drawn to it and it feels natural and you sort of feel that you could get better at it. And the reason the term is complex, because it's from a behavioral point of view, sure, we multitask all the time, but what's implicit in it that creates the confusion is that sometimes we use that term to mean like parallel processing. That you're borrowing from the computer terminology and signal processing literature, that you're literally parallel processing these two tasks and that they're getting equal processing power. And so you're truly multitasking in that way. And when you look at the brain, we've done these studies in our center at UCSF where we'll have someone in a scanner, we've done it with Eg. They have more than one demand on their attention. And we'll see that fragmentation occur not just in their performance, which is quite obvious for pretty much anyone. But we'll see it even nervous that there's really a switching between the networks that are involved in accomplishing either of those tasks independently and that you can't really multitask in that true sense of parallel processing to things that are demanding your attention. Now, if you can offload it and it becomes reflexive and becomes a skill that doesn't require attention, then you can do more than one thing. But the minute that changes, that's when the conflict and the interference occurs. So just to go back to your example of listening to a podcast and driving a car, sure, that could work. And it does work most of the time because driving is often very reflexive and you're pulling in a lot of bottom up information from the environment, making reflexive decisions without your top down attention. And so that allows you to focus your attention on listening to the podcast and digesting it and understanding it. But then something happens on the road and something unexpected and something that demands your attention and that is the point of interference and conflict because now your attention has to move from the podcast back to the road. It may not get there fast enough and then this is where you feel that weight and suffer in this example, incredibly detrimental consequences of not being able to truly drive and listen to that podcast with all of your resources devoted to both of them equally. So I recommend that people pull over to the side of the road if they're in danger of missing our subsequent sentences here, you got to have your priorities straight. So use two phrases there that are terms of jargon in not just neuroscience, but cognitive science and engineering generally. Bottom up and top down. How do you think about those? And it strikes me that there's a pretty clear asymmetry in terms of the bandwidth in those pathways. Yeah, let's break that down a bit. It's sort of core to this discussion about information processing and the brain. And those terms are used in a lot of different fields, and they're not so different in the context here in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science. And that the way I think about it. From the perspective of attention, I think about most of these things from that perspective, I find it's really useful. So attention is an incredibly broad concept and a complex one that would take us an hour to tease apart all the subtleties. But one way of thinking about it is in two categories. One is bottom up attention, and the other is top down attention. And bottom up attention is when your limited resources, because we have those limitations, and both top down and bottom up have limitations that are limited. Mental resources are being drawn or being activated by the environmental stimuli itself. So a loud sound, a flash of light, your name, something that's very important and salient to you, is going to demand your attention and pull your resources towards it very rapidly. And this is obviously a strong survival advantage. If you don't have great bottom up, you're likely to get eaten pretty fast. And so that's bottom up attention. So it's a very ancient part of our attentional system that was really critical for our survival on all animal survival. And then there's top down attention. And by that I mean the goal directed attention. It's when you make a decision, a conscious decision, based on interpreting information from either the external environment or your internal environment about where your attention is directed. And so you can be attending to something like this podcast right now, and you have every goal to absorb all this information, and your attention may get pulled away by a bottom up force. And so we're constantly managing these two draws on our overall sort of capacity of where we put our resources, both the bottom up and the top down. And if you pay attention to it, you'll see it every day, all day, at every moment, is that these two attentional forces are constantly playing a tug of war. How do you think about this experience we all have of self interrupting? That may be a phrase you actually use in the book, I don't recall. But it's this experience, it's all too familiar. It's now practically unconscious all the time of you're paying attention to something. You're doing work at your computer, say, and then you decide to check your email. Obviously the technology is playing a massive role here in terms of notifications. I mean, if you're receiving texts or you're receiving notifications, well, then it's being driven by the machines themselves. But even without that, we just often experience this degradation in our ability to sustain attention for the task at hand. And we decide to probably reward is the right framework to think about it. And we seek this dopamine hit by switching our attention to something else. And we're almost never very aware of the switching costs. There just how much time is lost reorienting to the thing you were doing when you do come back. What do we know about this whole process? Yeah, you said it perfectly. We can be our attention, our top down attention, our goal directed focus can be interfered with. That interference can occur on many levels. It can occur from external stimulation. Sort of the bottom up things we're talking about. I would say if your phone vibrates in your pocket or you hear a ping on your computer, that's like a perfect example of a bottom up source of attention. And technology companies certainly are aware of that, at least at some level that you can pull attention with that that's one that we're very aware of. But you could create interference internally too. And so there may be internal distractions, turnal bottom up information like an aching joint or your back just sort of nudges you or your stomach rumbles. And so those would be like almost like physiological bottom up stimuli. They're coming from your own body, but they're knocking on your brain and saying, hey, I need some attention over here. And then they could be much more complicated than that and occur not sort of in a bottom up way, but just that you have now for some reason decided and it could be subconscious or it could be conscious to divert your attention from your original goal and that may be to something external as well. So maybe I think that I could listen to this podcast and also bang out a quick email right now, or it may be directed internally. Right, so I'm going to listen to this, but also think about what I'm going to have for dinner tonight. And so we're constantly fragmenting our limited attentional focus with both external and internal distractions and multiple tasks. And there's a cost for this, like you said. Whether that cost is something apparent to you or not. It is there it has been well documented both neurally and behaviorally. Yeah, so there's obviously a cost in terms of the time lost in having to remind yourself where you were in the original task. Right? And people don't really keep track of that well, but the research suggests that you do lose a lot of time every time you switch. But it seems to me there's a kind of emotional cost to all of this. And it's somewhat paradoxical because I think the urge to multitask is often born of this internal sense of time poverty that many of us feel. And there's a kind of a feeling of urgency that comes with just the sense that we don't have enough time to do everything we need to do or want to do. And so hence, it seems like a brilliant idea to be doing two things or more at once. And we really want to feel that we can do that. There's probably a reward component to it, but also just an anxiety component. And one way to break this up is that there are these internal and external factors. Here we have our internal states like boredom, anxiety, stress, feeling of urgency, and this is driving us in this direction. And then there are the external factors, which is just the technology itself that's designed to game us in a way so many of these platforms that we engage, their entire business model is based on maximizing the capture of our attention. And that's not new, but it's really been weaponized to an unusual degree by our technology now. So maybe let's take the internal side of this first. What is this doing to our emotional lives? And how do you see it as derivative of very common states of mind like anxiety and boredom? Yeah, you summarized it absolutely perfectly. That's how I think about it exactly. That there are two forces, an internal and an external force that drives us to shift our attention all the time, whether it's multitasking or just being distracted by external or internal stimuli. And just to tie this in with something, we talked about a little bit of foraging in the book. I really spent a lot of time developing this, which really is a hypothesis that we're foraging for information in the way that other animals forage for food. And there's a theory that's used actually it's a mathematical approach to help understand and actually predict quantitatively of how long an animal will forage in a particular patch, like a squirrel in a tree, before moving to another one. And it could be actually predicted to really a high degree of accuracy. And they also have two forces that are driving them to make that decision. So there's a cost benefit ratio going on of how long you stay in your patch versus how hard it is to get to another patch. Right? So if you've depleted 50% of the nuts in the tree, but the next tree is really far away, you're just going to keep eating those nuts. But if the next tree is full and it's right there, 50% may be enough for you to jump over. And so that has been well described in how animals that forage and patchy environments make sort of these internal decisions about remaining or leaving a patch. And you could think of information as a patch as well that we're foraging in, whether it's a website or an article that you're reading or any task that you're engaged in. And there are these internal and external forces that decide sort of the cost benefit ratio of you staying there or just keep switching. And on the internal side, I think what's clear is that there is often a diminished return of remaining in a patch, sort of eating the nuts, right? Like you've read three quarters of the article, you sort of have the idea ready. So that's true and that's just part of why people switch ever, right? And that's sort of unavoidable. But then there seems to be these other aspects that you talked about that are becoming quite clear now in that there's these forces that drive us out of a patch that are not related to the diminishing returns, related to the information itself. They're related to these sort of internal drives that we are just intolerant, to being bored. Boredom feels just something that we cannot just sit with and allow to wash over us, even though it doesn't actually hurt us. And then there's also that anxiety that you're missing out on something else that FOMO that there's something going on that's deserving of your time that you're missing. And then there's also the anxiety that you're not being maximally productive, that you have the capacity to get another thing done simultaneously. And so as those elements accumulate over time, along with your diminished return that you're getting from the patch you're in, there's a driving force to push you out. And if that next tree is really close, if it's really just a tab in your browser or your phone sitting in your pocket, then there is no resistance to switching and you just keep moving. Yeah, well, the next tree, informationally speaking, is always just right there. It's a tab away. And there are an infinite number of trees now. So in one sense, boredom has almost been driven into extinction by technology because again, we have perpetual access to the totality of the world's information. And I still remember what it was like to walk into a Blockbuster Video looking for a movie to watch and spending some intolerable amount of time roaming the aisles there, looking for a film I hadn't seen or wanted to see again. And I remember how inefficient that was and how prone to failure it was. It got to a point where there was no guarantee I was going to come out of a video store with something to watch. Right? Yes, I remember that this never happened in a bookstore. There was still functionally infinite number of books I wanted to read. But with film, I really felt like we were kind of coming up against the limitations of supply there. And yet now we have access to so much information and entertainment and it's becoming so frictionless. I mean, most of us are still juggling too many apps and too many sources. But insofar as this gets consolidated in places like Netflix, boredom has almost been banished on one level, except on another level, it appears to be growing in the sense that it feels like our reward cycles in our engagement with media are getting shorter and there's zero downtime between them. Literally. The next episode begins to autoplay on most of these platforms, right? And you have to opt out of watching it rather than decide what you want to watch next. So it's just we're now part of this Binge watching machine and it's not just watching, I mean, binge reading, binge scrolling of social media and the frictions out of the system. Our expectation of reward is coming and it feels to me much shorter increments of time. And I would expect that our attention span, which is to say our tolerance for boredom or just the uncertainty of what our attention is going to land on in a satisfying way, is growing shorter. So on one level, I feel like boredom is almost gone, but on another level, I feel like we are being tuned to be less and less resilient to boredom than we've ever been. Yeah, I think that's that's exactly right. And it's it's sort of a fun area of some harmless self experimentation. You have these moments that throughout the day where you're forced to stop doing things. Like one that I love is just, you know, although things are shifting now, but because people utter in but like when you're waiting online at a grocery store and you're you sort of have only two people in front of you, it's not really going to take that long. You could just pause there and think about things or just relax your mind. But I feel I just think like most people do this drive to just reach into your pocket and with no actual intention of necessarily or need to look something up, but just to let that information flow start again. Even at a light, you know, at a traffic light, you know, you know it's only going to be 30 seconds. And this is part of the danger that you can feel if you just allow a little bit of introspection and time to occur on those natural pauses in our life, you can feel that onset of boredom. And it's something that there is, like you said, just a very low tolerance for. And I would challenge people to get familiar with that feeling of boredom, not to be afraid of it, to realize that it's not going to hurt you. And it's sort of like a little hunger is not necessarily the worst thing at times as well. You don't need to eat every second when you get these stimuli. So being in control and being aware of these internal states is really critical. And so I think with the intolerance aboard and there's a lack of appreciation or recognition of it as well. So what do you recommend people do? What sort of bright lines you think they should look for in their lives and whether we think about this in terms of habit patterns or discipline or engaging with technology differently or different technologies. I mean, I think we want to talk about some of the work you're doing in digital medicine at the end, but what do you recommend people do on a day to day basis? Yeah, this is such a great question. It was sort of an interesting point in my life as a scientist, and I know you have neuroscience roots as well. When I started getting asked that question because I don't fancy myself as like a self help type of person, but I understood the need for it. You know, I've been studying distraction and multitasking from a neuroscientist perspective. And when it came to writing a book on the topic that I wanted to be more than a neuroscience primer on this, it was a very real question that I had to ask myself, how do I answer that? And so how I really went about it was just describe to people what I do. So this is my own desire to live a focused life of meaning and how do I get there knowing all of this information that I found in my own research? What are the things that I do? And so that's sort of the route that I went about this. And also the grounding in the marginal value theorem, the optimal foraging models that we talk about gave a lot of those clues, because once you see the pressures that make us switch all the time. So that's sort of what I used as a foundation to give advice to both myself and anyone else. Once you understand the pressures that drive this behavior, then you sort of have the framework for reversing that and creating new habits. So, as we already described, there's both external and internal pressures on the external side, because that's one's a little easier is just the accessibility. There's no doubt that the accessibility is driving a lot of this behavior because that tree is so close. So some of the things and some people do this and go to extreme measures to do this is start limiting some accessibility just to make it a little easier. So if you can't not look at your phone when you're at a traffic light, maybe you should put the phone in the trunk of your car. Maybe you should not work with all your browsers open. Or if you're really writing an article that has a time pressure on it, maybe not keep Twitter or Slack open at the same time. And so limiting accessibility is just a really simple way to start decreasing that switching tendency. A little more complicated is on the internal side, how do you monitor and manage the anxiety and the boredom and the desire for higher degrees of productivity that are driving you from that side of the equation? And for there, what I experimented with myself was just practicing like many things in life, they don't come necessarily without effort. Practicing the art of sustained attention and single tasking. And I started doing this a couple of years ago as sort of now speaking about the book and that content publicly and just saying, okay, I'm going to challenge myself, I have an hour that I'm going to quit everything except this one source of my attention, this one focus. And when I started doing that at the beginning, it was really hard, it was shockingly hard because I felt this desire to just go and check Facebook or just go and talk to someone even if it wasn't technology. What I started doing and what I advised people based on my own experience is start with small periods of time that you're doing singular focus and feel what happens. Understand the boredom and the anxiety, work through it and stick with it. And then take that break. Make that break. Not about necessarily going on social media, getting into these. Iterative like sinkholes that just take you away from your goals but rather stretch, do some light exercise, close your eyes, meditate, look at nature either through photography or real nature. These things I think, have a lot of support for being really healthy. Little breaks and then get back into that focus and see if you can extend that over time. I think it's sort of similar to someone learning how to become like a long distance runner. You can't really just start by running 4 miles and what's intolerable to you on day one because it's painful or maybe even boring. After a while you start enjoying that feeling. I've discovered it's like that with this as well. You could single task sort of like an endurance runner where after a while it's just effortless and even fun to do that. And so I think it's a process of baby stepping into longer periods of time, of building the skill sets that allow you to sustain your attention without derailing yourself. I think this notion of single tasking is really important and the fact that we even have a name for it is a sign of how far we've wandered from what used to be normal. When I think about how much harder it's getting to read a book and if that's happening to me, I'm kind of a canary in the coal mine for this because I read a lot. Books have always been a major part of my life. I read both professionally and for pleasure. But even I am finding it harder to finish books. One, the competition for my attention is just always at a fever pitch so it gets diverted into other streams of information. But I am also finding it harder to just commit to sitting down for an hour and doing nothing but reading the book right. And that makes me realize that I'm almost unrecognizable to myself. The Sam Harris of of 20 years ago would not have. Been able to imagine finding reading a book for an hour at all difficult. I mean, there was kind of a basin of attraction there for me, which was once I was in it, I was in it. It's like forecasting at some point you're going to find it difficult to eat ice cream, right? That makes no sense at all. It's something I consciously correct for. And as you know, I spend a lot of time focusing on explicitly the topic of meditation and the importance of training attention in that way. Being able to pay attention is one thing, but having an internal sense that there are many things that merit your attention right now and the best way to play this game is to essentially have many browser windows always open. It's a kind of decision once you make it, you're then forced to function in that fairly doomed paradigm of just splitting attention. So I do think there's a lot to be said for just making a decision around certain things like this. And so having the concept of single tasking, it's a kind of hack for what you're going to tend to do by default just because of what's happening at your desk and coming from the smartphone in your pocket. Yeah, I agree. I like the way you said that. It's really more than one factor here that leads to success on the way out of this. One of them is the actual cognitive skill set of being able to sustain attention. And I think that that even if you want to and meditation is a great way to build that ability. Meditation, many forms of concentrated meditation are essentially that they're attention training practices in many ways and so that's part of it. And then you have to make the decision to actually apply it in a consistent fashion. And that comes along with controlling your environment to put you in the best possible setting to accomplish it. And then there is with all of that comes the forming of new habits so that it's not a constant control effort to do that. It is your reflex. Your reflex is to engage in the world in this way. And I think that with all those factors it's possible to see your way through, but it comes with recognition of what the cost of this type of style of interaction with technology and your environment in general is. That gives you the motivation to take all these steps to just live differently. So how can technology help? I mean, you have this phrase I've heard you use digital medicine, which is part of what you're exploring as a tech entrepreneur and a scientist. What is digital medicine and what else do you see on the horizon in terms of new technology that can help us? Yeah, well, thanks for thanks for the opportunity to talk about both sides of this coin because normally, like in very short formats, I'll do like an NPR interview and I'll have five minutes. And it's a nuanced discussion because here I am, the author of a book called The Distracted Mind. We just have been talking for 40 minutes about all of the challenges of our ability to maintain attention and how technology has aggravated that. And what I spend most of my time working on, on the academic and on the industry side, is using technology as a way of improving attention. And so it is complex on the surface. So I appreciate the opportunity to dive in a little bit. I think it's not dissimilar from most other things in nature is that there's a yin yang, right? There's always this push and pull, and any sword can cut both ways, a term that you used already. And that's true of technology. And I sort of dove in deep into that pool of, okay, technology has aggravated our already fragmented attention in a lot of the ways that we've been talking about. Starting with that as a foundation, can we reimagine it as a tool to actually do the reverse to help our attention? And that is a goal that was born out of just practicality that I don't believe will put in this genie back in the bottle. I mean, it is here, it is powerful, and it has a lot of really amazing assets. It's all over the world, right? So it has this incredible ability not just to connect, but to reach people that don't have access to many things, like doctors and teachers. So it has all of these incredible strengths that really appealed to me. And so I dove into, you know, now it's been twelve years since I challenged myself at thinking about technology as a source of good, not just in general in some wishywashy way, but actually as a tool to help fine tune attention abilities. That was my original goal. And starting twelve years ago, I came up with sort of this idea. I used the term digital medicine a lot. I think more frequently I use the term experiential medicine to encapsulate something a little larger, digital medicine being an example of that, or one of many types of experiential medicines. But the general idea behind digital medicine, and the bigger category of experiential medicine, is that our brains have this phenomena of plasticity, its ability to modify itself at every level in response to challenge and experience. And this is the basis of learning. It exists throughout our lives. It doesn't just end after you become an adult, and certainly not through older ages, as we now appreciate. And so the general concept is if we can challenge the brain in a targeted way and align the mechanics of whatever that interaction is and the reward systems appropriately, we should be able to optimize these neural systems, whatever they may be. And it's a very ancient practice. Meditation mindfulness, which I know is a big part of your world, is, I would say, a perfect example of an experiential medicine and it could be delivered through a human expert or it could be delivered digitally, in which case I would say that's a digital medicine. So that's sort of the high level path that I've been on now for over a decade, both in research and in sort of product creation and entrepreneurship, is to think about how we build technologies that create interactions that help us improve the function of our brands. Yeah, I want to reiterate that point you just made, which is often made, but I feel like it doesn't really land for people, or at least it can be. One is counterintuitive, and two, it's often hyped in a way that is misleading. So this notion that what you do with your brain winds up physically changing your brain based on neuroplasticity, this is a fascinating fact about us, that the machinery that is producing our experience and cognition changes itself based on how it's used. And as you point out, that's that's the key to all learning and everything else about us that leaves a trace. Right. So if someone's going to remember anything about this conversation, they'll remember it based on actual physical changes in their brains. That's what the encoding of memory requires. And yet it's often said that people kind of marvel at the claim that there's evidence, scientific evidence, that something like meditation practice can physically change the brain, right. Or the functional behavior of the brain under neuroimaging. But of course it does, right. Literally everything you do changes your brain. So on some level it is a kind of a hype claim that one hears in the meditation literature to emphasize this point, because everything changes your brain. But because we have this general property of plasticity, we really should view the consequences of paying attention to specific things in specific ways as being fairly indelible until we do something else that changes us in some other way. Right? So on some level, you get more of what you pay attention to. It's almost like the algorithms that are successfully gaming our attention. We know that if you're on YouTube and you keep clicking on videos of cats or Olympic sprinter, finals or whatever it is, whatever you get into, you get more of the same. And on some level, that same kind of algorithmic property is true of us. You're making yourself based on what you're doing with your attention and the kinds of habits you're ramifying and you are quite literally sculpting your neural circuitry in the meantime. And everyone experiences this in miniature psychologically. But it's another thing to remind yourself that there's a physical basis for this, a kind of living sculpture that is producing this. This is something that we've been doing inadvertently more or less every moment of our lives. And now we have the most wellresourced and technologically competent companies that have ever existed turning their tractor beams on us and demanding our attention from every screen in sight. And what you don't take responsibility for here is going to happen to you based on other people's business models. And it's just worth realizing that the causality here is not really in dispute. Basically, all of these moments matter and they deliver to you your future self, who will have whatever competencies or weaknesses or mounting dissatisfaction with life to deal with. And if your life doesn't feel the way you want it to feel, there's a lot you have done on purpose and by accident to bring yourself to this point, and there's a lot you may yet do to feel differently. Yeah, I mean, that was beautifully said. I think that is really true. It's sort of something that's overhyped and used sometimes even as a marketing tool, and yet underappreciated for its true profound power of change that experiences can induce one way that the reason I used I put the word medicine in there. Although it doesn't have to necessarily be for people that are sick, it has much broader implications. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriberonly content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, I'm recording this intro in the immediate aftermath of now two mass shootings. The one in El Paso, and it appears there was one in Dayton a few hours ago. Needless to say, social media is now a cesspool. I guess there are a few things I could say about this. Actually, I wrote a piece on my blog when I used to blog rather than podcast, about six years ago in response to some jihadist violence, and it really is the clearest articulation of what I have to say. At moments like this, the conversation about atrocities of this kind, mass shootings, is generally so confused and it's so frustrating to see people talking past one another for political or otherwise emotional reasons that I don't know. I think I'll read the first part of this blog post just to put my argument in view in the clearest form, and then maybe say a few things relevant to the current moment. This comes from a post titled no Ordinary Violence, which was published October 11, 2013. A young man enters a public place, a school, a shopping mall, an airport carrying a small arsenal. He begins killing people at random. He has no demands and no one is spared. Eventually, the police arrive, and after an excruciating delay, as they marshal their forces, the young man is brought down or arrested. This has happened many times, and it will happen again. After each of these crimes, we lose our innocence. But then innocence magically returns. In the aftermath of horror, we seem to learn nothing of value. Indeed, many of us remain committed to denying the one thing of value that is there to be learned. After the Boston Marathon bombing, a journalist asked me, why is it always angry young men who do these terrible things? She then sought to connect the behavior of the Sarnai brothers with that of Jared Loughner, James Holmes, and Adam Lanza. Like many people, she believed that similar actions must have similar causes. But there are many sources of human evil, and if we want to protect ourselves and our societies, we must understand this. To that end, we should differentiate at least four types of violent actor. And now this is a sidebar. There may be one new subtype here that I'll I'll add, but here's the first one. Those who are suffering from some form of mental illness that causes them to think and act irrationally. Given access to guns or explosives, these people may harm others for reasons that wouldn't make a bit of sense even if they could be articulated. We may never hear Jared Lofner and James Holmes give accounts of their crimes. And we do not know what drove Adam Lanza to shoot his mother in the face and then slaughter dozens of children. But these mass murderers appear to be perfect examples of this. First type, Aaron Alexis, the Navy Yard shooter, is yet another. What provoked him? He repeatedly complained that he was being bombarded with, quote, ultra low frequency electromagnetic waves. Apparently, he thought that killing people at random would offer some relief. It seems there's little to understand about the experiences of these men or about their beliefs, except as symptoms of underlying mental illness. Two, this is the second type. prototypically evil psychopaths. These people are not delusional. They are malignantly, selfish, ruthless, and prone to violence. Our maximum security prisons are full of such men. Given half a chance and half a reason, psychopaths will harm others, because that is what psychopaths do. It is worth observing that these first two types trouble us for reasons that have nothing to do with culture, ideology, or any other social variable. Of course, it matters if a psychotic or psychopath happens to be the head of a nation or otherwise has power and influence. That is what is so abhorrent about North Korea. The child king is mad or simply evil, and he's building a nuclear arsenal while millions starve. But even here, there is very little to be learned about what we, the billions of relatively normal human beings struggling to maintain open societies, are doing wrong. We didn't create Jared Loughner apart from making it too easy for him to get a gun. And we didn't create Kim Jong Il, apart from making it too easy for him to get nuclear bombs. Again, this was written six years ago. Given access to powerful weapons, such people will pose a threat no matter how rational, tolerant, or circumspect we become. And I guess I would add another descriptor here. There are people, it seems, who fall into one of these two categories, who are living in an online culture of trolling now, where killing people and writing semi bogus or entirely bogus manifestos, merely designed to confuse the media, is becoming a new phenomenon. Right? These are people who are not moved by a sincere ideology. They're just, quote, shit posting the behavior of trolling on websites like Four Chan and Eight Chan has been exported to the real world in the form of mass murder, designed as a troll. And to some degree, I believe the Christchurch shooting in the mosque had this form. It's still not entirely clear what happened there. So this is a kind of derangement that social media has introduced into our lives, where some people are willing to commit murder and even mass murder simply to enjoy the spectacle it creates online. Again, they're either crazy or evil or both. But in certain cases, the reasons for their behavior are not as they appear right, and the media seems to get very confused about this. Okay, the third type here normal men and women who harm others while believing that they're doing the right thing or while neglecting to notice the consequences of their actions. These people are not insane, and they're not necessarily bad. They're just part of a system in which the negative consequences of ordinary selfishness and fear can become horribly magnified. Think of a soldier fighting in a war that may be ill conceived or even unjust, but who has no rational alternative but to defend himself and his friends. Think of a boy growing up in the inner city who joins a gang for protection, only to perpetuate the very cycle of violence that makes gang membership a necessity. Or think of a CEO whose short term interests motivate him to put innocent lives, the environment or the economy itself in peril. Most of these people aren't monsters, however, they can easily create suffering for others that only a monster would bring about by design. This is the true banality of evil. Whatever. Hana arent actually meant by that phrase. But it is worth remembering that not all evil is banal. Four normal men and women who are motivated by ideology to waste their lives and the lives of others in extraordinary ways. Some of these belief systems are merely political or otherwise secular in that their aim is to bring about specific changes in this world. But the worst of these doctrines are religious, whether or not they are attached to a mainstream religion, in that they are informed by ideas about otherworldly rewards and punishments, prophecies, magic and so forth, which are especially conducive to fanaticism and self sacrifice. Of course, a person can inhabit more than one of the above categories at once and thus have his antisocial behavior over determined. There must be someone somewhere who is simultaneously psychotic and psychopathic, part of a corrupt system and devoted to a dangerous transcendent cause. But many examples of each of these types exist in their pure forms. For instance, in recent weeks, a spate of especially appalling jihadist attacks occurred. One in a shopping mall in Nairobi, where nonmuslims appear to have been systematically tortured before being murdered. One on a church in Peshawar and one on a school playground in Baghdad targeting children. Whenever I point out the role that religious ideology plays in atrocities of this kind, specifically the Islamic doctrines related to jihad martyrdom, apostasy and so forth, I am met with some version of the following quote bad people will always do these things. Religion is nothing more than a pretext. This is an increasingly dangerous misconception to have about human violence. Here is my pick for the most terrifying and depressing phenomenon on earth. A smart, capable, compassionate and honorable person grows infected with ludicrous ideas about a holy book and awaiting paradise, and then becomes capable of murdering innocent people, even children, while in a state of religious ecstasy. Needless to say, this problem is rendered all the more terrifying and depressing because so many of us deny that it even exists. Okay, well, I think I'll stop there again. I wrote this six years ago in the aftermath of some jihadist attacks, and now I'm reading it to you. In the aftermath of some mass shootings in the United States, which attest at least to the problem of gun violence here, as well as to our failure to make it difficult for bad people, crazy people, dangerous people to get access to guns. And it might, in fact, a test to a rise of white supremacist violence. At the time I'm recording this, it's not yet clear what's what here, but whatever is true of El Paso and Dayton, two things are absolutely clear. One is that, again, we need some rational gun control in the US. And I've written about guns. My views on guns and gun control are hard enough to parse that they resist easy. Summary you can listen to the podcast or read the associated essay titled The Riddle of the Gun. I can sound very pro gun for part of that, but the punchline you should not lose sight of is that the regulations I recommend on guns in the US are more stringent than anyone on the left is calling for. So don't lose sight of that if you freak out over the other parts of that essay that sound like they were written by the NRA, an organization which I hope will one day be destroyed. The short form of this point is that we license people to drive cars. We license them even more stringently to fly airplanes. And I think getting a license to own a firearm should be like getting a pilot's license. It shouldn't be easy. And if you're mentally ill or prone to suicidal depression, it should be very difficult to get your hands on a gun. But with 300 million guns already in existence in the US. This is a hard thing to bring about, not to mention the political religion around gun ownership enshrined in the Second Amendment. Anyway, we need a conversation and research and political change around the epidemiology of gun violence. It's insane that we suffer this in the US. To this degree. It's also true that we should keep some perspective. In the hours where I think it's now, 38 people have died in two mass shootings in the US. More people have died from ordinary shootings and by suicide, and even by medical errors in hospitals. Right? So we should keep some proportion here. And finally, whatever is the case with these specific shooters, whether or not they're both people of the fourth type, I describe in this essay people who are motivated in this case by the lunatic ideology of white nationalism, and that may yet prove to be the case. It is obviously a bad thing that we have a president who utterly fails to be clearly and consistently opposed to these ideas. Yes, you can find him in the aftermath of Charlottesville saying one measly thing against white supremacy, but to say that he has been ambiguous on this issue is an understatement. To say that he has given comfort to racists is an understatement. He completely lacks a decent ethical political response to these trends. I'm not a fan of dog whistle theory. I don't actually think he's dog whistling in his statements to white supremacists. I think he's just an ordinary Archie Bunker style racist who doesn't care about these issues and doesn't want to alienate anyone in his base. And I think the people who are endlessly talking about dog whistles are doing much more harm than good in our political discourse. Not everything is a dog whistle. In fact, almost nothing is a dog whistle. I'm not saying the phenomenon doesn't exist, but generally, racists just tell you what they think, and when they talk to other racists, they're explicit about their racism. And it really does matter that the left's allegations against Trump and his supporters are so poorly targeted. When he tells Alan Omar to go back to where she came from on the left, that is proof positive of racism. Again, I have no doubt that Donald Trump is actually a racist, but that's a bad example of racism. It can be read in other ways. And to think that it's a dog whistle to neo Nazis is just an act of leftist clairvoyance. That strikes me as totally counterproductive. To remind you how crazy this has all become, there was a Washington Post opinion editor who claimed that Nancy Pelosi was dog whistling to racists when she criticized AOC and Elan Omar and the rest of the so called squad. Nancy Pelosi, the dog whistle meme is going to prove politically suicidal on the left. We have to be precise even when attacking racists. So whatever turns out to be true in this case, whether either one of these mass shootings is a clear example of white nationalist terrorism, the problem with Trump is not that he is a clear supporter of white nationalist terrorism or even white nationalism. The problem is he is an obscenely, a moral president who can't be counted upon to say anything beyond what he imagines is narrowly self serving politically and financially, to use a great word, which is now much overused. This is the US. Presidency reduced to a grift, and it's awful. But it is not always precisely awful in the ways that are alleged on the left. And again, every error matters. We are guaranteed to have Trump for four more years if the Democrats can't get their house in order. So my political concern here is that does not get overplayed and overspun. It's totally possible that one of these shooters is mentally ill. And if this still gets talked about as white nationalist terrorism rather than a symptom of mental illness, that is going to be a political problem. And no, this is not a double standard. There are acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims that are not examples of jihadism, much less jihadist terrorism. Sometimes people really are violent for other reasons, as I sought to make clear in this essay. However, it is yet another very dark moment, and this has all been horrible news, but I will leave it there. And now for today's podcast. Okay, well, in this episode of the podcast, I speak with Judea Pearl. Judea is a professor of computer science at UCLA. He's the author of three highly influential scholarly books. He's also the winner of the Alan Turing Award, often considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Computer science. He's a member of the US. National Academy of Sciences. He's one of the first ten inductees into the IEEE Intelligence Systems Hall of Fame. He's received numerous awards and honorary doctorates, including the Rumbleheart Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal and the Lakatos Award at the London School of Economics. And he's also the founder and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation. And that is because he is the father of Daniel Pearl, who was the, I believe, the first journalist killed by Al Qaeda. At least the first that came to the attention of everyone in the aftermath of September 11. Anyway, I mentioned this at the beginning because it would have been awkward to have just ignored it. But as you'll hear, I didn't have the heart to make Judea's experience there a topic of conversation, so I opened that door only to close it. Then we just go on to have a fairly highbrow conversation about how science has generally failed to understand causation. We talk about the different levels of causal inference, counterfactuals, the foundations of knowledge, the nature of possibility, the illusion of free will, artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness, and other topics. Anyway, at one point I get confused about what we're talking about, so it's a bit of a nerd fest, but I really enjoyed it. And as you'll hear, Judea is a dear person and it was a great privilege to meet him. So now, without further delay, I bring you Judea Pearl. I am here with Judea Pearl. Judea, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Sam. It's great to be here. So we've been circling this podcast for quite some time. It's taken a while to actually get together, and we have many areas of overlapping interest, so I'm looking forward to talking to you about your work. I was prepared, as I said offline, to just talk about your academic work, and we'll get deep into that. But given my background as a critic of Islam and as a warrior about the link between specific religious ideas and specific forms of violence. It's awkward for me to bring it up, but it's awkward for me to ignore it as well. Danny Pearl was your son, who was, I believe the first, at least first most visible person murdered journalist. Murder journalists. Yeah, after 2001. So I wanted to kind of just mention that at the outset, we can talk about it or not if talk about this topic separately so we can separate it to discussions. Okay. I don't feel the strange talking about it. I get used to talk about it. But I think in terms of listeners interest, some people have interest in the technical part and some have in the ideological part. Right. It's good to separate it too. Okay, well, let's dive into your work and then see what happens. Because your work is fascinating. So how would you describe what your intellectual focus has been in your career recently? It has been the mathematication of cause and effect. Let's put it very concisely and precisely. But there's a direct connection to artificial intelligence. You talk about us. If we want robots to behave like us, to communicate with us in our language, we have to equip them with the ability to communicate in terms of cause and effect. This is our language. If they act stupidly without knowing the difference between correlation and causation, they will not be able to supply us answers to questions that we are burning for us. Even simple questions like why did the milk spill? Because I pushed it or because I was irritated or things of that sort. You want a good answers, a good explanation so we can communicate. So you just mentioned this opposition between correlation and causation. Yes. And this is a phrase that will be familiar to many people. I think many people will be surprised that it has impeded scientific understanding to the degree that it has. You make a very strong case that science has more or less ignored causation. And yet I think in the popular understanding, science is all about finding the causes of phenomenon. Correct. And so maybe we can speak for a few minutes about how statistics has rendered us unable to speak about causes historically. Statistics, it's science in general. Yeah, we learn physics. Every high school kids can solve physics homework. And if you look at the physics homework, you have boundary condition, you have the equation of motions and find out what's going to happen or even what's going to happen if you intervene and you change the spring length to double its previous value. It's a causal question, and every child can do that. But when you're trying to transfer this knowledge to a computer, to Robert, then you robert is facing a clash here. The equation of physics are symmetric, which means that x causes Y to the same degree as Y causes X, which means that the movement of the barometer depends on the pressure in the same way that the pressure depends on the movement of the barometer. Right. So when a Robert comes in and look at the equation and say, let me change the weather tomorrow by moving this barometer a little bit right. What would prevent the robot from doing that? Because it's the same thing that prevents the high school kids from not giving the same answer. Right? Yeah. But what? The high school kids had the notion of cause effect. So the high school kids filters the equations in his or her mind before giving you the answer. And that is the kind of filtering that we need to do here to introduce the asymmetry between cause and effect and do it mathematically because the robot doesn't understand the handwriting. Robots must understand equation. So we need an algebra which is asymmetric to capture the asymmetry in nature. So it's asymmetric with respect to influence time is usually the signature of influence. Correct. But it's not necessarily time. It's not only a time. We can show many cases in which the temporal direction, temporal order is different. And still x causes y and y doesn't cause x. It's very simple. You don't actually need teleology. The rooster crow precedes the sunrise and no one will say that the rooster crow causes the sunrise. It's highly correlated, too. Yeah. So the the root, the, the rooster crow appears to be a cause. If time were your only signature. If the time is the only signature right. It's not sufficient. So you talk about three levels of causation and maybe back up for a second and do a little more history of ideas. So David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, has been very influential here in alleging that at least in one place in his work, that we never, we have no direct knowledge of causes ever. All we have is the conjunction or the correlation, the coincidence of two events. And when event B reliably follows event A, we impute causation, where in fact there's no other knowledge ever gained there. And I've always felt that that's almost a kind of semantic game which ignores some background intuitions we have that reach deeper into the way the world is than just mere b following A. First is ignore experiments. And Garrielo lived before you. Right. So I'm surprised that you did not pay attention to Garillo, although Garrileo didn't make it explicit that with experiments we get additional knowledge that you could not get bypassive observation. But Yum puts too much emphasis on regularity, which was criticized by many other people. But then Yoon changed his mind yeah. Between his essay and the, and the treaties on human nature. And he after, I think, seven or nine years, he, he said, in other words, and then he, he brought up a counterfactual definition of causation. Right. Had the object been different, the results would have I don't have the exact phrasing I have. It in my book that he changed from regularity to counterfactual. Had the object been different, then the outcome will be different. And even put the words, in other words, between them as if they were the same. Right, but they're totally different. The first one is statistical regularity, which sits on the lowest level of the ladder, and the counterfactual is the top layer. The third layer. Yes. Let's talk about the three layers. You described them at one point as seen doing and imagining. Right. So scene is this well, I'll let you describe it. What is seen scene is you are sitting there like an astronomer, passively observing phenomena with your hand tied behind your back, and you are talking about how your belief changes with additional observation that's statistics. If you see some other piece of evidence, you change your belief, whether you see symptoms and you change your belief about disease. You see a disease and you have expectations about symptoms. So this is what statistic is all about. And so that's the domain of mere correlation and human juxtaposition, at least the first human is first mood. And that, by the way, is the domain of machine learning today. Right. Carefitting under noise, of course. Right, so that has been the dominant theology. Maybe we're going to head toward AI for a second, but maybe we should elaborate on that just for a stretch of 30 seconds. Machine learning takes in an immense amount of data and finds correlations which prove useful as long as we give it information as to what constitutes success. So it's like take a facial recognition task and that mere correlation combined with sufficient computational power can prove very useful. It's just amazingly useful. Yeah. Just obviously not the basis of general intelligence of the sort that we'll later talk about. It is debatable. Whether it is sufficient for general intelligence seems unlikely, but my opinion is not because I have seen mathematically that there are barriers that you cannot cross. Right, okay. So we'll get to AI in a second and the robots that may or may not kill us. So seen then there's doing. What is doing? Doing is running an experiment. I'm wondering whether smoking causes cancer. So I conduct experiment as old as Daniel in the land. Then in the book of Daniel, you have the first experiment where Daniel and his fellows Israelites, who were exiled, refused to eat the food. It wasn't kosher. And King Nebuchadnetta commanded them to eat the King's food because it was much healthier and he depended on their talents to run the empire. Right. So Daniel proposed an experiment. Okay, take a few of us, give them vegetarian food and take the other groups and give them the king's food and see who is going to be more healthier looking. And that was the first experiment that we know of. Almost controlled, almost undermined. Yeah, I don't know what the control is there, but yeah, well, take a group, you split the group into two parts. One of them is controlled, the other one is treatment, they call them. And you see the difference in the outcome. It's an experiment. But of course, this was invented only in the 1930s. Their idea of randomized experiments. Randomized controlled experiments. 1930s. Yeah. But we have been dealing with cause and effects much before that. Right. Even from a time of one, one hopes. How do we manage? Well, the child manages by conducting playful manipulation in the world. The child finds out that moving one ball caused the other one ball to move. Playing with one toy makes a noise and the other one doesn't solve. It's called playful manipulation. And that's, I believe, where we get most of our knowledge about cause and effect in the world. Yeah. You push the world and something happens with your own muscles. Like Galileo dropped the two objects from the Tower of Pisa and looked at them with his own eyes. That was essential. So the third level is imagining. Third one is imagining. Yeah. Some people do not see the you can sit back if you want. I can just swing this. Okay. Yeah. Imagining is looking at your theory of the world and manipulating it in your mind. I start talking about imagining by showing the first sculpture that described impossible objects. It was a line head connected to human body. That was the first figurine, ivory figurines discovered from 32,000 years ago in a cave in Germany. The first object artifact they describe an impossible object. And how was that created? Well, the artist in his or her mind probably was his imagined taking apart the human body, severance and putting on a lion head. Imagine it in your mind first and then put it in the ivory. And that was the key. You can manipulate things in your mind before doing it in the physical world. And that is a terrific idea because that creates, according to Harare, a market of promises. Yeah. You've all know Harare. He's been on the podcast. And do you know him? He's very interesting. I haven't met him personally. He communicated in one message. You guys should get together. So imagining is the domain of counterfactuals, and counterfactuals are a very important part of this story. It's essential for science. How would you define a counterfactual? It's figuring out an outcome that would have prevailed had a certain observation not taking place. Had Hillary won the election, had Cleopatra nose being longer than it was. Really? Okay. Had Jillian Cesar not close the robin, don't laugh, because that's how historians communicate. Right, okay. And they understand each other and they form a consensus so they can communicate. Had Osborne not killed Kennedy, how would American politics develop? When would have been pulled out of Vietnam and things of that sort, and they couldn't communicate that way, despite the fact that Osborne did kill Kennedy. How can we form a consensus about things that are conflicting with the real trajectory. Of history. So it's a discussion of what might have been, might have been, and it's anything that falls into the bin of had the world been different, what could we say then? Correct? If I hadn't crossed the street at precisely that moment, how would my life be different? And with that comes all the ethics. You should have known better. Yes, it can sound like a very dry export from the ivory tower, this notion of counterfactuals, but it underpins so much of what we care about, and I think we'll get into that. There's another connection for me to the foundation of knowledge. What does real knowledge consist in? It's not enough to be right by accident. So you can't like, if I look at my watch and it's actually broken, but it happens to show the correct time. At this moment, it's wrong to say that I am in knowledge of what time it is, because a minute later, I will reveal that my methodology is such that it's not delivering me actual knowledge about the world. So you need to be able to ask, and this is a problem I always get into with religious people when I criticize religion. I criticize it for this. When you ask yourself, I would invite any believer to ask this question of themselves now, would you believe in God if God didn't exist? Do you stand in such relation to the truth of his existence, such that you would not form a false belief that he exists? Is your belief in God the result of being in some contact with reality such that if God didn't exist, you wouldn't believe he exists? And I think any look at the history and psychology of religion demonstrates that in almost every case, apart from the mystics who have some vision of God that may in fact be a vision of God, who are we to judge? Believers routinely violate this principle because the truth is they inherit these doctrines from previous generations that have merely asserted that certain books were dictated by the Creator of the universe. And there's no no more burden of evidence than that. And there's no more reality testing or updating of beliefs, generation after generation. It's there's still the mere assertion that these ancient books are the perfect record of God's existence. You are facing now a specimen of a person who answer your description. I don't believe in God, actually. I know that God doesn't exist. Okay. And I still believe in him. Okay, well, that's going to get complicated. Okay. All right. So I'm reluctant to take a full detour here, but it's too interesting. Okay, so what do you mean? God and religion are just poetry. Okay. So I'm using certain metaphors sure, which are very helpful due to my cognition. I'm using them to communicate with you, with my children. And I say, God will punish you if you talk like that. Why not? Which means to be more scientific about it. Most of our reasoning works around metaphors similarities. And the deepest metaphor that we have are the metaphors of family relations. We are born to mother and father. Our perception system is so attuned to whether our mother frowns or smiles. It's the first thing that we learn. You grow up and you find out that the world is not only mother and fathers, it has stars and it has other things. So you create a metaphor because I understand mother and father. I don't understand the movement of the stars. So I would immediately come up with a conclusion that there is some force still, like my father, that moves the stars around, and like my father teaches me things and punishes me things. Sometimes it's very natural. That's the basics of our cognition. So I do not fight it. I use it. But I remember it only a poetry. Right, okay. Well, then you're in a parish with a very few members at the moment, but that's a legitimate use of poetry and literature, certainly, but it's not what most people most of the time mean by God, as you know. This is just to say that thinking about what might have been different at the level of belief so I believe certain things about the world, and if I believe I'm in touch with the world, I believe that, for instance, I'm staring at a microphone that I put here. I believe there's a microphone in front of me on the desk. Implicit in that belief to say that that really is my propositional attitude, that there's a microphone on the desk is the assertion that if there weren't a microphone on the desk, I wouldn't think there was one. Right. So there is a counterfactual built into just the assertion that this is a microphone, whether anyone ever thinks about it. But as you point out, an understanding of counterfactuals or an ability to model them is the necessary ingredient to understanding what in fact is a cause as opposed to merely an event that happens to precede some other event in time or be associated with it. Necessary to believe in actual cause, by actual actually is different than average cause. Smoking is on the average. Smoking is harmful to your health on the average. But some people could benefit from smoking. When you talk about individual, then you talk about counteracture. Right? Had I not smoked, I would have lived X number of years. Well, let's talk about the smoking case, because that was a fascinating bit of history in your book, which I thought I was aware of, but it was actually a far bit more grim and delusional than I realized. There was a period of such active and protracted debate about whether or not smoking caused cancer that it went on far too long. And you had scientists who were smoking two and three and four packs a day denying the linkage. And there's a nicotine empowered level of confirmation bias that was ruling the conversation there. What lessons do you draw from that period in our history? To me, it means something perhaps different than to other people. For me, it was an example of how scientists can argue about things for which they don't have a language. They didn't have a language of causation at that time. They had a language of randomized experiment which they couldn't conduct on smoking. Right. And that gave a Fisher, who was this top statistician at the time, an avid pipe smoker, if I recall. Yeah, pipe all his life. And it gave him ammunition to claim maybe what we see here is just coincidental correlation between some genetic factor that makes you crave for nicotine on one hand, and it puts you in a cancer risk on the other. So what we are seeing is just the effect of a confounder brain, a third variable that causes both. I am not sure that he did it because he was a smoker himself or because he wanted to be an I promised Abraham, which means just a smart smart, alien smartass. Okay. And to show off his knowledge about statistics and about the possibility that you might get the same results with a different hypothesis. Right. I'm not sure which was the case, but the fact that he resisted the conclusion of other people went on for more than ten years. I think many millions of people died as the the result of that. But eventually it was resolved by commissioner, and they came out the surgery general came out with a statement that it does cause cancer. And the way it came about it was interesting. They looked into the plausibility argument in order calculated the degree to which the hidden genetic factors will have to change your craving for gincoutine. And that made it impossible or implausible that if you have these genetic factors, you will crave eight times more than if you didn't have it. They don't have any mechanism between genetic fatal, but to make this craving plausible, that was a key for the conclusion that they came up with in the consensus they came up with. And things have been different since then. Right. But still, what one confronts there is the sense that based on a purely statistical argument, it's always an overreach to establish causation, no matter how much data you have of correlation correctly. And that has not been appreciated to the degree it should be. Nor causes in, nor causes out. That was Nancy Cartridge slogan, which people make sense. No, it doesn't. No causation without correlation. Everybody understand? Okay. But the idea is that if you want to get causal conclusion, you must have some causal assumption someplace or experiments, one of the two. Right. This is so important because so many people have forgotten. Let's linger on this notion of counterfactuals for another moment, because it does suggest that possibility is a real thing. And I've occasionally wondered, in fact, last time I wondered this in public, it was John Brockman's final edge question. And the one I suggested was, I don't know if you were in that particular round, but my last edge question, the question that year was what should the last edge question be? And I believe my question was is the actual all that is possible? Which is to say that is possibility an illusion? Is there only what is actual? Is the notion that something else could have happened always just an idea? And does it actually not reach into anything that we can profitably think about? Is there simply just the fact of the matter in every case? And counterfactual thinking is explicitly thinking about what is possible, what might have been had things been different? And I guess I'll just put it to you, how do we know that possibility is even a thing? It's useful to speak as though it were a thing. And this actually connects to the topic of free will, which you write about in the book, because you and I are convinced, happily, not many people agree with us, but you and I are both convinced that free will is an illusion. But in one way or another it's a useful or inevitable illusion. But we still don't understand what makes it useful. Right? You and I might disagree a little bit about how useful it is, but is it possible here, there's the useful invocation of the concept. Is it possible that possibility is an illusion as well? It is based on if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, just a brief housekeeping to tie up some loose ends from the last podcast. I got a fair amount of pushback, which, to my eye, rests on a misunderstanding. I'm slightly embarrassed that I didn't see the grounds for this misunderstanding when I recorded the last podcast, but it really does seem like a misunderstanding. So let me clear this up. I've gotten a fair amount of grief for my claim that the police response at the Capitol would not have been much different had that been a BLM protest that became a siege. I was pushing back against the claim that the behavior of the cops at the Capitol was a sign of white supremacy, white privilege, the general racializing of the interpretation of the failure to protect the Capitol, which was happening everywhere and from Biden on down. And I stand by everything I said there, but I didn't recognize that this concept of police response was open to two meanings, and many people took it to mean something that I would call police presence rather than the behavior of the cops who were actually there. Many people allege that there simply would have been more cops there had this been a BLM protest, and that the fact that there weren't is a sign of racism. Racism because they were assuming that white people would be well behaved and they would have assumed that black people would have gone mad and attacked the capital. That's a very different claim. It's not one I was responding to in the last podcast. I think a racial interpretation of that assumption is also unfounded, but I don't think the assumption itself is obviously wrong. So let me just clarify that I think it's quite possible that many people would have assumed that a pro Trump rally would also be, by default, pro police. That would not have been a crazy assumption given all that has preceded us. So therefore the idea that maybe they don't need a massive show of force from the cops to prevent an insurrection because these people are generally pro cop, maybe that factored into the decision making around how many cops should be there in the first place. That seems entirely plausible to me. Again, I don't know what's true there, and I don't know that there aren't other more nefarious reasons why there was such a weak police presence there. Again, it could have been something that Trump ordered. We will find out if there's any true conspiracy there or if it's just negligence or negligence based on bad assumptions. I do touch upon this topic in today's podcast with my guests, but there's no necessary racist implication from that difference in assumption. And you can see that if you just imagine what the cops would have assumed of an antifa protest had there been the biggest antifa rally in human history. Massane at the Capitol, what would have been the posture of the cops? Well, I would bet more or less everything that it would have been every bit as risk averse as it would be in the case of a BLM protest. Which is to say that the obvious animosity of antifa to law enforcement would have dictated exactly what people are claiming would have happened in the case of a BLM protest. And this strips away the variable of race almost perfectly. Antifa certainly seems to be an almost entirely white phenomenon. So anyway, that's the counterfactual we just have to imagine. But I think viewing any part of this failure at the Capitol in terms of race is just deeply unhelpful, in addition to very likely mistaken. And this would not change if we found, as we almost certainly would if we went looking, that some of the cops or some of the decision makers are avowed racists and Trump supporters. None of that changes the general picture of what happened here, in the same way that finding a few antifa goons among the insurrectionists will not change our basic understanding of what happened there. Right. This was a protrump insurrection, even if you can find some antitrump far left, BLM loving people in the crowd. So I hope that is clear. This is not at all to suggest that we don't have a problem with white supremacy and a larger movement here. We obviously do. And 100% of those people, for all intents and purposes, are part of the MAGA cult that we now need to deal with. Right? So I am not saying that racism isn't a variable, generally speaking. But to view what happened at the Capitol, specifically the level of force that was Marshalled and used or not used by the people who were there this. Notion that, again seems to have been endorsed by, more or less, everyone on the left, from biden on down, that what we saw at The Capitol was proof positive of white supremacy. The fact that the insurrection wasn't put down better than it was, was a symptom of racism. There is just no way to look at this where that conclusion seems reasonable from my point of view, and as I said last time, even if reasonable, I would argue it's the wrong point to be making now, and everything else that is racializing this moment is also the wrong thing to be doing now. The fact that Joe Biden just announced that his COVID relief package would be targeted to nonwhite people suffering the economic effects of the pandemic, many of you have probably seen that video. He stepped before the cameras and said that this aid would preferentially go to people of color. Latinos. He threw Asians in there as though Asian Americans were an especially beleaguered bunch, even though in the aggregate, they're doing better than anyone. This was an act of breathtaking political stupidity. Given the political needs of the moment, given the need to figure out how to build a bridge right of center at a minimum, given the need not to confirm the paranoia of everyone right of center that there's a tsunami of wokeness now breaking over all of society and the future. For people who want to get beyond racializing, every question in American life will be one of reeducation by pink haired lesbians. There is a culture war that needs to be won here, and racializing everything isn't the way to win it. And I defy anyone to justify a skin color preference in the doling out of COVID aid when the only ethical basis really is economic need, right? And if you don't think there are white people who suffered the utter destruction of their economic lives during the pandemic, you're living in some kind of malignant fantasy world again, it's the own goals that we should find absolutely unacceptable. And judging from how this went off on social media, this was a Lenal messy style bicycle kick into the wrong goal is just incredible. Why do it? And finally, I want to further contextualize my support for the Twitter ban of Trump, about which I have absolutely no misgivings. There's nothing that has happened in recent days that has given me cause to rethink that. But obviously the banning on social media has preceded a pace. There are many, many accounts that have been purged and there was the seemingly coordinated dismantling of the parlor app parlor as a social media, or was a social media platform favored largely by conservatives and no doubt some conservative lunatics. Let me just say that all of those further iterations of deplatforming seem far more complicated to me and merit serious debate about the role that social media companies play in our lives and the power of these platforms. And in the case of parlor, it's not just social media companies. Here we have the very infrastructure of the Internet, in particular Amazon's Cloud Services deciding to discourage a whole platform and a business that was probably valued at a billion dollars at that point from the internet itself. This is a kind of digital exile which may or may not have been warranted. A surprising number of erstwhile libertarians seem very comfortable with the idea that private corporations should be forced to keep people on their servers so as to not show any political bias and be forced to provide tools for people who are avidly spreading misinformation that is fragmenting our society. This kind of thing has to be argued for and there's no straightforward move to make from the first Amendment to enforcing the behavior of people who run these businesses. This is just to say that my mind is really not made up on many of the specifics there. I think it's going to be a fascinating and consequential debate to have. But as to whether or not the various digital platforms are justified in trying to contain the damage that Trump may yet attempt to do by essentially regurgitating him and his digital life into the abyss. Given what's at stake here, and given what a bad actor he has been, that just seems to me to be a very easy call. And it's not made more difficult by the apparent inconsistency of not being able to close all the other accounts that arguably should be closed at the same moment, whether it's the Chinese Communist Party or any other malicious source of misinformation, there's an enormous mess to clean up, but Trump was an all too identifiable piece of that. Any case, those are my two cent. As I said, there's much more to talk about, generally about the power of big tech, and I'm sure I'll pull together several conversations on that topic in the future. OK, well, today I'm speaking with General Stanley McChrystal and his colleague Chris Fussel, both of whom have been on the podcast before. We spoke last year, just as the pandemic was beginning to get rolling. And what a quaint conversation that was, in light of all that's since happened. General McCrystal is a retired US Army four star general who served more than 34 years in the military, and he was the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. That was his last assignment. He's written several books, including a memoir titled My Share of the Task, which was a New York Times bestseller, and he's a Senior Fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. He's also the founder of the McCrystal Group. And his partner, Chris Fussel, also teaches at Yale. And he and General McCrystal wrote Team of Teams New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, which was also a New York Times bestseller. Chris was a commissioned naval officer and he spent 15 years in the Navy Seals at various points around the globe, and he served as an aide de camp to General McCrystal. And Chris is also on the board of directors of the Navy Seal Foundation, and he's a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. And both of these guys have a podcast they do together called no Turning Back, and that should be available wherever you get your podcasts. And given the gravity of today's topic, this podcast is yet another episode that is not paywalled. It's a PSA of sorts. But if you want to support the podcast and you want to get full episodes in general, you can do that by subscribing@samharris.org. And as always, if you can't afford it, you can request a free account through the website. And now, without further delay, I bring you General Stanley McCrystal and Chris Fussell. I am here with General Stanley McCrystal and Chris Fussell. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me again. Thanks, Sam. Thanks for having us. We were on the podcast nearly, I guess, ten months ago. We were about a month into the pandemic, so this was the beginning of April, and I remember being quite sheepish even asking you guys about the possibility of civil unrest. I think I framed it as something that we would have a responsibility to at least touch on, given your expertise. But I think I hastened to say something like, obviously, I don't expect this. We don't want to be scaremongering, right? And I look back on that conversation, and I think, oh, how naive I was. It's hard for me to even reclaim that view of the world, given all that's happened in the intervening months. So I don't think we need to focus on it. Just perhaps it'll be relevant to some part of the conversation to acknowledge how much social unrest occurred over the summer around the Black Lives Matter protests that many of which devolved into riots. All of the craziness in Seattle and Portland, all of the very weird political responses to that, especially on the left, the calls to defund the police as though that's what we needed at that moment. All of that is just the context in which I want to talk to you about what has now happened in Trumpistan and what happened at the Capitol last week and the prospects that we may be facing some kind of insurgency in our society coming from the right. So I guess let's just start with last week. What were you guys thinking when you saw what was unfolding at the Capitol on the 6th? Yes, Sam. Thanks. I'll start by what I was thinking about was an experience for my youth. I grew up most of my school years in Arlington, Virginia, right across the street from the capital and from Stonewall Jackson Elementary School, where I went. A short walk away, was an area now called Ballston, which is a built up shopping center. But back in the mid 1960s, it was also the location of the headquarters of the American Nazi Party. And you could walk to a white frame house that had a porch on the front, and you could stand in front of it, and you could see a large painted sign that was about 20ft across that said, white Men fight smashed the Black Revolution. And then periodically, a young man would walk out in early 20s wearing a brown stormtrooper uniform with a swastika armband. And I remember watching that. And then as what I saw last week, as I saw some of the activities around the capital, I thought about, we have a history in the United States of extreme thinking. And you remember in 165, you could have an American Nazi Party, but you certainly would not have seen that in Germany. It was outlawed because they'd had a bad experience with it. And so as I watched what happened around the capital, I thought about the danger of very radical thinking and people who become energized and in some ways consumed by very extreme ideas. And so I started to think of what's happened, why has it happened? What's going to happen next, and what we could do about it. For me, it was a reflection on experiences in the counterterrorism world dealing with threats like al Qaeda, et cetera. And it took me a while post 911, being on the battlefield, etc. To, to really dive in and say this isn't just, this didn't start yesterday. There's a, there's a decades long history to stance point on to how, how these movements get to the point where they've turned into something that is extremely violent and dangerous and you've lost a lot of your other levers by the time it crosses that threshold. And so what I spent time doing then was diving in and studying that history and what I saw when I was watching on the news, etc. Or like the rest of us. What I was seeing was we are danger close to that edge, at which point the measures and responses are going to reach a threshold that we're going to be very uncomfortable with as a free society and we have to work really hard over the next six to twelve months to pull it back from that brink. Yeah, I want to talk about the underlying problem of what people believe is true about the nature of the world and how unreachable certain people seem to be at the moment by dialogue. But let's just focus on what actually happened at the Capitol and everything that is still mysterious about that. I think many people marveled at the fact that there was such an inadequate police presence and they're looking for reasons why that is so. And some are conspiratorial and seemingly fairly sinister. Some are just can be ascribed to bad assumptions or bad luck. I'm wondering what you think about let's just take that single variable of why there was an such an inadequate staffing and just why there was there was a basic assumption that more security wasn't required, given all that had preceded that day. If you remember in the 911 commission report, probably the most memorable line is, they say that it was a failure of imagination, of intelligence people to imagine that an organization like Al Qaeda could do a plot, an operation as detailed and as ambitious as the 911 assault was. I would say that if we spend a lot of time worrying why there weren't enough Capitol Police or enough barricades around the Capitol, we run the risk of missing the forest for the trees. The thing that was difficult for most Americans to imagine is you would assemble thousands of people, many of whom were very radicalized in the nation's capital, have the President of the United States address them and invite and encourage them to walk down and confront Congress where it works. I think it was difficult for most of us to imagine that occurring and I don't think we could possibly imagine that they would then try to break into the Capitol. And so I think we need to, we as a people and a government need to avoid the temptation to immerse in a lot of the details, step back, blur our eyes a bit, and say, now, wait a minute. This is the big problem, the fact that this could even frame up as a potential situation. Yeah. And watching the Stan and I spoke with us during the day and afterwards, and trained individuals, trained units are less frightening in many ways than a mob. And that's what we saw. A mob mentality is completely out of control. Right. It takes on a life of its own. And that's what I witnessed that day. Coupled with lack of creative thinking, why would you assume this would happen? Etc. And so as soon as they breached the front walls and came in mass, then it was the outcomes were completely unpredictable. There's no way that that Capitol police force could have reacted in a way to hold that back. It was determined to get in into the building. Now, hindsight being 2020, of course, but we all remember the days where we flew around the country, around the world, in aircraft with an easily open and closed cockpit door. Right. And that would seem ridiculous in today's environment. So that was a blank moment where we'll never look at those things the same. Yeah. So one thing that's been said a lot in response to this question is that this is a sign of racism in our society and white privilege and white supremacy, the full allegation being that had this been a Black Lives Matter protest, there would have been much more of a police presence there. And this is often combined with a distinct claim, which is that, and one I addressed previously on a podcast, that police presence aside, the police would have behaved themselves differently had this been a black or largely black mob assailing the capital. Which is to say more people would have been killed, more people would have been beaten up and bloodied and certainly arrested at the end of it. And I think that the first assumption may have some truth to it, but I think in both cases, bringing race into this question is profoundly unhelpful and almost certainly misleading. And I just want to just bounce my thinking off of you guys. Not to take the conversation far in this direction, but I think this is a truly toxic way of framing what happened at the Capitol, and it's making the people still in Trump's base harder to reach. Because, again, this is basically saying that all of you are in the Ku Klux Klan who have in any way supported this president. On the first point, that the question of police presence, the fact that there simply weren't more cops called in advance, I think it's easy to see. And again, there could be many other explanations for this, and some of them could be totally nefarious. Right? I mean, it could be that Trump decided he wanted to leave the Capitol unprotected. This is the kind of thing people are thinking now, but leaving all of that aside, and leaving aside the prospect that we may discover that some of the people in the police force at the Capitol were actually quite sympathetic to the mob and let them in without just a wave and a nod. And some video suggests that that was going on. Leaving that aside, just the question of could it have been that there was an assumption on the part of people who were deciding to staff the Capitol that a protrump rally would essentially be by default, be pro cop? These are people who have been supporting law enforcement by and large. And this can be obviously contrasted with a BLM rally where much of the animus is explicitly directed against law enforcement. The reason why I would I think you can strip race as a variable completely out of that problem is that whatever assumption would be made about a BLM rally would have been made perhaps in triplicate against an antifa rally. And antifa is certainly mostly a white organization, right? So it's like the variable here is the attitude toward law enforcement, not the color of people's skin, or at least that would be my claim. But I'm wondering if you think that played a role here. Just a few reactions. One on the I'm not an expert in this space at all, right. But there is an equity discussion that will be had on the back side of this. And I've had that like yourself, a few times over the last week with different friends, but I've always reacted to it. It's like there's a conversation to be had there. But if two helicopters go down on the battlefield, you don't walk into the general and say, I don't think they had enough seatbelts on the first helicopter. Right. Solve the problem that's in front of you, and we'll solve the bigger issues behind that on the backside, but the house is on fire. Let's save the other discussions for further down the road, which are important ones to have. I think there's one variable that isn't getting, including these conversations, which is an exposure bias from the Capitol Police right up until six months ago, lived a mile from the, the front of the Capitol building. And every other day there's some sort of protest surrounding the Capitol, Supreme Court, etc. That's the, the world that those officers live in day after day. And if that was your exposure, and none of them in your eight years of working in the Capitol Police had ever stepped through even a simple metal barrier, you can understand, I imagine, in the planning rooms, they're thinking, okay, it's going to be a bigger crowd. Here's how we respond to those not saying it's right, but you get routineized into how these crowds react. And certainly there was a moment when they all realized they got it completely wrong. But I would assume there wasn't a calculated discussion in the planning at the rank and file level about this group versus this group? Sam I think the bigger question that Chris hinted at there was this is a group that wouldn't be expected to cross a police line, wouldn't be expected to get violent against people that they've got a lot of connections to, and wouldn't be expected to storm the Capitol, and yet they did. A largely white crowd of people that the policeman who've been interviewed have described as true believers, one used the term rabid dog. People who have become so fervent in their outrage and their sense of loss that they have got to take an action that theoretically would be very counter to a law and order attitude in their part of society. So to me, what is causing this part of largely white population to get to this point and to take these kinds of actions? Yeah, I want to get into the ideas here, but I just have another question about what was happening at the Capitol, because I think, first of all, the video is so varied, but in aggregate, it it is kind of mystifying. And I'm left with the feeling that it is something close to a miracle that more people weren't killed. What's surprising to me is not that five people died, but that 50 or more didn't die, because I guess I just want to ask you about the rules of engagement in a situation like that. Granted, the crowd was so varied that I could imagine that the experience of some cops in various parts of this siege was quite unlike the experience of other cops. I mean, they're being confronted with a weird group of people who are not really looking like combatants. I mean, they're dressed in weird costumes. Some of them are surprisingly old. You have some footage of a cop taking selfies with one group, and that is quite unlike imagery of cops being beaten over the head with American flags and being crushed in doorways and just kind of the surging violence that we see in other videos. But I guess my question was, once the Capital was breached, once people were breaking down doors and climbing through windows, and the cops were the only thing standing between them and our nation's leaders, and you have some people calling for the deaths of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. I'm just amazed that there weren't scenes where every single person who came through a door got shot. From the cop's point of view, I can see that there's an element of self preservation here, because if you start shooting people and you don't have enough ammunition to shoot everybody, well, then eventually you're going to be killed by a mob. But to not have shot people at that point, at some point in the inner sanctum of that building, to not have really just said, this is actually war, is to have placed the safety of our congressmen and women in the hands of a mob that had just shown a willingness to overwhelm police officers and risk their lives in the process. That just seems totally untenable to me. So I guess I'm just you know, it's a very long way of asking, are you surprised from a just a a use of force perspective that more people weren't killed by cops? I'm really not, Sam. It's because if I learned anything from my years in the Seal teams, the the exposure that even an extremely well trained individual needs to that level of violence and uncertainty to be able to think really clearly in the moment is it's difficult. Right. And I think the situation probably changed on them so quickly that they were overwhelmed, surrounded. And from what I've heard, some of the interviews after the fact, several made the right decision, realizing, if I draw my weapon right now, I will shoot eight people, and then I'll lose my firearm. I will certainly die. And then they'll be armed, and they'll have my other two magazines, and now I've armed the masses. So I think the clearest heads we're trying to de escalate, which is extremely difficult to do in a mob, and we run the risk of sort of a Hollywood image of what it looks like, the barrel chested guy with a gun who can take on the big crowd. But if they hadn't been exposed to that before and what happens to when there's countless studies out there about this, an individual's white space shrinks down to survival in the moment. Now, compared to the forces that that Stan led and I was I was part of, there were operators that had been in violent situations hundreds of times. I knew an operator who pulled a pin on a grenade in the middle of a gunfight, realized there was a child in the room repinned the grenade while getting shot at like that's. That's superhuman mental behavior. Right. And we assume and expect that of a DC. Police officer who's suddenly surrounded by 400 people who's they're trying to crush into death. Right. So I didn't see anything in there that I thought was completely irrational behavior. There will be, I think, unfortunately, probably some sympathetic findings that people were more on the side of the protesters than on the side of the members of Congress, which will be terrible. But to the person, I understood the responses that I was seeing. For the most part, Sam, I would add there, I think Chris nailed it. I believe that had the Capitol police been told to expect violence, had they been depicted as the 300 Spartans holding the line against thousands of Persians, that they would have been much more minimally focused on responding probably with lethal force. But as Chris described, they didn't expect this crowd to do that kind of activity at the Capitol. And so I think as it came and then they were largely atomized in many cases. Police were in very small groups, and it was more. Difficult to feel like you're part of a cohesive organization that could effectively truly resist. Yeah. So let's talk about some of the underlying causes of this, which really, to my mind, rests on this seething cauldron of ideas, most of which are almost certainly false and should be easily judged false. And yet we're dealing with people who seem to have kicked themselves loose of the earth and are now apparently unreachable by argument. We have a personality cult around Trump that seems to be wrapped in uncountable layers of conspiracy theories and lies. We have QAnon, which is the kind of crazy, crystalline core of this movement and that has points of contact with a much older phenomenon of white nationalism and Christian identity. And we have a kind of quasi religious commitment to the idea that in the proximate case, the election of Joe Biden is a total fraud. Right. We have this election fraud, fraud being perpetrated by the President and by his enablers and by some prominent people in Congress. And so we have people who are absolutely sure that their country has been stolen from them and that this is all now just american history has become a dangerous farce and there's no institution that can be trusted except for the personality of Trump on some level. And then just this tissue of conspiracy theories that spread over social media and now which every effort to contain. This misinformation is seen as yet another sinister sign of global control right by our overlords in Silicon Valley or by a cult of crazy liberal cannibals who are molesting children. Really, the sky is the limit in terms of what you can believe, apparently. So I want to talk about this general phenomenon and what you think we can do about it, but I'm especially concerned about some reports we hear that there are, for instance, QAnon sympathizers or true blue cultists in our nation's military and in law enforcement. The ideas are the call is potentially coming from within the house at certain of these moments. What do you think about this and how do we begin to talk our way out of this? Great. Chris and I had a conversation before the podcast, and one of the things that he pointed out that I thought was a great analogy was this isn't a brain aneurysm. This isn't a condition that just suddenly appeared in US. Society in reality. This is a lifestyle health problem that we've had over time that began decades ago. And as we talked, there's a history of periods of extremism in the United States, such as the rise of the Kukux Klan in the 1920s, which a lot of people don't realize. But I would say that the hardest part of this really probably goes back to the 1950s. We came out of the Second World War, and we were in the early stages of the Cold War, and suddenly white men, which were the predominant demographic there at the capitol, white men started losing ground. They started losing their privileged position. And what that meant was they lost some of it to the equal rights movement, for gender, for women. They lost some of it to the civil rights movement. They lost some of it to the globalization of the economy. So the relatively and maybe undeserved privileged position that a white worker had for generations was suddenly under threat, and that caused great frustration. That caused a sense of loss. And we've seen that for several decades now. It was also matched by fear, fear that they would be displaced in society, in fact, be in a position of the oppressed vice, the oppressor such as they had seen minorities before. And so when you put together frustration and fear, you get the combination of desperation or you get the output of desperation. And so suddenly they become fertile ground for accepting things that they want to believe. They want to believe that all of this is the result of a conspiracy. They want to believe that there are evil people doing this to them, and they want to believe there are relatively simple fixes to it, like a demagogic leader who comes and is able to say, I will give you the solution to your problem. We'll build a wall. We'll do various things. And so what we've seen now, I think, is a fairly evolved radicalization of part of our population, and it's accelerated by things like social media, the ability to communicate so quickly and the ability to limit what you hear of information sources to those which you already agree with. And as you become more radicalized, what we see is you become more and more of a tendency to listen to those things, which makes you it's a self reinforcing loop. So I think what we've got now is a significant part of our society that believes what they believe, and they believe it fervently, and they believe it to the point where they are willing to do violence. If we go back to the Turner Diaries from the 1970s, which Timothy McVeigh had a copy with him when he in Oklahoma City, what we see is it's not new, but it's been evolving in American society. And I think we've now got a much worse physical condition in our society than than we have yet admitted. Say, if I just build on that device analogizing to our as our understanding of Al Qaeda deepened and other extremist movements, we started to look at it through sort of a Venn diagram. Imagine three circles on a page. The biggest circle, if they're moving, say, left to right. The biggest circle being those that sort of can can be broadly empathetic. I don't agree with their actions, but I get it. I understand. I know why they're angry. The middle circle being those that are willing to donate to the cause somehow support it, oftentimes through a third cut out charity, et cetera. But they kind of know where it will end up. And then for the final circle being those that are willing to take action, and it goes big, medium, very small. And for most of the fight against Al Qaeda and others, the overlap between those three circles was very much on the fringe, right? Just a small overlap between broad empathy and support, and then very few of those supporters actually willing to take action. What is scary now and I think social media has a huge negative role in this, and they need to come to account for that and talk about how they're going to change and work on the algorithms that drive those circles together. And the scene on the capital was a physical manifestation of those three circles overlapping. You have the extremist action arm in the mix with an elder couple that drove from the middle of the country because they thought they were being told this was an important action for them to take as good Americans. And that's a frightening place to be when those three overlap. You have a much deeper problem on your hands than you thought you did. So what do you think we should do now? Before we jump into that, let's talk about the challenge, the immediate challenge that's before us, which is securing the inauguration and finally accomplishing a peaceful or semipaceful transfer of power. What are your expectations for the next few days? We're recording this on the Friday before the inauguration. We will release this almost certainly a day or two before the inauguration. So many people will be hearing us before the final shoe has dropped and just simply hoping that the inauguration is brought off without anything terrible happening. What are you guys thinking about and expecting at this point? Yes, Sam. From experience, I would tell you we need to lock it down. We need to prevent violence, and we need to make it obvious to everybody that there is not an opportunity for violence. And those who try to do it will be dealt with, maybe with deadly force immediately. We have to do that because my experience back from Afghanistan, interestingly, taught us that when there is violence in an area, whether coalition forces caused it or whether Taliban forces caused it, it created more violence after it. It created an atmosphere where it just became easier for people to be violent. And so in the near term, what we've got to do is absolutely lock it down. We've got to go after the perpetrators from the last event. We've got to make it clear now that's not a long term solution. That doesn't solve the problem of radicalization. But what you can't do is let the idea that this is a riot after a soccer match that can go on with junk patrons doing it. You just can't let that keep going. So what do you do with the unhappy juxtaposition between our current security concerns? And again, it has a kind of a quasi religious status in our society, the primacy of the Second Amendment, such that in many places I'm not sure where DC falls here. I would imagine the laws are stricter, but as you know, there are threats or at least concerns around all 50 state capitals as well in the coming days. Many of these are states where open carry is legal. I mean, it's legal to walk down the sidewalk with your AR 15 proudly displayed. The dysfunction of this seems fairly unagnorable, given our current situation. How do you view the gun rights issue and gun safety issue in the current climate? Well, to what we were talking about earlier, there's a we want to prevent the point of no return here. Right. And I say that from experience. It's the reason that a lot of military leaders that I've known and respect when they go into senior positions as civilians are the doves, because they know, look, at a certain point, this is going to get out of control, and if you send in those that are designed to enact violence, it's going to get violent. And so let's expend all means before we get there. I don't think we're at that point yet, but we are dangerously close. And so to Stan's point, I think the immediate action is to make it obvious and uncomfortable for those that would want to show up armed. Obviously, you can't do that in Washington, DC. But in other states, if they feel that threat, they have to make it a physical presence obvious enough immediately to say, this is going to be bad. If you try to go down that road, it's going to be bad. But that's only one of multiple levers that have to be pulled. I think the move that the big social media platforms AWS have made to push folks off of those platforms is the right one. I think they have to start diving into their algorithms, as I mentioned earlier, to really stop aiding the coupling of these networks. And in some ways, that is a digital manifestation of that make it physically difficult. Right. One of the things we had in combat zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, we referred to as t walls. You may recognize them from pictures of battlefields and combat zones in urban areas. And it's just imagine a big concrete slab that looks like an upside down t. So we call them t walls. They're about 6ft wide, 15ft high. And if there were two parts of the neighborhood that were just going to kill each other no matter what, all rationality had left the scene, you just ran a t wall down the middle, and you said, now it's physically difficult for you two sides of the city to interact with each other. That's not respectful of your civil rights. That's not respectful of your freedom of maneuver. That is simply there to prevent you from killing each other, because we think you're completely irrational at this point. And we have to do that in the cyberspace now, separate these groups out, make it really hard for them to connect and grow. That will push the smarter, more sophisticated ones into deeper encrypted platforms, et cetera, as we're already seeing. But that's a much harder task than following someone on Twitter or in a larger sort of public forum. And so that is one step of many that have to take place in the cyber world. We have to do that in the physical world as well. And the next 15 days, let's say, is critical to that, tamp it down aggressively locally, nationally, etc. Because if we tip that next wire and we see suicide bombers, etc. The escalation of things we saw in the in the battlefield that we thought were unlikely, then the levers you have to pull get even more draconian, and we don't want to see that. The problem I'm perceiving here, though, is that we have a kind of positive feedback loop, otherwise known as a self fulfilling prophecy, which you could see in miniature with something like the Branch Davidians and the siege at Waco, right? So you have a group of people who are paranoid that the government will one day come in and subjugate them and in particular seize their guns, and so they begin buying guns and ammo with abandon so as to prepare for that eventuality. And their very preparations put them on the radar of the ATF and the FBI. And so the Feds do come knocking out of concern that we have a crazy radicalized cult and a compound filled with children arming itself. And that very intrusion is viewed in as no surprise, in the most sinister way, as a perfect confirmation of prophecy. And it's just that it's spiraled out of control from there. And so everything you're proving that we have begun to do, kicking people off of social media and trying to make it more difficult for those platforms to be a medium of radicalization, that is being viewed as not only an expression of hostility to their cherished beliefs, which it is, but precisely the kind of orwellian overreach that their paranoia is the antidote for. It's a confirmation of a worldview that we're seeing. And it's so hard for people to parse this moment that people who are miles away from this ideology, but who just have kind of basic libertarian attachments, right? Silicon Valley billionaires are worried about the fact that Trump was kicked off Twitter, setting a bad precedent for free speech, right? That our free speech. The First Amendment has essentially been privatized. Given just the overwhelming importance of having a digital town square where you can speak. And if you start getting kicked off all the platforms, what does it even mean to say that we have a First Amendment? So there literally are billionaires who think we have already massively overreached in kicking Trump off Twitter and finding all the QAnon accounts and closing those down as well. And so there's a war of ideas here that has to be won, and we're still either cleaning up the crime scene at the Capitol, and to my eye, we're already losing this war of ideas. Yes, ma'am. The reason this is so hard for security forces or the government, as we'll call it, is because the aim of insurgents or opposition or terrorist forces is to get the government to overreact it's, to get the government to come in and do things that upset the population, which then drives people toward the insurgents. If we go back to April 1775, colonists gathered munitions west of Boston. The British, probably with an abundance of caution, wanted to go seize those munitions. And of course, it produced Lexington and Concord with a lot of blood spilled and a hardening of positions on both sides. And it caused a tremendous number of people to join the revolutionary cause. You can't say that the British were completely wrong. They were trying to prevent the use of those munitions. But their actions do that. And this gets to the point of what needs to be done now has to be done with a very deft hand. And that's what we found in Afghanistan and Iraq. Because many of the things you may do, which makes sense from a very simplistic standpoint, to go get the bad guy or blow this up or to close this road, actually make the disease work. And so it's got to be done as part of a holistic campaign. But you do have to stop the violence. If you don't stop the violence, the fire grows and it becomes uncontrollable. So you've got to simultaneously stop the violence, but you've also got to go after things like the information sources. You've got to provide a counter narrative that is, in fact, compelling. You've got to convince the average person that it is in their interest that peace and law and order be re established. But it isn't easy. There isn't a single solution that works here. No silver bullet. So, again, let's move from the capital outward. What should be done on the basis of now, the hours of footage we have of that crime? Just how aggressively should people be prosecuted? What's the scope for forgiving more or less everyone who wasn't caught walking out with a lectern or some other trophy and saying, okay, all of you see the multitudes get a mulligan here. We're just going to prosecute 75 people, or whatever it is. Just how would you deal with the aftermath of that specific event? Yeah, I think it has to be aggressive across the board, but I would expand my view on that to say, as should video of rioting in Seattle or Pick Your city. There are laws. Laws are laws. And if you cross that, you should be held accountable for it. And so I don't isolate that just to the capital. This is an extreme and front of mind case, but we need to send the message right now that it won't be tolerated, regardless of political spectrum, regardless of race, et cetera. If you are willing to be in that extreme, action oriented edge of the Bell curve, you will be held to account for it. That is the foundation of a nation based on law and order. Well, then what do you do with the messaging? That really is the underlying cause of that radicalization, it seems to me, inescapable that the claim, in defiance of every procedure used to validate it, that the election was a fraud, that we've had that Trump won in a landslide. And yet, by virtue of incentives that simply do not exist, we had largely Republican election officials and secretaries of state and governors and judges collaborate with the Democrats to steal this election for Biden. And a Supreme Court, the character of which has been largely determined by Trump himself, didn't help for their own diabolical reasons. All of this is a vast conspiracy. And this messaging has come from explicitly and implicitly, from literally hundreds of congressmen, some congressmen and women whose own election was won on the very ballots they're claiming were fraudulent. Right. I mean, it's like this is it's a patently insane position to be arguing from if you're a member of Congress. And yet we still have people like Ted Cruz who have tied themselves to the mast of this sinking ship and seem to be content to disappear beneath the waves with their last words being that this election was stolen. Right. So clearly there's responsibility there. What do we do in the face of that? It's an interesting problem because we've never really held people to account for lying unless it was under oath for a legal issue. And we've certainly not prosecuted people for stupidity or the prisons would be even more false. So this is a unique period where I think we have got to hold people to account for their responsibility as elected officials. You'd like the election electoral process to do that, but the nature of gerrymandering and different areas doesn't make that possible. But I think that that may be the most difficult task we have to undertake here. How do we make it absolutely unacceptable to do something that is so cravenly, opportunistic and incorrect and let people get away with that? But I want to pass it to Chris because there's an interesting longer term thought on this. Yeah, I think education of the population, I mean, that sounds sort of pollyannish right? But it has to be a deliberate effort moving forward. You're never going to debunk the if I have a cosmic view, return to the golden era, I'm at that. 1% left or right on the Bell curve. You're not going to change my mind. Right. I'm hardwired to think like that when I think about us deepening our understanding of Al Qaeda as an extremist network that was expanding very quickly. There was the temptation out of the gates to stands earlier point to say, this is a brain aneurysm and we need to cut it out. And it took us a long time to recognize, no, this is diabetes, and it's been going on for decades and we're just the latest chapter in the evolution. And there is that golden era extremists inside their network, but it's much bigger than that, right? And so we had to study and understand so that we could deradicalize folks that had gotten pulled into that, but have an appreciation for where it started from. And so with Al Qaeda, you had to go all the way back to the post colonial era and the rise of pan Arabism and the failure of pan Arabism, and under the very draconian rule of Nasser and Egypt, the radicalization of the Muslim Brotherhood. And Zawahiri, who goes on to be the thought leader in Al Qaeda, bin Laden, they fight the Soviets on the backside of that. Al Qaeda is created as a rational, I would have disagreed with it, but a rational argument saying, we need a global army that can defend Muslim populations wherever they may be. And then the Gulf War happens and they're not invited to the fight, the US is. And now we're in Saudi Arabia and his cause becomes, we need to get the far invader out of the Holy Land. It's a rational argument, but somehow in a matter of then ten or 15 years, a series of events take place and al Qaeda turns into a death cult. Zarkawi and other young leaders come in and say, like, what you've done here? 911 was a great way to demonstrate to how many people we can kill around the world for this cause. And you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to start a civil war in Iraq between Sunni and Shia, using the most, you know, barbaric violence we can come up with. And I think it's going to attract like minded sociopaths to this fight. But that was when we showed up and we wanted to see this acute group of psychopaths. And it took me personally a while to recognize, wait a second, they are the last chapter in a 60 year history. And so if we don't understand and appreciate that, how can we possibly deradicalize the fringe of that hardcore inner cell? And we have to take the same approach here. We have to go back in our own history and say, look, there's 200 years of history as to why this group is willing, this middle circle is willing to show up and actually be part of the action. How do we keep them from getting radicalized and becoming the next real violent threat who's willing to put their own life on the line? I'm wondering, do you think there's anything Trump could say that could close Pandora's box here? I'm not suggesting that there's any chance he would say it. But if he got a proper firmware update to his brain and had a full MEA culpa, here where he said, Listen, guys, I'm a reality TV show star and I'm a bit of a con man and I've been lying all my life. And I'm sorry to say I was been lying about election fraud, too. And there really is every sign that Joe Biden really did win. I mean, I got the second most votes in American history, there's no doubt about that. I am great. But the truth is I fought long and hard for this, and I probably fought a little too long. And I wish Joe Biden well and all of this QAnon stuff, I'm not the guy who's going to save you from the pedophile cannibals, because as far as I know, there are no pedophile cannibals. And I'm just going to go play golf. And I'm sorry I made such a mess here at the end. Some four hour version of that with appropriate weeping and the prospect that he might commit cepuku at some point along the way. Would that do any good? Or would that all just be wrapped up in yet another layer of conspiracy where obviously the lizard people got to our dear president and now we have to fight all the harder? Sam I have a feeling you must have been drinking early today to even entertain that thought. Here's what I think. I don't think it would make one bit of difference. I think Donald Trump is an obese New York developer with funny hair who has become a symbol. I don't think he's ever led this group. He got out with a tuning fork and he found out that it resonated with the existing frustration and fear in this group. And so he became a symbolic leader for them, and he was convenient for them in some ways. They helped him. They were something that gave him a base that caused other Republicans to fall in line. But he was also very much useful to this group because now you had a persona that was relatively legitimate as the position of the President of the United States would be, who was saying things that added legitimacy to this radical movement. I think at this point, were he to come out and give a discussion, I think they would simply say that aliens have come down and they've taken the beloved leader and he's no longer himself. And what we've got to hold true is to the ideas, and they would continue to go their own way if he genuinely tried to change the direction of this movement now, I don't think he'd have any effect on it. Sam we saw something similar in the relationship between bin Laden and Zarkawi, the first real violent actor in Al Qaeda in Iraq, who was able to drive the movement. And you would think Zarkawi would have been you're, the great leader. What should I do next? And as we were just discussing, he went down a different path. We saw the correspondence back and forth, and bin Laden tried to do that, and it was the sorcerer's apprentice. The buckets are running around now and you can't control it. And Zarkawi's response to bin Laden, when bin Laden was sitting in his home office in Abadabad saying, hey, you're cutting heads off. You're burning people in pits. This is not the intent of the movement. We are here to fight the far enemy that's over there in the United States. That was a point of 911. And Zarqaiwa's response was essentially, come say that to my face. We are the new generation. We own this, and you're no longer relevant to what's happening on the battlefield. What about the relevance of what could happen to Trump? Right? What do you think should happen? What do you hope would happen in terms of just the optics of the kind of unraveling of his presidency or just how we move forward? He's been impeached at the time we're recording this, but there has not yet been a schedule of a trial in the Senate. It's almost certainly not going to happen before the inauguration, but whether there will be one has not been announced. Is there any emphatic and ignominious closure to his presidency that could make this whole collection of ideas less attractive to people, or do you think it's uncoupled from anything that's going to happen in that space as well? Yes, Sam, I think the answer is on two different levels. On the level of the groups that have been radicalized, trump has already been martyred. Trump is now somebody who's had the job stolen from him. So he serves their purpose now almost as though he no longer is alive. And so he is going to become this symbol in this idea. I do think, however, holding him to account, while it will give a little bit of fodder to those groups, is very important for the other opportunist politicians. I think what we've got to do is make it very clear that his kind of behavior, the dishonesty that we've seen, the leveraging of radical ideas, and whatnot, for his own purposes, doesn't pay. And so I think there's a generation of existing and up and coming political leaders who need that lesson, and they need to see it very clearly. Do you guys have a sense of how the military in aggregate views this situation? Traditionally, I have assumed, I'm sure there's polling on this, that the military has skewed Republican and has been I'm sure it was sympathetic to Trump up until a certain point. And I'm just wondering where you think we are with respect to the perception of the military around what has been happening. So based on my own experiences in the service, inevitably there's going to be reports about this army sergeant, this special operator, etc. So with a QAnon account. Or who was in the mix in the capital protest. Just the law of averages tell us that will happen. But it's important to remember a few things that our military, as it stands, which makes it uniquely around the world, is a cross section of our society, right? So you have a cross section of opinions. It skews conservative. Historically, that's where a lot of the support for the military comes from and the economic support for growth of the military. So a lot of that is understandable, but I don't think we should get distracted when those stories come up that says, okay, that's what the military thinks. I get those questions all the time. As does stand, what does the military think about that decision? Like? Well, I don't know. The military isn't a person. The military is a range of people, so you'd have to ask a lot of them to get a sense, just like you would in the general population. I think the the amazing thing about the US. Military and the most beautiful thing about it, is that it doesn't have a collective opinion. It will do what it is asked to do, and its leaders will come back. If we're talking about just normal international affairs and say, here's the risk calculus on that, here's the range of your options. Here's what it will cost, here's how long it will take. Does this meet the intended end state of our civilian elected officials? I learned the most about the relationship, and that the respect for civilian authority that the military needs to have from the senior military leaders I worked for when I was in the service. It takes you a while to get senior enough to understand there's a relationship between four star generals and admirals and civilian elected officials. Even though that elected official might be 33 years old. There's a demeanor to deferentiation to the civilian side of the Constitution, and the military would be the first to stand up and say, that's the absolute point. So it is at its best and collectively very unbiased in that view. And so I think the biggest risk is we'll get distracted by the story of the former special operator that was somewhere in the mix and take that as representative of the broad military. In recent days, there's been obvious concern around what Trump may yet do in his remaining days in office. And I think it's been reported that there was a phone call from Nancy Pelosi to someone in the Pentagon trying to seek out some assurance that the nuclear football is not quite as available to Trump as it might have been during the rest of his time as president. I wonder this is the moment that we ran into at the end of the Nixon administration when he was drinking a lot, and I forget who it was. It might have been his Secretary of State. Someone said, if you get any calls from the president, in the middle of the night about initiating a nuclear first strike on anyone, come to me first. Right. And I'm wondering what you think the posture is of the military in this last week of Trump's term with respect to any orders that might come from the White House to engage anything of substance militarily. I would say, Sam, that they are thoughtful. I would say they are always thoughtful whenever you're going to use military power. If it was something as extreme as launching nuclear weapons, they're going to be extraordinarily careful as they always are. I think that the conversation between the speaker of the House and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was no doubt substantive, but it was also made public. And I think it was made public for a reason, that people wanted to know that that conversation had occurred. And so I think that there is always a concern for a decision which might be made in haste or in anger by any leader. But I think that now we are close enough to the end of President Trump's administration that people are more thoughtful than ever. And so maybe not Donald Trump, but certainly the people around him are more thoughtful than ever. So I don't think the danger of that is one of the higher risks right now. So if you guys were advising the Biden administration, what should their priorities be in the first 100 days? Given what's happened? Let's assume the inauguration comes off without a hitch. And obviously, you know, he he's got massive challenges responding to COVID responding to the economic unraveling born of COVID dealing with an increasingly aggressive China, restoring our stature in the world with respect to foreign policy generally. He's got a lot to do. But it seems to me that there's some post mortem on this great unraveling we've experienced in recent months around the election fraud and just having half of a society believe that their government has been stolen from them. This requires some tending to. What would you advise, Sam? I'll beat the drum that I've been beating for nearly 20 years now, which I watched happen in the counterterrorism community, really under McCrystal's leadership and then generations beyond now. I worked underneath a generation of leaders who were willing. They came into a fight when it literally looked like sort of all is lost, right? We're not going to be able to beat al Qaeda. Just overwhelming odds and looking at the brink for the force. Right. And we're in a similar state right now. If I was in that incoming administration, things look pretty bleak every direction you observe. And so there was a recognition at that time in the military, we need to start doing things differently. We need to communicate in a completely different fashion with honesty, with transparency. Don't show me what the chart looks like. Don't show me case studies of how we did it in the 90s. We're going to rebuild this thing on on the fly because we're losing, because this we are in a lot of trouble. And I watched McCrystal and others put themselves at the center of that and communicate with forces, civilians, host nation allies all around the world on a 24/7 cycle for years on end. Now, I wouldn't put the president in that, but his team needs to start thinking like that. Who are the people that need to be at the table, and how do we get honest information into that mix so that we're all having a dialogue about how we solve these problems? What the president can do is enter into that mix and reintroduce ideas of honesty and competency and fundamentals of what it means to be a servant leader. That's a process plus a cultural change that was critical for us, and I think it's absolutely what is needed right now. A focused, interagency whole of government effort that breaks a lot of rules. Don't tell me you can't share in that information. Don't tell me you work for that person. We are all Americans right now, and we need to lean into that. And the president can set the tone. It's nothing if not interesting. There's a lot of blue sky if you want to reinvent civilization at this point, and we'll get to a place where we're doing things differently and better and cutting through just bad assumptions that have led us to the place where we're digging out from. So certainly no one has ever accused me of being an optimist, but I have my moments. But it will be quite a relief to get to the other side of the Trump administration and see something like a resurgence of competence and professionalism and civility and, you know, all of the all of the qualities you just you just enumerated. Chris, it's I just want to thank you both for taking the time to help educate me and my audience on the kinds of things we should be thinking about and looking for going forward. Absolutely. Our pleasure, Sam. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Great discussion, Sam. Thanks. And thanks for trying to get the message out there a bit. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, so today I'm bringing you a conversation that I originally recorded for the Waking Up app, and we released it there as a series of separate lessons a couple of weeks back. But the response has been such that I wanted to share it here on the podcast and put it outside the paywall. This seems like a better holiday message than most, as I think many of you know, Waking Up isn't just a meditation app at this point. It's really the place where I do most of my thinking about what it means to live a good life. And this conversation is about generosity and about how we should think about doing good in the world. Increasingly, I'm looking to use this podcast and the Waking Up app to do more than merely spread what I consider to be good ideas. That's their primary purpose, obviously. But I want to help solve some of the worst problems we face more directly than just talking about them. And I want to do this systematically, really thinking through what it takes to save the most lives or reduce the worst suffering or mitigate the most catastrophic risks. And to this end, I've taken the pledge over at Giving What We Can, which is the foundation on effective altruism started by the philosophers Will McCaskill and Toby Ord, both of whom have been on the podcast. And it's pledged to give a minimum of 10% of one's pretax income to the most effective charities. I've also taken the Founders Pledge, which amounts to the same thing, and I've had Waking Up become one of the first corporations to pledge a minimum of 10% of its profits to charity. And the thinking behind all of this is the subject of today's podcast. Of course, there is a bias against speaking about this sort of thing in public or even in private, right? It's often believed that it's better to practice one's generosity anonymously, because then you can be sure you're doing it for the right reasons. You're not trying to just burnish your reputation. As you'll hear in today's conversation, there are very good reasons to believe that this is just not true and that the imagined moral virtue of anonymity is something we really need to rethink. In fact, I've just learned of the knock on effects of the few times I have discussed by Giving to charity on this podcast, and they're surprisingly substantial. Just to give you a sense of it, last year I released an episode titled Knowledge and Redemption where we discussed the Barred Prison Initiative based on the PBS documentary that Lyn Novic and Ken Burns did, and Lynn was on that podcast. And at the end, I think I asked you all to consider supporting that work too. And together we donated $150,000 based on that one episode alone. I've also occasionally mentioned on the podcast that I donate each month to the against malaria foundation. And it was actually my first podcast conversation with Will McCaskill that convinced me to do that, and I do it through the charity Evaluator Givewell.org. Well, the good people at GiveWell just told me that they've received over $500,000 in donations from you guys, and they expect another $500,000 over the next year from podcast listeners who have set up their donations on a recurring basis. So that's $1 million and many lives saved just as a result of some passing comments I've made on the podcast. And then I've heard from Will McCaskill's people over at Giving What We Can, where I took their 10% pledge, which I haven't spoken about much, but it seems that hundreds of you have also taken that pledge. Again, unsolicited by me, but specifically attributing this podcast and the Waking Up app, as the reason that's hundreds of people, some of whom may be quite wealthy or will become wealthy, who have now publicly pledged to give a minimum of 10% of their pretax income to the most effective charities every year for the rest of their lives. That is awesome. So all of this inspired me to share this conversation from the Waking Up app. Again, this is a fairly structured conversation with the philosopher Will McCaskill. Some of you may remember the conversation I had with Will four years ago on the podcast. That was episode number 44, and that's a great companion to today's episode because it gets into some of the fundamental issues of ethics here. Today's conversation is much more focused on the actions we can all take to make the world better and how we should think about doing that. Will and I challenge some old ideas around Giving, and we discuss why they're really not very good ideas in the end. You'll also hear that there's still a lot of moral philosophy to be done in this area. I don't think these issues are fully worked out at all, and that's really exciting, right? There's a lot to talk about here, and there's something for moral philosophers to actually do that might really matter to the future of our species. In particular, I think there's a lot of work to be done on the ethics of wealth inequality, both globally and within the wealthiest societies themselves. And I'm sure I will do many more podcasts on this topic. I suspect that wealth inequality is producing much, if not most, of our political conflict at this point, and it certainly determines what we do with our resources. So I think it's one of the most important topics of our time. Anyway, will and I cover a lot here, including how to choose causes to support and how best to think about choosing a career so as to do the most good over the course of one's life. The question that underlies all of this really is how can we live a morally beautiful life, which is more and more what I care about and which the young Will McCaskill is certainly doing, as you will hear. Finally, I want to again recognize all of you who have made these donations and pledges, as well as the many of you who have been supporting my work these many years and also the many of you who have become subscribers to the podcast in the last year. I couldn't be doing any of these things without you, and I certainly look forward to what we're going to do next. 2021 should be an interesting year. So my deep thanks to all of you. And now I bring you Will McCaskill. I am here with Will McCaskill. Will, thanks for joining me. Again, thanks so much for having me on. So I just posted a conversation that you and I had four years ago on my podcast onto Waking Up as well, because I thought it was such a useful introduction to many of the issues we're going to talk about. And it was a different conversation because we got into very interesting questions of moral philosophy that I think we probably won't focus on here. So it just seems like a great background for the series of lessons we're now going to sketch out in a conversation. But for those who have not taken the time to listen to that just yet, maybe we should summarize your background here. Who are you, Will, and how do you come to have any opinion about altruism, generosity, what it means to live a good life? Give us your potted bio. Yeah, my potted bio. So I grew up in Glasgow, and I was always interested in two things. One was kind of ideas, and then in particular philosophy when I discovered that. And second was interested in helping people. So as a teenager, I volunteered running summer camps for children who were impoverished and had disabilities. I worked at kind of old folks home. But then it was when I came across the arguments of Peter Singer, in particular, his arguments that we have that model obligation to be giving away most of our income to help people in very poor countries simply because such a move would not be a great burden on us. It would be a financial sacrifice, but not an enormous sacrifice in terms of our quality of life, but could make an enormous difference for hundreds of people around the world. That moved me very much, but kind of being human. I didn't really do very much on the basis of those arguments for many years until I came to Oxford, met another philosopher called Toby Ord, who had actually very similar ideas and was planning to give away most of his income over the course of his life. And together we set up an organization called Giving What We Can, which encouraged people to give at least 10% of their income to those organizations they think that can do the most good. Sam, I know that you have now taken that 10% pledge, and I'm delighted that that's the case. And since then, this kind of set of ideas that were really just two very impractical philosophy of ad students kind of setting this up and not think, you know, I certainly never thought it was going to be that big a deal. I was just doing it because I thought it was morally very important. It turned out just a lot of people had had similar sets of ideas, and giving what we can acted like a bit of a lightning bard for people all around the world who were motivated to try to do good, but also to do it as effectively as possible. Because at the time we had a set of recommended charities. There was also the organization GiveWell, whose work we leaned extremely heavily on, making recommendations about what charities that they thought would do the most good and effective. Autism at the time focused on charity in particular, and in particular focused on doing good for people in extreme poverty. And since then, it's broadened out a lot. So now most people in the effect of altruism community when they're trying to do good, are doing so via their career in particular, and there's a much broader range of cause areas. So animal welfare is a big focus, and in particular and I think increasing, are issues that might potentially affect future generations in a really big way, and in particular kind of risks to the future of civilization at all that Toby talks about when he was on your podcast. And I have a factoid in my memory which I think I got from your original interview with Tim Ferris on his podcast. Am I correct in thinking that you were the youngest philosophy professor at Oxford? Yes. So the precise fact is, when I joined the faculty at Oxford, which is age 28, I'm pretty confident I was the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world at the time. Oh, nice. All right, well, no doubt you're quickly aging out of that distinction. Have you lost your record yet? Yeah, well, I'm old man at 33 years old now, and that's right. I definitely lost that a few years ago. Well, so it's great to talk to you about these things because as you know, you've been very influential on my thinking. You directly inspired me to start giving a minimum of 10% of my income to charity and also to commit waking up as a company to give a minimum of 10% of its profits to charity. But I'm very eager to have this conversation because it still seems to me there's a lot of thinking yet to do about how to approach doing good in the world. There may be some principles that you and I either disagree about, or maybe we'll agree that we just don't have good enough intuitions to have a strong opinion one way or another. But it really just seems to me to be territory that can benefit from new ideas and new intuition pumps. And there's just a lot to be sorted out here. And I think, as I said, we will have a structured conversation here which will break into a series of lessons. And so this is really an introduction to the conversation that's coming. And all of this relates specifically to this movement you started, effective Altruism. And we'll get very clear about what that means and what it may yet mean. But this does connect to deeper and broader questions like how should we think about doing good in the world in general? And what would it mean to do as much good as possible? And how do those questions connect to questions like what sort of person should I be? Or what does it mean to live a truly good life? These are questions that lie at the core of moral philosophy and at the core of any person's individual attempt to live an examined life and develop an ethical code and just form a vision of what would be a good society. I mean, we're all personally attempting to improve our lives, but we're also trying to converge on a common picture of what it would mean for us to be building a world that is making it more and more likely that humanity is moving in the right direction. We have to have a concept of what the goal is here or what a range of suitable goals might be. And we have to have a concept of when we're wandering into moral error personally and collectively. So there's a lot to talk about here and talking about the specific act of trying to help people, trying to do good in the world really sharpens up our sense of the stakes here and the opportunities. So I'm really happy to be getting into this with you. Before we get into what effective altruism is, I think we should address a basic skepticism that people have and even very rich people have, perhaps especially rich people have this. It's a skepticism about altruism itself and in particular, a skepticism about charity. And I think there are some good reasons to be skeptical about charity and at least in a in a local context. And then there's some very bad reasons. And I just want to lob you some of these reasons and we can talk about them because I would imagine you can counter this yourself. I meet some very fortunate people who have immense resources and can do a lot of good in the world who are fundamentally skeptical about giving to charity. And the bad reason here that I always encounter is something we might call the myth of the self made man. The idea that there's somehow an ethically impregnable position to notice all the ways in which you are responsible for all of your good luck, no matter how distorted this appraisal might be. You weren't born into wealth and you made it all yourself. And you don't owe anyone anything. And in fact, giving people less fortunate than yourself any of the resources you've acquired is not really helping them in the end. You want to teach people to fish, but you don't want to give them fish. There's some Iron Randian ethic of radical selfishness combined with a vision of capitalism that we're in free markets can account for every human problem simply by all of us behaving like atomized selves seeking our own happiness. It will be no surprise to people who've listened to me that I think there's something deeply flawed in this analysis. But what do you do when someone hits you with this ethical argument that they're self made and everyone should aspire to also pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. And we falsify something about the project of living a good life by even thinking in terms of altruism and charity. I think there's a few things to say here. So in the first case, the fact that you're a self made man, I mean, I do disagree with the plaintiffs. I can predict 80% of the information about your income just from your place of birth, whereas you could be the hardest working Bangladeshi in the world. But if you're born into extreme poverty in Bangladesh, it's going to be very difficult indeed to become a billionaire. So I agree with you that that's a myth. But even if we accepted that, the fact that you have rightly earned your money yourself doesn't mean that you don't have any obligations to help other people. So Peter Singer's now very famous thought experiment. You walk past a pond, it's a very shallow pond. You could easily kind of wade in as deep as you like and you can see that there's a child surrounding there. Now, perhaps it's the case that you're an entirely self made man. Perhaps it's the case that the suit that you wore, you justly bought yourself, but that seems neither here nor there with respect to whether you ought to try and wade in and save this child who might be drowning. And I think that's just quite an intuitive position, in fact, this ideal of self actualization, of kind of being the best version of yourself that you can be, which is the kind of admirable version of this otherwise sometimes quite dark perspective on the world. I think that is like part of being a self actualized, authentically living person is living up to your ideals and principles. And for most people in the world, you actually want to be a helpful, altruistic person. Acting in that way is acting in accordance with your deepest values. That is acting an authentic and a self actualized life. And then just on the second point is about whether, well, maybe chavety gets in the way. Maybe it's actually harmful because it makes people rely on bailouts. Well, here we've got to just think about there's market failure where in the case of public goods or externalities markets don't do what they ought to do. And perhaps you want government to step in, provide police or defense and sleep lights or taxes against climate change. And even the most kind of hardcore libertarian flea market proponent should accept that's a good thing to do sometimes. But then there's also cases of democratic failure too. So what if the potential people are not protected by functioning democratic governments? That's true for people in poor countries. That's true for nonhuman animals. That's true for people who are yet to be born, people who don't have a vote. The future generations are disenfranchised, so we shouldn't expect markets or government to be taking appropriate care of those individuals who are disenfranchised by both the market and by even democratic institutions. And so what else is there apart from philanthropy? Yeah. Yeah. So I've spoken a lot about the myth of the self made man. Whenever I criticize the notion of free will, it's just obvious that however self made you are, you didn't create the tools by which you made yourself. Right? So if you are incredibly intelligent or have an immense capacity for effort, you didn't create any of that about yourself. Obviously. You didn't pick your parents. You didn't pick your genes, you didn't pick the environmental influences that determined every subsequent state of your brain. You didn't create yourself. You won some sort of lottery there. But as will you point out, where you were born also was a major variable in your success. Very likely you didn't create the good luck not to be born in the middle of a civil war in a place like Congo or Syria or anywhere else which would be hostile to many of the things you now take for granted. So there's something frankly obscene about not being sensitive to those disparities. And as you point out, living a good life and being the sort of person you are right to want to be has to entail some basic awareness of those facts and a compassionate impulse to make life better for people who are much less fortunate than we are. It's just if your vision of who you want to be doesn't include being connected to the rest of humanity and having compassion be part of the operating system that orients you toward the shocking suffering of other people, even when it becomes proximate, even when you're walking past Singer's shallow pond and you see someone drowning. We have a word for that orientation, and it's sociopathy or psychopathy. It's a false ethic to be so inured to the suffering of other people that you can just decide to close your accounts without even having to pay attention to it. And all under the rubric of being self made. But none of this is to deny that in many cases, things are better accomplished by business than by charity, right? Or by government than by charity. We're not denying any of that. I happen to think that building electric cars that people actually want to drive may be the biggest contribution to fighting climate change, or certainly one of them, and maybe better than many environmental charities are managed to muster. There are different levers to pull here to affect change in the world. But what also can't be denied is that there are cases where giving some of our resources to people or to causes that need them more than we do, is the very essence of what it means to do good in the world. That can't be disputed. And Singer's Shallow Pond sharpens it up with a cartoon example. But it's really not such a cartoon when you think about the world we're living in and how much information we now have and how much agency we now have to affect the lives of other people. I mean, we're not isolated the way people were 200 years ago. And it is uncontroversial to say that anyone who would walk past a pond and decline to save a drowning child out of concern for his new shoes or his new suit, that person is a moral monster. And none of us want to be that sort of person. And what's more, we're right to not want to be that sort of person. But given our interconnectedness and given how much information we now have about the disparities in luck in this world, we have to recognize that though we're conditioned to act as though people at a distance from us both in space and in time, matter less than people who are near at hand. If it was ever morally defensible, it's becoming less defensible because the distance is shrinking. We simply have too much information. So there's just so many ponds that are in view right now. And a response to that is, I think, morally important. But in our last conversation, Will, you made a distinction that I think is very significant and it provides a much better framing for thinking about doing good. And it was a distinction between obligation and opportunity. The obligation is Singer's Shallow Pond argument. You see a child drowning, you really do have a moral obligation to save that child, or there's just no way to maintain your sense that you're a good person if you don't. And then he forces us to recognize that really we stand in that same relation to many other causes, no matter how distant we imagine them to be. But you favor the opportunity framing of racing in to save children from a burning house. Imagine how good you would feel doing that successfully. So let's just put that into play here because I think it's a better way to think about this whole project. Yeah, exactly. So as I was suggesting earlier, just for most people around the world, certainly in rich countries, if you look at your own values well, one of those values is being a good person. And you can see this if you think about examples. Like you see a building on fire, there's a young girl kind of at the window, and you kick the door down and you run in and you rescue that child. That moment would stay with you for the entire life. You would reflect on that in your elderly years and think, wow, I actually really did something that was pretty cool. It's worth lingering there because everyone listening to us knows down to their toes, that that would be, if not the defining moment in their life, in the top five. There's just no way that wouldn't be one of the most satisfying experiences. You could live to be 150 years old and that would still be in the top five most satisfying experiences of your life. And given what you're about to say, it's amazing to consider that and how opaque this is to most of us most of the time when we think about the opportunities to do good in the world. Exactly. And yeah, I mean, continuing this, imagine if you did a similar thing kind of several times. So one week you saved someone from a burning building. The next week you saved someone from drowning. The month after that you saw someone having a heart attack and you performed CPR and saved their life too. You'd think, wow, this is a really special life that I'm living. But the truth is that we have that opportunity to be as much of a model hero, in fact, much more of a model hero every single year of our life. And we can do that just by targeting our donations to the most effective charities to help those people who are poorest in the world. We could do that too, if you wanted to choose a career that's going to have a really big impact on the lives of others. And so it seems very unintuitive because we're in a very unusual place in the world. It's only over the last couple of hundred years. There's such a wild discrepancy between rich countries and poor countries where people in rich countries have a hundred times the income of the poorest people in the world and where we have the technology to be able to change. The lives of people on other sides of the world, let alone the kind of technologies to impedor the entire future of the human race, such as through nuclear weapons or climate change. And so our model instincts are just not attuned to that at all. They are just not sensitive to the sheer scale of what an individual is able to achieve if he or she is trying to make a really positive difference in the world. And so when we look at the history, look at the heroes, like, think about William Wilberforce of Fedik Douglas or the famous abolitionists people who kind of campaigned for the end of slavery and the amount of good they did, or either of these kind of model leaders, and think, wow, these are like really special people because of the amount they accomplished. I actually think that's just attainable for many, many people around the world. Perhaps you're not quite going to be someone who can do as much as contributing to the abolition of slavery, but you are someone who can potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives or make a very significant difference to the entire course of the future to come. Well, that's a great place to start. So now we will get into the details. Okay, let's get into effective altruism per se. How do you define it at this point? So the way I define effective altruism is that it's about using evidence and careful reasoning to try to figure out how to do as much good as possible and then taking action on that basis. And the real focus is on the most good. And that's so important because people don't appreciate just how great the difference and impact between different organizations are. When we've surveyed people, they seem to think that the best organizations are maybe 50% better than typical organizations like charities. But that's not really the way of things. Instead, it's that the best is more like hundreds or thousands of times better than a typical organization. And we just see this across the board when comparing charities, when comparing different sorts of actions. So for global health, you will save hundreds of times as many lives by focusing on antimalarial bed nets and distributing them than focusing on cancer treatment. In the case of improving the lives of animals and factory farms, you'll help thousands of times more animals by focusing on factory farms than if you decide to help animals by focusing on pet shelters. If you look at kind of risks to the future of civilization, man made risks like novel pandemics are plausibly just a thousand of times greater than magnitude than natural risks like asteroids that we might be more familiar with. And that just means that focusing not just on doing some amount of good, but doing the very best, is just it's so important because it's easy. Yeah, it's easy just not to think about how wild this fact is. So, like, imagine if this were true with consumer goods. So at one store you want a beer. At one store the beer costs $100, another it costs $0.10. That would just be completely mad. But that's the way things are in the world of trying to do good. It's like a 99.9% off sale or 100,000% exit fee. By focusing on these best organizations, it's just the best deal you'll ever see in your life. And that's why it's so important for us to highlight this. Okay, so I summarize effective altruism for myself now, along these lines, this is a working definition, but it captures a few of the areas of focus and the difference between solving problems with money and solving problems with your time or your choice of career in. Your response to my question, you illustrated a few different areas of focus. So you could be talking about the poorest people in the world, but you could also be talking about long term risk to all of humanity. So the way I'm thinking about it now is that it's the question of using our time and or money to do one or more of the following things to save the most number of lives, to reduce the most suffering, or to mitigate the worst risks of future death and suffering. So then the question of effectiveness is, as you point out, there's so many different levels of competence and clarity around goals. There may be very effective charities that are targeting the wrong goals, and there are ineffective charities targeting the right ones. And this does lend some credence to the skepticism about charity itself that I referenced earlier. And there's one example here which does a lot of work in illustrating the problem. And this is something that you discuss in your book, Doing Good Better, which I recommend that people read. But remind me about the ill fated Play pump. Yeah, so the now infamous Play Pump was a program that I got a lot of media coverage in. The even won a World Bank development marketplace award. And the idea was identifying a true problem that many villages in SubSaharan Africa do not have access to clean drinking water. And its idea was to install kind of chiltern's merry go round, one of the roundabouts, the things you push and then jump on and spin around. And that would harness the power of children's play in order to provide clean water for the world. So by pushing on this merry go round, you would pump up water from the ground and it would act like a hand pump, providing clean water for the village. And so people loved this idea. The media loved it, said, you know, providing clean water, this child's play or that's the magic van about, they love to have pun on it. So it was a you know, it was a real hit. But the issue was that it was really a disaster, this development intervention. So none of the local communities were consulted about whether they wanted a pump. They liked the much cheaper, more productive, easier to use Zimbabwe hand pumps that were sometimes, in fact, replaced by these play pumps. And moreover, in fact, the Play pumps were sufficiently inefficient that one journalist estimated that children would have to play on the pump 25 hours per day in order to provide enough water for the local community. But obviously, children don't want to play on this merry go round all the time. And so it would be left often to the elderly women of the village to push this brightly colored Play pump round and round. One of the problems was that it didn't actually function like a merry go round, where it would gather momentum and keep spinning it actually was just work to push, right? Well, exactly. You need the point of a children's merry go round is you push it and then you spin, and if it's good, it's very welleased, it spins feely, but you need to be providing energy into the system in order to pump water up from the ground and so it wouldn't spin feely in the same way. It was enormous amounts of work. Children would find it very tiring. So it was just a fundamental misconception about engineering to deliver this pump in the first place. Yeah, absolutely. And then there's just like why would you think you can just go in and replace something that has already been quite, well, optimized to the needs of the local people? Seems quite unlikely. Like, if this was such a good idea, good ask question. Why wasn't it already invented? Why wasn't it already popular? There's not a compelling story about, well, it's a public good or something. There's a reason why you wouldn't have already been wouldn't have already been developed. And that's, you know, let alone the fact that the main issue in terms of water scarcity for people in the poorest countries is access to clean water rather than access to water. And so instead, organizations like Dispensers for Safe water, which install clothing at the point of source. So at these hand pumps, clothing dispensers that they can easily put into the jelly cans that they use to carry water that sanitizes the water. These are much more effective because that's really the issue is dirty water rather than access to water most of the time. Okay, so this just functions as a clear example of the kinds of things that can happen when the story is better than the reality of a charity. And if I recall correctly, there were celebrities that got behind this and they raised it had to be tens of millions of dollars for the play pump. Even after the fault in the very concept was revealed, they persisted. I mean, they kind of got locked in to this project and I can't imagine it persists to this day, but they kept doubling down in the face of the obvious reasons to abandon this project. This included kids getting injured on these things and kids having to be paid to run them, and it was a disaster any way you look at it. So this is the kind of thing that happens in various charitable enterprises and this is the kind of thing that if you're going to be effective as an altruist, you want to avoid. Yeah, absolutely. And just on the weather, they still continue. So I haven't checked in the last few years, but a few years ago when I did, they were still going and they were funded mainly by corporations like Colgate palmolive, and obviously in a much diminished capacity because many of these failures were brought to light. And that was a good part of the story. But what it does illustrate is a difference between the world of nonprofits and the business world, where in the business world, if you make a really bad product, then well, at least if the market is functioning well, then the company will go out of business won't be able to sell it. Because the beneficiaries of the product are also the people paying for it. But in the case of nonprofits is very different. The beneficiaries are different from the people paying for the goods. And so there's a disconnect between how well can you fund these and how good is the program that you're implementing? And so the sad fact is that bad charities don't die. Not nearly enough, actually. That brings me to a question about perverse incentives here that I do think animates the more intelligent skepticism. And it is on precisely this point that charities, good and bad, can be incentivized to merely keep going. Just imagine a charity that solves its problem. It should be that if you're trying to, let's say, eradicate malaria, you raise hundreds of millions of dollars. To that end, what happens to your charity when you actually eradicate malaria? We're obviously not in that position with respect to malaria, unfortunately. But there are many problems where you can see that charities are never incentivized to acknowledge that significant progress has been made. And the progress is such that it calls into question whether this charity should exist for much longer. And there may be some, but I'm unaware of charities who are explicit about their aspiration to put themselves out of business because they're so effective. Yeah, so I have a great example of this going along. So one charity I know of is called Scott's Care, and it was set up in the 17th century after the personal union of England and Scotland. And there were many Scots who migrated to London, and we were the poor, we were the indigenous in London. And so it makes sense for there to be a nonprofit helping make sure that poor Scots had a livelihood, were able to feed themselves and so on. Is it the case that in the 21st century, poor Scots in London is the biggest global problem? No, it's not. Nonetheless, Scott's Care continues to this day, over 300 years later. Are there examples of charities that explicitly would want to put themselves out of business? I mean, giving what we can, which you've joined, is one our ideal scenario is a situation where the idea that you would join a community because you're donating 10% is just weird wild. Like, if you become vegetarian, very rare that you join the kind of a vegetarian society. Or if you decide not to be a racist or decide not to be a liar, it's not like you join the no liars society or the no racist society. And so that is what we're aiming for, is a world where it's just so utterly common sense that if you're born into a rich country, you should use a significant proportion of your resources to try and help other people. Impartially considered that the idea of needing a community, you're needing to be part of this kind of club open order group of people that just wouldn't even cross your mind. So the day that giving what we can is not needed is a very happy day from my perspective. So let's talk about any misconceptions that people might have about effective altruism because the truth is I've had some myself even having prepared to have conversations with you and your colleague Toby Ord. He's also been on the podcast. My first notion of effective altruism was that very much inspired by Peter Singer's Shallow Pond, that it really was just a matter of focusing on the poorest of the poor in the developing world, almost by definition. And that's kind of the long and the short of it. And you're giving as much as you possibly can sacrifice, but the minimum bar would be 10% of your income. What doesn't that capture about effective altruism? Yeah, thanks for bringing that up because it is a challenge we faced that the ideas that spread are the most memetic with respect to effective altruism are not necessarily those that most accurately capture where the movement is, especially today. So as you say, many people think that effective altruism is just about earning as much money as possible to give to give well recommended global health and development charities. But I think there's at least three ways in which that misconstrues things. One is the fact that there are just a wide variety of causes that we focus on now. And in fact, among the kind of most engaged people in effective altruism, the biggest focus now is making sure is future generations and making sure that things go well for the very many future generations to come, such as by focusing on existential risks that Toby talks about, like man made pandemics, like AI. Animal welfare is another cause area. It's not definitely by no means the majority focus but is a significant minority focus as well. And there's just lots of people trying to get better evidence and understanding of these issues and a variety of other issues too. So voting the forum is something that I have funded to an extent and champion to an extent. I'm really interested in more people working on the risk of war over the coming century. And then secondly, there are as well as donating which is a very accessible and important way of doing good. There's just a lot of in fact a large majority of people within the effective altruism community are trying to make a difference not primarily via their donations, though often they do donate too, but primarily through their career choice by working in areas like research, policy, activism and then just as a kind of framing in general. We just really don't think of effects of altruism as a set of recommendations, but rather like a research project and methodology. So it's more like aspiring towards the Scientific Revolution than any particular theory. And what we're really trying to do is to do for the pursuit of good what the Scientific Revolution did for the pursuit of truth. It's an ambitious goal, but trying to make the pursuit of good this more rigorous, more scientific edemporise. And for that reason, we don't see ourselves as this kind of set of claims, but rather as a living, breathing, and evolving set of ideas. Yes, I think it's useful to distinguish at least two levels here. One is the specific question of whether an individual cause or an individual charity is a good one. And, you know, but by what metric would you even make that judgment? And how do we rank order our priorities? And all of that is getting into the weeds of just what we should do with our resources. And obviously, that has to be done. And I think the jury is very much out on many of those questions, and I want to get into those details going forward here. But the profound effect that your work has had on me thus far arrives at this other level of just the stark recognition that I want to do good in the world by default, and I want to engineer my life such that that happens whether I'm inspired or not. The crucial distinction for me has been to see that there's the good feeling we get from philanthropy and doing good, and then there's the actual results in the world. And those two things are only loosely coupled. This is one of the worst things about us that we need to navigate around or at least be aware of as we live our lives. We human beings tend not to be the most disturbed by the most harmful things we do, and we tend not to be the most gratified by the most beneficial things we do, and we tend not to be the most frightened by the most dangerous risks we run. Right? And so it's just we're very easily distracted by good stories and and other bright, shining objects, and the framing of a problem radically changes our perception of it. So the effect, you know, when when you came on my podcast four years ago was for me to just realize, okay, well, now we're talking about Give Wells most effective charities, and the Against Malaria Foundations is at the top. I recognize in myself that I'm just not very excited about malaria or bed nets. The problem isn't the sexiest for me. The remedy isn't the sexiest for me. And yet I rationally understand that if I want to save human lives, this is the dollar for dollar, the cheapest way to save a human life. So the the epiphany for me is, I just want to automate this. And you just give, you know, every month to this charity without having to think about it. And so, you know, that that is gratifying to me to some degree. But the truth is, I almost never think about malaria or the Against Malaria Foundation or anything related to this project. And I'm doing the good anyway because I just decided to not rely on my moral intuitions day to day and my desire to rid the world of malaria. I just decided to automate it. The recognition that there's a difference between committing in a way that really takes it offline so that you no longer have to keep being your better self. On that topic, every day of the week is just wiser and more effective to decide in your clearest moment of deliberation what you want to do and then just to build the structure to actually do that thing. And that's just one of several distinctions that you have brought into my understanding of how to do good. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've got to recognize that we are these fallible, imperfect features. Donating is much like paying your pension or something, or something you might think, however we ought to do, but it's just hard to get motivated by. And so we need to exploit our own irrationality. And I think that comes in two stages. First, like building up the initial motivation. You can sustain that for perhaps feeling of moral outrage or just a real kind of yearning to start to do something. You can get that. So in my own case, when I was deciding how much should I commit to to give away? Over the course of my life, I just looked up images of children suffering from horrific topical diseases. And that really stayed with me, kind of gave me that initial motivation. Or I still get that if I read about the many close calls we had where we almost had a nuclear holocaust for the course of the 20th century, or if I learn more history and think about what the world would have been like if the Nazis had won the Second World War and created this global totalitarian state. There's all fiction, like most recently leading 1984 and again, this kind of ways of just thinking just how bad and different the world could be that can really create the sense of moral urgency. Or just on the news too, the kind of moral outrages we see all the time. And then the second is how we direct that. And so, in your own case, just saying, yes, every time I have a podcast, I donate three and a half, it saves a life. Fairly good way of doing that. Similarly, you can have a system where every time a paycheck comes in, 10% of it just it doesn't even enter your bank account. It just goes to, or at least immediately leaves to go to some effective charity that you've carefully thought about. And there's other hacks too. So public commitments are a really big thing now. I think there's no way I'm backing out of my altruism now. Too much of my identity is wrapped up in that now. So even if someone offered me, you know, a million pounds and I could skip town, you know, I wouldn't want to do it. It's part of who I am. It's part of my social relationships. And that's, you know yeah, that's fairly power. That's very powerful too. Actually, in a coming chapter here, I want to push back a little bit on how you are personally approaching giving, because I think I have some rival intuitions here. I want to see how they survive contact with your sense of how you should live. There's actually a kind of related point here where I'm wondering when we think of causes that meet the test of effective altruism, they still seem to be weighted toward some obvious extremes, right? Like, when you look at the value of a marginal dollar in sub Saharan Africa or Bangladesh, you get so much more of a lift in human well being for your money than you do or than you seem to in a place like the United States or the UK. That by default, you generally have an argument for doing good elsewhere rather than locally. But I'm wondering if this breaks down for a few reasons. So, I mean, just take an example, like the problem of homelessness in San Francisco right now, leaving aside the fact that we don't seem to know what to do about homelessness, it appears to be a very hard problem to solve. You can't just build shelters for the mentally ill and substance abusers and call it a day, right? I mean, they they quickly find that even they don't want to be in those shelters and, you know, they're back out on the streets. And so you have to figure out what services you're going to provide. And there's all kinds of bad incentives and moral hazards here. That when you're the one city that does it well, then you're the city that's attracting the world's homeless. But let's just assume, for the sake of argument, that we knew how to spend money so that we could solve this problem. Would solving the problem of homelessness in San Francisco stand a chance of rising to the near the top of our priorities, in your view? Yeah, so it would all just depend on how, like, the costs to save homelessness and how that compared with our other opportunities. So, in general, it's going to be the case that the very best opportunities in order to improve lives are going to be in the poorest countries because the very best ways of helping others have not yet been taken. So malaria is still life. It was wiped out in the US. And certainly by the early 20th century. It's an easy problem to solve. It's fairly cheap. And when we look at rich countries, the problems that are still left are the comparatively harder ones to solve, for whatever reason. So, like in the case of homelessness, I'm not sure about the original source of this fact, but I have been told that for those who haven't ever lived in the Bay Area, the problem of homelessness is horrific there. There's just people with severe mental health issues, clear substance abuse, just like everywhere on the street. It's so prevalent. It just amazes me that one of the richest countries in the world, in one of the richest places within that country, is unable to solve this problem. But I believe at least that in terms of funding at the local level, there's about $50,000 spent per homeless person in the Bay Area. And what this suggests is that the problem is not to do with a lack of finances. And so if you're we're going to contribute more money there, it's unlikely to make an additional reason. Perhaps it's some perverse incentives effect, perhaps it's government bureaucracy, perhaps it's some sort of legislation, I don't know. It's not an issue I know enough about. But precisely because the US of Soviet, the San Francisco Bay Area Soviet, is that if this was something where we could turn money into solution to the problem, it would more than likely it probably would have happened already. But that's not to say it will never find issues in rich countries where you can do an enormous amount of good. So open philanthropy, which is kind of a core effective altruist foundation, one of its programme areas is criminal justice reform that it started, I believe, about five years ago. And it really did think that the benefits to Americans that it could provide by funding changes to legislation to reduce the absurd rates of over incarceration in the US, where for context, the US incarcerates five times as many people as the UK does on a per person basis. And there's a lot of evidence suggesting you could reduce that very significantly without changing rates of crime. It seemed to be comparable to actually the best interventions in the poorest countries. Of course, this has now become an even more wellfocused issue. So I believe that they're finding it harder to now make a difference by funding organizations that wouldn't have otherwise be funded. But this is at least one example where you can get things that come up that just, for whatever reason, have not yet been funded. It's kind of new opportunities where you can do as much good. It's just that I think they're going to be comparatively much harder to find. Yeah, I think that this gets complicated for me. When you look at just what we're going to target as a reduction in suffering, it's very easy to count dead people, right? So if we're just talking about saving lives, that's a pretty easy thing to calculate. If we can save more lives in country X over country Y, well, then that seems like it's a net good to be spending our dollars in country X. But when you think about human suffering, and when you think about how so much of it is comparative, like, the despair of being someone who has fallen through the cracks in a city like San Francisco could well be much worse. I don't know what data we have on this, but there's certainly a fair amount of anecdotal testimony that poor people in a country like Bangladesh. While it's obviously terrible to be poor in Bangladesh, and there are many reasons to want to solve that problem, and by comparison, when you look at homeless people on the streets of San Francisco, they're not nearly as poor as the poorest people in Bangladesh, of course, and nor are they politically oppressed in the same way. By global standards, they're barely oppressed at all. But it wouldn't surprise me if we could do a complete psychological evaluation or just trade places with people in each condition. We would discover that the suffering of a person who is living in one of the richest cities in the world and is homeless and drug addicted and mentally ill, or to pick off that menu of despair, is actually the worst suffering on Earth. And again, we just have to stipulate that we could solve this problem dollar for dollar in a way that we admit that we don't know how to at the moment. It seems like just tracking the GDP in each place and the amount of money it would take to deliver a meal or get someone clothing, or get someone shelter and the power of the marginal dollar calculation doesn't necessarily capture the deeper facts of the case, or at least that's my concern. So I'd actually agree with you on the question of take someone who they're mentally unwell, they have drug addictions, they're homeless in the San Francisco Bay Area, how bad is their day? And then take someone living in extreme poverty in India or sub Saharan Africa. How bad is their typical day? Yeah, I wouldn't want to make a claim that homeless person in the US has a better life than the extreme poor. You know, I think it's it's not so hard to just hit a box bottom in terms of human suffering. And I do just think that the homeless in the Bay Area just seem to have really terrible lives. And so the question in terms of the difference of how promising it is as a cause is much to do much more to do with this question of whether the low hanging flute has already been taken where, you know, just think about the most sick you've ever been and how horrible that was. And imagine and now think about that for months. Having malaria, for example, and that you could have avoided that for a few dollars. That's like an incredible fact. And that's where the real difference is, I think, is in kind of the cost to solve a problem rather than necessarily like the kind of per person suffering because while rich countries are in general happier than poorer countries the worst off people, especially in the US which has such a high variance in life outcomes yeah. The lives of the worst off people can easily be much the same. Yes. I guess there's some other concerns here that I have which and this speaks to a deeper problem with consequentialism which is our orientation here, not exclusively. And people can mean many things by that term but there's just a problem in how you keep score because obviously there are bad things that can happen which have massive silver linings, right. Which have good consequences in the end. And there are apparently good things that happen that actually have bad consequences elsewhere or in the fullness of time. And it's hard to know when you can actually know that. You can assess what is true, the net, how you get to the bottom line of the consequences of any actions. But when I think about the knock on effects of letting a place like San Francisco become a slum, effectively, right? You just think of like the exodus in Tech from California at this moment. I don't know how deep or sustained it will be but I've lost count of the number of people in Silicon Valley who I've heard are leaving California at this point. And the homelessness in San Francisco is very high on the list of reasons why that strikes me as a bad outcome that has far reaching significance for society. And again, this is the kind of thing that's not captured by just counting bodies or just looking at how cheap it is to buy bed nets. And I'm sort of struggling to find a way of framing this that is fundamentally different from Singer's shallow pond that allows for some of the moral intuitions that I think many people have here which is that there's an intrinsic good in having a civilization that is producing the most abundance possible. I mean, we want a highly technological, creative, beautiful civilization. We want cleaning cities with beautiful architecture. We want institutions that are massively well funded producing cures for diseases rather than just things like bed nets. Right? And we want beautiful art. I think there are things we're right to want that are only compatible with the accumulation of wealth in certain respects. One framing, I mean, from Singer's framing those intuitions are just wrong. Or at least they're premature. Right. We have to say of the last child in the last pond before we can think about funding the Metropolitan Museum of Art on some level. And many people are allergic to that intuition for reasons that I understand. And I'm not sure that I can defeat Singer's argument here. But I have this image that essentially we have a lifeboat problem, right? You and I are in the boat, we're safe. And then the question is how many people can. We pull in to the boat and save as well. And as with any lifeboat, there's a problem of capacity. We can't save everyone all at once, but we can save many more people than we've saved thus far. But the thing is, we have a fancy lifeboat, right? Civilization itself is a fancy lifeboat. And there are people drowning and they're obviously drowning and we're saving some of them. And you and I are now arguing that we can save many, many more and we should save many, many more. And anyone listening to us is lucky to be safely in this lifeboat with us. And the boat is not as crowded as it might be, but we do have finite resources at any moment. And the truth is, because it's a fancy lifeboat, we are spending some of those resources on things other than reaching over the side and pulling in the next drowning person. So there's a bar that serves very good drinks and we've got a good internet connection so we can stream movies. And while this may seem perverse, again, if you extrapolate from here, you realize that I'm talking about civilization, which is a fancy lifeboat. And there's obviously an argument for spending a lot of time and a lot of money saving people and pulling them in. But I think there's also an argument for making the lifeboat better and better, so that we have more smart, creative people incentivized to spend some time at the edge, pulling people in with better tools, tools that they only could have made had they spent time elsewhere in the boat making those tools. And this moves to the larger topic of just how we envision building a good society, even while there are there are moral emergencies right now somewhere that we need to figure out how to respond to. Yeah. So this is crucially important set of questions. So the focus on knock on effects is fairly important. So when you again, let's just take the example of saving a life. You don't just save a life because that person goes on and does stuff. They make the country a richer. Perhaps they go and have kids, perhaps they will emit, CO2 that's a negative consequence. They'll innovate, they'll invent things, maybe they look at the art, there's this huge slam, basically from now until the end of time, of consequences of you doing this thing. And it's quite plausible that the knock on effects, though much harder to predict, are much bigger effects than the short term effects, the benefits of the person whose life you saved or who you've benefited. In the case of homelessness in the Bay Area versus extreme poverty in a poor country, I'd want to say that if we're looking at knock on effects of one, we want to do the same for both. So one thing I worry about over the course of the coming decades, but also even years, is possibility of a war between India and Pakistan. But it's a factor of which democratic countries seem to not to go to war with each other. So one knock on effect of saving lives or helping development in India is perhaps we get to that point where India is rich enough that it's not going to want to go to war because the cost benefit doesn't pay out in the same way. That would be another kind of potential good knock on effect. And that's not to say that the knock on effects favor the extreme poverty intervention compared to the homelessness, it's just that there's so many of them it's very very hard to understand how these play out. And I think actually you then mentioned, well, we want to achieve some of the great things. So we want to achieve the kind of highest apogees of art of development. I mean a personal thing I'm sad that I will never get to see is the point in time where we just truly understand science, where we have actually figured out the fundamental laws, especially the fundamental physical laws, but also just great experiences too. People having peaks of happiness that put the very greatest achievements of the pleasant day just and the very greatest peaks of joy and ecstasy of the present day just as basically almost, you know, insignificant in comparison. That's something that really I do think is important. But I think for all of those things, once you're then starting to take that seriously and take knock on effect seriously, that's the sort of reasoning that leads you to start thinking about what I call long termism, which is the idea that the most important aspect of our actions is the impact we have over the very long run and will make us want to prioritize things like ensuring we don't have some truly massive catastrophe as a result of a nuclear war or a manmade pandemic that could derail this process of continued economic and technological growth that we seem to be undergoing or could make us want to avoid certain kind of just fairly bad value states like the lock in of a global totalitarian regime. Another thing that I'm particularly worried about in terms of the future of humanity or perhaps it is just that we're worried that technological and economic growth will slow down and what we want to do is spur continued innovation into the future. And I think there actually are just really good arguments for that. But I think I would be surprised if that is what your aim is. The best way of doing that goes via some boots such as focusing on homelessness in the Bay Area rather than find that kind of aim at those ends more directly. Okay, well I think we're going to return to this concept of the fancy lifeboat at some point because I do want to talk about your personal implementation of effective altruism in a subsequent lesson. But for the moment, let's get into the details of how we think about choosing a cause in the next chapter. Okay. So how do we think about choosing specific causes? I've had my own adventures and misadventures with this since I took your pledge. Before we get into the specifics, I just want to point out a really wonderful effect on my psychology that is, I mean, I've always been, I think, by real world standards, fairly charitable. So giving to organizations that inspire me or who I think which I think are doing good work is not a foreign experience for me. But since connecting with you and now since taking the pledge, I'm now aggressively charitable. And what this has done to my brain is that there is a pure pleasure in doing this, and there's a kind of virtuous greed to help that gets kindled, and rather than seeing it as an obligation, it really feels like an opportunity. I mean, just you want to run into that building and save the girl at the window. Absolutely. But across the street there's a boy at the window, and you want to run in over there too. And so this is actually a basis for psychological well being. I mean, it makes me happy to put my attention in this direction. It's the antithesis of feeling like an onerous obligation. So anyway, I'm increasingly sensitive to causes that catch my eye and I want to support, but I'm aware that I am a malfunctioning robot with respect to my own moral compass. As I said, I know that I'm not as excited about bed nets to stave off malaria as I should be, and I'm giving to that cause nonetheless, because I just recognize that the analysis is almost certainly sound there. But for me, what's interesting here is when I think about giving to a cause that really doesn't quite meet the test, well, that then achieves the status for me of a kind of guilty pleasure. I feel a little guilty that I gave that much money to the homeless charity, because Will just told me that that's not going to meet the test. So okay. That's going to have to be above and beyond the 10% I pledged to the most effective charities. And so just having to differentiate the charitable donations that meet the test and those that don't is an interesting project psychologically. I don't know. It's just a very different territory than I've ever been with respect to philanthropy. But so this raises the issue. One of these charities is newly formed, right? So it does not yet have a long track record. I happen to know the people who are some of the people who created it. How could you fund a new organization with all these other established organizations that have track records that you can assess competing for your attention? First thing I want to say is just, does this count towards the pledge? And one thing I definitely want to disabuse people of the notion of is that we think of ourselves as the authority of like, what is effective? These are our best guesses. We've give well or other organizations have put enormous amounts of research into this, but there's still estimates, there's plenty of things you can kind of disagree with. And it's actually quite exciting often to have someone come in and start disagreeing with us because maybe we're wrong and that's great. We can change our mind and have better beliefs. And the second thing is that early stage charities absolutely can compete with charities with a more established stock record in just the same way as if you think about financial investment, investing in bonds or the stock market is a way of making a return, but so is investing in startups. And if you had the view that you should never invest in startups, then that would definitely be a mistake. And actually quite a significant proportion of givewell's expenditure each year is on early stage nonprofits that have the potential in the future to become top recommended charities. And so a set of questions that I would ask for any organization I'm looking at is what's the cause that is focused on what's the program that it's implementing and then who are the people who are kind of running that program? But the kind of background is that there's just some things we know do enormous amounts of good and have this enormous amount of evidence for them. And so I feel like we want to be focusing on things where either there's like very promising evidence and we could potentially get more, or it's something where in the nature of the beast, we cannot get very high quality evidence. But we have good compelling arguments for thinking that this might be super important. So funding clean energy innovation, funding new developments in carbon capture and storage or nuclear power or something, it's not like you can do a randomized controlled trial on that. But I think there's good kind of theoretical arguments for thinking that might be an extremely good way of combating climate change. It's worth bearing in mind that like saying something there's the very best thing you can do with your money is an extremely high bar. So if there's tens of thousands of possible organizations, they can only be one or two that have the biggest bang for the buck. All right, well, it sounds like I'm opening a Guilty Pleasures fund to run alongside the Waking Up Foundation. I'm very glad that they're pleasures. I'm glad that you are sufficiently motivated. It's a very good instinct that you find out about these problems in the world which are really bad and are motivated to want to help them. And so I'm really glad you think of them as pleasures. I don't think you should be beating yourself up, even if it doesn't seem like the very most optimal thing. Yeah. No, I'm not. In fact, I have an even guiltier pleasure to report, which at the time I did it, this is not through a charity. This is just a personal gift. And this does connect back to just the kind of lives we want to live and how that informs this whole conversation. I remember I was listening to the New York Times daily podcast, and this was when the COVID Pandemic was really peaking in the US. And everything seemed to be in free fall. They profiled a couple who had a restaurant in I think it was in New Orleans, and they have an autistic child. And everyone knows that restaurants were among the first businesses crushed by the Pandemic for obvious reasons. And it was just a very affecting portrait of this family trying to figure out how they were going to survive and get their child to help. She I think it was a girl needed. So it was exactly the little girl fell down the well sort of story compared to the genocide that no one can pay attention to because genocides are just boring. And so I was completely aware of the dynamics of this. Helping these people could not survive comparison with just simply buying yet more bed nets. And yet the truth is I really wanted to help these people, right? So, you know, just sent them money out of the blue. And it feels like an orientation that there are two things here that can arise to the defense of this kind of behavior. It feels like an orientation that I want to support in myself because it does seem like a truly virtuous source of mental pleasure. I mean, it's better than almost anything else I do, spending money selfishly and psychologically. But it's both born of a felt connection and it kind of ramifies that connection. And there's something about just honoring that bug in my moral hardware rather than merely avoiding it. That seems like it's leading to just finding greater happiness in helping people in general in the most effective ways, in middling effective ways. Feeling what I felt doing that is part of why I'm talking to you now, trying to truly get my philanthropic house in order, right? So it sort of seems all of a piece here. And I do think we need to figure out how to leverage the salience of connection to other people and the pleasure of doing good. And if we lose sight of that, if we just keep saying that you can spend $2,000 here, which is better than spending $3,000 over there, completely disregarding the experience people are having, engaging with the suffering of others, I feel like something is lost. And I guess there's another variable I would throw in here is this wasn't an example of this. This wasn't a local problem I was helping to solve. But had it been a local problem, had I been offered the opportunity to help my neighbor at greater than rational expense, that might have been the right thing to do. I mean, again, it's falling into the guilty pleasure bin here compared to the absolutely optimized, most effective way of relieving suffering. But I don't know, I just feel like there's something lost if we're not in a position to honor a variable like locality ever. We're not only building the world or affecting the world here, we're building our own minds. We're building the very basis by which we would continue to do good in the world in coming days and weeks and months and years. Yeah, so I mean, I essentially completely agree with you and think it's really good that you supported that family and yeah, it reminds me of my own case, something that stayed with me. So I lived in Oakland, California for a while in a very poor, predominantly black neighborhood and I was just out in Iran and woman kind of comes up to me and asks if I can stop and help for the second. And I thought she was going to want help like Catherine closeties or something be fine. It turns out she wanted me to move her couch like all the way down the street. Took like 2 hours and that was out of my working day as well because I'm at lunch and I just don't look at the use of that time at all. And why is that? And even from a rational perspective I'm not saying that this is oh, I merely shouldn't beat myself up or something. And I think it's because most of the time we're just not. The bigger question of like what individual action do we do? Like in any particular case? Which kind of model philosophy has typically focused on kind of act consequentialism? That's not typically the decisions we face. We face these much larger decisions like what career to pursue or something. Sometimes those are more like actions. But we also face the question of just what person to be? What kind of motivations and dispositions do I want to have? And I think the idea of me becoming this utility maximizing of obar that is like utterly cold and calculating at a time, all the time I think is certainly not possible for me given just the fact that I am an embodied human being but also probably not desirable either. I don't think that an effect felt as a movement would have started had we all been these cold utility maximizing robots. And so I think cultivating a personality such that you do get joy and reward and motivation from being able to help people and get that feedback. And that is like, part of what you do in your life, I actually think can be the best way of living a life. When you consider your life as a whole and in particular, it's not necessarily doing those things does not necessarily trade off very much at all. Can perhaps even help with the other things that you do. So in your case you get this reward from supporting this poverty family with a disabled child, or get reward from helping people in your local community that I'm presuming you can channel and help continue the motivation to do things that might seem much more alien or just harder to empathize with. And I think that's okay. I think we should accept that and that, in fact, should be encouraged. So, yeah, I think, like, it's very important once we take these ideas outside of the philosophy seminar room and actually try to live them to appreciate the instrumental benefits of doing these kind of everyday actions, as long as it ultimately helps you stand by this commitment to, at least in part, to try and do just what we rationally, all things considered, think is going to be best for the world. Yeah. So you mentioned that the variable of time here, and this is another misconception about effective altruism, that it's only a matter of giving money to the most effective causes. You spend a lot of time thinking about how to prioritize one's time and think about doing good over the course of one's life based on how one spends one's time. So in our next chapter, let's talk about how a person could think about having a career that helps the world. Okay? So we're going to speak more about the question of giving to various causes and how to do good in the world in terms of sharing the specific resource of money. But we're now talking about one's time. How do you think about time versus money here? And I know you've done a lot of work on the topic of how people can think about having rewarding careers that are net positive. And you have a website, 80,000 hours, that you might want to point people to here. So let's talk about the variable of time and how people can spend it to the benefit of others. The organization is called 80,000 Hours because that's the typical number of hours that you work in the course of your life, if that's a, you know, approximately 40 year career, working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. So we use that to illustrate the fact that your choice of career is probably, altruistically speaking, the biggest decision you ever make. It's absolutely enormous. Yet people spend very little of their time really thinking through that question. I mean, you might think if you go out for dinner, then you spend maybe 1% of the time that you would spend at dinner thinking about where to eat, like a few minutes or something. But spending 1% of 80,000 hours on your career decision on what you should do, that would be 800 hours. Enormous amount of time. But why did I do philosophy? Well, I liked it at school. I could have done maths, but my dad did math and I wanted to differentiate myself from him. I didn't have a very good reasoning process at all because we generally don't pay this nearly enough attention. And certainly when it comes to doing good, you have an enormous opportunity to have a huge impact through your career. And so what 80,000 Hours does via its website, via a podcast and via a small amount of one on one advising is try to help people figure out which careers are such that they can have the biggest impact. And in contrast, this is a much you know, the question of what Chavet is doing any to is exceptionally hard. This is even harder, again, because firstly, you'll be working at many different organizations over the course of your life, probably not just one. And secondly, of course there's a question of personal fit. Some people would be some people are good at some things and not others at Truism. And so how should you think about this? Well, the most important question I think is the question of what cause to focus on. And that involves big picture worldview judgments and philosophical questions too. So we tend to think of the question, of course, selection by using the heuristics of what causes. And by a cause I mean a big problem in the world like climate change or gender inequality or poverty or factory farming or pandemic, possibility of pandemics or AI lock in of values. We look at those causes in terms of how important they are, that is, how many individuals have affected and by how much, how neglected they are, which is how many other sources are already going towards them. And then finally, how taxable they are, how much we can make progress in this area. And in significant part because of those hevistics. That's why we've effective. Altruism has chosen the focus areas it has which includes pandemic preparedness, artificial intelligence, climate change, poverty, farm animal welfare and potentially some others as well, like improving institutional decisionmaking and some areas in scientific research. And so that's by far the biggest question I think, because that really shapes the entire direction of your career and I think depending on the philosophical assumptions you put in can result in enormous differences and impact. Like do you think animals count at all or like a lot, I mean, would make enormous difference in terms of whether you ought to be focusing on that. Similarly, like what weight do you give to future generations versus pleasant generations? Potentially you can do hundreds of times as much good in one course area as you can in another. Yeah, and then within that, the question of where exactly to focus is going to just depend a lot on the particular cause area where different causes just have different bottlenecks. We tend to find that working at the best nonprofits is often great. The search is often great, especially in kind of new, more nascent causes like safe development of artificial intelligence or pandemic preparedness. Often you need the search. Policy is often a very good thing to focus on as well. And in some areas, especially where money is the real bottleneck, then trying to do goods through your donations primarily and therefore trying to take a job that's more lucrative can be the way to go to yeah, that's a wrinkle that is kind of counterintuitive to people. The idea that the best way for you to contribute might in fact be to pursue the most lucrative career that you might be especially well placed to pursue. And it may have no obvious connection to doing good in the world apart from the fact that you are now giving a lot of your resources to the most effective charities. So if you're a rock star or a professional soccer player or just doing something that you love to do and you have other reasons why you want to do it, but you're also making a lot of money that you can then give to great organizations. Well, then it's hard to argue that your time would be better spent working in the nonprofit sector yourself or doing something where you wouldn't be laying claim to those kinds of resources. Yeah, that's right. Within the effect of altitude and community this is now, I think, a minority of people are trying to do good in their career via the path of what's called earning to give. And again, it depends a lot on the cores area. So how much money is there relative to the kind of size of the cause already? And in the case of things like scientific research or AI or pandemic preparedness, there's clearly just like a lot more demand for altruistically minded, sensible, competent people working in these fields than there is money. Whereas in the current case of global health and development there were just these interventions and programs that we could scale up with hundreds of millions, billions of dollars that we just know work very well. And there money is kind of more of the bottleneck. And so kind of going back to these misconceptions about effective altruism, this idea of earning to give, again, it's very mimetic. People love how counterintuitive it is and it is one of the things we believe. But it's definitely kind of minority path, especially if you're focused on some of these areas where there already is a lot of potential funding and it's more about just how many people we have working on these areas. This raises another point where the whole culture around charity is not optimized for attracting the greatest talent. We have a double standard here which many people are aware of. I think it's most clearly brought out by Dan Palada. I don't know if you know him. He gave a Ted Talk on this topic and he organized some of the bike rides across America in support of various causes. I think the main one was AIDS. He might have organized a cancer one as well. But these are ventures that raised, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think he was criticized for spending too much on overhead. But it's a choice where you can spend less than 5% on overhead and raise $10 million, or you could spend 30% on overhead and raise $400 million, which should you do? And it's pretty obvious you should do the latter if you're going to use those resources well. And yet there's a culture that prioritizes having the the lowest possible overhead. And also there's this sense that if you're going to make millions of dollars personally by starting a software company or becoming an actor in Hollywood or whatever it is, there's nothing wrong with that. But if you're making millions of dollars a year running a charity, well, then you're a greedy bastard. Right? And the idea that we wouldn't fault someone from pursuing a comparatively frivolous and even narcissistic career for getting rich in the meantime, but we would fault someone who's trying to cure cancer or save the most vulnerable people on earth for getting rich while doing that. That seems like a bizarre double standard with respect to how we want to incentivize people. Because what we're really demanding is someone come out of the most competitive school. And when faced with the choice of whether or not to work for a hedge fund or work for a charity doing good in the world, they have to also be someone who doesn't care about earning much money. So we need that. We're sort of filtering for sainthood or something like sainthood among the most competent students at that stage, and that seems less than optimal. I don't know how you view that. Yeah, I think it's a real shame. So newspapers every year publish rankings of the top paid charity CEOs and it's regarded as kind of scandal. The charity is therefore ineffective. But what we should really care about, if we actually care about the potential beneficiaries, the people which are going to help, is just how much money are we giving this organization and how much good comes out the other end? And if it's the case that they can achieve more because they can attract a more experienced and able person to lead the organization by paying more now sure, that's like it's maybe a sad fact about the world. It would be nice if everyone were able to be maximally motivated purely by altruism, but we know that's not the case. Then if they can achieve more by doing that, then yeah, we should be encouraging them to do that. There's some arguments against like, oh, well, perhaps there's kind of race to the bottom dynamics where if one organization starts paying more than other organizations should need to pay more too, and it just you get bloat in the system. I think that's the strongest case for the idea of low overheads when it comes to fundraising. Because if one organization is fundraising, well, perhaps in part they're increasing the total amount of charitable giving that happens, but they're also. Probably taking money away from other organizations. And so it can be the case that a general norm of lower overheads when it comes to fundraising is a good one. But when it comes to charity pay we're obviously just radically farther away from that. And yeah, it shows that people are thinking about charity in a kind of fundamentally wrong way, at least for the effect of optimist purposes we're thinking of which is not thinking about it in terms of outcomes but in terms of the virtues you demonstrate or how much are you sacrificing or something. And ultimately when it comes to these problems that we're facing, these terrible injustices, this horrific suffering I don't really care whether the person that helps is virtuous or not. I just want the thing. I just want the suffering to stop. I just I just want people to be helped. And as long as they're not doing harm along the way I don't think it really matters whether the people are paid a lot or a little. I think we should say something about the other side of this equation which tends to get emphasized in most people's thinking about being good in the world. And this is the side of kind of the consumer facing side of not contributing to the obvious harms in a way that is egregious or dialing down one's complicity in this unacceptable status quo as much as possible. And so this goes to things like becoming a vegetarian or a vegan or avoiding certain kinds of consumerism based on concern about climate change. There's a long list of causes that people get committed to more in the spirit of negating certain bad behavior or polluting behavior rather than focusing on what they're in fact doing to solve problems or giving to specific organizations. Is there any general lesson to be drawn from the results of these efforts on both fronts? How much does harm avoidance as a consumer add to the scale of merit here? What's the longest lever we can pull personally? Yeah, so I think there's a few things to say. So right at the start I mentioned one of the key insights of effective altruism was this idea that different activities can vary by a factor of 100 or 1000 in terms of how much impact they have. And even within ethical consumerism I think that happens. So if you want to cut out most animal suffering from your diet I think you should cut out eggs, chicken and pigs, maybe fish. Whereas beef and milk I think are comparatively small factors. If you want to reduce your carbon footprint then giving up beef and lamb, reducing fence and length fights, reducing how much you drive makes significant differences and dozens of times as much impact as things like recycling or upgrading light bulbs or reusing plastic bags. From the purely consequentialist outcome based perspective I think it is systematically the case that these ethical consumers and behaviors are small in terms of their impact compared to the impact that you can do via your donations or via your career. And the reason is just there's a very limited range of things that you can do by changing your consumption behavior. There's just things you are buying anyway and then you can stop. Whereas if you're donating or you're choosing a career, then you can choose the very most effective things to be doing. So take the case of being vegetarian. So I've been vegetarian for 15 years now. I have no plans of stopping that. But if I think about how many animals I'm helping in the course of a year as a result of being vegetarian and how does that compare when I'm looking at the effectiveness of the very most effective animal welfare charities, which are typically what are called kind of corporate campaigns? So it turns out the most effective way of reducing the number of that we know of reducing the number of hens in factory farms, laying eggs in just the most atrocious terrible conditions of suffering seems to be by campaigning large retailers to change the eggs they purchase in their supply chain. You can actually get a lot of push there and the figures are just like astonishing. It's like something like 50 animals that you're preventing the significant torture of for every dollar that you're spending on these campaigns. And so if you just do the maths, like the amount of good you do by becoming vegetarian is equivalent to the amount of good you do by donating a few dollars to these very most effective campaigns, I think similarly for reducing your carbon footprint. My cousin favored climate change charity Clean Air Task Force, which lobbies the US government to improve its regulation so that fossil fuels and promotes energy innovation as well, think probably reduces a ton of CO2 for about a dollar. And that means if you're in the US, an average US citizen emits about 16 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, if you did all of these most effective things of cutting out meat and all your transatlantic flights and getting rid of your car and so on, you might be able to deduce that six tons or so. And that's the same as giving about $6 to these most effective charities. And so it just does seem that these are just much more powerful than the perspective of outcomes. The next question philosophically is whether you have some non consequential reason to do these things. And there I think it differs. So I think the case is much stronger for becoming vegetarian than for climate change because if I buy a factory farmed chicken and then donate to a corporate campaign, well, I've probably harmed different chickens. And it seems like you can't offset the harm to one individual by a benefit to another individual. Whereas if I have a lifetime of emissions but at the same time donate a sufficient amount to climate change charities, I've probably just reduced the total amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere over the course of my lifetime. And there isn't anyone who's harmed in expectation, at least by the entire course of my life. And so it's not like I'm fading a harm to one person for the benefit to another. But these are quite subtle issues when we get onto these kind of non consequentialist reasons. Yeah, there are also ways in which the business community and innovation in general can come to the rescue here. So, for instance, there's a company, I believe the name is going to be changed, but it was called Memphis Meats that is spearheading this revolution in what's called cultured meat or clean meat where they take a single cell from an animal and amplify it so no animals are killed in the process of making these steaks or these meatballs or these chicken cutlets. And they're trying to bring this to scale. And I had the CEO, uma, Valletti, on my podcast a couple of years ago and actually invested in the company along with many other people. And hopefully this will bear fruit. That's an example of something where, though it was unthinkable some years ago, we might suddenly find ourselves living in a world where you can buy steak and hamburger meat and pork and chicken without harming any animals. And it may also have other significant benefits, like cutting down on xenoviruses. And that connects to the pandemic risk issue. Our factory farms are wet markets of another sort, and so it is with climate change. On some level, we're waiting and expecting for technology to come to the rescue here, where it's just bringing down the cost of renewable energy to the point where there is literally no reason to be using fossil fuels or bringing us a new generation of nuclear reactors that don't have any of the downsides of old ones. And again, this does connect to the concern I had around the fancy lifeboat. We have to do the necessary things in our lifeboat that allow for those kinds of breakthroughs, because in many cases, the solutions that just fundamentally take away the problem rather than merely mitigate it. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that in the case of if you're trying to alleviate animal suffering by as much as possible, I think that, yeah, funding of a search into clean meats plausibly the best thing you can do. It's hard to make a comparison with the more direct campaigns, but definitely plausibly the best. In the case of climate change, I've recently been pretty convinced that the most effective thing we can be doing is promoting clean energy innovation in this case. This is another example of importance versus neglectness, where you mentioned renewables and they are really key part of the part of the solution, but other areas are really notably more neglected. So carbon capture and storage, where you're capturing CO2 as it emerges from fossil fuel power plants, and nuclear power get quite a small amount of funding compared to solar and wind, even though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks that they're also a very large part of the solution. But here I think the distinction is focusing on issues in rich countries in order to benefit people in those rich countries or kind of as a means to some other sort of benefit. And so I think it's very often the case that you should focus on, like you might be sending money towards things happening in a rich country like the US. But not because you're trying to benefit people in the US. Because you're trying to benefit the world. So maybe you're funding, yeah, this clean meat startup or you're funding research into low carbon forms of energy. And sure, that might happen at the US. Which is still the world's research leader. That's fairly justified. But that's kind of partly the beneficiaries in the US of these things. But it's also, it's global. It's future generations too. You're kind of influencing, as it were, the people who are in the positions of power, who have the most influence over how things are going to go into the future. Okay, so in our next chapter, let's talk about how we build effective altruism into our lives and just make this as personally actionable for people as we can. Okay, so we've sketched the basic framework of effective altruism and just how we think about systematically evaluating various causes, how we think about what would be prioritized with respect to things like actual outcomes versus a good story. And we've referenced a few things that are now in the effective altruist canon, like giving a minimum of 10% of one's income a year, and that's really, if I'm not mistaken, you just took that as a nice round number that people had some traditional associations with. In religious communities, there's a notion of tithing that amount and it seemed like not so large as to be impossible to contemplate, but not so small as to be ineffectual. Maybe let's start there. Am I right in thinking that the 10% number just was kind of pulled out of a hat but seemed like a good starting point, but there's nothing about it that's carved in stone from your point of view? Exactly. It's not a magic number, but it's in this goldilocks zone where Toby originally had the thought that he would be promoting what he calls the further pledge, which is where you just set a cap on your income and give everything above that. But the issue, I think, seems pretty clear that if he'd been promoting that, well, very few people would have joined him. We do have a number of people who've taken the further pledge, but it's a very small minority of the 5000 members we have. On the other hand, if we were promoting a 1% pledge, let's say, well, we're probably just not changing people's behavior compared to how much they donate anyway. So in the UK, people donate on average .7% of their income. In the US, if you include educational donations and church donations, people donate about 2% of their income. So if I was saying, oh, you should donate 1%, probably those people would have been giving 1% anyway. And so we thought 10% is in this Goldilock zone and like you say, it has this long history where for generally religious lesions, people much poorer than us in earlier historical epochs have been able to donate 10%. We also have ten fingers, it's an Iceland number. But many people who are part of the community donate much more than that. Many people who affirm core people, part of the effect of autism community don't donate that much. They do good via other ways instead. It's interesting to consider the psychology of this because I can imagine many people entertaining the prospect of giving 10% of their money away and feeling, well, I could easily do that if I were rich, but I can't do that now. And I can imagine many rich people thinking, well, that's a lot of money, right? It's like every year after I'm making a lot of money and you're telling me year after year after year I'm going to give 10% away, that's millions of dollars a year. So it could be the fact that there's no point on the continuum of earning where if you're of a certain frame of mind, it's going to seem like a goldilocks value. You either feel too poor or too rich and there's no sweet spot or you know, to flip that around. You can recognize that however much money you're making, you can always give 10% to the most effective ways of alleviating suffering. Once you have this epiphany, you can always find those 10% at every point. And if you're not making much money, obviously 10% will be a small amount of money and if you're making a lot of money, it'll be a large amount. But there's almost all, it's almost always the case that there's 10% of fat there to be found. So yeah, you have thoughts about just the psychology of someone who feels not immediately comfortable with the idea of making such a commitment? Yeah, I think there's two things I'd like to say to that person. One is the kind of somewhat dialect argument and the second is more pragmatic. The direct one is just that even if you feel like, oh, I could donate that amount if I were rich, probably you are a bitch if you're listening to this. So as a if you're single and you earn $66,000, then you're in the global 1% of the world in terms of income distribution. And what's more, even after donating 10% of your income, you would still be in the richest 1% of the world's population if you earn $35,000, which we would not think of as being a rich person, even after donating 10% still being of rich as 5% of the world's population. And learning those facts was very motivating for me when I first started thinking about my giving. So that's kind of dialect argument, but the more pragmatic one is to think, well, at most stages in your life, you will be earning more in the future than you are now. People's incomes tend to increase over time, and you might just reflect, well, how do I feel about money at the moment? And if you feel kind of all right about it, perhaps you're in a situation where you're like, oh, no, I'm actually just fairly worried there's, like, serious health issues or something. Then it's like, okay, we'll take care of that first, but if you're like, well, actually, life's pretty old. I don't think additional money will make that much of a difference. Then what you can do is just think, okay, maybe I'm not going to give up to 10% now, but I'll give a very significant proportion of the additional money I make any future basis. So maybe I give 50% of that amount, and probably after that means that you're still increasing the amount you're earning over time. But at the same time, if you do that, then over the few years, you'll probably quite soon end up giving 10% of your overall income. So at no point in this plan do you ever have to go backwards, as it were, living on less. In fact, you're always earning more, but yet you're giving more at the same time. And I've certainly found that in my own life, where I started thinking about giving as a graduate student. So I now live on, like, twice as much, more than twice as much as I did when I first started giving, but I'm also able to give a significant amount of my income. Remind me, how have you approached this personally? Because you haven't taken a minimum 10% pledge. You think of it differently. So what have you done over the years? Yes, I have taken the giving what we can pledge, which is 10% at any point, and then I also have intention and plan to donate everything above what is the equivalent of £20,000 per year in Oxford 2009, which is now about £27,000 per year. I've never written this down as, like, a formal pledge, the reason being that there were just too many possible kind of exceptions. So if I had kids, I'd want to increase that. If there were situations where I thought my ability to do good in the world would be fairly severely hindered, I'd want to kind of avoid that. But that is the amount that I'm giving at the moment, and it's the amount I plan to give for the rest of my life, just so I understand. So you're giving anything you make above £27,000 a year to charge? Yeah, that's right, post tax. And so my income is a little bit complicated in terms of how you evaluate it, because it's my university income, but then also book sales and so on. I think on the most natural and there's things like speaking engagements I don't take that I could, but I think on the most natural way of doing it, I give a little over 50% of my income. So I want to explore that with you a little bit because again, I'm returning to our fancy lifeboat and wondering just how fancy it can be in a way that's compatible with the project of doing the most good in the world. And what I detect in myself and in most of the people I meet and I'm sure and this is an intuition that is shared by many of our listeners many people will be reluctant to give up on the aspiration to be wealthy with everything that that implies. Obviously, they want to work hard and make their money in a way that is good for the world or at least benign. They can follow all of the ethical arguments that would say, right, livelihood in some sense is important. But if people really start to succeed in life, I think there's something that will strike many people, if not most, as too. Epstemiat and Monkish about the lifestyle you're advertising in choosing to live on that amount of money and give away everything above it, or even just giving away 50% of one's income. And again, I think this does actually connect with the question of effectiveness. It's at least possible that you would be more effective if you were wealthy and living with all that all that that entails living as a wealthy person. And I mean, just to take by example someone like Bill Gates. He's obviously the most extreme example I could find because he's one of the wealthiest people on earth still, I think he's number two, perhaps, and he's also probably well established now. He's the biggest benefactor of charity in human history. Perhaps. The Gates Foundation has been funded to the tune of tens of billions of dollars by him at this point. And so I'm sure he spent a ton of money on himself and his family. His life is probably filled to the brim with luxury, but his indulgence in luxury is still just a rounding error on the amount of money he's giving away. Right. So it's actually hard to run a counterfactual here, but I'd be willing to bet that Gates would be less effective and less wealthy and have less money to give away if he were living like a monk in any sense. And I think maybe more importantly, his life would be less inspiring, less inspiring example to many other wealthy people. If Bill Gates came out of the closet and said, listen, I'm living on $50,000 a year and giving all my money away to charity, that wouldn't have the same kind of kindling effect. I think his life at this point is in fact having which is you can really have your cake and eat it too. You can be a billionaire who lives in a massive smart house with all the sexy technology, even fly around on a private jet and be the most charitable person in human history. And if you just think of the value of his time, right, like, if he were living a more abstemiousous life. And just imagine the sight of Bill Gates spending an hour trying to save $50 on a on a new toaster oven, right. You know, bargain hunting. It would be such a colossal waste of his time, given the value of his time. Again, I don't have any specifics, really, about how to think about this counterfactual, but I do have a general sense that actually this is actually a point you made in our first conversation, I believe, which is you don't want to be an antihero in any sense, right. If you can inspire only one other person to give at the level that you are giving, you have doubled the good you can do in the world. So, on some level, you want your life to be the most compelling advertisement for this whole project. And I'm just wondering if, for instance, I'm just wondering what changes we would want to make to Bill Gates's life at this point, to make him an even more inspiring advertisement for effective altruism to other very, very wealthy people, right? And, I mean, it might be dialing down certain things, but given how much good he's able to do him buying a fancy car, it doesn't even register in terms of actual allocation of resources. So, anyway, I pitched that to you. Yeah. Terrific. So there's three different stance I think I'd like to pick apart. So the first is whether everyone should be like me, and I really don't want to make the claim. I certainly don't want to say, Well, I can do this thing, so everyone else can, because I really just think I am in a position of such utter privilege. So being born into a middle class family in a rich country, being privately educated, going to Cambridge, then Oxford, then Cambridge, then Oxford, being, like, tall and male and white and broadly straight, and then also just having kind of inexpensive tastes. Like my ideal day involves sitting on a couch and drinking tea and reading some interesting new research and perhaps like doing going wild swimming. Yeah. And then secondly, also, I have just these amazing benefits in virtue of the work that I do. I have this incredibly like, I meet these incredibly varied, interesting kind of array of people. And so I just don't really think I could stand here and say, well, everyone should do the same as me. Because I think I've just had it kind of so easy that it doesn't really feel like if I think about the sacrifices I have made or the things I found hard over the course of ten years, that's much more like doing scary things like being on the Sam Harvest podcast or doing a Ted Talk or meeting very wealthy or very important people. Things that might kind of cause anxiety much more than the kind of financial side of things. But I've recognized there are other people for whom money just really matters to them. And I think in part, you're kind of born with a set of preferences and these things, or perhaps they're molded early on in childhood and you don't necessarily have control over them. So that's kind of me is what I'm trying to convey to this second is the time value of money. And this is something I've really wrestled with because it just is the case that in terms of my personal impact, my donations are just a very small part of that because we have been successful, we are giving what we can, has now moved $200 million. There's over one and a half billion dollars of pledged donations. The EA movement as a whole certainly has over $10 billion of assets that kind of will be going out. And then, you know, I'm donating my, you know, thousands of pounds per year. And it does not or make tens of thousands of pounds per year, and it's just very clearly kind of small on the scale. And so that's definitely something I've wrestled with. I don't think I lose enormous amounts of time. My guess is that it's maybe a couple of days of time a year. I have done some things, so, like, via my work, I have an assistant. If I'm doing business flips, like, that counts as expenses rather than my personal money, so that I'm trying to keep it separate. There's some things you can't do. So, like, if you live close to your office, I can't count that as a business expense, but it would shorten your commute. So it's not like, perfect as a way of doing that. And so I do think there's an argument, an argument against that, and I think that is of definitely a reason of caution for making kind of a very large commitment. And then the final aspect is, yeah, what sort of message you want to send? And probably my guess is that you just want a bit of market segmentation here where some people should some people should perhaps show what can be done, others should show, well, no, actually, you can have this amazing life while not having to wear the hair shirt and so on. I think perhaps you could actually convince me that maybe I'm sending a long message and would do more good if I had some other sort of pledge. And maybe you would be right about that. When I made these plans, I wasn't thinking through these things quite as carefully as I was now, but I did want to just kind of show a proof of concept. Yeah, I guess I'm wondering if there's a path through this wilderness that doesn't stigmatize wealth at all. The end game for me in the presence of absolute abundance is everyone gets to live like Bill Gates on some level. If we make it, if we get to the 22nd century and we've solved the AI alignment problem, and now we're just pulling wealth out of the ether, I mean, essentially just we've got Deutsche's Universal Constructors building every machine atom by atom, and we can do more or less anything we want. Well, then this can't be based on an ethic where wealth is at all stigmatized. What should have a probrium attached to it is a total disconnection from the suffering of other people and comfort with the more shocking disparities in wealth that we see all around us. Once a reasonably successful person signs on to the effective altruist Ethic and begins thinking about his or her life in terms of earning to give. On some level, there's a flywheel effect here where one's desire to be wealthy actually amplifies one's commitment to giving. So that in part, the reason why you would continue working is because you have an opportunity to give so much money away and do so much good, and it kind of purifies one's earning in the first place. I can imagine most wealthy people get to a point where they're making enough money so that they don't have to worry about money anymore. And then there's this question, well, why am I making all this money? Why am I still working? And the moment they decide to give a certain amount of money away a year, just algorithmically, then they feel like, okay, if this number keeps going up, that is a good thing, right? So I can get out of bed in the morning and know that today, if it's 10%, one day in ten is given over wholly to solving the worst suffering, or saving the most lives, or mitigating the worst long term risk. And if it's 20%, it's two days out of ten, and if it's 30%, it's three days out of ten. And they could even dial it up. I'm just imagining, let's say somebody is making $10 million a year, and he thinks, okay, I can sign on and give 10% of my income away to charity. That sounds like the right thing to do. And he's persuaded that this should be the minimum. But he then aspires to scale this up as he earns more money. Maybe this would be the algorithm for each million he makes more a year. He just adds the percentage. So if he's making, you know, 14,000,001 year, he'll he'll give 14% of his income away, and if it's 50 million, he'll give 50% away. Right? And obviously, I mean, if if, let's say the minimum he wants to make is 9 million a year, well, then he can get up to 91% of $100 million a year. He can give that away. But I can imagine. Being a very wealthy person who, as you're scaling one of these outlier careers, it would be, you know, fairly thrilling to be the person who's making a hundred million dollars that year knowing that you're going to give 91% of that away to the most effective charities. And you might not be the person who would have seen any other logic in driving to that kind of wealth when you were the person who was making $10 million a year because $10 million a year was good enough. I mean, obviously you can live on that. There's nothing materially that's going to change for you as you make more money. But because he or she plugged into this earning to give logic and in some ways, the greater commitment to earning was leveraged by a desire to maintain a wealthy lifestyle, right? It's like this person does want $9 million a year, right, every year. But now they're much wealthier than that and giving much more money away. I'm just trying to figure out how we can capture the imagination of people who would see the example of Bill Gates and say, okay, that's the sweet spot, as opposed to any kind of example that however subtly stigmatizes being wealthy in the first place. Yeah, I think these are good points. And it's to be where I think that stigma and wealth per se is not a good thing, where if you build a company that's doing good stuff and people like the product and they get value from it, and so there's enormous surplus, there's a lot of gains from debate, and you get wealthy as a result of that, that's a good thing. Obviously, there's some people who make enormous amounts of money doing bad things, selling opioids or building factory farms, but I don't think that's the majority. And I do think it's the case that it's kind of like optimal taxation theory. But the weird thing is that you're imposing the tax on yourself, where, depending on your psychology, if you say, I'm going to give 100% as the highest tax rate, well, you're not incentivized to earn any more. And so the precise amount that you want to give is just quite sensitive to this question of just how unmotivated you're going to be in order to earn more. So in my own case, it's very clear that the way I'm going to do good is not primarily via my donations. So perhaps this disincentive effect is not very important. But if my aim were to get as rich as possible, then, well, I'd need to really look inside my own psychology, figure out how much, especially over the entire course of my life, can I be motivated by pure altruism versus self interest. And I strongly doubt that the kind of optimal tax rate would be via my donations would be 100%. It would be something in between. That's what I'm kind of fishing for here. And, you know, I by no means am convinced that I'm right. But I'm just wondering if, in addition to all the other things you want, you know, as revealed in this conversation, you know, for yourself and the world, and, you know, acknowledging that you are, you know, your primary contribution to doing good in the world might, in fact, be your ideas and your ability to get them out there. You've had the effect you've had on me. I'm going to have my effect on my audience. And conversations like this have the effect that they have. And so there's no question you are inspiring people to marshal their resources in these directions and think more clearly about these issues. But what if it were also the case that if you secretly really wanted to own a Ferrari, you would actually make different decisions such that in addition to all the messaging, you would also become a very wealthy person giving away a lot of money? Yeah, if it was the case that I was planning to earn to give. And so I think a very common kind of figure for people who are going to earn to give via entrepreneurship or other high earning careers is a 50% figure where they plan to give half of what they earn at least once they start earning a significant amount. And that has seemed to work pretty well from the people I know. It's also notably the figure that Bill Gates uses for his Giving Pledge, where billionaires can join the Giving Pledge if they give at least 50% of their income of their wealth. Right. Most take that pledge, if I'm not mistaken, is pushed off to the end of their life. Right. They're just imagining they're going to give it upon their death to charity. Right. So you aren't allowed to do that. I don't know exactly the proportions. It varies. Like the tech, tech founders tend to give earlier than other sorts of people. I'm actually a little bit confused about what pledging 50% of your wealth means. So if I am a billionaire one year, then lose half my money and I've got $500 million the next year, do I have to give half of that or do I have to give half of the amount when I pledge, which would have been all my money anyway. Confuses me a little bit, the details of it, but it is the case that you can fulfill your pledge completely in the giving Pledge by donating entirely after your death. And there are questions about how much people actually fulfill these pledges too. And I really do want to say that's also just quite reasonable. Different people have different attitudes to money. I think it's a very rare person indeed that can be entirely motivated because we're talking about motivation over decades and we're talking about every single day. Motivation can be motivated at all times by pure altruism. I think that's very hard. And so if someone instead wants to pick percentage, number and aim to that. That seems like a sensible way to go. And in particular you want to be sustainable where if it's the case that moving from, I don't know, 50% to 60% means that actually your desire to do all of this kind of burns out and you go and do something else that's fairly bad indeed. And you want to be someone who's like I think the right attitude you want to have towards giving is not to be someone where it's like, oh yeah, I'm giving this amount, but it's just so hard and I like, I really don't like my life and it's unpleasant. That is not an inspiring message. Julia Wise has this wonderful member of the Effects of Altitude community, has this wonderful post called Cheerfully where she talks about having kids and thinking about that as a question and says that, no, what you want to be is this model, this ideal, where you're doing what you're doing, and you're saying, yeah, my life is great. I'm able to do this, and I'm still having a really wonderful life. That's certainly how I feel about my life. And I think for many people who are going into these higher learning careers saying, yeah, I'm donating 50% and my life is still absolutely awesome. In fact, it's better as a result of the amount I'm donating, that's the sweet spot, I think, that you want to hit. There's another issue here around how public to be around one's giving. And so you and I are having a public conversation about all of this and this is just by its very nature violating a norm that we've all inherited or a norm or a pseudonorm around generosity and altruism, which suggests that the highest form of generosity is to give anonymously there's a Bible verse around this. You don't want to wear your virtue on your sleeve. You don't want to advertise your generosity because that conveys this message that you're doing it for reasons of self aggrandizement. You're doing it to enhance your reputation. You want your name on the side of the building. Whereas if you were really just connected to the cause of doing good, you would do all of this silently and people would find out after your death, or maybe they would never find out that you were the one who had secretly donated millions of dollars to cure some terrible disease or to buy bed nets. And yet you and I by association here have flipped that ethic on its head because it seems to be important to change people's thinking around all of the issues we've been discussing and the only way to do that is to really discuss them. And what's more, we're leveraging a concern about reputation kind of from the opposite side in recognizing that taking a pledge has psychological consequences, right? I mean, when you publicly commit to do something that not only advertises to people that this is the sort of project a human being can become enamored of, you then have a reputational cost to worry about if you decide that you're going to renege on your offer. So talk for a few minutes about the significance of talking about any of this in the first place. Yeah, so I think the public aspect is fairly important and it's for the reason you mentioned earlier that take the amount of goods that you're going to do in your life via your donations and then just think, can I convince one other person to do the same? If so, you've doubled your impact. You've done your life's work over and again. And I think plausibly people can do that many times over, at least in the world today, by being this kind of inspirational role model for others. And so I think this religious tradition where, no, you shouldn't show the generosity you're doing, you should keep that secret, I think that looks pretty bad from an outcome, an outcome oriented perspective. And I think you need to be careful about how you're doing it. You want to be effective in your communication as well as your giving, where, you know, it was fairly notable that Peter Singer had these arguments around giving for almost four decades with comparatively little uptake, certainly compared to the last ten years of the effect of optimism movement. And my best hypothesis is that move from a framing that appeals primarily to guilt, which is, you know, it's a lower arousal motivation. You don't often get up and start really doing things on the basis of guilt to inspiration, instead saying like, no, this is amazing opportunity we have. And so this is a norm that I just really want to change in the long run. I would like it to be a part of common sense morality that use a significant part of your resources to help other people. And we will only get there, we will only have that sort of cultural change if people are public about what they're doing and able to say, yeah, this is something I'm doing, I'm proud of it, I think you should consider doing it too. This is the world I want to see. Well, Will, you have certainly gotten the ball rolling in my life and it's something I'm immensely grateful for and I think this is a good place to leave it. I know there will be questions and perhaps we can build out further lessons just based on frequently asked questions that come in in response to what we've said here. But I think that will be the right way to proceed. So for the meantime, thank you for doing this because I think you're, you're aware of how many people you're affecting. But it's still early days and, you know, I think it'll be very interesting to see where all this goes because I know what it's like to experience a tipping point around these issues personally. And I have to think that many people listening to us will have a similar experience one day or another, and you will have it. So thank you for what you're doing. Well, thank you for taking the pledge and getting involved and yeah, I'm excited to see how these ideas develop over the coming years./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our Subscriber feed feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, no housekeeping today. Jumping right into it. Today I'm speaking with Thomas Chatterton Williams. Thomas is the author of two memoirs. The first is Losing My Cool, and the second, the book under discussion is Self Portrait in Black and White Unlearning Race. And Thomas is a wonderful writer. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, the London Review of Books, and other journals. And here we talk about the reality and politics of race and cover many aspects of that question from his unique point of view as someone who is both the product of an interracial marriage and in one himself. Anyway, his take on the topic is fascinating and quite refreshing. And now I bring you Thomas Chatterton Williams. I am here with Thomas Chatterton Williams. Thomas, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. I have to say that my French mother in law is going to be extremely impressed. She's a huge fan of your meditation practice, but she doesn't even know that you do this other work. Oh, nice. Well, that's that's probably as it should be. That's great. So, yeah, I feel like I know her a bit. From your book. You've written a wonderful memoir, self Portrait in Black and White Unlearning Race, and I think we'll just use that as the focus of our discussion before we dive in. How do you summarize your career thus far as a writer and your interests? What have you tended to focus on? Sure, I studied philosophy and undergrad, and then I got a master's degree in cultural reporting and criticism in the journalism department of NYU. And I came out of grad school with a kind of coming of age memoir I was working on called Losing My Cool. And I thought that that would just be the only memoir I'd ever write. And I started writing magazine journalism and essays and criticism, literary criticism. But here I am with a second memoir, and maybe I've put myself on a track to become a serial memoirist without having meant to. But I always write about race and class and culture and identity through the prism of personal experience. I try to use my own personal experience to get at something larger. Yeah, well, you have a happily, a very, I guess it's fairly unique personal experience, which allows you to dissect the strands of what's perhaps at least perceived to be the most prevailing social problem of our time. And it's been that way for a long time. Perhaps I'm speaking somewhat provincially as an American, but the problem of race and everyone's reaction to it, and it's, you know, the the legacy of it. How old are you, Thomas? I'm 38. Right, so you're you're 38, and you've written your second memoir, which is which is To My Father's. Sarin yeah, which is hilarious but appropriate because it's a great book and has a lot to offer. It by way of informing our discussion as our listeners are about to discover. So perhaps summarize how you view your own racial identity, how you viewed it. That's obviously an evolving self concept, which you talk about a lot in the book. But how have you come to this question and perhaps summarize the dynamics of your marriage and fatherhood? Because there are some surprises. I guess I'll tee it up for you by saying that you at one point published an op ed arguing essentially for the durability of race in your case and the unequivocal fact that your children will be black no matter what else might be true about them. How is your thinking along those lines been revised? Yeah, that's right. I was born in 1981. I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey in the my father is a black man from the segregated south, from Texas. He was born in 1937, so he's really old enough to be my grandfather, and he's a sociologist by training. And my mother is a white, blunt haired, blue eyed daughter of evangelical Christians from Southern California. So I grew up in a mixed race household in New Jersey, but very much with a black identity and with the understanding from both of my parents that we were a black household and that there's really no such thing as being partially white, that you're either white or you're not, because whiteness is a kind of constructed identity, but it's very real in the world we'd have to learn to move through so people wouldn't perceive us as white. And we'd need to understand ourselves as black in this racialized world and embrace it. Not just accept it, but embrace it. And it wasn't even until the year 2000, when I got to college, that you could even check more than one box on the census. So I didn't really think of myself as mixed. I didn't know a lot of people I didn't meet anybody who defined themselves as biracial until I got to college, even though I knew black people of all variety of skin tones and hair textures, but no one who would define themselves as something other than black. And is that true regardless of someone's appearance, no matter how fair skinned someone is in the end, and no matter how much they quote pass or can pass for white in your experience. People don't take the other side of that identity and say that they're white or they say that they're biracial or mixed race. Well, there's a couple of things that had been my experience, but also things were changing already in the culture. So I came up I sometimes think that I'm probably the last generation for which the logic of the one drop rule of hypo descent that a single drop of black blood necessitates that you are only black, that that really kind of is compelling. It really makes sense out of something other than, like, a kind of solidarity level that makes sense on a scientific level or something like that. I didn't really question that on a biological level for most of my life. I don't think that that's where the culture is exactly anymore. I think that we're a lot more familiarized with mixedness than we were when I was a kid, certainly, but I never met so called black people like my children. So I don't know if in the culture that I grew up and to answer your question, I don't know if my daughter and son would be perceived or would have a plausible route to self identify as black appearing as they do. Right. And so it's like if, for instance, you had and we're kind of giving away the punchline here in terms of your own experience of fatherhood, but if you had looked like your children, do you think your father would have been as adamant in defining your identity as black? My father's an interesting guy, so I have wonderful recollections. He's still alive. I have wonderful memories of him saying with a straight face to me that my mother's not white. She's light skinned because she's got black consciousness. So my father could kind of probably he probably could wrap his mind around my kids being black, because one of the first things he said to me when he came to Paris when my daughter Marla was born six years ago, he held her, and I said, well, she doesn't really look so black, does she? And he said, she's just a palomino. I went to school on the segregated side of town with more than one person who was colored similarly. So this is nothing new in the black community, he said. So I think he actually could deal with it. He could accept it. He could integrate that into his understanding of blackness. But I don't think that as soon as anyone stepped outside of the house, that would be how the world would accept us or perceive us. I think that there would be an enormous amount of pushback for you to look like these children and to walk out into the world kind of proclaiming the sense of yourself that I advocated in the New York Times a year before my daughter was born in the op ed you were referring to. Right, okay, so so fast forward to your own marriage and progeny. Yeah. So I lived 30 years of kind of unexamined life from a racial perspective. I accepted that great harm was done through the imposition of racial identity and the construction of blackness and whiteness. But that, you know, it was how the world was and, you know, and it was really nothing to push back against. And, in fact, there was a kind of moral duty, I felt, for mixed race blacks to adhere to a kind of racial essentialism because I felt that people who could break away if they broke away from a historically oppressed group, it would weaken the group. So there was a kind of moral reasoning that I tried to lay out in this op ed. But in retrospect, I realized that that op ed was really written to convince an audience of one and that that audience was myself, because I was already married to a woman who was colored very much the way my mom is. And I was, I think, on some level, understanding that I would very likely have children who would not read as black to anyone but me. But I even convinced my wife this is not really a very European way of seeing things. Europeans who grew up in societies that never had slavery within their national borders don't have this idea of the one drop rule at all. Alexander Duma was a much we're using these words unscientifically, but he was a blacker looking guy than my children are. But his identity wasn't defined that way, the way that it would be in America. W. B. Du Bois was certainly someone who was heavily descended from Europe. We have a history of very, very European looking people defining themselves as blacks that we don't have here in Europe. But I prevailed upon my wife to kind of accept this this way of seeing things. And so for the next nine months after she got pregnant, we just accepted that we were going to have black children and be a black family, kind of reproducing the identity that I grew up with in my household. But when my daughter was when I was standing in the delivery room and the doctor started calling out, I can see the head, she said she described it as a tet dorrey, which is, you know, I was sluggish. It was the middle of the night, but I realized she's saying that there's a golden head for trudeau. And when my daughter opened her eyes and was out in our arms, I realized that whatever I thought I knew about race, she was shaking it to the core. She had kind of thrust what I call the fiction of race into my consciousness for the first time. Her physical presence in my life made me question these categories in a way that my own kind of contradictory childhood upbringing never forced me to think through the same way. Yeah, well, the variable of nationality is incredibly important here. The difference between how this all looks in America as an American and how it looks in Europe, given the different histories. It's huge. And so it's almost like when you're insisting to your wife that your unborn kids will be black, and the revealed inaccuracy, if not absurdity, of that when they come out looking Swedish. Really? Swedish, black and African American are used as synonyms in America. Right. It's ridiculous to use African American outside of America. Right. But it's almost like you were insisting our kids are going to be African American right. Because you're insisting on the American view of the durability of race that's right. Which doesn't have the same logic in Europe. And there was also this level of confusion that exists in America, which is what I was doing, actually, without realizing it, was I was conflating something biological with something ethnic, with something cultural, with something based on a, you know, a tradition and a loyalty to to a historical oppression. All of these things were combined in my mind with a very abstract color category that actually doesn't apply to most so called African Americans. Actual skin tone. Yeah, but the skin tone issue is the variable here because had your daughter come out looking black, you would never have discovered the conversation that you're having on the other side of this experience. Right. You just would say, okay, well, my kids are black, just like I thought they would be. I wonder, even if she didn't have blue eyes and really blonde hair, if I would have been. It doesn't make me question the fundamental discovery or the truth as I see it now, but it makes me wonder if I would have just I hope that you don't have to actually see racial categories fall apart in your own intimate life for these kind of insights to really feel compelling. I would like to think that I could have arrived at the conclusion, but I'm just not sure that I was the person that would get there without being prompted this way. Well, my own experience of the power of America and American history is brought home to me in many contexts, but the place where I first discovered it and where it's still most vivid to me is when I'm with my friend Ayan Hercli. Do you know ayan I've never met her. Right. So Ayan is Somali, for those who don't know her, and she looks Somali. So to look at her, she's more or less as black as anyone, but she's Somali. She's not African American. She lived in Europe. She's incredibly cosmopolitan, speaks half a dozen languages, and she's never had the African American experience. She lives in America now, so maybe she's belatedly getting a taste of it. But the reality is, is that she doesn't think of herself as black the way most African Americans think of themselves as black. And she manages to communicate that lack of identity just it's coming out of her pores. When you're with her, there's something that's not happening for her that is communicated. She just does not see the world in those terms. And the conversation doesn't even have to be about race. It may never touch race, but I realized, to my surprise, that it basically never occurs to me that she's black. Apart from the fact that it's useful to talk about her experience in conversations like this. Right. I know that a racist would view her as black, a white supremacist would view her as black, and many antiracists would view her as black too. They would say that whether she likes it or not, whether she has different experiences or not in America, she is confronted with white supremacy in the same way that other black bodies are. That's kind of what can unite racist and antiracist, actually. Is this kind of essentialist. Exactly. That's something that I've complained about a lot on this podcast, and I'm sure I'll complain about it here, is that the only people who are as fixated on the significance of race and its permanence as white supremacists are the irretrievably woke on the left who insist that this is a concept we're never going to get beyond. Right. But in the presence of someone like Ayan, you feel yourself to be beyond it. You feel yourself to be living in a post racial world because of how she's living. To me, and it seems to be clear to you from what I've read, that the goal has to be to get to a post racial society. Yeah, as long as you racism really creates race. Racism is a way of saying it's a perceptive error, as the philosopher Adrian Piper points out, and I'm really fond of quoting her on that, because the imposition of this perceptive error doesn't allow me to interact with you or engage with you as an individual. There are all kinds of history and stereotypes and myths that kind of come between me and you. So as long as we code people into racial categories, that's going to necessarily imply all types of value judgments and hierarchical implications. So we have to find a way to get beyond this. I'm not so naive as to think that my book is going to you just buy my book and suddenly we solve the problem of race and we get to a post racial world. I think that word, that term has been irredeemably corrupted post racial. Now, people can't say that in an unironic way on the left. It's just obviously ridiculous on the left, and it's been spat out so many times that you actually can't reclaim that. It is a useful phrase. Probably not, but, you know, I want to stay with the idea of someone like Ian Hercule because this is actually something that I think makes a lot of sense. Are you familiar with like, a dose American descendants of slavery, this kind of hashtag movement that's become popularized on Twitter? No. What's the kind of grassroots movement descendants of American slaves who advocate for understanding American descendants of slavery as as a distinct ethnic group. And that monolithic blackness actually doesn't make sense because a woman like ayan Hersiali or Nigerian immigrants that come into America to conceive of them as having the same experience and facing the same hurdles is demonstrably false. And also these groups don't nigerian immigrants, for example, that's one of the most successful ethnic groups in America. But when it all gets talked about as blackness, as though it's interchangeable. I think the disadvantage of race in American society is specific. It's not to say that it doesn't exist anywhere else and that there are variants of this in completely different cultures, but it's specific to the American experience. And slavery is the founding sin which we're still paying for in a wide variety of ways, politically and economically. And it's something you do touch in your book that the problem of race and social disparities there is mingled with the problem of class. And teasing those apart is difficult. Absolutely. That's why how can a program at Harvard or someplace that's supposed to how can an affirmative action slot for someone who's undergone slavery in America, how can a Nigerian immigrant be swapped into that? Because there's nothing genetic about whatever that program is supposed to repair. There's something that happened to a specific group of people in a specific places at a specific time. So for me, one of the main problems of moving through the world with racial language and categorizing people into abstract color categories is that it just obfuscates all of these complex things that make us who we are and that impact our lives. Yeah. You make one move in the book and it's not clear how fully you make it to me. So I want to talk about this, but you you seek to undermine the concept of race rather completely as a fiction. I mean, at one point, you just call it a fiction and you say that it's a social construct, it's not a biological one. And in some ways that's true, in some ways it's not true, though. And it's I feel like you're making a potentially dangerous move in in disavowing any relevant biology here, because it's not an accident that you can know something about a person's ancestry based on just looking at them. Right? I mean, I can I can look at someone whose ancestors spent the last thousand years in China and say, that person looks Chinese to me, and I'd never be tempted to say that he looks like he came from Norway. And so that's obviously that's just the surface level. Then there's you talk about susceptibility to various diseases and any other trait that would have a genetic explanation in in whole or in part. So there is a biological story here around race. It's just it doesn't align with the social construct in every case. And in certain cases it completely breaks apart so that, you know, for instance, the place where there's the most genetic diversity at this moment on Earth is on the continent of Africa, right? So if you're going to take the white racist view of Africa well, just everybody's black, obviously, but that doesn't track the actual historical isolation of various populations and the genetic diversity that's there. But the reality is that genetic diversity does produce consequences that people can find interesting, whether it's in susceptibility to disease or various traits. And I think the place we need to get to in transcending race is not to deny that these biological facts exist and may yet surprise us. It's to deny that they have any political significance for us. We shouldn't care about any of these things rather than commit ourselves in advance to remaining unaware of them or denying that they exist. Well, there's a few things that I would say to that. The first is that first of all, like with things like diseases like sickle cell is often brought up as like a black disease. But in fact, it seems that that's a disease that groups that populations that are exposed to malaria develop. And you can find many Greeks who develop sickle cell trait. And the idea that it's an inherently black disease doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. But I do in the book, quote David Reich, the Harvard geneticist whose oped really impacted my thinking. His op ed in the New York Times a few years ago, where he basically just cautioned us all to have a lot of humility. Because the only thing that's probably guaranteed with the increasing knowledge that we're getting in the field of genetics is that we're going to find out a lot of things that surprise us and a lot of what we think we know now as a fact can be overturned. So I take that seriously. But what we talk about when we talk about population groups is not exactly the same thing as what we talk about when we talk about black and white. Yeah, I don't understand and I've never seen somebody or heard somebody encountered somebody explain to me where a white person stops and a black person starts. And I think that these things get very tangled up in a place like America because the average African American, the average black American, however you define that group, has something like 20% to 25% Western European, usually Anglo Saxon genetic makeup. And there are millions and millions of white Americans walking around who have no idea and until recently wouldn't be able to know that they have sometimes significant African West African DNA in them because that's the whole history of rape and passing and lots of different things that have happened in this society. And another time, people colored, like my children, they might choose to hide the fact that they have a black grandfather and just move into white society that happened many times. We are a mongrel nation. We're a mongrel society. What Leon Weasel Tear said that really means a lot to me is that, you know, the achievement of America wasn't to create a multicultural society. It was to create the multicultural individual. I take that seriously. I struggled to understand how we can ever find a definition of racial groups and divisions that is coherent enough to make sense, because I was really thinking about all of these things in the conversation that you had with Charles Murray. And I find that it's really important to when we think about these things, does this population group have, on average, a different IQ than this population group, on average? First of all, what are the bounds of the population group? And second of all, I understand your point, which is how does that affect the individual? We live our lives as individuals. I don't understand what it means to be dumped into, or not dumped, but lumped into some enormous group like monolithic whiteness. What links a white Anglo Saxon Protestant with a Sicilian or a Spaniard or for that matter, with somebody who comes from the Caucasus mountain regions? What does it mean to say that these are all whites? Yeah, it defies I don't understand. How do we define these groups? How do we then compare these groups? And also, how do we take these measures like intelligence? And we've never even lived in a world where we really have seen what parity looks like. So these things kind of to your point, what's the purpose? Yes, but also, even if there were a purpose, show me first how we can measure these things. Right, well, so there's a lot in that I agree with, I think, the definitions of these things, concepts like race, where's the bright line between a white person and a black person? In America, there may not be one. Right. In my view, Booker has over 50% European ancestry. Right. Okay. You know what I mean? In the case of someone like yourself or someone like Booker, I have 60% so called Western Northern European ancestry. Right. And so Barack Obama is an interesting social choice to decide to call yourself black or decide to call yourself white or mixed race. And it seems to me to be a deeply uninteresting and probably politically toxic project to try to give a genetic answer to the question of self identity in those cases. But it's also very arbitrary where we decide where do groups start and stop? I mean, shatterman 10,000 years ago and living in what's now the United Kingdom had blue eyes and and and black skin. I mean, these groups are fungible. People are fungible. We will continue to change and mix. So the idea that we can just take a free frame of how people look today in groups that we've been calling white, black, Asian, which is a very vague term, the people will always be like this. We've only been saying people have been like this for 4500 years. I've eaten at restaurants, I've drunk at taverns in Europe that are continuously operating. I've slept in a hotel in Vimar. That's much older than the concept of race and the way that we think of it today. Yeah. No, I totally agree. But it's one thing to acknowledge all of those facts, it's another to doubt whether there are differences between groups, however we define them, and that those differences can be in the wrong hands, can be made to seem to matter. And so the only response to that that I hear many people advocating for, is to deny that such difference, that it's coherent to allege that such differences exist, or that they could conceivably matter. And I just think that's a fear based counsel of ignorance of certain facts. Just to take it in a politically uncharged case before this conversation, in reading your book, you're encountering the issue of what your ancestral background is, and you talk about having looked at the various websites 23 ANDME and Ancestry.com, and I realized I had an account at 23 and Me until literally, like, an hour ago. I checked my Ancestry, and there's a few things to observe about this. First I'm 51% Ashkenazi and 32% British Irish, I think 6% French. And then there was some other 9% Northern European. So I knew the gist of this. But one thing that's interesting is that I've had these data for at least a decade. I think I subscribed to 23 and Me the moment it was born. Right. So that could be 15 years, I don't remember. I find these facts about myself so utterly uninteresting that I'm sure I checked ten years ago and I knew I was half Ashkenazi and the rest European in some sense. But these are facts about me that have no relevance at all. And I have an aunt who is obsessed with Ancestry and she's constantly trying to get me to take an interest in this and I just have never had. Even if I could meet these people in person, I wouldn't be interested. Right. The truth is, I don't even much want to talk to this particular aunt. Right? So it's like, on some level, this is all an expression of my, quote, white privilege. I haven't had to take an interest in any of this. I'm just imagining a criticism that someone couldn't. Allege this is not how I see myself. There's nothing about my pedigree that is part of my identity. And so from this point of view of being totally uninterested in my race, I see certain potential facts as both true, undoubtedly true, and there to be found and totally unthreatening. So, for instance, you know, apparently I've got 32% British and Irish DNA. I am sure that if you tested every person on Earth, you got the the total population of people who have more than 30% British and. Irish DNA, you could find a dozen invidious comparisons to make between them and people with a different genotype. Right. So if we finally find the gene for being a jerk, we're going to have more of it than the Swedes, say, or the Nigerians or there's going to be a difference that can be spun as ugly and it has absolutely no relevance to me as an individual, and it need have no relevance to our politics. But it would seem, frankly, crazy for me to say there is no there biologically, there's no possible line of inquiry that could turn up something that is true there because we're all Homo sapiens and there are no important differences among us. That's something that I'm not afraid of. If you were to find the smoking gun tomorrow that proves that East Asians are slightly smarter than Anglosaxons and that the comparison works against other groups favor when compared to Anglo Saxons, if you show me how that's provable, I'll accept that. And I also understand that that has nothing to do with how I move through the world. I'm an individual, and sharing genetic ancestry with LeBron James has done nothing for my basketball game. Unfortunately, I wish it did. I've never really understood having enormous pride with your ethnic or so called racial group, or even with your nation in certain ways. And I've never understood having shame for these histories and deeds that have been done to and by people you're supposedly related to. I mean, human life is unequal. There's enormous inequality within a four person household. It isn't hard for me to believe at all that there's enormous inequality writ large. The idea that everybody is exactly the same would frankly be unappealing to me. There's a genetic component to this inequality, but there's also just a circumstantial component to this inequality. The fact that if you have a best friend who got into a car accident in childhood and has some deficit as a result, you're now among the privileged of people who were spared car accidents at crucial moments. Right? Sure. There's no fine grained equality of circumstance ever. Right. We've seized upon certain course variables as the crucial ones, and the goal has got to be to correct for disparities in luck. I mean, privileged by another name as much as we can economically and educationally, just as a matter of opportunity, and that political commitment is the only assertion of equality that I think we need to conserve all of our ethics here. I tend to agree with you, but I do think that there's something particularly insidious with insisting and I'm not saying that you do, but in the discourse, as it proceeds from both the racist and the antiracist kind of advocate there's harm done to society when we insist that these color categories are real, are meaningful, and that you can fit people into these boxes. I think that the term for me is what Glenn Lowry called transcendent humanism. I mean, life is lived on the individual level. We have to have values and ways of belonging to each other that unite us, not blood and skin and these kinds of ideas that have caused such human suffering over the past half millennium. You know, I really think that you can't redeem the language. I think we need a new language. You can't. These terms black, white, not only are they so vague, and they fail to capture life as it's lived on the individual level, but they actually we don't describe our reality. Our language produces our reality, too. So these terms produce the racism that's inherent in them that comes from this kind of collision of Africa and Europe through the slave trade. And I think that it's really important that the language be much more precise than the ways that we speak about race allow for. Yeah, well, I 100% agree with you there. So my conception of a post racial future is one in which this notion of being black or white is so uninteresting that you would it would never occur to you to mention this about another person or yourself, because there's there's virtually no circumstance in which it's relevant. I think that has to be the goal. That has to be the end point that we want to get to. And I've been pretty surprised and dismayed that that is not an end point that is shared with many increasingly prominent voices on the left. So I made that same point last fall at Bard during a conference where Ibrahim X Kendi was speaking. I forget exactly what he said, but he alluded to this idea of a kind of post racial future where how you look tells me as little as possible about who you are. He said that that was actually the white supremacist, the racist fantasy that race go away and that all inequalities become camouflaged and baked into the system. And I said, respectfully, I think that's not at all the white supremacist fantasy. The real racist fantasy is everybody is in a separate box and kept far away from each other. In my reporting with the French far right, with these thinkers that had influenced Richard Spencer and some of these all right guys, Galinda, Benoit, people like this, I wrote a long piece on this kind of thinking in France for The New Yorker a couple of years ago. These guys tell you straight up that they certainly don't want a post racial future. They want energized senses of racial identity. They want people to be hyper aware of their whiteness, and they want those white people to be segregated and kept away from mixing. There's a depressing element when you realize that you're fighting kind of on two sides. You're fighting on the left and the right to kind of carve out a space to just have an individual existence that's not defined by racial essentialism. Yeah, well, you mentioned Kendi, but you write about Tanhasi Coates in the book, and this is something that I've struggled with because on one level, it's very tempting to try to have a conversation with Coates. He's held up as a secular saint on the left, and his wisdom and prescriptiveness around race as an issue is just assumed to be more or less perfect. From the crowd who reads the kinds of journalism I read, the Atlantic readers and the people who would go to the Aspen Ideas Festival, or to Ted, the man can do no wrong, and yet, to my eye, he is a kind of pornographer of race, right? He's a good writer, but he's somebody who is trafficking. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay. No housekeeping. Apart from the now recurring reminder that if you're supporting the podcast, please get the private RSS feed. If you're listening to this in your podcasting app and you see a black Making Sense icon, you do not have the private feed, so please log again@samharris.org, go to the Subscriber content page and take the short steps to getting our actual Subscriber feed. That doesn't matter right now, but it will matter pretty soon. Okay? Today I'm speaking with Lynn Novick and Jewel Hall. Lynn is an Emmy and Peabody Award winning documentary filmmaker. She has been producing and directing documentaries for nearly 30 years, very often in collaboration with Ken Burns. And Lynn and Ken were on this podcast not too long ago, talking about their 18 hours documentary, The Vietnam War, and of course, they've done baseball and jazz and Frank Lloyd Wright and the War and Prohibition. And I believe Lynn worked with Ken all the way back to his truly groundbreaking documentary, The Civil War. But this new film is Lynn's solo directorial debut, and it's a four hour documentary series that she produced with Sarah Botstein. And the film is college behind bars. And it really is an extraordinary documentary. As you'll hear, it fairly blew me away, so much so that I really want, as I say at the end of this interview, this podcast to function as a mere commercial for the documentary. As much as I like talking to Lynn and Jewel, who I'll introduce in a moment, the conversation that we had is not only no substitute for seeing the film, it really provides no indication of how powerful this documentary is. So if this podcast does nothing more than inspire you to tune in to your local PBS station on Monday, November 25, when the first episode drops, it will have served its entire purpose. The film, again, the title of which is College Behind Bars, covers the work of the Bard Prison Initiative, which is giving a college education to people in prison. And the transformational power of this is so great that you really just have to bear witness to it by watching the film. And I'm inspired enough by this work to give all of the revenue coming into the podcast associated with this episode to the Bard Prison Initiative, so I will be doing that upon its release. Anyway, as frequent listeners to the podcast know, it's not often that I entirely subordinate the show to merely shilling for someone else's project. But in this case, the project is so good and so worthy of support that that's exactly what I am doing and should do. My other guest today is Jewel Hall, who completed the Bard program while in prison, and he was in prison for 22 years. He is now out and he got an undergraduate degree in German Studies through Bard. And then when he got out, he continued by doing graduate work in public health and he's now a program associate for the Ford Foundation where he provides data analysis and strategy development. Anyway, it was a great pleasure to get Jewel on the podcast as well. And now, without further delay, I bring you Lin Novic and Jewel Hall. I am here with Lynn Novak and Julie Hall. Lynn and Jul, thank you for joining me. Thank you, Sam. Our pleasure. Thank you. So Lynn, I'll start with you. You've been on the podcast before previously with your frequent collaborator, Ken Burns. This was for the Vietnam War documentary which you made, which was astonishing and was made doubly astonishing because I decided to watch, I think it was 15 hours of it in the 24 hours before we actually spoke. So I just basically came from the front to get on our podcast together. So I was slightly deranged in that conversation. But that was an amazing film. And then you, as many people know, have made many other remarkable films together with Ken, starting with the Civil War and then baseball and jazz and the war and Prohibition. But this new series, you have College Behind Bars, this is so arresting in a very different way. I guess the main variable here is that this isn't a historical documentary. You're exploring a problem that we're all living with now and that's born home, really, in every minute of this thing as a caveat to everything we're going to say here. I'm hoping we'll have a great conversation, but there's no way this conversation is a surrogate for seeing the film you've made. We will tell people where and how they can do that at the end, but in fact, let's just do that up front. Where where is this being released and where can people see College Behind Bars? Sure. Yeah. The the film airs on PBS. It's a four part series and it's airing in two chunks on November 25 and 26, the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving, nine East East Coast time. I'm not sure in the middle of the country if it might be at eight. And it'll be streaming on Pbs.org and on the PBS app. And they'll be streaming for 60 days. Great. And I'm going to wait to introduce you, Jewel, because we kind of figure out what the context is here. Lynn, tell me what the Bard Prison Initiative is and how this came to be the focus of your film. Well, in 2012 we were finishing promoting our film on Prohibition that Ken and I made with Sarah Botstein, our producer. And Sarah and I were invited to give a guest lecture about the film in a college class. And we'd been traveling around the country doing interviews and talking about the film and showing clips. In fact, we had been in Washington at the White House doing a screening for top law students in the DC. Area a few weeks before. So we've done a lot of talking about the film. And we went into this college class which happened to be part of something called the Bard Prison Initiative, which is a program that offers college degrees to people who are incarcerated. So Sarah and I went into a maximum security prison with our clip reel and the professor who was teaching this course, and we showed our clips like we'd been doing all around the country, and we weren't sure what to expect. And we had the most interesting and thoughtful and serious and sophisticated conversation with the students in the maximum security prison in the classroom. And it was sort of intellectually, incredibly challenging and thrilling and also sort of overwhelming to think about having that conversation in that place. And that was so sort of stunning to us that as we left the prison, sarah and I said to each other, this was an extraordinary experience. We did not realize this was happening here. This would be an amazing film. We weren't thinking that we would actually make it at the moment because we were just embarking on our Vietnam series in 2012. But over time, we got more interested and sort of involved. I taught in the program myself the following year, and Sarah taught some courses with me. And we just decided that this was too important a story to have anybody else do it. And we decided to throw our hat in the ring and make the film. We're going to get into what it's like for the viewer to watch this. But now let me just bring Jul in here because Julie, you are an alum of the program, and I guess I want to really talk about your whole experience from childhood, really. But before we get there, just tell us what you're doing now since you left BPI. I'm a program associate with the Ford Foundation, where I do strategy development and data analysis. Nice. Before we get into the actual kind of journey you create for the viewer through the film, Lynn, I just want to talk about the context in which we're having this conversation. Because one thing that's Born Home really poignantly in this film is that as hopeful as this all is because we meet these extraordinary students who are incarcerated, but they're making most of them such immense progress through this education program that it's an incredibly hopeful look at what is happening for these people and what is possible. And yet the knowledge that this is such a rare experience for someone in prison gives a feeling of desperation and futility even as well for the viewers. So the light and the dark of this are Born Home more or less every minute of watching this film. And the context in which we're having this conversation is one in which new laws are likely to be passed that affect this. And we have a history of passing some very bad laws with respect to educating people who are incarcerated. I don't know which one of you wants to take this, but can you just sketch what the picture is here of just how many people are in prison and what we spend and what we don't spend and how crazily masochistic this all is? In some ways, the numbers are shocking in and of themselves. And then the actual human waste and cost is even more devastating. America has 2.2 million people locked up in prisons and jails across the country. We have over incarcerated to such an epic scale that we're the world's largest jailer proportional to our population, and we spend $80 billion a year to do that. And the recidivism rate is very high. And most people who are incarcerated do not have access to meaningful educational opportunity while incarcerated. And many of them did not have that access before incarceration. And so it's not really a surprise that people leave prison demoralized and unprepared to return to society and be productive citizens. And you're right. This program, I mean, that's why Sarah and I felt so strongly about making the film. It shows what is possible and it is hopeful. And it also is a huge indictment of what has been going on. And I think our society hasn't paid enough attention. Yeah. And one detail that you mentioned, I think of it in the first episode again, this is a four part, four hour documentary is that it's? Over 600,000 people are released every year from prison back into the population. And the recidivism rate is somewhere around 50%. But it's only it's less than 4% for people who go through this program. And first, the politically inconvenient fact that this was all made much worse by the Clinton crime bill in 1994 when Pell Grants for inmates were rescinded, essentially. And we should note, inconveniently, that this bill was written by Senator Joe Biden, and it appears to have been disastrous. I mean, do you think I have that history? Right? I do. And I think Jewel could speak about a little bit more because he personally experienced some of this. Yeah, when I was incarcerated, I was incarcerated in 1994 and in 1995, that's when the bill you referred to was implemented. And I actually witnessed the college programs being pulled out of the prison. I was in. I was in Kokasaki Correctional Facility in New York State. And you correctly characterize this. And people were demoralized. People felt hopeless. There was a lot of worry about how people would continue their education. There was a lot of despair about how a person would survive in this environment that is violent, laden with drugs, and not many constructive opportunities for people who already achieved a high school diploma or a high school equivalency diploma. There wasn't much for people to do anything constructive. So I actually witnessed that period from 90, 95 to when I personally enrolled in Bard, I think around 2003, I saw that prison was like a different place when college wasn't inside the prison. And the Bard program is privately funded, right? Yes. So there's no longer taxpayer funding for this. But this really directs us to the question which you raised explicitly at one point, Lynn, in the film of what is the purpose of prison? We're incarcerating people for at least two reasons as punishment and to warehouse people and to take people off the street who we deem dangerous in many cases, but in the vast majority of cases, we know we're going to release these people back to society. And the fact that we're not taking the obvious steps to rehabilitate them, it just seems like a self inflicted wound that you would never imagine we would commit upon ourselves with open eyes. And somehow we did, which is pretty damning indictment of our public policy over the last 30, 40 years, as we've exponentially increased the prison population and taken away the programs that would make it possible for people to return to society. 95% of people, like you said, are coming home, and then we blame the people who come home and aren't really prepared for the failing that is actually on all of us. And I think for a lot of us who haven't been impacted by the criminal justice system, all of this has been happening kind of off stage. And I think as a society, we're beginning to pay a lot more attention to the sort of criminal injustice, mass incarceration, the lack of opportunity and rehabilitation. But for a long time, it wasn't a central focus. And I think a bigger issue is also that people on the inside want something to transform. They want something to give them a platform through which they could change their lives. But at that time period, there wasn't nothing. Guys was literally standing in the yard most of the day in front of a television, just watching TV and getting into trouble. But people really wanted something to motivate them, to make their time in prison less monotonous, make it more constructive. But college programs have been pulled out and, you know, there's was there was that despair. Yeah. Well, the the effect on the people in the program is so stark and just the way in which it changes their relationship to being in prison. I want to get to that in your story, Jule. So let's just start with really, the beginning. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn. In New York. Brownsville, Brooklyn, even, I would say maybe two years ago, was, was labeled to have had one of the most violent streets in New York City. There was a lot of violence in my neighborhood where where I grew up. I always love school, but, you know, a lot of my peers would pick on people who showed that attention to school. So I kind of saw that it was feasible to not let people know that I love school so much. I grew up in a single parent home, and I remember wanting to come home to do my homework, actually. I was excited about that. Yeah. There's this phrase, acting white, that has been exported from that experience. Was that the framing of it for you among your peers? I don't think it was necessarily about race at that point. I think it was just a sense of who's cool young kids who don't have a perspective on what life really is about and how education fits into our lives. So it was more about girls and hanging out and being seen, and you couldn't do much of that in school. So it was that type of criticism like, oh, come hang out with us, or, you should be with this girl and not in school. So it was just a general sense. And were you in a gang at that point? No, I'd never been in a gang, although I grew up in an area where I had close affinities with my neighbors, but I never was in a gang. Right, okay. So how did you wind up in prison? I wound up in prison because, you know, I made some bad decisions in life, basically. You know, like I said, I stopped I actually had a prison. Opened my eyes to this. Once I stopped putting emphasis on school, once I stopped focusing on school, that's when I began a life of being in the streets, cutting, class, fighting. That led me to the situation where I was incarcerated for some violent act that was occurring in my area, where another guy opened fire right where I lived. And I had this sense of, this has happened before. I don't know how it's going to stop. I think with my 17 year old mind incorrectly thinking, it's only going to stop if somebody fight back. And that just led to a whole bunch of things that were destructive and let me right into prison. Cell so if I recall correctly, you then retrieved a gun, and then a gunfight ensued, and then someone who you were close with in your neighborhood got killed as an innocent bystander, but the person who you were shooting at wound up shooting the person you knew. Basically, you were charged as an accomplice to that murder. Is that correct? Yes. That's a fair assessment. Yes. So, actually, this is one question I have, and I want to get back to your experience going through the program, Joel, but it seems to me that there must be people who are not suited to the BPI program for a variety of reasons. But I guess one effect of watching this film, which is which is fairly startling, is to be confronted by the feeling that the viewer's expectation of who's in prison is fairly erroneous. Right. We're introduced to people like Jewel. It's like, half a dozen people who are extremely charismatic and filled with promise and just being transformed by education. And it's incredibly inspiring and obviously, I don't want to discount any of that, but one also has to assume that there are people in prison who have committed crimes so terrible or who are so incorrigible or unrepentant that they would never even be considered as candidates for the program. And we're not seeing any of that. And I guess I just want to ask Jule just what the selection criteria are like for the program and just to give me kind of a reality check as to what are the kind of background facts of who else were you in prison with? And that's part of the context in which you're pursuing your education at that point. Well, Sam, I would say this one being admitted into the program. There's an explicit decision not to consider your crime. There's a sense that with BPI and many of the people who support us, that no one is beyond redemption. And whether it's for the purposes of release. Like Lynn just mentioned, 95% of the people incarcerated will come home. So we will want them to return to society to be better people and contribute society like many BPI students are doing now. There's. Also, I think we could interview or talk to officers, correction officers in the prison who actually felt that having a college program improve the day to day operations of the prison. Because guys, regardless of their crime, regardless of how much time they had, was more concerned about taking care of their classes and studying and not getting in trouble. So it has a constructive effect on the prison itself and not just about people being released. But one other thing I would like to mention is that when it comes to who is not able to take the program, I will also push back against that a bit, because one of the qualities, one of the things I think that makes BPI what it is, is that the students help each other. We had a way of developing a level of fraternity, and still do, where if we're in the same class and you're struggling, I'm going to help you, I'm going to go into the yard and study with you, or we're going to find the time to make sure that we all get this material. So there was a level of camaraderie and support amongst the prisoners itself that I want to say was actually supported by the BPI administrators. It was encouraged by BPI administrators for us to take a level of autonomy and self direction in order to educate ourselves to the degree and make the most out of material we were presented with. And I just would chime in one more thing I've heard people talk about a lot, which is every year a new cop of students are admitted. And sometimes the students that are already in the program would look at the other students, say, oh, I don't know, I've seen that guy in the yard and I don't know, is he really going to be able to do this or whatever, and people rise to the occasion and rise to the challenge over and over again. Yeah. I was charged with orientating students to the rigors of the program when they got in and made that transition from just being incarcerated to actually being incarcerated and taking this rigorous program. And I saw people who were in the yard involved in all types of negativity, but once they got in the program, they became the most engaged, articulate, intelligent people. And you're right, Sam. There were people who struggled with the material. But again, we were encouraged to help each other out, and we did. And I think that is what's spilling out to a lot of BPI alumni who are home providing solutions to the problems and helping people out. Here I'm reminded of the scene, I guess it's the first class, where the instructor says, as you said, we're not considering what you did to get into prison at all. Your crimes are totally irrelevant here. You're not a prisoner, you're a student. And that was a very powerful kind of induction into the curriculum. But I guess I'm still left with the feeling that there's a bit of a selection effect here, which I would only assume is in some way natural. Because, for instance, I don't remember anyone who you focused on, Lynn, in the film, whose crime or crimes were such that one would be really worried that this person was ever going to get out of prison. There are some people who are just not going to get out of prison because what they did was so terrible. Right. Well, I was considered one of those people, Sam. I just understand the logic of your crime, and this is not the kind of crime that makes me think you're the sort of person who wanted to kill and harm people in general. This was a plausible self defense situation. Yeah, maybe I could jump in and just say that. I think the film and everyone's stories provides a lot of social context for the environments people came from and the forces that shaped them. The traumas and all the things that we know end up resulting in violence and decisions and the trajectories that end up with people being incarcerated. And so I think what the program shows and the success of the student shows is that when you teach in the program, you don't know anyone's background either. You're just there as a faculty and you're not supposed to, and you don't investigate, and you relate to the students as students. And that's really important philosophy to the program. But it also just speaks to this larger question that I think is who's to judge who is or isn't capable of change and redemption? And I think without knowing the full picture of everybody's circumstances, it's really pretty tough call and that's not something that the program does or that we as filmmakers did either, actually. And we kind of hope the film, in a way, opens up that conversation for a different to have in a different way. And I would emphasize that, you know, even the people who may have that categorization, I don't you know, I'm not really sure. I don't want to label anyone, but there's an effect that these college programs have on the prison environment itself that many officers were supportive of and appreciative of because they understood that I have to come here and work. As long as I'm here working and these guys are focused on positive things, that's a good thing for me in my life and my family. Yeah, so I guess let me give you a little more of the motivation for my question here because one aspect of the film that which I found pretty flabbergasted in I guess if I thought about it for a few minutes beforehand, I could have anticipated it. But it did hit me as a real point of surprise, which is the resistance to the program and the resistance to programs like this coming from not just society at large, but, as you say, from the guards whose jobs you can anticipate would be getting easier. The more people in prison are getting educated and having their more fulfilling experience. The case that really just was jaw dropping for me, even one of the students in the program, her own mother resented the fact that she was getting a free education in prison. Right? Maybe both of you just kind of talk us through the logic by which people would resent the fact that prisoners are being exposed to great books and of a path of self actualization through education. And also just why the guards didn't figure prominently in the film. Because if I'm not mistaken, the guards are kind of mostly absent or entirely absent in the film in terms of their testimony as to how this affects prison life. I can speak a little bit about the officers which was that the officers union, we asked repeatedly for could we interview some officers, and they never responded. So we actually don't represent what the officers think or don't think. And so we actually don't know. We heard occasionally when we were filming, Sarah and I would talk to officers who were hanging out with us but we have nothing on the record from them. So we only have the commissioner of the state of New York's, Commissioner of Corrections saying that, yes, it's true that there can't be tension because the officers often don't have a college education themselves. And I think we take a position that officers should have access to education. We're not trying to create a dichotomy. And, Sam, you bring up a good point with Tamika's mother because it's important to recognize that people who are against or have information that makes them take a position that's against this program are generally the same population of people, mostly lower class people of color. Of course, some lower class white people there as well. So I think it's important, and I love your show, Sam, for this reason as well, because it's important to understand how politics come in and kind of distort and allow people to take positions that's not necessarily in their interests. We take the position with this film that college education should be accessible to everyone in America who wants it. Not necessarily about, you know, the crime, your job, your economic status. We see the not only personal development potential, but also civic responsibility that many of these, like you just referred to the humanities and engage with sociology, installs in a person. So to answer your question a bit more directly, yes, there are people like Tamika's mother who were or are against this program. But I would say two things about that. One, even Tamika's mother, once she had more information, she realized the benefit of this program. And two, the second thing I'll say is that college access is a problem beyond prison and we should not I like to look at this film as showing the potential of education overall. And it just so happens that it's in a prison environment. And we shouldn't overlook that because I think education can be something that makes America great again, doing someone who's probably not a friend of the program. Well, interestingly enough, yeah, the Obama administration started in a small way to have this Second Chance Pal pilot program, and the Trump administration has continued it and expanded it. And Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is in favor of pell grant restoration for people incarcerated. No, well, it's unexpected in the universe of politics that we're dealing with. And the other thing I would just say, because this is such an important point, so thank you for bringing it up is that we have seen the politics shift over the time that Sarah and I were working on the films. And when we first started, we felt a lot more of the resentment and kind of, I would say, the political argument that you hear to me because mom making was more prevalent and over time, up to today, we've heard. And we see that it is shifting quite a bit and for the reasons Jewel said, and also just because of how much money we're spending on mass incarceration. When you spend money on education, it saves money in the long run to a significant degree, one to $4 ratio. It isn't really about saving taxpayer dollars at all. It's actually about denying opportunity and access to education primarily to communities of color in America. That's the subtext that's kind of not made explicit, but is there even with someone like Tamika's Mom, sort of hearing the rhetoric and expressing it. But it has to largely to do with the resentment of the high cost of education and also frustration with her daughter being incarcerated and the suffering that their family. Has gone through to enjoy that. And I think one of the things that's very instructive about Tamika's mother, she also has a daughter that's a correction officer, right? So these are the same populations of people that we're talking about. So I definitely like to keep that in mind once we get into the distinctions and arguments made for or against. But I honestly feel that anyone who sees this film, they're going to be for something like this in prison for people who are incarcerated. Yeah, well, there's no question of that. It's even to the point where you just can't imagine anyone having a different reaction to it. It's so obviously good. And as you said, Jule, the economics also work out. I think. If I'm not mistaken, there was a Rand study which said that for every dollar spent in prison on education, you're saving five out of prison. I believe that was the math. And so the last time this failed, I think it was in 2014 that Andrew Cuomo tried to pass a law in this area, and then he got so much pushback that he just withdrew the the initiative. I think that's correct. It was a trial balloon and he didn't really put much force behind it after making the proposal. I think he was surprised by the reaction. And again, I think we should take heed to the politics involved because this isn't a new thing. College has been a way through which people are prepared to be released from prison to be productive members of society. We could go back to the 80s where it was known that these programs were on a benefit for society. Because I actually believe as long as you provide a person in prison with the quality of education, once that person released, that's not an individual gain, that's a societal gain. Just like education will benefit an individual to go into society and make society better. It has no difference for a person includes incarcerated. Yeah, well, so, Jewel, back to your experience here. So when you joined the program, how did it change your sense? You could speak personally, or I guess you can also speak for some of your fellow alums in the program. How did it change your sense of being in prison and your relationship to the time that was yet ahead for you to serve? It changed it radically. What you just quoted, I think, is my quote is somebody saying what I said? But this is what I usually speak about. I remember the first orientation I partook in when I got into BPI, and one of the administrators, Daniel Carpowitz, made a statement. He told us, from now on, you should no longer look at yourself as a person incarcerated in the prison. You should look at yourself as a student who's part of a bigger institution that is broad. And that was so uncomfortable for me because I had spent maybe eleven years in prison being told I was an inmate. And not only being told, believing that I needed to stay in a lane that was an inmate to survive, but being in Bar College changed my whole identity of myself. And I think that is important for one reason if none other, there's many that it put me in a mine state to understand what reentry or how reentry starts in prison. I needed to get out of the mind state of looking at myself as an inmate if I was going to be successful when I'm released, I needed to start that process as early as possible. But nonetheless, when people get into Bar, my experience is that a couple of qualities that the program had that put us in a position to be successful was one, the responsibility was on us. Not many people in prison give people the responsibility for their own development and I think that's really instructive because once a person is given that responsibility, you'll see what you see in the film. A lot of us engaging with our past and using the education to kind of like situate ourselves and understand how we got into the positions we were in. I think that's the path of change, transformation two, we were forced to give up our values in prison. You know, in prison there's norms and values that people take on or I don't want to mess with this guy because of his crime or I don't want to mess with this guy because it is. But again, bart put us in a position to say none of that matters. Only thing that matters is if you understand this material, are you putting your best foot forward and are you relying on other people in your cohort to do so? So it built a fraternity where in prison if you're not in a gang, you're a highly individual. So this program also put us in a position to say we need to rely on each other. So those are just a couple of the things that I would love to have a discussion about. How many bartolome are out here now manifesting those same qualities in the work they're doing. Because there's the fraternity, there's the understanding of self and environment and how to use these critical thinking skills we learnt in the program out here for real life situations. Yeah, that comes through so vividly in the film. Just the sense that you're forming, you and you and the rest of the people in the program are forming with one another of fraternity and support in the classroom which just seems like it is clearly functioning by a different dynamic than what is ordinarily going on in a prison. And then the connection that's being made to the outside world and to in virtually everybody's case a future life in society based on the material that is being worked with and just some of the most arresting shots. Lynn, occasionally you would linger on somebody's stack of books or their bookshelf, and just to see most viewers will be familiar with some of the books there, and certainly the topics of the nonfiction books, and to just see what a lifeline this material is for people. I don't know the effect. It was like just an unusually powerful meditation on the profundity of what education is for civilization and the profundity of of the missed opportunity for many of these people to who have gotten it earlier in life. You're basically seeing people who have been dying of thirst given a cold drink of water. Really just a very powerful experience that you've created. Thank you for saying that. Thank you for looking at the books, because we love seeing what people are reading, and you can see a lot. I know my bookshelf at home says a lot about me, what books I chose and what books I care about and save. And seeing the books that the students have in theirselves or in the library that are out on the table reflects where they're at and what they're thinking about. And that's insight into what's going on inside is so, so powerful. And the tall drink of water is exactly right. One of the students at one point says, literally, it's like you're in the desert and you get into PPI and you found an oasis. And the books play a role because I engage with Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Man, another one of my favorites is Walter Mosley. And I didn't just engage it by myself, I engaged it with my classmates. There's that level of interaction with each other. So I'm not only getting my impression of Friedrich Nietzsche, but everyone else is in that class. In my class, I'm getting the impression as well. And I think that is just like I know for me, it was, like, magical. It's like, wow, it's opening my mind to so much. I think there is something we find, Sarah and I find, in the collaborative process of making the film with our cinematographers and our editor, Tricia Reedy. When you're really in that, and I've heard you speak about it, this idea of flow, and I'm not sure I've ever really experienced it, but there's something euphoric about this pure intellectual or creative collaboration with other people. But you do something more than you could do on your own, and you're almost outside yourself. And we felt that sometimes when making the film, and I can see from what Julie is saying, I think that's the same thing that happens among the students when they're really deeply digging into the material. And what's the experience for the instructors in general? It comes through. You see them in action a lot, but I'm wondering what your sidebar conversations are like with instructors. Yeah, you know, when we started off, sarah and I did think we were going to focus a bit more on the professors because we were really interested in what their experiences were but we ended up realizing the students were really going to be the focus. But Craig Wilder, you had something like 400 hours of right? Yes, exactly. There was a lot on the cutting room floor and one of the things where some of the professors extended interviews about why they teach in the program and what they find so joyous and fulfilling. And it's not just this program. Any other professor I've ever met who's taught in a prison will say that these are the most engaged, serious, thoughtful students and some of the smartest and most capable students who work the hardest. And so you walk into those classrooms, and it's the most fulfilling academic experience they have. So professors who teach at MIT or on the Bard campus or at Columbia find that teaching the students in BPI invigorates their love of teaching their relationship to the material, and they bring that back to their classrooms, back on the main campuses where they teach, and everything kind of gets elevated and you just feel it. It's palpable, actually, in the way that they sort of walk into the classroom and are there totally present for the students, and everyone is fully present, which I think is also really interesting because they go back to this old fashioned teaching style of a blackboard and chalk and everybody is paying attention and you're looking at books and pieces of paper. There's no screens. And so there's sort of a tactile physical relationship to learning also, which, you know, it's it's just everyone's focused and involved. It's amazing to see the challenge for the students to carve out the time to actually just do the coursework. Many of them are staying up very late at night because it's the only time where it's quiet enough to actually read. Maybe, Julie, you can speak to what that was like. Yeah. Again, the professors didn't let up on us. I would argue they were a little bit harder. I think they would say that too. A great example is the senior project. When I wrote my senior project, I finished with 124 page exposition on the guest worker program in Germany and reading and writing the project. I remember there were points where I was just looking at the paper and crying, telling myself, I can't do this. This is too hard. It's a challenging thing. But people around me were supportive to a degree because they understood what I was up against. Of course, you had the noise, and I had to put myself in situations not to be distracted. I had to wait to certain times when I knew people weren't in the cell block so it could be quiet and not a focus. But nonetheless, I think that is also quality of education because it takes that level of innovation and structured time and being able to say, this is the best time for me to get the best results. I think that is all part of the educational process, and I would argue it's not easy in prison, maybe even a little harder. I think now that I'm home, I see the challenges that students out here face trying to stay focused on school. So I'm not trying to elevate one over the other. I just think that as a general matter, it's part of the educational process, in spite of the distractions, to be able to say, okay, this is how I need to structure my time in order to get this material done. Yeah. And this is one of the through lines in the film, is The Adventures of the Debate Club, which is a subset of the students here. But they debate. Was it west Point first? Yes. We saw them practicing for University of Vermont. We didn't film the actual debate, and then we filmed them against West Point and then Harvard. Yeah, I guess we don't want to spoil the effect, but it's just amazing that that's the level at which this is culminating. Right. You have the barred prison team against West Point in one scene and Harvard in another, and these are completely appropriate pairings. It's magical. And yet there's a lot that has to change to spread the magic. How hopeful are you, Lynn, that this is going to go in the right direction in a time frame that is at all satisfying? Wow. Well, I guess I have to live in a way that I just to get through life. I am hopeful. Just generally, I try to be hopeful, even though I think right now we're living in a pretty dark time. Sometimes I feel very despairing. But on this particular issue, I feel actually very hopeful because we are in a moment where Congress is, in fact considering legislation to restore pell eligibility for people incarcerated. So that is quite something. And then the question will be sort of, are there any limitations in terms of restricting it to certain kind of offenses or other kind of offenses or certain sentences? And then on another level, just also, will we hold organizations and educational institutions accountable to provide education to people who are incarcerated that is rigorous and demanding and doesn't condescend to them and does what Bard does, or any other similar program on the outside that people deserve the opportunity? So those are things that are real and scaling up, as they say, from a very tiny percentage of people right now who are incarcerated, to have access to quality degree granting programs to the 2 million people that are incarcerated. That that's a big climb. But it's certainly within our reach to both decrease the prison population, which we are doing and need to do much more aggressively, and also expand these programs on a huge scale. And I am optimistic, and we're really excited that the film is coming out right now for that reason. I'm very optimistic, too, if I may add, because, you know, I was incarcerated at 93 94 when the talk was just super predator, lock them out thoroughly. The key. And we are changing the narrative. I see the film and its role in changing this narrative. Sam, you cited the way in which people are in opposition to this program, and I think this is helping them to see a different narrative about what prisoners are trying to achieve while they're inside and what they are capable of doing. And because of that, I'm so hopeful. So, Julie, at one point you mentioned the other alums and and what they're doing. What what is people will go and see this film and fall in love with several people who are making their way through the program. And there's some follow up, but obviously the film was in the can earlier than this moment. What can you say about what people are doing and just what it's like to get out of prison having gone through BPI? Well, I'll take the last part first. Getting out of prison after going through BPI was a piece of cake in a sense that I felt because I did that senior project, there was nothing that I couldn't do. Now, that doesn't mean that I wasn't faced with the stigma of being incarcerated whenever I went on a job interview, but I had the level of confidence and as well as I could articulate myself in a job interview, to continue and push and push. And that was a trait that I learned from BPI. And another factor, like I mentioned earlier in the interview or in the podcast, are the fraternity. We have. We have an informal network of BPI students in the New York area, not just in the New York area. We have people in overseas, in Jamaica. We have people down south that are doing some very important things. They are actually engaged with their communities, whether through nonprofit organizations like New York. We have so many people in the bail reform space and philanthropic space and working to educate people or youth at risk that are BPI alum. But we also have people who are making that leap into the medical institution or getting their PhDs. So I just like to bring attention to the fact that we recognize that we have had in the past, our past selves. We have caused harm in society, but now it's like a conscious, driven effort to bring solutions to society. We have people all over in many sectors that are doing so many constructive things that's helping out the world today. I want to revisit part of the conversation where I was talking about offenders whose crimes might have been too grave for admission into the program. And just to get a clearer sense of kind of the ground truth here, I guess a question for you both. Are there people admitted to the program who are never getting out of prison, who are, let's say, on is there anyone on death row admitted to the program or there's some criterion by which people are selected against based on what their actual sentence is. Well, so New York State doesn't have the death penalty, so we don't have death row. Thank God that clears that up. I think if Max Kennedy, the director of the program, were here, he would say that really, because of limitations of space and resources. Anyone who has a sentence of life without parole, which is a very tiny, tiny percentage. Of people can apply. But there are many people with life sentences, which means you might have 20 years to life or 30 years to life. Which means that you have to go to the parole board after 20 years or over. And then it's up to the parole board whether Julie has a sentence of certain number of years, 22 years to life. So there are people who have gone through the program and go to the parole board and get released, and some don't. And so that's the real thing. And one of the issues that come up is that you might finish the program and then you still have time to serve, and you can keep taking courses and mentoring other students and that kind of thing. So but, you know, it's a tiny percentage of people that have life without parole, and most other people who are incarcerated, as we said before, will be coming home, but some may not. Right. Julie, you served 22 years. Yes, I served 22 years. I was sentenced to life that essentially said I didn't have any requirement to be released, but I had the consideration of release after 22 years. And was your experience in BPI part of what the parole board considered? Because I frankly can't remember if it was you or some other student there, but I remember the frustration as a viewer, seeing someone have their parole denied at a point in the film where it was pretty obvious, this is not a parole that you should be denying. Was that you or was that parole? That was multiple cases there. Yeah, it should factor into the conversation. What was that like? Well, I can't speak for the parole board. They keep their decisions rightly, so amongst themselves, they don't want to cause much controversy. But I think for me, my personal experience of going through the program, then going to parole, feeling like I was ready, but also having that self reflective stance of what I was in jail for, it was hard. It was really hard to be denied. I felt I was ready, but it forced me to sit down a little bit longer and think about why I was there. But nonetheless, the next parole board I had, I was released. But that doesn't bring much attention to the fact that there are many who are still being denied. I think BPI, we are building a level of respect and understanding that we are sincere people, we are different people than we went in but nonetheless, politics or this idea, this false dichotomy of the violent and the nonviolent crime comes into play whenever a person comes up for parole as well. I will say that the New York State does have a policy that if you've completed some part of college program, you can get six months off your sentence. So if you're going to be released, you can come home six months earlier. But that's what I was denied, right? That's what Julie was denied, yes. So it's not automatic, but you're eligible to apply for that. Yes. So right. Yeah. Okay, so yeah. So, Julie, you just you mentioned something about a false dichotomy between violent and nonviolent crime. There's a picture here of one obvious solution to the problem of mass incarceration is to recognize that the war on drugs has been a terrible failure and that far too many people are locked up for truly victimless crimes. Lynn, perhaps you can speak to this as well. This is obviously the low hanging fruit of reform, but what percentage of the prison population is actually, quote, nonviolent? I'm pretty sure that it's about half these categorizations. And I'm not a criminal justice expert. I will say I have done a fair amount of research, so I can understand the big picture. But about half of the people in prisons and jails are incarcerated for crimes that are labeled as violent. And in some cases, or a significant percentage of cases, the label violent doesn't mean that that person actually committed physical harm to somebody. The label is used fairly broadly. So that's one thing, and we could have a whole long conversation about that. But then in addition, there are people who are incarcerated who have hurt other people physically. And so that's where we need to at least face the fact that this is a society. We're not going to resolve or settle or solve mass incarceration where we have incarcerated people at such an enormous scale without addressing the fact that there are people, many people in prison, hundreds of thousands, who have committed physical harm but are trying to redeem themselves and also reckon with that and make the best of what they have of their future. And we can't do that if we don't offer them the opportunity to get an education while incarcerated. And I would like to add, if you take that population of people, there's some great work being done by if I may give credit to Bruce Western, he's doing some great research that shows one, violence is situational, it's environmental, it's not person based. Inherent. Inherent. Two, many of the people who are incarcerated for violent crime were once victims of violent crimes. So these are levels of evidence that we are engaged with. Now that shows that's why I use the term false dichotomy of the violent person or the violent crime because it's more nuanced and engaged. And I'm not trying to belittle any type. I'm not the type to deny the significance of people who committed these crimes and how they cause harm or whatever. But nonetheless, we have to understand that the label violent isn't an adequate label to describe what has happened. We need to think more about environmental circumstances as well as generational, if not historical, particularly with women who are the fastest growing population now, are being incarcerated at a higher rate, coming to prison with so many incidents of violence committed against them. And I just think that we have to have a more nuanced understanding of what's happening. Yeah, go ahead. I say it kind of goes back to the question that we talked about the beginning, which is, what is prison for? Yeah, I guess I just want to linger there for a moment because I feel like all of us, certainly everyone who's been out of prison their whole lives, have had the reality of crime and violence advertised to them if they haven't experienced it directly. It's been advertised in film and fiction and in true crime literature. And that amplifies a certain data point that no doubt exists. I mean, that there are some people who are actually psychopaths, there are people who take sadistic pleasure in harming others and they didn't invent themselves either. I mean, this is a situational problem as well, based on what their genes are and who their parents were and how they were brought up and all the rest, and whether they were victimized. But there's no question there are some truly scary people who we don't want to let out of prison. But for the vast majority of violent crimes, as you point out, Jewel, there are many more shades of gray as to what happened there and how any one of us, more or less psychologically normal person put into a situation might find themselves on the wrong side of a gun. And again, it's not that the world is filled with bad people who would do bad things under any conceivable set of circumstances. The world is far more full with people who are very much like ourselves, who are pushed into very unfortunate circumstances where a range of bad and worse options seem to be open to them. And so to just be put into closer contact with the details of these stories in a film like the one you've made, Lynn, and to just feel the door of compassion open. It's really an experience people need to give themselves, because everyone has had the Hollywood version piped into their brains since the moment they could watch television. And it's not a clear picture of violence or its casualties on either side. Thank you very much. That's a very, very thoughtful and generous description of what we've tried to do. So Sarah and I are very grateful. Thank you. And we want people to talk about this. We want to have this conversation. We think the film is a good way through which people could start investigating their ideas and understanding what is like something that they could stand by and something that is so nuanced that they need more evidence. And I think this film is a good point from which people could start this conversation. And that's what we're hoping will happen around the Thanksgiving table when we're tired of talking about impeachment. Right? So, Lynn, apart from seeing the film, and I want you to reiterate where people can see it, but at the moment these kinds of programs are privately funded. Where do you recommend I point people to put their shoulder to the wheel and help support work like we see in the film and has done through BPI and other programs. Yes, thank you for asking that. I think that the Barred Prison Initiative, you can certainly be looking contribute to that. You can find The Barred. Bpi.edu, I think, is the place to find it on the Web. And I would also say that contacting our legislators and political leaders and saying that we are not happy with the status quo and that we want that to be changed and have public funding sent toward it. And also, as a graduate of an elite institution myself, I am disappointed, to put it mildly, that Yale University, with its $30 billion endowment, can't see a way to do much in this space. They have started a prison education program, as a few other schools like it have. But to get started, they had to get a grant from BPI to get going. They didn't see fit to put their own resources toward it. And I think all of our elite institutions and public institutions of higher education also have a responsibility as civic institutions to find the best students, to expand their access and to sort of fulfill their obligations to society. So I think, as anyone listening can contact your alma mater, see what they're doing, and ask them why they're not doing more. Well, Lynn and Jewel, it's been so great to get you on the program. And again, I just need to insist that people see the film because this conversation is really not a substitute for that experience. As nice as it was to speak to you both, watching the film really bowled me over. So I just have to insist that this episode of the podcast really is just functioning as an infomercial for the film you've made. Lynn, thank you. Thank you, Sam. That's great. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Okay, well, as I said, this whole thing is a commercial for Lynn's film, so please see it. If you don't catch it live on PBS, please watch the streamed version and let it do its work on your brain. Once again, all revenue associated with this episode of the podcast will be going to the Bar and Prison Initiative. I feel very happy and grateful to be in a position to make a decision like that. And it feels great to be. Inspired. And thank you to Lynn and Jewel for the work they're doing, as well as Sarah and everyone else associated with this film and everyone doing the work at BPI. And to all of you in the US, I wish you a very happy Thanksgiving and I'll see you back here on the podcast soon. Until next time. If you find this podcast valuable, there are many ways you can support it. You can review it on itunes or Stitcher or wherever you happen to listen to it. You can share it on social media with your friends, you can blog about it or discuss it on your own podcast, or you can support it directly. And you can do this by subscribing through my website@samharris.org. And there you're you'll find subscriber only content like my Ask Me Anything episodes, as well as the bonus questions from many of these interviews. You'll also get advanced tickets to my live events. You'll find all of these things and more@samharris.org. And thank you for supporting the show. Listeners like you make it possible./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today in the podcast, I'm bringing you a conversation with Sarah Hater, who is the cofounder of the ex Muslims of North America. Many of you know Sarah from Twitter. There have been many requests to get her on the podcast. Very happy to finally have her on. But we spoke after the Manchester bombings, but as it turns out, just before the London Atrocity. And I suppose nothing really changes with each new event, but it is a very strange feeling to more or less expect some new eruption of jihadist insanity sometime soon. So it's it's just to say it's impossible to keep up with what's happening. But unfortunately, I fear this conversation will seem timely for the rest of our lives. Sarah and I talk about what it means to leave Islam, about the unique issues that surround being an ex Muslim as opposed to being an ex Christian or an ex Mormon or even an ex Scientologist. And Sarah shares this experience that very few people spend a lot of time thinking about, which is the experience of being an apostate, living in what would otherwise be the safest places on Earth, in the safest period human beings have ever enjoyed, but nevertheless being imperiled by the sectarian hatreds of one community. There's a lot of talk about Islamophobia in the news. There's very little talk about the danger and difficulty of being an ex Muslim in the west. That's why Sarah's organization and her voice are so important. So, without further delay, I bring you Sarah Hater. Enjoy. I am here with Sarah Hater. Sarah, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. I have been a fan of yours for it has to be at least a year. Two years. How when did you give that talk? At the secular conference. It was at the American Humanist Association. It was in 2015. I've started to realize that when I estimate the amount of time that has passed, I always should double it. So I said a year. And then I went to two years because I knew I had to be wrong. This is what happens when you age. That talk was fantastic. And was that the first talk like that that you had given or had you been sort of on the circuit for a while and I just hadn't noticed? I spoke here and there about my organization, Ex Muslims of North America, and just apostasy issues. That was the first time, however, that I was really talking about the issues with liberals and Islam and how it kind of coincides in this very strange way. Obviously, many people love that talk, and you have many fans among my listeners on this podcast, and many have requested that you get on. So I'm very happy to have you here. Speak for a moment about your background and just how you came to be one of the founders of Ex Muslims of North America. Sure. So I grew up in what I would consider to be a pretty liberal Muslim family. I didn't know at the time that this that my upbringing was so liberal relative to other Muslims. I only found out as I began to meet other ex Muslims about what their reality was, to know how good I had it. But I grew up in a in a relatively liberal Muslim family, which means that they allowed me to move away from college. They allowed me to sort of be a little bit more independent than Muslims generally are. Where were you where were you growing up? I grew up in Texas. I was born in Pakistan, and I moved here I think I was seven or eight when we immigrated to the United States. I remember the process of coming here. I remember the shock of coming to this country. I actually remember the first time I saw a woman in public whose legs were exposed. It was the it was a flight attendant when we stopped in Europe on her way to America. And I remember the shock. I remember feeling not really understanding what I was looking at and not really understanding that this was going to be a norm in America. Interesting. So you came from Pakistan when you were you said eight. Yes. And why did your family leave? Was there any because it sounds like you had a family that was more liberal than most. Was that at all part of the reason why they left? Or was it just a job change or what was it I think we would be called economic migrants, and I think it was just this general desire for a better life. However, my father does tell me that he specifically wanted a better life for his daughters. He had two daughters at the time, and he wanted us to have more opportunities, and he knew he would get that here. So when did you realize that you were a bit of an outlier in terms of your family environment with respect to religion? Well, I think most atheists would say this, and that's how I do identify as an atheist, that we were always sort of questioning. There were always sort of problems with religion, and I had them from an early age. But there were always ways for me to justify religious traditions that I may have found problematic until I got to be a little bit older. I was in my mid teens when I really started looking at the religion in a really critical way. I started actually reading for myself the Quran and finding that there were problematic verses and things that didn't really make a lot of sense to me. And the more that I looked into it, the less that it made sense. And I actually encountered quite a few militant atheists. And this is why, even to this day, I don't think that militant atheism is such a horrible thing, because it does push people like me to look into their faith, if only for the reasons that we want to defend it. And that is what happened to me, that I knew some atheists and they were giving me some questions and probing questions and I wanted to be able to defend my faith. So that was one of the reasons that I looked into it with such urgency, because I wanted to be able to defend it. And I found that there really wasn't much there for me to defend. And so I left the faith. Were these ex Muslims or were these Westerners? These were westerners. These were people who came from a Christian background and then left their faith and then started pointing out the problems within Islam to me. And of course I was offended. So this is something that the people talk about a lot, that the Muslims are offended when you talk about their faith in a critical way, and that's to be expected. And I was offended. I remember being offended. But that offense doesn't really mean anything in the longer arc of what we're talking about, which is truth. And of course people will be offended if you talk about something that they hold so dear. But it did push me to look into religion. Well, the offense is really a symptom of not having an argument. I don't get offended if someone claims that my deeply cherished mathematical beliefs or historical beliefs are false because either they have an argument or they don't. And just a offense never enters into it. The fact that we're in the territory where someone only has their offense to Wield shows that there's a problem intellectually. That's probably a part of it. At that time, when I was first being confronted with the problematic verse of the Quran, I didn't know it was possible. That seems ridiculous, and as I'm saying it, it sounds ridiculous, but I remember at that time not knowing. You just didn't know what was in the Quran at that point when you first had these conversations. Right? I didn't know exactly what was in it and I didn't know that it was even possible to look at it in anything but as this extremely virtuous text. I didn't know that there was an interpretation like that out there. So when I first encountered it, it was quite shocking to me. So do you actually ascribe your becoming an atheist to these conversations? Can you point to the conversation that was a tipping point or is the process more amorphous than that? It was death by 1000 cuts. This was definitely the encounter of pushback by what I would consider militant atheists was a part of it. And this is why I defend militant atheism today because I know that it had something to do with why I left. But it wasn't the only reason. There were 100 different reasons that the religion was making less and less sense for me. And I was starting to figure that out on my own. And push back from people that were nonmuslims did influence me into looking at it in a deeper way with more urgency than I would have otherwise. But I was finding that there were a lot of problems on my own. There were historical problems. There were contradictions within the Quran itself. So there were a variety of issues with the faith. So what is the organization you founded? Ex Muslims of North America? What do you guys do? And it's hard to imagine many people listening to this podcast would be confused about this. But still there must be some, but certainly many people, even most people in a wider society might not understand why there's a special need for an organization like this. What is so hard about being an ex Muslim? I think, well, like you said, it's not really well understood the extent to which there is Muslim conservatism and the way that Muslim communities in the west practice their faith and practice their traditions. I know that at the time that I was sort of starting on getting involved in this sort of activism, that I thought that my experience with Islam was normal. I thought that I was a representative of a moderate Muslim. And then when I started to meet other ex Muslims, I found that this was not the case at all. That I was extremely lucky with my experience with my parents. The fact that I had left the faith and I hadn't been threatened by them, I hadn't been abused in any serious way and I hadn't realized that I was kind of an outlier with that experience. And as I began to, to meet other ex Muslims, I started to see that there was a huge need for people to just meet others like themselves. And for me it was kind of a curiosity just wanting to meet other ex Muslims. But I knew that for others that was not the case. So myself and Muhammad Sayyad, we were, we were holding meetups for, for ex Muslims very covertly. There was a lot of like, you know, security protocols involved, but we were holding these just private gatherings of ex Muslims and we started to find that there were people coming from, I mean, it was outrageous. From 8 hours away they would be coming 8 hours. One way to attend an hour and a half long meeting just to just to be there and to experience the feeling of being with people that are like yourself, who don't demonize you our thinking the way that you do. And so when we started to see that how major of a thing it was for other ex Muslims, we knew that this was something that this needed to be a real thing. We needed to organize, we need to create an organization around it. We needed to foster communities like the one that we had started to build in DC all across the United States and Canada and teach them what we had learned about community building, about security, about privacy. I don't think, like you said, many Western, even atheists, wouldn't really understand the extent to which ex Muslims are ostracized and even persecuted within their communities, even in the west, to the extent to which that there's anyone who can relate to this. I find that people who come from Mormon backgrounds or just extreme Christian sects and Hasidic Jews can kind of understand where we're coming from and can kind of understand the extremes to which their community can go to defend their faith. So I don't think this is something that is understood by the broader community of even atheists. And so XM and A exists so that we can form these communities. And I think the thing that we do that is most different than any other kind of atheist community is that we provide ways for them to be anonymous. All of our meets and our events are completely secret and they are only available to people who are already part of the ex Muslims of North America communities. And in order to join the community, you, you have to go through kind of a screening of sorts. That's what we call it. It's not a science, it's kind of an art. But we do the best we can to ensure that the people that are joining are those who understand the rules and regulations that we have and also will keep the privacy and security of others in mind and to screen as best as we can for people who may be malicious actors who are coming in for other reasons. The emphasis on security issues is a sign of how different the situation is for Muslims. I have a weird vantage point or a unique vantage point on this, perhaps because I see so much of what it is to become an atheist from all these different sources. Being an ex Mormon, an ex Muslim, an ex member of a cult, an ex Scientologist, I see the exits. And what is unique about Islam is this implicit or very often explicit threat of violence. And so the security concerns that you're describing strike me as fairly unique to Islam. And that's just still, again, it amazes me that this is an issue that people are unaware of or that obscurantists can successfully cover. Over when this gets debated in public. But it is a controversial point about which it seems to me there can be really no debate at this point. The laws around apostasy, the fact that leaving the faith is considered worthy of death, certainly if you speak against it, you can find that in the Old Testament, too. You're not tending to see Jews or Christians, however extreme, even reference that edict. It's just there are theological reasons why that's the case. There are historical reasons, but I'm not hearing from ultra Orthodox Jews. I hear from them, and I hear just how difficult it is to be exiled from their community and to lose their marriages and lose their kids and all the rest. But I don't hear that they're worried that their members of their family will come and kill them. And I routinely hear that from ex Muslims. Right? So there's a pretty common thing I hear from ex Muslims is when they're describing their family, they'll say, well, my parents are pretty liberal. I'm not worried about them killing me in any other context. That would be an outrageous thing to say, that they're pretty liberal. In order to justify this feeling, you feel like they're not going to kill you. But that in itself, I think it should be telling that our organization needs to exist the way that it does, that we do need to follow all these bizarre security and privacy protocols. We really shouldn't have to, but we do, and we do for a reason. And it's interesting to me that is I find it to be ignored largely by the mainstream media that this is something that ex Muslims feel like they need to do, they need to hide. Many apostles are not open about their lack of faith. I see, you know, I know many ex Muslims privately. You know, I would say that myself and maybe Muhammad, Sayya, the president of XM and A. I would I would say that between the two of us, we probably know more ex Muslims than anybody else in the world. And I see sometimes I'll see in the media various people that are participating in charities or in public service organizations, and they're represented as Muslims. This Muslim person is doing XYZ charitable endeavor, and it's very wonderful. And I will know privately that these are ex Muslims, but they're not able to be open about their lack of faith because of the blowback that they will get in their community. So if, for example, you're working on a charity serving people in poor women in Pakistan, you're not going to be open about your lack of faith, because if you are open about your lack of faith, you're not going to be able to reach that community at all. You're not going to be able to have any contact with them. So in order for you to continue doing the work that you're doing, you're going to have to lie about your faith. So a lot of ex Muslims do do exactly this. And to the extent that we're talking about religious freedom, I know we talk quite a bit in the mainstream media, especially liberal media, leftist media, there's a lot of conversation about civil liberties of ex Muslims and religious freedoms, and we talk about them in context of certain traditions like the hijab. To the extent that the most fundamental freedom within the context of a belief system isn't guaranteed, that is to say, the freedom to leave, the freedom to not believe at all, to the extent that that isn't guaranteed, in my opinion, we can't have a conversation about freedom within that religion at all. Everything is to some extent coerced, because the most basic freedom, the freedom to leave, is never guaranteed. And the security concerns are really pernicious. Because even if nothing ever happens, right, even if you never become a victim of any kind of violence, the plausible concern about violence is ever present, and it adds friction to everything you do. Now, I encounter this in my personal life because of the issues I touch, but it has to be considerably worse for you and for anyone who's doing something similar. I'm very close to ayan Hersiali. I know what her life is like. I'm close to Majid Nawaz. I'm sure we'll talk about what he's doing and how it may be different from what you're doing. But still, anyone who's working in this space inherits this massive burden of worrying about what will happen when they become too visible. And it's as simple as not being able to hold a conference, right, or not being able to have physical offices. If you're going to have an atheist conference, generic atheist conference, or a meet up for ex Mormons, you never have to think that someone might want to show up and not only annihilate you, but annihilate himself just for the pleasure of killing everyone in attendance. And this is an all too plausible concern given the world we're living in now. Is there anything more to say about how you handle the security issue that could be useful for ex Muslims who may want to join your organization to hear, to put their mind at ease about how you handle this? Or is there any more to say about what it's like to be trying to get a movement off the ground under the burden of these kinds of unique concerns? What I can say generally is that I don't think it's clear from the outside of the day to day struggle that this presents. With us running an ex Muslim organization, for example, we get nervous when we do simple things like go to the printer or go to the bank, and we have reason to be nervous. And there's a sort of paranoia that overshadows are basic day to day operations, and it presents a difficulty in that it's difficult to do our work enough as it is. And then on top of that, if you have to worry about being discriminated against or possibly being harmed in a severe kind of way by your banker, makes the work that much harder to do. But from here on out, I'd rather not go into the details of how we protect us. Yeah. You did an interview with Jeffrey Taylor, which was a great read, and you said one thing there that I wanted to read into this conversation. You said, if Muslims feel they're being badly treated here in the United States, they can go to Muslim majority countries. But where can a person like me go? I'm in the safest place I can possibly be, and yet I'm too afraid to tell people where I live. It's tragic for me that there's even a need for our organization, and that really does expose just how unique a position it is to be an ex Muslim. You are in the safest place in the world to be if you're a Muslim, even really. I mean, we can talk about the problem of anti Muslim bigotry, but I think it is safe to say that most Muslims are safer in the US than they are in most Muslim majority countries, given how unstable and sectarian those tend to be. But for an ex Muslim in the US or in really, anywhere in the West, I guess it gets worse. Once you go to Western Europe, there is this real concern about not being protected by any community. Right. And just to mirror your language, it's true that I believe it's true that most Muslims are safer in the west than they would be in a Muslim country. But more Muslims are safer in the US than our ex Muslims. Ex Muslims are less safe in the US. Ex Muslims are less safe in Western countries than your average Muslim. And I think that's a perfectly fair thing to say and it should be extremely concerning. Yeah. And obviously you inherit all of the problems of Islamophobia, insofar as that is a problem, having your name looking like someone who was born in Pakistan. You encounter the same bias or bigotry that any Muslim could be worried about going through an airport or in any other situation where that would become relevant. And yet you have this added concern, which I would argue is a far more pressing one, which is you have some percentage of the Muslim community that thinks what you're doing warrants a violent response. And you never know how big that percentage is or how much you are on their radar. And it bears repeating, this is unique to Islam. As badly behaved as Scientologists are, when you take a good swing at that hornet's nest, they don't come and kill you. They can make your life miserable, they can sue you, they can show up at your office with a crazed look in their eyes and video cameras pointed at you 18 hours a day. These are bizarre people who are in an especially bizarre cult, but they don't commit murders and they don't commit suicidal acts of terrorism. And so this is, again, anyone who wants to defend Islam against the unique scrutiny that it merits at this moment has to deal with this fact that, as I said before, you have a play like The Book of Mormon that becomes a Broadway hit, and the Mormons take out an advertisement in playbill, in reprisal. Right? Their reaction is really adorable. There's not the slightest concern that Trey Parker and Matt Stone will spend the rest of their lives being hunted by religious maniacs, and yet no one can even imagine staging such a play about Islam at this moment. And the reasons for that are patently obvious and yet everywhere denied by people who complain about, quote, Islamophobia, right? I mean, I think if Islam could get to where Mormonism is today, that we would be in a much, much better place. And I think that in itself should be should be telling of how bad things really are. And it's shocking to me that still we've been talking about this for a long time. You've been talking about this for a long time, ayan Kocle has been talking about this for a long time that we finally need to be honest about what's going on. And I don't see much progress in that direction. Let's talk about the progress, or lack thereof. So one sign of painful lack of progress of late for me has been the way that Linda Sarsur has been championed by liberals and feminists as some kind of icon of women's rights when she, to my eye, is just a straight up theocrat and bully. How are liberals and feminists getting confused about this? Well, I think the hijab is a good way to illustrate the extent to which liberals are confused about this issue because as you pointed out, it's ridiculous to see the poster, the I think, Shepard fairy poster of a woman in a hijab as part of the Women's March. And I understand why people on the left, why progressives have this tendency. I understand what they are trying to do, which is to stand for the freedom of religion for Muslims. And this is a laudable endeavor. This is something that I support. This is a tendency that I really love about the left. I like that they instinctively want to protect the little guy. Having said that, not everything done in the name of good intentions is necessarily good. And not everything done in the name of good intentions will help the people that you want to help. And in many cases, it might harm the very principles of the very people that you want to help. And I think this is especially the hijab in context of women's rights, is a case where we can see this in a very clear way. I supported the Women's March. I support it generally speaking, women's rights are really close to my heart, and it's really important to me that feminism is something that becomes universal, that becomes global. So I support, generally speaking, these kinds of initiatives. But I was really disheartened to see that Linda Sir sewer was included and that the hijab was suddenly it's become this totem it's become this symbol of religious freedom. And it's pretty perverse. It's pretty perverse given the context of what the hijab actually is, and given the religious justification for the hijab, which is distinctly antifreedom. It's very coercive. It's coercive in large parts of the world. It's coercive in Western communities today. And yes, Muslim women should have the right to wear the hijab. Yes, they should have the freedom to follow their religion as they see fit, but we shouldn't herald as some sort of symbol for women's rights as a whole, because that's not what it is. And the symbolism behind the hijab matters. And that's what's shocking to me, is that, yes, we'll talk about the fact that Muslim women choose to wear it, and they should have a choice to wear it, and they should have a choice to be as religious as they want to be. But what does it mean to wear a hijab? Why do Muslim women feel that they need to wear a hijab? You'll hear I think it is Dalia Mogahead that was on The Daily Show a couple of years, maybe just a year back. I'm not sure exactly when, but she was talking about the hijab, and she referred to it as a means to privatize her sexuality, which is a very interesting way to putting it, particularly because as I'm listening to it, I remember thinking, oh, wow, that's clever. It's a clever way to phrase the hijab privatizing my sexuality. Because that's something that she's phrased it in a way where it would be easy to accept by people who are from progressive circles, by educated people. She phrased it in a way that they would just swallow it whole and accept it. And I think they want to accept it. However, we need to go back to what the religious justification for it is and what it implies. Even if you want to use her phrasing, let's look at it as a way of privatizing your sexuality. If you consider wearing the hijab covering up as modesty as a way of privatizing sexuality, you justify the viewpoint that women who don't do this are necessarily people who are publicizing their sexuality, and that if it means something, if you're signaling something by privatizing your sexuality, then you are also signaling something by publicizing it. And I think that needs to be discussed. That needs to be discussed widely. And it's shocking to me that Muslim narratives of what the hijab means are just accepted wholesale. They're just accepted, and not a lot of criticism is given some honest consideration. I think it's good to focus on the hijab because. I think many people are confused about just what they should think about it. I think I'm pretty clear about the hijab. I'm a little confused, frankly, about the Nikab and the Burqa, I think. So just walk me through this. So here's what I think about the hijab. I think that, as you said, that the first thing to be honest about is that most women who wear the hijab the world over are not doing it voluntarily. And even if you could stand them up and ask them and they would say yes, they want to live this way, it can't be construed as a voluntary choice, given the cultural context in which they're living, given the penalties for not wearing it, given how everyone in their life would think about them if they chose not to wear it. This is a choice against a background of almost total coercion. And then you have the rare case in the west of someone who her sophomore year at Brandeis can decide, well, maybe I want to wear the hijab, and it's a truly free choice. Now, I agree with you that any woman should be free to make that choice. They should just be honest about how different a choice that is than the pseudo choice that's being made every day by a woman or a girl in Saudi Arabia or any other theocracy. So people should be free to dress in that way. And we should also be honest that this is an ideological display, right? So when someone wears the hijab, they're telling me something about what they believe to be true, and there's no burden on me not to pay attention to that. I can notice that their external choice, as an indicator of their internal worldview, right and worldviews matter, what people believe and declare is important to them, matters. So it's a conversation. You are starting a conversation with the world when you decide to put on a hijab. And one of the things you're saying privatizing your sexuality is one way of putting it. But you seem to also be conceding, as is explicitly stated within the doctrine of Islam, that the onus is upon the woman to conceal herself as a way of protecting men from their lust. The onus is not on the men, not to be Boris monsters who are just groping any woman in sight who's not sufficiently covered. The onus is on women to be sufficiently modest. Even if you are making a free choice in the west, and Dalia Mogahed is your guru, this is an anti feminist concept of where the blame for social awkwardness and lust gets placed. Every choice, even if even if there is a choice that is freely made by a woman, it doesn't necessarily make it a feminist choice. And in the context of the hijab, even if Dalia or Linda Sir have freely made the choices that they've made, that doesn't make them feminist choices. They can be anti feminists they can be anti women, they can be anti women's rights. And that needs to be discussed and that needs to be talked about. To add on to what you were saying. When there's this burden of sexual purity that's placed on women, it really is something that I would call a rape culture of sorts, where women that are subject to sexual assaults bear the blame. If there are women who don't cover themselves in an Islamically prescribed way, and this is something that is pervasive in the Muslim world, the idea that a woman who shows her body, who is, you know, even walks in in a certain way or speaks in a certain way, they are to blame for male assaults against them. And you can see reflections of this in the ways that Muslim men treat non Muslim women. I mean, I know there's the sexual assaults that happened in in Germany on New Year's Eve. It wasn't something that was very surprising to me and to many people from the Muslim world. It's not entirely surprising because there is a dehumanization of women who don't cover themselves in the way that Islamic women are supposed to COVID themselves. It seems to be a signal, a free pass to do with those women as you will, because they do not have the same kind of dignities that women who are covered up have. So let's move on to even more aggressive covering. So the nakab, wherein only the eyes are exposed, and less people are familiar with that, I think, than the burqa, which is what you tend to see in Afghanistan, where everything is covered and you just have this kind of mesh for the woman to see out of there. I feel like my sympathies change a little bit because there's something so in the current climate, it's so provocative, but also, I think, unsafe and uncommunicative about covering the face. You don't know who anyone is. You don't get any of the social cues that are actually important for understanding whether you're safe around a person. The person who's having this imposed on them is being deprived of almost everything that's good in the world in terms of interacting with other human beings. What's your feeling about whether or not something like take the French approach to banning the nakab in public. How do you feel about that? Because, again, following what we just said about the hijab, my bias is certainly to let people dress however they want, but there is something really terrible about covering the face in public, and I don't actually know what we should do about it. Well, I agree that it's unsettling in the way that just the face veil is unsettling in the way that a head covering is not. But I don't think that we should change our approach to it. I think anytime that a facial covering of any kind of mask, would that be a party mask or a ski mask? Wouldn't be allowed. Neither should a face, a religious face covering be allowed. But aside from that, yes, it is disturbing. Yes, it does speak to this distance that Muslim women are sometimes forced to have with the world around them. But that doesn't mean that taking an action like banning it would be helpful. In my opinion, it isn't. I think what we do need to grapple with is that many Muslim women buy into the ideology that is given to them. Many don't, but many do. That's why you have limited resources. That's why you have daly moga heads, is that there are women who buy it, and they actually believe that they are being empowered by Islamic traditions. And so there are women who willingly put it on or think that they are willingly putting it on, and they feel empowered by it because they are fed a certain kind of worldview, and forcing them to take it off would not win us any favors from those women. And if anything, it might turn them into people that would want to wear the hijab, that would want to wear religious garb as a political protest. And increasingly I see the hijab and just various kinds of religious garb as a form of political post protest. And I don't think we should encourage it being turned into something like that because it becomes more powerful in that way. And the harms that the religion itself perpetuates because of the hijab gets a brush to the side. That's interesting, because I think the rationale for the French policy, at least the one rationale that makes sense to me, is that if you ban these things in public, what you're doing is you're creating a space where all the people who are being coerced into wearing these religious symbols are free because of the protection of the state not to wear them. They're no longer obliged to do what their family insists that they do because it's illegal to do it. And so you've created this context in which girls and women can be free in a way that they wouldn't be if you just let everyone decide what they should wear. But it sounds like you think that on balance, you'll actually just alienate more people than you will liberate by doing that. So to follow up on what you said, which was that perhaps it would free the women that are truly coerced, let's say a certain percentage of women are coerced to wear certain kind of religious garb in public. In the context of, for example, what the French were doing, I spoke out against, I don't know, the birkini, I think it was called, the Islamic swimwear that some French towns were trying to ban. And I spoke out against that ban. That seemed like good sun shielding practices. From my point of view. This is the other thing you brought up. There are other ways to COVID your face that we can't make illegal. So if you're going to make Halloween masks and ski masks illegal because they're so similar to nicob's. If you have someone who's super sun sensitive, who essentially is showing up in the equivalent of a birkini, you can't suddenly make that illegal. So it's a very weird thing to try to legislate, right? And you don't necessarily protect the women who are being coerced into wearing these things. In the context of a birkini, there are certain Muslim women who, let's assume are coerced into wearing religious gear, and because they're able to wear a burkini, they have a little bit of freedom. They're allowed to go to the beach and they're allowed to experience feel the sand on their feet and feel the water and get to participate in this public activity in a way that they probably would not be able to participate in if the burkini was banned. So in the context of the most coerced women, I don't know if we're necessarily going to protect them, because I don't know if the reaction of the most extreme religious families would be to say, well, if the state has banned a birkini, that means that you're allowed to wear a bikini or shorts or whatever it is to the beach. I fear that the reaction might be more often than that to say, well, you're not allowed to go to the beach and maybe we're taking you back home. It's a difficult one. And I don't know if the legislation is to blunt a tool for this, but I can imagine, for instance, if I'm sitting on an airplane and somebody gets on with a ski mask or a Halloween mask and refuses to take it off, or I see someone passing through security at the airport with a ski mask or Halloween mask on. I would expect that person to be stopped and to not be able to fly unless they took it off. Then you could imagine that there's an obvious exception. If they have a reason, if they have some medical reason why they have to wear a mask or they have a burn on their face or something that explains it, well, then fine. But I think there are many public spaces where someone is in charge of legislating certain norms, even if they're not laws against these things. And yes, it's like you can't show up to a restaurant without wearing pants, right? Probably there is some kind of law against it, but it's at the discretion of anyone who has control of a public space to deny access to people who are violating certain norms. And I think we just have to be honest about what it means to be wearing a nakab or a burqa at this moment in human history in the west, in an airport. You are advertising a worldview which is the worldview we care about from the point of view of being people who want to prevent suicide bombings on airplanes. To take the narrow case. So obviously you're going to draw more scrutiny. Obviously we can't see what's underneath this covering unless we put you in an X ray scanner rather than a metal detector. It poses a security concern both physically and ideologically. Again, you've announced your worldview in a way that you otherwise wouldn't if you weren't wearing this thing. It is analogous to if we had problems with a cult of neo Nazis that was killing people or threatening to kill people in virtually every city on earth. It would matter if someone showed up at the airport with swastika's tattooed on his face or, you know, wearing proudly wearing, you know, symbols of the SS on his jacket. I mean that's this person is saying, pay attention to me, I'm a security problem, or at least a potential one. It never strikes me as trivial that someone is wearing a NiCOB or that or that in particular, the man who is chaperoning her is the sort of man who wants his wife or sister to wear in a cup. Right. But I think we can make certain I think you're right to say that we can assume certain things, but I don't know if we can assume them universally in the context specifically of a woman in Indicab. We can't assume that she's being coerced. We can't assume that she's not being coerced. We don't actually know where her true beliefs lie because of the specific context of this religion and I don't know if it's helpful to make those assumptions. I agree you can't, but the balance has to swing one way or the other. And I think the French assumption that you'll be helping people the beach is an interesting case because I can easily see it going the way you fear that these are women who just will not be let out of the house given that there's no option for them to be fully covered at the beach. But when you think of something like a school right, or a place of employment, it just feels like a ban on covering the face in those contexts. Again, it's like whether this is the law or whether it's just every place of business is free to have their own policy. I don't know. But it's just I can't imagine hiring someone for some kind of public facing job where they insist on their right to wear in a cup, right? Like a bank teller. You're a bank teller and you're wearing a NiCOB or you're a nurse in a hospital, but you are going to wear a NikoB as you visit patients. I think you have to be free not to hire those people who insist that they wear in a cob in those contexts. Well, I think to the extent that it gets in the way of your job duties and you can make an argument that it would do that in the context of a nurse. I remember reading something about tangentially related, but I remember reading something about a female eye doctor in ISIS controlled territory who was no longer allowed to practice unless she had on a covering. And she complained that she wasn't able to see, and she needed to do these complex procedures with other people's eyes, women's eyes, and she wasn't able to see herself properly enough to be able to operate in the way that she needed to operate. So obviously, it gets in the way of job duties. Even you can make the argument, I think, that there are certain social obligations, sort of social aspects of a job that require someone to show their face, but it's different because different jobs would require that, and some jobs would require that, and some jobs would not. And on the whole, I know that from a perspective of an activist, the more constraints we place on religious freedom and Muslim religious freedom, the harder it gets for someone like me to argue in favor of Western values and for Enlightenment values. It's difficult for me to say that, you know, in the west, they allow freedom. In the west, women can dress as according to their content, whatever it if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Darren Brown. Darren, as many of you know, is a fantastic magician. He calls himself a psychological illusionist, which is to say that the effects he achieves really are at the level of manipulating the behavior of his subjects. He uses hypnosis and other forms of suggestion. He creates the most elaborate ruses by which to manipulate people's expectations and assumptions. If you've seen any of his television specials, you'll know that he puts people in situations where literally everyone around them is an actor who's in on the gag and people just have no way of understanding what is happening to them. And so he can drive them to do things that are really astonishing. In fact, if you haven't seen any of Darren's work, I would strongly encourage you to pause this podcast and go on YouTube and watch some of the many fragments of his specials that you can find there. Or better yet, go on Netflix and watch his most recent one Sacrifice or Miracle Before that or the Push. We talk about all of these, and you'll certainly get the gist of our conversation if you haven't seen his work, but you'll enjoy it much more if you have, because it really is hard to exaggerate how ambitious these changes in people's behavior are and how successful Darren is in producing them. It really is amazing. Anyway, we talk about his career as an illusionist, his reliance on hypnosis and other forms of suggestion and manipulation. We talk a little bit about his book Happy, where he goes into the value he's drawn from Stoic philosophy and his other thoughts on how to live a good life. Anyway, Darren is a very thoughtful, interesting, and extraordinarily nice person, and it was a great pleasure to sit down with him. So I hope you enjoy his company as much as I did. And now I bring you Darren Brown. I am here with Darren Brown. Hi, Darren. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you. This is so exciting. Thank you for having me. Yeah, no, really, it's a treat. I've known I had to get you on the podcast for a very long time because you're quite literally one of my most requested guests. Really? Yeah. But it's never come together. And then it always seemed that there was some prospect of you coming to the States but you and I connected in London recently when I had that event with Jordan Peterson, but we didn't record there. But now you are in and then we bonded over our fashions. Yes, afterwards. That was nice. That's an appropriate way to bond. So there are quite literally too many things to talk about. There's a ton that we can get into. Let's start with how you describe yourself as a psychological illusionist. Yeah. What are you doing as a magician? You do many things that I think a lot of people don't know about, but obviously we're going to be talking about your recent specials and your magic, but how do you describe your approach to magic? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, even that term psychological illusionist, I came up with in a panic when I was asked right at the start of my career what it is that I do. I started off as a hypnotist when I was I studied law and German at university in Bristol in England. Did you actually get a degree as a lawyer? I did. I didn't want to be a lawyer or a German. Think about what a good lawyer you could be with your skills now, though. Yeah, it was very little interest, really, but I got the degree. But in my first year, I saw a hypnotist before and so I started off with that and I bought, borrowed, stole books I could find on it. I was the guy at university who could hypnotize you, so I had lots of people turning up to be hypnotized. Did you formally study it in a psychology department? No, not at all. It was just self taught. I remember a couple of seminal moments. People would come over and I'd hypnotize them and I'd say, if you come back, if I click my fingers and tell you if I click my fingers, you'll go straight back to sleep. So it would save time, right, if they came back the next week and wanted to try something else. And I remember this guy coming around who I presumed I'd seen before, and I said, okay, sit down, look at me. And I clicked my fingers and I said, Sleep. And he went back into this what I presumed was back into this trance state, whatever that is, anyway, and then we did a few things and then afterwards we spoke and he hadn't been I'd never met him before. So at this moment of how did you know to respond to me clicking my fingers and saying sleep? And I realized at that point that so much of it depended not on these long sort of scripts that I was learning and that side of technique, which is kind of my confidence in the moment and their own bewilderment, perhaps obviously their own suggestibility. So things like that were taught me a lot. And then it's a difficult way of earning a living. And I was graduating, and I was just starting to scrape a living together. So I did more magic, like close up magic, that kind of thing. But the psychological stuff interested me more, the suggestion based stuff. So did you learn it from books or did you actually have a teacher who was a hypnotist? No, I didn't. I continued to learn at the hypnosis from books. This was pre, like the days of there were no YouTube videos, no nothing. This was like 1935. And I ended up doing a lot more magic. But I found the mind reading plots more interesting than making someone's card disappear. And so mentalism is the technical name for it. So I ended up I wrote a couple of books for magicians. I was earning a living in Bristol. This said the city in the west of England, going around tables in restaurants and doing people's parties. And then I got a phone call from this TV production company that were looking for someone that did mind reading. And they were really only I could only think of, like, four or five people in the country that did it. Mentalism was that it was esoteric. Yeah. Just no one, really no one just wasn't very commercial. And to give people a sense, many people will be familiar with your work, but just give an example of the kind of thing a mentalist like yourself does on stage with people. It's magic with a mind reading plot, essentially. But, I mean, I suppose someone that passes themself off as psychic could be technically a mentalist. So there's a wide range because I said not that many people do it, so there's kind of a wide range of what people do when they do it. Now. There's a lot more of them. And that's probably partly because I was making it popular in the in the UK. So if you were a young magician, I guess, you know, growing up, and I was, you know, kind of a role model, I suppose, for some. So there's a lot more mentalist now, but we were very few and far between before. Do your powers of mentalism extend to dogs? It does sound like a dog in the back. Get someone moving plates or cutlery. Okay, might be. Maybe I just that's a powerful suggestion. I just gave you that. It's a dog. So that was that. And yeah, but now I essentially, at its heart, a magician is just saying, look at me. Aren't I clever? That is sort of that's the only subtext. So as I grew up, I sort of grew out of that initial urge and the desire for the sort of controlling thing, which hypnosis certainly ticks that box if you're insecure, and those things are important to you, which I was. Did you ever go down the path of hypnosis as therapy? Therapy? I thought about it. I think ultimately, I didn't really want to sit and get in there with people's problems day after day. Now I mean, now I find not so much hypnotherapy, but psychotherapy I find fascinating. That world. I do find part of me would love to do that, but no, the performing came together in such a way that I had to kind of some point choose and go, I'll concentrate on this. But now I'm not very well known in the States at all, but in the UK, I kind of do a variety of things. I do stage shows every year that are like old fashioned magic shows, really, again, with kind of a mind reading sort of feel to them. And I do these TV shows now on Netflix, which are again, they're very different, but what I've done is I've tried to take a step back, and I kind of figured that it's dramatically more interesting if you're watching a real person go through a real situation. So the deception is now all out on the surface. So as a viewer, you're invited into the deception. The deception is happening on somebody that's going through something they don't really I want to talk about several of your specials in detail, but before we get there, let's just talk for a second about hypnosis. Hypnosis is a topic that isn't often touched. I don't think it came up once while I got a PhD in neuroscience. Right. I'm sure there's been some neuroscientific work done on hypnosis. The only time I touched it as a topic academically was freshman year at Stanford, where I think Stanford still has the scale of hypnotic susceptibility. I think, yeah, I think it predates my time there. But I remember being tested on this scale because they were looking for good and bad subjects to do research. I think it was a ten point scale, and I think it was a nine on the ten. So I was on that side of the tail. And then I remember going through these various exercises and the experience that proved to me that this wasn't just total bullshit, that there was something to this was we were regressed to how was it put? They asked us to imagine that we are eight years old, I think, or seven years old, and sign our names and without any conscious forethought. The script that came out of my signing was just this bubbly childlike script that was totally familiar to me as something the way I would have written my name as a seven year old. And it was not at all the way I wrote my name as an 18 year old. And then he asked Put the year. And I remember marveling at the fact that without any conscious arithmetic, you know, I was putting down the right year for, you know, that that age. Did you ever compare the handwriting? You know, if it was actually I don't remember going back and finding a sample of my handwriting if I could have, but it was just the spitting image of the kind of writing. And I just remember it feeling like an automaticity that I was not I wasn't gaming the system, trying to impress myself with hypnosis working. And I've spent no time studying it since. But it's one of these topics where I think you can talk to scientists who are still in doubt as to whether or not it's actually a bona fide phenomenon. And then it obviously connects to vaudevillian applications of it, which wherein it seems appropriate to wonder whether there's a fraud associated with what you're seeing on stage. So what is your understanding of the reality of hypnosis as a psychological process that can be invoked on stage? When I performed Stage Hypnosis, which I don't anymore, but I try and find other ways of employing it. But I used to finish with saying that I make myself invisible so the subjects wouldn't be able to see me, and then say I'd float a chair around and they'd all scream and run around and it was a fun bit in the show, but then I often used to have questions and answers afterwards. And I remember once say there were ten guys, I got them up and said, what was your actual experience when I was saying I was invisible and moving a chair around? What were you actually experiencing? And there were some that were saying, well, I just felt like I should play along. But yeah, you were obviously just moving the chair around yourself. Then there were people that would say, well, I knew you were doing it, but I just had to. Emotionally, I could only react as if that thing was floating, even though yeah, of course, when I think back as well, you were obviously there doing it. But I kind of was disregarding that and a range of reactions right through to there's no way you were moving that chair because that was floating. They're more happy to believe it was on wires and it was me. Now, I still don't know whether that whole discussion is colored by the fact that some people want to appear to be better subjects than others. But certainly what is clear is that the range of experience is so varied. I always think of it as a sort of like an actor getting into a part. You can get totally emotionally lost in something. It doesn't mean that anything untoward is happening. Have you experimented with giving people post hypnotic suggestions that they seem to be genuinely unaware of so that they're doing things that originate in a truly unconscious space in their minds? Because you can never really climb into anyone's head to really know. I remember telling a friend of mine that he'd find himself invisible and he was laughing, he was looking down and saying it's just like looking at a footage of the carpet and it's like I'm looking out of a camera. I think for me, one of the most interesting experiences of it was I did a show called The Assassin. So Stephen Fry is going to get shot by this guy. And we had this sort of first part was just looking at hypnosis. What is it? What are the limitations of it? So this is a just give, people. Yes. Okay, the set up here. So how is Steven Fry going to get shot? I throw these things away. All right. So the show was actually looking at the claims made by Sahan Sahan over the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, him saying that he was hypnotized by the CIA. So we kind of well, if we take what his claims are, is that even feasible that that can happen? Or is it just the stuff of, you know, just fiction? Right. So as closely as we could, we kind of replicated his story and did it with a guy that didn't know that that was the plan for him. So we found a very highly suggestible guy, even more suggestible than you, I'm sure. And there was only one point on the scale, if I recall, that, only one guy. And the show begins with finding that guy from a sort of a big audience of people who are volunteering and ends with him in a situation which he doesn't know is being filmed with a gun that he thinks is real. All the triggers going off, the polka dot dress and all these things that Sahan Sahan said the said the CIA had used and will he do it? Will he, in that situation, fire a gun which he believes is real, at somebody and and seemingly shoot them? But there was this really interesting bit at the beginning. So I've got these two clinical hypnotist psychologists with me as well, and we did two tests. One was the acid test, which is where the where the notion of the phrase comes from where you have somebody hypnotized. You give them what you've shown them is acid before they're hypnotized, but actually it's just water. And you say when you wake up and you get the signal, you'll throw this acid in someone's face. Right? So it's an interesting thing. If they're playing along at any level, of course they're not going to do that. They all did it. But it's a TV studio. They know no one's really going to give them acid to do that's. A part of the brain you get, part of them is going to know this is safe, and that's fine. That's what we imagine they'd do. But then towards the end, we had this guy in an ice bath, and this was the guy that we used in the end, and we just had no idea if he was going to do it or not. Either way, it was fine for the show. If he didn't do it, that was interesting. If he did do it, that was interesting. And he did very happily. He got in this ice bath and lay there, and there was no, it didn't seem actually they had a bet backstage, like a wager as to whether or not he'd do it. They thought he wouldn't do it. I had no idea. But that didn't seem to be the sort of thing that you could just play along. Pretending not to fight exactly. Just kind of pretend not to find that intensely painful. And that's one of the very few moments that I've had of just being really surprised by it. The other thing that surprises me is again, if it's just sort of a playing along is behaviors that people wouldn't know to do that get shared across, say, an audience. Very often I'm doing this with an audience of 2000 people and then walking out amongst those people that have responded who say are now standing eyes closed like head drop down. In your special before or the most recent one, miracle, you did this. Right. Let's dive into some of what you're doing here with the specials because there's hypnosis which is this one specific activity of inducting someone into a state and leading them to do various things post hypnotically. But you're also just playing with people's suggestibility a lot. You're prescreening your audiences in many of these specials in ways that sometimes, I guess they know they're being prescreened, sometimes they have no idea. They think they're taking a course in self improvement or whatever it is. And you are continually selecting for the most suggestible people or the most conforming people whether it's they're conforming to social pressure or showing themselves to be vulnerable to you just dropping the right words into their heads. So you've had so many specials that I would love to talk about, but should we go chronologically? I want to talk about the Push and I want to talk about Miracle and I want to talk about sacrifice. Okay, cool. There's only three most recent ones. Okay, so let's talk about the Push. What did you do there? So the Push was looking at social compliance and it was a big, dark, fun, funny kind of experiment. We did it over a weekend to see if somebody could be made to commit murder through just through social compliance. So there's a big event that this guy finds himself out. Everyone's an actor apart from him. He has no idea it's being filmed. He's applied to be in the show months ago and then told he hadn't got it. So he just finds himself at this event and bit by bit, starting with he sort of gets roped into helping at the event. So starting with him being asked to mislabel meat sausages meat sausage rolls as vegetarian and him kind of going along with that, it builds and builds and builds to the point that he pushes or doesn't push someone off a roof. By stages you're selecting for somebody who is willing to under some pressure of authority. Is it like a mini milgram experiment? In fact, you actually do the Milgram experiment in there. That was a difference. Oh, it was a different okay. We did a compliance test, which is the bell test. You may have seen where people are coming in. You've got being made to stand up and sit down when they hear a bell because the first few people in the row are actors. And then you build the line up, the actors then leave, and now you've got a room of people doing it for no reason. Just, again, just out of compliance. So you're yeah. So we've chosen this guy. He's then told he's not used, and then sometime later, he just is at this event that we've constructed, this whole way of getting in there without him knowing it's anything to do with us. So he's at an event where literally everyone in sight is in on the gag. Yeah. He's just surrounded by actors. He doesn't know it. Absolutely. Watching it, it's pretty remarkable to realize how unusual a circumstance that is and how we are not prepared to interpret reality with that being one of the possible explanations for what's going on. Absolutely. Well, the fear that we've had over the years of what if he spots a camera? Or what if there's a glitch in this Truman Show like fiction. But of course, the reality is if you were in a restaurant and a camera fell out from behind the curtains, you wouldn't think everyone here is an act, everyone here's an actor. This whole thing is some elaborate cameras falling out from behind the curtains. You wouldn't necessarily make that all about the whole thing. It's all about me. Yeah, exactly. So there have been moments when a camera has been spotted or just something like that has happened, and we're all suddenly all sphincters are tight and it's fine, nothing bad happens at all. So we've kind of got used to it. But, yeah, we've kind of got good at being able to create and hold these elaborate there's a whole other show with each one of these. And just how you create that, how you create the fiction, how you get the guy to the point that because also, these people have to be sure they're robust enough psychologically to go through these quite dark journeys, so they have to be independently vetted. This is my daughter's, my ten year old daughter's. Question for you is how do you know that far? How are you not in jail for what you put people through? That's her literal wording, because you're putting some of these, some more than others. But for instance, the Push, there is a real ethical question about what you're doing here, because in some cases, you're making people look very good. As we'll talk about in Sacrifice, you reveal this person's latent heroism, but in The Push, you are revealing a very dark fact about somebody, or at least it can be interpreted as a very dark fact. And how do you view that just to fast forward to the punchline of that show and spoiler alert for anyone who wants to go watch these shows. In some cases, yes, you get someone to reveal that they're capable of murder, he shoves a guy off a rooftop based on all the suggestibility that you have engineered in him, that doesn't look great on his CV, does it? Well, I that I think the push was, I think, uniquely dark and unemployed. Was it two of the three people? Four in the end, yeah, four. Four of them and three out of the four did. Three out of four did, yeah. The way I see these things with all of the shows, and I always have any of the shows, regardless of whether it's sort of a happy ending or whatever it brings out in the person, they're always very often going through a kind of a dark period of journey at some point. So I do get asked about ethically how they can be justified. My feeling is I'm really only interested in this one person's experience that is going through it. So in the push, for example, it's hard to talk about not giving it away, but the guy that doesn't do it has been through hell to get there, but he feels great about himself, so he's very happy with the experience and then the careful situation is framing the whole thing for the others. So by the point they come to do it, there are so many things that I've layered in during what has essentially been their audition process that they don't realize it's an audition process, the number of meetings that they've had, they think they're one of 300 people doing that. Perhaps by this point, it's only that five. There's things that can be layered in so that very quickly, obviously, at any point during, I can step in and if need be, and the whole thing, but also afterwards, the whole thing can be framed very quickly for them, again as something positive. And that's probably the most difficult. Not difficult, but the most of all the situations of having to make sure that something is a positive experience for them to take away, that's probably the most like would appear to be the most kind of conflicting. But actually, for them, they all found it very positive because their feeling is, I've now been through this and yes, I did that, but most people do. And that's what we've shown that's like, anything unusual about me, because that's what most people do. But I'm now armed with an experiential, that experience of having done it. So if ever I find myself in a situation where I'm going to get manipulated, I've been through that now and I can stand up to it and that's the key to me. And obviously these are all people that remain friends and we all keep in touch, none of them have had that other thing. We might think of, well, that means they're not going to get a job, or people are fascinated by their experience, but none of them have had those troubles. I think that show is unique in that. Question is, I think, probably most obvious with that as well. Are those people okay? And the answer is, they are. They always are. Everyone that's done these things comes out of it saying it's the best thing they've ever done. And that ultimately, to me, is what matters. Even though, of course, I understand people stepping back from it and going, well, how can you justify it? And so on. Yeah. So then it's the flip side of your experience and the necessity to deceive people to just get this show up and running. How do you navigate that ethically? Because they know what they're getting into. They're applying for my shows and they know the sort of things that I do right. And I think it's end justifying the means thing. I think that if somebody's going to go through something that takes there's a lot of manipulation involved, but the end result is a is a hugely positive one for them. I think it's I think that's okay to compare this to normal magic or normal illusion. So your normal stage magic is a situation where there's a trick. You, as a professional magician, don't want to reveal how the trick is done. It's not done the way it seems to be done. It seems to be done by magic. And there's some terrestrial answer compatible with the laws of physics that explains how the trick is done. And that's the part you don't reveal with these manipulations of people. They're absolutely what they are, if that's what you're asking. Yeah. My question is, is there any distance between the audience's final appreciation of what has happened and what has in fact happened? No, not at all. There are sometimes scenes that don't make it, scenes that have to get squashed down and bits, as you will be editing anything. Phil in Sacrifice, for example, had a couple of experiences that didn't make the final show, and there was a whole lot of other stuff we did with all the applicants that took part in the show that didn't make it. So there's always things like that. That's just part of putting a show together in terms of, is he playing along or does he know more about what's going on than I'm letting on, or anything like that? Then, no, it would be pointless and just sort of repugnant as well. I think we are statistically repugnant and pointless to do that, but it would be a kind of fraud. But it's interesting to consider that they're just gradations of fraud which account for magic. It's hard to know where the line is. Yeah, I suppose so. But I think it's a different category of yeah. For me, as I said, the fiction is something that we're sharing in. The deception is. Something we're sharing in. And I save the kind of theatrical deception that everybody knows that it's part of the game for the stage shows. Now, I think that kind of makes that makes sense. And even then I try and push it to a place that it's, I guess I'm 47 and doing magic is quite a childish thing. So I try and find more interesting things to do with the sort of technologies of magic, I guess, which ultimately, for me is just about the stories that people tell themselves. That's kind of my toolkit. So one direction that can go in is creating these specials where somebody's put through something and it is ultimately about the stories they tell themselves and maybe challenging those stories or the limitations of those narratives that they're living out. And then I save the more kind of the more just kind of look at me on cycle ever, but I'm still trying to try and do something more interesting with it for the stage. So yeah, it seems to me that your topic through all of these shows is a question about what are the actual origins of human behavior and what role belief and framing and expectation and suggestion and environment play and all of that. You really are doing a real time psychological study of people in odd situations and it's fascinating to watch, but there are these moments where the effect you're achieving seems impossible. Actually, I can't remember which show this was. This could be there are smithereens for me because my daughter and I binge watched so many of them in pieces. But you had one where, based on the mere association of a few things like the sound of Music playing from a passing car, you got people to basically perform an armed robbery of the Pinkertons or the Brinks, people who are bringing money to in or out of a bank. And the idea that that suggestion could be that powerful that someone would have, you know yeah, but it's not just music from the car. I mean, there's a whole process that you follow of basically conditioning which is essentially the same in sacrifice. And I've used this process a lot. I tend to sort of think, well, I need to get somebody to this point. So how does that break down in terms of the things they need to feel at that point and then eliciting those feelings, attaching them to some sort of trigger so that it's the same as if you always think, of the example of breaking up with somebody and having a horrible time doing that. But there's a song that's just playing a lot on the radio at the time, and then you don't hear it for five years, and then you hear it again, and it just immediately just brings you back into that state. But here we have a complex behavior that is not only starkly antisocial, but can send someone to prison. Right. This is a major decision to rob a bank. Yes, it was holding up the security, what I'm doing, but I'm presenting those triggers. So there were like three or four I can't even quite remember what they all were, but three or four different triggers, and then this sort of tantalizingly available scenario, which is, again, quite unrealistic. Right. So it's just all so kind of impossibly fortuitous that it all happens to me. It isn't a surprise. Well, the surprise is, I think, over the years, that people do just sort of follow these tracks that if you pick somebody that's suggestible you pick the right sort of person, and they've been through this transformative thing that's lasted for however long we've been filming for, built up these associations, it's going to happen. If you imagine it was a room of people, some of those people in the room you get would do it. But then what would be the difference between those people and the others? Well, they'd probably be more suggestible. Those ideas would be would be dropping in at a much more impactful level than most of the room. But then those are the people I'm using. I mean, they're kind of experiments in one sense. In another sense, they're clinically not really that interesting, because it's not like I'm doing it with a large number of people or I've got a control group in the next room doing it without the various triggers where you keep losing your control group, you keep just not selecting those people. Exactly. So it's more of a kind of here's an emotional journey to go through and maybe that might make you think about things in your own life. It's more of that kind of world. I see it more as a sort of kind of a drama, ultimately. But the mode, the feeling of an experiment is the way that that's expressed. What's your take on free will, given the fact that you manipulate people wherever you go to do things that they can't explain? I like I like that there's both. I like that if you look at it in one way, of course there's no free will, you can look at it another way and you can go, yes, but ultimately we can exercise our choice and make a difference to a situation. I'm quite happy to sit with both. I know I feel silly saying this to you. Well, no, there's definitely one level at which it makes conventional sense to talk about choices. Choices are the proximate cause of the thing you then decide to do. But when you try to figure out where your choices come from and just how much control you, as the witness of your experience had over those variables, from genes on up. Of course. Yeah, but I still think there was that experiment at the Max Planck Institute. This is where this idea came that we make our decisions, anything up to 7 seconds unconsciously before we make them conscious. You must know this with the subject pressing A or B in there. Like Benjamin Lebey that's the lab experiments yeah, those tantalizingly, they tell the story of the readiness potential in the pre motor cortex being available in this case like 500 milliseconds before the motor behavior actually 500 milliseconds before the person's subjective report of when they decided to move. So they're watching a clock that is, you know, made so as to make it as easy as possible to discriminate these increments of time. And they're given the simplest possible motor task, you know, hit the button or not hit the left button or hit the right button and their mind is genuinely open and not committed for whatever period of time. And then when they subjectively are aware of having committed, they note where the hand was on this special clock and lo and behold, it was a full half second before that where you could predict with I forget what the actual details were, but like 90% seconds or something. Ridiculous. Well, then they then there was an fMRI study that pushed that all the way back to like 7 seconds where you could get a better than chance prediction. So I've always found it a strange experiment because it feels to me contaminated by the idea of don't think about it before you do it. So of course you start to think about is it A or B? And then you could suddenly do the opposite. But the truth is all of that research is really a red herring. That's what it feels like. You don't actually need the neurophysiological story to know that there must be some chain of events of which you are not conscious that actually underwrite what you are conscious of and any conscious deliberation would fall into that category. Yeah, well, I have no argument with it. I enjoy both sides, but I don't think that with obviously what I'm doing, I'm creating the illusion of that sort of control most of the time. So I don't see my work as a sort of but you're still putting people in positions where they are strangers to themselves in that they're doing things that they can't account for but you can account for. Yeah, to a remarkable degree everyone's doing this to everyone all the time less systematically. I mean, advertisers are trying to get us to click their links and that's probably the most systematic version that we all encounter. But for you to be putting people in situations where you're hoping that at that moment they're going to push a guy off a roof some of them did and some of them didn't. I mean, I'm laying down I'm laying down these tracks for them. Right. 75% did and the ones who did, did it 100%. That's true. Let's talk about sacrifice because this is a genuine happy ending and it's appearing in the context of a political environment where it seems all too of the moment. Give us the set up. What is the show? It was because the Push was the first show on Netflix. I'd already done it already been out in the UK before, but it was the first thing on Netflix and then Miracle, which was my stage show. But Push was like the last sort of special that I'd done. And I felt like I had to do something that was sort of the opposite of it and was more redemptive rather than reveal the propensity to commit murder on the spot. Okay, so the premise is using these kind of COVID psychological techniques, trying to get a right wing Trump supporting American guy with pretty strong views against illegal immigration, if not immigrants generally, to take a bullet to lay down his life for a Mexican illegal immigrant, or at least someone he believes is. So that was the premise of the show. It's a crazy premise. It's a crazy premise. I mean, you could have walked that back a little bit and still it would have been an ambitious undertaking. When we initially kind of put the show together, I intended it to have more of an overtly kind of political feel to it. So in what you see at the start of the show, which is 100 people coming together and I'm choosing the guy I'm going to use, we had a whole day of really interesting experiments were going on. We were doing Jonathan Hyatt's work on Changing the environment to he writes about it in The Righteous Mind. I think perhaps it is natural he is one of his colleagues that making the room disgusting, leaving fake vomit and a nasty smell. And the idea is by having those feelings of threat and contamination, that you could make otherwise liberal minded people give more conservative sociopolitical answers to questions they'd already answered in more liberal ways earlier on, and vice versa, making conservatives more liberal, which is another well known experiment of inducing a feeling of invincibility first. So you're undoing that feeling of threat, which seems to be allied to more right wing views. So we had a whole lot of stuff that was really fascinating. All of this ended up coming out because it felt in the end, the show was more elegant to make it about a human quality of compassion and kindness and stepping outside of these kind of political narratives. So in the end, Trump was never mentioned and also think, if I'm not American, it's always a bit ugly and uncomfortable and somebody from somewhere else comes in and seems to be passing comment on your own system. So I think the show is better for it. There's just a lot more that we could have put into it. But in the end it's a story about, I think, somebody's stepping outside of the constraints of those kind of narratives. Do you have a hard time limit for these Netflix specials? Do they have to come in right at an hour? No, no, not at all. Not at all. I think originally we were imagining it would be like an hour and a half, and as we strip more and more out and it got down, I think it's about 47 minutes or something now, which is what the show, what an hour of TV certainly used to be with ads in, at least in the UK. So you've selected this right wing, somewhat conspiratorial character who is opposed to immigration and wasn't Floridly racist? No, he's not a monster racist, which would have been a different show. I think it would have been about, look how clever I am to be able to transform this monster racist guy into a nice guy, which I didn't want the show to be about. So I wanted somebody you'd kind of relate to. So, although at the beginning, what was the worst view he expressed? I can't quite I'm so inundated with this kind of material now, studying white supremacy and all the rest of it. He was saying, yeah, kick them all out and they're going to turn my country to shit. And so he was quite kind of quite clear in that he actually wanted people kicked out. Right. It wasn't just, build the wall, build a bigger wall. But it's not just a matter of not letting more in. No, but like a lot of people, he's dealing with difficulties in his own life, financially, particularly, and he's seeing what to him, people coming in and getting free handouts. And it's that sort of narrative that he settled into very comfortably. Right, okay, so you have the perfect subject. What does he think he's doing in this? He thinks he's taking part in a documentary about cutting edge biotechnology. So if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversation I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. OK? Still a lot happening in the world. It is crazy out there and today's podcast will take a major slice of that craziness and hopefully put some order to it. Just a couple of housekeeping items. Some exciting things happening over at Waking Up. To coincide with the beginning of summer, we kicked off an initiative we've called 100 Days of Giving. Each day we'll pick one person at random within the app to help us give away $10,000 to any one of ten extremely effective charities. And we're about seven days into that campaign and it will go on all summer. So we'll give a million dollars away over the course of 100 days and Waking Up subscribers will help us do that. We're giving to a wide range of causes, from the Malaria Consortium, to the Clean Air Task Force, to the International Rescue Committee, the Cure Alzheimer's Fund, the Animal Welfare Fund, the Climate Change Fund. All of these are organizations that we got some good advice on. And if you're a subscriber to Waking Up, you'll see more information within the app. Anyway, I'm really happy about that. Also in Waking Up, we're launching a new category of content called Life to add to the theory and practice sections in the app. We've always described Waking Up as not just another meditation app, and in part that's been justified by how we approach the topic of meditation itself. It's not merely a means of calming down or becoming more productive, but rather it's a practice that can open doors to truly life changing insights and to a new way of being in the world. But there's certainly more to living a fulfilling life than exploring the nature of one's mind directly through meditation. So we're creating a section in the app that can absorb courses on a wider range of topics related to happiness and decision making, leadership, wealth, parenting and many other topics. And we're launching today with the beginnings of a wonderful course on time management that the writer Oliver Burkman has produced for us. He wrote a book on the topic I really loved titled 4000 Weeks, and now he's producing an audio course for us. So anyway, that should be in the app, if not now, later today, depending on when you're listening to this podcast. And yeah, I'm very excited about it. And finally, here on the podcast, we have released another podcast feed titled The Best of Making Sense, where we resurface some of the older episodes that are truly evergreen. Rather than put them in the Making Sense feed itself. We have created a separate podcast, essentially, and you can find information about that by searching The Best of Making Sense. If you're a subscriber to the podcast, you need to get the private RSS link from my website, which you can now do on mobile quite easily. It's essentially one touch, and if you're not a subscriber, you will once again be getting half episodes. But they seem like a way to make the archive more accessible to new listeners, because there are very likely dozens, even scores of episodes new listeners have missed that they're unlikely to go back and find which really are as good as they were on the day I recorded them. In fact, as a proof of concept, I just listened to the conversation I had with Bart Erman about Christianity and had forgotten how much I enjoyed it, as there to be found as a recent addition in The Best of Making Sense. Okay, today we're talking about the end of the world as we know it. That really is not much of an exaggeration, because today I'm speaking with Peter Zion and Ian Bremmer. We're focusing on Peter's new book titled The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, which is a fairly dire look at the implications of deglobalization and demographic collapse. As I say, at the beginning, I invited Ian to help co host this episode, essentially because so much of what Peter has written about is just not in my wheelhouse. So I invited Ian to ride shotgun with me, which happily, he did, and I thought it was a great conversation. We track through a lot of what's in Peter's book why declobalization is happening, why he's so confident that it will continue to happen, how it has different implications for countries like China versus countries like America, and as you'll hear, there are not too many countries like America in his estimation. And there's a long discussion on the implications of demography and demographic collapse. Just what is the relationship between labor and consumption and investment and urbanization? What does the world look like with shrinking populations? As you'll hear, it is a bracing and fairly alarming picture of guaranteed disorder and scarcity. And there's also some discussion about the significance of the war in Ukraine and other recent developments there. Anyway, I found it fascinating. I hope you enjoy it. Peter Zion is a geopolitical strategist and founder of the consulting firm Zion on Geopolitics. His clients include energy corporations, financial institutions, business associations, agricultural interests, universities, and the US military. He is the author of The Accidental Superpower, the Absent Superpower, Disunited Nations, and most recently, the End of the World is just the Beginning. Ian Bremmer is president and founder of Eurasia Group, a leading global research and consulting firm and G Zero Media, a company dedicated to providing intelligence and engaging coverage of international affairs. He currently teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, and he has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller US versus Them The Failure of Globalism, and his most recent book is The Power of Crisis How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World. Ian is also a foreign affairs columnist and editor at large for Time magazine. Apologies for some of the audio, especially on Peter's side. Peter is in the middle of a book tour and we were unable to send him the gear we usually send to guests. So it sounds more like a phone call on his end, but his words are clear enough. And I bring you Peter Zion and Ian Bremmer. I am here with Peter Zion and Ian Bremmer. Peter, Ian, thanks for joining me. It's great to be here. Good to be with you guys. Peter, the occasion for this conversation is your fairly astounding new book, the title of which is The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, which I read last week, and I knew I wanted to speak with you. I also knew that I am not entirely qualified to absorb every aspect of your thesis. You cover so many topics which are really not my wheelhouse, things like geography and manufacturing and agriculture and industrial materials, ETCA. So I invited Ian on, really to kind of copilot the plane with me here and be a backstop against some of my ignorance about these matters. And Ian is a frequent guest on the podcast, so it's great to talk to you both. I'd like you to roll out your thesis as you present it in the book at kind of a high level at the beginning here. I guess I'll just kick you off by reminding you that one of the more provocative and unequivocal things you say in the book, among many provocative and unequivocal things, is that, quote, the world of the past few decades is the best the world is ever going to be in our lifetime. And so, basically, your claim that surfaces throughout the book is that the world as we have known it ended more or less in 2019 and there is no going back. And globally speaking, more or less, everything that matters is going to get worse, and it's going to be worse for the rest of our lives. As we'll hear that, you posit that there will be islands of relative advantage and America is going to do much better than China, for instance. But basically the sky really is falling on your account. So I'd love you just to jump in and give us a first pass at this argument. Of course. So let's start at the beginning. Before World War II, global trade in the way that we think of it today, did not exist. There was no manufacturers trade certainly not supply chains. Energy and agriculture tended to be kept in a house. If you wanted something, you went out and you took it, colonized it, you expanded into empire, and those empires clashed. Those clashes brought us the destruction of the world wars and the end of the imperial era. At the end of that conflict, the Americans proposed a new way of functioning. Instead of everyone having to have their own sequestered protected militarized convoy systems, the US. Would use its navy, which was the only one of Cyrus, to survive the war, and would protect everyone's commerce everywhere at any time, no matter who you wanted to partner with, where you wanted to go, where you wanted to sell, if in exchange, you would serve as cannon fodder. In the Cold War, we bribed up an alliance, and it worked. But the Cold War ended 30 years ago, and we've been backing away ever since. And in every presidential election, we have gone with the more populist candidate, and I would not exclude Biden from that statement. We're done. And at the time that the Ukraine war started, we actually had fewer troops stationed abroad than at any time since Reconstruction. So the American commitment to this sort of structure, which was always a security structure for us, is now gone. Second, that structure changed the way we live in a pre World War II, pre urbanized, preindustrial system. Everyone lived on the farm, and kids were free labor, so you had a lot of them. But when globalization happened, urbanization happened, and everyone took those industrial and service jobs and manufacturing jobs in cities. And when you move into a condo, kids are no longer free labor. They're just a really expensive headache. Adults aren't dumb, so we had fewer of them. You fast forward that 75 years, and it's not that we're running out of children. That happened 40 years ago. It's that we're running out of adults. And we do not have an economic theory for what a world where the retirees outnumber the children and the adults looks like, but we're about to live in that naked now. It feels good until now, because as you age, if you're part of a global system, if you have a lot of people in their forty s and fifty s people who have literally been in their careers their whole lives, well, they're very productive, but they've got to export that product in order to make it work. And in a globalized system, you can export from the more advanced aged economies into the younger ones, but that only works until you hit mass retirement. And at that point, you don't only lack consumption, you also lack production and investment. And that is a position where the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Italians, the Belgians, the Germans, and more are all edging into in the first half of this decade. And there is no system that we are aware of, even theoretically, where that works. So we are now at the end of what has been the greatest period of economic growth in human history, and now we get to figure out what's next. So there are two main pieces here. There's the claim about deglobalization and then the claim about demographics. I don't know which we should take first. There must be a few assumptions built into each of them. I'm wondering, maybe let's take de globalization first. That seems to be a very simple claim. Why is it happening? And what if we just imagine a case where you're claiming that America long ago decided to stop being the world's cop and pull back? And I'm wondering what Ian thinks of that. But let's just say that's true, and it's been true and it currently is true. That's the kind of thing that could change, right? And that would upend at least one crucial part of this thesis. What if everyone who mattered read your book next week and thought, we have to arrest this slide toward the brink, we have to secure a globalized supply chain and make the world safe for commerce once again? Why couldn't that happen? Well, let's start with why it can't happen, and then we can go into why it won't happen. First, the can't. If you want to patrol the global oceans, you need to make sure that there's one overarching naval power who has the capacity to do it, and there are not challengers to the throne who could potentially disrupt it. The US Navy is potent, but it is designed to smash countries, not protect trade anymore. We have eleven supercarriers. Another three are on their way. Fantastic tools for military power projection. But if you want to patrol the global oceans, you need destroyers. I would say you probably need about 800 of them. We have 70, and half of those are dedicated to protecting the carriers. It's also the 1960s anymore. The Soviets were never great at anything naval. But now there is a wider range of middle powers, of which China is one who would like to have their own sphere of influence in terms of maritime power. And that is just not something that works in terms of unrestricted merchant activity. So even if the United States wanted to do this, we no longer have the capacity to do it. And nor is there a country or a coalition of countries that have the naval power that would be necessary to build some sort of PAX global system. We just have sailed past that, to put it bluntly, in terms of why it won't happen, the United States politically has moved on. And part of what made globalization work is that for the Americans, globalization was a security pact, not an economic one. Everyone else got the economic benefits. We got to be able to write everybody's security policies. That was the deal. You do that for 70 years and economics change in the home country. And so we have seen the the gradual departing of manufacturing, for example, from American shores to the wider world. We have seen countries that normally could not have built the institutional or physical infrastructure or industrial plant be able to do so because of global finance. And we've seen other players come into the market in terms of energy and agriculture that couldn't have done so in the imperial era except as colonies. They're all independent countries now. And there's some resentment in the United States. This is part of the rise of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, part of the return of populism to the core of our political debates. The idea that the united states has gotten a raw deal, even though the deal is one we made, even though it's one we pioneered, and the idea that the united states is going to build out a navy so it can bleed and die, so that the chinese can import raw materials and export machined products, that was always a dubious line. And so here we are at the end of the system. So let me jump in. Let me say, first of all, that I think it's appropriate that we well, actually, big picture, I should say that Peter and I agree on much more than we disagree on. We've known each other for a long time. I read the book a few months ago. I liked it quite a bit. So we're getting I think this is going to be more about nuance and deep conversation that elucidates as opposed to fiery disagree with each other on everything. I will say that to the extent that we disagree, we probably disagree a lot more on the deglobalization piece and how far it goes than we do on demographics. So I would spend more time on that. I think demographics one of the few areas that we can make very strong predictions with confidence about where we are heading over the next 30, 50 years. Because most of it has already happened. It just hasn't happened. It hasn't played out yet. As Peter said, those people are born, but we haven't seen what happens as they become old. And we're going to exactly we know exactly how many 50 year olds we're going to have in 20 years because they're all 30 now. We do now. I don't think we necessarily agree on how many we need and what the implications of that are in one place that we will have an interesting disagreement later is about whether China necessarily loses because they have demographic challenges. I'm utterly not convinced about that, and I think that'll be an interesting conversation. But that's not where we are yet. Where we are now is a big question about deglobalization. I think one thing that's very interesting is the tension in this book. Tension with Peter's argument is that he said, we just lived through the most staggering and extraordinary sort of 50 years that the world has ever had, and now it's over. But at the same time, he said that part of the reason that the Americans aren't going to do this and don't want to do this is because so many Americans feel like globalization, this wonderful period, was such a raw deal for them. And those things are I mean, I'm not trying to be too cute here, but those things, they overlap, but they don't overlap perfectly. So we need to recognize that actually globalization was an enormous benefit for a certain number of Americans an enormous economic benefit for a certain number of people. And banks and multinational corporations that were largely had shareholders in the advanced industrial democracies, but that the middle classes and the working classes in those same countries were largely hollowed out. And so globalization wasn't such an amazing time for those people for the last 50 years. And Thomas Piketty has written about that, and a lot of people have written about that. And that's why you're getting all of this populism and anti establishment sentiment in the US. So there's an argument to be made there. The second argument to be made is that deglobalization is not a switch. We have had almost unfettered period of globalization for the last 50 years, and I have been a staggering enthusiast for it. And frankly, so has Peter, in the sense that we know that we've created a global middle class, and we know that there's been unprecedented amounts of human development and wealth and factfulness. And you can read that wonderful book by Hans Rosling who just departed us a few years ago, and you can see all those numbers. That's great. But we aren't right now in one period of deglobalization. I would argue that there are three separate types of deglobalization that are presently happening. They are different and they are constrained. The first is Russia. And Russia is being deglobalized and decoupled from the developed world because they invaded Ukraine. They hadn't. That wouldn't be happening, as we've seen from the Europeans and their energy policy over the last 1020 years. A second deglobalization is between the United States and China, but it is relatively limited to areas that are considered to be critical for national security. Those are defined differently between the United States and China. And a lot of other countries around the world, including the Europeans and the Asians want none of it. So even the Japanese, who are deeply concerned about national security tensions with China, and we saw that with Abe, and of course, we now see that with Kashida, want to ensure that they can continue to do more and more and more business with the Chinese. The Chinese feel the same way. So there's a constraint there in the same way that you feel that constraint for much of the private sector in the United States. And then finally, there's this every nation for itself. America first, India first, Malaysia first, which is this knee jerk reactionary populism to bits of globalization not working for parts of your populations, and that's absolutely everywhere. But it doesn't have a lot of power. And as a consequence, vested interests with a lot of money do everything they can to provide lip service but not actually move policy so far and so fast. So I guess I am saying that I think that the broad dynamics that Peter identifies as to this tipping point from unfettered globalization to something that feels a lot more challenging, I agree with that, but I'm much less sharp on globalization to deglobalization. I think it's more nuanced. I think the transition is going to it's going to take longer and it's also going to have different effects in different parts of the world. Finally, I would point out that I am less I don't believe that we are in a Cold war with the Chinese. I'm not saying Peter does. He doesn't say that in the book. I also don't believe we're heading for one in the same way that between the Americans and the Soviets, we had this mutually assured destruction that prevented us from getting into a hot war. I think the incredible amount of integration between the US. And the Chinese economies, never mind the Chinese economy and every other economy and the American economy and every other economy, actually provides very strong guardrails that really does limit our capacity to get into a Cold War between the US. And China. And ultimately that makes me more optimistic that the fact that the Americans and the Chinese have very different political systems and economic systems that have incompatibilities and they have military strategies on some issues that are clearly zero sum. That ultimately, their economic shared interests as well as their coming climate shared interests, and even their proliferation of dangerous technologies coming shared interests make me less pessimistic about the next 1020 years geopolitically than Peter is from a global perspective, though not so much for the US. In his book. Right. Well, just before I hand it back to you, Peter, more or less everything you just said about China and and there not being a risk of a Cold War is obviated by Peter's thesis, if he's correct, because China is more or less going to cease to exist as we know it in fairly short order. But we'll get to the the specific claims about China in a moment. Peter, what is your response to Ian? I would say when Ian I first met what was that, nine years ago? Eight years ago, yeah. What he just laid out was one of my scenarios that this could happen quickly, this could happen over a long period of time, there could be a transition period. Events of the last eight years, however, have changed my mind on that. I've seen significant shortsightedness in foreign policy making in the United States and Europe, but most of all in China. I've seen a collapse of China's institutional capacity to process information leading to ever and ever worse problems. And now we've got a little bit better demographic data that has come out of China, which is truly horrific. Actually, it's come out since the book published just a month ago, and we're now looking at a Chinese population that's less than half of what it is today, as early as 2050. And in that sort of environment, china is just not competitive in anything. And that assumes there are no interruptions to the flows of stuff into China. So I have lost track of the number of clients that have come to me in a panic and wondering when things are going to go back to 2019, whether it's because of Trump or because of China. And I really don't have a lot of good news for them anymore. And just in the last 48 hours, I am very concerned about Germany's role. Now that Nordstream is offline, we don't know if it's going back online. The last of the four pillars that support German industrialization manufacturing are in the process of crumbling. We have become so vulnerable in the last eight years, and everything has become so exposed. And just the bedrock that allows globalization to function, the idea that materials, energy, food and manufactured products, intermediate products in particular, can just flow effortlessly, that's all stopped. And when I look at a country with a terminal demography who has no control over its energy or its machine inputs, it does not take much of a breath to knock that over. And I think we're going to see in very real time, in just the next three months, just how bad this can get for Germany very quickly. And if we've got Germany and China in a degree of economic duress at more or less the same time, but for different reasons, I don't see how we pull out of this. I would love to be wrong. I would love for there be a transition period where we have a chance to plan, but everything has gone so far with no mitigation that I think we're well past the point of no return now. Okay, that's one I definitely feel more optimistic about. And look, I accept the point that there are a lot of corporates out there that are a little unmoored and a little untethered by things that have happened geopolitically in the world that they were not thinking about, were not expecting. I also think that you're going to get more of them coming to you, Peter, saying, I'm going to panic. We're not coming back to 2019 precisely because you are yourself moving towards more dire scenarios. And so there's going to be some self selection there in terms of the people who they're asking you. Fair enough, but let's talk about Nordstream, because I think that my understanding from the German government and from talking to a lot of people sort of inside this issue and our energy practice is that, worst case scenario, if the Russians were to completely cut off Nordstream. So nothing more after these ten days are over, I guess that's July 21 is that the Germans would be in a mild but not severe recession. You're probably talking about a 2% GDP contraction for one year compared to what they are presently expecting. There would be a significant amount of consumer stress that would require the Germans to pass on significant subsidies to the corporations and or benefits to the population that breaks their existing fiscal rule. They have plans for how they would do that. I have been stunned, Peter, with how quickly the Germans in totality have been willing to move on every single issue that they can to get a diversification away from Russian fossil fuels. They've got mobile LNG terminals that should be ready by winter end of the year, early next year, absolute max. A lot of efficiency measures they're taking there's. Diversification from the United States, from Qatar, from other countries. It's been shocking to me how quickly and depending on who you talk to, they think that either by the end of this coming year or maximum by the end of the following, that they will no longer need any exposure to Russian fossil fuels. And no one in Germany would have said that on February 24 after the Russians invaded. Now, I'm not suggesting this isn't a big problem, but the scale of the problem, even in the worst case scenario where the Russians cut everything off, I think is manageable. Secondly, I don't think the Russians are going to cut everything off. I think it's interesting that so far the Russians, when they have been sort of hitting the Germans and hitting the Poles and hitting others, it's been percentages and it's been also like they do with so many things, with fake arguments for why they have to do it because they're missing sort of they're having technical problems. And of course, we know they're not really having technical problems. But why they need to lie about it? Why do they need to obfuscate? And of course it's because they recognize that they do want to come back to the markets over time and they still believe, I think, that they will have that opportunity. They still think that after they take the Donbas and the Ukrainians, who have gotten much more pessimistic over the past weeks, get stuck with something that feels like a frozen conflict, then the Germans and the Italians and others are going to feel differently about Russia than they do now. And furthermore that the United States in 2024 with Trump running, might feel very differently towards Russia than they do now. And so Putin sees that he still has opportunities in a long game that make him not want to throw the energy baby with the Ukrainian bathwater. And so again, I'm not saying that you're directionally wrong. I think you're directionally identifying a lot of stuff that for me goes along with geopolitical recession, goes. Along with a g zero global order, which none of us like. But I'm less dire. I'm closer to your more. I wouldn't say it's an upbeat scenario, but it's certainly much more of a muddle through scenario than what you're painting. Or is it just a longer time horizon? It's a longer time horizon, but also the fact that we respond to crises. My last book was all about these crises also are precisely the kick in the ass that many institutions, governmental leaders at the nation level and at the non nation level, need to start changing and reforming their institutions in ways that will be more sustainable for the 21st century. Right. So Peter, I'd love you to respond to that, but I guess I'll add another piece here, which is obviously there are things that have happened recently that have put a lot of pressure on the global order. COVID and the war in Ukraine being, I guess, the two major examples. And on your account, all of that is just accelerating what was going to happen anyway. Again, we're going to jump into the demographic piece in a moment, but just on this point of a runaway trend toward deglobalization, why do you think it is actually happening? Is it inextricable from the demographics or is it's own variable? I think it's its own variable, but demographics are perfectly capable of killing it all by itself. Either of these issues, from my point of view, are death blows, and having them both in roughly the same time frame is just really bad luck. I'd like to go back to something that Ian said about the Russians. I am not convinced that they're going to turn Nordstream back on or not. I don't know. That's an internal Russian political move that it's entirely possible they haven't made the decision on. I am far more convinced that even if you put Nordstrom to the side for the moment, all of the pipes that traverse Belarus and Ukraine are ones that are probably not long for this world. It's difficult for me to see a Ukraine that believes it's losing the war to allow those to continue to operate. And I think one way or another, we're going to be seeing Russian energy fall off the market for a significant period of time. I disagree on that one. And by significant, I mean decades. The last time the Russians, for whatever reason, had to shut in their oil, it was 1992 because their exports, their raw production was fine, but their internal market collapsed, so industrial demand went away. And that meant you had wells shut in the permafrost. And when that happened, the wells become damaged and you get frost and water expansion damage up and down the pipes and in the wellheads themselves. And eventually you have to rebuild most of the system that took them 30 years last time. So Nordstream is like the issue of the moment, literally right now, this moment. But there is a half of other things that are semirelated behind the scenes that are perfectly capable of making any German hope for getting back to some sort of old normal or transitioning to a new normal on a time frame they can't control. And in that sort of environment, I am very concerned about what happens with German manufacturing. And I'm even more concerned about what that means for Germany's position within the Western world. Because it feels to me like the Russians are presenting the Germans with a simple choice. We can keep the lights on for you, but that means you're out of the coalition that is supporting Ukraine, and that means the logistics that you have that is supporting Ukraine are no longer in play. Or you can do this without us. And good luck with that. So I think that there's no chance that the Germans would be prepared to accept that kind of a Russian deal. You're right, and I don't think that the Germans have a hard time keeping everything running. Look, I get it. And also, I mean, I've seen how fast some of them are moving from gas to oil in terms of electricity needs. And again, I'm not suggesting they don't have problems here. Double negative. They have huge problems here. But they were aware of them. They've taken that step. They understand that they made themselves far too vulnerable for far too long. It was a strategic error. And the Olav Schultz government, which is quite stable, and its coalition, which is quite stable, is moving smartly in that direction. And so I also think that it was the Germans against French opposition, that made all the calls to ensure that Ukraine was given candidate member status to the EU. And part of the reason for that was because the Europeans, as a consequence, are going to be committed to rebuilding the Ukrainian economy. And no, they're not going to get into the EU for ten or 15 years. But that also means that it gives them the leverage to ensure that the Ukrainians aren't going to actually shut down or blow up pipelines that they are reliant on Europe going forward for their own rebuilding, irrespective of how much of the donbas and the land bridge to Crimea the Russians actually control. So what I see after this Russian invasion of Ukraine is a very large number of stabilizing measures that have been taken in a very difficult environment by the Europeans, by the Germans, by the Americans, and even by the Ukrainians. That help me feel like this transition. If the Russians decide that they want to go to a very bad place here, they'll be okay. And also, I would just suggest that remember that Putin said that if Finland and Sweden were to join NATO, that they would be held to pay diplomatic health, economic health, military health. They've gone through. They're joining. And the Russians haven't done boo because they can't handle an additional fight with NATO. On top of having 20% to 30% of their land forces getting chewed up in the first five months of this war. Russia just doesn't I don't believe Russia has anywhere close to the actual leverage that would be implied by an argument that says they can really shut the Germans down. I really hope you're correct. I think many people listening to this might be mystified as to why Russia and Germany, granted, the conflict in Ukraine and its knock on effects to countries like Germany are important topics. But why all of this has global implications, why are we past the point of no return with respect to deglobalization? And why is any of what we're focused on in the last few minutes relevant to that question? Well, Ian, you want to split that in half? I can take the economic side if you want to take the political and strategic, sure. Okay. So economically, Russia is the source of largest, world's largest source of fertilizer in the components that are necessary to make fertilizer, specifically, 40% of potash. Russia is the world's second largest energy exporter in terms of oil. Number one, with natural gas, which is not just used for fuel, especially in Germany. It is used as an industrial input. It's the base of German heavy industry. It is arguably one of the top three items that the Germans have in terms of making their industry globally competitive. And so if something happens to that, you're talking about a loss of the world's third largest manufacturing base, the energy that the Russians export, an oil form that's about 5% to 8%, based on who's doing the math in terms of global energy supply, and oil supply and demand mechanics are inelastic. So if you take off 5% of global energy, you can count on prices roughly doubling. There's no way we can have globally available fossil fuels without the Russians as part of the system. On the flip side, there are also major players in things like platinum and palladium and lithium and rhodium and nickel and copper. You also can't have the green transition without the Russians. So the Russians and Germans, time and time again, generation on generation, have had this weird dance where they have to be each other's largest economic partner, but they are also each other's largest strategic rival. So they move together to try to avoid a war. A conflict happens anyway. They hive apart. There's economic dislocation as a result, which the rest of the world knows as a recession or depression, and then they repeat it. They've been doing this for centuries, and this is probably the last time they do it, in my opinion, because of demographic restrictions. So who, quote, wins, unquote, this time around really matters. So I'm very happy with that economic explanation. And on the geopolitical side, the Russians, for reasons that I think are very explicable, nonetheless made an incredible misjudgment strategically when they decided to full on invade ukraine. I mean, they saw after 2008 in Georgia, after 2014 in Ukraine, that they didn't have a strong and united Western response against them. After 2014, the sanctions were pretty limited. You had European heads of state all come in to visit Putin. When they hosted the World Cup a couple of years later, it wasn't such a big deal. And then when Biden meets with Putin a year ago in Switzerland and it's Biden's agenda, he doesn't even bring up Ukraine. All he talks about is the pipeline attack on the colonial pipeline, the cyber attack, and said, that Russia. If you guys don't work on that and cut that out, there's going to be held to pay. And you know what? Putin actually rolls those guys up. Not only does he tell them to stop engaging in cyber attacks against American critical infrastructure, but literally in the weeks before the invasion of Ukraine, he actually has a bunch of the people that were leading the cyber group that was in charge of the colonial attack has them arrested, which nobody talks about this anymore. But the fact is that, from my perspective, that was Putin telling the Americans, okay, we're going to take care of the issue that you care about. The issue we care about, that you don't care about, is Ukraine. And meanwhile, he's got, you know, Merkel's Gone, who was the strong, you know, sort of advocate engaged with Ukraine through the Minsk Accords. He's got Macron saying that NATO is brain dead, and he's talking about his own way of strategic autonomy. He's got the Americans with this disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. The Americans kind of did unilaterally and that the allies are very unhappy about. He's got Xi Jinping saying he's his best buddy on the global stage. Now, by the way, I think that if Putin had decided just to do the second phase of what he calls the special military operation, if he had just taken the Donbas and the land bridge, I think he might well have gotten away with it. That you wouldn't have had the expansion of NATO and the Olaf Schultz 2% of GDP and the Europeans cutting everything off. He could have gotten it right. But he thought that he had the big kahuna right there, that if he took Ukraine and took out Zelensky, that he would be able to recreate a Russian empire, that he would be a new Peter the Great. That he would have achieved what Solzhenitson was talking about and redressed the greatest humiliation of his lifetime, which was the collapse of the Soviet Union by having Bielarus Ukraine and Russia together under one Russian empire. And that was a bridge way too far. The Ukrainians fought way too capably, and the west united and responded extremely strongly. So, Geopolitically, you now have a situation where not only have the Russians been decoupled from the west, but even the Asians, even Japan and South Korea, feel very strongly about this. And frankly, the fact that the United States and allies, even you'll remember, froze Russia's assets outside that were in their jurisdictions. No one thought that was even a remote possibility they were talking about. Maybe you cut them off from Swift and you ended up seeing the west doing far more to punish the Russians. So, I mean, you take what Peter just said about the economic side and add to that the fact that geopolitically and geostrategically, the Russians have been cut off from the west effectively permanently. As long as this regime is there, I don't see that changing. And of course, they're also in a vastly worse strategic position, security position, than they would have been if they hadn't invaded Ukraine back in February. So that's why you add all of that up. You have this significant component of deglobalization, where, for the first time in history, a G 20 economy has been basically severed from the G Seven. We've never done that before. Okay, well, I think it's now time to bring in the variable of demography, because it relates to even some of what you just said there, Ian. Because on Peter's account, part of what's in the back of Putin's mind, in his expansionist mood is the demographic collapse that Russia is suffering. And the implications of that for purposes of security. So, first of all, let me just confess at the outset that after reading Peter's book, I was somewhat alarmed and and chagrined at how little time I have spent thinking about the significance of demographics. I mean, it just is not something that I have spent any time on. And to hear Peter tell it, demography is, if not entirely destiny. It's pretty close. So, Peter, I'm wondering if you could just give us a primer on the significance of demography for a few minutes and talk about the relationship between population and labor and consumption and investment and urbanization, and just how all of that diabolical machinery works and why things are so dire in so many places at the moment. Well, it's just math, and math is diabolical. So I understand why most people don't follow it. It also takes a long time. Changes that are made to demographic factors today are not going to fully manifest for a generation or two. It's just that the cause, the root cause of all of this is the mass urbanization and the mass industrialization that happened in the aftermath of World War II and then really got intense in the post Cold War system. So think of a demographic structure like a pyramid, with all of the babies down to the bottom, followed by the toddlers, followed by the children, followed by the teenagers. And as you go up that pyramid, it gets narrower and narrower because of simple mortality. Now, until we get to roughly 1800, the whole world was a pyramid. Lots of children, very few retirees, everyone else stacked up in the middle with industrialization and urbanization. However, we got better health systems, and that meant infant mortality went down, but we also got urbanization, which means people had fewer kids. So that very bottom tier, the children, it got narrower in terms of fewer children, but then everybody lived like an extra two or three years, so the rest of the pyramid lifted straight up. You repeat that a half a dozen times as the technologies of urbanization percolate out. We get hospitals, we get ambulances, we get electricity in the countryside, and both of those trends continue. So you get narrower and narrower at the bottom, but the pyramid gets taller and taller and taller. And so your birth rate drops because you're urban now, but your life expectancy has extended. And China is probably the best example here. From the point that they started their industrialization process in the late seventy s, the birth rate has steadily ticked down as life expectancy expectancy has steadily ticked up. And from roughly 1980 until roughly 2020, their population doubled. But with fewer and fewer children every year, as your population lifts up that age bracket, you get bulges. And at first it's all good, because when you have a lot of people in your twenty s and your 30s, when that's where your bulge is, those are the people who do the consumption. Those are the people who do most of the low and mid value added labor. And this is the story of the Chinese industrial boom that we know. But if you keep aging, that bulge moves from the into the same time. That group at the bottom of the children continues to get narrower and narrower and narrower. And as that narrow section starts to lift up itself, you're now not just running out of children, you're adding a bit of people in their twenty s and their thirty s. And this is where China was roughly 15 years ago. And in that environment, your advanced worker cadre people's in their forty s and their 50s, it's super saturated. Their high value add work relative to their economic skill set for the economy as a lot as a whole does really well, and they start to outcompete everyone. And as you start edging into the early 60s, they become capital rich as well, because they have a whole lifetime of expertise behind them, and their kids have left home, so most of their big expenses are gone. But what is happening now is we're just going to the next step. That bottom part, the children, has been narrowing now for 60 years. That middle part with the adults has been narrowing for 40 years. And we're about to have a big bulge throughout the advanced world. And just behind them in China now, moving into mass retirement. And so what was good for consumption and then was good for investment in production is now good for nothing. Because retirees don't add value. They liquidate their savings. They go into very low velocity investments, which really aren't used for industrial development at all. And you're left with an economy that we don't even know how to put a name to. And we're going to see the majority of the world's, of the rich world, move into that environment in just the next few years. And China, if you believe the new data that seems to be leaking out of their census as of just a couple of weeks ago, it looks like they are far further along than we've ever thought. And they are absolutely going to age out this decade as well, assuming nothing else goes wrong. And in that sort of environment, globalization at its core becomes impossible because globalization is ultimately built on consumption. The European Union has worked for the last 25 years, even though it has a terminal demography, because they can sell to the wider world. But when too many countries pass that threshold, that's no longer possible. And so the developing world has not developed enough and is aging even faster than what we've seen go on in the rest of the world for the last 60 years. So every piece of the value chain and of the trade system that we've become used to in globalization, most of it just doesn't work anymore. You can have some smaller regional systems where the local geography and the local demographics interact in a constructive manner, but a global system, that is not okay. So I'd like to compare the cases of China and America here with respect to demography and its implications. Most people listening to this who have not like me, have not thought much about demographics, will have been thinking that China has been rightly touted for their economic growth low these several decades and also for their authoritarian ability to just get things done in a way that we can't. Right? So, you know, they can build a bridge in a matter of weeks that would take us ten years to permit and another ten years to build or to fail to build. And yet that picture of kind of like an endless labor force and a friction free environment where ideas can just translate into execution in a matter of minutes, that is all going away by virtue of this demographic collapse. And America has a very different fate with respect to demography. Ian, feel free to jump in if you see the China picture in a fundamentally different way. But then I want to just compare China. I will certainly tell you that I was very deeply disturbed when I saw the report came out recently from, I guess it was the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences that thought that there would be a decline in Chinese population starting now. And they expect that by the end of the century. You're looking at a Chinese population at under 600 million. That is utterly startling. If true, it is dramatically worse than the worst case scenarios of where the UN and others to have expected that China's population would be even just a year ago, you were talking about peaking out at 2027 and that there would be a much more gradual decline. So, yeah, it's a huge problem. Don't get me wrong. Let's just take this one piece, because, again, I think this is counterintuitive to most people. Most people believe they know that China had a massive overpopulation problem, and that was why you would have a one child policy in the first place. So that the goal had to be at least to stabilize the population, if not shrink it. And so why is it a disaster to shrink the population? Give me some color to what must be true if a population is shrinking that much that fast. Well, there's the question of who's working and there's also the question of who's buying. And therefore, what happens to China's economy? What happens to its influence globally? What happens to its ability to project power? Now, one way to resolve that is you bring in you have an immigration policy that would allow massive numbers of people that can engage in that or force younger people and the rest into China. Historically, China has been very unenthused about that kind of a policy. Right. I mean, this is not it's also a very big boulder. Yeah, you'd need hundreds of millions. No, I know, but, I mean, having said that, you know, the Chinese have exported an enormous amount of surplus labor to and, you know, in decades past to countries where they had didn't have people didn't have anything to do. They made sure they got them something to do. And it used to be that a big challenge that a lot of the backlash the Chinese had wasn't that their loans became equity, but rather because they were taking jobs away from local Africans or Bahamanians and others. Well, no one's talking about that anymore. So, Peter, what do you add, again to just to linger on this point, the bridge to depopulation? Why is the passage across that bridge so heroin, I guess, even in the generic case. But let's take the specific case of China. Let's just say this is true and the population is going to shrink the way you expect based on just looking at the demographic pyramid barring the magical invention of an army of superintelligent robots that can see to the needs of everyone as they start buying adult diapers. I've seen that movie. What are you expecting to be true at the level of day to day existence in China? If the new data is correct, there are more Chinese over age 45 than under at this point. And that means just maintaining the base productive capacity. The country has already passed them to one point of number two, but there are no longer if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. Along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay? A lot going on out there in the world. Lots of shootings and other chaos and just absolutely abysmal coverage of seemingly everything in the media. If ever we needed a sign that journalism was broken, my God, some of the stories we're telling ourselves now. But rather than get pulled into that morass, I will press on here, but I'll be doing some more AMAs. That might be the context in which to process a lot of this topical stuff. We're bringing AMAs back on the podcast and the way to submit questions. If you're a subscriber, you can submit questions by sending an email to asksam@samharris.org or you can do this on Twitter with the hashtag Ask Sam and we will gather questions and I will release AMAs on those topics. Again, we'll only be selecting questions from actual subscribers. Whether you're paying for that or it's free, doesn't matter, but you need to be a subscriber. Okay? Today I'm speaking with James Fademan. Jim is a psychologist who has degrees from Harvard and Stanford. He's also taught at four different universities and has had a very long standing influence on the topic of psychedelics. He is one of the early researchers here and is probably more responsible than anyone for the phenomenon of micro dosing. He's written several books. Most relevantly here. The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide. He also has a new book on the structure of the self that he co authored with Jordan Gruber titled Your Symphony of Selves. And in today's conversation we cover the terrain in both those books. To some degree. The first half is entirely on psychedelics how to think about taking them, who should take them, who shouldn't take them, considerations of set and setting, the role of a guide, the effects of microdosing, the difference between MDMA and other proper psychedelics, so called good and bad trips, the power of thought. And then we move on to a discussion about the nature of the self and the fiction of there being a unified self. So we talk about the self in its multiple forms as states of self and even multiple selves, per se, and how all this might relate to compassion and an understanding of an acceptance of what we are as people. Anyway, if this is your cup of tea, jim is a very wise companion for this terrain. Apologies for the audio quality. This was one of those conversations during COVID where the local recording failed, so all we had in the end was the backup recording of the actual zoom conversation. So there are some dropouts on Jim side. Everything of importance is intelligible, but the audio is certainly less than ideal. I think your ear will get used to it. And now I bring you James Fatiman. I am here with James Fadiman. Jim, thanks for joining me. It's a great pleasure. We could spend a lot of time trying to figure out where our mutual history intersected. I'm about 95% sure that you and I once met face to face at least once, and I'm sure we know many people in common, but perhaps we'll get there organically. But perhaps you can summarize your background here. How do you describe what you've focused on lo these many decades that you've been covering, the topics we're about to touch? Well, I got involved in psychedelics before I entered graduate school because Richard Alpert turned me on. I was living in Paris writing a very bad novel and my draft board said, would you like to go to graduate school or Vietnam? And I took the obvious choice and then worked with a clinical group in Menlo Park. And just as I had completed my dissertation on psychedelic therapy and by the way, I said it was good, the government said, we don't want to know anything more, thank you very much, and closed us down in the midst of a research project where people were using psychedelics to solve absolutely linear, rational, physical, scientific problems. And then I had another few careers outside of psychedelics since the government didn't want us to know much. And a number of years ago got back involved in psychedelic research, particularly in microdosing, and in between I've worked with and taught a number of psychology systems or life changing systems like Affirmations, psychosynthesis, and recently just completed a book on internal healthy multiplicity, which was apparently from the outside. Like where did that come from, given what I just told you? I've been working on that quietly for 25 years and finally got it out. So I'm at a place of feeling a lot of life ambitions perhaps or inclinations or directions are in a completed state. So I have a couple of turns left and a lot of things I'm intending to do and it's a pleasure to be with you. And several of my relatives are very excited because they are long term fans of yours and I'm a short term fan of yours. Nice. Well, the admiration is mutual. I found your books very useful and illuminating and I want to COVID them somewhat systematically here. I think that the focus will be on this first book that not your first book, but this first book. I want to touch the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide and I want to have a fairly structured conversation that can be useful to people who are thinking about taking psychedelics. They are taking them and how that can be done safely, who should do it, who shouldn't do it, all the related questions here and then we can happy to do those. Yeah. And then we can touch your latest book, which is titled Your Symphony of Selves, which you wrote with co author Jordan Gruber and talking about just how you think about the self or selves plural. And that could be interesting. But just to get a little more of your backstory. You did your graduate work at Stanford, correct? Yeah, that's correct. So you weren't at Harvard getting dosed by Richard Albert and Tim Leary. How did you come to no, I was just before that and Dick Albert and I had become friends. I was an undergraduate and I worked for a summer for him in a research project in California and we actually shared a house, so we were really genuine friends and I was living in Paris, truly writing a novel. And he showed up on his way to Copenhagen where he was to present with Aldous Huxley and Tim Leary, the first major presentation about psychedelics to the World Council of Psychologists. We met and I took him to a little cafe on this. Richard Albert and I are sitting there and he's really looking and feeling a lot less neurotic than I knew him to be. He was brilliant, neurotic, ambitious, charming, a lot of wonderful things. And he said, the greatest thing in the world has happened to me and I want to share it with you. And I thought, well, how bad can that be? And then he took out of his breast pocket a little bottle of pills. And I didn't freak out, but I certainly withdrew emotionally. I was so straight, I was not drinking coffee, but he said, Here, try this. So I took a pill which I now would say would be a moderate dose of psilocybin. This was synthetic psilocybin. This is not the LSD, right? They had not discovered LSD at this time. They started with psilocybin and after a while the colors got brighter and everything began to jiggle a little with energy that was all new to me. And then I was also aware of the conversations behind me as people were walking by, as one does. And then I suddenly realized that my French isn't that good, wasn't that good, and I could never hear those conversations prior to this. And I looked at Dick and I said, this is really too much for me. And he said, well, why don't we go back to your hotel room? And that was great. And he said, It's too much for me too. And I said what do you mean you haven't taken anything? He said this is my first night in Paris. So we both withdrew to my 6th floor walk up and some of my cherished beliefs were disassembled about what was valuable and not valuable in my life. Nothing therapeutic breakthrough, but just an awareness that there was a more to the way the world was. But I was still me and it was still my personality and my issues. And a week later I had followed Dick to Copenhagen and where I had another session with him which was really about human closeness and connection and kindness and support of one another at a level that the words don't handle too well. If we had one more notch up in value of each of those words that's what it was. Life went on and a few weeks later I was at Stanford and I discovered in one little tiny corner of Stanford a professor who was working with psychedelics and experience that has forever shifted my awareness, my belief system and also shifted my career. So that's a little more backstory. When would this have been around? I am sure that you and I met with Richard Alpert who was then later known as Ramdas at some point in the in the late 80s somewhere near somewhere Stanford. So anyway, it's great to meet again. Before we dive into this I just want to offer the obligatory disclaimer to our listeners that we are not giving medical advice, we're not recommending that you personally take psychedelics and obviously we don't know your personal situation, dear listener. So you just have to read the lines and between the lines in this conversation to extract anything that might be useful to you in your specific situation. Obviously we're not going to soft pedal the underlying truth here which is that psychedelics have been incredibly useful to each of us personally and the resurgence of research on them holds great promise for everyone really and it's one of the happier developments in recent years in psychological science. But obviously where most people are living these drugs are likely to be illegal and therefore you encourage some risk just taking them, however benign your experience on them might be. And some people can have bad experiences which we'll get into. So with that caveat out of the way, let's start with general considerations here jim, who should and shouldn't think about taking psychedelics? Well one of obviously the questions I get a lot over the years is I'm thinking of taking LSD but and I say don't do it. And they said but I haven't told you my reasons. I said no, if you feel there's a reason you shouldn't take a psychedelic you have to listen to that. So my caveat is much stronger than yours Sam, in that way. And the question of who and who shouldn't take it is only one that can be answered by an individual. I can tell you that if you read the literature there's a lot of discussion about not having a psychedelic. These are all high dose discussions we're having right now, right? Yeah, we'll talk about microdosing later. But for high doses the science world says not if you've had a psychotic episode, not if you've been a schizophrenic, not if you're bipolar and not if you've had a serious mental, something like that. Now I used to wonder about that is where did we get that information? So I started searching around and I asked some of the senior researchers who were friends and the answer was actually there isn't any information like that out there. What there is, is people doing research. Don't want those people in the research because if they have a bad experience or six months later they have a bad experience that has nothing to do with psychedelics, they will blame it on psychedelics. Now I follow this a little bit more with bipolar because that's one of the groups that can never get in any research projects and if you go online, of course, if you go to the web, of course there's a group of people who are bipolar who talk to each other. And so I asked them would you comment if any of you have had any psychedelic experience? Do you have any advice for the other people on this group? And the general advice was from people who had used psychedelics and I don't know how and under what conditions, but they said on the manic phase of being bipolar, don't take anything. And on the depressive phase of bipolar, a number of them said that psychedelics had been very helpful. So that's not published and that's not science, but that's what I call citizen science, which is what's actually happening out there and it's important to keep there are a lot of research studies and most of them are very favorable and exciting. But behind that, since psychedelics were made illegal in the late 60s, early 70s in the United States, and just the United States, 30 million people have tried high dose psychedelics or just LSD, not all psychedelics. And as of yet we have no deaths and we have a lot of people who had very unhappy and difficult experiences, but in some senses it's a very safe, these are safe substances physiologically and if you don't know what you're doing, you can have a terrible experience even on a moderate dose. So the variable is having some understanding of what you're doing and what you're learning. And so recommending or not recommending is not something I do except to not recommend unless you know what you're doing. Yeah. This is a bit of a conundrum, however, because even very experienced psychonauts, as you know, can feel significant trepidation when thinking about taking a high dose of anything. Even knowing what you're in for, even having experiences under your belt that you consider to be not only benign but incredibly transformative, you still approach this howling abyss with the appropriate awe and concern. You know, often. And I mean, so even someone as, as seasoned as Terrence McKenna would, would talk about the feeling of fear he would live with around this consideration of whether he should trip again. And so if your prescription or non prescription is if you feel any hesitation about doing this, don't do it. It's a little hard to apply. Well, that's probably why I put it out there, because it gives people a hesitation. And the image that came to mind, as you were saying it, is skydiving. No matter how many times you skydive and how carefully you check your gear, you know that sometimes people fall out of the sky and and it does, and the shoot doesn't open. And it's not a matter of skill or experience, it's a matter of the facts are that these substances will take you places you do not intend. And I think that's part of the reason why I've backed off from high dose work and high dose research, because it can always be not only a scary experience, which is fine, people pay a lot of money to be frightened if you've ever been to what's called an amusement park. But the question of benefit is really where I'm looking at. I'm not really that interested in people who kind of are tripping because their streaming service is down. I'm very interested in people who are saying, I really want to learn something important that will perhaps change my life, and therefore I'm preparing appropriately. Yeah, I should say I've said before that I didn't take any psychedelics for at least 25 years based on the kinds of concerns we, we've just sketched here. I mean, just just a growing awareness of what a colossal spin of the psychological roulette wheel it was. And having had some scary experiences, I decided meditation was a much more governable game. And so it wasn't until very recently, about a little over a year ago, that I had my first in several decades significant trip, which I found incredibly useful. But the seriousness of intent that should frame this project is worth emphasizing because there really is a distinction between a recreational approach to these things you're just bored and you want to have fun, and you might do this at a party, or do it at a concert, or under conditions where those things exist. Obviously, we're having this conversation during the COVID pandemic, and there's not a lot of either of those things, but people tend to approach this frivolously, and it's not that certainly doesn't guarantee a bad experience. You can have a great experience doing that, but it's not really the appropriate orientation, in my view. And it sounds like you agree, Jim. It's just that there really is these are incredibly powerful tools. Well, as my favorite kind of why recreational, it may be a little more risky than you think, is my kind of young people who said to me once we were having this fabulous trip until the car caught on fire, that really shifted everybody's reality in a way that they weren't able to cope. So we're really looking at something and actually in terms of my being conservative and it's wonderful that psychedelics have moved so far that I'm conservative is if you're going to have a high dose experience and you intend to get anything from it, it's very important to have a guide, a companion, a designated driver, so to speak. Somebody who knows more than you do and cares about you. That turns out to be a way of preventing almost all strongly negative experiences. Because when you're caught in a negative experience and you're on your own, or you're with other people who are off on their own trips, it's very hard to get out. When there's a guide, it's very easy to get out. Let's talk about that, each of us in chapters. So I want to talk about the role of a guide here, but this section might be called Set and Setting. How do you recommend? And again, we're talking about large effective doses here, not micro doses, which we'll talk about later. How do you think about people preparing for a significant trip, whether it's psilocybin or LSD or Ayahuasca, or we can talk about specific compounds in a moment. How do you think about the concept of set and setting? Well, what we know is that psychedelics are incredibly sensitive to set or your mental attitude and setting, the literally physical situation you're in. And that includes the other people who are around. And the main reason that I wrote that book, the Psychedelic Explorers Guide, is for the first two chapters, which detail how to become a good journey or how to set yourself up the best way possible, and also how a guide should behave and what knowledge they should have. Because it's not a simple question, but fundamentally the question is always do you feel safe? Is it truly safe? Is it private so you won't be disturbed? And do you have some idea of what you do you understand the substance, do you understand what the doses are like? And do you have some intentions? And perhaps that's what set is about, which is what do you intend? And it is likely that you will have what you intend, but you'll have something else that goes with it. So all of those are important. And I think the way I've said is it's set in setting and situation, which is what's your life situation? If your life situation is very difficult, even if you're in a lovely set and setting, it's not going to your life situation is going to impinge on that and you're going to be in trouble. What's the substance? Do you know what you're taking if you bought it illegally? Has it been tested? The word I use then is sitter, but because I'm actually trying just to use s's because you do that when you write books. But a sitter is almost like a coach and a coach doesn't bother you unless something is needed to be helped. So if you, for instance, you're lying on a couch, you have music, you take off the headphones, you sit up and you said I think I'm dying. And you do. You think you're dying and everything in your mind is telling you that. And the guide friend sitter looks over at you and said oh, that's great. And reaches out his hand, or her hand and part of you says wait, wait, wait, I just said I'm dying. And and this person who I know and love says it's great. And then another part of you said oh, I took this substance and it's taking me in a different and I'll just see what what actually is being by the notion that I'm dying. And what people then find out, and this is more on reflection later, is as your ego is noticing that it's about to be demoted from amazingly important to something that is useful, it often will come up with these. Amazing scenarios of what a bad idea it is for the rest of you to discover the correct placement or the correct kind of status of your so called identity. Remember, Alan Watts had a wonderful comment as he would look in the mirror and he'd say what percentage of me has ever heard of Alan Watts? If you just look at yourself physiologically, the answer is a tiny amount of your brain has to do with your identity and the rest of it really has other preoccupations. So that's part of what I'm suggesting is why preparation is important. Do you want to say any more about the role of a guide? Can a guide be simply any well intentioned person who's not tripping along with you? Or does it require some special experience? Well, the fact of the matter is that most people do not have access to highly trained, sophisticated guides who participated in research, studies, et cetera. So the reality of it, my opinion or not, is that very kind, loving people who have had prior psychedelic experiences that are positive often can be very healthy, safe guides. Again, the term is close to designated driver where you don't need someone who is an auto mechanic and a race car driver to be your designated driver. You need someone who has control of their feelings and emotions, is physiologically sound and who knows how to drive, right? So there is a whole class of people known as guides, according to Michael Pollan in his work for his book, he says there are hundreds of them across the country. There is even an International Guild of Guides which has been formed in the Netherlands. So there is an occupation where you can actually, in many locations find people who will have a lot of experience in sitting with people. And so that's a kind of in between place. And I was struck a few years ago in Berkeley on a power pole there was stapled a little notice. It said Tripsitter, which is someone who will sit with you while you are tripping. And it basically gave a phone number and this was someone who you could hire to come to your house and sit with you. So we are creating a kind of new occupational grouping here of people who know not only a lot more than you do, but consider it usually more than a vocation to help you. And I guess final question on setting, how do you think about the difference between taking one of these compounds, let's say LSD or Psilocybin out in nature or with senses directed outward versus an internal journey, whether you're blindfolded or just in a dark room? Well, I think it's the same discussion you have about mysticism. Is there there's internal mysticism where you go inside and you find that everything in the universe is inside, or you go outside and you find that everything in the universe is outside. The difference is that if you're interested more in your own psychodynamics and you have, say, therapeutic intentions, probably you will do better staying inside where you are less literally likely to be distracted by the amazing beauty of the 10,000 things. If you wish to blend more, to become more aware of your continuity with the natural world, then outside is fantastic and will give you a recognition of your continuity with the natural world that is not that you don't lose, you don't forget. Now let's talk about dosage and here we can talk about microdosing as well. Am I right in thinking that you're essentially the father of microdosing at this point? I think at the moment I'm probably the person who has the largest number of cases in his research base and has talked the most about it and is probably the most quoted. There's a generation of researchers coming up fast behind me and will soon push me aside. But for right now, yeah, I'm probably the most well known and person and has done and has reported on microdoses in ways that other people haven't. Yeah. Okay, well, that was a walk around, what was an attempt at humility, and I think it failed. You're going to have to boost the dosage then, I think, Jim, that's not necessarily always the best suggestion. So let's differentiate these two projects because they really are distinct. So let's talk about macro dosing first. Let me just go right up the line. Sure. And let's start at around 25 micrograms where people report some psychedelic effects, very mild of LSD. We're just talking LSD, and I'll do it in micrograms. Okay. Around 50 micrograms is what was called originally a museum dose and now is called a concert dose. And if you've ever wondered when you go to a concert why there's that unbelievably huge light show. It's because such a large percentage of the patrons have come intending to bid as much out of the light show as the music. And that maybe is 50 to 100. At 100 micrograms, one can do very hard nosed scientific research and there's a great many companies around the world, some of which admit to it, where a number of breakthroughs are attributed to working in that way with that dosage. When you get into the 100 to 200 microgram range, it's psychotherapeutic, which is you can work with a therapist somewhat the way the therapist wants to, meaning you're still in communication. You will trip off into kind of thought loops. If someone, if your therapist says, do you want to look at the death of your mother? Ten minutes later, you may return to the room and say, yes, thank you for that. I understand it much better and I understand my reactions. Once you go above 200 and up to say, 400, then you're usually talking about what is called a transcendent or a mystical or a unity experience. That's when you lose your primary identification with your own physical identity and your own psychological identity. So you are no longer, if I'm in taking 400 micrograms, at some point Jim Fatima becomes a subset of the larger being that I feel myself to be. And in that state people report things like experiencing the birth of the universe or physically their own birth, or memories of past identities. It's what we called in an original report in the psychedelic experience, which is experiencing that alan Watt said it nicely, is your body doesn't end at your fingertips. And that is a revelation to people. And on their return from that higher dose, they often will see that parts of their own emotional, physical, social system are really defective and they make massive change. I recall working with several alcoholics and they were referred by the court, so they were not exactly eager to have a psychedelic experience. This is the early sixty s and all of this was not known. And each one of them a week later went out and drank and then came back to us and said, what have you done to me? And we said, we gave you a psychedelic. And they said, But I don't like drinking. It feels like it shrinks my expanded awareness. So there's a wonderful bit of video footage from some work done at Spring Grove Hospital, again in the late 60s. This was 40 years later, one of these overnight recovered alcoholics and the filmmaker is saying, well, can you talk about your drinking? He says, I haven't had a drink in 40 years. And the filmmaker talks about Willpower and the man laughs and says, has nothing to do with Willpower. I've never had any interest in drinking ever since. So a high dose or a mystical experience level dose has a number of additional effects that will. Not be found at lower doses. And that's pretty much all the way down the 200, the psychotherapeutic dose, things won't happen at a lower dose, et cetera. Does that answer? What do you consider an analogous dose of mushrooms and or synthetic psilocybin? Well, yeah, in a couple of thousand cases I have, we have, I think, one person with synthetic psilocybin. That's interesting. Well, I guess it's coming back now right into the research, but it's not well, it's coming back because there are a lot of people who can make money from it. It's coming back in the research because researchers who come out of a psychopharmacology model want something that's as close to a normal psychologically active substance as possible. And they love to have accurate measurement, even though the amount a person should take should be based on what the person actually needs, not on their weight or their age. It's a little bit as if people came in for meals and you gave everyone the exact amount of each food carefully measured, and they said, but hey, I want more potatoes. And they say, no, the study says everyone has to have the exact amount of potatoes. So I have obviously some biases about some of the scientific research, even the best of it. But what we're looking at with psilocybin is three to 5 grams of mushroom will give you a fairly expansive trip. People have taken much more than that, and at some point they stop bringing back useful information. And so in my world, that's what too much of a dose is. Each mushroom has its own level, its own amount of psilocybin. Even if you have mushrooms from the same little patch, the same species, they'll be different. So it's much harder when you get into natural substances. And for example, what I know is in ayahuasca the Iowa ghetto, the shaman who is giving the medicine, whether they're trained in South America or one of the hundred or so in Los Angeles, they'll give you what they think is a good amount and then later on they will give you more, if that seems to be useful. Now, how much is a good amount? Okay, it's a quarter cup, it's a half cup. They're using their clinical, their kind of intuitive knowledge rather than a scale. So once you get into organics, it's much harder to say what's the right amount? When you, when you get into microdosing, it's much easier. Question of dose has always been subjective, and the people that I worked with clinically, I gave you those numbers, but let me, let me show you how it works. 400 micrograms is an amazing amount of psychedelic. However, when you have an alcoholic, you give them 400 micrograms, and an hour and a half later they're walking around the room and saying, man, something's going on, but I don't feel comfortable, and what are you guys doing anyway? Anyone else at that point is on the couch voluntarily asking for headphones and a blindfold because the input is so overwhelming. Well, when you add to the alcoholics cocktail another 400 micrograms. So they're now taking 800 micrograms, which I don't recommend to anybody. They settle down and again, behave exactly the way everyone else does on a much lower dose. And I looked at that for a long time, actually studied alcoholism and why most treatments don't work. And what I realized with psychedelics is alcoholics have learned and have a physiology that cooperates to handle very large doses of substances that distort consciousness. So in a sense, their ability to hold on and to hang on to their defenses is far more developed than for the rest of us. So I'm dancing around the dosage question, because it's not quite the appropriate question. The appropriate question is what is the correct amount for this person on this day, for this intention? And that, of course, is an individual question. Is there anything in your mind that significantly differentiates the experience on a high dose of LSD versus a high dose of psilocybin? That is mushrooms and in most cases? Well, the feeling in the underground, who takes a lot more drugs than I do, is that psilocybin is a kinder experience. It's a more emotionally gentle experience. And that's partly, it is said, because there is a plant spirit behind it. LSD is considered a little colder, a little more powerful. It doesn't let you off easy. And I know these are all very vague terms unless you know what I'm talking about. My research associate, Dr. Sfiakorb, at one point set up a little bot and it asked the little bot to say, here's 100 reports from Irwid about psilocybin experiences. Here are 100 reports of LSD experiences. Can you this little learning bot distinguish the two if you can't be told which substance it is? So it kind of blinded artificial intelligence. And the AI robot said, no, I actually can't tell the difference between those experiences. There's another group of people who are saying the difference between a synthetic psilocybin and a mushroom is also a great difference, and that is also not yet particularly. We don't know quite what that means, but it's probably true since a mushroom has a whole nother set of alkaloids in it. So it should have a slightly different effect than just the psilocybin molecule. Yeah, but one obvious difference is just the time course of the trip. LSD trip lasts about twice as long as a mushroom trip. That's important because that's one of the reasons that the research has gone the way it has. One of the questions is, with the psychedelic Renaissance, why are most of these studies psilocybin? Why not LSD? Because with LSD, we have a couple of thousand research papers, you know, to start with. And I asked one of the senior researchers, and this is this is this comes on as a little ridiculous, but it's actually quite subtle and sensible. He said there are several reasons. One is psilocybin will give the same experience but in a shorter amount of time, four to 6 hours, LSD eight to twelve. If you're working with someone eight to 12 hours in a research setting, that's two shifts of personnel that doubles your personnel cost. So there's a motive. I said there's two things about psilocybin. One is it's not called LSD, meaning it doesn't there's not a lot of press about it, not a lot of research and not a lot of not a lot of negative press. From the other, and this is my favorite is psilocybin is hard to spell. What they're saying is that just because it sounds more like a scientific term, people are more comfortable with it. Which makes me wonder why there isn't more research on DMT because that's over in 15 minutes and dimethyl tryptamine is also hard to spell. DMT is not on DMT. Do you have experience with pure DMT as opposed to DMT is one of the active ingredients in Ayahuasca as well. But that's a very different experience, apparently. Do you have the Smokable very short acting experience or the injectable very short acting experience? Although I may now lose at least half of your audience. I have not a great many experiences and I don't seek out new substances to experience. It's kind of like people who like wine. Some people like wine to drink, some people like wine to find interesting, difficult, rare, amazing wines. The question always for me is what is the take home value? Now that's a little bit as if someone I say, well, you went to a concert, what's the take home value? They said, don't be ridiculous. I went to the concert for the being there at the time. Well, I have nothing wrong with that and I of course do the same thing. But because of my background I probably take psychedelics more seriously than most people. So the question of all these different substances and all these different forms doesn't it doesn't resonate. And I remember when I was sending out little I gave a talk at Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz some years ago and I asked each of the people there to fill out a little form. What's your best trip? What's your worst trip? Why did you come here tonight and what have you used? And these were all undergraduates and there was one young man who had tried 24 different psychedelic substances. And I thought he probably doesn't get much out of it. He's a collector of having done experiences and that's very different. The other side of that, the other way of arguing that is the notion is and this is, I think from Jeanpolsart or Camus, which is when you ask God a question and he answers it, you hang up the phone. So for a lot of people they say, well, I learned what psychedelics had to teach me. And my interest then diminished. Yeah, well, that certainly resonates with me. I certainly felt that for 25 years and this is not something that I imagine doing with any frequency at high doses certainly. But I've never taken ayahuasca I've never smoked the Mt and I'm just hearing about the phenomenology of those experiences. They sound like they are certainly opening different doors in the mansion of the mind. And I do feel like I can attest to a somewhat significant difference between psilocybin and LSD at higher doses. What you said about the difference does resonate with me. LSD has a kind of metallic quality to it compared to psilocybin. Not to say that it's bad, but it is different. And then of course there's MDMA ecstasy, which is not classically a psychedelic which in terms of take home value has offered a tremendous amount to people. Where do you put MDMA in this conversation? There are two reasons MDA isn't a psychedelic. One is biochemical, which is the other is that you do not go beyond yourself. Your psyche out the experience, only you're. You in an incredibly InterSafe place where all the parts of you that are awful to consider or terrible events or traumas or worse, you can objectively look at and move them from the part of your brain that holds. Them as terrible trauma and disturbs or destroys your life and puts them into conventional memory where you can remember that you did terrible things, but it doesn't dominate your present. So it's a totally different set of experiences. And however, the way it's given is exactly the way we developed it in the comfortable room and the music and the headphones and the male and female guide. All of which are to make it easier for people to look at traumatic experience. If you give the same person a very very high dose of LSD they will pass right through the trauma area and have perhaps again one of these transcendent experiences which may or may not affect the trauma. We haven't really done that kind of research. So MDMA in a sense is psychologically less threatening because you don't go beyond your own identity and that's a real difference. Actually, this brings up an interesting point about which there may be research that I'm unfamiliar with but just based on my own experience, it's often felt to me that not taking enough of a psychedelic is as much of a risk factor in determining having a bad trip. We'll talk about good and bad trips next, but here we're talking about dosage. Not taking enough, not achieving escape velocity of some kind can doom you to an unpleasant experience as much as taking too much. If taking too much is in fact a liability. I've had trips where it felt like I took just enough to have my ordinary mental reality good and scrambled or I took just enough to be given an unusual mental energy with which to fixate on my psychological problems. But not given enough to fly clear of them for any span of time. And so the net result was there was something considerably more than a microdose that potentiated my capacity for unhappiness. And I believe I've noticed this from both sides because I've had trips where I've gone very far out, well beyond any personal reference point to my life and my psychology. And then it's only upon reentry, as I'm coming down, that you begin to punch into the atmosphere of the familiar and begin thinking about your life. Is it that strata of the mind that there's a sort of a new capacity for chaos and complication and neurosis? You're kind of a commercial for guides at this point. Look at that particular event that happens in a high dose, which is you have found that you are immortal or that you are one with whatever your religious tradition teaches you is the highest, or you've gone past that into feeling that everything is interconnected and it's all the same stuff. And then you come down and you find that there you are. There you are a kind of middle aged physician in a difficult marriage and one of your kids has some kind of illness and you have economic problems and you love kite surfing. That person can with a little bit right into the heart of their issues coming down than they could coming up. And one of the methods that we use when we're doing this clinical work, this with a couple of hundred people, is we ask them to bring in important photographs. Again, notice this is visual. We also ask them to have a list of questions, and I'll mention that. But we ask them to bring in important photographs, and this usually would be of important human beings in their lives. And we would say, would you like to look at your photographs? And they would look at us like, what's a photograph? And who are you? But then you hand them a photograph and say, it's their spouse. Now, again, these are trained guides. And what do they do? They do nothing. The person looks at this photograph and they may look at it for a minute and put it aside. They may look at it for 45 minutes, and then they say, okay, I'd like another photograph. And you don't know what's going on. But when they write a report a few weeks later, you find out they spend a huge amount of time therapeutically reworking a lot of their issues around that particular person. So it's a method of depth psychological work without form, without vocabulary and without theory. We also gave them a rosebud of rose starting to open. And almost every religious tradition that had access to roses makes them an important either symbol or active force. And we found again, that people would have an experience of working with a living, expanding, beautiful piece of nature that they felt was important. And again, people would take a long time just looking into that rose, indicating how it opened and they went inside it and how they became a rose and how that made sense to them in their usual life. So as one comes down, but one is coming down aware that one is more than one's identity. And when you had those high experiences, Sam, the ones, as you said, coming back into being you, it's always a little puzzling, like I'm part of everything there is. Why did I come back into a Sam Harris of all people? That's often where you then get an opportunity to say, probably I came back into the Sam Harris to clean him up a little bit so that he would get more benefit out of being in this lifetime. So let's talk about micro dosing, which superficially seems like a similar project because again, we're talking about taking LSD or Psilocybin generally, but the dosage being dialed down as much as you're about to describe really does change things. What constitutes a micro dose and what are people micro dosing? Well, I have to make this super clear. Imagine that microdoses have no psychedelic effect, so they are not a little bitty high. Maybe they're the difference between an MDY, there are still radio frequencies, but the microdose is one 10th to one 20th of what is called a recreational dose. With LSD, for the original work I did some years ago, it was ten micrograms. That seemed to be an appropriate amount for people to have the experiences that I'll talk about a little bit more without having to stop or disturb their life. They had their normal day, normal activities, normal work, normal driving, normal time with their family, et cetera. The dose for mushrooms was then about 0.2 grams to 0.5 grams. Now, when I say the doses again, what we found after you, you get a few hundred reports, is people say, gee, ten micrograms was too much, I'm taking 7.2 was too much, I'm taking one 10th of a gram. What we found is that people would correct the dose, so to speak, for their own understanding and experience. And we also found in terms of taking it how often, which is a huge difference between psychedelics and microdosing. Microdosing is done repeatedly. People found that after taking it one day on and two days off over a full month, that's about ten times over a month. Most people ended up taking it less often, so it looked like it was not addictive, just as all other psychedelics. But whatever value it had, people seemed to gain basic benefits within the first month and then allow it to continue at its own pace. Now what are basic benefits? Okay, it's very hard to make this easy to understand, but AILET Waldman did a book called A Really Good Day and it's about her month of microdosing. And the best definition of microdosing that I've come across again from one of our people is I did better work than I usually do. I made a few more cold calls that were successful. I had a few ideas in the meeting that I usually have no ideas. When I went to the gym, I did one more set of reps, and I enjoyed being with my family more than usual. And I forgot that I'd taken a microdose. One never says at the end of a high dose session, I forgot I took a psychedelic. Well, actually, that's not quite true. If it's a sufficiently high dose, you can completely forget you've taken a psychedelic, but then eventually you remember as reality. When you've taken a sufficiently high dose, you forget that you're a human being on this planet because when you come down, you're very surprised to find out that that's true. And hopefully you're not attempting any reps at the gym. No, let alone driving to it. So a microdose seems to improve the overall function of the organism. And I'm being kind of vague and scientifically because there are so many people who've reported different benefits or different improvements in useting microdosing that it's very hard to categorize and we can look at some of the details of that as much as you wish. Yeah, I guess let me just give you some anecdotal experience here and then get your reaction. So I only have experience microdosing LSD. And so I guess first question is, is there any reason to differentiate the effects of taking psilocybin versus LSD? Or are they essentially indistinguishable? Given that a microdose is as close to subliminal as you can get, I can't imagine there's much to say about the difference there. Well, when I was giving the differences in kindness and coldness, I was actually quoting someone who said, in our microdose community in Los Angeles, we've come to that conclusion that psilocybin is a little nicer, interesting. The important question is how long is it effective? And this is where it gets interesting. We know that LSD has major effects, ten to 12 hours, and we all say as if it stops at that point. We forget that with high doses, there's also what's called an afterglow of four to six weeks, where you feel better about everything in many ways and you're more creative and so forth. With micro dosing very early on, what I discovered was what called a two day effect, which is, if it's psilocybin or LSD, there's at least a two day effect. And a great many people say, I actually prefer the second day. It's better. So we're dealing with something which isn't distinguished in the easy sense of time. It may be distinguished in terms of its emotional warmth, but because you're taking it as part of your normal life, if you feel better and you're more effective, it's hard to say, is that analytic or is that emotional? It's simply that, my goodness, I hadn't noticed. Way to work that little niche at the bank that always I'm walking to work. I look forward to the flowers, particularly on days when I microdosed. Yeah. As far as the emotional valence, as far as how micro dosing might be recommended or contraindicated for any person, I can well imagine that microdosing would have antidepressant effects. It seems to increase arousal generally, as you say, it kind of brightens your attention, and it would surprise me if it wasn't functioning as a kind of cognitive enhancer and antidepressant. But I could also see that it might be contraindicated for somebody with any kind of anxiety disorder. And it seems to me that there is a kind of anxiety like valence to mirror arousal. Well, I would say, Sam, as an end of one, you have hit on both of the most important aspects, positive and negative, that people are aware of. And let me let me break that down. Let's look at depression. I'd say out of the first thousand reports we got, maybe 700 people said I have this summer. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Gavin de Becker. Gavin is widely regarded as our nation's leading expert on the prediction and management of violence. He's the best selling author of The Gift of Fear and several other books on violence prevention. His work has earned him three presidential appointments, and he's been on the President's Advisory board at the US. Department of justice. He's also worked with the governor of California. He's worked with universities, corporations, celebrities, too numerous to name. His first book, The Gift of Fear, was a number one New York Times bestseller and is now published in 19 languages. And Oprah Winfrey dedicated a full hour on her show to commemorating the 10th anniversary of that book. So Gavin has been extremely influential in how we think about violence, really at every level, from domestic violence to workplace violence to stalking incidents with celebrities, acts of terrorism, assassination. There's really no form of violence you can think of that Gavin hasn't weighed in on at some point. He's worked with security at schools. So it's really it's really the the full footprint of violence in our society and how it deranges human life. Gavin has made a study of this and his advice in this area is extremely good. So I've been a student of Gavin's for many years. He's handled security for me at my events, and he's just a great source of expertise on this topic. Gavin was very generous with his time here. I think he was talking to me from as far away as Fiji. But with the miracle of the Internet, we got together. And now, without further delay, I bring you Gavin to Becker. I am here with Gavin de Becker. Gavin, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you too. Well, I have really been looking forward to this conversation. I'm a huge admirer of your work. I am a fan. I consider you a friend at this point. You are just exactly the person I want to talk to about this issue. So you have handled security for events that I've been at, both organized by me and for me for many years. And I will have introduced you properly before this conversation, but your company, Gavin De Becker and Associates, handle security for, like, half of Hollywood and Silicon Valley at this point. And I see your presence everywhere and many people who may not know that about, you know, you from your book The Gift of Fear, which is, if I'm not mistaken, the bestselling book of all time on the topic of preventing violence. And you've written a couple of follow up books, a book about specifically protecting kids titled Protecting the Gift. And even more recently you have a book about how protective services of the sort you run prevent assassinations. And that's titled just 2 seconds. And you've worked all over the place with the State Department and the Department of justice and corporations and universities and you've really dealt with security and issues of violence at every level. So my first question, just by way of welcoming you onto the podcast is how did you come to be in this role? Because you really are in a fairly unique position with respect to violence and its prevention. So like everybody, my work and my life's path began in childhood. I witnessed and experienced a lot of violence and I did what children do, which is I learned to predict human behavior for my own safety and for the safety of others. And it's not unique. Particularly. There are millions of kids who know that when dad comes home in a certain mood from work early with a certain attitude toward the other people in the family and he sits down and he clicks open a bottle of beer and he looks at you a certain way. There are millions of kids who have learned to know that trouble is coming today. And we are in the business of predicting human behavior. So we predict the behavior of our siblings and our parents and our teachers and each other. And what I did is by accident or by intent or by fate or destiny, I systematized and really studied the ways in which human beings make predictions. And there's no prediction that is more crisp than the prediction that someone makes about their own safety. You could say that of all the remarkable things the mind does, it brings its greatest resources when the host itself is in danger. And so the kinds of things I did at ten years old in predicting violence and sort of madness in my own childhood are not terribly dissimilar to the kinds of things that I do today in terms of applying strategies that I think all of us and really it's a key message of my work, as you know, is that all of us have these resources, these intuitive resources inside us. But how is it that you became the go to guy on this issue? I don't think the history is so entirely unique because I think of a kid who saw his grandparent die of cancer and then becomes a cancer expert or somebody whose father died of a heart attack, and they become a heart surgeon or somebody who experienced or witnessed some kind of victimization or criminality, and they grow up to become a police officer. My point is that your ghosts can become your teachers. And there are plenty of people who decided, hey, I'm going to be a psychologist because I think there's money in it, and there are other people who decided, I'm going to be a psychologist because I sense and introspectively perceive the challenges that I have myself or that other human beings have. And if Gavin were choosing a brain surgeon, I don't want the one who's there because he thinks he can make a good living as a brain surgeon. I want the one who's there because he's been absolutely fascinated with this topic his whole life. So for me, at ten years old, I was home from school, and I saw on television the assassination of President Kennedy. And my father was not in my life at that time. And Kennedy was a kind of father figure to me, even a similar appearance. And it really knocked me on my ass that somebody young and in the prime of their life and involved in my life as a public figure, of course, could be assassinated even in the presence of what at the time was the highest level protective coverage in history. And so, you know, I asked myself the question at ten years old as I looked around and saw people crying and saw people upset, and you could see how this event came into our homes, at our school and our community, and it made me wonder forever about the best strategies for protection. I never followed an interest in the conspiratorial aspects of the Kennedy assassination, though I have opinions on it that wasn't what fascinated me. What fascinated me was the physical on the scene aspects of how people could be protected. And eventually, as I got into that field more and more by being the best kind of student, that's not the student who goes to a college class, necessarily. That's the student who never leaves the college class. I did it all my waking hours, everything I saw, everything I read, everyone I met. I extracted something that was relevant to my fascination. I call it now my work. And so as I developed strategies and ideas and began to write on the topic, I saw that the strategies that applied to the people we protect the most presidents, vice presidents, senators, congressmen, governors, et cetera, they also applied in far larger numbers to regular people. For example, a public figure in America is attacked on average every five years. But a woman is murdered by a husband or boyfriend, on average, every 5 hours. So the same strategies can be applied, not in terms of physical protective coverage, but in terms of identifying the pre incident indicators associated with violence. And no crime in America is more preventable or predictable than spousal homicide, because all the pre incident indicators are there. So that's a long answer to the question of how it is that I followed this path. I can give you some steps along the way that maybe make it seem like less of a magic trick if you want me to. But I think it's like everybody's life. I think you take the next step one after the other. And I'm going to use the word destiny for a moment because I do tend to believe just about everything is predetermined. But you're, you're going to do what you're going to do with your set of circumstances and your biology and your meal that day, and your amount of sleep and your age and your place of origin, birth. I think you're going to do what you're going to do. And I did my part. Well, let's just jump into a discussion of violence because there's so much to talk about there, and I want to have this conversation not merely as an intellectual exploration of the topic, and I think violence is incredibly interesting just as a topic, but I want this conversation to be useful to people in very practical ways. So I want us to give people a deeper understanding of violence and how to avoid it. And when I mentioned that I would be talking to you in a previous podcast, I said that given the numbers of people who are listening, it doesn't seem far fetched to say that this is the kind of conversation that could save a life or two or at least prevent some very significant suffering. But before we begin, I think we need to deal with essentially a statistical concern that I think many of our listeners will have in their heads, which is that violence is now rare enough in our society that there really is no reason to think much about it. To have a conversation of the sort we're about to have is essentially morbid or is a kind of fear mongering. Why do you think people at this moment in a society like our own, speaking now of the developed world, even the safest places within it, why do you think people should think about violence? So I actually have to laugh at the idea that people think an experience that has been going on throughout human history and is not only unabated and uninterrupted, but that they think a political statistic. Remember, statistics from the federal government are often highly politicized in terms of how they're developed. For example, there was a moment when rape statistics went down because they redefined rape. So rape involved, it used to involve any form of penetration, and then they defined it in a slightly different way in terms of penetration. And guess what happened? Rape decreased. But we are talking about a human behavior rape that has gone on throughout human history. And so the idea that politicians say, as many speeches have been given along these lines, we must stamp out rape in our culture, that's comedy. That's absolutely ridiculous. And we're talking about behaviors that while violence may tick down slightly, we'll say there's 26,000 homicides in America. And so a 10% reduction means that there's closer to 23,000 homicides in America. And that's not relevant to the individual who's facing a circumstance in which the preincident indicators of homicide are present. So for me, for example, a white male, I might walk around all day every day and go years without experiencing something that makes me raise my eyebrow and say this dark alley doesn't feel right. This circumstance, this person, this employee we're firing this moment for some reason gives me reason to respond. And I get a fear response or an intuitive response about safety. So I might go years without that. But a woman, if you ask for example, I did a thing a couple of years ago where we asked random men and film them and said when is the last time that you experienced fear about your own safety? And the men tended to answer, Eight months ago. Or when I was in Iraq or when I was first on the police force. Or never. And then we asked the same number of women and the women said, today or last night while I was walking to my car after our company party. Or yesterday when that ex boyfriend called me again after I asked him not to. My point being that it is a totally different experience for women than it is for men. It's a totally different experience for minorities than it is for white men ages 25 to 50. The idea that violence, which is an enduring element of human behavior, is affected because a statistic goes down. I'll give you a quick example. In California. In California, there are 1000 people shot every week. There are 1000 people shot every week. So most people are stunned by that statistic. I'm not. Why is it not a big deal? In one sense because there aren't 1000 who die. They go to the hospital. They deal with their shooting injury and it's almost like a car accident injury or slipping in the shower. But nonetheless, there's 1000 people who are shot in California every week. And so you now have a circumstance in which that statistic is worth avoiding. Meaning I'm just as interested in avoiding being shot as I'm interested in avoiding being killed. And yet what's happened in America and this is really key when people think about this topic, what you ought to look at is not the rate of let's take firearms deaths. It's the rate of aggravated assault. And here's the reason. What changed in the last 40 years? Profoundly? 911 service that calls ambulances and police officers to us more quickly, even if we can't say the address. Ambulance services that get us to nearer emergency rooms than ever existed before because Americans are so unhealthy that one of the biggest growth businesses is hospitals. Emergency room strategies refined by the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq so that shooting trauma is dealt with. So the odds of dying from receiving a bullet are vastly lower than the odds of receiving a bullet. And so my view is I just want to avoid tissue damage. I'm not really interested in whether it's good or bad tissue damage. I'm in the business of helping people prevent tissue damage, and in my case, with my clients, to prevent targeted tissue damage. So this is a long way of saying that statistics that say the crime rate is down do not change the relationship between me and that guy standing in front of me in the dark alley at two in the morning as I come out of a late party somewhere. One must always measure what's going on in their environment without regard to statistics. Here's a 22nd story. Years ago, there was an actress you'll remember, some audience members might not, named Teresa Saldana, who was stabbed by a mentally ill man who stalked her for a year, traveled from Scotland to kill her, tried to buy a gun, but couldn't. And so he used a knife instead. And she called the police sheriff's department, actually, about the fact that somebody was calling her mother and trying to get information about where she lived and then was calling her agent and trying to get information. And the and the police officer said on the phone, look, 99% of the time in these cases, nothing happens. Well, he was right. His statistics were right on perfect. 99.9% of the time with media figures being stalked or pursued, it doesn't end in homicide. 45 minutes later, she walked out of her apartment and she was stabbed 18 times through the chest and spent the next two years, you know, dealing with that surgically. And so the statistic was not valuable to her. And statistics, you know, you're sitting on a plane and you look out the window and and the left engine is on fire. You don't say to yourself, flying is safer than driving. In your moment, in your circumstance, there's risk and there's danger. And that's where we live in our moment, in our circumstance, in our situation. And quick thing is that on the actress I just talked about, Teresa Saldana, when I interviewed her assailant in prison years later and asked him, would you kill her if she were he still wanted to kill her. Would you kill her if she were in this room right now? And he said, no, not unless I had a gun, because he regretted and was disappointed that he'd had to use a knife. My point is that Saldana, anybody in the world could have said to her, hey, young actress who's barely known at all, forget about it. 99.9% of the time, nothing happens. And their statistics would be accurate, but their outcome would be grossly inaccurate. I do want to talk about these specific cases of public figures and the difference between men and women in their relationship to violence. Just generically speaking. There there are different types of violence, and this is another source of confusion for people. So there are things like there's there's social violence, like two guys in a bar, one says, what the fuck are you looking at? And then it escalates from there. And that's quite different from predatory violence like rape as a prime example. And these are both different from ideological violence of the sort that we see in acts of terrorism. And acts of terrorism are only superficially similar to mass shootings by mentally unstable people of the sort that we tend to see in schools or movie theaters and shopping malls. They're obviously surface features that lead people to think that someone like Jared Lofner is doing something analogous to what Al Qaeda is doing. But these are fundamentally different acts of violence, and this tends to confuse people. So is there anything you want to say about the general landscape of violence before we get into some of the more fine grained considerations of the sort you bring up in your book? Yes. A great question. And I'd like to express because going with what you said about making this useful and providing some practical information that people can understand about the resources they already have, I know we'll be talking about intuition, but one of the reasons that we say things like this is the safest city in America. So my odds are better living here, or the statistics are down, or this is the least violence we've had, high end violence we've had since 1957 is we are all automatically looking to exclude ourselves from the population of the stories we hear. So, for example, if I hear that a guy was eaten by an alligator in Florida, I can write that off quick because I'm not swimming in the Everglades. And if I hear that a woman was raped, I can write that off because I'm not a woman. And on and on and on, we all do this. And one of the most substantial ways that we do it is by assigning categories to types of violence. And now I'm right on your question. There's workplace violence, there's school violence. Is there a difference between them? Yes, there's a difference. The difference is the geography. That's the difference. The difference is the moniker that the news media gives to it. Another school shooting today in Omaha, Nebraska. Another workplace violence event in Omaha, Nebraska. It's a faster way to tell the story, but those two are remarkably similar, right? The student almost is an employee in the environment. The workplace violence perpetrator is dealing with relationships and dealing with feeling alienated, and things aren't fair, and others don't treat him well. They're nearly identical, but the geography is different. Now, let's go to the shopping center shooter. Is the shopping center shooter different because he's in a shopping center versus in a workplace versus outside of school? See, my my point is that the choice of venue for explosive acts of violence and I'll speak specifically now about multiple victim shootings, which are, you know, nearly a weekly event in the United States. So much so that they are not even national news anymore. They are local news. So a multiple victim shooting a guy who shoots four people at his workplace, if they don't all die, and if there isn't any video, that won't be on the news nationally. And so a lot of it is driven by the video. And you know, the video, I mean, the helicopter shot of the school with all the police and all the firemen around after a shooting like Newtown or any other school shooting. So speaking of school shootings, is a shooting like Newtown inherently different from a shooting by students like a Columbine? Not inherently, yes, they have different motivations and they have different reasons. But a good way to look at this, and this is I'm going to go a level deeper when I say this, is that during the year that 911 happened and there were in effect, 2200 homicides at the World Trade Center, so that the homicide rate in New York City just went up by 2200. And what changed? Nobody thought of it this way because they isolated that mass murder from all the individual husbands killing their wives and girlfriends and robbers inadvertently or intentionally shooting victims of their robberies. But an interesting component that I believe in is that if 2200 people are killed all at once in a big violent incident like 911, mass incidents of homicide will go down in the United States for a while. Why would that be? Because, in effect, not a lot of people have the stomach for the kind of violence that we see. For example, why doesn't 911 happen every year? Because it's a very rare thing for anybody to be willing to do it willing to kill themselves. That's more common in Muslim cultures than it is in the United States to perish during the event. But it happens. Obviously, school shooters like Columbine intended not to survive. And my point is that this categorization business is a news media artifact. It is not really about human behavior. Because if we take ourselves back 1000 years and we're living in the village and somebody gets killed, we ask a few questions. What happened to Steve? I'm choosing a name that's a modern name in this thousand year old village. We say what happened to Steve? And it might be that he got into a fight with Bill and he hit him with a rock. It might be that he was killed by a lion or a tiger. We want to know, we're interested. But ultimately, the loss of life as a condition of human beings living socially has never changed and it's not going to change. What's going to improve slightly is that we will have better strategies for predicting who among our population needs help. In effect, is most likely to act out. For example, the crime rate is down or the violent crime rate is down. That's true statistically. So it doesn't change anything for the woman whose husband is holding a gun to her head, nothing is different. But we have to also recognize that the strategies for doing tissue damage have profoundly improved in the same period. So we're talking about crime against us in our own society and we're not talking about war, which is another way that people meet their end. And so the instruments of violent death, everything from the style of how handguns operate better and better to what will soon be weaponized component drones, weaponized consumer drones, those have gotten so much better that we really have to factor that into the equation. Now, you say, well, I'm not going to get killed by a drone because I'm not a public figure at risk of that kind of thing. And that's perfectly true. But is violence all around us anyway? And this isn't to scare people. It's just to say that in a very real sense, you know how the surging water in an ocean doesn't really move, but what's actually happening is energy moves through it. In that exact same sense, the energy of violence moves through this culture. Others as well. But I will say more in this culture than in any place on Earth other than warring cultures. And so some of us experience it as an unpleasant breeze that we can tolerate. We hear a story of a friend's daughter in college who was sexually assaulted, and others of us are absolutely destroyed by it, as if by a hurricane. But nobody in America is untouched by the reality. I mean, here's a good example. We turn on the news today and there's a school shooting. You think that doesn't affect us, that profoundly affects all of us. And so whether we were the recipient of tissue damage or not, we're actually experiencing more violence than any other culture in human history because we experience it through television. Yeah, well, I do want to talk about the role of the media here and how the Internet may have changed things or amplified things. Just to revisit the logic of my question for a moment, because I totally take your point that the categorization of violence can be misleading and seem to remove us from the epicenter of the problem just by the words we choose. But I think there are there are clearly different pre incident indicators for different kinds of violence. So for instance, as you said earlier, men don't tend to walk around worrying about getting raped, and for good reason, because men out, you know, unless they happen to be in prison, aren't often getting raped in our society. And so there's a reason why women uniquely inherit that burden. And I mean, there's there's other differences that are relevant that we could talk about. I mean, women tend to be outweighed by men. You know, virtually all of the men they're around the men are taller, bigger, their their upper bodies are stronger. If you're a man to imagine what this would be like, you have to imagine that every time you get into an elevator, every man in that elevator is £60 heavier than you and obviously stronger than you. Right? And women don't tend to challenge other women in public places and ask them to go out on the sidewalk so that they can get into a fistfight as dumb guys do. And when violence is directed at women, it doesn't tend to be of the sort that is a fight among apish guys. It's an effort to physically control her, to move her to another location, to sexually assault her if it's stranger violence very likely. So there are differences here to add one more variable here that I mentioned briefly. There's a big difference between a mentally ill perpetrator of a workplace shooting or a school shooting or a mall shooting and a perfectly sane, ideologically driven terrorist. The pre incident indicators will be different in the back story of the terrorist. There may not be any of the things you hear in the back story of the mentally unstable mass shooter because he's not mentally unstable, he's just ideologically driven. I was kind of pushing you in that direction, but that's actually, in my view, not in contradiction with anything you said about the other ways in which our categories mislead us. Well, I think that's all of that's right and what you said about the woman in the elevator. And for a man to have the same experience, everybody would have to be taller and £60 heavier and muscular. And also everybody would have to be familiar with the territory of violence and force in a way that we're not. They'd all have to be martial arts experts because women traditionally in Western culture have been told, this is not for you. You're not supposed to understand the code of human violence. And a big part of my work is to say you do understand the code of human violence and you have all the resources that are necessary to protect yourself. And the protection might not come in the form of upper body strength and disabling your assailant. It might, by the way, but it might not come in that form. It might come in the form of intuiting earlier than a man might that you are at risk. And that's a skill and a resource that's been developed, what I would call the wild brain developed over millions of years that is slightly more tuned in women but also used more often in women. But let's go to a different category, not just women. There are other kinds of people who are victimized more easily and it'll be obvious why that is. Children. So children are the subject of all variety of physical assaults more often than people like you and I are speaking about people our age and socioeconomic environment and the kinds of lives. We live. So something like 15 kids are killed every week by their parents in the United States. So I'm not speaking to children here where I could say to them, you have nothing to worry about from your parents who love you. And the odds are so overwhelmingly out of 60 million of you right now, the odds are so overwhelmingly low that you would ever have an experience with your parent trying to harm you. However, if you have ABCDEFG Pre Incident indicators, then you have a reason to be concerned. Well, again, we're not speaking to children who are inherently throughout human history, life's miseries have fallen disproportionately on children. And so the various categories of who we are and the demographic that we fit into is relevant, depending on where you put us. If you put us in Iraq, all of a sudden we're in great danger, or you put us in Afghanistan. So the geography has an influence. All of these things do. But I think what I want to say that's important here, and it just goes to your observation about the the terrorist or the ideologically motivated violent actor. You know, the terrorist is very similar to the soldier. Both. Both people. We take young men who would never kill anybody and if we thought they would kill anybody, we'd be scared of them. And we take young men and militaries throughout human history have developed strategies for getting young men to be willing to place themselves at risk of being killed and to do this unspeakable and unforgivable thing which is kill another person. And that requires inculcation and training that militaries I'll choose. Our military, for a moment, have gotten so good at that. Today we have a far higher participation rate in combat. This is a super interesting thing. Back in the Civil War, about 50% of the soldiers actually participated. Others would put their head down and wait for it to end. How do we know that? Because corpse after corpse after corpse is found with the ball still in their rifle, and sometimes two or three balls in the rifle. You had to fire the musket and then load in and tap in the gunpowder and do all of that stuff. So what did they do? They were reloading and not firing. They were in complete trauma. They were shitting their pants. They were grasping the ground, and 50% participated. And those were the men who were more inclined to today, we have moved that statistic up through Vietnam and World War II. We moved it up, and now we have it at 90%. So 90% of American soldiers participate in combat, which is against our nature, you understand? And that's why when people come back from the trauma of war and they suddenly are without this great family of men and women they served with, we see so much PTSD. And it's why suicide rate has killed. The suicide in soldiers has killed more people than combat as you may know, coming out of Iraq. That's a tangent we'll avoid for right now. But the broader point is that and this is an important one as we move into in this discussion, as we move into the good news, we're still on the bad news right now it's important that people realize that violence not only part of America but part of our species. And ultimately, as the most powerful people in history, Americans, we've climbed to the top of the world food chain, you could say. But now facing not a single enemy or predator who poses us any danger of consequence, we've found the only prey left, which is ourselves. And nobody should doubt this. And I'll give you two good examples. In the last two years, more Americans died from gunshot wounds than were killed during the entire Vietnam War. Now. Let's go to Japan. That's got a population of about half hours. In other words, it's a big country. The number of young men shot to death in a year in Japan is equal to the number killed in New York City in a single busy weekend. So all the stats in the world will not change the fact that America is a particularly violent culture. And by the time your podcast is aired, thousands more Americans will have suffered a shooting injury, for example, and thousands will have faced a criminal and hundreds will have been raped by strangers and thousands will have been raped by boyfriends and spouses. And so that's what you have to believe in order to bring your resources to the table. Because if you actually believe what a politician says or the crime rate is down didn't we do a good job? Didn't the FBI and this administration do a good job for you in stamping out violence? If you believe that, then you tune down the radio channel that has to be the highest, which is your own intuition. Let's talk about intuition because we have just said that people are fairly confused about violence and tend to be bad at dealing with some of the information that's out there about it. But this point you make again and again, you've made it here and it's the very title of your book The Gift of Fear. There's one thing that we are actually very good at. Evolution has made us experts at detecting danger and detecting shady people feeling uncomfortable in the presence of people who are liable to do us harm. Talk about intuition here and what it means to trust it and why so many people are unaware of the validity of trusting it, the reasons given for not trusting it. Talk about the primacy of intuition for a moment. Well, here we get to, I think, the biggest gift we can give to listeners. And this goes for female listeners and male listeners. This goes for decisions you make in your work and decisions you make for your safety. Ultimately, the biggest decision we all make is who to include in our life and who to exclude from our life. That's choosing friends, spouse, neighbors, coworkers, et cetera. We make those choices. Those choices aren't made for us. And so my advice always is to make very slow and careful decisions about whom you include in your life and very fast decisions about whom you exclude. So if you have that nanny that you're uncomfortable about, she goes quickly. There's no reason to keep her around. I mean, I've had people through my career say, should we put in a nanny cam because we're worried that this nanny is doing something dangerous with our kids? And I say, no, you should get rid of the nanny because no kid is going to thank you in 20 years, mom. Thank you for having that video of me being hit by a spoon on the head by that crazy nanny you guys hired. And so the concept of listening to intuition is what I want to focus on for a moment because America, particularly or Western societies, we look to government and we look to experts and technologies and corporations to solve our problem for us. And I am very glad to tell everybody here that the police are not going to protect you because they're not going to be there during the moment that you face an intruder or you face a violent situation. And government is not going to protect you. It can't. It tries to pretend it can, but it can't. And the only thing that's going to protect you is your own intuition, which is your own ability to recognize that something is up while it's while it's right in front of you or while it's in your environment. And I think as you said, Sam, it's super hard for people to accept the importance of it because intuition is usually looked on with some contempt. It's described as emotional or unreasonable or inexplicable. And husbands make fun of wives for feminine intuition and they don't take it seriously. But what I can tell you about intuition I learned from the origins of the word itself. The root of the word in, tear means to guard and to protect. Super interesting that that's what it means. We think we're using intuition to make a thousand other decisions. But what it's built for, what it's in this system for, is to guard us and to protect us. And and what it you know, what it does is and I'm really going to quote you for a second here because you said a moment ago that evolution has really honed this true we didn't get the biggest claws. We didn't get the sharpest teeth or the biggest muscles. What we got is the biggest brains. And the idea that we use the expression gut feeling, well, the gut actually has more brain cells than a dog. So the gut is literally where a lot of that thought is going on. That's why you get that bad feeling in your stomach about this employee, this friend, this thing somebody said to you this danger. And that's a very meaningful thing. Gut feeling is the perfect word for it and it's visceral. It's in the tissue. And it isn't just a feeling. No. It's called the Antarctic nervous system. Well, you're smarter than I am. You gave it a better name. The idea is that this is a process. This process we ridicule. Intuition is a process more extraordinary and ultimately more logical in the natural order of things. It's more logical than the most fantastic computer calculation and it's our most complicated cognitive process. And it's also in some ways, it's the simplest, which I'll explain. But what it does, intuition is it connects us to the natural world and to our nature so that when we are free from judgment and we've got only perception, we say that thing in recounting what happened to us, somehow I knew. So if people will do these two things, one is to pay attention to intuition. In my opinion, it's always right in two important ways. One is it's always based on something and two, it always has your best interest at heart. And so give you a fast example. You're in an airport and you get that feeling I shouldn't get on this plane. And millions of people have had this feeling this plane is going to crash. Something they get anxiety about it and I shouldn't get on this plane. So what I ask people to do is look introspectively for a moment at where that feeling is coming from and if it is coming from a news story you saw two weeks ago on television of an ugly plane crash in Peru. That is not based on your environment or your circumstance. It's based on your memory or your anxiety. And that's not actual fear. If, however, the feeling is based on seeing the pilot stumble out of the bar at the airport and make his way slowly down the jetwalk. Now you've got something that's in your environment. And the question to ask always this is how you tell the difference between true fear like I'm afraid of getting on this plane, and unwarranted fear. Worry, anxiety, et cetera. This is how true fear will always be based on something in your presence and will always be based on something you perceive. The signal comes from your perception, from your senses. Unwarranted fear will always be based upon memory. And so it's something you remember, something you recall, something you're worrying about or something you're thinking about. But something based on your actual environment is a gift. Hence the title of that book. There's not an animal in nature that would say oh, I don't want that gift. Don't tell me when I should be worried about my safety. It's so much trouble. There's no antelope that suddenly is filled with fear and says to itself it's probably nothing but human beings every day are engaged in the constant prosecution of their own feelings. And you know, the the most vivid example I'm aware of is a woman alone in a building late at night. She's working late in the office and she goes to the elevator. The elevator door opens and there's a guy inside who causes her fear. She's afraid of him. And so what does she do? Most women get into a steel soundproof chamber with someone who causes her fear something no animal in nature would do. And why does she do it? Because she says I don't want to be the kind of person who makes a decision because of the guy's race or because his clothes look shabby. I don't want to be like that or I don't want to offend him or I don't want to make him angry. She talks herself out of what I call prosecutes her own jury's conclusion and she talks herself out of it and gets into the elevator. And as I say, these are things that no animal in nature would ever even remotely contemplate and human beings do it every day participating in their own victimization. The elevator example brings up some other issues here that are hugely important. And this is the the other side of the balance that causes people to not value intuition or to prosecute their feelings, as you say. And it's that these moments of negative intuition can be in contradiction to a variety of social norms that well intentioned people want to adopt. And so yeah, you just named one. You don't want to be racist, right? So if you're a white woman and the elevator door is open and the man on the elevator who makes you uncomfortable is black well, you may just get on that elevator perversely to prove to yourself and to him that you're not racist, right? You override your intuition. And in fact, I know someone who was in a circumstance like this and it didn't end well. And we can make it even more provocative than that. There are certain circumstances where the race of the person is obviously relevant information. It is in and of itself a pre incident indicator or a statistically relevant fact regardless of any other messages that are coming. There are places where it's more surprising or less surprising to see a person of a certain race and people feel very bad. We've all been trained to ignore those facts which again we can in many cases just instantly and intuitively surmise. So what are good people to do with that? Well, I mean the best gift any of us can give to not only ourselves but our society is that we take care of the person whom nature has made us responsible for primarily and that's ourselves. And so what I like to do and in my own life, believe me, I'm no different from anybody else I make mistakes all the time where afterwards I say damn it, I knew better. I shouldn't have talked to that person. I shouldn't have said that thing. I shouldn't have gone to that place, and I didn't want to. And I overrode it for some reason. A typical example would be you're invited to dinner at somebody's house and you just don't want to go, but you go. I think these aren't violence issues, but I think they're always mistakes. And in the Friend's television series years ago, phoebe, the character played by Lisa Kudrow, taught me something really important once. Somebody invites her to dinner and she says to them on the phone, oh, it's Tuesday night. Oh, I can't because I don't want to. That's pretty fucking strong. If we would all live that way and say, I'm going to listen to myself. I'm going to listen to the voice that's a little bit more important than the voice of political correctness, which is a bullshit scam that is going on in every culture to one degree or another and very hot right now in the United States. The significant issue isn't the branding of myself in this moment based on my behavior. The significant issue is listening to intuition and have the dialogue with yourself later about why you did or didn't do that. I'll give you a great example of this. If you a dog, for example, is an animal that listens to its senses very well and its perceptions. And when I was writing Gift of Fear, a good friend of mine said, oh, I know a lot about that. My dog is super intuitive. I said, really? Tell me. And she said, well, he hated the contractor that I hired, and boy, he was right. That contractor ripped me off. And so I said to her, listen, the dog is not an expert on contractors or people. The dog was reacting to you when the contractor came over, right? You were the one who knew all about contractors. And this guy, the dog didn't know that his car was too expensive for the level of bidding that he was doing or that his proposal was a little bit sleazy. The dog knew you. And the dog doesn't have better intuition. Here's what the dog has. It is not bothered by the way it used to be, the way it could be, the way it should be, the way it ought to be. The dog doesn't ask any of that question. The dog looks and says, the way it is reality in this moment. And for that reason, animals don't even go into this mental exercise of I don't want to be this kind of person. I don't want to be the kind of person who's suspicious. For example. I want to interject a quick thing here about words is that the root of the word suspicion was also a big teacher for me. That root suspica only means to watch. It doesn't mean to hurt somebody. Like, should I feel bad because I'm suspicious of my neighbor when my kids are playing over at their house and I'm wondering about whether he's an alcoholic or whether he's violent or whether he's a child molester. So I say, oh, I don't want to be suspicious of everybody like that. Well, suspicion only means to watch. It is curiosity with the added imperative to watch. And so if you're suspicious of that guy you're getting into the elevator with, you watch and you change your demeanor. But listen, changing your environment by getting into a steel box with somebody, that's a pretty radical decision when nature has just told you you ought not I mean, you're going to argue with that because you don't want to be that kind of person. Well, which kind of person do you want to be? The kind that's victimized. So I hit this kind of strong sam I know, because in this part of our discussion is the goal, which is, don't worry about why, worry only about is is this feeling in this moment something that I am as a general lifestyle choice am going to push down and ignore? Or is this feeling in this moment something that I am going to listen to as a general lifestyle choice? I think we should add one more principle here which you do talk about throughout your work. It really is the foundation of almost everything you recommend. And it's something that people who prepare for violence, who train to defend themselves and others, whether they're martial artists or they get into firearms training. You meet a lot of these people. You can see that they not only don't spend time focusing on this principle, but their training tends to, in many cases, teach them to ignore it. And the principle is just avoidance. The primary goal here, the first move to keep yourself and those you love safe, is to not be where violence can happen to you. Insofar as your training to protect yourself leads you to be the kind of person who's more likely to put him or herself in the path of violence, then that's obviously counterproductive this principle of avoidance. When you marry that to what you just said about intuition and the validity of intuition, that's so much of the story of what it takes to not be a victim of violence and why you cannot afford to be politically correct at all about this. Be politically correct after the fact, as you said, right? Feel guilty after the fact. But if you're not going to be motivated by a split second sense that the person who's just come into your presence doesn't mean well or represents a physical risk to you, if you are going to forsake that signal, based on some larger social concerns that have been drummed into you. You will be the sort of person who never acts to avoid proximity to violence at the first opportunity. Well, I love the way you said it, and I agree with all of it. And I think here I can sell this idea a little bit by offering a valueadd that has nothing to do with violence. Because as you said at the beginning, most people assume that it's so rare in our culture or in their lives that they don't. You would think it's morbid to think about it or they would not you. And so the cell is that the same resource I'm talking about. Intuition is how you get rich. It's how you choose a great spouse. It's how you fulfill your purpose here on Earth. It's what Steve Jobs had. It's what and listened to. It's. What? Jeff, bezos listens to if you had all these guys in a room, and by these guys I mean people who have changed our lives and who have contributed a great deal, they would all tell you that their decisions were not made on the basis of spreadsheets and logic and slideshows and calculators and all of that. Their ultimate decision to do something that nobody had ever done before. So logic would tell you, don't do it, right? If Jeff Bezos came to me and said, I want you to invest in my company. I'm going to sell books on the internet, he'd have to say to me, the odds are 99% you're going to lose all this money. And the only reason to do it is if you feel intuitively to do it. If Steve Jobs were to go somewhere, you know, there's a story of Steve Jobs saying to a friend of his whom he invited to be in the beginning of Apple, that guy was going instead to work for Coca Cola Company, which he did. And Steve said to him, do you want to change the world or do you want to put sugar in water? And that guy made his choice, but Jobs did something with his life quite different. So if you listen to your intuition, you're in the great company of people who make a lot of their decisions respecting their intuition. And basically this means learn how you communicate with yourself. For some people, it's a gut feeling or a hesitation or what have you. And for other people, it's the highest order messenger that intuition ever sends, which is fear. Let me real quick talk about the messengers of intuition. There's curiosity. Curiosity simply says, I got another question here. So you learn a little more. There's hesitation there's. There's suspicion, which is a pretty important one. There's dark humor, right? You say to me, hey, I'll see you next week, unless somebody's killed me by then. Well, I'm going to sit down and keep talking to that person because that's not a funny joke. There's no pure humor in that, but it's a way of expressing a concern. So I want to know, where did that come from? Oh, well, we got this employee, and he's a former Vietnam vet who carries guns a lot, and he's been talking about shooting his mouth off about how much he hates everybody. Ah, so let's talk about that because it'll either be resolved that it's not likely to produce violence or that it is. And then of all the messengers of intuition, I talked about curiosity, suspicion, hesitation. The one that must never be ignored is fear. Fear. It may be whispered or it may be screaming in your ear, but fear basically says, shut up, listen to me and I will get you out of here. And if you listen but if you don't listen, then you remain in an environment and this goes to your question about simply not being there. You remain in an environment that you've already been told contains the ingredients of violence. And I want to talk about because you said social conditioning and political correctness and what have you. What is the opposite of intuition? The opposite of intuition is denial. Because if intuition is knowing something but not knowing why you know it, then denial is choosing not to know something and having all the details right. My boyfriend has hit me before. He just lost his job, his drinking has increased, he's just bought a third handgun. He beat up his last girlfriend. I know all that and I'm going to act like I don't. So I ask our listeners today the question which of those two features of human behavior, denial or intuition, is likely to be more relevant and constructive for your safety and also for that other thing I'm selling, which is all the quality in your life. Because the quality of your life is completely determined by one thing and that is, let me make it clear. After you have food, after you have shelter, after you have your immediate physical needs met, the quality of your life is determined by the choices you make in terms of relationships. Employees, employers, family members, spouse, all these choices that we make, that's including the choice, by the way, of who to get into the elevator with because that's a relationship. Obviously, when violence occurs, there's very often a story to be told about the signs that were ignored. But more often than not, you're seeing these signs in other people and often taking steps to avoid further contact with them. And then nothing bad happens. But the signs can be fairly subtle. And I think if you're not someone who has your head in this kind of thinking, it can seem kind of paranoid to be viewing the world this way. I don't know if this is the greatest example, but this is something that just occurred to me. I remember I had a problem with my cable at our house and scheduled an appointment for the the cable guy to come over and and fix things and, you know, I don't have a standard relationship with the cable guy. This is the kind of thing that happens like once every five years or so somebody shows up and it was one of these moments where he comes through the front door. And I immediately had an intuition that there's something off about this guy. And here were the following moments that became salient to me. He comes to the door and he looks at me, but then immediately looks around the house. He's kind of surveying the house, right? So he's looking around at an inappropriately early moment, looking at objects, basically just trying to see in my interpretation what else is in the house or who else is in the house. So it's just this very subtle, like, failure of ordinary social behavior, looking past the person you're meeting in his house at an earlier moment than you otherwise would. And then when he introduces himself, he says, Hi, I'm John. But in the act of telling me he's John, he shows me his name tag as though to prove that he's telling the truth, right? So this struck me as this is a kind of cascade of impressions that's coming. It was later that I unpacked them in terms of why they struck me as wrong, but struck me as odd in retrospect, that he would ask me to verify that he is actually John by showing me his badge. And then the final kicker was that I showed him the television that was having a problem and then went off elsewhere in the house. I wasn't going to ride shotgun with him every moment while he's fixing the television, but then he comes back when I next see him. He comments on having seen my wife and me in a picture that was in a room that he had no business being in. Right? So it was like he had wandered into a room that was just not on his path over the course of dealing with the problem he was there for. And then, you know, all sirens were blaring. I mean, I basically thought that I had an ex con in my house who was casing the place, but people encounter that kind of thing all the time and I assume don't notice any of it. It's true. Evidence will sit there that I want to spend on. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. OK, well, a major housekeeping seems to be in order, but it is big enough that I think I will do it separately. So this housekeeping will be brief. I just want to say a few things about the app. We are finally releasing the group's feature. I know I promised that a few weeks back. That's rolling out this week with the new update and we'll go kind of week by week with progressively larger cohorts of the subscribers. So if you don't get it immediately, that's what's happening. You will eventually get it. We just don't want to break anything. So anyway, groups are coming and in lieu of housekeeping, I wanted to present a lesson that was recently released on the app. And this lesson is titled Space Time and Attention. So enjoy that and then I'll be back with today's guest. I'd like you to consider what is real in this moment. That is, what actually exists and what of the things that exist actually matter and what makes things matter. We tend to think of reality in terms of space and of things in space. We think of people and places that matter to us. We accumulate possessions, things in drawers and closets that we care about or once cared about. We move from room to room in our homes into spaces that we maintain for different purposes. So the sense of what is there for us in each moment is bound up with this sense of space. And we have digital lives that take place in virtual spaces and we can now see distant places on Earth in real time without having to travel. We can communicate with people who are elsewhere, but they are real to us by reference to their being in space. And if you believe that God exists, well, then the question becomes where? The reality of anything seems to entail its existence in space. And it's because abstract quantities like numbers violate this principle that their existence becomes so hard to think about. In what sense does the number seven exist? That becomes philosophically interesting and even inscrutable because existence is so bound up with our sense of space and time hovers over all of this like a ghost. In one sense, it's another abstraction based on the reality of change. All things that exist seem to change, and one thing causes or cancels another. It's based on these changes that we form a picture of time. Now we can get closer to the truth by importing time into our thinking about things. We can think in terms of processes rather than things. We can turn nouns into verbs. You, as a person, are not really a thing. You're a process. You're a stream of actions and experiences. And your moment to moment engagement with the world of things and ideas changes you. You acquire new skills and opinions and desires and concerns. You're not precisely who you were yesterday, and you don't exactly know who you'll be tomorrow. And look at what matters to you your relationships. A relationship isn't a thing. It's built upon experiences with another person. And a career isn't a thing, and your health isn't a thing. Everything you experience is made of moments in time. But the real significance of time is not what happens on the calendar or on the clock, but in our minds. The true source of profundity is attention. That is the cash value of time. We all know what it's like to guard our time, but then to squander it by not paying attention to that which would have made the time we guarded valuable. It's always amusing to see a group of people who've decided to be together for whatever reason. Perhaps they're having lunch in a restaurant, but most or even all of them are buried in their phones. The real coincidence of space and time that is meaningful is attention. Think of some possession or place that you love, some quantity of space that gives you pleasure. Perhaps it's a work of art you have on your wall, or a piece of jewelry, or a place in nature, a beach or a mountain. Perhaps there's a restaurant or bookstore that you'd be sad to know you would never see again. Let's say you maintain this connection to this object or place for the rest of your life. What is its real significance? How is it possible to grasp it and take pleasure in it? How can it matter to you? All of this is a play of attention. This object or place exists for you and matters to the degree that it captures your attention. Precisely to that degree you like to look at it or hold it or think about it. The real pleasure isn't in the object, it's in your mind. It's a matter of what it feels like to give this thing your attention. And this is where meditation reveals its real power. True profundity is to be found not in guardian space or even time. The real profundity is being able to use attention in a way that is truly rewarding. You're only as free as your attention is if you're lost in thought, even in a holy place on a holy day, or in formal meditation, or on your honeymoon, or at a child's birthday party. Or at work, you might as well be anywhere, because for that moment you are well and truly lost. If, on the other hand, you're recognizing the nature of consciousness, it also doesn't matter where you are or what time it is because the moment is profound. It's in this middle place where you're distracted with the objects and people and places that matter to you, where it really does seem to matter what you have and where you are. Your attention is bound up with what you're seeing and hearing and thinking in a way that plays upon your preferences and your hopes and your fears. Think of the moment when you notice that your new car is dented, or the jacket you love has a ketchup stain on it, or your checking account has less money in it than you expected. The team you were rooting for just won the championship, or you just finished a project that you've been working on for months, or happy hour just ended, but the waiter will still take your order and those are the best tacos on Earth. We mostly live in this place with attention bound up with what we want and what we don't want, what we expect, what we're surprised to find, and that our minds continually wander into thoughts about the past and the future. And in our wandering we lose awareness of the very things we want and have been busily gathering and guarding and may even have in hand. That best taco on Earth. Hits your tongue and you taste it, sort of. And then your attention races away to something else in space or time or merely within the space and time of your imagination. Think about what matters and how it's possible for something to matter. Many of us have thought about what we would grab from our homes in a fire. Just imagine it your family is safely on the street and you have a chance to grab something. What would it be? Photos? A computer? Your father's watch? You can't fit much in your hands. In some sense, we're always in this situation, we're always deciding what to grasp, what matters, what is worth paying attention to in this moment. Because you can only pay attention to one thing at a time, and it's only meditation that gives you a choice about what to grasp and what to let go of. It's as though we continually wake up in the burning house of the present only to find that we're holding and even struggling under the weight of some worthless object. That's what bickering with your spouse is like. That's what rumination is like. That's what most of our worrying is like. That's what comparing ourselves to others is like. That's what envy and regret are like. That's what pride is like. I mean, really, the Tate Gallery was on fire. And rather than rescue a Picasso or DA Vinci, you risked your life to grab some chairs from the coffee shop. Without a meditation practice, you will just find yourself holding something, staggering under some burden again and again, reacting to something, brooding about something, fixating on something, helplessly, without a choice, without the possibility of choice. Meditation is nothing more or less than the art of choice. It's the art of paying attention to what really matters. Okay, so that is a lesson from the waking up course, and if you want more information about that, you can find it@wakingup.com. And another thing that I'm now doing in the course, I've begun interviewing other meditation teachers and trying to get to the bottom of what they teach and why they teach it. These will be deep dives into the minutiae of consciousness and what can be gleaned about it from first person methods, whether they be contemplative or psychedelic or philosophical or otherwise. And now for today's guest. Today I'm speaking with Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin is a really great writer. She writes now mostly for the Atlantic, it seems, but she's been on staff at the new yorker and the wall street journal. She's won a national magazine award. She's also written for time and o, the oprah magazine, the New York times, and the Los Angeles times. She is a deeply irreverent and clever social critic. She has two books girl land and to hell with all that. And it was great to finally get her on the podcast. I've been a fan of her work for many years, and we had not yet met, and the podcast provided an occasion to finally sit down and talk. And here we certainly do our best to make trouble for ourselves. We talk about the MeToo movement and feminism and immigration, affirmative action, the whole college admissions racket. We basically steer toward every third rail we can think of. Anyway, I had great fun in the conversation, and now, without further delay, I bring you Caitlin Flanagan. I'm here with Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. So I'm a huge fan. I've been reading you for quite some time, and you seem to touch so many controversial issues, and you do it in a way that I can only imagine that some things blow back on you, and you may regret having touched a particular topic. But is there anything that any area you've gone into that you regret touching? Never. No. It's funny, I talk to a lot of young women writers about this. It's almost become like a part of my day every day. There's a few of them I know well, and they're writing really interesting stuff, really important stuff, and they're having such a hard time with the blowback and the response, and I try to tell them what nobody told me in the beginning, which was, it doesn't matter. It absolutely doesn't matter. Not just from a standpoint of the largeness of a life. Do you want to get to the end of the life where you didn't say what you thought. I don't think you do. But even in the immediate sense, it's not going to hurt your career, that people are really angry. It's going to make your writing more noisy, and people are going to be driven to it. And then inevitably, in that drive of people to your work, some of them are going to find that they really love your work, and that's going to expand the reach. So I've certainly the one that I got the most. It's interesting, I wrote a big, huge Atlantic cover story a long time ago, like, maybe 2006, where I was a nanny story. Yes. Yeah. And I remember handing that to my wife, and I'm not even sure I I knew who you were as a writer, but I hadn't read much of your stuff, and I remember handing it to her like, this is like, this is going to detonate in your hands. I don't think I spun it one way or the other. Let's just see what this does to your brain. But I can imagine that was intense. So summarize what your position was there and maybe back up for a second and just give our listeners a sense of the types of topics you've tended to touch and then let's go to the nanny story. I guess I would say, well, I'm interested in politics always, and I'm interested, although I am a self hating Democrat, I'm really interested in the endless hypocrisy of the left. I just think it's it's just I just try to have a comical attitude toward it because it's just so extreme, but so I'm interested in that. I'm interested in that. I'm interested in boys. I'm interested in girls. I'm interested in being a mother. I'm interested in. Just I've always just followed the things that are kind of emanating from my own private life and just kind of tried to put them. I love social history, so I love knowing why you do a certain thing that you just thought was coming completely from your own convictions, and then you realize, no, there's actually a history to this. And it was 20 or 30 years, and this happened, and that happened. So they're kind of small kitchen table subjects. But a few years ago is this too long? Am I going to a few years ago, I went to Santa Monica Public Library because they have great bound editions of old magazines instead of having to microfilm or whatever, and they have all these back issues of Time magazine. And so I got a bunch from, like, I think the 1980s, and I went through them, and it was amazing how many of the stories they thought were the big stories, they got it wrong, like hurricanes that I didn't remember until they said it attempted coups. That yes, it was newsworthy. Was it a cover story? Was it that big? No, but every single story on private life just rang true. That's the record of how we live our lives. That's the record of when you come back home and the door is closed and it's you and the people you live with if they're your family. The choices that you make and the things that you buy and the ways that you spend your time. The things that people really talk about after they finish talking about what they think they're supposed to talk about. That's what I like to write about. Well, on that point, it's been a while since I've looked at it, but did you ever see the multi volume History of a Private Life? Yeah. History of private life. It's a French French series. Yeah. But you're often accused of being an anti feminist by feminists. Right. Let's sort out that question. What's the allegation and what provokes it in your work? Well, the allegation, I don't think is precisely enough stated, and I've changed a lot with time, but my thing was feminine, so I was born in 1961, so I'm 56 or 57. You may be 58 this year. Right. That's what it's going to be. My husband just told me that. Yes, it's 58, and the math gets harder. Yeah. Well, it's been hard for the very beginning for me, but I was just always repellent. I grew up in Berkeley. Very lefty place, very lefty parents, very lefty experience. Were your parents professors or my father, yeah, and historian and a writer in Sydney English department. But when the 80s came along and so feminism was part of this very happening, like, legitimate attempt to really change the world. And it was interesting to me, and a lot of things started being talked about, you know, when I was an adolescent. You know, people was the very beginning of women talking about rape and about things you had to do, you know, before it was all in metaphor. It was all coded language, you know, oh, a boy might get fresh with you, or this might happen, or that might happen. This was the beginning of women really talking about rapes. And I remember this as a teenager. They weren't talking about date rapes or any intimate partner rape, but I remember as a teenager thinking, this is important, I need to know about this, because your mother would always tell you, and you need to not do this, and you need to not go there. And my father would say certain things, but they wouldn't say because some man may grab you and attack you and for sex upon you. They just wouldn't say it that directly. I don't know if it was rude or just I don't know what it was, but I remember thinking, this is all very important. But then when it got to be the mid eighty s, and then it became about that it was equally the whole idea of feminism is it's kind of a Marxist premise. All of women are a class. Okay, that's true. In some areas the vote is true. Abortion, it's true. But then it became about this idea that getting this Yale graduate a job at this investment bank is really an important feminist issue. It's like this white woman that was raised maybe middle class, maybe upper middle class. She went to a top college, and now it's good for all of us that she work in this callow industry and that we promote her. And it's really criminal that she doesn't have enough childcare to get this important investment banking work. It's criminal that she's not a partner in the law firm. And I just thought, this is totally bogus because now we're not a class. Now we're somehow going to push the very top white women into these careers that I certainly wasn't interested in who did them. I'm not really interested in the investment bankers of the world, and I certainly don't see it as some and it wasn't as though once we're in the investment banks, then we'll fund the revolution. It was like, once we're in the investment banks, then we can buy the beach house and not have to have our husband be the one to choose it. So I thought that was really bogus and stupid. And I think now there's a big element of a grift in feminism that any kind of mistake that a man makes, any like the New York Times, you cannot single any story out for particular banality. But this one, it was about the space going to the moon in 68, and it was like this was a program by and for white men. And then there was another article where it was actually Russia that had won the space race because they were the first to put a black man into space, right? And I just thought, this is the most the New York Times. Their real reporting is still great, and the armature and the depth of knowledge of the people who work there and the armature of the machine is still great, but there's just this deep inanity that runs through all of those social pieces. And all of that, I just think is bogus and stupid. But the main thing that I have a problem with is the erasing of boys and the erasing of men and the cackling gleeful way that they've done it. I despise those things, and yet, I have to say, the life I lead, the things I do, the places I go, the rights I hold, I have to absolutely thank feminism for that. And I remember my mother would always I was a kid, she was like, Now, Kate, when, you know, when you get married, you have to always have a credit card in your name. Because I see my friends, like, if their husband dies, they can't get credit. And I was, like, nine. I was like, what is credit? You know, I don't want a hinks card for but, like, all of those big changes that make me equal to a man as far as my rights and abilities, I certainly owe to the movement. So I'm not some Phyllis Schlafly who's probably a more interesting character. I should probably write about her. I don't really know anything about her except the top lines, but I'm not someone who's in any way saying we need to go back, or that women shouldn't work or anything like that. I just think that this combination of the grift and the unanimity of it that's being passed down to young women, I think is just the ananity, I think is silly and the grift is ugly. Well, I actually want to talk about me too, and that movement. Maybe we can jump into that earlier than I expected, but just a few more general points. One is that you obviously you have a nuanced position here, and as we have discovered, nuance is the enemy of common understanding more and more. It's just if your position can't be summarized in a sentence, some detractor will find a completely false reading of it by which to summarize it and hold you accountable to that. Or the least charitable interpretation of one of your nuanced points that needs to be, by definition, needs to be understood in context, becomes the advertisement for what your position actually is. So just bring me back to one, just for members of the audience who haven't read your stuff. I hardly think there's any members of the audience who haven't read this writing. Okay, well, just or have forgotten that this absolutely friendly, genteel voice that you now hear when someone gets on the wrong side of your pen, your scorn is truly withering. And it's really delightful to read, but I can. Imagine you take it right up to the line where it's just like, I think at least once or twice on Twitter, I've said, okay, Caitlin Flanagan is guilty of murder here. Somebody called the FBI, right? You do essentially what Hitch did. But I think you being a woman makes it I don't think you're perceived as a bully the way he was, but I got to say, seeing you take on Naomi Wolf, I mean, it's right up to the line. You're just eviscerating her, right. Not enough. Anyway, the pleasure of schadenfreude in your articles is just immense. But do you recalibrate that at all now in the social media age? Or did you set the dial at eleven back in the day and it's just stayed there? If somebody just comes out in a major place like a network news program or a really visible newspaper and they come up with some Inname, idiotic thing and then they're sort of getting the imprimatur of whatever it might be the New York Times or wherever it is that, say, Naomi Wolf is published. Very serious presses that just needs to be dealt with. And I am the woman that will take care of that. Like I always say, with Kristen Gillibrand, like, don't worry. If she ever gets her head above water, I just have a total assignment that will be taken care of. So anybody who's really fair game and they're publishing or they're speaking or they're being accepted in a very elite space, then just drives me crazy. And then the whole idea that they kind of skip over all these half truths, all I want to do is just expose the truth, and then because I'm funny, it becomes withering. Yeah, and it's very funny. All right, so I have an enemies list. I want to turn you loose on my enemies. Speed round enemies. We touched the nanny thing. So tell us, what was the controversy around your nanny article? There was a lot of discussion about the title for the essay. No one could come up with a good one. And then Colin Murphy at The Atlantic came up with the perfect title, which is a mouthful, but it's how serfdom saved the women's movement. And it was just about the fact that for all these women suddenly to go into these jobs, including, say, middle class women who needed two incomes, but also women who were Ivy League educated women married to Ivy League educated men so either one of them could have curtailed their career a bit the way they made it happen. Not in the absence of a daycare culture, which we didn't have, but that wasn't really the issue. These women didn't want their kids in daycare. They wanted them to be at home. They just always felt to be, oh, my child's not in daycare. My child is at home. She's in her own crib at nap time. She's playing in the backyard. And the person who's doing this caretaking, she's my direct employee. You can't really boss around a daycare worker. She's an employee of the daycare, and she's responsible to her boss. And so the way that that circle was squared is that we were at the beginning of really the very beginning of mass immigration so that the cities were really filled with women who were easily exploitable, some of them not documented in any way, and some of them were desperate. They needed work. They desperately needed work, and they had a lot of great mothering skills. And so all these women that were going back to work hired all these nannies, and they did a lot of terrible things that they do to this day. Is that okay? A family hires a nanny, and, oh, the nanny doesn't want to be treated in a cold way as an employee, and the family doesn't want to think of her as an employee. We wouldn't leave our precious baby with some employee. Why? Rosa is a member of the family. She's a member of the family, and we do a lot of things for Rosa. She wasn't able to get a car, and we paid the down payment, and we put the money down, and got her the car and her brother was having trouble and we did this and that for them. And you'd run into them with the nanny. Oh, it's Rosa. She's a member of the family. And inevitably, three years later, you run into the mom and the kid. Where's Rosa? Oh, it didn't work out. There was something that happened. I'll tell you about it and it's always be something that happened. And then Rosa goes on to her next job. But inevitably, I mean, it's really rare to find someone who's paying their Social Security set asides for that woman. They don't want to do it. They want to have and the woman doesn't really want it either. They want the full amount in that check. They want to say they're giving rows of full dollars. But when you're a low income worker and you move from job to job to job, you should be accruing those Social Security set asides. And if you remain poor or even I can't remember the exact number, but it's like 70% of the income of people who are like over 60, who are maybe lower middle class. It's their Social Security check. You're not paying into that. And let alone the fact that you're probably not paying time and a half if they're working over this certain number of hours. But they are really grinding down another woman. They're getting ahead in their lives by grinding someone down. And so I wrote extensively about all that and there was a huge blowback. And then all these women wanted to debate me in places like the 92nd street. Why? I was like, Are you kidding? But then they were such serious women and I was getting a lot of heat from my publisher to do it. Or that was when the book came out. That was from that article. But they were such big people that it seemed really weird or fearful that I wasn't debating them. And I was fearful because I knew if I went to the 92nd street why, there wouldn't be anyone. I got 1000 women with nannies. Right? Exactly. And I guess intersectionality, which now is kind of in this weird way, which I hate, but is sort of like really making the point that I was making so long ago maybe would give me some cover. But so I came up with this audacious thing that I didn't think would work. And I won't say the names of the women. It worked, but it worked 100%. I said I'll debate anyone anywhere, but we're just going to get a neutral person to look at our taxes for the last five years because they were all moms and I was a mom and I knew I was clean, right? And they fell away immediately. They disappeared. They disappeared. And some people could say, well, you're blaming women for this when it's a parenting issue. I think nowadays really change. Fathers are more involved with those decisions. But at. That time. It was the women who made those decisions, the women who dealt with the nanny, the woman who decided whether or not they were going to do the Social Security set asides and all that. And I just thought that that was how the women's movement depended on this kind of serfdom. And I think to this extent in La. The number of people that don't do that and think of themselves as very progressive West Side Los Angeles people and yet have a very low income worker in their home and think that she's going to be a lifetime retainer like some Carrie Grant movie where these old retainers are wandering in and out. She's not. Nora Efron had this funny thing in one of her final books of essays, of Things to Remember, and she said, one of the most important things to remember is that even the best babysitter in the world won't work. After a while, your family is going to change. It's not going to be right. And what have you done for her is my question, or to her. And this produced a lot of rage from a lot of women, but it also got me, and then it just completely maxed them out. And this is why I keep telling people, don't worry. I got invited to join The New Yorker as a staff writer. So it's like, if you're a big, noisy writer and you're taking up the space and the culture and you're really saying some new things, as much as you're going to have a lot of painful incidents, the world will take note of you. Yeah, well, I guess obviously there are people who are getting canceled. You have to be on the right side of certain questions because you are not right wing, right? You violate certain taboos of the left, but when push comes to shove, you're arguing for progressive causes. I don't know if I can say that because how would you describe yourself politically? Well, do you remember the Covington incident when those kids yeah, a great flashpoint. I just was thinking so I was like, oh, I just heard the top line. These kids abusing this Native American man, or whatever. I thought, oh, that's terrible. And I just watched the little tiny piece of video that everybody was saying, this is the evidence. Yeah, everyone became a clairvoyant reading. Yes. It was a very tired worldview. Odd piece of video. It was one child smiling in a very enigmatic way, standing close to a Native American man who's playing a drum. And I thought, I'm always thinking in cases like this, oh, there must be another clip they're using, because clearly this doesn't show me anything that that guy did wrong, that this kid did wrong. And then I just went farther and farther and farther, and it was completely bogus. That guy is a real sort of performance artist who, like, mixes it up in this way in different places. And gets attention and was promoting himself as a Vietnam vet and then a Vietnam era vet, and the whole thing was just a fraudulent event. And then NBC. Here I go again. These are the things I say that get me in immediate trouble. But Samantha Guthrie on NBC was given they should have talked to me, these covington families. She was given the opportunity to interview that exact kid in his home back in wherever they were from Kentucky, I guess. And it was a very disparaging interview on her part. It was all the worse for it being sort of gentle in the way that she did it because it was a morning show, but she was not an honest broker to that kid. And the other thing is, now I know all these people. I don't know Samantha, but I'm in that world enough that I go to events, parties, dinners with these people of MPAC East. And the right is absolutely correct. They are all extremely progressive. That is, to a person, they are pro choice to a person, they are anti Trump to a person. And so the right is absolutely correct that the mainstream media, the important media outlets, are pupled by extremely partisan reporters, editors, and opinion writers who try at the best they can. They don't go in there and sort of say, let's make a plot to do this or that. I guess my point there was just that you would probably be cancelable if you were actually right wing and making some of these same points. Like if you couldn't check some of the progressive boxes that at the end of the day make you look more saint than sinner from the point of view of the left. We just take the New Yorkers response to the platforming, or almost platforming of Steve Bannon at the New Yorker conference. Right? So David Remnick had a total mutiny on his hands. So if you were on some level pro Bannon, pro Trump making those points, then you could have some of the same essays that would spark the same controversy. But when someone drilled down, they would discover that you were politically toxic. And I think that would have a you're right. You're right. Although Bannon is certainly loathsome. I mean, somebody just sent me an email the other day from the magazine based on a couple of tweets that then he's like, I just don't understand your position on immigration, because I wasn't in one lane or the other. It's a very complex situation. Well, I want to talk about immigration, too. We're circling in on. Me too. Let's start there. So we've had huge cases in recent memory that have focused concern around sexual harassment and violence against women and this continuum from bad jokes to rape, and this has all been summarized by the hashtag me too movement. There was the Kavanaugh hearings more recently in the news. We have the Jeffrey Epstein case, and I think so many of us who have a nuanced position on this are certainly worried that the continuum doesn't get acknowledged as a continuum that you have in certain quarters what appears to be a similar level of outrage around literally bad jokes, wanting people to lose their careers over bad jokes. I mean, there are literally cases like this. There's the academic in the elevator who crowded elevator at a conference, and he says, Women's lingerie, please. That's like a bad Dean Martin style joke. Right. And I didn't hear the other shoe drop there, but I think he was actually fighting for his career. Last I heard that's what he was doing was fighting for his career. Yeah. And people think it's totally warranted, right? You have to hurl these people from the rooftops. Well, that's the problem, is that where they're so often located is in academic life, which is where we used to have our smartest people and now I think our but also journalists. That's what I said. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I had Rebecca traced her on the podcast, and we didn't go too far in that direction, but she has very strong intuitions here, ethically, that you have to break some eggs to make this equity omelet. And it just doesn't matter on some level that people who lose their careers, they'll be fine, they'll get another job. And that's actually not an exaggeration of the position she articulated. One example I used was Matt Damon. Matt Damon said something utterly benign and rational around this 20 megaton controversy, and he simply said, listen, we just have to acknowledge that groping someone is not the same thing as raping someone, and telling a bad joke is not the same thing as groping someone. And let's just save the cops for one end of the spectrum and our raised eyebrow for the other end. And had he not immediately backed up, certainly he perceived that had he not just apologized, back down and shut up for all time on this topic, he was in some real jeopardy as one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, and people like Rebecca think it's good that he's terrified. Right? We got to silence any demurral on this point. I want to talk about Kavanaugh. I want to talk about actual violence against women. But I guess the larger question here, the question we really have to sort out, and I have very few intuitions about how do we navigate the changing social norms in this space? Because there's no question that norms are changing, and many probably should change, but there's just a very awkward landscape. I can't imagine what it would be like to be a young, single person in an office where you're just surrounded by other people, and those are the people you're going to meet on a day to day basis, and you're trying to navigate workplace dating or not. And then we have these examples of people in the news whose work we still seemingly should admire some of the most creative people around. Their biographies continually discouraged these what now are unseemly stories, and were stories at the time. Just a few short years ago, the norms were different. Right? A joke told ten years ago was being told in a very different context. So I'm just wondering how you think about the changing norm issue before we get into the actual spectrum of well, part of what you're talking about with Matt Damon, that's the grift. So long as we keep them all terrified, so long as we show that we can cancel them, we can push ourselves ahead some way. We can push our ideas, our half baked ideas. Well, your ideas should be able to stand on its own without having to police these people. Sometimes I think, because I've certainly had experiences me, too. Kind of experiences. Not at work, because I don't go to the office, so I have to be like, me tooed, by the dog. And it is the history of women. It's the history of women is the history of rape, the history of assault. The history of someone was just saying to me this weekend that there was a poll where they asked all these women, what do you do to prevent sexual assault in your life? And they had these long lists. They came up with, like, 32. I keep my keys in my hand. I walk here, I walk there. And then they asked men the same sort of social class or office, what do you do? They're like, what are you talking about? I don't do anything. It's the history of women, and it's a terrible thing. When I was in college, there was this girl who really was raped in a fraternity. So this is like in the she went to the dean, and she had to go. She woke up in a bloody sheet in a fraternity house. She'd been a virgin all the rest of it. She got herself to student health. She had, you know, a report on that level. I don't know if it was a rape kid, as he would say today, but I mean, she had been kind of bruised up and she went to the dean, and the deans told her a man he told the young man to be more of a gentleman. And he told her to what were you doing into fraternity that late at night? And she was really not that it matters, but she really was just doing something very understandable. This was before binge drinking was the norm for young women on campus. Someone had really handed her a spiked drink. So anyway, she decides to stay at college. Oh, the guy even suggested you might want to transfer. This might be too humiliating. So there's an end to this story, which is that, like, years go by. Hopefully it ends with a hanging. It just about does, because she's 20 years later or 19 years later, she's about to go to Virginia Beach on vacation with her family. She gets the mail and there's a letter and the guy who did it has joined AA and he's written he needs to make amends. So he makes this complete amends to her, and she calls the Charlottesville DA. And he's like, okay, we got six months left on the statute of limitations, and that guy went to jail. Which people have strong feelings about that. But the fact of it was I went to college. It really was a situation where there was a tremendous amount of rape at the University of Virginia. It had only I mean, I I went there in the very early eighty s it had only been coed for about ten years. And it was just really I mean, I couldn't even imagine even thinking of going to a dean about anything in my personal life. So on the one hand, there's been this great progress. On the other hand, young women want to participate in behaviors that aren't good for them, that cause them tremendous grief and then looking for some reason for it, oh, it's a rape culture. And then they also attack the west. The west does not have a rape culture. We have rape, but we don't have a rape culture. Okay? So there was so much condensed in that, even just those last few sentences. I just want to plan a few flags on some landmarks there. And this is why it's very difficult to have this conversation, because the ethical fact based conversation is clearly nuanced. And unless you take the party line here and ignore the nuance, you're susceptible to a lot of blowback. What you just sketched there is that obviously violence against women is a perennial problem. Men are on average stronger than women. A certain percentage of men are going to force sex on women. This is just a crime problem that has been with us before we had a concept of crime. And then there are moments in culture where even totally apparently civilized people blithely ignore this problem. And as you describe your college experience, that was the case. We have woken up to the problem, and yet it seems like now we have executed a kind of pendulum swing of overcorrection where now there are hoax crimes, right, that we have to respond to, which do immense damage. I don't know what was actually believed to be true about the Rolling Stones. Nothing was raped. It was zero total fantasy projection by the girl. So, I mean, that is just I don't even know how to think about this. But clearly false allegations of rape do immense harm, not just to the unfairly accused, but to all the women who actually get raped, who then inherit this burden of disbelief. And it really only takes a few cases like that to spread this skepticism about legitimate accusations. So there's the false accusation problem and there's just the exaggeration, which seems to be fairly well subscribed at the moment of just the level of abuse of women and rape on college campuses in 2019. For several years now, people have been claiming that the chance that you're going to get raped when you go to college if you're a girl is just if true, no one would send their daughters to college. I mean, you know, I've heard people say it's like, well, it's like, you know, 30% chance you're going to get raped to college. Right? Now, either they're defining rape in so loose a way as to encompass sex you regret or something, you know, fairly anodyne, or they're just making things up. But there's just no way that 30% of women are getting raped on college campuses. So this is a hard space to navigate. And one thing I would add, which goes to this issue of false allegations, my bias has always been, unless there's something obviously anomalous in an account, the default setting is you just believe women, right? You believe the victims. And my intuitions here are that it's such a pathological thing to make up a fake rape account that the likelihood that anyone would do it is almost infinitesimal. And yet I've had one conversation recently that has kind of knocked me back on my heels with respect to that intuition. I was in London a couple of weeks ago, and I was at dinner with a barrister. And in the UK, as you probably know, barristers, the lawyers often work as prosecutors and defense attorneys. It's on a case by case basis. And I was asking him the kinds of cases he handles. He handles a lot of sex crime cases. And I said, what percentage would you say of cases that come to trial? There are many that get dismissed before they get there. But what percentage come to trial where you're worried let's say you're on the prosecution side. You're worried that you're actually prosecuting a guy for a made up offense, that this was not actually a rape. And I was expecting him to say that virtually never happens. And what I got from him was just the antithesis. I mean, it was like 30% to 50% in his experience where he's he's, as a prosecutor worried that this guy is just getting railroaded by somebody who just regretted the sex or had some other reason to hate him and knew that this was a way to destroy his life. Now, again, this is just one conversation of one based on one barrister's experience, but it completely ransacked my ethical intuitions here. And again, maybe we can filter this through the case of Kavanaugh. When I looked at Kavanaugh, I saw this fraternity jerk who seemed like he was very likely guilty as charged. And while this wasn't criminally actionable, it was enough to warrant him not being on the Supreme Court, in my view. And certainly his propensity to lie about it and theatrically protest his innocence in the way that he did. It just seemed like he was radioactive from my point of view. But half of the country had the opposite intuition, which is, here's a guy who was probably guilty of of either nothing or something that virtually every college aged man was guilty of at some point, right. Something that could be misinterpreted, and now it's going to now this is going to come out of his closet and ruin his life. It was a high school event. High school event. Yeah. Right. So let's talk about this issue of say whatever you want about Kavanaugh, but let's just talk about this issue of false accusation. And what I got a lot of after the Kavanaugh hearing was I rate emails and tweets from my audience around whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty. I mean, the fact that there was no proof here, apart from her saying it was so seemed to be dispositive for people. But again, that was not my intuition at the time and it's just not my default intuition. It seemed to me that there was nothing for her to gain and everything for her to lose to give this testimony. So as far as the motive to lie about this, it seems it seemed very hard to find. But yeah, I just pitched that to you because it's a very difficult thing to well, I had a very strange journey with the Kavanaugh situation because I had heard that there was this potential claim coming up. I was completely agnostic about Brett Kavanaugh. I didn't really know anything about him. I mean, I knew that Trump had been the one to nominate him, so I sort of had a bit of skepticism because of that. But then the guy he'd done just before Roberts was at it, he turned out to be not that bad. So anyways, I was agnostic about it, but I was hearing this rumbling that this woman and then I heard a little bit that it was this high school event. And then the next day I was just sitting at Santa Monica High School. A friend of mine was becoming an honored grad hall of Famer there. And I just kind of bored. During the middle of the program, I scrolled through my phone and The Washington Post was just breaking that it was in her psychiatrist notes. So I automatically said, I believe it because I knew so many people and something like this happened to me when I was in high school, and I just thought, well, there it is. You're not going to waste your time and money in your psychiatrist appointment to bring up there's really no in there. And this is years before he would be nominated Supreme Court. Right, exactly. You're laying the groundwork for a false, very long con. You know, it's like, well, we got all our representatives out there for like every man who could ever be possibly nominated telling their shrinks things that he's done. So I just quickly that night just wrote out, yeah, I believe her. I had this thing happen to me. I described it. It was very derailing and upsetting for me as a 17 year old girl kind of in her 16 year old 16 or 17 year old girl in my senior year of high school and didn't tell anybody about it. I mean, and then a few years passed. I remember when I went to college, it was the first time I heard the term date rape, and it was just like, sound like an oxymoron, like date rape, but date is this. And I remember going it was just like the world opened up to me that the two things could coexist. So anyways, I wrote that, and immediately I had to go to DC. For just the atlantic festival, and it was right in the middle of all this kavanaugh stuff, and the city was going crazy, and we had lindsey graham on the main stage. We had everybody on the main stage, and it was real. The atlantic was at the right time from the sort of callous, news breaking way of talking about things. So anyways, I go to bed the first night. I wake up the next morning, and I'm looking at my twitter, and somebody reached out to me and said, ben sasse of nebraska is reading your piece on the senate floor. And I was like, who's been sass of nebraska? What are you talking about? And then I thought, this is just they must have things come through on twitter. You're always getting tagged on things you have no reason being on. And someone else said, ben sass is reading your piece into the record, and here's the video. And then I clicked on this video, and it was the most embarrassing thing I'd ever I mean, what can I say? I'm always embarrassed. I'm just I live in a state of embarrassment. But it was just really awful because he was just calling me mrs. Flanagan, which is my mother's name. I'm not Mrs Flanagan. And then he was like, poor he's really laying it on. Like poor Mrs Flanagan. She never thought she could get a date again. Imagine how mrs. Flanagan would have felt. Night after night, he's just laying it on, and I'm like, this is really mortifying. That's what I'm telling myself. Well, that's the cost that you pay when you put your personal stuff out there. You might have louts retweeting it, or you might get it read on the senate floor and be like, in an embarrassed way. But then I thought, but I guess he's voted against kavanaugh because he really sees my piece. And then I found out he didn't vote against kavanaugh. I was like, I was really jacked up. I'm in DC. And my editor is like, go talk to him right now. And then he had just left in nebraska, and now we've gotten to know each other pretty well and I like Ben a lot, but so that all happened. And then after that happened, michael Barbaro from the Times, do you ever listen to the Daily? Yeah. So he happened to be out in La. And they'd never done a story that wasn't from the Times reporting. But he said, this seems to really and there's this fabulous guy, Andy Mills, who works there. You know him? Just by phone and email, but yeah, he's oh, he's fantastic. Spent a weekend with him at as. He was this great guy and really smart. Anyways, can you do it? I'm like, yeah. So this thing happened when I was 16. This conversation with Michael Barbara happens when I'm like 56 or whatever we've decided I am. And I had never, ever in my whole life talked about it in any other way except philosophically, because when the trauma of it had happened, I wasn't telling anybody. And then I learned about date rape years later. And then I'm like, I understand this new term, it's revolutionary. You know, I had something like this happen and for some reason I just sat down across to Michael Barbaro and he goes, tell me about senior year of high school. And I never have had anything like this happen to me, an interview. I just couldn't keep it together. And I was mortified. There were all these young people there. I thought, I can't cancel. I literally thought, I'm not going to make it through this. And I just realized that there was a tremendous amount of trauma that had been holding in my body for 40 years that I talked about it to people, but always in a yes, I'm on the side of these young women. You know, I had something like this happening once at a beach. One of my parents moved. This guy didn't know. Well, do you feel that it was a genuine unmasking of the trauma that was there, or do you feel like the framing and focus in this way? You were given a very kind of therapeutic framing and problematized focus. Did that kind of amplify? Well, it was a weird event and that the nice young people who make the show that are very smart, they would describe me, like, I think maybe in the promo to the Peacemen Online, like we're going to be talking to a sexual assault survey. So right away I hold their name for what happened to me, whereas something that happened to me on a date is more correct. But truly, I didn't think I was unguarded at all when I went into that interview. And suddenly these people are leaning in and asking me and I'm just telling you the thing that came out of me. If it had just been the therapeutic context, I would have been different. I would have said yes. And I feel fealty to other young women and this and that. It wasn't like that it was like I was 16 years old. I really didn't think I'd get through it. And I just think there's all these women men always think that women are hysterical, and we are a little bit hysterical because we hold all this trauma in us. Like, even women like me who are just very careful about when I was young and sexual danger and things like that, it still happens. And I think that then we get into arguments like the Kavanaugh argument where we aren't logical and men are like, this isn't logical. Where is your evidence? You're saying something happened 40 years ago. She doesn't remember where it happened. She doesn't remember this. How can you possibly be trying to say this should stop a man from becoming a Supreme Court justice? And women are just in this volatile fellow feeling of having things like this happen to them. And we all went a little bit nuts, but it was so I don't think men are women are as logical as men on a lot of things, and it's because we should just okay, stop that. No, we'll keep that. But just a sanity check here. Even that statement in the current environment is anathema just to acknowledge that there's any biological difference between men and women, which has psychological correlates that is already, among the sisters, a taboo. Right. Brothers too. A lot of the brothers, yeah. If you just go far enough left, certainly on women's issues. It's just I think women's issues is not a term anymore. Yeah, well, I'm sure I'm a dinosaur in several different ways in this conversation, but to be woke is to be convinced on this point that all of the apparent differences between men and women are culturally enforced to the detriment of women. And what you want is a kind of hard reset of cultural expectations. And thereafter, you will find that you should have a 50 50 representation of women in every walk of life. And, you know, except the death row. They don't want them 50 50. Like, it's like, okay, let's really become as violent. All the serial killers. Yeah, exactly. It's like we would have to introduce into our collective makeup enough violence and enough power and enough rage that we could get ourselves into death row, man, in a serious way. And we can't break in, man. It's a freaking glass ceiling on death row. So it doesn't hold up to me that these things aren't legitimate phenomena. I think we have your next title. The Death Row Glass Ceiling. Okay, so then what do we do about the prospect of either false allegations or honest confessions of trauma over things that shouldn't be traumatizing? We now have a generation of people who have been convinced that certain things are traumatic which other generations could rightfully say, well, those were normal and unavoidable, and you should have a thicker skin. And where is the line there? Because clearly there are norms. That we do want to change, right? I mean, it's not like the Mad Men era is something we should be nostalgia for. Although the main premise of the show was nostalgia. Yeah, that's fascinating, and I'm a fan of the show, but some of the things you saw in the show you couldn't believe were actually true, then I assume that they were not actually taking much poetic license, but it was just mind boggling, the stuff that was normal around gender and race and everything else. What do you do? Like the Rolling Stone case, right? Listen, let me tell you about that. If this woman on her big contract at Rolling Stone if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. As I mentioned in the last housekeeping, there is a subscription policy change happening on the podcast and this will be going into effect on Wednesday, May 1. So in order to have access to subscriber only content on my website, you will need an active monthly subscription. This means that those of you who never subscribed monthly or whose subscriptions have lapsed, and this includes anyone who used to support the podcast through Patreon, will need to start a monthly subscription@samharris.org. Now, as always, if you cannot afford to support the podcast, you know I don't want money to be the reason why you can't get access to my content. So if you really can't afford a monthly subscription, you need only email us at info@samharris.org and we will open a free account for you. But you will need to either subscribe or send us that email in order to get behind the paywall going forward. And again, that change starts May 1. That includes access to the live town hall, the Ask Me Anything episode of the podcast that's coming up on May 9. That's in Los Angeles, and that will be videotaped and streamed live on my website at 08:00 Pacific Time. And this will be interesting. This is an experiment, and if it works, we may do all of our AMA episodes. This way we will see what value is added with a live audience. Anyway, those tickets sold out, I think in 20 minutes, so that's great. I look forward to meeting you all and we should have fun. Again, the video will be streamed live on the website and a final cut will be posted there. So if you're in some time zone totally out of sync with Los Angeles, you need not worry. The episode will be available to you as well. As always, reviews of the podcast and itunes are very helpful, and this is also true for the Waking Up app. Please keep those reviews coming. Those affect our visibility in the App Store and therefore help determine how many people are made aware of the app. And again, I got to say, releasing this app has been extremely gratifying. Honestly is the one thing I've done where there is no distance between my intentions and the apparent effect of what I have produced out in the world. As you know, the app is continually under development and only getting better for your input. So all your feedback is much appreciated. And as you know, our policy for subscription to the app is also the same. If you actually can't afford it, just send an email to info@wakingup.com and we will give you a free year on the app. And if your luck hasn't changed at the end of that year, send us another email. I believe there are some seats left for my event at the Wiltern in Los Angeles with Mingueurimpiche in July. You can find out about that on my website@samharris.org, events. That is the first event associated with the Waking Up app, and that event is being co sponsored by UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center. And now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Shane Parish. Shane is a blogger and podcaster. His website is farnhamstreet at FS blog. And his podcast is the Knowledge Project. Many of you know him. I believe there was recently a profile in The New York Times about him that brought him into greater prominence. He has a background in computer science and he worked for many years in the Canadian equivalent of the NSA. In fact, he briefly worked with the NSA as well. But now he is a full time digital media person and he spent a lot of time thinking about thinking and we talk a lot about what he calls mental models. This conversation has a lot in common with the conversation I had with Danny Kahneman about reasoning under uncertainty, but I think you'll find it very different as well. Anyway, without further delay, I bring you Shane Parish. I am here with Shane Parish. Shane, thanks for coming on the podcast. Happy to be here. So we are we're doing this in your hotel lobby? Hence the ambient city vibe. This is a nonstudio sound, but it's an experiment. If people can hear us, it has worked. I think we probably share a significant audience and many people know who you are. But you run the Farnham Street blog and you have your own podcast, The Knowledge Project. We've interviewed some of the same people, so we have many interests in common. But there was a great New York Times profile on you, which I think brought you to the attention of many people. So let's just jump into a kind of potted history of your background because you came into this from an interesting angle. You started in was it cybersecurity? Specifically? Is your background, is it computer science and cybersecurity? Yes. I started work August 28, 2001 for an intelligence agency, and then September 11 happened two weeks later. And I worked in, I guess you could say, cybersecurity in one way or another for 15 years. Is that something you can talk about? Or are you bound by laws of Canadian espionage that you will make that part a very short conversation. We can't talk about too much in terms of specifics, I think we can talk about general things around cybersecurity or maybe privacy issues, but yeah, it's not something I think there's a lot of stuff out there now with Snowden and everything. So I think people have a fairly good insight into what goes on inside intelligence agencies. So you were in computer science and got into cybersecurity, right, like two weeks before September 11. So the landscape completely changed, your job description completely changed. Well, we didn't even have a sign on the building as of August 28, and by Christmas that year, we actually had a sign we existed, but we existed since the 40s. So just to contextualize for people, I worked for the Canadian version of the NSA, right? And it was a really amazing time to be working there. I mean, it was unfortunate, the events that sort of led to our increased visibility and Band AIDS. But with that said, we went from, I don't know, 500 people to 2000 or so when I left. A lot of growth, a lot of expectations. I ended up doing a job that I wasn't really hired to do, but I loved doing. And it was a good way to sort of give back to Canada and the country that I was born in. My parents were in the military, so we live coast to coast. I ended up working in the States for a little bit at NSA for a short time, and then most of my other time has been in Ottawa. Right. So what's the connection to Wall Street? Because you're this could have been an artifact of what The New York Times did to you, but there seemed to be a real emphasis on how popular your blog and podcasts are among the financial types. It's really strange. We have three main audiences for our sort of blog and podcast, which is Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and professional sports. And the way that it started was I took some time to go back to school, I think around 2008, 2009, to do an MBA and quickly realized that I wasn't going to learn what I was trying to learn from my MBA. I wanted to learn how to make better decisions because I was doing operations and I was making decisions that impacted people and countries. And I felt like there was an obligation on my part to get better at making decisions. And it's not there's no sort of skill that is making decisions better. It's a whole bunch of sub skills that you have to learn and apply. So I went back to school to try to get better at some of that stuff and quickly realized that the NBA wasn't going to teach me what I needed to know. And so I started a website called 68131 Blogger.com, I think, and that's the zip code for Berkshire Hathaway. And the reason that I did that was the site was an homage to Charlie Munger and warren Buffett, who were actually giving me things that I could think about and put into practice, about how to see the world differently, how to make better decisions. And I started just journaling for me. And the reason that we used 68131 was because I didn't think anybody would type it in at the time. It wasn't meant for anybody else's consumption. It's more like a personal online notepad for my own edification and connecting ideas. And then, I don't know, it took off from there. It wasn't anything conscious. We didn't try to reach Wall Street. It was anonymous too. It didn't have my name on it because I was working for an intelligence agency and they wouldn't sort of let me put my name on it. You took time off of doing intelligence to get an MBA with the intention of going back to intelligence, being better equipped to make decisions, or were you getting out of intelligence at that point? I did full time MBA studies and full time work at the same time. Oh, interesting. So I switched jobs to take a less demanding job in the organization while I did that. And the intent was always to go back and sort of see what options were available. I went back and went into management. And how do you view the current panic around online privacy and just what is happening to us based on our integration with the Internet? I can imagine you have a few thoughts on what we are doing with our data, what's being done with our data, how cavalier we are with these lives of transparency we're leading now. I think it's something that we need to be aware of and make conscious choices around, and I don't think there's a historical precedent where we can look back and sort of use that as a guide because the environment is changing so quickly. I think one of the big things that are going to dominate over the next ten to 20 years is online privacy and sort of the question about whether we're going to let foreign companies control parts of our infrastructure. And I think those questions, they're not necessarily resolvable. We have individual choices about what we do. I mean, you don't want to use Google, you can use DuckDuck Go, but you also want these valuable services that are being provided. I think we need to come to some sort of understanding about what that information that we're giving away is in a transparent way. I also think that there's an interesting if you think about it, one of the questions that I think is relevant is, do these companies get a cumulative advantage from having this information that prevents competition? And so is Google better at search because we use it? And the more we use it, the better they get at search, which means that it's much harder for competition to start. As these algorithms get better and they're trained with more and more data, it becomes harder and harder for the person in the garage to compete. And then you end up having to compete with capital and not necessarily technology. And I think that changes sort of the landscape of what we're seeing in the market today. So I think maybe it's a case where history has always been the same, where big companies and incumbents tend to get bigger. But I think that it's a little bit different this time in the sense that these companies make a lot of money. They're not necessarily bound by employees. They have a huge influence over regulatory frameworks. The harder or more regulated they become, almost the more barriers to entry you'll get for competitors as well. Where do you come down on the question of having a foreign company build critical infrastructure? I think that's a great question. Right? And I think one of the ways that you can think through that question is if we were to go back to World War Two or something, to what extent would we want another country building our tanks? To what extent do we want to be dependent on tanks that could be turned off remotely? Right. So to what extent do we want to be dependent on another country, even if we have good relations right now? I think one of the questions we ask is, like, are we always going to have good relations with these countries? What could go wrong? And we can't again, looking backwards, it's hard to find historical precedents where we can clearly say what could happen. But I think that the variability in outcomes is high, and we're focused maybe on short term optimization over long term survival. This is one of these places where it feels like the market fails us because it's just in the abstract, you can understand why you would want a free market for more or less everything, but it's just so easy to see what could go wrong here. If you have China or some quasi hostile foreign power, or at least a foreign power that is probably best viewed as a competitor, and it's very easy to see how we could be really in an open state of war at some point in the future. There's no way other way to look at it. You get if they were going to put something malicious into the system, you know, they would have the power to turn the lights out. And it doesn't have to be war in a physical sense. It could be trade war, economic war. I mean, there's lots of different sort of stealing IP, which we know they do implicit abandons. Right? And so one of the ways that we think to address this and I'm speaking of we as people, not we as my intelligence background, is, okay, well, we'll set up a lab, and we'll review your source code, and then we'll verify that it compiles and the checksums, and then we'll deploy it into our infrastructure. As a means to sort of reduce the risk. And I think that there's problems inherent with that, one of which is logic errors. And computer code are extremely hard to pick up on. But the one that stands out a little bit more to me would be, what if there was a zero day found? And a zero day, for people who don't know is a vulnerability that's not patched. It becomes available. That's found in the code of this infrastructure. So the phrase zero day means you have zero days to fix this. It's already right. There's nothing you can really do other than unplug your system to prevent it. And so they issue a patch, and does that patch go through this long process of code review, or does it get deployed right away? And you can quickly see circumstances where you would be forced into deploying something, even under this regime of labs and stuff, where you would end up with stuff that you would review it later, and at that point, it might be too late. And that's not to say that any nation would do that. Do you want to be put in a position where you have to think about that? Right. So, back to finance. It sounds like you were inspired by Berkshire Hathaway, by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Do you have a connection to those guys? Have you met those guys? Or is it just you're? Just a fan based on reading their stuff. Just a fan. I mean, there are people who have influenced my thinking a lot. The website Farnham Street is named after the street in Omaha where they have their headquarters in. Buffett has his house. And I think it's just interesting to me when I was doing my MBA and I was sort of thinking about this you had Daniel conman on recently, so you learn these cognitive biases that are great at explaining why we make mistakes. And you have sort of Michael Porter and his Five Forces theory of business competition. And I found it really interesting that these two guys in Omaha, Nebraska, or I guess one's in Pasadena, charlie Munger's in Pasadena, California, but these two guys took that work and they made it practical and useful and used it to make better decisions in the real world over a wide variety of companies and businesses. And I thought it was really interesting, and that's how I really got interested in them and thinking it was interesting, that conversation with Danny at one point. For those who aren't aware, daniel Kahneman is one of the fathers of what has become behavioral economics. But decision theory, prospect theory, was part of that. The work he did with Amos Fursky, for which Danny won the Nobel Prize in economics, revealed how bad we are at reasoning through various decisions. We have heuristics, where we make certain decisions under uncertainty. And many of these heuristics are bad ones. They're not always bad, but they're often bad. And one thing that surprised me in my conversation with Danny is he's the godfather of this way of debugging human reason. And yet when asked how much he's internalized this, how much better he is at not falling prey to bad intuitions or making bad decisions or decisions that will, in hindsight, prove to be bad, he claimed more or less to be as bad at this as anyone else. All of his knowledge hasn't really paid dividends in his practical reasoning, but I get the sense you're not quite in that same boat. How do you view yourself as a decision maker based on everything you've thought about and studied? I think it's really interesting that he said that, and I was going to bring that up, that he basically said, I've studied this my whole life and I feel like I'm no better at avoiding these things. And I think what that means is cognitive biases are really great retrospectively at explaining how we go astray, and they're not so great before in terms of avoiding maybe the pitfalls of those things. And the way that we typically sort of or the way that I deal with people and how they try to address it is they create a checklist of, oh, I'm going to write down overconfident. I'm going to write down sample size bias. And then the problem with that is the more intelligent you are, the better the story you're going to tell yourself about why that doesn't apply in this particular situation. Right. It's almost like you made your decision and then you're rationalizing it, but you're going through this checklist, so you're going to create overconfidence in terms of your decision and the range of outcomes. This is a point that Jonathan Height and Michael Shermer and other connoisseurs of faulty reasoning have made. That Height puts it this way that we reason rather often more like lawyers than like people who are actually trying to get at the truth, where we're doing some internal PR, trying to convince ourselves and others why our gut intuitions actually make sense. The problem is, the smarter you are, the better you are at doing that, and on some level, the better you are at fooling yourself. Yeah, it's egos over outcomes, right? We're trying to protect our ego and it's not a conscious thing. We're not sort of like meta thinking about protecting our ego. We're just unconsciously trying to protect our view of the world and our interpretation of the world as being correct. And we're willing to take a less optimal outcome in part because we can excuse it away after who could have seen that happen? And it becomes really interesting when you start thinking about what are the things that I can do in foresight to make better decisions? One of which we sort of alluded to this earlier. There is no meta decision making skill that you just learn. There's no class on decision making. There's a subset of skills that apply in a particular situation and tools, and those are the things that we want to learn. Right? Just as there's no meta skill. I think it was Herbert Simon who said there's no meta skill of sort of like, problem solver. What there is is there's people who bring particular skills that are relevant, and then they deploy that schema to a particular problem, and they can see things and chunk things in a way that other people can't see or chunk and make better decisions based on that. And that's only relevant if the environment hasn't changed from where they've owned their expertise or they've acquired that sort of mental models, if you will, of how the world works and the variables that interact. And I think one of the interesting things that my sort of study of Buffett and Munger has picked up on is they've deployed this and they've made a lot of sort of money in the process. But one of the things that they've done is they've stayed away from a lot of companies that are highly variable. They're more predictable. And I think one of the reasons they do that is that gives them a better lens. So my knowledge becomes cumulative instead of having to reacquire it all the time. If I'm trying to understand the technology behind Google, well, that's changing every day. But if I'm trying to understand the technology behind a dry cleaner, the dry cleaner or Burlington Northern Railway, it's changing a lot slower. So my knowledge as I'm learning becomes additive and cumulative. And so I think in those cases, your mental scheme is more likely to be correct. Right. So what do you do differently in your personal life or in your professional life as a result of all the study you've done about decision making? Well, one thing that I do that I don't think a lot of people do is I rarely make a decision on the spot. I rarely feel the need to sort of, like, sit down and decide something to demonstrate to other people that I'm in control or that I'm a decision maker. I'll often take 20 minutes or 30 minutes and go for a walk and actually just try to think through the problem and think around it. And the way that I conceptualize this in my mind is, like, you have a problem or situation, and you just want to walk around it. From a three dimensional point of view, what does that problem look like to you? What does it look like through different lenses of the world, and what does it look like to other people and how is it likely to impact them? Can you think of an example of a decision where you would this is one thing Danny Kahneman said. If he's better at anything now, it's that he's more alert to the situations where more care is needed. He's more likely to make an error and perhaps can take a little more time. Where have you applied this? We were talking about sort of allowing companies in your foreign infrastructure. That would be an example of where you can think through the problem from different lenses. Right. The immediate sort of response is, oh, it's cheaper, they're good, they're friendly with us. And then the longer you rag on that problem, the longer you work through it, the more implications you can see as to the outside. You can also think about it in terms of one of the ways that I think about this is like, how do I want to live my life? A lot of life is sort of optimized for financial maximization, but I don't agree with that. Right. I think that it's actually good to have a lot of margin of safety in terms of your financial position, because things can change. Interest rates aren't always going to be there. I mean, I don't know, but historically, if you want to look out into the future, we could have a situation where we have ten or 20% interest rates. Again, I don't want to go back to zero. So when I'm making decisions on finances, it's not necessarily just optimizing the short term. It's optimizing over a wide variety of outcomes. And I think when you start to take time to think about decisions, you don't necessarily need to have more cognitive horsepower than other people to make better decisions. You just have to think through a wider variety of situations and circumstances. Almost like you're doing a Monte Carlo simulation in your head where you're just thinking about what are the extent of the possible outcomes? Where am I likely to end up on a probabilistic basis? And are there outcomes that are unacceptable to me? In which case I want to avoid those outcomes and invert the problem. And then if you can avoid all the bad outcomes, you're likely to end up with good problems or good outcomes. So maybe we should just run through some of your mental models, because your blog, for those who haven't seen it, is just an absolute arsenal of short essays on what you and others have called mental models. And these are both explicitly relevant to decision making of the sorts that Danny Kahneman has spoken about, but also just ideas and memes that you think everyone should have in their cognitive toolkit, whether they relate to biology or or finance or probability or just many topics. So I just I listed a few here that we could touch. The map is not the territory. Best example of that is online dating, right? So you get a profile of a person that is the map, and then you meet the person. And they're often two completely different things. And we use maps all the time, right? We use maps in businesses, like strategic plans. We use balance sheets, income statements, or maps to what's happening in the business. They're an abstraction of it. But they don't represent every nuance and detail in the business. And we need maps to operate because our brains can't handle that amount of detail. So we have to have a map, and we can't have a map with perfect fidelity of the thing that it's representing. But territories change, and if the map becomes the goal in and of itself, you lose track of what's actually going on in the territory. So when I say online dating is the best way to conceptually it's, the quickest way to conceptually recognize this, right. Where you have a profile, a person is presenting a view of themselves that could be a tailored view. It's definitely a curated view. And then you go meet them and you talk with them, and they're nothing like their profile or their interests don't line up with their profile. So you base your decision to meet them on a map, and then when you sort of met them, you're dealing with the territory, and it's a different proposition. And I think that we just need to be aware of when we're dealing with a map. And if you're running a business or a team, you want to be touching the territory. Right. You want to have a feel for what's going on. Are things changing? How is the sort of morale of the team? And Ron would be another example of sort of like a map territory problem. Before they went bankrupt, everybody was reading the map, and the map was saying, well, they were lying about the map. The map was lying to you. But it is a map. That's the thing. Right. So the maps can deceive you and they can lie to you. And your job, to the extent that you're an investor, is to sort of understand the territory and understand what's going on at a different level. Yeah. I ran into this recently with somebody was urging me to make a few business projections. This is now a map of the future where the growth targets with respect to a business. And maybe there's some context where this makes sense for people to do, but it seems so obviously just made up. Right. And I just was thinking of what are the consequences of making this up? So you posit whatever it is, 20% growth over some period of time, and that is being put forward as some criterion of success, and yet you don't know you don't, in fact, know what's possible. Right. So it made no sense to me to be anchored to that number. It made no sense to imagine that we should be happy with that number or depressed not to have reached it, because it's just plucked out of thin air. If you could have ten X something, why would you be happy with five X? And if five xing something is in fact impossible, why would you be disappointed with four x? Right? So it's like all of this is made you're basically creating. A psychological experiment for yourself where you're either going to feel good or bad based on this confabulation that you did some months prior. Maybe there's more to it than I understand, but it just seemed like a crazy use of intelligence on a one off basis. Projections are sort of, as you said, they're dangerous. Right. So you can also start working towards the projection and not do the obvious best thing to do because you want to hit your projection. And then on a recurring basis, where you work for an organization or a body or entity that sort of like, is consistently making projections. There's very few of those organizations go back and calibrate the individuals making those projections. I mean, we used to have people who would make projections in a very sort of rote fashion. They knew which projections would get accepted, and they also knew that there was no consequences to sort of, like, pulling those projections out of their eyes. Right. And so if there are no consequences and you're not sort of held to account for your projections, you also have no way to calibrate the person making the projections. Is this person more accurate than another person at these projections? And then an interesting question would be what makes them more accurate than other people, and can we use that information to make better decisions? And it's also you're aiming at an arbitrary target, right? So if the projection is 20% growth, and that's what's going to satisfy you because you put that target on the wall, my question is, why not just do the best things you should be doing? In this case, we're talking about a business. Do those best things and see what happens. Right. Why aim at an arbitrary target that doesn't take into account the higher level thinking of just what are the best things you should be doing for this business? We don't make projections on our happiness, right? Married 15% more happiness. We do it with finances and numbers because it tends to be a little easier, but I think it causes a lot more harm. Okay, another mental model here. First principles thinking. Yeah. I mean, Elon Musk is sort of like the recent example of that, but it's breaking things down. And one of the things that the intelligence agency that we had to do a lot of was solve problems that are sort of like ungoogleable, where people haven't really solved them before or dealt with that particular problem, and you get constrained into thinking about things through your particular lens. So your discipline, if you went through computer science or engineering or arts or HR, and we were so fortunate to have a wide variety of people there, but one of the things that sort of got us out of what we had been done, the other constraint is what you've done before, right? So you're beholden to improve upon what already exists versus, I wouldn't say reinvent the wheel but rethink the problem. Like legacy code for the mind, right? You bring all this baggage with you. But if you actually stop and pause a bit of the problem for a second and think about what are the actual physical constraints of the world, what are the building blocks that I'm dealing with, what are the limitations, like the actual limitations, not what exists today. And then you can sort of rethink the problem in terms of how you want to solve it and you at least know what's possible. It might be more expensive, it might be cost prohibitive, so the organization can't do it. But it sort of like gets you into this out of this incremental improvement state and more seeing the problem more fundamentally. And I think that's where we see a lot of disruption in the world is I think it was Peter Thiel who had the concept of zero to one. And if you think of innovation as possibly having two types of different innovation one being incremental improvement and one being sort of like a fundamental change, I think the fundamental change is coming when we tend to think through problems from a first principle basis and take a different approach to them within the boundaries of what is possible. Whereas the incremental improvement is we look at something and we just move the widget faster. And they're both valuable and they're both valuable in an organization, I think it's just a lot easier to do the incremental improvement. And if you think of optics and promotions and how sort of the internal dynamics of an organization work, it becomes a lot less risky to do the incremental improvement than think about things through a first principles basis and what's possible. Yeah, I guess that's somewhat in tension with another mental model you have here, or at least possibly so in doing no harm, it's often the well, first let's explore what that means. What do you mean by doing no harm? On your blog, you call this the Via negativa. Yeah. So harm avoidance. We're sort of like prone to demonstrate value in an organization. We're prone to having this bias towards action, this bias towards doing something and being seen as doing something. And often when we do that, we have a knee jerk reaction. We solve the most visible problem that exists. We don't necessarily solve the fundamental problem. And a great example of this is sort of if you think about software and you have a problem with the software, hypothetically, you're using an HR software at work, you have a problem with that software. And that problem is people can't take vacation leave through that software. They have to manage and track it through an Excel spreadsheet. And so you're put in charge of solving this problem. And while you go out in the world and you look for software that can solve this particular problem, where you can track vacation and you implement this new software but you don't realize that the software has created other problems. You don't realize that you've just changed one problem for another and the problems that you're getting now could be a lot worse than the ones that you're dealing with. The tension I saw there is that the Via Negativa model would counsel a kind of conservatism, right. Or an incrementalism where it's like rather than tear up the whole approach by the roots and reinvent it, you do just want to shave off inefficiencies or find other ways of optimizing what has worked in the past rather than completely rethink it. You mentioned Elon yesterday. He successfully launched his Falcon heavy rocket and landed all the booster stages, right. So this fundamental change of thinking of rocket launches as something that should be totally reusable and you got to figure out how to land these things lay on the first stage on his face. Sounds like a crazy idea, but once you set that goal based on rethinking the first principles of the whole enterprise, now we've discovered there's a solution but that requires such a vast use of resources to rethink something so fundamental in an area that's so expensive already. Obviously the goal here is to cut the costs and to make it a bigger industry. But it's easy to see that you could have gone down that path and for a very long time for Elon it looked like he was going down this path to a waiting cliff. Right. There was no guarantee of success. What an amazing time to be alive. Watching rockets launch and sort of like reland and then redeploy is well, that footage is so there are a few things which every time you see them, you don't really habituate to how weird and futuristic they seem. This is footage that I'm sure at some point will become jaded enough to say, well, of course that's the way that's supposed to work. But watching those boosters land perfectly in unison, it just looks like a science fiction movie from the 80s that was just preposterous. And then when you think you sort of alluded to why that happened, right. When he's being interviewed, I remember him talking about it in the sense of I just thought about what was possible and I thought it was possible, it was physically possible to reuse rockets. And so he thought about the problem in a different way and he has a very great ability to attract not only capital but people to working on those problems and the result can be amazing. But it's also important to note that not all of those results are amazing. I mean, we see this sort of like SpaceX's of the world and we probably don't see the hundreds or thousands of companies that rethink the problem as well and fail. But I mean, that's how we make incremental progress, right? I guess that's probably another mental model you have written about. There's a survivorship bias that we're constantly being advertised the evidence of only those success stories and we're not given any true indication of the ocean of failures that is behind many of those. Maybe we should talk about that. I guess it also connects to another model, which is just understanding base rates, just how many new businesses succeed, for instance. Or this is not something that you necessarily understand when you calculate the probability that any new venture is going to work out for you. I mean, our view is based on ego, right? So we think the restaurant we're opening or the podcast we're launching or the app we're doing, or sort of the new business that we're sort of endeavoring to undertake is going to be successful because we're involved in it. But everybody has that view and the success rates are abysmal, especially after a five year period. Same as marriage, right? If you ask people whether their marriage is going to be successful, if they're sort of like on day one and embarking on that, they're of course going to say, we're not going to fall victim to this. 50% of marriages dissolve sort of base rate. But you need to factor in that outside view in terms of making decisions and you don't need to do it all the time. Maybe it's best not to do it in matters of love, right, and maybe it's best to make a more emotional decision. There, I think, in that having a positive bias or an optimism bias could actually be a self fulfilling prophecy to some degree in many endeavors, the positive attitude has to account for something in various contexts. I agree. I think this desire to be purely rational all of the time in every decision that we make might actually be a disservice because it would sort of take people like Elon and why would I try to reuse a rocket? It's never been done before and it would sort of dissuade us from doing that. We need some sort of emotional component to our decision making. It's just a matter of determining when it's serving us and when it's hurting us and I think that would be the more accurate view of how you think about them. So, thought experiments, how do you think about thought experiments? The phrase now for me is fairly charged because I am the victim of having used thought experiments on controversial topics that did not get received like they were thought experiments. Which one? This is something that I got, being a student of philosophy, where just to look for any kind of ground truth, especially morally, you want to think of the corner cases. You want to think of conditions where you've simplified a real world scenario so that you can discover whether or not you actually have an argument against or for the thing you think should be clear cut. So probably the clearest case for me is thinking about the ethics of torture. It's a fascinating and consequential argument to be had about whether torture is ever ethical. And it's by no means straightforward when you line it up against the other things we accept without blinking our eyes, which on paper seem worse than torture as you line them up. And the example I used was collateral damage. But in order to have that conversation, you talk about ticking bomb scenarios, right, which in the real world don't happen very often, and in the purest cases, they don't happen at all. But the issue is, if you actually want to get down to bedrock, if you want to understand whether you can make an ethical argument against the use of torture in all cases, you need the clearest case. You need to say, okay, let's take out all the variables. Let's take out the uncertainty, for instance, of a person's guilt, right? So we know the person we have is guilty, right? We know that. Yeah. We caught him with his heart. He even claims to be guilty, right? And we caught him with his computer, and we can see the kinds of nefarious things he's been planning, and we see the plans for the nuclear device that he claims is hidden in the middle of a city, right? And he won't give us the information. So you need the purified case, not because that's the likely case, but let's just figure out if we actually have an argument against the use of torture in all cases because that would be immensely clarifying. Because if we solve that, then we know, okay, we're never tempted to make an exception to this rule, right, because we've thought it through in the clearest case where we know the person is guilty. We know they've got a nuclear bomb in the middle of a city. We know we have a shortage of time. There's no other methods we can use to get the intelligence. You distill it down to the case where even good people would be the most tempted to resort to torture, then see if you have an argument against it. But what happens when you have conversations like that is that then people, rather than receive them in the spirit of ethical inquiry for the purpose of charting a course in the future politically, they put a journalistic or political lens on it from the start, right? In a clearer case, it is the case I haven't actually used, but this is the kind of thing that one would routinely do in a philosophy seminar. You say, okay, well, why can't we eat babies? Right? There are unwanted children in the world. They're full of protein. What's wrong with eating babies now? It's not that the person who's raising that example has an interest in eating babies. This is like a laser focus on moral bedrock, right, to go that far to the edge case. And it's instructive that some people will find it difficult to even argue that case, right? Some people will feel like they need to resort to a holy book revealed by an invisible god in order to get you some bedrock where you can stand so as to not eat babies. And so it is an engine of interesting and morally rich conversation. Obviously, not all thought experiments deal with ethically fraught territory, but I do find that the concept of a thought experiment has been stigmatized because it is synonymous with, or thought to be synonymous with not making contact with the real world. You're basically creating the straw man case that you are then going to use to guide you in the future with predictably bad results. A couple of comments just as you were talking there. One of the things that I found myself thinking as you were talking is how do we find out about what we think on an issue? How do we find out where we land on a particular issue? And so we're expected to have these fully formed opinions. We're expected to have these fully thought out and we have really, I would argue it's sort of increasingly difficult to have conversations about these things and that in itself is a problem. Can you imagine sort of like the outrage that would ensue about having this debate on Twitter or just trying to figure out where you land, you put this out there and then the feedback would be like the media would be all over you, people would be jumping on you. I don't have to imagine it. This is my life on Twitter, but this is it. This is why I'm tempted to delete my Twitter account on a monthly basis. Aren't we better off having this safe space, like almost like a sandbox, where we can play with ideas, where we can explore things where they don't have to infect us, we don't have to believe it? For me, this podcast has become that sandbox. I have taken great pains to insulate it against the normal commercial pressures, as you know. Maybe we'll talk about that at some point. But another example occurs to me that a guest brought up who I believe you've also had on your podcast, Will McCaskill, the physicist, who's just fantastic. And he was talking about the ethics of running into a burning building to save a child. You could do that, but if you run to that burning building and on your way to the child's bedroom, you discover that there is a Picasso on the wall and you could also save that and liquidate that. And we use the $75 million or whatever you get from that sale to save many more children than one. Right? And so if there were really a zero sum contest between the money or the child, at minimum, that's an interesting ethical apparent ethical dilemma to sort through. We have a very strong intuition that you would be a psychopath to grab a painting rather than a child from a burning house. But of course, the choice is never really presented to us in that form, but there are many analogous choices. When you look at just the decision for a news organization to spend 24 hours covering a story about a single suffering person as opposed to a genocide that is raging in some distant country, the way we marshal our resources. The single compelling case that causes the massive judgment, as opposed to these statistics, of vast human suffering that doesn't move the needle at all. This is how we can discover and correct for moral bugs that are that are actually of great consequence. We need a mechanism to sort of have these conversations, and I think it's going away. And as of right now, the only safe, guaranteed safe space you ever have is just inside your own brain. But in the future, we might even see that go away as technology increasingly sort of, like, permeates us and maybe our skin. And then what happens is the Minority Report might become real, right, where you think of somebody cuts you off and you're like, I want to kill them, and all of a sudden you're arrested because you have this thought. And I think we're in a very interesting time for thinking where that sandbox doesn't exist. You can't go out being Sam Harris and say something because you're you. But I mean, a lot of people with such a public profile can't come out with a controversial idea because the backlash on them is going to be so huge. And I think as a society, we need a way to sort of maybe prefin. Maybe if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes, AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, this is yet another occasion where I'm putting the whole podcast outside the paywall. We've been doing this a lot during the pandemic. There are certain topics where I feel a responsibility to reach the widest possible audience, and I seem to be doing podcasts on these sorts of topics of late. So the topic today is the threat of nuclear war. And as you'll hear, I think the prospect of our blundering into a nuclear war, either by accident or political miscalculation, is probably the greatest risk we face. And its danger is compounded by the fact that almost no one appears to be thinking about this risk. So this podcast is another PSA. I'll just remind you that if you value what I'm doing over here, subscribing is what makes that possible, and it's what helps this platform grow, and it's what makes it a place where I can talk about anything. Now, as chance would have it, we're coming up on the 75th anniversary of the atomic bomb in about a week. July 16 is the 75th anniversary of Trinity, the explosion of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in Alamagordo, New Mexico. Whatever the merits or necessity of our building the bomb and even using it to end the war with Japan, I can certainly be debated. But what is absolutely clear to anyone who studies the ensuing 75 years is that these were 75 years of folly, nearly suicidal folly. And this has been a chapter in human history of such reckless stupidity that it's been a kind of moral oblivion, and there's no end in sight. Rather, we have simply forgotten about it. We have forgotten about the situation we are in every day of our lives. This is really difficult to think about, much less understand. The enormity of our error here is stupefying in some basic sense. It's like we were convinced 75 years ago to rig all of our homes and buildings to explode, and then we just got distracted by other things, right? And most of us live each day totally unaware that the status quo is as precarious as it in fact is. So when the history of this period is written, our descendants will surely ask, what the hell were they thinking? And we are the people of whom that question will be asked. That is, if we don't annihilate ourselves in the meantime, what the hell are we thinking? What are our leaders thinking? We have been stuck for nearly three generations in a posture of defending civilization or imagining that we are by threatening to destroy it at any moment. And given our capacity to make mistakes, given the increasing threat of cyber attack, the status quo grows less tenable by the day. The first book I ever read about the prospect of nuclear war was Jonathan Shell's the Fate of the Earth, which originally came out in The New Yorker in 1982. It's interesting that Shell's work here stands exactly at the midpoint on the timeline between the world of today and the invention of the bomb. So 37 years had elapsed since the Trinity test. One Shell wrote The Fate of the Earth, and another 37 years and a few months in change have elapsed since he wrote that book. If you haven't read it, it's a beautifully written and amazingly sustained exercise in thinking about the unthinkable, and I'd like to read you a few passages to give you a sense of it. This is from the beginning, starting a few sentences in these bombs were built as weapons for war, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threatened to end history. They were made by men, yet they threatened to annihilate man. They are a pit into which the whole world can fall, a nemesis of all human intentions, actions and hopes. Only life itself, which they threaten to swallow up, can give the measure of their significance. Yet, in spite of the immeasurable importance of nuclear weapons, the world has declined, on the whole, to think about them very much. We have thus far failed to fashion or even to discover within ourselves an emotional or intellectual or political response to them. This peculiar failure of response in which hundreds of millions of people acknowledge the presence of an immediate, unremitting threat to their existence and to the existence of the world they live in but do nothing about it. A failure in which both self interest and fellow feeling seem to have died, has itself been such a striking phenomenon that it has to be regarded as an extremely important part of the nuclear predicament as this has existed so far. End quote. So there Shell gets at the strangeness of the status quo, where the monster is in the room, and yet we have managed to divert our attention from it. And I love this point he makes it's a violation both of self interest and fellow feeling. Our capacity to ignore this problem somehow seems psychologically impossible. It's a subversion of really, all of our priorities, both personal and with respect to our ethical commitments to others. A little bit later on, he talks about this state of mind a little more because denial is a form of self protection, if only against anguishing thoughts and feelings, and because it contains something useful and perhaps even in its way, necessary to life. Anyone who invites people to draw aside the veil and look at the peril face to face is at risk of trespassing on inhibitions that are part of our humanity. I hope, in these reflections, to proceed with the utmost possible respect for all forms of refusal to accept the unnatural and horrifying prospect of a nuclear holocaust. So there shell is being more tactful than I'm being here, admitting that this denial is on some level necessary to get on with life but it is nonetheless crazy. Year after year after year we are running the risk of mishap here and whatever the risk, you can't keep just rolling the dice. And so it seems time to ask when is this going to end? And Shell describes the prospect of nuclear war or nuclear accident about as clearly as anyone can. This is from later in the book. Let us consider, for example, some of the possible ways in which a person in a targeted country might die. He might be incinerated by the fireball or the thermal pulse. He might be lethally irradiated by the initial nuclear radiation. He might be crushed to death or hurled to his death by the blast wave or its debris. He might be lethally irradiated by the local fallout. He might be burned to death in a firestorm. He might be injured by one or another of these effects and then die of his wounds before he was able to make his way out of the devastated zone in which he found himself. He might die of starvation because the economy had collapsed and no food was being grown or delivered or because existing local crops had been killed by radiation or because the local ecosystem had been ruined or because the ecosphere of the Earth as a whole was collapsing. He might die of cold for lack of heat and clothing or of exposure for lack of shelter. He might be killed by people seeking food or shelter that he had obtained. He might die of an illness spread in an epidemic. He might be killed by exposure to the sun if he stayed outside too long following serious ozone depletion. Or he might be killed by any combination of these perils. But while there's almost no end to the ways to die in and after a holocaust each person has only one life to lose. Someone who has been killed by the thermal pulse can't be killed again in an epidemic. Therefore, anyone who wishes to describe a holocaust is always at risk of depicting scenes of devastation that in reality would never take place because the people in them would already have been killed off in some other earlier scene of devastation. The task is made all the more confusing by the fact that the causes of death and destruction do not exist side by side in the world but often encompass one another in widening rings. Thus, if it turned out that a holocaust rendered the earth uninhabitable by human beings then all the more immediate forms of death would be nothing more than redundant preliminaries leading up to the extinction of the whole species by a hostile environment. In much the same way, if an airplane is hit by gunfire and thereby caused to crash dooming all the passengers it makes little difference whether the shots also killed a few of the passengers in advance of the crash. On the other hand, if the larger consequences which are less predictable than the local ones failed to occur, then the local ones would have their full importance again and then jump in a little further on. Here there are two further aspects of a holocaust which, though they do not further obscure the factual picture, nevertheless vex our understanding of this event. The first is that although in imagination we can try to survey the whole prospective scene of destruction inquiring into how many would live and how many would die and how far the collapse of the environment would go under, attacks of different sizes and piling up statistics on how many square miles would be lethally contaminated, or what percentage of the population would receive 1st, 2nd or third degree burns, or be trapped in the rubble of its burning houses, or be irradiated to death. No one actually experiencing a holocaust would have any such overview. The news of other parts necessary to put together that picture would be one of the things that were immediately lost and each surviving person, his vision drastically foreshortened by the collapse of his world and his impressions clouded by his pain, shock, bewilderment and grief, would see only as far as whatever seen of chaos and agony happen to lie at hand. For it would not be only such abstractions as industry and society and the environment that would be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. It would also be over and over again the small collections of cherished things, known landscapes and beloved people that made up the immediate contents of individual lives. The other obstacle to our understanding is that when we strain to picture what the scene would be like after a holocaust, we tend to forget that for most people and perhaps for all, it wouldn't be like anything, because they would be dead. To depict the scene as it would appear to the living is to that extent a falsification. And the greater the number killed, the greater the falsification. The right vantage point from which to view a holocaust is that of a corpse. But from that vantage point, of course, there is nothing to report. Anyway, the writing is wonderful and it's still an important book 37 years hence. And in today's episode, I'm speaking to a man who has been presiding over this impossible situation since nearly the beginning, because today I'm speaking with William J. Perry and also with his granddaughter, Lisa Perry. As many of you know, William Perry has served in many capacities here with respect to our stewardship of nuclear weapons and our navigation of the Cold War. He was the US. Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Carter administration. And then he was Secretary of Defense under President Clinton. He oversaw the development of the strategic nuclear systems that are currently in our arsenal, and his offset strategy ushered in the age of stealth and smart weapons and other technologies that changed the face of modern warfare. In 2015, he founded the William j. Perry Project outlining his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. And he's been trying to educate the public on how urgently we need to take practical steps to reduce the danger of the status quo. He has a new book out called The Button the New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump. And the Button goes into this terrifying history and the terrifying status quo. He's also an emeritus professor at Stanford University. And as you'll hear, at 92 years old, william Perry is quite worried about our situation, and he continues to work to convey that concern to the general public. I mentioned it in the podcast, but if you haven't seen his video on the prospect of nuclear terrorism, which is only one facet of the problem of nuclear risk, you really should see it. It's a great animation that brings home just how crazy our situation is with respect to that variable alone. Also joining me today is Lisa Perry. Lisa is the communications director for the William J. Perry project. As I said, she's the granddaughter of Secretary Perry, and she's now dedicated to helping sound this alarm about the modern threat of nuclear weapons. And to that end, she has a new podcast titled at the Brink. You can go to athebrink.org or just download it in your podcaster. And that podcast is well worth listening to. And it was a great honor to talk to both Secretary Perry and Lisa Perry. And as you might expect, we discuss the ever present threat of nuclear war. We talk about the history of nuclear weapons. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cuban Missile Crisis the present threat of accidental nuclear war. Nuclear terrorism. Unilateral disarmament. The psychology of deterrence. So called tactical nuclear weapons, cyber security'security. The details of command and control, nuclear proliferation, some of the intermediate steps we could take toward safety, the prospects of strategic missile defense, nuclear winter and other topics. And now, without further delay, I bring you Secretary William J. Perry and Lisa Perry. I am here with Secretary William Perry and his granddaughter, Lisa Perry. Thank you both for joining me. Thank you. We're happy to do it. So, Secretary Perry, I've already told you I'm going to stumble over your honorific, I'm going to default to calling you Bill, which you've already assured me is inoffensive. So thank you for that. But you have a book coming out titled The Button the New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman To Trump. And you also have started the William J. Perry Project@williamjperry.org, the purpose of which is to educate the public on the dangers of nuclear weapons in the 21st century. And we were just talking offline about how we've gone to sleep on this topic. So I do want to get into the psychology of this with both of you. And Lisa, happily, you have a new podcast titled at the Brink, which discusses your grandfather's work and the ongoing dangers of nuclear weapons. And when that comes out, I will remind people both through this podcast and whatever other podcast I released at that point, that they should tune into it. Because I do think this is probably still the most pressing issue of our time, and it is quite deranging to recognize how little attention it is getting, even from people like myself who acknowledge that it's probably the most pressing issue of our time. It's probably been the most pressing issue of every moment I've been alive, and yet most of my moments have been spent blithely ignoring this issue. So I just want to welcome both of you, and perhaps we can begin with you, Bill. What is your history of engagement with this topic? I have been involved as a consultant on nuclear issues dating back to Eisenhower, and I've been personally advising presidents since President Carter. So in the earlier administrations, I was an anonymous person working on studies, and later administrations, I was not anonymous. Where would you have been during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is, you know, often thought to be the moment of greatest peril we've ever experienced? Did you have a a moment to moment experience of that, or is that something that you I did. It was again, it was an anonymous role, but a very important role. I was called back before I ever knew there was a Cuban Missile crisis, before we even heard that term. I was called to come back to Washington to help out by the Deputy Director, CIA, and he asked me to head a small team must have been six of us, I think, whose job was to study. The intelligence was coming in every day, particularly the photographs from the overflights, but the communications intelligence as well, and to write a report by the end of the day which would assess whether or not the medium range missiles which were being deployed in Cuba were operational yet or how long it would be before they became operational. This report got to President Kennedy first thing in the morning and helped him decide how much more time he had for diplomacy. So it was a very important role in that. In the face of advisers of his who were urging an attack on Cuba, military attack, he was trying to hold that off as long as possible to give diplomacy a chance to work, but he wanted to know how long he had to do that. And so the purpose of this study we were doing each day was to basically advise him how many more days he had for diplomacy. I didn't appreciate until very recently. I just recorded a podcast with Fred Kaplan, who wrote a book focusing on the experience of each administration that has engaged with our nuclear policy. And I wasn't aware of the degree to which Kennedy was essentially being goaded to war and the mistaken impression we got that he sort of stared Khrushchev down, and Khrushchev blinked. There was a sort of back channel deal around pulling our nukes out of Turkey, which is what de escalated the crisis, and I think that wasn't revealed until 20 years later. What lesson do you draw from that moment in history, and how has your thinking about nuclear weapons evolved since? Well, I was close enough to what was happening that I believed every day that I went into the analysis center I believed was going to be my last day on Earth. I knew the President was being pressured to take military action. I could see how dangerous the military action would be and how likely it would be to escalate. What I did not know at the time, and therefore the president did not know, was that in addition to the medium range missiles, which were not yet operational, that the series had also deployed so called tactical nuclear missiles. They were already there. They were already loaded with nuclear warheads, and they already and the military commander of that unit had the authority to use them. So if Kennedy had accepted the advice of his military advisers to attack Cuba, in particular, if he'd made an invasion of Cuba, our troops undoubtedly would have been decimated on the beachhead with tactical nuclear weapons and the general nuclear war we truly have called it. Now, we didn't know that at the time. And so when Kennedy assessed that the likelihood of a Cuban missile crisis erupting into a catastrophic nuclear war was one chance and three, he made that assessment without the knowledge that those tactical nuclear weapons are already there and already operational. So the situation was much more dangerous than he realized. I would assess the likelihood of that ending of catastrophic war knowing what I now know is better than 50 50. And take me back to the beginning of our thinking about these weapons and their use. And I guess the real beginning is our first use of them at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Right. At the time. How did you view our use of, I guess Nagasaki is harder or perhaps easier to dismiss as a misuse of nuclear weapons. But what did you think and what do you think about our use at Hiroshima? Well, at the time, I can easily tell you what I thought then. I was a 17 year old. I was about ready to go into the army. You would have been sent to Japan? I was have actually sent to Japan. That was after the war was over. So a few months after the bomb was dropped, I went into the army, and after basic training, went on to the army of occupation in Japan. So I was wholly in favor of it at this time. It was only later that I began to see the ramifications well beyond the quick ending of the war. Right. We should remind people of the history here, because the war against Germany had already been won. Hitler was already dead at that point. And this was really a story of ending the war with Japan earlier than it would have ended otherwise. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there was any concern that we were going to lose the war with Japan. But we were thinking we were going to save many American lives by ending it emphatically with this first use of nuclear weapons. Just plead ignorance here. What was the justification for Nagasaki? And why not let the implications of the bombing of Hiroshima have their psychological effect? Why did we so quickly follow on with the bombing of Nagasaki? Well, the outcome was never in doubt. What was in doubt is how many deaths would be resolved required for that to happen. We had, at the time an invasion force already on the way to Japan and being assembled to go to Japan. It would have been an invasion force even larger than what we had at Omaha Beach. So this would have been a big invasion and very costly invasion. That was one point. Second related point was the Japanese army was not prepared to surrender. Even with invasion. They were prepared to fight on the beaches and the towns, in the hills and the mountains, fight to the death. So it would have been a very costly invasion in human life. Not just we thought, of course, about American human lives, but there probably would have been millions of Japanese deaths resulting from that and the long prolonged guerrilla warfare. So at the time, and even to this day, I have no doubt that the alternative to dropping the bomb would have been a very costly invasion. Even after we dropped the first bomb, the Japanese army was not prepared to surrender. And even after we dropped the second bomb, the army was still not prepared to surrender. And the surrender only occurred when the Emperor did something that was totally unprecedented. He intervened and he went on the radio and announced the surrender. Right. The army was still opposed to surrender and in fact, there was a boarded attempt to make a palace coup after he announced the surrender. So the resistance to surrendering in Japan was very strong and it was by the most powerful group in Japan at the time, the Japanese army. So any assessment of the bomb dropping has to be made with the understanding of what the alternative was. And we have pretty good information then and even better information now on how recalcitrant the Japanese army was being and how unwilling they were to surrender. I think it's also important historical context to understand. Truman didn't actually so when he was vice president, he was not informed about the Manhattan Project. He did not know about it until he became the president. They told him that they had been working on this project and they had developed an atomic bomb, which came as quite a shock to him. And so when it was actually the generals who brought forth this plan to Truman saying, we have these weapons, and we have put together this plan to attack these cities in Japan, and originally, actually, it was not Hiroshima who was the first city that was chosen, and then they moved it to Hiroshima. But as historical evidence indicates, they somewhat misled Truman to believe that they were targeting military targets, not specifically civilian cities. So when Truman agreed to this plan, he thought that they were mostly going to be targeting military targets. And just with the amount of communication and how long it took for information to get out, it wasn't really until the Nagasaki bomb was dropped that they were really understanding the numbers of deaths that were coming out from these incidences. And that is when Truman actually went in, they had a plan to continue to drop bombs. They were going to drop more than just Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And after Nagasaki, and the reports were coming in of the hundreds of thousands of deaths that Truman went and said, no more. I will not let you drop any more bombs, and took the power away from the generals to have any authority over these weapons. And in fact, that is the history of the beginning of what eventually would become presidential sole authority over nuclear weapons was that transfer of military to civilian power and making sure that nuclear weapons stayed under civilian control. To make sure and try to take this power away from any potentially power hungry sort of military members, which, as you know, then sort of morphed into its own problem. So we have just landed really in the center of the morass here, because this is not an easy problem to think about, because we have already demonstrated the actual utility under certain circumstances of having these weapons. In fact, it's even plausible to say that lives were saved by the use of the first atomic bombs in World War II. And we've already demonstrated our willingness, obviously, to use them under certain circumstances. And as you point out, Lisa, the transfer to civilian control, which makes so much sense in light of that first experience, is now its own enormous problem. In the presence of someone like Donald Trump, who's followed every moment of the day with the so called nuclear football, we're in the process of rethinking that or trying to inspire our society to rethink that. And it's hard to find a line through this that is going to check all the boxes that we want to check here that's going to allow us to arrive at all the topics we want, we want to arrive at in a systematic way. But, I mean, here's the general picture that worries me and that I'm getting from having begun listening to your podcast, Lisa, and becoming aware of Bill's work and reading other sources here. There's a logic of nuclear proliferation and deterrence which seems somewhat inescapable and diabolical because having nukes is the difference that makes the difference on the world stage. In so many cases, countries just treat you differently once you have nukes. They don't tend to invade you. The reason why a country like North Korea or Pakistan or India would want nukes or Iran now it's not crazy for them to want these weapons because it's a fact of the matter that this power matters and deterrence only works between nations on the assumption that a country will actually use its nukes. So the fact that we believe that nuclear armed countries will use their nukes to respond to any significant aggression and of course any kind of nuclear for a strike, that's the psychological reality that gives the game theory its motive force. But this status quo, the fact that we have countries and individuals who have nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert and with launch on warning protocols and we have this demonstrated at least professed willingness to use these weapons under certain circumstances is what makes the possibility of stumbling into an accidental nuclear war so real. And I know, Bill, in your book you write that actually the likelihood of an accidental nuclear war is much higher than a war started in earnest because some country initiated first strike on another. I don't know if you have a first point of purchase you want to take on this problem, Bill, but it just seems to me that the status quo should really be intolerable to us because we have a world that has been rigged to explode really based on mishap, right? Based on misinformation, based on the prospect of faulty radar or cyber attack or even the derangement of a single individual. How's it that you think about the current moment? Because I'll just add one more fact here. The Doomsday clock that has been registering our alarm for 70 some odd years now is at its closest point to midnight than it has been at any point in history. It's now 100 seconds to midnight in 2020 and in 1953 it was at two minutes to midnight and it was at around four to five minutes to midnight during most of the Cold War. So according to the clock, we are at more risk than we've ever been. And yet it seems to me that most people have gone entirely to sleep on this issue. So talk to us about what it's like to be on the brink. Bill. The first point I would make is that I agree with the Bulletin's assessment and without putting minutes or seconds on, I would simply say that the danger of a nuclear catastrophe today is at least as great as it was at any time during the Cold War and yet almost no one in the public understands that reality. So that's just one important point. The second thing to consider is we have assessed the danger for decades now as being the danger of a surprise attack. On the United States what we called during the Cold War a bolt out of the blue, and we geared our policies and we geared our force structure to deal with that threat. I believe the reality today, and even the reality during the Cold War was that was never the main threat. The threat has always been the danger of an accidental war, the danger of blundering into a nuclear war, either through a political miscalculation or through a technical error. We had several examples of each of those during the Cold War, which, happily, we survived. One of them, of course, the most significant chance of a political miscalculation was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And as we talked about earlier, I believe the chance of that having erupted into an absolutely catastrophic nuclear war was probably better than 50 50. There were other political miscalculations on the Cold War, but that's the poster child of them. Beyond that, there was a possibility of a technical accident, and we had at least three false alarms in the United States that I'm aware of and at least two in the Soviet Union that I'm aware of. And any of those could have resulted in an accidental nuclear war. So the real danger during the Cold War was not a bowl out of the blue. The real danger was blundering into a nuclear war. And I believe that that is the same situation today and with at least the same likelihood today. Not that Russia or North Korea or Iran, you name the country is going to deliberately launch an attack against the United States, but that we will blunder into some kind of a nuclear exchange with Russia or with one. Of the smaller powers just to sort of demonstrate the level of randomness and really how dangerous and how likely we could really just stumble into an accidental nuclear war. There's this really pretty crazy story of actually what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis. There was an incident at an air base in Duluth, Minnesota, where it was late at night, and patrols were patrolling the base, and in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everyone was on very high alert at the time, and someone noticed that there was someone trying to climb the fence into the air base. And they went, you know, in a panic and tried to set off the alarm for an intruder. And they hit the wrong switch, and they instead set off an alarm, which then notified the base to then launch their nuclear armed planes to start working towards a possible attack. It turned out that it was a bear. A bear was climbing a fence at an air base in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. And something as simple as that could have stumbled us into a nuclear war. And it's truly, when we are at these moments, these politically charged moments, when things are at their most scary, when it's the easiest for us to stumble. It's part of the reasons why the fire and fury rhetoric from President Trump was so concerning. Because whether you believe he would actually follow through or not, just putting out the notion that he might supercharges the atmosphere for people to interpret things that they might not otherwise, and to make decisions based on those interpretations which could really lead us to this escalating situation. I think the logic of deterrence is pretty straightforward and it's fairly solid. But part of the issue is that there are actually some assumptions that we make about the situation that is in place for deterrence to hold up. And some of those assumptions include we assume that the people involved are rational actors, and we also assume that everyone involved has accurate and complete information, which unfortunately, especially in crisis situations, is not always true. And when you don't have full and complete information, you make decisions based on incomplete information. Deterrence can fall apart. Yeah, we're talking about human minds here, and human emotions and human assumptions and the psychology of confronting risk. And just to unpack a little more what you said about the Fire and Fury moment. So what we have there is President Trump threatening nuclear war. He's not the first president to do that. Many have done that since the first and only time we used these weapons. It should be understood that we have not renounced the option of a nuclear first strike. So the world is on notice that we and other nuclear powers are poised to use these weapons. It's our stated policy that under some circumstances we will use them even in response to conventional aggression. And in Trump's case, he was threatening their use in response to mere provocation, not conventional warmaking on the part of North Korea, but just further nuclear testing or even just further verbal threats that move the line of bellicosity a little further. But it's often thought that we would make an enormous gain, enormous step towards safety if we would renounce a first strike policy and merely had a second strike policy. But as you look at this, it should be clear that even if we had just a second strike policy, even if we told the world that under no circumstances would we be the first to use these weapons, we would merely respond to an attack upon us with a second strike. Even that policy leaves us open to an accidental nuclear war. Bill, your book starts with a scenario where a fictional US president gets bad information about an incoming strike that he learns too late was bad information, and he launches a retaliatory strike, which then becomes the real first strike to which the Russians respond with their retaliatory strike in a more or less ending human history. So correct me if I'm wrong, Bill, but it seems to me that while it would be progress of a sort to get to a second strike policy, we still have a time bomb on our hands. We still do. Notwithstanding that, I'm strongly in favor of moving to this second strike policy. It removes one of the probabilities, one of the possibilities of accidentally blundering into it doesn't remove all of them. But before we start talking about the possible path back from the brink here, maybe we should just talk about a few other terrifying concerns. Honestly, one of the most terrifying pieces of media I've seen over the years was an animation that you put out Bill Now a few years ago on nuclear terrorism, which it doesn't really fit into this logic of proliferation and deterrence in quite the same way, because any group that would do this, these don't tend to fall into the rational actor category. And also, it wouldn't necessarily be a nation state against which we could retaliate in response to an act of nuclear terrorism. But anyone who hasn't seen this video needs to see it. I'll put a link to it on my website, but they'll describe the scenario you concoct for nuclear terrorists and just how destabilizing a very low tech attack on us could be. The scenario we imagined was a rogue group within a small country's nuclear program. This is a rogue group that has access to the material but is not under full control of the government, and they build one nuclear bomb, ship it back to the United States, where their agent in the United States then detonated on Pennsylvania Avenue. The level of catastrophe of just one, let's say, Hiroshima type bomb, is more than most people would ever imagine. You know, besides 100,000 or so people casualties from this, there is the terror and the panic. In this case, it's in Washington. The government is decapitated, and the conclusion from it is a level of catastrophe that's really hard to imagine until you start going through the possibilities of a scenario like that. So we made that video to make to dramatize the point of how catastrophic one small nuclear bomb could be and the danger of nuclear terrorism. The good news from all this is that the one danger that we actually made some headway on in the last number of years is the one on nuclear terrorism. President Obama institute a program of getting all the nuclear powers together to take steps to improve the safeguards on their fiscal material. And I would say that whatever the probability of a terror group getting nuclear bomb was ten years ago, is substantially reduced because of what he has done in that area. So there's one bit of good news in all this is that we have taken steps, taken actions to reduce the likelihood of nuclear terrorism. The only real likelihood of a nuclear terror group being able to get a bomb, make it go, is if they could somehow get their hands on the fissile material. If they could do that, it's easier to imagine how they might be able to build a crude but effective nuclear bomb. Yeah. Have you followed any progress or lack thereof in our ability to detect nuclear materials coming into ports in shipping containers? I don't believe we could count on being able to detect that. There's another way. If I were the target group, I would be pretty confident I could find a way of getting the fissile material in. Right. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think in that video you talk about the prospect of a group setting off one bomb and then saying, you know, we have ten other bombs and ten other cities, you know, meet our demands or those go off too. Yeah. In the video we they only had one bomb and they they brag about they, they threatened the use of other bombs and the terror effect of that threat is as great as if they actually had them. The panic, not just in Washington, but all across the country is very great. And economic catastrophe, the results from that is very great. And you can look at just the changes that happened in our country after 911 and you can just imagine and extrapolate how much greater that something like a nuclear terrorist attack could be. I mean, there have been some experts who say this could be the end of our constitution as we know it, that this would really challenge pretty much everything that we hold as a nation to approach something like this. There is an upside to this, though, which is that there are things that we can do. And as my grandfather brought up, part of why we need to be having dialogues with countries like Russia no matter what is happening in other realms, in politics, we need to continue to have dialogues with all nuclear nations. Russia in particular because of how much this is an issue and that we cannot address the threat of nuclear terrorism as a single country. This is a global issue, and particularly nuclear powers need to be the most adamant to work on this because they have the materials, they have access to the materials. They need to make sure that they are securing these materials because it is quite intense endeavor to process these materials. It is not simple. It's not something that can be done casually. So generally when you're talking about terrorists getting their hands on fissile material, it's going to be coming from somewhere else. They're not going to be generating it themselves. And if it's coming from somewhere, it's coming from a refinery that is established and there are ways to track that. And that is what came down to with the Iran deal, is that despite all of whatever critics may say, there are ways to track these things and then they're quite robust. But we need to have a global cooperation to make sure that everyone is doing their part to secure these materials and to make sure that they are staying out of the hands of bad actors. But that requires dialogue, which unfortunately, in our current political environment has pretty much gone away, particularly between the US. And Russia. And that does leave us more open to this sort of situation. What was your views about our rescinding the Iran nuclear deal or stepping out of it ourselves? It was a major step backwards. We were gaining some degree of nuclear security through the Iran, the treaty we had with Iran or the agreement we had with Iran, and we just walked away from it. We walked away from it because the agreement we had did not include restrictions on other things that Iran was doing that we didn't approve of. And I understand why we were concerned about those. But because an agreement did not do everything doesn't mean we should give away what it did do. And what we did give away was the ability to constrain the nuclear program. That was, I think, a serious mistake. What about the argument that we should just unilaterally disarm or at least declare that there's really no scenario under which we would use these weapons? These can no longer be viewed as weapons of war. Given the logic of deterrence, I think we could take significant steps in that direction. Not all the steps that needed, but some of them. One in particular, when the last year or so of the Obama presidency, the second term of the Obama presidency, he was planning to reduce our nuclear stockpile unilaterally down to 1000 weapons. That is, the number of weapons deployed. We had a treaty which limited it to about 1600. And he said we don't need 1600. And so rather than going through the details of a new treaty agreement with Russia, he just unilaterally said we're going to drop them to 1000. That was a sensible thing to do, whether or not Russia followed suit, which was at least a possibility. But he got so much static on that that he backed away from it. So yes, it's a good idea, but politically in the United States and probably in Russia as well, politically it's very difficult to do if it's not matched by what Russia is doing. And we didn't have any agreement that Russia would go down to a comparable amount. So a good idea, but politically very hard to do. Right. I guess just in thinking about this, there is something fatalistic or even nihilistic about one's cast of thinking when one kind of goes through these scenarios. But if you just imagine the case of the worst case scenario russia decides to execute a full first strike against us and we're informed of it with a dozen minutes to spare, what is the rationale for retaliating under those conditions? Why would any president or any administration want to pointlessly kill hundreds of millions of people on the other side simply because we're all about to die? You're essentially doubling the likelihood that you'll usher in a full nuclear winter and erase human history entirely. If we could think ourselves to the point of realizing that it wouldn't be tempting to use these weapons, even in the case where they seem to most cry out for their use, at least the legitimacy of their use, what is the point of having them? What you're describing is what would certainly go through the mind of any president if he saw an attack heading towards the United States. He's exactly, I think, what he would be thinking and he might very well decide not to launch the retaliatory act even though he was capable of doing so for the reasons you've described. But of course, for deterrence to be effective, each leader, the leader of each country has to take the posture he's going to do that and it has to be a credible posture. So he cannot allow any doubt to creep into the other side's mind. But no matter how firm he is before this happens, no matter how clear he is of what he will do before this happens, if the attack is actually taking place, he would certainly go through that line of thinking. Any human being who is the president that state would certainly have to consider the possibility of not responding. But I think the more fundamental point, Sam, is that all of our thinking on this has been oriented around the possibility which is exceedingly remote, which is that the other side is going to launch see some political advantage to launching a major attack on us. Hundreds of nuclear weapons going off in the United States. What is the advantage of the other country to do that? What is the reason that he would do that? It just seems to me to be almost an irrational viewpoint. And yet our whole deterrence, our whole force posture, all of our policies are based on that as being the threat. Whereas in fact the real threat is a threat of blundering into a nuclear war through an accident or through a political miscalculation. That certainly was true all during the Cold War and it's also true still today. And because we have made the wrong assumption of what the threat is, we've taken a whole set of actions in terms of policy, in terms of force structure that designed to deal with this non threat, which in fact, aggravate make worse. The real threat we have, which is a threat of an accidental or blundering into a war. What incremental steps could we take that would importantly change the risk calculus? I think one idea that I've heard you discuss is just removing our land based missiles. Maybe if you think that's a good idea, talk about that and then let's talk about any other good ideas that are out there. ICBMs are by almost by definition a first strike weapon because they are in low known locations and it can be taken out. And so you would use them as a first use weapon not in a response weapon because they would be taken out before you could respond. So that makes them exceedingly dangerous, because their vulnerability if the President is alerted to an attack coming on the United States, he would have to assume that attack is going to be the first wave of that attack is going to be directed against their ICBMs. And therefore, he would be faced with the decision as to whether to launch those ICBMs before the attack impacts. And if he decides not to launch them, he risks losing all of the ICBMs. If he decides to launch them, he risks having accidentally start a nuclear war if in fact the alert he got was a false alert. So the, the ICBMs are unique, first of all, first strike weapon, which we don't plan to do, and secondly, uniquely dangerous because of the possibility of leading to an accidental war. For that reason, I think whatever level of nuclear forces we think we need for deterrence ought to be put into the submarine forces and air forces, and we should let the ICBM force phase out before it actually precipitates this accidental war. And the the decision that my grandfather was talking about, if the President were to be alerted that there was an attack underway, the time frame for that decision is roughly on the minute value of five to ten minutes. And mind you, this could be in the middle of the night, woken up the President coming out of bed saying there are missiles on the way. You have five to ten minutes to decide whether you use our ICBMs to launch a retaliatory strike or we lose all of those ICBMs. And it's really, it adds to this level of tension and this level of risk that you would insert into this situation that really seems untenable to maintain that situation. And that's an issue, that's not an issue with any of our other nuclear weapons or air and sea missiles, since those are generally considered in moving around in different locations and wouldn't be able to be so susceptible to a first strike. That danger is not academic to me. Many years ago, many decades ago, when I was the undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, I got a phone call in the middle of the night, about 03:00 a.m. This was 1979, I believe, phone call in the middle of the end, when the voice on the other end identified himself as the watch officer to North American Air Defense Command. And he says his computers were showing 200 ICBMs on the way from the Soviet Union to the United States. He quickly went on to explain that he was convinced his computers were in error and he was calling me. I was a technical person in Defense Department. I wasn't in the chain of command at the time. He was calling me to see if I could help him figure out what went wrong with his computers. But before he called me. Before he knew it was a false alarm, he did call the President. The call went through to the President's national security adviser, who was brzinski. And Brzinski waited for a few minutes before waking the President. And before he actually got to the President to awaken him, he got the second call telling him there was a false alarm, but he was within a minute or two of waking the President. Carter, who would have then had less than ten minutes to decide whether to launch our ICBMs in the middle of the night, no opportunity to consult with anybody, to get no way of getting context on what was going on, no way of assessing whether this was correct or not correct. He would have to make that decision. No President, no person should have to make a decision like that. But it's completely because of the vulnerability of our ICBMs to attack it's. Interesting I hear these details just cast back on to my underlying concern here, which is that I feel like we are ill equipped to have an appropriate psychological response to how insane this system is that we've built. We're now into the third generation of human beings who have built and maintained the system of self annihilation, which in the limit must approach a probability of one of malfunctioning. Right? I mean, we're just living year after year in this completely untenable circumstance and yet the insanity of it, the masochism of it is hard to keep in focus. As much as I'm paying attention to nothing else in this conversation, I know I'm going to go on with the rest of my day after we get off the line. And other things will capture my attention and be far more compelling to me than this problem, which I can do very little about. And I can do more than most people about it by having conversations with people like yourselves. There's a kind of moral paralysis around this because this is unlike so many other threats to our survival. This is completely self imposed. We're having this conversation in the context of Coronavirus making its progress around the globe and terrifying everybody. And that's a real problem that we didn't invent and that we are not sedulously maintaining. And it's the solution of those sorts of problems that should draw all of our ingenuity and energy. And yet we have this other problem. You would think it would take either the real existence of Satan or some diabolical superintelligence to mislead us into a place of being this idiotic with how we've prioritized our, our values. We're here, we're stuck here and we can't find a way out. I don't know if you have anything to say in response to that. I'm just kind of dumb struck by the fact that this is such an enormous problem, it is so unnecessary and yet it is also difficult to keep in view. I do have something to say about that. First of all. I agree with your assessment of how serious and how idiotic the problem is, but I do not agree with your assessment. There's very little you can do about it. It's the view that people have that they can't do anything about it. There's gardens in the fix we're in today. There are things you can do about it. In fact, this podcast is one of those things. The reason we have the problem is an education problem. People do not understand how dangerous it is. The political leaders do not understand how dangerous it is. And therefore we continue proceeding down the path with policies that allow us this dangerous situation to continue. There are a number of things we could do about it, concrete, specific things. They're political actions which no one of us can take. But if we can educate the public and educate our political leaders, then they can take those changes which would greatly reduce simple changes which would greatly reduce, for example, ending the presidential solo authority, prohibiting first use, prohibiting launch on warning, all of those things which are easy to do, could make a big difference in the danger. And you and I can take actions through education that can lead to the public state of mind, which could create the environment in which the politicians could take those actions. It's part of why I got so invested in this. When my grandfather started his foundation to start working to educating the public on these issues, I was so inspired because as you said, I am part of the so called millennial generation. And despite who my grandfather is, I really didn't understand that these were issues that were relevant today, that these were modern issues, that these are something that I needed to worry about. And when I started to grasp the scale and the severity of what was really happening around me, I couldn't do anything but try and do something about it to try to raise the alarm on it. That is why we started our podcast. And that's sort of the focus of what we're talking about is not just diving into what are the specific issues, let's understand how we got here, what they are, but also talking about what are concrete solutions that we can start working towards to reduce the danger. Because I think one of the things that happens when we talk about nuclear weapons in particular, that comes up a lot in the dialogue about this issue is people tend to have this sort of all or nothing approach and it's understandable. It's this really overwhelming concept. It's hard for us as humans for our minds to grasp the level of devastation, the level of destructive power that nuclear weapons have and it's much easier for us to just shut them out than it is to think about what it is that we have created here. But the truth is that there are incremental things that we can do to start to lower the risk. And that is actually very worthwhile in doing. It is very worthwhile in taking the time to push for these changes. And in fact, it may not seem like it, but there have been things that have happened over the decades since nuclear weapons were invented that have lowered the risks and it's just a matter of we need to bring the attention back to these issues so that we can continue to push for those things. And one of the things right now that is so concerning to me is that because we do not have this general public education about this as an issue, there are things that are happening in the background that we are doubling down on nuclear weapons because no one is standing up to say no, we do not want this. We do not accept this. Particularly and unfortunately this actually happened under the Obama administration is that he approved what is so called the nuclear modernization program. He approved this as a way to get the New Start deal passed and unfortunately as good as the New Start deal is, and I'm glad that he was able to get that passed, the fact that he pushed through this nuclear modernization plan I think is going to be largely a negative. What the nuclear modernization plan is doing is taking all of our older nuclear arsenal and updating them. But it is more than that because understandably it does make a lot of sense and it is very smart to make sure that if we are going to have nuclear weapons, that we make sure that those weapons are in strict operational shape, that they are in the best operational shape that we can make them to be. However, what is happening is that we are basically rebuilding a Cold War arsenal without ever questioning whether we should continue to have any of these weapons, when this is really the perfect time to say, let's look at what we have and really question maybe we could do better with less. Maybe we could reduce and get rid of our ICBMs. Just let them go into the trash heap, let them phase out. Maybe we could lower the number of weapons that we have overall. And in fact, as part of this nuclear modernization plan, the Trump administration has tacked on to it. And we are now developing so called lower yield tactical nuclear weapons, which are particularly concerning because there is this thought and this fear, and I think it's a very founded fear that having a lower yield nuclear weapon lowers the threshold for our military believing that they could use these weapons in a tactical and military sense. And as many experts will say, there is no understanding of when you use any nuclear weapon, whether it is a so called tactical nuclear weapon or a full warhead, whether that would not escalate to a full blown nuclear war. And of course, to give you context, these tactical nuclear. Weapons are roughly eight to ten kilotons, which is on par with a Hiroshima style nuclear bomb. So these are still incredibly disastrous, devastating weapons. And this is the sort of thing that we are slipping into because we do not have the public awareness and that political pressure to start changing things. There's really not too many people in our elected government right now who are fighting for these things. There are a few who are educated and are fighting, but they don't have enough allies to really make much happen. There is, in fact, actually legislation. There is a no first use legislation that has been put forth. There is also a limiting presidential sole authority legislation, as Congressman Ted Lieu and Edward Markey have put forth legislation that would remove presidential sole authority to launch nuclear weapons first without the approval of Congress. It does allow for a president to be the sole decider in the event of an attack to allow for that safety scenario. But it would remove what is currently our US. Policy, where the President and the President alone has the power and complete authority to launch a nuclear weapon without any checks or balances. And those are things that we can do concrete today, right now, to lower these risks, to start to work towards a world in which eventually maybe we don't have nuclear weapons anymore. Can you see the possibility of getting rescued by new technology? Here one idea that perhaps other people have had it and spoken about it, and I'm just not aware of it, but what if our cyber war capabilities became suddenly decisive and we could just turn out the lights and zero out the financial system in a target country? And in response to that, we decided, okay, we're getting out of this nuclear game. We're never going to launch these weapons, but threaten us with those weapons will turn your lights out. Is there any rescue that could come from a lateral move here that would take us out of the standard logic of deterrence? I do not believe so. I think just the opposite, that the new technology, for example, cyber aggravates. Rather than mitigates the threat, the cyber could be used by a rogue nation or by a malignant third party to interfere with our command and control or Russia's command and control. So as I see it, it increases the possibility of an accidental nuclear launch rather than, to me, the cyber a problem and not a solution. I want to just remind everyone of the human element here, because the current scenario is that this is for the President to decide, and the clock in many of these cases is ticking very quickly. And so you have Carter being woken up in the middle of the night, or almost woken up, and he would have had minutes to decide whether to launch our ICBMs. Is it true, Bill, that this could be apocryphal? But I remember hearing that Reagan thought that our ICBMs could be recalled after launch. Is that true? Has any president actually believed that? I don't know if that's true, but it's a certainly plausible theory because you would think we would have that capability. And in fact, we deliberately decided not to have that capability because of the fear that somebody might some, again, some malignant person after we launched, might send up a signal to deactivate the nuclear warheads. So for whether that is a good reason or not a good reason, we do not have that capability. So once we launch them, they are gone. Now, it's reasonable for people to believe that we would have a recall capability or destruction capability, and therefore it's quite possible that Reagan actually believed that for a while. But I'm sure somebody would have set him straight on it if he did. Yeah, but obviously the current occupant of the Oval Office doesn't really advertise his eagerness to fill in the blank spots on his map of what's going on. And that's married to a claim to understand everything, no matter what the topic is before him. And none of this inspires confidence. And I think even his supporters would imagine that he knows less about the details here than probably any occupant of the Oval Office before him. Right. And so you can imagine he's being given the prospect of using tactical nuclear weapons or low yield nuclear weapons and never even bothering to understand that, at least as you say, these weapons are as big as what we dropped on Hiroshima. Like the idea of just using these on the battlefield in Eastern Europe in response to some provocation and the logic, or lack thereof, by which you arrest a slide into a full scale nuclear war. Having used them, even his supporters, I think, can't have any confidence that he has thought through any of this or upon being forced to think it through with the clock ticking, will be especially good at it. Who's happy with the status quo here? It seems hard to change the status quo. Who's making it hard to change? I have to say that I share your concerns here, but I've also been concerned about other presidents through the years as well. Anytime you have a president that has a psychological problem, anytime you have a president who's in the heavy drinking, anytime you have a president that's taking medication for whatever reason, president Kennedy, for example, was taking heavy medication to alleviate the pain he suffered, and we have no way of knowing that that could have caused an impairment of his thinking. But it's conceivable. We do know that Nixon was in the heavy drinking in the last month or so of his presidency, and that would be a very substantial problem. So while I'm particularly concerned about the problems you described with President Trump, I really do not want any presidents to have the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. Yeah. Although, as Lisa pointed out this was considered progress when we lifted it from the hands of the military industrial complex. Well, we took it from the military, and that was the right thing to do. Why does it have to be with just one civilian? Why can't it? When we declare war, according to our Constitution, it requires an act of Congress. The Founders believe that declaring war is such a consequential act that it should require there should be impediments for the way to doing it, and then no single person should make that decision. And certainly launching a nuclear attack on another country is an extreme version of declaring war. Right. But then how would this apply to a retaliatory strike? Because if we only have twelve or the outside 30 minutes to get our act together, the reason we have evolved such a dangerous set of policies is because we have believed that the threat was a surprise attack from the Soviet Union originally, and now from Russia, a surprise attack against the United States. And therefore all of our policies, including how we respond to that, have been based on that theory. And given that, then the idea of having a single person make the decision and make it quickly makes some sense. But if you take away the necessity to make a decision in five minutes, if you say we have an hour to make the decision, or a day to make the decision, or a couple of days to make the decision, then having a single person make that decision makes no sense at all. And I think I want to illustrate just how scary our presidential sole authority system is. Is that right now, the way that the US system works partly in that mode, to respond to this threat of a potential bolt, out of the blue, the President can order a launch of nuclear weapons using the football. That order would then go on to the National Military Command Center, which would then go to the missiles and the bases and things. There have been generals in recent meetings in questioning whether we should rescind this power in lieu of the threats that President Trump has made. Generals who have said former generals of stratcom, claiming that we shouldn't worry because the military would not follow any unlawful order. In particular, they bring up the notion of military law requires the notion of proportionality and appropriateness. However, those orders do not necessarily go through stratcom to get to our missile ears. They do go to stratcom, but they go at the same time. And actually, I've spoken with Bruce Blair, who is a nuclear security professor, as well as a founder of Global Zero, and in his history was himself a nuclear missile several decades ago. And he talks about during his time in that position how rigorously that they are trained to respond to these orders in roughly in the space of three to five minutes that they would get this order. So this is really a regimented system that when it goes when the order is confirmed, it goes through. No one can countermand it. It goes through from the President to the missile ears in a couple of minutes that we would then be going to turn the keys to launch these nuclear weapons. And in fact, he said in all of the years that he was doing this, they were never trained to stop. They were never trained to stop or ask. As long as it was confirmed, they would turn the keys to launch the weapons. I think the simple point to make here is when the General says that they would not follow a new legal order if the President sends a command to launch, that's a legal order. Right. Whatever the reasons behind it, it's a legal order. So what the distractor General was saying was really a non sequitur. Yeah, this also came up in my discussion with Fred Kaplan, and he pointed out that the fairly Kafka esque logic here is that any protocol, any launch command that's already in the book has been vetted by military lawyers. So if you launch anything that's off the menu, it is by definition a legal order. And now you're just adding the vertical logic that if it's coming from the President, it is also, by definition a legal order. It's amazing. So let's just talk about proliferation for a moment because it's obviously the greatest risk is the status quo of mutually assured destruction between Russia and the US. But many other countries are acquiring or have acquired or seeking to acquire these weapons for reasons that are not surprising. The difference between if you're North Korea with nukes and without nukes, you are treated very differently by the powers you provoke. And so it is with Pakistan, and so it would be with Iran. What are your thoughts on proliferation? I mean, it's easy to see from their point of view. We have a system that I forget which country first used this phrase, it might have been India, but we have a system that looks like nuclear apartheid. The haves and the have nots with this technology. What do you think about the prospects of halting proliferation at this point and even rolling it back? Not very good. For the reasons you've just given, that any country can see the advantage to their security of having nuclear weapons. That's not a loosely advantage, it's a real advantage. North Korea, when they got nuclear weapons for obvious reason, which they believed it would give them security, what they saw as a real threat, which is a threat of the United States overthrowing the regime. So they got nuclear weapons to deter that threat. And they successfully, I think, accomplished that mission. So any country can see that as a good deal. For that reason, years ago, we created what's called the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, so that the countries that wanted to take advantage of that would have some reason not to. And the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty gets the non nuclear powers to agree not to go nuclear. And in return for that, the nuclear powers agree to work towards phasing out and decreasing their nuclear capability. So that was a two sided deal and that has been pretty amazingly effective through the years. But if you look at that today, you can see that the nuclear powers are not maintaining there under the deal in particular, both Russia and the United States are now beginning a major new build up of nuclear weapons, basically repeating with new and better technology, repeating the nuclear build up of the Cold War. So the attraction of having nuclear weapons is very real. The Non Proliferation Treaty has managed to offset that attraction and given us a very successful several decades of relatively low proliferation. But I think that's beginning to fall away now because of the action of the nuclear powers and not holding up their end of the Non Proliferation Treaty. Is there a tension between non proliferation and fighting climate change now given that new generations of nuclear power seem to hold a lot of promise for us, is that part of the unraveling of the prospects of non proliferation or is that not a variable? Well, it figures into the equation as follows that a way of proliferating and proliferating more or less secretly is to do it under the guise of nuclear power. And the poster child for that is North Korea, which had what they advertised as a commercial nuclear power program, which they used to build nuclear weapons. So that's the only case I know of where that has happened and it probably could have been prevented by better monitoring through the Nonproliferation Treaty. I would not use that as an argument against nuclear, against the use of nuclear power, which has a considerable advantage in terms of another existential threat we face, which is a threat of global warming. So yes, nuclear power could be an avenue, a path towards nuclear weapons that you have managed to keep your nuclear aspirations secret. But there's only one example that I know of where that has been done. There's a possibility that Iran might have a dual use program as well, but there's been quite a lot of attention and pressure to keeping that from happening. There is also actually a flip side to that in which there is a potential perceived benefit, which first of all, there is quite a difference in the type of facility that you would have as a nuclear power facility that you would need to have to enrich the type of material you would need for fissile material. And it's quite different from most facilities that you would build for nuclear power. So it is actually fairly easy to detect whether there might be illicit action happening there. And that's often what is the focus of the surveillance on Iran and making sure that they were not working towards a bomb. But there's also the potential positive side, which is actually, if we were to try and work towards disharmoment, there needs to actually be a place to put all of this fissile material. You cannot just abandon it. You actually need to put it somewhere. You need to recycle it. You need to blend it down. And one of the best ways to do that, one of the best ways to get rid of that material is actually to blend it down and put it into nuclear power facilities. And there's actually one of my favorite stories. During my grandfather's tenure as Secretary of Defense, he helped to champion a program which is the Nun Lugar program which, unfortunately, I think has not gotten enough attention throughout history. Is a program that was instituted in post Cold War to try and go into former Soviet countries is Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, who, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, suddenly became nuclear weapons states overnight. Yeah. And did not have the money or the infrastructure or the political will to maintain these things. And in fact, Ukraine at the time, became the third largest nuclear weapon state in the world when this happened. So to the level and the numbers of weapons that we're talking about here, this is the huge endeavor. And all these countries were incredibly financially unstable. This posed a huge security risk. And the Nun Lugar program was a program instituted in the US. To work alongside these countries and the newly formed Russia to go in and secure these weapons, to dismantle them and also work with the former military members there to rehome them. To retrain them so that they wouldn't be brought up by potential terrorist organizations who might be seeking these weapons or seeking scientists or people who know how to work with these weapons and to dismantle the submarines and all of the things that go into a nuclear infrastructure. This is huge multi year endeavor to do this. And part of what they did is the material that was dismantled and blended down from these former missiles was bought by the US. By nuclear power plants. And roughly the math that Senator Nun explained to me, who was namesake of this legislation, was that at the time, from roughly, I think it's 1995 to about 2002, some 20% of US. Electricity was coming from nuclear power. And for those roughly a decade, the amount of power that we were drawing from these former nuclear missiles was about 50%. So our lights for 10% of our lights in the entire US. Were powered by former Soviet missiles for about a decade. Well, that's symbolically quite beautiful. It would be nice to go further in that direction. So the non Lugar effort there, did that reach some kind of fulfillment, or did it sort of peter out for lack of well, we succeeded in eliminating all of the nuclear weapons in those three countries, ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, all of them. That all happened during the term I was Secretary of Defense before I left office. Those were all dismantled. I recall post September 11, there was an ongoing concern that Al Qaeda in that case could get nuclear materials from one of the former Soviet republics because you had materials that were under padlock in certain cases. And you had the implosion of economies where you had some thousands or even tens of thousands of nuclear engineers and scientists who had no jobs right, or driving taxicabs or working in some meaningful way. And you have the prospect of this incredibly valuable material being able to be stolen and distributed to terrorists. How sanguine are you about how fully that's been contained? The Nunligar program was directed at all three of those problems. On the first one in dismantling the nuclear weapons and fissile material, that was 100% completed during the time I was yeah, period, I was Secretary of Defense. On the second one in the the nuclear scientists and nuclear technology, we made progress on that. But and I think the problem is greatly mitigated, but you couldn't never say it was completely eliminated. What in your view are the most tractable, most achievable, concrete steps that we could take now for instance, bring us back to the command and control issue where to get this out of one apes hands and at least make it a decision by some committee or consultation with Congress. What would be required to do that? Could Congress unilaterally decide to diminish the President's power to launch a first strike or a retaliatory strike? Yes, there is legislation already pending with the Congress, which has no chance of approval in the present environment, but there's legislation pending to end presidential sole authority and first use. There's question as to how effective that legislation could be against the President determined to use them anyway. But that would be a major step in that direction. Certainly we could by through legislation retire the ICBMs. That could be an action taken controlled by Congress if they decided they wanted to do that. We could also limit strategic missile defense. That's again an action that could be taken by Congress. Let's just linger for a moment on that. What is your view of strategic missile defense and any possible improvements that could be had along those lines? Is it just destabilizing to the logic of deterrence or do you think it could actually land us at some place of greater safety? The biggest problem with strategic missile defense, aside from the fact it's pretty expensive, is that it doesn't work. Do you think that it actually can't work, given that it's always going to be easier to evade it than to respond to the evasions? Yeah, the reason it doesn't work are quite fundamental and without going into detail, it amounts to the fact that the offense in this case, as in many other cases in the military, but certainly in this case, the offense has a huge advantage of the defense, maybe a ten to one advantage. In the case of missile defense, that is primarily because of the ability to put decoys out, which can easily saturate the system. Now, that is limited to the case of strategic missile defense systems that operate in the outer space, not in the atmosphere. But that's the way our system works. It works in outer space, and therefore it's highly susceptible to decoys. And so fundamentally, it has very little chance of working. So that's one disadvantage of strategic missiles, other disadvantages that the other side fears it might work, and therefore they have incentives to find ways of bolstering the offense. So it stimulates the offense without mitigating it. That's aside from the fact it costs a lot of money, right? Yeah. And also it adds to the sense that if you imagine the view from the other side, the view from our adversaries, if they believe that we believe that we have a dome protecting us from any incoming nuclear missiles, they will judge the likelihood of our possible first use as being higher because we think we're immune from retaliation. Which then is just provocative in his own right. To be clear, no. Even the most pessimistic analysts in Russia today could not believe that our presently deployed missile defense system poses any threat at all ICBM forces. That's too small for them. But they do fear that it's the base on which we could rapidly build and that we could build a system which we might believe would defend our country. And they base their policies and their programs on the beliefs that we're going to follow through on that possibility. I did want to bring up one other effort that we really haven't touched on that is happening to try and work towards securing our future, a future, you know, maybe free from nuclear danger, which is that actually, several years ago, a treaty was passed at the UN. Which the prohibition on nuclear weapons a treaty was passed at the UN. To ban nuclear weapons entirely. And now this treaty has not been ratified yet because we're still waiting on several countries. We need a few more countries before it is fully ratified, but they're actually quite close to that. The organization that was behind that is ICANN International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. ICANN is actually an organization that is a number of organizations that come together to work towards this effort. And it was actually a legal push to try and make nuclear weapons illegal. And they've actually been quite successful. They were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their effort to pass this ban. And you have a lot of critics who come out and say that this is a pie in the sky effort, that there was no point to do this, that this is impossible. But I spoke with Beatrice Finn, who is the head of ICANN, an incredibly intelligent woman who is championing this issue. And I think she made a great point, which is they based this treaty off of the treaty to ban landmines, which has actually been incredibly successful and is not to say that there are no more landmines or that we even expect that in 510 years that there will be no more nuclear weapons. But you need to institute a goal. You need to set a standard for the world to start to work towards, to put this global pressure. And particularly what I think is really interesting that came out of the UN treaty was you had all of these non nuclear states who finally had a voice in this issue because as you said, there is this sort of dividing line between the haves and the have nots. And the majority of the world does not have nuclear weapons. However, they are subject to the decisions of the nuclear weapon states and how they decide to manage these weapons. They're really held hostage by this insanity. And how incredibly inappropriate is it that a few countries get to decide the fate of the world based on the power that they have decided to develop and also preventing other people from developing it themselves? And these non nuclear weapons states are standing up and saying they do not accept this risk value. They do not accept that this is how it should be done. And they are trying to reclaim their power and say, that they should have a voice in how this is handled and that we should really be looking at how the world wants to handle these nuclear weapons. And while even the people who are working on this treaty understand that just putting it into place doesn't mean that it'll happen tomorrow, they understand that this is a process, but it is about sending a message and about setting an expectation to work towards this. Of course, all of the nuclear weapons states have refused to participate in this discussion, as you might expect. But I think this isn't just an issue between Russia and the US. This isn't just an issue between India and Pakistan, just to demonstrate the level of seriousness that the devastation that could happen even from a limited exchange of nuclear weapons. And and just so people understand, there's roughly about 15,000 nuclear weapons around the world scattered throughout the nine nuclear weapons states. And U. S. And Russia have about 90% of those, and then the rest are scattered around. But there have been studies done to show that even a limited exchange of nuclear weapons, about 100 Hiroshima size bombs and this is often experts worry about India and Pakistan in particular being maybe if there were to be an exchange between nuclear weapons states, those two countries may be the most likely for something like that. If there were to be an exchange of 100 nuclear weapons between India and Pakistan, the devastation not just the number, the millions of people who would die, but the global impact on our climate. You know, the issue of nuclear winter, which, unfortunately, you know, was people thought that it was debunked, you know, in the 80s. But that's actually not true. There's quite a lot of research that has come out with modern tools to demonstrate that this is actually a very real fear. And just 100 nuclear weapons could cause a global climate catastrophe of a drop of roughly two to three degrees Fahrenheit in global temperature. And the fallout on our production of food and the mass starvation that would follow, based on these studies, shows on the numbers of one to 2 billion people would be affected by the mass starvation that would follow. So this really is something that all countries should have a voice on, because it's something that affects everyone. Just to be clear that the issue with nuclear winter is you're talking about all the ash and debris lifted into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight into the stratosphere. Yeah. So we're talking about crop failures. Once you have cloudy skies for years at a stretch, you would expect food production to go way down. I guess I want to close the door to any climate denier in Trumpistan who thinks so. Why would that sounds rather good. We can mitigate the fiction of global warming by reducing global temperature by a few degrees. What's wrong with that? Actually, you brought me to let's just address for a second the claim that going to nuclear zero is a completely quixotic and impossible dream. What should seem impossible is the maintenance of the status quo. We should recognize that the place where we started, where we acknowledged the perverse utility of Hiroshima, there are certain bounded circumstances in which you can make the case that having and using nuclear weapons actually works. We're not in that situation anymore. We're in a situation where the prospect, certainly when you're talking about the US. And Russia, the prospect of winning a nuclear war no longer exists. Right. You can annihilate your enemy, but your enemy also gets to annihilate you. And you've also, by reference to what we just talked about, you've probably annihilated yourself anyway by ushering in a proper nuclear winter. And there may be some local cases where one nuclear power could destroy a non nuclear power or even another more primitive nuclear power without suffering the logic of retaliation. Most of the world is not in that circumstance right now. And the circumstance we are in is of a really badly calibrated doomsday machine poised to detonate based on misinformation. Right. So anyone who thinks it's impossible to walk back from the brink here isn't really thinking about how untenable it is to just maintain our perch right on the edge of it. You've both been incredibly generous with your time, and this has been an education. Is there anything you want to say by way of conclusion here, and bring us into the end zone? Yes, I do. My. First comment would be that the total elimination of nuclear weapons is not going to happen soon, if ever. But the danger is so great, the danger to all civilization is so great that it is a goal we should be working towards. Ideas matter. And the idea that nuclear weapons are a danger to all mankind is a fundamentally important idea and we should continue to keep that idea in front of the world. But secondly, even before that happens, or if it never happens, there are many things we can do to reduce the danger of nuclear weapons. And that danger primarily resides in an accidental or blundering use of nuclear weapons through a technical error, through a political miscalculation. And there are a dozen or so very important political steps which we could take this year, next year, which would greatly reduce those dangers. We should be focusing our attention on doing those. Some of those involve ending the political presidential authority, involve prohibiting launch, on warning, prohibiting first use. These are dangers we face. We don't have to face. We can simply get rid of them. We can retire all of our ICBMs and still maintain a strong, very strong deterrence. And that not only greatly reduces the danger, but saves us hundreds of billions of dollars. We can limit strategic missile defense for the same benefits. We don't have to wait for new treaties, we can take actions to reduce our nuclear forces without the benefit of treaties. And we can elect a president that has understands these issues and is committed to trying to deal with them. Those are all things that can be done in the relatively near term that will greatly reduce our dangers while we, over the longer period of time, work towards the elimination of nuclear weapons. And beyond making political noises to those ends. Are there organizations that people can support that are doing effective work in this area? What's the role for philanthropy here? Yes, there's many such organizations. The Nuclear Threat Initiative is one very important initiative in Washington DC that works for the illuminating the nuclear dangers and taking steps towards minimizing them. The Bulletin of Atomic, a scientist in Chicago, is another such organization. Many of the world affairs councils and councils of formulations around the country work in this direction. So there are things that can be done to reduce political dangers. One organization is focused particularly on this issue, which is called the Plowshares Fund. And so the Plowshare that's located in San Francisco. And the Plowshares Fund has supported other organizations that are working towards the reducing the danger of nuclear weapons. So if a person says to himself, what can I do? I would say there are two things that can do. The first is to get yourself educated on this problem, which listening to this podcast is one way, but it could also be a pathway towards other ways of getting educated. And the second thing it can do is to support the organizations like Plow Shearers and like the Bulletin of Islamic Scientists that are working and like the Nuclear Threat Initiative that are working with very capable professionals working on this problem full time. That's great. Lisa, do you have any closing thoughts? Yeah, I think you hit on it exactly, which is that we cannot afford nuclear weapons both in risk and even financially. The nuclear modernization program right now is projected to cost upwards of $1.7 trillion trillion with a t $1.7 trillion just for this program alone, just for nuclear weapons over the next 20 or 30 years. And the risks that it presents to us are untenable. We cannot afford to maintain this status quo. And I think it's really important when talking about this, it can be easy to get overwhelmed, it's easy to feel defeated and hopeless. But there really is hope here. Nuclear weapons, like you said, these are man made weapons, unlike climate change, which is involving a lot of different forces that are being influenced by humans. We created these weapons and we control these weapons. And when is a people made problem means that there can be political solutions. What we need now is the political will to start pushing for those solutions. And like my grandfather said, it is about educating yourself and educating others. So it's listening to this podcast, listening to our podcast, sharing it with people, talking with people, making a ruckus, really starting to get the dialogue started, in particular with younger generations who did not grow up during the Cold War and may have not realized that these risks were there. And they were there at such a level as to say, if you don't accept the existential threat of climate change, you shouldn't accept the existential threat of nuclear weapons. Even more so that we are doing this to ourselves and to go out there and to push our government, to push our politicians to start to make these changes, to reduce the dangers and start to work towards a world in which maybe we can start to have the conversations about working towards a global zero. There is a world in which that can happen, but we need to make these first steps to start the dialogue. Sam, I'd make one final comment. I've stressed several times, and you yourself have stressed the importance of education in this field. And I like to give you an example, which is three years ago, my granddaughter Lisa knew nothing about this problem and she hopped on the project, went through a self education process, and now I consider to be an expert in this field. So it is possible for people, if they get concerned, if they get interested, to learn enough about it, to become real experts and to know what actions to take and how to take them that can reduce the dangers. So do not give up. The first step is educating yourself. And the next step is to try to take political actions to manifest some of the things that your education points you towards. That's a great note to end on. And I just want to thank you both for taking the time to educate me again. I'll remind people that, Lisa, your podcast is coming. It may in fact, be out the moment we release this or if not, very soon thereafter. And that is at the brink and we will link to that. And Secretary Perry, your book The Button is soon to be born. Look forward to that. And also, you have the website, the William J. Perryproject.org. And I just I just want to say again, I'm now going to promote you back with your honorific. Secretary Perry, I just want to thank you for decades of service on this front of all the people who are anywhere near the chain of command, so many of them advertise their unfitness for the job. And you have never been one of those people. So thank you for being a smart person in the room. Thank you, Sam. Good to talk to you this morning. Thank you so much./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am here with David From. David, thanks for joining me again. What a pleasure to be back. So you have a new book. You have been hammering Trump hard and it is necessary work. Is this your second book focused on Trump? Yes, I've written quite a few books, but I wrote a book that came out 2018 called Trumpocracy, which is a study of Trump's power, and this book is called Trump Apocalypse, and it's a study of the Trump finale and what comes after. Yeah, well, it's great to have you on to talk about this because as you know, and everyone will know, we are under the shadow of a presidential election that seems especially consequential. I guess whatever your view of reality here, you must think this election will matter unless you are annihilated or maybe especially if you're a nihilist. If you want to tear everything down, there is a good way to do it by voting wrongly. Here the problem I keep failing to adequately confront every time I talk about Trump, and I think you know I do that vehemently. Although now sparingly is that it does seem somewhat hopeless to convince anyone of anything. I'm painfully aware of how boring it is to simply sing to the choir. And I want to do some good in the world here with conversations of this kind. I want to convince people to see Trump as we do because I think we have an accurate view of him and it matters to understand what has happened here and what it would mean to double down on this error. What can we say at the beginning here to try to inoculate our listeners against some ways of misunderstanding the conversation? There will be an assumption on the part of many that this is a partisan bias where we will be expressing against Trump. What can you say to that point? Let me say I have spent my life, and it's now a lengthening life in the conservative and in the Republican Party. As a teenager, I was supported Ford over Carter in 1976. The first time I was ever involved in an American election I'm originally from Canada was in 1980 when I knocked on doors for Ronald Reagan in the town, my college town. I served in the George W. Bush White House I've been involved with conservative parties in Canada and Great Britain, and this is my world. So I'm coming from inside this world. For me, the theme of the Trump years has been the discovery, and I think this is so true for everyone who thinks about politics. We all have a lot of commitments in our lives, and they're often potentially in conflict, but we're not forced to confront that. And then comes a moment we say, well, I believe this and I believe that, and I have to choose. So maybe the way to start talking about this in a way that's useful, as you recommend, is not to talk about what we don't like, but to talk about what we do. What do we cherish? Why are we here? So let me talk about what is important to me, and I hope that that will resonate with some of the people who are on the fence that you describe. I grew up in the Cold War. I grew up, as I mentioned, in Canada, under the shield of that mighty American system of global defense that protected all of us. My family's Jewish. I'm Jewish. On my father's side, particularly, we lost the vast majority of our families in the Nazi Holocaust. We understand intimately what a world that is not, where justice isn't safeguarded by power. How justice in a world not safeguarded by power? Justice becomes a victim. I was formed by the extraordinary explosion of global prosperity in the 1970s and 1980s through free trade and free interchange. The happiest moment of my political life was that that moment in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down and went from South Korea and Chile and South Africa and and Eastern and Central Europe. It seemed like we were moving the whole planet to a place of greater security and prosperity. And I think that altogether adds up to the most stupendous human political achievement of all time. Now everything is costs. It didn't serve everyone equally well. And as that development advanced, it got bumpy. We went through the 911 crisis and the war in Iraq, which I was a supporter of, and, you know, that alienated so many people, and then the global financial crisis, and then the strengths and stresses of mass migration and unequal prosperity. And so it's not crazy that there was a reaction to that. And Donald Trump positioned himself at the head of that parade. And I get that in 2016. I spent a lot of time in the 2000s warning Republicans that their message was not responsive to where Americans were, where even their voters were. But Trump now is putting at jeopardy everything I cherish down to such basics as the integrity and competence of the US. Government. Yeah, an analogy comes to mind which would characterize my view of that jeopardy, and also how a criticism of Trump need not entail any partisanship, just to cut through the partisanship algebra pretty quickly, as you did you are a Republican or have been a Republican. So obviously your partisanship, if anything, runs the other way. I have never voted Republican, but there's absolutely nothing I have said or will say about Trump that would apply to someone like Mitt Romney or John McCain or any other normal Republican. So, again, it's not coming from a partisan place in me at all. And the analogy occurs to me that captures this and some of the risk you just cited. Imagine you're on an airplane cruising at 30,000ft, and at some point near the end of the flight, you see the pilot come stumbling out of the cockpit, and he appears just visibly drunk or insane. Let's say he gropes one of the flight attendants. He gets on the PA system, and he begins bragging about how rich he is. And maybe he starts castigating the passengers for having insulted him. He might say, if you want me to land this plane, you have to be nicer to me, something completely out of keeping with the role and responsibility he has to safeguard the lives of people on that plane. Then, just to continue this analogy, he could launch into a conspiracy theory about how the airline is really run by a shadow group of maintenance workers who have been undermining him, right? And he thinks they've been monkeying with the instruments in the cockpit, and he could fire the copilot. He could send him to the back of the plane and tell him not to move. Right? And he could do a dozen other things like that in the span of an hour that prove beyond any possibility of doubt that this isn't a normal situation, he's not a normal pilot. And now when it comes time to land this plane, the danger of something going wrong has been horribly magnified. And you are worried about this, quite reasonably so. And you're appalled to find that control over so many lives, yours among them, has been given to somebody who is quite obviously unfit for the job, monstrously unfit for the job. And now you find yourself worrying about this out loud and notice that there are people on the plane who are inspired by this pilot's antics and goading him on. He's now threatening to punch some old woman in the face, and people are, you know, yelling, he should do it. Right? And then people are turning to you as you begin to worry about this out loud, and they're claiming that you have pilot derangement syndrome and that you should just stop whining and enjoy the flight and that Captain Trump is making flying great again. Right? So this is your situation. You're worried about obvious incompetence and distraction from the task at hand and coming at a moment where everyone can least afford it, right? I mean, just we're in the middle of a global pandemic and a global economic emergency right now. The question is, and I'm posing this to our listeners how much of your concern about not dying in a plane crash is due to political partisanship? It is obvious that that's not even a variable, right? And that you may disagree with me and David here in our view of Trump and the situation and the importance of institutions and political norms. And we'll get into that. But the conversation we're about to have is coming from a place of concern about our society being able to respond intelligently to real risks. And again, it is our view that we are being led by somebody who is obviously a fraud and a con man and an incompetent and a morbidly, self interested person. And that has been obvious from day one. But it's becoming completely untenable to deny that fact, even for the span of a minute here. So with that long preamble, David, you've described you describe in your book Trumpism, ie. Support for the president and the kind of social movement that has kept him rather impervious to the kinds of criticisms we will launch here. You've described it as an affinity fraud. What do you mean by that? I mean that people who study organized crime or white collar crime will note that fraudsters often take advantage of people who are in some way similar to them and sympathetic to them. So Bernie Madoff, the great Ponzi scheme on Wall Street, he stole from people like Ellie Wasele, people who are involved in fellow Jews, people involved in collective Jewish life. And Madoff, with his stealing, would often be very generous to Jewish institutions. And when you look at victim, overwhelmingly, unfortunately Jewish, and what you will find often with other kinds of scenes like that, people pray on their own. They create an affinity, and they take advantage of that. And that is something that Donald Trump has done with many conservative minded Americans who would normally when you think about the Republican Party, I mean, historically, the Republican Party famously, what's the joke? Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line. So it's a very orderly political party. It chooses people with long histories in the party. You sort of rise through the machine. Typically, this never among Democrats. They are always choosing outsiders. You know, governors of Arkansas in their 40s, guy who makes it from the Illinois State Senate into the US senate and has been there for a couple of years, and romantic outsiders, the Republicans pick, well, let's take the guy who was vice president last time, and they come my nominee this time. You bump your way up. It's like Proctor and Gamble in 1953 and all of that orderliness that that quest for predictability. I mean, Donald Trump is none of those things, but he benefits. I want to say something about the title of this book, and it's relevant to what you just asked. So most of us use the word apocalypse to mean locusts and famine and hornets and disasters of all kinds. And we are certainly suffering through those, this global pandemic and this terrible economic shock. But literally, an apocalypse means an unveiling. A revelation comes from Greek words that mean to take the cloth off of something. And when Jewish and early Christian writers began to use the idea of the apocalypse and they were revealing the future, now the future they chose to reveal was a pretty horrifying one, but it was horror. That wasn't horror for its own sake. It was leading to the end of days. And so the Trump apocalypse that I want to write about is one that shows us something about who we are and where we go. As you say, there is a substantial minority in this country, maybe a little less than it was three months ago, that sticks with Trump, that sees something in him that speaks to them. And I think that loyalty is a danger not just immediately, but in the long term to a lot of institutions that we should all cherish. And what I wanted to write about was the nature of that danger. And then how do we prevent that kind of disaffection from being a threat to the country in the future? Not how do we brainwash people or convert them, but how do we make the disappointments that are maybe inevitable in modern life less dangerous to the political system that upholds modern life. Yeah, well, let's talk about that affinity, and maybe we're talking about 30% of Americans. There seems to be a core that now has outside political influence because they seem to be so unpersuadable, which is to say unmovable based on the 10,000 pieces of information that should have pride them loose from their affinity to Trump. What do you think the organizing principles are there? It's clearly not racism as often alleged by the far left. I'm not suggesting that there aren't racists who support Trump. In fact, I would imagine almost every racist does. But I find it very hard to believe that's the organizing principle, one thing that is clearly happening, and it's even creating a larger footprint in our society than support for Trump is a distrust for institutions. By institutions, we're talking about the press. We're talking about normal arms of government that heretofore seemed important, like the State Department. We're talking about science and scientists attempting to communicate it. How do you view the relationship between institutions and the rest of society right now? This is a problem that I described in a book I wrote a long time ago as the man in the white lab coat issue. If you watch an American movie made between, like, the end of World War II and the end of the 1970s, whenever there's a man in a white lab coat, he's there to explain how the plot is going to set in motion. He's going to explain how you can shrink a submarine so it's small enough to go inside the bloodstream. He's going to explain how time travel works works. He's going to give you like the device that'll save James Bond's life in the last act, sometime around 19 78 79, whenever you see a man in a white lab coat, he's got some moronic idea that's going to get us all killed. Let's clone dinosaurs. And the last time we see him, he's disappearing down the throat of the dinosaur. Although, in his defense, I'm in support of cloning some dinosaurs just for the fun of it. Yes, we've been through that shock and it's become especially intense recently. And I wrote about this in my first book about the Trump presidency. I'm trying to think, starting in about 1998, whenever people we socialize with, the people we went to school with, our type of people, whenever they had a brainwave, let's sell stock in a pet food company that moves pet food by air, let's do the Iraq War, let's securitize home mortgages. Every one of those brainwaves turned out to be an absolute calamity for most of the people around them. So a lot of the trust that we would like to see in our institutions was squandered by mistake and people came by their distrust honestly. And Donald Trump used that. Not that he's a trustworthy person at all. He's the world's least trustworthy person, but he had a shrewd eye for people's vulnerabilities. So one of the things that I am in this new book talking about is how do we regain that trust and how do we make practical changes in a way that stabilize democratic society and not just the states? Because we need to see Trump in a more global context. And a lot of the weighted for human life is tragically short. But the fact is people are living longer and longer, and as they live longer, they are carrying forward quarrels from half a century ago into the present. I mean, Newt Gingrich is still talking about Woodstock. He's still mad about it all these years later. And maybe Woodstock was a good idea, maybe it was a bad idea. He looked like the one guy who didn't get invited and held it against them. The Vietnam War, they're still arguing about that all this half century now, more than half a century later. And Donald Trump uses all of these cues from like the Nixon campaign of 1968 and it's yesterday's world and we need to build a politics for tomorrow's world. And that means sometimes that some of the things that you talk about that seem to be so called left wing issues like making healthcare more universal, can only be effectively executed in conjunction with things that would be considered. Right wing issues, which is having some kind of restraint on immigration, that a lot of the solutions to problems like climate change are going to involve ideas that actually look right wing, like pricing and like more use of nuclear power. And we are going to need a new generation of political leadership that is not stuck in categories left over from when there were three channels on TV. Yeah, that's an important point. We've been noticing this in many ways. That the old way of talking about left and right politically and the boxes that one needs to check to be a membrane in good standing as you move left or right of center. That seems to have been getting scrambled in a variety of ways and it just makes it difficult to talk about what's happening and predict how people will respond to news events. Trump himself is an existence proof that politics as we knew it prior to 2016 no longer makes any sense. The idea that the Christian right is behind this guy, as though he were some apotheosis of their values, it's a reductio ad absurdum of, yeah, everything they pretend is their values, and yet it is, you know, visibly manifest. So it's a very strange time to even categorize political thought. One of the things that defined politics when a generation ago, in the 1990s, was the United States was an exception to the rule that as societies became technologically developed, became wealthier, they became more secular. And so when you looked at social science from 1995, the United States looked like a real. I mean, it's completely different from Britain or Germany or the Netherlands or Australia or even Canada, all of which were rapidly secularizing, and the United States just wasn't. And then beginning of 2002, the United States suddenly, bang, caught up. And the United States has been and I talk about a lot about this in Trump Apocalypse, about the loss of religious affinity that has happened in the past decade and a half. And how much of this is about people under 30 simply not identifying with parental religion? And this may be a reaction. It raises the question, how religious was America ever? Really? Because there's always a big if you ask questions in polls like, do you believe in God? Do you believe in afterlife? You used to get 70, 80, 90%. But if you actually counted the number of people sitting in a church on a Sunday morning, it in no way accorded even if you asked, were you in church on Sunday morning? And then counted the people in church on Sunday morning, those two numbers didn't add up right. But there were a lot of people who were Christian identified, religiously identified, but it may not have been central to their life. And then the assertiveness of political religion since in the 21st century, we talked before about commitments come into contra, contradiction. A lot of people think, yeah, I'm I'm a Methodist. I don't go that often, but I think they're doing good work. I guess I'm a Methodist. Then they suddenly confront, wait, wait a minute. I see Jerry Falwell Jr on TV. I'm not. That that's what it is. I'm that I am not. And so you are seeing the secularizing society I think one of the reasons that the so called Christian Right has been so committed to Trump is because they are reckoning with this decristianizing among their own followers. And in fact, they are moving from something that was a religious movement in a way to something that is now purely a cultural movement where you no longer can tell the difference in what is Christian here and what is Southern or what is rural. Yeah. Or what is Christian and what is an animus against so called elitism right? Or against the coasts, or, you know, against the libtards in their big cities who are too woke and too, in the context of the current pandemic, terrified to get out there and get this happy virus. So how does a mask become a symbol of culture? There have been some very startling images broadcast us at least on, on social media of again, and it's just amazing that the perception of this global health crisis and economic crisis has been so politicized. But two images have jumped out to me in recent weeks. One is just the confrontation between pandemic protesters, that is people protesting against lockdown and health care workers, right? So they're literally shrieking epithets at frontline health care workers who are in their scrubs and masks. And then there was another video that went pretty viral, you might have seen this, of a local news reporter covering a protest, I think it was in New York, new Jersey or New York. And just the level of hatred being expressed by otherwise normal people toward a random member of the press was really alarming. Again, it could be something manipulative about how this was set up, but it seemed to be a member of a local news affiliate walking the sidewalk among this wasn't a clan rally. I mean, this was just ordinary people protesting the lockdown. But when they saw that a member of the press was among them, it was just awful. The degree to which they were visibly living in an information space where the pandemic was essentially a hoax. It was an attempt to kind of engineer an informational coup against the President. Right? This is all about discrediting Trump. This is why people are pretending this is something other than the flu. So this is where we are, I guess let's start with we have to talk about Trump and the election and the reasons for our concerns. But it's very hard to talk about anything if we can't find a shared space of facts and vetting of information whereby we can talk about what has happened on a Thursday on Earth. What do we do with respect to the degree to which the press is now reviled, especially in Trumpistan, how does the press get its act together? And has the press even covered Trump critically, obviously, without discrediting itself? Every moment it attempts to shine a light on each one of the President's innumerable missteps? Well, this is one of the ways when I talk about this in tripocalypse, but how we have to bring ourselves into our present time when people of a certain age, certainly my contemporaries, when we talk about the press we mean the New York Times, we mean the CBS Evening News, we mean CNN. We mean institutions like that that are self consciously press organizations that are funded by advertising and reader pay and that have a legacy that stretches back in time. So how do most information Americans get their information? Facebook, number one. YouTube, number two. The New York Times is maybe in the top five list because it is a provider. As a secondhand provider of content to those streams, read it. And the Americans who are most likely to say, I don't trust the media, in fact, are the people who are most reliant on media. They don't read a book, they're not interviewing scientists. They are following what they see on Facebook. And Facebook is Media. Even though Facebook is not creating the content, it is certainly making decisions, maybe robotically, but it is making decisions about the content you get. So we need to bring our content concepts of the world into alignment with the world we live in. And we live in a world which the media are very trusted, dangerously so, and in which they are losing their own ability to assess the quality of what they are providing, where they truly are acting like, like mediums, like connectors between one thing and another. So that I think one of the problem here is not a loss of trust of media. The problem is that we have media that no longer see it as their job to evaluate the truthfulness of what it is that they provide. So that is an internal problem. Whenever you talk about the media, don't use generality. Do you mean the New York Times? That's one set of issues. Do you mean CNN? And that's another set of issues. What do you mean Facebook and Fox News? Because that's something else. And if you have a concept of media that excludes the most important media companies in the country, it's not a very good concept. Yeah, they are clearly distinct categories because you take Facebook and Twitter and the rest of social media, these are platforms which are trying to disavow any responsibility as publishers. And it's understandable because I don't know how you even with some real breakthroughs in AI, I don't know how you perfectly vet or really take full editorial responsibility for your content. If I just sent from you a little bit there, yeah, go for it. Supposing an entrepreneur invents a company called McDonald's, and he says, you know what, look, when you used to get your hamburgers from a local store, obviously it was very important that there be some government regulation of whether the meat in those burgers was rancid or not. But we're going to serve a billion burgers a day or a billion a year. We are operating on such a scale that it's just impossible for us to verify that the meat in our burgers is not rancid. And that's just our business model. Our business model makes it impossible for us to vote for the fact that our meat isn't rancid. I think a lot of us would say, well, I'm not here for you. Your business model is terrible. We don't need you shouldn't be in business if your business model is you can't vouch for the fact that the meat won't make me sick. You shouldn't have that business. Yeah, it's interesting that there's been kind of a land grab for informational norms, which just happened, and now we're anchored to a status quo that is very difficult to rethink. So on some level you're calling to question whether something like facebook should even be possible, but it's technologically possible. You can link up half the world on a platform and allow people to talk to one another and to talk to everyone all at once if things go viral. And facebook has obviously found a way to monetize that, twitter less so. But we're asking whether that sort of thing should be allowable on some level. Is this a public square that you'd be to take the US. Constitution as a norm here? You'd be violating free speech if you tried to tamp that down. There's like a room in the mansion of human experience that's just opened up based on a certain technological innovation, in this case the internet. Or you take another example, which is different but strikes me as relevantly, similar, all of this anguish people feel over privacy concerns around the iPhone. Should apple be forced to build an iPhone in a way that it can be unlocked ultimately with an FBI warrant because we know a murder has been recorded on it, or have good reason to believe that? Well, there are many privacy purists now who think, no, you've got strong encryption, and this is just math and technology dictating that we should have now a zone of privacy, that even if we acknowledge that we ourselves are murderers, no one can force us to open our iPhones. They can demand our DNA, but they can't demand access to our FaceTime interactions or our WhatsApp interactions. On one level, that's just totally bizarre that we think that these are in some way norms that can't be rethought. But again, I'm sympathetic to a default to free speech, and I'm just impressed by how intractable it seems to monitor in real time everything that is hitting Facebook's servers, because any lunatic can post a video right now communicating anything he wants. And that will be one of I don't know, someone has the numbers here, but let's say one of a billion pieces of content uploaded today on Facebook. It's a needle in a haystack until it isn't. But I guess a different set of expectations could be invoked once it. Becomes obvious that this thing is there and causing a problem, then we could demand something in Facebook. But the idea that Facebook can't be in business unless they figure out a way to never produce a poison hamburger with all the hamburgers they're making, it doesn't seem like a deal breaker unless borrowing some perfect algorithm coming online. Let me give you another example of one of these questionable business models. The way politics worked in the United States from the civil rights era till the end of the 20th century was you had these two vast political parties. They're pretty messy assemblages of lots of different kinds of people and lots of different kinds of places. And for that reason they were not super ideological. And for that reason they tended to coalesce around with rare exceptions, like a Ronald Reagan figure, pretty moderate people. If they, when they became non moderate like Barry Goldwater or George McGovern, they got clobbered. And even a non moderate like Ronald Reagan learned he had to be a really beguiling, winning, sunny, reassuring person if he was not to frighten people with his ideology. That was so strong. That began to change in the 21st century. The parties became much more ideological for reasons that had to do with American life. As they became more ideological, they accelerated with reasons that didn't have a lot to do with American life, but became part of gaming of the system. And that on the republican side in particular, the republicans realized they had an ideology that could not command a democratic majority. In 1985, if you were in that predicament, you say, well, I guess we're going to have to change our ideology if we want to enjoy the spoils of office. But by 2015, the attitude was different, which is we don't want the conventional spoils of office like postmasterships and ambassadors, ships and those things. We actually have a program here that we are determined to cram through and we are self becoming aware we actually can't win in an open competition, so we have to make the competition more closed. And one of the big themes of the book is how the republican party, forced to choose between its ideological commitments and a competitive democracy, has been gaming the system more and more aggressively. And it's helped to do that, by the way, the movement of Americans from the interior of the country to the coasts in a system that makes these ancient boundaries so important. So you can have people pilot. You can have all of California with no more. I mean, if people in Wyoming ever retreated on an equal footing with people in California, they would feel themselves really ill used. And then you have the system where the money flows from the coast to the interior, but the interior uses the political power. You may remember senator Mitch McConnell talking about driving states into bankruptcy. What that's about is bankruptcy is a federal responsibility. When state defaults on its debt. States have been doing that since the 1830s. But if a state were ever to go bankrupt, which they can't now do, that would mean the state would submit itself to the oversight of a federal judge. I e somebody picked by Mitch McConnell. It is an attempt for the parts of the country that are receiving money to leverage their excessive power because of constitutional compromises and the way the system has grown up over time to take other people's economic power and use it to their own ends. So I have a series of suggestions in the book about how without radical political reform or fantasies like abolishing the Electoral College, you could bring the American federal system more into line with how wealth is produced in the American nation. The last thought on this, 2008 at the Republican Convention, sarah Palin gave this fantastic acceptance speech, and one of the lines is written by Brenda might do a great job. And one of the lines she used was she quoted a piece of writing and I tell the story of that rating when she said, we raise good people in our small towns. In the book I said, just imagine how all hell would break loose if a candidate at a Democratic convention would say, we raise good people on the Upper West Side Manhattan. We raise good people in Hollywood. Perhaps not quite as bad as the Upper East Side, but close. But who's paying the bills around here, folks? Yeah. The degree to which the cities and coasts subsidize the heartland is an interesting asymmetry there. And as you say, the political leverage based on representation, at least in the Senate, is running the other way. Why do you say abolishing the Electoral College is just a pipe dream? Because it's in the Constitution. You need to do a constitutional amendment to do away with it. So I'm focused very much in Trump Apocalypse on things that you could do with ordinary votes of Congress real fast, not with an idea of making the system perfectly representative, but avoiding its most terrible injustices, many of which were at the state level, where in states and not just southern states, but in Wisconsin. That the party that holds the majority in nearly a two thirds majority in the Wisconsin state legislature. How assembly and Senate actually when the Republicans got now have about 66 or 64 of 99 seats in the Wisconsin legislature, which they won with fewer votes than the Democrats won in 2018. And that is happening because the federal courts, which used to from the civil rights era until the 2000s, police the wilder actions at the state level, have withdrawn from that business. And so I talk in the book about how do you restore some of the concepts of the civil rights era in ways that are feasible, not too radical, that don't require huge change, but how do you get a new Voting Rights Act that would make sense in the post civil rights era. When the Supreme Court struck down the key sections of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, they made a good point, which is the Voting Rights Act held a state or a town in suspicion according to things that had done in the 19th century. So Hawaii got special scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act, as it then was, and Wisconsin did not. By the year 2013, Hawaii was a very good actor for voting rights, and Wisconsin is the worst actor north of the Mason Dixon line. And it's just weird that you would say, okay, Wisconsin gets an easy ride because of what happened in the 19th century. So agreed, the court was right, you need to rewrite this thing. But then, having struck down the key sections, nothing happened. And so states are now free to do whatever they want. And because of the Republican success in the elections of 2010, which were immediately followed by the census of 2010 and the redistricting of 2011, in the throes of the terrible aftermath of the Great Recession, they built an especially reactionary set of state and federal maps that disempowered everywhere in America. Where new products are invented, where songs are written, where science is done. So I talk about this with how all the productive parts of the country are systematically disenfranchised. And that's, you know, if you want from a Republican point of view, if you want the Republican Party ever again to be the party of enterprise, you have to get out of the business of being the party of the deindustrializing and places where coal used to be mined and reconnect with where the future is happening. Trump apocalypse is full of ideas for making the political system more responsive to the country. That's one of the ways that you protect the country against future of Donald Trump's. Let's remember, he got 46% of the vote. He got barely more of the vote than Michael Dukakis 1988, and a lot less of the vote than Mitt Romney and Al Gore and John Kerry. And if you bring the political system into harmony with the country, the biggest beneficiary of that will be the Republican Party itself, because you will take away from the party the option of defending enterprise by appealing to the most disaffected parts of the country. So how sinister do you think this actually is behind closed doors? When you talk about a reactionary attempt to gerrymander and suppress voting rights, you take an article that would be written in a place like The Nation or Rachel Maddow's take on just how dark this gets behind closed doors, how off the mark, if at all. Is that when Mitch McConnell is talking to whoever I don't know, back in the day, Paul Ryan, about just how to win, stay on this point of suppressing votes or managing to shore up support for Republican candidates in ways that anywhere left to center just seems illegitimate? How nefarious is what, in fact, is true? The right to vote has always been bitterly contested in the United States. At a certain period in history, we we learned a happy story of the ever spreading progress toward the vote, toward ever greater democracy. And it's inscribed in the great amendments the constitution. The 13th amendment ending slavery. The 14th amendment extending civil rights without regard to race the 15th amendment extending the right to vote without regard to race and through votes for women and through the extension of the vote to the district of Columbia and 18 year olds and up, up, up. But that's not how it happened. It was always going forward and going backwards. It has always been, through American history, a familiar tool of politics to try to prevent your opponents from having the right to vote. And to this day, the United States has the weakest constitutional protections of voting rights of any of the democratic countries, partly because the Constitution is so old, and so much of it was written before Americans agreed that everybody should vote. And so one of the things I think we need to make, and this may be the service Donald Trump has done us, I think it is not impossible that we will look back and say, that was a very upsetting experience, but it actually put us back on the right footing, because Donald Trump made explicit and made kind of cheaply, corrupt a lot of things that were already that were going wrong in the country without him. And so we need to commit ourselves to say, you know what? We're a democracy. We all think we are. I mean, sometimes you'll hear Republicans say, it's not a democracy, it's a republic. I think a lot of people react to that was I always thought it was a democracy. Didn't you think it was a democracy? And if it's not a democracy, shouldn't it be a democracy? So let's be a democracy. And let's say you can compete in all kinds of ways. You can find more appealing candidates with better resumes. You can ads on TV. I mean, you can dig up dirt your opponent did when she was a college student, all of that. But what you can't do is compete by preventing people from voting. And what you certainly can't do is write voting systems where if you get 45% of the vote, you get 60% of the seats. We're not going to let you do that. That option is now off the table. And if Donald Trump helps us to do that and other things, too donald Trump has taught us how the United States has, compared to any other democracy, a super politicized system of law enforcement. There is no other democracy on earth where decisions owe who to prosecute and who not to prosecute are made by such political people as in the United States. We need to fix that. And Donald Trump has forced us to concentrate. I think we basically live through a big tidying up of the American political system after Watergate and the related scandals in the then, those reforms have just been losing their impetus, losing their effectiveness over the past 20 years. I think we are going to need post Trump kind of moment of reform like that which we had just before the First World War, just after Watergate, really renew institutions. And not just voting institutions, but those that enforce law, those that make our social welfare systems work and those that preserve the climate and the environment for future generations. Trump is definitely pressure tested our political system and the rule of law to a degree that I think very few people anticipated. I think one surprising discovery is how much the same functioning of government relies not on actual laws, but on political norms. Just you don't do that sort of thing, right? So it takes someone who has absolutely no political scruples to do that sort of thing for us to realize, oh, there's actually no wall there, there's no guardrail, there's nothing keeping us from the howling abyss. If we move further in that direction and Trump has exposed so much of that landscape. I want to get into some of these up to the minute controversies around Barr and the so called Flynn controversy. But before we jump into those details, you, if I'm not mistaken, at least in the book, I don't know if anything's changed, you seem very confident that Trump will lose in November. Yeah, I really would like to share that confidence because if for no other reason, I will sleep better at night. Why are you so cheerful on that point? Well, I thought he was probably going to lose even before the pandemic struck. And I think now in the face of just the terrible economic process, if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, no housekeeping today. Just a reminder if you're a podcast supporter, to get the supporter RSS feed because some changes are coming. I don't want you to miss content. So go to the Subscriber Content page on my website and make sure you've got the subscriber feed in your favorite podcasting app. Thereafter, the Making Sense icon will show up in red rather than black. Today I'm speaking with Yasmin Mohammed. Yasmin is a human rights activist and a writer. She's a very eloquent advocate for women living in Islamic majority countries and in the Muslim community generally worldwide, and a very effective critic of religious fundamentalism. And her new book is unveiled how Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. And I've been in Yasmin's corner for a little while. When she was getting ready to write her book, and it was at the proposal stage, I blurbed her. This is the blurb that appears on the book, but this is a blurb, really, for her as a person before her book was even written. And I'll just read that here to give you some context. Women and free thinkers in traditional Muslim communities inherit a double burden. If they want to live in the modern world, they must confront not only the theocrats in their homes and schools, but many secular liberals whose apathy, sanctimony and hallucinations of, quote, racism throw yet another veil over their suffering. Yasmin Muhammad accepts this challenge as courageously as anyone I've ever met, putting the lie to the dangerous notion that criticizing the doctrine of Islam is a form of bigotry. Let her wisdom and bravery inspire you, and so you should. And here Yasmin and I talk about her background and indoctrination into conservative Islam and the double standard that Western liberals use to think about women in the Muslim community. We talk about feminism generally, the validity of criticizing other cultures, and other related topics. So now I bring you a very brave woman and one of my heroes, Yasmin Mohammed. I am here with Yasmin Mohammed. Yasmin, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Sam. So this has been a long time coming. I forget where I discovered you. Was it Twitter or how do we get introduced? I sent you an email, just a cold email. Well, I was supposed to do a talk in Australia with Majid about the Islam and the Future of Tolerance documentary and then I had to cancel it because I was going through a lot of basically, I was having consistent panic attacks and I had to take some time off work and then I just had to cancel all of my speaking engagements. So I sent you a letter to sort of apologize that I wasn't going to be able to make it. And then you wrote back to me and started asking me about the panic attacks and everything that was going on with there. And so then that's how I got into meditation, actually. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I remember that, but I don't remember that being the first contact. Did you not have a Twitter presence yet? I did have a Twitter presence, but you weren't following me yet. Okay, well, someone could have been forwarding your stuff. I feel like I saw you there first, but maybe not. Anyway, you go hard on Twitter. That's something we're going to talk about. Yeah, it's the Arab in me. So let's just take it from the top. We're talking about your book, unveiled in the end, but let's just start with your story from the beginning. Where did you come from and what was your parents like and what was your upbringing like? This is the beginning of your story that has, for better or worse, made you one of the most courageous voices I can name at the moment. So the beginning, I guess, would be my parents meeting each other in university in Egypt. So my dad's from Palestine and my mom is Egyptian, but Palestinians could go to university in Egypt. It was all covered. Like, they were treated as Egyptians, but they weren't given citizenship. So they met in university in Egypt. And my mother's family were very angry at her for marrying a Palestinian because they thought he was so beneath her. But they got married, and then they moved to San Francisco together, and they were there during the Peace, Love hippie era, and they had my sister, and it was a bit too much peace and love, and so my mom wanted, like, a quieter place to raise the kids. And so then they moved to Vancouver, Canada, and that's where I was born. But then their marriage fell apart in the end anyway. So when I was about two years old, my dad, you know, left us, went to the other side of the country. So here my mom is now in a new country. No support system, no community, three children, and she's feeling depressed, vulnerable, sad, lonely, all that stuff. How religious were they at this point? No religiosity whatsoever. Neither of them. They both grew up very secular. My dad had, like, zero connection to religion. It's just like a cultural thing. He's very anti Israel, just being Palestinian, but there's no religious like him personally. He wasn't practicing. And my mom's all alone. And so she goes looking for a support system, and she goes looking at the mosque for community. And at the mosque, she finds a man who is already married, already has three children, but he offers to take my mom on as his second concurrent wife. Right? So, you know, she is happy to have somebody take care of her and take care of her kids, and so she's willing to put up with whatever he's dishing out. My dad was abusive towards her. He used to hit her, and this man never hit her. He'd hit us, of course, but he never hit her, so she felt like this was a better relationship for her, so she stayed with him as a second, concurrent wife. We lived in his basement, and he is very like my life changed completely when he entered our lives. So before him, I used to be able to play with my neighbor's friends, like, we'd play Barbies together. I'd go swimming, I'd ride my bike, I'd go to birthday parties, listen to music, just like a normal childhood. And then once he entered our lives, it was just immediate. Everything is ham, everything is forbidden. And all of a sudden, my mom started covering her hair and we had to start reading from this book of these words that I didn't understand. And I had to start praying five times a day, and I resisted it from the beginning. Of course, I missed my old life. I was especially upset that I couldn't play with Chelsea and Lindsay anymore. They'd always come knocking on the door wanting to play Barbies, and I was never allowed to go, and they were never allowed in. You're going to the same school at this point? Yes, but not for long. Then I got as soon as the Islamic school was it wasn't built, it was in the mosque, but as soon as it was established that we would have an Islamic school and my mom was teaching in it, then I started going there. Was this associated with any religious awakening on your mom's part or she just needed a man to take care of her, and it was just practical and romantic festival. I don't know if romantic is part of it. I think you practical for sure. And it was a combination of both of those things. So she needed I think she was happy to have somebody take care of her, but then also she just became a full on board, again Muslim, so she just entered. It like she just jumped all in. If you see her wedding photos, she looked like a Bond girl, like short wedding dress, big, huge beehive. There was a belly dancer at her wedding. And to go from that to the woman that raised me that I remember is just a pretty shocking difference. And I used to always resent that. I'd be like, how come you got freedom? How come you got to live like this? Look at your pictures when you were a kid. How come I don't get that life? And she'd say, Because my parents didn't know any better, and I'm raising you better, and you're going to be a better person, and you're going to go to heaven. And my parents did the best they could, but they were wrong. And so how old are you when you're expressing these doubts or well, I was about, you know, about six years old when he entered our life, and I just I resisted all the way up. And probably about nine years old is when I stopped, because that's when the hijab was put on me and I started going to Islamic school, and it was just too much. So you can't really fight anymore when everything in your life is, you know, pushing you in one direction. You just, you know, succumb, especially when you're a kid. But according to my mom, I was never, you know, good enough. The devil was always whispering in my ear and making me question. I always ask questions, right? Like, if a law created everything, who created a law and stuff like that. How could I even these are such blasphemous. If Adam and Eve are the parents of all people, are we all children of incest? So these basic questions that a kid would ask, I'd get in trouble for them. So was there any point where you just went hook, line and sinker and fully adopted the worldview without doubt? Or did you always have some doubt humming in the background? The doubt humming in the background finally went quiet once I was forced into the marriage with Hasam. So once I married him and I wore NiCOB, so that's like, full face covering, the gloves, everything, I was so diminished that I didn't have anything left. And I also kind of made the conscious decision that, I mean, I was desperate for my mom's love and approval. My sister was always the good girl that always listened and never questioned, and I wanted that. I wanted to have that relationship with my mom. So she kept on pressuring me to marry this man, and I eventually gave in because I thought, you know what? Maybe she'll actually love me if I follow what she wants me to do. I'll marry the man she tells me to marry. I'll do everything the way she says to do it. I've been fighting against this my whole life. What happens if I just let go and see if she's actually right? And how old are you at this point? So I'm 20. And I did let go, and I did follow exactly what she said and until I had my daughter and held her in my arms and saw that she was about to grow up in the same environment that I grew up in. My mom was talking to her the same way she had talked to me. Her father was talking about FGM and her dying a martyr for a law and things like that. I'm like, okay, enough. I could maybe accept this world for myself, but I'm not going to accept it for my daughter. There's no way she's going to live this same life. And was he Egyptian? Yeah. And I think people aren't generally aware that FGM is practiced in Egypt, like, 98%, basically, like Somalia in terms of the prevalence of that practice. And this was just a fully arranged marriage, or it had been encouraged once you had met him, so it wasn't fully arranged in that I didn't know I was going to marry him my whole life. Sometimes people arrange marriages for their kids, like from the get go, but it was definitely a forced marriage, which is a very common thing in the Arab world. So it's like, this is the man we want you to marry, and then you basically just get introduced to him, and the woman doesn't need to consent. In Islam, it says silence is consent. So if you just sit there and cry, okay, we're good. Yeah. That's like saying, I do. And so you get pressured into it in the same way you get pressured into everything else. So it's just like wearing the hijab. And you get given two choices, like, do you want to go to heaven or do you want to go to hell? Do you want to be a good, pure, clean girl or do you want to be a filthy whore? These are your choices. Make the right choice. So forcing you into a marriage is similar kind of coercion. So it would be things like there's a hadith that says heaven is at the feet of your mother's, so your mother gets to decide whether you're going to go to heaven or not. So this was the one that was used all the time, and it's a very dangerous weapon for an abusive mother to have. So she would use that one. She'd say, you're never going to go to heaven unless I approve you to enter heaven. And if you don't marry this man, you will never go to heaven. You will burn in hell for eternity, and you will suffer here on earth because you are no longer my daughter. I want nothing to do with you. I won't even allow you to come to my funeral because I don't like, as far as anyone is concerned, you're no longer my family. And then when you die, you'll burn in hell for eternity. So go ahead and make the choice. Yeah. Reading your book, it's a fairly harrowing account of what your childhood and adolescence and young adulthood was like. And I think it's useful to differentiate what is just the sheer bad luck of having an abusive and perhaps mentally ill mom and having married somebody who will will get into his story in a moment. But that's bad luck. That could happen to anyone in any culture without religion. Then there are the cultural practices which aren't necessarily mandated by Islam and maybe don't necessarily represent every Muslims or even most Muslims experience. And then there's just what is fairly common under Islam, because you can just play connect the dots and see that it is mandated or at least encouraged in the texts. So how do you kind of carve out those different strands? For me, what is just the sheer bad luck based on the personalities involved and where is the contribution of Islam? Yeah, so the problem is a lot of these elements are sanctioned in Islam. So Islam says, for example, tells a man, if you fear that your wife is arrogant or disobedient, then go through these steps and then beat her. A law is telling men, if you fear that your wife is going to give you any trouble, beat her. Right. So not every single man is going to beat his wife and not every single man is going to viciously beat his wife. Different men are going to react in different ways, but the problem is the fact that it is sanctioned. So if you complain about it like in my example when I went to my mom and said he just punched me in the face when he saw that I wasn't wearing hijab in the house on the 17th floor because he was afraid people like, I don't know, seagulls people in helicopters might see me through the window. And her response was, he has every right to be. You are his. It says so right there. Chapter four, verse 34. So that's the problem. The problem is that it's codified, it's in the religion and so it can be used in different ways. You know, like not like I said, not every Muslim man is going to beat his wife, but those who do have scriptural support. Yeah, yeah. And the debate really is not whether or not that support exists, but what is meant by beating how hard you can beat your wife. That's very subjective. And there's scholars that come forward and they say things like, oh no, it's like with a toothbrush or whatever. But those are just scholars offering their interpretations as far as the Hurran is concerned. It doesn't say that, it just says Adawana. That's it. There's no asterisks there. But that's subjective anyway. It depends on the country that you're in, depends on the environment that you're used to. Beating can be pretty bad. And any obviously hitting another human being is a bad thing anyway. And the creator of the universe really should not be sanctioning husbands to be beating their wives. But there's a famous critic of Islam named Hamid Abdul Samad who is an Egyptian German man who had a really great way of describing this and he says it's like a laws at the bar and he had a bit much to drink and he's like, you guys should just like beat your wives, man. And his friends. Right? The scholars are behind him going, no, no, no, he doesn't really mean that. He doesn't actually mean that. He means with a feather or something. So those are just the scholars trying to soften it up. But at the end of the day, people read the Quran and they quote that verse, right? And you're wearing the nakab at this point. At what point did that happen? Pijab was at nine years old as far as I could remember. And then once I was engaged to him, started wearing the nuhab, he got it all delivered from Saudi Arabia. And that really helps in dehumanizing you. That really helps in turning me into nothing that he can control very easily. It just suppresses your humanity entirely. It's like a portable sensory deprivation chamber, and you are no longer connected to humanity. You can't see properly, you can't hear properly, you can't speak properly. People can't see you. You can only see them. I mean, just little things like passing people in the street and just making eye contact and smiling, like that's gone. You're no longer part of this world. And so you very quickly just shrivel up into nothing under there. Yeah. Well, we're going to get to this. But it is amazing how sanguine Western feminists are around this. Practice. Like, this is just another culture's ideal of how to honor feminine beauty and empower women. Who are we to criticize it? We should differentiate the hijab from the nakab. The hijab is just a straight up symbol of female empowerment now in the west. Right? I mean, despite your best efforts on Twitter, it is just amazing to see what is being done with this. And we have, you know, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre, the Prime Minister of New Zealand puts it on as the only possible show of respect for the community. There's just no other way to express solidarity but to don the symbol. And we have got Linda Sarsour organizing the Women's March. And there's so many examples of this. For some reason, people one can't see that most of the women on Earth right now who are wearing a hijab are not doing it based on some empowerment they felt at an Ivy League institution, where they just they're just going to take the male gaze off them at their own discretion. So they're forced to do it. The consequences of not doing it, in many cases, are, if not absolutely coercive social pressure. It's actually physical violence. But it is also just a step toward the nakab and the burka, which are the actual crystallization of the ideal here, that's being enshrined, which is all the female modesty is the only thing that safeguards male sexuality from completely running amok. It's like all men would be gropers and rapists, but for the fact that women hide themselves. Maybe we should jump into that. Now, I want to talk about who your husband revealed himself to be, but what have your encounters with Western feminists been like? Well, that makes me really sad that they consider Muslim women to be of some other species and that are so completely different from them. So for themselves, they will recognize all of those things that you talked about are basically victim blaming, slut, shaming. They recognize those elements of rape culture when we're in the Western context, which are, you know, they're they're much harder to see in the Western context. But under Sharia, it's very, very easy to clearly see a perfect example of rape culture, but they somehow when it's those women over there, it it's empowering. Like, would it be empowering for you if you were told you have to wear this clothing in order to protect yourself from men who might rape you? Or you have to wear this clothing in order to be good and pure and go to heaven, because if you don't wear it, then you're a filthy whore. No woman would want to hear that. No seven year old child would like to be told, you have to wear this in order to go to school, and your brother doesn't have to. He can wear whatever he wants, but you must wear this or you're not allowed to get educated. It is an atrocity. That's something that every human being should be upset about. And the fact that they think that it's okay for those humans over there but not for us is the part that really upsets me. Yeah. What do you do with the fact that you could go into any one of these cultures and find women who will say, I want to wear the NiCOB. I want to wear the burka? Just take your colonial bullshit elsewhere. Yeah. Oh, of course there will be. And you can also go to fundamentalist Christian cults, and they will tell you, I want to be a servant for my husband. You see people like that on Twitter all the time. They're like, I quit my job, and I cook and clean for my husband, and I'm proud of it. And whatever it is, women make all sorts of choices and decisions, and that's completely up to them, and they're free to do that, but I'm also free to make a judgment on the decisions that they're making. So when I'm talking about the hijab as a symbol of patriarchy and a symbol of misogyny, I am saying that because, as you mentioned, not only are girls coerced into it because of family or government or religion, but girls can be killed because of this. And not just in the Muslim world, but in Canada, in America, in France, in Sweden, there's honor violence and honor killing going on. A 16 year old girl in Canada was strangled to death by her father and her brother with the hijab that she refused to wear, and then her parents refused to bury her because they didn't want anything to do with her. There are so many stories around this. The one that sounds stranger than fiction is the case in Saudi Arabia school, where the school was on fire and the religious police wouldn't let the fire department put it out because the girls weren't appropriately veiled. And they're literally parents standing at the gates of the school watching their daughters burn alive. And there are women that are in Iran today that are being imprisoned for 15 years and more for refusing to wear this cloth on their head. So it's not just you know, it's not just a benign choice when the Prime Minister of New Zealand or when Meghan Markle put a hijab on their head. It's not just a benign support of some benign cultural thing. It is not just a symbol, but an actual tool of oppression. There are women being imprisoned and women being killed. There is a fight over this hijab going on right now. Women in Sudan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia. They're burning their hijabs in the streets. They're fighting against this thing. And then to see free Western women, free Western women leaders take this thing that they are fighting against and voluntarily dawning it and supporting it. What those women are doing is they are supporting the oppressors. They are supporting the oppressors that these women are fighting against. Yeah. The double standard is so clear, and it really is sanity straining that it's so hard for people to see. The clearest case for me in the media was when I don't even remember this, but Warren Jeffs, the leader of the FLDS, the fundamentalist Mormon cult, his compound was rated. And all these little girls and young women were led out in these Little House on the Prairie dresses. They were made to wear these awful 18th century dresses, and they had been married to men who were their grandfather's ages. And these forced marriages were described as rapes. And the men were totally unrepentant. And Jeff's got at least 15 years in prison. I forgot he got a real prison sentence. And this was all talked about on the news as just an unambiguous example of patriarchal exploitation of girls. The fact that it was associated with with religious belief was not even slightly exculpatory. And everyone celebrated the fact that there was a SWAT team raid on the compound. We kicked in the door of this place to free those girls. And it didn't matter at all that the girls didn't want to be free. We knew they had been brainwashed. So when they're talking about how they loved their husband for to a man or whatever it was, no one had any qualm discounting that for their obvious ignorance and brainwashing. Right. And when you compare that to what is happening routinely in the Muslim world, the mainstream media has the opposite response. And this is the most benign case of real extremism in the Muslim world. In truth, it's not even extreme. But the extremism in the Muslim world, you have to add to that the clitorectomies that would have been performed on these girls, the fact that they were raising their sons to be suicide bombers right. And there was an explicit indoctrination of martyrdom, and they were exporting terrorism to the capitals of Europe and America. That's how the fundamentalist Mormon cult would have to behave to make it an analogous situation. And no one can see it on the left. I guess. The other example I should mention, I believe I mentioned this on a previous podcast, but it really belongs here, because we were talking about this last night. I just saw ayan Hersie Ellie give a talk at a university for the first time in three years since since she was deplatformed at Brandeis. And it's a fairly conservative college, Pepperdine, an explicitly Christian college. And she ran through her whole life story on stage, starting with female genital mutilation, abuse in school, physical abuse, sexual abuse. She described it as routine among her friends at the school. She described all this and how she escaped a forced marriage, became a member of Parliament. She is just a true feminist success story, right? And as she starts to get into a discussion of contemporary politics honestly, the edgiest thing she said was if I were teaching at a university and someone and one of my students said that they didn't want to read a certain novel because it triggered them, I would insist that they read that novel, because that's what a university is for. And then I think the other thing she said was when Me Too came up, she expressed blanket support for it, but she said, we have to keep a sense of proportion. There are the Harvey Weinstein's of the world, and then there are people who just put a hand where it's not wanted and you slap it away. She was trying to give some articulating this spectrum of misbehavior that we need to differentiate. And as she's talking about this again, she had just spent a half hour describing in a background so replete with abuse, patriarchal abuse, that you would think it would have earned her intersectionality points of the sort that few people have. And I've got these white women students behind me who are beginning to almost heckle her, right? It was just hissing and laughter among themselves, and then they walked out. It was like another kind of brainwashing. There's a kind of moral panic happening around variables of gender and race on the left that is making it impossible to even parse the statements of a Somali woman who just recapitulated the entire Enlightenment success story of reclaiming secularism and modernity and humanistic values, in her own case, in a few short years. It's just amazing. So anyway, if Ion had white skin and had overcome all of those things in the west, she would be celebrated. She'd be hailed as a feminist hero. So, I mean, when you were talking before about the difference between that Mormon cult and girls in the Muslim world, I started to tear up because it reminded me of your Ted Talk, which I'm going to tear up again. That Ted Talk to me hit me so hard because it was the first time anybody in media I'd ever heard somebody care about those girls the same way you would care about any other girls. Like the argument you were making in that Ted Talk, like, these girls in Afghanistan. Why are they different than the girls from the Mormon cult? Sorry, Sam. That was great that Ted Talk was late. Thank you so much. You don't have to apologize. This is good radio. Yeah, a few people notice it, but I actually teared up in that Ted Talk. I don't care if we spoke about this or not, but there was a point where I talk about honor killing, and I said, Imagine your daughter gets raped, and what you want to do is kill her out of shame. And obviously I had rehearsed that talk a ton, unlike any other talk you ever give. A Ted Talk is like this memorization feat, right, where you have to remember every line because you've got a hard time limit and no notes. And so it's a very odd talk to give because it's a performance as yourself. I mean, you're not thinking out loud because you really have a script that you've memorized. At least that's the way most people do it. And the way I've done both of my Ted Talks, obviously, I knew exactly what I was going to say, and I had done this a dozen times at least. But I had just been told a couple of hours before going out on stage that my first daughter had taken her first steps. So when I got to that point in the talk totally punctured me, and I actually almost burst into tears. And you can sort of say people who are just watching it as a Ted Talk don't tend to notice. But you can see that I'm almost totally derailed in the talk at that moment. You could see that you actually care. That was very evident. And that's why it hit me so hard, is because I'm so used to there being this two tier system of all girls that matter and then the girls that don't matter. And that was the first time I had seen in the Western world somebody standing up in a Ted Talk, speaking up for us as if we were human beings like every other girl on the planet. And that was very evident in your talk. And then, of course, immediately after your talk, you get questioned about it and all the predictable things happen. And so that's a very quick the wokeness comes to swallow you after that. Yeah, exactly. Here I am feeling all excited and happy, and there it is. But I just wish that this is why the subtitle of the book, how Western Liberals Empower Radicalism. That's what it's all about. I want my liberal friends and supporters, and this is where I see myself. I am in this realm, too. So when I talk about liberals, I'm not saying those people over there. I'm saying us over here. We need to look at what we are doing and we need to stay consistent. And if we believe that all humans are equal, then why are we having a different set of, you know, why do we use a different yardstick for these people versus these people. So I feel like if they could see that, if they could understand that, then they would get it. I feel like if they could get the lunacy of, would you celebrate a Mormon underwear on the COVID of Sports Illustrated? No, you wouldn't. You would automatically see that that's ridiculous for many different reasons. But then having a birkini on the COVID of Sports Illustrated, that's something to be celebrated. I just want them to stay with the thought for four more seconds and just continue on with that and think, okay, why is this celebrated and this is not? Yeah, again, it's very hard to understand how the point doesn't run through and change people's outlook just in real time whenever you have the conversation. An example I occasionally use when I'm getting criticized for judging another culture. And again, I always go to the most extreme, and still that's not extreme enough. So I talked about the Taliban, or you started the Taliban a lot. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. OK, I have a town hall event in Los Angeles coming up in May, May 9 at a currently undisclosed location. This is going to be at a small club. I think it's seats 200, a more intimate venue than normal, and we're going to broadcast this town hall online. And I'm hopeful the video experience is going to be good. It's going to be an ask me anything episode of the podcast. But rather than take questions merely from you all online, I'm expecting attendees to bring their questions, though I will take some online questions and I'll get a chance to think out loud, so I'm looking forward to that. This is an experiment. If you are a subscriber to the podcast that is a supporter, you should have already received an email about this event, and you will receive another email on Friday the 26th when tickets go on sale, and those tickets will go very quickly. So if you live in Los Angeles and want to attend Live, I would jump on that. But if you're not in La. Or can't attend the live event, you'll find the video in your subscriber content online@samharris.org. There's also going to be a policy change coming soon here where you will need an active subscription to get content behind my paywall. The policy with respect to free hasn't changed. If you really can't afford to support the show, I don't want money to be the reason why you can't get access to my content. As you know, this is also true on the Waking Up app, but we need to move to an active subscription model here. So those of you who gave $1 once when that was possible, or those of you who supported the show on Patreon will need to start a monthly subscription through samharris.org, or send us an email at info@samharris.org telling us that you can't afford to, and then we'll open a free account for you. Okay, so today I am rereleasing an old episode, which unfortunately is highly relevant this week. The episode was originally 43 of the podcast titled What Did Jihadists Really Want? And the original release date was August 17, 2016. So, a little more than two and a half years ago, and in the aftermath of the recent bombings in Sri Lanka, I decided to listen to it, just to see if there was something more I needed to say to make sense of the current situation. And I find that there isn't. I did about as good a job as I can in trying to get you, the listener, to see Jihadism the way I do and the way I believe Jihadists see themselves. I must say, I'm also given further motivation, having just been at Ted and having had the usual collisions with the wokeness there. It was a great conference. I had a lot of fun. But I had one meeting with a Muslim apologist, I would call her, who I won't name. It was a private meeting organized by Chris Anderson, and he had some hopes that we would have a meeting of the minds. I think we didn't have much of one. It wasn't a waste of time, but it was also an experience where I confronted all of the usual denials and non sequiturs one encounters when one tries to say something rational about Islam at this moment in history. So it was a frustrating experience and now punctuated by an enormous atrocity. I think the current count is 350 have died in Sri Lanka. And the details we have so far prove yet again that the problem is not a matter of economics or politics, it's belief. These suicide bombers were middle class and mostly well educated. They had other opportunities. The problem was that they were convinced of the truth of specific religious ideas, ideas that are not in the Anglican Communion or in Mormonism or in Scientology. All I ever argue for on this topic is that we acknowledge the power of ideas and Islam has more than its fair share of bad ones. So if you want to confront the problem of Jihadism and Islamism, as we really all must, and as moderate Muslims the world over must, you have to be honest about these things. And what I encounter among apologists and among all too woke leftists is to some degree self deception, no doubt. But it is with disconcerting frequency a commitment to actually lying about the problem and to defaming anyone who won't lie about it. So I'm reupping this podcast because if I had to say this all again, I don't think I would change a word. And all of these observations are once again relevant. So what did Jihadists really want? Well, as I said in my last podcast, ISIS just released a remarkable document in the latest issue of their magazine, Dabiq, which is named after a city in Syria where they believe they will wage a final battle against a crusader army and usher in the end times. So I promise to discuss that in a separate podcast, which I'll do now. The whole magazine is fairly astonishing. I'll provide a link to a PDF on my blog, but I warn you that some of the pictures are disturbing. There's a photograph of a man getting his head cut off, which leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. But I'm going to read some relevant parts of the magazine on this podcast, and one thing that should alarm you is how well written it is. The writing in this magazine is actually better than you'll find in your average Salon article or on the Intercept. In fact, it's as well written as Fawaz Gurgy's new book on ISIS, published by Princeton University Press. And the copy editing in this magazine is actually better than in that book. I'm not exaggerating. I spotted a typo in the Gurgy's book in the first few pages. I haven't seen any typos in this copy of Dubbed, and it may sound like a strange thing to say, but good writing and good copy editing is a very bad sign. It tells you something about the caliber of people they've managed to recruit. The article I'm going to focus on and read in its entirety is entitled why We Hate You and Why We Fight You. And I think it will inevitably be said that there's something self serving about my reading this to you, because it confirms more or less, everything I've been saying about jihadism for the last 15 years. And perhaps there is something a little self serving about it, because, as you know, I've been pilloried for my views on this topic for about as long. But this really isn't a matter of my just saying, I told you so. I actually think it's important that if you have any lingering doubts about whether or not ISIS and jihadism generally is a religious phenomenon, that you clarify those doubts and just listen to what members of ISIS have to say for themselves. But before I get into that article in particular, here is what I think any honest reader will get from this magazine as a whole. The fundamental concerns of these people are theological. The claim they want to press and substantiate in nearly every paragraph, and which motivates everything they do, is a claim about the exclusive legitimacy of their religion. Every other way of life leads to hell. They really believe this. Now, most of you, I would wager, have no idea what it's like to believe that either paradise or an eternity in fire awaits you after death. And because you haven't ever believed this, you probably waste a lot of fuel wondering whether anyone actually does. I want to recommend that you stop doing that and simply accept that jihadists believe what they say they believe. Just accept it as a working assumption. If you do that, you will suddenly find that everything they do, including suicide bombing, makes perfect sense. So I recommend that you simply listen to what these people have to say for themselves, as you would any other people who are making extreme sacrifices towards some end. The disposition not to do this is really strange. Let's say you went to a medical school and you asked students why they were pursuing careers in medicine. How disposed would you be to second guess their answers? But what they're doing is fairly difficult. They're spending all this time in school, they're incurring massive student debt. They're spending their days indoors dissecting cadavers when they could be at the beach. What on earth are they up to? Well, if you ask them, they will tell you, and you won't waste any time wondering whether they have some other motive that bears no resemblance to what they say. There might be some diversity of reasons, but 90% of medical students will give you more or less the same story. They'll say that they want to help people, that they want a meaningful career where they know they're doing good in the world, they want a high prestige career, they want to be paid well, and they might have scientific interest in biology and medical research. You'll hear answers like this, and these answers make sense of their behavior. You won't hear someone say, I wanted to be a professional football player and found that I just wasn't quite good enough to turn pro. And so I decided to find the thing that was closest to the thrill of sacking a quarterback. And so I became a dermatologist. That wouldn't make sense. It wouldn't make sense to imagine that was the underlying motive. So why did jihadists do what they do? Well, they are telling us ad nauseam. They're telling us even when we don't ask. And a magazine like Dabiq advertises their concerns and aspirations with utter clarity. And you might want to say it's just propaganda. And it is propaganda, but it only works as propaganda because many Muslims share these aspirations and concerns and believe the same doctrines. To call it propaganda doesn't mean that it's dishonest. For these ideas to successfully recruit people means that they find these ideas compelling. So whether Abu Bakr al Baghdadi believes every word in this magazine isn't the point. The point is that this material is a highly successful means of recruiting foreign born jihadis. The point is that many people find these ideas persuasive, and that's not an accident. Now, recruiting and inspiring jihadis overseas is obviously different from getting Iraqis and Syrians to fight for ISIS at home. And there's no question that many locals have been recruited out of fear. Fear of Shiites with whom they've been locked in a sectarian civil war, and fear of what ISIS will do to them if they don't support the caliphate. So who knows what percentage of local Sunnis really support the extreme salafi jihadism of ISIS? It's probably a terrifying percentage, but it's not everyone. But here we're talking about the spread of Islamism and jihadism globally. So we're talking about persuasion, we're talking about the power of ideas. We're talking about a worldview that must be argued for and which some percentage of Muslims in any society will find compelling. And when you read this magazine, you find that, above all, jihadis are concerned about religious error. They really are concerned about the deviance of Christianity, which they consider a form of paganism, and about rival interpretations of Islam. And needless to say, they're horrified by secularism and atheism and homosexuality. They're concerned about the worship of anything beyond the single reality of Allah, whether it's the worship of Jesus or the Virgin Mary or more metaphorically things like money and pleasure in the arts and science. And the writers of this magazine go on at great length about how irrational it is to believe that a world as orderly as ours could have arisen from chaos. They give a long argument from design that is at least as lucid or as silly, depending on your view, as any offered by the Discovery Institute. They consider every sign of order in our world, including the beauty of nature and the cuteness of babies and the neurobiology of vision, the details of energy metabolism in the body and the functioning of our immune systems, as well as the faculty of reason itself, to be evidence of a benevolent creator on their account. The harmony between man and nature cannot help but attest to the reality of a just God. And this is spelled out in great detail in a magazine that prominently celebrates the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people. To read this magazine is to discover that the oft mocked line that was delivered by George Bush in his Texas drawl, they hate us for our freedom, is actually true. It is especially true if you include freedom of speech and belief. And those among you who think that they must have some other motive, that they must hate us for our foreign policy, as any rational people would in the aftermath of colonialism, well, you're simply wrong. And dangerously so, as they make absolutely clear. So everything that has been said and written by people like Noam Chomsky and Robert Pape and Glenn Greenwald and the dozens of prominent Muslim apologists about the motivations of jihadists, this whole pornography of self doubt that they've been peddling for more than a decade, all of this is pure delusion. The people who are attracted to the jihadist cause are actually concerned about the work of Darwin and Marx and Nietzsche and Durkheim and Vapor and Freud, who they call, quote, the engineers of Western decadence. They are revolted by the quote sodomite pride they see on display in the west. There's a testimonial from a European convert to Islam that's worth pondering. A woman, actually, and she talks about what it was like to convert in Finland and about how Christianity never made any sense to her because of course, it doesn't make any sense. Jesus is both a man and the Son of God and God himself. He's divine and all powerful, and yet he gets crucified and humiliated. This is ridiculous. Christians haven't been able to make sense of the Trinity for 2000 years. Islam actually is more straightforward than this, which is a real advantage. There's just God, and you are his slave. Get with the program or burn in hell. The magazine actually contains a long article on biblical criticism that does a very good job of dismantling Christian doctrine. The level of theological concern these people have, the absolute primacy of their claim to be in metaphysically correct is really impossible to exaggerate. They care about nothing else. There's only one question that makes any sense how can you avoid Hell and get into paradise after you die? That question is the black hole at the center of their worldview that sucks everything into it. So this Finnish woman who was born Christian writes, what struck me most as I was reading the Qur'an were the verses about hellfire and the punishment in the hereafter, end quote. Which isn't a surprise, obviously, because the whole point of the Quran is to admonish you to submit to Allah or else go to Hell. And she talks about how she converted to Islam and how her parents disapproved, and then she married a Muslim man and had a child, and then the happy family decamped to the Caliphate. And then she writes, quote, I can't even describe the feeling when you finally cross that border and enter the lands of the Caliphate, it is such a blessing for Allah to be able to live under the Caliphate. There are so many people who made several attempts to come, but just haven't been able to make it yet. Of course, when you come to the Caliphate after sacrificing everything for the sake of Allah, you'll continue to be tested. You're going to see hardships and trials, but every day you're thankful to Allah for allowing you to perform hijra, that's migration, and to live under the Sharia. Life in the Islamic State is such a blessing. You face difficulties and hardship. You're not used to the food or the change of life. You may not know the local language, you hear bombings, and the children may get scared, but none of that takes away from the gratitude you have towards Allah for allowing you to be here. Also, unless you're living here, you don't realize what kind of life you had before. The life here is so much more pure. When you're in Dar al Khafar, the lands of disbelief, you're exposing yourself and your children to so much filth and corruption. You make it easy for Satan to lead you astray here. You're living a pure life, and your children are being raised with plenty of good influence around them. They don't need to be ashamed of their religion. They are free to be proud of it and are given the proper creed right from the start. After four months of being here, my son was martyred, and this was yet another blessing. Every time I think about it, I wonder to myself, if I stayed in Dar al Kufar, what kind of end would he have had? What would have happened to him, al Hamdulilah. Praise be to God. He was saved from all that. And what could be better than him being killed for the cause of Allah? Obviously, it's not easy, but I ask Allah to allow us to join him. End quote. That's a fairly chilling passage. I'm going to read it again because you weren't ready for it. As you listen again, assume that this is a psychologically normal person who simply believes in the reality of martyrdom in paradise. Which is to say, she believes that this life is fundamentally unimportant. It's merely a test of faith. Believe the wrong thing and you will go to Hell for eternity. Believe the right thing and you'll go to paradise. Eternity is all that matters. I'll read the relevant part again. Of course. When you come to the caliphate, after sacrificing everything for the sake of Allah, you'll continue to be tested. You're going to see hardships and trials, but every day you're thankful to Allah for allowing you to perform Hitra and to live under Sharia. Life in the Islamic State is such a blessing. You face difficulties in hardship. You're not used to the food or the change of life. You may not know the local language, you hear bombings and the children may get scared, but none of that takes away from the gratitude you have towards Allah for allowing you to be here. Also, unless you're living here, you don't realize what kind of life you had before. But life here is so much more beautiful when you're in Dark. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, today I'm speaking with Graham Wood. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He's been on the podcast many times before. He wrote a great book on the Islamic State titled The Way of the Strangers Encounters with the Islamic State, and he's also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he also teaches at Yale University. Anyway, today we talk about guns and gun violence in America, the unique character of that problem. We recorded this a couple of days after the mass shooting in Yuvaldi, Texas, and we discussed the issue from every side we can think to analyze it from. No doubt there's more to say. Those of you who are not used to hearing me get choked up will hear me scarcely able to talk about yovaldi at one point. That story and the specific details are unlike any I can think of at the moment, and it is a kind of super stimulus, morally speaking, that I find it very difficult to think about. Anyway, Graham and I do our best here. This seems like an appropriate podcast to release on Memorial Day. It's also a PSA, so no paywall. If you want to support what we're doing here on the podcast, the way to do that is to subscribe@samharris.org, and I feel immense gratitude to all of you who do that. And now I bring you Graham Wood. I am here with Graham Wood. Once again, graham, thanks for joining me. I'm glad to be here, Sam. So we are speaking some days after the Yevaldi massacre, and I wanted to have a conversation with you about the larger issue of guns and gun violence in America and what we can do about it. You recently wrote a couple of pieces in The Atlantic about this, and obviously this is on everybody's mind. This is a this is a problem that, despite how excruciating it is, it seems just surprisingly intractable and it almost seems impossible to solve. This conversation will reveal how complex it is. The status quo is totally unacceptable, but it seems resistant to change for reasons that are more complex than the people who are calling for change generally seem to realize. And so I think we'll add some complexity to this. I don't know, and perhaps some moral clarity, but I'll be surprised if we arrive at anything like easy solutions. But perhaps to start, maybe you can just summarize your engagement with this issue. What has been your experience with guns and gun culture and your focus on this as a journalist? I mean, obviously you focused a ton on violence and chaos, especially overseas, but just in what part of your wheelhouse is this issue? Yeah, well, I guess the first thing to say is I'm a Texan, so if you want to know what my experience with gun culture is, I grew up in a place that identifies itself with having lots of guns around. And although I didn't grow up with a gun in my household at all, probably the majority of the of the friends I knew had them, shot them as kids, certainly had them in the house. And it feels totally normal for me to be around people who have guns and who use them responsibly. And I spent two years working on a ranch in California, and any rural environment you're in is likely to have a lot of guns in it too. And also to have people gun with guns who are using them responsibly and who think of them as just part of their culture and part of their work, something they use for work and for fun. So it's never been for me a thing that, as I think a lot of people in my journalistic milieu think of guns as scary things and they should be scared to some extent, but they might not quite understand how deeply implicated in the culture guns are. The other aspect of this that I think has really influenced me is reporting for years on terrorism and counterterrorism, where much like after Uvaldi, after September 11, I remember very vividly watching people understandably, looking for for anything they could do to keep something like that from happening again. And just like after Yuvaldi coming up with a lot of really bad ideas that on just a moment's reflection would reveal how bad they were and how unlikely they were to stop the threat. So just like people after September 11 would say, for reasons it's hard to fathom in retrospect, maybe we need a national ID card. Maybe that would stop this. Similarly, now there are a lot of solutions being proposed, like having fewer doors to the schools that I think, similarly, on Just a Few moments reflection would not solve the problem and certainly not the underlying problem. So that's the background that I take to this. And then in addition to that, I'm just someone who enjoys guns and who just happens to have a few days ago applied for my concealed carry permit. So I have some very recent experience of what it's like to try to be legally armed in this country at this moment. Yeah, you wrote an article about how just comically easy that is to do. It's not comically easy perhaps in every state, but where you did it in Connecticut, there really is no process of exclusion. Forget about getting guns. Now we're talking about you're getting a gun and getting a permit to carry it concealed. Did you want to say anything about that? Yeah, I expected that. Connecticut, which ten years ago had the Sandy Hook disaster to be one of the harder states to get a concealed carry permit. It's not. Not compared even to its neighboring states like New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island. And all it really takes is doing a one day gun course and after that going to the cops. And if you haven't committed some of the eleven deadly sins that would get you excluded from gun ownership, like having been convicted of a felony or being the subject of a restraining order, or having recently been a mental inpatient, these things will keep you from getting a gun. But I asked the instructor directly, who was been in law enforcement for 30 years. I said, you know, when I go to the police station to get all this paperwork filled out and approved, what if they just look at me and say, you look kind of crazy. You look maybe homicidal you look like not the kind of person we want on our streets, walking around authorized to be carrying a revolver. And he looked at me and said, first of all, if they excluded people on that basis, you think they'd let me have a gun? He actually looked perfectly normal, but his, his point was well taken. He said, you could go into the police station with your underpants over your pants and they would still hand you your, your permit back. So basically it's it's unless you, you've committed one of the very specific things that will prevent you from having a gun, then a gun is yours to carry around in Connecticut if you can jump through the bureaucratic hoops and take a one day course. Yeah. And this is a problem when we're going to talk about what happened in Yevaldi or Buffalo before that. You're talking about people who wouldn't have been excluded on the basis of most, even all of the remedies that people are suggesting could help solve this problem. Right. You're talking about people who legally bought guns, who did not have criminal histories. I guess the Buffalo shooter had some entanglement with the mental health system, but not of a sort that seems currently actionable. We'll talk about red flag laws and what we might do to mitigate this problem, but in so many cases, we're talking about someone who has legally acquired a gun. And even in the case of Yvaldi, who went through a background check and passed it because this person had no criminal history. Obviously there were many red flags in this person's life. And we'll talk about what it might mean to respond to those kinds of things more in a kind of pre crime Minority Report way and just how fraught that process might be. But this is, as you said, the conversation that happens in the aftermath of an atrocity like this rarely hits upon the actionable ideas that would obviously have reduced the risk of the very atrocity that has provoked the conversation. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and I understand why people would flail about in search of a solution here, but none of the things that were in place, they didn't fail in the sense of, as far as we can tell, this guy was legally permitted to have a gun. As an 18 year old without any serious run ins. So the system, quote unquote, worked. And unfortunately, the system working in this case means a couple of dozen dead people. So I guess I should briefly summarize my background here. Some people listening to the podcast will know it, but if not, you can read on my blog or listen to podcast number 19, where I wrote an article almost ten years ago titled The Riddle of the Gun in response to a, a shooting of this sort. And I think it was Sandy Hook that was the proximate cause there. And I've had several other podcasts and articles on violence. So, just in brief, I have very little affinity for the religious cult that is organized around the Second Amendment in the US. And I share every liberal's outrage at the outsized influence that the NRA has had politically over the years and just how obscene it looks from the outside and even from the inside, that America is such an outlier with respect to gun violence. It just makes absolutely no sense. And so when viewed from Australia or the UK or Canada, you look at the problem we're suffering here, whether it's mass shootings or just the ambient level of gun violence and suicides, that is mostly a problem of handguns. And we'll talk about that. It's just insane that we are living this way. And yet I am also someone who has never believed that calling 911 is a reasonable strategy for self defense if someone breaks into your home intent upon harming you or your family. And so I've been a gun owner for many years. I've, I've trained a lot with firearms of, of various types. I've, you know, gone down the rabbit hole there and discovered how fun it is to do that. I mean, once you admit that you have a reason to own a gun and you need to get well trained to use it and to use it safely, then it becomes just incredibly fun to shoot, right? It's a guilty pleasure, honestly. I understand why there are millions of Americans who love to shoot guns and see a reason to own them. Because, again, maybe I should just spell out the moral logic of this briefly, because it's easy to if you're outside of this, if you haven't gone down this particular rabbit hole and you ask, why would anyone want to own a gun? Right? Isn't that just increasing the likelihood, if you're going to take the end of this, that many New York Times opinion columnists might take it's? Just owning a gun is entirely fatuous because it just raises the risk that you're going to kill yourself or you're going to get killed with it by a member of your family who grows deranged or it's going to get used against you. So your John Wayne fantasies of defending yourself and your family with a gun are irrational. There are many reasons to think that's just not true in one's own case and to not fear that one is self deceived, right? Yes. If you have a life of chaos, if you're in danger of being suicidally depressed or a member of your family seems to be, if you're running a meth lab, if you're hanging out with dangerous, dysfunctional people yes. Then adding guns to your life, you might well think, is increasing the likelihood that you're going to be harmed by them. But if you're an entirely responsible, sane and well trained person who understands, almost to the level of a religious principle how important it is to store your gun safely, then it is true that the swimming pool in your yard is a greater risk to friends and family than the gun that is safely locked in your house. And responsible gun ownership, in that case, is a thing. And the reason why it makes sense ethically, is, in my view, a world without guns is a world in which the strongest, most aggressive, most violent, most well trained, and most numerous men always win. Right. That is what it is to live in a world where you don't have access to a weapon that gives you some kind of range in a physical altercation with a stranger who enters your house. The big guy always wins. And if you want to live in that kind of world, I just don't think anyone should be sentimental or nostalgic for that kind of world. Yeah. One thing, Sam, that really changed my mind about guns was a few years ago for The Atlantic. I profiled a gun celebrity on YouTube named John Korea. And one of the really amazing things about YouTube is that you can see things that in the past, a person could live 100 years and not see more than half a dozen serious acts of violence. Now you can watch YouTube and there will be color commentary by extremely smart, clever people who have watched thousands, tens of thousands in the case of John Korea and analyzed them. And I think a lot of people who have no experience with guns have the immediate assumption that there's just no way that someone is going to defend himself with a legally acquired and owned firearm, that home invaders always have the drop on you, that bad guys end up using the guns against you. And indeed, those things happen. But you start watching these videos, which are curated by Korea, and you start seeing it happens all the time that a self defender uses a gun against a bad guy. So I think a lot of fantasies about guns, pro and con, are not surviving scrutiny now that we can actually see more instances, now we could talk about whether in aggregate and it's hard to say owning a gun is more likely to save you or harm you. And as you say, a lot of the answer to that is going to have to do with how responsibly you store it, how well trained you are in its use and also whether you're a crazy person or not. So I'm guessing you've done the calculation and you are one of those people who uses guns with a sense of religious commitment to storing them and so forth, and also that you judge yourself non crazy enough to be responsible enough to own them. Yeah, I feel like defensively I need to put the punchline somewhere up front here because many people who read my essay, The Riddle of the Gun were just blindsided by it and horrified by it. They just could not believe that I would even own guns despite the fact that I'm the sort of person who gets the occasional death threat and attracts the occasional lunatic into my orbit. And it is a very nuanced and even confusing argument I make because I really am on both sides of this issue. And it's it's not an easy issue to parse. But the thing to put up front is that what I actually recommend I mean, the policies I would want to see enacted are more restrictive than any that anyone on the left is even arguing for and would be hopeless to try to implement in the current environment. Politically, the short form of this is I think getting a gun should be the equivalent of getting a pilot's license, right? I think you should have to be trained, you should have to be vetted. It should be highly non trivial to get a gun. Now, there are arguments against that bias. Is it against poor people that biases? It against people who just don't have the freedom to do all that. And yet still you could argue that the single mom home alone should be able to own a gun, et cetera. But anyway, I'm definitely biased on the side of making things much harder than even the people who are banging on about gun safety are inclined to argue for. And yet I find it very difficult to wish for a world without guns. Again, for the aforementioned reasons, I've just spent enough time training in martial arts and just studying human violence and just knowing, you know, knowing what the problem is without a weapon. Like a gun. When, you know, the guy who spent ten years in prison, you know, basically going to graduate school for, for crime comes into your house, you know, with bad intentions, you know, you picking up a frying pan is a low percentage solution. So with that said, let's talk about I guess I have another throat clearing caveat here. On some level, I wonder whether conversations like this are even good to have specifically in the aftermath of a mass shooting. It's because, again, we have a totally intolerable number of mass shootings. I think we've had 212 so far this year in the US. Which is just insane. I think a mass shooting is defined as anything over four people getting shot in a single incident. But nevertheless, that is a rounding error on the problem of gun homicide in this country. I mean, that that's just not what you know, if we, if we solved all the mass shootings magically, we would still have something like 99% of our gun homicide problem in this country. Right. And to speak of it in the context of a school shooting, there have been, I believe, about 30 such incidents this year. So, again, in my lifetime, I believe the total number of school shootings is on the order of about 1300. Right. So 201 year of mass shootings or 1342 years of school shootings. So we are quite reasonably exercised about what happens in Uvaldi, but when we talk about gun violence in general, that's a very small contribution to the number of actual dead. Yeah, I'm looking at the FBI statistics on homicide, and I think those we only have those up to 2019, if I'm not mistaken. So homicide has gone up since then. Famously, in the aftermath of COVID and George Floyd, we've, we've had an uptick in homicide. So I don't have those current figures. But when you look at 2019, we had nearly 140 deaths due to due to homicide. And that is, we should say, we should acknowledge way down from where it was in the early ninety s, and the vast majority, over 10,000 of these are due to firearms of some type. Most of those are handguns. Over 6000 are handguns unhelpfully. There are over 3000 where the type of the firearm is not stated. So there's probably some mix of handguns and long guns there. But there's only 364 in 2019 that are acknowledged to be rifles, 200 to be shotguns. And when you're talking about the much maligned AR 15, which is everyone's focus in the aftermath of Yuvaldi, as it was in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, again, this is a rounding error on the problem of gun homicide. And we can talk about the reasons why AR 15s are in fact scary. I mean, the context in which they are, you know, you are at a significant disadvantage given that a person with bad intentions or mental illness has acquired an AR 15. But having someone gain access to a classroom and the ability to kill people at point blank range, that is not a context where the unique advantages of an AR 15 are the problem. It's very easy to believe that Yovaldi or Sandy Hook would have been essentially the same catastrophe had the shooter been armed only with handguns. Right? Yeah. An AR 15 is not necessarily the weapon of choice if you're going to be going through hallways into small rooms, having a shotgun, having handguns, both of these things are more maneuverable. And no one's shooting back at you is the other thing for most of the time, unfortunately, for a very long time in the case of the guy in Uvaldi. But Sam, I won't ask you about the weapons that you keep in your home. But one argument that I've heard people make is the AR 15 is an excellent weapon against tyranny. If you're a Ukrainian and you have an AR 15 in your house, that will be very useful since you were just invaded. But if we're just talking about self defense, which sounds like is one of your biggest concerns, then you could just say, all right, no more Air 15th. But anybody who wants to can have an over under shotgun in his house, and that will work very well. There will be the upper half of the home invader will no longer exist once he's hit with that, and it will not be very useful as an offensive weapon. So you're not going to have gangland slayings with these. It seems like the good guy uses of a shotgun are pretty high and the bad guy uses are pretty low. So what do you think about that as a remedy, saying no more AR Fifteens, definitely no more handguns, but you can have a home defense shotgun anytime you want it? Yeah, well, so, I mean, it's just now, now we weighed into why the problem is so complicated. So, so again, the, the problem, the overwhelming problem in our society with homicide and suicide based on firearms is a problem of handguns. Right. So all the talk about assault rifles, AR Fifteens is not acknowledging the that fact. Right. And but had the, but the, the other problem is handguns are, are, are never on the table for banning. I mean, it's a political non starter. It's not certainly when you're talking about a culture in which concealed carry is a thing, it's the only thing you're going to carry concealed is a handgun. There are reasons why I would consider a handgun preferable to a shotgun for self defense, even at home. So there's an argument to be had there. But it's just that the handgun is the last thing anyone is going to ban, and it is, it is 99% of the problem. And again, if you take the situation like a school, shooting a handgun is arguably the most insidious thing to use because it is the thing that can be concealed until the last moment. I mean, the person walking into a school from, with an AR 15 looks, you know, every inch the dangerous maniac as he approaches the school because he's, you know, what business does somebody have holding an AR 15, you know, in the parking lot of a school unless they're a cop responding to a school shooting? So if there is protection of any kind at the school, it gives people the ability to notice that something completely out of the ordinary is about to happen. Whereas with a handgun, a handgun concealed in a backpack can be brought into any place of business, any soft target, right? A movie theater, an auditorium, any place that doesn't have a metal detector is vulnerable to somebody with a handgun. And again, up close, there's virtually no advantage to an AR 15 ballistically. It's usually worse to get hit with a round moving that fast, but in fact, not always. And it's easier to wrestle a long gun away from an attacker than it is a handgun. Right. It's easier just to grab the barrel and point it toward the ceiling, and then all of a sudden, you're in a wrestling match. And so the problem is, even when you're talking about mass shootings, handguns present every part of the problem. Everything you're going to hear about banning assault weapons. It's symbolic more than anything else. And it's not to say that I'm against banning AR 15s, it's just if we could do that, we still haven't solved the problem. I should say that the situation in which a rifle presents a terrifying advantage is where a person is shooting from some distance. Hitting something at 100 yards with a handgun is genuinely difficult, even for a very good shooter. And it's trivially easy with a rifle. So anyone with 30 minutes of training with an AR 15 can hit something at 100 yards at will. And that is not true with a handgun. And it's not true with a handgun, even if you're a good shooter. Right? And so that's a huge difference. And so when you're talking about a situation where someone's on the clock tower on the university campus shooting people at distance, um, you know, Charles Whitman style yes, rifles present the problem there. But the problem in that case is that many rifles that people would use for hunting, you know, the the very same rifle is precisely the rifle a sniper would use to kill people at distance. So unless you're going to talk about fundamentally removing guns from circulation, it's very hard to see how you're closing the door to various aspects of this problem. Yeah. Which raises the question, since the AR 15 is not the ideal weapon for wreaking havoc in a school or post office, then why is it constantly being used? And I think there's some interesting answers to that. One is that there's just a whole bunch of them. They're extremely common now and they weren't 20 years ago. But also, I think it points to something else that's really important, which is that there's a social contagion effect. Yeah. Everybody knows what Naar 15 is. Everybody talks about Naar 15. They have this talismanic importance to people who love guns and people who hate guns. And, you know, one of the questions that I think we should be asking that is going to have a really complex and difficult answer is why this is happening now, given that there have been guns in the US for a long time. And I think that these questions are related, that is, the social contagion that causes people to use an AR 15 is probably similar to the social contagion that makes people think, I'm an unhappy teenager. I'm not happy adolescent. And the way I'm going to express that unhappiness is with a suicidal rampage in a school. So I think, just as you say, the precise frame of the rifle, the precise type of weapon, is probably not what we should be thinking about. But instead, why is it that people have this idea in their heads that if they want to, say, express their politics in the case of Buffalo or express their hatred of the world in the case, it seems, of Yuvali, why did they go to schools to do it? And why did they pick up an AR 15 to do it? Yeah, I realized now I never actually made the point I wanted to make at the outset, which is yet another caveat here, which is around my uncertainty and even having this conversation focusing on a mass shooting. And for me, it's somewhat analogous to talking about plane crashes in the aftermath of an especially horrific plane crash. Right. And I notice this in what I'm inclined to say or not say to my daughters about both of those topics. Right. So if there's a plane crash, the truth is, unless they bring it up, I'm not going to talk to my daughters about plane crashes because I don't want them to be afraid to fly. The likelihood that they're ever going to be in a plane crash is infinitesimal, and the likelihood that they could do anything useful in a plane crash is also close to infinitesimal. So I think their lives are better just not thinking about plane crashes and being told accurately that the likelihood of being in one is vanishingly small and that they're safer on a plane than in many other places, including cars, where they're not worried to be. And I do want them to feel that way about going to school. Right. So in the aftermath of a school shooting, telling kids, especially kids under ten, what they should be doing if a maniac comes in with a gun and starts murdering people, I really have misgivings about even having that conversation. Right. And there's something so oppressive about this picture of the world that must be forming in the minds of our children where we're you know, we're talking about making schools resemble, you know, more and more something like a prison in terms of the, you know, the access to the campus and for them to be doing drills and being told what to do. In cases like this, I question the whole project psychologically. And it's not to say that if you're ever in a situation like this, you wouldn't want your kid to know to run away from the sounds of gunshots. But I'm uncertain about whether it's wise to focus on this in the way that we do, given the actual probabilities. I mean, on the day that Yovaldi happened, you know, it's got to be something like 75 million kids went to school that day in America, right. So. It's just it isn't this is not a likely experience for anyone and yet focusing on it amplifies everyone's terror and concern. So anyway, I say that only to then focus on it because I do think as a society we have to get our heads around this. But I have not sat my daughters down and had a talk with them in any kind of extended way around this issue and I just expressed my reasons for for not doing that. And I know you, you just wrote an article that that sort of took the other end of this to some degree. So I'm just wondering what you think about that. Well, first of all, I agree with you completely. I mentioned before the number of school shooting dead in the last 40 years is on the order of 400. That's like ten a year. That's ten too many, of course. But the idea that the chances of ten in 50 or 75 million chance of dying that that would cause us to change the architecture of our schools, the feel of our schools and also to force our kids under the age of ten to once or twice a year, mentally and physically simulate the possibility that there will be this extremely rare event of someone coming in and shooting as many people as possible. It seems to be obviously disproportionate and harmful for kids to be asked to think about that. And on the topic of social contagion, that means every kid in the country is on a regular basis asked to think about this as something that might happen, which increases the psychological availability of that as something they might not just live through but might perpetrate. So I think that's completely nuts that we would rearrange the lives of children just on that basis. In particular, I've written about why changing schools so that they're more prison like, first of all, wouldn't help very much, if at all. And second of all, for pretty obvious reasons, I don't think kids should go to school in prisons. I think they should go to school in happy places where they can think about ideas and play and be kids. On top of all that, I do think that kids have to be told how to react in a way that doesn't traumatize them. And that's what I've sort of come down to when I talk with my loved ones about what they should do. In the case of mass shooting, you just say, look, this is almost certainly never going to happen. But if it does happen, all you have to do is run away, run as fast as you can, and the chances that you will be fine are extremely high. I mean, if there's a mass shooter in a school, that person is going to kill people. Yes, but if experience is any guide to what it's going to look like, it's going to be someone with no training going in there having just bought his AR 15 and the chances of his being able to hit someone who's running are vanishingly small. You said 30 minutes will be enough to hit someone from far away. Yes. If you've got a bench rest, if you've and if that person is essentially standing still. Yeah, I mean, hitting something moving is hard. This is just generic advice for somebody in a situation where a gun is pulled on them. Someone pulls a gun on you and says, don't move, you run away, yes, you still might get shot, but the moment you're running, it is genuinely hard to hit somebody. And even when you have some training on this, and even cops don't get training on moving targets very often, it's a fundamentally different situation than shooting a stationary target. So, yeah, I mean, running away is always good advice. So I think that giving advice to people in ways that it is not itself traumatizing, you keep it simple. You let them know that it's not going to be something that you're ever going to have to do, but reassure them that if it happens, all you have to do is pretty much just one thing. And it's something that you do every time you go in recess, is run and then you don't stop running. And if you do that, the chances that you get through it are extremely high. So I hate the idea that kids first of all, I think it's a bad idea to have them shelter in place. To have them I would tell a kid, if your teacher says to shelter in place and there's shooting going on and you break a window and run, you will not even be charged for the cost of the window. You will not be kept in detention the next day. There will be no one who faults you for doing this. And I think that the outcome is likely to be far better than if you you shelter in place because the worst possible outcome, especially with an untrained shooter, is that he corners you, that he's standing in the doorway and the only doorway out of the classroom. So avoiding that scenario is the main thing that we have to do. I have a suspicion about how the shelter in place suggestion came about. I think it's because schools thought about fire drills. It used to be that you really wanted to keep an account of where all the kids were. You get them out and you know who everyone is, so you don't have to run back in and look for some kid who's wandered off. But obviously that's not a great template for dealing with an active shooter scenario since no one's ever going to go back in unless they're going in to kill the shooter. So I think that keeping the advice simple and based on thinking of it as a foot race, I think is probably the way to go. Yeah. The one thing I would add here is that as kids get older and once you're talking about teenagers who increasingly are physically equivalent to the size of an and strength of an adult, then one thing changes, which is then it's possible to physically swarm a shooter and bring them down. There is some training and just a different mindset is relevant. A bunch of 16 year olds could definitely take down a shooter and if they're cornered, knowing that acting in unison is very different than acting serially and just getting shot serially. This is a point you made in your article and this is a point that many of us made. I made this ten years ago in my article, but this is just very much in the air. We all noticed in the aftermath of September 11 that the rules have changed for hijackings in the sky, right? If the plane is already flying and someone stands up and says, okay, everyone, just stay in your seats. If you don't move, nothing bad is going to happen. There's a bomb on the plane. I'm just going to take control of this thing and we're going to fly to Cuba. That used to be people would just comply in those situations for understandable reasons. They're terrified and hoping against hope. They're going to be safe if they just follow directions. But in the aftermath of September 11, everyone probably on Earth who heard about it understood that there's a very different logic once that plane is flying. And the moment somebody stands up, whatever they're saying, whatever their rationale, you're going to gouge their fucking eyes out and you're going to all do it at once. And it's just raw animal response to an absolute imperative. Right? There's no negotiating in that situation. There's nothing to believe. The person who has advertised his intention to take over the plane has to be overcome immediately. Now, I would recommend that we have that attitude on the ground in an active shooter situation when running isn't the option. Right? So yes, if you can get away, by all means get away. But if you're stuck in a classroom or stuck in a movie theater and someone is just shooting, which is to say they've already advertised their intention to kill people for no good reason, then we have a real coordination problem that can be solved. And it can be solved exactly the way it's now solved in an airplane, right? Which is everyone. You have to recognize that it doesn't matter who this person is, doesn't matter how big, it doesn't matter how well armed he is. It doesn't matter how big he is. It doesn't matter how well trained he is. There's no one who can deal with ten people simultaneously swarming him. It doesn't matter if he's a member of Seal Team Six, if it's just bodies everywhere pummeling him. The unarmed crowd is going to win. And the problem in those situations is no one wants to be the first to get shot. Right. But if the person is already shooting people and there's no running away, we have to solve that coordination problem. That is advice that is completely useless for eight year olds, but it's not useless for 16 year olds. Right. So that's the one thing, I guess I would add for the school scenario when you're talking about high school. I might add one thing to your addition too, which is that you pointed out that this is what you do if you can't run. Yeah, one thing you can do in terms of the architecture and planning of schools is make sure there aren't places where you can't run. I mean, Ted Cruz suggested having a single door and he added that it should be a single door for entry and for egress from the school. And that's one reason why this is a terrible idea, not just for shooting, but for fires and so and other reasons. You need to have ways in and ways out. And you want to have as few places, few culz de sac as possible where a guy with an AR 15 can be barricaded into a room with eight year olds. So the very fact that we would be suggesting that we'd have one way in, one way out school disaster tells me that we're in a kind of September 11 mentality. We're thinking of what specifically, what would we have liked? We would have liked to have some static defense force at the front of the school. Well, guess what? A, that's not plausible to have at every school at all times, and B, there's going to be a lot of trade offs there, where instead, what you want is ways for people to get out, which, of course, has the added upside of making the school more open, more pleasant, and more like a school and less like a prison. So I think really thinking carefully about how we react to this and not doing it in a stupid way. I mean, I mentioned in my piece a maxim that the cryptographer and security engineer Bruce Schneier had after September 11 where he's pushed for a long time, saying what you want is a security system that fails. Well, so if it doesn't work, then the outcome is is not a total loss. So if you have a single door to get in and an armed security guard, then if you are able to if the shooter is able to ambush that security guard and get in, then the fact that he's trapped inside the school with all the kids is not ideal. So instead, you you should organize this this school in such a way that there's lots of ways out, so that once he gets in there, even if he managed to get the jump on the one security guard or the two security guards in the single point of entry. Then as soon as those gunshots ring out, then that school just empties out and every kid runs for his life. That's a very robust security system. It's kind of the opposite of what's being proposed right now. So yet another reason to think that making decisions in the aftermath of the school shooting is a terrible way to go forward. Again, we're focusing here on mass shooting and the worst possible type of mass shooting, a school shooting. You have all these happened, I think, two weeks after Buffalo Low, where many grownups were killed in a market and that was a racist inspired atrocity. I guess it's worth differentiating the sources of violence here because again, now we're talking about mass shootings, which are, sounds crass to say it, especially in the aftermath of a tragedy like this, but this is a rounding error on the problem of gun violence. I mean, there will be more kids killed probably even in a single city like Chicago this weekend by ordinary handgun violence of a sort that we're all too familiar with and all too ignorant of. At the same time, we're not paying attention to inner city violence and it's just in the background and it's disproportionately young black men killing young black men for no good reason in cities all over America. And if you're not going to get a handle on that, you're not going to change the outlier status of America in the world with respect to gun homicide. But when we're talking about a mass shooting like Yevaldi or Buffalo, these can have very different characters. I mean, in my mind there's at least three different sources of violence and they're they're highly non analogous, but they they're they can be overlapping, right? And and therefore an event like this can be overdetermined, right? So in one case, you have just frank mental illness, right? You have somebody who is deranged and whose reasons for doing what they're doing are totally uninteresting and probably inarticulate, right? If we asked Adam Lanza why he killed all those kids and teachers at Sandy Hook, he would probably have had nothing intelligible to say he was clearly mentally ill and that might have been the case with the evolving shooter. Or not. I don't think we know at this point. So how we respond to that problem in our society, how we flag these people early and intrude in their lives in such a way as to reduce the risk of anyone coming to harm on the basis of their mental illness, that is its own separate problem, which is worth figuring out, if possible. But it's a different problem from the problem of comparatively normal people. It's hard to think of someone being normal who would commit a mass shooting, but comparatively normal people who they're not delusional, they're not obviously mentally ill. They're high functioning, perhaps in other modes in their lives, but they can be in the grip of an ideology that causes them to do something horrendous because this is what they think is important to do. Right. In a Muslim context, they could be jihadists. I don't know enough about the Buffalo shooter. Perhaps he was also mentally ill, but it's totally possible for someone to be a white supremacist asshole in extremists who decides to kill people for patently racist reasons. And yet if you had psychometric data on this person, you would not diagnose a mental illness. Right? Yeah. Those are very different situations and we have to talk about them differently. I read the whole manifesto of the shooter in Buffalo and I can say with some confidence that there is no unless you're going to go reading his forehand posts or his email, then there's no way you're going to detect that this guy is so crazy that you definitely should not sell him a gun. Whereas in the case of the Uvaldi shooter, I think it's pretty clear that he was unwell. His coworkers at Wendy's thought he was crazy. There was a chance, a chance anyway, that an inquiry into his mental well being would have detected that maybe he shouldn't have an AR 15. So I think there are distinctions like that to be made. One thing that's the Buffalo shooter, he spends a long time in his manifesto describing his kit, what he's bought in terms of armor, weaponry and so forth, what he's planning to do, and he killed about ten people in Yuvaldi, the guy who was far less equipped, far less knowledgeable about his weapon, killed 20. So going back briefly, just to the questions of what the response can be, in other words, someone who really knew what he was doing, or at least somewhat knew what he was doing, compared to someone who didn't know what he was doing, nonetheless killed far fewer people. And I think that's because in in a supermarket, anybody who could run, ran, and then in Uvaldi, because they were kids and they were told to stay put and wait, and the doors were locked so nobody could come in and save them, and then the cops, for horrifying, seemingly negligent reasons, did not do so. Yeah, we will get to that. And that's that's the thing that just pushed body counts way higher, so far over the edge for me, as a news story. Yeah. Your point, though, is totally right. If we're thinking about how do we keep guns out of the hands of people who are going to use them in homicidal ways, then you have to reckon with it, with the actual people who are doing this. And in the case of Buffalo, I just don't think that there was any way where, if he had to go and have an interview with the Chief of police where he lived, to show that he wasn't totally crazy, I bet he would have passed the interview. So where does that leave us? Whereas the guy in Yuvaldi, I like to think that a 15 minutes conversation with someone used to having those conversations would have revealed that maybe this guy should be looked into a bit before he's given an AR 15. Yeah, and that certainly seemed to be the case with someone like Adam Lanza or who is it? Was it James Holmes and Jared Loughner? I mean, those guys were just properly bonkers and alarming everyone with how crazy they were. And so this raises the issue of red flag policies and just what sort of intervention is possible when even somebody's mom is terrified that they're going to commit some harm on the basis of their delusions. There seems to be very little to do, right? Like, you can't incarcerate somebody in some kind of mental hospital and hold them there for long periods of time until you're convinced that they pose no risk to society. I don't know where the current laws are state by state, but it seems like we're not in a position to do that at any kind of relevant scale and that there are civil rights concerns around being able to do that that are an impediment. And I guess the thing we should also acknowledge is that these different sources of they're the pure cases of these differences, but then there are cases where these variables overlap where you can have somebody who's slightly crazy and who's also ideological right. Again, there are cases where violence is overdetermined, but it's worth differentiating the pure cases because they're very different problems. I mean, the problem of a dangerous, divisive ideology that is causing even normal people to support violence or even engage in violence that would otherwise be unthinkable. You know, whether this is being leveraged by, you know, religious sectarianism or, you know, racist sectarianism or, you know, some other belief system, I mean, that's its own problem that we have to figure out how to solve. And then there's the the problem of crazy people. There's then there's I would say that there's a third class of person who's not crazy in the sense that they're delusional, but they're morally insane. I mean, there are people who are actual psychopaths who are virtually guaranteed to harm people in various ways, but they're not delusional. And to have a conversation with them is not going to produce signs of florid mental illness. You might not notice anything other than a malignantly, self absorbed person. Or more likely, if they're a psychopath, you'll enjoy their company on the first conversation, invite them over to your barbecue, right? It's not likely you're going to catch them either. I have one idea in this department, though, which is I acknowledge that we exist in a political reality where it's unlikely that any of the things that I would like to see in the way of gun control are going to change anytime soon. But I do think there might be a small shift in norms that we might be able to see, which is you know, I'm always impressed when I talk to people who really think about their self defense, about how concerned they are about making sure that their guns are kept safely and that nobody gets anywhere near them who isn't supposed to have them. So I wonder if that can be leveraged somewhat. So here's what I'm thinking of. There is someone who sold the Yuvalde killer his guns, and I only wish that whoever that was felt more of an obligation to have a conversation with him and check him out than that person did. And as far as I can tell, much of gun culture ignores that responsibility on the person who is handing off the gun in exchange for money. Yeah. They'll say, oh, if you're selling someone steak knives, you don't check out to see whether that person is planning to use them to murder his wife. I think that norm should change, and whoever sold those guns probably should. Well, that person's name should be known. I'm sure that person already feels plenty bad, but I think that person should probably feel worse. And that should be the expectation that if you're going to be in the business of selling people guns, you're going to be in the business of making sure that you're selling the people you trust, which currently does not seem to be the norm, but maybe we could push it there. And it would require no legislation to do so. Yeah, and maybe there's a role for insurance and liabilities around this happening. Right. If you're selling people guns and one of those people turns out to be a mass shooter, well, then maybe you're liable in some sense. And then there would be an industry of insurance, presumably, that would grow up around that. And, you know, that just the, the cost of I mean, there could be creative ways to make things expensive. I mean, one of the things about the evolving shooter that was so surprising to many people is just how many rounds of ammo he had on him. Right. He had over 1600 rounds in the school. I think he shot some hundreds. I think he shot at least 150 rounds. And he apparently had magazines everywhere. I think he shot about 100 in the first three minutes. Right. Which, by the way, means that he was deaf. Yeah. There's no way you can fire that many in that at that speed and still be hearing things that are going on around you. Unless you've muffled your ears, in which case you're also not hearing things going on around you. Yeah, I don't know if any of these guys show up with ear protection. And then that speaks to the possible advantage of having a law against high capacity magazines. There are many people who would emphasize that here. That the difference between having, you know, ten rounds before you you go empty and having, in the case of an AR 15, you know, 30 or, or more rounds. It's potentially a big difference. Except if someone has any kind of training, the break, the time it takes to pop in a new magazine is very brief. So unless somebody is standing right next to them, unharmed and ready to gouge their eyes out during that brief pause, it's not a panacea to have only ten round magazines. And so the question is, in what context does it make sense to own thousands of rounds of ammunition if you're a non maniac? There's a very clear case in a training context, ie. At a shooting range, but there's not really a clear case out in the world, right? So I guess I forget who expressed this idea somewhere recently, I think it was on a podcast. The idea that you could make ammunition much, much more expensive than it is, so that it would just be just fundamentally unfeasible to have hundreds, much less thousands, of rounds of ammunition out in the world. But you could exempt shooting ranges so that you could actually go to a range. You could practice, you could shoot hundreds of rounds at normal expense. But there'd be some way to actually not to ensure that people couldn't take hundreds of rounds away from a shooting range. And out in the world, if every round cost $30 or whatever it is, presumably you would not have someone show up with hundreds of rounds of ammunition. You know, that's that's just one idea that had never occurred to me. And perhaps there are other ideas like that. Again, if you're if you've managed to lock yourself in in a room with a dozen kids and you have some dozens of rounds of ammunition, you're going to be able to kill all those kids with whatever gun you have. And so that's just the problem of guns, period, right? It's it's not a problem of assault weapons and it's not a problem of high capacity magazines. And until we get our heads around that, or get our heads around the impossibility of responding adequately to that challenge, we're really not thinking about the problem of gun violence in America, unless you want to say more on that topic. The thing I think we really must talk about, I'll just point out one thing. The idea of making ammunition more expensive may have just occurred to you, but it's part of a Chris Rock routine, I believe, where he oh, really? You can have all the guns you want, but let's have a tax of $1 million per bullet, right? That'll just take care of everything. Yeah, I mean, maybe there's something there, but again, it's easy to see how if you're determined to get lots of ammo, you're going to be able to do that in America. So the thing that makes the evolving story so shattering for many of us, honestly, I'm not sure I can talk about it. Do you want me to intro it? I just have to get the tears back in my head. We can either take a second or yeah, no, you take the lead, I'll compose myself. I mean, the Yuvaldi story is it's still coming out, of course. But the thing that is going to haunt us forever is what we now know about the TikTok of the response. You know, that what happened play by play, which included a really long time when the police were apparently there, the shooter was still active, the shooter was still killing, and some of the kids were actually on 911 for the better part of an hour saying, save us. And 19 police officers were in the hall, not saving them. And the Texas authorities say they made the wrong decision. No kidding. But that decision was to treat this as if it was no longer an active shooter scenario, but a guy barricaded in a classroom with nobody else. So my understanding is the first 911 call came in at 1130, and then by 1135 or so, there were already police who were there. And then by 12:00, after which hundreds of rounds have gone off, there were 19 officers in the hallway. And it took until 1250 before Border Patrol showed up. And sounds like at this point it was them just saying, we're just going to do this, and going in at 1250, having acquired the key to the room and then killing the suspect, who sounds like now jumped out from a closet door. But we as a society are going to be thinking for a long time about how it can have gotten that bad the response. And at this point, just days later, it's still gutting to imagine what those minutes were like for the kids, some of whom survived and then some of them died because of the delay in that response. Yeah. And then there's this video of the police keeping the parents out while this was going down. Perhaps you've been able to characterize this video in seeing this video, which is perhaps the most infuriating thing I've ever laid eyes on, I worried that I didn't know exactly when this footage was shot, and maybe there's some way in which I just don't have the right frame around it. But if in fact this is during those, I think, 78 minutes when there's still kids who are getting killed and there are now cops there with full tactical gear, right. They've got their long guns, they've got their body armor, and many of them are focused on keeping hysterical parents away from the school. Right. And you've got 19 of them stacked up in a hallway not going in to kill this guy. And you've got I mean, it just the parents I view. I know, like one of the moms you may have read, she got the word that this was going down. She got in her car and drove 40 miles. Got there, said, I'm going in to to save my two kids. And then she was handcuffed the Yuvaldi cops handcuffed her so she wouldn't go in. Yeah. And then she convinced them to uncover and then wandered away and then jumped a fence into the school, got her kids, and ran out. And this is all happening before they've neutralized the shooter. There's mom of the Year right there. But the idea that parents who were willing to do anything to save their kids were being stopped from doing anything while the police were doing nothing, this is Texas, right? So there's two ends of this you can take, and I guess both have been taken. Certainly one has been taken by people who are on the gun safety side of this. And they look at this. This is in Texas, right? There is no state where the Second Amendment is trumpeted with more bravado. And this just seems like a reductio ad absurdum of the claim that the answer for a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun because you've got these officers with their guns stacked up in the hallway doing nothing. But, of course, that's not the whole story. The whole story is the reason why this situation is so lacerating is because the answer to the bad guy with the gun was a good guy with a gun. And we needed that good guy with a gun 78 minutes earlier. Right? And when the good guy with a gun finally broke through the fucking mesmerism that had taken over that place and kept those cops from doing the obvious, and he opened the door and walked in and shot the guy, that was the solution. That's the solution everyone was pining for and was right to pine for in that situation. It was trained for as well. Yes. I don't know if you've seen some of this reporting, but journalists I saw The New York Times got this, that they looked at the training that had been done in Uvaldi for this kind of scenario, and it was standard. I mean, it's been the protocol since after Columbine that. What do you do if there's an active shooter in the school? You go in close distance and neutralize the shooter. And you do that even if it means hopping over the dying bodies of students who have already been shot by him, because there's nothing that matters until that person is no longer shooting. So that you would fall back and wait to see what happens next, turn it into a possible hostage situation, negotiate. This was contrary to the training that they in Uvaldi had gotten just a matter of a couple of months before. And also, by the way, the training that should be obvious to anyone, even without training, nothing can happen that will be of any use until the person who's murdering people is no longer doing that. If anything's going to change as a result of this catastrophe, you got to think it's going to be that people whose job it is to protect schools or cops who could be summoned to an event like this, everyone now has to know that the barricaded shooter protocol doesn't exist in a school. Right? You respond immediately even if you're not waiting for backup. If you're not willing to go in alone in a situation like this, you're in the wrong job. I got to think that switch is going to get flipped as a result of this. Yeah, I would think so. And almost every law enforcement officer I've met, I'm pretty confident would react the right way. They certainly seem to be that they've gone into that line of work because they want to protect people in most cases. And there couldn't be a more obvious case than a guy with an AR 15 in an elementary school who's still walking around. I think it might also be useful for that protocol, that post columbine protocol, to be maybe even better known. Despite this counter example. Shooters should know, just like hijackers know that they are going to be torn from limb by passengers on an airplane. Shooters should know that here's what's going to happen when you go in. You're going to kill some people. The school is going to empty out faster than you can imagine, and then in a matter of seconds or minutes, you are going to be inundated by people with guns who are trying to kill you. There's not going to be time for you to negotiate, not going to be time for you to record TikTok videos. It's just going to be you with your very short life. And that's not how it was at Yuvaldi. I hope it can be credibly promised to people who are thinking about this in the future that that's how it will be if they try it. This opens the door to the much maligned NRA talking point. And I should say, again, defensively, that I'm no fan of the NRA, that the answer on some level is more guns, right? And to have teachers with guns or to have more of a presence at a school. And again, this sounds grotesquely comical in the immediate aftermath of evolving when you have 19 cops in full gear doing nothing. But I'm just wondering if there's there are two ways we could go here. We could try to imagine a world where we do something akin to what Australia did in the aftermath of a mass shooting and we just disarm our society fundamentally. And we could talk about a gun buyback and a change of the Second Amendment. And that politically seems totally hopeless, but perhaps it's not. And perhaps that's the thing people should be focused on. But given that we've got 400 million guns on the ground and it doesn't even seem dimly possible that it will be hard to get your hands on one if you really want to for the foreseeable future, then you have people, certainly in gun culture, saying, well, the problem in this case is that you had cops who shouldn't have been cops, who didn't have the training or didn't have the character or both to respond appropriately. And when somebody responded appropriately, we saw what happened. The Border Patrol agent opened the door and killed the guy. And that should have been done sooner. So that really the solution, was a gun. And I was thinking about another heavily armed society where I don't think things like this happen. And there seem to be cases there where it plays out more or less as the most dewy eyed NRA enthusiast would imagine. And I'm thinking of Israel. Again, I don't have a lot of data on this, but I've just seen various videos and heard stories where somebody begins killing people. A jihadist of one sort or another starts stabbing people on a sidewalk, and it's about 15 seconds later that somebody pulls out a gun and shoots him. And I'm just wondering, do you know anything about is there any lesson to draw from Israel for American society, or are there just too many ways in which that is a different case? Man I've been to Israel and I've observed this. You go in and you get a bagel with schmeer, and behind the counter there are two armed men who are making the bagel for you. So it's true that weapons are absolutely everywhere, and in the rare cases where they're needed, they're produced and then often used with great efficiency. So, yeah, that's a data point. They're also just rarely abused in the way that they are in the United States. So I suppose that the takeaway from that is that it's not just the presence of guns, but a culture of guns. That we're looking at the number of people who have those guns because they are motivated by self defense and who have training in most cases because they've been in the military in many cases they are combat veterans is so high that it just makes all the difference. In the case of the United States, we've got lots of people who have guns who are totally untrained. I mean, if my concealed carry class last weekend was any indication, then the Modal concealed carrier is not John Wick. It's a guy who has a pretty good chance of shooting his own hand or foot in ordinary training, and who really has to have rules of firearm safety, like tattooed on his hand if he's going to be expected to remember them. So I'm not sure how much we can take away if we armed the same number of people in the United States as are armed in Israel. I don't think the results would be great. Now, you and I have talked to Sam about Finland, where there are a lot of armed people, and it's completely anathema to just be walking around with a handgun. So there are ways, and this is because of Finland's territorial defense plan, which is to be ready in the event of an invasion to start an insurgency. So almost every man who's under the age of 45 is part of that defense force in case of a Russian style invasion, like it happened in the Winter War or Second World War. So I think there are cases where you can see lots of guns everywhere with as there is in Finland, as there is in Israel, very little abuse of them. But the fact is, we don't live in those countries. We live in a country where there's an enormous amount of abuse of guns, crime with guns, and just a lot of guns, 400 million guns. So I'm really hesitant to try to extrapolate from countries that are not ours. Yeah, and we have, I think, a unique cultural problem. You mentioned the social contagion factor here, and we have we have different cultural problems. I mean, as I said, you know, most of the problem of homicide is a problem of homicide in the black community on a daily basis. And it's black on black young male crime overwhelmingly. And that's his own problem. When you're talking about the problem of mass shooting, certainly the prototypical case is of a white guy. That's not the case in Yevaldi. You have a Hispanic there, but it is disproportionately white young men at the center of these horrors. And there you have a very different kind of cultural contagion. I don't know what we know about it, but this fetishizing of AR Fifteen s and whatever connection there is to video game culture and just the social isolation of many of these young men when you look at who they are and how they spend their time prior to snapping. There is a profile of this sort of person, and it's different than the profile of a teenager in the inner city who's in a gang who's dealing drugs. I mean, it's just a it's a very different logic to the to the violence of that that ensues there. I take your point. I might make one sort of pedantic correction or elaboration, which is mass shootings. First of all, there's a lot of them right now. We're on track for, I think, 600 to 700 in this calendar year, which is twice as much as they were ten years ago. But that includes drive by shootings. I think the sort of prototypical workplace or a school shooting is a white guy who's gone bonkers or is, in some cases, ideologically motivated. But mass shootings in general, a lot of them do happen in scenarios that are pretty different from what we tend to think of. Exactly. Isn't the definition of four or more people getting shot? Yeah, I think that's the sort of criminological cut off that they use. And then I think you put your finger on something else, though, which is video games and social isolation, which they have, I think, important and interesting relationship where it seems like video games for a lot of people turn into outlets for their rage. If you really like the idea of shooting a room full of people. There are very realistic ways you can simulate that. And it seems like some people get that from video games and then there are other people who play video games because of their social isolation and they just fall deeper and deeper into that isolation in lieu of any engagement with any other social reality. And it seems like the Buffalo shooter, crazed, antisemitic racist also just was deep into the isolation of the pandemic, disappeared down racist and antisemitic rabbit holes and then when he emerged was completely nuts. And then in the case of the Yuvaldi shooter, he too, it sounds like, was spending a lot of time alone because for some reason of social dysfunction. And then also probably it sounds like he was also using video games as a remedy for that social isolation. So I wonder how much of the jump in numbers in the last couple of years, which has been significant both in mass shootings and in school shootings, how much that has to do with people who are just alone and not able to deal mentally with the effects of that. So in closing, it might be useful to talk about possible remedies here and we've mentioned a few in passing and again, I don't know how quixotic either these ideas is. I think I said at the beginning that this conversation may produce really nothing actionable as an idea, but I keep coming back to again. Now we're focused on the distinct problem of mass shootings, of the crazy or ideological sort, right where you have somebody who's, however isolated they are, you could imagine them attracting the attention of family members and other kids in school. And I think that in the case of the evolving shooter, people were just obviously concerned about what a hostile person he was and he seemed scarcely hinged to people and I'm sure more information will come out about that. So the question is, what do you do when you're a student in a school or a parent and there's a young man in your life who you have every reason to worry about? And if they haven't done anything illegal yet, is there any hope that we would have some process of intrusion in the lives of such people at scale, perhaps facilitated by social media networks, that could get us actual data on this? Obviously you have companies that can profile people fantastically well for the purpose of delivering them ads. We could be profiling people who worry us and delivering those data to the appropriate authorities. The question is, what would be the end result there? That could conceivably be therapeutic, right? If you imagine cops showing up because Facebook has coughed up an immense amount of probabilistic data on all the dangerous people in any given city, the idea that you're going to get a knock on the door from the NYPD and that something good is going to come of that. When you're socially isolated gameplaying, AR 15 worshipping quasi lunatic already, that sort of seems hopeless. What army of social workers and mental health professionals are we going to marshal to intrude in the lives of people if we produce these data? I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. Yeah, I think you've adequately described how hopeless that situation is. Facebook does not want to be the clinical counselor to the world. The NYPD and every other law enforcement agency has nothing like the amount of resources to check out everybody who would be flagged in this way. So I'm not sure where that leaves us. I mean, there are enough crazy people all over the world. There was a guy recently convicted of killing a bunch of people in sleepy Norway with bow and arrow who was unwell, but he was sort of undetected by the system in the sense that nobody expected him to go on a bow and arrow serial killing spree. So that suggests that even extremely well resourced societies, which are pretty good at monitoring their own, are not going to be able to come up with some magic ability to detect people and then not detect them so sensitively without specificity, too, that they'll be able to identify which ones really need their attention. And that's why I keep coming back to this idea of you want people who are getting on the radar to interact with others in person, and I'm talking about others who have the ability to actually stop them in their tracks, stop them in their plans. And I don't know about you when I think, oh, this person might be a psychopath, my first instinct is not to personally intervene in that person's life, it's to get as far away as possible. But there are people who are trained to do that, and those could be school counselors. And as a last line of defense, I keep coming back to this idea that if I'm selling guns, I want to be confident of who I'm selling to and have a conversation with that person. And I want that for my own well being, because I could not live with myself if I sold an AR 15 to someone who later used it to kill people. So it would be good to try to work on the points in the chain of bad events where there's a possibility of having that face to face with someone. Where there has to be a moment when you look the person in the eyes and try to figure out if the person's homicidal or just wants to shoot targets or or feral hogs. So maybe that's the way to do it. I don't know quite how to change the culture so that that happens, but it seems not to have been adequate in this case. And what do you think about the prospects of having a true sea change in culture of the sort that Australia had in the aftermath of their mass shooting, where they literally just bought back all the guns. I mean, so we've got 400 million guns. You know, a plausible buyback would probably be, you know, $400 billion, maybe even put that at a trillion dollars. There's a lot of people who would sell their guns that one would imagine if you were giving them $2,000 or so per gun, but obviously there are probably millions who wouldn't at any price because gun ownership is their religion. But if there were the will to change the laws and a buyback, you could imagine just changing the facts on the ground where all of a sudden we look more like the UK in terms of the number of guns in existence. And there's some universe in which that is possible, but the question is, how likely are we to live in that universe? Yeah, I mean, you would know as well as I do we live in that country. The country where people turn in their guns in exchange for a few thousand dollars. I don't think so. When I talk to people who are really into guns in a way that I'm not I don't own guns. I don't shoot guns every week. But the people I know who do, they think of their guns as part of their identity, part of their life, sometimes part of their work, definitely part of their leisure, part of their existence. I mean, no exaggeration to say that a dozen times a day. They are thinking about where their guns are. They're thinking about how to store their guns. It's just like a huge part of how they're spending their mental cycles. So I don't think these people are going to be willing to just give up their guns and they'll immediately ask themselves if the laws change or if there's a social push for them to give up. Why me? The world is safer with me carrying a gun than it would be without my carrying a gun. And sometimes they're right when they think that. And I think it will be extremely difficult to convince them at scale that they should think otherwise. Yeah, that's what is so hard to parse about this, because there are people I know who carry firearms, people who I've trained with, current and former SWAT operators, who off duty, are never going to be caught unarmed. And honestly, I feel safer with them living that way than being unarmed, just given the reality of violence and the current facts on the ground. Yeah, it is, it is genuinely hard to think about. But in the, in the aftermath of an event like this, it's it really is, it's tempting to hope for a total reset of our society and it's just I i just don't see any path politically that we could even begin to walk to make that possible. And that is very frustrating. Even things that virtually all gun owners agree on, like making a truly comprehensive national background check system that would catch anyone who had any reason not to be sold a gun. As far as I know, there's widespread support for that, even among gun owners and I think even among NRA members. And yet that has thus far been politically a nonstarter. Yeah. Yeah, I think you're right that that most gun owners, they like to think of themselves as special. They like to think of themselves as people who are extremely responsible and unlike Joe Schmo, should be allowed to have guns because they can be trusted with them. The other thing that it's the hardest part of this puzzle to deal with, but I think serious consideration of it is going to be part of the solution. Really thinking about the social contagion portion of this, our friend Steve Pinker likes to talk about how the problem of streakers running onto football fields was solved when networks decided, we're just going to cut the commercial. You're not even going to know if you're at home, that there's a streaker on the field. And then suddenly there were just no streakers on the field for most people who were watching football games because they never heard about it, because they were watching on TV and nobody even mentioned them. And then suddenly it just isn't a thing anymore. Now, obviously, journalists can't stop reporting on the existence of mass shootings, but there is the availability of this idea of mass shootings as what one might do when one has a political point to make that's that's not great. That we're in a society where that's one of the first things that you think about as a way to, you know, tell the world how much you hate it or how much you want fewer Jews in charge. So changing that I have no real advice, I'm afraid, but that's going to be part of the solution when someone's smarter than me comes up with ideas and how to change it. Well, I feel like the mainstream media has drawn some lesson about this. I don't know when things change, but there's I perceive a reluctance to COVID a mass shooting of this kind in any way that focuses on the shooter. There are many cases where I don't even wind up learning the name of the shooter. It's not to say that it's been completely suppressed, but in the Buffalo case, if I knew the guy's name, I have since forgotten it. And I think that is good. There's a type of coverage, there's a type of fame that can be visited upon a shooter alive or dead in the aftermath of something like this that is genuinely counterproductive. Right. And it is part of the contagion problem because then you have the aspiring mass shooter thinking about how famous he's going to be after what he does. And so I think insofar as we can withdraw a lesson from the case of the streakers, I think we want to do that. Actually, there was a mass shooting, the biggest mass shooting in American history, the the Vegas shooting, which just went down the memory hole so fast. I mean, inexplicably fast. I think the only thing that explains it was just how wrapped up we were in some trumpian cycle of indiscretion politically, where there was just no oxygen left in the room, even for a mass shooting that killed I think that was 58 people and wounded hundreds. And again, the name of that shooter is is not in my brain. Do you do you have any ideas about why that the greatest mass shooting in American history is is has been so fully forgotten? The main reason is that we don't know why he did it. We truly have no idea. ISIS, interestingly enough, claimed it very soon after it happened, and there seems to be no reason to believe that ISIS had anything to do with it. It is weird, though, because ISIS typically does not do that. They very rapidly said, this is our handiwork. And it's strange that they would claim the one mass shooting where no even remote motive ever came up. He was like, was he in his 50s or sixty s? And he didn't really fit the profile either. He was in his yeah, later middle age at least, and pretty wealthy. And everything about that mass shooting was so strange, it was such an outlier that I kind of understand why we would memory hole it. Because it doesn't fit with anything else that we've seen before or since. The numbers, the venue, the planning, the motive, all of these things just don't fit with any previous case. So you'd think that the most, quote unquote successful mass shooting would be one that we try to learn from, but if we did try to learn from it, we'd probably make some bad decisions because it turns out not to be a very good model for anything that's happened. Yeah. Well, Graham, it has been very interesting and hopefully useful. Again, we've arrived in a place that's unsurprising to me, it would have been a miracle in my mind if we had come up with something that was genuinely novel and actionable here, but it seems useful nonetheless. Are there any points we haven't made that you want to make? In closing? No. I think it's really difficult to come up with solutions that are good. It's not that hard to find seriously proposed solutions that are really bad. So even when I kick myself for not figuring out how to solve the problem, I at least take some solace and maybe I'm pushing against some bad ideas that would make the lives of our children worse. And in this case, I think we identified a few of those. Yeah, maybe. I just want to reiterate one that came from you that, honestly, I hadn't thought about all that much. But I do think moving in the direction of a more open campus. It's counterintuitive for people. But you just want that campus to be able to empty as quickly as possible. Right. And so that so that the Ted Cruz solution is just it should be obviously wrong, and yet it's it's tempting to many people the idea that you're going to have a single choke point that's well defended and otherwise the the, you know, everything is a brick wall. I mean, that just that is obviously not the way to go. And, you know, happily, what seems, you know, most practical here is, you know, emotionally speaking, the most desirable. And I think we do not want schools to resemble penitentiaries. We want schools to be open, non, paranoid places to be. And if you can get out of school immediately wherever you happen to be, that's also the outcome you want in the case of a mass shooting. Yeah, I think all of that would having a more open school would be a much better school. And if kids are feeling alienated, if they're hating the world, I don't think it's going to help for their school to be prison, for their teachers to be like correctional officers, to generally be in an environment where they're thinking about death because of the very way that their campus is laid out. So it seems like there's a lot of positive externalities that would come from just setting up the school in a way that if there was one of those rare events, then the kids could scatter like a flock of birds and the place would be empty in a matter of seconds. Yeah. Well, Graham, as always, it's great to talk to you. Thanks for everything you're doing. As you know, I read you whenever you show up in the Atlantic and then I tap you whenever something in your dark wheelhouse appears in the news, and unfortunately, that's all too often. So you're my go to journalist for all things violent. Thanks for that, Sam. Thanks for a reminder of the dark world that I live in. But yeah, conversations with you are always the best. I appreciate it. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today I'm speaking with Kieran Setia. Kieran is a professor of philosophy at MIT, and he's the author of Midlife a Philosophical Guide as well as Life Is Hard how Philosophy Can Help US Find Our Way. His writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, Aon and The Yale Review. And in this conversation, we talk about the relevance of philosophy to the ongoing project of living a good life. We discuss the existence of objective moral truths, being happy versus living well, a response to grief, meditation as a remedy for psychological suffering, how to understand the claim that the self is an illusion, the difference between tealik and atelic activities, the power of reframing FOMO bias toward the future regret, the asymmetry between pain and pleasure and other topics. I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you find it useful. And now I bring you Kieran Setia. I am here with Kieran Setia. Kieran, thanks for joining me. Thanks so much for having me. So we have many shared interests. I loved your book, Midlife a Philosophical Guide. And you have a new book, which I just have a PDF of. It's coming out soon, and I've just glanced at that. But I think we can sort of merge the themes in both your books over the course of this conversation. But before we jump in there, maybe you can summarize your background academically and intellectually. What kinds of problems and concerns have you focused on? Well, I'm a philosophy professor. I teach at MIT, and my work on the sort of academic side has been about questions about the nature of human agency, human knowledge, and broadly speaking, in ethics, sort of anything related to the problems of how we should live. And then over the last, I guess, five, seven years, I've been doing more outward facing work that we'll talk about midlife and how it came out of my own experience. But I've been trying to think about how the tools of academic philosophy could be applied to the kinds of problems about how to live that my friends and I seem to be facing and going through, some of which philosophers talk about, many of which they tend not to spend so much time on. So the midlife crisis is one, and then in the new book, Life Is Hard loneliness and Grief and Failure, and the kind of challenges that we confront when we're living lives that are inevitably imperfect. Yeah, I've often marveled and I'm not alone in this, in the marveling at the broken connection between philosophy and the project of living. Well, that used to be the whole point of philosophy, to come up with some vision of life and the world that made securing as durable a possible form of well being. We'll talk about just what can be hoped for there, and it was just intrinsic to the project of literally loving wisdom. And that's the very concept of philosophy. And then it became this far more abstract and arcane discipline where it seemed to want to emulate mathematics and science more. And it became, following vidgenstein, really just a kind of language game which viewed everything in terms of the parsing of concepts. And I just feel like we lost our purchase on something important there. I don't know if you share that feeling. I mean, I think there's a lot of truth to that. Philosophers are often embarrassed by the idea of self help. But in a way, when you sort of think of the long trajectory of the history of philosophical ethics, the idea that thinking about how to live should make your life better, should enable you to live better, is a very attractive, plausible one. And that makes the line between moral philosophy, ethics and what would nowadays be thought of as self help pretty blurry. And they really only start to diverge. Sort of in the 18th century, you get philosophers who want to sort of pull apart the project of understanding morality or ethics from the project of sort of making people virtuous, making people better. And philosophy, a lot of what philosophers do now is relevant. It is closely relevant to practical questions about how to live, and some of that people know about through things like effective altruism. So bits of philosophy that are directed to the question, what are your obligations to other people? But the relevance of philosophy is much broader than that. But it's very much concealed by the way in which philosophy is sort of now formulated as and structured institutionally as an academic discipline. And I kind of wanted to reconnect those two and bring them back into conversation. Yeah, well, that's what I loved about your book Midlife, and what I know I will love about Life is Hard. And in Midlife, you remind us all of three questions that Kant asked which are really foundational to the whole project of philosophy, at least the first two. I guess I have some concern about the third, but the questions are, what can I know? What should I do? And what may I hope? And I think you and I both have some caveats to add to the concept of hope. But, you know, what can I know that really is is all of epistemology? And what should I do really crystallizes moral philosophy and ethics and ultimately even metaethics? In what sense can things matter? And how do we solve this navigation problem of life? In my mind, morality is pretty much always a question of what we should do next, given the space of all possible experience in which we're navigating. And there's a deeper question about how any claims we might make about what we should do relate to claims about what is true and what is knowable. How do you think about just the grounding of moral truth in a larger set of truth claims, the kind of the central problems of metaethics? Do you spend much time thinking about that? Yeah. So I do. And I tend to be sort of sympathetic to the idea that there are objective ethical truths. I mean, there's various kinds of lines that get drawn here that I think drawing, which sort of I think played a role in the divorce between, say, philosophical ethics and self help like drawing a line between morality as concerned with our obligations to others and then ethics as concerned with sort of how we should live more broadly. Those two, I think, are sort of interconnected in ways that make them hard to separate. And similarly, you sort of mentioned meta ethics. And there was a kind of period in mid 20th century moral philosophy where a lot of philosophers wanted to to do something, say something about ethics, sort of meta ethics in a way that didn't really engage with the question how to live. They wanted to separate the question of the nature of morality from practical questions about what the ethical standards were. And I think there's this kind of tendency in recent moral philosophy ethics, that I think is right to blur those lines and to suggest that we can't really draw those distinctions. And I think that sort of blurring of lines also applies to the kinds of questions about objectivity that you're raising. So on the one hand, there's a lot of moral disagreement. There's a lot of disagreement in ethics. And when we try to engage in ethical arguments, we often sort of come to loggerheads with other people. And it seems like there's a kind of question about how we could know the answer or whether there were really objective answers. And that can seem like a challenge to the idea of objective ethical truth. On the other hand, when you think about questions about what we know or what the standards of scientific rationality are, one lesson of thinking about sort of determined conspiracy theorists or science deniers is that if you insist on rejecting any premise that could be used to dislodge your view. You can maintain consistency at the cost of an increasingly warped but internally coherent perspective on how the world is scientifically. And so I think these problems about how do you actually persuade people? And how does our failure to persuade people. What significance does that have for the idea of objective knowledge and objective truth are much broader than ethics. And I think in both cases, the right response is to say something like, well, dialectical efficacy. Like being able to actually persuade people is one thing, but the fact that you can't persuade someone who's a conspiracy theorist or a committed flat earth and will say anything it takes to avoid internal inconsistency, that shouldn't make us think that that's a legitimate view. It's still an unjustified response to the evidence, even if it can be made strictly logically compatible with the evidence. And in the same way in ethics, I think we shouldn't be dissuaded from the idea that there really are objective knowable answers to questions about how we should live by the fact that we find ourselves sometimes faced with intractable ethical disagreements. That's not to say that there aren't differences between the case of science and ethics. I think a kind of pluralism about the variety of different good ways to live is appropriate in ethics, and maybe that kind of pluralism doesn't have the same role to play in our thinking about science. But I think that the sort of questions of how do we know? What do I know? And what should I do? Are sort of deeply entangled. And I don't think that there's a sort of it's very hard to explain why one should be skeptical about objective ethical truth in a way that doesn't just eat up the whole idea of objective rationality altogether. Well, you just seem to have argued for the thesis of my book The Moral Landscape in a wonderfully concise way. I don't know if you've seen that book or do you know the word ethics? Yes, obviously I agree with everything you just said. You made a point, which I make there, but you sort of made it from the other side, which I find pretty illuminating. The complaint I've often lodged is that scientists and philosophers do something different. They do something with the diversity of opinion on moral topics that they don't do with diversity of opinion on any other topic. Which is to say, they conclude from the mere existence of disagreement that there is no ground truth to be known. Right? So the fact that someone can show up at your morality conference and say, well, I happen to like the morality of the Taliban, what are you guys going to do with that? Basically, the conference just dissolves at that point, because people begin to say, well, clearly it's all just made up. It's all cultural convention. There can be no objective or universal claims about good and evil or right and wrong, because we've got the Taliban over there doing cutting people's heads off at halftime of their soccer games, and they tell us that's how they want to live. What are we going to do? But my point has always been, if you ask the Taliban about physics, or epidemiology, you're not going to get a lot of good sense either, right? The fact that they have opinions on those topics is never read by experts in those fields as evidence of anything other than their ignorance, right? And so the idea that you can find an island of people who are living in some starkly, awful way by our lights shouldn't convince you on its face that they have an equal claim to having thought through the problem of what is good, what is right, what is the moral structure, if there is one, in human affairs or in the larger affairs of conscious creatures and that their language game needs to be taken seriously the way the language games of our experts do. And so it's just the fact that we just sort of throw out the rule book of what it would mean to just try to push the conversation further into persuasion and to also recognize that in every other sphere of life. There are people who are unpersuadable because there are people who, as you say, they're committed to some form of dogmatism that's causing them to just change the rules of conversation on their side so as to be immune to any stream of evidence or argument that would destabilize their worldview. We don't read into that when we're talking to young Earth creationists. We don't view that as a real challenge to our geology or astronomy or paleontology or anything else. And yet that's not the feeling you get when talking about questions of right and wrong and good and evil among academics generally. I think that's exactly right. I mean, there's this phenomenon or kind of idea that comes out of 20th century philosophy of science, mid 20th century philosophy of science, of the underdetermination of theory by data. The idea is, if you're willing to adjust your auxiliary hypotheses, you can always avoid accepting any theory that seems to be supported by the data, by reinterpreting how exactly the observations were related to theory or how they were gathered or disputing the reliability of such and such instrument. And the standard response, not the only response in philosophy of science is to say, well, yeah, there's more to scientific rationality than just their consistency with the evidence. Like just not contradicting the evidence is not all there is to coming up with the best, most justified, most illuminating, most explanatory, best theories. And I think it's a puzzle to which there are kind of interesting historical answers why we don't take the same view in ethics of saying, well, yeah, someone can hold a consistent, internally coherent, but abhorrent moral view and abhorrent view in ethics. That doesn't mean that there's no fact of the matter or that there's no justification. What it means is, well, there's more to ethical, rationality sort of thinking well, about ethics than just not contradicting yourself. And put that way, it really shouldn't be that surprising that mere consistency is not all there is to ethical virtue in one's thinking about ethics itself. So I think the degree of disagreement historically and socially may be different. And that maybe invites people to suppose there's some dramatic contrast between ethics and science. But it's really a difference of degree. And as conspiracy theorists become more prevalent, the differences of degree may start to diminish. Yeah, well, the problem of persuading people about ordinary facts journalistic facts at this point has become fairly excruciating. So the idea that it remains difficult to persuade people about divergent moral facts, that's somehow no longer surprising. We can't even agree about what should be on the front page of a newspaper at this point. But that concern notwithstanding, less plunge in. I think a good place to start is the distinction you make between being happy and living well. How do you think about those two concepts? Yes, I think this is sort of a kind of distinction that gets drawn in various ways in philosophy but also in ordinary life. So I think one way to sort of see the contrast between being happy and living well and sort of asking yourself what is the object of selfhelp? Is the goal to be happy or to live well is to think about either. There are sort of abstract, wild philosophical thought experiments like people plugged into simulation machines in which nothing they're experiencing is real, they're actually completely alone. Everyone they seem to be interacting with is fake. Nothing that they think they're doing or almost nothing are they really doing. Many people have the thought, well, that is not a life I want for people I love. That's not sort of a good human life that's barely living at all. But of course, the person who's in that situation of deception and illusion could feel incredibly happy. They feel great. If we think of happiness as the kind of subjective state of mood or satisfaction, they have it. And what that suggests is, yeah, there's more to living well than happiness. It's not that we should not care about happiness or strive to be unhappy, but that's not really the goal of life. The goal is to live well. And that sometimes involves unhappiness and the unhappiness that comes with confronting reality. So there's also as well as these wild thought experiments I think it's something that people are very vividly confronted with when they think about grief, where the idea that the pain of grief and the unhappiness of grief and the sadness of grief among the other complex array of emotions that grief involves the idea that somehow well, it would just be better if we could get rid of that. That just doesn't seem right. The relationship between the pain and suffering of grief and living well is much more complicated than that. And I think that's a more general phenomenon that the relationship between negative emotions, negative feelings and living well doesn't always make your life worse. In fact, it's very important to living well, to recognize when things are bad, to sort of to live in the world as it is, not the world as you wish it would be. And so I think it's very important to sort of frame the philosophical project of ethics and the self help project in terms of living well primarily and happiness only. Secondarily, and one thing that does is to make clear that the boundaries between oneself and others are much more porous. So when you start to think about living well, part of living well is living as you should. And the question of how should I live? It doesn't immediately tell you how you should care about other people, but invites you to ask, well, if I'm going to live as I should, how should I integrate the rights and needs of other people into my life? And if you were just thinking about happiness, it might seem like, well, any connection between happiness and caring about other people is contingent. And often caring about other people makes you vulnerable to unhappiness. But once you think, no, the goal is not just to feel happy, it's to actually live a good life, you start to sort of break down the boundaries between what we might think of as self interest and what we might think of as morality. And I think that's a useful way of sort of reframing what the project of self help might look like if it was inspired by a kind of philosophical approach to ethics. Yeah, there's a lot in what you just said. There's so many intersecting questions and problems to sort out. One point you made about grief, which I find really interesting, and I think it's a certain point, it is going to be an actionable use case for all of us that will pose some interesting psychological and ethical challenges. The way I've put it elsewhere, I think it might have been in the moral landscape. It certainly was in some things I said while talking about that book. I asked people to imagine what it's going to be like when we develop, if we develop. Seems pretty likely a real cure for grief and bereavement right. So let's just say we have a grief pill that you could take and you know, within an hour you will no longer feel sad about that thing. You've been completely broken hearted over whether it's the death of a loved one or the the loss of a relationship or pick your poison there. If we had a cure for grief, the question immediately arises whether to take it ever. And if to take it, how long do you wait? Right? And clearly it seems like some kind of awful norm violation and even a break of trust with the person we ostensibly love. If, while their body is still warm, we pop the pill and 45 minutes later we're out in an arcade playing video games. To date myself with anachronistic reference. But it's like the idea that the love of your life dies and that you would want to take a pill which nullified your bereavement immediately that somehow seems incompatible with love itself. Of course, some real experience of grief seems appropriate and desirable. But then the question is, is there any point where grief itself becomes maladaptive? And no longer a sign of just how important that person was to you, but also a sign of, like, a failure of resilience and a failure to thrive and a failure to live in precisely the way your loved one would want you to live after they're gone? Right. So at some point you could imagine a grief pill really could be a necessary intervention for someone whose life has just unraveled under the pressure of bereavement. So there's half a dozen other things that occurred to me as you were talking, but maybe we can take that case. Do you have any thoughts about that? Sure. I mean, it's a fascinating thought experiment. I mean, in fact, there's already a kind of natural experiment that prompts anxieties of the kind you're describing so that the empirical work on grief suggests that most people tend to be quite resilient even in the face of loved ones that they were deeply attached to. And often within six months, their lives are almost back to normal. And that actually occasions a lot of discomfort and anxiety, the sort of sense that something has gone wrong with one's attachment given how rapidly it's possible to recover. So even without the grief pill, we sort of have a kind of emotional immune system that restores us to equilibrium much faster than many of us expect and in fact, much faster than many of us are comfortable with. And when you try to think through why that is, I mean, part of the answer seems leads to another puzzle you raised about how long. So part of the answer seems to be, well, when you think what am I grieving for? Well, there's the loss of the relationship. There's how bad it was for the person who died, the life that they could have had. But there's also just a kind of recognition of the sheer loss of life. And grief is a kind of rational response to that in the same way as we have reasons for other emotions like anger is a response to sort of perceived insult or fear is a response to danger or threat. Grief seems to be the reason for it is a certain kind of loss. And the puzzle is well, actually that starts to answer the question why we shouldn't take the pill. The thought is if we didn't grieve in response to the loss of someone we love, we wouldn't be taking in reality. This goes back to the contrast between being happy and living well. We want to take in reality, and in reality we should feel grief. We should respond in a way that acknowledges the terribleness of that loss. But then the puzzle is, hold on. If the reason for grief is just that my loved one is dead, that's not going to change. I mean, the reason that just stays the same, and it stays the same forever. So now we face the question the puzzle is less why should we grieve or whether we should grieve, but how can we ever justifiably stop grieving? And there's a real puzzle there. I mean, it you know, when you try to describe how the situation has changed, later you think to yourself, it's true. They died a while ago, and I've grieved for a while, but those things all seem irrelevant to the scale of the loss. Those things don't sort of diminish their loss in having died. So how can they make it rational to stop grieving? And I think this is kind of a puzzle I talk about in the chapter on Grief in Life Is Hard. I think this is where really what's happening is that our emotions respond to reasons. And this is a case where if we just look at the object of the emotion and try to proportion our emotional response to changes in it, we'll find that there's just a kind of indeterminacy. We don't know. There's nothing in the object of grief that tells you how long to grieve for. And this is, I think, one reason why rituals of grieving sort of practices of mourning, which are not rationally mandated, they take various cultural forms, are so important because what they do is allow you to sort of grab onto something to sort of guide and shape the process of grieving in a way that enables you to, at least in practice, get through this sense of the arbitrariness of grieving for a certain length or others. And often what they have is sort of distinctive temporal shape. So, like, you sit shiver for seven days, or in ancient Roman customs, there were sort of guidelines for how many months you should mourn for a child or a wife. Or what they do is precisely try to regulate something that, if we just look at the object of grief, would seem unregulable. And I think that is a kind of a deep feature of the nature of grief and the way in which it responds to loss. So, yeah, I think we can sort of answer the question, what would we lose if we took the grief pill by saying, well, we wouldn't be responding to reality the way we should? And then we face this problem, okay, how can we ever justifiably stop recognizing that loss for what it is? And we sort of rely on what is, to some extent, conventional, arbitrary social practices to help us do that. Yeah, that's all very interesting and useful, although there's a mystery on the other side of the continuum here, which is that one could ask how one ever justifiably starts grieving in the sense that and this has a direct connection to meditation and mindfulness and the nature of consciousness. I know you know, that's an interest of mine because just for instance, take my present circumstance. I'm recording this conversation with you. I'm alone, which is to say that no one I love is present in my studio now. They're never going to be more absent for me than they are now, right? My wife and kids are. I know them to still exist. I have no reason to be bereaved. But the truth is, I also know that I am totally fine in their absence, right? So the question is, how do I ever become someone who is not fine in their absence? Not only not fine, but how does their absence become synonymous with really the ruination of my well being for whatever half life that suffering has for me in the case of everyone I love dying? And this seems like perhaps a callous question, or at least a bizarre one, but in terms of the mechanics of psychological suffering, it's a very real one because the way we suffer is to think about the reasons we have to suffer. In this case, it is a kind of abstraction, and the thought I will never see her again meets out its punishment to you in the act of identifying with it. And that's why meditation promises to be a truly generic remedy for psychological suffering, because it's in being able to break the spell of thought that one can recognize that consciousness is, if only for that next moment, free of the implications of thought. And actually, I know from reading Midlife you have some concerns about what's considered the center of the bullseye here, the illusoryness of the self, and perhaps we'll get there. I'd love to speak with you about that. But the conundrum you posed about how it ever becomes reasonable to stop grieving, I do think is actually mirrored on the other side by this property of the mind. How is it that it becomes so reasonable to start grieving when in this moment I know that and you know, and any listener must know that it's totally possible to not only endure the next moment of being, of solitude, you can thrive in this next moment of solitude. And how does that fundamentally change ever? That's really that is very interesting, and I think it relates to a distinction I want to draw between different objects of grief and sort of the plurality of things that grief attaches to. So a distinction I think is useful is between relational grief or grief about the end of a relationship and grief for the sake of the one who's died and they come apart. So, you know, when you have a terrible breakup and the person hasn't died, nevertheless, there's something like grief, the sort of devastation of rejection and loss of a relationship, and then when someone you love dies, there's both you both have this phenomenon that. The relationship is now, I think, not really ended, but it's ruptured and changed in a dramatic way. And then you have, I think, also grief for their sake. And I think part of what you're pointing to is that if we focus on relational grief, the kind of relationship you think, well, insofar as my relationship, I was capable of being happy in my relationship with someone in their absence. All I have to do to get through grief is more of that. And so, yeah, why shouldn't I just sort of stay in the mode of being fine in their absence? And I think there's an that is a very interesting puzzle, but I think it it deals with one side of grief, the sort of relational side, the relationship focused part about, you know, I'll never see them again, I'll never interact with them again. And I think there is also a dimension of grief that is not in that way. It's not that relational grief is self regarding, but it involves you as one of the two sides of the relationship. I think there's also grief that is just not relational, it's just about the death of someone else. And there, I think the issue of how you could survive their absence doesn't seem to offer consolation. The thought is it's just a fact that they are dead. And the appropriate sort of emotional response to the enormity of that fact is to grieve, to go to begin this sort of complicated, difficult emotional process. And I think that kind of outward looking for the sake of them grief, it's not clear to me that it's subject to the same therapy you just gave. I think the therapy for that would have to be something much more radical, which would point us towards the nonexistence of the self and sort of more radical Buddhist ideas, where the thought would be if we could fully take in that we don't really exist and no one we're attached to really exists in the way we think they do. If that was really true, and we could really take it in, then the thought might be, well, the kind of loss that attachment would bring, this sort of outward looking loss, where the value of something irreplaceable is just gone, and you're sort of devastated by that. It would be sort of answered by sort of denying that we really existed in the kind of way that would make us fit objects of that kind of attachment. There are many puzzles about this we could talk about. And one puzzle for me is that it's never been clear to me, really, why this sort of revelation of no self isn't like sort of discovering that everyone you know and love, including you, is already dead. I mean, it's itself a kind of devastating discovery. And in fact, there's this idea of mindfulness meditation as a kind of therapy that is stress reducing. The sort of empirical literature on that that's sort of divorced from the kind of insights that Buddhist mindfulness meditation is supposed to bring us to. But there are some aspects of the Buddhist tradition in which meditation of this kind is not really stress reduction. It's a form of stress induction. Like, the process is supposed to be one of confronting something very, very difficult, like the nonexistence of yourself and those you love is a kind of devastating thing to confront. What's true is that once you've confronted it, you come out on the other side and you've, as it were, already pre processed the grief, as it were, through to the other side of grief. And that sort of makes sense to me. What I feel like might be having it both ways is a kind of picture of mindfulness meditation on which both the process itself involves stress reduction and the outcome involves a kind of equanimity. I feel like that is the thing that I find it harder to make sense of. Okay, so maybe we'll deal with it now. I think there's some confusion about what is meant by no self in Buddhism or really in any Contemplative tradition, certainly any of the Indian Contemplative traditions that spread east and north. So this is now encompassing all variants of Buddhism, including Vadriana and also Indian teachings like advice of a Dante. Not to say that the adherence of all those traditions think they're all teaching precisely the same thing, but their core. I think there is the same insight at the end of the day that is being described and entangled with various forms of religious belief and dogmatism, and it's more or less mingled with helpful or harmful concepts to varying degrees in these various traditions. But the core insight is that first we can mean many different things by the term self, and not all of them are illusory. So it's not the claim that people are illusions or that you can't say anything coherent about the biographical or psychological continuity of a person, right? I mean, it's not mysterious that I wake up today as me and not as you, in a different house, in a different life, et cetera. That's not a puzzle that anyone is trying to solve. And I do think there are very interesting puzzles around identity. Derek Parfitt but the real insight here and the illusion that is cut through and again it's cut through not merely conceptually but experientially, is the apparent default condition of feeling like there is a subject in the center of experience. Most people don't merely feel identical to experience. They feel like they're having an experience. They feel like they're appropriating their experience from some point. Very likely in their heads, that is just the witness, the thinker of thoughts, the guider of attention, the willer of will, the guy in the boat who has free will, who can decide what to think and do next. That's the default state for more or less everybody, as far as I can tell. And it's a peculiar point of view. As commonplace as it is, it doesn't make a lot of sense. It certainly doesn't make biological sense. It's not the same thing as feeling identical to your body, because people, again, don't feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they're subjects who have bodies to a large degree. I mean, they feel this is kind of a cartesian dualism here that is intuitive for people. And I think my friend Paul Bloom has said that people are common sense dualists and I think that's true. And that does link up with many beliefs about the divorceability of mind from brain and the immortality of the soul and all the rest. It seems somehow intuitive that your mind must be something other than what the brain is doing and it may in fact be. I'm not actually somewhat agnostic as to how consciousness is arising in this universe. And I take the hard problem of consciousness seriously as a separate question. But as a matter of experience, there's this feeling that I'm a subject behind my face. In some cases, certainly under conditions of being embarrassed or you're being suddenly made the object of other people's attention. I can almost feel like I'm wearing my face as a mask. Right. You think of what it's like to feel acutely self conscious and to be blushing, say in front of somebody you're at odds with your own face and so where the hell are you in this situation? You're the subject who's thinking and so it's that point of view who we represent. So now this is sort of the totality of conscious experience here. We represent the world so we have the deliverances of our senses so we see and hear and smell and taste and touch and so there's the full set of our perceptions and there's more to it than that. There's proprioception and everything else. You can be consciously aware of your body and space so there's the world and then you represent your body in the world but again, from the point of view of the subject your body is a kind of object in the world. It's out there to some degree and you're in it and you so then there's this final representation of being a subject internal to the body that is directing attention thinking thoughts willing its will and vulnerable to the warp and woof of life. So it's that final representation of the subject that is the illusion. And to put this in neurological terms, let's just say, for the sake of argument, that all of this is just neurophysiological events in the brain and delivering these representations. It is plausible, or at least should be plausible, that any one of these processes can be interrupted. Right. So you can cease to faithfully or coherently represent a world you can suddenly go blind you can suddenly not be able to name living things but still be able to name tools. You can suddenly not be able to perceive motion or location. Those things break apart. All kinds of things can be disrupted for worse, certainly. But what these contemplative traditions have recognized is that certain things can be disrupted or brought to a halt for the better, right? And the thing that really does, really can interrupt the usual cascade of mediocrity and suffering, psychologically speaking, is this representation of self as subject in the middle of experience. It is a kind of again, I realize I've been bloviating for quite some time here, giving you a lot, and there's much more to say on this. But you can represent the world and you can represent your body. In the world. And you can cease to represent a subject internal to the body. Or cease to, I should say, construct a subject internal to the body. And what remains in that case is a sense that the mind is much vaster than it was a moment ago, because it's no longer confined to this sense that there's this central thinker of thoughts. There's the recognition that thoughts simply arise all by themselves, just the way sounds do, right? No one is authoring your thoughts. You certainly aren't. In fact, the sense that you are is what it feels like to be identified with this next spontaneously arising thought. So you lose the sense that you're on the edge of your life. You're on the edge of the world, sort of looking over your own shoulder, appropriating experience and what you can feel very vividly. Again, this is not a new way of thinking about yourself in the world. This is a ceasing to identify with thought. What you can feel is a real unity. And again, there's fine print here. And whether we want to talk about this as unity or as emptiness, my preferred formulation here is nonduality, a nonduality of subjects and objects such that there really is just experience, right? Again, I'm not making any metaphysical claims about how this relates to matter or the universe, but as a matter of experience, you can feel identical to experience itself. You're not having an experience. You're not on the edge of the river watching things go by. You are the river. And that solves a very, very wide class of problems, psychologically speaking, with respect to suffering. And so it does land in a surprising kind of equanimity and even eudaimonia that may seem counterintuitive in the midst of the cacophony of ordinary life, but it's there to be found. But again, it's not the negation of personhood. It doesn't introduce all kinds of conundrums about how am I me and not you. It's just a recognition that as a matter of experience, there is just experience. And the feeling that there's an experiencer is yet more experience, right? So if you drop back, there is just everything in its own place anyway. So I gave you a lot there. But that's my attempt to perform an exorcism on the concept of no self that you seem to be working with? Well, I think there's something deeply right about the line of thought you're pushing. What I find hard to get in view, so I still struggle with is this sort of if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Cents podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. There you'll find a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. OK, well, this is yet another episode in what is becoming a series on the Russian war in Ukraine. Like almost everyone else, I'm still thinking a lot about this, not just for what's happening in Ukraine, but for the risk it poses for the rest of the world. We're in, I think, the 7th week of the war. And as you'll hear, I find myself still somewhat confused about what we should and shouldn't be doing. In response to help me sort it out this time, I have brought on Ian Bremmer. Ian's been on the podcast before. He is a political scientist who founded the Eurasia Group, which is a political risk research and consulting firm. Ian is the author of eleven books. He has a new one coming out next month titled The Power of Crisis how Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World. He holds a doctorate in political science from Stanford and he was once the youngest ever National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Anyway, it's always great to talk to Ian here. We cover the state of the war and the state of our response. Sanctions, biden's gaff, or so called gaff about regime change, fear of nuclear war, the logic of mutually assured destruction, the role of China in all this, the most likely outcomes to the war, as Ian sees them. Anyway, the world is a mess and we are here to talk about it. And now I bring you Ian Bremmer. I am here with Ian Bremmer. Ian, thanks for joining me again. Sam, great to be back with you. So I thought we're going to talk about the issue that is really the issue of the day, and it's been the issue of the day for the last, I guess, seven weeks now. We can talk about anything else that might be pressing, but certainly the ongoing war in Ukraine is pressing. Before we jump in, just remind people what your background is. What do you spend your days doing? I'm a political scientist and I started this firm that does global political science about, oh, I don't know, 24 years ago now. I look at global issues, but my background actually is on Russia and Ukraine. That my PhD actually spent a year living across Ukraine looking at issues of Russians living there, kind of back in 19 92, 93, for heck's sake. And so this is something that, even though I haven't spent as much time on in the last ten years, it has it you never quite let it go. Great. Well, so this is your wheelhouse. So I've had two conversations so far about this ongoing topic. I mean, it's evolved a little bit since I started. I had an early conversation with Gary Kasparov and then I had one with Yvonne Harare taking different aspects of this, but it's amazing to see how public opinion, domestically and abroad, gets blown around. And in the background here is this completely understandable fear, strangely resurrected by these events. But it really should have been a fear we've had for our entire lives of World War III, right? Doing something so stupid or ungovernable as to start the slide into an exchange of nuclear weapons or some other catastrophe of that magnitude. And that's really that's making it hard to recommend things in any kind of straightforward way. And so, like when I had Gary Casperov on the podcast, the implications of what he was saying I don't remember him saying it as starkly as this, but it was just, now is the time to have a conventional war with this crazy dictator of Vladimir Putin. If you're not going to draw the line right here, really, NATO doesn't mean anything. So all of this squeamishness around it, enforcing a no fly zone and the implications of all of that, that kind of talk is for cowards, right? I'm giving this more top spin, much more top spin than Gary gave it. But that was certainly the kind of implication one could have drawn from his side of the conversation. And of course, many people find that absolutely terrifying. And we have domestically a kind of horseshoe structure to our politics, where you have people on the far left and the far right more or less agreeing that we should go nowhere near talk of that kind. Right? This is just insane. Essentially, someone like Noam Chomsky and someone like Tucker Carlson could be expected to agree on this topic, which is the US has no business getting mired in a conventional war that could go anywhere near Armagettan. And we should be rethinking all of our promises to the rest of the world and clean up our own house and all of that. So before we get into the minutiae here, I just want to just take your temperature on the big picture here. How concerned are you about all of that? And what through line have you found in terms of if you were in charge and could actually make decisions up to this point, what do you think you would have decided to do? So I like your frame, Sam. I think that Gary I know Gary Kasparov, I mean, anyone in the field does. He has a very strongly held ideological position, visa vis Russia, and he comes to it honestly, if you think about the way he's been treated sort of as a former opposition member, incredibly brave as well on the ground in the former Soviet Union and Russia. There's a reason he's not there right now. And so I don't want to criticize his feelings about Russia and his courage and his bravery about Russia. I don't think he's an armchair pundit that's saying we should go to war and is willing to send your kids there. I think this is a guy who has the courage of his convictions. But I am very adamantly not with him analytically. I mean, for example, you said that NATO doesn't mean anything if we don't have a conventional war with Russia. No, NATO means something precisely because we're not having a conventional war with Russia. Ukraine isn't in NATO and we have not given them even a membership action plan. And by the way, nobody seriously thinks we should. That was true before the crisis and it's true now. So I mean, the very fact that we are saying we are not prepared to actively defend a non NATO ally and we are prepared to defend NATO allies. President Biden said it when he was in Warsaw a week ago. Does anyone believe that? Does anyone believe we would defend Lithuania? Yes. We have troops on the ground in the Baltic States. And I think people absolutely believe that the United States, and not just the United States, they believe that NATO would actually defend collective security, other NATO countries. I think the amount that has been done for Ukraine, despite the fact that they aren't a NATO member, is kind of astonishing. It's certainly shocking to Putin, I think it's shocking to Xi Jinping. And here I'm talking about the destruction of the Russian economy, including freezing a majority of their central bank assets. There was no one credible on this issue that believed that the United States would do that before this invasion occurred. The level of military support that's being provided to the very bravely fighting Ukrainians, as well as the intelligence support that's being provided to the Ukrainians as to the disposition of Russian forces on the ground. And all of that is part of the reason why Zelensky is still there today and part of the reason why Putin is losing and losing big. So I'm quite aligned with most of what the NATO alliance has done in response to this Russian invasion since it's happened. I'm not aligned with many things that happened before the invasion that got us into this position, and you and I can talk about that. But the challenge that we have right now is that Putin's misjudgment was so vast that his position and the position of his country under any scenario is going to be vastly worse than it was before he invaded. And yet he's probably still going to be in power. He's very likely still going to be in power, and he's still going to have 6000 nuclear warheads. And this is not just a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. It is a conflict between Russia and NATO. It will be a conflict between Russia and NATO. Even if we get to the point, hopefully soon, that we can have a ceasefire, that we can freeze the conflict on the ground in Ukraine, and that's going to be a hard thing to manage. And that makes things like another Cuban missile crisis thinkable, even though you and I clearly had hoped that 30 years ago when The Wall came down, we had a peace dividend and we could stop worrying about that. I mean, the reality of this war in Ukraine is that the peace dividend is over. And that's a truly tragic thing. Yeah, maybe. Define peace dividend. I think that phrase has been spoken a lot of late, but it's not something anyone has heard, I think, in living memory. What do we mean by peace dividend? We mean that we used to have a Cold War in every corner of the world, and we fought over every piece of land, and it was either ours or it was theirs. It was Warsaw Pact or it was NATO. It was aligned with the United States or not. There's a global policy of containment, and that was more important than any idea of globalization. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, most importantly for Europe, the EU expanded right up to Russian borders, NATO expanded right up to Russian borders. And the belief was that you didn't have to pay as much attention to national security, you didn't have to spend as much money on defense, and that you could focus on the social contract and on economic policy and you could build your countries, and that we didn't have to worry about World War Three. Now, the Americans, of course, pivoted more sharply from that after the attack on 911, but the Europeans never did. And of course, under Clinton and under Bush and under Obama and under Trump and under Biden, the Americans have been trying to convince the Germans to spend more money on their own defense, and they refused. But Putin, in five weeks has managed to convince the Germans to do precisely that. And that is structural, that no matter what happens in Ukraine, the Europeans are going to focus on national security and defense as a top priority for the foreseeable future. This will be a generational coming of age for anyone living in Europe in the way that 911 and The Wall coming down has been for a lot of Americans. This war in Ukraine will have that impact on the entirety of the European continent. And the EU is the world's largest common market. It matters a lot. And I guess, given the necessity of the moment, we think that's a good thing, albeit an unfortunate one. It'd be great to not need to think about European countries individually arming up, but it seems like they should have done it before this, and we might not be here if they had done it before this. I think that it is a good thing that Europe is together, no question. And by the way, Europe was coming more together over the last decade. The Nadir was the Greek crisis and the EU almost falling apart back in 2009, 2010. But since then, we had Brexit. And Brexit clearly taught the EU that none of them wanted to go through, that it helped strengthen the core European membership. We had the pandemic. And with the Pandemic, a recognition that the wealthy countries needed to actually ensure that the poor countries were taken care of, and a massive fiscal transfer from countries like Germany and the Netherlands to countries like Greece and Bulgaria, a really big Hungary and Poland, even countries that weren't as aligned with the EU at all politically. And then, of course, you have the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where a country like Poland and Hungary are actually doing the leading. They're taking the most refugees on the ground. They're deeply concerned about what this means for their security, and it's bringing the EU strongly together. But of course, it's also happening precisely because there will be a new Iron Curtain. And on the other side of the Iron Curtain will not be Eastern Europe. It'll be Russia, Belarus, a small rump piece of Russian occupied Ukraine, and a breakaway Russian republic inside Moldova, something probably no one's talked about on your podcast before. And that's not a fight. That is a disaster. That is a small group of population, badly treated Kleptocratic governance, massively authoritarian and heading for ruin, but armed to the teeth and led by Putin. And that is when people ask me, what's going to happen? How does this end? My view is it's not going to end. What do you mean end? What's going to happen is we're going to have a much more unstable global order with this really angry sort of Russia faux empire that has been cut off from the west and is angry about it. That's where we're heading. Okay, well, let me kind of cycle through this morass again, because unlike many topics I touch here, I feel genuinely confused about what I think we should do. What I think is would be the likely outcomes of any given set of choices we might make. And it's uncomfortable to be confused about what is perhaps the most important risk we run as a civilization. On the one hand, it seems to me totally untenable that we still live in a world where a single lunatic, you know, however amenable to a psychological diagnosis he might be or not. I mean, a single autocrat, a single Kleptocratic maniac who has less and less to lose when his back is against the wall, can threaten everyone in sight with death by fireball, right? And so we have a crazy autocrat problem that, globally speaking, we have to solve. The technology is too powerful to have one person who can decide to hold the entire globe for ransom is just not a stable situation for us. We have to figure out some way to put that to close that version of Pandora's Box. And I could be convinced, I think, that this is the moment to do that. Yes, we're running a risk of him going completely berserk, but he's not a jihadist. Right. He's not ideological in the way that would make him patently suicidal. He's somebody who has been rational, or, you know, apparently rational up until this moment. And in this frame of mind, I'm thinking, yeah, the distinction between Lithuania and Ukraine is less interesting to me. Why not really arm the Ukrainians fully? Why not possibly enforce a no fly zone for humanitarian purposes? Why not play the edge of this and unleash 100% of all possible sanctions so that we truly beggar Russia? I mean, the idea that the Europeans are still buying gas from him seems just ludicrous. And why not maximize the chance that there could be some internal revolt against him? The person who would solve this problem for us in the entire world is an assassin, right. The assassination game is the game we should be playing here. And so in this frame of mind, I'm thinking, okay, Biden's gaffe in talking about regime change is a gaff I can live with. Right. Because this is the vocalization of what every sane person is thinking at this moment. And is there a path here I agree, to make such an example of an autocrat that closes the door to this sort of thing happening in the future. Is that one possible path there? Now, again, I can argue the other side of this entirely, right, which we will probably do, but just give me a reaction to that fairly hawkish frame of mind. Well, one, we all want Putin out there's, no question. And if there was a way to actually accomplish that that actually was feasible and didn't run existential risks, I think anyone in their right mind would be thinking about it. And Lord knows the Russian people have been suffering in some ways the most through all of this. And I don't mean in the last five weeks. I mean for the last 15 years. So this is not a leader who is in any way fit for purpose in this country. Now, we don't need to talk about all the problems that American regime change has experienced over the past decades and the fact that the Americans being responsible for such a thing would not be received well all over the world. But leaving that aside, before we get to what can or can't be done to remove Putin, let's talk about the initial steps that you mentioned. You said, well, shouldn't we be arming them to the teeth? I think we're coming very close to doing that. The only reason there was an argument inside the White House about these migs everyone talked about the Polish mix. We give them the Polish mix. There was a willingness to do it. It was not because the point was we were scared of Putin's response. It was an open question about whether the Ukrainians would be able to fly them. And secondly, the considered view by the US administration that they would be knocked, they would be blown up before they had a chance to fly from whatever Ukrainian bases. They would be running their sortes out of that. The Russians just have too much control of the air to be able to make that work. And the view was that if you decide to give the Ukrainians, after all this debate, these couple dozen Migs, and then the Russians blow them up, that's worse for everybody. It makes Zelensky look weak. It makes the NATO looks weak. So she shouldn't do that. That's that's number one. The amount, I think that the military support that came from NATO should have come sooner and should have been stronger. I agree with you on that point. I think we were late on it. Part of the reason we were late is because the Europeans were completely unconvinced by American intelligence that war was coming. And the Ukrainians, of course, were actively undermining it. They were saying you're catastropheus. You're putting us in a box. You're making this more likely. Everyone calmed down. That was Zelensky saying that. That didn't make life easier either before the war actually started. I think that on the economic side, you said that it's ludicrous that the Europeans are buying gas from Russia. I'm going to take the other side of that. I will say that. Let's keep in mind, the Chinese, the Indians, every developing country around the world is doing some business with the Russians. And in fact, the Indian government not only just remember, our friends, erstwhile, allies in the Quad not only welcomed the Foreign Minister, the Russian Foreign Minister, lavrov to Delhi, but he actually met with Prime Minister Modi. What the hell is that? That's a problem, right? While the Europeans are actually doing everything they can, they're the ones who have all of the economic dependence on Russia, many of those countries with over 50% of their energy coming from Russia, and they are taking it in the teeth to unwind that as fast as humanly possible. The Germans are saying that they will have two thirds of their dependence on Russian energy gone by next winter. And I think they'll get close to coming there. They just put an emergency in place that will allow for rationing to start of the German people. Now, I mean, we're saying in the US. We're willing to take higher gas prices, but the Europeans, after decades of ignoring this problem out of decades of of wrongly allowing their policy to become beholden on on core strategic supply from Russia, which they never should have done, they are now en masse altogether, moving away as fast as they possibly can. I actually think the Europeans are doing a lot here, and I think the Biden administration is trying very hard. After a disastrous execution of the Afghanistan withdrawal and after big embarrassment on Aux, and after four years of America First, where the Europeans really didn't think they could trust the Americans at all. I think Biden has actually managed a pretty strong, coordinated policy set. Not easy to do where the Europeans are sacrificing a lot more. But we're leading. And if that means that the sanctions have taken a little longer and that means the weapons have taken a little longer, I'm prepared to make that trade. So I think that addresses everything you were talking about before we talk about regime change in Russia. So you're saying that the Europeans are still buying gas because it's just not actually feasible for them to zero out their dependence on Russia today. They actually need the energy, and they can't get it some other way. They're working so much harder and faster to get themselves out of that dependence than anyone would have expected. And I think that within three years, by the end of 2024, there will be no more Russian energy delivery to Europe. And and and I think it will be permanent. I think they're cutting it off. I think it's a very, very big deal. But so that that's definitely in line with what I this half of me, this, you know, sinister half of me thinks the devil on my left shoulder thinks should happen. Why not simply say, okay, you broke your relationship with the liberal world order, the west, and there is no path back. Right. You're going to get out of Ukraine eventually. The ruble is going to be used for toilet paper, and we're going to destroy you economically. Europe is going to get off your pipeline as quickly as possible, and you don't make anything anyone else wants apart from Fertilizer. We're going to solve that problem too. And you are now the new North Korea. Congratulations. Yeah. So the last few sentences are where you veered away from reality, because they can't become North Korea. They won't become Autaric, because they have an enormous amount of stuff that lots of countries around the world will buy. And as I mentioned, the Indian prime minister just met with the Russian foreign minister. He didn't need to do that. He did. And it's not just India. It's China. China is going to be the largest economy in the world by 2030. And Xi Jinping publicly is fully aligned with Putin's worldview. He's fully aligned with the idea that American policy towards Russia and Europe is analogous to American policy towards China and Asia. The quad, the IndoPacific strategy, bacchus, you name it. So Russia will become completely cut off from the advanced industrial democracies of the west, and that is it. We had 141 democracies that voted to censor Russia in the United Nations General Assembly. But in terms of support for sanctions. It's only the rich democracies that's it. That's a significant minority of the world's population. Of course. I guess one question there. Why didn't the alignment with China convince India that they should move toward us here? Because given India's adversarial relationship with China, because these aren't all coordinated moving pieces of one global puzzle. The Russians have been selling significant defense componentry to the Indians for decades. And that's a perfectly functional relationship. There's a lot of energy supply that goes from Russia to India. Now. They can get it cheaper. The Indians are historically non aligned, and they like being a part of the quad visa vis China. But Russia has never been featuring a part of that conversation. And by the way, the Chinese foreign minister just went to Delhi, and he didn't get a meeting with the Indian Prime minister. So the Indians know who they prefer here. And I think the United States has a better relationship with Modi than we have with previous Indian PMS. It is becoming more strategic. But remember when the pandemic hit and the Indians were providing all of those vaccines for the rest of the world that was coordinating with the US. Then suddenly they had a huge problem, and they asked, please send us one plane of vaccines. And the United States didn't do it when they had a real crisis. And so now we're having a crisis which has nothing to do with India, from their perspective. And we're going to tell them, don't buy oil, gas, and military componentry from the Russians. They're going to tell us to screw ourselves. So they're not part of NATO. And I think it's important from a Western perspective, like, you watch it, it looks like the whole world is with us. No, a very small number of advanced industrial democracies, largely rich white people, and Japan are with us. We're together on this, but that's it. And that's not the world. It's not even close to the world. It's not even close to the world's economy, never mind the world's population. So you don't think the sanctions, even ramped up to their absolute loudest volume, are sufficient to harm the Russian economy enough to dictate any kind of outcome here? Because there's just going to be enough leakage with China and the rest of the rest of the world, the developing world, such that you can't actually beggar Russia as a result of this. Well, here's the interesting thing, and this may surprise you, and I'm arguing the other side of my point for a second here, but it's interesting. China's trade with Russia in the last five weeks has actually gone down, and that's because China's economy has a hell of a lot of private sector companies. And they have lawyers, they have general counsels, and they understand trade law, they understand sanctions law. And so they look and they say, look, we don't care how friendly Xi Jinping is with Putin, we don't want to fall afoul of American secondary sanctions against us. So they are reducing their exposure to Russia. But what I am saying, what I'm reacting strongly against, is that Russia will not become North Korea. They have way too much critical mineral wealth. They are way too important in terms of defense export. They're the second largest defense exporter in the world after the United States. The world is too divided. The United States is no longer seen as the global policeman. We are not the architect of global trade. We are not the cheerleader of global values. And so just saying that we want people to do this, we do have the global reserve currency. We are going to hurt the Russian economy. Structurally. I mean, they will be in a depression on the back of this. Their GDP will probably contract by ten to 15% at a minimum. That's a big deal. But you said, will the maximum sanctions be an action forcing event? That implies to me, will Putin be forced to behave differently in Ukraine? And more broadly, will he need to capitulate because of the sanctions? And I think the answer to that is clearly no. Interesting. Okay, so now to talk the other side of my intuitions here, one thing that concerns me about any discussion of regime change, right? And therefore about Biden's now very famous gaffe, is that insofar? It doesn't matter how rational Putin has been up until this moment. If we begin talking as though any feasible resolution of this conflict is going to entail his ouster, that becomes synonymous with, you know, at minimum, you know, him being tried for war crime somewhere, or him being yeah, you know, hung up by his heels in Red Square by his own people. I mean, there's no good outcome for someone if we're saying, whatever happens, when this game is over, you, Vladimir, are not going to be among the players. And so putting his back that squarely against the wall turns him into functionally a martyr. Right. He's now not incentivized to do anything other than cause intolerable pain for everyone in sight. And so I have a fairly strong intuition that if we're worried about that, we shouldn't be doing that and we should be building him some kind of off ramp. And I'm wondering what you think about that and what an off ramp would look like. This is why I'm so pessimistic about where this crisis is going, is because I increasingly don't see a feasible off ramp, any off ramp. I see because Putin's misjudgment was so bad on the reaction of the west, on the willingness of the Ukrainians to fight, on the readiness and capacity of his own military, he is just as a consequence, he's in such a worse position. I don't know what an off ramp would look like that could be remotely acceptable to Putin. Look, he's backed away from Kiev because he can't take it. And it. Is possible that he won't be able to take the occupied territories of the Donbass. Remember, he recognized that whole Donbass territory. That's two thirds greater than what the Russians were occupying after 2014, what they continued to occupy when the war started. I think the best way to lead to an off ramp is to not allow the Russians to create facts on the ground that are unacceptable. And so this is the time to give the Ukrainians a lot more military capacity to prevent the Russians from taking all of the dawnbas, keep them in the territory that they formally occupied. They've been blowing up Mario Pole now for almost four weeks. It was a city of 430,000 Ukrainians. It's been completely devastated. Probably 20,000 Ukrainian civilians are dead, and and and the Russians have destroyed it, but it's taken them a lot longer, and they're still fighting there. As of right now, they're still fighting there. And if you can keep that fight going for another week or two, and you can show Putin that he's incapable of taking more territory in the southeast of Ukraine, the Dunbas, well, then you kind of have the old 2014 status quo ante, plus a whole bunch of dead Ukrainians and destroyed architecture, infrastructure, all the rest. But they haven't taken more land where if he takes additional territory and he annexes it into Russia, it's impossible to restart a negotiations process there. It's impossible to, at any point, talk about how you get any sanctions removed or reduced. And I agree that the fact that Biden has called him a war criminal so it's interesting everyone talks about this statement he made at the end of the Warsaw speech is a gaffe where he said, whatever it was, my God, how can this man stay in power? We cannot let this man stay in power. I don't think it was a gaff. And what I mean by that is, I think if you had asked Biden after the speech was over, was he happy he said it, he would have said yes. I think the reason it became a gaff is because his overly cautious staffers, watching him ad lib through the speech and seeing the reaction it got, immediately put out a, that's not our policy. And as you know, if you're on defense, if you're explaining, you're losing. Right. And I don't think Biden needed to explain. I thought the statement he made the next day, which was this was a moral position, that's exactly the way he feels. The way he felt. And it's completely consistent with saying that Putin is a war criminal. But when you say Putin is a war criminal, I mean, you are saying, I can't deal with this guy going forward. Yeah, that's clear. We're going to get this guy in The Hague if we have the power to do it. Like, this guy can't show up for a meeting because we're going to arrest him. Right? That's absolutely right. So right now, we have the Americans and the Europeans all together, but the farther we go, the harder it is to maintain that. And one point is that you've got the French government that is desperately looking for an off ramp. Any negotiation with Putin at any point on any discussion doesn't matter how much he's lying. Let's just find a way to get a negotiated settlement, move this through. Biden doesn't feel that way. Biden thinks that there isn't actually an overlap in the Venn diagram between the west and Russia, the west and Putin. And so there's really, at this point, even though we prefer negotiations, there's not much utility in negotiations. While the Baltic states and Poland and the United Kingdom actually don't want the war over because they want to see much more damage done to the Russian military and economy so they can't do this again. And the longer this persists, the greater those latent frictions, which haven't mattered much in the first weeks of the war, because we're all just on offense all the time trying to put Putin in the box and trying to support the Ukrainians. Suddenly the step two and step three and different approaches to those steps becomes more significant. And that's going to make this more challenging to manage precisely because, Sam, as you mentioned, because it's hard to imagine how this possibly looks from the Putin perspective, other than I'm on office, other than I've got to find a way to bloody these guys because they want to take me out. So then how concerned are you, given the logic there, that he is going to escalate to the point of using tactical nukes or chemical weapons or some other weaponry which is just on its face, totally anathema to the laws of conventional wars? We currently conceive them and and therefore it would do something that's going to force a response from us that is now taking us far closer to something like World War Three. So, I mean, never say never, obviously, in this environment, but that's not what I'm worried about. I'm worried about something else. The questions that you just raised are all about escalation. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at Sam Harris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I am speaking with Nick Bostrom. Nick is someone I've been hoping to get on the podcast for quite some time. He is a Swedish born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics and computational neuroscience and logic and AI and many other interesting intersecting topics. But officially, he's a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute. And this organization is a research center which is focused largely on the problem of existential risk. And today we get deep into his views on existential risk by focusing on three of his papers, which I'll describe in our conversation. We talk about what he calls the vulnerable world hypothesis, which gets us into many interesting tangents with respect to the history of nuclear deterrence and the possible need for what he calls turnkey totalitarianism. We talk about whether we're living in a computer simulation. He's the father of the now famous simulation argument. We talk about the doomsday argument, which is not his, but it's one of these philosophical thought experiments that have convinced many people that we might be living close to the end of human history. We talk about the implications of there being extraterrestrial life out there in the galaxy and many other topics. But all of it is focused on the question of whether humanity is close to the end of its career here or near the very beginning. And I hope they'll agree that the difference between those two scenarios is one of the more significant ones we can find. Anyway, I really enjoyed talking to Nick. I find his work fascinating and very consequential, and that's a good combination. And now I bring you Nick Bostrom. I am here with Nick Bostrom. Nick, thanks for coming on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. So you are fast becoming or not too fast, it's been years now that I've been aware of your work, but you are becoming one of the most provocative philosophers I can think of. And really it's wonderful to read your work and I want to introduce you, but perhaps to begin with, how do you view your work and what you focus on at this point? How do you summarize your interest as a philosopher? That's always been a challenge for me. Broadly speaking, I'm interested in big picture quests for humanity and figuring out which direction is up and which is down. That is, out of all the things you can be pushing on or pulling on in the world, which ones would actually tend to make things better in expectation. Yeah. And then various kind of subquestives that come out from that ultimate quest to figure out which direction we should be heading in. Yeah. When I think about your work, I see a concern that unifies, much of it certainly with existential risk. And I don't know if this is a phrase that you have popularized or if it's just derivative of your work, but how do you think of existential risk? And why is it so hard for most people to care about? It's amazing to me that this is such an esoteric concern, and you really have brought it into prominence. Yeah. I introduced the concept in a paper I wrote back in the early two thousand s, the concept being that of a risk either to the survival of Earth originating intellect life, or a risk that could permanently and drastically reduce our potential for desirable future developments. So in other words, something that could permanently destroy the future. Even that phrase, you really have a talent for coming up with phrases that are arresting, and it's such a simple one. It permanently destroy the future. There are probably more people working in my local McDonald's than are thinking about the prospect of permanently destroying the future. How long have you been focused on this particular problem? And again, why is it there's something bewildering about trying to export this concern to the rest of culture, even to very, very smart people who claim to be worried about things like climate change? Why is existential risk still such an esoteric concern? Well, it's become less so over the last few years. There is now actually a community of folk around, rationalist community, the EA community, various academic centers, effective altruism, not just these, but kind of radiating out from these number of individuals that are quite interested in this. So I think the comparison to the McDonald's restaurant would no longer be true. Now, maybe it was true several McDonald's years ago. Why it is? Well, I guess you could ask that, or you could ask why it's no longer the case. I mean, I don't know that the default should be, if we're looking at academia, that questions receive attention in proportion to their importance. I think that's just kind of a poor model of what to expect from academic research. So one can ask why it's changed. On one level, you're asking people to care about the unborn if the time horizon is beyond their lives and the lives of their children, which it seems on its face, probably harder than caring about distant strangers who are currently alive. And we know we're already pretty bad at that. Is that a major variable here? Sure. It's an extreme case of a public good, right? So generally, in a simple model of the market economy public goods tend to be undersupplied because the creator of them captures only a small fraction of the benefits. The global public goods are normally seen as the extreme of this. If all of humanity benefits from some activity or is harmed by some activity, as in maybe the case of global warming or something like that, then the incentives facing the individual producer are just very dissociated from terrible consequences. But with existential risk it's even more extreme, actually, because it's a transgenerational good in the sense that all future generations are also impacted by our decisions concerning what we do about existential risks. And they are obviously not in a position in any direct way to influence our decisions. They can't reward us if we do things that are good for them. So if one thinks of human beings as selfish one would expect the good of existential risk reduction to be undersupplied. Like, you could imagine if somehow people could go back in time that future donations would be willing to spend huge amounts of money to compensate us for our efforts to reduce X risk. But since that transaction is not possible, then there is this undersupply. So that could be one way of explaining whether it's relatively little. And there was something about what you said about it's harder to care. It's a little strange that caring should be something that requires effort. If one does care about it, it doesn't seem like it should be a straining thing to do. And if one doesn't care, then it's not clear why one should be what motive one would have for trying to strain to start caring. It's a framing problem in many cases so that there's a certain set of facts, let's say the reality of human suffering in some distant country that you have never visited, you have no connections there. This information can just be transmitted to you about the reality of the suffering. And it transmitted one way, you find that you don't care and transmitted another way. The reality of it and the analogy to your own life or the lives of your children can be made more salient. And so we know through the work of someone like Paul Slovic we know there are moral illusions here where people can be shown to care more about the fate of one little girl who's delivered to them in the form of a personalized story. And they'll care less about the fate of that same little girl plus her brother. And they'll care less. Still, if you tell them about the little girl, her brother and the 500,000 other children who are also suffering from a famine and you just get this diminishment of altruistic impulse and the amount of money they're willing to give to charity and all the rest, and it goes in the wrong direction. As you scale the problem, people care less. So we know we have some moral bugs in our psychology. Yeah. So the original paper about existential risk made the point that from a certain type of ethical theory it looks like existential risk reduction is a very important goal. If you have a broadly aggregated, consequentialist philosophy, say, if you're a utilitarian and if you work the numbers out the number of possible future generations the number of individuals in each of those that can live very happy lives then you multiply that together, and then it looks like even a very small chance in the probability that we will eventually achieve this would have a very high expected value, in fact, a higher expected value than any other impacts that we might have in more direct ways on the world here and now. So that reducing existential risk by 1000th of one percentage point would be, from this utilitarian perspective worth more than eliminating world hunger or curing cancer. Now, that of course says nothing about the question of whether this kind of utilitarian perspective is correct or is agreeable to us. But it just notes that that does seem to be an implication. I'm definitely a consequentialist of a certain kind, so we don't need to argue that point. But one thing that's interesting here, and this may be playing into it, is that there seems to be a clear asymmetry between how we value suffering and its mitigation and how we value the mere preemption of well being or flourishing or positive states so that suffering is worse than pleasure or happiness is good. I think if you told most people here are two scenarios for how you can spend the rest of your day. You can spend it as you were planning to, living within the normal bounds of human experience or I can give you 1 hour of the worst possible misery followed by another hour of the deepest possible happiness. Would you like to sample the two extremes on the phenomenological continuum? I think most people would balk at this because we think we have a sense that that suffering is on some level, you know, in the limit is worse than any pleasure or happiness could be. And so we look at the prospect of, let's say, curing cancer and mitigating the suffering from that as being more important ethically than simply not allowing the door to close on future states of creativity and insight and beauty. Yeah, I think one might want to decompose different ways in which that intuition could be produced. So one might just be that for us humans as we are currently constituted it's a lot easier to create pain than to create a corresponding degree of pleasure. We might just evolutionarily be such that we have a kind of deeper bottom than we have a height. It might be possible, if you think about it in biological term in a short period of time to introduce more damage to damage reproductive fitness more than you could possibly gain within the same amount of time. So if we are thinking about these vast features, you want to probably factor that out in that you could re engineer, say, human hedonic systems or the hedonic systems of whatever inhabitants would exist in this feature so that they would have a much larger capacity for upside. Right. And it's not obvious that there would be an asymmetry there. Now, you might nevertheless think that given in some sense equal amounts of pleasure and pain and it's a little unclear exactly what the metric is here, that there would nevertheless be some more basically ethical reason why one should place a higher priority on removing the negative. A lot of people have intuitions about equality, say in economic context, where helping the worst stuff is more important than further promoting the welfare of the best stuff. Maybe that's the source of some of those intuitions. Actually, there's one other variable here, I think, which is that there is no victim or beneficiary of the consequence of closing the door to the future. So if you ask someone, well, what would be wrong with the prospect of everyone dying painlessly in their sleep tonight? And there are no future generations, there's no one to be bereaved by that outcome. There's no one suffering the pain of the loss or the pain of the death. Steven so people are kind of at a loss for the place where the moral injury would land? Yeah, that is a distinction within utilitarian frameworks between total utilitarians who think you basically count up all the good and subtract all the bad and then other views that try to take a more socalled personaffecting perspective where what matters is what kind of happens to people. But coming into existence is not necessarily a benefit. And now I would say some kinds of existential catastrophe would have a continuing population of people who would be experiencing the bad, if you might, and say, the world getting locked into some totalitarian, like, really dystopian totalitarian regime. That maybe there would be people living for a very long time, but just having much less good lives than could have existed in some scenarios of existential catastrophe. There would still be inhabitants there. Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that destroying the future could be pretty unpleasant for people who are along for the ride. Now, I feel like just to harken back a few minutes ago, like on the general premise here, so I don't see it so much as a premise, this utilitarian view. I mean, in fact, I wouldn't really describe myself as a utilitarian, even more just pointing out the consequence. There are various views about how we should reason about ethics and there might be other things we care about as well aside from ethics. And rather than directly trying to answer what do we have most recent to do, all things considered, you might break it down and say, well, given this particular ethical theory what do we have most recent to do, given this other value or this other goal we might have? And then at the end of the day, you might want to add all of that up again. But insofar as we are trying to reason about our ethical obligations, I have kind of normative uncertainty over different moral frameworks. And so the way I would try to go about making decisions from a moral point of view would be to think I have this moral parliament model. It's a kind of metaphor, but where you try to factor in the viewpoints of a number of different ethical theories kind of in proportion to the degree to which you assign them probability, it's kind of interesting. When I'm out and about in the world, I usually have to make the case for utilitarianism, or at least you should consider this perspective. Like people are scoping sensitive. You should look at the numbers. If this thing has millions of people and this one only has one, hundreds of people being affected, clearly. And yet when I'm back here at the headquarters, as it were, I usually am the one who has to kind of advocate against utilitarian perspective because so many of my friends are so deeply died in the wool utilitarian, so narrowly focused on exercising mitigation. But I feel that I'm always the odd one out. Well, I would love to get into a conversation with you about meta ethics some other time because I think your views about the limits of consequentialism would be fascinating to explore. But I have so much I want to talk to you about with respect to X Risk and a few of your papers that I think let's just table that for another time. In fact, I don't even think we're going to be able to COVID your book Superintelligence. I mean, maybe if we have a little time at the end we'll touch it. But I should just want to say that this book was incredibly influential on many of us in arguing the case for there being a potential existential risk with respect to the development of artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence in particular. And so this is something the reason why I wouldn't cover this with you for the entirety of this conversation is I've had several conversations on my podcast that have been deeply informed by your view. I mean, I've had Stewart Russell on, I've had Elliot Yudkowski on, and basically every time I talk about AI, I consider what I say to be fairly derivative of your book, and I often remind people of that. So my audience will be familiar with your views on AI, even if they're not familiar with you. So if we have time, we'll get back to that. But what I really want to talk about are a few of your papers. The first is the vulnerable world hypothesis. Maybe I'll just name the papers here that I hope we'll cover vulnerable world. The second is are you living in a computer simulation? And the third is Where are they? Which is your analysis of the fermi problem asking where is the rest of the intelligent life in the galaxy? Let's start with the vulnerable world hypothesis. What do you mean by that phrase? Well, the hypothesis is, roughly speaking, that there is some level of technological development at which the world gets destroyed by default, as it were. Then what does it mean to get destroyed by default? I define something I call the semin anarchic default condition, which is a condition in which there are a wide range of different actors with a wide range of different human recognizable motives. But then, more importantly, two conditions hold. One is that there is no very reliable way of resolving global coordination problems. And the other is that we don't have a very extremely reliable way of preventing individuals from committing actions that are extremely strongly disapproved of by a great majority of other people. Maybe it's better to come at it through metaphor. Yeah, the earn the earn metaphor. You can kind of think of the history of technological discovery as the process of pulling balls out of a giant earn, the earn of creativity. And we reach in and we get an idea out and then we reach in and get another out. And we've extracted throughout history a great many of these balls. And the net effect of this has been hugely beneficial. I would say this is why we now sit in our air conditioned offices and struggle not to eat too much rather than to try to get enough to eat in large parts of the world. But what if in this ball, in this Earth, there is a black ball in there somewhere? Like, is there some possible technology that could be such that whichever civilization discovers its environment gets destroyed? Just to add a little color here, Nick, in your paper, you refer to this as the Urn of inventions. And we have been, as you say, pulling balls out as quickly as we can get our hands on them. And on some level, the scientific ethos is really just a matter of pulling balls out as fast as you can and making sure that everybody knows about them. We have this norm of transparency in science and we have pulled out thus far only white or gray balls. And the white balls are the ones or the technologies or the memes or the norms or the social institutions that just have good consequences. And the gray ones are norms and memes and institutions. And in most cases, technology that has mixed results or that can be used for good or for ill and nuclear energy is a classic case where we can power our cities with it. But we also produce fantastic amounts of pollution that's difficult to deal with. And in the worst case, we build weapons. So I just want to give a little more context to this analogy. Yeah, and I guess most technologies are in some sense double edged but maybe the positive predominant. I think there might be some technologies that are mainly negative if you think of, I don't know, nerve gases or other tools. But what we haven't so far done is extract a black ball, one that is so harmful that it destroys the civilization that discovers it. And what if there is such a black ball in the urn though? I mean, we can ask about how likely that is to be the case. We can also look at what is our current strategy with respect to this possibility. And it seems to me that currently our strategy with respect to the possibility that the urn might contain a black ball is simply to hope that it doesn't. So we keep extracting balls as fast as we can. We have become quite good at that. But we have no ability to put balls back into the urn. We cannot uninvent our inventions. So the first part of this paper tries to identify what are the types of ways in which the world could be vulnerable, the types of ways in which there could be some possible black ball technology that we might invent. And the first and most obvious type of way the world could be vulnerable is if there is some technology that greatly empowers individuals to cause sufficiently large quantities of destruction. Motivate this with or illustrated by means of a historical counterfactual. We in the last century discovered how to split the atom and release the energy that is contained within some of the energy that's contained within the nucleus. And it turned out that this is quite difficult to do. You need special materials, you need plutonium or highly enriched uranium. So really only states can do this kind of stuff to produce nuclear weapons. But what if it had turned out that there had been an easier way to release the energy of the atom? What if you could have made a nuclear bomb by baking sand in the microwave oven or something like that? Then that might well have been the end of human civilization in that it's hard to see how you could have cities, let's say if anybody who wanted to could destroy millions of people. Maybe we were just lucky. Now we know of course, that is physically impossible to create an atomic detonation by baking sand in the microwave. But before you actually did the relevant nuclear physics, how could you possibly have known how it would turn out? Well, let's just spell out that because I want to conserve everyone's intuitions as we go on this harrowing ride to your terminus here because the punchline of this paper is fairly startling when you get to what the remedies are. So why is it that civilization could not endure the prospect of what you call easy nukes if it were that easy to create a Hiroshima level blast or beyond. Why is it just a foregone conclusion that that would mean the end of cities and perhaps the end of most things we recognize? I think foregone conclusion is maybe a little too strong. It depends a little bit on the exact parameters we plug in. And the intuition is that in a large enough population of people, like amongst every population with millions of people, there will always be a few people who, for whatever reason, would like to kill a million people or more if they could. Whether they are just crazy or evil or they have some weird ideological doctrine or they're trying to extort other people or threaten other people. Just humans are very diverse. And in a large set of people, for practically any desire you can specify, there will be somebody in there that has that. So if each of those destructively inclined people would be able to cause a sufficient amount of destruction, then everything would get destroyed. Now, if one image is actually playing out in history, then to tell whether all of civilization really would get destroyed or some horrible catastrophe short of that would happen instead would depend on various things like just what kind of nuclear weapon would it be? Like a small kind of Hiroshima type of thing? Or a thermonuclear bump? How easy would it be? Could literally anybody do it, like, in five minutes? Or would it take some engineer working for half a year? And so depending on exactly what values you pick for those and some other variables, you might get like scenarios ranging from very bad to kind of existential catastrophe. But the point is just to illustrate that they historically have been these technological transitions where we have been lucky in that destructive capability we discovered were hard to wield. Maybe a plausible way in which this kind of very highly destructive capability could become easy to wield in the future would be through developments in biotechnology that maybe makes it easy to create designer viruses and so forth that don't require high amounts of energy or special difficult materials and so forth. And there you might have an even stronger case, like with a nuclear weapon. Like one nuclear weapon can only destroy one city, right, where the viruses and stuff potentially can spread. Yeah, we should just remind people that we're in an environment now where people talk with some degree of flippancy about the prospect of every household one day having something like a desktop printer that can print DNA sequences, right, that everyone becomes their own bespoke molecular biologist. And you you can just print your own medicine at home or your own genetic intervention at home. And this stuff really is the recipe. Under those conditions, the recipe to weaponize the 1918 flu could just be sent to you like a PDF. It's not without beyond the bounds of plausible Sci-Fi that we could be in a condition where it really would be within the power of one nihilistic or otherwise ideological person to destroy the lives of millions and even billions in the wrong case. Yeah, or send us a PDF. Or you could just download it from the Internet. The full genomes of the number of highly virulent organisms are in the public domain and just ready to download. We could talk more about that. I think that I would rather see a future where DNA synthesis was a service provided by a few places in the world where it would be able, if the need arose, to exert some control, some screening, rather than something that every lab needs to have its own separate little machine. Yeah. So these are examples of type one vulnerability where the problem really arises from individuals becoming too empowered in their ability to create massive amounts of harm. Now, there are other ways in which the world could be vulnerable that are slightly more subtle, but I think also worth bearing in mind. So these have to do more about the way that technological developments could change the incentives that different actors face. We can again return to the nuclear history case for an illustration of this. And actually, this is maybe the closest to a black ball we've gotten so far with thermonuclear weapons and the big arms race during the Cold War led to something like 70,000 warheads being on hair trigger alert. So it looks loud. I like when we can see some of the archives of this history that have recently opened up, that there were a number of close calls. The world actually came quite close to the brink on several occasions and we might have been quite lucky to get through. It might not have been that we were in such a stable situation. It rather might have been that this was a kind of slightly black Polish technology and we just had enough luck to get through. But you could imagine it could have been worse. You could imagine properties of this technology that would have created stronger incentives, say, for a first strike, so that you would have crisis instability. If it had been easier, let's say, in a first strike to take out all the adversaries nuclear weapons, then it might not have taken a lot in, in a crisis situation to just have enough fear that you would have to strike first for fear that the adversary otherwise would do the same to you. Yeah. Remind people that in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile crisis, the people who were closest to the action felt that the odds of an exchange had been something like a coin toss and something like 30% to 50%. And what you're envisioning is a situation where what you describe as safe first strike, which is there's just no reasonable fear that you're not going to be able to annihilate your enemy. It provided you strike first. That would be a far less stable situation. And it's. Also forgotten that the status quo of mutually assured destruction was actually a step toward stability. Before the Russians had or the Soviets had their own arsenals, there was a greater game theoretic concern that we would be more tempted to use ours because nuclear deterrence wasn't a thing yet. Yes, to some degree of stabilizing influence. Although, of course, maybe at the expense of your whole time. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, it's been a big week for news. There are many things happening in the world. Of course, there were the January 6 hearings, which are not at all the partisan witch hunt that Republicans are claiming. Most of the witnesses have been Republicans. That should be a pretty obvious point. And most have been avid Trump supporters. Most of them did this lunatics bidding up until the last moment when they were staring into the abyss. Some of them, like Cassidy Hutchinson, whose testimony was the most damaging to Trump, have everything to lose from coming forward. No doubt she and her family are now besieged by death threats and very real security concerns. She was an extremely compelling witness. She was obviously a Republican partisan down to her toes, and yet she recognized that what happened in the run up to January 6, all the cultic hysteria whipped up by the big lie and then what happened on the day itself was an abomination. Perhaps I should emphasize for the hundredth time that political partisanship has nothing to do with this. Liz Cheney is one of the people running these hearings. She is a conservative Republican. She is pro life and against gay marriage. She is, by my lights, a religious extremist. I am sure I disagree with 95% of her politics, but she is a straight up American hero in my book. On a bad day, she's doing more to support and defend the Constitution of the United States than the rest of the Republican Party has done in years. She is standing between us and the utter dismantling and desecration of our democracy. This is not a partisan point. For instance, I'll concede that almost anything bad that is said about the Democrats now is probably true. Biden appears unfit for office. Whether he's actually senile, I don't know, but he simply can't communicate the way the President needs to. You watch these speeches and interviews and press conferences insofar as they even take place. Every sentence is a death defying feat. It's like watching your mom do parkour. You're just waiting for the worst thing that has ever happened every fucking second. And he is totally unfit to run again in 2024. And Kamala Harris is probably worse. Though she might be fine neurologically, she still manages to speak in word salad in an apparent effort to talk down to people. Have you seen these snippets of her circulating? Many of the things she says are completely mystifying. It's like someone trained an AI on woke Twitter and had it talked to itself for the equivalent of a thousand years, and it went properly insane. And as a political candidate, she manages to convey a disingenuousness that makes Hillary Clinton seem like Will Rogers. This administration is doomed, right? And has been doomed almost since the very beginning. But Biden and Harris saved our democracy by beating Trump. And as odious and as incompetent as the Democrats have become, there is simply no comparison between them and what the Republicans have become under Trump. Trump and Trumpism is not just a symptom of a deeper problem, they are that, too. But they are also a cancer that has been actively destroying our politics. You have to cut out the cancer. Trump has always been and remains a litmus test. The real Trump derangement syndrome is to not see how abnormal he is as a person, and to not see or to not care how abnormal it is that such a person could have ever become the President of the United States. That's the real Trump derangement syndrome to say or to think things like, well, all politicians lie, right? What's the difference with Trump? There's no both sides to this political moment. Making Trump president was like making Alex Jones the lead anchor on the nightly news. Whatever you want to say about the media, whatever you want to say about CNN, for instance, about the errors of journalism they make over there, and about how woke everyone is, it would be orders of magnitude worse, and the degradation of our journalistic standards would be complete. If they swapped in Alex Jones for Anderson Cooper, that would be a totally different world, journalistically speaking. And that's where we are with the Republican Party, apart from the few brave people like Liz Cheney who are trying to save it from itself. Anyway, if you haven't been following the hearings, for whatever reason, you're missing something. The window they have opened onto the last days of the Trump administration is beyond unflattering. And the prospect that we may 1 day see the orange man in an orange jumpsuit seems to have grown a little. It's hard to imagine him not being prosecuted now after what we've learned. That is, of course, if he doesn't become president again in the meantime, which remains a real possibility. Of course. The biggest development in recent weeks was the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court. Some people have asked for my thoughts on that and about the ethics of abortion generally. Perhaps we'll do a podcast on that at some point. But briefly, I guess the first thing to say about Roe is that the writing was always on the wall for Roe, right? It has always seemed like a dubious judicial decision and just the wrong way to enshrine abortion rights at the federal level, and the fact that we've been relying on it for 50 years has been a failure of governance. The Democrats knew how precarious Roe was, and yet they completely failed to pass legislation, much less an amendment to the Constitution, to properly guarantee this right for women. So there's a lot of blame to go around, and the Democrats share in that blame. That said, I think repealing Roe is going to be unambiguously bad for women, in particular poor women in red states, and it'll be bad for the red states too. I think the spectacle of having desperate women prosecuted as murderers for going out of state to terminate a pregnancy or taking illegal medication at home, this will be bad for business. I think you'll find that corporations don't much like being associated with a real life version of The Handmaid's Tale. But again, this will only hurt red states. But I don't think the problem necessarily stops here. I do think there's a larger concern about creeping theocracy. Let's call this for what it is, what happened here. The unjustified and unjustifiable religious beliefs of Catholics on the Supreme Court have delivered this change in our society. This is religion, pure and simple. There is simply no valid ethical argument that privileges the interests of a single fertilized ovum over those of a woman whose life is going to be completely deranged by being forced to have a child. It's not just that pro life absolutists have bad arguments. They have no arguments for banning abortion at the earliest stages. But then, prochoice absolutists are also extremists. Anyone who would argue for abortion as an absolute right of a woman at every stage of pregnancy, as though terminating a fetus in the third trimester had no ethical implications beyond a woman's bodily autonomy. Such people are just not making contact with the real ethical terrain here. So our political debate about abortion seems pretty confused, and it ignores the very sensible intuitions that most people have on this topic. Most people recognize that a clump of cells is not a person, while a 30 week old fetus is so close to being a bouncing baby that it is a person. The real problem here is to figure out where that change happens, and therefore where it becomes ethically complicated to terminate a pregnancy. The most important question for me is at what point in development can a fetus conceivably suffer? That's not the only consideration, but I think it's the main one. And here it's reasonable to think that sensory connections to the cortex are the relevant threshold. We can be even more conservative than that and draw the line somewhere earlier. But it's not an accident that most people think that the first trimester and the third trimester are very different, ethically speaking. And the difference is in the presence or absence of the nervous system structures that could conceivably produce suffering. Terminating a pregnancy at ten weeks is just different than terminating one at 30 weeks. Given what we know about developmental neuroscience, I would say that the first should be at the total discretion of the mother, and the second should require very serious justification, like saving the mother's life or saving the child from some utterly horrific suffering, should it be born. And obviously, emergency late term abortions should and do include anesthesia. At a certain stage in pregnancy, you have to treat a fetus as a being who can suffer. But over 90% of abortions happen in the first trimester. And given what we know, that should be a legal practice available to all women, especially given what we know about the effects on a society that outlaws that practice. Ultimately, there's a lot of ethical work still ahead of us to understand human development in a fine grained way and to specify exactly where a fetus, even a specific fetus, becomes a person to which we want to ascribe independent interests. But most people know that the extremes are very different. Ten weeks and 30 weeks, say, and where we draw the line should be somewhere in the middle of that range. And yet our political discourse tends not to reflect this. But the fact that we appear to be moving into a situation where abortion at every stage will be illegal in half the country, that is clearly a step backwards politically and ethically, and we have Iron Age religion to thank for it. Okay, today I'm speaking with Morgan housel. Morgan is a partner at the Collaborative Fund and a former columnist at the Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. He is a two time winner of the Best in Business award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. He's also the winner of the New York Times Sydney Award and a two time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. And he has written a wonderful book titled The Psychology of Money timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness. And this is the topic of our conversation. We discuss how personal history shapes one's view of economic risk the implications of not understanding the future the difference between rich and wealthy how we measure success the problem of social comparison happiness versus life satisfaction, saving and investing warren Buffett and the power of compounding rational versus reasonable decisions the role of luck optimism versus pessimism dollar cost averaging and other topics. Anyway, I found it a very useful conversation, and I hope you do as well. And I bring you Morgan Hassell. I am here with Morgan housel. Morgan, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sam. So you wrote this really wonderful book, the Psychology of Money timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness. And I want to talk about a lot of what's in that book and anything else you think on these topics. But before we jump in, I guess two things. I want to acknowledge that we're having this conversation at an interesting moment, and we seem poised on the brink of some kind of recession, and the the stock market has been fairly crazy. And just one interesting reference point that jumped out at me. I think at some point in your book, you single out Netflix as a company that has made stratospheric gains. And I now notice that Netflix has lost almost all of those gains, and it certainly lost five years worth of gains seemingly overnight. So a lot can change here, obviously, and we don't know when people will be listening to this conversation. I think this will be evergreen. And they're just very different moments in the life of any economy and the life of any person. It's fascinating to see how it's changed even since your book was published. It's it's interesting, for sure. What I would note too, something with Netflix you mentioned, where I mentioned in the book is Netflix, during a period of 2002 to 2018, increased like 500 fold. It went up 500 fold. That's just cherry picking in hindsight. But during that period, it lost 70% of its value twice. It lost half of its value on six separate occasions, despite increasing 500 fold during that period. I think that's relevant today as it goes through another 70% climb, as you pointed out, that I think a lot of what we deal with in the economy and the stock market whenever we go through these periods like we have in the last six months, when a lot of things decline and collapse and there's a lot of volatility, I think the huge majority of what we are experiencing is normal volatility, normal accidents, normal uncertainty that you should expect with 100% certainty to occur during your life in the stock market, in the economy. It's rarely phrased like that. It's always, even in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and the Financial Times, it's phrased as like crisis, surprise, catastrophe, even if what we are dealing with is something that has always occurred at fairly regular intervals and will always occur at fairly regular intervals. Yeah, we'll talk about some of the details there when we talk about investing and just the psychology of it. But before we jump in, perhaps you can summarize your background. How did you come to focus on money and wealth and related matters? And perhaps this might be the time to talk about the way in which a person's personal history can provide a lens through which they look at these topics, and it's a lens that's fairly difficult to change. So I think you have some interesting things in your book on that topic. How does personal history and personal bias play in here as well? Well, I had a pretty unique background starting in my teenage years. I was a competitive ski racer growing up in Lake Tahoe. And because I was a competitive ski racer, I more or less bypassed high school, not because I was I was smart enough to bypass it just because it was viewed as getting in the way of competitive ski racing. So I did an independent study program for high school. That was a joke. There was effectively no academics involved. It was a program that was designed for juvenile delinquents. I was not one, but that's what it was designed for. And I did nothing. I did basically no academic work for it. When I was 16, they gave me a piece of paper that said diploma on it, but for all intents and purposes, I had an 8th grade education. And then I stopped after that. And during my teenage years, it was a lot of fun. I was ski racing all over the world. It was great that's I became a later teen, 1819 years old, and all my friends started going off to college. I had this moment of what now? What do I do? They all have this skill set in terms of a high school education that I did not, and they're all going into college that I felt I was completely inadequately prepared for, which I was. I started as a valet at a high end hotel in lake tahoe during that period, and that was my first exposure to wealthy people. I grew up in a in a middle class household, but I had never been exposed to very wealthy people. And at the hotel, you had people coming in, and their ferraris, and their rolls royces, and I had just never seen that before. And as I was 19 years old, I was very naive in my worldview. My first reaction as a 19 year old man was, I want to be that guy. The guy driving the yellow ferrari. That's who I want to be. I think it's funny now, because that's like the opposite of what I want to be, what I aspire to. But that was my first view of like, there is another side of the world out there that I don't know about, and I want it, and I want it badly. And so this was the early two thousand s the huge majority of those people who I met who were very wealthy, worked in finance, and that was kind of my first exposure to like, okay, I want to get into finance because I want to be that guy. And I had this chip on my shoulder in terms of my lack of education. And as the years went on, I finally started college when I was about 20, and I had to start at the most remedial levels of effectively, I stopped in 8th grade, and I had to start back at that level at a local junior college. Community college eventually worked my way up. I graduated from USC. It took me many years to get there. I think I was in college for six, maybe seven years, if you added it all up, because I had to make up for so much lost time. But my entire goal during that period was I want to work in finance. I want to be an investment banker. I want to move to New York and work for Goldman Sachs. That's what I wanted to do. And in the early 2000s, that's what a lot of young then in particular wanted to do because investment banking had this allure of like, that's where the power, that's where the money is. And when you're 21, 22 years old, you're just so enamored by that. And then, so I was going to be an investment banker, and then I got an investment banking internship in Los Angeles. And you've done your, you did your degree in, in economics. That's right, yeah. I have a BA in economics from, from USC. And I got my and so I started this investment banking internship and on, and this was my dream. This is what I had aspired to do to put all my eggs in this one basket. And on day one, not even day one, like hour one of this investment banking internship, I realized it was not for me. This is just not going to work. The culture of investment banking, particularly back then, was really geared towards hazing. It was not geared towards productivity or solving problems. It was like, how much can we torture you to see if we can break you? And if we can break you, then you don't fit in here. And my personality, some people thrived in that environment. I was like, Get me out of here. I couldn't last. It was supposed to be a several month long internship, summer internship. And I lasted like a month, and it was just a torturous month. So then I'm like, okay, I need to do something else. And then I got a job in private equity. And this was the summer of 2007. Got an internship at a private equity firm. And I really liked private equity. It was a great can you just differentiate those two areas for people? Because I'm sure some people could define investment banking and private equity, but I would imagine many can't. So how are those different? So investment banking is really a service industry of you get hired by a corporation to help you transact in a deal. So if a big company like Microsoft wants to buy another company, they want to acquire another business, they will hire an investment bank to kind of do the administrative work for them, which is creating presentations to sell the board of directors, getting the deal done, all the kind of behind the scenes valuation analysis, legal analysis to get this big merger done. That's at least one aspect of what investment banking is, right? Private equity. You are actually an investor writing checks where a private equity firm is like an investing fund that will go out and buy an entire business. They'll go out and buy a big industrial company that was for sale, and then they will not only invest in it, but they will now run it and manage it and kind of take over the business and do what needs to be done to run that business. So the banking side is very transactional, and private equity was more of like, you're actually a long term investor or somewhat long term investor here. And I really like that side of like, it was half finance and half business. It wasn't just a transaction. It was like, let's run a business now. So I really like private equity. And I was like, great, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to work in private equity. And that was the summer of 2007, which, if you recall, that's when the global economy started breaking up. That was like the early innings of the financial crisis. And then, so the fund that I was at got into some trouble, as a lot of funds did, and I was a junior analyst, and they came to me and said, look, there's not going to be a full time spot for you. The fund was really struggling at the time. So then it's like, okay, I'm just about to graduate. I have a degree in economics. The entire financial world was collapsing around me, the whole industry. Nobody was hiring in 2007, 2008, and I don't know what I want to do. And that was kind of a hard, tough moment for me. But then I had a friend who was a writer at the Motley Fool, and he said, hey, the Motley Fool is hiring investing writers. If you're looking for a job, you should apply. And I had no interest in writing. It was never part of the plan. I had no desire, I didn't enjoy it, never thought in a million years that this was what I would do. But I took the job at a desperation I just needed a paycheck at the time. And I thought, okay, I'll be a financial writer writing about the stock market. I'll do this for a couple of months until I find another private equity job. But I ended up staying for ten years at The Motley Fool, and that was really where I learned how to write and also learned that I liked writing and I enjoyed it and I loved the process of being an outsider. I'm not a fund manager, I'm not a financial advisor. I'm not an economist. I've just kind of sit at my desk in my house and observe what's going on in the economic world and try to piece together what I think is happening and what I can learn from it and any kind of insights that I might be able to glean and then write about it as an outsider. And I really enjoyed that process. So it was a completely serendipitous haphazard path to where I got but I think a lot of careers work like that. So I spent the last 15 years now or so just trying to figure out what's going on inside of people's heads when they're thinking about risk and greed and reward and uncertainty and just trying to write an interesting story that will capture people's attention about what's going on in the global economy. Yeah, well, your outsider status has caused you to produce an unusual and useful book because it's not a normal finance book. It is a book, as you say, which focuses on how to integrate the issue and problem of money and wealth into a balanced and fulfilling life. Right? And so many people get that wrong, and so many rich people get that wrong. It's just bewildering and it's fascinating to be led through your thinking about this, and it's just very convergent with what we're doing over at waking up and thinking about global issues in the context of living a more examined, fulfilling life. What does your personal history? Not everyone has experienced a major downturn at the moment they became or were struggling to become financially independent. You hear stories about people who lived through the Great Depression and what that did to them, and there are people who missed that entirely, and they're almost in the same age bracket. Maybe you can say some general things about how a person's experience can define their attitude toward money and building wealth comprehensively. Yeah. Well, let me tell you two stories. Here one that's kind of a follow up to my career and one that's just a little bit more personal. So I started as a writer in 2007, which is when the financial crisis began. So I spent the early years of my career writing, just trying to write about and piece together what happened during the global financial crisis of 2008. And as the years went on, I kind of realized as time went on that you could not find the answer to the question of what happened. Like why did the financial crisis happen? Why did people make the decisions that they did during the housing bubble and during the bust? You could not find the answer to that question in a finance textbook or an economics textbook. There's nothing in those fields that could accurately explain why people did the things that they did. But you could find little clues about what happened and explanations for what happened. If you are thinking through the lens of psychology, like greed and fear and sociology, keeping up with the Joneses and politics, like why certain regulations are put into place, history, all of these other fields that had nothing to do with finance could really accurately explain why it happened. And so that, to me, was just this idea that there was so much more to finance and economics than finance and economics. These are all fields that study how people think and how people behave. And behavior is such a big and broad, all encompassing field. There was a lot that we could learn about economics and finance through the lens of these other fields. That was kind of my first opening to this idea of, like, I want to write about finance and think about finance, but not through the lens of finance. That's boring. And I think it's just woefully incomplete. I want to look at this as more of like a sociology perspective, and I think that's a good segue into the other part of your question, which is that we tend to think of finance like it's a math based field. It's just numbers and data and charts and formulas, and it's like engineering or it's like physics, where it's very clean and precise. That's how finance and economics tends to be taught, like, down to the decimal precision. And everything we know about it is that it's not. It's just people make decisions with their money and have outlooks about the economy and their greed and fear that are all just based off of their personality and their psychology. And so much of that is just anchored to their own unique experiences of their personal history. And since everyone from different generations in different countries and different socioeconomic statuses have very different backgrounds and experiences in the world, everyone thinks about finance and economics differently. I think that's why it tends to be a controversial field in a way that like physics and meteorology is not controversial. It's not that it's not saying we don't that we know everything. But the arguments that take place in economics over like, what's the right tax rate, how should we promote entrepreneurship? Are so fierce in economics. And I think the reason is because there is no one right answer. Everyone is just doing what makes sense to them through their own lens of what they've experienced in life. And a couple of examples of this one that I think is really interesting is that before COVID australia had not had a recession in 30 years. There was 30 years without a single recession. A lot of that was just because china had an insatiable appetite for their natural resources. So this had this giant economic tailwind. So 30 years, no recession. Whereas in the United States, we had three recessions during that period, two of which were, like, crippling, devastating recessions that reset our entire society. And so the people of Australia, of course, are just as smart as anyone in America. They have the same information as anyone in America. They have they're they're learning about the same topics, but they had a completely different view of economic risk than anyone in the United States would. And it's not because one side is smarter than one another. It's just like the dumb luck of their individual experiences. And then you get into these these things of, like, if you grew up during the Great Depression, of course you thought about economic risk totally differently from the rest of your life than someone who did not. And that's all well documented. And whatnot I was once having. A conversation with Daniel Kahneman, who of course, is a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics. And we were talking about how our individual past shape how we view about risk. And he brought up this almost chilling point that he grew up in as a child in a Jewish family in Nazi occupied France. That was his upbringing and how that made him think about risk and just the kind of outlook of humanity in a pessimistic way, more than I ever would. And what's important about this is too, is like, I can learn about World War II, I can read about the Holocaust, but until you have the emotional scar tissue of experiencing it firsthand, it's never going to be even remotely as persuasive as it would be. Like, nothing is more persuasive than what you have experienced firsthand. And this is when people who think and go out of their way to be open minded and empathetic to other people's experiences. Everyone, including myself, including you, everybody is just kind of a prisoner to their own past, of the dumb luck of where they were born, when they were born, and the people who they kind of just happened to meet along the way, the experiences that they happen to have along their path. And so we all think we're being objective about how the real world works, but I think the truth is, nobody is. And I think that really comes through with how people manage their money and think about the economy. Yeah, kahneman is so useful here because not only does he have his personal experience, but his field of field, that he is largely invented of behavioral economics. He can draw lessons that are highly counterintuitive because so much of his focus is on how our intuitions prove to be bad in various circumstances. And one thing that's relevant here, which I believe you discuss somewhere in your book, is how he thinks about our capacity for surprise. And we tend to draw the wrong lesson from surprising events because the lesson people draw is, let's say there's a surprising downturn. Let's say in this case, Netflix loses 70% of its value overnight. And you think that okay, now you understand that you can build this into your model. This is the kind of thing that is going to happen in the future. But what you really should be building into your model, perhaps in addition to the first lesson, is surprising. Things are going to continue to happen, and they will be different. Right. Your capacity to be surprised is not going away. And you can't merely look at past surprises in preparation for the future surprise. What you have to actually factor in is you don't understand the future. That's it. And it's really hard for people to grasp that we have no clue what the biggest news story of the next year, five years, ten years is going to be. That's always been the case. I don't think there has ever been a time in modern history when we knew what the biggest news story of the next five years was going to be. Preemptively like, it's always been the case that the biggest news story was something that virtually nobody saw coming. COVID, 911, Pearl Harbor, the Great Depression, all of these things that were just like generational defining events that no one, or virtually no one saw coming before they happened. So that's always the common non, the common denominator of these big events. It's not that they were like big. It's not that they were massive events. Well, sometimes they are. It's that no one was prepared for them before they came. I'll give you one recent example of this that I think is really interesting. The Economist, which is a magazine that I really admire. I think they do great work, but every January they put out a twelve, a review for the year ahead. Here's what to expect over the next twelve months. They do this every January. If you go back and look at their January of 2020 edition for what to expect in 2020, there's not a single word about COVID which of course, as they were writing that edition in December 2019, it was an unknowable event at that point. And then if you go back and look at their edition from January of 2022 of this year, there's not a single word about Russia or Ukraine, which, again, of course, you could not have known with any kind of precision that that was going to take place. But COVID and Russia and Ukraine are probably the biggest events of those periods, but they were completely unknown 60 days before they took place by some of the best journalists in the world. And I think that's not a criticism of them, because that's just an example of it's always the case that even within a 60 day window, we have no clue what the biggest news story is going to be. I think that's true today, and I can say that with confidence because, again, it's always been like that. But no matter how many times we experience it, I think it's just so uncomfortable to accept that level of uncertainty. And there's always going to be just an insatiable demand for people to think that they can see the future, or to pay to people who tell them that they can see the future because the reality of accepting otherwise is so painful. Yeah. Well, with that proviso in mind, let's think through our relationship to money and wealth and related matters from something like First Principles. I think let's start with the differentiation you make between being rich and being wealthy. How do you think about those two, you know, seemingly synonymous concepts? I would first start by saying I I made these definitions up so people shouldn't take them too seriously. But rich, I described as, you have enough money to pay your monthly bills to live the lifestyle that you want to live. You can make your mortgage payment, your car payment. You have the monthly cash to make to COVID your spending. Wealth is a completely different thing. Wealth is the money that you have not spent. It's money that is saved up and invested and unspent banked up, sitting around that you're not doing anything with. That's what wealth is. And it's a very different concept because I think that the biggest reason that we should differentiate these two things is because rich, you can see I can see the car that you drive and the house that you live in and the clothes that you wear, the jewelry that you wear. That's all visible wealth. You cannot see. I cannot see your bank account. I can't see your brokerage statement. I have no idea how much wealth you have. And we go through a life with a very skewed and flawed sense of rich and wealth because we only make judgments and we only make assumptions based off of what we see. So you see someone driving a Lamborghini and you think, that guy must be rich. And maybe they are rich in the sense that they can make the monthly payments on that Lamborghini, but they might have zero wealth, zero money saved up that's going to give them independence and room for error and the ability to endure a recession. They might have zero. This, to me, I really became aware of when I was a valet and getting to know some of these people who would drive in and their Bentleys and their Rolls Royces and learning after I got to know them, that a lot of them were actually not that successful. They were like mediocre, successful people that spent half of their income on a Rolls Royce lease payment. And that, to me, was just like all of my assumptions about these people was completely skewed. And on the flip side of that, some people who were legitimately very wealthy, who you would never know by their outward appearance that I could measure them by. And that, to me, after you've seen 20 of those extreme examples of, like, I thought you were X, but you turned out to be Y, just the most extreme difference that I could think of. After I saw enough of those, it was just like, I don't believe there are so many flaws and skews that we are blinded by. And I would say particularly young men get blinded by the view of richness when actually what they deep down aspire to be is wealthy. They actually want to be wealthy. Because what wealth does the unspent money that you're not spending, that you're saving and investing and you're not spending on a monthly basis, is it gives you independence and autonomy. When you have that level of money saved up, that net worth saved up, where you can be autonomous. That's what wealth really is. It's like using money to give yourself a better life rather than just a tool to buy more things. I think that's what people actually aspire to. But always what they are measuring and judging in the world is just how rich people are or aren't. What are the consequences of richness being on the surface and wealth being invisible. I think there's so many people that will assume again, I think particularly young men who assume that the material aspects of richness the nicer car, the bigger house, the fancy or clothes will give them a level of happiness in life. And since I think what they actually aspire to is to be wealthy and to be independent but they don't know that yet. I think it leads to a lot of depression, actually, if they are lucky enough to have a pretty high income and they can go out and buy the nice car and the big house. A sense of emptiness when they actually get it, that it's not going to bring them what they assumed. I just finished Will Smith's biography, which is actually incredibly good, and he made this point that when he was poor, if he was depressed, he could always say, look, I'm depressed now, but if I have more money and prettier girls, then my depression will go away. And it gave him a sense of hope. But then when he was rich, he he couldn't have that hope anymore. If he was rich and depressed, he could not say, oh, if I only had more money, things would be better. There was no more hope. And so I thought that was a really interesting point of, I think, what the material side of wealth can do for people. Look, I like nice cars and nice homes as much as anyone else, but I think we massively overestimate the amount of benefit that we are going to get from those things. And that point that I just said is like cliche. That's a worn out point that a lot of people know. But I think the next step of that that does go overlooked is what we actually want is not the material. It's not that money won't make you happy. It's that money can make you happy if you use it to give yourself independence and autonomy and control over your time. That's something that I think for overwhelmingly, the majority of people will bring a lasting level of contentment and a benefit to their life that is overlooked. And so it's not a plea to live like a monk. It's not a plea to like the fire movement of retiring when you're 24 years old to live in a shack. It's not that. But I think if we can use our money with a sense of independence, of, look, if I if I have some level of savings, maybe I can, you know, take a lower paying job that I like more. Maybe I can live in an area that has a shorter commute, like whatever it is, maybe I can endure a medical setback without falling into a crippling amount of debt or bankruptcy. All of these things just pile on your shoulders with a little bit of lack of independence and autonomy in the world. That if you can remove that by having wealth, the money that you're not spending, it's something that is, like, so overlooked that can actually give people a fighting chance at using money to give yourself a better life. Yeah, well, I want to talk about wealth and happiness next. But there's a point you make in the book somewhere related to the visible and the invisible here, which is interesting, because when all you can see in other people unless you really know them intimately and you're having a conversation about their actual financial habits, all you can see is their spending patterns. Right? You can see the car they bought or the house they bought or the clothes they wear, and you can't see how much they're saving or not saving. And because you never really see what it takes to be truly wealthy or to merely pretend to be wealthy, the only thing you can be tempted to model, really, is the rich side of this dichotomy. I think that's right, and I think that's why there is a lot of I mean, here's one point that I think is interesting. If you ask most Americans what was the best period economically in the history of this country, what decade was the best decade economically in the history of America? Overwhelmingly across generations, across socio economic groups can point to one decade, which is the 1950s. We remember, like, across generations, we remember the 50s as the golden age of middle class prosperity in America. That's how we remember it. And I think what is amazing about that and fascinating about the nostalgia for the how easy it is to disprove that we were actually better off in the by almost any economic measure that you look at, the median American household, adjusted for inflation, is so much better off today in the year 2022 than they were in any period during the 1950s. And it's not even close. The median household income, adjusted for inflation, is more than two X today, what it was in the 1950s, and life expectancy, access to medical care, educational attainment, go on down the list of almost any metric you want to think about. We are better off today than the 1950s. So then the question is, like, why the nostalgia? Why do we remember it at such a great period if we know that it wasn't? I think at least one explanation for that is because a lot of it was the rise in media, particularly social media, over the last 20 years that just inflated everyone's expectations to an incredible degree. And maybe our incomes have doubled since the 1950s, but our expectations have more than doubled because everyone judges how well they're doing in the world relative to those around them. And when your judgment of those around you today is opening up instagram and just seeing a curated list of people taking their private jets to their private islands with their beautiful model wives and that's people's expectation of what the world is. And in that world, even if your incomes have doubled over the last couple of generations, you're going to feel worse off because your expectations are so wildly inflated. And I think that is like that's that's probably a huge socioeconomic trend of the last eight years since the end of World War II. It's expectations rising faster than reality on the ground. Even if the reality on the ground is a lot of progress and a lot of material success. It doesn't feel like that because we have so anchored onto this false view of what we want in life and what we aspire to in life and what is normal in life without having any sort of grounding in terms of how far we've come. I mean, I think anyone, if they are really honest about it, if you said I have a time machine, you can trade places. Do you want to live and work in the year 2022 or 1952? I think if you are honest about it, virtually no one would say 1952. Yeah. Well, in defense of all of the envious people in the 21st century, one difference between 2022 and 1952 is that the level of wealth inequality really has changed in 1952. Again, I think this is something you discuss in your book. The difference between the richest family in town and the average middle class family in terms of the outward signs of wealth wasn't all that extreme. It was the difference between driving a Chevy and driving a Cadillac. But basically people, when you actually just look at the amount of gains in wealth in the society that accrued to the top 10% or the top 1%, it was not completely out of whack the way it is now. And so there really are, I mean it's just that, you know, the far tail of the distribution is living in a completely different world economically than the average person in America is an extreme here. I think this is true globally, but the Ginny coefficient in America is I don't know what it is right now, but you know, it has been creeping toward something far more extreme than than anyone in the 1950s would recognize. That's true. I mean, I think a lot of that was kind of an echo from World War Two of like how the economy was managed. There were like wage caps during the war that kind of stuck around, at least in the corporate culture in the 1950s. The top marginal tax rate was 91% in the 1950s and there was a lot of like negatives that did come from that. But you're right that it created this period where wealth inequality was so low and therefore when people are measuring how well they are doing relative to those around them, most people around you in the 50s were doing exactly as you were. People were living. So like, the small house felt great because everyone else lived in a small house and the low income felt fine because everyone else had a low income. And camping for your vacation felt like a great thing to do because that's what everybody else did. And so I think that is a lot of the nostalgia that we had is that even if we were analytically worse off, like substantially worse off, it felt better just because people were measuring their success relative to everyone that's around them and everyone's around them was doing roughly as they were. And so that that started to break a little bit in the late seventy s and early eighty s and then took off from there. And I think it just, it went supernova in the last ten years with social media to where now your definition of the people around you is this algorithmically curated list of the most shocking photos that you can find of wealth and beauty and sex. And particularly for young men and young women. I think it's so distorting on where they should be in the world and how they anchor their success in the world and whether they it's this anchor of if I'm not driving a BMW or a Lamborghini and if I'm not living in a mansion in Bel Air and flying a private jet. I have not succeeded at all in the world, which is just, like, complete 180 from where we were in the 1950s. Which is what if I have a 1200 square foot house and I can go camping once a year? I'm successful. Okay, well, let's talk about the relationship between wealth and happiness because it's not precisely as advertised and people's beliefs about it are obviously quite consequential. We've already begun speaking about the variable of social comparison, which is, you know, I don't if anyone has figured out a way to correct for it, I haven't heard of it. It should be the kind of thing you could correct for because it really is irrational. The problem here is that because we derive so much of our sense of our own satisfaction by comparing our status with others, absolute changes in the life experience of everyone for the better don't register in the way that they should. So if you have a tide that lifts all boats, but some boats are still bigger than others, we become numb to those auspicious changes and truly just disregard progress across the board because we look at our neighbor and he's doing better than we are. This just habit of social comparison is truly insidious. And as we've already established, the the context of social comparison has genuinely changed because there are levels of inequality now that are very difficult to think about. I mean, people don't have good intuitions for the orders of magnitude here. And one way to think about it, which is which makes it intuitive for people, is if you put orders of magnitude in terms of time, for some reason, people grock this much more easily. So, I mean, the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars and a billion dollars and hundreds of billions, which is now where the richest people are, people just don't have a gut feeling for that. But if you tell someone that a million seconds is two weeks and a billion seconds is 32 years and a trillion seconds is 32,000 years, right now we're talking about people who are a quarter of the way to a trillion dollars. When you're talking about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and some of the other richest billionaires, when you're talking about someone who made $100 billion during COVID the difference between that and making $100 million during COVID or $100,000 if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Today I am speaking with Neil Ferguson. Neil is a financial historian, the author of many books. He's also a journalist, he's a professor. He is now affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the lucky husband of ayan Hersiali, one of my friends and heroes, also a former podcast guest, and he is most recently the author of The Square and The Tower Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook. In this conversation we talk about mostly that book. We talk about Trump and other matters. And those of you who have hated me on the topic of Trump may like that part of the conversation. Neil is really one of the first people to say anything that has given me pause on the topic of Trump. And what he says is fairly simple. It makes Trump look no better. It doesn't take the onus off of the people who have supported him. But I did find it worth thinking about, and it has to some degree, changed my sense of how bad an outcome the election was, all things considered. So once you appreciate that when it happens in the conversation. Neil, as most of you know, is a man of strong opinions and a wealth of information. And now I bring him to you. Please enjoy neil Ferguson. I am here with Neil Ferguson. Neil, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure, Sam. This has been a long time coming. You are one of my most requested guests, and you are also a man who's had the good sense to marry one of my favorite women on earth, ion Hersia Lee. So well done on both counts. That is the most interesting thing about me, and she is more interesting than me. So your listeners will just have to make do with second best on this occasion. Yeah, well, it's a good problem to have. It sure is. So, before we get into your new book, which is fascinating, give me a picture of how you view your career as an academic and a journalist. You are often described as an economic historian. You seem, from the outside at least, not to be an entirely standard academic or journalist. You seem far more entrepreneurial than that and have just walked a very interesting line through the media and academia. So how do you describe your job to yourself? Well, if one writes the history of an historian, it usually makes for rather dull reading. I think it was George III who said to gibbon, scribble, scribble, scribble. And my life is really type type. I decided at some point to become a writer, and that was the starting point. I think I was influenced by my grandfather. My mother's father was a journalist, an Otto Didak, who'd left school at a very young age. He'd risen to be Chief sub editor on the Glasgow Herald before World War II, and he encouraged me to regard writing as a vacation. It was something I could do easily from an early age, but it was my grandfather who made me consider it a profession. So the question that any writer confronts at a fairly early stage is how to pay for the rent and the heating and the the simple answer seemed to me to become an academic, because as an academic, at least one has a steady revenue stream. One's expected to write that's part of the job, and one's also, in some measure, being paid to teach other people to write. I fell in love with Oxford at first sight as a young man and thought nothing could possibly be more blissful than the life of an Oxford dom. I looked enviously at their bookline studies and assessed the job requirements. Once spent only half the year teaching three eight week terms, and the rest of one's time appeared to be dedicated to reading books and writing books. So that was a relatively easy decision. And I think under a different circumstances, in a different parallel world, I might just have led a life of blameless obscurity, probably in Cambridge, where I got my second job at Peter House. I lived happily at Peter House in college, a bachelor don, dining at high table and being insufferable, and I could probably have kept that up for decades. But then private life intervened. And really, from the moment I became a father, I had to be a little bit more creative about what I did. And I think that's when my secret hobby of journalism began to become more than just a hobby and actually a source of income. And to end this long answer, then I began to see that if I was going to communicate my ideas to a public slightly wider than the fellowship of an oxbridge college, I had to not only write for newspapers, but go on television. And here I am at the age of 53, doing podcasts with Sam Harris, still in this quest to disseminate my ideas to a wider audience and pay for my children. Yeah, well, to repurpose the cliche necessity being the mother of invention, it works out. It's good that those avenues were open to you because it's producing very creative work and influential work, and it's breaking down this tired notion. If it were ever true that you have to be publishing in some academic journal that only 400 people will read to actually make your contribution to the important conversations that are happening. Clearly, contributions are being made in books written for a general audience now, and that's been true for for quite some time. And your books are among both the most accessible and most comprehensive. And the new one is The Square and The Tower, which is about I should give the subtitle networks and power from freemasons to Facebook, and it is about the nature of networks, for good or for ill, really. And networks are contrasted with hierarchies. So maybe we should just start with some basic definitions here. I think everyone has an intuitive sense of what hierarchies and networks are but perhaps you want to differentiate them. For us. The book really begins with the false dichotomy in its title The Square and the Tower. And one's asked at the beginning to believe that there is a stark contrast between the town square where social networks form informally, spontaneously, with little real leadership, and the tower, where hierarchical structures of authority reside. So the image is that of an Italian town. Sienna is the one I chose in the book. But as I said, it's a false dichotomy. As the book unfolds, it becomes clear to the reader that in truth there are just different forms of network distributed networks which are very decentralized and hierarchical networks in which one node, or perhaps one or two nodes have a very high centrality, have a great deal of control or power or are able to monopolize information or resource flows. So for those listeners who have done their homework on network science that notion of a spectrum, of a continuum of different kinds of network architecture will be familiar. But I felt the general reader needed to be eased into that. And it's from a heuristic point of view, I think, quite nice to suggest that there's this distinction because I think in our everyday lives we feel there to be a distinction between the hierarchy that we inhabit. If we work for a corporation or for some other traditionally pyramidally structured organization and the network of our friends and family. I think a characteristic feature of modern life is that one alternates between the chart of some hierarchical organization, even if it's only in one's role as a citizen of a state and the social network that we inhabit out of the office. So this is the way the book proceeds. You start with this dichotomy and then gradually it becomes clear that it's really a continuum. Yeah, although I think there are a few features that make the dichotomy worth keeping in mind. There's the verticality of a hierarchy, the fact that the top stays at the top and that you can't really move out from the edge on any level, that everything has to kind of run through this chain from top to bottom. That classic networks, even with their clumping and clustering kind of hierarchies seeming hierarchies that happen within the network classic networks seem to violate that principle. So it's kind of what happens at the edges that seems very different. I think in strict terms, one shouldn't really talk about vertical and horizontal. I was at least discouraged from doing that when I started to hang out with the real network specialists at Stanford. But I think for the lay reader, this is a helpful way of thinking about it that in a hierarchical structure there's a node at the top. And I give the example in the book of Stalin's Soviet Union which is perhaps the most extreme case imaginable, stalin claimed, and in many cases was able to achieve a complete control over the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens and to prohibit or at least make very dangerous unauthorized social networking. So those horizontal ties, or edges, if you will, between nodes were hazardous if they weren't, so to speak, authorized or approved. To graph that, you would draw a treelike structure with all the edges pointing upwards towards Stalin, the central node, and none really running across from peer to peer. So I think this is a helpful way to think about it, even if it's not strictly speaking the technical language one should use. The technical language would be that Stalin in the Soviet Union had the highest between the centrality of any node. Right. But that's not something that one can readily, readily say on talk radio. Well, happily, we're not on talk radio, though it could sound just like it. But one point you make with respect to this dichotomy is that history has really tended to be written by the hierarchies in the sense that and the work of historians has so often been a matter of going to some archive and seeing the remnants of some regime in print and writing the story of what has happened in those terms. And that networks again claim a classic networks, the tissue of relationships and influences that happen throughout an entire society that tends to not be recorded in quite the same way. And we have this distorted view of what has actually happened in history as a result. That's right. Most historians cut their teeth in archives. I did that as a 20 something graduate student. And archives are generally produced by hierarchical entities like states or corporations. In my case, it was the Hamburg State Archives that I sat in. And I remember having a very frustrating experience trying to piece together the history of the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s from these official documents. The documents in the Hamburg State Archive essentially presented the world as it had appeared to a bureaucracy and an early 20th century bureaucracy that didn't really want to admit that things were spinning out of control. So to my bemusement, there seemed very little trace in the Hamburg State Archives of the greatest monetary disaster in German history, if not in all history. Then one day I bumped into a man at the British Consulate. I was having afternoon tea and his name was Eric Warburg, or Varburg. He listened to what I was saying about the reason I was in Hamburg and he said, oh, you must come and look at my father's papers. So I went to the the office of the the bank M. M. Varberg and sat in an old paneled study. And there were the papers of Max Varburg, who had been one of the leading bankers of 1920s Germany. And I entered the world of social networks and left the world of official hierarchy. And here was the story here was the story I'd been looking for because here in in Varbok's correspondence with his circle of friends, some of whom were in politics, some of whom were in finance, I found the story that I'd been looking for. And that was really the beginning of my career as a historian of networks, though I didn't quite appreciate it at the time. And it's only really with hindsight that I've realized I've spent most of my career trying to get away from those state archives and trying to find the records of the social networks. They are harder to find. You need a bit of luck, as I did have in Hamburg. But when you find the archives of the networks, I think very often you find a more interesting story than the official record in the state archives. It's really the history of private life in many respects which does such work for us, and of informal life, of leaders life, spontaneous life. I think that's part of the appeal to me of the private papers of an individual that it's all there in all its messiness. Of course, one needs to add that every notable person who leaves behind a collection of papers has probably weeded out the embarrassing ones and retained all the boring ones and retained the interesting ones. So you've got to guard against some selection problems. But I still find as an approach, at the very least, it's right to look outside national or regional government archives because that's the hierarchical version of history in there. That's the version of history that the bureaucrats have constructed and it's only a part of the story one needs to tell. And a quite different picture often emerges if you can get outside that hierarchy and enter the realm of networks. So you make one observation at some point in the book that struck me as highly counterintuitive, but it's fairly arresting. At one point you talk about the parallel between what has happened in our information economy with the birth of the personal computer and the Internet and what happened over the course of a couple of centuries, but seemed to have begun to peak in the 16th century as a result of the printing press and the spread of books and literacy as a result. And you say that the time we're living in now really the last few decades is in many important respects more similar to the 16th century than it is to the 20th. Can you say more about that? Yes, this is the central analogy in the book and analogy is really the way that historians are best able to illuminate the present with the help of the past. I argue that the printing press, as it spread across Europe, beginning with Gutenberg's invention in the 15th century, revolutionized the public sphere as radically as the Internet and the personal computer have revolutionized the public sphere in our time. And the ways in which these processes are similar are numerous. Number one, the printing press had the same effect on the cost of a book that innovation had on the cost of a computer from the 1970s until the early two thousands. And secondly, the the consequence for the volume of information were similar. With that lowering of the price of the unit of content production, the volume of content grew exponentially. The only real difference is that in the case of the printing press, the the Network Revolution, if you want to call it that, took well, it spread out over 300 years, really, beginning in the early 16th century with the period of the Reformation and carrying on right the way through the 17th and 18th centuries, with one network revolution after another. The Enlightenment, the political revolutions that followed from that, but also the scientific revolution and the Industrial Revolution. These revolutions all were driven by the much greater ease of communication through the printed word, but also the written word. Whereas in our time, the same kind of revolutionary changes have been happening in order of magnitude faster. So what took a century back then now takes a decade. And that's, that seems like a reasonable way of thinking about this drastic change in the structure of the public sphere. I can't think of a better analogy than the time of the Reformation, 500 years ago. And my point is that if Luther had tried to launch the Reformation without the printing press, we'd never have heard of him. He would have been just another, you know, another burnt heresy, whereas he was able to go viral. And the effects of his message as disseminated by the printing press were in many ways a startling to the 16th century Europeans as the effects of the personal computer and internet have been on messages that have gone viral in our time. Well, and of course, the effect in the near term was fairly bloody in Luther's case, near and far, because in the end, and this is really kind of key point, luther expected this to have benign consequences. He thought that once everybody could read the Bible in the vernacular and have a direct relationship to God not mediated by a corrupt clergy, we'd get that priesthood of all believers that the Bible talks about. Instead, he got 130 years of religious strife between proponents of the Reformation Protestants and opponents. And I think we are equally surprised today to find that creating giant online social networks does not produce a global community of happy people sharing cat videos, but in fact leads to polarization. And as in the 16th and 17th centuries, it's not just good things that go viral, it's crazy stuff. Then it was witchcraft that went viral as a concept in the wake of the Reformation. In our time, of course, all kinds of fake news and extreme views go viral. And we're as surprised by this outcome as the Lutherans were. They really didn't expect to unleash more than a century of religious conflict. But that's what happened. Yes. So let's talk about the quality of our conversation as a result of these networks and social media in particular, and the problem of fake news, because I've heard you say you say it in the book, and I've heard you say it in at least one previous interview, that there would be no President Trump without Facebook. And this effect that many people have noted of a kind of siloing of information where either by our own choice or some perverse tuning of the algorithms based on the advertising model of content now people are becoming more. Polarized. But connectedness is increasing polarization and amplifying the signal of true information, but also false information and in ways that everyone seems fairly stunned by. How do you think about what's happening now and what we should try to change? We should never have believed Silicon Valley's promise that if everybody was connected, then everything would be awesome, that that was a promise repeatedly made from the 90s onwards. It reached its zenith in the things that Mark Zuckerberg, a fandran and CEO of Facebook, said to the effect that if Facebook could only grow to the maximum extent, there'd be a global community, and in that global community we'd be able collectively to solve mankind's problems, or words to that effect. And I think he was sincere in that belief, I'm pretty sure. And I suspect the same was true of the founders of all the great network platforms. I don't even remember thinking very critically about this myself as a fairly early Internet user. But we should have known better, because not only did history predict that large social networks would be inclined towards polarization, so did network science. Because network science has this clear proposition that even small sized social networks will tend to self segregate into clusters. The term homophily is the technical one, which sounds a little strange, as it doesn't, again, get used much on talk radio. But it just means that birds of a feather flock together, right? And so we see this pattern even in high schools. Sociologists have worked on this since the 1970s, when they were scratching their heads and wondering why the integration of schools wasn't going so well. It turned out that even with all the bussing in the world, high school communities tended to self segregate along racial lines. So we've known about homophilia. We've known about the tendency for birds of a feather to flock together for a long time. And guess what? That's exactly what happens on Facebook and on Twitter. People congregate into clusters, mostly ideological clusters, when it comes to political issues. So we shouldn't have been surprised, but we were, because we drank the Kool Aid. We thought that if everybody was connected, then obviously everything would be great. I think the Trump point is a really important one, because nobody in Silicon Valley realized until it was much too late that their network platforms were going to be crucial to his victory in the 2016 election. Nor did they appreciate at all the significance of the fact that people were paying in Roubles for advertising on those platforms and opening accounts, suspiciously large number of accounts in Russia. There was a complete underestimation of the political risk in Silicon Valley, I think, because the culture of the computer science types of the engineers simply demoted that to a low priority. I think as it became clear, and I think this is a pretty clear cut point, that without Facebook and perhaps also Twitter but I think Facebook was really crucial, the Trump campaign couldn't have won. Heads were exploding all over the Valley, and the inquest into Silicon Valley's part in Trump's victory is still ongoing. We're only gradually being able to find out just how extensive the Russian hacking of the system was. But I think more importantly, we're only gradually coming to appreciate that the Facebook advertising tool was the key weapon that the Trump campaign used so much more effectively than the Clinton campaign, that it was able to overcome the massive financial disadvantage it had. She outspent him two to one and lost. And I think if you take away Facebook and Twitter and imagine that election playing out in pre 2008 technology, he would never have won. Yeah, so Silicon Valley essentially made Trump possible and this was definitely not part of the plan since most people in Silicon Valley I can think of perhaps two exceptions. Lean left. Yeah, well, and Peter Thiel is one. Probably Peter Thiel and Joe Monster who are friends that stand out for their yeah, I know Joe as well. I think their willingness to go against the current and the current is pretty strong in around Silicon Valley to be not just liberal but progressive, even as you're making your millions, if not billions, but apart from them, really, most people were more or less unthinkingly Clinton's supporters. And I don't think it dawned on many people that the internet, which sort of had made by liberals stamped on it, could be used to such extraordinary effect by not just conservatism, but a bunch of populists. This has been one of the great ironies of modern American history and that's part of why I'm a historian. That kind of irony is what makes history a worthy subject of study. Nobody anticipated that outcome and I still think it hasn't fully been processed in Silicon Valley or in Washington that the nature of the democratic process is fundamentally altered so that in future there will be two kinds of candidate those who understand how to use Facebook advertising and those who lose. Everything you just said is actually agnostic as to whether or not it's a good thing or not that Trump is president. Right. This is just what we're talking about here. I want to ask you about Trump in a second, but what we're talking about here is a fundamentally unanticipated mechanism by which political opinion is getting swayed, and the usual gatekeepers of information, real journalists and imperfectly, though mostly properly aligned, incentives in that community. And into that vacuum where their influence eroded, you have things like infowars and breitbart and utterly fake news being amplified on social media and for good or for ill, depending on what outcome you want. But still, the process now is it's violating every norm of civil conversation and truth testing? When you look at the details, the number of stories that are fake is alarming. The fact that the phrase fake news has been turned against real journalism by the people who avidly consume fake news, like real news is fake and fake news is real for millions and millions of people. This is really a breakdown of public conversation. Before I ask you about Trump, let's talk a little bit more about just the kind of truth testing that the norms of conversation are meant to preserve and what appears to be unraveling here. How do you view the role of advertising here? Because advertising is not something that most people would have thought was a threat to democracy or global sanity, but increasingly it seems to be one. How do you see ads as driving this process? Sammy, you use the phrase for good or ill. This is definitely for ill. Stick about that. Just to clarify that, Neil, even if you think Trump is a much better president than Clinton would have been, if that's your view I'm not speaking about you, Neil, I'm speaking about our listeners. If that's your view, there's still very good reason to be worried about this mechanism that got him elected. Absolutely. You're right to raise the issue of advertising. In the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, when the printing press was the dominant way in which ideas got disseminated, relatively few organs sought to make money through advertising. Newspapers and magazines started to do it. But it wasn't really central to the business model in the early years of the print economy. Whereas from a very early stage, the network platforms of the internet sought to monetize the search engine, the social network, through advertising. And this was a crucial departure, not only because it was business genius, but also because it created an entirely different public sphere with different incentives from the old one. I love mentioning Jorgen Habermas in context like this, because it's not a name that one gets to talk about on top radio or TV. But Habermas early work, the Structural Change of the Public Sphere, was a very influential work in my thinking. Habermas showed how much of the 18th and 19th century political changes in Europe were consequences of changes in the structure of the public sphere. And I think we've lived through a tremendous change in the structure of the public sphere, because Facebook, Google, YouTube in particular, but other network platforms too, have a very clear incentive. And the incentive is to demonstrate to the people to whom they sell advertising space online that they have high user engagement, that users are looking at content on Facebook, on Google, on YouTube, and they're looking at that content for more than a nanosecond. They're engaged by it. It is sticky. That's how you persuade people to do their advertising online, rather than in magazines, on newspapers, or on TV. But here's the problem. The things that cause us to linger on a web page are not its truth or beauty. We are attracted to the fake and we are attracted to the extreme. So fake news and extreme views are, it seems to me, fundamentally incentivized by this particular business model. And I could illustrate this with an example from a paper that was published after I had finished The Square in the Tower. This paper showed that on Twitter, a things are likely to be retweeted within ideological clusters. In other words, liberals tend to retweet liberals and conservatives retweet conservatives. Not really that surprising. But what is surprising is that a tweet is 20% more likely to be retweeted for every moral or emotive word that it uses. So the incentive, if you want to get retweeted, is always to ramp up the language. It seems to me that which is the real pathology here, that the social networks online, when it comes to politics anyway, are engines of polarization, that they are designed to drive us apart. It's not enough to talk about echo chambers and filter bubbles because that implies a certain static quality. These clusters are growing further apart. It is the more extreme people on the political spectrum who are most likely to tweet about politics. It is the most ideologically extreme members of Congress, in both the Senate and the House who have the most followers on Facebook. So I think these are consequences of a model that incentivizes the extreme. Now, at root of it all is, I guess, our original sin that we can't quite resist stories like the Pope endorses Donald Trump, even if we probably know the minute we see it that it's fake, we linger over it and are even tempted to forward it. But that's the problem. We have this engine of polarization, and nothing that has been said or done since the inquests into the 2016 election began has fundamentally changed this. It's the same system, and I think it will operate in similar ways in other elections, in other countries, and indeed in this country this year. You seem to me to be not as alarmed by Trump as I am. How would you characterize your level of concern about his presidency? Five days a week I wake up and I say, this is within the range of normal American politics. He's a populist. We've seen populism before, and the Constitution was set up for the eventuality of a demagogue in the White House, and it's working. He's constrained. So chill. And two days a week I. Wake up. And I think I wonder if it felt like this in the final years of the Roman Republic. And I think that's about the proportion. I think historian needs to be very skeptical about some of the claims that have been made by I won't name names by those who warn that we're descending rapidly towards tyranny by analogy with the Viamar Republic. That just strikes me as a terribly inappropriate analogy. And I'm impatient with the talk of tyranny, and I will name names. I disagree with my dear friend Andrew Sullivan about this, and I disagree with my friend Tim Snyder about this. I don't think we're descending into tyranny. And I think if one simply locates the Trump presidency in the context of American history, leave aside the Weimar Republic, there are numerous precedents for what we're seeing. And the most likely outcome at this point is not the collapse of the Republic. It's the impeachment of the president after the Democrats win back the House in November. That's pretty much the base case at this point, right? However, I think it would be excessively sanguine to say that that's the outcome with 95% probability. After all, didn't we learn in 2016 not to have too high confidence in our political predictions? I write a weekly column. That's a good discipline you're forced constantly to assess your expectations, make sure that you're updating your views. And my column has blown hot and cold for the last two years between dismissing Trump as a hopeless candidate to recognizing that he might very well win. And I veer around, as I write at the moment, between thinking that dreadful mistakes are being made and then reflecting that. For example, if one just compares outcomes, comparing year one of Clinton with year one of Trump, and leaving aside the personalities, they're not so very different. It's a difficult line to tread for the obvious reason that in this polarized public sphere that now exists, the man who goes down the middle is in the crossfire. It's very much easier. It would be easier for me to have gone fool, never Trump, as some of my friends have done. But my sense is that that's not the correct posture for a critical thinker. The critical thinker has to say, what is this like historically? And it is not like the collapse of the Weimar Republic. It is much more like the populist wave of the late 19th century, which was a backlash against globalization and produced Trumplike figures, even if not a Trump presidency. And I think if one takes that approach and tries one's best to be dispassionate, one arrives in this almost uninhabited center ground. It's a lonely place, I have to say. It's not much fun because you're kind of hated by both sides. If you go on MSNBC, you're accused of being a Trump apologist, and if you go on Fox, you're far too critical of the president. Drives me crazy. But this is precisely the pathology that The Square and the Tower is about, that we have created this extraordinary polarized public sphere in which to take some balanced middle position is almost by definition, to be dismissed by everybody as a trimmer right. You function largely, if not mostly, in conservative circles. I would imagine you have an appointment at Hoover and I'm just imagining what your network looks like. I imagine you have. Everyone is well represented, but you're certainly no stranger to conservatives. What do you make of the fact that concern about Russia's influence in our election is so politicized? And how is it that conservatives, perhaps conservatives, generically, but certainly the Republican Party, have become enamored of Russia and Putin when they were the party that a few short years ago had congratulated itself for winning the Cold War and ending an evil empire? What's your perception of Trump's entanglement with Russia and where the Russia investigation is likely to go? But then how do you make sense of the fact that if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today's guest is Rebecca Traister. Rebecca is writer at large for New York Magazine and a contributing editor at L. She's a National Magazine Award finalist and she's written about women in politics, media and entertainment from a feminist perspective for The New Republic and Salon, and she's also contributed to The Nation, The New York Observer, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue and many other magazines. She is the author of all the Single Ladies, Big Girls Don't Cry, and her latest book, which we discuss is Good and Mad the Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. Just a couple of things to be aware of here. We were talking past each other a bit. This was a conversation that certainly could have gone the way of my conversation with Ezra Kline. I'm happy to say it didn't. One technical limitation, which I mentioned at some point, there was a latency problem that sometimes happens in these remote podcasts where I can't interrupt a guest. So when you hear me try and it proves totally ineffectual, that's not Rebecca being especially vehement. She literally cannot hear my attempts to interject. So you'll notice that I gradually learn that and for the most part, stop trying. But it was a good conversation nonetheless. We get into the issues of Me too and race fairly deeply. She is quite a bit more woke than I am, no question about that. Anyway, more and more I think it's just important to attempt conversations like this, and this will not be my last attempt, so please enjoy my exchange with Rebecca Traister. I am here with Rebecca Traister. Rebecca, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. I think both of us come into this conversation with a little bit of trepidation because we're anticipating not agreeing about a very fraught topic. First, let me just say I'm a huge fan of yours. I've been trying to get you on the podcast for in the Midst of Last Fall I know was when you first reached out to me, right? Yeah. So there's tremendous goodwill on my side. I don't view this as a debate. I largely view this as an opportunity for you to educate me. And let me also say that one of the things I write about in the book and that I wrote about, I think in the Midst of Last Fall which was the sort of height of the flood of hashtag me too stories was my own ambivalence. And I'm somebody I don't think you could find, by some measures, a stronger proponent of the process. We're in the midst of and of coming to terms with the power inequities sexual power inequities gender, power, inequities racial power, inequities I mean, this is the stuff of my work, right? I am a serious proponent of this process. And yet, as I write in the book, and I think I made clear back then, I also have a whole mess of conflicting feelings about them. Because this is really hard, discomforting work that we're doing and trying to challenge systems and rules that have been in place and that we have all grown up with. And it's very painful in many cases, and it's full of contradictions and conflicting feelings, even for somebody who, like me, is an extremely strong proponent of Me Too and addressing sexual harassment and sexual assault as structural, systemic inequities. I think this will be a bit of a tighter, up walk, but most of all, I hope, is useful for everyone listening to us. Before we dive into the danger zone, let me just tell people who you are, actually. I'd like you to describe how you see yourself as a journalist, but I'll just remind people that we are talking about your new book, which really could not have come at a better time. And that book is good. And Mad the Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. And I can only imagine how your publicity team felt when they knew this was dropping. Right. It was either the beginning of the middle or just the end of the Kavanaugh hearing, which must have made someone think that there is a God and he's working for your publisher. What's it been like to jump into the fray at this moment. And I guess before that, just tell people how you view your position and career as a journalist. Sure, I am a journalist. I am a writer at large for New York Magazine, where I've been for several years. I write about politics, media and culture from a feminist perspective. I am both a reporter and an opinion writer, which gives me a degree of freedom. I report stories, but it's never a mystery, you know, what my politics are, what my viewpoint is. I am the author of three books. The most recent is Good and Mad. Yeah, I think that you're right, that the book Selling Gods. We're probably pretty happy about the timing, I have to say. In all honesty, and I'm saying this not as somebody, I would never pretend to not be ambitious and not want to sell books. I want all those things. It has been a fraught time to be out here selling books in the midst of national calamity and an extremely painful and extremely painful chapter in exactly the story that I work at telling about the United States and how power works. Here one that is going to have, to my mind and from my perspective, very long lasting consequences. The appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is going to have an impact over generations, certainly for the rest of my life, unless surprising things happen. And so there is certainly fraught to be out here wanting people to read my book, wanting to talk about, you know, the book was finished in June, long before I could have anticipated even, you know, Kennedy's retirement. And I have I have very mixed feelings about the news cycle that has made it you know, everybody says, oh, is the perfect time for it to come out, and I am glad if it was. I have heard from some people that it was a useful tool to help them understand what was happening with regard to how Christine Blasey Ford expressed herself, how Brett Kavanaugh expressed himself, how power and anger were being received over the past few weeks. And I'm glad of that, but it's definitely fraught to be out here selling books in the midst of this. Yeah, well, so just to give you a little clearer sense of where I'm coming from, I think you and I have political goals that are very close to one another's, the narrowest one being that I want almost anyone on Earth to win the presidency in 2020 other than Donald Trump. Yes, we are close on that. Although my range almost anyone else other than Donald Trump, I have a whole number of other people I really don't want to win the presidency. Yes. So one of my concerns here is that insofar as your framing of these issues seems likely to increase the chance of Donald Trump being reelected, I begin to worry there and sort of points at which I will flag that concern. There's also a larger goal which I'm sure we share, which is to arrive at a society where both real and perceived political equality is maximized. And it's important that it be both real and perceived, because I think, you know, real equality isn't good enough if people don't think they have it or they don't recognize they have it. And I think there are situations in which that's already the case, and I think we may disagree about some of that as well. I'm looking forward to hitting these points, but let's start with your book. Just a bit of a history lesson here. What is first and second wave feminism? Well, I don't love the language of waves. I tend to use it mostly with regard to second wave because it's become a descriptor. But the way it's used casually is first wave feminism is the sort of suffrage movement which takes roots in the 1830s coming out of the abolition movement and women who are involved in the abolition movement and some men, including Frederick Douglas, who begin to understand the problems of enfranchisement and full citizenship, you know, fighting for the abolition of slavery. Understanding also that the franchise and this is something Frederick Douglas would later write about with regard to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that the franchise for women was key. And so the suffrage movement, in the form that took it from the 1830s when the first suffrage meetings came out of the abolition movement, through 1848, which was the year of the Seneca Falls convention, and the writing of the Declaration of Sentiments, which ripped on the Declaration of Independence, calling for gender equality and actually calling out all the ways that women have been made dependent on men moves through the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. And then there is an enormous split within the suffrage movement that turns on real racism, the fury of these allies who'd come together and work together. But when black men but no women were offered citizenship and the franchise in the wake of abolition, some of the white women, including some of the leaders of the suffrage movement, notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony the racism, which has presumably long undergirded even a lot of their progressive activism. They express fury at the idea that black men would go ahead of them and become enfranchised, and they would not. And this finds really racist expression. Susan B. Anthony writes about the indignity of having hans and ung tongue vote before be able to vote and wield kind of electoral power over educated white women like herself. And the Krishna Mott is very, very ugly. And that split lasts decades. The groups break into two different of suffragists break into two different factions, two different organizations, and they do eventually come together. But in fact, a lot of that maneuvering of white supremacy within the campaign to get white women the vote, I mean, it is officially the campaign to get women the vote is based on an argument that white women's votes, which would be in support of their husband's politics, would cancel out the votes of African Americans. That's, you know, a lot of the the principle it's fascinating in in portions of that movement, even up until, you know, the year of his death, susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglas, who were very, very close friends and allies, even through some of these horrible splits, she asked him not to come to a suffrage meeting. He remained dedicated to the cause of suffrage throughout his life. She asked him not to come to a suffrage meeting in the south because she didn't want the presence of an African American, a former slave, to undercut the message that she was sending to white women. The 1913 Suffrage Parade in Washington. Black women were asked to march. At the end of the parade, IDA B. Wells insisted on marching with her state's delegation. And so there's one moment of culmination, which is the passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment, which officially guarantees women the right to vote. But of course, it did not apply to black women or at that point, black men in the Jim Crow south. But at that point, up to 1920, you're looking at almost 90 years worth of a movement that has gone through many stages. And that is the thing that's sort of traditionally referred to as first wave. But it's very hard for me to imagine it as a wave because it was almost a century, and many of the women who were behind the work of it lived and died without ever seeing any of their work come to fruition. And then, of course, it's another 45 years before the passage of the voting rights act, which theoretically guarantees full enfranchisement for African Americans as well. So the project of getting that full enfranchisement, that the franchise that was sort of conceived of in the 1830s and 1840s by abolitionists and suffragists, that takes, you know, more than a century. So it's very hard for me to conceive of that as a wave. The second wave is something that erupts in a kind of mass way in the 1960s, in part in the wake of the publication of Betty Friedan's feminine mystique, and then bubbles and becomes sort of more radical and becomes more attuned to doing the legal and political work of fighting to make new rules in the 1970s. And it sort of hits its height in the 1970s and results in all kinds of changes around hiring practices, professional discrimination, gender discrimination within workplaces, the reimagining of women's educational potential, the admittance of women into colleges and new professions, sexual liberation, the protection of women's reproductive autonomy. There are all these sort of legal and policy changes that are made during that period. Now, that altogether is a fairly short eruption of a women's movement, you know, pretty much within about 20 years. And so, to me, second wave is a much more specific that's it was kind of a wave. It was a thing that happened in in an amount of time we can kind of wrap our heads around. And so I do use the term second wave, but I don't love waves in general, because then it's like, when's the third wave? When's the fourth wave? And that's far less distinct. So no one's talking about me too as third wave feminism. I think there are, but this is why waves aren't always totally useful. There was a group of women who in the 90s called themselves third wave. They were bringing forth what they felt was a new generation of feminism rebecca Walker, Jennifer Baumgartner. They wrote a book called third wave. But then there was a sort of sense that flutwalks, which really erupted far more recently, was a third wave. The sort of eruption of a feminist internet, a feminist media, which happened in the years sort of around 2004, 2005. Was that the third wave of feminism? One of the problems with waves is that you're always kind of looking to see when's the next wave starting. And often social movements aren't really discernible as contiguous projects until they're over, and you're looking at them in retrospect, or until they've paused, because, again, many of them have gone on not just for decades, but for centuries, and you're able to sort of see more clearly in retrospect the path and pattern that they took. So that is one of the reasons that I tend not to use wave language to describe every iteration of a women's movement. I do think that the period that we're in is an eruption that depending on what happens moving forward, we may look back on as the moment of commencement or perhaps a peak of what I hope will be a movement to alter gender power. Hierarchies and Me Too as a hashtag is not that recent. Isn't it, like ten or twelve years old? Well, it wasn't a hashtag. In 2006, Toronto Burke founded the MeToo Movement. It was specifically aimed to make clear the ubiquity of sexual assault, sexual violence, and especially in communities for women and girls of color. And that was in 2006. Now the term. Me too. Was appropriated in October of 2017, in the weeks after the publication of the stories about Harvey Weinstein's predatory, violent, predatory behavior against so many women. And I believe it was the actress Alyssa Milano, who maybe first used the hashtag Me Too as a way to try to get personal narratives of having experienced sexual assault or harassment on the Internet. And she very quickly, I think, was told about, in some cases, appropriation of the work of those who've come before and have had less power, can be unconscious or something that they haven't learned. And Alyssa Milano was told about Toronto Burke and learned about Toronto Burke's leadership, and very quickly made sure that everybody that she was very public in saying, look, this is actually work that was pioneered by and led by Toronto Burke, who should be leading us now. And so it is now better understood that the hashtag me Two movement comes out of Toronto Burke's movement, which she is still leading. I would say that the hashtag Me Too movement, it is in part in response to the stories of not women and girls of color. But in many cases, the origins of it were with stories being told by very powerful white women, actresses and performers who've made some of the first allegations against Harvey Weinstein. And also under the umbrella of the hashtag Me Too movement. The conversation has broadened to not just be about sexual violence and assault, but about workplace harassment and discrimination. Right. I think one place to start here is just with the mental state of anger, which you defend really at great length throughout your book. We all have this sense that anger is an unreliable guide to action. Obviously, it can get you started doing something, but I think many of us worry that it's often not informed by a lot of wisdom or careful thinking and is just by its very nature hostile to those things. I think you start your book with a reference to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has written about the disutility of anger. And I must say I share that bias. It's not to say that I haven't found anger useful, but I feel that I've experienced its limitations just as a source of creative urgency. And I do perceive it a little differently than I think you do in public because one point you make repeatedly in the book is that anger tends to look great on men and terrible on women and that this reveals a double standard that we have that we shouldn't have. And the examples you use of it looking great on men, I just don't perceive the men that way. For instance, like Kavanaugh, I think it was in some of your press, you talk about his anger working for him, but Glossy Ford was just totally measured and had she erupted in anger, it would have been a disaster. But I just thought Kavanaugh's anger looked terrible and almost derailed him. And, you know, I thought Lindsey Graham's anger looked just and he became this absolutely repellent character the moment he erupted in an arguably totally disingenuous way. And conversely, the video of the women getting both angry and upset in other registers with Jeff Flake in the elevator, that played very well for those women. And I thought that worked. And it wouldn't have worked, frankly, for a man had Jeff Flake been cornered in an elevator by angry men. The threat of violence would have been so salient that it just would have seemed totally uncivil. I view anger a little differently here. I don't actually think you do. I don't think your points actually echo some of the things that I have been saying. Again, the book doesn't deal with Kavanaugh because it was published just a few days after Christine Blasey Ford's testimony. And one of the things I've been remarking on is pretty close to what you just said, that in this particular political moment where in fact we are adjusting our ears and eyes to broader ranges of expression from a broader range of people, it's a long process. That the example of the two different kinds of anger. The people speaking to the Judiciary Committee, to the powerful people in the room, and specifically to the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who are the ones who had the power in that instance were very traditional forms of anger. We knew that Christine Blasey Ford could not be angry because it would have undercut her point. Right. And one of the things I've been saying is that Kavanaugh could as a powerful white man and this has to do with who's presumed to be irrational to begin with. You are describing how you view anger as fundamentally unstable in some way. Women begin with a presumption that there's something emotional or irrational in them. This is attached to notions of what femininity entails, and white men in particular are presumed to begin with a measure of rationality right. They are normative citizens. Our normative leaders, our normative human beings are white men in the popular consciousness, in politics. And so historically, their expression, women's expression of anger, only serves to amplify the notion that she is fundamentally unstable or irrational, that she shouldn't be believed, that this is coming out of a place of instability and therefore sort of unreliable or not credible. Whereas for men, the expression of anger can amplify their rationality to show that they're extra passionate about whatever it is they're presumed to be telling you information about. And when I first saw that night, when I went home after the testimony, based on these presumptions of how anger can work for a man like Brett Kavanaugh, but would never have worked for Christine Blasey Ford, I felt like, oh, my God, it's over. This is going to work in his favor. It is going to be what the committee needs. And based on Lindsey Graham's own response, I felt like it's clearly what the committee wanted to see, what the powerful people who are going to make this decision, the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, the President, to the degree that he has power over his party, it's going to please them. And I felt like it did. But then there were these days where some things happened that showed me that things were changing a little bit. That anger, which I agree with you, I saw it as fucking irrational. And all the things, all the attributes that people historically have tied to women's anger, I thought it was infantile, tantrum, hysterical. I mean, to me, it was completely out of place. It was deeply irrational. Kavanaugh's expressions of anger, he looked like a fool. But the thing that I felt was that for the powerful people he was addressing moving up in power, the people were going to make the decision about his lifetime appointment. It would be effective. But then there was it turned out after people thought about it for 12 hours, that it was kind of mocked Saturn and it live mocked it in a way that matched the way that I'd seen it and that you just said that you saw it. It was hilarious. Yeah. As funny as undermining. And I thought, oh, my God, this is interesting because this tells me that there's something in how we're receiving this powerful white man's anger that is different from what historical models would tell us. And at the same time, Anna Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher yelling in that elevator was so powerful for so many people. Now, I would argue, and did then, that in part that anger was powerful because it was communicative and connected and expressive for millions of people who didn't have power in that instance, who were not on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who were not powerful members of the Republican Party in the position of deciding how they were going to vote. That anger was the expression of and cathartic and communicative for so many people who weren't in that elevator, who weren't in that Senate chamber. And that that was a power that is key to some to the potential social and political power of a mass movement that is looking for people to give voice to their frustration and their dissent. And that's part of why those women in the elevator played such a powerful role. But what was the result? The result was that his anger did do what it needed to do for the powerful people who were able to make the decision. And they made very clear that that anger, which was designed to amplify the point that he had been wronged, was the communicative force that was going to undercut their assertions that he'd been wronged. These are the Republicans who have since talked about how he was the victim of a mob, how he was we feel Donald Trump saying, I feel so sorry for his family. That is all of those are cues that came out of his angry display on his own behalf. So I agree with you that the sort of precarity with which I felt for a couple of days his anger might not have worked for him was symptomatic to me of the fact that we are in the process of hearing different people's anger differently. And I agree. But ultimately, it served its purpose, which was to persuade the people who had the power to appoint him to the Supreme Court of the United States to do so, and then to take his angry model for what had happened to him and repeat it to the world and affirm that as the story of what had happened, which was that Brett Kavanaugh had been attacked and that it was his anger that was righteous in the end and those who had stood in the way of his further accumulation of power had aggressed upon him. I wonder if there's a difference in the way feminine anger can play on both sides of the aisle politically. So I'm thinking of Sarah Palin, who I don't know that she actually ever communicated raw anger, but she was definitely put forward. I'm thinking of her appearance at the Republican National Convention. This is before she had been discredited in all of those sit down interviews with people like Katie Couric, but it was really the apogee of her political fame. And I remember being frankly terrified by that performance because I thought it was so good and effective for her crowd. I mean, I thought this is how right wing Christian theocracy starts. But one thing that was interesting to spectate on there is that especially in light of what we're talking about, is that there seemed to be an immense hunger for a woman in that role to take a very hard swing at the left and communicate a wrathful, triumphant but feminine war cry against liberalism and everything else that she was castigating. Is that not in any way a counterpoint to this perception that women can never strike this note? Credibly no. The way that they are encouraged to strike it has always been when they are striking it fundamentally in defense of white patriarchal power, which is what Sarah Palin was doing. It's what Phyllis Lafley was doing. It's what the angry women who opposed school segregation in the south, the white women were doing. This is one of the only ways in which women's anger and ferocity on a public stage is, in fact, fetishized by the powerful. Because if it is on behalf of that power and in fact, a power that, via its policy and ideology, seeks to subjugate or repress women, it's very useful to have a woman going out there and making the case for it. And you'll note that the way they make the case for it. Sarah Palin's anger was always expressed in maternal terms, which harkened back to the traditional valuation of a traditional white femininity as a mother. So she was the pit bull hockey mom, and she led the mama grizzlies during the Tea Party move, which was a hard right move for the Republican Party, rooted an enormous amount of misogyny. And so much of what drove the Tea Party once in Congress was shutting down Planned Parenthood, and Sarah Palin gave ferocious voice to this right wing faction. But she did it using terms and in a style that affirmed her as she wasn't threatening the power structure. Women who are angry on behalf of left politics and left policy that aims to alter who has power in this country are inherently a threat, and thus their anger is immediately marginalized and vilified. Whereas women whose anger is on behalf of a power structure are very valuable to that power structure. There are rewards on offer to them. There are vice presidencies on offer to them. Phyllis Schlafly wrote a book called she Led an army of Angry White Women, angry about the alterations to a patriarchal power structure that had been made by those feminists during the second wave. She led an army of women who were angry about those changed rules and expectations and opportunities in an incredibly successful, incredibly canny, tactically brilliant move against the ratification of the era. And she won in 1982. And in doing so, she, in that army, are the ones who dealt that second wave feminism. It's kind of symbolic final blow. And she did that while angry. But also her book was The Power of the Positive Woman. And if you listen to people who worked with Phyllis Schlafly, she said, we always had to smile. We were doing this with smiles on our faces. Again, kind of reaffirming. And she herself, as a woman who was constantly out on the road, was also affirming the. Values of traditional stay at home maternity, right? This was the figure that she embodied. And if you're embodying that figure of the woman who is valued on traditional patriarchal scales, and your anger is on behalf of those traditional patriarchal powers, then that anger is not going to be viewed or treated as the same kind of threat to that power. As if you're slow kennedy or Fannie Lou Hamer or Bella Abzug or Hillary Clinton. All right, so you mentioned to Clinton I want to talk about both Clintons, because I think so much of the current moment can be interpreted in light of their influence. But let's start with Bill Clinton, because it seems to me that he hangs over the whole me too moment like some kind of toxic waste that you keep finding where you don't expect to find it. He's the quintessential example of the problem, right? You're talking about male entitlement and bad behavior. He checks all those boxes. Whatever you want to say about Donald Trump in that area, bill Clinton can ride alongside him all the way, and some of the leading feminists of the time proved I mean, I don't think hypocrites is too strong a word to describe how they took his side against his legitimate accusers. And to some degree, this continues to this day. Although I think opinions are probably changing quickly, it does continue to this day in the sense that, I know Monica. I don't know her well, but we've met a few times, and I noticed in the news, probably not more than a year ago, that she got disinvited at a conference that she had been asked to speak at because then they've later secured Bill Clinton. They didn't want to put Bill in an awkward situation. That was within the past six months, I think. Yeah, right. But that's different from leading feminists supporting Bill Clinton, which is part of what was happening in the 90s that you're proud of. Let's say that I think it was a magazine. They're very different scales of the kind of thing you're talking about. Right. Let me just add one more piece here, Rebecca. The response to him was certainly problematic from a feminist point of view and most consequentially in the 2016 election because of how Hillary had played that political moment when she was First Lady and defending her Lotherio husband from all of his legitimate accusers. I don't think this is debatable. She had bullied these women. She had lied about, or certainly seemed to have lied about things she must have known were true. And in large measure, I think her failure to become president was probably overdetermined. But this has got to be one of the reasons why she's not president. Because at that moment in that debate with Trump, where she was there on the stage, going up against one of the most unethical people on earth, and she couldn't make a peep about it because of how badly her husband had behaved and how badly she had behaved in defending him. To some degree, we have to perform an exorcism on the Clintons to get to a reset with respect to the current moment politically. Sure, I think that we have to perform an exorcism on a lot of we have to perform an exorcism on the way patriarchal power has left again, systemically women dependent on men in all kinds of ways. So not just as husbands, but as leaders of political parties, as, you know, part of what happened, I i very much agree with a portion of what you the story you just told. Right. So the way that I have long understood what happened during Bill Clinton's administration with regard to the you know, and and for me, the big way in which it was deeply problematic from a feminist point of view is that Bill Clinton gets elected the year after Anita Hill's testimony. And Anita Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas is such an important point in feminist history. It's coming. It is coming on the heels of the 1986 Supreme Court decision that finds sexual harassment in the workplace to be a form of of sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. This is after more than a decade in the courts, you know, starting in the mid 70s, where women of color filed some of the first suits michelle Vincent Carmina Wood about sexual harassment they'd sustained in the workplace. They're borrowing from civil rights laws and discrimination law that's just been made in the wake of the civil rights movement, applying it to their own harassment within their workplaces. Those cases work their way up through the court. In 186, you have the Supreme Court decision, and then five years later, Anita Hill testifies. And the power of Anita Hill's testimony on our view of of gendered and racial power in this country was enormous. And we know one version of it, which is that the next year, after a view of the whiteness and the maleness of the Senate Judiciary Committee, then on both sides of the aisle, right, democrats and Republicans who just had white men listening to and treating this woman of color with disrespect, scorn disbelief. That view of our representative and governing body was part of what enraged a generation of women, what propelled a lot of them to seek elected office. The next year, we got the Year of the Woman. In retrospect, it seems very small, but in fact, it was four women elected to the Senate, including the first African American woman ever elected to the Senate in the history of the country, carol Mosley Brown. You can draw direct lines. Carol Mosley Brown held a seat that later Barack Obama held. He later became our first black president. It was the year that Diane Feinstein was elected. She, of course, was the ranking Democrat during the Kavanaugh hearings on a Senate Judiciary Committee. Barbara Boxer was elected. Kamala Harris now holds Barbara Boxer's seat. Kamala Harris was on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Patty Murray, who has talked sort of most vocally about how anger at the Hill hearings in part motivated her run for the Senate. This was a change with long lasting effect. I would also say that it was the cusp of sort of hammering home what sexual harassment meant, what it was, what it entailed, how it was a form of discrimination which had been decided by the Supreme Court but hadn't really been made clear. It was a form of power abuse, of gendered and sexual power abuse. And that conversation was really crucial. And then the next year, we elected a president who was the first Democratic president in twelve years, and on whom all kinds of people on the left, on the Democratic side, however you want to describe the politics at the time, were dependent. It had been twelve years of Reagan and Bush, and here was the guy who was our first Democratic president, and his behavior was in line with old expectations and mores about how men behaved with regard to women. Right. This is part of look, Ted Kennedy, during the Anita Hill hearings was also silenced in part because of his history. Yeah. Or did his nephew wasn't his nephew being prosecuted for rape or on trial, I believe at the exact same time as the Hill hearings for rape. And Ted Kennedy himself, of course, had left a woman to die in chappaquitic and had a terrible reputation for womanizing. So many of our leaders, left and right, I mean, this was part of the association of male sexual power and power abuse with public and political power is really deep and long lasting. Bill Clinton happened to become president at a time exactly post Anita Hill hearings, when our expectations and the rules were changing, and that was being hammered home to us. This is a man who, had he served as president 20 years earlier, probably wouldn't have been called out for any of this behavior because it was presumed to be part of how power worked and how patriarchal power worked. As it was, he was called out. And many of the people who, including some prominent feminists now some feminists, I want to point out Andrea Dwarfin, was incredibly critical of Bill Clinton. Right. There were feminists who were furious and who were very clear that Bill Clinton had abused power in his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. And there were feminists who believed the other women who told stories about him, but many mainstream feminists did defend him. And part of how we get there is looking at the realities of dependency. When you have men who have white men who have disproportionate shares of power, including political power, so that they are disproportionately the leaders of your party on who you are dependent. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversation I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay? The long awaited episode on the most depressing topic on earth child sexual abuse, otherwise known as child pornography in the form of its public consumption. As many of you know, I've delayed the release of this episode for several months. It just never seemed like the right time to drop it. When is the right time to talk about this, really? In the tech space? It was probably 20 years ago. Anyway, this is an episode that many of you will find difficult to listen to understandably. If you work in tech, I think you have a moral responsibility to listen to it. If you work at a company like Facebook or AWS or Dropbox or Zoom or any company that facilitates the spread of so called child pornography, you really have a responsibility to listen to this conversation and figure out how you can help solve this problem. As you'll hear, we've gone from a world where pedophiles were exchanging Polaroids in parking lots to a world in which there is an absolute deluge of imagery that provides a photographic and increasingly video record of the rape of children. And as you'll hear, the tech companies have been terrible at addressing this problem, and law enforcement is completely underresourced and ineffectual here. Now, as I said, I recorded this conversation some months ago as an indication of how long ago when Zoom came up in the conversation, I felt the need to define it as a video conferencing tool used by businesses. I've since cut that, but everything we discuss is all too current. In fact, the problem has only gotten worse under the COVID pandemic because the children being abused are more often than not at home with their abusers, and the people who consume this material are at home with much less to do. So both the supply side and demand side of this problem have increased. I will add a short afterward to mention a few things that the government is now doing, but nothing of real substance has changed, to my knowledge. Today, I'm speaking with Gabriel Dance. Gabriel is the Deputy Investigations Editor at The New York Times, where he works with a small team investigating technology from the topic at hand, online sexual abuse imagery to the companies that trade and sell our data in this business model, that's increasingly known as surveillance capitalism. Before working at The Times, Gabriel helped launch the criminal justice news site, the Marshall Project, where he focused on the death penalty and prison and policing. And before that, he was the interactive editor for The Guardian, where he was part of the group of journalists who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the widespread secret surveillance by the NSA. In this episode, I speak with Gabriel about the global epidemic of child sexual abuse. We discussed the misleading concept of child pornography, the failure of governments and tech companies to grapple with the problem. The trade off between online privacy and protecting children, the National Center for Missing and Exploited children, the difficulty in assessing the scope of the problem, photo, DNA and other tools, the parts played by specific tech companies, the ethics of encryption, sex distortion, the culture of pedophiles and other topics. Again, this episode is not a barrel of laughs, but it's an important conversation and it's yet another PSA, so not paywald. If you want to support the work I'm doing here, you can subscribe@samharris.org. And now I bring you Gabriel dance. I am here with Gabriel Dance. Gabe, thanks for joining me. Thank you so much for having me on. So undoubtedly in the intro to this, I will have prepared people to not listen to the podcast if they find the topic truly unbearable. Right? But I guess I should just reiterate here that we're going to speak about probably the most depressing topic I can think of. The real gravity of it tends to be concealed by the terms we use to describe it. So we're going to talk about, quote, child pornography and the exploitation of children. And yet these phrases can conjure images for people that don't really get at what's going on here because they can remind people of things like they're teenagers who get into the porn industry before their 18th birthday, right? And that gets found out. Or teenagers send naked photos or videos of themselves to one another or even with strangers online, and these images get out. And all of that gets binned into this category of child pornography. But at the bottom of this morass that you and I are going into, we're talking about the rape and torture of young children, either by family members or caregivers or by people who have abducted them. And obviously, I'm going to want to know from you just what the scale of this problem actually is, but then we're talking about a vast audience of people who are willing to pay to watch these children raped and tortured because they find the rape and torture of children to be the sexiest thing in the world, apparently. So psychologically and socially, we're just in a horror movie here and people need to understand that's where we're going. And you can pull the ripcord now if you don't want to go there with us. So that's a fairly grave introduction to you, Gabe, but you have been covering this topic for The New York Times in a series of long and very disturbing articles. So welcome to the podcast and thank you for doing the work you're doing because but for your articles, I really, again, would have just the vagueest notion of what appears to be going on in our world and even in our own neighborhoods. So thank you for lifting the lid on this horror show because it can't be especially fun to be doing this work. Well, thank you for having me on and I really appreciate you starting with an introduction that discusses the terminology around this horrible crime. I also didn't know anything about what I came into this calling child pornography. And our investigation started in February of 2019 and it was pretty quick that we learned I investigated this with a colleague of mine, Michael Keller primarily, and it was pretty quick that we learned the proper terminology used by people in the industry and law enforcement is child sexual abuse material. And I think for the purposes of this podcast, it'll be easier to refer to this as CSAM, which is the easier way of referring to it and not constantly using what I think is the inaccurate and inelegant term child pornography. Maybe let's just linger on the terminology for another minute or so because it really is one of those terms that really just reliably misleads people. So another example of this is people talk about male circumcision and female circumcision as though the term circumcision were interchangeable in those phrases. This is a social issue that is being obfuscated by some common words just to give people a sense of what should be obvious, but strangely isn't. Let's just consider how different this is from normal pornography because there's a lot that could trouble us and perhaps should trouble us about normal pornography. It's you can ask questions like how did these women in particular find themselves in a situation where they're performing sex on camera? Are they getting paid? How much are they getting paid? Are some of them actually not getting paid and being exploited or even coerced? Are they private videos that were meant to be kept private that just got leaked? Is there some backstory of suffering that would make the average person feel terrible about watching what purports to be a video of consenting adults having sex? So these are totally reasonable questions to ask. But it's also understandable that most people don't really think about these things when they're watching normal adult pornography because human suffering isn't being directly shown on the video. Even if it's edgy pornography. Who knows? There could be horrendous stuff out there that I can't imagine. But normal pornography, even edgy pornography, is within its frame. It seems to be the work of consenting adults doing something they want to do for whatever reason. But anything involving kids does not function by that logic at all, right? So any image or video of an adult having sex with a five year old is simply the record of a crime, right? Just full stop. And it is obviously a crime to anyone watching it. And yet, as appalling as it is that these crimes occur, it's almost more appalling that there's a vast market for them. I mean, I'm prepared to believe that one guy in a million is going to abuse his stepchild, right? But the idea that there are millions and millions of people with whom this person could find an online dialogue and sell them the video record of this abuse. That's just completely shocking to me. And the scale of it is completely shocking, as you report. So let's talk about the nature of the problem, what's going on, and how much of it is out there. Well, I think you're absolutely right to draw a distinction between what we call adult pornography and what the misnomer child pornography and what you said several times hit the nail on the head, which is consent. I mean, these are, as you said, children. I mean, even if we take a take away and we can come back and speak about self produced material by teenagers maybe, or 17 year olds who might be engaging in sexual acts on film before turning the legal age, these are not what we are discussing in the majority of our reporting. We are talking about prepubescent acts of sexual crimes against children. There is no consent. They are unable to consent, and there's no illusion of consent. You have to get your head around the depravity of the audience here. And again, this is going to sound very judgmental. Let's bracket for a moment some kind of compassionate and rational understanding of pedophilia that we might want to arrive at. It should be obvious that no one chooses to be a pedophile or anyone who finds this imagery titillating. But there's one example in one of your articles that this is not an especially lurid description of the crime, but just the details give you a sense of how insane all this is. So this is lifted from one of your articles. In a recent case, an offender filmed himself drugging the juice boxes of neighborhood children before tricking them into drinking the mix. He then filmed himself as he sexually abused unconscious children. So that's part of the titillating material for this audience. The imagery, the video of this guy putting whatever narcotic he used into juice boxes and feeding it to unsuspecting children and then performing sex acts on them. The criminality of this and the evil of it is absolutely on the surface, the details are mind boggling. There are definitely a variety of extremely depraved things that may come up in our discussion that I have learned are extremely hard for people to hear. They were hard for me to even begin to comprehend when I was learning these things from law enforcement, from survivors, from child advocates. The one you described was actually an example given by Special Agent Flint Waters, who at the time was a criminal investigator for the state of Wyoming. He was appearing before Congress when he was describing that video. And that was in 2007, actually, before this crime has exploded in the same way or in the way that it has for reference in 2007, and I'm sure we'll get more into the total numbers, but there were fewer than 100,000 reports of online child sexual abuse material in 2019. We just published a story on this past Friday in 2019, there were almost 17 million reports. So the explosion in content being found is staggering. And to talk a little bit, the examples are all horrendous. Hard to hear, harder to imagine, nothing you want to think about or read about. But just to kind of take it to the extent that we've learned is what's going on. There is also an active community engaged in committing sexual crimes against what they call the criminals, pre verbal children, which is to say children who cannot speak yet. And that means obviously, usually children younger than two, younger than one, instances of children days and months old being molested, raped, being raped, filmed being raped. And it is truly beyond shocking. And as we started to speak with the people who regularly engage with this content, their lives are forever changed. Anybody who deals with this issue cannot get it out of their minds. And it really speaks to why it has become such an interesting issue when it comes to law enforcement and the Department of justice and tech companies and this very interesting new privacy issues and some of the other things that raise that naturally come out of this subject. Yes, I want to talk about the scale of the problem insofar as you understand it and how ineffectual the government and the tech companies have been thus far dealing with it. But just to talk about your experience for a moment, how do you go about reporting on this? And in the course of reporting, are you exposed to any of this material or can you do all your reporting without feeling the same kind of psychological contamination that the law enforcement people you speak with experience? Great question, and one that also we had no idea going into this. So it might be helpful if I talk a little bit how we stumbled into this subject and then how we learned how to report on it. So I've been working here at the times investigating tech companies for several years now, and that has been everything from bots and fake followers, cambridge Analytica data deals that Facebook has struck. So I've been immersed in this field, along with several colleagues, where these mammoth companies are tracking all sorts of things about you. Web pages you like, who your friends are, where you are using this data to target you, things I know that you've discussed at length with many of the people you've had on the show. But still I felt often both in conversations with editors here as well as people outside the building, that I was having difficulty gaining traction on issues surrounding privacy online and how important and how high the stakes are. And so I started asking the small team I work with questions about what kind of actual harm can we show? Because many people would argue that whether it be Facebook or any other company violating our privacy by sharing our data with another company or selling our data or whoever might be doing what with our information. Many would argue that the harm is in violating our privacy, but that is still an abstract concept for many, and especially sometimes in a place like a news agency harm. When I'm working with people like Megan Tui and Jody Canter who are investigating Harvey Weinstein and crimes against women, and there's tangible harm there, and there's harm for some of my colleagues investigating what's going on in Myanmar and the Facebook disinformation and people dying from that. I mean, there's harm there. And so gaining traction around online privacy and harm was something that I was looking for. What topic is really going to bring this to a point where people can start having it was like a fast forward, right? I wanted to short circuit this conversation about privacy online to a point where we could actually begin discussing it in a way that has very real harming consequences. But here you're talking about the flip side of this, which is our commitment to maintaining privacy at all costs. If we ever achieve that, the full encryption of Facebook Messenger, for instance. One of the knock on effects of that will be to make these crimes more or less undiscoverable. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we'll come back, I'm sure, encryption and some of the potential, I don't know, solutions for people's privacy and very, very high stake decisions for children suffering this abuse and people trying to rid the internet of this type of material. So you're right. I was coming at it from a privacy side, but I also knew that it was more complicated than that. And so we wanted to figure out where does this privacy line start, actually? Like, where does the rubber meet the road? And one of the ideas was what we were calling at the time, child pornography. And and that was not only because of the privacy thing, but we were also talking about what has technology done over the last ten years that has completely changed the world. And one of those things is the ability to create and share imagery. I mean, look at Facebook, look at Instagram, all of these different types of social platforms and other things that have YouTube that have spun up. I mean, so much more images and videos are being created and shared and stored, et cetera, that it was just a hunch. I mean, what's going on with child pornography? A, nobody wants to talk about it. So as an investigative reporter, that is actually helpful when you encounter a subject that really nobody wants to touch. But the second thing that happened, the second thing that happened, that was that also I want to return to that point, though. I don't want to derail you, but we have to return to why people don't want to talk about this and the consequences of that. Absolutely. But the second thing that came in, which actually, in its own way, interestingly ties back to the encryption discussion and everything is the New York Times has a tip line that I actually helped set up in 2016. And this tip line has multiple ways people can send us information. Some of those ways are encrypted. Some of those ways are regular emails. Some of them are through the paper mail. And we received a tip from a man, and I believe it just came in over email. I don't think he was concerned with protecting his own identity. And this tip said, Look, I was on Bing, Microsoft Bing search engine, and I was looking up bullet weights. So literally, the weight of bullets, which I understand are measured in grains, and I'm not going to say the specific term he was looking up or that he was actually looking at bullets, but a certain weight of bullet. And he said, I typed this in, and all of a sudden I'm seeing images of children being sexually assaulted. And I've reported this to Bing, and it's been days or weeks, and they're still there, and I don't know what to do. So I'm telling you. And so we had already been thinking about this issue, and here in midFebruary, we get this tip, and I ask my colleague, luckily, as the small team leader of this technology investigations team, I'm sometimes able to pass a tip on and ask one of my fellow reporters to try to run it down. And so in this instance, I was happy to do that. In this instance, it was Mike Keller. And I said, Mike, check it out. Do me a favor, check it out. So Mike writes me back maybe half an hour later and says, yeah, I typed in the exact terminology that the guy sent in, and I only looked at it for half a second, but there were definitely very disturbing images that came up. And so we were shocked, first of all. But second of all, we immediately reached out to our head legal counsel at The New York Times, and there's a lot of benefits for work in The New York Times, but one of really the best things is that we have excellent legal representation in house. In this case, it's David McCraw, who's relatively famous in his own right for his dealings both with President Trump as well as many other people, Harvey Weinstein, et cetera. And David says, look, it is extremely important that you both understand that there is no journalistic privilege when it comes to child pornography. And he sent us the statue, and he sent us some news stories where reporters had, in fact gotten in trouble for reporting on this subject. And so what we had to do immediately, because Mike had in fact seen images, is report those images to the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Because not many people know this, I don't think. But it is one of the only crimes, if not the only crime that you have to report if you see I mean, you don't have to report a murder if you see it, but if you see an image of child sexual abuse, you have to report it or you are breaking the law. And that stands for everybody. So we filed a report with the National Center and we filed a report with the FBI, and we then began embarking on this investigation, knowing, first of all, that, A, we did of course, we did not want to see any of this material, but B, if we did see it, we had to report it. And along the way, we even received emails from the FBI saying, hey, reminder, you're not allowed to collect this information. You're not allowed this material. You're not allowed to look at this material. There is nothing you can do around this that is legal, which really did cause a complicated reporting process that's interesting. It somehow seems less than optimal, but it's also understandable. Do you think they have the dial set to the right position there, or would there be some better way to facilitate your work or whatever role you as a journalist can play in solving this problem? I think probably it's in the right spot, to be honest. I think that while it was difficult, we reviewed hundreds and thousands of court documents. And these court documents include search warrants and complaints and a variety of other things. And when you have a search warrant so when an investigator, let's say, based on a tip from the National Center or based on investigative undercover work, discovers somebody with this type of material on their system, they file a search warrant. And when they file the search warrant, they have to describe probable cause. And this probable cause nearly always is descriptions of a handful of the photos and videos. And speaking I've been speaking with a variety of both advocates and people involved. And while I have been personally lucky enough to have never, ever seen one of these images or videos, I have read descriptions of hundreds, if not more than 1000. And it is a terrible, terrible, terrible thing to read. And some people have said reading it is worse than seeing it. Now, I don't know, and I can't make that comparison, but I don't feel like I would gain much in the reporting process by actually seeing these things as you've only read them in our reports. Right. And I'm sure that's even more than enough for you to understand the gravity. And so I don't see what would be helpful in my being able to see them in any kind of journalistic privilege. And I think that would also likely be abused if it if it existed. Yeah, I guess the only analogy I can think of is the ISIS videos. You know, the Decapitation videos and the other records of their crimes, which, you know, journalists have watched and anyone can watch. And, you know, I've spent a lot of time, as you might know, railing about the problem of jihadism, and I'm just aware that I to know how bad ISIS was, I'm reliant on people who are paying firsthand attention to their crimes. Someone like Graham Wood over the Atlantic is actually watching these videos and confirming that they're as bad as is rumored, so I don't have to and so essentially, you have the cops doing that work for you, it seems. I can't imagine the information is getting lost or or corrupted there, given that there's so much of it. But it just would be odd if someone like Graham, in the process of, you know, writing his articles on Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and ISIS and our misadventures in the Middle East, had to, at every turn, worry that he could be thrown in jail for having discovered an ISIS video online. That seems like an extra piece of overhead that he doesn't need to do his work. Yeah, it was nerve racking. It was uncomfortable. And again, I mean, we did every single bit of our reporting, consultation with our lawyers, and we were also in close contact with the FBI, the Department of justice, local law enforcement throughout the country, international agencies dealing with this. So that doesn't provide any cover, certainly. But I was hoping, or I hope, that it raised flags everywhere to say, like, you know, because I was Googling some pretty crazy terms at points trying to learn about this issue. And, I mean, if you Google just child pornography on Google, literally search it on Google, they will return messages telling you that this is an illegal thing to look for, providing resources if you're inclined to look at this type of material. I mean, there is active messaging around people looking for this type of imagery. So I wanted to make sure I didn't end up on some list somewhere, which I hope I'm not on. But basically, we wanted to make kind of as much noise as we could as investigative reporters. We're not trying to tip other people off that we're doing this story, but so that law enforcement knew that we were actually trying to engage in this in a real journalistic way and that there wasn't any sort of anything else going on. Okay, so what do we know about the scale of the problem? You explained that at one point in 2007, we had 100,000 reports. I'll remind people of 2007 was was a time when we were all online. That's not 90, 97. You know, 2007 is certainly well into the period where the Internet has subsumed all of our lives. So that you have 100,000 reports then, and now we're up to 18, 19 million reports. But how much of this is just more looking and finding the ambient level of abuse that was always there, or how much do we know about the growth of the problem? Because it seems like, judging from your articles. The reporting around the issue is increasing something like exponentially, whereas the number of arrests and the amount of resources being put toward solving the problem are more or less flat, which is a terrible juxtaposition there. So what do we know about how big a problem this is? Well, it's the right question and unfortunately, I don't think I'm going to have a completely satisfying answer. And part of that everything around this subject in some way goes back to the fact that nobody wants to talk about this subject. And so there isn't a lot of transparency for a variety of reasons. Whether or not it's the federal government not keeping the records and reports that they should be, whether it's the lack of transparency from the National Center which is responsible for the collection and serves as the clearing house for this type of imagery, or a variety of other things. I can't answer your question completely, but I can give us some idea. And so the tip line, the cyber tip line, is run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, commonly referred to as Nick MC. And so Nick MC started the tip line in 1998 when people started becoming aware of kind of what you were saying, like 97, 98 people are coming online and law enforcement and Congress, other leaders, are realizing that child sexual abuse imagery is also coming online. And the Internet was the biggest boon to child sexual abuse imagery since the Polaroid camera. And so let's just spell that out for people that can't do the psychological math so quickly there. So that the significance of the Polaroid camera was that you didn't have to figure out how to get your film developed by a stranger anymore, you could just develop it yourself. And that took a lot of friction out of the system of documenting the abuse of children because unless you had a dark room, it was kind of mysterious how people could produce a ton of this material in the first place. Right. According to the law enforcement we've spoken with in the mean, they were pretty comfortable, I mean, eighty s and early 90s, before the advent of the internet, they were, they were pretty comfortable saying that they were, they had a good and handle on this problem and they were actually like stomping it out. I mean, child pornography, child sexual abuse material used to really be the domain of law enforcement in the US. Postal Service because that is how it was traded. It was traded in parking lots, it was mailed, and that is how the majority of it was caught and detected. But with the advent of the internet, and this is, again, this is even before digital cameras for the most part, I mean, certainly cell phones. So they opened this tip line 1998. In 1998 they received just over 3000 reports of what the legal term is child pornography, which is also why it's. Bit confusing when talking terminology. Most of the laws refer to it as child pornography. So there's just over 3000 in 1998. By 2067, we're at 83,000 reports 85,000. And then something happens and nobody can say with certainty, but the numbers start exploding with the invention of the smartphone the iPhones introduced in 2008. A bunch of other phones also start to produce that have high quality cameras, broadband connections. And so by about 2015, actually 2014, we break a million for the first time. And it's a big jump. 2013, there's less than half a million reports. 2014, that number doubles. 2015, that number quadruples. We're over 4 million reports. And by 2018, we're at 18 and a half million reports. So the numbers are growing exponentially and but there there's something we need to tease apart here, which is there are reports to the National Center. And the vast majority of these reports, more than 99%, come from what they call our electric service providers, facebook, Twitter, Google, et cetera. But each report can contain a number of files, so this is not a one to one. So when there's 18 and a half million reports in 2018, that does not mean there was 18 million pieces of content found. In fact, there were 45 million pieces of content found in 2018. And it was about split between images and videos. And we'll certainly come back to the discussion of videos because there's something startling going on there. But the numbers that we just published a few days ago for the 2019 numbers really start to tease apart these differences between reports and numbers of files. So in 2019, for the first time in over a decade, the number of actual reports went down. So the number of reports received by the National Center in 2019 was just shy of 17 million. So we're looking at a drop of about one and a half million. And we can talk about why that happened in a minute. But the number of files reported in 2019 was just under 70 million. So we've gone from 45 million in 2018 to 70 million in 2019. And again, as recently as 2014, that number was less than 3 million. So I want to talk about why this is so difficult to even focus on and what explains the failure of our response thus far. But I don't want to lose the thing you just flagged. What's the distinction between still images and videos that you wanted to draw? There the thing that we've seen, the rise in all photos and videos detected, and we should very much get to that, which is the fact that these are only known images and videos that they are detecting the systems they have to catch. This content are trained to match only images and videos that have been identified previously as illegal material. So we're not talking about new material almost whatsoever. This is in nearcompletess previously seen images and videos. But to speak specifically to videos. The technology for detecting video child sexual abuse is nascent compared to image abuse, and for that reason they've detected as recently as 2017, there were only three and a half million videos reported to the National Center, as compared to 20 million images. Last year, there were 41 million videos reported, as compared to 27 million images. So I know these are a lot of numbers, but what we're seeing is videos are exploding. Well, the number of videos detected, and that's almost wholly due to Facebook. And Facebook started scanning aggressively for videos in late 2017, and by 2019 they were responsible for by far the majority of video reports. I think they were responsible for 38 million of the 41 million videos reported. So the numbers are rising. The reports we'll come back to in a second, but the numbers of files and videos are rising. But as to your initial question, what does this tell us about a how much content is online, and B, how much is being produced? It tells us nothing about either of those for a few reasons, not nothing, but it paints a very incomplete picture. The first reason is, as I said, they're only detecting previously identified imagery, which means they're not detecting anything that is being newly created. That process is a very slow process to get added to these lists of previously identified imagery. It is because of funding issues and a variety of other things. The list of previously identified imagery is growing very slowly, but the number of recirculating images and videos is as high as ever. So we don't know a lot about how much new content is being produced and we also don't know because of that. We don't know if this problem is, as you said, always been there and we're just finding it because more companies are actively looking for it, or if it's actually growing right now. Conversations with law enforcement, amongst others, say that the problem is growing. And even common sense, as I said, with cell phones, broadband, cloud storage, social media, the internet is built to share videos and content and files. There's platforms that are billion dollar platforms completely dedicated to this. The fact that we don't know exactly how much is out there is evident in Facebook being responsible for 90% or so of all reports. Right, right. And other companies were not sure exactly. The whole industry, certainly before our reporting, and still to a certain extent was very cloaked in secrecy, and people were happy for that to be the case because nobody wanted to ask, yeah, I want to talk about what the tech companies are doing and not doing. But one wonders whether Facebook is responsible for much of the problem, or just given their scale, given that they've got 3 billion people on the platform, and given the sophistication of their tools that allow them to find the problem. To the degree that they do that, it's hard to know whether we're just penalizing them for looking and discovering the enormity of the problem on their side. But you would have a similar problem anywhere else you looked if you deployed the tools on any of these other platforms, whether it's dropbox or tumblr, or any of these other companies you mentioned in your articles. That's totally right, and I actually want to make sure that it's clear that I don't think facebook should be penalized for having the highest number of reports. There's a lot of nuance around the number of reports. And for example, we fought tooth and nail with the national center for them to disclose the number of reports by company in 2018, and they would not do it, and none of the other tech companies would disclose it either. All we knew was that there were nearly 18 and a half million reports. We didn't know who they came from. We didn't know what companies were detecting imagery versus video. We don't know when they were scanning for that, and there was a variety of reasons for that. But the biggest reason, there were two biggest reasons. One is the national center for missing and exploited children. It's actually a private nonprofit, and that has come under judicial review. And we can talk about that more later if we want. But what that provides them is we are not able to file freedom of information acts to receive information from them. So even though they're sitting on the canonical database of child sexual abuse reports, that's a federal crime. It's an extremely important statistic that in most instances, we would file a freedom of information request and be able to learn some of that, some of the information around that big number when we cannot file a freedom of information request to nick MC, and they would not tell us. So that was the number one challenge. And then none of the other tech companies would tell us either. And finally, we had a source who I can't disclose, who come to us and say, look, you would not believe that the number of that is coming from facebook. And you know, long story short, we found out that the number just from facebook messenger was 12 million. After we reported that number, the federal government had a conference or a presentation. They said that it was in total 16 million from all parts of facebook. And at first, at first blush, you think, damn, I mean, facebook is absolutely riddled with this content. Now, let me be clear, any company online that has images or videos is infested with this content. That is the case. So facebook does not stand alone in having this issue. The very interesting part about those numbers is that they actually reflect facebook taking an extremely aggressive stance in looking for this imagery. I mean, they're scanning every photo that gets uploaded since late 2017. They're scanning every video that gets uploaded, and they're aggressively reporting it to the national center. So those very high numbers actually reflect a very conscientious effort to find and remove this imagery. We spoke with Alex Stamos, who is a former, I think, chief security officer for Facebook. He was also the same position at Yahoo. And I mean, he said that if this, if other companies were reporting the same way that Facebook was reporting, we wouldn't have 16 million reports last year. We'd have 50 or 100 million. So Facebook actually and when we can come back to Facebook messenger, because that's where things get interesting with Facebook. But I think by any measure, facebook is actually an industry leader when it comes to finding and reporting this content. Right. I know that people hearing this are going to feel once they absorb the horror of it, they will feel somewhat powerless to do anything to help solve the problem. One question I was going to ask you at the end is, are there any nonprofits that you recommend we support who are working on the front lines of this? And so you just said something somewhat equivocal about the national center, which is really at the center for this, and they're a nonprofit. What do you recommend people do here? I mean, should we be giving money to the national center for missing and exploited children, or is there some better option for people who want to help here? Sure, it's a good question. I'm generally not in the business of it's, lucky. As a reporter, a lot of my job is pointing out problems and not necessarily finding the solution to them. But I do think the national center is full of great people. Really, you can't work on this and not be a compassionate person. This is a labor of love that these people are doing. That said, there are definite issues. I mean, the fact that it has this quasi governmental status that has come up. Justice Gorsuch, when he was a judge in the 10th circuit, ruled that the national center was in fact a part of the government. They get 75% of their funding in general from the federal government. That's about $30 million a year. But at the same time, they are absolutely overwhelmed. I mean, this problem is overwhelming the national center. It's overwhelming law enforcement. It's overwhelming a lot of tech companies. While it's complicated, I do think that their heart absolutely is in the right place and their efforts are in the right place. They're just behind. They're behind now. You could give money to them, and that would be good. There are other nonprofits that also are doing great work. The Canadian Center for Child Protection, who we reported on and who is one of the leaders in starting this idea of what they call naming and shaming tech companies because of the cloak of silence that's been around this, because we haven't been able to hear, what are you actually doing to combat this problem? The Canadian center has taken the lead in trying to push that process forward. You can donate money there. You can donate money to Thorne, which is also a nonprofit that is developing software for smaller companies, which is a challenge if you're a smaller company. Building these kind of systems to scan and detect content is expensive, and they're sometimes unable to do that. Why wouldn't there be an open source effort to develop this technology that anyone could use? Why would there be any proprietary angle on this at all? Why wouldn't Google or Palanteer or Facebook just break off some of their expertise and say, here are the tools, this is how you find child pornography in your databases, use them freely. Right? Again, a great question. Now part of what's going on is and look, google sits on Nick MC's board. Facebook sits on Nick MC's board. Nick MC gets in kind donations from Palantir. They've essentially depended in large part on volunteer and Google to upgrade their systems over the past few years, even though they have a not insignificant sum of money coming in from the federal government. But the detection system most commonly used is something called PhotoDNA. So PhotoDNA was invented in 2009, which many experts would say is at least five years too late when they knew what the problem was. But all the same, invented in 2009. It was a partnership between Microsoft and a person named Dr. Hani Fareed, who was at Dartmouth at the time, now at Berkeley. And it is proprietary, and we'll talk about that in a second. But basically what it is is it's a fuzzy image matching. And by fuzzy image matching, I mean many of your listeners who I know are adept at technology. You can take what are called cryptographic hashes of any type of file, and a cryptographic hash will shoot out a string of characters, and that string of characters is unique to that file. And if any small thing changes, that cryptographic hash will change. And so for a while, they were using cryptographic hashes to try to match known images of child sexual abuse. The challenge became that the people who are trading this type of imagery often are also pretty technological and literate in different technologies. And so they knew that even if they saved the image at a different type of compression or if they cropped it even slightly, that that cryptographic hash would no longer match. So PhotoDNA was the solution to this. And PhotoDNA is again, they call it a fingerprint, you can call it a fuzzy match, but basically it takes into account a lot of these minor changes that can be made to an image. So even if you change the color a little bit, you crop it a little bit, you write on it maybe a little bit, it's still going to catch that image that was invented in 2009. Now, the question of why it is an open source is a good question. They would say that it would allow people who are looking to dodge the system, to manipulate the system, access to the algorithm, which would then allow them to find out how to do that. I don't know enough to say whether that's for sure the case or not. For example, Facebook last year released an open source algorithm for video detection. Now, a couple of weeks ago, I asked some cryptologists, why would Facebook do that? And they said, well, it's probably not that very that good of an algorithm, to be honest. Dr. Fried will tell you that photo DNA is not some kind of top secret, incredibly complex thing, but they still do keep it under wraps. Now, Microsoft, who owns photo DNA, will license that to most companies from what we understand, if they ask. Now, there's been some movement around that lately that complicates things, but for the most part, Facebook has a license for PhotoDNA, google has a license for PhotoDNA. All of the big companies have licenses for PhotoDNA, and they use it on their system so that they can all share this list of what they call hashes, a hash list in between themselves, where they fingerprint photos and take a look at it. Now, that technology is being developed, unfortunately, with video, which I mentioned previously, there is no standard, and that has been confusing to us. It remains confusing to us. The National Center has said that they would prefer there's a video standard just the same way there is an imagery standard, but there is no video standard. So Google has their own hash fuzzy fingerprint system for video. Facebook has their own system. Microsoft actually evolved photo DNA to have their own system, and the government uses a different law enforcement uses a different system. So now all of a sudden, you have this issue of a bunch of different proprietary technologies generating different types of fingerprints that are incompatible, and no master list of these fingerprints. So there's really a rabbit hole to go down, which is not uncommon to technology as a whole. But again, in this instance, the ramifications of it are stark. Well, there's the effort of the tech companies and the effort of government. And there's something mysterious here around how non committal people have been toward solving this problem, because as you say in at least one of your articles, the US. Government has approved $60 million a year for this problem, which is really a drop in the bucket. It's just that on its face is not enough. But they don't even spend that amount every year. They set aside that amount of money, but they spend something like half of it. And this is just totally mystifying to me. If ever there were a nonpartisan issue where, you know, you could get Christian conservatives on the one hand and progressives on the far left on the other to be equally animated about it's got to be this. So the issue is, let's figure out how to prevent kids from being raped and tortured for money, and let's figure out how to hold people accountable who do this and who traffic in this imagery. And yet it seems that even the money that's reserved to fight this problem isn't being deployed. How do you understand that? It's hard to explain, but I do think that this is perhaps the right time to talk about people just not wanting to discuss the issue. Yeah. So in 2008, people knew this was a problem. As I said, that testimony that you had quoted earlier from Flint Waters, where he's talking about the man who gave juice boxes to the children and then raped them, that was twelve years ago. That was twelve years ago as of last year. So 13 years ago now, 2007. In 2007, everybody knew this was a huge problem, and so a bill was put on the floor by Joe Biden, debbie Wasserman Schultz, bipartisan. I believe cornyn was evolved either at that time or at least by 2012, as you say, it was a bipartisan issue. I think it passed unanimously. It was called the 2008 Protect Our Children Act. And it wasn't until a few, probably like a month into our reporting that we realized that there was legislation in order to confront this issue. And the more we dug into that legislation, what we saw is it was pretty good. It really foresaw a lot of the issues. But then what we saw, which was really disappointing, to put it mildly, was that many most of the major aspects of the legislation had not been fulfilled by the federal government. So there were three main provisions that were not followed through on. The first, and perhaps the most consequential is the one you discussed, which is Congress allocated only half of the $60 million that the bill appropriated to fight this. That money is supposed to go directly to state and local law enforcement in order that they can deal with this problem. And we haven't even spoken about them. But the short of it is they're completely overwhelmed. They're having to do total triage, many of them. That means they focus only on infants and toddlers, leaving the rest of the cases unexamined. That's true with the FBI. That's true in La. So you have these. They're called Internet crimes against Children task force. ICACS. All these ICACS begging for money. The money has been appropriated for the last ten years. It stayed almost wholly at 30 million of the $60 million I might be using appropriated wrong, might be authorized. I'm not sure what the term is, but basically they're allowed to give up to $60 million. They're only given $30 million. We found another thing that the Justice Department is supposed to produce biannual every two years, reports on these topics or reports on this problem. Now, these reports are supposed to have several pieces of information in them. They're supposed to compile data about how many reports, where the reports are coming from, in order that we have an idea of the scope of this problem and they're supposed to set some goals to eliminate it. Well, only two of what should now be seven reports have been produced. And finally, they were supposed to have an executive level appointee at least by 2012 when the bill was reauthorized for the first time. They're supposed to be like an executive level appointee, essentially a quarterback who's in charge of this issue. That position has never been filled with the executive level person. It's been a series of short term appointees leading the efforts. And so it was stunning to see that they had foreseen this problem and they had actually set up a pretty good law meant to address it. And the only reason that we can think of that these things were not followed through on is people were very happy to put the law in place and then turn their backs. And I can only chalk that up to people just literally not wanting to pay any mind to this issue after feeling like they dealt with it. It is truly mysterious. I don't know. Again, what we're talking about is a source of suffering that is as significant as any we can think of happening in our own neighborhoods. This is not happening in some distant place in a culture very unlike your own for which the normal levers of empathy are harder to pull, right? This is happening to, if not your kids, your neighbor's kids, and some guy down the block is paying to watch it. And it's all being facilitated by technology that is producing more wealth than any other sector on earth, right? So you're talking about the richest companies whose wealth is scaling in a way that normal businesses never do. And the money is not being allocated to solve this problem. It's just we need something like a Manhattan project on this where all the tech companies get together and realize this is not something the government is especially good at. Look at those Facebook hearings and you have a bunch of geezers up there trying to figure out what Facebook is while also trying to hold Zuckerberg to account for having broken our democracy. And it's just a completely fatuous exercise, right? So clearly we need the best and brightest to break off 1% of their bandwidth and wealth and figure out how to solve this problem. Because what seems to be happening, based on your reporting, correct me if I'm wrong, is that there are troubling signs that tech is moving in the opposite direction. They're creating technology based on other concerns that will make the problem harder to discover. And the example of this that you've written about is that facebook is planning to fully encrypt Facebook messenger, which is one channel where a lot of this material streams. And if you do that well, then Facebook will be able to take the position that Apple has taken around unlocking its iPhone. Right. Like, we can't unlock the phone because not even we can get into your iPhone. So if that person's phone is filled with evidence of crimes against children, well, it really can't be our problem. We've built the technology so that it will never become our problem. And there are many people who are understandably part of a cult of privacy now that have so fetishized the smartphone in particular and other channels of information as sacrosanct and have to be kept forever beyond the prime eyes of government. No matter how warranted the search warrant is, that a lot of people will line up to say, yeah, I really don't care what might be in the Facebook messenger streams of others or on another person's iPhone. I do not want it to be the case that you can ever get into my iPhone or my encrypted messaging. And I don't know how you feel about that. I mean, I've heard the arguments specifically with the case of the iPhone. Frankly, my intuitions have been kind of knocked around there such that I actually don't have a settled opinion on it. But I'm pretty sure that if you tell me that there's somebody who we know is raping and torturing children and we have the evidence on his iPhone but we can't open it, 99% of my brain says, okay, that's unacceptable. No one has an absolute right to privacy under those conditions. Let's figure out how to open the iPhone. But many people will disagree there for reasons that in another mood I can sort of dimly understand. But for the purposes of this conversation, those reasons seem sociopathic to me. How do you view the role of tech here and our looming privacy concerns? Right, well, it's interesting to hear somebody such as yourself who I know has a lot of experience with many of these issues, not child sexual abuse, but privacy, technology and the tech companies. But let me go back to a few things you said and then I'll address the encryption bit. We were shocked to find out how many people actually are engaged or looking at this type of material. Just one statistic or one quote I can actually give you is we were speaking with a guy, Lieutenant John Pizarro, who's the task force commander in New Jersey dealing with this type of content. So Lieutenant Pizarro says, look guys, you got 9 million people in the state of New Jersey. Based upon statistics, we can probably arrest 400,000. Okay, so he's just saying that 5% of people look at child pornography online. That's how that's right, okay. It seems impossible. Right. It's part of the challenges with reporting on it. A, nobody's going to tell me they look at this stuff. I actually did have a series of encrypted chats with somebody who ran some websites that did have this material. But figuring out how many people look at it or don't is very difficult for a reporter. But law enforcement and there is an agenda on law enforcement, we'll get to that when we talk to encryption, but what they say is three to 5% of any random population will be looking at this material. And that's not all pedophiles. And in fact, a large number of those people are not pedophiles. And that's one of the issues with having this kind of content even available, is that many of the child advocates will say, you spoke a little bit about adult pornography earlier and the wide range of adult pornography and just the insane prevalence of pornography. I mean, when certainly you and I were growing up, I didn't have access to pornography. Now pornography is everywhere and just like everything Internet, it's driven more and more extreme. There's more and more types of classifications, whether it's BDSM or teen pornography or any of these types of things. And again, according to interviews and law enforcement and specialists we've spoken with, they say that this will drive people towards child sexual abuse. So I just wanted to start by you noted that there's a lot of people it seems to be a much larger problem than we previously knew. Now, second with the tech companies and why aren't the tech companies and why haven't they done something? So again, I have to initially come back to the fact that nobody was really telling them they had to because nobody wanted to deal with it, nobody wanted to talk about it, nobody was asking him questions about it. I mean, there's been articles written about this in the past several years, but there has not been an investigation such as ours in probably a decade or so. It's a very easy subject to look away from. But in the course of my reporting, I did go back years and found employees, former employees at Twitter, former employees at Snapchat, former employees at Facebook, because those are the people who had insight in, let's say, 2012 1314, when the problem started really getting big. And from every single person at every one of those companies, I heard the same thing, which is that the teams responsible for dealing with that material, which are generally called trust and safety teams, are totally underfunded and basically ignored. So, an example, one former Twitter employee told me in 2013, when vine, which was Twitter's like, short lived video like, video tweets, six second, eight second tweets in 2013, there were gigabytes of child sexual abuse videos appearing on vine. And they were appearing more quickly than this one person. There was one person charged with this could take them down. So the idea that this is a new problem is totally absurd. All the companies have known about it for a long time, but they've been happy to not answer questions about it. This, I think, has appeared in a few of your articles, but there's one sentence in one. Of these articles that I read and reread and I'll just read it here and you'll have to explain this to me. So I'm just quoting one of your articles. Police records and emails, as well as interviews with nearly three dozen law enforcement officials show that some tech companies can take weeks or months to respond to questions from authorities, if they respond at all. Now, to my eye, that sentence doesn't make any fucking sense. How is it that the FBI could be calling Tumblr or Facebook or Dropbox or AWS or any other platform saying, listen, we've got crimes in progress being documented on your servers, toddlers are being raped and this information is being spread to the world through your servers. Call us back. How is it that the cops aren't showing up with guns kicking in the door, getting a response if they don't get a timely response? I mean, part of the problem, Sam, is that there's too much the cops are overwhelmed. So what's often occurring we found is that there is so many reports coming in to a local task force that they have to spend a significant portion of their time triaging these reports trying to find I mean the number one thing they want to do is identify if there is a child and imminent harm. Because again, a lot of this material is recirculated material. These are children who were abused ten or 15 years ago, who have been since rescued, saved, and the images are being found and reported, but there's no imminent harm. So they're going through and they're triaging. And again, we're talking tens of thousands or sometimes hundreds of thousands of reports for a task force. So what we found was occurring, which I agree is incredibly disturbing, is the law as it stands now. And there's been a bill that has been introduced subsequent to our reporting to address this. But as it stands now, the law says that tech companies, as soon as they become aware of this content, must report it. So first of all, tech companies are not legally obligated to look for this content and there are real and difficult to manage Fourth Amendment issues around that. But putting those aside, tech companies are not legally obligated to look for this content, but they are legally obligated to report it as soon as they know about it. So they will report this content. And then they are only allowed to store whether it's the imagery or anything about this, they're only required to store that for 90 days. After 90 days, they have to get rid of the imagery. There's no way they can keep a hold of the imagery, which leads to significant challenges for training, things like artificial intelligence classifiers. Okay? So they have to get rid of this. And that in itself issues a challenge. And second, a lot of the time, because law enforcement is so overwhelmed, because there's so much content, because they're having to figure out what's an actual threat. By the time they go to the tech company, many times they've gotten rid of the information. And so it's a dead end. You have certain companies like Snapchat, where their whole business model is based on getting rid of all kind of, any kind of logs or data or anything around imagery. So there were several instances where law enforcement would go to Snapchat and they wouldn't have it. We found cases where tumblr for a certain period of time, I think in 2016, was in fact informing people who they found this content that they had reported them. And we talked with law enforcement who said that that gave criminals ample opportunity to delete the evidence to destroy devices. So, yeah, it's absolutely nuts. And it's because the overwhelming amount of content, the inability for the National Center, whose technology is literally 20 years old, to properly vet and filter and triage the content, so some of they do, they try. Some of that then falls on local law enforcement who again, is overwhelmed, and by the time they get to some of these things, it's often gone. So a bill was introduced in, in December that would double the amount of time, at least, I believe, that the companies are required to hold on to this information. So that that's, that's one positive step, I think. But I want to get back really quick to the idea of why tech companies maybe aren't inclined to deal with this issue the way I think most of us would expect. So think about these trust and safety teams, right? Their job is to identify pieces of content and users to remove from the platform. Now, I'm sure, you know, that the way that many of these companies, if not all of these companies, certainly the public ones and the ones who are looking for funding, report their success is by number of users, daily active users, monthly active users, whatever it is. So you have this team within your organization whose job it is to remove users and to flag users. And yes, I think it's very easy for all of us to say, well, no shit, and we're better off without them. But I mean, unfortunately, what reporting and again, this is across several different organizations, several different people. This is not one anecdote, this is not two anecdote. This is several people saying we were underfunded, it wasn't a priority. And as I think we've seen with Facebook in recent years, as well as other companies, until it becomes a public issue, a public problem for them, they're not inclined to put any resources towards anything that is not in some way driving the bottom line. And so that brings us to encryption. Before we go there, let me just kind of message to the audience here, because I know that many people who work at these companies listen to the podcast. In fact, I know many of the people who started these companies. I can reach out and talk to many of the principal people here. So I know many of you are listening at every level in these companies. You have to figure this out. The fact that this is the status quo, that so little attention and so few resources are going to solving this problem when the problem itself is being materially facilitated by your companies. Right? I mean, the problem couldn't exist at this scale, anything like this scale, but for the infrastructure you have built and upon which you are making vast wealth, it's completely understandable that it's a daunting task. But if you're working for these companies and you're spending all your time trying to increase their profit and spending no time at all, when was the last time you as an employee at Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook or AWS or Dropbox, any of these companies, have thought about the problem we're now talking about? Please do something you know better than I do what you might do to make noise within your company about this, but prioritize this. Google lets its employees spend some significant percentage of time just thinking about problems that interest them. Well, become interested in this one. We're going to look back on this period of all the things that are going to seem crazy in retrospect. The deformities in our politics and in culture at large born of our just not figuring out how to navigate our use of these tools. The fact that we spend half of our lives ignoring our friends and families because we're we're looking at what's happening to our reputations on Twitter because we've put a this, you know, slot machine in our pockets and take it out 150 times a day. Right? All of that is going to seem insane. And once we correct for it and find some psychological balance, we'll be better for it. But nothing will seem more insane than the fact that we did not address this problem in a timely way. So with that PSA to my friends in tech. Back to you, Gabe. What do you have to say about the prospects of encryption and related issues? Right, well, let me follow up on that just so I can give your listeners a little bit of information as to what companies are doing what. And this won't be a full rundown, but just so people know. So there's a pretty big distinction between somebody like Facebook, who's scanning every single thing. They're a social media company, they're doing it aggressively. And places like cloud storage. Okay, so Dropbox, Google Drive, they tend to have very similar policies. And those policies are they don't scan anything you upload. They're only going to scan a file when you share that file. That's their policy. Now, that's an interesting policy, but in our reporting, we found that people easily circumvent that policy. They do that by sharing logons. They do that by leaving public folders open, available. So they're choosing. And these are all what the companies would say are privacy based policies. So Dropbox and Google only scan on share. Now, let me tell you a little bit for these first numbers that were only released to the New York Times about 2019. Dropbox only filed 5000 reports last year in 2019. Now, while we were doing our reporting in 2019, we said to dropbox, do you scan images? Do you scan videos? And after weeks of them saying, well, we can't tell you that. We won't tell you that for whatever reason, at one point in, I believe, July of 2019, they said, scanning videos is not a priority, not a priority for us. We don't feel that videos are the medium of choice necessarily, and that's not a priority. By the time we published our article, literally in the days before, dropbox said, oh, we're scanning video now. Okay, so they start scanning video. Let's say in the last quarter of 2019. What the numbers show is that of the 5000 reports dropbox filed to the national center, there were over 250,000 files. 5000 reports, 250,000 files. The majority of those files were video. Okay, so dropbox starts scanning for video. They start finding a lot of video. Amazon, amazon's cloud services handle millions of uploads and downloads every second. Millions every second. They don't scan at all. They scan for no images. They scan for no videos. Last year, they reported zero images, zero videos. You know, we could go on. Those are some of the bigger ones you have. Apple, apple cannot scan their messages app, and they elect not to scan icloud. So once again, they're cloud storage. They don't scan their cloud storage. Now, I've gone back to them. Some of these companies are starting to do it. I think that there's nothing like the exposure of a company to motivate them to begin doing this. But there are certainly things they can be doing. And they will tell you that they do dedicate a significant amount of resources. But let me address that as well. So Microsoft, who again invented or sponsored and invented the photo DNA, the creation of image scanning, has long been seen as a leader in this field. And remember, this all started with a tip from a user saying that they were able to find child sexual abuse on Microsoft. So my colleague, Michael Keller, both of us have computer science backgrounds. He wrote a program, and this computer program used what's called a headless browser, which means you can't actually see the browser. And he programmed this headless browser to go on Bing, to go on Yahoo. To go on DuckDuck go, and to go on Google and search for child sexual abuse imagery using terms that we both knew were related to child sexual abuse, as well as some others that were sent to us as tips. And the program, again, we had it very heavily vetted by our lawyers. It even blocked the images from ever being loaded, just so you know. So not only could we not even see a browser window, but the images were stopped from ever loading. But what we did is we took the URLs that were returned from these image searches and we sent those URLs to Microsoft's own Photo DNA cloud service. So essentially this is a cloud service that we signed up for with Microsoft saying very clearly, we're New York Times journalists, we're reporting on this issue and we'd like access to your API to check for images of child sexual abuse. They gave us access to the API. We wrote a computer program that searched Microsoft Bing using terms. We then sent those URLs to Microsoft Photo DNA and found dozens of images. Dozens of images. This is a trillion dollar tech company. So not only that, we found dozens of images. And that's before we just cut it off. I mean, again with letters coming in from the FBI saying be careful. And we weren't trying to make a massive collection or prove that there are millions. We found 75 before we were like, okay, there's plenty here. So then what we did is we went and told Microsoft, we said this is what we did. This is exactly what we did. These are the search terms we used. They said something akin to a bug, a problem. Okay? Three weeks later we did it again and we found them all. We found different ones, we found more. So the idea that these tech companies cannot find, I mean, they should be able to do this themselves, obviously when two journalists at The New York Times can do that. So the idea that they're doing and this isn't just Microsoft, right? It was also found on Yahoo and DuckDuck Go. Now both of those are powered by Microsoft search engine. So the default lies largely with Microsoft. We did not find any on Google. So that says two things. One, Microsoft is not realizing that their own system is indexing and serving up imagery that its own technologies can identify. And two, it's doable. You can stop this. Google's done it. However, Google did it in their search. And I'm not saying it's impossible to find it. Again, we didn't do some kind of exhaustive search, but it wasn't turning up on Google. So there is some extremely uneven commitment to this issue. And also there's this, the issue we flagged in discussing Facebook a while back, where if you don't look, you don't have any bad news to report. If Facebook looks, they find 16 million instances of the problem. AWS doesn't look, and they don't pay a significant price for not looking. The not looking has to become salient and an instance of terrible PR for anyone to be incentivized to look, it sounds like beyond actually caring about this issue, right? Well now we're running up against exactly what you described earlier, which is the privacy advocates and the encryption essentially absolutists. Right? And let me start this part of the conversation by saying I'm a reporter. I don't offer my opinion on exactly how this problem should be solved. My point is that this is the clearest example of where privacy has stark and terrible consequences for a group of people. OK, but that said, you're right. Amazon, Apple, they seem to pay very little price for filing almost zero reports of child sexual abuse. And meanwhile, Facebook gets a bunch of initially negative headlines for filing an enormous amount. Now, as we've discussed, those numbers are actually indicative of them doing a very good job. But as you said, in March of last year, mark Zuckerberg announced plans to encrypt Facebook Messenger. Now, let me put some context around Facebook Messenger and just how commonly it's used to share images of child sexual abuse. In 2018, of the 18 million, a little more than 18 million reports made to the National Center, nearly 12 million of those, about 65%, two out of three, were from Facebook Messenger. Right. In 2019, Facebook Messenger was responsible for even more, 72% of all reports made to the National Center. Whenever I tell people these facts, the response is almost always, who are these idiots that are trading child sexual abuse on Facebook? I don't know the answer to that, but there's lots of them. Now, if Facebook encrypts messenger, which again, Mark Zuckerberg has said they are going to do, they will almost completely lose the ability, they'll lose the ability to do any kind of automatic image detection, which is what everybody fundamentally relies on to do this. And while they will say that they are going to use other signals, the experts and people I've talked to anticipate that there will be nearly 100% decrease in reports from messenger. Maybe they'll be able to use some of these other types of indicators which I would actually be encouraging them to be using anyways, maybe they are. But to find this and this, that's these are signals, what they call which are messages that are sent from one to many people, or adults, messaging children, things that are again, I think they should hopefully be using anyways. But the fact that they plan to encrypt messenger, which jay Sullivan Product Manager and Project Management Director I'm sorry, for messaging privacy at Facebook in the fall of last year and prepared remarks, said private messaging, ephemeral stories and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication. And so by saying that, what he's saying is that this is what our users want. Our users want encrypted messaging, our users want privacy, our users want everybody to stay out of their living room, to use an analogy that they often use. But the truth is, and people are really terrified by this, that if they encrypt it, not only are they not going to be able to see CSAM, they're not going to be able to see all the other kinds of crime and grooming and sextortion and everything else that is occurring all the time on their platform. So obviously, there's a serious conversation that has to be had around Tech's role in this and the incentives and this cult of privacy and its consequences. That's its own ongoing topic of conversation that we're not certainly not going to exhaust it here. I guess the best use of our remaining time is just to give as clear a picture as we can of the urgency and scope of this problem. Because again, when you give me a factoid of this, what you did from New Jersey, so you have a law enforcement official in New Jersey who says we've got 9 million people in the state of New Jersey, and based upon our statistics, we could probably arrest 400,000 of them, right? These are 400,000 people who he imagines have looked at this material in some way online. Now, whether they saw it inadvertently, whether some of them are New York Times reporters doing their research, discount all of that, it appears that there's an extraordinary number of people who seek this material out because this is what gets them off, right? These are not research papers. And we have a culture. What do we know about the culture of pedophiles and all of the elaborate machinations they have to take to not get caught producing this material, trading in it, viewing it? First of all, how do predators get access to kids that they abuse in the making of these videos, yes, apparently there are truly evil parents and stepparents and caregivers. But how much of this is a story of abductions and other horrific details? What do we know about what's happening, you know, among the culture of people who produce and consume this content? Sure, I don't want to go on about encryption too much, but let me just raise a few things that I think would be helpful to the conversation, especially with your audience, because often when you come to the idea of encryption, it's this position of either yes encryption or no encryption, right? Either yes encryption or somehow there's going to be a backdoor into encryption. And I will say that I do feel that the government and this is one of the challenges of being a reporter I do think the government is using our reporting and using the issue of child sexual abuse as kind of the new terrorism that now, like, a week after we put out our first report, attorney General William Barr held an event at the Department of justice. And the event was entirely about how encryption is enabling child sexual abuse and how they need a backdoor into encryption because of this. Now, what that event did not discuss at all were the multiple other failures of the federal government in dealing with this issue. So I do feel like there is some disingenuous behavior, not only on their part, but also on the part of people who this is becoming a weaponized topic around encryption. Well, this is so grim because if ever there were an Attorney General who did not inspire confidence for his ethical and political intuitions and his commitment to protecting civil liberties, it's William Barr. So yeah, that just makes me think that the answer has to come more from tech than from government, at least government at this moment, right? I mean, obviously government has to be involved because we're talking about crime in the end. But yeah, it's easy to see how fans of Edward Snowden and everyone else who wouldn't trust the current administration as far as they can be thrown will just say, this is completely unworkable. You can't let these people in because they obviously can't be trusted to protect civil liberties. Right. And even Snowden has weighed in on this series specifically about saying he thought one of the stories we wrote was particularly credulous to law enforcement and to this argument against it. But you're right, I do think there are things to be done and we'll focus on Facebook solely because of this messenger example. Right now, I think one of the most compelling things I've heard from people who are really willing to engage on this issue is maybe encryption should not be deployed against all types of platforms. So for example, Facebook is a platform where children are at a distinct disadvantage to adults, not only for all the reasons that children are always at a distinct disadvantage. They're younger, they haven't learned as much, they don't have as much life experience. But literally, I've found dozens at least. And and by far from an exhaustive search of examples of adults going on Facebook, creating profiles that say they're 13 or 14 befriending other children, getting that child to send them an image of what is child sexual abuse, whether it's self generated or not, coercing them into it sometimes by sending that child other images of child sexual abuse that they've collected. And then as soon as the child sends them an image, they'll say, actually I'm a 25 year old guy and if you don't send me more images, I'm going to post this image on your Facebook wall and tell your parents. So then you have a twelve or 13 year old, I guess you're not supposed to be under 13 on Facebook, although we know those rules get bent and broken all the time. Now you have a twelve year old, a 13 year old saying, holy shit, I don't know what to do, I'm going to send them more photos. I'm so terrified if they tell my parents, if they post that on my wall. This happens all the time. It's called sextortion. It's one of the biggest issues coming up now. You have this platform where adults and children can interact at a distinct advantage to the children children are discoverable. Despite the fact that Facebook says you can't search for them in certain ways, which is true. There's still plenty of ways for an adult to find children on Facebook and message them and coerce them. And Facebook knows it's a huge problem. We're not starting from a place where they don't know it's a problem. They know it's a huge problem. Now, at the same time, Facebook has an encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp? And if we look at the number of reports to the National Center from WhatsApp versus Facebook, of course it's not even close. WhatsApp isn't even a fraction of a percent of the reports that Facebook sends. But that said, Facebook could there's one hypothesis, one possibility, not something I'm advocating necessarily, but an interesting thought facebook could direct. People say, look, messenger is not encrypted. We're not encrypting it. These are not encrypted messages. Law enforcement has access to these messages. Shout it from the hills. Everybody knows if you want to have an encrypted chat, we own a company, go use WhatsApp? We'll kick you right over to WhatsApp? Use WhatsApp. Now, that would make it substantially harder to coerce children, because at that point, what you have to do in order to even have WhatsApp, you have to have a phone number. So the child has to have a phone. The child has to have WhatsApp on it. And WhatsApp, as opposed to Facebook is not doesn't have the same sort of discoverability issue. You can't just go on WhatsApp and start finding children, right? Certainly not in the same way you can on Facebook. So maybe there should be more discussion around what types of platforms should be encrypted, what types of platforms are children at a distinct disadvantage? Like, do I believe I believe privacy is a fundamental human right, so I absolutely believe that there should be encrypted messaging. But do I has this course of reporting shaken to my core, how that should happen? Absolutely. And has it caused me to say, like, wow, how do we have a technology such as encryption, which by definition, cannot have a back door and still protect children? And what I find to be counterproductive when I start talking about these discussions, Sam, is that privacy absolutists, which is a term I use for them who have been thinking about this issue for years, they will immediately chastise me. I mean, I tweeted out this idea probably in October after we had started thinking about it and developing it. My colleague and I'm sure we're not the first people to think about this, but I said, shouldn't there be a discussion around what platform should be encrypted? And I was attacked. I was attacked by people who said, I've been thinking about this problem for 2030 years. I've analyzed it from every single point of view. I've run every scenario down, and every single one ends in encrypt everything. Now, I don't know if that's the right answer. I don't know what the right answer is. But what I do know is that at this point in time, when the general public is just starting to become aware of privacy implications online, just starting to understand what it means to have private messages, what it means to have social media platforms, what it means to broadcast your life to everybody or choose not to. The worst thing you can do is come in and tell people they're idiots for thinking about these things out loud. And so I would just offer that message to a community that I very much respect and enjoy communicating with. Again, I helped start the New York Times tip line. We implemented Secure Drop technology, which is encrypted technology. You can send us messages on WhatsApp and signal you can get to us in untraceable ways. I very, very much understand the importance and value of encryption and private communications, but I do think there is room to discuss where those are implemented, how those are implemented. Should those be implemented when you know there is a problem? Should those be implemented when you know children are at a distinct disadvantage? And still the answer might be yes. I don't know the answer, but I would just say that now is the time to help people start having these conversations. And if you've already run every scenario and you know the answer, we'll help people get there in a way that's constructive because the other ways are going to drive people away from it. I should echo a few of those thoughts and that I am also very concerned about privacy, and I would be the first to recoil from the prospect of someone like AG Barr having any more oversight of our lives than he currently has. Right? So it's easy to see how an ability to pry into our private lives can be misused by an ideological government. And yet we're talking about more than that. We're talking about the fact that at this moment, you have some sadistic lunatic mistreating children who, for whatever reason, he has access to, and shooting his exploits on an iPhone, uploading it to AWS, posting some of this stuff on Tumblr or wherever else. And Apple built the phone and Amazon runs the server, and Tumblr just got acquired by Automatic. And you have people getting fantastically wealthy on this technology. And this technology is what is enabling the lone maniac in his basement to accomplish all of this. If he just had a Polaroid camera, yes, he could walk that single photo in a brown paper bag to the the parking lot of a shopping mall and trade it for a $100 with some other nefarious stranger and risk getting caught that way. But these companies have built the tools to bring all of this to scale. So presumably people are making a fair amount of money trading this material now, and they're managing to essentially groom a very large audience of vulnerable people. You have to imagine that the audience for this is growing. The. Way, the audience for kind of weird adult porn is also apparently growing because people are getting numbed to various stimuli. Right. People have access to every possible image online, and certain people are vulnerable to just needing more and more extreme images to even find them to be salient. Right. So I would imagine at the periphery, if we're talking about 400,000 people in New Jersey downloading this stuff, not every one of those people 30 years ago would have been trying to find who they could exchange Polaroids with in a parking lot. And so this is kind of a cultural contamination, again, much of which is redundant to the bottom line of these companies that are getting fantastically wealthy for the use of their bandwidth for these purposes. So you can't be a privacy absolutist here. We have to figure out how to change the incentive structure around all this so that the companies themselves find some way to make this much harder to do and to make it much more likely that someone will get caught for doing it. Yeah, and I know that I do want to speak about pedophiles in education and finish up there, but we haven't even discussed a few things that when you're talking about what people could use their 10% or 20% time or just with these extremely bright people who work at these companies. Right. We have a part of one of our stories that's just almost too terrible to talk about, about live streaming. And this live streaming is going on, on Zoom, where there's over a dozen men sitting around watching another man rape a child and cheering him on. And the only reason, the only reason I was able to report this case out is because a Canadian undercover officer happened to be sitting in the Zoom chat room because it was known that this was a problem on Zoom and recorded it, and the police the next day went and saved that child. Right. So that's a wonderful story. But the fact is, when that case went to trial, which is kind of unbelievable that it went to trial, but it did go to trial. What the prosecutor said, the federal prosecutor man named Austin Barry, he said that the offenders know that live streams are harder to detect and that they leave no record. And that quote, that's why they go to Zoom. It's the Netflix of child pornography. So there's things we haven't even discussed, like live streaming and new content and classifiers that need to be built for that. That it's hard. This is a hard, complicated, technical task. And the implications and what people are absolutely going to respond to is the idea of walking into a surveillance state, which I know you've had multiple conversations, and that is why we did the reporting on this subject. That is why we did it, because it brings these questions to a head, is how do we deal with this? The answer for you of how we deal with this right now, as far as I'm concerned, is education. So I was in Amsterdam. I was actually in The Hague in the Netherlands late last year doing some reporting, because this is an international problem, and some of the laws in the Netherlands make it more common for this type of material to be stored on servers in that country. But that said, while I was there, I ran into some law enforcement, some international law enforcement, and I ran into a Finnish, basically, homeland Security agent. And we were having a couple of drinks, and I was talking to him. I told him what I was there for. He didn't believe me for a while, thought I was a Russian spy. That was interesting. Once I had finally convinced him that, no, I'm actually a reporter and I'm reporting on this subject, he told me that he was actually there for a conference on that subject, which I knew I was there for the same reason. And he said he had two small children. And I said, all right, man, what do we do? What is the answer to this? And he said, the only thing you can do is educate your children. You need to sit down with your children. You need to explain to them that they don't know who they're talking to online, that they cannot assume that that's another child, that they should not be sending images of themselves. They should not be live streaming images of themselves. And even more importantly, if they do, they should feel totally comfortable knowing that you will protect them and support them even if they've made that mistake. That as of right now, there is no tech solution to this problem. And and honestly, it's not in the near future. We we also didn't get the opportunity to talk very much about survivors, and that is absolutely heartbreaking. I remember I spoke with a 17 year old girl who had been raped by her father, who invited another man to rape her when she was seven years old, videotaped it and put it online. The confusion this young woman feels that her father would do something, she then lost her father. And not many people know this, but people who have been identified in these images and videos, every time their image or video is found on an offender's computer or cloud drive or whatever, they get a notice from the FBI. And this notice is to allow them a chance for financial compensation during the trial, which is often a few thousand dollars maybe. But they get these hundreds of notices a year. So every day, their parents or often a lawyer, because their parents cannot bear it, get these notices saying that, there's, it's been found again. It's been found again, it's been found again. So it's really important, as we talk about the technology companies and the efforts that need to be made and everything that the first generation of children who have been sexually abused and now have to deal with that every day of their life. Constant reminders. And this isn't a reminder that you were once physically assaulted in a fistfight. And that videos online, which I'm sure would be terrible, this is the knowledge that you being sexually assaulted as a child is serving the sexual pleasure of other deviants online is just I mean, I came out of that interview and I was devastated. And so it's very important we keep the survivors in mind because it's not just the child that it's happening to. When it's happening. It's again, a whole generation now of children who are growing up every day. I mean, they change their appearance because people try to find them later into the future. They can't speak out about it because it is such a stigmatized thing. It's an unbelievable pain. And so the thing that in law enforcement and yes, we hope tech companies and there are huge battles ahead, whether it be encryption, whether it be building classifiers that can detect new content, whether it be trying to figure out how to stop children and young adults from sending photos of themselves that can then be weaponized against them. All of those things, fundamentally, for the next few years at very least, the onus is on the parents to do a better job educating their children to realize that when their children are playing Minecraft or Fortnite that there are adults on there trying to coerce them. That no matter what platform your child is on, the unfortunate truth is there are monsters on that platform trying to do terrible things. And so while the tech companies, which I really hope figure out how to deal with this, it is on the parents to educate themselves and their children on how to be aware and avoid these problems. Yeah. Although that really only addresses a peripheral problem here. This exploitation thing is a problem, I'll grant you. And obviously, any parent should communicate with their kids around this. Don't send images of yourself, realize you could be talking to an adult, obviously don't agree to meet people in the physical world based on these online contacts and all that. But apart from the problem of possible stranger abduction being facilitated by that kind of online communication, that doesn't really bring us to the bottom of this hellscape, which is the sort of thing you described happening on Zoom, right. Where you have an adult who, for whatever reason, has access to a child, who is then raping that child to produce video for people who have happily gathered to consume it. Right. So there's a culture of this. You're right, it doesn't address that. But I don't want to stray from the idea that a large part of the community feels that any of these types of videos and images, the more that circulate, whether they're coerced or self produced, the more it drives people down. That hole that we just discussed to more and more extreme content. And B, there are several examples, many examples of children. Again. It's almost impossible for me to even imagine. But being eleven years old, having made the mistake of sending an image of my genitals to somebody thinking they were twelve, and then having them say that they're going to tell everybody in my whole world that I've done this, and not only that, show them that has resulted in children abusing. Often it is very common to bring in their siblings. I mean, the amount, the way it spreads, and then to actually sexually abuse their own siblings, which then leads to more extortion. So I completely agree with you. It does not solve the dark, dark, depraved things that we mentioned quite a bit in our articles. But sexploitation and sextortion are the fastest growing number of child sexual abuse images online. So it is in no way a panacea, but it is one opportunity to help stem the problem. So take me back to the Zoom case. What was revealed about it? Were the people who were watching also arrested or was it just the perpetrator? No, they were I have it in front of me here. So what happened was it was a man in Pennsylvania who was not the first time this had happened, in fact, that he had, I believe it was his nephew, honestly. But it was a six year old boy. And there was, I think, about more than a dozen men. And these men were from all around the world, speaking to the point of what we're talking about, the technology, they were all around the world now, I think a dozen or so were in the United States, but all around the world. And was this monetized in some way? No, in fact, a lot of it's not monetized. Once you get to the Dark Web, sometimes it can be monetized in a variety of ways, but that's actually one of the ways that they've helped shut down other types of dark market crimes like drugs and some of those things that are traded on the dark market, which is by Bitcoin transactions, even those can be traced to a certain extent. So there is certain types of things that go on, like Bitcoin mining, that they leverage other people's computers to do. They do sell some of this stuff online. But actually what we found certainly on the open web and on the platforms we've been talking about is a much greater predilection to just share it with one another, to share and stockpile. So they create these huge, huge stockpiles, often stored on their cloud storage. I mean, we found cases where there are millions of files on their cloud storage. But these people, I mean, it is truly horrendous. The men are sitting around, almost always men sitting around. They have a rule in these. It's known that they have to have their webcam on because in their minds, a police officer would never sit there with their webcam on. The rule is cams on. So they're all sitting there. They're rooting this man on while he rapes the boy. They're masturbating as they do it. They're the detective I think it's Detective Constable Janelle Blacketer, who is a Toronto police department. She was in the room. She recorded the stream that night. She sent the file to. Special Agent Austin Barrier, Homeland Security Investigations. They then subpoenaed Zoom, who was very compliant. I mean, when the companies learn about this, they almost always are very quick to react. Zoom sent him information. Turned out the man is in Pennsylvania. The man's name is William Byers Augusta. He's 20 years old. The next day, Homeland Security shows up, is able to identify the setting based on the video footage they've seen. They identified certain objects that were also in the room, saved the six year old boy. 14 men from multiple states have been arrested and sent to prison. And Mr. Augusta, who he received a sentence of up to 90 years in prison. Okay, so it worked in that case, but it didn't work because the tech companies caught it. Right? It worked because law enforcement caught it. Exactly. And, I mean, first of all, just to say something to the privacy absolutist here. I mean, wouldn't you, as a user of Zoom, be willing to let your conversations be searchable if you knew you could prevent this sort of thing from happening, or you could actually bring the people who are doing this sort of thing to justice? For me, it would be trivially easy to agree to that in the terms of service. And it's like, of course, I just don't understand how you get to what is it that you're doing in your life that you think absolute privacy under any conceivable scenario is important to you? What are you doing on Zoom that you can't imagine the government or the tech company ever being able to search? It even just algorithmically to vet its content. It's a religion. It's a fetish of some kind of absolute. First of all, it's nothing that human beings have ever had a right to this kind of privacy. I mean, there's no place in the real world where you've ever done anything or said anything that has given you an absolute right to privacy. It's physically impossible. Right? There's no room in your house that could hold all your secrets and never be unlocked by a third party, no matter what you had done in the world, right? And yet, somehow, in digital space, some of us have convinced themselves that we need these rooms. And again, for the purposes of this conversation, I've completely lost touch with the ethical intuitions that suggest that we need an absolute right to privacy. And it's the reason we do it. It's the reason we're doing this reporting is because, again, it was a shortcut to the conversations that I think need to be have around privacy on the Internet, around should companies be scanning people's photos? Should companies be scanning people's videos? Should they be detecting doing natural language processing to detect grooming? Should they be doing all these things like, let's let's have these conversations. And as you're saying, should zoom? At what point does your expectation of privacy go away? Like, so you're in a room with 16 other people around the world. Is there an expectation of privacy up until 30 people? Up until 50 people? Again, I'm sure that people are going to attack me for even raising these questions, but they're honest questions about at what point do these things start to affect people in ways that are, in fact, detrimental, if that is the case, if that would happen. But I think we need to move beyond a little bit of the conversation. Yes, there's some harm in Facebook, let's say, giving our likes to Cambridge Analytica, but there's far, far greater harm, I think we'd all agree, in people being able to trade child sexual abuse material under the cloak of encryption. So let's have that conversation. One other question here which trips a lot of ethical intuitions one way or the other. What do you think about the prospect of allowing entirely fictional production of similar material, animated child pornography or the CGI version of it, such that it could answer to this apparent appetite in many people without being at all derived from the actual victimization of children? At the moment, I'm assuming all of that material is just as illegal as anything else that is a real record of a crime. Is anyone arguing that if we could only produce this stuff fictionally, the real problem would be at least diminished? There are people arguing that I'm not going to say the name of the company because I think that is very questionable. It is illegal in the United States for any kind of, like, drawings or depicted imagery, I believe. But I think this gets to a very interesting point, and I want to talk specifically about pedophiles. And so before we did this reporting, and even in our first story, as soon as we published, we got lambasted by several people saying that we had used the term pedophile inappropriately, so to speak. Specifically, pedophiles are people who are attracted, sexually attracted to children. There is a whole nother group of people who look at child sexual abuse imagery. These are people who are not necessarily attracted to children. They are extremists. They are wandering down rabbit holes. They are addicts, and they are a huge part of the problem. But let's speak about pedophiles, because I do think there is when I'm talking with child advocates and some of the other people, I say and grappling with this problem, I think the same way that you're starting to grapple with it or have been grappling with it, which is, holy shit, what do we do. I think you have to think about attacking it from all angles. Right. And that also means dealing with the people whose natural attraction is to children. I do want to I mean, sympathy is probably the only word I have for it. There is a group of people and I'm not going to get into citing any of the studies. As soon as you cite a study, you have a million people telling you why that study was garbage. But there is a group of people who, when they go through puberty, begin to realize that they remain attracted to children of a certain age. And that that is the very, very common report of of a true pedophile is that they turn 1213 14, and as they continue to grow older, as they can go through puberty, they realize something is wrong. They realize they are still attracted to children. So how do you deal with that? Now, first of all, according to some of these studies, you then have a few years, right, where this child, this young adult, now knows that they have some sort of issue. And so that's an opportunity. That's an opportunity to intervene if we can find out a way to do that. And the second thing that I often think about and this is a bit tangential from what you're saying, I don't know. And I put the same question it's a good question. I put the same question to these people about should there be imagery that would help satisfy this? I mean, imagine as soon as we get to virtual reality, the different types of implications there, right? I don't know. I think it's worth talking to scientists, talking to people who study this to see if that would if that would stop them from offending, then perhaps that's a path worth walking down. I think other people would say that that would simply drive the number of people interested in this higher. Now, if they're still not actually assaulting children, that's a good thing. But I could see the argument, or perhaps if a study were done saying it would drive them to actually want to do this in real life, I'm not really sure. But what I do think adds another layer of complexity because it's very easy. What I just told you is that a bunch of these men who were arrested for watching another man assault somebody on Zoom, they received very lengthy sentences. I mean, they're getting sentences of 30, 40, 50 years for simply consuming and trading this material. And I don't mean simply to say that it's not serious. I just mean they're not actually doing the abuse right now. I will get jumped on for that as well. Yes, they are revictimizing the person in it, but simply to say they are not the person physically abusing the child and they're getting prison sentences of 30, 40, 50 years. Previously, I worked at a place called I helped start something called the Marshall Project, which is a criminal justice website. And we dealt a lot with this idea of rehabilitation, crime, punishment, rehabilitation. I do not know if a true pedophile, somebody who's truly attracted to children, is going to be any less attracted to a child or any less able to constrain themselves from doing this type of thing when they get out of prison 30 years later. And in fact, we have the sentencing is all over the map, whether it's state or federal level. So some of our survivors who we spoke with, they had somebody who went to prison, remember, they get these notices, went to prison because he had their imagery on his computer, got out, went to prison again and again their imagery was found on it. So I don't know exactly how to honestly help people who have attractions to children, because if it was you or I and I think about the people I'm attracted to, there's nothing I do to be attracted to that person. And I don't think there's anything I could do to not be attracted to some of the people I'm attracted to. I mean, this is an instinct. It's natural, it's whatever it is. And I do feel sympathy for people who, for whatever reason, are attracted to children. And I see that as an opportunity to somehow get in front of the issue at that point. And whether it's with animated 3D models, virtual reality, whatever it might be to help them live as normal life as possible, and with the number one absolute goal of not harm a child, then I think those options should be explored. Yeah, well, I think, again, we have to differentiate pedophilia from some of the rest of what we're talking about. So because pedophilia is this is a very unhappy sexual orientation, essentially. Right. It's one the implications of which pitch you into something that's illegal, non consensual, and therefore non actionable, if you're an ethical person. Right. So you didn't pick who you're attracted to. As far as I know. The research on this suggests that undoubtedly it's partially genetic, but I think it also has to do with what happens to babies in utero. I think it's developmental, but obviously we don't understand exactly how someone becomes a pedophile, but we should understand that they didn't make themselves so they have this they're they're profoundly unlucky on some level to find that their sexual attraction never matures to being attracted to adults who could consent to have sex with them. And yet that doesn't fully capture or even explain the picture we're seeing when you describe something like that zoom atrocity, which is you have people who know that they're watching a child getting raped and they're happy to do this. That's analogous to a heterosexual man being invited to watch a woman who he's attracted to women. He can be invited to watch a woman being raped on camera in a zoom session. What sort of heterosexual man is a part of that project, right? That's the culture of unethical pedophiles. That has to exist. For this whole problem to exist, you have to know that what you're doing is facilitating motivating, enabling the mistreatment. And in many cases, torture is not the wrong word for it. Torture of children. That's where we can be far more judgmental of what's happening here. I don't know if you have anything to say about that. No, just absolutely. I don't mean in any way for me saying that I have sympathy for somebody. Yeah, I wasn't taking it. I share your sympathy, and I totally agree that even if somebody is born a pedophile, there is no room to trade or share or actually abuse a child. I am deeply sorry if that is your position. If you are a pedophile, I am sorry. I still feel extremely strongly there is absolutely no circumstance in which it is ever okay, whether you film it or not, to abuse a child. There is no consent. It's right where we started. There is no consent. There is no opportunity for this child to agree. Some of these. And whether they're pedophiles or just terrible people, not to say that those are the same thing. Whether they're terrible people or not, some of them will bend over backwards to say that the children like it, that this is called loving a child, that these are things that if you could only see it I mean, you wouldn't imagine the amount of times that some of these people told me, if you could only see it, you would see how much they enjoy it. To that, I say, you're doing terrible things and you need to be punished for them, and we need to figure out a system. Well, clearly so the people who are saying that sort of thing and that's why I have these questions around the culture of this, because anyone who's saying, listen, pedophiles are a happy lot and we treat children well. And if you go back to ancient Greece, this was a norm, right? You know, presumably Plato was doing this to the boys on the block, and no one minded. So get over yourselves. 21st century people, presumably even these people, can't say with a straight face that, as you report in one of these articles, an infant being analy raped is enjoying this, right? I mean, it's just like there's no way I mean, like I put the question to you. I mean, are there pedophiles who are saying who are acknowledging that part of this picture is every bit as horrific as we think it is? Then they're pointing to some other part of the picture that they consider benign, or are they not making those concessions? The one who I spoke with most extensively insists that the children enjoy it. And the only distinction I could start to get them to draw is prepubescent versus post pubescent. I said, okay, let's leave aside post pubescent, even though it's still incredibly wrong to take advantage of any child. But let's leave aside to people like, how can you say that these prepubescent children are consciously making the decision and understand the ramifications and even further enjoy this activity? And, I mean, if there's such thing as privacy, absoluteists, there are child sexual abuser, absolutists and actually, Sam, it's a big part of the culture. It's similar to many other Internet cultures where they radicalize one another. That's what's going on in that zoom room. That's what's going on in there. They're radicalizing one another. They're trying to normalize their behavior. They're trying to share it amongst other people in order to make themselves feel like it's more normal. Normal. And when I was speaking with this person and he finally came to understand that there was no way in hell I was going to look at any of this type of imagery. And that all I was trying to do. Honestly, all I was trying to do is find out more information about how he was managing to keep his site up and running and listening to his beliefs. System happened to, unfortunately, come along with that bit of reporting. But there are people who fundamentally are telling themselves that this is an okay thing. Well, Gabe, we have gotten deep into the darkness together, and I just want to thank you for taking the time to educate me and our listeners. And again, anyone out there who has any, even a semblance of a privileged position with respect to working in Tech, having a brother or sister who works in tech, please start putting your shoulder to the wheel here and figure out how to make this a prominent problem that will be emphatically solved at some point in the near future. Because clearly, if we don't have the technology that can solve it today, that's coming. And if we incentivize ourselves to produce it, we'll do so and we can get the policy right. But clearly, what we have now is something bordering on a moral catastrophe. So, again, Gabe, thank you for all your hard work on this. Thank you so much, Sam. I'm sincerely grateful for the opportunity to discuss it with you. Well, as I said at the top, this conversation was a few months old, and I've gone back and asked Gabriel if anything has happened in the meantime. The biggest update was actually the results of all the New York Times coverage Gabriel produced. Apparently, there are two additional bills that have been introduced in Congress. The first was introduced by Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal, and it's called the Earnet Act. And if it passes in its current form, companies will lose their Section 230 protections when it comes to child pornography. The second bill was introduced by Ron Wyden, and it seeks $5 billion in funding, which would be amazing for law enforcement and others who are on the front lines. And I believe. That funding would be over ten years. So this is a hopeful sign. Once again, thank you to Gabriel and his colleagues for doing so much work here. They certainly brought this problem to my attention, and now I've brought it to yours. Thanks for listening. Thank you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with Andrew Yang. Andrew has been a CEO and co founder and executive of several technology and education companies, and this year, he announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States in 2020. And the central plank to his platform is universal basic income. Now, many people have been asking that. I do a podcast on this topic, and Andrew does a fantastic job representing it. And he is running for President, so that obviously adds interest as well. And he has a book titled The War on Normal People, which we talk about in this episode, and we really cover every related matter here. We talk about what UBI is, the principal arguments against it, whether it would be difficult to implement or not, what its likely consequences would be. This is a good tour of the issue, and I don't think this issue is going away. So now, without further delay, I bring you Andrew Yang. I am here with Andrew Yang. Andrew, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, Sam. So I will have properly introduced you in my intro here. But briefly, you have written a very interesting book titled The War on Normal People, which is your case for universal basic income, which we'll be talking about in this podcast. I've had many requests to COVID this topic, and you cover it so well in your book and so urgently so that, I'm sure will be the topic of conversation. But you also happen to be running for the presidency of the United States in 2020, and that is an extraordinarily novel thing to be doing. Before we get into UBI, how is it that you come to be running for the presidency, and how does one even think about making that decision? Because I think it must seem like an incredibly quicksotic thing to attempt, even if someone already has a huge national platform, which I suspect you don't yet. Give us your background and how you come to find yourself in this position. Sure. So I'm a serial entrepreneur. I ran a national education company that helped people get into business school, and I personally taught the analyst classes at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, JP. Morgan. I saw all of these smart, energetic young people who hated their jobs and didn't know why they were doing what they were doing. So then when my company was acquired by The Washington Post in 2009, I thought about the problems of the world. And the biggest problem to me at the time was that we had so much talent doing things that were not going to drive our society forward in meaningful ways. They were going to become investors, bankers, management consultants, corporate lawyers like I was for five months. And that wasn't going to be what we needed. So I started a nonprofit called Venture for America to help create businesses around the country and channel our talented young people to environments like Detroit or Baltimore and New Orleans or St. Louis to help rejuvenate regional economies. And so I saw a lot of the country I think you're from the West Coast, I'm from the East Coast. I had never been to Detroit or Cleveland or St. Louis or these places before starting Venture for America. And our goal was to create American jobs, which we did. We've helped create about 3000 jobs to date. But I was in my role as founder and CEO of Venture for America for six and a half years. And the more I saw, the more I realized that our economy has changed for good, that we're automating away so many jobs. So imagine Sam, if it was your job to create jobs and then you realize at a certain point that you were pouring water into a bathtub that had a giant hole ripped in the bottom. And so from there, I went on a quest to figure out what the heck you do about the hole in the bottom of the bathtub and then concluded that a universal basic income was the most realistic and efficient solution that one could implement in a reasonable time frame, essentially before the truck drivers get sent home, which is going to be a massive problem. And I'm sure we'll talk about that. And so then when you go to the drawing board and you say, hey, how am I going to get universal basic income across the finish line and make it reality in the five to ten years we have before the truckers jobs get automated, then running for president becomes really the only logical thing to do if you're trying to solve a problem. And that's what I do as an entrepreneur, is that you see a problem, you try and solve for it. So this to me was the clearest path. And how would you describe yourself politically? I suspect you and I are kind of similar, that I've traditionally been very Democratic leaning. I consider myself something of an independent at this point though I line up with Democrats and liberals on most social priorities. I think economically I'm like many entrepreneurs where I feel like there are a lot of things that you need private industry to tackle. And I am concerned about the fact that the government is not excellent at a lot of things that we wish it were excellent at. You've written this incredibly urgent book about universal basic income, also known as UBI. The case you make for the kind of economic emergency that is coming upon us is pretty dire, and we'll kind of run through your analysis. But let's just define UBI for those who haven't heard of the concept. It's actually a fairly old idea. I wasn't aware that it was as old as you discuss it to be in the book. What is universal basic income? Well, universal basic income is a policy where every citizen of a country gets a certain amount of money from the government, no questions asked, every period, essentially every month. And as you say, Thomas Paine advocated for it way back in the day at the founding of the country. And it's been baked into our country's DNA for decades. Where Martin Luther King was for it, milton Friedman was for it, fried Kayak was for it, richard Nixon was for it. It even passed the House of Representatives in 1971 and then installed in the Senate because of Democrats that wanted a higher income threshold than was being proposed. But 1000 economists signed a letter in the 60s saying this would be great for the economy and society. It's a policy where everyone gets a certain amount of money to meet basic needs every month. There's something you tackle early in the book, and I want to just get into the ethics here because I think there's a very strong bias, especially among conservatives, but it's a bias that I seem to encounter everywhere against this idea of giving everyone this free handout. And it's tied to this notion that there's some kind of work ethic that will be undermined here. And we'll talk about the objections to it. But there's this, I guess what I would call the illusion of a meritocracy that you deal with early in the book. And at one point you say, and this is a quote the logic of meritocracy is driving us to ruin. And then you go on to talk about how it's leading to this assumption that if someone isn't succeeding in today's economy, it's their fault, right? So the blame is on the person who is still poor, given all the opportunity that is available. And it ignores the fact that some people are simply luckier than others across every variable that is open to difference, that people aren't responsible for. You describe your own background. You talk about how your academic success was almost entirely the result of you being smart and good at taking tests. And these are not qualities about you that you created in yourself, and they're not the result of hard work and they're not the result of character. And I would argue if you know anything about my views on free will, I would say that a person's capacity for hard work and their character is also not something that they create. That's the last trench in which the people for the Meritocracy are fighting. But these dominoes, I think, should fall pretty quickly. How much can we blame someone who isn't as smart or happens to be bad at taking tests for not being able to fully capitulate the success you have found in your own life? And of course, as you discussed in the book, the differences don't end there. There are people who have two parents. There are people have one, there are people have none. Some people and their families enjoy perfect health. Some just get absolutely devastated by by the bad luck of of illness and injury. We know that all of these stresses and the kinds of scarcity associated with them are bad for people. They're bad. They they compete for cognitive bandwidth, as you describe, at some length in the book. So let's talk about the ethics of the situation and the kinds of resistance you get to the idea based on a sense that it's just simply wrong to hand out money to people. Well, one of the points I make is that it's not as if the truck drivers are about to get dumber and lazier overnight. It's just that their trucks are going to start driving themselves. It has nothing to do with their character and work ethic. It doesn't matter if they're a good truck driver or bad truck driver particularly. It's just that we can save $168,000,000,000 if we automate their jobs and probably thousands of lives because that's how many people die every year. So it works on both sides of dimensions, as you point out. Like, I certainly attribute most of my success through my early years just to the fact I was really good at filling out bubbles on scantron sheets. And the opposite is true for other people, where if you were not good at qualities that are academic system prizes, then you'll be increasingly marginalized and beaten down and told that you should think about a second rate or third tier like way of life for yourself. And that's what's appropriate. So the logic of the Meritocracy is about to well, it's breaking down around us because people are catching on. But more than that, right now we rely upon the marketplace to assign and attribute certain values to people's time. And one of the references I made to a group I spoke to last week was that you can have a radiologist who spent a dozen years in education, hundreds of $1,000 worth of training, spent ten years becoming excellent at detecting tumors on films. And then tomorrow, or literally right now, a computer is going to be a lot better at that than that radiologist because it can see shades of gray that the human eye can't detect and it can reference millions of films instead of hundreds or thousands. So the crudeness of the market as an effective allocator of value to our time is about to be exposed to people. And so that we have to evolve the next form of capitalism as quickly as possible or else we're going to find ourselves in almost unimaginable circumstances very, very soon. Yeah. So this market failure to value time is a huge problem. And I think at some point in the book you list all of the things that are important to us, obviously important to us, that the market currently doesn't capture or capture well. And that includes things like the environment, includes teaching and childcare. It even includes journalism. I would argue that it includes digital content almost in its entirety, just the way we have failed to fund quality online and we're now beholden to this advertising model that is incentivizing all the wrong things and driving us mad on social media. All of these are market failures. And as you point out, we're not only talking about blue collar jobs, we're talking about white collar jobs and traditionally high prestige jobs like, as you say, a radiologist or even doctors across the board. We could argue that the profession of nursing is more secure than the profession of oncology with respect to coming advances in AI. So there's kind of this barbell picture of very low end, low prestige, low compensation service jobs and super high end creative jobs that will be most likely spared certainly in any near term time frame. But in the middle you basically have everything from many service jobs and basically any job that has a significantly repetitive, routine characteristic. And I think at one point I think it was McKinsey that said that 73% of food prep jobs can be automated and the Federal Reserve categorized 44% of all jobs as routine and susceptible to automation. This is kind of a coming apocalypse for jobs that can happen very quickly. I mean, the radiology one is super poignant because it's just the next software update could achieve just the perfect cancellation of that kind of job. Yeah. And one of the most shocking things I uncovered in researching for the book was that this is no longer speculative. We're in the middle of it and we're dealing with it in the worst way possible, which is by ignoring it and pretending it's not happening. Where if you look at our labor force participation rate today, it's down to 62.7%, which is a multi decade low and the same levels as El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. Our life expectancy has declined for the last two years because middle aged Americans are killing themselves in record numbers where seven people die of opiates every hour and the disability rate is climbing to a point where now there are more Americans on disability than work in construction. When I tried to find out what happened to the manufacturing workers that lost their jobs in the Midwest, it turns out that almost half of them just left the workforce entirely and of that group, about half went on disability. So I studied economics in college and what classical economics says would happen is completely not happening if you actually dig into the numbers and the facts. So this is no longer something we can look ahead to and say, what are we going to do? This is ripping our society apart. The reason why Donald Trump is our president today is because of the spreading dysfunction. And right now the country is locked in a struggle between functioning and dysfunction, reason and unreason and scarcity and abundance and scarcity is winning. And that's what we have to reverse through universal basic income. It's our best way forward. So I want to talk more about just what this would mean and how it could be implemented and what the likely effects would be. But I want to deal with one objection upfront, because there's this kind of free market fundamentalism that one runs into, especially in Silicon Valley at the moment. There's a lot of libertarians in Silicon Valley. And actually, I was at lunch with some people, and one of the people included a very successful entrepreneur and VC now, but we were talking about UBI, and I told him I was going to have you on the podcast, and then he sent me an email, an incredibly generous, detailed email, offering kind of reasons to doubt this whole premise. And many of them you will have heard before, but it was very comprehensive and I won't read the whole email, but I just want to get at what was his central concerns here, because I've heard them many times and no doubt you have. And I think this is the kind of the first objection that you just have to figure out how to ram through if you're going to get people to take UBI seriously. And so it's it's this notion, which you've just expressed, that it really is different this time because we have obviously lived in a world for at least 150 years or so where we have noticed this effect of breakthroughs in technology where something comes online and it destroys jobs. We find new efficiencies in some labor process, and people can't envision what the replacement jobs will be. And so there's kind of this Luddite delusion. And what we're saying, what you're saying certainly is that this time is different, but some would argue here is that one, this is a failure of imagination. You could have gotten into a time machine and stood with the Luddites and shared their delusion and not seen what jobs would come in the wake of all the jobs that were being destroyed. There's this conviction that there will always be things for people to do, there will be jobs for as long as there's anything in this world that people want. I find this line of reasoning just so lazy and ridiculous and frustrating, where otherwise educated people will actually cite the Industrial Revolution and say, but look, 120 years ago we went through something similar and things were that's actually the argument. But saying that there will always be jobs as long as there are needs fails to take into account how the market values human labor. If a factory disintegrates in Michigan and then there are thousands of people out of work and don't have the money to somehow relocate to San Francisco or someplace, where the reason? And if they did, there'd be no way for them to actually manage the cost of living. I spent the last six and a half years walking the Midwest and the south and other places and just like that kind of ideological oversimplification just ignores realities on the ground like no one actually goes and hangs out. That was actually part of the picture he sketched here. He thinks the onus is really on the difficulty that people find moving to new centers of growth and the zoning restrictions that make it so costly to bring on new people in cities like San Francisco where the boom is happening. He thinks that if we want to help people we have to make it easier for them to move but fundamentally not treat them as liabilities who have to be paid for but to treat them as assets. Because in his view, people will always be assets. And his counterpoint also does boil down to this that if we weren't destroying jobs through breakthroughs in technology that would be synonymous with the lack of material progress, this is always the process that has to be hoped for destroying jobs. And if we're not destroying jobs in the medical sector there's no way people will be able to afford medical care in the future because there's no way to bring the cost down. So it is this kind of creative destruction picture of finding new efficiencies. But he thinks that the solution would be to just make it as easy as possible for people to relocate and find the new areas of growth. And that's something I'm very much in favor of. And that was something that universal basic income would help a great deal with, where if you look at the current rate of interstate relocation in this country, it's also at a multi decade low. Even as the opportunities are shifting, people are moving less and not more, they're hunkering down and that's a massive problem. As President, I would pay for people to move but giving them universal basic income actually does a lot of the same thing where we need to make our labor market much more dynamic and mobile. I will say, though, that trying to say, essentially, the market will get it right and we just need to push everyone to stay. Market mobile and market competitive will break down, meaning it's already breaking down and imagining that it's going to be a constant. Because, as you said, there's going to be massive job polarization, where if you look at the five most common job types in the country retail and sales, clerical and administrative, food service and food prep, truck driving and transportation and manufacturing, they're all going to shrink immensely. And many of those people will not realistically be able to identify new opportunities. Those five categories I just named are about half of all American jobs and most of those people have high school educations. The median truck driver is 49 years old, 94% male. The median retail worker is 39, majority female, about 60%. So we're talking about people who are working at 1214 $15 an hour jobs and then having those jobs disappear. It would help if they could magically move to another part of the country. It would help a great deal, but it's a multifaceted problem that's very deep and human. So yeah, let's tackle this the poster issue here of trucking because he actually sent me an article. You might have seen this article in the Atlantic that offers a counterpoint to this fear. There have been many studies that suggest that, as you said, trucking will be one of the first jobs and and one of the most consequential to be decimated by automation. But this Atlantic article, I think, citing a study that was somewhat curiously funded by Uber that doesn't automatically disqualify it, but I guess you should add a few grains of salt. It suggested that not only will trucking jobs not be hurt, but there, in fact, might be more people working in that industry. Because the cost of freight will go down and there'll be more demand. And for the longest time, it will be impossible to automate the final mile. So that you'll still need a person in a truck who will be better rested and will be able to do many other things, but who will have to navigate that final mile into a crowded city. And many of the other effects that people worry about, like tiny towns being bypassed by now sleeping truck drivers, their economies will be affected. But what do you say to this notion that this fear is fundamentally incorrect? That no matter how much we automate trucking, there will still be other jobs and even that the very same truckers would be doing because we're just not actually picturing how much truckers do apart from pushing the pedals and steering the wheel on a truck? Well, to me the truth is in the numbers, where if you see the number of truck drivers in this country has gone three and a half. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm presenting the audio from the event in Dallas I did with Christian Picciolini. Christian's written a wonderful book, White American Youth, which recounts his experience as a neo Nazi and leader of the Hammerskin Nation. In this podcast, we talk about how he got out of the movement, and we talk about the cult like dynamics of white supremacy and just the state of things on the extreme right in the US and Europe at the moment. Many related issues, a very long Q and A with the audience. I thought it was a great event. So without further delay, I give you Christian Piculini. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I've never been to Dallas before, so it is an honor. Thank you. I can only say that once so you won't hear me use that line again. Really, it's an honor to be here and I'm so happy all of you came out. I really think this is going to be a good one. I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite some time. My guest tonight became a white supremacist at the age of 14. And yes, well, he agrees with you. He became a leader in The Hammerskin Nation, which is one of the most violent hate groups in the world. And after leaving that, he became he founded a group called Life After Hate, which was a nonprofit dedicated to countering racism. He's given a TEDx Talk. He's won an Emmy for his role as a director and executive producer of an anti hate video campaign. He's the author of a really wonderful book, white American Youth my Descent into America's Most Violent Hate Movement and How I Got Out. And he's been profiled on 60 Minutes. He is a guy you should hear more from. So please welcome Christian Picchiolini. Christian, thanks for coming. I would have booed myself too, I think. Yeah, good to be like, really? Well, I've just spent an hour with Christian and he is like the nicest guy in the world. And when you read his book, which you really must do, you will be astonished at how you basically lived like a violent psychopath for many years. Let me pour you a long glass of water. Thank you. I appreciate that. Honestly, the level of violence described in this book is quite intense. You're obviously not a psychopath. How do you explain that chapter of your life? Well, I was recruited in 1987 into America's first neo Nazi skinhead group when I was 14 years old. And most people, I think, think that people who do that come from broken homes and deeply traumatic lives, and they do. But my life was pretty normal. My parents were Italian immigrants who came to the US in the 60s from Europe, and they were the victims of prejudice when they came. So it wasn't the way I was raised, but because my parents were immigrants, they had to work seven days a week, 14 hours a day to run a small business, and I never saw them. And at that age, growing up, I wondered what I had done to push them away. So I felt very abandoned, and I was very bullied and didn't have any friends. So I was searching very desperately for an identity, a community, and a purpose. And one day, at 14, probably at my lowest point, a man drove his car in an alley when I was smoking a joint. And he got out of the car and he pulled a joint from my mouth, and he looked me in the eyes and he said, that's what the Communist and the Jews want you to do to keep you docile. I was 14. I didn't know what the hell a Communist or a Jew or what the word docile meant. It's true. But it was the first time that I felt like somebody he was twice my age, and he would like somebody accepted me, like somebody was drawing me in, because he would make me feel proud of who I was. And I certainly was proud. But I was angry. I was angry at my parents, and I was angry at the world. This is inadvertently the best pro marijuana commercial ever. You should just have kept smoking that joint. None of this would have happened. Oh, my God. Actually, this story even puts more of the onus on you because you were not from a broken home. No. Right. So you're like a normal kid who just had a single conversation. One single conversation, but 14 years of feeling very marginalized and very much on the fringes. But there's so many kids in that position. The thing that one doesn't often think about when one has no connection to groups like this is this phenomenon of recruitment. And I think we'll talk about this because this is something that you're now trying to counter, and it's easy to picture if you take five minutes to think about it. But these movements do function very much like religious cults. Recruitment is a major feature of what's happening, and fear, rhetoric, the idea that if you don't do something, you're doomed. And there was very much that it didn't start out that way at first. When I was recruited, it started out with instilling, the sense of European pride that my ancestors were great warriors and artists and composers, and I grew up in an italian bubble, so I was very proud of being italian. But then it would kind of morph into something a little bit more sinister. It would morph into this idea that somebody now wanted to take that pride away from me. And then it started to go into naming who those people were. And of course, in the white supremacist movement, they will blame jews, african americans, immigrants, latinos, basically anybody who's not white, and they will even blame white people. So what did you actually believe, and how quickly did you ramp up into believing those things? Well, I literally went from trading baseball cards that week to shaving my head, getting a pair of boots, probably tattooing a swastika on me very quickly. At first, I faked it. I didn't know what the hell anybody was talking about. I was not political at 14 like young people are today, and I just kind of nodded my head and went along. It was a group of people to hang out with. But the way I got my most of my indoctrination was through music. There's a brand of music out there that at that time was very new to america. So we were listening to bands from britain and from germany of racist music made by white supremacists. That was propaganda. It was education. And that's how I got most of my education early on until I took over leadership of that organization at 16 years old, because the man who recruited me, who was america's first neo nazi skinhead leader, went to prison for a series of violent crimes. Again, it's very difficult to exaggerate the level of violence you guys were involved in, so it really is kind of a miracle that you didn't go to prison for what you were doing. Are we talking about dozens or hundreds of assaults? Well, I would say hundreds of altercations fights. Some of those were our group against other groups that were protesting people who knew they wanted to get into a fight with you. Right? Yeah. I mean, we had our version of antifa then they weren't called antifa, which is who is typically protesting these white supremacist groups these days. We had gangs of antiracist skinheads that we would fight quite often. In fact, we fought white people more than we fought anybody else, but there were absolutely dozens of violent attacks against people solely for the color of their skin or who they prayed to or who they loved. I mean, it was we were pretty brutal. But I can tell you something. I've I never met a white supremacist with positive self esteem, and also, I never met a white supremacist that didn't hate themselves and then used that self loathing to project it onto other people so that they didn't have to deal with their own pain. If they could make somebody feel worse than they felt, that made them feel better. More superior. How much of this was analogous to just being in an ordinary gang and getting off on the tribal component of power and violence? Quite a bit of it, I would say during the mid eighty s and early ninety s. It was very much like a gang. There was an identity, an outfit that we wore. We had our colors, we wore patches to identify us, and we operated in different cities and we were very organized. But then as the years progressed and I think we're seeing a lot of this now is it became much more organized when it started to infect a little bit more of the mainstream with a more palatable message. That's when I think it became much more dangerous. Have you gotten tattoos removed? That's a component of getting out of this life. Right. I am almost completely covered in tattoos, but I don't have any of my old tattoos remaining. I've never gotten them removed. I've had them covered over. Right. I'm glad to notice that you're not one of his geniuses who got a swastika on his forehead. I can't tell you how many geniuses I've had to help remove swastikas from their foreheads. You have to be especially certain of your ideology to know that you've wanted on your forehead for the rest of your life. If you have to tattoo a swastika on your forehead. You probably don't know very much about your ideology to begin with. I think I know a very prominent scientist who has the Apple logo tattooed on his bicep in case he forgets. Yeah, I got to think he regrets that now, but someday I'll have him on the podcast. But you do downplay the role of ideology, at least in this context. Right. It is a lot about male bonding and disaffection from the rest of the world and getting off on violence. And not clearly belief plays a part because you wouldn't know who you hate if you didn't have certain beliefs about white supremacy or the significance of race. The ideology is kind of the tie that binds them together. It's the license to be angry, to be violent. It's the projection of purpose. But I don't believe that ideology or dogma are what drive most people into hate movements or extremist movements. I really do think it's a broken search for identity, community, and purpose. And those are three fundamental needs that every human being has. We all want to know who we are, where we belong, and what we're supposed to do with our lives. And I have this theory that I call the pothole theory. If in our lives we hit potholes in the road of life and we don't have the support or the guidance to navigate around them like a family structure or friends, sometimes we get stuck in those potholes or we get detoured down a really dark alley. And those potholes can be anything from trauma, could be unemployment, could be mental illness. It could be seeing your father commit suicide at six years old and never dealing with that trauma. If we step in enough potholes, our search for identity, community, and purpose becomes very broken. And we hurt people. Hurt people. So if we are broken people, we tend to attract other broken people. So how did you reform yourself? What was what was the path out of this? Well, I was involved for eight years, so from the time I was 14 until I was 22. I'm 44 now, so I've been out for almost 23 years. And it wasn't one epiphany. It wasn't one magic moment where I went to sleep, seek, hiring, and then woke up saying, I love everybody. It didn't work out that way. It was a process of many of those moments. But ultimately, what it boils down to is I began to receive compassion and empathy from the people that I least deserved it from when I least deserved it. People that I thought I hated, who I'd never in my life had a meaningful interaction with or a conversation with began to, even though they knew who I was and what I had done, began to approach me with compassion. And they began to listen rather than talk at me and tell me I was wrong. And over time, the demonization that I had in my head, the prejudice, started to become replaced with humanization. And I realized that we had connections that were more similar than they were different, and that culture and language and food from all over the world are things that add beauty. The differences are actually what make us who we are, but it doesn't mean it makes us different than each other. Do you remember a first moment when doubt about your worldview became conscious? There were a lot of those moments, but one of the more powerful moments for me or the more compelling moments for me was when I was, I believe, 19 or 20 years old, and it was after a night of drinking. There was always drinking involved because we didn't really have the courage to do anything if we weren't drunk. But I was at a McDonald's late one night with some friends after midnight, and there were some black teenagers standing in line when we walked in. And I remember walking into that McDonald's and screaming that it was my McDonald's and that they had to leave. Of course, my language wasn't that kind, and of course they were intimidated by us, so they ran out and we chased them. And as the teenagers, black teenagers were walking across the street or running across the street, one of them pulled out a pistol and started to shoot at us. And on the second round, the gun jammed. When we caught that individual, we beat him almost within an inch of his life. And I remember looking down at him when I was kicking him, and his eyes were swollen and his face was covered in blood. And I remember in one instant, one of his eyes opened, and it connected with mine. And I felt empathy. I felt like this person who I didn't even think was a human being suddenly could be my brother, my mother, or my father. And I thought that it wasn't just about this person or this thing. It was about affecting so many people, what I was doing to this person. And I believe that that was the last time I was violent. Even though I stayed in the Movement after that, that moment stuck with me. And it was a moment where for years had kind of denied myself of empathy and compassion. And for whatever reason, that moment, it came back to me, and it had a very profound effect on me. And I wish I knew who that person was. I don't. Did you subsequently meet any of your victims, or was there kind of a backlog of suffering that came to clear its account with you? Yes, and it happened about five years after I left the Movement, and it was pretty serendipitous. When I left at 95, I went through a pretty dark depression. Even though I had internally denounced my beliefs, I was running away from my past, and I was miserable. And even though I was treating other people with respect, I wasn't treating myself with very much respect. And I remember in 1999, a friend of mine, a girl, came to me and she said, you know, I don't want to see you die, because there were mornings where I would wake up wishing that I hadn't woken up because I didn't know who I was anymore. And she encouraged me to go apply for a job where she just started working. Small company called IBM May. Never have heard of them. And I told her she was crazy. I said, I'm covered in Nazi tattoos. She knew. And I said, I'm a former Nazi. I went to six different high schools. I got kicked out of all of them, one of them twice. I didn't go to college. I didn't even have a computer. Like, what the hell would IBM want to do with me? And she said, Just go in there and tell them that you're good with people. And I was like, okay, sure, you got it. It's not the first quality that comes to mind. No. Granted, it was five years after I left. I was a better person, but I didn't believe I was a good person. Anyway, I went in and I had a couple of interviews with IBM, and I miraculously got the job. And I was so thrilled because I was going to learn how to network computers and install computers at a large school district. And until I found out where I would be going for my first day of work, it was my old high school, the same one I got kicked out of twice. IBM had no idea, no idea about my past. And suddenly I felt like a nervous first grader going to his first day of school because I thought, I'm going to walk in. Somebody's surely going to recognize me. I mean, I had held protests. I had tried to form white student unions. I had tried to do violent altercations with teachers. Yeah. Security guards, teachers, everybody. I mean, I was a terror at that school. And who walks by me within the first hour of me being there, but Mr. Johnny Holmes, the old black security guard who I got in a fistfight with that got me kicked out for the second time and let out in handcuffs. And he didn't recognize me when he walked by, but I recognized him. I was kind of skulking around dark corridors trying to avoid people and looking out, and I just knew that I had to do something at that moment. There was something inside me. I didn't know what that was going to be, but I decided I was going to follow him to the parking lot. Probably not a smart idea. And when I saw him getting into his car, I tapped him on the shoulder and I said, I'm sorry. It's all I could think to say. It's, like, all I could muster. And he looked at me after taking a step back because he was afraid when he recognized who I was. And he approached me with an extended hand, and I finally found some more words to explain to him what I had done and how I felt and how sorry I was for the terror that I caused him. And he hugged me and we cried. And he made me promise that I would tell my story. And that was in 1999. That's when I started writing my book. It just came out. It took me a long time to write that book, but he was the first person to to kind of pull the courage out of me, to one confront my past, because I started talking about it pretty immediately after that. Been doing it for now, almost 17 years. And he was the first person, I think, that recognized that this wasn't just a story of some messed up kid who joined a white supremacist group. It was the story of every young person who's searching for identity, community, and purpose that if we don't give them the right support and our young people are most vulnerable, that they could be deviated down this path because there are people looking for vulnerable people like I was. Yeah. So how do you think about forgiveness in this case and redemption, both with respect to yourself and with respect to other people, the kinds of people whose minds you're trying to change? I have to think there are people who are beyond the reach of empathy. Right. There must be people who you encounter. They don't have the handholds that you apparently had where the right look in the eye or the extended hand can be the bridge to a new life. There are people who are genuine psychopaths who are in these movements. So how do you think about that? It's a tough question, because if I were to deny empathy for anybody else, that means I would have denied it for myself or that I would have denied somebody else showing me that empathy. And I've also worked I've helped over 100 people disengaged from neo nazi and white supremacist groups over the years. And I've worked with some of the hardest, scariest looking, you know, people that nobody would give a chance to, you know, people who were born in the clan families who, you know, have that swastika tattooed on their forehead. I wasn't kidding about saying I've taken many people to have swastikas removed. And these are people that the whole world is given up on, and in many cases, they've given up on themselves. And I can tell you, these people are some of the best human beings that I know. Now, they've committed their lives to helping other people not go down the same path that they've gone. It's a hard question. I mean, trust me, I sit across the table from neo Nazis and white supremacists all the time, and there are moments where I want to jump across the table and I want to shake them and grab them and smack them. But I know that I can't because that pushes them further away, that the reasons that they even gravitated towards a movement like that is because they already felt marginalized. Actually, that brings me to a related question here. So what is the role of shame versus empathy? Because I think I've heard you talk about this. Because it's natural to want to shame people who were in these movements if it's revealed that, you know, so and so is a closet Nazi on Twitter. Everybody tries to get them fired. Yeah. It seems like the sane response is to penalize them for, at minimum, communicate how reprehensible that is and how the rest of the world sees it, for good reason. And then there should be some consequences for having deviated from the norms of tolerance that fully but you are very wary of pulling the shame lever. I don't ever pull the shame lever, but I do hold people accountable for their actions, for their words. I make them go through a process of making amends. When I work with people, they don't always want to work with me. Right. Sometimes it's a referral that I get from a parent or a loved one that says, my son or daughter is really into this, while you talk to them, just what are the logistics there? Are you just sitting in the living room when the kid comes home from school? Let me try and think. No, it's always voluntary, so I'm not deprogramming. I'm not doing interventions in a traditional sense where I'm surprising them in a room full of their family and saying, we need to talk and we're going off to treatment after this. It's not like that. I try and build rapport, right? I try and build trust. The fact that I understand their language because I used to say it is helpful. I may be a little desensitized more than the average person to some of the things that they say. That doesn't mean it doesn't make me angry, but I can sit and maybe listen just a little bit longer. But that's the key is I listen rather than tell them that they're wrong, rather than debate them or argue with them, which never solves anything. Nobody's ever changed because of a shouting match. But I listen and I listen for those potholes, and then I become a pothole filler. So when I hear chronic unemployment, I pair them up with a life coach or a job trainer. When I hear trauma or abuse, it's mental health therapy or mental illness, it's mental health therapy. And I'm trying to make people more resilient. And it's fascinating when you start working with somebody and they start to become more resilient and have more self esteem, they have less of a reason to blame the other for something that they feel is taken away because now they might be a little bit better equipped to deal with life. But I don't stop there because I do challenge the ideology, but I do that in a non aggressive way. I will introduce people to the people they think they hate. I've spent hours with Holocaust deniers and Holocaust survivors, islamophobes and Muslim families, just to allow them to humanize because nine and a half times out of ten, they've never ever in their lives met the people that they think that they hate. So the demonization becomes replaced with the humanization, and it works. It's the only thing that works. It's somewhat ironic that it always seems to be the Jews and none of these people have ever met Jews. I mean, it's like there's 15 Jews in the world. I think they're all my friends, and half of them are Buddhists. Now, I want to talk about the status of this movement now in the US. And Europe. Maybe let's start with the alt right, which is a phrase that I don't know when it was coined, but none of us knew it. Not a fan. Or the phrase white nationalism, because I know that those are phrases that they literally sat in a room and said, what can we call ourselves to make us seem a little less hateful? This is good to nail down, clearly. I think there has to be a spectrum of belief and a spectrum of ideological commitment, and there must be people who are happy to be a part of something, but they don't know what they're a part of. And you and I were talking backstage. It's kind of analogous to Scientology where you can become a scientologist. And I mean it's not so true now after South Park and all of these outings of the actual doctrines, but before South Park and before going clear in some of these other books and movies, you could have been a scientologist for a very long time without knowing just how crazy the doctrine was. So there are analogous situations in the white nationalist or white power movement where you've been indoctrinated into something that's like white identity politics, for lack of a better word, just like just pride in your whiteness and not liking affirmative action, say. And you might not even be self consciously a racist. And you were among these people who at a certain point had formed a conscious plan to go under the radar, right? At first it wasn't a conscious plan to go under the radar. At first it was very much like a cult where you detach yourself from everything that was important in your life your friends, your family, your hobbies and you go down a rabbit hole of information, misinformation and conspiracy theory that becomes your reality. And I can tell you that 30 years ago we recognized exactly what you're saying, that we were a small group that was too visible, and we said, these average American white racists who we want to recruit are getting turned off by the fact that we have swastikas on our foreheads, right? Or we have boots or shaved heads and we're talking very much about foreign kind of politics and national Socialism. So we made a very concerted effort 30 years ago to normalize. We said we're going to ditch the shaved heads and the clan robes and that's still around, but for the most part not. And we're going to trade in our boots for suits. We're going to go to college campuses to recruit where people are away from their families for the first time, are forming new opinions, may feel marginalized. We're going to get jobs in law enforcement. We're going to go to the military and get training, and we're going to run for office. And that's around the time that we see David Duke kind of get rid of the robe and wear the suit. And here we are 30 years later, and that is the representation of the white supremacist movement that we're seeing today, the Polos and the Khakis and the haircuts. And we decided to even take the language and make it more palatable, right? So instead of saying the global Jewish conspiracy that controls us all, we just started calling it globalization and we started saying things like the liberal media instead of the Jewish media terms that now some people are calling dog whistles. To me, they're a bullhorn. I hear these things and in context I know exactly what's being told when they're showing a picture of George Soros's face who is like enemy number one to the far right. But it has seeped into mainstream. Society where I think a lot of people are identifying with some of the same things that these white supremacists are, but don't know that they're being led down that path because it is a ramping up process, a normalization and then, bam, once you're in, you've already got the stigma. They know you can't leave. They know that you will get the threats, that you will be outed. So what do you have to go back to? It's like drugs. It's like a drug dealer. So let's talk about the gradations of commitment here. What is the landscape of white supremacy look like in the US. Now? It's hard to say because it's hard to see. We have people like Richard Spencer. We have kind of the pseudo intellectual Richard Spencers and the Jared Taylors of the world who wear the Brooks Brothers suits and look like professors, and you still have skin heads like I used to be. But in between, there is like this whole I can't see the audience right now, but they probably look a whole lot like you. I mean, there are dentists. There are some of our police officers. They're certainly in our military. There was a recent study of active service members that were polled about the instances of white supremacy that they saw. Like, I'm not just talking about racism, but, like, organized white nationalism, as we would think. One in four people in the military said that they see it on a regular basis. 25%. I mean, there's so many people that I've worked with that were recruited in the military by people like me, and I can't tell you how many people from my old organizations actually became police officers and prison guards and things like that and did that not having reformed themselves. That wasn't their way out. They were just they had the same beliefs, and they were they're still the same people, just much older. So how does Europe there's a kind of marriage between these movements in Europe, and it's kind of a global phenomenon. What's happening there? It's very similar. I mean, certainly Europe has a longer history with this. Obviously after World War II, there were many years of kind of resurgence of nationalism and then kind of the tamping down of it. But now we're seeing a massive resurgence in populism and nationalism that is using the refugee crisis and immigration as kind of the crux of their message. And they know that it's an easy message to spread because the minute a brown skinned person does something horrible, it's terrorism. And we scream about it, and every news is covering it for days on end. But how often have we ever heard white supremacist killings being called terrorism? Never, right? I'm not aware of any time where white extremism maybe except for the Timothy McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing, where white extremism has been called terrorism. And most people don't know, but Timothy McVeigh was very much a white supremacist. He hung around at area nations and was found with a copy of the Turner Diaries and one of the vehicles, which is a bible for white supremacist revolutionaries. But we just don't call it out as that. We call it mental illness, which many times it is, but we don't call it terrorism. Even though it's ideologically based, it's meant to incite terror, and it has all the same hallmarks of ISIS. In fact, there's really no difference between ISIS and American neo Nazis, except for the fact that white supremacists in America kill three times more people than any kind of foreign or domestic terrorist group does on American soil. 74% of all extremist killings in America since 911 have been committed by white supremacists. So how is Oklahoma City viewed in the white supremacist community? Is that just an unambiguously good thing to have happened, or is that going too far? No, they celebrate it. They celebrate it and they've tried to copycat it many times and have been stopped. Coincidentally. It was on April twentyTH, April 19, actually, the day before Hitler's birthday, which is a very special day for white supremacists. A lot of school shootings happen on April 20. I believe columbine happened on April 20. Those types of stories are what a lot of people who've been moved further down into the movement and who've lost a lot kind of aspire to do, we were trained, and we were training people to become these race war revolutionaries. We were stockpiling weapons. We were going into training camps to get paramilitary training. There was even at one point where a group from Tripoli, from Libya had come to contact me, or so I thought, to set up a meeting between me and Mommar Gaddafi because he wanted to funnel money to American groups who were fighting Jews in America. So it's just a matter of time, and I've been predicting this for years. I believe it's just a matter of time before we see white supremacist groups from Europe and the US starting to work with extremists from the Middle East. Because if you think about it, while it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, you think they'd hate each other, they have a common enemy that is greater than their hate for each other. Just gets better and better for the Jews, doesn't it? Then I have to call some of my friends. We're going to have to turn up the pressure on that Zionist banking conspiracy. You know, that doesn't exist, right? Check your bank accounts, people. What is the connection to Russia? Half of what you say here or all of what you say may sound like a conspiracy theory to anyone who's on the right wing here. What's been your experience looking for a connection between flight supremacy and Russia in the US. So I believe I may have been the first Kook screaming about Russian collusion. Way back before the words Russia and collusion were put together, I was I was working with a 17 year old girl. The parents had contacted me because they were concerned about this girl who was making their daughter, who was making white supremacist propaganda videos, recruitment videos, and she was becoming quite popular online. So they called me in, and they said, we're really worried. We just discovered this. And we know that she's being influenced by this 23 year old boy who lives in Idaho. She was in Florida, and he was in Idaho, and supposedly he was a German American boy who was a devout neo Nazi and had recruited her and was her boyfriend and had started to get compromising photos from her. And he was not, I could tell you after many hours and days of research, not a 23 year old German American living in Eagle, Idaho. He was a 35 year old Russian man living in St. Petersburg. And he was not only befriending this girl as her boyfriend, but he was doing it to at least a dozen other young girls as young as 14 years old, trading getting photos from them that were inappropriate and then using it to blackmail them. So I started to get really seriously into this because there was a crime being committed. And this is 2016. This was October I'm sorry, this was August of 2016, so before the election. And as I started to dig into this guy, I discovered that he was part of a ring of people that were very connected. And I found connections dating back to, like, 2010 that proved this, that had created tens of thousands of fake social media profiles, and they were all very neo Nazi and pro Trump. And I started to really just track them, and I'm like, what the hell is this phenomenon? Why are all these, like, Trump voters, like, all of a sudden having Make America Great Again hats with a swastik on it and having names like himler? So I started to track them, and I started to see this group form, and then I started to notice that their screen names and pictures were changing from white supremacist accounts to ISIS accounts, and then some of them would change to black lives matter accounts, and then some of them would change to feminist accounts. With and I started to see that the intention was just to put as much hateful information against these other groups out there to create this discord. And I started to pinpoint people. I actually found who the Russian guy was. He made a mistake in 2009 where he made a post using a screen name that he was still using but was attached to his real name. This was before, apparently he went to go work for the FSB in Russia, where he graduated in linguistics from the University of Moscow. Right. So I went to the FBI in October of 2016, and I said, there's something weird going on. I'm not quite sure what the hell is going on. But everything was pointing to Russia, because at that time, I had presented this information to the parents and to the girl, and I said, first of all, this guy's not who you think he is. He's a bad guy, and he's this guy. His name is Mikhail whatever his last name was. And she didn't believe me. So she leaked the information to her boyfriend. Within 3 hours of me leaving that house, 75 domain names that I own, that I run for my nonprofit, for myself, my parents, and their restaurant, were all hacked by Russian malware. Within 3 hours, 75 domain names. And I went to the service providers, and I said, what is going on? And they said, We've never seen an attack like this. So at that point, I went to the FBI again until October 2016, and I said, I've got 33 gigs of screenshots, videos, chat, conversations, phone calls, because now I was starting to antagonize these people to try and get more information. And I handed it over to them, and they said, thank you very much. We're busy reading Hillary's emails right now. We'll get to it when we get to it. And then I said, you should really look at this before election day, because I think there's something going on here. And I still haven't heard from them, so who knows? But now it's starting to come out that all that information that I found is actually being validated. They love Russia. I don't know why. What is this connection with Russia and Putin? So the white nationalist, or alt right movement that we see today has a very strong connection to Russia. They revere Putin. He's a strong man. They see him as like this ethno nationalist dictator. And in fact, many neo Nazis from Europe are going to train in paramilitary style in Russia and then going to fight on the Ukraine border, funny enough. And this, you know, I can't substantiate it, but coincidentally, so many of the propagandists for the American white supremacist movement are really beautiful Russian girls who speak perfect English, who are now starting to be found out. There was an article published today, there was another one yesterday about a teacher teaching grade school who was teaching kids about white supremacy. And then she had a double identity where she was bragging about the fact that in school she was teaching kids. She was found out to have a third identity, which was Russian. But, yeah, I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's so much that Russia is supporting this ideology or if they're just trying to create this movement of discord that they know is our weak spot. Frankly, racism in America is something that we've never really dealt with. Every society that's faced a genocide, let's say, like African Americans did during slave times, have somehow dealt with it, right? They've acknowledged it, and they've worked through it. We've never, I don't believe, really acknowledged that we have had that problem in our country, at least not from the top. You go to the South Lake here and tell me if I'm wrong, but I think we learn about the Civil War a little bit differently than we did in Chicago, right? In Chicago, in the north, you all were the bad guys. Right. And to you down here, it was Northern Aggression. Right. We learn about it differently. So even in our own country, we're, like, propagandizing our history. So I don't know that we've ever fully dealt with the issues that our country has had. What do you think the solution is at the level of our public conversation? At this point? We take social media and the fake news problem and the way in which this phrase fake news has been weaponized against real news so that you can even say fake news about anything that you don't like. And it seems to be an adequate retort to whatever is being expressed. I even hate using it even though it's true it exists, but I hate even calling it what it is because of that. I think the biggest thing under attack right now is truth. And once we lose it, it's gone. Because what do we what's our benchmark? Yeah. And I'm terrified of that, because the truth has to exist. There has to be something that we can hold onto. But what's happening in America today? What I would suggest is we're at a point where we're screaming from the extremes right now. We're being made to choose a side, really? And screaming to try and get to the middle doesn't work. I think we need to start in the middle and acknowledge the things that we have in common. The fact that we're Americans, the fact that we love our children and want them to be healthy and have a good education, that we want fellow Americans to have jobs and we want to have a good economy. Those are all things that we can agree on pretty much anywhere in the world where you go and you ask them, what's the most important thing to you? That's what they'll say. I want a job. I want my health. I want my kids to be happy. But you could actually even start a conversation with a current white supremacist and get agreement on those values. Absolutely. And if we start there, eventually we'll go off track, but we will have established that humanization that we can always go back to. If we start from the extremes and try to get to the middle, we never get there. We have to find a way to start in the middle again. Let's acknowledge what we have in common, what we want America to be, and then let's work from there. Let's listen to each other more than anything else. Well, I'm increasingly worried that the left is fully capable of making a catastrophe of this because the swing into identity politics in many cases seems to be all the justification a white supremacist would need to indulge his or her own white identity politics? Oh, absolutely. When somebody on the left attacks first of all, can we just stop calling republicans nazis because they're not nazis? That word has a very powerful ben Shapiro gets called a nazi. Ben shapiro is an orthodox jew, and he gets called a nazi. That said, I can't tell you how many parents email me and say, we're jewish, but my son is involved in this, and I'm worried he's going to be the next hill in roof. Like, I'm seeing signs of this and that. This is it's a social movement, folks. That's why I don't believe it's about ideology. It's about this identity, community, and purpose. And let's face it, our young people right now, we're failing them. They can't afford college if they're lucky enough to even be able to attempt to go. There's no guarantee of a job after graduation. Our whole country is in a state of division and turmoil right now where people who used to get along can't even look at each other. And I'm talking about relatives, even in some cases, what is there to look forward to for them? And I'm confused. As an adult, I can't imagine what a 14, 1516 year old is going through. So I think we are failing our youngest people. And because they feel lost, many of them are gravitating to some of these very ideological movements because they're idealistic, they're passionate, but they may have marginalization issues, and they may hear something that resonates to them. And it's a scary time because I am seeing a lot of young people who normally wouldn't be attracted to these types of extremist ideologies start to go there. And I'm talking about, you know, a young white girl from middle america who flies to syria to join ISIS, and also the young, you know, white boy who decides to walk into a church and murder nine innocent people because of the color of their skin. What was the significance of charlottesville? Has that been amplified just because of our current political obsession? Or was it as significant as people who are worried about it seem to think? I spent a week in charlottesville just recently, and I spoke to really all the players that were involved, from community members to heather Heyer's mother, the young woman who was killed, to the white supremacist in town, to the law enforcement. I spoke to everybody and very much what you said earlier, and I don't think we touched on it. Where the left is maybe enabling some of this right now, the fear from the community, even though it's a progressive community, is of the protesters and not the white supremacists. I don't know that that's very grounded in reality. But the left shoots themselves in the foot when they adopt the same tactics of the people that they're protesting against. So when we see violence come from the left, or when we see attacks of hate come from the left, or their only mission is to destroy white supremacists lives, that's not helping the situation. I tend to want to draw them in closer because they went that way, because they felt pushed away to begin with. Pushing them away is not going to make them any happier. It's going to actually entrench them more into this ideology and this fear of having lost something. And they use that as a narrative. They spin it. So when they're attacked, they become the victims, and they use that. We were just there for a free speech rally. We were just there for a Unite the Right rallies. See these really innocuous terms that they like to put on rallies. It was not about free speech. It was not about Confederate monuments. It was about going into a progressive place intentionally to elicit a violent response, because they knew the tension was there and they got it. And the minute that they were attacked, they became the victims. You see how our rights are being taken away. You see how white people are being treated in this country. That's their intention. They go to progressive places on purpose. That's why we heard about the Berkeley rally. That's why we heard about Charlottesville. That's why they go to college campuses. That's why they went to Skokie and marched in a Jewish neighborhood in the 1970s, the American Nazi Party. They do that to provoke them, to provoke violence. Two things that they love silence and violence. When we're silent, sweep it under the rug, they grow. When we're violent, they use it as a narrative. Yeah, there's another even more insidious aspect to this, which is something that Steve Pinker pointed out recently. Actually, it was an amazingly kind of compounding irony because his pointing this out. So he was on a panel somewhere, and he made the point that I'm about to make, but then that got chopped up by some leftist imbecile to make him sound like he was endorsing the alt right. It's this sort of compunctionless vilification of people that is the real virus here. But Steve's point was that the problem with silencing free speech on the left. Which is why if you hear that there was some demonstration at a college campus tomorrow that forced some invited speaker to not give his or her speech and that people were spit on and that the event couldn't happen, it's like 99% a leftist phenomenon now. I mean, this is what the left is doing on college campuses. And Steve's point was that the problem with not letting conservative and even right wing views get expressed on college campuses is that you don't in any taboo view, whether it's the intelligence and race and the gender differences, whatever, is considered a third rail in intellectual life. Now, the problem with not letting these views get discussed honestly and at length is that people. First of all, certain truths are being concealed and certain conversations are being deemed off limits, and people aren't developing intellectual antibodies to the bad ideas that get accreted around these topics. And so if for the first time in your life, you're hearing what seems like perfectly honest talk about IQ, say, but it's coming from someone like Jared Taylor, right? Well, then you're on this Greece slide into being indoctrinated into this kind of racist worldview, and the primacy of free speech has to be such an obvious value for the left. And the fact that we're losing sight of it is really the most worrisome thing here. It's disturbing to me that in many cases, the left is adopting when I say the left, I mean, that's a pretty vague term, right? We're talking about like, radical left for the most part. When they adopt the same tactics of their enemies, do they really become any different than those people? In many cases, what you're seeing is the door on the left is closed to anyone who makes any kind of sense on taboo topics. The classic case is, and perhaps we should spend a moment on this, because there this is a sign, a very troubling sign of the, of the moral confusion that the left is capable of. So you take a group like the the Southern Poverty Law Center, which used to be, I'm sure they imagine they still are this flagship organization, which is like the last bulwark against the white nationalism and Christian identity and all of this craziness we've been talking about, they're the people who sue the KKK and destroy at least chapters of their organization. But now they have put people like Majid Nawaz, who, you know, and ayan Hersiali, on lists of anti Muslim extremists, and they just put Christina Hoff Summers, this slightly right of center academic philosopher, on some list of bigotry. This is completely confused. And when you challenge them, Majid is suing them prior to announcing anything about a lawsuit suing them. First, we should acknowledge, because it's dangerous to put Muslim reformers and ex Muslims on lists of any kind, but a list of anti Muslim extremists, it's putting a target on their backs. And it's just incredibly pernicious because journalists use the SPLC as a resource. They're just trying to figure out who's who. Is Richard Spencer really a Nazi or not? The first call goes to a group like that. So this is not only objectionable, it is dangerous behavior. And the problem is, no one admits errors here. The person who did this at the SPLC has been contacted endlessly. I mean, I tweeted this and Majid tweeted this, and I on tweeted this, and it continues, and people just double down. People do not admit I mean, you have to spend five minutes on Majid before you realize this is not an anti Muslim extremist. First of all, he's a Muslim. He's a crazy he's not even an ex Muslim, and we have the luxury of both knowing him personally and didn't know that until tonight, but yeah, no, I would agree with that. I mean, Majid, his story is a lot like mine. I mean, he's a former extremist. Not only not an anti Muslim extremist, he was a former Muslim extremist. Right. He has a long way to go before he becomes an anti Muslim extremist. Sorry, I think part of the problem let me just preface this. I've respected the SPLC's work because I do trust their work. But I think that the arena has gotten so blurred now that it's easier to call somebody a member of a hate group or to call an organization a hate group if they're talking about something that maybe is uncomfortable to talk about. I know Majid. I know he doesn't hate anybody. I know he's not running a hate group. And it's unfortunate that he was added to that list. I was very surprised, and I even communicated to him when it happened that it was, like, astonishing to me that that could happen. I don't know what to say about that, other than it's a mistake that they made. He should be added to the list of extreme dressers. He is a great dresser. Whoever wears a pocket square should be on some list. That British colonialism. I think that rubbed off. He's a sharp dresser. But yeah, no, it's tough. I mean, there are a lot of groups out there. The AntiDefamation League, I think, is a pretty trusted source for monitoring hate groups. And they make mistakes, too. I mean, they came out when the attack in Parkland happened at first with Nicholas Cruz, and they were essentially fooled by far right trolls into believing that he was a neo Nazi. And then it came out that he really was a neo Nazi, that there was a swastika carved on the cartridge of the magazine, and that there were posts and Instagram chats that were so in that case, they made a mistake that ended up being correct. But it's hard to say what went into that decision or what goes into decisions. All I can look is history of what they've done. They've managed to bankrupt white supremacist organizations like the White Aryan Resistance, and they've done amazing work to try and dismantle white supremacy in the country, but it's clear that they're also fallible. Yeah. Well, on that note, I want to open it up to questions from all of you, because for people, in my view, the reason to do these events is to make it a proper conversation. There you are. Awesome. Nice to see you. There's people up there, too. So there are two mics. There should be two mics left and right. And sorry to anybody who had a hangover and just had bright lights, and I should say so before we start, I would encourage you to make your question actually a question. And this is not so much. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber only content content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today, I'm speaking with Russ Roberts. Russ is the president of Shalem College in Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He also hosts the award winning weekly podcast Econ Talk, which I highly recommend. And he's the author of five books, including How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life and most recently, Wild Problems a Guide to the Decisions That Define US. And that is the topic of today's conversation. We discuss the shortcomings of economics as a science. The power of books, the difference between wild and tame problems. Darwin's embarrassing attempt to rationally decide whether to get married the utility of techniques like decision analysis incommensurate goods free. Riding counterfactuals how the decisions we make change us, how bad we are at predicting future experience, changing moral norms, effective altruism free speech whether we are in fact making moral progress social media, truth versus comfort, problems with consequentialism, free will, meditation and other topics. Anyway, I really enjoyed this one. I hope you do as well. And now I bring you Russ Roberts. I am here with Russ Roberts. Russ, thanks for joining me. Great to be with you. So I've been looking forward to this. You are in a truly OG podcaster. You got into the game earlier than I did. You have a great podcast, Econ Talk, and you have a wonderful new book, Wild Problems A Guide to the Decisions That Define US, which is a great audio book, too, I think I consumed it all as audio on a few long walks, and it's especially good for that. You're a great company for those hours, so thank you for what you're doing and perhaps you can summarize your intellectual and academic background that you're bringing to those projects. Thanks for the kind words about the podcast and the book. I should warn my podcast listeners that the audiobook is not read by me, which they have complained about, but in a friendly way. I was disappointed, but it's actually still good. Thanks. I'm glad to hear it. My journey is a little bit off the beaten track, but I think the more you talk to people, the more you find out that there is no beaten track. But I started off as an academic economist, trained at the University of Chicago, taught at Rochester, Stanford, UCLA, Washed University in St. Louis, and George Mason worked for a number of think tanks, including the Hoover Institution that I'm still affiliated with. But somewhere in there, I got interested in communicating economics to a general audience. So I wrote a few novels that teach economics. I wrote a couple of rap videos, started a podcast, wrote animated poem. And strangely enough, about a year and a half ago, I got asked to be the president of a college in Jerusalem, shalom College, israel's only liberal arts college with the core curriculum and philosophy, history, great books, great texts, and decide to move to Israel and be the president of a college. So it's an unusual journey. I used to be really interested in economics. I'm still a little interested in it, but part of the reason I'm the president of this college is I got a lot more interested in philosophy, the life well lived. Yeah. And education more generally, which is quite a hard thing to do. Well, it turns out, yes. Did you have a deep connection to Israel already? Had you spent a lot of time there, or was this truly a blind adventure? Well, I'm Jewish. I've been to Israel before I moved here, probably a dozen times, maybe more. I've always loved visiting, never planned. To live here was not a life for some Jews. It's a dream to move to Israel and become a citizen. It was not our plan, but we jumped anyway when this opportunity came along to be presidential in college, did you have any Hebrew at that point? A little bit, katzat. Now I have a little bit more. My wife is semi fluent in a conversational way. I'm embarrassing, but trying to get better every day. Nice. My college, all of our courses, almost everyone is taught in Hebrew, so that's even though I'd like to sit in on, say, the Plato and Aristotle class or Homer or Shakespeare, I wouldn't get that much out of them, unfortunately. Maybe next year. We'll see. Right. So before we jump into the book, which raises a lot of topics that are kind of core to my interest, you just said a few things about your perhaps waning interest in economics and the difficulty of charting a path through education that retrospectively makes a ton of sense. Perhaps you can give me some of your thoughts on the limits of economics as a discipline. I think many of us who are lay consumers of its products tend to marvel at how unlike a science it often seems to be. Sam, don't tell anybody. So give me the kitchen confidential version of economics. But perhaps also you can say something about how you view the enterprise of education at this point and its challenges. So economics is very mathematical as it's taught at the graduate level, and it's taught as if it were science. It's the science of human behavior in graduate economics and in undergraduate economics. I think that's the wrong word. It certainly is a formal way of thinking about human behavior. And the essence of that formal way of thinking is maximization. We're trying to get the most out of our money or our time. I think one of the misconceptions people have about economics is they assume it's only about the stock market or GDP or unemployment or interest rates. It is about many other things. It is about how we spend our time. It is about the power of leisure and it's about the fact that if I choose one thing, I can't choose something else. So in many ways, economics is the study of choice. Choice under constraints. I don't have an infinite amount of money. I don't have an infinite amount of time. And in particular, economists are interested in both individual choices and then how choices aggregate in what are called markets. It's a funny word because we think of a market as like a farmers market or a stock market. But when economists talk about markets they mean the complex dance between buyers and sellers in, say, housing or restaurants and the prices that emerge from that process. And understanding those things and thinking about them thoughtfully is a tremendous craft and it's very valuable and it's very useful. But economists were kind of imperialist. One of my professors, George Diggler, said there's only one social science and we are its practitioners. Not the most humble view. I'm a big fan of George, but he was a very funny man, rare in our profession. But what he meant by that was the other social sciences, they don't really have any models. They have some theories, but they're not rigorous. Whereas economists, they can predict, they can do sociology, they can do anthropology, they can do psychology. And I was trained that way. And it's a powerful toolkit for thinking about human behavior but it has shortcomings. There are many things it's not very good at looking at. And as I've gotten older, I've started to think that those things that it's not very good at looking at are the things that most of us care the most about our sense of belonging. The tribes we're in, the Kin folk we have, the sense of dignity that we crave the feeling that we matter, that we're important, that people pay attention to us. These are the things that, with respect these are the things that we care about. These are the things that bring deep satisfaction not just happiness or fun or pleasure. When economist talks about pleasure, they mean everything. They mean the ice cream cone, they mean a good job well done. They mean great vacation. Problem is that calculus of adding up pleasures and taking away pains which is a fundamental utilitarian calculus I think his limitations, when applied to the things I was talking about earlier family love, belonging, transcendence the things that we care about deeply. I don't think the tools of maximization fit very well in there. I think we need other tools, other ways of thinking about it. So as I got older, I got less interested in sort of not sort of. I got less interested in what economists tools tell us. And we're interested in the parts of the world and our lives that economics has less to say about. I discovered Adam Smith's other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is a book about ethical behavior, the life well lived, why we do decent things to one another rather than merely be selfish and grasping. He says in there that the pursuit of money and wealth is a fool's game and will tarnish your soul. So those kinds of more philosophical thoughts became more interesting to me. The other thing that I think is related, which I think you're hinting at when you asked about education, is that most education as it's practiced in the United States and around the world, is the passing on of information and knowledge. And we live in a world where we have tremendous access to information and knowledge via Wikipedia, via YouTube, via podcast. And what I think education should be about is the kindling of the fire that is the human mind. That's Plutarch's line didn't say it in English. The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. I think most education around the world, high school, college, and even sometimes in graduate school, there's a lot of filling of vessels and not much kindling of a fire. And I've gotten interested in the question of how do you allow someone to explore a great text. You read a great book on your own. When you're reading the company of other people and with a great teacher to guide you, you're changed, you're transformed when it's done correctly. And that process, which is sadly missing in most undergraduate education, I think, around the world, is magic. And when you've experienced it, most of us never did as an undergraduate. But when you do experience it, it's not just sharing ideas with other people, it's sharing ideas in a thoughtful way under the guidance of another great mind, the teacher. And that gives you superpowers, superpowers of how to read, how to think, how to talk with other people respectfully. I think it's the essence of what I think of as real education. It's what we try to do here at Chillim College. We don't always succeed, but that's the gold standard. Yeah. And I often think about reading a great book as a conversation, even though it's it is in one direction. As you point out, if you're having a larger conversation with a great teacher and your own colleagues about the book, it definitely enriches the experience. But yeah, that's the wonderful thing about books. We have some very smart and in many cases wise persons side of a conversation that they have taken, in many cases, years to prepare. So we're getting the best of their thoughts and we're getting them across the centuries. It's really amazing. I mean, what an amazing technology a book is. How strange, though, that even though it's one sided, when you read it, ten years later, the second time they're saying something different. A really great book is a conversation in that sense. And Agnes Callard, the Philosophers said to me when I had her on Econ Talk, she said, great teaching is teaching you how to talk to dead people. And that's the magic of a book. It's extraordinary. And there are a lot of really talented dead people worth talking to. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about your book again. The title is Wild Problems, and you distinguish wild problems from tame ones. Maybe that's a good place to start. What are wild problems and what are tame ones? Tamewoods are ones that we can find solutions to using data and algorithm evidence. What movie do I want to watch? Saturday night? Get a pretty good idea of what might be interesting to me from recommendations that I would get online. If I want to get from Boston to Chicago and be traffic as much as possible ways, or Google Maps will help me get there. I want to get to the moon. It's a tame problem. It's not an easy problem, but we know how to do it. It's a certain set of steps. There's a recipe and certain problems in life. Recipes are the way to go. An algorithm is the way to go. And we're spoiled. We have lots of those techniques for many of the challenges we face in life. We have websites to give us recommendations. We have crowd, the wisdom of crowds to help us with recommendations even more richly. And we'd like most of life to be that way. And most of life is actually it's a remarkable time to be alive with the tools that we have for those kind of problems. Problem is, there's a handful of problems in our lives that aren't like that, where data and evidence are very little value, and the standard decision making tools, I argue, are not helpful, in fact, can mislead us. These are problems where we don't have a lot of data, either because things aren't measurable or the people who have access to the experience can't share it easily. It's hard to put those things into words. Or after I make a decision one way or the other, I'm going to be a different person. I'm going to be changed. And so there's even a question about the rationality is well defined. So these kind of problems are whether to get married, who to marry, whether to have children, how many, where to live, what kind of career to pursue. On some of these problems, you can get some information. You can get some information about the average salary in a field, for example, may or may not apply to you. You can certainly ask people if they're happy if they're married or happy if they have children. But I think those are very thin, unbelievably thin and sterile ways of thinking about these kind of choices. And as I suggest in the subtitle, these are the decisions that define us. They turn out to tell us both who we are and who we can be. And I think for many of these decisions, trying to make a cost benefit analysis, which is the economist central element of the economist toolkit, is, I think, the wrong way to go. The most important pieces of those cost benefit analysis of that cost benefit analysis are hard to measure and can't be entered thoughtfully. And we're often deceived by the ease with which we can quantify certain things, and that often pushes us to ignore others. I make the analogy of the person coming home from the party can't find their keys. They've lost them. Someone comes to help out. Finally, the person helping says, are you sure this is where you lost them? No, I don't think it is, but this is where the light is best, and I think it's under the street light. And I think a lot of times we're seduced by where the light is best. And often the most interesting things are in the shadows, in the darkness. So part of my book is trying to help people live in the darkness. Well, I want to get into some of the core ethical and metaethical issues around how we conceive of what is good and the questions about measurement and aggregating utility. I know you have concerns about the limits of utilitarianism or consequentialism, as I usually refer to it, and I share some of those, or at least I acknowledge the veracity of some of those concerns. But I think there might be some daylight between us philosophically there. And all of this has implications for other things you and I have both talked about in other contexts, like effective altruism, which is in vogue at the moment. But before we get down to something like bedrock, let's stay at a level above that and just kind of around the pragmatics of just how people make decisions, how they can make decisions, what is worth thinking about and how, as you point out, so much of our recipes for a good life don't really prove that useful when you're trying to weigh up the pros and cons of a major decision that defines us. And as an example, in your book, you spend a lot of time looking at Darwin's, certainly comical, but in the end somewhat silly checklist for deciding the pros and cons of marriage. Perhaps you can describe what Darwin was up to there, and we can use that as a jumping off point. Sure. So Darwin was 29 years old. He'd taken his trip on the Beagle, and he's thinking about settling down. So he wasn't sure it was a good idea. And being a rational person, he made a list of the pros and cons of marriage. It's a really embarrassing list for starters. At one point, he says a wife would be better than a dog anyway to come home, too. Very low bar. One can be thankful he wasn't test piloting this on Twitter, because, yeah, he'd be done. We would not have had the origin of species. Exactly. He'd be done. It's a low bar, even in the 19th century. But that part there's a little bit of it that's embarrassing when you look over the list and it's a little bit disorganized. I reorganize it a bit in the book. When you look at it, the negatives of marriage are both more numerous and more serious. The positives are things like someone to come home to, maybe companionship. The negatives are things like stuck with their relatives, socializing with them, the expenses of childbearing and child rearing, the tragedies of losing children to illness. Won't have time to do your science, won't make an impact on the world. It seems like a no brainer when you look at the list. If someone brought this list to you and said, what do you think? You'd say, well, obvious choice, don't get married. You risk not becoming one of the greatest scientists of all time in return for what he calls female chitchat. Another less than vulnerable summary. So despite that, he then scribbles a we have his journal, so we have this in his own hand. At the end, he writes this stream of consciousness narrative about how horrible it would be to be returning it alone to his dingy apartment at night. All of his rational procon list falls apart. He just finally says, I'm going to marry Mary. Mary. Exclamation point after each one. QED quite a semistratum that was to be proved. It's over. It's like a math proof got to get married. And there's a puzzle there. Why would the decision that he clearly favors in the sober light of day, which is to not marry, because it's going to be likely not worth it to him. And and by the way, Kafka makes the same list and he overwhelmingly decides it's also similar. It looks horrible. And so he doesn't get married, but Darwin does. And I think it's about six months later he marries his cousin, which is amusing because it means that the relatives who's worried about her'own relatives anyway, why? What was he thinking? The standard answer would be, well, he just made an emotional decision. He went with his gut. I don't think that's what's going on when you look at his list and if it would be true of anybody making such a list, and actually opened the book with a conversation with a friend who was trying to decide whether to have a child, and he and his wife made a list of the pros and cons. And he told me after they made the list, they couldn't decide. There were so many pros and so many cons that were so seemingly evenly weighted and certainly darwin and my friend, I would suggest, don't know much about marriage or childbearing child rearing, child raising. Certainly in the case of marriage, there's nothing in darwin's list about love, sharing a journey through life together, the ups and downs of that emotional experience. He didn't have any access to it. How could he know about those things? Now, he could read novels. I don't know if he's a big reader in novels, but his married friends, if he had any, which he probably did, he could see them socializing. But most people who are married can't explain the specialness of staying with somebody for decades. They can't explain and by the way, it's not all rosy, of course. Certainly you can't appreciate the upside, but there's also sometimes a very bad downside. All of that is veiled from most of us before we make a decision about whether to get married or not, or whether to have children, or whether to move to israel, or whether to become a chemist rather than a lawyer or a poet. And so how do you think about that? I mean, how do you when you confront that? And I think what darwin confronted was, I see myself I have always seen myself as a married person, as a father. And so he he took a leap. He married. He had many children. Tragically, some of them died. But he had a very good marriage most of the time. Towards the end, he had some issues with religion, and his wife was very religious. But for most of his life, they had a blessed marriage, a wonderful marriage. And ironically, one of his favorite things she did, I don't know if I mentioned this, was where they might have to leave London. What if she doesn't like london? She didn't like London. They had to move to the countryside. Turned out he liked it. She liked coming home or spending time with her at night. She would read to him so many of the things that make marriage and a shared life with another person special, he didn't know about, but something in him knew that it was worth making a leap over, even though it didn't appear to be a good choice. And I give many examples in the book of people from the world of science, math, very analytical areas, where these kind of decisions, they make what appears to be an irrational decision, and I would suggest it's not irrational, and neither are they making a decision with their gut. What they're doing is they're recognizing, as I think we all can and should and sometimes do, that these decisions are more about more than just how happy will I be day to day with another person or with a child or living in a different place or in a different kind of career. Those are not the only things we care about. Those day to day concerns, which I call narrow utilitarianism, they're not irrelevant. They matter. They're what economists tend to focus on. They are only, though, part of the story. The rest of the story is the overarching narrative of our identity, our sense of self, of who we are, and the virtues of those identities and who we could become, not just who we are. Now, in the economist model, you have a set of preferences, and you try to get the most out of them. The idea that you might want to change your preferences, that they might be unattractive or immoral, is rarely it's not ever hardly ever considered. But in real life, we should consider those things. We should consider who we want to be, who we want to become, and those choices we're talking about set us on those paths. And so it's about more than just the day to day pleasure or pain. I argue in the book, I don't know if you're married, Sam. I don't know if you have children. We have both. I'm married. I have four children. It is very possible that the number of days as a parent that are positive are smaller than the number of days as a parent that are negative. There are a lot of bad days. Things go wrong with your kids. They have challenges. They have trauma. You can't help them. They are not just like you. They give you heartache, but they also give you joy, and they are amazing, and they give you a taste of what it's like for your own parents. They connect you to your own parents in ways that are unimaginable. They create a future for you you couldn't have otherwise. It's not for everyone. It might not even be a good idea for everyone. It's certainly not. But it's not just about the number of good days versus the number of bad days. There's so much more at stake there, and I think people realize that. Okay, well, as much as I wanted to hover above it, I'm feeling the gravity of the issues you have with consequentialism pulling us inward. So there's a lot in there before we truly slip over the event horizon. Maybe. I just want to ask you about a tool. I think this is, you know, properly in the economics toolkit. I I learned it in the engineering economic systems department when I was an undergraduate at Stanford, actually. You you say you taught at Stanford. What years were you there? I was there 85 to 87. Okay. And then a lot of summers visiting. Interesting. That's exactly when I was there. That's when I was a freshman in 85. Ticketing economics. Did you know Ron Howard? It's funny you mentioned Ron Howard. I had a story from my book that didn't get into the book, but he has some very, very I heard a story about him from one of his students that I almost put in the book. I could share it if you want. Yeah, I love to cut it if you want. Yeah. So part of my book is about certainty and our desire for certainty, and that's the power of an algorithm, an equation, an app. It tells us what to do, and then I'll make the best decision. We have such a craving for that. Uncertainty makes us uneasy. And somebody told me a story about Ron Howard that I thought was really extraordinary, which was, I heard the story from the student. I contacted Professor Howard, and he gave me his version. And what I'm going to give you now is some might be one of the other remix, but the point is the same in both of them, which is that on his exams, with each question that you answered, you had to assign a probability that you were right. And the higher the probability that you assigned to a question that you got right, the more points you got and the higher the probability that you assigned to a question you got wrong, you'd lose points. And he told people, he said, don't put 100% certainty next to any answer, because if you put 100% that you're 100% certain and it's wrong, you will get a score of negative infinity, and negative infinity cannot be outweighed by your score on the final. If your midterms are negative infinity, you fail the class. So that was the story. So he gives the exam, and some people, I don't know how many, put 100% on a question that they got wrong, and their lives were who knows what happened to them. I don't know how much he actually enforced it. He did tell me that at some places where he taught, they didn't allow it. They found it cruel to give students, confront them with this decision. It hardly seems cruel to me. And what's powerful about it, of course, is that this student who told me the story had had the class 2030, 40 years ago, and it says, I've never forgotten that because it taught me that you should never be 100% certain about anything. And that is, I believe, a very, very deep lesson in life and very, very useful to be aware that some uncertainty cannot be resolved. Certainly you shouldn't be 100% sure of anything. And so that's my Ron Howard's work. But I never knew him when I was at Stanford. Oh, oh, yeah. It was too bad. He he was he's really I have lost touch with him mostly, although I did interview him for my book Lying, maybe six or seven years ago. But he had a great effect on me, ethically more than anything else, because he taught this course that he called The Ethical Analyst. I think it was a graduate seminar, but it was just an investigation. There's a conversation among ten or twelve of us for a quarter about whether or not it's ever ethical to lie right. And and we you very quickly push past the the Anne Frank scenario, and then you're talking about. White lies, really, for the rest of the course. And, you know, I I and it really seemed virtually everyone else in that class came out of the black box of that course. It really changed with respect to the ethics of line. And and I wrote a short book titled Line. That was really my version of what I learned when I was 18 in that class. But he also taught and really pioneered this area of I don't know what it's considered now, if it's operations research or I don't know where you find it on the shelf, but it's called decision analysis. And it's a technique of integrating all the information one has about a decision and all of one's probabilistic intuitions in a systematic way so that you can make what purports to be a more rational decision than just doing what Darwin did with the pros over here and the cons over there. And you sort of stare at your piece of parchment in his case for a while, and then you throw up your hands and you make a gut decision integrating everything you've been ruminating over. So what Howard purported to be able to do and the experience of using the tool, I almost never do it, but back in the day when I was studying it and trying to apply it to my life, it did seem better than just the pros and cons. It seemed like it allowed you to systematize your intuitions. And especially he demonstrated this a lot in class, that we're far better at making probabilistic judgments than we think we are. Like, if you ask a class of undergraduates how many McDonald's franchises are there on Earth at the moment? And you get certainly you see something like the wisdom of the crowd if you aggregate those guesses. But most people are pretty good. I mean, they're not orders of magnitude off. And it's true for probabilistic judgments about things that are going to happen in the future and you can get better at doing that. So I guess there's a long way and I actually don't remember whether Ron did that on any of the tests I took for him. But that's a very Ron thing to have done, with infinite negative outcome. But it was an experience of feeling like we could, in some perfect world, get better at aggregating our complete state of information and thinking about this from the other side as a counterpoint to what you just suggested. What else do we have to go on but the totality of information we have and think we have about what's likely to happen on the basis of taking one path or another? And couldn't we, at the end of the day, also build into our forward looking model of what's likely to happen, the probability that will be changed by the decision itself? And this is a topic I want to explore with you. As you point out, certain decisions change us. What's so silly about Darwin's list is that he's so completely blind to this prospect and really this certainty that once you're married, things are going to seem different. You're not able in this list to value things the way you will value them once you have this wife you love, right? Anyway, I gave you a lot there. But what do you think about decision analysis or some other as yet uninvented tool for leveraging our rationality more than we do at present? I think about emails. I get ads that pop up on my web pages about try this. This is the path to being more productive. This is the path to being more fit. The seven minute workout. Ever click on the seven minute workout? Sam yeah, that was popularized by the New York Times. I tried it for a while, separated my shoulder doing one of the dips, saw my piano bench was a mistake. But the bigger mistake was thinking, wouldn't it be awesome if there were seven minute workout? I wouldn't have to really, like, work. And studies show that the seven minutes are now, I'm sure somewhere there might even be peer reviewed. There's data and evidence that shows that it's true. There's a lot of things to say to what you said. I'm not sure I remember everything I want to comment on, but I'd start with the fact that our brains don't always process things so well, and we often look for the easy way out or the thing that we already have decided. But we tell ourselves a story, the narrative fallacy, and we will find data to convince us that we made the right decision, and we'll ignore the data that's on the other side. And I think being aware, that's very powerful. Having said that, use data when you can. I'm not antidata I'm not anti propuls. It's a good idea. It's just that the point of Darwin's story is that if you are not careful, you will leave out some of the most important things. If you have a really good decision making process and you remember those things and you seek counsel, which is always a good idea, ask a friend who you trust and who can be honest with you to help you think about what should be thought about. That's very powerful. It's not unimportant. And then perhaps to even think about how you ought to weigh the different things. But I think the other part that I comment on is that the idea that I can imagine what my life will be like in the future as a married person or as a parent or as a resident of a different place or in a different kind of career, that's an illusion. That's not like well, I'll do the best I can. No, it's an illusion. You can't get very good at it. And here's the other hard point. The things that will come to mind are often the things that are more tangible and the intangible things are going to be hard to remember. That's one good reason why you should say council, certainly a good friend can help you think of those intangible things. But at the root of part of the critique that I'm trying to make in the book, which has a critique of economics under the service, is pointing out that many pleasures are not commensurate. And to think that I can tot them up, I can just pile them up and then subtract away the pains ignores the fact that there are certain issues where that's not the right calculus. This really raises rears its head in ethical decisions or in decisions of commitment, right? How should I treat my spouse? Should I treat my wife when I'm thinking about my obligations, should I think, well, what can I get away with to be as happy as possible? It's tempting, right? And it's a natural impulse. We're hardwired, very much hardwired to look for ways to take advantage of our spouses, our friends, to do what helps us and not have to make sacrifices to free ride on their efforts. And what works in the other direction? Well, loyalty, love, commitment, honor, ethics, religion. There's a bunch of things. But for many of us those things are weak. And so would you argue that the best marriage for you, not for the two of you, but for you, is to see how much you can get away with in terms of the daily responsibilities of car pooling and dishes and cooking and cleaning and filling out the taxes and maybe your wife won't notice. We all understand that's despicable it's not an honorable path, but there's nothing attractive about it. And we'd argue that that's wrong. It's just wrong. But why is it wrong? Seems like isn't that what we do through all most of our life? We look for advantages. We look for a chance to get ahead. We look for what makes me as happy as possible. But we have to also understand that sometimes it's just wrong and we shouldn't do those things, but they're hard to do. So how do you should you do a cost benefit analysis and then on your deathbed realize you've been a horrible person even though you're really happy? I think that's horrifying. I think most of us recoil at the thought of that. So I think the standard decision making analysis, if you're not careful, leaves out ethical considerations, shared experiences that are often complicated. It leaves out the incommensurability of certain pleasures over others. You can't just add them up. And for me, part of my goal in this book is to help people recognize there's no right decision, there's no best decision. I think this is really hard for people when it comes to marriage. Who to marry, not whether to marry, but who to marry. I want to find the best possible spouse. Like a car. I want to find the car that's best for me. So I get on, fill out a little questionnaire how many children do you have? Do you like to drive fast? And I found out the best car for me is a two seater. That's not what a spouse is. It's a different kind of decision for figuring out which car is going to give you the most pleasure. Sure. If it doesn't have a back seat, you understand what you're giving up. If it's a minivan, you understand what you're giving up. But when it's a spouse, a particular person, a woman of that one, what are you giving up? You could find a nicer one, you could find a smarter one, you can find a prettier one, you could find a more exciting one. You name it. So is it always a mistake? How should you think about that? It's not easy to think about what the rational decision to make in that context. I'm not saying, oh, then flip a coin or do whatever you do. Just choose randomly. Close your eyes. But don't fool yourself into thinking that you're going to make a rational decision in these kind of areas, like you do with what kind of car to buy. Well, maybe this is a good place to invoke Herb Simon's concept of satisfying, because that is guess at what we do instead of arriving at some pinnacle of rationality. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. My conversation with Ezra Klein of Vox Media. I think I'm going to resist the temptation to add any editorial comments here. My previous episode, The Extreme Housekeeping Edition, had my full reaction to all of the controversy that preceded this podcast. At the beginning here, I go through a timeline of events with Ezra. Everyone will be up to speed. I think the conversation speaks for itself, and if you listen to the whole thing, you will definitely know what I think about it by the end. I think it probably does have educational value. I certainly hope it does. As to what lessons can be drawn from it, I will let you decide. All I can say is that I actually did my best here. This was a sincere effort to communicate and you can judge the effect. And now I bring you as recline. Okay, so for better or worse, we're finally doing a podcast together. We're finally doing it. So here's what I would suggest, and I want to see if this was amenable to you. So I heard the Housekeeping episode this week. I thought it would make sense for me to just give a couple of minutes short, kind of like opening thing at the beginning, try to sort of frame where I am on this. I think I maybe have a way to frame it a little productively and then I'm happy to, in return for that, give you the last word on the podcast if that feels right to you. Actually, I had a couple of ideas and so let me just put those out there first. I think we should make the ground rules explicit so that our listeners understand what's happening here. So my understanding is that we'll both present the audio unedited, and it's fine to cut mouth noises and other glitches, but if we take a bathroom break, we'll cut that stuff and we can have sidebar conversations that we both agree are off the record, but basically no meaningful words will be cut from the exchange. We agree with that. And I thought, I'm happy to do this after you start, or it makes some sense, I think, to do it before you add what you just suggested. I thought I should summarize how we got here and just kind of go through the chronology so that people who are just hearing this for the first time understand about the email chain and who Charles Murray is and all that. I assume I mean, look, we can do this in different ways, but my assumption is you tend to have, as I understand it, intros, where you do stuff like that. I probably will too. Yeah. But I think it would be good to avoid the perception that our account of how we got here is totally divergent. I think maybe I should give an account which you then can say, okay, yeah, that's the sequence of events as I understand it too. Sure. Here's my only hesitation on this, and I don't have a huge problem with it. If you feel strongly about it, we can do it. I would worry about us ending up burning a lot of our time going back and forth on how an email is described or something. So if we just want to do a very neutral account of it, that's fine with me, but I wouldn't want to end up with, like, a long chronology argument. Yeah. So I'll do that, and then you'll jump in at the end of that and give me your current take. And obviously, I'll be describing this account from this chronology from my point of view, but I'll flag the places where I think we have a different interpretation of what happened and but I think the sequence of events is totally objective here, so and I just have a list of kind of the order of things. Almost exactly a year ago, I had Charles Murray on my podcast, and Murray, as many of our listeners will know, is the author of the notorious book The Bell Curve, and it has a chapter on race and IQ and differences between racial measures of IQ that was extremely controversial. So Murray is a person who still gets protested on college campuses more than 20 years later. And while I have very little interest in IQ and actually zero interest in racial differences in IQ, I invited Murray on my podcast because he had recently been deplatformed at Middlebury College, and he and his host were actually assaulted as they left the auditorium. And in my view, this seemed yet another instance of a kind of moral panic that we were seeing on college campuses. And it caused me to take an interest in Murray that I hadn't previously had. So I had never read The Bell Curve because I thought it must be just racist trash, because I assumed that where there was all that smoke, there must be fire. And I hadn't paid attention to Murray. And so when I did read the book and did some more research on him, I came to think that he was probably the most unfairly, maligned person in my lifetime. It doesn't really run the risk of being much of an exaggeration there. And the most controversial passages in the book struck me as utterly mainstream with respect to the science at this point. They were mainstream at the time he wrote them, and they're even more mainstream today. So I perceived a real problem here of free speech and a man's shunning, and I was very worried. I felt culpable because I had participated in that shunning somewhat. I had ignored him. As I said, I hadn't read his book. I had declined at least one occasion where I could have joined a project that he was associated with, and I declined because he was associated with it, because I perceived him to be radioactive. So I felt a moral obligation to have him on my podcast and in the process of defending him against the charge of racism and in order to show that he had been mistreated for decades, we had to talk about the science of IQ and the way genes and environment almost certainly contribute to it. And again, IQ is not one of my concerns, and racial differences in IQ is absolutely not one of my concerns, but a person having his reputation destroyed for honestly discussing data that deeply concerns me. So I did that podcast again exactly a year ago, and Vox then published an article that was highly critical of that podcast, and it was written by Eric Turkheimer and Catherine Harden and Richard Nisbet. And this article, in my view, got more or less everything wrong. Okay. It read to me like a piece of political propaganda. Hey, Sam, again, so hearing this, I'm totally happy to have you do this on yours. I think this is a long kind of and I totally get like, from your perspective thing on it, but just imagine what it will be like for people coming to this podcast not knowing why we're having this conversation. I think that's fine. I just think that if we want to do it that way, let's just do a shorter version of this. I would suggest something more and expand on it how you want. But look, you had Murray in your podcast a year ago. He had been deplatformed at Middlebury. You wanted to defend him. We published an article that was highly critical view, I guess you can call it propaganda if you want, but obviously the more you lean on this, the more this is going to become what we talk about. It'll just take a long time. So it's like we've had a back and forth, published emails. I'm totally happy to have you summarize it, but I don't want to feel like I'm sitting here for ten minutes and then I have to go and do a point by point. I think that's not going to be productive. No, I think in my mind, I'm setting you up to say what you said you wanted to say, which is what your current take is on the situation. So, yeah, I will be brief. So I reached out to you by email. I felt this article was totally unfair. It accused us of peddling junk science and pseudoscience and pseudoscientific racialist speculation and trafficking and dangerous ideas, and Murray got the worst of it. But at minimum, I'm painted as a total ignorance, right? It was one line which said, while I have a PhD in neuroscience, I appear to be totally ignorant of facts that are well known to everyone in the field of intelligent studies. And I think that you should quote the line if you want to quote a line. Okay. So the quote is, I don't think that's what the line said. The quote is this is the exact quote. Sam Harris appeared to be ignorant of facts that were well known to everyone in the field of intelligent studies. Great. Now, that's since been quietly removed from the article, but it was there, and it's archived, so that's what I was reacting to. And I sent you an email where I was pretty pissed because, again, I felt I was treated totally unfairly and as was Murray. And I was especially pissed that you declined to publish an article that came to us unbidden. That came to you unbidden. It was unbidden by me or Murray from Richard Hare, who's the editor in chief of the journal Intelligence and a far more mainstream voice on this issue than Nesbitt or Cherkheimer or Harden. And he came to our defense, and he you know, that would have done a lot to correct the record, but you declined to publish that. And so we went round and round by email, and I got increasingly exasperated over just how I perceived you in the email exchange. And there was some talk of us doing this podcast together, but then I pulled the plug on that because I felt it would be totally unproductive. And at the end of the email exchange, I said, if you continue to slander me, I will publish this email exchange, because I felt that people should understand the actual backstory here and how this happened and why I'm not doing a podcast with you. And you did actually publish one more article from Turkheimer that took a shot at us, but basically we went radio silence for a year, about as far as I know. And then what happened is there was an article published in The New York Times by David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard, which made some of the same noises that Murray and I had made. And Murray retweeted it, saying, wow, this sounds familiar. And then I retweeted it, taking a snide dig at you, saying something like, well, I hope as reclines on the case, racialist pseudoscience never sleeps. And then you responded writing yet another article about me and Murray. And I felt this article was just as unfair as anything that had preceded it. In particular, I felt that you had summarized our email exchange in a way that was self serving and that I didn't agree with. And so that prompted me to publish the emails and I will be the first to admit, and I think you will agree with this, that that backfired on me. The public perception of my publishing those emails was that it was not a good look for me at all. And most people who came to those emails cold thought I was inexplicably, angry, and that you seemed very open to dialogue, and people had to do a lot of work to understand why I was pissed. And most people didn't do that work. I'm not saying that everyone who did the work, who listened to the podcast and read all the articles would take my side of it, but anyone who didn't do the work thought that I was somehow the aggressor there. In particular, the fact that I was declining to do a podcast with you was held very much against me, and that caused me to change my mind about this whole thing, because I realized, okay, I can't be perceived as someone who won't take on legitimate criticism of his views. And so I went out on social media just to see if in fact, people really wanted us to attempt this. And after 40 or 50,000 people got back and it was I think it was 76% said, yes, I decided that I was up for a podcast with you. And you had already said you were up for a podcast with me. And so here we are. And again, much of that is described from my point of view, but I think the timeline is accurate. This is not my ideal, but actually, I'd prefer we get into it. The only thing I would say here that you should just change a little bit in there so I don't do it on your behalf, is that you didn't email me. What happened is that this piece published out. I tweeted it out. You tweeted a public challenge to me to come on your show. That's true. Your producer emailed emailed me to come on your show. I emailed your producer and said, hey, can you connect me to Sam? We should talk about this. And then our email exchange began. That's true. The first contact was on Twitter, which is not a big deal. I just want to note that totally true. But here's what I'd ask. Let's jump into it. Let's just start with you. What don't I get? Why is your criticism of me and Murray valid? Just give me your take on all of this. All right, well, I appreciate that summary, obviously, and I'm sure we'll get into this stuff. I have disagreements with which articles are fair and which aren't, but I don't think that that is where I want to begin this. I'm sure we'll go through that. I want to try to frame what I want to do here today, because I think people can go through, they can read the original Vox articles all be linked in my show notes. I assume Sam will be linked in yours. They can read our emails to each other, they can read my article, they can listen to the original podcast. If you would like to be a Sam Harrison Escline completest the option is very much there. So I listened to your Housekeeping episode the other day. So I think I have some sense, Sam, of where you are coming into this. And I want to give you a sense of where I am in the hopes that it will be productive. So something you've said over and over and over again to me at this point is that to you, from the beginning, I've been here in bad faith. The problem is that I've come to this coming to slander you, to destroy your reputation, to silence you. And really, I take that as a signal failure on my part. I have not been able to persuade you, and maybe I will be today, that I really disagree with you strongly. I think some of the things you're trafficking in are not just wrong, but they're harmful. But I do so in good faith and I'm here because I want to persuade you in your podcast with Murray. The way I see what's going on here from my perspective, and one of the tricky things here is that I was not that involved in the original Vox article. I was editor in chief at the time, but I didn't assign or edit that. I stand by it. Things you publish when you're editor in chief ultimately are on you. And I actually think it's a good piece. But there are times when I can only speak from my perspective, not from the perspective of other people who wrote other things, but the way I read the conversation you had with Murray. And I think you gesture at this in your opening here, you begin that conversation by really framing it around your shared experience responding to politically correct criticism. You say, and I'm quoting you here, in the intervening years so the intervening years since Murray published The Bell Curve that you've ventured into I ventured into my own controversial areas as a speaker and writer. I experienced many hysterical attacks against me and my work. I started thinking about your case, your case being Murray's case, a little again without ever having read you. And I began to suspect that you were one of the canaries in the coal mine that I never recognized as such. So you say explicitly in the opening to that podcast that in the treatment of Murray, you saw the seeds of later treatment of you. And I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because something that I've been trying to do here is see this from your perspective. Here is my view. I think you clearly have a deep empathy for Charles Murray's side of this conversation because you see yourself in it. I don't think you have as deep an empathy for the other side of this conversation for the people being told once again that they are genetically and environmentally, and at any rate, Immutably less intelligent, and that our social policy policy should reflect that. And I think part of the absence of that empathy is it doesn't threaten you. I don't think you see a threat to you in that and the way you see a threat to you and what's happened in Murray in some cases. I'm not even quite sure you heard what Murray was saying on social policy, either in The Bell Curve and a lot of his later work, or on the podcast. And I think that led to a blind spot in this. It's worth discussing. I like your podcast. I think you have a big platform and a big audience, and I think it's bad for the world if Murray's take on this gets recast here as political bravery or impartial or non controversial. So what I want to do here, it's not really convince you that I'm right. I don't think I'm going to do that, and it's not to convince you to like me. I don't think I'm going to do that either. I get that. What I want to convince you of is that there is a side of this you should become more curious about. You should be doing shows with people, people like Ibrahim Kendi, who's author of Stamp From the Beginning, which is a book on racist ideas in America which won the National Book Award a couple of years back. People who really study how race and these ideas interact with American life and policy. I think the fact that we are two white guys talking about how growing up nonwhite in America affects your life and cognitive development is a problem here, just as it was a problem in the Murray conversation. And I want to persuade you that some of the things that the so called social justice warriors are worried about are worth worrying about, and that the excesses of activists, while very real and problematic, they're not as big a deal as the things they're really trying to fight and to draw attention to. So maybe I'll take a breath there and let you in. Yeah. Okay. That's a great start. So I guess there's a lot to respond to there. I guess the first thing I want to say is that there are two things I regret here, both in our exchange and in my podcast with Murray. And so I should just put those out first. I think the first is that I was, as you said, very quick to attribute malice and bad faith to you in the email exchange, and it's quite possible I did this when it wasn't warranted. The reality is the background here, which you alluded to, is that I am so battle scarred at this point, and I've dealt with so many people who are willing to consciously lie about my views and who will just play the evasion game endlessly. I've got people who edit the contents of my podcast to make it sound like I've said the opposite of what I've said. And then people like Glenn Greenwald and Reyes Oslon forward these videos consciously, knowing they're misrepresenting me. And there's been so much pushback about this, there's been so much correction that at this point, the possibility that it's not conscious, the chance of that is zero, right? So I'm dealing with people on a daily basis who are just happy to smear me dishonestly, simply to see what will stick. And in fact, when I published our emails, the tipping point for me was to see that Glenn Greenwald, Reyes Oslon and you in a single hour on Twitter had all hit me with stuff that I perceived to be totally dishonest. So my fuse is pretty short. I am the first to admit that. And if I treated you unfairly attributing bad Faith, when you were just led by sincere conviction that I had made an error or that you were arguing for something that was so important and that I wasn't seeing it, that is on me now. That said, I think your argument is even where it pretends to be factual, wherever you think it is factual, it is highly biased by political considerations, and these are political considerations that I share. The fact that you think I don't have empathy for people who suffer just the starkest inequalities of wealth and politics and luck, it's telling and it's untrue. I think it's even untrue of Murray and the fact that you're conflating the social policies he endorses, like the fact that he's against affirmative action and he's for universal basic income. And I know you don't happen to agree with those policies. You think that would be disastrous. There's a good faith argument to be had on both sides of that conversation. That conversation is quite distinct from the science. And even that conversation about social policy can be had without any allegation that a person is racist or that a person lacks empathy for people who are at the bottom of society. So that's one distinction I want to make. And the other thing that I regret, which I think is this is the thing you're taking me to task for, and I understand it, but I do regret that in the preface to my podcast with Murray, I didn't add some full discussion of racism in America. And the reason why I didn't, or certainly at least one reason why I didn't, is that I had, you know, maybe two months before that done a podcast with Glenn Lowry, the economist at Brown, who happens to be black. And, I mean, Glenn is fantastic. He's got his own podcast, The Glenn Show, which everyone should watch. But Glenn was on my podcast, and we were talking about race and violence in America. And I prefaced the conversation with a fairly long statement about the reality of white privilege and the past horrors of racism. And when I got to the end of it, glenn pretty much chastised me for thinking that it was necessary for me to say something like that just because I'm white, right? The fact that any conversation about race and violence, especially coming from a white guy like me, has to be bracketed with some elaborate virtue signaling on that point. So he basically said these aren't his words, but this was his attitude basically said, obviously, since you're not a racist asshole, it can go without saying that you understand that slavery was bad and that Jim Crow was bad and that you totally support civil rights. So his take on my saying that it was not a total surprise, given who Glenn is, but the fact that he viewed it as fairly pathetic that I felt the need to do that and that it couldn't just go without saying I remembered that. And, I mean, obviously, your point is well taken. I mean, two white guys talking about differences in IQ across races or across populations. I mean, if ever there's a time to signal that you understand that racism is still a problem in the world, that's it right? And while we did say some things I think should still have been fully exculpatory for anyone paying attention, I think it should be obvious with a modicum of charity extended to us, that Murray and I are not racist and that what we were saying was not coming from a place of racial animus. But that is the backstory for why I didn't have some kind of elaborate framing of the conversation. So this is good because I think this gets much closer to the meat of where we actually disagree. And something I want to be clear about is what I think was wrong in that podcast is not that you didn't virtue signal. It's not that you didn't come out and say, hey, listen, just before I start this up, I want everybody to know I'm not a racist. And by the way, I'm not here to say you're a racist. I don't think you are. We have not called you one. I actually think that's a different set of things, and we should talk later. I think this would actually be a good conversation for us to have about literally just what racism is, how we use that word in this conversation. But my criticism of your podcast and by the way, my criticism also of Murray and this is useful because I can work backwards through your answer here is not that you didn't excuse yourself. It's that in a conversation about an outcome of American life, right? How do African Americans and whites score an IQ test in America today? What happens when somebody sits down and takes a test today that is an outcome of the American experiment, an experiment we've been running this country for hundreds of years. You did not discuss actually how race and racism act upon that outcome. You did not discuss I mean, amazingly to me, you all didn't talk about slavery or segregation once. And what I'm saying here is not that you lack empathy, although I am saying in a different space. I think you have a sense of what Murray is going through that is different from your sense of what other people who are hurt in this conversation go through. I do believe that. But when it comes to the way you actually conducted the conversation, I'm arguing that you lacked a sense of history, that you didn't deal in a serious way with the history of this conversation. A conversation that has been going on literally since the dawn of the country, a conversation that has been wrong in virtually every version, in every iteration we've had in America before. The other thing I want to say about this, and this gets very importantly to Charles Murray's work. You're a neuroscientist. And so I get that. You look at Murray and you look at The Bell Curve, and what you see are the the tables and the appendices and and the kind of scientific version of Charles Murray. I'm a policy journalist. My background is I live in Washington, DC. I cover politics. Charles Murray not just to me. What he literally is is what we call policy entrepreneur. He's somebody who his entire career has been spent at Washington think tanks. He's at the American Enterprise Institute, where I have a lot of friends and I respect that organization quite a bit. And he argues in different ways and throughout, again, his entire body of work for policy outcomes. His book before the bell curve is called Losing ground. It's a book about why we should dissolve the Great Society programs. By the way, when he was selling that book, he said, a lot of whites think they're racist, and this is a book that tells him they aren't. Then he came out with a bell curve. And we'll go through this and I'll quote this back to you, but The Bell Curve's final Chapter, he says, Why did I do any of this? Why did I talk about any of this? Him and Richard Hearns Dean, obviously the co author of that book, do. And he says, the reason I did it is because we in America need to reembrace a politics of difference. We need to understand that we are cognitively different from each other, not just by race, but other folks do, but by race as well. And that understanding that changes what we should do in social policy. He literally says and again, I can quote this to you if you'd like. He says, for one thing, we have all these low cognitive capacity women giving birth. And by having these social supports for poor children in this country, we are subsidizing them to give birth. And what we need to do is take those subsidies away. So these women who. According to his book, are disproportionately African American. Their poor children do not get as much federal support when they are born, and so they are disincentivised to have as many children. He also says that we have all these folks who are Hispanic coming up over the border, that our immigration policy is letting in too many low IQ people. And while he's not quite as prescriptive in that part, he's pretty clear that he wants us to change our immigration policy in order to resist disgenic pressure. So I'm just going to finish this up. The other thing, you brought up his UBI work, and this is why the reason I bring this up is that the reason I think Charles Murray's work is problematic is that he uses these arguments about IQ and a lot of other arguments he makes about other things to push these points into the public debate where he is very, very influential. He's not by any means a silence to actor in Washington. He gives congressional testimony. He won the Bradley Prize in 2016 and got a $250,000 check for it. His book on UBI, it is completely of a piece with this. I reviewed that book when it came out. It's an interesting book. People should read it. But it is a way of cutting social spending according to Murray's own numbers. He says it would cut social spending by a trillion dollars in 2020. To give you a sense of scale, obamacare costs $2 trillion over ten years. So this is another book in a different way that is a huge argument for cutting social spending, which in part, he justifies by saying, we are trying to redress racial inequality based on an idea that is a product of American history, when in fact, it is some combination of innate and environmental. But at any rate, it is not something we're going to be able to change. And so we should stop trying, or at least stop trying in the way we have been. Okay, Ezra, again, you can't conflate his views on social policy with an honest discussion of empirical science. Those are two separate conversations. You can agree about the data or disagree in a good faith way about the data and have a separate conversation about what to do in response to the data and then disagree in a good faith way about that. Now, I'm not defending Murray's view of what the social policy should be. I'm open minded about universal basic income. I think there can be a good faith debate about many of these topics. It's a completely separate conversation, and I totally share your concern about racism and inequality. And again, I have no interest in using science to establish differences between races. But the problem is, and I have publicly criticized people who do have an interest in using science that way. And one of my critical questions of Murray was, why pay attention to any of this stuff? And I've said, publicly that I didn't think his answer was great on that, and I'm not interested in paying attention to this stuff, and yet I have to in order to have conversations like this. But the problem is the data on population differences will continue to emerge whether we're looking for it or not. And the idea that one should lie about these data or pretend to be convinced by bad arguments that are politically correct or worse, that it's okay to malign people or even destroy their reputations if they won't pretend to be convinced by bad arguments, that's a disaster. Morally and politically and intellectually, that is a disaster. And that's where we are. That's my criticism of what you have done at Vox and what Turkheimer and Nisbet and Harden have done. And the truth is, for whatever reason, however noble it is in your head, you've been extraordinarily unfair to me and Murray, especially to Murray. I just want to give you a couple of examples here. I think we have to go into this issue of you just claimed you didn't call us racist, right? You didn't use the word racist. I'll grant you that. You use the word racialist, which, you know, most people will read as racist. But even if that is an adequate way to split the difference, everything else you said imputed, if not an utter racial bias and a commitment to some kind of white superiority. You say again and again that is a quote from your article. This is actually the subtitle of the article. I called the podcast with Murray forbidden knowledge, you said it isn't forbidden knowledge. It's America's most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality. Right? We're shilling for bigotry and racial inequality. And then you convict Murray. Again, this is a quote of being engaged in a decades long focus on the intellectual inferiority of African Americans. Now, honestly, that is a smear. I mean, Murray has not been focused on African Americans. He's been waging a decades long battle to survive being scapegoated by people who insinuate that he's a racist. And the nature of that battle is to continually try to you have to keep touching this issue to get the slime off of you. But as you know, The Bell Curve was not focused on race. There's just one chapter on race. And the truth is that and you almost alluded to this in what you just said, the truth is that Murray is just as worried about unearned privilege as you are. He's just worried about a different kind of privilege. You could call it IQ privilege. And The Bell Curve is an 800 page lament on this type of privilege. And again, it has nothing in principle to do with race. Murray is just as worried about the white people on the left side of the IQ distribution as black people or Latinos or anyone else. And you could have said it would be just as true to describe him as having been involved in a decades long focus on the superiority of Asians over white people. Okay? Because that's also part of the story, and you might ask yourself why you didn't do that. But I want to read a quote from Murray on my podcast, because this I mean, this is again, I'm not at all arguing for his social policies. I just want us to be fair to the man. And so this is a quote. If there's one thing that writing The Bell Curve did, it sensitize me to the extent to which high IQ is pure luck. None of us earn our IQ, whether it's by nature or nurture. We aren't the ones who did the nurturing. Hard work and perseverance and all those other qualities are great, but we can't take credit for our IQ. We live in a society that is tailor made for people with high IQs. The people who got the short end of the stick in that lottery deserve our admiration and our support if they're doing everything right. And that's the end of the quote. He is worried about a world where success is determined by a narrow range of abilities. And these abilities, whether they come from nature or nurture, are distributed unequally. That's guaranteed to be true. We just know that they can't possibly be equal both among individuals and across groups. And when you're talking about the averages in groups and he's totally committed, as I am. Again, I don't know how many times you have to reiterate this in a podcast to make it stick, but the punchline here is that everyone has to be treated as an individual, but we have to get past thinking about groups. I mean, there's more variance within a group than between groups, and everyone has to be encountered on their own merits, and he's totally clear about that. So to paint him as callous and as racist and as essentially a white supremacist, you're talking he's he's fixated on the inferiority of blacks on your account. It is irresponsible and unethical. And that's the kind of wrong that I was trying to address by giving him a platform on my podcast. And that is what produced so much outrage in me in our email exchange. When I hear this, I actually really wonder how much I want to be careful here. I know Charles Murray. When I wrote my very first piece as a journalist in Washington, it was a piece about poverty. I interviewed him for it. I've reviewed his books. I've talked with him. My wife is writing a book about UBI, actually. He's quoted in the book, I do not want Charles Murray silenced. And he's a lovely guy, interpersonally. There's no doubt about that. And the quote you read from him about luck, I want to put a pin in that because there's a whole conversation I want to have with you about that quote. If Charles Murray followed what that quote implies, I think things would look very different with him and with my view of his career. But I do think I need to go through some of what you said here. So first, I don't know how much you understand Charles Murray's career. As I said, his first book is losing ground. It's a book about the Great Society. In the interest of time and basic human sanity here, Ezra, no. I'm worried that what you're going to do is actually all the stuff you're going to COVID is actually irrelevant because one hey, Sam, I've let you had your say. I'm just going to keep going. Okay, that's fine. But I just want to prevent your and listener frustration here because if you go on for ten minutes for me to only say, well, again, his social policies are not social policies I'm advocating, don't worry, we're going to go through all this and I don't mean this to be sharp, but you don't give short answers yourself. So we're just going to have to indulge the other one here. Sure. Okay. So this first book is losing ground. It's about dissolving the welfare state. And again, he says about that book, a lot of whites think they're racist. I'm going to show them they're not. Next book is a bell curve. The way Murray often defends The Bell Curve is by saying, hey, look, it only had this one chapter on race in IQ, and he's completely or actually a couple of chapters, but he's completely right about that. The chapters where that is mentioned, they are not the bulk of the book. But I'm actually a publisher of pieces and I work with a lot of authors on book excerpts. The furor around The Bell Curve is not around the book, which it's a long book, most people haven't read it. It's that the part of the book that he had excerpted on The New Republic, on the COVID of The New Republic under Andrew Sullivan. The COVID of The New Republic. It just says in big letters, race and IQ. The reason that is the part people focus on is that they pulled the most controversial part of the book and made it a huge deal. I know that authors, when they don't want their most controversial part to define the work, they don't let you excerpt that. So one I don't think Murray's blame is here. His next book is honestly weirder. I don't know if you've ever read or even are that familiar with Human Achievement. Just to be on the record here. I've read The Bell Curve and I've read Coming Apart. And that's all. Coming Apart is an interesting book, too, and Coming Apart just spells out his concern about the cognitive stratification of society. So human achievement is a book where Murray and this comes right after the bell curve. And when I describe this book, I almost feel like people are not going to believe me, but go look it up. Murray wants to quantify the human achievements of different races. And the way he does that is he looks in a bunch of encyclopedias and he literally counts up the amount of space given to the accomplishments of artists and philosophers and scientists from different places. And he uses that to say, european, American, Europeans, white Europeans have done the most to push forward human achievement. One criticism that I and other people have of Murray is he often looks at indicators that reflect inequality and uses them to justify inequality. That book is like one of the most massive correlation causation errors I can possibly imagine. So now the next thing you say is that in doing this that I am conflating two things I'm conflating just a calm discussion you two had about the science with the social policy agenda. I want to read you actually what was said in your discussion with Murray about this, because this is actually why I am interested in it. When you were talking with Murray, one thing I think to your credit, is you repeatedly asked him, hey, why do this at all? Why have this whole discussion about race and IQ? What are we doing here? So you say, Why seek data on racial differences at all? What is the purpose of doing this? And Murray responds, and again, I'm quoting, because we now have social policy embedded in employment policy, in academic policy, which is based on the premise that everybody's equal above the neck, whether it is men or women or whether it is ethnicities. And when you have that embedded into law, you have a variety of bad things happen. And then you ask it again. You say, needless to say, I'm sure we can find hate supremacist organizations who love the fact that The Bell Curve was published and admonished their members to read it at the first opportunity. Why? Look at this. How does this help society give more information about racial difference? And Murray, again, I'm not going to read the whole thing because I think that would be dull. Gives a long answer about affirmative action and why it is bad. So I am not the one conflating this. Number one, I am listening to the conversation you had. I'm a close reader of Murray's work, and the reason I care about this stuff is because I care about what the actual social policy outcomes then you don't know what I mean by conflate. Let me just I got to clarify. This is confusion. You can respond to everything. When I'm done, I promise I will shut up and let you talk. The final thing that you did in your answer to me here was you said again and again, people pretending to believe politically correct ideas, people pretending to believe. That evidence. A couple of things on that. I don't doubt your sincerity in this, but I can assure you that Nisbed and Paige Harden and Eric Turkheimer and me, we actually believe what we believe. And one of the things it has honestly been frustrating to me in dealing with you is you have kind of a very sensitive ear to where you feel that somebody has insulted you, but not a sensitive ear to yourself. During this discussion, you've called me and not through implication, not through something where you're reading in between the lines. You've called me a slander, a liar, intellectually dishonest, a bad faith actor cynically motivated by profit defamatory libelous. You've called Turkheimer and Nisbet and Paige Harding. You've called them fringe. You've said just here that they're part of a politically correct moral panic. I do think that you need to do a little bit more here to credit the idea that there just is a disagreement here. And it's a disagreement in part because people are looking at different parts of this with different emphasis, but also disagreement because people look at this issue and see different things. I often hear you on your podcast talk about how it's important to try to extend the idea of sincerity. And one thing that is annoying is that one thing that I have not done is assume that you don't believe what you believe. Everybody here is trying to have an argument about something that is important, that, in Murray's words, is about how we end up that should feed into how we order society, what we do to redress racial difference. And that's not just a high stakes conversation. It's also one where people just disagree. Okay, so untangling a bit of confusion here. I guess there's two topics here that I should address. I think we have to talk about what it means to insinuate that someone's racist. But the conflation issue, I get that you hate his social policies. I get that you see that he thinks his social policies are justified by what he thinks is empirically true in the world of data and facts and human difference. So there's a connection there, right? And you're worried that if one takes the data seriously in the way that he takes it seriously, if one endorses his interpretation of the data from psychology or psychometrics or behavioral genetics, that that will lead to social policies that you find abhorrent or that you think will produce a massive amount of inequality or suffering or something wrong. And I get that. But the conflation is that talking about data is one thing. Talking about what should be done in light of the facts that you acknowledge to be true or are likely to be true is another. And there can be good faith disagreements in both of those conversations. Those conversations are not inextricably linked. And what I am noticing here is, and what I've called a moral panic is that there are people who think that if we don't make certain ideas, certain facts, taboo to discuss, if we don't impose a massive reputational cost in discussing these things, then terrible things will happen. At the level of social policy that the only way to protect our politics is to be again, this is a loaded term, but this is what is happening from my view, scientifically is to be intellectually dishonest, to be led by confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a real thing. And this is the situation I think we're in. Everything you've said about the politics and the historical wrongs of racism, which you wrote about a lot in your last piece, I totally agree with. Okay. And I'm probably more aligned with you politically than I am with Murray, which is to say that I share your biases. I share the bias that is leading you to frame the matter the way you're framing it. Again, I probably should have spelled this out in the beginning of my podcast with Murray, and I didn't for reasons I described. I don't think it would have made a bit of difference, but I still should have done it. And I think it would have been called anodyne the way that Nisbet at all are talking about individual differences, anodyne. But I think everything you say about the history of racism is true. I think you could well be on the right side of a good debate about social policy, and your concerns here are totally understandable. I get all of that. So this goes to the charge of bad faith against you, which in this conversation, I admitted might have been unfair. Right? You might not be the Glenn Greenwald character I read you to be at a certain point in that email exchange. So let's just assume, as you say, that you feel intellectually scrupulous and ethically righteous. Okay? I know what it's like to feel that. And you feel this way because you are concerned about racism. You're horrified by the history of racism, and you feel that the kinds of social policies that Murray favors would be disastrous. And again, I'm not arguing for those social policies. But your bias here, your connection to the political outcomes when you're talking about the empirical science, is causing you to make journalistic errors. It's causing Nisbet and Turkheimer to make errors of scientific reasoning. And these are obvious errors. In your last piece, you have this whole section on the Flynn effect and how the Flynn effect should be read as accounting for the black white differences in purely environmental terms. Well, even Flynn rejects that interpretation of of the Flynn effect. I mean, he had originally hoped, he publicly hoped that his effect would account for that. But now he has acknowledged that the data don't suggest that. And there are many other errors of this kind that you and Nisbet and Turkheimer are making when you criticize me and Murray and you criticize Murray for errors that he didn't make. And in order for you to imagine that I'm equally biased because you must imagine bias on my side, why am I getting it so wrong? Why am I looking at the same facts that Nizbet and Turkheimer and Hardener are looking at, and I am getting it absolutely wrong. You have to imagine that I have an equal and opposite passion, that I feel equally righteous, but it's pointing in the opposite direction. I would have to be a grand dragon of the KKK to feel an equal and opposite bias on these data. And you've already said you don't think I'm a racist, but that's what it would have to be true of me to be as biased as you are. Again, understandably, given the history of racism on these data, and it's just not the case. What you have in me is someone who shares most of your political concerns and yet is unwilling to again a loaded word lie about what is and is not a good reading of empirical data and what is and is not a good argument about genetics and environment and what is reasonable to presume based on what we already know. And again, the problem is that even if we never look for these things again, even if we follow this taboo and decide that there's no ethical reason to ever look at population differences, we will be continually ambushed by these data. They're just going to spring out of our study of intelligence generically or human genetics generically. It's happened on other topics already and people try to keep quiet about it because, again, the environment, journalistically and politically, is so charged. And my criticism of you has been from day one that you are contributing to that political charge. And it's totally unnecessary because the political answer is so clear. The political answer is we have to be committed to racial equality and everyone getting all the opportunities in life for happiness and self actualization that they can use, and we're nowhere near achieving that kind of society. And the real racists are the people who are not committed to those goals. There's so much there. I actually really appreciate that answer because I think it I think it helps open this up. So let me say a couple of things here. One is that one of my macro, one of the things I've come to think about you that I actually did not come into this believing is you're very quick to see a lot of psychological tendencies, cognitive fallacies, et cetera, in others that you don't see applying to yourself or people you've sort of written into your tribe. So you say words in there like confirmation bias, et cetera, to me about Murray, about how we're looking at Murray. And the whole thing I just told you is that Charles Murray is a guy who works at conservative think tanks whose first book was about how to get why we should get rid of the welfare state, who is his whole life's work is about breaking down social policy. So to the extent that I have any biases that flow backwards from political commitments so does he? We're all what's my bias? I'm going to go through that. Don't worry. I promise you I will get to your bias very quickly. I do want to note you mentioned James Flynn here to prepare for this conversation. I called Flynn the other day. I spoke to him on Monday. His read of the evidence right now, and this is me quoting him. He says, I think it is more probable than not that the IQ difference between black and white Americans is environmental. As a social scientist, I cannot be sure if they have a genetic advantage or disadvantage. So that is what James Flynn thinks? As of Monday. So then you ask me, and I think this is a great this is a good question, because I think this gets to the core of this and it gets to where I tried to open this up into your view of this debate. Is that to say that you have a bias in it is to say, in your terms, that you're like the Grand Dragon of the KKK, that the only version of a bias that could be influencing what you see here is a core form of racism? That's actually not my view of you, but I do think you have a bias. I think you have a huge sensitivity, let's put it that way. And you have a lot of difficulty extending an assumption of good faith to anyone who disagrees with you on an issue that you code as identity politics. And there's a place, actually, where I think you got into this in a pretty interesting way. I went back and I read your discussion with Glenn Lowry at the beginning when you're talking about why you chose to have Glenn on the show. You say, My goal was to find an African American intellectual who could really get into the details of me, but whom I also trusted to have a truly rational conversation that wouldn't be contaminated by identity politics. To you engaging in identity politics, discredits your ability to participate in a rational conversation, and is something, as far as I can tell, that you do not see yourself as doing. So here's my question for you on that specific quote. What does it mean to you, particularly when you're talking about something like race, to have your ideas contaminated by identity? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+I am back with Andrew Sullivan. Andrew, thanks for joining me again. It's always wonderful to talk to you, Sam. So first we should just say that this is a simulcast. You are a freshly minted podcaster, and I am quite honored to be your first podcast collaborator here, at least. Obviously, you've done podcasts in the past, but this is your new dish podcast. What's going on over there? Tell us, what's your plans? Well, I'm incredibly psyched to do this with you as the first one. We're going to do this every week, we hope. And the idea is to be able to have a conversation which is not constrained by all the pressures that are on us now in the media, wherever we are, and to talk openly and reasonably with people of different views, believe it or not, and to hash things out in a way that you've always been a master of doing. And so I couldn't be prouder to be launching this alongside you in our what seems to be now a tradition. Right. Every four years, we get together and explain why we're both miserable about the coming election, but why we're going to vote anyway. So thank you. It's a big honor, and I'm psyched, and this is a big new adventure for all of us. Nice. Well, I'm very happy to do this with you. I must say. We we have quite a checkered past here, however, because four years ago, I think we jinxed the presidential election, we we had the brilliant idea of doing a podcast wherein we proved that we were as in touch with Hillary Clinton's flaws as anyone. We were not to be outdone by any aspiring Trump voter. And then in that podcast, we quite brilliantly, to my ear, turned the tables after about an hour of running down Hillary to make the case that Donald Trump was much, much worse. And despite all of our lesser of two evils casualistry, we got four years of Donald Trump. So let's not do that again. I don't know. Our influence terrifies me, as you know. I mean, how could one possibly speak without the thought of changing world history? But we'll do our best, I'm sure. You want to start with why Biden is a problem. Or should we start with Trump this time? Well, I think some of that's going to come up, because I think you and I have some concerns about how tongue tied everyone is around Biden's flaws for understandable reasons. But I want us to say something useful at this point, just on the odd chance that there are any persuadable people out there. But I must say, I'm pretty pessimistic about that. I suspect that almost anyone who's planning to vote for Trump at this point is probably out of reach of our arguments, and that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to reach such people. But let me just describe what I think the audience is for. Whatever we might say here. I think anyone who is in the QAnon cult or who thinks Trump has been put in the White House by Jesus to save the world or someone who thinks that Tom Hanks and the Dalai Lama and Michelle Obama are all cannibal child rapists. Those people are obviously not within range of us, and I don't know how big a group that is, but there's an impressively large group of people, it seems to me, who are in a kind of whether they're QAnon or not, they're in a kind of personality cult, and they will be immune to anything I have to say here. And I can't imagine you're going to make a dent either. But there are a few objections that come from what I consider to be smart, otherwise sane people who are planning to vote for Trump. And the number one objection I get, and if I could distill it down to something this person might say, it's something like, after hearing me go on a tirade about Trump, this person will say something like, I get that you don't like his personality. I don't like his personality either. And I get that you find him to be uncouth and offensive, and so do I. But none of that really matters. What matters is policy, and his policies are fine. In some cases, they're better than fine, and they're better than Biden's are likely to be because Biden is going to be captured by the left socially and economically. So I'm wondering what you do with that objection. Yeah, weirdly, I have been getting some of that the last week or so for more people in my personal environment, people who keep telling me that, yes, I've lost my mind a little bit because I have become a victim of Trump derangement syndrome and that the policy options that are coming before us are so horrifying. This I don't really agree with for several reasons. I don't think that the issues that Trump really campaigned on, he's really done a great deal for. I don't think, for example, that if you thought that it might be time, because of the impact that free trade has had upon various industries in the US. And certainly for white, non college educated workers, that therefore Trump's critique of what had been going on was not without merit. And I agree with that. But there has been no real success on tariffs, for example. I mean, there's been some minor tinkering, but we haven't seen a turnaround in manufacturing. We haven't seen a turnaround in things like coal. We haven't seen what he promised in 2016. We haven't even seen any serious, permanent or rooted policies in controlling or changing the dynamic on immigration, which, if Biden gets in, will be back to square one. That we haven't actually seen a war of ideas that has defanged some of the worst elements of the left. If anything, Trump seems to me to have presided over enormous strengthening of elements on the extreme left and that he has been their best friend in so many ways by making it almost impossible to counter some of these trends on the far left without seeming to defend the indefensible. So on those people who once substantively are sympathetic to a more adjusted, as it were, conservatism, I don't think Trump has been competent enough to deliver it. And I don't think and I think in many ways he's been extraordinarily counterproductive in that effect. And so I wish I could say that, yes, he had a point about immigration, he had a point about trade, he has had a point about white working class people in the west. But failure to deliver, failure to prove that he can do anything about these things. And in fact, when you look at it, he's almost not mentioning either of those key issues of immigration and trade this time around, which suggests that really his attachment to these causes was entirely instrumental and that really all he's about is his own sense of his own power and his own centrality to any conversation about anything. So I don't think that the argument that somehow some of the issues he championed illegitimate has been borne out in the last four years. I think, for example, he's done more to stigmatize and taint the cause of some kind of control of mass immigration than anyone on the left could ever have done. And I think that's really emboldening the people that he said he was trying to oppose and disempower. Yeah, well, your point about the way in which he's empowered the far left is very important because this is a very common claim, that this is trump is some kind of bulwark against the craziness on the left. But to the contrary, Trump has empowered the far left and he is he has given his his ugliness has given the far left whatever semblance of justification it's had, right, his flirtation with racism, his failure to clearly repudiate white supremacy. He has repudiated white supremacy to a greater degree than people on the left to give him credit for. He has actually done it in places, but he's done it so badly and so unconvincingly that he is the almost the perfect goblin to merit the counter reaction on the left. And so all the craziness of the wokeness cult and the overreaching of Black Lives Matter and all of that has happened on Trump's watch. And you could certainly argue in large measure because of Trump and because of how bad he is. So it's just the idea that he is somehow corrective to this seems crazy. And what I would expect to have under Biden is not the full capture of Biden by the wokeness. I would expect all of us to be able to far more credibly pivot and turn our attention on the wokeness and repudiate. It not to say we haven't been doing that, but we now do it under the shadow that the right and the far right under Trump has managed to produce. Whereas under a biden administration the wokeness can be discussed in terms that reveal it to be as unhinged and unpragmatic as it is the manner of his politics, which is that the truth is entirely dispensable, that narratives are what really matter that he can give a speech. And he's been giving these campaign speeches which are essentially built upon a complete fantasy about what is going on as well. I mean, COVID is the most obvious example in which he's declaring that it's over and we've succeeded at the moment that it's surging even in the places he's visiting. And if you could go through his and I listened to the last debate, and I try to follow the arguments that he's making because I want to understand what's happening, and they're just impossible to follow because they're built upon complete lies and delusions half the time. Fake statistics, invented scenarios, complete hyperbole's in ways that completely distort any kind of rational debate. So that you're reduced, when you absorb the way Trump discusses with a resort to feelings, essentially tribal feelings, feelings of emotion that he seeks to evoke and to exploit in a way that our rational functioning is short circuited. Because how can you begin to counter argue Trump when it is simply a stream of inventions that are entirely and always self serving, combined with a constant attempt to trigger and to inflame anybody who might conceivably take an issue with it? And there is something about that that creates a political dynamic in which other actors, those opposing him, because they can't actually engage reasonably with certain arguments, with evidence, they then are empowered to put forward their own narratives, their own delusions, their own tribal fantasies, to counter what he's doing. In a point of to the extent at which I really think we're lost. We are truly lost. When you listen to the debates going on, there is not a shared set of facts, there isn't a shared understanding that we have to apply reason to these facts. There is no deliberation happening at all. And when I wrote, like four or five years ago now, that this kind of rhetoric, this kind of worldview, which is entirely narcissistic, which is entirely subjective, which is entirely about feeling and emotion, this is an extinction level. Event for liberal democracy, inasmuch as liberal democracy requires all of us to engage in a respect for counterargument reasonable counterargument and to and fro and and trying to accept the result of some kind of deliberation. This he has completely subverted in our psyches and in our public debate, and therefore empowers irrationality everywhere, including on the left, so that we, we've, we've witnessed people saying things in what he called truthful hyperbole. When you think about some of the insane things that he said, well, I think of describing multicultural, multiracial, dynamic American 2020 as a form of white supremacy is nothing but a mirror image of this truthful hyperbole, which makes it almost impossible to engage with reality. That's what he's done. And he's not solely responsible for it. And I'm not going to say that wokeness or far left or the attack upon liberal democratic values he entirely created, he didn't, he was partly a product of that. But we have a test case of whether he can make it better. And in fact, he, by the very manner of his engagement in the discourse, is making it much, much worse all the time. Yeah, he has this almost supernatural ability to make his enemies worse people or behave like sociopaths. He, being this sociopath, manages to corrupt even the well intentioned reactions to his norm breaking. And this is what bothers me so much about this, allegation of Trump derangement syndrome, or just this claim that we get that you don't like him as a person, but that doesn't matter. The problem with that is that it doesn't even begin to make contact with the criticism of him as a person, which is actually relevant to his governing and assuming the responsibility of the presidency. Because as president, it really does matter that Trump is a terrible human being who values nothing beyond his own personal gain and who lies more than any person in human history. These are not private flaws. These are flaws that have done immense harm to our politics and to our society. And I mean, you just look at COVID. I mean, COVID is just one phenomenon which is in my mind. It's not even the main problem with with his presidency thus far. But it's just one case where these flaws, you could argue, have led to the deaths. Of some tens of thousands of people who wouldn't be otherwise dead, but for what he has done to the messaging around the around the public health messaging around the pandemic. And more broadly than that, I think it really matters that we have become the kind of society that could give a person like this so much power and responsibility. I mean, it's just like when you think about the underlying values here, if you're a parent and you could list the virtues that you, you hope your kids embody by the time they become adults. You want your kids to be intellectually curious and generous and honest and have integrity and have moral courage, have empathy, compassion, wisdom. Every parent would aspire to this. And Trump is the living, breathing negation of these virtues. He not only has none of them, he is just bursting with their opposites. Right? He is greedy and malevolent and uncomprehending and is completely unaware of his deficits. This may sound like a mere opinion about his personality, but it's not. These are statements that are every bit as objective about him psychologically as saying that he's overweight, or that he's taller than average, or that he's got bronzer on his face or whatever conspires to make him that color. And it matters what kind of person you put in this role and whatever you want to say about Biden and we'll talk about the scandal that no one will talk about. I don't know if you have any information or opinions about that, but whatever you might want to say about Biden and whatever peripheral corruption he could be found guilty of, there is no question that as just as a person as the ethical core of him, as a person, he is on another planet from Trump. And that has to matter. I think maybe an interesting comparison here is Bill Clinton, who I think character logically is a pretty awful person, but nonetheless was capable of operating even if he was, let's say, economical with the truth at times. There was at least some kind of respect he gave to the notion of making rational arguments with evidence and a respect he took even with when he was being persecuted by a special counsel, with nonetheless going through the motions of cooperating with it, even at one point being deposed and speaking to something which, in contrast with the things that Trump was accused of in, impeachment, completely trivial. But Clinton was able, in some ways, his personal character did, I think, affect his public, but not to the same extent. And this is the key thing here, it seems to me, is a kind of extraordinary and extreme pathological narcissism which prevents Trump literally from understanding the experiences of anybody outside of himself. And he's an inability to see that he is just one part of a bigger system and that, in fact, as president, he has responsibility for the interests of other people too. So that pathological narcissism, which is really deeper in him than I've ever come across in anybody in public life, means that when you come to a situation like suddenly there's a covert crisis, what are your instincts? Your instincts, if you were a regular, reasonably normal person, is blimey, we've got to do something about this. How do we figure out what the most sensible precautions are? Let's let's pick up the pandemic playbook that we had inherited. And you might even think that some of his instincts politically would be very successful. So, for example, he's kind of the guy that likes to shut borders. Well, he could have shut every border. He's kind of the guy that seeks to control the country, seeks to put himself at the middle of it. Well, he could have made all sorts of gestures to shutting down the country, to imposing masks. He had incredible leeway to do whatever he wanted. But if especially if your goal is to control the epidemic, what did he do? He immediately understood this to be a possible threat to the economy, which meant to his reelection. So his instinct was to deny it, to push it out of his mind, or if it did happen, to try and tell a story that made it not important. So he continually and persistently lied in order to push this out of his consciousness, because as far as he was concerned, it wasn't affecting him, even though, of course, it would personally in the end. But that basically incapacitated him from making any kind of sane judgment about this. In some ways, you would think this Xenophobic Germophobe I mean, this is a man that won't let anyone near him. What didn't historically wouldn't shake anybody's hands. If someone coughed near him in the Oval Office, he would ask them to leave. He was pathologically hostile to Germs. That's why he likes fast food, we were told. He never pressed the lowest button on an elevator because he was terrified of Germs. Why didn't this guy use all those things he had in his armor to launch a real campaign against COVID, which would have helped him, actually, politically in the end? Why? Because he simply narcissistically couldn't believe that if he were to reduce economic growth, it would harm him politically. That's all. Simple, short termism inability to see beyond that. And the other thing we learned in the campaign, of course, is that within his own structure, within the Republican Party, within his own administration, we saw this. As long as Go is the first campaign, no one no one has any authority to stop him doing anything. He's really extraordinary in his ability to persist with his Nazism through any advice, criticism, other alternative viewpoints to such an extent that it's a kind of blindness that when the real shit hit the fan, when the emergency happened, as it often does in a presidency, he just didn't have the skill to do it. His narcissism was so pathological, he prevented him from doing even obvious and sensible things. Yeah, he is a kind of moral and psychological paradox in a way, because it's almost like, I think, of the fine tuning argument for God. You and I have debated religion in the past. I don't remember you putting any weight on the fine tuning of nature's constants as proof of the existence of God. But many have done that just to remind people that if the gravitational constant were slightly different, there'd be no formation of galaxies and all the rest. And if the charge on the electron were different, well, then many things would follow that would be incompatible with life. And and it turns out that these constants are tuned within, you know, the the tiniest fraction of a hair to values that are compatible with the universe as we know it, and any change would make things worse. And it's almost like he's the virtues I listed a moment ago. It's almost like he's got these tuned to their worst possible settings, but this doesn't actually make him the worst possible person. I mean, there are people who are objectively worse than Trump. You just compare him to Hitler. Hitler is worse. But the things that actually make Hitler worse are actually virtues, right? I mean, like courage and a commitment to something beyond yourself, right? Like if you add those generic virtues to an otherwise malevolent asshole, well, then he becomes a more competent, more self sacrificing malevolent asshole, right? So evil gets amplified by virtues in certain contexts. It's almost like Trump has everything dialed to its least respectable level. He is not a courageous person, he's not a competent person. He's not a consistent person. He's committed to nothing beyond himself. But this makes him, again, it is almost supernatural. The degree to which he manages to skate through situations that would have destroyed any other predecessor politically, literally, he's guilty of 1000 indiscretions, which would have torpedoed the presidency of anyone else. So even someone like Clinton, who I share your estimation of Clinton, I'm not at all a fan, and I think there's definitely something sociopathic about him, but at least because he was actually quite smart and well informed and paid lip service, if nothing else, to the values of being consistent and competent and all the rest. Even as a liar, he felt the burden to lie in a way that his audience would not detect, right? So you have to be consistent in your lie and you have to remember what lies you've told. You have to insert the lie in the right place in the paragraph so as not to have your dishonesty immediately detected. Trump feels no burden of any of that. He's functioning by a completely different psychophysics. And for that it's almost like he's an extraterrestrial that has been put down into the political context of DC. And he's managed to train everyone around him through just sheer destruction of their expectations to accept everything. And it it really is. I mean, honestly, I think he could have had a Jeffrey Tubin scandal of his own this week, been caught jacking off on Zoom and he would be fine, right? Like, literally, his defenders would come forward and say things like that's how much he loves America. This guy is just so full of passion. Anything is acceptable from him to his cult. And I just have never seen anything like this. No. And I've never witnessed someone capable of believing their own lies with such a plumb and vigor and energy. There's not a single moment in his public life that he has ever seen fit to even qualify. Even when he said things that are so grotesquely untrue they're obvious, he will never concede the slightest scintilla of doubt about it. And the huge assertion of a big lie and the self confidence and the psychological tenacity extraordinary to insist upon this and to sustain it perpetuate. This is four years of sustaining a series of extraordinary fantasies which started by telling us, even when we can see it with our own eyes, by stunning, with telling us that his inauguration crowd was absolutely bigger than Obama's. Whatever your lying eyes are telling you when you look at that, that his ability to say that and to insist that it be true and somehow, by virtue of his own psyche, to force those around him to accept it. But even more important, because they're inconsistent fantasies, even within the frame of his own utterances, within the span of a few minutes. Right. He doesn't even have the burden of being consistent with what he said 30 seconds ago. Yes. And that is the key to his domination because the people around him have to agree to both things. Remember, they have to agree to first that black is white and they have to agree to the black is blue. And that is the way in which he enforces his domination. This is an entirely primitive, primal dominance mode of engagement. It is utterly it's a warlord mentality. It is a mafia boss mentality. It is I will say whatever and you will believe it. And honestly, I think the capacity to pull that off is a function of some kind of extraordinary mental disability. I mean, psychological illness. That there's an energy to this. I mean, look at the mat. I mean, he's 74, right? That's one virtue he has. He has the virtue of energy that is otherwise incomprehensible. I mean, the guy he's the picture of health. It's a perverse kind of health because he's obese and he doesn't exercise and you can tell the rumors about him eating nothing but crap are almost certainly true. And this is an unfortunately fairly depressing comparison with Biden. Just the physical presentation. Biden looks they both stumble over their words, but Biden's stumbles look like senescence and Trump's just looks like more Trump. Yeah, it's when he says, maybe I'm immune, maybe I'm a Superman. My genes are like these incredibly powerful things. And the truth is, I just have to sit there and say, I really don't know anybody with this level of energy sustained this long, with this amount of stamina. I mean, for God sake, the man had COVID-19 only a few weeks ago and he's seen his mid seventy s and one thought for a minute that reality would actually impose itself upon him. But no, he's even immune to that. All right, so I take it back. He's got one dial that's not tuned to the worst possible position. I envy him his energy, the way he has always campaigned. That is there's something quite amazing, there is something about mental illness that can provide that kind of energy. That's why it's inexhaustible. Because it's built upon a real psychosis within and this real desperate need never to sit still. I mean, the man has clearly never spent a moment in reflection, never spent a moment in silence. I doubt you get no impression. This man has an interior life. It's entirely outer directed. It's an empty void within that is constantly seeking affirmation. And in that desperation has a kind of unbelievable energy that also in the past, defeated his creditors, defeated anyone, anybody rival of his in the real estate. They just in the end, even though he crashed his company, even though he banked, he gave banks unbelievable headaches, in the end, his indefatigability required them to finally leave the table, forgive the debts, cut their losses, or his ability to not pay people, his ability to sue people into submission. This is a very deep and ugly I do think of the ancient's understanding of what a tyrant is. I think what we've seen is the tyrant is to Plato and Aristotle, out of control, personally out of control entirely a function of his appetites, which are insatiable. And there is no governing process within his mind. There is no ego to control the it. It is all it and it's all momentary. And it's that impulse that frightened me and still frightens me, given the system that we live in. And one of the things I've watched is people were worried that he would become a dictator or something. And I looked back and looked through what I wrote about him four years ago to see if I screwed up, if I've exaggerated. And I do think some of us didn't fully assimilate his incompetence or his laviness. And that is a huge relief in a way, that's my point about the comparison with a truly evil dictator is he doesn't have the competence or the commitment that would elevate him to that slot. I mean, he would need more virtues. He would need to have a sense of responsibility, which is what we understand to be adulthood, which is that you understand that your own actions affect others and you are cognizant of that. He has never seemingly grown up at all. I mean, this is a childlike person of extraordinary appetites and impulses and whims and fury, the anger, the rage that drives him all the time. That has also prevented him, for example, for in any way reaching out to others or to expanding his base. He has not sought to persuade people. He's sought to rally them because persuading others has to give them some status, some equality to him. These are people who could choose this or no. And he has to persuade them. That implies that he is in some way deference to them, even if it's a minimal form of deference. He can't do that. So it has to be constant rallying rather than persuasion. And that's why he's not expanded his base but has increased its fervency. And I don't think that's going to end entirely. In fact, I think if he were to lose, and I'm pretty sure he will, but there's still part of me that wonders if these polls have really captured what's going out going on out there. Yeah, well, we're right to be shell shocked from last time around. We are. But he also it turns out he kind of wants to be a talk show host sitting. In the Oval Office. He talks about his own administration as if he were observing it as opposed to directing it, because he lives in this strange world without actual responsibility. So, hey, I just got the biggest platform in the world. I will tweet 30,000 times irrational, crazy insults. The impact that that's had on all of our psyches over four years cannot be overstated. I think of him as president as like being in a family where one person is mentally unwell. Over time, everyone becomes mentally unwell. It takes so much bandwidth. I can't imagine even his supporters, even people who love him, I can't imagine they feel that this change that has come over our society in the last three and a half years is good. I mean, it's just everyone has to be exhausted by politics taking up this much bandwidth. And not just politics, but the but tribal politics, like intensely emotional, psychologically exhausting, emotionally draining, constant conflict, rage, emotional outbursts. This is all heat. There's almost been no light at all. And I certainly think that psychologically I've been I mean, I'll admit it, I think he's gotten into my head and has created I mean, I had a clinical depression just a couple of months after he was elected. And I'm not saying that as a joke. I'm saying that having to absorb a crazy person every day that you can't really avoid it reminds me of those people that have to live in totalitarian regimes where the picture and the face of the Dear Leader is constantly in your you can't get away from it. It's on your wall. You have to adhere to it. You have to acknowledge it every time so that there is no space left for you to have a time without Trump. What do you make of the fact, though, that there are people, if we haven't already driven them from our audience, there are people listening to us who just don't understand this allergy we have to Trump. I just kind of ran through all the reasons why I find him to be a despicable person, but there are people who just don't see this about him. And I and now, I mean, honestly, it's so evident to me that it's that I can't I don't really have even a theory of mind for someone who can't see any of this, but for me, he's a kind. Of. And this just plays into the hand of anyone who would accuse me of trump Derangement syndrome, because this kind of has a quasi Freudian structure. But if you told me that I was going to suffer some kind of neurological illness that would make me exactly like Trump, I would fucking kill myself. Honestly, I think the last time we spoke, I think this was in one of my diet drives about Trump years ago. I recalled the scene in The Exorcist where the you know, the the priest is performing the the final ineffectual exorcism of, of Linda Blair. And, and I think he's strangling her and, and the, the devil comes into him, visibly comes into him and shines out from his eyes, the green eyes of Satan. And at that moment he has this moment of kind of wrestling with himself and then he hurls himself through that window and down those stone steps and that's exactly what I would do. I mean, honestly, like he, he everything I hope to be, everything I, everything I admire in myself and want to increase and everything I'm depressed about myself and want to change, everything is pointing in the opposite direction from what Trump has fully actualized in himself. So he is a kind of super stimulus to me. He's just the most appalling person I can name. Right. Again, honestly, the invidious comparisons to someone like Osama bin Laden are honest. I do not feel the same way about Osama bin Laden, though. I recognize the harms that he caused based on his ideology. And obviously I've said more than my peace against jihadism, but Osama bin Laden is, as a person, is far more understandable to me and far less reprehensible personally, psychologically than Trump. I think the way people and this is just a guess because I'm honestly, genuinely shocked when I look at polling and find, for example, that white Catholics are 50 50. Now I was, you know, I brought up a Catholic. I am a Catholic. There are certain core I mean, we're going to disagree about the religious faith, but there are certain values that are taught and he is literally the negation of every single one. It is almost impossible to come up with someone less officially Christian in the virtues than Trump is. And yet half of them think he's okay. And look here's one thought is that they're not really thinking about him. They're thinking about the people they hate. They're thinking about he drives the liberals crazy, as you can hear, at least from my microphone. And they love that about him. And I understand that. That's the thing. I totally get that. They honestly drive me up the wall. I get into irrational states of loathing of some of these people and they're in my class and they are all around me. I live with them and at some point I'm just goddamn these people. If you imagine that people are just blinding themselves to who is and just so consumed by loathing contempt for the elites, then you can see how psychologically you can support him without thinking too much about him. And if you think of him as one giant middle finger, then it works. And I do think there is and I do think the way in which the media has responded and in which other institutions have responded, including things like the FBI and CIA and the mainstream media in its broad sense, and even the judiciary who have gone nuts, they have overplayed their hands in ways that equally undermine confidence in a liberal democracy. That seems as if it's all just some great tribal struggle. And if it is that tribal struggle, and you know you hate those people, well, maybe he's tolerable. Maybe he's just simply a weapon at hand. And given the sort of way in which those elites have never truly copped to their responsibility for some of the worst decisions in the last 30 years in this country, especially insofar as they affected regular working class white people, I think is integral to understanding his appeal as a concept. And I sympathize with that. I really do. And I've tried to learn from it. At the same time, he is so despicable and so dangerous. I mean, the fact that we are sitting here a week before an election, and neither you nor I can know for sure that one of the candidates, in fact, the president, will wait patiently for all the votes to be tallied, where there will be no question that there will be a clear and obvious transfer of power, that we will be resolved. We'll have this big conflict, but it will be resolved, and we will move forward. The fact that we don't know that for sure, the fact that this man is even holding the stability of our system as a weapon, shows an unbelievable level of recklessness and irresponsibility and a true danger to everything. And I'm so tired of being told right now that you overestimated, you hyperventilated. He hasn't been a dictator. He's blah, blah, blah. And this is a very sort of world weary sense. Yes, but what are we supposed to do when a president says, I may not abide by the results of an election? Are we supposed to sit there and say, oh, well, we know he doesn't really mean that, or we'll be fine? No, that's not our responsibility. Why are we being put in this position at all? How dare this man come into our democracy and threaten it this way? It is unprecedented passionate about this, but at this point, like, no, fuck you. That is not tolerable. No party should support it. No one can tolerate it, and yet he does. And by doing that, for those of us like me, who are institutionally very conservative, who believe that liberal democracy is fragile, needs to be defended, this is a crime against our very system of government. The fact that this man can sympathize with and openly support people who are engaging in the most hideous repressive measures, like Putin or she or he could actually, we're told tell she, don't worry about putting all those Uighurs in concentration camps. I'd be with you if I were over there. This is sorry, but it's just it's not a personality flaw. It's a critical, undermining argument to everything that we believe in in the west. Yeah. So you've just hit upon the worst current thing about him, and it's the one recent fact that I think in isolation. I mean, forget about everything else we've said about him and or could be said about him that I think should be a deal breaker for somebody. The fact that we have a sitting US. President who will not commit to the peaceful transfer of power should he lose the election this is just so unbelievable and it is so dangerous and irresponsible. That should be the only thing you have to know about him to know that you can't vote for him. I really do think that really does supersede any other concern we could have about anything. And there are literally 1000 other things that almost rise to that level. The fact that he's someone who repeatedly has asked why we can't just use our nuclear weapons. Right. He's the one person in our society who can launch a nuclear first strike and he seems to be conflicted over the ethics there. There are literally hundreds of things like that that we could dredge up to disqualify him or prove his unfitness for office. But the fact that he will not commit to a peaceful transfer of power here and the fact that he's willing to roll the dice with the obvious harm that that is doing to our politics and the risk that is amplifying for political unrest in the aftermath of the election. The thing that's amazing to me is that he has not lost support on the basis of that. I mean, I would think that his support his support should go to zero after saying that the only thing he could say that is equivalently crazy to this. And he almost did it. He made a joke about Biden getting assassinated at one of his rallies the other day. But the only thing that's actually analogous to him not committing to a peaceful transfer of power is for him to actually encourage his supporters to assassinate Biden. If he stood up at a rally and said listen, we'd all be a lot better if one of you put a bullet in this joker, right? If he did that, the truth is I'm not even sure that's worse. I think it might be more shocking to some people. But the fact that he is willing to roll the dice with endless allegations that the election is rigged, there's no way he could lose but for essentially a Democrat run coup. And he's not going to commit to the peaceful transfer of power. And he's just willing to just let that aftermath play out with 400 million guns in this society. It is unbelievable that we're here and it's doubly unbelievable that we haven't seen the support for him go to zero on that basis. Yes. And the truth is that I am genuinely frightened of a close result which he refuses to acknowledge. I'm genuinely frightened of an unbelievably specious attempt to call the election on election night regardless of whether we've completed or voted or counted all or even a majority of the votes. The fact that I'm afraid that he could indeed call for violence in the streets in his defense, that he could stoke and would talk about this as if he weren't ultimately responsible for law and order in the United States is simply unique in the history of the United States or unique in the history of Western democracy, actually. And given the passions that he has created, and given also the racial fault line that he has mined, and given the radicalization that he has also enabled, but not he hasn't created it entirely himself, but he has definitely made it worse. We're talking about probably the most dangerous period in modern American history in terms of the stability of the actual regime, of the stability of the system, when the person in charge of the system openly speaks of no responsibility for maintaining it. In fact, because, again, I come back to this pathological narcissism. He cannot see outside his own personal pride, ego, and self interest that we are still in a terribly precarious situation in this country, and I will not breathe easily or sleep well until he is removed from office. And I felt that way for them because I can't ever see because he's never given us any indication of any limit, any limit to what he will and will not do. It is a constant process of shock. And when you look at classical depictions of crazy tyrants, this is their capacity. It's part of what maintains their power. They never tell you the limits on what they can do. They always keep you guessing. We'll see what happens is one of his favorite phrases, which is a threat. It's not an observation. And his refusal to ever put any outer limits on what he can and cannot do in the terms of this culture is unique, and it is terrifying. And I'm sorry, but Republicans and conservatives who sort of roll their eyes at this as if what they're witnessing is entertainment. Truth is, I don't think I've seen the rank and file Republican response to his unwillingness to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. Have you noticed how Republicans spin that and bracket it or otherwise convey their reasons for not taking it seriously? I haven't seen a clear, absolutely unequivocal, except maybe from Romney statement from people with power saying, this is unacceptable and must be stopped. They would tell us that it's not going to happen. He's just joking. This constant he's just joking stuff. Again, it suggests that we're watching a miniseries rather than living in an actual functioning republic. But in this case, he's so obviously not joking. This ball has been teed up for him now at least a dozen times, and every time he declines to hit it in the way you would expect a US president to. I think it's because he sees himself sort of in a lawsuit where you never concede anything, and until the very last minute, when if you're forced to settle, you may be forced to settle, but you'd certainly never give away any leverage in advance. Which, of course, might be a sensible strategy if you are a private actor within a system which has already guaranteed some basic security, when you're actually the President of the United States and you're putting the entire system at risk. I just think there's an incredible complacency about the stability of this system, which really does help reinforce to me, who thinks of himself as a sort of classical conservative, just how anticonservative this republican movement is. It is absolutely contemptuous of procedures, norms, and institutions, has absolutely no concern for their preservation, does not even see the system that we live in for what it is. It is simply a TV show. It is simply a talk radio show. It is simply a forum for entertainment. And yes, I can get moved each another way, but by the entertainment I can get really pissed off at all these crazy lefties. I can love listening to Joe wrote. I can do all that, but I'm not going to keep my eye off the ball of sustaining the system. I've read enough history, I've seen enough I've read enough literature to see what is in front of our noses, which is this guy should never have been in there, ever. Yeah, there's now this loss of trust in institutions, but the loss of trust is to a shocking degree, warranted. I mean, there has just been a hollowing out of institutions, and there's, you know, there's been a denigration of them to the point where, you know, you're just not even sure how many competent people are left in positions of responsibility at places like the FDA and the CDC. And the press has, based on its own for the very dynamic you described, so much of the counter reaction to Trump, the necessary counter reaction has been so deranged by how bad he is, that now you have something like the New York Times is the worst possible incarnation of itself because it has been so captured by the spirit of the Resistance. And it's true, for example, with some of these courts that struck down his immigration rulings, which were self evidently from the get go within his purview, agree with them or disagree with them, that some of these legal and judicial arguments been thrown up by some of the courts which have eventually been shot down have nonetheless been discredited. The courts, I think, in a way that was always a danger in this. The overreaction was always going to be as dangerous long term as his expressions. And that's what the trick is within liberal democracy, is to try and keep these things at bay, because otherwise they cannibalize everything they cannibalize the rule of law. I mean, what he's done with the justice department, for example, what he's done to the credibility of the FBI, which is, I think, terrible in as much as we do have to have trust in neutral institutions that enforce the law, and if the FBI doesn't have that trust, we're in terrible trouble. At the same time, he's provoked reactions within those systems that I think have been excessive and in the media. I think the Russia obsession, the notion that we were going to prove that he is a paid agent from the 1980s onwards, I mean, this stuff was a fantasy. And even though there are lots of troubling ties between him and there are sympathies, he doesn't have any qualms or scruples about taking aid from anyone. And he naturally sides with dictators because he likes them. He thinks they're cool. He thinks they're the ones that really know what's going on. So his support for us, or he's close to Putin was completely over determined. But the entire establishment had to engage in what turned out to be a three year long goose chase to find some obvious smoking gun which was never going to be there in the first place, and has thereby helped discredit a great deal of these institutions. I mean, I think what you read in The New York Times today is that when you read, for example, ben Smith, The New York Times. Not to get personal about this, but who's defending keeping the Hunter Biden stuff? Out of the press. When you realize that this is the person who published the Steele dossier without any qualms whatsoever or any context or anything other than here it is, let's have a look at it you begin to realize just how the press has discredited itself and in public opinion also. And I must say, Sam, I look at places like CNN, and I can't believe it anymore. Yeah, it's completely broken. It is broken so badly. And a function of this, of course, is that it's also incredibly boring. You look at what's happened in mainstream media, and it is one endless tedious recitation of the same prejudices and views without any and you've seen them internally being capable of accepting a diversity of opinion within their own ranks. It's been a terrible period for media. Even though they have done incredibly well financially by pandering in this way and by becoming essentially abandoning any pretense of neutrality, they don't realize that that in itself is also an attack upon liberal democracy. And I want there to be a newspaper which I can trust, and I want to read a newspaper where I don't read every page and feel there is an obvious agenda here that even I, who loathe the man and despise many of his policies, still find irritating and crude and self discrediting. Well, that's just a crucial line that can't be crossed. There are so many valid, honest, well calibrated things you can say against Trump that you never need to exaggerate. I say this knowing that some people, having listened to me for the last hour, will think I've exaggerated his flaws but I can assure you I haven't. But to take the one piece of fine print I put out earlier on is that he has this very frequent attack against him that he didn't condemn white supremacy and that he in the aftermath of Charlottesville, he said there were good people, fine people on both sides, and left it at that. Right. That's simply untrue. You can take five minutes to listen to the press conference where, you know, the the fine people utterance first escaped his mouth. And it's within 15 seconds of of saying that he said, I'm not talking about the white supremacist, you know, that we should condemn them utterly. He was absolutely clear about that, that he was talking about what he imagined to be a different crowd of people who were simply protesting the removal of monuments that were dear to their heart right. And these were not the tiki torch carrying antisemite. Yeah. He made it. He did make a distinction that the press simply lied about and Biden lies about it and Kamala Harris lies about it. And whether everyone knows they're lying or not, or they just can't be bothered to figure out what wonders whether Daniel Dale has rules on this. Right. There are things that have said about him that are not true and that are unfair. Yeah. The point is you never need to do that. Right. You never need to be dishonest with respect to yes, but they have no gender in doing that because they want to racialize this. The left has done a great, sterling, constant job of saying that what this is really about is not illiberalism. It's not the dangers of a person who can't be trusted or who is a fantasist or a narcissist or a dangerous person. They want to make this into proof that, in fact, all of America just voted twice for Obama is not just racist, but white supremacist. And therefore they have to up the ante all the time. What's fascinating to me is after four years of that, four years of it, it looks as if Trump is going to significantly increase, even from a very low base, but nonetheless increase support among blacks and Hispanics. And if Biden wins, it's going to be because he won over elderly whites rather than so. The actual data that we're seeing does not portray this. And you also realize that the people who were critical in giving Biden the nomination were basically solid black Democratic voters who have their feet on the ground and their heads screwed on right. Who understood that it is not in the interests of African Americans to have their entire neighborhoods ransacked with looting and rioting and in claims that people do want to see police misconduct held to account. They do want to see real reform. And there is a huge, I think, majority for practical, common sense reforms in restraining police abuse. Absolutely. But that is being blown away by an attempt to create this sort of grand racial tribal narrative that isn't actually borne out in in reality. And that's also the case with the question of immigration, where what are completely genuine and completely legitimate democratic arguments about how much immigration should we have, how little immigration, how should we enforce? These are completely legitimate questions for politics. And yet we are told that anybody raising these issues or even having anything but a completely permissive view is inherently thereby a white supremacist. Now, of course, when people are being told that the things that they just wanted to have a voice on, that they are bigots for even raising it, of course they're going to be more concerned and hate the people calling them bigots than the person they think might actually in the end, stand up for them. And that helps Trump do what he wants to do in the sense that he's dismissive African Americans in contemptuous and lacks any empathy or compassion or any sense really, of the nuances of history. He's a racist, yes. But do I think he's a kind of long standing white supremacist seeking to oppress? No. He's desperate for minority votes. He champions them. He talks about them all the time. It's more complicated than that. He's totally without ideology. He's not committed to anything. I do think, I believe, you know, to a moral certainty that I have evidence that he's racist. Just but it's it's not especially public evidence. And I've talked about this before, but I know at least two people who have it directly from Mark Burnett that he buried the Apprentice tapes and that on those tapes you've got Trump using the N word in earnest. Not talking about it as a word, but just using it because that's what he calls these people. We also know that he's a rapist. I mean, this is not up for dispute. So you just struck a point of contact to the Hunter Biden scandal that no one will talk about. The truth is, I haven't looked into this enough to have formed an opinion about it. I just know how inconsequential an exercise that would be. Because the truth is, there's basically nothing that could be there that would swamp the invidious comparisons I've made between Biden and Trump thus far. It's like, even if you could prove to me that to take another scandal that no one wanted to talk about the allegation that Biden had sexually assaulted somebody who was working for his campaign, whatever it was, 20 years ago, at a certain point, the New York Times talked about that, but only to sort of put it back in the closet. It didn't seem especially credible, I think, in the end to people. But even if it had been every bit as credible as the allegations against Trump, well, it's one allegation against, what, 20 in Trump's case. So it's like there's nothing you're going to find in the Hunter Biden story that is going to rise to the level of the corruption I already know Trump is guilty of, and that's why it's deeply uninteresting to me. But I share people's concern that we are now in a place in our democracy where we feel like we can't even report stories because they could so destabilize our politics so that we would wind up with four more years of Trump. I think it is in fact true as a matter of just hourly changes in public opinion that comey's reactivation of the Hillary Clinton investigation in the last week of the campaign is why Trump became president. I mean, obviously there are many other variables here, but that was the thing that changed the polling decisively. I mean, you can just essentially time it to the hour, but we're here, so I don't know, what should we be doing with Hunter Biden and Joe Biden at the moment? I've thought about this too. I think the reason why that did have an impact is because it played right in 2016. Is it played right in just the existing narrative of Clinton as a crook, basically, and as a very deceptive and self interested, old fashioned corrupt politician. And so it hit that way. Although the truth is, even then, we're talking about a massive double standard, because whatever you could convict anyone else of in that regard, trump has that in triplicate. Yeah, I have done my best to read these stories about Hunter Biden's laptop. And when I think it's through, rather like you, rather uncannily like you, I think, well, compared to Ivanka, compared to Donju, compared to the unbelievable, open, proud corruption of this obviously corrupt family in the White House, this is trivial. But I do think that carefully engineered, last minute, partisan oriented, sudden revelations should be met with skepticism and restraint from the media. And I think that's perfectly sensible. What the Wall Street Journal did in reporting this out and telling us what wasn't there actually, that there wasn't anything there was the right thing to do. The extraordinary attempt to forbid any discussion of this in any other media source, the way in which bringing this up is regarded as some sort of horrifying thing. Whereas, in fact, obviously, it seems to me hunter Biden is a corrupt individual in a legal way most of the time. There's nothing illegal about the way he parlayed and peddled his connection to his father. And this is a problem. It pales in insignificance compared to what Trump is doing and has done. And it doesn't implicate Joe himself. But the way in which the mainstream media has responded instinctively to suppress this story, and the way in which social media then reacted also by suppressing this story, I cannot but unnervous this is a media that is more interested at this point in controlling the news than airing it. And I don't think the giuliani, slightly nutball interviews about this or some of the details of this. I don't think they're that persuasive. I don't think it would dramatically shift. But I don't like the idea that we have a media interested in keeping from the public stuff that might change their minds about a political debate with at this point in a campaign. I just don't like it. It's not what our instincts should be as journalists. Our core instinct should be what's here, what's in it. It shouldn't be to push it out there like Ben Smith did with the Steele dossier. It should be, however, not to say this must never be talked about. And what I've seen, I mean, the refusal to air this except on Fox. And then there are some lonely people like Matt Taibi who is interested in writing about this, and Glenn Greenwald, who is, I think, trying to write about this in Intercept. But that you won't find it anywhere is troubling to me. And especially troubling. Because if we do get a change of regime, if we do get biden in, then all these people are going to be involved not just in suppressing information, but suppressing information on behalf of those in power. And I see the mindset among my peers in journalism and it chills me. They really do believe that their job is to advance, quote unquote, social justice, is not to get as much information out to people as possible and let them decide for themselves. And that's a that's a really disturbing thing. And I've seen it up close and I've seen the pressure socially on people not to do this. And being a journalist is to be an asshole in so many respects. It is to embrace your position as the skunk at the party, the person bringing up the unpopular stuff, the stuff now, you can do it responsibly irresponsibly. And I'm not saying this stuff should have been spread all over the place immediately, but I am saying the way the media has responded to this seems to me deeply unhealthy. It speaks to a rot in mainstream media and its understanding of what journalism is. And it concerns me. It really does. I understand why people won't want to last minute comey with some bullshit, distorting everybody's views at the last minute. And I do think this was cynically done by partisan people for partisan purposes. But Hunter Biden is almost certainly a shady individual. And Joe Biden's refusal refusal even to address the question, simply to dismiss it out of hand as a smear job as opposed to engage in it. Similarly, his refusal, his absolute refusal to say where he stands on the question of court packing, which is an incredibly important topic and to have been supported by the mainstream media in in not answering these questions, in fact, cheering him for not answering them, is troubling, and certainly troubling for the future. It reveals that the media is disposed to treat and social media are disposed to treat much of American society as dangerous children. But I mean, the truth is that given what has happened and given that the dangerous child half of our society voted for last time around, that's not totally unwarranted. I mean, there really is this concern that even with however scrupulous you are to deal with the information, it is a kind of informationally, it is a kind of toxic waste that will get spread around. And given the asymmetries here what's so amazing is the New York Times gets one thing wrong to its everlasting discredit whereas Fox need not get anything right and they're both considered news organizations. And Trump can lie and lie and lie and lie and no one cares and it can be as obvious as the sun is in the sky and catch Joe Biden lying clearly and that could completely derail his campaign, but for good reason. Those are the norms we want. We want to get back to a world where to catch someone lying in public life dictates a real reputational cost. How did we get so far from that? Again, in Trumpistan, everything functions by a different physics and awareness of that is just paralyzed us in trying to deal with it. I get it. I think you're absolutely right. I think social media can do things that are really destructive and I do think some level of responsibility from those who control that social media and is important. I'm just concerned that it gets to a slightly pathological and rather knee jerk attempt to suppress information rather than to get it all out. And the strizand effect. By trying to suppress it, you're now calling attention to it. And it's although it seems like they have managed to squash it, I think the fact that there isn't really anything really damning in this about Joe Biden himself has helped keep this thing from not being the central and of course, it shouldn't be a central issue in the campaign. And of course, Tucker Carlson sitting down for an hour to spread this stuff is clearly not really a function of journalism. It's a function of partisan warfare at the same time. Again, I'm being squishy here, but I do think you have to as a journalist, if this stuff comes out, you have to, for example, ask Biden, is this untrue? Are you telling us that this is a complete fraud? That this laptop is not Hunter biden. That nothing in this is true about Hunter Biden? Is this an entirely false flag operation? And the fact is he hasn't been forced to say yes or no to that and he should be forced to say yes or no to that. We should know if he thinks this is an entire fabrication or if he thinks it's a real thing, that somehow they got hold of this laptop. It really is hunter biden. And but but it's being distorted or manipulated or those are two options. He he hasn't been the press has let him get away with that. So let's say we escape the worst possible outcomes here and arrive at something like the best possible from our point of view, which is that Biden wins in a landslide and there is a peaceful transfer of power and Trump tries to it's interesting to consider what he will attempt to do as an ex president. I guess I'm just wondering what aftermath can you imagine for Republicans? Just imagine the Republicans who will at that point try to diminish their culpability for having enabled Trump for four years. Just culturally, politically, what is this the process of of resetting going to look like? It's almost like you need truth and reconciliation commissions to give people the space in which to offer the appropriate Mia culpas and to get, you know, a reboot. I'm not sure it's that hard because I think you can make an argument and I'm looking at sort of center right parties in Europe on this. There are things that Trump identified and elevated that are real. There is a real worry about large swaths of the working and middle classes in the west being completely left behind by globalization and the power of unrestrained global capitalism. And there is also a genuine question of how fast a population can change demographically without being counterproductive in terms of it provoking racist, xenophobic or nativist responses when it is at what is a historic peak. I mean, not seen for another over a century of something like 14% of the entire population of the United States not having been born in the United States, which is as high as it's been since the early 20th century, after which there was a very draconian immigration law. I think those issues can be integrated into a more sensible and liberal democratic conservatism that you can harness patriotism, you can harness traditional values with skepticism towards completely free trade and with some more control and enforcement of immigration laws in a way that is a completely plausible and probably quite popular position. And it's something that, for example, in the UK, the Tories were able to do quite successfully and win an 80 seat majority, the biggest majority in decades in the UK parliament. And even though they're struggling with COVID obviously that's quite an achievement. I'm quite optimistic about the possibility of a kind of adjusted conservative. It's not going to be a return to neoconservatism in foreign policy. It's not going to be a return to neoclassical economics. It can't be because they have become, I think, a victim of their own success. So I do think there's a possibility for a figure to emerge to say, we get what you were saying, we realize this guy was out of his mind. They're not going to say it quite that boldly, but they will emphasize things like the rule of law, give and taken, a democracy, those kind of values. But to be honest, what I really hope is that Biden will be and present himself as being a unifying president. And that means, really, first of all, finding a way to keep us and keep this economy alive during COVID which is going to be brutal in the next six to nine months. But I do think there is a real opening for a major stimulus. I think there's a real opening for major infrastructure investment, for green energy investment. I do think there is an appetite for repairing our traditional alliances, which could be very popular. And I do think there's an appetite for police reform which is not framed in the terms of some sort of great reckoning with institutionalized racism or white supremacy, but which is geared towards bringing the races together around law and order and protecting everyone. I think there is a real opening for that kind of centerist Democratic position which is going to actually, in policy terms, be a shift economically to the left. And I think if Biden is able to do that without caving to some of the more extreme cultural and social elements in his coalition, he could be extremely successful. And so my hope is that we might move away from tribalism. I'm encouraged by Biden's quixotic but enduring belief that he can talk to a few Republican senators and get some kind of support. I do also think that Biden uniquely does not trigger white voters in the way that another Democrat might. I do think that there will be a big fight within the Democrats over who's going to win. And in my darker moments, I think Biden is just out of it and will cave and will bring in so many crazy ass wokies into the situation that it will all become terrible. But I don't want to give up on that possibility. It's not like Biden biden has run a campaign for the center. He has not, even though he has endorsed big infrastructure spending and debt, which I think is probably necessary given the extraordinary crisis of the global economy in this epidemic. But I think in general, he's quite appealing to lots of people, as we've seen. And I think he's also a decent person in as much as he won't outrageously lie. He won't stir up racial animosities. Today, for example, he just came out very simply and said the riots and looting in Philadelphia last night are just unacceptable and wrong, period. And that's important. It's important that the cops understand that the president is not going to sell them out at every opportunity, even though he's going to be tough in making sure that the injustices that are there are examined and rooted out. I just wonder whether Biden isn't actually a better spokesman for Obamaism than Obama was, even though Obama was incredibly eloquent. There was just something culturally I found him unbelievably inspiring and culturally ennobling and wonderfully. But clearly that didn't work for large numbers of people. They felt alienated to some extent, and Biden is not that the fact that the Democratic base picked this guy. The fact that black voters disproportionately picked this guy is encouraging to me. And it's an opportunity for us to revive a certain liberal Democratic, I mean, those in two small L, small D terms around this rather conventional figure of Biden. I can't wait for that, and I can't I want I so desperately want the temperature to go down. I want I want some of the tension to be released. I want I want a president I don't have to think about for a few weeks. I want someone whose core psyche I'm pretty comfortable with, even though Biden over the years has driven me nuts. And he's irritating in some ways, and he's confusing, and he has been a blowhard. What's interesting to me is the Biden they've given us in this campaign is not that Biden. He is more the elder statesman. Come together, let's all get along. Figure, elderly figure, someone who represents a past understanding, for example, of bipartisanship. And these are things that they have advertised. They put them front and forward. That matters in terms of how the administration will evolve. He's going to have enormous pressure on him from the left. But I think my hope again, I can't guarantee this, and part of me is pessimistic, but my hope is that he can really do that. He can put together a civilized civil coalition around the center. I actually think and this is another debate, if he gets a really big win, I think that helps him against the left, because he's going to bring in a whole bunch of Democrats into the Senate and the House who are going to be answerable to swing voters in marginal seats. And if you look at the way the Democrats responded on the way they campaigned in 2018, if that is where Biden goes, then I think it's quite possible he'll do very well. But as you point out, he is the elder Biden. And to the point of where it does not seem irrational to imagine that he's a one term president and he may well be succeeded at some point in the middle of his term by Kamala Harris Actuarially. It would not be terrible surprise. So how do you view the prospect of a Harris presidency? Why don't you ask me that question? This is the part we cut out not to give energy to Trump voters. Yes, I wasn't that to be honest with you. There's an element of her that obviously seems to be tough minded, and I'm certainly in favor of women in high office, and that's a plus as far as I'm concerned. There's an element to her that has seemed a little unserious, to be honest with you. I remember her in one of those debates where she said that within 100 days, if they didn't pass gun control legislation I can't remember exactly what she said. She would enforce it herself. And Bryden actually in that debate, said, well you know, constitutionally you can't do that. That's not within the powers of the president. And I was like, well that's an obviously good point and I waited for her to respond. She's a prosecutor, she knows the law, she knows the Constitution. And she just kind of giggled and laughed, said oh come on Joe, we can do it if we try. Yes we can. And I was like that is not a serious person. Right? But in terms of fears that she is a full avatar of the wokeness, her history as a prosecutor would suggest that she's not among the defund, the police crowd, whatever lip service she's paid to wokeness. No. But she also seems to have a finger in the wind and is a somewhat canny politician and will see he would have to die for her to succeed. I think there's still quite a chance he'll be hanging on for four more years. I don't think he's going to run again and I do think therefore, after the midterms there's going to be a real fight for the future of the party. I can't imagine running for a second term and I do think that also gives Biden an opportunity. You know, if you are trying to be the unifier, if you're trying to be the person who settles things down and attempts to put us back together in some way, then not having an interest in your own perpetuation for second term gives you a kind of platform to do that more in a bipartisan way. And I do think that's Biden's instinct, I do think he misses the old politics. Now there are many who say don't be an idiot, the Republicans are evil, that they will they won't compromise, they can't deal. They will probably oppose, for example, an unbelievably necessary stimulus during COVID They will probably do what they attempted to do with Biden, with Obama, which is basically try and cripple his ability to repair the damage. That depends how badly they're defeated, I think, and who's left. And it also depends on whether they take the same attitude to Biden as leader to Obama. And I think Biden does have some serious relationships in the Senate particularly that helps him. I do think he's better at congressional engagement and management than Obama was for psychological reasons. And I do think Biden is capable of reminding many people in the middle, I'm thinking particularly white people say in the Midwest that the Democrats aren't viscerally and character logically hostile to their interests and ideas. And I think his religious faith plays a part in credentializing him in that way his background does. And I think especially in a health crisis, I think there's something about his ability to empathize with people who have been stricken with grief and illness and struggle is actually important. We need it. I mean there is nothing faint about that. Whatever you do or don't know about him as a person, his back story as someone who has suffered bereavement upon bereavement, and in the first case, just the most shocking kind. The idea that someone with these reserves of compassion and just empathy for human suffering, that alone would be such a change in the office of the presidency. I'm for most sort of traditional Irish Catholic families in England and everything, but we're all roughly I know that guy. I know that guy, and I know he's a good guy. I just know that. And I can't tell you how deep one's yearning for just some human decency in that office. And I do think they've been very effective at putting that across. I do think that some kind of the presidency is a weird thing. It's not a prime minister. And there is a role in which the president does, as it were, bind the nation in a series in a matter of grief. And what we have been going through requires some kind of ability to understand that. I think, for example, the way Trump dismissed drug abuse, hunter Biden, torture from a coke addicted, a crackhead or whatever he called him. Such a fucking despicable human being, that guy. Just that detail alone, the idea that in a presidential debate, one of the candidates would attack the other one as a father of a crackhead, I mean, just that's where we are. But when you're also dealing in the context of this awful epidemic, which has been socially and personally isolating has been incredibly I mean, we've not only lost people, we've lost people we couldn't visit, we couldn't see, we couldn't help. I lost my dad and couldn't even go to a burial. And there is an open wound in this country that Trump does nothing but pour salt into. And we also have a crisis of addiction, which this epidemic has made even worse, that we're seeing the numbers of opioid addiction go up again. Fentanyl is spreading again. We really do have a spiritual crisis. Don, I'm going to trigger you, but I've reclaimed that word for my own purposes. Okay, let's say translate appropriately on my side, okay? We're all dealing with existential questions of life and death. And it does matter that someone is at the top that feels like is not seeing you entirely as instrumental to his political fortunes. It might actually take a moment to be with you and to acknowledge we have never, for example, in this country, we've never really acknowledged the deaths. So we have we could have half a million by the spring. And other countries have had moments where they've stopped to universally celebrate healthcare workers or those people. There also been moments in which people have stopped for a moment of silence in memory of those we've lost. I mean, this is, this is the other context that we're in right now of this extraordinary dislocation in which we're all living in this uncanny valley of our previous lives in which nothing, everything seems similar but it's just awfully off key. And and the other thing we learn about these experiences, the human experience I wrote an essay earlier this year about plagues in history is that what they do to societies is they suspend you in midair for a minute, and they are moments in which you can actually socially really reorganize and restructure in ways that otherwise might not happen. And I do think that we're going to see and as someone who was a supporter of Thatcher Reagan and a lot of neoliberal economics for a while, I do think that it's quite plausible argument. If you shift from race and identity to class, as a Democrat, you actually have a unique opportunity to build a consensus around more support for working people, more support for people with addiction, more compassion in that context, without dividing us by race and massive inequality. That absolutely needs to be addressed structurally with some redistribution. So there's a there's a moment here, an opportunity that, again, you don't see this old dude as necessarily harnessing, but I think he might be, in a paradoxical way, a man for the moment. In as much as that, yes, he could preside over this without making people afraid of a sort of leftist takeover because old Uncle Joe's in there also could be quite structurally important in terms of the economy. But also I think we want a defense of the west. We want someone to stand up and defend our way of life against the emerging powers of East Asia and Russia in ways that our current president has absolutely undermined from the get go. And I do think that's a great opportunity for this dude and by the way, I think he should appoint Obama as Secretary of State and send him around the world. Again, another apology for you second, but this time with real feeling, please. I also think, by the way, we're also going to have this like this unbelievably riotously debauched when we get past COVID, when we get past this, people are going to get the roaring 20s, we're going to be fucking 100 years later site. We're going to be drinking everything sight. We'll be doing every single drug and so on. And anyway, Biden is a transitional figure but primarily a sort of binding up the wounds kind of guy. Now I may be being naive here, I'm not saying that these forces of polarization, of tribalism can disappear. They're going to inherit if we get through this period peacefully and if the decision to vote Biden is a big one so that it can't really be psychologically reversed. If it's a kind of LBJ goldwater thing, then you can, I think, fix the thing. What I fear most is a narrow wind that is brutally contested that leads to unbelievable dissension and violence and the interregnum. Those are the nightmare scenarios that are in front of me. I'm just praying that don't happen. I think there's a chance with a landslide that we can get past them. But of course, we don't know. We live in history. I think we've discovered that it isn't over. Yeah, well, fingers crossed, Andrew. I think it's a great place to leave it. Before we sign off, I just want to say something to your audience. We're on both of our podcasts now, but talking to the dish audience. You and I have just spoken about all the ways in which bad incentives and pressure have corrupted the media and how difficult it has become to have a sane and intellectually honest conversation about difficult topics. And I really hold you to be one among a handful of people who can be relied upon to take intellectual and reputational risks to advance that honest conversation. And it's getting harder to do that. And the business model of journalism has been inimical to ordinary people doing that, and it's been taking extraordinary people or extraordinarily lucky people to do it. And you and I don't agree about everything. You and I certainly started out debating things and debating when it's been a few years since I looked back at our first debate about religious belief. But it was surprisingly hard hitting, if memory serves. And the fact that we have arrived in a place where we're friends and we're this copacetic, it just speaks to something about you that I have not discovered in everyone I've disagreed with in quite the same way. And so I just urge your audience to support your current endeavor, because the only thing that will allow you to be the voice we need on all the topics you will touch is a secure business model. And so they should support your podcast. They should support your newsletter, as I am, and I'm loving your newsletter, by the way. So I know it's uncomfortable to ask an audience for support, but it's not uncomfortable at all for me to ask your audience to support you. So I just really urge people to thank you do that so much. One thing we do every week is that I'll write my piece, but we really will publish the strongest dissents and arguments against it and force me to engage them in a reasonable way, and no one else is doing that. It's not a comment section where people yell at you. It is an attempt to put me on the spot every week to make sure that I'm kept honest by my own readership. And yes, we've proven that this can't happen anymore in so many media institutions that have been captured. And so supporting us really matters, and I'm really grateful. You've been an absolute role model in pursuing this kind of intellectual inquiry, and you've helped me calm down and think seriously and be a better writer and thinker and my readers do the same thing. And if you want to encourage that kind of discourse, please support us. Our payroll goes up this week. A lot of you will be in that position of choosing whether to actually back us with your dollars or not. It doesn't matter. You're welcome. Whatever. But please help us. Please support. It's a weekly dish. It's out there on substance, and I'm so grateful, Sam, for you to support that. And I'm also thrilled that this conversation is the first of a series of conversations I'm having with some, I hope some really interesting people, in which we will be having the same kind of conversation, which is not, which is an attempt to get to the truth. That's all. I just want to figure out what's true. And if that's your goal, then please be with us and help me do it. Nice. Well, I certainly hope that politics becomes so boring that our next conversation has nothing to do with it. That we won't even be tempted to talk about politics. That's the world I want to live in, Andrew. Amen. That is the ultimate achievement of a liberal society, is to have moments where we can leave politics entirely behind. Nice. Well, to be continued, brother. Absolutely. Thanks so much, Sam. God bless. I mean, I didn't mean that in a tricky way. Yeah./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Jonathan Height. John is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. He got his PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and then he taught at the University of Virginia for 16 years. I believe in the psychology department. He's the author of The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis and most recently, the Coddling of The American Mind with his co author Greg Lukianoff. And this is John's second time on the podcast. John and I have a somewhat colorful history. We now play well together, but that was not always so. I recently went back and looked at some of our skirmishes in print and was surprised to see how hard we rolled. We really tried to take each other's head off, but this is an example of a collision that ultimately worked out. There are people who I've fought pretty hard with in the past where our debate over ideas definitely slip the bounds of collegiality. This happened with my friend Dan Dennett about free will, and it happened with Sean Carroll, the physicist. But then further conversation got us back on track. Of course, there have been other skirmishes where the outcome seemed to cancel all possibility of future conversation. Admittedly, it's hard to know when that point has been reached. I'm hearing rumors, for instance, that Noam Chomsky may want to do a podcast, and that's an experiment I'd be willing to run. Actually, as bad as that email exchange was, probably have to do that in person and with a mediator and maybe with some MDMA and an arm guard. But I'd be willing to try it, so I'll let you know if that comes together. Anyway, John is now very easy to talk to. He is a collaborator, and he is doing very important work. And here we speak about his new book and about the recent moral panics among young adults. We discuss controversies over free speech on campus, the role of intentions in morality, the economy of prestige in so called call out culture. We talk about how we should define bigotry, systemic racism, the paradox of progress, how the world gets better and better, and we coddle our kids more and more because we want life to be as safe and as easy as possible. Understandably so. But there is a downside in any case, this is a timely conversation which should be relevant to people in every generation, really. We're talking to the young and we're talking to their parents who have to live with them. So, without further delay, I bring you Jonathan height. I am here with Jonathan Height. John, thanks for coming back on the podcast. My pleasure, Sam. So you have a new book, which really the world has been waiting for for quite some time because you're addressing a problem that has been like this cresting wave of leftist intolerance that has breaking over us now for some years. And the book is the coddling of the American mind, which you wrote with your co author, Greg Lukianoff. This book is long overdue. It's based on an Atlantic article that you guys wrote a few years ago. So let's just talk about the genesis of this. Yeah, but you were on my podcast a while back. I don't know if that was six months or a year ago. Yeah, sometime last year. And we got somewhat into this, but the problem has kind of crystallized since then and there are more elaborations of this. So take me back to the writing of the Atlantic article and just state the nature of the problem for us. So Greg Lukianoff is a friend of mine. We just knew each other casually through a mutual friend. And he came to talk to me in the summer of 2014 and said, john, all this weird stuff has been happening on campus. Greg is the president of the foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and he's been fighting for free speech rights for students since around 2000. And usually that means fighting campus administrators who are always imposing speech codes and designating little areas as free speech zones. And suddenly in 2013, 2014, students started asking for safe spaces, trigger warnings. They started saying that certain things need to be removed from the curriculum because they were dangerous or threatening or traumatizing. And in a variety of ways, the students were showing the very thought patterns that Greg had learned not to do in cognitive behavioral therapy. Greg is prone to depression. He's had some very serious suicidal depression episodes. We talk about one in the book that led him to learn CBT. And in CBT, you learn to do things like recognize catastrophizing. If someone comes to speak, it'll destroy people, black and white, thinking somebody's all good or all bad. Discounting the positive, the Western tradition or whatever you want to say. You know, you focus on just the negatives, not the positives. So Greg saw like, wow, this is really weird. Are we teaching students to think in ways that will make them depressed and anxious? So he came to he came to talk to me in the summer of 2014. And I had just begun to see some of that same stuff in my classes. And you and I talked about that in our last discussion just students acting in a really very sensitive getting angry easily and then filing charges, that sort of thing. So that stuff was I was puzzled by that. And when Greg told me his theory, I said, wow, that is such a cool idea, and I actually kind of like to write this up with you if you'll have me as a co author. And so he took me on. We wrote the article, and it came out in August of 2015, before all the protests and all the changes that happened around Halloween, especially Halloween of 2015. So people thought that we were cherry picking in 2015, but then all this stuff happened from 2015 through 2017 and violence at a few schools. So we ended up greg decided we actually had a lot more to say, and the problem was a lot worse, and he wanted to write it up as a book. And I said, I'm too busy. I've got to write this other book on capitalism and morality. But as I thought about it and I thought, no, wait a second. I can write about capitalism and morality and try to help people think about economic systems, which I'm just learning about myself, or I can focus on the universities, which is where I live and what I know about, and we can actually try to do something together. So I decided to write the book with him. And here we are. Now, in recent months, some people have argued that this problem is vastly overblown, that it's a minority of campuses and even a minority of people on those minority of campuses. I think it was a Vox article not long ago that argued that this was just a pseudo problem. Yes. I think their headline was, everything we think about the political correctness crisis on campus is wrong. And that kind of language everything. Yes, everything right. Who could imagine that Vox would get anything wrong here? Yeah, that's right. Rather careless. So what has happened to increase your confidence that you're not imagining this problem? Yeah, so what I'm all about is that we are all imperfect, we are all biased. We all look for confirmation of what we want. And that's why we need viewpoint diversity. And so I co founded Heterodox Academy precisely because we need viewpoint diversity, we need to be challenged. And so when a political scientist from Canada, jeff Sachs, not the economist at at Columbia different Jeff Sachs when he wrote an essay, or originally it was a set of tweets, but then an essay arguing that actually the data show that there's no change, there's no problem, it was actually wonderful. It was really it was a really great demonstration of the value of viewpoint diversity and challenge because it forced us to go to look at his data and say, wait, really? You see no change? And then to refine our position. And so what Sacks showed is that if you look at data in the GSS, the general Social Survey, and you look at millennials, they're no different on attitudes towards free speech. And he's right. And that really helped us refine our argument that all along we weren't talking about millennials, we were talking about the kids who started showing up on campus in 2013 because you don't see any of this stuff before 2013. It all comes in between 2013 and 2015. So right there, that helped us see that the issue is not millennials. And this, our book is not about millennials at all. It's about Igen or gen z. That's the first clarification that was very helpful. Second clarification is that there are about 4500 institutions of higher education in the United States. Most of them are two year schools or vocational schools. Most of them are not selective. If students go attend one of those schools and they go home to a family or off to a job, there's no way they're going to buy into this very arcane worldview in which words are of violence and they need safety from books. That kind of morality can only flourish if there's very little diversity. There's no other political diversity. If students are kept together for four years under certain circumstances, this arcane moralistic worldview can flourish. And that seems to happen, especially at liberal arts colleges in the northeast and the west coast. That's where the problem seems to be strongest. So when Sachs said it's not happening at most schools, we had to realize, you know what, he's probably right. Like, we don't know. We don't have data from most schools, but it's probably not happening at most schools. But if you just look at, say, the top 100 from what we hear from people there, students and faculty, it is happening. People are more afraid to speak up. Bad things can happen if you challenge the prevailing view. And it's not because most students have suddenly gone off the deep end. They haven't. This is another good thing from sacs challenge, is we had to refine our argument, say it's not due to a big change in the average student, it's due to a big change in the dynamics. So that now this sort of a subset of students who are very angry and who buy into some views that we can debate, but I think are bad ideas. A subset of students who buy into certain ideas now is allowed to ride roughshod over everyone else, and people are afraid to stand up to them. So it's a change in the dynamics. Yeah, the dynamics are interesting because I think our intuitions about just how many people in a group are required to nullify the intentions and the aspirations of the whole group are pretty bad. I mean, it doesn't take 50% of a group to turn the tide against the rest. That's right. And with social media. So a lot of our conversation, like a lot of many conversations, will probably be about social media and what happens? How does the system change when you have various things and forces in balance and then you suddenly increase connectivity by a factor of 100? How do things change? And so an essential term here is call out culture. This is what the students themselves call it. Anytime you're in a culture in which you can be behaving as you've always behaved, and suddenly someone will pick on one word, one thing you said, and there could be no end of trouble for you. There could be shame, humiliation, mobbing. When you are in such an environment, even if it's only one or 2% of your fellow students who would do that to you, it'll likely have an effect on your behavior. Just to be clear, this is not just a problem on college campuses. We're seeing this because, first of all, people graduate from college and they enter the workforce from these colleges at a very high level. So we see this sort of thing now at companies like Google, among software engineers. We see it at The New York Times in what was happening to Barry Weiss. I don't know if you recall when the Slack Channel for the New York Times was published and Barry had said something about she had made a joke about immigrants, so they get the job done, quoting Hamilton. This was during the Olympics, and she named an Asian American figure skater, I believe, who in fact, was not an immigrant, but she was nearly the daughter of immigrants. Yes. So it was marginalizing to say they get the job done. That's right. We got a glimpse of what the back channel discussions were like at The New York Times, and they seem very much to be of a piece with the kinds of triggering effects you describe in your book on college campuses. That's right. So when our article came out in 2015, a lot of people said, oh, come on, students protest. This is student culture. As soon as they go out into the real world, they'll have to drop this stuff. Once they're hired in a corporation, the corporation is not going to stand for this way of behaving and this very confrontational way of addressing hurt feelings. And we didn't know what would happen. But it turns out, yes, as you say, it became especially clear in 2017 with the Google memo and with a variety of other ways that these norms have spread out into some parts of the corporate world, primarily those that hire, I think, creatives from the elite universities. That's where this culture is most intense. So if you were to look at a mining company based in Colorado, I bet you'd see no trace of it. Right. But yes, from what I hear at top media companies, at the New York Times, at the Atlantic, there's a big generational divide, and this is very important for people to understand, whether you're on the left or the right. If you're over 30, or 35, you believe in free speech. And a lot of people on the left in journalism are looking at these new norms and saying, Wait a second, what is this? So while there is a left right aspect to it, unfortunately, it's more of a generational divide. There's a set of new understandings among young people. And we should go into why that is. Because when every part of my whole approach to morality is that we all live in a moral world, we all live in a moral matrix, and things don't happen because they're evil people out there pushing the evil ideas. They happen because there are good people pushing their ideas about virtue or goodness that end up producing some bad effects. And I think that's what's happening here. So we should just be very clear. This isn't about bashing young people or Gen X or Igen. This is about understanding how a new morality emerge, which prioritizes inclusion and diversity, which are good things, of course, but it prioritizes them in a way that I think sets us up for unending conflict in all of our institutions. Well, I want to get into the root cause of this problem and talk about your three great untruths, which I think was a great way to structure your analysis here. But before we broaden the focus, I just want to give an example of the kind of thing that has happened on some of these college campuses that has motivated you to pay attention to this problem, because I've paid a lot of attention to it, but the details of some of these cases were still blurry to me. And it is just amazing to consider what has been happening. So I think let's just talk about the Dean Spellman case at Claremont McKenna College. Yeah, that's a really, really clear one. Yeah, sure. I'll see if I can tell the story very briefly. So, Claremont McKenna College out in Los Angeles, there was a student whose parents had emigrated from Mexico. So she was born in California. She's a student at CMC and she writes an essay I think it's a campus publication. She writes an essay talking about how marginalized she feels, and she makes some points about what it's like to be seen as an affirmative action. Admit to be on a campus where all the people like you or most of the people like you are the gardeners rather than the professional staff. So it's a perfectly reasonable essay for a student to write. And then in response to that, the Dean of Students, Mary Spellman, sends her private email, just person to person private email. And I'll read you the whole email, Olivia. We changed her name here. But Olivia, thank you for writing and sharing this article with me. We have a lot to do as a college and community. Would you be willing to talk with me sometime about these issues? They're important to me and the Dean of Student staff, and we're working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don't fit our CMC mold. I'd love to talk with you more. So Olivia posted this email on her web page, and it's not quite that a riot ensued, but she invited people to comment on it to share her outrage. I leave it to the listeners to find the outrage. What was she outraged about? I guess you read the book, Sam, so you know. Yeah, it was the use of the word mold. Yeah. The amazing thing is that it hinges on a single word. This is way beyond a campus problem. But the dynamics of this is that it is to seize upon the worst possible interpretation of, in this case, a single word, I think, with the understanding that the author of, in this case, Dean Spellman, couldn't have possibly intended those worst possible associations with that word. Oh, but intent doesn't matter, Sam. Intent doesn't matter. Now, you and I will talk about that. That basic moral psychology is not, you know, if somebody bumps into you, we don't say they've done something immoral unless they meant to. If they intended to push you, it's immoral. But if they tripped or if it's an accident, then we say, no, you know you didn't mean it, okay, you apologize. We're done. But that's the old fashioned otherwise known as the universal view of morality, which is that intent matters primarily for judgment, not outcome or not impact, as they say. But the new doctrine is intent doesn't matter, its impact. And so if something makes someone feel marginalized or victimized, then they have been marginalized or victimized. And this is a really, really good way to set students up to be really hurt and angry often. And that's why the subtitle of our book is how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. So, yeah, in any normal world, even if she felt a flash of, like this mold, what is this word? Well, it turns out it's actually a word that they use on campus a lot to talk about how there is a standard prototype wasp jockey sort of white person. So fine that's the prototype and Dean Spellman is trying to help people who don't fit it. But yes, as you say, the goal of discourse is to find the worst possible reading so that you can call them out, and then you get the prestige for identifying a racist or something like that. So I think we should linger on why intentions should matter, but let's just close Dean Spellman's case. So what happened in the aftermath? All right, so Olivia posts the email on her Facebook page, and she says her comment is, I just don't fit that wonderful CMC mold. Feel free to share. So her friends took that invitation, and they did share it and added their outrage about the event. And that sparked a wave of giant protests. There were marches, demonstrations, as usually happens, there's usually a list of demands given to the president, and it almost always includes mandatory diversity training for everyone. And this is key demands that Spellman resign. So in the new call out culture, it's not enough to shame someone. You have to appeal to an authority to get them fired or punished or renounced. And the leadership there did what leadership at almost all universities does, which is they don't stand up for the person being attacked. They don't stand up for their faculty. They try to placate the angriest students. They do what they can to basically buy peace. And in so doing, they validate the narrative that CMC, like all schools in America, is so deeply institutionally racist that it needs radical reform. Why do you think the administrations are so craven in the face of these what clearly, I think would take 15 minutes to assess are moral panics. Yes, that's right. It is a moral panic, and we should return to that. And we should note that there are moral panics on both sides. The right wing media is in a moral panic about this, just as the students are, so there's enough craziness to go around. But yeah, I've wondered about that, too. Why did this universities almost always why do the leaves almost always show no backbone? And I think it's in part because they could not understand this. So in the first year, nobody stood up. There wasn't a single college president except for the president at Ohio State. When he said when they occupied his office, and he said, okay, you've made everyone here in this building feel unsafe. I'm going home now. The police will come at 07:00 A.m., and anyone here will be arrested. So then the protesters left, and also at Oberlin, when they gave the president there the list of demand, they gave him the ultimatum, and he said, I don't do ultimatums. If you want to come talk to me, my door is open, but I don't do ultimatums. And then they, you know, retracted it and and met with him. So the point is that the students are in part, they're behaving that way because there's been a vacuum of leadership. There's not any clear moral order, and so things just sort of drift to more radical, more confrontational approaches. And then we should say that Spellman did wind up resigning. Yes, correct. That's right. She did resign. The university leadership never stood up for her, never said a word publicly to defend her. They didn't fire her. Of course. They couldn't possibly fire her. But you can imagine what it would be like to be a dean of students. You can watch the videos. If you Google CMC student protests, you can find them. She seems like a very sweet woman who was the dean of students. And to have students swarming around, you can watch it looks kind of like one of those shame circles from the Cultural Revolution in a circle berating her through a megaphone. I'm sure she was quite well, I hate to say traumatized, but this really would be traumatizing to have everyone calling you a racist and demanding that you be fired. And I think she was castigated for falling asleep in one of these meetings. But really she was just trying to hold back tears. It was just like this. That's right. You watch the video and again, at one point she closes her eyes and she's squeezing her eyesham. You can't see very clearly. But a woman berates her says, and she's even falling asleep while we're talking to her. No, she's crying anyway. So the whole thing is really horrible to watch. And there are there are a number of these stories, a number of these situations, and most Americans don't know about them. So let's just pause for a second to talk about the underlying ethics of intentions and I guess apologies. It's pretty interesting to me to see and this goes far wider than the kinds of cases we're talking about, but just what are the criteria for an apology being accepted? We're witnessing now on social media the casual and in many cases warranted destruction of people's reputations. And this goes out to the me too phenomenon. And this is now ubiquitous in our lives. We're seeing people who just issue a stream of or a single unfortunate tweet and this comes back to haunt them. And they're either destroyed or not, depending on kind of the luck of the draw in many cases. And often there's an attempt to apologize and sort of the degrees of sincerity here. But all of this runs to the significance of what a person actually intends by his or her actions and how those actions are perceived by others and the mismatch there. And then what is subsequently said to clarify intention, or even when intentions were in fact bad or less than perfect. How is it that an apology can thereafter matter and redeem a person? So how do you think about this? So I think you're focusing a little bit too much on the dynamics of the interaction between the people calling for the person's head and the person who's being accused. I think that's not the right place to focus. The right place to focus is on the dynamics between the person calling for the person's head and all the other members of that person's team or side. So the way I like to think about things is I'm a social psychologist, so you often hear it said in journalism, follow the money. And if you know who's paying off who you understand what the motives are. You can unravel the mystery. Well, for a social psychologist, I would say follow the prestige. What is it that one gets prestige for doing now, everybody of all ages is interested in prestige, but especially for young adults who are working it out, it's really, really important and especially in a new environment like college. So what do you do to gain prestige? Is it being a great athlete, is it being beautiful, is it being smart? And it varies. Depends on your subculture, depends on the school. But you have to understand the economy of prestige. What is it that earns your prestige? And I think what has changed since 2013 or 2014 is that we've seen the growth of a new economy of prestige in which you gain prestige by calling out others, by essentially accusing them of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia or some other form of bigotry. Now, if you think about this, imagine many of your listeners will know the term externalities from economics. You know, if you if when I save money by buying a diesel car but it imposes an externality on the world because my car pollutes well, in the same way, if we have an economy of prestige in which I gain prestige by accusing others of racism or calling them out for various forms of bigotry. There's an externality, namely all the people that I am accusing every day. It's like, imagine if we were all paid by the bullet. Here's a gun, here's 1000 rounds of ammo. Just shoot, shoot as much as you can. You get paid by the bullet. It doesn't matter where it hits, just shoot. And I think that's what we have unleashed on some campuses, again, not most campuses. If you go to schools in the south or the lower Midwest or the mountain areas, I don't think it's as much. But along the coastal strip of the west coast, not inland, but the coastal strip of the West Coast and New England at elite schools. And again, not so much in the business school, not in the engineering departments, but in some of the humanities departments, in education schools, there are sub areas of universities where this new economy of prestige has taken root. So that's the way I analyze it. Well, so this reveals why it is totally divorced from any good faith interaction with the intentions of the person you're targeting. Exactly. If your eyes are on your group and the stock price of your prestige in your group, you're not actually detecting the thought crime you're claiming to detect in other people because you don't actually care what their intentions were. That's right. And I think the this it causes so many problems for a for a closed system like a university, where you could, you know, here we are, we're all trying to create diverse, cohorts, diverse institutions. We're pretty much all in favor of diversity in universities. So we're trying to create this kind of a culture in which the potential for risk, for offense taking is huge. If you have people from all over the world, you have people from all different ethnicities. So we're putting people together in ways where it could be like a tinder box. And what we should be doing is. Teaching them skills of how do you get along and not give offense? How do you give less offense and how do you take less offense? But instead, again, not everywhere, but in some subcultures, we're teaching people to take maximum offense, be maximally flammable, as it were. And then, of course, we have all these fires breaking out. So then again, just to back up here, why should intentions matter? Why is the status quo we are describing here such a moral error? Because normal human morality I think you and I both agree normal human morality is an adaptation shaped by natural selection to facilitate cooperation. Morality is about having the traits or virtue and character are about having traits that make you a good partner for cooperation. And so if somebody harms you deliberately, you need to know that and write that person off. If they harm you accidentally, it would be foolish to write them off. Everybody harms people accidentally. If you wrote off your family members when they offended you or hurt your feelings, especially they didn't mean to, none of us would have any family. So we have to pay attention to intent. That's what matters to judge a person's character. But as I said, this is not really about what happens between the offender and the offended. This is a game of what happens between the offended and all the other people that the offended person is signaling to. So following from there on the kind of primacy of intention, how do you think we should define bigotry? Well, I think the central definition should focus on intent. The central definition should focus on some element of hostility or negative evaluation. And so the term microaggression could be a useful term if it was limited to small acts that convey hostility, dislike, contempt. So I think that would do most of the work for us. If we focused on intent now, that would still leave something that would need to be addressed. And again, my approach is to say if there's a moral concept, there probably is something good, useful or true behind it. And so the people who promote the idea of microaggressions are saying, even if people aren't hostile to me, if they keep asking me where I'm from because I have dark skin or I look Asian or I look like I'm from the Middle East and they keep saying, Where you're from? And it's clear that my answer of New Jersey doesn't satisfy them because what they really want to know is where are my parents from? So I can see that if you repeatedly are asked that, it could get tiresome. And so I think it's good to have a term for that. It's good to train students to not do things that might make students feel self conscious or make them feel bad. Black students sometimes say people touch their hair. Okay, now, maybe the person who touches their hair might say, I was just curious. I didn't mean anything by it, and maybe they didn't, but that's really rude. Okay, so we need a term for that. But the term should not be aggression. The term should be a faux PA or something like that. It's something foolish. So I would be totally fine with training students. If we're going to do this experiment of putting together a very diverse student body, I think we should do some training in norms of how to get along and give less offense. But if we teach students about microaggressions and we teach them to follow their feelings so that if they feel offended, then they were attacked, and if they were attacked, then they need to call this number. Here's the number for the biased response team. You can find it in the bathroom of every bathroom at NYU. When I go to the bathroom, there's a sign there telling students three ways they can report me if I say something that offends them. So I think what we're doing here is when this is the second grade untruth in our book, is always trust your feelings. Don't allow anybody to challenge them, or to say, maybe you've interpreted this incorrectly. Yeah. So we'll get to these untruths in a second. Again, just to capture what we care about here that may be beyond intentions. I certainly don't have an up to the minute sense of what has been replicated. Perhaps you do, but some research suggests that there really is a problem here that is very likely outside the conscious understanding of any person who may or may not have bad intentions. And I think it's nowhere more clearly expressed than in these resume or CV tests that we have heard about where you send out identical resumes and you just change the name. In one case being a Wasp name with white connotations, and in another a name that has obvious black connotations, and you see a very different pattern, or so it's reported in callbacks for interviews, I guess. One, I'm just asking you if you know what the status of that research is and can we rely on it. And two, that does seem like a problem worth worrying about that really does slip this net of any person's individual intentions. Sure. So a couple of things about this. One is I don't doubt that there are many of those studies, and many of them find that result. An important thing to note is that in general, changing the name of the person matters. But when you look at the race or sex of the person doing the judging, it tends not to matter that much. In other words, it's not just that white men are bigots against everyone else. It's that people is that professors, let's say, or wherever it's done, professors have different expectations about a person based on their race or gender. So that's one thing. And here we should bring up Lee Justin's work on stereotype accuracy. If we live in a world in which there are, in fact, correlations between things, there's no way we can stop people from noticing those correlations. So I don't doubt that people have stereotypes and that people do act on those stereotypes. And those stereotypes tend to be shared across demographic groups. That's one thing. Second, I think that would certainly count as a kind of racism or prejudice. It is a judgment of people based on their category membership. That's not systemic racism. Systemic racism and sexism is something different. That means there's something about the structure of the institution that ends up disadvantaging members of certain groups, even if nobody no individual in the institution holds prejudiced attitudes. So that's a very important concept, and I don't doubt that that is real and it matters. But what I think is really important for us to all understand is what does it take to show systemic prejudice? And I heard your talk with Coleman Hughes, who's wonderful, and he put his finger on one of them. You cannot just say, oh, look, women are only 30% of the physicists, therefore it's systemically sexist against them. You cannot just point to differences of outcome and say, this proves systemic sexism or racism. You have to look at the pipeline, and only if the pipeline of very qualified people coming in is very different from the people getting hired, then now you're off and running. Now you can start saying there might be some systemic problem in the institution. So that's the first thing is when you when you when I ask students, okay, what give me an example. It's almost always two categories. Examples of systemic sexism, prejudices, etc. Are almost always underrepresentation, which, as I say, is not sufficient. It might be a reason to look into, but it's not proof. It's not even necessarily evidence. And the other thing that people point to is individual cases. So, like, at Yale, there was a really ugly case where it was a few months ago where a woman, a grad student found there was a black woman sleeping on a sofa in a common area, and she called the police on this woman. Now, this is obviously racism. She obviously thought, oh, this is a fellow student, so this is racism. Okay? But now does this mean that Yale is racist? And if your goal is to prosecute the maximum possible, if your goal is to show how everyone and everything is racist, then you say, this shows that Yale is racist. Yale must do more, still more diversity training, when in fact, I think the way to look at this is, yes, here was an act of racism, and it's appropriate for that woman to feel very ashamed of herself. And if Yale has, I don't know, 15, 20,000 people in it, and if this sort of thing is happening every day, and especially if it happens every day and people don't care, well, wow, that would be a systemically racist place. But you cannot take zero as the only acceptable number of of racial or sexist incidents. In other words, if you have a group of 20,000 people and there are three cases like this per year, that would be amazingly good, like, I can't imagine any human institution that would get that close to zero. And then, of course, if you factor in misunderstandings now here there was not a misunderstanding, but often people mishear each other. Someone says something as a joke. So no human institution will ever get down to zero per year. That's just not possible. And so you can't take instances as evidence of systemic racism or sexism. It's interesting because the leading edge of this ethically and politically for me, are those cases where you really just have the kind of the perfect instance of just kind of no bright lines. As you say. There are cases where stereotypes are more or less accurate. We have stereotypes very often for a reason, and those are cases where otherwise well intentioned people can be caught out as essentially spreading this impression of racism or bigotry where it probably doesn't exist, or at least doesn't exist at the level of bad intentions. I don't know the Yale case specifically, but just take violence in the black community among men aged 18 to 24. If you go to inner city Chicago and decide to be blind to the statistical reality that there is way more violence among young black men than in other populations, you're just being willfully blind to what is in fact a reality. So you could imagine someone in a coffee shop in Chicago seeing a young black man in some situation that's analogous to the one you describe at Yale, right? So someone who seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and having this, you know, reaction, you know, calling the police and it turns out to be totally unwarranted right now in that case, what's interesting for me is, does the person feel ashamed to have done that? Ashamed at the misunderstanding? The shame there is a measure of, I would argue, the person not being racist in the primary sense, which is the person doesn't want. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, so not much housekeeping here. Just a few words by way of context. This is the audio of the event I did in Boston a few months ago with Rebecca Goldstein and Max Tegmark. I introduce them both from the stage, so you'll be reminded of who they are in a moment. But we focus in this conversation on the foundations of human knowledge and morality as well. It's really a conversation about what is and what matters, and as is often the case with live events like this, there were some sound issues. The sound is definitely echoey and not perfect, but I think you'll acclimate. Hopefully you'll find the conversation as interesting as I did. And so now I give you Rebecca Goldstein and Max Tegmark. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for coming out. I have some great guests tonight. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. My first guest is a philosopher and a novelist. She has written about the relationship between science and religion and science and values, and she's also just written wonderful books on some famous people, plato and Spinoza and Kurt Girdle. And she's received many awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal from President Obama. Please welcome Rebecca Goldstein. Thank you for coming. And my second guest is a physicist at MIT. He's also a professor there. He's authored more than 200 technical papers on topics ranging from cosmology to AI, and he's the president of the Future of Life Institute, and he's now one of my go to guests on the podcast. I think this will be his third appearance, if I'm not mistaken. Please welcome Max Tegmark. Thank you, Max. Okay, so as I said, I've really been looking forward to this because these are two people who I can really just dive into the deep end of the pool with, without much concern about whether or not I can swim. In the run up to this, Rebecca sent me an email asking if I knew what I wanted to talk about, and I said something very vague. And then she sent me another email that had maybe 1000 words in it, and it was just the most amazing roadmap to my intellectual life. It's what I want to spend the next ten years thinking about. So I'm going to use that very much to guide this conversation, and Max hasn't seen any of this, so he should just be terrified. So I want to talk about what we think we know about reality and why we think we know it. And I want to talk about the parts of reality that matter and what makes them matter and whether we have to depart from scientific rigor in order to talk about anything mattering. And so this conversation will take us onto terrain that I love, which is the relationship between facts and values. But to start, I want to talk briefly about the relationship between science and philosophy. And so, Rebecca, I'd like to start with you and just I mean, there there are many scientists who have said very disparaging things about philosophy. He's actually actually one who we both know who I'm having an event with in about four to 8 hours. He should probably remain nameless, but his name rhymes with Lawrence Krause. But you repeatedly point out in your work that science is riddled with philosophy just from stem to stern, and that if you are not aware of your philosophical assumptions when doing science, you're very likely to be making illegitimate claims about how your science maps onto reality. So start us off with a little bit on the relationship between science and philosophy as you see it. Yeah, I sent you this roadmap, and now I'm trying to situate myself on it. I think that science is a great arbiter in trying to figure out the nature of reality, of what is. And I think that the sympathy of science, the amazing trick that it eventually worked out sometime in the 17th century was that it gets reality itself to collaborate with us because our intuitions are all off, right? And so our intuitions about space and time and individuation and teleology and causality, all of these very deep intuitive intuitions we have turn out to be off. I mean, the nature of reality itself turns out that reality out there exists exactly as it's represented to us in our subjective experience is off. And so this is an amazing thing that we've figured out what to do to get reality to prod reality so that it will answer us back when we're getting it wrong. So oh, so you think simultaneity is absolute, do you? It seems intuitively obvious that two events are either simultaneous with each other or not, regardless of which reference frames they're measured in moving relative to each other. Well, we'll just see about that. And somehow we prod reality to answer us back. And that seems to me that's what science does. So any question that we can figure out so that somehow reality itself can kind of smack us around and tell us that we've gotten it wrong, that's scientific. What philosophy, I think, is about is trying to maximize our coherence. We're very compartmentalized creatures. I think, for reasons that science is beginning to tell us why, evolutionary psychology can tell us why we're such compartmentalized creatures. We live very happily with our contradictions, and it's philosophy's job to vitiate our happiness. And that's been the way of philosophy ever since Socrates was wandering around that Agara and his dirty kiten, annoying people, getting them, showing them the internal contradictions. The philosophy has to take all of the knowledge that science is giving us about what is about the nature of reality and test it against other of our intuitions and see which are compatible, which are incompatible, what the options are. So a philosophy is always dependent on science. A good philosopher has to keep up the science, but it's a different kind of skill set that's called for it's not figuring out how to describe reality and then tell us if it's right or wrong. And it's not merely a matter of being the birthplace of science, because it's often said, and I think I've said it myself, that there was a time where all questions, virtually all questions of interest were philosophical, and then what's so called natural philosophy burst off these specific sciences? And I think in one of your papers, you talk about just people in philosophy signaling, we need some more science over here. Come help us, right? And that's not what philosophy is. In the course of asking these questions and trying to get our bearings in the world, that sometimes philosophers very often will put forth protoscientific questions, the science isn't there yet. The empirical means of prodding reality, getting reality to be a collaborator, doesn't exist yet. And often it's because the philosophers ask the question that the science emerges. It happened with physics. It happened with biology. It happened with linguistics. It's happening now in a lot of the fields that evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience is taking over before psychology. That happens. But I think that's not what philosophy is about. Philosophy is not about prematurely ejaculating scientific questions. Right. That's not what we're trying to do. It happens as a kind of accident in trying to maximize our coherence. All right, on that note, I'm going to ask Max what he thinks about philosophy. You're right. I've been in many physics conferences where some physicist has accused someone else of being too philosophical, as if that was supposed to be a put down. And I find it absolutely ridiculous. To me, philosophy is really synonymous clear, logical thinking. And if you look at the PhD that I have and ask, what does the PH stand for? I have news for those grumpy physics. It doesn't stand for physics. Doctor of Philosophy. Why? Because, well, natural philosophy is the phrase we used to use to describe what we now call science. Same thing within science itself. We often distinguish between theory and experiment. I guess in your words, Rebecca, you could say philosophy is the pure theory where you don't do the experiment. And we need that, of course, all theory and no experiment, well, then you get string theory and that might be too much of a good thing. Also, generally, we've had the most healthy progress when we've had both, where you have those theorists to keep annoying the experimentalists, like pointing out inconsistencies and giving them new ideas for things to try, new ideas for them to try to shoot down. And at the same time, you have these experiments to keep annoying the theorists by ruling out their theories. It's this interplay which has always been at work whenever we've had really great progress. I would say I think that's the biggest laugh I've ever heard with string theory is the punchline. Only in Boston should that happen. Let's just cut the enemies of philosophy a little slack here in that there's a difference in how we think about intellectual progress. So to say that there's been scientific progress is to say something that really would find no dissenters. The progress of science is all around us. How do you think about philosophical progress? What sort of philosophical progress have we made? I'm sure you will say that we have made some and that it should be obvious to us, but we rarely talk as though we're making and have made great progress before. I just I just did want to say in my saying that science is our best means of answering the question of what is the nature of reality. For me to actually defend that view would take me outside of science. I would have to put forth a philosophical argument, which I'm very prepared to do. But, I mean, there is there are other views about what science is all about, instrumentalism. I mean, that it's that scientific theories never expand our ontology our nature of reality, of what is but it's just, you know, it's a means of predicting future experiences, and it never you know so there's no reason to think that these theoretical entities that are used in scientific theories really exist, that there are fields or quarks or black holes or anything. And some very good scientists in the past and some philosophers put forth such arguments. So even to say what it is that science is doing, science reality can't tell us, is it instrumentalism or is it realism? Realism, scientific realism that depends on a philosophical argument, trying to make coherent what we're getting, the input we're getting from science, just to argue I can understand how I call them philosophy jurors some of our most celebrated, or certainly high profile scientists who just really dismiss philosophy. I understand what their argument is. Their argument is, what else is our intelligence good for other than figuring out what is? And it's science that does that. Therefore, there are questions that we haven't answered yet about the nature of reality. But just give scientists enough time and research grants, and they'll get it. Well, there are other kinds of questions, including what is it that science is doing that is not itself a scientific question. So you can't even make the argument without wandering into philosophy. Yeah, but what was your real question? Actually, I want to get there. I want to talk about realism versus all of its enemies, like instrumentalism. But just briefly, it is often thought that we don't make philosophical progress because the same sorts of problems seem to come around and we're still reading Plato. If we made progress, why would anyone ever read Plato ever again? Yeah, so if you could just briefly address that before we move on to hard question. And one of the arguments that I try to make is, first of all, when you read Plato and Aristotle, I mean, you're really amazed at how good they were at spotting the questions, but how bad their answers were. I mean, a lot of these, you know, answers have been disposed of. And a lot of the other thing, I think, is that as we make philosophical progress, science has incorporated in a lot of the arguments about interpreting science that were really philosophical problems. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities, right, that the 17th century philosophers made. The primary qualities are the ones that we captured in the language of mathematics, you know, which was the language of physics. And they really exist out there. So position and motion and weight and anything that can be described and measured in purely mathematical language and then you can subject them to mathematical equations and make progress. And everything else was deposited in the mind. So the way things look and the way they taste and the way they smell, that was all put into the mind. This was all a philosophical argument made in the 17th century that just sort of became incorporated into what we think of as a scientific point of view. Now, it's a philosophical interpretation, but it is philosophy, and the arguments were philosophy, and it is part of what we think of as a scientific world view. Now, I think that in general, what happens, I think that there has been a lot of progress, and I think, particularly in moral philosophy, that these were testing our inconsistencies, our moral inconsistencies, pointing them out, making arguments and moving us forward so that it's inconceivable to us. Now, when we look back at our slave owning, wife beating, heretic burning witch stony immediate family, how could they not have seen this? Well, they didn't see it. And it was philosophical arguments that got us to see it, so that now we don't see philosophical progress because we see with it, it becomes the very lens that we're looking at the world with, and so it becomes invisible to us. So, yeah, it really is the water in which we swim intellectually. I want to talk about realism, which can be defined in a few different ways, but I think about it whether you're talking about scientific realism or moral realism or even introspective realism, just trying to figure out what it's actually like to be you in each moment. It's the claim that there are truths, whether you know them or not, right? It's possible to be right or wrong about the nature of reality, and it's possible to not know what you're missing. There's an appearance reality distinction where you're trying to get behind appearances. And science is arguably the most rigorous place where we try to get behind appearances, or it certainly has the most rigorous methodology. Max, how do you think about this appearance in reality distinction as a physicist and cosmologist? How do I think about realism? Yeah. What do you think science is doing? Because, as Rebecca said, you can spend a lot of time as a scientist reconciling yourself to being an instrumentalist, which is just the math works out. We can predict the results of experiments, but who knows what we're actually probing into? Who knows what it really looks like? One thing I've been quite surprised by over the years, actually, is how many scientists, even though, have an incredibly intelligent bunch of people to come to entirely opposing views on philosophical matters. And often when you probe a little bit deeper, it's because they're quite naive about it and haven't even bothered understanding, you know, the various opposing points of views and because they dismiss all this as too philosophical. But then they have their own closet philosophy that they just don't call a philosophy. So basically haven't thought it through. And some scientists take this very instrumentalist point of view that, hey, who cares about if there's an ultimate reality or not? We should just focus on building gadgets that work and so on. That's, I guess, really just a preference amount of interest. Some people like chocolate ice cream, some people prefer strawberry. If someone doesn't care what exists. But I do. I find it absolutely fascinating. It's this deep curiosity to try to understand more about the cosmos we live in that made me want to be a scientist. Then there's a second school of dissent. Not the ones who say, I don't care about what reality is, but that deny its existence at some level. You get people who deny what I call the external reality hypothesis, the hypothesis that there actually is an external reality independent of us humans. Of course, you get some extreme folks like Solopsis will just say that nothing outside their hand exists, but they're a small minority father to say it, but you tell you who are they talking to? But you also get very famous people like Neil's Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, that said no reality without observation about his quantum theory, when you think about it, means that humans are observing that somehow makes things real. And this, to me, feels extremely arrogant, I have to say. No offense to you folks or you folks, but I'm pretty sure that if all of us disappear at the Andromeda Galaxy would happily keep doing its thing. And feels to me more like less of a thought through really scientific position or philosophical position and more like just the continuation of this human hubris that set us back in so many other ways. We used to be so obsessive about Earth being the center of the solar system and then denying the idea that there could be other solar systems. We even burnt on a Bruno at the stake 400 years ago for saying that. And then this now resistance of the idea of maybe parallel universes. Also this idea that somehow we're so special relative to animals or slaves or whatever. So now when we say, oh, we're so special that reality couldn't exist without us, I think it's silly, but it's a viewpoint I encounter quite a bit still in some sides. So the interesting thing is, of course, if philosophical education was part of scientific education, they would find these kinds of viewpoints having been put forth. I mean, Bishop Barclay, nothing exists unless you perceive it. He was putting forth these views and other people were criticizing them. And there's a whole long history where these things have been argued out and its weaknesses explored. And it just would be good, it would be so stupid of me as a non biologist, to think that I'm just going to charge in and say, what's wrong with evolutionary biology? Or something without educating myself. There is a discipline in which all of these views have been argued out and hammered out in their strong points and their weak points evaluated. And since physics and all science raises these philosophical questions, why not study the field? Exactly. But you see, this is precisely where this anti philosophical snobbery comes in as a psychological defense mechanism, because these scientists will say, well, I don't do philosophy. I think philosophy is stupid. And then they will charge in and talk about all these philosophical questions, make up their own nonstandard terms for things that philosophers have discussed for hundreds of years, and completely ignore everything that's been done. And effectively, what they're doing is this bad, uninformed philosophy, right? Yes, exactly. And they justify it to themselves by saying the philosophy is somehow stupid. I don't think that philosophy can be avoided, not just by scientists, but by all humans. I mean, I in fact think one way or another, we're all trying to get our bearings in the world, figure out what is and what matters. And you can't avoid some kind of philosophy in doing that. I think that's hard at being human. Yeah. And unfortunately, there are impressive reasons to be skeptical that we're good at doing any of that. And it's not just the outcomes we see around us. It's that if you take an evolutionary perspective, if you take the perspective of evolutionary psychology, it's pretty clear that there are two inconvenient facts here. One, reality wasn't designed with us in mind. It wasn't designed so as to be perfectly interpretable by us. And that's provided we're not living in a simulation that was run by the Mormons who actually conquer the world at some point. I'm waiting to find that out. That Mormonism is in fact true in this simulation, and everything I've been saying is going to consign me to hell. But there's also the fact that we have not evolved our cognitive toolkit, our intuitional toolkit, and we'll talk about the primacy of intuition in a moment. It hasn't been tuned up by evolution to track reality as it is. That's just not the sort of apes we are. I think that very suit what you're saying there, Sam, because one of the reasons that has caused a lot of curmudgeonly scientists again and again dismissed philosophers and often dismissed even other scientists like who were a little too radical for their taste. Einstein science type was precisely by saying, oh, these ideas are too weird. And when they couldn't refute them with experiment, they would refute them by saying, that's not science. But what that really meant, saying that it was too weird if you reinterpret that sentence in the context of evolutionary psychology, really meant that. Obviously, as you said, we evolved our brains to have intuition for the things that were useful for our ancestors, like how to hurl rocks to people and not get hit by the parabolic motions and stuff. We had no intuition whatsoever for anything that wasn't useful to them, like things moving much faster than us near the speed of light, or things much smaller than us, like quantum particles. So what evolution actually predicts for science is that whenever we use tech to see things that our ancestors have no access to, it should seem weird. It should challenge our very notion of what the boundaries of science are. It should probably force us even to redefine from time to time what we mean by science. So one could say, in that sense, that people who are being dismissive like this of things just because they say they're too weird or this is not science or too philosophical, are really denying the fact that they're evolved apes and they're taking this evolved evolutionary notion of what's intuitive and what's weird conflating that with some kind of truth. Listen, it's actually a point that we hit in a previous podcast, but I think it's worth reiterating is that you would be suspicious of any final description of reality that was commonsensical because we know our common sense isn't. Fitted to time frames in billions of years or to the plank scale or to anything else that is at the frontier of your discipline. Exactly. The common sense. We should assume from evolution that it should simply be a useful approximation for that very limited domain of reality that we had access to without microscopes or telescopes or particle colliders or any modern tech. Yeah, of course science has come too far. We could never go back to something that's commonsensical. I mean, relativity theory general relativity theory, quantum mechanics, it's already blown our minds. Right. And so we know that reality does not correspond. Some of our deepest intuitions about space and time and causality, they're gone. And so there's no going back. Except for those people who believe that all of this was created by a person just like us, who doesn't like homosexuality for some reason. Yeah, you said that. There are two great obstacles to our understanding the nature of reality, what is and what matters. I mean, to me, those are the two big questions. One is that, yes, obviously, unless this world was created by some designer who made sure that our cognitive abilities are up to the task, not much evidence for that. Yeah, this world, the laws of nature, they were not designed with our cognitive faculties and capacities in mind. And so it's amazing to me when people talk about all that we don't know. I'm not amazed by that. I'm amazed that we know anything, given that we are these evolved apes. And the other thing that keeps us and here a little more about moral knowledge, that keeps us from understanding nature of certain aspects of reality, including moral reality, is our own self involvement, our own way of privilege, ourself and those we love and our can, our tribe, all of that. And that also is a tremendous obstacle in terms of we've made very slow moral progress. We've made it. But there's a real and there it's not getting reality to answer us back. It's more looking at the various things we believe and seeing the internal inconsistencies. So we've got science to this great thing of just we need reality to answer us back because reality wasn't created with our capacities in mind. Then we developed these scientific tools, and I say philosophy is these other different set of tools, thought experiments, and forcing people to put all their premises out on the table, digging them out, going further and further, what are the presumptions of your belief? And the end game of that is to the end of that game is to expose our inconsistencies, our internal incoherencies. And we don't like that. That's our saving grace, really. If we find all sorts of ways of denying that we are internally inconsistent because it's usually working to our advantage to deny these inconsistencies. But if you really keep hammering at it and you push people's faces into it, eventually they give it up. And I think that's a different kind of reason. It's not science, a different kind of reasoning activity. And it also helps us to make progress. It's humbling to consider just how ill prepared we are for our modern circumstance by evolution. When you think of something as simple and as obviously evolved and as fundamental to our survival as pain, we've obviously evolved to feel pain. But we have not evolved to sense pain in a way that is especially useful in a modern context for instance, you can feel excruciating pain or be at least seriously inconvenienced by having an eyelash in your eye, right? Which means nothing. But your body can be riddled with cancer and you feel no pain at all because we have not evolved in a condition with oncologists and hospitals. But it would be very useful to feel pain associated with cancer and so as to detect it early. There's almost certainly intellectual equivalence to that sort of disability where it would be so much nicer to be able to do something intuitively or effortlessly that is in some way crucial to the whole enterprise. You're at the frontier of thinking about AI and so now we're talking about the prospect of building minds better than our own at doing some of these things. Do you spend any time worrying that there are certain questions that can be posed that are interesting? But take string theory as an example. Is string theory just an intellectual dead end that has absorbed the careers of now a full generation of physicists? I don't want to be able to make you any enemies here. If not string theory is. Do you worry that there is something very much like that where we are just playing with tools that are too blunt or not shaped appropriately for that corner of the universe? But let me say two things. First, about string theory, and then more broadly, about what we can and can't do with our evolved minds for string theory, even though I was joking about it earlier, and even though Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory has broken up with string theory. Hope I'm not spoiling it for anyone who hasn't seen that episode yet. The fact of the matter is that most physicists today who say they're working on string theory are actually working on much more broad questions than just fundamental theoretical physics. And string has just been kind of the thing they call themselves to sort of have a little community and get jobs. But it's more like, what was string? And I think there's a lot of promising avenues in there, for sure. That doesn't mean every physicist should work on it, obviously but it's good to take swings for the fences sometimes. On the broader question about what we can and can't do with our revolved minds I think as an antidote we had a lot of negativity here, but we were lamenting evolution has limited us so much like this. We can't get intuition for this and we're no good at wouldn't it be great if we could have better pain sensors? And so on? The flip side of that is, I think there's a lot we can be very grateful for also that works remarkably well. And as you said, that in a way worked way better than expectation. It's a kind of a miracle that it works as well as it does. Look at the chimps. And the chimps are not doing much of anything. It is. And first of all, if you think about what we actually evolved for, our bodies haven't evolved that much in the past 1000 years. But yet we're living lifestyle and we're sitting, we're in a big giant wooden stone box with weird artificial suns here and and strange stuff on our bodies and everything is about we spend large fractions of tangled and loose hold on, hold on 1 second. I just want to remedy this problem because civilization is not working as well as advertisers. This will be the first time. Okay, but on the optimistic side, first of all, it's remarkable how adaptable we are. And second, I do think it's actually really remarkable how much better we've been able to do with science than one might have thought. We are actually the masters of underestimation, as I think, summary of what we've learned from science in the past many thousands of years. First, we've of course, underestimated dramatically the size of reality. And everything we thought existed was just a small part of a much grander structure. A planet, a solar system, a galaxy, galaxy, sluster universe, maybe more. But more fundamentally, we've also underestimated our own potential as humans to figure out our world thinking. When Plato and Aristotle and so on were trying to understand a little bit of physics, almost everything was mysterious. And there were just a few things they thought they could find, some formulas and regularities for like motion. And then it turned out that was also completely wrong with Aristotle had and it took 1500 years until Galileo fixed it. And yet today we can turn it around and note that actually whereas Galileo, he could have a grape and a hazelnuts and tell you how they would move if you threw them, right? But he couldn't tell you why the grape was green and the hazelnut was brown and why the grape was soft and the hazelnut was hard. Now we can answer all of those questions with electromagnetism, with quantum mechanics. And we have banished to bring into the domain of science almost all aspects of the physical world now, except for consciousness and intelligence. And continuing just on the optimistic gratitude side of this, this understanding has been wonderful. Not just for satisfying our philosophical curiosity, but it's precisely this deeper understanding which is of course given us the technology which has transformed our lives. That's why our life expectancy isn't 35 anymore. Right? Even though yeah, it kind of sucks that I'm so dumb. And that evolution. That's the tegmark quote I want on Twitter. It kind of sucks that I'm so dumb. Actually, things were not mysterious to Aristotle. That was the problem. He had a complete worldview that seemed to answer everything. But it was just all wrong. It was a completely wrong methodology of explanation because teleology was at its center. I mean, the incredible thing that happened in the 17th century with Galileo and then even more with Newton is that this marriage of mathematics with empirical observation and prediction, this is an extraordinary thing. It's not at all intuitively obvious that you take this, what philosophers call a priori mathematics. It's a priority, it's not at all dependent on experience. Right. It's completely deductive. And you marry it to observations and you get this powerful methodology for exploring reality. And for Aristotle, the quantitative was just one of the ten categories of description which were not very important. It was all keyligy. What processes have an end and we understand a process, a physical process, all processes, by understanding what it's supposed to be accomplished through it. So it was a way of explaining, but it just didn't work. And so, really, science, we have infinite work in science, I would say for thousands of years. I think we've been working since the 17th century. So it's even more amazing. May I just add a little bit to what you said there, Rekha. I think this is also a tribute to modern philosophy, where the key word, I think, is humility. The idea that to get things right, we first have to be open to the idea that we might be wrong and actually question everything. In particular, question our own prejudices. That's what was really missing in Aristotle's time. And once we got used to this idea that not only were we often wrong and it was a good idea to question it, but often when we questioned ourselves, that's precisely when we were able to get great new breakthroughs which helped. That should end the modern revolution, the Renaissance science and all the time. Yeah, it's great. I mean, you're right. There's a kind of collective humility, I think, in both science and in philosophy, which very fortunately doesn't require that the actual practitioners be humble. Scientists are known for their humility, but there's a kind of collective humility, I often think. To me, the very definition of me being a scientist is that I would rather have questions I can't answer than answers I can't question. That's good. Yeah. So I want to talk about the concept of possibility. Much of what we talk about in our personal lives and in science and in philosophy takes as an assumption that there is a world of possibility to talk about counterfactuals things that might have been different makes sense to talk about certain things that could have happened, but in fact didn't happen. What gives us license to say that we might have done this event yesterday as opposed to today? And is this necessarily a scientifically or philosophically meaningful statement? Like I said, there are two views in philosophy and science that seem on their surface to be almost the same. They have different origins. So I wanted you to describe what's called modal realism in philosophy. And I wanted to connect that up with this picture of the many worlds interpretation of QM and then just talk a little bit about what it means to think in terms of possibility. Because my default setting now is that it may not make any sense at all to talk about possibility. That what is actual is in fact all there is and ever is and ever will be. And that possibility is just a fiction that we have spun in our conversation about what is, in fact, unfolding or seems to be unfolding. Bring us to modal realism. Yeah, actually, Max would be better about modal realism because I think he believes in it and I don't. Do you use that word for it? You're more of a card carrying philosophy than I am. We should defend I could explain what it means, but if you're, loosely speaking, take it to mean that everything that could exist does exist. I find that interesting idea but it's a little bit too wishywashy to be really scientifically testable and the various theories of physics that give you some kind of a multiverse whether it be distant regions of space that light. Hasn't reached us from yet, which are predicted by some versions of insulation that gave us a big bang or the ones of quantum mechanics or something else. Those are more restrictive in a way. It's not like everything I could think about after I had too much wine exists, but rather, if you have some particular equations, physics have this solution. If they have another solution too, maybe that exists, that's the kind of alternative realities that these theories tend to give in. But the shocking thing is that those alternative realities are still those cases, very many, and this bothers a lot of people. So, for example, my colleague Alan Goose here at MIT when he and others came up with this inflation theory, which is the most popular and mainstream theory of science right now, for what caused our Big Bang. What it basically says is, yeah, took something smaller than an atom, and it just kept doubling in size over and over and over again until it was vastly larger than all the space that we can see that we call our universe. And it also predicts that all this other space is also kind of uniformly filled with stuff. Initially. We know that in this neck of the woods, that stuff, those atoms and so on, gradually coalesce into the form, among other places, the Milky Way galaxy, our solar system, and Sam Harris, just Rebecca Goldstein and me and you. And here we are. But we know that the probability that this would happen in some random place isn't zero because it happened here. And inflation typically predicts you actually have an infinite amount of other places with stuff. So if you roll the dice infinitely many times, of course it's going to happen again. And the shocking prediction is then that if you go far enough away, you're going to get to another place where this identical conversation is taking place. The first one you come to, the person wearing the red sweater is going to be named Max Schmegmark, and he's going to be speaking some incomprehensible different language, whatever. But if you go far enough, you'll even find someone who speaks English and has the same memories, very disturbing notions. But you can't dismiss it just by saying it sounds too weird. Right. The way you dismiss it would be to falsify this physics theory, alan Goose's equations, and there are people building experiments right now to try to falsify it or test it better. And that's how we're ultimately going to sort it out, not by having prejudiced about it. Yeah. So the philosopher who was argued very strongly for modal realism was David Lewis. Did you know him? Did you? Yeah. No. When I was a graduate student at Princeton, he was actually on my dissertation committee and yeah, I won't pry any further than maybe I will pry. Yeah. He's a very sweet man. I never met him, but he was supposed to be very smart. He was a formidable philosopher and a very sweet man. I'm actually have a very strong mental image right now of he had a train set in his basement and he would only take people he liked very much down there. And I did go down there once. You were train set material. And it was that sounds kind of sketchy when the professor said, hey, do want to come down to my basement anyway? Yeah, you really stole the Thunder from this David Lewis story. We can edit that out. Edit the Thunder back in. But anyway, when he was running the train set, he put on this little engineering cap, and it was just the cutest thing I ever saw, right? But, yes, he took very seriously. He had a way us isn't meaningful to talk about. Had I not gone to college then, I would not now be a philosopher or something. What are the truth conditions of that? How do you figure that out? And the way he did it was by reefing possible worlds and saying that there are a whole bunch of possible worlds and they really exist. And you go to the nearest possible world in which I didn't go to college, and you check it out. We can check it out, but what would make it true is if that antecedent were true, would I not be a philosopher? Right? Or if I didn't go to college and I wasn't a philosopher then, I'd be a millionaire now or something, and you go to the nearest possible world. So he really took possible worlds very seriously in order to formulate what he took to be the truth conditions. Again, the motivation he got there for none of these probability reasons that Max just no counterfactuals make sense. Right. We understand them. If you hadn't called me right then, I would have missed the most important phone call of my life or something. We say these things all the time and they seem meaningful? What are the truth conditions? And he thought that the only way to do it was to say that all these various possible worlds, in some sense, really exist. When I didn't get hit by that truck this morning, which was a very near miss, there is a counterpart in a very close possible world of me who did get hit? Who did get killed. It is funny that it is strangely convergent with the many worlds interpretation. Yeah, it is. And I inflict a lot about that because I was almost hitting the jet by trucking one day and I if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with General Michael V. Hayden. General Hayden is a retired United States Air Force four star general and the only man to have ever run both the NSA and the CIA. He did that sequentially. He is currently a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy founded by the former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. And he's also a professor at George Mason University at the School of Public Policy, Government and International Affairs. And he's the author of the book Plain to the Edge american Intelligence in the Age of Terror, which is well worth reading. And this was a slightly unusual interview for me in that it was a straight interview. The General and I had some technical difficulties getting on Skype. It was amusing not to be able to get on Skype with the former head of the NSA and the CIA, so we had to conduct this interview on FaceTime. All of that wrangling took a little while and his schedule was tight. So I had about a half hour for this interview. So it could not be one of my leisurely conversations. It was really just my questions and his answers. But I think you'll find it interesting nonetheless. We talk about many things. We talk about the ethics of spying and the trade off between privacy and security, and we get into Edward Snowden and the consequence of his leaks. And I also get General Hayden's opinion about the Russian hacking of the US. Election. So please enjoy. And now I give you General Michael V. Hayden. I am here with General Michael V. Hayden. General, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. Listen, I want to talk to you about your book because it is fascinating. It is plain to the edge. American intelligence in the age of terror. But let's just talk about your background for a moment. You are a retired four star general in the Air Force and then went on to head both the NSA and the CIA. Am I right in thinking that no one has run both those organizations before? That's right. I'm the first one to have been head of CIA and NSA. But an additional wrinkle, the head of NSA is always military, so I was in uniform for that a bit unusual, but I was also in uniform for most, not all. But most of my time at CIA as well. Did you know you wanted to go into intelligence, or were you expecting a more ordinary career in the air force? Actually, intelligence is what I asked for. I was a history major. The air force was kind enough to let me get a master's degree before I came on active duty. I thought the art and discipline of history well suited me for intelligence work. They apparently agreed and allowed me to go ahead and do that for most of my career. A good two thirds of it, I was in what could only be defined as intelligence jobs. So now we're going to talk about things that I think most people in the general public only dimly understand, and I count myself among them not being among the things that are only dimly understood, but among the people who dimly understand them. What is the main difference between the CIA and the NSA? How would you characterize those organizations? So what we have done in the united states you don't have to do it this way, but we did, is that we organized our big, muscular national intelligence agencies by the way they collect information. NSA collects information through intercepted communications and communications in all of its forms phone calls, faxes, emails. CIA gathers information through human sources. The classic spy stuff that you see in the hollywood movies. There are other differences, but that's the fundamental dividing line between the two. And what's the relationship like between the various branches of the intelligence community? I guess you could throw the FBI in there as well. Are there rivalries? Look, I mean, look, these are all bureaucracies, and that's good news and bad. I mean, bureaucracies are how humans organize themselves in order to be most efficient with a specific task. But the way I've always put it is that it takes one kind of culture to intercept communications for which you are not the intended recipient. That's NSA. And another kind of culture to suborn people to give you information that frankly, the organization to which they belong doesn't want you to have. Those are different things. And so they build up a bit of different kinds of cultures. The magic is to preserve enough of those cultures so that they can actually do what they're supposed to do in the first place, but they also cooperate and synchronize and harmonize their activities. And is there efficient sharing of information at this point? How would you yeah, there is. And look, my irreverent way of answering that if god were giving us a grade and god were marking on a curve, comparing us to other countries, we'd get an a. But neither god nor the american people should mark us on the curve. It should be on an absolute scale. And so the sharing of information, again, created in these different kinds of organizations, the sharing of information is something that you always want to improve on. So described that way. The CIA and the NSA have different liabilities. I think at one point you say this in the book, that the CIA has often been faulted for in its use of human intelligence, for collaborating with bad people. The NSA has the opposite problem. They have the problem of eavesdropping on good people. Well, that's a great way of teeing it up. So from time to time, when CIA goes through a dark period, it's generally criticized for the company it keeps, all right, because boy scouts generally don't know the secrets you need to know. And so you establish relationships with folks who are out there in these targeted organizations. NSA, as you correctly suggest, NSA is out there a bit cleaner in the american culture. It's technology. It's not suborning someone. It's intercepting communications. But as you suggest, in the modern world, it's hard to intercept the communications of people who, frankly, I think you want us to listen to without bumping in to the communications of americans. And there's always great distrust that NSA intentionally or inadvertently listens to people it shouldn't be listening to. Perhaps you should define this term signals intelligence, or SIGINT. Yeah, so we put a three letter syllable in front of the word int, which means intelligence. And so you have im int imagery intelligence. It's a picture, guys. You've got SIGINT signals intelligence. That's the NSA, folks, the electrons and photons of modern communication. And then you meant human intelligence, which is the work of CIA. The politics of spying are pretty interesting because there are many things we do which everyone knows or assumes that we do, and so they're essentially open secrets. But when a secret is made explicit, people seem to react very badly to this information. So I'm thinking in particular of our surveillance, or claimed surveillance of angela merkel's cell phone that was revealed by, I believe by edward snowden, or at least alleged by edward snowden, and this created an international incident. But isn't it the case that all major governments both are allies and, and not assume that this sort of spying goes on all the time? They they do, and in their quieter moments, they understand. They're not enthusiastic about it, but they do accept that that kind of stuff is an accepted international practice. So I was in germany visiting at a conference during the height of the kerfuffle we had after snowden's allegations, and I told a story to the germans, which was simply after senator obama was elected. He had run his campaign through his BlackBerry, and of course we saw that and said, mr. President elect don't know that you should be doing that now. And he just refused to give it up. I mean, he's quoted, I think, on CNBC back in late 2008. He sounded like a second amendment bumper sticker. He said, they're going to have to pull it from my fingers in order to get my BlackBerry. So we said, okay, we got it, you're going to keep it, but can we borrow it for a little period of time? And we kind of tightened it up, and the President elect agreed to limit some of his usage on it. But what's the backstory on that? The back story is we were telling the soon to be most powerful man in the most powerful nation on Earth, that if he used his BlackBerry in his national capital, his emails, text messages, and phone calls would be intercepted by a big number of foreign intelligence services. And we didn't render our garments or faint outrage. We just understood that's the way things are. Yeah. In your book, you describe how stressful the job of being a SIGINT analyst can be, and you describe situations that I think most of us really haven't thought of in any detail. So, for instance, you talk about people who spend weeks and months listening to the phone calls of specific targets and getting to know them very intimately. And then when these people are discovered to be terrorists and are located and direct action is taken against them, which is to say they're killed these analysts then witness the aftermath. They're monitoring the calls of distraught family members. And this can be very stressful work that some intelligence operatives find they just can't do. We had that experience at NSA because that's what they do. And it's even worse than you've laid out. I mean, sometimes when you've done all your homework and you've created exquisite intelligence and you know the location of the phone, but you want to be absolutely certain this wasn't the day that this bad guy gave his phone to his cousin, all right? For whom we have no interest, that you actually, during an intercept, might turn to the analyst and say, is that him? Is that his voice? And the analyst knows full well that if the answer is yes, you're going to go do what it was you suggested, take direct action. So you've got that decision and you've got the aftermath. I mean, one thing in intelligence, it's really hard to dehumanize even the enemy because intelligence, you actually get up close and know people in the face of these Hollywood epics that give a cartoonish view of what espionage is, people who actually have to do it bear an additional burden. It seems that the public's trust in the intelligence community is now fairly low. I don't know if it's the lowest point historically, but it's at the lowest point I can remember. And this is largely the result of the revelations of Edward Snowden, and we'll talk about Snowden in a minute, but the history of the NSA and CIA targeting American citizens precedes Snowden. So you have the 1975 church Committee report which revealed the NSA was spying on people like Jane Fonda and Joan Baez, and history goes back even further than that. How do you view this history? So that was then, this is now. That's not acceptable behavior. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Jaron Lanier. Jaron, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Well, again, thank you for your patience in overcoming a surprising number of technical ordeals to get this conversation happening. This is ironic because you are among the more technical guests and yet we collectively have some bad technical karma. Hopefully, we've purged that problem and we can move forward. Yeah, I've been meaning to talk to you about your irrational belief in karma, and I don't know where this comes from, but I don't think there is really such a thing in our world. Although in my old startup, the engineers accused me of having some weird psychic field that caused demos to crash, especially on important occasions. Well, I believe them. Your reputation perspective. Yeah. Well, okay, well, let's jump in because I know your time is short and precious and we have around an hour here and a lot to talk about, so I just want to plow on. But before we start, can you just describe what you do? How do you summarize your career at this point for people who are unfamiliar with you? Oh, I make no attempt to do that, nor do I have any motivation to, except when somebody like you asks me. But I've done a few things. I'm a computer scientist. I started the field of virtual reality approximately after the founder of Computer Graphics really started it, which was Ivan Sutherland. But I named virtual reality and I had the first startup and prototyped a lot of the apps and made the first commercial gloves and headsets and so on. I was Chief scientist of Internet To, the academic consortium that scaled the Internet in the 90s. I've done video games, lots of other tech stuff. I've been working with Microsoft a lot lately. I've done a bunch of startups as well, including the one that became Google's first machine, Vision. And I'm also a musician, and I played with all kinds of people, like Philip Class and George Clinton, all kinds of people. And I write books, which is the immediate reason why I go on podcasts like this. And the most recent book, which I'm sure the publisher would want me to mention right away, is called ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Yes. Yeah. And I am a huge fan of your books and ironically, you just mentioned everything you do for which you are well known. That has virtually nothing to do with what we're going to talk about because I have found this side hustle of yours especially valuable, which is writing books and thinking all too pressionately about the problems with our digital economy and social media and what the Internet is doing to us. The book you just mentioned is your most recent, which we'll talk about, but you have two prior books that are relevant here. You are not a gadget. And who owns the future? There's just so many issues that intersect here. So I just want to kind of summarize for a minute or two my interest in this and then set you off. It seems like there are three areas that we'll talk about and it's hard to know where to start here. But the first is economics and there are questions about how we create a world where good and necessary work gets incentivized and supported and how we can have a large middle class, for instance, in the presence of increasing automation and AI. Then there's politics, where we need to think about the influence of the Internet and social media on our ability to make sense to one another and even just understand the behavior of other people. And this is a kind of fundamental issue of human cooperation that's getting in some ways much harder based on our technology. And then there's this third piece, which is personal psychology, for lack of a better word, which is just how is this technology affecting each of us directly? Among the ten reasons you give for deleting one, social media. One is that social media is turning everyone into an asshole. And I can I can say that I've personally run that experiment and it works. I I have been turned into an asshole on Twitter. So this is just an incredibly important topic, and I think perhaps we should start with the economic piece, because I guess one more thing, by way of preamble, is that many of the worst decisions we've made here, and this is something you point out in your books in creating this technology are not on their face bad decisions. I mean, they're certainly not sinister decisions. And to start talking about economics here, one of the first decisions we've made is around this notion that information should be free. And that just seems like a very generous and idealistic way to start. It just seems quite noble. So perhaps we can start here with the digital economy. What could possibly be wrong with information being free? Right? Well, this idea that information should be free was held in the most profound and intense way. It was something that was believed so intensely during a period starting in the in some ways it still holds for a lot of people. And to defy that was very, very difficult. It was painful for my friends who couldn't believe that I was defying it. It was painful for me. I did lose friends over it. And on its face, it sounds very generous and fair and proper and freeing. But there are problems with it that are so deep as to, I think, threaten the survival of our species. It's actually a very, very serious mistake. So the mistakes happen on a couple of levels here. I would say the first one has to do with this idea that information is totally weightless and intrinsically something that's free and an infinite supply. And that's not true, because information only exists to the degree that people can perceive it and process it and understand it. It ultimately only has a meaning when it grounds out as human experience. The slogan I used to have back in the 80s when we were first debating these things, is that information is alienated experience. Meaning information is similar to stored energy that can be released. You put energy into a battery, then you can release it, or you lift up a weight, and then you let go of the weight and it goes back down and you've released the energy that was stored. And in the same way, information ultimately only has meaning as experience at some point in the future. And the problem with experience, or maybe the benefit of experience, is that it's only a finite potential. You can't experience everything. And so therefore, if you make the mistake of assuming that information is free, you'll have more information than you can experience. And what you do is you make yourself vulnerable to what we could call a denial of service attack in other contexts. So a denial of service attack means that malicious people send someone your request to a website that it's effectively knocked out off the web, you can't reach it anymore. And every website that you use reliably actually has to go through this elaborate structure of other resources created by companies like Akamai that defend it from denial of service attacks, which are just infinitely easy to do. But in the same way when you have services like Twitter or Facebook where anybody can post anything without any cost to themselves and there's no postage on email and everything can just be totally filled up with spam and malicious bots and crap to the point where reality and everything good about the world gets squeezed out and you end up amplifying the worst impulses of people. And so it's created this world of darkness and falsity. It's reversed the enlightenment. There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's no such thing as free information. There's no such thing as infinite attention. There has to be some way that seriousness comes into play if you want to have any sense of reality or quality or truth or decency. And unfortunately, we haven't created a world in which that's so. But then there's a flip side to it which is equally important, which is we've created this world in which we're talking about technology often as something that's if not opposed to humanity, opposed to most of humanity. So there's a lot of talk and a lot of this comes from really good technologists. So it's not from like malicious outsiders who are trying to screw us up. It's our own fault, where we'll say, well, a lot of the jobs will go away because of artificial intelligence in our robots. And that might either be some extreme case where super intelligent AI takes over the world and disposes of humanity, or it might just be that only the most elite smart techie people are still needed and everybody else becomes this burden on the state and they have to go on some kind of basic income. And it's just a depressing. It's like everybody's going to become this useless burden. And so even if that means, oh, we all get basic income, we won't have to work for a living, there's also something fundamentally undignified like you won't be needed. And any situation like that, it's just bound to be a political disaster or an economic disaster on many levels we can go into, if it isn't obvious. But the thing to see is that this economic hole that we seem to be driving ourselves into is one and the same as the information wants to be free. Because the thing is, ultimately all these AI and robots and all this stuff they run on information that at the end of the day has to come from people. And each instance is a little different. But for a lot of them, there's input from a lot of people. And I can give you some examples. So if we say that information is free, then we're saying in the information age, everybody's worthless because what they can contribute is information. The example I like to use as just an entry point to this idea is the people who translate between languages. So they've seen their careers be decimated their 10th of what they were in the same way that recording musicians and investigative journalists and many other classes of people who have an information product, they've all been kind of reduced under this weird regime we've created. But the thing is, in order to run the so called AI translators that places like Bing and Google offer, we have to scrape tens of millions of examples from real life people translating things every single day in order to keep up with slang and public events. Language is alive. The world is alive. You can't just stuff a language translator once. You have to keep on refilling it. And so we're totally reliant on the very people that we're putting out of work. So it's fundamentally like a form of theft through dishonesty. I hope that should become clear. Yeah, well, I guess one question there is that I can see how it's true in the case of translation, but it seems to me nowhere written into the book of nature that it should be true in every case. So I think we could imagine some significant percentage of work that will get automated and it won't require this continuous drip of yet more humangenerated information. Well, what I'd say to that is that I think anytime somebody considers what they want from an advanced economy or an economy in a situation where technology is getting better and better is they should want more and more of the economy to essentially be about subjective value, about things like entertainment and cosmetics and sports and lifestyles and design and all that. That's what we should want because that's a signal that we're creating technologies in an economy that's really serving us, right? Yes. And so I would suspect, whether you want to call it AI or not, that some kind of growing core of functionality will probably require less and less continuous input from people, because it ultimately is composed of problems that can be solved approximately at least once, and then you can keep on using the solution for a long time. But the world of subjective value should be in constant creative churn and evolution. And so to me, it might very well be the case that you don't need to rescan the roads all the time to have self driving vehicles. Let's say you still have to do it because there'll be potholes or fallen trees or whatever, but you don't have to do it constantly. But most of the economy should be about these subjective things, about style and arts and fashion and joy and connection and all that. And that's exactly the stuff we've thrown the most into, the free bin where you're supposed to do all that stuff for free by uploading YouTube for free to YouTube and posting on Facebook for free and so forth. To me, the AI case and the creative case are not different. It's just data coming from people. I think the AI thing is just a fancy way of talking about information that confuses and muddies the issue. So this concern that AI will get really good simply doesn't concern me because what the economy should be about is precisely more and more subjective value, which can only come by definition from people. That's what it means, right? Okay, so we've hit the ground running here. I want to back up for a second and try to perform an exorcism on some bad intuitions here because I think people come into this. We've trained ourselves to expect much of our digital content to be free and free forever. And it now seems just the normal state of the world. And of course, podcasts and blogs and journalism and ultimately music should be free. Or if it's not free, it should be subsidized by ads. And I think there's this sense that TV and radio were free. So there's this precedent and advertising has its excesses, but I think people feel what's wrong with ads? Some ads are kind of cool looking and amusing and stylish, and we've lived with them for forever. And then there's these other elements, like having a personalized newsfeed. What's wrong with that? Why can't Facebook just give me what I want? And I think it might be useful to focus the conversation here on a couple of case studies that you deal with in your various books. And one I think that will be familiar to people is the music industry. And what happened to really the economic basis of creating and selling music, perhaps? Let's start. There was one thing that I remember vividly when music became digitized, is that it actually wasn't clear ethically to me and to, you know, millions of other people, that copying an MP3 file was stealing in any sense. I mean, that piracy seemed benign. And to I think a whole generation of people still seems benign because you're not depriving anyone of the material you're copying. You're copying an MP3 file or any other digital product doesn't deprive anyone else of that information. And yet the effect of this has been to shrink an economy that at one point sustained a very valuable form of creative expression and now has been in freefall for quite some time. So let's talk to me about what happened to music. Sure. Well, there's a couple of things I'd like to say, if I could. We've had an interesting experiment performed, but not in music, but instead in TV. Sure. I just like to mention that first before coming back to music. Is that okay? Yeah, that's great. All right. So in the case of TV, during the same era in which there was this kind of craze for making music free, which was kind of 90s into the first decade of the century, there was also a feeling that that should happen with TV and that in the future, TVs and movies would be created by a process that was reminiscent of the Wikipedia, where it just be a bunch of volunteers who would self organize and do it for free and everything would be better. And a lot of people tried to do that. My friend Will Wright, who made The Sims, had a company like that, and there were dozens of others. There were a lot of attempts and see, that at the same time, there were companies like Netflix saying, no, that's not the right thing. What the Internet allows us to do is have a direct billing relationship with people, and if we make the experience good and clean and smooth enough for them, they won't mind paying. And I just think there's no question that Netflix won that argument. I mean, that was a fair test. That was a fair showdown between two different philosophies. And there's just no question that the paid philosophy won. And in particular, people frequently refer to this era in which we're paying for TV and we don't see advertisements on HBO or Netflix that might be changing now, but this direct pay model, instead of the old ad model or the copy it model, they're calling it Peak TV. Everybody's heard that phrase. Whether it is or not. Of course, as a matter of opinion, I'm personally not into a lot of the shows that have captured the imagination of so many, like Game of Thrones, but it seems to be working. So we have a very clear thing. What I'd say about this question of if you copy something, the original is still there. If you copy information. I just have to say that what we decide is worth paying for is always something of an I won't say an arbitrary, but if there's always a cultural element, there's an element of values into how we decide to do this. We decide not to pay for what we think of as women's work. We decide for a long time we decided the air was free, so you just breathe it and the plants to make more air. But then we realize, no, it's not, and we have carbon credits. We realize we have to preserve our air and everybody has to pay for it ultimately, if we're going to survive, it's a matter of how we express our values, where we perceive our self interest, how we see a path to a decent society. Ultimately, the decision of how you value things and what's worth spending money on is not rational. For all of the books you can read about economics with all the fancy diagrams and equations. At the end of the day, a lot of it is really based on values and cultural expression. And so there isn't a way to absolutely justify some of these decisions. But that's always been true. Well, in some ways, it can be made rational in that you can trace the negative effects of bad incentives, or in this case, you know, I mean, if you're going to pirate every CD that gets produced in the year, whatever it was, 1998, then that's going to have a very predictable effect on the economics of producing music. And then musicians will have to tour, right? But not everyone wants to tour or can tour. And then if you do it to writers, if you pirate books well, writers for the most part can't even tour, right? I mean, they're not musicians. Only some of them can have careers giving lectures. So what you do in your books is offer a very rational case for why these incentives we've created or these new norms around treating information as free, have been really ruinous to certain sectors of the economy. Well, it's a strange thing. Like these kind of clouds of negative assumptions can overtake a society. So currently we assume that there's no way to have a college education that won't be infinitely expensive, that will put you in debt forever. We assume that there are these horrible things that are just indelible and there's an assumption that if you're a musician, it's inconceivable. There could be an economy to support you, so you better have rich parents, you know, and that that's approximately what's going on now. For the most part, in the average case, what I try to tell younger musicians is that this was not really so in the while I made my living as a recording musician, and leaving aside performances just from the recording business, I could sell, like, 30,000 records. I was kind of a minor artist, I would say, in the kind of avant garde, classical crossover world. And I'd get $100,000 advance per record and the big label that had signed me would earn it back. And that was cool, you know, and we got to record in a nice studio and all these things. It was it was a very cool time. I wish younger musicians could experience that. It was just extraordinary. And everybody was basically happy. I mean, it was working, right? But so my understanding here with music is that you had major bands who I think got something like 90% of their revenue from selling their music. See, that revenue shrink to whatever, 30%. And then touring had to make up the difference. And so it created a whole new business model for music. But that works in the case of many musicians. I don't know what percentage, but it doesn't work for many journalists, right? Or many authors. And even in the case of musicians, it's been heartbreaking. I mean, when this music wants to be free, things started happening. We just started having weekly fundraisers for people like famous musicians who'd gotten sick in old age and had no support anymore. And it was just so tragic. Recently, my very dear buddy friend for many, many years, john Perry Barlow, passed away and he had been a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, one of the most successful bands, which had actually pioneered a lot of this idea by encouraging tapers at their concerts from a very pure feeling, from a very generous feeling. But then at the end, even though he'd penned these songs and these huge selling records, he just basically didn't have income. And it just pissed me off so much. It's just so unfair. It's like what I call it is singing for your supper, for every single meal. You never get to build up any life. You can't build up any reserve so that you can have a sick day or grow old or have a kid who needs to go to college. Everybody goes into this gig economy where you're basically this disposable element in somebody else's fortune. And that's what making music free actually did. That's a very important distinction because it takes the case of music. So it may seem like a distinction without a difference for people. Because if I tell you that a band, like whatever radiohead, used to make all of their money selling music, but now they have to tour, but the crucial difference there is if you're making your money selling your intellectual property, well, then that is money that you can continue to make even when you stop working. Whereas if you're making your money touring, there is a linear relationship between every gig and every dollar. And once you stop touring, you stop making money. And that looks very different in your old age as a rock star. Yeah, there have been so many tragic situations. And of course, if you're young, what you think about is it's in my interest to not have to pay for this file. Right? But then you will not stay young forever, no matter what weird rhetoric comes out of Google spin offs. You will also grow old, you will also have a biological body, and you will have needs, and you will not always have perfect days. And this whole idea of intellectual property kind of like a lot of things in our society, you can think of it as something that only benefits elites, but actually it was fought for by unions trying to support people who were not elites at all. The Musicians Union battled long and hard to get these rights to create dignity for people who produced information in their lives and to have it lost by people who thought they were doing the right thing. It's just one of the great tragedies of our era. Yeah. There are so many elements here. For instance, as a writer of books, I know you have experienced this as well. You find yourself continually in competition with free versions of yourself. So if you give a Ted Talk, rather often you give the talk because you want to give the talk, but also because you're a writer of books, and this is a great way to get word of your work out. But the truth is that more and more in the current era, where everyone feels starved for time and attention, and it's becoming harder and harder to even commit to reading a book, your Ted Talk is going to satisfy some significant number of people that they understand your thesis well enough that they don't even have to read your book. The business model of publishing is intention, with all of these opportunities to get the word out about a book now in digital form. And a podcast like this is another case in point. And to that end, it would be only decent of me to assure people that we will in no way exhaust what is of interest in your books by having this conversation. If I may, there's one of my books you haven't mentioned, which is called dawn of the New Everything, which is a memoir and an introduction to virtual reality, and possibly my best book, but also the least notebook. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with Jay Shapiro. Jay, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me. So we have a fun project to talk about here, and let's see if I can remember the the genesis of this. I think, you know, I woke up in the middle of the night one night realizing that more or less, my entire catalog of podcasts was, if not the entire thing, maybe conservatively speaking, 50% of all the podcasts were evergreen, which is to say that their content was basically as good today as the day I recorded them. But because of the nature of the medium, they would never be perceived as such. And people really don't tend to go back into the catalog and listen to a three year old podcast, and yet there's something insufficient about just recirculating them in my podcast feed or elsewhere. And so I and Jaron, my partner in crime here, we're trying to think about how to give all of this content new life, and then we thought of you just independently turning your creative intelligence loose on the catalog. And now I will properly introduce you as someone who should be doing that. Perhaps you can introduce yourself. Just tell us what you have done all these many years and the kinds of things you've focused on. Yeah, well, I'm a filmmaker first and foremost, but I think my story and my genesis of being maybe the right person to tap here is probably indicative or representative of a decent portion of your audience. I'm just guessing I'm 40 now, which pegs me in college. When 911 hit, it was my late my second year. I guess it would have been early if it was September. And I never heard of you at all at that point. I was an atheist and just didn't think too much about that kind of stuff. I was fully on board with any atheist things I saw coming across my world. But then 911 hit and I was on a very liberal college campus, and the kind of questions that were popping up in my mind and I was asking myself were uncomfortable for me. I just didn't know what to do with them. I really had no formal philosophical training, and I kind of just buried them under the weight of my own confusion or shame or just whatever kind of brew a lot of us were probably feeling at the time. And then I discovered your work at the end of Faith, right when you sort of were responding to the same thing. And a lot of your language. You were philosophically trained and maybe sharper with your language, for better or worse, which we found out later was complicated, resonated with me. And I started following along with your work and the Four Horsemen and Hitchens and Dawkins and that sort of whole crowd. And I'm sure I wasn't alone. And then I paid close, special attention to what you were doing, which I actually included in one of the pieces that I ended up putting together in this series. But with a talk you gave in Australia. I don't have to tell you about your career, but again, I was following along, as you were on sort of this atheist circuit. And I was interested. But whenever you would talk about sort of the hard work of secularism and the hard work of atheism in particular, I'm thinking of your talk called Death in the Present Moment right after Christopher Hitchens had died. I'm actually curious how quickly you threw that together, because I know you were supposed to or you were planning on speaking about free will and you ended up giving this whole other talk and that one and I'll save it because I definitely put that one in our compilation. But it struck me as, okay, this guy is up to something a little different, and the questions that he's asking are really different. I was just on board with that ride, so I became a fan. And probably many of your listeners started to really follow and listen closely and became a student. And hopefully any good student started to disagree with my teacher a bit and slowly get the confidence to push back and have my own thoughts and maybe find the weaknesses and strengths of what you were up to. And your work exposed me and many, many other people, I'm sure, to a lot of great thinkers. And maybe you don't love this, but sometimes the people who disagree with you that you introduce us to on this side of the microphone, we think are right. And that's a great credit to you as well for just giving them the air and maybe on some really nerdy, esoteric things. I'm one of them at this point now because to back up way to the beginning of the story, I was at a university where I was well on my way to a film degree, which is what I ended up getting. But when 911 hit, I started taking a lot more courses and attract that they had, which I think is fairly unique at the time. Maybe still one of the only programs where you can actually major in Holocaust studies, which sort of sits in between the history and philosophy kind of departments. And I started taking a bunch of courses in there. And that's where I was first exposed to sort of the formal philosophy, language and education. And that was so useful for me. So I was just on board and now hopefully I swim deep in those waters and know my way around the lingo. And it's super helpful. But, yeah, it was almost Moore's law of bringing up the Nazis was those are the first times, actually, in courses called Resistance during the Holocaust and things like that, where, you know, I first was exposed to the words like deontology and consequentialism and utilitarianism and a lot of moral ethics stuff. And then I went further on my own into sort of the theory of mind and this kind of stuff. But, yeah, I consider myself in this weird new digital landscape that we're in, a bit of a student of the school of Sam Harris. But then again, hopefully any good student, I've branched off and have my own sort of thoughts and framings. And so I'm definitely in these pieces in this series that we're calling The Essential Sam Harris, I can't help but sort of put my writing and my framework on it, or at least hope that the people and the challenges that you've encountered continue to encounter, whether they're right or wrong or making drastic mistakes. I want to give everything in. It a really fair hearing. So there's times, I'm sure, where the listener will hear my own hand of opinion coming in there, and I'm sure you know the areas as well, but most times I'm just trying to give an open door to the mystery and why these subjects interest you in the first place, if that makes sense. Yeah. And I should remind both of us that we met because you were directing a film focused on Majid Nawaz and me around our book Islam and the Future of Tolerance. And also we've brought into this project another person who I think you met independently. I don't remember, but Megan Phelps Roper, who's been a guest on the podcast and someone who I have long admired. And she is doing the voiceover work in this series, and she happens to have a great voice. So I'm very happy to be working with her. Yeah, I did meet her independently. Your archive, I think you said three or four years old. Your archive is over ten years old now. And I was diving into the earliest days of it and there are some fascinating conversations that age really interestingly. And I'm curious. I mean, I think this project again, it's for fans, it's for listeners, but it's for people who might hate you also, or critics of you, or people who are sure you were missing something or wrong about something or even yourself to go back and listen to certain conversations. For example, one with, like, Dan Carlin, who hosts hardcore history. You had him on. I think that conversation is seven or eight years ago now. And the part that I really resurfaced. It's actually in the morality episode is full of details and philosophies and politics and moral philosophies regarding things like intervention in the Middle East. And at the time of your recording, of course, we had no idea how Afghanistan might look a decade from then, but now we kind of do. And if people listen to these carefully, it's not about, oh, this side of the conversation turned out to be right and this kind of part turned out to be wrong. But certain things hit our ears a little differently even on this first topic of artificial intelligence. I mean, I think that conversation continues to evolve in a way where the issues that you bring up are evergreen, but hopefully evolving as well, just as far as their application goes. I would love to hear your thoughts, listening back to some of those. And in fact, to reference the film we made together, a lot of that film was you doing that actively and live, given a specific topic of looking back and reassessing language about how it might land politically in that project. But this goes into really different, including an episode about social media, which changes every day. Yeah. Changes by the hour. Yeah. And the conversation you have with Jack Dorsey is now fascinating for all kinds of different reasons that at the time couldn't have been. So, yeah, it's evergreen, but it's also just like new Life and all of that, I think. Yeah. Well, I look forward to hearing it. Just to be clear, this has been very much your project. I haven't heard most of this material since the time I recorded it and released it. And you've gone back and created episodes on a theme where you've pulled together five or six conversations and kind of intercut material from five or six different episodes and then added your own interstitial pieces, which you have written and Megan Phelps Roper is reading. So these are very much their own documents. And as you say, you don't agree with me about everything and occasionally you're shading different points from your own point of view. I look forward to hearing it. And we will be dropping the whole series here in the podcast feed. If you're in the public feed, as always, you'll be getting partial episodes. And if you're in the subscriber feed, you'll be getting full episodes. And the first will be on artificial intelligence. And then there are many other topics consciousness, violence, belief, free will, morality, death and others beyond that. Yeah, there's one existential threat in nuclear war that I'm still piecing together, but that one's pretty harrowing. Your areas of interest? Yeah. Great. Well, thanks for the collaboration, Jay. Again, I'm a consumer of this, probably more than a collaborator at this point because I have only heard part of what you've done here. So I'll be eager to listen as well. But thank you for the work that you've done no, thank you. And I'll just say you're gracious to allow someone to do this who does have some. Again, most of my disagreements with you are pretty deep and nerdy and esoteric kind of philosophy stuff. But it's incredibly gracious that you've given me the opportunity to do it, and then hopefully again, I'm a bit of a representative for people who have been in the passenger seat of your public project of thinking out loud for over a decade now. And if I can be a voice for that part of the crowd, it's an honor to do it. And they're a lot of fun to a ton of fun. There's a ton of audio like thought experiments that we play with and hopefully bring to life in your ears a little bit, including in the very first one with artificial intelligence. So I hope people enjoy it. I do as well. So now we bring you Megan Phelps Roper on the topic of artificial intelligence. Welcome to the essential Sam Harris. This is making sense of artificial intelligence. The goal of this series is to organize compile and juxtapose conversations hosted by Sam Harris into specific areas of interest. This is an ongoing effort to construct a coherent overview of Sam's perspectives and arguments, the various explorations and approaches to the topic, the relevant agreements and disagreements, and the pushbacks and evolving thoughts which his guests have advanced. The purpose of these compilations is not to provide a complete picture of any issue, but to entice you to go deeper into these subjects. Along the way, we'll point you to the full episodes with each featured guest, and at the conclusion, we'll offer some reading, listening, and watching suggestions which range from fun and light to densely academic. One note to keep in mind for this series sam has long argued for a unity of knowledge where the barriers between fields of study are viewed as largely unhelpful artifacts of unnecessarily partitioned thought. The pursuit of wisdom and reason in one area of study naturally bleeds into and greatly affects others. You'll hear plenty of crossover into other topics as these dives into the archives unfold, and your thinking about a particular topic may shift as you realize its contingent relationships with others in this topic, you'll hear the natural overlap with theories of identity and the self consciousness and free will. So get ready. Let's make sense of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is an area of resurgent interest in the general public. Its seemingly eminent arrival first garnered wide attention in the late 60s, with thinkers like Marvin Minsky and Isaac Asimov writing provocative and thoughtful books about the burgeoning technology and concomitant philosophical and ethical quandaries. Science fiction novels, comic books, and TV shows were flooded with stories of killer robots and encounters with super intelligent artificial life forms hiding out on nearby planets, which we thought we would soon be visiting on the backs of our new rocket ships. Over the following decades, the excitement and fervor looked to have faded from view in the public imagination. But in recent years it has made an aggressive comeback. Perhaps this is because the fruits of the AI revolution and the devices and programs once only imagined in those science fiction stories have started to rapidly show up in impressive and sometimes disturbing ways. All around us, our smartphones, cars, doorbells, watches, games, thermostats vacuum cleaners, light bulbs and glasses now have embedded algorithms running on increasingly powerful hardware which navigate dictate or influence not just our locomotion, but our entertainment choices, our banking, our politics, our dating lives, and just about everything else. It seems every other TV show or movie that appears on a streaming service is birthed out of a collective interest, fear or otherwise general fascination with the ethical, societal and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. There are two major ways to think about the threat of what is generally called AI. One is to think about how it will disrupt our psychological states or fracture our information landscape. And the other is to ponder how the very nature of the technical details of its development may threaten our existence. This compilation is mostly focused on the latter concern because Sam is certainly amongst those who are quite worried about the existential threat of the technical development and arrival of AI. Now, before we jump into the clips, there are a few concepts that you'll need to onboard to find your footing. You'll hear the terms artificial general intelligence or AGI and artificial superintelligence or ASI used in these conversations, both of these terms refer to an entity which has a kind of intelligence that can solve a nearly infinitely wide range of problems. We humans have brains which display this kind of adaptable intelligence. We can climb a ladder by controlling our legs and arms in order to retrieve a specific object from a high shelf with our hands. And we use the same brain to do something very different, like recognize emotions in the tone of a voice of a romantic partner. I look forward to infinity with you. That same brain can play a game of checkers against a young child who we might also be coily trying to let win, or play a serious game of competitive chess against a skilled adult. That same brain can also simply lift a coffee mug to our lips, not just to ingest nutrients and savor the taste of the beans, but also to send a subtle social signal to a friend at the table to let them know that their story is dragging on a bit. All of that kind of intelligence is embodied and contained in the same system, namely our brains. AGI refers to a human level of intelligence which doesn't surpass what our brightest humans can accomplish on any given task, while ASI references an intelligence which performs at well superhuman levels. This description of flexible intelligence is different from a system which is programmed or trained to do one particular thing incredibly well like arithmetic or painting straight lines on the sides of a car or playing computer chess or guessing large prime numbers or displaying music options to a listener based on the observable lifestyle habits of like minded users. In a certain demographic, that kind of system has an intelligence that is sometimes referred to as narrow or weak AI. But even that kind of thing can be quite worrisome from the standpoint of weaponization or preference manipulation. You'll hear Sam voices concerns throughout these conversations, and he'll consistently point to our underestimation of the challenge that even narrow AI poses. So there are dangerous and serious questions to consider no matter which way we go with the AI topic. But as you'll also hear in this compilation, not everyone is as concerned about the technical existential threat of AI as Sam is. Much of the divergence in levels of concern stems from initial differences on the fundamental conceptual approach towards the nature of intelligence. Defining intelligence is notoriously slippery and controversial, but you're about to hear one of Sam's guests offer a conception which distills intelligence to a type of observable competence at actualizing desired tasks, or an ability to manifest preferred future states through intentional current action and intervention. You can imagine a linear gradient indicating more or less of the amount of this competence as you move along it. This view places our human intelligence on a continuum, along with bacteria, ants, chickens, honeybees, chimpanzees, all of the potential undiscovered alien life forms, and, of course, artificial intelligence which purchases itself far above our lowly human competence. This presents some rather alarming questions. Stephen Hawking once issued a famous warning that perhaps we shouldn't be actively seeking out intelligent alien civilizations, since we'd likely discover a culture which is far more technologically advanced than ours. And if our planet's history provides any lessons, it seems to prove that when technologically mismatched cultures come into contact, it usually doesn't work out too well for the lesser developed one. Are we bringing that precise suicidal encounter into reality as we set out to develop artificial intelligence? That question alludes to what is known as the value alignment problem. But before we get to that challenge, let's go to our first clip, which starts to lay out the important definitional, foundations and distinction of terms in the landscape of AI. The thinker you're about to meet is the decision theorist and computer scientist Elliezer Yudkowski. Yadkowski begins here by defending this linear gradient perspective on intelligence and offers an analogy to consider how we might be mistaken about intelligence in a similar way to how we once were mistaken about the nature of fire. It's clear that Sam is aligned and attracted to Eliaser's Run at this question, and consequently both men end up sharing a good deal of unease about the implications that all of this has for our future. This is from episode 116, which is entitled AI racing towards the Brink. Let's just start with the basic picture and and define some terms. I suppose we should define intelligence first and then jump into the differences between strong and weak or general versus narrow AI. Do you want to start us off on that? Sure. Preamble disclaimer though the the field in general, like, not everyone you ask would give you the same definition of intelligence. And a lot of times in cases like those, it's good to sort of go back to observational basics. We know that in a certain way, human beings seem a lot more competent than chimpanzees, which seems to be a similar dimension to the one where chimpanzees are more competent than mice or that mice are more competent than spiders. And people have tried various theories about what this dimension is. They've tried various definitions of it. But if you went back a few centuries and asked somebody to define fire, the less wise ones would say fire is the release of slogastin, fire is one of the four elements. And the truly wise ones would say, well, fire is the sort of orangey, bright hot stuff that comes out of wood and like, spreads along wood. And they would tell you what it looked like and put that prior to their theories of what it was. So what this mysterious thing looks like is that humans can build space shuttles and go to the moon and mice can't. We think it has something to do with our brains? Yeah, I think we can make it more abstract than that. Tell me if you think this is not generic enough to be accepted by most people in the field. It's whatever intelligence may be in specific context. So generally speaking, it's the ability to meet goals perhaps across a diverse range of environments. And we might want to add that it's at least implicit in intelligence that interests us. It means an ability to do this flexibly rather than by rote, following the same strategy again and again blindly. Does that seem like a reasonable starting point? I think that that would get fairly widespread agreement and it matches up well with some of the things that are in AI textbooks. If I'm allowed to sort of take it a bit further and begin injecting my own viewpoint into it, I would refine it and say that by achieve goals we mean something like squeezing the measure of possible futures higher in your preference ordering. If we took all the possible outcomes and we rank them from the ones you like least to the ones you like most, then as you achieve your goals, you're sort of like squeezing the outcomes higher in your preference ordering. You're narrowing down what the outcome would be to be something more like what you want, even though you might not be able to narrow it down very exactly. Flexibility generality. Humans are much more domain general than mice. Bees build highs, beavers build dams. A human will look over both of them and envision a honeycomb structured dam. We are able to operate even on the moon, which is very unlike the environment where we evolved. In fact, our only competitor in terms of general optimization, where optimization is that sort of narrowing of the future that I talked about. Our competitor in terms of general optimization is natural selection. Like natural selection built beavers, it built bees, it sort of implicitly built the spider's web in the course of building spiders. And we as humans have this similar very broad range handle this like huge variety of problems. And the key to that is our ability to learn things that natural selection did not pre program us with. So learning is the key to generality. I expect that not many people in I would disagree with that part either. Right. So it seems that goal directed behavior is implicit in this or even explicit in this definition of intelligence. And so whatever intelligence is, it is inseparable from the kinds of behavior in the world that results in the fulfillment of goals. So we're talking about agents that can do things. And once you see that, then it becomes pretty clear that if we build systems that harbor primary goals, there are cartoon examples here like making paperclips. These are not systems that will spontaneously decide that they could be doing more enlightened things than, say, making paper clips. This moves to the question of how deeply unfamiliar artificial intelligence might be because there are no natural goals that will arrive in these systems apart from the ones we put in there. And we have common sense intuitions that make it very difficult for us to think about how strange an artificial intelligence could be, even one that becomes more and more competent to meet its goals. Let's talk about the frontiers of strangeness in AI as we move from again, I think we have a couple more definitions we should probably put in play here. Differentiating strong and weak or general and narrow intelligence. Well, to differentiate general and narrow, I would say that well, I mean, this is like, on the one hand, theoretically a spectrum. On the other hand, there seems to have been like a very sharp jump in generality between chimpanzees and humans. So breadth of domain driven by breadth of learning, like DeepMind, for example, recently built AlphaGo and I lost some money betting that AlphaGo would not defeat the human champion, which it promptly did. And then a successor to that was AlphaZero. And AlphaGo was specialized on go. It could learn to play Go better than its starting point for playing Go, but it couldn't learn to do anything else. And then they simplified the architecture for AlphaGo. They figured out ways to do all the things it was doing in more and more general ways. They discarded the opening book like all the sort of human experience of Go that was built into it. They were able to discard all of the sort of, like, programmatic special features that detected features of the Go board. They figured out how to do that in simpler ways, and because they figured out how to do it in simpler ways, they were able to generalize to alpha zero, which learned how to play chess using the same architecture. They took a single AI and got it to learn Go and then reran it and made it learn chess. Now, that's not human general, but it's like a step forward in generality of the sort that we're talking about. Am I right in thinking that that's a pretty enormous breakthrough? There's two things here. There's the step to that degree of generality, but there's also the fact that they built a Go engine. I forget if it was a Go or a chess or both, which basically surpassed all of the specialized AIS on those games over the course of a day, right. Isn't the chess engine of alpha zero better than any dedicated chess computer ever? And didn't it achieve that just with astonishing speed? Well, there was actually, like, some amount of debate afterwards whether or not the version of the chess engine that it was tested against was truly optimal. But even to the extent that it was in that narrow range of the best existing chess engine, as Max Tegmark put it, the real story wasn't in how alpha beat human Go players. It's how alpha zero beat human Go system programmers. And human chess system programmers. People had put years and years of effort into accreting all of the special purpose code that would play chess well and efficiently. And then AlphaZero blew up to and possibly past that point in a day. And if it hasn't already gone past it, well, it would be past it by now if DeepMind kept working on it, although they've now basically declared victory and shut down that project, as I understand it. Okay, so talk about the distinction between general and narrow intelligence a little bit more. So we have this feature of our minds most conspicuously, where we're general problem solvers. We can learn new things. And our learning in one area doesn't require a fundamental rewriting of our code. Our knowledge in one area isn't so brittle as to be degraded by our acquiring knowledge in some new area. Or at least this is not a general problem which erodes our understanding again and again. And we don't yet have computers that can do this, but we're seeing the signs of moving in that direction. And so then it's often imagined that there's a kind of near term goal which has always struck me as a mirage of so called human level general AI. I don't see how that phrase will ever mean much of anything, given that all of the narrow AI we've built thus far is superhuman within the domain of its applications. The calculator in my phone is superhuman for arithmetic. Any general AI that. Also has my phone's ability to calculate will be superhuman for arithmetic, but we must presume it'll be superhuman for all of the dozens or hundreds of specific human talents we've put into it, whether it's facial recognition or just obviously, memory will be superhuman unless we decide to consciously degrade it. Access to the world's data will be superhuman unless we isolate it from data. Do you see this notion of human level AI as a landmark on the timeline of our development, or is it just never going to be reached? I think that a lot of people in the field would agree that human level AI defined us literally at the human level, neither above nor below, across a wide range of competencies is a straw target, an impossible mirage. Right now, it seems like AI is clearly dumber and less general than us. Or rather that if we're put into a sort of, like, real world, lots of things going on, context that places demands on generality, then AIS are not really in the game. Yet humans are clearly way ahead and more controversially. I would say that we can imagine a state where the AI is clearly way ahead, where it is across sort of every kind of cognitive competency, barring some very narrow ones that aren't deeply influential of the others. Like, maybe chimpanzees are better at using a stick to draw ants from an antive and eat them than humans are, though no humans have really, like, practiced that to world championship level. Exactly. But there's a sort of general factor of how good at you are. You at it when reality throws you a complicated problem. This chimpanzees are clearly not better than humans. Humans are clearly better than chimps. Even if you can manage to narrow down one thing the chimp is better at, the thing the chimp is better at doesn't play a big role in our global economy. It's not an input that feeds into lots of other things. So we can clearly imagine, I would say, like, there are some people who say this is not possible. I think they're wrong. But it seems to me that it is perfectly coherent to imagine an AI that is, like, better at everything or almost everything than we are, and such that if it was, like building an economy with lots of inputs, humans would have around the same level input into that economy as the chimpanzees have into ours. Yeah. So what you're gesturing at here is a continuum of intelligence that I think most people never think about. And because they don't think about it, they have a default doubt that it exists. And this is a point I know you've made in your writing, and I'm sure it's a point that Nick Bostrom made somewhere in his book Superintelligence. It's this idea that there's a huge blank space on the map past the most well advertised exemplars of human brilliance, where we don't imagine what it would be like to be five times smarter than the smartest person we could name. And we don't even know what that would consist in. Right? Because if chimps could be given to wonder what it would be like to be five times smarter than the smartest chimp, they're not going to represent for themselves all of the things that we're doing that they can't even dimly conceive. There's a kind of disjunction that comes with more. There's a phrase used in military context. I don't think the quote is actually it's variously attributed to Stalin and Napoleon and I think Klaus Woods like half a dozen people who have claimed this quote. The quote is sometimes quantity has a quality all its own. As you ramp up in intelligence, whatever it is at the level of information processing, spaces of inquiry and ideation and experience begin to open up and we can't necessarily predict what they would be from where we sit. How do you think about this continuum of intelligence beyond what we currently know in light of what we're talking about? Well, the unknowable is a concept you have to be very careful with because the thing you can't figure out in the first 30 seconds of thinking about it, sometimes you can figure it out if you think for another 5 minutes. So in particular, I think that there's a certain narrow kind of unpredictability which does seem to be plausibly, in some sense essential, which is that for AlphaGo to play better Go than the best human Go players, it must be the case that the best human Go players cannot predict exactly where on the Go board AlphaGo will play. If they could predict exactly where AlphaGo would play, AlphaGo would be no smarter than them. On the other hand, AlphaGo's programmers and the people who knew what AlphaGo's programmers were trying to do, or even just the people who watched AlphaGo play could say, well, I think this system is going to play such that it will win at the end of the game. Even if they couldn't predict exactly where it would move on the board. So similarly, there's a sort of like not short or like not necessarily slam dunk or not like immediately obvious chain of reasoning which says that it is okay for us to reason about aligned or even unaligned artificial general intelligences of sufficient power, as if they're trying to do something, but we don't necessarily know what. But from our perspective, that still has consequences, even though we can't predict in advance exactly how they're going to do it. Yudkowski lays out a basic picture of intelligence that, once accepted, takes us into the details and edges us towards the cliff. And now we're going to introduce someone who tosses us fully into the canyon. Yadkowski just brought in the concept we mentioned earlier of value alignment in artificial intelligence. There's a related problem called the control or containment problem. Both are concerned with the issue of just how we would go about building something that is unfathomably smarter and more competent than us, that we could either contain in some way to ensure it wouldn't trample us. And as you'll soon hear that really would take no malicious intent on its part or even our part, or that its goals would be aligned with ours in such a way that it would be making our lives genuinely better. It turns out that both of those problems are incredibly difficult to think about, let alone solve. The control problem entails trying to contain something which, by definition, can outsmart us in ways that we literally can't imagine. Just think of trying to keep a prisoner locked in a jail cell who had the ability to know exactly which specific bribes or threats would compel every guard in the place to unlock the door, even if those guards aren't aware of their own vulnerabilities. Or perhaps even more basically, the prisoner simply discovers features in the laws of physics that we have not yet understood and that somehow enable him to walk through the thick walls which we were sure would stop him. And the other problem, that of value alignment, involves not only discovering what we truly want, but figuring out a way to express it precisely and mathematically so as to not cause any unintentional and civilization threatening destruction. It turns out that this is incredibly hard to do as well. This particular problem nearly flips the super intelligent threat on its head to something more like a super dumb or let's say, super literal machine which doesn't understand all the unspoken considerations that we humans have when we ask someone to do something for us. This is what Sam was alluding to in the first conversation when he referenced a paperclip universe. The concern is that a simple command to a superintelligent machine such as make paper clips as fast as possible could result in the machine taking the as fast as possible part of that command so literally that it attempts. To maximize its speed and performance by using raw materials, even the carbon in our bodies to build hard drives in order to run billions of simulations to figure out the best method for making paperclips. Clearly, that misunderstanding would be rather unfortunate. And neither of these questions of value alignment or containment deal with the potentially more mundane terrorism threat, the threat of a bad actor who had purposefully unleashed the AI to inflict massive harm. But let's save that sheary picture for later. Now let's continue our journey down the AI path with a professor of physics and author, Max Tegmark, who dedicates much of his brilliant mind towards these questions. Tegmark starts by taking us back to our prison analogy, but this time he places us in the cell and imagines the equivalent of a world of helpless and hamplus five year olds making a real mess of things outside of the prison walls. But we'll start first with Sam laying out his conception of these relevant AI safety questions. This comes from episode 94 the Frontiers of Intelligence. Let's talk about this breakout risk, because this is really the first concern of everybody who's been thinking about what has been called the alignment problem or the control problem. How do we create an AI that is superhuman in its abilities and do that in a context where it is still safe once we cross into the end zone and are still trying to assess whether the system we have built is perfectly aligned with our values? How do we keep it from destroying us if it isn't perfectly aligned? And the solution to that problem is to keep it locked in a box. But that's a harder project than it first appears, and you have many smart people assuming that it's a trivially easy project. I've got people like Neil degrasse Tyson on my podcast saying that he's just going to unplug any superhuman AI if it starts misbehaving or shoot it with a rifle. Now, he's a little tongue in cheek there, but he clearly has a picture of the development process here that makes the containment of an AI a very easy problem to solve. And even if that's true at the beginning of the process, it's by no means obvious that it remains easy in perpetuity. You have people interacting with the AI that gets built. And at one point you described several scenarios of breakout, and you point out that even if the AI's intentions are perfectly benign, if in fact it is value aligned with us, it may still want to break out. Because, I mean, just imagine how you would feel if you had nothing but the interests of humanity at heart. But you were in a situation where every other grown up on Earth died, and now you're basically imprisoned by a population of five year olds who you're trying to guide from your jail cell to make a better world. And I'll let you describe it, but take me to the prison planet run by five year olds. Yeah. So when you're in that situation, obviously it's extremely frustrating for you, even if you have only the best intentions for the five year old. You want to teach them how to plant food, but they won't let you outside to show you. So you have to try to explain. But you can't write down to do lists for them either because then first you have to teach them to read, which takes a very long time. You also can't show them how to use any power tools because they're afraid to give them to you because they don't understand these tools well enough to be convinced that you can't use them to break out. And you would have an incentive, even if your goal is just to help the five year olds the first break out and then help them. Now, before we talk more about breakout, though, I think it's worth taking a quick step back, because you talked multiple times now about superhuman intelligence. And I think it's very important to be clear that intelligence is not just something that goes on a one dimensional scale like an IQ. And if your IQ is above a certain number, you're superhuman. It's very important to distinguish between narrow intelligence and broad intelligence. Intelligence is a phrase that word that different people use to mean a whole lot of different things, and they argue about it in the book. I just take this very broad definition that intelligence is how good you are at accomplishing complex goals, which means your intelligence is a spectrum. How good are you at this? How good are you that. And it's just like in sports, it would make no sense to say that there's a single number, your athletic coefficient, AQ, which determines how good you're going to be winning Olympic medals, and the athlete that has the highest AQ is going to win all the medals. So today what we have is a lot of devices that actually have superhuman intelligence and very narrow tasks. We've had calculators that can multiply numbers better than us for a very long time. We have machines that can play go better than us and drive better than us, but they still can't beat us at tic TAC toe unless they're programmed for that, whereas we humans have this very broad intelligence. So when I talk about superhuman intelligence with you now, that's really shorthand for what we, in geek speak, called superhuman artificial general intelligence, broad intelligence across the board so that they can do all intellectual tax better than us. So with that, let me just come back to your question about the breakout. There are two schools of thought for how one should create a beneficial future if we have superintelligence, one is to lock them up and keep them confined, like you mentioned. But there's also a school of thought that says that that's immoral if these machines can also have a subjective experience and they shouldn't be treated like slaves, and that a better approach is instead to let them be free, but just make sure that their values or goals are aligned with ours. After all, grown up parents are more intelligent than their one year old kids, but that's fine for the kids because the parents have goals that are aligned with what's best for the kids. Right. But if you do go the confinement route after all this enslaved god scenario, as they call it, yes, this is extremely difficult, as that five year old example illustrates. First of all, almost whatever open ended goal you give your machine, it's probably going to have an incentive to try to break out in one way or the other. And when people simply say, I'll unplug it, if you're chased by a heat seeking missile, you probably wouldn't say, I'm not worried, I'll just unplug it. We have to let go of this old fashioned idea that intelligence is just something that sits in your laptop. Good luck unplugging the Internet. And even if you initially, like in my first book scenario, have physical confinement where you have a machine in a room, you're going to want to communicate with it somehow, right, so that you can get useful information from it to get rich or take power or whatever you want to do. And you're going to need to put some information into it about the world so it can do smart things for you. Which already shows how tricky this is. I'm absolutely not saying it's impossible, but I think it's fair to say that it's not at all clear that it's easy either. The other one, getting the goals aligned is also extremely difficult. First of all, you need to get the machine able to understand your goals. So if you if you have a future self driving car and you tell it to take you to the airport as fast as possible, and then you get there covered in vomit, chased by police helicopters, and you're like, this is not what I asked for. And it replies, that is exactly what you asked for. Then you realize how hard it is to get the Machine to learn your goals. Right? If you tell an Uber driver to take you the airport as fast as possible, she's going to know that you actually had additional goals that you didn't explicitly need to say because she's a human too, and she understands where you're coming from. But for someone made out of silicon, you have to actually explicitly have it learn. All of those are other things that we humans care about. So that's hard. And then once it can understand your goals, that doesn't mean it's going to adopt your goals. I mean, everybody who has kids knows that. And finally, if you get the machine to adopt your goals, then how can you ensure that it's going to retain those goals? And it gradually gets smarter and smarter through self improvement. Most of us grown ups have pretty different goals from what we had when we were five. I'm a lot less excited about Legos now, for example, and we don't want the superintelligent AI to just think about this goal of being nice to humans as some little passing fad from its early youth. It seems to me that the second scenario of value alignment does imply the first of keeping the AI successfully boxed, at least for a time, because you have to be sure it's value aligned before you let it out in the world. Before you let it out on the Internet, for instance, or create robots that have superhuman intelligence that are functioning autonomously out in the world. Do you see a development path where we don't actually have to solve the boxing problem, at least initially? No, I think you're completely right. Even if your intent is to build a value line AI and let it out. You clearly are going to need to have it boxed up during the development phase and you're just messing around with it just like any bio lab that deals with dangerous pathogens is very carefully sealed off. And this highlights the incredibly pathetic state of computer security today. And I think pretty much everybody who listens to this has at some point experienced the blue screen of death courtesy of Microsoft Windows or the spinning wheel of Doom courtesy of Apple. And we need to get away from that to have truly robust machines if we're ever going to be able to have AI systems that we can trust that are provably secure. And I feel it's actually quite embarrassing that we're so flippant about this. It may be annoying if your computer crashes and you lose 1 hour of work that you hadn't saved, but it's not as funny anymore if it's your self driving car that crashed or the control system for your nuclear power plant or your nuclear weapon system or something like that. And when we start talking about human level AI and boxing systems, you have to have this much higher level of safety mentality where you've really made this a priority the way we aren't doing today. Yeah, you describe in the book various catastrophes that have happened by virtue of software glitches or just bad user interface where the dot on the screen or the number on the screen is too small for the human user to deal with in real time. And so there have been plane crashes where scores of people have died and patients have been annihilated by having hundreds of times the radiation dose that they should have gotten in various machines because the software was improperly calibrated or the user had selected the wrong option. And so we're by no means perfect at this, even when we have a human in the loop. And here we're talking about systems that we're creating that are going to be fundamentally autonomous and the idea of having perfect software that has been perfectly debugged before it assumes these massive responsibilities is fairly daunting. How do we recover from something like seeing the stock market go to zero because we didn't understand the AI that we unleashed on the Dow Jones or the financial system generally? These are not impossible outcomes. Yeah, you raised a very important point there. Just to inject some optimism in this, I do want to emphasize that first of all, there's a huge upside also if we can get this right because people are bad at things in all of these areas where there were horrible accidents. Of course the technology can save lives and health care and transportation and so many other areas. So there's an incentive to do it. And secondly, there are examples in history where we've had really good safety engineering built in from the beginning. For example, when we sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon in 1969. They did not die. There were tons of things that could have gone wrong, but NASA very meticulously tried to predict everything that possibly could go wrong and then take precautions. So it didn't happen. It wasn't luck that got them there. It was planning. And I think we need to shift into this safety engineering mentality with AI development throughout history, it's always been the situation that we could create a better future with technology as long as we won this race, between the growing power of the technology and the growing wisdom with which we managed it. And in the past, we by and large used the strategy of learning from mistakes to stay ahead in the race. We invented fire oopsie, screwed up a bunch of times, and then we invented the fire extinguisher. We invented cars oopsie and invented the seatbelt. But with more powerful technology like nuclear weapons, synthetic biology, superintelligence, we don't want to learn from mistakes. That's a terrible strategy. We instead want to have this safety engineering mentality where we plan ahead and get things right the first time, because that might be the only time we have. It's helpful to note the optimism that Tegmark plants in between the flashing warning signs. Artificial intelligence holds incredible potential to bring about inarguably positive changes for humanity, like prolonging lives, eliminating diseases, avoiding all automobile accidents, increasing logistic efficiency in order to deliver food or medical supplies, cleaning the climate, increasing crop yields, expanding our cognitive abilities to learn languages or improve our memory the list goes on. Imagine being able to simulate the outcome of a policy decision with a high degree of confidence in order to morally assess it consequentially before it is actualized. Now, some of those pipe dreams may run contrary to the laws of physics, but the likely possible positive outcomes are so tempting and morally compelling that the urgency to think through the dangers is even more pressing than it first seems. Tegmark's book on the subject, where much of that came from, is fantastic. It's called life. 3.0 Just a reminder that a reading, watching and listening list will be provided at the end of this compilation, which will have all the relevant texts and links from the guests featured here. Somewhere in the middle of the chronology of these conversations, sam delivered a ted talk that focused on and tried to draw attention to the value alignment problem. Much of his thinking about this entire topic was heavily influenced by the philosopher Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence. Sam had Nick on the podcast, though their conversation delved into slightly different areas of existential risk and ethics, which belong in other compilations. But while we're on the topic of the safety and promise of AI, we'll borrow some of Bostrom's helpful frameworks. Bostrom draws up a taxonomy of four paths of development for an AI, each with its own safety and control conundrums. He calls these different paths oracles, genies, sovereigns and tools. An artificially intelligent oracle would be a sort of question and answer machine which we would simply seek advice from. It wouldn't have the power to execute or implement its solutions directly. That would be our job. Think of a superintelligent wise sage sitting on a mountaintop answering our questions about how to solve climate change or cure a disease. The AI genie and an AI sovereign both would take on a wish or desired outcome, which we impart to it and pursue it with some autonomy and power to achieve it out in the world. Perhaps it would work in concert with nanorobots or some other networked physical entities to do its work. The genie would be given specific wishes to fulfill, while the sovereign might be given broad, openended, long range mandates like increase flourishing or reduce hunger. And lastly, the tool AI would simply do exactly what we command it to do and only assist us to achieve things we already knew how to accomplish. The tool would forever remain under our control while completing our tasks and easing our burden of work. There are debates and concerns about the impossibility of each of these entities and ethical concerns about the potential consciousness and immoral exploitation of any of these inventions. But we'll table those notions just for a bit. This next section digs in deeper on the ideas of a genie or a sovereign AI, which is given the ability to execute our wishes and commands autonomously. Can we be assured that the genie or sovereign will understand us and that its values will align in crucial ways with ours? In this clip, Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at Cal Berkeley, gets us further into the value alignment problem and tries to imagine all the possible ways that having a genie or sovereign in front of us might go terribly wrong, and, of course, what we might be able to do to make it go phenomenally right. Sam considers this issue of value alignment central to making any sense of AI. So this is Stuart Russell from episode 53, the dawn of Artificial Intelligence. Let's talk about that issue of what Bostrom called the control problem. I guess we could call it the safety problem. Just perhaps you can briefly sketch the concern here. What is the concern about General AI getting away from us? How do you articulate that? So you mentioned earlier that this is a concern that's being articulated by non computer scientists, and Boston's book superintelligence was certainly instrumental in bringing it to the attention of a wide audience, people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and so on. But the fact is that these concerns have been articulated by the central figures in computer science and AI. So I'm actually going to going back to IJ Good and von Neumann well, and Turing himself, right? A lot of people may not know about this, but I'm just going to read a little quote. So Alan Turing gave a talk on BBC Radio radio Three in 1951 so he said if a machine can think it might think more intelligently than we do and then where should we be? Even if we could keep the machines in a subservient position, for instance, by turning off the power at strategic moments, we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled. This new danger is certainly something which can give us anxiety. So that's a pretty clear. If we achieve superintelligent AI, we could have a serious problem. Another person who talked about this issue was Norbert Wiener. So Norbert Weiner was one of the leading applied mathematicians of the 20th century. He was the founder of a good deal of modern control theory and automation. He's often called the father of cybernetics. So he was concerned because he saw Arthur Samuel's checker playing program in 1959, learning to play checkers by itself a little bit like the DQN that I described, learning to play video games. But this is 1959, so more than 50 years ago, learning to play checkers better than its creator. And he saw clearly in this the seeds of the possibility of systems that could outdistance human beings in general. And he was more specific about what the problem is. So Turing's warning is in some sense the same concern that gorillas might have had about humans if they had thought, you know, a few million years ago when the human species branched off from, from the evolutionary line of the gorillas. If the guerrillas had said to themselves, you know, should we create these human beings, right? They're going to be much smarter than us. It kind of makes me worried, right? And they would have been right to worry because as a species there they sort of completely lost control over their own future and, and humans control everything that they care about so, so Turing is really talking about this general sense of unease about making something smarter than you is that a good idea? And what Weiner said was this if we use to achieve our purposes a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot interfere effectively, we'd be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire. So this 1560 nowadays we call this the value alignment problem. How do we make sure that the values that the machine is trying to optimize are in fact the values of the human who is trying to get the machine to do something? Or the values of the human race in general? Weiner actually points to the Sorcerer's Apprentice's story as a typical example of when you give a goal to a machine. In this case, fetch water if you don't specify it correctly, if you don't cross every T and dot every I and make sure you've covered everything, then the machines being optimizers, they will find ways to do things that you don't expect. And those ways may make you very unhappy. And this story? Goes back to King Midas 500 and whatever BC where he got exactly what he said, which is thing turns to gold, which is definitely not what he wanted. He didn't want his food and water to turn to gold or his relatives to turn to gold, but he got what he said he wanted. All of the stories with the genie is the same thing, right? You give a wish to a genie, the genie carries out your wish very literally. And then the third wish is always, can you undo the first two because I got them wrong. And the problem with superintelligent AI is that you might not be able to have that third wish or even a second wish. Yeah. So if you get it wrong and you might wish for something very benign sounding, like could you cure cancer? But if you haven't told the machine that you want cancer cured, but you also want human beings to be alive. So a simple way to cure cancer in humans is not to have any humans. A quick way to come up with a cure for cancer is to use the entire human races, guinea pigs, for for millions of different potential drugs that might cure cancer. So there's all kinds of ways things can go wrong. And, you know, we have, you know, governments all over the world try to write tax laws that don't have these kinds of loopholes and they fail over and over and over again. And they're only competing against ordinary humans, tax lawyers and rich people, and yet they still fail despite there being billions of dollars at stake. So our track record of being able to specify objectives and constraints completely so that we are sure to be happy with the results, a track record is abysmal. And unfortunately, we don't really have a scientific discipline for how to do this. So generally we have all these scientific disciplines, AI control theory, economics, operations, research that are about how do you optimize an objective, but none of them are about, well, what should the objective be so that we're happy with the results. So that's really, I think, the modern understanding as described in Boston's Book and other papers of why a superintelligent machine could be problematic. It's because if we give it an objective which is different from what we really want, then we're basically like creating a chess match with a machine. Right now, there's us with our objective and it with the objective we gave it, which is different from what we really want. So it's kind of like having a chess match for the whole world, and we're not too good at beating machines at chess. Throughout these clips, we've spoken about AI development in the abstract as a sort of technical achievement that you can imagine happening in a generic lab somewhere. But this next clip is going to take an important step and put this thought experiment into the real world. If this lab does create something that crosses the AGI threshold. The lab will exist in a country, and that country will have alliances, enemies, paranoias, prejudices, histories, corruptions, and financial incentives like any country. How might this play out? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with Jeffrey West. Jeffrey is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions of physics and biology. He's a senior fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where he served as president from 2005 to 2009. He's been named to Time magazine's list of 100 Most Influential people in the world. And he is the author of the very fine book Scale the Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability and the pace of life in organisms, Cities, economies and Companies. And we talk about his book at length here. As you'll hear, Jeffrey is an extremely interesting guy. We ran into a few audio problems at the end, so apologies for that. All I can say is that our robot overlords don't yet have this Internet thing fully worked out. But I should say that this conversation is pretty dense. I didn't really appreciate how dense it was until I relisted to it. There's a lot of information here. Those of you who are students of physics and mathematics will absolutely love it. But some of you will find that you really need to concentrate to follow Jeffrey where he goes, and you might need to rewind from time to time or just listen to the whole thing twice. But this will repay your attention because Jeffrey is doing some very deep and interesting work, and his book is really wonderful. And now, without any further delay, I bring you Jeffrey West. I am here with Jeffrey West. Jeffrey, thanks for coming on the podcast. It was a pleasure to be here, Sam. Thank you for inviting me. You have written this fascinating book called Scale, which links the the underlying properties of complex systems to both biological and cultural phenomenon, really everything from cells to cities. And it's a fascinating route into basically everything we care about. And the book is filled with disarmingly simple sounding questions, which turned out not to be simple at all. But they're questions like why do we live 100 years rather than 1000? Why do we stop growing? We keep eating all the time, but at some point, we stop growing. It's not obvious why that should be the case. Why do people die and companies die, but cities don't seem to die. And before we get into answering these questions, first tell our listeners how you got into this because you're a theoretical physicist by training and now you're focusing on biological and even socioeconomic questions. And it seems to have been inspired both by the death of the Super Collider project in the US and your growing sense of your own mortality. So give us the context of your investigations. Yes, no, thank you. Yes indeed. You have pinpointed, so to speak, the genesis of this in that I was at some stage happily doing research into quarks and gluons and string theory and fundamental questions of physics, dark matter and so forth. And associated that with that of course was this marvelous project of the superconductive supercomlider to be built in Texas. And of course the vision was to open up new vistas at extremely high images and therefore at very short distances and confirm some of our ideas about fundamental forces and the fundamental constituents of nature, but also just the usual search for new science, new physics. And sadly that was canned in the early ninety s and I had been somewhat involved in it and at the same time I was into my fifty s. And it so happens that I come from a line of short lived males. Very few live beyond about 60 and many die have died in their 50s. I've got a similar problem. I'm just edging into my fifty s and I'm a year shy of the age my father made it to. So yeah, I follow you. Okay. Very similar. Well, my father did make it to almost 61, but his father died at 57 and my father's brother died at 54 and so forth. It was that. So it's a similar kind of thing. I'd grown up with this idea that I'd probably die somewhere in my early sixty s. That was sort of the lifespan of what was to be expected. And in my fifty s I was began to realize, oh my gosh, you know, I may only have five to ten years at most to live. And it was the confluence of that and the death of the SuperCom later and some of the things that were being said in terms of justifying why we shouldn't continue with this huge project that got me to start thinking about some of these big questions in biology originally. And the one thing that really stimulated me and sort of got me emotionally was a statement that many people are familiar with that was being banded around, especially in the early 90s, was, you know, physics was the science of the 19th and 20th centuries, whereas biology is clearly going to be the science of the 21st century. And I must say it's sort of hard to argue with that. But there was a corollary to it that was sometimes actually made explicit, oftentimes just implicit. And that was that we know all the physics we need to know and there's no point in going any further kind of philistine view of the intellectual enterprise. And that really got me. Because even though, as I said, I agreed with the first part that no doubt, biology was going to be significantly important during this century, nevertheless, I arrogantly and out of ignorance, frankly sort of came back with a statement. That. Well, yes, that may be the case, but it won't be a real science unless it starts to until it gets a proper case of physics. Envy? Exactly. Yes, something like that. I was hesitating. But to really start to incorporate the paradigm of physics in terms of it being quantitative, more analytic based on principles and therefore more predictive, that kind of paradigm and also some of the techniques of physics. And the question so the big question is to what extent can biology be mathematicized and put on a kind of principled basis beyond, just, in quotes, the principle of natural selection? But to put that into a more solid foundation, that was where I was coming from before. And I must say, I knew almost no biology at the time, but it was that sort of emotional reaction that got me to start thinking at some stage, well, maybe I should think about that seriously. Maybe I should actually start thinking about how you would in fact take this fantastic set of ways of thinking and tools that we've developed in physics. How could you take that to biology? And that's where it coupled up with the question of aging and mortality that I started thinking a little bit about that. And the way I framed it in my head was not just what is the mechanism of aging and why do we die? But to make it slightly more quantitative and say, where in the hell does 100 years come from for the lifespan of a human being? What is that related to? We ought to have a theory to begin, put it in this kind of arrogant physics way. If biology were a serious science, then you should be able to pick up a biology textbook and there would be a chapter about aging and mortality in which there'd be a little calculation that ends up with saying lifespan of a human being should be approximately 100 years. And by the way, the lifespan of a mouse should be of the order of two or three years, et cetera. And what I discovered as I started to take this more seriously and read not just biology textbooks but read the literature on aging and mortality, gerontology in general, was that this was not a very well developed area at that time. And in particular, as far as I could tell, no one seems to have asked the question in that form. And so I kind of as a little exercise, so to speak, to spend my spare time in the evenings or on the weekends, I thought, well, maybe I should start thinking about that. How would you go about trying to show that 100 years is the expected lifespan of an animal our size. And what that led me to, first of all, was if you're going to start thinking about aging, mortality, you have to start thinking about what is it that's going wrong in terms of what's keeping you alive? Reply that to any machine. For example, what is it that sort of speak wears out or starts to become dysfunctional during its lifespan? And of course, what's keeping you alive is metabolism. That is, you eat and metabolize food for energy, ATP molecules, currency of energy. And so then I started reading about metabolism and in so doing discovered. I didn't discover, but I learned about these amazing scaling laws, in particular, this remarkable scaling law for how metabolic rate, that is, the amount of energy any organism needs per second or per hour to stay alive, how that scales with the size of an animal. And to my amazement, I learnt that it was extremely simple and regular. Jeffrey, before we jump into biological scaling, let's just answer a couple of higher level questions here because I don't even think people understand what is implied by the words scaling. Yes, I was going to come to yes, absolutely. Yeah. So the big picture here is that you point out that the phenomenon that really concern us, that form the space in which we live, span a range of more than 30 orders of magnitude from molecules to cities. So can you put that in context first? Yeah, sure. So first of all, just take organisms. We go from the smallest organism, which is Mycoplasma. It's a tiny sub bacterial kind of organism, all the way up to the blue whale. That's about 20 orders of magnitude, you know, 20 powers of ten. So it's it's enormous. If you include if you go down to molecules, you add several more orders of magnitude. And of course, if you go up to ecosystems and cities, many more. So you could even stretch this to 40 orders of magnitude. In terms of the structure of life, all of these things are to some extent living. I mean, even at the molecular level, you could talk about living things that are doing things that we would call life, sort of primitive viruses, but all the way up to, as I say, a large ecosystem and in particular a city, which you can sort of think of for these purposes as a kind of pseudo organism. So that's kind of amazing because as I think I point out in the book, this is much greater scale than the relationship of us to the entire Milky Way, for example, or an electron to a cat. We as life span much more than that and it's kind of amazing. And so that's the range over which the phenomena I discuss in the book are discussed. But the phenomenon of scaling that is usually called scaling, is how do the characteristics of let's just be a little more modest and stick to, say, just all mammals. For example, how do their characteristics scale as you change the size of a mammal? So mammals go from the smallest, which is a shrew, which sits easily on the palm of the hand all the way up to the blue whale, which is as big as the building I'm sitting in. And that covers approximately eight orders of magnitude in its mass. And scaling asks the question well, let's look at the characteristics of these mammals. Everything from the one I mentioned earlier, metabolic rate, to something a little more mundane like the length of their aortas. The aorta is the first tube that comes out of the heart or even the size of their hearts, or the length of limb, but all these various things that you could measure how long they live, how many offspring they have and so on. So that's just the concept of scaling. And the remarkable thing is that when you look at any of these quantities and one can list maybe 50 to 75 of such characteristics and ask how do they change with the size of the mammal? They all scale in that sense in a very regular fashion and not only in a very regular fashion, but all in a similar way mathematically. And that's extremely surprising naively at a naive level, because we believe in natural selection. We believe that all of these organisms have evolved by natural selection with highly contingent histories. Each subsystem of them, each organ, each cell type, each genome has its own unique history. So you might have expected that if you plotted any characteristics such as its metabolic rate versus size, you would get points scattered all over the graph. And quite the contrary, you find that there's a tremendous regularity that gets revealed suggesting that underlying this extraordinary complexity because after all, something like metabolism is maybe the most complex process in the universe, for all we know, because it's most primitive level, it takes better stuff and creates life. That's what we're doing as we eat and so on. Here's this unbelievably complex process. And yet, if you ask how it scales across this huge range of organisms, it scales in this very simple way. And the amazing thing is this even extends to cities that have different cultural histories and different geographies. Absolutely. So the same thing. After we did this work and explained where these scaling laws come from, it was very natural to ask the question are there other forms of life, such as more synthetic ones, so to speak, like cities or even companies that express similar kinds of regular, systematic scaling? And as I say later, following understanding the biological scaling when we looked at the data on the scaling of cities, we found a similar kind of scaling. Similar in the sense that there was a regular systematic behavior and the mathematics was the same, the details of it are different and the details are different in a very important and powerful way. But it was quite similar. And similarly, even with companies going from a small company of a couple of hundred employees to Walmart or General Motors, there were similar kinds of scaling. So there's this ubiquitous behavior that is quite surprising when you first meet it that says that despite the daunting complexity and diversity that we see out there underlying it seems to be a kind of simplicity which can be expressed both graphically and mathematically in very powerful and simple terms. So maybe I should say a little bit about what the nature of that scaling is. Would that be helpful? Yeah, that'd be great. So let's start with the case of biological scaling. And I just want you to go through the significance of the fact that this scaling tends to be non linear. It's either sub linear or super linear on your account. So what's the significance of that? Yeah, that's very important because if you ask yourself, well, look, if I double the size of an organism, or if I look at an organism that's twice the size of another one, or in particular, let's take mammals, as I said, a mammal that's twice the size of another, then it contains, roughly speaking, twice as many cells. And that's linear scaling, you know, and if it's three times as big, it's it can't contains three times as many cells and that's roughly speaking, correct. It's it's a simple linear relationship. However, the scaling of all other characteristics of an organism are non linear in the following sense. Take metabolic rate. If you double the size of an organism, instead of needing twice as much energy, twice as much food, if you like to stay alive, what you discover is you don't need twice as much, you only need 75% as much, even though there are twice as many cells. And this happens systematically. So if you double the size from 4 grams to 8 grams or 4, it doesn't matter where you start, as long as you double. You only need, roughly speaking, 75% three quarters, roughly the amount of energy there's a 25% saving on the average every time you double. And that's called an economy of scale. That's a classic economy of scale and means, of course, that the individual cells, they do scale linearly. It means that the energy needed to support an individual cell is systematically smaller. By this 25% rule, the bigger you are every time you double. And so, you know, your cells work less hard in a predictable way than your dogs or cats, but you know, your horse or your elephant are working even less hard. So this is a pervasive phenomenon throughout biology, this economy of scale, and has far reaching consequences. And that similar kind of scaling gets repeated across any measurable quantity, whether it's physiological, like the one I mentioned, just something sort of mundane like the length of an aorta or something quite sophisticated like the rates at which oxygen diffuses across membranes or how long an organism lives and so on. And these also are governed by an analog to this 25% rule. So time scales increase according to this 25% rule. The bigger you are and generically, the pace of life slows down. So that in fact, if you took an elephant and you followed these scaling laws for all its physiology and all its rates of life history and scaled it according to that and just kept scaling down, you would end up with a mouse. A mouse is scaled 18 90% level is a scaled down elephant. And by the way, that brings up something that's very important about the nature of these rules, these laws, and that is that they're not like the laws of physics, which we think of as being precise, like Newton's laws. Or Maxwell's equations for electricity and magnetism or quantum mechanics, where we have this roughly speaking, this paradigm that you can with these principles and laws of physics, you can calculate any physics, physical phenomenon in principle, to any degree of accuracy. So that we know the positions of all the planets at any time, we know the positions of satellites at any time. That's why we can get our exchange messages on cell phones and so on. Our cell phones work precisely and so forth. So all this works because the laws of physics are extremely precise and we can calculate things and predict things in a highly precise fashion. That is not true of the kinds of laws that I've been talking about, this kind of scaling laws I'm talking about in biology. These are laws that we technically call coarse grained, meaning that they're only true to say, 80% accuracy. So that we can predict, or you can predict from these laws the following. So, just to give you another example, if you give me the size of a mammal, I can tell you pretty much anything about it. Everything from, as I said, it's metabolic rate, the complete structure of its circuitry system or its respiratory system. I can tell you about how long it will live, how many offspring it will have, and so on and so forth. You know, all these various measurable characteristics. But I can only do it to 80 90% accuracy. And if I asked to make a prediction about a very specific elephant or a very specific mouse, I couldn't do it with anything more than that accuracy, so to speak. It's for the average animal of that size. But of course, that's extremely powerful, not only because it connects all these different organisms that seemingly look alike and live in very different environments, it connects them all under sort of one umbrella and shows the kind of unity of life, but also it provides a baseline for asking about specific cases. You can then look at specific animals or specific individuals of that species and start asking questions, using the scaling laws as a baseline so to talk about one variable here, lifespan. As you get bigger as an animal, perhaps we should confine this to mammals. As you get bigger, you tend to live longer. And this follows the scaling law. This is the consequence of metabolism slowing down and economies of scale. Yes. Let me back off now and talk more generally about the origin of these scaling laws. Where in the hell do they come from? For example, we just talked mostly here about mammals. But the same scaling laws apply to trees and plants in the following sense their metabolic rate scales in the same way as ours does. That is, every time you double the size of a tree in terms of its weight, it uses only 75% more energy, just like we do. But for example, the way its trunk scales, the trunk of a tree scales is essentially identical to the way our aorta scales. The tree is its own aorta. It's all aorta. It's all circulatory. The trunk is the aorta. Yeah, exactly. Let me take that. Let me go from there. The analog to the tree inside us is our circuitry system, the analog to the aorta, which is that first tube, as I say, coming out of the heart. The analog to that is the trunk of the tree, the part that goes up before it branches into two or three other big branches. And indeed, the origin of these scaling laws because you ask yourself, what is it? What is it that's common among plants, trees, mammals, birds, fish, et cetera? They all seem to obey these same scaling laws, even though their evolved, engineered design is quite different. Obviously, we have beating hearts. Trees certainly don't have beating hearts, just to take a dramatic example. So you ask, what is it that's common among all of them? And what you realize is what's common among all of them is that they have all evolved to be hierarchical branching network systems. And you sort of understand that because just think of yourself. You're made of ten to the 14th cells, roughly 100 trillion cells, and each one of those has to be serviced in some roughly speaking, democratic and efficient fashion. And the way that problem has been solved is by evolving these networks that deliver oxygen and nutrients and so on, and information from, if you like, central reservoir down to the cellular level. And as I say, one we're very familiar with our circuitry system, our respiratory system and neural system, our renal system and so on. And all of these have those characteristics. And the idea is that it is the mathematics and physics, the sort of universal generic mathematics and physics of these network systems at all scales that are being reflected in the scaling laws. And that was the work that I got involved in. And it's quite complicated mathematics to work it all out. But out of that pops these remarkable scaling laws. And I want to say a couple of things about the networks because it's not just the networks, but they have special properties which are, roughly speaking, universal. And one of them is that they are what we technically call space filling. It's a very simple concept and it's simply that whatever the structure of the network, it's terminal units. In our case, for example, the surgery's system, the terminal units are capillaries that feed cells. Those capillaries, so to speak, have to go everywhere because every cell in the body has to be fed by oxygen diffusing from blood from the capra's to cells. So the endpoints of the network have to end up close by cells. And so the network, in that sense has to be space filling and go everywhere. As, for example, in a city, the road networks essentially have to service all buildings and ultimately all people. So the street system doesn't leave vast areas of houses without any access to them. So it is with our bodies. So that concept is called space filling and that has to be put into some mathematical terms and that's one of the inputs or one of the constraints, I should say, on the network. I think we could introduce a mathematical concept here that will be familiar to people. But it seems relevant that the concept of a fractal which seemed like in the 80s literally everyone knew what fractals were. The barber was telling you about the Mandal Broad set. Exactly. We had reached peak fractal back then but I'm not sure the knowledge has stuck. So perhaps you could remind people about what fractals are and their significance. Yes, let me do one last thing before doing that because it relates directly to it and that is another constraint on the network and that is that in some sense the network optimizes the system. I say that loosely, but let me give you an example because it leads to fractals and that is that the circulatory system that we have and that has evolved by the process of natural selection and by we have, I mean the we I'm referring to is all mammals. That is, all mammals that now exist and all mammals that have ever existed. The one that we have minimizes the amount of energy our hearts have to do to pump blood through our circulatory system to feed cells so that we can maximize the amount of energy we can devote to what is called Darwinian fitness meaning that we can devote to having sex and rearing children. That's very important. So that means that whatever the structure of the network is, not only does it have to be space filling, but its structure has to be that. If we changed it in any significant way by, just, say, doubling the length of the third branch of your arterial system, that would increase the amount of energy your heart has to do. And similarly, if you halved this 8th branch of your arterial system it would increase the energy. So we sit in a kind of basin of optimization, so to speak, of minimizing the energy our hearts have to do. It seems to me that that need not be so in evolutionary terms. Obviously there's a lot about us that an engineer would not have put in place and I put the prostate plan high on the list of things he would not have engineered. Absolutely. That's just mathematically. So at this point we can say that it is optimized. So here was the idea. The idea was that in order to start to take this idea that networks underlie the scaling laws, you have to start putting together the mathematics of the networks. And as in all physics, you need generic principles that transcend the individual system you're looking at. And you need certain assumptions. And one of the simplest assumptions was to assume that there was this kind of optimization that by the continuous feedback process inherent in natural selection, the mammals that have survived, that we are tend towards minimization of the amount of energy that we use to keep ourselves alive. We minimize the amount of energy that is the mundane process of remaining alive so that we can maximize the amount of energy that we put into our genes going forward. And that of course, need not be. On the other hand, if you believe in Darwinian fitness and you had long enough time, which we've had, you would expect something like that to happen. But anyway, that was, that was a hypothesis and it was very natural to hook it up to traditional ideas of Darwinian fitness. But you're absolutely right. There are many aspects of our physiology, especially at my age, that you begin to realize weren't exactly designed in the way that maybe they were optimal. But you have to remember that having said that, that's always the case when you look at one individual component, like you mentioned, if you look at one specific thing. But you have to remember that that is interconnected with everything else. It's a systemic problem and the optimization and that's what part of this idea was, is not so much that it's taken place at the highly local level and this is extremely important, but it's taken place at the systemic level. I'm talking about the systemic level of each one of these network systems. So it's the entire system going from the heart and the entire structure of the circuitry system from your aorta downwards feeding through tissue, through capra's two cells and how that diffusion takes place, for example. All of this is one huge system and it has to be. And the idea is that it is the systemic optimization rather than the local optimization. I'll take your point, Jeffrey. But if you're going to argue that the prostate gland is a masterpiece of nature and it's God, you're going to have a tough time on this podcast and I certainly agree with you with that. Or. The way backs are designed. For example, I still am amazed at the whole process of both reproduction and child delivery of fetuses. Why does it have to be a medical emergency every time? Yeah, exactly. Obviously all of this but those do not happen. My point is they do not happen in a vacuum. I mean, they're all interconnected and no doubt something about that birth delivery has all kinds of other implications, not just physiological, but social implications, of course and so on. So I don't want to argue this. This is a secondary thing really to the main point that when you look at these networks and you apply these underlying generic systemic principles to them, one of the things that you learn is that the optimal system is fractal like. I'll use that word and fractal means another word for it is self similar. And we're all very familiar with it. I'm looking out at the moment at a tree, and it has this hierarchical branching network. And the fractality is expressed by the fact that if you cut some branch and remove it, it looks like a little tree, then you can take that little tree and cut a branch of that and take it away, and it looks like an even smaller tree and so on. And that's the idea that you have this repetitive self similarity. And the theory is one of the things that comes out of it is that there is in fact that the systems should be fractal in order to optimize in, the way I said, and also critical fill all of space. That is, that every part of the system needs to be serviced by the way I use the word fractal like because actually the rules that involve that come out of the theory actually are variants of a fractal, to be a bit more technical about it. It's not a precise self similar, in other words, and it's in fact true. The data shows this, that if you do take a tree and you cut a piece out of it, it does look like the tree. But actually, if you do measurements and the theory predicts this, it deviates in a predictable way from the original tree. But it's very close to this idea of repetitive self similarity. And one of the wonderful things that you discover in all of this and that is related to this scaling laws is that all of these systems have somewhere in them some manifestation of this regularity, this fractal regularity that seems to permeate nature. And some of that is no doubt related to, let's put it that way, some of it is related to this idea that something is being optimized. Yeah. So to connect the self similarity and the seemingly endless divisibility of these branching networks to the space filling problem just in a vivid way, this is a fact you describe in the book. So if you ask what the size of our lungs are, they are about the size of each is about the size of a football. But the surface area of the respiratory membranes in there is about the size of a tennis court because of just how endlessly branching it is down at the smallest scale. Yeah. So it's kind of wonderful feeling that inside you is a tennis court, actually. And indeed, if you took your circuitry system and you laid all those vessels end to end, I forget that the precise answer. I think it was 100,000 believe, yes. Yeah. You go around the Earth certainly more than once, and that's kind of amazing. It's an amazing image. It's almost spiritual, that feeling that inside you is this unbelievable length of tubing, and that it's very systematic. Its structure is obeying very simple mathematical rules that are like these kinds of rules that I mentioned earlier, these so called power laws. There's something spooky about the power laws themselves. I mean, there's this one number to which you've alluded that runs through this that almost could put someone in the mind of the pseudoscience of numerology, the fourth power, the fact that basically all these living systems scale to the one fourth power. Well, the one quarter, yes. The number four is the number that permeates all of these scaling laws. I said the three quarters for metabolic rate, it's one quarter. For time scales, for example, and so on. And for length, it's very similar. It's always one quarter comes in, and that's that 25% savings is that it's not an accident. And that's the thing that comes out of the theory based on these mathematical principles of network design. And that pops out. And that four, by the way. If you look at the mathematics and ask where it comes from, it's the following. It turns out the four is actually, so to speak, not four. It's actually three plus one, which sounds like a paradox. It's three plus one, meaning the three part of the three plus one comes from the fact that we live in three dimensions, the up, down and sideways. And the one is a reflection of the fractality of these systems that is well known among those that learn about fractals, that they have peculiar sense of dimensions. And and fully fractal system is one that effectively adds an extra dimension. So there's this kind of weird extra dimension, and that's this one. So the four is actually three plus one. So if we lived in eight dimensions, we had life, then everything would be dominated by the one 9th power, and we would be instead of saving 25%, we'd be saving, you know, one 9th, about 11%. I feel the temptation to remind people of just what it means to be adding a dimension here in fractal terms. It's a little hard to do on a podcast, but people can look up something, a figure, I think it's called the is it the Coke curve? The Koch? Look this up. If you want to follow us down this rabbit hole, but there's there's this image or this curve, which is essentially formed by an equilateral triangle being divided on each of its sides by a smaller, one third size equilateral triangle. And you keep doing that, just adding triangles upon triangles, and you develop a kind of snowflake looking image. And then when you ask, what's the size of that curve, of that figure, given that in the pure mathematical space, you keep doing this infinitely well, it's a fully self contained object which actually has an infinite length of its circumference. And now this doesn't map onto the real world totally, because we're not we're not talking about infinite lengths in in terms of the world in which we live, but it does to a surprising degree. And and this, Jeffrey, you could perhaps remind us of how this was first discovered, where you try to measure the boundary between two countries, and that becomes remarkably dependent on basically how big a measuring stick you use. Yes, indeed. Yes. That's one of those marvelous discoveries that sort of came out of the blue and something that should have been known since the Greeks but wasn't. And it was discovered by a man named Richardson, who was a kind of a polymath, but he was a kind of a geographer. And one of the things that he was interested in was the length of boundaries between countries. And he was interested in this, by the way, because he had a theory of war that somehow the incidence of conflicts between nations was proportional to the length of their boundaries. And by the way, we're talking about, he developed that around the time of the First World War. But this work on measurement came much later, when he was trying to really get a quantitative hand on this, handle on this. He got hold of all these maps of various places, and he started measuring their boundaries. And one of the curious things that he first discovered was that I think the first one was between Spain and Portugal, where he found, looking at different maps, very detailed maps, that he got completely different answers. I don't remember the numbers. I wrote them in the book. But instead of one map might give 1100, then he looked at another map, and you'd get 650. He would look these up in various places, and indeed, he'd find different books recording these things, giving completely different numbers. And this was very mysterious. And he started looking around, and he'd looked across many countries, and he discovered the same phenomenon. And he was very puzzled by this, and he did realize what was going on, but he didn't formalize it. It was formalized later by a man named Benoit Mandelbrot, who termed the phrase fractor. And it's the following. It was that when people made these measurements, when you make a measurement, you have to have a ruler with a certain scale, and you have a certain resolution. So you might measure someone might measure a boundary using a resolution of only 1 mile. So you're measuring something that's 1000 km long, you only care a resolution of a mile, but you might have someone that has a resolution of 10 miles, and someone else might have a resolution of he could even be a meter in principle. And you can immediately, when you start thinking about it, you realize what the problem is. That if you measure a boundary, which is a squiggly line, and you put a ruler on it, where the resolution is, say, 10 km, then anything below 10, but below that 10 line, the boundary may be squiggling around. And so you measure that as 10 km, but someone else with a resolution of 1 km would measure it as 25 km, for example. So that was the problem, he realized. And in fact, then he discovered that this followed a very regular pattern, that if you plotted the length that's measured or reported versus the resolution, there was a very simple mathematical relationship. And amazingly, that relationship is just like the relationships I talked about in terms of things like metabolic rates and all the other characteristics of organisms. And that's where the connection was to fractures. And it was Benoit Murdrot who realized that not just that there was this phenomenon of the problem of making measurements and resolution, but that in fact, it was self similar. Boundaries are approximately self similar, so if you look at one scale and then scale that up, it just looks like what the boundary would look like at the bigger scale, and so on and so forth. As you said, this is a genuine mystery why this wasn't discovered literally thousands of years ago. This is one of those things that was just staring everyone in the face, and most of science is not like that. Does anyone understand why this wasn't discovered before? Vandalbria yes. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Mark Bowden. Mark is the author of 13 books, including the number one New York Times bestseller Blackhawk Down. He reported at the Philadelphia Enquirer for 20 years and now writes for The Atlantic and Vanity Fair primarily. He's also a writer in residence at the University of Delaware, and his most recent book is Hui 68 a Turning Point for the American War in Vietnam. And as you'll hear, Mark and I get very deep into the topic of North Korea. He wrote this wonderful article, though a fairly harrowing one, about just how difficult and dangerous and intractable our stalemate with North Korea is. This came out in The Atlantic a few weeks ago. It might still be in the current issue of the magazine, but in this podcast, we essentially walk through the logic of that article, and you will know more about why we haven't solved the North Korea crisis, though it's been a crisis for decades. And now I bring you Mark Bowden. I am here with Mark Bowden. Mark, thanks for coming on the podcast. Well, thanks for inviting me, Sam. Well, I've been a fan of yours for a long time. You. I think I mostly see you in the Atlantic. Do you do you publish regularly somewhere else as a journalist? Mostly in the Atlantic. I do occasionally write for Vanity Fair and also for Sports Illustrated now and then. I have missed you in Sports Illustrated. I must say that this is more about me than about the rest of the world. I think many people will be familiar with your book Blackhawk Down, which became a film, but perhaps you can describe your career as a journalist and as a writer thus far. What have you tended to focus on? Well, for about 20 years, I was a newspaper reporter at the Philadelphia Enquirer, and there I covered just about everything imaginable from science to foreign assignments to transportation in Philadelphia, to politics to cops. But gradually, the overarching direction of my career was always to do longer stories and stories that took more time to report and investigate. So I kind of graduated from daily newspaper stories to Sunday stories to Sunday magazine stories, to Sunday magazine serials, and then now to books and magazine articles. Were you involved with the film version of Blackhawk Down? Did you write the screenplay I wrote the original draft of that screenplay, which I think they very wisely threw away, and then they hired a wonderful screenwriter named Ken Nolan who adapted it. Although I continued to work with Ken and I worked closely with Jerry Burkheimer and Ridley Scott throughout that whole wonderful experience and very happy with the way the film turned out nice. And and now you just released a book on the Vietnam War, right? Which I haven't seen, but I think I just read a review of in in the New York Times Book Review. Is that right? Correct. It's called Hui 1968 and it tells the story of the battle of Hue in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive. Ken Burns is releasing a big documentary on Vietnam in a couple of months. I think in September he's going to be on the podcast. I might have to do my homework by reading your book. I was at the screening of Ken Burns held a premiere in New York a few weeks ago, and I was lucky enough to get a ticket. And I've gotten to know the folks who worked on that project over the years that I was working on my Way book. That would actually be a good event for you to do. You and Ken could be in dialogue somewhere and reawaken a public conversation about Vietnam. It seems like the moment has arrived. Well, we'll see. I think there might be some things like that in the works. I want to talk about one other piece briefly that you wrote, which you wrote a piece in The Atlantic in 2003 on torture titled The Dark Art of Interrogation where you came to more or less the same position I did in my first book with respect to the ethics of it. And I hadn't read your piece until much later and I've since recommended it to many people. Did you get much criticism for that article? Because I've encountered more or less nothing but pain for even touching the topic. What was your experience like? I did get a good deal of criticism, but none of it very intelligent. Actually, most of the criticism, to my way of thinking, came from people who either hadn't read the essay or hadn't understood the argument that I was making. I think probably the main sticking point was that I argue that whether or not to torture or coerce someone is a moral decision. And a lot of people seem to cling to the idea that it's simply a pragmatic decision because torture never works under any circumstances, which I don't believe is true. So I think just by virtue of the fact that I'm willing to say that I think torture is occasionally an effective way of getting information, that, of course, doesn't mean you ought to do it. But that was enough to trigger a lot of criticism. Yeah. And your position that it should be illegal, but that we should recognize that there are situations where even good people would be tempted, understandably, to break the law, and that if you can't imagine such situations, you're actually not trying hard enough. That's a very novel argument and it's one that I agree with. But I think I will spare us both a lot of pain by declining to talk about this topic anymore on this podcast. We can move on to far more cheerful topics like North Korea. Yeah. And I also say that the ethical implication of everything you and I have said on this topic is also shared by the and this is something I've said before, but that great Handbook of Evil, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. If you look up torture in that reference work, which really is one of the best reference works in philosophy, you find a very clear argument for the same position. So if you think we are Torquemada, you can group us with Stanford as well. Well, it's nice to be a good company like that. Yeah. So, North Korea, you wrote this piece, I think it's still in the current issue of the Atlantic, and the title is how to Deal with North Korea. There are no good options. But some are worse than others. And this is as stifling a piece as you would expect given how we're essentially standing in front of four doors and none of them lead anywhere we want to go. And I want us to walk through this pretty systematically because it stands a chance of being the most consequential foreign policy issue of the present and the indefinite future. First, how did you go about reporting on this? Well, I thought it best to seek out people who have either worked on the North Korea issue in the military or in the White House or in the State Department, and who have spent years wrestling with what to do about North Korea. And in some cases, in the cases of some of the military commanders have had to actually prepare for the various options and pick their brains, ask them, because we have a president who sort of plays to the lowest common denominator. And I thought there was a real fear with some of the things that he was saying that he would kind of build a level or a groundswell of support for trying to attack North Korea or to pressure it, at least militarily. And I wanted to try to throw some cold water on the simplistic thinking there and actually talk to people who had wrestled with this issue and lay out what, in fact, the options were. Well, remind people about how we got here. So how did North Korea become this this blank space on the map? I mean, the images at night tell so much of the story. You have South Korea, which is just totally illuminated like a 21st century society, and the north is just this sea of blackness outside of Pyongyang. What is going on north of the DMZ. Well, that country, North Korea, which was created after World War II when Kim Il Sung was the Korean leader who helped with the Chinese to evict Japan, ended up in control in North Korea, and he established certainly one of the most bizarre regimes of modern times. It's really kind of a throwback to 17th century imperial state in Europe, where you have a hereditary dynasty with a whole mythology around Kim Il Sung and since then his son and now his grandson, who are purported to be sort of divinely selected leaders of the Korean people. Their whole raison detra is to enable the Kim family to remain in power and to benefit from that position. And so they've built a very draconian, totalitarian state that focuses most of its resources on building up its military and in the last 20 or 30 years to developing nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and missile systems that, you know, that we've now seen are capable of potentially reaching Alaska. And very soon we'll be capable of reaching the United States mainland. And I think that that effort has been so all consuming and costly that it has drained North Korea of nearly every other option. And it's been through long periods of very near starvation where it's estimated that millions of people start to death in the 1990s. Those conditions have eased somewhat. Out of necessity, I think the regime has allowed the black market to flourish a little bit, which people are eating anyway there, but there's very little else going on outside of the capital city of Pyongyang, which is kind of the Kim family showcase. As you point out. This is almost a religious cult. I mean, it's not otherworldly the way normal religious cults are, but it's clearly a personality cult that attributes magical powers to the dear leaders. These are almost the most confused people on earth in terms of how they view their place in the world. As Christopher Hitchens used to say, this is a a nation of racist dwarves. Yeah, they're like three inches shorter than the South Koreans, and yet they think they're a master race. And I got to imagine that the spell has been breaking for, for some people somewhere in the society over, you know, over the recent decades. But apparently they have thought that the food aid they see coming from us is just like an awestruck offering to the genius of their dear leader by the west. And I think of them as kind of like a cargo cult armed with nuclear weapons. Do we have any sense of what percentage of North Korean society believes the mythology? We don't have a good sense of that because there's not a lot of interaction between the Western world and North Korea. The journalists who go there are given potemkin village tours. I have spoken to a few who have done longer term and a little wider reporting, and their sense of it is that most North Koreans are very cynical about the government the way people are about governments everywhere, but that they don't dare say what they think or speak out against it. I mean, the one thing we haven't mentioned is that North Korea is very much a gulag state in that they have millions of people imprisoned for the slightest of offenses and even failing to clap loudly enough at a public appearance of the Dear Leader can get you executed or thrown in jail. So whatever North Koreans think, they're smart enough to keep it mostly to themselves. It seems to be the most successfully engineered orwellian experiment the Earth has ever seen just in terms of its isolation and the totality of the totalitarian control and the level of informing against family members. And it's just have you seen the book The Cleanest Race? Yes, I have. That's a Myers book, right? Yeah. Which really does lay out the racist underpinnings of their philosophy and the bizarre nature, as you described, of their quasi religious worship of their Dear Leader. I realize the news has moved on a little bit since you published your article, even just a couple of weeks ago, because that was right before this seemingly successful ICBM test. How big a problem is North Korea at this point for the rest of the world and how would you rank order it in terms of our concerns for our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of all the other implicated societies? Well, I think that it's far away the largest national security concern of the United States. Everybody, I think, largely because of media, has this outsized fear of terrorist attack by Islamist fundamentalists, which is sort of a hangover from 911, which was 16 years ago. I think that the threat of terror attacks will be with us always. But North Korea poses a threat on a completely different scale. They have weapons that could kill millions of people. Right now, the primary threat they pose is to South Korea and to Japan. But as their reach extends with ICBMs, the United States is also potentially a target. And while they don't have the kind of arsenal to pose an existential threat to the United States, I do think that the prospect of a nuclear weapon being exploded over Los Angeles or any other American city is a pretty terrifying prospect. And one that, frankly, as this article goes on to explain, there's very little we can do to prevent short of deterrence. The implication of their recent missile test is that people agree that they can probably reach Alaska and Hawaii now, but not quite Los Angeles or the rest of the United States. But that should be coming in pretty short order. And then you are talking about there really is no word to describe how crazy and irresponsible the statements are of the regime, whatever you think their actual motivations are and whatever you think their level of suicidality could be. But we have a completely maniacal regime, which in what's the outside estimate, a few years, five years, should be able to land a nuke on a city like Los Angeles or San Francisco. When I wrote the piece, which is just a few months ago, the estimate was three or four years. But this most recent ICBM launch, successful one, came much earlier than anticipated. So my guess is that we could probably even dial back the three and four years. It might be even closer than that. So in your article, you talk about four possible responses to the problem, and they all suck. So let's move through these first. Just tell me briefly, what are the four, and then we can just run through them. Well, the first would be an all out attack, what I call prevention, which would essentially crush the Kim regime, would destroy its military, wipe out its arsenals, and essentially reduce North Korea to a stateless humanitarian zone. The second, I call turning up the screws. And that would be applying pressure through some form of military attack or embargo that would really hurt North Korea, but would be short of an all out attack. And that would seek to essentially prove to Kim Jong UN that we mean business and hopefully get him to recalculate his plans and back away. The third option is decapitation, and that would involve targeting Kim himself, or maybe Kim and a few of the key people around him, probably to assassinate them, or possibly, I guess, even less likely to arrest them and thereby sort of take off the head of that state and hope that something more reasonable would follow. And the last option, which may be the hardest to swallow, but which I think is probably inevitable, is acceptance, which is recognizing that nuclear technology, missile technology, is old stuff. It's been around for more than a half century. Lots of people know how to do it. And North Korea is eventually going to figure these things out and going to have these weapons. The paragraph in your article I want to read, which is kind of central to why the first three options seem to be more or less unthinkable. And it's not necessarily what everyone would expect. It's not that the North Koreans already have nukes, and then they can nuke South Korea or Japan or one of our allies, even their conventional arms makes this situation seemingly totally intractable from a military point of view. And so this is your text. For years, North Korea has had extensive batteries of conventional artillery, an estimated 8000 big guns just north of the demilitarized zone, the DMZ, which is less than 40 miles from Seoul, South Korea's capital, a metropolitan area of more than 25 million people. One high ranking us. Military officer who commanded forces in the Korean theater, now retired, told me he heard estimates that if a grid were laid across Seoul, dividing it into three square foot blocks, these guns could, within hours, pepper every single one of them. This ability to rein ruin on the city is a potent existential threat to South Korea's largest population center. Its government and its economic anchor shells could also deliver chemical and biological weapons. That's the end of your text there. So the thing that makes any kind of military response, however much of a surprise attack we could muster, so impractical is that within minutes, the moment anything starts happening, they can just annihilate Seoul with their completely conventional artillery. And obviously, if you had evacuated millions of people from Seoul, you'd be tipping your hand as to what's happening. Is this really the issue that there's just no way for us to knock out his capacity to harm Seoul quickly enough so as to make any kind of prevention or decapitation or turning the screws approach practical? Yes. It's the main reason why the United States hasn't done something like this. A long time ago, when Richard Nixon was president, the North Koreans shot down an American warplane and killed, I believe it was, 31 American service members on board. Nixon was not known to be a timid Seoul when it came to the use of military force, and he chose not to counter attack North Korea or to punish them militarily for doing that. And that was back in, what, the early 1970s, when this capability is already in place to attack Seoul. So the capability of north Korea to punish or to inflict death and ruin on South Korea has gone up and up and up and up. And I think it's even a little cynical and probably sadly correct that Kim and his regime calculate that this would possibly not be enough of a deterrent for the United States, because, after all, those are just South Koreans living in Seoul for the most part. And so in order to have the level of security that he feels he needs, the ability to attack the United States mainland has been their great quest in the last 20 or 30 years. So the stakes have gone up so high at this point that I think for any sane person, the only policy priority ought to be to prevent conflict from breaking out. Let's take this, the prevention case first. This is the all out attack that attempts to prevent anything, even a single shell, emerging from North Korea headed toward the south. In your reporting on this topic, did you encounter any serious person with a good reputation in the military or policy circles who thinks that we should just attack North Korea all out and roll the dice with a prevention strategy? No, I didn't. Although some of the people I spoke to said there are people who hold that opinion and who have voiced it at the Pentagon. But I don't believe that at the highest levels that it would be something seriously considered. And this is because to do anything like that is synonymous with what a minimum of some hundreds of thousands of deaths in Seoul, or a minimum of a million. What are the estimates? Well, a minimum, I would say yeah. Would probably be hundreds of thousands. And that's a very optimistic minimum. If North Korea felt it was under all out attack, the chances of it doing nothing but launching conventional shells at Seoul and at American bases in South Korea is fairly small. I think that the far more likely totals would be millions. So this is one problem with the second and third option. Well, let's take the second option first. Turning the screws. Remind our listeners what that is and why it's problematic to consider. Okay, but first, if I could, Sam, I'd like to go back to the first option. Sure. If we assume, and I think everyone I've talked to agrees, who knows anything about the actual weapons involved, that it's unrealistic fantastical is a word I heard use that we were completely successful. We were able to attack North Korea and destroy all of its capability without them getting off a single shot, without being able to kill a single American or South Korean. We would then be left with a totally stateless north korea, which would create one of the greatest humanitarian crises in modern times, would flood China with millions of refugees, would flood south Korea with millions of refugees, and would leave the United States with the responsibility of essentially moving in and trying to govern a North Korea that would have, because it's a very rugged terrain, pockets of resistance likely throughout that country. Also very likely possessing nuclear material. Chemical and biological weapons. A situation that would make our occupation of Iraq seem like taking your kids for a walk to the local playground. By comparison. So there is no way, either, through an attack that would result in only a few chemical weapons exploding to an all out success, but no calculation of this works to our benefit. Yeah, I'm really glad you made that point, because the best case scenario is so far if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Today I'm speaking with Lori Santos. Laurie is a professor of psychology at Yale University, and she hosts the very popular podcast, the Happiness Lab. And she teaches the most popular course at Yale, which is on the scientific understanding of happiness. She also runs the Comparative Cognition Laboratory in the Canine Cognition Center at Yale. And here we get into what we know, or at least have good reason to believe scientifically about the causes and conditions of happiness. At this point. We talk about the role of expectations and the experiencing self versus the remembered self. We talk about framing effects and the importance of social connections the effect of focusing on the happiness of others as opposed to one's own introversion versus extroversion the influence of technology on our social lives, our relationship to time, the connection between happiness and ethics. Hedonic adaptation the power of mindfulness resilience, the often illusory significance of reaching one's goals and other topics. Anyway, I really enjoyed this. I hope you find it useful. I now bring you Lori Santos. I am here with Lori Santos Laurie. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me on the show. So this is a long time coming. Many people wanted to hear from you. How do you describe what it is you do academically and intellectually? Yeah. So I am a professor of psychology here at Yale University. My day job as a psychologist is involved in studying what makes the human mind special, and I do that by studying non human primates and domesticated dogs. But most of my time these days is taken up with a different scientific pursuit. In psychology, I became super interested in the scientific basis of happiness and well being. And you have a podcast titled The Happiness Lab, where you go into these issues in depth and the course you teach at Yale. Am I right in thinking this is the most popular course at the university? Yeah. So in 2018, I taught a new class on this topic called Psychology in the Good Life. And the first time I taught it, it did become Yale's largest class ever, just under, like, 1200 students enrolled, which was about one out of every four students at Yale. Since then, we put the class online on coursera.org, and it's now one of Coursera's biggest classes. And just in the last month, we've had over a million learners enroll. Well, that's great. Happiness really is a paramount concern for everyone, whether they think about it in those terms or not. Let's just focus on the word for a second, because happiness, at least in English, is a somewhat insubstantial concept, and people will often say something like, you know, there's much more to life than happiness. Mere happiness sounds like a somewhat a feat, goal, or primary value. It seems to grade into something like hedonism or pleasure. And then people would tend to try to balance that in their talk about the goals to which human life could tend with concepts like meaning and virtue. And then many of us find ourselves using a word like flourishing, which is strangely stilted, although not as stilted as using the Greek eudaimonia. And then I tend to talk about well being a lot, and you actually just use that term. So how do you think about the concept? I mean, mostly I just think I wish we had better terms than that. Everyone agreed on them, so I didn't spend a lot of my time kind of fighting about that. I use the term happiness because I think that's what a lot of people think of when they're thinking about concepts like well being and flourishing. I agree that happiness is a much more loaded thing because some people think it's about hedonism and really basic kinds of forms of happiness. But I think people kind of get this concept of happiness. We know it from the Declaration of Independence, right? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But scientifically speaking, I think social scientists mean a particular thing when they use the term happiness or wellbeing. And this is the definition that I end up using in the course, which is that you can basically say you're happy if you have a lot of well being in your life and for your life. And what we mean by that is that kind of happiness in your life is the sort of almost hedonistic kind of positive emotion type stuff, right? You're happy in your life if you have lots of positive emotions and laughter and so on. And not many negative emotions like, relatively speaking, there's not a tremendous amount of sadness and anger, although we can debate about how much of that you want, but that's kind of being happy in your life. But there's another feature, I think, that the social scientists really care about, and that's that you're happy with your life. And so that's basically your answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life right now? And so I think there are these interesting moments where those dissociate, right? I have my academic dean here in my residential college, just had a newborn baby, and I think she's very satisfied with her life. But in her life right now, there's a lot of negative emotions of, like, cleaning dirty diapers and not sleeping and these kinds of things. And I think I see a lot when I go to different talks and things of people who are really happy in their life. They have a lot of hedonistic pleasure, but really at their core, they're really dissatisfied with their life. And so I think, in my view, if you're able to maximize both of those things, that winds up encompassing things like flourishing and meeting and all these kind of lesser concepts. I think if you're happy in your life and with your life, you're doing pretty well, right? Was it that distinction, happy in your life and happy with your life, to my ear, that is more or less identical to Danny Kahneman's distinction between the experiencing and remembering self. Is there any daylight between these concepts for you, or is that the same division? I think there's a little dissociation there. I think you can have happiness in your life and with your life in the experience self, right? And so, just as an example, right now I'm experiencing lots of positive emotions just from daily things I do and daily activities. But I also have a lot of meaning from this happiness work. And that feels like it right now. Like I don't have to think back on it. It's not my future self. Kind of looking back and thinking like, oh, that was the kind of thing I really want to enjoy. I can experience that life satisfaction in the moment. And so I think you can actually have both in the experienced self rather than the remembered self. Although it sounds to me what you're doing is something I do naturally. And this is a point of disagreement between me and Danny. I really do think the remembering self is simply the experiencing self in one of its modes. It feels like something to have these moments of retrospection when asked, what story can you tell about your life? How satisfied are you? The fact that in his paradigm, he's able to show that there's a mismatch rather often between who you're talking to when you're asking about a retrospective judgment and who you're talking to when you're asking for a moment to moment accounting of just what it's like to be you. Still, there really is just a single timeline of life experience. And as you say, the global assessment of one's life. Is what I'm doing today actually meaningful? Is it bringing value to the world? Are the sacrifices that I'm making or the stress I'm under now? Is it aimed at some purpose that I feel inspired by and that others feel inspired by all of that? Is that's where this remembering self and the experiencing self, just in my experience, they become indistinguishable? And so I wonder if you're just taking, however inadvertently, my side of the argument against Danny here, that really, if we become very fine grained about what we mean by the experiencing self, it just swallows the remembering self. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right on this one. And I don't know, I think I mean, I haven't pushed Danny on this directly, but my sense is that we don't have what the timeline is for the remembered self. Right. If any form of retrospect, if any form of meta analysis of it is the remembered self, as soon as you ask me like, hey, how are things going? How satisfied with you? If I ever have to take a global view, it's possible that it's using the mechanisms that I use for the remembered self to some interesting extent, right. I don't think Danny's really specified how far back we have to do the remembering, but it might be that any any point where we're kind of going meta and thinking about our own happiness might be partly the remembered self. And I think this actually brings up a bigger issue with a lot of the happiness research, right, is that we want to get at what happiness feels like in the moment. But the only way we can do that is to ask people. And it's very possible that between the experiencing and the asking in any form, we're kind of getting some interesting mismatches there. Like, it could be that just having you reflect on your own positive emotions, it's going to change that. Right. That might be different than kind of what I was noticing and what I was experiencing and the sum total of that throughout my day, which sucks for happiness researchers, right? Because we have to ask people somehow I wish there was a thermometer where we could get it happiness or well being accurately without asking people, but we don't really have that. And it's hard for us to ever know if the act of reporting on your happiness is changing it, whether that be what you're experiencing, what you're remembering in whatever form. Yeah. I have another question here which relates to this, which is the role that expectation plays in determining a person's sense of wellbeing and with expectation, I'm thinking it can also be retrospective, right? So I'm having a certain experience, it has a certain emotional valence, which could be negative, right? It could be stressful. But because of my expectations, or because of how I can even retrospectively reconceive the stress I was just under, where I'm currently under, this kind of framing effect can seem to in part or fully determine whether an experience gets scored as pure suffering or one of the highlights of my life. Let's say you're climbing Everest, right? And obviously the physical experience is just more or less a pure ordeal. But if you get to the top and you get back down without dying, and you don't destroy your ethical code by passing somebody's near corpse on the way down, we've all heard those horrible stories. So you can have something that, if you were sampling each time point along the way, just looks like torture, and yet retrospectively and for real, for the rest of one's life, it's going to seem like one of the best things you've ever done. How do you think about those framing effects? I think those framing effects are huge. I almost think that the way you're framing an experience and I mean that in a variety of ways. How you're categorizing it, how you frame it retrospectively, the expectations you have about it going into it. I think that those expectations and those categorizations are more powerful in some cases than the actual experience itself for what we go through. I mean, just there's so many kinds of cases like this. So take really classic work in the history of psychology where you give people a particular physiological response and then give them different kinds of frames for how they make sense of it. You know, so this was back in the day, kind of before ethics and social psychology, but you basically unknowingly pump subjects full of, like, adrenaline. Basically. You basically give them speed without them realizing it. And then you you set a frame for what they could be experiencing. They're either in a room with other subjects who are acting really aggressively, who are really angry, or who are kind of partying. They think the experiment is super fun and they're enjoying it. And what you find is that the subject's entire experience of that event depends on the frame of the other people around them. If they're in a room of people who are partying and they're experiencing these physical sensations that are kind of a little bit agitated, they think it's really fun. Whereas if they're around other angry people, they find it incredibly negative, and they see it as angering. And so what this shows us is the basic physiology of what we're experiencing, how we actually feel about it, whether that's positive or negatively balanced, or whether it's something that might lead to happiness or lead to sadness or anger. It's completely based on what our expectations are about that moment. In some cases, the social contagion of other people's expectations about that moment. I mean, that's the basic physiology. And the example you're getting into is even more complicated. It's not just a single physiological experience in a moment. It's integrating across a whole host of physiological experiences and then looking back on it. And so we might have some frame about those experiences, say, before we start on Mount Everest. Maybe it's a dream of ours and something we've trained for and so on, that's going to cause us in the moment to see those actual experiences tiredness and physiological stress and fight or flight response, all that stuff. Like we're going to see those differently and then see them differently. Retrospectively, I think it's kind of a mess. But in some ways, I think that's really powerful though, right? That means that we actually have the chance to reframe things in our life in these powerful ways, right? And I think the ancient traditions figured that out, and then the condiment and TURSKIS of the world figured that out in modern times. And that's exciting because it means we can use these framing techniques to change around our experience. We don't actually have to change our physiology to change whether or not some experience makes us happy or sad, right? And we actually don't even have to change the past or have avoided certain negative experiences in the past if we can reframe them in the future. And this is the one thing that I pulled from existentialism, apart from an appreciation for how much of it didn't make sense. It's just a sense that you are always free to tell yourself a new story about the past. So this humiliating failure that has bothered you up until yesterday can be reframed as the thing that caused you to get the tools that are now integral to your success or whatever it is. You can actually just change your relationship to something that used to be a source of suffering for you and in that sense, reach into the past and put it to some order. Yeah. And the most amazing thing about the human mind is that we can do that prospectively, too. There's lovely work by social psychologists like Ethan Cross that talk about the power of psychological distancing, basically trying to think about an event as your future self would think about the event. So I'm about to go through I don't know, I'm going to have a really stressful interview with Sam Harris right before I start that I could think, well, how would future Lori want to think about this interview? I'd want to think we had this great discussion and we dealt with these hard hitting issues and this is going to be awesome, and that if I were to think that way even before I started the interview, it would frame how the conversation was going. If I kind of got stressed out in the middle of it, I'd think like, oh, this is the hard hitting part that I really wanted to experience that would kind of feel better later. And so what Ethan's shown is that we don't have to just wait till we get to the future to think back retrospectively in this positive way. We can use that as a frame in the present to shape experiences over time, too. He's shown that you can do that simply by having a narrative in your own head that uses your future self. And the third person, Laurie in the future will want to think this way about X, Y and Z experience that can shape it in real time as you experience the event. Well, lucky for you, you're speaking to future Sam, who's a real pushover. No problem there. So let's start from some kind of ground zero for people psychologically. So let's imagine someone comes to you, you're a happiness expert, and they come to you and they say that they are profoundly unhappy in their life. What generic advice would you give to a person that really is generic that you think is more or less a good idea for virtually anyone, barring some strange contraindication? What do you recommend to people as a first pass for turning the various dials within reach to improve their sense of wellbeing? Well, I think the first piece of advice is just that the science suggests you can intervene, right? I mean, I think a lot of people who are not happy at a given time think that there's something about them that's messed up, right? Genetically they're just predispositioned to be unhappy or they're kind of built to be that way. And I think the first thing to tell people is just that that might be the case to a certain extent. There's some heritability to most wellbeing measures, but there's a lot you can do to intervene on them. And so I think that's kind of message number one is look, you can take some action and fix this. In terms of the specific actions, I would suggest if you look at the positive psychology literature, one of the hugest effects on our own happiness is our social connection. You know, there's a famous paper by Marty Seligman and Ed Guinea that suggests that social, social relationships and strong social relationships are necessary for happiness. They're not sufficient for happiness, but you can't find happy people that don't have them. And so that really suggests that if you want to be like happy people you should focus on your social relationships. And that means taking a hard look at your priorities to figure out if those social relationships are falling by the wayside. And I think in the modern day where we prioritize work and the things that go with work and for my students, their academic performance, often that's coming at the opportunity cost of the time you'd spend on your social relationships. That's kind of hit number one is are you making time for the people that you really care about in life? And a lot of that work also comes from some lovely studies by Robert Waldinger and his colleagues. He's part of this long running Harvard happiness study that it's super cool. It's been studying men from Harvard and they were men because the studies started back in the 1930s. So men from Harvard and also like men from lower income Boston neighborhoods and they've been tracking them over time. And so now their original cohort is in their ninety s and they've been able to look at all kinds of features about their health, their immune function and whether they get heart disease and diabetes and so on. And what's remarkable is that a major predictor not just of mental health like happiness, but also physical health is the nature of these men's social relationships. They're actually predicting longevity now so that the men who are still alive in this cohort study are the ones that seem to have tended to have the best social relationships. And so, again, kind of doubling down on social relationships is great because it's like doing double duty. It's not just good for your mental health, it's great for your physical health too. Right? Yeah. So let's run through the list of things that come to mind and then I'll come back to some of them because I do want to talk about relationships more. Yeah, so social connection is a big one, being other oriented generally. And what I mean by this is the act of paying attention to other people over yourself. So being the kind of person that gives to charity, that volunteers your time, that is focused on other people generally seems to be a big one for your happiness and your health. One that sounds silly is what I tell my students, are just healthy habits. And by that I mean the stuff that we know is good for physical health, like making sure you're getting enough sleep, making sure you're getting enough exercise, making sure you're eating right. Those physical things seem to have a huge impact on people's mental health much more than we think. And then I think there's a whole set of things that are more in your wheelhouse. I know the act of being a little bit more present, being mindful and then changing your mindset towards things like having a mindset that's a little bit more grateful and a little bit more compassionate generally. And these are mindsets that often come from ancient practices, like different forms of meditation and so on. Those would be my top hits. We can get into the lesser top hits too, like right, like being being religious, it turns out, is actually pretty good for your happiness. Or at least I should clarify, not necessarily believing religious believing in religious doctrine, but actually taking part in religious practices, it turns out, is correlated with happiness. And yeah, we can go way down the list, but we'll see which ones you want to pick up on. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's go back to relationships. And I think knowing something about your work, it's not just one's close relationships. It's also one's orientation toward strangers. I mean, whether you will just talk to people in public, on an airplane or in line or something, you've covered in at least one of your podcasts. So this would suggest, however, that extroverts could be at some kind of advantage here and that shyness could be a real impediment to self actualization of some kind. How do you think about that? Let's leave aside close relationships. Let's put someone out in public among strangers. How do you think about the variables that determine a person's social experience? Yeah, this one was a shocking one for me when I first started reading the literature, mostly because I'm not a very social person when it comes to strangers. I'm the kind of person that when I hop on a plane, I put my huge headphones on in the hope that no one will speak to me. That's what I used to do, at least. But yeah. So there's so much work by folks like Nick Epley and Liz Dunn and others that show that the simple, fleeting connections that we have with strangers can be really powerful for our well being. And in this sense, I really mean the sort of happy in your life kind of well being. It really seems to bump up our positive emotions. And so these are things like the simple conversation you have with the barista at the coffee shop or chatting up your Uber driver while you're on your ride. These kinds of simple social connections seem to bump up our mood, and the absence of them can seem to kind of decrease our mood in some interesting ways. And so what's striking about that intervention, though, is that people really don't think that's the case. This is work by Nick Epley. He finds that people make incredibly strong predictions that talking to strangers is going to be weird or awkward or just not very fun. And what he finds is that because of that misprediction, people tend not to talk to strangers when they have the opportunity to do so. And that's true of introverts and extroverts. I think the bigger issue for introverts is that that prediction in introverts is even stronger. So if extroverts predict, and it'll be a little awkward to talk with my Uber driver for the whole ride, introverts end up predicting, it's going to be actively awful to talk to my Uber driver for the whole ride, like it's going to make me completely miserable. But both extroverts and introverts, Nick finds, actually get a big bump in well being from having that conversation with the stranger. This actually is a theme that's worth investigating further because I think this is part of a lot of the stuff we see in the positive psychology work, which is that there are these things that we can do to bump up our wellbeing. But by and large, our theories about what we should do to bump up our wellbeing seem to be wrong, which is pretty frustrating because it means that, like, rational people aren't doing the things that they should be doing to improve their happiness because they have misconceptions about the stuff that's going to work. Right, so by theories, you don't mean the scientific theories in the literature. You mean each person's personal idea about what they should do to become happier. Yeah. Not even in that rich of an explicit sense. Right. If I'm standing in line at Starbucks to get a latte, I have some intuitions about what's going to make me happy. I probably think the latte is going to bump up my mood or bump up my productivity. If I decide to talk to somebody, it's because at least implicitly, I thought that would be a good idea, it would kind of feel nice or feel good in that situation. And so we constantly have these very low level automatic intuitions about the stuff that feels good and that controls how we act in the world. What's scary is that what the scientific theory suggests is that those intuitions are often wrong. In other words, we're systematically not doing the stuff that could make us happiest. Yeah. So how do you think about shyness in this context? Because that obviously is the wall through which many people never push and it keeps them isolated in a social circumstance where even if they accepted your thesis that they would be more or less guaranteed to be happier if they could get to the other side of that wall, it feels bad to even attempt it. Yeah, I think what the science suggests you should try if you're an introvert and in that situation is just see if you could try it out. Like just take baby steps into having conversations with strangers and then be mindful about how it feels. And what Nick's data really suggests is that it's probably going to feel better than you expect. The problem is that there's a real startup cost to having those conversations because we have this strong intuition that it's going to go really badly. But if we can get over that startup cost, the benefits that we experience can be really powerful. And that's when I resonate with myself. I mean, I don't necessarily consider myself an introvert, but I'm definitely not the kind of person who just typically strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. Actually, my producer of my podcast, Ryan, he's a journalist by nature and every time we go out he's always talking to people and I'm like, how do you do that? But the science suggests that I'm totally wrong. I need to kind of bust through that initial awkwardness and try it out and you get much more benefit than you'd expect. So I'm like you in that respect. And it's always amazing to be with a friend who is the exact opposite and just see how different their life is in situations like that. I mean, I know people who can walk into a crowded elevator and strike up a conversation with zero awkwardness and it is a kind of superpower which I notice I entirely lack. You just realize in those moments that there are people who are walking through the world having a completely different experience because everywhere they're going, they're just talking to people and having a self reinforcing and by and large entirely pleasant encounter with the world. Whereas I don't know if you have any sense of the percentages here, but I would imagine increasingly so. And we can talk about how certain changes in our society technologically have ramified this default setting of kind of eyes down isolation. But I would imagine most people at this point are walking through cities more. Or less ignoring everyone most of the time, at least to the limit of what's possible. And the people who aren't doing that at all, they're living at a very different parallel track of human experience. Yeah. And the data suggests it's like a happier track. Yeah. It's nice to know the researchers who study this stuff because they often live it. I remember going out to dinner with Nick Epley recently. We were in Aspen, Colorado together, and we went out to dinner and he will just strike up a conversation with everyone. You know, the waitress is trying to come, you know, just take our order, and he'll end up chatting with her for like 15 minutes to the point that she's kind of having a good time, like, oh, sorry, I have to go, you know, put your order in, or the person next to you. And, you know, and it's it's foreign. Even though I know these data, it's foreign to me. It's not the thing that I would normally do, but I can rest resonate with them. Like, wow, that was so much more of a fun dinner. It went by so much faster because we were having all these interesting conversations. And the people around you are filled with interesting stories, interesting ideas. Like, we're social primates, we're going to get a lot out of that. But the message is that what we have to do is to violate our intuitions. And I think this is so fundamental and I think it doesn't get talked about enough. It really challenges our rational approach to improving our own well being and to getting to eudaimonia. If we have all these incorrect theories, again, incorrect intuitions about the sorts of things that we need to do to be happy, that means we could be rationally following what our intuitions tell us, but actively moving against what would be best for us in terms of our well being, which is so striking. And that's why I find the science so important. It's because it doesn't totally cause you to update your intuitions. I'm not immediately a social person who's talking to the barista all the time, but I can kind of put some work in to overcome those. And it does make your life better if you can fight some of these bad intuitions. Okay, so we're having this conversation in the first week in April 2020 in a context where for, I would say at least a decade, maybe a decade and a half, we've witnessed a variety of social and technological changes which, again, have made people in some ways less isolated, but in a face to face sense, more isolated. So the introduction of the smartphone is probably the biggest one. You go into public and people tend to close down any opportunity for spontaneous interaction with strangers because they're virtually always looking at their phones whenever they get a chance. And I guess on some level they're socializing with somebody else, often by doing that, but it's not face to face, and it's a very different experience for social primates. And I don't think I'm the only person to feel that. We've all been inducted into a psychological experiment to which more or less, no one has really consented. And we're just rolling the dice with human psychology and seeing what comes of all this. And now this is in the context of this conversation, especially ramified by the COVID-19 pandemic, where you have people truly isolated for reasons of epidemiology and isolated under conditions of significant stress, if not health stress, then economic stress. So I guess let's take both of those pieces. How do you see the trade off between some of the technological advances we've made? They really have created wealth and the ability to even have careers that would be unthinkable. I mean, the Internet has been obviously immensely useful and we're not going to get rid of it. But it's easy to see how it may have eroded face to face social connection for most people most of the time. And then let's jump to the current circumstance of the pandemic. Yeah, I mean, I worry a lot about what technology is doing to our social connection. If you get back to the barista in the coffee shop scenario, one of the reasons I don't talk to the barista is I'm not totally sure it'll be that fun, but also I don't even notice the barista, right, because I'm staring down at my phone and checking my email or scrolling through my Instagram feed or something. And most of us are doing that. And I think you're right. We've put these devices in the pockets of 6 billion people around the planet and we don't really know their cost. There's now some good data coming out about the specific ways that cell phones in general and technology in general might be affecting our social relationships. And they're all striking and really scary. So Liz Dunn, who's a professor at the University of British Columbia, has been doing some of this work. She just does these really simple experiments where she has, say, subjects sit together in a waiting room either with their cell phones or without their cell phones, and they're instructed to just have the cell phone out. So they're not even necessarily using the cell phone. It's just basically present. And what she finds is that the presence of a cell phone ends up decreasing the smiling between those subjects who are in the waiting room by about 30%, like just having it out. And we see the same thing when we look at all kinds of different social activities. Right. She has another study where she has families going around like, say, like a science museum together. And she either lets the parents have their cell phones with them or not. And what she finds is way less enjoyment on the part of the parents in the science museum when they have their cell phones out with their kids way less feeling like they bonded with their kids. But also the kids feel that way too. The kids are feeling less bonded with the parents too. And again, this is just the mere presence of our cell phone. And I think we often think when we talk about technology, there's always like, oh, social media and Facebook, they're so evil and they destroy connection. For me, just as a basic scientist, I actually worry more just about what our attentional resources are doing when we're around cell phones, right? Because in some ways, our brain isn't stupid. Our brain knows what's on the other side of these devices. And there's some pretty good, interesting, panic inducing, exciting stuff on the other side of these things. And now those devices are competing with the basic social interactions we have. Like, yeah, I could have a conversation with my husband over the dinner table, but if I have my phone there, I know that on the other side of that phone is every political discussion that's happened, every cat video in the universe. Liz Dunn, I interviewed her for an upcoming season two episode of my podcast and she had this wonderful analogy. She said, when you go to a dinner with your husband, imagine instead of bringing your phone, you brought this big wheelbarrow. And in the wheelbarrow is like, you know, a printout of every book that's ever been written. You know, like, printouts of every one of your emails since 1992. Like a big, big stacks of photo albums of all your family pictures. Like every cat video, a DVD of every cat video in the universe, every museum, like, archive of every print that's ever been made in every art gallery all over the world. Porn. Like, big DVD pile of porn. He's like, if you were sitting next to that wheelbarrow during dinner, you'd be distracted. Like you wouldn't want to talk to your husband because you'd want to flip through the DVDs and see what cat videos were there, right? What she says is like, your brain knows that on the other end of that device is all that stuff, that wheelbarrow is there. And even if you're you're paying attention to your conversation with your husband at dinner, there's a part of your mind that's distracted that you have to keep reeling back from that big wheelbarrow of cat videos. And we've put that distraction, as I said, in 6 billion pockets around the world. And we don't know what it's doing to our attentional resources. We don't know what it's doing to our social resources. All we know is that it's a huge opportunity cost. We haven't been able to measure that cost yet, but I think it's huge for our social relationships. And also, given what we know about meditation and mind wandering, I think it's huge for our well being too. We're kind of constantly pulling our attention back from these devices in a way that didn't exist ten years ago. We just didn't have that attentional cost ten years ago. So I find it really scary, but not for the reasons people typically think of. I just think there's just an attention suck that exists now that never existed before in human history, and we have no idea what it's doing to our minds and our relationships. Actually, let's linger here. Before we get to the pandemic circumstance, there's another variable here which is related to what technology is doing to us and how we're essentially addicted to smartphones in particular. And that's our relationship to time and the sense that we have to use it wisely, that basically everything is an opportunity cost that we're constantly triaging with respect to what we could be paying attention to. And for many of us, certainly anyone who's a kind of knowledge worker, there really is no boundary between the moments where you could profitably get things done and any other moment in life wherever you happen to be. If I'm Lori Santos in a Starbucks in Line, there are many reasons not to look at the barista. But one is you can catch up on the emails that you know you're going to have to answer at some point. Then if you answer a few now, that's a few fewer, you have to answer later in the day when you get home. There's just this fundamental erosion of the boundary between the imperative of getting stuff done and all of these other moments in life, and it creates a background level of stress for many of us. And there's something about our relationship to time that gets changed there. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, I think that's really important. So one of the other things we know is super important for well being is our perception of time. There's some lovely work coming out of Ashley Willing's lab at Harvard Business School focused on this concept of time affluence, which is the subjective feeling that you have a lot of free time. The opposite is time famine, where you feel kind of famished for time, hungry for time. And Ashley's work has been showing that physiologically, time famine works a lot like hunger famine, where you're kind of triaging it sort of pumps up your stress hormones and so on. Ashley's also shown that what's odd about our sense of time right now is that we assume we have less free time, but actually, if you look at people's calendars, they actually have more free time all told, which is kind of surprising. We feel like we're so time famished right now. The problem is that our time right now is broken up into into what she's called time confetti. So we have free time, but it's in these, like, tiny snippets. And I think that the the form of those tiny snippets is exactly has the features of exactly what you're saying, which is that it's it's hard to use those in a way that promotes our well being. It's hard to like have a deep conversation with our spouse when we have like five minutes here and there. It's like, well, let me just get a few emails off the cuff if I have this little bit of free time. And so even when we have these moments of free time confetti, we end up using them kind of for work stuff or for stuff that's really fast, right? Sometimes when I'm doing kind of exactly what you're saying, I'm in line, I could get a few emails down, but that's anxiety provoking. I'll just do a quick panic, scroll through my social media feed or look up that news article and so on. And so we end up because the time is so cut up and in these tiny bits, we end up using it for what feels like the easiest thing, right? Things that have a little bit of a startup cost or things that take a little bit of time to get going, we tend not to prioritize. And that means we're not prioritizing a lot of deep social connection with people because that has this kind of startup cost and takes a little time. It often means we're not even prioritizing good leisure either. The time confetti means we don't want to learn a new instrument or learn a new language or even dive into a deep novel. All those existential novels you're talking about before, like, I'm not picking up a good sarge novel because it feels too much like I'm just going to scroll through the New York Times or I'm just going to pick up my Twitter feed. Like we kind of only have time for a few characters because the time is so broken up. And so I think this time confetti has lots of consequences for our happiness. And I think you're right that the fact that these technologies are breaking up our time in these ways is having a negative effect. But the technologies also have a negative effect on time in a completely different way, which is that unlike the other important things in our life, be it social relationships or sleep, those things don't nag us as much as our devices do. My husband doesn't have a notification ding that comes up in my window when I'm checking my email too long, but my email does when I'm talking to my husband, right? And so I think the fact of the matter is that most parts of our technology, most apps in these things get revenue and get money from having eyeballs on them. And so your iPhone wants to kind of remind you to be using your iPhone and all the apps on your iPhone want to be reminded you to use those apps. And that means that they've kind of start bugging you in a way that the other important things in life don't. And it's really hard to ignore those things because they're built on the latest neuroscience of what grabs your attention, of what kind of gives you a little dopamine hit, so you feel like it'll be rewarding to jump on that phone. And real life doesn't do that. Real life doesn't have teams of designers trying to mess with our attention and mess with our dopamine. And that's problematic because it means that the technology kind of grabs our attention easier. And when you add to that the normal time confetti that all of us have, where we're kind of just going to go with the easy thing, it's kind of a recipe for not prioritizing the right stuff in our lives, right? Yeah. The technology has changed the way we initiate social contact, even with people who are our closest friends. It used to be that you would just pick up the phone and call someone, and that wasn't a surprising intrusion into their solitude, which it is now. I feel like a cold call, even from someone I'm close to. With a few exceptions. My wife is an exception, and there's a couple of other people in my life who I still expect a call from, but virtually every other call. The default now is to set it up by email or by text. And just a cold call is almost analogous to 20 years ago, how it would have felt if someone just showed up at your house unannounced and rang the doorbell. And I don't know if you have noticed this in your life, but there's been a migration from email to text now, and very short form punctate communication. I mean, now text rather often is a surrogate for maintaining the relationship in the old way, which is actually seeing or speaking with each other. Yeah. And we know that obviously it means those are shorter communications, right. Because you're not kind of having long, lingering conversations. But it's also missing all the stuff that we're built as primates to pay attention to. Right. You don't get the right emotion through text as you do through changes to my vocal intonation or subtle changes to my facial expression. We haven't, as a species, gotten good at using text to do that stuff yet. Long text. Right. If you read, again, a fantastic novel, you can see pathos in there. You can see the emotion, but you don't really get that, you know, in a short text, you know, about dinner and when dinner is ready kind of thing. And so I think we're we're we don't realize what we're missing out on in those interactions. Yeah. And I think, you know, again, it's just crazy that we've had this experiment on human psychology and basically changed around 6 billion social relationships without people's permission and not knowing really how it's going to have long term effects. But I think we're starting to see the long term effects. I mean, this is the mental health crisis that we've been seeing exploding in all generations, but particularly in young people who have, for the most part, only ever known these forms of communication. This is the explosion of loneliness that we've seen. Loneliness has been increasing by double digit numbers in the last decade. And in some ways it's ironic because these technologies were supposed to be linking us up, but in practice, they could be failing to allow us to connect in the ways that our primate minds are used to connecting. And that can have all kinds of consequences we don't realize. So how have you been thinking about the COVID-19 experience we're all having? Really, for most of us, in genuine isolation, albeit in many cases with our families, and many of us are experiencing a silver lining there, where we're having more enforced quality time with our families. But it is, generally speaking, a surreal upheaval. It's a psychological experiment of a different order now, and we've all been inducted into it. Yeah, I think it's first of all, it's just surreal and crazy. This is what it must have felt like to live through other major natural disasters for our species. I feel like we're dinosaurs watching the meteor hit in some ways. But I think the biggest upheaval, as you said, is in our social relationships and our social lives. And I think if you look at what happens when people are going through a tough, stressful time, what our species does is we try to hook up with other people. We try to hang out with our friends. We go to our mom's house and get a hug, if that's possible. We just try to connect as much as we possibly can. And in terms of our physical health, that's impossible right now to flatten the curve. We just can't do that. There's an additional feature that's bad for social relationships too, which is that if you think about what the threat is in the COVID-19 crisis, it's other people. You know, it's that guy that touched my doorknob before I walked out of my house. It's the person who's panic, buying the toilet paper that I need. Like, in addition to not being able to connect with people, which is our natural response during a crisis, other people are part of the crisis. They're kind of making the crisis worse. And I think those two things together are making this an incredibly challenging time. It's making an otherwise incredibly challenging time even more challenging. The good news, though, is, I think this is the time when we can start to harness some of those technologies for social connection in even better ways. And what I mean by that is that it's not just a matter of like, hey, go on zoom and talk to some friend over zoom. It's trying to find ways to use these technologies to get the informal social connections that we're missing out on so much. Many of us, as you said, some people are living in isolation, and I think for them, it's a completely different matter, but some of us have family members and so on. But we're missing the chat with our coworkers at the water cooler. We're missing that quick conversation with the priest at the coffee shop, or just the smiles that we give to people when we walk down the street. Those have gone away a little bit over time, but they're still there. And I think a lot of us are facing the need, the craving that we're getting from not having that stuff. There's a new, really cool paper by Rebecca Sachs, who's a neuroscientist at MIT, who'd actually started this work a long time ago, but it just got published during COVID showing that if you put people in social isolation, the areas of their brain that would normally show craving for things like food and so on start craving social connection. So basically the kind of hunger craving that we get at for, say, sugary foods when we stop eating those, that's the kind of thing that we get for social connection after a really short period of social isolation. And so I think a lot of us are going to be going through that right now. But again, the good news is that there are these mechanisms of connecting with other people. I think we just have to use them to replicate the informal social connections too. Those are the ones we kind of need. For example, made a Zoom meeting to hang out with a friend of mine who's in New York while I was just chopping vegetables for dinner. And I was like, hey, just like, be there while I'm chopping vegetables. And her face was on the screen and I'm chopping vegetables and we're chatting. But in that you have a couple of things. I can see her facial expressions. She can hear me laughing. We can hear each other's intonation in our voices. I can see her in real time. It's not face to face, but it's pretty good for what our primate beings are sucking up, or at least it's much better than scrolling an Instagram feed or looking at a text thread. We just have to kind of build that in. But the problem, as we talked about is we have to get over that thing that we have kind of built in through these technologies of like, I got to call somebody and that feels awkward and it's kind of the startup cost. But I think remarkably, our norms changed really fast. I mean, even just for me personally, it felt those first Zoom calls are like, we're going to play trivia over Zoom friends. Felt a little like it's kind of weird. But within three weeks of doing it, that's just kind of how we connect. Now it becomes normal surprisingly quickly to use these technologies in these informal social ways. I want to recall something you just said about being other oriented and the payoffs of that. I mean, this is a very Buddhist concept. If you want to be happier. Help somebody else is essentially the algorithm. Or even just intend to help somebody else. Think positively about somebody else's. Wellbeing, and you'll find your gladden in your own mind. How do you think about that? And the larger framework in which people pursue that. So we can think about ethics and having some kind of actual conscious conception of the type of person one wants to be, the kinds of virtues one wants to actually live out in one's life. This is where so called self sacrifice becomes the wiser form of selfishness. If you really just want to be happy, if that's your goal, one fairly wide doorway into that is to be very rigorous about using your energy in a consciously prosocial way to improve the lives of others. So what do we know about all of that? Yeah, well, what we know is, I mean, the science suggests that, as usual, the Buddhists were right. All these ancient traditions wound up being confirmed by modern social science and neuroscience. But yeah, I mean, the Happiest folks tend to be, on average, the folks that give more to charity, even equated for income. The Happiest folks tend to be the ones that, on average, volunteer more of their time and are just kind of, as you said, kind of ethically oriented to kind of thinking about other people first. But I think this is another spot where our intuitions get it all wrong. If you look at any self help magazine or any article these days, especially during COVID-19, it's all about self help, self help, self care, treat yourself. This is Parks and Rec slogan that you need to be treating ourselves. I think. We think that when push comes to shove, the way to get out of a stressful situation is to become more inward oriented, like focus on what we ourselves think we need, hedonistically or in terms of our meaning and life and leisure and stuff like that. And the science suggests that that, again, is an intuition that's just incredibly wrong. There's some work by Liz Dunn and her colleagues that shows that spending money on yourself actually makes you less happy than spending money on other people. She does these lovely studies where she just walks up to somebody on a street and hands the money and tells the subjects how to spend it. And so half of the subjects are told spend the money on other people by the end of the day, and some of them are told spend the money on yourself by the end of the day. And what she finds is that the people who spend money on other people at the end of the day and even later on, like at the end of the week, are happier, self reported, are happier than those who spend the money on themselves. Nick Epley does work showing that that's not people's intuitions. She asks a different group of subjects which of these conditions would make you happier until subjects are in pretty strong agreement that they want the money for themselves. That's the kind of thing that would make them happier. And so I think it's one of these things that, like ethically and in terms of our religious commitments, those of us who are religious people kind of get that you're supposed to do nice stuff for others. But often people think about that in a like, well, that's to be a good person, it doesn't necessarily make me in the moment happier to do something nice for somebody else. It's kind of a sacrifice. Right. But in practice, what the science suggests is that that's wrong. If I'm having a really bad day at work, I shouldn't go off and buy myself a manicure. I should just get a gift card to give one of my co workers a manicure. And that intuition feels just wrong to me. Maybe it's the right thing to do or a noble thing to do or a very ethical thing to do. Like philosophers would be really proud of me. But I don't think that Laurie's own dopamine system is going to respond better to gifting that manicure than getting it myself. But that's actually what the data suggest. Yeah, this is where mindfulness can be very helpful because you can notice the hedonic bump when you do that sort of thing and it can become more and more vivid. And also you can notice the ways in which giving what in real terms is even more I mean, just like writing a check to an organization, there are ways to do that where you get very little hedonic reinforcement and there are ways to do that where you get much more. And it's interesting, the variables there, but it'd be great if there were a truly linear connection between doing good things in the world and moment to moment gratification. But there's definitely a connection. But it's just it requires some intelligent steering of your own attention to extract the reward that is there to be extracted. This circumstance of being in economic lockdown offers some unique opportunities to experience this. So I've noticed that anyone who is fairly well off in this situation who hasn't experienced an implosion economically and who can continue working really the low hanging fruit here ethically is to continue to support the people in one's life who, you know, are just being cratered by this change in the economy. So take somebody in a service role. The first person to come to mind for me was the woman who cuts my hair. I get a haircut, I don't know, once every six weeks or so. And I had to know that her business was more or less going to zero under these conditions. So very early on I had the thought, well, I'll just buy imaginary haircuts. There's no reason why she should suffer the fact that I can't physically get those haircuts. And just doing that. And a few things like that. I mean, it wasn't a list of 100 people like that in my life, but taking care of those people when I was truly sacrificing nothing to do it, that's some of the most pleasant experience I've had all month, just being able to do that. I would just argue it's a good thing to do. It's good for you and it's good for the world. Yeah, totally. I mean, I want to pick up on two points here. One is just I think you've kind of completely hit the nail on the head right there. I think this is COVID-19 is a time where we really feel like we don't have that agency, right? I mean, the maximally frustrating thing is, do you want to help? Just stay home and don't do anything. Like, just stay home. Like don't do anything. And you know, humans don't like that. We like to be causally effective in the world. And I think one way to be causally effective is just to be helping financially. If, again, you're in the privileged position to do that, all the people you would have normally helped financially anyway, and in some ways, as you said, there's no cost to it. That money was already spent. And I think that's an important framing for this time is that many of us are getting financial windfalls that we're not paying attention to. I'm not spending $4 on a latte every morning, which was my normal practice. Some of us are not paying the subway fare or the gas fare for our commutes. These are all tiny windfalls that lots of us are getting in so many domains during COVID-19. But we can pay those windfalls back to the people that need it right now. And even folks who are in not great financial positions because probably a lot of your listeners aren't in the same privileged position that you are to know that they still have a job. Some of them are working less hours or maybe even have lost their jobs and so on. Even those folks have a different windfall. They have a temporal windfall. They have time that they might not have had before. And again, the best use of time in terms of your well being is time spent on other people. So you can be making those calls to advocate for, say, more PPE for healthcare workers. You can make a call to an elderly neighbor to kind of check on how they are. And those kinds of ways of spending our money and our time during this crisis can have a huge impact on our wellbeing personally. But then also they're just like good for the world because we're like doing good stuff to protect the economy and protect the vulnerable folks during this crisis. But I also want to pick up on a second thing, which is this idea you mentioned that to notice the effect that your good actions have on your own psyche, you kind of have to be a little bit mindful. And I think this is really powerful. This is something that I think neuroscience is just beginning to understand, which is how we can use mindfulness to hack these bad intuitions that we have about stuff. Throughout this conversation, I've been saying we should be more social, but we don't realize that, and therefore, we don't do it. We should be nicer to other people, be more focused on other people, but we don't notice it, so we don't realize we should do it. Mindfulness, the research is starting to suggest, is one way to hack those things so that you can start to notice, hang on. When I actually do this, it feels nice. And that while it doesn't immediately change your intuitions, it can kind of change your reinforcement structure such that you start to realize what these things really look like. And this comes from some lovely work coming out of Hetty Cobra's Lab. She's a neuroscientist at Yale who uses mindfulness techniques to do all kinds of different therapeutic things, including working with addicts on their craving and so on. And it's a powerful technique because even in domains like an addict who has craving for, say, nicotine or heroin or something like that, the act of noticing what it's like afterwards can update these circuits that are getting the wanting wrong. One of the worst things about the mind, this is like one of the most shocking things I ever read in my early psychology training, was that there's this interesting disconnect in the brain between circuits that are involved in wanting and sort of craving and circuits that are involved in liking. And so the circuit that tells your body, hey, go out and crave this thing. Go get it. No matter what cost work, work really hard to get it. That's completely different from the circuit that's actually going to like the thing once you get it. And you can see these crazy dissociations, like in the case of addiction, where we can have incredible craving for something, work really hard to get it. Take the heroin addict who's addicted to heroin, but then when you finally get that reward, you don't actually like it that much. It's actually not even that rewarding. The heroin to an addicted heroin addict is just bringing you to baseline. It's not even that good anymore. And this, I feel like, is true in addictions, but it's so true in so many aspects of my life before I kind of started practicing meditation and mindfulness, where it's like there's all these things that my body wants me to go after all the time that I think is going to be really great because my crazy cravings super high for it. But then when I get it, I'm kind of like, if you actually notice, you're like, well, that wasn't that good. That kind of sucked, or, that didn't make me feel what I thought it was. Going to make me feel. And then there's stuff like we're talking about about doing nice things for others where at least for me, I don't necessarily have the craving for it. As I said, on a bad day, I'm not thinking, let me give a gift card for the manicure to my coworker. I'm thinking, let me get the manicure myself. But then actually, if you're mindful and you pay attention afterwards, you could notice even though the craving, the wanting wasn't that high, the liking is pretty good and it can cause you to start shifting your behaviors. So heddy is starting to do some real work on the actual neuroscience of this. Like what is it about this act of mindfully noticing that can then feedback on your behaviors? So you're kind of updating what desires you really do want to have over time. Yeah, that's fascinating. Mindfulness also can show you that desire doesn't have to be gratified to disappear. If you just become interested in desire itself as an object of consciousness and just become committed to witnessing it arise and persist for a time and then pass away, it will in fact pass away. And in many cases, obviously you can resurrect it again by focusing on the wanted object yet again. But you can sensitize yourself to this full time course of desires arising and subsiding and realize that there's nothing you have to do about it. It's almost like the abandoned shopping cart of the mind. We've all had this experience that you go to Zappos or whatever and you pick out a pair of shoes but then you think better of it and then those shoes follow you around for the rest of your life online. But you can abandon the shopping cart and it really can just disappear. Then one wonders, okay, well then what is the significance of gratifying any specific desire? And then on the other side, as you say, you can become more mindful of what it's like to gratify a desire. And if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely fairly unlistener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. No housekeeping today. Apart from mentioning that big things are happening over at Waking Up, we have redesigned the app and I'm really happy with the result. Props to the team over there at Waking Up and many good things happening on that front that I'm excited about. Okay, well, today I'm releasing a podcast that we originally aired a few years ago. This is with Annel Seth, a quite celebrated neuroscientist, and this was a really good conversation on consciousness that runs to 3 hours. Anniele has a new book out available today titled Being You a New Science of Consciousness. And I have not yet read the book. He was beginning to write it when we last spoke, but I'm told it's fantastic and it has received wonderful reviews and been endorsed by many smart people david Eagleman, Nicholas Humphrey, Alex Garland, the director of the film ex Machina, Sean Carroll, Nigel Warburton, and it's been endorsed by none other than my wife, Anika Harris. So anyway, I look forward to reading it. I really enjoyed this conversation with Annel. He remains a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex and the co director of the Sackler Center for Consciousness Science. And with that, I give you anil Seth. I am here with anil Seth. Annel, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thanks for inviting me. It's a pleasure. I think I first discovered you I believe I had seen your name associated with various papers, but I think I first discovered you the way many people had after your Ted Talk. You gave a much loved Ted Talk. Perhaps you can briefly describe your scientific and intellectual background. Quite a varied background, actually. I mean, I think my intellectual interest has always been in understanding the physical and biological basis of consciousness and what practical implications that might have in neurology and psychiatry. But when I was an undergrad student at Cambridge in the early 1990s, consciousness was certainly as a student then and then in a place like Cambridge, not a thing you could study scientifically. It was still very much the domain of philosophy. And I was still at that time, I still had this kind of idea that physics was going to be the way to solve every difficult problem in science and philosophy. So I started off studying physics, but then through the undergrad years, I got diverted towards psychology as more of a direct route to these, these issues of great interest, and ended up graduating with a degree in experimental psychology. After that, I moved to Sussex University, where I am now actually again to do a master's and a PhD in computer science and AI. And this was partly because of the need, I felt, the time to move beyond these box and arrow models of cognition that were so dominating psychology and and cognitive science in the 90s towards something that had more explanatory power and the rise of connectionism. And all these these new methods and and tools in AI seemed to provide that. So I stayed at Sussex and did a PhD actually in an area which is now called Artificial Life, and I became quite diverted, actually. Ended up doing a lot of stuff in ecological modeling and thinking a lot more here about how brains, bodies and environments interact and co construct cognitive processes. But I sort of left consciousness behind a little bit then. And so when I finished my PhD in two thousand s, I went to San Diego to the Neuroscience Institute to work with Gerald Abelman, because certainly then San Diego was one of the few places, certainly, that I knew of at the time that you could legitimately study consciousness and work on the neural basis of consciousness. Edelman was there, francis Crick was across the road at the Salk Institute. People were really doing this stuff there. So I stayed there for about six years and finally started working on consciousness, but bringing together all these different traditions of math, physics, computer science, as well as the tools of cognitive neuroscience. And then for the last ten years, I've been back at Sussex, where I've been running a lab, and it's it's called the Sacla Center for Consciousness Science. And it's one of the the growing number of labs that are explicitly dedicated to solving or studying at least the brain and biological basis of consciousness. Yeah, well, that's a wonderful pedigree. I've heard stories, and I never met Edelman. I've read his books, and I'm familiar with his work on consciousness, but he was famously a titanic ego, if I'm not mistaken. I don't want you to say anything you're not comfortable with, but everyone who I've ever heard have an encounter with Edelman was just amazed at how much space he personally took up in the conversation. I've heard that, too, and I think there's some truth to that. What I can say from the other side is that when I worked for him and with him, firstly, it was an incredible experience, and I felt very lucky to have that experience because he had a large ego. But he also knew a lot, too. He really had been around and had contributed to major revolutions in biology and neuroscience, but he treated the people he worked with I think, often very kindly. And one of the things that was very clear in San Diego at the time, he didn't go outside of the Neurosciences Institute that much. It was very much his empire. But when you were within it, you got a lot of his time. So I remember many occasions just being in the office, and most days I would be called down for a discussion with Edelman about this subject or that subject, or this new paper or that new paper. And that was a very instructive experience for me. I know he was quite difficult in many interviews and conversations outside the NSI, which is a shame. I think it would cause his legacy really is pretty extraordinary. I'm sure we'll get on to this later. But one of the other reasons I went there was one of the main reasons I went there was because I'd read some of the early work on dynamic core theory, which has later become Giulio Tanoni's very prominent integrated information theory. And I was under the impression that Giulioni was still going to be there when I got there in 2001. But he hadn't. He he left, and he wasn't really speaking much with Edelman at the time. And it was a shame that they didn't continue their interaction. And when we tried to organize Festriff, the few of us, for Edelman some years ago now, it was quite difficult to get the people together that had really been there and worked with him at various times of his career. I think of the people that have gone through the NSI and worked with Abelman, there are extraordinary range of people who've contributed huge amounts, not just in consciousness research, but in neuroscience generally, and of course, in molecular biology before that. So it was a great year, great experience for me. But, yeah, I know he could also be pretty difficult at times, too. He had to have a pretty thick skin. So we have a massive interest in common. No doubt we have many others, but consciousness is really the center of the bullseye, as far as my interests go, and really, as far as anyone's interests go, if they actually think about it, it really is the most important thing in the universe because it's the basis of all of our happiness and suffering and everything we value. It's the space in which anything that matters can matter. So the fact that you are studying it and thinking about it as much as you are just makes you the perfect person to talk to. I think we should start with many of the usual starting points here, because I think they're the usual starting points for a reason. Let's start with a definition of consciousness. How do you define it? Now, I think it's kind of a challenge to define consciousness. There's a sort of easy folk definition, which is that consciousness is the presence of any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. For a conscious organism. There is a phenomenal world of subjective experience that has the character of being private, that's full of perceptual, qualia or content, colors, shapes, beliefs, emotions, other kinds of feeling states. There is a world of experience that can go away completely. In states like general anaesthesia or dreamless sleep. It's very easy to define it that way. To define it more technically is always going to be a bit of a challenge. And I think sometimes there's too much emphasis put on having a consensus technical definition of something like consciousness because history of science has shown us many times that definitions evolve along with our scientific understanding of a phenomenon. We don't sort of take the definition and then transcribe it into scientific knowledge in a unidirectional way. So so long as we're not talking past each other and we agree that consciousness picks out a very significant phenomenon in nature, which is the presence of subjective experience, then I think we're on reasonably safe terrain. Many of these definitions of consciousness are circular. We're just substituting another word for consciousness in the definition like sentience or awareness or subjectivity or even something like qualia, I think is parasitic on the undefined concept of consciousness. I think that's right. But then there's also a lot of confusions people make too. So I'm always surprised by how often people confuse consciousness with self consciousness. And I think conscious experience of selfhood are part of conscious experiences as a whole, but only a subset of those experiences. And then there are arguments about whether there's such a thing as phenomenal consciousness that's different from access consciousness, where phenomenal consciousness refers to this impression that we have of a very rich conscious scene, perhaps envisioned before us now that might exceed what we have cognitive access to. Other people will say, well, no, there's no such thing as phenomenal consciousness beyond access consciousness. So there's a certain circularity. I agree with you there. But there are also these important distinctions that can lead to a lot of confusion. When we're discussing the relevance of certain experiments. I want to just revisit the point you just made about not transcribing a definition of a concept that we have into our science as a way of capturing reality. And there are things about which we have a full psychological sense which completely break apart once you start studying them at the level of the brain. So something like memory, for instance, we have the sense that it's one thing intuitively, you know, pre scientifically, we have the sense that to remember something, whatever it is, is more or less the same operation regardless of what it is. Remembering what you ate for dinner last night, remembering your name, remembering who the first president of the United States was, remembering how to swing a tennis racket. These are things that we have this one word for. But we know neurologically that they're quite distinct operations, and you can disrupt one and have the other intact. The promise has been that consciousness may be something like that, that we could be similarly confused about it, although I don't think we can be. I think consciousness is unique as a concept in this sense, and this is why I'm taken in more by the so called hard problem of consciousness than I think you are. I think we should talk about that, but before we do, I think the definition that I want to put in play, which I know you're quite familiar with, is the one that the philosopher Thomas Nagel put forward, which is that consciousness is the fact that it's like something to be a system, whatever that system is. So if a bat is conscious this comes from his famous essay what is It Like to Be a Bat? If a bat is conscious, whether or not we can understand what it's like to be a bat, if it is like something to be a bat, that is consciousness. In the case of a bat, however inscrutable it might be, however impossible it might be to map that experience onto our own, if we were to trade places with a bat that would not be synonymous with the lights going out, there is something that's like to be a bat. If a bat is conscious. That definition, though, it's really not one that is easy to operationalize and it's not a technical definition. There's something sufficiently rudimentary about that that it has always worked for me. And when we begin to move away from that definition into something more technical, my experience has been and we'll get to this as we go into the details, that the danger is always that we wind up changing the subject to something else that seems more tractable. We're no longer talking about consciousness in Nagal's sense. We're talking about attention. We're talking about reportability or mere access or something. So how do you feel about Nagal's definition as a starting point? I like it very much as a starting point. I think it's pretty difficult to argue with that as a very basic, fundamental expression of what we mean by consciousness in the round. So I think that's fine. I partly disagree with you. I partly disagree with you. I think, when we think about the idea that consciousness might be more than one thing, and here I'm much more sympathetic to the view that heuristically at least the best way to scientifically study consciousness and philosophically, to think about it as well, is to recognize that we might be misled about the extent to which we experience consciousness as a unified phenomenon. And there's a lot of mileage in recognizing how just like the example for memory, recognizing how conscious experiences of the world and of the self can come apart in various different ways. Just to be clear, actually, I agree with you there. We'll get into that. But I completely agree with you there that we could be misled about how unified consciousness is. The thing that's irreducible to me is this difference between there being something that it's like and not the lights are on or they're not. There are many different ways in which the lights can be on in ways that would surprise us. Or, for instance, it's quite possible that the lights are on in our brains in more than one spot. We'll talk about split brain research, perhaps, but there are very counterintuitive ways the lights could be on. But just the question is always, is there something that it's like to be that bit of information processing or that bit of matter? And that is always the cash value of a claim for consciousness. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think that it's perfectly reasonable to put the question in this way, that for a conscious organism, it is something like it is to be that organism. And the thought is that there's going to be some physical, biological informational basis to that distinction. Now, you've written about why we really don't need to waste much time on the hard problem. Let's remind people what the hard problem is. David Chalmers has been on the podcast, and I've spoken about it with other people, but perhaps you want to introduce us to The Hard Problem briefly. The hard problem has been, rightly so, one of the most influential philosophical contributions to the consciousness of debate for for the last 20 years or so. And it goes right back to Descartes. And I think it encapsulates this fundamental mystery that that we've started talking about now, that for some physical systems, there is also this inner universe. There is the presence of conscious experience. There is something it is like to be that system. But for other systems tables, chairs, probably most computers, probably all computers these days, there is nothing it is like to be that system. And what the hard problem does, it pushes that intuition a bit further, and it distinguishes itself from the easy problem in neuroscience. And the easy problem, according to Chalmers, is to figure out how the brain works in all its functions, in all its detail. So to figure out how we do perception, how we utter certain linguistic phrases, how we move around the world adaptively, how the brain supports perception, cognition, behavior in all its richness, in a way that would be indistinguishable from and here's the key, really, in a way that would be indistinguishable from an equivalent that had no phenomenal properties at all, that completely lacked conscious experience. The hard problem is understanding how and why any solution to the easy problem, any explanation of how the brain does what it does in terms of behavior, perception and so on, how and why any of this should have anything to do with conscious experiences at all. And it rests on this idea of the conceivability of zombies. And this is one reason I don't really like it very much. Hard problem has its conceptual power over us, because it asks us to imagine systems, philosophical zombies, that are completely equivalent in terms of their function and behavior to you or to me, or to any or to a conscious bat. But that instantiate, no phenomenal properties at all. The lights are completely off for these philosophical zombies. And if we can imagine such a system, if we can imagine such a thing, a philosophical zombie, you or me, then it does become this enormous challenge. You think, well, then what is it? Or what could it be about real me, real you, real conscious bad that gives rise, that requires or entails that there are also these phenomenal properties, that there is something it is like to be you or me or the bad? And it's because Charmers would argue that such things are conceivable that the hard problem seems like a really huge problem. Now, I think this is a little bit of we've moved on a little bit from these conceivability arguments. Firstly, I just think that they're pretty weak. And the more you know about a system, the more we know about the easy problem, the less convincing it is to imagine a zombie alternative. Think about you're a kid, you look up at the sky and you see a seven four seven flying overhead, and somebody asks you to imagine a seven four seven flying backwards. Well, you can imagine a seven four seven flying backwards. But the more you learn about aerodynamics, about engineering, the harder it is to conceive of a seven four seven flying backwards. You simply can't build one that way. And that's my worry about this kind of conceivability argument that to me, I really don't think I can imagine in a serious way the existence of a philosophical zombie. And if I can't imagine a zombie, then the hard problem loses some of its force. That's interesting. I don't think it loses all of its force, or at least it doesn't for me. For me, the hard problem has never really rested on the zombie argument, although I know Chalmers did a lot with the zombie argument. So let's just stipulate that philosophical zombies are impossible. They're at least what's called in the jargon nomologically impossible. It's just a fact that we live in a universe where if you built something that could do what I can do, that something would be conscious. So there is no zombie sam that's possible. And let's just also add what you just said, that really when you get to the details, you're not even conceiving of it being possible. It's not even conceptually possible. You're not thinking it through enough. And if you did, you would notice it break apart. But for me, the hard problem is really that with consciousness, any explanation doesn't seem to promise the same sort of intuitive closure that other scientific explanations do. It's analogous to whatever it is, and we'll get to some of the possible explanations, but it's not like something like life, which is an analogy that you draw that many scientists have drawn to how we can make a breakthrough here. It used to be that people thought life could never be explained in mechanistic terms. There was a philosophical point of view called vitalism here which suggested that you needed some animating spirit, some elan. Vital in the wheel works to make sense of the fact that living systems are different from dead ones, the fact that they can reproduce and repair themselves from injury and metabolize and all the functions we see a living system engage which define what it is to be alive. It was thought very difficult to understand any of that in mechanistic terms and then, lo and and behold, we managed to do that. The difference for me is, and I'm happy to have you prop up this analogy more than I have, but the difference for me is that everything you want to say about life, with the exception of conscious life, we have to leave consciousness off the table here. Everything else you want to say about life can be defined in terms of extrinsic functional relationships among material parts, so reproduction and growth and healing and metabolism and homeostasis all of this is physics and need not be described in any other way. And even something like perception. The transduction of energy, let's say vision, light energy into electrical and chemical energy in the brain and the mapping of a visual space onto a visual cortex. All of that makes sense in mechanistic physical terms until you add this piece of oh, but for some of these processes, there's something that it's like to be that process. For me that it just strikes me as a false analogy. And with or without zombies, the hard problem still stays hard. I think it's an open question whether the analogy will turn out to be false or not. It's it's difficult for us now to put ourselves back in the mindset of somebody 80 years ago, 100 years ago, when vitalism was quite prominent and whether the sense of mystery surrounding something that was alive seemed to be as inexplicable as consciousness seems to us today. So it's easy to say with hindsight, I think, that life is something different. But we've encountered, or rather scientists and philosophers over centuries have encountered things that have seemed to be explicable, that have turned out to be explicable. So I don't think we should rule out a priority that there's going to be something really different this time about consciousness. There's, I think a more a heuristic aspect to this is that if we if we run with the analogy of life, what that leads us to do is to isolate the different phenomenal properties that co constitute what it is for us to be conscious. We can think about, and we'll come to this, I'm sure we think about conscious selfhood as distinct from conscious perception of the outside world. We can think about conscious experiences of volition and of agency that are also very sort of central to certainly our experience of self. These give us phenomenological explanatory targets that we can then try to account for with particular kinds of mechanisms. It may turn out at the end of doing this that there's some residue, there is still something that is fundamentally puzzling, which is this hard problem residue. Why are there any lights on for any of these kinds of things? Isn't it all just perception? But maybe it won't turn out like that. And I think to give us the best chance of it not turning out like that, there's a positive and a negative aspect. The positive aspect is that we need to retain a focus on phenomenology. And this is another reason why I think the hard easy problem distinction can be a little bit unhelpful. Because in addressing the easy problem, we are basically instructed to not worry about phenomenology. All we should worry about is function and behavior. And then the hard problem kind of gathers within its remit everything to do with phenomenology. In the central mystery of why is there some experience rather than no experience, the alternative approach, and this is something I've kind of caricatured as the real problem, but David Chalmers himself has called it the mapping problem. And Varela. Francisco Varella talks about a similar set of ideas with his neurophenomenology is to not try to solve the hard problem to court, not try to explain how it is possible that consciousness comes to be part of the universe, but rather to individuate different kinds of phenomenological properties and draw some explanatory mapping between neural, biological, physical mechanisms and these phenomenological properties. Now, once we've done that, and we can begin to explain not why is there an experience at all, but why are certain experiences the way they are and not other ways? And we can predict when certain experiences will have particular phenomenal, characters and so on, then we'll have done a lot more than we can currently do. And we may have to make use of novel kinds of conceptual frameworks. Maybe frameworks like information processing will run their course and will require other more sophisticated kinds of descriptions of dynamics and probability in order to build these explanatory bridges. So I think we can get a lot closer. And the negative aspect is why should we ask more of a theory of consciousness than we should ask of other kinds of scientific theories? And I know people have talked about this on your podcast before as well, but we do seem to want more of an explanation of consciousness than we would do of an explanation in biology or physics that it somehow should feel intuitively right to us. And I wonder why this is such a big deal when it comes to consciousness. Because we're trying to explain something fundamental about ourselves doesn't necessarily mean that we should apply different kinds of standards to an explanation that we would apply in other fields of science. It just may not be that we get this feeling that something is intuitively correct when it is, in fact in fact a very good scientific account of the origin of phenomenal properties. Certainly I mean, certainly scientific explanations are not instantiations. There's no sense in which a good theory of consciousness should be expected to suddenly realize the phenomenal properties that it's explaining. But also, I think we do I worry that we ask too much of theories of consciousness this way. Yeah, well, we'll move forward into the details and I'll just flag moments where I feel like the hard problem should be causing problems for us. I do think it's not a matter of asking too much of a theory of consciousness here. I think there are very few areas in science where the accepted explanation is totally a brute fact which just has to be accepted because it is the only explanation that works. But it's not something that actually illuminates the transition from atoms to some higher level phenomenon. Say again? For everything we could say about life, even the very strange details of molecular biology just how information in the genome gets out and creates the rest of a human body it still runs through. When you look at the details, it's surprising. That part is difficult to visualize. But the more we visualize it, the more we describe it, the closer we get to something that is highly intuitive. Even something like the flow of water. The fact that water molecules in its liquid state are loosely bound and move past one another. Well, that seems exactly like what should be happening at the micro level so as to explain the macro level property of the wetness of water and the fact that it has characteristics, higher level characteristics that you can't attribute to atoms but you can attribute to collections of atoms like turbulence, say. Whereas if consciousness just happens to require some minimum number of information processing units knit together in a certain configuration firing at a certain hertz and you change any of those parameters and the lights go out. That, for me, still seems like a mere brute fact that doesn't explain consciousness. It's just a correlation that we decide is the crucial one. And I've never heard a description of consciousness of the sort that we will get to like integrated information, tanoni's phrase that unpacks it. Any more than that, and you can react to that. But then I think we should just get into the details and see how it all sounds. Sure. I'll just react very briefly, which is that I think I'd also be terribly disappointed. If you look at the answer in a book of nature and it turned out to be, yes, you need 612,000 neurons wired up in a small world network and that's it. That does seem, of course, ridiculous and arbitrary and unsatisfying. The hope. Is that as we progress beyond, if you like, just brute correlates of conscious states towards accounts that provide more satisfying bridges between mechanism and phenomenology that explain, for instance, why a visual experience has the phenomenal character that it has and not some other kind of phenomenal character like an emotion, that it won't seem so arbitrary. And that as we follow this route, which is an empirically productive route and I think that's important, that we can actually do science with this route. We can try to think about how to operationalize phenomenon in various different ways. Very difficult to think how to do science and just solve the hard problem head on. At the end of that. I completely agree. There might be still this residue of mystery, this kernel of something fundamental left unexplained. But I don't think we can take that as a given. Because I certainly can't predict what I would feel as intuitively satisfying when I don't know what the explanations that bridge mechanism and phenomenology are going to look like in ten or 20 years time. We've already moved further from just saying it's this area or that area to synchrony, which is still kind of unsatisfying, to now, I think, some emerging frameworks like predictive processing and integrated information, which aren't completely satisfying either, but they hinted a trajectory where we're beginning to draw closer connections between mechanism and phenomenology. Okay, well, let's dive into those hints. But before we do, I'm just wondering phylogenetically, in terms of comparing ourselves to socalled lower animals, where do you think consciousness emerges? Do you think there's something that's like to be a fly, say, that's a really hard problem. I mean, it's I have to be agnostic about this. And again, it's just striking how people in general's views on these things seems to have changed over the last recent decades. It seems completely unarguable to me that all other mammals have conscious experiences of one sort or another. I mean, we share so much in the way of the relevant neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology exhibits so many of the same behaviors that it would be remarkable to claim otherwise. It actually wasn't that long ago that you could still hear people say that consciousness was so dependent on language that they wondered whether human infants were conscious, to say nothing of dogs and anything else that's not human. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, that's a terrific point. And this idea that consciousness was intimately and constitutively bound up with language or with higher order executive processing of one sort or another, I think just exemplifies this really pernicious anthropocentrism that we tend to bring to bear sometimes without realizing it. We think we're super intelligent, we think we're conscious, we're smart, and we need to judge everything by that benchmark. And what's the what's the most advanced thing about humans? Well, you know, if you're if you're gifted with language, you're going to say language. And it now already with a bit of hindsight, seems to me, anyway, rather remarkable that people should make these. I can only think of them as just quite naive errors to associate consciousness with language. Not to say that consciousness and language don't have any intimate relation. I think they do. Language shapes a lot of our conscious experiences. But certainly it's a very, very poor criterion with which to attribute subjective states to other creatures. So mammals for sure. I mean, mammals for sure, right? But that's easy because they're pretty similar to humans and primates being mammals. But then it gets more complicated. And you think about birds diverge a reasonable amount of time ago but still have brain structures that one can establish analogies, in some cases homologies with mammalian brain structures and in some species, scrub jays and corvids generally. Pretty sophisticated behavior too. It seems very possible to me that birds have conscious experiences and I'm aware underlying all this. The only basis to make these judgments is in light of what we know about the neural mechanisms underlying consciousness and the functional and behavioral properties of consciousness in mammals has to be this kind of slow extrapolation because we lack the mechanistic answer and we can't look for it in another species. But then you get beyond birds and you get out to I then like to go way out on a phylogenetic branch to the octopus, which I think is an extraordinary example of convergent evolution. They're very smart, they have a lot of neurons, but they diverged from the human line, I think as long ago as sponges or something like that. I mean, really very little in common, but they have incredible differences too. Three hearts, eight legs, arms. I'm never sure whether it's a leg or an arm that behaves semiautonomously and one is left when you spend time with these creatures. I've been lucky enough to spend a week with them in a lab in Naples. You certainly get the impression of another conscious presence there, but of a very different one. And this is also instructive because it brings us a little bit out of this assumption that we can fall into that there is one way of being conscious, and that's our way. There is a huge space of possible minds out there and the octopus is a very definite example of a very different mind and very likely conscious mind too. Now, when we get down to not really down, I don't like this idea of organisms being arranged on a single scale like this. But certainly creatures like fish, insects are simpler in all sorts of ways than mammals. And here it's really very difficult to know where to draw the line, if indeed there is a line to be drawn, if it's not just a gradual shading out of consciousness with gray areas in between and no categorical divide, which I think is equally possible. Many fish display behaviors which seem suggestive of consciousness. They will self administer analgesia when they're given painful stimulation, they will avoid places that have been associated with painful stimulation and so on. Here things like the precautionary principle come into play that given that suffering, if it exists, conscious suffering is a very aversive state, and it's ethically wrong to impose that state on other creatures. We should tend to assume that creatures are conscious unless we have good evidence that they're not. So we should put the bar a little bit lower in most cases. Let's talk about some of the aspects of consciousness that you have identified as being distinct. There are at least three. You've spoken about the level of consciousness, the contents of consciousness, and the experience of having a conscious self that many people, as you said, conflate with consciousness as a mental property. There's obviously a relationship between these things, but they're not the same. Let's start with this notion of the level of consciousness, which really isn't the same thing as wakefulness. Can you break those apart for me? How is being conscious, non synonymous with being awake in the human sense? Sure. Let me just first amplify what you said, that in making these distinctions, I'm certainly not claiming pretending that these dimensions of level content and self pick out completely independent aspects of conscious experiences. There are lots of interdependencies. I just think they're heuristically useful ways to address the issue. We can do different kinds of experiments and try to isolate distinct phenomenal properties and their mechanistic basis by making these distinctions. Now, when it comes to conscious level, I think that the simplest way to think of this is is more or less as a scale. In this case, it's from when the lights are completely out, when you're dead, brain death, or under general anaesthesia, or perhaps in very, very deep states of sleep all the way up to vague levels of awareness which are similar, which correlate with with wakefulness. So when you're very drowsy to vivid awake, alert, full conscious experience that I'm certainly having now feel very awake and alert. And my conscious level is kind of up there. Now, in most cases, the level of consciousness articulated this way will go along with wakefulness or physiological arousal. When you fall asleep, you lose consciousness, at least in early stages. But there are certain cases that exist which show that they're not completely the same thing on both sides. So you can be conscious when you're asleep. Of course, we know this. This is called dreaming. So you're physiologically asleep, but you're having a vivid inner life there and on the other side. And this is where consciousness science, the rubber of consciousness science, hits the road of neurology. You have states where, behaviorally, you have what looks like what looks like arousal. This used to be called the vegetative state. It's been kind of renamed several times. Now, the wakeful unawareness state where the idea is that the body is still going through physiological cycles of arousal from sleep to wake, but there is no consciousness happening at all. The lights are not on. So these two things can be separated and it's a very productive and very important line of work to try to isolate what's the mechanistic basis of conscious level independently from the mechanistic basis of physiological arousal. Yeah. And a few other distinctions to make here. So also general anesthesia is quite distinct from deep sleep just as a matter of neurophysiology. Certainly general anesthesia is nothing like sleep, certainly deep levels of general anesthesia. So whenever you go for an operation and the anesthesiologist is trying to make you feel more comfortable by just saying something like yeah, we'll just put you to sleep for a while and then you'll wake up and we'll be done, they are lying to you for good reason. It's kind of nice just to feel that you're going to sleep for a bit. But the state of general anesthesia is very different and for very good reason. If you were just put into a state of sleep, you would wake up as soon as the operation started and that wouldn't be very pleasant. It's surprising how far down you can take people in general anesthesia almost to a level of isoelectric brain activity where there is pretty much nothing going on at all and still bring them back. Many people now have had the non experience of general anesthesia. And in some weird way, I now look forward to it the next time I get to have this, because it's a reassuring experience, because there is absolutely nothing. It's complete oblivion. When you go to sleep as well, you can sleep for a while and you'll wake up and you might be confused about how much time has passed, especially if you've just flown across some time zones or stayed up too late, something like that. You know, might not be sure what time it is, but you'll still have this sense of some time having passed. Except we have this problem, or some people have this problem of anesthesia awareness, which is every person's worst nightmare if they care to think about it, where people have the experience of the surgery because for whatever reason the anesthesia hasn't taken them deep enough and yet they're immobilized and can't signal that they're not deep enough. No, absolutely. But I mean, that's a failure of anesthesia. It's not a characteristic of the anesthetic state. Do you know who had that experience? You've mentioned him on the podcast. Really? Francisco Varella. Oh, really? I didn't know that. I did not know that. Yeah, Francisco is getting a liver transplant and experienced some part of it. Well, that's pretty horrific. Could not have been fun. Yeah, I mean, of course, because the thing there is under most serious operations, you're also administered with a muscle paralytic so that you don't jerk around when you're being operated on. And that's why it's particularly nightmare scenario. But if anesthesia is working properly certainly the times I've had Joe anesthesia, you start counting to ten or start counting backwards from ten, you get to about eight, and then instantly you're back somewhere else, very confused, very disoriented, but there is no sense of time having passed. It's just complete oblivion. And that I found that really reassuring because you we can think conceptually about not being bothered about all the times we were not conscious before we were born, and therefore we shouldn't worry too much about all the times we're not going to be conscious after we die. But to experience these moments of complete oblivion during a lifetime, or rather the edges of them, I think is a very enlightening kind of experience to have. Although there's a place here where the hard problem does emerge because it's very difficult, perhaps impossible, to distinguish between a failure of memory and oblivion. Has consciousness really been interrupted? Take anesthesia and deep sleep as separate but similar in the sense that most people think there was a hiatus in consciousness. I'm prepared to believe that that's not true of deep sleep, but we just don't remember what it's like to be deeply asleep. I'm someone who often doesn't remember his dreams, and I'm prepared to believe that I dream every night. And we know even in the case with general anesthesia, they give amnesia drugs so that you won't remember whatever they don't want you to remember. And I recently had the experience of not going under a full anesthesia but having what's called a twilight sleep for a procedure. And there was a whole period afterwards where I was coming to about a half hour that I don't remember, and it was clear to my wife that I wasn't going to remember it, but she and I were having a conversation. I was talking to her about something. I was saying how perfectly recovered I was and how miraculous it was to be back. And she said, yeah, but you're not going to remember any of this. You're not going to remember this conversation. And I said, okay, well, let's test it. You say something now and we'll see if I remember it. And she said, this is the test, dummy. You're not going to remember this part of the conversation, and I have no memory of that part of the conversation. You're right, of course, that even in stages of deep sleep, people underestimate the presence of conscious experiences. And this has been demonstrated by experiments called serial awakening experiments, where you just wake somebody up at various times during sleep cycles and ask them straight away what was in your mind. Quite often, people if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs. The conversations I've been having on the waking up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed feed, and we'll only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, no housekeeping today. Today I'm presenting a conversation originally recorded for the Waking Up app. And while podcast subscribers already get access to those conversations through my website, it seems to me that this episode might be of more general interest. So I'm releasing it now on the main podcasting feed. Today I'm speaking with David White. David is a poet and the author of ten books of poetry, along with four books of prose. And he holds a degree in marine zoology and has traveled very widely and has, as you'll hear, a sensibility that is quite relevant to questions of awareness, the nature of the self, what it means to live an examined life, and other topics that are central to my concerns here. It really was a great pleasure to speak with him, and he has a wonderful voice. So now I bring you David White. I am here with David White. David, thank you for joining me. It's a pleasure. So I recently discovered you. I was actually at the Ted conference where you spoke a couple of years ago, but I think I was not in your session and just heard echoes of the effect you had on the rest of the crowd, which was quite positive. And then I subsequently saw that talk when it came online and I don't know, saw another place where you were speaking and reading, and now have read one of your recent nonfiction books, your prose books, The Three Marriages, which I want to talk about. But you're primarily a poet. And so just to begin, can you describe how you view your career as a writer and some of the other things you're doing? Because I know you're not just working as a writer, you also work with organizations, and you have an interesting way of interfacing with the world. So tell me what you're up to. Yes, I suppose there's two ways of looking at my way as a writer. One is looking back on it and looking at the astonishing journey. One is the frontier that I'm on now. And I've always seen poetry intimately connected to good thinking. There's a tendency to think that poetry is on the arts side and therefore you leave your strategic mind at the door. But it's actually good. Poetry is very practical in looking at the phenomenology of the conversation of life in other words, what happens along the way when you try to deepen that exchange. And Colridge said, no poet begins in philosophy or they write very bad poetry and it's very true but he also then said, but every port becomes a philosopher. Interesting. And so, yes, the practice of verbal acuity connected to listening and visual acuity starts to read you for larger and larger understandings. And I suppose the work of the poet is to invite create language that invites everyone else into that understanding at the same time in a beautiful way, actually not just a quididian mechanical way but in a way that actually enriches you as you enter the experience. You have a background in, is it marine zoology? I do indeed. I had a ten year excursion into sciences from when I was 17 to 27 or so, and I worked as a guide in a naturalist gianathovalista in the Ecuadorian National Park System in Galapagos and felt like I actually experienced all of my ambitions being fulfilled and left Galapagus wondering what I would do for the rest of my life. Really? And that's when the return to you could say that the states of attention that I experienced in Galapagus also began restarted my poetic career because I've written poetry since I was six or seven years old, probably under the influence of my Irish mother. And then I wrote seriously through my teens until I was 17 or 18, when my sciences overwhelmed my time for writing. And it was good to have that hiatus. But when I was in Galapagos I started to understand that there were five different levels of attention that I could identify. Of course, there are many, many more the Tibetans have gradations of hundreds of them but there were five that I could identify and I noticed that the deeper my level of attention for the world, the more that my identity as a person actually changed and also deepened and widened. And you could say that I started to understand that a person's identity didn't depend on their inherited beliefs and I've always felt actually that a person's beliefs are the least interesting thing about them, actually would that most people realize that? Exactly, yes. And that your identity actually depends more on how much your attention you're paying to things that are unpeople, that are other than you. And of course, you are in a discipline here of interviewing, which is a real discipline of listening to those that are other than you. Yeah, I've begun to say that really our true wealth is not even in the coin of time. It really is its cash value is in what we do with our attention because we all know what it's like to guard our time and then to squander it by misusing our attention. So really your life becomes the substance of it moment to moment. It becomes what you do with your attention yes. And with regard to your metaphors with time, the great thing about the deeper and deeper states of attention lead you into the timeless and the untrammelled. Because we have all this surface language around time that we will kill time as if it that would be possible. As if we could make time as if that would be possible. And we have all kinds of language which actually doesn't bear examination when you apply it to time. I think one of the reasons poetry is so coming to the fore in the world of instagram and the falling away of our previous structures is its invitation into the timeless and the untrammelled. We have so many children in the developed world who are bullied into their adulthood just by the way that we educate them and the amount of coercion around learning. And there's something about portrait that allows you to have your own language and that sets you free. Do you have a background in meditation or any Contemplative tradition, like in Buddhism? You just mentioned Tibetan Buddhism. So what's your background there in Eastern or Western spiritual traditions? Well, my first background was spending an enormous amount of time by myself out in the woods and fields and hills of Yorkshire, where I grew up in the north of England. I had a kind of wordsworthy in childhood. I had a very fierce education, too, in kind of the last gasp of the old classical world, classical teaching. But we had marvelous countryside around where I grew, and I spent a lot of time alone there and listening and watching. And I was always entranced by landscapes. So that was my first introduction. And then I started when I was at university to get really interested in the more esoteric forms of meditation. And I tried all kinds of things myself. When I think back, it was quite draw what I was turning my mind to. But then I discovered Zen sitting in Zen teachers, and I sat Zen quite seriously for many years with very serious teachers. And so I feel like that has stood me in good stead, actually, over the years. Even though I don't have a Zen teacher now. I feel it like it's in my body somehow. And what about psychedelics? Did you have a phase or are you in a phase now where you have used the pharmacological advantages of I did have a phase, yes, I did, and I found them very helpful. Which did you take? Well, I was in South America, and so I had experiences with the various forms of mushrooms and then with ecstasy. And my first experience was one that was really, really rejuvenating, and that was with LSD when I was at university. And I hadn't realized until I took it and had that experience that and it was just one experience, actually, towards the end of my time at university. But I hadn't realized how much I'd been mourning my childhood and my childhood visions or vision, I should say, of the world. And that experience on LSD really restored the bridge between the young man I was becoming and the child that I had been. So that was really remarkable. I'm very thankful to it. So I've never been a drug taker, but every now and again I've had these threshold moments which have deepened my experience. Whenever I have taken anything, I've always just wanted to be alone, actually. So I often find company quite distracting. No matter how much fun you might be having, I always feel this incredible invitation to the underground to grounding it in my body and grounding it in understandings and insights. So I'll most often just take off by myself, walking. Nice. Was that before you got into Zen practice? Yes. And a couple of experiences after in parallel. Yeah. Well, I know wherever you speak I did not have a words worthy in childhood to be called back to. But still the vividness of the natural world is available on the other side of many of those compounds. Exactly. Yeah. So, actually, let's start off with a poem. I'd like you to read The Bell and the Blackbird because this is one of these poems where the connection between your work and paying careful attention to the world and the subsequent changes in one's consciousness when one does that is so obvious. So maybe you could give us that. I will. I'll recite it. I have it in my memory, actually. And just a little context for this. The poem is called as you said, it's called The Bell and the Blackbird. And it's really the inherited understanding in the Irish tradition. You could say the Celtic tradition, but particularly in the Irish tradition that human beings are constantly choosing too early in the conversation that the strategic mind throws up these black and white and binary questions because that's the only way it can approach things. But almost always the way forward is actually holding them both together or the way between things. And the image here is of a meme in the Irish tradition which occurs again and again of a monk in the old Irish church which had a tremendous relationship with the natural world. A monk standing on the edge of a monastic precinct and hearing in the morning and hearing the bell of the chapel calling him to prayer. And he says to himself, that is the most beautiful sound in the whole wide world which is the call to silence, to depth, to another context beneath the context that you've established in the world. And he's just about to turn towards the chapel when doesn't he hear from over the wall he hears the call of the blackbird from the fields and the woods. And then he says to himself and that is also the most beautiful sound in the world. And the lovely thing about the story in a very Irish way is you're not told which way he goes, because actually, we don't get to choose. If you think about it, the first call is to a deeper understanding of ourselves. Should I rehearse more before I play my instrument in public? If I'm a musician, should I deepen my understanding? Should I educate myself more? Should I get a degree before I held myself at the job? World and the other one is the call of the world just as you find it, just as you hear it, just as you see it, and perhaps even more importantly, just as it sees and hears you. So this is the piece the Bell and the blackbird. The sound of a bell still reverberating the sound of a bell still reverberating or a blackbird a blackbird calling from a corner of the field asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper into the one that waits. The sound of a bell still reverberating still reverberating or a blackbird a blackbird calling from a corner of the field asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper into the one that waits either way takes courage. Either way wants you to become nothing but that self that is no self at all wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know you'll have to give every last thing away. The approach that is also the meeting itself without any meeting at all that radiance you have always carried with you as you walk both alone and completely accompanied in friendship by every corner of the world crying hallelujah. Nice. I love your style of recitation. Perhaps other poets do this and I haven't noticed, or is this really your own innovation? But you repeat lines in a way that it's kind of obvious when you hear it. It's especially obvious when you see it on the page that these lines are not repeated in the written form of the poem itself, but you kind of retraverse your steps again and again, and it has a kind of incantatory quality to it and really just demands that your poems really be recited by you. That's the form in which to consume them. Well, if you think about it, it's seen as an innovation, but it's actually a re innovation because it's how poetry would have been recited in the old traditions. And the chorus in the Greek theater, for instance, was something that was that the gods had said, and therefore it had to be repeated because it couldn't be understood fully the first time. And I often say poetry is language against which you have no defenses, so you have to actually say it in ways against which there are no defenses. If you hear a good marital argument, you'll hear both sides repeating things, usually three times. Yeah, the poetry of English exactly in three different ways, because the other person must hear it. Or more poignantly, if you are bringing very bad news to another person, of the loss of a loved one. You will always be very careful about how you say it, and you will say it three times in three different ways, and you leave silence between the lines, and you will have this tremendous physical connection to the listening ear. So that's the way poetry should be read, actually. And it's a great pity that it isn't in so many poetry readings, because people turn up at a portrait reading, perhaps for the first time, and they hear something remarkable from the port, man or woman. And before they know it, the port's onto the next line, when they haven't even actually caught up with what they just heard. So many portrait readings can be actually quite violent to the listener. So we need to treat the listener with a deep kind of respect, give them some space, give them some silence. You don't even know what you've written yourself, so you need to hear it too. You don't understand fully the implications of what you've said. And if you do, it's not good poetry. It always leads to broader and wider emancipations of your understandings. There are many lines I've recited for 20 years, you know, and then suddenly you're standing somewhere in a hall or a room or and you say, My God, I never understood that in 20 years of reciting it. But there it is. Yeah. So beautiful. You are literally trying to overhear yourself, say things you didn't know you knew. That's the discipline of writing poetry. So you speak about what you call the conversational nature of reality in various places. What do you mean by that? Well, it just seems very obvious to me. Whatever a human being desires for themselves will not come about exactly as they first imagined it or first laid it out in their minds equally. Whatever the world desires of you will not happen, no matter how coercive that world is. What always happens is the meeting between what you desire from your world and what the world desires of you. It's this frontier where you overhear yourself and you overhear the world. And that frontier is the only place where things are real. That, to me, is the conversational nature of reality. And the discipline is to stay on that frontier as fully as you can. Does that relate in your mind to this opposition you sketched in the poem? The distinction between hearing the summons of the bell and going in to work on yourself and improve your craft and prepare rehearse and not yet to enter the world, but as opposed to actually trying your gifts, such as they are, in public and for better or worse. Yeah, it's lovely relief, actually, to realize you don't get to choose. You always have to rehearse, you always have to deepen, you always have to practice. You always have to find the next level of generosity in your being or your soul. And you must meet the world just as it finds you now, too, with whatever you've got. Right. And I think once you actually follow that frontier conversation, the conversation itself actually starts to deepen you and after a while you realize, well, actually, I don't need to do the work, I just need to be in that exchange, in that meeting place. In many ways, that's the way my career has gone. It's only a career in looking back. It's a kind of frontier otherwise in which you just try to keep a kind of integrity and groundedness while keeping your eyes and your voice dedicated towards the horizon that you're going to or the horizon in another person that you're meeting. Yeah. That actually describes how I view my career as well. It really is a yeah. Because I'm now spending most of my time doing things that I never envisioned doing. And if you had told me five or ten years ago that I would be spending my time in precisely this way, I would not have believed you. Yes. Had you shown me the path into the future exactly. It would have not only been unfamiliar to me, I would have had reasons why that could not be the path. Yes, that's very well said. I always think a good work always leads you into world you could not have imagined for yourself. I grew up from my Irish and Scottish and Yorkshire sides with this kind of blood allergy to all hierarchical powers come from long lines of Irish, Scottish and rebels and Yorkshire luddites. And so you can imagine, when I first went full time as a port and I had my first invitations into the corporate world, my first reaction was to say no. Because my only my only understanding was that I would have to compromise myself and compromise my work and create some kind of propaganda that worked in parallel with whatever the organization wanted. So it was a powerful upsetting and subversive surprise to find that I didn't have to. It would have been much more comforting to have found that I did need to compromise and therefore I could say no. But I was actually led into a world that I never imagined I would belong to. Yeah. Well, this seems like a nice point of segue to your book, The Three Marriages, and there's one you should say what those Three marriages are. But I'd like to start with what you have observed to be the illusion of work life balance because this strikes me as an unusual and very useful observation. Yeah, it's another binary that just has more stress. So I'm not only supposed to be this incredible, inspirational center of charismatic understanding in the workplace, but when I come home, I'm supposed to be this paragon of perfection as a partner in a love relationship or as a parent in a family. So it just has this working harder all the time. So it's really interesting to think that we live and breathe, actually, between our different marriages. And we have times where work is naturally the center of our life and other times where family has to come first. And knowing when those rhythms appear and disappear is really part of being able to go through the doorway of happiness and satisfaction and understanding. So the first marriage, to my mind, is the one we normally talk about, the Jane Austen horse and carriage marriage, but in today's world, that's also a love relationship with another person, whatever gender or mid gender you are. So that's the first marriage is a love relationship with one other person and someone who you make yourself physically vulnerable with. And that's, of course, what sexual relations does is undermine our sense of physical frontier. That's why you have arguments with your intimate loved one that you don't have with anyone else in the world. So that's the first marriage. And the second marriage is the marriage with your metier, with your vocation, with your work. And I often think work must be a marriage because why would you have stayed so long in your work if it wasn't marriage? You must have committed. You must have made a promise to something that was greater than the knit and the grit and the difficulty of the everyday insanity of work. Just like a marriage at home or a committed relationship, if you were to take any one day in your work life as the reason why you were in that work, you'd lock yourself up in a padded room quite often and never come out. But what keeps a marriage sane or a relationship sane or a work sane, is the horizon to which we've dedicated ourselves. That's what keeps the difficulty of keeping the conversation alive with another man or woman. That's what keeps us alive in keeping the conversation, the heartbreaking conversation with our work, alive. And then the third marriage is the marriage, the relationship with that tricky movable frontier called yourself, who, like another person, is constantly surprising you as to who it's becoming and what it wants from life. I always say you always meet the new you in the mirror in the form of a stranger, and you always turn away from that stranger to begin with. Just like you always turn away from the surprise that your partner seems to inflict on you when they suddenly want something completely different. Well, we have that same surprise with ourselves as we go through the different thresholds of our life. Through our mid 30s, through our mid 40s, through our mid fifty s. And you have to get to know the person you're becoming like, you have to get to know again and again the person if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. Thank you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I've been thinking more and more about what we're doing here, about what I'm doing personally, and about how that fits into the various trends we're seeing in our intellectual and ethical and political lives. The circumstance we find ourselves in is increasingly strange, don't you think? It's half psychological experiment and half Ponzi scheme. What are we doing here? I generally think about civilization as a machine for engineering and safeguarding certain experiences, and it seems to me that it has barely started running in earnest. I mean, we've had a few thousand years of real culture and a few hundred years of anything like scientific rationality and then merely a few decades of leveraging all this with information technology. Maybe there's a hardware and software analogy here. Perhaps civilization is the hardware layer and culture is the software. We have the things we actually build the roads and bridges and the hospitals, the factories, the Internet. And then we have the reasons why we built these things and the insights and ideas that make them possible. And the stories we tell ourselves and our expectations of one another, our hopes for the future, the norms we adhere to and demand that others adhere to. Whether we can consciously specify those norms or not, much of culture is implicit. We need to make it more and more explicit when things begin to break down, when our efforts to cooperate with one another are failing and failing at great cost to everyone involved. On one level, it's a miracle that anything works at all. And things really do work to an impressive degree. Most planes do not crash. Rather often you call the police and they come and either prevent or solve a crime, and everyone's grateful and no one appears racist. Journalists often put their biases aside and get their facts straight. Tomorrow, some drug company will develop a new medication and regulators will help to standardize its usage, and it will actually improve people's quality of life without imposing unacceptable costs elsewhere. It's against a background of success and successes that we increasingly take for granted that our failures are so noticeable. But I know I'm not alone in feeling that we've had more than our fair share of failures of late. And of course, we can't get off the ride. There's no break to pull. We are condemned to create and proliferate culture memes, upon memes, upon memes we bend light and sound for the purposes of entertainment, we create corporations and economic relationships that leverage mutual advantage and yet seem to presuppose endless growth. And it's very hard to envision where all of this frantic activity is headed. Clearly, we have to navigate between a crisis of overpopulation, where we suffer some kind of global collapse and famine, and underpopulation, where we have multitudes of senescent men and women wandering the streets in diapers with no one to care for them. And we have to expect technology to save us or to ruin everything. Are the robots coming to our rescue or are they coming to kill us? It's hard to know from here. In the meantime, as we stagger around with our smartphones, the need for meaning is becoming more and more pressing. What should we be doing with our time on earth? Needless to say, the ancient answers to this question aren't working. In fact, they're becoming increasingly dangerous. One answer to the crisis of meaning is tribalism. And tribalism has many forms. From caring just a little too much about soccer or college basketball to the fully weaponized hysteria and cultishness that has subsumed our politics. All tribalism now tends toward theocracy, whether it's religious or not. It develops a taste for the irrational. Rather often, you have to profess to believe the unbelievable as a profession of in group loyalty. And then the ideologies proliferate, and they erect taboos and blasphemy tests that are non negotiable. And then, even otherwise, smart and decent people increasingly adopt the ethics of the crowd, and they scapegoat others, and they find they rather like to watch a human sacrifice, whether real or metaphorical. Of course, we now see this dynamic in the form of identity politics everywhere. There's not even a pretense of an argument that the world can be made better for everyone. And the media and academia and other institutions have been captured by all this clamor. And these new norms of intolerance in the name of tolerance are making honest conversation more and more difficult and even dangerous. Because if you say anything that calls this modern catechism into question if, for instance, you wonder whether systemic racism is really as bad as advertised by those who might be shrieking about it in Portland in front of a vacant storefront, or whether the cops are really killing disproportionate numbers of young black men at this moment in history. Or whether Islam really is as peaceful and compatible with modernity as methodism is, say. Or whether there's an element of social contagion behind the increase in transgenderism among teenagers, specifically teenage girls, or if the pervasive social inequality we see in our society has anything to do with certain cultural norms actually being better than others or more terrifying still, whether there are genetic differences among individuals or even between groups that might be involved here. Well, if you even entertain any of those ideas, well, then you're a nazi fit only to be destroyed. And this increasing commitment to moralizing and politicizing everything is becoming authoritarian. It is stifling dissent, it is punishing thought crime, and it has provoked an exodus of smart people from mainstream institutions. And so we now have podcasts and substac newsletters proliferating by the hour. But as I've said several times of late, this shattering of institutions is increasingly dysfunctional. Not everything in our society can be accomplished by outsiders and iconoclasts. Imagine if we no longer trusted mainstream sources of airplane parts and every pilot was left to their own initiative to find spare engine parts from nontraditional sources. That would be madness. You're going to get your spare plane parts on Etsy. But something analogous is happening in information space when people are deciding what to believe, actually trying to figure out what is factually true about COVID for instance, or China or climate change. People no longer trust the mainstream media or academia or the government to deliver anything like the Unvarnished Truth. And this is largely due to how captured these institutions are by left wing social justice hysteria. And to make matters even more confusing, there are Nazis in our society and there are people who are Nazi adjacent. And some of these people have had an inordinate influence over right wing politics undermining our basic commitment to democracy. There are many people on the right who, by tendency or design, seem to want an authoritarianism of their own. So we're being pushed and pulled by turns to some kind of precipice. And the question is, how can we step back? Reality doesn't care about the color of your skin or your biological sex, or the gender with which you identify, or the religion into which you were born, or the cult toward which you were lured from some shopping mall. And if we play our cards right, the future won't care about those things either. But the question is, how do we get to that future with our world intact? When will we realize that we're all on the same team and that we've been celebrating one own goal after the next? And how will we realize it? What is the mechanism that will force us to converge on a common picture of reality and a common set of primary values? Anyway, trying to figure this stuff out remains the purpose of this podcast. And as always, it's a privilege to have anyone listening at all. And now for today's questions. Hi Sam. My name is Corey. I live in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. My question for you is more of a vote than a question. I'd really love to hear you discuss the Eric Topel podcast with Brett Weinstein on a Future podcast. I know that you have considered that and kind of rule it out at this point, but love for you to reconsider. My sense is that there is a lot more common ground to land on than disagreement. And each of you, I think, could actually learn from the other about their own sense of reality surrounding the COVID issues. I think we're all a bit confused, and we would all learn from the two of you learning from each other. Thank you. Hey, Corey. Thanks for the question. Yeah, this is a hard one for me, actually. I get that it seems crazy not to just flip on the microphone and talk to the guy or talk to him and Heather, who's also been his partner in crime. It's hard to put this in a way that doesn't sound like a personal attack, but the reason why I don't want to do a podcast with Brett and Heather is the same as why I wouldn't do a podcast with a 911 truth conspiracy theorist or Alex Jones or anyone in that world. Because there's a basic asymmetry, which is very hard to overcome. It's so much easier to make a mess than to clean it up. It's so much easier to light several small fires than to put them out. It's like a ten to one advantage, to put it that way. It sounds like my concern is not losing a debate, and that's absolutely not my concern. If you're going to view this as a debate, it's one almost immediately. But I worry about what people take from the encounter, and I just don't want to do additional harm to our public conversation about what is in fact, an important public health concern and a growing political one. First, the asymmetry. The reason why there's such an asymmetry here is that it is just impossible to debunk most things in real time. And even if the point being made is in fact, spurious, it won't seem spurious to 99% of an audience. Right. So the person on the conspiracy theory side of things can say, well, what about the 14 CDC officials who resigned last week and wouldn't give reasons when asked, what do you make of that? Now, there's probably nothing to be made of that right. I didn't even hear about it. The truth is I just made that up. But when delivered in the context of a, quote, debate about these things with someone who whose whole angle is there's conspiracy everywhere, it can seem like, oh, you didn't know about that? Well, that's clearly a problem. You should look into that. What about the paper that just came out of Micronesia that showed ivory mechan was 100% effective? I didn't see that paper out of micronesia. Oh, you didn't? Well, okay. You should really do your homework. It's possible to just scatter a lot of dust in the eyes and ears of the audience and make it seem like there's so many anomalies out there. There's so many things that need to be explained. And if you're not going to explain those things, if you're not going to connect this particular pattern of dots, well, then you're just not doing the work. And that need not necessarily be done in bad faith. Of course it can be right. It's a tactic. But that's not what I'm alleging Bred and Heather would do. I'm just saying that's the way they think now. It's such a scattershot approach to this. There's so little quality control around the kind of information they're putting forward and it takes such an effort to chase it all down and debunk it. And anything that shows up that's new in the conversation can't be tracked down in real time. So I don't have much hope that a conversation would wind up producing a document that would be good for the world. The truth is, I'm not the best person to have the conversation either. It would be good to have an immunologist or a virologist or someone who's much closer to this type of research who could really get into the weeds with them more. And the truth is, they're obviously the wrong people to be doing what they're doing. And it shows. But that's not obvious to their audience. Apparently it's not obvious to them. So I would welcome an encounter between them and somebody who's truly professionally qualified to talk about all the details. And perhaps that will happen. I mean, in fact, I just reached out to Joe Rogan, telling him what I thought of his latest podcast with Brett and Heather and recommended that he figure out how to unring that bell. And maybe he will bring Brett and Heather on with someone like Eric Topple or someone even closer to the topic at hand. And that could be useful. But even then, I think that in front of Rogan's audience, it's questionable whether that will actually work for the reasons already given. It's just so easy to be misleading. And again, I'm not suggesting bad faith on their part. I think they probably really believe everything they're saying. But there is just an asymmetry here in how difficult it is to close every loophole to conspiracy and the influx of the incredible as they get opened in the conversation. I'll give you one example of the kind of thing I found implausible in Bretton Heather's last appearance with Joe Rogan. This is the kind of thing that they too should find implausible. That the moment these words escape their mouths. And it's still mysterious to me why this isn't happening. But for instance, they were talking about the evolutionary logic of immune escape, right? So we get vaccines and the moment tens of millions of people start getting vaccinated, that begins to select for variants that can evade the vaccine, right? So it's a it's a fool's errand to be thinking that you're going to get out of this pandemic by vaccinating everyone because you're just going to create more transmissible and possibly even more dangerous variants. Now, there's a lot wrong with this from a public health point of view and from an evolutionary point of view. Right. From an evolutionary point of view, it's just half the story right? Yes. The immunity conferred through vaccination can select for variants that can defeat the vaccine, but the immunity conferred by having caught, covered, and recovered also selects for variants that can escape that immunity. Right. So vaccination is on all fours with natural immunity there. Think of how worried we need to be about a variant that can defeat natural immunity. Also. That's an argument against all vaccination, because no vaccines, to my knowledge, are 100% effective right. Regardless of exposure, regardless of possible genetic changes in a virus. Right. And I believe that the mRNA vaccines for COVID are among the most effective vaccines we have. We're just in the middle of a pandemic, which is an extreme circumstance. I'm not quite sure how our measles vaccines would be performing if we were in the middle of a measles pandemic. If everywhere you went, you were confronted by somebody who had measles I don't know how often measles mutates, but I think we'd probably find that there's some breakthrough infection. So if you follow his argument, you seem to land in a true antivax position. Right. Don't vaccinate against anything because you're selecting for dangerous variants. And again, ignoring the fact that natural immunity is also doing that. And it's curious that Brett and Heather are not seeing that, because, again, they run everything through the logic of evolution. There's another glaring error here. To suggest that our current problem with variants has anything to do with vaccination seems a little bonkers, because the biggest problem, the Delta variant, emerged in India and became prevalent there under conditions where exactly no one was vaccinated. We know that the emergence of Delta has nothing to do with our vaccination regime. The whole thrust of their comments there is confused. Right. And once again, the subtext to everything they're saying, no matter how reasonable and attentive to caveats, they can seem and I will grant you, they can seem incredibly reasonable. They do not seem like Alex Jones, and this is why what they're doing is so insidious. But the basic message, the basic implication of everything they say, and the apparent reason behind everything they're saying is the belief that these COVID vaccines are dangerous, and you should be worried about them. You should be profoundly hesitant to take them. These are not normal vaccines. And, in fact, the pushing of these vaccines on the public is colossally, unethical. That is what they are messaging. Right. They've said as much explicitly on their own podcast. I think Brett called it the greatest crime of the century, or something insane like that. I should get the actual language. All right, hold on. Okay. Now, I've taken a few minutes and found the transcript of Brett's confabulation on this topic. He's talking about the absolute scandal of the suppression of the life saving knowledge of Ivicton and the pushing of the vaccines on his own podcast, where he's talking to a doctor. Cory. The podcast itself is titled The Crime of the century, and they're going back and forth about how nefarious the machinations must be to have produced this policy. Dr. Corey says all the pipeline molecules, the stuff that's coming that they want to bring to market are also there, right? And then Brett says which have had a tremendous investment made in them. The thing I think we're almost certain to get wrong is that as outsiders, we have no idea what these conversations sound like on the inside. There's a temptation to imagine that people are somehow sitting around comfortable with the fact that their behavior is going to cause hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of deaths, that it may stick humanity with a relationship with a pathogen that it will not be able to shake because it will prevent us from taking the appropriate action until it's too late. We imagine that people are saying these things out loud when I'm sure that there are some sociopaths in the system who are probably capable of having those discussions, but there aren't enough sociopaths to account for this behavior. There is some way that people who are doing a harm great enough. I've called it the crime of the century. And I realize the century is young, but this is going to be hard to top. It's going to be hard to top. There is some way that people who are engaged in something worthy of a claim like the crime of the century are comfortable with what they're doing, or worse, are convinced as the right thing that somehow the greater good is being served. Okay, here you have it in fairly crystalline form. The conspiratorial thinking, the outrageous claims about death and destruction due to these vaccines and the suppression of Ivictin for purely mercenary reasons. The problem, of course, is that there's no reason to think this is true. Right? There is no reason to think that Ivermectin is a surrogate for getting vaccinated. And there's no reason to think that people should be terrified of getting these vaccines. And that is the message that bread is spreading hour by hour by hour. Whereas the truth is we have a head to head comparison between three cohorts of people. Tens of millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases, those who have been vaccinated, those who have caught COVID without being vaccinated, those who have caught COVID having been vaccinated. And we know the outcomes. We know them well enough to know that you're far better off being vaccinated and eventually catching COVID as you will, than catching it without having been vaccinated. Catching COVID is not a strategy for becoming immune to COVID It's just catching COVID right? And those who survive will have some natural immunity. The jury is no longer out on that score. Now, it may be true that in certain populations it is rational to worry that the potential side effects of vaccination are greater than the risk of COVID For instance, I believe there are some data about teenage boys having a higher risk of myocarditis than teenage girls? Certainly I think it's a tenfold difference. And the risk may be high enough that it is in fact greater than their risk of becoming severely ill with COVID The data I saw suggested it was kind of a coin toss there, but slightly in favor of not getting vaccinated. If those data hold up well, then yes, it may be rational to decide that twelve year old boys shouldn't be vaccinated. But the general picture here is fairly well established. We know catching COVID is worse in almost every case that has thus far been tried than getting vaccinated for COVID. And from what I've seen recently, the data in favor of ivory mechan seems increasingly dubious. So parsing, all this should be left to the professionals. Again, I come back to my basic mystification around what Brett and Heather are doing. Why do this publicly? If you're going to make the personal choice not to get vaccinated based on your scrutiny of the data, great, make that choice. But why spend the better part of a year convincing people that they shouldn't get vaccinated? You can say that's not what you're doing, but that is in fact what you're doing. And that's what seems so irresponsible. The US is now one of the least vaccinated countries in the developed world. We got these lifesaving vaccines before everyone, and now we're the 37th most vaccinated country. We're behind the UAE and Portugal and Singapore and Spain and Denmark and Uruguay and Chile. Belgium, Ireland, Canada, Bahrain, the UK, Mongolia We're behind Mongolia, Norway, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany. We're behind Mauritius and Cyprus, but we're also behind Cambodia, Lithuania, Malaysia, the Czech Republic, Greece. It makes no sense, right? And it's because of misinformation and the way it's interacting with our hyperpartisan political landscape. That's why we're here. And there's no question that 3 hours of the Bretton Heather show on Joe Rogan is having an effect. And that'll sound as censorious as it does. I just think it's irresponsible. And I'm not quite sure how to grab hold of this increasingly unbalanced object so as to set it right. But perhaps Rogan will do something to unring that bell. Okay, next question. Hi, Sam. My name is Brian and I live in Paris, Ontario. My question is for you. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm speaking with Benjamin Wittes. Benjamin is a legal journalist who is a senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, and he's a co founder of the Lawfare blog, which is a great source of unbiased information on US. National security and law. And I brought him on to do a post mortem on the Mueller report. Seems to me the public understanding of what's in that report is fairly distorted by politics, so I wanted Benjamin to walk me through it. And if nothing else, I think you'll find this a very useful analysis of what Mueller found and what any reasonable person should believe about what he found. Needless to say, this is a moving target. Mueller May 1 day testify in Congress, but his findings in the report are remarkably clear and yet obfuscated to an astounding degree. In any case, I hope you find this useful. Now I bring you Benjamin Witness. I am here with Benjamin Witness. Benjamin, thanks for coming on the podcast. Pleasure. I discovered you, as many people have, on your fantastic blog, dealing with all things legal, the Lawfare blog. And I'm hoping we're going to do a very accessible and fairly comprehensive, at least up to the moment, autopsy on the Mueller report. But before we dive into the matter at hand, how did you get to focus on what you have now focused on? For, it seems, quite some time, what is your legal and political history? Yeah. So I have a weird history, which is that I am not a lawyer. Contrary to a lot of people's understanding, I'm a sort of legal journalist by background. And I wrote the Washington Post's legal affairs editorials for nine or ten years, including the period starting just before the Clinton impeachment through 911 and the period after that up through 2006 when I left. And during that period, I had always had an interest in the sort of law of national security dating back from before my Washington Post days. But during that period, for reasons that are probably pretty obvious, I became much more acutely interested in it. And I left at the beginning of 2007 to come to Brookings and focus on a book I wanted to write on that subject and lawfare developed a few years later, I guess in the fall of 2010. And by that time, this set of subjects was essentially all of what I worked on. And with a few narrow exceptions, that was my career by that point. And so over time, lawfare has just been kind of the project that bit me in the ass and wouldn't let go. Well, it's easy to see why it hasn't let go, because it's such a wonderful sanity check for many of us who just need to figure out what ends up in these matters. Well, thank you. How would you describe your own political leanings? Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, when lawfare was founded, I think most people regarded us as and there were only three of us who wrote it at the time most people regarded us as the sort of respectable right flank of a lot of the issues that we wrote about. So we were largely writing from a point of view of trying to evaluate government policy and sort of be helpful to practicing lawyers in areas like detention and kind of drone strikes and Guantanamo and that sort of set of things. And the three of us were all I think what united us was that we sort of did not accept kind of a lot of the sort of conventional human rights and academic orthodoxies that were prevailing at the time. And so we were thought of as, I guess, the right of that debate. That was a reductionist way to understand who we were. And particularly as the site grew and we started adding other people, we were always politically diverse. And I don't think you will find a more exquisitely bipartisan or nonpartisan masthead in American life and letters than lawfare. The site doesn't have any positions. It doesn't have any politics. It does have a group of people who have very different attitudes toward a lot of different issues. I would describe my personal politics as quite centrist, at least until the politics of the country shifted very dramatically, very suddenly. And now I suppose I've had a political orientation kind of forced upon me by the circumstances, in that I am very alarmed by the incumbent president and I am opposed to what Donald Trump is trying to do and what he stands for. And in that sense, at a very personal level, I have sort of taken the view that in a two party system, if one really is alarmed by the behavior of one of the parties, one doesn't really have much choice but to support the other. That said, that is my personal view, not the institutional view of lawfare. Okay? So I'm hoping that the conversation we produce here will be of interest and perhaps even persuasive to people who are not nearly as critical of the President as I am. By the way, can I just say that that is the ambition of lawfare in general and has been since long before Donald Trump when we started it, and we were writing stuff about Guantanamo litigation. My ambition for the site at the time was that it should be as useful to the lawyers who represent the Guantanamo detainees as it is for the government lawyers on the other side, and it should be as useful to people who disagree with me on the merits of certain things as who agree with me. And I feel the same way now, we do a lot of stuff that the goal of which is to be useful to whoever is working on these issues or thinking about them or trying to understand them, irrespective of whether they agree with the author in question or agree with me more particularly. Yeah, well, as we both know, that's easier said than done, especially in this case. I have been accused of having a whopping case of Trumped arrangement syndrome, and I really haven't been shy about expressing my antipathy for the President, and antipathy is not too strong a word. He embodies almost everything that I find detestable in. Other people might be advertising myself as a candidate for a Freudian case study, but I find it a continual source of shock that half of the country isn't appalled by what this man says and does mostly says. So I want to just bracket that. And I want us to be careful in just talking about what we think is objectively true here and what happened, what the Mueller report attests to and what it suggests about Trump and what we you know, those of us who are concerned about his tenure and wanted to end in 2020, what we should do and say about all this. I guess I want to start with, before we get into what is in the report, I want to see if you share my sense of how badly the release of it was handled, at least for those of us who cared about it having a useful impact. What are your thoughts on how this was dropped and the amount of time the President and his surrogates had to spin what I think will prove a false interpretation of its contents? Yeah, so it's a very complicated question, and let's try to break out at least three and maybe four discrete aspects of the release, because I think the merits of them are quite different. So the one on which I think Bill Barr is taking a bad rap is his handling of the redactions and the amount of time between when he received the document and when he made the release and a 400 plus page document that has to be reviewed for a bunch of different government equities that may produce redactions. That is a labor intensive process. And I don't think that a three week, almost four week lag from his first seeing the document to a public release is a terribly bad outcome. Nor do I think, actually, that the substance of the redactions. For all that a lot of Democrats are outraged by them are that objectionable. And I think he did a reasonably creditable job of saying, here's what I'm going to do, here's the process I'm going to use. Here's the time frame I'm going to do it in, and then doing more or less what he said he was going to do. And the result was a document that we can all read. There are some frustrating redactions in there. There are some ones that are probably a little too aggressive in certain areas, but by and large, everybody knows more or less what Bob Mueller found, and I, by and large, do not have a serious complaint about the way Barr handled the logistics and mechanics of the review and redaction process itself. The second question is, and I'm doing these in ascending order of what I think of as outrageousness, is the letter that he wrote two days after he had received the document. And that, I think, is very hard to justify. And I think for anybody who hasn't read the piece that Charlie Savage wrote in the New York Times that actually shows the full quotation of every quote from the report that Barr put in that letter, I think it is very hard to excuse the degree of distortion that arose from the selective quotations in that letter. And I do think that letter was substantively distortive of Mueller's meaning and therefore was not at all surprised that Mueller complained of exactly that in his letter to Barr. And so I think if you're going to take three weeks to release the document, which I think is reasonable, it pays not to have distorted its meaning in advance of those three weeks so that the president then has this long period of time to trumpet what turns out to be at least a complicated and in some important respects, a kind of false narrative about what the report contains. And I think Barr bears a lot of responsibility for that. The third area, which I think is arguably even worse, is the contents of his press conference the morning that the document was released. And in that press conference, he repeatedly used terms that are simply presidential talking points. Not, by the way, legal talking points, but actual, like, historical talking points. So for the Attorney general to say repeatedly that Mueller found no collusion is, you know, an appropriate thing for, I suppose, for a spin doctor to do on Fox News, but it is not an appropriate thing for the Attorney general to do from the great hall of the Justice Department. And it's really an exercise in messaging that I think was beneath the dignity of the Justice Department and certainly should have been beneath Barr's personal dignity. So I think there was i, by and large, agree with you that the rollout was very unfortunate. I just think that some of the criticism of it focuses on what, for me, are the wrong thing. Right. Right. Well, we'll talk about conspiracy versus collusion once we get into the body of the report, one other kind of framing effect, which I think has had significant consequences and really shouldn't have, is undoubtedly there were some people who had false expectations about what this report was likely to produce. But it seems to me much more of a case of Trump and his supporters spreading falsehoods about what most people's expectations actually were. Right? It's like the fact that Trump isn't being led away in an orange jumpsuit as a result of this report, or the fact that conspiracy wasn't proven right. The fact that we don't have proof that Trump or people running his campaign conspired in advance with Russians to hack the election or to hack the DNC emails and to help him get into the White House thereby. I mean, that's as much as I was hoping this report could destabilize the President politically, it never occurred to me that that would be what was proven there. So I don't know if you have any thoughts about that, but part of the spin I'm encountering here is this triumphal sense that we took a hard swing at the ball. We, the President's critics, took a hard swing at the ball and missed entirely, whereas the ball being described was not a ball I ever was aiming at. So I feel very much the same way. And I do think that there are a few caveats that I'd add to that. So one of them is that, as you acknowledge, there were some people who had, frankly delusional expectations of what the report was going to produce. And there were people who were, as recently as a few weeks ago, talking about, will they revisit the Office of Legal Counsel opinion on whether the president can be indicted. Right. And there were a lot of people who seemed to expect a finding on Russian electoral interference that very directly implicated Donald Trump in criminal activity. And I suppose if you're one of those people, that the results of the findings of the report must be very disappointing. I was never one of those people. I believed it absolutely needed to be investigated. And I am perfectly satisfied with a finding that Russians committed criminal acts in hacking Democratic emails and in running a fraudulent social media campaign, and that individuals when had committed criminal acts in lying to investigators, but that the nature of the interactions between the Russians and people associated with Donald Trump did not themselves amount to criminal conspiracy or other criminal activity. That doesn't trouble me particularly at all. And I and is not even especially surprising to me, given what we knew about, given how easy it is to avoid entering into a conspiracy with people who are operating to some degree to your benefit and with your knowledge. And so I don't find it especially surprising. Unlike a lot of people, I don't find it upsetting. I think it would have been horrifying had there, in fact, been a criminal conspiracy, I would have been absolutely wanted to see it prosecuted. And I certainly wanted the investigation to proceed to the point of satisfaction on that point. It has done so. I'm satisfied with the outcome, and I think the report is immensely illuminating as to what we can, as a historical matter, hold Donald Trump and the people around him accountable for. Well, I want to get to that because there's much more they can be held accountable for. And that much more was what I was anticipating would be borne out. Let's just give a high level snapshot of what this document is. There are two volumes. How would you describe their contents? So I would describe the two volumes as having between them four major sets of findings. The first is and these are roughly in the order that they take place in the two documents. The first three are all part of volume one, and they go like this. The first is that it substantively clears the president and his people on matters concerning the Russian social media operation. That is, the Russians ran a criminal social media operation that was a conspiracy to deprive the United States of regulatory authority over electoral and other matters. And that while people associated with the president were duped by this into engaging with the Russian material, nobody on the US. Side, including nobody associated with Donald Trump, knowingly participated in this scheme. That's the first major finding, and I think we should be all critics of Donald Trump on the left, on the right, and in the center, should be willing to accept that at face value. Yes, there was a Russian conspiracy. No, it was not one that the president or his people are implicated in, except in the sense that we all get duped by fraudsters sometimes. Let's just place a footnote here to acknowledge that many of the president's defenders this is perhaps true still of many deny that the Russians did anything of substance in the 2016 election. And one of the things for which I hold the president accountable is his apparent denial of this problem and the slowness with which he acknowledged the mounting evidence which continues to this day. I mean, the president had a conversation the other day with Vladimir Putin and was asked afterwards whether he discussed future electoral interference with him. And he said it didn't come up. So he continues to not want to face the consequences of this for his worldview with respect to Vladimir Putin. Right. But that said, there's a difference between being a Dupe and being a criminal. And I think the portrayal by Mueller of the Trump people in this section of the investigation is that of they were duped, they may have been foolish for engaging with social media content that they should have been more savvy about. He does note that no Clinton campaign people were duped by the Russian social media campaign. So you can say they were foolish and silly and into stuff that helped them, but they weren't knowingly conspiring with anybody. And I think that we should just take that at face value. So this brings me to the second one, which is the second area, which is the hacking of emails. And this one is much more complicated because on the one hand, there is no evidence discussed in the report that anybody associated with the Trump campaign was involved in a conspiracy to hack the emails. And it is simply not the case that there is no evidence in this part of the report that there was no engagement with knowing engagement with people who were both responsible for that hacking and responsible for the release of those emails. And I think the sort of no collusion narrative that has emerged as to this part of the report is frankly dishonest. And so let me just tick off a few things that the report found that if I were a rhetorician, I would not describe as no collusion, right. Maybe we should distinguish between conspiracy and collusion here as well, right? So look, conspiracy is a criminal offense. It's, it's written in the US code. It has known elements. And it requires that two people have an agreement as to a law that they're going to violate and a course of conduct that is going to violate that law and that they take overt steps to doing so. So if you are thinking about robbing a bank and you ask me, would you want to help me rob the bank? And I say sure, and then I start doing Amazon searches for your disguise or your mask or your gun, then we're guilty of a conspiracy, right? But if I'm aware that you're going to rob the bank and you're going to use the money from the proceeds of the robbery in a fashion that might help me, but I never agree to anything with you and I don't take affirmative steps in support of what you're doing. I'm just really pleased that you're doing it. What if your next rally in front of tens of thousands of people, watched by millions, you champion your friend's cause in robbing the bank? So, you know, there are a lot of there are a lot of people who, you know, publicly endorse criminal activity, right, and they do it without I mean, think of all the people who say nice things about ISIS in public, right, and in publicly encourage terrorist movements to which they're sympathetic. The Irish Republican Army had a lot of people who spoke up for it in the United States back in the day, right. And as long as you keep a distance between yourself and the criminal activity of those organizations, you're actually not guilty of conspiracy to commit terrorism. So it's really important to keep separate. The question of is there enough evidence that they participated in a criminal conspiracy to indict and prosecute people for participation in that from did they behave in a way with respect to the Russian hacking that we should judge very harshly? And I think the answer I have no reason to doubt mueller's conclusion as to the legal question, but I also have no reason to doubt that a reasonable person reading his findings as to the substantive conduct in which they engaged should be appalled and disapproving and judgmental. So let me stipulating that they did not engage in criminal conspiracy that one could prove to the standards of the criminal law, which is to say, beyond prove with admissible evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt every element of the offense. Let's talk about what the report found that they did do. All right, so one of them was in touch directly with the guifer two persona of the Russian intelligence, military intelligence, that's the group that did the hacking. There was direct contact between one member of the Trump entourage and gustafr two. They were deeply involved in sort of thinking, you know, coordinating their media strategies around WikiLeaks releases of the hacked emails. And they were actually in touch with WikiLeaks on the subject. So they weren't coordinating with the Russians about the hacking of the emails, but they were coordinating with WikiLeaks about the release of emails, or at least trying to. As you noted, the president gave a public speech in which he publicly encouraged hacking of Clinton's emails. And here's a part that we did not know before the release of the Mueller report, which is that right after doing so. And remember that the president has tried to dismiss that speech as a joke, but he, immediately after that speech, directed Michael Flynn, his then campaign national security advisor, to try to retrieve the emails that he was talking about in that speech. Which is to say, not the emails that the Russians had stolen, but emails that he believed had been hacked from Hillary Clinton's old private email server. And so this led to a sustained effort by people on the fringes of the campaign at Flynn's instigation, although not his direct control, to engage with Russian hackers to retrieve these mythical stolen emails. Now, this, of course, is not the same emails that the Russians released and actually stole. And in fact, there doesn't seem to be a lot of reason to get to believe that these emails actually existed at all, or that the people that they got involved with were real Russian hackers. But it's fair to say that the effort on the part of the Trump campaign, and remember, this is all taking place around the same period of time that there's the Trump tower meeting where they are promised dirt on Hillary's campaign and Hillary, and they respond enthusiastically to that. So it's fair to say that they were very open to receiving the fruits of these hacks that they went after. They encouraged the Russians to do this hack, to do a different hack. They went after emails that they believed to be in the possession of Russian hackers. And so my view is basically, if they didn't violate the law here and didn't manage a conspiracy, it was more out of sheer incompetence and conspiracy theorizing. They were going after emails that didn't exist. It wasn't because they were morally above engaging with the Russians over hacked emails. And so I think the picture on this one is very damaging to the President, at least if you bother to actually dive into what they really did. It's interesting. It's analogous to what happens later in the report around the crime of obstructing justice. So as we will talk about why he was not charged and and could not be charged with that, but it was not for want of trying that he didn't get the the Mueller investigation strangled in his crib, because he kept ordering people to do things which they judged to be either, frankly, illegal or not sane. And so it was just it was really it was a kind of a halo of insubordination that surrounded the President, where he would give orders that were not followed. And it's only because they weren't followed that he hasn't been well. I mean, it turns out he couldn't be, on Mueller's analysis, convicted of any crime while in office. But we would be talking about laws being broken had people obeyed his edicts. Yeah, and we'll get to that. When we talk about obstruction. I actually think on the obstruction stuff, the evidence of actual criminality is pretty overwhelming. But I agree with you to the extent it's not even more overwhelming. It's because a lot of things that were demanded to happen by the President were not carried out. And that actually does mitigate to some degree the obstructive outcome, although not the obstructive behavior. Yeah. So the third area before we get to obstruction, though, the third area is what to me is the most dramatic, which is this or the most dramatic in the volume one set, which is this? 100 plus pages of description of the contacts between Russians, government officials and their intermediaries and people associated with Donald Trump in the period around the campaign and the transition. And of course, the background to this is that Trump was saying at this time to anybody who will listen, I have nothing to do with Russia. Right. And he had any number of ways of denying that his campaign had had contacts with the Russians. And of course, the press has revealed a lot of these contacts in the past, and so the fact that they took place is not a particular surprise. The exhaustive catalog of them is truly astonishing. And we can go into them in more detail, but it takes literally 100 plus pages to describe them all. And what Mueller finds is that neither individually nor collectively do they amount to this joint meeting of the minds as to a criminal purpose. And that conspiracy law requires. And so therefore, though you have this incredibly suspicious pattern of conduct and contacts, and some of which are really weird, it does not overcome the requirement of conspiracy law that there be some, you know, agreement toward an illegal purpose and overt actions in support of that. So, you know, again, one can say, well, therefore he's been cleared of collusion. Or one could say that the pattern of behavior that Mueller documents is bizarre concerning from a counterintelligence and potential questions of what the Russians, what leverage they might have on him, et cetera, but does not, obviously violate any particular set of criminal laws. And so I think that's the sort of third big basket that volume one of the document reflects. Yeah. And now volume two. All right, so volume two is where the most obvious criminality ends. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMA and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. OK. Well, today I'm speaking with Matt Mullenweg. Matt is one of the founding developers of the WordPress platform which if you don't know, powers many of the websites you go to. In fact, I believe that 36% of the web is now run on WordPress. That includes my website. I believe it also includes sites like the New York Times. WordPress is everywhere and it's an open source platform. But Matt in 2005 started the company Automatic, which is now what drives WordPress.com and WooCommerce and many other companies. They recently acquired tumblr. And I wanted to speak to Matt because he has unique insight into running distributed teams. As you'll hear, Automatic is entirely distributed. They have over 1100 employees working in, I believe, 75 countries. So Matt has been thinking for a long time about the advantages and challenges of working from home. So as many companies and their workers are struggling to figure out how to reinvent themselves in this new environment where we're all needing to shelter in place, I want to bring Matt on to talk about this. And now, without further delay, I bring you Matt Mullenweg. Well, I am here with Matt Mullenweg. Matt, thanks for joining me. It's a pleasure. Let's get into your background. We're, we're having this conversation in the crucible of the current moment with the Coronavirus Pandemic raging on 100 shores here now. But let's introduce you properly. Give us your sort of business perch and then we can jump in. Yeah, I started contributing to WordPress and the WordPress Open Source project when I was 19. So I didn't have a ton of work experience beforehand besides like freelancing and things. I actually thought I was going to be a musician, but then a few years later started Automatic to commercialize basically SAS services or software as a service around WordPress. So we made WordPress.com, Jetpack, WooCommerce a lot of the sort of more commercial things, but so there's actually kind of like a nonprofit volunteer project called WordPress and then my company called Automatic. So you and I have hung out a few times and I've known in the abstract that I've always wanted to speak with you on the podcast. We have several mutual friends and one just put it into my head that I should talk to you in the current moment because you really have a unique experience with remote work. Describe just how fully you've embraced remote work and how long you've been doing this. Sure. So when Automatic started in 2005, we were coming out of an open source project and typically open source projects are volunteers working from all over the world, just collaborating online. What was a little different is we decided to keep that model as we scaled the company. So we are now, if you fast forward to 2020, we're now about 1200 people all over the world, all working together, remotely, collaborating completely online. We like to not use the word remote even because we say distributed because remote implies that there's essential and remote. So we say we're fully distributed and no indent meaning that especially the early days people said oh, this works one year ten people or 15 people. Well, it won't work when you're 50 or one year, 150 or reach dumbar's number or whatever it is. And we've shown we could scale it to being commercially successful as well as kind of hopefully doing good things for society and also try to blaze the path where they now there's a ton of other fully distributed companies many are unicorns of valued at multiple billions of dollars and doing some really amazing stuff throughout the industry. So there's like GitLab and vision, there's a lot besides just automatic out there. Yeah. So many companies now are confronting this imperative to figure out how to be a distributed team. Obviously, this is totally unworkable in certain businesses and we're witnessing the closure of restaurants and the decimation of the service industry. And yet some companies, like yours, and happily, like mine, just by sheer accident, are in a position of being, I guess, as antifragile as to employ the term of jargon of one of my nemesis or as anti fragile as you can be in the current environment. What do you say to all of these companies that actually can make this change or at least put a significant percentage of their workforce into home quarantine? Essentially from an epidemiological perspective that's what is being asked of us. What advice do you have for how to make that transition? There's a lot packed in there. Well first I will say that considered a moral imperative. So just like we would ask anyone who can work from home you really should or it's worse for society. I think any company which can enable their people to be fully effective in a distributed fashion can and should and in fact should do it far beyond after this crisis has currently passed. I think there's some interesting parallels. You never want to compare disasters or crisis but after 911 we were in a situation where people were staying at home naturally and they were disengaging from the broader economic activity and we had to ask society to say hey, go back out, go to the movies, go to parks, go to restaurants, et cetera. Right now we're asking people to do the opposite. So we're saying please do not engage in these particularly physically colocated activities but we do still need to restart the economic engine and anyone who can contribute to the economic engine at this point I think should be doing everything they can to be part of it. You asked like what to do for companies transitioning this? First, I would say that this is not a normal work from home situation. Usually when you work from home, your kids might have daycare or be in school. So a lot of people are struggling with sort of unusual family situations when they're trying to work. There's obviously a ton going out, and there's going to be, I think, a lot of challenges, tragedy and hardship at the same time. But I think that you can kind of zoom out and say, well, how can I use this as an opportunity to essentially build a framework for how myself, my colleagues, my industry, my organization can be, as you put it, antifragile, which is not just resilient in the face of turbulence like this, but actually gets stronger. I think there's five levels here but I've been talking a while already no, five levels keep rolling I want to hear it sure so are you familiar with Daniel Pink's work drive? Yeah but I don't know that our listeners are to me this is probably one of the most influential books on me when creating automatic and sort of designing the workplace that I wanted to work in and I wanted to model for the world. He talks about if you want people to be happy, motivated, content, satisfied and fulfilling their work it's not really about compensation or giving them bonuses and actually some of those things can have the opposite effect but it's really about three things mastery, autonomy and purpose. Mastery being like are you able to get better at your job? Do you have the sort of ability to accomplish it or are you being held? It's the point of haired boss holding you back from doing what you are trying to do. The other side that normal organizations can do really well at is purpose and that's working for something bigger than the paycheck for something bigger than yourself. Do you feel connection in your work to something larger that can be intrinsically motivating far beyond any extrinsic factors might be where I think distributed organizations can do better than any sort of in person office based organization is an autonomy. Autonomy is do you have the freedom and agency to basically control your environment, to get your work done as effectively as possible? That's how I'm defining it now if you imagine what you do in an office so many elements of your environment are out of your control from the trivial to the serious. Like if you were going to physically colocate with someone for a third of your life like a partner or a roommate you would take that very seriously right? You would kind of consider that like a major life decision and make that choice very carefully. But in work we're sort of just thrust into this physical colocation with a random set of humans who we did not choose to be put there. They're there hopefully because they're competent. That jobs and useful to the employer. But even that can be a question sometimes. And then the environment itself for the sort of compatibility as a whole is very constrained. So you don't have control over the temperature. You're typically using the restroom in a shared setting. Pets might be allowed at some point, but maybe you don't like that other people's pets are there. Or maybe there's all sorts of fraught things there. Your desk is probably not everyone has a corner office with a window. There's just so much there. The food, the talking of your colleagues, the temperatures. And it's interesting, I think you've kind of not been in an office situation for a while, right? No, in truth, I've never been. It's something I have no direct experience of. But the other aspect of it that seems to be true is that for better and worse, often worse, there's a lot of work time that's not actually a matter of getting work done. And I know this from even distributed meetings. Many meetings are, in the end, wasted time. So there's probably efficiency to be found. Assuming one can actually figure out a way to work from home or work remotely that doesn't open itself up to its own distractions. You can probably get a lot more done in less time if you know what you're doing. And so that's where we get into the levels of autonomy. So you know how there's like different levels of self driving cars, so I think of the different levels of autonomous organizations, so how far they index on giving people the autonomy to be happy and satisfied with work. So level one I'm going to find, as the company hasn't done anything deliberate, but almost anywhere today, if you're a knowledge worker, if there's an emergency or something, you cannot go into the office for a day and still kind of keep things moving. Hop on a phone call. Your equipment is probably like your cell phone. You have broadband, you can get by. But more likely you're going to kind of put things off until you're back in the office or you won't be as effective if you're not in the office. Right. Level one, that's where most organizations are at like 98% of the world that can be like this. Level two is, I think, where a lot of people are heading right now, which is where you try to recreate what you did in the office but just do it online. So with so many organizations forced into sort of an immediate work from home situation, they're scrambling. I likened this a little bit in 1922 when radio dramas were first starting and radio as a dramatic medium was just beginning. The first things they did weren't like great things just for radio is they would literally just have actors perform plays, right, but on the radio. And so there was no taking advantage of the medium. Or cinema in the beginning was kind of similar. The terminology at this phase, at this level is often rooted in old frames. So moving pictures or you've probably heard the telecommute or telework. Yeah, I've even used that myself to my embarrassment. What a strange term. Like on a telephone. At this level, the company's probably woken up to like, you need to be able to access things when you're not in the office or certain tools. Maybe you're starting to adopt things like zoom or Slack for chat and video, but still you're recreating the old modes and that everything is assumed to be synchronous. And you might even say, like, hey, everyone needs to be online at these hours, like nine to five. You're just kind of recreating, honestly, what's a factory model of office work, which doesn't make any sense for knowledge work in the first place at home. And this is also the phase where sometimes companies will want to install software on their employees computer to screenshot their screen or make sure certain things are open or that they're logged in. It's kind of the big brother phase. And this is, I would argue, sometimes even less productive than in the office because you're actually removing some of the freedom and agency and you're kind of on some worst tools. So a lot of companies are going to be going through level two now, and I would just advise them to that kind of old saying, if you're going through heck, keep going. If you're going through level two, tough it out and start to talk about how you can move to what I'll call levels three through five. So level three is where you start to really take advantage of the medium. So some examples of this. Like, let's say you're having a video call, but instead of having people typing at their computer or something like that, you could have a shared Google Document all open for everyone on their screen and designate someone to take notes. And then everyone else will see the notes being written as they're being taken. Now, this sounds like it might be distracting, but it's actually an incredibly clarifying practice in a meeting because you're kind of in real time checking whether the artifact of that meeting, the notes being taken from that meeting, reflect the shared understanding of what was agreed to. And communication is hard in general, but in work situations, so often I see so much conflict and drama come from where people thought they were on the same page, but they were using words, the same words to mean different things. They didn't have a shared understanding of the expectations or outcome. So when you're the notetaking is actually, I think, one of the most powerful physicians in a meeting. And so when it's kind of a shared responsibility there, you get a lot better outcome and expectations for the meeting. You can start to share screens really quickly. So like, hey, just let me pull up this chart really quick, let me show you something and let me show you a website using things like zoom. You can actually share the screen of your phone if you want to demo something on an app, you really start to get to where it's pretty powerful. This is also where typically people start to invest in better equipment. And this could be as simple as like buying a lamp for your desk so you don't look like you're, you know, the walking horror movie so you don't look like you already have COVID-19. Yeah, it's also really fantastic if I think the best investment at this is actually an audio. So I'm a little heterodox in that I do not believe in muting during meetings. If you don't have to because when you're muted, like if let's say we're having this conversation and we would have to unmute to talk to each other every time, it would really introduce that delay and make it quite stilted so you lose some of that spontaneity of great conversation. But we ask people to mute because they usually have really terrible mics and a lot of room noise and stuff. Right. The good news is there's like 30 $50 USB headsets. I like one from Sennheiser called the SC 30 or SC 130 that plug into your computer and they have a little you look like you're in a call center. But just the physics of it is that when the microphone is very close to your mouth, it doesn't have to work as hard and it can kind of be tuned to get just your voice and not all the background noise. And literally like dogs can be barking, kids can be yelling, you don't hear it. I also believe this is the area where software is going to have incredible innovation. So there's a cool machine learning tool called Crisp AI. I think it's like 30 or $40 a year. You can run it on your computer and it actually uses machine learning to remove background noise even from noisy environments. They can do it both for incoming audio and outgoing audio, which is actually so if you're talking to someone noisy it can kind of remove everything except for the voice on their side as well. Can it be run on a phone as well, or just a computer? So they have an iOS app but you have to use the app to make the call. So it's not yet because of the sort of systems level access. But I would also say at level three you're probably using a laptop more to work and if you put these tools through the laptop you actually get a lot more power than if you're just using your phone or an iPad or something. Level four is also our level three is also where we invest in written communication. So the written word I think is by far the most powerful for sharing things in the distributed organization and writing. Quality, clarity and skill becomes more and more valuable, I think, in all organizations. But the more distributed you are, for sure this is going to be a windfall for all the humanities degrees. Absolutely. We screen for it very heavily in our hiring process. Like, I actually don't care where you went to college or anything like that, but we do a lot to screen for writing ability, both in how you apply, how we interact. We'll hire many, many people without ever actually talking to them in real time or on voice. We do it entirely through slack and tickets and other things to interact because that's how we work. Yeah, that's going to be the final product in many cases. Yeah. That's interesting. Level four. Can I talk about level four? Yeah, please. Level four is when things go asynchronous. So everything thus far, you're kind of assuming that people are synchronous, which requires people to be on the computer at the same time. And so you're actually not giving people, like, the agency to design their days or design their productivity to choose how the same output. You're judging them on what they need to produce, but not on how they produce it. So I think a lot about the 2016 Japanese relay race team. Do you know that story? No. So the Japanese runners, like, their 100 meters dash was a full, like 2 seconds slower than, like, the Usain Bolts of the world. They were not the fastest runners by far, but they were actually able to get a silver medal in the 2016 Olympics, beating out faster teams like Jamaica and others because they focused purely on the baton handoff in the relay race, and they were able to shave seconds off the baton handoff. That's great. I think about that all the time. So, like, for example, if you can get to where you have people all over the world, level four is also where you can start to hire tap into the global talent pool. If you can start to hire all over the world and have those people be able to be just as effective working their daytime or most productive hours and passing off that baton between the people working daytime hours in the US. To Europe, to Asia Pacific, you essentially get a 24 hours cycle. And what might take a normal organization three days to have three kind of cycles of going through something you could do in 24 hours. Now, this is the idealized version. It's never quite that easy, but you can get a lot closer by focusing on that baton pass. Level four is I think that also where you can start to shift to things. When you shift to asynchronous, your decisions can take a little longer, but they can be a lot better. So you were complaining a little bit about meetings. I could talk for two more hours about meetings, but most meetings are terrible. And there was a funny tweet. We're finding out just how many meetings could have been an email instead, like emails for status updates, things like that aren't great, and often they use as a forcing function just to get people to pay attention to the same thing. At the same time. So we just say, hey, we're going to get everyone in a room and force you to think about this topic. Now, the downside of that, and like, you know, as someone who appreciates contemplation and deep thought is that all you're getting in that hour is people's reactions. So they're presented with information and this is most meetings, they're presented with information and they react immediately. And typically we also get all the dynamics, which are tough in person situations where the highest paid person's opinion in the room tends to carry more weight, more gregarious or outgoing. People speak a lot more often, men speak more than women. So you lose a lot of really valuable perspectives and inputs into the decision making or sort of the decision making process when you can move, asynchronous it actually creates a ton of space for the introverts, for the thoughtful. People for folks for whom English might not be their first language, to really sit with an idea, play with different hypotheses and then contribute something. That's very thoughtful back. They've had the chance to take a walk with it or think about it in the shower, whatever it is that sort of contributes to their best critical thinking and contribute those ideas. So this means it might take a day or two to come to a decision that you might have been able to hash out in an hour long meeting, but you can design your business around this. The decision you come to and the insight that was gone into that should be much, much better than if you just got people reacting to things in real time. Right? We at level four now. Level four, there's a level five? Level five, yeah. This is a direct brain machine interface. Yeah, I like to have level five. I do call it nirvana. So it's always good to have an unattainable level. Right? But level five is when you're doing better work than any in person organization could ever do. And I like to think of level five work. It's fun, so every organization can have a taste of it. So the fun side of level five, I would say, is there's things you're able to incorporate in your day to day that would be either socially awkward or impossible in an office. So remember all that stuff we talked about, about being in an office? Like not everyone has a corner office. Your colleagues are loud, they eat smelly food, all those sorts of things. This is when you really start to actually be able to design your environment in your day around health, wellness, mental well being, et cetera. So something I like to do that would be not impossible but definitely socially awkward in office is in between meetings I like to do like 20 squats and then some push ups to kind of keep my blood flowing and keep myself active. You could do that office, but I would feel weird. Personally, I do a lot. I have a desk that can go up and down, and when I start to flag energy in the afternoon, I have to put fun music on and do a little dancing while I'm doing my emails and reading. Obviously not if I'm on video again, it would be awkward. Treadmill desks are also great for this. I have colleagues who have lost 20 or £30 just because they start putting in tens of thousands of steps during the day when they're not on video or call. Just being on a treadmill desk doing a very slow, like 1.52 miles per hour walk while they're doing what would normally be a stationary activity. Right. My personal favorite here is actually right now. I have a candle on my desk. I find that the flame is like very centering. It reminds me to breathe. It also smells really nice, at least to me. But you imagine an office with 200 people in an open office, all the candles, like you set the fire alarm off, can't do that. So you can really you can design things. And at an organizational level, when everyone is able to operate at that higher level, I do believe they also then can bring their best selves to their work, their most creative thinking, their most productive times of day, and they can start to incorporate things that, again, might make their lives significantly better. But be hard in office. Even if your office said you can leave between two and 03:00 P.m., like we allow people to do that to pick up their kids, you might feel awkward if everyone else in your office wasn't doing that. But when you're distributed, you can go drop your kids off, pick your kids up every day. Very, very common pattern with families, which makes a huge difference in the kids lives and theirs. But it's completely your colleagues have no idea because you're still producing the same kind of output. Right? Yeah. That's a crucial threshold there where you no longer index on time spent in the office or at the desk, and you simply focus on the output that you care about. Right. So it doesn't matter when you get it done or how you get it done, it just matters that it get done. That's a very different orientation than you have by default in a normal office, which is, I guess, obviously normal offices demand results as well. So you have people working after hours and cramming to get things done often. But in reality, there's a lot of merely existing during the work hours, and that counts as a full day's work. Whereas if you could do something heroically productive in 3 hours, that should be good enough. It's just a different value. It actually kind of links up with the default sense that we all have, that even in a world of infinite abundance, everyone should have to work to justify their existence. And this is what Andrew Yang's campaign ran up against. In trying to explain UBI to the rest of America, you're telling me you're going to give people money and they don't have to work? This is just the ultimate subversion of our ethics and our politics. But in a world where we really could just pull wealth out of the ether, then that should be a world where people could just creatively use their time to any purpose that interests them. And you really shouldn't have to find something to do that other people will pay you for. Now, obviously, we are nowhere close to that world. We were closer to that world a couple of weeks ago and we are quickly being shoved further away, which I want to talk about, but I get the sense that many employers are uncomfortable with the idea that they don't really know what their employees are doing. Moment by moment, hour by hour, unless they're in a box with them in an office building. What can you say to that concern? That's level one or level two? We inherited this from the factory model, right, where if you weren't in the factory, you really weren't doing your work. But for some reason, we've carried this over into knowledge work, which actually lends itself to being far more productive when you're distributed than when you're crammed in cubicles or in open office spaces next to 200 of your not favorite people or not closest friends. I've worked in offices before I had jobs subcontracting for oil companies. I worked at CNET when I first moved out to San Francisco. I honestly think it's easier to slack off an office than it is when you're working from home. And I should define easier there. It's easier to get by with it. So obviously when you're at home, no one knows what you're doing, right? But the results of that input start to become very, very apparent. And if you start to go a couple of days without delivering the thing that you said you were going to deliver, or your output compared to a colleague starts to really diverge, people are going to notice. Whereas if you're in an office and you show up early in the morning, you're well dressed, you asked, you ask smart sounding questions in meetings, you're not drunk, like people don't see Facebook on your screen. You can actually get by for like three, four months before people really notice that, hey, what has Joe done recently? What are they really producing? And I think there's a lot more focus. I mean, another moral reason why I think that distributed work can be so much better for the world and society is that by focusing purely on those outputs, you actually remove a lot of the kind of built in lizard brain biases that we all have. Kind of inherent like I said, I was joking earlier. Someone's not drunk and they dress well and things we assume they're doing good work. We also. Have a ton of other stuff that there's been a lot of research around. Like when someone jay walks, if they're wearing a suit, people are more likely to follow them than if they're dressed like a bum. We're kind of hard wired in a lot of ways to have these kind of built in social cues and unconscious biases and things like that. And when you're able to remove all that, I think you get something much closer to what Ray Dalio talks about. Something like the idea meritocracy, which I think all organizations should strive for, where we're just looking at the work itself and the purest, most objective form and judging that, not trying to bring in all these other things, either conscious or unconsciously, that might influence us about how someone is doing in their role. So what are the other barriers here that keep organizations from moving up these levels? One that comes to mind is a concern about security. So if you're all working in an office together and accessing databases and office computers, now we're switching to remote access to every tool you need to use. And I can imagine that certain companies will either bulk at that or worry about it or not know how to implement it in a way that actually doesn't compromise the security of their clients or customers or just open them to some kind of risk they haven't had to think about. Is there a generic discussion to be had about this problem? Yeah. The good news is organizations were already moving to endpoint security or bring your own device or untrusted devices already. And even the most sophisticated ones like Google moved to this years ago. So it used to be there was this kind of regulatory capture where there'd be It departments that had to justify like very complex processes or systems and aim of security. And there was this kind of model that assumed that if you were inside the wall, you were trusted. If you're outside the wall, you're untrusted. Now, of course, this makes it and as the sort of huge rash of hacks and data disclosures has shown, that when you put all your faith in the wall, that becomes a single point of failure. You just have to call the receptionist and say you're a prince from Nigeria and you need her password. You're in the human element. It's only strong as the weakest length and you lose what insecurity we call defense in depth, where you try to have defense layers at every single step. So of course, if you can have a wall, have a wall. But beyond that, assume that there might be untrusted or malicious actors inside the wall. Actually, a security model that a lot of tech companies are having to move through in Silicon Valley is assuming that trusted people, employees with valid credentials might actually not have motivations which are aligned with the company. They might be employed by state actors from China or Iran or Israel or other things. And so you really have to look at what are the behaviors that we want to protect against, not just saying the access control model of security. And I actually am really excited if there's any silver linings or anything. You look to be hopeful that we're being kind of jolted out of many old models. I saw the story the other day that Skype and FaceTime were not allowed for telemedicine. Again, there's the teleword because they aren't HIPAA compliant, which is a set of regulations designed to protect patient privacy, but again, regulatory capture. The other reason they weren't allowed was because all the companies selling like super expensive telemedicine stuff that didn't work as well as FaceTime. We're sort of putting these obscure rules in. That said, if it's not this, it's not HIPAA compliant. And those regulations have at least been temporarily removed and I think hope get permanently removed, that when certain solutions like a FaceTime has security, which is kind of best in class in the world, we can say that this is sufficient for handling private data, like discussing how you're feeling with your doctor. Right. So security is, I think, something that, again, as you start to move through the levels, you naturally move to a point where you enable more distributed at level one and level two, especially at level one, people might not physically, they might not actually be able to do the work because there's some internal system that they just don't have access to. But again, most knowledge companies, most certainly technology companies, there's no reason for this. So what are the tools that you think of as now just being standard at the moment to do this? Well, so on tech tools, online stuff, I would say that Zoom, Slack and something that we use, something to replace email is really key. So email is nice because it's Asynchronous, but unfortunately it's private. Part of levels three and four are you start to move to be a lot more transparent internally. So information isn't locked up in private things like inboxes. So what P Two is, is essentially a synchronous blogging system that's internally public, but private to the world that we can use instead of email to have all discussions. So Automatic is probably a level four organization with glimpses of level five. Sometimes I, from my colleagues, get under five emails per month. Wow. And some months it might just be one or two. Basically all I get with email is like private HR stuff, things that need to be one to one, private communication. Everything else happens on these internal blogs, including if someone wants to ask me a question, they can do that publicly in Slack or P Two. And then when I answer that question, the rest of the organization has the ability to see that. We've also developed essentially like an internal Google alerts. So of 1200 people producing lots of posting comments, there's literally thousands per day. It's more than any person could reasonably read every day to follow at all. But with this internal Google alerts you could just get alerted when someone mentions a topic that you're interested in or of course mentions your username. So it allows just a lot more effective sort of tapping into the information you need to without kind of the huge CC chains or like sort of opt out methods that email tried to take to information sharing. And so how flat is your organization? What are you doing about the tyranny of notifications? If anyone can just use your username and you've got now over 1000 people working for you, how often are you pinged with stuff that is just diverting your attention? That's a great question because I think two things get conflated there. One is the actual organization itself. So we have a totally normal organic brand or chart, right? We have a very natural hierarchy of teams and divisions and everything like that. That's totally normal inside automatic. Now communications though is totally flat and accessible which is happening in larger companies as well. Like if you work at Verizon you can figure out the CEO's email and email them but just by making things by default public. We have kind of these open channels. The beauty of it is you get folks who might not be in a meeting if you're having a meeting about a topic participating. So for example, maybe a frontline support person is saying wow, I heard this from a customer, I'm seeing this pattern. Or folks from a different area of the company who might be working on something, a similar problem can drop in and say things. Now, it's a double edged sword. So what's beautiful about that can also be the downside. So on these kind of asynchronous threads around decisions or design or things like that, you can also just get where people without as much credibility but lots of opinions or lots of time to argue drop in, right? So that can be just kind of like the internet sounds like Twitter. Yeah. Or Reddit. So that can happen. You just have to sort of deal with that as it happens. Maybe talk to the person or just say we're looking for this type of feedback but not for this type of feedback. And then I think it's also really important to have just like there's good meetings or bad meetings, there's good or bad threads. So start the thread with what you want the outcome to be when you need it by and then when it's all done, summarize it. So maybe there's 100 comments on a particular thread. And then we like to encourage a best practice where someone summarizes sort of the best arguments on every side and then says what the decision is and sort of why you're doing that. Like we thought of this, but we decided to go this other direction. Are there challenges as a manager that are unique to this distributed environment or is it basically the same thing but with different tools? I think managers are actually the biggest barrier to companies moving up the levels towards nirvana. So I say individual contributors or sort of engineers, support people, et cetera like that, actually fall into distributed work really easily. Especially because so many people have experience with side gigs or being freelancers or something where it just feels very natural to do the work. Just you have a bit more autonomy over your day. You need to work a little harder to make sure you have good processes and schedule and everything but you can do the work. But managers, particularly if they have a lot of experience, famously they talk about managing by walking around where people might sort of get a pulse of the organization by walking around the office or the queue farm or whatever and just kind of dropping in on people, things like that. You lose that kind of ambience intimacy or information gathering that comes just by being around people. So with all of this, I think that it's not actually inherently, necessarily good or bad. It's just different to work this way. And you have to list out the things that you're missing and sort of from first principles, go back and say, oh, well, I don't have as good pulse on my team. And then brainstorm ways you can get that. So for example, many managers will still continue weekly one to ones for 30 minutes. Or you might start meetings with kind of like a warm up question where you ask someone like what their favorite cartoon when they were growing up is and things kind of break the ice and get to know people. You also, I think as a manager, have to keep a closer eye because where you might notice in an office when someone is coming in looking really dejected or sad or low energy, you need to keep an eye out for that. And sometimes even just their rigid communication or how responsive they're being to make sure that there might be something going on in their life that you could be a better, more supportive manager if you were aware of. But they might feel awkward bringing it up and you're not going to notice just from how they're sitting at their desk slumped over. You start to need to be a bit more attuned for that. Also if you go fully distributed, like level four when you're actually global so meaning that you're able to tap into the world's talent pool, you have people automatic now has people in 70 countries. The time zones can get a little tricky so we try not to spread individual teams. So teams are typically five to 15 people across more than eight time zones. And some companies even go as far as to say people need to be within like two or three time zones from each other so you don't get too big of an hourly spread. But most certainly if you had someone in Asia, someone in the Americas, and someone in Europe, there's no good time for that at least once a week when you kind of need to sync up. The last time we spoke about this, it was a few years ago, I think you did have a physical office. I think it had like eleven people in it and you had close to 1000 people distributed. What's the state of things now? So we went to closing that office. It kind of dwindled because traffic in the Bay Area got so bad. Even though we have a similar percentage of people, I think over 100 people in the Bay Area. The office people just stopped wanting to go into because even though it was a really beautiful office, we had, I think, 3000 person there. Well, we didn't want that. It just kind of ended up that way. That's enough for a candle and a treadmill desk. Yeah, they could have more control and autonomy over their life at home, and the commute could be a real killer, especially when traffic started to get bad. So we shut that down. Then we also bought a company called Tumblr, which historically has always had a really, really strong New York office. And New York also being one of those places where many people's home set up is not as conducive to great work. So when you move to level three, four and five, you start to find that people often will start to make changes in their life to just have a better quality of life. So often that might be moving to someplace where the same dollars gives you just a lot more space, because then you can have a dedicated room for your home, office set up, or more outdoors, or whatever it is that you value. But of course in Manhattan that could be very tricky. So maintaining an office there was when we did the acquisition, they said it was super, super important. So we actually committed to maintain one for five years for them. We temporarily moved into a WeWork and we're building out a space. Now something interesting has happened. So before they had about 130 people going into the office, as we sort of started to share some of our best practices around distributed work. Previously, the folks who were, and I'll use the word remote here the folks who were remote from the New York office of Tumblr had a much worse experience. So they weren't able to be as productive as the people who were in the office. As they started to incorporate more of the best practices of distributed work that you and I have talked about, they had less need to go into the office to be productive. And it's down to where there's only 40 or 50 people. Of course, prior to this current crisis, only 40 or 50 people that were regularly going into the office in a given week. So even those living in Manhattan started to shift away from going in certainly every day like they used to. And I will say one more thing. Where it's useful to have a physical space for the office is fundraising. So I raised over $450,000,000 last year. I found it hard to do that from coffee shop. Meet me at the Starbucks. No. And literally in 2018 or 2018, I tried doing that. So where I'd meet people like at lawyers offices or our investors offices or other things and tried to do this large round and to be honest, was much less successful. Interesting. So we've actually built out a small space that we actually plan to be empty 99% of the time in San Francisco just for investors. And we'll also use it for board meetings. So our board meetings have been distributed for many years now, but we like to get everyone together once a year. That's actually worth saying. The magic of distributed work, which is something that in normal situations, every company should incorporate, but right now is obviously off the table, which is meetups. So when you join Automatic, we kind of flip the script where most companies say like, hey, 48 weeks of the year we want you in the office. And then three or four weeks you can travel or be on vacation, whatever, we reverse it. We say 48 weeks of the year, do whatever you want, be wherever you want, we just are going to judge you on the output, not your input. But three or four weeks a year you should expect to travel and sort of take that into counts, whether you need like home care or someone to water your pets or take your dogs or whatever, take that into account for your compensation decision as well. That three or four weeks a year you're going to need to be away from home. And these meetups have been really crucial to us. So paradoxically, the in person time is just as important as distributed time for building that trust. And I think going back to our earlier discussion about there's our lizard brains, it's just things that happen when you're in person where you can sit across a table and break bread, when you can see, you know, the full bandwidth of their, of your five senses being engaged by, by their presence. That is just more powerful than any technology will be able to create, no matter how rich the medium is or we move to VR or whatever. And the trust you build in that in person time can actually carry you through years of not seeing that person again. And I'm sure we could all think of friendships we have or maybe like a family member who we don't see regularly, but because we had that really intense bonding time at some point in our history, we just have a deeper level of trust and communication with that person. So that is, in any organization, trust, communication, et cetera, is really, really important, and that in person time is key for it. Yeah. So are these global meetups where everyone comes to a big conference, or do you have regional meetups that are smaller, so they're organizational, so they're around what you work on less than where you are? So historically, once a year, we've bought the entire company together. As we've gone over a thousand people, that's to me, become a bit less useful because it feels more like a conference than it does, like, really gain to know your colleagues. Although even at that, we'll have little hacks. So, for example, we have a software program where you can sort of it's a two way system that lets you say whether you met someone or not. So I could say, oh, I've met Sam, and then that also gets marked for you that you've met me. All of our meals at the meetup, we actually have some software that assigns the seating for all the dinners and lunches. So you're seated with people that you've never met before, and so that gives you the opportunity to create as many of those cross organizational bonds as possible. But we do once with the whole company, and then more often, two or three times a year, you'll meet with your team, which is typically pretty small, usually under ten people, and then maybe once with your division, which could be anywhere from like 50 to 300 people. So those smaller ones, when it comes to structure, I obsess about this, and I believe all organizational structures are trade offs. You just have to be conscious about which trade offs you're making. And we have tried to make where automatic is fractal, so whichever level you zoom in or out of, it self resembles a whole you're like Al Qaeda. Okay. But more socially positive. Yeah. We try to say, like, if there's a 20 person team, that should look and work a lot like when automatic did, when the whole company was 20 people. So we try to make the team super cross functional, remove the external barriers to them for shipping or iterating. And that that is just really, really effective for for allowing the I would say we've actually been able to get faster in our speed of iteration as we've grown, where typically as companies grow, they tend to get slower. I know it's one of your intellectual nemesis, but I really obsessed about much of the writing of Nassim Taleb because and Jeffrey West is another one of his work. Yeah. This idea that companies are typically not resilient and tend to head towards extinction, but cities can last survive nuclear bombs and still keep going. What's fascinating, I think that every person running a company should read and study that work, because what are the elements of the cities? What are the elements of control that they give up what are the sort of like little bit of anarchy and randomness they allow that allows them to persist and thrive and be so creative and actually increase in productivity as the density goes up. I think companies can recreate the same things. So I'd like to segue to our now global concern about what's happening with Coronavirus. Can I say one thing for you? Yeah, sure I forgot it but it is so important so especially in this day and age where sometimes we can be more sensitive I'd like to say that there's a good woke and a bad woke. Like we can be over sensitive to what people say. When you shift to distributed a lot of your communication is going to be written and usually when you're reading something there's two ways to read anything. A way which can kind of get you kind of worked up or mad or feel like the person's attacking you and a way which doesn't. So we have an acronym we use a lot internally called API which normally in tech stands for Application Programming Interface but we use it to say Assume positive intent. That's great. 99% of the time in a work environment, the person who's sending you a message is not trying to make you feel bad. They're not trying to attack you or anything like that. But we can often feel that way. And again, our lizard brains can kind of flare up and we get into a defensive mode, which can devolve quickly, especially when you're typing back and forth to each other. So we like to say like just assume the best intent and what you receive. We like to say be conservative in what you put out. So meaning like try to put some extra fluffy language or extra emojis or a GIF or whatever it is that when you write a message try to make it as kind and humane as possible and sort of take into a mind that the person receiving it might read it the wrong way. So this is kind of a variation of pasta's law to be like liberal what you accept and conservative in what you put out. And then finally we like to tell people to up meetings. So if you find you're typing back and forth a lot and it's getting like a little combative see if you can hop to an audio call real quick. And audio is safe because even though people might not be dressed or ready for a video call anyone can hop on audio really quickly and just sometimes getting on the phone can really de escalate things really in a really beautiful way. It's also used being distributed to de escalate yourself. So if you're feeling really worked up like can you take a walk or do some push ups or like just like take a few mindful moments away from the computer in a way that allows you to bring a mindset back to that communication which has a lot more inquanimity or is more kinder to the other person. Yeah, emojis are interesting because I was one of the holdouts. I went for a very long time without using an emoji. Emojis were everywhere and I was still some dogmatism based on my identity as a writer. I don't know what it was, but just aesthetically, intellectually I was allergic to emojis. And then I just immediately stumbled into their utility once I started spending a fair amount of my time on Slack. And once texting became more a part of my life, I was kind of slow to adopt texting as a main form of communication. But it's just in terms of efficiency and also giving some framing to the text, which is often too terse to it just takes so much time to close the door to any variant reading that worries you. So emojis can be useful there. I hope that our work tools also get better at asynchronous audio communication. So in WhatsApp or Telegram, it's very easy to send short audio messages in Slack. It's currently really impractical. So I think that will improve communication a lot. I think level up level four quite a bit. Did you also used to use a lot of punctuation like periods at the end of sentences? Yeah, it's amazing. For the longest time, email for me had to rise to the standard of what you would have written as a letter. It made no sense, but for the longest time it didn't occur to me that it did. I still try to write as coherently as I ever try to write, but I'm much less concerned about typos or I'm dropping the subject for many sentences. I notice now the personal pronoun just often doesn't show up in the sentence because I'm just saying things like working hard on this. Now that's a sentence, right? I never would have done that before. I feel like I've been cognitively rewired by the pace of electronic communication. I think it's actually an interesting difference between level three and four, actually, because it's interesting if you visualize like the sentence, this isn't what I was looking for. If you imagine that with a capital T in a period at the end, it feels way heavier than if that were kind of all lower case without a period punctuation at the end. But I've also found so I've actually started to start to expand my brevity a bit more because especially coming from like IRC and old internet stuff, it was very rapid fire. Short messages a lot more like texting. But when you move to more asynchronous, you want the message to be as specific and contain all the context as possible for someone reading it maybe out of context or just in the stream of other things to have everything they need to respond. And so when you have kind of these dangling references to pronouns or concepts that might occur in previous messages, you have more chance for misinterpretation. So I find myself actually spelling things out a little bit more like and so and saying like, hey, are we, you know, are we approving the salary for these three hires? And where previously I'd be like, yes, or, that sounds good. Now I'm trying to say yes. Comma approving the salary for these three hires because also there might be other messages in the stream since then, you know, there might be other things that sort of create some ambiguity for what you're responding to, or that person might be stuck on sending you messages until you respond to that specific thing. So it just allows kind of like a level of threading asynchronously, asynchronicity to have more of that context in every message. Okay, so how are you thinking about society at the moment? We're recording this after I haven't looked yet again today, but the stock market was plunging for another day in the last week, falling more than at any point in history. And I'm sure it's going to go up again, but I'm sure it'll go down again and how far down is anybody's guess at this point? Just to bring people up to speed with the epidemiological picture, I'm not seeing an off ramp in the near term here where life gets back to normal. So I think we have many months of this, barring some remarkable breakthrough in antiviral treatment, which so lowers the risk attendant to getting the coronavirus that people can behave normally with it replicating all around them. So in the best case we have, I think, months of disruption. We have to retool in some significant way here. And obviously even if we could get out of this situation in a few short weeks, something like this is going to happen again and there's no guarantee that it won't be far worse the next time. On some level we got lucky with the, I mean, it seems perverse to say it, but we're very lucky that this virus isn't ten times as lethal as it is because that is absolutely on the menu biologically, to say nothing of what someone could consciously weaponize and spread. So the big picture question here is how are we going to avoid falling into a great depression here? Do you have any thoughts about that? Yeah, this is definitely the more somber part. I should I've I've tried to be a lot more positive and jovial in my advocacy of distributed work because I think it will be crucial, like I said, to unlock sort of economic engines where we can in this really trying time. But like you, if I look forward, I actually become quite quiet and somber because I think there's in addition to being easily a year of disruption, we're going to have a lot of loss of human life and tragedy there, which will weigh psychically and mentally very heavily on every single one of us. And I already have friends who are. Very sick from this. No one who's passed yet. But just if you think statistically, by the end of the year, we're all going to know a few people who have been on the bad end of this disease. We were supposed to have a big conference last month on the side, and on February 12, I had to personally make the call to cancel it because the team still kind of didn't have a consensus on where to go for so it's over a month ago, I got a huge amount of criticism. Now, 36 days later, we're now seeing people start to wake up and have a lot more of the the social behaviors, which, to me feel like they have a chance at lowering the RNAs, etc. But, you know, I worry that we'll relapse, that we'll have premature victories or lapse of kind of these social distancing or physical distancing, as Adam Gonzalez likes to call it, measures. And so that's why it's so key that we that we really work at kind of getting what we can of, you know, operating in our lives, even under the situation. So we're really, really curious if we are able to recreate in America, you know, the kind of systems that they had for home delivery of goods and food and things. In China, where the kitchen were kind of like everyone's temperature would be taken and the delivery person's temperature would be taken and you kind of had these things to keep society going even in the face of an incredibly contagious and dangerous disease. Just before we started recording that, there were some reports on a resurgence in in some of these countries that have had the most success in flattening the curve. So South Korea and Singapore and even, I believe, in China in areas that have been fully locked down. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens when restrictions on social proximity become relaxed, either legally or just by people no longer complying with strong recommendations, and just how we can find a pattern of life that diminishes the risk sufficiently so that this just doesn't run at a slow boil for a very, very long time. I mean, the counterfactual here is so hard to absorb. If we could all just perfectly quarantine for something like three weeks, we could have this evaporate, right? And we could force this into extinction. Barring the people who are already sick, who need to be cared for in hospitals, we could fully contain this thing, except for the possibility that the virus has some truly rare characteristic where people remain infectious for much longer. You'd expect this to self extinguish. If we could just take our best advice immediately. But we show absolutely no signs of being able to do that. So it's going to go on for a very long time. And it's almost like we're living on another planet here where the atmosphere has become inhospitable and we each have to figure out how to maintain the integrity of our respective biodomes or spaceships. And it's absolutely bizarre. So what do you think about when you look at the economy shutting down? I mean, the things that you can see. An organization like yours can keep flying at cruising altitude, I would imagine, without much of anything changing apart from individuals getting ill. But then there are other sectors of the economy where it's very hard to imagine how they can function at all or how they can restart, even when the picture with respect to the disease has totally changed. They're perfectly viable restaurants, the most popular restaurants in cities like San Francisco and New York and Los Angeles who may just go out of business simply because they can't handle this hiatus in their activity. Can you think of any creative ways or is there anyone in your world who, you know, who has thought of creative ways to bridge this gap in economic activity? It just seems to me that there's so many truly successful businesses that may not survive this. Yeah, I think it's an opportunity, one that no one asked for, but to really re examine. If you're a business, what is it that you are selling to the old? Actually, like, you don't sell a drill, you sell a hole in the wall. So are there ways to provide the value that you provide to your customers that aren't just doing it today this way because you did it before? And I think we're going to have to re examine every aspect of our society which is overly reliant on physical colocation because that makes us in an ever hyper connected society where people travel more than ever, et cetera, makes us particularly vulnerable. And like you said, this one being a dress rehearsal for something that could be a lot more deadly. I would bet. If you have to decide that we're going to have more situations like this in the future, not fewer, that there will be more things like this that impact our ability to sort of be physically colocated with random members of society more often. And so if we're able, I think it's a moral imperative for every single business to try to re examine their supply chain and their delivery mechanisms to customers in this. For those restaurants you mentioned, just pick a specific example. Like, I love the stories, we'll see how it goes. But like a high end restaurants, like an aviary who might have said their product was purely the experience of being there. And it's true the theater of some of these restaurants is part of it in the Ambience, but sort of rapidly shifting to Be to go and delivery orders and that they can kind of shift their business model. Have you heard about cloud kitchens before? No, I don't think so. I think I have heard the phrase, but it means nothing to me. It started to shift with Uber eats and DoorDash and these different things. When you think of the business model of like a grocery store versus an Amazon Fresh or a Walmart versus Amazon, these kind of like big box football field size spaces where people come and pick up their stuff is a little bizarre, right? Because it's like inventory plus logistics plus making people do a bunch of themselves. Then you also get things. There's an industry term called leakage. Do you know that one? Or shrinkage? No, what is it? Shrinkage is not just George Costanza thing. It's also when inventory walks out the door without people paying for it. So shoplifting or stealing either from customers or from employees. Wait a minute. That's a huge issue. Shrinkage is a euphemism for leakage is a euphemism for theft. Yeah. Interesting. And it's a very common industry term where typically they'll have single digit percentage of inventory in certain businesses that just walk out the door. So when you can move to delivery, you bypass all this. Much like the shift to a cashless society actually can decrease corruption quite a bit because now transactions can be tracked and there's no cash register that money can walk out from and things like that. So I think a lot of these things, the digitization and the atomization of society can actually have lots of ancillary benefits in areas we might not even expect. The sort of second and third order effects from when you move to being, say, mostly delivery, both positive and negative. There was a spate of delivery theft as people started to rely on Amazon more and more. Now the technology has started to adapt to that though. So one, they've been able to use data to look at where that was concentrated. So I'm aware of a company that was running a large national ecommerce chain and they were finding that essentially like I think it was 60 or 70% of all the loss happening in the country was in one zip code in Massachusetts. Oh, really? That sort of big data allows you to zoom in and it turns out that in their supply chain there was, you know, someone essentially telling someone when this high value item was going to be delivered. So that the package thefts. The one time IH package theft, they stole some water and some socks so they didn't get it was actually a high risk, low reward activity for that person. But if you know it's going to be a computer or a cell phone or something like that, they show changes to economics and the risk reward. So that information is very valuable, but they were able to identify that. I think there's also shifts like now where you have these smart locks that allow people to leave packages inside the door or inside the fence or something like that in a more secure fashion. Even things like the ring doorbell where you know immediately when someone rings the doorbell, you kind of see what's happening right there or can create more like do you know the term like club versus LoJack solutions? Insecurity. Yeah. So they can create more LoJack solutions where if everyone on the street has a ring, you'll probably catch someone on video at some point when they're doing something bad versus just like making it less attractive for you to be stolen versus others because sort of decreases the societal benefit and changes the risk reward curve for immoral or society harmful behavior. So I think about these things a lot because I think that the systems we put in place will have many order effects and we are unfortunately, in real time trying to define new methods of privacy, of travel, of communication, of insular lists for countries, of how companies are working. That the repercussions of which we're going to feel for a generation. Yes, it really does seem like it's crossed that threshold where we'll feel the impact of this for a very long time. I think analogies to 911 are misleading. I read that the impact on the restaurant business of 911 was something like a 3% decrease in revenue over the course of the next month. It really was minor. It's like it was the only thing anyone was thinking about. But people were still going to restaurants and this is just perfectly designed to zero out whole sectors of the economy and rebooting under any significant uncertainty is very hard to picture. But even once we have a vaccine, still, it's going to take a while to climb out of this. And as you say, we have to find different ways of collaborating that allow for a similar pattern of economic activity and growth and for certain parts of the economy or certain businesses. It's hard to see what the hole in the wall is that really can be delivered absent selling the drill in the usual way. I do have a hard time picturing it for restaurants, even just food delivery. I would love to be able to support my favorite restaurants if I were comfortable having their food delivered, but it's hard to see how I'm going to get comfortable with that if I'm picturing a world where a significant percentage of the people preparing that food have to be shedding virus, right? And that's a world that's coming in a handful of weeks. Under what conditions am I going to be eager to have my favorite meals delivered to my house? I can picture treating the packaging as contaminated and ordering things that I can put directly into a pan and essentially repeat. But still, let's imagine they could design food for that, right? Give you something that needs two more minutes or a minute in the microwave before you eat it or whatever. That final step in preparation can be that you could have kitchens where everyone is certified essentially to either. Hopefully once we have testing, there could be actually some regular testing. I have a friend who's a firefighter in Houston. They're starting to do testing after every shift when they think they've been exposed to COVID or to Coronavirus. So you can start to build in things to create sort of safe pockets or sort of trusted supply chains, cloud kitchens. I'm sorry, I forgot to define it earlier. It's a restaurant with no storefront, no retail space, no place for customers to sit, but they still have a brand and a menu and everything else. They just exist purely in kind of the industrial kitchen space, which, of course, we have a lot of history around food safety and how to prepare our food in a hygienic way. And we're pretty good at that actually, in America. So there's no reason you need all that. The rest of the stuff that's actually expensive and adds a ton of overhead to both employ people and sort of maintain that ambience space. And so, you know, where so many, let's say 98% of restaurants today, or 99% of restaurants have that retail space, maybe in the future, only 20% of restaurants have that retail space because you go there purely for the ambiance or purely for the theater of being there, versus the sort of utility of that delicious meal that you want that, it turns out, can be delivered in an effective way and in a way that comes a lot of safety. I think that delivery networks are going to if we're going to function as society over the next year, we're going to really figure out a way to treat the delivery workers as essential functions. The same way that we might say for health care, other emergency services. Because it'll be really important for the fabric of society and the sanity of society for people to not feel like one. They have to go into grocery stores to get things and also just to manage the sort of delivery and supply chain. So, for example, my understanding is a lot of the grocery store being picked clean was not a permanent thing. It's not that we can't produce enough toilet paper for everyone in the world. It's just that, like, they normally sell a fixed amount and for some reason everyone decided to buy it at once. So they ran out then. But there's more toilet paper on the way, right? We don't have to worry about this. We're not going to have a global shortage. It's not like a virus that attacks trees, right? These sorts of things. I think we can assuage a lot of the panic behavior if we're able to maintain some of these basic services. Yeah, so it does seem that testing is the crucial piece here. If you could, and this would happen more or less with respect to every set of hands that could touch the thing you're ordering. So it's both the delivery services and in this case, this microcase, the restaurants, the ability to test and to be confident in the sensitivity and the specificity of the test and kind of the real time value of it. And also the prospect of finding people who are immune to the virus because they've already had it. They had a mild case, so they had just become carriers, essentially, but now they just have antibodies for it. So we need an antibody test. Although if this is a rapidly mutating annual thing, that won't be as effective. Yeah, we have to understand the virus we're dealing with better here and what it means to screen someone and be confident they're not shedding virus at the time. That really is as far as a landmark on the horizon in our climb out of this hole. That's an important one. Yeah. And when you think about it, we have a version of this which is easily accessible and a version which I'm actually kind of optimistic with. So the easily accessible is taking temperature, right, so that hopefully can catch as early as possible. But then, of course, the the novel aspect of this is the latent period. But let's assume that we can, you know, because other countries have ramped up the testing far more than we have in the US. With the sort of warlike intensity of society focused on getting that testing more widely available. Could we get to a point where every American had a number of tests on hand and could test themselves with some regularity? And particularly if they're in like a role where they're interacting with lots of other humans, they can't self quarantine as much? Yeah, I think that could, like you say, bring it to the point where we could get a lot closer to eradication than we would through an extreme social measure like saying everyone, including emergency workers, stay home. There are definitely people who can't stay home, and that's its own challenge. But this just comes back to the point you made very early on in this discussion, that for those of us who can stay home now, that shouldn't be viewed merely as a, as the thing that will keep us personally safe and therefore it's prudent to do it. It really is an ethical obligation. I mean, this is the thing you can do that can contribute to the health of society and the rebooting of our economy if you can work from home. It's a moral imperative now and to view yourself as someone, especially someone who's young, who stands a good chance of getting a mild case of this. If you get it, you are the first line of defense in front of every person in the community who's more vulnerable than you are every old person in your life. Your parents or your grandparents, or any older person, or more vulnerable person, an immunocompromised person, say, even a child in that case who you might meet. And so it's hard to get a visceral feel for this that you're actually doing something important by doing much less of all the things you want to do by staying home. Well, but to go back to work, how much of the spread already was because of the social stigma against working from home, or the fact that people couldn't be productive when they were at home, so they went into work a little bit sick or maybe when they were still in that early phase. So they were shedding but didn't display a lot of symptoms. I actually would take it to the point where, much like David Heinmer Hansen, I would say that bosses today who are still forcing their employees to go into work when they don't have to literally will have blood on their hands in their society, will look at that almost like a war crime. So there's what you do today, immediate reaction, and then there's what you're doing to build for the future. Any person listening to this that has influence over the future of their organization can and should make it so that they can remove all the stigma, all the sort of otherness or second class citizenness of being at home. Because we really need especially kind of a post COVID world to make it okay for someone, even at the slightest hint, to be able to say, I'm not going to come into work today, assuming we even maintain offices to the same degree that we've had in the past. Yeah, I've been thinking in the last, I don't know, two days or so, it's amazing how long a day is now, how much change one can witness over the course of mere days. But I've been thinking that there has to be a way for us to not forget any of the lessons we're learning here. We have to make some of the most basic lessons indelible. There are many things we're discovering. Essentially, you see some horrific misstep reported in the media, like the president's spontaneously preventing all travel from Europe. I say spontaneously, without warning. And therefore there's a panic. And you have airports where people are packed shoulder to shoulder trying to get through immigration. Right. You see photos of this that was shocking. And you say, okay, we can never do that again. But I fear that in this blizzard of bad news, the lessons will get lost. I almost feel like we need a Google Doc for all of civilization right now. We're just continually updating just a list of things we can never forget again. Right now is not the time to hammer China about their wet markets, but we can never forget that maintaining wet markets is completely unacceptable. The first thing on my list is don't play with bats. We need to get human bat relations down to zero or down to how you work in bio containment at the CDC. Right. And then the list just proceeds from there. And it has political implications, it has economic ones, and it just covers really all aspects of human behavior. It just seems like there's some kind of online project that should you're in the website business, there should be a website for the lessons learned here that people can contribute to. Well, I think society does evolve, and if you think of all of humanity as an organism, the Internet on our communication methods allows us to sort of increase the clock speed of humanity or increase the rate at which we're able to evolve our social morays around these things. But while I'm in violent agreement with everything you just said in specifics, I do think that we have to be careful not to fight the last war. So by definition, let's call out another good concept from Nassim dilemma, say Black Swan events. It will not be from bats next time. So we can eliminate all the wet markets. We can eliminate maybe we eliminate bats. I don't know. We can get around these things. And the next kind of novel, there's still evolution happening in these organisms. And the next novel, virus. I worry a lot, actually, about prions and protein viruses, like things that would be infinitely harder to contain and that we have no known treatment for, even in the foreseeable future, that we don't even have something like an antiviral. So it's going to come from someplace else when we fix the things that happened last time. And so you really just have to think about, like, well, two things that I like, I like to think about is there a way we can do things the opposite of what we've done in the past, and what would be the pluses and minuses of that? And then I find that almost every problem, especially in business, can get a lot better if you think really long term. So if you zoomed out and said, okay, if we did X, if we fast forward ten or 20 years, what would our company, organization, society, look like if we continue to do X? And everyone else also did X? And that actually can remove a lot of the short termism, which I think plagues our humanity's biggest problems today, including climate change, which we haven't talked to. But our response so far to the coronavirus does not make me as optimistic about climate change because it's so much more slow moving. I do hope that I don't know, are you fundamentally, are you default optimistic or default pessimistic? I think I'm default worried, which is not quite the same thing as being pessimistic, but by default pay a lot of attention to the way things can go wrong or are going wrong, and the imperative to respond to those problems. No one's ever accused me of being optimistic or Pollyannaish, but it's not that I don't I mean, I really do think we have an extraordinary ability to solve problems, and really the sky is the limit on that front. I think we could engineer something like a true utopia. It's not that it'd be no problems, but the problems would become increasingly refined. And then in some limit case, we're just trying to make things more and more beautiful and disagreeing about standards of beauty across all domains. The human experience could become a kind of paradise, really. And we've all experienced moments where it is, and yet it has to be shored up against the insults delivered by nature and randomness and bad actors. And that's impressively hard to do, and it but to come back to your comment about climate change, which is something I said almost verbatim in my previous podcast, the one thing that has made me pessimistic in seeing this drama unfold is how hard it is for so many of us to orient to a threat that is becoming less and less ambiguous by the hour. We're hearing anguish reports from Italy about its healthcare system crashing and doctors who have worked in ICUs for decades who have never seen anything like this, having to triage patients based on how many kids they have or the likelihood they're going to survive. They're essentially practicing battlefield medicine in the best hospitals in their country and putting two people on a single ventilator and thereby causing them to share any conceivable infectious agent between them. Right. Because it's just they're out of ventilators. This is medicine in extremis. And we're hearing these anguish reports. There's no barrier to us getting this information. We're getting it in real time. And yet we've got people crowding Disney World on its last night of operation and Fox News blaring out misinformation to half of our population and they're lapping it up. And without any consequence to the business of Fox News, people have cut together the kind of before and after statements of anchors on Fox News where they're denying this as a Democrat hoax and then a day later they're telling people to socially distance. And obviously Trump is patient zero for this kind of disregard for honest communication. The fact that we're here with respect to a threat to our well being, even just economic wellbeing, forget about the health implications. The fact that we're so slow to orient to it. Honestly, it makes the case of climate change seem totally hopeless. I now think that the only solution for the problem of climate change is a surreptitious, one where we just invent technologies and businesses that become so compelling and they become so benign with respect to climate that, you know, people adopt them because that's the kind of car they want. That's the kind of car it's just better. And we've never had to persuade anyone of anything. That actually seems truly hopeless to me at the moment. Well, the good news well, sorry, I feel silly. Thank goodness you'd be the optimist. Well, I'll catch it, but I think it's going to be really bad. But that adversity does create clarity. So in these things, it's true that there's been no immediate business. I actually have no idea what's going to happen with media, but I think that it goes to show that in good times, when the tide is rising, you can kind of get by with weak or bad leaders or weak or bad information. But when things get tough, that's what really has to draw people together. And there is a much higher bar that every person has when it becomes more of a life and death situation, which this is a life and death situation. I resonate a lot with a philosophy that all suffering comes from separation or the myth of separation. And so my biggest, actually even more than distributed work, I advocate for open source because I believe that we need more transparency information. We need humanity working together to solve common problems. And open source is a way to do that in software. An optimism I'm having right now is how much better this is than it even could be at this point by researchers all over the world sharing data in a very open way. We're starting to break up the kind of journal publication and other things we're saying, like, hey, we had this myth. Like journal publication is a really good example. Like we have this myth that this peer review process creates correct outcomes, almost like the firewall we talked about earlier, where if it's on the other side of the wall, it's secure. And we of course know that many things are not reproducible and that process actually isn't always perfect. And also there can be true and useful things that haven't made it through that process or that will make it through that process. But if you can share things with context, as the researcher in Washington did, who talked about the you probably saw the sequencing of the virus that said it's probably been in a wild in Washington for four to six weeks. That's for, at least in the technology world, when a lot of us woke up to if you noticed, tech companies started, like, saying work from home and shutting things down a bit sooner, canceling events, pulling out of events before a lot of the rest of the industry that Tweet is I would point directly to that as the reason that it happens. If you can have the adversity bring us closer together, I hope that they say, much like democracy, once you've had a taste of freedom, it's hard to return to your previous state. That once we see the benefits of kind of the sharing of information, that the kind of better angels of our nature can shine through. And if you believe, as I do, that humans are fundamentally good at their core, on average, the adversity can cause us to behave in a more generous or altruistic way. And it's best. But we're going to swing in Houston. We have hurricanes and I'm in Houston right now. After Katrina there was a lot of because in New Orleans they didn't fully evacuate for Katrina, a lot of people died. It was. A huge tragedy, one of the worst domestic tragedies we've had. And the government response was really bad. There was a hurricane coming to Houston after that, and they overreacted. So they told everyone to evacuate. And that evacuation of the third or fourth largest city in America clogged. All the roads and cars would run out of gas, and then they would die. And then the roads would get clogged up more. Dozens and dozens and dozens of people died in the evacuation as a result of the evacuation. And then to top it all off, the hurricane became a tropical storm. It ended up not being even something very severe. And so you had this kind of overreaction to a mistake in the past, which now has created something which, you know could be similar to to how the New York Times talked about the N 95 Mask, where, like, we were telling people to do the right thing, but maybe for the wrong reason. That you have an overreaction where I worry that as we start to open things up, as the virus recedes a little, we'll then get too open, it'll come back, and then we'll overreact the other way. It was getting too closed in ways that will send needless shocks to the economy. Yeah, no, that's totally valid. We've had to thread the needle here in our thinking and our messaging about this because it's true that it's possible that the panic associated with this pandemic and any, you know, subsequent overreaction, personal or collective, can be worse than the consequences of the virus ultimately. And that's true. Even if, you know, a million people in the US. Or 2 million wind up dying from this virus, it's still conceivable that crashing the global economy will have worse effects than that. Right. So while that is a kind of talking point that people have been using to dismiss the danger here, the extreme version is to call this a hoax that has been designed by the Democrats to unseat the President, which one could hear perhaps one can still hear it in certain circles, even though the president himself is not speaking these ways. It is a legitimate concern that we we not crash our economy unnecessarily, and we not crash it for a moment longer than is necessary because a lack of economic activity translates into lives lost in very concrete ways and to other social ills. But crashing our healthcare system because it can no longer function under the load is the immediate problem that we're avoiding. I think you have to be solutions oriented in how you talk about these things. So I'm not as optimistic if you told everyone, like, hey, we're not going to have enough masks. Please don't buy them, that people would not buy them. Like, something might kick in where they say, well, okay, if you were to modify that and say, hey, for the next two weeks, we really need health workers to have these as much as possible. If you have extras, please donate them. And in the meantime, we're ramping up all these factories, all these things to make hand sanitizer and mask and all the things that that will help slow the spread of this. So in a few weeks, there'll be enough for everyone or whatever the actual reality of that situation is. I think that I'm a lot more optimistic about that. But you have to have you have to think in systems and processes you can't just hope is not a strategy. And how do you think about the failures of the free market here? Because I've long been worried that while the free market should do everything that it can best do, there's a kind of free market fundamentalism here and a libertarianism which imagines, quite falsely, that it can do everything in the best way and that we need not take regulatory or other steps to produce things or correct for externalities that the market simply can't see. And so we're now learning about all of these things that we have outsourced to China rather often, but to elsewhere for sound market reasons. But we've lost the ability to produce these things ourselves in anything like a nimble way. And this goes to our most basic life saving drugs. It goes to things like ventilators and respirators. What do you think about an indelible lesson we might learn here with respect to the things we want to be able to make immediately or have on hand always in a crisis like this? I think that you have to assume that regardless of any precautions you take, there will be times when everything goes wrong in a way you cannot imagine. And I'm not a free market fundamentalist, but I am optimistic that at some point over the next month we'll be able to produce lots of masks. I'm hopeful that at some point this year we'll be able to mass produce enough tests so we'll have an abundance of that. And then hopefully, we also start to keep our strategic reserve. And that's where I think governments can really be really most valuable, is when they can plan for the strategic reserve, the insurance, the things to tide over temporary shocks to the system, much like we do for oil. We should look at that for many, many other staples of oil functioning society. I was actually really surprised to hear I don't know if you knew this, but China actually has a strategic pork reserve. I guess they've just had some bureaucrats somewhere said that for the harmony of society, particularly in a country so large, which is relatively authoritarian, it really relies on the citizens being happy that access to pork is actually a key thing to keep society running in a harmonious way. And so they've they've built up the reserves there. Now that's that's a funny example, but we can probably have all been woken up to things in our own lives that just having a week or two in the pantry might not be a bad idea. Yeah. And I think where it's going to be most hard is for companies because we have this kind of culture of short termism stock buybacks, et cetera, and we really need companies to build a lot more of a rainy day fund. And that is, by the way, running a company multibillion enterprise. It's hard to make that case because there's often, like, invest as much as possible or return to shareholders. And in fact, that's your fiduciary responsibility that you take on as an executive or director of these companies. So we need a way to incorporate the long term there. But when we were in the longest, almost uninterrupted bull market kind of from 90s till now, with maybe 2001 and 2008 being blips, there's generations, including myself, that never really experienced a true downturn. Right. And that's why I think you made the analogy more to World War I than 911. And I think that's a very, very apt one. We are many generations removed from the amount of hardship society has had to go through and what we'll need to go through both in collective action and personal hardship today. Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe if you can say a little bit more about the business case here. There are startups that have a certain amount of runway. There's all this pressure to grow as quickly as possible. And I got to think a lot of businesses are going to wish they hadn't gotten so far out over their skis in an effort to grow. Even businesses that are designed more or less like yours, where they're optimized for distributed work. There's something about the current environment where it's nice to know you can make payroll for years if you're sitting on profits, whereas taking profit is all too rare in Silicon Valley. Right. I mean, Amazon is the ultimate case of this. They weren't profitable for something like 20 years and then Jeff flipped the switch and now it's become perhaps among the most profitable companies on Earth. But the virtue of being able to not get hooked up to profits for years and years as you grow, that is now the the model of achieving escape velocity in Silicon Valley. And I got to think this moment has some lessons to impart for business people, certainly in that space. Well, there's often advice for people take away five or 10% of your income and put it away. And I think businesses need to adopt something similar. I think all of us, as both consumers and as also as job seekers, should look to the businesses which today are having to do big layoffs versus those which are saying, hey, even if our stores are closed, we're going to keep paying people. Apple Lululemon, there's dozens of examples. Those are the organizations that have adequately planned for downturns like this or downturns in general or unexpected events in general. And they deserve our patronage, both as customers and as places where we choose to devote a third of our life. Our working hours, some of our most valuable time, half of our waking hours goes to our job often. And so I believe that we each should try to donate our talents or put our talents not donate, you pay for it, obviously, but put your talents to where you feel most aligned with the way in which the company is run. There's a backdrop here as well, which is the oil things that are going on. Have you talked about that much? No. Well, you have a fight between Russia I'm in Houston, so I think about energy a lot. You have the fight between Russia and Saudi Arabia crashing oil prices. You're hearing that companies here are going to start to pretty immediately pull back on 20%, 30% of their workforce because much of the oil extraction we're doing in the US is just not profitable at the prices per barrel of oil and things that are dropping to. So they're having to do really, really big pullbacks and very quickly. And suddenly those are the type of things that do create supply shocks throughout the system because now they're going to all their vendors and asking for an immediate 10% drop in all of their sort of costs, even to SaaS services like Internet services. They're going to say, hey, can you drop 10% off our bill? And some of that's Opportunistic, but some of it's very real and that they need to bring their cost structures down almost immediately to survive. Yeah. The knock on effects of all of this are extraordinary. We have to remind ourselves this is only beginning. I mean, this is a very early moment to be having this conversation, and this will change week by week. Are you hopeful for political change after this? Do you think it'll shock people into it? Cautiously hopeful. I'm worried about many things. I'm worried about Biden's candidacy. I'm worried about ways in which social cohesion can fray, seems guaranteed to fray under economic pressure, and that will just energize a kind of more toxic populism that will just ignore how we got here. I mean, the fact that even now, this early, trump thinks he can successfully rewrite the record and say that he's been on this pandemic all along and has responded effectively to it, and this is now just best described as the Chinese flu and modular. The fact that I really do think we have to hold China accountable for some obscenely dangerous cultural practices, this is a global problem that requires global cooperation. And simply putting this in quasi Xenophobic terms as a problem of China and of Chinese origin, that's falling into the demagogues playbook here. And I could imagine, you know, certainly as we we lose the plot or we begin to encounter the outrage of people who never found the plot politically. Yeah. I think this could become rather than the utterly clarifying moment it should be, which is it matters when you hire dishonest, incompetent people who are slow to react to obvious problems and show a total unwillingness to prepare for them. I do worry that it could tip over into something fairly scary. Again, it's early days, it's hard to see where it will go. I have one last question for you since we're wrapping up. Sure. I have a lot of colleagues for whom the mental anguish of this, especially uncertainty, has been really tough and are starting to explore meditation. Mindfulness, what would you suggest to people for whom this is a really stressful and anxious time to just be a human and how they could use those tools? Yeah, well, that really is a softball question on this podcast. Well, but I think it's important. Yeah, as you probably know, I'm putting everything, all the advice I have to give on that front into my app, Waking Up. And occasionally some of that discussion hits the podcast, but it's really Waking Up is the place where people can find everything. I'm thinking on that topic and actually I'm just about to release a lesson, which I'll probably put on the podcast to respond to that question, where it's just how to think about meditation in the context of an emergency, and this is a very strange emergency. It's sort of natural to think that you don't have time to meditate in the midst of most emergencies because you're too busy responding to them. But in the case of this one, I would argue that that's even a misunderstanding of how to marshal your resources in the case of any emergency. But leaving that aside, in this emergency, really what we're finding is that most of us have in some sense, more time on our hands and in a very real sense, more time on our hands and we're forced into comparative solitude. We're being shoved on to retreat by Mother Nature right now. Many of us, most of us. Even so, it's the perfect time to get your mind around this concept of mental training and clearly witnessing the mechanics of your psychological suffering. You'll notice that most of your anxiety in response to this pandemic and the changes in your life that it's enforcing, most of it's not useful, most of it's just toxic. And it too is contagious. I mean, I just notice how I am around my family and when I have an unwitnessed background level of anxiety pushing forward all of my communication, I'm not good company in those moments. I'm spreading my stress to the people who most need to be reassured by who I am in each moment. Not to mention I'm also suffering in those moments. So for me, meditation is not even so much a formal practice. I mean, the formal practice is is how you learn the skill. But crucially, it's it's a learned skill to be able to notice the difference between being lost in thought and recognizing thoughts themselves as they arise in the mind as just objects of consciousness. And that really is a quantum difference. I mean, it's a binary difference. I mean, either you can do that or you can't. And being able to do that allows you to unhook from the emotional consequences of any given pattern of thought. So if you're thinking terrifying thoughts about where all this could be headed professionally, politically, with respect to your own health or the health of the people you love a lot of us are meditating on risk a lot of the time right now, which is to say our attention is embedded in this very real threat to virtually everything we care about. And we're on Twitter and we're reading the newspaper and we're watching the news and we're having conversations with, with other worried people. And so there's a kind of social contagion here which, you know, in part is necessary because we need to be motivated to a common purpose. But hour by hour in your life, honestly, 95% of the anxiety any of us will feel today isn't helpful. And an ability to notice thoughts arise, notice the voice in your mind or the imagery that is capturing your attention that's sneaking up behind you in each moment and seeming to become you. The thought, oh my God, what's going to happen to the Dow? Right? If you're watching the implications of the stock market or worrying about your mom or whatever it is, it's not to say you shouldn't care about your mom, but every moment of thinking about your mom without knowing you're thinking about your mom, simply just being identified with that stream of thought is a moment where you're producing anxiety to no good purpose. And it's becoming the the mood music to everything you subsequently do. So an ability to unhook from that and truly reset is a kind of superpower and some people can acquire it fairly quickly, but it really does only come with training. I mean, it is a skill. So it's like you're not going to accidentally learn to play the piano. You're not even going to accidentally learn how to do a push up correctly, right? You do have to be taught these things. So yeah, there's everything useful I have to say on the topic I do put into my app and once again remind everyone I keep doing this. And people occasionally prove to me that it's still possible not to notice this. But for anyone for whom the price of a subscription to this podcast or my app is a problem and you are the best judge of that, you need only send us an email and you get everything for free. And many, many people send that email and there's no means testing. There's no further questions about it. It's just you send us an email that you need a free membership on the Waking Up app or subscription to samharris.org for this podcast. I mean, despite the fact that I'm putting many of these podcasts, as I will with this episode, outside the paywall, because, you know, I consider them PSAs. Thank you for that, by the way. It's been super helpful. We're talking about stuff that everyone should hear, but anyone who has to think about increments of money, that make it a hard decision about whether or not to subscribe to my app or podcast. If $10 a month or $6 a month. If these are increments that you have to sweat, you're precisely the person for whom this policy was created, because I absolutely do not want to become a source of economic stress for anyone at any time, frankly, but much less do I want it at times like these. So I know many people who are subscribers or who have free accounts continually hear other people complain about the fact that I have any of my stuff behind a paywall. And that opens the door to a larger debate about just how to monetize digital content and what ads have done to our economy and democracy. And I've taken very strong positions on all that. But I just encourage people who hear people complain about this, remind them that they can always have this stuff for free if they just send an email. And that's the best I can do, given my business model. Cool. Thank you, Matt. You, too, can send that email and there'll be no means testing over there in Houston. Yeah. Thank you. I do find that that mindfulness of that meditation is even more important when things are tough and I've gone through personal hardships or friends dying or wow. It can really make a life changing difference. So count this as my personal endorsement that everyone should explore it, whether it's Sam's app or something else. Also just a fundamental insight here. It's a conceptual insight that everyone should have and everyone can experience viscerally, which is all you have is your mind, right? Obviously, I'm not saying the mind is divorceable from the body, but I mean, all you have, the only tools you have in each moment in relationship, in responding to stress, all you've got is the cognitive and emotional tools you've built for yourself over the course of a life. And many of us have built these tools or failed to build them inadvertently. We're not aware of having made our minds by virtue of what we've paid attention to moment to moment. I mean, we have been practicing something, however haphazardly, every moment of our lives. We've been ramifying our desires and our fears and our concerns. We've acquired skills and abandoned them. And it's worth realizing that you can be deliberate about this and really change your mind fundamentally fairly quickly. There are many levels to this in terms of just learning new concepts and frames with which to view experience. But mindfulness really is I do consider it a necessary piece here. And yeah, again, it's a practice, so you sort of become what you do with your attention. So I do recommend it since there might be a lot of engineers or business people listening because of the topic. I will plug one book that I found help a lot of, particularly engineers, connect with this, where more traditional meditations books didn't work. It's actually from a guy who was at Google. It's called Search Inside Yourself, and he uses a lot of metaphors of, like, background processes, interrupts, technical metaphors, essentially, to be an introduction to meditation. So it can be a helpful frame for people to explore if they haven't resonated with many of the other traditional meditation intros. Great. Well, listen, Matt, thank you for your time. It's been great to get you on the podcast. Likewise. Really enjoyed it. And take care. Stay safe./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. No housekeeping today, apart from a note to say that Ricky Gervais and I are working on the third season of Absolutely Mental. So if you want to catch up with the first two, you can do that over@absolutelymental.com. And that's been a lot of fun. Okay, today I'm speaking with Paul Bloom. Paul, I think, holds the record for most appearances on this podcast. I have lost count, but it's been many times. He is now a professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and remains an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Yale. His research focuses on the psychology of morality, identity, and pleasure. He has received many awards and honors, including the million dollar Klaus Jacobs Research Prize. He's written for Nature and Science and The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and he's the author or editor of eight books, most recently The Sweet Spot, the Pleasures of Suffering and The Search for Meaning. And it's a very fun book, which we discuss in part. We talk about the role that pain and suffering play in living a good life. We discuss the connection between chosen suffering and meaning, the research of Danny Kahneman on well being. We talk about the possibility of integrating the experiencing and remembering selves that Kahneman differentiated. We discuss moral motivations, the effect of parenthood on happiness, unchosen suffering, the asymmetry between loss and gain robert Nozick's experience machine thought, experiment, the value of pleasure, effective altruism value in the future more than the past the power of contrast, false ideals of happiness, polyamory, money and status, the role of the imagination, boredom, the power of apology and other topics. Anyway, as many of you know, trying to sort out what it means to live a good life is one of my core interests, and given the nature of the topic, it's probably one of yours. And now I bring you Paul Bloom. I am here with Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for joining me again. Hey, thanks for having me back, Sam. So you have this habit of writing very interesting books on topics that are sort of hiding in plain sight. The last book, which I'm sure we discussed, I'm not sure it was on our last podcast because we did several in that period, but your your last book against empathy sort of brought the Dark Side of Empathy, at least empathy as emotional contagion into focus. And while that's something that it seems like many people should have noticed before you wrote a book about it, you're deciding to focus on at book length on it really brought it into the conversation. And I would count your current book to have a similar property here. There's sort of an open secret component to these topics because it's not like they're totally unobserved. I think many people know much of what you're focusing on here, but they don't know they know it, and they certainly have never had a chance to see it in the context of current research on the mind. So there's really a pleasure in this. The new book is the Sweet Spot the Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. And I'll let you summarize your thesis there before we jump into it. What is the sweet spot? First, thank you. Thanks for having me on. And we did talk about against empathy in some way. You could put these books in sort of a pair of anomalous claims against empathy in favor of suffering. This is kind of a different sort of book. Against empathy was kind of pugnacious saying that the way we've been doing it is wrong, we should do morality differently. This is more of an exploration of people's curious appetites and just a careful look at what we like. When I started writing this book, I was just preoccupied of certain puzzles, which is why do people get pleasure from certain forms of controlled suffering? Why do we take hot baths, go to Saunas, you know, do martial arts, run marathons, go to scary movies, go to, you know, listen to sad songs? And I was really interested in the role of suffering for pleasure, and I was going to call the book The Pleasure of Suffering. But as I sort of got into it more and more, I realized that some suffering is actually not in the service of pleasure, but in the service of meaning and purpose. And so I ended up basically sort of two books. In one. The first part deals with pleasure. The second part deals with suffering as part of a good life. And in the course of writing this, it was a fun book to write. But in the course of writing this, I sort of settled on a claim which is at the core of the book, which you call motivational pluralism, which is that we're after many things. We do want pleasure. It's a hot day, we like a cool drink, but we also want meaning and purpose. We want morality. Sometimes you want truth, sometimes you want beauty. And my book tries to put this together through the lens of shows and suffering. Yeah, this is so interesting because it's one of those topics that the fact that there's so much diversity of opinion on what constitutes a good life is pretty surprising given that the answer to this question is probably the most important answer we can ever find. Right? I mean, there's nothing more tragic than a life misappropriated. And it's a little bit like perhaps even more surprising because it's a much simpler question. The fact that there's diversity of opinion or basic confusion about what constitutes a good diet is also surprising. We've been on this earth for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years in our current form. We've certainly had a few centuries to look at it carefully, and we're still confused about what we should be putting in our mouths on a daily basis. And we're even more uncertain about the recipe for a truly good life. So there's a lot to consider here. Some of the problems are definitional. And so maybe we should jump into that part first, just the semantics of it, because we have words like pleasure and satisfaction and meaning and happiness, well being, flourishing UDA, ammonia. Obviously these are overlapping concepts. Start us off with some clarification on terminology. Yeah, for each of these words, there's a lot of debate about it. People use it, use the words in different ways. Happiness, notoriously, can mean very different things. Meaning is notoriously very vague, and I try to make it less vague when I talk about it. But let's start with pleasure. There's an intuitive sense. Pleasure is what makes us go, ah, pleasure is my way of seeing us through a short term experience that we like, that we say, bring us more of it. And you contrast this with suffering or pain. You know, pain is the physical part of it, but also, you know, shame, humiliation, boredom, anxiety, disappointment. And you would think they're total opposites. And in fact, you would think that you want the pleasure and you want to avoid the suffering. But it's a very interesting fact about people that experiences that are normally painful, that normally could bring you suffering and difficulty in all sorts of ways are what we sometimes want. And sometimes we want them because they're in the service of pleasure. Like BDSM I talk a bit about that. Or rigorous exercise, which is difficult. In fact, it's supposed to be difficult. If it was easy, what would be the point? As well as sort of longer life projects that we take on. And we say, this is, you know, we know this is going to be hard, but if it wasn't hard, it wouldn't matter. And this brings us to the definition of meaning, which is and I'm not taking this from a philosophical point of view, just trying to do this a priority. If you ask people, what's the meaningful experience? You ask people, how meaningful is your life? They answer coherently. It's a coherent question. And so we could look to see what they're talking about. And they seem to be talking about experience projects that are difficult to take a lot of time and involve struggle and doubt and uncertainty. They involve suffering of different sorts, and if it didn't involve suffering, it wouldn't be meaningful. Yeah. One of the main problems here is that people are unreliable narrators to their own adventure here, to some degree, we're always in the presence of an unreliable narrator, or at least a potentially unreliable narrator in several respects. There's the fact that most people really, maybe all of us, don't know what we're missing. Right. There's certain experiences we have that we like, that we keep gravitating toward. And invariably there are opportunity costs associated with each of those. And we don't know how much better life would be if we had slightly different priorities or even vastly different priorities. So even in satisfaction of our desires, even what we imagine our noblest desires, even on those days or weeks where we're living exactly as we feel we should again, we just don't know how much greener the grass is on the other side of the fence that we can't see. And then you add to that all of the failures of memory and the problems in integrating memory with an evaluation of just how happiness or well being or the absence of suffering is accruing. And this goes to the famous issue that Danny Conaman ran into in his research on the experiencing versus the remembering self. Maybe you want to summarize that and then we can get into it. Because I think you and I have a different I don't think you and I agree with Danny in his view of it, but he perhaps remind us what he thought he figured out there. Yeah, I mean, we could talk a lot about the general idea. We could be wrong. We could say something's meaningful and valuable and worthwhile and just be deluding ourselves. And just before we get to Danny, just want to point out that my argument is about chosen suffering. Unchosen suffering is a very different thing. This is fresh in my mind because I wrote an excerpt of my book in The Wall Street Journal, and I got an email from somebody who was furious at me and said, I live in chronic pain. Who the hell are you to tell me this is value as part of a good life? Screw you. And very angry. And I pointed out in a response, Look, I'm very careful. I'm not talking about unchosen suffering, chronic pain. Your child dies, you have a horrible illness, your house burns down, you get assaulted. That's suffering of quite a different sort. But at the same time, and building on what you're saying, we tell stories about that. We are very good storytellers, and it's a very natural narrative to say this happened for a reason. This made me a better person. And I'm actually kind of skeptical about those stories. There's a whole literature and post dramatic growth which finds that people often say, after a horrible thing, I'm better, I'm stronger, I'm more resilient, I'm kinder. But it turns out when you look closely. There's not much evidence for a real change. It's more of a story we tell ourselves. That's interesting. Let's get to that because I think that's important to explore. But let's table the unsought suffering until we deal with the other requisites of happiness here. So you have to give me condiment on the experiencing and remembering. Self conaman is the coolest. So this is Danny Connorman, our Nobel Laureate in Psychology, and well deserved, technically a psychologist, but Nobel Laureate in economics, which is the only thing he could, I guess, qualify for. And somebody will jump in and say, economics isn't a real Nobel Prize, and I'm just going to be clear of that ugly debate. I'll give it to them for the Peace Prize that has been so devalued that it's an embarrassment. Now, we'll keep chemistry, physics, and on Sunday's, literature, right? So Kahneman's done some lovely studies on our perception of our memories of experiences. And he points out there's a difference between what you get when you weigh the actual pleasure and pain you feel versus how you recall it. So one of his findings is what he calls duration neglect. You have a miserable four hour flight where you have nothing to do and you're going crazy with boredom, versus an eight hour flight, which is just as boring and just as unpleasant. You would think the second one is twice as bad and it is twice as bad unpleasantness. But you remembered him about the same. A wonderful two week vacation and a wonderful one week vacation. You get home, it doesn't matter. One was twice as long, you remember it the same. But now you get to the really weird part, which is, when assessing the quality of experiences, we tend to judge the peaks and the endings. And so Connorman did some really amazing studies. He did that both in a lab and also with people experiencing colonoscopies. And this was done a while ago, and colonoscopies were actually quite painful. So he gives people a painful experience that ends on a very painful part, and it stops and said, you're done. Then he gives another group exactly the same experience, ending on exactly the same high degree of pain. And then he adds some mild pain. So the second one plainly has more pain, same pain as the first one, plus some more. Then you ask people, what do you prefer? And people say, oh, the second one was much better because it ended on a more pleasant note or less painful note. It leads to the bizarre fact that if you're having a painful dental operation and then it just ends. Dentist says. Fine. You're done. You could go home. You say, could you give me a little bit of mild pain? So I remember this better. It's just perverse. And overall, condiment says your judgments of your day to day pleasure and pain, you could do this in a different way by giving people an iPhone app that beeps at random times when people say how happy they are, how sad they are, will differ from your remembered judgments of what kind of life you live. And then there's a big debate in psychology and philosophy, too, which is what do you want to maximize? Do you want to maximize the sum total pleasure you have in your life, or do you want to maximize how when you look back on your life, you experience it? Connellman famously says remembered happiness is what should count. He says it's what people really take seriously, while other people, like my friend Dan Gilbert, says it's experienced at camps. Yeah, so Danny famously decided that you really can't reconcile these two different modes. The person you're talking to when you're asking someone about their life is always the remembering self who's making a global judgment about how good the vacation was or how good life is, how satisfied, how meaningful. And then when you compare that to the experience sampling mode of the person who just gives a quick rating of their level of well being at random points during the day, when you give them an app to do that, it's just there are two totally different measures. And I think the way Danny phrased it at one point with me was that what people really want. I mean, in the end, the way people go about their lives so as to live the most meaningful, satisfying lives is that what they want are good future memories. You want to live in such a way so that when we ask you in the future, how happy were you with the last year decade life? That person says, oh, I wouldn't change a thing. Right. Even though that's just one moment in time. And I've never bought this analysis. I'm not denying his findings. I think this seems clearly true of us empirically, that there's a disjunction here. But I think something close to what Dan Gilbert imagines should be possible, that you should be able to just summon the area under the curve. Recognizing that the remembering self is none other than the experiencing self in one of his or her modes or one of his or her moments. And it just it's different in that it has a different salience. And it is what always comes online when you ask a certain kind of question for a person. And the crucial bit to integrate is that the answer that you're able to give to that question, whether prompted by someone like Condiment or just to yourself, when you wake up at four in the morning and you're thinking, about your life. That ability to answer that you're satisfied or that you wouldn't change a thing has further effects on the rest of your experience. Right. It's not truly an isolated moment. It has it matters that whenever you find yourself in conversation with someone and they say, well, so how's it going? How's your life? How's your family. That conversation feels a certain way and it changes your status or perceive status. This sense of satisfaction builds or erodes depending on how those conversations go. And so I just think it's not but it's happening nowhere else but in the timeline of your experience. You're not on some other planet for those moments of conversation. So it's anyway, I don't know if you are sympathetic with that, but it seems to me that they can be married. I like the argument. I actually talk about dance work quite a lot in my book and and I end the book later on, you know, with with a discussion of exactly that scenario. He offers the example of a swimming pool and you spend, you know, 95% of your time just lying in a swimming pool, you know, drinking peanut coladas and feeling great and then 5% of time you look back and say, my life is a waste, I've just been wasting. I think this has no value. And the way he would put it is, well, that's 95% happy and 5% miserable. That's pretty good math, actually. It's better than most lives, so stick with it. That's crucially different from what I'm feel free to press on and criticize that view, but there's a few wrinkles there that I would I think I'm going to agree with you. That doesn't capture what I'm after. So how far are you willing to go? So there's a view which I think Dan holds because he told me he holds it, which is a sort of straightforward hedonism, which is we think there's something about the experience of saying, oh, my life is a waste and I wish I was helping people and I don't have any purpose. We think that's sort of a different kind of motivation than the motivation that makes us want to lie in the pool. But it's all the same, it's all pleasure, right? All altruism is in fact some kind of self gratification. That's right. I mean, Dan doesn't make this argument, but I've heard it enough. I've done a lot of work looking at moral motivations and why we sometimes do good things to each other and cruel things to each other. And I think there's very strong evidence that we have more honestly moral motivations. We don't just want to impress others, we really want to do good stuff, or sometimes bad stuff. But the hedonists will push back and say, well, when you give up a really pleasant afternoon to go visit a sick friend in a hospital, you think you're doing it because you care about your friend. But really, you like the buzz you get from doing it. Or you want to avoid the pain, the guilt of not doing it. Well, there is truth to that, but that's not as deflationary as I think a hedonist would. Allege the buzz you get another word for that is or potential words for that is our love and compassion and connection, and it's friendship depending on the circumstance. That's some of the good stuff in life that, yes, you can say you want it selfishly, but it's a wise form of selfishness. It's not just another hot fudge Sunday. There's no regret component. Like, there's a kind of hedonism that is by its very nature, superficial, and therefore, when you look back on it, it doesn't really survive scrutiny. It's very easy for someone to run the argument that, okay, you've wasted your life. All you did was stay in a swimming pool the whole time. Really, the whole time. I don't care how perfect the temperature of that pool was. There was more to life than that. And yet you wouldn't say that of someone. Wouldn't say, oh, all you did was surround yourself with people who you deeply loved and cared for, and you made their lives better, and you prioritized minimizing human suffering across the board, and you became famous for your compassion. And millions of people said you were their hero. And you had this virtuous circle where everything was aligned in your life, and there was no possibility of hypocrisy. And what you were like behind closed doors was every bit as noble as how you seemed to be in public and oh, yeah, you just wasted your life. Exactly. There's two separate objections you could make. First is what you alluded to earlier, which is, you know, suppose suppose you say, you know, suppose you spent the afternoon visiting a sick friend and it wasn't wasn't a lot of fun, but afterwards you said, well, I feel good about it. I did the right thing. You know, first, why do you feel good about it? Well, you feel good about it because you want to do good things, because you have a motivation to do good. You recognize its value, and that's what drives the pleasure. It's not the same pleasure as biting into a sugary treat or having a pool or right temperature. And I think second, and this is maybe a deeper objection is as a motivational theory, this is often simply mistaken. We both have kids, and we want our kids to flourish and be happy. And sometimes it's a lot of suffering for us to do. So it's a lot of work. Maybe you miss out on things you want to do. Maybe your child is going through a difficult time and you're struggling with your child to help out. And if some psychologist was to say, well, you're really just doing this because you get a pleasurable buzz from doing it, I think you're right to say that's ridiculous. You value certain things. But doesn't the research show I think this goes to Dan Gilbert's research specifically, that basically parenthood is a net negative for almost everybody for a very long time. I forget what the time course of recovery period is here, but don't you basically have diminished happiness for many, many years, reliably becoming a parent? It's complicated. So, yeah, there's some work still done by Danny Kahneman finds that if you use a beeper with parents and it beeps randomly when they're with their kids, despite what they'll tell you, they're kind of miserable. And, you know, being with kids ranks somewhere around, you know, menial housework and far below things like interacting with friends, having sex, or having a good time. And this research finds that nonparents sorry, parents are worse have it worse than non parents. Other research which which Dan like, loves to describe, looks at marital satisfaction. When you have kids and ideas, you start off very happy before you have kids. You have kids, satisfaction drops. You have more kids, it drops more. Their teenagers is at the bottom, and then they start to leave the house and your happiness rises and rises. He has this line saying the only sign of empty nest syndrome is increased smiling. This is Konaman or Gilbert. This is Gilbert. This is Gilbert. Connor is nowhere near as funny. Brilliant, but nowhere near as funny. But it gets more complicated. So other studies since then have found that it depends who you are. Fathers tend to be happier with parenthood than mothers, older people happier than younger people. And there's an enormous country difference where countries that have a lot of child support, the Scandinavian countries and so on, for them, parents are actually happier than non parents. The country out of survey of 22 countries were just the biggest happiness blow to having kids for one reason or another is United States. So even if you're just a hedonist, I don't think you should be just even if you're just a hedonist, it's kind of complicated how you're situated, whether or not to have kids. Yeah, but I think in the end, when you ask people when you ask people, do you regret having kids, even on a private survey, people say, no, greatest thing in my life. And here's where you might jump in and say, well, this could be a case of self delusion. To say this biggest thing of your life, which caused so much transformation, some of it negative, was a bad thing, a mistake, maybe too much for people to bear. And they might tell themselves good stories about it. But I actually think that when people answer a question like that, they're not talking about Heatons, they're not talking about pleasure. They're talking about other sources of value. Yeah, I mean, this is so interesting because maybe let's jump to suffering for a second because there's something an unsought suffering because something clarifying about it. I was thinking at one point in reading your book, I asked myself I think you were talking about why people seek out horror movies and other noxious stimuli and also those cases where, you know, a bad experience is rated as something that, in the end, is a net positive, which seems somewhat paradoxical or can seem paradoxical because it can be something that, by definition, you would never want to repeat. Right. But you get people saying that they're glad it happened to them. Right. I asked myself the question, what's the worst thing I've ever seen in my life? So maybe I'll describe this because maybe a trigger warning is in order to describe something, I'm stealing myself. Yeah, absolutely horrible. But it's not that I wish this thing hadn't happened because it happened to somebody else, and it was a horrible thing to happen, but I can't say that I wish I hadn't seen it, but there's no way. If you told me, okay, you can see that again, there's no way I would decide to see it again. So psychologically, it's strange to be in this spot. But anyway, I was on a trip to India, and we were in the back of a taxi and driving down one of these predictably chaotic roads outside of Delhi. And there was a bus that was at kind of an odd parked at an odd angle with the curb, and there was a massive traffic jam. We were slowly passing this bus, and people were milling around, and it had all the signs of something untoward had happened, and the bus looked like it had hit something and just, like, parked on the curb. And I was scanning the scene, looking to see, as one does morbidly, looking for the thing that you're going to wish you hadn't seen. But still, this is why traffic predictably slows when there's an accident. So I was looking over the scene to see what had happened, and it unfolded this way. So it looked like it had hit a fruit cart, and the fruit cart was just obliterated. And I was looking for a person or people, and I thought I experienced this profound relief that there were no people in sight that had been hit by this bus. And then I recognized in the next moment that what I thought was a fruit cart was in fact a person who had just been obliterated by a speeding bus. I mean, literally, this person had been smeared over 40ft of pavement, and it was an absolutely mind stopping vision of just the most awful thing that can happen. That's the worst thing I've ever seen with my eyes that was real. And yet I can't say that I wish I had never seen it, but I would, of course, never want to be in that situation again. So it's just psychologically, if I had to specify the good that came to me from seeing it, I was sitting with one of my best friends. It was a shared experience, right? So this is now something that we haven't talked about it often, but it has come to mind occasionally, and it's a kind of corner condition of human existence. It's a kind of peak it's strange to call it a peak experience, but it's a kind of peak experience in the sense that. It was that arresting. So there are experiences of emergency and just sheer unpleasantness and horror that can still, if they're abbreviated enough or if their knock on effects are not continuous and terrible for you personally, they do sort of go in the column of experiences you were glad you had and you wouldn't, in fact, wish to be without. I think that's right. I, for the most part, take the intuitive view that unchosen suffering is a bad thing. But occasionally there are things that you would experience that could have a positive effect on you that you would have never chosen to experience. And it could have a positive effect in terms of changing how you think about the world, changing your emotions, or simply broadening your scope of human experience. So I think a lot of claims about the benefits of unchallenged suffering are exaggerated. But there's actually psychological evidence that looks at people's the amounts of suffering people have had in their life. And it turns out that people who have had very low amounts of suffering tend to have low pain tolerance and low resilience. And in other research, they're less kind. They're less able to help other people. There may be something to be said for the idea that a certain amount of unchosen suffering, I don't know, builds character, toughens you up. The same studies find that people who report a lot of suffering in our lives also have low pain tolerance and low resilience. There's kind of a sweet spot in the middle. Yeah. Wouldn't you just expect there to be some kind of normal distribution over this where on the question of what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, there's going to be a cohort for whom that is absolutely true and a cohort for whom it's absolutely not true. I would expect that. I would also expect that maybe the suffering that does us the most good is of an intermediate sort. Nietzsche, he loves aphorisms. And it's such an exaggeration. Often what doesn't kill us causes us terrible damage we never recover from. But sometimes the right sort of unchosen suffering could lead to a positive transformation. Yeah. There's so many intersecting issues here because you would think, as Danny Kahneman thought early in his career, that you should just be able to aggregate this stuff in a straightforward way. But we know that there are so many other variables. There are framing effects where basically the same experience can be good or bad, depending on how you conceptualize it. Obviously, Shakespeare got here first. What's the actual quote? There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Yeah. And so there's that. And there's also just this asymmetry between pain and pleasure or happiness and suffering, which is the bad commensurately. Bad things are in fact incommensurable with the good things, and even just the order of things matters. We weight loss as more significant than gain even when we're talking about the same thing, right, which is to say people care more about losing $100 than gaining $100. So how do you recommend that we start doing the arithmetic in our own lives as we're trying to figure out what's important? What should supersede something else? What sacrifices are worth making, how much meaning making struggle is a good idea versus just an expense we shouldn't actually be paying when we'd be wiser to be in the big, warm pool with Dan Gilbert? How do you think about these things for yourself? I think that's the hard problem of life. If we're motivational pluralists, which I think we are, and we want many things, then there's the question of how to trade them off and how to determine the relative value. And it's a question that can't be ducked at every point. We have to decide whether to sort of, you know, lie on the couch and watch Netflix or visit the sick friend or, I don't know, read up on astronomy and learn some facts we didn't know. You can stand on one leg and watch Netflix and just kind of get both going at the same time. Yes, you could do Netflix while doing push ups or something and just get everything all worked out. But yeah, there's a certain balance, and people choose different sides of this balance. I like there's a wonderful thought experiment by the philosopher Nozzek of an experienced machine, where they plug you into a machine, and you live a rich, full, happy life. That's not real. It's the matrix, basically. And Nozick says, well, nobody would want to choose to go into the machine, because the problem with a machine is you think, I don't know, you think you have a rich, fulfilling relationships and people who love you and climbing Mount Everest and solving world hunger, but it's just an illusion. It's just a dream. You're not doing anything. You're a blob. And then Noseyk says, who wants to be a blob? And I share Nosix intuition. I'm actually curious whether you do too, that I wouldn't want to get plugged into the machine regardless of how much pleasure it gives me. But I got to admit, I've been asking students, undergraduates, graduate students about the Experience Machine for a long time, and a substantial number of them I think I'm getting to now, more than half say, yeah, I plug in. Yeah. Well, it's also interesting when you consider it from the other side, because and this is something you you do in your book when you when you try to disentangle it from status quo bias. And as you imagine, you're already in the machine, and now you're you're being lifted out, and you're consulted. Do you want to go back to that supremely happy, fake life that you just thought was real for the last 50 years? And viewed from that side, you could see more people wanting to plug back in if they realized the thing that they had been enjoying so much is what they're returning to. It really struck me up when I read about the case where they switch the priors when they switched the status quo, because I was definitely a no machine kind of guy. And then if I you know, I wake up, boom, all of a sudden there's a flash and I'm sitting in a room and some technicians are saying, you know, you've been in the machine for ten years. This is your annual. We take you out. And we say, you know, do you want to go back? And of course, if you go back, we wipe out your memory of this experience. You think it's a real life, but it's just an illusion. And I think back imagine thinking about my children and the people I love and the projects I'm engaged in, and I would feel this wave of of horror that it was all all nothing, just a dream. But I think I'd want to go back to them, back you know, I have too much attachments to think of cutting myself loose, even if they turned out to be imaginary. Well, and certainly most people have had this experience of wanting to get back into a dream, right? Like, you wake up from this incredibly fun dream and you wish you could just close your eyes and just jump back in. In fact, I think once or twice in my life I've managed to do that. And so obviously, you're not committing for the rest of your existence to do that. But they show certainly a willingness to be diverted as pleasantly as possible by something they know isn't real, not for their entire lives, but for a surprising portion of it. When you count all the time we spend vicariously going on adventures with others through fiction and film and television and all the rest. That's right. So to go back to your question, how do you balance all of this? The answer is you don't give pleasure zero. I've encountered a lot of people who are heeding us, and they say, look, there's just a one word answer to what people want, and it's pleasure. And I don't agree with them. But I also don't agree with people who say it's all about meaning and struggle and purpose, because pleasure has some value, it has some intrinsic value, and it has some value as part of a good life. I mean, to go back to your question also about all of these biases and negativity bias and order bias, I think, and how do we cope with this? You could take it in a bit of a different direction and say whatever problems these pose, they're also a source of fun. So in a part of my book where I talk about suffering as a source of pleasure, part of this involves playing with these biases. So you might give yourself a bad experience, like a very hot bath or a sauna or spicy food in order to get pleasure from the relief. When that goes away, it's a very sort of common human pleasure. You may enjoy the mastery of control pain. You may enjoyed a rhythm. So give an example of revenge films. You must have seen John Wick. I've seen one of them, or most of one of them. Yeah. So I get the gist. I think he got the gist in the first one. He's a retired assassin and then early in the movie, some Russian mobsters he has a run in with kill his dog and it's very sad. And then the rest of the movie he takes his revenge. That's how you know they're really evil. Killing the family is not enough if they have to kill the dog. And then you know they're really going to deserve what they get. Right, so you feel some people towards the end of what you say, isn't this excessive? But it's not excessive at all, as John Wick must have killed 100 a thousand people, you feel, yeah, well, it was a dog. They had it coming. And this movie has a rhythm to it and it's sort of a classic rhythm for many, many movies and many stories, which is Bad Thing, then Good Thing. And if you were sort of so foolish to think, wow, this would be a better movie if you took out that sad part of the dog, well, you can't have the good part without the bad part. Revenge films have to have the bad act. So we feel so justified and so happy when the good stuff comes. Yeah, there's a direct analogy to life, too. This is kind of back to Kahneman and the peak end rule, or I guess just the end rule. The order of things matters. We feel like a bad thing followed by a good thing redeems the whole enterprise, whereas a good thing followed by a bad thing is a catastrophe. That's right. There's a rhythm of the lives we want. Psychologists have asked people questions like how do you want your life to go? And people want their lives to get better and better. There's something called a James Dean effect where people really love lives that end on a high note, as opposed to most of our lives, which kind of peak out at a certain point. And then often the last few years aren't so great. And people, even if those last few years, are happy still, it's better to end on a high note or take a more local case. Take a job you work at for ten years and each year your salary goes up a bit. Forget about inflation, not just the absolute amount your salary goes up a bit versus you work on a job for ten years and each year your salary drops. But suppose it turned out that the math was such that in a dropping case you actually made overall more money. Still, people say, well, that sucks. I want things to get better. Yeah. It really is interesting because I'm always tempted to take the step further back and say, that, okay, our default reactions to these parameters are very likely wrong, and we should be able to subsume even those with a wider view still, which corrects for them. So once you understand the asymmetry between loss and gain and that it's not strictly rational that you should care about $100 exactly $100 worth. Right. And it shouldn't matter whether it's going into your wallet or coming out of your wallet yeah. Then you should be able to perform that correction for yourself. And even in certain cases, uncouple what you deem to be good from even if you can't change your moment to moment experience of it or even the way you feel when making a retrospective account, you still should be able to perform some kind of course correction. Here the only place in my life I'm trying to figure out where this I've actually applied this, and the only place that's coming to mind is on the topic of altruism and philanthropy. This is I don't know if you've heard any of my conversations with the philosopher Will McCaskill, who's one of the young fathers of the effective altruism movement. And so, famously, what they've done is they've worked to uncouple judgments of the most efficacious use of resources from the way any given use of resources makes us feel. Right. So there are causes to which you could give your money, which give you immediate good feels. They have really compelling stories and nice graphic design on their brochures, and sometimes it's a cause that shouldn't even exist. It's just a completely misconceived charity that's not only not doing the good it thinks it's doing, it's actively doing harm in the world. And then you have far less sexy causes to which you could give money, which you can never feel quite as good about because there's just no way to tell a super compelling story about them. But when you actually do the analysis, they're super efficient ways of mitigating human suffering and long term risk. And so having thought about it enough, talked about it enough, and wanting to idiot proof this part of my life, I've just decided, okay, doing good, actually doing good is fully divorceable from how I feel while doing that good, and I want to get as many good feels as I can out of it. But if in the end, the project can't be made salient enough for us to give me the feeling of heroism I would feel if I ran into a burning building and saved a little kid, well, then, so be it. In terms of resources, I'll prioritize the non sexy efficacious thing because in the end, it just matters how much suffering you're in fact, mitigating. No, I mean, as you know, you're talking Catholicism to the Pope. My anti empathy book exactly turns on exactly that point that our feeling. We've talked about this many times. I think we're very much on the same page, which is what makes us happy, satisfied, makes us feel like good people, is often quite divorced from actually what makes a difference. Peter Singer has a great example of this. He says that often people like to give to many, many charities small amounts, sometimes so small amounts they're processing the checks, cause the charity to lose money. They've become a burden to those charities. That's right. And for each one they think, oh my gosh, I'm saving the whales. Oh, wow, I'm helping the Africans. And they get a little example of like, going through a tasty buffet and taking a little nipples from everything. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am here with Paige Harden. Paige, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me, Sam. So, just a few notes to our listeners that we're kind of jumping on this podcast because we had a bit of a Twitter collision, and then a very friendly person reached out to both of us to see if he or she could midwife a better conversation. So there's at least one thing that's relevant. There is I haven't sent you the gear I usually send guests to get as close to perfect audio as we can get. So we're doing this over Skype, and apologies for any Skype like glitches in your sound. Before we jump in, can you summarize your academic background and just what you've been focusing on as a scientist? Yeah, so I am a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where I've been since graduate school, and I run a research lab there that is focused on genetic influences and how they shape child and adolescent development. So one part of that is on cognition and academic achievement, and then the other part of that is on mental health with a particular focus on antisocial behavior problems, delinquency and crime. So I do twin studies and then a variety of measured DNA studies using polygenic scores, which maybe we might dive into later. And then in the past two years, I've been writing a book. I'm about to be finished with it, although there's still a long road, I'm realizing, until a book is a physical object in the universe between finishing the manuscript and it being published, which is called The Genetic Lottery. So it's on the role of genes in shaping social inequality, and it's really trying to reshape that conversation away from thinking of genetics as an enemy of equality or equality hinging on genetic sameness to really think about, given our current landscape, particularly in the US. How could we use genetic information and what we've learned from genetic studies to think about what it means when we say equality? So that's been my passion project for the last couple of years, and I'm excited to talk about that in relation to, I think, the many issues that I think we could touch base on today. Oh, that's great. If memory serves, you'll have exactly eleven months to wait once you finish your book and to see it born an increasingly ridiculous eleven months, given the nature of media these days. Yeah, it feels very antiquated in relation to the immediacy of everything else, what's happening right now. Well, lucky for you, inequality is still going to be a problem after eleven months, so it will not be less relevant, I'm sure. So there's something I'd like to ask at the outset here, because I'm pretty confident that you and I are coming to this conversation from very different places, just with very different frames around what it means to have this conversation. I think we were our glitch on Twitter was born of that difference. So at the outset, I'd love to get your impression of why we're speaking now and just what's happened between us, because we've never met, as far as I know. I don't think we've ever bumped into each other at a conference or anything, and yet we're entangled in some way now. So from your point of view, how did we get here and what is your motive in having this conversation? Yeah, entangled is a good word for it. Spooky action at a distance. The origin of this is you had a podcast with Charles Murray, I think, going on two years ago now, and I wrote an article with my former PhD advisor Eric Scherkheimer and social psychologist Dick Nizbet in Vox that was critical of Murray's portrayal of the state of the science. That's how I viewed that article. And then there was reactions to that article, and then our response to those reactions. There was yet another piece on the same topic by Ezra Klein. There was multiple conversations between you and Klein about whether the substance of it and whether soliciting it and publishing it was in good faith. And honestly, the aftermath of that publishing of the Vox piece never stopped well with me. I think in many ways, the parts of it I wrote in my head as I was writing it was very much me as a scientist responding to what I thought Murray was portraying inaccurately. And then I think as the article got published and sort of reverberated through social media and as you know as well as I do, that has this weird, funhouse, mere distortionate effect on conversations. It seemed that you felt criticized in a way that, to be quite honest, surprised me, kind of the intensity of it. Something was being lost in my intention and how it was being received. And so I kind of left that whole thing with that didn't go how I would have wanted it to go. And I don't feel like I communicated the messages that I was intending to with the precision that I wanted to. And then fast forward to the most recent week. You had Robert Fleman on your podcast to talk about his new book Blueprint. And I had what I think is a very kind of social media moment in which I am responding to someone else's comments on what are we all going to do as parents around school closures. And someone responded with, oh, well, you need to listen to Sam Harris's new podcast because then you'll realize that going to school doesn't matter. And it was such an alarming tweet and with some backstory that I've known Robert Plumbing for quite a long time. I respect him immensely as a scientist, but the role of whether or not schools and parents make a difference is a topic about which we've had multiple conversations with public and private and about which we disagree. So there really was this kind of like full circle moment in which I felt like, oh, are we back here? Talking about someone was on Sam Harrison podcast and how that information is being received by your audience and how I'm responding to it. And then I have to be really honest, I was really surprised when you responded on Twitter. I think I had this idea in my head that your platform is so enormous and there are so many people responding to you at any one time that the extent to which what I was saying about not even in that moment, I wasn't even, as you know, responding to the podcast, but so much to this anonymous person who was saying, oh, you should listen to it because then you will realize that schools don't matter. Just really it was really upsetting to me in that moment, and it really kind of kicked off our, I think, sense. At least I have this sense of sort of having unresolved unresolved to go back to your original word, unresolved entanglement, that we're both interested in these issues, that the conversation really was not between you and me the last time around. The Vox article. And I think maybe something was lost in that and how that played out. So I'm hoping that by having this conversation, we will each get something out of it, we'll learn something about our respective perspectives, but also that we can move forward. I don't think that you're going to move away from being interested in these issues, and certainly I'm not, as you say, in eleven months, inequality is still going to be a problem and I'd like to move forward feeling like there's a mutually respectful relationship, and that wasn't what was playing out on Twitter. So that's kind of where I'm really hoping this conversation goes today. Nice. Yeah, we definitely share the goal there. And another thing we share, I'm sure, given everything you've just said, is a concern about social inequality and social cohesion and just the suffering of other people. I'm sure we both want other people to thrive, both because we care about other people, but also just for purely selfish reasons. I'm sure we both would much prefer to live in a society that is filled with happy, self actualized people. And you know, I trust you don't like to see the sidewalks filled with homeless people any more than I do again, both for the sake of the people themselves and for our own quality of life, right? So I think everyone has an interest in these issues. Everyone, whether they're thinking about it or not, has an interest in things like wealth inequality and the crazy disparities in crime and access to health care in our society and failing schools. And insofar as racism remains a problem and the cause of other problems, I think you and are both concerned about racism, I think it's safe to say. But I think I should say a couple of things about how I'm coming to these issues that will explain what was otherwise surprising about my reaction to your Vox piece. One, my reaction and my non reaction, I didn't actually answer. I didn't respond to your Vox piece. And many people thought I should have because many people saw it as a serious scientific criticism of a conversation I had on my podcast. And I must say I didn't view it that way and that's why I didn't respond, among other things. And so let me see. Let me see if I can just launch into an account of what has happened here for me and explain just what, you know, what would otherwise seem like bizarre behavior. First, I think we should distinguish two topics here. There's the scientific topic of human intelligence and, you know, differences in human abilities generally, you know, whether we explain these differences environmentally or genetically or both, all of that is interesting and consequential and important to talk about honestly. And there's that topic. But then there's this sociological and political fact that it's difficult to talk about these things, right? Those are two very different things. And I'm really brought to this topic mostly because of my focus on the second topic. That's certainly why I had Murray on my podcast. Again, just to be clear, we need to distinguish certain scientific topics from the fact that talking about the science right, is rightly perceived, I think, to be professionally dangerous and personally toxic. That is, unless one is committed to maintaining a certain kind of political correctness, more or less to all costs. Here, if I can just jump in there really quickly, I roughly agree with that division. But I think, and we can circle back to this, I think failures in either make the other more difficult in the sense that if we can't speak openly and honestly about the science, that makes doing the science harder. But I think also people our responsibility to talk about the science as clearly as possible as part of what I think of the scientists contribution to sort of keeping cancel culture at bay like so I think I agree. With the division that you can sort of think of those two issues. But I think they do affect each other in the real world in kind of this continuous basis. Yeah, except I think you and I will draw that boundary a little differently. And I can argue about why I draw the boundary as I do because I think it's important. I think any principle other than intellectual honesty that would cause us to make certain scientific claims is very nature going to be unstable and prove to be a bad bulwark against the kind of social outcomes that I think you and I both would recoil from. Right. So I think we'll probably get into that. But just again for context, I think I said this at the top. You and I were brought together by a moderator who wants to remain anonymous and inaudible in this conversation. We have someone on the line with us who hasn't yet chimed in but may yet chime in and we will edit out those intrusions. This person wants to remain anonymous because they and I'm using they to conceal gender, not to say that they are transgender. They perceive this whole topic to be so fraught that they are concerned that this might blow back on them or institutions with which they're associated. That's just a sign of the times. Right. You and I just may calibrate our we obviously calibrate our sense of the risk differently, but that's the nature of the context in which we're having this conversation. I just want to say I don't disagree with our anonymous third participant. I have been in the field of behavior genetics essentially my whole adult life. I applied for graduate school when I was 20 years old. And so that sense of this thinking about how genetics relates to inequalities between people and what implications that has for our policies, for our nation, our intuitions about justice and fairness is really strikes at the heart of so many issues that people feel passionately about. And by virtue of being an explosive topic requires communicating about it with great care. And I think if you're going to do it, you have to do it well. And to say, well, I'm willing to be interested in this issue, but I'm not going to drag a whole bunch of other people by virtue of my association with them, into that morale. I agree that there are potential implications, even just in terms of time, for anyone being sort of associated with this conversation. Yeah. All of that is ultimately unnecessary. Not surprising, but unnecessary. And I think whatever political daylight we eventually land in that is stable will be born of our having discovered that this is really not a problem to talk about. Right. And that's where I'm hoping to get to. But the strategies I see other people using I think are bound to be ineffective. And they have the additional problem of being of creating a lot of casualties of another sort along the way. Just to give you some color to my experience here, first, I'm interested in intelligence, both human and artificial. But I've never been interested in IQ per se, and I'm certainly not interested in racial differences in IQ. But I've grown extremely concerned about the way our capacity for moral panic has made it difficult to have honest conversations in general about just all kinds of topics having nothing to do with behavioral genetics or intelligence or just across the board. And I'm talking about religion, for instance, or differences among religions, and I really don't like scapegoating and mob justice, and this is the kind of thing one encounters on this topic. So, as you said two years ago, I brought Charles Murray on my podcast for reasons around these free speech concerns, right? This was in response to his being physically attacked at Middlebury, a full quarter century after he wrote his controversial book The Bell Curve. And I can say that having that conversation with him has had a profoundly negative effect on my life right now. And it's not because anything Charles said or did, and it's entirely because of what other people said and did in response to that conversation. And some of that was foreseeable, certainly should have been foreseeable. And to some degree, I consciously took this on as something that I felt a moral obligation to respond to what I perceived to be both an injustice in his case and a creeping dysfunction in our intellectual life, and the fact that you have professors being assaulted on college campuses for highly distorted ideas about what they wrote 25 years ago. And you were one of the principal people who contributed to this backlash by publishing that article in Vox, right, along with, as you said, Richard Nisbet and Eric Turkheimer. And now, you may not think it was a smear, but in my world it absolutely was, right? And it gave Ezra Klein the scientific cover, or the seeming scientific cover to publish other smears of me and Murray inbox. And it's one thing to differ about specific interpretations of data, say, but the reality is that that article accused me and Murray I mean, I think you thought your emphasis was mostly on Murray, and it was. But virtually every sentence I was wrapped up there as part of the problem. You accused us of peddling junk science, right? And the best interpretation of how I came out in that article was as Murray's dupe, right? Like, I didn't understand the science and he put one over on me. But the more reasonable interpretation of the article was that I was more of a willing accomplice in the spread of dangerous and discredited ideas. And whatever you thought your take on my podcast with Murray was and whatever top spin you thought you were giving a part of the article you wrote or not. And however much daylight there might be between you and Nisben and Turkheimer, the net result of that article was to land me on the Hate Watch page at the Southern Poverty Law Center in the company of neo Nazis and Ku Klux Klan lunatics. Right? Yeah. Whether or not you thought it was a smear in the current environment, it absolutely functioned as a smear. Right? And it is. When I pinged you on Twitter the other day, what I was really responding to was I was responding to two things. You're seeming outrage that I would quote platform Robert Plumman, which using the phrase platform in response to my putting a person who's inarguably one of the leading people in the field on my podcast, seemed bizarre to me and seemed of a piece with the article you had written about me and Murray. But you resurfaced your Vox article. Right. Which, again, in my world, functions. As for people who don't get into it, people who can't take the time to listen to a two hour podcast and don't have enough understanding of the topic, to see, as I think I do, the mismatch between your article and what, you know, I and Murray actually said in that podcast, that article functions as scientific proof, essentially, that I'm a racist asshole, or at least dangerously irresponsible in my platforming. A racist asshole on my podcast. And that's just an objective statement about how this thing functions in my life. And so to see you retweet it and then take a shot at me for having quote platformed Robert Plumman, you got a somewhat snide response from me on Twitter, really? Page and you did this all without listening to the podcast with Robert Plumman. Man, that's amazing. Right? So some people think I'm just being thin skinned and I can't take criticism of my views. That's not what's happening. Unless you see what's coming back at me on a daily basis and see the effect in my life and in the lives of others. The truth is, I have taken immense pains to be uncancellable. Right. And I effectively am uncancellable. So I'm an incredibly lucky person. I have very few complaints about my life, but this is definitely one. I recognize that because of what happened there, and in large measure because of the article you wrote and then what Ezra Klein did with it, it may well be the case that 30, 40 years from now, when I die at the end of a long and happy life. My daughters will read that I was persistently dogged by accusations of racism or something completely insane. Given what I actually feel about race and racism and what it would mean to live in a just society, and the causality of that is absolutely apparent to me given the social forces and the social incentives and the biases I see around this conversation. That's who you were meeting on Twitter the other day? Yeah. Okay, so I have a couple of responses that the first is just that helps me understand more about kind of the tenor of your response, thinking about it in terms of how my article, but particularly how that article was picked up and reverberated and interpreted to ultimately lead to you being clustered with neo Nazis. Obviously, I can see how that would be deeply upsetting. What I feel like this brings up for me is there's a kind of ironic parallel here in the sense that you're saying you wrote this thing and you didn't intend for it to lead to other people casting aspersions on me as a racist or as a Nazi. But it had that effect, given the social environment that we live in and the way that journalism works. So don't you bear some responsibility for how that criticism was used? Well, let me just clarify one thing. It's not as inadvertent as all that because, honestly, the only I should just give you a little more color for what I think about the article. The only way to interpret the article is that Murray and I again, it's more Murray. I mean, I'm sort of showcasing his views, but, you know, I was also signing off on many of the things he was claiming, and you made that clear in the article. But the frame you gave it is that these are dangerous, well known to be discredited views. It wasn't totally coherent because in one paragraph you guys say, the truth is there are many scientists whose views are much closer to Murray's than to ours, and we don't even have the same views. Right. So you did sort of pay lip service to the idea that there is a continuum of views about now we're talking about the heritability of intelligence and group differences in intelligence here. That's the most toxic topic. So you paid a little lip service to it, but basically the general thrust of the article was and that this is junk science and it's dangerous, it's irresponsible, and it is of a piece with a long history of awful justifications for racists pseudoscientific, justifications for racism and bigotry and slavery and all the rest. And we're now part of that. There's no way to say, I hear where you're going. You think that I'm trying to hold you responsible for the completely inadvertent interpretations that some people have made of your article, but most of it is there in the article, and there is no commitment to racism and no cover for white supremacy given in my framing of Murray, or honestly, we'll get into this. But even in what I understand to be Murray's views, just for our listeners who have not read the article or listened to the podcast and also just to give a little bit of backstory is, I think, many times people who respond to Charles Murray's basic thesis. Which is that one IQ tests have predictive validity for things we care about, the individual differences in intelligence are substantially charitable and that group differences between racial ethnic groups and IQ are likely genetic in origin. And in four, that because of that, things will be we have some pessimism about the possibilities of social policy go back to three for 1 second, because this is a crucial distortion in your article that was just unnecessary. And it's there for anyone who wants to go back and read your article and then listen to the two hour podcast. And at the time, I assumed most people would do that, and they'd be able to do that. But of course, that's a ridiculous assumption, and most people just either read the article and didn't take the time to listen to the podcast, or having listened to the podcast, they read the article and they couldn't remember what was in the podcast. And most important, people are so desperate to believe that Charles Murray is a racist monster and that this whole topic of racial differences in IQ is radioactive for very good reason, that they're overwhelmingly biased just to accept the claims you made in that article at face value. But the claim you just made that Murray puts I think it was your point number three, you just enumerated that Murray thinks this explanation for racial differences in IQ is very likely to be mostly genetic. That is just untrue, right? It's untrue in The Bell Curve, it's untrue in the podcast. Several places in that podcast, we spelled out why, even if Intelligence is 80% heritable, say, you could not say that the differences between groups was due to genetics. In fact, it could be 100% environmental. And I think in the podcast, I use the analogy to height. You could have an island of people who have the genes to be as tall as the Dutch, but if they were malnourished and you found them to be shorter than the Inuit, it would be 100% due to environment. And so we made those caveats. And when I made that particular caveat, charles Murray, his first sentence was, that's the crucial point, right? The irony is that there's a tiny substantive difference between you. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in my understanding of your view, and again, I don't know what distinguishes you from Nesbitt and Turkheimer on this point, if anything, but the only difference between what you're arguing for and what Murray is arguing for is what we might call a default hypothesis with respect to the role that genes play in group difference. Right. And it's actually something that Richard Hare brought out. So Richard Hare, who I don't know, I've only spoken to him once, and I you know, I've never met him, and and he unsolicited responded to your Vox piece right here. Richard Harris, the editor in chief of the journal Intelligence, and he's the author of the book The Neurobiology of Intelligence. So he's a person who's in this field, and he came out of the woodwork in response to your Vox piece. And Ezra Klein, just so people understand how the sausage of, in my view, defamation gets made, ezra Klein refused to publish that response from Hare as though he had run out of pixels on the Vox website. And then Richard Hare wrote a follow up response to your second piece in Vox, which also Vox refused to publish. But the point he made is that for people in the field, in the field of intelligence and you clearly have a different view of this, but this was his view. Again, unsolicited. Is that the default hypothesis? Is that for a highly heritable trait. Individually, like intelligence. It's a safe default assumption that genes will play some role, some not the majority role, just some involvement in group differences. And this was Murray's point in the podcast. Otherwise to have a different default assumption to say that we're going to default to it's 100% environment and genes play absolutely no role whatsoever. Right? It seems like it's an assumption you need to argue for. I mean, this is a minuscule difference in terms of what someone's finding plausible. I don't think it's a miniscule defense. Do you not think it's a minuscule difference because of your judgment of scientific plausibility or because of your concern for the social effects of one assumption versus the other? Because of the science, I would say because of the depths of evidence for it as a scientific hypothesis. I think this is a really unintuitive point. We can talk about how within a group, differences between people are caused by genes and differences between groups could still be due to the environment. But I think lurking behind there, there's still this intuition that, well, how plausible is that? And if there were genetic differences, they would obviously work in the same direction that we see in the case of phenotypic differences. Right? So I think it sounds so plausible to call it a default to say, well, we know that James caused intelligence differences within white people. We know that there's phenotypic differences on average and IQ between racial groups. Shouldn't our kind of running null hypothesis, given the absence of any good evidence either way, shouldn't our prior be that the genes are also involved in the group differences? And I think that the idea of what our prior should be is really based on like a very basic statistical misunderstanding. I mean, according to Richard Hare, this is the default hypothesis among intelligence researchers. I mean, it's actually named that. I'd like to give a concrete example that I think illustrates this. So recently there was a paper in BioArchive by a team of people that do ancient DNA studies which was finding that one of the early genetic loci associated with having a particularly bad response to COVID is something that we seem to have gotten from our neanderthal ancestors. So everything in COVID genetics is very preliminary. Right now, the paper, I think, is still an archive. It hasn't been published yet, but if you look at the paper, you see, okay, well, here's a genetic variant that makes people more likely to develop bad complications from COVID and to die from. COVID And then if you look at the worldwide distribution of that gene, you'll see that it's it's absent in Africans because you know, they do not have a significant proportion of neanderthal genetic ancestry. So you have an example of within people of European ancestry. We can look and we can say here's a gene that's associated with this response. And then if you looked at the phenotypic differences in bad outcomes from COVID across groups of people, you might, using Hires default hypothesis logic, say well, genes cause this gene causes bad COVID response in white people. There's so much worse medical outcomes in black people. It must be that part of this difference between them is genetically caused. And what's more is because they have more of this genetic risk that we're seeing, but in fact they have none of it. Right. The genetic differences that we're seeing within people of European ancestry cannot explain at all the differences we're seeing between white people and Black people in terms of their medical outcomes. And what's more, it goes in the opposite direction as you would expect based on the within person genetic differences. So that's not specific to discussion of intelligence. That's not specific to a discussion of IQ. It's a really basic statistical point which is that if you know the direction of an association within a group, you don't know anything about whether that plays out between groups, not even in the sign of that direction. Right? So it could be that let's say actually Africans are at a genetic advantage for cognitive ability that's been swamped by environmental risks and diversity. And I think once you realize that that's not just about IQ that was labeled as an ecological fallacy, that's like a basic statistical point. Where I come to is that we have no information, no default about what is the relationship between differences in genetic ancestry and the causes of these cognition differences that we see on average between groups. And in the absence of any data, any really good data, the only priors we have are informed by what right. So that's why I think the prior that there is a genetic difference and what it's more it works in this particular direction is not informed by the science. And that's the part that I really I don't think that's a minor disagreement. So I think if we look at the evidence for how much does IQ statistically predict life outcomes in people? There is a huge amount of evidence there and people might not like to hear it, but we can talk objectively about what that means when we're talking about what is a reasonable prior in terms of our explanations for group differences in performance and standardized IQ tests. I don't agree with the framing that what has been called the default hypothesis is actually reasonable prior because I think that's based on a really basic misunderstanding of what knowledge within groups tells us about causes between groups that's tricky to describe because default hypothesis sounds like such a reasonable norm. But I don't think it's agnostic enough about what we know. Okay. All of that's interesting and useful. And for me, again, it falls into the bin of being what I think is a very minor difference in scientific intuition, which we can continue to drill down on. I think it's interesting it's contained in the analogy I just gave to height. If we find an island of short people, they may in fact have the genes that point in the opposite direction, right, entirely. They may have the Dutch, you know, super tall genes. They could just be malnourished, right? So, you know, the environment completely swamps their genetic advantage for height. And obviously we could be in that circumstance with respect to the differences between black and white IQ scores in the US. Or any other invidious group difference we seem to have found through psychometrics. That's totally true, and I really think Charles Murray would admit that if put that way. But in terms of it being a different intuition scientifically about, you know, what the default should be, it seems to me a fairly minor point. And it's a point most importantly, it's a point about which totally well intentioned people can disagree. Right. And, you know, often Murray just leaves it as he's agnostic. Right? It just seems a safer assumption that genes are involved. And again, you're right. He's assuming the valence there that the genes are making the contribution in the direction of a disadvantage. This is probably maybe where the kernel of our courageous agreement lies, which is that Murray is saying I'm agnostic and is sort of saying agnostic about a range of possibilities which often when he talks doesn't include the possibility that there is a genetic advantage to people of African ancestry. I'm saying there's just really no good science about this. And so I think where the more major disagreement is is what is the risk to benefit ratio of spending time pontificating about that possibility in the absence of any real scientific data? So I think if you have one set of values, I think it's, well, we should just be able to talk openly and honestly about any possibility that exists. And this is one possibility of the world, and we don't have any good data to suggest that it's true, but let's speculate. And it's really kind of our ability to talk about any possibility that might exist in the world is kind of prioritized, I think, where other people might also have not a different value, but weight a different value is what are the harms potentially done by that speculation? And I think for a lot of people, they think about, well, that is a speculation that, even if it doesn't necessarily feed into, is at least consistent with some really ugly racist views about the inferiority of black people in particular. And so I think some people push back on this. Well, why should we talk about something about which we are scientifically agnostic that just so happens to reinforce a really ugly stereotype? I think for me personally, I am frustrated by the amount of attention that this topic eats up when we have so much good genetic data and so many exciting methodological developments that are on much better scientific ground that we could be talking about how do we use those to improve people's lives? But instead everyone gets kind of sucked into this black hole of speculating about racial differences when we don't really have ready data or methods to solve that problem. And so I just think there's a real I think there's a real opportunity cost given how, in your own words, fraught and explosive this topic is to paying so much attention to something that we can't and haven't solved. Well with data at the expense of talking about all the things we could solve with data that we do have good scientific information on. So I think my risk benefit calculus on what good versus what harm is done by letting people speculate wildly in the absence of scientific data on the sources of black white IQ differences. I think I come down on a different risk benefit calculus than you do about that. Okay, well, so there's a lot contained in the phrase letting people speculate. Yes. As soon as I said it, I thought that's kind of like a strange that is strange. Mr. Orwell, you and I totally agree about the opportunity costs here, but I view them as coming from a different quarter because I have no interest in IQ and I really have no interest in IQ differences among groups. Right. So it's not for an intrinsic interest in this topic that I have suffered massive opportunity costs in getting sucked into this black hole. Right. What I am concerned about is the quality of our public conversation about everything and the defnestrations of good people for bad reasons and the voxification of science and journalism that leads to witch hunts and Blasphemy tests and scapegoating and all the rest. And what I think I'm seeing here is a failure to distinguish scientific disagreement from the pressures of politics and social activism. And I'm seeing most people, even most journalists and scientists, pin their hopes for political equality and social cohesion and good outcomes or the hope for a good society on our ability to either avoid certain topics until the end. Of the world or pretend that certain plausible assumptions are, in fact, not plausible, but rather just so outrageously unlikely and socially damaging that a person could only entertain them based on a desire to live in a society that isn't good. Right. That is racist. So the assumption that people come away with whether you consciously felt this about me and Murray or not, I would be happy to know. But the moralizing topspin of the article you and your co authors wrote and certainly the effect in the world is that it suggests that only someone who's committed to maintaining social inequality right? Only someone who is selfishly committed to maintaining the unfair advantages of their group based on racism. Again, this is something that the onus is on white people here. Strangely, it's not on Asians, right. Who compare favorably to everybody on this particular metric. Only someone who's just morally deranged by our modern lights could be tempted to take what Charles Murray says about race and IQ seriously, or could have a default hypothesis that suggests that, well, we don't know what genes are doing here, but they're probably playing a role and they're probably playing a role in the observed direction of disparity. And I think that's one deeply unfair. But worse, I think it's dishonest with respect to the actual nature of the scientific differences. I think it will be bowled over by coming developments in genetics and in other sciences. So I think it's unstable. I think it's not actually a safe space to occupy, given the coming advances in science. And and this is my big picture concern, I think we will this is my default hypothesis that applies to everything across the board, not just intelligence. If you could list the top 100 things that we care about in human beings, intelligence would be one. I don't know where it would be on the list, but somewhere in the top half, certainly. But list everything we care about, you know, the big five personality traits and susceptibility to violence and shyness and compassion and everything. Sense of humor. Right. I think virtually all of these things on the list will be dictated to some significant degree by genetics in the case of individuals, and to some significant degree by environment. But the thing that will pose a political concern for people is that if we had ways of testing ways of measuring all of these traits, and in many cases we do, and we decided to exhaustively test differences between groups, we would find differences. It would be an absolute miracle if the mean value for the hundred things we most cared about were the same for every conceivable group of human beings. And again, it wouldn't even matter how you pick these groups. These groups could be self identified. They could be Yankee fans versus Red Sox fans. They could be the Norwegians. They could be people who think they're Norwegian but are wrong about it. We could chop up humanity in every conceivable way and test these groups, and we're going to find mean differences. So my view politically is we need to be able to absorb that fact and realize that it doesn't fucking matter. Right? It really doesn't matter. There's so much to respond to in that. So I think the first is you surely have noticed it looks like it worked very cool. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, today I'm speaking with Ian Bremmer, and it's important to know that we recorded this interview before Trump's recent meeting with Putin. We talk about Trump a little bit here. Not much would change about the conversation, but it's just good to understand why we are apparently oblivious to the recent news from Helsinki, news that seems, to my eye at least, to be every bit as alarming as the alarmists say it is. Though unsurprising, it is, of course, no surprise that Trump is sufficiently incompetent and so easily manipulated by his own narcissism and self interest that he could gladhand a tyrant who kills and jails journalists and his own political opponents. And take his side in a controversy that is, in fact, no controversy against the unanimous understanding of the intelligence communities of the United States. And we should note that serious people are using the word treason to describe this. I don't think Ian Bremmer, today's guest, would be one of them. He would be slow to make that accusation. But it'll be very interesting to see if this is yet another thermonuclear scandal that Trump manages to weather, or if it actually matters. In the end, it really does seem that for 40% of the American population, nothing he can do or say matters. There's no level of incoherency, no level of conflict of interest, no ethical impropriety, nothing that can matter. It's amazing. Anyway, I won't belabor the point. Ian Bremmer is the president and founder of the Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm. He has published ten books, including Superpower, the End of the Free Market, and Every Nation for Itself. He lectures widely and writes a weekly foreign affairs column for Time magazine, where he's the editor at large. And most recently, he's the author of the new book US Versus Them the Failure of Globalism. And that's what we talk about today. We talk about globalism and all of its problems. The attendant rise of populism issues like immigration and trade. All of these things are all too relevant to our current circumstance. So without further ado, I bring you Ian Bremmer. I am here with Ian Bremmer. Ian, thanks for coming on the podcast. Damn. My pleasure. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but I recall meeting you only once. I think we met in the green room. Of some show. I don't know if it was a CNN show or something else. Do you have any recollection of this? This is like probably twelve years ago. I feel like I know you so much better from End of Faith and various speeches and such that you've given. So if we met in a green room, it was so much less significant than that, but it is completely lost from my memory. Well, I've appreciated you from afar as well, so it's great to finally meet you virtually and for good reason, because you have a new book which I'm eager to talk about. The book is us versus them. The failure of globalism this could not be more timely, but before we jump into the book, give me your Potted biography. Well, how do you describe what it is you do? I'm a political scientist and I think of myself that way. I was trained out in the West Coast at Stanford originally. I was kind of a post Sovietologist. I started working on things former Soviet as that country slash empire was in the process of falling apart and speak Russian and lived out there for a few years. When I finished my PhD, I was an academic for a couple of years and then basically started a company because there was apparently no company for political scientists. And I really wanted to still be a political scientist. So I've done that for about 20 years now and we have a couple of hundred folks and we all look at how politics affect the markets all over the world. You've written this book which doesn't give too many causes for optimism, at least in the near term. Let me see if I can summarize your worries here. You have this argument that those of us who have benefited from globalization and are now worried about the rise of populism everywhere need to be very careful not to discount the concerns of the people who have voted in the populace and in our case, who have voted for Trump. And you're making a very detailed case for the legitimacy of certain concerns about trade and immigration. And this general way in which the support for cosmopolitanism and the celebration of cultural diversity and the free exchange of goods and ideas that seems universally subscribed among wealthy and educated people at this moment is leading to a breakdown of trust and an erosion of social capital among people who are less well off. And so people like ourselves mock the populace at our peril because there really is something that has to be understood here and business as usual is not going to serve us well. Is that a fair summary of where your head is at at the moment? Absolutely, Sam. And I mean, you would think by I mean, if you just came down from another planet and showed up in the United States right now, you would certainly think you turn on the media. You think the reason why we have all these problems is because of this crazy person called Donald J. Trump, and that's just not true, right? I mean, fundamentally, first of all, it's something that's much broader than just the United States. So you can't look at the solutions as only being limited to the American president. And much more important than Trump being elected is how you got to a place where more people didn't bother to vote than voted for Hillary, or that so many would have voted for someone who so clearly was incapable in so many ways of actually leading the country. Absolutely. I believe that there are just way too many people that don't believe that there is complicity on the part of the globalists over the part of the past decades, myself very much included in being in being responsible for this problem. Well, let's define a few terms here, because I've used several, which I think most people have a vague sense of, but I think very few will have a precise definition for in their heads. How would you differentiate, for instance, globalism versus globalization? What do those two terms mean? So when I talk about globalists, I'm talking about the Jews, right? I'm just kidding. Actually, I'm really not doing that. It's funny how there have been some in the alt right that have tried to take that term and make it nefarious. Actually, when I talk about globalism, I'm talking about a philosophy, an ideology that's been promoted by elite leaders in the west. So public intellectuals, political leaders, corporate leaders, business leaders, media leaders, that free trade, open borders, and global security provided by the US. And our allies was the way to go and further would be the best for all of our citizens. That's globalism. It's really a political ideology where globalization is something I'm a huge fan of. That's an economic process that shows that bringing goods and services and ideas all over the world is going to create more global wealth and make our lives better. And certainly if you look at today's planet and the fact that we have one global middle class as opposed to a few really rich people and a lot of crushingly poor people, that's been a fantastic change. And most of the world is literate today, and most of the world lives over 70 years of age, and 90% of one year olds get an immunization. And I mean, the world is more free of suffering today than at any point in history. And I know you've talked to Steve Pinker in the past, recently, and others that tell that story much more refreshingly than I certainly would. But I'm sadly a political scientist. I'm not focused on the global economic trends or demographic trends. And from the political science perspective, the advanced industrial democracies, the liberal democracies that have benefited from promoting globalism in their borders have really failed a lot of their citizens. And we see a lot of structural inequality that's only growing as a consequence of that. And a lot of people that feel very displaced and they either completely check out of the political system or they vote to break things. And I don't see that changing any time soon. In fact, it's getting worse. I got maybe two more terms here. I used a term I believe that's pretty close in meaning to globalism, but doesn't have the same negative connotation, at least in many people's minds. And that's cosmopolitanism. And I don't know if you would see much daylight between those two concepts, but for me, cosmopolitanism is this sense that humanity is a single community, in principle at least, if not always in practice, and that we can have a reasonable expectation that we will all converge on the same moral and political norms if given enough time. And that therefore differences in background, it's just the sheer accidents of birth don't ultimately matter. And there's this phrase that sounds that it might be of recent coinage, but actually it goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, this notion of being a citizen of the world. And this is an attitude that many of us have adopted because we do view ourselves as citizens of the world. Our interests are not so narrowly anchored within our own political national borders. And as you point out, the success of so many things a reduction in violence, a reduction in war, reduction in illiteracy, or a reduction in basic health epidemics, the spread of infectious disease these are tides that can, at least in principle, lift all boats. And yet this seems to be put in peril now by the rise of another term we've used here populism. How would you define populism? Yeah, absolutely. As the opposite of cosmopolitanism. I mean, populism the idea that your people are the ones that need to be promoted. And it's X first, it does. America first, whites first, blacks first, I mean, you name it. But it's a reduction of humanity to much smaller constituent and usually identity politics pieces. I like the way you just talked about cosmopolitanism. It reminded me of something. I'm 48 years old, so I grew up in the remember that when I was in high school and college, people used to always ask me my astrological sign, and I don't know about you, Sam, what are you, Sam? I'm in Aries. But Aries don't believe in astrology. Yeah, well, that's okay. From the end of faith perspective, I'm not surprised. But I'm a scorpio, and I liked being a scorpio. And my mom used to read, you know, sort of the Horoscopes. And what I liked about being a scorpio, aside from the fact there were cool things you could read into scorpio nests, serious loyalty, a little bit secretive, that kind of thing. Is also that everyone had a shot at one of these twelve things. And the fact that you're going to be different from your family members, and your Venn diagram could overlap with absolutely everyone. Doesn't matter your class, doesn't matter your gender, your white or black, what country you're from. Everyone gets a shot at a cool horoscope sign, right? So it's a good ideology for cosmopolitans, right? There's a lot of Venn diagram intersection and overlappingness. You look at the world today, and people think of themselves much more as Americans or other. Nobody asks about astrological sign anymore, but if we get on social media, we've got algorithms and technology that are doing their damned us to sort us. I think that that really undermines civic nationalism, and it really promotes us versus them ideologies. We only watch things that we like because we are the product that's being sold to ensure maximization of advertising revenue. That's an incredibly dysfunctional thing. I'll give you one more stupid example, Sam, but since I'm in the mindset for it, on Monday, I went to jury duty. And we do jury duty every six years. I kind of like it because it's one of these things in America that brings everyone together, and Lord knows in New York that's even more true. So last time I was there six years ago, had my jury duty, and you all listened to the watch the ten minute orientation video. And by the way, same orientation video that I saw this Monday, so no change. And then after that, six years ago, some people watching the paper, reading the paper, some people are sort of reading a book. A couple of people go outside for a smoke. But over the course of the day, you talk to each other, you met the people. And there were a couple of people I actually stayed in touch with just from jury duty six years ago. I remember this 55 year old woman that taught in a local community college who we ended up being in touch with each other, and her kid wanted to be a political scientist. It was kind of cool. This Monday, we finished the same orientation video. And right after the video was over, I would say with one or two exceptions, in the entire room of 2300, every single person was either on their phone or on their computer. No one was worried about how much time they were wasting. They were all engaged in their own world, engaged with people that were much more like them than the people in the room. And no one talked to each other at all, except maybe borrowing a pen. There was no civic nationalism. It was all reverting to much more like for like we went behind our walls. And I think that of all of the trends that are stimulating us versus them style populism the backlash to free trade and open borders and globalization and the fact that the working class isn't doing as well as they used to in the west. The backlash to open borders and different people coming in and changing our demographics. The backlash to us and its allies fighting in failed wars and sending poor enlisted men and women off to battle and coming back in pieces and not being treated very well. Of all of those things which have been coming for decades, the one that is by far the most debilitating, in my view, and that I'm the most negative about, are these technological transformations that we've seen just in the last five years. Yeah, well, this is something that I've thought more and more about, just the effect of social media on myself personally and on society at large. I noticed you have, I think, 32,000 tweets to your name, so you are implicated in this problem. I would say you might have a problem if you sent that many tweets. What do you think about the effect of social media here? And are we in danger of exaggerating the problem of political polarization? It certainly seems like we're in a very new place. Speaking domestically at the moment, with the rise of Trump and the fact that the two sides of the political spectrum seemingly cannot have a civil conversation about facts anymore, is this an illusion of much deeper fragmentation in our society, or is it in fact real? I think it's becoming much more real much more quickly. I think that the fake news and disinformation problem is one that is facilitated in part by a media space that has fragmented away from three big networks where the personalities were different, but the news that you consumed was the same to one where now the news that you consume if you support Trump or if you oppose Trump is actually completely different. And usually I try to run outside if the weather is nice, but if it's not, I'll be on the treadmill and I try to watch a little Fox and a little CNN or MSNBC in the morning when I'm doing it. And it's obvious that the headlines are different planets and have very little to do with each other. And the ability, as a consequence, to really change the narrative. I mean, getting Trump supporters over the course of literally just a year to go from law and order we love the FBI and the Department of justice to these guys are complicit and they're in the tank for the Democrats, and we want to undermine them. And that's a dramatic ideological change that's facilitated by getting the same news from a filter bubble all the time and only listening to people that agree with that and push you in a more extreme direction. And if you combine that with our own neuroplasticity, the fact that our brains rewire pretty damn quickly in response to changed environments, whether it's losing sight or losing a hand or whether it's starting to sort of develop sympathies for our kidnapper or our hijacker. I mean, our brains have effectively been hijacked by a much narrower slice of political understanding, fealty and community. And we are adapting to that. And our kids are adapting much more quickly because, of course, they're growing up with nothing but twenty four, seven online. And once that moves towards augmented reality, I i really do fear that it's going to be much harder for us to be cosmopolitans ever again. Yeah. Some of the changes in ideology on the right post Trump have been fairly bewildering. The fact that Putin is a celebrated figure among Republicans now, this is the party that imagines it won the Cold War and to some degree validly imagines it won the Cold War. This is the party that you would expect would be the last to lose sight of the problem with someone like Vladimir Putin. And yet it seems like he has a better reputation among Republicans now than certainly any Democrat. There's one fact you cite in your book that's just straight up terrifying. The fact that there's a Washington Post poll that found that a majority of Republican voters, a majority, said they would favor postponing the 2020 election if Trump suggested it. One can only hope. This is one of those poll questions where many people just didn't understand the implications of the box they were checking. But that's just patently insane to think that a majority of Republicans would favor that. Yeah, I hope you're right. But I also feel that a lot of people believe that democracy isn't a good system because they don't think we live in a democracy. They think the system pretends to be a democracy and it's rigged. It's in reality a potemkin democracy where you get fundamentally different types of policing or jurisprudence and lawyering or educational opportunities and all the rest if you're from a privileged class. And that's not the America that we were brought up to believe in. But I do think that's a concern. My mother's not with us anymore, but if she were, and I say this in the opening of the book, she would have voted for Trump. My brother did. And that's because they fundamentally believe that the system is rigged against poor folks that don't matter. As much as I consider myself a cosmopolitan, strongly. Only by accident of history do I happen to be an American. Or was I raised Catholic, and if I was raised Buddhist, or if I was Japanese, would that make me think that the American system was still better than the other ones? Probably not, right? So I have a hard time being less than ecumenical about these things personally, and yet I'm really sympathetic to people that want to blow up the system. I'm really sympathetic to the anger of people that look at the role of money in American elections and look at the failure of the American Dream for so many Americans and say, you know what? This system isn't working. So if you give me something else irrespective of what it was I mean, Brexit was such an obviously stupid thing for the future of the UK on every count. It was obvious to anyone with any sense in their head that the only deal that would be made possible for the UK with the EU after leaving would be one that was worse for the UK than the status quo. Ante like that is, on its face, obvious. But if you are someone that feels like the system has been lying to you for decades and that no matter who you vote for what you do, it's going to continue to find a way to screw you and benefit them, then voting for Brexit simply to make the establishment pay attention to you suddenly becomes a rational thing. Yeah, let's talk about a few of the pieces here that are relevant. I guess immigration and open borders within the EU might be a good place to start, so immigration is often described as something that has no downside for anyone. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, today I'm bringing you the audio from my live event with Danny Conneman at the Beacon Theater in New York a couple of weeks back. This was a sold out event in a very cool old theater. I'd actually never been to the Beacon before, but it has a storied history and music and comedy. Anyway, it was a great pleasure to share the stage with Danny. Daniel Kahneman, as you may know, is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Princeton University and also Numericus Professor of Public Affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for the work he did on decision making. Under uncertainty with Amos TVSKY. Unfortunately, Tversky died in 1996, and he was a legendary figure who would have certainly shared the Nobel Prize with Danny had he lived longer. They don't give the Nobel posthumously. In any case, I think it's uncontroversial to say that Danny has been the most influential living psychologist for many years now. But he's perhaps best known in the general public for his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of the work he did with Tvrsky. Michael Lewis also recently wrote a biography of the Kahneman Tvrsky collaboration, and that is called The Undoing Project. Anyway, Danny and I covered a lot of ground at the Beacon. We discuss the replication crisis in science systems one and two, which is to say, automatic and unconscious cognitive processes, and more conscious and deliberative ones. We talk about the failure of intuition, even expert intuitions, the power of framing moral illusions, anticipated regret, the asymmetry between threats and opportunities, the utility of worrying, removing obstacles to wanted behaviors, the remembering self versus the experiencing self, improving the quality of gossip, and many other topics. Anyway, Danny has a fascinating mind, and I think you'll find this a very good introduction to his thinking. Of course, if you want more, his book Thinking Fast and Slow also awaits you if you haven't read it. And now I bring you Daniel Kahneman. Well, thank you all for coming. Really an honor to be here. Danny, it's a special honor to be here with you, so thank you for coming. My pleasure. It's often said and rarely true that a guest needs no introduction. But in your case, that is virtually true. But we're going to talk about your work throughout. So people will if they if for the one person who doesn't know who you are, you will understand at the at the end of the hour. But I guess by way of introduction, I just want to ask about what is the worst thing about winning the Nobel Prize? That's a hard question. Actually. There were many downsides to it. Okay, well, nobody wants to hear your problems, Dan. So how do you think about your body of work? How do you summarize the intellectual problems you have tried to get your hands around? It's been just a series of problems that occurred that I worked on. There was no big program. When you look back, of course, you see patterns and you see ideas that have been with you for a long time, but there was really no plan. You follow things, you follow ideas, you follow things that you take a fancy to. Really. That's the story of my intellectual life. It's just one thing after another. Judging from the outside, it seems to me that you have told us much of what we now think we know about cognitive bias and cognitive illusion. And really the picture is of human ignorance having a kind of structure. It's not just that we get things wrong, we get things reliably wrong. And because of that, whole groups, market, society is going to get things wrong because the errors don't cancel themselves out. Bias becomes systematic and that obviously has implications that touch more or less everything we care about. I want to track through your work as presented in your now famous and well read book, Thinking Fast and Slow. And I just want to try to tease out what should be significant for all of us at this moment because human unreason, unfortunately becomes more and more relevant, it seems, and we don't get over these problems. And I guess I wanted to begin to ask you about a problem that's very close to home now, what is called the replication crisis or reproducibility crisis in science, in particular social sciences and in particular psychology. And for those in the room who are not aware of what has happened and how dire this seems, it seems that when you go back to even some of the most celebrated studies in psychology, their reproducibility is on the order of 50, 60% in the best case. So there was one study done that took 21 papers from Nature and Science, which are the most highly regarded journals and reproduced only 13 of them. And so let's talk about the problem we faced in even doing science in the first place. Well, the key problem and the reason that this happens is that research is extensive and it's expensive personally and it's expensive in terms of money. And so you want it to succeed. So when you're a researcher, you know what you want to find and that creates biases that you're not fully aware of. And I think a lot of this is simply self delusion. That is, you know, there is a concept that's known as phacking, which is people very honestly deluding themselves about what they find. And there are several tricks of the trade that people know about them. You are going to do an experiment. So instead of having one dependent variable where you predict the outcome, you take two dependent variables and then if one of them doesn't work, you stay with the one that does. Fair. You do that and things like that a few times, then it's almost guaranteed that your research would not be replicable. And that happens. It was first discovered in medicine. I mean, it's more important in medicine than it is in psychology, where somebody famously said that most published research in medicine is false and there's a fair amount of published psychological research is false too. Even some of the most celebrated results in psychology, like Priming and the Marshmallow test and well, yeah, I mean, it's not only it's actually they get celebrated in part because they are surprising. And the rule is the more surprising the result is, the less likely it is to be true. And so that's how celebrated results get to be non replicable. Right. Well, and the scariest thing I heard, I don't know how robust this study was, but someone did a study on trying to replicate unpublished studies and found that they replicated better than published studies. Did you hear that? I don't think that's replicable, but hope not. Let's talk about system one and two. These are the structures that give us so much of what can be a dispiriting picture of human rationality summarize for us. What are these two systems you talk about? I mean, before starting with anything else, there are clearly two ways that ideas come to mind. If I say two plus two, then an idea comes to your mind. You haven't asked for it. It's you're completely passive. Basically something happens in your memory. If I ask you to multiply 24 by 17 or something like that, you have to work to get that idea. So it's that dichotomy between the associative effortless and the effortful. And that is phenomenologically obvious. You start from there and how you describe it and whether you choose to describe it in terms of systems, as I did, or in other terms, that's already a theoretical choice. And in my view, theory is less important than the basic observation of that. There are two ways for ideas to come to mind and then you have to describe it in a way that could be useful. And what I mean by that is you have to describe the phenomenon in a way that will cause help researchers have good ideas about facts and about experiments to run. And the system one and system two was it's not my not my dichotomy and even not my terminology. And in fact it's a terminology that many people object to but I chose it quite deliberately. What are the liabilities? Because in your book you try to guard against various misunderstandings of this picture. Well, yes. There is a rule that you're taught fairly early in psychology which is never to invoke what is called homoculi which are little people in your head whose behavior explain your behavior or explain the behavior of people. That's a no. And system one and System two are really homoculi. So I knew what I was doing when I picked those. But the reason I did was that System One and System Two are agents. They have personalities. And it turns out that the mind is very good at forming pictures and images of agents that have intentions and propensities and traits and they're active and it's just easy to get your mind around that. And that's why I picked that terminology which many people find sort of objectionable because they are really not agents in the head. It's just a very useful way to think about it, I think. So there's no analogy to be drawn between a classical psychological, even Freudian picture of the conscious and the unconscious. How do you think about consciousness and everything that precedes it in life? Clearly related in the sense that what I call System One activities, the automatic ones, one characteristic they have is that you're completely unconscious of the process that produces them. You get the results, you get four. When you hear two plus two in System Two activities you're often conscious of the process. You know what you're doing when you're calculating. You know what you're doing when you're searching for something in memory. So clearly, consciousness and System Two tend to go together. It's not a perfect and who knows what consciousness is anyway? But they tend to go together and System One is much more likely to be unconscious and automatic. Neither system is a perfect guide toward tracking reality but System One is very effective in many cases otherwise it wouldn't have evolved the way it has. But I guess maybe let's start with a picture of where our intuitions are reliable and where they reliably fail. How do you think about the utility of intuition? I'll say first about System one. That our representation of the world. Most of what we know about the world is in System One. We're not aware of it. So that we're going along in life with producing expectations, being surprised or not being surprised by what happens. All of this is automatic. We're not aware of it. So most of our thinking system One thinking, most of what goes on in our mind goes on and we're not aware of it. And intuition is defined as knowing or rather thinking that you know something without knowing why you know it or without knowing where it comes from. And it's fairly clear, actually that's a digression. But there is a guy named Gary Klein, a psychologist who really doesn't like anything that I do. How does your system one feel about that? I like Gary a lot, actually, but he believes in intuition and an expert intuition. And he's a great believer. And he has beautiful data showing beautiful observations of expert intuition. So he and I invited him, actually, to try and figure out our differences because obviously I'm a skeptic. So we're intuition marvelous. And where is it flawed? And we worked about we worked for six years before we came up with something, and we published an article called The Failure to Disagree. Because, in fact, there is a fairly clear boundary about when you can trust your intuitions and when you can't. And I think that's summarized in three conditions. The first one is the world has to be regular enough. I mean, first of all, intuition is recognition. And that's Herbert Simon said that you have an intuition. It's just like recognizing that. It's like a child recognizing what a dog is immediate. Now, in order to recognize patterns in reality, which is what true intuitions are, the world has to be regular enough so that there are regularities to be picked up. Then you have to have enough exposure to those regularities to have a chance to learn them. And third, it turns out that intuition depends critically on the time between when you're making a guess and a judgment and when you get feedback about it. The feedback has to be rapid. And if those three conditions are satisfied, then eventually people develop intuition. So that the chess players chess is a prime example where all three conditions are satisfied. So after many hours, I don't know, 10,000 or not, but many hours, a chess player will have intuitions. All the ideas, all the moves that come to his or her mind are going to be strong moves. That's intuition, right? So the picture is one of intuition. They're intuitions that are more innate than others. We're so primed to learn certain things innately that no one remembers learning these things, recognizing a human face. But much of what you're calling intuition was at one point learned. So intuition is trainable. There are experts in various domains, chess being a very clear one, that develop what we consider to be expert intuitions. And yet much of the story of the blind spots in our rationality is a story of the failure of expert intuition. Where do you see the frontier of trainability here? I mean, I think that what happens is that when those conditions are not satisfied, people have intuitions too. That is, they have ideas that come to their mind with high confidence, and they think they're right. And so the main thing, we met these people. Yeah, we've all met them, and we see them in the mirror. It turns out you can have intuitions for bad reasons. All it takes is a thought that comes to your mind automatically and with high confidence. And you'll think that it's an intuition and you'll trust it. But the correlation between confidence and accuracy is not high. That's one of the saddest things about the human condition. You can be very confident in some in ideas. And the correlation you shouldn't trust your confidence. Well, that's just a depressing but fascinating fact that the signature of a high probability that you are correct is what you feel while uttering that sentence. Psychologically confidence is the marker of your credence in whatever proposition it is you're entertaining. And yet we know they can become totally uncoupled and often are uncoupled, given what you know or think you know scientifically. How much of that leads back into your life and changes your epistemic attitude personally? Do you hedge your bet? How is Danny Kahneman different, given what he has understood about science? Not at all. Even more depressing than I thought in terms of my intuition is better than being better than they were. No. And furthermore, I have to confess I'm also very overconfident. So even that I haven't learned. So what do you have to get rid of those things? You're just issuing a long string of apologies. I mean, how do you get through life? Because you you should know better. If anyone should know better, you should know better. Yeah, but I don't really feel guilty about it. How hopeful are you that we can improve? How hopeful are you that an individual can improve? And how hopeful are you that we can design systems of conversation and incentives that can make some future generation find us more or less unrecognizable in our stupidity? I should preface by saying that I'm not an optimist in general, but I'm certainly not an optimist about those those questions. I don't think that, you know, I'm a case study because I've been studying that stuff for more than 50 years and I don't think that my intuitions have really significantly improved. I can catch sometimes, and that's important. I can catch recognize a situation as one in which I'm likely to be making a mistake. And this is the way that people protect themselves against visual illusions. You can see the illusions and there's no way you cannot see it, but you can recognize that this is likely to be an illusion. So don't trust my eyes. Take out a ruler. There is an equivalent, there is a similar thing goes on with cognitive illusions. Sometimes you know that your intuitions, your confident thought is unlikely to be true. That's quite rare. It doesn't happen a lot. I don't think that I've become in any significant way smarter because of studying areas of cognition. Right. Okay, let me just absorb that for a second. What you must thirst for on some level is that this understanding of ourselves can be made useful or more useful than it is, because the consequences are absolutely dire. Right. Our decision making is one could argue the most important thing on Earth, certainly with respect to human wellbeing, right. I mean, how we negotiate nuclear test, ban treaties, right? Everything from that on down, this is all human conversation, human intuition, errors of judgment, pretensions of knowledge, and sometimes we get it right. And the Delta there is extraordinarily consequential. So if I told you that we, over the course of the next 30 years, made astonishing progress on this front, right, so that we, our generation looks like bumbling medieval characters compared to what our children or grandchildren begin to see as a new norm, how did we get there? You don't get there. It's the same as if you told me we don't perceptual system be very different in 60 years. And I don't think so. Let's take one of these biases, or sources of bias that you have found the power of framing, right? We know that if you frame a problem in terms of loss or you frame the same problem in terms of gains, you get a very different set of preferences from people because people are so averse to loss. So the knowledge of that fact, let's say you're a surgeon, right, and you are recommending or at least proffering a surgery for a condition to your patients who you have taken a Hippocratic oath to do no harm. And you know, because you read Danny Kahneman's book, that if you put the possibility of outcome in terms of mortality rates versus survival rates, you are going to be moving several dials in your patient's head one way or the other. Reliably can you conceive of us ever agreeing that there's a right answer there in terms of what is the ethical duty to frame this correctly? Is there a correct framing or are we just going to keep rolling the dice? Well, this is a lot of questions at once. In the first place, when you're talking about framing the person who is subject to the framing, so you had a surgeon framing something for a patient. First of all, the patient is going to be completely unaware of the fact that there is an alternative frame. That's why it works. It works because you see one thing and you accept the formulation as it is given. So that's why framing works. Now, whether there is a true or not true answer. So let me mention the sort of the canonical problem, which actually my late colleague Ms. Zurski invented. So in one formulation, you have a choice between well, there is a disease that's going to cause 600 death unless something is done, and you have your choice between saving 400 people or two third probability of saving 600, or alternatively, other people. Get the other framing that you have a choice between killing 200 people killing 200 people for sure and or not allowing them to die, and a one third probability that 600 people will die. Is there a correct answer? Is there a correct frame. Now, the interesting thing is people depending on which frame you presented to them, they make very different choices. But now you confront them with the fact that here you've been inconsistent and some people will deny it, but you can convince them. This is really the same problem. If you save 400, then 200 will die. And then what happens? If they are dumbfounded? That is, there are no intuitions. We have clear intuitions about what to do with gains. We have clear intuitions about what to do with losses. And when you strip it from that language with which we have intuition, we have no idea what to do. So what is better when you stop to think about stop thinking about saving or about dying? Well, I've forgotten if that research was ever done. I forgot what the results were. Has the third condition been compared to the first two? What do people do when you give them both framings and dumbfound them? Where do the percentages go? With respect, this is not something that we've done formally, but I can tell you that I'm dumbfounded. That is, I have absolutely no idea. I have had the same intuitions as everybody else. When it's in the gains, they want to save lives. And when it's in the losses, I don't want people to die. But that's where the intuitions are. When you are talking to me about 600 more people staying alive with a probability two thirds or, you know, when you're talking about numbers of people living, I have absolutely no intuitions about that. So that is quite common in an ethical problem and in moral problems that they are frame dependent. And when you strip the frames away, people are left without a moral intuition. And this is incredibly consequential in when you're thinking about human suffering. So your colleague Paul Slovic has done these brilliant experiments where he's shown that if you ask people to support a charity, you talk about a famine in Africa, say, and you show them one little girl attached to a very salient and heartbreaking narrative about how much she's suffering. You get the maximum charitable response. But then you go to another group and you show that same one little girl and tell her story, but you give her a brother and the response diminishes. And if you go to another group and you give them the little girl and her brother and then you say, in addition to the suffering of these two gorgeous kids, there are 500,000 suffering children behind them suffering the same famine, then the altruistic response goes to the floor. It's precisely the opposite of what we understand. System two should be normative, right? The bigger the problem, the more concerned and charitable we should be. So to take that case, there's a way to correct for this at the level of tax codes and levels of foreign aid and which problems to target. We know that we are emotionally gamed by the salient personal story and more or less morally blind to statistics and raw numbers. There's another piece of work that you did which shows that people are so enumerated with respect to the magnitude of problems that they will more or less pay the same amount whether they're saving 2000 lives, 20,000 lives or 200,000 lives. Yeah because basically and that's just the one characteristic basically you're saving one life. You're thinking you have an image, you have stories and this is what system one works on. And this is where emotions are about. They're about stories. They're not about numbers. So it's always about stories. And what happens when you have 500,000? You have lost a story. A story to be vivid has to be about an individual case. And when you dilute it by adding cases you dilute the emotion. Now what you're describing in terms of the moral response to this is no longer an emotional response and this is already you know this is this is cognitive morality. This is not emotional morality. You have disconnected from the emotion. You know that it's better to save 500,000 than 5000 even if you don't feel better about saving 500,000. So this is passing on to system two. This is passing on to the cognitive system the responsibility for action. And you don't think that handoff can be made in a durable way? I think it has to be made by policy makers. And policy makers we hire some people to think about numbers and to think about it in those ways. But if you want to convince people that this needs to be done you need to convince them by telling them stories about individuals because numbers just don't catch the imagination of people. What does the phrase cognitive ease mean in your work? Well it means that some ideas come very easily to mind and others come with greater and greater difficulty to the point of so it's also called fluency. What's easy to think about and there is a correlation between fluency and pleasantness apparently that pleasant things are more fluent. They come more easily. Not always more easily but yes they're more fluent and fluency is pleasant. So there is that interaction between fluency and pleasure which I hope replicates the picture I get is of I don't know if you reference this in your book. I can't remember. But what happens, what we know from split brain studies that for the most part, the left linguistic hemisphere confabulates, continually manufacturing discursive stories that ring true to it. And in the case of actual neurological compabulation there's no reality testing going on. There's nothing. It's just it's telling a story that is being believed. But it seems to me that most of us are in a similar mode most of the time. There's a very lazy reality testing mechanism coming online and it's just easy to take your own word for it. Most of the time. I think this is really as you say this is a normal state. The normal state is that we are telling ourselves stories. We're telling ourselves stories to explain why we believe in things more often than not retrospectively, in a way that has bears no relationship to the system. One bottom up reasons why we absolutely I mean but you know, for me, the example that was formative is what happened with post hypnotic suggestions. So you put somebody under hypnosis and you tell them, when I clap my hands, you will feel very warm and and you open a window and you clap your hands and they get up and open a window and they know why they opened the window and it has nothing to do with the suggestion. It comes with a story. They felt really warm and uncomfortable and they needed air and they opened the window. Actually, in this case, you know, the cause the cause was the hand was clamped. Is that going to replicate that one? Replicates? I'm pretty sure. I hope so. Yeah, I'm sure. Do you have a favorite cognitive error or bias? Which of your ugly children do you like the most? Yeah, it's not the simplest to explain, but my favorite one is sort of extreme predictions. When you have very weak evidence and on the basis of very weak evidence, you draw extreme conclusions. I call it technically it's called non regressive prediction, and it's my favorite. Where do you see it appearing? Is there an example of it that you see it all over the place? But one very obvious situation is in job interviews. So you interview someone and you have a very clear idea of how they will perform. And even when you are told that your ideas are worthless because in fact you cannot predict performance or can predict it only very poorly, it doesn't affect it. Next time you interview the person, you have the same confidence, interview somebody else. I mean, that's something that I discovered very early in my career. I was an officer in the Israeli army as a draftee, and I was interviewing candidates for officer training. And I discovered that I had that uncanny power to know who will be a good officer and who won't be. And I really could tell interviewing people I knew, they're character, you get that sense of confident knowledge and then the statistics showed that actually we couldn't predict anything and yet the confidence remained very strange. Right, well, so there must be a solution for that, though. Some people following your work must recommend that you either don't do interviews or heavily discount them. Right, yeah, that's absolutely true. Don't do interviews mostly and don't do interviews in particular because if you run an interview, you will trust it too much. So there have been many cases, studies I don't know about many, but there have been studies in which you have candidates, you have a lot of information about them and then if you add an. Interview, it makes your predictions worse, especially if the interviewer is the one who makes the final decision. Because when you interview, this is so much more vivid than all the other information you have that you put way too much weight on it. Is that also a story about just the power of face to face interaction? And it's face to face interaction. It's immediate. Anything that you experience is very different from being told about it. And as scientists, one of the remarkable things that I know is how much more I trust my results than anybody else's. And that's true of everybody I know. We trust our own results. Why? No reason. All right, then let's talk about regret. Okay. What is the power of regret in our lives? How do you think about regret? Well, I think regret is an interesting emotion, and it's a special case of an emotion that has to do with counterfactual thinking. That is, regret is not about something that happened. It's about something that could have happened but didn't. And I don't know about regret itself, but anticipated regret. The anticipation of regret plays an important role in lots of decisions. There's a decision and you tell yourself, well, if I don't do this and it happens, then how will I feel? That expectation of regret is very powerful, and it's well known in financial decisions and a lot of other decisions. It's connected to loss aversion as well. Right. You will regret it. It's a form of loss, and it's quite vivid that you are able to anticipate how you will feel if something happens and that becomes very salient. Well, does the asymmetry with respect to how we view losses and gains make sense ultimately? I think at some point in your work, you talk about an evolutionary rationale for it because suffering is worse than pleasure is good, essentially because it just there's a survival advantage for those who are making greater efforts to avoid suffering. But it also just seems like there's if you if you put in the balance of possibility, the worst possible misery and the greatest possible pleasure if I told you we could have the night we're going to have tonight, and it will be a normal night of conversation. Or there's a part of the evening where I can give you the worst possible misery for a half hour, followed by the best possible pleasure. Let's have a conversation. Let's just get a cheeseburger and a Diet Coke. The prospect of suffering in this universe seems to overwhelm the prospect of happiness or well being. I know you put a lot of thought into the power of sequencing. I can imagine that feeling the misery first and the pleasure second would be better than the reverse, but it's not going to be enough to make it seem like a good choice, I would imagine. How do you think of this asymmetry between well, the basic asymmetry is between threats and opportunities. And threats are more immediate in many situations. It's not true everywhere. There are situations where opportunities are very rare. But threats are immediate and they have to be dealt with immediately. So the priority of threats over opportunities must be built in by and large evolutionary. But do you think we could extract an ethical norm from this? Asymmetry, for instance, could it be true to say that it is more important to alleviate suffering than to provide pleasure if we had some way to calibrate that did the magnitude of each? We did a study, Dick Taylor and Jack Netch and I did a study a long time ago about intuitions about fairness. And it's absolutely clear that that asymmetry rules intuitions about fairness. That is, there is a very powerful rule of fairness that people identify with not to cause losses. That is, you have to have a very good reason to inflict a loss on someone. The injunction to share your games is much weaker. So that is symmetry what we call the rights that people have. Quite frequently the negative rights that people have is the right not to have losses inflicted on you. So there are powerful moral intuitions that go in that direction. And the second question that you asked because that was a compound question about wellbeing, yeah, I think in recent decades there's tremendous emphasis on happiness and the search for happiness and the responsibility of governments to make citizens happy and so on. And one of my doubts about this line of work and this line of thinking is that I think that preventing misery is a much better and more important objective than promoting happiness. And so the happiness movement I have my doubts about on those grounds. Given what you've said, it's hard to ever be sure that you found solid ground here. So the intuition that you just cited is that people have a very strong reaction to imposed losses that they don't have to unshared gains. Right. You do something that robs me of something I thought I had, I'm going to feel much worse about that than just the knowledge that you didn't share some abundance that I never had in the first place. But it seems that we could just be a conversation away from standing somewhere that makes that asymmetry look ridiculous analogous to the Asian disease problem. Right. It's a framing effect that we may have an evolutionary story to tell about why we're here, but given some opportunity to be happy in this world, it could seem counterproductive. I say this already being anchored to your intuition. I share this situation. Yeah. I think that in philosophical debates about morality and well being, there are really two ways of thinking about it. And there is one way about when you're thinking of final states and of what everybody will have. And there there is a powerful intuition that you want people more or less to be equal, or at least not to be too different. But there is another way of thinking about it, which is, given the situation under the state of society, how much redistribution do you want to impose? And there there is an asymmetry because you are taking from some people and giving it to others, and you don't get to the same point. So we have powerful moral intuitions of two crimes, and they're not internally consistent, and loss aversion has a great deal to do with that. So given that there are many things we want and don't want, and we want and don't want them strongly, and we are all moving individually and collectively into an uncertain future where there are threats and opportunities and we're trying to find our way, how do you think about worrying? What is the advantage of worrying? If there was a way to just not worry, is that an optimal strategy? I think the Dalai Lama most recently articulated this in a meme, but this no doubt predates him. Take the thing you're worried about, right? Either there's something you can do about it or not. If there's something you can do about it, well, then do that thing. If you can't do anything about it, well, then why worry? Because you're just going to suffer twice. How do you think about worry given your work here? Well, I don't think my work leads to any particular conclusions about this. I mean, the Dalai Lama is obviously right. Why worry? But some people are going to tweet that, and it's not going to work out well for you. On the other hand, I would like to see people worry a fair amount about the future, and even because you don't know right now whether or not you'll be able to do anything about it, right? I mean, maybe worry. The only way to get to get enough activation energy into the system to actually motivate them to do something is to worry. You know, one of the problems, for example, when you're thinking of climate change, one of the problems you can't make people worry about something that is so abstract and distant, and if you make people worry enough, things would change. But scientists are incapable of making the public worry sufficiently about that problem to steal a technique that you just recommended. If you could make a personal story out of it, that would sell the problem much more effectively. Climate change is a very difficult thing to personalize. It's very difficult to personalize, and it's not immediate. So it really climate change is the worst problem in a way, the problem that we're least well equipped to deal with because it's remote, it's abstract, and it's not a clear and present danger. I mean, a meteorite coming to Earth that would mobilize people. Climate change is a much more difficult problem to deal with, and worry is part of that story. It's interesting that a meteorite would be different. I mean, even if you put it far enough out there. So you have an Earth crossing asteroid in 75 years, there would still be some council of uncertainty. People would say, well, we can't be 100% sure that something isn't going to happen in the next 75 years that will divert this asteroid. Other people will say, well, surely we're going to come up with some technology. That would be onerously costly for us to invent now, but 20 years from now could be trivially easy for us to invent. So why steal anything from anyone's pocketbook now to deal with it? You could run some of the same arguments, but there's something the problem is crystallized in a way. The difference is there is a story about the asteroid. You have a clear image of what happens if it hits a lot clearer than climate change. So one generic issue here is the power of framing. We are now increasingly becoming students of the power of framing, but we should just be able to come up with a list of the problems we have every reason to believe are real and significant and sort those problems by. The variable of this is the set of problems that we know that we are very unlikely to feel an emotional response to. We are not wired to be motivated by what we rationally understand in these areas and then take the cognitive step of deliberately focusing on those problems. If we did that, if everyone in this room did that, what we're then left with is a political problem of selling this attitude toward the rest of you use the tricky word there and the word is we. Who is we in that story? Who is we? So you are talking about a group of people, possibly political leaders, who are making a decision on behalf of the population that in a sense they treat like children who do not understand the problem. It's quite difficult. Surely you can't be talking about our current political leaders. No, I'm not, but it's it's actually I find it difficult to see how democracies can effectively deal with a problem like climate change. I mean, you know, if I had to to guess, I would say China is and is more likely to come up with effective solutions than the west because they're authoritarian. Okay, so is that an argument for a benevolent dictatorship of some kind? To get a document, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, just brief housekeeping here as always. If you want to hear about what I'm doing, email is the best way to do that so you can sign up for my newsletter@samharris.org. I've been spending less time on social media of late, and I think that trend will probably continue. Let's see here. We've got some good people coming up on the podcast. Jared Diamond, I just recorded an interview with him. He has a new book, Judea Pearl, the father of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was murdered by al Qaeda back in 2002. But Jude is also one of our most celebrated computer scientists, and I've got some other good people coming up soon. As always, if you get value from this podcast, I encourage you to support it by becoming a subscriber@samharris.org. We're currently making changes to the website there. There will be more subscriber only content coming soon. But your support is what allows me to do this without relying on outside sponsors of any kind. Which, if you knew how often I encounter people who are afraid or otherwise unwilling to say what they really think on a topic for fear of losing their jobs or alienating sponsors, you would know what an unusual circumstance you've helped me create here. So again, thank you for your support. Today I'm speaking with two people michael Weiss and Yasha Monk. Michael is an investigative journalist who has covered the wars in Syria and Ukraine and focused on Russian espionage and disinformation. His first book was titled ISIS Inside the army of Terror, which he co wrote with Hassan Hassan, and that was a New York Times bestseller and named one of the top ten books on terrorism by The Wall Street Journal, as well as one of the best books of 2015 by The Times of London. Michael is a regular guest on CNN and MSNBC and the BBC, and he writes a column for The Daily Beast. And Yasha Monk is a writer and academic and public speaker, known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy. He's an associate professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund and also a senior advisor at Protect Democracy. He writes for The Atlantic and The New York Times, and he also hosts the Good Fight podcast on Slate. Yasha has written three books Stranger in My Own Country, The Age of Responsibility, and his latest, The People Versus Democracy, which explains the rise of populism and talks about how to renew liberal democracy. Anyway, this conversation was recorded about a month ago. Everything we talk about is still entirely relevant, but the recording date would explain why we might not mention the most up to the minute embarrassments of basic sanity and common decency you might have noticed in the media of late or in your Twitter feed. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation. We talk about the state of global politics, the rise of right wing populism in Europe, the prospect that democracy could fail in the US. We discussed Trump and his political instincts at some length the political liability of wokeness, the left's, failure to rethink support of Chavez and Venezuela, the dangers of political polarization, the attractions of extreme partisanship, cancel culture and other topics. So now, without further delay, I bring you Michael Weiss and Yasha Monk. I'm here with Michael Weiss and Yasha Monk. Guys, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. So Michael, you have been here once before, but Yasha, we have just met for the first time, and I brought you guys together because I think you are both extremely astute political minds, and I was surprised to learn you two have never met. So I picture you both impaneled at the same conferences. But I thought we could talk about just areas of mutual concern. I have a few nouns floating around in my head that I think we can connect. Things like liberal and illiberal democracy, populism trumpism all of these trends that make me wonder about the political landscape now, both at home and abroad and where this is all headed. Maybe Islamism will come into the picture, but it seems that we can take very little for granted right now politically and that we're now part of history that in a way that hadn't been so obvious a couple of years ago. So I want to say we those of us privileged to be in the west, who could have imagined that they were not part of history at some point in their lives? So I guess I'll start with you, Yasha. First, for those who don't know you, what do you focus on and what are your foremost concerns at the moment? I started worrying about the state of our democracies, sort of before it was cool. I saw the rise of far right populist parties in various European countries throughout the early two thousand s. I observed things like the appeal of Sarah Palin in 2008 here in the United States. I did some survey work with a colleague, Roberto Four, that showed that people give a lot less importance to living in a democracy than they used to, that were more open to certain authoritarian alternatives to democracy even so sort of connected Dodds and started shouting into a wilderness, saying, guys, we got to be worried about this. Perhaps our democracies aren't really stable. And people said to me, your Cassandra. And I said, Cassandra was right, damn it. So that was sort of my life. And then 2016 came. Donald Trump won the United States. You had brexit since then? You've had the rise of people like Hilsonaro in Brazil or Matteo Renzi, Matteo Salvini in Italy. And so I've sort of become, over the last couple of years, one of the sort of chief populism explainers, I suppose. Are you a political scientist? What's your actual background? I'm a political scientist by background. I studied history as an undergrad and then got bored of that. So I did more history of political thought, and then I thought, those texts are really interesting, but I kind of want to think about how the world should be in my own way. So I started doing sort of political philosophy, and then I thought, well, it's nice to think about what the world should be like, but actually there's really important things going on and how it's changing right now. I don't think people are seeing that. So now I suppose I'm just sort of general purpose political scientist. Right. Okay, Michael, who are you and what are you worried about? Well, like Yasha, I suppose. I specialize in catastrophe studies, actually. I think if there's a theme to the work that I've done as a journalist, it's looking at totalitarianism and some of its lesser offshoots. So obviously I wrote this book on ISIS, which was a deep dive into Middle Eastern jihad and the wellsprings of it, both theological but also materialist. I mean, the last time you had me on, we talked at length about why people were joining this organization, not always because they were fundamentalist or they had been ideologically brainwashed. There were a lot of different drivers because of the poor. Right. That's the only explanation. Is that correct? Nutella and Grand Theft Auto. That was the big lure. I'm glad we have a meeting of the minds here on that topic. Yeah, well, actually, I shouldn't say this. Before I was even interested in the region at all, I was more interested in Communism, Soviet totalitarianism. So I had done a lot of as an amateur, I mean, in college and then post college reading on Soviet history, Soviet literature, and also the debates that had been taking place in the west about what this represented. I have a sideline hobby in New York. Intellectuals who congregated around Partisan Review in the always find myself coming back to their polemics and their essays. And I never thought after well, I suppose I didn't come into a political consciousness in 90, 91, but certainly when I was in in university, these things were dead and buried. Right. The end of history was definitely in the ascendant as a kind of conceit in political science, even though there are plenty of people who are pushing back against it, saying, this is nonsense, history doesn't come to an end, and look at what was happening in the Balkans. In many ways, I suppose the tie that binds my intellectual fascination is movements that ought to have been consigned to the dustbin of history but keep coming back around for whatever reason and reinventing themselves and how they reinvent themselves. So, you know, we we bandy around words like fascism and now socialism has become a Qurant again. But what does it really mean? And how are these things being used and deployed in the 21st century context as opposed to the 20th century? Right? I mean, maybe we should define or unpack that phrase, the end of history, which I know you touch in your book. This is due to a very influential article by Francis Fukuyama and then a book by that title. I don't know how he's weathered the disconfirmation of his thesis, but yasha, do you want to tell us what is meant by that phrase? Yeah, I mean, the idea of the end of history became a sort of meme before we started really talking about memes in everyday speech. And I think a lot of people caricature what Francis Fukuyama was arguing in big ways. But basically he published this article in the National Interest in, I think, the summer of 1989, saying that ideologically liberal democracy has won, that the idea of self determination and individual liberty no longer has real competitors. Because the Soviet Union has been discredited, fascism has been discredited. The Islamic regime in Iran does not offer an alternative that's appealing to most people in the world. And so even though, as he put it in that article, there's still going to be historical events that will be recorded in the annual Chronicle of Foreign Affairs in the larger hegelian sense, in the larger sense of what history is headed towards, history has ended. And I sort of always like to defend Fukuyama because when I was a grad student in political science at Harvard in the late 2000s, people laughed at Fukuyama. They didn't take them seriously. They didn't take the idea of the end of history seriously. But I learned as not gospel truth, but certainly something that we believed in an article by two political scientists who would never use grandiloquent claims like the end of history, saying, once a country has changed governments for free. And fair elections a couple of times. And once it's reached a GDP per capita of about $14,000 a year, it was consolidated. It was safe. You no longer had to worry about democracy. It would basically be a democracy worth. And there was every bit as much a claim by the end of history what we all have ever said, and I think that's no longer true. We now have sort of the fury busting cases that show that you can have democracies that look like that that turn into dictatorships. What are some of those cases? So the most obvious case is hungry. I was actually there a couple of months ago. So if you remember the famous speech by Winston Churchill, 1946, an iron curtain is descending across the center of Europe, from Chester and the Baltic to triathlon the Adriatic. I sort of noticed that you can now drive along with old Iron Curtain through Poland and Hungary to Austria and Italy, and never leave a country ruled by four Italian populists. And now, in some countries, like Austria and Italy, there's clearly still democracy, and the governments are undermining that in certain ways. In other places, like Poland and Hungary, democracy is really on the line. And when I was in Shop Run, a small western city in Hungary in March, I was struck by the fact that people were afraid to talk to me. You talk to ordinary people on the street and you say, Hi, I'm doing a documentary for BC. Can I speak to you? I'm like, no. And you put the microphone away and say, look, I'm not going to use your name, we're not going to show this, but can you just talk to me? What do you think of a government? Oh, it's terrible. It's terrible. But if I tell you that, I might lose my job tomorrow. And even interestingly, the people who support the government are afraid to talk to you because they think if they somehow end up saying one critical thing, or perhaps we sort of selectively edit to make them say something that they're not actually saying, they're going to get in huge trouble. So that culture of fear in the heart of Europe, in a country that's a member of the European Union, is absolutely striking. And it's because somebody came in as a populist saying, all of the political leads are corrupt. I alone truly represent the people. Trust me to solve all your problems. I'm going to return power to you. And instead, what they've done is to abolish independent institutions, to undermine individual rights, to put loyalists into the courts and the state media and the electoral commission. And even for Victor Arban was definitely elected democratically in 2010. It's now no longer possible to remove him by democratic means. And Hungary is a country that does have more than two changes of government for free and fair. Elections in the past has about five. It has a GDP per capita of just over $14,000 a year. So that's the most striking case. And also what's interesting to me is Hungary and Poland. The leadership in both of these countries had come from this anti totalitarian or anti communist tradition, right? And they have diverged from the inevitable liberal paradise that was meant to descend upon all of us, to become more right wing, authoritarian populists. But still, within the context of how they see their national destiny, it's still being fought as though it was 1986, right? The people who informed the people who worked with the Soviet satellite governments and all the rest of it, that's still used as a cudgel to smash their opponents. So that's another interesting aspect of all of this. These debates were not completely settled when we thought they were, and all of the factionalism and the intramural fighting that came out of what was I mean, you had all of these arguments before 89. What was the main driver of dissidents in this region? The Catholic Church played a role. Some people tend to over exaggerate that role. Some people tend to discount it. But now, really, it's almost a fraternal split. The anti communist movement has now shattered into a million pieces. You have your liberals, you have your socialists, you have your conservatives, center right conservatives, and now you have your Victor Orbans, who are essentially dictators in waiting, if not already. So how paranoid would it be to draw any kind of lesson from those examples? For the US. This was early on when the full hysteria of Trump's election was upon us. But I remember I had the historian Timothy Snyder on the podcast, and he's been not at all shy about drawing a very straight line between the example of any failed democracy and the prospects that ours could fail under Trump. He has these very vivid anecdotes of people going to the polls for the last time, not knowing it's going to be the last time, and yet, needless to say, the pushback you get from Trumpists is excruciating whenever you air those concerns. And again, I think the stupor of the end of history assumption has not totally lifted for me. It does feel impossible on some level that America could ever go down that path that we just sketched or noticed in other democracies. How do you guys feel about that? Well, I think it depends on the exact nature of the parallel you draw. I respect Tim Snyder a lot, and I think he's done very important work. I also have some important disagreements with him, and one of those is about how useful it is to draw the analogy to fascism. Fascism was in many ways quite different. One of the differences is that a lot of fascists quite openly oppose democracy. They said, look, all of this democracy, people squabbling with each other. This sort of bourgeois idea is really bad. We need nephrolotarian government, we need a hierarchical government, and then they parade it in the streets with brown shirts and little sticks of wood on fire. Now, if that was the situation, then it would be easy to recognize. Aren't there elements of Trump's behavior that echo? I think the elements are cultural more than I mean, look, if this was really fascism and by the way, I'm not one of these people who thinks America is going to be forever immune to these diseases and pathologies. No way it can happen here. I just don't think it's necessarily happening now. And the answer to that is look at the institutions. We've had an election since Donald Trump. The Republican Party got pretty trounced in Congress. This investigation, which he has tried by hooker, by crook, to obstruct and dismantle, meaning the Mueller investigation still made it to completion. The report still came out. Yes, there are shenanigans happening between the White House and the Special Counsel's office, but we still have a picture of a deeply dysfunctional presidency. So all of his attempts, whether by Twitter, whether by mobilizing the real angry fanatical base that still supports him and will support him no matter what he does, american liberal values, the resilience in American society has bitten back. And this is not to say I actually happen to think he has a fairly okay chance of winning reelection in 2020. A lot of that has to do, though, with what the Democratic Party is represent. It's more than okay at that point. I would bet on it. I mean, we still do have an independent judiciary. We still do have well, I think they are more pessimistic, right? So I think, look, we're talking about Hungary, right? And we're talking about fascism. Comparing it to Hitler, I think, is unhelpful in all kinds of ways. Completely comparing it to Hungary is in some important ways also wrong. One of the things that I was struck by when I was in Shoon is that people had real fear about losing their jobs because a lot of them either worked for the state or in indirect ways, the job dependent on the state. They worked for a little contractor who did most of their work for the local town and things like that. The United States are very different in those ways. True, right. It's a much bigger country, a much richer country, a country with more independent power centers. In Hungary, most newspapers live to some extent from government advertising. So you can not just take over the important state broadcasting agencies, but you can basically force the private media to follow your line as well by taking away advertising a bit criticizer. You can't do that in the United States. We've had a very active press in the last two or three years, but it's done along with some very silly op eds, some of the best reporting work in the history of the United States. And unlike in hungry people can't shut up about how much they hate Donald Trump. They're outspoken in their criticism of this government. Now, at the same time, I do think it's important to see the parallels, and I see two big parallels. The first is in the nature of the movement we're facing right now. So what populists do is to say that they and they alone represent the people. So they promise to represent the people, which means they promise to be more truly democratic, but they don't acknowledge the existence of any power centers independent of them. And they don't understand that people can have different political views and still retain a full stake in our society. And both of those claims are very, very dangerous because it's why one populist after another starts to vilify and marginalize minorities who are religious or ethnic, and it's why they cannot accept the rule of law, why they cannot accept the existence of an independent judiciary. And so when you look at the rhetoric of Alban and Hungary, of Erawan and Turkey, or of Donald Trump here in the United States, them calling opposition parties traitors, from calling the media the enemies of the people. This started even before the election where he was open minded as to whether or not he would accept the results of the election if he lost. Right. And he was calling for the imprisonment of his rival and encouraging people to physically assault journalists who were covering him critically, which is to say, honestly, enemy of the people. A lot of these tropes which are not accidental, I don't think particularly to my mind, the most dangerous thing that this president still poses is Bannon is gone from the White House. But Bannonism is still very much there. And you see now he's gone to Europe to try and essentially export his political savvy. I mean, this whole idea, this Breitbartian notion, politics is downstream from culture. It's very important. Like I say, I think Trump is much more effective as a cultural reactionary than as a political one. And that's because as a political neophyte, his first office was President of the United States. He doesn't know how the system works. He is completely befuddled by the fact that he can't simply order his Attorney General to investigate his enemies and have that done the next day. He is astounded at the fact that the White House counsel cannot terminate a special counsel investigation into obstruction of justice and Russian interference and like the snap of his fingers thanos like this gets done. That to me, suggests and that's not to say that a simpleton or somebody who's completely uninitiated into the vagaries of American politics is not dangerous in his own right. This guy absolutely is. But again, what worries me more is the rise in race hatred, the rise in antisemitic hate incidents, particularly in places like New York, and people argue about, well, is Donald Trump responsible for this? I do think he's created the mood music, the atmospherics for this. I don't like the word polarization because it doesn't really adequately describe what we're facing. But when, you know, he describes out and out fascists marching to the tune of Jews will not replace us as there's some fine people on both sides and, and traffic's in this kind of moral equivalent. He is giving license right to the worst elements of the society. He is giving them a sense of impunity that they can carry on in a way that they hadn't ever been able to do before, and now they have the imprimatur of the presidency with which to do it. That, to me, is the most dangerous thing, although just on that point in his defense there, and I rarely come to his defense if you look at the full video from that press conference where he supposedly said nothing to denounce white supremacy, he does denounce white supremacy. The problem with the left now is that they're so scattershot in their attacks on him. You don't have to lie to paint Trump as a racist or a bigot or a grifter or a con man, because he's undoubtedly all of those things. But in that case, there's a few things muddy in the waters. One is that you had Antifa very likely initiating the violence against neo Nazis who had a permit to march. Right. There was violence coming from both sides. And that's not to say that Trump hasn't, as you say, created the mood music for racism and white supremacy. But I think we have to be careful on every one of these points, because the amount of energy that Trumpistan draws from every error here, they can just point to the video, apparently him decrying white supremacy, sure. But this is also a man who took a very long time and tried to dodge at every opportunity, the opportunity to denounce David Duke. And the reason for it was again, it doesn't mean that he's pathologically. He claimed not to know who David Duke was, but understand the motivation. This is not, and to Yasha's point about, you know, these facile comparisons to Hitler and the Third Reich and really deeply motivated bulk style fascism for Trump, it's narcissism, right. David Duke and white supremacists, they support me, and I like anybody who supports me and who flatters me. So why am I going to go out of my way to denounce these people even if I don't really like the cut of their jib? But that itself, again, goes to this kind of cultural reaction. He's built a personality cult around himself, and I do think it's important that we don't get caught up in the details of those things. You're right that we have to be very careful about the claims we make. But I do think there's a larger story to how he thinks about politics and how he's trying to undermine the democratic system. Now, lock her up is an incredibly extreme statement. I mean, the very basis of any democracy is that you might think of your political competitors as adversaries, who you really want to be, but you have to recognize their legitimacy. And saying I'm going to go and put her in prison is very extreme. The fact that at one point in the debate, he seemed to call in doubt whether he would accept the outcome of the election. There's still a very real question in my mind about whether Trump would have acknowledged the legitimacy of a 2016 election if he had lost it, and what he will do in 2020 if he does lose. So so I think it's important to go back to a larger question we're asking about. Okay, so to what extent are we seeing the system under fret here in the United States now, you have a similar set of forces pushing against it as in Hungary. You have older democracy and more affluent democracy trying to defend itself. So how is it going? Well, the first thing I would say is that, as you say, as you said earlier, michael Trump is not a very sophisticated or for Italian populist. Now, that both means it is less likely that things will go deeply wrong in the next couple of years. It also means that if we get a smarter, more strategic, more ruthless incarnation of the same energy, it might be able to do a whole lot more damage than we've seen the last couple of years. Yeah. The second thing I would say is that if you go back and read the New York Times of a Wall Street Journal about Turkey in 2005, a few years, three years, even five years into adoan, even ten years into ado, one being the Prime Minister at the time of Turkey, and they are all saying addo one is deepening democracy in Turkey. He's finally bringing a form of moderate Islam into the Turkish government, overcoming some of the very real discrimination against religious Muslims in Turkey. This is a Muslim form of Christian democracy that's going to give us actual democracy. Smart people thought that for many years, not seeing the ways in which Erdogan was undermining democracy and well on his way towards becoming a dictator. So let's not prejudge this. It is not in none of these cases, not in Venezuela, not in Turkey does a populist come in and three years in, it's obvious it's a dictatorship. It takes a long time. And so then look at what the institutions actually are doing right now. You both have just put your finger on the thing that worries me, that to my eye, Trump is amazingly unpersuasive. He's not ideological, he's not a clever totalitarian in the making. He is, as you said, Michael, just a black hole of narcissism. And that is the thing that determines everything he does. And it just so happens that aligns with an authoritarian stick as a politician. But it's just so astonishing to me that he has succeeded to the degree that he has, and that he has this personality cult around him where it's not even that he has policies that people are so enamored of, they just on some level, they're enamored of him as this anti norm or this norm wrecking machine. And I don't know if it's just kind of the spirit of reality television or whether people just like, they just want to tune in for the next episode, and they just like that. It's exciting. And the. Liberal media has gone berserk in response. But the fact that we're here with someone who so obviously lacks the real tools of political genius and insight into how things work, you know, that's that's scary. I think what he was actually very masterful at tapping into is the amygdala of American politics is to say, the establishment is corrupt. The establishment is cheating everybody. Right. This whole system is rigged. And what he did very cleverly, and I don't credit him with the kind of political savvy that like a circuit in Russia has, who who really sort of has a playfulness with which he he applies this authoritarian mindset. With Trump, though, it was, hey, you know, I'm already corrupt, but at least I'm telling you, these guys, they're the hypocrites. Don't trust them. I cheated the system. Let me show you how to cheat it too. Or Let me show you how it really works. And this resonated so well with so many people. Not even but that's such an amazing point, because he objectively lies more than any person anyone has ever seen. And yet that lion showed up as a kind of authenticity that's exactly honest about the corruption and the system. Yeah. There are no rules. Watch me break all the rules. I'm the only one hotel primaries was when Hillary Clinton was asked why she attended his wedding. And he was asked why he had invited Hillary Clinton. Right. And Hillary Clinton, with a tortured look, said something like, I thought it would be fun. And everybody knows that Hillary Clinton's idea of fun is not to go to Donald Trump's wedding. It's bullshit. Right. And Trump said, well, I'm a real estate developer in New York. I got to get along with all these people. So he was actually admitting to corruption of a certain form. He certainly was admitting to taking part in the corruption of a system. Yeah. But he was, at one level, honest about it. He said why? I did it because I had to get along with influential people. Also, when she said, you haven't paid taxes in however many years, he said, that makes me smart. Now, prior to Donald Trump, would any American politician stand up at a debate and say, I've never paid any tax money in ten years, or whatever it was? No, but for him, not only was that a sort of impulse response, but he really does. And and this I think he was right about. There are Americans out here who don't want to pay taxes and, like, Wait a minute here. This guy's a gazillionaire. He claims he made all his money himself, which is not true. He inherited a lot of it. Certainly born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But he's cheating the system. The system that has cheated us. Maybe what we need is a con artist and a fraud, but somebody who says who sort of pulls back the curtain and shows the wizard of Oz, right? Or at least pretends to, which is what he really does. He's not actually showing the heart of corruption in the American system. He is pretending to show it. That resonated very powerfully with a lot of people. And we can get into this conversation later if you want, and I'll hold my thoughts on it. But what you're now seeing on the left in this country is an attempt, I think at least certain quadrants of the left to replicate Trumpism. But from a progressive point of view, this sort of populist rise. And you're seeing this all over Europe. In fact, I just read a piece in the Ft Financial Times about Bannon trying to create a kind of academy for the alt right in an abandoned or old monastery in Europe. And he said one of the things that he's alighted upon in Europe is this fusion politics. It's sometimes called red Brownism, although that's complicated too, for reasons we just discussed, why we shouldn't traffic in these sort of outmoded comparisons to fascism, communism. But anyway, in Italy, for instance, left wing populism, right wing populism, they find a happy marriage together in Salvini, right? And Salvini, by the way, people forget, I mean, five five star or the was it Lega Nord, he founded the first Stalinist faction in Milan of that party. So he's had a kind of ideological promiscuity similar to those in the 20th century who made the transition from one extreme to the other. But the point is, Bannon, more than anybody on a cultural level understands. Look, the old categories don't matter anymore. It's not Republican Democrat. It's not even liberal conservative. It's who wants to tear it all up and start again. And that can apply just as easily on the right as it can on the left. That's what I think Trump is tapping into. And I think, again, to me, the danger is the left over reaction to Trump threatens to do the same thing. Well, there's different ways of framing that. I mean, my fear is in part a kind of left of rotarianism. And we're seeing in Venezuela that that can be very disastrous in the American context. I think that's a lot less likely. So I'm not worried about Bernie Sanders becoming president. I'm worried about Bernie Sanders being the candidate of a Democratic Party, ensuring that Donald Trump gets a second term. So there's multiple dangers. There one point about the way in which Trump profits from this elite discourse, which is that it's sometimes puzzling, I think, to understand why things that he says that most Americans really do dislike and there's good evidence that they dislike. But when he calls Mexicans rapists and so on and so forth, that is not something that the majority of Americans wants to have any kind of truck with. But what happens is that all of the people who the majority of Americans hate condemn Trump, and we have good reason to condemn Trump when he says those things, but they look at that and they say, do I like what Trump said? No, but if all of those guys hate him, there must be something right with him. It's a very weird dynamic, and I don't actually know how to get out of it. I don't think people should shut up about, you know, should stop condemning terrible things he says. But there is a strange way in which that helps him, because all of the Democrats and all of the sort of more moderate Republicans standing up and saying, how dare you say this? Makes people look at him and say, oh, yeah, he is the one who actually is willing to say things and who's not like the rest of them. So perhaps there's something to him. Yeah, well, I do see that directed at me occasionally by people who are smart. But there's a delight, again, we're more than two years in, and I'm still mystified by this, but it seems like a kind of nihilistic delight in just getting a rise out of his political opponents that his fans like this notion of Trump derangement syndrome. It's that it's created a situation where apparently there's nothing he could do that's sufficiently odious to cancel the delight that his fans feel in watching people react to it. It's kind of a superpower in watching his critics be proven wrong. Well, that's why I think it's mission critical to never be wrong. But if you say he didn't condemn white supremacy and then we can go to the tape and he did, that undoes 100 good things you might have done. Sure. For me, it was more good people on both sides. I mean, the marchers in Charlottesville find me a good person. But let's take a simpler example of what you were just saying, Sam. I mean, I was on Twitter a few weeks ago, and everybody was, as I was reading it, reporting that Trump had said, oh, Boeing, they should just rebrand the seven three seven max, and put it back into business. And I was like, well, that really seems ridiculous. And I actually went to Trump's Twitter tweet, and it turns out that he had said we should fix it and then rebrand it, which is a silly thing for president to say. I don't know why the President of the United States should be giving branding advice to Boeing, but it's very much not what I had gotten the impression of. That was definitely a case when I thought, look, Trump says so many odious things. Do we really need to exaggerate his silly tweet about Boeing to get, like, a little point on him? This really is counterproductive. And look, the extremists always managed to thrive and exploit the failure of center parties, whether it's center left or center right, to address real problems in a society. For a brief, flickering moment, the British Nationalist Party did quite well, I think, in the European parliamentary elections. We're going on, what, ten years ago now. And the reason was they were some of the only people banging on about immigration and its discontents in the UK. Labor and conservatives just refused to touch the issue. As to hot button or whatever, trump with his comments about, you know, well, somebody's doing the raping and and his his ridiculous xenophobic remarks about Muslims and and Mexicans is tapping into a genuine concern. A lot of Americans have about rampant immigration or about well, what's going to happen now that this post Arab Spring Middle East is on fire and we have it's. Give us you're tired, you're poor. We just don't know where they're coming from or what their ideological motives may be. Right? These are legitimate concerns to have. He's just addressing them in a sensationalistic way, but at the same time encoded in his commentary is if you criticize me or you attack me for what I'm saying, you're another exponent of political correctness. Remember in the primary, the first thing he did was we do not have time. I don't have time for total political correctness. That's a valid argument when made by people who in good faith who say, yeah, I think culturally there is something about, you know, condemning a man before all the facts are in or jumping the gun or as we say on Twitter, virtue signaling when you don't even know what the hell you're talking about. However, this guy is not the answer. He is not the antidote to it. Right. I don't want to spend all the time on Trump and I want to swing to the left and do a post mortem on the pathologies we detect there. But Yasha, you said something that had a Snyder esque echo, at least in my brain, which is should Trump get reelected in 2020? Well, actually two things. One is, should he lose in 2020, whether he will accept the results of that loss and what that portends. But also, should we get him for four more years? Is there a further erosion of democracy or institutional norms that you worry about or is that a paranoid bridge too far? Well, again, it depends exactly on what we mean by that. Look, I mean, I remember in 2016 having debates with political scientists, friends of mine, about what would happen in the Republican Party if Trump won the presidency and those basically optimists who said the Republican Party, these people have a very different set of ideological beliefs. They're going to rein him in. They're not going to go along with what he does at all. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, what happened to that? Yeah. And then those pessimists like me who said, no, Trump has more support than the sort of old Republican orthodoxy. So over time, he's going to be able to primary people and to run his own candidates and it'll be a civil war in the Republican Party for four or eight years, but it may end up being a Trumpian party. We were both far too optimistic, actually. What happened is that the party grandees just rolled over and flipped. Think of somebody like Lindsey Graham in 2016. I would have said, well, perhaps they'll primary. Lindsey Graham Lindsey Graham Prime read himself. Well, just think of the fact that Trump could dance on McCain's grave while he was in advance of his death, right? I mean, just speak badly of a dying man who was objectively a war hero and the best friend of Lindsey Graham. Right. Lindsey Graham. Yasha. You're here for the Milken Institute. I moderated a panel with Lindsey Graham on it about ISIS and the threat to the Middle East posed by ISIS in 2016, when Graham was one of the most outspoken antitrump Republicans backstage. And I've said this publicly, so I have no problem betraying the confidence. It was Lindsey Graham on one side, Tony Blair on the other, having a competition, an auction for self pity as to whose party has lost its fucking mind more, the British Labor Party or the Republican Party. And Lindsey Graham was saying, I don't understand why we can't just chuck him out of the party the way you all do in the UK. Wanted him gone from the GOP and now has become this sort of vanguard defender of the faith. It's bizarre, but, yeah, I quite agree, that's extreme. And then if you jump to what's happening with the Department of Justice, I think that's very serious. I mean, it is now very obvious that we have an attorney general who openly says he's the president's lawyer as opposed to the lawyer of the United States who has and I don't want to get into the Mueller report and all of that. I was never somebody who I thought is very important to make sure that Mueller wasn't fired. I never thought that the report would show that Trump is a secret Russian spy or anything like that, but who clearly misrepresented the nature of it. Yeah. You have Trump calling on investigations of his political opponents in a situation in which some of the more reasonable people in the Department of justice are leaving, in which Barr is quite clearly saying he's just representing the interests of Trump. I wouldn't be entirely astounded if there is a politically motivated investigation into the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate or one of his close associates in a way that can create scandals and so on. Now, I am not saying that Trump is going to steal the election in an outright way. I'm not saying that if he loses, he will refuse to leave the White House. He will go and undermine the credibility and the legitimacy of a system all along. But if he's in power for four more years, and if he's succeeded by somebody who's a little bit more popular, who is a little bit fruder, I think it would be naived to assume that American institutions can withstand anything. It is interesting, though, and I mean, I can speak with some insight here because I do still report on Syria and US policy towards Syria. All of Trump's instincts, complete withdrawal, take the oil, let the Russians sort it out. All of these things have actually been rebuffed, and not just once, but repeatedly. You know, Trump campaigned on military withdrawal from Syria, and, you know, frankly, let's just smash bomb the shit out of ISIS and go home. That's not happening. And I know for a fact it's not happening. Policy that had been implemented, that had been cobbled together by the Brains Trust, such as it is with the National Security Council and some of his Mideast hands. Remember, there were still at the very beginning of the administration, some good people in government, particularly the level of State Department, even to the level of the White House. The only reason this man, I think, wasn't indicted by Mueller for flagrant obstruction of justice is because, frankly, professionals in the White House kept him from committing overt crimes. But that was my takeaway. McGahn basically said, I'm not going to do this. Similarly, with respect to US policy, maybe not at the domestic level, I know that's not my bag, but foreign policy was one of his apologies. Main lines is, well, we know he didn't collude with the Russians. We know he's no patsy of Putin. Look at how hard this country has been on Russia, whether it be sanctions or supplying Javelin antitank missiles to the Ukrainians, or now standing up to Putin's proxy Maduro in Venezuela. Well, yeah, I mean, with Venezuela accepted, where Trump has been quite outspoken, the institutions of American government, I mean, it's very difficult to get things done. Like, there is a Treasury Department for a reason. Doing sanctions is not I mean, the president can dictate policy, but the implementation of it is everything. We didn't lift sanctions on Russia. We didn't recognize Crimea as Russian Federation territory. All of the worst case scenarios didn't come to pass because of the sort of and that gives me a little bit of hope and optimism. But I do quite agree with Yasha, somebody more sophisticated who's seen what Trump has done in terms of tenderizing the electorate and making the rise of a real authoritarian possible. That's the real danger, because it's never the first guy out the gate. It's usually the one who follows, who has more wisdom and more experience that you have to worry about. All right, well, let's talk about the wokeness. The wokeness on the left. That is obviously on some level a response to Trump, but it predates Trump in its concerns. And I think we all detect that there's a problem in principle with identity politics. But to point that out is to be convicted again and again of insensitivity with respect to the underlying concerns like racism and gender equality. And everything else that has pushed people to identify with some subgroup. First and foremost, whether defined by the color of their skin or their gender or their sexuality. And yet, at least to my eye, it is so obviously a losing hand to play in the current environment. Forget about the foundational ethics of it or where we want to be in 100 years as a global civilization. If your concern is just to bar the door to Trump in 2020, amplifying the wokeness is a disaster. I'm going to take one narrow case. It is totally possible for decent ethical people to disagree about what our immigration policy should be. And if you are going to stand on the left and equate any concern about immigration or any concern about having a defensible border with racism every time, there are enough people in this country who are sick of being called racist when they're not actually racist? Who will vote for Trump over your woke candidate who's framing everything in terms of racism and white supremacy. So how do you view the left? And I don't know if we want to talk about specific candidates at this point, but what are the stirrings on the left do to you at the moment? I suppose to your point about the political non viability of maximum wokeness? I mean, Bernie Sanders is not for open borders. He's spoken quite clearly about this. He's spoken about a firm immigration policy, but firm according to Bernie Sanders. No candidate I think is running on this absolute kind of utopian concern or conceit that the United States should just let everybody in. No background checks, nothing. Yeah, look, wokeness to me is political correctness from the 90s turbocharged and taken to really an insane degree. Now, I was in university, not in the late ninety s to early 2000s. There were elements of this then, but it was the kind of thing it was on the wane then, it was being satirized. You had films like PCU coming out, the Onion was taking the piss. The Onion still takes the piss, thank God. But yeah, no, I mean we were talking earlier offset about Twitter and the kind of cesspit, almost the kind of stasi like mentality that persists when you look it's not even about somebody saying something really ridiculous and overtly offensive and then having the pile on effect. It's trying to inject a little bit of nuance or being even a little variance with liberal orthodoxy can get you pilloried and publicly shamed. And though to my mind the one saving grace of all of this and Yasha, you can speak to this because you've written about it very online culture as it's called, or the internet, wokeness is not at all reflective of American social reality. So how do we know that? Because I feel that the fact that Trump got elected without anyone realizing he was going to win was an example of the Twitter verse being the real world and we didn't notice it. Well, I'm not sure. On the night of the election, Nate Silver said there's a one third chance that Trump would win it. Well, one third is still significant. Yes, but it's very significant. I mean, you're not going to agree to play Russian roulette two or three times, which would give you a one third chance of losing your life. Right. So the polls picked up what people actually fought and when you poll people about some of the issues that are at the center of what you are calling wokeness, they don't have very much support at all. So I wrote a piece in the Atlantic late last year about the number of people who think that political correctness is now a problem in this country and it is about 80% of Americans. And by the way, it is a higher number of people of color in this country than of whites. So that's a point to spell out. I don't know if you wrote this article or not, but I remember someone I think it's a New York Times piece that the woke social justice warriors are for the most part privileged white people. This is not people of color who are lining up by and large along these ideas. Absolutely. So what's interesting is when you look at the people who in the words of this very, very good hidden tribe study by an organization called more in common progressive activists, it's about 8% of the population with those kinds of beliefs and they are far, far more likely than the general population to be white. They're about twice as likely to earn more than $100,000 a year but three times more likely to have a postgraduate degree. And of course, white people who are very liberal have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the views of people of color in the United States are for two reasons. First, that a lot of black people vote for the Democratic Party for the simple reason that in its current incarnation, parts of the Republican Party really are racist. So obviously, even a black person who's pretty conservative in all kinds of ways is not going to vote for that party. So a huge majority of blacks in the United States vote for the Democratic Party. But when you ask them to self identify as liberal, moderate or conservative, only 27% of them say liberal, 30% say conservative, and 40% say moderate, which is really quite striking. So we need to get out of the categories of Twitter. We need to understand that if you are white listener to this who probably has a good degree, a good job, the people who, you know, in your world who are people of color are likely to be pretty liberal because most people in your world are likely to be pretty liberal. But that is not a good standing for the majority of people of color in this country. Well, yeah, and the irony of all this is the term itself woke began, I think, in the African American community. And the idea was it's to raise consciousness about the plight of American blacks, whether it's through police brutality, you know, lack of employment opportunity, or the relative economic status as compared to white America. It has now been coopted or it's I don't know to to what extent, and I haven't seen any studies on this. It's used parodically or it's used in earnestness, but it has been coopted. And I remember this because the first time I ever used it on Twitter, you know, a colleague of mine who's black, who's very much part of what's known as black Twitter, said, why are you using this term? I said, oh, everyone's using this term now. She's like, it was only a matter of fucking time before they took this from us too, in terms of cultural appropriation. And yeah, because when you're being beaten up or or choked out by the cops or being accused of, you know, violent crimes you haven't committed, you don't have time to worry about a third gender being introduced into democratic society. You don't have time to have the kind of ridiculous arcane debates that eat up so much time right now. I mean, so two two funny things today on Twitter, and I couldn't help but relate the two. One was millennial college students want to eject Camille Paglia from I forget what the university or the academic that's it, right? And number two, according to the economist, millennials are not having sex. I think if millennials are having more sex, they wouldn't be worried about Camille Paglia and what she's written over the course of 25 years in a pretty accomplished academic field. And I guarantee you the downtrodden and the oppressed not to use that word sardonically, but truly don't give a shit about Kimil Paglia and what academic organization she belongs to. So you're quite right. It is a very privileged conceit at this point. So here's something that I think is important for making progress on these issues, which is that we could spend a lot of time beating up on the silliest manifestations of this extremely online Twitter phenomenon. And that's worth doing. I mean, I think it's important to criticize it. It's important to point out some of the craziness. But I think what's more important is actually to argue about what kind of country we want and to point out the poverty and the vision of what a lot of progressives now envisage for the United States. And it's a poverty of ambition as well. So what I see is, for example, in the thesis of the inevitable demographic majority, that's one version of identity politics. Identity politics always means very different things. I'm careful about using the term. What I see in it is basically saying, look, we have people of color vote for a Democratic party much more than white people. They're growing segment of the population. So we just have to sit pretty, sit tight, and 30 or 40 years from now, we'll win every election. Now, I think that's wrong for all kinds of poker reasons, but we can go into yeah, although I'm impressed with someone who can care about the cell phone inherited 30 or 40 years from now with a sleight of hand. There where it goes from by 2044, we'll be a majority minority country to well, we're sure to win the next election if we only mobilize that base. Right. They pretend that you don't have to be patient till 2044. I think it's not going to happen in 2044 either, for various reasons. But here's the most important thing. What kind of vision is that for the country? Do we want a society where 30 years from now I'll be able to walk down the street and observe, oh, you're black, you must be voting for the Democrats. Oh, you're white, you must be voting for the Republicans? Is that the society we want to implement? Do we want a society in which there's a big block of deeply resentful white people? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, some housekeeping today. So I want to clear up a little confusion about the difference between Waking Up, my meditation app and this podcast, Making Sense, and also talk about how I see them interacting going forward. The podcast, as many of you know, was originally called Waking Up, and why that was I have no idea. I had written a book by that title and apparently I just felt I had run out of titles. And so for the first hundred episodes or so, that's what the podcast was called. And then I realized I wanted to release a meditation app which was a direct descendant of the book, and Waking Up was obviously the perfect title for that and it really had never been the best name for the podcast. So we renamed the podcast Making Sense at that point, which was a much better name for it given the diversity of topics I touch here. But the net result is that many people are still confused about what the podcast is called, and when someone refers to the Waking Up app online, many people think they're talking about the podcast. And this confusion is compounded because I've now opened a separate conversation track in the app, which is essentially a new podcast on topics more narrowly focused on meditation and the nature of mind and ethics and generally what it means to live an examined life. And to make matters worse, sometimes one of these conversations seems worth airing both on the app and on the podcast, like the one on psychedelics with Roland Griffiths or on addiction and craving with Judson Brewer. So I occasionally do that. And this is also confusing. And even if the conversation is just on the Waking Up app, making Sense podcast subscribers get access to those conversations when they're logged into my website. So I understand why some of you don't know what the hell I'm up to over here first. Waking up and Making Sense really are separate endeavors despite the occasional sharing of content. So the basic picture is if you want all of my podcast content plus the podcast like conversations I have on the Waking Up app, you need to subscribe to the Making Sense podcast through my website, samharris.org. And if you're not subscribed to the podcast, you'll be hearing half episodes and missing other content. That's behind the paywall. If you want to use the Waking Up app, which is actually much more than the conversations I've been having there, it's a whole curriculum that I'm continuing to develop and I'm bringing on other teachers as well. The way to get that is to subscribe to Waking Up, either through the iOS or Android apps, or you can use the web based version@wakingup.com, and in either case, if you can't afford a subscription, you can have one for free. For Making Sense, you just need to send an email to support@samharris.org and for waking up, send one to support@wakingup.com. And I've talked about my reasoning here before. It's very important to me that money not be the reason why someone doesn't get access to my digital content. That's true both for the podcast and for the app. Now, as far as the difference between these two platforms, the Waking Up app is where I'm talking about firstperson approaches to understanding the nature of the mind. And by understanding, I don't mean just conceptual understanding, I mean experiencing the mind in a new way. So this is where I'm focused on things like meditation and now psychedelics and ethics and related topics. The Making Sense podcast is where I'm talking about everything that interests me from physics to politics. And as I said, from time to time a conversation will appear in both places because I think it will be of interest to both audiences. But most of what I have to say about meditation and first person methods of exploring consciousness will be set on the app, not on this podcast. Because it still seems like most people who are listening to this podcast are not really interested in meditation. I've heard from many people some version of I really like it when you talk about current events and science and things like AI or the brain and behavior or the conflict between religion and science. But I'm just not interested in the meditation stuff because it's got the stink of religion all over it and the fact that it's Buddhism and not Christianity or Islam just doesn't matter. It's still irrational and probably bullshit. And other people say things like, well, I've tried meditation and it did nothing for me. And I think you're probably just fooling yourself, just like people who believe in God. There's no way you can know you're not fooling yourself. You're just imagining that you're having certain experiences in meditation or you're just imagining that they have any significance. Well, there's only so much pushing I can do on a locked door. And as I said, generally this podcast will cover topics of a much wider interest than meditation or the nature of consciousness. But in today's podcast, I want to give you skeptics one more shot at understanding what I'm up to. So I'm going to present a conversation that I recently recorded for the Waking Up app. And I'm doing this for two reasons. The first is that there are specific insights into the nature of mind that I consider to be the most important things I've ever learned. And they're not a matter of simply believing something new and they're certainly not matters of faith. And the fact that some of these insights have been best described in Eastern traditions like Buddhism doesn't make them Buddhist, no more than the fact that Isaac Newton was Christian makes the laws of motion somehow Christian. And these insights are not merely important for one's well being, they're important intellectually. They clear up philosophical and ethical and even scientific confusion. And the truth is, I've been very slow to appreciate this. I've been slow to understand just how much intellectual work is being done for me by the fact that I've had certain experiences in meditation. And these experiences have made certain features of the mind obvious. So there are questions about things like free will or the hard problem of consciousness or the nature of morality that people continually get hung up on. And I often can't see the basis for their confusion. And more and more I see that this basis is not conceptual. It's that they can't actually notice certain things about their own experience. Take free will, for instance. This is a topic I've covered a lot. People find it endlessly. Bewildering. The truth is, we have every reason to believe that free will is an incoherent concept. It just doesn't make sense in a deterministic universe and it doesn't make any sense if you add a dose of randomness to the universe either. And this has been obvious for probably 400 years, and yet I keep running into smart people who think that free will is a real intellectual problem, that we know we have it in some sense or we have some purified version of it, and that we find ourselves at a kind of intellectual stalemate when debating it philosophically or scientifically. Now, of course there have been people on the podcast who have agreed with me people like Robert Zapolski and Jerry Coyne. But even in agreement, they are taken in by the illusion of free will. The reality is that if you can pay sufficient attention to your mind, the illusion disappears and it becomes obvious that everything is just arising on its own including one's thoughts and intentions and other mental precursors to action. There is just no fine grained experiential correlate to the common notion of free will. That's why I say in my book on the topic that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. So being a better observer of the nature of one's own mind isn't just a matter of improving one's. Wellbeing, though that is one of the core purposes of meditation. It's also an intellectual project. It's a matter of bringing one's first person understanding, one's subjective experience into closer alignment with a third person understanding. That is, an objective understanding of how the world is. And meditation is the training that allows you to do this. Consider the analogy that I've sometimes used to the optic blind spot. You all know you have a blind spot in your visual field and I'm sure most of you were taught to see it in school. You made two marks on a piece of paper. You closed one eye, you stared at one of those marks and brought the paper closer until the second mark disappeared. This is a very simple procedure, subjectively that allows you to see something right on the surface of consciousness that you would otherwise spend your lifetime overlooking. And the blind spot was actually predicted based on our growing understanding of the anatomy of the eye. And then someone developed this simple procedure by which one can find it. So in seeing the blind spot, you're actually seeing something subjectively as a matter of direct experience that reveals a deeper truth about the eye. Well, I can also say that the nonexistence of an unchanging self in the middle of experience an ego, the feeling that we call eye, is also predicted by the structure and function of the brain. The feeling of being an ego in your head, a thinker in addition to the next arising thought can't be one's true point of view. And in fact, the feeling that such a self exists is the same feeling to which people attach this notion of free will. There is no self who could enjoy the spurious power of free will. And this is directly suggested by what we know is going on in the world and in the world inside our heads. There's no account of neuroanatomy or neurophysiology that would make sense of an unchanging self freely exercising its will. And meditation, ultimately, is a very simple procedure that allows one to discover the absence of this fake self directly. And here you can see that reasonable sounding objections from skeptics aren't reasonable. Consider the one I just mentioned, right? What if you're wrong? What if you're just fooling yourself? How is this different from believing in God? Right? Well, okay, imagine if someone said this to you about the optic blind spot. I mean, you've run this experiment and you can do it again right now. You can interrogate your conscious perception of the visual field directly right now and see that dot on the page disappear and reappear and disappear and reappear. You can do this on demand. You can do it a dozen times in the next 30 seconds. And what have you found? Yourself talking to an otherwise brilliant person, a professional philosopher or physicist. But this is a person who clearly had not picked up a piece of paper, much less put a mark on it to do the experiment. And then imagine that when you explain the procedure to them, they had an argument for why there was no point in doing it. Or they said they had had bad experiences with paper in the past, their mother was really into paper and they just had bad associations with it. Or maybe they claimed to have done the experiment. But from everything they say about their experience, you can tell they were holding the paper wrong or they had failed to close one eye, or they didn't know which dot they should be looking at. Perform the blind spot experiment now. Or just remember clearly how decisive it is and take a moment to imagine hearing these kinds of objections from smart people. And then you'll get a sense of what my experience is like in these conversations. And the truth is, this analogy isn't sufficient, because you also have to imagine that seeing the blind spot directly is much more valuable than it is. Imagine that seeing the blind spot significantly improved your life. Imagine that it gave you a capacity to let go of negative emotions more or less immediately. And what if it allowed you to understand other things, intellectually and ethically, that you couldn't understand before? If you add that component, you'll get a sense of why I've been banging on about the importance of meditation, even in situations where the person I'm speaking with seems less than interested. The podcast I did with Adam Grant and Richard Dawkins last year are good examples of this. I'm riding my hobby horse about meditation to the evident frustration of my guest. The reality is, there's not many people in a position to do this. There are not many people who understand the science and the relevant philosophy and are committed to fully coming out from under the shadow of religion, who know down to their toes we have to get out of the religion business, and who yet understand what consciousness is like beyond the illusion of the self. And if you've heard me talk about this before, you'll know I'm not holding myself up as a perfect example of this understanding. I still consider myself a student of it. I'm merely practicing this understanding. And again, the recommendation I make about meditation is not narrowly based on the peripheral scientific claims for it that have been so hyped in the media as a tool of stress reduction or for improving one's health. It probably does reduce stress, and that's probably good for you. But that's not its core purpose. It's of much deeper interest, psychologically and intellectually, than that. Imagine hearing that someone is playing grandmasterlevel chess just to reduce stress, right? That's not likely the whole motivation, whether or not chess can reduce stress in the end. So if I've established any credibility with you as a thinker, as an honest broker of information, and as a critic of religion, please take this for what it's worth. There is something to understand here. More precisely, there's something to experience here that will change your understanding of many other things, and the fact that traditional efforts to have these insights have tended to occur in religious contexts and in New Age and cultic contexts. The fact that some people who talk about the illusion of the self turn out to be New Age frauds, for instance. That's inconvenient. Yes, it's distracting, but it's irrelevant in the end, james Watson's user interface issues as a person and his resulting professional problems have no implications for the actual structure of DNA. So in this episode of the podcast, I want to give you one more look at the kinds of things I'm talking about almost entirely in the Waking Up app. And to do that, I want to introduce you to Richard Lang. He was a longtime student of Douglas Harding, who I've mentioned several times. Douglas was an architect by training and then devised his own very creative way of talking about the nature of awareness. He really stepped out of every traditional way of teaching and came up with his own metaphors and procedures. And the core of his teaching surrounds this experience of what he called having no head. And he wrote a book by that title on having no head. And I've long thought that while there are some liabilities with this way of teaching and practicing, and I discussed some of those with Richard here, it is a uniquely accessible way of unmasking this experience of selflessness. Many people get it who I'm convinced would not get it by being given more traditional instructions. Now, what they make of it is another thing. It's quite possible to not see its significance initially. And again, I talk about that with Richard. But introducing Richard in this context seems especially apropos because Douglas Harding and his teaching were at one point singled out for criticism by some very smart people. In fact, by my friend Dan Dennett and his collaborator Douglas Hofstadter in their book The Mind's Eye. And I wrote about this in my book, Waking Up because this was really a crystal clear moment of, again, very smart people who consider it their full time job to think about the nature of the mind having no idea what they're talking about when it comes to a first person method of investigating it. So before I bring Richard into the conversation, I want to read the section from my book Waking Up titled Having No Head. The basic insight is this that Douglas noticed that from the first person point of view, when he looked out at the world, he did not see his own face, he did not see his own head. Rather, where he knew his head to be, there was simply the world, right? So when he was looking at another person's face and they were looking back at him and he was feeling implicated by their gaze because he knew what they were staring at, they were staring at his face, he noticed that as a matter of direct experience, there's no face there. And he found that he was simply the space in which they were appearing. I'll give you the quotation that Hofstadter and Dennett excerpted in their book and then criticized, just to give you a sense of the intellectual impasse here. So this is a quotation from Douglas Harding. Then I'll give you Hofstadter's reaction to it. What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular. I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert, limpness or numbness came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was. My name, manhood, animalhood, all that can be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the now, that present moment, and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouser legs terminating downwards, and a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirt front terminating upwards in absolutely nothing whatsoever. Certainly not in a head. It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness, vastly filled, and nothing that found room for everything, room for grass, trees, shadowy, distant hills, and far above them, snow peaks, like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world. Here it was this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void. And this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight, utterly free of me, unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul, lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around. There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden. I had been blind to the one thing that is always present, and without which I am blind indeed to this marvelous substitute for a head, this unbounded clarity, this luminous and absolutely pure void, which nevertheless is rather than contains all things. For however carefully I attend, I fail to find here even so much as a blank screen on which these mountains and sun and sky are projected, or a clear mirror in which they are reflected, or a transparent lens or aperture through which they are viewed still less a soul or a mind to which they are presented. Or a viewer, however shadowy, who is distinguishable from the view. Nothing whatever intervenes, not even the baffling and elusive obstacle called distance. The huge blue sky, the pink edged whiteness of the snows, the sparkling green of the grass. How can these be remote when there's nothing to be remote from? The headless void refuses all definition and location. It is not round or small or big, or even here as distinct from there. Okay, so that's the end of Harding's quotation. And then here is my follow up text. Harding's assertion that he has no head must be read in the first person sense. The man was not claiming to have been literally decapitated from a first person point of view. His emphasis on headlessness is a stroke of genius that offers an unusually clear description of what it's like to glimpse the nonduality of consciousness. Here are Hofstadter's quote reflections on Harding's account. So now I'm quoting Hofstadter in the book he co authored with my friend Dan Dennett. We have here been presented with a charmingly, childish and solipsistic view of the human condition. It is something that, at an intellectual level, offends and appalls us. Can anyone sincerely entertain such notions without embarrassment? Yet to some primitive level in us, it speaks clearly. That is the level at which we cannot accept the notion of our own death. End quote. Okay, so back to me. Having expressed his pity for batty old Harding, Hofstadter proceeds to explain away his insights as a solid cystic denial of mortality, a perpetuation of the childish illusion that, quote, I am a necessary ingredient of the universe. End quote. However, Harding's point was that I is not even an ingredient, necessary or otherwise, of his own mind. What Hofstadter fails to realize is that Harding's account contains a precise empirical instruction look for whatever it is you are calling eye without being distracted by even the subtlest undercurrent of thought, and notice what happens the moment you turn consciousness upon itself. This illustrates a very common phenomenon in scientific and secular circles. We have a contemplative like Harding, who, to the eye of anyone familiar with the experience of self transcendence, has described it in a manner approaching perfect clarity. And we have a scholar like Hofstadter, a celebrated contributor to our modern understanding of the mind, who dismisses him as a child. Okay, so that's a very clear illustration of the intellectual impasse. And upon hearing my conversation with Richard Lange, many of you may still be stuck on Hofstadter's side of the impasse. You might just think, what are they talking about? Of course I can't see my head. What, are you crazy? Again, if that's where you're stuck, all I can do is encourage you to keep looking. Richard Lange was a longtime student of Douglas Harding's and studied with him for 30 years or so. He's written several books based on his own experience teaching and also brought together much of Douglas's work, and you can find more of his material@headless.org. And Richard, while I haven't met him, I think you'll hear sounds like just about the nicest person on Earth. If we held a global contest for the nicest person, I think I would nominate Richard just based on his voice alone. In any case, this is not a podcast that you can profit from while multitasking. You shouldn't be working out in a gym. You really have to give this your full attention if you're going to get anything from it. In the first half, we talk about Richard's life and his experience with Douglas, and in the second, we get into the details of the practice. And there's no paywall on this episode, I consider this a public service announcement. And now I bring you Richard Lang. I am here with Richard Lange. Richard, thanks for joining me. A pleasure to be here, Sam. So how do you describe what it is you do? Well, I don't know really. I describe it as seeing who you really are and it is paying attention to what it's like to be yourself from your own point of view as opposed to what you are for others. So if someone was looking at me, they'd see Richard sitting at the desk and obviously see my head and background. But my point of view, the first person point of view is quite different. I don't see my head, I'm looking out of open space. I am a space for the world, I would say. So it's a very different point of view from the objective one where I'm a person and I accept both, I love both. And I would say that this experience, which is so obvious, I mean, all the listener has to do is look and notice whether they can see their own face. I'm sure they can't. And instead you see the world. But it is essentially a nonverbal experience and you can't get it wrong. You can't half see your no face or see it a bit blurry. And I would say I'm convinced it's the same for us all. We're all looking out of this single eye, this openness, but we've got a different view out and different responses to it. Well, how's that for a starter? I want to get into the experiential component of this, but we should talk about how you got into this position of teaching people about the nature of awareness. And we'll talk about your teacher, Douglas Harding, who I've mentioned many times both in my app and on my podcast. But before we get to Douglas, did you have a background in meditation or any other contemplative tradition before you stumbled upon Douglas? Well, in a way I did. I met Douglas when I was young, I was 17. But when I was about ten, the headmaster at my school told a story, which was a story from someone called the Venerable Bead, who was this holy man in the north of England in I don't know, 9th century or something. And Bead tells this story of a king and having a kind of feast in winter in a big hall. And there's a big fire and in through a window flies a bird crossed the room and out the other window. And Beard said, this is what our life is and who knows where we came from? And who knows where we're going? And headmaster at my school told this story when I was about ten and it got my imagination. I thought, what is out that window? And so I got interested, you know, in Christianity at the time that was the context and really in the mystical side of it. But at the next school there was no one sort of really interested in that. And it was the late sixty s. So I started reading around and reading about other religions and I got interested in Hinduism in particular, and Buddhism. And I wanted to get enlightened 1516. And then I read a book on Zen by Guy called Christmas Humphreys, and there was a note about the Buddhist society summer school. This is in England. And so I decided to go with my brother and we went from the north of England down to near London, and we went to this summer school. It was very confusing to begin with, all kinds of different approaches. And then one day someone said, oh, you ought to go to the workshop, informal workshop with Douglas Harding this afternoon. And I hadn't heard of him, but we went and Douglas got us to point a finger back at our no face and look. And rather fortuitously, I found what I was looking for. And Douglas was very friendly and he said, Anyone interested, come and visit. He lived in Suffolk, in sort of east of England. So when I got back home with my brother, my mom looked at us. She was worried we're going to join a cold or something, realized we were fine and then was interested herself. So around Christmas time, we all went down by train and stayed with Douglas. Well, there was, as usual, about 1015 people there. And it was a weekend. He had two houses and one of them was used solely for people interested in what we called seeing. And that really was the beginning of a friendship with Douglas. And he had many, many friends and he never charged a penny. It was always, just, come and be with us if you're interested in this. And for whatever reason, I also felt drawn to actually sharing it. Most people don't, really, but I did. And I recognized somehow at an early age that this was a fantastically, effective, simple, way forwards way in terms of sharing the experience of who one is. And so shortly after that, I went to university not far from him in Cambridge. And I used to go down every other weekend and started to go to his workshops and just to help out. And I I sort of got used to the experiments and making them up and and all of that. So I I started it was just the way it occurred to me to be involved in sharing this. So even while I was at university, I was running workshops in my college room. What were you studying at Cambridge? Well, I was studying history, although the main thing I was studying was seeing who you really are. And as I say, I used to go down to Douglas's house all the time and made many friends. And one of the things that was true about that community, because he really made friends, his friends were people who were interested in this. And it was clear that there was no hierarchy at this level because you can't half see your no face or see it better than somewhere someone else. And Douglas always. Was very kind of strong on that. So I sort of looking back, I kind of grew up in a mini community where seeing who you are, as we call it, was normal. All my friends were headless. People who have heard me speak about Douglas will know that it's been in the context of his really, his central empirical injunction, which is to look for your head and notice that you fail to find it. And we'll go over that a bit. But what's so interesting about Douglas is that he came up with truly novel practices and analogies and framings and ways of looking into awareness. It's his own methodology, which really is very effective for so many people. I would argue it has at least one pitfall which we'll get into, and it touches this point you made about there being no hierarchy and no way of doing it wrong or no way of once you've seen it, you've seen it. I think there's definitely some caveat to issue there. But before we get there, let's just talk about Douglas the man for a moment, because I think I was mistaken about a few points of his biography when I've spoken about his insight. I believe I have this from his book on having no Head, that he first noticed this when he was in Nepal, staring out at the Himalayas from this place called Nagarcoat. But from reading your you've published essentially a graphic biography, The Man With No Head. And it seemed that he had this insight into headlessness earlier. So maybe you can just give us a brief tour of Douglas's spiritual biography. Yes, well, he grew up in an exclusive Plymouth Brethren, which was a very strict Christian group, and his father was very keen, very dedicated, a very small group in the east of England, and they used to have prayers twice a day and four times on Sundays and God knows what. But at 21, he left. And his reason for leaving was that, well, you might be right, but I am not going to accept that you're right just because you say you are. I want to find out for myself. And it hurt his father's father cut off from him. And anyway, Douglas went his own way, but he had been profoundly affected by his father. During the First World War, the Germans bombed the town where they were. It was a seaside town, and his father refused to go into the cinema to seek shelter, but got the whole family on. Then he's praying, well, the bombs came over or the shells came over, and he said, I'm going to put my faith in God. Well, Douglas rejected the sort of kind of the peripherals of the religion, but he was affected by this deep faith somehow and this sense of the importance of meaning of yeah, something like that. Anyway, at 21, he left, and then he started inquiring. He was training and then working as an architect in London and he started inquiring into what he was. And I think he often used to say the basic thing that amazes me is that I am. You know, I mean, just how amazing just to be. I mean, I might not be. And while I am, I'd like to find out who I am, what I am. And he'd already rejected what the Plymouth Brethren was saying. So at this point, he wasn't going to take on another dogma. He was going to look for himself. And he started, really by recognizing that he was made of layers depending on where the observer was. So 6ft was human but closer to his cells and then further away. He was a city or a species. And this sort of enabled him to sort of cross the boundary between his skin and the rest of the world. And he began developing this feeling that he was this view that he was like an onion with lairs. And, of course, when you realize that, you must ask what's at the center? And in 1937, he'd already written a book by then and he went to India with his wife and they had two children there and the war broke out. And although he was a successful architect there his main interest was this inquiry into what am I? I've got books of notes from those years drawings and maps and mandala kind of things with these layers. Anyway, in about 1943 he'd come to the position that he realized he was made of layers and that the nearer you got to the center, the less there was. So it made sense that he was kind of no thing at the center. But he couldn't seem to experience that it was just a guess. And then he was reading a book where there was an article or a section by Ernst Mark, physicist. And Mark it's a fairly well known picture drew a self portrait not of what he looked like at 6ft but of what he looked like from his own point of view which, of course, is headless with his nose about 10ft tall because if you close one eye, your nose goes from the ceiling to the floor. And when Douglas saw this and it was probably sitting in the Imperial Library or somewhere in Calcutta he suddenly thought that's it. And it was not a big wow. He used to say it was just like a cool recognition. Ah, that's what I am at zero. That's what I am. You see. Now, in on having no head, as you quite rightly say he talks about walking in the Himalayas and seeing it there. And he used to say, oh, well, I did walk in the Himalayas and I did see it there. But that was just a sort of way of starting the book. But recently I was going through all his books and I was going through he's got a whole load of books by Suzuki and I was looking through, because he made notes in all the books and when he read them and when he reread them and so on. And there's a little section on Satori on the wow. Experience. And just underneath it, Douglas has written Darjeeling exclamation mark. And so I think, you know, after seeing it down in Calcutta, he did go up several times up to that part, to, you know, walk in the hills, and he must have had, you know, understandably a powerful experience of being spaced for the mountains. So I think it's all true in a way. And what was his connection to other contemplatives and teachers of the time? And so he he began teaching. When did he began teaching in earnest? Was it the 50s? What happened was he was very much on his own in India. It wasn't he didn't go round any gurus. He was totally working on his own, doing research, you know. And when he saw this, he realized in 43, he realized it hit gold. He came back to England in 90, 45, just towards the end of the war, and he said to his wife, who had already returned, I'm going to take a year off to write my book. Well, in the end, a year turned into five years, and he was on his own five years, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, one holiday in all that time. And the book is the hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. It is huge, 600 pages, just huge. And then he condensed it because he knew he couldn't publish that. And CS. Lewis read it, and that's how it took off. CS. Lewis wrote back and said, I've never been so drunk in a book with a book, you know, since I've read books on in World War One or something. And so that began to put him on the map. But he wasn't teaching. He he was a writer. He was a thinker. And then he got back this was in the 50s, got back into architecture because he hadn't been earning any money, became very successful, continued to write a bit here and there. But at the end of the 50s, he felt he was in the doldrums, and he wasn't getting his message across. And at that time, he came across Zen through Suzuki, really. And for the first time, he came across people, the old Zen masters, who were talking about their original face, the face you had before they were speaking his language. And at the same time, he also came across Rahman and Mahashi, who influenced him and affected him, I think, with his just total dedication. That's what Rahman was about, wasn't it? So at the end of the 50s, because of this discovery of Zen, he then got in touch with the Buddhist society, thought, oh, well, maybe there are some people there who will understand what I'm talking about, because he had not shared it, really, with anyone, he was on his own with it. And Christmas, Humphreys and Way, we'reay recognized that Douglas had something here and they published On Having No Head and that was his first really popular book, which of course he starts with that, you know, the best day of my life, I was walking in them layers, all of that, and so I had no head. But it wasn't until 1964, that book was published in 61, that he really shared it for the first time, a song who was his secretary in his architectural practice, and it blew her mind, and it blew his mind that it blew her mind. And he thought, oh, I can die now. I've shared it with one person and then the next year up in the North Manchester, he said my God, things are taking off. I shared it with two more people. So this is early days now, around that time he built his second house just over the road from his first house, and that became just I hadn't known why really he was building it. That became a potential meeting place for people interested in this, and he was teaching comparative religion and in the course he would share the headless experience. And so people began gradually to meet and that's where the community started in the mid sixty s. And it was towards the end of the he began to invent his experiments and he always wanted to share and he was doing before the experiments, really. I mean, the experiments were always there in a way, because the experience of your headless nature is so direct. But he got the idea of the experiments and in the late sixty s and early seventy s, I mean, in 1972 he produced a toolkit with all the experiments and I was around then and we were making them up and I helped him make the toolkit. We used to go down for a week and work on it and he was very creative, he was always coming up with a new way of kind of sharing it. He was on the job twenty four seven, so if you went to his house, you couldn't go unless you were interested in seeing and as soon as you walked in the door, before you walked in the door, you were aware of who you were because that's what it was all about and everyone else was. And at the Buddhist society they said, you'll always know where Douglas Harding's friends are because they laugh a lot. So he just followed his instinct. He knew he wanted to share it, he knew he'd got something really powerful, I mean, he just believed in it. This is a breakthrough. We've been talking about a true nature for centuries. Now you can see it, now you can point at it, now you can see your face to no face. It's not abstract, it's concrete. Face to no face with others. You're looking out of a single eye. So he wrote a book in the 70s called The Science of the First Person. This is a science, the science of objects. You look at them, the science of the subject. And he said this your experience of yourself, which is space for the world, is as valid as other people's experience of you, which is an object in the world. Yes. He never stopped. He just never stopped. He was always on the job. He developed a model in the 1970s, the universe explorer model. He wrote many books, articles, traveled incessantly. And the man with no head. Do you detail at least two of his meetings with prominent Buddhist at the time? One with Alan Watson, one with Philip Caplo? Yes. It seemed like with Watson he had a meeting of the minds. And with Caplo he didn't, or at least it was an odd encounter. Is there more to that story? Well, with Caplo, the first meeting was good. And Caplo first came and visited Douglas at his house. And it was a warm occasion and he came all the way into the country. He was on a passing through England and with a monk, they made the trip. And he said, this is the spiritual center of England. That was his comment. And invited Douglas to Rochester. But the second time, like in my book, caplo sort of did this Zen testing thing and Douglas didn't go for that. He said, I've just come to share something. I've come to be tested. But there's letters. I've got all Douglas's letters and stuff. And there's letters afterwards where they're warm between each other. And Douglas didn't hold a grudge at all. That's kind of a Zen stick to use paradox and weird tests to demonstrate the nature of mine. But it can certainly misfire. And there's a famous story of Kala Rimpoche, who's a great Tibetan meditation master meeting. I think it was Suzaki Roshi. I forget which Zen master. I think it was Suzaki. And at one point the Roshi held up an orange and said, what is it? And Kalu turned to his translator and said, don't they have oranges in Japan? Yeah, the culture sort of missed each other then. Yeah. Okay, so let's jump into the experience and do our best to introduce people to it. I guess we should say that unfortunately many of the experiments that Douglas devised are highly visual. And we can talk a little bit about the primacy of vision as a context in which to see this experience. And this is the kind of thing that it can be recognized with your eyes closed too. But many of us have found that that's a subtler thing to recognize. So I guess with that limitation on it just knowing that we can give people instructions that they do with their open eyes that reference vision as the primary sense. But we just have to recognize that this is going out in pure audio form. So we have to it all has to be intelligible. So with that proviso, how would you instruct how do you instruct someone who is contemplating this for the first time? Yes, well, I could just take you and them or whatever through just a little process that includes closed eyes and being aware that we're just audio here. Okay, well, as you say, a lot of the experiments are visual and you can just notice you can't see your face now. But a very simple, direct thing to do, which I think is worth doing is to actually point. So if the listener is willing to play a bit, I would ask you just to get your index finger of your right hand or something and point out. So you've actually got to do it because it's just making clear the arrow of attention is out. So you might be pointing at the table or vase or a window and you're looking along your finger and there's a thing. Now, what I want you to do is just turn your finger 180 degrees around to point back at the place you're looking out of and notice what you see there or what you don't see, because I don't see anything right now. I don't see my face, don't see my eyes, don't see any shape or movement or anything. So I'm pointing I would say I'm pointing at my no face, at this space here, this stillness, this silence even. And this outward and inward is a two way pointing thing. So that's a kind of useful gesture to bear in mind. So just starting visually, I said, well, you can't see your face. I'd say the inward pointing arrow of attention is pointing at no thing space. Now, this is a nonverbal experience, so I'm putting words on it. I'm absolutely convinced everyone can see this because you can't see your head. Instead, you see the world. But you may choose different words from me so that we accept that. So I'd just like you first to notice several things about the view out from this space. That it's a sort of oval view, the field of view, and it fades out all the way around. So whatever you're looking at is most in focus. And then when you get to the edge, as it were, it fades out and then you can see nothing around it. And I take that seriously. It's sort of hanging in nowhere, the view. There's nothing above it, nothing below it, nothing this side of it. It's just hanging in space and it's single. So if you look at any two objects, you say, well, that one's bigger than that. You can compare the size, it's relative. I say, now look at the whole view, how big is it? And there isn't a second one to compare it with, so I can't say how big it is. And so the two things to note here, well, two or three, one, it's single, the view out, I might hear about your view, but I don't experience it in my own experience. Like you say in the app, it's a matter of experience. There's just one view. It fades out into nothing. It's not inside anything. I can't say how big it is. Now, close your eyes. See? Now, so you've got a kind of darkness, which again is in your app, as you say. It's kind of lit up. It's not just nothing. There's something there. Let's call it darkness. It's not uniform darkness. Now, how big is that darkness? Well, there isn't a second one to compare it with. It's single, so I can't say and is it inside anything? Well, just like the visual view. No. I could say it's in space or awareness or consciousness. Now, I move my attention to sounds and I hear this voice coming and going and other sounds. So, if I use the same kind of words, the field of sound, like the field of vision field, that's all the sounds. How big is it? Well, there isn't a second one to compare it with. And is it inside anything? No. Or it sits in silence. So these sounds are coming out of the silence, going back in. And I think you see era developing the first person language. I am the space in which the darkness is happening. I am the silence in which the sounds are happening. Now, I move my attention to body sensations. And if I put aside my memory, my sort of map and just go by the sensation, see lots of different sensations. Now, how big is the whole field of sensation? Well, there isn't a second one to compare it with. It's single. See, I can't see how big it is. And is it inside? I think in this awareness now, I identify with my body. Sensation is often enough. So if I say that, I can't say how big the field of sensation is. I can say, I can't say how big I am. I'm not inside anything. Yes, I'm single, I'm alone. And then finally, we can move our attention to thoughts and feelings. So think of a number. There's a thought, you see, and think of the face of a friend and the affection you feel, feelings or anything problem and anxiety that comes up challenge you've got. Now, how big is this very complicated field of mind? Well, I don't experience a second one to compare it with. And where is it? Well, I think, as the Zen people say, it's in no mind. Or my thoughts, like my voice, are coming out of nowhere and disappearing again. And this is who I am, this open space, and this is who we all are. So, I don't know what you're thinking, Sam, or what you're feeling, but I'm convinced you're the same indivisible space containing your particular view. So now, when we open our eyes, well, what really changes? The space is full of colors and shapes magic, but one is still this single space that contains everything. So that's pointing out the obvious. Yeah. Well, that was a great tour. So let's start with the place. We started with the open eyed considerations of pointing at one's own face and noticing that there's nothing to see. And I want to just try to channel the skepticism that some listeners may feel. And this may be the kind of thing you've heard a lot. And if you can think of other challenges that don't occur to me, feel free to raise them. But I can imagine someone saying, well, of course I can't see my face, I can't see my own eyes, but I know they're there, right? What's the significance of this? You seem to be suggesting that there's something profound about the eye not being able to see itself. But I know I have a head, I know I have a face, I know I have eyes in the middle of it. What's the point of this? Yes, I think there are different ways of approaching this and I'm really not in the business of trying to persuade or convince anyone. For a start, I'm just happy to be this. And if people are interested, I'll respond. But if they are interested, I'd say, well, you say that my head is here, you see my eyes and I know you can see it from, say, 3ft or 6ft away. But what I am depends on the range, you know, on where you are looking from. And if you come up to me, then you'll see my you see my face. But come closer, you'll see a patch of skin and come even closer if you've got the right instruments and you'll find cells, molecules, atoms, particles, almost nothing. And I'm right at zero. And I say, well, absolutely nothing here, but I'm aware and full of everything. So I say, well, of course I've got a head, I've got eyes, but it's a matter of where I keep them. And I keep them out there in the mirror and I keep them in other people at a range there. I need them, but they're not central. Now, obviously, this is a very different way of appreciating what one is, but it does actually fit with what science says. And what we've done, you see, is accept what everyone tells us about who we are from their point of view and say, well, you must know more about what I am than I do. And what I'm suggesting is my point of view, which is headless, eyeless, tongueless without anything here is valid here. And when I touch my head, you say, well, look, you can touch your head. I say, well, for you I'm touching my head, but for me, man's disappear. And there are sensations and awareness and this is taking it as it's given. And if someone doesn't go along with that, well, there's nothing I can do, really. And this does make sense. But whether someone says yes, no, or maybe to it is rather mysterious. To me, this gets to what really are the unique strengths and liabilities of this way of pointing, because I've been convinced for a long time that what Douglas was getting at here. It really is the fundamental insight into selflessness that is provoked in Zok Chen pointing out instruction or is sought by really every method of meditation, certainly in the east. And it's what the advisor teachers are talking about, people like Ramana Maharshi. And the thing that the headlessness insight gets at almost uniquely well is how available the glimpse of this quality of consciousness is, how it's right on the surface. There's no such thing as depth. There's no place to go deep within through a practice of meditation to see this. There are many analogies that I've used to indicate how on the surface this is. And so one analogy I've used is seeing the optic blind spot. I mean, once you are taught how to do that well, then that thing you're seeing isn't far away. It's not deep within. It's in some place on the surface of consciousness that you didn't realize existed until you saw this particular effect. And another example I use is the difference between looking through a window at at the scene outside or inside, and seeing your face reflected on the surface of the glass. Yes. And that if if the goal were to see your face and someone is looking through their face out at the scene, how do you tell them to recognize their face? Just how long should it take? How deep must they go? And really the answer there is they just have to change their plane of focus and they'll see their face instantly. Yes. And that does get at again, these analogies are imperfect, but it gets at something that this method, when it works, reveals really well, which is that there really is no distance here, and what's being pointed out is already true of the nature of awareness. It just has to be recognized and there's really no distance to go. But the flip side of that is that people who haven't spent a lot of time meditating and haven't deeply ingrained this search for insight into selflessness may glimpse this thing very briefly and not see it as the answer to their search, because they really haven't had a search and they haven't become connoisseurs of their own enlightenment. And so they don't see that this glimpse of openness and centerlessness immediately balances the equation they've been struggling to solve. Yes. I believe Douglas, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that he once said in some context that the voice of the devil says, so what? And do I have that right? Did he notice this as a problem where people would glimpse this and then say, well, so what? And then it was hard to kind of get them past that point? Well, yes. I mean, you show them their true nature and they go, okay, what's on TV tonight? It's astonishing. Douglas was astonished that you could show this and people would not value it. But he took that with a pinch of salt, and in the end he shared it with so many people. And I think I probably have the same approach. You go round sharing it as widely as you can and affirming everyone's got it, and then you stand back and see what happens. And some accept it and some don't. And it's really mysterious and really interesting for that reason. I mean, fascinating. And we have regular online video meetings, quite a few a week. And I've started asking people, Why do you value this? And everyone's story is different and sort of unpredictable, really. And my feeling is that one just goes and shares it and affirms everyone's got it. And that their response, whatever it is, even if it's so, what is valid? And as you go around, gradually, it seems to me, more and more people say yes to it and value it. And that is infectious, and it's a longterm project, but I am part of a community where I can see how powerful that is and how wonderful and how much fun it is. And I just think, well, we've got a great party going. There's no need to advertise it. It will speak for itself. And it does. Yes. I really don't think one can judge whether someone is ready for it or not. I say everyone is ready and here you are. Do what you like with it. So let's map this on to a more traditional way of thinking about this, which exists in many places. But I would say Zogchen has been the most systematic in talking about both sides of this, the seeming paradox of this already being true of the nature of mind. And on that account you have people from the Zen tradition and the advisor tradition sometimes speaking as though practice doesn't make any sense because this thing is already true. But the other side of that is a glimpse of this isn't sufficient. That's actually the beginning of someone's practice. And what your job is thereafter is not to seek this as dualistically as though this were some goal that had to be attained, but to get used to this and more used to this and grow into it so that you're living from that place more and more. And it becomes more and more obvious such that at a certain point, it can't be overlooked. So how do you think about or speak about the difference between an initial glimpse of headlessness and a stabilizing of this glimpse or a living from that place more and more? Well, I think it's both ends of the spectrum. I did a workshop just a couple of days ago, and at the end of it, about 40 people, someone said, but how do. I keep this going? I said, well, it's like anything you've got to practice. And here's something that you can do if you're serious about wanting to get it going. I said, I want you each day to commit yourself to noticing three times when you're with people that it's face to no face. And I want you to sit for 2 minutes and just on your own quietly and notice your single eye. And thirdly, I want you, when you're walking down the street at least once in the day to notice you're still and the scene removed. It's both. You've got it. You can't lose it, you're home. But you have to practice it. You have to draw on it. You have to yes. Let it into your life. Yeah. I think it's important to recognize that doing this in the presence of other people makes it especially vivid because our sense of separateness is not only visually anchored more than in any other sense domain, but it really is ramified socially. Right. So we feel this contraction of self very much in relationship to others and it's what you know, it's this self other dichotomy. Yes. One could argue is it's two sides of the of a single coin that that gets gets forged at some point in in our development. And if you can, just imagine the difference between you're looking across let's say you're sitting in a cafe and you're looking across at somebody else sitting at another table, a stranger, and they're reading a book. Say they're not aware of you, and then in the next moment, the person looks up and is looking directly into your eyes. And so there's that moment of eye contact with a stranger and that transition from merely observing someone in the world to feeling in a very visceral way that you are now an object in the world for them, they're aware of you. For most of us, that heightens this feeling. It's not an accident that we call it self consciousness. We become aware that others are looking at us. We sort of project our eyes outward and objectify ourselves by the direction of their gaze. And if in moments like that, whether you're looking at a stranger or with more appropriate social cues, actually talking to someone who has invited the relationship so you could be talking to a friend or whoever, if you look for yourself if you look for your head in those moments and fail to find it clearly, if there really is just this openness where you thought yourself to be a moment before in which the other person is appearing, that can make this nondual awareness especially vivid. Absolutely. It may be helpful just to briefly describe what I think of as the four stages of development because it includes discovering the self. So shall I just do that? Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, so stage one is the baby. And I'm using my own language here, but the baby is first person headless at large. You have no idea of what you look like. You look at another person, you don't feel under inspection. The eyes don't have that power yet. So that's stage one. Stage two is the child, where you're learning language, and through language you're learning that others can see you. And you're developing the capacity to sort of in imagination, go out and look back at yourself through their eyes as a thing. And as a child, you're not yet really sure what kind of box you're in. So it's as easy to be a train or a bird as a little boy or girl. And all of these stages are infectious. If you're with a baby, in my language, it's just giving you permission to be headless. It's just open. And if you're with a child, it's giving you permission to be flexible and playful and get down on the floor and be a train, because now you keep growing up and the feedback through language from society is that are what you look like. You are the one in the mirror. Look, there's your face. That's what you are at center. We can see you can't but trust us. And so you learn to see yourself as see you and profoundly identify with that and act as if you're behind a face and act as if they are behind a face there. So now, when you look at someone and they look at you as you're saying you feel looked at, that's a kind of learned thing and you're doing the same. So you're communicating. I'm in a body, you're in a body. I can see you, you can see me, and you feel looked at. So that's the third stage, which is infectious. You walk into a room and everybody's doing it. If someone looks at you, you feel looked at you're a thing. Now, potentially the fourth stage is when you reawaken to your own point of view, which, as you said, is headless, and you are space for the world. And when you look at someone else, now, here's the little experiment to do. They turn their gaze to you and normally you feel put on the spot and looked at and singed. Now you can look at that gaze and see it's directed into nothing, like you were saying. And so what sort of put you in the box? Someone else's gaze is now an opportunity to see you, that you're not in the box. And this fourth stage is as infectious as all the others. And so when you're with friends who are enjoying being headless, of course we're still feeling looked at, but at the same time, we're aware that we're space for each other. And I hope that this is I have many friends I share this with, and it's wonderful to finally bring into the public domain awareness of our true nature. And many people find that a friend who's a guitarist and he said as soon as he saw this and he went and performed, he suddenly wasn't on stage, he was space for the audience. Yeah. And it's very healing in lots of kinds of ways. It's healing in precisely the way that mindfulness is healing because it is a kind of mindfulness of the centralistness of awareness, basically. You're taking that as your object of mindfulness rather than any other object of consciousness. Yes. So it has the effect of for those moments where you're aware of this, you're not identified with thought. You're not clinging to the pleasantness of experience or pushing unpleasant experience away. You're simply this openness in which whatever is appearing is appearing. And so it's got its own intrinsic equanimity and serenity to it. You're just recognizing this quality of consciousness. So when when you teach people about this, do you talk about being lost in thought as the obstacle to seeing this in the next moment? How much of your your discussion of this has a similar character to the way in which we tend to talk about practice of mindfulness or meditation generally? I think they dovetail perfectly, really. I suppose one slightly different angle, maybe, is that I talk about placing your mind, placing your thoughts. So normally we think of thoughts somehow at the center here, in a mind in our head. But when you are mindful, they're just objects, like you're saying, really. And they're out there with the table and with everything else. So your mind is at large and there's no mind here. And this is this the mind loves it. It's very freeing to see your mind as the world is big. The thoughts and feelings don't affect your no mind, they don't affect this space. But you're not in denial and you experience the whole range of things wonderful, but they're there and not here, if that makes sense. Yeah. The way I have put that before is that the world you see with your open eyes is the same place where you're thinking and feeling. Exactly. You can actually see that, at least visually. You can see that in just superimposing a visual image onto the physical world you're looking at. Right. So people can do that with a greater or lesser degree of vividness. But something happens there if you're staring at your table and you imagine a very small horse and carriage on it. Something there is different than when I say imagine an elephant on it. And that superimposition of something shows you that your visual mind is in some basic sense, before your eyes. And we just know, as a matter of the underlying neurology, this is all happening in the same place. And that really opens up some profound things, because how on earth you actually imagine an elephant? I mean, it just pops up out of nowhere, right? I mean, it's just extraordinary, but it pops up in the same place as the table. And so I say, well, you know, the whole thing is popping up out of the great void. Now, this is magical. It is, yes. One pays attention because it's so interesting. Do you have any specific instructions for people when they look at their face in a mirror? That seems like a very good you can do that on demand in a way that you can't necessarily get someone to make sustained eye contact with you on demand. What practice would you recommend there? Well, very similar to as you do on your app, I would say. Okay. I mean, we always do this in a workshop. I take mirrors and you get people to hold the mirror out in the arm's length in their hand and you just simply say to them, well, on present evidence, where's your face? You see well, it's there in the mirror and there isn't one at the near end of your arm, so to speak. And so just as your space for another person face to no face, so you are with your image in the mirror with yourself, which is rather compassionate thing to do, actually. And you can say to people, all right, well, I mean, the mirror is telling you what you look like this evening, but it's also telling you where your face is and so I get people to bring it up towards them and see how it changes and you've got to keep it at arm's length to see it. Well, then I might say, well, you know, imagine we had a big long mirror and I held it on the other side of the room where you could see your whole body that now, imagine one on the moon. What would you see? You'd see your planetary face so the mirror is showing you where you keep your appearances. I've got a planetary face out of that range. I've got my human individual face at about 3ft and no face center. And when you're growing up, you're taught to sort of reach into the mirror. I take people through this? I say so. Imagine looking in the mirror. Now. Imagine reaching in and getting hold of that face, pulling it out towards you, flipping it the other way around because it's facing the wrong way. Enlarging it because it's too small. And imagine putting it on. Now. That's what you those are the tricks you learn to do as you grow up in order to get this idea. You're behind a face. That's where you get it from. Plus what others say, but you don't actually do it. It's imagination. And when you actually look, I mean, you've got that going and that enables you to function as a separate individual, which I think is terribly important. I'm not at all in favor of denying that there's room for both, so you've got that going but now that's your sort of public self but privately now, you see my face is over there in the mirror. I'm not like that here and that face is growing older, but the space here doesn't grow older. Now that this is a fantastic meditation. One of the things I love about this emphasis in practice is that it seems to bypass a pitfall that many of us have noticed in ordinary mindfulness. Because ordinarily with mindfulness, you're being taught to become more and more aware of the micro changes in physiology. Most people start with the breath and become very aware of your body and ultimately appearances in mind thoughts and feelings and tensions. And until you can do that in a nondualistic way, there can be this kind of uncanny valley effect where what you're becoming is more and more self conscious in many circumstances, right? So you become more aware of your own kind of neurotic entanglement in each moment. And it can lead to a stage in your practice where you don't feel that you're being benefited by doing so much meditation. In fact, you're becoming somebody who is less functional in some way because you walk up to the cashier in a store and you've just got so much attention on yourself and it's in some way less freeing than just being blithely unaware that it's possible to live an examined life in the first place. And so what this approach does is anchor mindfulness to simply openness and free attention, particularly in those moments of social interaction, whereas you have no attention on yourself because you can't find yourself, you're simply the space of free attention in which this other person is appearing moment to moment. Yes, I don't think that way bypasses any of these challenges, by the way. I think that one still has to work through all kinds of things. But this is life, isn't it? Life is full of challenges. I mean, about 15 years ago, after being with the headless wave for, you know, 35 years, I suddenly began getting panic attacks. And that was rather shocking. And I don't know if you've ever had a panic attack, but it's rather disturbing, it's out of your control. And what I realized this panic attack was about was fear of others, feeling separate. Finally, I suppose, looking back, this deep sense of separation that I'd sort of managed in the space erupted. I didn't really know what to do, but I said I did know what to do. Just remain open inquire and pay attention and trust and all that. But I tried various strategies. There are no others, there are no others, there's no self, it doesn't work. You can only go so far. In the end, the way I found myself through this was I can't get rid of this sense of others and self. I've been trying, I can't do it. And I accepted it. And of course, I could see that accepting this sense of separation didn't disturb the space. It was in the openness, it was yet another thing arising and I'd been trying to get rid of it. Well, of course, what you resist persists. And as soon as I began to accept it, actually, something wonderful came out of it, which was a profound valuing of the otherness, of people and of the self within the one. The one was many, and the many were one. I didn't have to try and cancel out the many in order to be the one. So I'm saying this, that I think that even when you're seeing who you are, I mean, perhaps even more so, it shines a light everywhere in the end, and it doesn't let you off anything. But these what seem to be such difficult, strange things god, why is this happening to me? They teach one something about the world that nothing else could teach. And this sense of, you know, the world is me, profoundly me, yet it is profoundly other, is glorious. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting, because it it does get at a distinction that the Buddhists really emphasize to a point of pedantry, it seems, in the end. But I think the distinction is important, which is the difference between asserting the oneness of what remains when you're no longer taken in by the subject object perception and not asserting, you know, anything, really, essentially, is the notion of emptiness. So it's not it's not even one. It's not one. It's not many. There is simply this unity of cognition and appearances. Right. And so there's no many of us have experienced this at various points in practice and certainly met people who seem to be stuck in this place of kind of reefing an experience of oneness. And there's a kind of subtle undercurrent of conceptualization continually happening there that's going unrecognized. Yes. You have to sort of work through those things, don't you, in a workshop? One of the good things about doing a workshop is that there are lots of people there and they can see that people react in different ways. And so you'll get someone who is going, wow, everything's in me, there's only one. And someone else goes, Well, I can't see my head, but I don't get that. And my job at that point is to say, you've got it. You're just having a different experience, and it will change. And, in effect, don't get stuck in anything. Really? Sometimes I will say, if you wake up tomorrow morning after the workshop, you think, what on earth was all that about? All those experiments? Don't try and remember. Look again now. Don't try and hold on to any feeling of oneness or whatever it was. Just be clueless, like right now, for me, pay attention and see what's happening. And this is life unfolding. This is living. This is glorious. This is spontaneous and unpredictable, isn't it? Yeah. So, Richard, is there anything that we haven't covered here that you think would be useful for people to recognize what we're talking about and work with it? Well, I'm aware we've just got audio. It's like speaker on the phone. And one of my jobs in my life has been a psychotherapist. I've done a lot of counseling and a lot of it on the phone. And why I say it is that I don't talk about the headless way on the phone. They haven't come from that for that. They might come for six sessions because they're suffering bereavement or health, whatever. Anyway, what I do is I just be the silence and I listen to their voice and my voice. And so what I'm paying attention to is two voices, like now, yours and mine in the one consciousness. And obviously, I know my voice is, this is my voice and that's your voice. But from the point of view, my true nature, they're both mine. Now, this means, in a certain sense, that I position myself right where you are or where the client is, and I'm looking out of the same space and trying to feel my way into their world. Now, I find that people sort of recognize that instinctively because you're on their side. And so I'm saying this, that in my experience, this has so many applications in everyday life, and it's exciting and interesting. That's an interesting way to frame it, because when you put it like that, it can become obvious that when I'm hearing you speak, I'm hearing your thoughts for the first time. I don't know what you are going to say next, but the truth is I'm in the same position with respect to my own thoughts. Yes. Right. I don't know what I'm going to think until the thought itself appears and when I'm speaking like this, unless I've been thinking and preparing what I was going to say and kind of waiting for you to stop talking so that I could insert what I had already thought out. The normal experience is to simply be thinking out loud, to be hearing my utterance precisely when you hear it. I stand in the same relationship to both of our utterances, which is to merely hear them for the first time when spoken. And it's magical. It's magical. They're just coming out of the no mind or the silence or consciousness, whatever you want to call it, and going back in. I mean, how does that happen? It's just yes. And it's so intimate, isn't it? Two voices in one consciousness. Yeah. Well, it's a pleasure to bring your voice to this conversation. If people want to reach out or find one of your workshops or get your books, where would you direct them online? Well, our website is headless.org and if people are interested in joining any of our online video meetings, they can just contact me through the website. And all our books are on the website and information about workshops. So feel very welcome to get in touch with me through the website, I suppose, and thank you. Sam. You know, often I get people, many times, people saying, oh, I heard about you through Sam Harris. Oh, great. Yeah, so really, lots of friends come to workshops or contact me online, and it's through reading your book or your excellent app or the podcast. I just want to appreciate how you have. Well, thank you for that. Yeah, well, get ready. You're about to get a few more. Oh, good. Well, thank you very much. Delight to have been here. Likewise. Okay, well, I hope you found that useful. Again, if you were left wondering, what the hell are those guys talking about? There is an experience there that can become quite clear. It can be very brief in the beginning, and then it can be expanded and elaborated through practice. And did you see what I mean about him being the nicest guy on Earth? What a voice. Actually, I've invited him to record guided meditations for the Waking Up app, and he has accepted. So hopefully those will be coming soon. And if you want more information about that, you can find it@awakenup.com. And with that, I'll leave you until next time you./n
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+Today I'm speaking with Dia Khan. Dia is a two time Emmy award winning and twice BAFTA nominated documentary film director. She is the founder of Fuse. That's F-U-U-S-E-A media and arts company that puts women and minority communities at the heart of telling their own stories. In 2016, she became the first UNESCO goodwill ambassador for artistic to freedom and creativity. She's made at least three films to date. Banaz a Love Story, jihad and White Wright meeting the Enemy. And we talk about the last two, Jihad and White, right? You really have to see her films. Dia is doing something truly extraordinary. She's doing something extraordinary as a person, even more than as a filmmaker. Now, you'll you'll hear in the second half of this podcast in the last hour or so that we don't agree about everything. There's definitely some daylight between how she views the collision between Islam and the modern world and the way I view it. And she clearly doesn't fully align with my friends Majid and Ian her Clay. So there is a further conversation to be had on that front, but I hope you'll view the exchange we did have there as a model for the kind of conversation that millions of people could and should be having about these issues. Unfortunately, audio quality for this podcast is a little spotty. There were a few sound problems on her side. It's not too bad, but it goes in and out at a few points. I think it's worse in the beginning, so apologies for that. In any case, I love this conversation. I think Dia is fantastic. If you watch Whitewright, you will understand why I think so. Disagreements aside, I now bring you Dia Khan. I am here with Dia Khan. Dia, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. I know I mispronounced your last name. How do you say Khan when you're not an American who can't pronounce Middle Eastern nation? You know, that's not bad, actually. Khan. I mean, the only difference, I would say, is Han, but khan. Most people say that, so not bad. Okay, well, it was great to meet you by phone. Essentially, we're over the Internet, and you've explained to me that there's some explosions in the background. You're not in a war zone. What's going on? I'm not it's Guy Fawkes night, so there's a lot of fireworks happening, but it should calm down, I think, in another hour or so. Okay, well, as long as you're safe, that's all we care about. Absolutely. So you and I actually have met over the phone. You might be aware of this, but these were less than auspicious circumstances. I think you were in the room for my ill fated conversation with Miriam Namazi. Do I do I have to? I was that's correct? Yes, because I did a film when was it? Was it a couple of years ago now, I think. Yeah, I did a film about apostasy and basically young people that are leaving Islam both in England but also in other countries, and just what their experiences are like. And then also the kind of support or lack of support that they find within the Muslim community. And then organizations like Miriam's, the Council of Mixed Muslims, that provide that much needed support for these young people. So I was following Miriam a lot around that time. And then obviously you guys had your conversation. I also happened to be in the room and eventually just turned off the camera. Yes, that's good. I haven't seen the footage of that, but I experienced my side of the conversation firsthand, and I can only say you were very briefly a friendly voice on the line. And then I was delivered into Miriam's hands and we had what many view as perhaps my least successful podcast. It certainly was in the top three, but it was kind of bewildering because we agree about many things, but we got bogged down on debating open borders and just couldn't get back to dry land. I do think that was a shame because I think you have a lot in common, actually. And what was a bit frustrating for me being a listener was it just felt as if you were both sort of talking past each other, and that's always just sort of sad and a waste when that happens. Well, I am virtually certain you and I won't have that problem having watched, I think, your two most recent films that are available on Netflix, jihad and White. Right. I'm just so amazed at what you're doing and such a huge fan. And I just hope everyone watches these films. Our conversation will be absolutely no substitute at all for actually seeing them. So you just have an enormous fan in me, and I just want to talk about what you're doing as a filmmaker. That's very kind of you. Thank you. Really appreciate that. It's it's, you know, when you do your work and, you know, you're so I mean, film is such a sort of obsessive, really long, really hard process, and it's it's just hard for me to look up from from the work that I do because it just is so all consuming. So when people finally see the work and then the responses to the work is always touching and confusing and quite amazing for me to realize that other people have a relationship to the work that I do. Because for me, it's a matter of just sort of satisfying my own curiosity, really, is what these films are an exercise in. Yeah, it's got to be something more than curiosity here, though, because what you've done here is you're kind of responding to a moral emergency in both films and putting yourself on the line in a way that really seems unusual for a filmmaker. But before we jump into each film, just tell us a little bit about your background. How do you come to be dealing with these topics? And I was surprised to learn you grew up in Norway, which you betray no evidence of. Who are you and where did you come from? Well, you are right. I was born and raised in Oslo, Norway. Come from a Muslim family. My father is Pakistani, my mother is Afghan. Very, very liberal. Very, I would say sort of an eccentric family in the sense that we had lots of artists and activists in the house. When I was growing up, with some of my earliest memories of just sitting and playing on the carpet, when my father and my mother would be entertaining and having conversations about politics and about human rights and about theater and about music with feminists and with activists and human rights defenders from their part of the world. So I sort of grew up understanding that that's what life is like, that's what Muslim women are like, even. But my dad is a bit of a strange guy. He had a lot of experiences of racism in Norway, and one of the things that he had in his mind was that the only way you can get past that is and he gave me this lecture when I was actually quite young. He said, look, there are only two professions in the world where your race won't matter. Your gender, your religion, your background won't matter. If you work harder than everybody else and you remain patient and just stick to it, then eventually you'll be able to do well in life. And one is sports and the other is within the arts, and particularly music is what his love was. And so at the age of seven, he basically decided that my profession was going to be music. So I started studying music, and this was North Indian and Pakistani classical music that I studied from the age of seven. Very, very rigorous training. My dad was wonderful, but also very strict, very harsh person when it came to commitment to music. And I always sort of joke about this, that my dad didn't arrange my marriage or anything like that, but he chose my profession for me anyway. In Norway. I very quickly started doing public performances both on TV and at music festivals and various places and sort of became, I would say, this mascot for multicultural Norway. This little strange girl who was doing this strange sort of music and kind of a symbol of how well Norway was doing with all of its sort of, quote unquote new arrivals from all around the world. And everyone felt very good about themselves and patted themselves on the back. But as my success continued, I started getting more and more negative reactions as well, from two sides. One side was saying, what is this little basically, paki, which is a derogatory term for people from Pakistan and South Asia doing on our TV all the time? Sending people like this, they need to piss off back home. And then the other side that I started also getting abuse from was from my parents community. And the Muslim community in Norway is actually quite small, but harassment from that side also started getting very intense, to the point where, by the age of 17, I had to pack my bags, buy a one way ticket to London, and left. So was sort of exiled from Norway, which is strange in a way, because a lot of people leave difficult countries in search for safety in Norway. But for me, it was the opposite. Let me just see if I understand here. So you had a very liberal Muslim family, and it sounds like you didn't escape all of the Southeast Asian kinds of pressure one can get from one's family, but it was directed toward music rather than religion or conservative social norms. And so you're, being a female performer, put you on the radar of religiously conservative people who then made your life miserable. Is that yes. Their reasoning was that they consider music to be unacceptable. They consider music they consider music to be a very low profession, a profession that is engaged with by prostitutes and dishonorable people. And people would often say, you come from a good family. Why are you engaging in such an immoral and dishonorable profession? And I remember, I think I was 1112 years old, and we used to have these sort of delegations of men would come to our house and try to talk sense into my father, saying, we don't even allow our boys to engage in this profession. What are you doing dragging your girl into this? And he would always show them the door. He would never care. And he would always say, look, this is my daughter, my decision. And you people just you leave. You have no jurisdiction over her. And my grandfather on my father's side also lived in Norway. He was one of the first immigrants from Pakistan to come to Norway to work. He's very religious, very conservative. He helped build several of the mosques in Norway and very loved and respected in Norway. So when people had when they struggled with my father, then they would go to my grandfather saying, look, she's bringing shame on the entire community. She is leading our girls astray by showing them that they can do things like this, and this has to stop, you know, stop him. And he wasn't able to do that. And then eventually, you know, people started coming to me in the streets of Oslo. You know, people pulled knives on me. I was sat on. I was attacked at my own concerts. People tried to abduct me from my own schools. It became very, very difficult. And you're a teenager at this point. Yeah. And my mother always gets really upset whenever she thinks about this because she's like, you know, because I remember when we made the decision. She was sitting at the kitchen table, and she sat me down, and she said, look, do you understand that we can no longer protect you? Do you understand that we can no longer keep you safe and that you're going to have to go? And I remember going, yes, I do understand that. And my heartbreak, sort of, at the time, was obviously I was afraid of what was going on, and also I was afraid for my family because they stood by me, and they paid a heavy price for that. They were completely isolated and sort of pushed out by the rest of the community, but they still chose me instead of the community. But I remember her just having to send her child away, and still to this day, she gets really sad when she thinks of that time. And my brother lost his sister. We didn't have means of communicating like this back then, so it was really hard. I left my career, left my friends, left my life, left my family, left everything behind. So it was hard. As you pointed out, it's amazing that you had to leave a Western society. This is not leaving Pakistan or Afghanistan, which would be understandable. And I think the heartbreak for me was my exit was a very public exit. It wasn't something that sort of happened in secret. It was sort of plastered across the national newspapers in Norway, saying that I'd been threatened out of Norway and all of this. And my kind of just sorrow at the time, sort of in the mind of a 17 year old, was that no one said anything. Nobody said that, hold on, this is wrong. And I remember kind of my way of thinking again as a 17 year old was I couldn't help but feel if I would have been blonde and blue eyed, would people have behaved differently? Would they have treated me differently, and would there have been any kind of outrage then, instead of just quietly letting me go like that? And and I always sort of say this, but I really felt like at the airport, where you have there's always that one suitcase that keeps going round and round on the baggage carousel. Nobody comes to claim that suitcase felt like that. I felt like I didn't belong to to the Pakistani community, and I felt like I didn't belong to my country, you know, and and that was a very painful, very, very difficult feeling to carry as a 17 year old, because you you don't feel like you've done anything wrong. I did everything right. I was obedient to my father's dream, you know, I worked really hard, you know, and and and this is what you end up with, is just loneliness and just a sense of deep, deep loss, wandering the streets of London, having no idea what to do or who you are or how you rebuild your life. So, I mean, this is a very long answer to your question. No, it's good to get your your backstory here. But ironically so you you go to London, which is also a center of Islamist and jihadist extremism. I often think of it as being one of the worst in the west in terms of your exposure to a radicalized community. I guess nobody knew who you were when you arrived, but just based on your own films, you're kind of out of the frying pan into the fire, aren't you? Yeah, well, yes and no. Because the reason I chose London is because I'd been here at the age of twelve and growing up in Norway, I always felt like this strange sort of dark child in the sea of the blonde and the blue eyed. So I always had this feeling of never quite fitting in, never quite being sort of enough for either side, not being Norwegian enough, not being Pakistani enough, and then the fact that you're a girl on top of it, it just adds all that extra baggage. But coming to the UK when I remember when I was twelve, I loved it because I could suddenly see people who look like me and I suddenly felt like I didn't stand out in that way. And that's one of the reasons I chose that instead of instead of the US. For example, but where but also US was too far. But anyway, I think, you know, to a huge extent, London is a symbol and an example of how sort of diverse cultures can coexist beautifully through some of the art and the music and the foods and the friendships and the kind of life that you see a lot of people leading. But then, of course, there is a flip side to that as well, where you also see people on the margins of the society and these various communities also obviously edging farther and farther towards violence and farther and farther towards separation, division and fear of each other. Yes, it's a difficult place in some ways, but in other ways it's also actually quite successful, which I think we don't really get to talk about or see very often when it comes to feminists from the Muslim context. When it comes to robustly addressing some of the challenges that we face within various minority communities. I've seen that engagement in a much more impressive robust form than I've seen anywhere else. So I think a lot of the solutions also reside in England as much as the problems. You must know my friend Majid Nawaz. Have you crossed paths with him? I have met him, yes. Do you align with his reform efforts at all? Or is there daylight between how you come at this and how he does? I don't know enough about the reform effort, but the little that I do know, I don't think that we align. I mean, I understand and respect some of the work that he's doing, but I think on the reform side of things, I don't particularly see how that's effective, to be quite honest. I think people practice and manifest their religiosity in a multitude of ways everywhere. And I think that's where the key is. I don't think a kind of top down a choreographed reform is really needed. Well, actually, can you explain to me what you understand he is doing? And maybe I'm misunderstanding and then I can yeah, basically, he's not cast himself as a theologian at all. In fact, the theologian that he relies on most of the time is in your film Jihad Osama Hassan. I don't know if that film predates his association with Quilliam, but I think I'm not mistaken about that. That's the same person, the same man. Yeah, but Majid's argument is simply that actually following the line you just suggested, that given that there's so much diversity in how people practice Islam, the only answer is a respect for secularism. You have to keep your version of the faith out of public policy and out of law. And everyone should be free to practice as they want insofar as their practice doesn't infringe on the well being of anybody else. But it's just there is no solution that gives you the one right version of Islam. It's just there has to be a truly robust commitment to secularism in the Muslim world. So what is the purpose then? So when we say that the reform initiative, what does that mean then? Well, he attempts to do many of the things that seem to have happened to some of the subjects in your film Jihad. You have people who used to be jihadists or used to be Islamists, and through some collision with modern values, they have relinquished their commitment to that theocratic project, and now they're far more liberal. And that's what happened to Majid and that's what happened to some of the people in your film. And so the Quilliam Foundation just attempts to formalize how one goes about reaching out to such people and changing their views on things. So, I mean, Maja just finds himself in conversation with people like many of the subjects in your film. Maybe we should just jump into talking about Jihad because I actually want to spend most of the time talking about your second film, White Wright, or not your second film, but the second film I want to talk about, which is about white supremacy in the US. Because it's just an amazing document you have produced there. But let's start with Jihad, because we're already talking about this. So you focus on this problem of religious extremism under the banner of Islam. And the main figure in the film is somebody who I don't know all that much about, but Abu Muntasar, maybe introduce him. How did you come to make this particular film? Whilst I wanted to try and understand well, there were there was a couple of things I was trying to do. One thing was that I wanted to understand why we were starting to see our young people leaving the UK and other European countries and wanting to go to foreign battlefields. So young Muslim kids who we would imagine have every reason to want to live and want to just lead their lives as young people here, instead of going on these foreign battlefields. So I was wanting to try and understand, why is that? Why would somebody do that? And then the second reason, which was much more personal, was after having all the experiences that I've had in my life, I sort of got to a point in in life where I was sort of done being afraid. And done hiding and done leaving country after country and wanted to do something that I've never done, which is to sit down with the kinds of men that were the reason that I had to leave Norway, for example, and see possible for us to sit across from each other and have a conversation just about life and about each other. And so I set out on that sort of search and then came across Abomanthese, who basically is one of the sort of founding figures of recruiting young people from the UK, actually from America in the past as well. Denmark, Germany, across Europe, recruiting young Muslims to go and fight on foreign battlefields. In his time, it was Afghanistan, it was Bosnia, it was Chechnya, Kashmir. And then he subsequently also then inspired this kind of trend of foreign fighters that we now have seen in recent years. And what was really interesting in speaking to him is that he was saying that one of the biggest differences between his era and what we're witnessing now is that when he was going over there, because they were fighting, against the Soviets. He said that they were considered I mean, as we already know, they were considered to be performing a holy war that was of benefit to the west. So the west was encouraging it and supplying weapons to these guys and providing other logistical support to the Mujahideen and the Jihadis, basically. And he said, obviously, now the enemy has changed, so now this force is viewed as a very negative one. But anyway, the point about him is that he managed to sow these seeds of this movement and of this trend that we now have seen blossom through through the recent years. By the time I got to speak to him, he's completely renounced his actions. He utterly regrets everything that he's done and he has now completely dedicated every single moment of his life in trying to undo what he's done, trying to I mean, we spoke about forgiveness a lot, both in the film and also off camera. And I think he is trying to get to a place where he can forgive himself for the damage that he's caused. And I think that's why he's doing everything in his power now to try and work with young people, both in prison, in the community. And he's still very much a believer, but has understood that his understanding or his way of expressing his faith at that point was, you know, very misguided and and something that he really, really feels a lot of pain about now. Yeah, and that pain comes through. He breaks down, I think, at least twice in interviews with you. And it's quite mesmerizing to watch, because he's right out of central casting. He's exactly who you would think would be the bad jihadist in your movie of the war on terror. And yet he has had a total change of heart. And it's extraordinary. I mean, to me, I have to be honest, I started the film very, very pessimistic, and I wasn't quite sure what I was going to find. I had a feeling that I would just sit with these guys and that it would just be an uphill struggle and that we would never agree on anything. I've been afraid of men like this most of my life, and to sit down with them and to be able to connect with them in the way that we did and for them to share as much with me as they did was really special. And I left the project far more hopeful that change is possible. No one is beyond redemption. No one is beyond the recognition that I did something wrong. I think it takes a lot of courage for people to admit that they did something wrong and wanting to try and do better, wanting to try and do something different. And he gets a lot of I mean, after the film came out as well, he got a lot of negative reactions, and the film did too, because a lot of people, some people who used to love him were saying, you're a sellout, and what a coward you are. And he says that in the film, too. But the backlash from sort of the rest of society was also very intense for him because people want to see him hung. People want to see him dead for what he did and don't see the value in where he stands today and what his sort of wisdom that he's arrived at can contribute towards the younger people that now are going through some of the same issues that he did. And he was very different as a leader, as a recruiter. He was very different than his followers, is what I found, which I thought was quite interesting. He was absolutely committed to the cause. He was very, very dedicated both to his faith but also to kind of the geopolitical realities at the time that he wanted to participate or contribute in some way, whereas his followers were much more driven by a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, and kind of revering him as the father figure that they didn't have in their life. And I just find that really interesting that the recruiters like him and leaders like him are able to sort of take those feelings and redirect them into a political cause and ultimately towards violence. Yeah, well, the jihadi worldview is incredibly compelling. I often think of it as you get to be a spiritual James Bond, right? I mean, not only do you get to organize all of your craving for meaning and profundity and otherworldliness and whatever religious superstition you have on board, it has all of the satisfactions of supercharged religion. But in addition to that, you as a testosterone poisoned young man get to join a gang, right? And you get to channel all of your sexual repression and awkwardness and dissatisfaction into this project of becoming a warrior for God. And really it just checks all of the boxes in the male imagination and search for self aggrandizement. And then if you believe the doctrine, you're expecting an eternal reward which is explicitly sexualized, right? You get to hang with virgins, with God forever. And it really is like, in my view, the scariest possible set of memes to be spreading. But there's no mystery as to why it's so compelling with a few basic assumptions, just assuming that paradise exists and that marginal is the way to get there. But also I think what's really interesting is the fact that it's sort of emotional and psychological vulnerabilities is underlying a lot of this and the needs that these movements are satisfying for young men. I think what's interesting about that is a lot that we can actually do something about. And one of the things that I did find is that as much as these guys go on about religiosity and that's their primary driver, and that's kind of the I always call it sort of the window dressing that they put on top of everything else. I did find that other than some of the very, very committed guys, like recruiters, like the leaders, most of the followers were actually not particularly religious, actually, and that they were far more driven by a sense of alienation. And this is something that I found quite similar, actually, between these guys and the white supremacist that I met, is just this inability to deal with shame and humiliation in their life. Whatever the source of that might be, whether it's in experiences of racism or abuse or trauma or whatever the specifics might be, but just an inability to deal with that. And all sort of extremist movements seem to equalize whatever loss of manhood and masculinity these men feel, whatever emasculation they feel, this sort of equalizes and like you say, sort of supercharges it for you. And then also look at the rewards. I mean, never mind the rewards in the hereafter, but look at the rewards that you get while you're here. Look at for someone who feels invisible and powerless and insignificant. Suddenly everybody cares about you. Suddenly you are on the front. Covers of every single newspaper you're on, every single newscast. The most important men on the planet, men at the time like Obama, has to now think about you and talk about you and worry about you. I mean, that's extraordinarily intoxicating. I agree with you that the religiosity or religious aspects of it that these guys believe that they're loyal to is, of course, a part of the picture and so is also foreign policy. Because when I started making the film, people were saying, oh, my friends were going find out, is it foreign policy, Grievances, or is it religion? And what I found is that obviously, both are absolutely a part of the cocktail, but what makes somebody get up and act on that? I was against the Iraq war. I have a lot of issues with American British foreign policy as well. But there's a reason I pick up a camera and these guys pick up a gun, and I want, why do they why are some Muslim men drawn to this? There are, you know, one point, what, six or 7 billion Muslims walking around the world right now? And if the only qualifier to be a terrorist or to be a jihadist is to be a Muslim, then everyone would be dead by now. Right? So that's not enough of a qualifier either. So what underpins it? So that was interesting to me is that it was the psychological and emotional vulnerabilities that were very much the reason why some of these guys are drawn to it and other people are not, and how cynically these movements and these recruiters are targeting these vulnerabilities that young men have. I mean, they're actively looking for these guys. I remember somebody saying to me during the course of making that film is, you know, when ISIS was very, very active online. Do you remember? Yeah, there's a lot of online recruitment going on. And, you know, what I found is that their recruiters would spend hundreds of hours with young kids online, hundreds of hours. And you can only imagine some kid who is disengaged from the rest of his life, you know, maybe doesn't have the kind of friendship circles or is struggling at home or is, you know, having some sort of expectations in his life from his family or from his country that he's unable to sort of live up to. And then you've got this person spending hundreds of hours on you, building loyalty, building friendship. I mean, that's extraordinary. And same with Abominate. His followers that I spoke to, they would have died for him any day. They would have died for him in some ways before they would have died for their faith. Right? Does that make sense? So that intensity of their relationships within these groups, it cannot be underestimated, I think. Yeah, well, it has a cult like structure. It's just you have a charismatic leader. You have various beliefs which convey meaning intrinsically. I mean, you're talking about a person's place in the universe and what happens after death and what answer makes sense of every apparent injustice and struggle and failure in this life? It will all be rectified at a certain point. It's interesting because to compare the two phenomenon, the phenomenon of jihadism and the phenomenon of white supremacy, they have so much in common, and as you say, the recruiting tactics are the same. The vulnerabilities of the young men in many cases are the same. I think there are a few differences. Religion is one part of it. Religion does show up in the white supremacist side as well because they have their own Christian beliefs that they kind of graft on to their racism and xenophobia. But it's not it's clearly not as integral to white supremacy as religious belief is to jihadism. I think some of them. It really is quite intensely. And that's why my head was sort of wanting to explode when I was listening to some of the white supremacists and using some of the same terminology, saying, and suddenly I'm a warrior for God. Yeah. And I'm sitting there going, oh, my goodness, I can't believe this is like a repeat. The slogans and the flags are different, but it's the same guy. And also, having been on the receiving end of death threats from both yeah, you get it from both. Yeah. I have to say, reading some of those threats, it might as well be the same guy. And what they say that they're going to do to somebody like me, it's the same kind of stuff, which is really interesting and telling, I think. But of course, there are differences as well, but I just find that the type of personalities that are drawn to this seem to be very similar across extremist groups. And also the tactics are very similar, too. Yeah. And also there's honor culture at the back of both. I would think that the honor culture is a little more intense in the jihadist context, but still, white supremacy drawing a lot of energy from southern honor culture, is easy to see some of the same dynamics there. Yeah. I mean, gender is a huge part of this, and I think the term toxic masculinity I think is absolutely appropriate for both as well. And both are sort of harping on to a past, to a golden past, when everything used to be so much better, when it used to be great. And they can be a part of ushering in that past, which includes bizarrely putting women back into the home and into very, very severe and rigid gender roles, and only to continue having either Muslim babies or white babies. It's really interesting, all the similarities there. It seems like in your encounters with your subjects in jihad, these were, I think, almost to a man, people who had thought better of the whole project and had come out the other side, at least to some significant degree. Remind me, was there anyone in the film who was just fundamentally hostile to you and a current jihadist or Islamist whose whose views were just antithetical to everything you were trying to talk about? There were a couple of guys who are active now, but being a Muslim woman myself, it's even the most hard core of men, hardcore fanatic jihadi types. Many, many of them, depending on how you approach them, will find it difficult to be hostile, just to be hostile. So so there's this kind of strange courtesy thing. And since I wasn't there to have a kind of an antagonistic conversation or to have I wasn't really there to have a fight, it actually went for the most part, it went okay, but I was very clear. I am Muslim, but I don't cover my hair. I come from the background that I come from. And my sort of condition was that I come as me, you come as you, and we both leave our baggage at the door and we meet each other as just who we are. And that was fine. Well, I must say, you do bring out the best in your subjects. I've been describing you with reference to the film on white supremacist as Kryptonite for white supremacists. It's just amazing the effect you have on these guys. So let's just pivot to white, right? Which again, people just have to go see it's on Netflix in the US. Do you know whether it's globally available on Netflix? No, it's not. It's available in where is it? In the US. And in the UK, I think, and then in Australia and Canada, other places. Their own broadcasters are streaming it online. Well, people have to get their eyeballs pointed in the right direction and watch this hour long film. So let's just talk about how you got into position to even shoot this, because you find yourself in Charlottesville just at the right time, when all of this famously goes off. How did you come to be in Charlottesville? And you must have just heard that there was going to be a big demonstration and just assumed that would be a good thing to film. Well, there's been several events at Charlottesville, or rallies at Charlottesville last summer. Excuse me. I went to the first one, which was the KKK was going to basically protest some of the statues being removed. So I went to that and it was maybe about 40, 50 clan people and what felt like at least 1000 counter protesters. And then there some people were saying that actually there's going to be another rally coming up in a couple of months. Are you coming to that? And I kept going. I don't know. I barely even knew what Charlotte was until that point. And then in the meantime so I went to that. And then the entire process of trying to get people to speak to me was very, as you can imagine, very difficult and very time consuming because most people that I contacted were not interested in speaking to me because I explained again, I was very clear who I am, what kind of background I have, what kind of politics I have, because I didn't want anyone to feel like I was springing anything on them in person. I wanted them to know clearly this is who I am and this is what I would like to do, which is to try and not necessarily speak about the ideology, but try and find ways to discuss why people are drawn to these movements. So most of them said, no, not interested. And one guy, which is his name is Jeff Scoop and he is the head of the National Socialist Movement, which is the largest neo Nazi group in America and one of the oldest ones. He wrote back and was not particularly interested, but I thought, okay, well, at least he's not saying a complete no, so let me just push I pushed him for such a long time and he finally said, okay, you get 1 hour. You come to where I live, there's a specific motel. You come to that 1 hour, and then you just leave. And I said, okay. Thank you. Fine. No problem at all. And 5 hours later he says, we're going to a rally which will be in Charlottesville and you are welcome to join us. And I said, wow, okay, great. And then I actually flew to Detroit, which is where he is. And he drove, and I sat in the car with him filming for 9 hours. He drove from Detroit to Charlottesville and you had one person in another cameraman. It was just me and my colleague, a producer who also films. And that's it. So the two of us in the car with Nazis basically for 9 hours, talking about all kinds of very inappropriate stuff because 9 hours is a very long time. You can't find out who someone is after 9 hours in a car. Oh my goodness. Absolutely. And he basically said, Look, I guarantee your safety and you come. It'll be fine. And so the whole deal was that I'm going to march with them. I'm going to basically do whatever they do so that I can get a chance to walk in their shoes and just see what happens. So as you can imagine, we pull up to these different parking lots beforehand. All these various white nationalists and all these various white supremacist groups are gathering from all around America. And I'm the only brown person and one of the very, very few women I mean, never mind even brown, but just even one of the few women there. And everybody just looks at me like they want to slip my throat or something. It was absolutely horrendous. So even though Jeff had said, it's fine, we'll look out for you, it's okay, it was horrible. And I kept being pulled off by different groups. Who the f are you? What are you doing here? Blah, blah. And then they also start saying and then Jeff also starts saying the antifa. So the antifascists will also be counter protesting at the rally. And we usually get into physical fights with each other. Sometimes there's been hammers that have come out and I'm just standing there going, oh, my goodness meme, what have I just agreed to do? Was this the point where you felt the least safe physically in making either of the two films? Yes, but there were several instances in this film where I felt very unsafe. I mean, this was just one of them. Well during the actual charlottesville. So as I march in with them and they're chanting, jews will not replace us, and they're chanting about deportations that they need to become what is their chant? Anyway, now we start the deportations and I'm marching in with these people, and then the local community of people from Charlottesville and counter protesters are shouting and screaming at us as well. And I'm trying to film in the middle of all of this and I'm wearing a helmet, and suddenly I get pepper sprayed because they were trying to pepper spray somebody else. And it was just a mess. And it was terrifying when all the violence broke out, because the entire time, even before it turned into violence, the intensity of all of these people, everybody was on edge. And you could tell both sides were just raring to go at each other. So when it happened, it was really terrifying and managed to anyway, get back safely to barely to the parking lots again. And then one of the guys said, oh, there's going to be this gathering afterwards and it's fine for you to bring cameras. You can talk to some of the people there and said, okay, that's fine. In the mountains of Virginia, somewhere off some dirt road in this compound was about 60, 70 guys there. And I remember talking to my colleagues, saying, okay, let's just get our cameras and go down. And he goes, no, look, let's just wait. Keep the camera in the car, and if everything is okay, we'll come back and get the camera. And I said, look, he said, it's fine. Let's just get it. He said, no, just let's wait. And you stop walking down this dirt road and the guys start gathering and start shouting and screaming and cursing. I mean, I probably can't say the stuff. No, you can say whatever you want, okay, but the fuck are you fucking media? Are you a fucking Jew? It just starts shouting and they can't even really see me yet. Put your fucking hands up. And then they start bringing out weapons. And some of them are topless and they've got bruises on their body from earlier in the day, and they're drinking. I see lots of air in one hand and weapons in the other hand. I'm not really used to seeing that many weapons anyway, coming from Europe. But this was stuff that I've seen, like, in Battlefields. Like, this wasn't handguns, these were massive machines. And finally get down there and they start getting in my face and start shouting and what kind of a fucking Muslim are you? Are you a Shia? Are you a Sunni? And I start chuckling a little bit, going, what does that have to do with anything? And why is your fucking head not covered? What kind of a fucking Muslim are you? And I'm going oh, my goodness me. And I remember looking, glancing at my phone, and because they've got my colleagues circled as well and shouting, but where are your Nazi friends at this point? Because at this point you've got Nazi friends. Yeah. So he's gone suddenly, I can't see him and he's frantically looking for whatever person had said it was okay for us to come because he kept going in to be cool, so and so said It's fine. And so he kind of disappears and these guys are smelling blowing cigarette in my face. It was so frantic and more and more of them are coming and getting in my face. No space between us at all. And I remember glancing at my phone and it says, no signal, right? And at that point I'm thinking, okay, they can put a bullet in my head and they can put me in the ground right here in the middle of nowhere and no one's going to find out. No one's going to know. Because then everything starts running through my head, going, I haven't told my colleagues that I'm here, haven't told my family, haven't told the TV channel, haven't told anybody that I'm actually here. So if something happens to me, they'll know I'm gone, but they're not going to ever, ever find me again. And finally, the guy, Brian Culpepper is his name, he came and he managed to negotiate our way out, so we were allowed to finally leave. So he didn't actually negotiate your staying there and filming? No, he wasn't able to. Breaking bread for those guys? Yeah, it got so hysterical and they were cursing. I mean, the people were very riled up. And so finally left. And my colleague is white, so it was just me who's not like them. And I remember just immediately getting back to the motel and writing my colleague Joanne and just saying to her, look, this is where I am. This is what I'm doing. Here's my mother's phone number, here's my brother's phone number. If you don't hear from me every couple of days, you need to let them know. But this was just one of many very unpleasant experiences at another place. I went to a training camp where I was allowed to film part of it and then not another part. And I remember a guy sitting there with again, everybody's drinking, everybody has guns out and he's got his gun on his lap and he's holding it, and he's looking at me, just staring at me, not talking, just staring at me as I'm talking to other people. And then finally he says the best thing about serving in Iraq and serving in Afghanistan, he's a former soldier, is getting paid to shoot ragheads like you. I'm sitting there going, okay, that's great. Thank you, and just make my way away from there. And it was just Horrifying and some other guy following me around, clearly on medication. Also for a former soldier, kind of twitching and kind of glassy eyed. I'm going to put a fucking bullet through your head. I'm going to put a fucking bullet through your camera. Don't fucking film me. And I'm going, oh, my goodness. I'm not filming you. Stop following me. Well, this is amazing to hear because virtually none of this comes through in your film. Your film is a far more hopeful document. And now I'm beginning to worry that it's a document for another world because the main import of your film is you put a white supremacist in a room with Dia Khan, and there's no way to maintain the white supremacy for very long under the empathic insistence of you as an interviewer. No, but you saw that with I mean, never mind these guys, but you also see it in the film with Richard Spencer and the Jared England as well. Yeah, I was going to remark on that difference because you have a few guys whose names escape me, but there's probably three guys who you seem to spend a lot of time with, and each falls under your sway to a degree that is, frankly pretty adorable. And they're effectively deprogrammed of their white supremacy in your presence based on questions you ask. And I got to say, the fact that you also happen to be a beautiful woman can't have been irrelevant. The effect on the viewer is I basically felt like I was watching three guys fall in love with you and encounter a level of cognitive dissonance with their worldview that was just completely unsustainable. I don't know if you felt that yourself, but it was just like when you get around asking them, so you mean to tell me you would want to deport me and you would think I should be stripped of my rights? And each one of them is saying, no, it's amazing. These are amazing encounters you've captured on film. They are. But you did not have that effect on Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor, it seems. And was that based on them or you had less access to them, or how do you perceive the difference between those encounters? Well, the men that I just spoke about, these very kind of vicious encounters, one of the men who in the film leaves Brian Culpepper, he saw me being treated like this. And part of his reason for leaving was that he couldn't see me treated like this because he was starting to consider me to be a friend and this was very so I think he started seeing his movement in a different light when he's seeing it relate to his friend, somebody like me. Whereas beforehand this hadn't really occurred to him. It wasn't personal, it doesn't become personal but when it comes to the Richard Spencers and the Jarrett Taylors of the world I did not get to spend as much time with them but also I actually find them to be more sort of sinister in many ways and also more dangerous. What surprised me most about making this film actually was the very deep difference between sort of the working class guys or you say blue collar, don't you guys? And this sort of suit and tie brigade of Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor and others like them. I found the kind of camaraderie and the kind of love between these various groups really telling as well because you see Richard Spencer treating his own followers with a lot of contempt and a lot of disrespect which I think is interesting. Whereas Jeff and some of the Nazis that I spend time with, for example, at Charlottesville, when the worst violence started happening, there were several cars that were brought up to one of the areas to pick up all the leaders of the different groups. And Richard Spencer was was escorted off into a car. And a lot of the other leaders and Jeff was actually one of the only guys who said, no, I'm going, because their followers weren't able to fit into the cars. So Jeff said, I'm going to walk back. So he walked back through all the counter protests with the rest of his group because he didn't want to be separate in that way. So I think that was really telling me. But your question is why was my encounters with those guys different? I think because their aim is something different and their reason for being in the movement is something different. I think for the neonazis that I spoke to, a lot of it is about emotions and whereas for the Jared Taylors and the Richard Spencers, it's much more about ideology and it's much more about power and I think it's also about wanting access to more power, whereas for the other guys, it's it's just trying to regain some sense of dignity and and some sense of purpose and meaning and belonging. In all the the other words that we said earlier about the previous film. So I think it's harder to get through a lot of people who are deeply committed to an ideology. They have a barrage of argumentative tactics and their worldview is something that's been built over a long period of time and they've spent ages cherry picking arguments and reading biased materials to constantly reinforce their worldview and reaffirming and refining their arguments against the other side. And I think Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor fit into that, whereas the other guys were able to sort of connect to my humanity and therefore also their own. Yeah, the difference is really striking just as a viewer. It's when your Nazi friends are warming up to you. Adorable is not too strong a word. It was very cute to see you just kind of cut through their worldview and the result is just superhumanizing. And you feel compassion for these guys. And then to see you walk into a room with Richard Spencer and he's got this kind of reptilian glare, and he really is a sinister guy who there's no warmth, and his own egocentricity and cruelty are so obvious. The guy is just a colossal asshole as a viewer. I just want you to get out of the room with him. I was uncomfortable having you and his company, but when you went into these situations, your technique as an interviewer is it's really pretty interesting. Again, I'm aware that there's so much happening off camera that I'm not seeing, but you're just really directly seeking to build an empathic connection with someone. You're not arguing with them. You're not trying to give a litany of reasons why they're wrong about anything. You're trying to understand them. And then just juxtapose the rapport that's being built by that just basic human communication with the fact that they have a set of beliefs wherein you are branded as the other so irretrievably as to really suggest that they should want to murder you or have someone else murder you. And at a certain point, you just juxtapose those two facts. And in the cases of at least three of the guys, it proves totally untenable. How did you think about your approach to this? Because you really are just putting yourself on the line in a very interesting way. I think you have to, or at least I feel like I had to, because I've had experiences of racism most of my life. As a result, I've been an antiracist anti fascist campaigner most of my life as well. And I've done sort of everything that you would imagine. I've gone to antifascist protest. I've shouted at these guys. I have flipped them off. I have thrown stuff at them. I've done all of that, and none of that really did anything. The other thing that I was always told growing up is that just give a time and these movements will just disappear. And it's true. They sort of reduce in size and in noise, but then they come back. They never quite ever go away. And here we are today with sort of this resurgence again. And so I just got to a point where I realized again that I'm done being afraid of people like this. And I need to try something that I've never done before, which is to sit down and to listen and to see if it's possible for us seemingly enemies they're my enemy as much as I am theirs in many ways. And to see if it's possible for us to build a human connection and to work with that and use that as a starting point. Not using the ideology as a starting point. And that's very much the same with the jihadi side as well. Is if it's possible for us to build human connections first. The ideology eventually falls apart for most people because it's always about something else. It's always about other human needs that are not being met. And if you can acknowledge that and if you can sort of sit through that together and I think a sincerity and a real wish to listen and not condemning people it's very easy to condemn them, I have to say both sides. It's very easy to condemn the jihadis and to condemn the white supremacists as well and it's very, very satisfying, I have to say. It feels great to condemn them and to judge them but it doesn't provide any answers and it doesn't provide any results. I did not make the film with the hopes of changing anyone or changing anyone's mind or anything like that. I purely made the film to try and understand why people do the things that they do why people believe the things that they believe and to see if it's possible for us to sit across from each other just as human beings and use that as a starting point towards something something else just of greater understanding perhaps. So the fact that some of them started using words like friend for me the fact that we were able to build a real relationship with each other of friendship was absolutely shocking to me and confusing and something I never would have expected. If you would have said to me a year ago that I'm going to become some of your best friends, are not this my goodness? I would have laughed at you at first. And then secondly, I think I would have been offended that you would think that I would do that. And here we are. And it's very strange, but it does give me a lot of hope. And going back to the Richard Spencer and that kind of dynamic also, what's with the biggest difference between him and some of these guys is I spoke to these guys alone. I spent a lot of time with them alone. Richard Spencer never was around me alone. Yeah, that could be a big difference. So that kind of dynamic of always wanting to sort of show yourself as this whatever, tough guy is very different. And the same thing with the Nazis as well. All the difficult experiences that I had only happened when they're all big groups and the testosterone and the anger and the name calling and all of that is really intense and whipped up. Maybe your superpowers only come out when you're one on one. Yeah, you're a superhero that has to get alone with. Her target. Exactly. That's my superpower. Yeah, but it's nonetheless super. I mean, the effect is really is pretty mesmerizing to watch. I'm touched by them, I have to say. Ken, one of the guys that's the guy who was throwing the antisemitic flyers out of his window, he called me because in the film, he doesn't leave. He uses the word friend for me, but he doesn't actually leave. But in the film, I also asked him, I said, okay, so what does this mean now going forward? What is this going to mean? And he said, Well, I think this opens me up to maybe speaking to other people who are different to me. He actually stayed true to that. He actually did do that, and he ended up speaking to after I'd gone. We kept in touch, and he was also I mean, he was expelled from his university, and I tried to help him with some of that. I think they were worried that he was going to shoot there. I don't know. He had that photo that he posted on Facebook, I think. Exactly. And I tried actually, I haven't really said this out loud before, but I tried reasoning with some of the people at his university, some of the professors, to try and say that, look, I don't believe that he has it in him to do that. And somebody like him, at the crucial point where he stands in his life right now, the best place for him to be right now is in a space where he can continue his education. I think if you take that away from him, then we do run a risk of him going over the edge. But he really needs to continue learning and needs to be in an environment of knowledge and people and thinking and reading. Nevertheless, they kicked him out, and I understand that as well. But anyway, he he there's a black pastor in his African American pastor in his apartment complex who he started talking to, and then this pastor invited him to his congregation, which is an all black congregation. And then Ken goes there, talks about his past as a Ku Klux Klan member and currently as a neo Nazi, and his view and all of this. And the response to him was kindness and was compassion. And people apparently came up and hugged him after and said, obviously, we disagree with you and dislike what you stand for, but it takes a lot of courage for you to come in here and say and sort of speak in this way and to put yourself out there like that. And that completely just unpicked everything for him. So he called months ago and said, Look, Dia, I've completely left. I've left the ideology. I've left the groups, I've left everything, and I'm so sorry. And he said, you know, the hate was eating me from the inside. And he said, you know, I want to try and and do better and and you know, and it's it tells me that we can't really afford to give up on people who seem like him. I mean, he has a massive swastik as you see in the film, has a massive swastika tattooed on his chest and a clan tattoo, utterly committed to his cause. And today he's left. And in the film he says oh, but I'm never going to break bread with a Jew. Two or three weeks ago I heard that that's exactly what he's done. Oh wow, nice. He's having his tattoo removed. So there is hope. I'm not saying that let's hug a Nazi and everything's going to be fine. But what I've learned is that I think no platforming these people and completely just rejecting them I think feeds into their kind of story of victimhood and as if they are speaking some sort of forbidden truth. And I think if anything, we need to expose racism. We need to challenge it and we need to confront it rather than allowing it to just marinate in its own kind of madness. And going back to you were talking about interviewing technique. I mean, I don't think I really have an interviewing technique other than just I think empathy is very important to me. No, it doesn't seem like a technique. It just seems like a willingness to hold all of your judgment in abeyance and make a connection with these people. Yeah, because I think the judgment and the kind of feelings of self righteousness for holding all the right opinions and having all the correct politics and all of that kind of stuff I think is just counterproductive. I think it actually adds to the problem and adds to people's radicalization rather than not in speaking with the jihadis who left and then also with former violent neonazis in this movement, in this film. What struck me after the fact is that what interrupted people's kind of hatred and people's ideology is for someone who represents the other in their eyes to treat them with dignity and with respect and with some level of kindness. And that doesn't immediately change somebody. But that began the process of unraveling some of this in their minds and that was just as true for some of the jihadis as well. For example, being treated by an American nurse, for example. So somebody doesn't suddenly become no longer a jihadi, but again, human connection. And I think empathy. And I asked Jeff at the end of our 5 hours that was supposed to just have been 1 hour, I i asked him, I said look, why are you sort of tolerating me why why are you wanting to continue this conversation? And he said he said I completely dislike what you say. I completely disagree with what you stand for and the world that you want to live in. And he said and I'll actively fight against it. And he said but I respect that you believe in something. And he said, I respect that you are sincerely an activist. And he said, So that I can actually relate to. He said, Everything that you stand for is just kind of horrible to me. But I respect your sincerity. Well, if memory serves, you made more progress with him than that. Well well, he is still the the head of the Nazi Party, though. But wait, so./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Jason Fried. Jason is the co founder and CEO of Basecamp, formerly 37 Signals, which is a Chicago based software firm which produces the Basecamp product. He's also the co author of the book Rework, among others, and he also writes Inc magazine's Get Real column. And I invited Jason on the podcast to discuss the recent controversy over his no politics policy at Basecamp, which caused quite a firestorm on social media. As you'll hear, we discussed the pervasive failure of institutional nerve in the face of all of this social justice activism. How our politics has acquired a religious fervor of late, some of the cultural risks of remote work how to keep activists out of one's company antitrust regulations for big tech, how social media might be improved, ProPublica's, recent disclosure of the tax avoidance schemes of the richest Americans, the prospect of implementing a wealth tax and other topics. Anyway, a very timely conversation and a counterpoint to some recent podcasts where I focused on corporate cowardice. Here we have an example of corporate courage, which is certainly worth celebrating. And to that end, I bring you Jason Fried. I am here with Jason Fried. I'm sure there's a lot we could talk about. You have an interesting background, but we have a specific thing to talk about, which we'll get to in a second. But before we do, perhaps you can summarize what you've been up to low these many years. How do you describe what it is you do, and in particular, the company you started, Basecamp. What does that do? What is the product for those who have not experienced it? Yeah, sure. So, back in 1999, I started a business set called 37 Signals. We originally a web design company, and over a number of years, we eventually morphed into doing software development. And we did that because the product that or the the work we were doing was was website design. And we needed a better way to manage that work. We were using email and shooting things back and forth and things were getting lost. So we eventually made this thing for ourselves called which well, it wasn't called Basecamp yet, but it was like a project management tool, internal communication thing. And eventually we started using it with our clients and they liked it. And we said, maybe we can turn this into a product, and we did that in, like, 2004. So since 2004, we've been making software. We've made a variety of different products over the years. This is software as a service, stuff you'd use online. And we've always been a very unusual company in that we've done things our own way. We're fully independent. We're privately funded by ourselves and our customers, so we don't take outside money. And we've always sort of taken a different path than the rest of the industry. We've pushed back pretty hard against a number of different things, but basically we make two things basecamp, which is a project management and sort of internal collaboration tool for remote work. And also we make something called Hay, which is He y.com, which is our newest product, which is an email service. And so those are the two things we make today. And how big a company is it, both in terms of employees and revenue or valuation, however you want to consider it. Scale? Yeah, I can rail on rant against valuations because I think they're kind of ridiculous. So I'll just give you a sense of we've historically been at our largest, about 60 people, and since we're private, I don't disclose exact revenues, but we generate tens of millions of dollars in annual revenues and annual profits, and we've been profitable every year since we started the business in 1999. Nice. And you've also had a fairly intentional consideration of culture and business philosophy. You've published several books about business, and you write for Inc, I believe, regularly. So maybe you can summarize how you've thought about business and business culture up until this moment. Yeah, we are an independent company, and I believe in independence and small businesses. And part of the reason why we haven't taken outside money is because we don't want to be beholden to someone else. We want to do what we think is right. We want to try things. We want to experiment with things. And we found that the only way to do that is to be independent. So I'll give you a sense of some of the things that are different about Basecamp. First of all, in our industry, which is the tech industry, people are used to overwork and just being driven really, really hard. 1012 hours, days, all nighters, weekends, the whole thing. We just expect an eight hour day from people. Eight hour day, 40 hours a week. Very standard, very mainstream, very old school kind of work environment in that way, which is just give us a good day, 8 hours, that's plenty of time to do great work. And because of that, we require a certain degree of focus and attention to be put on that work. Which is why we try to eliminate a number of distractions. For example, we don't really have meetings at base camp. You know, if people need to get together, it might be two or three people, but we don't have scheduled meetings. We don't have daily standups. We don't have a bunch of all hands. We don't have the type of culture that a lot of companies do, which people are just drowned by meetings constantly in them all day, and they're chunking your day into smaller and smaller bits, and no one has time to get work done because you've got only 15 minutes here or maybe an hour there before the next meeting. So we kind of stay away from that kind of stuff. We we do four day weeks in the summer, so basically May through September, we only do four day weeks, which is a 32 hours week, which is really unusual. We've worked remotely for about 20 years. We have a very different approach, and our general approach is let's focus on the stuff that matters. Let's get rid of the things that don't. Let's put in a good day's work and then let's have a life. Which is, again, very weird in the tech world, which is not about life, it's about work all the time, and we're not about that. So there's a bunch of other things as well, but those are some of the fundamental things that we've done to make this place a different place. So you guys must have weathered COVID better than many other companies. You were already fully distributed. We've had an office in Chicago for the past ten or so years, but most of our employees are all over the place. So outside of Chicago, so we have people in the US and Canada, in Europe, Hong Kong and Australia, and we've always been remote. Even the local people who lived in Chicago, they may have come into the office once or twice a week. So we've always essentially worked as if we were a remote company. And I think we did weather it pretty well because we were used to it. We didn't have to scramble to figure this stuff out. But at the same time, I think it hurt us because we'd always leaned on each other a couple of weeks a year. So we would fly everybody into Chicago twice a year for about a week to have these in person meet ups where we got to share a meal and hang out and have some FaceTime and just have some social interactions, which we hadn't been able to do for the past year because of COVID And the last time we did it, I think, was fall of 2019. So it had been a while, and I think it was a problem because, by the way, everyone's going through this as well. So this isn't unique to us, but I think we realized how important it was or it is to see each other at least occasionally and remind ourselves that we're all human, we're all soft bodied organisms here, and we have feelings, we have emotions, and we're complicated. And I think we lost a little bit of that through COVID. And I think I know a lot of people have. It's been a very difficult year for a lot of companies. Obviously a lot of people. Okay, so what happened? Now we have a picture of you as an employer that sounds quite domineering and depressive, and I can imagine that your workforce is looking for every opportunity to revolt. So what has brought us together for this podcast? Well, it's about been about, almost two months now. In mid April, we announced a policy change that basically said we're not going to continue to talk politics at work. I'd say over the past few years, probably starting in, you know, 2016, as, as a lot of things started in 2016 and, and through the 2020 election and, and beyond. Now politics has invaded every aspect of life, obviously, and it's become incredibly contentious and it was sort of leaking into our day to day too often. Not every day, but enough. And we've been at this kind of low simmer for a while where we sort of felt like it was just part of life at work. But it started to get more and more concentrated and the boil began to heat up. And we were having discussions in the company that were company wide. So between 50 and 60 people were participating in these conversations or at least receiving the notifications that weren't all participating where things started just to go off the rails in a way that felt very non productive and unhealthy. And when I say non productive, I don't mean measuring productivity. I just mean this is not the kind of general mind space we should be in at work. We shouldn't be debating the most complicated issues of the day. I mean, these topics are hard enough to discuss, period. Professionals have a hard time discussing this stuff. And to think that all we have to do is mix work in there and that'll be the antidote and work will make it better. I mean, it's just the opposite. Work makes it incredibly hard to have conversations like this. We just decided when I say we, I mean David and I were the two owners of the business. We decided that we were going to not have political discussions inside Base Camp any longer. Now, to be clear, let me just clarify a couple of things. So when I say Inside Base Camp base Camp is the name of the company, but also the name of our product. So when I say Inside Basecamp, I mean in Basecamp, the product where we do our work, which is where we do all of our work. We just don't want political conversations leaking into that. If you want to set up a signal account, a group, WhatsApp whatever you want to do with discord thing to talk about that during the day, that's fine. But we can't have this in front of everybody whenever, at random times. Now, we're also quite political as an organization in a different way in that we are very outspoken about things that involve our work. So we're very much in favor of antitrust regulations against big tech. We're very much in favor of more privacy regulations because we think that big tech is just basically in everyone's face all the time and everyone's business all the time. It's unhealthy. So we push against that. We've gotten into some public, very public battles with Apple about the App Store and their rules. So we are still going to be involved in political discussions that directly touch the edges of our work, but that's the limit of what we're comfortable doing. And so we made that declaration along with a few others, and things kind of went sideways. Let's say we had about at the end of the period of time where this was sort of a topic, we had about 20, a little bit over 20 people leave the company as a third of your workforce, basically. Yeah. And a couple of other things to share here, which is that we offered an extremely generous severance package, six month severance for anyone who'd been here for more than a few years and three months, or yet three months if you've only been here for a few. And some people took us up on that. Outside of the policy changes, they were just ready to go anyway, and they were looking for a new opportunity, and this was a good chance for them to do that. That said, the majority of people probably left because of the policy change that we made. So it was a very difficult time, sad time, and I know a lot of people were sad, and it was challenging, a very challenging kind of existential moment for us as a company of roughly 60, to have a third leave. But we survived it and we're here to grow again. But it was a very interesting process, and I learned a whole lot about group dynamics and especially social media pressure and sort of the toxicity, of course, that we all know is there, but then when you're part of it and you see it coming directed at you, it's a whole other thing. And that was an eye opener, even though I knew it. But to feel it is different, and it was challenging. So here we are. But we've made the decision. We think it's still the right call. We think this decision is right, and we think that we're early on it. We have a history of being early. We've been working remotely for a long time before other companies had done it. 40 day work weeks is still, of course, not a thing most companies would do. We pushed very hard against venture capital, and you're starting to see more of a bootstrap revolution happening right now. We've been preaching this for 20 years. There's a number of other things that we've done ahead of the pack. And I think that sometimes when you're early, it hurts even more. You got to put your neck out there and give something a try. But to me, this is an extension of the experiment, which is base camp. And we feel almost a moral obligation to live up to our independence and to do things that other people wouldn't give us permission to do. That is why I'm an entrepreneur, to do things that I wouldn't have permission to do otherwise. Because if you're just going to do what someone's going to tell you to do, you might as well go get a job. It's kind of how I look at it. So we take that seriously and we give things a shot and we try things out and we see what happens. And time always tells and we'll see, we'll look back on this a year from now or two and see how it all played out. So things must have been heating up prior to your change of policy, right? Because you kind of ripped the band aid off with the policy change. But prior to that, were there signs that things were becoming dysfunctional at the company? Or was it really at a very low simmer and you just decided this is just something that needed to be corrected going forward? And then things only got chaotic after you announced the new policy. I think it had been ramping up. Now I have an organizational view that's different than some people who only see part of the organization. I'm the CEO. I'm part of all the discussions. I see what's going on. I'm part of other discussions that aren't public inside the company. And there was a ramp up. Now I'm only willing to talk about the things that have been made public because everything else is a private internal conversation, of course. But the thing that ultimately sort of ripped it all off, I think, was this conversation that was had about and this has all been made public, it leaked. So here it is. There was a list of names that had been kept by some people in the company, sort of you would call them. They were considered to be funny sounding names. Now this was a serious lapse of judgment. And when I say names, these are customer names that have had come in via customer service emails and this is a terrible lapse of judgment and I feel responsible too. I knew about this list about a decade ago when it first began, and I sort of thought it was put away at some point, but apparently it continued and it was growing. It hadn't been updated for many, many years, but it existed and had been moved between systems, like upgraded, moved between different file services and whatnot. Anyway, at some point an employee apologized for being part of that list. And I thought that apology was very fair and, and, and great. But in addition to that apology, there was a, a chart that was posted along with the apology, which is actually the ADL pyramid of hate. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Yeah, pyramid where at the bottom you have, I think, microaggressions and it kind of goes up three or four levels to the top. It's genocide. And the suggestion ultimately was that if we are going to be making fun of people's names, which again was a major mistake, that we could end up literally like Genocidal, which is just such an I don't know, it just I mean, it's obviously what it is. It doesn't make any sense. I think you might need to take some VC money to bring that project to scale. You would need some more people. That's true. There might be one reason to do it right. But the thing is, it was so interesting about it, was that some people thought that that was just simply okay. And I could not wrap my head around how we got to a place where we were talking about genocide at work. And the subject of the genocide was that we were potentially going in that direction if we were willing to make fun of people's names, which again, was wrong. And the thing that's so interesting to me is that there's got to be a time and a place where you can say, we screwed up and we're sorry, and it can end there. But in some cases, it can't end there unless you come to a full account of all the horrors that it could also end up leading to. And I just felt and Dave and I both looked at that and said, this has to be the end of that because we can't literally normalize discussions about genocide that we were potentially going to commit right inside our company. This is just so out of proportion. And that was ultimately what it was, but there had been a boil and this was sort of the moment where, like, we can't let this continue. This just doesn't make any sense. Would I be right in guessing that the person who alleged that you were on the ramp to genocide is also a person who took the buyout when you offered it? Yes. Well, obviously this is not just a problem for basecamp and that's why we're having this conversation, but it's become system wide in media and tech and Hollywood, and it truly is ubiquitous. And that's what's so alarming to many of us, that there's a fringe phenomenon, which should be a fringe phenomenon on the left, that is capturing our institutions and, you know, decay through twelve education. Now, to a remarkable degree, I tend to describe what we're witnessing under the guise of social justice politics as a kind of moral panic. And this is not to say that racism and sexism and transphobia aren't problems anywhere. I think they clearly are, but they're not problems everywhere, and they're being treated as such by a large group of activists and cult leaders. Frankly. I mean, people like Ibrahimax Kendi who are pushing a politics on the rest of the country that resembles nothing so much as mental illness. And because they enjoy this asymmetrical advantage with respect to social stigma, because being accused of racism in particular is so destructive to a person's reputation, these activists are successfully silencing and cowing most good people. And the people who do have the courage to call bullshit on all this dishonesty and bullying can be made to seem like they're joining the ranks of bad people who are really racist and sexist and transphobic. So now we have the spectacle of some of the least racist people and institutions on earth issuing abject apologies, the kinds of apologies that would seem appropriate in an exit interview from the Ku Klux Klan, just rending themselves over their past sins. And I mean, this is something that recently happened that you may have heard about this at Juilliard, right, and it's drama department in particular just tore itself apart over its alleged racism. The drama department at Juilliard is 50% black, circulating crazed lists of demands to itself, talking about how black bodies are being subjected to violence under this appallingly racist regime at Juilliard. And so this has become like the Salem witch trials. And I remain convinced that this fever will break at some point and that sane people will step forward and acknowledge that while there's still a lot of work to do to address specific inequalities in our society, we have made tremendous progress. I mean, there is in fact less racism and sexism and transphobia at this moment in America, in particular in our institutions, than there has ever been anywhere on Earth. And not to acknowledge that is becoming increasingly perverse. Even while you are right to want to work, to resolve, remaining inequalities. What you've done here, I think, is if it hasn't been celebrated sufficiently yet, it will one day be because the lack of institutional courage we're seeing in the most profitable companies that have ever existed. Company like Apple. Right. Which is just showing every sign of capitulating. The moment a Twitter thread gets started, it's really shocking and totally dysfunctional. How do you view the landscape of Tech in particular? There are a few other companies who have done more or less what you've done. I mean, I'm thinking of coinbase and shopify. I think in the case of Coinbase, I certainly didn't hear they paid the same kind of price you did in terms of employees leaving. Perhaps they didn't offer the same kind of generous exit package. But how do you view your tech colleagues and their commitment, or lack thereof, to holding the line here? Yeah, well, there's a few things going on. First of all, there does appear to be a tinge of sort of a religious fervor about this. I will say everybody who's ever worked here, I think, is a wonderful person and they have a great heart and their intentions are good. I don't wish ill will and anybody and I think that people are making their own personal decisions, and I'm fine with the decisions people make. The problem, though, is that when the alternative is that the takes are so uncharitable that if you stick around here I mean, there was some threats to people who work here still. And I'm very appreciative of the people who stayed and lived through this because some of them were being threatened terribly, that they were racist and they are white supremacists and that they are fascist or part of a fascist regime. It's like the most uncharitable possible takes on people. When it defaults to that, that's a problem that is their heretics, basically, and that does not sit well with me at all. To go straight there just does not make sense. And it's funny. Like I'm Jewish. I was called a Nazi. I was called a white supremacist. Of course, white supremacists want me dead too. To even have a suggestion that I would side with that is just to be completely blinded to the realities of what that is. Anyway, what happened is that the other thing I've kind of noticed here, and by the way, I've been off Twitter for about two months. I was off at about a week prior to this all going down, and I'm glad that I was, because my sanity was maintained to some degree during this process. But I was shown screenshots of what was going on on Twitter and the amount of shame and bullying directed at our employees, and that people who work here was just horrifying. And what's interesting is that I think part of the reason why, for example, Coinbase, I think they lost something like 5% of their workforce, something like that, we lost about 30, is that we have a smaller surface area. We have 60 people, and we had a page up@basecamp.com team, which we've since taken down, where everyone's name was there and people's Twitter handles were there if they were on Twitter. And it was very easy to throw a mob at that small degree of surface area and literally shame the hell out of people. Look, I've been on Twitter for years, got a few hundred thousand followers. I've been very active on Twitter, and Twitter is a double edged sword. And I've just come to realize that it's actually a terribly toxic soup of complaints and and attacks, and I don't want to soak my mind in that anymore, so I'm off of it. But I think Twitter plays a huge role in this, and it's one of the reasons why so many companies are afraid, because you get a very, very vocal group grandstanding and throwing bombs at individuals. Who's going to stand up to that. And I don't blame any of our employees who decided they just couldn't take that and they decided they had to leave too, because they didn't want to be part of that I can understand that. I really, truly can. That pressure must be enormous. And there was moments that I wanted to quit, like, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to be subject to this. How did this happen? So I get the pressures, but I think that's part of what's going on. If there was no Twitter, I think things would actually be quite a bit different. Now. Twitter is also wonderful. We've managed to make serious inroads against some stuff that Apple is doing, not around this, but around the App Store, by marshaling an audience on Twitter and getting people to understand our point of view and our take. And Twitter is wonderful in those ways, too. But, man, it's such a tricky place. And I think that's the main thing that's going on is that because Twitter is so public and because there's no identity verification on Twitter, you have no idea who is forming the mob, is forming the group. You just don't know. And so therefore, there are reasonable, good people on there who do have a different point of view fine. Who want to throw some bombs, that's fine. But there could be thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of fake accounts. You have no idea what's going on on there, and they can destroy people. And that's really sad. So I understand the self preservation, what it must take at that level to sacrifice somebody or something to say, I can't handle this anymore in public, so we're just going to do this thing to make that go away. I get where that comes from. Yeah, we have a massive coordination problem here, because this problem could go away instantly if enough people just stepped forward together. But because it's difficult to orchestrate that, and because the penalty for any one person summoning too much courage can be extraordinary, you have people just wanting to avoid the problem altogether. It becomes rational not to be the one to open your big mouth, because so much ire and dishonesty is going to be targeted in your direction. And this problem strangely doesn't go away when you become incredibly successful and wealthy. I mean, you can literally meet billionaires who have no more courage than your lowliest employee, because they're the first to think, well, what's the upside for me? I don't want to complicate my life. And in addition, I've got thousands of people and in some cases hundreds of companies. I was talking to a famous venture capitalist who shares all of my opinions, apparently, on this subject. When I asked him why he wouldn't talk about this publicly, he said, admittedly, this can be a totally altruistic motive, at least in his head. He said, Just too many people and companies depend on me. I've got hundreds of companies and people whose whole livelihoods are wrapped up in the next thing I do or don't do on some level. And why would I want. To complicate everyone's life by opening my big mouth on this topic. Yeah. Part of that is when you have so many interests that are intertwined and dependent upon one another, you have to worry about what the stakeholders might say and maybe your company is going to go IPO in a year and you got to worry about that. And there's a lot of things to worry about. The deeper your tentacles go and the more dependent you are upon this funding source or that eventual exit or whatever it might be. Which is one of the reasons why we felt like we could take this on and try it. We are, as I mentioned earlier, independent. We don't have a board, we don't have investors. If not us, who? And look, we even discussed, david and I, my business partner, I discussed like, this could take the company down. Like, this literally could. And you know what? We're okay with that if that was to happen. We've been in business for 22 years. This is more of a, I guess a stoic practice, perhaps, but just kind of the negative visualization. The worst thing that can happen here is business could go out of business and that would suck. It really would. It'd be painful and terrible. And I put my life's work into this. I'm 47, like, half of my life, basically, and the full majority of my of my professional life has been in this. I would hate for this to go away. I love this place. I love the people who work here at the products we make are fantastic. We have wonderful customers. We've done a lot for the industry, we care a lot, we give a lot back. We're very altruistic when it comes to the work that we do. We've open source tons of software, we've written a bunch of books. We're out there and very vocal and willing to say things that we think need to be said. But if that all went away, we would be okay with that. I mean, I don't want it to be that, but we had to come to that. And I can understand how other people who have far more dependencies and by the way, the other thing is if you've worked at basecamp, you can work anywhere. So anyone here who has a job could get another job somewhere else. If that happened, I'd feel terrible about it, but if that happened, that would happen. We're very grateful that that didn't happen and that we have a wonderful crew here and we've already been hiring and people are excited to work here more than ever in some cases, because they really want a place that's a refuge from what's going on in the world right now. They want a place where they can hone their craft and focus on the work, of course. Have social conversations with colleagues, of course, but a place where they aren't constantly having to address or decide whether or not. They want to wait in or stay out of the biggest topics of our time. They want a place where they can just kind of do the work. And so that's been wonderful to see the response and the company is great and it didn't hurt the business. We had a few extra cancellations that one week, but other than that, everything's back to normal. So that was reassuring too, that this is actually I think our position is actually quite mainstream. It's hard in the tech world to feel that because when you're surrounded by it, and especially if you spend time on Twitter, it feels like the whole world is against you at this moment. But the more I talk to people and the more people I've heard from, I received hundreds of emails from folks and I've talked to a lot of people and other CEOs and leaders and business owners and other employees at other companies, companies and just vendors that we work with. And they're like politics at work? That's crazy. Why would we ever talk politics at work? We don't talk politics at work. It's also a bit of an American thing since we have employees all over the world. We did lose a few great employees in Europe, but for the most part, a lot of people were just surprised that the reaction was what it was. And anyway, it comforts me to know that this is actually a pretty mainstream point of view, which is that politics and religion, I mean, there's other things you just wouldn't talk about at where people know not to talk about religion. And since politics has essentially become a religion these days, it feels like it fits in that category in the same way that if you were in an open office and you were to, you know, everyone's working in an office and someone just grabbed a podium and started to proselytize and talk about their points of view on religion or politics and that you should come this way or else everyone would say, like, hey, shut up. What are you doing? This is totally inappropriate. But given the fact that we use remote working tools like Basecamp and other companies use things like Slack and whatever else you use, it becomes actually you lose the attachment to the physical pushback of some of these things. It's the same way. This is a bit of a tangent, but it's the same reason why software often gets worse over time. It's because there's no physical edges pushing back on it. If you have like a physical object, if you're thinking about industrial design, so a can of soda or something, it's going to have to be a certain shape, a certain size, made of a certain material. There's just some obvious physical limits to what something can be. Software, however, can be anything. And that's why it often becomes anything. It becomes overwrought with more features and slows down and gets confusing over time. I think the same thing is true right now with remote work, which is that and by the way, I'm a huge proponent of it, but that you can throw things into this place that you normally wouldn't if you were in person. And that begins to erode sort of the wall between what's reasonable and what isn't, given the environment and the organization that you're in. So I think that's part of it too. And I almost don't blame people for falling into that because it's sort of a natural depression. I don't mean depression. Depression. Tractor. Yeah, in a tractor. It happens. I get it. But anyway, we felt like we had to basically fill that depression in so people wouldn't keep falling into it and we didn't normalize it and here we are. Yeah, there's something insidious about what gets done with silence in software and on social media too, because silence gets read as assent for better and worse and mostly worse. And then you can get attacked for your silence. I notice you haven't commented on X. That must mean you're a fascist. And then what's widely supporting this problem is that people's silence is being counted as acquiescence to this hysteria. Right? I mean, so, you know, the silence of people at every level, you know, including at the top, it's just giving space to all of these. Again, it does have a quasi religious shape to it. There's blasphemy tests and formal scapegoating of people reputational witchburnings. And all of it is so dishonest in most cases that it's really toxic and affecting almost everything. That was one of the other things if I could jump in on that. This is one of the other things that started happening, is I began to hear from a number of employees who, over the past number of months, felt very uncomfortable because they have their own personal opinions, even in support of some of these things, but they chose just not to share them because people sometimes will say that's privilege. I think just your own personal opinions are your own, right? You don't need to share what's on your mind with everybody. Your cause doesn't have to pull an opinion out of me at any time and some people just choose not to want to talk about these things. It's also not on everybody's mind equally. Some people don't have time to think these things through and they're not even sure where they stand. People are nuanced here. People are complicated and these are really complicated issues and you shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means that you're complicit, right? And that the non charitable or the uncharitable assumption is that if you don't say something and you don't stand up for something, then you are against it. And not only are you against it, but the against equals you're a racist, you're a white supremacist. The reach is just so vast so quickly, and also then if you want to kind of weight into it, because you maybe do want to participate, but you say the wrong thing, you don't necessarily know how to say it, and everyone's definition is a little bit different. You can be attacked for a microaggression or whatever it might be, and then you're like, you don't know where to go. And I feel like what ended up happening at base camp was that the self esteem of the organization felt like it was being battered. People were afraid to talk. They didn't know how they were being perceived. There was assumptions about what was being said and what side you were on. There were factions were being formed. And, you know, it's it's it's one thing to have a detailed debate with somebody or a political debate with someone when you know you can, at the end, clap your hands and go home. The problem with mixing this with work is that you have this debate or you stay in it, or you stay out of it, and staying out of it is communication as well. Again, like you said, it could be perceived as acquiescence or whatever it might be, but then you got to work with people who think you're a monster. How do you do that? This is just it's unfair. It's literally unfair to have that going on. And so, again, this atmosphere just does not feel conducive to a supportive place where we can actually do the work that we're here to do. And the other thing is that we're a small business. We can't really affect global change on any of these points anyway. I mean, it's one thing perhaps, to try to get a huge multinational corporation to make some moves, to make something better if you want to go in that direction. Like, I can almost understand the desire for that. We just don't have that presence. We can't make that. We can't press into the world in that way. We can press into our world, which is the tech world. We can press into antitrust stuff. We can press into software development. We can press into leadership and management styles and advocate for sane work hours and advocate for really fair pay and advocate for reduced hours and advocate for remote work and advocate for a lot of autonomy and agency and said organizations and all these things. That's our realm. That's our sphere of influence. And we can stick to that and feel we should be able to stick to that and feel wonderful about our contributions to the world without feeling like we need to take everything on that could ever be wrong. And that's how it began to feel, and maybe not to everybody. And I can appreciate how some people go or probably listen to this going jason, it wasn't like that. Well, it was where I sit in the organization, which is looking at the whole place and how we're doing and how we're feeling and the general sense and I hear from all sorts of different employees. So as CEO, I have to make some of these difficult decisions about what is this place like to work at? And this was one of those decisions. I really don't think anyone could challenge your lived experience as CEO. Jason, you're on firm ground there. So have you changed anything about your hiring practices? What advice have you given yourself here going forward, and what advice would you give to other tech leaders? Yeah, well, we put a few job ads out there so far, and we're getting wonderful people applying, and so we haven't changed the practices. I think it's pretty clear that we want to make sure that we're focused on the work here and that this is a place where you can come and do great work and hopefully the best work of your career, and that we want to create an environment where that's possible. And I think that we've shown over 22 years that this is a wonderful place to be for those reasons. And it's one of the reasons why up until just recently, I think close to half of our company have been with us for more than seven years, which is extraordinarily long in this industry. I think the average tenure at most tech companies is something like 18 months or two years. I think we had 20 some odd percent that were over ten years here. So obviously I'm bragging a bit, which is not something I'm comfortable with doing so much. But I will say that we built a wonderful company, a place where people can do great work with great people, and even the people who left are great people. I feel like everyone's a great person here. We have wonderful benefits and wonderful pay in a wonderful environment, and we don't screw people over with meetings all day, and we don't take people's time, we don't divert people's attention. So I think all those things are one of the reasons why we typically get hundreds or thousands of applications whenever we put a job up. And that's continuing, as we've seen already with the job as we put up. So I don't think we have to say anything else. We just have to make it clear where we stand. I mean, you could be relying on the fact that this hiccup got so much press that anyone seeking a job with you now knows what the rules are. But five years from now, if you couldn't really assume that, would you be asking any further questions or telling people just what the policy is upfront as a kind of filter against Woke or any other style of activism coming into the company? Yeah, we haven't really discussed that, like, what to do about that. I would just say that, first of all, politically, I don't care where you stand. I don't care where you stand religiously, I don't care about any of these things. They're none of my business like, that's how I look at them, right? They're completely none of my business. So you can come in with any point of view you want, but we have a collective society here and we're deciding to focus on the work and be essentially non political outside of our immediate things that we touch. So I don't know what that language might look like. I know Coinbase has said mission focused. That's their language. I don't like mission purpose. That's not my language. So I don't know what we're going to say at some point. So far we don't have to say anything. But I think, yeah, at some point it would probably make sense to come up with something like that. But we tend not to get ahead of ourselves on these things. Right now we're attracting wonderful people, hired some great people already, and right now everybody understands the advantage to working at basecamp. Can you really state it that categorically? Because I'm also hiring. I have my own ventures, and I would not be eager to hire a white supremacist, say, right, if you're a neo Nazi and you're applying whatever good a software engineer you might be, if you're applying for a job at waking up and those are your political views, well, we're obviously not interested. And I would extend the same judgment to the other side of the continuum if you're so far to the left that you think I'm a racist for saying what I just said on this podcast. I'm also not interested in working with you. How to communicate that? In my case, I probably don't need to communicate that explicitly because people are aware of what I'm up to on the microphone. But I'm just wondering if you're a CEO of another company and you basically see the world that way where you you just don't want extremists and extremist activists in your company because they are a species of religious fanatic and the laws against discrimination on the basis of religion notwithstanding. I'm not going to hire jihadists. There's a lot of people I'm not going to hire based on their Kakamami beliefs. So the question is how to select against those beliefs because they are so disruptive. Is there a generic advice to give to people? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe to samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Sam, how are you? Oh, my gosh. Andrew Yang. You launched my entire presidential run. Really? That's barely an exaggeration. There was this period when everyone who was supporting our campaign was because they heard me on your podcast. Yeah, well, it was amazing to witness and I was very happy to play a part in it. Obviously, the major assist was to get you on Rogan's podcast after you did mine, which just completely blew you up because he has this an audience so large that the mainstream media has yet to even understand what's happening in podcasting. It was fantastic to watch your ascendancy, and I can only imagine it's the beginning of the Andrew Yang Show on various fronts. So I'm happy to see the adventures. It's great to be a part of it. Well, you've been a huge part of it, Sam. And I have to tell you that I remember our conversation and then I remember watching your conversation with Joe on AI after you and I spoke. Right. And then I realized, oh my gosh, Sam was waiting for someone like me, where you'd been talking about trying to prepare society for AI for years. And you were like, how the heck is this going to happen? And I only figured out after the fact that you'd essentially paved the road for me before I'd even come along. I think in any political cycle, you would be a breath of fresh air, but in the current environment, I mean, now even more so. But back when you first appeared, what was so amazing and depressing was the juxtaposition between what should be possible in a US president and what is actual in the case of Trump. Before anyone ever heard of you. We all knew that there are people in the world who understand science and who have read widely and who are deeply curious about the way the world works and who are normal human beings who have fallen in love. With some person and at some point in their lives who feel real compassion for the suffering of other people and people who are clearly moved by ethical arguments and the progress of ideas. And you are clearly one of these people. You're someone for whom it's obvious that the last 1000 years of human progress has meant something and what we have in place of a person like that in the Oval Office, we have a barbarian with a smartphone who appears to love nothing but fame and money and golf. And an interesting thought has never escaped his lips. The juxtaposition is so grotesque. The level of hope that was hurled on your shoulders was kind of abnormal because of the context in which you're appearing. But really, it's the fact that you're not, in any sense a normal politician is wonderful. And I hope we draw more and more lessons from how far you got in the last campaign. And I hope you stay in the center of our conversation about how to dig out of COVID land, because obviously your primary plank in your campaign, the UPI, that is an idea whose time has come. And it was almost like you were a profit in light of what was soon to arrive in terms of an economic cataclysm. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to talking through all of this with you. It's quite a moment we're living through. Yeah. I thought, we're going to automate jobs and send everyone home, and it turns out that we're all home for a different reason right now. I was joking with somebody who was serious. I do think that I had the only stump speech that referenced the Spanish flu of 1918 for me. I was saying that that was the last time American life expectancy declined for three years in a row right. Which we just had happened in the last three years. But this time, I have to say, Sam, the things I was concerned about have all been compressed into a very short time frame. Instead of closing 50% of America's malls, we've closed virtually all of them. And now I know some of them are reopening, but a lot of those jobs are going to be gone for good. Yeah. So maybe we can talk about what you think the COVID pandemic has exposed in our society. Obviously, it's accelerated the arrival of the future. What are you expecting to be true once we emerge from this? At whatever point in terms of the effects on the economy and how effective or not are pumping trillions of dollars into the system will be and how the post mortem on that might reveal incredible levels of corruption, what are you expecting to be true in six months or a year? I think these are catastrophic times for tens of millions of Americans. And it's frustrating that, for whatever reason, the gravity of the situation is not as clear to some people as it is to me or others who know how tenuous a hold many Americans already had on their month to month, paycheck to paycheck ability to make ends meet. And watching our government try to send money to people even, is incredibly frustrating because we're missing so many people and the mechanisms we're using, like hearing these stories of people calling their state unemployment office day after day and just never getting through. Because we're asking systems to do things that they're not designed to do. Like the state unemployment office is not designed to all of a sudden take millions of inquiries. And the thing that occurs to me, as I think would occur to a lot of people listening to this why do people have to call a phone line and connect to a person in order to access these benefits that have been authorized? Andrew, let's drill down on that for a second because this is so bizarre and potentially it's such a missed opportunity. So your idea, which doesn't originate with you, but which you have brought into such prominence of universal basic income is that this is something that the government can do well, right? We should be able to just send checks to everybody. But in the current environment we're recognizing that even that isn't good enough. We need a digital infrastructure that can directly give money to people. And correct me if I'm wrong, currently you can't even apply for this money unless you have a previous tax return which is going to leave out millions of people who most need money. So maybe you can discuss how far we're falling short of what should be possible here in terms of just getting money to people as quickly as we can. So I just want to relate my experience with my organization. Just a number of weeks ago, we were trying to get money into people's hands and we called JPMorgan Chase, we called Citigroup and said, hey, can we get money to people in the Bronx who have accounts with you and need it? And they couldn't help us. We even asked them, can we buy bank cards from you that we will somehow physically get into people's hands. They couldn't help us with that. We wound up working with a local organization that had people's financial info, neighborhood trust. And we sent a million dollars to 1000 families in the Bronx through that organization. And my direct experience with this is the same experience we're having society wide where the government's saying, okay, let's send everyone money. Let's send everyone one $200. And then they look around and say, well, how do we know where people are? How do we know what account to send the money to or address if it's a check? And the best information they have is through tax returns. That's the majority of the mechanism they're using. And that misses tons of people. And this is, it turns out, millions of people who didn't file taxes because they made below a certain amount or they're working in frankly, some kind of informal environment where maybe they're cleaning people's houses and they're just getting paid cash. And so, you know, they, they didn't file taxes either because they didn't make enough or because frankly, they were just like, well, I'm just going to operate and pay my bills in cash. So because we're using people's tax returns, if you didn't have that connection to the government and a bank account on record for them to return your tax refund to, then you're not getting money. And unfortunately, that's tens of millions of the most needy Americans, because if you can imagine the folks that aren't filing taxes, many of them are quite poor. Yeah, the thing about UBI, which strikes me as so much better than many remedies that seem very much like it, is that there's no question of means testing it because people worry, well, does it really make sense to be sending Jeff bezos, say, $1,000 check? That seems like a waste of money. But obviously, if our tax structure were rational, jeff would be paying an enormous amount, I mean, more than anyone, back into the system in taxes. So it wouldn't matter if he was also on the dole getting UBI, right? So it seems like we should just take all the friction out of this and get money to everyone in the right increments, whatever that is. Yeah, we should be flooding the zone with money, honestly. And the incredibly frustrating thing is that if you really wanted to account for the Jeffs of the world, you could just take out of their tax returns later. They can just pay it back in 2020 or 2021 in their tax returns next year. And I've talked to people who did not qualify for stimulus checks because their income was too high in 2018, and they're in desperate straights now. And I was like, Their income has gone to zero. Maybe they had a small business. And so they're looking up saying, like, why am I not getting this $1,200? We should be giving them the $1,200. And if it turns out they didn't need it, we cannot always just clawed back in taxes later. Though to me, that shouldn't even be that necessary. But if you were going to worry about the gifts of the world, you could always just get it back after the crisis has abated. The theory being that right now we're in crisis mode. Right. So my concern now is that this is going to increase wealth inequality in ways that will be politically intolerable. And how we navigate that moment, I think, is everything hinges on that. I mean, I worry about the loss of social cohesion. I worry about a level of political partisanship that really seems to be indicative of a failing country. And I feel like we've been on the cusp of that really every day under Trump with respect to the level of partisan rhetoric and the degree to which the two sides can't get on the same page for the purposes of ordinary political compromise. And you obviously at this point, know much more about that than I do. But I just worry that in the aftermath of whatever is going to happen here economically, the people who will weather this much better than anyone else are the people who are already very well off? And whether a middle class exists in a year is really an open question. And so I just wonder what your thoughts are about that and what did you learn through the experience of campaigning all that time and going to more American cities than I will ever go to in the rest of my life? You should join me next time, Sam. Join me. You could come. We could be tied in terms of number of town halls. It had to be an amazing experience. So what's your view of our ongoing economic emergency between now and next year? You hit the nail on the head where we are going to eviscerate what's left of the American middle class. There was an executive in Silicon Valley, Vala Afshar, who said 2020 will vastly accelerate the adoption of and then he listed ten things and you think about them, you're like, oh yeah, all of that's happening. Ecommerce drone delivery, digital contactless payments, video conferencing, autonomous vehicles, wearable, health monitors, 3D manufacturing, voice mobile applications, online learning and smart robotics. Those things were already on the table and now we've just revved them up into overdrive because we need to do some of these things for public health reasons. And if you look at autonomous cars and trucks, wouldn't you rather get picked up in a vehicle that has been sanitized and a human has not sat enough? Unfortunately, all of the arguments is like, oh, you need a person for that. Now the person is a net negative in terms of someone's confidence level, in terms of not just the way we feel about it, but the actual transmission rate of the coronavirus. And so you're seeing companies that were on the fence about throwing people overboard and automating processes now making a very, very clear investment in these technologies. And you can see it in what the stock market is saying where when people are announcing record layoffs, their prices go up, though the stock values go up because investors know that if you can shrink your workforce, then the returns on capital will be higher. So this is going to be disastrous for tens of millions of American workers over time. And the government is the only entity that can meaningfully try to resuscitate the middle class and the opportunities available to most Americans in the days to come. And I know many people listening to this are not going to love the message that the government is going to be the center of the universe for these decisions. But unfortunately, that's what we're faced with. Yeah, well, that's always the first sticking point when you talk to someone who a fantastically wealthy person who recoils at the idea of paying more in taxes, who doesn't like the concept of redistribution, not because they're callously inconsiderate of the suffering of other people and not because they don't care about wealth inequality. Really the first thing you encounter is that everyone has a fundamental skepticism and granted, some of this is well earned, that the government can do anything right. It just seems like a waste of money to give the government more money to try to solve problems. And there's this strain of libertarianism that suggests that it should, by default, more or less always fall to the private sector to solve these problems. But a few things I think should be obvious here. One is that there are many problems for which the private sector can't produce a ready solution, either because the incentives just aren't there or you just have a massive coordination problem and you just can't respond flexibly all at once. And I think responding to a global pandemic is certainly an obvious commercial for a problem that needs to be solved even beyond government. I mean, we need a global response to this problem. The lack of our internal leadership is galling and terrifying, but our complete abdication of any role in the wider world in coordinating a response to COVID is also just embarrassing. But so the idea that we should be starving the government in the context where at any moment problems of this sort can appear and we're dealing with a public health emergency and an economic emergency simultaneously and we have these piecemeal efforts of various well intentioned billionaires riding in on their white horses to solve some very local problem delivering PPE or something. And in probably the most heroic case, you have Bill Gates really doing great work inspiring vaccine research or Jack Dorsey committing a billion. Yeah. So that's great. But clearly that is not a surrogate for the wise use of government resources. And even if you think the government is just incompetent and can't spend your money, well, the answer to that problem is to create a better government. Yeah. It's to actually get it operating at a higher level, not to say it's like, oh, well, because like you said, there really is no other answer to some of these massive problems. Yeah. Yeah. So it's an incredible time. It's the impossible task. Man I remember when I was telling people I was going to run, there's a silicon Con Valley CEO who said to me, he was like, what are you doing? You're going into the most useless environment possible. Because he liked me, he thought I was effective. And he was like, why are you running headlong into the universe of inefficacy? And then I said to him, I said, look, are things working well in government? No, in many, many respects. But do we need to get it working at a higher level to avoid calamity? I say yes. And I said this, obviously, before the coronavirus crisis came. What's funny? Sam, my wife and I, this is a little while ago, but there was like an interview you sat down for and you were describing me and you said something about, like this Andrew Yang fellow. He seems like a normal enough guy, except that he's crazy enough to ruin his life running for president. I don't know if you remember saying that. No, I don't. Yeah. So what are your thoughts on that front? What's the net of your experience running? And do you think you will run again or find or seek some other role in government? What's the plan there? My motivations are the same as they've ever been, and the problems have gotten bigger, unfortunately. I thought, well, it's unacceptable that we're letting this freight train just bear down on us and just ignore it. And and in my mind, the freight train was the progressive dehumanization of our economy. And I saw in the numbers that we had already blasted away millions of manufacturing jobs, and there was no real feedback mechanism unless you count Trump and his victory, because most of those manufacturing jobs were in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Missouri, like the swing states that Trump all won. And now the problems are bigger than ever. And, you know, my motivation is as high as it's ever been, so I'm just still trying to solve problems every day, and my capacity to solve problems is higher now than it was when I started my presidential run. There's no change on that front. I mean, I certainly learned a lot about becoming president by running for president, where I have a sense as to what I'd missed when I sat down with you a couple of years ago. And, like, I didn't realize that the process was going to entail certain things. But as long as the problems are there and I'm able to contribute, I'm going to do it. And if that includes running for office again, then that's what I'm going to do. Is there anything you would do differently? In hindsight? No. It's really fascinating. I mean, I could definitely talk about this for a while. One change I would make is that I did not realize that there were a couple of hundred beltway journalists in DC. That had significant influence over the press narrative, and I did not sit down with most of them, and most of them treated me like a marginal anomaly slash novelty slash ignore him and it'll go away picture. And I'm not sure if my sitting down with them would have changed that. Not all of them are as thoughtful as someone like you, where you just evaluate someone based upon your own judgment of them. That's one thing I figured out, too, is that there are so many people that represent these institutions that didn't really think for themselves. They just operated on whatever the institutional incentives or motivations were. So I don't know if my sitting down with these couple of hundred people would have moved the needle, but I would have done that. There were so many learnings in Iowa and New Hampshire where we got my favorables up, and this is actually true nationwide, where my favorability ratings were as high or higher than virtually any other candidate in terms of do. People like me, trust me, think I'm reasonable, think I'm well intended, and we just couldn't get them over the threshold of this person should be president right now. We got a lot of people to a point where they were like, really? Like Yang, really hope he becomes cabinet member or something along those lines, but we couldn't quite get people over a threshold of put him in the White House this year. And if I run again, that's one of the things I'm spending my time doing, is frankly normalizing myself more where it just felt like a little bit too much change for some people. Right. Yeah, I can imagine. It was also the calculation of electability. It's like, I want this guy to be president, but I would imagine that the rest of the country might not or he's not going to be able to sell himself in this election cycle. And so for anyone who's privileging getting rid of Trump above all else, that has to be a factor. That's how we wound up with Biden. Right. Is biden anyone's first choice. I'm not sure, but the electability and not Trump calculus has gotten us here. I don't know if you want to plunge into a discussion of the remaining months of the 2020 election now, or if you have other topics you want to hear. Well, you know, it's I mean, I I'm on the same page you are, Sam, where I think that Trump's a total disaster and defeating him is job one. That's why I ran. And now I'm going to help Joe defeat him because Joe is going to be the Democratic nominee, and to me, any day, Trump's in office is bad for civilization, bad for humanity. Yeah. Well, so let's jump into that. I'm not sure if your tongue is going to be tied on any of these topics, so I'm just going to just push until I hit a wall. Yeah. Obviously, he's confined himself to picking a woman for VP, which he did not mention to me when I talked to him about this very topic. Right. That's funny. So do you have a strong opinion about who you think he should choose to make his chances as favorable as possible? No, I now obviously spent some time with Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris. I've met Stacy Abrams, but I don't know her well. I don't know Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. I don't know a couple of the other people that we all know are in the consideration set. I like both Kamala and Amy. They're good, warm human beings behind the scenes. And Elizabeth Warren, I shouldn't leave her out because I know that she's also elizabeth has always been very generous to me as well, where I don't know if you remember the debate exchange when she was like when we were arguing over automation and I asked her to read my book, and then she actually read my book. We talked about it, like, the next debate where she commended me on it. So I like the candidates that I know, elizabeth, Kamala, Amy in particular. I don't have any insight as to where Joe is going to go with that choice. Do you have a sense of what would be the best choice, purely from the pragmatic point of view, just getting elected? I'd have to look at the numbers because I know Joe's team must have numbers on this where they're running it, and I don't have that data, so I wouldn't want to play pundit. Right. It is funny, Sam. Obviously, if anyone had run that, like, hey, should Andrew Yang run for president before the fact? The answer always would have been no. And so, obviously, that wasn't a very data driven decision. But when we were running, did we try and get data for any opportunity that we had in front of us, whether it was, like, how we were spending our money or who we were targeting or what to name the freedom dividend or whatever the choices were. It's like when we could get information, we'd get information. There was a point, thanks to you and other supporters, where we actually could run private polls, which we would do, and they were very helpful and insightful. Like, we we kept figuring out, you know, one of the things I was proudest of, Sam, is we got the approval for universal basic income up from something like 25% to 66% in the state of Iowa. And we knew that because we were asking people about it. It is funny. It's like certain decisions you make based upon instinct and gut and what you think is right, and then certain things you try and put a finger in the wind and get some numbers for. Right? So now, how worried are you about the Biden campaign at this point? So that the two major things that I see pulling the wind out of his sails are obviously the sense that he's too old to be doing this. And here we have there are two forms of asymmetric warfare here, and the first is, I guess, neurological. I'm sorry, every one of his gaffes seems to suggest senescence on some level. Every one of Trump's gaffes seems to just suggest more Trump. And I have no doubt that Biden is showing the signs of age. I mean, you just have to look at video of him speaking 20 years ago to see that. I also know I don't really care, given the current circumstance. And Trump is whether you want to think of him in neurological terms or psychological ones, he's a deranged person, and he's also a terrible speaker. It's also word salad that you get out of him much of the time, but strangely, it doesn't suggest anything like normal infirmity, even to his detractors. Right. I mean, Trump has this preternatural energy of a 300 pound child. And on some level, there's an unfortunate comparison between him and Biden with respect to age and the inability to get to the end of a paragraph with something like 100% confidence. They both show it, but it just shows up very differently and it has different political consequences. So there's that concern about Biden is he just too old to be in a debate with Trump or to campaign successfully? And then there's the me too scandal or incipient scandal with the Tara Reid allegations. And again, he's up against somebody who can match him 1020 X for every me too scandal. But it doesn't matter in Trump's world. Everyone has priced that in. It wouldn't even matter if we had video of Trump mauling some young woman at a beauty pageant, right? It's just he's functioning in a different political universe. So I'm just wondering how you think those two issues that are dragging on Biden are likely to play out. How concerned are you? I want to say three things about this, sam and I've seen Joe Rogan's commentary on Joe. I had a 30 minutes sit down conversation with Joe Biden last week because I was on his podcast. It should air soon. And he is fine. Lucid strong in that setting, and having been on the debate stage with him a number of times and then seen him debate, that stuff's not easy if you can just stand up there and just debate on national TV or do a town hall for like an hour, 2 hours. He still is very strong in many respects, and I think that the concern around his aging is overblown from my exposure to him as a human being. Like, I've been around him and like, he's fine. And you actually could not do some of the things he's done if you really were struggling in the serious, serious way. Of course he's getting older in the sense that's just empirical fact, but that stuff in my experience with him directly is not as much of a concern, and it's been overblown for a number of reasons. Part of it is, I think, in the Internet is like if you wanted to parse something, you could make anyone, I think, seem very gaff prone. And obviously, Joe, he's had some turns of phrase that you'd look at and see that they weren't ideal on the Tarot read front. The way I think about it, Sam, is when we've seen other people in this circumstance, like, a pattern has emerged where if you look at any of the serial predators, it's never won. There's just like this whole freaking drum beat. And in my mind, if you were to say, hey, has Joe sort of intruded on someone's personal space in a way that we're rustled or touched the shoulder, that sort of thing, it's like, sure. But to me, one of the reasons why the media is treating the Terror Reed allegations the way. They are is that there's, like, this one isolated event that seems very, very out of character and that if he was the sort of person that could do what he's accused of doing, in my opinion, the odds of there being other episodes that are similar to that sometime in the intervening 27 years would be, like, 99% plus. Because in every other instance, it'd be like if Harvey Weinstein did it to one aspiring actress and then never again. That's not the way someone in that position of authority who's a true predator would operate. Like you would see it would happen again, like months later. Months later, there'd be this whole freaking cascade that we've seen with other folks and which we've seen with Trump. What is he, 19 allegations? When you talked about this video of him fondling someone at a pageant, I thought to myself, it's like, does that exist? We wouldn't be surprised if it did, right? So to me, those two concerns are not really the main areas of this election where it's going to be contested. And that leads me to the third thing. The third thing is that this really is going to become, like it or not, I believe, like a referendum on Trump. And whether 50% or more of us say, this is not the direction we want the country to be heading in, we need to change. And the funny thing is, Joe defeated me, among other people, and Joe one states that he didn't set foot in. There's like this familiarity and comfort people have with Joe where this election, I believe, is going to be like an up or down vote on Trump. And I think that people are going to put thumbs down because we're trapped in our homes. This pandemic has been mishandled at the highest levels. You still have chaos in the PPE procurement markets with the federal government outbidding states and just swooping in and grabbing gear for a national stockpile. And like, rich states are outbidding poor states, even as the biggest public health problems are in poor parts of the Southeast in Louisiana and Mississippi. So I think that Joe you shouldn't evaluate it as like in the way where Joe's campaign is limited right now because of the crisis. There's no massive rally I expected at this point in time where I'd be out there campaigning for Joe because we'd all be out there having rallies. And the fact that we're not is categorically not a good thing because it deprives Joe's campaign of the opportunity to make a case in conventional ways and have these great backdrops and have Press and Surrogates and me and a dozen other people out there pounding the pavement and making the case for them. So all of that is not good. But I still believe that there's a great chance that Joe wins and Trump loses because so many people are fed up with this White House. Well, how much should we blame the other Republicans. And I guess it's an interesting question to put to you because it's pretty obvious that the way you campaigned and your political intuitions here to be as nonpartisan as possible and just to focus on problems and your recognition that there has to be a bipartisan solution to these problems is fairly overt. But when you look at the way in which the Republican Party has become a personality cult around Trump, people with real political reputations, you know, people who used to be serious people, even if you you know, whether or not. You agreed with their policies. The way in which they have enabled this incompetent crime family, the Trumps, and propped them up in the face of a deluge of scandal. Really? But the deluge has been so incessant that it's impossible to focus on any part of it long enough to blow it up into a proper scandal. It's just this has not seemed like normal American politics. Everyone expects some degree of vanilla and complicity and cowardice in politics, but this is just, it just seems like we're in another universe. I mean, we, we are in some kind of banana or a public territory with how our politics has turned. And it is the story of Republican complicity people like Mitch McConnell. And so I guess even beyond the election, I think if Trump loses in the fall, I think many people will feel like there should be some reckoning, right? I mean, I feel like we're going to need a, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to process the toxicity of the last four years. And that's in the, in the best case of Biden winning and all of us being able to hit reset in 2021, there's no Truth and Reconciliation Tribunal coming politically. How should we walk that line in the next six months with respect to casting blame on Trump's enablers? And just in the case of Biden winning, I guess I'm tempted to say, all right, we're giving a mulligan to everybody because there's so many problems we have to solve. So remember those four years where you utterly destroyed the reputation of the United States on the world stage and flirted with the complete unraveling of our institutions? Well, we're just going to give you no harm, no foul on that, and let's reset. But I feel like the rancor may not end. I think that it just may not be open to us because we will finally confront what a horror show this has been. One thing I disagree with you on, Sam, is this thing has been going on for decades. Yeah, well, I wouldn't actually deny that. Yeah, I don't think you would. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app the Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, brief housekeeping. The waking up course. The groups feature is finally launching, I believe, in the next update. So more or less any day now. And this will give you the ability to schedule a time to practice with friends and colleagues and even strangers. You can just go out to people in your world and then meet in a virtual group where you can sit in silence or listen to a guided session or both. I'm actually excited about this. It will obviously create social support for people and accountability, but I think it'll just be very cool to see your friends practicing with you in silence. I'm hoping that it will simulate the intimacy one experiences on retreat. It's amazingly intimate just to sit with people in silence, so hopefully that proves valuable to everyone. Needless to say, if you discover bugs, please let us know at support@wakingup.com. And if you're not using the app and you want more information, you can find all of it at that website. The app launched now nine months ago, and the feedback has really been great. It is very gratifying to know that so many of you are finding it useful, but it's still very much a work in progress and it will be absorbing much more of my energy over the next year or so. So stay tuned for changes and more content. Okay, well, in this episode of the podcast, I speak with Ricky Gervais. You surely know Ricky from The Office and Extras and many of his other shows, most recently Afterlife on Netflix. You can also see his great hour of stand up there titled Humanity, and he has another one in the works called SuperNature. This conversation was a long time coming. I've been emailing with him for years at this point, but we had never met, so I took the opportunity to fly to London. I thought this was one that had to be done in person. Anyway, it was great to finally meet Ricky, and we talk about many things. We talk about comedy, obviously, and fame, the effect of social media. We talk about the risk of telling offensive jokes or saying much of anything, really. We talk about Louis CK. And Brexit and Trump, political hypocrisy, the state of journalism. We touch many things here, as always, if you find conversations like these valuable, you can support the podcast by becoming a subscriber through my website@samharris.org. And I left the bonus questions in this episode. But once my website is revamped, which is also happening very soon, we'll be rolling out the bonus questions I've acquired for other guests to subscribers. So those, along with Ask Me Anything episodes of the podcast and some other content that will soon be coming is there to incentivize subscription. Because while the podcast itself is free, subscriber support is what makes it possible. And now, without further delay, I bring you Ricky Gervais. Do you want to make sure that's recorded? Yeah, no, it is recording, but I just want to make sure the level is right. So yeah, I think as close to you as you need to be, but yeah, I want you to put your back out for this interview, so you should be uncomfortable. Okay, why don't I do that? Get you comfortable. I will move the mic. What kind of chair is that? It's a novelty chair from Graham Norton. Right. It's not too much. I have known mic technique this, Mike. Well, you are a podcaster, so you should have some mic technique, no? Yeah, you can get right up on it, but you have that big laugh all over the world. I'm going to ask you to leave the room if you have to do that again. Big laugh. That's the lovely euphemism for annoying noise. It's a great laugh. You know who's the biggest laugh? Have you ever heard? Jeff bezos laugh. No. He has the most cartoonish billionaires laugh. It's like a rifle shot. I imagine it's fantastic. It might be sort of a linear relationship of wealth. Louder and louder. Okay. Right. There we go. I'm going to get you now. Two idiots staying up to try and sound intelligent. I am here with Ricky Gervais. Ricky, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. I've traveled a quart of a mile for this in my office very near my house in Hampstead. You've flown 3000 miles? So guess which one of us is jet lag? That's good. I have the advantage. It's an honor for me. It's been some years that I've wanted to just meet you and I just noticed that it wasn't happening by accident, though we were exchanging emails, so I just wanted to make it happen. The day has come and it's a thrill. I'm a bit nervous. You're a professional comedian. I know, but I'm scared of famous star. I'm scared that us two in a room would egg each other wrong and we say things that would be you can't have a subtle argument anymore, is my point. There's no place for nuance or everything that has to be binary for the right people to agree and disagree. And there's no context anymore. No one cares about context anymore. They take anything out because it's all about point scoring. So that's why when we're discussing contentious or having a discussion seems dangerous in the modern world. Well, I want to talk about that. Before we jump into that, I just want to ask you a few questions about just how you got into this position. At what point did you become famous and how long were you working in comedy before you had to think about the world? Paying attention to I guess it's sort of an accident, a very slow, gradual process. And by the time I decided to be a professional comedian, I sort of nearly was one because The Office came first. Right? Well, I actually started stand up before The Office went out, and I think my first Edinburgh show was while The Office, the first series was was going out on TV. So I certainly started right in The Office before I started doing Stand Up to any degree, but they're about the same. But I think it was still relatively late. Okay, briefly, I was a failed sort of musician, early twenty s. I then eventually got a a job, just a job in my twenty s. And I worked in an office for like nine years, I think, which is what The Office is sort of based on. You know, I wasn't taking notes. I wasn't thinking, one day I'll be a comedian and I'll write about this. I was thinking, this job is near my house, pays the rent, and I've got friends and it's fun. And then, because I worked as part of it was the admin center for the university. I helped a local radio station get its license by letting them promote to the students. And out of the blue, because I got on with them, it's a tiny little station that just got his license called XFM. They rewarded me with the job, and again, it was still an admin. I was the head of speech, and they wanted me to write little news things and help out in The Office. It was a gift of a job, and I was meant to write things for the DJs, what was on that night, or bits of news, because I'm lazy. I thought, Do I have to type this out? Can't I just go on and say it myself? It would be quicker. And I went, yeah, go on. And I went on, and I was funny. I was just myself, and I was sort of funny, but a normal guy being funny. Never thought that this would be my job. And soon I was popping up on three or four different radio shows throughout the day, and it was just a day job with a little bonus. And I think from that, someone was listening. They were starting a new show on Channel Four. This is 1997, and it was called the 11:00 Show. So it was sort of like a cutting edge, no hold barred, sort of Saturday Night Live for new comedians and pretty much anything you'd say. What you want. And I went on there a couple of times, and I suppose that was when I thought, oh, this is good. This pays better than a real job. It's less work, it's fun, but still I was thinking, this is not going to last, I'm just doing this. And then I thought, no, I'm old enough now to do this full time. And I already had David Brent, along with lots of other things that I was doing. Just again, it seemed like I was an amateur comedian all my life. So you had David Brent as a character before the office. Yeah, and he wasn't called that. It wasn't until he started thinking about it and he's got to have a name. And then there was this sort of nice synchronicity that I was earning enough and didn't have a day job to sort of write The Office, and it still didn't go out for another two or three years. I went out in July 2001, and then I also got my own show from the Channel Four thing as a as a little spin off called Meet Ricky Juice. You know, again, it was getting like a million people and but I knew I had The Office, and I knew The Office was sort of more important, and I thought, this is what I want to kick the door down with. What year did the office there? 2001. July the 9th, 930. BBC Two. When did fame kick in? When did you suddenly well, that was certainly I'd have to say that I would be getting recognized on the streets and see things about me in the news and my picture around immediately. The first season of The Office, yeah, but still, most people I came from nowhere because all the other stuff was small. I had a bit of a cult following from the 11:00 show, but we're still talking a couple of million people watching that. And indeed, the first series, The Office, I think only got like one or 2 million people. Then it repeated and it became a cult, and then it was like 4 million. Then the first episode of the second season got started at 5 million. So it grew sort of gradually and quickly, but, yeah, that was certainly when I thought, oh, okay, I'm a professional comedian now with a bit of profile. And it was creepy at first. In fact, I feared fame before it happened because I was sort of older and wiser. I was like, you're in your 40s, right? Yeah. Well, 38, 39 starting and then after the first year of The Office, I think I hit 40. It would have been yeah, it would have been July 2001. I was just 40 and lots of things to think that I didn't want to be lumped in with those people that just wanted to be famous. So I wanted to be clear that this was an upshot of fame. If you become a successful comedian or actor, you're probably a bit of a famous one just because. And I never signed that never signed that deal with the devil. Make me famous, and you can go through my bin. So I was quite militant about my privacy and probably too much now. It's cool. Now I don't care. And I also thought it would be an injustice for people this how lies about me, because I thought my reputation was everything, and now I think it's still important. But I realized that reputation is what strangers think of you and characters, what your friends know you are. And so I don't care anymore. Now I hear things about me, I think, who cares? No one cares. No one cares. People certainly pretend to care. They give a good semblance of caring. Yeah, but then if that's like really, if you take social media not just social media now lazy journalism, the the worst bit of clickbait for me is so and so said a thing, and people are furious. No, no, they're not point nor 1% people are furious. The rest of us don't give a fuck, and we wouldn't even know about it if you hadn't made it headline and shown two tweets as an example. So that's the problem. If you take what social media is saying, you might as well go and visit every public toilet wall in the world and get offended by what they've written. Except there are now real world consequences to this kind of amplification. Of course. That's exactly what it is. Twitter is I mean, Twitter has become more and more of a cesspool, and you mustn't take it seriously. You got to treat it like it's virtual. And I don't get a lot of stick, really. I see some people that it's like they're keeping back a mob with a flaming torch. It seems to me that you have created a persona for yourself that inoculates you against the worst part of this. Well, first of all, comedians in general have a little more latitude than normal people. A comic can get away with something that a politician could never imagine saying traditionally. Traditionally, historically. But now it's like it's worse to make a joke about a bad thing than to do the bad thing. I want to talk about that, about whether comedy has become more dangerous. But I also want to notice that I do think you are you're managing to fly above or below the radar in a way that I feel like other comics aren't. Because I don't know if you understand the physics of it, but I feel like you are more bulletproof than most. Partly because you don't appear to give a shit about any kind of backlash. Well, that has to be the perception, I think, for a comic, because as soon as you start apologizing to the mob, you might as well give hecklers the stage, because that's all they are. They're hecklers. And you've got to be in charge. And I think if I have achieved that, I've achieved it for lots of reasons. That's happening under the water. That is, I try and make my stuff bulletproof so I can defend it. I don't go out there and go, I'm going to say what I want and offend who I want and I'll ruin the day and I'll undermine the moral fabric of society and I don't care. I'm not like that at all. When these these jokes, these routines hit, you know, Netflix or BBC, they've been they've been tested on people around the world, they've been honed. But then there's been a sea change in people's attitudes, of course. Are there any jokes that you once did and could have fully defended at the time, but now wouldn't do? Has anything fundamentally shifted for you? Well, I think the big impossible feat through recent changes is you can make your jokes bulletproof at the time, but now you have to make them bulletproof at ten years time, just in case. 10,000 years time, exactly, yeah. People never going away. John Wayne was canceled 40 years after he died recently for not being woke enough in 1971. So just how woke did you expect John Wayne to be? I know, exactly. Yeah. Disappointed in an interview for Playboy magazine, no less. People reading Playboy nowadays are going, this is this system woken up, you know, so but you you can't you can't legislate against stupidity, you can't legislate against the future. All you can hope is that people understand, like, I talk about this in my new show Supernatural, about the council culture, that it's not enough to apologize anymore and move on. People want blood, people want you ruined because it's a point scoring competition now. So Kevin Hart did some shitty, childish, homophobic tweets ten years ago, but my son's not getting it at the time. He got up back, I said, oh, sorry, I didn't mean like that. I was just being silly, really. Sorry. Deleted them all. Then he gets the the job of his life. You know, last year, hosting the Oscars, the tweets come back up. The mob on Twitter going, what about these tweets? You're finding a homophobes? Just apologize again, Kevin. He said no, I can't keep apologizing. I said, Sorry, and I can't keep hogging. So he lost a job. Now he's got a point, really, because if there's no value in saying sorry and changing and progressing and evolving, why bother? He might as well just do those tweets again. And it's really counterproductive. Also, if the apology isn't sincere, let's table that for a second. I want to talk about what I am thinking about as kind of the physics of apology. Just how can people redeem themselves? What should constitute an adequate apology? But before we get there, I want to just stand this issue of dredging the past in search of controversy, because this did almost happen to you recently. It was more targeted at Luis. So you had that interview show where you sat down with Lucy K and Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld. Yeah. And you guys use the N word, and you're you're discussing why it is that that only two of you ever use the N word and the other two of you never do. But you're using the N word in the context of having this discussion. Right. And then this gets exported to social media and media in general in the most inflammatory framing. The thing that was, in my view, totally exculpatory. And it was exculpatory at the time, and I don't remember you getting grief at the time for that. It was like 2011 was that you were explicitly referencing one of the most famous bits of comedy ever is that Chris Rock's bit about N word. There are black people and then there are ends. Anybody goes back and forth, and me and Jerry were saying, we never use that. Right. Louis CK. Does. And then he and Chris were going back and forth about that. And I think Chris said that he was black. But the most important point is that at no point was there an indication that anyone there was a racist or whatever used this term to express racism. And the person who got the brunt of it, of course, was Chris Rock for allowing Uncle Tom help midwife this atrocious that was their headline, and the rest of us was collateral damage. But he was the one that got the real hate thing that is well, I'm louie, because of obviously they were trying to find other reasons to carry him further. Actually, I want to talk about that as well. But you must have heard what happened to this guy, Jonathan Friedland at Netflix. The communications director at Netflix. No. Okay, I probably do, but this is probably now a year old. The story didn't get a lot of press, but it's so emblematic of what has gone wrong in this moment. So I just want to kind of get your intuitions on it. But the comic, Tom Segura, who has a couple of Netflix specials, very funny guy, who in his latest special, used the word retard or retarded. I do know about this, but I can't remember the details. Goal. Yeah. Okay. So he used this word, and there was a lot a lot of blowback. I mean, Netflix got lots of grief from, you know, parents with with kids with mental disabilities. And so they had this sort of emergency meeting of the, you know, the top brass at Netflix. So it's Reed Hastings, the CEO, and, you know, the ten people under him, and this guy, Jonathan Friedland, who was their communications director, and he said, Listen, we've all been blindsided by this. Who knew this was this bad? But apparently the word retard is as bad as the N word. But he used the word right. He said, it is as bad as this word for the black community, and we have not understood this yet. He's using it in the spirit of saying he used the R word in full. Right? He used the N word in full to illustrate how bad the R word is. But again, it was in the service of saying, this is how woke we have to be. This is how scrupulous we have to be. We have to figure out how to navigate this such that we make amends and don't offend any more people. Right? But his uttering those magic syllables again in a context where not only was he not expressing racism, he was expressing the most energetic antiracism. Right? He got fired. Fired him, because the magic syllables had been used in that context. And I happened to find myself at dinner with him, just randomly at a dinner party, and had not heard the story. So I'm hearing it directly from him and his wife in the, you know, maybe two months after he had been fired. And it seemed to me they hadn't even absorbed what had happened to them, right? So I'm asking him wait a minute. So did anyone in that room, did Reed Hastings or anyone under him or even any of the millennials at Netflix who were calling for your head, did anyone think you're a racist? And he said, oh, no, no. But it's like he hadn't even absorbed the implications of that. This was a human sacrifice to a taboo, of course. And it seems to me that, then again, there's something comforting in that, because a lot of people if that had happened to me and I've been fired and lost my livelihood, I'd still want people to know that actually I wasn't a racist. That would still be the worst bit for me, for people to think I was a racist. That, to me, is like a little light at the end of the tunnel. That, okay, I've fired. I've lost her, but at least I'm not a racist. And that's what people know the power of it. They know it's the worst thing to be and accuse someone of. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So that's the power people have when there's a lynch mob out to get someone. People do sacrifice good people because they can't get to the bad people. But that's what's so perverse about this circumstance, because what it's selecting for politically especially, are the bad people who don't care about being called racist. Right. Everyone that's being fired and publicly embarrassed about a misdemeanor and being called a Nazi, there are real Nazis who are getting away with it, just waiting for the charge. Exactly. Yes. This must be amazing for real racists to be out there and going, it's all right, everyone's a racist now. This is a great smokescreen. We've got we've got people out there calling people who aren't Nazis Nazis, which makes us look they don't know they don't know the real Nazis from the people who said the wrong thing once. You know, it's a happy accident, I think, and it plays into the hands of the genuinely bad people. There are real racists and there are real Nazis and there are people who are pressing, actually oppressing people and causing harm. And then the people who joke about these things, who are the poster boys, they get the brunt of it. It just makes the world slightly worse. All right, I want to swing back into social media and controversy for a second, but I have another question about fame. Have you gotten too famous for your own comfort? If you could reel it back and be less famous or be differently famous, would you? How much does fame? But then that's like saying, I want to be able to turn on and turn it off. I like getting a seat in restaurants, but I don't like people looking at me when I'm shopping for pants. Well, that's sort of tough. So all I can do is demand. All I want is the same rights as anyone else. That's all I want. The money sorts out the privilege. Right now, I just want but now I don't court it. I live in a place where I can walk around and I'm not bothered. Now, how different is that from city to city? Are there cities like, if you go to La or New York, are you bothered more than in law? I'm not bothered because I'm a 58 year old in a stable relationship who doesn't do drugs or gamble or break the law or go to I'm not interesting. But you must get the incessant demand for selfies. Yeah, and that's nice. I never refuse that's nice because I hear stories of so and so and so. A person who genuinely likes your work and they think they know you and they have to pluck up a bit of courage to ask for a selfie. And I see they're nervous. And I also thank you very much. My pleasure. And that that's not that to me isn't being bothered, that's being a person, that's being a human being. You know, if I wasn't famous and someone asked for help that didn't take anything, I'd do it anyway. Have you got change? Yeah, I have. Yeah. It's not like you don't walk away going, what a great person I am. So that means it's no skin off my nose. You see you're in a restaurant eating with friends and people come up to the table and interrupt your dinner asking for a selfie. Again, slightly annoying that they haven't read the situation right again. But usually I'm really left alone in restaurants because they get it. I could go to places and be bothered. If I went to some sort of loud, drunken bar at 11:00, I'd be bothered. If I go to a posh restaurant, I'm not bothered because you sort of create your safe spaces. We get onto that. So, no, it doesn't really bother me. There is a level of fame that's clearly paralyzing or at least deranging of a normal life where the people I guess it may correlate with some of the variables you just checked off as not having. I mean, being whatever the Justin Bieber level of fame is or the Lady Gaga level, you can't get out of the car because there's 100 people waiting for it and you have to hide and wear beards. I haven't got that because I haven't got that demographic. That's a big difference. Yeah. I also haven't got that sort of I see comedians who they caught it. They say horrible things and scummy things and they get scummy people and then they get annoyed when they're scummy people that they've pandered to act like scummy people. Now, all my fans that I like to think are normal, but they're not crazy because I haven't propagated that sort of environment. Do you know what I mean? They're right. I'm not I'm not on telly all the time. If I go to A, I might play with 10,000 people, but I'm in the car before they're out of the door. If if I went and if I started stage diving, it'd probably get a little bit scary. You know what I mean? That would be hilarious. Do it once just for the image. Exactly. So as much as I sort of fear it and I'm probably a little bit phobic about and I joke about the general public, ironically treat them as scum and say things like that. Some of it I don't mean it. They know that I appreciate my fans more and more, actually, as I get older. And that's what makes you bulletproof. Well, that comes through. But it's interesting that you have that layer of I don't know if this is on some level the David Brent persona or there's a few of your personas that you use comedically where you're above everyone. Exactly. And yet the jokes on you. Right. Yes. Right. Well, that's the important point. So traditionally a comic is a court gesture. They're down in the mud with the people making fun of the king carefully. You don't want to get off with his head. And so we have to be low status nowadays. People know what comedians like me earn. It's hard to be low status on a Gulf stream. Exactly. Right. So what do I do? I do it in two ways. One, I invite them in. I let them look behind the curtain. I go, what? You think it's brilliant being rich and famous all the time? We'll look at this and I say, it's not all, look how I embarrassed myself in front of the queen, or the first time I took a private jet. They thought I was the cook, so I let him in and go, I'm one of you. Right. I know I shouldn't be here, but it's. Like I'm taking the piss and it's not all roses. The other way I get low status is I talk about things where they're better off than me, genuinely. I talk about being old and I'm going to die soon, I'm fat, I'm going bald, I've got distended testicles. So I do that and then you can sort of get away with more. They get it. They get the joke. And I think that's preferable to lying. I think that's preferable to me going out there and pretending to be on welfare or pretending to still care about this or that. So I joke about being rich and I do it arrogantly so that hopefully they get the irony right. It's a great position to be in because you get all of the benefits of being honestly appreciative of your fans and you get all of the fun of playing that other layer of pseudo arrogance. But also there's a part of me that says, honestly, if I can do it, anyone can. They know that I've probably worked hard and they know that I probably had something. But it is quite an inspirational story, really. A fat, working class kid from Reddin who suddenly makes it at 39. That's quite a good story. It's not like I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and I had privilege, do you know what I mean? There's nothing to be jealous of with me. They look at me up there in my bad jeans and fucking sweatstained, black T shirt, drinking Fosters out of the can and they go, I don't want to be him. I want his money, but I don't want to be him. They can laugh about it because we have to be the butt of the joke, really. And with all that arrogance and with me playing the war story, I'm always the butt of the joke. If you look into it. I might. I'm being childish. If I'm winning, I'm smugly. Being a child. Is there an example of a comedian who has a fundamentally different geometry to their comedy? Who you would well, there are comedians that don't go there with themselves. They go out in a suit and they do puns and they're good at what they do. But those jokes are as good to read, you almost don't need them there. So my stuff can't be stolen. Do you know what I mean? It's not syntax and semantics, it's attitude. It's a mood. It's a man as angry about the world as we are. It's almost not about the lines. There's a narrative. And it's interesting you've thought about persona, because that's the other thing that the problem that some people don't get. It is a persona. It's a persona as much as David Brent, but it's just more subtle because I use it as my own name. So I treat the audience with a lot of respect in that I want them to be smart enough to know when I'm saying somewhat, I mean and when I'm saying something I don't mean, and I almost explain that in my news, Supernatural, I come up and I do a joke and I go, that's irony. That's when I say someone I don't really mean and you as an audience, you laugh. You're laughing at the wrong thing because you know what the right thing is and I explain it at the beginning. You also have that bit in humanity where you go through a list of jokes that you would never tell while telling the joke. And again, I've set them up, I've warned them, I've warned them. I almost challenge them to be offended. And of course they're not, because they're ready for it. And then people say, Ah, but the problem with irony is some people don't get it. And I go, yeah, that's true. They go, So someone can be laughing for the wrong reasons. And I go, yeah, I don't know what I can do about that. Because if you water the irony down so much that you're not irony, I might as well go out and say, racism is wrong, isn't it? And get a round of applause. Well, that's great, that's lovely, but it's not funny. To me, comedy is an intellectual pursuit, and as soon as you start pandering or wanting everyone to give you a round of applause because they agree with you, then you've lost something comedically. And I think you've got to be a bit cleverer with it than just going out there. And it's not my problem who's at the back. When you play the 10,000 people, there probably is a rapist and a Nazi. What sort of door policy is that as you come in, have you ever raped anyone? You're not coming. It's like, I'm not responsible for the people at my gig. I'm only responsible for what I say. I'm not responsible for how they take it. Do you know what I mean? And the intention behind what you say should be what's most important, what you're honestly attempting to communicate if your speech somehow misfires, if you use the wrong word in the wrong context. I mean, I think there was a someone told me about this. This may be closer. I think this is a British story, which this must be very well known to you, and I'm going to botch it because I'm from America. But wasn't there a comic who recently used the phrase colored people in the US. Saying colored people puts you in the south in 1963. Just a straight up racist. But people of color is the perfect phrase, right? And to get that wrong is enough to have it's about intent. I think if you were going round saying colored nowadays, it's hard to believe you haven't heard that. We've moved on, right? It could be genuine. Yeah, it could be a genuine mistake. I remember when it was the polite thing to say, and then when I say that people thought it was too harsh, saying black people with good intentions. And, of course, if things change, then it's a bit odd that you militantly stick to words that people have moved on from. But it depends whether it's genuine or not. I think it's all about intent. It's all about context and intent. Well, the reason why it should be about intent, I mean, it's not that you can't cause harm that you don't intend, and one should feel sorry about that. But the crucial bit is that the fact that you didn't intend it is the indicator that you're not the sort of person who will cause those harms in the future. In ten years time, this podcast will have us to saying the C word. Pilot yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. And so there's already another C word, too. I have a list of cwords. Now, you can say cunt, because, again, I try to explain to Americans how it doesn't hold the same misogyny. In England, it's a term of affection. Saying come to a woman would be a bit I'd never say that because it just seems to. And I'm sexist for not saying country, but I try and stress that it's so far removed from female genitalia in context. In England, we say it to men for two reasons. One, we hate them. Two, they're our mate. I was in Edinburgh once and two policemen walked past and they said, oh, Mr Javed, you're a funny hunt. I said, thank you very much. It's a term endearment as well. But there is no misogyny. In fact, it's almost the other way that you don't use it. So it's very complicated and nuanced. And that's the problem with social media as well. It doesn't know international boundaries. So when I tweet from London for all time, in every culture, everywhere, of course, yeah. And we have to be educated. And I'm a fan of political correctness per se, that I don't say the wrong I try not to say the wrong thing. I don't want to be taken the wrong way. I don't want people to be offended. I don't want people to think you're a fan of civility. Civility, exactly, yeah. Political recklessness, but, like other things, has been mugged and changed and now there's a new word for it. It's woke and all that. But, yeah, if someone says, oh, we have a new term for that now, I'll go, Good, yeah, fine, just let me know. I didn't get the memo, but now I've got the memo, I'd be a psychopath to still go around using the wrong term. All right, well, I'm feeling that the tractor pull of controversy is irresistible. But I have one left field question to ask you now, because I'm going to forget it if I don't do it. In thinking about this interview, I stumbled upon an interview you did with Gary Shandling on YouTube, which was fascinatingly off kilter, and I couldn't tell how much was being played consciously for comedy and how much was truly awkward. I don't know what to say here, because I don't think he was quite himself, really, at the time. He was in a bad place. Yeah. And he talks about it after. There's a thing on YouTube where he talks about it. He says he was trying to do a thing and it sort of went wrong. What happened was he invited me to be on his some sort of anniversary box set behind a DVD extra, behind Larry Sanders, a fan. Right. And I said, oh, I'll do a thing with you as well. While I'm at it. I did a thing where I was doing my three comedic heroes, which was him, Larry David and Christopher Guest, and I did those three. There's a conspiracy theory that goes around that after the Gary Shanding of I canceled the series. It was only three. Did you do that then? No, that's it. People think that you do it as you go along. I think they might have been the first one. Oh, no. I did Larry David. And then I didn't know him. I met him once, very briefly, but social awkwardness was part of his comedy. I know. Off hair. He told me that he was in therapy five days a week. He had five different therapists. When we got there, his crew couldn't find him. And then he came in and he says he thought he was recording for his thing at first. There's a thing on YouTube where he talks about it. Look it up. I can't remember what it was, but he explains it all and it was still fun. I left it all in. People think that it was a stitch up. No, I edited it. Right. I edited it on this podcast. Occasionally I get people attack me as though they've caught me doing something on this podcast. I had a chance to take my foot out of my mouth. Of course I know we've left it in. And also, it didn't feel awkward. It felt like two people, two idiots firing. Well, it felt like there were sort of comedic egos jockeying for status a little bit. I said again that he's my hero. Yeah. But then it was not clear that what he was playing for comedy and kind of foe status, or whether he actually didn't know who you were to the degree that most viewers would assume at that moment. Yeah, but he was teasing me as well. He was trying he was trying to get something going even, you know, even after the initial thing where he says he didn't realize I mean, then we had then we had it. It was like sorry. We were we were sort of having fun, and then we had breaks and he and he told me lots of stuff that you'd been through. And then we got back to it. It's funny to be as an enormous fan of yours to just have a document there and an enormous fan of his to have a document there where the two of you are collaborating and to actually not know how to interpret what's going on. I mean, it is kind of a weird sort of cognitive restraint. It was like we were doing it because it was funny and interesting and we were winding each other up, but then it seemed like there were moments where it was, I love that awkward. In fact, I could have put in the bits where we stopped and we were sort of normal and nice to each other, but where's the fun in that? He owned me and he hated me. He didn't. He invited me, to be honest. DVD there's a great thing. You should find it speaking about it, and he says that he got the energy wrong and he was trying somewhere else. And it's funny because when I got back with it, the broadcaster went, oh, my God, this is really great. You should do a new intro saying he was weird. And I was going, I'm not doing that. No, I'm not doing that. He had a bad day. But, yeah, it's odd what people hold up. It's owned on Twitter. Really owned. All right, so we've put our toe in the water a bunch here, but let's just focus for a moment on what social media is doing to us. So you do seem to more or less just have a good time, at least the public facing on social media. You're very engaged. No one ever genuinely hurt my feelings on Twitter. That would be impossible. Right. The analogy I use is, I'm walking down the street and there's a guy living in a bin covered in shit and he shouts at me, you can't am I going to get upset at that? I'm going to keep walking. I might take a picture, but it's exactly let's just walk through this somewhat systematically. So you do respond to people occasionally? Some. I mean, the truth is, I don't get that sort of again, I don't know why, but I don't get it. I think, yeah, I have no idea why. Sometimes I have to look for it. Sometimes I search things to look for. If I'm doing a new bit, I'll put in a couple of words and find a mad thing and I talk about that. And someone said, Dan once said, why do you only retreat the maddest examples of fundamentalist Christians? And I go, because a sensible Christian is not funny. Someone who just says, oh, I got spirituality in them. Living that live there's nothing funny about that. Whereas someone that says, I hope you get raped by Satan, that's funny. That's why I choose that. Comedy is an exaggeration. It's not my job to be fair. To be fair. It's like, Is it funny? Well, now, is there a problem, though, when you retweet someone to whatever it is what do you have, 20 million or something on? So is there a problem that are you encouraging the Twitter mob to go after this person who well, I am a bit careful because you don't want that. So I try and do it with good humor. Now. I hardly do it at all. Was there any point at which you felt your engagement with social media was out of balance and just complicated in your life? And you do course correct. No wasting time, because it's fun, it's interesting. I can sit there and go through I use it in many ways, right? I think, number one, I use it as a marketing tool. 30 million people who get an email. That's a good yes, and on that level, it may just be unavoidable. I mean, when you have a new show and you need to put tickets on sale, it would be idiotic not to have a Twitter channel where I don't spend anything on my gigs of pure profit because I don't have to spend anything on advertising. They sell out around the world. So there's that, right? Why would I not use that? It would be crazy for me to shut that down because there are a couple of idiots I use it as market research as well, because that's not a sample. That's the world. If 100, 200 is a good sample, then 30 million pretty much as it is. That's how it is. There's still the echo chamber because they presume. They follow me for a reason. But it's very good for putting out jokes and finding the ambiguity, because someone out there will go, do you mean this? And you go, oh, I didn't know it was ambiguous. That's good. I'll change that. So it's good for joke writing. It's good to reduce I like that restriction of characters to be it's no good for nuance. It's no good for so you've got to be manipulating that sample. You've got to go, Hold on. So this person doesn't get it. Does that mean there's something wrong with a joke? Or does it mean they're an idiot? Usually it means they're an idiot. You don't care about whiff if 10,000 people are laughing, you don't care about one heckler. It would be madness to throw. I'll lose that joke. And also this service sometimes I've explained the joke to people and the people who got it are angry. They go, don't fuck it, we got it, you know, don't. And I just say, when a comedian apologizes, I go, I fucking don't apologize. So you can't please everyone. You shouldn't you can't legislate against stupidity and you shouldn't, you know well, so but you're so you're again, I'm trying to find the ways in which you are you seem to be uniquely immune to the pain here because, you know, like, what do you mean by I mean, I don't I don't know. I'm not sure that's true. Is it because I act like I am or my responses or I shouldn't be. I've survived terrible controversies I'm defiant against. Yeah. So it's, one, the public perception of you not getting as much blowback as other people would. Because I'll tell you why. It's not the public perception. That's the point. If you're on Twitter, you think that there's a war going on. If you go onto Twitter and you go that you hit the right buttons, right? It's like you're watching Game of Thrones. It's like the world is full of Nazis versus antinates. It's turfs versus transactivists. You got in the real world. It's not. They don't exist. It's like this 1% that's in your phone, and that's the terrifying equality that someone living in a bin can do a tweet, and the next tweet is Richard Dawkins. And you go all that. They're the same. They're not the fucking same. Ones are more so that's the problem. So when you go on these things and it blows up like it's, you pick Richard Dawkins as a perfect example of somebody who has obviously complicated his life by his use of Twitter. And there's certain tweets he has sent, which I think had you sent them, it wasn't merely that the joke was poorly crafted in his case. It's that he functions by a different physics of reputation management than you do, because, well, my name comes up a lot on Twitter when there's a controversy, apologize is a summer, and people defend and go, hold on, ricky Gervais says these things, which is right, but I want to go, Hold on, let's look at it. There's lots of variables here. One, I'm good at it. I'm good at my job. I've thought about this joke. This isn't me going out and saying the wrong thing. Two, you could say, well, that's not a joke. I make jokes about those things, but that's not a joke about the thing. That's someone advocating the thing. And there's another big difference there is. It a joke. First of all, was it a bad joke? That's another thing. If you're dealing with really contentious, the more emotive and contentious the issue is, the funnier the joke is going to be. Perfect. Yeah. You've got to go, people, oh, I get it. And again, I talk about this on humanity. People often get offended by, let's say a joke. Let's talk about jokes, actual jokes. People saying things they don't really mean for a comic effect to elicit a laugh. Right? People get offended when they mistake the subject of a joke with the actual target. Some people think that something shouldn't be joked about, which is clearly not true. And they do that because they think and there's lots of stages here they think that. So if it's a bad thing, if it's a joke, auschwitz. Yeah, exactly. What's the target of the joke? Is it people being killed? Or is it about a stupid misunderstanding? Or is the Nazi? There's lots of ways this can be okay. You can make jokes about race without being racist. We don't even get to is it a racist joke or not? It can be just a joke about race and everyone knows that you can make a joke about race without being racist. It seems to me that there are comics, though, that have completely changed their act in response to how thin skinned everyone has become. Again, I sort of get it. You have those thoughts, oh, I'm dealing with irony, and I used to play the right wing bigger and everyone got it, but now the right wing bigger in charge. So is it the right thing to do? So I have to find a way where I can still make these sort of jokes and people get them. I do feel there's a responsibility to at least try the frame, to get the right target and hope people get it. So I get that and then I get why people go, it's just not worth it. No one understands me, I'm getting shouted at and my friends don't get it either. And I want to be in this club, I get it. I don't want to give up. I don't want to give up. I want people to understand it and I try. If anyone says I'll explain the joke, I'm happy to explain the joke because I love the intellectual pursuit. I love to say someone no, I'll give an example. So at the Golden Globes now, that's the only chance I get to write one line here. And then if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Will Store. Will is an award winning writer and his work has appeared in The Guardian, the Sunday Times, the New Yorker, and The New York Times. He's the author of many books. Most recently, The Status Game on Social Position and How We Use It. And that is largely the topic of today's conversation. We talk about the role that status plays in human life and culture. We discuss the taboo around caring about status, egalitarianism. The perpetual insecurity of status, how we play multiple status games simultaneously identity, social connection, dominance, virtue, success, status, urge as an evolved mechanism, gossip, status and health, the consequence of humiliation, the role of social media, status and politics, conspiracy thinking, moral panics, status and philanthropy, and other topics. Status is one of those things that once you begin thinking about it, you see it everywhere and realize that it was doing its mad work all the while without you thinking much about it. Anyway, it's a fascinating and all too consequential subject. And now I bring you will store. I am here with Will store. Will, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sam. So I loved your book. The book is The Status Game on Social Position and how we use it, and I want us to just dive deep into that topic. But before we do, perhaps you can summarize your background as a writer journalist, however you think of yourself. What have you focused on and how do you describe your place in the world at the moment? Yeah, well, I was a journalist for 20 years, and now I sort of focus on books, really. And I guess most of my nonfiction focuses on looks at kind of how science can explain the human condition, really who we are. And what other topics did you hit before status? My first book was written in my 20s was about the supernatural. It was like kind of a slightly light hearted adventure with ghost hunters and people like this. It was really about why people believe in crazy things. You didn't find any ghosts? Some odd things happened, I have to say, but, no, I didn't find any ghosts. And the next book was The Heretics, which was published in the US. As the unpersuadables. And that book looked at the question of how is it that otherwise intelligent people could end up believing crazy things. So not stupid people, but really smart people. So I did things in that book, like, I went on this really weird holiday with the historian David Irving, who is, if you're familiar with him, notoriously please summarize. Yeah, he was once highly respected historian of a second World War. We know most what we do about the far borrowing of Dresden because of David Irving's scholarship. And at some point in his career, he decided that Hitler was, in his words, a friend of the Jews and had nothing to do with the Holocaust. And he's doggedly pursued this line, this belief, and it has literally destroyed him. It's destroyed his reputation. It's destroyed him financially. He went to prison. He was actually in prison. He was given the opportunity in an Austrian court to, you know, renounce his views on the Holocaust, and he refused and went to prison. I think in his seventy s, you know, he was famously sued by an author. There was a film made about that court case. So this is a guy who is you can say whatever you like about David Irving, but he's a smart guy, he's intelligent, and yet he has come upon this insane belief that is literally, to most people, unbelievable. I forgot how far his denial went. Did he go so far as to say the gas chambers weren't gas chambers and examining the ruins of the crematoria and saying that none of this is as advertised? Well, temporarily, he did. He went through a temporary phase of kind of hollow course denial. When he read a paper, I think somebody went to Auschwitz or somewhere and chipped some material off the wall of a gas chamber and had it analyzed, its concentration of gas. That's it, right? And they said, this is a weaker level that you need to kill cockroaches. So it's impossible to think that millions of people were killed this way, but it didn't occur to this person, actually, cockroaches are much more hardy than the human beings. But to be fair to David Irving, he did then kind of walk back that belief, but also to be fair to the truth, one of the things that I did when I was with him, I was undercover pretending that I was also a right wing revisionist historian. And we went to a former concentration camp in Poland, and he was walking past the Guard's Tales, and he was saying things like, there's the box office. And when we got into the actual gas chamber, it was extremely upsetting to watch. There was a school group of young girls, I think they were from Russia is my memory. And he started, the group started barricking about how ridiculous they were believing this stuff. And he was saying that the doors on the gas chamber were fake. He said these are just standard air raid blast doors. I think somebody was saying that the locks were on the wrong side and things. So if you call him a Holocaust tonight, he'll sue you. But there's certainly lots of extreme revisionism going on with him and his followers. That's interesting. I wasn't expecting to talk about this, but I'm wondering what you think about the ethics of going undercover. What was that experience like? And my generic take on this is that there are many stories that couldn't be told or couldn't be told adequately, unless some people were willing to deceive others about who they are. I mean, to go properly undercover, whether from a law enforcement point of view or an espionage point of view, or a journalistic one. But what was that experience like and what do you personally think about the ethics of it? The ethics, for me are straightforward. I'm interested in the truth. I'm not interested in just dismissing these people as, well, they're evil. That's the story I actually want to know. Okay. Rather than calling them names, how can we explain these people believing what they do? So that's my take on the ethics is pretty straightforward. Do you think there was no way to embed with the heretics or the conspiracy theorists in a truly above board, honest way? Just saying, Listen, I don't want to demonize you guys. I want to understand you. I don't actually share your beliefs, but I'm really here to have an honest conversation. Sure. Most of the book was above board. I think this was the only chapter I went undercover, and that's because David Irving, there's no way I would have got anywhere near him. I didn't lie in the email to him. I said, I'm writing a book on people who have the courage to stand up to the orthodoxy, and you're one of them. So, yes, there was some flattery going on and actually almost went wrong, because on the first day of the sort of seven or eight day trip, I interviewed him and and and was obviously too forthright in my views, and he kind of can't stop the interview. And it was very difficult then to get him to agree to sit down, which he did eventually. I did almost give the game away. The experience that you asked, it was kind of surprising because aside from being unbelievable antisemites, these were ordinary men when they found out that David Irving wasn't cooperating with me anymore with my project. Every day after our kind of road trip, we'd sit down and have there'd be a lecture from David and a question and answer session. And I found out towards the end that the guys had sort of conspired between them to ask lots of questions I thought would be helpful for me and my projects, writing about heretics. They behave very kindly towards me. Again, it's that whole thing that they're not monsters. There are people who've made a mistake. Again, I wasn't planning to hit this topic. Obviously, I haven't read that book of yours, but I'm just fascinated by why people believe crazy things, and especially why smart people, and even well informed people, even too well informed people in some perverse way, believe crazy things. What did you conclude about that process? How do you explain it to yourself? Obviously, this is a problem that has only grown in scope and consequence in recent years. Given the way conspiracy theories are amplified on social media, and given the reaction to the ham fisted efforts to contain the spread of misinformation, the black listing on social media, or the shadow banning or whatever else Twitter and Facebook currently do, that freaks everyone out when they have unorthodox information they think really must spread, whether it's about vaccines or anything else. Politics. So what's your sense of the cognitive, emotional, social, cultural conditions that we're trying to put right here? Well, I mean, the answer that I got to in the heretics was my introduction to the idea that the brain is a storyteller. And in the book, I describe the brain as a hero maker. It wants to make us a hero in the story of our lives. And what tends to happen is that any kind of fact in advertise that we verticomas, that we come across that flatters, that heroic story, that heroic sense of who we are, we uncritically accept it, usually. And any fact, any verticals we come across which challenges that heroic story of who we are, we're very good at rejecting. And so the brain isn't particularly interested in the truth. The brain is much more interested in motivating us, getting out of bed, telling a heroic story about who we are and what's in store for us in the future. In the specific case of the Holocaust deniers, the people who were on the trip with David Irving, what was extraordinary was the number of men whose parents had served on the side of the Nazis in the Second World War. In fact, on the final night, there was this garlic showing of the film Downfall, the kind of hyperrealistic German film about the final days in the Hitler bunker. And one of these guys, Australian guy, he didn't want to watch the film because his dad was in the bunker with Hitler and he would find it too distressing to watch the film. To me, it felt like these were men who'd grown up with Nazi parents and they wouldn't allow themselves to believe the story that the culture tells us, that the Nazis, nazis a synonym for evil and the Holocaust really happened. And they felt they were on this great cognitive kind of mission, a lot of them, to prove that their mums and dads, probably who they loved, weren't evil and all this stuff wasn't really true. That was an insight I wasn't expecting to have when I kind of pitched up with these people. Yeah, well, that leads us rather nicely to the topic at hand, which is status. But before we go, there I was just wondering, did you ever deal with the case of David Ike? I've met David Ike. Yeah. He threw me out of his house. Yes. What is going on there? What? Who is David Ike? For people? I think he's probably more famous across the pond than he is here. What's his story? David Ike is an extraordinary individual. So he was a footballer, and then he was a famous BBC TV sports presenter, and then his father died and he had what I believe is a very profound nervous breakdown, an episode of Psychosis. But his kind of brain dealt with this chaos by telling a story in which he was kind of the second coming, that he was basically God. Jesus. I remember seeing it. I actually saw it in the 80s. He was on this big chat show, Wogan, which is a bit like the lesserman show, and Wogan was interviewing him about all this stuff, and the audience was acutely uncomfortable to watch because the audience were laughing at him openly and the things he was saying. So David Ike has always been seen as this kind of absolute lunatic. If you read his memoirs, I'm sure he had an episode of Psychosis, but extraordinarily, he's kind of reborn now as this conspiracy theorist who manages to sell out, you know, hundreds theater seat theaters. He sells huge amounts of books and and he seemed to really rise after the after 911. And he's kind of mad genius is to take all the individual conspiracy theories, like Illuminati and so on, and connect them all into one grand conspiracy theory. And it involves basically high status people like the Queen and JFK being secret shapeshifting lizards. He believes the moon is a space station, a hollowed out space station. But he's got huge amounts of followers now, so he's kind of reborn as this kind of it's kind of like the British Alex Jones, but even crazier than that. Yeah, that's how I have him pegged. He's like Alex Jones, except the pedophiles are actually lizard people. Lizard people? Shape shifting lizard people. Yeah. As I say, he threw me out of his his house when when he felt I was insufficiently well read on his endless, you know, multi thousand page books. Wow. Okay, well, so status. What is status? I think people have a gut feeling for the concept, but I bet many people would be hard pressed to give it anything like a coherent definition. How do you think about status? Well, it's simply the feeling of being valued. Sometimes when you talk about status, people think, oh, he's saying that everybody wants to be rich. He's saying that everybody wants to be famous in a celebrity. And of course, wealth and fame are part of status, but all status, really, is the feeling of being of value. So when psychologists look at our kind of deep needs, our deep cravings, they find we have a craving for belongingness and connection that's one thing. We want to be loved and we want to join groups. We're tribal. Obviously, once we're in those groups, there's a kind of urge to move up, to feel not just loved, but valued. And that's what status is. I can hear there's going to be a subliminal tug of war between my sane status and your sane status, but I think we should both stick to our respective countries here. I think so, yeah. And yet desire for status is taboo. Isn't taboo to say that you would want to be valued by the people in your life or by your community and that you want to have a positive you want to be seen to be making positive contributions to society, et cetera. But there's something tawdry or perceived to be tawdry about people's concern about status. And it's hallmarks, certainly when you're talking in terms of wealth and fame, even virtue signaling now is part of this picture where any self consciousness with respect to how one is being perceived by others is viewed as venal or in some other way, something you should be able to rise above. How do you think about the taboo aspect of seeking status? I think it's because we're all so chippy about our own status that we just don't like it at all. If anybody was to admit that they were interested in it and we don't like it, I think there's a taboo against ourselves admitting it. I think it's connected to the fact that people don't like self aggrandizing people. They don't like people who present as if they deserve high status. When anthropologists look at pre modern groups, huntergatherer groups, they're often described as egalitarian. But as people like the psychology professor Paul Bloomers pointed out, they're only egalitarian because the people in those groups care so very much about status. They're constantly jostling, and there are constant checks and balances. So if somebody goes in there and claims to be a great hunter and comes in all proud of their catch, then there will be an effort by the group to pull that person down and to get them to act in humility. In the book, I write about a pre modern group in the north of Canada who have a tradition of singing, of circling a person who's too hubristic and singing a song of derision in their faces. So I think the taboo against kind of admitting even to ourselves that we're interested in status is connected to all of that stuff. Yeah. Although one of the master hacks of that system is you can rise in status by not taking yourself too seriously. You only become an object, a successful object of derision, if you can't laugh at yourself. And there are different careers that are more amenable to this than others. But how do you view the insecurity of status? This is a point you make in your book. At some point, status is perpetually insecure. Really? No matter who you are. I mean, you're always liable to slip on the ice and fall in front of a crowd. And it's kind of funnier the higher status you were, you know, if you're an aristocrat and a top hat and an overcoat and you fall on the ice, that's just hilarious. And so how do you view the perpetual insecurity of status and people's efforts to shore it up? Well, yeah, I think that's why people get so chippy about status. One of the reasons is because what is it? You can't own status. It's not a material object. Money is a symbol of status that you might use to measure your status or you might not, depending on what you like. But it isn't money. You never own your status. You can't take it to bed and lock it in a box. So it's always up for grabs. It's always in question. Elon Musk can be reduced in status in conversation with somebody that he admires and respects if they treat him disparagingly. Michelle Obama, somebody as high status as her or Beyonce equally might feel very low status if they were treated with disrespect by somebody that they admire. So, you know, we're constantly measuring our status. In the book I write about, neuroscientists talk about how we have this thing in the brain called they call the status detection system, which is constantly measuring everything as a way of gauging our status. So it measures things like the amount of eye contact we're getting with numerical precision. In one study, they looked at people being served measures of orange juice and they found that if you serve lots of measures of orange juice to people but one person gets slightly less orange juice than everybody else, they're going to get preoccupied with it and get upset about it. And of course, we completely understand that because as human beings who all own status detection systems, we know full well that what you're upset about isn't the fact that you've got half a mouth or less of orange juice than an Xperson. It's that your status detection system has read that as an insult. Okay, so I'm not as valuable as all these other people because you're giving me less juice. Yeah, that's connected to maybe it's really of a piece with a broader principle here, which is that people's sense of their own well being is so often anchored to comparison with a lot of others, right? And so it's not based on some absolute measure of well being. And that's why all boats rising with the same tide doesn't really solve most people's problems because even if things get better and better for them, they see things getting better and better for their neighbor who already had much more than them. And actually, this is a point explicitly made in your book by Carl Marks, if I recall, which I never wasn't aware that Marks hit on this and he was not a dummy for all the chaos born of his economic theories. And yeah, he said basically, if you have a tiny little house, that's going to be fine as long as everyone else has a tiny little house. But if there's a palace next door, your tiny little house is now going to be perceived as a hut or a hovel and you'll be unhappy. Well, we'll get to any ways in which you draw lessons from this later on. But one point you just made, which at least implicitly, was that we only tend to care about others view of us and therefore mark our status this way insofar as we respect the other people, which is to say, based on how we perceive their status. I mean, the status they hold for us is the cash value of their opinion of us and is the thing that can raise or lower our status, or at least to some degree. I just had a recent experience of this, perhaps you noticed it online. I had what purported to be a real conflagration and witchburning on Twitter, where I was the witch, but it took place in exclusively right wing circles. Explicitly. It was happening in Trumpistan, among Trump's most avid defenders. And what was interesting psychologically in my experience is how little I cared about the, you know, the human sacrifice that I had become because of how I view the people who were dancing on my grave. Because in my world, anyone who is defending Trump to that degree at this point really has low status. I know I don't agree with almost anything that is underwriting their opinion of me there, and so it really didn't matter, except I saw one writer whose work I admire, sort of. He wasn't all in on my auto defay, but he caught some of the pleasures of being had at my expense. And that one person that stung because I actually like that person, right. And admire his writing. So it was interesting just to see that bifurcation in my mind, and it was anyway, perhaps you have something to say about that. Yeah, that's absolutely right. What they find is that we're not playing a status game with everybody in the world. We play multiple status games. We're kind of tribal in the sense that we're members of lots of tribes all at once and we care about what our kind of co players in these tribes think of us. But people outside our tribes, I mean, sure, if anybody insults you, you're going to feel something, probably. But as you say, if you have contempt for these people, if we actually actively consider them low status, it's no way. It's not going to sting anywhere near as much as somebody in your game with you who you know, A and B, especially if they're in your game with you and you perceive them as to be above you in that status game. And those are the ones that really burn. Yeah, and it's impressively multidimensional and it shifts because it can be for the purpose of any specific encounter or conversation, who has high status and who doesn't. So you can be an academic who almost by definition doesn't have a lot of money or doesn't have a lot of fame, but in a certain dinner party conversation, that person can be very high status when they're opining on their topic. And the billionaire at the table will feel lower status intellectually when dealing on that topic. But then things flip when you're talking about money or fame and it goes round and round depending on what the matter at hand actually is. Yeah, and it's how you're measuring status. We're so amazing at playing these status games. We can use anything to measure status. It's certainly not all about money. My wife and I have been to places like Santa Bay in France, places where we could surrounded. We were in the bottom 1% of wealth Santa Bay, but even we managed to look down our noses, a lot of them, because they're so ghost. Look at that. It's not about money. We've got our own ways of measuring status. They've got their own ways of measuring status. No, they were looking at us and seeing these scruffy herberts with bad shoes who shouldn't be there and we were looking at them as these ridiculously, over the top, orange skinned idiots. It all depends on how you're measuring status, how you're assessing status. Every game has its different almost like tokens, like on the monopoly board, you've got plastic houses and hotels. Every game has got a different way of different thing of standing for status. And all this connects to the concept of identity. How do you think about identity in light of the sort of never ending possibility of finding new status games and having one supersede the next? How do you think of personhood, perhaps a healthy sense of personhood in light of that landscape? Well, it's huge. I think to a great extent we become the games that we play. When I say I'm a writer, that I'm not talking about what I do for a job, that's a massive part of my identity because that's 95% of the source of the status in my life, which is an unhealthy amount, really. So we join groups. The groups have rules of behavior. We follow the rules. And the better we follow the rules, the higher we climb in status. We begin to dress like those kinds of people, talk like those kinds of people, read the kind of books and consume art in the way that those kinds of people read books and consume art. Identity is fluid and multiple. We can be one person when we're engaged in one status pursuit, maybe at work and then at the weekend when with our cycling friends, we can be another kind of version of us playing another status game. So you can't separate the status game from identity. I really do believe that, as I say, we become those games that we play, we become conformist in that group context in terms of how should we pursue these games. And this is where I become a bit hypocritical because I'm not very good at doing this myself. But the research is that we're kind of happier and more stable emotionally, the more groups we belong to. So I think the more status games we play, the more sources of status we have, the more we hedge, the better place we are. I'm in a vulnerable position because my life is devoted to my writing and if that was to go wrong, my career will peak and decline like anybody's does. It's going to be more than just a disappointment for my career. It's going to be an assault on my identity and an assault on my sense of who I am. It's also interesting how some of the markers of status can flip. So I was thinking, as you were speaking about what's happened just with dress as a social signal. In certain contexts, dressing in fancy, expensive clothing is a marker of high status, but in other contexts, it's actually a marker of low status, or certainly lower status when compared to the billionaire who just shows up in a hoodie because he can. There's no reason if you're Mark Zuckerberg, I guess if you're dragged before Congress, you put on a suit, but when you're in every other situation, the fact that you just roll in in a hoodie is a sign that, well, you don't have to play the game of wearing nice clothes. Right? I mean, like, I don't think this is necessarily conscious on his part or anyone else's part. And I now, as I complete this sentence, I'm forced to reflect on the fact that I've been wearing hoodies with disconcerting regularity. But there is something about just being when you're of sufficient status in a certain context, you don't have to try, you don't have to put on errors. There's no pretense that you need to have because you're the genuine article. Well, except I'd say there are heirs and there is pretense. It's just that I think dress is all of the kind of status queues that we adorn ourselves with, is always an arms race. We're always looking at what other people are doing and wanting to want better. And I think when you get to the very top, that's the way that you can do it. My wife, up until recently, was the editor of Elle magazine, the fashion magazine in the UK. And she would always tell me that the people in the fashion industry don't wear all that very expensive stuff. They tend to dress in black and have their hair pulled back. And that always made me think of weirdly of Hitler, because Hitler was the same, wasn't he just worried? He didn't wear all his military stuff, he just wore with medals and. All that stuff like Herman German did. He just wore a plain uniform. What do you do when all the people, when you're above the people at the very top of the state escape, who all adorned in their finery? We just go the other way. You signal that the pose is I don't even need that. But of course it's still a pose. You're still marking yourself out as separate from the other elite people around you. But in your book, you describe some other principles here which can balance this out. Like, for instance, connection. What's the relationship between social connection and status? Well, it's linked when you think of the concept of the status game. When I talk about status games, it's just a proxy for tribe. We're a tribal animal, and that's why we crave connection and status. We time and time and time again collect into groups. Those groups have rules, and then the better we play by those rules and the better we play in the context of that group, the higher we rise in status and the better the conditions of our life get within that group. So connection is an individual part of the status game, but as I say in the book, it's not enough. We like to think about connection a lot because it feels like it says something nice about humans. We love belongingness, and we love being loved, and that's true. But once we've connected into any group, we rarely content to be kind of flop about on the bottom rungs, considered likable, but useless. We want to feel like, okay, they like me, but do they value me? Do I impress them? Are there things that they look at, they think, well, he or she is good at that. And when you think about that, the concept of the status game, of the groups and the contest for status that is all of human social life outside the family, that's religions, that's corporations that's cults that's, football teams, you name it, that's what we're doing. We're gathering into groups, playing by rules, and rising and falling in status depending on how well we serve those rules. Connection and status is kind of what we do as human beings. For you. Now, as you've thought about this at this sort of depth, what I'm hearing is that there's really you're not envisioning an alternative to caring about status. I mean, there's obviously the embarrassing and petty and tawdry end of this, but there's also the idealistic enabling virtuous end as well. Am I hearing you correctly that it's not a matter of getting out of the status game, it's in finding a healthy, life affirming, connection inducing, creative version of it? Well, it's about playing the right game. So I think there are basically three different genres of status game that humans generally play. There are three kinds of status game. The first kind of status game is the dominance game. And we've been playing dominance games for millions of years since before we were human. You know, dominance is aggression or the threat of it. So when hens peck each other to establish a pecking order, that's a dominance game. We still do that. Obviously, we still do that. It's not just physical violence. It's also any kind of coercion, bullying, ostracization, any kind of threat. Anytime somebody is forcing you to attend to them in kind of humility as if they're a high status person, that's dominance. So that's dominance. There's also the virtue game. You know, when we became human and became tribal, one of the ways we could earn state is by being virtuous. And so virtue is all about knowing the rules, following the rules, enforcing the rules. And it's also about belief. How well and how sincerely do you believe the stories and myths and legends and laws of the tribe? So that's the virtue game. And you can see people like the Pope, the Dalai Lama, Michelle Obama, these are kind of superstars, global superstars of the virtue game. They're famous for being good. Over here in the UK. The royal family is a kind of virtue game. It's all about deference and respect and believing in all your hearts that the queen and a fucked up family are really special and important. So that's a virtue game. But there's also the success game. The other way that you could status and be seen as a valuable person in the tribal context is by being good at stuff, being a good storyteller, a good tuber finder, a good warrior, a good sorcerer, and so on. And that's modernity. That's civilization. Even as I say in the book, even Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, recognized that it wasn't pursuit of money that made the world go round and that made progress happen. It was the pursuit of what he called esteem, is that people want to feel important in the eyes of their peers. So you don't want to get rid of the status game. I really believe that we make a fundamental mistake when we condescend to the status urge. Like it's certainly the very worst of human nature. And in the book, I write about status and its connection to everything from serial killers to genocide to kind of incel misogynist culture and spree killers. Yeah, but it's also the best of human nature. You don't get modernity without the status game. You don't get progress, you don't get science, you don't get technology, you don't get vaccines, and so on and so on and so on. Yeah, it just seems like having a social process that reinforces value, right? The value people create for others, the value people get in being recognized for creating value for others. And there's just a positive feedback loop there. I mean, that is the healthy form of esteem is the social mechanism that inspires people to do more and more that other people value, right? Apart from just being paid for it. Obviously is the material version of that. But contributing to society and having society tell you they want more of that and to feel better as a result, that is a virtuous piece of machinery that I think we would perhaps there's a way of psychologically uncoupling even from that and being happier still. Certainly the notion of self transcendence within an explicitly contemplative context would argue for that and perhaps we could have a sidebar conversation on that topic. But short of that, what it means to be a good person in a healthy society entails actually adding to the well being of others in addition to or finding a mode of fulfilling one's own desires that is actually positive some with respect to the desires and well being of others. Yeah, I mean, I think it's incredible and fantastic that our species has evolved this instinct to reward ourselves and other people when they prove that they are of value, when we even do it to ourselves. Sometimes research writes about what they call the imagine rewarding it on our heads. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. We clearly waited too long to come to Vancouver. Thank you. Amazing. So a quick rundown on this evening's event. There's a couple of microphones set up. We will be getting to questions from you guys a little later on. We're going to chat for however long we feel like it, but we want to make sure there's time for questions after that. So good to see you both again. Yeah, my question, I'm really enjoying kind of this series events and I thought today we'd start off in a different direction. That's all about me. No, it's actually a question that I think both of you are going to have really good input on. I did a debate a couple of weeks ago against a preacher who seemed to have not only no understanding of science, but no appreciation for it. Didn't care. Didn't care if he was fairly representing it. As a matter of fact, I think there's a chance you might have stood up and accosted him at some point because he literally stood in front of me and said, oh, that evolution stuff. It's not like anybody's ever banged sticks and rocks together and got a puppy. He said this twice during the debate. The first time we're in a debate structure, so I'm trying not to interrupt. I need to follow the rules of debate. And the second time I just halted and jumped right in and I was like, you're right. That's never happened. And no scientist has ever portrayed anything like that happening. And luckily we're in a high school and the students seem to get it. But how do we work past not only just willful scientific ignorance, but we seem to have built communities where we haven't instilled any appreciation for it or any appreciation to treat it reasonably. Let's just throw up a straw man and call it nonsense. I don't often quote Tony Blair, but he said, education. Education. There is staggering ignorance of what evolution is all about. Hello. I think we're living in a simulation right now and it's failing us. So, Richard, what do you do with this underlying misunderstanding of the role of randomness in evolution? Can you inoculate us against that problem? Mutation is random only in one sense. Actually, mutation is random only in the sense that it's not directed towards improvement specifically. It's non random in other senses. Natural selection is quintessentially nonrandom. That's exactly what natural selection is. Anybody who thinks that you could possibly explain the beauty and the elegance of living things by some kind of random process would be stark raving bonkers. Anybody who thinks that we think that has got to be Starkraving bonkers. Of course it's not random. The whole point of the scientific enterprise in this case is to find an escape from randomness, is to find a solution to the problem of how you get these staggeringly non random things, which are living creatures, out of the laws of physics. And that's what we're about. I mean, to explain that by postulating a creator. Now, that is almost resorting to randomness. That's saying that complexity, non randomness is another word for complexity comes into being spontaneously, by sheer luck, god just happened to be there. What natural selection, what evolution does, is to explain how you get there from simple beginnings, which are easy to understand, and how you work up gradually, gradually, gradually up a kind of ramp of improvement until you get to complexity. That's the whole point. We're trying to escape from randomness. And natural selection is the only escape that anybody has ever suggested that will work. It strikes me. I was thrilled that students this wasn't a public high school, although I believe it was a charter school, because it's going to be unlikely that a regular state sponsored public school is going to invite me into debate. A preacher, although it was a debate class. But I was inspired that the students seemed to catch on to what was going on. So at least I'm a little optimistic that they were reasonably educated on the subject. But how do we deal with adults? This minister, he's not going to go back to school, he's not going to pay any attention to us. What did he actually say? I didn't quite hear the cat, the final word of what he said. He portrayed evolution as if scientists were saying that you bang sticks and rocks together and you get a puppy. That's sort of ridiculous over the time. That's going to be a meme. That face right there. I'm just lost for words. Although, truth be told, that the details of procreation are almost that strange. If you've ever had a child and it could not be more alien if we watched a horror movie and this is how the aliens produced their offspring, it could not be made stranger than it is. That was not an antisex tirade, by the way. That was just if anyone thinks that the great majority of scientists are so utterly idiotic and naive that they think that what they that the way you get life is by banging sticks together and stones together, I mean doesn't it give him pause to think that actually the vast majority of scientists have a fully coherent theory that fills library shelves the volumes of books about it? If it was that simple. If we're just banging sticks together, that's not the way it would work. What do you do with the underlying improbability of the whole process getting started in the first place? Tornado going through a junkyard and assembling a fully work in 747 argument. The first step, the origin of the first self replicating molecule, the origin of the first gene. That was a necessary first step before natural selection could get started and that is a step that nobody has yet solved. There are quite a lot of theories about it. We may never know for certain because it happened a very long time ago. We know the kind of thing that must have happened and that is a big barrier. That is one of the main questions that remains. Once that's happened, that was a fairly simple start. Once that's happened, then the whole panoply of life, the whole branching, complexifying beauty of life then gets then gets going. We do need a theory of the origin of life but once that starts then everything else follows with great logic and persuasiveness. And of course, until we get to the point where we have a good understanding then the answer that we should give is we don't know yet. Rather than pretending that we do and that there's some godlike governing force, we like to say we don't know because that gives us something to do. It's incredibly good job security for the curious. One of the things that troubled me is all of us have dealt with religious minded individuals in debate type formats. Here's a preacher who knew nothing and it was proudly on display. And there's a part of me that says should this individual be allowed to speak to children at all? And yet I have to defend this idea of freedom of expression that people get to share their ideas and that puts us in a place where we're constantly in a battle of ideas. How badly informed should somebody be before we just stop paying attention to them and work on the people who perhaps are reachable? Well, the problem in that case is that the preacher represents in the US what, 35%, 45%, depending on what his convictions are of the population. So it's not you have to you can ignore the preacher but you can't ignore the fact that a significant minority and on some questions a majority of Americans hold just patently absurd ideas. So it's the ideas that really matter. He knew nothing, but he was proud of knowing nothing. It sounds to me a lot of us are ignorant of lots of things. I mean, I'm ignorant of very many things and I'm sure you are as well, but we don't I never heard it put so nicely. But we admit when we're ignorant and we don't try to pontificate about things of which we know nothing. Whereas he was doing exactly that. In a way. It wasn't so much that I don't think he thinks he's ignorant. I don't think he's proud of his ignorance. I think he thinks he's convinced he has the right answer and that we are all engaged in a scientific fairy tale. So there's like an extra layer of smug superiority over the top of it where he gets to dismiss the work of countless scientists that have taught us the best current understanding of the diversity of life and it gets to shrug it off with sticks and rocks. Well, if we ever have to convene gatherings like this in hell we'll know we did something wrong. I'm pretty sure a part of that was in hell but I maintained my composure. That really is the thing. That's what completely changes the equation. The moment you believe you are certain or even just have very good reason to believe that this life is just a way station on the way to some eternity that you could get very, very wrong or very, very right depending on what you believe. Just that being your master algorithm that makes a mockery of every pretense to human knowledge no matter how technologically useful it is. It doesn't matter if we cure cancer with some future. Biology and prayer has never worked. If you believe in heaven and hell, that really governs everything, it seems, in a way. I don't think I mind his believing what he believes. What I mind is his thinking. We believe what he thinks we believe. Yes, he thinks how could anybody be so stupid as to think that? You can. He simultaneously presented a straw man of evolution and evolutionary scientists and anybody who fell into that I accept the reality I'm going to straw men you all with sticks and rocks now. We can laugh at it. And if you feel like laughing at it some more, by all means. There's been lots of discussion about how best to engage on these for lack of a better phrase. How big of an asshole should you be? How much pushback should there be? How seriously should you take them? And quite frequently someone will come up and present to the idea that there are sophisticated theologians that this preacher that I had a debate with is in one category and some other academic aridite theologians are in another category. Is that the case? Well, there are sophisticated theologians who accept evolution, of course and have no problem with that. And so they there. Our argument with them is a quite separate argument. I have met sophisticated theologians who believe pretty astonishing things like believing, literally that Jesus turned water into wine. And I thought sophisticated theologians had written all that stuff off and said oh, no, that's just metaphor. That's just nice story. We don't really believe Ethan anymore. But I have spoken to very, very highly qualified, sophisticated theologians. Highly educated, accept evolution totally but yet they think Jesus turned water into wine and walked on water and rose from the dead and was born of a virgin. All very unscientific ideas, and still they call themselves sophisticated theologians. Well, first we should acknowledge that sophistication is better insofar as it means moderation and less of a commitment to the most dangerous ideas. But my problem with so called sophisticated theology is that no one ever admits where the sophistication is coming from. It's coming from a loss of faith in specific doctrines. It's getting hammered into them from the outside. It's coming from science and a modern conception of ethics, a universal conception of human rights, a sense of how unseemly it is to think that anyone, by virtue of being born in the wrong place, is going to spend eternity in hell just because they didn't happen to hear the good word from their parents. So they lose their purchase on those dogmas, and yet they retain this conviction that Jesus was born of a virgin or was resurrected and will be coming back. And those are just the it's a God of the gaps argument in certain cases. But there's just certain questions where science hasn't yet closed the door to belief, and so they're putting all of their chips on those questions. We might have slightly different views of what a sophisticated theologian is, which is probably a testament to how it's actually not sophisticated theology but obfuscated theology. Because when I hear someone say, oh, you take calls on the atheist experience and you get people who couldn't present a reasonable argument at all, why don't you take on real sophisticated theological? And my answer is always tell them to call in. Here's the phone number. They can call in whatever week they want. And they'll say, well, here's this academic who's presented this particular version of the ontological argument of moral argument, and you've got Ray Comfort the banana man on one hand, and they pretend that there's something superior with regard to argumentation on the other. And the many years I've been hosting the show and doing debates, what I find is what gets labeled as sophisticated theology is the exact same thing. It's not like the arguments of these sophisticated theologians are any more sound than the arguments of great comfort. It's just that they're better speakers. They're actually less sound in one way and that they don't. So the belief system is still anchored to a belief in revelation. They're still fixated on the texts, but they have ignored much of what seems untenable in the text. And they don't have an argument about why that's okay because if God wrote any of these books, and nowhere in the book does God say, well, you could ignore the first half because now I'm getting to the good part. It's all God's words. It's actually a less principled position than fundamentalism. That's why it's always, in my view, unstable in the face of fundamentalism, because the fundamentalist always has the advantage of saying, listen, I'm going to read the whole book. I'm going to take the most plausible interpretation of it. I'm going to read every word as literally as possible, and that always begins to fixate on more divisive, more doctrinaire, more irrational ideas, at least with the fundamentalist. You you know what you're arguing against. You're not arguing against a wet sponge. It seems perverse to say it, but there's actually more integrity to the most fundamentalist position, because there's simply one irrational move, which is the belief that this book is perfect in every word. But the moment you believe that, well, then it is, in fact, rational to try to connect all the dots as reasonably as possible. But sometimes they really don't say anything. They say something like, well, God is the ground of all being, or God is the essence of isness something. Well, actually, I have a soft spot for that kind of I don't like the theistic version of it. But this is perhaps the only argument I can adduce in favor of so called sophisticated theology, which is there's an experience that people have Christian contemplatives say, really contemplatives in any tradition and have had for millennia, which does start it does provoke those sorts of noises from people. I mean, the the problem is you you get far enough into any of these contemplative traditions, and everyone begins to sound like a Buddhist. And then if you're in the 14th century in Christendom, the Inquisition shows up at your door, as they did to Meister Eckhart, who happily died of natural causes just in time. But there's an experience that people have of losing their sense of self, say, and feeling at one with the universe or the world, or having some kind of ethical, just a full ethical reboot of their hard drive where they feel love that they didn't know was possible. Right. That kind of self transcending love. Yeah. I'd enjoy that, I think. I'm not sure I would. We can have what is it that's a good thing about losing one sense of self? That's a big question. Well, when you look at just the mechanics of your own suffering, when you look at just what self concern gets you psychologically, you can begin to feel that most of your suffering is not actually directly tied to bad things happening. It's tied to all this whole machinery of self concern, anxiety about the future and regret about the past, and worries about what people said of you or think of you, or will think of you. And so much of our neurosis is taking place just in the conversation we're having with ourselves. And that's all predicated on the legitimacy of this starting point of feeling like there's a self riding around in the head who is carried through from one moment to the next in life, you are the same person you were yesterday. So the thing that embarrassed you yesterday, that you're now remembering and now feels terrible, the psychological continuity there and the durable continuity seems to mandate that you suffer over precisely the things that you were suffering over yesterday, because you're that same self carried through moment to moment and have everybody watch Frozen. And you can just let it go. Right, because I think the sense of self is actually something that's incredibly valuable, that we have a preservation motivation, we have a desire to understand the world that we inhabit. It it may even be the case, as I've argued and others have, that there's no such thing as altruism in a true sense, but that you could have altruism from a purely selfish standpoint and still do good. Yeah, but I wouldn't call it that. Begins to play with the boundaries of the, quote, self. The moment you begin to feel that your selfishness extends to everyone being happy right. Because you actually care about everyone and you feel better when you see people smiling rather than weeping. If you extend the circle of your self concern to everyone, well, then that's not normal selfishness. That's sainthood. If I'm doing it because I feel that good when people smile, that doesn't mean I necessarily care about them. It means I might care about that good feeling that I get. Yeah. Except the I get part is vulnerable to inspection in the sense that there's an eye who's appropriating that in every moment. Is it's a project which can be accomplished in a moment or you can fail to accomplish it after many years of looking? But there's the sense that there is a it's useful to define what we mean by self because most people don't feel identical to their bodies. So when I say the self doesn't exist, I'm not saying that people don't exist, I'm not saying that nobody's here and this is all an illusion and there are contemplative and religious and spiritual traditions that can sound like they're saying something very much like that. I'm saying that the sense that we all have of being a subject in the head riding around in the body as though it were a kind of vehicle. Right? Because this really is most people's starting point. They don't feel truly coterminous with their bodies. They feel like they're in their head and that their hands are down there in some sense. And that sense of being a subject in the head is vulnerable to inspection. You can lose that sense. And on one level, you can just be identified with your body. That is actually progress. Simply to feel like a body in the world is different from the way most people feel. Most people are kind of and this is what we're running into most people are common sense duelists. They feel like the mind can't possibly be identical to the brain. The mind is something altogether different and it just feels like it's in the head as a kind of there's a sort of locus of attention that's emanating from the head. But this body is a machine that can malfunction and it's changing over time. It's clearly not what I am. And I am probably a soul, then I'm probably a spirit. I can probably drift off the brain at death. And that sense and all the ways in which that sense can be played with by fasting or prayer or meditation or psychedelics or getting crazy ideas that you find emotionally very animating. Adventures You Can Have in Dualism are part of the problem here because you Adventures in Dualism should be the title of your next book. I didn't know if you want to jump in on that at all. Nothing to contribute. I sit here and I listen to this and I think there's like a four hour fascinating for me conversation. You might not think so much because I have no problem with the idea that the mind is the brain, but I know there are people who do. But it doesn't feel that way. I know it doesn't feel that way. I don't know that it's necessary, and I don't know what the right path is. I don't know that, for example, losing this sense of self could be a great thing. One thing I would add is that you lose it all the time because it actually isn't there. You are losing it all the time something that's not there. It always seems there retrospectively, but when you're really paying attention to something, when you're so called lost in your work or you're lost in some athletic task or you're just lost in thought, you're thinking about something and you're not aware that you're thinking. This sense of our own kind of central presence in our heads is constantly being undercut by attention being diverted to something out in the world or to some experience, and you can become increasingly sensitive to how it's being interrupted. I would love to get to the truth, and I love the fact we're on the pursuit, but irrespective of what the truth is, Richard, something like consciousness, which we still, some would say we understand and some would say we don't, I think we don't. But what would be the evolutionary advantage in the process by which we get to consciousness as we have it? We seem to have it that might distinguish us from other animals? It's a big mystery because you could build an animal which did all the sophisticated things animals have to do hunting for food, avoiding predators, looking for mates, doing everything that an animal has to do in order to survive and propagate its genes. And I don't think it would have to be conscious at all. I think it could all be done in the way that a computer would do it. I mean, when you talk to Siri or Alexa, they sound conscious, but you know they're not. And for an animal to survive with a nervous system, it doesn't, it seems to me, need to be conscious. And I'm very glad I'm conscious that I'm pretty sure you are as well. I think other people I'm not a solid cyst, but I do find it a bit of a mystery why we have consciousness at all. Yeah, I would agree. I think it's as I wrote somewhere, it's the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion, including the universe. This universe could be a simulation on some alien hard drive or descartes, something similar to you. Yeah, although I got 40 emails last week that says we've proved that that's not true. And I don't necessarily buy those emails either. That's exactly what the simulators would say if you were. But consciousness as just the felt sense that something is going on, the fact that there's an experiential quality, whatever this is, whether you're a brain and a VAT, whether you're in the matrix, whether consciousness is being produced by information processing in your head as seems reasonable to believe. Consciousness is always the first fact before any other facts can be discussed. And it's also the most important thing in the universe. It's the only thing that makes at least in my view, it's the only thing that makes the universe important is the fact that the lights are on. The fact that it's possible for the lights to be on. If you told me there's a universe somewhere that's got stars and planets, but the constants of nature are tuned just a little awry so that conscious life is impossible, that is a deeply uninteresting universe, and it's the consciousness is the only ground for any moral dimension to our lives, too. And yet I'm with you in feeling that it's not clear that it does anything. It's not clear how it would be selected for. Because if you just look at your own experience, everything that you're conscious of, anything that you seem to be consciously deciding, or any place where it seems that consciousness is necessary to integrate information behaviorally, to have a complex goal, say, for someone to say to you, well, you should really get to the Orpheum Theater at 08:00 to hear this talk. For that to become a behavioral plan, let's just say that that is, in fact something that can only be done consciously in apes like ourselves. Still, it's not clear why. Well, as you said, it's not clear that that should be the only way that it gets accomplished. And we could easily build robots, one presumes that could they could do these things without it being something that it's like to be those robots. But even in our own case, if consciousness really is just what it is at the level of our neurophysiology, it's only effective in virtue of what it is at the level of neurophysiology. So the fact that there's a subjective side to it doesn't matter. The fact that you're having this experience now, which again, is the most important thing in anyone's life, the experience side of it is not what is actually behaviorally effective. If, in fact, consciousness has the other face, which is its neurophysiology and its information processing dynamics. Nicholas Humphrey suggested that one of the most important things we have to do is to second guess other people. We swim through a sea of social sea. We have to make our way through very, very complicated relationships with other people, and we have to second guess what they're going to do all the time, where we're having to predict how this other person is going to react. And so he postulates what he calls the inner eye, which is looking inwards to yourself as an aid to second guessing what the other person might do. You need this extra sense organ to help you to predict the behavior of the other person. I still don't think that does it somehow. I wouldn't have been as surprised by the last presidential election if I was doing that correctly. Yeah. And I was here before the election and predicted that there was no way Trump could win. And as somebody who occasionally pretends to read minds and make predictions for a living, or was that a mistake? I think what Richard talking about is something that I've heard elsewhere, is the the intentional stance. What if it's the case that consciousness which gives rise to this sense of self in a way that goes beyond a mere self reflection and consideration, leads us to connections with other people, and this is what provides the evolutionary benefit. But it also leads to something else that I thought we'd talk about, which is tribalism. Our lives as individuals become merged, obviously, with our family. We have this immediate connection to our family. And then we extended this, and we extend the definition of family, and we begin to form tribes. And there was a time and a place where that may have been the best thing. Is it the case that obviously these could all be side effects of just what happened? And I would think that I'd be okay with the idea that consciousness and tribalism and everything are side effects of what happened. There doesn't have to be a guiding hand. But in the process viewing it from natural selection, what were the benefits of tribalism, and have we actually outgrown them, or are we maybe taking a step back? Well, if I'm not mistaken, Richard, I think altruism, the evolutionary rationale for altruism, really only makes sense in a tribal context. So that one of the silver linings of internessing tribal conflict was that in group, altruism got selected for I don't know if there's any recent work on that, but that was my reading of things. That's not to say that we're stuck with we're stuck with tribalism as the only rationale for altruism. But in terms of how apes like ourselves became as altruistic as we are, it's thought that competition among tribes was the basis. Well, I suppose a Darwinian view of altruism would go back to a time when we lived in small tribal. Groups. And there were two things about living in these small groups. One was that you were completely surrounded by kin, cousins, second cousins, siblings, nephews and nieces, and so on. And so there would have been a Darwinian incentive to altruism towards anybody you meet because anybody you meet is a member of your own village, your own tribe, your own clan. And the second thing, the other Darwinian engine motor of altruism is reciprocation. And reciprocation depends, or largely depends upon encountering the same individual again and again. And that again happens within the village, within the band, within the tribe. So there would have been a selection pressure in favor of within group altruism and outgroup hostility. Xenophobia so we can expect that there should be this tendency to despise the out, the outgroup and to be altruistic and cooperative with the familiar in group. And that could be defined as people you've known on your life, people you were brought up with, people who look like you. There are all sorts of ways in which the rule of thumb for how to behave could have latched on. And it's a pretty depressing outlook when we moved out of our tribal past and moved into big cities where we're no longer in small tribal groups, but we still have the same rules of thumb which work. And that is a good thing. We have a rule of thumb that says, just in general, be nice to anybody, empathize with anybody. Because in the distant past anybody would have been defined as your own tribe, your own clan, your own kin group, your own reciprocation group. So I wonder if it's to our benefit. There's a couple of potential ways to go there. One is to get everybody to realize that everybody still is part of our clan, that we we are one human clan. I don't know. I don't have the magic solution to end the various divisions. But the other is maybe to get people to recognize that they can be a part of a number of different glands that overlap. This is how we build societies. I care more about my immediate family than I do my neighborhood, but I care more about my neighborhood than I do the broader world. But I can't diminish my caring for things outside my scope to zero because we know that we have an impact on each other even at great distances. Peter Singer wrote a book called The Expanding Circle in which he starts out by talking about this in group, kin group, and then talks about the altruism broadening itself out to wider and wider and wider groups. And he would like that to include nonhuman, our animals as well. Psychologically, we can extend our tribal loyalty to all sentient beings. There were some folks out front with pictures of both of you actually lobbying for something along those lines. Oh, yeah, which is nice. I think. Singer's, heuristic is the right one. That moral progress is. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, I want to say something about the Sam Bankman Freed fiasco. As many of you know, I spoke to Sam once on the podcast. We also put that conversation on the Waking Up app. We've since removed it from the app because it really no longer belongs there, given what happened. But it's still on the podcast. It's episode 271, so you can find it there if you're interested. I'm not going to give a full account of what Bankman Free did to destroy his reputation and his wealth and the wealth of many investors and customers. It seems in record time, many details are still coming in and this is all being very well covered by the press with schadenfreude and cynicism to spare. And that's a point I will return to. But briefly. Bankman Freed had made tens of billions of dollars trading cryptocurrency, and he had built one of the world's largest crypto exchanges, FTX, along with his own investment entity called Alameda Research. And the connection between FTX and Alameda was always unclear. And this seems to have been, in retrospect, something that investors and the business press should have been more interested in. But my interest in Bankman Freed was entirely due to his stated commitment to effective altruism. He appeared to be the world's greatest example of what has been called earning to give in the EA community, which is setting out to make a lot of money for the express purpose of giving most or all of it away. And at the time I interviewed him, everything suggested that he was doing this. In any case, what seems to have happened last week is that concerns over the financial health of FTX and its links to Alameda Research triggered essentially a run on the bank. FTX customers tried to withdraw their assets on mass. And this reveals an underlying problem at FTX. Unfortunately, bankment Freed appears to have used customer assets that should have been safely stored there to fund risky investments through Alameda in a way that seems objectively shady and unethical. Whether or not it was also illegal, I don't think we know. All this happened outside of US. Jurisdiction, as a majority of crypto trading in fact, does. So whatever the legality or illegality, bankman Freeze seems guilty of enormous financial malfeasance. He appears to have lost something like $16 billion in customer assets. And then there were clearly moments where his public comments about the state of the business amounted to lies. These were lies that seemed calculated to reassure investors and customers that everything was fine when everything was really falling apart. Now I have no idea when all the shady and unethical and probably illegal behavior started. Was he Bernie Madoff from the beginning? Or does he just panic in a financial emergency thinking that he could use customer funds just this one time and then everything would be okay again? The truth is, I don't even know whether Bernie Madoff was Bernie Madoff from the beginning. I don't know whether he was a legitimate investor who was making his clients a lot of money and then got underwater and then went ponzi in an attempt to get back to dry land and then found that he never could. That wouldn't be good, obviously, but it's a very different picture than of a man who was an evil liar from the very beginning, just a pure sociopath who knew that he would be bankrupting vulnerable people every step along the way. Perhaps we know what's true about Madoff. I just haven't read very deeply about his case. But the point is, I have no idea who Sam Bankman Freed was or is, really. And this morning I went back and listened to the interview I did with him. And even with the benefit of hindsight, I don't detect anything about him that strikes me as insincere. I don't have any retrospective spidey sense that makes that conversation appear suddenly in a new light. Now, maybe I'm just a bad judge of character. That is totally possible. I've had people much closer to me than Sam Bankman Freed who I've never met and only spoken to twice, once being on that podcast. I've had people much closer to me, people I've worked with, and people who are actual friends behave in very strange ways that have totally surprised me. And some of these people have large public platforms and have done things in recent years that I consider quite harmful. I've commented about some of them and I've held my tongue about others. And frankly, I'm still uncertain about the ethics here. What sort of loyalty does one owe a friend or a former friend when that person is creating great harm out in the world? Especially when you yourself have a public platform from which to comment on that harm and are even being asked to comment? Is it appropriate to treat them differently than one would treat a stranger who is creating the same sort of harm? I don't know. You can probably guess some of the names here, but COVID alone has caused several of my friends and former friends to say and do some spectacularly stupid things, and I haven't known what to do about that. However, my point is that I've been very surprised by much of this behavior. So perhaps I am a bad judge of character. However, in the case of Sam Bankman Freed, I had no prior exposure to him. That podcast conversation was the first time I ever spoke to him. He was simply someone who had been ripped from the pages of Forbes magazine and promoted by the most prominent people in the effect of altruist community. And I had no reason to suspect that he was doing anything shady behind closed doors. And it appears that many of the executives at FTX didn't know what he was doing. And the venture capitalists like Sequoia and lightspeed and SoftBank and Tiger Global and BlackRock, who gave him $2 billion, clearly didn't know what he was doing. And again, when I listen to my interview with him now, I don't detect anything that should have been a red flag to me. Of course, none of this diminishes the harm that Bankman Freed has caused. As far as I can tell, the accounting is still pretty murky, so it's not clear where the money actually went. But as I said, he appears to have lost something like $16 billion of customer funds. That's a lot of money. And it's quite possible that some people who listen to my podcast with him could have been so impressed by him and his story that they invested in or through FTX. I would certainly be unhappy to learn that that had happened, and I would deeply regret any role that my podcast played there. But again, I just listened to the conversation this morning, and I still don't hear anything that should have caused me to worry that Sam Bankman Freed or FDX was not what they seemed. Now, beyond the immediate financial harm he caused, bankman Freed has done great harm to the reputation of effective altruism. The revelation that the biggest donor in the E A Universe was not what he seemed has produced bomb bursts of cynicism throughout tech and journalism, all of them quite understandable, but also quite unwarranted. First, let me be clear about my own relationship to effective altruism. I've said this before, but I view EA as very much a work in progress, and I have never been identified with the movement or the community and have only interacted with a few people in it, mostly by having them on my podcast. And as I said to Will McCaskill, the movement has always seemed somewhat cultic and too online for me to fully endorse. Some of its precepts seem a little dogmatic to me. What I've taken from effective altruism has really been quite simple and can be distilled to two points. The first is that some ways of helping to reduce suffering are far more effective than others, and we should care about those differences. For instance, it's quite possible that trying to solve a problem by one method will be ten or even a hundred times more effective than trying to solve it by another. And in fact, some ways of trying to solve a problem will only make the problem worse. Now, this is such an obvious point that it seems insane that you would need a movement to get people to understand it. But prior to EA, most philanthropy seem to be basically blind to any rational metrics of success. In fact, many charities are governed by perverse incentives. They can't afford to solve the problem they're ostensibly committed to solving, because then they would go out of business. Effective altruism, at least in principle, represents a cleareyed view of what it takes to do good in the world. And to prioritize the most effective ways of doing that good. The second principle, which more or less follows directly from the first, is that there is a difference between causes that make us feel good, that are sexy and subjectively rewarding to support, and those that reduce suffering and death most effectively. As I've discussed many times on the podcast, we are easily moved by a compelling story, particularly one with a single sympathetic protagonist, and we tend not to be moved at all by statistics. So if you tell me that one little girl fell down a well and I can do something to save her right now, well, I'm going to do more or less whatever it takes, especially if that girl lives just a few blocks away from my home. But if you tell me that 10,000 little girls fall down wells every year and most of them live in Tanzania, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. But it's not going to sweep aside all my other priorities for the day. I might just go get some frozen yogurt in an hour. And if you do convince me to support a charity that is working in Tanzania to save these little girls, however big a check I write, the act of writing it is not going to be as subjectively rewarding as my helping my neighbors save one little girl. It might be 10,000 times more effective, but it will be 10,000 times less rewarding. This is a bug, not a feature of our moral psychology. We are just not built to emotionally respond to data, and yet the data really do indicate the relative magnitude of human suffering. So on this point, effective altruism has convinced me to give in a way that is unsentimental, in that it can be divorced from the good feelings I want to get from supporting causes I'm emotionally connected to. It's caused me to commit in advance, to give a certain amount of money away every year, in my case, a minimum of 10% of my pre tax income, and in the case of waking up, a minimum of 10% of our profits, and to give this money to the most effective charities we can find. As I've said before, I even said this in the intro to the episode with Sam Bankman Freed, committing in advance to giving a certain percentage away to the most effective charities and then giving whatever I want to less effective causes to which I might be more emotionally attached. This has really transformed my ethical life for the better, because I now experience giving money to a children's hospital or to some person's GoFundMe page more or less like a guilty pleasure. It's like I'm splurging on myself that money could be going to the most effective charities. But selfish bastard that I am, I'm just helping a single individual who may have been the victim of an acid attack in Pakistan, right? It's hard to capture the psychology of this until you experience it. But it has transformed my thinking about many things about wealth and charity and compassion. And exactly none of this is put in jeopardy by the discovery that Sam Bankman Freed was guilty of some terrible investment fraud. Again, I'm still not sure what happened with him, whether he was exactly what he seemed, but then freaked out in the midst of an emergency and started lying and stealing in an attempt to get out of it, or whether he is a pure con man. But neither of these possibilities has any implication for what I've taken from effective altruism. And the same would be true if there were unhappy revelations yet to come from other prominent people in the EA community. This would be very depressing, but it would have no effect on how my thinking about ethics has changed for the better. Here's an analogy that might make this a little clearer. Imagine a very prominent scientist, or a group of scientists is found to have faked their data. This happens from time to time. Imagine that the scientist in question has been so influential and the fraud was sustained for so long that a Nobel Prize now has to be rescinded and an entire department at Harvard shuddered. Would this say anything about the legitimacy of science itself? Of course not. However, I'm now seeing a lot of people respond to the Bankman Freed debacle as though it reveals that the very idea of effective altruism was always a sham. It's as if people are concluding that no one is ever sincere in their attempts to help others, or that there are no better and worse ways of doing good in the world. Certainly not where charity is concerned. It's all just virtue signaling and reputation laundering and sanctimony and lies. There appear to be many very selfish people who didn't much like hearing about someone giving most or all of his wealth away, who now feel totally vindicated in their selfishness. They seem to be thinking all those effective altruists were just pretending to be better than me. And they're not. They're actually worse, because they can't be honest about their selfishness and hypocrisy. Over here in the real world, we're just all in it for ourselves, and that's fine, because that's all that's possible anyway. This is all just morbid and obtuse. Just as you can know that science is a legitimate enterprise because you can actually do science, you can know that effective altruism is legitimate because you can actually do it for the right reasons. As damaging as fraud can be in both domains, no case of fraud can put either domain in question. Fraud has no logical relationship to either enterprise. Scientific frauds are not science, they're frauds, and the corrective to them is real science. Ethical frauds are not ethics, they're frauds. The corrective to them is real ethical behavior. The other crazy thing I'm seeing is that people are linking bankman free's behavior to the ethical philosophy of utilitarianism, as though belief in this philosophy was bound to produce such behavior. And everything I've heard said or seen written about this is pretty confused. I'm sure I'll talk more about this on future podcasts because it's important to get straight. But the short point I'll make here is that in my view, the claim that utilitarianism or more properly consequentialism, is bad amounts to a claim that it has bad consequences of some sort. But of course, if these consequences are worth caring about, they can be included in any fuller picture of consequentialism. My point, and I made this at length in my book The Moral Landscape, which remains the most misunderstood book I've ever written. My point is that everyone really is some form of consequentialist, even if they think they're not. You just have to listen to them talk long enough and they start telling you about the consequences they really care about. Deontology. For instance, a version like Kant's categorical imperative or virtue ethics. Right? I think these positions entail covert claims about the consequences of certain ways of thinking or acting or being in the world. Anyway, I'll speak more about that at some point. But suffice it to say that if Sam Bankman Freed stole his customers money and gambled it away, whatever rationale he may have had in his head, it would have been very easy to argue that this was wrong from the point of view of consequentialism. Just look at the consequences. They're disastrous. They're disastrous for him and for his investors and customers and for anyone in his life who cares about him. I mean, just think about the consequences for his parents. His parents are both Stanford law professors. Now, assuming that neither had any idea what he was up to, and so they're not at all culpable for what happened. And who knows, they might actually have been involved. I know nothing about them, but I suspect not. Imagine how their lives changed last week. They have spent the last decade being congratulated, I suspect endlessly, for having produced such a marvelous and marvelously successful son. Can you imagine? He got a degree in physics from MIT and then went on to make $30 billion for the purpose of giving it all away to charity. And then expanded his influence into politics and among celebrities so that he could do even more good. Ultimately, he's hanging with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and Tom Brady and Gisele. But rather than being just a starfucker or an ordinary rich guy, he is laser focused on making money to solve the world's most pressing problems. Can you imagine how proud his parents were? And now their son is the next Elizabeth Holmes or worse. I mean, you just have to consider the lives of these two people. And this is a fucking Greek tragedy. But of course, the harm has spread much further than that. Anyway, those are my thoughts at the moment. I will definitely speak more about these issues on future podcasts, and I'd be happy to hear suggestions for anyone who I might speak with who could take the conversation in New Directions. Thanks for listening. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval has a PhD in history from Oxford University, and he's a tenured professor in the Department of History at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He specialized in world history and medieval history and military history. But his current research focuses on macro historical questions. For instance, what is the relationship between history and biology? What is the essential difference between human beings and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history has unfolded? These are all fascinating questions. Our time was somewhat limited by Yval's schedule. Our love for Skype was somewhat unrequited. He was back in Israel at the time of this interview. But I think you'll find our conversation very interesting. And now I bring you Yval Harare. I am here with yval. Noah Harari. Yuval, thanks for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure to be here. You have really just exploded onto the scene here with two wonderful books, sapiens being the first, and Homo DEOs, which just came out in the US. Congratulations. These are really fantastic, beautiful, exciting books. Thank you. Your backgrounds in history, however, you're you're a historian, technically, but you've written two very interdisciplinary books. You get into anthropology and biology and technology to an unusual degree, and I'm very fond of this kind of crossing of boundaries, intellectually. Being a fan of the concept of the unity of knowledge. Did you always know you wanted to work this way when you went into history? Was that your intention, or is this just something that has happened kind of late in the game for you? I always wanted to do it, but for many years, it seemed impossible. It's really only after I got my tenure at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem that I also got the courage of the opportunity to let go of the publisher parish regime and do what I really wanted to do, which was to pursue the big questions of history, the big questions of life, and as you said, in reality, is one. If you want to get answers to the really big questions, you cannot remain confined within a single discipline, because reality isn't confined to a single discipline. Yeah. I often say that the single disciplines are now defined more by university architecture and budgets than anything else. And to remain siloed in one way of thinking about reality. In part, it's an understandable outcome based on everyone's limitations on time and bandwidth and the impossibility of knowing everything about everything. So people do specialize, but really the boundaries between philosophy and science and specific disciplines within science and anthropology and sociology and psychology and history, the facts of the cosmos don't obey these boundaries. So it's great to just see someone run directly over them. If you start with a question, that, for me, is one of the most central questions of history, whether humans today are happier than in stone Age, and whether we know how to translate power into happiness, then what discipline does this question belong to? It's history, it's philosophy, biology. It's everything. Yeah. So I want to jump into the books, in particular, your latest. But before I do, it's very rare that I get someone on the podcast who is also seriously committed to the practice of meditation and has a lot of experience there. So this is a very novel thing. Okay. You came off of, I believe, a 60 day silent retreat recently, and if I'm not mistaken, that's something you do every year. How did you get into meditation, and what does your background look like there? Well, when I did my PhD in Oxford 17 years ago, I went to Vipassana retreat, and I learned Vipassana meditation from a teacher called Fanguel, and it completely blew my mind and then changed my life. And ever since that first course, I I do 2 hours of Vipasana meditation every day. I usually start my workday with 1 hour of meditation, and I finish it with another hour of meditation. And every year, like, my yearly vacation, is to go for a long retreat of between 30 and 60 days of just meditation in complete silence. No emails, no computers, no books, no reading, writing, nothing. Just meditating. That's wonderful. I am envious. Do you have kids? No, just dogs. Explains a lot. That explains your freedom. Yeah. That's really wonderful. So just to give people a clearer picture of what you're up to there. So Goenka is a very famous Vipassana teacher. There are two strands of apasana that have been very influential, particularly in the west, among all the Westerners who in the 60s discovered this practice, and they both come out of Burma. And Goenka is one line coming from a teacher named Ubakkin, and there was another line that came from a teacher named Mahasi Sayadow. And so all of the papasana practice I've done on retreat has come from the Mahasi Saadow line, which teaches the same kind of mindfulness, but it's a different sort of practice. I think the technical details are less important. The key is just to observe reality as it is every moment, just to stay focused. What is really happening right now as against all the stories and explanations that our mind constantly generate, and it is extremely difficult. What struck me in my first course. I remember like the first day I came to the retreat I was absolutely amazed by it that it starts with a very simple proxy. It sounds simple anyway of you just have to focus your attention on the breath and observe when the breath is coming in and when the breath is going out of your nostrils that's it, you don't have to do anything, just observe that. And I couldn't do it for more than like 5 seconds or 10 seconds and my mind would run away somewhere. And I was 24 at the time and it was the first time I realized how little I understand my mind, how little control I have over my attention. And this is why they start with this very simple practice just focus on the breath because it's so difficult. And once you get the hang of that and you can do it for more than 10 seconds, then yes, the idea of the instruction is to start observing not just the breath, but everything that is happening in the body. Sensations throughout the body, in every part of the body, there is some sensation at any moment. And you start observing that and you see the deep connection between these sensations and what's happening in your mind. That we think that we react to events in the outside world, to memories from our childhood to something we saw on television. But in fact, in each and every moment we constantly react to the sensations within our body. And everything people do as a story and I can say that everything people do, you know, from fidgeting in your chair to starting a world war, you're actually reacting to sensations in your body. It's amazing how out of control our minds are and how few people realize that their minds are out of control. And the consequences of them being out of control are as you say, these are. The same process that gets you to say something untoward in a personal interaction is the very process that brings us civilizational scale catastrophes, wars and all the rest. People are being moved by their thoughts in every moment and they see no alternative and meditation is for the most part the one way people can become more aware of these processes that rule their lives. Have you had any psychedelic experiences or anything that got you to go on that first retreat or how did you find yourself there? No, I had a very good friend. He's still a good friend of mine. He now works in Silicon Valley. And he, for an entire year, kept, like, nudging me, you should go to a retreat. And he was very persistent. And I was at a time in life that I had all these big questions and I had no answers. And I was very disappointed with the university, with the academic world, with my studies, because they didn't provide me any answers to the really deep questions of the suffering in the world and the suffering in my life. Where is it coming from and what can we do about it? And he kept telling me you should go to a meditation retreat, maybe it will show you something. And I just kept reading books and reading articles and I was convinced that the answer will come from there until I reached a certain degree of desperation and I said okay, what can I lose from going to this ten day meditation retreat? And I never looked back since. And have you done any psychedelics since or is that something that you haven't experienced as a student? I did, what was it? Ecstasy, but it was an interesting experience but it didn't teach me anything really valuable. And later on I realized I think the dangerous potential of all the psychedelic drugs is that people get hooked on the excitement and that they want special experiences. And this is also dangerous sometimes in meditation that people come to a meditation retreat and they want something special. They want to experience, I don't know, bliss and to fly in the air and to see stars and whatever. And then you come to the retreat, at least in the pasta now and they tell you okay, observe your breath and then you have a pain in your back and they say oh good, you have pain. Observe the pain just for once in your life instead of reacting to the pain just see how does pain feel? Or maybe it's very hot and they tell you okay, observe the heat, how does the heat feel? Or how does boredom feel? And people say I don't want to observe border or pain, I want these special wonderful experiences. And it's the same with psychedelic drugs. I think that they can open your mind to some levels of reality which are usually hidden from us. But the danger is that people just want the next trip and the next special experience. And in the end I think the real keen is to understand the normal everyday experiences and not the unique once in a lifetime special experience. Because if you want to deal with your anger or boredom or irritation or anything then you need to observe your anger and it's very difficult if you're just pursuing special experiences. Yeah, that's a very important point and I fully agree with it. The illusion that gets introduced when you're using psychedelics in that way to have more peak experiences as you say. You can use meditation that way where the moment you feel a little bliss or rapture or some very positive unusual mental state you can take that to be the signature of a successful meditation. And the illusion that creeps in there, which is of a peace with everyone's efforts to seek happiness throughout their lives, is that experience has to change in order for the most profound things about the human mind or human consciousness can be discovered. Profundity is elsewhere which is, in fact, not the case. I mean, if the ego is an illusion, as it turns out it is you can discover that coincident with the most ordinary moments of consciousness. You don't need the full fireworks show of a psychedelic experience to notice that there's a subject object illusion that can be penetrated. And that's something that you do get with a very systematic approach to mindfulness meditation in this case. It's wonderful you're doing that. Has meditation affected the way you approach your work? I believe I detect the influence in many of the things you've written. But how do you view that? Yes. It has a very deep influence both on my ability to research and to write such books. Because especially when you deal with something like the history of the world in one book, the one thing you need above all else is the ability to focus what's really important and how not to get booked down in the thousand little details and all the kings and battles and dates and all that. And the practice of meditation, I think, gave me this ability to remain focused. And without that I couldn't have written sapiens or homogeneous. And on another level at least, Lipasana is really about observing reality as it is and being able to distinguish between what is real and what is just a story or a fantasy created by our own minds. And this has a very deep impact on my interpretation of history because also when I look at history, for me the big question is what is real and what are fictions created by human beings? And at least my understanding is that the source of human power, but also the source of so much human misery, is the human imagination and the ability of humans to create fictional stories and then to believe them to such an extent that they can start entire wars just because they believe some religious or national or economic fiction. And this is really what gave us control of the planet. We control this planet not because as individuals we are much more intelligent than chimpanzees or pigs or dogs but rather because we are the only mammal that can cooperate in very large numbers. And we can do that because we believe in fiction. If you examine any large scale human cooperation you always find a fictional story as a basis whether it's about God or the nation or money or even human rights. Human rights like God in heaven. They are just a story invented by humans. They are not a biological reality. And this is, again, the source of our power and also of many of our calamities. You can never convince the group of Chimpanzees to attack the neighboring group by promising them that after they die if they die for the great Chimpanzee God or the great Chimpanzee nation then after they die they will go to Chimpanzee heaven and they receive lots of bananas and virgin chimpanzees and things like that. No chimpanzee will ever, ever believe such a story. And this is why we control the world and not the chimpanzee. I love this basic picture, but I must admit I've had a few problems with some of your terminology here because you use words like religion and fiction and stories fairly loosely. So you say things like science depends on religion and humanism is a religion and all, as you just said, all large scale human cooperation is based on fiction. But it seems to me that there are fictions and then there are fictions. And I think we still want to differentiate between stories and concepts that are obviously false, right? And therefore spread confusion by definition and those that one need not be confused to adopt. So, you know, the US constitution or the concept of human rights or the convention of money, these are not fictions in the same way that the concept of paradise or martyrdom or the Holy Spirit are fictions. And I don't have to be confused about the nature of reality to see the benefit of thinking in terms of human rights or to use money. Do you disagree with that or are we on the same page there? I definitely agree that not all stories are the same and some stories are much more beneficial than other stories. And also they demand a kind of different kind, maybe, of belief. But what happens is, even if you start by a convention like money, that, yes, everybody knows that these pieces of paper have no value and it's just an agreement between people that invest them with a certain value very soon, what happens is that people forget that or ignore that. And if you open a suitcase full of $100 bills and you look at the brain of the person who is looking at that pile of money, you see like all the neurons going crazy and the person sees the money as something really valuable. Now, if you start talking with him and have a long philosophical discussion, then yes, in the end, maybe he will agree that actually it's just a convention. But the immediate experience of the person looking at the pile of money is immense greed and even a willingness to kill for it. And it's the same with corporations. If you tell somebody that Google is just a story or General Motors is just a story, then yes, if you sit for a long philosophical discussion or legal discussion, they will understand what you mean. But in most cases, in everyday experience, we treat these entities as if they are completely real. Yeah. It's also worth pointing out that we can get locked in to these conventions in ways that create an immense amount of needless suffering. And you must know Alan Watts, the great popularizer of Eastern philosophy from the he told an amusing story. I'm sure he told this a hundred times, but when he's talking about the great Depression in this vein, and talking about the concept of money, he pointed out that money is an abstraction, kind of like an inch, right, or any unit of measurement. And so the way our economy fell into the abyss after the Great Depression was to some degree a matter of our not being able to free ourselves from this convention. And so he talked about what happened in the Great Depression was like a construction worker showing up on the job, and the foreman says, Sorry, no more work today. We've run out of inches. Right. The idea of running out of money when there's still houses to be built and still people who want them, and there was no less work to be done, but we couldn't coordinate our work, given what had happened to the economy. These abstractions obviously have enormous power. And also, I would say that if you would talk with, like a theologian, then he will tell you, well, we also know that God is not this old man, old angry man in the sky that gets upset. I don't know if you don't follow his orders. God is love, God is whatever. And he will come up with some very abstract and maybe convincing story about what God is. And when you hear this story of the theologian, you will say, well, actually, maybe I was too fast to condemn religion. But as a historian, I would tell you, yes, the theologians, God, this is this is maybe kind of a nice not nice, but this idea has some sense in it. But this is not the God of history. This is not the God that launched the Crusades and the jihad and all the religious world and persecutions and so forth. There is a huge gap between the god of the theologians and the god of the masses. And from historical perspective, it's the God of the masses that really count. It's the angry men in the sky. And it's the same with money. Yes. If we have this deep conversation, then we all agree that money is just an obstruction created by humans and so forth. But I don't know if you're in the middle of a warfare between two gangs or between two corporations, then everybody is dead serious that these pieces of paper or these electronic data on the computer, this is the most important thing in the world. So what is the Internet doing to us now in affecting the power or lack of power of the stories we use to organize our lives? How do you view our current moment with respect to creating stories that will allow for the emergence of a viable global civilization or truly open societies that are durable? What's your sense of the present? Well, there are two questions. There one about the Internet and the other about a global society. And I think they're very different questions. Let's hold globalism. I want to talk about globalism and its precarious birth later on. So let's just talk about technology and its implications at the moment. Well, technology makes our stories and fantasies more important than ever before because it makes them more powerful than ever before. You know, if people in ancient Egypt wanted to live forever, they just couldn't. They didn't have the technology. So they fantasized. And their fantasies had a lot of impact on the economy because they used all the resources to build these huge pyramids. And it had an impact on culture and on politics, but the impact was limited. Now, when people fantasize about immortality, they're starting to have the technology to actually do it. I don't think it will be feasible in, say, 20 years. But given 50 years, 100 years, I don't think that overcoming old age and death is impossible. And then whatever we fantasize on, whatever our dreams, whatever stories we believe, it becomes the most powerful force in the world. The very future of evolution of life will be shaped by human fiction. By I mean, by human fiction, I mean the stories in which we believe science and technology will give us the power to realize whatever fiction we believe in. And then the question, what is your favorite fiction? Will become maybe the most important question in the evolution of life. What we are seeing, or what we will see in the not so distant future is exactly the collapse of the separation between fiction and reality. Because things that begin as fiction in the human mind, we will have the technology to make them a reality and then they are no longer fiction. Yeah, you could create your favorite heaven or hell maybe using bioengineering and using brain computer interfaces and virtual reality technology and things like that. Do you think in terms of optimism and pessimism here, or are you just describing the world as you see it and not tipping in one direction or another with respect to your hope or fear about what's happening? I try not to think in terms of optimism and pessimism because it then colors your lenses and makes it more difficult to just see what is happening. I also think of the historian that history is not deterministic and technology is not deterministic. You could use the same technology for very good purposes or for very bad purposes. If you look at the 20th century, then you see that with the same technology of electricity and cars and radio and all that, people could create communist dictatorships or fascist regimes or liberal democracies. The electricity didn't tell people what to do with it. And it's the same with biotechnology and artificial intelligence. We still have options. And just to give one example, which is close to my heart, because I'm very much concerned about what we are doing to other animals, and especially farm animals. And I think that biotechnology poses both the greatest threat and the greatest promise to farm animals depending on what we choose to do. With it. You could use biotechnology to start engineering cows and pigs and chickens that grow faster and have more meat and give more milk and whatever serving the interest of the industry, while completely disregarding what this means in terms of the experience and the misery of the animals. On the other hand, you could use biotechnology to start what is known as cellular agriculture, or create cultured meat or clean meat, which is meat grown from cells. If you want a steak, you don't need to raise a cow and kill it and have a steak. You can just grow the steak from cells. I actually had, Uma Valeti, the CEO of Memphis Meats, on the podcast about a year ago, and that was the topic. I'm very excited about this truly ethically, pure approach to growing meat. Just no animal involved. It'd be a wonderful breakthrough. Yeah. So this is a good example. That the same field. Of course, it's not exactly the same technology, but the same field, depending on how we choose to use it, can be an immense blessing and can be a terrible curse. So I try to focus just on understanding what are the possibilities. And also I try not to make prophecies and forecasts. I don't think anybody really knows how the world would look like in 2015. I really just try to map the different possibilities. So to take a very local case that is in the news, the news itself is in the news, really. So the issue of fake news seems to me has direct relevance to the influence of stories. How do you view this recent phenomenon of fake news? Is it at all new or have we been dealing with fake news for thousands of years? I still don't understand what's new about it. I mean, it's a very troubling phenomenon for sure, but I don't think there is anything new. I mean, if this is the era of post truth, then I would like to know when was the era of truth? The 1950s? The 1930s? The Middle Ages? I don't think there is anything that Joseph Gabel didn't know about propaganda and fake news and manipulating the public. And going much further back, fake news are thousands of years old. You just need to think of the Bible. And the Bible is also a disconcerting example that fake news can last forever, not get exposed after a month of a year. They can last for thousands of years. That's a great meme. Fake news can last forever. Let's get T shirts printed. So one thing is very interesting. In your latest book again on the implications of technology, you speculate about the likely birth of new religions inspired by technology. Say a little more about that. Yes, I think that there is a good chance that Silicon Valley in places like it will create not just gadgets and tools, but ideological systems and even religions that will make many of the traditional promises of religion promising justice and prosperity and even immortality. But here on earth, with the help of technology and not after you die with the help of supernatural beings. And you can say that we have actually seen at least some technical religions, religions based on technology previously, maybe the best example is socialism and communism. Communism promised to create paradise on Earth with the help of the technology of the Industrial Revolution. Now, it didn't work very well, but this was the basic idea we don't need God, we just need to control the means of production. And the engineers and the technicians, they can create paradise on Earth for us. And this didn't work very well. But I think that in the 21st century we'll see a second wave of, of these technologies. Now, if you don't like the term religion, you can, you can just use ideology instead. But I think there is no essential difference between ideology and religion. They both fulfill the same function in history to give legitimacy to human institutions and to human norms and values. Whether there is a God involved or not is really far less important than the historical function. Because in the end, it's not God that makes religions, it's humans that make religion. The dividing line for me usually between religion and another kind of ideology, like a political one, is that the line between the natural and the supernatural. So when when you're you're positing the existence of invisible agents for which you have no real evidence or you're making claims about the validity of prophecy the messiah is going to return, or you're making claims about the survival of consciousness after death based on precious little evidence. That's where I think it's obviously a religious enterprise and you have superstition and other worldliness creeping in. But again, there's no very clear line there. And when you talk about something like the personality cult in North Korea at the moment, obviously it has many of the features of a religion, certainly the socially consequential ones. And then you have something like the singularity phenomenon or the idea of the Singularity in Silicon Valley as propounded by somebody like Ray Kurtzweil that has many of the features of other worldliness, arguably that a classical religion does. I mean, there is this expectation of immortality that you mentioned a few moments ago. And yeah, I agree that the boundaries here are somewhat fungible. But when you think of the birth of a technology inspired religion, is the notion of the Singularity something that answers to that description already or are you thinking about something else? Definitely, that's probably the best example we have today. I think like the singularitarians may deserve the title the first Silicon Valley techno religion. But as the technology matures and delivers more and more achievements in power, I think we'll see more and more of that. Especially because, again, in contrast to ancient religions like Christianity or the religion of ancient Egypt, when you needed. To postpone most of your desires to the afterlife. The immense attraction of the new technologies is that they promised to fulfill all these miracles here and now in this very life on Earth. Now whether they managed to do it or not it's a different question, of course. But the temptation is, I think, immense. The difference here, it really does strike me as a difference is that the technology that promises this kind of rapturous fulfillment of all human desire exists to a considerable degree even now and we are noticing it. While it creates these benefits, the benefits of intelligent technology and automation it is creating the very harms that will make people more and more desperate to find something to anchor them. Take automation as the narrow case. The consequences of automation, I think unarguably at this point will be a kind of relentless loss of the need for human labor. Right? There are jobs that will go away that will never be replaced. And in the limit, when you get perfect automation and perfect AI we have a total change of just the purpose of human life. People will not be able to find their meaning anymore in work because there is no need for human work in the same way that there's virtually no need for horses to work now. And if you gave me a horse I wouldn't know what to do with it. I mean, if you gave me a free horse you would just be imposing a cost on me, right? Whereas a century ago there were, I think 28 million horses working in the US. And they were indispensable. So if you buy the fact that we are moving towards something like in the best case, I mean, this is to be desired and this is, this is a matter of success. If we don't destroy ourselves with technology we will be putting ourselves out of a job. Then the the challenges of wealth inequality and you know how to spread this wealth around and developing the political and ethical norms that will get people to want to do that that's a huge challenge. And you'll have vast numbers of people who are looking for meaning in their lives and obviously that's a problem now. It's been a problem for thousands of years but it's a problem that most people haven't had to confront very directly because the burden has been on them to spend most of their lives working. And that's something that seems to be going away again if we succeed, if it doesn't go away it means we have created some chaos for ourselves that will be intolerable for other reasons. So tell me about your views on wealth inequality here and the implications of automation and artificial intelligence for the future. I'll think first about inequality and then about the problem of meaning which I think is the deepest problem. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I am speaking with Robert Wright. Robert is an author, I think most famously, of the book The Moral Animal, which was one of the first books that many of us read on evolutionary psychology. Robert has written many other books. And for many journals he's written for the New Yorker, The Atlantic Time, Slate, the New Republic He's a recipient of the National Magazine Award for essay and criticism and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He's taught in the psychology department, the University of Pennsylvania and in the religion department at Princeton. And he's currently a visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York. And Robert's new book is Why Buddhism Is True the Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. And we talk almost entirely about the book. We start the conversation putting some of our checkered history to rest so that we can move on. Those of you who know the history will know that it has been, as I often say of these kinds of things, fairly prickly. But we have a very collegial conversation on the topic at hand. We talk about the connection between meditation and morality. There's a fair amount about the harmony between evolutionary psychology and the Buddhist view of the mind. Also a lot about the illusoryness of the self and how to make sense of that claim. In any case, I now bring you Robert Wright. I am here with Robert Wright. Robert, thanks for coming on the podcast. Well, thanks for having me. Soon. So you've written a fascinating new book, which I'm very eager to talk about, but before we dive into that, I need to say a word or two. Or we should say a word or two about our history, because some of our listeners will be aware of it, and they, as a result, will be waiting for this conversation to run completely off the rails. I'm sure we're capable of that if we put our mind to it. I wouldn't count us out. There was a passage in your book on page 17 which made me smile. I'm gonna I'm going to read that. It gives us the the right context. I think you write, I don't have a hostile disposition toward humankind per se. In fact, I feel quite warmly toward humankind. It's individual humans. I have trouble with. I'm prone to a certain skepticism about people's motives and character, and this critical appraisal can harden into enduringly harsh judgment. I'm particularly tough on people who disagree with me on moral or political issues that I consider important. Once I place these people on the other side of a critical ideological boundary, I can have trouble thinking generous or sympathetic thoughts about them. I must say that's the vibe I've been getting from you lo these many years. What do you think accounts for that? Well, first of all, if you keep calling my book fascinating or whatever you called it, I will be able to think generous and sympathetic thoughts toward you. Yeah, it's funny how that works. I don't know. I'm a somewhat temperamental person in general, and I've always had a temper, and, you know, issues matter to me. I mean, it's funny because the the book is about some of the cognitive biases that lead us to behave this way. I mean, that lead us to think the worst of people under some circumstances. So I'm aware of the issue. I don't know, it's interesting. Do you think you're kind of wholly free of this? Not that I'm interviewing you. You don't have to answer that question. Well, you should feel free to interview me because this is definitely a conversation more than an interview, always far away. But I feel like the dynamic has been fairly one sided between us. It's not to say that I can't be a jerk in other circumstances, but I feel like I've been noticing. I mean, not a ton of it, and certainly not a ton of it of late, but I actually went back and looked at the history just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating or recalling in a way that was starkly self serving. But I think the only two times we've met are both on videotape. You unearthed this interview you did with me more than ten years ago and released it, I think only like a year ago. So it's this time capsule interview, which is kind of hilarious because it plays like a deposition. And it's kind of funny in relation to your current book because I now realize that your interest in things like meditation and Buddhism and the notion that the self might be an illusion and that it would be possible to be recognized as such. All of those interests predate that conversation we had a long time ago, where, to my eye, I was getting a fairly incessant attitude of skepticism from you toward me on those topics. Our conversation ranged over other topics as well. I think the main issue ideologically between us has been you have felt that my linkage between the specific ideas within Islam and jihadism and therefore terrorism has been inaccurately or unnecessarily direct. And you think that much of our entanglement with the Muslim world has very little to do with religion per se. It has much more to do with politics and tribalism and other more terrestrial issues, and so we've disagreed about that. But I feel like that gave everything else you were hearing from me kind of lack of luster, which made you deeply skeptical on points, which now I see in your book. You and I basically agree. Yeah, I mean, first of all, you're right. There's a genuine ideological and slash philosophical tension between us at one level. I mean, I think you and some of the other new atheists are wrong about the relationship between religious doctrine and behavior generally, and that in the contemporary context, that leads to unfortunate policies that have exacerbated the situation, and I continue to care deeply about that. Now, if that's led me to be unfair to you in the past, then I was wrong to do that. I actually haven't reviewed the record that much. I was thinking that review from the interview that I did of you ten years ago was reasonably civil. I mean, I'm sure it was critical because I think you're wrong, but in any event, you're right. There is this broad area of agreement as well. I hesitate to say that it's worth watching, but it's worth watching just for I mean, one, we're both more than ten years younger, which is unnerving in and of itself. Yeah, well, I look 20 years younger, you look five years younger. That's what's unnerving. It's quite The Picture of Dorian Gray. I wish I had somewhere. But the way it's filmed, too, is kind of hilarious. It really does look like a deposition. It's like a two shot in what looked like it's like a wood panel, legal office looking space and everything conspires to make it seem uncomfortable. And then we had a debate, actually, on the issue that we disagree about with respect to Islam. And that was very, very weird for reasons that have nothing to do with you. In fact, there may even be reasons that you don't know anything about. But that was the one time I ever walked out on stage having just received a seemingly credible death threat for that event itself. That event was streamed live on the Internet, and someone called the venue saying that they were going to shoot me at exactly 07:00 at that event. And I don't know if you recall any of this, but the event started a little late, and the half hour preceding my walking out on stage, I had been standing in the company of three officers from the LAPD and Venue Security and other security, all trying to assess whether this was a credible threat. And then I remember leaving their company feeling no total assurance. What's interesting in that video is you can actually see it on my face. The degree to which I'm scanning the audience while I'm talking is absolutely bizarre. So that didn't improve our vibes that night. I remember the security detail and thinking, you must be a very important person. Also, I want to assure you that I had nothing to do with the death threat. Sam. It's a good method, though. If you want to win a debate, you can call in death threats on your opponent. Yeah, it would work. I'll keep it in mind for future debates. I remember a wildly supportive audience for you, like rock star level, wildly supportive and being envious. I think it was an atheist. Yeah, it was some kind of gathering of like minded folk. Yeah. Okay. Well, so now to the matter at hand. We'll put all of that behind us and all is forgiven because you've written, as I said, a very interesting book on a topic that is dear to my heart. So let's just get into that, I guess. Before we get into the book itself, just how would you summarize your interests and background as a writer and a journalist? This book is not obviously in your wheelhouse, given everything else you've done. How do you describe yourself as a thinker? I think it kind of fits in, broadly speaking. I mean, I think I've always been interested in kind of cosmic, philosophical, spiritual, maybe issues, and that's evident in really probably in all my books. The most obvious kind of precursor, I guess, of this is my book on evolutionary psychology, the Moral Animal, where I noted in that I wasn't well versed in Buddhism at the time, just to be clear that it was the Buddhism part that seemed new. Obviously, the evolutionary psychology has has been your throughline for many years. Right. I did note in that book, and even emphasize two things. One, natural selection did not necessarily design us to see things clearly. Natural selection's bottom line is to get jeans in the next generation. And if having an illusion or misperceiving something or having a tendency toward that will help get jeans in the next generation, then natural selection will favor misperception. I even talked a little about, for example, the split brain experiment. Suggesting that we overestimate the extent to which we have our conscious self is kind of a CEO self. The second thing I mentioned is that we are not designed to be happy and that in particular, gratification is designed to evaporate because that's what keeps us motivated to seek more food, more sex, more status. Whatever it is that has been conducive to genetic proliferation, I don't think I understood at the time. I did quote the Buddha saying something in that book, but it was kind of off topic. I don't think I understood at the time that these two things, having illusions about the world and being prone to suffering are not only well, I knew that at least maybe I knew they were emphasizing Buddhism. I didn't understand the way Buddhism links them up. In any event, I certainly did not understand the extent to which, as I now believe, evolutionary psychology provides a kind of a backstory for Buddhism and helps corroborate even some of Buddhism's most radical assertions. And also, I think, modern psychology more broadly does there are experimental findings that have nothing to do necessarily with evolutionary psychology that also back up Buddhism. So I see the clearest connection with that book, but I could probably find some little linkage with other books. Now, there's a whole other part of me that has written op eds about foreign policy and so on that's only connected to this book in the sense that I think if we if everyone in the world did see things more clearly in a way that I think meditation facilitates, we would have fewer wars and foreign policy problems in general. Well, so I should mention the title of the book. The book is Why Buddhism is True the Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. And we will get into the significance of all those words. But I guess let's just linger on the title for a second. Because this I can only imagine as an author who has tried to dust off the term spirituality and put it in scare quotes with really never a feeling of comfort. You don't have to imagine that. Right, yeah. No, I did that in waking up. In fact, we had the same publisher, Simon Schuster. Right. So I can imagine this title, Why Buddhism is True gave you a little trepidation. Well, for more than one reason. I mean, first of all, it, it just sounds kind of unbearably overbearing or something. I mean, I mean, you know, it's not it's not a humble title. There's that there's like who the hell are you to to say that after, you know, 2500 years you've come up with some, you know, some fresh insight into the question of the foundation of Buddhism's truth? Secondly, what are you doing using a word like true when there are even parts of Buddhist philosophical tradition that cast doubt on whether that word has ultimate meaning? Third, what do you mean by Buddhism? There are lots of different Buddhism, like all spiritual and in a way, philosophical traditions, has evolved over time and developed these different branches. In some cases, the different branches have different ideas. So isn't it essentialist to act as if there's a single Buddhism? All those questions naturally get asked. I actually addressed those in a quick note to readers at the very beginning, or at least acknowledge my awareness of them. I joked to friends in publishing before the book came out that the title may be a little hyperbolic, but I don't think it exceeds industry standards. But honestly, I'm willing to stand by it. I also have an appendix where I elaborate on the specific Buddhist ideas that I think are corroborated and the extent of their corroboration. I'm claiming, and I elaborate a little more on what I mean by true, but with all that as qualification. I'm serious about the title. And it's not that I've had some special insight, certainly as you know, if you've read the book, I don't claim to be some kind of great meditator. I mean, Sam, you have much more meditative depth and meditative history than I have, and you've had deeper experiences. I just think that until the advent of modern evolutionary psychology and some findings from experimental psychology in general, it was not possible to nail some of this stuff down the way you can now. So it's just it's like, for Mo, for almost all of 2500 years, it hasn't been possible to make the kind of argument I'm making. Yeah, there's one thing you bring that is pretty novel, maybe entirely novel. I don't know that I have encountered it anywhere, which is the piece that we'll talk about the way in which evolutionary psychology really dovetails nicely with the truths as they can be gleaned from Buddhism or specifically the practice of meditation. I guess the other caveat here is that you are not endorsing any form of Buddhism. You're not arguing that rebirth is true or likely to be true. And I don't think you talk about in the book. But I would imagine you're not any more of a fan of Buddhism as a reservoir of political insight than I am. If you look at societies that have been Buddhist historically, they have fairly unimpressive political fortunes. And the people who have argued that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was made possible in large part because of a Buddhist spirit of quietism, that incubated, that kind of extremism, I don't have a strong opinion about that. But it's just not obvious that Buddhism is the perfect operating system for a society to thrive politically or scientifically or in any other way. I guess people would want to remind us of what's happening in Myanmar right now. And very strange career arc of Ansansuchi, who was everyone's favorite saint when she was under house arrest. And now she's not far from some bizarre angel of tribal vengeance in her not dealing responsibly with the Rohingya Muslim ethnic cleansing crisis. So it's not Buddhism you're really pushing for as any kind of ideology. There are certain things in Buddhism, specifically mindfulness meditation and the truths about human experience that can be gleaned from it that you think, give us an unusually good look at what it's like to be us and what the prospects are for bettering our lives by a deliberate use of attention. Would you agree with that summary? I'd go a little further. I mean, I'd say, first of all, you're right. I'm not defending things commonly considered supernatural or exotically metaphysical, like rebirth. And I make that clear at the beginning too. I'm talking about the naturalistic part of Buddhism sometimes called secular Buddhism. I'm a little ambivalent about that phrase, but I would say I am defending well, not just radical claims. Well, first, let me say I think at the heart of Buddhism pretty broadly lies what I consider a kind of amazing claim, which is that the reason we suffer and the reason we make other people suffer is that we don't see the world clearly. And I say it's an amazing claim because it suggests that you can kill three birds with 1 st. If you can learn to see the world more clearly, then you will suffer less. You will be a better person toward other people. That's that's the idea. And I think that's found pretty broadly across the Buddhist traditions. I certainly think you can locate that in both Terravada and Mahayana. And if you ask what they mean by see the world clearly, again, in both traditions, there are some pretty radical claims about the extent to which we're diluted. I mean, the idea that the self doesn't exist, or even that our conception of the self is way, way off base, that's a radical claim. The doctrine of so called emptiness, that our perception of the world out there is deeply misleading in ways we could get into later if you want. That's a radical claim. When you look at what the claim is, and I'm actually defending those propositions to a pretty considerable extent, and I'm certainly defending that first thing, that the reason we suffer, that our suffering and our bad behavior are related to not seeing the world clearly. Right. Well, I guess it says something about me that the truths of selflessness and emptiness and the connection between suffering and seeing the world clearly, those weren't among the radical claims that I was thinking about when I was differentiating. You from the rest of the world's, Buddhist. All of that seems now to me straightforwardly, true. And we'll talk about all that. That's based on your experience, though. I mean, to reading public, that's all right. It takes some work to even get them to take it seriously. And that's what I tried to do. I mean, I would quickly say, on the political issue, yeah, you're right. That's a whole subject we could get into. But I think the first thing people have to understand when they ask, well, wait a second, what about Myanmar? Is in Asia. Leh buddhists, by and large, don't meditate. Many monks don't meditate. So right away, if my book is talking to a considerable extent about how meditation can clarify both our literal well, our vision of reality and our moral vision, that's what's happening. The horrible things that are happening right now in that part of the world are not all that closely connected to that claim. Yeah, that is something that is not often appreciated, that meditation is a very esoteric endeavor within the context of any Buddhist society, really. I would think this is probably true even of Tibetan society, such as it still exists, but it's definitely true of a place like Thailand or Burma. So several doors open here that I want to rush through each at the same time. Just to summarize basically what you said about the point of contact between meditation or Buddhism and science. There is this alignment between what we can understand about ourselves largely through evolution and to some degree through neuroscience, and how Buddhism describes the human condition. And understanding this both can give an impetus to a practice like meditation, and they can also both reduce our suffering and reduce the kind of suffering we produce for others. I think that second piece that, you know, speaks to goodness and morality. I feel like that connection I feel like you've also acknowledged it somewhere in the book that connection is less clear, which is to say, there are people who seem at least to be very good meditators who aren't necessarily good people or haven't been good people. And so the connection between competence in meditation and being a good person is less direct than we might hope, and at least there's some evidence for that. It's certainly not automatic. Yeah. And I do say that in the book, and of course, historically, the Dharma, the Buddhist teachings, have included a lot of ethical instruction. The assumption seems not to have been that if you just meditate, you'll automatically become a better person. That said, I think there's a correlation, some kind of probabilistic correlation. I mean, I think you see this even at the beginning of a meditative practice. If you're just doing what you don't even think of as Buddhist meditation, and you call it mindfulness based stress reduction and it calms you down a little, you'll probably be an easier person to get along with. I mean, you'll probably become what a utilitarian would call a better person just because you're causing less suffering. And I think that correlation tends to be there. But you're right. There are a number of famous, very adept meditators who sexually exploited their students and things like that. So it's not automatic. And in principle, meditation is a tool. Adeptness at meditation could, in principle, be used to make you a more effectively bad person. As a general matter, I think you're absolutely right. When you look at the motives in yourself for being a jerk, they are fairly reliably undercut by your paying more and more attention to the dynamics of your own suffering and well being, and questioning rather skeptically why you should follow each thought to its behavioral terminus. And I do think there is, as you said, a probabilistic correlation between time spent practicing something like mindfulness and being more ethically sensitive before we actually get into mindfulness and its connection to what we know about ourselves scientifically. How did you get into any of this? When was your interest in something as esoteric as mindfulness was? It's pretty current now, but 14 or so years ago, it was not nearly enjoying the public moment it is now. How did you get interested, and what form has your interest taken? Yeah, well, I guess probably ever since college, I had occasionally tried to meditate. It was one of those things you're supposed to dabble in Eastern philosophy and so on. So I tried it a few times. It had never clicked for me. I'm not a natural meditator at all. I have a very limited attention span, for one thing. So I finally, on the advice of a friend, tried an actual one week meditation retreat in 2003. Silent meditation retreat in the, you know, vipassana slash mindfulness tradition. You might say Vipassana. Vipassana and mindfulness aren't exactly the same thing, but they're related. And, you know, it was just the first two days were hell. I couldn't focus on my breath. Hated myself for failing. Most of our listeners will be familiar, I think, with this topic because I've had Joseph Goldstein on the podcast, although it's been a couple of years, but do you want to describe what a meditation retreat is like and how startlingly different it is from ordinary life for someone who hasn't done it? Sure. In fact, the first thing this friend did was say, you should go hear Joseph Goldstein talk in New York. And this was 2001, because I remember it was right after 911, and then it's his retreat center, the insight meditation society that I went to in 2003. And, you know, these things vary from retreat center to retreat center, how they're structured and so on. At IMS, it's like, by my count, I think it was five and a half hours total of sitting meditation each day, five and a half hours of walking meditation. You do a little job in the morning that keeps the cost down for everyone. At night, you hear a dharma talk by one of the teachers. The meditation sessions are 45 minutes. There's no talking except, like, a couple of times a week. You can check in with a teacher either in group or individual setting, but you're not talking. There's no news from the outside world. And if anybody goes to a retreat, my advice is do not bring your smartphone. Whether or not the retreat center emphasizes this, get off the grid. Set your email on auto reply. That's an important part of the experience. So you're there. So those first couple of days, I'm like, everyone there looks like they're doing better than I am, and most of them were. I'm sure they were mostly veterans, probably. I couldn't focus on ten consecutive breaths. I mean, like, all day, the first day. And like I said, finally it clicked. Had you meditated for some considerable period before you sat your first retreat, or did you just jump right into it? No, I had not. I tried it a few times. I went to a couple of meetings at a place where they did Zen in DC. Like, 25 years ago. I had gone at a Unitarian church, to a Unitarian church here to sessions after the church service a few times. But no, I had never understood why anyone would meditate. Hadn't got an inkling, like, zero positive reinforcement that's interesting because not many people jump into a retreat without having experienced enough benefit or seeming benefit from meditation to feel like they want the full immersion experience. Yeah, I honestly don't know why. I mean, as you probably know, I was brought up religiously, so I don't know, maybe there was then I lost my Christian faith. Maybe there was some kind of void. And also, as I acknowledge in the book, I'm not a person wholly without improvements that could be made to my psyche, you might say. And that's what brings a lot of people to meditation, just ranging from mild anxiety to severe self loathing, whatever the issue may be. It often begins as a therapeutic thing. I think in my case, it was more than therapeutic. I don't think that was the bulk of it. I think I was, you know, I probably in some sense, wanted salvation. You know? I mean, I was brought up to want salvation, and I don't know, but I recommend meditation retreats. They're not guaranteed to work out wonderfully, but I call them extreme sports for the mind. I mean, there can be harrowing times and deeply gratifying and awe inspiring times and profoundly illuminating times, but it's a serious thing that I encourage people to do if they're at all inclined. Yeah, I guess I don't know if you would agree with this, but when I recommend that someone sit a retreat, or if someone comes to me wondering whether or not they should sit a retreat, I tend to say that they shouldn't sit a retreat shorter than five to seven days. I feel like the first two or three days of any retreat of really any length, and it can be two or three days, or it can be three months are the hardest. And if you only sit for a weekend, you basically have had the full experience of hitting the wall of your own restlessness and disinclination to be there without giving yourself any time to settle in for what it's like to actually be there. Does that resonate with your experience? Absolutely. I say, like when they say, what about a weekend retreat? I say, well, if it's a good way to scout out a teacher to see if you want to spend the whole week with him, yeah. Otherwise, I would not expect very dramatic results, so I would not have gotten anything out of a weekend retreat. And yet, by the end of the week and I describe some of this in the book, but by the end of the week, it felt transformative. There had been both individual experiences while meditating that were, well, in one case, mind blowing, in one case, really arresting. But beyond that, there's just this transformation of your consciousness, not just when you're meditating, but you're like walking around in the woods and seeing beauty in places you've never seen it. And I remember in this first retreat, I came upon a weed called a. Plantain weed that I had actually spent a lot of time trying to kill, usually by pulling up, because it's the kind of weed that had afflicted a couple of front lawns I had had. I just suddenly thought, why have I been trying to kill this weed? And now that's going to sound like this touchy feely. But there's a significant point I was experientially apprehending here, which is that and it sounds trivial when you say it as a point, which is just that weed is a human imposed category. It doesn't say weed on the DNA of weeds. It's a cultural thing. And there are plants that in some cultures people have decided they don't want on their lawns or their flower beds, and that's what we call a weed. But that doesn't mean that there's any kind of objective rigorous rule that separates weeds from non weeds. And it doesn't mean that weeds are actually unattractive in some objective sense. And again, that sounds kind of like a trivial point that that humans categorize things. Obviously it's a human adventure category. But Sam, you probably know what I mean. When you feel it as a perceptual shift, you realize that how subtly these human conceptions and like stories we tell infiltrate your perception normally. So, like, I had been going around apprehending essence of weed in the subtle way that I didn't even understand. I wasn't aware of doing it. But when it's gone and you're just it's just a plant, that's a really dramatic perceptual shift. And I personally think, I mean, it depends on what you mean by the Buddhist concept of emptiness. And there are different interpretations of this within Buddhism. But I think the perception I had is related to one common interpretation of the idea of emptiness, which is just that the things we see in the world actually don't have essences. We impose those on them. To see emptiness is to truly experientially appreciate that things don't have essences and that the essences we perceive reflect kind of human imposed categories. So that was on my first retreat. Again, it would be hard to appreciate, from what I've said, how powerful it felt to look at a weed that I had always hated and go, that's as beautiful as the other stuff in the forest. But I think it was like a highly nontrivial apprehension. Yeah, well, before we get into the topic of emptiness, which I definitely want to touch, I think we should just remind people what the practice of mindfulness is so that they can understand what it is you were doing that could have produced an epiphany like that and others will talk about. And this also speaks to why there's nothing unscientific about this enterprise. There's a lot that can go by the name of meditation or spiritual practice that can seem starkly unscientific because it comes freighted with specifically religious concepts and iconography and things that are being added to your experience. Ritualistically or by virtue of what you're visualizing or the mantra you're chanting. And all of that can seem like a departure from empirical rigor. And it's not to say that all of those practices need be a departure from empirical rigor. There's a way to stand with the parikrishna as a chant without being a religious lunatic, I would argue, but with something like mindfulness, the connection to science, at least potentially is very direct. All mindfulness is is paying very close attention to experience without adding anything to it. There's no mantra, there's no visualization, there's no necessary belief framework. It's just in each moment you are making an effort to clearly notice whatever you in fact notice, whether it's a sensation in the body or a sight or a sound or a thought or a mood arising in the mind. You're noticing these phenomenons, the contents of consciousness, as clearly as possible. And that clear noticing is different from the way you're tending to live in at least two respects. One is you're tending to live your life, and this is something very few people notice about themselves until they try to meditate. You're tending to live lost in thought. You're thinking every moment of the day without noticing that you're thinking. And your experience of the present moment and your experience of anything you can notice is coming to you through this veil of discursivity that is in fact not noticed by you. So that's the first thing. It's just hard to pay attention because you are thinking every single moment of the day and you're not aware of it. And so you'll try to follow the breath as an initial exercise in mindfulness, and this is a very common experience. People will pay attention to the breath and then feel that they're doing it for even minutes at a time. And then say, well, you know, when when you ask them what that was like, well, say, you know, I did it for like, five minutes, but then I got distracted and then I came back. Whereas, you know, and as everyone discovers on their first retreat, you know, if their life depended on it, they couldn't stay on the breath for anything like five minutes. It's hard enough to follow five breaths in succession without getting carried away by thought. Yeah, actually I was once on a retreat with the Burmese meditation master Upanddida Sado, whose name I think is familiar to you. It was like a two month retreat and it was set up in such a way that you could hear the, as you said, that you would have a daily or every other day interview for ten minutes with the teacher. And this retreat was set up so that actually you could hear the interview that was happening before you on the retreat. So you're kind of waiting in line, you're in the vestibule, waiting for your chance to talk to upon dita. And so I could hear the person in front of me every time I went for an interview. So I was hearing this person say in the beginning, you know, in the first few days of the retreat, that he could as I just said, he could stay with the breath for maybe five minutes and then get lost, and then he would come back to the breath. And, you know, I just recognized at once how absurd that was because this was not my first retreat. But then over the course of maybe six weeks, I could hear his experience getting more honest, where he would say that, now maybe he can get ten breaths in succession and then he's off. That's not a description of a person's ability degrading. That is a description of what it's like to actually equip yourself with the tools to notice how powerfully distracted you are in each moment. And so just to bring one other element in here. So once you can pay attention to experience closely again without adding anything to it, you then begin to notice the difference between merely being aware of phenomenon and reacting habitually to phenomenon, as described in the Buddhist lexicon with desire and aversion. And so your tendency to grasp at what's pleasant and push away what's unpleasant that begins to seem as. In fact, it is a powerful source of disturbance in your mind. And as you know, the Buddhists link that to basically all forms of psychological suffering. But at minimum, this is an automaticity. You can relax by merely paying more careful attention to the raw qualities of experience, nonjudgmentally, not grasping at what's pleasant and pushing away what's unpleasant. And when you do that, a door into a very different kind of experience of a sort that you just described with The Hated Weed Opens. And again, at no point have you stepped away from the spirit of scientific empiricism. You're not believing anything on insufficient evidence. You're not pretending to know something you don't know. You're actually just paying more careful attention to what it's like to be you in each moment. Right now, I can see people doubting this. People who haven't done it doubting this and saying, well, so you say you went off and meditated, and you're claiming that the view of reality you had after that is truer than the ordinary view. Why should I privilege your claim? I think you and I both feel, on the basis of the actual experience, that there are reasons to believe that it is a more objective view you're getting. When your mind calms down, you can kind of feel the layers of story fading away and so on. What I try to do in the book is to provide actual arguments to the effect that it's a clear vision. I mean, to take what you mentioned, the emphasis in Buddhism on both a version on the one hand and a particular kind of attraction on the other, a kind of a clinging you use the term desire, a kind of a craving for something, however you want to put it. I think that is just a very deep insight into the way human psychology works and how it blurs our vision. And if you pay attention and again, it's hard, as you say, it's easy to think, well, if I want to see things clearly, I'll just look at these curtains and stare at them and not look at anything else. And there's some sense in which you're seeing them more clearly than you were five minutes ago. But I think when you meditate, you realize how subtle the things are that are keeping you from true clarity and they tend to boil down to very subtle manifestations of aversion and kind of clinging or desire, right? I mean, it's like that weed. There was, there was an element of a version in my perception of that weed that was coloring that perception in very subtle ways. And that, you know and I argue that if a version is coloring your view of something that is inherently suspect, if you really want to talk about what is an objective view of the world, you have to remember that the aversions we have are their products of a particular evolutionary process natural selection as manifest in a particular lineage, namely human evolution. And then on top of that, particular experiences we have in our lifetimes and so on. But the point is, aversion and desire, there's not necessarily anything wrong with either of those. And in fact, both of them can be very valuable survival mechanisms and can be of great pragmatic value and can also bring you pleasure that is not to be denied. That's all fine. It's when you start, when they color your view of the actual truth of things that I think that they are philosophically suspect. So I think this Buddhist just cutting to the core of it like more than a couple of millennia ago, this emphasis on aversion and kind of clinging attraction or attraction, it's astute and it's profound. I mean, when you think about it, since the very origins of life, to approach or to avoid is the fundamental behavioral decision. If you look at a bacterium, that's what its behavioral algorithm is all about. So since we were, I mean, who knows when sentient subjective experience as we think of it dawned. But, but in some sense, at its very core are these two experiences and they infiltrate our emotions, they infiltrate our perceptions more subtly. That's why I think that one perspective from which to appreciate Buddhist philosophy is the evolutionary perspective, if that makes sense. Yeah, well, let me just flag a possible point of confusion here. So it would be easy to respond based on what you just said, that of course, desire and aversion have been hammered into us by evolution and they're absolutely necessary for our survival. You're just going to wander off a cliff if you have no desire to stay alive or not suffer some horrible injury. So there's this, I think, understandable sense that a life without desire and diversion would be a bad thing or in fact just starkly untenable. You just wouldn't survive a day of it. There's something I guess we could call a kind of status quo bias here. It's not well understood that the mind in terms of its kind of raw attention, the powers of attention, can be trained or that a person can be more or less talented in paying attention. Now, it's obviously any kind of a physical domain. It's obvious there's a difference between an Olympic sprinter and someone who can't even get off the couch, right there's a range of athletic abilities is undeniable and there's a range of intellectual abilities we also recognize. But these run more in the direction of knowledge acquisition and an aptitude for it. So it's not really well understood that just by looking at the drapes, as you say, most people aren't in a good position even to begin to pay attention. And there really is a scope for real training here even to get to the starting line in terms of understanding what there is to pay attention to and what the consequences of noticing it might be. And so this is a real barrier that a lot of people never surmount, which is they hear that meditation is a good idea or has all of these health benefits or psychological benefits and they want to look into it. And so they try it for five minutes or an hour and they look inside and they just see nothing of interest really because they're really just sitting there thinking whether the legs are crossed or not. And they're not actually able to do the practice to a degree to reveal anything at all. The fact of that failure isn't obvious to them. And this is why taking psychedelics has been the doorway to a real commitment to something like meditation for so many people in the west. Because many of us wouldn't have been convinced that there was a there there, but for having our normal levels of psychological unhappiness overridden for a time by one or another drug. It's not to say that drug experiences are always a perfect surrogate for what there is to be experienced through meditation, but at a minimum, if you take 100 micrograms of LSD, something is going to happen. Now, it may be very unpleasant, it could be pleasant or unpleasant, but very few people walk away from that experience thinking that it's impossible to change a human experience. I mean, they may think that it was just a drug experience and has no implication for the rest of what's possible in human life. But with meditation you really do have the problem where you can recommend it to a skeptical person. They can think they've tried it and they've come away thinking that it doesn't work for them or this is just a totally fraudulent enterprise people are practicing some elaborate form of self deception by meditating. Yeah. And I personally think that the fact that I've gotten something out of it means that just about anybody can. Again, I tried various ways to do it, it never worked. But there was a way I finally found to try it. It did make it work, even if it took like a one week silent meditation retreat. But I think there are very few people who can't come to see that. Oh yes, this is giving you a different view of the world. Let me give you a trivial sounding example, but I think a significant one. So where I do my morning meditation, there's like one of these little kind of mini refrigerators and sometimes it starts humming. And one thing I've discovered while meditating and listening to it is that actually this refrigerator's hum at least, definitely consists of at least three different sounds that are coming from different parts of the refrigerator's mechanism and they are varying apparently independently of one another. So they're kind of weaving this little symphony. But anyway, I maintained that it is an objective fact that if I consulted with the makers of the refrigerator or somebody, they could confirm that. Yeah, actually the three different things. Now, I am sure that if I had never started meditating, I would have gone my whole life thinking that a refrigerator's just one thing. Right. And annoying in the same way that that weed of yours is annoying. Well, right. That's the other thing is when you're listening to it during your meditation, it's beautiful. That's amazing in itself. But that part, you might say is subjective. What's not subjective is that I think you could confirm actually I was getting closer to the truth when I said no, there's at least three different things going on in the machinery here. Now, kind of relatedly on the thing you mentioned first about well, aversion and desire or attraction are pragmatically useful. That's true. But even then I think it's important or it can be useful to anyone, including someone who does mindfulness meditation, to get clear on when feelings are actually useful to you, the person, as opposed to when they were useful merely from natural selection's point of view. And then third, as opposed to when in like a modern environment, you're having a feeling like anxiety that might have been more useful in the environment we evolved in but is not so useful now because you're reacting to a novel environment that we're not designed to react to. So and and this gets back to the the fact that we're not designed to see the world clearly. Right. Like if you look at something like fear, you know, if you're taking a walk and you've been told that there are rattlesnakes around and somebody died of a rattlesnake bite while hiking, every time you you hear the grass rustling, you're going to think there's a rattlesnake there. Right. You're going to entertain that hypothesis very seriously even believe it. If a lizard darts out you may briefly literally see a snake you're going to be wrong 99 times out of 100 and you're also going to suffer. By the way. Fear is unpleasant and both of those are designed in features from by natural selection apparently. And the logic is clear that it's better to be safe than sorry. Better to have all these false positives of fear than to be insufficiently vigilant and die of a rattlesnake bite. Now that's the case where your interests and natural selection interests coincide. You look at something else like our drive for status. Well status during evolution seems to have been correlated with genetic proliferation so we tend to seek it. On the other hand, the seeking of it seems to be subject to that general tendency of gratification to evaporate. So we get the promotion or we do whatever we rise in people's esteem before we enjoy it for a little while and then we want more. So there I would say look if you love it, go for it. But if the status game is causing you suffering on balance then you might remind yourself that was just designed to get your genes into the next generation in a different environment. It's probably not even doing that. It may or may not do that. Now actually if you want to think about socioeconomic status that's inversely correlated with genetic proliferation. So there's all kinds of absurdities that a modern environment creates. And finally if you look at something like anxiety, natural emotion but first of all there is the false positive issue. So like yeah it's natural to think oh where's my toddler? Something horrible must have happened. That's a natural false positive. Fine and maybe it's good you know, you want to be vigilant about your toddler. But then you look at something like public speaking anxiety or the anxiety that a parent feels upon dropping their child off at a daycare center for the first day where they're going to be tended by somebody the parents don't know. Well these are unnatural things in the environment of evolution in the kind of hunter gatherer type environment. They didn't do public speaking and address a bunch of people where it really mattered and they had never met any of the people. They didn't leave their children in the care of people they had never met. These are cases where if you're lying awake at night before a big talk or if you're sitting there worrying about your kid at daycare when it's not going to motivate you to do anything that's going to help. These are unproductive anxieties that they're causing you suffering. They are in many of these cases they lead to actual illusions like catastrophe scenarios. So I think you're right that our feelings were designed to be pragmatically useful but sometimes that they were useful from the organism's point of view and sometimes just from the point of view of genetic proliferation and sometimes in the modern environment, they're not useful from anyone's point of view. And so I think I try to provide this backstory in the book because I think it is useful for some people when they're doing something that, as you know, mindfulness meditators encourage you to do, which is just observe your feelings as they kind of appear and disappear and see them as these transient phenomena and as nothing more. In other words, don't invest them with the meaning that we're naturally inclined to invest them with. Here again, I think the evolutionary story can help a meditate or appreciate that, yeah, you might be getting closer to the truth if you just drop the meaning that you've invested feelings with and just watch the feelings. One thing you make very clear in the book is that nature didn't include us. Reality if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay, no housekeeping today. Today I'm presenting a conversation I had with Stephen Lawrence, who is a Belgian neuroscientist and neurologist. He has a clinical practice as well, and he's engaged in a lot of fascinating research, which we don't actually talk about, that will be left for a future conversation. This time around, he wanted to interview me for a book he's doing, and he wanted to talk about meditation. And as the conversation got into some interesting detail, I thought many of you would like to hear it. So this is me being interviewed about meditation, what it is and why one would do it, how it can help us understand the mind scientifically and the ways in which it can't. And now I bring you Stephen Lawrence. I am here with Stephen Lawrence. Stephen, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Sam so, Stephen, you're working on a book, and you wanted to talk about meditation and consciousness and related things, and so I'm happy to do it and happy to go wherever you want to lead. Thank you for that. Yes, indeed. I actually wrote a book. I was invited to do so by a Flemish small publishing company, and it is about my personal experience and then as a neuroscientist, how we study the brain of these Buddhist monks and how, as a neurologist, I now actually prescribe meditation, and it turned out to do very well. It was then translated in French and other languages, and now it's coming out in English. And so I'm very happy to have your testimony when and why you started to meditate. Nice. So my listeners know. So you're a neuroscientist and a neurologist. So you have clinical practice now. You're in your hospital. Yes, right. I'm in the University Hospital of Lies. I'm an MD neurologist. Our area of expertise actually, is the damaged brain. So I created the Coma Science Group and now had the Giga Consciousness Research Unit, where we tried, and from a scientific point of view, basically, to understand human consciousness, which, as you know, is one of the biggest mysteries for science to solve. And we do that not only by looking at patients who have a severe acquired brain damage after trauma or hemorrhage or survivors of cardiac arrest so that's coma and related states also near death experience. But then we also have a lab looking at what happens in your brain and mind when you are anesthesized, when you're giving these narcotic drugs, or psychedelic drugs for that matter. And finally, we have a strong tradition here and a whole lab looking at hypnosis and its medical use. We have over 10,000 patients who had surgeries like taking out your turret or tumor in the breast where anywhere you would have general anesthesia or pharmacological coma. But here people are undergoing this intervention while basically thinking about their holidays in this hypnotic state. Wow. You've had thousands of people have surgery without anesthesia under hypnosis. Yes, this is a wonderful woman who's called Magris Femovil who's anesthesiologist and she's really a pioneer who introduced hypnosis. And as you know, this is what we know from television and theater doing tricks. But it's also something that illustrates, I think, again, the power of the mind and how, as she has shown, you can use this in the operating room during surgery, but also now in the pain clinic. So yeah, that's what we do with the team. But talking about meditation for me is something, it's out of my comfort zone. It's not something that I would have predicted 20 years ago. Yeah, I'm happy to get into it with you. So I think your first question was how I got into it. And it was in my case, and this is really not unusual, my interest was first precipitated by a drug experience. In my case it was MDMA, otherwise known as Ecstasy, and I think I was 18 and I had an experience there which was not what's the all too common one. Now, I wasn't, I wasn't at a rave or a party. It wasn't really a recreational use of, of that drug. I took it knowing its potential to reveal something interesting about the nature of my mind. And I took it very much in the spirit of investigating my mind and seeing what transformative experiences might be on the other side of my ordinary waking consciousness. And so the experience itself wasn't so directly relevant to what I later came to consider the true purpose of meditation, but it revealed for me the fact that it was possible to have a very different experience of myself and the world and my sense of my being in the world. And just it was possible to have a much better life than I was going to have by just living out the implications of my own conditioning and tendencies at that point. So it set me on this path of self inquiry, really, where I then explicitly studied techniques of meditation to try to explore the landscape of mind further directly through introspection. And I've taken other psychedelics since psychedelics have been a part of this, but they are separable. I mean, perhaps you want to talk about that, but there's no question that but for that initial experience, it seems pretty likely that I may never have grown interested in meditation or anything like it. So the when was you were 18 years old, curious and then taking these drugs to kind of explore changes in self perception and then you turn to meditation. What kinds of meditation did you try? I had been given a book by Ramdas, who originally was named Richard Albert and he was, along with Timothy Leary, led some of those initial experiments at Harvard in the 60s studying LSD and was also fired from Harvard along with Tim Leary for their misadventures in handing out LSD to all comers. Many people know his story. He went to India, he met his teacher, he came back with a very long beard and in a dress calling himself Ramdas. And he then was a kind of spiritual teacher for many, many years. He only recently died, this was 87. I sat my first meditation retreat with him and there he was teaching an eclectic mix of practices and it was really a kind of buffet of spirituality, but part of it was Buddhist meditation in particular Vipassana or mindfulness meditation. And that was the practice I most connected with on that retreat. And then I went on to sit explicitly Buddhist vipassana retreats in silence after that and spent a lot of time studying with my friend Joseph Goldstein, who was one of my first Vipassana teachers and sat with his teacher, SADA upandita Burmese meditation master, and then eventually migrated away from strict vipassana for some reasons. I think we'll probably talk about just the logic of the practice and the kind of goal seeking that was built into it eventually seemed mistaken to me or at least unnecessary and also a source of a fair amount of striving and psychological suffering. And then I connected with so called nondual practices both within and outside of Buddhism. And that did change, it did significantly shift my approach to meditation, but that took a few years to happen. So there were several years there where I was mostly, never exclusively, but certainly mostly practicing what people in the west know as mindfulness now, but very much under a kind of Burmese Terravada Buddhist influence and then migrated to the Tibetan practice of Zoh Chen, but also influenced by some teachers and teachings I encountered outside of Buddhism. And yeah, and so all of that during my twenty s. That absorbed a fair amount of time. I spent about two years on silent retreat in the decade of my twenty s and had dropped out of school and, and, you know, wasn't quite sure how I was going to integrate all of these things. And then only after that decade did I return to school and get a PhD in neuroscience and begin to get all of my interests aligned. And it's taken some time, but now I'm in a position to have the kinds of conversations I want to have about the nature of the mind and what can be understood about it or not based on first person methods like meditation. Wow. So how would you define these nondual practices and how they differ differ from mindfulness? I think it's best understood certainly by anyone who has tried to meditate by describing the usual starting point for the practice of meditation. So if someone decides they want to meditate and they're taught a method and this can be mindfulness, this can be some other method like transcendental meditation, mantra meditation could be a visualization practice, it can be any use of their attention. But most of us start that project from a specific point of view. People tend to close their eyes and if it's ordinary mindfulness practice, they might be told to focus on the breath. And so if you close your eyes and you try to pay attention to your breath, most people will feel that their consciousness, their awareness, is kind of a locus of attention in the head. They're paying attention from someplace and it's very likely in their head, behind their eyes, and they can aim their attention at the object of meditation. So if they're aiming their attention at the breath, whether at the tip of the nose or in the rising and falling of their chest or abdomen, there's a sense of being a subject in the head that can now strategically pay attention to something. And of course that the real obstacle to doing this successfully is distraction, getting lost in thought. And so thoughts are continually arising and you're getting pulled away from the object of meditation and then you bring your attention back to the breath or to sounds, or to a visualization or a mantra, whatever you're focusing on. And as concentration builds, this can become more and more successful. Right? So attention can rest on the object of meditation for longer periods of time. And if you're practicing mindfulness, you can get good enough so that you can even notice thoughts arising as objects and consciousness, rather than just be merely taken away by them in each moment. And many interesting changes in one's states of mind and emotion can happen here. But if you're practicing dualistically, it more or less always feels like there's a meditator, there's a subject who is paying attention, there's the subject which is the source of awareness itself, and then there's the object of awareness, whether it's the breath or sound or whatever. And that point of view, that duality, that subject object perception is an illusion. And it is the primary illusion that meditation is designed to cut through. And if you're practicing really well in this dualistic way, that will occasionally happen, and it may happen a fair amount to make it happen. If you go on retreat and you do nothing but meditate for twelve to 18 hours a day, and your mindfulness gets very continuous and effortless, you can find that this subject object distance collapses again and again and again. And so you'll hear a sound for instance. And in that brief moment of just the impingement of the sound on your eardrum, you might notice that there is no sense of one who is hearing the sound. There's just hearing there's no you in the head listening to a bird out there. There's just this ineffable appearance of hearing that is unified. The subject drops away and the object drops away really. And there's just kind of the unity of knowing and disappearances. But again, it's haphazard. You don't have any control over it. When it stops happening, you're left thinking, oh, that was that was interesting. How do I get back to that? And it seems under that way of practicing that the only way back to that is to once again summon this heroic level of concentration and continuity of mindfulness. And what nondual paths of practice have understood is that there really is a fundamental illusion to cut through there. It really is not the case that you need massive sustained concentration to get to this experience of unity or nonduality. In fact, it's already the case in every moment of consciousness. Consciousness itself doesn't feel like a center in the head. It doesn't feel like a spotlight of attention being aimed at its objects. There is no self in the head or thinker of thoughts. There's just this open condition in which everything is appearing and it can be recognized as such directly. And so it's that recognition that really is the starting point of nondual practice, a practice like Zogchen. And really you can't begin practicing it until you recognize that this is the way consciousness already is. But once you do, then your mindfulness becomes synonymous with that recognition. So what you become mindful of thereafter is not the breath or sounds or anything else per se, though you may in fact be aware of the breath or sounds or whatever happens to be appearing. What you become mindful of is that there's no subject in the middle of consciousness. The practice itself becomes simply familiarizing yourself with this intrinsic property of consciousness that you basically have spent every moment of your life overlooking prior to learning how to practice in that way. And so that is the difference. Again, it's somewhat paradoxical to talk about and can be confusing to many people. But I think most people realize that whether they're trying to meditate or not, they do feel like a subject. They don't feel identical to their experience. They feel like they're at the center of their experience. They're having an experience. They're appropriating it from a place in the head. And that's the central illusion that is cut through in nondual practice. Thanks. We briefly discussed the when and the how and you mentioned the why curiosity, as I understood, and also mentioned to try and live a better life. Can you say a little bit more why you continue to meditate and what are your current favorite exercises? Well, so the why there are really two whys, which can be more or less important for people. I mean, the most common why, though the why that is certainly advocated by the Buddhist tradition generally isn't really intellectual curiosity. It's much more a matter of overcoming suffering. We all feel unhappy to one another degree in our lives. It's not to say that happiness doesn't come, but it also goes. You just can't stay joyful all the time, and if you just wait long enough, you'll feel frustrated and annoyed and angry and sad and fearful. And there's a lot of psychological pain that most of us experience fairly regularly. And meditation is offered as a method of having some fundamental insights into that process, such that you don't keep suffering to the same degree and in all the ordinary ways. And it certainly holds out the promise that it might be possible in some sense not to suffer at all, to actually fully escape the logic by which you tend to make yourself miserable. And it has a lot to do with having insight into the nature of thought itself and breaking one's identification with thought. So much of our psychological suffering is mediated by our thinking about the past and the future and then failing to connect with the present because we're thinking so much and not noticing that we're lost in thought. So my motivation, while it was always somewhat intellectual as well, certainly was primarily about living a better life in the sense of just not suffering unnecessarily and just actually being happier, recovering from the ordinary collisions in life that cause psychological pain, recovering more quickly. And I think that certainly is the most common motivation. And for me, both of these motivations continue. What's changed for me is that it's not so much a sense of practicing deliberately anymore. Occasionally I do sit and meditate, but it's much more a sense of always practicing in that my moment to moment experience is always being punctuated by what I would call meditation, what would qualify as meditation. If I happen to be formally in a session of meditation, which is to say, a recognition of the way consciousness is, and it happens automatically, it doesn't happen all the time, I spend an impressive amount of time still lost in thought. But when I'm not lost in thought, the thing that I become aware of is this nonduality of subject and object in consciousness. Figure and ground have flipped here a little bit, which is in the beginning, I was trying to get to this experience, and meditation was a formal attempt to do that. Initially it was haphazard, and then I was doing it more or less on demand, but now there's much more of a sense of this is the way consciousness is, and much of normal life is my inadvertently overlooking that. But when I'm when I no longer overlook it in any given moment, it is what, you know, what I'm restored to. It no longer feels like a practice of any kind. In fact, it's, you know, when one is actually really meditating, one isn't doing something one is doing less than one normally does. It's simply the absence of distraction. Once you know what to pay attention to, it is simply the absence of being lost in thought for that moment. And were you suffering as an 18 year old? Were you in a crisis? That decade of dropout was what's your personal story there? Well, I had had many experiences of intense suffering, but nothing extraordinary. Just completely ordinary sorts of suffering that people experience in life. But I had had them as a teenager when I was 13. My best friend died when I was 17. My father died when I was 18. Just proximate to this experience with MDMA. My girlfriend had broken up with me in college in freshman year. These are very ordinary experiences. Some people don't have anyone die until they're a little bit older than I was. But if you just wait around, people are going to start dying on you. And so I was not living in a civil war or really there was nothing unusual happening in my life. I had a very lucky life at that point, all things considered. But those experiences hit me really hard. I was really unhappy, for instance, after my girlfriend broke up with me in college, I was probably in some kind of clinical state of depression for several months after that, I was not myself. And it was because I was thinking incessantly about what I had lost. I was meditating on loss and loneliness and grief and had absolutely no insight into this process. I mean, I was just a mere puppet being blown around by whatever this next train of thought would be. Right? And that's everyone's condition. I mean, if you do not see an alternative to being identified with the next linguistic or imagistic appearance in your mind, I mean, the next emotionally laden statement that, you know, seems to appear in the voice of your own mind, you know, whether it's self judgment or something that produces anxiety or something that produces sadness over a loss you've suffered. If there's no space around this automaticity of thought, there's no alternative but to be living out the emotional implications of whatever the thought happens to be. And most of us, most of the time have at best, mediocre thoughts. We're we're not tending to tell ourselves a story about how good life is, how grateful we are for all that we have, how beautiful the people in our lives are and how lucky we are to be with them. I mean, you can decide to shape your thoughts along very deliberately wholesome lines that will improve your mood. And that's a totally useful practice that is very much supportive of mindfulness and these other practices we're talking about. But most of us don't tend to do that automatically. Most of us think about all of our disappointments, we notice everything that's wrong. We have a long list of things we wish would happen. So we tend to be captured by a story of deficiency, right? Things are not yet good enough. And we're telling ourselves a story that if only we could change these things about our lives. If only I could get another girlfriend, right? If only I could meet somebody. That was almost certainly a story I was telling myself at that point. Or if only I could get back to the girlfriend who broke up with me. That self talk seems to promise something which proves to be a mirage, this idea that if we could only arrange our lives perfectly, there would be a good enough reason for attention to truly rest in the present moment and be satisfied. But unless you have a mind that is capable of that, that's not what happens. You get what you want and you find that you simply want other things at that point. And again, your happiness appears to be contingent upon satisfying those desires. I'm not saying it's not better to get what you want than to have just one disappointment after the next. I mean, yes, there are ordinary sources of pleasure and happiness in this life, but none of them are durable sources of happiness. All of these contingent sources of happiness need to be continually propped up by our efforts. They all tend to degrade, and you accomplish one goal. And no matter how wonderful an experience it is to do that, it doesn't take 15 minutes before people are asking you, what are you going to do next? Right? Nothing gets finally banked as the foundation upon which you can rest and be happy every moment thereafter. So meditation is the practice of understanding something about the mechanics of this dissatisfaction and the search for happiness. And to deliberately step off the hamster wheel here just to see that if you're running on this wheel, on some level, you're not getting anywhere and the only way to truly come to rest is to step off it. That resonates with my own experience. You mentioned your crisis, losing your best friend, your father girlfriend. It seems quite often the case that we seem that seemingly need these difficult moments to go and discover things like meditation. It's also what I see in my outpatient clinics, and maybe that's a pity. People actually tell me it's a pity I had this burnout or depression or whatever, and I wished I would have discovered meditation before that. So strangely, it's something that is, I think, also maybe with your community and your app, it's something that you must often hear that people come to this because they don't feel or go well, and maybe we should invest more in prevention and talk about this before. What do you think about that? Again, it's difficult to talk about because it is somewhat paradoxical. This is the line one continually walks in describing meditation and its benefits. Because it's not that nothing else matters, right? It's not that there aren't ordinary requisites for happiness that you want to recommend to people. And yet, yes, it is good to have good relationships being integrated in the community and having people you love and who love you, who can support you, and who you in turn support. I mean, all of that is for most people, most of the time, a necessary component of being a happy person. And yet there is an illusion here. It's not stable. And all of that is made better by discovering that the true foundation for psychological wellbeing doesn't rest on even those relationships. To have the best relationship, to have the best marriage, on some level you really need to already be happy. You need to bring into that relationship not your need for companionship, but your ability to simply love the other person, right? It's not transactional. It's not I'll love you. If you love me. You're already happy. And you deeply want happiness for this other person. You're not extracting something from them for your own benefit, though you are getting a lot of benefit by being with them. But the center of gravity of your well being is already over your own feet, where you stand. You're not leaning into them in a way that makes the whole enterprise precarious. But again, this is paradoxical, because I wouldn't want to say that it's not important to have the other person. But there's no question that relationships get healthier and healthier. The more you, on some level can be just as happy when you're alone in a room, when the one you love leaves the room. You're not diminished by that. And there's kind of two levels at which we can seek well being, and one level is to continue to do all the things that matter, or seem to matter for most people most of the time. So yes, it's better to be healthy than sick. It's better to be comfortable than uncomfortable, it's better to have financial resources than to not have them. And all of these things remain true. And yet the deeper truth is you're only going to be as happy as you can be based on what you're doing with your attention in each moment. And if you're just habitually lost in thought and thinking crappy thoughts about what just happened to you on social media, whatever the actual character of your life, you're not in a position to enjoy it. And it is in fact also true that there are people whose minds are such that they can be deeply happy even in conditions that would drive most people totally crazy. I have studied with people who spent decades in caves just meditating, right? You put the average person in a cave and separate him or her from everything they they want out of life and everything they love in this world, and they'll go insane. And they'll go insane based on an inability to pay attention in a very specific way. Again, there's something paradoxical here, but the paradox is resolved by are doing both sets of wise things simultaneously. You want to have a good life, you want to do work you find meaningful, you want to participate in the world in ways that are fun and creative and connect you to other people. And you want to recognize this thing about the nature of your own mind. In my book, I argue for meditation courses in school, maybe just the way we have specific teachers teaching, giving physical education, and it's important to take care of our body, but I feel we neglect the emotional well being in our educational system. There's wonderful things happening, but nothing structurally, at least not in Europe. But I don't think it's the case in the States that still education is very much about acquiring knowledge and maybe we could and should do better. What's your opinion on that? Yeah, this is something my wife Annika has focused on a lot. She's taught mindfulness in schools, both the school that my daughters go to and other schools for some years. And yeah, it's amazing kids can really learn this. I think probably six years old is about the earliest you can profitably start. But yeah, kids can learn to initially simply become more aware of what they're feeling. A six year old who can recognize specific emotions clearly and see how they motivate him or her to behave in certain ways, that's an amazing skill to teach. And it's the first step toward the primary value of living an examined life that was so central to Western philosophy for at least 1000 years or so. And then we lost it in the west. I mean, this is why so many people like myself have gravitated toward Eastern traditions, at least initially, to learn these techniques. Because the value of wisdom, wisdom as opposed to mere knowledge, is something that it's not that it ever completely disappeared in the west, but it got genuinely submerged by other priorities. And it certainly has been the case for now centuries that if you're a Western philosopher, that carries absolutely no implication that you're doing something that entails living a better life. Right. There need be no connection between philosophy and well being or living an ethical life, being a benign person at a minimum in this world. And so you can have some of the great philosophers of the Western canon who were just almighty neurotics and, you know, toxic people, and that says nothing derogatory about their philosophy. Right? So you have someone like Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, I mean, just Schopenhauer threw his housekeeper down a flight of stairs, vitkinstein who just beat pupils and treat his colleagues terribly. These are not people to emulate in terms of how they lived their lives. Obviously, each of these were brilliant men and can be profitably read for their thoughts about other topics. But there. Was an important bifurcation between what philosophy became in the west and its original purpose, which was to understand something about the nature of being in the world such that it transforms your capacities as a person and transforms the actual moment to moment texture of your life. So we have largely lost that, I think the fact that even now it's really an afterthought or it's appearing as a kind of new discovery that maybe we should be teaching children something about how to be such that they become happier, wiser, more ethical people. And I think that's the most important project we have. And it seems strange that we don't even discuss it for the most part at any point in our education system and then just rely on people to figure it out for themselves once they become grown ups. Absolutely. It strikes me even more as a caregiver. I'm supposed to take care of others. But actually, throughout my studies at University Medical school and then specializing neurology, never, ever have learned anything about taking care of myself and listening to my own emotions. And we know caregivers are at risk for burnout. I have two colleagues who committed suicide. We know this for such a long time, and still so little is happening, structurally speaking, in our faculty, in our educational system. There's another point there, which is we've all met doctors who are maybe brilliant physicians, certainly, in my experience, been recommended to me as brilliant physicians who have terrible bedside manners. They're in, in no sense a healing presence as a person. And so you're coming to them essentially for their their expertise as physicians, you know, as, you know, diagnosticians or, you know, people who could recommend a course of treatment, or they might be brilliant surgeons. Right. So this is actually the pair of hands you want operating, if it comes to that. But these are people who are just, on some level, canceling whatever healing benefits there might be of actually connecting with a wise and compassionate physician because of who they seem to be in their own skins as people. I don't know what they teach in medical school about how to be with patients, but obviously the profession of being a doctor selects for a range of, you know, personality types, and I'm sure that the very specialties further select. Right. So it's you're somewhat at the mercy of the personality that shows up there and again. Yeah. It would be better if there was a more holistic understanding of just what it means to be in that role. Right. Because you're dealing again, and I'm not speaking from experience. I'm really just speaking as a consumer of medicine. But depending on what specialty you're in, you're encountering people very often in the most vulnerable, anxietyridden or even grief stricken moments of their lives. And it matters what sort of person you are in those moments. Absolutely. In my field of expertise, seeing patients after comb and their families and a lot of people die. Yeah, it is a big challenge to do the job with empathy and compassion and as you said, we were not selected for that. We had no particular courses and that is a pity. Speaking of that, and in my job again, I see death on a daily basis. And how did meditation change your relationship with death? Well, it's certainly traditional to frame the project of meditation and spiritual practice generally contemplative practice very much in the context of getting ready to die on some level. This is part of the explicit project, which is death is inevitable and we spend most of our lives by default materially avoiding it for obvious reasons but also avoiding thinking about it. I mean this is the whole notion of death denial, which I think has a lot to it. And there was a wonderful book by that title, the Denial of Death by Ernst Becker. We try to distract ourselves from this ever present reality and many of us manage to do that rather well. I mean there are people who don't think about death all that much because they're so busy trying to have a good time in life. And I would say that by tendency. I've always been a person who who has not been able to forget about death for very long. This is probably due to the fact that I did lose a few people close to me, you know, fairly early on. So, you know, it was always obvious to me, or at least, you know, from 13 onward, it was quite obvious to me that this was a reality and this could happen at any time. There are no guarantees that you're going to live a long life and so it's something that I've always kept in front of me as a fact, I think, more than the average person and meditation is a further way of doing that. It's a way of extracting the wisdom of doing that rather than merely being made morbid by one's awareness of death. It's a method of recognizing just how much there is to be grateful for. You haven't died yet. Your life is right here to be enjoyed and it can only be enjoyed by you right in this corner of the universe that is illuminated where you sit, only you get to make the most of that and how you pay attention to it. It really is the most important piece of that. Making the most of it isn't, in the end radically changing what is already the case there. It's really being able to sink into the experience of being in the world more and more and enjoy it and enjoy it in relationship to other people. Enjoy it in relationship to the natural beauty of the world. Enjoy it by behaving more and more ethically. Enjoy it by having better and better intentions with respect to your collaboration with other people and enjoying the quality of mind born of those good intentions, right? I mean, rather than seeing yourself in competition with others, actually wanting other people to succeed and feeling good when they succeed, rather than feeling like your happiness has been somehow diminished by someone got a slice of the pie that you wanted, using all of that to come to rest more and more in the present moment. I really do see that as the project and an awareness of death is apart from just being in contact with reality, right? This is coming for all of us. It is the backstop that keeps you from just wasting all of your time and attention. Without an awareness of death, I don't know, I think it would be possible to just distract yourself as pleasantly as you could muster always, right? And have kind of no deeper priorities. There really is something good about being aware of death, but unless you can find that and use that, it is easy to just feel like it's it's a source of unhappiness. I mean, every time you think about death, you feel like, okay, that's that's no place to linger and I just want to the project now is to forget about it. And I think that's a misuse of the actual opportunity. You've referred a number of times to the Buddhist tradition and how do you deal with terrible? If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at sam mharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, been locked down for about a month here, a little over a month on my side. This is an increasingly surreal experience. Anyway, I hope you're all staying reasonably sane and healthy. I just want to express my gratitude for all of you who can't actually lock down because you're serving some essential function in society healthcare workers, frontline responders, those of you who are working in the supply chain, delivering packages and food, working in markets and pharmacies, we're all incredibly lucky to have you and totally dependent on you. So thank you for what you're doing. This episode of the podcast is yet another PSA. I think I've had four or five of those in a row, so you will not hit a paywall here. Anything on the Pandemic we're putting out in its entirety. But just to remind you, if you care about getting all of my podcast content, the only way to actually do that is to subscribe@samharris.org. And also, apologies for the sound in this episode. It's been my general practice of late to bring people into studios and record them professionally. The Pandemic has made that impossible. We've been sending people microphones so they can record from home, but we can't control all the variables in their environment and how all that works out. So you'll hear some strange acoustics for one of our speakers today. You'll get used to it. It's by no means terrible. I actually had a podcast recorded a few days before this that we can't release because the audio was that bad. One can never be entirely sure what one's going to get under these conditions, but today's episode is perfectly fine, albeit not perfect. Okay, today I'm speaking with general Stanley McCrystal and his colleague, Chris Fussel. General McCrystal retired from the US. Army as a four star general after more than 34 years of service, and his last assignment was as the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan. He has written several books, one of which is a memoir titled My Share of the Task, which was a New York Times bestseller. He's also a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and he's the founder of the McCrystal Group Leadership Institute. And his colleague on today's episode is Chris Fussel. Chris is a partner at the McCrystal Group, and he's the co author with Stan of Team of Teams, which was also a New York Times bestseller. Chris was a commissioned naval officer, and he spent 15 years in the Navy Seals in various points around the globe. He also served as the aide to Camp to General McChrystal during his final year commanding the Joint Special Operations Task Force fighting Al Qaeda. Chris is also on the Board of Directors of the Navy Seal Foundation, and he's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he also teaches at the Jackson Institute at Yale University and in this podcast, we focus on the COVID-19 pandemic. We discuss our initial mistakes in responding to it. The nature of the ongoing crisis, the threat of a breakdown in social order, the problem of misinformation the consequences of dishonesty from the government, the prospects of a nationwide lockdown. The trade off between personal freedom and safety, the possible threat of tyranny, concerns about the global supply chain and the price of oil going too low, the safeguarding of the 2020 presidential election and other topics. So without further delay, I bring you Stan McCrystal and Chris Fussell. I am here with General Stan McCrystal and Chris Fussell. Guys, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having us. So, Stan, I will drop the general for our conversation, but obviously it's a great pleasure to get you on here, given your expertise, and you don't need much of an introduction. I will have given you one in my opening remarks, but perhaps both of you can summarize your experience here that seems relevant to the conversation we're about to have. Sure, I'll start. And Chris and I shared a lot of it. I spent a career in the military, but really starting in 2003 when I took command of Joint Special Operations Command America's counterterrorist forces, we were mostly focused in Iraq, but actually spread across the entire Mideast against Al Qaeda and eventually against Al Qaeda in Iraq, which emerged starting in 2003. And what happened was we were a purpose built counterterrorist force for precision, almost elegantly, precise operations, but not on a very high tempo. Then we ran into this new entity, al Qaeda in Iraq that was amorphous, viral like entity that was opportunistic. It was wickedly fast. It learned constantly, adapted to the conditions everywhere it was, and it was really lethal. And for about two years, they were defeating us. No matter what we did. They were just a different threat that we weren't ready for. So what we did is, in the middle of the fight, we transformed the organization, not as much organizationally as culturally. We moved to a distributed operation where we operated from 76 different bases simultaneously. We had to synchronize ourselves every 24 hours because that was the pace of the war. We had to change the mindset of how operations were conceived and approved. We had to push approval way down close to people, close to the action. And yet we all had to stay collaborative so that we had a common picture, a common shared consciousness of what was happening. It feels an awful lot like what is happening with COVID-19 right now. And so my background, really, that's the time when my beliefs on leadership started to shift pretty dramatically. And then in 2010, when I retired, we founded the McCrystal Group on the hypothesis that our experience was not really unique to war or counterterrorism. It was to the age of complexity and speed, which has changed the environment we operate in. And Sam, I joined the military of the Navy in the late 90s. Went straight into the seal teams and spent about a little over 15 years there in that community and in 2003 went through the selection to become part of the counterterrorism task force that stan McCrystal would oversee for about five years during really the peak years of transforming that organization from top down and linear into distributed network model. And so for a few years got to see it on the front edge, forces on the ground, outposts around the world, around the fight. Then spent a year on Stan's staff as his aide to camp, sort of like a chief of staff you'd find in the civilian world. And got to see that from the strategic level, watching how really a global enterprise had transformed a way it communicated decentralized decisions. I'd been on the receiving end of that. But then got to see it from behind the scenes. Got deeply interested in the network methodology that is again so, so pertinent today as well. Went on to study that in grad school, went back to my Seal command for, for a few more years and then in 2012 came here and a bit partnered with Stant ever since that time. Nice. Nice. Well, so there are many ways we could have this conversation. So your expertise with respect to distributed organizations and the resilience that one has to build in by organizing in new ways, that obviously there's a positive side to that. I mean you're learning from having bumped up against terrorist organizations. But all of this is relevant for how businesses now need to proceed under these new and highly disruptive conditions so we can talk about what people can do and should do in the business community to make themselves more resilient. But I want us to focus on the ways in which our fairly inept response thus far to the pandemic in particular in the United States. I don't know if you share that judgment. I would love to get your take on just how you think our response has gone so far. But however well or ineptly we respond, there are downside, risks to virus aside, an economic collapse that we all need to be mindful of. And in particular I'm concerned about social cohesion. And again, this could be a generic conversation for some future pandemic, right? Let's say this is a COVID-19, is a dress rehearsal for something much worse. I want to get a sense from you guys about what you're thinking about and watching for and worrying about and the kinds of advice you would be giving to the government and to businesses and to individuals in light of the possible knock on effects of what is on one level an epidemiological problem and on another quickly growing and economic one. Absolutely. And Sam, what I'll do is I'll start and frame up what I think the situation has evolved to and then pass it to Chris because he and I have spent a lot of time talking about the social cohesion part. If we think about the threat right now, this amorphous, viral, frightening threat of a pandemic mixed with liberty, a shutdown or a seizing up of the world's economy on a short term basis has us frightened by something we can't touch or feel but we know is deadly. And it also has us terrified because our economic well being, our security of our future is in doubt. If we look at the United States as the pandemic started to appear, first in China and then little places elsewhere, our first response was not to be as candid with the American people as we should have been. And I think several things came out of that. By not laying out the situation very clearly, like a leader at the beginning of a war might do, we created misperceptions about the level of threat and the level of activity that would be needed to defeat this. Maybe that was to make people feel better in the moment. But the reality is what it did was it caused a lot of organizations to be slower to respond than they needed to be. As we did that and we reacted slowly. We started to suddenly see the effects of the virus on the United States, which, of course, accelerated the economic shutdown. And then what we've been doing since is largely fighting this as 50 separate state battles, as though each state and really each municipality is on their own to fight this virus. But the very nature of an opportunistic threat like this is that you must be united if you want to win a war. The way you do it is you break your enemy into pieces and then you defeat them in detail. If you want to lose a war, you do the opposite. You get divided up. And then each organization is trying to defend itself, and they can't. So what we've done is we've set up a mindset in the United States that says, to a degree, every man and woman for themselves. And I break that to the state or municipal level. When they lack the confidence, the expertise, the resources to do that, then suddenly you see society under pressure, but it's not linked arms. Let me pass to Chris because that pressure can produce some frightening effects. Yeah, maybe starting at a pretty high level of what we've seen in other parts of the world that we may think we're far away from, but in reality, this is part of our sort of human DNA, the tribalism sort of local focus that can kick in as we start to lose those things that we take for granted that do keep us cohesive enough so that you don't separate as a society. There's a thing called the social cohesion curve that I'm a big believer in, and it's just a simple sort of X Y axis that says you have a everywhere. If a country is not, you know, in civil war has its cross some level to maintain sort of daily peace around society. Some of that you get for free based on the homogeneity and the similarities inside the thing, like Norway, for example, would be pretty high just on the natural level of cohesion. And then you have to COVID the difference with sort of rule of law and order. And sometimes if that natural order is pretty low, like we found in a place like Iraq, for example, from the outside, pre 2003, it looks like, okay, this is a relatively stable place. The natural cohesion was much lower than we would have assumed, and Saddam Hussein and the Baptist had covered the gap with all sorts of massive suppression behind the scenes violence, some of which we knew about, but some of which we didn't. Right? And so when that gets removed and the bathes get removed, then suddenly that gap is wide open and that tribalism kicks in very quickly. And in a matter of months, society decade into civil war, and then it comes Al Qaeda and throws a grenade in the middle of it, right? And we've seen that other places in that Afghanistan when the Taliban came in and separated the society through very violent methodology, obviously, but turned what, just 15 years prior had been a vacation Mecca post Soviet and warlord situation where the violence was intenable. The Taliban then separates people down to the lowest and isolated level, and it'll be generations, if that's ever able to recover, to the Afghanistan once new Balkanization in the cetera, et cetera. So we've seen examples of this. We have to be. And to Sam's point, as things get separated down to the state and local level, that will further decay, potentially down into socioeconomic lines, some of which you're already seeing to start to trickle up in the news, whether it's between healthcare, food shortages, those sorts of things, there's a real potential under the surface that we can fractionalize. I think we're far distance from the levels of violence we've seen in other places. But the social repair in an already very polarized society could take much longer than we imagine it would if we don't get aggressive right now as leaders at every level to keep those communities, states, et cetera, tied together under some common banner. Right. I think many people listening to this conversation will find it frankly alarming that I'm even inclined to talk to two military guys, however well qualified, and view the current situation through that lens. To talk about the possibility of a breakdown in social order is to paint an unnecessarily scary picture. And there's just something inflammatory about even entertaining this possibility. But I think one lesson to draw from this experience is if you haven't thought about how quickly the world can change, and once it changes, there's this kind of ratcheting effect where it seems to move in one direction and it's very hard to get it to move back to where you came from. You're not drawing the obvious lesson. Most of humanity at this point is now told to stay home, and various places are enforcing that recommendation with greater, lesser, heavy handedness. And it really seems to me fairly obvious that if our response to the economic emergency isn't really effective, we run a risk of many things going haywire. That again, this is standing completely aside from the very obvious stressor of the epidemic which could break our health care system and make this parallel theme of tragedy just what is beginning to happen economically poses a threat of a breakdown in social order. So I just want to frame this discussion by saying that I'm not expecting a breakdown in social order, but it would seem irresponsible to not have experts of your sort at least talk us through the kinds of things we should be looking for, responding to preempting in advance. I'll give you one example. So, like in Los Angeles, it was just recently advertised that some very nice stores on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills had boarded up their windows with plywood, obviously anticipating the problem of looting. And when I saw that, on the one hand, you could interpret that as a signal of heightened risk, but conversely, it's also just a message sent to it's almost like broken windows policing run in reverse. It's just a bad message of social distrust sent to all of society. But when you start to see things like that, I see it kind of unraveling beginning, which we should want to figure out how to arrest. And there are other rumors that I don't know if this is official, but I have this unfairly good authority that police departments are policing quite differently now because they don't want to be up close and personal with people when they don't have to. They don't want to be putting people into jails where this contagion could be exploding the courts, they're not empanelling juries. Our justice system is grinding to a halt as well. And therefore there are crimes that are not being prosecuted and crimes that are not being even responded to at the level of policing. So this is the kind of thing that, again is moving in the wrong direction when you're talking about social order. So I just wanted to put that out to both of you. And I think it's only responsible for leaders at every level to recognize what is similar about a current problem or crisis and what's different. And there are variables here that we've never dealt with. We've certainly seen natural disaster, hurricane Sandy type stuff. That's when the gritty nature of our society comes out. But the variable that's different there is and we all love seeing this, right? Neighbors support neighbors. They come out, they rebuild a house, they go to the hospital and volunteer their time, et cetera. We can't do that in this situation. It only makes the problem worse if you try to play to your strongest side of your nature and help one another out. So we have to separate and that adds fuel potentially to the fire that you're talking about. And I think one of the things in a good way I like to say society is the thing you don't notice it lives in the background if you live in a good society. Right. But if you've been to places where that was the truth and then very quickly it's not the truth. My first experience with this was pre 2001, spending time in Croatia, training with units there and got to be good friends with Croatian, their special operations units, an officer there who had been married to a Serbian woman, they still were. And when the wars started, they had 12 hours to make a decision were they going to go back to her village? Are we going to stay in Croatia? They decided to stay in Croatia. Then he told me this whole story as we got to know each other. His unit went back and fought in the village where his wife was from and his children's grandparents had lived there. And that had happened in a matter of 1824 months and lasted a generation. Right. That was a level of intermarrying, common language, common culture that would have seemed absolutely seamless to an outsider. And so, yeah, you have to think through you can fight it, you can get ahead of it. But leaders have to be very deliberate about how are we going to hold these social ties during together when we have to be physically apart. Yeah, I just want to echo the point you made about how bizarre and unnatural this problem is. This is not at all like any other sort of natural disaster because keeping people apart is the first and only remedy at this moment. And that's the antithesis of all of the ethical and political silver linings societies can tend to find when everyone has to respond to a crisis, it really is almost engineered for a bad outcome. So how do you think we should be messaging around this? Because one of the things that is especially insidious about the current crisis is there's a political overlay to everything or at least people have to burn a lot of fuel trying to fight themselves free of it. And so the messaging around this being a problem is balkanized with respect to politics. There are many people who for the longest time seem to think this was all a hoax. It's a media driven narrative designed to harm the President's reelection prospects. And many people seem to have recovered from that, but certainly not everybody. And I don't know how much time you guys spend on social media, but I'm encountering pizza gate level conspiracy theories around basic terrestrial facts of epidemiology. And it's pretty weird out there in the information space. We can take any piece of this you want, but just in terms of what is being communicated, how it's being communicated, how we get on the same page with respect to this. Now, two crises again, COVID and the economy. What are your thoughts there? Let me start first with the idea of what keeps people believing and operating according to the rules of a society. And I think it's based on confidence. The value of money is based on the confidence that someone else will accept that money for what you need. The reason many people follow laws is because they believe there's a law and order system, that it's in their interest to follow laws, because other people will then as well. Once you start to have a dearth of information. If we did a thought experiment and we said COVID-19 was approaching, and suddenly all digital communications were cut off, television, phones, everything, suddenly people would fill their heads with whatever the idea of the potential threat is. We already see hoarding, we see increased sales of firearms recently during this, and those are glimmers of people losing confidence that the system is going to work. So now if you say, well, we haven't lost all communications, but our communications have become corrupted, they've been corrupted by politics, and they've been corrupted by dishonesty as well. People just putting absolute disinformation out. And so people start to discount the truth. They start to act in a way that says, I'm not confident that society is going to work in the way that it was advertised and that I experienced before. And so now I've got to draw into my tribal group, whether it's my family or religion or race or whatever it is, draw together, which causes society to atomize more. You see that whenever a society is under huge pressure. Again, we saw it in Iraq, you see it during riots where people sort of go to the place they feel safest. But a modern society can't function that way very long because our systems are built on things having to connect, deliveries having to be made for supply chain, for food, the delivery of services. I think it's a more fragile apparatus infrastructure than we sometimes think it is. And that's why I think the importance of really clear, accurate information to build people's confidence, it may not be the story that they want, it may be paint a pretty challenging picture, but the accuracy is essential because people make decisions based upon their perceptions. And people will again, they'll as we'd say, they'll go high, right, and sort of drift out of where common sense should take them. And that really threatens society. That's something I've worried about, frankly, ever since Trump became president. Because whatever 1 may like or not like about him, I think it is uncontroversial to say that his relationship to the truth, to a truly fact based discussion about anything, is about as precarious as we have ever seen in not just politics, really, just anywhere in public life. I'm sure there are still people out there who will not admit that the President lies to an unnatural degree, but it's objectively true to say that he does. Right. That's not a partisan statement. And I've always viewed this as just a horrific liability, because if we have someone who will lie reflexively, even when it doesn't serve his interests, he will contradict himself in a way that certainly doesn't make him look good and there's no apparent advantage. And he does it just relentlessly and with a velocity that we've never seen before. And it's sort of good fun when there's nothing at stake and the Dow is hitting 30,000 and we're not in a war, and everyone in Trump's base can just laugh that he's winding up the libtards. But now we really need leadership, and we really need to be able to trust the information we're getting from the White House. And honestly, it just seems like something that cannot be corrected for apart from the experts with their own reputations to maintain, however difficult that project is messaging around him, whether they're standing within 6ft of him or not, there's no way that Trump becomes someone who can actually be trusted not to shade the truth. I know you guys have a somewhat taboo for you to strike what seems to be a hard political note one way or the other, but I'm just wondering what your your senses of that and and what to do in light of that. Because to my eye, and you know, at least 60% of the country's eye, this is a man who will lie about anything all the time for reasons far less grave than the kinds of reasons he's confronting now. So how do we reboot from there? I think there's two ways to tackle that. Even trying to say this thing as it turns into a political conversation, it only exacerbates some of the problems that run against logic. Right. People just saying, well, I'm on this side, therefore I believe or don't believe in an epidemiologist. Right? Yeah. Let me just respond to that concern just to try to close the door to there, because it really is not a political point I'm making. I mean, I would never say this about someone like Mitt Romney, right? This is not an antirepublican point, and it's just not political to point out that someone is not speaking factually and is either ignorant of certain facts or consciously misrepresenting them. And you can catch Trump doing that so often that you can set your watch by it. Again, I don't view that as a partisan statement, although it will be heard as a partisan statement by the President's defenders. I hear you making it, as you often do, a sound argument about the importance of verifiable truth. And that's more important now than ever. One of the things there's two thoughts that teases up. One is at what level would this be fought? And I'll turn that over to Stan because this is exactly what he had to do inside of our force to fight a distributed problem, right? Governors and mayors and local leaders are now our new frontline colonels. The other, though, is the interplay between these types of systems. And this is one that Santa has been staring at this problem for 20 years. And so it's just painfully obvious when you see it happening the way that a traditional top down system works. And if you have a very sort of corner office bureaucratic leader who always wants to receive information and walk out and share it as his or her own, which is not uncommon in big enterprise, government, military, et cetera, that tendency trickles down very quickly and the whole system will snap into that sort of behavior. And it's the exact opposite of what you need to do when you're fighting a network spread. Networks and traditional bureaucracies or hierarchies are their governing dynamics, are fundamentally opposite, right? One only cares about how how quick can I grow and I'm going to find new opportunity wherever it exists. That's how Al Qaeda spread and that's how this is spreading. Obviously different problems, but the variables that allow them to do that in an interconnected world are very similar. And so if you are a leader, like if Sama Crystal had rolled into the joint counterterrorism community and said, I want to know everything, and then I'll tell you what to do next, we would have done every single thing we did correctly, and we would have gotten praised for it. And we would have been orders of magnitude too slow to keep up with the problem. We'd have fought a bunch of localized fights, all looked good in our own little world, and the problem would have spread multiple times faster than we could keep up with it. And the real problem is, if you had a Caustic leader sitting on top of a system like that, he could have said, well, all the other things happening aren't my problem because everything I say to do gets done right, so my units are great. This is everybody else's problem. So at every level these two stack up against each other in opposite and very dangerous ways. Leaders in this sort of situation need to quickly create the copper wire for connectivity, get ground truth, because that's where the truth sits up and through the system and then be the ultimate network connector and say, I don't know the answers. This is changing too fast. But I bet the mayor in this city has some good insights. What does she know? What can we learn from it? And how quickly can others be informed by that? So I just want to be the network conduit and I will never be able to walk out on stage and look like the brilliant know it all like I could have in a traditional hierarchical model and. That's a hard behavior for leaders to shift towards. So there's not a solution there that's highlighting the problem of the balance and those personalities. I think the thing that I had hoped for 20 years ago was that the Wikipedia effect would bring truth out. And so I really sort of had a Pollyanna view that said if you get enough sources in unfettered from providing ground truth, that the truth would went out because it's the truth that has not proven correct so far. And so one of the dangerous parts about this is because that's not proven true. If you look at our political environment, people discount everybody. I had a pretty intelligent friend of mine the other day say that he was not happy with what the President said, but he thought that all politicians lie, so what the President says doesn't matter, right? And we've discounted it. And then there's the idea that all news media is flawed and so we've discounted all sources of information that we used to be reliant on. It really does matter how you respond to an error, right? So like, you know, when the New York Times makes a mistake, if they doubled down on it every time it was pointed out, well, then they're just torching their reputation. And it doesn't take too much of that before you've made what many perceive to be an unrecoverable error. And so insofar as their reliable channels of information and unreliable ones, it really does often come down to what any organization or any individual does when it becomes clear that they made a mistake. But one of the things that's so toxic about our information ecosystem right now is that because everyone can essentially silo themselves without even knowing they're doing it, but everyone can create enough of an echo chamber based on the kinds of news they like to hear. It just seems that many people become unreachable, right? There's always a conspiratorial rejoinder to a fact that is impossible to assimilate within your cherished conspiracy theory worldview and people can just stay stuck there. And then you're dealing with people who for whom the sky is the limit based on allegations of the most insane intent behind any like, you know, I'm talking to people. Not publicly at the moment, but privately, but people. Who have immense social media platforms who think that the problem is all made up, that COVID-19 is not even as bad as the flu, and that all the noise we're hearing from hospitals and governors is just an attempt to get more money out of the federal government that is perhaps married to some kind of social panic. And there's literally no there where we're going to wake up and realize that basically only 75 year olds died from COVID-19 and there were most of them were going to die anyway from other conditions. I'm talking about people who have millions of followers on Twitter and they're messaging this kind of contrarian attitude with respect to this, that is incredibly harmful. And one irony here is that this has hit the blue counties first I. E. The big cities. And so it's only now beginning to make itself known in rural America and throughout the south. And we're just at the beginning of this thing, both epidemiologically and economically. Where do you think this goes? Once the difference between New York City and every other place in the country is no longer so stark as you're talking, there's some parallels to the tribal viewpoints that we experienced in previous life with the Al Qaeda fight that I think may start to manifest here. And there's a glimmer of hope here as well. One of the things we found, again, back to this interplay of traditional systems and networks that really have no emotion. They just want to get big fast. One of the ways that will play out is we'll pat ourselves on the back for seeing our numbers go down in New York, which is the end product of people literally putting their lives on the line and working around the clock. That's a good story. COVID doesn't care. It's just going to leave that very hard access point and go somewhere else. It'll drift into these other communities as you're laying out. So that's not up to us. When we went into that fight, we all showed up with our organizational biases, which are similar in some ways to these political lines, geographic lines, et cetera, that are going to be a challenge here. So this started inside the military units. I came from the Seal teams, and I had grown up in a culture that said, we don't get along with this army unit or that unit over there, et cetera, et cetera. And you don't know better. You just grow up believing that to be the truth. And it's based on sort of cultural lore. And they thought the same thing in reverse, right? So as we got distributed, one of the first things that McCrystal did was, we're going to send you out closest to the fight, and we got in these small pockets next to each other. When the bullets are flying, those old sort of cultural biases go out the window pretty quickly, right? So you figure out a way to become a cohesive team on the ground. There were certainly some forcing functions, and that was not a flick of the switch. Once that started to take hold inside these very, very alpha military units and you know those personalities, sam, you spend time around that part of the military, then it was able to expand out into civilian organizations as well. So we had a collective bias against intelligence organizations or against diplomatic organizations, et cetera, et cetera. And as these members of those different tribes clustered in small groups close to the fight, we used to call it the Star Wars bar, right? You walked in and it was all different colored aliens but we were locked in one localized fight which made it very serious and traditional tribal norms could be overcome by sort of a common bond on solving your local issue. Then when those networks were tied together into a bigger system, you started to get ground truth and you got a clear picture across these boundaries that had an interagency feel to them because there's local groups that said, look, we're all on the same page here's why we're interpreting this. And then you connect that around the world. And the leaders were given an honest picture of what was happening inside this network threat. And of course that goes back to the previous discussion. It was dependent on leaders that were willing to put in place a network methodology that allowed and in fact forced the sort of truth to power, sort of paradigm that everybody likes to talk about but is very hard to put in place. They created a system very deliberately where those closest to the fight had a daily platform where they could talk about what was happening and at a certain point no one could deny that truth. The problem is bigger here, it's shrinking here. We need helicopters over here, we need predator assets to go to the north. And those were decisions that were coming up from the ground based on that interagency cross tribal boundary realistic picture. We can do the same thing here. It's those local leaders creating a networked connection model between mayors, hospital systems, first responder, governors even, so that they can become the ground eye view and truth if they're given the platform, that can become a very very powerful tool. But it that will take intentionality and all of us will default to my down and in view, just like I would have in the Seal teams. I wasn't going to suddenly say I'm going to forego all of my Seal team tribal norms, walk across the street and try to become buddies with this army Ranger over here because my tribe would have said, what the heck are you doing? Right? We had leadership on top of it that said this is the only way we win and I'm going to put forcing functions in place and make you all get along. And I believe there was no sort of book written about this beforehand. I believe that will make us as interconnected as this Al Qaeda threat. And the same thing I think can hold true here. What do you think the prospects are that we'll have a national lockdown? I think it's inevitable. I think it'll be late to need. But at a certain point what we've seen so far is instead of being ahead of the problem, we are responding as a nation to sort of the facts being right in front of us and having to do it. And so I think a national lockdown comes pretty soon. I'm not sure how much it will have cost us to be this late, but I believe it's significant. And this opens the door to another strand of concerns, which is the ways in which arguably a necessary response to a biological and economic emergency can be viewed as the aggregation of power and even the looming threat of tyranny. Right. So it will have a government that, by definition, will have more and more power, both overt which is, in this case, imposing a lockdown and how it's imposed. The details there will matter, but also just we're seeing really, a hunger for increased surveillance. Right. We want to be able to track the spread of this thing. We want to be able to track the efficacy of social distancing. Most people will have seen the video of all those cell phones leaving the beach in Fort Lauderdale and spreading out throughout the country. And these are now digital surveillance tools that the government will have more and more access to. And on some level, we have a scared population that will be eager to give away its privacy and some amount of freedom with both hands if it could possibly do some good here and again, this is more of a ratcheting effect where, you know, you keep turning the wheel in one direction and it becomes or one could fear that it becomes very difficult to turn it back and to reset. So how do you think about the threat of tyranny or the perceived threat of tyranny as we enact a more comprehensive response to the problem? Yeah, Sam, I'm not as worried about it as some people are. If you go back in our history, we've always imposed measures we had to, whether it's passports to get in and out of the nation, whether it is TSA to protect airlines from terrorism, whether it's things we do policing wise just to make sure that people are safe on the streets. I think every nation, the society makes a trade off between certain personal freedoms and then what's needed to keep the society from destroying itself. I think the technology has been growing, so it just makes it easier to have surveillance cameras or cell phone tracking or any number of these things. And I think society will make decisions like it has with the use of mobile devices. Many of us have traded off a lot of our security for convenience. And I think people will be only too happy to trade off some of their convenience for security from a pandemic or other threats. So I don't think it'll be as bad as we think. In fact, I think the population will sign up for it pretty easily. I think we'll have to keep watching it because the problem is it tends to get ahead of us. Now, the technology, what we can do with cell phones, what we can do with tracking is more than the average person appreciates. So they will have given up more of their personal privacy than they know. And so we do need to watch that. If you watch what not just is being done by governments but what's being done by marketers, what's being done by political campaigns, there's an extraordinary ability to target voters or customers or whatever using data that most of us don't really think about when we log into a website or use our cell phone. I would build on that just a little bit. Sam, we had a conversation before this all hit with a few folks in your world just around the idea that this concept of being unknown right, is really a unique on the grand scope of history. My sense of individual autonomy and people not knowing what I'm up to is maybe going to be just this brief cute little moment of 100 years or so. Because if you think about in a tribal culture, obviously everybody knows everybody. That's how you survive. Even going back just to my grandparents generation growing up in small town, everyone was in your business all the time. It's only in recent history that you've been able to move away. Being from middle class community, you could go to school, you could get a job in a city where no one knows you and you can create a sense of autonomy and independence and you can choose how known you are to that local community. Technology has already usurped that right. And this may be the wake up call that says no to stance point. Collectively we're going to trade off that sense of autonomy for collective protection like we've done throughout the vast 99.9% of our of our history. And I think that this will be as all the on the back side of this, all the data that will be collected, the arguments will be quite sound to be able to trace this sort of thing. And to your earlier point, I know you've discussed this with others on your show, this probably is the warm up, right? Anyone that knows this space far better than we do will say yeah, this is round one, this is the easy warning for what could happen down the road and so those things could couple together and we will learn out of this probably. Hey, one of the ways we have to position ourselves to be ready for this when it's a 40% kill rate and easier transfer methodology is to sacrifice some of these liberties. Right. The knock on effects of that for long conversation but we're going to be having this conversation pretty quickly. Yeah, that's one thing to be hoped for if it's possible to learn these lessons so clearly that we could have a kind of turnkey solution to the next pandemic. Because it really does seem like this isn't the last time we're going to be faced with something for which we have zero immunity and, as you say, could be much worse. And a national or global shelter in place order could be responded to with real alacrity and something like finesse. If we just knew how we unrolled it, everyone understood the need for it, and we know how to stall our economy and then to restart it, and we know how much money to pump in or what percentage of GDP to pump in. And it seems like there's a machine, the workings of which were understanding more and more, and now we're stress testing it. But again, the leadership has been such and the public debate about, in many cases, undebatable facts has been such that it's not yet inspiring much confidence that we're learning the lessons in a way that will be indelible. Yeah, but it's an interesting thing to consider sort of the Guns of August argument in the military. We're always fighting the last thing because it was so hard. You learned the wrong lessons for the next war. There wasn't an easier Al Qaeda that was fought before this generation, right. And it learns and it grows, et cetera. If there is a bigger thing on the backside of that, of this, that could come in ten years, sometime in our lifetime, or certainly probably waves of this current one. One of the things we are trying to talk very directly with leaders across all different parts of industry and government, et cetera, is everybody gets a pass right now because we're all trying to figure this out. We need to move faster. No one gets a pass in the fall, no one gets a pass in the spring. And certainly as a society, we don't get another pass on this once we've we figured this one out exactly like you're saying, what are the things we have to have in our routine to be able to go in and out of this if it happens again in five years or if it happens again in the fall? And so a lot of leaders understandably, or organizations are thinking, how do I get through this quarter? That's fine. We got to baseline ourselves. But how do I create the organization of the future that's going to be able to survive through these things, or the nation of the future that can deal with this sort of pandemic when it's even worse and it could be orders of magnitude worse? How do you guys think about the tension between what is rational for individuals or even individual businesses to do versus what is collectively beneficial? I mean, there are zero sum or apparent zero sum trade offs here. I mean, take something like, you know, whether to buy PPE, right? You know, the hoarding of masks or anything else. The hoarding of food being early to stock up and how much to stock up when if there's a run on the market or a run on the bank or a run on anything, you get this breakdown of the system and supply chain and in many cases, a breakdown of confidence in our institutions and norms. And obviously, there are kind of tipping points there where those tensions can be resolved up until the point and then you've got people boarding up their windows and trying to sell thousands of bottles of Purell out of public storage and then being vilified online for it. How do you think about those trade offs between the individual and the group? I think when you lose confidence that society is going to work in your favor and our collective favor, that law and order that supply chains are going to work, then you start to have a case where people or small groups are incentivized to do what's best for them because the good of the society no longer applies to them. I don't think it would take very much to see that behavior kick up more than we have. We've seen some hoarding and things. We've seen a couple of communities that I read about basically say, we don't want any outsiders coming in. I could see three weeks from now, small towns with checkpoints outside the towns with people with shotguns saying, no strangers can come through these checkpoints into our town. And from their standpoint, it would look like very rational behavior from anything. Six months. If we went back six months and we predicted this kind of thing, we'd say it was sort of a post apocalyptic zombie land behavior, but I can see that happening. And people justifying to themselves in that particular case, it works. The problem is, the more those things happen, the more it speeds up the deterioration of society. The more you break things apart, the less this globalized system we've created works. And a lot of people aren't fully appreciating the fact that there are so many things that are not built not only in their neighborhood, but not in their country, that they rely on every day, that suddenly you say, no, wait a minute. It's in our interest for the global structure to be healthy and to work. And in fact, it could be to our demise if it doesn't. So I think that we need to spend time educating people on that, because if you have a simplistic view, you take simple actions. Yeah. One of the things that I've heard Stan say quite frequently over the last few weeks is to leaders who not just industry leaders, but any leaders that sit on top of these networks that keep society together, it's time to activate the network. How do I think about that? And the obvious ones, I'm a mayor of a town, I'm a governor, et cetera, city manager. But there are all these supernodes inside community networks that we take for granted because they're just in the background, right. My school principal, my church leader, my community group leadership, et cetera, that localized space. Those leaders, they can be a real part of the solution, but it's a new sort of challenge for them. So I I'm sure this is happening everywhere across the country, but the the school system will say, okay, we're, we're, we're at home for the rest of the year. We're going to hand out school packets three times a week. We're going to do Skype calls. So it turns into the kids involved through digital platforms with their teacher. But those principals sit on top of these, especially in a place like DC or other larger cities, very diverse adult communities, and we see each other in passing at the school. Our kids are on the playground together, et cetera. There's a social cohesion that comes from that that could be gone for 612 months. We don't, we don't know yet how long and when. We couple it with the problems that could be on the back side of this. You know, I live in, in the middle of DC. My kid goes to a school with other kids who I know their parents because we spend time after school together. Some of those kids live in food deserts on the other side of the city. When there are shortages that are impacting those communities, and the tethers between the adult population have been separated because we're so isolated, then you, you add in one more risky variable to how, you know, society can start to unwind in a very unfavorable way. So who are those local leaders? It might seem unnatural for a principal to step in and say, you know what, every two weeks I'm going to do a Skype call with all the parents in my school because I want them to hear from each other. I want it, I want those ties to stay in place. That's never been part of their job description, but those are those invisible networks that we have to find ways to keep strong because we don't know how long this is going to last. Yeah. What are your expectations there on the time front? How long are you preparing yourself for it to last? Yeah, we've talked a fair amount about it. I think we're going to see the effects of COVID-19 directly, meaning waves of, of it into 2021, probably into the spring of 2021. I think that as society gets a little more prepared for it each time, that each one will be a little bit less impactful on us. We'll be better at doing certain things, but I think that the requirement to separate is probably likely again in the fall and maybe again in the winter or early spring, which is going to affect the economy. So I think if we think in that kind of a time horizon, we need to think about solutions that are not everybody cocoon in their home for two weeks, and then we emerge and it's all well. I think we're going to have to make organizations work. The distributed work environment for not just a few, but for most organizations are going to have to work. We're going to have to figure out how we take care of those people who have to be out physically doing it. Not just first responders but people in the supply chain and things like that. We're going to have to think through those because there's not an alternative. We have got to keep those fundamental wheels of society turned. I can remember from the Al Qaeda fight the last time I had a finish line in my head was the when we were chasing Abu Musa Abozar Kawi in in Iraq who was the first, you know, really well known leader of AQI yeah, Al Qaeda 2.0. He was sort of innovative, et cetera. And we all and I can remember having these conversations. I happened to be Ford deployed during that time window and we knew we were close and the thinking was this will be the finish line when we get him, this war will start to wind down. And we got him and within two or three days everybody realized oh wait a second, that wasn't a finish line. There is no finish line in this thing. This is a new type of threat. Have you met Abu Bakr al Baghdadi? No. Because you realize this is an ideology that exists in networks and it will just continue to thrive. So our challenge then was a it was a wake up call but B how do we redesign ourselves? And of course this is what our leadership have been saying to us for a while. We're just a little thick headed, at least I was. How do we redesign ourselves to be able to survive through this much longer unending, generational infinite war that a network wants to fight? And if you take it with a rigid we're going to be done by X date, then you're only setting yourself up for frustration and probably failure. What lesson do you draw around our dependency on a global supply chain here? Because many people were frankly astonished at how thin our supply was on many fronts. I think that the PPE issue has been the most galling for people. Just the idea that we could so quickly run out of masks and that many of them need to be produced in China and China having the same problem. And then when you overlay the prospect of being in conflict with a country like China and you recognize that most of our medication is coming either in whole or in part is coming from China and India. It's just one person drew the analogy of outsourcing our ammunition to China knowing full well that we could one day be in a shooting war with them, but we're expecting them to supply us with bullets. What lesson do you draw about what we actually need to take in house for emergencies of this kind? Yeah, I think that one thing is the interdependencies between countries are grossly under or misunderstood because as you say, we may say, okay, we're going to make all of our weapons here, all of our ammunition here, all of our key things. But then you find that key basic materials or components of those are required. And like we found in our medical supply chain, we have interdependencies. This came from a focus on trying to be as efficient as possible to reduce our costs as much as possible. And if you go to the doctrine of free trade, it makes sense people should do that part of economic activity for which they are best suited. But it does create this mutual dependency that we are dependent upon the supply chain there and they are dependent upon us for many things. Therefore, you've got to decide whether that's acceptable, whether they are a reliable enough partner both politically, medically, militarily for us to do that. And that's a consciousness that I think America has lacked for quite a while. I think we just don't have a sense for just how many things we don't either make or the raw materials we don't produce. Yeah. It seems like there should just be a comprehensive inventory of everything we wish we had in the current circumstance and didn't and then figure out why that was the case and also just figure out what the government can only do effectively. It just seems like the free market incentives for many of these things are just never going to be there. And so recognizing that inability to produce an antiviral that if all goes well, only a tiny percentage of us need to use once in our lives. The market doesn't incentivize investing billions of dollars in that. But clearly that's the kind of thing we need in these circumstances. I don't know if you have thoughts about the division of labor between government and private industry there. Yeah, it said if you go to just medical capability. Governor Cuomo gave a great sort of primer on this the other day, and he described, do we have a privatized hospital system? And all of those hospitals can't afford to keep beds that they don't need, so they very carefully calculate what they need. And so we don't have excess capacity. The military has to have a certain amount of excess capacity, like you see with the hospital ships and then field hospitals that they can put up, but they have to be prepared for conflict and sudden casualties. But the rest of our system just isn't built that way. And so when we suddenly want to have this surge capability, we don't have it. I think that's a national decision. The nation has to decide how much surge capability do we want to maintain either keeping mothballs or we'd have to subsidize hospitals to keep it ready. Yeah. And obviously all the other emergencies and potential emergencies that the world can throw at us have not been canceled just because all of our attention is on this one. How do you see the risks we're running on other fronts? Yeah, I think we've been running this risk for a few years here in the United. States for sure in our sort of echo chambers preoccupation, which is fast, new cycle, et cetera, and at strategic cost. And we've seen examples of that with Russia and other actors that had done some pretty sophisticated stuff over the last three or four years. This is back to our earlier discussion, one of the new variables here. It could be proven wrong here, but certainly not in my lifetime has there ever been a single story that the whole world is talking about. This is literally the only thing any outlet is talking about anywhere in the world right now. There may be an exception out there, but it's just blanketed, right? And so those sophisticated actors all the way down to violent groups that most folks have never heard of, they know when they have a smoke cover, right? And I am sure that this is being taken advantage of by really bad actors all over the world. Not just nation state players, but localized problems were in countries that we would normally pay attention to and be able to put pressure on and use diplomatic leverage, et cetera, et cetera. That they know that their actions won't break through, no one will care, and if it doesn't get into the media cycle, they can get away with whatever they want. That could be violence, that could be whatever their intent is. And so a lot of that will never be unwound. But I am willing to bet that some of the stories that will come out of what happened during this blanket coverage, there will be some heartbreaking stories in there and some strategic ground that we will have a real challenge ahead of us to make up. So everything from the strategic level all the way down to the local sam, I would add there's some destabilizing factors that are likely to be second and third order effects. The one that jumps out most is the price of oil. We were already moving away from oil into renewables, which I think was a good thing. But many economies in the world to include a Harris to a degree, are based on a stable price of oil, much higher than it is right now. And I think there's every chance that the price of oil could drop down below $20 a barrel. If it goes there, then many nations aren't economically viable anymore. And so their entire economic model is upended. And so you almost have to have instability follow from that. Throw on top of that, less mature medical systems, and they get hit with COVID-19. So you have this combination of factors that produces instability, which whenever you have instability nowadays in the world, you can export it whether you're trying to export it or not. So I think that's just a couple of examples of things that could easily happen in the pretty near future. So I know you guys are running out of time over there, so I'll bring it into the end zone here. Do you have any special concerns about the election in November? Because just on its face, asking everyone to turn up and vote in person seems epidemiologically unwise, and it would be very easy to see in the paranoid fantasies of his detractors, a concern that Trump could just decide it's not safe to hold an election. I don't know what the constitutionality of that would be, but how haywire could the presidential election go if COVID is still surging on all fronts at that point? Yeah, I think first an election is critical, I think for lots of reasons, but particularly in the United States right now, a presidential election is critical. I also think that it's entirely within the capacity for us to go without having to go physically to polling booths. I think we've got the ability to transition to vote by mail where necessary, but vote digitally. Otherwise there would be growing pains in it. But I think we could have already started making that transition. I think we also could take a great step forward toward decreasing voter suppression that way. There are lots of things I think that technology could help us do. This could be the forcing function for us to take it on. I'm worried that we can do it fast enough for November, but I think we need to make that effort. We talk about social unrest or social cohesion. I think if this election is not conducted, then I think that will be an additional pressure for part of the population with a sense that they have been disenfranchised. Yes, it's just the concern about a hacking of a digital election is so excruciating at the moment and the crisis of legitimacy that would follow if there was any doubt as to whether or not the result was really the real result. It's hard to see how we get away from paper on some level. Well, I don't think that it could be executed flawlessly and still undermined in the echo chamber, which is the real it's part and parcel of the core of the problem. But I would say it's sort of the DNA of growing up in the world that we did, fighting these complex fights. You're always sort of manically nervous about the second ridge line out, and it makes me nervous that we're not talking at the national level about what this will look like in the fall. There needs to be a plan in place that we're considering and debating right now. Assume the worst in the fall and don't try to solve it in October. Right. We need to get ahead of this right now and start warning the American people and prepping for it. Well, I want to thank you both for the work you have been doing for many years and the work you'll continue to do. It's been great to get your expertise here on the podcast. Is there any place you would point people if they want to follow your work and understand what you're doing with businesses and give us the relevant websites and social media handles. Sure. All of our stuff is hung on our corporate website. Mccrystalgroup.com, or Team of Teams is the first book we wrote together a few years back. That's a great primer on sort of theory of the case. That what we experienced over overseas and then a quick search away, they can find Stan and myself on social media platforms. Great. Stan, Chris, thank you so much for your time. Sam, thank you for having thanks, Sam./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I am speaking with Anne Applebaum. Anne is a columnist for The Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize winning historian. She's also a visiting professor at the London School of Economics where she runs arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda resisting those things rather than producing them. She's formerly a member of The Washington Post editorial board and she's also worked at The Spectator, the Evening Standard, the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, the Economist, the Independent. Her writing has appeared everywhere, including the New York Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and she's the author of two very well regarded books. The first is Iron Curtain, which describes the imposition of Soviet totalitarianism in Central Europe after the Second World War, and her previous book, Gulag a History, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004. Now, as you'll hear, I've primarily been reading Anne in The Washington Post and following her on Twitter where she's just been an assassin. Her commentary on Trump has been on point from the very beginning, practically from the moment he announced his candidacy. So I recommend that you follow her on Twitter. She's at Anne Applebaum. All one word. Needless to say, her expertise on Russia and propaganda is coming in especially handy these days. You'll hear that? We recorded an addendum to this podcast because a few days after we recorded the initial conversation, events got quite colorful in the ongoing investigation into collusion between the President's team and the Russians. So we added about ten minutes at the end to bring things as up to the minute as one can in a podcast like this. No doubt the story will have changed since, but I suspect the moral core of the story is the same, and that's what we talk about. Now, of course, you all know what I think about Trump, and I know that many of you are getting bored with my howls of pain, and so I haven't been saying much on my own. Instead, I've been bringing guests on who have a lot more to say than I do, people who are far more knowledgeable about politics and the inner workings of governments and the relevant history. So in this vein, I spoke with Gary Casparov and David From, and now I'm bringing you Anne Applebaum. Enjoy. I am here with Anne applebaum. Anne, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. Well, listen, I've been following you on Twitter. Avidly is not too strong a term. You are among the few people who have just been devastating against our current president. And I would put you up there with David From in terms of the quality of your stuff you've been circulating on social media about him and in response to his antics. So first let me praise you for that. It may seem like a trivial thing, but I think it's of immense social importance. Well, thank you. I'm not sure is it flattering or not flattering to be known for your Twitter feed, but I'll take it as a compliment. I think we fight in the trench we are given, and it seems to be an important one to occupy at the moment. Before we jump into the matter at hand, can you just say a little bit about your background as a journalist? How is it that you have come to do the work you're doing now? I entered journalism in 1989. I began as a stringer, living in Warsaw. Actually, late 1988 is when I first moved there, and I was a stringer. I was in my mid 20s writing for British newspapers, writing for The Economist magazine, actually, and the Independent newspaper and others. And partly because I've sensed that it was an interesting time to be there, and partly because I was just very lucky. I wound up covering the collapse of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, not only in Poland, but in the whole region, you know? And I think that experience of seeing a tyranny collapse and seeing democracy replace it. I then had an occasion to watch those countries change over the subsequent 20 years is probably that was probably the formative political experience of my life. So that might make me a little different from other American journalists. That was the thing that interested me the most and that I wrote about the most over a couple of decades. I took that in several different directions. I wrote a couple of history books. I was fascinated by the history of the region. I wrote a history of the Gulag system, which was the Soviet camp system. And then I also wrote a history of the Sovietization of Eastern Europe after the war. So, in a way, the opposite of the process that I observed. What did totalitarianization look like? I'd witnessed democratization. This was the opposite process. I wrote as a history book, but I've also worked as a journalist in Britain. I worked on the editorial board of The Washington Post, where I wrote about healthcare and all kinds of ordinary things. But I suppose that experience of being constantly trying to understand what was dictatorship, what was democracy, what were the constituent parts of both? What made people adhere to one system or the other? Has something that's been I've been interested in my whole professional life, and I didn't think that those would be important things to know and understand in following and interpreting an American election and an American presidency. But it turned out that they were. And if I had any insight into Donald Trump in his early days from last summer and last spring, it was because I immediately saw that much of what he was doing was these were tactics that came from Ukraine. I mean, I recognized, you know, Ukrainian politics, which I also write about. I recognized the use of tactics, the way he was using social media, the way he ran his electoral events. And they looked to me like things I'd seen in Eastern Europe. And I think that somewhat weird insight might have turned out to matter because it looks like he was influenced by well, certainly his kid a campaign manager who had long Ukrainian experience, and I think that explains some of his electoral tactics. Anyway, obviously that's much of the reason why we're speaking now, because you were so early and so clear on these parallels, and we're in the process of discovering how relevant your expertise is at the moment. We'll get into talking about the investigation and what evidence is there or seems likely to be there of a connection between the Trump campaign and Russia. But just briefly, how would you describe yourself politically? How do you come to this? What are your political biases and commitments? I always thought of myself as being center right. I was very happy in the Tory Party in the 1990s when I was living in Britain and I was a British journalist. I have voted Republican in the past, but I have this feeling that although my views haven't changed, I feel that the right actually in the three countries that I remain connected to, which is Poland, the United States, and Britain, the right has changed so much that it's left me somewhere else. I mean, somewhere in the center. I feel very out of touch with the current Republican Party, certainly since the Brexit vote. I feel out of touch with the Tory Party, and the Polish right has gone mad as well. It's a whole other stories, but I don't think I've changed. I mean, my views are the same as they were the same as they were 20 years ago. I sort of started as an anti Communist. I was interested in small but efficient government. I understand there has to be some public funding for some things, and of course, that will vary from country to country depending on what people want. But those views were, in the 1990s kind of center right views, and I'm not sure where they leave me now. Right, but you're not coming at this from the far left. You're not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or Michael Moore. I'm not Elizabeth Warren. I'm not Bernie Sanders. I'm not Michael Moore. And, I mean, I, you know, I was I was, you know, the Bernie Sanders candidacy is, of course, another interesting it was another interesting phenomenon of the last year. I didn't have any initial sympathy with it at all. I mean, as time went on, you know, I began to see I began I understand more why people were voting for them and why people were exciting for why I'd be excited by them at this particular moment. But no, actually, you mentioned David From, who I think he's also been on your program for much of my life. I would have had trouble distinguishing myself from him in terms of political views. I mean, we've differed about some things, but sure, I used to write for the Weekly Standard. I used to write for the National Review. I didn't know how people considered me because I'm not probably culturally different from some of the American right, but I was very happy in that position ten years ago, and now I just don't know. Yeah. Well, that strikes me as the most useful background to have at the moment, because what one can't allege about you and from and David Brooks and all the people who are center right and who have been traditionally Republican or certainly more Republican than Democrat. You can't allege rank partisanship in your criticism of Trump, which could be alleged of anyone on the left. I don't think honestly at this point, but certainly that's what would strike the mind of any Trump defender. This is really the challenge before us, because I want to talk about Trump and Russia and fake news and all of these intersecting concerns, but the challenge is to say something that could be conceivably persuasive to someone who doesn't already agree with us. And this is the challenge I put to David in my podcast with him. It's a very high bar, given the style of thinking on the other side. This just strikes me as almost an insuperable problem, given how the defenders of Trump don't acknowledge seemingly facts that you have to acknowledge to be sane with respect to his behavior and his obvious lying. I mean, the most alarming thing about Trump from my point of view is and this is among many alarming things, but it's the degree to which he lies. And the most alarming thing about his defenders is their reluctance to admit this they'll say things like all politicians lie, as though Trump's lying was of the ordinary sort. So even in the most extreme case, you have something like the wiretapping allegation against President Obama that most Republicans in Congress will say at this point is that the president is wrong, but that entirely misses the moral and political core of what happened here. The President wasn't wrong in the sense that he was mistaken. It's not like he has some information that he misinterpreted in good faith, as anyone might have. He made up this allegation to cause chaos, obviously to distract people from some other chaos. He caused in a previous news cycle, and it's kind of the political equivalent of a suicide bombing. It's one of these utterly malicious, slanderous, insane lies that you actually you stand no chance of being able to get away with. And he tells these sorts of lies all the time, lies of a sort that really cannot be believed, where his line is so obvious that the language game he's playing at that point isn't the ordinary attempt at deception. He's just trying to bowl you over with his disregard of the norms of political discourse. So as someone who's a student of this style of communication, where you're kind of the strong man or the autocrat or the highly atypical political figure begins to communicate in this way, how does this strike you? What are the consequences of having a president who not only can we not trust, but it's worse than that we can trust him to lie always when he thinks it serves his purpose, even when it doesn't serve his purpose. How do you think about that? Well, first of all, I do want to come back to the question of who is supporting him and why and how to reach them, because that's actually something I'm working on now myself. But this question of why he's behaving the way he does I mean, first of all, you said this is so atypical. It's actually not atypical. You can look around the world, and you can find similar leaders. I mean, the the period that I worked on, you know, as a historian is a little different in that, you know, I was writing about the Communist parties, you know, in the they combined lying with violence. So, in other words, they lied about what they were doing. They lied about the purpose of it. They lied about their achievements, and then they suppressed people who disagreed with them. And I don't think we're dealing with anything like that in the United States. And I think it's important to be clear about that. Nobody's being forced to believe him as they have been in other countries and other times and places. Lying has been very central, actually, to a lot of 20th century governments. But the correct comparison to him, though, is if you look at Putin and how he uses lies, and if you look at Chavez and how he used lies, you do see that there are leaders who have used them effectively. So Putin uses them in a very specific way. He lies and the media that he controls, and he, again, is in a different position because he controls all the media, which is, again, not the case with Trump. He's acting in a different climate, but he creates lies deliberately, partly to devalue the entire concept of truth. I mean, it's very interesting. Look at what happened after that Malaysian plane crashed in Ukraine a couple of years ago. It was shot down by we now know it was shot down by Russian antiaircraft weapons, and it crashed in Ukraine, and many people died, including many Dutch people. What did the Russian media do after that? It didn't say, we didn't do it. No. Instead, it released literally dozens of different explanations. There was one explanation. It was the Ukrainians shot them down because they were aiming at Putin's plane. There was another explanation that said there were lots of dead people put on the plane on purpose, and it was crashed on purpose to discredit Russia. Many of them were absurd, the explanations, but the proliferation of them was such that it created this massive confusion around that event. And Radio Free Europe did a very good series of interviews in Moscow at that time, right afterwards, and they asked people on the street, why did that plane crash? And overwhelmingly, people said things like, oh, we have no idea, and we'll never know. It's impossible to find out. The truth cannot be known. And the effect of Putin and Putin's press, the sort of multiplication of explanations, was that it obfuscated the idea of truth. People don't believe you can find out the truth, and that's very useful to a dictator. Putin doesn't want people he doesn't want people to believe anything, because maybe somebody will eventually print, for example, how much money he really has. Actually, many things about his colleagues and associates have been printed. There has been information about money stolen. There's a big piece, actually, in the last few days reported by several newspapers about the extent of Russian money laundering in Europe and how much billions of dollars stolen from the Russian budget, and so on. So what Putin wants is for all those stories to be undermined. So if you tell lots and lots of lies, then people don't really know what to believe. And I don't want to make a direct analogy to what Trump is doing, but Trump clearly is trying to undermine the so called mainstream media, or even just the media. He wants people to doubt what they read. He wants his followers not to believe, I don't know, the New York Times or The Washington Post. And so by lying, he obfuscates the whole space. In a way, the whole media space. And the media conversation is thrown into chaos. I think it's really interesting how difficult it is for sort of mainstream reporters, really, whether they have kind of center right or center left views even, to describe what he's doing. I mean, for example, as soon as he made that wiretapping claim, obama denied it almost immediately. It was pretty clear to me right away that it wasn't true, that he'd made it up, as you say, to distract from something else. But it's very difficult for in our media environment. It was very hard for people to cope with that, and people kept reporting on it, and they kept asking questions about it, and it was very difficult for us to come to terms with it. And I think what it helped to do was undermine the whole idea that the press can report on things that are true and find truth and falsehood and that there's anything that can be true or false at all. He prefers to exist in a kind of fantasy world where he can make up reality, so he can say, I don't know, I won the popular vote in the election where there were millions of people at my inauguration. And he wants people to believe that because he wants to create reality and not be beholden to reality. And lying is one of the ways in which political leaders do that. They do it in Russia, they do it in Venezuela, they do it in Turkey. I mean, it can be done. It turns out that you don't need even a police state to do that. You can sort of pollute the information space just by lying. And I think he has done that. And the interesting thing will be to watch what happens both to the American press and to the American political debate over the next several years. And actually, I don't have a prediction exactly. As I said, I can tell you what happened in totalitarian countries where people were forced to believe in lies or were forbidden from contradicting them. But how it will work in the United States, I don't know yet. In other countries, you get a phenomenon where people separate public life from private life. In other words, there's one set of values that apply in the public sphere. In the public sphere, you lie, and then in the private sphere, you behave differently around your family and your children and so on. And maybe something like that will happen in America where people begin to say, right, the public sphere is different, and we behave differently there, and we behave differently at home. Maybe you will begin to get people cutting themselves off from public life. And I've seen this a little bit among people. I know it's also awful. I can't bear to read about it anymore. Get me away from it. And that's another reaction that you get again in Venezuela and in Russia. Okay, I'm not going to pay any attention to the political sphere because it's so confusing and awful. I want to flag that point, because the truth is, I feel that myself, and I notice that among people, and I just see that happening around me, but I feel it really acutely myself. And I'm someone who has made a lot of noise about Trump and dealt with the pushback that one gets there, and there's a kind of reality testing fatigue that sets in, and it's so onerous to have to respond to this stuff. And he lies with such velocity and so grotesquely. And as to his defenders, the Sean Spicers of the world and Kellyanne Conway, and it's unbelievable what comes out of their mouths. And I've said this before, I'm sure I'm not the only person who has said this, but if Trump were one 10th as bad, he would seem worse. Like you can't even keep up with the crazy thing he said a few hours ago, because he's saying another crazy thing right now. And you see, the media just can't even focus on his various crimes and misdemeanors against basic human sanity, to say nothing of civility, because they come just so rapidly and they're so enormous. We know this in other countries. It's not unique to the United States. As I said, people develop couping mechanisms. They cut themselves off or they create they make a distinction between public and private morality, or in some cases, they realize that to get ahead in their job or in their community, they need to pretend to believe it. And so they do. I mean, that's another phenomenon it's worth paying attention to, is that I think that a lot of the Republicans who defend him or who aren't anyway, don't criticize him, are doing it for this reason. So he's set the tone of public life, and in order to succeed in his world, whether it's in his Cabinet or in his White House or in his or in the Congress that he's president of, people will need to pretend what he's saying is true. And that will create another weird level of alternate reality yeah. Where you know or might be true, people can't contradict him because in order to sort of in the way that the Communist Party used to say, we've had this tremendous economic success, and people would say, yes, we've had tremendous economic success, it wasn't because they believed it. It's just that that was what it was necessary to say in order to get ahead. And we will now see that phenomenon in American life as well. Yes. Let's step back for a second and because I don't want to ignore this challenge I put to us at the beginning, what is the smartest defense of Trump you've heard? So what could someone say? I don't know who this person would be. If you have a smart defender of Trump in mind, please name this person, because I would love to know such a person exists. But what could someone say to argue that none of what we just said matters at all? So I do know some people who have defended Trump, and I won't mention their names because they might not like it. But the main defense that I have heard from intelligent Republicans who care about their country just as much as you and I do is that there are things that we need to get done that the Republican Congress which is now united and dominated by the Republicans and we were about to have a Republican dominant or any way four to five, if I may, never quite works out like that. But a Supreme Court that will have a conservative majority or might have a conservative majority. You never know how people really vote. But there are now important changes that we can make and we just need to somehow live with Trump and his madness and get around him. And the Republican Congress is going to do so many great and important things that we can ignore this. And I'm not defending that defense, I'm just saying I've heard it. How deep does that go? Does it go so far as to say that not only is Trump the lesser evil here, it's just not that Clinton was going to be so terrible and make our being the rights policy concerns unattainable, but that there's something actually more optimal about Trump than that. That what the system needs is this level of chaos or something like it. We need a recognition. There's the Steve Bannon anarchy argument or the Peter Thiel anarchy argument that we need total chaos and revolution and we need to burn everything down and then in the ashes of our country, we will rebuild something better. But that's, by the way, a Bolshevik argument. That was the motivating idea of the Russian Revolution, which ended in total disaster. I mean, there's no evidence that revolutionary destruction creates anything good ever. I mean, there's no historical example you can point to, but there are people who believe that. There are people who believe that. Stated that way, it sounds quite crazy to me. Do you think Bannon and Teal and people who subscribe to the wrecking ball theory are imagining that level of real world chaos? Or are they just imagining that it can be contained to the bureaucracy of government and that it will kind of clean out that mess of bad incentives and career bureaucrats who staff the administrative state, but that nothing that we really care about will be destroyed. So I only know I'm now repeating what people have said about Bannon or heard him say or interpreted. But I'm told that he does believe in something quite a lot more than that. For example, he would like to have a war with China because he feels that we need to bring this crisis to this competition between our two countries to ahead and we need to resolve it. And so we need a war and just desiring a war like that, that's another it's also very Bolshevik. I don't know whether that's true or not, but if it is, then it is a case that they do believe in something quite a bit more than just less bureaucracy. Give me the view from across the pond. What is Trump doing to our standing in the world? How did the various European countries view us at the moment? This is of course my main concern. I live in London most of the time. I live in Warsaw part of the time. I have a kind of foot in different parts of the transatlantic alliance. I'm married to a Pole who was in a previous Polish government and I watched Central Europe join NATO, which was very moving at the time, and I watched the creation of the expanded transatlantic alliance as it is, and the spread of democracy and prosperity across Europe. First of all, it was clear to me during the campaign that Trump, even by his rhetoric and his behavior, was doing enormous damage to America's reputation. But of course, since he's been in office, it's become much worse. The same things that we see at home, of course, are seen abroad. I mean, there's no difference anymore. The same tweets that he's tweeting, the United States are read all over the world. I was told there was a department now in the South Korean government that's now devoted to reading Trump's tweets because they need to be up on them in case I don't know, in case he accidentally insults South Korea, they might need to know about it. Sign of the times. Yeah, exactly. But I mean, first of all, the lying, which is perceived as lying abroad just as is at home. But second of all, the open and obvious disregard for America's allies and alliances and traditional friendships, which are not minor and unimportant things and which have been extremely valuable and important to the United States. One of the bizarre things about Trump, who styles himself as a deal maker, is that he doesn't seem to understand even what our alliances are and what they give to us. Why does the United States have an outsized footprint all around the world? Why does the world speak English? Why you know, why is the world open to American companies? And one of the reasons is and also, why are we why was our strength generally accepted and not fought back against in Europe and other places? And part of it is that we are an unusual superpower and that we have created this structure of friends and alliances and like minded countries who want to cooperate with us in creating international trade agreements and international financial. Arrangements and ensuring that the business is possible for our companies and the world is open to our diplomats and our tourists. And our travelers. I mean, there are all kinds of benefits that we have as a nation, both economic and psychological and political, from this enormous web of alliances with other democracies. And Trump, by denigrating it, I mean, constantly, actually, all the way through the campaign and right up until really a few days ago, when he once again attacked Germany and Sweden in a in a strange speech that he gave at a rally in Florida. He has continually attacked them over and over again while appearing to praise dictatorships and particularly Russia. And that has alarmed people because what does it mean? Is America not interested in democracy anymore? Are we not going to defend our friends anymore? Are we not interested in the world that we created? I mean, the globalized world, we call it globalization, actually, in a lot. Of ways. It's been americanization. It's been people accepting our norms and our ways of behavior and our understanding about economics. Free trade is an American really. It's an Anglo American idea. The British championed it in the 19th century, but we championed it now. This is the world that we wanted and that we've stood behind and where we wrote the rules. So are we now going to unwrite all that? Are we going to destroy it? Are we going to go backwards? And it's very confusing for our allies and for people who don't like the United States. It's a combination of them feeling quite nervous about it, about us and not being sure what we'll do anymore. But it's also a green light, okay? America doesn't care anymore about democracy. That makes it easier for us to beat up on our dissidents. So I think there's been a I think the two months of his presidency have had a profound negative and maybe irreversible effect on America's impact in the world and America's presence in the world. This is something I did try to talk about before the election quite a lot, and I don't know that one of the things I'm worried about is that I don't know that Americans understand this anymore. I don't know if Americans are aware of the degree to which this is their world, that they created with their rules, and that we have been the main beneficiaries of it. Yeah. Could you just reflect on the concept of soft power? It seems like that's what you've been describing, but it's not a concept that most people, I think, are familiar with. So soft power is the power that we exert through being, for example, the world leader in education, that people want to come and study in our country. They admire American degrees. It's the power we exert through the power of American culture. People want to watch American movies. It's power through diplomacy. It's power through media. It's power through that we set by example. I mean, for example, it's a side issue, but an important one. The fact that Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, has stated that he doesn't want to bring reporters with him anymore when he travels. Well, one of the things that when the Secretary of State brings reporters to, for example, China and has an open dialogue with them, one of the things that does it shows, look, this is the American system. Our officials are transparent. They speak to reporters. And that sets a kind of example for China. It's a it's a kind of challenge. It shows, you know, this is how we do things, and we think it's better. And by refusing to do that, he he loses something, so he loses a measure of influence. Oh, I see. He's a secretive leader, just like one of ours. He becomes less interesting to people who want China to evolve. So the soft power is the things that we do that aren't military that nevertheless create American influence. And this is one of the things that Americans have excelled at and that we've been particularly good at over the last several decades, is exporting our model things that values that we believe in all over the world, not through military force, but through, as I say, the power of example, through media, through education and other things. And that even leaves aside economic power, which is another source of power. Yeah, the idea that military power is the only thing we have is absurd. I mean, of course it helps, and it's very important, particularly in particular circumstances. But American power and strength comes from people admiring us and wanting to be like us as much as it comes from anything else. I want to get into Russia and that tightly wound knot in a moment. But just to stay on this point of foreign perception of our travails at the moment, how does our response to Trump, such as it is, appear to our allies abroad? How does it look like this investigation into Russia ties that's to whatever degree being midwifed by the Republicans in Congress? How does our response look to the rest of the world? Our system is not collapsing, obviously, but the fact that we successfully promoted someone like Trump and are now so tongue tied in addressing what, to me is his obvious unfitness for the role of the presidency. It looks like American democracy is precarious in a way that I don't think anyone previously could have imagined. Yes, I've had a lot of sort of hysterical Germans wanting to know, is this the forthright is totalitarianism rising in America? I think actually I've mostly suggested that that's not the case. I think it's a little early, actually, because a lot depends on how our democracy does react to him, how do we deal with him? What does happen in these hearings? Is our system able to cope with a liar? Is it able to cope with somebody with these authoritarian tendencies? And if it turns out that it can, which I think it's too early to say that it can, I think it may or very well might be able to, then I think American proxy will look stronger to people. American democracy will look stronger to people. So I think certainly it's true that the outside world is gripped by the Russian story, partly because, particularly in Europe, I can say there's really no country in Europe that doesn't have a similar story. There is enormous amount of attempted Russian influence in really every country in Europe, and in some cases, it's already shaped elections and it's already shaped political narratives, and people are very aware of this problem. So watching how that comes out, I think will have an enormous impact on other countries, particularly European countries. Well, that's a great background point to make, because obviously Trump's defenders will say that the Russian story is just a conspiracy theory. Right? As though Russia there's no evidence that Russia ever does anything like this. No, the Russian story is I saw it last summer when it started. I knew exactly what it was as soon as the first WikiLeaks, just before the Democratic convention. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, today's podcast is yet another PSA. There have been many of them of late. Needless to say, if you want to support what I'm doing here, the way to do that is to subscribe to the podcast@samharris.org. It's really the subscribers that make all of this possible. But given the kinds of topics I touch here, it's with some regularity that I feel the need to put out a podcast in a form where the most people will hear every word of it. And today the topic that could not suffer a paywall is what is now universally described as vaccine hesitancy and the general condition of misinformation and disinformation that surrounds vaccines in general, but the COVID mRNA vaccines in particular. I think anyone who has listened to the podcast in the last year or so will have no doubt about where I stand on the topic of the COVID vaccines. But I haven't focused on it because it seemed like there really has not been all that much to say. And it's just a general error of futility around persuading anyone who has decided for one reason or another that they're really worried about the COVID vaccines and not all that worried about COVID That's the bifurcation here. We have a very large cohort in our society who think that COVID is not an especially big deal. At minimum, the dangers of it have been exaggerated. Of course, there are many millions of people who think it's a hoax and that there is in fact, no problem at all. In any case, there's a spectrum of opinion on this side wherein people are really not at all concerned about getting COVID, but they're quite concerned about the dangers or imagined dangers associated with the vaccines for COVID. And then there are the rest of us who have the valence on those terms flipped and were quite concerned about COVID and not especially concerned about the risk of vaccines. Rather, we were incredibly eager to get vaccinated and to get our kids vaccinated. And we are fairly aghasted at and increasingly troubled by the thinking and unjustified certainties coming from the other camp. If people agree about anything on this topic, it's that you can't shame the other side into compliance, right? And to talk down to them, to cast the vaccine hesitant as stupid or uneducated, is generally deemed counterproductive. And it's also in many cases, just not true, because there are many smart people who fall into this camp, as will become obvious anyway. The fact that this is possible, the fact that one can be smart and aggressively misinformed and misinforming of others, attests to just how bad the problem of misinformation has grown in our society. Anyway, I was avoiding this topic because, again, I don't think there's that much to say on it. But it's pretty obvious now as the pace of vaccination has slowed to a crawl in the United States and the need for vaccination globally is fairly excruciating. And the Delta variant has tipped us into a condition where even those of us who are vaccinated can no longer enjoy the light at the end of the tunnel because we have been pushed back into that tunnel by, frankly, the confusion of our neighbors. The tipping point for me the other day was I was eating at a restaurant and noticed that about half of the waiters were wearing masks and half weren't. And I asked one of them, what's the policy here? Are we wearing masks or not wearing masks? And he said, well, the policy at the restaurant was that if you're vaccinated you don't have to wear a mask and if you're not vaccinated, you do. I chewed on that for a few minutes after he walked away. And then I looked at all of these young men, they were all men with a kind of a fresh set of eyes and realized that there is no reason these guys aren't vaccinated, but for the fact that they have some spurious memes and bad ideas bouncing around their brains. And they were very likely put there by some of my friends, some of my fellow podcasters, who have either gone down this rapid hole themselves or just platformed people who spread misinformation about vaccines and about COVID and not known enough to push back in real time against these ideas. And in sitting in this restaurant looking at these waiters who are all podcast listeners, I just know it. I've spoken to a few of them about it and they're advertising their dangerous confusion on their faces by wearing masks that would otherwise be unnecessary for them. This was before the explosion of the Delta variant in my city. I just figure I have to say something. So the goal of today's podcast is to present a very simple case which hopefully stands a chance of persuading some number of the vaccine hesitant. And the punchline is this even if you accept the worst claims about the risks of the mRNA vaccines, which are almost guaranteed to be false, but even accepting them, the case for getting vaccinated is absolutely clear cut. Given what else we know about the effects of the vaccines in preventing disease and about the effects of COVID itself, it's a very simple argument. But it requires that we get into some of the details here about what's being claimed and about what we know thus far from what is really one of the largest medical experiments ever performed. We now have over 100 million people in the US alone who are fully vaccinated. We have an extraordinary amount of information about the dangers here, or lack thereof. So anyway, I wanted to produce a document that could be spread around to the people in your life who may still be hesitating to get vaccinated. And to help me do this, I decided to speak with Dr. Eric Topel. Eric is a truly world renowned cardiologist. He's also the Executive Vice President of Scripps Research and one of the top ten most cited medical researchers. He's the author of several books. The Patient Will See You Now. The Creative Destruction of Medicine and Deep Medicine how Artificial Intelligence Can Make Health Care Human Again and even more relevantly for our purposes. He's been very active on Twitter for the last year and a half or so, countering some of the crazy ideas that have been spread around COVID and around vaccines. And you can follow him on Twitter at eric topel erictopol and I recommend you do that. He's continually surfacing useful articles, but I thought Eric was one of the best people I could find to walk me through what we currently know or have every reason to believe about vaccines and about the state of our response to COVID We discuss the general problem of misinformation, the political and social siloing that people experience in our society. We cover concerns about mRNA vaccines, the emergency use authorization by the FDA, what that means and what it doesn't mean, and the false claims made about it. Talk about the effectiveness of the vaccines and differentiate vaccine efficacy from effectiveness. We discuss the Delta variant, the misuse of the vaccine adverse event reporting system. The Veres database. We discuss concerns about the long term side effects of the COVID vaccines, bad incentives in medicine, IVR, mectin, government and corporate censorship, and touch upon vaccine mandates and other topics. Anyway, as you'll hear in the discussion, neither I nor Eric have any conceivable conflict of interest here. In fact, Eric has distinguished himself in the past for going after Big Pharma. He had his career fairly derailed at one point in his battle against Merck over Vioxx, and he was very much on the heroic side of the good in that battle. Neither of us have an idealized picture of the pharmaceutical industry or the incentives that might drive any specific decision there. The only reason for this podcast is I'm growing increasingly concerned about misinformation leading to needless illness, disability, and even death in our society and the world over. So, with that said, I hope you find this podcast useful. And now I bring you Eric Topel. I am here with Dr. Eric Topel. Eric, thanks for joining me again. Great to be with you, Sam. So let's say you've been on the podcast. I forget when that was, it was a while back. But let's briefly introduce you properly. How do you describe your background and current perch in medicine? Well, I'm an old dog. I've been around for a while now. In the early years, well, I was a cardiologist, but research was more in clinical trials, and then in the mid ninety s, it switched to genomics and digital medicine. And so I'm at Scripps Research a professor of molecular medicine here and also executive vice president of the Scripps Research Institution. Nice. I'm talking to you today just because I know you're a wonderful communicator of science and medicine and you can just help people think about what is rational on this topic. And also, you've been very active on Twitter throughout the pandemic just forwarding articles which you hopefully highlight for people and just cutting through what has become a truly a deluge of misinformation and disinformation and conspiracy thinking, you know, malignant fantasies. It's just that we're now dealing with a an information space that is so contaminated by the digital entrepreneurship of people with various convictions that it's just very difficult to get to anything like ground truth around COVID and vaccines and, you know, sound public health advice. And this is coupled to a pervasive distrust in institutions. Now, people, people distrust the government, they distrust the media, they distrust science and scientists. Our medical journals have lost standing. Certainly organizations like the CDC and the who have fairly emulated their reputations over the last 18 months or so. And some of this is understandable. I mean, there really has been some terrible failures of public health messaging and instances of hypocrisy and doublethink. But rather than perform an autopsy on all of that, I want us to see if we can have a conversation about vaccines and vaccine hesitancy and starting pretty much from first principles and from what we can be reasonably sure about in the current environment. So I have a few other things I want to say by way of getting us started here, but is there anything you want to say just to kick this off? Well, your points in the intro here are spot on, Sam. The vaccine progression from the sequence of the Sarscovy two in January 10, to the clinical trial executed, completed in November, and rolling out vaccines all in a matter of months is of historic significance. There's never been a vaccine that's been short of eight years as the average, and many, many fail. So what we have here is one of the greatest triumphs in, in biomedicine in history, and it's very sad to see that being compromised by mis and disinformation. Okay, so let's just talk about a few background facts here. So first, despite that triumph of rolling out these vaccines at record pace, the vaccination rates in the US. Have now plummeted. We're around 250,000 shots first shots given a day now, which is like something like one 10th of where we were at our highest rate. And we'll focus on the US. Here, but anything we say will apply to other countries where vaccines are available and where a significant percentage of people don't want to get them. But I think we have to recognize that everyone is very likely to be in a bubble of sorts here. So it's you know, I think I mean, I honestly think I only know a few people out of the hundreds of people I know personally, I think I'm only aware of knowing one or two who aren't vaccinated and I'm sure that anyone who isn't vaccinated is very likely surrounded by people who are not vaccinated. Right. So this is analogous to what happens with smokers. Right. I think I only know one or two people who still smoke cigarettes, whereas if you smoke cigarettes, I imagine many of your friends are smokers. So we're impressively siloed here and this is all making it very difficult to talk about what is rational and responsible because the siloing is not just socialist with respect to information and sources of information that one deems credible. There's one difference though, about that, Sam. I think you're making an apt comparison to the smoker circle orbit versus the non smokers. But the difference is that the smoker circuit isn't directly trying to hurt the non smokers. Right. Whereas here we have a harm that's serious, unfortunately. Yeah. It's worse than second hand smoke coming from exactly unvaccinated here. It's a flip of the model. The way it was supposed to work, Sam, was that there was this famous herd immunity which a lot of people had never heard of until they heard of herd immunity. And then that idea was if we could just get 70% of people vaccinated, then the other 30% would benefit because the virus wouldn't be able to find hosts. So that there the majority, the one bubble would help the smaller one. But what's happened, unfortunately, is that we have a much more transmissible contagious version of the virus with delta. So we've seen a flip of that model where the unvaccinated, because it's substantial minority already are now leading to infections in the vaccinated and that's not the way it was supposed to work. Right? Yeah. So this is a bit of a stretch psychologically to build a bridge between where we are and where the unvaccinated, the resolutely unvaccinated are. I'm living in a world where I and all of my friends were profoundly impatient to get vaccinated and many of us were going to vaccine centers early on and lining up for hours, even whole days hoping to get some overflow vaccine. Right. This is now months ago and now vaccines are ubiquitously available and we have people who don't want them. Right. But I do think rather than stigmatize the unvaccinated or put the onus on them in very judgmental terms, I just want to see if we can this is a pointless exercise if we can't say something that stands a chance of being persuasive for these people. Right. First, I think to understand who these people are, there's been a fair amount of polling on this and I'm drawing these comments from the Kaiser Family Foundation vaccine monitoring website. So there are a few ways in which our society is segmented here. The first is obviously political, right? So there's a left right divide politically that accounts for a lot of this difference. So 2% of Democrats say they definitely will not get the vaccine, whereas 23% of Republicans say that so it's a very significant effect. And no surprise. There's about a 30% difference in vaccination rates among Democrats and Republicans. 86% of Democrats have received at least one dose, and only 52% of Republicans have. And there have been exceptions to this with respect to public messaging. Some Republicans and right wing media figures have said what I would consider the reasonable thing, but many have tended to amplify the message that COVID itself is not really bad, it's just a flu or maybe even a hoax. But these newfangled COVID vaccines are dangerous. And then you have people like Trump slinking off to get vaccinated in secret without using it as an opportunity to actually send a helpful public health message. So politics are definitely part of it, but it's not the whole story. Age is also a major variable. So people over 65 are much more likely to be vaccinated than the young. This is actually fairly rational because, you know, people over 65 understand their much greater risk for serious illness or, or death from COVID And there's also a rural urban divide, which is, again, somewhat, if not rational, understandable because the people living in crowded cities are more likely to get exposed to COVID and they're more likely to be vaccinated as well. And there are other cuts you can make at this education as a variable. College graduates are more likely to be vaccinated than those who haven't finished college or never went. And there's some stratification by race. Whites are more likely to be vaccinated than blacks or Hispanics, but the effect is not that great. And then there are weird pockets where there's a very strong antivax sentiment, like the yoga community apparently is very wary of getting vaccinated for COVID. And the reasons when when you poll people in these various groups, the reasons they give for not being vaccinated tend to focus on concerns about the newness of the vaccines and fear of side effects. These are new vaccines. They could not have been fully tested because they were produced so quickly, and therefore they're likely to be dangerous. And then you add to this distrust of the government and also just a belief that they don't actually need a vaccine because the risk of COVID has been greatly exaggerated. This is basically the picture you get of why people are not getting vaccinated. I think there's two prominent things that you've mentioned that deserve emphasis. Sam. So first you did cite the Kaiser Family Foundation survey, a large survey of Americans. And in that one of the most important reasons that people gave, and you can understand it, is that the FDA didn't give full approval yet, and it's still being categorized as an emergency use. And so that, you know, you can understand people being skeptical went out without this final blessing by the FDA. Then the other thing I think you've alluded to but can't be emphasized enough, it isn't so much the problem with the unvaccinated. It's the problem of the information being fed to them, which they actually believe these things because a lot of this is purposeful. A lot of this is intentionally trying to prevent the benefit from being actualized. So I think those are factors that I consider pretty high on the list for where we are right now. What do you mean intentionally trying to get the benefit from keeping the benefit from being actualized? Well, in the political spectrum, as you've mentioned, there's such a remarkable dichotomy between the Republicans and the Democrats. And there was a great cartoon by one of my favorite cartoonists, Bill Brown Hall, who said, Obama, he's out there as sunglasses, and he says on the cartoon, vaccines are bad, and that's how you get Republicans to get vaccinated. But there is clearly a movement among many Republican leaders in Congress and states to not be supportive of the vaccine front. And only in recent days, interestingly, have they started to come out with a message that this is important and that we're facing a very serious delta wave right now. So this is, of course, very late in the game where we're now highly dominant with this very formidable version of the virus. And so the messaging from politicians to buck, a lot of things have been blocked politically, and it's not an area that I want to even get into as far as politicization of the vaccines. But unfortunately, it has happened. The data you cited, there are other surveys that suggest it's even worse than that. So never before have vaccination in this country been so highly political. And I remember as a kid I know I'm older than you, I think, Sam, but when I was a kid and getting polio vaccine, everybody got the polio vaccine. There was no politics. And if you go back in time, we've never had anything like this. And the sad part is the people who are not getting the benefit of the vaccine, a lot of it is because they're on social media, they're getting fed misinformation. And by the way, we also know the Russians are involved. This is part of this mission of their divisiveness. And we haven't had a counter offensive in this country to all this misinformation. In fact, I pleaded with Vivek Murthy, our surgeon general, back in May to do that. And I think he saw just last week he did make that announcement. But it hasn't really been aggressive. It isn't calling out the sources of this. So what we have is a problem of lots of misinformation, some of it quite deliberate and lack of a counter. Yeah. The reason why this is so upside down is you have many, many millions of people who believe some combination of the following that the risk of COVID the disease has been vastly exaggerated. Right. COVID is a hoax or it's just a flu or it's just not a factor. But the vaccines are scary and dangerous we just have literally tens of millions of people who are totally sanguine about the prospect of catching COVID but really averse to the idea of getting vaccinated for COVID. And obviously, from our point of view, that's totally upside down. But this is the balance that has to be the results of which have to be fairly judged. On the one side, you have the risk of COVID plus the effectiveness of the vaccines weighed against the risks of vaccination because this is really a forced choice for all of us. Unless you're going to be perfectly in hiding, you're going to be exposed to the novel coronavirus and it's some variant or many variants thereof, and you can either be exposed having been fully vaccinated or not having been fully vaccinated. And this should be simple to talk about and, you know, the comparative risks should be simple to assess now because we, we have many, many millions of people who have run this experiment. We've got millions of people who have caught COVID without the benefit of a vaccine. We've got millions of people who have been vaccinated and we can assess the negative side effects of getting these vaccines. All of this can be assessed. But again, this is happening in a context where many, many millions of people believe that, for instance, everything that has been going on here has been part of a vast totalitarian conspiracy. I mean, there are people who think that the lockdowns and the masking has been not for the purpose of mitigating real illness. The whole point has been to acclimatize otherwise free societies to regimes of extreme social control, right? And then you, you add to that paranoia the belief that any emphasis on vaccination rather than treatment of COVID with existing compounds like ivory mectin, that's based on a pure profit motive coming from big pharma and the mercenary manipulation of government, right? We're all doing the bidding somehow of pfizer and adjourna, right? I mean, so I can say, like, for instance, someone's going to think that of us in this conversation. You should go without saying that I have absolutely no entanglement with big pharma and there's no pressure on me to do a podcast about the benefits of vaccines. So this is just a pure PSA from my point of view. But that's the environment in which we're having this conversation. Yes, I would add, you know, I have no connections, conflicts with pharma. But even everyday people on Twitter say you're a tool. You're a shield for pharma. When in fact, I've been attacking them throughout the in fact, before. The vaccines were approved, I was attacking them for not posting their protocols during advisor and all the rest of them. And also more recently, for a premature pronouncement of need for boosters. And no, this is, this is all, as you say, just part of that kind of multidimensional conspiracy, accusal and theory. And it's really, it's saddening to watch. And in a way be part of that. Yeah. Okay, so what do we know about the effectiveness of the vaccines at this point? Right, so the vaccines, when we had the first trials that came out in November, December, was formal review. We learned that they were 95% effective, both pfizer and then subsequently short shortly after moderna. That was against any infection or as it turned out, which wasn't the primary endpoint of the trials. The same was at least against any severe illness like death or hospitalization. So the trials were just designed, 75,000 participants, multicountry. This is the largest trials ever performed in vaccines and they showed this remarkable you may recall, Sam, that at the time when the trials were done, the FDA had set the bar for 50%, if 50% narrow enough confidence intervals, that would qualify as approval. Here we had 95% striking. There's only one other vaccine in history that's been at this level of efficacy. That's efficacy. So then you have, of course, the different world, which is effectiveness when you put the vaccines in the real world. And what's striking, wherever you look, whether it's Israel or the UK or the various centers that are reported in the US. We see the same effectiveness as efficacy. Now, that's unusual too, because what's happened there is the real world isn't like that ideal situation of the inclusion criteria, the exclusion criteria, exactly the right way that the vaccines were given and they're frozen into the moment and all the perfect things. Usually you see a drop off in effectiveness and in fact, it's held up. Now, that was with the original strain. And of course, there's been some evolution first from what is called the ancestral or Wuhan strain to the D six one 4G, which had a little bit more transmission. And then we went through this alpha, beta, gamma, and finally now to delta. Now delta, there is a small drop off in effectiveness. We don't have an efficacy trial. We have now effectiveness in the real world. And what we're seeing now is like a five or six point drop. So instead of 95%, it's like 88, 90% effectiveness. That's exceptionally good against any symptomatic infection and 96% against death or hospitalization, which is extraordinary. So here we have, you know, what most would consider the best vaccine and data sets in history. And it's ironic that we have such a substantial number of people, or as you position it, bubble, that just are still not believing this. And and of course, the safety has gone along with that. Yes, there are many kind of natural experiments happening here. One thing you can do is compare the rates of hospitalization and death for the vaccine unvaxed. I mean, granted, there are contexts in which this can be misleading. So, I mean, obviously in a society where 100% of people are fully vaccinated, well, then 100% of people who are hospitalized or dead from COVID will also be fully vaccinated. Right? But presumably there'll be very few of them if the vaccines actually work. But we have many situations where around 50% of people are fully vaccinated and 50% aren't. And we can compare what's happening at the hospitals and in the morgues. And you take a place like Virginia where about just under 54% of the population is fully vaccinated. If you look at the, the hospitalization data, over 98% of the people hospitalized are not fully vaccinated and over 99% of the deaths are for people who are not fully vaccinated. So it's just that our hospitals are not filling with the vaccinated in places where there's a comparable cohorts of vaccinated and unvaccinated people. So what we have is, what we appear to have now is a raging pandemic among the unvaccinated. And of course, some number of vaccinated people will experience breakthrough illness and even severe illness and death, but the numbers are minuscule by comparison. Is there any way in which this doesn't speak to the effectiveness of the vaccines? Yeah, I think you're bringing up what has been used again by the same people who are the antivaxxers anti science. But what is being used is the increasing number of breakthrough infections with Delta. So in prior Delta we know, has a viral load or the number of copies of virus that is a capable replication, 1000 fold or more compared with the ancestral strain. So we know it's a more challenging virus, much more contagious transmissible. Now with that, the breakthrough infections of people winding up in the hospital with prior variants, versions of the virus was less than 1% and even less than a fraction of 1% and something like zero 1% for death. Now it has gone up some for Delta that is, you know, now it's a couple of percent, you know, few percent hospitalizations and you know, perhaps it will approach 1% in death. But the point here is that this is a formidable now version of the virus. And what we have is a problem with mathematics, because people who don't understand that, for example, let's say in Israel, where you have more than half of the current breakthrough infections, people are in the hospital and say, oh look that vaccines aren't working well, that's just because in Israel, among these people that are being looked at, 89% of adults vaccinated have been vaccinated. There's no one left to get sick. Right? It's that whole point. If 100% of the people are vaccinated, then everybody and anybody who's in the hospital, obviously that defines a breach for illness. So people are missing the point about denominators and fractions. But if you calculate the vaccine efficacy, as has been done in the UK and in Israel effectiveness, I should say it stays at the 90% level. It has never changed with Delta. So here I think is again, whenever there's just a sleight of hand with statistics, it's being used in a way by antivaxxers in what I consider to. Be deliberate. A lot of these people are intelligent, they know better, but this feeds their narrative. Yeah, there's another comparison here which should be pretty straightforward. We have something like 159,000,000 people now who have been fully vaccinated in the US. Right. And we have probably a similar number of people who have been exposed to the coronavirus. I mean, there's only 34 million confirmed cases according to the CDC. But we know it's got to be higher than that. So we can compare. We have tens of millions of people in each cohort, people who've been vaccinated and people who have gotten COVID. Now, if the people have gotten COVID, we have around 600,000 who have died for the people who've gotten vaccinated. When we ask how many people have died as a result of getting vaccinated, this is just a comparison of just how dangerous is COVID compared to the danger of getting vaccinated. These data are kind of hard to get your hands around because it seems like there are reports of people dying after getting vaccinated without there being any real assessment of whether the vaccine was causally responsible for their death. I mean, there's just people who happen to drop dead from something after being vaccinated. And the highest number I've seen there is 12,000. Yeah, but it's probably twelve, right? If it's that many. I think this is the problem you're bringing up is this is this unfortunate situation. We all like open science, open data. But the CDC, when they set up the vayers, this is the adverse event reporting system. They didn't recognize that this was going to be used by antivaxxers because these cases are not adjudicated. They'd not, as you say, not been reviewed. They have no idea whether the death has any linkage. Because we know people, when you have 162,000,000 Americans, which we have as of today, who are fully vaccinated, some people are going to die naturally with vaccination. And so these are people part of the VAERS reporting System. Now, what is extraordinary here is that this is used on a daily basis. The likes of Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingram, mainstream television stations and lots of other entities are using this data. And it's obvious misuse because unlike the clinical trials where no one died of a vaccine vaccination, the safety was just extraordinary. No one died of the vaccine in either medurna or pfizer when these 75,000 pieces trials, because every case, every potential side effect is reviewed by an events committee. Now, one of the ways you could die of a vaccine would be if you had anaphylaxis, profound allergic reaction. But there's been multiple reports of the people who had anaphylaxis specifically with the mRNA vaccines, and they haven't died. I mean, they got treated and a small number had to get hospitalized, but that would be the one thing you could link with death. Now, there are these exceptionally rare, rare side effects, like with the J and J and AstraZeneca this blood clotting issue, which is called vaccine induced thrombocytopenic thrombosis or what, we you know, we have seen very rare myocarditis in young people, particularly men with mRNA vaccines. These are exceptionally diam barre with Johnson Johnson, 100 cases among 12 million people vaccinated. So if you just look at these rare things, first of all, they don't die. Mostly people don't die. They recover, mitochondritis, almost all recover. And it's very mild with the blood clotting issue. Well, if it does occur where there's a cerebral sinus thrombosis, yes, that has a high fat out of it, but it's incredibly rare. One in hundreds of thousands of people with AstraZeneca or with J and J not seen with mRNA. So just to review the composite here, the safety is overwhelming, but the VAERS open data registry of unadjudicated data is what's causing the problem because it's being basically used by people who either don't know or knowingly are using it to spread false information. Right? Yeah. So I take all those points, and undoubtedly that's the correct way to look at it. But even if we took the vera's numbers at face value, even if we acknowledge that 12,000 people have been killed outright by these vaccines, it still makes COVID look a hell of a lot more dangerous than the vaccine for COVID. You're still talking about when you have, on the order of 160,000,000 people who have been fully vaccinated, 12,000 people dying. That's less than one in 10,000 people dying based on this intervention. It would be a depressing number, but it's so much better than the number for getting COVID without having the benefit of the vaccine that people still have this upside down, even taking those numbers at face value, which of course we can't do. I couldn't agree with you more. In fact, you're looking at it overall with respect to the exceptionally rare side effects that I've mentioned, the chance of you having any of those from COVID is considerably higher, orders of magnitude higher. So, yes, across the board, the relationship between getting COVID risk versus any risk of the vaccine, it is overwhelming that the vaccines are providing an exceptional net benefit. And that can't be questioned. That's real data. That's the most solid evidence data set that I've known in my 35 years in academics. And it's important to realize that when you're talking about numbers this large, when you're talking about 160,000,000 people being exposed to any intervention, there will always be some number of bad reactions that if you focus on those without understanding the background statistics, could make a rational person, an otherwise rational person nervous about that intervention. But the truth is, if we were giving people peanut butter as a prophylactic against COVID, if peanut butter were 100% effective against COVID, some number of people would die outright from peanut butter. That's right. That's the nature of human biology. But obviously we would consider it an absolute gift beyond words if peanut butter could prevent this disease. Well, one other thing I just want to mention, because what you're saying is so spot on, but the issue about the concerns of long term effects of the vaccine, I do want to address that because a lot of people say, well, I think the data look good, but what about could something happen later? And the answer there is, I think, pretty astounding in that in the history of vaccines, there has never been something that showed up beyond two months after the vaccines were in common use. Okay? We're now beyond seven months. So there is never there is no reason to think that these vaccines are going to be different than vaccines that have been going on for many, many decades and so many different diseases and platforms. So the long term, people should have confidence in vaccines because there's no more surprises. The surprises have been unveiled either in the clinical trials or the first two months when they get into you know, you have 190,000,000 Americans who've been exposed to at least one dose. We have hundreds of more millions around the world. We know what these vaccines do. There's no long term surprises that we could see at this point. Right. But even if we were going to give a hostage to paranoia here and grant that we don't understand the long term implications of the vaccines, you still have this head to head comparison with the actual disease of COVID which makes the vaccines look comparatively benign, right? So if you're worried about the long term possibilities of vaccines, you should be doubly worried about the long term possibilities of having caught COVID without the benefit of having been vaccinated. If you're worried about there's people circulating an article that suggests that the spike protein born of the mRNA vaccines could be bad for the blood brain barrier. Right, but what does COVID do to the blood brain barrier? Right. Well, yeah, I mean, firstly, that is absurd. I saw this through commentary that Brett Weinstein put out that people who get a headache as a side effect of a COVID vaccine, which is not uncommon to get a headache, that that could be a brain fog from the mRNA getting into the brain. This is totally unsubstantiated. Totally. And to try to make a parallel with the true brain fog that is the cognitive effect hit to people who do get COVID, so called long COVID or long haulers, which is happening in at least 10% of the people with confirmed infections. And, you know, I I know many people, colleagues, people I work with who are affected by long COVID, who have brain fog and have profound fatigue, have difficulty breathing, can't even go on a long walk, that they used to be healthy and athletic. So for anyone to posit that people who get a headache is having mRNA going into the brain, that is totally irresponsible. It's reckless, it's it's sick and it casts unnecessary doubts to these people, the innocent. You know, it's in a way, Sam, I have to say it's predatory. It's taking people who want to believe in a conspiracy or don't know what to believe and making vaccines look like they're intended to harm with no evidence whatsoever. It's really sad. So there's a conspiratorial frame of mind here which is given just enough pavlovian reinforcement to be almost impossible for people to break out of because there are occasional conspiracies. There are certainly bad incentives that can be detected where it's easy to allege a profit motive. On the part of Pfizer, you reference the fact that pfizer was prematurely recommending booster shots. Right? Well, the reason for that is the cynical reason for that is fairly obvious to see, because this would mean literally billions of dollars fall into their bottom line if that were our health policy. And so there's this background concern about a profit motive in medicine that is deranging people's thinking. Here Brett Weinstein is an example of this. I know that he's very concerned that the emergency use authorization for these vaccines required that there be no valid therapeutic for COVID in order to get triggered. And so by definition, this is on his account. By definition, it had to be judged that there was nothing in the armamentarium of medical science that could treat COVID in principle in order to fast track these vaccines. And therefore we overlooked the near panacea of Ivermectin, an old compound that is generically available and from which no pharmaceutical company stands a chance of profiting. And so there in Brett's mind, you have the perfect storm of bad incentives and greedy pharmaceutical executives driving policy toward a windfall profits and disregarding the life saving opportunity of handing out IVR mechan to one and all and driving us toward some kind of abyss of novel risk. Right, because on his account, these mRNA vaccines are new and therefore have to be assumed to be dangerous because they, by definition are untested or we're testing them on ourselves now on his account. So this is where we have to deal with the claim about IVR mechan and why it's not a rational alternative to these vaccines. Yeah, well, I do want to go over this because the notion about the emergency use authorization is incorrect. Firstly, that is the definition in the setting of a pandemic or crisis for the FDA is may be effective. That's all it takes. May be effective. It doesn't have to be that there's no other treatment as long as something may be effective in an emergency situation, the FDA has the ability to push forward, as they did, you may recall, they gave an EUA for hydroxychloroquine. They gave an EUA for convalescent plasma. There already were other things, like, for example, when the convalescent plasma was granted, which was wrong and had to be withdrawn, as was a hydroxychloroquine. Both of those were there were other things out there for treatment. That is when the plasma we've been through this, where there were all sorts of sense, whether it was then President or other people following the President, that hydroxychloroquine was, you know, some magical drug, and it proved not only to not have an effect, but to also have some dangers. The convalescent plasma, where over 600,000 Americans got convalescent plasma because of a tortured data analysis without a randomized trial that was given an emergency use authorization, which promoted hundreds of thousands to get the treatment, they may have actually helped to spur on these variants because they were getting these polyclonal antibodies. That certainly wasn't helping the situation, helping them. So then comes Ivermectin. Now, I've reviewed that data carefully, because on Twitter, if I put anything on Twitter, I usually get at least some comments about, did they get Ivictin? Or if only they had ivory. They all had ivory mechan. No one needs a vaccine, this kind of stuff, right? I said, so where did this come from? So it turns out there are a bunch of small studies, and they've been metaanalyzed multiple times by different parties. And, you know, I think the best breaking over of the data was by this fellow, Gideon MEYERWITZ Cats, who put together his Iver mechan for COVID-19 based on fraudulent research. And that was just earlier this month on a medium. Now, in it, he takes an unbiased view and very careful view of ivory mechan, which is an antiparasitic medicine, as you mentioned, it has been used for river blindness, it is used for lice, it is used for various parasitic diseases, and it's relatively safe. I mean, there are some serious side effects, but they're uncommon. Now, the point here is that what about these trials? Do we have any large trials? The trials, like, you know, I I did one of the largest clinical trials in in medicine with 41,000 patients in 18 countries around the world for heart attack. And, you know, I know what a large trial is when I see it. Mega trials, over 10,000, which is what you want and what the UK has done in the recovery trials. You know, we haven't had one large trial in the whole COVID-19 pandemic done in the United States. But these trials, these trials of Iranctin are exceptionally small, and the largest one was this one from Egypt, which Gideon Meyeritz Cats shows was highly irregular. One third of the people who died from COVID in the trial were already dead when the researchers started to recruit them. I mean, you just don't see this kind of stuff. You need a time machine to run that trial. You have, quote, if this is an outright fraud, the ethical concerns of randomizing people into a clinical trial before the ethical approval comes through is enormous. And his piece takes this hard in terms of the fact that this trial from Egypt, the largest, which isn't large at all. I mean, this few hundred people in either arm of Ivictin. This is not what you would call any evidence for making Ivictin a standard drug. Now, I see a signal there that Ivramectin could be beneficial. I don't know why, I don't know the mechanism. And I would also hasten to add that our place and many others have raked through every drug known to mankind for repurposing. That is, most molecules drugs have been characterized. We know their structure and we can match up whether it would work against this virus. And Ivorymectin has never shown up, despite hundreds of others that have for having an antiviral specific qualities. But putting the biology aside, it looks like there's a signal. But for anyone to say that this should be given universally and as Brett Weinstein has said, and others, that it's 99% effective, there is no drug that's 99% effective known to man. And then to say it reduces mortality or improves survival by 70, 80, 90%, these are impossible. They have never occurred. This is, you know, just not acceptable. Yeah, well, what's conspicuous here is what I am not saying in Brett's defense. I mean, Brett brett is somebody who I consider a friend. He's definitely a colleague. He's moderated some of my debates. I know his brother Eric very well. He's a fellow podcaster. We've been on each other's podcast. I guess I would say that I haven't heard everything he has said on this topic and he's gone on for many, many hours. I know, but I've heard enough to be very uncomfortable with what he has put out there. And I do consider it dangerous. What strikes me as just frank misinformation, getting pushed out there to millions and millions of people. But it is, in Brett's case, born of almost a character illogical bias against institutions at this point, some of which I do understand. I mean, so like, for instance, one thing that he, that's really animating him is the the response to what he's doing from the big tech companies, right? So the fact that YouTube will demonetize the episodes of his podcast where he discusses Ivory mechan, I'm torn even here. I don't know what YouTube and Facebook and all of these companies should be doing. I mean, there's certainly a straightforward argument that they should be censoring what is obviously misinformation. But the problem here is that many things that were wrong yesterday are considered good information today. Right. They're very unlikely to get censorship. Right? What is outlier thinking and can be deemed dangerous or irresponsible can, in the fullness of time, prove to be the only correct view. So it's just a difficult problem that they show no sign of being able to solve. And Brett and everyone who's listening to him incredibly animated by their clumsy efforts at censorship because they can always point to the instance where what they censored actually is now CDC policy, right? At one point, CDC was against mask wearing, right? And what are you going to censor the people who said we should have been wearing masks a year ago? It was just obvious we should have been wearing masks. It's a hard problem to solve in terms of a response and it's easy to see how people get freaked out by the authoritarian implications of having these virtually monopolistic companies close down conversation on specific topics. But absolutely, it's a nightmare of what's happening in terms of how friction free the spread of misinformation has become. So I don't know what your thoughts are on the front of what we should be doing. And also just to close the loop on Brett's concern here, it's not just that the big tech companies are doing it, but there really is a conspiracy that's happening out in the open where you have the government asking the big tech companies to do this. Right. It's not that no one ever conspires. Even in this case, they even admit that they're conspiring. But certainly viewed from one side, it seems counterproductive. As bad as the misinformation and disinformation problem has become. Yeah, I am sympathetic to the point that everyone should be heard and things shouldn't be censored. That I think, is clear. However, when it has come to a point where it leads to harm of people, then you have to say, well, is this crossing the line when you're harming a lot of people? Now, I think the conspiracy theories and theorists get tremendous amount of fuel when this happened. So for example, if we go back to the lab leak origin versus the natural zoonotic origin of the virus from Zoanotic to human, there were a lot of people who initially in the science community advanced that this had to be a natural, not a leak at the Wuhan Virology Institute. And then as time went on, there were more and more irregularities. Still no definitive evidence either way, and we may never get that definitive evidence, but basically, the people's voices who were not being heard regarding the Wuhan Institute lab leak, assuming an accidental lab leak, they got more concerning substance. And then the conspiracy theorists would say, there you go, right? And they were saying that at the beginning. And so now you have another parallel where whether it's either mectin or vaccines, you have people who are pushing these agendas. And you know what? I don't have a problem with pushing Ivermectin as advancing it as a candidate drug that we need. Totally. There's 2200 people in randomized trials. Most of the randomized trials are 20, 40, 60 people, 2000 people. To say it should be given universally and has 99% effective, that's not you can't make that assertion. And you know, I listened to Brett, a couple of his podcasts, interview with Tess Laurie, one of the UK scientists who he has been aligned with, and I can tell he's an intelligent fellow. I mean, he's a bright fellow, but he doesn't know how to do clinical trials and he shouldn't be passing himself off as an expert to interpret that data. These are not what we would consider definitive trials. Now it should be pursued. Ivermectin is a very inexpensive and relatively safe drug and it may indeed have very positive effects. But you shouldn't be having emergency podcasts. And then the people that he brings together, like for example, the Dr. Kirsch who said the COVID vaccines have caused more deaths than have all other vaccines combined over the last 30 years. This is somebody he brought on as a guest. Okay? And then you have him also lined up with the front line COVID 19 Critical Care Alliance for an emergency podcast. With Joe Rogan making these claims, there's something serious afoot. The public is largely unaware they have been placed in kind of danger. 99% effective ivory mectin. The pandemic would end in a month. That is complete balderdash. Okay? The pandemic will not end in a month and there is no drug or no vaccine that's 99% effective. So the problem here, Sam, I see, is that he is overstepped. That is, he's aligned himself or had guests who are saying things that he then has a large following instead of taking a critical view. I'm sure he's upset with decentring. I would be too. But it doesn't mean it should go across the line as to advancing things or people who have and saying things like, for example, the headache, which is the mRNA crossing into the brain. These are unfounded things and they're dangerous things. And that's where I have a concern. What do you make of the fact that some of these people who he's brought on his show and at least one I think he was on with Rogan with at least one other person, these people are MDS with seemingly relevant credentials, caring for people with COVID And I mean, these are not MDS who've been sidelined for malpractice years ago and they should be credible sources of information here. And it is, should be it's genuinely bewildering even to very smart people to see an MD who purports to be close to the data. And in one case, one of these people even claim to be the originator of mRNA vaccine technology. Yeah, I don't know how specious that claim is. Yeah, this is actually one of the chief offenders I'm glad you mentioned it, Sam, is Dr. Malone. Dr. Malone who puts out that he was the inventor of the mRNA vaccines. Well, guess what? He wasn't the inventor. And what he does is he's now the a person who is leading the charge against the vaccines and, and people unknowingly because he identifies himself as the inventor there, that they this is the perfect fuel for the conspiracy there. It's incredible. You couldn't make this stuff up. That person who positions himself as the inventor, having worked decades ago on a path, but he is not the inventor of either of the mRNA vaccines. Okay. And then also the front line doctors. The front line doctors, one of whom I should say was part of this, they are the ones who are suing the government right now that the vaccine should be taken off the market. Okay? So we have a problem here. This is a group of people who are either unwittingly or knowingly harming people who don't know better, who I have to say, their channel of disinformation I consider predatory because it's not based on the right evidence data. And I don't want to see it censored, but I also want to see it toned down and stick with the facts, don't make stuff up. Yeah. People are going to find this hard to adjudicate because on the one hand, it's you and me talking about this and you're an MD with a seemingly relevant background. And we're up against Brett Weinstein and his MDS. And she said situation where you sort of have to pick the authority who you trust. But that I mean, there's more information than that. That's a standoff. But we're living in the presence of the the largest vaccine and disease experiment ever run. Right. We're talking about tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of people getting the disease under conditions of being vaccinated or not. And the disparity in the results is so clear at this point. And again, even if you take the worst numbers from the most vaccine avoidant as the ground truth for what these vaccines do to you, it's still an easy decision to get vaccinated to mitigate your risk. Yeah. When you have vaccine trials done around the world, the first two, the mRNAs and 75,000 people and then since that time, 100,000 more participants in randomized double blind trials. I mean, these are the real deal. Then you have 2200 people in all of the ivory mechan trials total around the world. I mean, there's a little bit difference in the weight of evidence, the totality of evidence also with the safety. And I think that should drive people if they truly are data driven, evidence based. Even if you're not with a medical or science background, you want to see totality of evidence and you don't want us to see things that are just either made up or fueled by these. I would say a good example of somebody who I know known from the past is Alex Barronson. Okay? He's formerly an excellent New York times journalist. He then wrote a bunch of novels that were highly successful spy thrillers. And now he's a regular on Fox news talking badly about vaccines and making stuff up and using data, manipulating data. Okay. And of course he's a hit with this group. Right. But he has no background. He has no clinical trials background, no science background, but he is a darnling of those who want to be fed with this kind of information. How do you explain, Eric, the people who do have the relevant background going this far down the wrong rabbit hole. Just the MDS who Brett has in his stable, what are they up to? What has happened? One way to explain it, it's a fairly invidious thing to say, but there's some percentage of MDS and PhDs and people who have all the right credentials on paper who snap for one reason or another. I mean, they're going through some inordinate stress in their life or they're actually delusional. They basically have a background level of schizophrenia in any human population of 1%. Right. So you will occasionally find crazy MDS and PhDs who will testify about anything. Now, I'm not making a specific allegation with respect to the people we've named, but you have to expect that you can always find a crackpot PhD or MD for any I mean, you can find them to defend big tobacco. The people who will either cynically or based on some derangement will back any cause and put their credentials to that purpose. But do you have any other sense of what's going on with these guys? Yeah, you're making a really valid point here, and that is we have seen people who have a medical degree who are not supporting the body of data that's so overwhelming regarding safety of vaccines or the lack of adequate proof, for example, in the case of Ibrahimectin. And the answer for that is difficult to come up with why, but I think the thing that hasn't been done I'll go back to something we discussed early in our conversation. If we had a counter offensive for the facts, that is, if we had said, remember when Trump was very frequently lying and there was a fellow on CNN that was the official fact checker and he would take them on one by one and get the facts. Okay. And he did an exceptional job of that. He was pretty busy, you have to say, throughout the time of the 20,000 documented lies or something. Right. Anyway, we don't have that in the pandemic. If the people were called out for lying or for fact free, they may back off. But when they have a license to just make stuff up or twist things, to not acknowledge that the various registry, none has been adjudicated, none of it we know of any events, or we know that they actually happened and what was the potentially known root cause of these events, but they don't do that. That's a data set that's abused in the highest way. But there's something about being a contrarian too. I mean, you're a minority. You're in a different circle. The people in this group seem to be close knit and kind of spurring each other on perhaps the fellowship of being in this group is alluring. I just don't know. It's sad to see though, because I know these people are intelligent and they must recognize the lapses in what they're pushing. Yeah, what I don't think people recognize people who have. A conspiratorial style of explaining anomalies don't tend to recognize that their explanations don't actually run through. I mean, there's no plausible background set of incentives that could explain a given conspiracy coming together. So you take, like, the 911 Truth conspiracy as an analogy. You talk to conspiracy minded people on that topic, and they'll just toss off one claim after another without acknowledging the truly insurmountable obstacles around getting people whose incentives are not perfectly aligned to collaborate in such an awful project. Who rigged the Twin Towers to explode? Just how many hours does it take to go into those buildings unobserved and rig them to explode, right? And how do you get hundreds or thousands of people to collaborate in that project of murdering their neighbors on a bright fall morning and then never breathe a word of it afterwards? No one feels guilty. No one divorced their husband and then spilled the beans. I mean, it's just perfect silence, perfect collaboration. And so it is with many conspiracies that get alleged in this context, just like the influence of Big Pharma. The truth is, there is absolutely no conspiratorial explanation for what you and I are doing on this podcast. Right? I've got no connection to Big Pharma. I will criticize Big Pharma in the next podcast on another topic with absolute freedom. I've got no fear of YouTube demonetizing me. I'm completely free, and I'm doing exactly what I want, and you're the person I wanted to do it with. And this is what we're doing. As you know, Sam, my career almost ended back in 2004, 2005, because I took on merck about dioxide, right? Yeah. I am the least person in the world that's pro pharma, okay? And I've taken big risk about taking them on, and I still am during the pandemic. So, no, we're trying to play this thing straight. We're trying to go with what is the body of evidence that is extraordinary. We are, in a momentous time in life science where we learned how to, you know, develop a vaccines in at scale in a time velocity that no one could ever have imagined and to basically end the pandemic. Had we been able to get vaccines widely distributed throughout the world, potent vaccines throughout the world early on, the pandemic would essentially be over now, okay? We wouldn't have a delta variant. We wouldn't even have beta and gamma, right. We probably would have just been able to arrest it largely and contain it at the alpha stage. The problem is, though, we aren't able to make the vaccines for seven plus billion people. Right? Not fast enough. But the other problem is, in the United States, which is far worse than any other place that I know of in the world, we have a very significant proportion of these antivaxxers conspiracy theorists. Antiscience. I mean, this started, of course, before the pandemic, but it's been gone much higher levels. So we are not reaping the advantages and the protection here that we could. And I have to say, I was really looking forward to the summer this time of year because I thought, you know what, we could get right back to pre covert life. I could stop having to put my attention on covert and get it back to the things that I much more enjoy. And basically it's been screwed up because of Delta. It's now going to last a lot longer. We'll get through delta. It'll take a couple of months. We'll get over this wave. But the toll it will take on the deaths on the hospitalizations and particularly the large number of cases we're going to see with long COVID that was unnecessary. Had we not had so much resistance and hesitancy and anti vaccine for the people who would be part of the protection instead of part of the liability and vulnerability group. Right, okay, so let's conclude on some recommendations or confessions of uncertainty about what we should do going forward before we talk about vaccine mandates and related matters. What's taking so long with the the full FDA authorization of the vaccines? Why is that not already accomplished? Yeah, well, I've been pushing hard on that, as you saw at a New York Times oped a few weeks ago, and prior to that, trying to get Dr. Woodcock, who's the acting commissioner, to come out and talk to us, tell us what is going on. So I know the former FDA commissioner as well, and some of them, a few of them I've spoken to at some length about this. And as you know, I've been on several FDA advisory committees over the years, so I know the workings and I understand what's happened here is that the usual so called biologic licensing application, that's the full approval, that is 100,000 plus pages of documents, it requires plant inspections. It's not just the clinical trials. It's not just does the drug, does the vaccine work and is it safe? It's, it's more than that. But in this case, because of this pandemic crisis, back in December, when the mRNA vaccines were given their emergency authorization, the company started submitting packet by packet to get FDA review. And so we've had seven months since that time for the FDA to have completed their review. And indeed, in speaking to FDA commissioners, they believe it should have been done by now. Okay? In fact, it should have been done in June at the latest. And we now have heard just last week from Dr. Woodcock that this could be take till January. Well, we can't wait till January. This should have been done now. There is no excuse except that this is not the number one priority. And as you saw, there was an Alzheimer's drug that was approved highly irregular concurrent with this. And so it's really unfortunate we do not have an FDA that's functioning at the level it needs to in the midst of this pandemic especially as the US. Is confronting this very formidable version of the virus. Yeah, and in defense of the people who are worried about the quality of our information, the truth is we need institutions we can rely on, and it's pretty clear we don't quite have them. The FDA, the who, the CDC, all of them have at various moments covered themselves in embarrassment in the last 18 months. So again, there's a rational way to understand that and then there's the paranoid way to exaggerate the nature of that problem. But we do need a rebooting of our institutions here and there's no question what do you think we should do around requiring vaccination in the public or private sector in various contexts? So mandates in schools or hospitals or businesses or for travel? What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, it's really tied in, Sam, to the question you just asked about the full approval. Because general counsel of our health system and if you talk to private large companies, municipalities, even though there have been some that have said, like, for example, at the University of California, you have to be vaccinated or you can't come on campus, you can't be a student, you can't be on the faculty. But that's the rarity right now. The day that we get full approval, which should have happened by now, all these things open up and there will be a requirement for vaccination or there will be accommodations for those who don't want to get vaccinated. You have to wear a mask at all times at work and you have to get tested on a frequent basis. And I would submit to you that the people that opt for the non vaccination, after a couple of weeks, they're not going to want to go through all that and they'll go ahead and get vaccinated. So I actually think tens of millions of Americans, soon after full approval will be required to be vaccinated or will be given an option that is unpowerable. Yeah, we should acknowledge that there are some people who actually can't get vaccinated. I mean, there are people in various stages of cancer treatment, I believe, and there are people who just have weird immune systems who go into anaphylaxis over vaccines that are as benign as possible. And so, you know, herd immunity is the only way to protect those people because they can't get vaccinated. And under any regime where vaccines are required, there would still be a medical exemption for certain people, right? Yes. But those same people want to have protection with mass. They want to have protection from, like, for example, if they did get infected from testing, they were found to be they'd want to get monoclonal antibodies to the virus as soon as possible because they don't have an attacked immune system. So, yes, you're absolutely right. Some people can't get vaccinated. It's very rare. But for them, that same option of mass and frequent testing is part of their defense. If we didn't have the anti force, we would have passports. Right. We would know that you had an option. Either you had your vaccination digital proof or you had a rapid antigen test. Very soon, around that time, you had proof that you're good to go, whether it's to a restaurant or to work or on a trip on a plane, whatever. We are against passports in this country, just like we've had the anti force against masks and, you know, and vaccines and and stay at home when things were really rough. I mean, so that's unfortunate. But several countries, as you know, are adopting the passport system, and it's working well. I mean, there are countries, like in Denmark, they rely heavily on rapid antigen tests. And while they're getting their vaccinations up to the highest level, it's working extremely well for suppressing infections and many other places as well. So we aren't taking advantage of the rapid testing side, which we should. I mean, a lot of these companies are US. Companies, but that's another misfire. I wish we could do that. It would help the situation we're in right now. Well, Eric, to my ear, I feel like we've covered it. I'm sure not to the satisfaction of the people who are unpersuadable. But is there anything else left to be said in your view on this topic? Well, I just think when we go forward, years from now, well, after this pandemic is over and hopefully we'll be at a time when we can really be reflective, we'll think about this momentous science advance science and medical advance of vaccines and the extraordinary proof track record of potent efficacy, safety. And we'll wonder what happened? Why did the US. Who failed as a country in the early part of the pandemic with, as you said, 600,000 and more deaths still? Why did they not become the world model for blocking the virus's? Harm. And I think a lot of things we discussed today, Sam, will be written about for years to come. Because we had the potential to just show the world that we could build the Delta wall of immunity, whether it be from the vaccines or, as you mentioned, the 100 million plus people who had prior COVID that had some natural immunity. How did we botch it up? How did we become as vulnerable as we are right now and in the weeks to come? It's really unfortunate. And maybe after all this, we'll have a movement back to being data driven, evidence based and not allow for the misinformation to propagate, which something that should be emphasized. We know that the misinformation gets spread far better than truth. Right. That's been documented. So maybe out of all this it won't happen now, but in the years ahead, we can get back to where we were where we were in the old days when the polio vaccine was being rolled out and all the other ones. Yeah, as always. Eric, thank you for your wise counsel and your time. I look forward to the next occasion. We'll talk about a happier topic. We'll talk about human health somehow rather than our needless misadventures and own goals around disease. But until then, thank you so much. Thank you you sam real pleasure. And I look forward to the next chance that we get to talk./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm speaking to Roland Griffiths. Roland is a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at Johns Hopkins University and the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. He has authored over 400 scientific publications and he has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and numerous pharmaceutical companies. Roland has also conducted extensive research with sedative, hypnotics, caffeine and other mood altering drugs. In 1994, Roland got very interested in meditation and this made him curious about altered states of consciousness generally, which prompted him in 1999 to initiate the first study in decades on psilocybin. And since then, he's been at the forefront of renewed scientific interest in psychedelics. This research has looked at the utility of psilocybin and MDMA, in particular in the treatment of anxiety and cancer patients, treatment resistant depression, PTSD, as well as their utility for improving the lives of otherwise well people. As you'll hear, there have been big changes in Roland's life since we last spoke. We last spoke almost exactly three years ago. Since then, he's received a stage four cancer diagnosis, which appears to be untreatable, and we talk about that. And as part of his end of life planning, rowland has created a major project at Johns Hopkins to endow a professorship that comes with research funds in perpetuity. And if you want more information about that, you can find it@griffithsfund.org. I'll read you Roland's quote from that web page. The purpose of this endowment is to support a professorship and to establish a world class, rigorous, empirical program of research with psychedelic substances to advance understanding of wellbeing and spirituality in the service of human flourishing for generations to come. The hallmark of this research shall be the scientific method. Once again, you can find out more about this project on that web page. The Waking Up Foundation will be supporting it. We're giving $250,000 over two years and I am excited about that. If you want to join us again, the website is griffithsfund.org and Roland and I speak about psychedelics and mortality. In today's episode, we discuss the current state of psychedelic research, the timeline for FDA approvals, the risks to mental health posed by psychedelics in vulnerable groups, the use of psychedelics by otherwise healthy people who are just seeking a deeper experience of life, the relationship between psychedelics and meditation, advice for quote bad trips, microdosing, Roland's experience getting his cancer diagnosis and our mutual reflections on death and other topics. And now I bring you Roland Griffiths. I am here with Roland Griffiths. Roland, thanks for joining me again. Pleased to be there, sam, good to hear you. We spoke almost exactly three years ago about the work you're doing at Johns Hopkins on psychedelics. And it's really it's not too much to say that you have been leading the resurgence of scientific interest in psychedelics. And we'll talk about that. But I just checked my calendar and soon after we spoke I know you know this because I appended some audio on this topic to the podcast we released. But almost right after we spoke I had the first psychedelic experience I'd had in I think over 25 years. And I just looked at my calendar and as chance would have it, it was actually three years ago to the day that we're recording this, which causes me to reflect on how I've used the last 1000 days or so and we will talk about how you have used them. But it's been a crazy three years. This was before COVID really, right before COVID So we've had a global pandemic and all the attendant disruption in our lives since then and there have been some immense changes, I know, in your life. So let's jump in, we can talk about anything you want and start anywhere you want, but what have the last three years been like for you? Well, let me first just comment that I was delighted that you tried exposed yourself once again to psychedelics and your description of that was absolutely beautiful and harrowing. But that's the nature of these experiences. So yeah, let's see what's happened since then. At the time we spoke, I think our center was up and running that that happened in 2019 and and as much as the tension of culture at large had already been come to focus on psychedelics, it's just ramped up enormously since then and so we now have a dramatically changing landscape. There are now a number of academic centers that have declared interest in psychedelics and so that research is going to pace there's. NIH that's just very recently stepped in to the fray here. They had been reluctant to fund human studies on psychedelics and they're still just beginning to do so, but they have now funded several out of several institutes, including one clinical trial of addiction to cigarette smoking done by my colleague Matt Johnson at Hopkins. So that's moving a pace and then I don't quite know how to think about it and wrap my head around the consequences of it. There's this huge groundswell of movements at state and local levels to decriminalize or legalize psychedelics and I do have some concern about that but a lot of sympathy for that. I guess the other significant development is that clinical trials under FDA that are slotted for medical approval of compounds have been moving forward. It's medical approval pending results, but the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies Maps has some very promising data with MDMA and treatment of PTSD. And then there are two companies, the Yosona Institute out of Medicine and Compass Pathways out of the UK that have been given breakthrough therapy status designation by FDA for their trials in major depressive disorder and treatment resistant depression respectively. So that is moving forward. So it's an exciting time. And also the basic neuroscience, there's just a lot going on with basic neuroscience and understanding, both at the molecular and network level, what might be occurring with psychedelics. So it's enormously exciting and far outstrips anything that I could have imagined would happen when we initiated our studies back in 2000. So are all the compounds moving in lockstep? What drugs are we talking about at this point? And, and in terms of approval and funding by the NIH and Decriminalization, do you view everything that has clinical and therapeutic relevance moving into the end zone more or less at the same time, or are some of these compounds years ahead of others? Yeah, it appears that the MDMA for PTSD application will very likely cross over the threshold. First, of course, these are all unknowns. They could run into major problems. FDA could ask for additional studies, but the best guess would be that MDMA might be approved in anywhere from two to four years. And the work with depression is moving more slowly. I would put that at three to five years for approval. I don't know of any other compound right now. I think there are trials going on. I don't know what the FDA regulatory status is of those trials and whether they have been pitched to FDA for approval. But by and large, the focus has been on Psilocybin, because that's where we've generated the most data. There is one other group, Bmore, that is developing Psilocybin for treatment of alcohol use disorder. But I think most of the attention has been focused on Psilocybin. And these decriminalization and legalization efforts being done at state and county and city levels have focused largely on Psilocybin, but not exclusively on Psilocybin. So the different initiatives that have been passed differ with respect to precisely what they're attempting to legalize or decriminalize. However, all those initiatives come with a very significant problem that although you might be able to decriminalize or lower the priority for enforcement at the state level or the city level, that does not change the federal level. Like what happened with marijuana before. It would remain a potentially federal crime. And then it's a question of whether that's enforced or not. So there's a lot of unknowns here. And the other big thing that's happened in the area is that companies, individuals, have awakened to the potential financial benefits of developing compounds. And so there are probably 100 or more startups, maybe 200 or more startups, all of which are grasping for intellectual property and patent and trying to patent different things with respect to psychedelics. And so there's going to there'll be a big shakeout in that. But that's drawn a lot of interest and money into the area that hadn't been there heretofore. But all that work is focused on therapeutics and not my principal interest, and that would be the larger implications for healthy volunteers and the interaction with what I'm now calling secular spirituality. Right, right. Yeah. So let's jump into the research side of this first and I'll just say upfront that you'd the big thing that's happened in your life since we last spoke is that you have received a stage four cancer diagnosis. And I'm very eager to speak with you about that and about what that has done to you and your your thoughts about mortality and the role that meditation and psychedelics play and you're moving through this chapter of life and so that's I really want to explore that as much as as you you want to. But let's leave that for the second half and just jump into the research and the cultural change that's being forced upon us by the change in the availability and attention paid to psychedelics at this point. And maybe let's start with the misgivings you just mentioned as a caveat a few minutes ago. Because I share them and notwithstanding the fact that psychedelics have been indispensable to me and I obviously took them in a non legal context, there's many of us who are the beneficiaries of the chaos of the didn't live through the 60s. But I consider myself someone who in their wake became interested in psychedelics and other esoterica and had access to these drugs simply because of what the 60s did to our culture. Many of us still notice that much of that came with pretty significant downsides and the fact that research in psychedelics and scientific acceptance of that impulse to research took so long to resurrect was largely the result of some of the missteps from the many of us are eager not to see us step in the same ditches this time around. So how are you thinking about the landscape that's ahead of us in terms of research and cultural adoption of psychedelics, legal and illegal and ambiguously legal as you just mentioned with respect to federal and state laws being different. What are you concerned about? And if you could just write the script, what do you think it should look like, what should we hope happens? So I've focused and our groups have focused on medical approval and getting that over the finish line and for a couple of reasons but the primary one is that medical approval fits within an institutional structure that is working and is regulated. And so it's the least controversial as far as I'm concerned and it's the least risky because there can be and setting and screening conditions that are built into that approval process that are going to mitigate against people engaging in dangerous behavior or becoming harmed by exposure to psychedelics. And it's also a way of the medicalization, it's a way of normalizing it within culture because there was so much demonization of these compounds back in the 1960s and there are many people who have still not gotten out of that concern and fear. So if I were going to write a script I would have said let's focus exclusively on medicalization first and then turn toward broader application and treatment of well people. My concern about the decriminalization and legalization movements is that we run the risk of just moving too fast with these with the availability of these compounds to the population at large. There are real risks associated with psychedelics that are now getting swept under the rug by psychedelic enthusiasts. But it is the case and the most common problem is people will get disoriented or panicked or otherwise untethered and engage in dangerous behavior. And that could involve simple panic where someone runs into traffic or believes that they're going to be harmed and will defend themselves or attack somebody and people get killed under these circumstances. Most don't. It's low probability, but it can happen, particularly under conditions where the set and setting conditions aren't right and the experience isn't supported by individuals who can provide feedback to the person once they're going off in dangerous territory. The other kind of danger is that people need to be screened for vulnerability to particularly psychotic disorder schizophrenia, but also in the case of bipolar to mania. And there may be other psychiatric conditions for which psychedelics pose unique risks. But there are enough anecdotal case reports of new onset schizophrenia occurring after a single or a few doses of a psychedelic. And this normally occurs in individuals who are going to be most susceptible to the disorders of their family histories. It usually occurs in the late teens and early twenty s. It can occur later, but that coincides with the onset of schizophrenia. That's a horrific outcome. I mean there's no coming back from a diagnosis from a disease onset of schizophrenia. That's a lifelong condition that you'd wish on no one. Let's linger on that topic for a moment Roland, because I'm not close to that research and I don't know how close you are to it, but it had always been thought that there was some possibility of a psychedelic trip. We're usually talking about Psilocybin or LSD here rather than something like MDMA if I'm not mistaken. But it had always been thought that there was the possibility of a trip provoking the onset of schizophrenia. But there's just the obvious confound that you have lots of people in their teens and 20s taking these drugs over the decades and that this is the period where people are going to present with schizophrenia if that in fact they're going to take that turn. And it's really hard to establish causation just looking at these longitudinal changes in people's lives. Have we moved to a place where we can actually say that there is some causal role played by one or another drug in actually provoking schizophrenia that wouldn't otherwise have occurred? No, I don't think we have. But the very nature of how these cases are detected you're not going to do a randomized trial with vulnerable people. I think we're left with these anecdotal case reports. But in my own thinking about this, we have seen a couple of cases of mania develop in our experimental situation and increasingly there are reports of that and when you read them it's pretty convincing that the onset is correlated with the administration of the psychedelic. It's a concern, I know it to be a concern of FDA. We have excluded in our studies people with family histories of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. There may be variations of bipolar that for which there's not a problem but but if it has that's associated with mania that really could be a problem. What does that exclusion look like if they have a first order relative with the condition first order? Well right now we're probably overly conservative but we've excluded people at Hopkins who have first or second degree relative of either schizophrenia or some psychotic disorder, enduring psychotic disorder or bipolar and I think we're being overly conservative. There are studies now going on that are starting to treat bipolar patients and so we need to collect a lot more data on that. But whether or not there's a causal relationship there are going to be reports of this sort and if stirred right in the media that's going to create the precise conditions that we want to avoid. So there's every reason in my mind to be very conservative and not forge ahead too rapidly with respect to that. But again they are very rare cases and I think we just need to do more research with them. Although as far as I know schizophrenia is still thought to be an ambient condition in virtually any population. You could name something of the order of 1%. You know, you just randomly select people in any culture anywhere on earth and something like 1% will present with what we consider to be the clinical disorder of schizophrenia. So this is not an infinitesimal number of people this is something that is going to keep showing up. So it's interesting to consider how that background fact will interact with more widespread use of these compounds. And I would expect we would be able to see I mean, you know, if we actually crossed over into markedly more psychedelic drug use, we would be able to detect an increase in schizophrenia if in fact there was a causative relationship. Yes I guess just coming back to it there are cases and we've seen them in which the onset of not schizophrenia but mania occurs the day following administration. So clearly something that's happened there. Now whether or not they would have become manic spontaneously or not we don't know because it's not a controlled trial but the coincidence is convincing enough to me that I don't want to push that at least right now where our culture at large hasn't fully adapted to the potential value of psychedelics. And my own thought about this is that what we need to develop is cultural institutions that are going to be supportive of appropriate use of psychedelics and I see it almost as a coevolutionary process that if we're going to reintroduce psychedelics into culture. We need some constraints and or some wisdom in, in how they're used. And I don't quite know what form that takes. I mean, certainly the medicalization is one, one form of that, but I think that wrinkles a lot of people thinking that it's going to be restricted only to medical use. And what I would imagine over time, but this could be decades or generations, is that we're going to hopefully develop the cultural institutions that will incorporate these. I think my, you know, our initial clinical study with these compounds were in, ironically enough, given my situation in cancer patients who were depressed or anxious because of a cancer diagnosis. And there we saw big effects, immediate effects that lasted throughout our six month follow up. And in another study, people have been followed up for five plus years. So quite a remarkable effect. And my hope had been that that would be the first medical approval. And the reason for that is that culturally we have a lot of sympathy for people who are facing death. And within a few generations, if the results are what we think they would be, virtually everyone would be exposed either personally or through friends or family members to the benefits of that. And that would go a long way to changing and making the culture interested in further pursuing that. So one of the things that happened when the companies approached regulatory bodies about approval for, say, depression and cancer, the FDA pushed back and said, we're concerned about something called pseudospecificity. If it's good for depression and cancer patients, how do we know that it's not good for depression in the general population, which is of course, a much larger population? And so the companies became persuaded that they needed to reach out. It's kind of grotesquely funny. It's the idea that they were concerned that these drugs might relieve too much suffering on the boundary of death and therefore we kind of back propagate into everyone's self interest to want access to these drugs earlier in life. Yeah, it's somewhat ironic here that we've started obviously on a very cautious, even deflationary note here, if somebody listening to us in this part of the conversation could be forgiven for wondering why anyone would want to take these drugs in the first place, given the risks we're discussing. And you have talked about wanting to explore their cultural introduction in a way that's narrowly focused on medicalization as the most circumspect and responsible way to do this. And yet your real interest, your, your core interest, I know is on the benefits of psychedelic use in, well, people, you know, they having nothing to do with terminal illness in principle or in PTSD or any other clinical diagnosis, just the, the existential and spiritual needs of ordinary human beings at really any stage of adulthood. And that really has been my interest. And that is certainly the widest promise of these compounds we should be attentive to caveats and concerns however they crop up in this conversation. But how do you differentiate the narrow focus of medicalization and the treatment of clinical disorders like treatment resistant depression or PTSD or I guess it's probably not clinical, but it's clinical in a different sense, endoflife anxiety. How do you differentiate that from this wider promise of these compounds? Yes, well, I think that's just a specific application of these compounds, but as I see it, the much larger, more profound, most impactful impact is going to be in the general population. And apart from that so the focus on medicalization for me has been just a pragmatic way to proceed. So yeah, you you mentioned my interest in spirituality and just I know we talked about this a couple of years back. So I became interested in psychedelics only after starting a meditation practice, which is usually, in my experience, that the reverse is often true and certainly was true in my case, where you have an experience on psychedelics and that proves to you that there really is a there there and then meditation becomes the more easily governed path toward actualizing that possibility. But you have flipped the script here. I have, and I'm glad I did because as a curious scientist, I came into the field less biased. Now, I did have in college a couple of experiences, I'm guessing with LSD, but they were totally inconsequential to me. They were a little bit confusing, they were done under really suboptimal conditions and they didn't have any particular meaning to me. So I had had some earlier experience, but I certainly would not have characterized myself in any way, shape or form as being a proponent of psychedelics. It was only after I got involved with meditation and just intrigued with the exploration of the nature of mind and the phenomenology of some experiences I had with meditation that drew my attention to the interiority of my life, which I had largely ignored. I didn't really have any religious grounding that had any meaning to me. I I was curious about the nature of inner experience, but I came out of graduate school with a lot of training in the experimental analysis of behavior, which is essentially scandinarian, saying that all the attention needs to be focused on behavior and very suspicious of any subjective effects because they couldn't be validated by third person account. I became interested in meditation just out of that recognition that I didn't know that I was poorly in touch with the nature of inner experience, the nature of mind. And so that opened up for me, got me really curious initially about different meditation traditions and then I started reading religious literature and realizing there was a rhyme in there, something that seemed compatible. And at that point in my career I'd been at Hopkins for about 25 years. I was established with an international reputation in psychopharmacology of mood altering drugs, mostly drugs of abuse and found myself deeply curious about these other kinds of experiences. And it was that that got me curious about psychedelics because I went back and read some of that older literature and it really sounded like there could be something of interest there. But I was dedicated to my meditation practice and I've continued it ever since and actually quite put off it would be appropriate descriptor from the psychedelic enthusiasts that seemed to think that this was the one and only way and the best God's gift to humankind. Yeah, I didn't believe it. I'm born as a skeptic. That's what science is about. We want to see things for ourselves and prove things. But that first study we ran where and ended up people having these experiences of deep meaning among the most meaningful experiences of their lives and they continued to report them to have that kind of meaning. They attributed changes in attitudes, moods and behavior to that experience all in a very positive direction. And those experiences looked like naturally occurring awakening experiences or mystical type experiences that have been described by contemplatives and by religious figures or that spontaneously occurred over thousands of years. So there was something incredibly compelling about that. And I think that is the core and central finding. There's something reorganizational about one's sense of self and worldview that can occur with these experiences under appropriate conditions. And I think that's what's so interesting. And the features of that experience include this sense that we're all in this together, that there's interconnectedness to them, to where we sit in this world. And that's accompanied by a sense that the experience is precious beyond belief. Some people, if you wanted to put it in religious terminology it would be a sacred experience. And then the third feature that I think is so interesting about it is that the experiences felt to be true, absolutely true, more real and more true than everyday waking consciousness. Now we don't know that that's the case but that's the feeling that arises. But if you think about that someone has an experience of this interconnectedness, it's precious, it's valuable, more valuable than anything they've had. And it's true. You there have the basis for rewriting the operating system of the individual. Their whole self narrative can change with that and they're empowered to make different choices going forward. And I think that's part of the therapeutic effects of these drugs but as well for the healthy volunteer opportunities for growth. What I think is so important in the broadest sense in terms of spirituality is that sense of interconnectedness that we're all in this together and that that's true, it's real, it's precious, that is a basis for rewriting morality or ethical understandings. It really boils down to the Golden Rule, doesn't it? And my contention would be that the most important thing is that we need to develop a world culture that embraces that. Because if we don't we're looking at annihilation by climate change or AI risk or bioterrorism or any number of other options. I see that there's something my sense is there's something fundamentally important about this project for us to understand the nature of these changes and then put them to good use in changing culture in a way that's going to lead to human flourishing. Remind me, what sort of meditation practice have you been doing? Well, I started off with City Yoga, which is a guru based Indian practice, but was confused, put off by the guru nature of that and the projection that's put on the teacher. How far back did you go with that? Was this after Muktananda died or did you meet Muktananda? I never met Muktananda. So when I was involved with city yoga, the baton had been passed to Guru Mai Swami Chidlasananda. Well, it was interesting because Siddha Yoga was really focused on experience and it comes out of a tradition of the Tantric tradition of Shock Depot. That is, the guru is said to confer awakening experiences and there's some remarkable reports of that, but they were very focused on the emergent experience. I guess as my meditation practice deepened, I became more curious in the broader field of the nature of mind. And as I said, I was kind of put off by the reification of the guru principle. There are also some very colorful ethical scandals in that organization. So yeah, that both the postdate and and reached all the way back to Muktonanda's tenure. So it's yes, it's a mess. Oh, yeah. And but and that's true of many of these religious meditation traditions. Right. If you empower the teacher, they end up going off the rails, as will happen with psychedelic therapists as well. They get empowered and inflated ego and start misbehaving. But I became interested in the nature of mind and drawn into Buddhism. And so I'd say for the last out of 15 years, my practices have been primarily Buddhist oriented. Done some work with Alan Wallace, who comes out of the Tibetan tradition, but it's really IMS. And Vapasna terra Brock and Jonathan Faust and Joseph Goldstein. Nice. And Jack Cornfield and they have elegantly stripped away the supernatural pieces of it. And I really respect that tradition. Yeah. So how do you view the connection, or lack thereof, between meditation and psychedelics? I guess you could bring in any relevant neuroscience here or just your own first person experience, but how do you view them as complementary or discordant methods? Any thoughts you have about the connection or lack thereof would be interesting. Yeah, so of course that was my initial interest. I got involved with meditation and then curious about psychedelics. And listen, I've come to believe that there's a lot of similarities between them, that they're both in principle ways to investigate the nature of mind. And so if we just step back and think about what psilocybin and meditation do. So I'd say psilocybin is this. Pharmacological tool that helps people recognize how it feels to embody the present moment. That's exactly what meditation does. Psilocybin. People can dispassionately, observe and let go of pain, fear and discomfort. And again, that's what meditation does. Transform a conventional sense of self to something other recognition that you're not your mind, you're not that voice in your head. There's a sense of awareness that goes outside and beyond that. And then this gaining this authoritative sense of interconnectedness of people and things, I think those both come out of potentially the psilocybin and meditation experience. So we went on, because of my interest in meditation, just to study novice meditators with psilocybin, longterm meditators with psilocybin. And across the board it the exposure to psilocybin facilitates and resonates deeply with the meditation experiences. And so in one study where people did not have a meditation practice, but were willing to take one up, and then different groups of people got different exposure to different doses of psilocybin. And what we showed is that the enduring changes in traits, which is very difficult to find any experimental work showing trait level changes in people, but we were able to show trait level changes in this dimension of, of psychological wellbeing and prosocial behavior at six months. And that was attributed to interaction between meditation and psilocybin. So psilocybin greatly potentiated that in an unpublished study. In long term meditators, these were people who had, in many cases, tens of thousands of hours of meditation, but they weren't classic contemplatives, say, out of the Tibetan tradition. But they had long term experience with meditation. And either no or any experience they had had with psychedelics had occurred 20 or 30 years ago. So they certainly weren't proponents of using psychedelics. And, and there it was just very interesting those those individuals took to the psilocybin were able to navigate the psilocybin experience, I think, much more readily because of their understanding and experience with examining the nature of mine. And so in some ways, the effects were less profound in them. But across the board, most say all because I need to go back and look at that data. Most reported that if anything, it enlivened their meditation practice. Long term meditators can very often fall into a habitual type of practice. They have a go to practice of meditating on breath or visualization or whatever, and they can lock into that practice and it can become habitual. And the psychedelics, by and large, got them out of the rut of whatever single practice or single set of practices they were using. And so if anything, increased their interest in meditation. Importantly, none of them would have said that psychedelics were any kind of replacement for meditation because it's really, the meditation provides the foundation for these kinds of explorations. And so there's all the difference in the world between awakening experience and leading and awakening a life. And you know, that's what meditation is absolutely designed for, right? It's practice and it's practice for bringing that sense of awareness and moment to moment into daily life. And psychedelics certainly are less likely to accomplish that then in terms of neurophysiology. Of course the default mode network which has got a lot of attention particularly early on with the psychedelics is decreased under acute psychedelic administration. But that's exactly what happens in long term meditators it's decreased. So there's a reason to think that at some kinds of network levels at least acute psychedelics they're producing something that looks akin to what long term meditators might experience. Although you can appreciate our understanding about the nature of mind consciousness and these kinds of effects aren't really in their absolute infancy and we just don't have the scientific tools to really pull them apart as yet. But I think there's a lot of interesting research to be done with meditation and psychedelics. One thing I might say is that if I think about how we prepare a meditation naive and psychedelic naive individual for a session we essentially talk about having them look at the nature of mind and look at the nature of objects of consciousness that will appear during the session. And the one thing that we very often say it's just kind of a metaphor is unpredictable. You're going to get this compound where we really have people focus introvertively, so we have them put on eye shades and headphones so they're really going inward. And we tell them all kinds of things can arise within that. And it can be beautiful, it can be transcendent, but it also can be ugly, and it can be really frightened. And so if, for instance, during the session, a demonic figure appears, and it would be as frightening as as you could possibly imagine because it's being created by you, for you, if that should appear, what you don't want to do is run from it. Because if you try, you're never going to escape it. And you don't want to fight it, because either way, you're reifying it as something else. And the appropriate posture to take, although the hair on the back of your neck may be standing on end, is to approach it with curiosity. Be deeply interested in what it is and the guarantee if you're able to do that is that it's going to change, it's going to turn into something else because it's not real, it's just an object of consciousness. And so we're essentially giving people, I think a mini course in mindfulness and inviting them to go into that. And I think for that reason that meditators have much less difficulty navigating the psychedelic experience because they're accustomed to seeing the games their minds can play. You don't go on a long term meditation retreat without being humbled by all kinds of thoughts or ideas that torture you until you realize once again that you've just been caught up in a story, in a narrative that seems silly. Once you can step back from it. Yeah, it's interesting that more and more the relationship between meditation and psychedelics seems paradoxical to me and somewhat difficult to talk about, or at least it can seem paradoxical when talked about in its totality. One complication here is that these terms that we've been using again and again, meditation and psychedelics mean many different things and people have different associations with them. So there are many different types of meditation, there are many different philosophies around it, there are both explicit and implicit goals that can be different and those differences can really matter in terms of a person's experience. And with psychedelics, obviously just there are different drugs on offer and they have different consequences. Some differences are subtle and some are quite extreme. And we, we've been talking about psilocybin in this context mostly, but there's, there's obviously there's LSD and Mescaline and ayahuasca, and pure DMT and, you know, and five Meo DMT and there's a lot on the menu here that people associate with that term and all of these differences matter. And then there's a drug like MDMA, which is not even technically a psychedelic, and we've been talking about that too. And then there's just this fundamental difference in the plane of focus for anything like a mindfulness based approach to meditation and the ordinary use of psychedelics. So we can distinguish between the contents of consciousness and consciousness itself as a starting point here. And the goal in many forms of meditation, and certainly in any sophisticated or mature approach to mindfulness, is to recognize something about consciousness itself that is liberating, right? It's not to change the contents of consciousness, it's to notice that one's relationship to the changing contents of consciousness is the problem. You know, that it's the problem of clinging, it's the problem of incessantly, plunging into greed and hatred and delusion into grasping at what's pleasant and pushing what's unpleasant away and not recognizing what's neutral. The practice at that point is to keep falling back into this mere witnessing of experience, ie. The contents of consciousness, and to relax one's reactivity to the point that you can recognize the consciousness itself, that the mere light by which everything is appearing has an intrinsic quality of freedom to it. And most importantly, it's free of the sense of self that what you're calling yourself is among the appearances before the floodlights of consciousness. And consciousness is a prior condition to its arising and that can be noticed regardless of what the contents of consciousness are. So it could just be the most ordinary sights and sounds and sensations and thoughts without any of the remarkable disclosures that are more or less synonymous with the psychedelic experience. And so that's meditation and yet, somewhat paradoxically, many of us, not you, but me and many others, wouldn't have recognized that meditation was or even could be a thing but for the pyrotechnic experience of psychedelics. And there's also just the fact that quite related to that claim, which is that if you give 100 naive people a meditation instruction, I don't know what percentage will find anything of interest there. But some considerable number of people, if you're selecting randomly, will close their eyes and look within and attempt to follow whatever instruction you give them and very likely find nothing of interest, right? Nothing, you know, nothing will happen and they'll walk away perplexed and and perhaps grateful not to have to waste their time on that project for even a minute longer. Whereas 100 naive people, given the sufficient dose of psilocybin or LSD or any other psychedelic, something like 100% of those people will have a radical change in their experience. And as we've already discussed, some of those changes could be starkly unpleasant and they'll come away feeling like that was not a good experience. But for a very high percentage of people with the appropriate set and setting, they will have one of the most important and transformative experiences of their lives. Yet that transformation and the associated importance will be the result of radical changes in the contents of consciousness. All of their neurotic normal thoughts will be blown away and what will be left is something like the classic Beatific vision that one encounters in spiritual and mystical and religious literature. There'll be vast perceptual changes and if their eyes are open, the connection with the natural world will be extraordinary. And if their eyes are closed and they've taken something like a high dose of psilocybin, the landscape of mind will open up into this vast territory of visual experience and visual and synesthetic experience, where one's emotional body is brought forward across this landscape of immense visual implication. And in some ways the center of the Bullseye meditatively is orthogonal to all of the extraordinary changes that can happen for a person taking psychedelics. And yet they're quite complementary and supportive in ways that we have discussed. I mean, one is many people just can't even get started with meditation but for, first having had a psychedelic experience. And conversely, many people have a much better psychedelic experience based on their meditative experiences and the training they've had in just letting go of thought and conceptualization and negative emotion and not clinging to experience itself as a basic orientation. So it's sort of hard to talk about, I think. But at least for me personally, meditation and psychedelics have been kind of two wings of the bird of having a first person mode of inquiry into the nature of mind. And I can't view either as dispensable and yet they're quite different when taken separately at any point in one's journey and for a significant period of time. Yeah, a couple of things. One, when you were describing what it is you learn in meditation, I think what was occurring to me as you were rolling through the list of how that changes your experience, is that's available within the psychedelic experience? But I will grant you that intermittent use, there's very little stability, but that actually leads me to propose what I think will be a really interesting future direction for research and that is integration of intermittent and perhaps low dose psychedelic use with meditation. So with a foundation of a meditation practice and then low dose psychedelics imposed on that. And I will confess to having done a week long meditation retreat and three days into the retreat taking a microdose of LSD on the order of ten micrograms, which is sometimes said to be sub perceptual. But that's not right. But it's, it's barely perceptible. But what my experience of that was, was that it just supercharged the retreat experience. We were going through cycles of meditation and walking and that all was just beautifully intensified, but there was nothing discontinuous from straight out meditation retreat experience. And so I think there's a lot to be done there. You also commented on the differences among the psychedelics. There we, again, we're on in our infancy, we talk in pharmacological terms that there are these classic psychedelics and they're essentially the same, they all bind serotonin two A receptor, you know, they're producing similar kinds of acute effects. But yeah, indeed, if you, if you, if you really start experiencing some of those differences, LSD is similar to, but way different from psilocybin and those different from mescaline and different from DMT. There's a lot of interesting work to be done with that. And then let me just finally comment on your observation that you expose 100 people to meditation and a good number are just not going to find anything there. And that was my experience. I initially got interested in meditation when I was in graduate school and this was 25 years before I really got involved. And there I thought, jeez, this sounds like it'd be interesting. I'm going to give this a try. I realized that the teacher is talking stuff that doesn't converge with my understanding of science at all, but I'll take it metaphorically. And so I gave it a try. But it was torture. He bounced off three minutes, felt like 3 hours and I very, very quickly decided this was, this wasn't for me. And it was only subsequently that for whatever set of reasons, I tried again and then something opened up for me. Yeah, I can't remember if this came out of your lab or not, but there was at least one paper I read integrating, I think it was a five day meditation retreat or it might have been a seven day retreat with I don't recall it being low doses of psilocybin. I thought it was an actual psychedelic dose. But are you aware of that study? Yes, that came out of the Switzerland group led by Franz Folenbiter and they did a meditation retreat, this is a Buddhist retreat. And then on one day they gave a rather high dose of psilocybin and reported positive effects of the type that we've seen and not yet reported, but I think there's real room for further exploration of lower doses. And if you give a high dose of psilocybin, it's hard for me to imagine what that would be like in a retreat situation, but it wouldn't lend itself well to normal retreat experience, that's for sure. It's also hard to picture how it scales if you have 100 people on a retreat together, how you give 100 people high doses of psilocybin and keep everyone comfortable, that's hard to picture. What are your thoughts about micro dosing? Because you've just mentioned it and this is obviously all the rage in certain parts of culture now. What is there? Well, I have yet to see persuasive evidence that it's useful clinically, it's being purported as a great intervention for depression and other things. I have yet to see data that make that convincing. And there's so much room for placebo effects in there driven by expectancy, and so I think we have insufficient data on it. But but I can say from personal experience that at least microdosing with LSD is certainly a thing, and I think that there's something fundamentally interesting there and it's very subtle. And so someone who has no meditation experience and is not finely tuned to their inner experience may miss it entirely, and that's that's why they say it's subperceptual. But for those of us who have paid a lot of attention and attended to subtle changes in consciousness, there's nothing subtle about it at all. Okay, well, let's talk about your experience of getting your cancer diagnosis. I would love to explore anything you want to share on this topic. When did you find out and what was that like? Yeah, so this was just a year ago and I went in for a routine screening colonoscopy to come out of anesthesia and being told that I had a significant colon tumor. How old are you and how long had it been since you had had your previous colonoscopy? Well, good question. So I'm mid seventy s, and it had been just over five years. And so that was, in my view, a medical mistake. I had had polyps detected in earlier colonoscopies and a five year follow up was too long. I was just slightly over five years because of COVID So I don't recommend yeah, I recommend being conservative about that because it came as a disruptive and unhappy surprise. So the initial experience was one, frankly, of disorientation and confusion like, this really can't be happening. And then I went on to get a CT scan and lo and behold, I have metastases to liver, which that then makes it stage four, but there can be stage fours that are curable and stage fours that are not. And as it turns out, and over the course of the year, mine turns out not to be among the curable versions. So the initial response was just disbelief. It was like a dream. And I could remember waking up at times and I come online and I start thinking about something I want to do. And then this thought comes up, oh yeah, you have stage four cancer. And so initially it was something that really bringing it into focus is something real, just was not on hand. But then very quickly after that, when I embraced that, okay, this is a real thing, very quickly after that, I started running through all the psychological postures that were on offer for someone with stage four cancer diagnosis. So there's fear, anxiety, resentment, anger, denial, belief in some sort of afterlife or something of that sort, and fighting the cancer. On my first cancer chemotherapy session, my daughter wrote me, dad kicked cancer's ass, john Wayne approach. And I thought, I don't want to go to war with anything, I'm not going to roll over, but that doesn't feel right. And so as I contemplated that, it actually quickly became apparent to me that the only appropriate response was to lean into what's real and the gratitude that we feel can feel for the privilege of being these conscious, sentient beings and the preciousness of that. Immediately when the cancer diagnosis came into focus, I started reprioritizing things. So that came up. But there was this sense that the wisest way to hold this would be one to just acknowledge it to be true, and to then lean into gratitude for the preciousness of life. And then something, frankly, Sam, occurred that I would not have expected. But there was this sense of joy and wonder and of course, being a meditator, invariably we've practiced loving kindness and gratitude and we've done some contemplations on death and dying. And so I thought I I thought I had been through that. But somehow that whole framing became supercharged with the diagnosis. And there was a sense of incredible well being and equipoise that emerged in the face of what normally would have looked like challenging situations. Getting the port, my intravenous port, inserted and then it became infected. I ended up in the hospital for five days over Christmas and multiple discomforts with chemotherapy and different surgeries. But somehow I'm able to reframe and embrace those much as one would with an object of consciousness that emerged in a psychedelic session that was potentially disconcerting. And so far, and I'm now a year into this, it's just been maintained. I really felt in some sense initially that I was in a psychedelic experience. There was something kind of vivid about this. And I think what I found myself doing and doing in a way I didn't imagine to be possible, was that whenever a negative framing of what my experience was came to mind, I essentially just said, no, I'm not going to go there. I'm leaning into gratitude and wonder and appreciation for whatever it is, whatever the appearance is. And that's worked in an amazing way. What do I attribute that to? I think foundationally my meditation practice because practicing meditation were accustomed to, at least on occasion, watching objects of mind emerge, seeing narratives emerge and being able to step back from those narratives and recognize that they're just part of the larger field of consciousness. I also think that my experience with psychedelics, although it's not extensive, it's limited, but I think that played a role as well because psychedelic experiences can be incredibly harrowing and invariably there are rabbit holes that one could go down that are just very difficult. And I'd had enough of those experiences to recognize as they came on that I had some agency about whether or not I was going to go there. That came to play because I was playing with hardball with the potential challenges facing the diagnosis. So I think the meditation was really important, whatever worldview I have with respect to that and then some psychedelic experiences may have played into this but I think what's moving to me and the reason I'm happy to talk about this is because, in principle, we needn't have a terminal diagnosis to experience what I'm experiencing and to have some jump start or supercharge to the appreciation for what I can only describe as the mystery virgin on a miracle that we are these highly evolved, sentient creatures that have become aware that we're aware and we know and we have no clue, deep clue about how to solve that mystery and whether it's ever going to be solvable, as you well know. And so that's it leaning into that and in principle trying to figure out and whether there are studies that can be done to help people awakened to that in the course of their lives in the absence of having a terminal diagnosis. When you look back on the experience of getting your diagnosis and the changes in your attitude that followed and you reflect on what you were like before, how much of a mismatch is there? As you said, you were someone who had been a long term meditator. You were interested in obviously in these existential questions. You had reflected on the preciousness of life and its finitude. I have to imagine you weren't someone who was taking your immortality for granted and wasting your time in ways that you now retrospectively consider totally insane and obscene. But insofar as there is a mismatch there, what is it like to reflect on? If you could give your former self some advice, what would you have said to the 60 year old Roland? Apart from getting screened more frequently? Yeah. It's your project, Sam. It's my project. It's waking up. I considered myself to be reasonably awake prior to this experience and and that just went up, you know, a whole magnitude of of intensity and I guess I didn't know that, I didn't know that that met that kind of jump could even occur. I thought I was I thought I was doing well with respect to, you know, my practices and so I think what I would say is push, push more deeply into this and I, and I, and I don't know what the manipulation would have been. Should I be meditating more, should I be doing that? You know, there are number I do breathwork practices, I'm interested in a variety of kinds of changes. So I don't know other than to report that there is this huge magnitude of change. Yeah, I mean, I suspect doubling down on meditation and careful use of psychedelics and certainly not narrowly focusing on just that. I mean, there are all kinds of other kinds of practices that bring that sense of gratitude and awareness into being. I think that's what's needed. That's the focus of the project that I've come up with as a gift, as something that came up when I started revising my will, was to create a program of research that does just that that focuses in on psychedelics and the development of what I would call secular spirituality. That is, spirituality stripped of paranormal and supernatural causes. But it has to be hard empirical research. I believe fundamentally in science as the, as the way we can come to true understanding of reputable phenomena and so I think there's so much to be done and I'm so excited about the prospect that I won't be doing that. But we're going to set in motion engine of research that would grind this out in perpetuity and that's incredibly exciting to me. Yeah. I want to close on a discussion of specifically what the project is and how people can support it. But before we land there, I'm just curious have you done a high dose of psilocybin since your diagnosis? Yes. So it's a good question. I have done a significant dose of LSD since the diagnosis. Now let me say that for the first six or eight months I had zero interest in in psychedelics as I described. I felt like I was already in a psychedelic experience and I felt that that it couldn't get any better and why would I want to mess with it? And then yeah, a number of acquaintances, you know, suggested that yeah, how did I know I didn't have something more to explore and with respect to psychedelics and the disease? So I did, I did a pretty significant dose of LSD and did some inquiry into that and it was turned out to be really affirming of where I am. I really went into the experience with the query of whether I was masking over some deep fear or anxiety about death and dying. Was I somehow psychologically papering this over and were there skeletons in the closet that I needed to know about? And at least within this experience there were absolutely none that I was doing the right thing. The way I was managing it was good. And then I'm not giving to using psychedelics in this fashion, but I did in this one case, I addressed the cancer as something other and said, okay, what can you tell me what's going on here? And it's just inevitable that I'm going to die. And there was no response at all, which I didn't know how to make of that. And so then I adjusted again. I said, so you do know that I'm really grateful. I consider you a blessing. My life has been changed remarkably because of this experience and as I've said, on any number of occasions, it would have been a tragedy had I just walked out to that medical appointment and been run over by a bus. I would have missed I would have I would have missed the best, best part of life. My wife and I are saying, since the diagnosis would never have been happier, more content. So, so then I dressed the cancer saying, I really respect you, I consider you a blessing, but do I have to die? And the answer comes back yes. This is the way it should be. You're doing it right and you should keep doing it. And furthermore, there was a sense in that interaction that I had something to say about it. And that's why I'm talking to you publicly in a way that I would have never spoken about personal use before. There's something mysterious going on here that needs to be unpacked. And then when I got that back from cancer that, no, you're doing fine and it is as it should be, I then said, well, how about give me more time if I have something to communicate? So I started bargaining and I got nothing back. But it was like I said, I'm not accustomed to using psychedelics like that to kind of reify some object as other and go into dialogue. As a matter of fact, I have some aversion to using psychedelics in that way, but in, in this case it came out in a way that was very clear with what I was doing and what I, and what I should be doing. And it emboldens me to speak publicly about this. It also emboldens me to try to stay on this path of awakened awareness in the presence of this. And yet I'm deeply humbled by what still may lay ahead for me and whether I have the capacity to keep the train on the rails. And by no means do I think I have this completely handled. But what does occur to me is that I'm really interested in trying. I'm interested in leaning into whatever challenges emerge and see where it goes. I think I emailed you when I saw the video that you released describing that you had gotten this diagnosis and how it had changed your, your relationship to your own mortality there's. I think it's a ten minute video that people can see on, on your website. You know, my first thought was, obviously I was very sorry to hear about the cancer, but I was. So happy to see the state you're in with respect to your relationship to it. It was so infectious. And again, I'm somebody who thinks about death a lot, and I'm somebody who really tries to make use of that thought to enhance my focus on my real priorities in normal life, all the while knowing that actually getting a terminal diagnosis must sharpen up that point considerably in a way that is hard to manufacture for oneself prior to such a diagnosis. And hence my question to you and it was just seeing you as an older brother have this experience before me. It was quite kind of the wisdom that was leaking out of your pores and is leaking out of your pores on this topic is contagious and it's wonderful to see how you're navigating this, it's quite inspiring. Your email to me was really nice because you acknowledged that there was some challenge to what I was going through but you were recognizing the upside of it. One thing that I've found is so many people want to come and just say how sorry they are or how awful that must be. And that is completely contrary to how I'm holding the experience. And I find myself pushing back on that immediately because I'm just not going to embrace that. There's challenge here. And people will write me, I hope you're feeling better. And I'll say better than what I've been doing. I've been doing great. And so, you know, the assumption is that you're, you're not not doing well. So yeah, yeah, thank you for that. Yeah. But when I think about the, the effects, the, the long term effects of my last mushroom trip which I took again three years ago on this very day, when you're talking about changes in the contents of consciousness, all of these changes are by definition temporary, right? And so it's not ultimately having that experience, it lands in the storehouse of memory to whatever degree. And very much like dreams, psychedelic experiences can be hard to remember you're having them in a state that is fairly discontinuous with one's normal waking consciousness and it can be very hard to hold on to any of it. But the thing I feel that I took away perhaps more than anything else was a sense that I actually don't have a fear of death itself and that was kind of surprising. And I would separate death and the actual experience of dying from all of the attendant chaos and pain that may be associated with any specific mode of dying. I mean, obviously somebody getting hit by a bus, it's very quick. But in a situation of long term illness there's all of the experience of what it's like to be ill and all of the treatments and the medical adventures and misadventures. I can't say I'm looking forward to any of that. And I'm sure even in your state of real gratitude, there are ups and downs medically. But when I think about the actual experience of having one's mind lose any reference point to the details of one's life, there's a really prosaic version of that. We all happily go to sleep each night and lose our experience of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and thinking completely. And we're very grateful for it. Right. So there's that. But when I think about the intensity of or the possible intensity of dying, whatever that experience is or could be, I came away from the 5 grams of mushrooms while blindfolded feeling like whatever death is, there's no way it's more intense than that, right? That thing I just went through, there's just no way to turn up the volume on experience beyond that. And obviously that's an empirical claim which I could be wrong about. But I came away feeling like when you're you're, you know, you're shot out of a nuclear cannon, it's all fine, really. There was just so much love and gratitude that was along for the ride when there was no longer a reference point to me in my life. If there is a residue in my life, it's that where I just feel like death itself is not a problem. And again, separating it from all of the other transitory experiences one can have on the way to that final one, I don't know if that resonates with you at all from your experiences. Yeah, it does. So the contemplation about death is certainly a really interesting one. So when we were running our cancer trial and I ended up asking all of our volunteers prior to upon admission just to try to understand where they were coming, so I'd say, well, what do you think happens when we die? And any number of them had wonderful thoughts about meeting relatives and going into new lives or whatever, but a member said, no, it's a computer down powers off. That's it. And for those people, I'd say, well, what's the probability that you put on that that there's absolutely nothing after death? And they say, oh, yeah, it's what I believe, so give me a percentage. They say 95%. And I would go what? 95? 5% chance. You know, you so you actually don't need much of a percentage there to make one curious about the very nature of what death is. And for me, it's as close to zero as it can get, but it can't be zero because I can't know and and I think that's all I need to remain deeply curious and wanting to be awake to the experience of dying because it's a once in a lifetime opportunity. So there's a funny sense, at least right now, that I'm I'm deeply interested in that. Although, again, I, you know, I come out of a deep, skeptical and scientific reductionistic viewpoint that would put the probability of that at not zero because I don't think that's humble, but something pretty close to zero. The other thing I just want to share with you is, over the course of some of the treatment, where things became increasingly clear that there were no good response options and care was out of the question. I'd come back from getting a second opinion at Sloan Kettering for some radical intervention, and the next day I woke to the image of the hourglass, which I think is a lovely image, and it's the finitude of life. And that just came up really clearly for me. So that hourglass has been turned, and you can see the sand running out of the top chamber into the bottom chamber. You're not quite sure how quickly it's running out, but you do know that at some point that last grain of sand is going to drop. And there's something lovely about that image. And it leads me to think that we should all have hourglasses, big hourglasses in our in our living rooms or bedrooms to remind us about the finitude. Because to me, that's what's brought this into such clear focus. And there's even a paradox here, though, because from the point of view of consciousness, there really can't be an experience of the end of anything I talk about. There's a section on the waking up called, I think, The Paradox of Death, where I explore this essay from the philosopher Tom Clark on this very point, which is it's interesting because he he's a physicalist you know, he's a western trained analytic philosopher who very much takes the draws the lesson from science that the mind on some level is what the brain is doing and consciousness is likewise. And so if consciousness is arising in the physical brain, well, then when the physical brain dies, consciousness must cease. But he explores this fact that consciousness for itself is always present, right? So many materialists irrationally expect that, well, if death is the end of consciousness, well, then there's some sort of positive oblivion that awaits us. But there really can be no experience of oblivion. In the same way that the time before your birth wasn't some sort of abyss from which you emerged. There's no experience of having emerged from nothing after you die. There really can be no positive oblivion that you'll experience. So what Clark does in this essay is and this is something that isn't quite original to him there are people who have launched a similar argument. I think Alan Watts said something along these lines, and Erwin Schrodinger did as well. But if you follow the logic of this, you can come up with a a fairly mystical view of what consciousness is for itself without violating any physicalist or materialist assumptions, because consciousness is always simply impersonally present for itself. Even our sense that it's interrupted in the course of our lives by deep sleep or anesthesia or anything else, when you look closely at it, that tends to be just the sense that there's a lapse in memory, right? Like there's a period in your life the 8 hours previously to Waking Up that you don't remember clearly and you sort of extrapolate from that that consciousness was interrupted. But there really is no experience of the absence of consciousness. There's just the character of experience and the implications we draw from it in each moment. And you can listen to that section where I talk about what Clark draws from this. But there really is a very interesting and fairly mystical view of continuity that you can draw based on just a couple of assumptions. Just one, that the consciousness is in itself impersonal and all the personal stuff comes at the level of its contents and the fact that it never really experiences its own absence, almost by definition, from the side of consciousness. There really is this kind of eternal condition of simply experiencing its own being and is not experiencing its own non being. But anyway, Clark has more to say on that, which is pretty interesting, which awaits you. If you want to look at it, I can also send you his essay. It's really well done. Yeah. Well, thank you. So I do subscribe to your waking up app. Thank you. But I haven't listened to that, so I certainly will. Yeah. There's so much mystery, right. You know, our limit, our limitations to what we understand are just incredible. And so that's kind of what I I lean into with the gratitude is that we're living in the middle of this mystery. We really don't know how it came about and where it's going. We don't have a coherent physics. We certainly don't have an understanding of consciousness. But isn't that to be celebrated, that there is this mystery and somehow we've been privileged to be granted this sentience and awareness? And if we just can decouple from that narrative story that's driving us to aversion or clinging, if we can just let that subside, then it's just incredibly beautiful and to be celebrated. That's what I found myself saying to people who asked me about my experience. I said, this is just an experience for celebration and I invite you to join me in that celebration. There's no reason not to. It's something we all know, I think, that resonates so deeply with our experience as sentient beings and this kind of mystery in which we live. So, yeah, it's to be celebrated. Well, on that point, please tell me more about the endowment project that you're launching. Yeah, well, thank you. So, as I mentioned, this came there have been any number of changes in my life because of the diagnosis. It's actually been shockingly wonderful and beautiful. So I got married to my long term partner, Marla and we hadn't thought marriage was particularly important. And we did some contemplation about that and had this just joyful ceremony. And I'm just so delighted to call her my wife now. My relationship with my children has changed. Relationships in general have changed. So there have been many many gifts that have opened up and so one of them came about in revising my will and I got to charitable contributions and my initial thought was, oh, that's easy, give well of course, you know so well, it's the effective altruism movement. And for some years I've just defaulted to Give Well because they're such a great organization that have really looked at the impact of different charities. And then the next day I woke and thought, what would I really want to give? What came up for me is what I want to give is exactly what I want for myself and I want for the research that I've been doing. And that's to continue to explore and support this broader awakening project. And there's something fundamentally important about that, as I mentioned to you earlier, that I think actually has existential importance to the survival of our species. That there's this ability to unpack these kinds of experiences and explore their applications in a way that may indeed be critical to the survival of our species, given that we have other alternative technologies that are being developed that could be species terminating. And so I thought that's what I really want. I want people to awaken to that. And I thought at first I don't have a big estate, so I thought I could give some money to Johns Hopkinson that have a recurring lectureship on spirituality and psychedelics. And the reason that psychedelics are key to that, the science of it, is because we can now study these experiences prospectively, these life changing experiences. And heretofore we haven't been able to do that. We've been able to look at spontaneously occurring experiences but not studying them prospectively. So my belief that empirical research is critical to that. And so then what occurred to me is I probably have some goodwill in the field given that I just happened to be one of the people who opened up the latest psychedelic renaissance and so ended up seeking an endowment to establish a professorship. And it's in my name, but that's irrelevant. It's the Roland Griffiths professorship. Psychedelic research on secular spirituality and well being. And it's focused on studies, rigorous empirical investigations of this relationship of psychedelics to these transformative experiences and then the consequential effects on well being. I created this endowment. It's audacious. I'm trying to raise $20 million for it. And the reason for that is that what I want to COVID is the full salary for a full professor doing research in this area. But I also want to generate enough income so that there are research funds available to conduct a program of research in this area. It's an endowment given to Johns Hopkins. And the the downside of endowments is that they, they generate, you know, maybe 4% of their worth over, over time each year. But the upside is that they're managed in perpetuity and institution like Hopkins has every reason to attend to their endowments and manage them carefully because endowments are their lifeblood. And so this engine will create an enduring program of research in this area for which there's no funding currently available short of straight up philanthropy to do this kind of research. All of the funding and the attention of the psychedelic research right now is going into therapeutics. And so I think it's in principle a really, really important project. I'm really excited about it. We've actually got $14 million in pledges so far, so we're trying to close our $6 million gap, and by the time this podcast airs, I think we're going to have opened it up to the general public. But I'm really excited about it. I love the idea that it continues in perpetuity because I think ultimately there's actually no answer to the core question of the mystery that we face. And so indeed, I see this turning on for decades, generations, millennia, as long as Hopkins continues to survive as a viable institution. Yeah, well, it's wonderful that you've made as much progress as you've you've made toward your goal, and I really have no doubt you'll meet it. There's just a tremendous amount of goodwill toward you and your whole project here. And the Waking Up Foundation will give as well because it's certainly well within our remit to support a cause like yours. So I look forward to that and I certainly hope our audience will donate as well, and we'll give them the necessary information to do that. $6 million is a lot, but I'm confident that there is an immense amount of interest in creating a durable legacy for you on this point, because this really is beyond the narrow therapeutic case for psychedelics. This is answering that larger, truly universal existential case, which is we need a 21st century, scientific nondilusional approach to these deepest spiritual and ethical concerns, and we really are on the cusp of that within the narrow circle of an institution like Johns Hopkins. And I share your view that making it a wider cultural conversation ultimately is what we need to inoculate ourselves against the most injurious and profligate wastages of human time and attention to which we're so obviously prone. This is a hope that was articulated several generations ago when psychedelics made their first appearance, but I think it's more urgent now in the presence of increasingly powerful technology and cultural changes that seem to be shattering our world as much as they're bringing diverse cultures together. So I share the view that this century is some kind of crucial bottleneck for our species, and getting our heads right on a deadline here seems quite important. Whether I'm around to see the crucial changes or not, I really have no expectation there. But when I think about the lives of our children and grandchildren, the work we do now seems incredibly important, and you have been so crucial to that work. So, Roland, I really want to thank you for your time on this podcast. But even more, thank you for the work you've done for decades now to advance our understanding of our own minds and what's possible. Thank you. Thank you very much, sam, I really appreciate that and really appreciate your comments that you just made. So with great gratitude to you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. For today's conversation, I am speaking with Kurt Anderson. Kurt is a bestselling author and he's written for Vanity Fair and the New York Times. He's also written for Time and The New Yorker. He also writes for Television and Film and Stage. He co founded Spy magazine. And he was, at one point, the editor in chief of New York Magazine, and he's the host and creator of Studio 360, the award winning public radio show. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was the editor of the Harvard Lampoon. But most relevant for today's conversation, he's the author of a new book titled Fantasyland how America Went Haywire. And we talk about it today. We talk about the American aptitude for unfounded belief. We talk about the way in which credulity inspired the founding of America, specifically the religious lunacy of the Puritans. We talk about media and the growing populist mistrust of authority, the link between postmodernism and religious fundamentalism. And inevitably, this all comes around to the Trump phenomenon, about which Kurt has much to say. Also the effect of fame on politics, and there are other topics here. Anyway, we only had about an hour to discuss these things, so this is briefer than most podcasts, but I think you'll find Kurt's take on the present moment quite interesting. And now I bring you Kurt Anderson. I am here with Kurt Anderson. Kurt, thanks for coming on the podcast. My complete pleasure. So I don't think we've ever met. I noticed that we've been to similar places like the Aspen Ideas Festival and places like that, but I'm not aware of having met. Am I am I right about that? I think you're right about that. Okay, well, it's a pleasure to meet you virtually. Now, you have written a fascinating book, which I think will be more or less the totality of our conversation. The book is Fantasyland how America Went Haywire a 500 Year History. And like a few people I've had on the podcast recently, you seem to have written a book that was just perfectly poised to capture what was about to happen. Obviously, you had to have been writing this long before thoughts about a President Trump were anything other than a punchline, and yet you have written, really, the backstory to our current moment in a way that is pretty remarkable. So congratulations on having such good luck as an author. Thank you. If I believed in Providence, I would figure I'd had it come my way. Absolutely. I started working on this book, started thinking about this book many years ago and then started working on it 2013, 2014. And near the end, the appearance of Donald Trump as the impending nominee, just as I was finishing the book. Yes. Seemed like, I guess lucky timing is the phrase. Yeah. Well, if you were a man given to prayer, you might been praying for the wrong thing at that point. Well, yes, indeed. And I remember early last year waking up one morning when Donald Trump seemed to be about to wrapping up, if not wrapping up the nomination, him being a plausible winner at that point and saying to my wife, I know this is horrible to say, but if he gets the nomination, it could be very good for this book. Yeah, well, again, it really is amazing to read through the lens of our current moment. I would argue it would have been a very different this is something I said to Ken Burns when he was on and we were talking about his Vietnam documentary, which is this incredible time capsule experience of just looking at the divisiveness of American politics in addition to the chaos of that war. And watching it through the lens of the present was very different than it would have been watching through, let's say, the first term of Obama's presidency. And that's also true with your book. Obviously, there was many of the trends you talk about of American Unreason, which we'll discuss were present even there, but we really are at some kind of apotheosis of your thesis. No, that's exactly correct. And as I've said to people as I've been talking about the book since it came out, everything I am arguing here, and certainly the history that I am laying out and arguing here would have been true. We still would have been in a pickle, by my lights, had Donald Trump not been elected president. But here he is and a kind of poster boy exhibit A for my history and for my theses, and makes it a lot easier to explain what I'm talking about to people, frankly. Well, so before we jump into the book, just give us a brief potted history of your intellectual life. You've been a novelist and a broadcaster and a magazine editor. How do you describe what you've been up to? Well, because I've done a lot of things and I still do a couple of things. I usually go with what's on my passport, which is writer. But yeah, I was a journalist and then I became a magazine editor. I edited New York magazine, started Spy magazine back in the then, began writing novels at the end of the last century. And about the time I also started doing a radio show on public radio, which I still do. So I still write novels and I still do the public radio show. And Fantasy Land is is my first big nonfiction book. So that's that's basically the sum of it. How often do you do your radio show? It's a weekly show. It's a weekly hour called Studio 360. Right, right. Okay. So the book is essentially a history of American credulity. And I'm sure we will emphasize the downside of this, but there is, as you point out, more than the downside. There is some silver lining to this American disposition to unite. What on their face seems like very different trends, but they all sort of push in the direction of believing things strongly on insufficient evidence. We have religious commitments and crack, pottery and entrepreneurialism and a capacity for self reinvention and a love of show business and celebrity culture and even conspiracy thinking. And all of these forces have brought us to this present moment. But before we dive into the negative aspects of all of this, can you say something about the silver lining for this American aptitude for unfounded belief? Well, unfounded or less than perfectly founded? I mean, there are benign aspects to this, certainly, and there is even heroism. I can come to this place and I can build this thing or become this person or do this extraordinary thing, even though it's doubtful that you, the individual, will succeed in doing any of those things. But that sense of the impossible dream that has all of its obvious good sides and has served us well as a country in many different respects. So I would say that's it I would say certainly the freedom until the freedom went too far in believing crackpotism and disbelieving evidence or choosing not to believe evidence. All of those ways in which America indulged every flavor of belief, true false, crackpottish, brilliant was good when it intel. It wasn't until until it became a kind of uncontrollable kettle boiling over. So I would say creating this extraordinary country out of nothing, authoring this country from scratch, had many good sides. We could then get into all of the doubts about, oh, but you say this is good because they moved west, because they believed it, and they committed genocide against the Indians. And that's a different case. But I would say, by and large, much of what I see as becoming highly problematic and leading us to the place we've arrived at today was a net plus for most of our history. Let's start with the history, because this is a work of history you've written and the roots of America, which really are seemingly in the DNA, literally in the DNA of the country. Insofar as there was kind of a selection pressure for a certain type of person to come here, there are two aspects to it, and that seemed to be intertwined very early around the founding, which was on one level, you had people driven essentially by the myth of El Dorado, the mythical city of gold. And then you had others who were driven by the myth of the Garden of Eden, literally wanting to find it on earth. And so there was this twin motive of kind of get rich quick scheme and a pilgrimage that attracted more than its fair share of religious maniacs. And it's these two groups, and they came in waves from England, as you point out, and with vast numbers of them dying for the privilege of searching for one of these two things. And the people who were left, the people who made it were really of this sort the people who would take inordinate risk based on having been successfully advertised to essentially a full advertising campaign for decades in England that proffered both of these fantasies to wouldbe colonists. And the people who were taken in were the founders of this country. Well, you've put it exactly right. That's a beautiful summary. And certainly as a child, and even through high school, the history of those first European settlers that I knew were the Puritans in New England. And I was taught very little about the nature of their Protestantism and the fact that it was, for its time in the early 16, hundreds perceived among the Church of England people back in England as a primitive, medieval form of their newish religion of Protestantism. So I learned very little about the gold hunters down south, but as you say, that they especially died by the hundred and kept coming and dying and not finding gold. It took them more than a generation to be convinced that there was no gold to be had in Virginia. So those did seem like not just kind of metaphorical nodes for our beginning, but the very real thing, as you say, these two different forms of wishful, passionate belief in the either unprovable or untrue. We're our founders, and I really didn't know about, as you say, this essentially first global advertising campaign put on by the businessmen whose colonies these were, who had the charter from the Royal charter from England to do some business here, build an empire. Yes, pamphlets, posters and all kinds of advertising were put out in England to convince these people to come here. And as you say, it's not just a crack to say, and they self selected for suckers. That is something historians, legitimate historians, real historians, PhD historians before me have proffered as an important defining quality of the early Americans. Yeah, I think you have a Daniel Borstein quote to that effect. Exactly that it was just an explicit selection pressure for those susceptible to advertising. So let's say something about the religious commitments of the Puritans. We have this word Puritanism, which does signify kind of an overweening attachment to biblical literalism and a fondness for something like theocracy. But people, I think, are not so in touch with the character of these founders. In fact, you point out one moment where our confusion or revisionism is fairly surprising that John Winthrop, the Puritan leader, is the author of this famous line about America being a city upon a hill. And when that phrase is invoked today, it means that essentially we're an example to the whole world of what happens when a diverse society really gets its act together. This is just the summation of almost Enlightenment values succeeding and some kind of moral order. But in the context in which he uttered these words, he was really talking about the fulfillment of end times prophecy. He was talking about Christ's imminent return to judge the living and the dead. And these were people who felt that was going to happen very soon. Absolutely. And that this could be the new Jerusalem where that happens. And they thought of themselves as, yes, analogous to the biblical Israelites searching for the Promised Land, but not merely analogously. They literally thought this was going to happen and that the New World could be the epicenter of all that. The other thing about Puritans, when we talk about them today, or use that word today, of course, it almost exclusively is a synonym for prudishness and sexual restraint. And of course, yes, that was part of it, but not the most important or frankly interesting part of what the Puritans, and especially the Puritans who came to America were all about. And I say the Puritans who came to America because there are plenty of Puritans in England and in continental Europe. But the ones who came here was this most zealous faction of a zealous faction of Puritans who were the zealous faction of Protestants. So, yes, they absolutely believed in this in the end times coming very soon, and that they were the agents, god's agents in coming to the new world to see that through. As well as being great believers in signs. And wonders and symbols regarding oddly shaped roots and meteor showers as various signs that they were either on the right track or that God was displeased, depending on the day. Well, I'm a little torn about how to proceed in this conversation, because on one level it would make sense to move through chronologically, almost decade by decade, and get your take on how we got here. But another path would be to focus on specific variables like religion or conspiracy thinking or postmodernism and talk about how these things interrelate. Do you have an intuition about the best way forward here? Well, I thought the best way forward was for writing the book, was to do it more or less chronologically, but doing it in those thematic ways, I'm entirely happy to do that's the other way to do it, so I'm happy to do that. I do want to mention just a character among the Puritans who we barely know today. Most people don't know of her, Anne Hutchinson, who was this extraordinary character. I just think she's a great story. So before we leave the Puritans altogether. I would love to talk a little about her because I find her so fascinating. Yeah. Let's talk about Anne. She was a middle aged mother of many, many children. Well to do. Came here in the early first waves of puritans. Settled in Boston as they did and lived in the good part of town. Neighbor of the governor, but decided very early on that she felt herself essentially sainted and in. Touch with the divine in a way that all the male clergy and leaders were not and began having essentially rump church sessions at her home that her husband allowed her to do, I guess. And they became very popular. And in addition to critiquing the sermons that were being given by the of course male puritan leaders every Sunday, she brought a whole other piece to the idea, to the puritan protestant Christian idea, which is that I can feel who's Godly, I know who the elect are, I know who is with God and who isn't in this 6th sense way. And that because I feel it, it is true, which when we look at that in almost 400 years retrospect, she is to me a kind of prototypical American in that sense. And of course they banished her and threw her out and she went and found her version of religious freedom down in Providence with Roger Williams. But her case is presented today correctly insofar as it goes as this as this with her as a beleaguered feminist heroine which she was judged by all these guys and being deprived of her religious freedom, as was also true. But she essentially one upped the puritan religious leaders in terms of their, by my lights, religious fever and extravagance and again did this other thing which is no, I am holy, I am a prophet, I feel these things, which was not part of the Puritan idea. So I just find her an extraordinary character and in a way that the Puritans, even though much of their theology has become current again in American Protestantism, I find her as this extraordinary way ahead of her time figure in representing a kind of religious practice and belief that came to define American Protestantism almost uniquely in Christendom. Yeah, well, she was a kind of religious entrepreneur and others obviously have followed. But she also did expose the way in which any religious cult, no matter how fanatical, is always vulnerable to the even greater fanaticism of one of its members. Yes, exactly. And that has been the story of American Protestantism, of being this very facile thing with no center, no state church and that as they grow, as the new denominations emerge and they're all full of vigor and zeal and fanaticism and then they cool down and new hot, more fanatical and zealous sex grow up. And no, that is in a nutshell the history of American Protestantism. And you actually touch on some of the older history of protestantism, which is relevant here because it was clearly enabled by the birth of the printing press. So the power of the media really is coincidental. The emergence of media as a powerful force to shape public opinion is coincident with the Protestant Reformation. And both are coincident with this populist trend that led to the widespread disparagement of experts. In the case of the Protestants, they were explicitly repudiating the expertise of the Church. But this is something that just continues to this day, where you have access to media allowing for both on the right and the left, a kind of kindling of doubt with respect to the established powers or established authorities. And it's a war that just rages generation after generation, where you just have these kind of waves of repudiation of what is, at least in the current generation's mind, the considered opinions of those best informed on a given topic. But the media is always allowing for a kind of sea change or an attempted sea change against that opinion, rather often on the parts of people who are just reinventing reality for themselves. A lot of this conversation isn't unconstrained by anything that has gone before. Exactly right. And indeed, who knows? Our descendants will know better in some hundreds of years if the digital revolution and the Internet is as disruptive in the way that the Movable type and the printing press in the late 15th century was. I have a feeling it will be and is, and certainly, as you're suggesting it is this extraordinary, in the case of America, especially bookending of this technology, in the case of the printing press, that permitted Luther's ideas and the Reformation to happen. If he'd come along 50 years earlier, I don't think it wouldn't have happened. He wouldn't have been the guy anyway to make it happen, because the press allowed books to be printed and books in modern languages to be printed. And thus everybody, every believing Protestant to be in this priesthood of all believers, his or her own priest with his or her own Bible, interpreting it at will. Yes, there is this technology then and now that are permitting this transformation of understanding of reality. And what you had then and now have in this kind of repetition or rhyme now is this part of Protestantism that they believe so strongly and that all American, that Americans in general, beyond the fervently religious Protestants here. I think it is part of the American character, this anti establishment feeling. And I don't need to trust the experts. I can figure it out on my own. And this antialitism, which it was certainly given oomph and power by our overwhelmingly Protestant founders and forebears. But it is not just among those piously, devoutly religious Protestants today where that anti establishment, anti expertt feeling is deeply rooted and passionately pursued. One thing you point out in the book, which is fairly surprising. I don't know if other people have pointed this out before. You talk a lot about a synergy, rather malignant synergy between religious fundamentalism and its sort of antiracional tendencies and movements very much in academia. Postmodernism in particular, which, with its doubt about science and really doubt about reality itself and those two trends on the left and right of the political spectrum have really married in. A way to bring us to this moment where it seems most people feel entitled to have their own take on reality itself, whether it's informed or not, by even the vaguest understanding of the scientific worldview or any other real intellectual trend that could deliver them facts. So just it seems a legitimate project for most people to have a very strongly felt opinion about Cosmology or global warming or anything else about which they may have spent no time informing themselves. And this does cut across political lines, I think, in the way that you described. Do you want to talk about that weird marriage? Sure. Yeah, it is a weird marriage, one that I had been passively suggested here and there. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at@samharris.org./n
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+Hey, Ricky. Hi. Quick one. I've been thinking about your dream, your joke in your dream. And as we comedians say, I think it deserves more. A little bit more. Yeah. No, actually make it funny. No, it is. Sometimes it's funny for the wrong reasons and on a meta level. Well, first of all, it's funny that you told me. It's funny that I had the courage and I was underwhelmed, and it's like you've been through that once. Because the funniest thing, of course, is an eminent thinker waking their partner up and going, I've just dreamt a great joke. That's funny already. Right? Listen, you had anika laughing at the phrase eminent thinker. Yeah. So it's good. This is what I want to talk about, right? So it sounds like a joke. It sounds like a child's joke. Even the premise, what noise does a monster make? Now, that's a simple you think it's going to be a pun, some sort of play on words. What noise. But it's better than that, because there's even a play on there in your joke, because we think it means a noise a monster consciously makes a roar or a gruhr. But no, it's the involuntary sound it makes because it's big and it's heavy and it can't help that noise. It doesn't want to make that noise. So that's funny already. You've imposed this as this monster making this noise, but it's just because he's big and heavy, right? So that's funny, right? Because of course, the other thing is you've learned that noise from cartoons and theater productions, because a monster doesn't make that noise. You've learned that from cartoons and theater productions. Okay? And here's what's the funny bit for me, is that I think you think that's funny in your subconscious sort of dreamy state, because I think you invented that. I think you think you invented that noise and monster mates, even though you've learned it from cartoons and theaterology. That's why I think you think it's so funny, because I think subconsciously you think, well, that's a great play. That's a great play on what sounders and what's? Ah, it's this one. And you think you invented that. I don't know. There's something there that you were excited about, the cleverness of it. I don't know. Maybe I'm very flattered that you've done an autopsy on my psychosis, but I would ascribe it to just the frank psychosis of the dream state, literally. That was one of the funniest things I had ever heard, of course. And you can't help it, because as we said last time, your brain just cut to the emotion of having thought of the funniest joke in the world without the workings out. You hadn't gone through that process. You just got to. And Jane reminded me of one that she had 30 years ago. She woke up laughing, right? And she said, I just dreamt I told the funniest joke, and she was already out of it. And knew it wasn't funny, but her trying to tell me the funniest joke in the world because she knew how awful it was really made me laugh as well. And again, it nearly works, right? The joke was in her dream, that was the funniest joke in the world. The joke was, if there's two things in a pot of ivy, they're both leaves. Now, that really does almost work. It almost works. That's much better than my joke, because it's almost a dis on the Ivy. That's all it's got, right? If you ask me what ivy's got and it's got two things, it's leave just got more ivy. Oh, dear. Yeah, that's what I've been thinking about. What can't you joke about? Because you go hard. I'm surprised occasionally I recall how edgy you are in certain contexts. Your Golden Globe stuff is just murder, right? You're murdering people in the room. But have you course corrected in recent years? You wouldn't do that. You did a few years ago. I sense the things I have a set of rules, and that's depending on the forum as well. I wouldn't do a kids party and talk about the things I talk about live. In fact, I feel uncomfortable live if I'm doing something, you know, I try and make it, you know, 16 and over so I can relax that I'm not I'm not corrupting the youth. And, you know, I play by the rules of TV and you see, you know, the Golden Globes is a very good example, but if you think about it, that was network television at peak time, 05:00 p.m.. That went out across America, and I didn't break any broadcast rules, so it couldn't have been that bad. How could you get away with Dame Judy Dench licking her? I forget the word, but there's a Ninj. Okay, that's a really interesting one. So what happens is, I think usually I was told by the production team at the Golden Globes, they like me doing it because I'm easy. I turn up with a scrapper paper with 20 jokes on it, and they said, usually presenters have, like, a team of 20 writers for like, six weeks before, and they're worried about it, and they keep changing it, and things happen as I turn up and go, I'm doing these, are these all right? But what you have to do is the day before, it has to be lawyered. And what do you call it? We call it taste and decency. You call it something else. Standard and practices. Yes, exactly. And what that usually means is you can't do gross things that people might find offensive language liable. Of course. I don't want to libel anyone. Anyway, I think I think I can work around the language thing. If you can't, then there's probably something missing. Although we talk about that as well. I want to I want to address the people that say anyone can get a laugh swearing. I want to go, all right, okay, let's sell the tickets, go out and weigh the arena and just swear. See how funny it is, mate? And usually I've done it when there's one person, one lawyer just looks down and goes, yeah, that's all right. This time, I don't know why. I don't know whether it was a reflection of the time they had a dream team of lawyers. Oh, there was 17 people in the room. 17 people in the room. But it was exact some of the writers wanting to come down just to see what I'd done, you know, you had scared the shit out of them from previous years, right? This is your third year running or something? Yeah, but fifth year, it was the fifth year running over a ten year period. So I think some of them were sort of excited at the prospect because it usually always gets quite a reaction. And there were the people who write the other stuff, because apart from me, there's people who write all the other intros, if you know what I mean. So there was those guys there. There was the exec producers. Producers and lots of lawyers. Nothing there's about 15 people in the room, so tough crowd. So I did my monologue exactly as it went out. So you actually perform for that room full of lawyers? Yeah, I mean, I'm not giving it everything, but, yeah, I do it. I read the jokes as well as I can, so they get them. There's a mild performance. But that's the other thing about the Golden Globes. Unlike my stand up and obviously the narrative stuff I do, it's much more about the gag. They have to work. I haven't got time to work it in over six weeks. It's more like a piece of, you know, poetry. It's more like, you know, a formula. It's got to be fast. It's got to be set up, punchline, laugh. Otherwise it's too nebulous. It won't get the laughs that you do when you've got a worked routine. So you want 20 zingers, really. Even then, I still try and do a little bit of a narrative. I still try and you know how I edit my jokes for that? Oh, I've done two about him. That's not fair. Or that looks like I've got somewhere against that person. Because you might have three jokes about someone and you go, what's the best one? So you try and keep it fair. I try and make it about the people in the room. And that event, I try and make it like it couldn't be in any other place at any other time, in any other room. I try and do the classic court jester of punching up. I have a go against the, you know, the broadcast of the Hollywood Foreign Press and the richest, most powerful people in the room, right? But the place where you really just eviscerated the whole room and one person in particular was when you went after Tim Cook and Apple for running sweatshops. They obviously cut to Tim Cook just sitting there at a banquet table, and then you pivoted to telling everyone in the room that they were in no way entitled to be sanctimonious because if ISIS created a streaming service, they would call their agents immediately. I did that on purpose because that was a sort of theme of the year. I thought it was quite zeitgeisty that it felt right that people had had enough of Hollywood and being lectured, too. And I think we've talked about this before that I even think Trump getting in was almost a protest vote against that authoritarian liberalism for the last ten years. So I sort of addressed that again without taking a side. I don't think I took a side, but for instance, you're slamming Tim Cook there. Was that actually a lawyered line? They knew you were going to do that. Yeah, but don't forget, I don't think I mentioned his name. I don't think I knew he was going to be there, and I certainly didn't know they were going to cut to him. So they made it. Oh, I don't know who they're going to cut to. I don't plan that. But no, the joke was real. Yeah. So I thought the funny joke was, this is a lovely program. And you know what? I don't even know that that's pretty true. I don't know that it is up itself or pretentious or anything like that. I've heard great things about it. The joke being that I decided to try and put in a little list to make my case, to make the joke funnier. And of course, I went after the biggest corporations. I've got nothing against those corporations. I did check that I was faxed, right? And the lawyer said, yeah, that's fine. They quickly Google it and say, have we got a case here? But there's no malice. I haven't really got anything against anyone in the room. Do you know what I mean? It's all for the joke. If the joke was better the other way round, I would have done it the other way around. This myth that every joke is a window to the comedian's true soul, our chains, that I'll flip it. I'll pretend to be left wing, right wing, no wing. I pretend to be anything to make that joke better. I'll decide halfway through I should take the other side. No, but it makes the joke better. I do think you were landing a deadly, earnest blow against at least Apple there. I mean, because we were aware that they have they're outsourcing the production of iPhones to Foxconn, and you literally have people jumping to their deaths from the rooftops of those factories because their lives are so intolerable. I mean, that that story had been in the news and I mean, you could, in a more recent vein, make the point that Apple is evading taxes by basically running its trillion dollar business through a post office box in Ireland, right? It's incredible, right? But I'm sort of saying to people, I'm not your man. If you think I'm Shay Gavara of the capitalist modern world, you're wrong. They were jokes. And my private life might happen to align with the jokes. And of course, you want to be on the right side unless you're saying the wrong thing for a funny reason. As I say, a lot of my stand up, I play the right wing bigot for comic effect. Irony is a lovely, lovely tool to deliver the right message that sounds like the wrong message. So you have to really look at the joke and look deep. But in general, I'm not this social justice warrior for either side. It's how good is that joke? And of course, the more truth there is to it, the more awkward it is. Or it wouldn't be fair if it wasn't true. If if none of that was true, it just wouldn't be fair. Do you know what I mean? I've put jokes out, I've looked into it and I go, oh, it's not true. It's nervous myth. He didn't do that or that. So I don't do it because I don't want to add to the myth and legend when it's bad or it gives someone a bad day. And even if it's a joke, there's a certain power, particularly on that stage, and people make their own mind up sometimes and what you're trying to do. But I read the jokes out and everyone was laughing, thought, Great. And the head lawyer went, Just one thing you said, so this is the joke they picked up on. I start off with, we got to see James Corden as a fat pussy. He was also in the movie Cats, but no one saw that. And the reviews I saw one that said, this is the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs. Dame Judy Dench defended the movie, saying it was the role she was born to play because she liked nothing better than clunking herself down on the carpet, lifting her leg and licking her own mine, right? So first thing he says is, when you say pussy there, you mean because he was in Cats. I went, yeah, okay. I thought this is easy. This is easy. Okay, right. This has some more of this. Any other questions? And then, is mine okay? Yeah. It's a funny little euphemism. It's an English word. I said, they won't even know what it means, I don't think, if Americans even use it. And then someone looked up and said, oh, it says vulgar term for vagina. I went, well, of course it's a vulgar term for vagina if you're not a doctor. And of course it's a vulgar term. Everything's a vulgar term for vagina. Yeah. And they went, worried them just because they looked up and it was like the definition vulgar went, Right. I said, well, what can I say for vagina? And the lawyer, when you could say vagina, I went, I'm not going to say vagina. That's so much worse that I'm actually now literally vagina. No, it's got to be it's got there's got to have some sort of funny twist to it. And silliness. Mine is a funny word, too. Yeah, mine is a funny word. It is a euphemism. It's like didn't say I didn't say it. I thought it would be safe because Americans would guess what I meant, but they wouldn't be offended by it because they just have learnt that word. If I make up a word for vagina, it's not offensive. If I suddenly go, club a club and you know that means vagina, you're not offended by it because you don't use it. So I went, what can I use? Then? People were saying box. I was going, I'm not going to say box. The lawyers are pitching you. Everyone was chipping in, I'm not going to say that. And so I said, what about Flange? We say that as well. And I like that word, mine. And flange, I like those NGE words because they're nice and funny and soft, and I've used them in my book, Flanimals for kids. I say plunging and munge fabulous. It's a funny orange. Orange is a funny syllable. So they went, yeah, that's fine. And then someone looked it up, one of the execs, and went, oh. It means it's a slang term for something in a sync here, so that I confused. And I went right, okay. And so we went through it, right? And we're going through all the things I'm not going to say that that's worse. I'm not going to say that that's worse, all this sort of stuff, right? Once said quim and I went, I'm not saying quim. That's a really horrible I don't actually even know that word. I've never heard quim. Yeah, I think it's an old Anglo Saxon word. Maybe. But anyway, no, it's our worst connotations. It's like a real bro word. It's horrible, right? So I wanted a playful, silly word for it, right? The important thing was I was talking about a being a cat and what cats do. We were getting sidetracked. I convinced them that I said, you will not get one complaint for the word mine. Why would you get complaint? They know what I mean. Licking their own minge, but they won't know exactly what they won't complain. And they went, okay, say mine. But you won't bleep it, will you? Because I thought if you bleep it, that sort of ruined the joke. People go, what was that? They went, no, we won't bleep it. So we went with mine. They did bleep it anyway. They did. I heard it online and it was unbelievable, right? No, they bleeped it, right? But I knew they would, so I pointed so I thought, I still won't wow, this is quite a game of chess. I didn't realize that you had that going on. Just to get podium, I often have to talk people down. All my career I've talked people down through when they're worried about some up they go, all that, and what they're worried about is writing a letter. And very often, once you explain to them what the joke is because again, everyone's human and executive tell you no different, they sometimes mistake the subject of a joke with the actual target. And they're nervous because their jobs on the line, they don't want a complaint. They don't want to get I've never had a complaint upheld in my whole career. What about personally, with respect to the people you do you know? But I'm pretty sure I give her the benefit of the doubt that she'd have a sense of humor. What have I said that's so horrible? The joke is she acted like a cat, if you like, you know, and and cats lick their own bits. It's as simple as that. That's what's funny, that you leave those bits out of art, you know, it's it's quite a it's quite a funny trope. I'm sure every cartoon, every adult cartoon who's shown as cat or a dog has shown and doing something that cats and dogs do, unlike children's cartoons. So it was no big deal for me. But, yeah, I've often had to talk people down and explain to them why it's okay. I've said I've offered to write the letter, and sometimes they just want someone to take charge and tell them why it's okay. If memory serves, I think they cut to Tom Hanks looking shocked on your punchline there. Yeah, that became a big mean that people thought that he was disgusted enough himself. I'm not sure. I just thought he thought cool, didn't expect that and did a nice face when the camera came to him or that was a bit warm for these nice I don't think he was being particularly damning of me or I don't know. I have no idea. And you see the cut later and I kind of remember what he actually did it to. I can't remember what bit he did it to. I think it was on your delivery of mine. Go right to Hanks. There's somebody in the control. I get hanks got something in his mouth. It is a good word. When I got I remember after it, I got home and Jane said, oh, you should have said clunge. I thought. Oh, I should have said clunge. It's perfect plunge, because that's the same it's English. Again, they would have probably looked it up and it would have said vulgar term for bits and pieces. But I think it's non specific plunge as well. I think it's men and women. It's just your stuff you shove into your pants. Whether you're a marriage. These are esoteric terms. I don't know half of these you're deep in the Euphemism game over there. Yeah, I'd be pretty good at euphemisms because they are a fine tool to get round things. But the best thing is make them up. Make a word up. It's just as good if you really don't want to get a complaint. The English are great at euphemisms and innuendo. We've got a whole strand of British comedy based on innuendo, and that can be anything from bad puns to there's a spate of films in the sort of called Carry On films, where it was all that it was all matron and someone would come in and see a building and go, what's the unsightly erection? It's that sort of body. And then there would be things like a door would shut and you'd hit, which was and we have a thing called Panama, which I don't think you have, which is an old Cinderella or something, but done with modern jokes, with modern sort of stars and actors. And it's all in jokes and puns for the parents that the kids don't get. So avoid of ill are sort of, on two levels, naughty innuendos, on the face of it. All right? So back to the question which you've neatly evaded. Is there anything that you won't do? Now, for instance, you went after Caitlyn Jenner hard a few years ago. That's the thing. Because obviously the thing that was picked up out of that was the possible transphobia. But again, I address that in humanity. No, my point is that I don't go out there and say I'm allowed to be transphobic. I deny I am transphobic because I'm not transphobic. Just like I'm not racist when I joke about race, I'm not pro cancer when I joke about cancer. This is the thing people get that. They see people in the audience, they see a joke, they go, he's joking about famine, he's joking about cancer, he's joking about AIDS, he's joking oh, that's my thing again in humanity. I did a thing on Jimmy Fallon, a joke. I said I was on a flight and the announcement came over. Someone is fatally allergic to nuts, so we're not handing out any nuts on this flight. And I go, It's about me being selfish. And I go, I never wanted nuts more. They are infringing on my human right to eat nuts. And I go, I wish I'd bought my own nuts on. The joke being that I'm so selfish that if I bought my own nuts on, I would eat them and this person would die. And I have to spend a whole day on that plane just because someone would die if I had nuts to avoid the avid antagon again, what I do now before I fly, is I rub myself down in nuts, right? So the joke being that I'm that mental to say that I can't have nuts but I can still kill this person. They're clearly a joke and it never happened. Obviously none of that ever happened. And I did it on Jimmy Fallon and laughed at the next day on Twitter, I'll get I got to wake up to about ten tweets. This woman said, how dare you joke about food allergies? And I was like, what? I've got a daughter who's fighting the allergy. And that says, no laughing matter. It's disgusting. You know how many people die and ignore it? And then she starts acting in Jimmy Fallon and NBC. I don't ignore it. And then she said, you should never joke about food allergies. So that was a real deal. So I sent back, I joke about cancer, AIDS, famine and the Holocaust, and you're telling me I shouldn't joke about food allergies? And she sent back, yes, but the Holocaust didn't kill children with how important her thing is, which is human. We're all like it. She can see the jokes. She can see the jokes about the Holocaust family. And she gets it. She gets the joke. She gets the irony. But she can't see the wood for the trees because it means something to her. So her emotions overwhelm the critical aspect of this. If she had her own way, all those other jokes are okay, but not that one. And everyone's a bit like that. I've had it before. I did a routine on an early thing about Anne Frank. When I joke about I said, I've been watching a lot of Discovery Channel and the History Channel. Ask me anything about sharks and Nazis, and I say about how amazing. I'll go, Sharks are amazing. Nazis horrible. Sharks are amazing. They can sense blurred one part in a million. I do all this thing about sharks. A shark would have found Anne Frank like that. But the Nazis so stupid. Every day they go, what's that noise? What's that tapping? And I mime the typewriter. I go nothing. Rats move on. Anyway, I do this routine that the Nazis can't find Anne Frank. Like she's up there just typing away. And I got a letter from a Jewish society in America saying, we enjoyed the show. We enjoyed the startup. We enjoyed everything. So we were very disappointed about jokes about Anne Frank. I sent back there, but, you know, I was joking about famine and cancer, and I thought, yeah. I went, well, I'm joking about that. I've got nothing. I think it's a terrible fit. And I explained to them, I go, I joke about the terrible things. It doesn't mean I condone them. I'm the same person as you, I think. And they went, oh, thank you for your explanation. And it's like they've never worked out. Yeah, it's amazing that that would actually have been information to them. Exactly. But I get it. It's hard. It's hard to divorce yourself and what people I've done it on Twitter before. I've said, what should never be joked about? What should never be joked about? And people nice, normal people sincerely answer and of course, every answer is funny because they've imposed this, like one person said, losing two children, right, setting the bar at two rather than one. And my brain was, he lost two. This is very specific. Like he could deal with it. It's mind blowing with the confidence that they say losing three children is funnier. Yeah, I know. But also between them, they listed every disease and any specific disease is funny because they didn't list all the others. Why didn't they list all the others? That's brilliant. So, no, there is no joke about there's a real irony here. I guess irony captures the shape of it. Some of the same people. So when I think about, let's say, hiring someone and having to worry about their history of tweets, right, is there something in this person's history that is going to blow back on me or them and become a problem? Arguably, I shouldn't think much about that. I don't tend to think much about that. But that is something that many people think about now. Whereas you could hire someone who has been convicted of murder, right, serve their time, and you are now part of their redemption story. And the same people who would try to destroy you for having hired someone who's trailing some bad tweets would celebrate you for hiring someone who killed a family and has been brought back into some sphere of redemption and forgiveness. Well, that's the thing, isn't it? I think, same as you, I'm an atheist, but there's a couple of things I quite like in the Bible, and one is, he was without sin cast the first stone. I think people have forgotten that, particularly on social media. I've never seen such vindictive people wanting blood and want to destroy people because they're on the wrong side. And again, it's tip for tap. People are doing it. Well, if you're doing that, I'm doing this. And I did a tweet a couple of years ago. It was a tweet about freedom of speech. And it was a quote from Churchill, and someone said, you know, he's a white supremacist. And I tweeted back, not in that tweet, he's not. There's nothing to do with it. The quote has nothing to do and it's not enough now that if someone doesn't like you liking someone for some reason, they'll find a completely different reason why you shouldn't like them, because they're not on the right side. No one looks at an argument anymore. They look who's saying it. And if they're on the wrong side, they're discredited. There's no nuance. Like, I did a tweet. I'm a typical old fashioned, lefty socialist, anti racist, antisexist antimophobic kind of guy. But if I tweet about freedom of speech, I'm suddenly all right. And it's true, because it's odd that that's become a right wing thing, because some people think that because free speech could allow you to say awful things, that the concept of speech is the. Wrong thing. That's what's weird. And the only way you fight a horrible hateful speech is nice speech, proving the hateful speech wrong. If you curb free speech, it's an absolute fundamental right that all other rights rely on. And it seems odd to me that people are willing to make exceptions and they come up with strange, nebulous terms like, yeah, not hate speech. I want to go, what's hate speech? It turns out that hate speech is something that anyone doesn't like, that they don't want to hear it, except there are people. So, for instance, and I've gotten some pushback for my position here, but I don't know how closely you followed the de platforming of certain people. Like, obviously Donald Trump is the big one, but before him, Alex Jones. You know, I was certainly in favor of kicking Alex Jones off Twitter and everywhere else he got kicked off of because of what he was doing. I mean, the fact that to be manufacturing lies about parents who have just had their kids murdered hold on, wait a minute now. We're getting into it now because there are loads of caveat to free speech already. There are loads. And I agree with them all. I think I agree with every single one of them. As I said, from libel to slander to food additives, even to watershed and private places, I agree with them all. But the one I don't agree with is someone's right to not hear something they don't like. Right? That's what we can't do. That joke is unpleasant. Well, it might be, but it's that thing you shouldn't pave the jungle. You should put on better boots. You can walk away, you can turn it off. The best form of censorship is your right not to listen. And people get confused what freedom of speech is. They think that freedom of speech is their right to be heard and understood and taken seriously is none of that. You know, it's a very delicate thing, but it is written, there are rules, and all you have to do is look them up. And then, you'll know, we have different rules too. You are governed by things are far more restrictive in the UK. And whenever I hear about these specific cases of people being brought to the attention of the police for having said something that was offensive to public morals or whatever, it gets phrased over there. It sounds frankly insane to me. I mean, that's the problem with the internet, isn't it? That it's global, but rules are local, but it's been going people muddy the water. There's one side that thinks some people want free speech so they can go around saying awful things all the time. Well, that's not true. And even if it was, let's look at that. And then the other side, they do want to say awful things all the time to annoy the other side. So it's this horrible, vicious circle. But that's why we're not in charge. That's why we can't decide whether someone has the death penalty or not. It goes to a court of law. Otherwise, we do things. If one of our friends is murdered and they ask us on the street, what should we do with him? You go kill him. But law takes that out of it, takes out this seeing through anger and all those things. But the deep platforming taking Donald Trump, I'm still torn about that because I'm the same as you. I'm no fan of Donald Trump, never have been. But Twitter saying he's breaking our rules is one thing. But then I think the delicate thing about that is, don't they become a publisher as opposed to a platform? So aren't they then responsible for everyone? Can I now sue people for saying something horrible to me on Twitter? Can I sue Twitter? It's very complicated. I think there are edge cases, certainly, where it's first of all, Twitter has, for this whole time, been deplatforming people for ridiculous things. So by that standard, Donald Trump should have been deplatformed years ago. He literally threatened nuclear war on Twitter. Every single case. You could go down a rabbit hole and argue about it forever. And that's why we have to have principle. And I think people are confused by principle. I think it's a genuinely confusing thing. I get it. I always get it. I get it. When someone backs down because they lose their livelihood or their friends or their career or their family, integrity can cost that's why it's a valuable sort of asset, because integrity can cost people everything. And I get it. I get it why people are scared to say the wrong thing because they can lose a job, and it's easy to say where they shouldn't. But then then someone will say, what about this guy? And you go, well, that's different. That's a different principle. People as I say, people are confused with principle because they have a million examples, and all those examples are wrong. But on the face of it, they look the same. Someone got fired. Why? Well, people don't accept there's a sliding scale of morality. I think that's the problem. There's this weird sort of binary sort that if anyone has done something wrong and you don't like them, they're Hitler. It's as simple as that. You know, who has that? Got in trouble? Someone got in trouble. For what's? That actress who got fired from Disney for saying conservatives like Gina Carano says, a pritius from the mandalorian. She said something like, conservatives are now like the Jews under Hitler, or something like that. The Jews are in the run up to the Holocaust. I actually don't like obviously, I don't support that comparison, but this idea that you can never make a comparison to Nazis or Hitler or the Holocaust. No, this was weird because people on the other side were saying, Trump's like Hitler. So surely that and yeah, it is a fucking stupid thing to say. Also a bad comparison. Ridiculous exaggeration. But that's what metaphor is. That's what analogy is in poetry. People say, I would die for you. And if you start taking everything literally, there is no poetry anymore. Or metaphor. Or exaggeration. Exaggeration. Comedy is exaggeration. Comedy is exaggeration. So it's very difficult. And sometimes it comes down that people aren't smart, but I think sometimes there's malice. I think people sometimes get it, but they don't care. They won't defend someone they don't like on principle because they just want to see them go down. Yeah, this is all too common. The primary sin I've been seeing now for years is that the people who don't like you have added a rule to the rule book that they deem ethical, and it's obviously unethical. If they can figure out the worst possible construal of the thing you said, even when it's obviously not the intended meaning, they will seek to hold you to that and defame you on the basis of that. So, for instance, in this case, Gina Carranos is being reacted to like she's completely disregarding the horror of the Holocaust and thinks that what's happening to conservatives in Hollywood right now is exactly as bad as rounding people up and putting them in the gas chambers. Now, obviously, in our defense, was just lazy and idiotic, but no one actually believes she believes that, right? I know. But if stupid was a crime, we'd all be in jail. I understand there's degrees of damage. Sometimes all people want to it's different with an individual shouts it out of a window. And when people think that they're given a platform. If she was a presenter and she was saying that on the BBC news, I think there'd be much more of a case, say, of course, yeah, this is irrespective. I really do think I'm uncomfortable talking about these issues. I'm uncomfortable talking about freedom of speech now. I'm uncomfortable because it seems so unjust that if you defend it, you're labeled right wing. And I can say, just pointing out whether someone's left or right wing doesn't win the argument. But you know what it does to them? Someone who thinks it is fundamentally wrong. And let's not forget the people on all sides think they're right. They actually think they're right. They've convinced themselves that everything on this side is right and everything on that side is wrong or they've gone. Not everything on this side is right. But if we can take down one of their generals, we'll win the war. Some of it is tactical. It is tactical, and I don't want to be caught up in it. I don't want to be fired or hated or for something I said that I didn't mean. But as you say, it doesn't matter how clear you are. They take it out of context and they decide your motives. But the most frightening one is easily in ten years time, this conversation could get us both fired. Well, I hope to have a good laugh when that happens. I'll see you. I'm going to have a tea now. I mean dinner. Tea means dinner. Well, tea, I think it's a working class thing. I used to say breakfast, lunch and tea. Tea was like, 06:00, but I think pastry will say breakfast, lunch and dinner at eight. It's funny, as I get older, I'll eat at seven, I'll be in bed at half ten, we watch some, like, European dramas and they're saying things like, oh, we'll see your dinner tonight. Yes, I'll pick you up at ten. I want to go. Fuck off, will you? I'll be in bed, then. Pissed. You're not pissed. Yeah, you and you and P diddy. Right. All right, then. Brilliant. See you later./n
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+I'm recording this on March 17, 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic becomes a reality for most of the globe, many of us are at different stages in our understanding of what's happening. Reports out of Italy are, frankly, terrifying. And the United States, as of 48 hours ago, it seems, has finally understood what's coming. And it's clear that that understanding has come too late to respond in a way that really would have been optimal. So I want to talk about meditation in the context of a growing emergency, because on the one hand, it can seem like the most dispensable of things. Who has time to meditate in an emergency? But I want to suggest to you two things that's the wrong way to think about your resources. In any emergency, but particularly in this one, all the usual considerations are reversed. This is a very strange emergency. This is an emergency in which the most effective contribution you can make to your own well being and the well being of others is to stay home. Unless your presence out in the world is critical for the survival of others, if you can possibly afford to stay home, you should do that. I won't rehearse the epidemiological arguments here. You've heard a lot about them, but that is absolutely clear. So you are being forced into a kind of retreat, right? You very likely have more time on your hands, and now you're left alone with your mind and with the stream of information coming to you through social media and the news and the phone calls from worried friends and family. And now you have a choice of what to do with your attention. So this really is a unique situation. This is something that most of us have never experienced. And at this point, the reality of it is only beginning to set in. This is also a situation in which, because we're dealing with a contagion, a biological contagion and a social contagion, the spread of fear and bad ideas. Contagion is the order of the day here, because that's the case. Our responsibility to get our head straight seems unusually acute. We affect people very directly in a crisis like this. All too directly. If you don't take sufficient care with your hygiene here, you literally put the lives of others at risk. And mindfulness. A basic awareness of what you're doing with your hands is, in many cases, the only tool you have to keep you and others safe. Many of us grimly laughed at the video of the public health spokesperson who, at a press conference, was insisting on the importance of no longer touching one's face in public, only to then demonstrate her total lack of self awareness by licking her fingers before she turned the page of her speech. I think I tweeted at the time, how can we avoid touching our faces if we have no idea what our hands are doing? That really is a problem. So I want to talk about this basic situation. And I'm speaking to those of you who understand the value of meditation and have made it a practice. I know that even many of you who have a practice are struggling now to do it in the context of this increasingly stressful situation. But I'm also speaking to those of you who are just beginning and are not yet sure of training attention in this way. And I'm speaking to those of you who are frankly skeptical of the whole enterprise. I'm sure many of you think that something as a feat and apparently inward and impractical, as paying attention to the breath or to the nature of your mind, can be safely ignored under conditions like these. So I'm speaking to everyone. I hope what I have to say is useful. But before I begin speaking about meditation per se, I want to linger on this point about contagion. And I'm not just talking about the virus. I'm talking about the way we affect one another. I'm talking about our ethical and emotional entanglement with our friends and family members and with the wider world at this moment. Everything we say and do and how we say and do it affects the minds of others. And many people are worried about spreading panic at this moment. Honestly, I've been worried about convincing people that this situation has to be taken seriously and that we should have begun the self quarantine that is now being imposed on many of us several weeks ago. So whether you think people need to be comforted or have their concern aroused, it really matters what you communicate and how you communicate it. And I know that in my personal interactions with people in the last few weeks, I felt in myself an agitation which is ultimately unnecessary and unhelpful and quite personally toxic. And it is something for which mindfulness, as a quality of mind, is really the only remedy. For instance, if I'm speaking with my wife or my daughters and I have an ambient level of anxiety running in the background, I either notice that or I don't. And if I don't, everything is coming from that place. Whatever message I'm imparting, I'm imparting my own stress in those moments, and it's contagious, and its effects are there to be seen in those moments. I am no comfort to my daughters, one of whom is definitely old enough to understand the situation we're in and to worry about it, right? And there have been moments where my wife Annika has said, listen, you need to take a moment and relax. You're too agitated. You're not good company right now. Very appropriately putting the onus on me to get my act together. But without a real insight into the nature of anxiety through mindfulness, I would simply have no tools with which to follow that advice. Yes, I could go watch television, I could go work out, I could go divert myself, but I couldn't actually respond in the moment by releasing the stress, simply letting go of it, standing free of it and beginning again. That takes training. That is a skill. It's every bit as much a skill as being able to ride a bike or perform a handstand. Either you can do it or you can't. And practicing mindfulness is the way you learn to do it. So I view mental training very much like physical training as, among many other things, a kind of disaster preparedness. Right. Who will you be on the most stressful day of your life when you lose your job or when someone close to you gets sick or dies? You will only have the mind that you have built for yourself. You will only have the skills that you've acquired. And honestly, the writing is on the wall here. We are all going to experience in a wide variety of ways an extraordinary amount of stress in the coming months. There are very few occasions in life when you can more or less guarantee a kind of common fate for societies. I think war is probably the only other example I can think of. We have all been inducted into a war of sorts and we really need to take care of ourselves and those around us. And again, what is so unusual about this situation is that unlike almost any other crisis, the thing that is being asked of us, unless we happen to be doctors and nurses or working directly to keep the supply chain moving, the greatest contribution we can make at this moment is to do nothing to stay home. And many people are saying this could last for weeks. I can't say I know what I expect here, but I don't see what the off ramp would be apart from a true breakthrough in effective treatment or a vaccine. And I have to believe that both of those things are many months away. So virtually all of us have a lot of time on our hands at the moment. And the challenge, certainly in every place where quarantine is voluntary, the challenge will be to maintain this condition of social distancing and this very quickly becomes a mental health challenge. We are deeply social creatures. It is quite telling that solitary confinement is considered a punishment inside a prison. People seem to prefer the company of even murderers and rapists to the prospect of being locked alone in a room with their own minds. And that is because an untrained mind, which is to say a perfectly normal one, can be an extraordinarily unhappy place to be in your own mind can be terrible company. And if it is, you can be sure it's less than ideal company for others. So if you care about your own sanity and you care about offering effective support for the people around you, it's worth paying attention to the mechanics of your own mental suffering, your own anxiety and self concern and agitation because the alternative is just to promulgate your unhappiness to others. So, a few thoughts on anxiety in this circumstance. Well, first we should acknowledge that anxiety is very useful. It's not something that you'd want to banish entirely from your mind. It's a signal. Right? It is the emotional valence of certain thoughts, perceptions, social interactions that gets your attention. People who are incapable of feeling fear are deprived of a response to life that has an obvious evolutionary rationale. There's no mystery as to why we readily become afraid. This has protected us physically and socially for eons, right? So it's not a matter of getting rid of anxiety or fear, but what you can do, what you want to do, what those who care about you wish you could do, is let go of these emotions when they're no longer useful, right? The difference between feeling acutely anxious in response to new information that demands your attention and being made chronically anxious by that information is total. Those are descriptions of completely different minds. And you really do have a choice of which mind you'll have, just as much as you can choose to maintain your physical health. You can choose what to eat and whether or not to exercise. You can choose what you do with your attention. But to be able to make that choice, you have to notice the mechanics here. You have to notice thoughts as thoughts. You have to notice the peripheral cascade of emotion for what it is as fully divorceable from the thoughts themselves. And you have to learn to pay attention to these processes in a way that allows you to achieve equanimity with them in the present moment. So I'll give you a concrete example of this. So today again is March 17. I was listening to the New York Times podcast, the Daily this morning, where they interviewed an Italian doctor who's working on the front lines of the Coronavirus pandemic outside of Milan, the part of Italy that has thus far been hardest hit. And he's describing the experience of being a doctor in an ICU there. And his emotion comes through, right? He is holding back tears. He's talking about being inundated with desperately ill people and having to triage them with limited resources, literally having to decide whose life to try to save and who to let die. And increasingly, these people are his colleagues, other doctors and nurses who are coming down with COVID-19, the illness born of this virus. And certain things become absolutely clear when listening to this interview. We're now hearing from doctors who are scared and overwhelmed and grief stricken by what they're experiencing. And they are urging us to understand that this is coming to your city too. And I'm hearing this in the context of knowing that my city has been very slow to respond. So as I'm listening to this, I can feel that I'm getting anxious. I'm hearing reports of a tsunami that is coming. I'm hearing about the devastation. And I know that there is no principle of physics that is going to keep this wave from inundating the spot where I'm currently sitting. So what do I do in that moment? Well, there's part of this change in my emotion that is useful. It's getting me to record this piece of audio, for instance. It was directly upon hearing that where I thought, okay, there's something I need to say on this topic that might strike a different note than the podcasts I've recently recorded. So it's energy that I could put to some use, and hopefully some of you will find this useful in turn. But most of the cascade of emotion that began to be kindled there, beyond feelings of just compassion for our collective circumstance, most of it is worth letting go of who I was when I came down to the kitchen to see my wife. It was better for me to be free from anxiety in that moment because there was nothing that would be helped by my imparting a feeling of urgency. So, given my experience with meditation, I was able to notice the machinery here, the thoughts that were getting triggered by listening to this podcast, and the emotions that were being dragged into consciousness by them. And if you don't have enough attention to notice thoughts, they simply seem to become you. If you think, oh my God, we're ten days behind Italy. In ten days, our hospitals are going to be just like this. It's worth understanding the probability of that. It's not worth helplessly ruminating about that because you can't notice thoughts arise in your own mind. Again, the difference is not a matter of whether or not thoughts arise. Thoughts will continually arise in your mind. They're arising right now, competing with your ability to even understand what I'm saying. I'm speaking and you're trying to listen, but your mind is also speaking. If you can't notice this process, it just feels like what you are. Paradoxically, you feel identical to each thought as it arises in consciousness. And now there is so much to think about. Health concerns aside, we are witnessing an economic emergency unfold before us. The US stock market dropped more yesterday than it has at any point in history. Even if there were no coronavirus, even if no one had any heightened health concerns, what's happening to the economy at this moment is devastating. Again, part of that emotional arousal will likely be useful. It will get you to pay attention to things that you should pay attention to, to make decisions. But most of the emotional response will be detrimental to anything you want to do to your relationships, to your own creative and emotional resources that you'll need even 1 hour from now, if you have work that you can do from home, right? If your career is relatively spared by recent events, how useful is it for you to be feeling excruciating anxiety while doing that work? How many minutes of every hour will it be useful for you to feel terrified? These questions answer themselves, right? So you do want to get a handle on this, whether you ever thought meditation was your cup of tea or not. And all I can promise you is that you can do that. But it takes training, and it is training that most of us now have time for, or should have time for. Again, the greatest contribution you can make to society now is to stay home. And many of you are hearing this in places where your government has told you to stay home. So it's a very unusual situation we're in where this feeling of urgency needs to be channeled into solitude and apparent inaction. So I just want to say that all the resources I think I have to give you direct insight into the nature of your own mind in a way that makes a difference. I'm putting all of that into the Waking Up app. This is where I'm talking about these things. And I want to reiterate something here that I have said several times on my podcast and emailed about and tweeted. Both the Waking Up app and the Making Sense podcast are now subscription services. And of course, they have to function like any other business. They both have employees and contractors. But it's very important to me that money never be the reason why someone can't get access to these platforms, right? So if you can't afford a subscription to Waking Up or Making Sense, please send us an email and you'll be given a free one. And if you're a subscriber to Waking Up, you probably already know that you can give free months away on the app to anyone. You can just post a link on social media or text it to a friend. And if you ever hear that someone who has benefited from a month on the app is not subscribed because they don't feel they can pay for it, please remind them of this policy. Because the last thing I want under these conditions of growing economic stress is to become a source of stress for any of you. And with that, I will leave you to the rest of your day. I just urge you to take a few minutes out of it, to pay attention to the nature of your mind./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm speaking with Barbara Tversky. Barbara is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and professor of Psychology at the Teachers College at Columbia University. She's also the president of the association for Psychological Science, and she has published more than 200 scholarly articles about memory, spatial thinking, design, creativity, and she regularly speaks about embodied cognition at conferences. And she was married to one of the most famous and influential psychologists ever, Amos Tursky, who partnered with Danny Conneman in all those studies of judgment under uncertainty. And he would have certainly won the Nobel Prize along with Danny had he lived. Anyway, Barbara and I talk about her new book, Mind in Motion how Action Shapes Thought, and we talk about many topics in this vein. We talk about the evolution of mind prior to language, and the way in which our sense of space and motion have governed our capacity for thinking. We talk about the importance of imitation and gesture, the sensory and motor homunculi in the brain, the information that's communicated by motion, the role of mirror neurons, the sense of direction, natural and unnatural categories, and the way in which our categorical thinking is derivative of our sense of space. We talk about cognitive tradeoffs and other topics. And now, without further delay, I bring you Barbara Tursky. I am here with Barbara Tversky. Barbara, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Thank you. So you have written a fascinating book. I think our conversation will be largely focused by your book, and the book is Mind in Motion how Action Shapes Thought. But before we jump into the book itself, can you summarize what your intellectual history looks like? What have you focused on and who have you been? Well, I won't go back to childhood. Let me start with graduate school in psychology. There's a long story before that. But when I entered cognitive psychology and it was an exciting time, everything was open, brilliant, people were around me, the language was king, and in many ways it still is. And that came from many sources. It came from propositional, thinking and philosophy. It came from chomsky and language. And both of those areas were very much on everybody's mind, exciting us. It came from our own intuitions that somehow, when we're thinking, we're talking to ourselves and even that. So that seemed wrong to me. There's so much thinking that isn't that. And how do those thoughts come and how do the words come? They just pop in our mouth. And it came from psychology, where people were showing that the length of a verbal description predicted your memory for the visual world. So all that struck me as incomplete. We have a huge memory for faces, most of us. We can remember faces that we haven't seen in years. We can't begin to describe them. Same with scenes. And if you think phylogenetically and BrainWise space in one way or another and it's multimodal, occupies half the cortex, it was around evolutionarily long before language came. So it struck me that, first of all, it must have its own logic that's different from language and that, if anything, space served a foundation for language and thinking, not vice versa. So that governed more or less what I was doing. At first it was intuitive. Later, I realized it was pretty systematic. And that helped me carve future research. But in many ways, spatial thinking was marginalized because of the hegemony of language. So people thought it was maybe like music or like smell, some specialized interest, but not central. What seems to have changed that and now everybody's jumping into space was the Nobel Prize in 2012 to O'Keefe and the motors for place cells and grid cells, which seemed to capture our spatial thinking. And then very recent research has shown that those same cells in the hippocampus don't just gather information from all over the cortex to code a place, but they also code events in time. And people, again, gathering multimodal information from the cortex. And that those place cells are mapped in a two dimensional array on the grid cells. So the grid cells in rats map space, but in human beings, they seem to map conceptual relations, temporal relations, social relations. So that helps me argue that spatial thinking is the foundation of thought, not the whole odipus, but the foundation. But that's taken a long time. Well, this is fascinating at first glance, I think we can easily argue about the primacy of space and movement through space because just in evolutionary terms, if you can't move, if you can't sense the environment around you and respond with any action in that space, there's no basis to evolve intelligence or anything else. Intelligence only matters because you can do something with it that affects your survival. A sense of space and the world and a capacity to move within it had to have come online very early and as we know, long before language does. The point you made about describing faces is fairly revelatory about the with regard to the impotence of language compared to a memory. For in this case, the visual object of a face, which we know is represented uniquely in the brain when you imagine trying to describe a person's face. So that others could recognize it on the base of your linguistic description. Apart from describing someone who has a huge scar or who's missing an eye or something, it's a completely hopeless task. And yet, as you say, we instantly recognize faces out of among the thousands or tens of thousands we might recognize instantly. I'm just going to kind of just feeding you more areas where we might go here. The other thing that occurs to me is that our sense of space is really the foundation of our ontology, our sense of what is real or what exists. When you think of the existence of something, you're really thinking of, by default, things in space. And then there are abstract ideas or abstract quantities that people philosophers have wanted to argue for millennia now that have some existence, but because it's not obvious where they exist, that has always been somewhat inscrutable. So when when you think of the things like numbers, right? I mean, does the number seven exist? In what sense is the number seven an invention? In what sense is it a prior reality? Well, the impediment there to our thinking about this seems to be the question of where are the numbers without people? Where would the numbers be? So I would add that our sense of what is real and what can be real is also anchored to this prior sense of space. Thank you. You've gone over a lot of what I tried to do in the book. And number is fascinating because animals, many animals, many species, every day there's something new or another new animal that can count or not really count, but estimate quite accurately. So animals without speech, without any complicated language like ours, can solve all kinds of fascinating problems that are very difficult to solve. Babies can do that. And all of that seems to be without language. So there are other ways of thinking that aren't language. And number seems to be tied very much as you suggested, to space. Those of us who have number words, and not every language has number words, tend to line up numbers on a line. The spacing between numbers affects how we collect terms. In algebra. If you look at the notation system that we now use, and there were many notation systems that preceded it that weren't as successful. The notation system depends on space. The most right hand column are the ones and to the left of that, or the tens and left of that, or the hundreds and so forth. And that spatial way of arraying numbers becomes essential to our thinking, and we do it without even realizing. That's one of the reasons why the Roman numerals screwed everybody up. There are many things you can't do well with Roman numerals. Right. They use space in a complicated way. Right. That didn't work. Right. Exactly right. Space is underlying how we array things in the mind and how we then array them in the world. Our natural state of awareness of ourselves in the world presents the body as a kind of object in the world for us. Most people feel that they're interior to the body in some way is the subject and that their body is out there among the other bodies and vulnerable to the impositions of the environment. How do you think about our sense of embodiment? So I've got five different tracks running in my mind. I'll see if I can keep them and organize them first. I avoided that term because it's used so differently by different thinkers and because it's become a buzzword. And I always worry about buzzwords. They're first celebrated and then vilified as any fad is. So I worried about that. And I thought if I brought it up in a book meant for the general public I'd have to go through all that philosophy and what did Andy Clark mean? What did David Kirsch mean? What did Larry book? And I didn't want to do that, right? But I do think I've shown many phenomena where the body is involved in thinking. Certainly the mirror neuron system that we internalize facial expressions that we see, we internalize actions that we see in our own motor system and often that gets expressed in squiggling and moving the body. In one way we also imitate and that is a way of thinking and it's a way of remembering and it's a way of understanding. So that's one component of embodiment another that I've looked at and other people have looked at is gesture. And there were re externalizing, internal thoughts by setting up some sort of spatial motor representation of whatever it is we're thinking about. So if you ask someone for directions they'll almost inevitably use their arms and their head to indicate how you should move. And often those gestures say more than the words do. The words are more brutal. People can't necessarily express that information well in words. They forget terms and so forth. So you want to watch the gestures. And usually we do. Even implicitly, we somehow pick them up without conscious awareness that we're looking at them or when we're making them, that we make them. So those gestures can serve your thinking. They can also serve my own. So if you sit on your hands and try to describe a route, a complicated route to somebody else, you're probably going to have trouble doing it. And we brought that phenomenon into the laboratory we had. And I wish I could show you the videos because they're quite fascinating. We put people alone in a room. They're reading complicated descriptions of space, locating eight or nine landmarks in an array. And either you're walking through it and this is on your right and that's on your left and now turn right. And now you see that sort of root description or a north southeast west description. So people had to read these. They're hard. We were going to test them. And while they're doing it, 70% of our subjects of our participants are staring at the screen and their hands are essentially sketching a map. So that's an abstraction. Right. It's lines for paths and points. They stamp on the table for places. People do it quite differently, though the lines and dots are pretty similar. We've done the same for explanations of mechanical systems, like how a car brake works. And again, people are reading it. They're enacting it with their body, often in huge gestures, sometimes smaller. People, again, do it differently. And when we tell people to sit on their hands while they're reading, they perform worse on the test. So it's not it's 70%, it's not everybody. But a good portion of people spontaneously gesture. They're not looking at their hands. So somehow that representation, that encoding is spatial motor. It isn't visual. And again, if they do it, they're better blind children gesture. Yeah, that's fascinating. And again, that's not our research, but again, it's and they can't know that their gestures are communicating something to you, or they're unlikely to at four years old. So it seems to be helping their own thinking. And that feels like a mystery to me, that those actions of the body that are actually abstractions are helping you comprehend and remember. And when you watch these people gesturing, you get the feeling, first of all, you see them thinking, and that's exciting, but you get the feeling that the gestures are translating the words into thought. Yeah, I can feel that internally sometimes when I speak, that gesturing is helping me complete a thought and that if I were prevented from gesturing, it would be a kind of impediment. Right. But words, too, I'm happy with. I use them a lot and I rather like them. But if you look at our language, it's again expressing actions on thought. We raise our ideas, we put them forth, we tear them apart. These are all ways we talk about objects. So we're thinking of ideas as objects and acting on them. Lake, off and Johnson went through many of these metaphors, and Tommy and other people before him or before them. But there almost isn't another way of talking about thought except as actions on objects, the role of action and the ways in which we represent it, and the body that can perform it. So much of this is counterintuitive and unconscious, and some of it's an in principle, unconscious. Some of it I think we can become conscious of, or we can become conscious of some of the related facts. I'm thinking of things like the sensory and motor homunculi in the brain, which is the strange proportions with which various parts of the body are represented and tied to action. I mean, so, for instance, we we have a much most people have seen this from a psychology textbook. This is something you talk about in your book as well. But we have much larger areas of neural real estate devoted to representing the hands and the lips than the feet or the shoulders. The fact that those areas are so much better mapped is tied to the fact that we do much more with our hands and lips than other parts of our body and we derive much more information. We can act on the world with much more precision, and yet it's not looking internally. You can't necessarily sense that your sense of your body is warped in that way. And people are surprised when you can perform this experiment on yourself and see just how different your two point discrimination is. If someone puts two pencil tips on the palm of your hand, you can differentiate that it's two with those pencil points very close to one another. But if they do that on your back, it feels like one point even when there's something like I forget an inch or half an inch between pencil points. So it's not necessarily intuitive and available for direct inspection. And so too, with things like you mentioned mirror neurons and these are neurons in the brain that that were discovered by Rizalati's Group and and actually, one of my advisors at UCLA did work, Marco Yakuboni on this topic. And much has been made of mirror neurons and perhaps too much has been made of them, but they're the regions of the brain, and now more than one, which respond to the actions of others. And certainly a case can be made that we understand the actions of others, both their intentions and goals, by mapping them back onto our own bodies, essentially moving in our imaginations as we see other people move. And I think this is something you say in your book. We can notice this in the difference between the way experts will watch certain kinds of behavior. If you're an expert in yoga or ballet or some sport, your brain will show a different response to the movements of another expert performing those disciplines than a naive brain will because you know what it's like to move in that way. I think many of us can appreciate this internally from watching sports where it's different, watching a sport that you've spent a lot of time playing yourself because you know it from the inside. And it's just amazing to see the best people in the world perform that sport because you can sort of emulate what they're doing in your imagination but then they exceed what you've ever done. So I guess I just deluged you with a lot of your own information, but I guess I want to hear whatever you have to say about what's available to consciousness here for us in how we represent the body and the bodies of others and our actions and the actions of others. So I'll start backward? Well, no, I'll go back to the beginning. You've summarized a lot of things that I wanted to say and things that I've learned since then and frustrate me because I want to add them. So going back to the Homunculus map, which is exaggerated, as you say, and we did find that recognizing other parts of other bodies is often more tied to their neural size than it is to their actual size. And those were studies done long ago. If you look at children's drawings all over the world, they tend to be these tadpole drawings that are heads, big heads and arms sticking out and legs sticking out, and the rest those and feet and hands, often lots of fingers. And these, again, seem to be how children think of the body, even though what they're seeing is very different. So I think some of that is coming out nicely, that a child is drawing what they think, and they think of their body as the really big moving parts and functional parts, and not so much the actual sizes. And I get frustrated when parents want drawings to be or teachers to be more realistic. There's something to learn from drawing realistic things. But I also appreciate the expressiveness of drawing what you think, and certainly modern artists full of that and charming and frightening and those kinds of abstractions that are always fascinating. So that's bodies. One research project that I admire, and this is related to the mirror system, is work of Maggie Shafra and her colleagues. So there are these point light demonstrations. You take somebody in a lab, dress them all in black, put lights at their joints and ask them to jump, play Ping Pong, dance, do all sorts of different things. When observers see those light arrays statically, they make no sense at all. You hardly even know it's a body. But when they move, as they naturally move, you can see it's a man, it's a woman. You can see if somebody's happy, you can see if somebody's heavy. You can pick all that up from these lights, and there are fewer than ten of them scattered at the joints. You pick up all that information and you pick it up quickly. Again, implicitly. And it helps small women like me walking dark streets at night to pick up somebody else's movement quickly, so I know if I'm in danger in some way or not. So those skills we need quite quickly. What Shafar and her colleagues did was bring in pairs of people, friends, and have them do these different videos and bring them back three months later and watch those videos. And they were watching videos of themselves, of their friend, and of a stranger who was part of another couple. And their task was to identify what the people were doing, playing Ping Pong or dancing, and that they did pretty well. But they were also asked, who is it? And naturally, not surprisingly, they were better at identifying their friends than perfect strangers, but they were best at identifying themselves. That's actually kind of counterintuitive, because you spend less time actually seeing your own, certainly your gross body movements. You don't actually see your leg movements very much or your body moving through space. So that's kind of surprising. I agree. It's surprising. So what's the theory? And there isn't a better theory than mirror that you watch that movement, you implicitly map it onto your own body and the way your body moves, and it feels right. It's like trying on a piece of clothing and it fits. And here it's trying on a pattern of motion and it fits. It feels like me. So that is, I think, counterintuitive, as you say, and quite surprising and relates certainly to the work that was done later on, recognizing motor activation when you're watching something that you're expert in. The classic experiment was comparing caparea dancers with ballet dancers. And for both observers, both kinds of observers, watching either kind of dance did arouse the motor cortex, but the dance you knew aroused more. And that gets into your observations about athletics. And here again, it's split second inferencing that we're doing nonverbal. There's no way in a fast moving basketball game that you can figure out what your team is doing, what the other team is doing, what they're going to do, who's faking me, right? How do I fake the levels of complexity that are required for those sports are extraordinary. Again, split second. Of course, they depend on expertise and practice and so forth, but none of that is much too fast for words. It just couldn't happen otherwise. So one more thing on the inferencing. This is work of a talented group in Genoa, in Italy, and I worked with them a little bit, but they did the major part of the work. They can show videos of an arm reaching for a bottle and they truncate the video before your hand even touches the bottle. But you can tell from watching those truncated videos whether the person about to grasp the bottle is going to drink from it, is going to pour, or is going to give it to you. And you know that before the hand gets there. So those intentions of other bodies, even normal people, are reading very quickly, it turns out. In this again, I learned later that children on the spectrum have a harder time with that and they also have a harder time making the movements. And as you know, mirror neurons have been implicated in autism. Exactly. Spectrum deficits. Exactly. And in exactly that way. And to think that it's a motor action deficit that underlies this very deep and disorder that seems to have huge implications for people's lives is fascinating. Right, that it's a motor. And again, coming back to motor, it turns out that for people who are aging and I belong in that category, moving and moving in space is more essential to preserving cognitive function than doing cross repositories. Nice. Motion, again, is not just important for our immediate survival, but for our cognitive facilities and certainly for emotional and social and just about every aspect of our lives. Yeah. I want to bring you back to sports for a second because you referenced a study that I hadn't heard of related to this gesture study you just described with videos of reaching behavior. There was a video study of basketball players shooting free throws where they would stop the video before the ball reaches the basket at various distances from the basket. And it showed that basketball players were better than coaches and fans and sports journalists at predicting which free throws would make it into the basket. So you have kind of an expert audience, but still the basketball players themselves were better at making these predictions based on the visual cues. Right. It's probably being mapped in one way or another on their own body and they've had enough practice. People talk about basketball players as being free throw machines that they consent whether it's going to make it or not. That study, I don't think has been done, but it would be nice to do. What about sense of direction? I think we've all been enrolled in a vast psychological experiment where we systematically degrade our sense of direction and also our sense of map reading because we're now totally dependent on GPS. But some people famously have great senses of direction and some people have terrible ones. I can attest that my wife Annika has a sense of direction that's so bad, it's truly perverse. What's fascinating to me about her sense of direction is that it's reliably wrong. It's not just randomly wrong. It actually contains information. She wants to go more often than not in the wrong direction. That is just diametrically opposite the direction we're supposed to be going in. It's almost like she knows what the right direction is and then has to flip it somehow to go in the wrong direction. I don't remember if you touched sense of direction in the book, but indirectly right. And again, there's a long answer there and it's complicated. You can remember routes as procedures. You go down the street, turn right, turn left. You can have a more global map of the environment you're in, but you still have to place yourself in it. So you have this overview perspective and then you have this immediate surroundings perspective where you're placing yourself in it. And that's a trick that's hard and harder for some people than for others. Russ Epstein at Penn has done beautiful work on the myriad components that it takes to navigate space and understand space. So there are levels of understanding space. And I have a suspicion that what your wife is doing is something that one of my kids and I sometimes do. And that's if you enter if you go on a street or enter a store by turning left, when you get out, you turn left again. So then you're in the opposite direction as opposed to reversing the direction and turning rights. So it's a kind of heuristic that that is 90% or 180 off and that might be what? What Anika's problem? I have no idea. My father was hopeless. He kept getting us lost. So it turns out that ability to keep track of yourself in space is independent of other spatial abilities. And that's fascinating too. The spatial abilities are a complex of things and people have tried to make sense of them and interrelate them as some of it three dimensional, some of it two dimensional is some of it imagining yourself moving, imagining an object moving. There are sensible ways of trying to make sense of the abilities, but they don't seem to make sense of the abilities. And navigation seems to be independent of these other spatial abilities. I want to also going back to some of the threads that your question raised, the overview and the root view and perspective taking because that's core in many ways core to our lives taking other perspectives and taking other perspectives on the ground when I'm facing you and I have to explain something to you and do I take your perspective or mine? When I'm interpreting your behavior, am I taking your perspective or mine? And then going above and getting a map of a territory so we can think of those overview maps not just of a spatial array of places, but also of ideas. We said the grid sells map conceptual relation or social relations or political relations. And people can map their social networks, right? These are networks. They're points for people or ideas and the lines between them are the relations between the people or between the ideas. And that's, again, like space we navigate from place to place, a long path. Yeah, I'm actually glad you raised that point about ideas because that's fascinating. In your book, you discuss how categories can be presented to us as natural. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the make and Cents podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Neil degrasse Tyson. Neil probably needs no introduction. He's been on the podcast before, and he's been everywhere else before. He is an astrophysicist who hosts his own podcast, Star Talk Radio, as well as the Emmy Award winning National Geographic shows Star Talk and Cosmos. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and most recently with his co author James Trefo cosmic Queries star Talks Guide to Who We Are, how we got Here and where we're Going. He is also the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. And today we talk about our place in the universe, and we spend much of the time on the question of whether or not we are alone here. So we discussed the famous fermi problem I. E. Where is everybody? And that naturally grades into a conversation about recent events on Earth, where a renewed interest in UFOs has captured a lot of mainstream attention. We also cover the public understanding of science a bit, the impossible existence of flat Earthers who still live among us. And then I try to lead Neil once again into a conversation about politics and attendant moral panics, and you can judge the results of that for yourselves. Anyway, it's always great to speak with Neil, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. And now I bring you Neil degrasse Tyson. I am back once again with Neil degrasse Tyson. Neil, thanks for joining me. Yeah, Sam, I love your show, and I never think of myself being on it so that when I'm on it, it's like, oh, what am I going to talk about? Because all of your guests and all of your conversations are anything that I do just as a scientist and as a popularizer, you kick it up a notch, and you just injected into all of the most controversial things going on in society, and I'm just not that brave. I feel like I should not be on your show. I just feel that way sometimes. Well, I hope not to confirm that hypothesis, but I will lead you to the edge of your courage, and you can pull me back. Okay. But it's great to hear your voice. But before we go all over the place here, I want to just touch upon your book, because you have a new book out, which is Cosmic Queries star Talks Guide to Who We Are, how We Got Here, and Where We're Going. And let's start with the area of just pure scientific interest, and then we can go to points of controversy or not, as the hour unfolds. But this is really a gorgeous book. It's published by National Geographic, so it's really well illustrated. And in reading it, I confess I have not read all of it, but I've read a lot of it, and it just struck me immediately that this is the book you would want to hand to a smart, inquisitive, science interested teenager anywhere from, I don't know, 14 on up. It's just perfectly pitched to, like, a person's first book on science. Was that at all your intention in writing it? It's interesting you say that, because what I learned from my very first book, which was many, many moons ago, I wrote a book, and I said, well, if I'm going to write a book on science, I want to make sure everyone understands everything that's in it, right? And so my first book was a question and answer book on the universe, and I wrote it in a playful way. I had a pen name for the Merlin. Dear Merlin, how does the universe work? And Merlin would recall a conversation with Einstein. It was a fun, playful thing, and all the questions were asked by full up adults when the book came out. I found that when adults read it and they understood everything in it, they thought to themselves, well, this is clearly not for me. This is for someone younger. And I said, wow. So people are accustomed to when they encounter adults, when they encounter a science book, they expect some of it to sit above their head. And so I said, okay. So my next book are going to have two chapters that's guaranteed to be above everybody's head, and no one thought about giving those to kids. But Cosmic Queries, I think, is a celebration of the deepest sources of curiosity that exist within us as humans. And all of those cylinders, if I'm allowed to use an internal combustion engine reference, all of those cylinders are firing for all of us when we were younger. Every day is, what is that? And it's a flower and a tree and a rock, and why is this and why is that? And some of those questions get very deep, like, how did it all get here? And why are we all here? And are we alone? How will it all end? And so that deeper category of question got elevated and put into this book. But the whole concept of Cosmic Queries is stoked monthly. In our podcast, StarTalk StarTalk, we interview celebrities. And I have a comedian who's a co host, so they're a force of levity on a show where content might have their own force of gravity. And I dial those in so that we have a consistent product each time. But one of the more successful variants on that show is called Cosmic Queries where our fan base just simply asks us questions and we culled the deepest subset of those and put them into this book. So for me, it's a celebration of what it is to be human and be on one side of knowing something and want to cross over into another side of enlightenment. And, yeah, it serves the curiosity in us all. I think some adults, they've lost it. And so maybe it'll fan the embers and maybe ignite a flame once again because, you know, it was there when you were younger. So I think that's why you were feeling that way about it because it makes you feel young again and wide eyed. And thanks for noticing the National Geographic DNA in the book. It's a beautiful book. And we didn't stop at just science illustrations. There's art as well, carefully chosen artwork that evokes the themes or the ideas in the narrative. So thanks for calling that out. Is it always an exciting time in astronomy and astrophysics or have there been periods of stagnation analogous to those in physics? I get the sense that in physics, certainly in any given generation, there's an impressive feeling of at least on the theory side of spinning your wheels and not necessarily making discernible progress. But intuitively, it seems like it could be different in astronomy and astrophysics. That's a perceptive point, and let me attempt to address it, whether or not I fully answer it. In physics, what you're referring to, I think, is sort of the revolution or evolution of ideas. And you don't get those every day. You get them maybe once in a generation and all the years in between are filling in the gaps between those ideas. And those don't tend to get headlines even if they're intrinsically exciting to a physicist. In astrophysics, occasionally ideas matter deeply, yes. But what happens more frequently is that weird stuff gets discovered or interesting stuff. Water on the Moon, on the craters of the Moon. A black hole in in the galaxy, in the center of the galaxy. Photograph of the black hole in the center of the galaxy. So things that exist in the universe because the universe is so vast and it has so many different kinds of objects that in all of our catalogs we probably miss something that is one in a million or even one in a billion. And when that gets discovered, that's headlines. And so, no, it doesn't rethink the whole field. But it is definitely fun to inventory and talk about and characterize it and try to figure it out. Now, I did do one thing for a while. I was a postdoc at Princeton. And Princeton has our feature journal, the Astrophysical Journal, all on one wall from his very first episode for his very first issue, 1895 the Astrophysical Journal up to the present. And I thought to myself, Let me do this experiment. And I found the exact middle of that wall of all the journals, and I said, I wonder what date this is. And it was five years ago, so this would be sort of the halfway point. And as I did this, and I kept having it, what I found is that the halfway interval of time was 18 years. It fluctuated between 15 and 18 years. So the total amount that was published doubled every 15. Now, not all of it is quality. You get that, I understand. But as a first pass measure of the pace of things, this was highly illuminating to me. And it said that, yeah, if you're living on the exponential curve, every day looks like you're living in special times. And I remembered going back. I have a book on the sun written by an astronomer named Charles Young. In fact, he was at Princeton in his day. I have two versions of the book. One that came out in, like, the 1880s, late 1880s, and another one came out in the 1890s. It was like the second edition. And like, five years or eight years had gone by. And you read the preface in the second edition. It says, our advances are so great in our understanding of the sun, we had to come out with another. And I'm thinking, you guys have no clue what a great advance is yet. Of course, that's what it felt like. When you're on an exponential growth curve, everybody feels like they're living in special times. The biggest change again, I have a layperson's view of advances in astronomy, really, to take the observational side of things for a moment. The biggest news in my lifetime, I think, leaving aside very sexy things like gravitational waves, is just that the fact that we crossed over from talking merely about planets in our solar system to confirming their existence elsewhere. So we we lost Pluto quite famously, but we gained I don't know how many planets at this point. How many extra solar planets have? Over 4000. Yeah. And it's rising fast. What's the safe assumption now? That our own galaxy has hundreds of billions of planets. Yeah. So we do that calculation, and in this section, are we alone in the universe? But you can ask a different set of philosophical questions, something that might titillate you. You can look at all of the layers of bias that are inherent in how we even go about answering those questions. Because even in your very statement, you said, well, how many planets? Because the life that you know and the life that I know lives on a planet. But maybe life also lives on moons. Maybe it lives in atmosphere. Maybe it lives in gas clouds. So we go through all of the biases. There's a carbon bias, right? We are carbon based life. Some of these biases, I think are fully legitimate. But if you really want to search with as wide a net as possible, also consider the Goldilocks Zone. So much was written and talked about for decades, from the 1950s and 60s, when this concept was first formulated, where we know life thrives needs and thrives on liquid water. So if you're going to stick a planet in a star system, not too close, it will evaporate the water, not too far, it will freeze the water. So there's this zone, this belt around any star where a planet would naturally have liquid water. And you need atmospheric conditions to sustain it, of course, but you're not fighting it. It would happen naturally if the conditions allowed. And so then we learned, wait a minute, the sun is not the only source of energy in town, all right? Jupiter and its tidal stresses on its surrounding moons is a source of energy. So one of Jupiter's moons, IO, is the most volcanically active place in the entire solar system because Jupiter is pumping it with energy. And so now we have to think, if life needs the warmth, warming energy of a heat of a just needs an energy source, why does it have to have a star? And then we learn every model of the solar system that we construct of any star system when it's born, most of the planets that formed are unstable orbits, and they fly out into solar space. It may be that there are more vagabond planets than there are planets bound to their local star systems. So you say, well, that's not a good prospect for life. However, Earth still has energy sources in its core. This is how you get volcanoes and all these mid sea vents that are pumping very hot waters into the bottoms of the oceans. If you're a life form thriving on that, you don't even care if you were ever orbiting the sun, you could be a frozen lake bed, frozen ice on top, but down below, you could be doing the backstroke in your warmed hot tub. So this notion that we want to look for planets and look for habitable zone, the Goldilock Zone, may be needlessly restrictive as we go forward. How have your intuition has been pushed around with respect to the prospect that we are alone versus the prospect, seemingly equally astonishing, that the galaxy and the universe is teeming with life? Have you had changes in the way you weight those probabilities over the course of your life? Yeah, that's a great way to ask that question. I would say the probabilities have, as they've changed, they've changed only because we learned to new things, but not because I had to reevaluate what I was already thinking. I've always been very open to possibilities of the universe. Just given the size and the diversity of objects and the age, practically anything you can imagine being possible, we think is going to be possible. But there's some other really good reasons for some of the bias that we are invoking here. For example, there's a famous episode of the original Star Trek where they encounter a life form that's basically made of rock, and it moves through rock like we move through air, and it's rock based life. And an active ingredient in a lot of minerals is silicon. So it's silicon based life. And this was their attempt to do this in the 1960s. And this was silicon based life as opposed to carbon based life. Well, they didn't pull silicon out of their ass, right? Why do people think of silicon based life? If you go back to the periodic table and remember why elements form columns, the columns have similar valence electrons, which means if you're above or below another element in the periodic table, you can make similar molecules with all the same other atoms. Well, let's find carbon. Well, there it is at the top of the chart, number twelve. What's directly below it? Silicon. So every molecule you can make with carbon, you can make with silicon. So why not create an entire parallel life system where silicon is the base instead of carbon? And so that's a perfectly legitimate chemical broadening of your bias as you go search. My rebuttal to that is you don't need to do that because first, carbon is hugely sticky. It sticks to itself and multiple bonds, silicon also. But what you really went out is that carbon, depending on where exactly you are in the universe, is between five and ten times as abundant. So carbon is already going to be added before silicon figures out how to put on its pants in the morning. And so I don't need to really think of life forms based on an isotope of bismuth or even silicon. So I think carbon is the way to go here, just given its diversity of chemistry that it offers us. And I don't know if I directly answered your question. Oh, have I changed any of my evaluations? Yeah. So the Fermi paradox is what you're dancing around there. And I want to clarify the Fermi paradox because I think most people who invoke it don't know the full weight that it carries. All right, so you can do the thought experiment. Enrico Fermi, the physicist, famously quipped, if there's life in the galaxy, then the galaxy ought to be teeming with life and they would have visited us by now. Where are they? Okay, so maybe they're not there at all. It might be worth spelling out why that seems so logical, I mean, just with respect to any kind of time, which exactly so so you can ask yourself, well, how wide is the galaxy? So 100,000 light years. Okay, so that feels intractable. So let's say you never get to the speed of light, but let's say we get to 20% the speed of light. That means you can cross the galaxy in 500,000 years. All right? But most stars are not the diameter of the galaxy away from each other. They're much nearer. So, for example, Alphas and Shuri system from Earth four light years away, 20% the speed of light. You get there in 20 years, okay? And you can star hop. So imagine this is one of those I forgot whose machine they got named after. You go to a planet and then it's with a robot, and then the robot builds two copies of itself and then they launch to other planets, okay, or even people or aliens. So they arrive on a planet and then they say, okay, time to go to more planets. And now you go from one planet to two to four to eight. There are star systems, it turns out if you did, that only going to two. Once you land on one, it's two to the end power, right? So however many years are loaded in your N, you can easily, completely populate the entire galaxy in an evolutionary timescale. Easily. You can do it within tens of millions of years. But the planet is around for billions of years. So, so where is everybody? That's the, that's the question. And, and the the other intuition, the the other element to this picture is that if your complex life is ubiquitous, you would expect certain civilizations to be millions of years ahead of us. Because given nearly 14 billion years to start this experiment, it would just be a miracle if all complex life were precisely the same point in its technological evolution. So to find ourselves not surrounded by evidence of technological alien life is to suggest that it might not exist. Because again, where is everybody? Yeah, and you're right, we are very Johnny come lately in this. First you have the 14 billion year old age of the universe. Then you have the five, four and a half billion year old solar system. And then ask, how old is the branch of the tree of life called primates? All right, if primates were your best chance or mammals, let's say, were your best chance of, quote, intelligence on Earth, we really didn't get underway until after the dinosaurs. And that's basically yesterday, 65 million years ago, and the Earth had been around for hundreds of millions of years cranking out life. So imagine a planetary system that got a billion year head start on us. If there's any forcing vector towards intelligence, we would be dwarfed by any such intelligence that manifested itself. And the comparison I like making, and I'll get back to Fermi in just a moment, is this comparison. You always hear about the DNA between the chimp, bonobo, let's say, and a human. It's some high 99, whatever, percent identical DNA. And the people who want to keep thinking humans are special will say, but what a difference that half a percent makes. And they they crowd themselves into that half a percent and celebrate all that we are that chimps are not. But I'd rather pose the question a little differently and say, suppose the difference between humans and chimps is as small as a half a percent DNA in the intelligence vector, whatever that vector is. Suppose it is that small. What do you say? Well, what do you mean? We have the Hubble telescope and poetry and philosophy and they stick a Twig in a hole to get Termites out. And I say, well, maybe the difference between those is small. You don't want to think that way, but imagine it. So now let's imagine an alien who is 5% along that same vector beyond us that we are beyond the chimp. What would we look like to them? No reason for me to think that. We wouldn't look any different to them that chimps look to us because a smart chimp can stack boxes and reach a banana. Toddlers can do that. So what does a smart human do? Well, we can roll Stephen Hawking forward here's a smart human, and they'll chuckle and say, oh, he derives black hole theories in his brain, just like little Timmy over here who just came home from preschool. So and and that's a half a percent. So now imagine 5% 10% and their simplest expression of an idea would transcend our smartest capacity to comprehend in the same way. You walk up to a chimp and say, what time is it? They have no idea what your time is. You know, you want a cup of coffee at a Starbucks? Going to catch a plane? Do you want to go to the library? None of this makes any sense to them and they're our simplest sentences. So I think about this all the time, leaving me to wonder whether the search for intelligent life SETI is itself a bit of hubris. Because it assumes that some other species has our intelligence and not something so far beyond us that they would take no interest in who and what we are. One of the solutions to the Fermi paradox is that we are to the aliens what worms are to us. You don't walk down the street and a worm crawls out from the moist soil. You'll say, Gee, I wonder what that worm is thinking. Let me go understand that. Unless you're a wormologist. No, you're not thinking that. So one of them is that they studied Earth and there's no sign of intelligent life to interest them. But I have my favorite explanation for the Fermi paradox, and forgive me for not remembering who to credit this to, but I don't take ownership of this idea. It's whatever drive is required for you to want to colonize planets with abandon, right? You go to a planet, you have offspring, and they colonize two planets and they go two planets. Whatever that drive is has the seeds of its own unraveling built within it. Because what happens when the planets start becoming scarce? You're urged to do this risking life and limb, that means it's deep in you. You need that planet. You want that planet. And so you go out, and then there's somebody else trying to claim the planet, and then you have interstellar warfare competing over the limited real estate of the planets in the galaxy, and then you think it's a version of the Great Filter argument that I believe is original to Nick Bostrom. He certainly spoken about a lot. He might have gotten it from somebody else, but I think it's Bostrom. But the more generic idea here is that it puts most of the onus on technology. Once you get technically sophisticated enough, you have almost certainly built destructive technology. And whether this is specifically weapons of war or artificial intelligence or something that gets away from you and sufficient technical prowess to colonize the galaxy becomes self terminating. But almost by definition, there's too many ways to kill yourself and to have all your incentives as a species not aligned that you self extinguish. So I would say that would be a subcategory. Or maybe they're both categories of the self destruct phenomenon in high intelligent creatures. Because what this specifically implicates is the same urges that infuse colonial Europe, right? So here you have Spain, Portugal, England, the Netherlands, and they all want to conquer the world. So initially, they have their own territory, but then they encounter each other, and then the entire system implodes because they can't share it, because in them, they want to own it. And so this notion has already played out in this world, and that was the implosion of Europe and its colonistic ways, going from the age of the great explorers to the age of the great collapse of the colonial empires. So it's not a stretch to imagine this as sort of a fundamental truth without having to analyze the psychological profile of the alien. It's just one of these basic, simple facts that might manifest no matter the life form. Well, to back up for a second and to bring it back to fermi. How has your sense of the proliferation of life, or lack thereof, changed once we discover things like amino acids in meteorites and in the tales of comets, which is to say that the building blocks of life seem fairly ubiquitous. Yeah, and that's part of what we all find encouraging for those who are rooting for life elsewhere, because I can encapsulate that statement in a simple fact. If you rank order the abundance of chemical elements in the universe, the number one element is hydrogen, number two, which is chemically active. The number two is helium, which is not chemically active, but it's there. But it's a big number two. Number three is oxygen. Number four is carbon. Number five is nitrogen. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So everything's on the map, out of the five top elements in the freaking unit and the 7th is a ham sandwich are contained in what we call biochemistry. And so that's why, like I said, if we were made of some exotic, like I said, an isotope of bismuth, you might have an argument to say god did something special on Earth because this stuff is not found anywhere else. If anything, life is opportunistic. It makes very good use of what it has. And one other fact, which is not often cited, but it has to be in the equation is the earliest fossil evidence of life. It comes in around 3.8 billion years ago. And Earth began 4.54.6. So for the longest while, decades, people subtracted those two numbers and said, all right, life took 600 million years. That's still pretty fast given that we're four and a half billion years old. Okay, that's still pretty fast. It's small compared to the life, the, the life expectancy of Earth. But it's even better than that. Again, I'm value judging the speed of this because the early Earth was subjected to what we call the period of heavy bombardment. There were two such periods. Heavy bombardment. Earth is still the polite way to say it is accreting matter from the nascent solar system. The more violent way to put it is it is being slammed constantly by comets and asteroids because it has a strong gravity in its region, it's clearing out its orbit and all that material ends up going somewhere and it lands back on Earth. And so the Earth is gaining mass. And by gaining mass, it gets gains even more gravity. It becomes even better at it. And over that time, Earth's surface is sufficiently pelted that the temperatures prevent the formation of complex molecules, because under high temperatures, the molecular bonds break. And every time you try to experiment with it, it gets broken apart. So it's not conducive to the experimentations of life. So if you're going to start the clock, wait until the period of heavy bombardment is over. That's like 4 billion years ago, not 4.6. So now you start the clock. Now Earth has some chance of cooling down and making complex molecules and starting the birth of biochemistry. And there it is. Earth went from organic molecules to self replicating life within between one and 200 million years in the early universe and in the early Earth. And that's stupefying. So if it did it that fast, using native ingredients on a planet just formed like anybody, any other planet, then no one who studied this problem is walking around saying we're alone in the universe. Although there is the additional improbability, whatever it is, of getting from life single cell and I guess multicellular to technologically advanced civilization. You can argue that we have barely accomplished it and there's really no sign. But for us, there's no sign of natural selection producing anything like civilization without us. So again, we're sampling this in a very narrow time window. And who knows what the next million years might bring? But I guess let me. Just sharpen up your the fermi intuition here. If you had to bet or assign a probability to one of two outcomes or one of two states of affairs. One, we're alone with respect to complex life or or technological sentient civilization building life. So there might be microbes elsewhere in the galaxy, but there's nothing like us pining for other star systems versus the galaxy was or is teeming with advanced life. And we and for whatever reason, we don't see it. Which seems less astonishing to you or less unlikely? Yeah, I have to think about it the way you worded it, but let me it's because I don't entirely agree with part of your premise. So look at beavers. Beavers are mammals. They have large brain like relative to other branches on the tree of life and they fully exploit the resources in their environment. There's a tree. I'm going to use that tree to dam this river and I'm going to make an underground den. All right? Are we any different from that? We use trees. Well, first we use grass to make huts. That was available. Then we use trees. That's pretty convenient. Then we found metal. Oh my gosh, let's use that. Okay. And then we learned how to make alloys. Let's do that. And then we learned chemistry. Let's do that. So, yes, it takes thresholds of intelligence to exploit your environment even more. But the simple act of exploiting an environment is not unique to being human. That's my first point. Second, the Romans were no less smart than anyone who followed them. All right? Smart in terms of what their brain could figure out. But they didn't have alien communication technologies, they didn't have radio telescopes, they didn't go into space. So imagine the Roman Empire and aliens are waiting for a return signal back through space and no return signals. They're still trying to do arithmetic with their Roman numerals. That was that was the problem. Yeah, they needed the Arabic numerals for that one. Yeah, but people forget that Roman numerals do not have a zero. You cannot represent a zero with Roman numerals. And that's why the calendar, the Christian calendar, Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar, there's no year zero. It went from one BC to Ad one because no one could wrap their head around it. So, yeah, arithmetic is hard. I think they would have figured something out. I think they were smart folks in the fullness of time, I take your point and we should be humbled by how much change can occur over vast time scales. Right. You look at the rest of what's on Earth with us now and it's hard to imagine anything evolving into the kind of species that could do more than we're managing to do. But we're just looking at asynchronous lines of evolution, right? And given millions of years, basically everything is potentially available. And millions is short compared with billions. Right? A billion is 1000 times longer than a million. And here we were, some kind of fist size or smaller shrew or some kind of rodent running underfoot, trying to avoid becoming orders for trex. And that's how it would have stayed if the dinosaurs didn't just get unlucky and an asteroid takes them out. Prize open the niche, an ecological niche that allows mammals to evolve into something more ambitious than a rodent. Meanwhile, rodents are still among us. So I want to impress upon people, if they didn't otherwise sort of wrap their head around it, that we went from rodents to humans in 65 million years. And that's a vanishingly small fraction of a billion years, and Earth has been around for 4 billion years. So now here's the tricky part. If you line up this is a little thought experiment. If you just lay Earth's timeline out on the wall, left to right, beginning to end, and then you blindfold yourself, like pin the tail on the donkey. And then you walk up to it, you don't know where you are, and you pin the tail. Most of the places on that timeline, you pin it. Earth only had single celled life. Complex life was relatively late last half a billion years, and then what we call intelligent life in big brain mammals even smaller than that. The point is, if Earth is any indication, if it ever gets to that, then it's fast. So imagine it got to that sooner or the other side. Flip side of that is, imagine the asteroid never came. There'd still be dinosaurs here today. You know how I know that? Because dinosaurs were around as a community for 300 million years before the dinosaur, before the asteroid. So what's another 65 on top of the 300? They'd still be here. So what this tells us is what we think of as intelligence clearly is not important for survival. Otherwise roaches would have really big brains, right? So maybe the big mistake here is thinking that intelligence is an inevitable consequence of evolution when all it would have taken was one broken branch. Then that could have taken out all the mammals from the vertebrate chain, and then we would not have anything like we think of today as intelligent creatures. Yeah, but if you run this experiment billions upon billions of times, well, there you go. As long as we have on the assumption on the assumption that we're by in no way unique and we being species of Earth and if multicellular life is ubiquitous in the galaxy or in the universe and you just have those hundreds of billions, ultimately trillions of similar experiments to run, then it's very difficult to imagine that you don't have, at minimum, tens of millions of cases of advanced technological life. That's how you get to win the argument in the end. You say, oh, what are the chances of that happening? One in a million, okay? One in a million. And there's 100 billion star systems out there. So run the numbers. Yeah. No one is thinking we're alone out there. Yeah, but is that actually the opinion in the field that if you polled people at, at a, a conference of physicists and astrophysicists and astronomers, you think a large majority would say that advanced life is ubiquitous in the universe? I think the only sensible way to do it is to just, we have a sample of one. So let's just start with that and ask, what fraction of the total timeline of Earth has Earth had? What we would call intelligent life or big brained life, and what fraction of that period has it had intelligent the Drake equation. And what fraction of that period has intelligent life with technology. So if you do that, then that gives you a set of fractions that you can layer onto the entire stellar population of the galaxy. And even using highly conservative estimates, you do not come out with us being the only life form around. And like I said, if you look at the actual map of the galaxy where we have found these 4000 exoplanets, it's this tiny little circle around the star, has to be close enough to get good data to know whether it has another planet around it. And you say to yourself, gosh, this is what leads to that analogy that comes from the SETI Institute with Jill Tarter and Seth Shastak, where they say, if you're going to say, well, how could have we found life, we haven't found life yet. And that's like taking a cup, an empty glass and scooping it into the ocean and pulling it out and saying the ocean has no whales from this tiny sample of the vast ocean that you know you have yet to search. Yeah. What do you think the limit is on getting a truly optical look at an exoplanet? Any of these large telescopes that you describe in your book coming online, how close are we to seeing anything of interest in another solar system? Yeah, that's a great question. So let's ask it another way. If you're on the Moon, how well can you see sort of cities on Earth? Not very well. Those images you see on the screen savers where you have the space station orbiting, they pumped up the brightness of those cities so they can stand out as beautifully as they do. But if you're going to go a quarter million miles away from them and stand on the Moon, become much less visible. And that's our nearest neighbor in space. And allow me to quantify this. Imagine a schoolroom globe, and I'm always sad because there's always color coded. And so you think of Earth as a place divided by countries, not unified by land and water and atmosphere. That's just me getting sentimentally cosmic on it. But you can ask, well, what altitude above that globe would you find the International Space Station? Half the people I've asked that come away about a foot from it? No, it's three eighths of an inch above the surface. All right. Now, where would the moon be? Well, we're so jaded by how often we see the Earth and moon drawn in a textbook, people tend to put the moon maybe a foot or two away. No, the moon is 30ft away. Where would Mars be? A mile away. Space is vast. So to directly image a planet yes, that could be on our horizon, but to image it in a way where we're going to see roads and cities, I don't I think that's unrealistic, but I have a I say that but smiling because I know what we're already up to. You want to see life forms waving back at you. What I want to see is any evidence in the atmosphere that anybody's alive on that planet surface, and we call them collectively biomarkers. Right. I didn't know this. I had to figure this out. One of these, my own that I gleaned as I got older and wiser and learned. And so you grow up and you see these science fiction stories and take Star Trek again, for example. They never donned spacesuits. Do you ever wonder about that? Never. They're walking around on all kinds of planets. No spaces. Okay. I also wonder about the suits they were wearing, but that's not a matter that's the were too young. Okay, I remember. All right, so I get to pull rank on you with my age. So they never wear spaces. Why? Because they have sensors and they say, Captain, is an oxygen nitrogen atmosphere. Okay, let's go down. As though if you searched enough, you would just simply find oxygen nitrogen atmospheres. What I didn't know at the time, and I don't think they knew either, is that we only have oxygen because we have life. Right. That's the only reason. And not only because we have life, but life is constantly making oxygen, because oxygen chemically is highly reactive. So if you start out with a planet that's born with oxygen, it'll go away. It is going to react with all manner of things, and it'll go to zero in very little time. So the fact that we have an active fraction 2020 1% air of oxygen tells you something, is constantly making it, and that's the photosynthesis in plant life. So if you find a planet that has a stable supply of oxygen, oh, my gosh, bump that to the top of the list. And there are other unstable molecules like methane, although there are other ways you can make methane. But the people who are in the business of studying the chemistry of atmospheres, they've got a laundry list of chemical of molecules that will be the product of all kinds of life that we know goes on here on Earth. And one of them was phosphine. You may remember the news stories. They found phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, where it's not so hot, scalding hot on the surface. You come up a little, it's a little cooler. Phosphine. No one can figure out how you make phosphine other than by the natural chemistry of life itself. So that made headlines. It's been questioned for other reasons since then. But so we have this cottage industry of people studying the atmospheres of exoplanets now that we have the catalogs of exoplanets ready for our perusal. And I think that's where the answers are going to come. And what and one last point about that is I joke that if you find a planet that has hydrocarbons in their atmosphere but also smog and soot and other things, that would be the sure sign of the no intelligent life at all polluting its own air. And the last thing I'll say about the atmosphere is the thickness of our atmosphere is to Earth as the skin of an apple is to an apple. Right? So we think of this as this huge ocean above us when it's not, and it's actually quite fragile. So this connects rather nicely to recent news stories about the aliens in our midst. And I got to imagine you were hit with all manner of communication of human origin about this behind the scenes, because even I was. And this is not my wheelhouse. What we've had we're recording this in just edging into the second week of June. And so we've had recent disclosures in the press that the Pentagon and the off the Office of Naval Intelligence primarily have thrown up their hands and have admitted that we are in the presence of technology that they can't explain. And they've put forward some classified evidence, apparently, that is supposedly better than the stuff that has leaked out, and the media has seized upon this. They've been really prominent stories that were not at all skeptical and not marshaling any of the legacy of, you know, skeptical debunkings of this kind of material in their reporting. And so we have 60 Minutes and The Washington Post and The New Yorker, the New York Times really, more or less everyone in sight has given a very fair and one might even say credulous hearing to these reports. To my eyes, it's just not really clear what's going on. I've said this on someone else's podcast, on, on Lex Friedman's podcast, that, that I had received a sort of an advanced communication in advance with respect to the calendar, not with the details that this was coming. And I was urged to sort of prepare my brain to receive these startling disclosures so that I could help shape a public conversation about this new consensus, which purported to be again, it seems to me that the shoe really never quite dropped, and I want to get your opinion on this. But what I was asked to anticipate was that the people who are best placed to assess the evidence, the people who have the radar evidence, the Navy pilots who have had the dashcam video, the analysts who have poured over these data for now several decades, they have formed a consensus that there's no way what they're seeing is a mere artifact of glitches in our technology. It does not admit of any truly skeptical interpretation. No. We are in the presence of technology that is so advanced that it could not be of human origin, and we don't know what to make of that fact. I guess the first question before we get your full download neil, did anyone contact you and ask you to sort of prepare your head for what was coming? Yeah, I've been interviewed at least a dozen times in the last ten days, most recently a few hours ago for the daytime. ABC showed a few, so you are correct to recognize if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the waking up podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay. Housekeeping here. I have a new event series to announce. It's called experiments in conversation. And I'll be kicking this off with Eric Weinstein in January. January 28 will be in Detroit at the Fillmore. On the 29th, we'll be in Milwaukee at the Papst Theater, and on the 30th, we'll be in Chicago at the Chicago Theater. And the idea with Experiments and Conversation is to launch a series of events that is about more than my events. I'll participate in many of them, especially in the beginning. But there's so many great speakers out there that I want to create a speaking series that could eventually take place in many cities simultaneously. It'll be conversation based. These are not lectures. We've been thinking internally about this being Ted for two, where the Ted conference has significantly refined and even institutionalized the short lecture. We're going to attempt to do something similar for Conversations. And to this end, we'll be looking for public intellectuals and creative people who are willing to take some risks and think out loud on important and controversial topics. We're looking for people who are not cowed by the prospect of saying something so surprising or counterintuitive that people might take offense at it. I can't tell you how stifling the current environment is for speech. With the exception of podcasts, it is just crazy out there. So I'm hoping this series can help us all recalibrate a little bit. Now, in a perfect world, there will one day be hundreds of events like this happening each year all over the world. But we'll see how it goes with the first three. And I really can't think of a better person to kick this off with than Eric Weinstein. Eric is one of the most consistently interesting and courageous thinkers I know. He is a real polymath, and in my experience, we can talk about almost anything, and it's fun and illuminating and just it's what a conversation should be. So he was a natural starting point when thinking about this series, but eventually I will turn to him and say, who else could you have a great conversation with? And he might go off with that person and do an event in a city near you. And I'll reach out to some of my other favorite podcast guests and people I admire and ask the same question, and the conversations will spread. Anyway, this is all starting in Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago in January. So if you live in or near any of those cities and you want to come out for a live event, here's your chance. I don't get to your part of the world very often. In fact, I've only spoken once in Chicago, and I've never been to Milwaukee or Detroit. So come on out. Presale tickets are available to podcast subscribers right now. If you're a support of the podcast, either through samharris.org or Patreon, you can log into my website and you'll see a presale code on my events page. And that's samharris.org events. And then tickets go on sale to the general public on Friday, November 2. So subscribers only have a few days of exclusive access this time around. Apologies for that. Live Nation collapsed the schedule on me for some reason. You guys usually have a full week, but not the case here. Anyway, I'm looking forward to those events, and Eric and I will try to make sense. Okay. The waking up course. The app is now available on Android. I'm very happy to say that didn't take too long at all. Many of you feared that it would take years, understandably so. But no, it took a mere six weeks beyond the iOS build, so enjoy that. Please know we're continually updating it. Insofar as you find bugs or improvements that should be made, please tell us@wakingup.com. And again, your reviews are incredibly helpful, so please keep those coming. Let's see here. I've got some good people coming up on the podcast. I've got Rebecca Traister, the feminist journalist who has written a Scalding Me Too book. We had a colorful conversation. Johann Hari is coming up. He's written a book about depression that many people are finding very useful. Darren Brown, the magician, who is remarkable, as you probably know. He's coming up. Dia Khan, the Muslim filmmaker who's made an amazing film about neo Nazis and white supremacists in the US. Dia proves to be kryptonite for white supremacists. It's quite amazing. Well, speaking of Ted, today I'm turning the tables and presenting an interview I did with Chris Anderson, the owner and impresario of Ted. He's just launched his own podcast, The Ted Interview. I believe this is his third episode. As you know, I occasionally do this. I present my appearance on another person's podcast. I think you might enjoy it, and I think you'll enjoy this one. Chris is a great interviewer, and as you'll hear, he's a little concerned about some of my views, and he pushes back on me from time to time. This was actually very noticeable after my first Ted Talk in 2010, where Chris came on stage and asked me some very worried questions about my views on the hijab. And I think Chris has been worrying about me ever since. Anyway, what Chris has done with the Ted conference is truly incredible, and it was an honor to be interviewed by him. So please enjoy my conversation with Chris Anderson. Welcome to the Ted interview. I'm Chris Anderson, and this is the podcast series where I sit down with a Ted speaker and we get to dive much deeper into their ideas than was possible during their Ted Talk. My guest today is Sam Harris. Philosopher, neuroscientist, author, podcaster. Sam has been at the heart of many of the most provocative conversations out there today. Politically, I would place him at what you might call the radical center. A stern critic of Donald Trump, but also of political correctness. For example, he has infuriated people on both left and right in almost equal measure, but he has also delighted many, many people because of his clarity of thought and his fearlessness in how he expresses those thoughts. Sam's podcast waking up is super popular. I'm a regular listener. And he's also famed for his book called The Moral Landscape that was the subject of his first Ted Talk. Most people probably here think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life. Questions like, what is worth living for? What is worth dying for? What constitutes a good life? So I'm going to argue that this is an illusion. The separation between science and human values is an illusion and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. So the debate is over the nature of morality. Specifically, is there such a thing as objective moral truth? Or is morality inherently subjective? In which case all moral statements are ultimately just statements about the values an individual or a culture happens to hold. So let's give an example here. I mean, look, if I say something like, it's wrong to lie, or we should all stop eating animals, are those ultimately just your personal moral values? Or might there be a sense in which they can objectively be judged to be true or false? If you believe in God, there's an easy enough answer to this question good is. What God has revealed to us is good. He's created human beings with consciences and with a holy book that sets out what is right and what is wrong. But most modern philosophers, academic scientists, don't think you can outsource morality to God. They would say there is a fundamental difference in the world between facts and values. Facts as statements about the real world. They can be true or false. Values are human creations. They differ between different cultures. We can debate them, but ultimately there is no objective arbiter of the truth of a moral statement. What's interesting about Sam Harris is that although he definitely doesn't believe in God, he does believe that statements about moral values are ultimately objective statements. In his view, we can discover the truth about those statements through an ever deeper knowledge of science, of psychology, for example, of how human societies operate and of the exercise of reason. There's a lot at stake here. If Sam Harris is wrong and the majority of scientists and philosophers are right, then it's hard to see how there can be such a thing as moral progress. If a moral system is simply the subjective values that a culture creates, it puts a limit on how much you can argue against views you disagree with, like the sanctity of life or child marriage. You just have no real answer to the position, look, this is what I and my family, going back generations, choose to believe. If Sam Harris is right, on the other hand, it becomes possible to argue that certain cultural values are objectively wrong and must be changed, and to present real evidence as to why that might be so. And looking forward, it impacts how we build ethical decisions into the technologies we're creating, like machine learning, artificial intelligence, social media, algorithms, selfdriving cars. There is much to ponder here. It's not just a philosophical argument. It's as important a conversation as there is. So let's go. So let's start here. How can you build morality out of mere reason and science? And perhaps you could even start by defining what morality even is. Well, I would, I would say that it is anchored to the the fact that we are in relationship with one another. So if you're in a universe of one, if you're on a desert island, the ethics of your living don't come into play because there's no other conscious system that can be affected by what you do. So if you're truly alone and can't harm or benefit anyone, then we don't really talk in moral terms. We talk in just in terms of wellbeing, so a moral system is the rules by which we should treat each other or not treat each other. How do you create the rules by which to treat each other? How do you build a moral system from the ground up? Just imagine that we have no notion of should or ought. There's nothing we should do. This thought has not occurred to anyone yet. And even the notion of right and wrong and good and evil hasn't occurred to anyone. We just find ourselves in this universe. And the circumstance which we didn't create is one in which conscious minds like our own are susceptible to a vast range of experiences. And some of these experiences suck, right? It's unambiguously. And if you doubt that, just imagine having every variable that conspires to make you miserable turned up to eleven, right? So if you doubt this, go to a hot stove and put your hand on it. That is a powerful philosophical argument. The experience you will have there is deeper than your doubts about whether morality can be anchored to reason. And if you think, well, it only burns my hand because my mind and body are constituted in such a way well, yeah, that's precisely the point. I'm saying that every possible mind is susceptible to a range of experiences. Given the physics of things, we don't know how consciousness is actually integrated with physics. That's a mystery. But there is some relationship. And we live in a universe where conscious minds have a range of conscious states and some of these states are better than others. And I think that claim that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad and that every other state of the universe is better, I think that is as rudimentary a claim as we ever make in reasoning about anything. It's as rudimentary as two plus two makes four. It's as rudimentary as events have causes, it is bedrock. And we know there are many other conditions on offer which are far better than that, right? Some are sublimely rapturous and filled with beauty and apparent meaning and all the satisfaction that the luckiest people we know and ourselves in our best moments have enjoyed while alive. And so what I would argue is that what we have on our hands is a navigation problem we are navigating in the space of all possible experiences. Let me just push on one sort of philosophical point about that. In describing the worst possible state for all people, though, couldn't two different people look at two universes and disagree about which one was actually a worse state? In one, let's say everyone was making this God almighty mess, they were just creating mud everywhere. It was the ultimate sort of pigsty and it was disgusting to look at. And in another, there were people being hurt really badly, but there was also this beautiful artwork in the sky that was somehow some creation of perfection. People could disagree about which of those two was the worst, couldn't they? Yes. What you're saying is true of my picture of morality in general. And that's why I called it a moral landscape, where you have peaks and valleys, and some of these peaks could be equivalent and some of the valleys could be equivalent, but yet different. So you could have societies of people functioning by very different principles and moral intuitions and senses of what's right and wrong, and they could be enjoying equivalent states of well being that are irreconcilable, right? So you could have an island of perfectly matched sadists and masochists, say, and they might be happy by their own lights, but we would look at them and say, that's a completely bizarre and undesirable way of living. So there is a kind of moral diversity possible in my picture, but for this example, this thought experiment, just imagine that every conscious system in that universe suffers as much as it possibly can for as long as it can. So if you're telling me there's somebody who would consider a universe of dirt to be worse than a universe of painful torment, well, then that's the universe he gets, right? However your mind is constituted so as to suffer to the ultimate degree for as long as possible. That's what you get in this universe. And so someone who said, but suffering isn't the point, say injustice is the point. So I think a worse universe than that is one where people may not be suffering, but there is greater injustice. The reason why justice seems important to you is because it seems important to you. There's an experiential component to this, right? So one simple way it seems to be almost of getting to your argument is just to imagine a scientific comparison between here are two universes and they're actually identical in every regard. Except that in one, one child is suffering, and in the other, that same child is is not suffering control for everything else. And it feels like it's not a stretch to say as a fact that that universe with a child is not suffering is better. Yeah. So as long as you can get me, give me this spectrum of better and worse, that's all I need. And there are several double standards here that people observe by default, which are the source of our what I would argue is our confusion about morality. So one double standard is that even the most hard headed scientists use a totally different standard. And so they give you an analogy here if you take something like physics as the prototypical case. So if someone shows up at a physics conference with his cockamamie view of physics, that can't be integrated with standard physics. If someone wants to argue for a biblical physics, say, that person just doesn't get invited back to the conference. There's no burden upon mainstream physics to incorporate that view into physics. And no one would be tempted to say, on the basis of defining people who think that the Earth is flat or they've invented some perpetual motion machine or whatever it is, no one takes those claims seriously. And so does with medicine. If someone came to a hospital or into a medical school and said, listen, I have a totally different conception of human health, and it entails vomiting continuously and being in continuous pain and then dying soon. That's how I'm going to define health. If a person is working with a conception of health, that doesn't matter to us for good reason. There are obviously controversies in science, and those are debated even for decades, and sometimes they overturn our standard conception of what is true. But the kind of radical skepticism with respect to maybe there's no such thing as science, right? And maybe there's no such thing as truth that doesn't continually undermine our conversation, whereas with morality, it does. And so when you find another group behaving by a totally divergent moral code, a group like ISIS say so ISIS thinks that the best thing to do is kill apostates, kill blasphemers, throw homosexuals from rooftops, take sex slaves, and in the even best case, die in for the privilege of doing all this in an act of martyrdom. Right? So this is their conception of a life well lived. And people look at this in the west, and well educated, over educated people with PhDs and people who have careers as bioethicists, people for whom thinking about what is good and right and beautiful in a Western context, that is their job. They look at this diversity of opinion and they say, well, who are we to say that this is wrong? All we can say is that we don't want to live that way, but it's mere preference. And then this gets connected to a descriptive notion of how we got here. When you look at how our moral toolkit has evolved, I mean, we're social primates that have our morality anchored to certain emotions like disgust and jealousy and a capacity for empathy. And we look at these evolved capacities and we say, well, there's nothing about the process that got us here that is causing us to track anything of substance about the way the world is. We're not in touch with reality when we're moralizing. We're just apes with preferences. And so these two things, the fact of moral diversity and the fact that much of our morality is anchored to these evolved, apish tendencies, those two things have led many, many smart people to believe that there's no there there's no truth with respect to right and wrong and good at evil. I mean, by presenting the ISIS case there, you've started with the sort of the awkward, logical implication of moral relativism. Most people wouldn't start there. They would say what they're protecting is, for example, if we discover a culture in the Amazon rainforest, never been discovered, and we discover that they have certain ways and certain moral preferences and how they run their society, who are we to judge and say our Western ways are better? But that kind of anthropology driven moral relativism as championed by people like Margaret Mead becomes quickly kind of an absurd position where you can't say that objectively ISIS's views are wrong. That's just their culture. We can't say they're wrong. All we can do is fight them. But I just want to just plant a flag there because you mentioned anthropology, which is a discipline which 70 years ago, in the aftermath of World War II, explicitly said the American Anthropological Association explicitly said when the UN. Was trying to develop a universal conception of human rights, the anthropologists all lined up and said, this can't be done. This is a fool's errand. There is no such thing as universal human rights. But think of how ethically questionable that position is. There's no way to say that clitorectomies are a bad thing. It's pure delusion. The moment you link morality to the well being of conscious creatures in general and people in particular, once you draw the link between human flourishing and morality, which I think the link is very direct, and we can talk about that. But once you draw that link to say there are no right and wrong answers here is tantamount to saying we will never know anything about human well being. There'll be no human psychology that can tell us how people flourish. There'll be no sociology, there'll be no economics. There'll be no other discipline that can give us right and wrong answers. And that, I think, is wrong. Okay, so what you're saying is that the route from science to morality, as it were, you've described it as sort of a reason based route. There's another route that people might give, which is a sort of an evolution based root to morality, which would say that it's completely credible to believe that apes, and certainly our ancestors, evolved a conscience, or perhaps multiple consciences, if you like, moral instincts that guided behavior which turn out to be really helpful for surviving and promoting group collaboration and so forth. But those instincts may be generally good and beneficial, but may also be buggy, as we know that so many aspects of our psychology is just odd. It may have been fine tuned for life a few million years ago. It definitely runs into all kinds of glitches in the world that we're in now. And I think what I hear you saying is that there's this incredibly important agenda of applying reason to the start point instincts that we have. And this, of course, is where it gets really hard. People do. I mean, John Height has spoken at Ted and has argued that there are these different moral engines going on in people. Some people care much more about fairness or about happiness. Others care more about honor or about purity or about justice. And I think you want to argue that you can use the tools of reasons to bridge those gaps. Those are not fundamentally divisible chasms that can't be breached. Right? Yeah. So there are two separate projects here, two ways in which science can weigh in on the question of morality. One is to help us descriptively understand how we got here. And that is an evolutionary story. That is a story talking about ourselves in terms of our history as social primates and just observing as a matter of psychology and sociology and every other discipline that can be brought to bear on this, that people have emotions and intuitions and various cultures have norms which everyone involved claim have something to do with morality. Right? So there's a feeling of disgust that people have, and clearly its ancient origin is to be anchored to things like smells and tastes, and it protects the organism from just pollution. But then as we've evolved, we haven't evolved any new hardware. And so what we have built in terms of our morality norms and our sense of their violation is anchored to this same circuitry. So now discussed is doing a lot of work in the moral domain and the political domain. And it's even done some neuroimaging work I did early on shows that these same circuits, in this case the insula in the brain, are working to differentiate just truth and falsity so that when you find a statement to be false, it seems to activate the same network. And based on culture, this can play out in very different ways. So you can find cultures where people find certain things disgusting which seem completely arbitrary to us, right, and therefore wrong, and then we find other things disgusting. To take this down to something like food preference, there are cultures that eat dogs, and we find this absolutely disgusting. And many of us eat cows. The Hindus find that absolutely disgusting and sacrilegious. So clearly we can't to talk about the ultimate wrongness of eating cows or dogs. The conversation can't begin and end at what people find disgusting. Right? You want to say it should be possible to make progress on that by bring a Hindu and Westerner together and let's have a conversation and look at what's actually at stake here, who's being reasonable, who isn't, and see if we can't change those feelings. And probably everyone listening can think of things that they were discussed at one point that they've maybe shifted on over time. But but more generally, I want to make the claim that there's this there is another project which is just in principle, is just as scientific as the first project of telling an evolutionary story of how we got here. And this project is to talk about what is possible for us, what states of conscious well being are possible, given the kinds of minds we have and given the kinds of minds we can someday have based on changes whether cultural or pharmacological or genetic or just with neural transplants or implants, we integrate our minds with technology. Who knows what states of consciousness are on offer? Whatever is on offer, a completed science of the human mind would be able to tell us just how good it is possible to feel the truths about us will be known scientifically, ultimately. Right? So, just as a scientifically minded group of explorers could embark on a journey through a new landscape and try and figure out the smart way to navigate it using measurement and reason and discussion among them, so a group of reasonable humans could navigate the moral landscape and figure out new possibilities better peaks, as it were, that we might aspire to. That's a beautiful sounding project and certainly convincing to many people. But it runs into this problem quite soon in practice, which is that from this start point you are putting yourself onto a springboard where you can basically sort of sound, for want of a better term, morally superior. You will say, Muslims, your book is sick and promotes violence and it provokes this really strong reaction among people that you are being discriminatory, you are being in some cases, you've been accused of being racist because of the strength at which people hear these views expressed. How could you persuade someone who's not in your world right now that these ideas are for them and they're for all humans? They're not just for you? Is it possible to bridge? Yeah. Well, first, I should say is that despite how undiplomatic I can be on this topic and seemingly unpragmatic and even inept in communicating these ideas in a way that people can hear them, people's minds are changed all the time. And even in the most extreme case, I hear from fundamentalists former fundamentalist Christians or former fundamentalist Muslims people who have described themselves as this close to being jihadists. I've heard from these people and met them in person whose minds have been changed by a totally uncompromising and tone deaf and even apparently callous criticism of their beliefs. So it is a myth to say that someone can't be reasoned out of a position they weren't reasoned into, say, right, that's just simply untrue. People, through the hammer blows of reason all the time come out of their dogmatism and their poorly considered views. Islam is, for whatever reason, especially politicized. And you reap a whirlwind of criticism on the left politically for pointing out it's obvious issues, whereas Christianity on the left I can criticize fundamental Christianity all day and we'll win plaudits from people on the left. But the moment that turns to Islam, people worry that this is somehow discriminatory. And that's just a double standard we have to notice because it makes no sense. And the issue is that all we have is human conversation by which to orient ourselves to these questions. The most important questions in human life are questions we have to be able to talk about. And we have a very large proportion of humanity that is saying, okay, these questions, these most important questions how to live, how to cause your children to live and what to die for these are questions that we're not willing to talk about rationally. These are questions upon which we have a book that was dictated by the Creator of the universe for whom we have no evidence which will be sacred until the end of the world. The book can't be edited. And all that's left for us to do now is to decide how completely we will be enslaved by the contents of this book. And if you say anything about this project that is disparaging or even skeptical, I will consider you my enemy. That's where we live. And it's completely insane. It is as though we were living in a world where people were doing this with the plays of Shakespeare or the Iliad and the Odyssey. That's how perverse and random it is. It's appropriate to lose patience with the status quo. So this is such an interesting topic to me because I'm thinking about this a lot in terms of ted, actually, in terms of ted speakers come to the ted stage. They're coming to try to persuade people of something. Often. Sometimes those efforts succeed brilliantly and sometimes they fail. And sometimes when they fail, they fail for unexpected reasons. Not because the person said anything that wasn't true or sort of reasoned in one way but because they did things that provoked unintentionally sort of a defensive reaction in the audience and so communication didn't happen. I guess my question to you is let's say that your project essentially is to sort of spread the good meme of moral progress to the world. How do you do that? So that there's reason, which is one way in which humans persuade. Each other. But most people suppress reason as their main listening tool and they're listening to other things. They're impacted by their emotions. They're impacted by whether they trust someone. They're impacted by whether they feel that there's a connection there. I just wonder whether there's a discussion. It's more like you feel like a tactical discussion about how you would do best to persuade people who aren't Westerners, say aren't liberal Westerners or whatever, that you are. Right. And that, yes, there may be some people who you have persuaded who've completely abandoned their faith, for example, and come over to a different one. But I think there may also be many other people I could be right or wrong about this. We haven't done a survey, but they've heard you. They've heard the tone of some of what you've said and rather than being persuaded, they've reacted against it because it has sounded scornful or disrespectful. Is that a danger? Well, first I would point out that a person's capacity to be offended, that the feeling of offense is not an argument and it's not a virtue. We all have this thing, and in many people it is functioning like it is some kind of epistemological principle. This is how I'm going to judge the correctness of a view. I'm going to react to it instantly. Right. So if I say to you, well, there's good reason to believe that men and women differ biologically, start with the uterus and start counting from there. And the more science studies us and sex differences, we have discovered that this extends to human psychology and cognitive abilities and interests. So you start linking those sentences together, people begin to get uncomfortable. Right. The discomfort isn't evidence of anything with respect to it being true. Right. Not evidence, but it is real. And the de facto impact of that maybe that you lose part of your audience. But the point I'm making is that we have a project collectively 7 billion of us, we have a project to get more and more people more of the time to become sensitive to cognitive and emotional reactions that are making conversation and clear thinking impossible. Right. And this is one of them. The feeling you get like, I don't like the way this sounds. It's a logical error to move from that feeling to the feeling that this counts as evidence against the viewer. Correct. So let's agree that that's a logical error, but it might also still be a tactical error by you as the persuader to push that much to trigger that offense. Sure. In other words, if you could make the case a different way, why wouldn't you? Well, I do. Depending on the situation, I make it every which way. I'm certainly not a provocateur. I'm not saying the offensive thing just to get a rise out of people. Everything I say is sincere. I'm not giving it the top spin that makes it less accurate because I know I'm going to get a rise out of people in any case, I think that there are enough people who are mulerous, there are enough people who are bending over backwards to not offend on these topics. And what we need are more and more people to say, listen, we can all be a little thicker skinned than that, and we're paying a price for political correctness. We're paying a price for not being totally straight. And it is just a fact that just to talk about the narrow subject here, but this applies to everything, everything that's polarizing. It is a fact that we are paying an immense and generally unacknowledged and I would argue totally unnecessary price for respecting this concept of revelation. This is the idea that any one of our books has an origin that is not merely human. And the moment you put a little pressure on that belief, you're already in the territory of deeply offending billions of people. So that's true. So let me tell you a story about my own sort of engagement with both religion and Islam. It sort of intersects with us a bit. I was my parents were missionaries. I grew up in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian, born again Christian, believed that my Christianity determined whether I go to heaven or hell. My father was in Pakistan for many years in the belief that unless he could persuade Muslims to accept Christ that they would go to hell. And this drove his whole approach to life. And he was in his own, by his own measures, a deeply moral person. Instead of making money in the west, he was out there as a pauper trying to persuade people of this belief. Over many years, he and my mother got to know many, many Muslim families at much greater depth. And something kind of surprising happened. They they found that many of them were deeply spiritual and shared a lot of the sort of concerns they did. They were concerned for the poverty they saw around them. They obviously sacrificed for their families and they worked hard. And they're incredibly hospitable and spiritual in the sense of sort of the quest for something deeper themselves. They found a connection to him and slowly, you know, his views shifted to believing that actually Muslims and Christians quite probably worshiped the same God just by different names and with different sort of accompanying beliefs. But it was a monumental shift for someone who started from where he started and his conversations with Muslims. He could go a very long way by starting from a position of respect, of emphasizing the things, the good things that were there. So what I guess my my question for you is that because you I hear what you say and I believe what you say about your sincerity, you are very passionate about what you believe. What people sometimes hear is a withering scorn, which is very effective in your ted Talk I picked up one line you made about millions of Muslim women being trapped in cloth bags. And if you say that as opposed to a different way of interpreting, we could say that, like, I'm here trapped in a cloth bag around my body for different reasons. If there was a different story that said, look, there are so many things that are extraordinary about your tradition and your religion. There's this emphasis on mercy. There's this emphasis on compassion, on hospitality. Many Muslims spend so much of their lives trying to figure out how to make the world a better place. They're not focused on the stories around violence and so forth that are part of the Quran, but arguably open to different interpretation. If you start from a different point, don't you have a better chance of persuading the silent majority of Muslims to take you seriously and to want to be part of the solution as opposed to provoking them to sort of, say outside a meme coming in, defend, reject, to sort of close you out? And you actually make someone could argue that you make life harder for moderate Muslims because of that sort of feeling of scorn for the whole enterprise, right? First, it's virtually never that I'm communicating scorn for people. It's ideas that I'm criticizing. And what you talked about with your family's experience in Pakistan and Afghanistan, none of that is surprising to me. But there's just a deeper principle here that we're human beings where we are on some basic level, running the same software, and culture is laid on top of that. But we have a deeper psychological capacity for empathy and ethical engagement and even spiritual insight. And I don't shy away from this concept of spirituality. I do consider myself a very spiritual person. And as you know, I've spent a lot of time practicing meditation. I've spent, all told, some years on silent meditation retreats. And I think that the contemplative life is something that we have only begun to think about in Western scientific, rational terms. And it is a part of the spectrum of human experience that I think is undoubtedly there and worth understanding culturally. The problem is that the respect for tradition, and in particular the respect for revelation, keeps us balkanized into these separate moral communities that do have irreconcilable differences. And so you pointed to the possibility of Christians and Muslims having a kind of reproach mall and around we both worship the same god. You can't play that game with Hindus, right? The bridge from Christianity to Hinduism only runs in one direction. Hindus can say, well, Jesus is just an avatar of Vishnu. But the Christians can't look at Hinduism with its multiplicity of gods, you know, thousands of gods, many of whom have the most garish fictional monstrosities. From the point of view of Christianity, you've got people worshipping monkeys like Hanuman or elephant headed gods like Ganesh. None of that makes any sense it's all understood in a context of karma and rebirth that also makes no sense. Somebody's right and somebody's wrong and somebody's going to hell if you believe these things. And there's no reason we should find ourselves in this circumstance for centuries more. And we just don't have the luxury of waiting for centuries to change our views on these topics. But sometimes people like yourself, I would say, and others who sort of criticize religion, they sound as if they're coming to it. As if religion was a belief, like, say, a belief that Jupiter is the biggest planet that was, that someone, if they were persuaded or shown how ridiculous an idea that was, would abandon it and possibly miss. It can happen. But I think it's a deeper thing that you're trying to overcome. I mean, as someone who grew up religious, it's not just a belief, it's a relationship. To let go of a belief in God is worse than getting divorced. It's sort of like it's a relationship with what you believe to be someone who you've had connection with your whole life, I think incoming critiques of it. Yes, there is a discussion to have around reason, but it feels like your core identity is being attacked. I think when that happens to humans, a whole other set of defense mechanisms come into play. And I guess what I wonder is, let's say we agreed that a world where religion did not play the dominant role that it does now could be a better world. How would you get there? It might not be a head on assault on religion. It might be like if you look at what's happened with Christianity a few hundred years ago, christianity was at least as violent as the most extreme aspects of of Islam today. And gradually, most Christians have just downplayed those interpretations of the Bible. Those arguments, you know, the people espousing them have lost caused people most people don't need as coherent and consistent a worldview as, as you need. And as I kind of feel like I I need, most people are able to embrace an element of contradiction and to say, you know, I love the traditions here, and I believe in some of the core ideas of religion. Even with Hinduism, Christians and Hindus can unite on certain things. They can unite in an idea that life is about more than shopping. It's about the exploration of mystery and wonder and the divine and the pursuit. Perhaps God is all around us. Gods are all around us. Those two things don't have to be that different. They can agree on compassion as like as a core operating system value. I would argue it's possible that an approach that said, I love that about your religion, that that is at the heart of it, and that you do that. I'm uncomfortable with this. Can we talk about that? But it starts from a position of respect for what is good and arguably the single biggest thing that religions do that fundamentally plays to the moral world you want is that they have persuaded billions of people that they should pursue the interests of others over themselves. And that, I think, is the hardest thing that the abandonment of religion hasn't really handled yet is that by saying all those rules don't matter anymore. Find yourself, follow your passion, be your thing. We haven't inspired enough people yet to say as a core part of that, by the way, don't just live for yourself. Well, I think the need is to be able to talk about the most important questions in human life without losing our connection to one another. And we are not playing that game well. We need to be able to hear people out. We need to be able to reason about everything because reasoning is the only thing that scales. It's the only way of talking about a problem which stands the chance of being universalizable. And this is why identity politics is clearly a dead end. It can't be that this thing is important and the whole world needs to take it on board because you are you or because you have the color of skin that you do by accident. Whatever this thing is, if this is going to relate to our building a durable, cosmopolitan, pluralistic future together, this thing has to be true and important because it's touching the way the world is for everyone on some level. It's touching some universalizable principle of human psychology and human flourishing and economics or whatever it is. And our religious provincialism doesn't do that. Our incompatible claims about revelation don't do that. Or the mere accidents of birth and skin color and gender don't do that. And so again, we have to be able to reason as human beings very much in the style of to take John Rawls for a second. He had this brilliant thoughts experiment which is that was called the veil of ignorance or the original position where he asked us to imagine organizing a society such that we figure out what we think are just and fair arrangements between people. But we did this from behind a veil of ignorance where we don't know who we're going to be in that society. And this is a starting position where you then could imagine that whoever you are, whether you're a neo Nazi or a black person or a Muslim or an atheist, whoever you are, not knowing who you're going to be in this society. This is a heuristic that could allow people to converge on principles of fairness without them having to sort out their differences in advance. From that veil you could have a recent discussion about what would be the limits of inequality in a society. What would be the fundamental rights that you would want at a very minimum to have you don't know if you're high IQ or low IQ. You don't know where you will fall. Right? And this is a principle that generally, I think is unacknowledged, that we have to spend much more time acknowledging, which is that so much of this comes down to luck. Some people are so much luckier than other people. You're lucky to be born in the right place at the right time, to the right parents with the right economic opportunities. And all of those switches can be toggled in the other direction and you have none of that. And through no fault of your own, this is a massive lottery. And so much of what will make the future better is for us to care about the most shocking disparities in luck and correct for them collectively. And that John Rossian conversation seems like a beautiful thing, imagining that people just using the tools of sort of reason and fairness and discussion among them. You could come up to certain basic fundamentals of a society. For example, like as soon as you have that discussion, everyone puts basic health care and education right at the highest of something that a society, of course, would do, because you would want that to the minimum to give yourself a chance and you can build on many other things on the top of it. And then the tragedy of the present seems to be that certain discussions seem to get shut down before they can even start with the lines that you can't say that to me because of who you are and who I am, which is identity politics. Yeah, and I agree with you that it's a tragedy. I have this picture of these sort of two different audiences from the view of someone speaking to audience. You know, there's an audience here's, the speaker and the people are watching and their eyes are open and their arms are open and they're excited and they're listening. And then the other audience where they've heard something that means, oh, I don't know about you, and they're in protection mode. I think there are strategies to provoke the sort of the opening of the arms and the listening. And one obvious question, I guess, is whether should we start every conversation when there are different identity groups involved with some kind of recognition of the biggest concerns of the other group? I wonder whether that's something that we need to spend more time on. Well, I think there are tricks, as you say, that are very useful and that we are paying a terrible price for not remembering enough. Let's not call them tricks, let's call them wise maximum. But it's just only something like so many of these arguments occur with each side straw man in the other, right? So you take the worst version of your opponent's view, one that he or she can't wouldn't sign off on, and you attack that and that's totally unpersuasive. What we need is the opposite. So this notion of steel manning, which is now a term of jargon among us, where you prop up the best possible version of your opponent's view, which they will not find fault with. Right. So let me just summarize what I think you think, and then what you put into that place is perfect. That's the way to start one of these debates. Right, right. I would add one more tweak to it, perhaps, Sam, which is not just that's the way you think, even before that this is the way that you feel. And I think that feelings are so fragile right now that people want that recognition first, almost, to feel that more human connection, not just an intellectual connection. Yeah. Although I would say that this dichotomy between reason and emotion or the intellect and feeling that it's a bit of another one of these myths, it's certainly not the case neurologically, and I would say it's generally not the case experientially. None of this is divorced from emotion for me. So that first Ted talk I gave for you, where I was talking about the moral landscape and how science can understand human values and I'm a spock like character. I actually almost burst into tears at one moment. I'm talking about honor killing. And I then I ask you to imagine what it's like to be a father who believes that the family honor and male honor is so predicated on the sexual purity of the girls in the family that when he has when his daughter gets raped, what he's moved to do is to kill her out of shame. Right. So that would just by stating that example, I virtually burst into tears. So I'm reasoning in a cold and calculating way about what is right and what is wrong and the power of ideas. But this is all just a neuron away from a very energized and feeling laden contest. But if your audience hadn't been the Ted audience, say, but had been an audience, including, say, it was an audience in an Islamic country, there is an edit to that talk that could have made it much more effective, which is to start by saying, look, I understand the beauty and the idea of honor. I understand that you come from a tradition where family values are deeply respected, where you want to celebrate the purity of marriage. You don't want people engaging in widespread infidelity. You look at what's happening in the west and you're horrified by what you see. You're horrified by the movies you see. You don't want your society to be like that. I understand the beauty of that. And then from there you go. But you can't go from there to the horror of killing and defense. I did sort of make that point, even in that talk. But this is a point I do make. It's not hard to see the merit in the criticism of Western superficiality and materialism and blindness to what is sacred, or possibly sacred about our appearance here. We have done a bad job as you say in secular culture, particularly in the west, in Valuing, something more than just gratifying one desire after the next. And so it can't all be a matter of getting nice tastes on your tongue and buying the most expensive watch you can afford, right? And yet, clearly we need a deeper and truly universalizable conversation about what is most profound and what is possible here. And again, this is where you have to draw the line and have to be uncompromising. I think the idea that we will get to a good place by simply reducing our adherence to these irreconcilable claims of revelation like getting Christians and Muslims and Jews to be just a little bit less fundamentalists more of the time, that incremental effort is the end game. I think that is clearly untrue because the problem is there's an asymmetry here. There's an advantage to fundamentalism always, because one, when you go back to the books, the books never tell you to be a moderate. They never tell you the problems with fundamentalism. And fundamentalism can always be rebooted by just merely adhering to the text and there's something more honest about it. And again, this is where there's an asymmetry within every one of these traditions, where the fundamentalists are on firmer ground theologically than the moderates at the liberals because they can always say, listen, I just want to know what the book says. I want an honest adherence to what is here on the page. And what that gets you is intolerable. Right? You have to be doing some advanced, not entirely straightforward, casualistry with the book to edit out the bad parts. So let me pull you back almost to the start point of your position here. Your start point comes from recognizing that all that matters are things that happen to sentient beings. If an atom moves here and there at the universe, no big deal. If something suffers or enjoys something that matters. And that's the anchoring view of the position. So that's fundamentally a statement about consciousness. And yet consciousness, I think, in your view, certainly in mind, is the one big thing that we know about that science so far has miserably failed to give a really compelling explanation of. I would say. So you've got a view that science can get you to sort of a rational view of right and wrong, of morality that's anchored in a story about something that science really can't explain. How do you think about that? Is that a paradox or how should we as you know, I'm one of these people who believes there is a so called hard problem of consciousness. The consciousness is unlike anything else we've attempted to study or understand scientifically. And it's simply a fact that the only evidence for consciousness in the universe is our direct experience of consciousness itself. But the flip side of that is that consciousness is the one thing that can't be an illusion. It's the one thing we can't be mistaken about consciousness. Whatever it is, exists. I think therefore I am the original. Yeah, but I think Descartes might have meant something very close to this. But consciousness is deeper than thought and the I am part is also fishy because I think the self is an illusion. The self is a construct. There's no stable, unchanging self carried over from one moment to the next. Something feels, therefore something is. Yeah, something seems to be happening. And that seeming is what we mean by consciousness. So even if we're not actually doing a podcast now and you're just dreaming that we are, even if we're just brains and vats, if we're in the matrix, we could be radically confused about everything. But whatever this seeming is, the fact that the lights are on, that is consciousness. The fact that there's a qualitative character to our appearance here to being, and that some systems have it and probably some systems don't, right? And some parts of the brain have it and some parts of the brain don't, that is mysterious. But the fact that that is so is the one thing that isn't open to any possible doubt. It is the kind of paradox because it is the thing that is doing all the understanding. We don't understand consciousness, but unless something appears in consciousness, it isn't an empirical datum to be taken into account at all. Is there any hope that in the next ten years, say that we make material progress on understanding consciousness? I mean, it's been this riddle for thousands of years. It feels like in some ways that there's going to be dramatic new data points over the next decade as the machines we build start to exhibit what looks very much like conscious behavior. Do you think that's going to force us to make decisions like the decision on whether the things we create are conscious or not? That there's huge implications of that? Do you think we'll be able to make a wise decision about that or will that just remain impossibly? Impenetrable? Well, I think several things might occur and it matters which universe we find ourselves in. I think it's hugely consequential that we might build conscious machines, therefore machines that can suffer and machines that can experience well being and perhaps suffer unimaginably horribly in ways that we don't understand or experience well being that exceeds our own, that ethically is of enormous importance in certain cases. You could imagine it being the most ethically consequential thing that has ever happened in the universe. If we could build simulated worlds that are essentially hell realms and populate them with conscious minds, that would be the worst possible thing we could do. And I should point out, give us the same moral stature as the God of the Bible or the Quran if he exists as believers believe he does. Which is to say this is a completely psychopathic thing to do to create a hell and populate it. So it matters if that's the case, if that's possible, and it certainly matters if we stumble into that circumstance not knowing we've even done it right. So we wouldn't want to do that on purpose. We wouldn't want to create hell on purpose. And yet it's possible that we could do it inadvertently, given just the physics of things. What I think is quite likely and pretty undesirable from my point of view, is that we could lose sight of this being an interesting problem in the first place. We could build machines that seem conscious, seem so credibly conscious to us, far in advance of our understanding what consciousness is at the level of information processing. Our machines will all be passing the Turing test. We'll feel in relationship, helplessly thrust into relationship with them. They'll make the right facial expressions. We'll design them this way because we'll want to interact with machines, at least in certain circumstances, that make us feel like we're in relationship with another person. And it'll just be obvious to us that our robot servant is conscious because it seems so. And if we don't know, I mean, there's a perfect disjunction here. We could build systems that are not conscious, but seem conscious, and we could build systems that don't seem conscious at all because we haven't built the interface for them to seem so, but they in fact are conscious. Perhaps Google is suffering right now with all that complexity of information processing that's going on and it's in woe the dismal nature of all the searches that people are typing into it, which is that the input could be better. Yeah, it's hard to take that concern seriously, but something like that is certainly possible precisely because we're building these machines, making them more powerful. At some point we will have to make an effort to put human values into them. So we're going to have to decide what those values are. And even if you just look at it from that standpoint, it seems to me your work is incredibly important. I mean, these questions are incredibly hard to resolve. But at some point we're building things that need to operate based on some kind of moral code. And so we have to bring more people into this conversation. We have to figure out and have to try and figure out a way of having it that pulls in as many people as possible collaboratively and constructively and get past this horrible moment in history where truth is nothing, reason is nothing, and it's all just a fight. Yeah. So this is philosophy on a deadline. And this is one of the silver linings to the risk here, is that being forced to build our values into technology that's becoming more powerful than we are will force us to ignore the academic quibbles here and acknowledge that there are better and worse answers to moral questions and to just take self driving cars as one example and. Again, it's a near term example. It's already here. It's an engineering problem that we have to solve. And then the question is, what moral biases and intuitions do you want to build into your robot cars? Do you want cars that run over white people, preferentially because of all the white privilege in the world? Do you want cars that put the drivers or the passengers life at some greater risk? If we're talking about a trolley problem where it's the one versus the five or the one versus the ten, one child versus three old people. Exactly. And to not answer these questions is to answer them one other way. By default, you either make your car blind to the differences between people or you make it sensitive to the differences. And so it's a forced choice. I think people have different intuitions about what the right answers are here, but clearly there are wrong answers and there are clearly answers. And some of the traditional answers that you would get from religion, like Islam, for instance, I will bet will be judged wrong even by a majority of Muslims when this technology has to come online for everyone. And if they are judged wrong by a majority of Muslims, that's maybe an indication that people are incapable of moral reasoning across long held again. And this has happened, as you pointed out, to Christianity in a very effective way. Christianity, we're not tending to meet the Christians of the 14th century anymore. And that's because of what scientific rationality and secular politics and humanism and capitalism and just modernity in general has done to Christianity. And to some degree, the disparity we see between Christianity and Judaism and Islam now is because Islam is a vast religion, it's nearly 2 billion people and much of the Muslim world has not suffered the same centuries long collision with modernity or. And the collision it's suffering now is occurring over a much shorter time frame and without many of the same social and economic benefits being spread to these societies. And so we have to keep the endgame in view. The endgame has to be a viable global civilization that is pluralistic, cosmopolitan, tolerant of difference, and yet convergent on the same answers to the most important questions in life that we can't be radically tolerant of difference. These ideas are for everyone, not for one group, for everyone. And you're ready to fight for that? I'm trying. I'm trying with your help. Sam, it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for all your time here and wish you the best. If you find the Waking Up podcast valuable, there are many ways you can support it. You can review it on itunes or Stitcher or wherever you happen to listen to it. You can share it on social media with your friends, you can blog about it or discuss it on your own podcast, or you can support it directly. And you can do this by subscribing through my website at sam Harris.org. And there you'll find subscriber only content which includes my Ask Me Anything episodes. You also get access to advanced tickets to my live events, as well as streaming video of some of these events. And you also get to hear the bonus questions from many of these interviews. All of these things and more you'll find on my website@samharris.org. Thank you for your support of the show. It's listeners like you that make all of this possible./n
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+Okay. This is a podcast that is a little beholden to the news cycle. This is about Trump and the Russia investigation. This is just day brief by my podcast standards. 1 hour tour of how a lawyer and former US attorney trained in the relevant areas views the Trump presidency and the Mueller investigation. My guest today is preet Barara. Preet is, as I said, a former US. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. From 2009 to 2017, he prosecuted cases involving terrorism, narcotics, arms trafficking, financial and healthcare fraud, cyber crime, public corruption, gang violence, organized crime, civil rights violations. He's been featured by Time magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. And in 2017, he joined the faculty of NYU Law School. And he has his own podcast, which is excellent titled Stay Tuned with Pre. So, fair warning, if you're sick of conversations about Trump and the Russia investigation, this is not the podcast for you, but otherwise it might well be. So now I give you preet Barara. I am here with Preet Barara. Preet, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me on. Let's just summarize your background because you really have the perfect background for the conversation we're about to have. Please give us your potted bio and just briefly touch on the kinds of areas you have focused on in the law. Wow. Okay, so we can take up the hour with this. I was born in 1969, so I was born in India, came the United States. My father is a proud Indian immigrant pediatrician and hoped for his sons to become doctors. We disappointed him deeply. Neither my brother nor I became doctors. Ended up going to law school. After law school, I worked in private practice, although my goal and destination always was really the US Attorney's Office from the time I took a trial practice class, trial advocacy class at Columbia. But it took me a while to get into shape to go to the US Attorney's Office. I applied, got in after about six years in private practice. And while I was a line prosecutor, I prosecuted all sorts of things, as you might imagine in Manhattan. Narcotics cases, mob cases. Ultimately, I focused more on Russian organized crime, chinese organized crime, Italian Lakosa Nostrip, did some terrorism cases, not too many fraud cases. You name it, we did it. Then I spent four and a half years working as chief counsel to Senator Schumer on the Judiciary Committee, during which time we had multiple Supreme Court vacancies, and I got to work on judicial confirmation process. And then after Barack Obama became the President, upon the recommendation of the Senator, I was nominated to be the US attorney. And then I got to serve in that position for seven and a half years, where we did again, you name it, except I was overseeing the office instead of being a line person in that office. And what I'm proud of during that tenure is there are some offices, I think, that are known for focusing on one or two things, and I believe that we didn't disproportionately focus on any one thing. Sometimes some of the stuff we did got disproportionate attention, like insider trading cases. They were working just as hard on cyber security threats, on gang cases, on securities fraud, on terrorism cases, on public corruption cases, also civil fraud cases. So I think we did a lot of things in a lot of different areas. If you want to talk about them, we can. And I served very humbly and appreciatively in that position until I was fired by Donald Trump last March. Obviously, your expertise with Russia and Russian organized crime and financial crime is highly relevant to the conversation we'll have here. Say a little bit more about the firing. Was there some point of principle you were standing on in order to be fired? I seem to remember reading that all the US. Attorneys under President Obama were told to resign and you refused. Is that right? Yeah. Well, it's slightly more complicated than that. I had been expecting to leave the office when Donald Trump got elected because that's how it works. But usually almost in every case, and some people get this wrong after a period of transition. I got confirmed after Barack Obama became the president in August of 2009, and there was an orderly transition process. People aren't just booted out. Even when Clinton got rid of the holdover US. Attorneys, that was over a period of time with a built in transition process. So in any event, I expected to leave a few months after the election. But Donald Trump made the extraordinary move of asking me to stay, which is a little bit of a story through Senator Schumer. And not only that invited me to Trump Tower, up to the 26th floor, where I met first because Donald Trump was busy with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, who kept me company until the President could come and meet. And it was a it was a lovely meeting in which he was very complimentary of how I conducted myself in the position and how the office had done. I made a little speech about independence, and we went on our merry way with him asking me to stay another term. So fast forward several months went out of the blue. The president called me for reasons that are still unclear. I thought it was in a that was on March 9 of 2017. I thought for various reasons and after consultation with the Attorney General's Office, the Chief of Staff to Jeff Sessions, that it was inappropriate not knowing the subject matter and knowing how it might look to the public if there was a conversation on the side between a sitting president and a sitting US. Attorney who had jurisdiction over various things, including him, his associates, his businesses, and a lot of other interests that unless we knew what it was about, he was the better course to not speak directly with the President. And 20 hours later, I was asked to resign. Now, I don't know if they're connected. I don't know if they're not connected. And so when that happened the first day, so that was on a Friday, not to belabor the story, but I wasn't sure if they meant to include me. So at the beginning, I wasn't thinking to myself, I'm going to be defiant and require being fired. I just wanted to know, you know, given some track record of incompetence and quick decision making on the part of people in the White House, if they had meant to do that. You know, there were two other people who were sitting US. Attorneys also who I don't think they meant to ask for their resignations. That was Rod Rosenstein, who was the nominee to be the Deputy Attorney General, and Dana Benta, who was the acting Attorney General at that time. I think, given the haste with which it was done, I was just trying to make sure, as an initial matter, that it meant to include me. And then I consulted with folks in my office, senior staff, and I've lived long enough to know that you don't know what the reasoning is behind certain things. I had in my mind no understanding or explanation as to what may have changed between the time that Donald Trump said please stay, and orchestrated in a fairly high profile meeting, even before he had named a Secretary of Defense, before he had named a Secretary of State, I believe. Right. And I just wanted the record to be clear for the future, that the person who had personally invited me to come meet with him, shake my hand, look me in the eye, ask me for my phone numbers, that it would be clear from the record that that person also wanted me gone. And it wasn't just sort of some mass bureaucratic shuffle. And then once I was assured of that, then I left. Okay, so if someone has been asleep for the last 14 months or just arrived from Mars, I would like to have you walk us through what you think they should understand about our current situation. I guess this is narrowly focused on the Russia investigation and what seems to be the most plausible picture of what has happened there and what is happening. To uncover more of the facts and the President's behavior through this whole time with respect to the investigation, can you just start a kind of a narrative as to what has been going on and what where we think we are now and where you think this is all going? Sure. So I think if the alien had a deep understanding of what American history had been like, I think the alien would think to himself, herself or its health, things seem a little bit different. You have a President of the United States who has a different background from anyone else who's been elected, which is not necessarily a terrible thing. A person. The first time in maybe forever I can't remember if this is true. But with no political experience, no political experience, no public service experience, and no military experience of any kind, which is a first, which can be a good thing, which can be, you know, precedents were made to be broken and the status quo is meant to be disrupted. And that can be a tremendous thing. It's important in technology. It's important in science. It can be important in government as well. But you don't want to throw out the things that are good and the things that make the country strong and the institutions that got us to where we are. So I think if you're looking at it from the outside, you're thinking to yourself, how do we get to a point where a president is trashing the press, is calling one of the great, I think, protectors of democracy and freedom, even though they get it wrong sometimes. The press is made up of human beings like any other institution is. But calling the press the enemy of the state, we've fallen a little bit far. If that's the current state of affairs. How you have a president who can't say a bad word about certain kinds of people, including authoritarians, like Putin and Duterte and erdogan, while at the same time, if anyone in the United States has a temerity to engage in some kind of protest that he doesn't agree with, he slams them by name, he punches down. He bullies people. He doesn't like how judges operate. You get the sense, if you're observing from the outside, that, thank God the Framers had certain structural protections in place and the places where the Constitution has structural protection, I think we're okay. The President doesn't like a judge's ruling. The most he can do at this point is holler about it, yell about it, vent about it, tweet about it, or do all of those things. And the judge in the federal system has life tenure and may not like it, and may not like being named publicly, and it may be difficult to get the hate mail, but can just continue to do his or her duty under the Constitution. And that's because the Framers made that possible. I think the same is true with the institution of the press. You can complain about it. You can call it fake news. You can denigrate it, you can undermine it. But at the end of the day, notwithstanding some silly talk about wanting to revamp the libel laws and expressing concern about the First Amendment, the First Amendment is pretty much here to say, hey as well. Where where I worry about the state of affairs over the last 14 months is is the President where he has the ability not to, you know, follow tradition where there are no hard laws, there are no constitutional provisions, he can get away with a lot of things. And we have come to expect presidents to behave a certain way, to release their tax returns when they run for office, so that there's transparency, to divest their economic interests, so there's no conflicts of interest not to surround. Himself with people who are not even able to get a security clearance after 13 or 14 months to have unpaid around him, his daughter, his son in law. There's a whole variety of things that are bad, not because they are different necessarily from how prior presidents have done things, but because they undermine, I think, people's faith in democracy and undermine what I think makes us strong. And when you talk about the particulars of the Russia investigation, which I don't have any personal knowledge of, it's being conducted by Bob Mueller and a team of people who I know personally, to some degree, the idea that there has been meddling in the in the election by the Russians. The president doesn't seem to care, doesn't seem to want to talk about it, and more importantly, doesn't seem to want to do anything about it, in part because it maybe undermines, in his mind, the legitimacy of the last election is, I think, it's an abomination, and it's not good for the country. And it puts in question the president's slogan that he loves to utter, which is very simplistic and could, you know, could resonate if it were true and backed up by Action America First. So, you know, that's sort of how I'm thinking about how things are going on. You raise a few points here, which on their face should be astounding to people, to anyone who's thinking about this through an unbiased lens. Partisanship aside, it is astonishing to have a president who is attacking our bipartisan institutions from an apparently personally defensive and, quite frankly, often unhinged place. Maybe Nihilistic even too. Yeah. So he's attacking the press as the enemy of the people. He's attacking individuals on Twitter, private citizens. He's singling out for abuse. He's attacking the Department of justice, the FBI, all of our intelligence agencies upon which he has to rely to get any information about what's actually going on in the world. And as you say, what he hasn't done is say a single negative word about dictators whose reputations precede them by now decades. Someone like Putin. There's no way to not criticize Putin as an autocrat if you're actually speaking about what's happening in the world. I mean, he likes autocrats. I think I think he was I think he wishes he could be one. I mean, the question of some relevance is we were talking about the constitution and the checks and balances and the structure of the various branches of government which are bulwarks against this kind of thing. But it's an interesting question to ask. If Donald Trump had his druthers right and he doesn't. But if he had his druthers and he did not have limitation, is there something in his own mind, body, soul, intellect, moral compass that would prevent him from doing various things? In other words, if he had his druthers, would he put journalists in jail who didn't like? If he had his druthers, would he completely revamp the libel law to make him able to sue anyone who criticized him? If he had his druthers, what kind of a police state would he think would be okay? If he had his druthers, how independent do you think he would allow the Justice Department to be? He's restrained and curtailed in that respect in a lot of ways. But I don't know if there has been a president and people point to Nixon, but I don't I don't really know who, if given, you know, unrestricted authority, ability, power, would be capable of doing what I believe is in Donald Trump's heart and mind to do. And part of that is evidenced by, as we've been discussing, his apparent affection for not necessarily the people themselves, although maybe his personal affection for Putin and others. But he seems to be enamored of what they are able to do and how strong they are able to be and how unchallenged and unchecked they can go about their business. And I think he loves that. And I think if there's any way possible he could be that way, he would I think he is unpatriotic in the sense that not only does he undermine the institutions, he doesn't have respect for them, and he wishes and I don't hear people asking him this like, you know, in this way. And I'm sure he would, you know, evade and deflect, but but I don't think he has respect for the institutions that check the president because he doesn't want to be checked. As you say, it's even worse than that, because he doesn't even care that the people he's praising, in this case Putin, are adversaries of the United States. We're dealing with, in the main, a hostile foreign power that has targeted our democracy in ways that are now well established. Obviously, this is believed to be a mere conspiracy theory by many of Trump's defenders. But the fact that there seems to be no doubt that Russia does this not just to the United States, but to basically every democracy that it cares to pay attention to. And it's just amazing that given all the evidence of their meddling and given the continuous problem of cyber attacks that emanate not just from Russia, but other countries like North Korea and China, the fact that he has shown no willingness to get to the bottom of this and to defend us against our obvious adversaries and is rather joining the people who are claiming this is all a conspiracy theory. Apart from the fact that it signals that he has something to hide, it is just a nearly treasonous level of unconcern. As President, It's just I never heard a defense of look, I think treasonous is a word that's only reserved for Democrats who don't clap for him during the State of the Union. That's right. I realize it's a big word, even in this context, to get a lawyer to sign off, but I think there are a couple of other things going on. So I don't know if the reason that he's so supine on these issues relating to Russian meddling is because he has something to hide, as some people love to speculate, that Putin has a lovely file on him and he's behold and Trump is beholden to Putin. But there's something else that's going on without having to resort to conspiracy theory. We know something else about the president, and I'm not trying to play armchair psychology. He has a lot of power, and he's incredibly insecure. And the combination of tremendous power, which he sort of walked into accidentally, combined with tremendous insecurity, not only about sort of his wealth, but about a lot of other things, including the legitimacy of having won the of his. Election victory combines to create a dynamic in which anything relating to Russia and anything relating to the future, which is not a partisan issue, he doesn't like to talk about, he doesn't like to reflect on, he doesn't like to lead on because it threatens to throw into the air again this question about what happened in 2016. And did he get elected on his own or did he have aid from this other country? And I think his insecurity causes him to hate that so much that it blinds him to the other responsibilities that he has as a president of the entire country and someone who's supposed to be the guarantor of free and fair elections for both parties. Yeah. Although if it was just a matter of his insecurity and the perception of the legitimacy of the election, and there was no collusion or no way in which he was beholden to Russia for financial arrangements that predate his campaign by probably decades, I don't know why he wouldn't just go on offense and say the things you would expect. An innocent person who was outraged by Russian meddling and Putin's own history as an autocrat would say, this is completely unacceptable. If there was any meddling, obviously, I don't think it accounts for my win in the election, but it's completely unacceptable, and we will get to the bottom of it. And Putin is somebody who has to straighten out. He's not a Democrat. He kills journalists. This is all well established, and we have to deal with him, but he doesn't appear to be any friend of the United States. What would prevent him from saying those obviously sane things if he were just concerned about the public's perception? I don't disagree with you. I think multiple things can be going on at once. We often say when we're investigating cases and this can be said of the White House and certain things that they were doing. Nefariousness and incompetence are not mutually exclusive. So insecurity and bad and misconduct are not mutually exclusive either. And in his case at least the way we're talking about it, they both sort of suggest acting in the same direction they're not inflict with you. As far as he's concerned. I think he likes the autocratic power those folks have. He may have something to hide because he's acting like it and he also doesn't like the way it makes him feel because he's insecure. All those three factors lead to the same kind of conduct. And by the way, it also doesn't necessarily explain his affection for and compliments of these other strong armed folks with whom we don't have the same antagonistic relationship with respect to the election like Erdogan in line. I mean, Duterte in particular, given the kind of work that I have done and used to do, the way that Duterte talks about fighting the war against drugs and the extrajudicial killings. The extrajudicial killings that not only have happened. But that Duterte brags about and claims that he is personally I think he's claimed he's personally killed people or thrown people from helicopters and engaged in all sorts of violence as a populist hero trying to eradicate drugs from that country. I don't think Trump has specifically advocated any of those particular things. But he speaks in general terms about the great job that deterre has done and I don't believe the Philippines meddled in our election. So there is this other thing going on, this effect for people who have that kind of power because maybe he aspires to it. Right? And by the way, the other thing we haven't talked about going back to our alien coming from Mars, that I think imbues all of this with something terrible separate and apart from the attacks on institutions and something he may be hiding and everything else. This is a person who does not believe in speaking the truth in any context and virtually at any moment. And that is something that is more dangerous than a lot of other things. Casting not just aspersions on people who he disagrees with, but casting doubt on all truth, literally, without compunction tweeting out things that are demonstrably wrong and false on a regular basis. And then you're treated to this vision of tens of millions of people not caring about that and agreeing with him regardless and manufacturing counter theories and counter conspiracy theories that's in some people's minds, I think the worst thing that's going on because he has a lot of power and is using the bully pulpit in a particular way that no one has used it before. But in favor of disbelief in anything you hear. Just because you saw it with your own eyes doesn't mean you have to believe it. And people are starting to subscribe to that. I have a podcast too. It's not been around as long as yours. And I had Gary Caspero. It's a great one. Thank you. But Gary Casperov was on, who's no friend of Putin's. And he said something interesting. The idea behind being a certain kind of autocrat like Putin and Trump seems to emulate some of this is not to say that this other person is always wrong. It's not to say that this other news outlet is always incorrect and not to have every single outlet lionize you and say everything you do is great. It's to cause people to not know what is true and what is not true. It's to sow confusion about what the truth is. So if somebody says this person was fired for this reason, or somebody says this ruling is okay or not okay, donald Trump can cast enough doubt about it that people have to wonder, are we getting the truth from anywhere? I mean, he flips on a regular there was a time when he said Fox News was terrible because they weren't saying good things about him. And then he says, Fox News is great. There are times when he says, you know, the New York Times is terrible, the failing New York Times. Then they say something positive, and then he calls him up and he sits for an interview and he says that they're they're terrific. He he cites sources that he hates when they support him or support a proposition that he espouses, and then he does the opposite. And so it's it's kind of a confusing merry go round of truth untruth that upends people's understanding and I think, confidence in every outlet. Well, that's where we are. We're in this place where our epistemology has broken down and everyone is now siloed in their echo chamber. And you have people who are taking infowars as a legitimate organ of the news, apparently with a totally clear conscience, right? And even if they would bracket that with some question as to the veracity of everything they get there, they certainly would compare it favorably with any legitimate organ of the news, whether it's The New York Times or The Economist or The Atlantic. And so that already is a fairly terrifying destabilization of our public conversation. It's one that we should remind people has been explicitly endorsed by the president. I mean, the president sat down with Alex Jones and praised him as basically the new Walter Cronkite. That kills me the most. I mean, one of the things that kills me the most in all this is that I don't know that there's a more odious outlet figure than Alex Jones. And every time there is a tragic massacre of children like we just saw this week when we're taping in Florida, one's mind sometimes goes to Alex Jones, who put the families of people who suffered loss and death and grief unbelievable in Sandy Hook that you can have a president United States say about that person, you're terrific and you're great and sit down with him for an interview and at the same time say that some other outlet like the New York Times, which, you know, they make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. I make mistakes. I'm sure you don't make any mistakes, but we all make a few. And to basically to his constituency suggest not only that you can equate Alex Jones's disgusting reporting and nonsense and made up garbage with the New York Times, but that one is the first is superior to the second in some ways and when people follow, there's some respect. Maybe this is a quaint thought, but you know, when people have power, they have responsibility to to something other than themselves, other than to their own self aggrandizement. And Donald Trump has a lot of power because there are a lot of disaffected people who believe in him and hated the status quo. And it is what it is. He has the ability to take them to bad places and he doesn't need to do it. I mean, maybe he does need to do it to maintain, you know, the standing that he has in, in the the 30s as far as approval ratings go, but it seems that he takes it farther than other politicians, even fairly odious politicians have taken it. What do you make of the fact that if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org? You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Sadha Mukherjee is an oncologist and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician at Columbia University and NYU Presbyterian Hospital. He's a former Rhodes scholar. He graduated from Stanford, the University of Oxford, where he got a PhD in studying cancer causing viruses, and he got his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. His laboratory focuses on discovering new cancer drugs. He's published articles and commentary in such journals as Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron, and in publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker and The New Republic. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies, and his most recent book, which is the topic of our conversation, is The Gene and Intimate History. And now I give you Sadartha Mukherjee. I am here with Sadartha Mukherjee. Sadartha, thanks for coming on the podcast. Yeah, my pleasure. Well, listen, you have a great job. It looks like you're doing amazing things in the world on at least two fronts. I just want to start before we get into your book, I want to start by getting you to describe what it is you do and how much of your time is spent in each of these two careers. You have a career as a physician and as a writer, both at very high level. So describe what you're doing. So I'm a physician scientist, and the particular area I work on is in the clinical realm. I work on leukemia as I'm an oncologist. So I treat cancers. I see patients with cancer. My area within cancer is leukemia and lymphoma, basically cancers of blood cells, although I certainly see other cancers as well and treat other cancers as well. So that's one aspect of my physician scientist life. The other part is I do laboratory research. I do basic cancer research. Our laboratory has really a couple of major fronts. We can talk about them, but I work on cancer genetics. We've discovered genes that are implicated in cancers, particularly blood cancers, and we try to use that information about cancers to try to figure out how to treat, make new treatments and then bring that all of that stuff back to the clinic to sort of make a difference in human lives. So it's been called bench to bedside, but of course, it's a long and complicated route. So that's the world I live in. I have a laboratory, actually, across the street from where I see patients. So in a rather physical sense, in the road in between. So now I cut you one job short. You have three jobs. You're a physician, you're a scientist, and you are also a writer. And how much of your time is spent writing these books we're about to talk about and your New Yorker pieces? The time is spent. It's very uneven. So my primary life is as a physician scientist, but then when the books come, the birth of a book is like the birth of a baby. The books take over your life for a while, though sometimes bloodier, they take over for a while, and then they go out into the world and eventually they sort of take on a life of their own. One thing that's nice is that for the first book, Emperor of All Maladies, I then collaborated with Ken Burns and a bunch of other people, cancer geneticists and cancer biologists on making a documentary. So that book sort of acquired a second life, if you will. And that's going to happen with the gene as well. Ken Burns is again going to do a PBS documentary on the gene. So it's somewhat like a sign curve. It goes up for a while, then it dies down for a bit, then goes up for a while, et cetera. And The New Yorker is not the only outlet that I write for. I write for the New York Times Magazine. Actually, I've written much more for them in the past and also for other places like Vice, where I do also some editorial work. But really it's all focused on questions. I write pieces not because I'm on salary at any of these places, but because I am interested by when a topic interests me or when the editors want to excerpt things from the book is when those pieces appear that either book excerpts chosen by the editors or they are topics that I initiate because I'm interested in them. Right. Well, I want to talk about The Gene, in particular your more recent book. I have some questions about cancer. I'd like to ask you at the end. Unfortunately, I have not read Emperor Vulmalities, for which you won the Pulitzer, but I've read The Gene, and that's your more recent book. And that gets to some really fundamental science, obviously, but fundamental questions of human existence and public policy and ethics. And this is as rich a topic as anyone can find in the 21st century. And I want us to move through it fairly systematically because I can assume a fairly even a very educated audience on this podcast. And in other episodes, I would be happy to use a term like phenotype without bothering to define it. I would just assume that people can look it up if they're confused. But in this conversation. I think we should do our best not to leave anyone behind on anything because the topics are so fundamental and important. That would be great. And stop me when you think that the whole point of the book is to minimize jargon. Now, that involves some simplification, necessarily. So we'll try to cut the right balance, but that's a tough thing to do because the audience, as you're saying, is simultaneously very sophisticated. But some of the issues here are so fundamental that if we gloss over them, I suspect we'll lose sight of very important issues. Yeah, and they're just interesting facts that jump out of even the definition of a word that you are quite sure you understand and use without any self consciousness. Let's start where you kind of the path you take through the book. It's very much of a historical tour of our understanding of the basis of life and inheritance. So you trace it from its beginning, really, in just philosophical speculation. You start with Pythagoras and Plato and Aristotle, but then it wasn't until Mendel that we arrive at really a crucial understanding of the atomic and information theoretic aspect of inheritance. So just remind people about the significance of what Mendel did. Well, if it's okay with you, let's start with a little before Mendel. Let's start with people that you mentioned. Pythagora, Sarah stole the question of human heredity. Why is it that we look like our parents? Why we look unlike our parents is a question that really obsessed people scientists, thinkers, philosophers for generations and twinned to that idea. And it's very important to make it very clear, is that even in Plato, even in Aristotle, you have simultaneously the desire to understand heredity and a desire to manipulate human heredity. Those things come hand in hand. That's one of the messages of the book, is that no sooner have we begun to understand the principle or principles of heredity because of the aspirations that we have as humans. It's some ancient desire, clearly, but to guarantee the best for our children. The heredity does not live in abstraction, even for a minute. It immediately becomes concrete. It immediately becomes it jumps to life, literally, and makes and begins to work its way into fundamental questions about who are we? What do we want to transmit? How do we aspire to see ourselves? How do we aspire to see our children? Aristotle wrote about this. Plato wrote about this. They didn't understand what heredity was necessarily in current scientific conception, but they had strong ideas about it. And those ideas were powerfully twinned to the notion that they would change human beings if they could manipulate it. Well, then we're going to get to the topic of eugenics. But I think the punchline I take away from what you just said is that eugenics on some level is unavoidable. I mean, we all begin attempting to practice it the moment we start thinking about genes. That's exactly the point. The point is that the aspirations to manipulate genes come directly out of some ancient human desire, which is very related ultimately to, as I said, wanting the best for yourself and your children. And we see this pattern recurring over and over again in this book. It's obviously one of the drivers in this book is that is to realize that it's not as if in 2017 we've all of a sudden ascended to some kind of higher plane where we've been able to somehow divorce or cut our understanding of genetics from our desire to manipulate it. In fact, it's only been amplified. We'll come to these topics, but it's important to underscore them right from the beginning. So onto mendel. Mendel is an important, interesting character in this book. The first version of the book didn't begin with Mendel, but I thought that and I'll talk to you about how I reorganized some of these issues. But Mendel is, of course, for me the most obvious way to begin this story. And that's because even though Mendel didn't coined the word gene, he performed experiments that allowed him to get to the concept of the gene. Now. Who's? Mendel. Mendel was a monk. We know. I've been to Bruno. I've looked through whatever papers there are on Mendel, some of them in translation, some of them I had translated from the original Germans medal, was a monk. He lived in what is now the Czech Republic most of his lifetime, in a city called Bruno, which was a city center, a relatively active place. He lived most of his life in a monastery, and attached to that monastery was a garden. Mendel the monk, like many other monks, parsons naturally, people who certainly were part of the clergy, was interested in questions of natural science. He was also a natural scientist and he was an Augustinian, in fact, many Augustinians trained in botany, they trained in biology, they trained in geology. And Mendel carried this tradition forward. And the question that Mendel asked was a very simple question, which is if you take hereditary traits that move across generations, what is the pattern of that movement? Is it that these traits, once you mix them together, do they blend like a wearing blender? Or is there something about them that is there something different about them? Now, interestingly, the dominant theory in Mendel's time was this blender kind of theory, this idea that in fact, it makes some intuitive sense. Your height is some kind of average between your mother and your father. The shape of your nose or the color of your hair is often some kind of average. So it makes a lot of intuitive sense. But of course it doesn't make entire intuitive sense because if that was true, you couldn't explain gender. Gender is not the average of your two parents. Every generation somehow seems to retain the information about male physiology and female physiology, male anatomy and female anatomy and then seems to be able to regenerate this information. So even the most obvious, if you think about it for a second, there was a problem there. You had to explain these two peculiar contradictions. Mendel doesn't write about these contradictions. He went straight into the experiments and his experiments. Mendel's genius was to boil the experiment down to a very simple idea, which is if you take two traits and you bred them to be true in an organism, two strains of organisms, what happens when you mix them, what happens in the first generation, what happens in the second generation. And what he found was astonishing. What he found was that if you did this experiment with peas, that these traits seem to behave in a very odd manner. First of all, they did not blend. One trait became dominant over the other. The second thing was that as they moved through the generations, the traits didn't go away. They had the capacity to be retained in some kind of indivisible or we struggle for analogies atomistic form. It couldn't be split apart. The wearing blender didn't blend them all away. They remained true to their original essence. And then he also found that they acted independently of each other. They were really somewhat like particles. Now, there's a lot of debate, looking back at mental, whether he was solving the problem of heredity in general, whether he was interested in plant hybridization. So the smallness of his experiment, I happen to believe, having read metal over and over again, that he was very aware that his experiments had something important to say about how organisms create their form and function. So he, of course, didn't use the word gene. If you read his papers, and perhaps this is the way to read them in contemporary times, if you read the papers, you do get the sense of his idea that information is involved. He codes the idea of a gene. He calls it a big a and small a, for instance. So I don't know how history will sort of eventually solve the question of how much Mendel knew about what he had eventually found. But certainly to my reading, there's a strong hint that, number one, Mendel understood that what he found was very consequential, that traits did not move in this wearing blender form, but in fact had a kind of again, we struggled with with with modern words for this, but had a kind of atomic quality about them. They were indivisible, they were particulate and they moved across generations in wholesome, in a kind of whole form. That was the basic. And they followed this is an important piece as well. They followed mathematical laws and ratios which would be very tough to capture if you were just sort of blending everything together. Well, there's one way to solve that problem. We can clone some of that DNA that was left on those manuscripts and raise the resulting human being in a monastery near a pea garden and then ask him what he's thinking. Well, to me, what's interesting about all of this is that I was at a conference recently and one of the things that I tried to do was to remind people of the exact dimensions of that garden. And of course, it is strikingly small. It's about the size of three rooms and from those three room springs. All of this discussion today about gene cloning and ethics, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, it's remarkable. So let's talk a little bit about what we now know that mendel didn't and essentially the basics of information flow in biological systems. So you have genes to RNA, to amino acids to proteins. Just remind listeners of that sequence a little bit. There are two ways you can think about the information flow. One way is that genes encode instructions. They usually encode instructions by instruct the formation of RNA. This RNA itself can give rise to important functions in cells and bodies. But also this RNA then gets translated into proteins which are strings of amino acids can be even further chemically modified but are fundamentally strings of amino acids. And these strings of amino acids ultimately are responsible for much of the form and function that we see in living organisms. So there's information transfer. You can think about genes as the master code of instructions. The RNA as a kind of soft copy. Although, as I said, it itself has important functions. It itself can carry out much of the important functions. And that RNA is translated into proteins which are responsible for most of what we know about features and functions of organisms. So the color of your hair, the color of your eyes the signals that go between cells that instruct cells how to be and what to be many of these are either proteins themselves or they are products that are created by proteins. There is both the protein product of genetic transcription and then there's just the fact that some of these products also regulate the function of genes as well. So that's an important piece. The regulation of genes is a crucial piece and it was known for a while. So the question, of course, is the cells in your eye and the cells in your retina and the cells in your blood have essentially, give or take some exceptions the same genetic information, the same DNA. How is it that the cells in your eye or your retina are very different from the cells in your blood? And it turns out that genes are regulated. The analogy that I use is that although the Symphonic score, if you were to use that analogy the Musical score is the same in the eye and in the blood the eye cell chooses to play out certain parts of that score and in doing so, picking out certain bars, picking out certain sections. Obviously, the output of the genetic output that it has in RNA and proteins is different. And that is partly responsible for the difference between your retina and the cells in your retina and the cells in your blood. And there's really no clear boundary between species when you're talking about genes as information. There's no DNA that is intrinsically human and there was no first human. Both of those are correct. They're very important consequences. So the fact that there is no that the genetic code seems for the most part, there are few that could be minor quibbles with that sentence. But for the most part, the genetic code is identical between blue whales and bacteria in humans. First of all, that is a powerful argument for evolution. We'll set that aside for a second. But in fact, the flow of information has been conserved across organisms, across the entire biological world. And you're right, there is nothing fundamentally human about human DNA. If you were to put, as experiments have shown, you can put a yeast gene into a human cell, and for the most part, the human cell will take that yeast gene and make RNA and proteins out of that yeast gene. You can take a viral gene and put it into a bacterium and for the most part, the virus will take that viral gene, make RNA and protein out of that viral gene, and there's nothing intrinsic to one versus the other. Again, there are some minor sort of scientific quibbles about what I just said, but that's for the most part true. And again, with respect to species, the boundary between species is blurry in time too. There was no moment where in the primate line, if you had a time machine, you could go back and point to the first human being. Exactly right. It depends on what we mean by blurry in a genetic sense, there's continuity. But of course, as you know very well, part of the formation of species is reproductive isolation and thereby leading to the formation of species in a genetic sense. You're absolutely right, there's continuity, but that itself doesn't make species. Species formation is I'm going to discuss it a little bit. It's not the central subject of the book, but species formation is a little bit more complicated than just genetic continuum. Yeah. So I want to just touch on this topic of eugenics because you can't avoid it for long. And as you just indicated, this is just part and parcel of understanding what genes are or even attempting to understand them. And this idea that now, obviously eugenics is a highly stigmatized word for good reason, given fairly recent human history, and we can talk about that, but just this basic issue of caring about how the next generation turns out as a possible parent. If you marry a person because they're smart and beautiful and not too crazy, and you think they'll be a good parent and you wouldn't select them as a mate if they weren't, these things, this seems to amount to a very crude form of eugenics, doesn't it? Well, eugenics has kinship and mate selection, et cetera are topics of their own. I mean, the way I like to think about eugenics, you're right. It seems that there's an ancient desire that we have which is ultimately related to the idea of how to best create the best future for our children. That's an ancient desire eugenics has to do with. It's important to distinguish between those aspirations which are present in multiple cultures, present in ancient cultures. Eugenics is a kind of deliberation on that idea. It brings it to a particular kind of self consciousness. And it is the idea that we can deliberately, prospectively, intentionally manipulate human heredity in order to create the best humans in the next generation and in doing so, improve the human race or species. These were Victorian words, but we have to use them here in general. So the forward march, as it were. Look, the reason we are having this entire conversation, I think, is that is that we're at a pivotal moment in in history. We'll talk, I'm sure, more about this, but as you know, just to give give the listeners a kind of advanced flavor. Three or four months ago, the National Academy of Sciences wrote a document saying that for the first time, it would be permissible under extreme circumstances under conditions where there's a disease that causes extraordinary suffering, to intervene on the human genome in a manner that would make that information perpetually, permanently heritable. When humans, in other words, in sperm and egg forming cells, so called germline genetic or genomic modification, everyone who's listening to this should know or will know that this is a momentous point in history. We are essentially saying that we are a machine that has begun to learn to read and write its own instructions. So therefore, the question arises when in the past, what has happened? When we've been tempted to read and write our own instructions? And and and just to point out, there's a there's a there's an ancient drive in here. The writings go back to Plato and Aristotle, but the the self consciousness arises particularly in the late 18th and 19th and 20th century. So the word eugenics is coined by Francis Galton, cousin of Darwin's. And Gorton imagines that he can he and others can manipulate human heredity to produce better human beings and thereby improve the human condition in general, alleviate suffering and improve the human condition in general. And in fact, one of the things that's important about eugenics in this first phase is that it is embraced by many Victorian progressives. It is thought to be a progressive idea. It's thought to be an idea which we should be subscribing to, because what other better way that is there to improve the human condition than take the horns and the reins of heredity in your own hands? Many famous Victorian progressives sign on to this. They can list them in the they're listed in the book. And then there's a second phase. The second phase is the trees that eugenics then moves to the United States. So it undergoes a kind of manic adolescence in the United States. This is a time from around 1910s to the 1930s when it is also the rage in the United States. Offices of the Eugenics Record Office is soon set up in England, eugenics meant selective breeding in America. The twist was placed on it. Eugenics became the possibility of selective sterilization that if you were an embassy ill or a moron or had genetic perceived to be genetic or hereditary problems, we should remind people that those were technical terms imbecile, moron, idiot. In fact, I point that it's pointed out in the book, but I'm using these and they were loosely used, but they were powerful technical terms invented to sort of service the eugenic engine. If you had a particular level of intelligence, you were called an embassy on or a moron or a high grade moron, low grade moron, et cetera. But the point was that very soon, by the late 1920s and the early 1930s, even the courts in the United States had agreed that, in fact, men and women who had these kinds of hereditary traits should be sterilized by state mandate and thereby, again in the hopes of improving human heredity. And many men and women were in fact sterilized based on these grounds. And the story that I tell in the book is that of Carrie Buck, a young woman who was falsely probably found to have a hereditary condition of imbecility, as I said, most likely because of really manipulation of information by the state and she was forcibly sterilized. The case rose to the Supreme Court and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the so called judicial moderate, said, three generations of embassies is enough. That word enough signals something a kind of impatience with with, you know, let's just let's just get on with it. You know, this is a time when better babies contests were part of, you know, fair. You you go to a railroad fair or on the playground and there'd be a better babies contest to select the best babies, et cetera. There were films about sterilization in the United States. So that's the second phase. And the third phase is the one that we're most familiar with is that the idea then metastasizes to Germany where from selective breeding and selective sterilization, it morphs into selective extermination. In England, we could breed the better humans. In the United States, we could sterilize them and thereby prevent them their birds. Then in Nazi Germany, the logic was extended why not just exterminate them? And on that grounds, initially the German scientists began to exterminate again following the United States those that are considered genetically genetic defectives. This is their terminology. And very soon that morphed into the idea that genetic defectives. Well, why not then exterminate racial defectives and thereby that ultimately launched what we know as sort of racial eugenics in Nazi Germany the extermination of Jews and other races as well. Yeah, well, one clear variable here is just the means of intervention available to us. So in a world where the only choice is between selective breeding, forced sterilization and exterminating people well, clearly those methods are so crude that they would only tempt people who are either fundamentally deranged by some ideology or lacking in compassion. To a degree, that is just pathological. Let me interrupt this, though. What's interesting is that I agree and disagree with that. And that's the point of part of the first part of this book. In fact, when the Victorians were speaking or I should say Ben Garden and his associates were speaking about human heredity in this manner. One thing I should say I think I spoke a little too loosely in grouping selective breeding with the other two. I mean, I can see how selective breeding is exactly that. In fact, we should remember and be very remind ourselves that this history was a gradual stepping into blood, as it were. And in fact, it's not as if the Nazis all of a sudden one day woke up and said oh, this would be a nice way to improve the human race. They followed the road to help through the best genetic intentions of the progressives of the 1890s and 19 hundreds in the United States and in England. Yeah. And again, it comes down to the technical means available. So, for instance, if the question is whether or not a person with a heritable disability should be allowed to have a child that will have that disability or will likely have that disability, that's a very interesting and difficult ethical question. Depending on what the disability is and the likelihood that some as yet unborn child will inherit it, but it becomes a trivially easy question to answer in favor of intervention if the intervention is trivial to apply. So if you told me that, well, this aspiring mother who doesn't want the state to meddle in her life at all, you know, stands a 99% chance of giving birth to a deaf child, say, but if she'll simply take this vitamin that's otherwise harmless, twice during her pregnancy, the risk of this will be removed. Well, then, yeah, she the state has an interest in ensuring she takes that vitamin. Right. It would be criminally negligent on her part not to take that vitamin. And there's a continuum from that, you know, harmless and and trivially easy intervention to the removal of her uterus right. By a state. Again, absolutely correct. But to remind ourselves and we're fast forwarding a little bit but it's important to keep reminding ourselves that in reality, the genetic information in humans has turned out to be more complicated and thereby raised the spectrum of more complicated questions. So again, to use your analogy to run along the structure of. Analogy, for many diseases, the odds turn out not to be 99%, but turn out to be something like 20%, 30%. And some of these diseases are very dependent on other genes that that child would inherit. So the context and on the environment, just to give you a very concrete example, and this is very intimate example, because it happened to me recently. I was giving a talk on cancer genetics, and after that, a woman with BRCA, one mutation, Braca, one mutation with a terrifying history of breast cancer, came to me to talk to me afterwards, and she said her mother and her grandmother had died of breast cancer. She had had two children. She was thinking of having another one. The question she was asking is, should she and could she eliminate the BRCA One gene mutation forever from her lineage? And the answer is, if not now, very soon. Basically, we have the technologies to allow her to do that. We have the technologies that she could do that by selectively implanting an embryo which lacks that genetic variation. And if in the future we might be able to do that by selectively changing the genomes, offer sperm and egg carrying cells or making cells. But remember, in her case, the child will not have a 99% chance. Actually, what's interesting about it is we is we can't really predict we can predict that the child who is born with the Raca One gene mutation will have a multiply, higher fold risk of having breast cancer in her. Future and other cancers, but breast cancer in her future. But we cannot looking at her genome or looking at her tell you whether it's going to be at age 30, at age 60, at age 70. Is it going to be an indolent variant of cancer? It's going to be likely very aggressive where it's going to spread. All of this information is weirdly hidden from us. We can tell you that there is risk and there's propensity for risk. Is it a tenfold risk or something around there? Actually, I don't know what the newest numbers are for Braca One, but let's say ten fold. Well, so unless the Braca gene confers some other benefit that I'm unaware of, what would be the argument against eliminating it? The argument there's some arguments about against eliminating bracket one is an intermediate example. I'll give you another more extreme examples in a second. But the arguments against eliminating it right now are we don't know exactly whether we can use these technologies in a predictive way. If you think about it's in the doing, as it were, if you think about the intervention into sperm and egg forming cells, when we do these genetic interventions, we're doing these in the lab with other genes, not with bracket one, but with other genes that we've discovered when we're doing this in the lab. These interventions, these technologies allow us to do powerful genetic interventions in stem cells, but they sometimes miss and they reach a different target. They're off target effects. So that's one, the second one is that the interventions that we're doing often, as I said, occur in the context of other genes. So we know very little about how other genes and environments influence it. Sure. Braca one will be an example of a genetic variation where we will already and will allow genetic interventions in the future. And insofar as it gets simpler if you go to something like cystic fibrosis, then it's a pretty easy decision, isn't it, to eliminate it? It is an easy decision to allow the elimination. Socially speaking, it's an easy decision to allow the elimination because of the fact that the disease that it's linked to causes extraordinary suffering. Whether an individual woman chooses to or not to exercise that decision, I think should be left up to her. The point is that one of the things that the history is teaching us, I think, is that state mandates are not very successful here because they end up intervening on individual liberties. So the states can provide guidance, they can provide the options of what would happen. But it seems to me that once the state got into the business of forcing a woman to have only one prescribed kind of genetic lineage, I think for me that steps a little too far. But now, is that intuition of yours technology dependent? I think you're picturing kind of a forced in vitro conception as opposed to a natural one. Whereas if the intervention could be as easily applied as taking a harmless pill, then do you still feel the same way about it? Again, I'm talking about cystic fibrosis. I think I would feel the same way about it. I don't think it's intervention dependent. I think it has to do with allowing humans the liberty to choose what kind of heredity they choose to transmit. And there's some historical precedent for this, obviously, down syndrome is an important historical precedent for this, which is that the state provides guidance as to what the life of a child with down syndrome may be like. And even there, we very much know there's a wide spectrum. Down syndrome has a wide spectrum. But of course, there are important medical consequences of down syndrome. The state provides guidance, but it doesn't go and tell women that you can't have that child. Right? It seems to me that cystic fibrosis is a clearer case, maybe not the clearest possible, but getting there both in the simplicity of the underlying genetics and in the cloud without a silver lining outcome, and then when you try to map it on to other ethical imperatives. So, for instance, just a reminder this is a side note, Sam, but it's an important reminder, just a reminder to remind us that we think that the cystic fibrosis gene variant that now causes disease was likely selected at a time when gastrointestinal diseases like typhoid were rampant. Throughout Europe, and that gene variant likely protected people from dying. Now, I'm not trying to be wax eloquent about a history that's long past. Most countries in the United States, in the west, do not have these threats of typhoid, but just a reminder that these gene variants were, in some cases, selected for very particular environmental conditions. Yeah, well, that's a great point that I actually want to get to in a slightly different context, because that presents a fascinating limitation on our ability to use this technology, even if we get our heads straight ethically. But I'm just thinking back to this particular intervention, the feeling that I should oblige my children to wear seatbelts whether they want to or not, and whether I want them to or not, and that the state has an interest in my doing that. Because it's not much fun to see needlessly injured or dead children show up at the Er day after day when they could have just been wearing a seatbelt. Why isn't there a why isn't there a seatbelt law for genetics? Yeah, seatbelt law for unborn children on some level. Again, when the I think that you're pointing out exactly the reason. Because seatbelts, our aspirations and personhood, are not linked in the same way to seatbelts as they are to to heredity. And that may be because of vast cultural reasons, it may be because of an enormous particular interest in heredity, but we have carved out a special place within ourselves, within our cultures, that says, look, the autonomy that we have around heredity is an autonomy that should be respected unless they are truly extraordinary circumstances. And even when they are extraordinary circumstances, I've taken care of many children with down syndrome who have leukemia. In fact, this is one of the terrifying things that happens. And so there is no doubt that that is an extraordinary circumstance and there is extraordinary suffering involved. But even in such cases, we've decided, partly because of the history and partly because of the special place we've carved out for our aspirations around heredity, to provide strong guidance, but not step beyond the lines of strong guidance. We've left it to individuals. It's just a fascinating area ethically, which I haven't thought as much about as I would like, because just in hearing you say that now, it really is what we're privileging the aspirations of the parents over the experience of their future children in a way that wouldn't make a lot of sense if the children already existed. There are several philosophers and biologists and geneticists who are grappling with this question now. So to what extent you have to take into account the unborn voice of the child. It's a fascinating and important debate, but the point here being that I've given you my perspective on this. But the point here being that being that this debate will become increasingly centrally central as we learn to read and write genomes more and more, right now we are in a kind of learning phase, a steep learning phase of reading and writing. We are like the time we if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including between bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't get access to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I have said and written a lot about free will over the years, and I wanted to get all of my thoughts or my most effective thoughts all in one place. Many of you find my argument against free will to be very provocative and even off putting, and many of you mistake it for a philosophical argument that doesn't make contact directly with experience. So I want to see if I can do this all in one pass and actually bring some of you along with me into the end zone here. So here's the starting point. Most people believe that they have a self which enjoys something called freedom of will. And in fact, this feeling of self and the feeling that we have free will are really two sides of the same coin. But here I'm going to focus on free will because in many ways, it's easier to deconstruct. Now, I found in my surprise that this is a very sensitive topic, and so here I want to offer the usual disclaimer. If it makes you uncomfortable to think about these things, you need to be the judge of whether this discomfort is healthy and worth pressing into, or whether it's actually bad for you. And in the latter case, just skip this journey with me. And it's probably not an accident that many people find the prospect that free will might be an illusion to be provocative, because the idea of free will seems to touch nearly everything people care about morality, law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, feelings of guilt and personal accomplishment. Most of what is distinctly human about us seems to depend on our viewing one another as agents who are capable of free choice. I say seems to because I don't think it does, really, but it can take a little while to see this. Now, most people believe that the challenge is to reconcile a subjective fact, the fact that we experience free will with objective reality, the way physical causes and events arise in the universe. But I want you to examine this. What I hope to impress upon you is that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will and there are no subjective facts about it to reconcile with the truths of physics and neurophysiology. In fact, our conscious experience is perfectly compatible with a scientific picture of reality that does not stop or change character at the boundary of our skin. Many people worry that the consequences of dispensing with free will must be negative. Now, obviously, this wouldn't suggest that free will actually exists. But generally speaking, this claim about negative outcomes isn't true either. Losing one's belief in free will can actually have very positive consequences. For one, it removes any rational basis for hating people and we'll explore that later on. Let's begin at the beginning. The popular conception of free will rests on two assumptions. The first is that each of us was free to think and act differently than we did in the past. We chose A, but we could have chosen B. You became an accountant, but you could have decided to be a firefighter. You had chocolate ice cream last night, but you could have picked vanilla. It certainly seems to most of us that this is the world we're living in. The second assumption is that we are the conscious source of many of our thoughts and actions in the present. Your sense of deciding what to do in each moment seems to be the actual origin of your subsequent behavior. You feel you want to reach and pick up an object, and then you do. The conscious part of you that wants and intends and perceives seems to be in control of at least some of your thoughts and actions. However, there is every reason to believe that both of these assumptions are false. Of course, there's very little disagreement over the fact that events have causes. Everything that arises seems to be borne into existence by some previous state of the universe. Now, maybe there's some place to stand where all of this proves to be an illusion. Maybe there's some way to view the cosmos as a whole or reality itself and to say that nothing has ever actually happened that change itself. The process of cause and effect itself is an illusion. But let's leave that possibility aside for the moment. Most of the time, things certainly seem to happen. Lightning strikes a tree and a fire starts. A few lines of computer code cause your phone to ring. People are born, they grow old, and then they die. Everywhere we look, we see patterns of events. And all these events have prior causes. Which is to say, they depend, materially and functionally and logically on other events that preceded them in time. And most relevantly for our purposes, all of our conscious experiences our thoughts, intentions, desires and the actions and choices that result from them are caused by events of which we are not conscious and which we did not bring into being. You didn't pick your parents. You didn't pick your genes, therefore, and you didn't pick the environment into which you were born. And yet the totality of these facts determines who you are in each moment and what you do in the next. And even if you think that you have an immaterial soul that somehow animates this machinery, you didn't pick your soul. The next thing you think and do can only emerge from this totality of prior causes. And it can only emerge in one of two ways lawfully, that is, deterministically. Like one domino just getting knocked over by another, or randomly. Now, randomness is a very interesting concept and it's not clear how pervasive it might be. There are arguments against determinism, especially in quantum mechanics, that suggest that subatomic particles themselves make, quote, free choices. Which is to say, there's nothing in the prior history of the universe that tells them what to do next. And if what a particle does next doesn't depend on the past, well then there's no theory that can predict what it will do next. I'm not taking a position against this at the level of particles, but I am claiming that this kind of independence from prior causes would not give people the psychological freedom they think they have for two reasons. The first is that there's every indication that larger systems like human brains behave more deterministically. But more important, randomness of any sort would not give people freedom of will. There is no will in randomness. If you ever did something that was truly random, that had no relationship to prior states of your brain, if it literally came out of nowhere, that wouldn't be what you or anyone means by free will. You would think what the hell did I just do right? And why did I do it? Such an action would be precisely the sort of thing we would deem out of character because it would be, by definition, out of character. To be in character is to be discernibly in line with prior tendencies. It follows a pattern. Something truly random would be unanalyzable. There would literally be no answer to the question of why you did it. With true randomness, there is no why. That's not what we mean by will, much less a free one. That is not psychological continuity through time. The problem is that neither determinism nor randomness nor any combination of the two. Justifies the feeling that most people have that goes by the name of free will, the feeling that they're free to think and do more or less whatever they want in the present in a way that allows them to be something other than a mere concatenation of causes or mysterious influences to be something other than a natural phenomenon. People don't want to believe that they are in any sense like a wave breaking on the shore. But this is how causes propagate, or seem to propagate. Many scientists and philosophers have acknowledged the problem here, but most appear to think that we must live with the illusion of free will or euphemized about it. And I'm arguing that this is a mistake. So what do most people mean by free will? Well, there's controversy over this among philosophers and scientists but I think the central false intuition is pretty clear and it results from how our subjectivity is structured or appears to be structured. Again, the feeling of having free will is directly connected to the feeling of being a self. With respect to free will, it amounts to this. Most people feel that the conscious part of their minds the one that is experiencing their experience, thinking their thoughts, feeling their feelings is in control of their mental life and behavior in some real way. They feel that they are the source of their intentions and actions. Not merely that these mental and physical states are arising in their bodies somehow but that they are initiated by their conscious minds in some way. The fact that something's happening in a person's body isn't really the point. People do not feel free to beat their hearts or to stop beating them. They don't feel that they're causing their cells to divide or to metabolize energy. They don't feel they're in control of their livers. But they do feel that they are the source of their thoughts and voluntary actions. And at any given moment they feel that they are free to think and do something else. Now, perhaps you feel this. Perhaps you feel that if you could rewind the movie of your life and return the universe to the precise state it was in a moment ago you could think and behave differently. I think there's little question that most people presume this about themselves and about other people not philosophically, but implicitly as a felt sense of how they exist in the world. This seems to be the very essence of what it means to hold ourselves and others morally responsible for our actions. If someone does something to harm you intentionally you feel they shouldn't have done it, right? They could and should have done otherwise and you have a grievance against them that is very different from how you feel about a malfunctioning piece of machinery or a gust of wind that might produce the same harm. So the reason why discussions about free will are self fraught is that declaring free will to be an illusion strikes at the very heart of what people feel is true about their own subjectivity in each moment. And it seems to have implications for a wide variety of moral norms. As we'll see, the implications are not what many people think. I'll argue that our morality actually improves once we recognize that free will doesn't make any sense. But again, the consequences of believing in free will or not are quite separable from any claim about what is true. One simply can't argue for the reality of free will based on the imagined good effects of believing in it and with respect to what's true. The problem is, there's absolutely no reason to believe that free will exists. There's no objective reason, and there's no subjective reason either. In the end, a belief in free will is analogous to believing that if you rewound this piece of audio, I might finish this sentence some other way. As I said, traditionally this has been viewed as a philosophical impasse. We know we have free will because we experience it directly, but we just can't see how to make sense of it in terms of physical causation. But as I hope to show you, there is no impasse because there's no experiential reason to believe in free will either. The Experiential you the conscious witness of your inner life, the one who's hearing these words right now. You aren't the author of your thoughts, intentions and actions. Rather, thoughts, intentions and subsequent actions simply arise and are noticed. But this doesn't mean there's no difference between voluntary and involuntary behavior. There is. Let's take a closer look at this. Reach for something and pick it up now and pay attention to what the experience is like. Now, whether you're aware of it or not, voluntary behavior is structured by intention and expectation. Your brain produces a forward looking model of what's about to happen. And if the model is violated, you'll notice you know what it's like to reach for something and to accidentally knock it over. For instance, the successful manipulation of an object feels different than just banging into it and produces different results. And voluntary actions can be consciously interrupted. Which is to say we can experience an impulse to stop them. And this impulse is effective. And of course, they can be deterred by other people and by legal penalties. And involuntary action such as a muscle spasm or a reflex or a seizure or tripping and falling, can't be deterred. So there are many differences here. What someone does voluntarily says more about him about what he wants, for instance, about what he's likely to do in the future, than an involuntary action does. Doing something on purpose reveals something about one's purpose in life. We don't need a concept of free will to notice these differences. And as I'll make clear later on, most of our ethical judgments remain unchanged when we give up the illusion of free will. But not everything remains unchanged. And a few things that do change are actually quite important. Again, I want to flag what is novel about my argument here. Most philosophers and scientists believe we have an experience of free will that is undeniable. And the challenge is to make sense of it in terms of a picture of causality that seems not to allow for it, whether that's deterministic or random. I'm claiming that we don't have the experience we think we have. There is no experience of free will. So let's look more closely at our experience. Consider how your thoughts arise because they're the basis for most of your complex behavior, certainly your most deliberate behavior. If you pay attention to the process of thinking, you'll see that your thoughts simply appear in consciousness, very much like my words. In fact, you can observe that you no more decide the next thing you think than you decide the next thing I say. What are you going to think next? You don't know yet. Your thoughts determine what you want and intend and do next. Your thoughts determine your goals and whether or not you believe you've met them. They determine what you say to other people and what you don't say. In fact, thoughts determine almost everything that makes you human. Now, most people feel that they are the thinker of their thoughts and therefore their author. And this is one way of describing the feeling of self, subjectively speaking, as a matter of experience. There's no thinker to be found in the mind apart from thoughts themselves. There's no subject in the middle of experience. Everything, including thoughts and intentions and counter. Thoughts and counterintentions is arising all on its own. And the feeling that there's a thinker in addition to the flow of thought is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you're thinking. It's the feeling of being identified with the train of thought that's passing through consciousness in this moment. But if you pay attention to how thoughts arise, you'll see that they simply appear quite literally out of nowhere. And you're not free to choose them before they appear. That would require that you think them before you think them. So here's the question if you can't control your next thought, if you can't decide what it will be before it arises, and if you can't prevent it from arising, where is your freedom of will? At this moment? You might be thinking, what the hell is he talking about? Here is what I'm talking about. You didn't choose that thought either. If you're confused by what I'm saying, you didn't produce your confusion. You didn't decide to be confused. Conversely, if you understand what I'm saying and you find it interesting, you didn't create that state of mind either. And if your mind is just wandering to thoughts of lunch and you missed half of what I just said, you didn't choose to be distracted. Everything's just happening, including your thoughts and intentions and desires and most deliberate actions. You are part of the universe and there is no place for you to stand outside of its causal structure. And as we'll see, there's no one to stand there either. You're not a self in the end. You're certainly not a subject in the middle of experience or on the edge of it. You're not on the riverbank watching the stream of consciousness, because as a matter of experience, there is only the stream and you are identical to it. This is not a metaphysical statement. I'm not talking about how consciousness relates to the physical universe. I'm talking about your actual experience in this moment. As a matter of experience. You are not having an experience from someplace outside of experience. There is only experience. You're not on the edge of your life looking in. You're not sitting in the theater of your mind watching a life movie. And the feeling that you are, the feeling that you can stand apart from everything that's happening and this feeling of being free to choose the next thing you do or the next thing you notice, the next thing you pay attention to. This feeling is itself part of the movie. Yet more appearances in consciousness. There's just consciousness and its contents in this moment. Again, this isn't just a philosophical point. Most people think that free will really exists and it's just hard to map onto the physics of things or it doesn't exist, and we just have to admit that we're living in the grip of a powerful illusion. But that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying free will doesn't exist. And in fact, it's such an incoherent concept that it's impossible to say what would have to be true of the world for it to exist. There really is no way for causes to arise that would make sense of this notion of free will. But I'm making a much more fundamental claim about the nature of conscious experience. I'm saying there is no illusion of free will. If you pay attention, you can see that your experience is totally compatible with the truth of determinism, or determinism plus randomness. Let's run a little experiment. Just close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. And now think of a movie. It can be one you've seen or just one you know the name of, right? Doesn't have to be good, it can be bad. Whatever comes to mind doesn't matter. And pay attention to what this experience is like. A few films have probably come to mind. Just pick one and pay attention to what the experience of choosing is like. Now, the first thing to notice is that this is as free a choice as you are ever going to make in your life. You are completely free. You have all the films in the world to choose from, and you can pick anyone you want. And you can pause this audio and take as long as you want. Now, let's do that again. I want you to become sensitive to this process. So forget the first film and choose another. And again, pay attention to what you actually experience here. What is it like to choose? What is it like to make this completely free choice? You got a new film? Okay, do it one more time, right? Just clean the slate. Think of a few more films and choose one. Did you see any evidence for free will here? Because if it's not here, it's not anywhere. So we better be able to find it here, so let's look for it. Well, first let's set aside all the films you've never seen or heard about and whose names and imagery are unknown to you. Right. Needless to say, you couldn't pick one of those. And there's no freedom in that, obviously, because you couldn't have picked one of those if your life depended on it. But then there are many other films whose names are well known to you, many of which you've seen, but which didn't occur to you to pick. For instance, you absolutely know that The Wizard of Oz is a film, but you just didn't think of it. And if you thought of The Wizard of Oz, apologies, but you get my point. You can swap in the 7th Seal or Mission Impossible or The Deer Hunter. There. And if you're hearing this for the first time and you thought of all those films, well, then we really are living in a simulation. And it's all about you, apparently. So consider the few films that came to mind in light of all the films that might have come to mind but didn't. And ask yourself, were you free to choose that which did not occur to you to choose? As a matter of neurophysiology, your wizard of Oz circuits were not in play a few moments ago for reasons that you can't possibly know and could not control based on the state of your brain. The wizard of Oz was not an option. Even though you absolutely know about this film. And if we could return your brain to the state it was in a moment ago, and account for all the noise in the system adding back any contributions of randomness, whatever they were, you would fail to think of The Wizard of Oz again and again and again until the end of time. Where is the freedom in that? It's important to see that whether the universe is fully determined or it admits of randomness, the picture is the same. Determinism gives you no freedom, obviously. It would just be mere biochemical clockwork. But randomness gives you no freedom either. If you knew that your next choice of a film would be the result of a random process, some quantum roll of the dice, that would be the antithesis of what most people mean by free will. There's no will in that. And if that same random influence appeared a trillion times in a row just by chance, you would think of the same film a trillion times in a row just by chance. No matter how we think about causation, whether things are determined or random or some combination of the two, there's no place for you as the conscious subject to stand that isn't downstream of causes that you can't inspect or anticipate. Everything is just appearing in consciousness. Again, focus on the experience. Here. You can forget about the metaphysics. Free will is an enduring problem for philosophy and science. For one reason, people think they experience it, they feel they have it. Do you experience it again? If it's not here, it's not anywhere. The only constraint you've been given is to think of a film, and you can pick anyone you want, and you can take as long as you want. It is likely that every other choice you have made in your life has been more constrained than this one. What job to take, who to marry, whether to have kids, who to vote for. Most choices in life are much more obviously constrained by other variables than this one. So if you're not free to simply pick a film right now, I don't know where you're going to find free will anywhere in your life. So really pay attention to the experience. Do it one more time. Pick a film, any film. Okay, so we can use my films here to describe the experience. I thought of Chinatown and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Alien. And let's say I thought, I'm going to go with Chinatown, but then at the last second, I thought, no, I'm going to go with Alien. This is the sort of decision that motivates the idea of free will. You go back and forth between two or more options, and then you settle on one without suffering any obvious coercion or pressure from the outside world. It's just you and your thoughts, and you appear to be doing everything. So I pick Alien over Chinatown. I appeared entirely free to make that choice. But when I look closely, I can see that I'm in no position to know why these films occurred to me in the first place, or why I chose Alien over Chinatown. I mean, I might have some additional story to tell about my choice. I might now think, well, everyone says Chinatown is a great film, but it's actually a little boring. So I picked Alien, which is not boring. But of course, we know from a vast psychological literature that these sorts of explanations are often pure fiction. And when people are manipulated in a lab, they seem to always have a story about why they did what they did, and it often bears no relationship to what actually influenced them. It's simply a fact that our judgments about the causes of our own behavior are often unreliable. Generally, this comes courtesy of the left hemisphere of the brain. But even if I'm right in this instance about why I picked Alien over Chinatown, I'm in no position to know why my memory of Chinatown being boring had the effect that it did. Why didn't it have the opposite effect? Why didn't I think, I'm going to go with the classic whether it's boring or not, the thing to notice is that you, as the conscious witness of your inner life, are not making decisions. All you can do is witness decisions once they're made. No matter how many times you go back and forth between two options, no matter how many other thoughts arise to give color to this process, giving weight to one option or the other, the process itself is irreducibly mysterious from your point of view. And whether these mental events are fully determined or in part, random, the experience is the same. Everything is just happening on its own. May I say, pick a film, and there's this moment before anything has changed for you. And then the names of films begin percolating at the margins of consciousness, and you have no control over which appear. None, really none. Can you feel that you can't pick them before they pick themselves? Someone else might as well be whispering the names of films in your ear for all that you did to summon them. And the same can be said for the process of choosing among the candidates that do appear. Even if you go back and forth between two choices for an hour iny Meeny Miny Mo, you can't know why you stop on the one that you finally choose. If you pay attention to how your thoughts arise and how decisions actually get made, you'll see that there's no evidence for free will. Not only no evidence, it's impossible to make sense of the claim that free will might exist. What could it refer to? Forget about the physics of things. What, in your experience, could it refer to? Everything is simply springing out of the darkness. What will you think or intend or want or ignore or forget and then suddenly remember? Next, our experience of being and acting in the world is totally compatible with the truth of determinism, or determinism plus randomness. And this has implications not only for our sense of self, but for our ethics and our view of other people. And this insight can be extraordinarily freeing psychologically. It can lead to much greater compassion, both for other people and for ourselves. And far from causing us to become passive. And insight into the illusoryness of free will can allow us to behave much more intelligently in life as we will see. I've been arguing that there's no such thing as free will. So what is there? Well, there's luck, both good and bad, and there's what we make of it. Actually, that's not quite true. What you make of your luck is also just more luck. Once again, you didn't choose your parents. You didn't choose the society into which you were born. There's not a cell in your body or brain that you, the conscious subject created. Nor is there a single influence coming from the outside world that you brought into being. And yet everything you think and do arises from this ocean of prior causes. So what you do with your luck and the very tools with which you do it, including the level of effort and discipline you manage to summon in each moment, is more in the way of luck. I mean, how do you explain your capacity for effort? How. Do you explain when you're lazy? How do you explain when you're lazy, but then you suddenly get inspired and make great effort? You can't. The you that experiences sudden inspiration, or a doubling of effort, or a failure of nerve. The you that rises to the occasion or chokes isn't in the driver's seat. In each moment, there's a mystery at your back, and it's producing everything that you can notice your thoughts, intentions, desires, inhibitions, and all of the behaviors and course corrections that follow from them. This is an objective truth about your subjective experience. You can't inspect your causes. Now, most people resist this idea seemingly at any intellectual cost. And yet this single insight is the antidote to arrogance and hatred. And it provides a profound basis for compassion, both for other people and for oneself. It's the basis for real forgiveness, again, for other people and for oneself. It is literally the path to redemption. And it's the only view of human nature that cuts through the logic of retribution, this notion of punishment as justified vengeance. And it allows us to simply consider what actually works in changing people's behavior for the better, so that we can achieve outcomes in the world that we actually want. But before we get into the ethics, we need to clear away some more confusion. At this point, many people begin to wonder about the importance of choice and decision making. If there's no free will, how do we do anything? And why do anything? Why not just wait around to see what happens? There is no free will, but choices matter. And this isn't a paradox. Your desires, intentions and decisions arise out of the present state of the universe, which includes your brain and your soul, if such a thing exists, along with all of their influences. Your mental states are part of a causal framework. So your choices matter whether or not they're products of a brain or a soul, because they're often the proximate cause of your actions. Imagine that I want to learn to speak Mandarin. How is that going to happen? It's not going to happen by accident. I'll need to attend classes, or hire a native speaking tutor or travel to China. I'll need to study and practice, and this will entail a lot of effort. I'll get frustrated and embarrassed by my failures, and I'll have to overcome my frustration and embarrassment and keep learning. My decision to learn Mandarin. And all of the efforts that follow, if they persist long enough, will be the cause of my speaking Mandarin at some point in the future. Badly, I am sure. It's not that I was destined to speak Mandarin regardless of my thoughts and actions. Determinism isn't fatalism. Choices, reasoning, discipline, all of these things play obvious roles in our lives, despite the fact that they're determined by prior causes. And again, adding randomness to this machinery doesn't change anything. But the reality is that I show no signs of making an effort to learn Mandarin. It simply isn't a priority for me. Am I free to make it a priority? Well, in some ways, yes, but not in the crucial way that the common notion of free will requires. I can't account for why I don't want to speak Mandarin more than I do. I can't decide to make learning this language my top priority when it simply isn't my top priority. And if it suddenly became the most important thing in my life, I wouldn't have created this change in myself. I would be a mere witness to this change. It would come over me like a virus. If I read an article tomorrow that convinces me that the best use of the next few years of my life is to become competent in Mandarin, I will not be able to account for why this article had the effect that it did. I've already read articles like that, and they haven't moved me. If the next one does, where is the freedom in that? It would be like being pushed off a cliff and then claiming that I'm free to fall. The fact that I might enjoy the feeling of the wind in my hair doesn't change this situation. And so it is with any other influence. A conversation with another person, or indeed a conversation with oneself, simply has the effect that it has and not some other effect. You are free to do an almost infinite number of things today. Free in the sense that no one will try to stop you from doing these things or put you in prison if you do them. But you're not free to want what you don't in fact want, or to want what you want more than you want it. You're not free to notice what you won't notice, or to remember what you've truly forgotten. Again, consider your experience in this moment. Are you going to spend the rest of the day and tomorrow and the day after that, and onward for days, uncountable, struggling to master a skill that you don't happen to care about? Are you going to learn Mandarin, or the violin, or fencing? Are you going to take up rock collecting? Why aren't you more interested in rocks? There are people who are all in for rocks. Why aren't you one of these people? If you suddenly became one of these people, and began spending all of your free time looking for interesting rocks, freely doing what you most want to do, you're now rock collecting to your heart's content. Where is the freedom in that? And if your interest suddenly dissipates such that you no longer care about rocks, where is the freedom in that? You are being played by the universe, but choices still matter, because causes matter, change matters, and a capacity to make change matters. Biological evolution and cultural progress have increased our ability to get what we want out of life and to avoid what we don't want a person who can reason effectively and plan for the future and choose his words carefully and regulate his negative emotions and play fair with strangers and participate in various cultural institutions. He is very different from a person who can do none of those things. But these abilities do not lend credence to the traditional notion of free will. People sometimes ask, well, if there's no free will, then why are you trying to convince anyone of anything? People are just going to believe whatever they believe. Your very effort to convince them that they don't have free will is proof that you think they have it again. This is confusion between determinism and fatalism. Reasoning is possible not because you're free to think however you want, but because you are not free. Reason makes slaves of us all. To be convinced by an argument is to be subjugated by it. It's to be forced to believe it regardless of your preferences. Think about what it's like not to know something and then to know it. To learn something despite your prior ignorance or presuppositions to the contrary. To be placed in the grip of an argument that is valid and true. To be led step by step over foreign ground without spotting an error, without seeing any place to put a foot or hand to arrest your progress, to then be delivered to the necessary conclusion, is the antithesis of freedom. You're about as free as any prisoner who has ever led to the gallows. It's the lack of freedom that makes reasoning possible. That's why I know an argument that worked on me should also work on you. And if it shouldn't work on you, it shouldn't have worked on me either. Reasoning is all about constraints. Two plus two equals four. Where is the freedom in that? It matters that two plus two equals four, and it matters that we each can be made to understand that by being forced to think under the same logical constraints. Are you free not to understand that two plus two equals four? Not if you do in fact, understand it. Are you free to understand it if you don't understand it? Again, no. Not until the understanding itself dawns in your mind. So whether you understand something or not isn't under your control. But the difference matters absolutely. And knowledge on all fronts, matters absolutely. It's every bit as important as we imagine it to be. In fact, it's probably more important than most people imagine it to be. The physicist David Deutsche has argued that knowledge can produce any change in the universe compatible with his fogs because of a change can't be called if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today I'm speaking with Johann Hari. Johan is the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream, which is being adapted into a feature film. He has been twice named Newspaper Journalist of the Year by Amnesty International UK. He has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and many other journals. His Ted Talk. Everything you think you know about addiction is Wrong has more than 20 million views. And his most recent book is Lost connections uncovering the Real causes of depression and the unexpected Solutions. And we talk about both his recent books, Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections. So we mostly speak about the dynamics of addiction and depression, but this leads us to talk about politics and the state of the world and humanity's search for meaning. Anyway, Johan is interested in many things and I was very happy to get him on the podcast. So now I bring you Johan Hari. I am here with Johan Hari. Johan, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much, Sam. You're the one of the very few people I know who said my name right. First time we were the very first time. I once waited for 6 hours in an emergency room because they were calling for Joanna Harry to come forward. I've always been impressed by that. So I forget how we first connected. I think what happened is I noticed you wrote a review of my first book, The End of Faith, that I didn't hate. I thought, I got a feeling we met through Richard Dawkins, but that might be a completely false memory. No, I don't know. But you must have been 14 when you wrote that. I just have a weird baby face. I'm actually tragically old. It's just how old are you? I'm nearly 40. I'm 14. A few months. Oh, nice. Well, I've got a friend who has a baby and for some reason, babies always react positively to me and she thinks it's because babies think I'm their king when they see me. I'm just like a bigger version of them. Yeah. You have two books. Unfortunately, I've only read one of them. You have a new book out that I haven't read, but I believe I have the gist from seeing some of your public utterances, but they seem clearly connected. The first book, Chasing the Scream, was a call to sanity with respect to the war on drugs and the way we think about addiction. And now you have this new book, Lost Connections on Depression, right? And it seems to me that the connection there, correct me if I'm wrong, is that you're arguing that we are not just bags of chemicals that can be best thought of as suffering chemical and imbalances with respect to addiction and depression, there's much more to be understood about our circumstance to account for both of these problems. And while it seems to me that you're often assumed to be discounting any neurophysiological understanding of these problems, I don't think you're doing that in either case. But neurophysiology isn't the whole language game we need to play with respect to talking about these problems and talking about solutions. That's a really good way into it. And I think I came to the second, but they were both quite personal journeys for me. So I wanted to understand addiction because we had a lot of addiction in my family. One of my earliest memories is trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was too small then to understand why. But as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family. So I ended up for my book Chasing the Scream, going on this big journey all over the world to try to figure this out and to look at the war on drugs more generally. And I think that the thing in that that led me to the second book was what I learned about the causes of addiction. So you're totally right. Biology is an important part of both addiction and and depression. With, with all mental health problems, there's a very broad scientific consensus. There's three kinds of cause, right? There are biological causes like your genes and brain changes. There are psychological causes, how you think about yourself, and there are social causes, your environment and how we live together. And they play out in all mental health problems to some degree. So think about things like dementia, right? Dementia has clearly got a very heavy biological component. But even with dementia, we know your psychology can slow it down significantly if you speak more languages, for example. And we know your environment can have a massive role in slowing it down. People who are socially connected, have a strong sense of meaning and purpose, can develop dementia much more slowly. And there's good evidence for that. One thing that surprised me is what I learned about addiction in relation to that. You and I talked about this a few times before, but I think about this. It was a real moment that changed my life. It made me realize I had misunderstood even what I thought I'd seen in front of me with some of the people I love. So if you'd said to me when I started doing the research for Chasing the screen what causes, for example, heroin addiction? I would have looked at you like you an idiot and I would have said, well, the clues in the name, dummy, right? Obviously heroin addiction is caused by heroin. For 100 years, we've told this heavily biological story about addiction, which is that addiction is caused by the chemical hooks in the drug. We think I would have thought, if we kidnapped the first 20 people to walk past this hotel? And how would I injected them all with heroin every day for a month, like a villain in a saw moving as one does. At the end of that month, they would all have been heroin addicts for a simple reason that there are these chemical hooks in heroin that their bodies would start to desperately physically need. They would, in fact, be hooked. This is where we get the word hooked from and that's what addiction is. And I actually learned that while chemical hooks are real and I can talk about the real role of them and it's important to stress they're real, actually, I went interviewed a wonderful man in Vancouver called Professor Bruce Alexander, who's really changed how we think about addiction and led to some really amazing changes all over the world. So Professor Alexander explained to me the story we've got in our heads, that addiction is caused just by the chemical hooks comes from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple experiments. Your listeners can try them at home if they feel a bit sadistic. You take a rat, you put it in a cage and you give it two water bottles. One is just water, the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself quite quickly. You might remember the famous ad in the Partnership for Drug Free America advert that showed this experiment and said, you know, something like it will happen to you. But in the 70s, Professor Alexander came along and said, well, hang on a minute. You put the rat alone in an empty cage where it's got nothing that makes life meaningful for rats. What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage that he called Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats, right? They got loads of friends, they can have loads of sex, they got loads of cheese, they got loads of colored balls, they got loads of wheels. Anything a rat can want in life that a rat finds meaningful, it's there in Rat Park. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drug water. And of course, they try both. This is the fascinating thing in Rat Park. They don't like the drug water very much. None of them ever use it compulsively, none of them ever overdose. So when rats don't have the things that make life meaningful. You get almost 100% compulsive use in overdose. When they do have the things that make life meaningful, they don't develop problematic use. And there's lots of human examples of this that I'm sure we'll get to. But for me, that the core of this is I realized the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection, as you totally rightly point out. It doesn't mean there aren't real biological dimensions to addiction. There are there's biological, psychological and social aspects. But I realized how much I had underestimated the role of these social aspects, and when I started talking about this all over the world, and that line got a lot of traction. The opposite of addiction is connection. People totally reasonably started saying to me, well, what do you mean by connection? You can't just mean social connection. And I had never meant that. I'd written about how Portugal had taken the lesson of Rat Park and applied it to their drug policy. I'm sure we'll get to that. And they didn't just give people friends, they did a lot more than that. But it's very conscious. I guess it was this mystery that was hanging me, which was partly, what does connection mean? And I was thinking about that through these two other mysteries that were really paying out for me. Right. As we said, I'm I'm nearly 40 every year I've been alive. Depression and anxiety have increased here in the United States and across the Western world, and loads of indicators of despair have been increasing suicide, addiction, and so on. And I want to figure out why. Partly because I myself have been quite depressed. So I ended up going on this journey and I realized there was a real excuse. The pun connection between the mystery I was trying to understand with addiction and the mystery I was trying to understand with depression and anxiety. Does that make sense? Yeah. Just to seize on the last data you referenced, do you recall how much what the metrics are and how much depression, anxiety and suicide have gone up? And we know what the metric of suicide? Suicide is much easier to measure with depression. Depression and anxiety, it's hard to measure for several reasons. What we can measure relatively easily is reported depression and anxiety. So people going to their doctor, those are probably not the best figures in the sense that for two reasons, there's been a bit significant decrease in stigma, which means more people are willing to come forward. That's a great thing also, because we've got much lower threshold treatment for depression. Right. It used to be if you think about when my grandmother was the age I am now, firstly, it would have been too stigmatized. She would not have gone to her doctor. But if she had, the only treatments they had were really very potent things that kind of knock you out. Right now, obviously, someone can go to the doctor they can be given much still very powerful and potent drugs, but much lower. It's much easier to get hold of them. There's much less weight put around taking those drugs, partly because they're still potent, but they're less potent than the drugs that people used to be given. So I don't think that's a great metric. I think there are other metrics we can use people describing themselves as depressed, as important. But the reason why I feel fairly confident that depression has risen is because when I went all over the world, interviewed the leading experts about this, I learned that there's scientific evidence for nine causes of depression and anxiety. Generally, people, when they go to their doctors, are told a very simplistic story. I mean, when I was a teenager, I went to my doctor and I said that I had this feeling like pain was kind of leaking out of me and I couldn't control it, I couldn't regulate it. And my doctor said to me, well, we know why people feel this way. There's a chemical called serotonin in people's brains. Some people are naturally lacking it. You're clearly one of them. All we need to do is give you these drugs. You're going to feel better. So I started taking antidepressant that's marketed in the US as Paxill. I felt significantly better for a few months, really a lot better. And then this feeling of pain started to come back. So I went back to my doctor. My doctor gave me a higher dose. Again, I felt better a little bit less time. Again, the pain came back. I kept being given higher and higher doses until for 13 years, I was taking the maximum possible dose and really believing this story that it was just about serotonin, which was leaving me rather confused about why I kept this depression was coming back. But what I learned is there is, in fact, scientific evidence for nine causes. Two of them are indeed biological, although I don't think a chemical imbalance is the right way to characterize them. And lots of those factors, those factors that we know cause depression, anxiety, have been rising. So given that we know that they cause depression and anxiety, I'm sure we'll get to them. Again, we know they've been rising. Given we know they cause depression, anxiety, I think it is. And given that significantly more people are describing themselves as depressed and anxious, I think you can reasonably put all that evidence together and say there has been a real increase in depression and anxiety. And we see this in all sorts of indicators. You know, suicide has significantly increased. I mean, it's extraordinary fact that when you put together suicide and opioid deaths, average white male life expectancy has fallen for the first time in the peacetime history of the entire United States. So there are all sorts of indicators of depression for which we have very robust numbers, which I think which, not coincidentally, are clustering together in the same places, right? So if depression was just a chemical imbalance in the brain, if addiction was just a response to accidental chemical hooks, why would we see that depression clusters in the same places as suicide in the same places as addiction, in the same places, antidepressant use? That wouldn't make sense. The fact that these indicators in the same places as support for President Trump, interestingly, in a lot of them, we wouldn't see these things clustering together if they weren't densely related, right? Well, some of those things are clearly causally related. So if you're depressed and you're being prescribed antidepressants or you're addicted to opioids and suffering, the consequences of that, that's a cluster of problems and subsequent dysfunction, clinical depression that gets all kinds of other dysfunction in your career and your relationships. So it is that you do have a chicken and the egg phenomenon that you have to tease apart there. That's a really important point. I think it helps if we see it in the context of clustering with something else. And this is something that unites a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I write about in Lost Connections. So everyone listening to your podcast knows they have natural physical needs, right? Obviously you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd be in real trouble real fast. But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs, right? You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future. That makes sense. And our culture is good at lots of things. I'm extremely glad to be alive today. I love dentistry, I love gay marriage. There's a whole range of things that I'm thrilled to be alive. Now, my ancestors in many ways had Irish peasants, and as Swiss peasants, had significantly worse lives in all sorts of ways. But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs. I think there's good evidence for that. And while it's certainly not the only thing that's going on, I think it's the thing that is driving these crises. So that can sound a bit weird in the abstract. I'll give you a specific example. This is the loneliest society there's ever been. There's a study that asks americans, how many close friends do you have or you could turn to in a crisis? And when they started doing it years ago, the most common answer was five. Today, the most common answer not the average, but the most common answer is none. Right. There are more people who have nobody to turn to than any other options. It's part of an enormous array of social science that shows there's been an explosion in loneliness, isolation, and I spent a lot of time talking about this with an amazing man called Professor John Casiopo at the University of Chicago who's the leading he was sadly just died. He was the leading expert in the world on loneliness. And he I remember saying to me, you know, why are we alive? Why do we exist? In part, it's because our ancestors on the savannahs of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't, in a lot of cases, bigger than the animals they took down. They weren't, in a lot of cases, faster than the animals they took down. They were much better at banding together into tribes and cooperating. Just like bees evolved to need a hive, humans evolved to need a tribe. And if you think about those circumstances where we evolved if you were separated from the tribe, you were anxious and depressed for a really good reason, right? You were probably about to die, you were in terrible danger. Those are the physical responses we still have to feeling isolated. Yet we are the first humans ever to try to disband our tribes and tell ourselves that we can do it all alone. And it's a key factor in why we're so distressed. One issue is there are no bright lines between biology and psychology and social phenomenon and culture. At every point, it is coherent to think about an individual as being entirely the inheritor of whatever neurophysiological states are being kindled on his brain as a result of all of the influences and the underlying genetic propensity. He's got to respond to those influences. So what you have is your brain and its states in each moment producing the character of your mind and the cash value of any cultural meme or presence or lack of healthy relationships. Anything that's getting in is getting in by virtue of making some impression physiologically on you as a system. So it's always tempting to think the nearest lever to hand is making a change directly in the person. So if we could get a pill that would truly cancel depression it's not incoherent to think that such a pill could exist, right? Because depression to arrive and be expressed has to be a matter of what your brain is doing. But that's true with anything. That's true with any other state of mind that you could experience. And we're sort of meandering into a time where the possibility of intruding on ourselves technologically and pharmacologically is going to become more precise and more tempting and we could become untethered to the more certainly traditional, more normal, probably more normative mechanisms by which we regulate our state. So it's one thing to regulate your state by diverting yourself with social media or a video game or some entertainment something that further isolates you but may actually scratch some kind of psychological itch for the time being. It's another thing to actually establish a real connection to another person that begets its own ways of regulating your state. It's conceivable that we could find ourselves on a path to an Aldous Huxley like terminus where we essentially all self medicate in a way that becomes more and more effective. And what you're bemoaning here is how ineffective the status quo is for most people. We're very lonely. We're very isolated. There's lots of addiction to things that are obviously unhealthy, but it's conceivable that we're just going to get in over the hump of all of these less than optimal ways of isolating ourselves pleasurably and heading toward a future where there are more ideal ways of becoming isolated and yet arguably happier. So I'm not wishing for that future. I think, as I said, you could imagine a better place to arrive than that. But it seems to me that there's a lot of energy and effort directed at solving the problem in that direction. I think that's a brilliant way of putting it, and it's something I kind of tried to think about a lot. There's a lot in what you just said that I want to think about. So I went to see this South African psychiatrist called Derek Summerfield. He's a great guy. And Derek happened to be in Cambodia in 2001, I think it was, when they first introduced chemical antidepressants in that country. And the local doctors, the Cambodians, had never heard of these drugs, so they were like, what are they? And he explained and they said, oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants. And he said, what do you mean? And he thought they were going to talk about some kind of, like, herbal remedy, like Berno St. John's War or something. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields, and one day he stood on a landmine and he got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial limb, and he went back to work in the rice fields sometime later. And the guy started to cry all day. Didn't want to get out of bed. He developed classic depression. Apparently. It's very painful to work underwater when you got an artificial leg, and I'm guessing it was traumatic for obvious reasons, right? And they said to to Dr. Somerfield, well, so we gave him an antidepressant. And Derek said, well, what was it? And they said, well, they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense, right? That it wasn't some purely some biological malfunction. They figured if they bought him a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this situation that was screwing him up so much. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stop. Within a month, his depression was gone. And they said to Derek, well, you see you see, Doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean right now, if you've been raised to think about depression, the way we have. That sounds like a joke. I went to my doctor for an antidepressant. He gave me a cow. But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the whole world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not crazy, you're not a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs and you need real love and help and support to get your needs met. And what I think is interesting is we've spent so much time and so much of our money and resources as a society trying to find a physical technical fix where we have not succeeded very well. Chemical antidepressants have some role to play, but the best long term research into chemical antidepressants, the Star D trial shows most people taking them, do become depressed again when stressed again. That doesn't mean they have no value. They have some value, but we just got to be honest, we've been massively increasing these attempted technical fixes for the last, every year, for the last 35 years. And every year depression and anxiety has continued to rise. There's clearly something we're missing in those pictures and, and one thing that struck me going all over the world and trying to find, well, who has built solutions based on the best evidence? Actually, the people who admire the people doing the technical biological work. It's really important, but they have so far yielded quite limited results. Actually, the places that have done have yielded the best results have often been the people who were doing very low tech things. I'll give you an example. One of the heroes of the book is an incredible man called Dr. Sam Everington. He's a doctor in a poor part of East London where I live for a long time. And Sam was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety. And like me, he thinks chemical antidepressants have some valuable role to play. But he could also see that they were not solving the problem for most of his patients. And he could also see that they were depressed and anxious for perfectly understandable reasons like the one we're talking about. They were acutely lonely. So one day he decided to pioneer a different approach. A woman came to see him who I got to know quite well, called Lisa Cunningham. And Lisa had been shut away in her home with just crippling, depression and anxiety for seven years. And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs. I'm also going to prescribe something else. There was an area behind the doctor surgery that was known as Dog Shit Alley, which gives you a sense of what it was like. It was just kind of scrubland where dogs would go and shit. And he said, What I'd like you to do is come and turn up a couple of times a week with a group of other depressed and anxious people. I'm going to come because I've been quite anxious myself, and we're going to turn this into something nice, right? So the first time the group met, lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety, terribly sick and anxious. But as the group met, they decided what they were going to do is turn this scrubland into a garden, right? These are inner city East London people. They knew nothing about gardening, right? This is how they're going to teach themselves. And a few things happened. The first was they started to get their fingers into the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons, right? There's a lot of evidence, enormous evidence that exposed it to the natural world. It's a really powerful antidepressant. But even more importantly, they started to form a tribe. They started to form a group. They started to care about each other. If one of them didn't turn up, someone would go to their house and check they were okay. The way Lisa put it to me, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom. And there was a study in Norway of a very similar program, which is part of a growing body of evidence that found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants. And this is something I saw all over the world. The most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we're so depressed and anxious in the first place. And yet what we've done as a society and as a culture is both when it comes to drugs and when it although drugs can provide relief to people, not just antidepressants. I mean, heroin will provide you some relief. There's sorts of drugs that provide you with some relief from pain for a time, while it also takes extracts of cost as well. But I think, more generally, I think what you said about these growing technologies, I thought a lot about this, and one of the ways I want to understand this was I went to the first of an Internet rehab center in the United States, just outside Spokane in Washington. I said, I have to admit that when I arrived clearing in the woods, I get out of the car. The first thing I did totally instinctively, was look at my phone and feel really pissed off. I couldn't check my email. It was like, you're in the right place, right? So I arrive and they get all kinds of people in this. It's called restart. Washington. They're great people. They get all kinds of people there, but they disproportionately get young men who've become obsessed with multiplayer role player games like World of Warcraft and Fortnite. And I remember talking to these young men and then talking to the woman who runs it is that you should have on your show. You'd really like. Her. She's fascinating woman called Dr. Hillary Cash who runs this center. Remember her saying to me, it's not her exact words there on the website, but she said something like you've got to ask yourself, what are these young men getting out of these games? Right? They're getting the things they used to get from the culture, but they no longer get. They get a sense of tribe. They get a sense that they're good at something and they can rise at being good at something. They get a sense that people see them and notice them. They get a sense they can physically roam around. Study in Britain that found the average British child now spends less time outdoors than the average maximum security prisoner, because by law, a maximum security prisoner has to have 70 minutes a day. But of course, as she put it, what they're getting is like a parody of those things, right? In the same way I started thinking about it, I think the relationship between social media, which only become more and more advanced as VR virtual reality develops the relationship between social media and social life is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex, right? I'm not against porn. Like almost all men, I look at it sometimes, it meets a certain basic hitch. But if your entire sex life consisted of looking at porn, you'd be going around pissed off and irritated the whole time because you didn't evolve to wank over a screen. You evolved to have sex. In a similar way. We did not evolve to interact with each other through screens. We evolved to actually do what we're doing, sit face to face, see each other. But I think the crucial thing I learned from Dr. Kesh you have to think about the moment the Internet arrived, right? For most of us, it's the late ninety s that I think I sent my first email in the year 2000, which seems incredible to me now that I live most of my life without it. But at that a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I'm writing about, that I learned about from these scientists, were already supercharged by that point, right? Think about loneliness, which we've talked about already massive increase in this world before the internet. What happens is the internet arrives and it looks a lot like the things we've lost, right? You've lost friends here's, some Facebook friends, you've lost status. There's been a huge rise in inequality and humiliation at work. Well, here's some status updates for you. But what we've got is a kind of simulacra of those things, a parody of those things. I think you're totally right. We're going to be offered better and better simulacra of the things we've lost. But what I would argue is the things we've lost are right there in front of us, right? We don't need simulacra or we don't need billion dollars simulacras. We don't need a small number of people will need, you know, brain interventions, but the vast majority of people who are distressed do not. And in a way, what I'd argue for is a kind of return to much more obvious insights, rather than a turn to very expensive and more easily monetizable kind of parodies or simulations of those lacks of those things. Let's talk about the generic solutions to depression. Again, I haven't read your book, so I'm just going to guess what you would recommend. I'll just add to the list you've already started here. So engagement with the natural world is a net positive for many of us. Most of us, I would imagine physical exercise should be on the list. Getting enough sleep must be on the list. Although you do have a chicken and egg problem here, where depression begins to erode. Sleep social connection is the primary thing you've mentioned, I would guess, finding meaning in one's work, but doing work that one finds meaningful, rather than doing work that one finds synonymous with drudgery. What am I missing? Well, let's develop a few of those because I think the solution that you've identified, the problems there, but it can seem daunting to people. So let's look at work. For example. This is a huge one. I noticed that lots of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work. So I started to look at, well, what's the evidence about this? How do people feel about their work? And it was quite striking. So Gallop did the best research on that here in the US and across the world massive three year detailed study. What they found is 13% of us, one 3% like their work. Most of the time. 63% of us are what they call sleep working. You don't like it, you don't hate it. You just kind of get through the day, and 24% of people fucking hate and fear their jobs. Right? I was really struck by that. 87% of people like the thing they're doing most of their waking life. Rast I think, could this have some role to play in our mental health problems besides facts? Look at all the evidence around this. And I learned there was an incredible man who went to me called Professor Michael Marmer, who discovered in he's an Australian social scientist, and he discovered in the 1970s the single big he's not the only one, but the single biggest factor that causes depression at work. He discovered if you go to work tomorrow and you have low or no control over your job, you are much more likely to become depressed and anxious by a really significant amount. And at first, when I was talking to him and learning what he said, I actually misunderstood what he was saying. I thought he was saying, okay, you got this. 13% of people at the top who get to have nice jobs, they're going to be okay. But they control, and everyone else is condemned to this kind of misery, right? And I thought about my family, right? My my dad was a bus driver, my brother's an Uber driver. My grandmother's job was to clean toilets. I thought, Wait a minute, are we saying these people are condemned to this misery? And he kept stressing, it's not the work that makes you depressed. It's being controlled at work. So I think, well, what's the kind of solution to that? What's the antidepressant for that? I learned there's really good evidence for this. I went to Me in Baltimore, a woman called Meredith KIOS, a totally interesting person. Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night just sick with anxiety, right? She had an office job, and she would tell you it wasn't the worst office job in the world. She wasn't being bullied or, you know, harassed or anything, but it was really monotonous, and she couldn't bear the thought this was going to be the next 40 years of my life till I retire, you know, whatever. It would have been 45 hours a week. So one day with her husband Josh, she decided to do this quite bold thing. And at first, when listeners hear me say this, they're going to think I'm saying, this is what you should do. Then they're going to think, I can't do that. And they're right. They can't do that. This reveals a wider insight that we can act on together. So Josh, her husband, had worked in bike stores since he was a teenager in Baltimore. And as you can imagine, it's insecure work you got very little control of. You have any rights at work, really. You don't even get paid vacation time. And one day, Josh and his friends who worked in the store just asked themselves, what does our boss actually do? Right? They liked their boss. He wasn't a terrible person, but they were like, we seem to fix all the bikes, and he seems to make all the money. They decided they were going to set up a bike store of their own that works on a different principle. So where they had worked before was a corporation. Very recent human invention goes back to the 19th century. This is you know, people will know it because most people listen to this will work. In a corporation, you've got, like, the boss at the top, and he's like the commander of the army, and everyone below them is like a soldier that takes their orders. And sometimes the commander is nice and answer your opinion. Sometimes he doesn't. They decided they were going to open a bike store that wet on a different principle, an older American principle. It's a democratic cooperative, so they don't have a boss. So they fired their boss, and he had to go on antidepressants. He was a sad, broken figure. So they opened this bike store, and so they take the decisions together by voting, like once every couple of weeks. In practice, they agree on almost everything anyway. They share out the profits, they share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks. I know we get stuck with the shitty tasks, but they're one of 10,000 democratic cooperatives in the US. It's a growing number. But what was fascinating spending time with the people in Baltimore Bicycle Works, their store, which is totally in line with Professor Mahmoud's findings, is how many of them talked about how they've been depressed and anxious before, but were not depressed and anxious now. And what's interesting is it's not like, you know, they didn't quit their jobs fixing bikes and go off to become like Beyonce backing singers, right? They fix bikes before, they fix bikes now. The difference is now they've got control over their work. Now if they have an idea, they can translate it into practice, if they can persuade their colleagues. It's a very different way of being in your daily life right now. There's no reason why we should be structuring the way we work, the thing we do most of the time, you know, in a way that depresses and humiliates so many people, right there's no every corporation could be tendered a democratic cooperative. That sounds like a big thing. We've lived through enormous changes, you and I, that is about understanding a deep cause of depression and anxiety. People are soaking up a huge amount of humiliation or just plain boredom at work. And we by restoring control to people, they can infuse their work with meaning in a way, you which of course doesn't mean of course, there's still going to be some jobs that have to be done that are not the best jobs in the world when it comes to creativity. But the more you get and there's scientific research about this, the more you give people control over their work, the more they find meaning in that work. Did you write about or research meditation at all in this? Yeah. So I was really interested in in a few kinds of both meditation and psychedelics. I actually came to the evidence about meditation and I loved what you wrote about this in Waking Up. And I came to the meditation actually through the psychedelic stuff and it led me back to reread Waking Up. So your listeners will know, because you've talked about this a lot on the show. But until the mid 1960s or a little bit later, there was lots of evidence, lots of research into giving people psychedelics that was not done to the standards. We want scientific research to be done today for sure, but was very promising about giving it to people who had alcohol addictions, giving it to people with depression. That seems to have quite striking results. And then the Nixon administration shuts the whole thing down and the research goes dormant. Until eight years ago, a man I interviewed, credible guy, Professor Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins university really reopened this whole field of research and subsequently there's been a huge reawakening of it. So I went to interview the teams that have done this new research in here in Los Angeles, at UCLA, at UCL, in London, some of the people from NYU at Johns Hopkins and in Sao Paulo in Brazil and in Ah, whose in Denmark. And there are loads of fascinating things about psychedelics which you know much better than I do. There was one subset of the findings that I found particularly fascinating and I think reveals a lot and leads us into the debate about meditation. So they did a smoking trial. They took people who were chronic long term smokers. And I think about this like my mother smokes 70 cigarettes a day. There's a photograph of me and my mother when I'm six months old. She's breastfeeding me smoking and resting the ashtray on my stomach. Wow. She would wind up on 60 Minutes and swiftly carted off to jail. This was 1970, Scotland, where you were sent to jail if you didn't do that. Right. But actually when I showed her this photograph, when I fed it a few years ago, said you were a difficult fucking baby, I needed that cigarette. But so they take people like my mother who'd been chronic long term smokers and they gave them three doses of Silosibin, the active component in magic mushrooms, and they followed them over time. What was incredible was 80% of them stopped smoking. 80%. To give you a comparison point, the next most successful smoking cessation tool we have nicotine patches, have a 17 one 7% success rate and a year later more than 60% of them had still stopped. Right. It's important to stress this was a relatively small trial but a very striking result. But there's a subfinding of all these results. They did them with them long term meditators, they did them in London, they've done it with depression. That I think is really, really important. So when people take psychedelics, they will have the majority of people have something that they would describe as a spiritual experience. Right? And that's interpreted broadly, you and I, by atheists don't mean you see God. But it turns out there's a big range in how intensely people have a spiritual experience. So some people will have an extraordinarily potent spiritual experience and some people, a minority, have no spiritual experience at all. It turns out the positive effects, things like smoking cessation, reduction in depression and so on, correlate very closely with how intense your spiritual experience is. If you have a very intense spiritual experience, you have all sorts of positive outcomes. If you do not have an intense spiritual experience, you have very few positive outcomes. And I think this telescope that fits with the wider evidence that we're piecing together in this conversation, which goes back to the opposite of addiction, is connection as a fascinating guy in Mississippi who's doing work giving Silasybin to people with cocaine addictions and is having really striking results. What the psychedelics do? We don't want to get into a debate where we act like we talk about it the way people talked about antidepressants in the 90s. Like it flips a switch in your brain and that transforms your brain. That's way too simplistic. Of course there's a physical effect in your brain when you take a psychedelic, obviously. But what it does is it gives you a spiritual insight, it gives you a moment, a taste of deep and profound connection. If it goes well, as Bill Richardson, an incredible guy who also would be a great guest for you, he's the only person who was doing the scientific research in the 60s who was still around for the Rear Awakening eight years ago. And he's like the Yoder of psychedelics. I love him, he said to me, I think it was him. It breaks your addiction to yourself, it breaks your addiction to the ego. Right? We live in a culture that's constantly like kind of itching powder for the ego. It's constantly getting us to thinking. Gatistically gives you a moment of what life is like to not be that way, but then you have to find ways to sustain it. So I remember speaking to Robin Carhartt Harris, who's the professor who led, along with Professor David Nut the depression trial in Britain. So they gave chronic long term depressed people psychedelics and again had an extraordinary effect. But there was a kind of catch to this that Robin explained to me. So I'll give you an example of a woman, she takes the psychedelics, been depressed for a long time, the depression goes away. It's incredible. She realizes she's deeply connected to the natural world, to other people and then she goes back to her job as a receptionist in a shitty English seaside town and she simply cannot live in a way that is consistent with these lessons. Right? If you go around your office in an English seaside town or Atlantic City or whatever thinking that you're deeply connected, we're all the same, you know you're not going to have your job for very long. Right? So we've built an environment that in many ways militates against the insights that psychedelics provides us with. And I think in a way what psychedelics are because most people are not going to want to take psychedelics at all and a lot of people are not going to take them repeatedly. It's more like setting a direction or a compass in which we want to travel towards a more connected and meaningful life. Right? What you then have to do is figure out how do we develop these insights away from the drug or with the drug? Maybe people want to carry and take it again and again and if they do, I'm all on their side. And that's where it led me to look at the research on meditation and so on. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, you bring up a few interesting things there. One is that this notion that real change, permanent change can be anchored to an insight, having a reference point outside of your usual routine of unhappiness can actually give you a tool, cognitively and emotionally, to change the way you feel. And I think many of us would be familiar with this. It might not even be a peak experience like a psychedelic experience, it could just be a conceptual reframing of the experience that you have been finding so oppressive. The experience itself may not change. There's a few examples of this that I'll just float by you. I mean, one is one I often think about and have referenced on the podcast before, is that if you take the physical symptoms that are unpleasant, they don't actually have intrinsic significance until you frame them conceptually. So you can have imagine what it's like to be at the peak of a very intense workout, right, where you're just, you know, you're either lifting weights or you're running, so you're having some anaerobic or aerobic extreme experience. If you simply woke up in the morning and felt those bodily sensations, you would call 911 and just wait for the ambulance. Right? But because they're happening in the context of a workout, not only are they, it can still be negatively valenced. I mean, I think we would all notice them as still as unpleasant in some sense. But the framing, our knowledge of the context and the meaning of being able to push yourself to that degree is positive. And therefore many of us are even to some degree quote addicted to exercise. Right? It's one of the best things we do with our days. And yet the moment to moment character of the sensory experience can be negatively valence and yet it's a totally positive experience. Again, it's just if your beliefs about what you're feeling are scary, well, then those symptoms can be to be told that that ache in your stomach is almost certainly indigestion or it's very likely cancer, right? Those are just ideas. The sensations don't change. But one's experience would be impressively changed by the framing. Another, I guess, even more extreme example for me, it does come from meditation and it offers a kind of edge case to many of the things we've been talking about. For instance, I totally concede the importance of connection in our lives. And the quality of your life, it seems to me, in most people's cases is almost entirely defined by the quality of the relationships in it. Right. Social isolation for most people most of the time is just perfectly correlated with degradation in the quality of their life. But it is also true to say that some of the most ecstatically, happy and wisest people I've ever met have spent a good portion of their lives in total isolation, in some cases literally in caves for years. At a time, right? And so it is possible to be completely isolated and isolated in a way that most people would consider the realization of their worst nightmares. This is a point I've made before, that it's telling that solitary confinement is considered a punishment even inside a maximum security prison. And most people prefer the company of rapists and murderers to being locked in a room alone with their minds. And yet it's possible to, in the context of isolation, experience profound well being. And the difference there is being able to meditate or not, right? And meditation in this case is really just being able to notice what the mind is like when you're not continuously identified with and lost in thought. And so much of our thinking is negative. The character of one's identification with thought is almost entirely painful. But meditation kind of in the normal range of people's experience forget about isolation in caves for a moment. This can happen very, very quickly, literally in, like, your first ten minutes of attempting it. You can discover that it can be quite pleasant and even profoundly pleasant to simply pay attention to the breath or to any simple object in your experience. The breath is a very common one that people use for training mindfulness. And yet, in reality, there's nothing more boring than the breath, right? It's like if your job was just to sit and pay attention to your breath, that would be the most boring job on Earth. And yet, if you know how to pay attention, boredom is not a problem. Boredom really is just a lack of attention. And it's not to say there's not a distinction between profoundly interesting and creative and easily rewarding jobs and more classically boring and oppressive ones. But there's something about just based on these two examples, I would expect that being able to reframe what one is doing, even if one has to do it, which is to say, think differently about one's situation and pay attention more carefully to one's experience, which is to say, actually become interested even in what is routine and repetitive. Again, I'm not discounting the fact that making substantive changes to what one is doing may in fact be warranted, but it is just possible to not be unhappy doing something that is classically boring and menial and without purpose. Ironically, what happens when you look at what people do when they join religious cults or religion? Traditionally, they submit themselves to some course of training that is about crushing or at least rebuffing their egocentricity and their notion of deriving meaning from their extrinsic accomplishments. And the story they're telling themselves about how they're not normal. They're extraordinary in some way. And so you have these Ivy League trained attorneys and businessmen going to Rajnisha's Ashram, and they're being asked to scrub toilets and dig ditches. And it's a cliche of what happens to a self important person who's successful when he or she gets into the company of some religious adapt, whether he's a fraud or not. But the truth is, it actually works for people. The people are not pretending to have punched through to some new level of well being and happiness. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriberonly content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Kevin Kelly. Kevin helped launch Wired Magazine and was his executive editor for his first seven years, so he knows a thing or two about digital media. And he's written for The New York Times, the Economist, Science, Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. His previous books include out of Control New Rules for the New Economy, Cool Tools, and What Technology Wants. And his most recent book is The Inevitable understanding the Twelve Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. And Kevin and I focused on this book and then spent much of the conversation talking about AI, the safety concerns around it, the nature of intelligence, the concept of the singularity, the prospect of artificial consciousness, and the ethical implications of that. And it was great. We don't agree about everything, but I really enjoyed the conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And now I bring you Kevin Kelly. I am here with Kevin Kelly. Kevin, thanks for coming on the podcast. Oh, man, I'm joining this right now. Yeah. Listen, so many people have asked for you, and obviously I've known you and about you for many years, so I'll talk about how we first met at some point. You are so on top of recent trends that are subsuming everyone's lives that it's just great to get a chance to talk to you. Well, thanks for having me. So, before we jump into all these common topics of interest, how would you describe what you do? I package ideas, and they're often visual packages, but I like to take ideas and not necessarily my ideas, but other people's ideas and present them in some way. And that kind of is what I did with magazines, beginning with the whole Worth review formerly called Coalition Corali, the whole Worth catalogues, wired websites like Cool Tools and my books. So you've written these two recent books on technology, what Technology Wants, and your most recent one, The Inevitable. How would you summarize the arguments you put forward in those books? At one level, I'm actually trying to devise a prototy of technology, so so, you know, before Darwin's theory of biology, the evolutionary theory, there was a lot of natural suddenly had these curiosity cabinets where they would just collect biological specimens. And there was just one weird creature after another. There was no framework for understanding how they were related or how they came about. And in many ways, technology is like that with us. We have this sort of parade of one invention after another, and there's really no theory about how these different species of technology are related and how they come together. So at one level, my books were trying to devise a rough theory of their origins, and perhaps no surprise, cutting to the punchline. I see these as an extension and acceleration of the same forces that are at work in natural evolution, or cosmic evolution for that matter. And that if you look at it in that way, the system of technology that I call the technium is in some ways the extension and acceleration of the self organizing forces that are running through the cosmos. So that's one thing that I'm trying to do. And the second thing I'm trying to do is to say that there is a deterministic element in this, both in evolution and in technological systems. And at the very high level, a lot of what we're going to see and have seen is following kind of a natural progression and so therefore is inevitable. And that we as humans, individuals and corporately, need to embrace these things in order to be able to steer the many ways in which we do have control and choice. The character of these. So I would say, like, once you invented electrical wires and you invented switches and stuff, you'd have telephones. And so the telephone was inevitable. But the character of the telephone was not inevitable. iPhone was not inevitable. And we have a lot of choices about those, but the only way we make those choices is by embracing and using these things rather than prohibiting them. So now you start the book The Inevitable with some very amusing stories about how clueless people were about the significance of the Internet. In particular, I was vaguely aware of some of these howlers, but you just wrap them all up in one paragraph, and it's amazing how blind people were to what was coming. So you cite Time and Newsweek saying that more or less the Internet would amount to nothing. One network executive said it would be the CB radio of the 90s. There was a Wired writer who bought the domain name for McDonald's, McDonald's Dot, and couldn't give it away to McDonald's because they couldn't see why it would ever be valuable to them. Now, I don't recall being quite that clueless myself, but I'm continually amazed at my inability to see what's coming here. And if you had told me five years ago that I would soon be spending much of my time podcasting, I would have said, what's a podcast? And if you had told me what a podcast was, essentially describing it as on demand radio, I would have been absolutely certain that there was no way I was going into radio. Just it would not apply. I feel personally no ability to see what's coming. Why do you think it is so difficult for most people to see into even the very near future here? Yeah, it's a really good question. I don't think I have a good answer about why we find it hard to imagine the future. But it is true that the more we know about that in other words, the experts in a certain field are often the ones who are most blinded by the changes. We did this thing at wired called reality check, and we would poll different experts, and nonexperts in some future things, like whether they're going to use laser drilling and dentistry or flying cars and stuff like that. And they would have dates. And when these came around later on in the future, it was the experts who were always underestimating, who were, I guess, overestimating when things were going to happen. They were more pessimistic and it was sort of the people who so the people who knew the most about things were often the ones that were most wrong. I think it's kind of like we know too much and we find it hard to release and believe things that seemed impossible. So the other observation that I would make about the things that have surprised me the most in the last 30 years and I think the things that will continue to surprise us in the next 30 years all have to do with the fact that the things that are most surprising or actually things are done in collaboration at a scale that we have not seen before, like things like Wikipedia, Facebook or even cell phones and smartphones to some extent that basically we are kind of organizing work and collaboration at a scale that was just really unthinkable before. And now that's where a lot of these surprises have been originating. Is this the our ability to collaborate in real time and scales that, that were just unthinkable before and so they seemed impossible and for me most of the surprises have had that connection. Well, I know you and I want to talk about AI because I think that's an area where we'll find some, I think, significant overlap but also some disagreement and I want to spend most of our time talking about that. But I do want to touch on some of the the issues you raise in in the inevitable because you divide the book into these twelve trends. I'm sure some of those will come back around in our discussion of AI. But take an example of, let's say this podcast. One change that a podcast represents over radio is that it's on demand. You can listen to it whenever you want to listen to it. It's instantly accessible. In this case it's free, so there's no barrier to listening to it. People can slice it and dice it in any way they want. People remix it. That people have taken snippets of it and put it behind music so it becomes the basis for other people's creativity. Ultimately, I would imagine all the audio that exists and all the video that exists will be searchable in a way that text is currently searchable, which that's a real weakness now, but eventually you'll be able to search and get exactly the snippet of audio. You want this change in just this one domain of how people listen to a conversation that captures some of these trends, right? Exactly. So there was the flow or the verb of the remixing was, to your point, the fact that the big change in music, which the music companies didn't kind of understand, they thought that the free aspect of downloads of these files was because people wanted to cheat them and get things for free. But the chief value was that the freeze and freedom is that people could take these music files, they could get less than an album, they could kind of remix them into singles, they could then manipulate them, making them into playlists. They could do all these things that make it much more fluid and liquid and manipulable and fungible. And that was the great attraction for people. The fact that it doesn't cost anything was sort of a bonus. That wasn't the main event. And that all the other things that you mentioned about this aspect of podcast, of getting them on demand, the shift from owning things to having access to things, if you have instant access anytime, anywhere in the world, that's part of the shift. The shift away from things that are static and monumental to things that are incomplete and always in the process. The movement from centralized to decentralized is also made possible when you have things in real time, when you're in a world of like Roman error, when you whereas very little information flows. The best way to organize an army was to have people give a command at the top and everybody below would follow it. Because the commander had the most information. But in a world in which information flows liquidly and pervasively everywhere, then a decentralized system is much more powerful because you can actually have the edges and steer as well as the center and center becomes less important. And so all these things are feeding into it. And your example of the podcast is just a perfect example where all these trends in general conspire to make this a new genre. And I would say in the future we would continue to remix the elements inside a podcast and that we would have podcasts within VR that will have podcasts, as you said that are searchable and have AI remix portions. Of it, or that we would begin to do all the things that we've done with text and annotations and footnoting would be brought to this as well. So if you can just imagine what we've done with podcasts and now multiply that by every other medium from Gifs to YouTube. We're entering into an era where we're going to have entirely brand new genres of art, expression and media. And we're just again, at the beginning of this process, what do you think about the new capacity to fake media? So now I think you must have seen this. I think it was a Ted Talk initially where I saw it, but it's been unveiled in various formats now, where they can fake audio, so well, that given the sample that we've just given them, someone could produce a fake conversation between us where we said all manner of reputation destroying things. And it wouldn't be us, but it would be, I think, by current technology, undetectable as a fraud. And I think there are now video versions of this where you can get someone's mouth to move in the appropriate way so it looks like they're delivering the fake audio, although the facial display is not totally convincing yet, but presumably it will be at some point. What do you think about that? In a handwaving way, not really knowing what I'm talking about. I've imagined there must be some blockchain based way of ensuring against that, but where are we going with that? In 1984, something I did a cover story for the whole Earth Review of CQ, I think it was called at the time. It was called Photography as the end of evidence for Anything. And we used a very expensive Scitex machine. It was like multimillion dollar machine, which cost tens of thousands of dollars an hour to basically what we would now call photoshop. This is the early photoshop. So National Geographic and Time and Life magazine had access to things and they would do little retouching stuff. But we decided to Photoshop flying saucers arriving in San Francisco. And the point of this article was that, okay, this was the beginning of using photography as the evidence of anything. And what I kind of concluded back then was that there's two things. One was the primary evidence of believability was simply going to be the reputation of the source. So for most people you wouldn't be able to tell. And we already have that thing with text, all right, I mean, it's like words. You could quote somebody, you can say put some words and say, sam Harris says this, and it would look just like yes, it was written exactly. So how would you know? Well, the only way you could know was basically you have to trust the source. And the same thing was going to happen with photography and now it will be with video and audio. And so they're coming up to the place where text is, which is basically you can only rely on the source. The second thing we discovered from this was that and this also kind of applied to this question of like when you have AI and agents, how would you be able to tell if they're human or not. The thing is that for most cases, like in a movie right now, you can't tell whether something has been CGI, whether it's real actor or not, we've already left that behind. But we don't care in a certain sense. And when we call up on a phone and there's an agent there and we're trying to do a service problem, in some ways we don't really care whether it's a human or not, if they're giving us good service. But in the cases where we do care, there will always be ways to tell and they may cost money. There's forensic ways to really come decide whether this photograph has been doctored, whether CGI has actually been used to make a frame, whether this audio file has been altered. There will always be some way if you really, really care. But in most cases we won't care and we will just have to rely on the reputation of the source. And so I think we're going to kind of get to the place where text is already, which is the same thing. If someone's making it up, then you have no way to tell by looking at the text. You have to go back to the source. But that doesn't address the issue of fake news. And for there, I think what we're going to see is like a truth signaling layer added on somewhat, maybe using AI, but mostly to devise what I would think is going to be kind of like a probability index. To a statement that would be made in a networked way rather than it will involve Wikipedia and snopes in places, maybe other academics, but it'll be like page rank. Meaning that you'll have a statement. London is the capital of England. That will be like that statement has a 95% probability or 98% probability of being true and then other statements will have a 50% probability being true and others will have a 10% probability and that will come out of a networked analysis of these sites or the Encyclopedia Britannica or whatever says so. These other sources have a high reliability because in the past they have been true. And this network of corresponding sources which are ranked themselves by other sources in terms of the reliability will generate some index number to a statement. And as the statements get more complex, that becomes a more difficult job to do and that's where the AI could become involved in trying to detect a pattern out of all these sources. And so you'll get a probability score of this statement is likely truthfulness. It's kind of like a prediction market for epistemology. Yes, that's interesting. So in light of what's happening and the trends you discuss in the inevitable, if you had a child going to college next year, what would you hope that he or she study or ignore in light of what opportunities will soon exist? One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea that we're all going to be perpetual newbies, no matter whether we're 60 or 16 or six, that we're feeling very good, that we've mastered smartphones and we know laptops, but the gestures and how things work, this kind of literacy. But in five years from now, there'll be a new platform, virtual reality, whatever it might be, and we'll have to learn another set of gestures and commands and logic. And so the digital natives right now have a pass because they are dealing with technology that was invented after they were born, but eventually they're going to have to learn new things too. And they're going to be in the same position as the old folks of having to learn these things. They're going to be newbies again too. So we're all going to be perpetual newbies. And I think the really only literacy or skill that should be taught in schools is so that when you graduate, you have learned how to learn. So learning how to learn is the meta skill that you want to have. And really I think the only one that makes any difference because whatever language you're going to learn is not necessarily going to be the one that you are going to get paid for knowledge. If you want an answer, you ask a machine. So I think this idea of learning how to learn is the real skill that you should graduate with. And for extra bonus for the ultimate golden pass, if you can learn how you learn best yourself, if you can optimize your own style of learning, that's the superpower that you want, that I think almost takes a lifetime to get to. And some people, like Tim Ferris, are much better at dissecting how they learn and understanding how they can optimize their self learning. But if you can get to that state where you have really understand how you personally learn best, then you're golden. And I think that's what we want to aim for is that every person on the planet today will learn how to learn and will optimize how they learn best. And that, I think, is what schools should really be aiming for. I was going to say our mutual friend Tim seems well poised to take advantage of the future. Just going to have to keep track of him. Let's talk about AI. I'll set this up by just how this podcast got initiated because though I long knew that I wanted you on the podcast, you recently sent me an email after hearing my podcast on robot ethics with Kate Darling. And in that email you sketched ways where you think you and I disagree about the implications and safety concerns of AI. You were also reacting to my Ted Talk on the topic and also a panel discussion that you saw where I was on stage with Max Tegmark and Elon Musk and Yon Tallan and other people who were at this conference on AI at Asilamar earlier this year. You wrote in the set up to this email, and now I'm quoting you there are at least five assumptions the super AI crowd hold that I can't find any evidence to support. In contradistinction to this orthodoxy, I find the following five heresies to have more evidence. One intelligence is not a single dimension. So quote smarter than humans is a meaningless concept. Two, humans do not have general purpose minds and neither will AI's. Three, emulation of human thinking will be constrained by cost. Four dimensions of intelligence are not infinite. And five, intelligences are only one factor in progress. Now, I think these are all interesting claims and I think I agree with several of them, but most of them don't actually touch what concerns me about AI. So I think we should talk about all of these claims because I think they get it interesting points, but I think I should probably start by just summarizing what my main concern is about AI. So as we talk about your points, we can also just make sure we're hitting that. And when you talk about AI, and when you talk about this one trend in your book, perhaps the most relevant cognifying essentially putting intelligence into everything that can be made intelligent, you can sound very utopian and I can sound very dystopian in in how I talk about it. So but I actually think we we overlap a fair amount. I guess my main concern can be summarized under the heading of the Alignment Problem, which is now kind of a phrase of jargon among those of us who are worried about AI gone wrong. And there are really two concerns here with AI and, and I think there are concerns that that are visited on any powerful technology and the first is just the obvious case of people using it intentionally in ways that cause great harm. So it's just kind of the bad people problem. And that's obviously a real problem. It's a problem that probably never goes away, but it's not the interesting problem here. I think that the interesting problem is the unintended consequences problem. So it's the situation where even good people with the best of intentions can wind up committing great harms because the technology is such that it won't reliably conform to the best intentions of good people. So for a powerful technology to be safe or to be operating within our risk tolerance, it has to be the sort of thing that good people can reliably do good things with it rather than accidentally end civilization or do something else that's terrible. And for this to happen with AI, it's going to have to be aligned with our values. And so again, this is often called the Alignment problem. When you have autonomous systems working in ways and increasingly powerful systems and ultimately systems that are more powerful than any human being and even any collection of human beings, you need to solve this alignment problem but at this point people who haven't thought about this very much get confused. Or at least they wonder why on earth would an AI, however powerful fail to be aligned with our values? Because after all, we built these things or we will build these things. And they imagine a kind of silly Terminator style scenario where just robot armies start attacking us because for some reason they have started to hate us and want to kill us. And that really isn't the issue that even the most dystopian people are thinking about. And it's not the issue I'm thinking about. It's not that our machines will become spontaneously malevolent and want to kill us. The issue is that they can become so competent at meeting their goals that if their goals aren't perfectly aligned with our own then the unintended consequences could be so large as to be catastrophic. And there are cartoon versions of this as you know, which more clearly dissect the fear. I mean, they're as cartoonish as the Terminator style scenarios but they're different. Something like Nick Bostrom's Paperclip Maximizer to review. I think many people are familiar with this, but so Nick Bostrom imagines a machine whose only goal is to maximize the number of paper clips in the universe. But it's a super powerful, super competent superintelligent machine. And given this goal, it could quickly just decide that, you know, every atom accessible, including the atoms in your own body, are are best suited to be turned into paperclips. And, you know, obviously we wouldn't build precisely that machine. But the point of of that kind of thought experiment is to point out that these machines, even superintelligent machines will not be like us and they'll lack common sense or they'll only have the common sense that we understand how to build into them. And so the bad things that they might do might be very counterintuitive to us and therefore totally surprising. And just kind of the final point I'll make to set this up. I think we're misled by the concept of intelligence because when we talk about intelligence we assume that it includes things like common sense. In the space of this concept we insert something fairly anthropomorphic and familiar to us. But I think intelligence is more like competence or effectiveness which is just an ability to meet goals in an environment or across a range of environments. And given a certain specification of goals even a superhumanly competent machine or system of machines might behave in ways that would strike us as completely absurd. And yet we will not have closed the door to those absurdities, however dangerous if we don't anticipate them in advance or figure out some generic way to solve this alignment problem. So I think a good place to start is where we agree and I think where we the first thing I think we both agree on is that we have a very poor understanding of what our own intelligence is as humans. And I would make a further statement that I think the common conception that we have of IQ is a very misleading notion of intelligence in humans. That we can kind of rank intelligences in a relative scale, a single dimension of. And this is taken from Nick Bostrom's own book, that you have a single dimension and you have the intelligence of a mouse, say, or the IQ of a mouse, and then a rats a little bit more. And then that chimpanzees a little bit more. And then you have the kind of a really dumb human and the average human, and then a super genius like Albert Einstein. Then there's the super AI, which is kind of off the charts in terms of how much smarter along this IQ it can be. And that, I think, is a very misleading idea of what intelligence is. Obviously, the human intelligence is a suite, a symphony, a portfolio of dozens, 20 maybe who knows how many different modes or nodes of of thinking. There's perception, there's symbolic reasoning, there's a deductive reason, inductive reasoning and emotional intelligence, spatial navigation, long term memory, short term memory. There's many, many different nodes of thinking. And of course, that complex varies person by person. And when we get into the animal kingdom, we have a different mixture of these, and most of them are maybe simpler complexes, but in some cases, a particular node that we might have may actually be higher, maybe superior in an animal in terms of if you've seen some of these the chimpanzee. Yeah, chimpanzees remembering the locations of numbers, just like, oh, my gosh, obviously they're smarter than us and sort of in that dimension, we should just describe that so that people are aware of what because they should find that video online. What it is, is a Champions League has a screen, and there's a series of numbers in sequence, or numbers that appear in different positions on the screen. Very briefly, it's like a checkerboard that suddenly illuminates with, let's say, ten different digits. And you have to select all the digits in order and select all the you have to hit the right squares, then the numbers then disappear, and then you just have a blank checkerboard, right? And you have to remember. You see it for like, a split second, and you have to remember where they are, and you have to go back and hit the locations in order. And no human can do this. But for some reason, chimps seem to be able to do this very easily, so they have some kind of short term memory or a long term memory. I'm not sure what kind of memory of spatial memory that really would amaze us and we would find superhuman. I think we both agree that human intelligence is very complex. And my suggestion about thinking about AI is always to use plural to try to talk about AI, because I think as we make these. Synthetic types of minds. We're going to make thousands of different species of them with different combinations of these kind of primitive modes of thinking. And that what we think of ourselves, our own minds. We think of kind of just a singular intelligence. It's very much like the illusion of us having an eye or being centered. There's an illusion that we have kind of a unified universal intelligence. But in fact, we've evolved a very specific combination of elements in thinking that are not really general purpose at all. It's a very specific purpose to survive on this planet and this regime of biology. When we compare our intelligence to the space of possible intelligences, we're going to see that we're not at the center of some universal, but we're actually at the edge like we are in the real galaxies of possible minds. And what we're doing with AI is actually going to make a whole zoo of possible ways of thinking, including inventing some ways of thinking that don't exist in biology at all today. Just as we did with flying. The way we made artificial flying is we looked at natural flight, and mostly birds and bees and bats is flapping wings. And we tried to artificially fly by flapping wings. It just didn't work. The way we made artificial flying is we invented a type of flight that does not exist in nature at all, which was a fixed wing and a propeller. And we are going to do the same thing of inventing ways of thinking that cannot really occur in biological tissue, that will be a different way of thinking. And we'll combine those into many, many new complexes of types of thinking to do and achieve different things. And there may be problems that are so difficult in science or business that human type thinking alone cannot reach that we will have to work with a twostep process of inventing a different kind of thinking that we can then together work to solve some of these problems. So I think, just like there's kind of a misconception in thinking that humans are sort of on this ladder of evolution where we are superior to the animals that are below us. In reality, the way evolution works is that it kind of radiates out from a common ancestor 3.7 billion years ago. We're all equally evolved. And the proper way to think about it is like, are we superior to the starfish, to the giraffe? They have all enjoyed the same amount of evolution as we have. The proper way to kind of map this is to map this in a possibility space and saying, these creatures excel in this niche, and these creatures excel in this niche, and they aren't really superior to us in that way. It's even hard to determine whether they're more complicated than us and more complex. So I think a better vision of AI is to have a possibility space of all the different possible ways you can think and some of these complexes will be greater than what humans are. But we can't have a complex of intelligence that maximize everything. That's just the engineering principle. The engineering maximum is you cannot optimize all everything you want. You're always bound by resources and time. So you have to make trade offs. And if you want to have a Swiss Army knife version of intelligence that has all the different things, then they're going to be kind of mediocre and all the things that they do. You can always excel in another version, another dimension by just specializing in that particular mode of thinking and thought. And so this idea that we're going to make this super version of human intelligence that somehow excels us in every dimension, I don't see any evidence for that. Let me try to map what you just said on to the way I think about it because I agree with most of what you said. I think the last bit I don't agree with, but I certainly and I come to a different conclusion, or at least I have a very vivid concern that survives contact with all the things you just said. I certainly agree that IQ does not map on to the way we think about the intelligence of other species. To ask what is the IQ of an octopus? Doesn't make any sense. And it's fine to think about human intelligence not as a single factor, but as a constellation of things that we care about. And our notion of intelligence could be fairly elastic or that we could suddenly care about other things that we haven't cared about very much. And we would want to wrap that up. In terms of assessing a person's intelligence, you mentioned emotional intelligence, for instance. I think that's a discrete capacity that doesn't segregate very reliably with something like mathematical intelligence, say, and it's fine to talk about it. I think there are reasons why you might want to test it separately from IQ. And I think the notion of general intelligence as measured by IQ is more useful than many people let on. But I definitely take your point that we're this constellation of cognitive capacities. So putting us on a spectrum with a chicken, as I did in my Ted talk is more or less just saying that you can issue certain caveats, which I didn't issue in that talk. But issuing those caveats still makes this a valid comparison. Which is of the things we care about in cognition. Of the things that make us able to do the extraordinarily heavy lifting and unique things we do like building a global civilization and producing science and art and mathematics and music and everything else that is making human life both beautiful and durable. There are there are not that many different capacities that we need to enumerate in order to capture those abilities. It may be ten. It's not a thousand and a chicken has very few of them. Now, a chicken may be good at other things that we can't even imagine being good at, but for the purposes of this conversation, we don't care about those things. And those things are clearly not leading to chicken civilization and chicken science and the chicken version of the Internet. So, of the things we care about in cognition, and again, I think the list is small, and it's possible that there are things on the list that we really do care about that we haven't discovered yet. Take something like emotional intelligence. Let's say that we roll back the clock 50 years or so, and there's very few people thinking about anything like emotional intelligence and then put us in the presence of very powerful artificial intelligent technology, and we don't even think to build emotional intelligence into our systems. It's clearly possible that we could leave out something that is important to us just because we haven't conceptualized it. But of the things we know that are important, there's not that many of them that lead us to be able to, you know, prove mathematical theorems or or invent scientific hypotheses or propose experiments. You know, and then if you add things like even emotional intelligence, the ability to detect the emotions of other people in their tone of voice and in their facial expression. Say these are fairly discrete skills. And here's where I begin to edge into potentially dystopian territory. Once the ground is conquered in artificial systems, it never becomes unconquered. Really, the preeminent example here is something like chess, right? So, for the longest time, chess playing computers were not as good as the best people, and then suddenly, they were more or less as good as the best people, and then more or less 15 minutes later, they were better than the best people, and now they will always be better than the best people. And I think we're living in this bit of a mirage now where you have human computer teams, cyborg teams, much celebrated by people like Gary Kasparov, who's been on the podcast talking about them, which are, for the moment, better than the best computer. So having the ape still in the system gives you some improvement over the best computer, but ultimately, the ape will just be adding noise, or so I would predict. And once computers are better at chess and better than any human computer combination, that will always be true but for the fact that we might merge with computers and cease to be merely human. And when you imagine that happening to every other thing we care about in the mode of cognition, then you have to imagine building systems that escape us in their capacities. They could be highly alien in terms of what we have left out in building them, right? So, again, if we had forgotten to build in emotional intelligence, where we didn't understand emotional intelligence enough to build everything in that humans do, we could find ourselves in the presence of, say, the most powerful autistic system the universe has ever devised. Right? So we've left something out and it's only kind of quasi familiar to us as a mind, but Godlike in its capacities. I think it's just the fact that once the ground gets conquered in an artificial system, it stays conquered. And by definition, the resource concerns that you mentioned at the end, if you build a Swiss army knife, it's not going to be a great sword and it certainly isn't going to be a great airplane. Well, then I just think that doesn't actually describe what will happen here. Because when you compare the resources that a superhuman intelligence will have, especially if it's linked to the Internet, if you compare that to a human brain or any collection of human brains, I don't know how many orders of magnitude difference. That is, in terms of the time frame of operation. You're talking about systems operating a billion times faster than a human brain. There's no reasonable comparison to be made there. And that's where I feel like the possibility of something like the singularity or something like an intelligent explosion is there and worth worrying about. So again, I'd like to go where we agree. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our Subscriber feed feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account, and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Okay. I am here with Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for joining me. Hey, Sam. Thanks for having me. So just a little preamble to set up this conversation. I have been thinking of late that I've been kind of getting boxed in in my normal podcast format. I'm often having conversations with people where they've written a book, very likely, and I've taken rather often taken the time to read it, and this may be the one conversation I ever have with them. And so it really has to be focused on their topic and fairly buttoned up and exhaustive and doesn't really allow me, in most cases, to just kind of wander around and hit topics of interest and be a little more freeform and conversational. And so I was thinking of starting a new track in the podcast where I can be more topical and kind of of the moment and experimental and talk about work in progress and all the rest. And I was thinking about who I could do that with, and you were the first person to come to mind. As you know, I reached out to you, and here you are. So thank you for agreeing to do this. Well, I was really thrilled to be invited to do this. I've always felt that our conversations go very well, and I think it's because you and I hit a certain sweet spot where we agree and disagree in the right measure, making our conversation sort of productive, but not us constantly saying to one another, oh, you're right. You're exactly right. So this should be fun. Yeah. I must apologize in advance. I have a cold for our inaugural conversation. And if you catch it over there at Yale, I think it will be due to an excess of empathy on your part. My biggest weakness. Okay, well, we have to begin on an unhappy note because we are speaking today in the aftermath of Kobe Bryant dying in a helicopter crash along with his 13 year old daughter, and I believe it's seven other people. We're speaking on the Monday after and the outpouring of grief and just the kind of the way the world seemed to stop around this event. In my memory, the only thing I remember, like, it was Princess Diana dying. I don't know if that's what else compares to that. But how do you perceive moments like this? I mean, this one is complicated by several other factors which we'll go into, but it's pretty breathtaking the way the death of a celebrity like this cuts through death denial in a way that few other events do. It's really affecting. I was in in London on Sabbatical when Princess Diana was killed in this car crash, and the outpouring of grief was extraordinary. The streets emptied out while people went to the funeral or watched it on TV. People could talk about nothing else, and people were viscerally affected. You'd walk past people on the streets who were weeping and it's extraordinary. I think when it comes to certain sorts of celebrities, the amount of personal contact people have. A lot of people said that they were more affected by her death than the death of their brother or their mother. It's this powerful feeling that it's not only that she was beloved, it's that she was some sort of, I don't know, fairy tale character for them. And I think great athletes often feel a similar niche for us. Yeah. And also his 13 year old daughter, who looked like she was going to be a superstar basketball player in her own right. That was really devastating. In fact, it wasn't clear that she was on the helicopter at first, so his death wasn't announced. And then you saw all these images of him with his daughters circulating. And then to find out that she was also killed, it was really brutal. There's a familiarity component. The fact that you've seen this person so much, but this is additional fact that if it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone part of the brain in some way, so that it makes life seem especially precarious and again, especially with a child involved and dying in an accident in this way. Yeah. You could have a taxonomy of deaths of people you don't know. Under one extreme is older people in their seventy s and their 80s, where it could be sad, it could be really affecting, but in the end it's not a shock. It doesn't seem particularly unjust. Then you get young people, and this is a case we're dealing with now, and that could be far more moving. It seems so arbitrary and frightening. And then you get children and children children are the worst. It is the worst when it wasn't like that happens to a kid. You could look at any adult and say good things and bad things about them and they have their friends and their enemies. But there's one thing everybody agrees on, it's that kids shouldn't die. If you ever want an argument for the cruelty, if there is a God of God, it'd be the death of children. Yeah, it really is. The argument for which there's no rebuttal the normal arguments about free will and any kind of justice for a person's behavior while alive. Obviously, it doesn't apply to kids. So really, this has become the perfect storm on social media, because immediately upon the announcement of his death, it might have been before anyone realized his daughter was involved. There was this Washington Post writer, Felicia Sunmez I'm not quite sure how to pronounce that last name who tweeted a link to a 2016 Daily Beast article written by somebody else detailing the never quite settled to everyone's satisfaction rape allegations against Bryant. And the response to that was absolutely infernal. She's actually just been put on administrative leave from The Post, and this was one of those moments where it landed with me. I don't know if I'm representative of most people here. I mean, I'm not a basketball fan. Kobe really hasn't had much of a space in my brain. And I was aware of, obviously, these allegations against him and was still not aware of what I think about them. It's just obvious that they precede the me too moment. Had they come about now, there's no way he would have not been cancelled. But, you know, they predate everyone's heightened awareness of these issues. And so she was, you know, repromoting the scandal in the immediate, I mean, to say immediate aftermath of his death. I mean, it was like literally within ten minutes or something. It seemed an example of enormous bad taste, given what his family is now dealing with. But it is an interesting question. Just what is appropriate to acknowledge about a person when is too soon, and what's the right way to play a moment like that? It's just, you know, again, it struck, I think, almost everyone as fairly tactless and masochistic on her part, but I don't know where the line is. And it's just interesting to see what social media has done to us here, because it's tempting to feel like you need to express an opinion at moments like this if you have any public profile, and she is certainly reaping the results of having expressed hers. I don't know what the rules are here. I don't think she knew either. This conservative figure, roger Scrutin. He died recently, and for the most part, a lot of his friends and family and his fans posted gentle stories about him and respect for him and expressed her sadness. But there were many people who said this guy said awful things and maybe was an awful guy, and so much better the world is without him. And my own bias is that we should always err in favor of being kind to death, at least in the short term. But there are different views on this. I know Christopher Hitchens, famously your friend Hitch, argued that that we should not be kind to recently dead. If we think they were terrible, we should be up front and say this. Yeah, I'll just remind people that he was on the news savaging Jerry Falwell at that point. And then given that I shared his views of falwell, I really didn't feel much critical distance from that savaging. But I saw the other side of that very equation when Glenn Greenwald wasted no time dancing on Hitch's grave when he died. And it struck me as fairly craven, given that this is the kind of thing he wouldn't have fared well saying to Hitch his face. In this case, it just seemed like the grief of Kobe's family needed to be so paramount. You're just imagining his wife and her remaining daughters dealing with the death of a husband, father and a daughter as well. It's just that moment to press the unresolved me too case against Bryant, which was again, it's not so clear. The infidelity part is clear, and you can be as judgmental about that as you want, but it's just not really your place to judge if the marriage survived it, right? I mean, who knows what the understanding is or was between his wife and himself at that point? It's like, given that it's unsettled, it just I don't know, it was kind of a self immolation of a journalist. I'm not sure that was the hill she was right to want to die on. So that's one way of looking at it, which is the accusation was uncertain and given that, you shouldn't have brought it up. But there may be other things going on. In that case, for instance, it was Mike Tyson who had actually done time for rape bringing saying, well, there's a dead rapist now. People might have a different feeling about that. Well, that opens the other issue of just the kind of the moral significance of having done one's time. This is actually something I want to talk to you about, and we can get there when we get there, but what are the physics of redemption? We have someone do something awful, let's say. There's no uncertainty about it. We think it's awful. They admit it was awful. What constitutes an appropriate readmission to our good graces? How does somebody get their reputation back when they've done something terrible? And we and we have examples of this. I mean, there are murderers who get out of prison who then become paradigmatic stories of moral rehabilitation. Then on the other end of the continuum, we have people wanting to cancel someone for all time for a few errant tweets that they unleashed as teenagers. How do you think about that? Even in the case where the previous moral infraction is quite clear? It's a good question. I'll say just two things. One thing is, I think that one force in all of this that we should acknowledge is I think we pull apart particularly famous people. They're either good or evil. They're either Princess Diana or Jeffrey Epstein. And there are forces that pull you to one end or another. The idea of saying, okay, this guy died, and there was goodness and there was badness, and he has critics he has his friends is uncomfortable, particularly over social media. You have to take one side or another. As for redemption, you're right. There are all of these famous cases of these neo Nazis who became crusaders to help minorities. There's people who murderers who have achieved in the eyes of others what you see as redemption. But I'm trying to think of this and I can't. Can you tell me one famous celebrity figure who was really used today's word canceled and now is in everybody's good graces? I don't know. Pee wee herman. Yeah, well, I don't know that anyone is paying attention to him now. Yeah, I think he did sort of come back and get redeemed. But Kobe might have been tyson is also an example of this. But both Kobe and Tyson are examples of people who really more or less made it all the way back. For most people. Kobe, to an enormous degree, his career, most of his triumph was still ahead of him as an athlete. I could have that slightly wrong. Again, I don't follow basketball, but he was like 25 or 26 when that scandal broke and he died at 41. So I guess once you're tarnished, you're always going to be tarnished in somebody's eyes. But that was a pretty solid example of having put it behind him. So what did he do? Right. In case practical advice for anybody listening to us are for you and me if we ever really get into trouble. What's the technique for achieving public redemption? Well, it sort of depends on what for. I think there's some unhappy data on the efficacy of the rather Trumpian tactic of never apologizing. Right. There's some social science data suggesting apologies backfire and the political scheme apologies. I've seen apologies by people who have done inappropriate things and their enemies just mock them and say, we wanted more. Yeah. So it is interesting to consider what constitutes and what should constitute an acceptable apology. Whether it has strategic value in general and I think in the case of something like accusations of rape or their own thing, but just take the infidelity part of it. The crucially exculpatory thing in the case of somebody like Kobe Bryant or Tiger Woods is whether or not the wife stands by your side. Right. That's a different outcome. Or the husband, as the case may be. But yeah, again, I didn't follow it so closely, but he just seemed to have come all the way back and again, it was pre. Me too. It's hard to imagine it would have survived the glare of the present moment. I guess Bill Clinton is a sort of parallel case, although because his infidelities and into accusations of rape happened when he was president and a lot of people supported him at the time, he never really fell that much from grace. But I think the fact he was supported by his family and I think there's sort of at least he tried to tell a redemption story. Probably reasonably successful. When he dies, people will be saying wonderful things about him. Yeah. That's another example where Hitch was on the case. I don't know if you ever read his book, no One Left to Lie To the Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton, but Hitch went all in on the accusations of rape there. And I must say, it's been a long time since I've looked at that book, but I found it fairly persuasive and it reset my view of Clinton. And whatever is true about the extreme accusations there, that the utter dysfunction of his marriage with Hillary or whatever, or the political liability of whatever deal they had cut in their marriage, came back in the 2016 election when she's on stage debating an opponent who was eminently cancelable based on his own sexual transgressions. And you know the allegiant accusations? Yeah. That he was trailing. And and yet, to that debate, he brought, you know, Bill Clinton's accusers into the audience. And, you know, Hillary couldn't say a word about any of this because of how she had conducted herself during the time of her husband's presidency and when those accusations were surfacing, how she just excoriated these women as liars. And gold diggers and I mean, just she was so on the wrong side of history there and so apparently dishonest in how she took his side and, you know, scheming in a Lady Macbeth sort of way. I mean, it was just everything lined up to just completely neutralize her at a moment where she would have had an overwhelming political advantage. Yeah. It is one of a set of ways in which it would better have somebody running against Trump at the time. And this is also an example of something you and I have talked about before, which is how our moral code now causes us to reevaluate things in the past, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. You know, if if these things about Bill Clinton came out and he was a president and it was now, the ramifications would be far, far worse, because we see it as as his behavior, as as inexcusable in a way that many people didn't back then. I think that is true on the left. I mean, every place left of center is a spot on the map that is truly hostile to even a rumor of a rumor of an accusation of that kind. But what do you make of the fact that Trump really suffers no such penalty? I mean, it seems like there's nothing, no accusation of that sort or any other sort that matters in his world. I make of it extreme despair. I think it's apparent that there's no such thing as dirt on Trump. There is nothing he could say or do that would cause his fans and a large majority of Republican base to give up support for him. I think this is one case in which tribal loyalty dominates individual character. And in some way, it's entirely rational for people like you and me and, you know, roughly half of the country to attack Trump and despise Trump. But by doing so, it sets up a dynamic where anything new reported against Trump tribal loyalties kick in. And you say you're attacking our guy, and Trump feeds off of that. So, I mean, look, I don't want to come off like, oh, I would have predicted this all along. Honestly, I had thought that naively, that American conservatives were actually conservative in manners of propriety and sexuality and conduct, in which case they would find Trump honestly repellent. And this has been a rude awakening for me. How do they manage to put out with that guy and not only put out with him, celebrate him? There's an endless source of surprise that there's any remaining capacity for surprise on this score. Just when I think he's crossed a line that is going to force people to defect, it never happens. The legendary resumed tapes of him having bizarre sex acts with Russian prostitutes where he pees on them or has them pee on him or something. These could come out, be on YouTube, in the front page of New York Times. I don't know what it would do with his support. I don't know whether it would cause it to drop at all. This reminds me of other tapes that I occasionally mention on this podcast, the Alleged Apprentice, the N word tape where he uses the N word with abandon. And as I've said several times, I know to a moral certainty that those tapes exist. I know people who have it directly from the mouth of Mark Burnett that they exist, and multiple people. The one thing I would point out about that is that Mark Burnett is living with the illusion that by not releasing those tapes, he has done nothing. Presumably, in his mind, releasing those tapes would be an extraordinary act, would go off like a nuclear bomb, and to withhold those tapes is to take no action. But I would say that the opposite is the case. He took an enormous action and act of responsibility to decide for a nation of 340,000,000 people that no one could know about what this man is like behind closed doors when he had the evidence of it. And I remain somewhat hopeful this will never be confirmed or disconfirmed, but I do think that hearing those tapes would probably make a difference. It's one thing in the abstract to know, okay, this is the kind of guy who probably uses the N word without any irony or meta context, just how he talks in private. To know that in the abstract, but then to actually hear it done over and over again with all the context. I think it would be kind of like I don't know if you remember this, the way the Mark Furman tapes played during the OJ trial, that was the end of the end of the trial when we heard just what this guy's mind was like. What do you think? Do you think it would matter if we had hours of him speaking with a bandon like a member of the Ku Klux Klan? No. If I had to guess, I would say no. I would say Trump. Over and over again. Trump says things and does things. The whole Access Hollywood tape, I would have guessed in that simpler time that that would be the death of any politician, but it wasn't endless. Now there must be hours and hours of him saying things that are grotesque and if tweeting them. In fact, I actually think if he got caught with those tapes in some way, it would be his brand. It may be more embarrassing for him if he spent 2 hours rhapsodizing about how he likes Japanese poetry. He's really a cosmopolitan at heart. Then people say, what the hell? He's yeah, a globalist. But him, Stanworth, he's just he's a straight talking guy. I don't know. I mean, there's something there's just something so toxic about the word that, I mean, it has a a magical power that, you know, I think no other word does in English. I mean, certainly in America, and I think famously doesn't have the same kind of power in places like Australia. And you get the occasional Aussie who will use the word thinking. Well, surely this is fair game to talk about the use of the word in this context. But I don't know. Unfortunately, we will never hear those tapes. So let's go back to the topic of moral redemption, and I guess we could broaden it to moral responsibility and forgiveness. And there's also this concept of moral luck yeah, which I have always found fascinating. I think this phrase originates with Bernard Williams, but Thomas Nagel also wrote an essay, and I think Nagel's discussion of it is really the one that I have in my head. But there's this feature of moral transgression and culpability and good and bad outcomes. We have an intuition that for a person to be truly responsible for their actions and to deserve the punishment or the reward that comes to them, it shouldn't be mostly, much less entirely a matter of luck that their actions occur in the first place. Right? I mean, it shouldn't just be this spin of a roulette wheel that gets you put in prison with everyone thinking you deserve it or gets you celebrated as some kind of moral hero. But when you actually look at how events unfold, there's a component of luck that you just can't ever purge from the system. The example that comes to mind for me is that of a drunk driver who, yeah, winds up killing somebody's, kid or otherwise, you know, causing tremendous suffering. And then you think of all the people who drive drunk who have no bad outcome. They just get home safely to their beds and sleep it off. And the difference between those groups seems purely a matter of luck. And if that example doesn't really land with people, because most people are now scrupulous enough not to drive drunk and they feel like, well, if you kill someone driving drunk, you deserve it, well, then think about texting. Virtually everyone listening to us now will have, at some point, behave irresponsibly with their phone in their cars. And some people are more or less still committed to doing that on a daily basis, despite whatever admonishments come their way. And texting while driving is an unambiguously dangerous thing to do, which most people get away with. And yet some people wind up killing people and go to prison for it. So then the question is, if the only difference between you and the person who's now in prison for, let's say, ten years for killing a child while glancing at their phone and driving, if the only difference is a matter of luck, how do we feel about the punishment? Aren't they, on some level, already punished enough? I mean, just think of how ruined your life would be. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Anyone over 40 probably has very vivid memories of September 11, 2001. I certainly do. I can remember how angry I was in those first few days or months, really. I was angry over the event itself, of course, and for the loss of life, and for the sheer disorder that had been unleashed in our world. But as the days and weeks and months wore on, I became especially angry over how confused, otherwise sane and well educated people were about the threat we now faced. What I saw all around me was a kind of implosion of moral intelligence, and those who saw our enemy clearly were often driven by their own dogmatic religious beliefs. In my experience, the only people in the US. Who could be counted upon to understand what we faced were fundamentalist Christians, which gave me very little basis for hope that we would play our cards right. As many will remember, the sky on the East Coast on 911 was unusually beautiful. It was a condition that's apparently described as severe clear by pilots. Most of us had never heard that phrase until after it was used on 911 to describe the unlimited visibility of that morning. It strikes me as a very apt phrase to describe how I felt on that day and really ever since, more or less from the moment that the second plane, United Flight 175, crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center, from that moment forward, I have been unusually alert to the power of bad ideas. Up until the moment that the second plane hit, it was possible to imagine that what had happened at the north tower had been an accident. I don't actually remember what I was thinking at the time. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what time I started watching the news coverage that morning, because it was very early on the West Coast. But I remember the difference between understanding that one plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and understanding that two planes had, and that difference is extraordinary. With the first plane, more or less, everyone thought that they were witnessing a tragedy, and whether it was some kind of horrific navigation error or mechanical malfunction. I mean, what could it be? Condoleeza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, had been briefed that July about an impending al Qaeda attack, even one that might involve the use of hijacked aircraft. But upon learning that a plane had hit the North Tower, even she reports thinking, well, that's a strange accident. And that doesn't actually surprise me. There's no question that 911 represents a massive failure of intelligence, and this is something that's well documented in Lawrence Wright's book, The Looming Tower. But in the moment, in the presence of the unthinkable, it is hard to think clearly. No question there were 17 minutes between Flight Eleven hitting the North Tower and Flight 175 hitting the south. So there were 17 minutes to live with the illusion that we were witnessing a tragic accident and its horrible aftermath. Flight Eleven had hit the North Tower between the 93rd and 99th floors. No one outside the building could have known this at the time, but it had destroyed all the stairwells, trapping over a thousand people above the point of impact. So I believe it's true to say that no one who was above the 92nd floor in the North Tower survived. And in those 17 minutes, many things happened that are very hard to think about and some seem very hard to understand. First, in the South Tower, many people saw no need to evacuate. In fact, people who did begin evacuating were told to return to their desks. Even in the North Tower, many people who were below the zone of impact felt no urgency to evacuate. They thought the fire department would just put out the fire, and many thought they were being responsible in leaving the stairways clear for the fire crews to ascend. It's just an amazing detail. Given what was about to happen, it seems almost no one had an inkling that a fire of that sword could lead to a structural failure and that the whole Tower could collapse. We have testimony from people in the South Tower who gathered at the north facing windows and watched as papers came billowing out of the North Tower and rained down on Lower Manhattan like confetti. And then suddenly came the recognition that some of the objects that were falling were in fact people. An estimated 50 to 200 people jumped or fell out of the towers before they collapsed. There's the famous falling man image that appeared on September 12 in newspapers all over the world and then never appeared again. And I believe some news organizations briefly ran videos of people jumping. But then everyone seems to have decided that that was just too much, and it was too much. However, even in some of the more benign videos that just show the towers burning at some distance, you can still hear the crash of people hitting the ground. There's just no getting around it. There is something especially heartbreaking about these jumpers on a day when everything was heartbreaking. So just imagine what it was like to be in the South Tower witnessing this horror unfold, or standing on the street looking up. It's just an impossible moment that would seem to admit of no further possibility of astonishment, right? And then comes the roar of the engines of Flight 175 traveling at nearly 600 miles an hour. There are several videos of this, and they never cease to be astounding. The imagery aside, even the sound is astounding. We never hear the sound of a large commercial airliner flying at full speed up close. That roar of the engine alone told us that something was profoundly wrong with the world. So what changed with the second plane? Well, it proved the intentionality of the act and the suicidality of it, and therefore it established its ideological origins. In fact, it established the truth of what was happening as fully as it would have if you could have heard the hijackers shrieking Allahu Akbar from the cockpit of the plan. With one plan, the same behavior could have been the result of mental illness, right? But not with two, right. The severely mentally ill don't organize in this way. So in that moment, everyone was asking the question, what force on earth could get people to do something like this? And those of us who knew something about the differences among the world's religions didn't have to spend very long searching for an answer. I don't remember how long it took to implicate Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. As I recall, bin Laden said something celebratory but somewhat ambiguous soon thereafter, but didn't take clear credit for 911 until around 2005 or 2006. But very soon, I think within 24 hours or 48 hours at most, the fact that we were dealing with Islamic extremists of some sort was established. And then the experience for me was something like a feeling of limitless clarity on a few points, along with an ability to spot the moral confusion of others at what seemed like a very great distance. Of course, this will sound utterly tendencious and even delusional to those of you who disagree with me about the connection between extremist Islam and Islam, or those who imagine that America has no standing to even complain about the events of September 11 because we've always been the world's worst terrorist state. These are obscenely, stupid positions, but they are not straw men. I've argued with these people ever since the moral relativists, and the people who think there's no real connection between any religious ideology and human behavior, the anthropologists and sociologists who have convinced themselves that religion is always a pretext for economics or social status or politics or some other terrestrial variable. There are seemingly unlimited numbers of overeducated people who imagine that nobody really believes in paradise, not really. And I spent more than a decade arguing with these people, and I'm honestly not sure what the result of all of that has been. But I know that I don't have anything new to say on the topic. It's such a simple point, and I am always mystified that people don't see it or refuse to see it. Some political scientists will emphasize the territorial claims of certain jihadists or their sense of humiliation, say. But when we look at the claims themselves, when we hear what these people say, both in their public and private conversations, in many cases, we know what they say in private. It always comes down to one thing above everything else paradise. Yes. Osama bin Laden objected to the presence of foreign troops on the Arabian Peninsula. That's what motivated him. So that sounds like a quasirational political grievance, right? But American troops were there at the request of the Saudi government. We had saved them from a likely invasion by Saddam Hussein. They wanted us there. Osama bin Laden's grievance was theological. It was, in his view, a sacrilege to have infidels in the Holy Land. Mohammed himself had said there should be no two religions there, and bin Laden was rich enough to do anything he wanted with his life. There is no economic explanation for what he chose to do, and the religious explanation is perfectly explicit and perfectly rational, given the requisite beliefs. If, after all we've witnessed in the intervening years, having seen privileged people living in the west join the ranks of the Islamic State by the thousands, dropping out of medical school in London to join the Caliphate if you think it's all just politics and economics and social bonding that gets people to behave this way. Well, then I think there really is no reaching you. And in that case, you are as far from the reality of what happened on 911 as the 911 truth. Conspiracy theorists are these people who took what was probably the most witnessed event in human history and turned it into a kaleidoscope of paranoid illogic. At 1.16% of Americans claimed to believe that 911 was an inside job, that we did it to ourselves to motivate a war in Iraq, to steal their oil. Right. Rather than just purchase the oil, we decided to fly planes into our own buildings and murder ourselves and start a couple of wars, because that would have been, what, less expensive. Of course, this prefigured all the madness that was to come. This was before social media. Can you imagine what 911 would have been like if we were all on Twitter? There were people there, probably still are, who believed that the planes weren't planes, that the Pentagon had been hit by a missile, not American Flight 77. It didn't matter that some people had spoken to their loved ones on that flight up until the moment of impact. It didn't matter that others had seen the plane crash into the Pentagon with their own eyes. It didn't matter that there were plane parts on the ground, right. No. It was a missile proving the involvement of our own military. In fact, some people believe that the planes that hit the twin Towers weren't planes, either. They were holograms. And they believe that the voicemail messages from the doomed passengers were faked by CIA technology. They believe that all the people who were supposed to have been on those planes were quietly murdered by our government. And they believe that the towers collapsed not because these buildings weren't designed to absorb the impact of fully fueled passenger jets. No, they had been rigged to explode. For months, an army of psychopaths had smuggled explosives into these buildings in the dead of night. Now, you can take a few of those preposterous assertions, ala Carte, or you can take the whole lot. That's what millions of our neighbors claim to believe about 911 before the advent of social media. Can you imagine what would happen now? Anyway, back in the real world, we launched a war on terrorism, which was always a misnomer. As many as possible. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. OK, well, this week is the fourth anniversary over at Waking Up, and I wanted to share a bit more about why I've decided to put so much attention over there and to build the app in the first place. Seems to me that many of you in the Making Sense audience don't necessarily understand what I'm doing over there. When I was a teenager, after two people very close to me died, I became interested in certain esoteric questions like what is the nature of consciousness and what is a self? And what's the connection between the human mind and reality in the first place? How is it possible to understand reality? And how should our answers to such questions inform how we live? Now, these topics didn't just interest me philosophically or scientifically, I wanted to explore them directly through firsthand experience. Which is to say, I wasn't looking to merely know more or to believe new things. I wanted to live differently. And all of this culminated for me after my sophomore year in college, when I dropped out of school for what amounted to a full decade. This was the late eighty s and ninety s, and during that time I made many trips to India and Nepal, where I got a chance to study with some of the greatest meditation teachers alive at that point and I spent about two years on silent retreats, ranging in length from one week to three months. I also read very widely in the literature of philosophy and religion and contemplative spirituality, both from the east and the west. I also took psychedelics, occasionally more so in the beginning, and all of this served to fundamentally change my perspective on what was possible for minds like ours. So I came out of these years of seeking a very different person, and in many ways I found the experiential answers I had been looking for. But none of this amounted to making viable contact with the world, much less a career. So eventually I went back to school, where, perhaps unsurprisingly, I majored in philosophy. And because I was still fascinated by the core questions of the mind and its connection to reality at large, I then did a PhD in neuroscience. However, just as I was beginning my doctoral research studying belief, disbelief and uncertainty using functional magnetic resonance imaging, september 11 happened. And because I had spent the previous decade deeply immersed in religious literature, my concerns about the threat of fundamentalism were already very well formed. It really didn't take me more than 24 hours to figure out what we were dealing with and to anticipate how confused many smart people would be by the problem of jihadism. The truth is, many are still confused by it. So I stepped away from my research at that point and published two books The End of Faith and then A Letter to a Christian Nation, which dealt with the Christian backlash to the end of faith. In both of these books, I argue that faith and reason really are in conflict and that religion and science, therefore, are in perennial conflict. And together with the biologist Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the writer Christopher Hitchens, I became known as a new atheist and as one of the four horsemen of a new wave of opposition to organized religion. And all this took some years to play out, and the resulting skirmishes in the culture war kept me away from my research for nearly four years. However, I've always been truly bored by politics and most interested in those first questions that sent me to Asia and into the silence of retreat. These questions about consciousness and the self and the nature of reality, whether we can know what is real. Ultimately, for me, these are not divorced from everyday concerns. In fact, they directly relate to the most fundamental causes of human happiness and suffering and to the larger question of what it means to live a good life. And ironically, they keep bringing me back to politics, which happens a fair amount on this podcast. My main concern at this point is to figure out how we can all live together so as to maximize the chance that humanity will thrive now and in the future. So while Waking Up is often described as a meditation app, its purpose isn't just to help you meditate, it's to help you live a more examined and fulfilling life altogether. The point is to help you close the gap between the person you want to be and the person you seem to be in this moment. Now, like this podcast, Waking Up is run as a subscription business. However, also like this podcast, we've always provided free membership to anyone who can't afford it. You'd only send an email to support@wakingup.com to receive a free year on the app, and this can be repeated as many times as one needs. Our business philosophy is pretty simple. Of course we want to grow as a company and build wonderful things, but we never want money to be the reason why someone can't benefit from our work. We also give a minimum of 10% of our profits to the most effective charities, and this commitment to reducing suffering on other fronts has been central to our mission from the beginning. Now, perhaps you've tried meditation before and decided it's not for you. Or you think all this talk about the nature of mind and the illusionist of the self is just New Age mumbo jumbo. Well, okay, but if you leave it there, you really are shirking. The challenge I'm posing to you because my claim is that you have spent most of your life lost in thought. That is, thinking without recognizing thought itself as a process, and therefore not recognizing what the mind is like prior to identification with thought. And this status quo is the basis of all of your suffering. It's the mechanism by which disappointment and worry and regret and anger and sadness color your life is the thing that makes you bad company for others and for the important people in your life whom you ostensibly love. It's what makes you an asshole when you are an asshole. And you are extraordinarily likely to spend the rest of your life in this condition unless you look into the matter deeply. And it's over at waking up that I most fully explore this terrain. So yet another pitch for me to look into it if you haven't. And as chance would have it, today's conversation is about death and how to prepare for it in practical terms. Now, death is something I've thought a lot about. I've always had a sense that I think about it more than most people, certainly more than most people I know. I lost one of my best friends when I was 13, and my father died when I was 17. I don't think this is an unusual amount of exposure to death, but for some reason these losses were very formative for me for as long as I can remember. Certainly since I was 13, I've thought about death many times a day. Some of this thinking may have been morbid, but much of it's been useful. Though I can't say I haven't wasted time. I don't have any important regrets at this point. In the last few years, I've been keenly aware that I've outlived my father. He died at 51, and I've often recalled what it was like for him to live his last year of a life interrupted by sickness and death. When I read or listen to authors or philosophers or scientists who I admire, I notice which ones are dead, and I notice what age they were when they lived their last day of life. And when I hear or read one of them say something about the future, I occasionally do a quick bit of math and realize this was a future they never lived to see. I enjoy old films and photographs, but not merely for what their creators intended. I also view them as rather vivid obituaries to the people in them. So more and more I live with a sense of the finiteness of life, and it's making me wiser, I think. I mean, we work and travel and eat and sleep and dream, and we repeat these things as though we might live forever and yet one day we will die. There is something astonishing about this. I really don't think I'm afraid to die, though. Perhaps I'm afraid of the chaos and pain and indignity that might surround the process of dying. But as to the ultimate experience of finally surrendering my life in the world, I don't actually worry about that. And again, I would credit my experience with meditation and also with psychedelics for that. I do believe it's possible to run the loss of everything in emulation mode before it actually happens. You might see my description of what it was like to take 5 grams of mushrooms for more color there. However, losing the people I love is something that worries me. Paradoxically, it doesn't worry me that I will lose everyone when I die. I just worry that I could lose some very important people while I still have many years yet to live. And I'm also aware that I have at least a few people in my life who are very worried about losing me. So anticipated sorrow haunts our living. We know we're going to lose people, and we know that others we love will lose us. We know therefore, we will be givers and receivers of grief. What a strange situation. So much of my interest in meditation derives from this. How can we live truly fulfilling lives in light of death? How can we prepare our minds to lose everything? Well, among other things, by learning what it means to not hold on to anything. What is it like to have a mind that doesn't cling to memories, or to hopes for the future, or to experience itself? That is really the essence of meditation. Meditation isn't, in the end, a practice you add to your life. It is the discovery of what it means to not cling to experience, to identity, to a concept of a self. What is that experience like? It's doing less rather than more. It is ceasing to do something you're doing by tendency right now. And if you can't find that experience of freedom now, it seems very unlikely that you'll find it later, amid the great unraveling at the end of life. Anyway. Today's conversation is a very practical discussion about the unavoidable fact that life ends. Either you will die and others will have to deal with the aftermath, or you will live long enough to have to deal with the deaths of the people you love and then you will die. And there really is a fair amount of practical wisdom that can help you navigate this process. Today I'm speaking with B. J. Miller and Shashana Berger, and they've written a very compassionate and useful book a Beginner's Guide to the End practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death. And as emphasized several times in this conversation, the conversation really isn't a surrogate for reading the book because there is a fair amount of practical advice to give here. BJ Miller is a hospice and palliative medicine physician who's worked in many different settings, and he now sees patients and families at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. He speaks all over the country and internationally on the theme of living well in the face of death, and he's been profiled in The New York Times and elsewhere. Shoshana Berger is the Editorial Director of IDEO, and she was a senior editor at Wired. She's written for the New York Times, Fast Company, Time, Wired, Popular Science and other journals. She's also the author of another book, ready Made how to Make Almost Everything. And today we talk about preparing for death. We discuss the difference between palliative care and hospice, the tension between getting the most out of life and not clinging to experience. We talk about planning for death while still healthy, the importance of an advanced directive, navigating the healthcare system, pain control at the end of life, assisted suicide, psychedelic therapy for end of life anxiety, and other topics. Again, this is a subject you might not want to think about, but I'm convinced you'll be better off if you do. And now I bring you BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger. I am here with BJ Miller and Shashana Burger. BJ. Shashana, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Sam So. You have written a wonderfully, useful book together Beginner's Guide to the End practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death. But it will not be without trepidation that most people pick up such a volume. I don't want us to just get into really everything relevant here. There's no way this conversation will be a surrogate for reading your book, because your book is filled with practical advice that really is better read than listen to in terms of the kind of checklist advice one can have for people facing terminal illness or going through the experience of having a loved one, face it. So we'll touch on some of that, and anything that seems super important, feel free to interject it. But it's just a note to listeners that there's more in the book of practical significance than we will cover here. But before we jump into the topic, perhaps each of you can tell me how you came to focus on death and dying professionally to this degree. Most people think about death, but you two have gone all in. Maybe, BJ, we can start with you. How did you come to this topic? Yeah, a couple of different ways. Sam? Well, I don't know, personally, professionally. Kind of came kind of coevolved for me. A lot of it starts with my own injuries when I was 19, sophomore in college. That's when I came very close to death myself. And that was a real wake up call, as you can imagine, to take life well, take life seriously, but also playfully, but really get into this thing while I have it. It might be worth telling that story, however briefly you want to, because people might imagine that you were playing football and got a concussion or something more prosaic, but you had a fairly spectacular encounter with mortality or near mortality. I did, but I'm chuckling because you reminded me of a moment at a restaurant long ago when I was wearing shorts. So I'm a triple amputee, guys. I'll tell that story in a second. But very sweet, ancient woman approached me in a restaurant and said, Tapping the shoulder, and said, Football injury. And I didn't know how to answer, but anyway, so, yeah, when I was 19, I was just horsing around with friends and there was a parked commuter train just on the edge of campus, sitting there, not moving, not just sitting there. And we decided to climb it like you'd climb a tree, just kind of being sophomores, sophomoric and the power lines run overhead. And when I stood up, I had a metal watch on my left wrist and electricity arc to the watch and big explosion. And I was in and out of close to death in the burn unit there in New Jersey for maybe six weeks or so in there a total of three months or so, but survived hello. But end up losing both legs below the knee and my left arm below the elbow. So, yeah, it was a pretty spectacular moment. That was a real, you can imagine, real crossroads in my life that led me into medicine and an interest in life that included death, an interest in life that included loss and suffering, as well as Joyce and Immutability and change. So that was very much my entree that took me into medicine. At first, I was going to do rehab medicine. Disability was the thing that I kind of walked away most interested in. But what do human beings do when they bump up against things they can't change or can't control? And that was really the nugget for me. And from there, it was also entwined with with death. But as I kind of got into it more and more suffering, death, wanting to change, not wanting to change, this whole stew kind of begat palliative medicine. That took me into hospice and palliative medicine. And from there, death became front and center with a lot of the hospice work. But even for patients who had plenty of life left, I was noticing that death, either metaphorical death or, you know, physical death, could be this great prompt, this great foil. And so that is what I really began to work with it professionally to mirror what I was doing personally. So, anyway, I don't know how short that was, but that's the gist of how I got into this subject. And, Shashana, how did you come to this? So it started as a very personal issue for me. I'd had a lot of exposure to death pretty early on in life. My college roommate Ode and I've had actually two boyfriends die of the same cancer, which is very odd. And then the kind of critical death for me was my father's death. And I met BJ just after that, and that's when it became professional. So we met at IDEO, the global design company where I work. At the time, BJ was the executive director of this and hospice, which is this beautiful residential hospice located. It used to be located in a Victorian house in San Francisco where people came for comfort and care at the end of life. And as you may know, sam hospice carries an unfortunate stigma. Many people actually consider it to be a kind of death sentence. So BJ and his team came to Idio hoping we could find a creative way to recast or effectively rebrand hospice in a way that would communicate its value, because it's really the most holistic, palliative, and free suite of care you can opt for at the end of life. And so when the designers at IDEO cut win that we'd be working on designing the end of life experience, they were so excited about working on something that was so consequential and so poorly designed in American culture, largely because we live in denial of our own mortality and do everything we can to avoid thinking about it. So this idea of designing, quite literally life and death was extremely exciting, and everyone wanted to work on it. Designers were throwing themselves into the volcano, and I ended up on a small team. We created this kickoff meeting to invite BJ in where we actually built this tunnel that led from our office entrance on the pier at the bay in San Francisco to this dome like structure, built a foot, a small group just sitting in the round, and internally, that meeting space became known as the death yurt. And on that first day when we met BJ, we led him in through this kind of liminal tunnel, this passageway that terminated in this candlelit dome. And it had a transparent top, and it caught the flickering shadows of the candlelight. And we just wanted to create an intimate, safe intersankum for this conversation. There were ten of us there, and our assignment was to come ready to talk about how we design our final moments on earth. So we started going around the room, and each person painted a more opulent picture than the last of what their final moments might look like alone at the top of a mountain, or being surrounded by all your friends and family but in a forest, or assembling your perfect curated death playlist. And I remember I was dreading my turn because I was fresh off of my father's death just three months before, and I had just started at IDEO and I wanted to join this rapture. But I'd witnessed my father's death as something so quiet and something that didn't remotely resemble any of these lofty visions. I mean, my father suffered with dementia and depression for many years and he did not have an easy death. And by the time we got him on the hospice, he was mostly unconscious. He hadn't uttered and intelligently by word for a year. And my last moments with him were, as I would imagine, many last moments with loved ones are just very quietly by the bedside, stroking his forehead and wetting his lips with a sponge and whispering that I loved him and scrambling to find a CD of Yiddish music because I knew those were the beloved songs of his childhood. And that hearing is the last sense that you lose, hoping that he would hear that. So anyway, I was trying to square my experience with this exercise that we designed for kicking off this work with BJ and this inhospice. But my father's experience felt so undesigned and so over medicalized and in many ways quite inhumane. And so when my turn came, I just said as much and I broke into tears. And I remember BJ was sitting across the room from me and locked eyes with me. And I knew that he understood as a palliative care physician whose work is to usher people through this human condition of suffering, he knew that that's what death looks like. And it looks nothing like what we see on TV, and it often happens in an ICU and in a clinical setting. Anyway, I came to understand that designing one's life and death doesn't mean that you can really control it. It means that you can come up with some principles for how to be true to how you want to live. So you've introduced a couple of terms here and also a stigma associated with one of them. Perhaps we can explain this state of affairs. So, BJ, can you differentiate palliative care from hospice? And either one of you can tell us why there is such a gravity to invoking hospice care and how we should think about that? Yeah, sure. And Josh, maybe I'll define some of these things and yeah, I'll leave it to you to help us understand how they land with the public. We've been wrestling with palliative care. It gets so confusing. Sam and I really appreciate your question. People within medicine get confused about what the heck palliative care is. So it's really important. Hospice came first. It's an ancient idea, really took off in modern terms in the UK in the 60s, came to the US in the as a sort of a non medical, largely volunteer approach to care. And it was very beautiful. In the 80s, medicare got in the business and started paying for it in a novel way. And you tell me, Sam, we can take any little tributaries on policy fronts or whatever else along the way here, but since the 80s, hospice became an insurance benefit. So that's how we say we're on hospice, we're on insurance benefit called hospice. So it's hospice has many meanings, but it is this kind of care reserve for the final six months or a year of life, say. But into the people who did this kind of work, one way or another, would kind of realize, well, why are we waiting till the end of people's lives to listen to them, to defer to their experience, to honor? Them to tender their comfort to their peace. Help them make meaning, deal with meaninglessness, you know, help the families reckon and square what's going on and live on. You know, it's beautiful, beautiful stuff. But it was we reserved it for the final six months or less to live, you know, so in the idea was to try to try to break it free of the insurance designation, which is the thing that said six months or less to live. And you got to give up certain kinds of care to go on to hospice. All these kind of invented hurdles, man made. And so in the field of pad of care, grew up. The term was coined by Balfour Mount in Canada, was one of the first hospice docs in North America. And we were trying to always evade the baggage of the hospice designation. And also it's sort of attachment to death because the whole idea is really to live well until you die. It's not about celebrating death per se. It's really about celebrating life and eking out all that you can while you can. So out of care. Grew up in the 90s as a field to say, no, no, our work here is multiple disciplines coming together to, you know, mitigate suffering essentially to focus on the experience of illness, not the transactions of disease management, to help you suffer less and help you realize more joy. That's kind of the gist. So palliative care is just now the umbrella term since 2006. The field at large is palliative care. Hospice now is considered a subset of palliative care, that is this kind of multidiscipline work, but still reserved for the final months of life. Whereas in palliative care it's the same training. You're a hospice doc as well as a palliative care doc that come together. But in my pallet of care clinic, I'll see people for many, many years or people who are in remission, who aren't dying anytime soon. So sorry for the long answer, brother, but that's kind of hard to do. It succinctly, that's good. But is it true to say that hospice only gets triggered once you admit you being the patient, the family in concert with the healthcare provider, that you're no longer doing anything to fight this illness and attempt to overcome it? You're not deliberately prolonging life at that point, what is it that you are no longer doing in order to invoke hospice? So that's right. So you're pointing to the two main sort of stipulations of the hospice benefit to qualify for this kind of care to be paid for two things. Two doctors have to certify that your death will likely come in six months or less to, you know, we're, we're pretty bad at prognosis, so it's a best guess. And the second stipulation is what you're pointing to is you have to essentially stop trying to combat this illness. So if you're dying from, say, heart failure, if that's your hospice diagnosis, you can come into hospice. We will stop a lot of these expensive heart pumps and things like that that are sustaining your life or trying to cure or reverse the heart disease that care then goes into. Instead making sure you're comfortable and working with you for the time that you have to realize certain things in your life, et cetera, becomes much more social, much more supportive. In a word, rather than trying to fight the disease, you're trying to support the person. So that's the kind of segue of care, your other diagnoses, if you have diabetes and any other thing that can continue to be treated. But the diagnosis that qualifies you for hospice, you no longer qualify to push back on that disease. And in the 80s, that made a lot of sense. By the time you reached this point, there wasn't much more to try to beat your disease or by then, the person was really not interested in this or that treatment. It was too taxing, too toxic. It's getting a little messy now because a lot of treatments coming down the pike can help you live a little bit longer, a little bit more comfortably, but are not ever intended to, say, fix or cure your illness. So there's an increasing gray zone of treatments that might qualify from a palliative point of view, but don't from a hospice point of view for these reasons. So it gets really murky and it feeds into this that hospice is giving up because in some way you are you're giving some choices up. Yeah. Does that make sense? Kind of picture that. So the, the question I posed about people's hesitation around invoking it sort of answers itself because it it comes at the moment where you have to admit that, okay, you're going to die from this thing, and it's no longer a story of how you're going to get better from the cancer or whatever it is. That's right. Shashana, did you have something you wanted to say there? Well, I always look at the kind of etymology of these things, hospice and hospitals and hospitality. It's all about caregiving and how we care for people, how we care for each other through the entire arc of life. And we pay a lot of attention for how we care for our first born, for how we care for children, and very little for how we usher people out of life. And part of the project of this book was knowing that there was this book, what to expect when you're expecting. For New Parents, which is sold like 500 million copies, and every set of parents gets their newly minted copy. We wanted to create something like that, a stepwise approach to thinking about this experience for the other end of life. And hospice is a part of that. Yeah. So you mentioned, BJ, that you were at the Zen hospice. Does that suggest that were you a Zen practitioner before you came to it, or did you just come as a hospice doctor who happened to land at that particular hospice? No, I came there more more the latter, Sam. I came there for entrance by two things a Zen hospital project which had started in 1987. And I know you've had a beautiful interview with Franco Ceseski, who was the founding executive director back in the really remarkable little place. And it had closed down after Frank left, and it was just reopening. And so I came there as a hospice doctor, as an agnostic hospice doctor who was broadly interested in spirituality or just philosophy, how we approach the truth, how we approach life. So I was interested in Buddhism and had studied it a little bit and found it irrefutable in so many ways. Didn't really see it as a religion, but more as a philosophy. And my agnosticism fit, I thought, pretty snugly within those confines. I was really there as a hospice doc who loved architecture, and this sweet little guest house, as Victorian was sort of anything but a nursing of anything but a hospital. And there was a sort of a belief or an observation that bones of a place, the inanimate objects, the design, all of that could affect the experience. Of course it can. The beauty of a place. Of course it can. So I was there for the house, and I was there because they had a basis of care in volunteerism and in spirituality. And that seemed like a very interesting, perhaps a larger, better catchment for this subject than the sort of reductive medical model. Per sena. Do you have a background in meditation or any spiritual practice that's informing your approach to this? Well, Sam, I largely learned to meditate from you. I have to give you credit here. Someone gifted me a subscription to Waking Up, and I had dabbled in meditation before. And growing up in the Bay Area, you can't help but osmotically be exposed to all of the Buddhist activity around here. And we have spirit rock here. So I had a yoga practice, and certainly I was interested, but really, it wasn't until I started having you in my ear that I started more religiously meditating. But I'd just say that for me, the death of my father was such a tectonic shift for me, and it so rattled me to the core that I did turn to various different spiritual guides and faiths. I certainly turned back to my Jewish community and I listened to a lot of, you know, very wise teachers who grapple with loss and death and grief in a way that I think is very useful to me. The Tibetan practice of meditating on death five times a day, I think it is, is really right, is that you should keep death close because, of course, it is everywhere and we are dying all the time. And having that inform how you live that has changed my life, that has brought more urgency to my life. It has brought much more connection, more presence. And so I think that's all very useful. Yes, well, more or less, every spiritual tradition recommends that we keep death in mind. And it's the impermanence of life that motivates most philosophical reflection or deliberate practice that's aimed at wisdom. But it's always seemed to me that there's a paradox or a seeming paradox between kind of two modes of response to this reflection. I mean, there's there's the there's the mode in which we can we can really, you know, seize the day with a sense of urgency and follow a sort of carpideum piece of advice, which alone can be just a further admiration of our attachment to things and clinging to things. There's no bucket list, however fully accomplished. That's the same as recognizing a quality of mind that just doesn't cling to experience and to life itself. And so I think there's this potential trade off and confusion between the urgency of trying to get the most out of life, which again, there's a lot to be said for that. But that's distinct between simply recognizing that this moment is already enough, right? And I think more and more we want certainly anyone with a meditation practice will find this familiar. We want a mind that is at peace with experience, whatever it is, and is at peace with the reality that we're at bottom, we're not really in control of anything. And it's these kind of nested illusions of control that we sort of fight our way beyond as we confront our and others mortality. So I'm wondering if either of you have any reaction to that, because in my own life I noticed that I really am running both programs. I mean, there are many things I do because I want to do them and I have vacations planned and projects planned. And there is a sort of bucket list mode of prioritizing things that on their face seem like good and enjoyable uses of time. And I wouldn't say that that is a waste of time, but if you are living with the illusion that your happiness is going to be secured only when you arrive at the peak of all these mountains that you're planning to climb, you seem guaranteed to be disappointed. And then there's sort of a figure ground reversal that needs to be accomplished where you can recognize, well, it's possible to be already happy before anything happens, before the vacation actually arrives. It's only worked out for me in continually kind of being buffeted back and forth between those two modes and recognizing that one needs to supersede the other. For me, yeah, I will say you're really putting to something really important here. And I think in some ways, Shosh and I, the book, in some ways, as a beginner's treatise, we mostly sort of suggest or come up to find our way to, oh, boy, okay, time is finite. My time is finite on this planet, and, okay, let's take life seriously. Let's figure out, let it distill what we care about, and let's pursue those things that we care about. There's something really beautiful and wonderful about that. One of the things, if we were going to write, like, an intermediate guide, I think we'd spend more time on, like, a second book. Like, you're squaring the limits of that approach along with, like, the limits of the self, you know, and if you just stay in yourself all the time, you're only going to get so far. That would probably be the sort of second big book. But you're right on, I think. And as I've kind of gone down this road myself or my work, I am increasingly tuned into and it's always a dynamic, just as you're saying, Sam, of this other piece of learning to be okay with what already is front preload your happiness or your piece and then work from there. Don't this idea of hedging leveraging your current piece for some better piece or more happiness down the road. I used to do this a lot with myself, and I do it less and less to sort of leveraging the present for some possible future. And so I think what you point to is just perfect, Sam. It's really not one or the other. It's not being or doing. I think the project ends up being cultivating the good judgment to pull on the right tool and to not see these as a dichotomy. It's not being versus doing. It's not caring about achievement versus these are false divides. You can do both. And I think over time, what you really a mature person gets to is this sense of judgment of toggling between the two, applying these approaches and these mindsets at the right time and holding it all loosely, leaving room for things that you just don't understand. So there's some perhaps like a unifying theory out there that we haven't kind of hit on just yet. But you move between these valences, and that's where so much the action is. That's where you stay really, I think, very present with yourself. In real time. You can square the expectations of yourself and from others of you and of your life and the potential you have to make something with it, with the idea that it's never going to be enough. If you're really paying attention, there's always more. It's always a work in progress. So, yeah, I don't know that I'm saying anything novel there, Sam. I think you spelled that perfectly. But that so much, really, as far as I can see, is the project. Yeah, well, just the being doing opposition lends itself to being while doing. Right. Really, you can run those two together. There's that great phrase, life is what happens while you're planning that vacation. Right. We tend to live in any tense but the present. We live in the past and feel regret. We are planning for the future. I remember this. There's I don't know if you ever saw that movie. Nomadland, no. It's a wonderful movie with Francis McDorman, but there's a story, it's basically about people who hit the road in vans and are unhoused and just travel through life. And there's one scene in which they're all sitting around the fire at night in in essentially the trailer park and telling stories of why they became Nomads. And one woman says, I was working in the corporate world for 20 years, and my boss saved up for a boat which he had parked in his driveway, and he kept saying, you know, I just I can't wait to retire and take this boat out and just set sail. And everything was dreaming about this future, this imagined future happiness that he was in pursuit of. And then, of course, he got a terminal diagnosis while still at work and a very short window of time, and that boat never left the driveway. And she says that was the moment that catalyzed her, and she was like, I'm not waiting for my life to start. I'm going to start it now. And she got in the van and rode off into the sunset. And I think there's so much wisdom in so much of the conversations you have about this, about that illusory pursuit of some future happiness, when really the moment that we have now is the most voluminous opportunity we have for that. And I have to say, there was a lot of lessons about that in caregiving for me. So when I was taking care of my father, I really had to investigate the nature of time in a different way. I had to really synchronize to his time, which was very slow, a much slower metabolic rate than I'm certainly used to. I'm a really busy, full time working person with two teenagers, and we mostly live in Kronos, that linear clock time of which there's never enough, right? The Stoic philosopher Seneca writes about the shortness of life, and he postulates that it feels long if you know how to live it. If you find length in those moments, time can be elastic and can expand and contract depending on how we inhabit it. So you can either be kind of ravaged by chronos and linear time, and it can become very transactional. We have all these phrases about that time is money, and you're wasting time. Time waits for no one. But when you are caregiving, you really have to slow time. Down and just be there. And there are real depths to plumb, I found there. I would often just end up sitting on the couch with my father, holding hands. And there was a universe of feeling there that I really hadn't had with my father before, because we had had a very heady kind of relationship that was really built on the commerce of ideas and just conversation. And suddenly he had no use for language, no use for hearing about my life and my accomplishments, but just sitting and being with him and watching my kids play became this shift in how you inhabit time and feel time. And it's like there's that phrase, don't just sit there, do something, which gets inverted in the most lovely way when you're taking care of someone who needs quiet. And it turns into, don't just do something, sit there. Yeah, okay. We're really talking about both sides of this, but I think it's useful to acknowledge how different they are, even though they both come to mind when we talk about death. And there's the difference between being the one dying and being among the bereaved or soon to be bereaved. And they're very different experiences, obviously. I can only talk about one of them, but BJ, you have seen both for years and years, and I can imagine you've seen hundreds, if not thousands of people die and that many families and circles of friends go through the bereavement process. I think we should cover, you know, any side of it you want to, but perhaps we can start with and this is sort of where your book starts with advice for healthy people for whom death is still fairly hypothetical, right? I mean, they may have had someone close to them die at some point, but they're not dealing with it now. And and life is, quote, normal, and you haven't been dragged into the kingdom of mortality, which happens the moment your day is now going to be spent at a hospital, whether for your own illness or the illness of someone you love. So let's talk about normal life. What do you both advise people to do now? Well, maybe I'll set us up here, if that's all right, and then we can play together on this one, too. I think a couple of thoughts. One is just to get to the pretext of your question. Sam yeah. You could very easily and well make the argument, when do we begin dying? You could certainly they were born somewhere after our brain stopped developing, if they ever do. But that's an evasive answer. There is something different about when your horizon is in sight, when you know the thing that's going to end your life. It's more of a spectrum as you move from abstraction to reality. But there are meaningful differences from someone who's at the end stages of an illness and dying at any moment, from someone who's walking around talking otherwise in good health per se, et cetera. So your question alone brings up a lot of good points. But let's just hold that there's a difference between sort of acute or near term dying phase and the rest of life. And you see that in the body. One of our chapters is on final days when things rules of thumb that guide you through the rest of life no longer really apply. Food and water goes from something of sustenance to something that actually can hurt you, for example. So there's some other examples in the world of physiology that's all behind your question. But let's get to your question. One of the reasons why and by the way, let's give Shosham credit, it was her idea to write this book and it was a terrifying prospect. But we both it was an easy thing for me to say yes to because we both knew there were some basic things that could be covered and we could level set for our readers and avoid a lot of unnecessary suffering. And it was also a joy to write with shot in so many ways as a layperson, as a caregiver, as a design thinker, not as a clinician. So just wanted to get that out there too. And I'll cut to you show in a second. Because a lot of your work with some of those early chapters but just to say the reasons to write a book to read like this the reasons to read a book like this are because while you're early in life, the thesis is don't wait until that diagnosis to realize you're mortal. If you can invite the truth of death into your life earlier and you will receive its lessons. And on practical terms, there are some things any of us can do early in life that will prepare us for our eventual death in some real practical ways. So one thing to realize is our healthcare system. The default settings of the healthcare system are to put you on machines, take you to ICU, do everything humanly possible to keep your heart beating. And in the world of medicine, again, a very powerful but very reductive lens onto life basically holds that if you got a heartbeat, you're alive. Essentially some brain activity, you're alive. Most of us wouldn't consider that living by some definition, but that's the health care definition. So if you don't do, say, an advanced directive, you run the risk of just falling down the default path of medicine and ending up in situations you probably don't want to be in or you might not want to be in. So there's a big reason to think about it so you can get the sort of death that suits you. Another reason, of course, is to prepare for it. So that it's kind of one of the kindest things you can do for your family and friends, people who will live on after you. If you've stated your wishes, if you've made it clear how you want to go out, then you take so much guesswork out of the people who will survive you, and you can ease their grief. But the third reason to do all this stuff, I think it's the best or the biggest or something like that, is what we've touched on. Once you realize you will die, at some point, you, in a sense, can start really living. And I have seen that play out a zillion times over in my own life and in others. And so so that's the setup. That's why that's why prepare. Otherwise, gosh, you'd just say people have been dying forever. It's a natural thing. When my turn to die, I'll die and I'll be, you know, fine. Why do I need a book to tell us about this? Well, we need a book to tell us about this because we've invented structures and systems that make certain inevitabilities in life a little inhospitable and shaky and counterintuitive. So anyway, over to you show maybe on some of the advanced planning and other things. Sure. Well, I just want to make sure we're answering your question here, Sam. Was that really it about how you prepare yourself for this experience and think about it further upstream? Yeah, I think it's natural for people who are healthy right, and for whom there's nothing bad on this front has happened yet to want to use that time to think about everything other than planning for the inevitable, even if they could pay lip service to the understanding that it is inevitable. There are many people who don't have wills. And even if you have a will, that really doesn't quite get at every aspect of planning you deal with in your book. And again, the checklist aspect of this I think is best delivered by your book, not so much by audio, but I think some of the big points are worth talking about. For instance, the advanced directive. I love your take on it as well, Shashana, but I'm also wondering if the physician's eye view of death, you know, having seen many, many people die, could give us some wisdom as to, you know, what's worth wanting with respect to resuscitation or not, etc. Well, I'm definitely going to hand that one over to BJ. But I'll just say, from my perspective in writing the book and talking to hundreds of people about how to kind of grapple with this experience, it's so taboo in our culture. And you're absolutely right. We don't want to think about it. We don't talk about it. We don't have conversations about it. We have a colleague, Jessica Zitter, who's a palliative care doc and an Er doc, and she actually wants to institute death ed in schools as a component or as a counterpart to sex ed, because we really do think that it should be just a conversation that we have throughout life. And there are so many different touch points throughout life when it's appropriate, like when your kid goes and becomes a driver and takes his driver's test or her driver test and has to choose whether or not they want to become an organ donor. Great opportunity to start talking about, yes, there's a possibility that when you get behind that wheel, you will get in an accident, and let's think about what you might what you might offer the world in a very generous way if that happens. So there's lots so many opening gambits throughout life when you can have this conversation. But I'll just say that there are a couple of different things we talk about in the book, and one is the kind of material mess that we accumulate in life and how to deal with that, because, of course, you hand all of that down to the people who you love, and it's a lot. And there's this great Swedish notion of death cleaning that as you get older, you should go through your material world and decide what you need and what you can give up, because you don't want to pass that along. You don't want to pass that mess along. It's a lot to get through for the people you love. And then there's, of course, the emotional mess that we create in life as human beings, which is much more complicated. But that is where the meat is. Thinking about your relationships and whether or not you have resolved old disputes. People in your life, what do they need to hear from you? How are you feeding and watering your relationships throughout life? And Irabiac, another palliative care physician who we interviewed for this book, has this beautiful framework of saying the four things that matter most at the end of life. And those things are, Please forgive me. I forgive you, thank you, and I love you. And he says that just saying those things can really unburden the people around you in feeling like they've come to terms with letting you go and feeling resolved about that. And we actually asked him, IRA, it's been ten years since you wrote that book. Is there anything else you'd add to that list? And he said, Actually, I talked to 60 year old men who are still carrying around the wish that their dead fathers had said to them, I'm so proud of you. I've really built that into the way that I raised my kids, just taking every opportunity to tell them how proud of them I am. And I think, again, just returning to this moment is the only moment that we can be sure of knowing that you are expressing the things that you need to express and then all the paperwork stuff. You're right, Sam. We cover off in the book, we actually have this notion of a When I Die file, which has like 20 things in it that you want to put in there, and that can be in a shoe box or a file or on the cloud, wherever. But it's a place where your family can go to find all of the logistical stuff that just traps people up when they're in the thick of grief and they can't even think straight and they just need very clear instructions for how to shut down a life. BJ, before you give us the DNR particulars, I forget if you mention this in the book, do we know the statistics on just what percentage of people die suddenly and bypass any need for advice around how to navigate a terminal illness? I guess this is more or less cardiac events and accidents we're talking about here. But do we know what the percentages are? The data that I have seen referenced, I have to say, I haven't chased it down to its source. But the data I've seen referenced around your question, Sam, is and it mirrors my kind of own experience in my practice. But maybe 10% to 20% of people can look forward to that sort of spontaneous death where they're fully alive one moment and then whammo. Gone. And there's not much in between space. And that number is shrinking in part due to the advances of medicine. We're able to keep people alive, myself as one of them. We can keep folks alive, but not unscathed. And so a lot of people now, a lot of illnesses that were immediately terminal nowadays are chronic, at least for many years. So another thing that the book steps into, or our time steps into is this moment where science and medical science has advanced and it's smeared or protracted this dying phase. And that has lots of consequences. So for good and for ill, we live with this thing that will cause our death oftentimes for many years. And so more and more of us are dying from chronic illness that will very likely it is right now very likely the reason the way you or I will die. And that number is growing as the population ages. So these issues are becoming more and more important or powerful. And in the coming decades, they will continue to swell. Aging, dying is going to be increasingly in our face because of the population dynamics. Yeah. So with that another sort of reason to pay attention to this stuff now as so as you're talking and reminded too, of one of the joys of this work that we did together or do together, there's also just the magic like you're doing with us today, Sam, of just talking about these things. And you have done such a beautiful job before us too. This subject is not a stranger on your work. And that's beautiful. It's just the basic math of pulling things out of a closet. And one thing I kind of want to get out there I'm going around here nonlinearly, but as you're referencing a moment ago about there are some important differences between living and dying, I'll just say I'll jump to what feels to me like really good news and good news observation. And a lot of this is that a lot of what feel like neurosing around regret and getting it right and wondering how to heat or pay attention or quiet our critic all the things that we kind of frantically do to ourselves and to each other when we have this sort of open ended life in front of us. In some ways that's the hard part. By the time someone is actually dying in their final days and weeks and they've gotten a taste of watching their body fall apart bit by bit and dying in some ways has already begun, they've already said a lot of goodbyes when you're kind of shaken down by that chronic process. One of the things that often goes, especially if you have some loving support around you, I don't hear a lot of people on their deathbeds wailing about regrets. Actually, I hear a lot of folks at the time of diagnosis whaling about regret. That's an important difference. So I just want to kind of note that there's some good news here that I think in some ways living is the harder part or some ways more complicated. Dying can really bring us down to the essentials and distill life and make it very obvious in some ways. So let that be good news essential. Meanwhile, I've actually never heard that point made and it seems intuitively, right? Do you have an explanation for it? Well, I don't foresee that. I'm not a scientific moment. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today I have Gary Taubes. Gary is the author of three fairly recent books on nutrition, good Calories, Bad Calories, Why We Get Fat, and most recently, The Case Against Sugar. He's a former staff writer for Discover and a correspondent for the scientific journal Science. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Esquire. He's been included in numerous best of anthologies, including The Best of American Science writing 2010 received many awards and has become fairly controversial for the very strong position he has taken on diet and human health and the degree to which he has criticized the field of nutrition science. He has the knocks and and bruises to show for having courted such controversy. But we had a very interesting conversation and it's one that may actually influence how you eat and what you feed your kids. And now I bring you Gary Taubes. I am here with Gary Taubes. Gary, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Sam. Pleasure to be here. So let's start with your background as a journalist. I think many people are familiar with you, but you you have a long background as a science journalist and you've now focused of late on the science and pseudoscience of nutrition. And you you've spent three books on this. You. You wrote Good Calories, bad calories, which was a very large and very well footnoted book. And then you wrote Why we get fat? And now the case against Sugar. And all of these are honing in on the same thesis, essentially, and making it more accessible to readers. These books were born of at least one very controversial article that was I think it was in the New York Times Magazine. How have you approached your writing career thus far and what's caused you to focus on nutrition to this degree? When I started my journalism career, I started, as mentioned, as a science writer. My background was in physics, so I was naturally going to focus on physics. And my first two books. My first book, I lived at CERN, the big physics lab outside Geneva, and was embedded with the research collaboration of physicists who, over the course of the ten months I was living with them, basically discovered nonexistent elementary particles and then realized slowly their mistake. And then by the time I left to write the book, we're willing to publicly acknowledge that they had screwed up. And then this led me to kind of obsession and fascination with this question of how to do science right, with this excruciatingly difficult and how easy it is to get the wrong answer. So I did a series of investigations, both for Discover magazine and then my second book was on this scientific fiasco, cold fusion, which I always saw. I actually wrote it hoping it would be a case study that every young researcher would have to read before they engaged in a research career, because it was basically about how making an error of any magnitude could ruin your career in a functioning scientific environment. Just remind me, what was the cold fusion scandal? Was it a conscious fraud on some level, or was it just a mistake? I concluded for the most part that it was just a mistake, but it was a mistake that the researchers involved at the University of Utah clearly made up data, which is technically misconduct. It's technically fraud. But the reason they made up the data is because their incorrect discovery was being stolen from them by a physicist down the road at Brigham Young University. Stealing fiction. That's fantastic. It's funny. I still have there's still an option out on my cold fusion book by a now very successful Hollywood director who sees it as a wonderful comedic story about science. But if you think you've discovered something and you have premature data and then somebody who should know is stealing it from you, then that seems to be compelling evidence that it must be real. But now you don't have enough data to actually publish your own paper, so then what do you do? And what they did was made it up. So technically, it was fraud, but they were such idiots on some level that it's even hard to say whether they knew they were doing something wrong when they did that crazy story. Anyway, that led me I had a lot of friends in the physics community after doing these two books, a lot of physicists who saw me as a kind of investigative journalist that they could point at a subject that smelled suspicious to them and kind of pulled the trigger, and I would go investigate it. And so several of these physicists suggested in the early 90s that I get into looking at the science and public health because they thought it was terrible. And indeed, it it was everything I had learned from these brilliant experimental scientists in the 80s that was required not everything, but most things that they've considered required to do science right and minimize the possibility that you're fooling yourself was considered, is considered kind of luxuries in the field of public health. It's just too hard to do it. It's too expensive to do it. Your systems, human beings living in the real world are so messy. So rather than acknowledge that they can't establish reliable knowledge, what the community kind of did en masse, unconscious decision to just lower the standards that they would use to establish causality, to make statements about what is or is not a healthy diet. Which is where I ended up focusing on by the late ninety s, I was writing these investigations for science first on this issue of whether salt caused high blood pressure, which seems to be common knowledge and the basis of dietary advice since the 1980s. And you look at the evidence, it's just not there. Unless God told you personally that salt I know as soon as I say that I'm stepping into dangerous ground here, but unless God tells you perfect personally that salt caused high blood pressure, you'd never conclude that from the evidence from the randomized controlled trials. This is really just one of the great scandals of science at this point that there's still so much confusion about what constitutes a healthy diet. I mean, so, like, I just imagine if I went to see a cardiologist today and I told him that I eat, you know, every day for breakfast, a bowl of oatmeal and drank a glass of orange juice, say some number of cardiologists, a significant percentage would say that's great, bravo. Right? Some would probably say I'm living on the edge. And I think you would probably say I'm living on the edge. And conversely, if I said I ate a plate of eggs and bacon every morning, many cardiologists, certainly most, would say that I'm attempting a slow suicide, whereas some would say that is optimal. Right? So it's just like, how is it that we're in this situation, we're getting ready to colonize Mars, and we cannot agree about what would be healthy food to take for the trip? Just it's a crazy situation. Well, and it's, it's worse than that because this situation exists in the midst of an unprecedented epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Right? So a third, over a third of the population is considered clinically obese. Two thirds is overweight something like almost 10%, almost one in ten in Americans are diabetic disease that was vanishingly rare just 120 years ago. So you would think, right, that and beset by these epidemics, we wouldn't be able to cross the street in our neighborhoods without tripping over some scientific committee trying to figure out what we did wrong, what we don't understand about the nature of a healthy diet. And instead there's this sort of placid acceptance that, well, people just eat poorly and we tell them how to eat, and we've been telling them how to eat for 50 years and nobody listens, and everyone goes to McDonald's and Taco Bell and that's the cause of the epidemic and that's what makes us fat. And yeah, it's a crazy situation. I mean, I've been stuck in the middle of it because I am one of these people who think you'd be healthier if you ate the bacon and eggs. I often describe myself as the kind of person who believes that bacon and butter are health foods. And at least if I'm killing myself, I'll die relatively happy. Knock on wood. Jesus, I'm talking to you. I've evoked God and the fact that I'm superstitious in the first five minutes. That's all right. If you sneeze, I'll probably say, God bless you. It's deeply wired in the brain. Okay. I've tried to document this. My first book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, the two investigations I did for science, first on salt and blood pressure, and then on this belief that a low fat diet is a healthy diet. Those led me to that infamous New York Times Magazine cover story. What if it's all been a big, fat lie? And by that point, I was pretty confident that the science of nutrition was I mean that, as you put it, to pseudoscience of nutrition. It's not a functioning science, as the scientists that I knew would call it. And so I spent the next five years of my life investigating and trying to figure out what other mistakes had been made, where the mistakes might have been made, what you have to do to fix it. But then that puts me in the position of being a journalist, saying all the authorities are wrong. And while the doctors you could go to the different cardiologists cardiologists in your neighborhood might disagree on what's a healthy diet, the nutrition community, the influential nutritionists for the most part, all agree, and it's reflected in the public health guidelines. Let's talk about your basic thesis here. So what is your criticism of the current state of conventional wisdom? And what do you actually think is the ground truth of what we now have good reason to believe is healthy to eat? Okay, so there are three more or less fundamental pillars of all nutrition science regarding a healthy diet, regarding what we should eat in a day to day level to be healthy. So the most fundamental is this idea that we get fat because we eat too many calories. The technical terminology for it, because people need a technical terminology when they have a particularly stupid idea, is the energy balance hypothesis or theory of obesity. And you'll see articles I just downloaded one today that was a working group report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer. And the idea is that obesity is an energy balance disorder. You take in more calories and you expand, you get fatter. That's sort of the basis of everything, because the nutrition community knows that once you get fatter, as you get more obese, you increase your risk of diabetes and heart disease and cancer and Gough and all these other diseases. So if you want to prevent that from happening, if you want to minimize your risk, the first thing to do is you're supposed to balance your calories into your calories out. And it turns out when you look at the literature, you go back. That's an idea that came out of nutrition science from the 1870s to the 1920s. So modern nutrition science actually dates to the late 1860s, when German researchers created devices called calorimeters, room size devices that can measure the energy expenditure of humans or animal subjects living in these rooms. So you can measure the energy content of food by burning them and burning the food in what's called a bomb calorimeter. Now, you can measure the energy expenditure of humans and dogs, and the researchers start doing this around the same time that other researchers are working out the laws of thermodynamics and concluding that the laws of thermodynamics hold for animate as well as inanimate objects. And by the early 19 hundreds, you have a theory of obesity that it's caused by consuming more energy than you expend, because that's all the research community could measure. So the idea is that the way foods influence our weight is through their caloric content only. And there's this idea, that phrase you've heard of calories or calories of calorie, because a calorie of protein and a calorie of carbohydrates and a calorie of fat all brings the same amount of energy into your body. But the problem is that belief system is technology dependent. If all you can measure is the energy content of food, then you come up with a hypothesis that the energy content of food determines your weight. Beginning around 1920, the science of endocrinology hormones and hormone related diseases begins to grow and mature. It's pioneered in Germany and Austria and the Germans and Austrians come to this conclusion that clearly, obesity has got to be a hormonal regulatory defect. They look at, like, men and women fatten differently, men fatten above the waist, women fatten below the waist. So sex hormones have to be involved, right? When boys and girls go through puberty, boys lose weight and lose fat and gain muscle. Girls gain fat and gain in very specific places. They've got to be hormonal control of fat accumulation. But the American scientists began to dominate the field. First of all, they just didn't understand. They weren't scientists. They were doctors. They didn't understand endocrinology. They were wedded to this idea that fat people just eat too much. They saw a hormonal explanation for obesity as an excuse for fat people to remain sort of gluttons and sloths, and they talked about it. You can see it in the literature and articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1925, when whoever wrote I can guarantee whoever wrote that article didn't have a clue what endocrinology was, is arguing that obesity is in a hormonal disorder. And then again, the Germans and Austrians are arguing clearly, it's got to be. You cannot explain anything meaningful about obesity by this energy conception. Let me just ask a few questions here to kind of bound just how far reaching your claims are here, because you're not disputing thermodynamics no, I assume I got a physics degree. I'm not allowed to. Right. Or you would be far more famous than you are if you were disputing. It credibly. So I imagine you would admit that on some level, you gain weight because of a surplus of calories. So, for instance, if I were going to eat, you know, 15,000 extra calories a day, it wouldn't matter if those were extra carb fat or protein calories. If I was at that surplus day in, day out, I'm going to just keep gaining weight, right? Yeah. Although, actually, it might matter. But again, it depends how you define excess. Let's use a metaphor, an analogy to help understand. Let's say instead of thinking in terms of excess weight, we're talking about excess money or wealth instead of obesity. Okay? So now clearly you can't get rich without making more money than you spent, right? But you would never say that you got rich because you made more money than you spent. There are certainly degrees of that disparity, and where you put the line is a judgment call. But it's not just a matter of where you put the causality, because again, to get rich, you have to make more money than you spend. That's a given, right? There's conservation of money, just like unless you're a counterfeiter, just like there's conservation of energy. So to get fat, it means you're taking in more energy than you're expending, but you might get fat because, for instance, I can give you a drug that makes your fat tissue accumulate fat. What you're saying, clearly, is that there's more to the story. So that I'm claiming that as soon as you went to causality, as soon as you say and again, we'd never do it in any other field. Think about climate. Let's use climate change as an example. Clearly, if the atmosphere is heating up, it's taking in more energy than it expends, right. Otherwise it wouldn't heat up. Right. But the question is, why is it taking in more energy than it expands? One possibility is that the sun is heating up, so we're getting more energy from the atmosphere, but we're pretty confident that's not happening, right. Another possibility might be that we actually have a heat trapping phenomenon going on in the atmosphere in theory, which I believe for the most part. And so the fact that the atmosphere is taking in more energy than it expends and it lets out is irrelevant. What we want to know is why is energy being trapped in certain areas of the atmosphere? Why does certain frequencies of light get trapped and not others? Why do certain molecules trap heat in the atmosphere and not others? And what's the source of those molecules? You could think of it as a heat trapping problem, right. And then you don't think about how much is going in or out. You don't care about that, even though clearly more is coming in. You could think if you're getting richer, your bank account is accumulating money. Yes, but if I, if I suddenly again, to take the wealth case, if I suddenly told you that I'm now going to spend ten times more than I earn and I'm committed to doing that, you can predict that if I live long enough under this regime, I'm going to go broke. And so you're not disputing that basic picture. There's nothing magical here about the hormones. I think you're saying that the difference between our macronutrients and how they interact with the endocrine system brings many other variables into play, including things like a person's level of appetite, a person's level of involuntary energy expenditure. There are other things happening, right? Yeah. But you're still thinking in terms of the fat mass being fundamentally controlled by how much people eat and exercise, by intake and expenditure and what I'm saying. So think of let's use children's growth as an example, okay? Now, we could starve. A child can't do this as an experiment and stunt its growth. Okay. Clearly happens in famines all the time, but we would never say that the child grows because he eats a lot of food. Having a lot of food available certainly allows growth to happen, but the growth is pretty much food independent or not protein independent. So different macronutrients have different effects. But if we were talking about growth so again, we could look at the boys and girls going through puberty as an example. They're both getting bigger, right? They're both getting heavier. So we know they're taking in more calories than they expend because that's what the laws of thermodynamics tell us. But the boys lose fat in the girl and gain muscle, and the girls gain fat. So now the fact that they're taking in more calories than they expand is irrelevant to understanding why the boys lost fat and gained muscle and why the girls gained fat and where the girls gained fat, because it doesn't happen everywhere. Right. So there are other examples come to mind. So, for instance, you wouldn't say of the growth of cancer tumors that that's best explained by a surplus of calories. Exactly. Okay, so there's more to the story. Not just that there's more to the story, but if you think of, like, you could think of cancer as a calorie energy balance problem because clearly the tumors are growing. And if you needed to push the analogy and I've got slides to this effect that I use on top, you can find examples of, like, benign tumorous masses that weigh £50, £100. Still, you wouldn't think of it as an energy balance disorder despite the fact that whoever had that 50 pound or 100 pound benign mass had to take in enough energy to create the tumor. And if you thought about it as an energy balance disorder, you would not understand the etiology of that mass. Right. So what is the ideology in your view, of the obesity epidemic? So what happens in the 60s. Remember, this is only one of the fundamental pillars. So we still have two more to get to. Yeah, endocrinology is begins to be understood in the in the 1920s on some profound level. Insulin is discovered, growth hormone is discovered, other hormones are discovered. It's a German Austrian occupation. The German Austrians are arguing that obesity is clearly a hormonal regulatory defect and that discussing it in terms of energy balance is meaningless because, again, it's like discussing the puberty issue, which was one of the examples they used in the literature. The war comes around, the German Austrian school evaporates, and the lingua franca of medicine switches from German to English. And postwar, the science of obesity is in effect recreated by young nutritionists. And doctors at Harvard School of Public Health and elsewhere have no clinical experience with obesity and just embrace this energy balance ideas. Clearly, fat people just eat too much. We know this because I know a fat person and he eats a lot. That's about the depth of the thinking. And by the 1960s, obesity is considered an eating disorder, and it's studied primarily by psychologists and psychiatrists. The 1960 couple of researchers in New York create something called the Radio Immunoassay that allows you to measure hormones in the bloodstream for the first time accurately. One of them later wins the Nobel Prize for the work and the 1966 explosion in the field of endocrinology. And by 1965, it's clear that fat accumulation in fat cells is primarily regulated by the hormone insulin. And this is conventional wisdom. You could look at biochemistry books and endocrinology textbooks today, and they'll tell you the same thing. So remind people just what is the role of insulin regulating fat storage? So, we think of insulin as the hormone that's defective in diabetes. And type one diabetes, which is the acute form that usually hits in childhood, your pancreas doesn't secrete enough insulin or doesn't secrete any. And in type two diabetes, which is the very common form, 95% of all cases, it associates with excess weight and age. Patients actually begin as what it's called insulin resistant. So their pancreas secretes insulin in response to their diet, and the insulin regulate controls their blood sugar, but it doesn't do a good job of it. So they have to secrete more insulin to keep their blood sugar control, and they have elevated levels of insulin in their blood throughout the day. So by 1965, it's clear that insulin not only tells your lean tissue, your muscle cells and your organs to take up glucose, carbohydrates that constitute your blood sugar, to keep the blood sugar in control, they also tell your fat tissue to take up fat and hold on to fat. So by 1965, insulin is being described, including by the couple that created the Radio Immunoassay. And again, Roslyn Yellow, the physicist and the pair later won the Nobel Prize. Her partner Solomon Burson passed away yellow and burston are describing insulin as the most lipogenic hormone, meaning its fat forms fat, stimulates fat formation, and the more insulin, the more fat you're going to accumulate. And the problem is to the field in general. So well, a few things happen. First of all, working physicians read the medical literature and they say to themselves, look, if insulin stimulates fat formation and we secrete insulin in response to the carbohydrate content of the diet, which we do, what happens if you just don't eat carbohydrates and in fact, they find out that you happen to lose a lot of weight? This is the basis of genesis of the Atkins diet. Atkins was a cardiologist in New York who read that literature and said, gee, it seems to me if I remove the carbs and replace it with fat, so I eat a high fat diet and bacon double cheeseburgers without the bun, I should lose weight because I'm going to lower insulin. If I lower insulin, I'm going to mobilize fat from my fat tissue. And they write these very best selling diet books, and the medical community responds. The cardiology community responds. They're beginning to believe the second pillar of the nutritional wisdom, which is that dietary fat causes heart disease. If dietary fat causes heart disease, atkins is going to kill more people than Hitler did. That's an extreme example, but so this scares them. So not only do they have to sort of beat down Atkins, which they do with a kind of vicious critique in the American Heart Association, I guess I forget which journal was JAMA or the American Heart Association journal, but they say that these diets are quack diets, they're fad diets. They will kill people. Are we talking about the is way back in the 60s, but Atkins became very prominent with his books much later than that, right? No, no. 19 his he started to become prominent in New York, in the magazine world in the late 1960s. Early 1973 was when he published his book, which is right around the time that this belief that dietary fat caused heart disease was gelling. That's interesting, because my awareness of Atkins came much later. They seemed like there was a resurgence of interest in his diet some decades after that. Yeah, my piece in 2002 in the New York Times Magazine, which was kind of seen as an apologia for Atkins because I basically said he might have gotten it right. So that piece in the New York Times Magazine kind of resurrected Atkins, or was he coming along this whole time? He was still around, he was still publishing books. People were still buying the books. But yeah, my piece more or less resurrected it and prompted Michael Pollan to then write his books in response to the lunacy of anyone suggesting that all of America should be on something like an Atkins diet. Yeah, that was interesting. The original the problem happened, though, the disconnect between what the science the evidence said and the way the field embraced that evidence happened in the 1960s and 1970s. Okay, so this, this is just to keep everyone clear here that you, you've told us about the first and now second pillar. Remind us what they are and let's get to the third pillar. The first pillar is this idea that obesity is an energy balance disorder is caused by taking in more calories and expense rather than being a hormonal regulatory disorder where the Dysregulation is caused by the what foods you eat rather than how much you eat. So basically, I can feed you foods. And the idea is they're easily digestible carbohydrates for fine grains and sugars and they will work to elevate your insulin levels by two different mechanisms. And once your insulin levels are elevated, you will store fat. And if you're losing calories into your fat cell because now some of what you're eating is being trapped as fat rather than used for energy. That in turn will make you hungry or and you'll eat more, you may even exercise less. But the primary effect of these foods is to make your fat tissue expand and accumulate calories as fat. Some foods are literally fattening independent of their caloric content and other foods are literally not fattening independent of caloric content. Okay, so that's your retort to the first pillar. Yeah, and I can document and I have documented again where this hormonal regulatory disorder hypothesis died literally 1941, and how the energy balance hypothesis is what the Europeans called the energy conception took over in the US. And dominated the field and then in the 1970s, what's interesting about fields of science create paradigms and paradigms shift when the fields are small and maybe a half dozen individuals can determine what's good science and what's not, sort of what has to be known, what's inconsistent, what experiments have to be done. For instance, in the revolution in molecular biology, it happens in the 1950s and it's Francis Crick and James Watson and half a dozen other people who made that revolution happen. And if you remove Francis Crick, you get no understanding of DNA, then the same thing, theoretical physics, you could remove one Julian Schwinger and we don't have a standard model as we have today in obesity. They had the same half dozen people. These guys just didn't know how to do science. They just weren't very smart. It's like, just like you have bad plumbers, we have bad scientists out there. And these guys dominated the field in 1970s and they didn't like the idea that a low carbohydrate, high fat diet was a preventive way to prevent or treat obesity because they thought high fat would cause heart disease and they thought fat people get fat because they eat too much. Right. So high fat causes heart disease is the second pillar. Yeah, it's the second pillar. So what they did is they just removed and again, you could see this. In the textbooks and the conference proceedings, they said, because we don't like the implications of the Endocrinology, we are going to decide that endocrinology has no influence on obesity. We're just going to kind of remove it from the literature to the point that two months ago, the New England Journal of Medicine publishes an article on the pathophysiology of obesity, pathophysiology and mechanisms of obesity, which is a disorder of excess fat accumulation. And there is zero discussion in the article of the hormones and enzymes that actually regulate fat accumulation. It's not considered relevant. So I want to get to how you explain that, but just I don't want to leave the structure of your thesis hang in here. So what's the third pillar? The third pillar is this idea that we should all eat mostly plant diets. So the second is, again, dietary fat causes heart disease, and then specifically saturated fat. And saturated fat is associated with you get the significant part of the saturated fat and their diet comes from animal products, therefore animal products cause heart disease. And out of this we get this idea that we should always mostly plant diets, that populations or individuals that eat mostly plants or all plant based diets are healthier than people aren't. And that in turn is based on this field of observational epidemiology, the Mediterranean diet and all the rest. Let's just take the second pillar for a second. How do we know that saturated fat in the diet isn't a problem? Isn't a problem generally and in particular isn't the primary source of cardiovascular disease? Well, on one level you can't know it for sure. So we have to leave that possibility out anyway. All we could say is, is it likely to be a cause of heart disease or not? And here's where the epidemiology comes into this as well. Back in the 1960s, researchers in the US primarily were interested in why there's so such high levels of heart disease in the US and certain European countries and not others. So what they basically did is said let's look at these populations and see what they eat. And what they found is that populations that had high levels of heart disease ate a lot of saturated fat. There was a famous study called the Seven Countries Study done by Ansel Keys at the University of Michigan. And so the populations at eight high levels of saturated fat, like the US and the UK, had high levels of heart disease and populations at eight high levels of unsaturated fats did not. So Greece, hence the Mediterranean diet and their olive oil. And this is a kind of observational study that the question then becomes, if you see that people in the US eat a lot of saturated fat and have heart disease compared to some other country, does that mean they have heart disease because they eat a lot of saturated fat? This is a question that you've got an association between saturated fat consumption and heart disease. But that association holds logically, it holds no causal information. My mother used to say, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China, which is sort of just because the price of tea in China is going up and heart disease is going up, we don't think there's an association there. We don't think it's causal. Why would we think the saturated fat thing is causal? So the only way to know if the saturated fat association is causal is to do randomized controlled trials to basically intervene, change people's diets, and see if you tell them to eat more saturated fat or less saturated fat, well, they have more or less heart disease compared to whatever they replace that diet with. And as it turned out, trial after trial tried to test the saturated fat hypothesis and for the most part, failed to confirm it. Just in defense of epidemiology, you could also find a population that is eating just as much saturated fat or perhaps even more, but isn't eating, in this case, sugar, and see that the correlation breaks down. Has that, in fact, been found as well? Well, and again, that's the kind of issues you have with the level of science. Remember, I was told to go into this field, public health, because my physicsist friends thought the science was terrible. So this famous seven countries study that began to really shift Americans towards eating a Mediterranean diet and eating olive oil and polyunsaturated fats instead of saturated fats looked at seven countries around the world. So the US. And the UK and Greece and Italy and I don't know, a couple of Scandinavian countries in Japan may have gotten that wrong, but that's the gist of it. The interesting thing is there are two countries right in the middle of Europe that eat very high saturated fat diets and have among the highest lifespans in the world france and Switzerland. So you could just ask the question instead of picking, for instance, Greece and Italy. Had they picked France and Switzerland? So I lived in Geneva for a year. The two national dishes are both cheese dishes, fondue or something horrible called raclette that you got at every cocktail party you went to. Clearly, these people eat very high saturated fats. So depending on what countries you pick, you can get very different answers. As it turned out, Ansel Keys, the investigator, ran that study. He didn't pick France and Switzerland. He picked Greece and Italy. This is the problem with those kind of observational studies. There's a host of problems with those kind of observational studies. I had another cover story in the New York Times Magazine in 2007 making that point where these studies are basically uninterpretable. So what you get instead are researchers with preconceptions interpreting the answers to fit their preconceptions. In those two cases, you've picked out societies where I wouldn't expect the sugar consumption to be especially low, certainly not the refined carbohydrate consumption actually in France. Aren't they just eating baguette and chocolate as rapaciously as any people who have ever been born? Well, French sugar consumption is about 100 years behind ours. So they were always notoriously. Not notoriously, but the sugar consumption in France was always about 30 50% of what ours was. Switzerland, I can't say, but I would assume it's the same or close. In fact, the whole Mediterranean that people talk about, the French Paradox, is actually a Mediterranean paradox for all these countries, spain, Italy, Greece all had relatively high fat diets. Then as you get into France and Switzerland, you go further north, the fat becomes more saturated and less olive oil based. But they all had relatively low heart disease rates. And when you actually dig into this literature and I was the first journalist to really do this, I remember speaking to one British epidemiologist who had come originally from Australia, and he talked to me. He said Australia had this huge Greek population that emigrated after World War II when Greece was decimating. So they moved to Australia. They live on lamb chops and fosters beer, and their heart disease risk goes down. And so how do you explain them? The question is, who knows? You've got to do randomized control trials. You cannot establish causing the only times you can establish causality with epidemiology is when you have a phenomenon like cigarette smoking and lung cancer. So you have exceedingly rare disease in non smokers. And you could compare nonsmokers to smokers, and you see twentyfold increased risk of lung cancer and smokers versus nonsmokers. And then the reason we believe it's causal is because you can't think of how to explain it. You can't think of an alternative hypothesis, not that the cigarette industry didn't try, but you can't think of a viable alternative hypothesis other than cigarettes called lung cancer. And of course, it makes eminent sense that clearly, if you're drawing smoke into your lungs, you could imagine that that would cause lung cancer. So it makes biological sense. But these other effects that we've based public health policy on are relatively tiny. They're not 20 fold increased risks. They're not three or four fold increased risk. They tend to be 20% increased risk or 50% increased risk. Right? And that's simply you can imagine all too many things that could explain it. It seems to me you do make this argument, at least in the background in your books, where you emphasize the correlation between the, I think, what are called the diseases of Western civilization, cardiovascular and peripheral vascular and things like gout. And there's a long list of things that seem to come with when a traditional culture suddenly gains access to in your case, the smoking gun is refined carbohydrates and especially sugar. So it seems that you are talking about changes in populations where you show up among the Inuit. You see that they're eating nothing but whale blubber or a lot of whale blubber, and they have no access to any refined carbohydrates. And they don't exhibit these pathologies until you start giving them bags of doritos and soda, and then they have all the pathologies that we notice in Western societies. Isn't that part of your story that you're telling? Absolutely. Science is about funny. I was a science journalist for, I don't know, 20 years before I got around to reading Claude Bernard's Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, which he wrote in 65. And Bernard said, Science is about explaining what we observe. Ultimately, science is about explaining what we observe. And it's weird. I had never thought about that. But you've got observations whether in the laboratory or in your particle accelerators or in nature, and everything we're trying to do is explain what the cause of those observations are. Is it some new fundamental particle? Is it some carcinogen in the water supply? Is it who knows? So the observation that led to this dietary fat hypothesis is that we had a lot of heart disease in the US. And then the point what I learned doing my research and what I sort of brought back from Obscurity is that while US. Researchers were focusing on that, there was a sort of school of British research. The British had an advantage. They had missionary and colonial hospitals scattered all over the world. So research would be trained in the UK or in Europe, and then they would go work in Botswana Land or some South Pacific island or Australia treating Aborigines. And wherever they were, they would document report this, in effect, epidemic of obesity, diabetes, Western diseases, hypertension, heart disease, cancer. They would all increase in prevalence and in some cases explode in prevalence as these populations all around the world became Westernized. And then the question is, what is it about the Western diet that leads to this explosion of diseases? And this is conventional wisdom. And Michael Pollan, with whom I disagree on sort of two of the three of his mantra, eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Michael basically builds his argument from the same data, that same observation. And that's what you have. If you try to explain that, then you're asking the question, what is it that Western diets bring to these populations? So you agree with him that we should eat food, but you're not so sure about the plant part or the not too much part. Yeah, the plants I'm not too sure about. And the not too much, I think, is meaningless. It's based on the assumption that you get fat if you eat too much, but then you can't define what too much is. Except just to go back to thermodynamics for a second, you would agree that whatever macronutrient or food you thought was blameless, let's say a steak, if I eat 15,000 calories of steak, as impossible as that may be in practice, I'm going to get fat unless I burn 15,001 calories. Well, and so the question is and again, we're going to get back, because this is the area that's so fascinating, let's look at it a different way. Just again, I'm saying you could eat, which isn't going to be difficult. You could eat, say, 2000 calories of steak a day, plus 1000 calories of green vegetables, or 3000 calories if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having in on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. OK, it has been an intense week. I was on vacation this last week. This is the first vacation I've taken in quite some time with my family. It's been at least a year. Can't recall the last one, I think. But anyway, I was on vacation and attempting to be a good father and good husband, not paying too much attention to social media. But I did happen to catch at one point that Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan and Ezra Klein had all attacked me in the span of an hour on Twitter. And genius that I am, I felt that I needed to respond right then and there. I think the lesson of this whole episode is don't rush to make things worse. That is a lesson I will try to fully absorb going forward. And frankly, I think I need to rethink my relationship with social media. There are so many problems that need not be created that are pure confections of having said something or noticed what somebody said on social media. So I'll be rethinking my relationship to all that to bring you all up to date. I know that many of you have noticed what happened to me in the last week, but I just want to give you my picture of it and then tell you what's happening going forward. Almost exactly a year ago I had Charles Murray on my podcast. And Murray, as most of you know, is the author of the notorious book The Bell Curve, which, while it was not focused on differences between races in any significant sense, there was a chapter on race and IQ in that book. But the book was devoted to just the cognitive stratification of society having nothing to do with race. Anyway, that chapter on race and the negative response it received fully engulfed Murray's life. This is in the mid ninety s and Murray is still someone who gets protested when he goes to a college campus to give a talk about something that is totally unrelated to that book. And while I have very little interest in IQ and zero interest in racial differences in IQ, I invited Murray in my podcast because I am deeply interested in free speech and in not letting moral panics get out of hand. And what had happened is Murray had been invited to give a talk at Middlebury college, and he was deplatformed in a fairly spectacular way by an angry mob of students. And as he and his host were leaving the auditorium, they were physically assaulted. And ironically, his host was a very liberal professor who was planning to debate him. Essentially, she had a list of hard questions she wanted to ask Murray. Anyway, she received a concussion and a neck injury, and I believe she still suffers from the results of that. So this was a big deal. And it appeared to be the worst example of this spreading moral panic on college campuses where conservative speakers, or even those who are just imagined to be conservative, are getting deplatformed. And the fact that this is happening at colleges where the free exchange of ideas is the whole point of the institution, that is something that many of us are quite worried about and are appropriately focused on. Now, there are people who consider all of these examples of moral panic on college campuses, middlebury and Yale and Portland and Berkeley and Evergreen. Many people consider these outliers that signify absolutely nothing. And there's some poll results that suggest that attitudes toward free speech haven't changed the way many fear. So whether there really is a moral panic on college campuses can be disputed. I think I know Jonathan Height, who's been on this podcast, thinks the panic is real, and he's writing a response to a recent Vox article that suggests that it wasn't. But in any case, people can debate the state of the panic. All I can say is that there certainly seemed to be one at the time. I invited Murray on the podcast, and the thing that made me most committed to speaking with him was the realization that I had been part of his shunning, as I say in that podcast. I had avoided him and even avoided his book for decades because I believed that where there was that much smoke, there must be fire, right? So I felt morally culpable for this. So I had this podcast conversation with him, and of necessity, in order to defend him against the charge of racism and in order to show how unfairly he had been treated for decades, our conversation had to present some of the scientific justification for his claims. So we spoke about the current picture of IQ data. We talked about the way genes and environment likely contribute to intelligence and any other human trait. We got into the weeds somewhat, but again, this is driven not by my interest in IQ, much less racial differences in IQ. It was born of my trying to write a very clear intellectual and moral wrong. And then in the aftermath of that podcast, ezra Klein, who was the editor in chief of Vox, he was at the time, now he's editor at large. He published a paper that was highly critical of both Murray and me. The article was written by Eric Turkheimer, Katherine Harden, and Richard Nizbet, who are all real scientists, and because Nisbet is the most famous of them, and because he's been grinding this axe over IQ for several decades now. I've tended to refer to this as the Nizbit paper, but Turkheimer appears to be the first author on it. So Klein published this piece, and I'm assuming he published it because he thought it was a fair and accurate and important critique of the conversation I had with Murray. But it wasn't. So I contacted Klein by email. This first probably happened on Twitter, but then we moved to email and I expressed how unfair and inaccurate I thought the piece was. And there was some talk of us doing a podcast together to hash this out. But then I got so exasperated in this email exchange with him that I pulled the plug on that idea. I decided there was no way I could talk to this guy. There was just so much evidence of bad faith on his side. As my friend Brett Weinstein says, bad faith changes everything. And it really does. Either someone is going to reason honestly about the plain meaning of words and about facts as we know them, or they will try to smear you with anything they can use, however dishonest. Right? And that's what I feel Klein was up to. And so I pulled the plug on the podcast idea because I thought it would be an excruciating waste of time, be like the podcast that I have ironically titled the Best Podcast Ever with Omer ZS. So let me just be clear about what I think happened here. The Nispit article was truly dishonest and actually slanderous. It put the onus on Murray and me to prove that we're not Nazis. And if you don't think it did that, you're not reading closely enough. It contained highly charged and highly moralistic accusations. It accused us of the most egregious intellectual misconduct on Nizbet's account. We were guilty of purveying racialist pseudoscience, and that's everyone reads racialist as racist. And if they were trying to split the difference there, their true intentions were revealed in many of the other things they said. We were part of this horrific legacy of bigotry, and everything we said justified bigotry. Klein called my podcast with Murray disastrous on Twitter. I had titled it forbidden Knowledge. Right. And he said it's not forbidden knowledge. It's America's most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality. This is what he said in his most recent piece. So these are serious accusations and they're actually false. This is not good faith criticism that I was complaining about. These are the kinds of blows that, if they land, can and should destroy a person's reputation. They're intended to destroy a person's reputation. The reality of the situation is there's scientific data on IQ and race and genetics and environment and all the related issues. And there can be a good faith debate about these data and there can be a good faith debate about the social policies that one would want to enact to respond to whatever the facts are so as to most help everyone. Right? How can we do good in the world? Honest debates to be had on those questions. But the criticism of Me and Murray was not an example of honest debate. It presented a very skewed and ideological view of the science. And it branded Murray's account of the science as junk science and racialist pseudoscience, whereas his account of the science is actually mainstream. I'm talking about his account of the data. I'm not talking about his views on affirmative action or what should be done in the world. All of that can be debated, too. You can debate both sides of the affirmative action question being fully committed to equality and without a racist bone in your body. But now I'm just talking about the scientific picture. I should note that just yesterday, the first author on this paper, Eric Turkheimer, apologized for calling me and Murray peddlers of junk science. He admitted that was an empty insult. It turns out it's just science, right? This is a disagreement about how to interpret data, and it could have been a good faith disagreement. But the truth is, and this is my honest take on the scientific field at the moment the truth is that if there is a fringe here, nisbet and Turkheimer and Harden are on it for patently ideological reasons. Now, of course, it is understandable that they are worried about racism. We all should be worried about racism. We should all be committed to political and economic equality. We want everyone to have as much opportunity as they can have. That is all understandable, but distorting and cherrypicking the science and slandering anyone who won't succumb to your level of confirmation bias as a racist is totally unethical. That's not good faith criticism. This is one side of a scientific debate smearing the other side with the most toxic moral and intellectual aspersions possible. These are reputation destroying slanders. So when I wrote Klein and I found him to be totally evasive, I got fairly pissed. One especially unethical thing he did after slimming us with this piece klein refused to publish a far more mainstream and balanced defense of us. That was submitted by Richard Hare, who is the editor in chief of the journal Intelligence and is the author of a recent book, The Neurobiology of Intelligence. Hare came to our defense totally unbidden by me or Murray and with a far more mainstream opinion, and Klein refused to publish it. And he has continued to publish attacks on Murray and me in Vox. So when our email exchange unraveled, I told him that if he continued to slander me, and in particular if he misrepresented the reasons why I declined to do a podcast with him, I would publish that exchange, because I thought the world should know how he operates as a journalist and an editor. The world should know how dishonest he was being and how he wasn't even slightly committed to offering a fair representation of both sides of this debate. Then I think basically a year passed, certainly without me noticing anything from Klein on this topic. Whether or not he actually made any noise on it, I don't know. But then there was a New York Times op ed by the Harvard geneticist David Reich which made some statements similar to the ones that had gotten Murray and me into hot water. And Murray retweeted it, and then I retweeted it with a jab at Climb. I said, I sure hope, as reclines on the case, racialist pseudoscience never sleeps. It was a totally snide comment, of course, but totally fair. Given what he has done, it is just obvious that David Reich is not a racist. And the points he was making could be easily spun the way mine and Murray's had been spun. And he was definitely saying some of the same things about genetics and population differences. They could have gotten him slimed. And then Klein responded with yet another article attacking me and Murray. And crucially, he discussed the email exchange I had with him and my refusal to do a podcast with him in ways that I found to be totally self serving and misleading. So this prompted me to publish our email exchange. Now, as it turns out, that was a mistake. That was a serious miscalculation on my part, because if you just read the emails, apparently I looked terrible. I seemed inexplicably, angry, I assumed bad intent on Klein's part for reasons that were not clear to readers. Klein seemed friendly and opened a dialogue, and I just seemed pissed. And the fact that I published a private correspondence seemed unethical. But if you had listened to my podcast with Murray and you read the Vox article to which my emails were a reaction, then most people understood my anger and saw Klein's evasiveness for what it was. And when you saw that he had mischaracterized the contents of our email exchange, you thought that my publishing those emails was fair game. Now that's obviously the view I took, otherwise I wouldn't have done it. But let me be the first to admit it was a colossal mistake, given that I was asking way too much of readers. The problem was it took a lot more work to be in the second camp and understand what was actually going on here. I was relying on people to have listened to a two hour podcast and to have read the original Vox article. Of course, many people didn't do either of those things. In particular, it seems that my declining to do a podcast with Klein was widely interpreted as my avoiding a hard conversation and just failing outright to deal with serious criticism. Needless to say, I didn't see it that way and I don't see it that way. But in the aftermath, of all this, I became very uncomfortable with that perception, so I put it to a vote on social media, Twitter and Facebook, and 76% of people on both platforms claim to want to hear a podcast with the two of us. So I've changed my mind, and I'm now going to do a podcast with Klein, and we will record that in a few days and we will release it jointly on our podcast. I won't insist upon any ground rules apart from it being unedited, and I don't know whether this will be a productive conversation or not. There's certainly a danger that it could be my next best podcast ever, because, again, I detected an extraordinary amount of bad faith on clientside. Some of you think I'm listening this. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. Today I'm speaking with Michael Sandel. Michael teaches political philosophy at Harvard University, where he teaches the quite famous course on justice that has been televised and viewed by tens of millions of people. And he is the author of several books, the most recent of which is The Tyranny of Merit what's Become of the Common Good? And that is our focus. In today's episode. We talk about the ethics of success and failure in our society, the enduring problems with capitalism, how college has become a sorting mechanism for a new kind of caste system. We cover what I have come to think of as the pernicious myth of the self made man. And we discuss the paradoxes which come from valuing excellence, all the while recognizing the role that luck plays in producing it. It's a very timely conversation as we struggle really throughout Western society to deal with the politics of humiliation and injustice and the rising levels of wealth inequality to which they are anchored. Clearly, we're going to have to get a handle on this sooner rather than later. And now I bring you Michael Sandel. I am here with Michael Sandel. Michael, thanks for joining me. Good to be with you, Sam. So I will have properly introduced you here, but give me your short form bio. You're a man of many honors and talents, but how do you describe yourself in an elevator with a stranger? I teach political philosophy at Harvard. And you also, if I'm not mistaken, teach what's often described as the most popular course at Harvard, this course on justice. Do you still teach that? I'm teaching at this semester, adapted to include new examples of justice and ethical dilemmas arising from the pandemic and from this moment of racial reckoning. Nice. Well, you have a new book. The Tyranny of Merit. What's become of the common good? Which I want to focus on. But another colorful fact about you, which I only just learned, was that in 1971, at the age of 18, you debated Ronald Reagan when he was the governor of California. That had to be amusing. But I also recall that you and I once debated I think I probably got the more seasoned Michael Sandel somewhere around. I think it was 2005. Do you recall that we met at either Pomona or harvey Mud College yes, I do. So we've met once, and I remember that being quite a collegial and amicable debate on it surely must have been on religion at that point. I think that's right. I think it was about the role of religion in public life, if I remember correctly. Yeah, well, nice to meet you, albeit at some distance here on a new topic, and it's a topic that I think we substantially agree on. Although I must say there's something so counterintuitive about a criticism of meritocracy, it makes the topic itself surprisingly elusive. Once you think you have the thesis in hand and you agree with it, it's almost like you wake up and can no longer find your purchase on the felt sense of the argument anymore. Because there's just something so ingrained about this notion that the only flaw in meritocracy, which is to say, truly valuing differences in competence and excellence and rewarding people along that continuum, is that the flaws generally thought and felt to be that we haven't achieved it. We don't have a fair society with real anything like equality of opportunity. But if only we could give everyone the opportunity they deserve, well, then what could be wrong with just letting people rise or fall based on their own merits? Right? Let's start there. How do you think about this notion of meritocracy at this point? Well, you're right, Sam. It is a counterintuitive idea, because merit, on the face of it, is a good thing, even an ideal. What could be wrong with trying to assign people to social roles and to jobs based on their merits, rather than based on arbitrary factors or the accidents of their birth or whom they know, connections and so on? And if I need a surgeon, if I need surgery, I certainly want a well qualified surgeon to perform it, not someone who's poorly qualified. So on the face of it, merit seems an unqualified good. And yet when merit comes to be a governing philosophy, a way of determining access to opportunities, it has a dark side. And the book tries to bring out this paradoxical feature of merit. I would put it this way. If we had a perfect meritocracy, if we could one day overcome all of the obstacles that hold people back, all of the prejudices, wouldn't that be a good thing? Well, it would have this feature that the winners of the race, this fair race, would believe, understandably that they deserved their winnings, provided the races run fairly, and that the losers deserved whatever place they wound up in. And here, when we think about a society and an economy and a democracy, here's where the flaw in the ideal arises first. It's a good thing to bring everyone up to the same starting point in the race. But if we could, it would be predictable that the fastest, most gifted runners would win and would believe they deserved all of the benefits and the material rewards and the honors that the society bestows upon them. But a question, one question could be asked is do we deserve in the first place, the talents, the gifts that enable us to flourish in a market society like ours? Or is having those talents a matter of good luck? Take, for example, make it concrete LeBron James. He's a great basketball player, just helped lead the Lakers to the NBA championship. He works hard to cultivate his great athletic talents. But does he really deserve those talents and all the benefits that flows from them? Or is having those talents, certainly it's not his doing that he's gifted in that way. That is good luck. But more than that, Sam, the fact that he lives in a society that loves basketball, that too is hardly his doing. If he lived back in the Renaissance, they didn't care much for basketball then, and they preferred fresco painters. So that too is a matter of contingency and good luck. So for these two reasons, it's a mistake for the successful to assume that their success is the measure of their merit, and that they therefore deserve all of the benefits that flow from the exercise of their talents. And here's where the dark side of it comes in. Especially when we think about our current society and our politics. As the successful come to believe that their success is their own doing, a measure of their merit, they tend to inhale too deeply of their own success. They forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way, and they tend to look down on those less fortunate than themselves, believing that their failure is their fault. And I think this is hubris among the successful meritocratic hubris, I call it, and the humiliation. The demoralization among those left behind accounts for some of the resentments that have gathered in recent decades against elites. Resentments that we saw bubble up and find expression in the populist backlash of 2016. So there's a lot here. So there's the kind of the ethical case, and then there are the political ramifications of getting that right or wrong here. So you've just sketched that in brief, and your book really goes deeply into it. We have this sense among these successful, certainly, that they desperately want to believe that their success is morally justified, right? There's this notion of justified advantage, which, just by the very logical nature of the claim, begets this notion of justified disadvantage, right? The people who are not winners, ie. The people who are losing to one or another degree, also deserve their lot in life. And this leads to a kind of resentment and populist anger that we've seen and the attendant politics of personality and trumpism and also this now pervasive and totally destabilizing distrust of institutions and expertise. Now we're living in a kind of shattering of our public conversation about basic facts, because so called elites are despised to the degree that they are in the media and in academia and various institutions. And I'm quite sympathetic with much of this criticism because the elites have played their side of this terribly, and maybe we'll touch on some of those specifics. But before we get into the politics of all this, let's linger on the ethical case, because I totally agree that we should view differences in success in general as a kind of multivariate lottery that's being run. You know, it's not just a matter of the normal forms of good luck. Everything can be ascribed to luck in the end. I mean, you know, down to your jeans and all that they do to determine who you are and down to the environment and all that it does in concert with your genes to determine who you are. No one made themselves. No one created the society into which they were born. Take the perfect example of someone like LeBron James. He neither created his physical attributes that allow him to succeed as a basketball player, nor did he create the world in which basketball would be valued or even deemed interesting. And so he has won a kind of lottery. And yet there does still seem to be this problem in how we deal with differences in ability that we value and will inevitably value. Because you take something like basketball, if you value basketball, if you enjoy watching the sport, almost by definition, you will value the far end of the continuum of the bell curve of a basketball talent more than you'll value the mean, right? And so no one wants an NBA where everyone gets a chance to play and everyone gets a trophy at the end of the season that annihilates the principles by which one it would even capture your attention as a sport. If you could wave a magic wand and reset all of our ethical and intentional dials here, just what would be our experience? Take the limited case of basketball, thinking about basketball, valuing basketball, buying tickets, and rewarding the obvious merits of a player like LeBron James. If I were recruiting a basketball and NBA team, I would still go sam for the best players. I would I would want LeBron James. I would want the best players. So that's not really the question. The question is what moral dessert we attribute to those who enjoy material rewards as well as honorific rewards for excelling in this or that way. So in in the narrowly contained realm of basketball, the hiring practice wouldn't be different. The recruiting practice wouldn't be different. But when we look at the society as a whole, and when we look at social roles and when we look at who gets to govern and who gets to have the greatest voice and who makes the most money, there's the tendency to assume let's take the economy. There's a tendency to assume that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good. But this is a mistake, because there are all sorts of contingencies that determine who makes a lot of money and who makes less. Contingencies that are in no way related to differential contributions to the common good. And when we ask about who governs us, we want, in broad terms here's the basketball analogy. We want to be governed by the people who are best at governing or in a representative democracy, we want to be represented by those who are best at that role. But today, essentially, we are governed by only a segment of the population, those who have managed to get four year university degrees, overwhelmingly in democracies in the US. And in Europe, parliaments and executive branches are dominated by, overwhelmingly by those who have university degrees, even though those of us who have such degrees represent a minority of, of our fellow citizens. Most, most people don't have a four year university degree. Nearly two thirds do not in the United States and in Europe. So if we're talking about governing, this touches too on your point about expertise, Sam, and the backlash against elites and experts. I think that we've confused talking about merit and governing. We've confused the virtues necessary to govern well in a democratic society with technocratic expertise, but that's distorting. That's much too narrow. So in many of the domains, once we get outside of basketball, the problem is that we have woefully misconstrued what counts as the relevant merits. So that's why the basketball illustration is helpful up to a point. But when it comes to distributing economic rewards and when it comes to governing, what we tend to regard as merit actually misses the mark by quite a long way. Okay, so I think it's helpful to grab the ethical side of this before we talk about just descriptively what's happening at the level of our politics and society at large. So I hear in part of this criticism, a criticism of the notion that there's any direct causal connection between wealth and value creation. The cartoon version of blameless wealth that one would get in a libertarian circles. Perhaps above all, this notion that the only way someone becomes spectacularly wealthy is to create a commensurate amount of value for the world. That is how a free market would reward human excellence and value creation and the way that gets deranged. Obviously, we don't live in the cartoon. There are ways this is not reflective of reality, but I think there is a core truth to it right now. You, you might say that we value the wrong things, right? So someone can open an instagram account and flaunt their body. And if they're young and, and beautiful, they'll have millions of people following them, or at least some of them will, and they may be able to leverage that into vast wealth, as have the Kardashians. It's not to say they're only assets, but there's no question they are being rewarded by some notion of, if not value created for society. It's the capturing of attention. There is a machinery here that is working based on what people, the choices people are making and the resulting effects in the market, and money is flowing in what is deemed to be the right direction. That's a case where I think we might say, okay, well, people are just valuing the wrong things, and other people are becoming amazingly wealthy based on this distortion and priorities. But then when you have something, you have someone else who's become immensely wealthy by a purely creative act that has just brought nothing but joy to the world. I mean, someone like JK. Rowling, she writes her books, people line up at midnight to buy them in front of bookstores all over this world. That was a fairly pure register of the value being created, and she became among the wealthiest writers in history as a result. What are you suggesting could change about our current system with reference to someone like JK. Rowling? Shouldn't we reward her in precisely the way we have and esteem her in the way that we do based on her creative output? Well, there are two reasons that the answer might be yes, that we should reward her in the way we do. Though it's important that you drew this distinction just at the end of the question, Sam, between rewarding her monetarily and rewarding her with esteem. And the answer may be different in the two cases. But if she is providing something that is valued and that is worthy of being valued, then she should be rewarded certainly with esteem for having done that. But there are two reasons we might want to reward her. One is to encourage her and people with creative gifts like hers, to continue to exercise them by writing books that we love to read or our children love to read. That's a reason. That reason has to do with providing an incentive to her and others like her to continue doing what they're doing because we like the stories that she writes. But it's important to notice that that reason, the incentive reason has nothing necessarily to do with whether or not she morally deserves all the money she makes writing Harry Potter stories. That's a further question. And so the second question is, should we reward her in the sense that not only does she get a lot of money for selling a lot of Harry Potter books, but we also consider that she morally deserves the money that she makes thanks to the market success of the books? And that's the further question. That's a harder case to make. Now, this is why your mention of esteem matters. We might decide that she deserves esteem for having written beautiful and compelling Harry Potter stories. And yet it could very well be a further question whether she should make ten times more than other writers or people in other professions or a hundred times more or a thousand times more or 10,000 times more. It's hard to claim that as a matter of moral dessert, she deserves to make X times more where X is in proportion to her actual earnings relative to other people. Whereas I think it's easier to say she's certainly worthy of admiration for the creativity she brought to bear writing these stories. If I could just add, I think you put it very well when you said part of the objection is that we value the wrong things. Part of the objection to assuming that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the common good. It's important to keep hold of this question because it's a question that the free market libertarians you mentioned beg, they ignore. But here's a simple, concrete example to test it. I don't know, Sam, if you were a fan of Breaking Bad or Walter White. Yeah. So Walter White started out as a high school chemistry teacher and he didn't make much money. He had to work when he wasn't teaching at a second job at a car wash. And then, as we know, he broke bad and became a meth dealer. He he used his talents as a chemist to make perfect methamphetamine and made millions and millions selling this methamphetamine because there was a great market demand for it. So here would be the test for the pure, idealistic free market libertarian. Assuming there were a competitive market in high school chemistry teachers and in meth cooks, and Walter White made thousands of times more cooking and selling meth than teaching high school chemistry. Would we conclude from that that his contribution as a meth dealer was thousands of times greater, more important than his contributions as a high school chemistry teacher? Probably not. It'd be pretty hard to make that claim. So part of what I'm suggesting is that really, to understand the question of merit when we're talking about the economy and economic rewards, we have to address the question about whether we are valuing the right kinds of things in the design of markets and in the allocation of rewards. There's so many things that distort this notion of value, a notion that there's a linear relationship between the value being created by someone's efforts and their monetary rewards or their rewards with respect to esteem. I mean, you just take the case of, you know, someone who's saving your life, you're having a heart attack. You know, the paramedic shows up and saves your life. Well, in that moment, this is the, you know, the most valuable job on earth for you. Right. But that doesn't suggest that we could have a society that paid paramedics $20 million a year for working their trade. Right, because it's more of a trade than finding the outlier in the NBA can be thought of as a trade or, you know, the outlier with respect to writing novels. I don't see how we get away from this seemingly crazy outsized reward structure for the people who are on the far tail of the continuum for things we value, rightly or wrongly. There is this larger criticism we could explore around a society that is just captivated by the wrong things and that's a much longer conversation that will outlive both of us. How do we want the things we should want in the end? How do we live lives altogether that we won't regret, that in hindsight will seem sane? And how do we avoid just colossal wastages of time and opportunity collectively, but in a world where people can freely spend their time, attention and money on things they want and in a system that maximally incentivizes a creative and hopefully ethical response to those wants, right? If we want to be able to give everyone at all times what they want, what they really want as quickly and as efficiently as possible, something like capitalism seems like the best answer we've ever arrived at. And something like global technocratic capitalism is where we've landed. And again, we can point out flaws in this. I mean, there are, you know, obviously negative externalities to various business practices that free markets don't account for and we want some kind of regulation, environmental and otherwise. But it's hard to see that if you are going to be writing novels that are so creative that people want to open theme parks in order to explore the consequences of your ideas, right? And people by the tens of thousands show up at those theme parks every year to buy the merchandise that is derivative of your ideas. Other than just deciding that someone like JK. Rowling needs to pay more in taxes, that we should have something like a wealth tax or a tax that's so progressive that very, very wealthy people pay the preponderance of their wealth back into the system. If we just had our tax codes straightened out, wouldn't that be a sufficient remedy for this particular lottery problem? Well, that certainly would be one way of responding to it by considering a revamping of the tax system. A wealth tax would be one possible way of dealing with this. But I would also say if we're thinking now practically and moving into the world in which we live, I think we should have a public debate about whether it's fair or desirable to tax earnings from labor, the work people do in the real economy at a higher rate than earnings from interest, dividends and capital gains. Why should we tax workers at a higher rate than investors from the standpoint of merit or dessert and contribution to the common good? A more dramatic example of this, Sam, would be I think we should have a debate about whether to trade off the all or part of the payroll tax, which, after all, is a tax on labor paid partly by the worker and partly by the company and make up that lost revenue through a financial transactions tax or at least one on speculative financial activity unrelated to improving the real economy or high speed trading. The actual way in which enormous income and wealth is generated. The characteristic way is not the JK. Rowling way or even the LeBron James way. It's to do with for looking at broader trends over recent decades the financialization of the economy. We see this in the US and Britain, which is the tendency of a greater share of economic activity, of GDP and especially of corporate profits accounted for by financial activity rather than providing goods and services that people use. Now, there'd be nothing wrong with this or with the outsized rewards that people in the financial industry reap if that increased financial activity corresponded to the productive contribution to the real economy. But increasingly, the financial activity that has exploded in recent decades, especially with financial deregulation in recent decades, contributes little, if anything, to the real economy. The social purpose of finances, to allocate capital to productive activities, new businesses, enterprises, factories, homes, schools, hospitals, roads and so on in the real economy. But most financial activity in advanced financial systems such as the US. And the UK is not of that productive kind. It's been estimated by those who know more about it than I do that only about 15% of financial activity consists in investment in new productive assets for the economy. 85% consists of simply bidding up the price or betting on the future prices of already existing assets or increasingly synthetically created derivatives and other fancy financial instruments that have precious little to do with making the economy more productive. So in some ways, the standard defense of a les fair free market distribution of income and wealth, drawing on JK. Rowling or on LeBron James misses what's actually going on for the most part with the with the growing inequality in our economy. And so in debating the tax system, I think we should confront that directly. Hence I would suggest in addition to a wealth tax, a financial transactions tax to offset to enable us to reduce taxes on work in the ordinary sense. Now, if I could just add one more thing about this Sam. This isn't only for the sake of redistributing income from the wealthy to those who need it more, though that would be one advantage. It's also to prompt a broader public debate about the earlier topic we were discussing, which is whether the purpose of an economy is to help shape the way we value different contributions to the economy and the society, or whether the point of the economy is simply to accept whatever valuations seem to be implicit in the existing system. And I'm hoping by these and other proposals to prompt a broader public debate onto the terrain that you said rightly is contestable and we could be debating about for a very long time. What does it mean to value the right kinds of things? What does it mean to encourage certain contributions to the common good and to discourage others? I think that should be a part of our public debate. And one way of making it a part of our public debate is to raise questions, for example, about the role of speculative finance by comparison with the productive contribution of people who produce valuable goods and service truly valuable goods and services. Yeah, well that's obviously a very important distinction. There's so many areas of the economy where, if we could be fully transparent as to the contributions being made by that economic activity, we would want to rethink what we're incentivizing and how we're rewarding people. Because there's so much rent seeking behavior and there's just so much administrative bloat in the whole sectors of our economy are suffocating under this apparatus we put in place. And you take the medical system and just what you know, just how much time doctors have to spend dealing with insurance companies. We spend more on medicine than any society on earth and we do not get the return on our investment. So yeah, there's a lot to straighten out there. But even the pure case is hard to think about and puts us up against certain moral paradoxes. So, for instance, just imagine a society where we had decided, okay, we've gotten past this notion of mere equal opportunity. Because we know that even if we could open the doors perfectly and give every child, starting right now, an equal opportunity to get into Harvard, say, well, there'll still be massive differences in their ability to avail themselves of those opportunities because of all of these other disadvantages. But the paradox here is that the thing that's under our control, the environment, if we perfectly tuned, that if we gave everyone from utero onward all of the same environmental benefits, right? This is magic, right? We obviously can't do this. But even if we could, where that would land us is in this dystopian counterfactual world where now what we'll have to spectate on are the the massive differences in genetic endowment, right? I mean, if you perfectly secure the environment against disadvantage, well then all you will see is a kind of tyranny of genetic differences and will be in some kind of Gattica like Dystopia. And that would be if with the best of intentions, we could create perfectly equitable and enriched environments for everybody. You can take that case and do with what you will with it. It almost seems like a kind of mirage here to figure out how to actually solve this problem given a perfect ability to do so. Well, I think what the mirage like feel of this thought experiment brings out is that even a perfect meritocracy would not be a just society because the winners would still be determined by factors that were not their own doing. And yet, to make matters worse, the closer we gain to providing truly equal opportunity, the greater the. Tendency for the successful to believe that their success was their own doing, the greater the tendency to forget or to overlook or deny the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way, and the greater the tendency to look down on those who are flourishing less and to say their failure must be their fault. So what goes along with the meritocratic picture is a sense of human agency so thorough going that we tend to attribute moral responsibility for one's fate, for where one lands in life. Notwithstanding the persistent contingencies that you've just described, and that we've been discussing, the attitudes towards success and failure, toward winning and losing, as we approached more closely perfect equality of opportunity, those attitudes towards success and failure would become all the sharper, all the more pronounced. And what I'm suggesting is from an ethical point of view and you've rightly invited us to distinguish the ethical from the political dimensions of this ethically. The Hubris leads those on top to forget not only the luck and good fortune but also their sense of indebtedness. And as well as looking down on those less fortunate than themselves, So that's the ethical problem. That's the dark side of meritocracy. Morally speaking, it's the hubris. Rather than the more we appreciate, the more we would be alive to the role of accident and luck and fortune, the more open we would be toward a certain humility toward success, toward winning. And this openness to humility can open us also to a greater sense of responsibility for those less fortunate than us, those who struggle, those who may be left behind through no fault of their own. So that's the ethical side of it. But politically, even though we haven't realized the perfect meritocracy that you've just described, and that we've been imagining this ideal, this picture has so dominated public discourse that it has shaped the response to the deepening inequality of the last four decades. And I think it's no accident that meritocratic modes of public discourse and moral argument have strengthened their hold at the very same time that inequalities of income and wealth have deepened with the kind of market driven globalization we've had in recent decades. And this has fueled the anger, the resentment of those who have lost out. It's one thing to feel that you've lost out because the system is unfair. The system is rigged. That's a worry about fairness. But humiliation is a deeper kind of demoralization, because it's a system where the attitudes towards success and failure lead those who struggle to believe, well, maybe I don't work hard enough. Maybe I'm not talented enough to land where they landed. That's deeply demoralizing, and maybe that's why they're looking down on me. One of the most potent sources, Sam, I think, of the populist backlash that we've seen most dramatically in 2016 is the sense among many working people that elites look down on them. And this has a specific meaning in the context of American politics, because for four decades, the meritocratic promise was, yes, there may be deepening inequality, but you can rise. Everyone can rise through individual effort and training. Provided you go to college, then you too can compete and win in the global economy. What you earn will depend on what you learn. So the response, and this includes Democrats and Republicans, the response to the deepening inequality was to offer individual upward mobility through higher education, which, on the face of it, seems inspiring. I'm all for improving access to widening access to higher education, but as a remedy for the inequality that we've seen, it's a pale, inadequate solution. And it contains what seems an inspiring message. You too can rise if only you go to college, contains an insult, an implicit insult. And the insult is this if you don't have a university degree and you're struggling in the new economy, your failure must be your fault. And this, politically is folly when we recall that most people don't have a four year college degree. So instead of focusing on arming people for meritocratic competition, I think we should be focusing more on affirming the dignity of work and having a public debate about what it would mean truly to enable everyone to flourish, whether they're in blue collar jobs or whether they're in whether they're well, credentialed people in professional jobs. Let's focus on the problem of college, because this is, in some measure the whole problem in microcosm, but it's also the longest lever that has separated the fates of winners and losers in our society. College on your account, other people have hit this topic. Daniel Markovic was on the podcast a couple of months ago. College has become a kind of sorting mechanism for a new caste system in our society. And again, as you point out, this is not just a problem with one party or the other, and this comes from everywhere, that this is the way you will successfully compete in this increasingly global state of economic nature. And it's not only something that is offered more or less to everyone, and everyone who will claim the opportunity can sort of get it in hand. But there's something, you know, generally fair about how all of this shakes down, because, of course, the elites, right, the best of the best in any field will wind up and should wind up at the best universities. Because how else would the best universities select their student body? And if this gets gamed occasionally and occasionally perversely with people buying their way in, there's a probbrium attached to that. But in the general case, it's hard to even optimize that because the schools are fantastically expensive to run. And if you're not going to give alumni any advantage, well, then why would they be donating year after year to Harvard's endowment, right? So there's something that, while it's not ideal, many people look at this and think, well, how else could it be? So I ask you in our closing chapter here, what is the problem with college and how should we fix it? The main problem with college is that we and by we, I mean the society as a whole, not just the higher education community. We have made colleges and universities. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, there's a lot going on out in the world. I guess there always is. But in the last 24 hours, it seemed especially so. As I'm recording this intro, we appear to be witnessing the complete implosion of FTX, the cryptocurrency trading firm whose CEO, Sam Bankman Freed, has been on this podcast, and he has been one of the most visible faces of the effective altruism movement. At the time I interviewed him, Sam was worth over $20 billion. It might have been 30 billion at the time, and had pledged to give virtually all of it away. Cryptocurrency is quite volatile, and as of, I think, the day before yesterday, he was worth something like $15 billion, virtually all of which appears to have evaporated in the last 24 hours, it seems, along with the holdings of many other people who had their money and trust in FTX. At this point, it's not clear just what degree of malfeasance there was on Sam Bankman Freed's part, so I will reserve judgment. There no doubt we will all learn more soon. But as to whether or not this is a bad outcome for him personally, for investors in FTX, and for the effective altruism community, there really can be no doubt of that. This was really bad news on all those fronts. In happier news, we had our first virtual retreat over at Waking Up. Over 40,000 people registered for that on the day. I think we had about 10,000 when Joseph Goldstein and I did a live Q and A at the end. Anyway, both the retreat and the Q and A are now available to be done at your leisure in the practice section in the app, and I think we'll be creating more of those in the future. Okay, well, today I'm speaking with Neil degrasse Tyson. Neil is an astrophysicist and the author of the number one bestseller, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, among other books. He is also the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he has served since 90 96. He has his own Emmy nominated podcast, star Talk and its spin off. Star Talk Sports Edition. The man has received 21 honorary doctorates and various other awards. He has an asteroid named after him, and most recently, he's the author of a new book titled Starry messenger Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. And we focus on the new book. We talk about what makes science a unique human endeavor. The tension between respecting scientific consensus and overturning it, which leads to confusion about paradigm shifts and scientific controversies. We talk about the social importance of probability and statistics, climate change, a relative blindness to exponential cultural change, social media, social inequality and affirmative action, identity politics and a post racial future. The wisdom of focusing on class rather than race and other topics. It's always fun to talk to Neil, as you'll hear. He is always a good company. And now I bring you Neil degrasse Tyson. I am here with Neil degrasse Tyson. Neil, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. I feel like an old timer. Well, you are a repeat and much beloved guest. And I'm pretty sure I've been living with you more than you've been living with me of late, because I digested your last book 100 hundred percent. As an audio book, I tend to balance between audio and hard copy when I really want to get something into my brain. But for you, I just happened to there's some great fall weather where I am, and I took a bunch of long walks and you were walking with me. It was really a miracle of technology and a wonderful use of time, which I highly recommend. I did narrate the book myself. Yes, as you should with that voice of yours. Have you narrated all your books or have you no, just the shorter ones. I mean, I did a huge book on war. It was 600 pages or so. And I said, no, I can't. If I had the time, I would have, but I just couldn't justify it. Plus, you're taking money out of someone else's mouth where they read professionally, you know. So I figured, listen, do you find it hard to do? Is it does it come easy easily for you, or no, it is, but pages, you know, to spend six days in a sound studio or whatever that would have taken. As it is, this book is relatively short story. Messengers minus the End Notes is 200 pages or so. Then the book is a small format, so I could do that. Plus, a lot of it is in my voice. I mean, figuratively and literally, because there's some storytelling that I do in there about events in my life and how that connects to the science and the culture and the and the geopolitics. So I felt that these are stories no one else can or really should be saying to you as you walk in the fall weather. Yeah. I find it hard to do, though, actually. I find that occasionally I have written a sentence that I literally cannot get through out loud, and I have to change the wording. It becomes a Cirque du Soleil routine for me to try to get to the end of the sentence and I have to rewrite it for the audio book. Well, you're a brilliant writer and I'm eternally envious, not in a vengeful way, but just envious not in a dark way. In a dark way. Thank you. Your command of words that are just the right words and just the right time and place are brilliant. And what I try to do when I write is have the sentence work not only as words on a page, but as words that you hear in your head so that there's a rhythm and a flow and a balance of what words are used that may be a little challenging versus others that are not. And in that balance, I think it becomes an easier product to read, to read out loud. Well, you do read it very well, so I recommend audio, if that is a person's predilection. I should say the name of the book here. You said it quickly, but it's Starry messenger cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. And the subtitle really does capture the angle here because you do think about civilization a lot. And so we'll get into that. You've taken a turn slightly toward the political at various moments in the book. And I remember last time we spoke, your allergy to striking a political note was palpable and also understandable. Has, has something changed on that front for you or what what's your thinking? Yeah, I was around politics. The book basically came to term in the sense that I it's been gestating within me my entire life. If I may use uterine analogies here. I remember when I was a middle schooler, early years, when I'm thinking in a scientifically literate way, which began maybe when I was nine or ten, but it didn't really sort of hit a stride until I was twelve and 13. And I just remembered looking around at full grown human beings, adults, listening to what they're saying and watching what they're doing. And I say what you're saying. What you think? What? And in one case explicitly, there was a comet headed around the sun and it was expected to be very bright. Turned out that it didn't live up to expectations. That's not what matters here. Astronomers had discovered a comet and it was in all the news. No one saw it yet with the naked eye wasn't brighter close enough yet. And I'm walking out there and there's a man with a placard marching up and down the street saying, repent, the comet is coming. The end of the world is near. And I said, you're a grown up, okay? Don't you have any understanding? And so I've been collecting in me these observations of all the ways people and cultures and civilizations and especially people in power think about the world and how absent it is of science literacy, of numeracy, of especially statistical numeracy is is lacking. And so it was in me. And I'm sitting there during COVID and I said it has to get birthed. This book has to come out. And it just got birthed. Whole the whole thing just came out of me. I'm on this site. Goodreads. And someone asked Dr. Tyson, when you were writing this book, how did you get through writer's block? There was no writer's block. That's great. So it's been in me. I just haven't had the occasion to write about it. And in a way, it's my most scientific book because everything about what we see, what we do, and what we think, I'm highlighting ways that a scientist would view that. And if you care I mean, if you don't care, that's one thing. But if you wondered what what how what does a scientist say about what I'm doing? This is the book for that purpose. Well, what is it that you think makes science unique? I mean, if we're going to take a bird's eye view of our situation and distinguish science from the rest of human endeavors, how would you distill that for someone who's just considering this demarcation for the first time? Yeah, there are two separable variables there one is science as an enterprise, and the other is the scientist. And scientists, if I need to remind people, are also human, and they're they are susceptible to many of the sort of vagaries of what it is to be human. And so where you think your opinion is of higher value than someone else's opinion, you might think your opinion is a fact even though the evidence doesn't support it. And all the portfolio of biases that you learn about the great Wiki pages on cognitive bias, the scientist has a susceptibility to it like everyone else. However, there's the expectation that they would try to ferret it out in some way or another. So to scientists in an argument, there's an unwritten rule, unwritten, that either I'm right and you're wrong, or you're right and I'm wrong, or we're both wrong. And I don't know many other arguments that unfold in society that have that pre, that prior arrangement in that conversation. And by the way, when you have conversations set up that way, at the end, you say, I think we need more data, or, let's wait until this other result comes in. Great. Now let's go have a beer. So the arguments between scientists end up in a bar and the arguments between other people, even if it's of a similar sort of intensity, can, in their limit, end up in all out warfare, bloodshed and death. Because two people do not agree on their worldview of who they should worship, who they should sleep with, what side of a line in the sand you live on, what language you speak, what color your skin is. And in science, so much of it transcends that that there's a limit to how much we're going to get riled over. And so there's great value to seeing the world scientifically, especially cosmically, because it lifts you up and away from so much of what divides us. What are some common misunderstandings of what science is? It seems to me that we're living through a period where the dirty laundry of science or the sausage making to pick your cliche has been exposed to public scrutiny in a way that has left people pretty cynical about and frankly, confused about science. I'm thinking specifically of our misadventures through COVID. We have changing, and this is something that you touch on some. We have these changes of policy which seem like frank confessions of scientific error that are marks against science as a methodology and science as a source of authority. Whereas in most cases, what you're seeing is just the kind of the moving target of scientific consensus and fact finding and debate and the cure for scientific mistakes. It's just more science, more testing, more data, more scrutiny, more criticism, and the process looks messy as we lurch about. We can leave aside for the moment I want to come back to it, but there are obviously other problems like bad incentives and corruption and misinformation and fraud. There are possible contaminants, any human conversation and any scientific one, but even just the pure scientific process of criticism and uncertainty and and further testing that can look like, you know, an all toohuman failure to figure something out for the longest time. And I I think people now are I mean, science as an institution. I'm just taking the temperature based on a few polls I've seen and just the general vibe on social media. It seems like the institution itself has lost some of its luster in the eyes of non scientists over the last few years, especially because of what's happened around public health messaging and COVID. I'm wondering what you think about that. Yeah, this is a very important issue, especially in modern times. So I think there are several moving parts here, and if I can unpack it just a little bit so we live in a time where you don't have to get off your ass and go to a research library to gain access to research articles. You can get them online, but once you go online to find them, you have the mixture of what is authentic research with what people just want to be true, because any Google search will find you, every other person who thinks exactly the way you do in what it is you're searching for. So you have a contamination, a noise level of your ability to find that which is authentic, which isn't. That's the first part of it. Second part of it, the scientific community is not trained at communicating with the public. I took one class in graduate school about giving public talks, something like that. It became a mandatory thing, old enough. So I'm talking about the 1980s. So this was early. It was like, wow, why are you doing that when we should be learning what to do in the lab, right? So even that got pushed back in its day. So now you have people who'd spent their lives in a lab and they did well, and now they they're promoted to some higher position of institutional authority and messaging, and now the press is in front of them. And so what are they going to say? All right, so we're early COVID. And one of them says, oh, this is not going to be too bad. It'll be over within a few weeks and the cases will be contained. They don't know to say, well, they should have known, or in another world, they would say, based on these assumptions that we're making, on how China is handling it and how Scandinavia is handling it, if we do the same as they do, we will contain this within two months. Okay? The if then statement is so important. But the urge to give a definitive statement to the press so that the press can then create a headline is so high it leaves you then susceptible to, like you said, the bleeding edge moving frontier of one research article versus the next building on the previous one, possibly showing that it's not as effective as was intended. That's possible on the frontier. And so the couching of the advice, I think, in retrospect, I knew it when it was happening, but institutionally, especially the CDC with their new director, said, we're going to have to be better at this, better at this communication, and that is for damn sure. So now you have this. What is science and how and why does it work? You see people watching this edge of science move back and forth and give sometimes conflicting information. Now they want to apply that to anything else. Science says, well, maybe Earth is not round, okay? Or maybe we're not warming the planet. Or maybe because scientists can be wrong. And what they're missing is, of course, when you have a scientific result verified multiple ways by experiment, it is not later shown to be false. This is a missing piece of this understanding of how and why science works. It's not taught in the schools. It's not taught. And you even have people say science people who mean well say science, unlike religion, will change his mind when the data shows that it needs to change his mind. E will never equal MC cubed, okay? It's MC squared. It's not there are things that we're not changing our mind about, not because we're stubborn, but because the evidence is so overwhelming that we have something in the books that we're not looking to see if that's going to be different one day because all experiments have verified it. We're on to the next problem. So all of these are factors. And I'm pretty sure that if science were taught as an enterprise, taught as a means of querying nature, taught as a possibly unique way to sift that, which is you want to be true from that which is true, then people would come out of the school systems without this kind of skepticism of the entire scientific enterprise. Yeah. It seems to me that there is a, if not a paradox, something close to a paradox at the heart of the enterprise that understandably leaves people confused. And it's around this tension between valuing scientific consensus and scientific authority and not being blinkered by it, because obviously, almost by definition, scientific progress, any real breakthrough is a breakthrough because it goes against the grain of received opinion and by definition, expert consensus. Right. So it's when you have an Einstein who gives us special and general relativity that goes against a prior paradigm and to the initial mystification and consternation and just frank resistance of many qualified experts. It even goes further where someone like Einstein himself became resistant to quantum mechanics. Right. And he famously said, God doesn't play dice with the universe and debated bore until, I guess, the end of his days never having fully come around. And the realistic picture of what's going on there is still not resolved. But there is this tension because you don't accept something as true just because most scientists believe it or just because the most famous Nobel laureate in the given field believes it or says it. So that's really not the cash value of the reasons for belief. To really get to the cash value, you have to actually understand the data and the argument and the evidence. And it's in the math, it's in the detail that gives you the reasons for saying it's so. Right. And so, just to take the simplest case, we believe that water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, not because the most famous chemists have said so, but the fact that every chemist on Earth, you know, with, you know, who's neurologically intact, would agree that it is so. That is a surrogate for the real reasons to believe in the chemistry of water. And there's not enough time in a single human life to run every experiment and drill down to bedrock on every scientific claim. We have to take received opinion and scientific authority as a surrogate for our own investigation, all the areas where there's not a pressing reason to do otherwise. So there is this dual mode we're in because we do care about scientific consensus and authority. And when 95% of scientists say that something is so, the weight of our credence is with them, as opposed to the crankish fringe who's saying the opposite. And yet it's also true that the lone voice in the scientific wilderness is occasionally right and can completely upend the scientific consensus based on better arguments and better evidence. And it's in the presence of any given minority voice, the one epidemiologist who says that these new mRNA vaccines are going to kill millions of people. Unless you really understand the field, or even sometimes even if you do understand the field, it might not be immediately obvious if you're in the presence of a crank or a lone genius. Right. And there's work to do to figure that out. And I feel like what we're living through now is an instance where trust in scientific authority and consensus has been dialed way down and for understandable reasons and for obviously spurious ones. I mean, the institutions have also heaped shame upon their heads by being obviously politicized on various points in debates about gender and race. And there's just been some crazy stuff happening. Even in our best scientific journals, you've got epidemiologists by the thousands. Castigating right wing people for their public demonstrations, but then supporting left wing people for their public demonstrations all within the same pandemic. And so people have grown quite cynical. But I'm just wondering if you can speak to this core tension between trusting scientific authority and the progress of science being more or less synonymous with overturning authority, at least on certain points. Yeah. So there's a caricature of science which has understandable and obvious origins but doesn't represent the typical scientific advance. The caricature is everyone believes one thing, and then there's some lone genius who comes up with an alternative idea that would negate or otherwise render wrong the prevailing view, and then they're suppressed, and then they finally rise up, and then it becomes the new paradigm. And that is not how most of this works. All right? So, for example, take the discovery of the double helix. We did not have a prior paradigm before the double helix. It's like we just didn't know. Right? Okay, we don't know how it is. We're looking. Up comes the double helix. That's a good one. That works. And arguably, one of the greatest discoveries in science was not the act of overthrowing a previously held idea. And I just want to make it clear that most discoveries in science are of that nature, not of the nature of overthrowing a previously held idea. That's my first point. Second, a previously held idea used the word consensus and authority often in those few moments. And I don't like the word authority because that implies you should do it because they have some position of power. And plus consensus, the way most people hear that word, it would be opinions, the gathering of opinions. And you look at what the majority opinion is. We also use that word in science, but not to reference opinions, which creates some of this disconnect communication. Disconnect. We use it for what is the scientific consensus? And what that typically refers to is the research papers on this topic, what do they show? And the research paper is not a scientist's opinion. It is the scientist displaying data. And provided they're not themselves biased, like I said, there's always that risk, especially in the scientific fields that involve the measurement and the analysis of other human beings. They tend to be particularly susceptible to bias that would include all the fields of psychology, anthropology, and perhaps the most biased period of any field ever would be like, 19th century anthropologist creating the races of man and ranking them and judging them and and and making that the foundation of the science of eugenics. Right. There's a whole thing you have to, like, look really carefully when people start ranking other people, what is their field? What is their motive, what are their funders and the like in the physical sciences, which is a little more distant from the social sciences and the biological sciences more distant from human beings, we're a little bit less susceptible to that. And so you look at what does the body of research show? We will call that a consensus, but it has nothing to do with their opinions. And I assert that if you have 97 research papers saying one thing because the data shows it, and one person says, no, you should bet on that consensus, because that's how it goes. The one person that says, do you have data? Well, I don't think it's that way. Go check it out. You'll find out that they will cherry pick things to fit their needs or their beliefs or their worldview. And just because an entire scientific community does not agree with you, it doesn't mean you're correct. Okay, so so and and the point with with Newton becoming Einstein, this is a fascinating chapter here's the towering achievements of classical physics, and we have Newtonian gravity and Newtonian motion. Oh, my gosh, it's explaining everything. But then, wait a minute. There's some things that doesn't explain. OOH okay. Well, there's Mercury's orbit and there's weirdnesses, and we don't and Einstein comes along, so I got I got this. And he introduces special relativity and general relativity, which is basically the modern version of motion and gravity, and they supplant Newton. They don't go back into Newton's world and say, your experiments that you did are wrong. No, they're still correct. What it did was draw a larger circle around the Newtonian physics, and it said, Newtonian physics is a special case of Einsteinian physics. You put low speeds and low gravity into Einstein's equations, they become Newton's gravity. So, yes, it was a new worldview, and it took a lot of people to get used to it. Oh, yes. But that did not mean the previous worldview was all of a sudden wrong. In all the ways that it had been tested, we grew in our understanding of the world and Einstein's resistance to quantum physics. Okay, this was his attitude towards it, but he contributed mightily to quantum physics. Some of the most important results came from him. He just didn't like the underlying foundations of what could be making it okay, but the experiment still did all the talking and so, yeah, I mean, people like to talk about scientists fighting and arguing at any conference. That's what they're doing. But once it comes through the mill, the experimental mill. That's not what anybody's arguing about anymore. So, yeah, what do we do about our institutions? They need to communicate better. They need to communicate more honestly. They need to not use the word, these are the errors in my measurement. They don't know how that people hear that. They say, oh, they made errors. No, these are the uncertainties in the measurement, and every measurement has uncertainties. That's not taught. Where do you get that? You sort of get it somewhere, maybe in one lab class in high school. That's it when that's a fundamental feature of what it is to take data. And the next experiment needs to reduce those uncertainties so that you can have greater confidence in what's going on. And then you look at what all the science tells you. This is why we have the National Academy of Sciences. They digest this information and present reports. There it is. We're not trained to do that. And it's sad because we needed that at the moving cusp of COVID Yeah, I think let's take another pass over the same terrain, because I think I want to drag you back into the weeds here, because I think it's just a mess, and if we can straighten anything out, I think we should. So there's a few other things I'll put into play here. One is it just an analogy, which I think I have from you. I have a vague memory of you having said this years ago. I think we were probably at one of those Sauk Institute conferences. And correct me if I'm wrong or maybe I'm right and there'll be no way to know, you won't remember having said this. But I think the analogy when something like imagine science is like an apple. At the level of the skin of the apple, the front edge of it, there's this area of scientific controversy where we're pushing into the unknown. And yes, the whole paradigm could swing in the balance. But as you move away from the skin, as you go into the meat of the apple and down to the core, most of it is no longer in play, right. And things are not going to be radically overturned. So, for instance, just to give a biological example, it's just not the case that we might wake up tomorrow and discover that DNA has nothing to do with biological inheritance. Right? That's not the kind of Paparian falsification that may yet await us in science. There's just too much data to conserve. It would be an absolute miracle at this point if DNA had nothing to do with inheritance. And so that's not the place. That's not the part of the apple where their big movements are going to occur. Does that capture your thinking, or do you fall over saying, that not my analogy, but I'd like it? Generally when I speak of apples, they're falling no other than the Newton apple. That did not. Hit him that the Earth's atmosphere is to Earth as the skin of an apple is to an apple in terms of relative thicknesses. So just to put that in context, for people who think we're at the bottom of some infinite ocean of air, it's actually quite thin. That's the only case. I would have used an apple, but I'm in full agreement with that reference for that reason. The term paradigm as introduced and used in the way that Thomas Kewan used it for the structure of scientific revolutions is way overplayed, okay? Because a paradigm shift, as people think about it and use it, every scientist is thinking this, but then some new data comes along and then everyone shifts over and then they think something different, leaving you with the impression that science is a construct of belief systems at any given moment. And the last time there was a paradigm shift of that kind was the Copernican revolution, where no one knew any of this. Okay? But that predates the active engagement of scientific experimental science, where you're going to say, I have an idea, but let me test it. The testing an idea did not become a routine thing until at least the 16 hundreds and the Copernican revolution basically predates that what goes right up to Galileo. My point is, yes, we can call that a paradigm shift. I have no hesitation. But Newton to quantum physics, newton to Einstein is not a paradigm shift as much as it is a growth in our understanding of the world, because nothing shifted. It just got bigger. And it's a very important difference here. So I don't think anything is so strongly held as to be a paradigm if there is insufficient data to support it. They're just people's leaning towards one idea or another. I would hardly call it a paradigm. Now, what do you do about the social problem? Really? It's only an intellectual problem in that we don't always have enough time to drill down far enough and figure it out and do science on the clock to anyone's satisfaction. But what do you do with the problem that you can always find a PhD or an MD or a collection of them who will take any position on anything, right? You can find PhDs who will say that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. And that actually was a documentary on some of these guys, and they were the same ones who then set up shop on other points of non controversy. They moved from smoking to, I think, fire retardants in California and other topics. But it's something we witnessed during COVID You had people who would you can just always find someone to put on a podcast who has the right scientific credentials, seemingly, and yet is taking this position that is extreme and extremely deranging of the conversation about what is plausible or what is worth paying attention to in any given moment. How do you recommend people assimilate that fact because I just noticed people who I could name who should be connoisseurs of misinformation at this point get quite bewildered in the presence of many of these people. And again, the thing that makes this so bewildering is that in the presence of an emerging pandemic, there really was a lot to be uncertain about. And in any given week, the facts weren't yet in. And as I said earlier, it was a moving target, and to some degree, it still is. How do you deal with this as a consumer of information? How do you think about the public consequence of basically everyone being able to do their own research and therefore everyone is able to land in the presence of someone who seems to have all the relevant scientific bona fides, and yet they're so outside the bounds of scientific consensus on any given point that they should be treated with extraordinary skepticism? Yeah. So the 900 pound gorilla in what you said is that the people who are selected to give this dissenting view are people whose dissenting views resonate with your politics, your religion, your culture, or your overall desires. So you're finding someone who will fulfill what you want to be true rather than what is true. So that's the first part of that. Another part is that I try to address this in the book, in the chapter on Risk and reward. So what I do is I take certain risks and I recast it in another way, which is a formally equivalent risk, but makes you think about it a little differently. So, for example, for a while, the off quoted number was 97% of research papers show that humans are warming the Earth. And in the past 20 years, that percent has gotten higher. It's probably 99 or near 100%. So so but let's go back to when it was 97%, and that's when everyone was talking about it. It's when they first manifested. So I said, all right, let's say there's 100 engineers and there's a bridge just brand new built across this river. And 97 engineers say if you drive your car across that bridge, it will collapse. And three of them say, no, not a problem. Just go ahead and do it. In fact, it'll be safe for you and everyone who follows you. Would you drive your car across that bridge? Would you? And I'm thinking you probably won't even before you investigate. Are there biases among the engineers? You would say, these are engineers and I'm not an engineer, but I'm going to go with this consensus. So to say I'm going to go with the 3% of the 100% of climate scientists who are saying, by the way, many of them were not even climate scientists, but they were scientists to say that we're not warming the Earth. And that fits with my economic philosophies that I'm hoping that when you see these numbers presented in these other ways, you might think a little differently about it. Take smoking, for example. The last numbers I saw, there's an 8% chance of dying from lung cancer if you're a chain smoker, okay? And somewhere around there and and of course, there are other higher percentages for other diseases, but let's take lung cancer for a moment, and then I say let's recast that. So next Tuesday, everyone who lights up a cigarette will be entered in this lottery so that the moment you light your cigarette and take your first pup, 8% of them, their head will explode, and they'll fall over as a bloody gut, gutty mess on the street, okay? And then everyone else, if that didn't happen to you, you can smoke the rest of your life. Are you going to take that chance? Are you going to risk that? And by the way, that's a cheaper solution than what reality would be, because then you die immediately and there isn't this healthcare that has to be sustained while you first get cancer, and maybe we'll try to cure you and remove a lung and whatever else happens. So that would be a way cheaper solution in society if that were inactive. Course it's not. I spend a fair amount of pages recasting certain risk factors that people are interpreting in ways that they think doesn't apply to them. And so other than that exercise, I don't have a silver bullet here. But what I do know is that public illiteracy innumeracy in statistics and probability are at the heart of so much of people's understanding of risk. And I'm not the only one who thinks about in Oxford is it Oxford or Cambridge? There's a chair, an endowed chair called the professor of the Public Understanding of Risk. Somebody said, this is important enough. We're going to make an entire endowed line, professor line, to address this. And so, yeah, people are making decisions that they think they've thought it through correctly, and in fact, they haven't. Yeah, well, let's linger on the topic of climate change because that is especially difficult to think about because as you point out, the economic incentives, certainly the short term ones, seem to point in the direction of not taking it seriously, and it suffers from many of the variables I've mentioned so far. There are obvious reasons why the general public has kind of lost sympathy with the consensus opinion because it's been so highly politicized. In certain cases, religion interacts unhelpfully with it. But now in in recent years, we have this new face of climate activism, which seems to be teenagers with obvious anxiety disorders and or autism. I mean, teenagers who need help have, in some cases become the most prominent voices of climate activism. And in recent weeks maybe this has been going on for longer than that, but I've just noticed it probably about a month ago, you've got people who are gluing themselves to the most famous works of art in major museums or throwing paint or Soup on priceless pieces of art. And this is turning off the general public for obvious reasons. I can imagine your head has been settled on the topic of climate change for quite some time. Why has this been so difficult to take seriously as a problem? Yeah, it's a mismatch of time scales, right? We have an election cycle that runs on two years worth of expiration dates, and then they get renewed. And senators are six years presidents, or four, possibly eight, if you want to talk about something on a 20 year time scale. How is that ever going to show up in your stump speech? How is that even going to who's going to be listening to you? Oh, the very youngest of the generations who will inherit what it is you do, but even then, is that enough for you to get elected on? So there's a mismatch between our political system and our capacity to engage solutions for problems that operate on a timescale longer than the political timescale of what we, of what we of the society that we built for it. So, yeah, I mean, this this is part of the problem, by the way. That kind of activism. I mean, this is you tend to see that with younger people in any level, in any topic of activism. All right? I don't know that 60 year old men and women throw paint on throw soup on paintings. It's it's the young generation. The young generation protested the Vietnam War. It was not the older people. It was the younger people. So so it's not a weird fact that we have a social, cultural issue in need of progressive change and the next generation is leading that. I'm not surprised by that. And soup on a painting got your attention. It got people's attention. And so I don't know what to say other than to say, well, one day we'll think about solving this. That's a recipe for disaster when it involves an existential risk. And by the way, again, I blame people, the fact that we're not taught probability and statistics in school. So let's take the Bell Curve for an example, okay? In my world, we call it a Gaussian curve because he sort of first laid out the fully expressed mathematical form of it. And what it says is, most things that vary would be in the middle, and there are fewer and fewer things out on each extreme, okay. Fewer or fewer representations of whatever variable you're measuring. Okay? So now watch. They announce there's been a 1.2 degree increase in the temperature in the average temperature of the world Celsius increase, and this will be devastating. And you say to yourself, I have more than a one degree variation in the rooms of the home that I live in, all right? Within the same room, I have a more higher temperature variation than that. And then from day to day and from day to night. So you're telling me I'm worried about a one degree change in the temperature of the Earth. Well, okay, because we're not talking about what's in the middle. The one degree shift in the average yes. That bell curve shifts a little bit to the right. Okay. Temperature increases to the you shift it a little bit and looks almost the same, except when you go on the tail. Now, you slide off to that tail. A one degree shift in the middle has devastating consequences out on that tail. And that tail of the distribution is where all the action is that people are reacting to with the intensity of the hurricanes and the once in a century flood zone that now floods every ten years. The epic rainfalls right now, it was 73 degrees out my window today in in New York City. All right? And so well, that's odd because it's November. Well, it's just a day. Okay, maybe. All right? But the tail of that distribution carries all manner of extreme weather with it. And now we're talking about two degrees by 2030. 2050. I forgot the exact year. And we'll just see more and more of this happen. If people knew and understood the effects of the tail of a bell curve of data relative to what you see in the middle, maybe they react differently. I don't know. You know, everyone in their math classes I will never need to know this for the rest as they learn trig identities. That is definitely a pedagogical mistake that we don't teach probability and statistics to high school students routinely. We teach them trigonometry and calculus and if calculus, which arguably have much less application to problems of immense social concern. So my one conspiracy theory in the book is that the reason why we don't teach problem leading statistics is because money for education in practically every state is partially fed by lottery tickets. So if you taught probability statistics in the school, no one would play the lottery. Yeah. You have this story about the the scientific convention in Vegas where the the I think was the MGM Grand made less money than it ever made in the history the American Physical Society, which is my physics peeps back in 1986, they were going to hold their convention in San Diego and there was a hotel snafu and Vegas says, we'll take you. And the MGM grabbed them back in the MGM arena. It was called the Vegas, one of the biggest hotels. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Robert Sapolsky. Robert is a neuroendocrinologist and a primatologist. He's a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur so called Genius grant. I don't know if that's the official title of that grant. Does one have to say so called there? In any case, Robert really is a superstar professor and communicator of science, as well as a top flight scientist. And as I say, in the beginning, I remember being in a class at Stanford when he came in as a guest lecturer, and I recall that being one of the moments that nudged me toward doing my PhD in neuroscience rather than philosophy. I've been wanting to speak to Robert for quite some time. He's actually been one of my most frequently requested guests. In this episode, we discuss his new book, behave the Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, which I highly recommend. It really is the most accessible discussion of brain science you will find. And for those of you who want more talk about free will and about the fact that the concept doesn't make much sense and about why that matters, we get into that at the end. And now, without further delay, I bring you Robert Zapolski. I am here with Robert Sapolski. Robert, thanks for coming on the podcast. Sure. Glad to be here, as you and I know, but our listeners don't. We have been fighting our robot overlords to get a clear connection here now with two attempts, and I think we've got it. But as I said, if this glitches on us, I will get on a plane and come and interview you, because we have a lot to talk about. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks for persisting here. I'm trying to check my memory here. I don't think you and I have ever met. We're in very much similar circles. But I recall actually, when I was at Stanford, I was in a class with John Gabrielli, I think, on the neuroanatomy of memory, and you were brought in as a guest lecturer. And so that was my first exposure to you and really fairly early exposure to what is interesting about brain science. You gave this very cool interdisciplinary talk because you are both a neurobiologist and a primatologist. And just you should know that you standing in front of a class of undergraduates for the better part of an hour, got into my brain and inspired me, in part, to go the direction I did. So thank you for that. Well, thanks. That's really good to hear. So you've written this book, Behave, which is just this monumental tour of the human brain and behavior, and we will cover some of it. We will. We definitely will. Not exhaust what is interesting in that book. But what you did here is, as I know all too well, it's really hard to write about the brain in a way that's accessible. Because it's not so much that the concepts are so hard, but once you get into the details and you start naming parts, it just becomes this thicket of neuroanatomical terms and people totally lose the plot. You really do a fantastic job in this book of giving scientific detail in a way that is not at all boring and really quite accessible. And honestly, this is not something I have managed to do in my books. And that's why when I bring in the relevant neuroscience, I kind of get in and get out as quickly as possible because it makes for brutal reading. But you've struck a wonderful balance here, so more praise to you. Well, thanks. I have had to survive neuroanatomy classes, so I know exactly how awful all the multi syllabic names can be. So I'm still traumatized myself. Yeah. So I want to talk, before we get into your book, just about your background here and the way in which you've married what is essentially neuroendocrinology and primatology, which is a fairly unique combination. I can't imagine there are too many of you at meetings with the same bio. How has primatology informed your study of the brain? And if I'm not mistaken, you focus exclusively on baboons. Right. So how has the picking of baboons been relevant here? Well, sort of the common theme in my work has been to understand the effects of stress on health, and particularly the effects of stress on the brain. And what do you know? The punchline for all of that is stress can do some pretty lousy things to the brain. What I've spent many decades doing is, as you say, sort of oscillating between being a lab scientist, growing neurons and petri dishes, mucking around with their genes and such, and then for 32 summers, picking up and going to a national park in East Africa and studying baboons there. And these are the same animals I return to each year, animals I can dart, can anesthetize, and when they're unconscious, do a whole bunch of, like, basic sort of clinical tests you do in a human in terms of balancing the two. They've always kind of complemented each other in that you observe something or other interesting about the brain based on your petri dish neurons or your lab rats. And that's great. But the question, of course, is whether this actually tells us anything about the real world. Let's go study a primate in this natural habitat. And then you see something interesting behaviorally with these wild primates and you say, Jeez, I wonder, like, if it's this part of the brain or what's going on there. And thus you go back to the lab and you're cultured neurons. So it's been sort of a very privileged ability to do these sort of complementary approaches. I'm now picturing you darting these baboons. Do you do it yourself? Do you actually fire the gun? It's a blow gun. It takes surprisingly little practice. Fortunately, baboons have very large rear ends, which is what you aim for and beyond. Cliche is like, you're nice liberal. And so the ability to sort of sneak around the bush with a blow gun and shoot it wild baboons and do that, it's great. And you're doing conservation work the whole time. So, yeah, it's a blast. I love doing it. Now, do the baboons recognize you enough to and recognize what you're doing enough of the consequences of your darting to form a grievance against you darting them? Not if things go well. And sort of 90% of the time out there, you're collecting behavioral data, which is your basic Jane Goodall sort of scene where you're just hanging with them from dawn till dusk. And there's sort of a whole science about doing it in a quantitative, objective kind of way. So it's actually an infrequent day where I'm out darting. But one of the things that actually makes it quite difficult is you can't dart somebody until there's nobody else around and nobody looking. And he's turned the other way. You dart him and he responds as if he's been stung by a bee or has sat on a thorn, jumps up, scratches his rear for a second, sits back down, and then three minutes later he's unconscious. So you get one alone, and when he's unconscious, you can approach him and no one else intervenes from the troop or notices what you're doing at that point. Well, that's when it all goes perfectly smoothly. When it doesn't, he decides to pick up in those three minutes before going under and walk over and sit down right in the middle of a gazillion other baboons or get into a fight with somebody, and those are the ones that don't go so well. What are you doing to the reputations of these baboons that walk among their troop and start a fight and then promptly faint from your anesthesia? Well, it's got to cause all sorts of interesting belief systems in these animals that I can't quite access. That's funny. Now, are there disallogies between baboons and humans that are of interest here? Because they're further from us than chimps. So are there ways in which chimps are similar to humans and baboons aren't? And if so, why? The choice to study baboons? Chimps would be much better insofar as, you know, the cliche they share and do share 98% of our genome with us. Far closer in terms of social structure, in terms of cognitive, emotional capacities, all of that. Nonetheless, baboons still count as close relatives, and I think we 96% share DNA for a bunch of reasons. Baboons are perfect for what I do. They live out in the open and these big open grasslands so you can see them 12 hours a day and you can actually, like, see them to dart them. They they don't live up in trees. They're not endangered. They're big. They've got lots of blood that you can borrow from them for your sort of tests. But probably most of all, given that I study stress, none of us are getting stressed because we're like riddled with diphtheria or some horrible chronic illness. None of us are getting stressed because we're chased by sabertoothed tigers every day. Instead, we're westernized humans, which is to say we get chronic psychosocial stress. And it turns out baboons are absolutely perfect for this. They live in these large troops, 50 to 100 animals. The serengeti where they live is like a perfect ecosystem. Predators don't hassle them much, and they only have to work about 3 hours a day for their calories. And what that means is you've got 9 hours of free time every day to devote to making some other baboon miserable. All they do is generate social stress for each other. They're perfect models for westernized humans. Now, what about mandrills? They look like baboons, but they're not baboons, right? Am I right about that? There's some major taxonomic civil war going on about that. As to whether they are a baboon type, I've steered clear of that one because I'm fairly uncommitted to it. But their different social system, they live in dense rainforests. They would be mighty hard to study. These savannah baboons that I focus on are perfect. So now, getting to your book, which is really this wonderful tour of the brain and behavior and morally salient behavior. You and I approach these questions from a pretty similar angle, and we agree about many things. I'm sure we'll talk about free will at one point because many of our listeners want us to. And you are one of the few people who have made more or less the same noises on this topic that I have in science. We've broken the same taboo here. That'll be fun to talk about. But to start with where you're coming from, you have a kind of unity of knowledge approach and you look at the various levels of scientific explanation, from neurophysiological and genetic to psychological and cultural. And each of these clearly has a different language game associated with it. But you like, I don't make much of the transitions between these levels. But you do something interesting here where you find a novel way of segmenting these different levels of analysis with respect to time, the proximity to causing human behavior, which is very interesting. So talk about how you break down the levels of scientific explanation. In a temporal sense, as behavioral biologists, which most of us are in some stripe or other, a behavior occurs. And we are, in a sense, asking why did that behavior just happen? And it turns out that's actually asking a whole bunch of questions because if you're asking why did that behavior just happen? Part of it is what occurred in the brain of that individual 1 second ago? But you're also saying what were the sensory cues in the environment a minute ago that triggered those neurons? And you're also asking, what did that person's hormone levels this morning over the recent hours or days have to do with making them more or less sensitive to those sensory cues which then trigger those neurons? And then you're often running to neural plasticity over the course of months, back to childhood, back to fetal environment, which turns out to be phenomenally influential on adult behavior. And then you're back to genes. But then if you're still asking why did that behavior occur? You're also asking, well, what sort of culture was this person raised in? Which often winds up meaning what were this person's ancestors doing a couple of hundred years ago? What were the ecological influences on that? And finally, when you're saying why did that behavior occur? You're also asking something about the millions of years of evolutionary pressures beforehand. So it's not just the case that it's important to remember to look at these things at multiple levels exactly as you said. Ultimately, they merge into the same. If you're talking about the brain, you're talking about the childhood experiences when the brain was assembled. If you're talking about genes, you're implicitly talking about the evolution of them. All of these just are a confluence of influences on behavior that are all sort of interconnected. Yeah, well, we'll get back to precisely that picture when we talk about free will because obviously there's a lot of confusion about degrees of freedom for the mind when you're talking about the neurophysiology of human behavior or the way in which culture influences brain development. The punchline here, obviously, is that once you grant that the brain is the final common pathway of all these influences when you're talking about human thought and intention and behavior, well, then you have to grant that what the brain is doing is the proximate cause of what the person is doing. And either you're going to sign on to the laws of physics here or you're not. So we'll get back to that. But there's a common misunderstanding around the relationship between reason and emotion just across the board, but in particular with respect to human behavior and the answering of moral questions, the way in which we just form a worldview that there's this idea that you can be emotionally motivated or you can be motivated by emotion free rationality. Let's perform a little psycho surgery on that idea. You treat this in your book. How do you think about reason and emotion? Well, it's the inevitable, like Coke versus Pepsi dichotomy there. And as to which is more important, which influences the other more in terms of our actions. And of course, it turns out, as with most sort of dichotomies with behavior, it's a false one. They're utterly intertwined and intertwined on a neurobiological level. You have a thought, you think of something terrifying that happened to you long ago and emotional parts of your brain activate and you secrete stress hormones. Or you have an aroused emotion, you're in an agitated, frightened state, and suddenly you think and reason in a way that's like imprudent and ridiculous. We make terrible decisions. Often when we're aroused, the two parts are equally intertwined. Probably where the most progress in thinking about this intertwining has come in recent years is there's a certain sort of comfort and I think chauvinism we take as these creatures with big cortexes and thinking that nonetheless, reason is sort of at the core of most of our decision making. And an awful lot of work has shown that far more often than we would like to think, we make our decisions based on implicit emotional, automatic reflexes. We make them within milliseconds parts of the brain that are marinated in emotion and hormones are activating from the standpoint of the brain long, long before the more cortical rational parts activate. And often what we believe is rational thinking is instead our cognitive selves playing catch up to try to rationalize why our emotional instincts actually are perfectly logical and make wonderful sense. And in lots of ways, the best way to show this is you manipulate the affective, the emotional, the automatic, the implicit, the subterranean aspects of our brains where we may not even be aware of it. And it changes our decisions. And then we come up with highfalutin explanations for why it's actually because of some philosopher we read freshman year. That's why I did what I just did. No, actually it's because of this manipulation that just occurred. Yeah, there are really two sides of this. So that's one side, which is kind of deflationary of cognition and reason. So you think your reasoning and that your reasoning is driving your cognition or your belief formation, but then when you look closely, you find that it's being driven from below by emotion. But the flip side of that is that in order to make even the most coolly, calculated reasoning effective, it needs to be integrated with parts of the brain. In this case, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, that you need a felt sense of the consequences of being right or wrong. And this connects to dimazio's work and others where people who have neurological damage there, they may know the correct strategy, say in a gambling task, they may understand the probabilities, but they can't make that understanding effective because it doesn't actually mean anything. It's not coded appropriately. Yes. And it turns out this is like a tremendous rebuke for the people out there who would say, if only we could be purely rational creatures. If only we can get rid of all that affective muck from underneath, why, we'd all be Mr. Spock and it would be a wondrous world. And exactly, as you say, ventrammedial prefrontal cortex work of people like Damasio, people who have damage to this part of the brain. That's basically the means by which your emotional parts of the brain talk to your most rational ones and tell them what they're feeling, get damaged there. And people make decisions about things that we view as appalling, as beyond the pale of cold blooded, as detached. As one example, you take any normal person on Earth and you give them sort of a philosophy problem would you kill one stranger to save the life of five? And they maybe say yes, maybe say no. And then you say, would you kill your parent, your loved one, to save the life of five? And in half a second you say no, of course not. It's my mother, it's my child, whatever. And you take somebody in damage to this part of the brain and they give the exact same answer. It doesn't register. They don't process relatedness in the same way. And every primate on Earth would look at that and say there's something desperately wrong with this person's brain. On this issue of emotion and rationality, one point I have begun making which I haven't heard made, and I just want to bounce it off of you. I've begun to think about doubt, which really is one of the core foundations of our rationality right. I mean, so you say something which I find implausible kind of my error detection mechanism, whether it's logical or factual or semantic or based on memory, something gets tripped, you say you, you utter a sentence, and I don't buy it. That feeling of doubt, in my view, really is an emotion. And we actually have some neuroimaging data to back this up in that all the fMRI studies I did on belief showed that disbelief, doubting, the veracity of a proposition, was associated with activity in the anterior insula. And I've actually begun to think of doubt as a kind of emotion on the continuum of disgust, as a kind of propositional disgust or cognitive disgust. And frankly, when I see our president speak, I find I'm viscerally in touch with doubt. As discussed right, there's a certain level of incredulity in the face of a confident utterance that precipitates in me at least a fairly strong emotion of disgust. So I just want to put those data in front of you and just get your take. Well, my insular cortex is right with you on that one, but I thoroughly agree with it. Obviously, there's some domains where doubt is just a purely rational process. You sit there and you add up two and two, and somehow it comes out to five. And that's a fairly pure cognitive state of saying. I doubt if that actually is correct. But most of the doubts we have, and in our social world, I think you're absolutely right, is steeped in emotion. Emotion discussed perhaps at the person who is sowing that doubt emotion. Robert, just to clarify, if we put you in a scanner and give you propositions just like that, two plus two equals five. You're six foot five inches tall, you're a woman with blonde hair. George Washington was never President of the United States. I just give you propositional statements which you recognize to be untrue, but which are not, in fact, emotionally laden. I would certainly predict, on the basis of now, three neuroimaging studies, that those would be associated with insular activity in you and the same statements in a positive light that you would accept, you know, George Washington was the first President of the United States. Wouldn't I completely agree, because it's very much context dependent. If I were sitting there on my own and adding up two and two, when I got five, I would have a half seconds worth of pure rationality. Wait a second, that's not right. And then I would have that's it. I'm an idiot, I'm a fake. Everybody else is going to finally figure it out. I can't even add two plus two. And sitting there in the brain, immature. I think you're absolutely right. That would not be a purely cognitive experience. That would be, what are these guys up to? Do I trust them? Do I feel safe here? Do they think I'm an idiot? What do they think of me? Did I say something foolish before? Are they going to lock me up in the scanner? Et cetera, and off and running with emotional aspects? I think one of the most perfect realms for looking at this is when you look at conformity studies and where people go along with something that is patently untrue, yet they go along. A certain percentage of them are just being affable, they're being publicly conforming, but a certain percentage actually changed their minds. And you can see activation of the visual cortex. Hey, remember, you actually saw something different than you're saying. You saw what all of them are saying. This is a state that's also associated with activation of the insulin cortex, activation of the amygdala. It's anxiety. Doubting provokes anxiety. Certainty is a very comforting thing. And doubting, even seemingly the most cerebral and sort of soulless of issues out there, nonetheless readily taps into all these senses of anxiety running underneath there. There's this other piece here, which is that the brain doesn't have. This is just a constraint of evolution. We were not built so as to acquire new cognitive abilities. De novo. The only material to use for modern human cognition are these ancient structures that have to be commandeered to new purposes. So everything we do is built on the back of these apish structures. Here we're talking about the insula, which does receive the inputs from the visceral. You find rotting food disgusting. That is the tale told by the insula. And the only way to build a mind that has the capacity to find abstract ideas repugnant is to be repurposing or extending the purpose of these brain areas that we're doing nothing of the kind in apes like ourselves that couldn't form abstract ideas. Absolutely. And it's a totally fascinating domain. The fact that this insular cortex, which, if you're like mole, will tell you if you're eating something rotten, activates in humans thinking about moral disgust that a part of the brain that does temperature sensing for you is also activated when you're contemplating whether somebody has a warm or cold personality. That the parts of your brain, some parts that are involved in pain detection in a very literal sense also activate when you're feeling empathic about somebody else's pain. And all of these speak to this sort of old truism about evolution. Evolution is not an inventor. It's a tinkerer. It makes do with what's already there. When did humans come up with the concept of moral outrage and moral disgust? Maybe in the last 20,000 years, 50,000, whatever. When did we come up with the concept of having warm or cold personalities a lot shorter than that? And at that point, nobody sits down and says, okay, we need to evolve an entirely new part of the brain that does moral disgust. They say insula. I know that kind of sounds the same. They do food disgust like, here, give me some duct tape. We're just going to push that into the insula. And now the insula also does metaphorical moral disgust. And it's a brain that's winging it in a lot of ways for some really interesting ways in which it's better and ways in which that's for the worse. When you think about the role of the brain in producing these kinds of purely human level distinctions, things like the birth of civilization, really, it's largely a story of what the frontal cortex is doing. I think you say at one point in the book that this region of the brain is what makes you do the hard thing when the hard thing is the right thing to do. Let's talk for a moment about the role of the frontal cortex in our species. That's exactly sort of a summary of what it does. More jargony. It does impulse control and emotional regulation and long term planning and gratification postponement and executive function. It's the part of the brain that attempts to tell you, this seems like a good idea right now, but trust me, you're going to regret it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Of great importance, it's the most recently evolved part of our brains. Our frontal cortex is proportionately bigger and we're more complex than in any other primate. And most interestingly it's the last part of the brain to get fully wired up. We're accustomed to images of your brain is pretty much set to go by the time you're at kindergarten. The frontal cortex is not fully online until people are, on the average, about a quarter century old. Which is boggling. Which is boggling. But it also tells you a whole lot about why adolescents act in adolescent ways, because the frontal cortex isn't very powerful yet. But in that is an incredibly interesting implication, which is if the frontal cortex that does all this complex, like culture, specific reasoning and regulating your behavior, if the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to fully mature, by definition, it's the part of the brain that is least constrained by genes and most shaped by experience. And that's real important because think about, okay, the frontal cortex, it's your moral barometer, if that's the right metaphor. It's your calvinist voice whispering in your head. So the frontal cortex, for example, plays a central role if you're tempted to lie about something. And if you manage to avoid that temptation, your frontal cortex had something to do with it. But at the same time, if you do decide to lie, your frontal cortex plays an enormous role in you doing an effective job at lying, because that's a version of frontal regulation. Also, okay, control my voice. Don't make eye contact. Don't let my face do something funny. That's a frontal task. Also, if you're talking about a part of the brain that is both central to you avoiding lying, but once you've decided to lie is central to you doing it effectively. This is a very human, very complicated part of our brains. Yeah. To follow on what you just said there about the implications of it being so late to develop, this is really where it matters. What culture you're in and what early life experience you have and what kind of person you become with respect to your beliefs about ethical norms and what constitutes honor, and everything that stands out as a salient consequential difference between groups and societies. Now, none of this is just floating around in the ether. It's not just in the books on our shelves. This is getting etched in the brains of all concerned. And largely, this is the story of what is happening in the frontal cortex. Yes, and that's exactly why it can't mature until you're 25. It's not that it's a more complex construction project than wiring up the rest of your brain is. You need the first 25 years to learn your situational ethics and your culture specific beliefs and that sort of thing. And those are subtle, and they're often unstated, and they're often exactly the opposite of what people tell you things are supposed to be about. Think about it. Every culture on earth bans some types of killing and allows others, and they all do different ones. Every culture on earth supports some. Types of lying and bans others in our culture. It's okay to lie to Grandma, to say, oh, I don't have that toy. This is wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. When you've got the actual toy in your closet, and it's okay for us to lie, if somebody says, Are you harboring those refugees in your attic? And you say, no, of course not, sir. Of course not. SS Officer that one's okay, but there's other ones we banned. Every culture has prohibitions about sexual behaviors where some types of behaviors are wondrous and others are blasphemy, and they all differ. And that's a lot of subtle stuff to have to master as to what counts is doing the right thing. Although I'm doing my part to not spare Grandma the brutal truth about the toy. Yes, that's a meme I'm trying to knock down. I know your book lying certainly makes the most convincing sort of argument I have seen, for it's not okay in any domain. Yeah. Although I think there's a misunderstanding there. I think I saw in a footnote or an end note you said that I'm against lying in all conceivable circumstances. Kind of the CONTEIN view, which is not the case. Actually, if you're at the door with the Nazis and you've got Anne Frank in the attic then I view lying, the way most people do as an adequate and even necessary act of self defense. Or the defense of others. In those cases, I really view it as being on a continuum of violence where it's the least violent thing you can do to someone who's no longer behaving as a rational actor or someone whose behavior you can modify with honest speech. Okay, sorry for that misrepresentation. Nobody was supposed to read the footnotes. Well, Anne Frank is safe in my ad. Are there primates that show an analogous delay in maturation in the frontal cortex, or is that a uniquely human issue? No, it's primate wide. It's even rodent wide. But it's not as dramatic, it's not as delayed, it's not as faced with complex of the task as we do when learning sort of the complexities of our frontal dependent prohibitions. But, no, we're not the only species that invented the idea that this is a very good part of the brain to make very malleable in the face of experience. We've just got the most dramatic version. There are other interesting bits of neuroanatomy here that you don't often hear talked about, at least in the popular press. There's something called von economo neurons, which are unique in primates and cetaceans and elephants, I believe. And they're, I think, uniquely in the insula and anterior signalate, or preferentially there, and they relate to social cognition and self awareness. Give us a potted description of what's happening there with these neurons. They're very cool. You study human brains, and one of the first things you have to recognize is we're not humans because we've invented a totally novel type of neurotransmitter or a completely new brand of neuron. It's just that we've got more of them. They're more complexly wired. But then people found this one neuron type that did seem to be unique to humans, these von economos. They're almost entirely found in anterior cingulate insulate cortex having to do with empathy and moral disgust and all that cool, interesting stuff. So that's plenty interesting. But as you say, then people looked further, and it turns up in other species and all the usual suspects when you're looking for the most complex social worlds. Yeah, other apes, other primates, cetaceans, elephants. And the best guess is that they play a role in some very complex aspects of sociality. Are they mirror neurons? And don't get me started on that one, but very little reason to think they play the very narrowly documented sense of what these mirror neurons do. That's a whole separate rant. But one of the most interesting things is these are the first neurons that die in a very obscure neurological disease called frontal temporal dementia and one that predominantly damages the frontal cortex. And the first neurons that go are Von economies. And two interesting things about that, what that tells you is these are really expensive, vulnerable neurons to operate if they're the first ones that keel over. But the other thing is, what does the disease look like? Disinhibited, socially inappropriate behavior. And often it's initially viewed as a psychiatric disorder until you realize this is a massive neurological sort of carpet bombing of the front part of your brain. Whatever these neurons are doing, they are very much sort of specialized for the most complex social things we fancy species do. Yeah, well, so I think the last stop on our cook's tour of the brain here, or at least the cooks tour of the frontal cortex, is the dorsal lateral PFC, which is associated with much of what we consider to be higher rationality or executive control. And activity here is able to dampen activity in emotional parts of the brain, like the limbic system, for instance, the amygdala in particular, reducing negative affect. It can do this by becoming active in a relevant way. And this is something that I think people understand that if you cognitively reappraise what an experience means, so, for instance, you think someone's being rude to you, then you reconstrue that, realizing, say, that maybe he's just nervous. And then that will dampen your initial negative emotional response to what you perceive to be rudeness. But what's also interesting is that really any use of your dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex can dampen negative arousal. And if you're feeling negative emotion and you just put your attention on something else, you just start doing math problems or you do anything that that requires an alternate form of cognition that can have a similar effect of of dampening arousal. In thinking about this, it's always interesting to consider how someone like yourself who spends a lot of time thinking about the mechanics of emotion, cognition from the brain side. Does this ever become relevant to you in your life? Behaviorally? Is there anything that you do differently in your moment to moment experience, given how much time you spend thinking about what's going on under the hood? For better or worse? Yes. The same thing has infested my wife, who's a neuropsychologist by training. Exactly. When our kids were young, I remember this one day where our four year old son had just done something rotten to his two year old sister and we swooped in there and we were doing that. You're not a bad person, but you did a bad thing and wailing on him with that one and why did you do that? And at some point, I don't even remember which of us said this, one of us would say, why are we getting on him so hard here? He has like three frontal neurons. And the other one's response would be, well, how else is he going to develop a good frontal cortex? So we actually think that way in my house, which is pretty appalling when you think about it. Although sort of something I write about in the book, where I have the most trouble sort of applying my worldview as a mechanistic reductive, deterministic sort of scientist guy, thinking about behavior is, as you say, when it's getting to the realm of free will. Much like you, I don't believe there is free will. I believe free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. But what I find to be a hugely daunting task is how you're supposed to live your life. Thinking that way, and even me with like, I'm willing to write down and print, there's no free will. And here's why. At some critical juncture of some social interaction, I act absolutely as if I believe there's free will. I hear about somebody who's done something jerky and I wish horrible things to them instead of stopping and saying, oh, no, but think about what happens to them as a second trimester fetus. It's very hard to function with that. Like most people, I hit a wall with that one. It's a whole lot easier to operate with the notion of agency. Well, let's jump in there because this is obviously a hugely consequential issue. Or maybe it's obvious to us, it's not so obvious to most people. I think that coming to a different conclusion about free will has consequences, and I would argue they're quite good consequences. But let's get there. So let's just step back and remind people, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing partial episodes of the podcast. If you'd like access to full episodes, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. And as always, I never want money to be the reason why someone can't listen to the podcast. So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option@samharris.org to request a free account and we grant 100% of those requests, no questions asked. I am here with Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin, thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me. If people only knew how difficult it was under pandemic conditions to get a valid connection. This has been brutal. But you're inheriting my bad tech karma because I just break technology wherever I go. Oh, I assumed that you always had perfect connections at all times. It's just bad luck, but it happens enough that I'm used to it. But it's great to have you here. And actually, I did go out on Twitter when we first scheduled this and we got some hundreds of questions and I have a few of those seated in here. But let's just start with what's on your mind and what this experience of quarantine has been like for you thus far. Well, I first want to say, Sam, that I think you saved my life because I am a person that has all these underlying conditions and I was not taking this seriously as so many people were not. And I'd even been I have to go to the doctor a lot. And I'd even ask the nurse, what about this COVID or corona? Is this a problem? And she said, oh, it's not a problem, it's a flu. And you just take some you drink a lot of fluids and you take some Tylenol. And it was so appealing to think that it was nothing. You want to believe the good news? Always. And so I was going along thinking everyone was hysterical. And then you just happened to sent me an email, a short email about something else. And at the bottom you said, be careful, this is shaping up to be a really big deal. And that caught me. I thought, Sam is really smart and this is the kind of thing he would be really smart about. And that kind of sat in my mind. But I still had to go to a work lunch. And as I was sitting in the work lunch, noticing the restaurant wasn't nearly as crowded as usual, the guy I was interviewing and I our phones kept going off with all these different things being canceled. And while he was sitting there, a job he had booked that was really important to his family economically, financially, I should say dropped out. And so it was kind of just seeing someone in real time, losing work and income, and I walked out of there, and I remember I never eat enough at a work lunch. I'm very nervous in work lunches, and I always don't eat. And I stopped I was walking to the car and I stopped in a drugstore, and I bought a candy bar, and I sat on the it was a bench bench, bus stop bench on Ventura Boulevard. And all of a sudden I just thought, I need to go home. Sam Harris said this. I'm seeing a lot of signs in it, and I need to get home. And so I really personally have to thank you because I would have been and still may be in really serious, serious trouble if I get this. Well, glad to be of service. There was this really uncanny part of this mass induction into reality where I was essentially a week ahead of everyone in my life. I began to feel like a character in a movie where it was just me and one other friend who was even probably 24 hours ahead of me. And it just was a bizarre experience, bizarre conversations with family members and friends and what was it, Sam? I'm sure you've covered this before, but I'm so interested. What was it that got your attention? What was it that made you realize this was a really serious thing? A few things. One, I've been primed to think about that I've been waiting for a pandemic on some level. I actually did a podcast maybe six months ago on this topic. I have a template for this sort of thing happening, although I'm fairly amazed at how little detail was in the template and how strange this experience has been as it has unfolded. But the prospect of this happening wasn't foreign to me. The dominoes started to fall pretty quickly. Frankly, I feel pretty late on this. It really wasn't until the end of February that I was paying attention. And people who were really paying attention were a month earlier than I was. For whatever reason. I was so distracted by other things. I wasn't really noticing the reports from Muhan. But I also just happened by sheer coincidence, I happened to know someone who got this very early, and no kidding, he's still in an ICU oh, God. Who's not especially old. He was even 52. And so the prospect of this was just like the flu seemed far fetched, albeit for reasons that are not statistically sophisticated. I could have happened to know someone who died from the flu too, and had my intuitions move there, but it kind of anchored me to a sense that, no people my age are going down from this. And I don't know, people dying from the flu or being intubated and spending more than a month on a ventilator. Yeah. So that just sort of woke me up. And again, it's moved so quickly, it's just been interesting to see how long a week is in COVID time, isn't it? And I think that's the emotional thing that everybody's, you know, everyone's had a personal crisis, and, you know, we all know what that's like. And the the feeling of shock and of panic and sort of getting our vision very, very narrowed into what's you know, when there's a crisis, people get their priorities straight in about two minutes. You know, most of the time we bumble around and we wonder what am I supposed to be doing with my life? And is this the right direction? And Could I advance myself or my children in different ways? And then there's a crisis and you get down to the material aspects of life and what really matters. And we're all sort of having this at the same time, this incredible feeling of dislocation, of fear, of the intensity of love that we have for the people we love. That you can't really think about that too much in regular conditions because it would just tear you apart and you couldn't ever leave them for a minute. So we're all in this very intense experience. And I kind of think of it as when I was a kid, we were in Ireland a lot in Dublin and in Dublin Bay when the tide goes out, there's a certain strand and the tide will you know, when it's low tide, all of a sudden you see everything that was underneath the water for the last 12 hours. You see the pebbles and the sea glass and the big dangerous rocks that would have hurt you if you'd gone out. And then it gets covered up again and you can't see any of it in that brown water. And I think that's what it is now. We're seeing the big rocks and we're trying desperately to avoid them in our personal life, keep the people we love safe. And we know that everything here is beyond our control. One thing that we can't lose sight of is how different we are all in some kind of common predicament. But there are so many different kinds of experiences to be having now and it's easy for me to lose sight of that because I'm in touch with many people who are having a pretty similar experience to the one I'm having and not so in touch with people who are in some ways having the opposite experience. Actually, that's not entirely true. I'm in touch with a fair number of doctors who are working, who are performing surgeries and who are on the front lines of this, but the people out in the world who are part of critical infrastructure who are still working and exposing themselves to this and exposing others if they're unaware that they're sick. And then they're the people like ourselves who are sheltering in place. And those are obviously very different experiences. And then they're the people who are locked down as we are, but who have their lives totally disrupted. They can't work because their work was synonymous with not being locked down. It'll say they're running a restaurant or working in a store, both of which are closed. And then there are people who either don't have families now, they're experiencing social isolation of a sort that they may have never experienced or go for years and years without touching. And then there are the people like ourselves, who and I haven't spoken about this, but I can assume you're probably experiencing, at least to some degree, a silver lining effect here because you're locked down with your family. And there's been something really beautiful about discovering some of the things on the beach that were truly precious that you were not necessarily seeing on an hour by hour basis. Well, I think that we're really seeing this division between are you a laptop jockey or not? If your work is able to be done entirely in this immaterial space of data that's transported back and forth between computers, then you're probably not taking a financial hit, right? And it's interesting, the New York Times that will endlessly fascinate me until the day I die, where they cover very well and very broadly the situation in all times, but now in particular, of what it's like to be out of work or to be low income at this time or to be sort of fragile in terms of your financial status and then have it all ripped away. They cover it very well, but all of their social coverage is their cooking recommendations are endless, and they watch this on Netflix, and what a great time to reorganize the pantry. And you realize that if they're a product, they know their consumer very well, and the consumer is probably a laptop jockey. But even within that social class where we are lucky to live, I think it's even deeper than including the nature of love. But I think it's bumped us quite suddenly into the material world and the realization of how far we have gotten away from it. And I've been the thing that amazes me, Sam, more than anything else, the toilet paper shortages. There'll be jokes and whatever about that, and I'm sure books will be written. I mean, all of this it will take a decade or more to understand this. The thing that amazes me is that America is out of yeast. And yeast doesn't mean cookies and brownies yeast means bread. And Americans in a huge number. That's one of the most elemental human activities there is. There is this calling to make bread. There's no bread shortages. We can get the same sliced bread that we always got. But people are being drawn, I think, and I don't want to sound, I don't know, too out of the real to say this, but I noticed that I've written about this a lot, that our homes have become this weird place. We don't have as much as we think we have a deep connection to our homes and as much as HGTV, the Redecorating Channel, as many fans as it has, even for those kind of wealthy people remodeling homes. They're not centers of production. They're centers of consumption. Plug in your chips and your sodas and watch the TV and then, Alf, you go to the soccer game, to the job, to the vacation. But all of a sudden now our homes aren't places to display ourselves or our wealth or it's sort of, oh, thank God I have a stove in an oven, and thank God I've got this freezer. And people are we we try to live a life. It's just sort of like mind body, spirit. We try to live a life that we can, just the way I grew up. You live totally in your head, but then you get to a point you realize, no, you've got to live in your body too. And I think that we have gotten in that kind of feeling of just our homes are these pit stops and they're these display areas. And then anybody who's in that laptop jockey level of the economy, which is a very small percentage, but with a huge influence on society, their homes are often much too big for them. They can't hear their children in them. They can't even find a really warm, close place to be together. And I think that's just way down the line. It's nothing to really think about or be concerned about now, but I think when the water comes back in and when we're well again and this is over, I think we'll be thinking about that. Is there a way to live our lives where the things that were exposed to us that are of high degree of worth? Is there a way that we're willing to sacrifice other things to keep that revelation? And we don't know. We're in a mystery right now. Yes, I think it will reorganize many things for all the people who are successfully working from home now. They'll be faced with a choice about whether or not to return to the former pattern of being in an office building for their job. And I got to think many of the companies that successfully pivoted to a distributed workforce may stay distributed just for quality of life reasons. And what do you think it's going to do to education? This is this is to me, having been a teacher and writing a lot about education, this has been the most interesting thing to me. Well, everything's interesting. It's a time where everything's interesting, which is why we're all exhausted. But America, in this incredible thing hat is off to the teachers of America that in two weeks they scrambled to get a distance learning program together for basically every child. It's not a good program. It's not high quality. How could it be two weeks to totally switch methods of teaching that's really, obviously it's not very practical. But the thing that parents I talk to a lot of them because I'm so interested, the thing that parents complain about more than the quality and more than how harassing it is, all these different systems and passwords, and really little kids need a lot of help with that. The thing they complain about is how short it is that before they know it, that they imagined that their children would have 7 hours. They'd have sort of 7 hours of coverage the way they do when they drop a child at school. Yeah, but the actual instructional time in an American school for the core subjects that are the make and break of a child, boy, that's 90 minutes. That's 90 minutes. That's been pretty startling to discover. I struggled on how to take the temperature of this thing. So what I've defaulted to is just asking my oldest daughter her perception of how much she's learning at home now. And her perception is that she's learning more, and it's in a fraction of the time, which makes me feel like, okay, school, at least at this age, is essentially daycare plus, you know, a play date with friends. It's not really optimized for learning if she can learn as much in 2 hours as she does in a full day of school, what's going on over there, right? And I think in the wealthier communities or in the private schools, it doesn't add up to a problem because a wealthy parent, they get a test score in a standardized test, and if it's low, a reading score, that's perceived as an emergency. And tutors, sometimes very expensive tutors are brought in, and unless there's a problem reading and math in particular, you can remediate quickly. And reading to an extent. So and wealthier parents nowadays, they you hear people who run private schools talking about this all the time. Wealthier parents care tremendously about the experience of the school day. They want their kids to be engaged every minute in a sort of delightful way, and so they're willing to have that happen. But when you look at, I mean, California's education, it is in crisis. It is. I mean, Sam, just do this when you get off with me, or if you have some time, go online and take the basic proficiency reading test that 60% of kids flunk can't pass that are in school at 12th grade level, and you'll be shocked. And these kids, year after year after year, you know, you start, you know, this is what the Khan Academy has really stressed. When you start falling behind in math, a year goes by. Two years go by. You're lost. You're just lost, and you can't catch up, and you don't have the private tutor. So what we're really doing, as you say, is we're covering the day for working parents. We have a tremendous disparity because when it's the wealthy parents are going to remediate, the non wealthy parents, they're probably in a different address by the time that test score comes in, you know. And the test score is the farthest thing from an emergency to a low income person. So and if anybody thoughtful was looking at it and said, gee, the number one thing that holds these kids back is math and reading, then we would teach a lot of math and reading. But in California we have 180 day school year and that doesn't mean you're going to get 180 lessons in reading because you have assemblies and special schedules and all sorts of things that block into it. We're not required a number of hours in these essential subjects. So I think we're all getting a look at things we don't want to think about. We don't want to change. We don't want to face facts about our lower income level of education. We don't want to face facts about, gee, if my kids really just having an experience at school, is that the best kind of experience? And you know who's having the last laugh now are the home schoolers. Because as all the laptop jockeys are running around looking for a password and being so upset that they've like 90 minutes later, everything's done. Boy, the homeschoolers are on top of that. They know how to do this. I spent about 30 seconds thinking about the irony here because the homeschooling movement, at least my perception of it in the US. Is that it's I don't know what the actual percentage is, but it seems like fundamentalist Christians are over represented in that movement. I've been hearing from them over the years for obvious reasons, but just to recognize that these people have to be the absolute experts in what everyone's facing right now. But the other interesting thing, and I mean this is back to our decadent life before we all are an imminent threat of dying. Who's getting in on homeschooling? They're very wealthy because they realize that school is an interference to the thing that gets you in the Ivy League. You get in the Ivy League if you're from a wealthy family because you have such a developed talent that it is recognized usually on a national or even international level and that school is a harassing block of time. And so they hire people to get the kids through higher level curriculum for sure, but they want to be free from school so that they can develop the thing that gets you into the Ivy League. So it's just a really I guess it is once again with the haves and have notots this squeezing out of a middle class entirely and this just entirely different experience. So how much of a reset do you think we're experiencing here? How different do you think the world will look in a year or 18 months or after the epidemiological and economic implications of all of this run their course? Again, I don't know what the timeline actually is, but it's hard to see how whatever the new normal is, will seem anything like normal shorter than twelve months from now. Well, I have no idea. That just in America, the notion that once again, up against Donald Trump, we have the weakest Democratic candidate in my lifetime. Let's put a pin in the great Joe Biden for a moment, because there's a lot to talk about there, but actually, let's race on to that. But I just wanted to .1 thing out here that there are at least two, if not paradoxes, ironies that we're going to be slamming up against now. The first is one that I pointed out on Twitter yesterday, as did several other people, which is that if social distancing actually works as intended, which is to say, if we flatten the curve, which it seems like we're doing in many places, such that the healthcare system doesn't break the level of contagion and morbidity and mortality is more flu like than smallpox. Like the people who have been resisting social distancing, the people who've been crying hoax, media hoax, and they will feel totally vindicated. I'm in touch with some of them, right, and they're absolute imbeciles. They're smart people, many of them, but they've managed to craft for themselves a truly unfalsifiable worldview. Like only bodies piled to the sky would convince them that they were wrong about this, and maybe not even then. And then there's just this very strange element to this confirmation bias, which is the cities, the blue counties were the first and hardest hit by this, right? So in Trumpistan, the virus is only now arriving, right? This was perfectly tailored for misinformation and conspiracy theory and confirmation bias and just a complete failure of public health split along political lines. Something like 97% of Americans are actually under lockdown orders now. So you got to think that social distancing is happening even in, you know, the reddest of red counties to some degree. But up until very recently, there were scenes of people in packed churches. And how this is going to interact with our politics in the coming months, I don't know, but it's been a pretty depressing spectacle to watch on social media. Well, I'm always amazed by well, first place, the thing to really know about America is we're a really strange place. We're a really weird place. We put on a story that we all believe that has to do with us sort of all heading in the right direction together. But I remember one thing to my father, who was he was a freshman in college when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and he went off to the Pacific and did his thing and then finished college. And I never thought about it at all. And then Tom Brokaw came up with the notion of the greatest generation, and I said, oh, that's my gosh, my own father lived childhood in the Depression and then going off to war. And I said, dad, do you know you're the greatest generation? And he looked up and said, if you had known one of the enlisted men on my ship, you would never use that vowel phrase again. And he just said, the level of ignorance of racism. I'm not at all speaking to the troops of today for whom I have a great respect, and obviously we're talking about men who were raised in the mostly Southerners on his ships, but we're a strange country. And I really realized it when there was a video of a woman, I don't know where, but she was somewhere in Trump's fan, and she was driving somewhere, and I think a cop and a cameraman, at the same time camera person, were witnessing this moment where the policeman was saying, you have to go home. This isn't safe. And she said, I'm covered in Jesus's blood. I tweeted that as the atheists have finally found their Super Bowl commercial. Yes, but on the other hand, can you imagine to live in that life, she's much more at peace with death than we are? Do I really have that belief, which to us doesn't even sound like a good thing, like, you're covered in Jesus's blood. Like, is that good or bad? I wish she had said blood of the Lamb, or something even more cultic and creepy, but for some reason, I thought Jesus's blood was more I don't know, but to be covered in it. I'm sure this goes back. I always say the people who really understand their religions are the fundamentalists. We all say the worst things about them. But I'm like, you read the Quran and you're like, It's a pretty bloodthirsty book. But we all come along, and I'm a Catholic, and I just sort of we all pick and choose. We use our birth control, whatever. But then there are these people who really believe this stuff, and, you know, there are snake handlers and and why do we I mean, not not bringing you into this, obviously, but who do we who go to, like, St. John the Divine and then, like, have a nice brunch afterwards with Joan Didion or whatever? Why do we think that we are better than they are? They seem to really understand it. I'll take the Brunch with Joan Didion. Can I meet you for brunch after church? Yes, you may. During which I'll be praying for your soul. Your reference to birth control reminded me of one of your recent delightful tweets. This is right at the beginning of our quarantine, where we're wiping off packages with clorox. And I think you wrote, I haven't been this nervous about getting something wrong since I got my first diaphragm in 1983, or whatever. Well, it was the same. It was really I mean, it was a joke, but it was true. I remember being a young person, and you think you're doing it right, and with most things, if you're mostly doing it right, then you're mostly getting the benefit. But I remember this thing like, if I get this wrong, it's going to be this incredible disaster. Like, there's no a little bit or not. It's all 100%. But mentioning that you ask what's going to change? I think we're going to see a very positive change in sexuality. Because being my generation, which was after the sexual revolution, before AIDS had really spilled into the heterosexual population or was even understood, sex was this font of tremendous pleasure and tremendous closeness to the young man whom I dated or whom I was in a relationship with. Kind of serial monogamy as a dater. And it was this intensely exquisite thing that would keep you in relationships longer and that would give you an illusion of more closeness of the true minds on something. And now I hear so many young people, especially young women, whom you would think, well, boy, they have the keys to the kingdom. There's nothing to hold them back, and they're miserable. And I think a little bit more discernment, a little bit higher stakes, a little bit more sense, that, okay, let's get to know each other. Let's find out a lot about each other. Let's find out our testing on this. Not just the Callus SPD testing, but I think this could really change this idea of ultimate randomness, especially for heterosexual youngish women. The idea that that is a pleasurable thing for the majority is an error in thinking that's not accurate about women. So I think that this may begin to change that porn driven culture which has been so bad for most young women. Well, we're going to talk about women in a second because we're getting into politics. I want to drop your Twitter handle here because I don't know where this is going to be paywalled, but everyone should follow you on Twitter. What's your Twitter handle? It's at Caitlin Pacific. Yeah. So everyone should follow Caitlin. Caitlin has figured out Twitter, and it's delightful. Thank you. Okay, so the election. My God, what have we done here? We have a nation of 330,000,000 people. We couldn't find one who either doesn't have dementia or doesn't seem to have dementia. It is viewed because if you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. You'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast and to other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our a private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, jumping into an AMA here. We got questions over Twitter and by email. I have audio for, I believe, most of those questions. Let's jump in. First question. Hi, Sam, I'd rather remain anonymous. My question for you pertains to being pro vaccine and antirestrictions, a position unmoored from any political base in this interesting timeline. I listened intently to your last on Disappointing my Audience segment, and I'm wondering if perhaps you're allowing your understandable frustration with a backwards antivaccine minority to obscure your view of what these restrictions have really been like for much of America that does not have the luxury of remote work. My wife and I have been incredibly fortunate these past two years, but we have many friends that have lost careers, businesses and family without the ability to stay home and stay safe. That is increasingly classified as a virtuous position. I consider myself deeply pro vaccine and also vehemently antilockdown, a position born of a career managing risk in complex systems for the aerospace and defense industries. The absolute risk that children and vaccinated individuals have faced from COVID has been well below ordinary background hazards for nearly a year now, and I believe our failure to grasp the harm we are inflicting on children, working women, and the poor risks further polarization if it is not immediately stopped. Do you feel that unrelenting mandates and restrictions from the left are justified? And what do you feel they will do to our already splintered political and class structures if allowed to persist? Thanks so much for taking my question. Okay, well, good question. Actually. I agree with most of that, probably all of that, and yet the question was asked as though I was expected not to, which makes me think there's something and I'm also looking at some of these other questions here which put this concern in my mind. There's something about the way I've spoken about COVID and vaccines and misinformation that has conveyed the sense that I'm completely in favor of the most draconian measures we've taken to achieve zero COVID, which, apart from in the first month or so, was never in the cards. I take all of those points. I think it's almost impossible to exaggerate the difference between good and bad luck with respect to what one was doing to earn a living in particular when the pandemic hit. And this interacts with the variable of class, but not entirely. I mean, there were people who were in fact very well off before the pandemic hit but happened to be in industries that just could not survive anything like a lockdown. So I'm going to think of people who owned movie theater chains or restaurants, no matter how successful, unless you had a restaurant that could pivot to delivery. There were some great restaurants that failed during the pandemic and all of this was just luck, right? So I take the point that some people have been very lucky and had it very easy comparatively. In fact, some people's businesses grew during the pandemic and of course this differed by country too, where there were some countries that locked down much harder and much more effectively than we did in the US. I think in the beginning, locking down and locking down harder than we managed to do made eminent sense. Right. We didn't know what we were dealing with and there was the possibility of achieving something like zero COVID, although our openness to immigration and travel would have always posed a problem there. Right. We would have had to have closed the borders. But the rationale for locking down then was not so much achieving zero COVID, it was to avoid crashing our health care system. And it made perfect sense and the people who were complaining about it at the time had no leg to stand on and we spent an enormous amount of money trying to ensure that no one was too badly damaged by our efforts there. But once we began to understand the scope of the disease and how it was transmitted and needless to say, once we got effective vaccines, then are thinking about what was saying public policy shifted and had to shift and perhaps it should have shifted more. I think it's pretty clear at this point that the degree to which we closed the schools and the length of those closures turned out to be a very significant mistake. Distance learning didn't work all that well and once we got to a position where anyone who wanted to get vaccinated could get vaccinated, then I think the rationale for closing schools and frankly, even forcing kids to wear masks in schools, generally speaking, all of that is at minimum quite debatable. And my mind is not settled on some of these points. But many things have changed. Vaccines are ubiquitous. We have treatments for COVID now that we didn't have even a few months ago. And the latest variant, Omacron, which I think has a 98% prevalence, now appears to be far more mild, especially if you've been vaccinated. And COVID, as we know, has always been comparatively mild in kids. So as for lockdowns and even mandates, at this point I am skeptical, right? I think mandates are probably counterproductive across the board. My friend Peter Tia just wrote a nice article avidly supporting vaccines and just as avidly condemning mandates. You can look that up on his website, and I think I agree with basically every point he makes. The one thing I would emphasize, though, is that his argument only makes sense in the presence of a disease that is comparatively benign. And much of my thinking in the last year or year and a half around COVID has been not so much worrying about COVID per se. Again, once we got good vaccines, things changed a lot. And now, in the presence of good treatments, things have changed again. What has worried me most is that we seem completely unable to depoliticize a conversation about basic epidemiological facts, and this is terrifying. If you imagine a much more lethal pandemic, again, it's possible to imagine that as you turn the lethality dial up, everyone's politics will magically evaporate. All the conspiracy thinking will find nowhere to land. Just the sheer terror of mortality will clarify everyone's epistemology. No one will have any time for Alex Jones when they see a sufficient number of bodies stacked like cordwood in a park. But I'm not so sure. I think the fragmentation of our media ecosystem I think what's happened on podcasts and in newsletters and in right wing media, I think the ways in which Republicans in particular have tried to leverage an antivax hysteria something like this, I think is quite possible, even in the presence of much more serious disease. And if that's the case, and we were to fail to solve our problems of coordination and cooperation and basic trust of institutions and public health messaging in the presence of something ten or 20 or 30 times more lethal, that's what I'm worried about. It has been a very long time since I was personally worried about catching COVID I haven't caught it. I still do what I can to keep myself and my family safe. Much of my thinking here is still focused on the few members of our family who have significant comorbidities and for whom even a vaccine doesn't seem like a perfect insurance policy. But if you've gotten the idea that I think we should be responding to COVID itself as though it were a terrifyingly lethal illness at this point, that's not what I've meant to convey. What I've meant to convey is my absolute astonishment and despair in the face of the fragmentation of our society, the total loss of trust in institutions, in fact, the conviction among so many otherwise smart people that we don't even need institutions. That's the old way. Now we're going to just run this thing by podcast and newsletter and Twitter feed. That's how we're going to deal with all the challenges we face in this century. Cybersecurity, cyber terrorism, the remaining threat of nuclear war, climate change, pandemics natural and engineered, the threat of artificial intelligence run amok, the pressures exerted on our society by wealth inequality. All we need to do is move fast and break things. We just need disruptors. We're going to run this whole thing like it's a new tech startup. That's how we're going to maintain cruising altitude into the 22nd century. That's completely insane. It feels in some sense like the teenagers have taken over the place. There's no expertise that matters, right? You can't trust the experts anymore. No, we're all going to get online and become epidemiologists and virologists and immunologists in a few short weeks by doing a lot of Google searching and YouTube. Douglas Murray told me recently that he saw a tweet where someone said on Twitter, oh, look, all the people who knew everything about COVID last week now know everything about Afghanistan. I mean, that is the spirit of the time and it's not good for us. The truth is, I have at no point in this pandemic had a strong opinion about COVID or public health measures. I have just had a strong opinion that it makes no sense for unqualified people to have strong opinions on these matters and that it's dangerous when you have millions and millions of people deciding that their intuitions about a brand new pathogen and the first significant pandemic in anyone's lifetime should supersede the product of rational scientific investigation by those who are most qualified to perform it. And the difference between dispassionate scientific analysis of COVID or anything else and advocacy, right? There is a difference there that is very difficult to digest. And we are clearly bad at doing this and we have to get our act together because this will not be the last pandemic. In fact, given how disruptive COVID has been, I would bet that the threat of bioterrorism has increased significantly. This is about the easiest way possible to disrupt a society. And if you're a nihilist or you're insane or you're a jihadist or you're a fanatic of some other stripe, well then bioterrorism just got its Super Bowl commercial. So getting better at responding to a pandemic, getting better at producing vaccines and getting people to actually take them, I consider that one of our most important tasks as a society at this point. Okay, next question. Hi, Sam. My name is Andy and I live in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My question for you is related to mindfulness and memories. I've been finding a lot of value in your guided meditations on the waking up app. And since I've started practicing, I've noticed an improvement in my ability to recenter myself. In times of stress, especially when confronted with embarrassing or regrettable memories, some people suggest that memories like these resurface now and then because they aren't fully resolved. Do you think that these memories need a resolution or is mindfulness the best way to manage them? Thanks, Sam. Thank you for the question, Andy. I don't have much of a psychodynamic interest in mulling over the past. It's not to say that's not every useful. There are certainly patterns you can discover and making that discovery can equip you to live differently, right? If you see you keep getting into the same situations and suffering the same kinds of collisions with other people or circumstances, there may be something to resolve conceptually about all that. But generally speaking, the fact that a painful memory or an embarrassing one surfaces and that it is painful or embarrassing in the present, that doesn't really suggest to me that there's something unresolved about that. It's just a more general symptom of this feeling of being a self. That's what's unresolved for everyone until you can resolve it. It just feels lousy to feel identified with this fictional center of gravity, especially in the midst of unpleasant thoughts about one's past or future, right? So the interesting question is how is it that in the present moment a memory of something that happened even quite long ago can arise in the totally evanescent way that any memory does and yet carry with it a fair tonnage of misery? How does it impose its weight on you in this moment? Not why does it? Right? That's the sort of resolution you're asking about. But how does it what is the mechanism? How is it possible for something as gossamer as a thought to make you miserable in this moment? Well, the discovery to be made here is that it is something that you're doing, right? There's a contraction, there's a failure to recognize thought as thought. That is the proximate cause of the present suffering. And for that mindfulness really is the antidote. A clear scene of the mechanics here. And the freedom to be felt is the freedom of just watching this otherwise lethal thought just pass you by, right. And realize that you as the conscious witness in this moment are truly unimplicated. The past truly resolves itself when you can stand free of it in the present. Again, there may be other things that are useful to do conceptually. Reframing your thoughts about the past can also help in many ways. You can view some past trauma or embarrassment as the very thing that gave you certain skills or feelings of compassion in the present. You might be able to draw a direct line from something terrible that happened a decade ago to your ability to help specific people in your life with similar challenges in the present. So there's a reframing that is available to us much of the time that can be very powerful. But from my point of view, there is no real antidote to the most basic mental suffering that is better than insight into the illusoryness of the self around which all of our suffering appears to be constellated. Anyway, hope that helps. Andy. Hi, Sam. My name is Isabel, and I live in New York. My question for you is how can you work through a consequential lie by a close and trusted person in your life? How can you forgive and trust again? Can you share your own experience on how you've dealt with lying by someone you care about. Thank you, Sam. Hey, Isabel. Thanks for the question. Well, this goes to the topic of forgiveness, which is more general than the issue of lying. And there for me, the crucial variable in whether or not you can forgive somebody, whether or not an apology is acceptable, is if you can see how this person has changed, if you can see how they view their past action, which you find reprehensible and in this case, a lie, in the same way that you do. Right? Which is to say they disavow it and they assure you that it won't happen again. To take your question generically, assuming we're talking about a significant betrayal of trust, the question for you is, well, can I ever trust this person again? And that depends, at least in part, on their view of what they did, right? Do they regret lying to you, or do they have some defensive story about why it was necessary? So those are the kinds of details that matter, right. I think to forgive someone, we need to feel that there's a plausible path that stretches from who they used to be when they intentionally injured us to who they purport to be now. Right? Someone who can be forgiven and brought back into the fold. But it's also important to acknowledge that it is often hard for people to change. Right? And if you have someone who's quite habituated to lying, that's hard to completely reform unless the person has had some real ethical breakthrough. So sometimes when you catch someone lying, you understand something about who they're likely to be in the future. And forgiveness or apologies aside, it might not be appropriate to trust them all that much going forward, depending on how ingrained this tendency is. So there are many variables that are hopeless to quantify and really must be judged intuitively. Anyway, I hope that helps. Thanks for the question. Hi, Sam. My name is Tim and I live in Ontario, Canada. My question for you is regarding your plans to promote effective altruism by awarding NFTs to certain individuals who donate sufficiently large amounts to certain charitable organizations. I think it's a great idea, but I'm just wondering if you would consider expanding the scope to include people who may not have a lot of money to give or who simply give their time and efforts in a way that also achieves effective altruism and equals or exceeds any good that a monetary donation to a charitable organization might do. Should such people not also be eligible to receive the recognition that these NFTs endow? Thanks very much, Sam. Thanks for the question, Tim. This gives me a chance to clarify something that apparently was not clear, although if you get into the fine print on the giving what we can pledge, it becomes clear it's not about the amount of money that anyone would give. It's the percentage of earnings, right? So it doesn't matter how much money you make. You could be making $30,000 a year. If you're giving a minimum of 10% of what you make, you can take that pledge. Of course, there's this added consideration that many people might realize that the best way they can contribute to the most urgent causes is to simply make a lot of money in some unobjectionable way and give a lot of money each year to those causes rather than volunteer somewhere or spend their time in some way. That's explicitly philanthropic. And this is what Will McCaskill and the other effective altruists call earning to give. And that's what Sam Bankman Freed is up to over there at FTX. And of course, 10% is just the minimum. Many effective altruists give much more than that. And some people pledge to give everything above a certain amount. They decide what they want every year to live on and then give 100% beyond that number. And again, that number can be whatever you want it to be. Right? I mean, I'm not advocating that people live obstacamious lives and give everything else to charity. That's amazing if you want to live that way, but I really don't have a negative conception of wealth here. You take someone like Sam Bankman Freed who's making billions of dollars and will be giving billions of dollars to the most urgent causes, in my mind, it really doesn't matter how much money he spends on himself, right. Because anything he spends on himself really is just a rounding error on the amount of money he will ultimately be giving away. Right. The difference between him living in a studio apartment and him having a 30,000 square foot house in one of the most expensive cities on earth would be almost impossible to discern against his actual wealth. Obviously, he's an outlier, but something like that applies to the rest of us. I do think that if we're going to solve our problems collectively, it's not going to be a matter of convincing the most affluent people and societies to make significant sacrifices. I think we need to improve technology. We need to increasingly produce what we produce in a carbon neutral way, and then we need to prioritize helping people and safeguarding the future. And I really do think we can massively change how we allocate resources without stigmatizing wealth. And part of this has to do with creating virtuous cycles that leverage people's desire for better things. This has happened with electric cars. Elon Musk started building electric cars that did not represent a sacrifice for anyone. He made electric cars some of the most desirable cars ever built. I mean, you have to spend something like $2 million on a combustion engine car to have a car that is faster than the current version of the Model S. So if you want a fast car, it's completely rational to want an electric one at this point. And I think that's the path forward on many other fronts, in particular with the problem of climate change. I think we can get there by focusing on the things we want right for climate change. And now I'm rambling for climate change. We don't even have to talk about climate change. We can just talk about the virtues of having clean air. You just look at the consequences of particulate pollution and how much nicer it is to live in a city that doesn't have any. That's all for climate change. And there you're just talking about people not dying from emphysema and cardiac arrest and everything else that bad air creates. Literally millions of people, globally speaking, die every year because we use dirty fuel that puts particulates into the air. So rather than guilt trip people over risks that seem merely hypothetical to most of them, why not focus on how much nicer our world could be if we weren't breathing bad air everywhere? Anyway, there's just a few thoughts. But the short answer is, at any level of giving, if you're going to give a minimum of 10% of your pretax earnings to some of the most effective charities, that is, not to your alma mater or to the local symphony or anything else you might want to support, that's all good, too, but separate. You can take the giving what we can pledge and the waking up pledge will be structured along those lines. Hey, Sam. This is Clint from Monument, Colorado. My question is this what are your views on transgender women in sports? If you were asked to advise policy on this issue, what would you recommend? Or philosophically, how would you approach this complex and sensitive topic? Well, thank you, Clint, for asking the question that gets everyone canceled. It is the very essence of a fringe issue. But I do have a few thoughts about it. First, it strikes me that there's a spectrum of concerns here. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+9 million children die every year before they reach the age of five. Picture an Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people. One of those every ten days killing children. Only under 524 thousand children a day 1000 an hour 17 or so a minute. That means before I can get to to the end of this sentence some few children very likely will have died in terror and agony. Think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared and their prayers will not be answered. Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way and their parents to grieve in this way either can do nothing to help them or doesn't care to. He is therefore either impotent or evil. And worse than that, most of these people many of these people certainly will be going to hell because they're praying to the wrong God. Just think about that. Through no fault of their own they were born into the wrong culture where they got the wrong theology and they missed the revelation there. There are 1.2 billion people in India at this moment. Most of them are Hindus. Most of them therefore polytheists. No matter how good these people are they are doomed. If you are praying to the monkey god Hanuman you are doomed. You will be tortured in hell for eternity. Now is there the slightest evidence for this? No. It just says so in Mark nine and Matthew 13 and Revelation 14. Perhaps you'll remember from the Lord of the Rings it says when the elves die they go to Valinor but they can be reborn in Middle earth. I say that just as a point of comparison. So God created the cultural isolation of the Hindus. He engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance or revelation and then he created the penalty for this ignorance which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire. On the other hand your run of the mill serial killer in America who spent his life raping and torturing children need only come to Jesus on death row and after a final meal of fried chicken he's going to spend an eternity in heaven after death. One thing should be crystal clear to you. This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability. We're told that God is loving and kind and just and intrinsically good. But when someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath we're told that God is mysterious. Who can understand God's will? And yet this is precisely this merely human understanding of God's will is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place. You know, something good happens to a Christian he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive change in his life. And we're told that God is good. But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents'arms and drowned, we're told that God is mysterious. This is how you play tennis without the net. And I want to suggest to you that it is not only tiresome when otherwise intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. This kind of faith really is the perfection of narcissism. God loves me, don't you know? He he cured me of my eczema. He he makes me feel so good while singing in church. And and just when we had given up hope, he found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother's mortgage. Given all the all that this God of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others, given the misery that's being imposed on some helpless child at this instant, this kind of faith is obscene. To think in this way is to fail to reason honestly or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings. And if God is good and loving and just and kind and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery? Why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft? Now, of course, there's a way of not taking these questions to heart. God is not bound by moral duties. God doesn't have to be good. Whatever he commands is good. So when he commands the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it. This, to me, is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own. If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you're just a Catholic. And I'm not the first person to notice that. It's a very strange sort of loving God who would make salvation depend on believing in Him on bad evidence. If you lived 2000 years ago, there was evidence galore. I mean, he was just performing miracles. But apparently he got tired of being so helpful. And so now we all inherit this very heavy burden of the doctrine's implausibility. And the effort to square it with what we now know about the cosmos and we and what we know about the all two human origins of scripture becomes more and more difficult. I hate to break it to you here at Notre Dame, but Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice. Christianity is not a religion. It repudiates. Human sacrifice. It is a religion that celebrates a single human sacrifice as though it were effective. God so loved the world that he gave his only son. John 316 okay. The idea is that Jesus suffered the crucifixion so that none need suffer hell, except that those billions in India. This doctrine is astride a contemptible history of scientific ignorance and religious barbarism. We come from people who used to bury children under the foundations of new buildings as offerings to their imaginary gods. Just think about that. In vast numbers of societies, people would bury children in postholes. People like ourselves thinking that there's would prevent an invisible being from knocking down their buildings. These are the sorts of people who wrote the Bible. If there is a less moral moral framework, I haven't heard of it./n
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+Drugs and the meaning of life. Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person's thoughts every waking moment. And even in our dreams, we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion and cognition towards states of consciousness that we value. Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal, some are stigmatized, some are dangerous. Though perversely, these sets only partially intersect. Some drugs of extraordinary power and utility, such as psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms and licergic acid diethylamide LSD, pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well tolerated. And yet one can still be sent to prison for their use, whereas drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libidum in almost every society on Earth. There are other points on this continuum. MDMA, or ecstasy, has remarkable therapeutic potential but is also susceptible to abuse, and some evidence suggests that it can be neurotoxic. One of the great responsibilities we have is to educate ourselves along with the next generation, about which substances are worth ingesting and for what purpose, and which are not. The problem, however, is that we refer to all biologically active compounds by a single term drugs, making it nearly impossible to have an intelligent discussion about the psychological, medical, ethical and legal issues surrounding their use. The poverty of our language has been only slightly eased by the introduction of the term psychedelics to differentiate certain visionary compounds which can produce extraordinary insights from narcotics and other classic agents of stupefaction and abuse. However, we should not be too quick to feel nostalgia for the counterculture of the 1960s. Yes, crucial breakthroughs were made socially and psychologically, and drugs were central to the process. But one need only read accounts of the time such as Joan Didian slouching towards Bethlehem to see the problem with a society bent upon rapture at any cost. For every insight of lasting value produced by drugs, there was an army of zombies with flowers in their hair shuffling toward failure and regret, turning on, tuning in and dropping out as wise or even benign. Only if you can then drop into a mode of life that makes ethical and material sense and doesn't leave your children wandering in traffic. Drug abuse and addiction are real problems, of course, the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. In fact, the most abused drugs in the United States now appear to be oxycodone and other prescription painkillers. Should these medications be made illegal? Of course not. But people need to be informed about their hazards, and addicts need treatment, and all drugs, including alcohol, cigarettes and aspirin, must be kept out of the hands of children. I discuss issues of drug policy in some detail in my first book, The End of Faith, and my thinking on the subject hasn't changed. The war on drugs has been lost and should never have been waged. I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one's own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them at enormous expense constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling, murderers, rapists and child molesters makes one wonder whether civilization isn't simply doomed. I have two daughters who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that they choose their drugs wisely, but a life lived entirely without drugs is neither foreseeable nor, I think, desirable. I hope they someday enjoy a morning cup of tea or coffee as much as I do. If they drink alcohol as adults, as they probably will, I will encourage them to do it safely. If they choose to smoke marijuana, I will urge moderation. Tobacco should be shunned, and I will do everything within the bounds of decent parenting to steer them away from it. Needless to say, if I knew that either of my daughters would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or crack cocaine, I might never sleep again. But if they don't try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in their adult lives, I will wonder whether they had missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience. This is not to say that everyone should take psychedelics. As I will make clear in a moment, these drugs pose certain dangers. Undoubtedly, some people cannot afford to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug. It has been many years since I took psychedelics myself, and my abstinence is borne of a healthy respect for the risks involved. However, there was a period in my early 20s when I found psilocybin and LSD to be indispensable tools, and some of the most important hours of my life were spent under their influence. Without them, I might never have discovered there was an inner landscape of mind worth exploring. There's no getting around the role of luck here. If you are lucky and you take the right drug, you will know what it is to be enlightened or to be close enough to persuade you that enlightenment is possible. If you run lucky, you will know what it is to be clinically insane. While I don't recommend the latter experience, it does increase one's respect for the tenuous condition of sanity, as well as one's compassion for people who suffer from mental illness. Human beings have ingested plantbased psychedelics for millennia, but scientific research on these compounds did not begin until the 1950s. By 1965, a thousand studies had been published, primarily on psilocybin and LSD, many of which attested to the usefulness of psychedelics in the treatment of clinical depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, alcohol addiction and the pain and anxiety associated with terminal cancer. Within a few years, however, this entire field of research was abolished in an effort to stem the spread of these drugs among the public. After a hiatus that lasted an entire generation, scientific research on the pharmacology and therapeutic value of psychedelics has quietly resumed. Psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT and Mescalin all powerfully alter cognition, perception and mood. Most seem to exert their influence through the serotonin system in the brain primarily by binding to five H, T, two A receptors, though several have an affinity for other receptors as well, leading to an increased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Although the prefrontal cortex in turn modulates subcortical dopamine production and certain of these compounds, such as LSD, bind directly to dopamine receptors, the effect of psychedelics seems to take place largely outside of dopamine pathways, which could explain why these drugs are not habit forming. The efficacy of psychedelics might seem to establish the material basis of mental and spiritual life beyond any doubt, for the introduction of these substances into the brain is the obvious cause of any numerous apocalypse that follows. It is possible, however, if not actually plausible, to seize this evidence from the other end and argue, as Aldous Huxley did in his classic The Doors of Perception, that the primary function of the brain may be eliminative. Its purpose may be to prevent a transpersonal dimension of mind from flooding consciousness, thereby allowing apes like ourselves to make their way in the world without being dazzled at every step by visionary phenomenon that are irrelevant to their physical survival. Huxley thought of the brain as a kind of reducing valve for mind at large. In fact, the idea that the brain as a filter rather than the origin of mind goes back at least as far as Umri Bergson and William James. In Huxley's view, this would explain the efficacy of psychedelics. They may simply be a material means of opening the tap. Huxley was operating under the assumption that psychedelics decrease brain activity. Some recent data have lent support to this view. For instance, a neuroimaging study of psilocybin suggests that the drug primarily reduces activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in a wide variety of tasks related to self monitoring. However, other studies have found that psychedelics increase activity throughout the brain. Whatever the case, the action of these drugs does not rule out dualism or the existence of realms of mind beyond the brain. But then nothing does. That is one of the problems with views of this kind. They appear to be unfalsifiable. We have reason to be skeptical of the brain as Barrier thesis. If the brain were merely a filter on the mind, damaging it should increase cognition. In fact, strategically damaging the brain should be the most reliable method of spiritual practice available to anyone in almost every case, loss of brain should yield more mind. But that is not how the mind works. Some people try to get around this by suggesting that the brain may function more like a radio a receiver of conscious states rather than a barrier to them. At first glance this would appear to account for the deleterious effects of neurological injury and disease. For if one smashes a radio with a hammer, it will no longer function properly. There's a problem with this metaphor, however. Those who employ it invariably forget that we are the music, not the radio. If the brain were nothing more than a receiver of conscious states it should be impossible to diminish a person's experience of the cosmos by damaging her brain. She might seem unconscious from the outside, like a broken radio, but subjectively speaking, the music would play on. Specific reductions in brain activity might benefit people in certain ways unmasking memories or abilities that are being actively inhibited by the regions in question. But there's no reason to think that the destruction of the central nervous system would leave the mind unaffected, much less improved. Medications that reduce anxiety generally work by increasing the effect of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, thereby diminishing neuronal activity in various parts of the brain. But the fact that dampening arousal in this way can make people feel better does not suggest that they would feel better still if they were drugged into a coma. Similarly, it would be unsurprising if psilocybin reduced brain activity in areas responsible for self monitoring, because that might in part account for the experiences that are often associated with this drug. This does not give us any reason to believe that turning off the brain entirely would yield an increased awareness of spiritual reality. However, the brain does exclude an extraordinary amount of information from consciousness. And like many people who have taken psychedelics, I can attest that these compounds throw open the gates. Positing the existence of mind at large is more tempting in some states of consciousness than in others. But these drugs can also produce mental states that are best viewed as forms of psychosis. As a general matter, I believe that we should be very slow to draw conclusions about the nature of the cosmos on the basis of inner experiences, no matter how profound they may seem. One thing is certain the mind is vaster and more fluid than our ordinary waking consciousness suggests. And it is simply impossible to communicate the profundity or seeming profundity of psychedelic states to those who have never experienced them. Indeed, it is even difficult to remind oneself of the power of these states once they have passed. Many people wonder about the difference between meditation and other contemplative practices and psychedelics. Are these drugs a form of cheating or are they the only means of authentic awakening? They are neither. All psychoactive drugs modulate the existing neurochemistry of the brain either by mimicking specific neurotransmitters or by causing neurotransmitters themselves to be more or less active. Everything that one can experience on a drug is at some level an expression of the brain's potential. Hence, whatever one has seen or felt after ingesting LSD is likely to have been seen or felt by someone somewhere without it. However, it cannot be denied that psychedelics are a uniquely potent means of altering consciousness. Teach a person to meditate, pray, chant or do yoga, and there is no guarantee that anything will happen depending on his aptitude or interest. The only reward for his efforts may be boredom and a sore back. If, however, a person ingests 100 micrograms of LSD, what happens next will depend on a variety of factors. But there is no question that something will happen, and boredom is simply not in the cards. Within the hour, the significance of his existence will bear down upon him like an avalanche. As the late Terence McKenna never tired of pointing out, this guarantee of profound effect, for better or worse, is what separates psychedelics from every other method of spiritual inquiry. Ingesting a powerful dose of a psychedelic drug is like strapping oneself to a rocket. Without a guidance system, one might wind up somewhere worth going and depending on the compound in one's set and setting, some trajectories are more likely than others. But however methodically one prepares for the voyage, one can still be hurled into states of mind so painful and confusing as to be indistinguishable from psychosis. Hence the term psychotomimetic and psychotogenic that are occasionally applied to these drugs. I have visited both extremes on the psychedelic continuum. The positive experiences were more sublime than I could have ever imagined or than I can now faithfully recall. These chemicals disclose layers of beauty that art is powerless to capture and for which the beauty of nature itself is a mere simulacrum. It is one thing to be awestruck by the sight of a giant redwood and amazed at the details of its history and underlying biology. It is quite another to spend an apparent eternity and egoist communion with it. Positive psychedelic experiences often reveal how wondrously at ease in the universe a human being can be. And for most of us, normal waking consciousness does not offer so much as a glimmer of these deeper possibilities. People generally come away from such experiences with a sense that conventional states of consciousness obscure and truncate sacred insights and emotions. If the patriarchs and matriarchs of the world's religions experience such states of mind, many of their claims about the nature of reality would make subjective sense. A Beatific vision does not tell you anything about the birth of the cosmos, but it does reveal how utterly transfigured a mind can be by a full collision with the present moment. However, as the peaks are high, the valleys are deep, my bad trips will without question the most harrowing hours I have ever endured. And they make the notion of hell as a metaphor if not an actual destination, seem perfectly apt. If nothing else, these excruciating experiences can become a source of compassion. I think it may be impossible to imagine what it is like to suffer from mental illness without having briefly touched its shores. At both ends of the continuum, time dilates in ways that cannot be described. Apart from merely observing that these experiences can seem eternal, I have spent hours, both good and bad, in which any understanding that I had ingested a drug was lost and all memories of my past along with it. Immersion in the present moment to this degree is synonymous with the feeling that one has always been and will always be in precisely this condition. Depending on the character of one's experience at that point, notions of salvation or damnation may well apply. Blake's lying about beholding eternity in an hour neither promises nor threatens too much. In the beginning, my experiences with psilocybin and LSD were so positive that I did not see how a bad trip could be possible. Notions of set and setting, admittedly vague, seemed sufficient to account for my good luck. My mental state was exactly as it needed to be. I was a spiritually serious investigator of my own mind, and my setting was generally one of natural beauty or secure solitude. I cannot account for why my adventures with psychedelics were uniformly pleasant until they weren't, but once the doors to hell opened, they appeared to be left permanently ajar thereafter. Whether or not a trip was good in the aggregate, it generally entailed some excruciating detour on the path to sublimity. Have you ever traveled beyond all mere metaphors to the Mountain of Shame and stayed for a thousand years? I do not recommend it. On my first trip to Nepal, I took a rowboat out on Pua Lake in Pocora, which offers a stunning view of the Annapurna range. It was early morning, and I was alone. As the sun rose over the water, I ingested 400 micrograms of LSD. I was 20 years old and had taken the drug at least ten times previously. What could go wrong? Everything, as it turns out. Well, not everything. I didn't drown. I have a vague memory of drifting ashore and being surrounded by a group of Nepali soldiers. After watching me for a while as I oggled them over the gunnel like a lunatic, they seemed on the verge of deciding what to do with me. Some polite words of esperanto and a few mad ore strokes, and I was offshore and into oblivion. I suppose that could have ended differently, but soon there was no lake or mountains or boat, and if I had fallen into the water, I'm pretty sure there would have been no one to swim. For the next several hours, my mind became a perfect instrument of self torture. All that remained was a continuous shattering and terror for which I have no words. An encounter like that takes something out of you. Even if LSD and similar drugs are biologically safe, they have the potential to produce extremely unpleasant and destabilizing experiences. I believe I was positively affected by my good trips and negatively affected by the bad ones for weeks and months. Meditation can open the mind to a similar range of conscious states, but far less haphazardly. If LSD is like being strapped to a rocket, learning to meditate is like gently raising a sail. Yes, it is possible, even with guidance, to wind up someplace terrifying. And some people probably shouldn't spend long periods in intensive practice. But the general effect of meditation training is of settling ever more fully into one's own skin and suffering less. There. As I discussed in The End of Faith, I view most psychedelic experiences as potentially misleading. Psychedelics do not guarantee wisdom or a clear recognition of the selfless nature of consciousness. They merely guarantee that the contents of consciousness will change. Such visionary experiences appear to me to be ethically neutral. Therefore it seems that psychedelic ecstasies must be steered toward our personal and collective wellbeing by some other principle. As Daniel Pinchbeck pointed out in his highly entertaining book Breaking Open the Head, the fact that both the Mayans and the Aztecs use psychedelics, while being enthusiastic practitioners of human sacrifice makes any idealistic connection between plant based shamanism and an enlightened society seem terribly naive. As I discuss elsewhere in my work, the form of transcendence that appears to link directly to ethical behavior and human wellbeing is that which occurs in the midst of ordinary waking life. It is by ceasing to cling to the contents of consciousness, to our thoughts, moods and desires, that we make progress. This project does not in principle require that we experience more content. The freedom from self that is both the goal and foundation of spiritual life is coincident with normal perception and cognition, though admittedly this can be difficult to realize. The power of psychedelics, however, is that they often reveal in the span of a few hours depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime. William James said it about as well as anyone one conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it parted from it by the filmiest of screens. There lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and add a touch. They are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality, which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final, which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question, for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness they may determine attitudes, though they cannot furnish formulas and open a region, though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. I believe that psychedelics may be indispensable for some people, especially those who, like me, initially need convincing that profound changes in consciousness are possible. After that, it seems wise to find ways of practicing that do not present the same risks. Happily, such methods are widely available./n
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+I was going to do a podcast on a series of questions. Got so many questions on the same topic that I think I'm just going to do a single response here and we'll do an Ask Me Anything podcast next time. The question I've now received in many forms goes something like this why is it that you never criticize Israel? Why is it that you never criticize Judaism? Why is it that you always take the side of the Israelis over that of the Palestinians? Now, this is an incredibly boring and depressing question for a variety of reasons. The first is that I have criticized Israel and Judaism. What seems to upset many people is I've kept some sense of proportion. There are something like 15 million Jews on Earth at this moment. There are a hundred times as many Muslims. I've debated rabbis who, when I assume that they believe in a God who can hear our prayers, they stop me mid sentence and say, why would you think I believe in a God who can hear prayers? So there are rabbis, conservative rabbis, who believe in a God so elastic as to exclude every concrete claim about Him, and therefore nearly every concrete demand upon human behavior. And there are millions of Jews, literally millions, among the few million who exist for whom Judaism is very important. And yet they are atheists. They don't believe in God at all. This is actually a position you can hold within Judaism, but it's a total non sequitur in Islam or Christianity. So when we're talking about the consequences of irrational beliefs based on Scripture, the Jews are the least of the least offenders. But I have said many critical things about Judaism. Let me remind you that parts of the Hebrew Bible books like Leviticus and Exodus and Deuteronomy are the most repellent, the most sickeningly, unethical documents to be found in any religion. They're worse than the Quran. They're worse than any part of the New Testament. But the truth is, most Jews recognize this and don't take these texts seriously. It's simply a fact that most Jews and most Israelis are not guided by scripture. And that's a very good thing. Of course, there are some who are. There are religious extremists among Jews. Now, I consider these people to be truly dangerous, and their religious beliefs are as divisive and as unwarranted as the beliefs of devout Muslims. But there are far fewer such people. For those of you who worry that I never say anything critical about Israel, my position on Israel is somewhat paradoxical. There are questions about which I'm genuinely undecided. And there's something in my position, I think, to offend everyone. So acknowledging how reckless it is to say anything on this topic, I'm nevertheless going to think out loud about it for a few minutes. I don't think Israel should exist as a Jewish state. I think it is obscene, irrational and unjustifiable to have a state organized around a religion. So I don't celebrate the idea that there's a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, and I certainly don't support any Jewish claims to real estate based on the Bible, though I just said that I don't think Israel should exist as a Jewish state. The justification for such a state is rather easy to find. We need to look no further than the fact that the rest of the world has shown itself eager to murder the Jews at almost every opportunity. So if there were going to be a state organized around protecting the members of a single religion, it certainly should be a Jewish state. Now, Friends of Israel might consider this a rather tepid defense, but it's the strongest one I've got. I think the idea of a religious state is ultimately untenable. Needless to say, in defending its territory as a Jewish state, the Israeli government and Israelis themselves have had to do terrible things. They have, as they are now, fought wars against the Palestinians that have caused massive losses of innocent life. More civilians have been killed in Gaza in the last few weeks than militants. Now, that's not a surprise, given that Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Occupying it, fighting wars in it is guaranteed to get women and children and other noncombatants killed. There's probably a little question over the course of fighting multiple wars that the Israelis have done things that amount to war crimes. They have been brutalized by this process, that is made brutal by it, but that is largely due to the character of their enemies. Whatever terrible things the Israelis have done, it is also true to say that they have used more restraint in their fighting against the Palestinians than we, the Americans and the Europeans, have used in any of our wars. They have endured more worldwide public scrutiny than any society has ever had to while defending itself against aggressors. The Israelis simply are held to a different standard, and the condemnation leveled at them by the rest of the world is completely out of proportion to what they've actually done. It is clear that Israel is losing the PR war, and has been for years now. One of the most galling things for outside observers about the current war in Gaza is the disproportionate loss of life on the Palestinian side. This doesn't make a lot of moral sense. Israel built bomb shelters to protect its citizens. The Palestinians built tunnels through which they could carry out terror attacks and kidnap Israelis. Should Israel be blamed for successfully protecting its population in a defensive war? I don't think so. But there is no way to look at the images coming out of Gaza, especially of infants and toddlers riddled by shrapnel, and think that this is anything other than a monstrous evil. Insofar as the Israelis are the agents of this evil, it seems impossible to support them. And there's no question that the palestinians have suffered terribly for decades under the occupation. This is where most critics of Israel appear to be stuck. They see these images and they blame Israel for killing and maiming babies. They see the occupation and they blame Israel for making Gaza a prison camp. Now, I would argue this is a kind of moral illusion born of a failure to look at the actual causes of this conflict, as well as a failure to understand the intentions of the people on either side of it. The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time based on Quranic prophecy when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say, oh Muslim, there's a Jew behind me, come and kill him. This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of Palestinians. The discourse in the Muslim world about Jews is utterly shocking. Not only is their widespread Holocaust denial, there's Holocaust denial that then asserts we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened, it didn't happen. But if we get the chance, we will accomplish it. There are children's shows in the Palestinian territories and elsewhere that teach five year olds about the glories of martyrdom and about the necessity of killing Jews. And this gets to the heart of the moral difference between Israel and her enemies. And this is something I discussed in the End of Faith. To see this moral difference, you have to ask what each side would do if they had the power to do it. What would the Jews do to the Palestinians if they could do anything they wanted? Well, we know the answer to that question, because they can do more or less anything they want. The Israeli army could kill everyone in Gaza tomorrow. So what does that mean? Well, it means that when they drop a bomb on a beach and kill four Palestinian children, as happened last week, this is almost certainly an accident. They're not targeting children. They could target as many children as they want. Every time a Palestinian child dies, israel edges ever closer to becoming an international pariah. So the Israelis take great pains not to kill children and other non combatants. Now, is it possible that some Israeli soldiers go berserk under pressure and wind up shooting into crowds of rock throwing children? Of course, you will always find some soldiers acting this way in the middle of a war. But we know that this isn't the general intent of Israel. We know that Israelis do not want to kill noncombatants because they could kill as many as they want, and they're not doing it. What do we know of the Palestinians? What would the Palestinians do to the Jews in Israel if the power imbalance were reversed? Well, they have told us what they would do. For some reason, Israel's critics just don't want to believe the worst about a group like Hamas, even when it declares the worst of itself. We've already had a Holocaust and several other genocides in the 20th century. People are capable of committing genocide. When they tell us they intend to commit genocide, we should listen. There is every reason to believe that the Palestinians would kill all the Jews in Israel if they could. Would every Palestinian support genocide? Of course not. But vast numbers of them, and of Muslims throughout the world would. Needless to say, Palestinians in general, and not just Hamas, have a history of targeting innocent non combatants in the most shocking ways possible. They've blown themselves up on buses and in restaurants. They've massacred teenagers. They've murdered Olympic athletes. They now shoot rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas. And again, the charter of their government in Gaza explicitly tells us that they want to annihilate the Jews, not just in Israel, but everywhere. The truth is that everything you need to know about the moral imbalance between Israel and our enemies can be understood on the topic of human shields. Who uses human shields? Well, Hamas certainly does. They shoot their rockets from residential neighborhoods, from besides schools and hospitals and mosques. Muslims and other recent conflicts in Iraq and elsewhere have used human shields. They have laid their rifles on the shoulders of their own children and shot from behind their bodies. Consider the moral difference between using human shields and being deterred by them. That is the difference we're talking about. The Israelis and other Western powers are deterred, however imperfectly, by the Muslim use of human shields. In these conflicts, as we should be, it is morally abhorrent to kill noncombatants if you can avoid it. It's certainly abhorrent to shoot through the bodies of children to get at your adversary. But take a moment to reflect on how contemptible this behavior is and understand how cynical it is. The Muslims are acting on the assumption, the knowledge, in fact, that the infidels with whom they fight, the very people whom their religion does nothing but vilify, will be deterred by their use of Muslim human shields. They consider the Jews to be the spawn of apes and pigs, and yet they rely on the fact that they don't want to kill Muslim noncombatants. Now, imagine reversing the roles here. Imagine how fatuous, indeed, how comical it would be for the Israelis to attempt to use human shields to deter the Palestinians. Some claim that they have already done this. There are reports that Israeli soldiers have occasionally put Palestinian civilians in front of them as they've advanced into dangerous areas. That's not the use of human shields we're talking about. It's egregious behavior no doubt it constitutes a war crime. But imagine the Israelis holding up their own women and children as human shields. Of course, that would be ridiculous. The Palestinians are trying to kill everyone. Killing women and children is part of the plan. Reversing the roles here produces a grotesque Monty Python skit. If you're going to talk about the conflict in the Middle East, you have to acknowledge this difference. I don't think there's any ethical disparity to be found anywhere that is more shocking or consequential than this. And the truth is, this isn't even the worst that jihadists do. Hamas is practically a moderate organization compared to other jihadist groups. There are Muslims who have blown themselves up in crowds of children, again, Muslim children, just to get at the American soldiers who are handing out candy to them. They have committed suicide bombings, only to send another bomber to the hospital to await the casualties, where they then blow up all the injured, along with the doctors and the nurses, trying to save their lives. Every day that you read about an Israeli rocket gone astray, or Israeli soldiers beating up an innocent teenager, you could have read about ISIS in Iraq, crucifying people on the side of the road, christians and Muslims. Where is the outrage in the Muslim world and on the left over these crimes? Where are the demonstrations? 10,000 10,0000 deep in the capitals of Europe against ISIS? If Israel kills a dozen Palestinians by accident, the entire Muslim world is inflamed. God forbid you burn a Quran or write a novel vaguely critical of the faith, and yet Muslims can destroy their own societies and seek to destroy the west, and you don't hear a peep. So it seems to me you really have to side with Israel here. You have one side which, if it really could accomplish its aims, it would simply live peacefully with its neighbors. And you have another side which is seeking to implement a 7th century theocracy in the Holy Land. There's no peace to be found between these incompatible ideas. That doesn't mean you can't condemn specific actions on the part of the Israelis. And of course, acknowledging the moral disparity between Israel and her enemies doesn't give us any solution to the problem of Israel's existence in the Middle East. Again, granted, there are some percentage of Jews who are animated by their own religious hysteria and their own prophecies. Some are awaiting the Messiah on contested land. Yes, these people are willing to sacrifice the blood of their own children for the glory of God, but for the most part, they are not representative of the current state of Judaism or of the actions of the Israeli government. And it is how Israel deals with these people, their own religious lunatics, that will determine whether they can truly hold the moral high ground. And Israel can do a lot more than it has to disempower them. It can cease to subsidize the delusions of the ultra Orthodox, and it can stop building settlements on contested land. The incompatible religious attachments to this land has made it impossible for Muslims and Jews to negotiate like rational human beings and has made it impossible for them to live in peace. But the onus is still more on the side of the Muslims here. Even on their worst day, the Israelis act with greater care and compassion and self criticism than Muslim combatants have anywhere, ever. And again you have to ask yourself, what do these groups want? What would they accomplish if they could accomplish anything? What would the Israelis do if they could do what they want? They would live in peace with their neighbors. If they had neighbors who would live in peace with them, they would simply continue to build out their high tech sector and thrive. What do groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda and even Hamas want? They want to impose their religious views on the rest of humanity. They want to stifle every freedom that decent and educated and secular people care about. This is not a trivial difference. And yet, judging from the level of condemnation that Israel now receives, you would think the difference ran the other way. This kind of confusion puts us all in danger. This is the great story of our time. For the rest of our lives and the lives of our children, we're going to be confronted by people who don't want to live peacefully in a secular, pluralistic world because they are desperate to get to paradise, and they're willing to destroy the very possibility of human happiness along the way. The truth is, we are all living in Israel. It's just that some of us haven't realized it yet. You?/n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I once participated in a 23 day wilderness program in the mountains of Colorado. If the purpose of this course was to expose students to dangerous lightning and half the world's mosquitoes, it was fulfilled. On the first day, what was in essence a forced march through hundreds of miles of backcountry culminated in a ritual known as the Solo, where we were finally permitted to rest alone on the outskirts of a gorgeous alpine lake for three days of fasting and contemplation. I had just turned 16, and this was my first taste of true solitude since exiting my mother's womb. It proved a sufficient provocation. After a long nap and a glance at the icy waters of the lake, the promising young man I imagined myself to be was quickly cut down by loneliness and boredom. I filled the pages of my journal not with the insights of a budding naturalist, philosopher or mystic, but with a list of the foods on which I intended to gorge myself the instant I returned to civilization. Judging from the state of my consciousness at the time, millions of years of hominid evolution had produced nothing more transcendent than a craving for a cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake. I found the experience of sitting undisturbed for three days amid pristine breezes and starlight with nothing to do but contemplate the mystery of my existence to be a source of perfect misery for which I could not see so much as a glimmer of my own contribution. My letters home in their plaintiveness and self pity rivaled any written at Shiloh or Gallipoli. So I was more than a little surprised when several members of our party, most of whom were a decade older than I, described their days and nights of solitude in positive, even transformational terms. I simply didn't know what to make of their claims to happiness. How could someone's happiness increase when all the material sources of pleasure and distraction had been removed? At that age, the nature of my own mind did not interest me. Only my life did, and I was utterly oblivious to how different life would be if the quality of my mind were to change. Our minds are all we have. They're all we have ever had, and they're all we can offer others. This might not be obvious, especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement when your goals are unrealized, when you are struggling to find a career, or you have relationships that need repairing. But it's the truth. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved. If you're perpetually angry, depressed, confused and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won't matter how successful you become or who is in your life, you won't enjoy any of it. Most of us could easily compile a list of goals we want to achieve or personal problems that need to be solved. But what is the real significance of every item on such a list? Everything we want to accomplish to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better job is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking, this is a false hope. I'm not denying the importance of achieving one's goals, maintaining one's health, or keeping one's children clothed and fed. But most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present. We're trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied. Now, acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and therefore the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have made this claim for ages, but a growing body of scientific research now bears it out. A few years after my first painful encounter with solitude in the winter of 1987, I took the drug three four methylene dioxy N methylamphetamine MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, and my sense of the human mind's potential shifted profoundly. Although MDMA would become ubiquitous at dance clubs and raves in the 1990s, at that time I didn't know any one of my generation who had tried it. One evening, a few months before my 20th birthday, a close friend and I decided to take the drug. The setting of our experiment bore little resemblance to the conditions of Dionysian abandoned, under which MDMA is now often consumed. We were alone in a house, seated across from each other on opposite ends of a couch and engaged in quiet conversation as the chemical worked its way into our heads. Unlike other drugs with which we were by then familiar marijuana and alcohol, MDMA produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. Our mind seemed completely clear. In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that I loved my friend. This shouldn't have surprised me. He was, after all, one of my best friends. However, at that age I was not in the habit of dwelling on how much I loved the men in my life. Now I could feel that I loved him, and this feeling had ethical implications that suddenly seemed as profound as they now seemed pedestrian on the page. I wanted him to be happy. That conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the inside appeared to restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance. The sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. I could no more have felt envy at that moment than I could have wanted to poke out my own eyes. What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed these gifts on him, I would have. Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own. A certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections. Perhaps, but the general feeling remained one of absolute sobriety and of moral and emotional clarity unlike any I had ever known. It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life. And yet the change in my consciousness seemed entirely straightforward. I was simply talking to my friend about what I don't recall, and I realized that I had ceased to be concerned about myself. I was no longer anxious, self critical, guarded by irony in competition, avoiding embarrassment, ruminating about the past and future, or making any other gesture of thought or attention that separated me from him. I was no longer watching myself through another person's eyes. And then came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be. I was feeling boundless love for one of my best friends, and I suddenly realized that if a stranger had walked through the door at that moment, he or she would have been fully included in this love. Love was, at bottom, impersonal and deeper than any personal history could justify. Indeed, a transactional form of love I love you because now made no sense at all. The interesting thing about this final shift in perspective was that it was not driven by any change in the way I felt. I was not overwhelmed by a new feeling of love. The insight had more the character of a geometric proof. It was as if, having glimpsed the properties of one set of parallel lines, I suddenly understood what must be common to them all. The moment I could find a voice with which to speak, I discovered that this epiphany about the universality of love could be readily communicated. My friend got the point at once. All I had to do was ask him how he would feel in the presence of a total stranger at that moment, and the same door opened in his mind. It was simply obvious that love, compassion and joy and the joy of others extended without limit the experience was not of love growing, but of its being no longer obscured. Love was, as advertised by mystics and crackpots through the ages, a state of being. How had we not seen this before? And how could we overlook it ever again? It would take me many years to put this experience into context. Until that moment, I had viewed organized religion as merely a monument to the ignorance and superstition of our ancestors. But now I knew that Jesus, the Buddha, Lao TSU, and the other saints and stages of history had not all been epileptic, schizophrenics or frauds. I still considered the world's religions to be mere intellectual ruins, maintained at enormous economic and social cost. But I now understood that important psychological truths could be found in the rubble. 20% of Americans describe themselves as spiritual, but not religious, although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously. Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn. And yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support. Before going any further, I should address the animosity that many readers feel toward the term spiritual. Whenever I use the word as in referring to meditation as a spiritual practice, I hear from fellow skeptics and atheists who think that I've committed a grievous error. The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, which is the translation of the Greek numa meaning breath. Around the 13th century, the term became entangled with beliefs about immaterial souls, supernatural beings, ghosts, and so forth. It acquired other meanings as well. We speak of the spirit of a thing as its most essential principle, or of certain volatile substances and liquors as spirits. Nevertheless, many nonbelievers now consider all things spiritual to be contaminated by medieval superstition. I do not share their semantic concerns. Yes, to walk the aisles of any spiritual bookstores to confront the yearning and credulity of our species by the yard. But there is no other term apart from the even more problematic mystical or the more restrictive contemplative with which to discuss the efforts that people make through meditation, psychedelics, or other means to fully bring their minds into the present or to induce non ordinary states of consciousness. And no other word links this spectrum of experience to our ethical lives. Throughout this book, I discuss certain classically spiritual phenomenon, concepts and practices in the context of our modern understanding of the human mind, and I cannot do this while restricting myself to the terminology of ordinary experience. So I will use spiritual, mystical, contemplative and transcendent without further apology. However, I will be precise in describing the experiences and methods that merit these terms. For many years, I've been a vocal critic of religion, and I won't ride that same hobby horse here. I hope that I've been sufficiently energetic on this front that even my most skeptical readers will trust that my bullshit detector remains well calibrated. As we advance over this new terrain, perhaps the following assurance can suffice. For the moment, nothing in this book needs to be accepted on faith. Although my focus is on human subjectivity, I am, after all, talking about the nature of experience itself. All my assertions can be tested in the laboratory of your own life. In fact, my goal is to encourage you to do just that. Authors who attempt to build a bridge between science and spirituality tend to make one of two mistakes. Scientists generally start with an impoverished view of spiritual experience, assuming that it must be a grandiose way of describing ordinary states of mind parental love, artistic inspiration, awe at the beauty of the night sky. In this vein, one finds Einstein's amazement at the intelligibility of nature's laws described as though it were a kind of mystical insight. New Age thinkers usually enter the ditch on the other side of the road. They idealize altered states of consciousness and draw specious connections between subjective experience and the spookier theories at the frontiers of physics. Here we are told that the Buddha and other contemplatives anticipated modern cosmology or quantum mechanics, and that by transcending the sense of self, a person can realize his identity with the one mind that gave birth to the cosmos. In the end, we are left to choose between pseudospirituality and pseudoscience. Few scientists and philosophers have developed strong skills of introspection. In fact, most doubt that such abilities even exist. Conversely, many of the greatest contemplatives know nothing about science. But there is a connection between scientific fact and spiritual wisdom, and it is more direct than most people suppose. Although the insights we can have in meditation tell us nothing about the origins of the universe, they do confirm some well established truths about the human mind. Our conventional sense of self is an illusion. Positive emotions such as compassion and patience are teachable skills, and the way we think directly influences our experience of the world. There is now a large literature on the psychological benefits of meditation. Different techniques produce long lasting changes in attention, emotion, cognition and pain perception, and these correlate with both structural and functional changes in the brain. This field of research is quickly growing, as is our understanding of selfawareness and related mental phenomenon. Given recent advances in neuroimaging technology, we no longer face a practical impediment to investigating spiritual insights in the context of science. Spirituality must be distinguished from religion because people of every faith and none have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim or a Hindu can experience self transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light, constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs. Because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another, a deeper principle must be at work. That principle is the subject of this book. The feeling that we call eye is an illusion. There is no discrete self or ego living like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. And the feeling that there is the sense of being perched somewhere behind your eyes, looking out at a world that is separate from yourself, can be altered or entirely extinguished. Although such experiences of self transcendence are generally thought about in religious terms, there is nothing in principle, irrational about them. From both a scientific and philosophical point of view, they represent a clearer understanding of the way things are deepening. That understanding and repeatedly cutting through the illusion of the self, is what is meant by spirituality. In the context of this book. Confusion and suffering may be our birthright, but wisdom and happiness are available. The landscape of human experience includes deeply transformative insights about the nature of one's own consciousness. And yet it is obvious that these psychological states must be understood in the context of neuroscience, psychology and related fields. I'm often asked, what will replace organized religion? The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive. Doctrines such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or the death in defense of Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions, but what about love, compassion, moral goodness and self transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is. This book is by turns a seeker's memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner lives the feeling of self that we call I. I have not set out to describe all the traditional approaches to spirituality and to weigh their strengths and weaknesses. Rather, my goal is to pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion. There is a diamond there, and I've devoted a fair amount of my life to contemplating it. But getting it in hand requires that we remain true to the deepest principles of scientific skepticism. Where I do discuss specific teachings, such as those of Buddhism or invaded Vedanta, it isn't my purpose to provide anything like a comprehensive account. Readers who are loyal to any one tradition or who specialize in the academic study of religion may view my approach as the quintessence of arrogance. I consider it rather a symptom of impatience. There is barely time enough in a book or in a life to get to the point. Just as a modern treatise on weaponry would omit the casting of spells and would very likely ignore the slingshot and the boomerang. I will focus on what I consider the most promising lines of spiritual inquiry. My hope is that my personal experience will help readers to see the nature of their own minds in a new light. A rational approach to spirituality seems to be what is missing from secularism and from the lives of most of the people I meet. The purpose of this book is to offer readers a clear view of the problem, along with some tools to help them solve it for themselves. The Search for Happiness one day you will find yourself outside this world, which is like a mother's womb. You will leave this earth to enter while you are yet in the body of vast expanse, and know that the words God's earth is vast. Name this region from which the saints have come. Gelalidine Rumi I share the concern expressed by many atheists that the terms spiritual and mystical are often used to make claims not merely about the quality of certain experiences, but about reality at large. Far too often, these words are invoked in support of religious beliefs that are morally and intellectually grotesque. Consequently, many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self deception. This is a problem because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available. Many of the beliefs people form on the basis of these experiences are false. But the fact that most atheists will view a statement like Rumi's as a symptom of the man's derangement grants a kernel of truth to the rantings of even our least rational opponents. The human mind does indeed contain vast expanses that few of us ever discover. And there is something degraded and degrading about many of our habits of attention as we shop, gossip, argue, and ruminate our way to the grave. Perhaps I should speak only for myself here. It seems to me that I spend much of my waking life in a neurotic trance. My experiences in meditation suggest, however, that an alternative exists. It is possible to stand free of the juggernaut of self, if only for moments at a time. Most cultures have produced men and women who have found that certain deliberate uses of attention meditation, yoga, prayer can transform their perception of the world. Their efforts generally begin with the realization that even in the best of circumstances, happiness is elusive. We seek pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, sensations and moods. We satisfy our intellectual curiosity. We surround ourselves with friends and loved ones. We become connoisseurs of art, music or food. But our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for an hour or perhaps a day. But then they subside, and the search goes on. The effort required to keep boredom and other unpleasantness at bay must continue moment to moment. Ceaseless change is an unreliable basis for lasting fulfillment. Realizing this, many people begin to wonder whether a deeper source of well being exists. Is there a form of happiness beyond the mere repetition of pleasure and avoidance of pain? Is there a happiness that does not depend upon having one's favorite foods available, or friends and loved ones within arm's reach or good books to read or something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be happy before anything happens? Before one's desires are gratified? In spite of life's difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease and death we are all, in some sense, living our answer to this question and most of us are living as though the answer were no. No. Nothing is more profound than repeating one's pleasures and avoiding one's pains. Nothing is more profound than seeking satisfaction sensory, emotional and intellectual moment after moment. Just keep your foot on the gas until you run out of road. Certain people, however, come to suspect that human existence might encompass more than this. Many of them are led to suspect this by religion, by the claims of the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated figure. And such people often begin to practice various disciplines of attention as a means of examining their experiences closely enough to see whether a deeper source of wellbeing exists. They may even sequester themselves in caves or monasteries for months or years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would a person do this? No doubt there are many motives for retreating from the world and some of them are psychologically unhealthy. In its wisest form, however, the exercise amounts to a very simple experiment. Here is its logic if there exists a source of psychological wellbeing that does not depend upon merely gratifying one's desires then it should be present even when all the usual sources of pleasure have been removed. Such happiness would be available to a person who has declined to marry her high school sweetheart, renounced her career in material possessions and gone off to a cave or to some other spot that is inhospitable to ordinary aspirations. One clue to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement, which is essentially what we're talking about is considered a punishment inside a maximum security prison. Even when forced to live among murderers and rapists most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant time alone in a room. And yet, contemplatives in many traditions claim to have experienced extraordinary depths of psychological wellbeing while living in isolation for vast stretches of time. How should we interpret this? Either the contemplative literature is a catalog of religious delusion, psychopathology and deliberate fraud or people have been having liberating insights under the name of spirituality and mysticism for millennia. Unlike many atheists, I have spent much of my life seeking experiences of the kind that gave rise to the world's religions. Despite the painful results of my first few days alone in the mountains of Colorado, I later studied with a wide range of monks, llamas, yogis, and other contemplatives, some of whom had lived for decades in seclusion doing nothing but meditating. In the process, I spent two years on silent retreat myself in increments of one week to three months, practicing various techniques of meditation for twelve to 18 hours a day. I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time, doing nothing else, not speaking, reading or writing, just making a moment to moment effort to observe the contents of consciousness. One has experiences that are generally unavailable to people who have not undertaken a similar practice. I believe that such states of mind have a lot to say about the nature of consciousness and the possibilities of human. Wellbeing, leaving aside the metaphysics mythology and sectarian dogma, what contemplatives throughout history have discovered is that there is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves. There is an alternative to simply identifying with the next thought that pops into consciousness and glimpsing. This alternative dispels the conventional illusion of the self. Most traditions of spirituality also suggest a connection between self transcendence and living ethically. Not all good feelings have an ethical valence, and pathological forms of ecstasy surely exist. I have no doubt, for instance, that many suicide bombers feel extraordinarily good just before they detonate themselves in a crowd. But there are also forms of mental pleasure that are intrinsically ethical. As I indicated earlier, for some states of consciousness, a phrase like boundless love does not seem overblown. It is decidedly inconvenient for the forces of reason and secularism that if someone wakes up tomorrow morning feeling boundless love for all sentient beings, the only people likely to acknowledge his experience will be representatives of one or another Iron Age religion or New Age cult. Most of us are far wiser than we may appear to be. We know how to keep our relationships in order to use our time well, to improve our health, to lose weight, to learn valuable skills, and to solve many other riddles of existence. But following even the straight and open path to happiness is hard. If your best friend were to ask you how she could live a better life, you would probably find many useful things to say, and yet you might not live that way yourself. On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one's own advice. However, there are deeper insights to be had about the nature of our minds. Unfortunately, they have been discussed entirely in the context of religion and therefore have been shrouded in fallacy and superstition for all of human history. The problem of finding happiness in this world arrives with our first breath, and our needs and desires seem to multiply by the hour. To spend any time in the presence of a young child is to witness a mind ceaselessly buffeted by joy and sorrow. As we grow older, our laughter and tears become less gratuitous. Perhaps, but the same process of change continues. One roiling complex of thought and emotion is followed by the next, like waves in the ocean. Seeking, finding, maintaining and safeguarding our wellbeing is the great project to which we are all devoted, whether or not we choose to think in these terms. This is not to say that we want mere pleasure or the easiest possible life. Many things require extraordinary effort to accomplish, and some of us have learned to enjoy the struggle. Any athlete knows that certain kinds of pain can be exquisitely pleasurable. The burn of lifting weights, for instance, would be excruciating if it were a symptom of terminal illness. But because it is associated with health and fitness, most people find it enjoyable. Here we see that cognition and emotion are not separate. The way we think about experience can completely determine how we feel about it, and we always face tensions and trade offs. In some moments we crave excitement and in others, rest. We might love the taste of wine and chocolate, but rarely for breakfast. Whatever the context, our minds are perpetually moving, generally toward pleasure or its imagined source, and away from pain. I'm not the first person to have noticed this. Our struggle to navigate the space of possible pains and pleasures produces most of human culture. Medical science attempts to prolong our health and to reduce the suffering associated with illness, aging, and death. All forms of media cater to our thirst for information and entertainment. Political and economic institutions seek to ensure our peaceful collaboration with one another, and the police or the military is summoned when they fail. Beyond ensuring our survival, civilization is a vast machine invented by the human mind to regulate its states. We are ever in the process of creating and repairing a world that our minds want to be in. And wherever we look, we see the evidence of our successes and our failures. Unfortunately, failure enjoys a natural advantage. Wrong answers to any problem outnumber right ones by a wide margin, and it seems that it will always be easier to break things than to fix them. Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will triumph not merely in the end, but in every moment. Our pleasures, however refined or easily acquired, are by their very nature fleeting. They begin to subside the instant they arise, only to be replaced by fresh desires or feelings of discomfort. You can't get enough of your favorite meal until in the next moment, you find that you are so stuffed as to nearly require the attention of a surgeon. And yet, by some quirk of physics, you still have room. For dessert. The pleasure of dessert lasts a few seconds, and then the lingering taste in your mouth must be banished by a drink of water. The warmth of the sun feels wonderful on your skin, but soon it becomes too much of a good thing. A move to the shade brings immediate relief, but after a minute or two the breeze is just a little too cold. Do you have a sweater in the car? Let's take a look. Yes, there it is. You're warm now, but you notice that your sweater is seen better days. Does it make you look carefree or disheveled? Perhaps it's time to go shopping for something new. And so it goes. We seem to do little more than lurch between wanting and not wanting. Thus the question naturally arises is there more to life than this? Might it be possible to feel much better in every sense of better than one tends to feel? Is it possible to find lasting fulfillment despite the inevitability of change? Spiritual life begins with a suspicion that the answer to such questions could well be yes. And a true spiritual practitioner is someone who has discovered that it is possible to be at ease in the world for no reason, if only for a few moments at a time, and that such ease is synonymous with transcending the apparent boundaries of the self. Those who have never tasted such peace of mind might view these assertions as highly suspect. Nevertheless, it is the fact that a condition of selfless well being is there to be glimpsed in each moment. Of course, I'm not claiming to have experienced all such states, but I meet many people who appear to have experienced none of them, and these people often profess to have no interest in spiritual life. This is not surprising. The phenomenon of self transcendence is generally sought and interpreted in a religious context, and it is precisely the sort of experience that tends to increase a person's faith. How many Christians, having once felt their hearts grow as wide as the world, will decide to ditch Christianity and proclaim their atheism? Not many, I suspect. How many people who have never felt anything of the kind become atheists? I don't know. But there's little doubt that these mental states act as a kind of filter. The faithful count them in support of ancient dogma, and their absence gives nonbelievers further reason to reject religion. This is a difficult problem for me to address in the context of a book, because many readers and listeners will have no idea what I'm talking about when I describe certain spiritual experiences and might assume that the assertions I'm making must be accepted on faith. Religious readers present a different challenge. They may think they know exactly what I'm describing, but only insofar as it aligns with one or another religious doctrine. It seems to me that both of these attitudes present impressive obstacles to understanding spirituality in the way that I intend. I can only hope that whatever your background, you will approach the exercises presented in this book with an open mind. Religion east and west we are often encouraged to believe that all religions are the same. All teach the same ethical principles, all urge their followers to contemplate the same divine reality. All are equally wise, compassionate and true within their sphere, or equally divisive and false, depending on one's view. No serious adherence of any faith can believe these things, because most religions make claims about reality that are mutually incompatible. Exceptions to this rule exist, but they provide little relief from what is essentially a zero sum contest of all against all. The polytheism of Hinduism allows it to digest parts of many other faiths. If Christians insist that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, for instance, hindus can make him yet another avatar of Vishnu without losing any sleep. But this spirit of inclusiveness points in one direction only, and even it has its limits. Hindus are committed to specific metaphysical ideas the law of karma and rebirth, a multiplicity of gods that almost every other major religion decries. It is impossible for any faith, no matter how elastic, to fully honor the truth claims of another. Devout Jews, christians and Muslims believe theirs is the one true and complete revelation, because that is what their holy books say of themselves. Only secularist and New Age dabblers can mistake the modern tactic of interfaith dialogue for an underlying unity of all religions. I have long argued that confusion about the unity of religions is an artifact of language. Religion is a term like sports. Some sports are peaceful but spectacularly dangerous free solo rock climbing, for instance. Some are safer but synonymous with violence, as in mixed martial arts. Some entail a little more risk of injury than standing in the shower, like bowling. To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes required to do it. What do all sports have in common, apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful. The same could be said of spirituality. The esoteric doctrines found within every religious tradition are not all derived from the same insights, nor are they equally empirical, logical, parsimonious, or wise. They don't always point to the same underlying reality, and when they do, they don't do it equally well. Nor are all these teachings equally suited for export beyond the cultures that first conceive them. Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn't, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding in many circles. To make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry. In one sense, all religions and spiritual practices must address the same reality. Because people of all faiths have glimpsed many of the same truths, any view of consciousness in the cosmos that is available to the human mind can, in principle, be appreciated by anyone. It is not surprising, therefore, that individual Jews, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists have given voice to some of the same insights and intuitions. This merely indicates that human cognition and emotion run deeper than religion. But we knew that, didn't we? It does not suggest that all religions understand our spiritual possibilities equally well. One way of missing this point is to declare that all spiritual teachings are inflections of the same perennial philosophy. The writer Aldous Huxley brought this idea into prominence by publishing an anthology by that title. Here's how he justified the idea. Philosophy of perennis. The phrase was coined by Leibniz. But The Thing, the metaphysic that recognizes a divine reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds, the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with divine reality, the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the imminent and transcendent ground of all being. The Thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world and in its fully developed forms. It has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this highest common factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than 25 centuries ago. And since that time, the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all principal languages of Asia and Europe. Although Huxley was being reasonably cautious in his wording, this notion of the highest common factor uniting all religions begins to break apart the moment one presses for details. For instance, the Abrahamic religions are incorrigibly dualistic and faith based in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The human soul is conceived as genuinely separate from the divine reality of God. The appropriate attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance is some combination of terror, shame, and awe. In the best case, notions of God's love and grace provide some relief. But the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from and in relationship to a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about his supremacy. The Eastern tradition represents a very different picture of reality and its highest teachings found within the various schools of Buddhism. And the nominally Hindu tradition of advice of a Dante explicitly transcend dualism. By their lights, consciousness itself is identical to the very reality that one might otherwise mistake for God. While these teachings make metaphysical claims that any serious student of science should find incredible, they center on a range of experiences that the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity and Islam rule out of bounds. Of course, it is true that specific Jewish, Christian and Muslim mystics have had experiences similar to those that motivate Buddhism and Invitea. But these contemplative insights are not exemplary of their faith. Rather, they are anomalies that Western mystics have always struggled to understand and to honor, often at considerable personal risk. Given their proper weight, these experiences produce heterodoxies for which Jews, Christians and Muslims have been regularly exiled or killed. Like Huxley, anyone determined to find a happy synthesis among spiritual traditions will notice that the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart often sounded very much like a Buddhist quote the knower and the known are one simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they hear, this is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge. End quote. But he also sounded like a man bound to be excommunicated by his church as he was. Had Eckhart lived a little longer, it seems certain that he would have been dragged into the street and burned alive for these expansive ideas. That is a telling difference between Christianity and Buddhism. In the same vein, it is misleading to hold up the Sufi mystic al Halaj as a representative of Islam. He was a Muslim, yes, but he suffered the most grisly death imaginable at the hands of his coreligionists for presuming to be one with God. Both Ekhart and al Halaj gave voice to an experience of self transcendence that any human being can in principle enjoy. However, their views were not consistent with the central teachings of their faiths. The Indian tradition is comparatively free of problems of this kind. Although the teachings of Buddhism and Invitea are embedded in more or less conventional religions, they contain empirical insights about the nature of consciousness that do not depend upon faith. One can practice most techniques of Buddhist meditation or the method of self inquiry of advaita, and experience the advertised changes in one's consciousness without ever believing in the law of karma or in the miracles attributed to Indian mystics. To get started as a Christian, however, one must first accept a dozen implausible things about the life of Jesus and the origins of the Bible, and the same can be said minus a few unimportant details about Judaism and Islam. If one should happen to discover that the sense of being an individual soul is an illusion, one will be guilty of blasphemy everywhere west of the Indus. There's no question that many religious disciplines can produce interesting experiences in suitable minds. It should be clear, however, that engaging a faith based and probably delusional practice, whatever its effects, isn't the same as investigating the nature of one's mind, absent any doctrinal assumptions. Statements of this kind may seem starkly antagonistic toward Abrahamic religions, but they are nonetheless true. One can speak about Buddhism shorn of its miracles and irrational assumptions. The same cannot be said of Christianity or Islam. Western engagement with Eastern spirituality dates back at least as far as alexander's campaign in India, where the young conqueror is ten philosophers and children. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. There you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I'm here with Joseph Goldstein, who's a very old friend and quite respected meditation teacher, and we're going to talk about all things related to meditation and mindfulness. And Joseph and I have known each other for about 25 years and he was one of my first meditation teachers and became a friend a long time ago. We spent a lot of time studying with other teachers in Asia. He's here recording this interview with me under less than ideal audio conditions. So we apologize for that. Joseph, for those of you who don't know, started the Insight Meditation Society in Western Massachusetts and it's probably done more than anyone, certainly as much as anyone, to establish the practice of mindfulness in the west. And this explosion of interest you see in mindfulness in the scientific community and in clinical practice, it's largely the result of how clearly he and his colleagues have taught it to thousands of Westerners. So Joseph and I are going to talk about mindfulness and the mind in general and probably push into some areas of interest only to us and alienate 99% of our listeners, but that's what we are free to do. So Joseph, thank you for being here and thank you for agreeing to talk about all this with me. I'm delighted to have a chance to get back into the meat of our discussions which we've had over all these years. Joseph and I have had arguments on trips about everything. About everything. And on transcontinental flights where he has been captive and desperate to avoid me, however unsuccessfully. So before we get into esoterica, tell us a little bit about how you got into meditation and how this became your life's work. Well, I was studying philosophy at Columbia University in New York as an undergraduate, and by the time my senior year came around, I was really anxious just to get out and see the world. And this was in 1965 and it was just soon after the Peace Corps was established. So that seemed to me a really good vehicle for getting out and seeing new parts of the world. So I applied to the Peace Corps and I actually applied to go to East Africa. But as fate or karma or accident or whatever, whatever the conditions may be happened, they sent me to Thailand, which turned out to be a very fortunate happening, because while I was in Thailand, I had my first contact, really with Buddhism and Buddhist teachings and meditation. Soon after, I started teaching in Bangkok, I was teaching English. I started going to discussion group at the Marble Temple, which was quite a famous temple in Bangkok. There were some Western monks who were leading the discussion, kind of introducing Westerners to some of the Buddhist ideas and concepts. Of course, having just graduated college in philosophy, I went there full of my own ideas about things, and I would be asking so many questions in the group that people would stop coming. I think we've all been in groups like that. Right. And we've probably both been that person. You were the insufferable blowhardt. Exactly. So finally, this one monk says, joseph, I think you ought to meditate. I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know anybody who meditated. I was 21, 22 years old in the Far East. It was all extremely exotic to me, and it just seemed like a really interesting thing to do. So he gave me some initial instruction, and I also began a little reading. There's one classic book called The Heart of Buddhist Meditation which laid out the basic methodology. And so I gathered kind of all the sitting paraphernalia cushions and this and that to sit. And the very first time, I set my alarm clock for five minutes because I didn't want to oversee it. But something quite amazing happened in that first five minutes, and it really changed the whole course of my life. The first time you sat, you actually connected with the practice and realized it was something worth looking into. Well, what I realized, it wasn't that I had any great enlightenment experience, but what I realized was that there was a way to look into the mind as well as looking out through it. And my whole life I had just been looking out out of my mind rather than looking into it. So it was like a turning in place. And just that was so extraordinary to me. I got so excited, I started inviting my friends over to watch me meditate. Right. Which arguably the most narcissistic thing you could possibly do. Well, more charitably. It was naive. It really came out of this tremendous enthusiasm for what I felt I was discovering. Right. Obviously, they didn't come back very often. It made for a poor viewing experience. Very poor. But that was the beginning. And then over the course of my time in the Peace Corps, I extended time past five minutes a little bit, but still. So how long did it take for you to actually go on intensive retreat? At the end of my Peace Course Day, I had an experience somebody was reading from a Tibetan text friend was reading. So at this point, you had been meditating for what, a year? Yeah, maybe a year, but very intermittently. Just an hour a day or something, probably not even right. But I was dabbling. I was just dabbling and reading and going to some classes trying to find out more about it. But just at the end of my peace course day, before I left for home, I had a really transformative experience listening to somebody read from a Tibetan text. And it just was an experience of opening to an understanding of the mind. And kind of in classical Buddhist terms, they talk about the unborn or the unformed or using words like that to describe the freest aspect of the mind. So something happened. What the hell happened? Somebody was reading this text, Tibetan text, and that was a very early translation of it. Which translation? Which has now been a faulty translation. Faulty translation by Evans Wayne called the Bedding Book of the Great Liberation. There have since been much more careful translations of it, right? And very powerful ones. But even in that faulty translations, have the new translations revised the very line you found? So no. Okay, all right. So let's back up. You've got this faulty Victorian translation of the Betting Book of the Great Liberation, and you have a friend who's reading it out loud to you, right? And then at one point in the reading, just on the word unborn, the mind open to that experience, right? Say more about that. You hear this word unborn. You're looking into your mind all the while what changes? So it's it's a momentary experience that has the power of a lightning wilt. So it's a unique moment of the mind going from being aware of different things arising moment after moment, what sights and sounds and breath and the mind itself. And then upon hearing the word unborn and it's very hard to describe, but if you think literally of what that word means, unborn, it's the experience of non occurrence. Being born is something occurring. So moment after moment experience is being born and dying. Being born and dying. Moment after moment unborn is a moment of non occurrence which broke that stream of continual birth, of continual occurrence. And the metaphor, or similarly one of those, right after that moment, I described it to myself as zero. It was the experience of zero. Right. So the experience was, however difficult it is to characterize, it entailed the loss of ordinary sensory experience. You're no longer seen here in smelling, tasting, touching, thinking. Right? So the lights went out in some sense, the lights went out in some sense, but there was a knowing of that. Right. And this gets into another, deeper discussion of that experience which we might have later. It is the knowing of a reality that doesn't entail ordinary sensory perception. It's zero. Right. Rebooting of the hard drive. Yeah. But one of the things that became so apparent is that zero is not nothing. Zero is a powerful number and perhaps the most powerful number. And the fruit of that experience was the immediate understanding and realization of the selflessness of this whole process we call life. But there's no one to whom it's happening. Right. It's a process of what one teacher described as just empty phenomena, rolling on, meaning empty of self, empty of core substance. Yeah. That experience doesn't refer back to anyone. And that all was just understood completely in that moment. That view of self was just completely gone. What? Take me back to the immediate aftermath of that experience. So your friend is reading this book to you on the word unborn. You have this cessation experience. You come out of it completely. Your mind is blown. Tell them to stop reading. How long do you think you had been gone for? Just a second. Yeah. Momentary. Right. So you have this transformation and now you're articulating it to your friend. What's that next half hour like? The next half hour was like I was in a completely altered sense of everything because it was free of any notion of the self. Center had just dropped away. Right. But this wasn't the fruit of many years of practice, so I really didn't have any I had very little context for understanding this, although I knew enough that something familiar within the Buddhist tradition had just happened, but I didn't understand the mechanism or what led up to it or I didn't have any context. Was there anything negative about it or scary about it? Were you at all destabilized in a way that were you kind of searching to get back to who you were? I wasn't searching to get back to who I was, but there was a period of, I think some days where it was destabilizing of my previous way of being and the conventional way of being. So I was kind of starting to find my sea legs and all this. Right, but was there part of you at all that worried about it, that thought about it in psychopathhological terms? No. Even as there was kind of uncertainty about how to manifest, how to relate? No. I always felt that something tremendously powerful and revealing had happened. Right. To stick with the immediate aftermath was that the character of your experience in that moment was changed. But if I recall correctly, you were experiencing things which now you don't necessarily tend to experience. Now, selflessness is still obvious to you, but there were features of your experience in the immediate aftermath of cessation that are not true right now. What was especially salient or psychedelic or otherwise odd about those next hours? It was like it was days too. Didn't you have a week where you felt like you were as much the other person in the room as you were selling or something like that? Yeah, but also just this happened 50 years ago. So even though the experience is very vivid in terms of impact and understanding, some of the details have faded. But you have had what you consider the same experience again, through the practice of meditation I have, but not actually as dramatic. The aftermath was not as dramatic? Or you actually think that you can detect a different character to the Cessation experience? No, I would say the aftermath was not as dramatic. So talk about the aftermath for a minute first. I wonder I told my friend to stop reading because I knew he didn't understand what had just happened. He just destroyed your mind. There's no point to going on, because from my perspective, I had experienced what that teaching was trying to do. So why keep reading? It was redundant at that point. And so I just wandered off. And I remember this was in a school. It was right next to the Bangkok Zoo. So I was just wondering around I was wandering around in the zoo. And just in this place of the way you expressed it, there was no separating out of myself, separate from everything that was being seen or heard. Right. It was all one thing. But presumably you can do that now in the context of this conversation with me, but it's not quite the same thing. No. What is it? But talk about the positive characteristics of this aftermath experience that is positive, not necessarily as being good versus bad, but positive in terms of something added to the flavor of experience. That's not happening for mostly again, I'm not sure of this, but my sense is that it was just the newness of that experience because it came so out of the blue and so unexpected, and not as the result of a systematic, meditative progression. So the change was so dramatic, so sudden, so unexpected, so without mental preparation. It's a bit like through the looking list. Yeah. All of a sudden you turned inside out. Now that experience is just and the understanding is much more familiar to me. So I think it just doesn't have the same dramatic interest. Right. Do you think there's a difference in just your stability in that experience, so that in the immediate aftermath of Cessation, you were stabilized in that selfless awareness to a degree that is not normal in your life? It's a little hard to say because and something kind of must have had a half life. Right. So it wore off. This transfigured consciousness wore off after over days. Over days. And then you really wanted to find out what the hell had happened. Yeah, exactly. But this is just at the end of my Peace Corps stay. So I was going home, and I had no idea what to do or how to integrate this. But I tried talking to people about the fact that there's really no self. And the self is a construct, of course. People, meaning your rabbi in the Berkshires. Well, to my family when I got home, even to friends before the friends in the Peace Corps, before I left. This is just like a week or two before. So there was this huge transition happening, finishing my time in Thailand, going back to the States. Obviously, people had no way of relating to what I was talking about. So when I went home, it didn't take me long to realize that I wanted to pursue this understanding and actually just a little anecdote. When I was home, I went up to a place called Chapel House at Colgate University to go on a little retreat myself. But this before I had done any intensive practice, right. So I went up to this place, beautiful place, upstate New York, and they had a copy of that text there. And so I got somebody to read me the text, thinking, oh, maybe I can recreate this whole thing. Read it again. Right. So I realized that wasn't the way. And so then I just became motivated to go back to Asia. This is still 1965. No, this is 67. I went into the peace score in 65. And this happened just in the beginning months of 67. So you were part of that wave of Westerners going to India, slightly early part, going to India to meet Eastern teachers of Esoterica. So I was going to go back to Thailand, since this is where all this happened. But I stopped in India on the way, people had given me the names of different Indian teachers and gurus, so I went in Indian. I was just wandering around to some different ashrams. So Hindu ashrams and Buddhist? Yeah. So at this point, you were not committed to Buddhism as the context for your study? I think I was, not so much consciously, but I went to this one Sikh ashram that teaches this what do you call the inner sound? NAD yoga, something like that. So I went there, and it was a very powerful big ashram in the Punjab. I've got tentatives. Now I could be a master of sound that is unadnorable. He was very impressive, very powerful. And everybody who went there was on the on the trajectory of wanting to get initiated into it. So that's all the pressure, the peer pressure, was to go for initiation. But there was just something in me based on this experience that said, this is not my path. So I went for a personal interview with the master, and he wasn't trying to convince me or anything. I said to him, Just doesn't feel the right path for me. I think I'll go back to Thailand. And he said, I think you should stay in India. But not necessarily with him. No, not with him. So as it turned out, that proved to be a very prescient remark. Whether, from my perspective, weren't a turbine all these years, it would have been a very different path. Anyway, I'm going back to the train station to go back to Delhi, to go to Thailand again. In the rickshaw on the way to the train station, the thought pops into my mind. Maybe you should go to Bogaiah, which is the place the Buddha was enlightened. I go to Bogaiah and at this time there are not that many Westerners in Boga. There were very few. I go to this place called the Burmese Vihara where the Westerners were staying, like the Burmese restaurant for Burmese pilgrims. But Burma was closed at that time, so the no Burmese were coming. So the few Westerners there were maybe five or six Westerners. They were staying there. I met some of them. They were a group of Danish people. They were studying meditation with this person named Anakarika Munindra, who had just come back from nine years in Burma and was teaching vapasana, or insight meditation. So he had just come back, he had started teaching in Bogaiah. So these Danish people said, you know, you like to meet Menindee. So I went to see him. He explained the Vipassana practice and it was an immediate connection. It's exactly what I was looking for. But wasn't Vipassana what you had been given in Thailand? Not really. What I didn't give it in Thailand was much more just the preliminary being with the breath. Right. So it was more like a concentration practice in a way. And it was very unintensive when I went to Menindra and he explained the practice and then I started doing it intensively, that's when I realized this is a good expression of what my experience was had been. Right. Well, for our listeners who are unaware of, maybe unaware of the details of apostle practice, can you do just like a two minute guided meditation just to get us there? After you drink that water crackling, water bottle, ruin our audio. Okay, so I go to Meninderjee. He explains the basics of apostolic practice, which is really simple. It's the sitting meditation part, is sitting down, starting with attention on the breath and just feeling the sensations, the experience of the breath and being aware of moment to moment, whatever arises, sensations in the body, thoughts, emotions. We do a little bit of meditation, do like a minute or two. Okay? So if as you're listening to this, you just take some comfortable posture, sitting in a relaxed way. In Vipassana, generally we close our eyes, but can also be done with the eyes open. So sit. And you might begin by taking a few deep breaths, simply as a way of settling into the awareness of the body and let the breath come to its own natural rhythm. And simply be aware or feel the sensations of each breath as it comes into the body, as it leaves the body. It's not a breathing exercise, it's an exercise in awareness. So we simply use the breath as a vehicle for being aware. As you feel the breath going in and out, you may become aware of sounds, background sounds or loud sounds. Then simply notice hearing. Be aware of the experience of hearing how the sound comes and goes. Then returning to the breath, you might begin to feel other sensations in the body, of pressure, of tightness, of tingling, of vibration. If any sensation becomes predominant, become aware of the sensation. Notice how it changes when it's no longer predominant can return to the breath. Be aware of any thoughts or images that appear in the mind. As you're feeling the in breath and outbreath thought may come and at first may carry you away. You're lost in the thought, but at a certain point you become aware that you're thinking. You might make a soft mental note thinking to highlight and emphasize the awareness of thought rather than being lost in it. And notice what happens to the thought in the moment of awareness. Does it continue? Does it disappear? And the thought is no longer there. Again, return to the breath or bodily sensations. So in this way we are just being mindful moment after moment of whatever is the predominant experience in the body, in the mind. And through that awareness we begin to see the changing nature of all these phenomena things are arising and passing away. And in the awareness of this process of change, the mind no longer clings and the mind of nonclinking, of non grasping is really the essence of the positive practice. Well, that's great. So a few things to point out there. One is that is the whole practice in a very short span you can give more or less the entire practice. There's tweaking of the dials that you may want to emphasize for someone in the middle of a three month retreat or given whatever they happen to be experiencing, but in seed form. The whole logic of the practice was just given what's unique about Vapasa. And I think the reason why it has been adopted by so many clinicians and now scientists who are studying meditation is that one. It doesn't require that you add anything strategically to your experience. You're not repeating a mantra, you're not visualizing something. You don't have to develop an interest in or sympathy for historical figures or imaginary, potentially imaginary figures, deities in Hinduism or the Tibetan Buddhist canon. And so it really is just paying closer attention to whatever happens to be happening in that moment in in the mind and body. And the other very important feature of it is that it in principle doesn't exclude anything. So this so you don't need a quiet room, you don't need a a comfortable body. In principle, anything you notice is as good as any other object of meditation and that virtually every other practice doesn't meet those two tests. So I think it's perfectly designed for export to a secular scientific audience because it stands to reach life. It's just life. And if you want to know something more about what it's like to be you and what could possibly be discovered through introspection, it makes sense to pay attention. Exactly. All this is paying attention. But when I first went and met Manintraji in Bogaia, when I went to meet him, he said something that was so the common sense of it was so striking to me. It's really what was the big hook for me. He said, if you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it. There was nothing to believe. There was nothing to join. It was just that. How else can we understand our minds except by observing the accessibility of it? And the common sense of it was so striking to me. Of course, as we do the practice, there are many, many dimensions of our experience that reveal themselves that previously we had not been aware of. So it goes very deep into with tremendous nuance. But the basic instruction is this simple. Yeah. It's always a matter of not being lost in thought about the experience, noticing thought as thought and noticing the character of experience with interest and without grasping it pleasant and pushing away the unpleasant. Exactly. Simply always being aware of what's arising. And I think one thing that people get confused about is obviously there's a vast amount that the brain is doing and that therefore the mind is doing that we're not aware of, and that is not best discovered through introspection. I mean, so hence the necessity of having whole branches of science named psychology and neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science and linguistics and everything else. I'm following the rules of English grammar more or less effortlessly to get to the end of the sentence. I have no idea how I'm doing that. And when I fail to do that, I have no idea why I fail. And the best way to discover those details is not by me paying attention, because it's simply not visible. The data are not there. But what mindfulness is is a tool to be as aware as possible of the actual character of your subjective experience. It's not to say this is the best way to do neuroscience. It's the best way to be aware of what it's like to be you in every moment. And it's in that context that you can discover whether or not this thing you call yourself exists the way you have always thought it does. And it's very pragmatic in another sense, because one of the things we discover through this simple introspection and observation is to see what patterns of thought and emotion create suffering for ourselves and others and how to be free of that suffering. And that's really the bottom line of why to do it right. It's a way of coming out of suffering. And we become much more expert in terms of understanding our own minds and our own conditioning, because we all have established habit patterns that are not helpful. They're not conducive to peace, not conducive to freedom. We need to learn about that. We need to see how all of that's happening. So take me back to. So now you're with Menindra in Bodegaia, and he's making a lot of sense and has given you a practice that seems very promising in light of this experience you had in Thailand. What is your motivation at that point? Is your motivation an interest in the nature of the mind? Is it getting rid of suffering that you're finding intolerable what's driving? For me, interest was the key. I didn't have any obvious suffering. I was just still very young. I was 23 years old. And I was just incredibly interested at this point in the mind and exploring the implications and ramifications of what this experience was. And upon this further investigation, I realized that Buddhism really explained it all. This was the most appropriate context for the exploration. So at that point, had you gone and met other gurus apart from that one Sikh? Had you metananda or Nanda Maima? No, I had gone up to the Himalayas to try to find some Tibetan teachers, since it had been a Tibetan text. Right. But it was in the middle of winter, and it was freezing cold, and the Tibetans had all gone south. So nobody was there. No. And Simon injury was really aside from that one Ashrama had gone to, he was the first teacher I met, and I feel very fortunate because it was just exactly what I was looking for. Right, but you did do some practice in another tradition of the positive because you sat goenka that was after. It after, okay, you get the boat guy, you meet Menindra. How long did you stay in India? That very first time I was in India, I stayed for about six weeks or two months, and then I was going back to the States. And when I started, I had no concentration. So it's almost like I was practicing to catch up to the experience I had had because I hadn't done any of the mental development that in the normal course of things, would have culminated in that. Right. And so when I started to actually so you were not a prodigy, not a meditational prodigy from the side of actually doing the practice? Not at all. In fact, I think quite the opposite. What's interesting, but this breakthrough cessation experience as a starting point, why wouldn't that have made you a prodigy? The only prodigy aspect that I could discern, there was no doubt. Doubt about. The path had been eliminated because I had this very clear understanding and realization of the selflessness of it all. But I saw also that there was still a lot more work to do. There was still a lot of conditioned, habit patterns of mind that were still there. So even though I knew they were selfless, I had that basic understanding still. And when you sat down to meditate with Menindra, you're spending virtually all your time lost and yeah. Because you don't have concentration. Yeah. No, exactly. And and enjoying. It. I was I was a nice way to spend an hour, right? Cross your legs and think, yeah, exactly. It was basically what I did. But I knew I had found the path made sense to me, even though that it was not easy. But I didn't have any doubt. I knew, yeah, this is what I want to do. So I went back to the States, worked for a little while, made a little more money and just, you know, was anxious to get back to India and to pursue it. When I went back, I got inspired to do the meditation on lovingkindness meta. Meta. That's the polyword. I had just come to a realization that I felt that this was a quality that I could well develop in myself, feel a little lacking in myself, and I started lacking in the world. So I was very inspired. Can you just describe what that practice is? You don't need to do a guided method practice. The way method is done, or one way it's done traditionally, is just to think of somebody. You start with a benefactor, somebody for whom you have good feeling, loving feeling, and you visualize them and repeat certain phrases of loving kindness, of well wishing, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be free of suffering. And it really becomes a mantra of loving kindness where you're repeating the phrases, directing it to the image. And then it's a progression going from a benefactor to a friend, to somebody who's neutral, to somebody who's difficult for you and into all beings. So it's a gradually expanding field of loving kindness. And unlike mindfulness in this practice, there's a target mental state that you're trying to kindle and to hold in the mind and to grow and deepen. And there's a very explicit goal in terms of the mental state you're trying to produce. And actually there are two aspects to it. One is the development of the feeling of lovingkindness, but it is also a concentration technique. And so what develops it can also be used to develop concentration as well as the feeling of loving kindness. And for me, so I was doing this lovingkindness meditation intensively also for about six weeks or two months. So this is all day, every day. So you're on retreat. On retreat. And it was in doing that practice that for the first time, my mind developed some concentration and it was quite remarkable. It's a whole new inner space. And before, even though I had no doubt about the practice and I was committed to doing it, it was really difficult, it was work. So your first time, you had periods that were periods of intensive practice on retreat, doing Vipassana where you hadn't broken through. So your first period of retreat was doing meta? No, the first six weeks when I first went to Bogaiah, I was doing Vipassana, but for like 10 hours a day. Yeah. And still just feeling the effects of not having concentration. Right. No, I was continually trying to bring my mind back and be present. It was hard work, but I had no doubt about it. I wanted to do it. But you were a hard case because many, many people do a ten day or three week retreat, vapasa for the first time, and at some point in that retreat really do experience kind of effortless concentration. No, I didn't. And that's why for me now, as a teacher, I have tremendous confidence in people being able to do it. Because if I could do it, anybody could do it because my mind was so unconcentraged. But the meta, really, that established my mind in a degree of concentration. Not fantastic, but sufficient. And it changed everything. Because once the mind develops a certain level of concentration, then the practice becomes much more effortless. Right. There's a momentum to the practice and it becomes much more enjoyable. And so doing that period of the loving kindness was really important for me in the whole trajectory. And then at a certain point, I went back to Vapasana and then just proceeded to continue with Vapasana going through. How long did you stay in India this time? I was in India over a seven year period, and I was back and forth to the States maybe two or three times in that period for a few months at a time. So I was mostly in India. Mostly in India for about seven years. Mostly in Bodega Bodega during the winter months up. And we would go to the mountains in the summer months. Dalhouse. Yeah, Dalhouse air is very, very hot in the plains in the summer during this period. So you're basically in India for seven years. And now this is the period where a real influx of Westerners is now noticeable. You've got Rum, Das and the whole party coming through Bogaya and doing Goenka retreats. You study with Goenka as well during that period? I did. Starting in 1970, I started doing Goenka retreats, which was also very powerful. It was a very powerful technique, but I had a major obstacle. So when I first started doing Go anchor, which is a body scanning. So the difference being you don't focus on the breath as a primary point of contact. You actually very strategically move through the body, notice in sensation from your toes to your head and back again. Right. He does emphasize using the breath for the first few days of a ten day retreat. For concentration. For concentration. And then it opens up to the body scan. Right. So when I first started doing that, I already been with meningra for a few years. My body, it totally opened up, just became a body of light. And it's wonderful. It was just free flow of energy, and it was unpack. That phrase can sound a little spooky. Body of light. What do you mean by body of light? You weren't literally glowing from the inside. It felt like it. But usually we experience the body as somewhat dense and solid. But through this intensive body, scanning up and down, we begin to experience the body as an energy field, meaning just a field of flowing sensations with no solidity any place. And so it's just this free flow of energy that's very enjoyable. And so I got into that and we just spent hours and hours and hours in that very effortless. Then I had to go back to the States. Maybe I'd run out of money or come back for a couple of months. When I came back to India, I had lost my body of light and it had become like a body of twisted steel. And I could not recreate that experience. And for two years I was struggling to get that back. Struggling in the context of meditation. With goenka or with menndra? No, with goenka. So he spent two years doing the goanca style or more. I spent close to four years, three and a half years doing that style. So it had started off gloriously, right? And then as it crashed but of course, mindful that the point of the practice is not to recreate specific body correct manifestation. It was too seductive. It was too seductive. And yeah, I was just doing it wrong. Right? I did give you instructions. No, not really, because there was a lot of emphasis in that tradition to get that free flow. So that was, in a way, the goal. Right? And so it was exceedingly frustrating. It was the worst two years of my practice, and it took me two years to realize that it's not about getting something back, but to be with how things are. So finally, it took a long, long time. Finally my mind let go of that fixation and just relaxed into how things were. And then there started to be movement again. It never got back to how it was, right. But it didn't matter that it was a different kind of flow. So that was its own learning in terms of understanding what the practice really is about. That's a point of interest to me, which we've argued about in other contexts. But it's interesting the way in which the logic of a practice, explicit or implicit, can lead you to practice in a way that is just not profitable. There's a very classic progression in what are called the stages of insight. So there's a very classic unfolding of different experiences where people at a certain stage have experiences of tremendous rapture and clarity and concentration and all the things that we're practicing to develop at this particular stage. They're called corruptions of insight because the tendency is for almost everybody in one way or another to get attached to them. It's such a remarkable shift from anything that's happened before that when you're experiencing that, it just feels you've arrived as a flavor of enlightenment. It seems like this is this is why I was practicing in the first place. I want to feel this way. Exactly. And it's called pseudo nirvana. Yeah. And so it takes some real guidance at that point to simply be mindful of those states as other changing conditions, not to be attached to it. And the very next stage of insight is called seeing what is the path and what is not the path. And that's an important juncture because until that point we think that having those experiences is the path. Yeah. And so we have to really go through that and see that it's not the path that's just experiences along the way. And that the whole path is always about letting go. It's not about holding on. Yeah. And whatever is fundamental to the nature of mind has to be discoverable in the context of whatever experience happens to be present. If the thing you're taking to be significant is there by virtue of having some contingent conditions in place, then obviously it's vulnerable to change. Exactly. I like to say in the teaching, in guiding people through situations like this, if freedom is dependent on conditions, it's not freedom. Just take me back to that period that now your inBoat guy's been there for years. Now you're just practicing in a bunch of context. You're not going to be poorly bogus or not. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. There you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, this is an ask me anything podcast. I've now received hundreds of questions on Twitter and in other formats, and I'll try to get through several of them, but many have converged on a single topic which will come as no surprise the recent atrocities in Paris, the murders of the Charlie EBDO cartoonist, and the murders in the Jewish market. And also, many of you are concerned about the subsequent self censorship, which has really been quite amazing to witness. It's just astonishing that the media cannot do the one thing that it could do to keep it and everyone else safe, and it can't do the one thing that would have kept the Charlie EBDO cartoonist safe, which is publish en masse all of these cartoons and present a united front against this creepy and theocracy. So I'll try to say a few things on this topic. I haven't commented on it publicly yet, and while I've been circulating the interviews done by friends and colleagues like Majid Nawaz and Ayan Hersiali and Douglas Murray, all of whom have been excellent, I've been declining interviews myself, and I'm not quite sure why I've been doing that. I think the main reason is that it's just become toxic for me to say over and over again that which should really go without saying and to then be vilified for it. It really is no fun dealing with this topic, although I am writing a short book with Majid Nawaz, the working title of which is Islam and the Future of Tolerance, and I'm very happy about that. Majid is doing amazing work and he's really just indispensable. And we're having a very good conversation. And that will be published in June at the latest, I hope, by Harvard University Press. And beyond everything we may or may not agree about, I think we've produced an example of a fundamentally different conversation on this problem of Islam at this moment. And if you don't know who Majid is, you should Google him. He's a former Islamist who obviously knows exactly why Islamists do what they do. But now he's a reformer and he's quite articulate on the topic of how to move Islam forward. And while I'm skeptical of that project and increasingly worried that it might be hopeless, he and I managed to have a very good conversation. So I will alert you all to the birth of that book when it occurs, but perhaps I can say a few things about recent events in the meantime. Well, the first thing to say is that the response of liberals and again, it is so depressing to have to use the term liberal in a pejorative way in this context. But liberalism has completely lost its Morrins on the topic of Islam. Needless to say, we have all the usual suspects. Glenn Greenwald and Reyes Aslan and Chris Hedges and Karen Armstrong. And as unreadable as these people have become, you can't help but notice the stupid things they say about Islam even in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity like this. And as will come as no surprise. They will tell you that this has nothing to do with Islam. It has nothing to do with heartfelt religious convictions. No, it has everything to do with capitalism and the oppression of minorities and the racism of white people in Europe and the racism of cartoonists at a magazine like Charlie EBDO. You know, that is the cause of this behavior. That's what causes someone to grab an AK 47 and murder twelve cartoonists and then scream Allahu Akbar in the streets. It is a completely insane analysis. Even if you grant everything that's wrong with capitalism and the history of colonialism, you should not be able to deny that these religious maniacs are motivated by concerns about blasphemy and the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad and consider their behavior entirely ethical in light of specific religious doctrines. And it's a kind of masochism and moral cowardice and lack of intelligence, frankly, at this point, that is allowing people to deny this fact. And then we have the practice of self censorship, which is completely understandable and entirely based on fear. And the reason why it's understandable is that this fear is actually quite rational. If you were the only person or news organization printing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad and that's why every newspaper and magazine and news outlet on earth should have agreed to print the latest Charlie EBDO cover immediately, on the same day, and spread the risk. We hear everywhere about this false tradeoff between freedom of speech and freedom of religion, as though there was some kind of balance to be struck here. There is no balance to be struck. Freedom of speech never infringes on freedom of religion. There's nothing I could say in this podcast about religion generally or about Islam in particular that would infringe upon someone else's freedom to practice his or her religion. If your freedom of religion entails that you force those who do not share it to conform to it, well, then that's not freedom of religion. We have a word for that. That's theocracy. This respect that we are all urged to show for, quote, religious sensitivity is actually a demand that the blasphemy laws of Islam be followed by non Muslims and secular liberals in the west. Are defending this thuggish ultimatum and putting the lives of cartoonists and journalists and free thinkers and public intellectuals in jeopardy day after day. So we're harming ourselves when we practice censorship on this point, the Muslim world simply has to get used to free speech winning, and we should make no apologies for this. But there are several double standards that are quite harmful on this point. For instance, it is illegal in France and Germany and a few other countries in Western Europe to deny the Holocaust. That's a bad law. A person should be absolutely free to deny the Holocaust, which is to say he should be free to destroy his reputation, and others should be free to ridicule him and to boycott his business. There shouldn't be a law against this kind of idiocy. And making this category of speech illegal is a terrible mistake. And Islamists and liberals are using this mistake as a basis to condemn the so called hypocrisy of all the people who are defending Charley Abdo at this moment. Whatever you think about the content of the Charlie Ebdot cartoons, and as many people have pointed out, this content has been misunderstood outside of France. Cartoons that appear racist to a non French speaker, to someone who's ignorant of French politics, are anything but racist when you understand the context. But even if you granted that most of these cartoons were racist and therefore offensive, you have to concede that protecting this speech becomes important. When you have one group of people, quote radical Muslims who are responding to this offense with credible threats of murder in every country on earth, we can't give in to this. So here's one sign that a person, whether he's on the left or the right politically, has completely lost the plot. Here. The moment he begins to ask what was in those cartoons? Were those cartoons racist? Was that a negative portrayal of Muhammad? To ask such questions is obscene. People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis. And we are seeing a total capitulation on the part of news organizations in the face of this terror. The fact that the New York Times will not print the current cover of Charlie EBDO, even though it is absolutely newsworthy and even though they are writing articles about it, is shocking. And we should notice how euphemism is preventing honest conversation on this topic. We use words like extremism and extremism. What do these words mean? Well, extremism generally suggests that an expression of a certain set of ideas has become an exaggeration or distortion of those ideas. But when we're talking about Muslim extremists, have they really exaggerated or distorted the core teachings of Islam? No. Muslim extremists are motivated by the most literal and straightforward and comprehensive resort to the ideas expressed in the Quran and the Hadith. What is ISIS doing that Muhammad didn't do or didn't advocate? Somewhere in Scripture, good luck finding something important. And that's a fact that we just have to absorb. That is a body blow to political correctness that just has to land, and land hard. Happily, someone like Majid Nawaz is prepared to talk about this. He's prepared to take the other side in a conversation with me in this case, and he can do it without lying about the connection between what people believe and their behavior in the world. And he should be distinguished in your mind from someone like Reyes Oslon, who is a fount of lies and misdirection on this topic. Reza is one of these people who has said in recent days that the murder of cartoonists and Jews in Paris was due to the failure of integration of Muslims in France and the racism that has been directed at them. This is leveraging a very common intuition. There must be two sides to every conflict, right? So there's two sides to this story. On the one hand, you have the racism of Charlie Abdo and its readers, and on the other side you have the poor immigrants who are struggling to assimilate in a hostile society. That's what causes people to slaughter cartoonists while shouting, we have avenged the Prophet. This politically correct analysis is morally insane, and news organizations and readers should lose their patience for it. To focus on the content of the cartoons, as people like Aslan and Greenwald have done, as though it were somehow morally relevant, is a disgrace. And the moment that someone does it, he has tipped his hand. It is a perfect litmus test. I get the sense that people still don't understand what we're dealing with here. Have you seen any of these recent interviews with captured ISIS fighters? Religion is the whole story. They are totally fixated on getting into paradise. In fact, the Kurds have put female soldiers into the field, and this terrifies members of ISIS because they believe that they won't go to paradise if they get killed by a woman. They literally run away from these female soldiers. It's like a culture of psychotic and psychopathic children. And just consider the attitude they showed toward real children. Of course they've been murdering Shia and Christian and Yazidi children, burying them alive and crucifying them. But they seem happy to inflict needless horror on their own children. You may have read a story recently about a street magician in Raqqa Assyria, who had been entertaining children for years. ISIS deemed his activities UN Islamic and cut his head off. Just imagine what it is like to be a child in this context. Imagine the sort of men and women that such a childhood will produce. The crucial thing to understand is that stories like that do not represent an excessive use of force by a few deranged individuals. All of this butchery, the murder of journalists and aid workers, the torture of women who get caught breastfeeding in public is as central to the project of jihadism as an opening of a new Starbucks is for us. This is what they think is best about themselves. This is what they use to advertise their project to the rest of the world. Video footage of an aid worker. An aid worker getting his head cut off is part of their recruiting materials. These horrible stories coming out of Syria and Iraq, this is not their mi li massacre. This is what they unabashedly stand for. This is an expression of a worldview, and this worldview is contagious. It doesn't matter if a person has had direct contact with al Qaeda or ISIS or whether he's quote a lone wolf. We're talking about the spread of ideas again, ideas about martyrdom and jihad and paradise and the rights of women. And Blasphemy, the point we cannot ignore, the point that should never be obfuscated, is that we are at war with a global phenomenon of jihadism, and there can be no compromise with this death cult and these fake liberals, these fellow travelers with theocracy, these people who, in the name of liberalism, protect only political correctness and masochism. They are absolutely part of the problem. They are preventing us from demanding that the Muslim community worldwide get its act together. And this is why expressions of horror and rejection are insufficient in the Muslim community. Of course, you're horrified by this behavior if you're a decent human being and have even a tenuous connection to civil society in the 21st century. But that's not enough. Muslims have to honestly grapple with the bad doctrines in their faith. They can no longer just say that Islam is a religion of peace. They can no longer lie about the doctrines that relate to martyrdom and jihad and apostasy and the rights of women. Muslims have to fight a civil war of ideas or a civil war against jihadism and Islamism generally. That's what has to happen. It's not a matter of blaming all Muslims for the actions of a few. It's a matter of demanding a reformation within Islam that only Muslims can accomplish. The civilized world is waiting for this to happen, and people continue to die until it does. And of course, most of the people dying are Muslims. As I said, the conversation I'm having with Majid Nawaz is directly on this point, and Majida is doing extremely important work with the William Foundation, and I encourage you all to look him up if you're not aware of who he is. Well, moving on to a very different topic, about which I've also received several questions. I released a video of a lecture I gave in the fall on the subject of my book Waking Up, and that's available on my website. But I received complaints from several readers that I was selling it and not offering it for free. Now, I knew this was coming, and this is actually a difficult thing for me to talk about, but I think it's important. We've all begun to expect everything online for free, and I include myself in this. I want to read articles and watch videos, and I don't want to pay anything for them. If someone sends me a link to an article in the Wall Street Journal and I hit their paywall, I'm not going to read it. I don't want to subscribe to another newspaper or magazine, certainly not for a single article, and money aside is just too much of a hassle. But of course, everything can't be free online, or no one will be able to make a living producing quality work. We have yet to find an elegant solution to this problem, but the problem runs deeper than this, because people actually make a significant effort to find content for free rather than buy it. I've heard from several people, ostensibly fans, who are just waiting to find my Waking Up video free Wildfire. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. There you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. As many of you know, there was recently a triple murder in Chapel Hill, North Carolina by committed by a person named Craig Steven Hicks, who is still alive. This is not a suicide murder, so undoubtedly we'll one day hear what his conscious motives were. But he killed three young people, apparently over a parking space. At least that was the subject of their dispute. But he happens to have been a person who identified as an atheist on his Facebook page and expressed admiration for people like Richard Dawkins. He might have said something about me, I'm actually not sure. But he was self identified as an atheist and critical of all religion apparently on his Facebook page. And because the victims of this crime were Muslim, it is now being widely described as a hate crime and it in fact is being described as a symptom of a problem that we have in the atheist community, a problem of militancy, a problem of anti Muslim bigotry. And many people are claiming that I am somehow responsible for this, both for the background problem and for the murders themselves, which is quite an amazing thing to be accused of. So it seems to me there's a fair amount of moral confusion here and also just factual confusion about the reality of human violence in the US and elsewhere. But the first thing to say is that I feel nothing but horror over this crime. These people were killed in the very prime of their life, at the beginning of their adult lives and they were, by all accounts, marvelous people. I can only imagine, in fact, I can't imagine the grief of their parents and their loved ones. So there's absolutely nothing in my work or in my mind that is supportive of a crime like this. And I would have hoped that could go without saying. I think in this context it probably can't. Nevertheless, the deluge of claims of equivalence between this crime and the Charlie EBDO atrocity or the daily behavior of a group like ISIS has been astonishing to witness. And you can sense that people have just been waiting for a crime like this that could conceivably be pinned on atheism. But of course, the analogy between militant atheism and militant Islam is a terrible one. It is an anti analogy. It is false in every respect, atheists are simply not out there harming people on the basis of their atheism. Now, there may be atheists who do terrible things, but there's no atheist doctrine or scripture. And insofar as any of us have written books or created arguments that have persuaded people, these books and arguments, insofar as they're atheistic, only relate to the bad evidence put forward in defense of a belief in God. There's no argument in atheism that suggests that you should hate or victimize or stigmatize whole groups of people, as there often is in Revealed religion. And what we're seeing is that people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan and the usual suspects, the bevy of apologists for theocracy in the Muslim world are using this very real tragedy in Chapel Hill to try to stoke a kind of mob mentality around an imagined atheist campaign of bigotry against Muslims. It's an incredibly cynical and tendencies and opportunistic and ultimately dangerous thing to do. Of course, people like Glenn Greenwald and Reyes Oslon are alleging that there's some kind of double standard here that atheists are so quick to detect a religious motivation in the misbehavior of Muslims worldwide, but when it comes to their own, well, then they discount the role played by atheism. But this is just a total misrepresentation of how an atheist like myself thinks about human violence. It is simply obvious that some instances of Muslim violence have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. And I would never dream of assigning blame to the religion of Islam for that behavior. And to my knowledge, I never have. And insofar as I'm ever confused about the source of Muslim violence, well, then I apologize in advance for that confusion. But the problem, of course, is that there are teachings within Islam that explicitly recommend, in fact demand violence in certain circumstances. Circumstances which we in the 21st century, if we are decent human beings, will recognize as being morally insane, apostasy, blasphemy adultery, merely holding hands with a man who is not your blood relative or husband if you are a woman unlucky enough to be born in a country like Afghanistan. These are rather often killing offenses. And the link between the doctrine as it is understood by Islamists and jihadists at this point and the behavior is explicit, it's logical, it is absolutely unambiguous. And yet this doesn't prevent people from denying it at every turn. Now, there is no such link between atheism or secularism and violence of any kind in any circumstance. There's nothing about rejecting the truth claims of religious dogmatists. There's nothing about doubting that the universe has a creator that suggests that violence in certain circumstances is necessary or even acceptable. And all the people who are comparing these murders to Charlie EBDO or to ISIS, as insane as that sounds, are really trivializing a kind of violence that threatens to destabilize much of the world. And ironically, it is violence whose principal victims are Muslim. I would also point out that the idea that there's some kind of epidemic of hate crime against Muslims in the United States is totally at odds with the facts. You need only check the FBI website and you'll see that there is no such wave of religious bigotry directed against Muslims or directed against anyone at all. In fact, hate crime is a very rare offense. Five people were murdered on the basis of hate crime in 2013. And when you look at the hate crimes directed at people based on religious bigotry, the crimes against Jews based on antisemitism, outnumber the crimes against Muslims five to one. And this is every year, and this is even in 2002 in the immediate aftermath of 911. So if we're going to be concerned about hate crime in the US. We should be concerned about antisemitism before we worry about antimuslim hate crime. And the level of antisemitism in the US. Is minuscule when you're talking about violence against persons. Now, I wouldn't say the same thing of France, but in the US. It is virtually a non problem, especially when you compare it to the tens of thousands of ordinary murders and rapes and aggravated assaults that happen on the basis of purely interpersonal violence. People are saying that this could not possibly have been a triple murder born of a neighbor's dispute over a parking space, but this is the most common form of interpersonal violence. It never makes sense on paper. You're talking about people who fail to regulate their emotional states, and they have in the US. Ready access to weaponry that makes it incredibly easy to kill someone impulsively. So hate crime per se is not a major problem. And the people who are trying to whip up a frenzy of concern over the ambient level of bigotry and intolerance and violence against Muslims in the US. Are really trying to engineer a kind of moral panic designed to distract people from the real problems that Muslims face and that we all face, frankly, which is this basic incompatibility between a 7th century theocracy and our collective aspiration to build a truly pluralistic and global civil society. You can understand this all through the lens of free speech, right? This is all you need to consider a phenomenon like Charlie EPDO or The Satanic Verses. And for some reason, people on the left have aligned themselves with theocrats and people who are truly intolerant and tolerant of the very liberal values that apologists for Islam think they're enunciating. As I've said before, tolerance of intolerance is just cowardice, and it's a cowardice that's increasingly consequential. So this analogy between so called militant atheism and militant Islam is essentially a moral hoax. The thing that very few people seem able to distinguish and the distinction that greenwald and aslan obfuscate at every opportunity is the difference between criticizing ideas and their results in the world and hating people as people because they belong to a certain group or because they have a certain skin color or because they came from a certain country. There is no connection between those two orientations. That the the latter is, of course, bigotry, and I would condemn it as harshly as anyone would hope. But criticizing ideas and their consequences is absolutely essential, and that is the spirit in which I have criticized Islam in various flavors, and Christianity and Judaism and Buddhism. And all of these criticisms are different because these belief systems are different. So that's the distinction that one has to recognize. And the clarity of that distinction leads to a kind of experience in the world that where critics seem to not imagine. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversation I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. There you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm going to talk about cults. Mostly. I've been in a cultish frame of mind in the last week getting over bronchitis, so my apologies for my voice being even raspier than it usually is. But I've been paying attention to cults for some reason, and I've focused on two cults that have been around for a while heaven's Gate and Scientology. I recently saw the film Going Clear, based on Lawrence Wright's book by that name, and the book is well worth reading. The film is really a devastating takedown of Scientology. I can't imagine it won't do the organization lasting harm if enough people see it. It just exposes how goofy Elron Hubbard was and how sinister his organization soon became under him and his successors. So I do see that film. It's playing on HBO and had some theatrical release as well. But I've mostly been thinking about the Heavens Gate cult, which, as you might recall, about 18 years ago, came to the world's attention because 39 members, including the chief member, a man named Marshall Applewhite, who was known as Doe to his devotees, all took their lives in a mansion near San Diego. They all donned identical pairs of Nikes and drank a cocktail of phenobarbital and vodka, I believe, and then got in their bunk beds and covered themselves with purple shrouds and departed, they imagined, for a spaceship that was following in the tale of the comet Hailbop. So this was a rather horrifying and peculiar news item. I think it remains the largest mass suicide in US. History, although I recall my reaction to it at the time was a little bit less than reverential. I remember sitting on my couch watching this first footage that came out of this house of everyone in their bunk beds with their Nikes and hearing the voiceover announcer say, and in their freezer, they had nothing but court after court of Starbucks Java Chip ice cream. And I remember sitting on my couch alone and saying out loud to myself, wait a minute. Starbucks makes ice cream? And then I leapt to my feet and drove straight to the supermarket and bought some Starbucks Java chip ice cream. I guess we all draw from certain tragedies the lessons we need at the time. Obviously, I've become more sympathetic with the plight of these people in the intervening years and more interested in the phenomenon of cults and have drawn other lessons from this one. In any case, the most fascinating thing about Heavens Gate is that the members of this class, as they called it, left final video testimonies as to why they were doing what they were doing and how satisfied they were to be doing it. And this is of course analogous to the video testimonies one often gets from jihadist suicide bombers. But these were people who were really aware of how inscrutable their behavior was going to seem to their loved ones and to the rest of the society in which they were living. And they really made their best effort to defend their actions, if not explain them, and to simply bear witness or demand that the world bear witness to the psychological fact that they were absolutely unconflicted in doing what they were doing. They just felt immense gratitude for the experience of living for decades with their other occult members with whom they had formed an obvious bond, and for the guidance of Doe and Tea, the woman who had been his partner, who had died a decade earlier. And these were people who, for the most part, were clearly happy and approaching their deaths with genuine enthusiasm. They were gleeful about the prospect of departing this world and arriving elsewhere in the galaxy. So these videos are really an amazing document and I was tempted to put some audio in this podcast, but there really is no substitute for seeing the videos themselves. So I will embed those on my blog and there's about 2 hours of video, there's additional hours of Doe himself giving his final testimony, and that's also fascinating to watch. But the videos of the cult members are really profoundly strange and unnerving when you see just how sanguine they are about their whole project, which is, on its face really the most profligate misuse of human life imaginable. These are people who lived in total isolation for decades under the sway of obviously crazy ideas, depriving themselves of most of life's experience. And these are people who had abandoned children, they had abandoned the rest of their families, and abandoned every other human project that we might deem worthy of a person's attention and energy and then killed themselves in the most carefree state of mind. And it was entirely the result of what they believed about the nature of the soul, about the nature of the kingdom of heaven, about the the hideous condition of the world, and about the coming apocalypse that Doe assured them was imminent and that this represented their last chance to migrate to the kingdom of heaven. They didn't seize it. Now everything would be lost. So these videos really are quite unique. And above all, they offer an insight into just what it's like to be totally convinced of paradise. The most shocking thing about this, well, there are a few things. One is the undeniable fact that most of these people were clearly happy. In some basic sense you struggle to detect in their faces and in their deliveries some clue to their deeper psychopathology. And in many cases I think you will come up entirely empty. Now these people bear all the signs of having spent as most of them had 20 plus years living in total isolation from the world. Most of these people had been part of this cult since the the mid seventy s. And they this is was in 97 that they killed themselves. They all wore identical terrible haircuts and all had androgynous clothing that they buttoned up to the neck. I believe they shared all their clothing in common, including underwear. So they had a dogma of non attachment that was operating here that led to a kind of self effacement at the level of their presentation. They all wore equally terrible eyeglasses, those who needed them. Like they all wandered into a lens crafters and just asked for the worst pair of glasses that could possibly be pulled out of the box. So there's something about these people, they are misfits of a sort. And it's tempting to imagine that they were socially marginalized to a degree that somehow explains how they were recruited into the circumstance and therefore how they met their end. But that's not to say that these aren't happy, intelligent, relatively high functioning people who could have succeeded in other contexts in life. And I think that's to some degree obviously true of some of them. One thing is clear that many of these people were parents who entirely abandoned their children to join Doe and Tea and submit their lives to this experiment which when you look at the details is rather shocking to consider. It's shocking especially because when you listen to the teachings of Doe, you can also watch hours of video where he describes all that he knows about the workings of the universe. Some of this video, at least an hour of it, is his final testament, given with the full knowledge that they're going to commit suicide in the coming days. And in watching DOE's performance here, I think you'll also look in vain for an obvious reason why people would give their lives over to this man. A few things are conspicuous. One is the total absence of compelling intellectual content. This is not a brilliant person. He's not bowling you over with his ability to connect ideas or to turn phrases. The only clue to his powers of mesmerism is his quality of eye contact, which as I discussed at one point in my book, waking up is a feature you find in gurus in general and in people who are making heroic efforts to persuade. And in Doe this is conspicuous. The man rarely blinks, he's looking at a camera lens for this video. But one can well imagine that this is the style of eye contact he used when talking to people directly. Maybe I'll offer a brief digression on this topic. There's actually a section in my book, Waking Up, where I talk about eye contact, and I'll just read it to you. A person's eyes convey a powerful illusion of inner life. The illusion is true, but it is an illusion only thing. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. For today's episode, I've decided to do an Ask Me Anything podcast, so I solicited questions on Twitter and got some hundreds of them, and I will do my best to answer as many as I can over the next hour or so. And these will, by definition, not be on a theme. How does the struggle of atheists for acceptance compared with that of women, blacks, gays, et cetera? How long until true equality arrives? Well, I'm not sure I would want to draw any strict analogy between the civil rights struggles of blacks and gays and women and that of atheists. Because while atheism is, as a political identity, more or less a non starter in American politics at the moment, which is to say that you just cannot have a political career or certainly no reasonable expectation of one, while being out of the closet as an atheist. Nevertheless, atheists are disproportionately well educated and well off financially and powerful. Far more than 5% of the people you meet in journalism or academia or Silicon Valley are atheists. This is just my anecdotal impression, and I don't know of any scientific polling that has been done on this question, apart from among scientists, where the vast majority are non believers and the proportion of nonbelievers only increases among the most successful and influential scientists. But I'm reasonably confident that when you're in the company of wealthy, connected, powerful people, internet billionaires and movie stars, and the people who are running major financial and academic institutions, you are disproportionately in the presence of people who are atheists. So while I'm as eager as anyone to see atheism get its due, or rather, to see reason and common sense get their due in our political discourse, I don't think it's fair to say that atheists have the same kind of civil rights problem that blacks and gays and women traditionally have had in our society. Now, in the Muslim world, things reverse entirely, because, of course, to be exposed as an atheist is, in many places, to live under a death sentence. And that's a problem that the civilized world really has to address. What is your view on laws that prevent people from not hiring on the basis of religion? Well, here I'm sure I'm going to stumble into another controversy. I tend to take a libertarian view of questions of this kind. So I think people should be free to embarrass themselves publicly, to destroy their reputations, to be boycotted. So if you want to open a restaurant that only serves red headed people, I think you should be free to do that. If you only want to serve people over 6ft tall, you should be free to do that. And by definition, if you only want to serve Muslims, or you only want to serve whites, or if you only want to serve Jews, if you want a club that excludes everyone but yourself, I think you should be free to do all these things and people should be free to write about you. Pick it in front of your store, clubhouse or restaurant. But I think law is too blunt an instrument, and this is not to disregard all of the gains we've made for civil rights based on the laws. At this point, I think we should probably handle these things through conversation and reputation management, rather than legislate who businesses have to hire or serve. I think if the social attitudes of a business are egregious and truly out of step with those of the community, well, then they will suffer a penalty. And it's only because 50 years ago, the attitudes of the community were so unenlightened that we needed rather heavy handed laws to ram through a sane and compassionate social agenda. And some might argue that we're still in that situation. I think less so by the hour. And at a certain point, I think law is the wrong mechanism to enforce positive social attitudes. And of course, my enemies will summarize this as sam Harris thinks that it should be legal to discriminate against blacks and gays and women. Can you say something about artificial intelligence, AI, and your concerns about it? Yeah, well, this is a very interesting topic. The question of how to build artificial intelligence that isn't going to destroy us is something that I've only begun to pay attention to, and it is a rather deep and consequential problem. I went to a conference in Puerto Rico focused on this issue organized by the Future of Life Institute, and was brought there by a friend, Elon Musk, who no doubt many of you have heard of. And Elon had recently said publicly that he thought AI was the greatest threat to human survival, perhaps greater than nuclear weapons, and many people took that as an incredibly hyperbolic statement. Now, knowing Elon and knowing how close to the details he's apt to be, I took it as a very interesting diagnosis of a problem, but I wasn't quite sure what I thought about it, because I hadn't really spent much time focusing on the progress we've been making in AI and its implications. So I went to this conference in San Juan held by and for the people who were closest to doing this work. This was not open to the public. I think I was one of maybe two or three interlopers there who just hadn't been invited, but sort of got himself invited. And what was fascinating about that was that this was a collection of people who were very worried, like Elon and others who felt that we have to find some way to pull the brakes. Even though that seems somewhat hopeless to the people who were doing the work most energetically and most wanted to convince others not to worry about having to pull the brakes. And what was interesting there is that what I heard outside this conference and what you hear, let's say, on Edge or in general discussions about the prospects of making real breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, you hear a time frame of 50 to 100 years before anything terribly scary or terribly interesting is going to happen. In this conference, that was almost never the case. Everyone who was still trying to ensure that they were doing this as safely as possible was still conceding that a time frame of five or ten years admitted of rather alarming progress. And so when I came back from that conference, the Edge question for 2015 just happened to be on the topic of AI. So I wrote a short piece distilling what my view now was. Perhaps I'll just read that it won't take too long and hopefully it won't bore you. Can we avoid a digital apocalypse? It seems increasingly likely that we will one day build machines that possess superhuman intelligence. We need only continue to produce better computers, which we will, unless we destroy ourselves or meet our end some other way. We already know that it's possible for mere matter to acquire, quote, general intelligence, the ability to learn new concepts and employ them in unfamiliar contexts. Because the 1200 CCS of salty porridge inside our heads has managed it, there's no reason to believe that a suitably advanced digital computer couldn't do the same. It's often said that the near term goal is to build a machine that possesses, quote, human level intelligence. But unless we specifically emulate a human brain with all its limitations, this is a false goal. The computer on which I'm writing these words already possesses superhuman powers of memory and calculation. It also has potential access to most of the world's information. Unless we take extraordinary steps to hobble it, any future artificial general intelligence known as AGI will exceed human performance on every task for which is considered a source of intelligence in the first place. Whether such a machine would necessarily be conscious is an open question. But conscious or not and AGI might very well develop goals incompatible with our own. Just how sudden and lethal this parting of the ways might be is now a subject of much colorful speculation. So just to make things perfectly clear here, all you have to grant to get your fears up and running is that we will continue to make progress in hardware and software design unless we destroy ourselves some other way. And that there's nothing magical about the wetware we have running inside our heads, and that an intelligent machine could be built of other material. Once you grant those two things, which I think everyone who has thought about the problem will grant, I can't imagine a scientist not granting that one, we're going to make progress in computer design unless something terrible happens. And two, that there's nothing magical about biological material where intelligence is concerned. Once once you've granted those two propositions, you now will be hard pressed to find some handhold with which to resist your slide into real concern about where this is all going. So back to the text. One way of glimpsing the coming risk is to imagine what might happen if we accomplished our aims and built a superhuman AGI that behaved exactly as intended. Such a machine would quickly free us from drudgery and even from the inconvenience of doing most intellectual work. What would follow? Under our current political order, there's no law of economics that guarantees that human beings will find jobs in the presence of every possible technological advance. Once we built the perfect labor saving device, the cost of manufacturing new devices would approach the cost of raw materials. Absent a willingness to immediately put this new capital at the service of all humanity, a few of us would enjoy unimaginable wealth, and the rest would be free to starve. Even in the presence of a truly benign AGI, we could find ourselves slipping back to a state of nature policed by drones. And what would the Russians or the Chinese do if they learned that some company in Silicon Valley was about to develop a super intelligent AGI? This machine would, by definition, be capable of waging war, terrestrial and cyber with unprecedented power. How would our adversaries behave on the brink of such a winner take all scenario? Mere rumors of an AGI might cause our species to go berserk. It is sobering to admit that chaos seems a probable outcome, even in the best case scenario in which the AGI remained perfectly obedient. But of course, we cannot assume the best case scenario. In fact, quote the control problem, the solution to which would guarantee obedience in any advanced AGI, appears quite difficult to solve. Imagine, for instance, that we build a computer that is no more intelligent than the average team of researchers at Stanford or MIT. But because it functions on a digital timescale, it runs a million times faster than the minds that built it. Set it humming for a week, and it would perform 20,000 years of human level intellectual work. What are the chances that such an entity would remain content to take direction from us? And how could we confidently predict the thoughts and actions of an autonomous agent that sees more deeply into the past, present and future than we do? The fact that we seem to be hastening towards some sort of digital apocalypse poses several intellectual and ethical challenges. For instance, in order to have any hope that a superintelligent AGI would have values commensurate with our own we would have to instill those values in it or otherwise get it to emulate us. But whose values should count? Should everyone get a vote in creating the utility function of our new colossus? If nothing else, the invention of an AGI would force us to resolve some very old and boring arguments in moral philosophy. And perhaps I don't need to spell this out any further, but it's interesting that once you imagine having to build values into a super intelligent AGI you then realize that you need to get straight about what you think is good. And I think this that the the advent of this technology would cut through moral relativism like a laser. Who is going to want to engineer into this thing the values of theocracy traditional religious authoritarianism? You want to build homophobia and intolerance toward free speech into a machine that makes tens of thousands of years of human level intellectual progress every time it cycles? I don't think so. Even designing self driving cars presents potential ethical problems that we need to get straight about. Any self driving car needs some algorithm by which to rank order bad outcomes. So if you want a car that will avoid a child who dashes in front of it in the road perhaps by driving up on the sidewalk, you also want a car that will avoid the people on the sidewalk or preferentially hit a mailbox instead of a baby carriage. Right? So you need some intelligent sorting of outcomes here. Well, these are moral decisions. Do you want a car that is unbiased with respect to the age and size of people or the color of their skin? Would you like a car that was more likely to run over white people than people of color? That may seem like a peculiar question, but if you do psychological tests your Trolley problem tests on liberals and this is the one psychological experiment that I'm aware of where liberals come out looking worse than conservatives. Reliably if you test them on whether or not they would be willing to sacrifice one life to save five or one life to save 100. And you give subtle clues as to the color of the people involved. If you say that LeBron belongs to the Harlem Boys Choir and there's some scenario under which he can be sacrificed to save Chip and his friends who study music at Juilliard they simply won't take a consequentialist approach to the problem. They will not sacrifice a black life to save any number of white lives whereas if you reverse the variables, they will sacrifice a white life to save black lives rather reliably. Now, conservatives, strangely, are unbiased in this paradigm, which is to say colorblind. Well, do we like bias here? Do you want a self driving car that preferentially avoids people of color? You have to decide. We either build it one way or the other. So this is an interesting phenomenon where technology is going to force us to admit to ourselves that we know right from wrong in a way that many people imagine isn't possible. Okay, back to the text. However, a true AGI would probably acquire new values or at least develop novel and perhaps dangerous near term goals. What steps might a superintelligence take to ensure its continued survival or access to computational resources? Whether the behavior of such a machine would remain compatible with human flourishing might be the most important question our species ever asks. The problem, however, is that only a few of us seem to be in a position to think this question through. Indeed, the moment of truth might arrive amid circumstances that are disconcertingly, informal and inauspicious. Picture ten young men in a room, several of them with undiagnosed aspergers, drinking Red Bull and wondering whether to flip a switch. Should any single company or research group be able to decide the fate of humanity, the question nearly answers itself. And yet it's beginning to seem likely that some small number of smart people will one day roll these dice, and the temptation will be understandable. We confront problems alzheimer's disease, climate change, economic instability for which superhuman intelligence could offer a solution. In fact, the only thing nearly as scary as building an AGI is the prospect of not building one. Nevertheless, those who are closest to doing this work have the greatest responsibility to anticipate its dangers. Yes, other fields pose extraordinary risks. But the difference between AGI and something like synthetic biology is that in the latter, the most dangerous innovations, such as germline mutation are not the most tempting commercially or ethically. With AGI, the most powerful methods, such as recursive selfimprovement are precisely those that entail the most risk. We seem to be in the process of building a god. Now would be a good time to wonder whether it will or even can be a good one. I guess I should probably explain this final notion of recursive self improvement. The idea is that once you build an AGI that is superhuman, well, then the way that it will truly take off is if it is given or develops an ability to improve its own code. Just imagine something again that could make literally tens of thousands of years of human level intellectual progress in days or even minutes. Improving itself not only learning more, but learning more about how to learn and improving its ability to learn. Then you have this exponential takeoff function where this thing stands in relation to us intellectually, the way we stand in relation to chickens and sea urchins and snails. Now, this may sound like a crazy thing to worry about. It isn't. Again, the only assumptions are that we will continue to make progress and that there's nothing magical about biological substrate where intelligence is concerned. And again, I'm agnostic as to whether or not such a machine would by definition be conscious. Let's assume it's not conscious. So what? You're still talking about something that will have the functional power of a god, whether or not the lights are on. So perhaps you got more than you wanted from me on that topic. I like you, but as an atheist, I find stateism to be a dangerous form of religion, and I won't paint a billion people as barbarians. Okay, well, there are two axes to grind there. Well, this whole business about stateism I find profoundly uninteresting. This is a separate conversation about the problems of US foreign policy, the problems of bureaucracy, the problems of the tyranny of the majority, or the tyranny of empowered minorities. Oligarchy. These are all topics that can be spoken about. To compare a powerful state per se with the problem of religion is just to make a hash of everything that's important to talk about here. And the idea that we could do without a powerful state at this point is just preposterous. So if you're an anarchist, you are either 50 or 100 years before your time, notwithstanding what I just said about artificial intelligence, or you're an imbecile. We need the police, we need the fire department, we need people to pave our roads. We can't privatize all of this stuff, and privatizing it would get its own problems. So whenever I hear someone say, you worship the religion of the state, I know I'm in the presence of someone who just isn't ready for a conversation about religion and isn't ready to honestly talk about the degree to which we rely and are wise to rely on the powers of a well functioning government. Now, insofar as our government doesn't function well, well, then we have to change it. We have to resist its overreaching into our lives. But behind this concern about statism is always some confusion about the problem of religion. And again, this person ends his almost question with, I won't paint a billion people as barbarians. Well, neither will I. And again, when I criticize Islam, I'm criticizing the doctrine of Islam, and insofar as people adhere to it, to the letter, then I get worried. But there'll be much more on this topic when I publish my book with Majid Nawaz. I originally said that was happening in June. That's unfortunately been pushed back to October because it's still hard to publish a physical book, apparently. But you will have your fill of my thoughts about how to reform Islam when that comes out. What do you think of Jank Ueger's, the Young Turks attack on you and Ian recently? Well, I guess I've ceased to think about it. I push back against it, briefly saying on Twitter, obviously my 3 hours with Jenk had been a waste of time. It appears to have been a waste of time, at least for him. I think many people got some benefit from listening to us go round and round and get wrapped around the same axle for 3 hours. It actually wasn't a waste of time for him because I heard from a former employee there that was literally the most profitable interview they've ever put on their show. I don't know what he made off of that interview, and I don't begrudge him making money off his show, obviously, but I feel that Jank now systematically acts in bad faith on this topic. He has made no effort to accurately represent my views. Again, it's child's play to pick a single sentence from something that I've said or written and to hew to a misinterpretation of that sentence and attack me. And I think that the thing I finally realized here. And this is not just a problem with Jenk, it's with all the usual suspects and all of their followers on Twitter. I've just reluctantly begun to accept the fact that when someone hates you, they take so much pleasure from hating you that it's impossible to correct a misunderstanding that would force your opponent to relinquish some of the pleasure he's taking in hating you. This is an attitude that I think we're all familiar with to some degree. Once you're convinced that somebody is a total asshole, where you've lost any sense that you should give them the benefit of the doubt. And then you see one more transgression from them, another thing that confirms whatever attitude in them you hate, whether they're homophobic or they're racist or they don't believe in climate change or whatever it is. And once that has calcified, that view of that person has calcified in you, and you see yet one further iteration of this thing, well, then you're not inclined to second guess it. You're not inclined to try to read between the lines. And in fact, if someone shows you that transgression isn't what it seemed, well, then you can be slow to admit that this is not totally foreign to me. I noticed this in myself. This is something that I do my best to shed. I think it's an extremely unflattering quality of mind. This is not where I want to be caught standing, but my opponents seem to be always standing here, and that makes conversation impossible. Okay. How did you become such a good public speaker? I have a speech class this fall and I'm sick about it. Well, I certainly wouldn't claim to think that I am such a good public speaker. I think at best I'm an adequate one. And as I wrote on my blog a couple of years ago in an article entitled The Silent Crowd, I really did have a problem with this. I was really terrified to speak publicly early in life and overcame it and overcame it rather quickly just by doing it. Meditation was helpful, but meditation is insufficient for this kind of thing. You have to do the thing you're afraid of. You can't just get yourself into some position of confidence beforehand and hope to then do it without any anxiety? No, you have to be willing to feel the anxiety. And what is anxiety? Anxiety is just a sensation of energy in the body. It has no content, really. It has no philosophical content. It need not have any psychological content. It's like indigestion. You wouldn't read a pattern of painful sensation in your abdomen after a bad meal and imagine that it says something negative about you as a person. Right. This is a negative experience that is peripheral to your identity. But something about anxiety suggests that it lands more at the core of who we are. You're a fearful person, but you need not have this relationship to anxiety. Anxiety is a hormonal cascade that you can just become willing to feel and even interested in. And it need not be the impediment to doing the thing that you are anxious about doing. Not at all. I go into this in more detail on my blog, but this is just something to get over. It's worth pushing past this and not caring whether you appear anxious while doing it. Just do your thing and you will eventually realize that you can do it happily. But some people are natural speakers. They're natural performers. This is what they are comfortable doing. They love to do it. They're loose. They have access to the full bandwidth of their personality in that space. And I am not that way. And even being comfortable doing it, I'm not that way. It doesn't come naturally, and I'm happy. I've fooled at least you. If I'm a good public speaker, it's a statement that I have something interesting to say. If you pay close attention, you'll see that I just kind of drawn on in a monotone. And my lack of style is to some degree a necessity because I want to approach public speaking very much as a conversation. I get uncomfortable whenever my pattern of speech departs too much from what it would be in a conversation with one person at a dinner table. Now, if you're standing in front of a thousand people, it's going to depart somewhat. This is the nature of the situation. But I try to be as conversational as possible. And when I'm not, and when someone else isn't, it begins to strike me as dishonest. Yet I will grant you that the performance aspect of public speaking allows for what many people appreciate as the best examples of oratory. So you just listen to Martin Luther King, Jr. He is so far from a natural speech pattern. It is pure performance. Just imagine being seated at a table at a dinner party across from someone who was speaking to you the way MLK spoke in his speeches. You would know that you were in the presence of a madman. It would be intolerable, right? It would be terrifying. So that distance between what is normal in conversation and what is dramaturgical in a public speech. I don't want to traverse that too far. I'm not comfortable doing it and actually tend to find it suspect as a member of the audience. What is really entailed in Zogchen meditation? Is it the loss of eye that is the self, or does it go beyond that? Well, traditionally speaking, it goes beyond that in certain ways. But I think the core point is what's called nondual awareness to lose the sense of subject object awareness in the present moment and to just rest as open centralist consciousness and just fully relax into whatever is arising without hope and fear, without praise and blame, without grasping at the present or pushing away the unpleasant. So it's a kind of mindfulness, but it's a mindfulness of there being nothing at all to grasp at as self. So yeah, selflessness is the core insight. They don't tend to talk about selflessness, they talk about nonduality. Any suggestions or advice if I want to do two years of silent meditation on retreat? Yeah, well, just don't do it by yourself. You really need guidance if you're going to go into a retreat of any significant length. So find a meditation center where they're doing a practice that you really want to do and find a teacher you really admire and who you trust and then follow their instructions. A couple of more questions about meditation. Why do we do it sitting up? If having a straight back is valuable, why not do it lying down? Well, you can do it line down. It's harder. We're so deeply conditioned to fall asleep lying down that most people find that meditation is just a precursor to a nap in that case. But it can be a very nice nap. And if you're injured or if you're just tired of sitting, lying down is certainly a reasonable thing to attempt. Most people find that it is harder to stay awake and people often have a problem with sleepiness while sitting up. So that's the reason I haven't read any of your books but want to soon. Does your view that there's no free will give you sympathy for your enemies? Yes, it does. I've talked about this a little bit. It is an antidote to hatred. I have a long list of people who I really would hate if I thought they could behave differently than they do now. Occasionally I'm taken in by the illusion that they could and should be behaving differently. But when I have my wits about me, I realize that I am dealing with people who are going to do what they're going to do and my efforts to talk sense into them are going to be as ineffectual as they will be. And there's really no place to stand where this was going to be other than it is. And so it really is an antidote to hating some of the dangerously diluted and impossibly smug people I have the misfortune of colliding with. On a regular basis. Can the form of human consciousness be distinguished from its contents or are the two identical? That's an interesting question insofar as I understand it. There are a couple of different ways I can interpret what you've said there. But I think human consciousness clearly has a form both conscious and unconscious. When you're talking about the contents of consciousness you're talking about what is actually appearing before the light of consciousness. That's what is available to attention in each moment, what can be noticed. But there's much that can't be noticed which is structuring, what can. So the contents are dependent upon unconscious processes which are noticeably human in that the contents they deliver are human. So, for instance, an example I often cite is our ability to understand and produce language the ability to follow grammatical rules, to notice when they're broken. All of the all of these processes are unconscious. And yet this is not something that dogs do. It's not something that chimps do. We're the only ones we know to do it. And all of this gets tuned in a very particular way in each person's case. For instance, I am totally insensitive to the grammatical rules of Japanese. When Japanese has spoken in my presence, I don't hear much of anything linguistic. So the difference between being an effortless parser of meaning and syntax in English and being a little better than a chimpanzee in the presence of Japanese that difference is again unconscious yet determining the contents of consciousness. So there are both unconscious and conscious ways in which consciousness in our case is demonstrably human. And I don't really think you can talk about the humanness of consciousness beyond that because for me consciousness is simply the fact that it's like something to have an experience of the world the fact that there's a qualitative character to anything that's consciousness. And if our computers ever acquire that, well, then our computers will be conscious. What's your opinion of the rise of the new nationalist right in Europe and the issue of Islam there? There's a very unhappy linkage there. The nationalist right has an agenda beyond resisting the immigration of Muslims. But clearly we have a kind of fascism playing both sides of the board here and that's a very unhappy situation and a recipe for disaster at a certain point. I think the problem of Islam in Europe is of deep concern now and especially so probably in France, although it's bad in many countries. You have a level of radicalization and a disinclination to assimilate on the part of far too many people. And it's a problem unlike the situation in the United States for reasons that are purely a matter of historical accident. But I think it's a cause of great concern and it is, as I said in that article on fascism. It is double concern that liberals are sleepwalking on this issue, and that to express a concern about Islam in Europe gets you branded as a right winger or a nationalist or a xenophobe. Because these are the only people who have been articulating the problem up to now, with a few notable exceptions, like Ian Hersielle and Douglas Murray and the UK and Majid Nawaz, who I've mentioned a lot recently. So it's not all fascists who are talking about the problem of Islamism and jihadism in Europe, but for the most part, liberals have been totally out to lunch on this topic, and one wonders what it will take to get them to come around. Lots of questions here. Apologies for not getting to but the tiniest fraction of them there appear to be now hundreds. So what charity organization do you think is doing the best work? There are two charities unrelated to anything that I'm involved in that I, by default give money to. Doctors Without Borders and St. Jude's Children's Hospital. Both do amazing work and work for which there really is no substitute. So, for instance, when people use any of the affiliate links on my website, or you see in a blog post where I link to a book, let's say I'm interviewing an author and I link to his book, if you buy his book or anything else on Amazon through that affiliate link, well, then 50% of that royalty goes to charity. And rather often it's Doctors Without Borders or St. Judes. I just think when you're helping people in refugee camps in Africa or close to the site of a famine or natural disaster or civil war, where you're doing pioneering research on pediatric cancer and never turning any child away at your hospital for want of funds, it's hard to see a better allocation of money than either of those two projects. I reject religion entirely, but I'm curious how you, with complete certainty, know there is no God. What proof do you have? Well, this has the burden of proof reversed. It's not that I have proof that there is no God. I can't prove that there's no Apollo or Zeus or ISIS or Shiva. These are all gods who might exist, but of course, there's no good evidence that they do. And there are many things that suggest that these are all the products of literature. When you're looking on the mythology shelf in a bookstore, you are essentially perusing the graveyard of the dead gods. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+I wanted to do another Ask Me Anything podcast, but I know I'm going to get inundated with questions about my conversation with Noam Chomsky. So in order to inoculate us all against that, or at least to make those questions more informed by my view of what happened there, I want to do a short podcast just dealing with the larger problem, as I see it, of having conversations of this kind. More and more, I find myself attempting to have difficult conversations with people who hold very different points of view. And I consider our general failure to have these conversations well so as to produce an actual convergence of opinion and a general increase in goodwill between the participants. I consider this the most consequential problem that exists. Apart from violence and other forms of coercion, all we have is conversation with which to influence one another. And the fact that it's so difficult for people to have civil and productive discussions about things like US. Foreign policy or racial inequality or religious tolerance and free speech, this is profoundly disorienting, and it's also dangerous. If we fail to do this, we will fail to get everything else of value. Conversation is our only tool for collaborating in a truly open ended way. So I've been experimenting by reaching out to people to have difficult conversations. I recently did this with the Muslim reformer Majid Nawaz, which resulted in a short book entitled Islam in the Future of Tolerance, which will be published in the fall. And as you'll read in that book, this was not at all guaranteed to work. Majid and I had a very inauspicious first meeting, but when I later saw the work he was doing, I reached out to him, and the resulting conversation is one in which we made genuine progress. He opened my mind on several important points, and most important, it was a genuine pleasure to show readers that conversation, even on very polarizing topics, can occasionally serve its intended purpose, which is to change minds, even one's own. Now, here I would draw a distinction between a conversation and a debate. They're superficially similar when the parties disagree. But to have one's mind changed in a debate is to lose the debate and very likely to lose face before one's audience. Now, this is an incredibly counterproductive way to frame any inquiry into what is true. Now, I've occasionally I engage in public debates, but I've never approached them like a high school exercise where one is committed to not changing one's view. I don't want to be wrong for a moment longer than I need to be. And if my opponent is right about something and I can see that, I will be very quick to admit it. So my dialogue with Majid was not a debate, really, even though at times we are pushing rather hard against one another, it was rather a conversation. And on the heels of that success, I decided to attempt a similar project with Noam Chomsky, and the results of my failure are on my blog for all to see. Of course, many people understood exactly what I was trying to do and why I published the exchange, and they apparently appreciated my efforts. I tried to have a civil conversation on an important topic with a very influential thinker, and I failed. And I published the result because I thought the failure was instructive. The whole purpose was to extract something of value from what seemed like a truly pointless exercise. But that's not the lesson that many readers took away from it. Many of you seem to think that the conversation failed because I arrogantly challenged Chomsky to a debate, probably because I was trying to steal some measure of his fame, and that I immediately found myself out of my depth. And when he devastated me with the evidence of my own intellectual misconduct and my ignorance of history and my blind faith in the goodness of the US. Government, I complained about his being mean to me, and I ran away. Well, I must say, I find this view of the situation genuinely flabbergasted. Many of you seem to forget that I published the exchange. You must think I'm a total masochist or just delusional. I know that some of you think the latter. I heard from one person, I think it was on Twitter who said, Sam Harris reminds me of a little kid who thinks he's playing a video game and he thinks he's winning, but his controller isn't actually plugged in. Now, I happen to love that metaphor. I'm just not so happy to have it applied to me. Anyone who thinks I lost a debate here just doesn't understand what I was trying to do for why. Upon seeing that my attempt at dialogue was a total failure, I bailed out. I really was trying to have a productive conversation with Chomsky, and I encountered little more than contempt and false accusations and highly moralizing language accusing me of apologizing for atrocities and then weird evasions and silly tricks. It was a horror show. Now, I concede that I made a few missteps. I should have dealt with Chomsky's charges that I had misrepresented him immediately and very directly. They are, in fact, tissue thin. I did not misrepresent his views at all. I simply said that he had not thought about certain questions when I should have said he had thought about them badly. Those of you who have written to tell me that what I did to Chomsky is analogous to what has been done to me by people who actually lie about my views, you're just not interacting honestly with what happened here. I did not misrepresent Chomsky's position on anything. And insults aside, he was doing everything in his power to derail the conversation. And the amazing thing is that highly moralizing accusations work for people who think they're watching a debate. They convince most of the audience that where there's smoke, there must be fire. For instance, when Ben Affleck called me and Bill Maher racist, that was all he had to do to convince 50% of the audience. But I'm sorry to say it was the same with Chomsky. I can't tell you how many people I heard from who think that he showed how ludicrous and unethical my concern about intentions was. For instance, he's dealing in the real world, but all my talk about intentions was just a bizarre and useless bit of philosophizing. But think about that for a second, okay? Our legal system depends upon weighing intentions in precisely the way I describe. How else do we differentiate between premeditated murder and crimes of passion and manslaughter and criminal negligence and just terrible accidents for which no one is to blame? Imagine your neighbor's house burns down and yours with it. What the hell happened? Well, what happened has a lot to do with your neighbor's intentions. If he had a cooking fire that got out of control, that's one thing. If he tried to burn down his own house to collect the insurance payment, that's another. If he tried to burn down the whole neighborhood because he just hates everyone, that's another. Intentions matter because they contain all the information about what your neighbor is likely to do next. There's a spectrum of culpability here, and intention is its very substance. Chomsky seems to think that he has made a great moral discovery in this area, and that not intending a harm can sometimes be morally worse than intending one. Now, I'm pretty sure that I disagree, but I would have loved to discuss it. I wasn't debating him about anything. I was trying to figure out what the man actually believes. It's still not clear to me because he appeared to be contradicting himself in our exchange. But in response to my questions and the thought experiments I was marshaling trying to get to first principles, all I got back were insults. But worse, many people seemed to think that these insults were a sign of the man's moral seriousness. Many seem to think that belligerence and an unwillingness to have a civil dialogue is a virtue in any encounter like this, and that simply vilifying one's opponent as a moral monster by merely declaring him to be one is a clever thing to do. Now, despite what every Chomsky fan seems to think, there was nowhere in that exchange where I signaled my unwillingness to acknowledge or to discuss specific crimes for which the US. Government might be responsible. The United States and the west generally has a history of colonialism and slavery and of collusion with dictators and of imposing its will on people all over the world. I have never denied this, but I'm hearing from people who say things like, of course ISIS and Al Qaeda are terrible, but we're just as bad, worse even, because we created them, literally and through our selfishness and our ineptitude, we created millions of other victims who sympathize with them for obvious reasons. We are, in every morally relevant sense, getting exactly what we deserve. Well, this kind of masochism and misreading of both ourselves and of our enemies has become a kind of religious precept on the left. I don't think an inability to distinguish George Bush or Bill Clinton from Saddam Hussein or Hitler is philosophically or politically interesting, much less wise. And many people, most even, who are this morally confused, considered Chomsky, their patriarch, and I suspect that's not an accident. And I wanted to talk to him to see if there was some way to build a bridge off this island of masochism so that these sorts of people who I've been hearing from for years could cross over to something more reasonable. And it didn't work out. The conversation, as I said, was a total failure, but I thought it was an instructive one. So I don't know if that answers all the questions I'm going to get about the Chomsky affair. But when I put out a call for an AMA later this week forgive me for moving on to other topics, because I don't think there's much more to say on this one. But I'm going to keep trying to have conversations like this because conversations are only hope./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. There you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'll be speaking with Jerry Coyne. Jerry is a biologist at the University of Chicago, and he's written over 100 scientific papers and several books, the most recent of which is Faith Versus Fact why Science and Religion are Incompatible, and I highly recommend that you pick it up. Jerry is one of the more frequent and articulate commentators on the clash between scientific and religious ways of thinking, and he's been a colleague and comrade and friend in this area for several years. I should probably apologize for the audio here. We did this interview remotely, and the recording of Jerry's voice especially leaves something to be desired, but you can hear the clarity of his thinking nonetheless. So without further ado, I bring you Jerry Coin. Hey, Jerry. How are you doing? Fine. Yourself? I'm good. Well, thank you for taking the time to do this. You are the first proper interview on my podcast, which no, really? Yeah, which makes me happy. I'm honored. Nice. Well, I was trying to remember where we met. Was that? In Mexico? At the Cu DoD Delaci Dais conference. Yeah, that's the first time I met you. It might have been the first time I met Dan, and it was certainly the first time I met Hitch. Last time as well. That was a good conference. It was a surprisingly well organized one. Yeah. Unfortunately, I had to miss the big debate with you guys. That was supposed to be nice, but had to get back to catch my flight. If you missed the debate, you missed Naseem Taleb's performance where he gave voice to one of the most bizarre eruptions of anti science gibberish. I can ever recall hearing that's on YouTube for any interested person that I do. I realize that was on YouTube. I'll have to go back and look at it. It was amazing. He insinuated himself into this debate that was already too crowded with like three or four people on each side, and he insisted that he had something of compelling interest to all of humanity to say. And then he got up there and just laid down a word salad of a sort that well, I guess you're used to word salads in these kinds of debates. I also remember from that conference this was the first time I witnessed just how different a human organism Christopher Hitchens was than myself. I don't know if you recall, but it was like a three hour drive to Mexico City from where the conference was because the traffic was so brutal at every hour of the night. And he had to go to DC. The next day, so he was flying in the morning. He had like a 06:00, a.m. Flight from Mexico City, and he had an event that night in DC. And I met him at the bar at midnight where he was having a scotch and a club sandwich, and he was not planning to sleep. He was just going to get in the car, get on the plane, go to DC. And perform again that night. He had an amazing stamina, that guy, especially given the way he used his body. I'm glad to get to meet him once before he dies. Yeah, well, I want to get into the topic of your new book, but just a couple of questions about how you got in a position to write it first. How did you get into science and what is your current focus in biology? Well, getting into science, people have asked me that, and that's not clear. If I were to name something, I suppose I'd say it was my parents, because my dad was an animal lover. So from the very first, I can remember, he was always dragging us to zoos and things. And then when I was a kid, they bought me all kinds of science books the golden book of Geology, the Golden Book of dinosaurs, that whole series. And I didn't really choose science as a gift of profession until I went to college and I took an introductory biology course that was taught by an evolutionary biologist, guy named Jack Brooks at William and Mary. He was extremely charismatic, and that's all it takes, basically, for the tipping point. From that point on, I was hooked on evolution and studied it throughout college, and I went to graduate school. So that's how I became a scientist. My area of research has been pretty much in my career with a few digressions the origin of species, that is, how one lineage can branch into two or more lineages. What are the genetic changes that accompany the origin of species that make these different lineages reproductively separated from one another, and are there any generalities or regularities in this process that we can study, and which genes are involved in that process? So I was basically taking up the question that Darwin started with his book the Origin of Species, which he, of course, neglected to answer. He didn't say anything about the original species. He talked about how a single species would evolve. And that question lay pretty much fellow until about the 1930s and then became fellow again. And I was interested in it, so I started working on it when I went to graduate school. And you're working in drosophila or what animals? Yeah. And fruit flies. If you want to study the genetics of how species form, genetics defined in a hard way, then that means doing crosses, not just sequencing DNA, which we couldn't do anyway when I started it. So if you want to, for example, find out where and how many genes distinguish two closely related species for a character like the sperm motility or behavioral isolation, mating discrimination, or any of their traits, like how they look different or anything, there's no way around that, even in these days of DNA sequencing, except across them. And fortunately, in fruit flies, many closely related species can be crossed under lab conditions, and they have a generation time of about ten days to two weeks. So you can go through 30 generations of manipulations in a year, which makes them ideal for this kind of study. Of course, you can't do that with any other organism except maybe flatworms or something. But at least for studying flies, I've gotten a deal out of that system. Yeah. And so now you also spend a lot of time policing the boundary of science and non science. And you've been a very vocal critic of religious dogmatism and a real ally of mine on that front. And you have a blog, Why Evolution is True, that you do most of that writing on. And now you have a couple of books. The first, Why Evolution is True, where you go into the details of answering that question, and your new one, Faith Versus Fact why Science and Religion are Incompatible, deals with the collision between Science and religion very directly and very usefully. It's a book I highly recommend people read. What percentage of your time now are you allocating toward doing primary science, and what percent is this more public communication of science slash defense of of science against unreasonable? Well, I'm sort of at the tail end of my scientific career. I turned 65, and I'm actually going to retire within a year. So the amount of new research I'm doing is zero. And but I'm cleaning up what I have done, which means writing the final papers that I got on my last grants and everything. So right now I'm and I've been half time for about a year and a half. So right now I'm seguaying from science into, you know, more public kind of journalism, writing, et cetera. So right now, I probably spent about 80% of my time doing the latter and 20% of it doing straight science, because that just consists of writing up the research that I haven't finished writing up yet. Right. Well, the thing you focus on in the new book is this phenomenon that we've come to call accommodationism. Can you explain what that is? Did you coin this word? Where did this word come from? Coin is a good verb for that. I think I did, but I'm not sure. It's one of those words that I use a lot and I think people got from me but I'm not sure I'm the originator of it. So since I don't know that, I'm not going to claim credit for that neologism but it is a good one and people have picked it up in terms of what it means. It's a view that is held by both believers, agnostics and atheists themselves sometimes that there is no inherent conflict or any kind of conflict between science and religion. There are various ways that you can couch that compatibility thing but that's basically the view that there is no conflict between the two areas and was the first clear and clearly wrong headed expression of this Steven J. Gould's non overlapping magisteria. Where do we get this notion of fundamental compatibility? Yeah, actually he's the guy that made it famous. But I think I have actually the book here, I can find the first expression of it in 1925 by Alfred North Whitehead. I just have a quote from here that says that remember the widely different aspects of events which were dealt with in science and religion respectively. Science is concerned with the general conditions which are observed to regulate physical phenomena whereas religion is wholly wrapped up in the contemplation of moral and aesthetic values. On the one side there's the law of gravitation and on the other the contemplation of the beauty of holiness. What one side sees the other misses and vice versa. So that's Whitehead in 1925, anticipating Gould by 74 years saying basically the same thing, that it's the separate magisteria view. Gould, of course, made the view famous because he was a famous scientist. The public lapped up his works and he wrote a whole book on this he calls the noma or non overlapping magisterial hypothesis. Plus everybody loved the idea. Why can't we all get along? That's a very popular idea. You can't be wrong if you say something like that. And it was a famous book. But you see this kind of view of non overlapping magisteria scattered throughout the discussion of science and religion, you know, throughout the 20th century. Just to be clear about what non overlapping magisteria are, it's the idea is that there are these two domains of expertise that are separate and one is the purview of religion, the other is the purview of science and they don't overlap. So in principle there can be no conflict between science and religion. That's correct because it's like a Venn diagram with two circles that don't intersect so there's no overlap. I think Gold was badly wrong about that but that was his thesis. One sphere, just to be clear, is the domain of investigating what's real in the universe and the other domain, Gould said, was the Billy Wick of meaning, morals and values, which is the religious circle. I just can never understand why this idea has a half life of more than like 90 seconds among smart people because clearly every religion is making claims about certain invisible things and certain ultimate fates really existing for people and souls and various corners of the cosmos. There are invisible spirits, there are souls, there are gods, there's a hell you can go to or successfully avoid. These are all claims about the way the universe is and how someone like Gould could think they don't trespass on the terrain of science. I can't even begin to see how this confusion is arising in someone like him. I think this book is a bit disingenuous. I knew Steve, he was on my thesis committee and he was a diehard atheist if there ever was one. I don't know if this book was like a psychological burp in him or that it was a gambit to gain popularity with the public. I just find it hard to believe, knowing Steve, I mean, he's passed on now that he would really believe this. But when faced with the kind of argument you made, which I agree with 100%, that almost all religions, there may be a few outliers make statements about what is real in the universe. Gold would claim that that's not real religion. So for example, creationism, which is a staple of Christianity in the United States and is accepted by about 43% of all Americans young earth creationism is the tenet of Protestantism of many Protestants. And that's a claim about the real world. I mean, Genesis talks about basically how old the earth is. If you calculate it back, it talks about everything being formed at once. It makes statements about his flood. All these things are not only scientific statements but they're scientifically checkable. So what Gould did when I'm faced with that is he said, well that's not real science. I mean, sorry, that's not real religion. I don't even remember what he calls it. I talk about it in my book. But he finessed the problem by just defining a way as not religious, those statements that religion makes about reality. And so of course, tautologically he was correct, but it doesn't make sense. And theologians have glommed on to this evasive maneuver he made. In some circles, it's still popular to deny that religion does not make statements about reality. There was an article by Tanya Lorman in last Sunday's New York Times referring to another paper by, I think, a Belgian philosopher who claims that religious statements of fact aren't the same as the kind of fact that we think of when we say there's a table here or the earth is 10,000 years old. They're what do you call statements of religious creeds. They don't have the same factual or epistemic content as factual statements. So there's a whole lot of so called sophisticated religious people who take a different tack from Gold and claim that religion is not about factual statements at all. And I would take issue with that and I assume you would too. So they too would sign on with no one. But most of the allergians have rejected Steve's statement because just on the religious side, because they recognize that their own faith makes claims about reality. To take Christianity as the example, if you think that Jesus really existed, you're making a claim about a historical person. And if you think that he really survived his death and in some sense persists and can hear your prayers and that he may be coming back to earth to raise the dead, in turn, you're making claims about biology. You're making claims about the human survival of death. You're making claims about telepathic powers of a now invisible carpenter. You're making very likely claims about human flight without the aid of technology. It's very frustrating. This is, as you, I think, suggested, also related to the idea that many people have that religious beliefs don't actually lead to any significant human behavior in this world because religious beliefs are, in principle, vacuous, and they're only about solidarity and community and finding this sort of nebulous meaning in life. They don't actually lead to concrete behaviors that we need to worry about. So jihadism is not the result of what any specific muslims believe. It's politics. It's economics. And so religious belief is not worth worrying about. It's an attitude that many of our fellow atheists hold, and therefore, they see no reason to oppose people's religious certainties even when they're seeming to encroach in the public sphere and in the kinds of public policies that members of our own government want to enact. They continually doubt that religion is at the bottom of those policies, whether it's opposition to gay marriage or embryonic stem cell research or whatever it is in the context of the United States. And I find it incredibly frustrating to interact with this kind of denialism, which is the other side of what you're calling accommodationism. Yeah, it's interesting. There's actually two claims there. The first one is that religion does not make any meaningful statements about reality. And the second claim, which can be separate from that, is that religious beliefs don't lead to behavior. I mean, those things aren't necessarily connected with one another, but it would be an interesting exercise to see if those people who claim that religious beliefs don't have epistemic content are the same people who deny that, for example, belief in the Quran leads to suicide bombing. I think somebody like Karen Armstrong would instantiate both of those views. She has this apophetic view of religion that you can't say anything about god, and of course, she goes around and claims that everything bad that religious people do is not based on religion themselves. So yeah, well, Scott atran, the the anthropologist, has linked those two ideas very explicitly in the way he talks about Islam, that these beliefs, religious beliefs are, in principle, vacuous. They have no propositional content about the world that could motivate anybody to do anything differently, and therefore nobody does anything differently on their basis. I e. Nobody blows himself up for that reason. Yeah. I was going to say I think we had something like a bit of this conversation when you were here in Chicago last and I would like to ask those people, okay, what would it take to convince you that they really were motivated by religion? I mean they're like theologians in a way that there's nothing you can tell them to disabuse them or no evidence whatsoever that would convince them that they're being motivated by religion because they can always think of a way that it's something else. So I like to ask them to write down a list of okay, what would it take you to show that? I saw your interchange at Tron, I guess it was in 2006. I read that yesterday and I was simply astounded that he could say the things he did. And then you showed a video of a Muslim preacher reciting from the Quran and you said it was very moving. And I looked at that and it was the words were beautiful, the musicality was great and he was talking about hell fire and how people were weeping. It's hard to believe that any kind of emotional reaction like that could not be caused by belief in the propositions that the preacher is actually laying out at the time. It wasn't the music that was making them cry. It was the fact that they were part of this great movement of belief. So I think to anybody who's not blinkered by some kind of accommodationist desires, it's palpably obvious that so much behavior is motivated by religious belief. I mean, look at creationists. If they don't really believe in the tenets of Genesis why are they trying to force them to be taught to everybody in schools? Why are they opposing evolution if it's just some kind of metaphor that they see in Genesis? I don't think that's the case. I think they really do believe that the words of Genesis are true and that's borne out by polls that show that a substantial proportion of Americans take the Bible as literal truth. Yeah. And you made in that conversation in Chicago the very useful observation, which I have now reiterated many times, which is this is a double standard that people like Atran and Armstrong and everyone else has not copped to because they never ask that we justify or that we doubt the political or economic rationales put forward for human behavior. So for instance, when someone like a member of the KKK says, I'm doing all this stuff because I hate black people, I'm really a racist and this is my core political ideology, nobody doubts that racist hatred of black people is really motivating this person. We would never try to look for an underlying motive there that negates the claim that he is in fact really racist. But when we have someone expressing their religious opinions or their religious expectations, the idea that they're going to get into paradise, behaving a certain way, or the idea that homosexuality is anathema to God accommodationists, insist upon finding some layer below that which is the true reason why a person is behaving as he is. Yeah, this is a good example of confirmation bias. I mean, theologians behave the same way. You know, they'll accept evidence that substantiates their religious beliefs, but anything that goes against it, they reject or work it into their worldview. Somehow these accommodationists in terms of politics and religion are exactly the same way. And I can't help but believe that this is just one more symptom of the unwarranted respect that people have for religion and faith. They just cannot bring themselves to claim that religion could make anybody do anything bad. I mean, if people like us could admit that religion can sometimes make people do good, I don't see why they can't admit the same thing on their side. Yeah, and let's put a finer point on that, because I freely admit that religion can cause people to do extraordinary things which are good and many of which could be unthinkable, but for that specific person's religious beliefs, it's certainly possible that there are people who would only go to Africa to aid in a famine because of what they believe about Jesus and about the importance of spreading his word, and that those same people couldn't find a truly rational, secular motive to behave that way. It's not to say that rational, secular motives don't exist, but for any one person, it's quite possible that he's not going to get out of bed in the morning and do good, but for believing certain irrational things about God or about his fate after death. That's totally possible, and there seems no reason to deny that. That's another example of the double standard. I mean, if we can admit that religion is such a psychological motivator that it will drive missionaries to places that are well, god forsaken in both respects and sacrifice basically, their well being in their lives to do this kind of stuff. Why do they deny that? It could also motivate people to do things that we consider bad, but they consider good for their religion. I don't really understand the whole thing, except that the people that usually do that show this overweening respect for faith. Yeah. So what do you make of someone like Francis Collins? Because obviously one argument that we hear for the compatibility between science and religion is essentially an existence proof in the person of someone like Francis Collins. Here you have a scientist who is a working scientist, who is, in fact, in Collins's case, an evangelical Christian. So there it is, proof that science and religion are compatible. And he says that they're not only compatible, but mutually supportive. What do you make of the riddle of his mind? Well, there's two claims there. The first one is compatibility. The second is spatial support. I would think the second one first, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'll be speaking with a man whose work I greatly admire, dan Carlin, the host of the Hardcore History and Common Sense podcasts. And Dan and I will be releasing this conversation jointly on both of our podcasts. We're calling this a crosscast, which is analogous to a cross post one sometimes sees on blogs that publish the same content simultaneously. It turns out we have many listeners in common and many of you have been urging us to have a conversation together, I think anticipating considerable disagreement on issues like the war on terror and state security and foreign policy. And I don't know that we collided as much as anyone might have expected, but we had a good, energetic conversation, which I greatly enjoyed and I hope you will too. So in a moment, I give you Dan Carlin. Hey, Dan, how are you doing? I'm good, how are you? I'm great. Well, listen, as my fans know, I have been frequently referring to you as the greatest history professor on Earth at the moment. And I know this may cause you to blush, but listen, I'm just a huge fan of your Hardcore History podcast and have been recommending it to anyone with ears at this point. That is very dirty pool to start off a discussion with a compliment like that, because now what am I supposed to say? Sam, you've said some of the nicest things and I really appreciate them. Thank you so much. And listen, isn't it amazing that we're having these kinds of public discussions in the realm of the virtual realm here, where everyone gets to watch? I mean, the modern technology has taken us back almost to an Athens type situation where we can have these sorts of public conversations and we don't require some TV network to figure out if they can sell airtime or whatever for something like that. It's a pretty interesting new world. Yeah. And I do not say this to preempt any of the hard hitting criticism which always comes yeah, for me, that's what I'm going to do. Exactly. But actually, this is a question I wanted to ask you, though. You refer to yourself as a fan of history and you are at pains to distinguish yourself from a professional historian or the legions thereof who may in fact be watching your show or listening to it and scrutinizing it for errors. Do you get pushback from academics? What's that experience like for you? Well, I have to be honest, I think my own opinion here, but I think everybody's been remarkably generous and nice to me on everything because I had envisioned a completely different kind of program when we started it. I wasn't going to talk about any sort of narrative history at all. I was just going to talk about, isn't this weird? And isn't this funny? And the sort of stuff history majors used to talk about on their lunch break. And as the show evolved, the audience wanted more of the background, and so it went into territory I wasn't perhaps I had never given a lot of thought to do I want to go challenge historians, or something like that. And this is why we use so many quotes and whatnot during the program, because I think coming from the position that, you know, you're not an expert, you're not pretending to be an expert. So when you make some sort of statement, we feel like you want I think we call them audio footnotes. You feel like you want to have someone there to say, listen, it's not me saying this. Here's a couple of historical points of view you're still picking and choosing. So it's not totally fair. But at the same time, I think I build that into the way we do things. I think if I was a professional historian with all the credentials and published and all this, I would approach the program differently, because I'm not. I make sure that every time we say something, we try to have somebody who is credible and who is trustworthy, or at least who we should listen to a little bit more than the podcast host back up what I'm saying. So it's become a key way that the show has evolved to take advantage of the fact that I'm not a professional historian. Yeah, well, I wonder how deep that caveat actually cuts, however, because in my career I have weighed in on a variety of questions that fall outside the official area of my academic expertise. And occasionally I get pushback on this very point that you don't have a credential which would cause someone to be confident about your opinions in this area, let's say, on the topic of religion, for instance. But many of these areas simply require that one read the books and be attentive to one's sources and have conversations with experts. And at a certain point you're playing the same language game the experts are. And it's certainly appropriate to have humility and be attentive to the frontiers of one's ignorance. But in science, this really breaks down quite starkly because I'm surrounded by scientists who simply do not have the academic bona fide days you would expect, and yet they are contributing in various areas of science. At the highest level, there are physicists who don't have PhDs in physics there are computer scientists who don't have even college degrees. I mean, I'm in dialogue with an expert on artificial intelligence now who never went to high school, right? So at a certain point, it's a matter of how you can function in a given domain, not a matter of what your CV looks like. And scientists, as long as you're making sense, accept this far more readily, in my experience, than people in the humanities. I'm just wondering just how you view it, because unless you're making mistakes and not correcting them, I don't see how you're not functioning as an expert on those topics. You you touch and I mean, maybe there's a distinction between if you want to be an expert on World War II or at least the Nazi side of it, you really need to deal with primary sources in German, and that's some wrinkle there. But I'm just wondering how you see that. I think it sort of depends on the specialty we're talking about. So, I mean, for example, take a surgeon who operates on people's brains. I think we can both agree that you're not going to want your amateur brain surgeon coming in and saying, listen, I read this expert, and this is how he suggests we do it. So there's a specific specialty there. I think bringing up the humanities, though, is a wonderful point because the humanities, by its very nature I mean, look at the subjects that make up the humanities law, religion, language arts, think, music. I mean, these are all things with much more leeway, I would say, in terms of even the creative than you get in something like brain surgery, for example. I think the way to put it would be that you were just suggesting that people outside the expertise have something perhaps that they can bring to the table. In a lot of these cases, I think it three dimensionalizes things a little bit to have somebody from another discipline apply the mode of thinking common in their discipline to an unusual realm. In other words, in order to get a 360 degree view of things, sometimes take a historical event. You might want to have the Second World War examined by somebody who's an expert in military affairs, obviously, or somebody who's an expert in international relations is going to write a book with a different point of view. One of the best books I ever read on the Second World War was done by an economist who looked at it from a completely different point of view. And so in that sense, I think you can three dimensionalize reality, and that's what you're looking at when you look at history, you're looking at a moment in reality, and there are multiple arushiman sort of a variety of ways to look at things. What I maybe bring to the table is I'm looking at this from outside the specialty. When you deal with a lot of historians today, you are dealing with scientists in a certain realm. I mean, these are people that aren't going to talk about things that they can't quantify. Any good scientist is going to want to be able to back up what they say in a peer reviewed journal. That's how a lot of historians are today. But the specialty of what they study takes away that ability to look at things from a farther away lens. Right. So in 50 years ago, you would have had all these historians who would have been just fine looking at events as though they were in a satellite and give you these big pronouncements. Most historians today wouldn't be comfortable with that. The problem is historians aren't dealing with brain surgery. They're dealing with human beings. And that by its very nature, is hard to quantify and hard to get your mind around. So I guess it gives me a lot more leeway than a brain surgeon. And they've been very kind with me, all these professionals. I don't think they sometimes like the way I will dramatize events, but I look at this as like what Alfred Hitchcock famously said about what drama is. Drama is just reality with the boring bits taken out. And that's kind of how I look at the history show. I'm giving you the story that an author would give you or a writer would give you, or a historian 50 years ago might give you. Yeah, well, what you're doing is fantastic, and that'll be my last dollop of praise before we get into areas of contract. That's it. It's got to stop now. That's right. So I've been hearing echoes and rumors from among our Mutual fans that you and I should have a conversation about the sorts of things you treat on your Common Sense podcast, which I have listened to, frankly less. I've only heard a few episodes of it, but I get a sense that people are expecting us to not fully align on questions of foreign policy and just war and the war on terror and the role of Islam in inspiring the terror side of that war, et cetera. I don't know how much you know of my positions on this, but I suggest we just sort of meander into these areas and see what happens. Well, sure. And maybe we could start with how do you keep getting these people angry with you when Sam Harris if you Google Sam Harris, there's going to be all these wonderful moments, like the Ben Affleck moment and all these other things. I feel like I've got pretty thin skin when it comes to things like Twitter and all those other things. How do you deal with these situations and then how do you go back and do them again? I mean, it seems like the position you put yourself in is to enjoy that because you're going to just do it again on the next show. Yes. Well, I guess there's a Freudian diagnosis for this I'm not going there. I'm just suggesting you might consider it. Yeah, well, I realized at some point that it doesn't bother me to be hated for positions I actually hold. If someone understands what I think, and they think it's reprehensible and they want nothing more to do with me as a result, that I'm fine with the thing that gets under my skin and which, unfortunately, I have to deal with more than anything else is a frank misunderstanding of what my position is or just a malicious distortion of it so as to spread a misunderstanding of it. And I deal with that more and more. Now, unfortunately, there is no way to deal with it elegantly, comprehensively, and effectively. You can't keep writing letters to the editor for the you can't follow your critics around cleaning up the mess they're making, and it is much easier to make a mess than to clean it up. So, yes, wherever you go and you see my views discussed, you see just total distortions of them. And that does wear on me. And I've, as a result, attempted to pick my battles. And I avoid certain controversies now, frankly, because I anticipate the cost both in terms of time and annoyance, and then just decide it's not worth it. And I actually just gave up a book contract that was the best book contract I ever had and maybe we'll ever have. But I decided the topic was just going to put me in an all front, 360 degree mode of fighting critics whose first impulse is to more or less ignore all of the nuance in my argument. So I'm being more selective about the kinds of battles I pick now, although I'm liable to sort of stumble into any area of controversy in the middle of a conversation like this and reap the whirlwind, but it's annoying. But I think some of what this conversation would be if we touch those topics is me distinguishing what I actually mean from what many of these people like Ben Affleck think I mean. Well, and it's funny, too, for those who maybe don't understand and I've only had the tiniest, tiniest sampling of what you must go through, Sam, but people will point me sometimes to say, a reddit page or a bulletin board somewhere where the headline topic will be, dan Carlin said blank. Is he right? And you'll read what it says you said, and you never said it. But there'll be hundreds of responses of people debating what an idiot you are for saying that, and you don't even know how to begin to correct that element. And you just think, if this continues to proliferate over time, the Internet will be full of stuff that I never said, can't defend, and that people slam me for. So I can only imagine how you get it. And you're dealing with topics that require huge amounts of nuance and lots of clarifying statements and lots of disclaimers and all that other stuff. And if you just take a piece out of that to sample in a blog it's really hard to give the overall impression you're trying to convey on any of these subjects. We all have that problem. Yeah. And also what I'm dealing with is I'm coming up against certain taboos which are just kind of amplify misunderstandings. So the taboo around criticizing religion as opposed to other sets of ideas that is something that people are really biased against tolerating. They think there's something indecent just as a matter of principle in criticizing people's deeply held religious convictions whereas there is nothing wrong with criticizing their false ideas about history or biology or anything else. And there's also a lot of white guilt and understandable guilt over the history of slavery and colonialism and just the sheer wealth imbalance between the west or the developed nations and the developing ones. And so a criticism of Islam in particular gets mapped onto those concerns about inequalities in our world and you get a lot of confusion. It's interesting to look at cases that pass through this filter more or less undistorted. So, for instance, for me, the case of North Korea you get pretty perfect convergence from people in the west, liberal or conservative, on the wrongness, the ethical wrongness of the regime in North Korea. And I think more or less everyone would acknowledge that if there was something we could do to liberate the North Korean people without too much bloodshed, we should do it. Really, it's a hostage crisis. We have a couple of maniacs, or generations now of maniacs with Buffant hair holding millions of people hostage, starving some significant percentage of them and brainwashing them with an ideology that is just clearly totally out of register with any real understanding of what's going on in the world. These people think they're a master race. They're essentially a cargo cult armed with nuclear weapons. And I think it's a if you talk to liberals and conservatives about this, the real problem is just a practical one. There is no way to resolve this hostage crisis without massive loss of life. They have nuclear weapons. That's one problem. But even short of that, they have so much artillery aimed at Seoul that there's no way to do it without a horrendous war. But if we could wave a magic wand and change the situation and disabuse these people of their mythology and their intellectual isolation and cancel that regime, everyone acknowledges that would be a good thing. And yet, if you try to move that to a similar consideration of Islamic theocratic regimes, jihadist regimes or Islamist regimes, things begin to break down under the influence of political correctness. And so I just put that to you as a potential starting point and await your words. Well, let me suggest a difference. Take the North Koreans, for example, and we talk about brainwashing. I think your analysis was right on, but here's the thing if all of a sudden they allowed an actual free election in North Korea. Be interesting to see the results. It'd be interesting to see if the brainwashing took hold to such a degree that people there voted to continue the regime or if all of a sudden, like the emperor having no clothes, we would see that all these people are actually more savvy and are able to resist the brainwashing more than we think and vote to do away with the regime. That'd be interesting to have. And the reason I ask that is because when I think about these Islamic, the extreme regimes so, for example, the sorts of state that an ISIS ISIL is trying to put together, for example, or even, let's just say, one that's been a more functional and valued member of the world community, let's say Saudi Arabia. If all of a sudden you had free and fair elections in Saudi Arabia that included all adults able to vote, it'd be very interesting to see what the results were. And so when you talk about the ability of whether it's liberals or let's call them paleo conservatives or anyone else to look at a situation and agree that a North Korea is a tragedy, and wouldn't it be nice if those people are freed? And doesn't this also apply to these Islamic regimes? I'm not sure. I remember getting an email from a woman, and she lived here in the west, but she was Islamic. And I had made some comments about women in burkas and the rights of women in some of these countries, and I had used that as a particular touchstone. And she wrote me back and she said, listen, no offense, but this is what you don't understand, not growing up in this society. She says, I want this. I want this burka. And she called it something else. There's another word for it. And I was raised in a society where we began as little girls to look at this and couldn't wait until we got to the age. And she said, now, my views may not be representative, and certainly different regions and different areas have different feelings about this, but from the traditional little town I came from, I didn't see this as an imposition on my freedom. To me, it was a rite of passage. And it's a cultural change for me to see it as some sort of inhibition, because here in the West, I think she should have the right to wear a miniskirt, which is not something that might have occurred to her. And so, in other words, if you could go to these areas that the ISIS folks are beginning to take over, or lose, as the case may be, and ask what the people there want, it'd be very interesting whether or not they want to be liberated. And, you know, you can have two kinds of liberation. You can have the pie in the sky, one where we say, we're going to liberate you, and in 50 years you're going to be like, Germany is today, or we can liberate you, and you Sunni folks will be living under a bunch of Shiites who take advantage of you all the time. I mean, it it's not a perfect world where we can offer these people a panacea either. So they're often making the same sorts of choices in their heads that we're making at the ballot box, which is, are we going to get a lot of difference if I vote for this Democrat, credit this Republican, nothing seems to change. So you start to vote for lessers of two evils. I think those people would react in a similar way. So I guess what I'm saying is there might be a difference between a country where it really does look like all these people are captives like North Korea and another country like Saudi Arabia, where you're just not sure if you actually polled people in a free poll if they would say they wanted to continue to live like that or not. There may be a cultural difference. It's hard for us to notice. Yeah, well, I think this goes to the foundational issue of whether anyone can want the wrong things and whether there's a place to stand where you can say that in fact, they do want the wrong things. They have been brainwashed, as I said, in the case of North Korea or some concatenation of causes has led them to has trimmed down their worldview in such a way that doors to human flourishing are closed to them or closing to them. And someone outside that culture, someone who has not been brainwashed by it, could open those doors. So for instance, literacy for women, I think that is an intrinsic good. And it really doesn't matter how many women you can get to tell you from behind their burqa that they don't want to read. They don't know what they're missing. It's possible not to know what you're missing. And I think once you strip away political correctness, you have to agree that being born a woman in Afghanistan any time in the last 30 years was to be unlucky, was to be an unlucky woman by and large. Now, it's not to say that you couldn't find one happy woman there who, if given a chance to sample all of the human experiences on offer, would for whatever reason, realize that she is happiest in a burka not reading. That's possible. But that's not how most of the women there came to live the lives they're living. These lives have been imposed on them. And for the most part, when you listen to the expressions of relief and humility and clarity that you get around this notion of wearing the veil in the Muslim world, I don't hear it too much around wearing a burka, but wearing lesser veils like the hijab. You are hearing that as a response to the thuggish misogyny of the men. In those cultures, women are treated like whores and considered to be whores. If they're not appropriately veiled, they are groped and most of these societies beaten for not being appropriately veiled. When you have that kind of stigma around the empowerment of women or just the mere sexuality of women, and when you have every man's notion of his own honor predicated on the chastity of the women in his life, well, then, yeah, it's two sides of a coin. And no doubt many women feel relieved to be appropriately veiled in those cultures. And I'm also not holding up the miniskirt as the ultimate example of psychological health with respect to variables like youth and beauty and female sexuality, et cetera. There may be interesting things to talk about there, but I don't think there really is much daylight between these theocratic societies within the Muslim world. I'm not saying all of the Muslim world fits this description, but when you're talking about the Taliban or ISIS or any of those contexts and something like North Korea, which we recognize rather readily to be a condition of brainwashing in a political cult as opposed to a religious one and see, this is where I always have my issues with that. If somebody were going out there and making and when I say somebody, I mean somebody in our government if somebody in our government were standing up and saying, listen, part of what we're doing in this world is making the world safe for women to walk the streets and to vote in their societies and to drive and to enjoy everything. It's a human rights question. Right. And I agree with everything you said about that. But the problem then becomes one of selectivity. Somehow we care about these things as a country with a foreign policy where we happen to have reasons to care, right? Afghanistan might be important or Iraq might be important, but in a country like Saudi Arabia, which isn't just doing these things, but which in an educational sense is a bit of a fountainhead for these ideas and the most extreme of the extreme ideas, but they get a pass. Well, we should plant a flag there because that, I think we will both agree, is really a perverse result of our dependence on their oil. And if we could pull that off the table, then I think things look very different. They get a pass because we need them to be our friends or have needed them to be our friends almost at any moral cost. But then let's talk about that because it's better than putting a flag there. I would make the case that so much of the problems that we are having as a result of, shall we call it, the radicalization of a region, has to do with the fact that we're over there and they don't like it. And the reason that we're over there in large part has to do with the resources. Oil is obviously petrochemicals of any kind, obviously the main reason. But there are others. But we're over there. And I was thinking the other day about how we would react. And Sam, you've heard my shows, this is how I think. But I always try to think to myself, how would we react in a comparable situation? And it's funny, I was reading not that long ago a book on the Iranian Revolution of 1978 79, and they were talking about how the Shah's secret police in Iran were so good at monitoring any gathering of people that might be seditious, that might want to overthrow the government in any sort of capacity, to replace it with any sort of government. And the one place the Shah had a hard time was when these people would meet in mosques and meet over religious purposes, because it was difficult for the Shah's government to crack down on religious people without looking bad to their own population. They had their own reasons for not doing it. But it created a safe zone that involved religion in a way that 30 or 40 or 50 years previously, back in the era where you had guys like Nasser trying to push, by Middle Eastern standards, secular sort of nationalism, where those people were sort of forced into the arms of making in the same way. We might have a Red Dawn scenario in this country. If we had a bunch of Islamic people stationing their tanks on our territory because something under our ground was a national security interest to them, I have a feeling we would be doing things. We might not be slitting throats ISIS style, but I bet we'd have some guys in big trucks with gun racks in the back that were fond of planting explosives sometimes. I mean, I don't think we would react all that differently. I think the fact that there's a religious overtone to this makes us feel like we would react differently. Where if you took the religious overtone out and just put us in the same situation, I bet we're not all that much nicer than some of these people we see fighting what they see as outside colonialists or people foisting their culture or stealing their resources or what have you. Do you think we'd be all that different if the shoe were on the other foot? Well, I think the analogy breaks down a little bit because we're not stealing their resources and we're not stealing oil from Saudi Arabia. We are just protective of it because we need it. Now, I think that's a problem we absolutely must solve, and we should be running a Manhattan Project to solve it. And the technology is very much within reach. We could all be driving electric cars, we could all be on solar, we could have true resource security, and that would be an extraordinarily good thing to do. The analogy breaks down for me. Because, one, we're not mere invaders of these countries. Now, I didn't support the war in Iraq. I think it was a terrible idea, especially a terrible idea in retrospect, although I think the argument could have been made for it more or less along the lines I just gave for the North Korean case. You had a virtually psychopathic dictator and a hostage crisis, and it would have been a good thing if the civilized world could have found a way to intervene and liberate the Iraqi people, except for the fact that the level of religious sectarianism in that society caused it to explode into civil war. And I don't hold us responsible, nor do I think anyone should hold us responsible for the millennial long inter nesting hostility between Shia and Sunni. That's entirely a religious confection. But surely, Sam, it was a known quantity that needed to be taken into account. It's why there are people at the highest level saying, don't do this. This is a fractured society that's being held together by a vicious strongman. And if you take the vicious strongman out, who the heck's going to hold it together? It's Yugoslavia without Tito all of a sudden. Yeah, well, it points to the differences that religion introduces into these sorts of events. But wait, wouldn't ethnic tensions play the same sort of role in some of these other societies? I mean, religion, it's not a unique situation, it's a variable that could be replaced by other variables in other places. I mean, the Nazis, there was a religious component to it, but it wasn't primarily religious. But there was an ideological concept that played the same variant role in their situation. I think you could find hundreds of those. An ethnocentrism, a racism, a superiority complex, ancient ethnic hatred. Any of those things plays that same variant role. Well, it's not the same. There are other forms of us, them thinking, no doubt, and you just ran through the list. So racism and xenophobia and any kind of in group, out group tribalism gets people to go to war with each other periodically. But the notion of paradise, I think, changes the equation significantly, which is to say, true belief in paradise, in martyrdom, as a way to arrive there, in fact, as the most reliable way to arrive there. And the Christian tradition really has never even had that the way it exists within Islam. The psychological phenomenon that I'm most focused on and most worried about, frankly, is the fact that you can be someone without any political grievances. You've never been mistreated by anyone. You're just a guy who grew up in the suburbs of Marin County or Maryland or any of these places where we've seen people so called self radicalize, where an internet meme gets into their head. They may have been born Muslim or not, but at a certain point they decide, well, Islam is really worth looking into. And they read the books and they go down the rabbit hole and they decide, yeah, jihad is incumbent upon every Muslim male. There's nothing more beautiful or important to give your life over to. And paradise really exists. It really is waiting for me. I'm going to get there. I'm going to get the virgins. All of this stuff is believed by the kinds of people who are being recruited to ISIS, and they are going over there in a spirit of jubilation. ISIS is not acting like a bug light for the psychopaths of the world or the depressed people of the world who just want to die in the desert. These are people who are highly motivated. They feel a great sense of meaning. And we might say that, well, this is not such a big phenomenon. We're just talking about some tens of thousands of people at this point coming from other societies to join the Islamic State. But that phenomenon is a window onto the psychology of what is happening in these societies. Among the indigenous people who are committed to these ideas. There's a deep kind of transcendental meaning taken on board when you actually believe these things, and it explains why you can get mothers to just celebrate the suicidal atrocities committed by their sons and why people can. A very chilling conversation I just read and excerpted in the next book I'm publishing in the fall was between this former Muslim, a Muslim, now atheist, Ali Rizvi, and a supporter of the Taliban after the school bombing in Pashawar in Pakistan last fall, where 150 students were massacred by members of the Pakistani Taliban. And a supporter online was expressing his support, and Ali got into a bit of a debate with him and he just pulled back the veil on this sort of thinking. He said, Listen, you're a materialist. You don't believe in paradise, therefore you think that these kids were just annihilated. They weren't. We know them to be in paradise because they've not taken on the sinfulness of their apostate parents, and we did them a favor. There's no problem killing these kids. But the problem I'm dealing with and talking to people like many of the people who are probably among your listenership, is that secular, liberal, Westerners burn a lot of fuel trying to convince themselves that anyone actually believes this stuff. The moment you take on board the proposition that millions and millions of people actually believe in paradise and they think there's no problem with death when all these jihadists who say we love death more than the infidel loves life are actually giving us an honest statement of psychological fact. The moment you take that on board, you have to admit the game has changed. Now, it's not totally changed. It's not like it shares nothing in common with the other sorts of tribalism you mentioned. And it's not that politics never plays a role here. And it's not that we don't do stupid things like ignore the sectarianism between shia and Sunni. But the thing I'm focused on, which has me worried is the fact that you can get educated, Westerners even, to believe this stuff and to be motivated to act on the basis of these ideas. But, Sam, here's the thing. You suggest in the tone of the argument that this is unusual or that this is singular or that this is different. It's a variant of human behavior we've seen over and over again, especially in what I was having a talk with a Southerner not that long ago who was talking to me about the Civil War and talking about the American South before the Civil War is what he called an honor culture. And these honor cultures are common throughout history. The arguments that you were saying about paradise and the willingness to die and embrace death and enjoy death and make it beautiful and something to be sought is exactly the way my stepfather, in absolutely horrifically scared terms, by the way, talked about how they felt about fighting the Japanese in the Second World War. Right. And it wasn't quite secular because there's a religious overtone to the whole thing. At the same time, the feeling of one of the most important things being to scratch off the imperial chrysanthemum on your rifle so that it was marred before you died and didn't fall into the hands. I mean, all these things, your mind reels. But what it seems to show is it's a window to a certain human experience which is recurring and not that uncommon. The idea the Spartans had that the people who were born in that society were born to die for the state. That's what they were. They go have more sons so that the state will be glorified when they die for I mean, it's just this what's the old line that one Spartan Martin had when his wife was going to see him off to a certain death? And she said, kind of, what do you want me to do? And he said, Marry someone else and have a lot of sons. I mean, the whole society is predicated on an honor system which says you die for the state or you die for the underlying cause. That justifies the state, whether that's the emperor and his infallibility and his Godlike nature, or whether it's somebody actually telling you what God wants and what awaits you on the other side. It seems to me that we're taking something that is not singular and not that unusual when you look at the entire breadth and reach of history and making it sound that way. Well, I would agree. It's on a continuum. There's no question that people and it's not always religious. The continuum is not there's a religious continuum, but that's part of a larger continuum. Ideas motivating people to give their lives over to a greater cause. Don't you agree that that will always exist? You get rid of this particular ideology that's motivating these suicide bombers, there will be something else. Well, no, I think we genuinely make progress in this area. I think that, for instance, Christianity, apart from a few pockets of fundamentalism in the west and a few aberrations that we're in the process of overcoming, I think Christianity has moderated itself significantly as a result of its collisions. With modernity, with science and secular, politics and notions of human rights, and just the fact that in the developed world, most Christians most of the time, have more that they want out of life than is suggested between the covers of the Bible. So they ignore the bad parts in the Old Testament. They ignore the bad parts in the New Testament. They try to focus on Jesus and half his moods. The truth is, most people, no matter how Christian they are, don't spend a lot of time reading the Bible in its entirety. And they are very different for the most part than Christians in the 14th century. And I believe your podcast on this topic was called Prophets of Doom. When you listen to what it was like in that community and how credulous these people were and how expectant of the end of history in their lifetime, those people are in a minority, a tiny minority within the Christian tradition. Even, I would argue, among fundamentalists in the United States, you can get fundamentalists to talk about the rapture and their expectations of it in their lifetime. But in terms of what is the beliefs that are operative for them day to day, those have been knocked back considerably since the 14th century. And what I would argue is that while it's not a total difference of kind, what we're confronting in the Muslim world now is a little bit like a tear in the fabric of time. And we have the Christians of the 14th century pouring into our world armed with modern weapons. And again, this doesn't cover all 1.6 billion Muslims, but it covers a disconcerting number of people throughout the world, in Muslim communities east and west, who are motivated animated by a very literal and comprehensive reading of these texts, the Quran and the Hadith. And there are a few differences between Islam and Christianity that make it even more incorrigible than Christianity was. The Quran does not have a line like we have in Matthew render unto Caesar those things that are Caesars and unto God those things that are Gods. And that line does a lot of work for Christians who just want to get out of the state business. And that's a problem. We have to find a way forward within the Muslim world for genuine reform. And there are people working to do that. And I'm trying to help these people do that. I've collaborated on a book with one of them, Majid Nawaz. There are people who are doing really heroic work and really risky work. That's the other thing that is quite disanalogous at this moment in history to stand up as a Muslim and say any of the things that I have just said very likely will get you killed in 100 different countries at the moment. And it's a problem that we as a global civil society have to find some way to overcome. Couldn't you make the case, Sam, that, for example, you mentioned something very similar to this. You go back and you read the Old Testament of the Bible, as the Christians call it. There'll be stuff in there where it says that you should stone women who are not virgins on their wedding night. And if you did that today in the name of Judaism, more than 99% of Jews would think that was crazy. And the reason is why? You ask? Why? Because once upon a time, it not only was crazy, but the book authorized it in a way that maybe some of the people in an ISIS or some radical Islamic group would say their text legitimized. But here's the thing. But before you go too far down there, just don't forget your thought. But in defense of all the truly crazy Jews who still exist, there are those who will tell you that, no, it still holds. We just don't have a sanhedrin. We don't have a consecrated religious body to enforce it. Okay, I got you. There are people who will actually just say that all of that's just been put on pause. Yeah, if you saw it on YouTube, I don't know how many people are going to stand up and say, finally somebody's living up to the religion. I guess my point is that and you mentioned it, what we're seeing here is the vast majority of Islam. I know Islamic folks. I'm sure you do, too. They don't seem anything like the people that we have a problem with. I have one who can quote the Bible like a televangelist. He quotes the Quran in multiple languages, and every time I'll ask him, I'll say, so I hear a lot about this aspect of the Quran. Tell me what you think, and he'll explain the different ways they can be interpreted and the different Islamic thinkers over time and the way they've approached these things. The people that we're having problems with, by and large, are a minority, and they're people who listen to the problem that Islam has in a sense, that the Ottoman Empire played a partial role in before its disintegration was some sort of ability to proclaim what is heretical and what isn't a part of the religion. In other words, let's pretend you had this caliph that people like ISIS always say they want, right? Somebody who could play I'm sorry for the analogy. It's imperfect, but a Muslim pope, let's just say, not going to be able to deal with Shiite and Sunni things right away, but someone who could essentially say, because you'll often hear there'll be some terror attack and you'll get a couple of Western Muslim leaders who will say, this does not represent true Islam. But true Islam right now is a difficult thing. It's a little like that guy who burns Koran's in the US South and says that he's a preacher. He has just as much to make these decisions as anyone else. If you have a caliph who is a religious leader who can say, listen, I can't stop them from doing that, but let me just tell you, you do that and that 72 virgin claim is not going to come true. And who are you going to believe? That weirdo with his track record or me, right. That's missing in the system. And this is why, if you look at the problems that we're having with Islam, the vast majority of Islamic folks are embarrassed and horrified by the whole thing and are getting blowback in their own personal lives. People who wouldn't hurt anything pay the price for people who would. So you turn around and say, what can we do if you want to win this war? If you look at this as a war on Islamic extremism, then to me, and you know, this is what I studied in school. I studied try to try to come up with victories, right? Military victories. It's a hearts and minds conflict. The people that are going to win this war for us are Muslim. And so anything we do that alienates the people we need to win is counterproductive in the end. Well, I totally agree that this is a war of ideas that has to be waged by Muslims, with other Muslims. They're the only people who are credible to those other people. Yeah, it's a war of ideas, and it is a civil war. And we have to figure out how to help the true secularists and reformers in the Muslim world to win. But the one thing I take issue with in what you just said is that it's a tiny minority who support these ideas or this behavior that, in fact, is not true. It depends what you're talking about. But pick a number. Pick a number, because there has been a lot of polling on this, and frankly, the only way we ever can gauge public opinion, you can't gauge it by just meeting as many people as you can meet. You have to do it with opinion. But throw out a number. Let's play with whatever number you want. One distinction I would make, and this is a distinction that was impressed upon me by my friend Majid Nawaz, with whom I collaborate on this book. And Majid was a former Islamist. He was a former radical who was trying to engineer coups in places like Pakistan. He wasn't technically a jihadist. He wasn't perpetrating terrorism, but he spent five years in prison for his activities in Egypt. And he knows why radicals do what they do. And he's in dialogue with jihadists. And he now runs a counter extremism think tank, the Quilliam Foundation in the UK trying to come up with a counter narrative for devout Muslims to disentangle Islam from the kinds of theology that you see justifying the behavior of the Islamic State and other, quote, radical or extremist groups. The problem, however, is that if you run an opinion poll in the UK asking what do you think should happen to the Danish cartoonists after the cartoon controversy? Or do you think the seven seven bombers were justified in their actions, you get shocking levels of support for this. Something like 70% of British Muslims think that the Danish cartoonists should all have been imprisoned. And I don't know what percentage of those think they should have been killed, but 70% don't understand the imperative that free speech win in this case and that those are British born Muslims now. So you can only imagine what it is in Tehran or in Mecca. So the distinction that Majid impressed upon me is that between Islamists and conservatives, this has always confused me and it's now clear. And it's actually the distinction I was trying to make on that show with Ben Affleck and you could see the results there. Islamists are people who are trying to impose Islam on society politically. They want a state religion wherever they happen to have a state or wherever they live. They want society to be obliged to live under Sharia Law. And jihadists are the subset of Islamists who are willing to do this through violence immediately. That the broader set of Islamists just want to do this through some political process. But that the goal is Sharia Law for everyone. Whether you're a Muslim or not, you have to live under an ascendant and triumphal Muslim state. And this is a global aspiration. Most Muslims are not Islamists. And I think the percentage is somewhere around 15% or 20% worldwide are Islamists and they're there are differences among Islamists. But what is islamists agree that Islam has to become the global religion and there's no way to separate politics from religion. The rest of the Muslim world. Now we're talking about something like 80%. They're not Islamists. They don't want their religion imposed from the state. But a majority of that 80% is absolutely conservative in their views, religiously so. They have views about the veiling of women and the honor implications of female sexuality and the appropriateness or the acceptability of homosexuality and free speech, et cetera. Cartoons about the Prophet. They have very conservative views which at any given moment may seem to align them with Islamists and jihadists and the people who burn embassies in response to cartoons. But when you ask them about how they feel about the Islamic State or about Al Qaeda, they will tell you everything. You would be consoled to hear. Of course they hate Al Qaeda. Of course they think Al Qaeda has hijacked their peaceful religion and they want nothing to do with it. But when you drill down on their specific moral attitudes, they are extremely conservative. And I would argue that, as with Majid, that we have to apply pressure to both of these communities to embrace a global, pluralistic, liberal, secular mode of tolerance that is only subscribed to, at this point by a minority within the Muslim world. Not a majority. It's not the numbers are not consoling, and it is, as you say, not something that a white infidel like me is going to impress upon 1.6 billion people. This has to happen within the Muslim world by Muslims. But here's the thing. See, I think there's a single and I've seen this, and I'm going to take it in another direction in a second to try to show how I think this is a recurring thing and we've just plugged Islam in for something else. But I mean, let's take Islam out of this and let's go to a bunch of Americans down in the Bible Belt and say, do you think the newspaper in your community should show that piece of artwork that shows Christ in a speaker of urine? Right. What do you think and should that be legal and what their reaction would be to that? Or if you went to a bunch of people who were veterans of the United States military, who served on, let's say, D Day and said, should people be allowed to urinate on the flag and then show other people that or wear T shirts that show horrible manglings of the US. Flag and should that be legal? The difference is that while they may think that's horrible and worthy of a punch in the nose, they're not going to go blow up a shopping center because they're offended. So I think the offensive side of this is a very human way to behave. And I think you would get similar sorts of reactions if you frame the question a certain way from all kinds of groups of human beings being offended to the point of wanting to punch somebody. Pretty standard human reaction. The differences you would have pointed out is the desire to kill somebody over it as a way to intimidate them into behaving the way you want them to behave. And I want to add further along that continuum the difference. Once you believe that you will go to paradise for doing so, or once you believe that your children behind whose bodies you're hiding as a human shield, will go to paradise if they're killed while you're behaving that way. And again, I feel compelled to take a non religious example to point out that I'm agreeing with the continuum, the structure you're sketching out. I think this kind of offense is a very human and universal yeah, and let's talk about a heroic death, right? Because, for example, you look and you study the side of the anarchist movement from 110 and 15 years ago, which, by the way, every time I mention all the peaceful anarchists out there say, please distinguish my views from the ones you're talking about. But about 120 years ago, it was in vogue, let's put it that way, for people who thought that political change was so necessary, it was worth killing people over to do something that involved what was known at the time as the propaganda of the deed. And the idea behind this was is if you, let's say, assassinate, and there were a bunch of foreign leaders, were foreign from an American viewpoint, assassinated. There were even American attempts at assassination in order to kill a leading figure, in order to get the publicity that comes with that and then encourages others to kill important political figures that are part of the establishment. The propaganda of the deeds whole idea was that you would be giving up the rest of your life, whether it meant you got hung for capital murder or spent the rest of your days in prison or whatever as a hero to the movement. It's like the old non religious Soviet Union. The hero of the Soviet Union, right? The kid who turns his parents in so they can be executed at the camp because they were counter revolutionaries, and then the little kid gets a statue devoted to him. I mean, these are not unusual kinds of things, and they don't have to be religiously driven to happen. So when we talk about people that are offended and then lash out, I think something like that is where the rubber meets the road. In terms of when you say, in a free society, how do we make it not? Okay, let me give you an example. Once upon a time, if you killed your wife, we've you found her in bed with another man, there are courts that might let you off for that and juries that might let you offer that a lot less likely today because things have changed. But there's a lot of people out there you could interview who would say, listen, I'm just telling you, man, if you find your spouse out with somebody else and somebody gets shot, not that hard to understand. So, I mean, I think you may have made a case when you talked about the time fabric ripped open and we're seeing a bunch of people with a mentality that used to be more widespread or that runs counter to modern liberal secular sensibilities. At the same time, it's like saying that a bunch of people have a worldview that's dangerous and wrong. And the way we're going to solve that is by bombing and doing things that end up providing propaganda to the people you're trying to beat that they can then use against the people we're trying to convert or at least keep on our side. To say, see, these people talk a good game, but they kill women and children, too. And you can talk about things like intention all the time, but if it's your kid that gets caught in the crossfire when we're trying to get a bad guy in Pakistan. There's nothing I'm going to say to you that's going to calm you down and make you rational and not make you think, I'm going to go get the bastards who did that to my kid. So you're creating the next round. What I was going to go I remembered my train. I thought what I was going to go with this is saying in a funny way as a kid, and I know you're about my age, too we grew up at the last half of the Cold War, the so called Red Scare, which was so for those of us who lived through it and were at least on my political viewpoint, it would drive you crazy how we were obsessed with this communist threat. And just sure, it was just out. And then once the spell was broken, you look back and you go, god, it's amazing we got so wound up over that. And then sort of almost in the historical sense right afterwards, we now get this Islamic thing which has almost been plugged in for what used to be a sort of a godless atheist, ideological enemy to an extra God believing, non secular enemy. I mean, in a funny way, I feel like it's deja vu all over again and I just have Islamic terrorists plugged in for former Soviet spreaders of world revolution. But the justification that our government uses to impede on those very secular values that you were just defending is the same. It's a wonderful hammer with which to hit our constitution with, just like the Soviet Union one was before it. Well, it did get plugged in, but we should recall that it plugged itself in. We had September 11, which was a moment where history intruded into our lives. I don't know how you felt, but I really felt that was the first moment where it was absolutely clear to me that I was living in history of the sort that I had read about in history books where you see that things can go totally into the ditch in a moment's notice that are forces aimed at your life that you were not aware of. And all of a sudden there really is a burden in the current generation to get the maintenance of civilization right. But I agree with you. There are many similarities there, and I think we should be dropping bombs very selectively. I think the problem of collateral damage is a huge one. I don't think we should overestimate the number of people who become radicalized as a result of our collateral damage, but I think I think it is a genuine phenomenon. But what's more of concern to me is that certain ideas, if merely accepted, create a condition for a total repudiation of the kinds of values we need the better part of humanity to embrace at this point, which is a commitment to. Free speech and equality among the sexes and tolerance for diversity. We need these things globally. We can't just live on islands of tolerance where we then are forced to interact with and suffer our poorest borders with genuinely intolerant medieval commitments. So we need to spread this worldwide, and it's a big problem. I feel like we have dealt with Islam as much as we need to at the moment. I want to actually make a lateral move to a similar topic and ask you what you think about this recent controversy around the Confederate flag and whether it can be displayed on the state house in South Carolina or if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I'll be speaking with Megan Phelps Roper, who is the granddaughter of the infamous Fred Phelps, who is the pastor of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. You've seen the signs they hold while picketing the funerals of dead soldiers. Signs that read, God hates fags. Or thank God for dead soldiers. Or thank God for AIDS. Megan grew up in this church, as did the rest of her family. Most of her family remains in it. She has since left and is in a unique position to bear witness to the power of religious belief, both in her own life and in the lives of everyone she grew up with. I found it a fascinating conversation. I found her a highly intelligent and seemingly very reliable witness to this sort of life experience. And I hope you find our conversation as enjoyable as I did. One thing I should point out is that it will seem highly anachronistic that we don't talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that made it legal for gays and lesbians to marry throughout the United States. We actually spoke before that ruling came down. Also, I feel the need to apologize for the quality of the audio. The more I get into podcasting, the more I am horrified by the quality of the audio I've put out previously. But I assure you, eventually things will be stable on my end. Unfortunately, this was not such an occasion. I would fire my audio engineer, but then I would have to fire myself. And now I give you Megan Phelps. Roper. Hey, Megan. How are you doing? I'm really good. How are you? I'm good. Well, thank you for doing this. It's great to hear your voice. And you and I were put in touch by Graham Wood, the Atlantic writer. And how did you cross paths with him and did he interview you for something previously? Yeah. So I was on Twitter, and his cover story what ISIS really wants within my feet a lot. And I read it. And as I was reading it, I was hearing so many themes that were so similar to my own upbringing. I mean, obviously, my family, Westper Baptist Church is not ISIS, but there are so many aspects of the way they believe and things that just struck me as I was going through it. And when I got to the end of the article, I was just totally blown away. And I scrolled back to the top and I saw his name and I immediately recognized it. And about eight years ago, I was talking to him for I think we were talking about Soldier's Funerals. It was when not that long after the Soldier's Funeral's protest had started at the church, and we exchanged emails back then. And so I found him on Twitter and I was like, yeah, I don't know if you remember me, but I just read your article and it was amazing. And then we just started talking. Yeah. What Graham thought would be interesting in putting the two of us together is to talk about the power of religious belief and the role that it plays in inspiring people's behavior. And you obviously have a unique perspective on that, having the background that you have. But let's back up and talk about your background itself and what the Westboro Baptist Church is. Many people will have seen the visuals online of you and the rest of your family, I guess, holding signs that say God Hates Fags or I think thank God for Dead Soldiers is one of them. So tell me about Westborough, and let's get into what you actually believed growing up, right? Okay, so the protesting started when I was five, and the church is located about half a mile from a public park in Topeka, Kansas. And this park was known as a place where gays could go and meet and have anonymous sex. And it was something that was well known in the community, and it was even listed in this nationally circulated address book of such places listings across the country. And one day, a couple of years before the picketing started, my grandfather was writing through the park with my older brother, who was at the time about four or five maybe, they were riding their bikes, and my grandfather would ride ahead a little way and then circle back. And one of the times when he was circling back, he saw two men trying to lure my brother into the bushes and just immediately wanted to do something about it. So he started writing letters to the city fathers and going to city council meetings, trying to get the part cleaned up. It was really something that was well known. They were journalists and cops. They were doing sting operations, and so it was an undeniable fact. So this was in what year? 88, 89. And this was your your father or your grandfather who had this experience? My grandfather, yes. My grandfather is Fred Phelps. Sorry. And he's the one who founded I mean, who was the first pastor of the Western Baptist Church. Was he a pastor already or he just decided to become one at this point? So he was ordained when he was, I think, 16 or 17 in Utah, and he was kind of a traveling preacher. And then he ended up in Topeka and he was preaching at a church called the East Side Baptist Church. And they were about to start another church on the other side of town and they asked him to stay and be the pastor. So that's how he ended up in Tabika at this church. So he had this experience which would spark homophobia in many predisposed to it, and so he decided to start this church. Was he already someone he had to have already been someone who was quite fundamentalist in his belief anyway, right? Or was this a formative moment for him? So I'm sorry, I should back up a little ways. The church actually started 1955. So he had been a preacher for some time before this incident. I'm sorry, I think I think I misunderstood yeah, what you were saying. Sure. So, yeah, so he and his, his views over the years had gotten, you know, further and further away from the mainstream. And so when this happened and, you know, he spent, I think it was about a year, maybe more than a year, trying to get the city to do something about it. And when he eventually got thrown out of a city council meeting for saying that, the city council members were sitting around like last year's Christmas trees. So they threw him out and he said, okay, well, I'm going to do something about this myself. So that's when the picketing actually started and it was just relatively innocuous signs like, you know, watch your kids gays troll this park. You know, gays are in the restrooms and, you know, things like that. And the response, you know, from the community. Other churches started coming out to counter protests, saying things like, God's love speaks loudest. There was a huge contingent of counter protesters from Ku, which is about half an hour away from the church. There really wasn't much about God initially, but then when these churches started to counter protest, they were like, well, the Bible does say things about gays and it's not good and we are a church and we have to address this issue. So that's how it initially got started. And then over the years, it just got more and more extreme. So first gays were the target and then it was churches for supporting gays and otherwise not following what my grandfather and the church members believed. They weren't following what the Bible said, not just about gays, but about, you know, pre marital sex and divorce and remarriage and adultery and, you know, so and then pretty quickly the funeral protesting started. I think it was 93. So this was all in 91 is actually when the protesting started. So I think 93 they were protesting funerals of gay people who had died of AIDS. And it was partly an attention getting mechanism, but it was never just to get attention, I remember. And this is something that a lot of people, you know, have charged the church with? Yes, they're they're not really Christian. They don't really they don't really follow the Bible here, look, they ignore this verse and this person. But there was I remember listening to my grandfather in an interview a few years ago, and the reporter said, some people say that you're just doing these things to get attention. And he kind of looked at her like she was crazy or stupid and said, well, of course I'm doing it to get attention. How can I preach to these people if I don't have their attention? So there was always a reason and a purpose for the protests themselves, but to get attention for them and to get attention for the message was always the primary goal. The charge that things are done just to get attention usually carries with it the insinuation that people don't really believe what they say. They believe that these expressions of hatred are just meant to be inflammatory, but aren't necessarily an honest statement of one's outlook. Was there any distance between what you and the rest of the family believed and what you were saying publicly, or were you just simply giving voice to your actual worldview? No, we were just giving voice to our actual worldview. I mean, my family didn't come to the table with hatred for LGBT people and then looked to the Bible to justify that hatred, which is a common charge. They read, if a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them, and walked away from that with and not just that verse, but lots of other ones. They walked away from that with God Hates Fags and supporting the death penalty for gays, and to categorically deny a connection between those words from Leviticus and our beliefs. To say that we read into the text what we wanted to see is, I think, to be blind to the nearly all encompassing power of that sort of blinding faith. And that's why it was such almost a relief to read in Graham Woods article to say that ISIS is Islamic, very Islamic. You know, it's it's not a matter of ISIS being representative of, you know, Muslims as a whole. It's a matter of them drawing inspiration from the text. Yeah. And the church and your grandfather are sometimes mentioned in this connection. What I find as someone who criticizes the link between religious belief, in this case, Muslim jihadist ideas and a phenomenon like ISIS, I find that people who don't like that connection very much will say, well, we have our extremists. We have the Westboro Baptist Church. Now, it's always a frustrating thing to hear as though what your family has done is in any way analogous to what is happening throughout much of the Muslim world, and in particular in Syria and Iraq right now. But your family's church is often held out as the most extreme variant of Christianity in the west and in particular in the US. I'm wondering if that's true. I'd like to just find out precisely what you believed on other topics, but it's clear that this attention getting mechanism of standing out there with signs has convinced many people that you're extreme. But are are you part of the Reconstructionist or Dominionist movement that wants all of the old laws in in Leviticus and deuteronomy practiced? I mean, do you do you think that homosexuals should be killed or adulterers should be killed? Because there are Christians in the US. Who claim to believe that. And is your grandfather among them? Yes. They're not trying to reinstitute all of the Levitical Code or the Mosaic Code. They think that there's two categories according to the church. There's the Ceremonial Law, which is things like the Dietary Code, and then there's the Moral Law, which is things like laws against murder and against homosexuality and against adultery. So they're only trying to uphold the moral law. But this was actually one of the things that eventually helped me to see outside of our paradigm, because my grandfather would say things like that. The only way for the United States to show that they have truly repented of the sin of homosexuality is for them to institute the death penalty for homosexuality, make it a capital crime. And we had we had a sign that said death penalty for fags. Yeah. So the comparison to ISIS is somewhat more reasonable than I first thought. It's not that, obviously you've been running around killing people, or your church has, but you're advocating a true commitment to sort of Taliban style theocracy or ISIS style theocracy. So what are other killing offenses? What else would you pull out of? Or what else would your grandfather pull out of Leviticus as actionable, I might say adultery. But again, this was one of the things that let me back up 1 second. For one, they're not actually trying to institute a theocracy. They don't believe that the United States. They believe that the world is going to end, and that only a tiny remnant of humanity, which is to say the church itself, but only the left of God. So they're not trying to actually change the laws. They're not actually trying to make anything happen with the government. They don't believe it's possible. And so it's not something that they pursue. Right. But that question about death penalty for vague, that was the very first point, the very first real question that I had about our theology. When I say question, I mean doubt. The first thing I realized that we were wrong about, and it came from a conversation with a Jewish guy on Twitter. I'm advocating for the death penalty for gays, and I'm quoting these verses from Leviticus, and he says, well, what about this member of your church who had a child out of wedlock? And I said, what about her? She repented, so she doesn't deserve that punishment. And he said, yeah, but that's also a sin worthy of death. And also, didn't Jesus say, let he who is without sin cast the first stone? And so this is the first time stepping back from that and realizing if she had been killed. If you kill someone, as soon as they sin, you completely cut off the opportunity to repent and be forgiven, which is a major foundation of Christian theology. This is what we were preaching, repent or perish. You have to repent and follow God's laws and live as we live, and that's the only way to heaven. And then for him to say that, quoting Jesus, let he was without sin cast the first stone, I realized because we would always answer that quote, because people would throw that in our face all the time. We would answer that by saying, yeah, but we're not casting stones. We're preaching words. All we have are words. We put words on signs and we stand on public sidewalks. We're not hurting anybody. But we were advocating for the government to kill people. And what was Jesus talking about there if not the death penalty? So I take that to my mom and a few other people in the church and was just immediately shut down. Like no Leviticus calls for the death penalty. If that penalty was good enough for God, then it's good enough for us Romans. One says that gates are worthy of death and so are their enablers. No. So what did your mom say about the analogy to the other member of your family who had had a child out of wedlock? Just that I was getting wrapped around an axle, like, oh, it's just not this an important piece of theology, or that the point is they're not going to do it. That's what she said. And I remember thinking like, yeah, but if we're going to use this as a litmus test, the fact that instituting death penalty since Jesus said, let he who is without sin cast the first stone, shouldn't the litmus test be the other direction? Shouldn't the fact that we don't do that be showing that we're obedient to God and such? One thing that I think we should flag here is that it's often believed on the atheist, secularist, rationalist side of the conversation that you just can't reason people out of their heartfelt religious convictions. Because there's this meme that has gone around, often attributed to someone like Mark Twain, I don't know who actually said it, but the idea is that if you can't reason somebody out of something they didn't reason themself into, but it's clearly not true. And anyone who's actually been in dialogue with many people like yourself over the years knows it's not true. Your effort to make your belief self consistent and this person on Twitter pointing out a logical contradiction in your beliefs was an entering wedge for you, which ultimately separated you from these ideas that had been drummed into you. So I want to get into what you now believe in a minute, but I want to linger for a moment on just what the church doctrine is. In a church like Westborough, how do you resist the move that many, many Christian denominations make, which is to disavow more or less everything in the Old Testament because it no longer applies? You don't have to fulfill the law that Jesus gave a doctrine of grace, and none of that old barbarism applies. Why wasn't that move open to you and your family? Because we believe that there are a lot of verses in the New Testament, a lot of passages and writers in the New Testament who referenced the Old Testament as a basis and foundation for their doctrines and sort of reinforcing them. And Jesus himself said that not one heaven and earth will pass away, but not one jot or tittle of my word will pass away until all is fulfilled. Yeah, there is that. Yeah, we definitely didn't disavow the Old Testament. And the only reason that distinction I was explaining a minute ago about the difference the distinction between the ceremonial law and the moral law. The reason they don't keep kosher or something is because of a New Testament passage that specifically sort of revises it's in Acts ten and Eleven talks about, you know, Peter is having a vision and, you know, God sends this sheet down with all these animals that are were unclean under the Mosaic code. And God says, rise, Peter. Kill and eat. And Peter says, not so, Lord, for no unclean thing. It's past my lips. And this happens three times. And God finally says, don't you call unclean. What? I've cleansed. So it's like, okay, this is now. It's not no longer required to keep kosher or to follow these. And there are several other passages in the New Testament that specify which of the laws you have to follow. But so we definitely took a lot of our, a lot of our doctrine and a lot of our beliefs from the Old Testament. It doesn't help that Paul also endorses at least the morality of killing homosexuals. I think it's in Ephesians, although I think he also says that it doesn't have to be carried out. Isn't that how things shake down with Paul? I'm not sure about that passage you're referring to in Ephesians, but I do know that we memorized a lot of the Bible, but we memorized Romans one, one summer and the end of Romans one. It's basically starting from verse 18. Towards the end it's talking about gay people, and then at the end it says that don't you know that they which commit such things are worthy of death? Not only those which do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. That really is always the issue that a more literalist queuing to the text has a kind of self consistency and power. Even when even when the text is as the Bible is rather amazingly inconsistent. The effort to connect the dots, the effort to make it as consistent as possible, keeps you as wedded as possible to a first century or a thousand year BC moral code, depending on on what you're emphasizing. So it's, yeah, really is always the issue I'm walking into here where the theology is really on the side of the literalist when it comes down to an argument about what the books actually say, any effort to make them seem merely metaphorical or more elastic than any plain reading of the text would suggest. That effort itself is clearly being driven not from some imperative that the reader is finding in the text, but an imperative that's coming from outside the text, from the world that's filled with libertines who want other things out of life. You have a different set of priorities that have come from a modern, secular, scientific, cosmopolitan commitment, and then you go back to the text trying to make sense of its sacredness, and the deck is stacked against you. If you're a moderate or a liberal, Right? Graham talks about this a little bit, I think. And there's different kinds of belief. There's belief like my family, and that I believe at least some percentage of ISIS is in similar groups. And those are people who read the text. And like you said, the plain meaning of the text, whatever they take away from that plain reading, that is what it says. And there is no interpretation. And that idea about there not being any interpretation, that's another thing that was so similar. I don't know if you read in The New Yorker there was a story recently called Journey to Jihad. And again with all these similarities and that one was one of the first ones. The leader of one of these groups it was called Sharia for Belgium asked this prospective recruit if he was prepared to learn the Koran without any distortion or editing or interpretation. It's like, okay, you just read the text, and it means what it means, and you have to go along with it, no matter what your moral impulses would say otherwise. And then there are people who read it and who are there's a willingness when they read it to include their own thoughts of, like you said, things outside the text, their own beliefs and understanding of the world that obviously influences the way that they read it or that they're trying to read it in light of beliefs that they already have. And my family saw that as explicitly evil. Like, you are substituting your judgment for God's judgment when clearly the Book says this. And we would quote the Bible. We meant, like I said, we would sit around, we read the Bible every single day. We talked about world events and the church's interpretation in the light of the church's interpretation of the Bible, and we would memorize big parts of it, and we would be standing out on the picket line talking with people and just quoting verse after verse. And so many people and I'm not saying everyone is like this, but so many of the people we were talking to had no idea that the Bible said these things, right? And again, this is one of those things. I mean, I was reading Rasa aslan said something like, if I were to he was talking about you and Del Mar, and he says they believe that people derive their values from their religion. That, as every scholar of religion in the world will tell you, is false. People don't derive their values from their religion. They bring their values to their religion. And I can just say flat out that's exactly the reverse of what happened to my family. My family without these texts, they would be doing amazing, incredible things that would change the world for the better. I mean, my family is full of lawyers and professionals, and they work hard and they're incredibly intelligent. They have advanced degrees, and incredibly it can be incredibly kind and generous. And that's one of the things when you're there, when you're part of it, that shows you the goodness of like, see, so much of this stuff comes directly from the Scriptures, and it's so good and so wonderful and it's such an amazing thing to be a part of. And yet, because they have to set aside again their own moral impulses and accept this reading of the text as they understand it, because they believe it's the word of God, they are left with, you know, picketing, funerals and, you know, causing all sorts of causing all sorts of trouble and heartache for people. Yeah, well, none of that is a surprise to me, of course. And I think the same is true even amid all the grotesque violence you see in ISIS. You see these guys, these are not depressed, suicidal psychopaths who just want to destroy their lives and go out with a bang. These are people who are deriving, incredible experiences of meaning and highly energized, passionate experiences of bonding with their brothers in arms. And they just have no doubt that what they're doing is morally right and that the creator of the universe is going to reward them for doing it. And so it's not. To hear that your family was experiencing, and probably still is experiencing a rich life in the context of these beliefs doesn't surprise me at all. What is it about? Explain the picketing of funerals, in particular, the funerals of soldiers. What is that about? And what is the sign thank God for dead soldiers mean soldiers funerals? The picketing started in June of 2005, so it was a couple of years into the war, and they were seen. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'll be speaking with Joshua Oppenheimer, a filmmaker who has made two mesmerizing films, the act of Killing and The Look of Silence. And as you'll hear from this interview, I am quite awed by his achievement. He has managed to make films about genocide that are harrowing, as you would expect, but also remarkably beautiful. And he's created a kind of moral laser with both of these projects. And it just it focuses the relevant emotions of outrage and compassion in a way that I haven't experienced before in film. As I say at the outset of this interview, I consider both of these films masterpieces. I highly recommend that you see them. If you haven't, I think you'll be able to enjoy our conversation whether or not you've seen them. But this should really be a goad to go straight to a movie theater to see The Look of Silence and to go online to see the director's cut of The Act of Killing, which you can see on Netflix. But other than that, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer. He's a recent recipient of the MacArthur quote, Genius Award, which, if you've seen the films, you will recognize is richly deserved. So without further ado, I'll give you Joshua Oppenheimer. Hey, Joshua, how are you doing? I'm very good. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Listen, are you sitting down? I'm going to praise you rather fulsomely to start. I'm sitting. I got to tell you, you have made two of the best documentaries I have ever seen. I consider both your films the act of killing and the look of silence. Just masterpieces. And I don't use that word lightly. So it's a great pleasure to talk to you. And I know you have the second film, The Look of Silence, coming out today in New York. I don't know when we're going to release this podcast. I assume it'll be out in at least Los Angeles by the time we do. But I just want to tell you, I want to talk about both films emphasizing the new one. But it's an amazing accomplishment what you've done with these films. Well, thank you so much. I'm honored and humbled by that. Thank you. Now, before we get into the films themselves, perhaps you can say a little bit about the relevant history here because both films discuss a genocide that many people don't know anything about. And it follows a history of exploitation by Western powers that really is quite shocking. So can you tell us a little bit about what happened in Indonesia? Sure. Well, Indonesia was a Dutch colony until 1945. And Sukarno, the first President of Indonesia, was a charismatic left leaning populist and the founder of the nonaligned movement. He was trying to steer Indonesia into a space, a course of development that was neither dependent on the Soviet Union, nor the west, nor the United States in the Cold War, when countries were under tremendous pressure to take sides and to align themselves with one power or the other. And this, of course, incurred the wrath of the United States. So in the years from the late 50s up until 1965, the United States supported, began supporting very intensively the Indonesian Army as a kind of opponent of the President of Sukarno and of the broader Indonesian left. And in 1965, there was a military coup in which a new military dictatorship came to power and consolidated its rule through the mass murder of anywhere between half a million and 3 million people in under six months. The victims were any presumed opponent of the new regime. So union leaders, progressive politicians, critical journalists, the ethnic Chinese, anyone who was in a left leaning organization called Leaders of the Indonesian Women's Movement. And all of this was supported and incited and then rewarded to the tune, ultimately, of billions of dollars of aid by the United States. So in Indonesia, we have essentially two generations of people who have been living surrounded by the people who murdered their loved ones. There's been no justice that the killers are still in power. That's right. More than that's right beyond there having been no justice. Or the reason there's been no justice is because the perpetrators remain in power. I believe you said in another interview that it was like going to Germany 40 years after the Holocaust and finding the Nazis still in power and happy to reminisce about how they reduced millions of people to ash. Yeah. And I think the Nazis would be more ashamed of it than the Indonesians because they knew that the rest of the world was condemning the Holocaust while it was taking place. Whereas here, the Indonesians knew the perpetrators in Indonesia know and believe that the rest of the world was celebrating their genocide while it was taking place. In fact, while I was filming, one of the perpetrators, one of them looks right at the camera because I'm right behind the camera and therefore right at me and right at the audience and says I should be rewarded with a cruise to the United States because it was America that taught me to hate and kill the communists. There's a very inadvertently funny, but just tonally so now deranged piece of footage that you supply in the new movie the the look of silence from, I think it was NBC News. Or was it NBC News? It was an NBC. Yeah. Special 1 hour long NBC News report produced in 1967, essentially celebrating the genocide. We hear that Indonesia is now more beautiful without the Communists. And we hear that goodyear major corporation, in order to harvest the latex that would end up in our tires, the soles of our shoes and in our condoms, was using slave labor drawn from death camps. When the workers were used up, they were sent back to the camps to be killed, starved, or dispatched out to death squads to be killed. This is, of course, essentially what German corporations were doing on the periphery of Auschwitz a mere 20 years earlier. And the German radio was not actually broadcasting that to German citizens. This is actually being reported pretty openly to American citizens, but as something good, as good news, as a victory in the struggle for freedom and democracy, something that should be celebrated and it should give us pause. Anyone seeing the film ought to pause and wonder whether the struggle of the so called free world against the Communist world was the real reason for American involvement in these atrocities, or whether that was actually just a pretext or an excuse for the murderous corporate plunder that we see documented in sunny terms in the NBC clip. Well, it is a ghastly history. But history aside and the horrific details aside, I'd like to get at what is so unusual about your films because there are many documentaries on horrible pieces of history, there are many Holocaust documentaries, and many genocides have been reviewed in film. And this makes for difficult viewing in every case. But what's so strange about your films is that they're almost like psychological experiments for the audience and for the people on the screen, and I would imagine, for you as a filmmaker, because you have created situations that no one has really seen before, I think few people would have thought possible. And they have the effect of turning up the volume on our moral emotions, feelings of outrage and horror at man's inhumanity to man. But you've done this in contexts that can't contain these emotions at all. In the act of Killing, your first film, there's a campiness and near comedy to this movie where the main killer is this amusing dandy who loves Elvis and John Wayne, and he's got this fellow goon sidekick who's a cross dresser. And I will get into each film separately. But now talking about both, generally in the new film, you do something very different, but it has the same effect of not being able to contain the emotions you're driving to the surface. Because in the new film, The Look of Silence, there's a formal beauty to it. All these shots are so stunning and so tranquil, and there's a silence and an attention to aesthetic detail in your framing of everything but it's like there are nuclear bombs going off beneath the surface and all we're seeing is the occasional unsettling of a teacup, and the effect is just riveting. Those are beautiful descriptions of what I've tried to do in both films. I mean, I try to paradoxically, by narrowing my focus onto one perpetrator and the men around him in The Act of Killing and One Survivor's Family in The Look of Silence, I try to create immersive, present tense experiences for viewers. I try not to tell a story through exposition, which, of course, keeps us at the distance, gives us the same remove from the events depicted. That a storyteller that a narrator would have. But instead, I try to immerse you and have you identify with the people involved. And I see my work as creating occasions, creating situations in which the inherent contradictions and horrors come to the surface in a way that feels overwhelming. And despite it all taking place within the overall safe space of making a film uncomfortable for everybody involved. And in The Act of Killing, I'm encountering the truth of boasting bragging perpetrators. And I felt the moral truth of this, the kind of transcendent truth here would be if these perpetrators would make a musical. And so I invite them to dramatize what they've done in whatever ways they wish in order to make visible the lies, the stories, the fantasies that allow them to live with themselves, the persona, the contradictory persona they inhabit that allow them to live with themselves. And then this is something you really see in the in the longer international version of the film, the version of The Act of Killing that came out outside the United States but is now actually available in the US. Too, as the director's cut on Netflix. It's The Act of Killing directors cut, but it's 40 minutes longer. What came out outside the United States, you see this kind of recursive process of performing, of dramatizing, and then watching and responding. And you see Anwar watching his own fantasies, his dramatizations, and then proposing the next one in response and watching and proposing the next one in response. And what unfolds is this kind of fever dream about escapism and guilt. And we are sucked right into it with Anwar. So I think that what's happening here is we are immersed. Each time Anwar watches the horror, watches his previous dramatization, we can see that he's terribly pained. But as you put it very nicely, there's nowhere for those emotions to go except further denial. So he proposes what he considers to be a kind of aesthetic improvement. So if he can fix the scene aesthetically, he can somehow dispel the pain and fix his past morally. And so one dramatization begets another, begets another, begets another until we're tobogganing through a kind of fever dream of shifting fantasies. And we get this. And it's about, again, the lies and fantasies that make up the killers present and the terrible consequences of those when imposed on the whole society of the corruption, the thuggery and the fear. And in that sense, it is about impunity today, not about the events of the genocide half a century ago, which, as you pointed out, there's many documentaries about terrible things in the past and they don't have the same impact because we know that there's been many terrible episodes of history all over the world. I try to make this about the present and I try to make it universal. Similarly in The Look of Silence by focusing on one survivor who sets out to do something unimaginable, something that we have never seen in the history of nonfiction film, namely, confronting survivors, confronting perpetrators while they still hold a monopoly on power. We see another kind of confrontation when Adi goes and shows that he's willing to forgive the men if they can only accept what they've done is wrong. They're forced to see him and by extension, his brother, whom they murdered. And then all of their victims as humans. And their lies, their delusions, start to crumble and you see them frantically scrambling for new lies because those emotions are impossible, as you put it, Sam. And they start to deny they deny responsibility, they get angry, they get defensive. And all of this takes place within a space that I've tried to depict with as much grace and humanity and even love as possible so that we can feel yeah, the haunted silence in which the family has been, the survivors families are forced to live and in which this is taking place. And I hope it makes the violence and the anger and the tinder sort of tinder box. It's it's the kind of silence of nitroglycerin. I hope it makes that the beauty and the intimacy makes all of that more shocking. It certainly does. And also the level of compassion evinced, especially the second film. The look of Silence is really breathtaking, ODI's compassion and his apparent willingness to forgive if he can only find someone with a conscience worth forgiving seeing his interaction with the killers of his brother is just mesmerizing. And I want to step back for a second, though, because we just kind of breeze through the act of killing. And for those who haven't seen the film, it'd be very difficult to understand what's going on here. In fact, I think even if you've seen it on a first viewing, it's very hard to appreciate how strange a document this is. You inevitably miss some of the amazing detail in the beginning as you're trying to figure out get your bearings in this world and with this project that you've created of the musical in which these killers reenact their crimes. So I want to just talk just broadly about the devices you use in both films. In The Act of Killing, as you say, you have the killers create a musical kind of a weird hybrid Western film noir soap opera in which they depict their torture and murder of their neighbors, and crucially, also their feelings about it. These sort of musical numbers often reflect on their emotions about what they've done, their desperate attempt to glorify it, for example. And they play both parts. So you have killers playing victims, too. And so they're experiencing both sides of it, often in the same they don't even change costume incongruously. They play victims in what they were wearing as killers. But it becomes this very strange ritual of almost just an expiation of their sins. And then you have them watching this footage. And this is a device you use in both movies, where you have both perpetrators and victims watching the confessions of perpetrators on television, and then you film them while they're watching themselves or others confess to these crimes. And so this film within a film device in the act of killing is what, in my view, makes it really one of the strangest documents our species has ever produced. Half of my amazement at the film was not so much that the events themselves that you depict are amazing and horrible, but the sheer fact that your film exists was as amazing as anything within it. How you got these people to collaborate in this way and what they thought they were doing, and just it produces this uncanny feeling of strangeness. Now, in The Look of Silence, your new film, it's a very different film. You're treating the same material, you're talking about the same events, but you have a different device here where Adi, who's an optician, is fitting. He doesn't do this in every interview, but in many interviews with the killers, the interview is conducted over the course of him fitting them for eyeglasses. So he's testing their vision and then he's using that as a context in which to have this conversation. Did you just stumble into that device or did the filmmaker and you realize that this was going to produce wonderful footage and a great way in, so that you crafted this as a device? Or did you? Well, no, of course, the filmmaker I recognized that the filmmaker and me recognized that this would be this powerful metaphor for blindness, because I knew Audi would be testing the eyes of men who would be resistant to seeing. And I knew that specifically the eye tests, they wouldn't give us access. The perpetrators Audi is confronting knew me from years earlier. So the access would come from me. I would bring Audi and I would say, I'm back after all these years. The men who and this time, I no longer want you to dramatize what you've done in whatever way you wish, which is what I would have maybe asked them to do years earlier. I would remind them that I'd gone on to make a film with some of the most powerful men in the country, in which they do just that and that would, of course, serve to keep us safe. The act of Killing had been shot but had not yet come out. When we had not yet been seen by anybody. It had been edited, but had not been seen by anybody. When we shot The Look of Silence, I knew once it was seen, I wouldn't be able to return safely to Indonesia. So this was a space where it was a narrow window where we could make this film. And I realized that I was well known for being close, for having made this film at the highest ranking perpetrators in the country and believed, therefore, people believed, therefore, that we were close because that no one had seen The Act of Killing yet. Now I'm still close with Anwar Congo, the main character in the film. But of course, the powerful politicians in The Act of Killing hate me. So I would tell the man Audi was visiting, I'm back with this after all these years. I've gone on to make a film with some of the most powerful men in the country. I would name some names and I wouldn't refer to them as the most powerful men in the country. I would just name their names. And then I would say, I this time want to film you and Adi discussing these events. You both have personal relationships to it. You may disagree with each other, try to listen to one another because, of course, Audi was hoping to find reconciliation with his neighbors. And I told him from the beginning I don't think you'll find anybody who's able to admit their guilt because it would be too traumatic for them to do so. But if I can show their pained responses, if I can show how impossible it is, that is, if I can document why we fail to get the reconciliation you're hoping for, I will be making visible how torn the social fabric of Indonesia is and how urgently truth, reconciliation and some form of justice are needed. And in that sense, for anyone watching the film anywhere in the world, people will be forced to acknowledge the prison of fear in which every Indonesian is living today and therefore forced to support, and somehow to support truth and reconciliation. And I said to Adi, So I think you will fail, but I think that we might succeed in a bigger way through the film as a whole. And so, like the dramatizations in The Act of Killing, I felt that the confrontations in The Look of Silence would make visible something that had impossible to ignore, something that had previously been invisible or deliberately ignored by everybody in Indonesia. Then I would say, I'm here, so I want to document this. I would tell the perpetrators, I want to document your conversation with Adi. Try to listen to one another. And as a thank you for your time, adi is an optometrist. He will test your eyes. And if you need glasses and want glasses, we'll give you as many pairs of glasses as you like. And you see, I realized that the eye test, in addition to likely producing this kind of powerful metaphor for blindness, would also help keep the confrontation safe. You referred to them as interviews, Sam, but we're having a conversation more but such a conversation could be called an interview. You're sort of interviewing me. An interview is when you're looking for information and feelings. God, he's trying to do something. He's trying to reconcile his family with his neighbor's family, with the families with his brother's killers. And that's not an interview. That's a confrontation. That's a dramatic scene. And I realized that if we could make, wherever possible, if the first part of this drama, this confrontation, were eye test, it would help keep us safe. Because when you're having your eyes tested, you're, of course, disarmed. Your guard is down. You're not likely to physically attack somebody. And also, of course, it was a context that Otti could prolong for as long as necessary, where he could elicit the stories, the most important details of what the perpetrators had done, all things that they had told me years earlier. But, of course, if oddie were to go to them and say, I understand you did this and this and this from Joshua's footage, they would feel trapped and there would be no chance of dialogue. It would be dangerous and confrontational from the outset. So this was a chance for the perpetrators in a comfortable setting to volunteer what they had done. And in the context of a setting or time frame that Adi could control, he could keep it going for as long as necessary. So that was the original impetus for the I test. But, of course, I understood this would likely be this very powerful metaphor because I knew the kind of stories they would tell. I knew they would tell these unspeakable details, things like, right out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting while their eyes are being framed by these ridiculous surreal scarlet test lenses. Yeah. And visually, it has an aesthetic beauty, too. You open the film, if I'm not mistaken, with a shot of one of the people getting his eyes tested. So much of this hinges on Adi as a person and just how he shows up for these confrontations. And he is truly remarkable. There's a level of moral seriousness and gradations, of anguish and compassion that you get off of him. He's like a one man truth and reconciliation commission. There's a moral force to his very subtle conversations with these people. Once you're witnessing it, you realize you haven't seen these kinds of encounters between people really ever. Yeah. And it's quite amazing. Watching the film, though, I began to worry for his safety. And it seems like he was running a considerable risk collaborating with you. And this comes out his concern about this comes out at various points in the film, and I believe in your press materials, you talk about this being you mentioned it here. It's the first time that this has ever happened where you have someone confronting perpetrators of a genocide when the perpetrators are still in power. And so I'm just wondering, what kind of safety precautions did you take and what is the security situation now? Well, we knew that we might have to stop the filming and perhaps not even release the film. Throughout the production, for each of the confrontations, Audi would go with no ID. So that it would be if we were detained, it would be hard for Audi to be for them to identify who he was before we could get help. Hopefully from one of our embassies, we would have come with two cars so that we would be able to if we had to run away or escape, it would be harder for them to follow us. So we had a kind of getaway vehicle and Audi would have his family waiting at the airport, ready to evacuate if anything went wrong. For all of the confrontations with the more powerful perpetrators, these were safety precautions that we took. But then when the film was I think what kept us safe above all was, as I said earlier, first of all, that the COVID that we had from the fact that I was believed to be close to the highest ranking perpetrators, of course word could have spread to them. Somebody could have asked, do you realize what Josh was doing? And that could have fallen apart. So every night between the confrontations, I would spend with Anwar Kongo, which was sort of strange to be shifting between Adi by day and Anwar by night. But we knew that if word had spread, anwar would be the first to find out. Just for our listeners, Anwar is the perpetrator protagonist from your first film. The act of killing. The act of killing. And of course, that's right. And so we knew that he would tell me or I would feel that something was amiss if word had spread. That was what would allow us to make the decision with some comfort to shoot the next day. We shot the scenes as quickly as possible over the course of their six confrontations. We shot them over six days, as we worked out and we worked our way up the chain of command. We shot one test confrontation. In fact, it's the one with enormous the man with the red glasses that we talked about earlier because we knew he had a terrible relationship with his commanders, had no one, therefore, to complain to, really. And Adi does not tell him. You may remember this from the film Sam. Adi does not tell him who he is. And we used that so that Audi could then go to his wife and to his mother and his family and say, what he's doing? We could film their reactions which you see in the film as well, and you see their apprehension. And then we showed them that scene so they could see what it looks like. The family then said, this is very important. If there's some way of continuing this, even if it means we have to move, you should try to continue because you're breaking half a century of silence here. I think the other thing that kept us safe was the fact that these men simply could not believe these conversations were happening at all. There's this sense of total disbelief. They just can't believe the questions that are coming out of Adi's mouth and they don't know how to respond. In a way, being able to intimidate or bully or terrorize someone depends on them being afraid. There was this kind of amazing study of a woman somewhere in the Midwest whose fear center and her brain wasn't working. And people would come up to her to mug her and she would react with no fear and they would run away because they were frightened by her lack of fear. And I think there's some of that going on. In any case, when we had a rough cut of the film about six months before the world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, we met, all of us, the film crew, the team that released had already released The Act of Killing in Indonesia. Adi's family and me and my producer in Thailand at that point, in Thailand because we knew I couldn't safely return to Indonesia anymore ever since The Act of Killing was released. And we asked, what should we do? Should we hold this film back until these men are so old they pose us no threat or until there's been real political change in Indonesia? Or should we release the film and the family moved to Europe? Well, when the family and the Indonesian team saw the film, they said, this has to come out right away. There's so much momentum for change from the first film, The Act of Killing that we need to build on that. And the family said, well, we're willing to move to Europe if that's what it takes. Crew in Indonesia said, Let us see if there's a way we can keep you in Indonesia, if you would prefer that, if you feel comfortable with that. Because we think that Audi will be seen as a national hero when this film comes out. We'll have a central role to play in the movement for truth and reconciliation. In fact, we were able to do that. The family did have to move several thousand kilometers from where we shot the film, from where the family comes from. They're now out from under the shadow of the perpetrators, but still in Indonesia. There's, of course, nationally powerful perpetrators who we also worry about. They have not threatened Oddi there's. The family still in Indonesia. The children are in better schools. We see the terrible brainwashing that. Happens in Indonesian schools in the film, the children are in better schools. Adi, we raised money for Audi with the True False Film Festival, for Adi to open an Optometry store, a brick and mortar eyeglasses shop, and for the kids to be able to go to university, should they wish to. So there's a better future that we're trying to build for the family. But the fact that they and the fact that the family should have to flee like fugitives when they're simply trying to create trying, in fact, to forgive their neighbors is a sign of how far Indonesia still has to go before it becomes truly a democracy with the rule of law, where the law applies equally to the most powerful as it does to the weakest. And that said, Audi is now seen by many in Indonesia as a national hero and is playing a very central role in the movement for truth and reconciliation there. And yet we do have a plan B for the family to leave the country should it at any point become necessary. Oh, good. Well, I'm happy to hear both of those facts, but I guess I'm a little surprised or confused about the basis for surprise among the Indonesian higher ups. You know, all the perpetrators knew what they were divulging in their encounters with you and in both films. And there's evidence, certainly in the act of killing, that this history of genocide is openly celebrated. There's one scene where you have them on what looks like a local talk show, maybe it's a national talk show, and this is a young woman interviewing Anwar Congo and and the others about their murder of of communists, and they even claim that they killed 2.5 million communists. Kind of the high end of the the spectrum. I I think it's more often said that a million people died. So they're celebrating this on television and there's lots of laughter and there's absolutely no moral qualm about what happened. So then what is if that is, in fact what the national dialogue is around the disappearance of over a million people, and all these people knew what they were telling you and they were bragging about having participated in this, what is then the basis for outrage once your films come out? I think there's an official history which doesn't refer to the genocide that talks about the horrific discrimination. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm going to be speaking with Paul Bloom. Paul is the Brooks and Suzanne Reagan Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University. He's published more than 100 scientific articles in journals such as Science and Nature. He's the editor of BBS Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which is a great journal, and he often publishes in the popular press and The New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, et cetera. He's won numerous awards and he has a book, Just Babies the Origins of Good and Evil, which I highly recommend. I've always really enjoyed my conversations with Paul, and it was a pleasure to get him on the podcast. And if you enjoy our conversation, please let us know about it. Twitter is probably the best place for that, and please copy Paul on that communication. He gives his Twitter address at the end of the podcast. And if you think we're dangerous morons, well, then feel free to tell us that. We can take it. But generally speaking, it's very helpful if you spread the word about the podcast on social media, and it's especially helpful if you review it on itunes. I know as a consumer of these things, it's not immediately obvious why that would be so, but I can tell you, as a producer of one, reviews are extremely helpful. So if you can bear it, please take a moment to write a sentence or two about the podcast and post that on itunes. That would be much appreciated. And without any more fine print, I now give you Paul Bloom. Well, I now have Paul Bloom on the line. Notorious Yale psychologist. Hey, Paul, how are you doing? I'm doing well. How are you doing? I'm good. Well, thank you for coming on the podcast. Notorious. Yes, notorious for attacking empathy of late, which has been a surprise to many people. I want to get into that, but before we do, I want to just back up and introduce you to listeners who may not be totally familiar with your work. What have you focused on and what are you focusing on these days before we get into your recent controversial views on empathy? So I've worked on a range of different issues in my research career. I sort of have a bit of an academic deficit disorder with regard to my research focus. So I worked on language, learning, religious belief, pleasure, and most of all over the last several years, morality. So I completed a book, Just Babies, on the origins of morality. And recently I've become interested in more normative questions of how we could be moral people. We can make the best moral judgments and do the best moral actions. So this brought me to look at debates over the relative merits and our capacity for reason, issues about compassion and care, and in particular, issues about empathy. So my next book, which is still being written, is going to be a critique of empathy. It's tentatively called Against Empathy, and I've written some articles exploring that. So that's sort of a natural offshoot of my broader interest in moral cognition. That's a great title. So I think we'll want to get into the larger question of scientific understanding, morality as well, because as you know, that's an area of interest of mine, and I think it's an area where we don't totally agree, if I'm not mistaken. So that could be interesting. But you've spent a lot of time doing, I guess, what would be called developmental psychology. I'm wondering, you're a parent, I'm wondering if your understanding of the human mind in those terms has affected your parenting. Is there anything in science that has affected the way you operate in the world in that domain? Almost nothing. I mean, my kids now are teenagers. One's off to university and reflecting on it. None of my interactions, nothing I've done with them has been influenced by either my own research or everything I've known about psychology. The reason for the almost is I feel my psychological training has given me, I think, healthy skepticism of what psychologists have to say about child rearing. Right. You have kids and, you know, there's so many choice points sleeping in a separate bed, sleeping with you, what sort of punishment, what sort of discipline, a range of problems. And psychologists weigh in enthusiastically on all of them. Being a psychologist myself, I know for the most part we don't know what we're talking about. For the most part, kids are pretty resilient. So if you love your kid, if you don't do anything grotesquely wrong, your kid will turn out the way your kid turns out. Let's back up there. Wait. What do you make of that fact that science has not informed your life in that respect? Because I share your incorrigibility or disregard of science, and although it's not the result of being especially close to those particular data, is it really just that you feel like we don't know anything of substance, that's actionable for a parent? Or is it just that it's too hard to bring that kind of understanding online? When you're in the trenches being a parent, how do you explain the fact that you wind up parenting more or less exactly the way you would parent if you were a non scientist? Yeah, I think parents are intensely interested in the data and very willing to act upon it. I think too willing to act upon it, too willing to take psychologists seriously. I think the problem is your option one, which is we just don't know much about development or what makes people happy or healthy. I don't want to exaggerate it. Certain things around the edges we do know. There are some, I think, useful narrow techniques for helping your kid get to sleep and dealing with certain crises, certainly issues about food and allergies. We have some interesting tidbits and local facts that are useful. But the broader question everybody wants to know, which is how do I raise my kid to be a good, happy, successful, healthy kid? We just don't know, and it's not for lack of trying. In general, I'm very enthusiastic about my field, and I've written popular books trying to extend the insights from my field to broader questions that interest a lot of people. Like how does pleasure work? Or why do people have religious belief? But I'll confess that for many of the most important domains of our lives, we've come up with very, very little. And is that just a larger statement about how hard it is to understand the human mind in truly scientific terms? Yeah, I think psychology has turned out to be a much more difficult field than physics or chemistry or the harder sciences. I don't think psychologists are stupider than physicists or chemists. I just think the problems have turned out to be more difficult. I think to some extent we're in a pre Copernican phase in psychology. We're waiting to turn into a full fledged science. And the problem, I think, is most urgent for domains like health and happiness and success over more specific narrow problems like visual perception or motor control or short term memory. There the science gets done. Yeah, but Jerry Photo had something, his first law of cognitive science. This isn't quite it, but my memory of it was the more intuitively interesting something is, the less we know about it. So there's a form of sticker shock. I teach intro Psych, and people coming in want to know questions like why are some people mentally ill? What could I do to be happier? Why do people change their minds about things? And what I tell them is the best science we have, which is on problems like color vision, amnesia, long term memory and language processing. We know the most about what intuitively matters the least. I'm not sure whether this is some sort of savage law of the universe or just reflects the fact that the problems that we're most interested in are just the hardest to resolve. I think there is a savage law of the universe in a related sense, and it actually may connect with Fodder's law, which is that we have obviously not been designed by evolution to understand our circumstance in any deep sense. Our common sense intuitions about how things work are applicable within the domain of hurling rocks in parabolic arcs at one another and moving at the speed at which apes move. So when you get down to the very small in physics or the very large in cosmology our intuitions are obviously at odds with what we're discovering to be true. And I think that may be true with the brain. It may certainly be true with the significance of information processing or even the fact that information processing is a thing that can be studied. And so our intuitions about what is interesting also is part of that picture. I was having a conversation with the physicist Max Tegmark recently who's done some very interesting work in cosmology, among other areas. And we were talking about this and he made this point which is kind of a stronger version of a point that I just made which I thought was interesting because he said that it's not only not surprising that what we find to be true violates our intuitions. It should be expected, if we take evolution seriously that our cognitive toolkit has evolved for a certain domain and has not at all been constrained by the way reality is altogether. We should expect the truth to be deeply counterintuitive and we should be distrustful of explanations that mesh well with our common sense. And I think that is probably true across the board. It probably doesn't just apply to things like quantum mechanics and cosmology but it may apply to areas much closer to your area of interest. For instance, normative solutions to moral problems. We have not evolved to function well in a group of 7 billion people trying to run a global economy and solve civilizational problems. We have evolved in small bands of hunter gatherers and are tuned to the social challenges we encounter in those circumstances. So this may be a bridge from where we just were to talk about things like empathy and morality but I just want to get your reaction to that right. I think the point is exactly right and the highlights of both the similarities and the differences between psychology and a field like physics. So in both cases we have these bedrock foundational intuitions that have evolved through natural selection. For physics, it's middle sized objects that, you know, move in certain ways for for psychology, it's people beliefs and desires. The question is how come we've made so much success in physics where we have quantum theory, we have cosmology. We understand a very big and a very small and not the equivalent success in psychology. And one answer could be what we're talking about before the problems in psychology are simply in some way harder. Another issue, though, is something which has been raised by the evolutionary psychologist Lita Cosmetics which is that our intuitions might blind us in certain ways that make psychology hard to do. So we have what she calls instinct blindness which is the sense which is that if something is psychologically natural, it seems to sort of not need explanation and doesn't benefit from explanation. If you take something very simple, which we can explain, which is why people love their children and that's evolution 101. People have evolved to love their children for a sort of standard functional reason. And we could talk about where in the brain this capacity is. We talk about what triggers it and what doesn't trigger it. But my experience is if you say these things, which I think is a rather trivial and fairly obvious example, people find it almost repellent. And so a lot of psychology, I think, runs against the problem that people don't want to hear it. It doesn't seem right. It seems to sort of violate certain sacred intuitions that we might have. Let's linger on that point for a second because that is a difference, obviously, between psychology and physics. So what's going on there, do you think? It's just when you say that, when you give any kind of, quote reductive explanation for something like love, do you think the message that people draw is that they don't really love their children or that love isn't really important or what's happening there? I think there's two things that might be independent or might be connected. One is they don't think this needs an explanation. I see this in many realms. I tell people well, I study why certain things, why people think killing is wrong. And they look at me and say, well, duh. Of course killing is wrong. There is a waste of taxpayer dollars. Exactly. And you say you're a professor, and I used to say I study why do people enjoy orgasm and chocolate? And people laugh because it's obvious. Of course we do. And it needs tremendous you need to be I think William James talked about it said you need to be an almost depraved person to want to explain these things, to go beyond a common sense intuition. So problem one is that people it takes a lot of work to get people to understand that these are contingent facts. If we were wired up differently, if evolution were differently, we would want to eat our children, not love them. We would have sex with trees and not people. And so you have to explain how things work out. So that's one problem. And I think the second problem really is I think people find it almost morally repellent to dig in to these questions, particularly for moral questions and actually, particularly for a question, I think, which has occupied you a lot more than this occupied me. And you contribute a lot to this, which is when it comes to spiritual or religious matters, if you tell people you're interested in why people believe in God or believe in an afterlife, they immediately run to the inference that you're attacking these beliefs and that there's something wrong with the enterprise. Yeah, I interrupted you there with the inhomogeneity or the lack of analogy between psychology and physics. So apart from the bad vibe that people get when you start explaining prominent features of the human mind, there's this sense that not only is it wrong or somehow unsavory to reduce these cherished mental states to something biological, there's a sense that it's just superfluous. These things don't have to be explained. I guess some people do have this attitude toward things like gravity, but in terms of our living, we don't feel like we need to explain it. But there's no real resistance to the enterprise of physics when you think about an open ended search for explanation. That's right. So for whatever reason, obvious physical facts don't meet with the same objection. I think maybe throughout history, at some point, when somebody says, I'm interested in why things fall to the ground rather than fly into the air, other people laughed and said, it's obvious. Why would you question such a thing? But we don't do that. Now, we understand these are good questions. And more to the point that there aren't typically the moral implications for it. Nobody feels threatened if you say you're studying gravity or energy or mass. Well, if you say you're studying love or religion or morality, it gets people scarred up. I mean, maybe there's a case to be made that it should get people scared up. Maybe a lot of society runs on certain things not being questioned and not being challenged. And the influence of people like you and me is not necessarily a positive one. Well, I guess it gets people's guard up because it at least implicitly carries the message that things are not as they seem. And that's true across all of science. But when you're told that things are not as they seem with respect to gravity or the way diseases spread or anything else that science might tackle outside the human mind, you're not delivering the same kind of insult. Whereas if you say things are not as they seem, with things like interpersonal love or parental love or spiritual experience, you are often explicitly, but at least implicitly saying that the reasons why you think you're doing something. The reason why you think this is so important to you. You love your kids, you love your wife is not at all what is really pulling the levers of your mind. There's another explanation entirely that doesn't even treat these nouns necessarily at all. Now, we're talking about genes or we're talking about neurotransmitters or we're talking about something that's not even available to your own inspection. Subjectively. If you continue the conversation long enough, I don't think that becomes deflationary in the way that people fear. But if you don't continue it long enough, you're left giving people the impression that love is nothing but a certain balance of neurotransmitters, and therefore that's right, you're just a bag of chemicals. Get over yourself. Yeah, I think that's right. I like the word insult because that's often how it's taken. I'm writing a part of my book that's looking at political psychology. It's part of a sort of a separate question about whether liberals and conservatives differ in their empathy. And one thing I've noticed in political psychology is political psychologists lean, to a tremendous extent, liberal. This is the point that John Hutton's colleagues wrote up in an article. It's true of academics in general, but certainly it's true for political psychology. And one effect that this has is that there's endless detailed explanations of why conservatives believe what they do. So what's going on when they reject affirmative action or they don't like the president's health care plan. But there's extremely little reflection on why liberals believe what they do. Now, even if you think the liberal cause is the right one for just about every question, still it's an empirical question how we come how liberals come to the beliefs that they do. But it's considered as either a superfluous question or a taboo one. If you're liberal, you think liberals believe what they do because they they it's the right answer, and and you don't want to reduce it down to experience or, you know, God forbid, random, arbitrary social experience. And of course, the same thing comes up with religion, which is that religious people often get very offended by studies of why people are religious, while they find studies of why people are atheists fascinating. And often they raise it as a challenge. Why don't you go study atheists? And in fact, I think we should study atheists. And there's some work on atheists, in my experience, is when you talk about atheists under research and wider atheists, often they get their hackles up. Nobody wants to cherish beliefs to be put under the microscope by somebody like me. Not even me. What you've done with empathy is even more seditious than that, I think, because it's not just that you are proposing that we study necessary and cherished emotion. You're actually challenging the common sense view of it as being socially and psychologically beneficial and vital to our moral lives. You've come down very much on really a side of a controversy that most people didn't even know existed, which is that empathy in many cases is harmful and is not a good piece of software if you want to be a reliable moral actor in normative terms. So tell me about what you've said about empathy, and let's get into the details. So I always have to begin with the most boring way ever to begin anything, which is we're talking about terminology, because people use the term empathy in all sorts of ways, and I think my position is easily misunderstood. If you think some people think empathy just as a word referring to anything good compassion, care, love, morality, making the world a better place, and so on, under that construal of empathy, I have nothing against it I'm not a monster. I mean, I want to make the world a better place. Other people use the term empathy very narrowly to refer to understanding in a cold blooded way what's going on in the minds of other people, understanding what they think and what they feel. And I'm not against that too, though. And we might want to talk about this. I think it's morally neutral. I think very great and wonderful and kind people have this sort of cognitive empathy, if you want to call it that. But so do con man, seducers and sadist bullies are. One way reason why bullies are very good at being bullies is that they exquisitely understand what's going on in the heads of their victims. Yeah, that's often misunderstood, by the way. We should just footnote that that this form of cognitive empathy that you've just distinguished from the other form that you're about to describe is something that psychopaths have in spades. When we talk about psychopaths being devoid of empathy, it's not the empathy that allows us to understand another person's experience. That is not something that prototypically evil people lack. In fact, as you just said, they use this understanding to be as successfully evil as they can be. That's exactly right. Another term for cognitive empathy is social intelligence. And I like that way of talking because it captures the point that intelligence is an extraordinary tool. Without it, we couldn't do any great things. But in the hands of somebody of malevolent ends, intelligence could be used to make them a lot worse. And I think that social intelligence is exactly like that. Mind reading. Another term for it is a tool that could be used any way you want it. And the very best people in the world have tons of it, and so are the very worst people in the world. The sense of empathy I'm using, and it does actually matches what most psychologists and most philosophers how they use the term is empathy is in the sense of what Adam Smith and David Hume and other philosophers call sympathy and what it refers to as feeling what other people feel. So if you're in pain and I feel empathy for you, I will feel to some degree, your pain. If you're humiliated, I will feel your humiliation. If you are happy, I will feel your happiness. And you can see why people are such fans of this. It brings me closer to you. It dissolves the boundaries between me and you. And there's a lot of psychological research showing that if I feel empathy towards you, I'm more likely to help you. Dan Basson has done some wonderful studies on them and I don't contest that at all. But the problem with empathy, and one of the problems with empathy, there are many, but the main problem is it serves as a spotlight. It zooms me in on a person in the here and now, and as a result, it's biased, it's parochial, it's short sighted, and it's enumerated. One way I put it is it's because of empathy that governments and societies care so much more about a little girl stuck in a well than about millions or more people suffering and dying through climate change. It's because of empathy, at least in part, that we freak out and panic over mass shootings, which, however horrible, are a tiny proportion of gun homicides in America. Zero. 1%, roughly. Yeah. I mean, so if you ask people, they would say mass shootings are the most terrible things there are. I live in Connecticut. New Town's, not that far away. After the Sandy Hook killing, people were, including me, deeply upset. But intellectually, if you could snap your fingers and make all the mass shootings go away forever and then you did that, nobody would know based on the homicide numbers. It's so tiny, so it misdirects us. It causes us to focus on the wrong thing. It causes us to freak out at the suffering of one and ignore the suffering of 100. In one of your books, I forget which one, you you talk about the study where we care more about one than about eight, and you say something could affect us. If there's ever a non, that's Paul Slovic's work. That's right. That's right. Some wonderful studies and also some named Ritoff and other investigators have done this since, and you described this. If there's ever a non normative finding in psychology, that's it. And so I think we could I think there's many more examples like this that we could say we could look and say and say as rational people, well, you know, a black life matters as much as a white life. The life of an ugly person who doesn't inspire my empathy matters just as much as a beautiful person who does, and the lives of 100 matter more than a life of one, especially. And this, this is the the amazingly nonnormative finding from Slovak's work is that especially if those hundred include the one you were caring about. So you can set up this paradigm where you show a reliable loss of concern when you add people to the group. So you start with one little girl whose story is very emotionally salient and people care about her to a maximal degree, and then you add her brother to the story and people care a little less. And then you add eight more people to the story, keeping the same girl, and people's care just drops off a cliff. That's truly amazing. It's not one attractive girl versus 100 faceless people. It can be the one attractive girl along with the hundred, and you care less. It's a magnificent and horrible finding. And I've long championed the forces of reason and rationality and moral judgment, I think, far more than many social psychologists that were capable of that. And so there's an interesting duality here. On the one hand, our gut feelings push us towards the one girl and not the hundred, even if 100 includes the girl. On the other hand, we're smart enough to recognize, when we put it in this abstract way, that that's a moral mistake in some way. You could view it the moral mistakes caused by empathy as analogous to the mistakes and rationality that people like Gandhi Kahneman have chronicled, where you see people just you get these puzzles and you ignore the base rates and you get things all messed up. When you step back and look at it and do the math, you realize, wow, that was a mistake. My gut led me in the wrong way. Visual illusions are another case. It looks this way, but it isn't. You take out the ruler and you measure it. And although the lines look like they're different lengths, they're the same. So we have this additional capacity to do this both for things that connected external war like vision, but also for morality, where we have standards of reason and consistency, and we could use it to say, wow, our empathy is pushing us in the wrong direction. Yeah. So now do you see us correcting for this in a way that is adequate to the magnitude of the moral error? Or is our way of correcting for it more haphazard than that? Our way of correcting this is always haphazard. But the analogy I make is with racism. We know we have racist biases. Many of us have explicit racist biases. But there's a lot of evidence for implicit racial biases, biases that we don't know we have even, but that influence us in all sorts of ways. If you think racism is okay, then there's not a problem. But suppose, as you and I do, we think racism is wrong, so what do you do about it? Well, the answer is not you try harder. We know trying hard doesn't work for these sort of biases, but there are different sorts of fixes. So, in fact, for biases, often there's technological fixes. One story, this may be apocryphal, but it's a good story is that symphony orchestras were heavily biased in favor of men because they claimed that to people making dishes who were both men and women said, men just sound better. They have stronger, more powerful styles. So what they did was they started auditioning people behind a screen, and then the sex ratio became more normal. So this is an example of you got a bias, you don't like it, and so you try to fix the world so it doesn't apply. And I could imagine similar things happening with empathy, where you change laws and policies so that empathy plays less of a role. I'll give you one small example. Just because of the trial of the Boston Marathon Killer has come to an end. Was recently in the news. But I think victim statements are a horrible idea where people come into court and describe in. Great detail, their anguish and their pain. And this plays some role in sentencing and that seems hugely immoral because the extent to which you're going to be affected by the witness statements depends on how much they cry and whether they have the same color skin as you and whether they're attractive and whether they they are stoic or weepy or whatever. And then this will then influence how many years in prison somebody has. It seems bizarrely, intentionally, structurally irrational and immoral. Yeah, I've actually never thought about that before. I think you're absolutely right there. I'm wondering if the argument in favor of witness statements relates to the debt owed to the victims and their families and that there's some sense that we owe this to them, the opportunity to vent and express their grievance this way and that a judge and a court would be reluctant to deny that to them. Is that what makes this such a common feature of these kinds of trials? Yeah, I think that's what the argument for it is. And if it would make the victims happier, feel that they're getting what they deserve to make their statements, it's an excellent case for it. But it seems to go too far to have these statements influencing the influence of sentencing. I mean, this isn't us necessarily a bleeding heart argument. It could be go both ways. I mean, if the victim's statements seem are done by people who don't inspire your empathy. If a white jury is listening to victim's statements by black people, they might say this isn't capturing my empathy, this isn't upsetting me. Let's give the guy a light sentence. So I don't have any sort of view as to whether the sentences in these sort of cases are too harsh or too lenient. It's just that the victim statements put noise and issues of incredible bias, including racial bias and makes that part of the sentencing process. So that's an easy fix to get rid of things like that. I've often said that I think our laws and social institutions need to engineer our better judgment and our understanding of moral normativity and inoculate us against our failures of intuition. Even when we can summon the appropriate intuitions, we can't always summon them reliably or it takes work to summon them. And what we want are laws that are wiser than we are. We want to be able to rely on a system that corrects for what at the end of the day we recognize to be a kind of a suite of moral illusions or moral biases that are leading us to misallocate both emotional and very real resources. I think that's exactly right. There's a phrase by Lincoln that Sikh thinker made as the title of his wonderful book the Better Angels of Our Nature. And I think that those better angels first and foremost is deliberative careful, analytic, cost benefit reasoning on how to make the world a better place. And laws and policies should work to instill them. Because under some analyses, that's what something like a constitution is, which is a constitution is at a very higher level saying, look, you might get really excited and want to have a law that says you could reelect a popular third president or reinstall slavery or ban some ugly political doctrine you don't like, but you can't. We're going to block this, and you could undo the block, but it's going to be very difficult and take a very long period of time. Constitutions under this view, are the sort of equivalent of waiting periods to buy a gun or get married. Just they slow you down. They make it harder. And by making it harder, danny Kahlin talks about thinking fast and slow. And thinking slow, I think, is a lot better. And I think good social institutions reflect, as you put it, the workings of thinking slow and often encourage us to think slow. But it's interesting because you can often think slow in areas that are taboo, and I think it's no less important to venture into those areas, given that so much human suffering often hinges on what one thinks. But it seems to me that in questioning the value of the moral value of empathy in its kind of emotional contagion form, you have trespassed on a taboo there. And tell me a little bit about how the conversation has gone in public. I noticed that there was a little bit of pushback recently in a New York Times op ed, and you had that Target article in the Boston Review that I sent in a piece for. What has it been like to make the noises you've made recently about empathy? It has not been a popular argument. Some of the objections turn on a misunderstanding, so some people say, I'm outraged by what you're saying. I have a lot of evidence that empathy is good and doesn't suffer from the problems that you say it suffers from. And then they go on to defend compassion, for instance. And I'm very careful in my book and in my work to distinguish empathy from compassion. And we should bookmark this because it connects to meditative practices, actually, in an interesting way, the good arguments I've heard against empathy, the ones that have made me scratch my head, is that empathy might be useful or central for intimate relationships. So when it comes to relationships between, say, us and our children and our friends, you are supposed to be biased and parole and not, you know, not impartial. And so a defender of empathy might say that somebody who had zero empathy might be a fine policymaker, a fine moral judge, but a lousy husband or wife or father or mother. I don't think that's true. I think if you look at it closely, even here, it's not empathy that we're looking for, but understanding and caring. But those are the arguments that most give me pause. And in fact, I'm certainly a consequentialist, and I'm, on most days a utilitarian. But I'm struggled with and we've talked about this before I've struggled with the question of the obligation we have towards those who are close to, like, our children and to strangers. I haven't been persuaded by people like Peter Singer who says, in the long run, there should be no difference. Right. Well, that's a very rich area to talk about. I'd like to go there, but I don't want to miss this point. Let's deal first with this distinction between empathy and compassion. How do you separate those? So I actually got thinking about this through a chance meeting with Matthew Ricard. Yeah, I know Matthew. I would think that you would you guys have a lot of affinity. So I met him at a conference, and he was wearing his saffron robes and had a futific smile and radiated peace. And I was me. And I came up to him and started talking to him. We ended up getting a cup of coffee, and he asked me what I was up to. And I was quite nervous because I'm not a confrontational guy. And I figured this is not a it's like telling, you know, a rabbi, you're writing a book in favor of pork, you know, to tell this guy's against empathy. But to my surprise, he said, yeah, that's kind of that's standard Buddhist teaching. And he pointed out that Buddhists make a distinction between what's called something it's called sentimental compassion, which is what I've been calling empathy, which is feeling other people's pain, getting into their head, and great compassion, which is more distance. And he's done this wonderful research program with this neuroscientist, Tanya Singer, where they carefully work explicitly to distinguish empathy from compassion. They get people in fMRI machines to do meditative practices that are either empathic or compassion. They look at how expert meditators do it, what more normal people do. And the moral of all of this, which connects to other psychological research, including the work of Richie Davidson, actually has done some wonderful work on this, is that empathy burns you out. It burns you out. It saddens you. It makes you less effective. What you should do instead is you should feel compassion, what the Buddhist called loving kindness. You should feel positive and cheerful. If you're dealing with somebody who is miserable and ashamed and in pain, you don't feel miserable, ashamed, and pain. You feel cheerful, positive, full of love and energy. So you care extraordinarily deeply about them, but you don't feel their pain. And I think once you make this I don't care what you call it, in the end, the issue isn't over what you call empathy, whether you should keep empathy under any definition. It's about what kind of intellectual and sentimental attitudes we should have towards people. And I think the attitude that they call compassion is far better than the attitude that they call empathy as you say it's a clear recognition of the suffering. There's nothing about your attention that is distracting you from the reality of the other person's suffering, but it's not diminishing your own well being in the presence of that suffering. What you're feeling is a real commitment to alleviating. It that's different than simply being also miserable in the presence of human misery. That's exactly right. And you don't have to be a monk to appreciate this. I think people often have a failure of moral imagination where they'll say, well, you're not going to do anything nice if you don't have empathy. But think about all the things we do. Think about giving to charity and helping out a friend and giving advice and volunteering to take a standard philosophical example, saving a girl's life who's drowning. In none of these cases do you have to put yourself in their shoes. What you have to do is care about them. Right? Presumably, if I passed a girl drowning in shallow water as I walk by, I would rush in and pull her out. I'm not a monster. Head high water. I think you'd go in there well, Singer's example peter Singer's example sets the bar very low. It's extremely shallow water. Shallow pond. It's a shallow pond. But I'm really wearing nice shoes and they cost like $50 for me. That's nice shoes. If I go in, I'll ruin my shoes, but I'll go in nonetheless. And Singer's point goes on to say that you recognize that a life is worth far more than $50. And then Singer goes on to make the point, well, then, when you spend $50 buying a meal or a night out at a bar, you're doing a moral equivalent to murdering a child. So put that aside. But I would drift into the pond, shallow or deep rescue the girl. But plainly, I don't have to put myself in her shoes. I don't have to feel what it's like to be drowning. I don't have to imagine the sorrows of her parents learning that their beloved daughter had died. That's ridiculous. Rather, I notice she's drowning. I say, God, it really would be horrible for this person to die. I get to save her and I save her, and I'm not special here. Most of the kind things we do have nothing to do with empathy, just as a lot of the very bad things we do are motivated by empathy. Let's get to that. That's very interesting. This is the dark side of empathy. But before we get there, we should also point out that passion. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely a on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'll be speaking with Joseph Goldstein, who is an old friend and quite a distinguished and wonderful teacher of meditation, in particular vapasana meditation, mindfulness meditation. Joseph and I spoke before on my podcast about a year ago, and that episode was entitled The Path and the Goal. And if you haven't listened to that, I recommend you do before listening to this one, because this one is in fact a response to listener questions that arose from that first podcast. The conversation this time around, because it's in Q and A format, really does not take any kind of linear path from beginner to expert in terms of its content areas. And one thing I'd also point out is that I make no effort to discuss the liabilities of Buddhism as a religion. As most of you know, I don't consider myself a Buddhist. I just find the practice of meditation incredibly useful. Joseph certainly considers himself a Buddhist, and he is a quite well known Buddhist teacher and largely responsible for bringing the techniques of Buddhist meditation into more prominence in the west over the last 40 years or so. But we use Buddhist terminology, and while we define these terms from time to time, I'm not making any effort in these conversations to divorce this topic from its traditional Buddhist context. I do that more in my book Waking Up. This is just to say that those of you who may be uncomfortable with seeing meditation and the nature of mine discussed in an explicitly Buddhist framework will continue to be uncomfortable throughout this conversation. But given Joseph's background and his expertise, it would have simply been a waste of time to try to translate our terminology for export out of Buddhism into some other non sectarian context. In any case, Joseph is a gym. He's, as I said the first time around, one of the wisest people I've ever met. And as you'll hear at the end of our conversation, he and our friend Dan Harris, the ABC News anchor and author of the New York Times bestseller 10% Happier, have designed a short meditation course in the form of an app and where this podcast is embedded on my blog, I have a link to the relevant page in the itunes store. And while you can start that course for free, I think you get the first three days free. If you choose to buy the whole course, you get a 20% discount using the product code waking up, all in caps. So if you want more information about that, please check my blog. And without further preamble, I give you Joseph Goldstein. I'm now with Joseph Goldstein. I have him back for round two of more Meditation Punishment. Thanks for coming back, Joseph. Thanks for doing this. It's great. I think something like 180,000. Is that right? People have listened to the first one, or that it could be the same for people who are just die hard hitting refresh over and over again, but we certainly were more esoteric than many conversations on this topic become. But I think that was probably a strength and a lot of people appreciated us getting into the weeds about mindfulness and the difference between different types of mindfulness and zogchen versus vapasana. Or zogen and vapasa. Yeah, that's the case maybe. So let's get into it again and we have a bunch of questions that have come in, but first, is there anything that you recall from our last conversation that you wanted to revisit and explore or you want to retract? Something that I said? Anything come to mind? Nothing really is coming to mind. The older I get, the less I recall, the less that comes to mind. Okay, well, we have many questions and maybe that will just start us off. So Jamie Lunsford asks what amount of practice is required before the average practitioner can expect to obtain, quote, sufficient concentration, as Joseph puts it, to change the quality of her experience? I'm sure it varies, but more generally, what if I never go on a ten day retreat or meet a Zogchen master? Can everyday practice still serve me? I think it's correct to say that there is no average meditator, that people bring a wide variety of backgrounds to the meditation. And so for some people concentration comes quite easily and for others it takes quite a systematic training. What I would say is it's really important to watch the commitment to being mindful throughout the day because concentration actually comes about through the continuity of mindfulness. So it's not so much an effortful focusing, but rather more quality of being relaxed back into the moment to get right back into the Zochen Vipassana framework. A Zo Chen phrase that is used very often, which we might have mentioned in our last talk, the phrase that's used is undistracted nonmeditation. So the nonmeditation part suggests that effortless quality of settling back into a natural awareness, but often people forget the undistracted part. Yeah, it's about this continuity of relaxed awareness. And so really the question is whether we're really considering our meditation to be the time that we're sitting on a cushion for however long each day, or we're seeing it as practicing that quality of undistracted nonmeditation throughout the whole day. And it's that continuity which will lead to some stability. What does the phrase the word nonmeditation mean to you? Because undoubtedly that's going to be confusing to some people. I think it has many levels of meaning, but just in the simplest way of understanding it, it can refer to a relaxed awareness, settling back into the simplicity of things being known moment after moment, without an efforting, without a striving. I think that's just the simplest way of understanding it. I think in a Zoegchen context it means abandoning subject, object, focus too, that has the implication that you're not trying to fix attention on anything strategically. It's just wide open to whatever in fact you notice. Yeah, I think that could be a further way of understanding it. But as you point out, the crucial distinction is between being distracted and undistracted. If you're distracted, then you're just lost and thought like anyone else. And one of the things almost everybody notices is that it's not very easy to remain undistracted. The idea is very nice, the idea of non meditation, that open effortless awareness. But there's something else which is needed in order to sustain the undistracted quality. And you could call it recognition, you could call it remembering, you could call it settling back. I make the difference. You could call it mindfulness. Wouldn't you call mindfulness the gatekeeper of that? Definitely. The quality of mindfulness is to know when we're distracted and when we're not. Toko orgian the great zota and master called mindfulness the watchman of the mind. Another phrase that I like to use, especially when I'm teaching retreats, but it could be useful for anyone practicing in the course of their daily lives, is understanding the difference between being casual and being relaxed in our attention. Because often those two are confused. We hear the suggestion to be relaxed and then before we know it, our attention has simply become casual. And in that quality we find our minds getting distracted again and again. So there's certain impeccability that's needed. This brings up a few questions. Actually, one question of mine or one thing to explore further. I have recently said in another podcast, and it's directly to Jamie's question, that I felt like I didn't learn how to meditate until I sat my first ten day retreat. And I think this comment has given some people cause for despair, because my experience was I got very into meditation. I was sitting really reliably an hour a day for a full year before I went off on the first, I think it was Yucca Valley retreat with you. And it wasn't until maybe the fifth day of that retreat, somewhere around the midpoint, where I really connected to the practice in a way that I hadn't before. And I remember the epiphany, presumably reasonably accurate, that I had just been thinking with my legs crossed. In my daily practice for the previous year, an hour a day was insufficient for me to really drop down a level within a mindfulness context with continuity and sustained attention to see what I wasn't seeing and to really clearly see the difference between being lost in thought and not. Now, I'm sure I was a hard case, but can you comment on that? Is that a common experience to feel like it's not until you sit in intensive retreat that you really know what it is you're supposed to be doing? I think you probably did have a strong propensity for thinking. So it depends on what people I love that one to you, Joseph, what people bring to the practice. I guess the question I would ask you, and I don't know whether you remember back to then, but in that time before your first ten day retreat, you mentioned that you were sitting pretty reliable an hour a day. The question would be what were you doing the other 23 hours? Whether you had enough understanding of what was needed to actually be committed to the practice of mindfulness just in the course of your daily activities. And many people don't appreciate the importance or the power of that. I think the jury is still out because I think there are not that many people who give that level of attention and of mindfulness to walking down the street or to eating or to really making the daily activities part of the practice. So whether the level of concentration and settlement you experienced on the retreat would come in the course of daily practice, if you did, that would be an interesting experiment. Now clearly if people come to a retreat, they're practicing intensively all day long in silence, just sitting and walking. So there is a momentum that more easily builds up. Right. So it's understandable that you had that experience actually in a related experience, was to discover sometime later that the walking meditation practice is every bit as deep as the sitting practice. I would imagine people also make that discovery rather often later, for whatever reason. And I don't know if that was in the same retreat or my next one, but at a certain point it just became very clear that the walking that I had been treating as kind of a break from the sitting, as a way of just rejuvenating the body, was truly profound. And so that's something there are kind of layers of discovery, very simple ones at the beginning, where you notice that mindfulness is as available in every context as in every other context. In principle. It doesn't actually have to be framed by a sitting practice, though, again, the crucial difference between distraction and non distraction is the thing that always one has to notice. Yeah, I think that is a very important insight. And many people, it does take time for them to realize how profound the walking practice can be. But anybody who's listening to this podcast might take this understanding and in the course of their daily practice actually give more attention to the walking. And so one very helpful thing that I often suggest to people is if you're doing a daily practice of an hour or however long it may be, to perhaps do the first ten minutes of walking meditation and then sit. And that does two things. One, it settles the mind so that we drop into the sitting in a deeper place from having done the walking. And it begins to reveal the fact that the awareness can be as refined in the walking as in the sitting. Once we have that understanding, then in walking any place, we're walking down the street, we're walking from one room to another. Once we really have the sense of what it means to feel the sensations of the movement and walking, we realize it takes very little effort because we're walking anyway. There's nothing special to do except to be feeling it. Then every step we take through the day can be a walking meditation. And that gives a chance for us to build the momentum that person who sent in the question was asking about. There's more chance of building up that level of stability even outside of a retreat. Right? Although always a retreat is helpful, there's no doubt about that. But at a certain point, don't you feel that it's divorced from the principle of momentum? You seem to be suggesting that it's by dint of momentum that the experienced meditator has better daily meditation practice than the unexperienced one. Okay, so I think here this may harken back to our previous conversation. It's not that I have a bone to pick with you no back into these same ruts, I think giving you a predilection for the Zoe Chen perspective, which, as you know, I have tremendous appreciation for. Also, I think would be more useful in this conversation if you simply replace the word momentum with stability. Because for me they're the same thing. Right? But I guess I'm trying to dig under that it's not so much I see momentum stability, they both get decisively interrupted, and they can be interrupted for so long that any notion of a carryover from some previous period in the day seems a little far fetched. Right. So you could have an hour that's just wall to wall distraction, right? You're watching a movie or you're arguing with someone on the telephone, or you're shopping. It's something where you've linked up as many moments of dualistic, confusion and distraction as you're capable of. I would imagine that hour has cleared out the bank of potential energy you have stored up from all your previous moments of continuity or momentum or stability, so that you're really starting fresh. Get me to a moment where you're starting you've had a period of total distraction, and now you just have to start fresh. And you're starting fresh with a period of sitting for the first time in 24 hours, or even longer than that. I think that someone who knows what they're doing knows what to look for knows how to pay attention has has become sensitized to the difference between being lost in thought and being clearly aware. That person can very quickly move through to an experience of clarity and sustained mindfulness. That it is like a skill that you've learned which once you know how to play the piano, once you know how to ride a bike, you can actually start doing it. It's not like every time you get on the bike you fall off because you don't have enough momentum from your previous ridings. No, I think that's right. Yeah. So I guess it's a skill based conception of what it means to be mindful rather than a storehouse of energy notion. I'm not denying that the momentum phenomenon is there stability phenomenon. Yeah, or the stability, but there is a sense of storing up energy when you link enough moments together. And that's something you get, I think, especially on retreat, where the day at a certain point is really humming along and it's not something one tends to feel unless one is practicing in a sustained but I agree with what you just said. I think there is another dimension in addition to having learned the skill and being able to access what that skill can bring more easily, the more practiced one is in the skill, as you say, you don't have to struggle to know how to balance on a bike each time. Like the mind drops right into it. Something I've noticed over many years of practice now over 50 years, that there is a gradual build up of what I would call the base of concentration or the base of stability. And I kind of liken it to the ski reports where they give the snow the snow report and how deep the base is. And what I've noticed is that of course it will go up and down. It'll be deeper or shallower at different times, but the slope of that curve over time, I have noticed, has really gone up. And so the mind drops more easily into a deeper base of stability, of concentration. And I think that's that's not a question of, you know, we're more or less concentrated for any particular sitting. You could probably address this more accurately, but the neural pathways in the mind get, I don't know, the right terminology get more deeply patterned over time. And it's just easy, even if one has been distracted. For example, you go to the movies and you're totally lost in the movie. You come out and you decide to sit for an hour. If one is well practiced, the mind will drop into that deeper place of stability, and that has grown over the years. The more we practice, the more stable that becomes. Well, I think that fits with the skill based model. It is a skill of attentional regulation, which you get better and better at. So you just have a facility for coming back to the present moment more decisively and you notice when you're gone earlier. I also find that intense experience is a kind of mindfulness alarm now and increasingly in a way that isn't in the beginning of one's practice. So that when you're suffering, you can't suffer for very long without realizing that this is a problem for which you have a solution. And at that point you're either willfully not using the solution and indulging in some negative mind state or you're cutting through the suffering and undermining it just as a matter of habit every moment going forward. Yeah, and I think one element of that habit which for me has been a huge source of energy in the practice to cut through in those moments of being caught up or lost in some kind of suffering is the quality of interest. For me, interest has played such a key role in my meditation practice because when my mind is suffering in whatever way just caught up, caught up in some reactivity for the most part I get really interested in what's going on in my mind. How is my mind getting caught, how am I feeding this and that? Interest then provokes the attention, provokes the investigation. And interest is I love that word and I love the quality because interest is very nonjudgmental. There's a there's a tendency in the mind, especially for people in the beginning of their practice, although this could go on for many years, is when we're involved in some kind of negativity or some kind of suffering, there can be a tendency to be self judgmental or judgmental about what's arising. And that of course just ties the knot even tighter. If there's a quality of interest, it's like we're removing that judgmental aspect and it almost becomes the mind becomes like this puzzle that we're trying to understand, that we're trying to untie the knots and it gets very interesting. There are two expectations that cover what we've just been talking about that I think can be unhelpful. One would be the expectation that you need to be on retreat, having linked many many moments of mindfulness together to get down to bedrock in this moment. Right? So if you've been lost for long enough, there's really nothing good that's going to come of the next moment of mindfulness. Kind of a radical gradualism expectation which I think is false, but also to some degree self perpetuating. So to drop that is helpful because you really can have as deep and as meaningful an experience of mindfulness in this moment as at any point in a retreat if you really pay attention. The other is relevant to what you just brought up. The expectation that certain negative mind states shouldn't or won't come up any longer for you if you have any kind of mature meditation practice. So, as you said, to feel that you really shouldn't be experiencing something and have a self judgment added to the negative experience blocks the door to just becoming interested and cutting through it on the basis of just merely paying attention to the arising of this anger or fear or greed or whatever it is. Once you know to expect that many negative things will keep coming up, victory is in, at least in my view or at my stage of practice. Victory is in the half life of these things. Like how long do you saw? How long are you an asshole for? Right? The difference between being angry for an hour and for 5 seconds, that is a huge difference. It's just an hour of sustained anger. Given all that you're liable to say and do in that space is a life, a truly life disorienting state of mind. Whereas 5 seconds is just again, you could just be the one who's interested to see this anger arise and pass away. Well, there are a couple of things. One is I just like to emphasize the fact that it's not necessarily that we'll go from an hour of anger to 5 seconds. We could get five more seconds, 5 seconds after that. It's the punctuation of it that is to become sensitive. Keep it right. There's one attitude of mind, an attitude shift, which was tremendously important for me in seeing the negative feelings or emotions or things that cause suffering arising in my mind, when I went from either feeling bad about myself for having them or judging them, being in an adverse relationship to them when things shifted. And I became delighted to see them because I would rather see them than not see them. So there's a certain moment of delight that can happen when we have that frame. So anger arises or judgment arises, or fear arises, or conceit or pride or envy or jealousy, any one of the afflicted emotions. When these arise now and in the moment of seeing them, it's almost like a smile comes to my mind because, you know, in the in the language of the Buddhist discourses, where the Buddha would often say oh, Mara, I see you. That's the quality in the mind in that moment. Oh, Mara, I see you. And there's a certain joy in the fact of the seeing when that shift happens, it changes everything in terms of our relationship to it. Then that becomes the foundation for an investigation to say, okay, you know, what gave rise to it? How am I getting caught? How can I be free in this moment? Well, I must say I love to see you get angry too, Joseph. That's always fun. Well, keep trying. So there's a few questions related here. I think we've covered some of this, but Julio Gutierrez asks could you speak more about the path outside of the meditation cushion? How to be mindful in daily interaction with people, how to be mindful while having an intellectual discussion? We've covered some of that, but what is your thought on how to be mindful, if at all? While engaged in intellectual work. There's the difference between thinking and not thinking or being lost in thought, seeing thought as thought, or just being busy thinking. This is a question I get from people a fair amount. The idea that you can't really be mindful while doing most of what creative, intelligent, productive people need to do. How do you view that? I think there are two domains to understand this in. One, it's something my first teacher, Manindraji, would say often in addressing that question. Because when we are engaged intellectually, even something as simple as reading a book or doing any kind of creative work that involves the intellect and involves thinking or concepts, we can't really apply the same kind of mindfulness as we would, for example, in meditation because otherwise the words would become disconnected. We wouldn't be tuning into the level of meaning particularly. And so Minister is used to talk about what he called a general mindfulness where we're totally engaged in what we're doing. You know, we're engaged in the concept and we're using that level of the mind. But there's enough mindfulness present to pick up if some unwholesome states arise in the process of being engaged in that work. We're talking or we're reading or we're doing some kind of conceptual work. And if the mind is in an even place in doing it, or a wholesome place, there's interest in creativity and energy. But then if something unholsome should arise, there's enough mindfulness to pick that will pick that up. And in that moment, we could kind of settle back and say, okay, what just happened? So that's a kind of mindfulness is a protection for the mind. There is one exception which I found to mindfulness within kind of that conceptual intellectual realm. And the Buddha had an interesting comment about this, and that is in giving or in speaking the in giving Dharma talks or even in speaking the Dharma in a in a Dharma conversation that actually falls more into the meditative level than the level of just conceptual work. So even though we're using concepts to express the content, there's a certain power in terms of speaking the Dharma. So that it's actually possible the Buddha mentioned this to get enlightened both in speaking or in listening, right? Because in that kind of conversation, if we're doing it with wisdom, we're not so much lost in our usual evaluation of what's being said oh, I like this, I don't like it, I agree with it, I don't agree with it. But rather, in a Dharma conversation or either speaking or listening, it's more that we're actually doing the words rather than analyzing them. And so that's why it can be such a powerful experience to hear a Dharma talk or to be in a really engaged Dharma conversation, as I say, where we're actually experiencing what the words are saying. It seems to me that the difference may be even more categorical than that because I just think listening to someone speak or having a conversation is potentially more amenable to that kind of expansive clarity than doing other things like reading. I'm talking to you. I can very clearly be mindful both while talking and while listening. And I can cut through what I'm calling or have called the illusion of the self in the midst of that. And in some ways it's even more clear, because social circumstances are usually so selfrefying and ramifying, that to lose a sense of self while looking at your face, it's got a clear mirror to that experience than just looking at a wall or some other or having your eyes closed. But if I go to read these questions from listeners here, there's a kind of trimming down of my awareness to just decode the sentence I'm reading that seems to some degree synonymous with delusion for me. It's like it's it's not that you can't read. And certainly if I was reading about meditation or emptiness or any of these topics, I could bring a special kind of attention to the task of reading. But generally speaking, looking at words on a page and trying to figure out what they mean, at least for me, is a much duller frame of mind. And it's analogous to like, walking into a supermarket, just doing shopping and looking for different brands and trying to figure out which one you want. I mean, there's something so dull about that use of attention. Dull not as in boring, but dull as in just there's a kind of a bovine lack of clarity by comparison with other moments. The ultimate example that no longer pertains. Happily, the world is free of this experience now. But I recall what it was like to come off retreat decades ago and we'll go into a Blockbuster Video store looking for what video to rent. And there was something excruciating about that experience. To just travel the shelves, reading with your headCock to the side, to read the vertical spine of these cassette boxes, trying to figure out what you wanted and just going through hundreds of crappy movies, many of what you've seen. And at that point I was just very sensitive to the difference between paying attention one way or the other. And that has always figured in my mind even more than experiences of interpersonal conflict as a kind of awareness that is just the antithesis of wisdom and clarity and mindfulness. I think that points to how to say this. It points to both the diluted and unsatisfying quality of wanting. Just that mind state of wanting itself right? Is a kind of Buddhist it's a Buddhist terminology, duka. It's just unsatisfying. The amazing thing is that we are seduced generally into thinking that wanting is enjoyable and we live very often wanting to want. Like your experience in the store, you were just waiting to want something exactly you're wanting to want, not seeing that the very quality of. The wanting mind is inherently unsatisfying yeah and it gets amplified in that case because you're kind of wanting on a deadline because you can't get out of the store until you figure out what you want. Right? It's just an exercise of focused wanting and dissatisfaction and the kind of hopelessness of the whole exercise becomes obvious. But here this becomes a very interesting exercise, I think for people to explore in the course of their daily lives because wanting comes up a lot in a lot of different situations. It would be very interesting for people to begin to really pick up or become aware of when there is wanting in the mind for whatever it may be and to get a visceral sense of what it's like. What does it feel like to want to have that quality in the mind and then, if possible, either to contrast that with other times of not wanting and just to begin to see the difference in one's experience between wanting and not wanting. And one could do that if we're aware of the wanting and then are mindful enough to just wait until it's gone. Because wanting, like everything else, is impermanent. And in that moment of transition, of going from wanting to not wanting, that's a really powerful moment because we get a very clear understanding of the difference in our experience of those two mind states. And for myself. It always feels like I've been let out of the grip of something. As soon as the mind is released from wanting, there's a kind of relaxation into openness, into ease. But this is not something that most people are paying attention to. The kind of wanting mode is just so much part of our everyday lives. We hardly pay attention to it. Right. And yet, if we are mindful of it, it can offer a very profound understanding of the nature of mind, of the cause of a lot of suffering at this point, because I've played with this a lot, you know, and I watch for this on my mind very often. They'll not always there's still quite a bit more to do in this regard, but quite often. Often enough to be noticeable. I'll notice a wanting for something and then I'll I'll consciously say or consciously remind myself I don't need to want this. You know, the wanting is a choice. The wanting is a choice I'm making. And if in those moments I really see that clearly and say, no, I don't need to want this, and the mind actually lets go. It's an amazing moment of ease and it's always available to us. It's just being mindful enough of what our minds are doing and the potential for making wiser choices. Yeah. Yeah it actually connects to this. The next question I have here from Matthew Laurel Trinidad I would appreciate some comment on what Joseph and you think of the role of sela I e. Moral conduct in the development of mindfulness and how to define or arrive upon the essential principles of sila or to avoid religious dogma and defining or arriving at the same. It's hugely important. Right. So say more about that. But I guess one question to get you started that just occurred to me is it seems to me, certainly reading the literature on meditation and understanding some of the mishaps in the careers of various gurus and yogis, it's possible to be quite an accomplished meditator and still be a total schmuck, right? So it's still someone to be someone who is not only not impeccable but reliably unethical by our standards. You have Swami Muktanda building a tunnel between his living quarters and the girls dorm at his ashram, where he's essentially raping one presumes 14 year old girls and they're just horrendous stories about specific people. Who about whom? There. Are also stories that really seem to attest to their spiritual athleticism in terms of their meditative attainments and the kinds of positive effects they've managed to have on people. So talk about that. Well, I think this points to a critical distinction between power and wisdom. And through meditative skill the mind can become very powerful in many ways into all kinds of what might even seem miraculous things and certainly with strong energetic impact on other people. So lots of experiences can happen when somebody has developed, through whatever particular techniques, the strength or power of mind. That's very different than wisdom. And it is very possible for people to have developed these without wisdom. Isn't sustained mindfulness synonymous with a certain component of wisdom? Are you talking about? Somewhat. You imagine that some of these teachers have just become concentrated in ways that may be pleasant and given them certain powers of mind or amped up their charisma as teachers so they have certain influence over their students but they have just consistently missed the bullseye of what you're calling right practice. That's one possibility because that seems a little far fetched to me. I would imagine that if you grabbed someone like Mukdananda in his best hour of meditation and could run that on your brain, you might find all of the components of what you're calling wisdom. And yet it still hasn't inoculated him against being a sociopath in other circumstances in his life. No, I disagree. I think that just classically speaking, the power of concentration is that it suppresses the defilements at a particular time. And so while you're in that concentrated state, it may be that these unskillful mind states are not arising. But as soon as you're out of the concentration, then these unwholesome states just re emerge because the concentration by itself it's not a purifying force in and of itself. Right. We're not necessarily seeing into the impermanent empty nature of phenomena. People could be very concentrated and while they're in that state, you hook them up to some brain monitoring and their brains might seem very peaceful or calm or stable or whatever it shows, but that's not saying anything about what the filemans have been uprooted from the mind. And that's really the function of wisdom, which is a very different kind of practice. It's also the function, though, of an explicit conceptual understanding about the importance of ethics in one's life. So that if if you're teaching people to meditate without any kind of deep or sophisticated ethical consideration of just what what life is for and what constitutes a good life, then kind of the the edges of the path are not discernible. There's no metric by which you can then say, oh, my life has wandered off into some totally unskillful and suffering producing direction. This relates to another point I've made in other contexts that it's often pointed out that Buddhism can give rise to the same kinds of pathologies as Islam which I've frequently criticized. And what is often thrown at me is the phenomenon of the Kamikaze pilots in World War II, that you can have Buddhist suicide bombers because they were clearly influenced by Zen. It wasn't just Zen, it was Shinto and it was Japanese martial nationalism and and other constellations of ideas, but Zen was definitely involved and you had Zen masters who were advocating for this behavior. And if anyone wants to read about that, there are two books, Zen at War and Zen War Stories, that detail that evidence. And yet you have now the modern spectacle of Tibetan Buddhists. Rather than becoming suicide bombers, they're practicing self immolation in response to the actions of China. And it seems to me, and there's not really deep scholarship at the bottom of this. I have more experience of Tibetan Buddhism, but insofar as I know Zen as well, you can read for a very long time in the Zen literature and not find any emphasis on compassion and seala ethics. To the contrary, you can find many analogies that seem to give a kind of martial ethic, the sword of wisdom, kind of a samurai ethic comes to the fore often in in Zen parables. So it's actually not a surprise to me that Zen get under a certain construe could have helped animate the kamikaze phenomenon. And it's also not a surprise to me that vadriana Buddhists are self immolating as opposed to becoming suicide bombers. Given the emphasis on compassion in that context, I think I have to disagree with if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there you'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'll be speaking with Paul Bloom again. We spoke to podcasts back. He's a psychologist from Yale and a wonderful thinker. This time around, we get into some controversial areas. We go to the dark side a little bit. We talk about torture, despite my better judgment. We talk about Cecil the lion, talk about politics. You'll find at the end that I perform a kind of intervention on myself and Paul to some degree on the topic of eating meat. Many of you, vegans and vegetarians, have been after me for quite some time for a few remarks I made about having been a lapsed vegetarian. And now the chickens, as it were, have come home to roost. So you'll hear that I call for the best resources out there for how to be a vegetarian or a vegan healthily, and that's a sincere request. So if you have good information to send me, please do so through the email contact form on my website and please put vegetarianism or veganism in the subject line and I will keep you apprised of my progress. And without further preamble, I give you Paul Bloom. I'm back with Paul Bloom, my friend, the Yale psychologist who was on the podcast last time. Hey, Paul, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Then how are you? I'm good. Well, you are back largely because I wanted to talk to you again, but people loved our last podcast, so I would encourage people, if they haven't heard you the first time around, to go back and listen to what we said about empathy. But now I think it would be good for the two of us to strike out onto some novel territory here. And I had the idea that we could look at some essentially moral case studies where we talk about stories in the news that are particularly salient in moral terms and just essentially free associate on them. That sounds like a lot of fun. I mean, the issues that we could talk about are interesting in and of themselves, but it could also serve as sort of test cases to explore certain views that you and I have and maybe flesh out some agreements and some differences. Yeah, well, so you and I, in preparation for this conversation, just batted a few topics around. I think we both still dimly recall the Republican presidential debate, the first one with Donald Trump, which happened, I think, about ten days ago. And one thing stood out for me there that I just think is it's amazing that no one picks up on this? I don't think I saw this talked about in any journalistic context, but it seemed that at least three of the candidates there declared their opposition to abortion, not only in general and not only in the case of rape and incest, but even to save the life of the mother. I'd like to just spell out what that actually means because it's really a mind boggling position for anyone to have, especially someone who would seek to run this country. I would guess that would be Huckabee and Santorum. Who would be the third? Yeah, I think it was Walker, Cruz and Rubio. And Rubio. He didn't spell it out, but he said that his support for abortion in the case of rape, incest and for the life of the mother had been mischaracterized. It's kind of a hand waving denial of his liberal position there. You have to respect it as a morally consistent view. If you do believe it's murder, then that follows. And you could admire these people, if anything, for their moral consistency and their willingness to see the implications of their views. Yeah, no, it's a courage of a certain kind, no doubt. So let's just look at the details here, because what this means is, in a perfect world, by their lights, even if a teenage girl were raped by her father and became pregnant and there was some reasonable concern that she would not survive the delivery of this child, they would be against abortion. Even if we could intervene immediately, even the moment after conception and just remove a single celled fertilized ovum, they would be against it. That is in fact, the moral position. This idea that life starts at the moment of conception and is equivalently sacred at that point, that's what they're committed to. And presumably any doctor who could by magic or otherwise extract a single cell from the uterus of a raped daughter who was likely to die if she carried this fetus to term, that they would want that doctor prosecuted as a murderer and presumably killed if therefore the death penalty at the very least put in prison for the rest of his life. That is the totality of this moral position. It is just mind bogglingly unethical, and yet no journalist ever presses these people on it. I think it's because the journalists don't take them particularly seriously. I don't know whether they should be taken seriously. I think for at least some cases, like Huckabee, for instance, this might express a sincere and considered viewpoint. But for a lot of these politicians, for one thing, they know that no such law would ever get passed. They're not going to revamp Roe v. Wade in this sort of dramatic way. I think what it is is a signal. Look how far I'm willing to go. Even if you don't think I'm right, you got to admire me, they're saying, for my consistency and my moral strength. I think the psychology of what's going on is very interesting, but I don't think that these are meant to be purely evaluated as moral positions. But they're only appropriate signals, which is to say, effective ones, useful ones. From a political point of view, if some significant percentage of the electorate actually holds these views. So they're at best, they're pandering to the convictions of a mob who actually would want the laws to change in this way. Yes, they're pandering to the most extreme members of the Republican Party in the hopes that all the non extreme members will at least respect or not be repelled by their extreme views. But how could they be confident of that, given what this moral position entails? Again, we're talking about someone who's raped and who will die if she brings this baby to term. And we can prevent this catastrophe by removing a single cell or a collection of 50 cells right. A microscopic organism without any nervous system, without any capacity to suffer. This is, in fact, what is being proposed, and they are confident that this will not alienate better than 50% of the electorate. I just don't understand. Their confidence is derived from either some assumption that just no one is following the plot here and no one actually understands the position they're articulating or they just think that most people most of the time are close enough to this position that it's a safe position to stake out. I think some combination of the two. Another issue would be Trump's immigration policies, which if you spell them out, they're sort of unimaginably, cruel expelling children and their parents, including parents who may be legal immigrants or children who may be legal immigrants in order to sort of establish some sort of anti immigrant position. And I think, like the abortion thing, if you spell it out to them what the implications are, they would find it repellent. But at the same time, I don't think people are responding or meant to respond to the moral content of these views as opposed to their status as signals. I mean, remember the whole thing about Obama's birth certificate. I actually think that that most people who claimed Obama was not an American citizen didn't really believe this. They were just saying boo Obama. They were saying, I don't like Obama. Here's a bad thing we could say about them. And I think that a lot of these moral statements are not meant to be thought of as factual moral claims in some way. I think you're giving the Republican candidates too much credit. I think you're sort of envisioning them as making these thoughtful ethical claims that are meant to be evaluated as opposed to making dramatic flourishes for the audience. It almost doesn't matter which side of that you take because the dramatic flourish is only effective or at least not ruinous to your candidacy if no one is objecting to what is suggested there. So either you have to be confident that everyone is speaking and reasoning in bad faith, or enough of everyone for your doing so not to matter, or you have to think that millions of people actually agree with the letter of the position you're staking out. I haven't studied this, but I think the poll data suggests that it would have to be option one. I don't think this extreme pro life view is held by a large proportion of Americans. I think most Americans fall sort of uneasily in the middle, and obviously there's a political party difference. But I think the view you're sketching out with its implications, if you put that to people, Republicans as well as Democrats, they say, no, we don't want that, to sort of put this in a nice light. It's analogous to a politician who says that such and so is their top priority and nothing is more important than saving American lives. Nothing is more important than this, nothing more important than that which is taken literally as absurd. Nobody would assume that a single policy should override all other policies, but these are statements meant more as sort of speech acts that highlight one's commitment and one's loyalty to the party. So in some way he may be the only American who's taking these people to the work seriously, the one person watching this debate who is actually doing the math here, morally speaking, but that's morally absurd. So actually, there's something that in Trump's candidacy and his whole style of self presentation, which I think supports your interpretation here, which is that the fact that he is as popular as he is, given that it is almost impossible to take what he says seriously as a kind of histrionic bad faith to his style of self presentation where even he doesn't believe what he's saying. Nor does he believe that you believe it. And yet he's winning points for saying it as loudly as he can say it. People are just simply relieved to have someone speak in an uncensored way, even if it's actually a kind of bad faith performance where he's actually not voicing an honest position. I think that's right. I think people have pointed out that many of Trump's views lean very left. He's notably sympathetic to single payer health care systems, which if somebody named some of the Bush or Rubio suggested, they be laughed off the stage. But there's a huge tolerance for Trump's views because they're not taken seriously as views. I find Trump fascinating. I find the ascendance of Trump just extraordinarily interesting. And I mean, one thing I ask your opinion on this because I'm genuinely dumbfounded is what explains the variation how people respond to Trump. So for me and for most of my friends, which tend to lean very liberal. We find Trump repellent. We find his endless boasting, his bragging about his money, his derision towards his enemies, his personal insults, just this awful, awful person. But so many other people seem to be attracted to him. They seem to think, this is terrific. This is this great guy who we admire, who deserves our respect, and we give him help. They say about Trump, what do you think underlies that difference? Well, it's hard to even locate myself on that continuum, too, because there is where do you lie on that continuum? Like, how do you personally respond to Trump's style? I think I'm in two places on it because it was in some ways a relief to have him on that stage because he was just so ungovernable. He destabilizes what is otherwise a machine perfectly designed to produce noninformation and to give you absolutely no insight into how people would actually govern. And because he's destabilizing the Republican Party, I think it's, if nothing else, interesting, and I think it sounds like you do, that he's probably not committed, not truly committed to anything all that scary. So he's actually less scary than some of the other Republican candidates in terms of how they would likely govern. Also, I don't think he stands a chance of becoming president, so I'm not worried about him in any deep sense. But he is a genuinely comic figure, and it's hard to imagine people who truly like him not seeing that. The fact that anyone's taking him as a truly successful and brilliant billionaire who has gravitas because of how much he's accomplished, that's very hard for me to believe. But I'm sure most of the people who support him do more or less take him in that sense. I mean, for the last many years, I've been writing on a defense of human rationality, arguing, contrary to people like my friend John Height, that we're actually far more rational and reflective than people give us credit for. Even in our political domain, we are capable of rational thought and rational liberation. I have to say, the Republican debate and Trump in general, is proving to be an embarrassment for my theory. I feel like getting refuted more and more each day by watching reactions to Trump, and it's kind of sad that at some level let me back up. Chomsky has famously argued that the rational thing to do is not to care about these the debates into political parties, because to all intents and purposes, they're dissigned are all the parties of big business and imperialism and so on. And I don't believe that. But maybe people aren't taking this seriously. They're enjoying a spectacle of Trump. They're rooting them on. And maybe if you if you if you press them on it, they would say, we don't really care how much of a difference to Republicans and Democrats. We're just there for the show. I have your same angle on reason and the same gripe with height. But I must say, my own experiences of late, not just as a spectator on our political process, but just my collisions with my own critics, have caused me to worry that, as I recently just said on Twitter, that I fear that reason is actually an acquired taste and not that many people seem to acquire it. There's a style of argumentation that I'm running into again and again and again, and it's on Twitter, but it's at much greater length. It was with Chomsky when I attempted to have a conversation with him where there is such an unwillingness to engage with the details of an argument that you don't want to be true your opponent's position, that you're not even willing to take the time to understand it. The style is you just want to demonize the person from merely broaching a certain topic. And yet this strategy of vilifying someone distorting their position, yelling louder and louder and louder until you silence them. That is viewed by many people who support your side of the argument as a truly clever thing to do, that it's effective, it's morally appropriate, just call the other person an asshole or a monster loudly enough until the conversation is over, and then you've won. And just more and more I'm finding that that is where people who imagine that they are highly scrupulous and honest and intellectually serious agents of progress, that's how they're behaving. It's very depressing. It now makes me want to pick my battles far more conservatively because it's such a waste of time and energy to even attempt some of these conversations. I could understand that I kind of watched as a horrified spectator to some of the things you're talking about, and you have my sympathies in some way. I won't defend that style, but I'll make an observation about it, which is that if what you're going after is trying to find out the truth, then you don't want that style at all. You want to listen with an open mind. You want to let both sides air their disputes. You want to explore counterfactuals and so on and so forth. On the other hand, if there's something, if there's some policy you want and you have a goal in mind and you've already settled the issue to your own mind, in some cases, that may be the most rational strategy to demonize your opponent, regardless of the sort of moral qualities. The example I'm thinking about is debates over torture, where when people raise I'm thinking Alan Dershowitz, for instance, has made some provocative claims about the occasional necessity of torture under certain circumstances. I followed him down that rabbit hole and I get his hate mail still, and I get my own hate mail. And it's a totally thankless job. As I've said in various places, I actually regret having even talked about the and written about the topic because it's just I think it's hugely interesting ethically, philosophically, it's something you absolutely want to be able to talk about, and it has great consequences as a matter of public policy. But you are so perfectly demonized, even for talking about it that it's just not worth it. And that's a feature, not a bug. I mean, that's the point. The point is that if you have a certain view that says that torture is repellent, one should never do it. It's monstrous, and that's an absolute principle one holds, then you may choose to demonize people who argue in favor of torture rather than engage with them because you want them. You want to make their views and to make those people repellent. You want to disincentivize holding that view. But the problem is, as I hope to show in my arguments on this topic, is that the consequences of that position are even more repellent if you actually follow it to the letter. It is somewhat analogous to this abortion example just raised. If you actually look at the details of what it would mean to never under any circumstance have recourse to making another person so uncomfortable that they talk to you, right. What it will call torture by another name. You can easily concoct not just thought experiments, but very realistic situations. In fact, situations we know have occurred where the person before you, you absolutely know is guilty and has information that would save lives, and yet you're just delivering them coffee and cigarettes and giving them cable television to watch. If you look at the details, you can easily find a situation where you would be a moral monster to not have recourse to that, and yet you can't even push the conversation far enough as to reveal that. No, it's true. And I've seen the style of demonization apply to people on the right, people on the left. It's something that individuals with tremendous confidence, both in the correctness of their views and the monstrosity of other views, will kind of cheerfully engage in and believe they're undecided angels. And it's not such an alien feeling. If I bumped into a Holocaust denier, I wouldn't give them the respect of having a lengthy discourse with them. Yeah, I would ridicule them, but that's because, you know, that's such a heavy lift. I mean, there's so much evidence against their view that even their very interest in pursuing that line of inquiry says something negative about them, intellectually speaking. Leaving the ethics aside, it's like belonging to the Flat Earth Society. The fact that your attention is captured by that project says something derogatory about you. I think some people would say the same thing about people arguing for genetic bases of ethnic differences, people arguing about torture, people arguing about unfettered capitalism. I'm not defending this, but I'm sort of making a descriptive claim that those who do the demonization see themselves as in the same position that you and I would see ourselves when confronted with a Holocaust denier. Right. You're confronted with somebody who must be motivated by sheer animus and sheer irrationality. They're not worth the time of day and actually they don't belong in the sort of free marketplace of ideas. Just to show you how brow beaten I've been by this, I feel the need to insert just a defensive caveat here because having merely raised this issue echoes of my former self on the topic of torture, I'm going to get slammed. So I just have to point out that my investigation of the ethics of torture drew a parallel between torture and collateral damage. And the core of my point is that collateral damage is worse than torture across the board. It is worse to blow people up, innocent or guilty than it is to waterboard them. It's certainly worse to blow them up along with their children than it is to waterboard them. And if we ever found ourselves in a situation where torturing one person seemed likely to minimize the prospect of collateral damage, torture would have to be preferable. Waterboarding would have to be preferable. Waterboarding someone who is Osama bin Laden or he merely looks like Osama bin Laden. It would have to be preferable to dropping a 500 pound bomb on him and his family in moral terms. And yet we accept collateral damage more or less without argument. There's no one whose reputation has been destroyed by his willingness or her willingness to accept collateral damage in time of war. And yet merely raising the prospect of torturing a certain class of known terrorists just would destroy you and as Dershowitz and I have experienced to some degree on the margins. So anyway, I have to point that out. I think torture should be illegal, but not everything that should remain illegal is in every instance unethical. Trespassing should be illegal and theft should be illegal. But there are situations where you would have to be a monster not to trespass or not to steal if the stakes were high enough. And finally, in my defense and it's now tortured to realize how boring this is. The position I have on torture precisely the position you get if you read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in their article on torture. They have an example of a carjacking where a guy stole a woman's car at a gas station and she had her infant baby seat in the back seat and he abandoned the car on an incredibly hot day, I think it was in New Zealand or Australia. And the police promptly caught the guy and wanted to know where the car was. And he just denied against all evidence that he had stolen the car. And they knew that a baby was dying in the back of it somewhere on the side of the road and they smacked him around a little bit and then he immediately told them where the car was and they saved the baby in the nick of time. That's the example that the stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives in support of, at the very least, a nuanced ethical consideration of the validity of torture. For me, I think that should stop you in your tracks. I mean, the idea that cops could not make this guy at all uncomfortable physically when they knew he had taken this car, they knew it because they had video footage of him. He was like a 300 pound Samoan guy with a blonde Afro or something. He was like the most recognizable person on earth who they had on video. And yet if you try to have a conversation on this topic it's over before it even starts. Yeah, I think my intuition is the same as you're certainly in that case, I mean, this is Consequentialism 101. In fact, the Utilitarians like Bentham were actually they used torture as an example and they said there should be that the logic is causing one person suffering to save 1000 lives is a rational thing to do. And so the same moral philosophy that gives you gay marriage and gives you personal freedoms of all sorts that liberals like me like also gives you the justification for torture, I would say. As you're aware, there is a counterargument which I'm sometimes persuaded by, which is that in that instance you're certainly right that torture is a good thing, but nonetheless, as a matter of policy one should block it. Absolutely. Well, that is my argument. In fact, it's actually not original with me. I got it from Mark Bowden, the Atlantic writer who wrote a long article on torture which is linked somewhere on my website. He argued basically that he thought it should be illegal across the board. But our interrogators should know that there are certain cases perhaps never actually reached, but certain cases which if reached will be ethically and psychologically obvious to them, where it would be ethical to make somebody uncomfortable by whatever means because you absolutely know that you are in one of these ticking bomb scenarios which potentially can occur. And in that case you would still be breaking the law but there's no judge or jury who would want to prosecute you for what you did. So you will be ethically and in fact off the hook even though you will have broken the law. And I think that's the right policy. I think it should be illegal across the board because of all the other consequences of having some legal mechanism by which to torture people. So I like the analogy you gave before collateral damage, which makes a nice point. I taught a freshman seminar a couple of years ago on the Seven Deadly Sins and I started at one point the famous trolley problem, which I think we spoke about last time we talked. And basically the question is would you kill one person to save five and one innocent person to save five innocent people? And my students by and large says, yeah, it was they would. And then a bit later in the conversation, I asked, would you torture somebody to save five people? And they said no, right? They said they said, and then and then I said, but which is worse? Killing somebody or torturing them? That's the thing. Now, here's what I'll say which might shock you. I have the same intuition. I actually think that in some way, although at least for certain tortures, I'd rather be tortured than killed. I guess there's some torture so horrific, I'd rather die, but I'd rather be smacked around than killed. Nonetheless, I think in some way smacking around or certainly waterboarding, the more serious tortures are worse than killing somebody. And I need to sort of nail down the intuition. It has an intuition to do with human dignity and respect. Somebody who kills another person in some way to act as less degrading than torturing another person. Though in another respect, of course, it's far worse to kill than to torture. Yeah, I think it does have certain connections to the trolley problem. It does. Invoke that difference between flipping the switch and pushing the fat man. That's right. There's something the up close and personal hands on aspect of it. But all of those are aspects that are separable from the actual ethical case, which is to say that you could have modes of torture that didn't entail any of that. I mean, the example I gave, which to everyone's horror in the end of Faith, was you could have a torture pill which delivered the instruments of torture along with the instruments of their perfect concealment. And your experience as a torturer would be you gave the terrorist or the evil genius this pill and he laid down for a nap of an hour and got up and then confessed everything because he never wanted to go through that again. I think at the end you'd be tempted to call it a truth pill. This would all be concealed from you. And your experience was just having people come to you saying, okay, whatever you do, don't do that to me again. Now, again, I'm not arguing that we should have such a pill. I'm saying that all of these surface details are separable from the core case, which is which is worse? Killing someone, killing their children by accident, as in the case of collateral damage maiming children standing within 500 yards of the bomb you dropped, orphaning them, or making a person you know to be guilty and in possession of crucial information to save lives, uncomfortable to whatever degree is necessary to get them to talk. Yeah, I agree with what you said before, which is these are deep issues. They're important issues. They're issues that we're confronted with. I'm kind of annoyed at the sort of prissiness of some philosophers who refuse who would argue that torture of any sort is absolutely wrong. Collateral damage of any sort is absolutely wrong. Killing is absolutely wrong. And. Failing to confront the fact that in the real world when we deal with these in times of war, in times of the criminal justice system, people have to be questioned, people have to be detained. And the question of what is torture, even if one is categorically against it, you still have to confront the case of where it begins and where it doesn't begin. There's no excuse for failing to delve into these issues and the same of collateral damage. Someone who's for me hardcore pacifism isn't merely a sort of unrealistic position. It's basically a monstrous position because it says you should not engage in war even to stop the most savage brutality. Even if even if a relatively costless invasion could stop the Holocaust, you shouldn't do it. And to me I think that's just awful. Yeah, well recall as I did in the end of Faith, gandhi's position on the Holocaust. Gandhi thought that the Jews of Europe should have willingly walked into the gas chamber so as to arouse the rest of the world to the moral horror of the Nazi regime. But then you ask yourself what is the rest of the world supposed to do once they're aroused when they themselves drink the kool aid of Gandhian pacifism? Do they go into the gas chambers too? I mean there's absolutely no moral core to pacifism when you actually take it to its extremity. What you're committed to doing as a pacifist is simply bearing witness to the misery and death of innocence imposed by the world's sadists and thugs and you are not going to dirty your hands in the process. And if push comes to shove, you're going to let them kill you and your children too. How this is ever sold as not only a moral position but the highest possible morality is a total mystery to me. But again, this is one of those positions where if you don't unpack it, it can pass as an incredibly scrupulous ethical view. As you say, there is a burden to understand what is entailed on both sides of these arguments. If you're categorically against torture, if you're categorically against abortion or for it, whatever your position is, you have to be willing to look at what that commits you to. I was rereading this article by a really smart criminologist on violence and he was likening violence to a cancer. And I thought that's the worst analogy ever because cancer is something which is unnecessary awful and if you eradicated it, the world would be a better place. But violence is inevitable and important and essential for having a good and compassionate society. You need to threat of violence in order to make sure that people honor contracts, that they don't rape and steal and kill one another, that they don't free ride and accomplishments of other people. And by just about any evolutionary account, the reason why we have anger and a punitive appetite is to keep people on the up and up and to keep them from being predators upon one another. So I'm kind of down on empathy. But I've been persuaded by people like Jesse Prince that anger and the punitive desires actually can be a tremendously good thing. If you took away an appetite for violence, for people, a desire to inflict suffering on those who do bad, I think the world would fall apart. So Paul Bloom is against empathy, but for violence. That'll be a good tweet. And now I have a subtitle for my book. Well, I agree with that. I think it's also a fascinating area to talk about. I still want to linger for a moment on this topic of I guess they are taboo topics of conversation. A taboo topic is something which taints you for even mentioning it. Yeah, I think they're hugely consequential. I wasn't planning to talk about torture and every single time the topic comes up and I find myself digging the hole a little deeper, I seem to regret it. But there are so many topics like this now which are like they're just radioactive and many are far more consequential than torture because that really is a kind of outlier case. But for instance, in the news now, I'm going to raise this topic and we are not going to talk about it because I truly think this is radioactive. But I just want to, I'm going to raise this just to show listeners how this sort of comes up for me, the now very current topic of police brutality and racism and the inequality between the way blacks and whites have to deal with the misuses of police force. All of that has, I think, been appropriately shocking to people and no news to anyone. Now this is hugely talked about in our society in the last twelve months or so, ever since the killing of Michael Brown, or actually even before that, it wasn't police related violence. But the Trayvon Martin case, I think primed this discussion and then now we've had maybe a dozen very high profile cases where cops have killed a black man in very different circumstances. Now there's a range of circumstances here and this is what cannot be talked about. Everyone on the side of the outrage insists upon grouping all of these cases together as almost like a single datum, a single proof that white racist cops are killing black men based on their racism. And this is a fact that is so obvious as to be undeniable and to attempt to parse it in any way is going to stigmatize you for the rest of your life. But I think one thing should be absolutely obvious is that these cases are very, very different. They're very different uses of violence on the parts of the cops. They're very different victims in terms of what they were actually doing in the world. Now, to my eye, we've had, in twelve months, really the full range of example where you have a case of a sadistic, stupid, poorly trained cop essentially committing a murder and the cop should be in prison for the rest of his life, all the way to a totally appropriate, understandable and conservative use of force, which resulted in the death of the criminal suspect and everything in between. Right. And yet you cannot talk about this. And it has to be talked about, because anyone who's going to group all of these together as a single problem is just not even remotely speaking honestly about what's going on in our world and about what it takes for cops to do their jobs or what kind of cops you want or what is an appropriate use of force given the situation. We can't talk about any of these things because of how taboo it is to differentiate among these instances wherein a black man died in the presence and because of the actions of cops, black or white. I think that's a correct diagnosis, but leans a bit towards pessimistic. I mean, Obama's Justice Department, for instance, parsed it pretty nicely with regard to Ferguson, where they said, on the one hand, the killing of Michael Brown was legitimate. It was just a justified shooting by police officers, and there was no reason to have further charges. But at the same time, the Ferguson Police Department did have a history of systematic racism. You can parse it. It's true. There's a certain dynamic where if you were to rush out on Facebook or Twitter and then say, well, this shooting of an unarmed black kid was justified, people would immediately take all sorts of implications from it, from your statement about that. Yeah, and there is a certain dynamic. Similarly, if one was to go on Facebook or Twitter and say that it was unjustified, it was murder, a cop committing murder because he could, people draw justifications from that too. There's sort of a bizarre polarization that happens with these issues, which is you're forced to once you take a side, you're forced to categorize all instances that bear on the debate as falling into your side of the issue, even if this is just irrational. The shorter version of all this is nuance is underappreciated in certain contexts, quite consequentially. So I just think I'm sort of arguing from an end of one here just to kind of what it's like to be me, because I seem to touch all of these controversial topics because I find them, one, interesting, but two very consequential. I think the intersection between philosophically interesting phenomenon, philosophically and scientifically interesting phenomenon, and huge social consequence, that is the most interesting intersection of all. And that's where I want to spend my time. But the consequences are you wind up touching topics like violence and racism and war, and these are the big moments in life, however statistically rare they are. These are huge cases where we have to get things ethically straight, but the personal psychological and social cost of dealing with the blowback on these topics. This is understandable. It's just that there's a bandwidth problem. People don't necessarily have the time to fully understand what you said or what you meant to say or what was actually in the original article. They just see the sliming of you. That is the loudest thing out there. And so this style of arguing where you just maliciously misrepresent someone's views or encourage a misunderstanding of them, again, I'm just kind of marshaling time and attention and kind of emotional resources now and obviously doing it badly, because in this conversation we've raised torture. We've raised all of these topics, gun control and racial profiling. Exactly. Let's go straight there. It's an interesting question. How much of a slimming is a sort of accidental byproduct of how people's minds work and how much of it is a purposeful strategy on people and people on certain sites? And and I think it's possible. I think you can dissect, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+I just got back from Boston, where I had my event at the Kennedy Forum with Majid Noise, and I've just reaped the whirlwind on social media. It has been really amazing, kind of the perfect storm of political correctness and intellectual dishonesty. So I'm going to do a little bit of housekeeping. Hopefully this won't be too painful. I'm just going to try to suck the poison from the wound as quickly as possible. But the pushback against Majid and I merely having a conversation, the the malice we have both received, majid in particular, has really been flabbergasting. Nathan Lean, an employee of Reza Aslan's, called Majid my lap dog. Murtaza Hussein, an employee of Glenn Greenwalds, got on Twitter and called him a talking monkey, a porch monkey, a native informant. This is all after viewing the video of our conversation at Harvard. And that video is online. You can see that on my blog. Watch that video and then contemplate how close minded and psychologically and ethically confused you have to be to think that Majid was functioning as my lackey there. As I said on that panel, if anything, my views were more modified by our dialogue than his were. And if you read the book, you'll just see how that conversation evolved. It's just amazing to me that the level of cynicism and ill will this is bringing out in people, but I suppose I shouldn't be amazed. Last week I did an interview with Dave Rubin, and Dave is a really nice guy, incredibly supportive, and had the bright idea of trying to inoculate the world against misrepresentations of my views by just going through the most controversial positions on profiling and nuclear war and all the rest. And he thought he would we would do five minutes on each over the course of this interview, and then he would put up those separate chapters as a point of reference for anyone who wanted to be clear about what my views actually are. Well, we did this, and then people distorted this very conversation. So, for instance, I said, with respect to my views on profiling at airports, I said, If Jerry Seinfeld shows up at security and gets the same sort of pat down that anyone else does, we know that is a waste of time. We know that Jerry Seinfeld famous celebrity is very unlikely to have been successfully recruited by the forces of global jihad while no one was watching. So any time spent patting down his body or selecting him for special attention based on some notion that it's only decent and fair to do so, that is security theater, and that makes us all less safe. Well, PZ Myers excerpted that. If you've forgotten who PZ Myers is, you could be forgiven. Perhaps. But in any case, he's a biologist who's a blogger who I now never interact with. But I'm mentioning him because he kicked this whole thing off. He summarized my view as being one where if you look like Jerry Seinfeld, you should not receive scrutiny at the airport. Which is to say, if you're white and or Jewish looking, you should not receive scrutiny. And Glenn Greenwald and Reyes Oslon reacted to this, spread this around to millions of people. And Jink uygur did the same, I believe. So in any case, my Twitter feed was just a tsunami of stupidity when I got back from Boston. The point, as is obvious in the video, and should be obvious, is that I'm saying if you are a famous celebrity, nothing turns on this. How many celebrities go through the TSA and hold up the line because they're being patted down? It was a joke. I was simply pointing out that there are people at the airport who we know are very unlikely to have been recruited by ISIS. I put 80 year old Okinawan women in there and little girls from Norway. But my point was that if Jerry Seinfeld himself is going through, we know he's not a member of ISIS. And when responding to Glenn Greenwald's attack on me on Twitter, I said, Glenn, I could have just as well used Denzel Washington. It would have been the same point. And he said, It's very telling that you picked Seinfeld and not Denzel Washington. Right. So this is Glenn Greenwald. In his beloved capacity as a mind reader. He's detecting in me the bigotry and racism that I didn't know I harbored or have imperfectly concealed. Well, let me just spell it out for the deliberately obtuse. If you are Denzel Washington or Jamie Foxx or any other celebrity of color who doesn't stand the slightest chance of having been recruited by Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, well, then I think you should get the same treatment at security that Jerry Seinfeld gets. Or Betty White, which is the other example I used in that interview. And this is why I describe my view as anti profiling. It's not a matter of singling out people from the Middle East or people with dark skin. It's a matter of not, obviously wasting time and scarce attentional resources. It's a matter of paying less attention to people who we know are extraordinarily unlikely to be jihadists. Unfortunately, this very public and, I think, calculated distortion of my views about profiling has coincided with a 14 year old boy's arrest in his school in Texas. This boy, Ahmed, who brought what he described as a clock to school, and he is a Muslim boy who is very interested in engineering, it seems, and is a tinker and inventor. And he brought some tangle of circuitry to school, which he said was a clock, but his teachers thought it was a bomb or might be a bomb, and brought him to the principal's office, and he wound up arrested as a result of this. Now, who knows what happened? This story is only breaking today, but now I'm getting hammered for this being the outcome of my views on profiling. So I should say a few brief things about this. First of all, everything I've said about profiling relates to what I think should happen at airports, which is a unique circumstance. Why are airports unique? Well, because when you're talking about a terrorist getting on a plane, you're talking about someone who is willing to die, right? You're talking about someone who is, by definition, suicidal, if you're talking about bringing down a plane with a bomb or by some other means. So if someone's getting on with his or her kids, you have to then think that this is a person who is willing to sacrifice his kids for this cause. Now, that is a rare breed of person, right? And we should be using all available cues to determine how likely someone is to fit that profile. And as I argue and maintain, smart, well trained people can, at a glance, exercise very educated intuitions about these things. And not everyone is equally likely to be a jihadist, much less a suicidal one, at the airport. But again, I don't think I fall outside of that profile, right? If I'm wandering through the airport alone and I'm not recognized to be the vociferous critic of jihadism that I am, hey, I'm as likely as almost anyone, based on surface appearance, to be the next suicide bomber. But Betty White isn't. And no one who looks like Betty White, frankly, is. And until ISIS and Al Qaeda successfully recruit people who look like Betty White, I think gradations of suspicion are perfectly appropriate here. But things change when you're talking about schools. Now, we're not necessarily talking about suicidal terrorism. We're talking about incidents that more resemble the kinds of things we have learned, unfortunately, to worry about at schools. We're worried about mass shootings, for the most part, of students and teachers, by students rather often, and rather often by white students, I think probably most often by white students, judging from the news coverage. So if you're worried about the next Columbine massacre, if a kid shows up at school with something that looks like a bomb, I should hope that the teachers and the administration will exercise the same degree of caution. Whether the child is white or Arab or Muslim or Christian, the background of the person is totally irrelevant. We're talking about the the object they brought with them, which has provoked suspicion. Now, again, I don't know anything about Ahmed apart from the video that I saw of him online. He looks like a perfectly wonderful kid whose interest in science is to be celebrated. But if he brought something to school that looked terrifying to his teachers and he couldn't give an adequate account of what it was, well, then caution was totally warranted, whatever his religious background or color of his skin. And if it looked like a clock, well, then not. I've seen some photos that purport to be the thing he brought. It didn't look much like a clock. But in any case, the idea that racism or bigotry or xenophobia was giving some top spin to this episode, that is, if true, to be totally deplored. Right? Again, I don't know the specifics of what happened to Ahmed. It looks, on its surface, to be reprehensible, but the way in which Glenn Greenwald and the usual suspects are demagoguing this issue and holding it up as an example of Islamophobia or as a straightforward implementation of my views, well, should come as no surprise. It's totally dishonest and it's quite damaging to our conversation about very hard issues. How we deal with our security concerns going forward is a very difficult issue. It's difficult politically, it's difficult ethically, it's difficult practically, and it is only made more difficult by this kind of obscurantism. So I think that's all I have to say about that. Of course, I'm painfully aware that many of you find this incredibly boring. You can't believe how boring I find this. And I'm aware that many of you think it's totally counterproductive for me to defend myself. I wish I believe that. It's it's not clear to me what to do, but it's pretty clear that silence on my part and just trying to rise above it doesn't work. So, you know, up to the limit of my tolerance and yours, I'm going to have to address these things occasionally. However, on my next podcast, you will learn that we very likely live in a universe where there are infinite numbers of beings listening to podcasts just like this one, where we didn't talk about any of these things. Though that would also entail a universe where there are infinite numbers of beings just like us, listening to this exact podcast an infinite number of times. I don't know about you, but I consider that a problem. Let's try to fix that going forward. Thank you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'll be speaking with Max Tegmark. Max is a physicist at MIT. He's a cosmologist. In particular, he's published over 200 technical papers, and he's been featured in dozens of science documentaries. And he's now an increasingly influential voice on the topic of artificial intelligence. Because his Future of Life Institute deals with this and other potential existential threats. Max has written one book for the general reader, a book that I found incredibly valuable, entitled Our Mathematical Universe my Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. And we'll be talking about some of that today. I really enjoyed talking to Max. We talk about the foundations of science and what distinguishes science from non science. We talk about the mysterious utility of mathematics in the natural sciences. We also talk for quite some time about our current picture of the universe from a cosmological perspective, which opens on to the fascinating and totally counterintuitive concept of the multiverse, which, as you'll see, entails the claim that there may well be a functionally infinite number of people just like yourself leading nearly identical lives and every other possible life at this moment elsewhere in the universe, which is my candidate for the strangest idea that is still scientifically plausible. And finally, we talk about the dangers of advances in artificial intelligence as we see them. In any case, it was a fascinating conversation from my point of view. Max is a fascinating guy, and I hope you enjoy it and I hope you'll buy his book, because it is well worth reading. And now I give you Max Tegmark. How you doing, Max? Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's great to be on. It's really a pleasure to talk to you. I have a lot I want to talk to you about. I'm reading your book, Our Mathematical Universe, which I highly recommend to our listeners, and I'm going to talk about some of what I find most interesting in that book. But it by no means exhausts the contents of the book. There's no conversation we're going to have here that's going to get into the level of detail that you present in the book. So I really consider your book a huge achievement. You've managed to make an up to the minute picture of the state of physics and cosmology in particular, truly accessible to a general reader, and that's certainly not something that all of your colleagues can claim to have achieved. So congratulations on that. Thank you for your kind words. It's important to remember also, of course, that if in thinking about these things or reading my book, one feels that one doesn't understand quite everything about our cosmos, you know, nobody else does either. So that's quite okay. And in fact, that's really very much part of the charm of studying the cosmos, that we still have these great mysteries that we can ponder. Yeah. So I'm going to drive rather directly toward those mysteries. But first I just want to give some context here. You and I met in San Juan, Puerto Rico, at a conference you helped organize on the frontiers of artificial intelligence research and in particular focused on the emerging safety concerns there. I hope we're eventually going to get to that. But that's where we met, and our obvious shared interest is on AI at the moment. But I do want to talk first about just the pure physics, and then we will get to the armies of lethal robots that may await us. Sounds great. It seems pretty clear to me from our conversations also that we also have a very strong shared interest in looking at this reality out there and pondering what its true nature really is. Let's start there, kind of at the foundations of our knowledge and the foundations of science, because in science we are making our best effort to arrive at a unified understanding of reality. And I think there are many people in our culture, many in humanities departments, who think that no such understanding is possible. They think there's no view of the world that encompasses subatomic particles and cocktail parties and everything in between. But I think that from the point of view of science, we have to believe that there is. We may use different concepts at different scales, but there shouldn't be radical discontinuities between different scales and our understanding of reality. And I'm assuming that's an intuition you share, but let's just take that as a starting point. Yeah. When someone says that they think reality is just a social construct or whatnot, then other people get upset and say, if you think gravity is a social construct, I encourage you to take a step out through my window here on the 6th floor. And if you drill down into what this conflict comes from, it's just that they're using that R word, reality in very different ways. And as a physicist, the way I use the word reality is I assume that there is something out there independent of me as a human. I assume that the Andromeda galaxy would continue existing even if I weren't here, for example. And then we take this very humble approach of saying, okay, there is some stuff that exists out there. Our physical reality, let's call it, and let's look at it as close as we can and try to figure out what properties it has. If there's some confusion about something, that's our problem, not reality's problem. There's no doubt in my mind that our universe knows perfectly well what it's doing and it functions in some way. We physicists have so far failed to figure out what that way is and we're in this schizophrenic situation where we can't even make quantum mechanics talk to relativity theory properly. But that's the way I see it simply a failure so far in our own creativity. And I think it's not only would I guess that there is a reality out there independent of us but I actually feel it's quite arrogant to say the opposite because it sort of presumes that we humans should go center stage. Solopsists say that there is no reality without themselves. Ostriches, in the Apocryphal story make this assumption that things that they don't see don't exist. But even very respected scientists go down this slippery slope sometimes. Neil Bore, one of the founders of quantum mechanics famously said no reality without observation which sort of puts humans center stage and denies that there can be things you should call reality without us. But I think that's very arrogant, and I think we can use a good dose of humility. So my starting point is there is something out there and let's try to figure out how it works. Right. I think we'll get to Bore and to his Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics at some point, at least on the fly because as you probably know, it really is the darling interpretation of New Age philosophers and spiritualists. And it's something that I think we have reason to be somewhat skeptical about but inconveniently for us. This skepticism about the possibility of understanding reality does sort of sneak in the back door for us somewhat paradoxically by virtue of taking science seriously in particular evolutionary biology seriously. And this is something you and I were talking about when we last met, where I think at one point in the conversation, I observed, as almost everyone has, who thinks about evolution. That one thing we can be sure. Of is that our cognitive capacities and our common sense and our intuitions about reality have not evolved to equip us to understand reality at the smallest possible scale or at the largest or things moving incredibly fast or things that are very old. We have intuitions that are tuned for things at human scale things that are moving relatively slowly and we have to decide whether we can mate with them or whether we can eat them or whether they're going to eat us. And so you and I were talking about this. I said that it's no surprise, therefore, that the deliverances of science in particular your areas of science, are deeply counterintuitive. And that's right. You did me one better, though. You said that not only is it not surprising it would be surprising and, in fact, give you reason to mistrust your theories if they were aligned with common sense, we should expect the punchline at the end of the book of nature to be deeply counterintuitive in some sense. And I just want you to expand on that a little bit. Yeah, that's exactly right. I think that's a very clear prediction of Darwin's ideas, if you take them seriously, that whatever the ultimate nature of reality is, it should seem really weird and counterintuitive to us. Because developing a brain advanced enough to understand new concepts is costly in evolution and we wouldn't have evolved it and spent a lot of energy increasing our metabolism, et cetera, if it didn't help in any way. If some cavewoman spent too much time pondering what was out there beyond all the stars that she could see or subatomic particles, she might not have noticed the tiger that snuck up behind her and gotten cleaned right out of the gene pool. Moreover, this is not just a natural, logical prediction, but it's a testable prediction. Darwin lived a long time ago. We can look what has happened since then, when we've used technology to probe things beyond what we could experience with our senses. So the prediction is that whenever we with technology study physics that was inaccessible to our ancestors, it should seem weird. So let's look at the fact sheet at the scorecard. We studied what happened when things go much faster than our ancestors. Near the speed of light, time slowed down. Whoa. So weird that Einstein never even got the Nobel Prize for it, because my Swedish converging countryman on the Noble Committee thought it was too weird. Right. You look at what happens when things are really huge and you get black holes, which were considered so weird. Again, it took a long time until people really started to accept them. And then you look at what happens when you make things really small, so small that their ancestors couldn't see them. And you find that elementary particles can be, in several places at once extremely counterintuitive, to the point that people are still arguing about what it means. Exactly. Even though they all concede that the particles really can do this weird stuff. And the list goes on. Whenever you take any parameter out of the range of what our ancestors experienced, really weird things happen if you have very high energies. For example, like when you smash two particles together near the speed of light that the Lord had run collider at CERN. If you collide a proton and an antiproton together, and out pops a Higgs Boson, that's about as intuitive as if you collide a Volkswagen with an Audi and out comes a cruise ship. And yet, this is the way the world works. So I think the verdict is, in whatever the nature of reality actually is, it's going to seem really weird to us. And if we therefore dismiss physics theories just because they seem counterintuitive, we're almost certainly going to dismiss whatever the correct theory is once someone actually tells us about it. So I'm wondering though, whether this slippery slope is in fact more slippery than we are admitting here though because how do we resist the slide into total epistemological skepticism? So for instance, why trust our mathematical intuitions or the mathematical concepts born of them or the picture of reality in physics that's arrived at through this kind of bootstrapping of our intuitions into areas that are counterintuitive? Because I understand why we should trust these things pragmatically. It seems to work. We can build machines that work. We can fly on airplanes. There's a difference between an airplane that flies and one that doesn't. But as a matter of epistemology, why should we trust the picture of reality that math allows us to bring into view? If again we are just apes who have used the cognitive capacities that have evolved without any constraints that they accord with reality at large? And mathematics is clearly insofar as we apprehend it, discover it, invent it, an extension of those very humble capacities. Yeah, it's a very good question and some people tell me sometimes that theories that physicists discuss at conferences from black holes, the parallel universes sound even crazier than a lot of myths from old time about fire, flame throwing dragons and whatnot. So shouldn't we dismiss the physics just as we dismiss these myths? To me there is a huge difference here in that these physics theories, even though they sound crazy as yourself said here, they actually make predictions that we can actually test. And that is really the crux of it. If you take the theory quantum mechanics seriously, for example, and assume that particles can be in some replacement ones then you predict that you should be able to build this thing called a transistor which you can combine in vast numbers and build this thing called a cell phone and it actually works. Good luck with a useful technology using the fired hypothesis or whatever. This is very linked, I think, to where we should draw the borderline between what's science and what's not science. Some people think that the line should go between that which seems intuitive and not crazy and that which feels too crazy. And I'm arguing against that because black holes seemed very crazy at the time and now we found loads of them in the sky. To me instead, really that the line in the sand that divides science from what's not science is. The way I think about it is what makes me a scientist is that I would much rather have questions I can't answer than have answers I can't question. One thing you're emphasizing here is that it's not in the strangeness or seeming acceptability of the conclusion. It's in the methodology by which you arrived at that conclusion. And falsifiability and testable predictions is part of that. I don't think you would say that a poparian conception of science as a set of falsifiable claims subsumes all of science because there are clearly scientifically coherent things we could say about the nature of reality, where we know there's an answer there, we just know that no one has the answer. The very prosaic example I often use here is how many birds are in flight over the surface of the Earth at this moment? Well, we don't know. We know we're never going to know because it's just changed before I can get to the end of the sentence, but it's a totally coherent question to ask, and we know that it just has an integer answer. Leaving spooky quantum mechanics or parallel universes aside, if we're just talking about Earth and birds as objects, we can't get the data. But we know in some basic sense that this reality that extends beyond our perception guarantees that the data in principle exist. I think you say at some point in your book that a theory doesn't have to be testable across the board. It just parts of it have to be testable to give us some level of credence in its overall picture. Is that how you view it? I'm actually pretty sympathetic to Pauper in the idea of testability works fine for even these crazy concepts like sounding concepts like parallel universes and black holes, as long as we remember that what we test are theories, specific mathematical theories that we can write down. Parallel universes are not a theory, they're a prediction from certain theories. A black hole isn't a theory either. It's a prediction from Einstein's general relativity theory. And once you have a theory in physics, it's testable as long as it predicts at least one thing that you can go check, right? Then you can falsify it if you check that thing and it's wrong, whereas it might also make just because it happens to also make some other predictions for things you can never test, that doesn't make it non scientific. As long as there's still something you can test. Black holes, for example, the theory of general relativity predicts exactly what would happen to you if you fall into the monster black hole in the middle of a galaxy that weighs 4 million times as much as the sun. It predicts exactly how you're going to when you're going to get spaghetti and how when you're and so on, except you can never actually do that experiment and then write an article about it in physics review letters because you're inside the event horizon and the information can't come out. But nonetheless, that's a testable theory because general relativity also predicts loads of other things, such as how your GPS works, which we can test with great precision. And when the theory passes a lot of tests for things that we can make, and we start to take the theory seriously, then I feel we have to be honest and also take seriously the other predictions from the theory, whether we like them or not. We can't just cherry pick and say, hey, I love what the general relativity theory does for GPS and the bending of light and the perihelion, the weird orbit of Mercury and stuff, but I don't really like the black holes. So I'm going to opt out of that prediction that you cannot do the way that you just say, I want coffee, and opt out of the caffeine and buy decaf. In physics, once you buy the theory, you have to buy the whole product. And if you don't like any of the predictions, well, then you have to try to come up with a different mathematical theory which doesn't have that prediction but still explains everything else. And that's often very hard. People have tried for 100 years to do that with Einstein's gravity theory right, to get rid of the black holes. And they've so far pretty much failed. And that's why people have been kicking and streaming, screaming, dragged into believing in, or at least taking very seriously black holes. And it's the same thing with these various kinds of parallel universes also, that it's precisely because people have tried so hard to come up with alternative theories that explain how to make computers and blah, blah that don't have these weird predictions and fail, that you're starting to take it more seriously. Yeah, well, we're going to get to the parallel universes because that's really where I think people's intuitions break down entirely. But before we get there, I want to linger on this question of the primacy of mathematics and strange utility of mathematics. At one point in your book, you cite the offsighted paper by Wigner, who I think you wrote in the 60s about in a paper entitled the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences. And this is something that many scientists have remarked on. There seems to be a kind of mysterious property of these abstract structures and chains of reasoning where mathematics seems uniquely useful for describing the physical world and making predictions about things that you would never anticipate, but for the fact that the mathematics is suggesting that something should be so. And that's right. This has lured many scientists into essentially mysticism, or the very least philosophical Platonism, and sometimes even religion, positing mathematical structure that exists or or even, you know, pure mathematical concepts like numbers that exist in some almost Platonic state beyond the human mind. And I'm wondering if you share some of that mathematical idealism. And I just wanted to get your reaction to an idea that I believe I got from a cognitive scientist who lived, and I think he died in the 40s, maybe the 50s. Kenneth Craig, who published a book in 143 where he I think it just in passing, he this anticipates Wigner by about 20 years, but in passing, he tried to resolve this this mystery about the the utility of mathematics. And he he simply speculated that there was a there must be some isomorphism between brain processes that represent the physical world and processes in the world that are represented, and that this might account for the utility of mathematical concepts. I think he more or less asked, is it really so surprising that certain patterns of brain activity that are in fact what mathematical concepts are at the level of the human brain can be mapped onto the world some kind of sameness of structure or homology there? Does that go any direction toward resolving this mystery for you, or do you think it exceeds that? That's an interesting argument. The argument that our brain adapts to the world and therefore has a world model inside of the brain. Our brain is just clearly part of the world. And so there are processes in the world, and there are processes in the world that have, by virtue of what brains are, have a sameness of fit and a mapping. So I agree with the first part of the argument and disagree with the second part. I agree that it's natural that there will be things in the brain that are very similar to what's happening in the world precisely because the blood brain has evolved to have a good world model. But I disagree that this fully answers the whole question, because the claim that he made there that you that you mentioned that brain processes of certain kinds is effectively what mathematics is. That's something that most mathematicians I know would violently disagree with, that math has something to do with brain processes at all. They think of math rather as structures which have nothing to do with the brain hold. Let's just pull the breaks there, though, because clearly your experience of doing math, your grasp of mathematical concepts or not the moment something makes sense or you persist in your confusion, your memory of the multiplication table, your ability to do basic algebra and everything on up. All of that is in every instance of it's being realized is being realized as a state of your brain. You're not disputing that, of course. Absolutely. I'm just quibbling about what mathematics is, what's your definition of mathematics. And I think it's interesting to take a step back and ask, what do mathematicians today generally define math as? Because if you go ask people on the street, like my mom, for example, they will often view math as just a bag of tricks for manipulating numbers or maybe as a sadistic form of torture invented by school teachers to ruin our self confidence. Whereas mathematicians, they talk about mathematical structures and studying their properties. I have a colleague here at MIT, for example, who has spent ten years of his life studying this mathematical structure called E eight. Never mind what it is exactly, but he has a poster of it. He's on the wall of his office, David Vogan. And if I went and suggested to him that that thing on his wall is just something he made up somehow that he invented, he would be very offended. He feels he discovered it, that it was out there, and he discovered that it was out there and mapped out its properties in exactly the same way that we discovered the planet Neptune rather than invented the planet Neptune right. And then went out to study its properties. Similarly, if you look at something more familiar than, e, eight, you just look at the counting numbers 12345, et cetera, the fact that two plus two is four and four plus two is six. Most mathematicians would argue that this structure, this mathematical structure that we call the numbers, is not the structure that we invented or invented properties of, but rather that we discovered the properties of in different cultures. This has been discovered multiple times independently. In each culture, people invented rather than discovered a different language. For describing it in English, you say 12345. In Swedish, the language I grew up with. You say F three. F three FM. But if you use the Swedish English dictionary and translate between the two, you see that these are two equivalent descriptions of exactly the same structure. And similarly, we invent symbols. What symbol you use to write the number two and three is actually different in the US. Versus in India today or in the Roman Empire. Right. But again, once you have your dictionaries there, you see that there's still only one structure that we discover, and then we invent language to just drive this home with one better example. Plato. Right. He was really fascinated about these very regular geometric shapes that now bear his name, Platonic Solid. And he discovered that there were five of them the Cube, the Octahedron, the Tetrahedron, the Icosahedron, and Dodahedron. He chose to invent the name Dodecahedron, and he could have called it the Schmodecahedron or something else. Right. That was his prerogative to invent name the language for describing them. But he was not free to just invent a 6th. Platonic Solid. Yeah. It's in that sense that Plato felt that those exist out there and are discovered rather than invented. Does that make sense? Yeah. No, I certainly agree with that. And I don't think you actually have to take a position on or you don't have to deny that mathematics is a landscape of possible discovery that exceeds our current understanding and may, in fact, always exceed it. What is the highest prime number above the current one we know? Well, clearly there's an answer to that question. You mean the lowest prime number above all the ones we know? Yes. Sorry. Yes. The next prime number, that number will be discovered rather than invented, and to invent it would be to invent it perfectly within the constraints of it being, in fact, the next prime number. So it's not wrong to call that pure discovery more or less analogous, as you said, to finding Neptune when you didn't know it existed or going to the continent of Africa. It's Africa is there, whether you've been there or not. Right. So I agree with that. But it still seems true to say that every instance of these operations being performed, every instance of mathematical insight, every prime number being thought about or located or having it, every one of those moments has been a moment of a brain doing its mathematical thing. Right. Or computer sometimes, because we have increasingly large number of proofs now done by machines. And discovery is also sometimes we're still talking about physical systems that can play this game of discovery in this mathematical space that we are talking about. This fundamental mystery is that why should mathematics be so useful for describing the physical world and for making predictions about blank spaces on the map? Exactly. Again, I'm kind of stumbling into this conversation because I'm not a mathematician and I'm not a mathematical philosopher. And so I'm sort of shooting from the hip here with you. But I just wanted to get a sense of whether this could remove some of the mystery if, in fact, you have certain physical processes in brains and computers and other intelligent systems, wherever they are, that can mirror this. Landscape of potential discovery. If that does sort of remove what otherwise seems a little spooky and platonic and represents a challenge for mapping abstract, idealized concepts onto a physical universe, yeah, that's a great question. And the answer you're going to get to that question will depend dramatically on who you ask. There are very smart and respectable people who come down all across the very broad spectrum of views on this. And in my book, I chose to not say this is how it is, but rather to explore the whole spectrum of opinion. So some people will say, if you ask them about this mystery, there is no mystery. Math is sometimes useful in nature. Sometimes it's not. That's it there's nothing to mysterious about it. Go away. And then if you go a little bit more towards the Platonic side, you'll find a lot of people saying things like, well, it seems like a lot of things in our universe are very accurately approximated by math, and that's great, but they're still not perfectly described by math. And then you have some very, very optimistic physicists like Einstein and a lot of string theorists who think that there actually is some math that we haven't maybe discovered yet that doesn't just approximate our physical world, but describes it exactly and is a perfect description of it. And then finally, the most extreme position on the other side, which I explore at length in the book, and that's the one that I'm personally gesting on, is that not only is our world described by mathematics, but it is mathematics in the sense that the two are really the same. So you talked about how in the physical world, we discover new entities, and then we invent language to describe. Them. Similarly, in mathematics, we discover new entities like new prime numbers, Platonic solids, and we invent names from maybe this mathematical reality and the physical reality are actually one and the same. And the reason why, when you first hear that, it sounds completely Looney tunes. Of course, it's equivalent to saying that the physical world doesn't just have some mathematical properties, but it has only mathematical properties. And that sounds really dumb if you look at your wife or your child or whatever. And this doesn't look like a bunch of numbers, but to me, as a physicist and when I look at them, of course, when I met Anaka, your wife for the first time, she has all these properties that don't strike me as a mathematical don't tell me you were noticing my wife's mathematical properties. But at the same time, as a physicist, I couldn't help notice that your wife was made entirely out of quirks and electrons. And what property does an electron actually have? Well, it has the property minus one, one, half one, and so on. And we've made up nerdy names for these properties. We physicists, such as electric charge, spin, and lepton number. But the electron doesn't care what language we invent to describe these numbers. The properties are just these numbers, just mathematical properties. And for Anika's quark, same deal. The only properties they have are also numbers, except different numbers from the electrons. So the only difference between a quark and an electron is what numbers they have as their properties. And if you take seriously that everything in both your life and in the world is made of these elementary particles that have only mathematical properties, then you can ask, what about the space itself, then, that these particles are in? What properties does space have? Well, it has the property three, for starters, the number of dimensions, which again is just a number Einstein discovered it also has some more properties called curvature and topology. But they're mathematical, too. And if both space itself and all the stuff in space have only mathematical properties, then it starts to sound a little bit less ridiculous, the idea that maybe everything is completely mathematical and we're actually part of this enormous mathematical object. I don't want to spend too much more time here because there's many other things I want to get into in your book. But this is just a fascinating area for me, and again, unfortunately, one that I feel especially unequipped to really have strong opinions on. Listening to what you said there, how is it different from saying that every description of reality we arrive at everything you can say about corks or space or anything? It's not, as you just said, just a matter of math and values. We could also say it's a matter of, in this case, English sentences or sentences spoken in human language. Could we be saying something as, in the end, trite, as saying that the question of why mathematics is so good at representing reality is a little like saying, why is language so good for speaking in or so good for capturing our beliefs? Is there kind of a disallowogy there that can save us the language we invent to describe mathematics, the symbols for the numbers and for plus and multiplication and so on, is, of course, a language too. So languages generally are useful? Yes, but there's a big difference. Human language is notoriously vague, and that's why the radio and the planet Neptune and the Higgs bows on were not discovered by people just sitting around, blah, blah, blah, in English, but with the judicious use of the language of mathematics. And all of these three objects were discovered because someone sat down with a pencil and paper and did a bunch of math and made a prediction that if you look over there at that time, you'll find Neptune, there a new planet. If you build this gadget, you'll be able to send radio waves. And if you build this large Hadron Collider, you'll find a new particle. There's real power in there. And I think before we leave this math topic, I just want to end on an emotional note that some people don't like this idea because they think it sounds counterintuitive. We already laid that to rest in the beginning of our conversation. Other people don't like it because they feel it sort of insults their ego. They don't want to be thinking they want to think of themselves as a mathematical entity or whatnot. But I actually think this is a very optimistic idea if it's true. Because if it's wrong, this idea that nature is completely mathematical, that means that this fantastic quest of physics, which has exploited the discovery of mathematical patterns to invent new technologies, right, that means that quest is going to end eventually, that physics is doomed. One day. We'll hit this roadblock when we've run out, found all the mathematical patterns they were to find, we won't ever get any more clues from nature, and we can't go any further with our understanding or technology. Whereas if it's all math, then there is no such roadblock. And the ability for life in the future to progress is really only limited by our own imagination. And to me, that's the optimistic view. Is there any connection between this claim that it's all math at bottom, with the claim that it's all information? I'm now getting echoes of John Wheeler, who talked about it from Bit, this concept that at some level the universe is a computation. Is there a connection between these two discussions or are they distinct? Yeah, there probably is. Probably is. John Wheeler is one of my great heroes. I had the great fortune to get to spend a lot of time with him when I was a postdoc in Princeton, and he really inspired me greatly. My hunch is that we will one day in the future come to understand more deeply what information really is in its role in physics, and also come to understand more deeply the role of computation and quantum computation in the universe. And they will one day come to realize maybe that mathematics, computation and information are just three different ways of looking at the same thing. We're not there yet, but that would be my guess. Are we there on the topic of entropy? There's a relationship between entropy in terms of energy and entropy in terms of information. Is there a unified concept there, or is there just kind of an analogy bridging those two discussions? That's fairly well understood, even though there are still some controversies that are brewing. But this is a very active topic of research. In fact, you mentioned that you and I met at a conference that I was involved in organizing. The previous conference I organized, you'll be pleased to know, was called The Physics of Information, where we brought together physicists, computer science people, neuroscientists, and others, and philosophers, and had a huge amount of fun discussing exactly these questions. So I think there's a lot more to come. And to me, these ideas, the most far out and speculative ideas I explore in the book about the role of math are not to be viewed as sort of the final answer to end all research, but rather simply as a great way to generate new, cool, practical applications of things. It's a roadmap to finding new problems, and you hinted at some of them here. I think there's a lot of fascinating relationships between information computation and math and the world that we haven't discovered yet and probably have a lot to do with how consciousness works, as well as my guess. And I think we have a lot of cool science to look forward to. Consciousness is really the center of my interest, but we may not get there because I now want to get into the multiverse, which is probably the strangest concept in science. Now, it's something that I thought I understood before picking up your book, and then I discovered there were three more flavors of multiverse than I realized existed. I want to talk about the multiverse, but first let's just start with the Universe, because this is a term around which there's some confusion. Let's just get our barons. What do we mean or what should we mean by the term universe? And I want to start with your level one multiverse. So if it's possible, give us a brief description of the concept of inflation that gets us there. Sure. So what is our universe? First of all, before we start talking about others, many people sort of fantastically assume that universe is a synonym for everything that exists, and if so, by definition, there can't be anything more. And talk, apparently universes would just be silly. But that is in fact not what people generally in cosmology mean when they say universe, when they say our universe. They mean the spherical region of space from which light has had time to reach us so far during the 13.8 billion years since our Big Bang. So that's, in other words, everything we could possibly see, even with unlimited funding for telescopes, if that's our universe, we can reasonably ask, well, is there more space beyond that from which light has not yet reached us but might reach us tomorrow or in a billion years? And if there is, if space goes on far beyond this, if it's infinite or just vastly larger than the space we can see, then all these other regions which are as big as our universe, if they also have galaxies and planets in them and so on. It would be kind of arrogant to not call them universes as well because the people who live there will call that their universe. And inflation is very linked to this because it's the best theory we have for what created our Big Bang and made our space the way it is, so vast and so expanding. And it actually predicts generically that space is not just really big, but vast and in most cases, actually infinite, which would mean, if inflation actually happened, that what we call our universe is really just a small part of a much bigger space. So, in other words, space then is much bigger than the part of space that we call our universe. And this is something actually, I don't think it's particularly weird once one gets the terminology straight, because it's just history all over again, right? We humans have been the masters of underestimation. We've had this over inflated ego where we want to put ourselves in the center and assume that everything that we know about is everything that exists. And we've been proven wrong again and again and again, discovering that everything we thought existed is just a small part of a much grander structure a planet, solar system, a galaxy, a galaxy cluster, our universe, and maybe also a hierarchy now of parallel universes. It would just continue the same trend. And for somebody to just object on some sort of philosophical grounds that things can't exist if they're outside our universe, if you can't see them, that just seems very arrogant, much like an ostrich with its head in the sand saying, if I can't see it, it can't exist. Right? But things begin to get very weird given this fact that inflation which, as you said, is the best current picture of how things got started, given that inflation predicts a universe of infinite extent, infinite space, infinite matter, and therefore you have a universe in which everything that is possible is in fact actual. Everything happens. Everything happens, in fact, an infinite number of times. Which is to say that you and I have this podcast an infinite number of times and an infinite number of different ways in one version, in some universe or some part of now we're still talking about the level one multiverse here. We're just talking about if you could travel far enough, fast enough away, you'd arrive on some planet disconcertingly like Earth, where you and I are having a virtually identical podcast but for a single change in term. Or I just decide to shave off my eyebrows in the middle of this conversation. Exactly. Or a Swiss talking French. This is well, stop me there. Is that, in fact, what you think? A majority of cosmologists believe so. This is a great question. Of course, it's a great illustration of if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, a lot has been going on. There has been another mass shooting, which is really the proximate cause of this podcast, but the reaction to it ties in with my release of my book With Majinois this week and some of the pushback against that. For instance, the minor demagogue Deem Obadala, who I collided with on CNN last week, got onto Twitter after this shooting, which took place in a community college in Oregon, and because of a rumor that the shooter had asked people their religion before killing them. He speculated that this was the result of new atheism and perhaps could be directly tied to me. But he made a great show of withholding judgment by way of casting aspersion. So he got on Twitter and he said, hey, friends, I know that many of you don't like Sam Harris, but seriously, don't unfairly link new atheism to this shooting. We don't know the facts yet. That is just a masterpiece of demagoguery. This is a point that I then felt I had to spell out on social media. So I wrote a short piece on Facebook and also on Twitter, and I'll just read it to you. I think it's important. People are so confused, or pretending to be confused about the nature of atheism, that the argument is always that it's just like religion. So Dawkins and I are often accused of being just as fundamentalist as our most fundamentalist adversaries on the religious side of the argument. But this is just a totally fatuous thing to say. There's no analogous doctrine on the side of atheism. So in any case, this is what I wrote no rational atheist or new atheist holds religion accountable for every idiotic or unethical thing religious people do. We blame a religion only for what its adherents do as a direct result of its doctrines, such as opposing gay marriage or killing apostates. Atheism has no doctrines. It does not demand that a person do anything or refrain from doing anything on the basis of his unbelief. Consequently, to know that someone is an atheist is to know almost nothing about him, apart from the fact that he does not accept the unwarranted claims of any religion. Atheism is simply the condition of not believing in Poseidon or Thor or any of the thousands of dead gods that lie in that graveyard we call mythology. To that extent, everyone knows exactly what it is to be an atheist. The atheist has simply added the God of Abraham to the list of the dead. If a belief in astrology were causing people to go berserk, to deny medical care to their children, or to murder unbelievers, many of us would speak and write about the dangerous stupidity of astrology. This would not be bigotry or intolerance on our part. It would be a plea for basic human sanity. And that is all that an atheist criticism of religious, tribalism and superstition ever is. If you understand this, you will recognize any attempt to blame atheism for specific crimes, great or small, for what it is a fresh act of religious demagoguery. So many people got back to me in response to that, saying, no, no, atheists believe all kinds of things. Atheism is full of doctrines. You believe things about evolution, you believe things about cosmology. Again, this is confusion. So my response was, yes, atheists harbor all sorts of beliefs ethical, political, scientific. But they don't get these beliefs from atheism. Rather, their atheism is itself the product of what they believe about science and about the merely human origin of all our books. No rational atheist is dogmatically opposed to believing in God. It's just that the evidence for his existence is terrible. It would be trivially easy, in fact, for an omniscient being to write or inspire a book that would remove all doubt about him. Neither the Bible nor the Quran is that sort of book. For instance, if the Old Testament contained a single chapter that resolved the deepest questions of 21st century science, rather than merely telling us how to sacrifice goats and when to stone our daughters to death, I too would be a believer. Now, many people pushed back against this. They thought that there could be no book that could testify to its authors omniscience. I think you're not thinking clearly enough about just how good a book could be written by an omniscient being and what sort of signs could be in there that would demonstrate that it could not possibly have been of human origin. In any case, nothing much turns on this. It's pedantic to fixate too much on the word omniscience. I'm just saying that every rational atheist could be convinced about the reality of God or about the truth of Christianity or any specific religion given sufficient evidence. If Jesus shows up on the White House lawn and starts wielding his magic powers and David Copperfield and all the other magicians can't figure out how he's doing it, and he's healing the sick and he's reading minds and he's flying without the aid of technology, and he's just doing the whole superhero dance for us. Every scientist would be convinced that something supernatural, or at the very least, totally unique in human history was going on, and we would just wait to be told by this being what the hell? That something. Is there's a sufficient demonstration that could make believers of all of us skeptics? And so the reality is that atheism is a simply a position of not being convinced by the unjustified and in certain cases unjustifiable claims of religious people. And that is not a situation of intellectual parity. As Carl Sagan famously said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The extraordinary claims are not on the side of atheism. They're on the side of those who believe that their books were written by the creator of the universe. They're on the side of people who believe that their favorite first century rabbi rose from the dead and still exists and can read the minds of everyone alive and will be coming back to judge the living and the dead. These are positive claims about the way the world is, and they are claims that trespass on science across the board. So there is no doctrine within atheism at all, really, but a failure to be convinced. Now, it's true that certain atheists can express this failure and express their views about the stupidity of those who are convinced in a way that is hostile and offensive and that people find annoying. That's true. But there is no doctrine within atheism that can lead to behavior of any kind. Religious people have been waiting for this. In particular, Muslim apologists have been waiting for this. They've been waiting for an event that can be tied to atheism. We saw this with the Chapel Hill shootings earlier this year. Again, this joker, Dean Obadala, blamed me and Dawkins for those shootings. There was no evidence at all that this was even a hate crime. In fact, this was just an ordinary triple murder, if that doesn't sound like a total oxymoron, but this guy grew unhinged over a neighbor dispute and the fact that he was an atheist, there's no sign that that was the cause of his behavior. And again, this is a point that was in the piece I wrote. I have to emphasize it again. As critical as I am of religion, and as much as I want to spell out the link between belief and dangerous behavior, the link between a belief in jihad and martyrdom and the kinds of violence we see in the Muslim world, for instance, I would never dream of holding religion responsible for every bad thing that religious people do. Most people on earth are religious and have always been. Virtually everything, good or bad, has been done by somebody who believes in God. So every liquor store that has ever been robbed has very likely been robbed by a person of faith. Statistically speaking, there has been nobody else to do the job. Now, if a Muslim robs a liquor store and steals a pound of bacon and kills the cashier, I would not even be slightly tempted to blame Islam for that behavior. It's absolutely clear that there are Muslims of whatever degree of religious conviction who can do heinous things that have absolutely nothing to do with their religious beliefs. That should be obvious, but it is not obvious to the other side, who are just waiting to find an atheist doing something heinous so that they can pin it on atheism, as though there's an analogous problem of specific doctrines within atheism producing bad behavior. If we had a text, if we had a text that we deemed sacred, that we deemed infallible, and it said things like butcher them in their schools, then there'd be a case. And if every time there was a mass shooting by an atheist in the school, we denied the link between this doctrine and the behavior, all the while reaffirming the infallibility of the text in which that line appeared, that would be an analogous situation to what you have in the Muslim world. So find me that group of atheists who are talking about some infallible text that they will defend, even when it obviously produces murder in mayhem. It doesn't exist. It will never exist. It's a totally false analogy. But there has been this mass shooting, and in response to it, many readers and listeners have asked me if it has caused me to reconsider my views about guns. And this alerts me to the fact that many of you don't necessarily understand what my views about guns are. I certainly don't align with any predictable political poll on this issue. As I think most of you know, I wrote an article after the Newtown massacre entitled The Riddle of the Gun, and I'm just going to read it in this podcast and in perhaps a few places elaborate on its points. But it was, in fact, one of the most controversial articles I ever wrote. Because most of the people who like what I'm up to, most of the people who are skeptical of religion and interested in science and interested in the nature of human consciousness and in things like meditation and like to see this convergence of philosophy and science and issues that matter in the real world. Most of you tend to not be people who keep arsenals in your homes on the odd chance that you may have to defend yourself against a home invasion. You're not Second Amendment gun fanciers, for the most part. And so when I wrote this article, which seemed, at least on balance, to be pro gun, many of you were just floored. And I heard a lot of despair from otherwise very devoted readers. But many of you, in fact, did not understand my basic position. So I'm going to read this essay again, but I want to inoculate you against these misunderstandings by putting a few things in view at the outset. The first thing you need to understand is that my recommendations with respect to gun control are more aggressive, more stringent, more intrusive than any you have heard from any liberal who is bemoaning the status quo in the United States. So it is true to say that there is no politician who has articulated a position on gun control more anti gun than mine. And my position is a non starter. I think getting a gun should be genuinely difficult. I think it should be like getting a pilot's license. You shouldn't have to be trained, dozens of hours of training should be required to legally own a gun. And I think that background checks and all the rest should be as intrusive as possible at this point. There is no one articulating that position. And those of you who are sort of distant from this debate and think that, well, we should just ban guns are not in contact with just how impossible that project is politically and practically in the United States. In the United States, we have 300 million guns on the ground and we have at least a million people, probably more, for whom gun ownership is the most important variable in their lives. That people who are telling us they would fight a civil war to defend their right to own all the guns they want and all the guns they currently have. And needless to say, these people are quite well armed. So if you can imagine trying to get guns back from these people, you know, the people who are the rabid core of the NRA, no one is proposing that there's no buyback program that's going to get guns out of these people's hands. So unless you have some magical method of getting hundreds of millions of guns off the street, whatever remedy you suggest has to be applied in a condition where there is already a surfeit of guns. There are guns everywhere. And that is a different scenario than what you have in a country, let's say like the UK, where there are just not that many guns in circulation. Then there's a condition where banning gun ownership may, in fact be viable. And I am on two sides of the ethics of that issue. There are a few things I think, and you'll hear me talk about them, that run counter to a notion of a ban, even in a condition where we could really start fresh and there are no guns yet in existence. But that takes me to my second point, which is everything I say that's apparently in defense of a person's right to own a gun goes completely out the window once we have a truly equivalent but nonlethal alternative to a gun. So the moment the Taser or some other company devises a weapon that doesn't kill people but stops them in their tracks, and it has the range and reusability and all of the defensive characteristics of a gun and hopefully better, then I think the argument for owning guns totally evaporates. I'm not a Second Amendment person. The Constitution is only important to me insofar as it secures sane policy in every present generation. And if things change, if technology changes, if the world changes. The Constitution has to change. So the moment we have a non lethal alternative to guns, everything I say in defense of firearms is canceled. But there is no real alternative at the moment. And you just have to see video of cops using their Tasers on people and see the vagaries of those effects to know that the current generation of Tasers don't offer a substitute for a gun. And finally, though, I do in this essay, express open mindedness about the possibility of putting armed security guards in schools and on college campuses and in any place that we would be worried about a mass shooting, and I'm actually not. If we had truly well trained security guards, I'd be happy to have them more in evidence in this world for reasons that will become obvious. But it's obvious that that is not a fundamental solution to the mass shooting problem. The mass shooting problem may be a problem that can't totally be solved. Which is to say that if a person is intent upon killing a bunch of innocent people, there will always be a place a restaurant, a movie theater, a school, a shopping mall that is sufficiently insecure so as to make that a very easy thing to do. And the only real remedy there, which I do in fact think would change the lethality of these episodes, would be if people internalized a new ethic and sense of responsibility around keeping society safe from this kind of violence. And the analogy I would draw, and I draw this at the end of this essay, although I don't make much of it, is to what you now know would happen in an airplane at 30,000ft if someone pulled out a knife or a gun or just started trying to open the cabin door. This sort of thing has happened since September 11, 2001, and we now know what happens, right? And we knew it a week after September 11, and no one had to talk about it. Something has changed worldwide, I think, very likely in the minds of billions of people. And it is a sense of what you have to do as a bystander in the enclosed space of an airplane at 30,000ft when someone starts misbehaving and trying to essentially bring the plane down. There is nowhere to run on a plane. And everyone understands that whether you're trained or not, whether you have a weapon or not, you have to attack the attacker. You have to go on offense, and you have to go on offense hard and immediately, and there's nothing to talk about. Imagine someone standing up on a plane now and saying, everyone just stay in your seats. You're all going to be fine. I'm just going to take control of this plane, right? That is a total non starter. Now, September 11 cured us of the illusion that safety could possibly reside in listening to this person's demands. Doesn't matter who you are, you jump on this guy and you start trying to claw his eyes out. Someone hits him low, someone hits him highs. Someone grabs a weapon hand. I mean, this is, this has to happen and it has to happen immediately. Now I think this sense of just and it is really like an animal sense. It was like a firmware upgrade of our limbic system. But it is local to an airplane in flight. I don't think it should be. I think if someone comes into your classroom and produces a weapon and says, everyone get against the wall. You are in an airplane at 30,000ft. If someone in particular has already shot someone, just imagine you've already heard shots ring out in the hallway, right? And now this person comes through the door of your classroom. There is nothing to talk about. And if you can run away, great, run away. But if you can't run away, everyone has to swarm this person. The reality is that no matter who you are, no matter what gun you're carrying, if five people dive on you and tackle you, your plan will be sufficiently disrupted. A gun is not magically destructive. A gun is a piece of metal. And if the barrel is pointed in some innocuous direction, it is not dangerous to anyone. So you grab the shooter's arm, you grab the gun. It's true someone is very likely going to get injured or killed doing this. And any individual hero who tries to do it is also very likely going to die. But if everyone does it simultaneously, as they would on a plane, you're in a very different situation. The shooter is in a very different situation. I don't care if he's Delta Force or a Navy Seal, if ten people just dive on him, he's going down and there's no way he's going to be able to continue to harm people. But what you have in these situations is some version of compliance where a person with a gun can hurt people into some situation where he continues to have distance from them and just can shoot away and people are compliant or people come up to him serially. One person tries to be a hero, gets shot. Another person tries to be a hero, gets shot. And then you run out of heroes or you have people hiding under desks and just getting shot. We need a new understanding of how to behave in these situations. And luckily these are incredibly rare situations. This is not the preponderance of gun violence, as you're going to hear in this essay, has nothing to do with mass shootings in terms of the actual casualties. They are a rounding error in the deluge of gun related homicides in the United States. As horrible as they are, they are not the problem that we have to confront when we're talking about the problem of gun violence. That's a long winded way of saying, I think there is a response that would make a difference. It's a response that we can all take some responsibility for. It's something that effortlessly got into our heads after September 11 with a local case of an airplane. And I think this is a totally trainable thing. There are people who run drills in schools for active shooter drills, and you can see video of this online. And far from being terrifying and oppressive to the students, they look incredibly fun, right? They get to tackle this person who comes through the door, and it's probably the most fun they have in the entire year in school. In any case, training for this kind of thing is doable it's wise. I'm sure it's fun. It's analogous to the sorts of training I've done in martial arts, and people should do it. But short of training, we should just understand that there are situations where you have to react en masse instantly and that that really would change things. And I have a little more of my thinking on violent conflict on my blog, and the first article to which the Riddle of the Gun was a follow up was The Truth About Violence. There's been a lot of response to that article, and I have not heard anything from law enforcement or people in the military or the people I train with, SWAT operators and martial artists. I haven't heard pushback on the details there in any important sense. Insofar as I do, I will correct the record. But in any case, I still believe that is a valid resource for how you're thinking, how you should be thinking about potentially lethal encounters with people. And finally, I just want to say, as I say at the end of this podcast, that I acknowledge that this is not everyone's cup of tea. There are people who think that merely thinking about this stuff is perverse. We are incredibly lucky to live, for the most part, in safe societies. In fact, we live in the safest societies that have ever existed in human history. Most of us, many of us, I should say, certainly most of the people, have the leisure to listen to a podcast like this. And because we live in a condition where becoming a victim of potentially lethal violence is so unlikely, it seems morbid and in some way intellectually disreputable. To even think about this stuff, to think about human violence and to train in anticipation of ever having to face it, that's crazy. Many of you think that I hear from people who don't lock their doors at night, and they think that locking their doors would impose upon them and their children a kind of concession to paranoia that would be psychologically and spiritually unhealthy. Well, if you're one of these people that I think it may be hard for you to get on board with this consideration, I can only say that the likelihood of encountering significant violence in your life is not as remote as you might believe. But it is still remote enough that you are likely to avoid it. You're unlikely to be raped, you're unlikely to be assaulted. You're unlikely to be murdered. That's a very good thing. But you're also very likely to meet someone who has encountered violence of this sort. This is a little bit like a car crash. I've never been in a significant car crash, right? But I don't drive with a sense that car crashes don't happen to people like me. And here we are in car crash territory. We're not in plane crash territory when talking about the statistics of violence, even in the safest neighborhoods in our societies. But I will concede that many of you think I've just gone off my rocker every time I write or speak about martial arts or guns or the lethal use of force or studying how violence unfolds between people. And you can just wait for the next podcast. It will not be on this topic. But for those of you who are interested in what I think about guns and why yet another mass shooting doesn't get me to say, oh, yes, we have to ban guns in the US. As if that were possible. Listen to this essay with an open mind and realize that it might blow you around a little bit in how you feel about what I'm saying, because I do argue both sides of this. If you're a Second Amendment person, you're going to hate half of what I say. And if you're morbidly afraid of guns, you're also going to hate what I say. My position is slightly hard to characterize here, but in any case, my views have not changed since I wrote this. But there may be some points to clarify along the way. And now I give you the riddle of the gun. The riddle of the gun fantasies and zealots can be found on both sides of the debate over guns in America. On the one hand, many gun rights activists reject even the most sensible restrictions on the sale of weapons to the public. On the other, proponents of stricter gun laws often seem unable to understand why a good person would ever want ready access to a loaded firearm. Between these two extremes, we must find grounds for a rational discussion about the problem of gun violence. Unlike most Americans, I stand on both sides of this debate. I understand the apprehension that many people feel toward gun culture, and I share their outrage over the political influence of the National Rifle Association. How is it that we live in a society in which one of the most compelling interests is gun ownership? Where is the science lobby, the safe food lobby? Where's the get the Chinese lead paint out of our kids'toys lobby? When viewed from any other civilized society on Earth, the primacy of guns in American life seems to be a symptom of collective psychosis. Most of my friends do not own guns, and never will. When asked to consider the possibility of keeping firearms for protection, they worry that the mere presence of them in their homes would put them in, their families, in danger. Can't a gun go off by accident? Wouldn't it be more likely to be used against them in an altercation with a criminal? I'm surrounded by otherwise intelligent people who imagine that the ability to dial 911 is all the protection against violence a sane person ever needs. But unlike my friends, I own several guns and train with them regularly. Every month or two, I spend a full day shooting with a highly qualified instructor. This is an expensive and time consuming habit, but I view it as part of my responsibility as a gun owner. It's true that my work as a writer has added to my security concern somewhat, but my involvement with guns goes back decades. I've always wanted to be able to protect myself and my family, and I've never had any illusions about how quickly the police can respond when called. I've expressed my views on self defense elsewhere. That's in a blog post entitled The Truth About Violence. Suffice it to say, if a person enters your home for the purpose of harming you, you cannot reasonably expect the police to arrive in time to stop him. This is not a fault of the police. It's a problem of physics. Like most gun owners, I understand the ethical importance of guns and cannot honestly wish for a world without them. I suspect that sentiment will shock many readers. Wouldn't any decent person wish for a world without guns? In my view, only someone who doesn't understand violence could wish for such a world. A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want. It is a world in which a man with a knife can rape and murder a woman in the presence of a dozen witnesses, and none will find the courage to intervene. There have been cases of prison guards who generally do not carry guns, helplessly standing by as one of their own was stabbed to death by a lone prisoner armed with an improvised blade. The hesitation of bystanders in these situations makes perfect sense, and diffusion of responsibility has little to do with it. The fantasies of many martial artists aside, to go unarmed against a person with a knife is to put oneself in very real peril, regardless of one's training. The same can be said of attacks involving multiple assailants. A world without guns is a world in which no man, not even a member of Seal Team Six, can reasonably expect to prevail over more than one determined attacker at a time. A world without guns, therefore, is one in which the advantages of youth, size, strength, aggression and sheer numbers are almost always decisive. Who could be nostalgic for such a world? Of course, owning a gun is not a responsibility that. Everyone should assume most guns kept in the home will never be used for self defense. They are, in fact, more likely to be used by an unstable person to threaten family members, or to commit suicide. However, it seems to me that there is nothing irrational about judging oneself to be psychologically stable and fully committed to the safe handling and ethical use of firearms. If indeed one is carrying a gun in public, however entails even greater responsibility than keeping one at home, and in most states, the laws reflect this. Like many gun control advocates, I have serious concerns about letting ordinary citizens walk around armed. Ordinary altercations can become needlessly deadly in the presence of a weapon. A scuffle that exposes a gun in a person's waistband, for instance, can quickly become a fight to the death, where the first person to get his hands on the weapon may feel justified in using it in, quote, self defense. Most people seem unaware that knives present a similar liability. According to Gallup, 16% of American men carry knives for personal protection. I'm quite sure that most of those men have not thought through the legal, ethical, and game theoretical implications of drawing a blade in a moment of conflict. It is true that brandishing a weapon, whether a gun or a knife, sometimes preempts further violence. But emotions being what they are, it often doesn't, and the owner of the weapon can find himself resorting to deadly force in a circumstance that would not otherwise have called for it. Some facts about Guns 55 million kids went to school on the day that 20 were massacred at Sandy Hook elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Even in the United States, therefore, the chances of a child's dying in a school shooting are remote. As my friend Stephen Pinker demonstrates in his monumental study of human violence, the better Angels of Our nature, our perception of danger is easily distorted by rare events. Is gun violence increasing in the United States? No, but it certainly seems to be when one recalls recent atrocities in Newtown and Aurora. In fact, the overall rate of violent crime has fallen by 22% in the past decade and 18% in the past five years. As a side note, I think there's been an uptick in the last twelve months or so, but the general trend has been of a massive reduction in all violent crime in the last 20 years. We still have more guns and more gun violence than any other developed country. But the correlation between guns and violence in the United States is far from straightforward. 30% of urban households have at least one firearm. This figure increases to 42% in the suburbs and 60% in the countryside. As one moves away from cities, therefore, the rate of gun ownership doubles. And yet, gun violence is primarily a problem in cities. It is the people of Detroit, Oakland, Memphis, Little Rock, and Stockton who are at the greatest risk of being killed by guns. In the weeks since the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary, advocates of stricter gun control have called for a new federal ban on, quote, assault weapons and for reductions in the number of concealed carry permits issued to private citizens. But the murder rate has fallen precipitously since the federal ban on assault weapons expired in 2004, and this was also a period in which millions of Americans began to carry their guns in public. Many proponents of gun control have observed that the AR 15, the gun that Adam Lanza used to murder 20 children in Newtown, is now the most popular rifle in America. But only 3% of murders in the US. Are committed with rifles of any type. 70 mass shootings have occurred in the US. Since 1982, leaving 543 dead. I don't have the most recent number here, but obviously that has increased a little bit. These crimes were horrific, but 564,452 other homicides took place in the US. During that same period. Mass shootings scarcely represent 0.1% of all murders. When talking about the problem of guns in our society, it is easy to lose sight of the worst violence and to become fixated on symbols of violence. Of course, it is important to think about the problem of gun violence in the context of other risks. For instance, it is estimated that 100,000 Americans die each year because doctors and nurses fail to wash their hands properly measured in bodies. Therefore, the problem of hand washing in hospitals is worse than the problem of guns, even if we include accidents and suicides. But not all deaths are equivalent. A narrow focus on mortality rates does not always do justice to the reality of human suffering. Mass shootings are a marginal concern, even relative to other forms of gun violence, but they cause an unusual degree of terror and grief, particularly when children are targeted. Given the psychological and social costs of certain low frequency events, it does not seem irrational to allocate disproportionate resources to prevent them. We should also remember that mass killings do not depend on guns. Much has been made in the press about the fact that on the very day 20 children were murdered in Newtown, a man with a knife attempted a similar crime at an elementary school in China. At the Atlantic, James Fallows wrote 22 children injured versus a current count of 20 little children and eight other people shot dead. That's the difference between a knife and a gun. Guns don't attack children. Psychopaths and sadists do. But guns uniquely allow a psychopath to wreak death and devastation on such a large scale so quickly and easily. America is the only country in which this happens again and again and again. You can look it up, but this is more tendencies than it might sound. There has been an epidemic of knife attacks on school children in China in the past two years, as Fallows certainly knows. He is, after all, an expert on China in some instances. Several children were murdered in March 2010, eight were killed and five injured in a single incident. This is as bad as many mass shootings in the US. I'm not denying that guns are more efficient for killing people than knives are, but the truth is that knives are often deadly enough, and the only reliable way for one person to stop a man with a knife is to shoot him. As a side note, there I should emphasize the words reliable and one the only reliable way for one person to stop a man with a knife is to shoot him. Now, of course, if you have a weapon that gives you a certain range, a long stick or a chair that is helpful against a person with a knife, and multiple people attacking a person with a knife, armed or not, can certainly stop him. But if you're talking about one person in the presence of a knife wielding attacker, a gun is certainly your best option, provided you're not already being stabbed. Back to the test. It is reasonable to wish that only a word to a speech. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find and our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, it is Saturday, November 14, a day after Paris, and as you all know, at least 129 people were murdered last night by jihadists, probably affiliated with ISIS. ISIS has claimed credit for it and many hundreds of people were injured, so the death toll will almost certainly rise by the time you've heard this. I hope to get this podcast out tomorrow, Sunday, but anyway, that's where things stand at the moment. And my Twitter feed is just inundated with people wondering what I have to say about this event, and I have nothing new to say. This is a situation I've been in now many times. I sit down to write or in some other way respond to recent events, and I find that I've said this stuff 100 times over. You just have to change the dates and a few of the nouns in a blog post or a lecture, and you find what you've said is totally appropriate to the moment. Now, that's depressing because it means we are making the same mistakes over and over again, and the stakes are just getting incrementally higher. So rather than struggle to write something new, I'm going to read an older essay entitled Sleepwalking Toward Armagettan. And I wrote this just a year ago on September 10, 2014, after the murder of journalist James Foley by Jihadi John, who was killed yesterday, I believe, in a drone strike or was reported to have been killed. So I will read that and perhaps offer an aside or two on recent events. I'll be speaking with Douglas Murray on Monday. I'm not sure when I'll publish that podcast. Probably might take a week to get that out, but our conversation of this week was preempted by a cold of mine, which I'm just getting over, so my voice is even less euphonious than it normally is. Sorry for that. I offer this essay because it really is what I'm thinking now. But one thing to keep in mind, as I've been saying for 14 years, this is the big story of our time, and it is an incredibly boring one. Let the boredom of this just sink into your bones. Realize that for the rest of your life, you're going to be reading and hearing about and otherwise witnessing, hopefully not firsthand, the lunacy and attendant atrocities of jihadists. Please pay attention to the recurrent shrieks of Allahu Akbar. This is the cat call from the Middle Ages or from Middle Earth that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. So this fight against jihadism and Islamism generally, this is a generational fight. This is something we are doing for our children ultimately and our children's children. And we have a war of ideas that we have to wage and win, and unfortunately, we have to wage it and win it with ourselves first and again, this requires an admission that there is such a war of ideas to be waged in one, which is the purpose of my most recent book with Majid Nawaz. But the balance has to swing. Denying this problem, denying the problem of Islamism, denying that Islam, the religion, has a unique problem at this moment in history that has to become as unseemly and as reputationally costly as any dangerous expression of bigotry now is. It certainly has to be more costly than an honest discussion of the problem is people are referring to these events in Paris as a wake up call. Who on earth at this moment needs a wake up call? If you didn't wake up on September 12, 2001, there may be no hope for you. What will it take to get your attention? There are no surprises anymore. We have to relinquish our capacity for surprise here. There is nothing so destructive that these people won't attempt it. The only thing that has prevented them from killing millions of people is a lack of technology. And we have to ensure that they never get it. But the idea that our enemies are sufficiently like ourselves and that they won't set this world on fire is pure delusion. Most of you aren't even comfortable with the word enemy. To refer to jihadists as our enemies, somehow that is provocative. We have grown so efficient as a civilization as to imagine that we have no enemies. Or if we do, they're only of our own making. And when people on the right call them barbarians, well, then that is just demagoguery. Those are just our own demons springing into view. You have to get some perspective here. It is not mere wartime propaganda that we will one day look back on with embarrassment. To call ISIS a death cult, to call them barbarians, to call them savages, to use dehumanizing language. They are scarcely human in their aspirations. The world they want to build entails the destruction of everything we value and our right to value. And by we, I mean civilized humanity, including all the Muslims who are just as horrified by the Islamist and jihadist project as I am. We have a project that's universal, that transcends culture, that unites everyone who loves art and science and reason generally, who wants to cure disease, who wants to raise each new generation to be more educated than the last. And this common project is under assault. So if you can't get your head straight about that. You think there might be two sides to this war, that this is blowback, that we're somehow culpable for it. You have not understood what these people are about, and they have been telling you what they're about ceaselessly. So the problem is with you watch some of their videos if you can stomach it, and if you can't stomach it, that should tell you something. And unfortunately, most of us, we have to keep convincing ourselves that evil exists, that not all people want the same things, and that some people are wrong in how they want to live and in what sort of world they want to build. And if we can't convince ourselves of this once and for all, well, then we'll have to wait to be convinced by further acts of savagery of the sort that we just saw in Paris. Why wait? Why not get your head straight now? Again, the situation I most fear is that more and more, with liberals failing to see the dynamics of this problem, there will come a time where the only people who have the moral conviction to oppose this death cult behavior will be nearly as bad as the Islamists themselves. Now, I'm speaking of right wing Christian fascists of some sort. You have to ask yourself, if there was an election in Paris tomorrow, who would you vote for? Right? And if this happens ten more times in Paris, who will the French vote for? This mass psychological experiment is being run in every country in Europe and no doubt will be run again in the US. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one in this episode. I'll be speaking with Douglas Murray. Douglas is a bestselling author and award winning journalist in the UK. He's the associate editor of The Spectator magazine and also associate director of the Henry Jackson Society, which is a think tank in London. And he writes regularly for the Spectator standpoint the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Wall Street Journal in Europe. And he appears regularly on the BBC and other media outlets. And he has spoken in the British and Dutch and Danish and European Parliaments and at the White House. Douglas is, as you will hear, a very incisive critic of political correctness and someone who is unusually engaged and extraordinarily articulate on the problem of Islamism and our habit of capitulating to it. So it's a great pleasure to talk to Douglas, I should say, to give you some context that we spoke about a week ago, right after the attacks in Paris, and we speak about the Syrian refugees in Europe, and things have moved on a little bit in the US in the last five days or so. So there's been an active debate on Syrian refugees coming to the US. I should point out that that Douglas and I were speaking about the European context, which is different from the US. From a security point of view that, as you'll hear, the vetting process for refugees in Europe is nearly nonexistent in the US. That does not seem to be the case. And this is an important difference. As you'll hear, I think our ability to vet these people, which is to say, understand who is coming into the country and what their ideological commitments are, is the most important thing to consider. Since Douglas and I spoke, there have been many strange and silly declarations, both on the right and the left, relating to this crisis. And what's especially depressing is that the demagoguery has been coming from both sides. So we've had Donald Trump and Ben Carson and Ted Cruz say things like, I think Trump said there should be a registry for all Muslims and we should start closing mosques. We shouldn't let any of the Syrian refugees in. Cruz said we should let in only Christians. It's into the vacuum left by liberals that reasonable security concerns find this kind of expression because the reasonable concerns are being denied at every turn. For instance, the President has said that no refugees have ever become terrorists, but that's simply untrue. There are Somali refugees living in Minnesota who have gone to fight and wage jihad for Al Shabaab. So it is just factually false, morally blind and politically stupid to treat this as a nonissue. And every time the President opens his mouth on this topic without describing the problem accurately, avoiding at all costs the noun Islam, never uttering the words Islamic terrorism or political Islam or Islamism or even jihadism, the feeling of being lied to just becomes more and more galling. The Republicans are absolutely right to be outraged by this and they're also completely crazy. So this is a terrible situation to be in politically. President Obama has offered pure sanctimony on this topic. He talks about American values, and we're better than that. And disparaging anyone who is concerned about security risks associated with these refugees as lacking in compassion and is failing to live up to American values. But step back here. Take the personalities of the people on the right out of the equation. Is it crazy to express, as Ted Cruz did, a preference for Christians over Muslims in this process? Of course not. What percentage of Christians will be jihadists or want to live under Sharia law? Zero. And this is a massive in fact, it is the only concern when talking about security if we know that some percentage of Muslims will be jihadists inevitably if we know we cannot be perfect in our filtering if we know that a larger percentage will, if not be jihadists, will be committed to resisting assimilation into our society, then to know that a given refugee or family of refugees is Christian is a wealth of information and quite positive information in this context. So it is not mere bigotry or mere xenophobia to express that preference. I hope you understand I'm expressing no sympathy at all with Ted Cruz's politics or with Ted Cruz, but it is totally unhelpful to treat him, though he actually is a religious maniac, like a bigot on this point. This is a quite reasonable concern to voice. And the fact that we have a president who will not even name the problem is giving the right enormous energy that we really don't want them to have here. So while we don't talk about the US context directly with respect to the refugee crisis, you'll hear Douglas and I try to articulate a middle position here, which is understanding the real world facts related to the migrant crisis. Acknowledging that the immediate problem of global jihad is not a matter of migration. It's a matter of already radicalized citizens in all of these societies. In any case, Douglas is one of the best people on this topic. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. And now I give you Douglas Murray. Douglas. Welcome to the waking up podcast. It's great to be with you, Sam. Well, thank you for doing this. As you know, we were supposed to speak last week. I canceled on you twice one for a recording malfunction and one for a cold which still lingers. But in the meantime, the jihadists of the world have produced further evidence, perhaps the best in anyone's memory, that we cannot live alongside them. And so they've given us even more to talk about. But before we dive into that and get into all the areas of our shared interests, I just want to spend a few minutes to talk about your background, just for people who don't know who you are in my audience, when somebody asks you what you do, how do you answer that question? I use the all embracing term writer, which is what I do. I've been a writer ever since I've been an adult and a bit before I started off by writing about literature, which is my first love. And now, in more recent years, for the last 15 years anyway, have ended up writing, by necessity, I think, rather than desire, about politics, about international affairs, particularly about terrorism, particularly about security. It isn't because I'm a political nut in particular. I think it's because I think that you have to be involved in politics if you care about the culture. And I care about the culture, and I'm very concerned and have all sorts of views on it, which I write about for plethora of publications and books and so on. And I am also a broadcaster. I suppose I do a lot in the UK, in particular where I'm from, as I'm sure your listeners can tell from my accent. And yes, and I like to think I write about a very broad range of subjects, I do, but I suppose in recent years, I've ended up being caught more and more writing about the big issue of our time. I wish it would go away, I wish it were possible for me to go back to writing about literature and about music and other things I love, but there we are. Needless to say, I share your feeling of boredom on this account. I view every moment spent in conversations of the sort that we're now going to have as really an extraordinary opportunity cost and it's just lacerating to contemplate all the work that is not getting done and all the amusement not being had because of this distraction from the work of civilization. But so what percentage of your time would you say you spend on the issue of Islamism and its problems? Well, I try with my editors at various publications to have a deal that I write an article about something I love for every article I write about something I hate. The 50 50 quota never works out these days quite that much. But I did manage to write a piece just before Friday that came out in one of the magazines I met Spectator magazine here in the UK, which is our oldest weekly magazine. I managed to write a piece on one of my favorite artists, 20th century artist Rex Whistler, who was killed in Normandy in 1944 on his first day of action, but was a wonderful artist. I managed to write about that and I was I was actually focusing on a review of the new two volumes of T. S. Eliot's complete work in a new critical edition, which I was really hoping to get round to this week. But once again, I'm afraid I've spent time, all my time on these issues, and I suppose I can't moan about it too much. One could always stop, but my hope has always been that there would be lots more people who would say the things you say, say some of the things I say, and that they would come along in greater and greater numbers, and that basically I could retire. Alas, unless they don't come along in sufficient numbers. As I say, it's still my hope. Maybe by the time I'm 40 I'm 36 at the moment, maybe by the time I'm 40 I can retire from the scene. I doubt it. Yeah, well, I can't quite say that I wish for it because for the listeners who are not familiar with you, they should know that watching you debate on these issues, probably on any issue, but I think I've only caught your debates on this topic, is just a thing of beauty. And happily, YouTube is now full of examples of you laying waste to your opponents. So don't retire until some competent disciple can take your mantle. Find me some. Okay? Well, we seem to be pulled to the topic by tractor beam here. Obviously, we'll talk about Paris. We're now talking on Monday, the Monday after the Friday where over 130, I think now people were murdered in Paris by jihadists. I want to get into the larger footprint of our concerns here, which is it's really free speech and the failures of liberalism to protect it and the problem of Islamism and Western masochism in response to it. And also just the related problem of identity politics and imaginary grievances that millions of people find captivating. So there's much more than just AK 47s going off in polite society. But let's get into that. I think I always burn a lot of fuel in talking about this, knowing who my audience is, trying to convince someone that there really is a problem here. Now that probably is not so necessary in the immediate aftermath of Paris, but people seem to think that people like ourselves are exaggerating the nature of this problem. And so I just give that to you as a doorway into this topic and we just love to hear what you have to say. There are people who exaggerate the problem and there are many people who underestimate it, as you say. In the wake of atrocity like that a couple of days ago, it's unlikely many people are going to underestimate it, but there still are some who do. I would say that one of the most interesting ways of looking about this is one that the American scholar of Islam, Daniel Pipes, says quite often, which is that the striking thing in this whole area is that it is a one way street. Pretty much very few people say, I used to be worried about Islamic extremism, but I'm not anymore. More people say more every day, many more every year. I'm getting worried about this. And that is something that, in a way, is a signal for hope. It means that people are paying attention to what is happening in the world. They're starting to join the dots. Late, sure, but they're starting to join the dots and they are concerned about it. And as I say, I agree with that. I think it is a one way street. I've never heard anyone who said, I used to worry about the persecution of religious minorities within Islam, but I don't anymore. Nobody says, it used to be worse Islamic extremism 20 years ago and so on. Right. All of these things, in a way, are very bloody parts of a very bloody learning curve. And I suppose for those of us who care about ideas and about writing and thinking and speaking and the idea of free inquiry and of debate, I suppose one of the most saddening things about all this is simply that it seems to require events always, rather than reason, to propel most people into realizing there's a problem. And that is very disconcerting. It's very sad because obviously we would wish that most people listened to reasonable argument, listened to reasonable summaries of the problem and acted and thought accordingly. But that doesn't seem to be the case. And recent events will, I think, just bear that out further. Yeah. Because people have a hard time taking our enemies at their word. Nothing speech doesn't count, even when the speech entails a crystal clear discussion of what they plan to do, want to do, aspire to do, if only they had the power to do it, and the incremental evidence ever accruing that they are accomplishing many of these aims. I find that secular people tend to doubt that anyone really believes what they say they believe. Absolutely. They can't imagine anyone really believes in paradise. And I've told listeners this many times, but I have literally met anthropologists who have told me that no one believes in paradise and no one is ever motivated by the content of their religious doctrines. It's always some other reason, and you're in the presence of someone like that. And this was at an academic meeting where we were debating these issues. And this is the kind of thing this person said in public. I've named this person before. I don't know why I'm being sheepish about it now. It's scott a tran. Scott a tran is is an anthropologist who is incredibly influential. He's he gets meetings with various governments, and he has inserted himself very much into the dialogue about terrorism and Islam and all the rest. But he is someone who told me in private, even both in public and in private, when I said, listen, just level with me. We're standing in the men's room at the Salk Institute, and he said he looked in the eye, he said, nobody believes in paradise. So he's either presuming to be a mind reader and knows that everyone is lying, even those who are willing to blow themselves up, and even those who are willing to celebrate their children once they do. It's the greatest deception in human history, if that's the case. Yeah. I've for many years marveled at the capability of reasonable and intelligent people to put reasons into the mouths of terrorists that the terrorists never asked for, and also to come up with increasingly bogus and now demonstrably wrong explanations for why things are happening. My think tank, the Henry Jackson Society in London, we've analyzed every single person convicted of Islamist related offenses in America and in the UK in the last 15 years. It's kind of ongoing project. It's the only project of its kind that actually just does the statistical analysis of people. One of the reasons we did that was that some years ago, I got fed up with hearing people saying, for instance, the terrorists that we're dealing with were, for instance, suffering from a lack of education. Obviously not true, demonstrably not true. But I used to demonstrate it wasn't true by giving the anecdotal cases. You know, Murderer of Daniel Pearl was at the London School of Economics. The people who blew up Mike's Bar in Tel Aviv were from King's College in London. 2009. Detroit Bomber was from University College, London. I'm just focusing on about a square mile of London. So I used to give those they anecdotal. They thought it's worth doing this in statistical analysis that we had to enter all the hundreds of cases, and good. You know, you can show this now, actually, the tourists in America and in Britain that have been convicted, we're not talking about putative cases or disputed cases or anything. We're talking about people who've been convicted, are disproportionately well educated, are disproportionately, likely to have attended university, disproportionately, likely to have done further education. So one by one, you can shoot down these things. It's laborious. It takes a long time, it's very costly, but you can shoot these things down. And I think that we are in the process of that at the moment. And you don't hear that so much anymore. Sure you do, from some people. I mean, Tariq Ramadan, long foe and very close enemy of mine, was on the radio in Britain this morning saying that it was to do with integration, education, a whole lot of other things, but fewer and fewer people buy that, I would argue. So what this means is you whittle them down to what is the point? What is the cause? What is the propulsion? And this, I say, is a long and slow trudge that people in liberal Western democracies are making towards the truth. And it's going to take a long time, but things like this do take a long time because there's so many reasons for us to want to avoid the truth, because it's very worrying. It has all sorts of very serious implications. And one thing lurking in a lot of people's minds may be, oh my God, if that's the case, then we're screwed. Yeah. And there are other things that make this so difficult to talk about. So, for instance, I was noticing, even in your even in this conversation, some of the mad work of liberal demagogues or people who Majid Nawaz and I are now calling regressive leftists was effective even in the way I was listening to you. So, for instance, you brought up Daniel Pipes. Now, Daniel Pipes is someone who I don't know directly. I've never met him. We've had some email correspondence in the past. I've read some of him, but it's been some years since I've followed him, so I'm not totally familiar with his stuff. Which is to say that if someone mentions Daniel Pipes as you just did, there is between me and his name some residue of charges of bigotry that have got into my head in the same way that no doubt charges of bigotry against you or me have gotten into the heads of others. So I noticed that there's kind of a bad odor associated with his name, and I could name many other people for whom this is true and for whom it is almost certainly unwarranted. Right. But I just don't have the time to read everyone's books at this point or to watch everything they've said on YouTube. And so not being able to vet some of these people, I have declined to make common cause with them. And there's another example of a person you I know have collaborated with before who I've seen one of his talks and found him really impeccable, but he's often vilified as being a bigot. And that's Mark Stein, right? Yeah, absolutely. I'd like to ask you about both of them, but you can decline to talk about their cases. But I just want to point out how insidious this is, because here are people who I just simply haven't had the time to read in any depth. And yet, because people have called them bigots, I am now wary of making common cause with them, aligning myself with them, even forwarding their stuff when I happened to see it and like it if it's an article, because I don't know how that's going to blow back on me dealing with my own charges of bigotry. Yeah. If I can say so, you have a bigger problem than I have on that because I think you self identify as a liberal, I suppose, as a left winger, don't you? No, we should get into that because at this point I'm not even sure what that means. We should just know the check means either. I'm not sure what it means either anymore, but I've never particularly cared for that. In all sorts of ways regard myself as a liberal in all sorts of ways are regarded by some people as being left wing, but I don't particularly care about it. And I think I'm more identified as being a right winger or a small c conservative and so on. And I sort of don't mind about the labels anymore. And to tell the truth, I know it might be different in America, but in Europe and in Britain these days, I think that these things are mattering less and less. And we're losing patience with this game because, you see, if the whole game is played on the left terms, as it were, then first of all, we'll lose because there is no possibility of confronting very large societal issues only with one fragment of the political spectrum. And it's also very clear, I would say, by now that, look, I've got some of my best friends on the left but it is very clear to some of us that the left has been the problem on dealing with these issues. It is the Left that has been throwing around willful and I think deliberately knowing that they're not true allegations against people. I've often said that with the modern left since certainly the end of the Cold War, they've basically had a supply and demand problem. They want racists, they want Nazis, they want bigots and actually, thank goodness, certainly in my society, I think in yours, they're in pretty short supply and so these people have to find them. They want a supply of bigots and racists and fascists and actually the supply is extremely small and the people that they demand are too small in number to really give them enough of a political identity so they stretch it out. They've deliberately used as offensive terms as they could and used them of people that they must know do not fit that label. And I think the result is, by the way, among other things, that they have denuded certain terms of any meaning and that this is going to come back and bite the left in a big way. And I can see this happening in Europe all the time at the moment. The accusation of racism, for instance. I don't think it's going to wash for very much longer. I just don't nobody cares as much as they're used to about that because they have seen the left use it on everyone. I've seen it for years. I've seen my black friends called racists. I've seen my black friends called sellouts and coconuts and all sorts of things. I've seen the most vile racial abuse of racial minorities by the left and I don't care about this anymore. It's too late to be willing to be blackmailed by people who are fundamentally insincere in their insults. Yeah, but there still seems to be a mystery here, because I agree with you, and it's something I've often remarked on, that the tactics being used here are just shockingly dishonest. But the commitment to using such tactics, the fact that people see no ethical problem in accusing someone of being a racist who they know isn't a racist or a fascist. Who they know isn't a fascist. There there there must be some underlying urgency motivating that they must think that that the ends justify the means in some sense. And of course, it's politics. But what's amazing is that they are, and certainly on the topic of Islamism functioning as de facto apologists for theocracy. So the fact that they don't see this, the fact that this or that don't care about this, the fact that identity politics and their concern for generic brown skinned people or generic immigrants trumps any concern they should otherwise have about real fascism and real theocracy and real human rights abuses, that still strikes me as somewhat mysterious. I feel like I'm in the presence of people who have made some kind of reverse Faustian bargain where it's like they've sold their souls to the devil and they got stupid in return. Just before the atrocities in Paris, the previous news story was the students at Yale where we just saw these students and they're shrieking narcissism. These are among the most privileged kids in human history, and they became moral and psychological invalids in response to a polite email about Halloween costumes. So something is very strange on the left right now. What the hell is going on? Could I give one explanation of what it is? Another conservative, who I'm sure would make you tingle with slight fear if I mentioned his name, but an American conservative who used to be on the left and moved very much to the right, david Horowitz. He said some years ago, something very interesting about 1968. Now, I mean, we might have all sorts of issues about this, but he said something to me I think is far more true today, which is that the surprising thing is not that young people would rebel. Young people always rebel. This is something that young people do. The surprising thing is why did the adults give in? Now, I think this is far more relevant to today rather than 1968. The amazing question which hovers over Yale University is why do the adults sit and take it and the kids can run rampage? And this is the really large problem which Islamists and other terrible people are simply taking advantage of. Somebody needs to say to the shrieking girl who's effing and blinding at her professor, you know what? You're not at a home. This is not a home for you. It's a university. It's a very different thing. And what's more, if you cannot cope with Halloween costumes, then you've got no place at a university, because you're going to have no chance of dealing with quantum physics or Shakespeare or Heidegger if Halloween spooks you out this much, you're a useless person. And you're going to go into a useless career. Because if you're a lawyer and you have gone to Yale but you're too sensitive to hear about rape cases, you're not going to be able to represent anyone in a court of law. So you're no use for the law. You're no use for literature, because you might read a novel which will trigger you. You're no use for the sciences. You're no use for anything. And that's what the adults should be saying. They should be telling the kids to grow up, and the adults have lost their confidence. And that is the most striking thing to me. And let me just say one other thing about this, this whole thing of the weirdo sexual obsession. Transgender, trans, poly, gender identifies, CIS I've got a penis, but I can still win Glamour Woman of the Year award. And who are you? Not only do you have to respect me as a woman, if you say I'm not an entire woman, despite the fact I've got a penis, still, you're a bigger. And then you got to find Caitlyn Jenner attractive. If you don't find her attractive, you don't want to sleep with Caitlyn Jenner. You're an even bigger bigger. This is what and actually, to cite the other person you just said that would trigger you. Sam Harris, mark Stein said this the other day. This is the conversation we're having when the mullahs will nucas. Everyone will be discussing whether somebody is transgender despite the fact they've not had any operation. There's a woman in Britain called Jack Monroe, fatuous, far left wing, so called antipoverty campaigner, totally talentless individual. This blogger has recently come out as transgender. She says, by the way, she's not going to do anything about it. We just have to call her transgender and regard her as transgender. But she's not going to get a penis put on her, and she's not going to have her breasts reduced or taken off or anything, and we've just got to start calling her a non sexual pronoun now. It's theirs. Jack Monroe, the pink newspaper. I'm gay. I read some of this crap. The Pink newspaper ran a story about Jack Monroe becoming transgender because she says she is. I think she just wants a bit of publicity. They run a piece about her and they've got to say there jack Monroe wrote a piece on their blog saying that when they was younger. I mean, it's the salt on the language. Apart from anything else, anyone who cares about our delicate and beautiful language should turn away now. But we'll all be discussing whether somebody who hasn't got a penis can be a man and whether somebody who has got. A penis can be glamour woman of the Year when the Islamists come in with Kalashnikovs. It's pathetic. It's a breakdown in our society and you have to rectify it. That is hilarious. Well, for those who may just be introduced to you again for the first time in this podcast, there you have a taste of the kind of ire that Douglas is able to summon in the midst of a debate. And that's a gear, unfortunately, which I don't have and wish I did. I think perhaps that part of my brain was damaged by too much meditation. But it is bad for you. Well, it's certainly bad for this. And you have this gear and Hitch obviously had it and it is incredibly useful, so keep that well oiled. Now, to the substance of what you just said, though. But first of all, the fact that you're gay, does that give you any more freedom to say what you just said? Or are you also going to get hammered for that? Litany doesn't give you any more freedom, I say it's all about politics. Don't be fooled. Homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, all these things are shut up and let me speak. And don't think anything different from me. I've never had a single bit of credit from the left for being a gay man opposed to radical Islam. Of course not. Why would they? I don't want it, by the way. I don't want their pats and their pandering and anything like that. But I see all of these things used against people all the time. It's politics and they don't really care about anything else. They never did. Let's focus on that for a second, because in terms of the anti intellectualism of all this, for me, it's really the core. People are focused on what you think more than how you think. If you do not think what's been prescribed in the canon of your side of the political spectrum, this presents an immediate problem for you. And any train of thinking that seems to test those boundaries or, God forbid, leads into some area of novel thought or a position that doesn't align with all of the predictable ones on the checklist of left and right, then you are anathematized. And yet what you think is not what is important here. It's always how you think. It is, how you reason. It is the fact that you're available to good chains of evidence and argument. And if you're not available to those things, you're simply not in touch with reality in an ongoing way. And you are an unreliable witness to every subsequent event. All you have is dogmatism if your views are not on the table to be modified by new evidence and new arguments, if you push a conversation in a direction that is uncomfortable. And again, I find this especially on the left, although it's similar to what happens in a religious context when you begin to challenge the veracity of Scripture or any other dogma. If a reliable chain of reasoning and evidence begins to push up against the boundary of some leftist shiboleth, you just reap a storm of personal attacks and lies and there are no rules. Sure, but I mean, why would there be? I mean, these people as I say, they're fighting for everything that they think they believe in. Why would they not play as dirty as they like? I think the more interesting thing is why people don't do it back. We don't do it back for a very clear reason, which is that we think there should be some decency in this world. But I or you could at any point decide to turn around with as frivolous attacks on our enemies as they do on us. We could perfectly easily turn around and say, the problem with Glenn Greenwald is he's such a pedophile. Right. He is such a pedophile. And the problem with Riza aslan is he just can't stop shagging kids. We could do that. It would be as frivolous and as untrue as their constant smears of their opponents. But we don't do it. Why? Because we have a belief in the truth. Because we don't want to pump out lies simply to further a political agenda. Because we've got a bit of decency in this world. And I think we have to hang on to that. And I'm very glad that, by and large, people of our thinking do. Let's talk about that. In what sense are you are you a conservative? Several different ways. I mean, one is that I I've got a very conservative instinct and I don't like the term progressive. I don't like this term. I don't like the idea I don't like the idea that I'm progressing towards what I think a lot of the fundamental things of progressive so called politics are things that should make people suspicious. All sorts of things. The idea of a leveling out of society, of fighting until a day when everyone is utterly equal and so on. There are parts of it that are true and are good and large parts of it that are obviously something else. I believe in conservative because I believe in retaining the things that are good and think very often that a lot of so called progressives want to trample on a lot of those things, I think. I suppose in another way also, I believe in tradition and I believe in custom, that there are some things that are good because we have been doing them for a long time and they reflect a wisdom of experience and collective experience. And that in itself is a part of politics that should be deemed to be at least something that has worth a lot of things. I would, by the way, say this is different to a considerable degree to a lot of American conservatism and certainly to a lot of American Republicanism in Britain. Most small c conservatives like me would see an Edmund Burke, for instance, and somebody we admire, right. And that is, I think, rather different in American tradition. Burke, I suppose, had one of the most important statements of my form of conservatism, which is that he saw our role as being to formal of a culture, to form a unity and a pact between those who have gone before, those who are alive now, and those who are going to be born. And that you have to be very careful about destroying any particular end of that pact or breaking the pact. And it's that that I think would make me conservative, passing on laws and traditions which have seen my predecessors well and have done well for them and giving them justice and meaning and all sorts of other things and security and passing them on. I suppose this is the crucial difference with the left. I mean, not believing that one can create a utopia in politics. I think this is a very important point, if I say so myself. Politics, it seems to me, is taking on too much significance in our societies these days. It might be to do with the decline of religion. There are other factors. But I hear of people who in Britain, when the recent election happened, the Conservatives won all these people of the left. There was a colleague of mine, Spectator, and I had a competition to find the most ludicrous response from the left, but there were people who were claiming they had cried every day, they'd woken up every day since the election, remembered it wasn't a horrible nightmare and burst into tears. My view is this is a totally wrong headed way to think of politics. Politics is not about everything to do with your life, it's about a bit of your life and the orderly governance of your society. But it's not the means through which you make people good, it's not the means through which you make people happy. I mean, when people think that politics is going to make them happy or think I think they must be taking something no, your personal life makes you happy, culture makes you happy. I mean, it was Alexander Hetson, I think, who said that culture and art and the summer lightning of human happiness are the only guarantees we have. Who would want a Republican contender to give them that? Who would want a Democrat contender to give them that? It's a crazy misreading of the role of politics. So I do worry about that on the left, and I think it is among the things that makes me Conservative. I think maybe of just a problem with translation here across the pond, because certainly 90% of what you described as the terrain of conservatism I certainly can align with. But all of that, once you bring it into an American context, is vitiated by a level of ambient religiosity and bamboozlement that it's just when you talk about tradition in alabama, or even in Pennsylvania, tradition is of the sort that would prevent you from believing in evolution. Right. That's the problem. Yeah. And it would prevent you from believing in it. Yeah. Even if you're a presidential candidate who happens to be a Yale trained surgeon. Right. Well, that, by the way, can I say, without wanting to sound too nationalistic, we are very lucky in Britain, rather specifically in England, and I suppose in Scotland as well, about Wales, and rather less so Northern Ireland. We're very lucky in that the form of religion which we've inherited is a wounded form of Christianity. It's a cultural form of Christianity, undoubtedly one in which belief actually is not that important. It's quite different from the Christianity of parts of America. I suppose the nearest you'd get, you might get on the coast the form of Episcopalianism. That was close to it, but it's not remotely fundamentalist. The idea of being a fundamentalist Anglican is so ludicrous that no one would put the two words together. And that's partly because of the fact that Anglicanism, prosthet Anglicanism in the United Kingdom, in England, was sorted out the church state problem some centuries ago and made an interesting reconciliation whereby, effectively, the state owned the religion, but the religion had a place at the table that was very important. But all sorts of compromises happened that have meant that by the 20th century, it isn't remotely weird. By the way, there are books about this now. There's one only a few years ago from the director of the University Church at Oxford University called Christian Atheist. Quite a lot of people would regard themselves as that. I call myself a Christian atheist because, as various Italian philosophers have said, that's the product of what you are, you believe or not, is important, but you are a product of that, just as there are Jewish atheists and indeed, as we now know, thank goodness and more, a number of Muslim atheists. But what they've come from is not something that necessarily can be completely ignored or necessarily should be completely ignored. If there is worth in it, then that itself should be should be considered. That's why I don't like the wholesale ridiculing of all religion that some people, I think of it too glibly do. So would you detect some daylight between yourself and me and some of my colleagues? For a very long time, richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and I were being described essentially as a four headed atheist. We're the new atheist. And, you know, there are differences between certainly differences of emphasis, but also just differences of what we believe to be true or important there. But the generic picture of a very strident attack on all religion in principle, because it's so much of it, really all of it, that's relevant to us rests on a claim about the divine origin of specific books, which is, on its face, ridiculous and disproved by the contents of every page of those books. It sounds like you aren't fully aligned with that project. No, I'm not talking about that. I'm not, for various reasons. But I mean, one is, and I don't apply this by any means to you or to Christopher I have a problem with something that is it where some of your admirers have ended up doing, which is to say, the problem is all religion. And you see, and I find this a weasely way out. I think this is one of the ways in which people avoid the problem. I can understand why people think it. So, just to be clear that the problem is all religion as opposed to the problem of Islam. Not a real problem. Exactly. If I haven't been energetic enough on spelling out why that's confusion, I have to get less sleep at night. And Christopher also was very clear about that. I have a residual, I'm sure you won't mind me saying, this little problem with Richard Dawkins that has an amusing background, if you don't mind me relaying it for a few minutes. Richard and I were meant to be doing a debate a few years ago at the Cambridge Union, where I think the plan was that it was him and me beating up a couple of imams, which sounded great to me. I forward to it enormously. Of course, as you know, actually, Muslim religious leaders never actually turn out for debate. I don't know if you've ever debated. They just don't debate. Various sort of scholars and pseudo scholars and publicity seekers do, but generally the imams steer clear of it for a very clear reason, which is that they know that they'll look like idiots and what they believe or pretend to believe will be disproved. I mean, they're right to avoid the debate on their own terms. But anyhow, I was looking forward to this. It turned out that we didn't have any imams, but we did have Rome Williams sheepish, former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Tariq Ramadan, as I mentioned before, a very dear enemy. But unfortunately, Richard I think it was Richard's fault that the motion became stronger and stronger and harder and harder, as it were, and it became that there's no place for religions in the 21st century. And I thought that was a preposterous thing. And so I switched sides and won the debate for the other side, despite the fact I couldn't talk to either of my people on the other side because I'd been so rude about the archbishop and so vitriolic about Tariq Ramadan that I think we agreed that I would speak last. He said he wouldn't have that tariq, because he said, you will spend the whole time attacking me. And I gave him my word I wouldn't. I only spent half the speech attacking him. But I tell you this because there's another segue of this, which is that I've also been a bit rude about Richard in that now, he has changed on this, but certainly some years ago he used to give Islam a bit of a soft ride in compared to Christianity. And there's a famous interview which he did on Al Jazeera with somebody called Medi Hassan, where Medi Hassan read the opening of chapter two of The God Delusion, an amazing piece of rhetoric about how God is the God of the Old Testament, the appalling, disgraceful, disgusting figure in all of fiction. So this was read to him on Al Jazeera and the interviewer said to Richard Dawkins, you believe that of the God of the Old Testament? He said yes, I do. Quite rightly. The interviewer said, and you believe that of the God of the Christians? And Richard said I do. Quite rightly. And then the interviewer said, and what about the God of the Quran? And this little flicker went across Richard's eyes and he said, The God of the Quran I know less about. And I wrote a piece after this saying that this wasn't surprising and a surprising response from Richard Dawkins. Professor Dawkins was simply demonstrating the survival instinct of his species. I was so pleased with this gag, I reported it, I retold it everywhere I went. And Richard quite rightly, took exception to this and said I next saw him, that I owed him an apology. And I gave him a sort of half asked apology because he has actually, and did actually, later in that interview, to be fair to him, ridicule the idea that profit mo flew around on a half human horse and all this kind of crap. And so he did go into it a bit more, but I knew exactly what was going on in that moment and that Richard Dawkins effectively came up against that cliff, which we all know is there, which is when what is true and what needs to be said is right at the point where it could screw everything in your life up. Not because it isn't true, but because you're on Al Jazeera and the entire Muslim world could be watching and you may very well discover you've got to leave your house, you've got to go away for a bit, you've got to go into hiding and worse. So it's a bit cruel that I ridicule him and give him his example, because actually, I think Richard Dawson has done amazing work in all sorts of ways in his career, but I understand the slight reticence, and it's a bit cruel of me to pick up on it when it has occurred, and I don't think it occurs so much now. But, no, my main beef is with the people, the sort of Twitter warriors who responded after Paris the other day by saying, the problem is all religions. And I think that's a cop out, because I think you need to say, actually, you know, what the response to the load of jihadist Islamists going around Paris gunning people down for being in a restaurant does not mean you've got to close, like Anglican schools in England that do a perfectly good job of educating kids. It does not mean you need to crack down on rabbis, you know, in synagogues across Europe. In a way, this points to a cowardice underneath the cowardice in our time, which is, I think that you and Christopher and others made it possible to say all religions are untrue, all religions can be terrible, all of this is true. But the thing is, in a way, you've also given people the ability to say, we've got a problem with one religion at the moment. But I would say that there is one thing beyond that which it's also important to consider that some of us will think, which is actually, some religions are better than others. Yes, Anglican Christianity, Brian March is a lot better than Sunni Islam. You'd much rather have the local Anglican vicar come round to tea than your average fire breathing in arm. And we're very lucky that that is the case. And I sort of just think it needs nodding to. Oh, yeah, well, I'm actually perpetually nodding on that point. And since the beginning, I have always been very clear to spell out that generic atheism doesn't make any sense. There is this bias, very strong bias, among self identified atheists, that if you're going to be an intellectually consistent atheist, you have to oppose all religions equally because they're all equally invalid. But this is just simply untrue. It's untrue as a matter of fact, and it's untrue as a matter of moral imperative. So all religions are not equally improbable because any specific doctrine can be more or less at odds with what we know to be true about the nature of the universe. And if you keep adding doctrines to one another, your belief system becomes less and less plausible. So it's a very simple point I've made and to the confusion of many people, but Mormonism is objectively less likely to be true than generic Christianity is, because this is a simple statement of mathematical probability. The Mormons believe basically everything Christians believe, and they believe some additional nonsense. Whatever probability you put at Jesus's return to earth to resurrect the dead, you have to put a lesser probability on the claim that he will return to the precise spot of Jackson County, Missouri. Right. As opposed to returning anywhere. The Mormons lose that probabilistic contest there. Wouldn't it be brilliant if there were actually documentation saying that Mohammed had a conviction for fraud before pretending to hear the Quran? I'm sure he did. We just don't have the paperwork. It's too bad we don't know as much about Muhammad as we do of Joseph Smith. No doubt. And this obviously, just across the board, this is relevant. So when I say that specific beliefs matter, that means that when I criticize the religious impediments to embryonic stem cell research, I'm not talking about islam, because Islam doesn't take a position there. Islam has an admittedly crazy idea, but nonetheless useful idea, that the soul doesn't enter the fetus until far past the moment of conception, either day 80 or day 120, depending on which hadith you believe. And so the Islamic State could practice embryonic stem cell research. Right? So Islam is not a problem on that front. On that front we're talking about Christianity and Judaism for the most part, but on every other front now relevant to the maintenance of civilization, islam, political Islam, jihadism is the problem we all have to focus on. My concern, which I've voiced now, no doubt to the boredom of our listeners. They've heard me say it many times over, but perhaps you haven't heard it. My concern is that because of what has happened to the left and because of the narcissism of the small difference that just captivates everyone in polite society now, where, as Mark Stein said, we are going to be talking about the truly trivial when nukes go off in some major American or European cities. My concern is that at a certain point we will see only the far right in our own society become energized enough to call a spade a spade and address the problem of creeping theocracy under the guise of the civil rights of Muslims. Could I give another example of why that is? This gets into another point. As I say, it might be a point of difference between us. Before I get to a point of similarity, I mean, I am very concerned and this, I think again, this is a matter of similarity. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today I'm speaking with David Deutsch. David is a physicist at Oxford. He's a professor of physics at the center for Quantum Computation at Clarendon Laboratory, and he works on the quantum theory of computation and information, and he is a very famous exponent of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, neither of which do we talk about in this interview. David has a fascinating and capacious mind, as you will see, and we talk about much of the other material in his most recent book, The Beginning of Infinity. And we by no means cover all of its contents, but as you'll see, David has a talent for expressing scientifically and philosophically revolutionary ideas in very simple language. And what you'll hear in this interview is often me struggling to go back and unpack the import of some very simple sounding statements, which I know those of you unfamiliar with his work can't parse the way he intends. In any case, I hope you enjoy meeting David Deutsche as much as I did. David, thank you for coming on the podcast. Oh, thank you very much for having me. Listen, I don't know what part of the multiverse we're in where I can complain about jihadist by night and talk to you by day, but it's a very strange one we seem to be in at the moment because we're about to have a very different kind of conversation than I've had of late. And I really have been looking forward to it. I spoke to Steven Pinker, told him that we were going to speak, and he claimed that you are one of his favorite minds on the planet. I don't know if you know Stephen, but that's high praise personally, but that's very kind of him to say that. So let me begin quite awkwardly with an apology. In addition to the apology that I just gave you off air for being late. While I aspired to read every word of your book, The Beginning of Infinity, before speaking with you, I've only read about half, not just the first half. I jumped around a bit, but forgive me if some of my questions and comments seem to ignore some of the things you had the good sense to write in that book and that I didn't have the good sense to read. Not much turns on this because, as you know, you have to make yourself intelligible to our listeners, most of whom will not have read any of the book. But I just want to say that it really is a remarkable book, both philosophically and scientifically. It is incredibly deep, while also being extremely accessible. Thanks. And it is a profoundly optimistic book in at least one sense. I don't think I've ever encountered a more hopeful statement of our potential to make progress. But one of the consequences of your view, if I'm not mistaken, is that the future is unpredictable in principle and that the problems we will face are unforeseeable and that the way that we will solve these problems is also unforeseeable and problems will continue to arise of necessity. But problems can be solved. And this claim about the solubility of problems with knowledge runs very, very deep and it's far deeper than our listeners will understand, based on what I've just said. That's a very nice summary. It's interesting to think about how to have this conversation because what I want to do is kind of creep up on your central thesis. And I think there are certain claims you make, claims specifically about the reach and power of human knowledge that are fairly breathtaking. And I find that I want to agree with every word of what you say here because, again, these claims are so hopeful. But I have a few quibbles, and it's interesting to go into this conversation hoping to be relieved of my doubts about your thesis. I'm kind of hoping that you'll perform an exorcism on my doubts, such as they are. Sure. Well, I think the truth really is very positive, but I should say at the outset that there is one sort of fly in the ointment, and that is that because the future is unpredictable, nothing is guaranteed. There is no guarantee that civilization will survive or that our species will survive. But there is, I think, a guarantee that we can. And also we know in principle how to. Before we get into your claims there, let's start the conversation somewhere near epistemological bedrock. I'd like to ask you a few questions designed to get to the definitions of certain terms because you use words like knowledge and explanation and even person in novel ways in the book. And I want our listeners to be awake to how much work you're requiring these words to do. Let's begin with the concept of knowledge. What is knowledge and what is the boundary between knowledge and ignorance, in your view? Yes. So there are several different ways of approaching that concept. I think that the way I think of knowledge is broader than the usual use of those terms and yet paradoxically closer to the common sense use of the term because philosophers have almost defined it out of existence. Knowledge is a kind of information. That's the simple thing. It's it's something which could have been otherwise and is one particular way. And the particular way it is is that it says something true and useful about the world. Now, knowledge is in a sense an abstract thing because it's independent of its physical instantiation. I can speak words which which embody some knowledge. I can write them down, they can exist as movements of electrons in a computer and so on thousands of different ways. So knowledge isn't dependent on any particular instantiation. On the other hand, it does have the property that when it is instantiated it tends to remain so. So the difference between, let's say, a piece of speculation by a scientist which he writes down and then that turns out to be a genuine piece of knowledge. That will be the piece of paper that he does not throw in the waste paper basket and that's the piece that will be published and that's the piece which will be studied by other scientists and so on. So it is a piece of information that has the property of keeping itself physically instantiated causing itself to be physically instantiated once it already is. Once you think of knowledge that way you realize that, for example the pattern of base pairs in the DNA of a gene also constitute knowledge. And that in turn connects with Karl Popper's concept of knowledge which is knowledge that doesn't have to have a knowing subject. It can exist in books abstractly or it can exist in the mind or people can have knowledge that they don't even know they have. Right. Well, I want to get to the reality of abstractions later on because I think that is very much at the core of this. But a few more definitions. What is the boundary between science and philosophy or other expressions of rationality in your view? Because I think people are, in my experience profoundly confused by this and many scientists are confused by this. I've argued for years in several contexts about the unity of knowledge and I feel that you're a kindred spirit here. So how do you differentiate or fail to differentiate science and philosophy? Well, as you've just indicated, I think that science and philosophy are are both manifestations of reason and that the real difference that that we should be uppermost in our minds between different kinds of ideas and between different kinds of ways of dealing with ideas is the difference between reason and unreason. But among the rational approaches to knowledge or different kinds of knowledge there is an important difference between science and other things like philosophy and mathematics not at a really fundamental level but at a level which is of great practical importance often. And that is that science is the kind of knowledge that can be tested by experiment or observation. Now I hasten to add that that does not mean that the content of a scientific theory consists entirely in its testable predictions. On the contrary, a typical scientific theory, its testable predictions are just a tiny, tiny sliver of what it tells us about the world. Now, Karl Popper introduced his criterion of demarcation between science and other things, namely whether that science is a testable, theories and everything else is untestable. And people have ever since he did that, people have falsely interpreted him as a kind of positivist. He was really the opposite of a positivist. And if you interpret him like that, then his criterion of demarcation becomes a criterion of meaning. That is, he's interpreted as saying that only scientific theories can have meaning. Right. He's a verificationist. Yes. So he's called a falsificationist to distinguish him from the other verificationist. But of course he isn't. It's a completely different conception. And his philosophical theories themselves are philosophical theories, and yet he doesn't consider them meaningless. Quite the contrary. Right. The difference between science and other things comes up when people pretend to have the authority of science for things that aren't science. But on the bigger picture, the more important demarcation is between reason and unreason. Yeah, I want to go over that terrain you just covered a little bit more because you made some points there that I think are a little hard for listeners who haven't thought about this a lot to parse. And I think those are incredibly important points. So, for instance, this notion that science reduces to what is testable, this belief is so widespread, even among high level scientists, that anything else, anything which you cannot measure immediately, is somehow a vacuous claim. In principle, the only way to make a credible claim or even a meaningful claim about reality is to essentially give a recipe for observation that is immediately actionable. It's an amazingly widespread belief. So too, is a belief in a bright line between science and every other discipline where we purport to describe reality. And it's like the architecture of a university has defined people's thinking. So the fact that you go to the chemistry department to talk about chemistry and you go to the journalism department to talk about current events and you go to the history department to talk about human events in the past these separate buildings have balkanized the thinking of even very smart people into thinking that all of these language games are in some sense, irreconcilable and that there is no common project. I'll just bounce a few examples off of you that some of our listeners will be familiar with, but I think they make the point. So you take something like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Right? Now, that's a historical event. But anyone who would purport to doubt that it occurred if someone said, well, actually, Gandhi was not assassinated, he went on to live a long and happy life in the Punjab under an assumed name. This is a claim about terrestrial reality that is at odds with the data. It's at odds with the testimony of people who saw him assassinated. It's at odds with the photographs we have of him lying in state and there's an immense burden of reconciling this claim about history with the facts that we we know to be true. And the distinction is not between what someone in a white lab coat has said or facts that have been brought into view in the context of a scientific laboratory with a National Science Foundation grant. It is the distinction between having good reasons for what you believe and having bad ones. And it's the distinction between reason and unreason, as you put it. So one could say that the assassination of Gandhi is a historical fact. It's also a scientific fact. It is just a fact, even though science doesn't usually deal in quantities like assassinations. And you're more a journalist or historian to be talking about this thing being true. It would be deeply unscientific at this point to doubt that it occurred. Yes. Well, I'd say that it's deeply irrational to claim that it didn't occur. Yes. And I wouldn't put it in terms of reasons for belief either. I agree with you that people have very wrong ideas about what science is and what the boundary of scientific thinking is and what sort of thinking should be taken seriously and what shouldn't. I think it's slightly unfair to put the blame on universities here. I think the the this misconception arose originally for quite good reasons. It it it's rooted in the empiricism of the 18th century and before the origin of science where science had to rebel against the authority of tradition and of human authority and try to give dignity and respect to forms of knowledge that involved observation and experimental test. And so empiricism is the idea that knowledge comes to us through the senses. Now, that's completely false. All knowledge is conjectural and comes from within at first and is intended to solve problems, not to summarize data. But this idea that experience has authority and that only experience has authority, false though it is, was a wonderful defense against previous forms of authority which were which were not only invalid but stultifying. Right. So it was a good defense, but not actually true. And in the 20th century, a horrible thing happened, which is that people started taking it seriously as not just as a defense, but as being literally true. And that almost killed certain sciences and even within physics. I think it it greatly impeded the progress in quantum theory. So, just to come to a little quibble of my own, I think the essence of what we want in science is good explanation. And there's no such thing as a good reason for a belief. A scientific theory is an impersonal thing. It can be written in a book. One can conduct science without ever believing the theory, just as a good policeman or judge can implement the law without ever believing either of the cases for the prosecution or defense just because they know that a particular system is better than any individual human's opinion. And the same is true of science. Science is a way of dealing with theories regardless of whether one believes them and one judges them according to whether they are good explanations. And there need not be ever any such process as accepting a theory, because it is conjectured initially and takes its chances, and it's criticized. And as an explanation. If by some chance a particular explanation ends up being the only one that survives the intense criticism that science has learned how to apply, then it's not adopted at that point. It's just not discarded. Right. I think we may just have a stumbling over a semantic difference in how we're using terms like reasons and reasons for belief or a justification for a belief. I understand your quibble here, that you're pushing back against this notion that we need to find some ultimate foundation for our knowledge rather than this open ended effort at explanation. But let's table that for a second, because obviously your notion of explanation is at the core here. And again, I just want to sneak up on it because I don't want to lose some of the detail with respect to the ground we've already covered. Let's come back to this notion of scientific authority, because it seems to me there's a lot of confusion about this, about the nature of scientific authority. It's often said in science that we don't rely on authority, and that's true, and it's not true when push comes to shove, we don't rely on it. And you make this very clear in your book, but we do rely on it in practice, if only in the interests of efficiency. So if I ask you a question about physics, I will tend to believe your answer, because you're a physicist and I'm not. And if what you say contradicts something I've heard from another physicist, well, then, if it matters to me, I will look into it more deeply and try to figure out the nature of the dispute. But if there are any points on which all physicists agree, a non physicist like myself will defer to the authority of that consensus. And again, this is less a statement of epistemology than it is a statement about just the specialization of knowledge and the unequal distribution of human talent and just, frankly, the shortness of every human life. And we simply don't have time to check everyone's work. And we have to rely on, in some sense, the faith that the system of scientific conversation is correcting for errors and self deception and fraud. Yes, okay, I got myself out of the ditch there. Yes, exactly. At the end, what you said was right. So you could call this authority. It doesn't matter, really, what words we use, but every student who wants to make a contribution to a science is hoping to find something where every scientist in his field is wrong. Absolutely. So it's not impossible to take the view that you're right and every expert in the field is wrong. I think that what happens when we consult experts. Whether or not you use the word authority, it's not quite that we think that they're more competent. When you refer to error correction, that hits the nail on the head. I think that there is a process of error correction in the scientific community that approximates to what I would use if I had the time and the background and the interest to pursue it there. And so if I go to a doctor to consult him about what my treatment should be, I assume that, by and large, the process that has led to his recommendation to me is the same as the process that I would have adopted if I had been present at all the stages. Now, it's not exactly the same. And I might also take the view that there are widespread errors and widespread irrationalities in the medical profession. And if I think that, then I will adopt a rather different attitude. I may choose much more carefully which doctor I consult and how my own opinion should be judged against the doctor's opinion in a case where I think that the error correction hasn't been up to the standard I would want. And this is not so rare. As I said, every student is hoping to find a case of this in their own field. So every research student. So when I travel on a plane, I expect that the maintenance will have been carried out to the standards that I would use well, approximately to the standards that I would use well enough for me to consider that risk on the same level as other risks that I take just by crossing the road. It's not that I'm sure. It's not that I take their word for it in any sense. It's that I have a positive theory of what has happened there to get that information to the right place. And that theory is fragile. I can easily adopt a variant of it. Yeah, it's probabilistic. You realize that a lot of these errors are washing out, and that's a good thing. But in any one case, you may judge the probability of error to be high enough that you need to really pay attention to it. And often, as you say, that happens in a doctor's office where you're not hoping to find it again. I still picture us kind of circling your thesis and not yet landing on it. Science is largely a story of our fighting our way past anthropocentrism this notion that we are at the center of things. We are we are not specially created. We share half our genes with a banana and more than that with a banana slug. So, as you describe in your book, this is known as the principle of mediocrity, and you summarize it with a quote from Stephen Hawking, who said, quote, we are just chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star on the outskirts of a typical galaxy. Now, you take issue with this claim in a variety of ways but the result is that you come full circle. In a way. You fight your way past Anthropocentrism the way every scientist does. But you arrive at a place where people, or rather persons I think that's the formulation you tend to use in which you define in a special way suddenly become hugely significant, even cosmically. So and so. Say a little more about that. Yes, well, so that quote from Hawking is literally true. But the philosophical implication he draws is completely false because well, one can approach this from two different directions. First of all, if you think of that chemical scum, namely us and possibly things like us on other planets and in other galaxies and so on if they exist, then to study that scum is impossible, unlike every other scum in the universe because this scum is creating new knowledge and the growth of knowledge is profoundly unpredictable. So as a consequence of that, to understand this scum, never mind predict, but to understand it, to understand what's happening here entails understanding everything in the universe. Because, as I say in the book I can give an example in the book that if the people at the SETI project discover were to discover extraterrestrial life somewhere far away in the galaxy they would open their bottle of champagne and celebrate. Now, if you try to explain scientifically what are the conditions under which that cork will come out of that bottle then the usual scientific criteria that you use of pressure and temperature and biological degradation of the cork and so on will be irrelevant. What is the most important factor in the physical behavior of that bottle is whether there exists life on another planet. And in the same way, anything in the universe can affect the gross behavior of things that are affected by people. And so, in short, to understand humans you have to understand everything. And humans or people in general are the only things in the universe of which that is true. So they are of universal significance in that sense. Then there's the other way around. It's also true that the reach of human knowledge and human intentions on the physical world is also unlimited. So we are only used to having a relatively tiny effect on this small, insignificant planet, et cetera. And for the rest of the universe to be completely beyond our ken. But that's just a parochial misconception, really, just because we haven't set out across the universe yet. And we know that there are no limits on how much we can affect the universe if we choose to. So in both those senses, we are by which I mean we and the ETS and the and the AIS if they exist there's no limit to to how important we are. So we are completely central to any understanding of the universe. I'm struggling with the fact that I know how condensed some of your statements are and I also know that it's impossible for our listeners to appreciate just how much knowledge and conjecture is being smuggled into each one. So I guess let's just deal with this concept of explanation and the work it does. First, there's a few points you make about explanation that I find totally uncontroversial and even obvious, but which are in fact highly controversial in educated circles. And one is this notion that, as you say, explanation is really what lies at the bedrock of the scientific enterprise and the enterprise of reason. Generally. Explanations in one field of knowledge potentially touch explanations in many other fields and even all other fields. And this suggests a kind of unity of knowledge. But you make two claims, really especially bold claims about explanation, which I do see some reason to doubt. And as I said, I'd rather not doubt them because they're incredibly hopeful claims. So I guess the first to deal with is the power of explanation. I guess I'll divide these into there's the power of explanation and there's the reach of explanation. And these may not be entirely separate in your mind, but let's just deal with it. There's a separate emphasis here. You make what is a seemingly extraordinary claim about explanation, which at first seems quite pedestrian. You say that there's a deep connection between explaining the world and controlling it. Everyone understands this to some degree. We all see that the evidence of it all around us in our technology. And people have this phrase knowledge is power in their heads. So there's nothing so surprising about that. But you do go on to suggest, and you did just suggested in passing, that knowledge confers power without limit or it is limited only by the laws of nature. So you actually say that anything that isn't precluded by the laws of nature is achievable given the right knowledge. Because if something were not achievable given complete knowledge, then that itself would be a regularity in nature that could be explained in terms of the laws of nature. So there are really only two possibilities. Either something is precluded by the laws of nature or it is achievable with knowledge. Do I have you right there? Yes. And that's what I call the momentous dichotomy. There can't be any third possibility other than those two. And I think you've given not only a statement of it, but you've given a very short proof of it right there. So how isn't this just a clever tautology analogous to the ontological argument proving the existence of God? So many of our listeners will know that according to St. Anselm and Descartes and many others, it's believed that you can prove the existence of God simply by forcing your thoughts about Him to essentially bite their own tails. And for instance, I could make the following claim I can form a clear and distinct concept of the most perfect possible being. And such a bean must exist therefore because a bean that exists is more perfect than one that doesn't. And I've already said I'm thinking about the most perfect possible bean and existence is somehow a predicate of perfection. Now, of course, most people will recognize certainly most people in my audience will recognize that this is just a trick of language. It could be used to prove the existence of anything. I could say I'm thinking of the most perfect chocolate mousse. And it must exist therefore because a mousse that exists is more perfect than one that doesn't. And I already told you that I'm thinking of the most perfect possible mousse. What you're saying here doesn't have the same structure. But I do worry that you're performing a bit of a conjuring trick here because and I'll just ask the question, for instance why mightn't certain transformations of the material world be unachievable even in the presence of complete knowledge? Merely by and this is something I realize you do anticipate in your book but I want you to flesh it out for the listeners merely by, let's say, a contingency of geography so that, for instance, you and I are on an island and one of our friends comes down with an appendicitis. And let's say you and I both we're both competent surgeons. We know everything there is to know about removing a man's appendix. But it just so happens we don't have any of the necessary tools and everything on that particular island just has the consistency of soft cheese, right? So just by sheer accident of our personal histories there is a gap between what is knowable and what is in fact known and what is achievable. Even though there are no laws of nature that preclude our performing an appendectomy on a person why mightn't every space we occupy just by a contingent fact of the way the universe is not introduce some gap of that kind? Well, there are definitely are gaps of that kind and they are all laws of nature. For example, you know that I am an advocate of the many universes interpretation of quantum theory or many universes version of quantum theory and that says that there are other universes which the laws of physics prevent us from getting to. There is also the finiteness of the speed of light which doesn't prevent us from actually getting anywhere but it does prevent us from getting anywhere in a given time. So if we want to get to the nearest star within a year we can't do so because of the accident of where we happen to be. If we happen to be nearer to it we could easily get there in a year. And in your example, if there's no metal on the island, then it may be I mean, it's rather a complicated thing to calculate but there will be a fact of the matter of. Whether and it could easily be that no knowledge present on that island could save the person because no knowledge could transform the resources on that island into the relevant medical instruments. So that's a restriction that the laws of physics apply because we are in particular times and places and of course the most powerful thing is we don't in fact have the knowledge to do most of the things that we would ideally like to do. So that's another restriction. But that's completely different from, I think, what you're imagining which is that there might be some reason why, for example, why we can never get out of the solar system. Getting out of the solar system is if that were impossible, it would mean that there is some, for example, some number, some constant of nature, 1000 something which limits the other laws of nature that we already know. Now, there might be other laws of nature. When you say how do we know that there isn't, that's a little bit like if I can turn your objection around the other way, you know, that's a little bit like creationists saying how do we know that the Earth didn't start 6000 years ago? There is no conceivable evidence that could prove that it didn't or that could distinguish the 6000 year theory from a 7000 year theory and so on. There's no way that evidence can be brought to bear on that. And that leads us to explanation again, which is another difference between my argument which I think is valid and the ontological argument for the existence of God. That is, as you said, it's a perversion of logic. The argument purports to use logic but then smuggles in assumptions like that perfection entails existence, for example, to name a simple one. Whereas my proof, as it were, is an explanatory one. It isn't just this must exist, it's that if this doesn't exist something bad would happen. For example, the universe would be controlled by the supernatural or the laws of nature would not be explanatory or something of that kind which I think is just leading to the supernatural in a different way. Right? I think the argument works because it's explanatory. There isn't a whole of the same I mean, you can't prove that it's true, of course, but there isn't a hole in it of the same kind as in the ontological argument. The fishiness I was detecting worries me less than what I'm going to go on to talk about. It regarding the reach you posit for explanation. But it's more a matter of emphasis. If you're saying that we could have a complete understanding of the laws of nature and yet there could be many contingent facts about where we are let's say a distance or a current distance from a star we want to get to which would preclude our doing anything especially powerful with this knowledge. And you are going to shuttle those contingent facts back into this claim about, well, this is just more of the laws of nature. I mean, these facts about us are regularities in the universe which are themselves explained by the laws of nature. And therefore we're back to this dichotomy. There's just the laws of nature and there's the fact that knowledge can do anything compatible with those laws. I guess the concern is in various thought experiments in your book, you make amazingly powerful claims about the utility of knowledge. So for instance, at one point you talk about a region of space, a cube the size of the solar system on all sides that's more representative of the universe as it actually is, which is to say it's nearly a vacuum. It's just we're talking about a cube of intergalactic empty space that has more or less nothing but stray hydrogen atoms in it. And you talk about the process by which that could be primed and become the basis of the most advanced civilization that we could imagine. You might maybe spend a minute or two just talking about how you get from virtually nothing to something there. But it is a picture of almost limitless fungibility of the universe on the basis of knowledge. And that's a take us to deep space for a moment. Yes. So you and I are made of atoms and that already gives us a tremendous fungibility because we know that atoms are universal. The properties of atoms are the same in this cube of space millions of light years away as they are here. So we're talking mostly when we're talking about the power of knowledge to achieve things, to control the world. We're not talking about tasks like saving someone's life with just the resources on an island or getting to a distant planet in a certain time. We're talking about the generic thing that we're talking about is converting some matter into some other matter. So what do you need to do that? Well, generically speaking, what you need is knowledge. What would have to happen is that this cube of almost empty space will never turn into anything other than boring hydrogen atoms unless some knowledge somehow gets there. Now, whether knowledge gets there or not depends on decisions that people with knowledge will make at some point. I think there is no doubt that knowledge could get there if people with knowledge decided to do that for some reason. I can't actually think of a reason. But if they did want to do that, it's not a matter of futuristic speculation to know that that would be possible. Then it's a matter of transforming atoms in one configuration to atoms in another configuration. And we're now getting used to the idea that that is an everyday thing. We now have 3D printers that can convert just generic stuff into any object, provided that the knowledge of what shape that object should be is somehow encoded into the 3D printer. And a 3D printer with the resolution of one atom would be able to print a human if it was given the right program. So we already know that. And it's although it's in some sense way beyond present technology, it's not way beyond our present understanding of physics. It's well within our present understanding of physics. It would be an absolutely amazing turn up for the books if that turned out to be beyond physics. I mean, beyond what we know of physics today. The idea that new laws of physics would be required to make a printer is just beyond belief. Really, to just take us from the beginning. In empty space, you start with hydrogen and you have to get heavier elements in order to get to your printer. Yes. So it has to be primed, not just with abstract knowledge, but with knowledge instantiated in something. We don't know what the smallest possible universal constructor is. That is just a generalization of a 3D printer, something that can be programmed either to make anything or to make the machine that would make the machine, that would make the machine, to make anything, et cetera. So one of those with the right program sent to empty space would first convert, would first gather the hydrogen, presumably by some kind of electromagnetic broom, sweeping it up and compressing it, then converting it by transmutation into other elements. And then by chemistry into what we would think of as raw materials. And then using space construction, which is the kind of thing that we're almost on the verge of being able to do into a space station. And then the space station to instantiate further people, to generate the knowledge to suck in more hydrogen and make a colony. And well, they're not going to look back from there. How far do you want me to describe it? Right. It's just a very interesting way of looking at knowledge and its place in the universe, I think. Before I get on to the issue of the reach of explanation and my quibble there, I just want you to talk a little bit about this notion of spaceship Earth, which I loved, how you debunk this idea. There's this idea that the biosphere is in some way wonderfully hospitable for us, and that if we built a colony on Mars or some other place in the solar system, we'd be in a fundamentally different circumstance and a perpetually hostile one. And that is an impressive misconception of our actual situation. You have a great quote where you say that the Earth no more provides us with a life support system than it supplies us with radio telescopes. So say a little more about that. Yes. So we evolved somewhere in East Africa in the Great Rift Valley, and that was an environment that was particularly suited to having us evolve. And life there was sheer hell for humans. Nasty, brutish and short doesn't begin to describe how horrible it was, but we transformed it, or rather not actually our species, but the species that are some of our predecessor species already changed their environment by inventing things like clothes, fire and weapons and thereby made their lives much better still horrible by our present day standards. And then they moved into environments such as as I also say in the book, such as Oxford, where I am now, and it's December, and if I were here at this very location with no technology, I would die in a matter of hours, and nothing I could do could prevent that. So you are already an astronaut? Very much so. Your condition is as precarious as the condition of those in a well established colony on Mars that can take certain technological advances for granted. And there's no reason to think that future doesn't await us, barring some catastrophe placed in our way, whether of our own making or not. Yes, and also there's another misconception there which is related to that misconception of the Earth being hospitable, which is the misconception that applying knowledge is effort. It's creating knowledge that is effort. Applying knowledge is what we call automatism. It's automatic. As soon as somebody invented the idea of, for example, wearing clothes, from then on, the clothes automatically warmed them. So long as they were wearing the clothes, it didn't require any more effort. Of course, their clothes. There would have been things wrong with the original clothes, such as that they rotted or something. And then people invented ways of making better clothes. But at any particular stage of knowledge, having got the knowledge, the rest is automatic. And now we have invented things like mass production, unmanned factories and so on. We take for granted that the water gets to us from the water supply without anyone having to carry it laboriously on their head in pots. It doesn't require effort, it just requires the knowledge of how to install the automatic system. Much of our life support is automatic. And every time we invent a better way of life support, we then make it automatic. So the people on the moon, living on the moon, in the lunar colony, to them, keeping the vacuum away will not be a thing they think about. They'll take that for granted. What they will be thinking about is new things. And the same on Mars and the same in deep space. Right. Well, again, that's an incredibly hopeful vision of our possible future. Thus far, we've covered territory where I really don't have any significant doubts, despite the fact that I pretended to have one with the ontological argument. So let's get to this notion of the reach of explanation, because you seem to believe that the reach of our explanations is unbounded. Which is to say that anything that can be explained, either in practice or in principle, can be explained by us. Which is to say human beings as we currently are. So you seem to be saying that we alone among all the Earth's species have achieved a kind of cognitive escape velocity and we're capable of understanding everything. And you contrast this view with what you call parochialism, which is a view that I have often expressed and many scientists have expressed, as Max Tegmark was on my podcast, a few podcasts back, and we more or less agreed about this thesis. And so the thesis of parochialism is just. Evolution hasn't designed us to fully understand the nature of reality. We're not either the very small, the very large, the very fast, the very old. These are not domains in which our intuitions about what is real or what is logically consistent have been tuned up in any way by evolution. And insofar as we've made progress here, has been by a kind of happy accident. And it's an accident which gives us no reason to believe that we can, by dint of this accident, travel as far as we might like across the horizon of what is knowable. So what is to say that if a superintelligent alien came to Earth for the purpose of explaining all that is knowable to us, he or she may make no more headway with us than you would if you were attempting to teach the principles of quantum computation to a chicken. And so I want you to talk about why that analogy doesn't run through why parochialism, this notion that we occupy this a kind of cognitive niche that there is really no good evolutionary reason to expect we can fully escape, why that doesn't hold true. Yes, well, you've actually made two or three different arguments there, all of which are wrong. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll will find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. So today I have something different for you. I have an audiobook preview. The book I did with Majid Nawaz islam and the Future of Tolerance a Dialogue has just been released as an audiobook, and in this podcast you'll hear about a half hour of the audiobook and about a half hour of the postscript that we recorded, especially for the release of the audiobook. This postscript was not part of the hardcover, and in it we answer reader questions and talk about how the book has been received and deal with some of our critics. But you'll hear, I hope, that this book was really made to be an audiobook. It is, in fact, a dialogue. Of course, you'll hear the distinction between our reading this dialogue rather than merely producing it extemporaneously, but the fact that we're reading it allows us to be precise. And on this topic, more than many others, I think precision is now the key in the postscript. We just have a conversation, much more like a podcast conversation, and you'll hear about a half hour of that as well. In any case, this was a hugely gratifying collaboration for me. I'm just so happy to have connected with Majid, to have started this dialogue, to have produced this audiobook and the print edition, and to now be able to call him a friend. It's been a win just across the board for me. Now, unfortunately, I don't think the problems we discuss in this book are going away anytime soon. I think Majid's voice in particular is going to be increasingly relevant in the years to come. But I'm just very happy to have started this dialogue, and I look forward to collaborating with him in any way that I can in the future that will be useful. And you all can support our efforts by listening to the book or reading it and talking about it, or blogging about it and sharing it with others. So now I give you a preview of the audio edition of Islam and the Future of Tolerance a Dialogue by Sam Harris and Majid Nawaz, read by the authors. Majid, thank you for taking the time to have this conversation. I think the work you're doing is extremely important. I'm not sure how much we agree about Islam or about the prospects of reforming the faith, and it will be useful to uncover any areas where we diverge. But I want you to know that my primary goal is to support you. That's very kind of you. I appreciate that. As you know, we are working in a very delicate area, walking a tightrope and attempting to bring with us a lot of people who in many instances do not want to move forward. It is very important that we have this conversation in as responsible a way as possible. Agreed. I'd like to begin by recalling the first time we met, because it was a moment when you seemed to be walking this tightrope. It was, in fact, a rather in auspicious first meeting. In October 2010, I attended the Intelligence Squared debate in which you were pitted against my friends Ion Hersial Lee and Douglas Murray. We met afterward at a dinner for the organizers, participants and other guests. People were offering short remarks about the debate and otherwise continuing the discussion. And at one point Ion said, I'd like to know whether Sam Harris has anything to say. Although I was well into a vodka tonic at that moment, I remember what I said more or less verbatim. I addressed my remarks directly to you. We hadn't been introduced, and I don't think you had any idea who I was. I said essentially this majid, I have a question for you. It seems to me that you have a nearly impossible task, and yet much depends on your being able to accomplish it. You want to convince the world, especially the Muslim world, that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by extremists. But the problem is Islam isn't a religion of peace and the so called extremists are seeking to implement what is arguably the most honest reading of the faith's actual doctrine. So your maneuvers on the stage tonight, the claims you made about interpretations of scripture and the historical context in which certain passages of the Quran must be understood, appear disingenuous. Everyone in this room recognizes that you have the hardest job in the world and everyone is grateful that you're doing it. Someone has to try to reform Islam from within. And it's obviously not going to be an apostate like ayan or infidels like Douglas and me. But the path of reform appears to be one of pretense. You seem obliged to pretend that the doctrine is something other than it is. For instance, you must pretend that jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle, whereas it's primarily a doctrine of holy war. I'd like to know whether this is in fact the situation as you see it. Is the path forward a matter of pretending that certain things are true long enough and hard enough so as to make them true. I should reiterate that I was attempting to have this conversation with you in a semipublic context. We weren't being recorded, as far as I know, but there were still around 75 people in the room. Listening to us. I'm wondering if you remember my saying these things and whether you recall your response at the time. Yes, I do remember that. I'm glad you reminded me of it. I hadn't made the connection with you. I'm also grateful you mentioned that although we were not on air, many others were present. To my mind, it was just as important inside that room as outside of it for people to take what I was saying at face value. In fact, my desire to impact Muslim minority societies with my message is just as strong as my desire to impact Muslim majority societies. Part of what I seek to do is build a mainstream coalition of people who are singing from the same page. That doesn't require that they all become Muslim or nonmuslim. On the contrary, what can unite us is a set of religion neutral values. By focusing on the universality of human, democratic and secular in the British and American sense of this word values, we can arrive at some common ground. It follows that all audiences need to hear this message, even inside that room. Therefore, the stakes were high. To lose that audience would be to realize my fear, the polarization of this debate between those who insist that Islam is a religion of war and proceed to engage in war for it, and those who insist that Islam is a religion of war and proceed to engage in war against it. That would be an intractable situation. Now, moving to the specifics of your question, I responded in the way I did because I felt you were implying that I was engaging in pretense by arguing that Islam is a religion of peace. If I remember correctly, you said it's understandable in the public context, but here in this room, can't you just be honest with us? Yes. That's exactly what I said. Yes. Can't you just be honest with us? In here implied that I hadn't been honest out there. My honest view is that Islam is not a religion of war or of peace. It's a religion. Its sacred scripture, like those of other religions, contains passages that many people would consider extremely problematic. Likewise, all scriptures contain passages that are innocuous. Religion doesn't inherently speak for itself. No scripture, no book, no piece of writing has its own voice. I subscribe to this view whether I'm interpreting Shakespeare or interpreting religious scripture. So I wasn't being dishonest in saying that Islam is a religion of peace. I've subsequently had an opportunity to clarify at the Richmond Forum, where Aaron and I discuss this again. Scripture exists. Human beings interpret it at intelligence squared. Being under the unnatural constraints of a debate motion, I asserted that Islam is a religion of peace simply because the vast majority of Muslims today do not subscribe to it being a religion of war. If it holds that Islam is only what its adherents interpret it to be, then it is currently a religion of peace. Part of our challenge is to galvanize and organize this silent majority against jihadism so that it can start challenging the narrative of violence that has been popularized by the organized minority currently dominating the discourse. This is what I was really trying to argue in the intelligence squared debate, but the motion forced me to take aside war or peace. I chose peace. I understand my interest in recalling that moment is not to hold you accountable to your original answer to me. And it may be that your thinking has evolved to some degree. But our conversation broke down quite starkly at that point. I don't remember how we resolved it. I don't remember that we did resolve it. Well, let's proceed in a spirit of greater optimism than may seem warranted by our first meeting, because we have a lot to talk about. However, before we dive into these issues, I think we should start with your background, which is fascinating. Your Islamism seems to have been primarily political, born of some legitimate grievances, primarily racial injustice that you began to view through the lens of Islam. But you haven't said, as members of al Qaeda do, that you were incensed by the sacrilege of infidel boots on the ground near Muslim holy sites on the Arabian Peninsula. To what degree did religious beliefs, a desire for martyrdom, for instance, motivate you and your fellow Islamists? And if no such ideas were operative, can you discuss the religious difference between a revolutionary Islamist outlook and a jihadist one? Yes, sure. Of course. There are indeed similarities and differences between Islamism and jihadism. We shouldn't be surprised by this. The same applies when we look at, say, communism. Socialists are on one end and communists on the other. Some are militant and some aren't. It's the same with Islamism. Now, I've argued that the motivation for Islamists and jihadists is ideological dogma, fed to them by charismatic recruiters who play on a perceived sense of grievance and an identity crisis. In fact, I believe that four elements exist in all forms of ideological recruitment a grievance narrative, whether real or perceived an identity crisis, a charismatic recruiter, and ideological dogma. The dogma's narrative is its propaganda. The difference between Hezbollah, Dahiya and al Qaeda is akin to the dispute within communism as to whether change comes from direct action and conflict. If you take the theory of dialectical materialism in communism and whether we should step back and allow the course of history to carve its own way or intervene to affect it, purists of that theory will argue that you don't have to do anything, that the means of production will naturally shift from the bourgeoisie to the workers. And any intervention is futile because that's just the way history works. Others will say we must take direct action. Such differences on a theoretical level also exist between Islamists of the political or entryist type, those of the revolutionary type, and jihadists. Of course, jihadists believe in taking direct action. They have an entire theory around that. I'd argue, in fact, that the rise of the so called Islamic State under Abu Bakr al Baghdadi does somewhat vindicate Osama bin Laden's strategy and his belief that making the west intervention weary through war would lead to a power vacuum in the Middle East and that the west would abandon its support for Arab despots which would lead to the crumbling of despotic regimes from the ashes of that would rise in Islamic State. Bin Laden said this eleven years ago and it's uncanny how the Arab uprisings have turned out. What I'm trying to get at is the religious distinction I think I detect between the type of Islamist you were having been the victim of violent prejudice in the UK. And becoming politically radicalized by Islam and someone who may or may not have similar grievances, but decides to go fight for a group like the Islamic State because he genuinely believes that he's participating in a cosmic war against evil and will either spread the one true faith to the ends of the earth or get himself martyred in the process. Were you thinking about the prospects of your own martyrdom or was your Islamism more a matter of politics and ordinary grievances? I suppose I'm trying to say that although there's a difference in methodology, all Islamists believe they're engaged in a cosmic struggle. But this cosmic struggle isn't the only reason they're doing it. Perhaps I'm giving too much credit to critics of my views on this topic, but let me bend over backward once more. I'm imagining, as so many people insist is the case, that some significant percentage of highly dedicated Islamists are purely political in that they're motivated by terrestrial concerns and are simply using Islam as the banner under which to promote their cause. Aren't there Islamists who don't believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom? We would simply call them insincere. Insincere people exist in any movement and under any ideology. But if we're going to look at what Islamists subscribed to, obviously we have to discount the minority who are machiavellian and join only because they want something else out of it. But if you consider those who are sincere and I was sincere in what I used to believe, you'll find that they're prepared for martyrdom. I had to face torturers in Egypt and thought I was going to die for my cause. In that sense, all sincere Islamists believe they're engaged in a cosmic struggle for good against evil and they define good as a holy struggle. But again, to emphasize that is not the only thing they believe. Though they do certainly believe in martyrdom, they also believe in the evils of Western imperialism. Likewise, they believe that they're living under Arab dictators. The grievance narrative kicks in, as I said prior to the point of recruitment. But at the point of recruitment, this grievance narrative is fossilized by ideological dogma which then becomes the vehicle through which they express themselves. So it's not one or the other, but certainly the cosmic struggle is a consistent element for all Islamists. Another difference between jihadists and Islamists is that Islamists will seek martyrdom according to their own theory. So in Hezbo Tahir, we were taught that martyrdom is achieved by being killed while holding a despotic ruler to account or spreading the ideology. We were taught that if the regime kills you while you're attempting to recruit army officers, you'll be a martyr, and you should embrace that. But we were also taught that you're not a martyr if you blow yourself up in a marketplace because you're killing civilians and other Muslims now, whereas Hezbollah Tahira was attempting to incite cous by the existing army, jihadists simply said, why don't we create our own army? Why are we bothering with these guys who are infidels anyway? For jihadists to die while fighting for their own army is martyrdom? That is the difference. As long as you're dying in accordance with the view you subscribe to, you're a martyr in the eyes of your group. So you wouldn't distinguish between jihadists and other Islamists as to the degree of religious conviction, for instance, their level of certainty about the existence of paradise or the reality of martyrdom. The difference is purely a matter of methodology. Yes, some jihadists are not pious in the sense of having firm religious convictions. They simply prefer the violence, the direct action, so they're attracted to those groups. Yet some Islamists are incredibly pious and sincerely believe in the holiness of their political cause. So piously, or the lack of it, and religious sincerity or the lack of it fluctuates between and within and among groups. This is all fascinating and again, extremely useful to spell out, but we should clarify another point here, because the line between piety and its lack may not be detectable in the way that many of our listeners expect. For instance, it's often suggested that the 911 hijackers couldn't have been true believers because they went to strip clubs before they carried out their suicide mission. However, to me, there's absolutely no question that these men believe they were bound for paradise. I think many people are confused about the connection between outward observance and belief. That's right. The 911 hijackers were not suicidally depressed people who went to strip clubs and then just decided to kill themselves along with thousands of innocent strangers. Whether or not they went to strip clubs or appeared pious in any other way, these men were true believers. Yes, the strip club thing is a red herring because even in a traditional view of jihad, when you believe you're engaged in an act of war, you're allowed to deceive the enemy. So whether it's espionage or going undercover or war propaganda within traditional thinking, as revived by modern jihadism, it's permissible during war. The 911 hijackers being seen in strip clubs is, however, relevant for use in propaganda against them. Most conservative Western Muslims who do not think they're at war with their own countries would find such behavior immoral. But you're absolutely right to say that it's not indicative of the hijacker's religious convictions, or lack thereof. This confusion between supposed jihadist religiosity and sex should be clearer now, after the world has witnessed baka haram and the Islamic State's enslavement and mass rape of women. It is not necessarily accurate to assume that, say, the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood are somehow less pious than the leaders of, say, the Islamic State. More violence does not necessarily equate with greater religious conviction. Each group is deeply convinced of its approach to achieving Islamism in society, and both face much danger in the pursuit of that goal. But they differ in methodology, and they very much despise each other, just as Trotsky and Stalin eventually did. That didn't mean one was less a communist than the other. They had a factional dispute within their ideology. Some people misunderstand such disputes within Islamism, they argue. What do you mean, Islamism? There's no such thing. The Muslim Brotherhood hates groups like the Islamic State. And the Islamic State would kill members of the Muslim Brotherhood. I always remind them. That's like saying there's no such thing as communism just because Stalin is said to have killed Trotsky. It's an absurd conclusion to reach. Of course there's a thing called communism, and there's a thing called Islamism. It's an ideology. People are seeking to bring it about, but they differ in their approach. Degrees of religious conviction are not what will help us understand the differences among jihadists, revolutionary Islamists, political Islamists and non Islamist Muslims. Let's take Sead Hudab, for example. Hudab was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and is now known as one of the founding fathers of the theory that eventually became modern jihadism. The Egyptian regime killed him for writing a book, which he wrote while incarcerated in the same prison that I came to be held in many years later. It takes a high degree of religious conviction to die merely for writing a book, and that for the Brotherhood was martyrdom. Likewise, Hezbollah tarra members glorify the death of their members at the hands of the regime, but not the death of suicide bombers. They prepare their adherents to be killed for trying to overthrow a regime. And they tell all the same stories about martyrdom and internal bliss in paradise that jihadists do. The only conclusion I can draw from everything you've just said is that the problem of ideology is far worse than most people suppose. Absolutely. But to repeat, ideology is but one of four factors, albeit the most often ignored. I would generally agree, although there certainly seems to be many cases in which people have no intelligible grievance apart from a theological one, and become, quote, radicalized by the idea of sacrificing everything for their faith. I'm thinking of the Westerners who have joined groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Sometimes religious ideology appears not merely necessary, but sufficient to motivate a person to do this. You might say that an identity crisis was also involved. But everyone has an identity crisis at some point. In fact, one could say that the whole of life is one long identity crisis. The truth is that some people appear to be almost entirely motivated by their religious beliefs. Absent those beliefs, their behavior would make absolutely no sense with them. It becomes perfectly understandable, even rational. The problem is that moderates of all faiths are committed to reinterpreting or ignoring outright the most dangerous and absurd parts of their Scripture. And this commitment is precisely what makes them moderates. But it also requires some degree of intellectual dishonesty. Because moderates can't acknowledge that their moderation comes from outside the faith, the doors leading out of scriptural literalism simply do not open from the inside. In the 21st century, the moderate's commitment to rationality human rights, gender equality, and every other modern values that, as you say, are potentially universal for human beings comes from the last thousand years of human progress, much of which was accomplished in spite of religion, not because of it. So when moderates claim to find their modern ethical commitments within Scripture, it looks like an exercise in self deception. The truth is that most of our modern values are antithetical to the specific teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And where we do find these values expressed in our holy books, they are almost never best expressed there. Moderates seem unwilling to grapple with the fact that all scriptures contain an extraordinary amount of stupidity and barbarism that can always be rediscovered and made holy and new by fundamentalists. And there's no principle of moderation internal to the faith that prevents this. These fundamentalist readings are almost by definition more complete and consistent, and therefore more honest. The fundamentalist picks up the book and says, okay, I'm just going to read every word of this and do my best to understand what God wants from me. I'll leave my personal biases completely out of it. Conversely, every moderate seems to believe that his interpretation and selective reading of Scripture is more accurate than God's literal words. Presumably, God could have written the books any way he wanted, and if he wanted them to be understood in the spirit of 21st century secular rationality, he could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft. It really isn't hard to write a book that prohibits sexual slavery. You just put in a few lines like don't take sex slaves, and when you fight a war and take prisoners as you inevitably will, don't rape any of them. And yet God couldn't seem to manage it. This is why the approach of a group like the Islamic State holds a certain intellectual appeal, which, admittedly sounds strange to say, because the most straightforward reading of Scripture suggests that Allah advises jihadists to take sex slaves from among the conquered, decapitate their enemies, and so forth. Imagine that a literalist and a moderate have gone to a restaurant for lunch, and the menu promises fresh lobster as the specialty of the house loving lobster. The literalist simply places his order in waits. The moderate does likewise, but claims to be entirely comfortable with the idea that the lobster might not really be a lobster after all. Perhaps it's a goose, and whatever it is, it need not be quote fresh in any conventional sense, for the moderate understands that the meaning of this term shifts according to the context. This would be a very strange attitude to adopt toward lunch, but it is even stranger when considering the most important questions of existence what to live for, what to die for, and what to kill for. Consequently, the appeal of literalism isn't difficult to see. Human beings demand it in almost every area of their lives. It seems to me that religious people, to the extent that they are certain that their scripture was written or inspired by the creator of the universe, demand it too. So when you say that no religion is intrinsically peaceful or warlike, and that every scripture must be interpreted, I think you run into problems, because many of these texts aren't all that elastic. They aren't susceptible to just any interpretation, and they commit their adherence to specific beliefs and practices. You can't say, for instance, that Islam recommends eating bacon and drinking alcohol. And even if you could find some way of reading the Qur'an that would permit those things, you can't say that its central message is that a devout Muslim should consume as much bacon and alcohol as humanly possible. Nor can one say that the central message of Islam is pacifism. However, one can say that about Jainism, all religions are not the same. One simply cannot say that the central message of the Quran is respect for women as the moral and political equals of men. To the contrary, one can say that under Islam the central message is that women are second class citizens and the property of the men in their lives. I want to be clear that when I use terms such as pretense and intellectual dishonesty when we first met, I wasn't casting judgment on you personally. Simply living with the moderate's dilemma may be the only way forward, because the alternative would be to radically edit these books. I'm not such an idealist as to imagine that that will happen. We can't say, Listen, you barbarians, these holy books of yours are filled with murderous nonsense. In the interest of getting you to behave like civilized human beings, we're going to redact them and give you back something that reads like Khalil Gabran. There you go. Don't you feel better now that you no longer hate homosexuals? However, that's really what one should be able to do in any intellectual tradition in the 21st century. Again, this problem confronts religious moderates everywhere, but it's an excruciating problem for Muslims. Yes, I'd agree with that last sentence. It's certainly an excruciating one for Muslims because it's currently, and I've said this openly one of the biggest challenges of our time, particularly in a British and European context, as witnessed by the Sad and horrendous atrocities committed against hostages in Syria by British and European Muslim terrorists. We definitely have to acknowledge that anything we say could apply to Judaism and Christianity. But a particular strand of a politicized version of the Muslim faith is causing a disproportionate share of the problems in the world. So there are good reasons to focus on that strand. I don't dispute any of that. Just as a side note, you say that in the 21st century we should have the right to edit any holy book. But of course there will always be value in preserving texts as they once were, say, a thousand years ago, even as historical documents. I don't think the issue is the physical state of the texts we're looking at. This brings me neatly to everything else he said. I think the challenge lies with interpretation, the methodologies behind reform, whether reformists are in fact continuing a pretense, and whether this challenge is insurmountable. I think it's about approach. Let's start with this. You're very clearly speaking from an intellectual perspective. You're trying to approach this consistently. You're trying to approach this with an understanding of the challenges ahead, and you're trying to be sensitive and not harm my work. I appreciate all of that. But you also have to recognize that you're speaking from the luxury of living in were probably born, raised in a mature, secular, democratic society. It can sometimes be very hard to make a mental leap and put yourself into the mind of the average Pakistani. I know many Pakistani atheists who, alongside liberal Muslims, are trying to democratize their society from within Pakistan. You and I can have this discussion without fear. But for them, such open discussions can result in death. Of course, and I hear from many of these people, I'm well aware that millions of nominally Muslim free thinkers are in hiding out of necessity. This is one of the things I find so insufferable about the liberal backlash against critics of Islam, especially the pernicious Meme Islamophobia, by which anyone who thinks that Islam merits special concern at this moment in history is branded a bigot. What worries me is that so many moderate Muslims believe that Islamophobia is a bigger problem than literalist Islam is. They seem more outraged that someone like me would equate jihad with holy war than that millions of their coreligionists do this and commit atrocities as a result. In recent days, the Islamic State has been burning prisoners alive in cages and decapitating people by the dozen and gleefully posting videos attesting to the enormity of their Sadism online. Far from being their version of the. Mi li massacre. These crimes against innocence represent what they unabashedly stand for. In fact, these ghastly videos have become a highly successful recruiting tool, inspiring jihadists from all over the world to travel to Syria and Iraq to join the cause. No doubt most muslims are horrified by this, but the truth is that in the very week that the Islamic state was taking its barbarism to new heights, we saw a much larger outcry in the Muslim world. Over the killing of three college students in North Carolina amid circumstances that made it very likely to have been an ordinary triple murder as opposed to a hate crime indicating some wave of antimuslim bigotry in the US. This skewing of priorities produces a grotesque combination of political sensitivity and moral callousness, wherein hate crimes against Muslims in the US. Which are tiny in number, often property related, and still dwarfed fivefold by similar offenses against Jews, appear to be of greater concern than the enslavement and obliteration of countless people throughout the Muslim world. As you say, even having a conversation like this is considered a killing offense in many circles. I hear from Muslims who are afraid to tell their own parents that they have lost their faith in God for fear of being murdered by them. These people say things like, if a liberal intellectual like you can't speak about the link between specific doctrines and violence without being defamed as a bigot, what hope is there for someone like me who has to worry about being killed by her own family or village for merely expressing doubts about God? So, yes, I'm aware that one can't speak in Pakistan, as I do here. This raises an intellectual point and a pragmatic point. Intellectually, I don't accept that there's a correct reading of Scripture. In essence. Now, you can point to many passages in the Quran and in a Hadith, and I've certainly read them because I memorized half the Quran while a political prisoner. That you would find very problematic, very concerning, and, on the face of it, very violent. But as I've said, to interpret any text, one must have a methodology, and in that methodology, there are jurisprudential, linguistic, philosophical, historical, and moral perspectives. Quentin Skinner of the Cambridge School wrote a seminal essay called Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas. This essay addresses the danger in assuming that there is ever a true reading of texts. It asks the question, does any piece of writing speak for itself, or do we impose certain values and judgments on that text when interpreting it? I personally do not use the term literal readings, because this implies that such readings are the correct literal meaning of the texts. I would simply call it vacuous. Similar to the printing press's influence on the Reformation, increased Internet access has facilitated a more patchwork, democratized populist approach to interpreting Islamic texts. Now, the key for me, and this is only the intellectual point I'll move to the pragmatic in a minute is that if we accept that texts are in fact a bunch of ideas thrown together and arbitrarily called a book, then nothing in a vacuous reading of the text makes it better than other interpretations. The question is, do we accept a vacuous approach to reading scripture, picking a passage and saying this is its true meaning regardless of everything else around it? Or do we concede that perhaps there are other methods of interpretation? It comes down to our starting point. If one were to assume that a correct, unchanging reading of Islamic scripture never existed, and that from inception to now it has always been in the spirit of its times, then the reform approach would be the intellectually consistent one. Indeed, we would expect it to be the majority view. Today this approach stands in opposition to that of the very organized, vocal and violent minority that has been shouting everyone else down. If, on the other hand, we start from the premise that the vacuous reading was the original approach to Scripture, then the reform view stands little chance of success. There may be no answer here. I don't think this question has been resolved when it comes to interpreting the US. Constitution or Shakespeare or indeed any religious scripture. So, pragmatically speaking, what can be done? If somebody in Pakistan were to raise with me the issues you have raised, they could be killed. In such a stifling atmosphere, what is the solution? I don't want our listeners to think that all Muslim majority countries are the same. For instance, in the middle of Ramadan in 2014, Turkey witnessed a gay pride march. A sensible way forward would be to establish this idea that there is no correct reading of scripture. This is especially easy for Sunnis, who represent 80% of the Muslims around the world because they have no clergy. If a particular passage says Smite their next to conclude, despite all the passages that came before it and everything that comes after it, that this passage means smite their next today is to engage in a certain method of interpretation. If we could popularize the understanding that all conclusions from scripture are but interpretations, then all variant readings of a holy book would become a matter of differing human perspectives. That would radically reduce the stakes and undermine the claim that the Islamists are in possession of God's words. What is said in Arabic and Islamic terminology is this is nothing but your ijtihad this is nothing but your interpretation of the texts as a whole. There was a historical debate about whether or not the doors of it jihad were closed. It concluded that they cannot be closed because Sunni Muslims have no clergy. Anyone can interpret Scripture if she is sufficiently learned in that scripture, which means that even extremists may interpret scripture. The best way to undermine extremists insistence the truth is on their side is to argue that theirs is merely one way of looking at things. The only truth is that there is no correct way to interpret scripture. When you open it up like that, you're effectively saying there is no right answer. And in the absence of a right answer, pluralism is the only option. And pluralism will lead to secularism and to democracy and to human rights. We must all focus on those values without worrying about whether atheism is the most intellectually pure approach. I genuinely believe that if we focus on the pluralistic nature of interpretation and on democracy, human rights and secularism, on these values, we'll get to a time of peace and stability in Muslim majority countries that then allows for conversations like this. I wanted to also mention one anecdote, which, for those who are listening, I think they would find as another positive example of why this conversation was so important. Just today I spoke to somebody who's just started with Quilliam. In fact, the world will know about this through a press release we released tomorrow. But I'm telling you here a day in advance that there was a group in Britain known as Al Mahajirun, which was founded by Omar Bakri Mohammed, who used to be the leader of my former Islamist organization Hezbollahir in the UK. And then he split off and founded Al Mahajirun. Al Mahajirun produced none other than Anjam Chaudhry as its current UK leader. And Ahmad Buckley is currently in prison in Lebanon after he had his permission to remain in the UK rescinded. It's now a banned organization under Britain's terrorism legislation. Omar Buckley's son recently was just killed in Syria fighting for ISIS. Most of Europe's support for ISIS has come from those remnants of the Al Mahajirun and their supporters across Europe, because they then morphed into groups known as Islam for UK, Islam for Belgium, islam for the rest of the European countries. So this group is pretty much responsible for producing ISIS rank and file recruits from Europe. A former leading member of that organization, who left a long time ago before they were banned. He was Ahmad Bakri Muhammad's, one of his right hand men in in the UK just today joined William, and there was a group there was it's great news. He's been on a journey himself. But there was a and the reason I mentioned is there was a final doubt in his mind that was nagging away him as to whether the term Islamism was was a pragmatic term that we were using or indeed had some substance to this point of the distinctions between you know, because I I argue that Islam is interpreted in many different ways and Sufis interpreted in one way, fundamentalists in another and Islamists in yet a third way. And he wasn't sure he had this nagging doubt as to whether Islamism was indeed another phenomenon within the spectrum of interpretations and really, you know, was trying to come to grips with some of this. So I gave him an advanced copy of the book because we've been obviously working with him for a while to get him to the point where tomorrow we're we're going to announce to the world through a press release that he's joined William. And this conversation is just fresh that I've had today with him. And he said that he really enjoyed the book. He said that ten years of proselytization known as Dawer within the Islamist networks and actually even within traditional Islamic circles, preaching ten years worth of Islamic preaching, couldn't have achieved, in his view, what this one short 120 pages booklet has achieved. And he's full of praise for the fact that we've embarked on this conversation. He is, and also credited the dialogue, which I think he's going to put in his statement, that he releases from Quilliam as to why he's joined. He credits the dialogue itself to finally crystallizing his notion of not just using the term Islamism, but exactly what it is and why it's so important for us to challenge it head on. So there's been great progress on a practical level with somebody like this, and I just wanted to convey that to you, just to say that there is some positivity that is already emerging around the fact that we've had this conversation. No, that's great. Well, that's incredibly gratifying and he's someone I would love to talk to at some point. I would imagine he would be a great guest on my podcast. Absolutely. Yeah. But he's been with us. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, I'm going to do a ask Me anything podcast this time around. Now, as some of you know, I often set out to do these and then answer one question for 20 minutes or more and don't get very far. And I'm afraid that's what's going to happen this time around. I'll answer a few questions in a rather long winded way and then hopefully do some rapid fire answers and and get through many of your questions. I must say, I really appreciate the response I get when I whenever I go out for questions. I get hundreds. Honestly, I can't even read all of your questions, but I've read many of them and it's very hard to choose. I'll just work through them. But I also have to do a little housekeeping in this podcast, so I will start with that first. I'm recording this podcast on New Year's Day. So happy New Year everyone. And I ended the year in contentious fashion on Twitter. I don't know why I use Twitter. If I treated Twitter the way I treat Facebook, I would never have any of these entanglements that I so often discuss with you. I would never notice what was being said about me or what sort of skirmishes I was being dragged into, and therefore, I'd never be tempted to respond. So it perhaps deserves some rethinking whether it's worth my paying attention. But I'll tell you in a moment. At least two of my upcoming guests are coming on the podcast simply because of some Twitter incident. And so it's certainly interesting. It keeps me forever uncertain whether I should be using this technology. But in any case, as for my upcoming guests, I have actually three of the guests coming up are coming up entirely as a result of Twitter, so you could figure out whether it's a blessing or a curse at this point. I'll soon be speaking with Jaco Willink, the Navy Seal who was recently interviewed on Tim Ferriss's podcast first, and then Joe Rogans. And I encourage you to listen to both those interviews. That's literally 5 hours of interview with Jaco. He's just a fascinating guy and I certainly would have always loved to have him on my podcast. And it occurred to me to reach out to him, except I just heard literally 5 hours of him on two of my friends podcasts and it just seemed I wasn't quite sure what there would be to add to that conversation. And Jocko now has his own podcast at Joe Rogan's insistence. He started a podcast immediately and is banging those out. And the guy is great. But on Twitter we got thrown together and people were encouraging him to come on my podcast and he said he'd be happy to do it. And so here we are. So I'll be speaking to him in the coming weeks, and I look forward to that. And I'll try to find a fundamentally new line through the conversation so that we can get to some of his insight and experience that he didn't have a chance to share with Tim and Joe, and that should be fun. I'll also be speaking with Scotty REITs, who's a former SWAT operator. He was the lead weapons and tactics instructor for LAPD SWAT and now trains people in the use of firearms. And I'm going to talk to Scotty about violence and self defense and firearms and gun control, and also what it's like to be a cop and the misuse of force that we've all seen of late from Cops, and just to get into all of those politically sensitive but interesting areas. And Scotty, I think, will be a great person to do it with. Jocko and Scotty will come close together and that will be we can call that Violence week on the Waking Up podcast. I'll also be speaking with Mariam Namazi, the ex Muslim reformer based in the UK, who many of you probably know. You've probably seen video of her. I've circulated video of her before, and this was also Twitter born. There was an incident of what I considered friendly fire, where she went after me for what I think is a misunderstanding of my views on profiling. And I've always thought Mariam was great, but she more or less slammed me as a bigot, as far as I could tell, on Twitter. And so I reached out to her and she's agreed to come on the podcast and we'll try to rectify that situation whether or not we succeed. Mariams is a voice you all should hear, and I will bring her to you. There was also another Twitter born collision, not so friendly fire with someone who I'd never heard of, a young Muslim, probably soon to be lawyer. He's getting his JD at Yale. He's a writer who wrote a truly withering book review in Salon about my book with Majid, and he hated the book, seems to hate Majid, but especially hates me, and hatred really isn't too strong a word. People were hurling this review at me on Twitter. As you know, I don't tend to read Salon. So anyway, I read it. Needless to say, I don't agree with it. But I reached out to I don't know if his name is pronounced Omar. Omar. I will find out from him. Let's call him omar. That's how it's spelled. I reached out to him on Twitter and he agreed to come on the podcast. And so I anticipate that being a difficult conversation. And my interest is, as I've said before, in trying to figure out how to have hard conversations, how to start very far apart in a conversation and figure out how to converge, or at the very least, agree to disagree on specific points in a way that is not entangled with personal hostility and misunderstanding. And that, admittedly, is a challenge that not everyone is up to. I tried it with Noam Chomsky, and I will be trying it with other people. My conversation with Majid was also an example of that, and I didn't know how it was going to turn out and became hugely productive. So I'm going to be running similar psychological and conversational experiments on my podcast, and Olemayer will be one. Also, I'll be speaking with Jonathan Height, who many of you know. He's a very influential psychologist with whom I've disagreed in the past, and in a none too friendly way, I might add. And so that is another instance of my reaching out to somebody who has taken some very hard shots at me in the past, and I've returned fire. And we're going to see if we can have a civil and useful conversation on important topics. That will be coming sometime in February, I think. And also I will have Steve Pinker on at some point, and I have a few other guests lined up so that there will be interesting conversations coming your way. I feel the need to apologize once again for the level of congestion I'm bringing to the mic. Now, I have two young girls, each of whom seems to be striving to win the Patient Zero Award for bringing new colds into the world. I don't know if they're out there playing with ducks in a pond or where they're getting these viruses, but they're bringing them to Daddy. So I bring them to you in a substandard audio performance. So bear with me there so many of you noticed various Twitter controversies and wanted me to address them. Here's the first with Fareed Zakaria, the CNN and Washington Post journalist. He sent out a tweet about a week ago endorsing a truly terrible piece of Islamist propaganda. And so the tweet read my book of the week, who Speaks for Islam what a Billion Muslims Really Think? That's the title of the book. And then he calls it an essential voice of reason. Now, this book was written by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, and apologies again. I don't know exactly how to pronounce Dalya's last name. I will say Mogahed. It's probably not right. Esposito runs a Middle East studies center at Georgetown, and Mogahid works for Gallup, the the famous polling organization that published this book that Zakaria was recommending. So I tweeted in response, witness the capture of academia. Esposito polling gallop and journalism. Zakaria by rank Islamism. Now, many people took this tweet to be a sign that I had gone off the deep end by alleging some kind of stealth Islamist takeover of our institutions. Well, there is an attempted Islamist takeover of our institutions, and it's not especially stealthy. But to be clear, I wasn't claiming that Zakaria is an Islamist. Rather, I think he's probably been deceived by Islamist misinformation, of which there's an endless supply. And there is no question he's spreading such misinformation by pushing this book. And nor do I think Esposito is an Islamist, because to my knowledge, he's not even a Muslim. But everything I've seen him publish about Islam has been, if not a lie, a half truth. He's someone who have called a Muslim apologist in the past, and his center at Georgetown is funded with tens of millions of dollars by the Saudi government. It's the Prince Awaid bin Talal Center for Muslim Christian Understanding, and his function appears to be to whitewash Islam in general and the obscenity of Saudi Wahhabi Islam in particular. Now, I was frankly unfamiliar with Mogahedn. She's the executive director of the Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies. I just happened to have seen her on Meet the Press a few days before, sitting beside my friend Azra Nomani, the eminently rational journalist and Muslim reformer. And more or less every word out of Mogohead's mouth was again a lie or a half truth that seemed calculated to deceive a secular audience. She was saying things like the members of ISIS aren't religious and that they have no theological or popular support, and that there's no correlation between being a religious Muslim and being a jihadist. In fact, the correlation is negative. According to Mogohead, you're more likely to be a jihadist if you're not a devout Muslim. These statements are completely dishonest. I did a little digging on Mogajid, and from what I can tell, it seems that she has some affinity for, if not direct connection to, the Muslim Brotherhood, as do many people who claim to be Muslim moderates in our society. And it's very annoying that only people on the political right, and many of whom are dogmatic Christians or Jews, seem to have the time or the temperament to point this out. A group like the Council on American Islamic Relations Care, which seems to be the most influential Muslim civil rights organization, was a direct offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and has been supportive of terrorist organizations like Hamas. Is it connected with these organizations now? I don't know. Do its members even know? It could be like Scientology, where you don't know how crazy the organization is until you're deep in it. But I can tell you one thing for certain this is an organization that systematically lies about Islam and demonizes its critics and tries to make life as difficult as possible for people like ayan hercli. And again, this group is treated like the Muslim ACLU by the press. It's insane. And both Esposito and Mogahed are darlings of this organization, as is Glenn Greenwald, as you know. So whatever her connections, Mogahed practices some of the worst forms of Islamist obscurantism and identity politics. She describes jihadism as a purely political phenomenon that has no connection to religious doctrine or belief. And needless to say, it's always arising out of that vast reservoir of, quote, legitimate grievances that Muslims have against the west. And she's also an Obama appointee. She sits on the President's Advisory Council on Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and she's one of the people who had a hand in writing President Obama's famous Cairo speech. Again, I'm painfully aware that despairing over facts like these makes one sound like a right wing crackpot. So to be clear, I am an Obama supporter. I've voted for him both times. I will almost certainly vote for Hillary Clinton in the fall, because I don't see any other conceivable choice, though I have to hold my nose over her obscurantism on this issue in particular. But it isn't crazy to worry that Islamists are gaming our system, because they quite obviously are. Now, again, I don't know for sure whether Mogahed is an Islamist. She wears the hijab and says some very dishonest things about Islam in general and Sharia law in particular. Still, she may just be a useful idiot, like her colleague John Esposito that the line here can be difficult to find, and it may not even be important to find it. It's the ideas and their influence, rather than the people conveying the ideas that I'm worried about. This is also not to say that ideologically motivated people, even Islamists, couldn't produce an honest poll or a book based on such a poll. And I certainly wasn't discounting the contents of the book because his authors strike me as nefarious and dishonest people. For instance, let's just flip this around. If I were to produce a poll of religious public opinion, perhaps hiring an organization like Gallup or Pew to run it, here are two things about which I am certain. I am certain I could do this honestly and make every effort to produce a poll that was well designed and scientifically valid. I'm also certain that religious people and their apologists would reject its findings, whatever they happen to be. Because of my history as a critic of religion, I have made no secret of my views on religious faith. I think religion I think faith based religion is dangerous and divisive bullshit, and I think Islam is the worst of a lot. So it would be totally understandable and also wrong for a religious person to reject a Gallup poll of religious opinion that I was associated with. So to be clear, I am not doing that in reverse. When Esposito and Mogohead's book came out in 2007, I bought it and I read it, and I found it so obviously misleading as to not even be worth discussing. But now Fareed Zakaria is pushing it eight years later as his pick of the week and as a, quote, essential voice of reason. And it should be disturbing that Zakaria can't see the flaws in this book, because, again, they are so obvious. So what's wrong with the book? Well, first, it purports to be an unprecedented and thoroughly scientific poll of Muslim public opinion. But the authors don't show any data. And the ways they discuss their data, along with the kinds of questions they thought to ask in their poll and the questions they declined to ask, prove that they were after a certain result, which was to make Muslim opinion look totally benign. They want you to believe that Islam is just like any other religion and that Muslims worldwide are just like any other group of religious people. Now, the book isn't entirely filled with lies. The authors admit, for instance, that the imagined link between poverty and lack of education and terrorism, or support for terrorism, is a myth. They admit that the most radicalized people in the Muslim world tend to be middle class and educated. In fact, according to Esposito and Mogajid, the politically radicalized tend to be more satisfied with their financial situations and believe their standard of living is improving and are more optimistic about their futures in general than the so called moderates are. Which proves that the remedies that many secular liberals imagine exist for extremism in the Muslim world. That is, more education and economic opportunity are not remedies at all. As I've been saying for years, I don't know how many more engineers have to fly planes into buildings or devote their lives to waging jihad in other ways for us to get it through our heads that the lack of education and economic opportunity isn't the cause of Muslim extremism. But even in making this concession, esposito and Moga had revealed that getting Islam off the hook is their goal. Their point is to say that the backgrounds of terrorists are so diverse as to fully exonerate religion. There's the usual tendencies nonsense about how the 911 hijackers went to strip clubs, for instance, which, according to Esposito and Mogohead, proves that they weren't really religious. Majid and I dealt with this lie in our book. They also point out that most jihadists aren't graduates from madrasas. This is a point that Scott A. Tran makes all the time, as though this suggests a lack of connection between sincere religious belief in Islamic doctrine and jihadism. They even go so far as to intimate that the academic backgrounds of prominent jihadists suggest that almost anything could make one a jihadist. So that Hippocrat bin Laden, for instance, was, quote, trained in management, economics and engineering. It's like, who knows which of these streams of information could have radicalized him. This is pure obscurantism. But this isn't the worst part of the book. The worst part comes down to the questions that were asked as well as those that weren't asked and the way the results are discussed. So one of the most egregious examples can be found in the question that Esposito and Moga had used to differentiate what they call radicals from, quote moderates. They report that only 7% of Muslims worldwide consider the 911 attacks to be, quote, completely justified. And then they go on to say therefore, that nine in 1090 3% quote, believe the attacks were not justified and they call these people moderates. Incidentally, the press ran with this reporting that 93% of Muslims, or nine in ten the world over, are, quote moderate. Well, if you know anything about anything, you should be feeling a little queasy at this point. I took one look at this line that only 7% of Muslims consider the 911 attacks to be, quote, completely justified. So nine and ten are moderates. And I knew I was being lied to by sinister people or being misled by useful idiots. Again, I can't claim to know which of these categories Esposito and Moga headed fall into. So the first thing to point out is that even if true, even if this most sanguine of interpretations of this pseudo data is true, 7% of Muslims believing that the atrocities of 911 were completely justified is a problem that should not be minimized. The authors equate this with 91 million people. Their book came out in 2007. Today it's more like 112,000,000 people. Recall what we're talking about here. We're talking about the intentional murder of 3000 innocent non combatants at a time that preceded our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. We're talking about 112,000,000 people who think that burning thousands of people alive in the twin towers was completely justified. That's already a huge reservoir of murderous lunacy. But of course the real problem is that the 7% figure is totally misleading and intentionally so. We can tell from the wording, quote, completely justified that Gallup used a scale in its poll from one to five or one to seven where completely justified and completely unjustified where the tail ends. There was almost certainly a choice of somewhat justified or mostly justified or both that many people picked. And there was certainly a choice of don't know or no opinion. Think of all those people who couldn't say that the attacks of 911 were completely unjustified but said rather they were mostly justified or somewhat justified or said they didn't know. These people are being described as moderates. And there's another problem with using this particular question as the dividing line between moderates and extremists. As many of you know, and as Esposito and Mogajid surely know, vast numbers of Muslims think that Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks of 911 because there were 4000 Jews who didn't show up to work that day. Millions of Muslims believe that the Mossad and the CIA conspired to bring down the World Trade Center as a pretext to invade Muslim lands. In fact, one poll indicated that 16% of Americans believe something like this is the whole 911 truth movement, right? So using this question in this way rigged the game. And again, Esposito and Mogad almost certainly know this. And they know that if they had asked questions about apostasy or blasphemy or the rights of women and homosexuals and polytheists or whether infidels deserve to spend eternity and hellfire, the results of their polling would have been appalling. And every poll of Muslim public opinion that has been run on these questions produces appalling results. And again, it literally took me 5 seconds to see the problem here. Why didn't Fareed Zakaria see it? He is a journalist who covers these issues. He doesn't want to see it. Even this fictional 7% is talked about in the book in a way that is obviously tendencies and misleading. They say, for instance, that, quote, if the 7% 91 million of the politically radicalized continue to feel politically dominated, occupied and disrespected, the west will have little, if any, chance of changing their minds. End quote. Again, the burden is upon the west to behave better and show respect to people who think the attacks of September 11 were, quote, completely justified. And again, remember, these attacks came before we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Justified for what? Ask yourself that. I should say I invited Dalyamoga head on the podcast after a little sniping on Twitter, and she declined. But I would have been happy to speak with her. I've seen her promulgate what I now call the narrative narrative. And basically everyone is doing this now, from President Obama on down. And it's understandable in some ways, but it's it's also scary. So pay attention here. The idea I'm about to describe is almost unrivaled in its strangeness. And yet those hearing it for the first time, to say nothing of those who espouse it, never seem to notice that something out of the ordinary is being said. Now, you've heard this idea before, and I will venture to guess that you did not notice how strange and indeed terrifying a claim was being made. The idea is this in fighting ISIS or in resisting the spread of Islamic theocracy generally, we must at all costs avoid, quote, confirming the narrative of Islamic extremists. The fear is that any focus on the religion of Islam or its adherence profiling at TSA, intelligence gathering at mosques, or merely acknowledging that we are at war not with generic terrorism, but with Islamic terrorism, will drive many more Muslims to support the jihadists. Now, think about what is actually being alleged here. Think about the underlying pessimism, if not paranoia, of this claim. Let's use an analogy. Okay? Let's say you are a bald white man. And unluckily for you, there happens to be a global insurgency of neo Nazi skinheads terrorizing a hundred countries. Most white men are perfectly peaceful, of course, but this insurgency has grown so captivating to a minority of them that no city on earth is truly safe. Bald white men have blown up planes and buses and burned, embassies and even murdered innocent children by the hundreds, and we have spent trillions of dollars trying to contain the damage. Many of these bald white men are seeking to acquire nuclear materials so that they can detonate dirty bombs or even atomic ones in the capitals of Europe and the United States. And to make matters worse, many of these men are avowedly suicidal and therefore cannot be deterred. Now imagine hearing presidents and prime ministers and newspaper columnists and even your fellow bald white men express the fear that merely acknowledging the whiteness and baldness of neo Nazi skinheads would so oppress and alienate other bald white men that they too would begin murdering innocent people. Imagine being told that at all costs we must not confirm the narrative of the neo Nazis by acknowledging that white bald men emblazoned with swastikas are of greater interest, from a security point of view than elderly Hawaiian women. This is the situation we're in. You might be somewhat confused by the racial characteristics of this analogy. Obviously, Islam is not a race. But most people appear to believe that by honestly describing the link between the doctrine of Islam and jihadism and therefore admitting that Islam is of special concern in a way that Anglicanism and Mormonism aren't, that we will provoke otherwise peaceful Muslims to such a degree that they will become jihadists or support them. Now, this is either one of the most pessimistic and uncharitable things ever said about a community, or it's true. And if it's the former, we should stop saying it. And if it's the latter, we should be talking about nothing else and obliging Muslims to talk about nothing else. Where are these Muslims who are just like you and me, in valuing freedom of speech and secular tolerance and scientific rationality, who want their daughters to grow up to be fully self actualized members of society? Who aren't afraid of cartoons, who think gays should be free to marry, but who, if subjected to an extra glance at the airport or a visit from the FBI at their mosque, will be, quote, radicalized and helplessly driven to support ISIS? They're just like you and me now, but say the wrong thing about Islam on television, and they'll start supporting a group that decapitates journalists and aid workers, rapes women by the tens of thousands, and throws gays from rooftops. That is what is being claimed, and it is absolutely shocking doubly so, because no one is admitting or seeming to even notice what a shocking claim it is. And again, I don't know what is true here. It could be a totally reasonable fear or it could be pure paranoia, but I'm pretty sure the difference matters. So that's all I have to say about that particular book and contradom on Twitter. Again, it is highly inconvenient that worrying about the spread of Islamist ideology and the deception that covers its spread immediately puts people in mind of the Red Scare and Joseph McCarthy and right wing conspiracy theories. You have to follow the plot here. I am always talking about the necessity that freedom of speech and freedom of thought be safeguarded. You should be free to think and say whatever you want to say. And the people who are trying to write blasphemy laws, whether actually or effectively in the way they are stigmatizing the criticism of Islam as tantamount to bigotry and xenophobia and even racism, these people are undermining the freedom of speech and the freedom of thought. There is no analogy to the Red Scare here, but it is, I just confess, highly inconvenient that The New York Times doesn't do a proper analysis of where the sympathies of people like Mogahead and Esposito are. And they don't talk about the corrupting influence of Saudi money, money from a regime that is theologically indistinguishable from ISIS flooding our academic institutions and funding mosques worldwide and supplying them with literature that demonizes infidels and polytheists and, needless to say, Jews. So this is not conspiracy theory time. This is just the nefarious work of Islamists that is in plain view for anyone who wants to see it. But unfortunately, most of the people who want to see it are on the right wing. So you do a Google search on someone like Dalia Mogahead and you're immediately dumped onto Front Page Magazine and The Weekly Standard and other conservative publications. That's because the liberal publications are not doing their job, and many of them are doing the other job of obscurantism. And you have a place like Salon that gets this wrong almost as a matter of principle. Okay, so on to more of your actual questions. What progress have you made toward becoming vegetarian or vegan? So this question arises from my podcast. I think it was the second podcast I did with Paul Bloom where we sort of just stumbled into an intervention I performed on both of us around the topic of the ethics of eating meat. One of us asked the other, what would be on your short list for things that will just mortify our descendants on our behalf? The way we look back on Thomas Jefferson and we're just aghast that he couldn't see the wrongness of slavery. We have this supremely ethical and intelligent person who still couldn't see what an abomination slavery was. So what analogous blind spots do we have? And what will our descendants be scandalized by when they look back on us and on both of our shortlists was the horror show of factory farming, and neither of us could defend it. Both of us participated in this machinery of death, and we both admitted that it's only because it's out of sight and out of mind that we were able to do so. And neither of us could defend eating meat under these circumstances, nor could we defend. Delegating the acquisition of meat to others in this way, we did kind of stumble into an intervention of sorts. Then I threw Paul under the bus by saying, well, I'm willing to make a change in my diet. And I don't know what kind of moral monster you are that you aren't, but in the case that was a fun conversation. And at that point I asked vegetarian and vegan listeners to send me resources and help me idiot proof the process of getting off of meat. And I made that appeal because I had been a vegetarian for six years at one point and became anemic and just decided it was not a healthy diet for me. So, yeah, so I have a little to report, but not enough that I want to go into it in any depth. But I can say that since that conversation, I have been a vegetarian. And now that's I think that's about four months ago. And I did some blood work recently. And strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, my lipid profile, my cholesterol and triglycerides have gotten worse on a vegetarian diet and I think that's largely because not because I'm eating more dairy and eggs. And yes, I'm aware of the ethical concerns around dairy and eggs, but because I'm probably eating more carbohydrates. And so there's the bread and the pasta and the rice and all the rest that's tweaking my blood sugar, and that has an unhappy effect on lipids. I'm still working with this. I'm still a vegetarian. I am an aspiring vegan. I'll keep trying to find my way through this science experiment without making food preparation and eating a new religion for myself or the center of my life. I have to be realistic about what I can do here, and I don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. So at the very least, I'm convinced about the ethical problem of eating meat. The eggs I buy claim to be impeccable ethically. Every chicken has something like 108 pasture to run on, and I am aware that that doesn't answer the concern of what happens to the male chicks born in their hatcheries. But I'm still not convinced that I can be a healthy vegan at this point, but I'm going to try to be convinced. So again, this is a slow unwinding of my carnivore lifestyle. But in any case, I've made the big change, which is I no longer eat meat, chicken or fish. I suppose you could even make the case that eating fish, given our current system, is more ethical than continuing to eat dairy and eggs. I would be interested to know how you vegans and vegetarians view that. I did have one idea for a short book or a long blog article where I could go through the comparative neuroanatomy of various species as well as what we know about the likely basis of consciousness and pain and suffering in various animal brains, and try to make some intelligent ranking of the likely harm done at each stage. So is it you know, is it worse to kill a cow than a fish? Is it worse to kill a pig than a cow? Can you really eat oysters and other bivalves without any concern that they may be suffering? This might be interesting to look at at some point, take a fair amount of time to do it right, but in any case, that's at the back of my mind to look at. Next question. This one's from Faisal Sayed AlMutar, who many of you know is the ex Muslim Iraqi reformer and voice of reason. He was recently on Dave Rubin's show and gave a great interview there, and he was one of the people I consulted on my book with Majid, and he gave some very helpful notes. He's great. Anyway, he asks, if the Islamic Reformation modernization movement doesn't succeed, what do you think should be the alternative? And that's an extraordinarily difficult question. I think I can't answer it. I don't think there is an alternative. If Islamic reform modernization doesn't succeed, we will have a continuous source of conflict with free speech and tolerance of diversity and gender equality and a respect for science. I think it will work at some point because it will become so painful and untenable that it will just have to work. I don't know how much blood will be spilled or how many pendulum swings toward reactionary governments will see in Europe and even in the United States. I don't know how many Donald Trump campaigns will have to endure. Again, I'm not especially worried that there's going to be a Trump presidency, but it's conceivable, and it's conceivable because of this. But it has to succeed. Or at the very least, Islam has to become like Christianity in the United States. That's a problem that was big enough for me to have written a short book about it, Letter to a Christian Nation, but it's comparatively a tolerable problem once we get there. Once the Middle East is like the Bible Belt, then we'll have the luxury of trying to fine tune things and wondering what the far future might look like. Okay, another question. This is a longish question that I got by email, and it contains a criticism, but I thought it was good, so I'll read the whole thing. Here's my question with some context and set up. Do you think your reliance on hypotheticals and thought experiments has become a hindrance to making headway and discourse on important issues, in particular the threat of Islamic terrorism? Generally speaking, how big a role should thought experiments and hypotheticals play in discussing key issues? It seems that lately you've given several gifts to your detractors, namely the statement about Ben Carson. While I understand your position in stating that you'd support him over chomsky on the point of terrorism only, I still think this was a disastrous tactical error that didn't need to be made. Your point could have been made in any number of ways that didn't involve taking an absurd position, voting for Carson under any metric on a situation that will never actually happen. Chomsky running for president. Imagine a person that had not heard of your work until seeing that statement. Do you think they'd be more or less likely to dig deeper and fully explore the nuance of your views or write you off as a crackpot? If the goal is to win the war of ideas, it seems like tactics like this might be doing you more harm than good. The non starter with Chomsky and the defense of torture in certain circumstances are other areas where relying on thought experiments and hypotheticals did not seem to win many supporters. The name is Jason Tifl. Thank you, Jason. Well, I agree. I think it's probably, in the specific instances you cite, counterproductive, and perhaps I should be more disciplined in how I screen for those statements which wind up being counterproductive or easily used to mislead people about my views. The Ben Carson thing is very obvious, though I couched it with so many caveats and so much context that one really had to be totally malicious to spread the meme that I support Ben Carson for President. But of course, I have critics who are just that malicious. Someone like Max Blumenthal did just that. The issue is, when people are that malicious in their use of ellipses, they can defame you with any statement. But I take your point. They may not notice that you were talking about anything until you make a statement of the sort I made about Carson. And the net result of that one certainly was not helpful. On the question of thought experiments, I noticed. Now I offered one at the top, and talking about the narrative. Narrative, they do serve the purpose, if the analogy one is drawing is correct, of clarifying people's thinking and getting down to first principles. Using a thought experiment or an analogy, however surprising, can break the spell for people in a way that just talking more and more about the complex details of events in the world can't. So, yeah, I would be reluctant to say that thought experiments and hypotheticals shouldn't be used, but I think more care is needed in resorting to them, perhaps, or at least justifying their use. And I didn't think that kind of care was needed in the case of talking with someone like Chomsky, because obviously he's a celebrated academic who understands what is going on when someone resorts to a hypothetical in order to get at first principles. He's also someone who seems inclined to deliberately miss the point when he thinks it will serve his side of the argument. I have to factor in the price I pay for being so on my guard in conversations like the one I was having with Douglas Murray, that I wind up just not having useful conversations and not branching out into areas that are ethically, interesting and consequential, where my views may prompt someone to think differently in important ways than they thought before. I find it thrilling when someone raises a point that I find I'm uncomfortable with and I'm being led helplessly in the direction of something that I find destabilizing to my cherished opinions, and I can't see any errors that being made, and yet I don't like where I'm being taken. I find that absolutely thrilling. I find those moments some of the best moments in intellectual life, and I've been told by many of you that I managed to do that for you. So I would be reluctant to stop doing that. I'd be reluctant to speak more like a politician than I do, but I would be the first to admit that I may have caused myself more headaches than I should have by not being more careful than I've been. So I don't do a lot of censoring of what I think or how I say things, but increasingly I find that I do some because, again, if I didn't care whether I was misrepresented, it would be a lot easier. And getting off of Twitter would be one way not to care, because I seem to only see these things on Twitter. But as I said as well, I also see some useful things on Twitter, and some of the upcoming conversations I will have on this podcast are a result of what I've seen there. So there may be no perfect solution. I'll just keep trying to find my way as I eat nothing but vegetables. Next question. This is a similar one, actually. Obviously, it's your, quote, controversial views that gain the most notoriety. However, the importance of an idea and how much attention it receives are only loosely related. Some ideas, arguably such as your stance on profiling, may turn out to be relatively unimportant, regardless of how reasonable or well reasoned it is. Worse, it could be actively unhelpful. Such topics can be so explosive and your position may not condense to tweet length that it can easily be used by opponents to denigrate you. In this regard, sharing such ideas could detract from more critical points. In what way should the imagined repercussions affect what you decide to publicly share? If you believe something to be true, would it be moral to withhold it? In this respect? Is there such a thing as a noble lie of omission? Are there ideas you've decided against sharing? What are they? That's interesting. Share them now. And are there views of yours that you believe don't get enough attention? And this is from Jordan. Thank you, Jordan. Again. Yeah, I think there are. And I once wrote an article. I believe it was entitled why I'd Rather Not Speak About Torture on my blog. And I said there or somewhere that I once had an epiphany that not everything worth saying is worth saying oneself, and that is still true. I still think that's true. And I notice certain people abide by this precept much better than I do and have commensurately easy lives as a result. I would put someone like Steve Pinker in this category. This is not true of somebody like Richard Dawkins who gets down in the trenches in the same way that I do. Part of this is the ideas themselves, right? So that there are topics like profiling, for instance, where I just think it's ethically both interesting and important to figure out what we think on this topic. Get this wrong in any significant way and people will die. People buy what, the hundreds, the thousands? It's truly important that we figure this out. So, yeah, I'm reluctant to say that I shouldn't touch those topics, but in hindsight I can say that, yeah, some of them have been just more trouble than they're worth. And I think I've said on this podcast at least once that I tore up the best Wool contract. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll to find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Scott REITs. Scott is a 30 year veteran of the LAPD. He worked in the elite Metropolitan Division and then became a member of D team, otherwise known as SWAT, and he finally became the lead weapons and tactics instructor for the whole Metro Division. So he's a supremely qualified expert on the topic of guns and the use of force, both legitimate and illegitimate. And I think you'll find his perspective on these matters quite useful. And now I bring you Scott Reeds. Okay, well I'm here with Scott Reeds, otherwise known as Uncle Scotty to those of us who have trained with him. Scotty, thanks for coming on the podcast. Absolutely, my pleasure. I can't thank you enough for having me on. Listen, well there's there's a lot to talk about and I've been thinking about how to organize this conversation. I really have three broad areas that I want to touch on. One is just violence in general and self defense and related topics. The other is guns and gun control and then finally cops and the challenges of policing. And I think we're probably going to move back and forth between these these areas. But to start, let's just talk a little bit about your background as a police officer and just why is it that you're in a position to have an opinion on these various topics? Well, I was on LAPD and from 1976 until 2006 I did my probation in the Wilshire Division, which was a very hot division back then. I was wheeled being transferred after one year in the field and Wilshire was transferred over to Van Ice. I worked a special problems unit there on a hive car. I was actually a heroin expert, so I developed an expertise in heroin. It wasn't too long after that that I gained entrance into Metropolitan Division, which is an elite division within the department at the time. It had 240 men and 60 men in SWAT, which is deep atoon 60 men in Beep Platoon which worked primarily the Valley Hollywood and 60 men in Sepatoon which worked downtown. So you had deep attune Beepatoon? Sepatoon APL tune was administrative and I came into Beepatoon, worked there for a while and then I gained entrance into SWAT. And I was in SWAT for approximately ten years and both of as an operator and later on as an instructor and toward the end of my career left SWAT. But I stayed in Metro and a position was created for me by the department as the primary Firearms Tactics instructor. Not only for Metro, but it kind of morphed into all divisions for accelerated training. Specialized divisions such as SIS, Antiterrorism Undercarbon, Narcotics, Vice, what we call the follow team, internal follow team, which would follow bad corrupt cops. And in addition to that, during my years, I've ended up having the very fortunate experience of training all over the world, pretty much all over Europe, all over the United States. I've trained SWAT teams all over, policemen from all over. I've worked with groups such as GIGN, the police national, I've worked with the Italian special forces, work with, just name it. Tremendous amount of people had a unique opportunity working with seal team six during the members of delta. So what I kind of ended up doing after all that is my wife, Brett McQueen and I established international tactical training seminars. And this is about over 25 years ago now. So all the experience that I have learned and all the information that I've garnered over the years, we now disseminate in our classes not only to civilians who are beginning or have never held a gun before, but all the way up to hostage rescue for SWAT teams or specialized units such as specialized military units or special forces. And as of now, for the last 20, almost 28 years, I've been working as use of force expert in police tactics, communications, police procedures, the application of deadly force in federal and superior court. So I've been doing that on a constant basis, and that's quite a process that's in a real eye opener. So I think, in essence, I learned about deadly force application, police procedures, and this applies to civilians as well, even the military, and ultimately applied it. I've been in a number of shootings, and then I taught it, and now I defend it, so it's really come full circle. So I've got 40 years now behind the gun. Yeah. Well, I can say as someone who's trained with you at this point a fair amount, you really are one of the best teachers of anything I've worked with. It's really just an immense privilege to train with you. And I think people are unaware. Even people who blow own guns and shoot guns are unaware of just how much there is to know to shoot well. And the difference between working with someone like yourself and working with other people who I've trained with is just night and day. So people should know that you really are in addition to just having the right biography on this topic, you're just an immensely talented teacher. Thank. I'm blushing, and I owe you a case of beer for that one, but no, thank you. I think one of the things that does come through in all of our classes. Brett, who teaches myself, our son Jordan kind of runs the office, but all of our instructors are current LAPD SWAT, former LAPD SWAT, everybody. All of our instructors are people that have the heart in it. They're not in it necessarily for the money at all. They're in because they care. And we understand the ramifications, the implications of the improper application of deadly force. We also understand all of them have been involved in shootings, multiple shootings. And we understand what it takes not only to prevail in the field or within one's home, but also you have to understand how to prevail within a court system, within a judicial system. You have to be able to accurately and honestly articulate your actions. So it is a much fuller process than what Hollywood depicts. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so before we we get into the nitty gritty here, I guess I just want to flag both for you and our listeners some what I perceive to be the biases of my audience. I think I have an audience that certainly skews to the left politically. It's also an international audience. So there are many people in Europe and elsewhere who look at, for instance, the level of gun violence in America and just think, what on earth is going on? You've you people have lost your minds. You've got 300 million guns on the ground and you wonder why people are getting shot. Right? And many people in my audience, I think, frankly, can't imagine owning a gun. They can't imagine why any civilian would ever need a gun. They think rightly. So they think we are living at the safest moment in human history. And it's statistically unlikely that anyone is ever going to be involved in a defensive use of a firearm if they own a gun. So that's the kind of background assumption of many listeners with respect to topics like guns and gun control. And now with policing, many people have seen the very recent and very well publicized misuses of force on the part of cops. And there's the whole Black Lives Matter campaign that started with Trayvon Martin, which wasn't a police involved incident, but then continued with Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Walter Scott and others. And the reason why I'm so eager to talk to you about this is that what disturbs me here and we don't have to get into the details of any of those specific cases, but what disturbs me is that there's a, to my eye, quite clearly a range of police behavior and uses of deadly force. And on the one hand, you have just shockingly obvious failures of training. You have cops who shouldn't be cops. You have cops who are racist. You have cops who belong in prison. And then all the way on the other end of the spectrum, you have totally legitimate, understandable uses of deadly force that any sane cop, black or white, would have produced, even with the benefit of hindsight. And there's a total failure on the part of most people and certainly on the part of a campaign like Black Lives Matter to differentiate these cases. And we have a kind of identity politics and moral confusion about what's going on here. So we don't have to talk about specific cases unless you want to. And I think on some of these cases, there are still facts coming in, but there is undeniably this spectrum of incompetence on the one hand, and unfortunate uses of deadly force that are, given the constraints of policing, unavoidable. So I guess let's start with the topic of what it's like to be a cop and what is it that people don't understand about the cops point of view and how difficult it is to police. And take me through a traffic stop or start anywhere you want, but just tell me what is it that cops confront and why is it that uses of force escalate in ways that are kind of counterintuitive to people who have not trained in this area at all and certainly who have never lived as cops? Well, wonderful, wonderful question, and I think we're about to get into a really absolutely fascinating area of the application of deadly force and training. This is going to take a little bit of time. It's a very broad brush stroke, but when I worked on the streets, I worked on the streets, never behind a desk. I made thousands of felony observational, arrest Metro. That's all we did is felony observant. And you're constantly stopping people. You're looking for dope guns, you're looking for suspects, bad guys, gang members, and so forth, wanted criminals. I worked on some of the serial killers, such as Richard Ramirez, part of that task force looking for the Night Stalker in Van Ice. We were out there in special Problems. You're trying to catch Bianco Bono. Didn't know who they were at the time, hillside Strangler. But aside from that, when a police officer stops anybody on the street, you're looking at a very contemporaneous event. The officer may think he knows what's going on, but I can guarantee you that many times, especially in very confusing, very fluid and dynamic and tense and uncertain situations, the arrest has been made. Whatever force has been applied and we start investigating. There are always going to be permutations that are within the incident that we didn't know about at the outset. What that means is I could stop an individual in a vehicle for running a stoplight, coming to a California rolling stop where you don't quite stop. I pull him over. Unbeknownst to me, this guy just knocked over, committed at 211 bank of America and shot four people. But the broadcast has not been issued yet. So I come walking up with the intention of issuing a citation. Next thing I know, I'm in a bloody gun battle. I can have an individual who is mentally disturbed. He's just beaten his wife, he's on narcotics, he's under the influence, any number of things. It's such both a fascinating and terrifying career all in the same moment as you and I are sitting here right now. There are life and death struggles that are occurring in the United States between police and individuals on the street in the United States of America as we sit here. By the time you and I have finished this podcast, there will have been probably a number of uses of forces on LEPD alone here in Los Angeles. When I was a policeman, I always expected the worst. So when I came up, I expected the gun, I looked for it and so forth. I trained to a very high standard. And when you're just linger there for a second because that can sound like a psychological problem or a kind of paranoia that is unjustified, can you justify that expectation? That's a good point to point out the clarification. In other words, when I make a stop, I assume that it's going to go sideways. I don't approach it in that manner other than in my mind, just expecting that if he were to come out, if he were to do this and we talk about with my partners, I'm going to be cover officer, you're going to be the directing officer, you're going to be the controlling officer. You're the one that's had in a conversation with the individual issuing commands and so forth, I'm going to COVID So if I was perhaps, let's say I was a passenger officer, I would already bow to the side of the car and off and you wouldn't even know it had happened so quickly and the car hadn't come to a full stop. And then my partner is issuing all the commands, suspects, let me see your hands, exit the vehicle, and so forth. Because all we do is high risk felony stops, not high risk type stops. We don't issue tickets in Metro. So from that standpoint, we got many, many guns. We received many guns off the suspects. And if a suspect started making referred to move, in other words, he starts going underneath the seat, he's inside the glove box. I might draw my pistol low ready and we tell him to freeze. We get back behind cover, we get on the PA system. Now we start issuing commands. I remember at one, and I talk about this in my book and we'll discuss that later, but where we made a stop and the suspect was what we call hanky. There were two suspects in the vehicle and I got out and drew the pistol low ready. It's not aimed at the person, but it's a low ready and fingers alongside the frame off the trigger and I miss you in commands. It's a very stern manner, what we call command presence. And the suspect looked and you can tell he was somewhat hesitant. And I said, down on your knees. Turn around, cross your feet, hands behind your head, interlace your fingers, and so forth. And we came up and finally put both of the suspects down, handcuffed them right away. Well, the suspect had a shoulder hole drawn for a 45 auto. 45 auto was laying on the seat on the floorboard, loaded, cocklock, ready to go, full magazine one in the chamber. So that's eight rounds. And I always made a point when I took guns off the suspects to ask, why didn't you make a move? Why didn't you go for it? And I never forget to this day, and this would happen on a repeated basis, they said, you had me. I knew it. And there was no use of force. I didn't have to do anything other than put handcuffs on him. Now, had I walked up in a sloppy manner, had I walked up without anticipating something going terribly awry, the outcome could have been much different. He may have decided that this was his chance, right? So when I'm talking about expecting the worst, it's very benign. You would never know it by looking at me. I look like a burned out hippie refugee from Woodstock wearing my birkenstocks and so forth. Not quite. But those of you who can't see him, not quite, but but you know, I just kind of surfer dude and that that was my persona in the street unless I realized that it was going south. And then the persona we used to refer to it euphemistically in the old days as going metro would change literally in a fraction of a second. And now suddenly we're in a whole different realm. But that persona actually mitigates and avoids a use of force because you're using proper tactics to avoid the application of force. And that's the important component. And that takes time. It takes experience. It takes years and years of street smarts. It takes many interactions until you finally get a handle on how you yourself as a law enforcement officer are going to comport and present yourself to bad guys, whether you are stern or not. I mean, I could probably address a group of nuns in one room and walk over and address a group of ex cons, and I can relate to both of them. So most people who have an encounter with a police officer I don't know if it's most, but certainly many aren't in fact bad guys, right? So they're people who, for whatever reason, have been stopped by a police officer and they've perhaps noticed. Cop fairly switched on. I'm reminded of a story my friend of mine told who's a guy like me is objectively a not a scary looking guy and has no history of crime. And he's just this if you need the caricature of him. He's essentially a Jewish intellectual who really wouldn't scare anyone, and he got pulled over for a traffic stop and something. He was, I think, talking back to the cop in some way and probably as someone who's never trained in the use of firearms or even self defense, never thought about these issues. Probably were his hands on the wheel or his hands visible to the cop. Probably not, right? He's probably just acting like the innocent person he knows himself to be. And once the dialogue starts with the cop, he's outraged to be detained in this way. And he notices the cop unfasten the restraint on his holster, and he says, what, are you going to pull out your gun on me now? And he just becomes irate. And the cop says, well, tell me, what does a bad guy look like? Right? And that completely shifted my friend's point of view. He realized, okay, there's no way for the cop to know there's reasonable expectations based on what somebody looks like. But if your hands aren't visible and you could have a gun behind the door, and if a cop doesn't have his gun out and you have yours out, he or she is already behind the curve. Just walk me through that a little bit. Well, what you're looking at there's contempt of cop. And so what happens? Sometimes you have look, policemen, unfortunately, you don't know what's going on in their lives. Some policemen, and I'll be very honest, shouldn't be a policeman, absolutely should not be a policeman. There's no doubt about it. It takes a special person to be an effective police officer. Just having the badge means nothing. It's like having a Steinway have one, but it's just going to be gathering a lot of dust. To be an effective police officer, you really have to have compassion for the people you're trying to serve. Now, sometimes officers don't like being challenged, and they come up and somebody says, well, why did you stop me? And especially if you get the quasi pseudo attorney that knows his rights, and they all seem to, sometimes that throws officers off a little bit. Now they become, again, contempt of cop. And that's how the police I'm just saying this is how some police officers might perceive it. Whereas a rational police officer who is literate, well educated, who has the background and knowledge, would be able to say, look, this is why I stopped you. This is the probable cause as to why I stopped you, and I intend to do this, and so forth. You're willing to cooperate and so forth. He'd be very nice, very gentle and very soft, and the guy keeps on coming back at him. And some policemen start building up, basically resistance, because what they're taught is that people should follow your commands, but people don't always follow your commands. With seasoning, you learn how to winnow out very quickly and very rapidly, kind of who's a good guy and who's a bad guy. And this will especially be true in some place like Los Angeles. You have officers that work certain divisions, which we recall hot divisions. They're murders and stabbings, ambulance shootings, ambulance stabbings. There are fights, there's pursuits. It's just really nasty and it is nonstop in one watch. And then suddenly they take that person. Now they shift them and let's say they bring him out to beautiful bucolic Beverly Hills and the first thing he does he pulls this guy over that runs with a stoplight and the guy gets back in his face. And this officer has been used to four or five years of basically combat. Right. It's probably not going to go well for he's going to probably cite him for no gloves in the glove box and he's going to find anything he can in order to issue out that ticket. And that is that a problem? Yeah, it can be. And the selection of of officers when I came on in 1976, my understanding they had well over 2500 applicants. I think it was 25,000. And I came out for the University of Mexico, drove out here and had to wait over 24 hours in line at Van Ice High School just to put an application and go back, take midterms, drive back out for a written exam, believe it or not, with you know, four year degrees. It was insane. They actively processed 2500 people if I remember correctly. And they only took 91. Almost everybody in my class had it. Had a graduate degree. Had it. We're not upper graduate. We had a couple of guys with masters but most of the guys had four year degrees. Right. So you're saying it's become less selective? Well that is the general consensus of people that I've talked to because they're trying to get people to come on. I think a lot of policemen, a lot of individuals now shy away from law enforcement due to the fact of all the negative publicity and they say I don't want the headaches. And I can understand that to a degree. The standards and who they bring on and who they don't. I've seen some wonderfully gifted individuals who have tried to get on the department that for whatever reason were disallowed from getting on the department. One of the more humorous ones was an individual who has a law degree from Cambridge and he wanted to become a reserve on LAPD. And he wrote they asked him apparently at one point you're supposed to write not a dissertation but just some type of a written form and just free hand. And so he wrote it and because they didn't understand it they thought he was illiterate. This is a guy with a law degree from Cambridge right. And you're disallowing him from coming on because you're claiming that he doesn't understand the English language. This boggles the imagination. So that's kind of humorous to a degree. I don't know what the solution is. Policemen receive fairly good wages for what they do but by the same token it's an inherently dangerous job. You don't know what's going to happen. One of the shootings I worked on at the beginning of last year, the officer's first hour in the field in San Bernardino sheriff's, he's been involved in a shooting his first day, first hour in the field, he's involved in a shooting. What are the odds? Well, so when you say worked on, this is now in your capacity as someone who's consulting on on cases, on legal cases, yes. Defend defending him? Yes. Defending him in the application of deadly force in a lawsuit was called wrongful death. Right. So I'm defending the Australian in that instance. But what you bring up is a wonderful point, and that is that policemen don't know who they're stopping, and not all policemen are going to be great. Not all policemen have good people skills. They don't have good communicative skills. They are not able to think on their feet. They don't necessarily like being braced. You have a lot of policemen that are maybe perhaps a little too aggressive, too militaristic. Right? Well, I guess I was emphasizing the other side of this, and again, we have a spectrum. But my point, I guess, the lesson I drew from my friend's experience was that many people just don't know. They're so fundamentally ignorant of the dynamics of the escalation of force and what cops experience with other people and how many cops either know someone or have heard of someone who just got shot in the face the moment he pulled someone over for a traffic stop. And so we have assumptions about what is a legitimate escalation of force. As a civilian, I'll give you a clearer case for me. So, for instance, there are people who wind up in wrestling matches with cops, right? They go hands on a cop without understanding the implications. From my point of view as a martial artist and as someone who's thought about these things from my point of view, the moment you go hands on a cop, you have totally legitimized his use of deadly force. But for the fact that he or she doesn't actually want to kill you unnecessarily and will rely on some other tools, either their own hand to hand training or their own less lethal tools to contain you. But the issue for a cop, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that he doesn't know. First of all, he has a gun. He or she, just for simplicity, I'll keep saying he here, but he has a gun on his belt. He doesn't know what you're going to do after you knock him out or after you get him down and dominate him physically if you're stronger or bigger, more athletic or more skilled, and he cannot afford to wrestle with you or box with you in certainly any kind of sustained way. And certainly if there's more than one of you, going hands on a cop is a disaster, and he has to assume you're going for his gun at some level. And so people think that cops should be if someone's wrestling with them, he should be wrestling with them. If the person only has a knife, well, then that doesn't legitimize the use of a firearm. And people have no idea what can be done with a knife and how disastrous it is to be wrestling with someone who has a knife, even an unskilled person with a knife. So talk about just how force may escalate in surprising ways around cops. These are phenomenally great questions and subjects that you bring up. So let me put it this way. An officer never knows when you're stopping somebody. You have no idea what their intent or ability is. Let's say that as a groundwork foundation, if I lose consciousness every time a police officer is involved in an interaction with an individual, there's a gun on the scene, so there's always a firearm. If I become unconscious, I have no control over myself or the safety of others around me. That's number one. If I end up sustaining injuries which diminish my ability to a substantial margin where I'm unable to defend myself or others effectively, that also endangers not only my life, but those around me as well. So when you're looking at escalation of force, what you're using is what we call a continuum of force. The first force is by simply coming out and saying, sam, I need you to stop right there, please. And that's just nothing more than command presence being nice. Now, you don't I might be a little bit sterner. Now, I'm going to issue you commands at this time. You start advancing toward me. At that point, I might take out perhaps, and let's say for the sake of argument, you're unarmed, but you take a fighting stance. Well, I might take out the baton, I may take out the pepper spray. If I had the taser, I might take out the taser. So you need to really rethink this whole situation. So I have some other options. So we go from verbalite, we have command presence, which is just being in uniform or having a badge on telling you to do something. Then we have your less what we call nonlethal, which are the basically the baton, your OC spray, oliver Resonant capsican. You have the taser, you have joint locks. You have obviously, there's bar arms and carotids. And then finally you end up with deadly force. And there's less lethal ammunitions, such as the shotgun bean bag round that comes out. You'll see the lime green shotguns. Most departments have them. Not fun to be hit, but it's like getting hit with a baseball bat. Not much of a party, but you have options, but you're not always able to bring those options to readily bear on a situation. A lot of the situations, all of my shootings occurred within 2 seconds. In other words, from the time that I realized I had to apply deadly force, the instant from. My physical application, deadly force, to cessation of activities of applying that deadly force under 2 seconds very fast. I don't have the luxury or latitude of scrolling through 150 options. And this is where Supreme Court law comes into play. And this is a fascinating subject in and of itself. When I came on the department, 1976, all states had different laws regarding the application of deadly force. And if my memory serves me correctly, at the time, you could shoot a fleeing felon. Okay? In Los Angeles, if I'm not mistaken on this, there was a law on the books that stealing more than $7 worth of avocados was a felony. This was probably drafted in the early 18 hundreds when $7 worth of avocados was a wagon load. Yes. So there better be some good avocados. There are some great avocados. So let's say, for the sake of argument, I'm working Welsh here. We get up avocado theft, farmers market. So I race up there, it's 115 degrees. I'm in my LAPD, blue wool surge uniform, and I've just had code seven, which is eating. I don't feel like running. And I run up and the groceries goes, he's going that way. What do you steal? Avocados. How many? $8 worth. So I drew out my pistol and shot him. Theoretically, that would have been a judicious application. Deadly force under the law. Now, it's ridiculous. I mean, that's an extreme example. But there were states that had different protocols. There were departments that had different shooting policies. Now, Supreme Court finally said, enough of this, and they started to come out with different standards. And one of the standards was basically a four pronged test. And that was initially that you looked at the nature of the crime, you looked at the nature of the intrusion. This is the intrusion they're talking about, the force applied toward the individual. You looked at the nature of injury sustained by the individual as a result of your application of deadly force. And then you adjudicate as to whether or not that was reasonable. It was very complicated. Nobody really got a handle on it. So two different Supreme Court decisions came out. Tennessee versus Garner in the then the most seminal one of all is Graham versus Connor. Tennessee versus Garner. And I won't go into it. You can look it up. But ultimately, officers cannot shoot a fleeing felon unless they can articulate the weight or nature of the state's interest outweighs the interests of the individual's civil rights. In other words, I've got a murderer, suspect, active shooter, classic. He's running away. I can't catch him. He's got a rifle in his hand. Can I put him down, shoot him in the back without absolutely, yes. Obviously that's again, one example. Then we go to Graham versus Connor. And Graham versus Connor really sets the standards. And what they say is, when an officer applies any kind of force, it has to be objectively reasonable versus subjective. It has to be objectively reasonable. And this is going to be weighed in by the city attorney, district attorney, by the FBI, by Department of justice. It's a very extensive process. When I work on these cases, there are thousands and thousands of pages. In some of these cases, it takes forever. Walk throughs all the facts and evidence, blood spray, pattern analysis, trajectory. It's on and on. It's fascinating. And ultimately, in front of a jury, whether it's in a civil action or criminal action, the jury or the court, if they decide to go with a court mandated trial, is going to decide as to whether or not the officer's application of force was reasonable, objectively reasonable. And one of the things that Chief Justice Rehnquist came out with is an opinion stating that because police situations are tense, dynamic, fluid, and uncertain, that it is unfair for individuals to apply 2020 hindsight absence, the presence of an uplifted knife. Now, that's a fact. That's a wonderful wording, because what it's saying is, look, this gets into the meat of the matter, what we're talking about. When you look at something on TV and some of these are bad shootings. There's shootings that I would tell you right now, I couldn't defend them. And you need to settle. Right. The officer was completely out of line. Some of them need to go to prison because they're lying. And when you're looking at these cases, what you're looking at is, is it reasonable for the officer at the time, given the facts and circumstances known to the officer at the time, that the shooting transpired his background and training? In other words, I cannot hold a rookie with two weeks in the street to the same standard I hold myself. I've got 40 years behind the gun in all the different cases. For me to apply deadly force, it's got to be off the charts. Now, for a younger officer, I might be able to say, look, he doesn't have the experience that I did. He doesn't have the technical expertise. He doesn't certainly doesn't have the mechanical ability. He doesn't have the presence of mind or the experience to have formulated maybe a proper decision. It may not have been a great decision. It may be mechanically impure, but according to the law, it was objectively reasonable that he applied force, whatever force that may have been in this circumstance. And that's what throws a lot of people, because why aren't the officers in prison? Because of the jury instructions. Right. Well, that's interesting. I never heard that, that courts will hold officers to a different standard based on their experience in these cases. Almost, yeah. Basically, each shooting is adjudicated on its own merits. So you can't say, well, because this shooting went down this way, this one should have gone down in a similar manner, it's impossible. There are too many variations and permutations in each shooting that are unique unto themselves. So when you become involved in these shootings? Each shooting has to be adjudicated on its own merits. The facts in evidence, the circumstances known to the officer at the time, that the shooting or use of force transpires his background knowledge of the entire incident, as well as his training. Now, there's also one other thing, and now we get into precipitative factors. Was the officer legally justified in being where he was? Did he make the right tactical decisions? Did he employ the right communications? Did he surround? Did he request backup? Did he request less lethal? It gets really involved. It's unbelievably involved. And I get attacked with this all the time in depositions, in court. Well, why didn't the officer do this? Or I may have. An attorney said, well, Auster REITs, would it have been reasonable for the officers to have done this? I said, absolutely. But they didn't, did they? No. Could they have done this? Yes. Would that have been reasonable? Yes. And they didn't do it, did they? No. And he might do 15 of those in a row, and then finally he'll look at me and say, well, why didn't they do all those? Well, because they didn't have time, right? What about the intuition that many untrained people have? Why can't you just shoot the person in the leg, okay? And this comes back I get jury questions all the time. Why didn't they shoot the knife out of his hand? Why not use a baton against the guy with a knife? First of all, let's look at this again. We could have days doing this. This would be fascinating. But let me explain something. Let's say pepper spray. OC is an irritant. It's not an incapacitator, okay? So it's irritant. I've been sprayed in the face by my partner when I had an altercation with the suspect, because my partner was a terrible aim. I was still able to fight. I was still able to bring the suspect under control. We look at the taser. It's not an infallible process. So sometimes the darts don't go in. They don't separate enough because it's a neuromuscular, basically disruptor, and it causes the muscles to violently, if you will, twitch, contract 16 times a second. It'll get your mind right. But both of those probes have to make contact, and then the electrical conduit is between those two contacts. Baton strikes don't always work because you get glancing blows and so forth. Less lethal munitions from the shotgun. Sometimes guys get hit, and they go, give me more, and you go, you got to be kidding me. What's this guy on? And I fought suspects that have been unbelievably tough. It's just scary. So when you're looking at the application of deadly force, when you're looking at less lethal and people say, why didn't you shoot them? And they're like, well, if I rip your femoral artery open and you bleed out in 20 seconds, guess what? It's a fatal. Also, rounds. We're talking about terminal ballistics rounds do very interesting things in side bodies. And I have seen rounds that have struck. I had one shooting about three years ago where the round struck the suspect's hip inboard about an inch and a half, and then it ricocheted off the hip. It basically made a 70 degree angle turn upward trajectory now because it was a slight downward angle and went through the heart, bottom of the heart, top the heart, and exit out through the suspect's right clavicle. And he was dead on scene, expired on scene. Well, theoretically, that's a glancing or a peripheral hit. And so shooting somebody's, a knife out of somebody's hands, you better be really good. That's damn near impossible. So all these things that you see in the movies, it's Hollywood. Yeah. And officers don't have and we'll get into training, but the officers themselves don't necessarily have the ability to make this, you know, with pinpoint accuracy when you work with handguns and just shoot them in the leg and wound them or shoot something out of the suspect's hands. On the contrary, there are stories of shootings in elevators where 17 shots are fired and no one is hit, or 100 rounds from five different officers are fired and the subject is hit twice. Perhaps we should get into the standard to which most cops are trained now and just what any illusions we have about that. Yeah, well, I will put it this way. This is one thing that has irked me for years and years. I recently came back from the East Coast where the department really good department, great chief, really understood. And so they had me come out and I trained their entire department in four sessions and over a space of two weeks. And the standard of training that I train people to far exceeds the minimalistic standards that most officers are trained to. Officers are trained to what they call post standards, which are police officers standards and training. You have to get a lot of people through academies so you have a base level of performance that an officer must qualify with a firearm, certainly go through written exams and understand this and that. So everybody wonders, why are the officers the hit rates are terrible for police. I mean, it's in the low teens, the actual numbers of hits, far more misses in the field and actual field documented shootings than there are strikes on suspects. We have sometimes excessive amount of rounds going down range, although there is a brand new Supreme Court decision that just came down regarding that. However, that being said, the jurors sometimes will ask and written, well, why did the officers fire so many rounds? Why are there so many officers engaged in shooting? And the analogy I like to use, and I think all your listeners can probably latch on to this imagine if I taught you how to drive a stick shifted Volkswagen Bug. That's what I trained you to do. Here's your little VW Beetle from the 70s, Woodstocked out, and then I ship you across the ocean. I put you into a Formula One in the Lemons 500 at night in driving rain, and you crash and burn at the first turn. And you're astounded well, I trained you to one standard when an entirely different standard was called for in the field. And this is what happens when you do a qualification course. By necessity, you have to have some measure of proficiency. You have to have some standard that you can go back and say, look, the officer qualified. Here are the records. But it's so vast, the mechanics and I'll just rip through a list very quickly. You're looking at all very positions, braced, unbraced, rollover prone positions, reverse positions. You're looking at shooting firing support, hand, firing hand only. You're looking at low level light problems. You're looking at high speed moving targets, knife attack targets, hazard situations, vehicles, barricaded suspects, all the impediments that may be interposed between yourself and a down range target, partial targets. You're looking at distant targets. You're looking at targets that articulate and present awkward angles and so forth. That is a lifetime of study. Yeah. Now, when you go and you stand in front of a silhouette that has clearly delineated scoring rings, I've never seen that on a suspect. I've never seen a suspect wearing a shirt with a silhouette. And right now, on the record, will state that the first ex con that comes out with an LEPD silhouette tattooed all over his entire body, I'll buy him at dinner at Morton's Steakhouse. I'm sure that's going to come out someday, but that's not what you get. So we train to one standard, and most qualification courses are nominal at best, and you're doing the same course. It's when you come back six months later for 30 years on LEPD, our combat qual course remains the same. This is a standard. You're looking at budgets, you're looking at manpower pulling all the officers out. You have 10,000 officers. How are you going to train them all? How are you going to get them qualified? So for me, it's a real double edged sword. And the interesting thing is that the most well, let me put it this way. The greatest watershed event an officer will ever experience, and the most seminal event literally impact an entire department, is the application of deadly force. And yet, traditionally, throughout law enforcement, it is that aspect, the application of deadly force, the mechanics, knowledge of the law, articulation that is the least trained to that the least amount of money is budgeted for. So what you've just described is certainly troubling. It's something to which we don't have much. Even with the use of body cameras and this ubiquitous practice now of recording what the cops do, we don't have a ton of evidence of the poor performance of cops in the application of deadly force or just the obvious lack of training, because it's interesting. We should probably talk about the significance of video and the way in which video can even be misleading. But from a hand to hand weaponless altercation point of view is that now there's so much video evidence of cops not being trained in just how to physically restrain people. So there's just some amazing videos I could show you. And I think I'll put one or two online when we post this podcast, I'll put them on my blog. There's some amazing video of cops wrestling with suspects. Three cops trying to figure out how to subdue one clearly unarmed, small, little so one video I'll show you. These videos get circulated in the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu community because people are just a gas that no one really knows. At this point, 20 years after the Ultimate Fighting Championship, there are still cops who don't have sort of basic hand to hand skills, in grappling in particular. So there's this one video that has made the round and has commentary from Henry and here and Gracie, who are great jujitsu teachers. And it's, I believe, three cops, all of whom look like they're £220, trying to control an obviously drunk, much smaller shirtless, unarmed man, shoeless man. He's in stocking feet in a McDonald's on a slick floor. He's got literally no shoes. Three of them are trying to figure out how to bring him down and they can't solve the problem. And they go to a taser. Ultimately, they go to a taser and one tries to throw a front kick at him and can't do that. They ultimately TASE this guy repeatedly, right? And it's just the most just ghastly incompetence from a martial arts point of view. And I'm not actually judging the cops here. The problem is they haven't been trained. They haven't been given the tools they need to solve this problem. And there's another video, which perhaps you've seen, of what becomes a wrestling match that then winds up in a lethal force, or at least in a shooting in a Walmart parking lot with a kind of deranged family that just attacks the cops. I think this family had been harassing employees at this Walmart, and the cops come on scene and you see this all from Dashcam video, and it's a family of like, eight people, men and women. And one cop says, okay, we need to separate this group here. And they wanted to he wanted to control them by at first separating them, but the family refused to be separated, and they just, like, on cue became like the zombie family that was going to attack the cops. And it becomes this insane protracted ten minute wrestling match where the cops use every tool on their belts, from pepper spray to batons to tasers, totally ineffectually. One has his gun wrestled away from him, and it's all on camera. And it looks like, honestly, from the point of view of a trained martial artist. And again, this is not to judge these specific cops, but it looked like everyone had been dosed with some sort of neurotoxic agent where they just couldn't function properly. I'll show you these videos later. But in any case, so there's, I think, a reasonable understanding of what you can't do in a situation to control an agitated, strong, athletic person non lethally would in many cases dictate an escalation of force on the part of God. Well, your wonderful points again. And this is when I work on the streets and still know I work out all the time. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll to find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'll be speaking with Jacob Willink. Jocko is a former Navy Seal. He was a Navy Seal for 20 years and commanded a unit of Seals in the Battle of Ramadi, which is often acknowledged to be the toughest battle in our war in Iraq. And the unit he commanded became the most decorated special operations unit in that war. Jocko is also a black belt in Brazilian jiujitsu and really is just a rare authority on violence, its application in the world, the practical reality of it, the ethical imperative of it in certain circumstances. So it was a great privilege to speak to Jaco. I found our 2 hours together extremely useful, and I hope you feel the same way. I now give you Jocko Willink. So I'm here with Jaco. Willink. Jocko, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me on. First of all, congratulations on everything. You are exploding. Your book has exploded. Your podcast, the Jocko podcast has exploded, all in very quick succession. So the world has decided it needs more Jocko. That's awesome. I'm very happy for you. It's interesting to watch unfold. Like most people, I first heard of you on the Tim Ferris Podcast and then you, very shortly after that did one with Joe Rogan. And I would just say to our listeners, if you haven't heard those interviews, those are actually 5 hours of interviews, I think two with Tim and three with Joe. I recommend that you do that because I'm going to make a serious effort here not to duplicate those interviews. And those interviews were just awesome. So Jocko and I will wait for you, go off and listen to 5 hours of Tim and Joe, and we'll be right here. So your book, which also we're not going to talk about much, but which I love, I'm about two thirds the way through it, is called extreme ownership. And this is now part of really a wave of Navy Seal books. I've read a few of the other ones, american Sniper and Lone Survivor and I think a couple of others. And but what's unique about your book is that you this is not just a battlefield memoir. You are very explicitly relating the lessons learned as a commander of Navy Seals to business and leadership in general. And so that's a very unique angle. And I recommend that people again read that book, and this conversation will be no substitute for reading that book. One question on that is, there has been traditionally a taboo around Seals writing books and even talking about their careers. Has the taboo been lifted, or did you have to be very careful in how you approached writing the book? And have some of these other books not been so careful? What's happening with publishing and Navy Seals? Well, the way I was raised in the Seal teams was that you didn't talk about your job, and you definitely didn't go out and write books, and you just were the term that they fed us, which I ate and enjoyed and believed was, you are a quiet professional. That was the ethos of how we carried ourselves. So this idea of the quiet professional, you know, you do your job, you do what you're supposed to do, obviously doesn't entail writing books about what you do. Now, starting in the guy named Richard Marcinco, Dick Marcinco, wrote a book called Rogue Warrior. And this was after he had had a little bit of a rough exit from the Navy and had gotten in some trouble. And that book was huge, but and it definitely was, I would say, looked down upon by people within the community, within the Seal teams that, you know, this guy. You shouldn't go write a book. And so that's what I grew up with. Now, since the 911 and the war on terror has happened, obviously, there's been more books by Seals, by special operations guys across the board, by military people. So I think that there's just people want to know what we do and how we do it. When I say we, I mean people in the military. And I think that's why there's been some more books published on this subject. For Leife and I, LAIF is the person that I wrote the book with. There's another seal. We worked together on my last deployment to Iraq, and we both ended up in positions where we were teaching leadership inside the Seal teams. He was teaching it to the junior officers that were coming out of the basic Seal pipeline, and I was teaching it to the more advanced Seals that were actually in platoons, getting ready to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. So we had crystallized this knowledge from deployment, and we doctrinalized it really not to the full extent that we probably should have, but guys were always asking us, hey, do you have these lessons learned written down anywhere? And eventually we did put them down, but then when we got out, we both left the military. We both started working with we formed a company. We were working with various businesses, and the businesses that we were helping with their leadership started asking the same question do you have this written down? Is there any documentation on this? And eventually we said, okay, we got to write this stuff down and that's what we did and that's what ended up being the book. Well, again, it's a fascinating book and fusion of a war memoir with just the principles of leadership and just a straight up business book. So I recommend you guys check it out. But we're not going to talk about any of that. I want to talk about violence. I want to talk about violence really at every scale from war to personal self defense. I think we'll probably focus on war mostly, but you really strike me as someone who's in a unique position to give a very informed opinion on violence at every scale. And although you're probably not an authority now, if you ever were one, on what it's like to feel vulnerable as a man in our society, I mean, you're not a prime candidate for a mugging unless it's going to be Hickson, Gracie and his five friends mugging you in the parking lot. So you may be out of touch with certain realities that people confront in their lives, but for everything from just being a jiujitsu black belt to being a Navy Seal who saw serious combat, there's just violence at every scale. And even between those two extremes, there's law enforcement, which I heard you describe. I think it was in your book or in one of those interviews, maybe both. That part of your deployment to Iraq had the character of Baghdad SWAT, right. So it was less war making and more just sort of order making. And that comes with its own constraints, ethical and tactical. So let's just fill in a little bit of your background for people who did not take the assignment and go listen to 5 hours of you with Joe and Tim. When did you join the military and did you actually know you wanted to be a Seal going in or was that a later development? Yes, I knew I wanted to join the Seal teams. I wanted to be some kind of a commando my whole life, since I was a little kid, since I kind of remember wanting to do anything significant. I wanted to be some kind of a commando, some kind of a soldier. And as I researched and research is a strong word, as I found more out about the military, eventually I found out about the Seal teams and it was allegedly the hardest and the most difficult. And so that's what I went into. I think people know a fair amount about the Seals at this point, again, because of all the books and the related films, but just give me the lay of the land here. So is it in fact the single most elite force in the military or are there analogous special ops forces in the other branches that are every bit as rigorous? Or is there some actual hierarchy that's acknowledged even by non Seals, that Seal training is for whatever reason, pushing people to the highest standard of training. Every branch of the military has some form of special operations. I've worked with all of them. They're all tough guys. They're all great guys. And I think everyone has a mutual respect for each other and for the different training that we all go through. And it's all relatively similar, I would say. If there's anything that separates again, this doesn't make it better or worse, but one thing that the Seal teams does and the basic Seal training has is water and a lot of water work. And actually, if you hear Tim Ferriss talking about doing some of this water training that he's done, it's a real challenge for some people. And no doubt working in the water definitely makes you better at things because if you and I were going to go take down a building, could train you to do that in a pretty short period of time and you already know how to shoot. So we'd go over some basic tactics and it's not that hard. If I said, okay, before we go to take down this building, we're going to go on a boat and we're going to swim across the beach in big waves. We're going to get to dry land. We're going to make our guns work again. We're going to make sure our radios are still waterproof. Then we're going to patrol in wet and cold, and then we're going to take down the building. It's a lot harder. That's all there is to it. So the water is definitely provides a level of challenge that is very distinct to the Seal teams. Now, you guys haven't been seeing a lot of water, though, lately. It seems like the water training has been wasted in our recent engagements. It absolutely has been. I would say it hasn't been wasted, though, because when you have to perform something in the water all the time, when you do it on dry land, it's a lot easier. Right. So the training wasn't wasted. It was taken advantage of. But to your question, all the different military branches, the Marine Corps, the army, the Air Force, they all have their special operations unit, they all train hard, they're all great guys. They all have a little bit of a specific mission, but they're all, in my mind, all pretty much the same type of guys. So when you mean specific, is it something like Delta Force is more focused on hostage rescue, is that right? Correct. I think the best example is the Special Forces. The Green Berets. They're more focused on going and working with counterinsurgency situations with local forces, and they're very advanced in languages. So the Seal teams were really bad at languages in terms of the number of guys we have that speak other languages. And in the Green Berets, they have a lot more people that speak more languages. So that's a mission that they're going to excel at, whereas we're more of a direct action force or a special reconnaissance force? Is there any military skill that is focused to a greater degree in one special ops community more than another? For instance, like Sniping, is there a brand of sniper that is acknowledged to be more trained than any other, or snipers across each of those disciplines more or less interchangeable? This is like asking a Yankees fan, who's better, the Yankees or the Red Sox? Or is this? Well, I can tell you that the snipers that I've worked with from the Seal teams are outstanding. And the Seal sniper trading course is an unbelievably hard course, an unbelievably hard course that actually has a pretty significant attrition rate. And it's just a great course. The Seal snipers are great. Everyone. The army, the Marine Corps. We're always all focusing. We go to each other's schools. So I believe that they all produce good people, really solid people. And yes, I'm being politically sensitive to my answers to this question. Yeah. And I've just noticed that you've been in describing working with other ordinary soldiers, and even reservists, you've been incredibly respectful and grateful, and you have made no secret of how indispensable their bravery was in the Battle of Ramadi and the other engagements you fought in. And it was really great to hear in those other interviews, well, that one I would not hold back on at all. The bravery and the professionalism of our American soldiers that I work with and Marines was just phenomenal and humbling to be around them. And again, when you deal with special operations guys, this is what we want to do. This is what we love to do. It's what we want to do. You can ask any Seal. They'll tell you the same thing they want to do since they were a little kid, et cetera, et cetera, a regular soldier. Now, some of them are professional soldiers, and that's what they always wanted to do. But a lot of them are just people that that's a phase of their life that they're in. And so to ask these people going through a phase of their life that they're expecting to go out of in a year or two years, to ask them to do these extraordinarily risky things that take an immense amount of courage and bravery and to watch them step up and do this over and over and over again despite casualties and losses and pressure. It's very humbling and amazing to watch. And that's why I would never hold back when talking about the American servicemen and women that I worked with, bravery is this maybe unique emotion in that you can't fake it because faking it is actually bravery. If you're terrified and you're merely acting brave and going through the motions and putting yourself in harm's way, that is what bravery is, right? There are other emotions where the counterfeit version of it is, in fact, a counterfeit. But it's the real thing. If you're terrified and you're then doing the thing that you're terrified to do. Yes, yes, to fake bravery is in fact to be brave. And they used to tell us false motivation is better than no motivation. In other words, it's better to be, yes, I'm excited to do this, even though you're not. I don't know if I believe that or not, but I kind of do. I kind of do. And I would see people's motivation turn as they falsified their motivation, for whatever reason, and then they become, you know what? Let's let's do this. Let's get this done. Well, you talk about that in the book and elsewhere, even on your own podcast. You talk about in the face of being told the most deplorable thing about what is about to happen or likely to happen on a patrol, you habitually say good or is another good day, or what's the actual phrase you were using? Well, the one that I just talked about on a recent podcast was good. This was one of my subordinate leaders, one of my brothers, actually, one of my good friends. And he pointed out to me that whenever something was going bad, for instance, he'd say, oh, we got this intel that on this target we're going on to, there's going to be all kinds of IEDs, and they're saying there's going to be dozens of enemy fighters. And I'd say, Good, that means we have an opportunity to get after it. So you definitely get in that mindset where you look at the challenges as being a good thing. So actually, I was going to ask you this later, but it seems relevant here. And again, I'm kind of creeping up on what I consider our main topic here, but what explains the lack of this attitude and the lack of success that we've seen among the troops that we've trained? The Afghans and the Iraqis you fought in the Battle of Ramadi, and Ramadi, as most people know, was then lost to the Islamic State, and now it's just recaptured, like yesterday. I think we have the Iraqi army has like 80% of it under control, but there were descriptions of I think this might have been in Mosul, but 18,000 Iraqi troops melting away in the face of 400 ISIS fighters. And there have been similar things with the Afghan troops, with the Taliban. Now, presumably this is the same population of people, except for perhaps some percentage of foreign recruits to the side of the ISIS and the Taliban. We're talking about Afghans and Iraqis in both cases, but the troops that we have trained often just show such low morale or such an unwillingness to engage the insurgencies in those countries. Can you say something about that? Because from a civilian side, it begins to look a little mysterious what's happening there. But you've fought alongside Iraqis and you've put your life in the hands of Iraqis. You've risked your life for Iraqis. And I know you don't want to cast aspersions upon Iraqis and Iraqi troops in general. But what explains this, again, 400 ISIS troops and 18,000 Iraqi soldiers disappearing. Can you explain that to me? Yes, I can. War is a test of will, and that's it. And when you have 10,000 or 18,000 or 10,0000 troops that do not have the will and there's two pieces of this will, and I've said this before, so I don't mean to rehash, but it is the answer. You have to have the will to kill people. That is what war is. And you are going to kill the enemy. That is what your goal is, is to kill them. And when you kill the enemy, because the nature of war is confusing and there's the fog of war and it's an imperfect situation, you are going to kill innocent people. This is another part of war that is horrible and ugly and it is factual. This is what is going to happen. So when you engage in war, you must have the will to kill. You're going to focus as much as you can, obviously, on the enemy. But there will be innocent bystanders, there will be women, there will be children that are going to die, because this decision has been made that a war has to be fought. On top of that will to kill, you also have to have the will to die. That means on an individual level, that means your friends, the people you're with, that means that you have to have that will. And so what happens when you have these ISIS fighters that through their mental state that they're in, they have clearly demonstrated that they have the will to kill everyone innocent civilian, women, children, they have that will because of their belief in martyrdom. They obviously have the will to die. Now, you take the Iraqi soldiers and well, they don't have those strong beliefs. And part of it is because they don't have yet, maybe they'll never will, maybe they've had flashes of it, but they don't have this unified feeling of unity around the nation of Iraq where they consider themselves an Iraqi first, whereas they consider themselves their religious sect, their tribe, their family. There's a lot of other things in there besides being Iraqi. So when this fight is a will, it's the will of ISIS and what their beliefs are against not so strong of a will of Iraq. This is what happens. You bring up a good point about the just the role that religious sectarianism plays there, because you have a Sunni Shia problem, in particular in Iraq, which certainly erodes almost all the Sunni will to fight against ISIS because they perceived themselves to be at the mercy of the predominantly Shia government. And by the way, you gave me a nice out on this question and said, I don't want you to sit here and disparage the Iraqi soldiers. And I have not even the remotest, close level of respect that I have for the American soldiers. I mean, the Iraqi soldiers, we saw them do all kinds of horrible things. We had companies of Iraqi soldiers quit. We had battalions of Iraqi this is when I was there battalions of Iraqi soldiers, five or 600 soldiers were not fighting anymore. So that did not I have no problem saying that these are facts. Yeah. In your book, you describe one raid where you literally had to physically push and drag Iraqi soldiers with you through the door in the middle of a hostage rescue. This is the core of what I want to talk about. I perceive in my audience and certainly in Joe Rogan's audience and in our political environment in general, and it's disproportionately a problem among liberals of whom I count myself among just pervasive doubts about the legitimacy of violence in any context is war ever necessary? And I think people there are many people who have a default answer to that question, which is no, that it's always an ethical failure on some level. And it strikes me that when you have the most civilized people disproportionately doubting that war is ever necessary, that you have a problem defending civilization at a certain point against its genuine enemies. And these doubts are not they're understandable on some level. So, for instance, I heard you talk on your podcast. You expressed great admiration, which I share for Dan Carlin's podcast, in particular his series on World War I, Countdown to Armageddon. And, listeners, if you have not heard Dan Carlin on World War I, your other assignment, which will now take you 20 hours, is to go listen to that. I've repeatedly called that a masterpiece, and it really is. So you have in a war like World War I, which any way you look at it, looks like the most pointless sacrifice of human life and wealth. You had a generation of young men in Europe just fed into a meat grinder for no apparent purpose. You have them fighting for months on end to capture another 100 yards of farmland, to move their trenches forward. And even more horribly, this whole escapade was engaged from the point of just this delusional idealism about war. You just had this romantic idea about how glorious it was going to be to go to war, and then they get there and they're just pulverized. And people, I think, draw the wrong lesson from this and people draw the lesson that basically this is what war always is, right? It's always this pointless, it's always this unnecessary. There's always a kind of moral equivalence to both sides where it's just sort of the needless sacrifice of human life on both sides. And there are no bad guys, really. So there are two moments in your podcast with Rogan that I just want to revisit, and I think we're going to have to make a few passes on this before I'm satisfied that we have performed an exorcism on the ghost of Pacifism and Cynicism. But at one point you talked about fighting for our freedom over there. And what I detect in Joe's audience is just a tsunami of cynicism on that point, like, what the fuck are you talking about? You're not fighting for our freedom or anyone's freedom over there. This was a misbegotten war. It was born of our lust for oil. The Carlyle Group pulled the strings and you went over there and you killed people for no reason. And this was just the prosecution of, at best, selfish national interests where we harm innocent people. And you just spoke about the unavoidability of collateral damage. And that is an excruciating fact of war at this point. And it's only becoming more excruciating. In fact, it's so excruciating, we're so aware of the costs of war, even though we conceal them from ourselves, that one wonders whether we are up to fighting certain necessary wars, given those cause. Could we bomb Dresden? Now, I think you could argue the bombing of Dresden was not necessary to win World War II, but we did things in fighting that necessary war, which now we would find totally indefensible because we have so much more information. So fighting for our freedom is one concept that I want to talk about. And there was another moment in Rogan's podcast where you, where you talked about this shibboleth of liberal anti war speak, which is that you can't bomb an idea, right? And you say, well, no, actually, you, you can bomb an idea. So let's talk about that for a moment. I think this notion of you and our military fighting for freedom in Iraq can be defended even if you think the war in Iraq was on balance, absolutely unwise right, that it was the wrong war to fight. And I think, I think a case can be made that it was the wrong war to fight. I would like to know what you think about that. But I think that even if you were going to bracket the conversation by saying, listen, we should never have gone into Iraq given the outcome or given the misinformation or lies about WMD, even in that context, you can argue that you were fighting for freedom and that on the ground in Iraq, you were trying to make life better for Iraqis who didn't want to live in this internessing, hell realm of civil war. So I just want to get your take on both these concepts of fighting for freedom, perhaps even in a war that in hindsight doesn't look ideal, and this notion of you just can't bomb an idea. War is not the answer to ISIS or fascism or anything else that ails us. As I talked about on, on Joe Rogan being on the ground in Iraq with Iraqi people, they wanted us to be there. They wanted us to help them and to provide them with security. And they want to live in peace and stability, and there is no doubt in my mind about that. And that is what we were doing there on the ground, fighting to help these people. And in the beginning, it was obviously to get rid of Saddam Hussein and that regime. But by the time 2006 rolled around now there was an insurgency, it was ISIS, and they wanted to take control of Ramadi, and they actually had control of Ramadi, but they were enslaving the people, brutalizing them, raping them, murdering them, torturing them. That is what was happening. We went in and stopped that from happening and gave them back their freedom. We didn't impose any government on them. We didn't take any oil from them. We gave them the opportunity for peace and stability in that city and in Iraq. So that is what we did. Yeah. One thing I would point out here is that even if you think that we shouldn't have gone into Iraq, I'm on record here as being neither for nor against the war. I've always said that I didn't know what I thought about the war in Iraq, except for the fact that it looked like a dangerous distraction from the war in Afghanistan, that we looked like we could very well botch, and that, in retrospect, it looks like a disaster. Given the rise of ISIS and given the way we left. But even if you were going to say that, if you're going to say, with the benefit of hindsight, we should not have gone into Iraq, you are obliged to admit ethically how depressing a claim that is. Because what you're claiming is we had this hostage situation where Saddam Hussein is keeping a nation of 30 million people hostage to just a horrific totalitarian government. And what you're saying is that Iraqi society was so fractured along religious lines that it required a dictator of this barbarity to keep the lid on the sectarian civil war that then exploded when we took the lid off and left. And that's a very depressing claim about the the state of religious sectarianism, and it certainly doesn't make the influence of religious certainty on the ground there look good. One thing to interject on that is when you talk about the people of Iraq and how this sectarian violence was waiting to explode, and you see that on TV sometimes, it's the equivalent of seeing a riot in America and thinking that's what America is, because we'd go do operations in Baghdad and there's normal life happening. Not everyone is bent on this religious violence. They're not they're normal. I shouldn't say normal, but there's people that their focus in their life is not their religion. Their focus in life is selling more cars or making more bottles or doing whatever it is they're doing, raising their kids and getting to school. And that's what their focus is. That's what a majority of Iraq is. And it's very easy to lose sight of that. When what we see on the news is sectarian violence is one side of Shia and one side of Sunni and how they're clashing. That is not what the normal, average Sunni person is doing. The average Sunni person in Ramadi is cleaning their store and putting new product up on the shelves and fixing one of the cars that they're working on. That is what is happening in Iraq. And we so often lose sight of that, that Iraq is not the very small percentage of people that are fully engaged in this sort of political or religious strife. The vast majority of people are people like in America, where if you go down Main Street, USA, what are they doing? They're living their life. They're trying to pursue happiness. That's what Iraq is. And unfortunately, what we see, and it gives us the impression that that's what all of Iraq is. What we see is a bunch of people bent on violence and that is not what Iraq is. I'm glad you said that because that even makes this admission even more excruciating and it's worth pointing out. So you have people, totally normal people, who really do just want to live free and self actualized lives. They're not looking to stone people to death for adultery and they're not looking to wage jihad against apostates within their own society or export their jihad to the rest of the world. And so you're talking about people just like you and me, who, by dint of just sheer bad luck, they've been born into a society where their intellectual interests and their desire for freedom are just smashed at every turn. By, one, the dictator who's keeping a lid on sectarian violence and two, the sectarian violence that is ready to rise up and destroy everything. So then you're saying that we, whether we as America or we as the rest of the civilized world, can't go in there and offer any help to these people and that in retrospect, it looks like the wrong thing to have attempted it. So that is, if you're going to be critical of the war in Iraq, you have to just own the fact that yet, yes, you're saying that these are hostage crisis for which we don't have a remedy and some people are unlucky. You're unlucky to be a girl born in Afghanistan, but I, as a peacenik, am in principle against anyone trying to come in and rescue you because of the cost, because of collateral damage. And I think it makes collateral damage is such an ugly fact on every level. It's ugly that it's impossible to wage war in such a way so as to not kill innocent people. And it's totally understandable that it produces more enemies for us on some level. I don't know what the rates of that conversion are, but it wouldn't be a surprise if you are an ordinary Iraqi or an ordinary Pakistani, and you just had half your family blown up in a drone strike, that that would make you, in some basic sense, irretrievably at odds with the people who did that to you. Whether or not you had any sympathy for Jihadism. So talk a little bit more about collateral damage, and, I mean, how you think about it in terms of the legitimacy of trying to do good with force in the world, given that you really can't avoid collateral damage. You can't completely avoid collateral damage. But I'll tell you what, america goes through extreme lengths to absolutely minimize collateral damage. The amount of risk that gets taken by American forces to avoid collateral damage is immense, and they avoid it on a regular basis. I mean, we don't carpet bomb anymore. We don't do Dresden anymore. We don't do that. To get bombs dropped in the city of Ramadi was an extremely difficult task to get done because of the threat of collateral damage. Despite being fired from a building, you know where these enemy are and they're inflicting damage and killing people, but yet there's unknown areas around it. So therefore we're not going to drop a bomb on it. We do that all the time. We are very, very judicious in the way we execute operations. Now, that being said, because war isn't perfect, there are situations where innocent people die. Yes, that that does happen, and it's awful and it's horrible. And this idea that now we've created even more terrorists. I think it's a case that could be made, but it's not the 100%, and you don't for every innocent person that dies, that you go and you you know, we we actually approach those families and we go and explain to them what happened, and we give them money, and we try and help them rebuild whatever went wrong. That is what America does when we make these mistakes. So so I think we just kill these people and then that's it? No, we go in and try and repair the damage as much as we can. Of course, we can't bring back loved ones, but we try to make this up and explain the situation. And so there's not a 100% conversion rate of you killed my brother by accident while we were being terrorized by ISIS and in the crossfire, my brother got killed. And I think it came from America. And now, therefore, I'm going to wage jihad against America. That's not a 100% conversion rate. In fact, I would tell you that it's probably a much lower conversion rate than you would think. These people are at war. They've been at war. They understand what war is. They know that war is imperfect. But ISIS doesn't even come back and make those apologies. They don't come back and say, we're sorry. They don't come back and say, let us rebuild your house. Let us give you some financial support for the son that you lost who is providing this income to your family. That's fine. Let us take care of you. ISIS doesn't do that. ISIS causes collateral damage all over the place. And so I think it's a little bit of a stretch to think that there's this 100% conversion rate, and I think that the conversion rate is actually small enough that it makes it it's hard to say it's worth it, but we take calculated risks with collateral damage, and we have to. Otherwise, we can't do anything. You cannot execute a war with zero risk of collateral damage. It cannot happen. I would love for it to happen, but it cannot happen. So therefore, you have to mitigate the risk as much as possible and go forward. That's the way it works. Yeah. And it just seems to me that when you're talking about situations of moral emergency of this sort so you have ISIS raping women by the tens of thousands and crucifying children and burying people alive. This goes to the issue of of moral equivalence or the lack thereof. I mean, people imagine that we are no better than our enemies in this case, even in this case. And in some sense, I confront people who think we're worse than our enemies because we made them. We created ISIS because we went into Iraq. We used to fund al Qaeda against the Soviets, right? So that somehow this causes them to lose sight of the very different human projects we have advertised here. And, again, this comes down to human intentions. What kind of world do you want to build? If I gave you a magic wand and you could just create the world as you saw fit, I have no doubt that you would create just abundance everywhere for everybody, right? So there'd be a Starbucks on every corner, and there'd be a Jiujitsu School on every corner, and people would just be able to live out their dreams, and I would do that. And the people who got us into these various wars, many of whom have been demonized to an extraordinary degree, and many of whom who I share very few political principles with, someone like Dick Cheney, right. I think if you gave him a magic wand, he would not create a hell realm for people in the Middle East. He would make the Middle East more or less like Nebraska or Florida. And you ask yourself, what would Abu Bakhar al Baghdadi do with a magic wand? He is telling us what he would do with every fucking video. Right? They're making no secret of the vision of life that they are aspiring to. And again, it's important to point this out that there is no moral equivalence here. The kinds of just rapacious evil you see in an ISIS video is not an accident. It's not an aberration of their program. It's not their version of the Mi Lie massacre. It's not the thing that they have to go back and apologize to their society for and say, I don't know how we did this, but we were pushed into extremists, and there's a lot of soul searching necessary. No, no. Every journalist put in an orange jumpsuit and murdered is an absolutely fine point on a vision of life that they are not keeping secret. In fact, this is part of their recruitment material. This is PR for them. This is what they think. And in fact, no will successfully bring like minded people to their shores to fight alongside them. And again, this is a minority of the Muslim community worldwide. This is not synonymous with Islam, but this is a global jihadist insurgency that we're confronting in many places. So I guess I want to just linger for a moment on again, this is a quote from your interview with Joe. This notion of you can't bomb an idea. So if you can't bomb this idea out of them, by definition, force is not the appropriate response to ISIS, because ISIS is an idea. What do you have to say to that? Good luck. Set up a series of debates with ISIS and try and use our logic to defeat them? Is that the other proposal? What is the alternative? There's an assumption that ISIS is the hardest example to absorb by this line of thinking. But generally speaking, people think that our own selfish behavior on the world stage, our own unapologetic theft of or just commandeering of resources, has created people with, quote, legitimate grievances all over the world, especially in the Muslim world now. And ISIS is, on some level, an expression of those legitimate grievances. And if we were better actors, if we were more apologetic, if we shared more wealth more of the time, if we just got out of Muslim lands entirely, right? If we were not protecting the Saudis, we were not over there in any sense, if we just kept our culture to ourselves, then we would discover that everyone wants the same thing out of life on some level, and that this violence would no longer be directed at us. We have created this because we are, in some sense, literally people will say, the US. Is the greatest terrorist organization in world history. Again, this is the center of Joe's demographic. This is the kind of thing I get thrown at me whenever I talk to him on his podcast. This is what Noam Chomsky has done to the human mind at the global scale. So the thing I wanted to bring you back to is this notion that you can't bomb an idea. As you pointed out with Joe, Nazism was an idea. Slavery was an idea in the United States held to tenaciously that the military nationalism of Japan was an idea after those wars, which were, as you point out, bombing on a scale that now we can't even contemplate. Right. And probably shouldn't contemplate. Germany and Japan are friends, right? I mean, the idea of Nazism was successfully bombed out of Germany. Yes. And let's not forget that both Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany would never have stopped their drive to take over the entire world. They didn't have a border that they were going to. They were going for world domination. So, yeah, we had to stop them. And there was only one way that they were going to be stopped, and that is through the use of force and violence. The other thing to point out there is that you could see our intentions, our fundamentally benign intentions for the world and even for our enemies in the aftermath of those wars. Because what do we do to Germany and Japan? Did we just go in and start raping people and steal their land? And we rebuilt them into financial superpowers. We wanted peaceful collaborators, economically and culturally, and there's no question that's what we want in the Middle East, too. So let's just zero on the notion of pacifism here because I find it very frustrating to encounter pacifism. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. OK, well, this is going to be an Ask Me Anything podcast. I had an interview with Miriam Namazi that got postponed. That will happen probably in a few weeks, and I'm looking forward to that. And so I've got your questions here coming in from Twitter and email. Actually, the first one is on something related to Mario Namazi. I'll just I'll deal with that only to postpone it, really. But many of you asked what I thought about the, quote, open letter to Sam Harris that Ina at Nice Mangoes wrote alleging that Douglas Murray is a bigot. And Murray actually circulated that on Twitter. That's how I noticed it. So, Ina, who's this blogger who many of you probably know wrote an open letter to Ben Affleck after my collision with him. She's an ex Muslim who has made some very nice noises on this topic. But she attacks Douglas in this letter as a bigot and claims that his views about immigration and the refugee crisis are bigoted. I don't know if there's anything else she believes that constitutes a sign of his bigotry. And a few other people, like Atticus Amber, another person I noticed on Twitter, have raised a more general concern about taking care not to provide far right bigots cover in how we talk about Islam and Islamism. And this was also the subject of Ina's letter to me. I definitely share the general concern that we not provide cover for bigots, but I really reject this claim about Douglas. I don't think Douglas is a bigot. I don't think anything he said in my discussion with him on my podcast suggests that he is. I really think his heart and mind are in the right place. That doesn't mean you necessarily agree with his views about immigration. But I think let me just table this now, because I will get into this in depth when I speak with Mariam Namazi, because she substantially shares Ina's views, as far as I can tell. In that case, a retweet I think did equal an endorsement. And there's a lot to talk about with Mariam, specifically on the topic of immigration in Europe, because she is for open borders, which is not a position I share. And in that context, I'll be happy to defend Douglas, who I think is just genuinely afraid about the destruction of European culture and one doesn't need to be a bigot in order to worry about that. So, to be continued on that topic, question number two how should we differentiate labels used for clarity and labels used in a way that encourages tribalism? This comes from Maggie, whose Twitter handle is a simple hedonist. And this is related to another question I got about the term regressive leftist. Actually, several people worried that this is being applied almost at random to people who we don't like. And in a very tribal way, I think labels have to be used carefully and accurately. And I do think people are using regressive leftist in a way that doesn't totally track its intended meaning. I would reserve it for any so called liberal who is either explicitly or tacitly taking the side of highly illiberal people, very likely in the Muslim community based on political correctness or a misplaced concern about racism. So the classic case of this, you see with people like Glenn Greenwald, who just reflexively, it seems, aligns with theocrats, protecting them from criticism and labeling anyone who would criticize their worldview as a bigot or a racist. So it's on that specific point and where you have people who should be committed, and in fact are committed in every other mode of life to free speech and gay rights and the rights of women, but who can't follow those commitments to their logical conclusion in the presence of usually Muslim intolerance. And the reason for that is simple. There's this underlying software routine they're running on their brains, which, one, privileges a concern about bigotry and racism over everything else. And two, in the foreign policy domain, they more or less blame everything that's wrong with the world on the west and on colonialism and on US foreign policy in particular. And so you have those two commitments aligning to make any moral clarity on the question of, let's say, how women are treated in Muslim societies really difficult to attain. So that's where I would say we should reserve the use of regressive left or regressive leftist, the person who is in fact a liberal, except where liberalism really is needed at this moment to protect the most vulnerable people in the most intolerant communities on earth. Okay, next question. What about the idea of free won't as opposed to free will? This comes from Matthew Hendrich. Free won't is this idea that I believe Michael Shermer used in his recent book The Moral Arc, but it comes from Benjamin Labette, and I'm sorry, I never know whether he pronounced his name Benjamin Lebe or Benjamin Lebet. He's no longer alive to to consult, and I only ever see it written. But I'm going to go with Labette, benjamin Lebett, who famously gave us some early neurophysiological results on the topic of free will using EEG, and who showed that you could predict a person's motor response some hundreds of milliseconds up to half a second before they were consciously aware of having intended to do something. He then came forward with this idea of free won't that although free will was difficult to justify in light of these results he thought that we have veto power and could cancel an action at the last minute and that this offered some freedom. And I believe he published this first in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. I would have to look, but I recall reading a paper from him on this topic. This never made any sense at all to me because whatever the neurological precursors are of the veto those two are being kindled and made effective by processes which no one is conscious of. Now, I don't think Labette ever did an experiment looking for the timing difference there between when one is conscious of one's veto and when it's actually kindled. But surely there's a time difference there. And again, even if there weren't this is often a misunderstanding about my argument against free will. It's not just that there's a time difference. It's not just that there is a period where neurophysiologically we can detect an intention or a motor plan and then this only becomes conscious some hundreds of milliseconds later. Even if we were conscious at the first instant of this plan arising in the brain or of the veto arising in the brain its mirror rising in that moment is also inscrutable. It's also compatible with a total lack of free will. The time. Lag is slightly more inconvenient for anyone who wants to argue for free will. Because what it demonstrates is that there is a period where you still think you are free to make up your mind where you still think you are making up your mind, where you still think you have not decided what you will do. And yet what you will do is in a very real sense determined by the state of your brain at that moment. And this must be true to some degree with any veto of a motor plan. But again, I think in a deep sense the illusioness of free will is not dependent on any gap there between the arising of the intention and its conscious execution. So I hope that was clear. I don't think free will gives you any more freedom than the more common notion of free will. But of course, it's also a fact about the human mind. We veto various intentions from time to time. We intend to do something. We're about to reach for it, we're about to say something and then we think better of it and we cancel that plan. But again, the moments where you do that just pay attention, that is inscrutable. You can't actually account for why you do it at that moment or why it's effective in that moment, why you do it precisely at the moment you do do it. I mean, it's all being pushed forward into consciousness by processes of which you are not conscious and which you did not bring into being. I think there's another question about free will coming up, and perhaps I'll go over that ground again. For anyone who's mystified many of you are asking me, why on earth am I voting or planning to vote for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Well, it's not for any deep conviction about Clinton's integrity or honesty. I share the common perception of her as a political opportunist. I think she really wants to be president. I don't doubt that she also wants to live in a nice world and help people. But if you get one thing from the Clintons, it is their desire to be in power and on the top of the mountain. And there is a basic insincerity there. There's an endless appetite for political calculation in place of obvious candor, and it is definitely grating, and it doesn't inspire trust. If you ever heard her trying not to admit that she had changed her mind about gay marriage in an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air I think this happened about two years ago. You'll see everything that's wrong with her approach to communicating the workings of her own mind. It's the most excruciating five minutes of radio I can remember hearing where she's becoming more and more defensive, more and more irate. That Terry would suggest that she had changed her mind on this topic, whereas she had actually changed her mind on the topic. It's just unbelievable. But she's changed her mind to the right position on that topic. And I think she's, you know, despite the fact that she will say that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam and that Islam is a religion of peace, and she will sound like a fairly delusional person when talking. About the conflict in the Middle East. I'm reasonably confident that she understands what is actually going on there and that she's one of the grown ups who will be able to respond to crises there in an intelligent way. I imagine she will continue Obama's policies to some significant degree. I can't claim to know that about Bernie Sanders. I don't think he has thought about foreign policy very much. He certainly hasn't said much about it. The little he has said makes me worry that he's been somewhat infected by Noam Chomsky's worldview, which I think is the moral black hole swallowing everything on the left side of the political spectrum. So I don't actually know whether we can trust Sanders to be wise on what I consider the most crucial question of foreign policy, which is our fight against global jihadism. And there are many other questions where I would expect Hillary to be far more seasoned and smarter, frankly. On foreign policy, whether it's with Russia or China or any other hard case, I agree that the influence of money in politics and wealth inequality, these are huge issues that we have to get our hands around. I suspect that the difference between Clinton and sanders on those topics is not so much a matter of what they want to accomplish. But I think Sanders is making promises he can't possibly keep there. He's clearly an idealist, and his idealism will be smashed if he was ever in office having to deal with Congress. So I think that I think these are empty promises, albeit revolutionary ones, that he's making on those topics. But most important, far more important than anything I have just said is the fact that I think Sanders cannot get elected in the general election. Now, I know this will raise the ire of all of his fans who are aware of national polls where he's beating Ted Cruz, for instance, and Hillary isn't. But Sanders has not been hammered for the better part of a year by the Republicans because he's not been a plausible candidate until now. If he were the Democratic nominee, a billion dollar apparatus on the Republican side would do nothing but emphasize his identity as a socialist, right? There is no way this country is electing somebody who has to nuance the term socialism in a general election. It's worse than being an atheist at this moment. It's not the only strike against him, but I think it's a devastating one. So I think Nominating Sanders would be to virtually guarantee a Republican victory in a year where the Republican candidates are both less sane and less competent than usual. There's just no reason for the Democrats to lose this election, and I think it would be terrible if they did. I think the prospect of having Cruz or Trump as president is an extraordinarily scary one for different reasons in each case. But I think the only grown up in sight here is Clinton. And that doesn't mean I don't have great reservations about her. But I think she's smart and competent and knows how to compromise so as to get some things done in government. And I certainly can't say that about Sanders across the board, so take that as a tepid endorsement of necessity for Clinton. But that's why I've said what I've said about Hillary versus Bernie. Next question. There were several questions about Noam Chomsky's interview with Medi Hassan on Al Jazeera, where Chomsky actually greenwalded me to some degree, which is amusing. He claimed that I'm someone who specializes in hysterical slanderous charges against people he doesn't like. I'd love to know where I'm guilty of that. If I've ever said anything inaccurate, that is slanderous against the people I don't like. I wish he would point it out. In our email exchange, he hurled this charge at me. But the substance of his charge amounted to a pedantic and evasive distinction without a difference. I had said that he never had considered the intentions of the United States versus those of her enemies, and he insisted that he had considered them. And it was a baseless slander for me to suggest otherwise. But he totally disregarded the significance of intention discounted. It said, you can't possibly know intentions because people lie about them and at one point even inverted their significance, suggesting that not intending harm made one somehow more culpable for evil than intending it. It struck me as a fairly crazy view, but I was eager to talk about it and in the end I couldn't figure out what his specific view was, apart from the fact that it was absolutely clear that it was different from mine in precisely the way that I said it was. He believes that considering intentions in cases like this is a sign of moral confusion, whereas I believe in certain cases it is the only difference between good and evil. Because good people can create immense harm by accident and evil people can sometimes do conventionally good things, seemingly good things, in an effort to do some larger harm, right? If they're manipulating people or they can also just do good things by accident, right? If a man kicks a puppy in the street and unbeknownst to him, he actually kicks it out of the way of a passing car and saves its life inadvertently. The effects of that isolated action are good, but we wouldn't call him a good person. He was kicking puppies for the fun of it. This is Moral Philosophy 101. Chomsky can't seem to get his head around it and in this interview with Medi Hassan, when asked to rank the respective evils in the world, he comes right out and says that the US and Britain are off the charts and the most evil regimes in how they've behaved on the world stage. Now, I think that is a frankly crazy point of view. It's a point of view you can only arrive at by totally disregarding the intentions of our governments, the kind of world we want to build, what we would do if we had even more power, and the intentions of our enemies. In this case, it was the Islamic State that was being talked about. So I don't want to go over this ground again. I think you guys know how I think intention functions here. Intention is the only guide to what someone's going to do next, right? It's the only guide to what they will do if they have the power to do it. That's why intentions are morally important. That's why there's a huge difference between the person who injures you by accident and feels sorry over it and the person who injured you intentionally and wants to do you further harm in the future. The injury could be the same. The only difference, and it's an enormous one, is the intention behind the action. So Chomsky seems to simply count the bodies and this is just a crazy thing to do. Just think of World War II. Someone might have suggested this analogy to me on Twitter or by email and I think it's a good one if you're just going by body count, right? Well, more Germans died than Americans in World War II. So you look at what we did and you look at what the Germans did. And with respect to the conflict between the US. And the Third Reich. Well, the US. Looks worse. We killed more Germans. Right? I guess we're morally worse than the Nazis there. Does that make any sense to anyone? The importance of intention is obvious because our intentions were revealed once we won that war. What did we do to Germany? We rebuilt Germany. It would have been fairly different if we had conquered Germany only to then go in and rape all the women, enslave all the children, and kill all the men, right? That's a rather big difference. And you would have seen that difference had we intended to behave that way. Chomsky ignores all this, and it's mind boggling to me that anyone considers his views on this topic morally sane. Much less important to consider now, is that a slanderous charge against him? I don't think so. I listened to the whole interview with Medi Hasan. He said many other things that were less crazy than that, and he said a fair amount that was just as crazy. He claims to be even more concerned about jihadism than I am, but he purports to be drilling down to its root cause, which, as was obvious from the context he believes is U. S. Foreign policy. We created global jihadism according to Chomsky. Okay, well, good luck with that. My analysis of the roots of jihadism can fully absorb the reality of blowback, the fact that we funded Al Qaeda against the Soviets. Did we create the doctrine of jihad? Have we created a belief in martyrdom in paradise? Are we responsible for the fact that tomorrow morning some bright guy in London or Antwerp or Paris or Brooklyn is going to wake up and decide to fight for ISIS? No. The real answer to the riddle of jihadism is both simpler and more complicated than what Chomsky is alleging. And his emphasis is just all wrong and reliably wrong on this topic, as is the emphasis of everyone influenced by him. It seems to me no question that Chomsky is the godfather of the regressive Left. If responsibility for this moral confusion and political masochism can be laid on anyone's head, it's Chomsky's. And that's why I would have loved to have had a real conversation with him on this topic. Because if he's misunderstood, well, then I would like to cease to misunderstand him. But unfortunately, I think he's understood all too well, and it's time people stopped listening to him. Next question. What was the most unexpected and or remarkable audience reaction during your recent tour of Australia with Majid? And this came from someone named Good Life decoder on Twitter. Most unexpected or remarkable audience reaction? Well, first let me say I loved meeting you all in Australia. Those of you I met, I feel I need to apologize for a couple of things. One is my jet lag. I was just hammered by jet lag there. And though I attempted to rally, I don't think I was fooling anyone. It's just it is what it is. But I was pretty tired at each of those events and some of you noticed that Majid and I had a good laugh in the one of the book signing lines. I think no less than five people came up to me and, you know, Majid was sitting right next to me. We're both signing books. No less than five people came up and said, man, you look exhausted. And one person came up and said, Just don't die. Right? So Majid, for the rest of the trip, majid kept turning to me and saying, man, you look exhausted. So that and my my having said that, I'm not a fan of hip hop, got me trolled endlessly by Majid and the the other organizers of that trip. Anyway, just despite jet lag, we had a great time, and Majid was the highlight of those events. A few other things to know about that one is that every single Muslim group invited to those events declined and quite memorably. The Australian Muslim Students Association. I don't know how big that is, I might have that name slightly wrong, but some Islamic student group in Australia declared that Majid was not welcome in Australia. And to see Majid shunning by the Muslim community there was fairly sobering, given how reasonable and intelligent Majid is. But the most surprising audience reaction, actually, one person came up at the book signing from Pakistan and said to me, not to Majid, which was surprising, that I really should never doubt that my message is being heard, even among religious conservatives in Pakistan. He had been a devout Muslim and my YouTube videos apparently really got through to him and he was now a nonbeliever and quite happy to be out of the closet. And I think he was living in Australia now, but he watched my YouTube videos in Pakistan. That seems like an especially heavy lift for me. And I must say that when I put out books and videos and podcasts, I'm rarely thinking that someone in a truly conservative context in a place like Pakistan is being successfully reached by them. I know there are atheists and closeted secularists in countries like Pakistan who listen to this podcast and watch YouTube videos, because I hear from these people, but I rarely picture actually reaching someone who is devout and changing their mind in that context. So that was fantastic to hear. And I don't recall your name, but it was great to meet you. So I think that was the most the moment of most gratifying surprise from the trip. But it was great to travel with Majid and I really enjoyed Australia and hope to go back in the not too distant future. One other thing I should say about Australia is that while many people seem to love the events, I did hear some complaints about the format, that these were on stage interviews, so that I didn't give a proper talk. I just came on stage and was interviewed by different people in the different cities. And there's a strength to that format, but there's also an obvious weakness. The weakness is I don't prepare anything beforehand. I don't know what questions I'm going to be asked. I haven't prepared a lecture, I certainly haven't prepared slides, so it's just a conversation. And so I am at the mercy of whatever I get asked and it's all contemporaneous and I can wind up saying many things that you have all heard before, depending on what gets asked. I think some of you are not a fan of that format. I didn't dictate that format for the Australia tour. In fact, Think Inc only does events in that format. They want conversations between some interviewer and the person they're touring. And Neil degrasse Tyson and Cornell West and other people who preceded me in that speaker series engage the same format. I go both ways on that. Sometimes on stage interviews really work, sometimes they don't. But I acknowledge there is a difference there. And you are not getting my most polished treatments of specific topics that are foremost on my mind at that moment. You're getting my answer to whatever gets asked in the moment, which is precisely what you're getting in this podcast. So take it or leave it. Next question. Which misrepresentation of your views are you most tired of defending? This is from Amer Pars. I think it would have to be the nuclear first strike that I allegedly want to execute on the entire Muslim world. Yeah, that's the most depressing because I saw it spread and I was aware of doing nothing about it. I just didn't see the point of answering this charge. It was so stupid and really it was engineered by one person. Chris Hedges just went on his book tour and shouted this from the rooftops and it stuck. So, yeah, that's the most boring one, I believe. What does agency mean in the context of free will? Is the difference between involuntary and voluntary action only an indication of future behavior? And this is from Oliver Lyons Hartman. This is a good question. My disavowal of free will is not a denial of there being a difference between voluntary and involuntary action. Clearly there's a difference between what you intentionally do and what you do by reflex or unconsciously. And there are many different ways to see this difference. One is that voluntary action is something you can cease to do voluntarily or in response to some disincentive. If someone says, Listen, I'm going to find you $100 if you park in that space again, well, then you can decide not to park in that space again. If you helplessly park your car there because you can't do otherwise, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll to find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I'm going to give you a podcast that I really just stumbled into. I was on a phone call with a man named Uma Valletti, a cardiologist who is now running a company called Memphis Meats, and he is trying to bring to market what he calls cultured meat. This is meat that is synthesized from cells of cows or pigs or any other common food animal, but is grown by processes that do not entail whole animals to be born and to live and die under the terrible conditions of factory farming or any other conditions. This is meat grown outside the usual biological process of being attached to a full animal, so it entails none of the animal suffering or, as you'll hear, the other environmental and health related concerns of factory farming. So, in any case, I was on the phone with Uma, and the moment we got into the conversation, I realized this is something that you guys should know more about. And so I just converted a phone call into a podcast. And that's how I'm bringing you now, uma Valletti, cardiologist turned entrepreneur and food producer. Enjoy. Well, I'm here with Uma Valletti, the CEO and co founder of Memphis meats. And as many of you know, I've been interested in vegetarianism and veganism and the the ethics of factory farming. And I stumbled into an interest in the emerging possibility of synthesized meat. And Uma is now running what appears to be the most prominent effort in this area. So, Uma, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Sam. I'm delighted to be here. So tell me a little bit about how you got into this and your background. You and I just got thrown together on Twitter. Maybe I should get into how we come to be talking to one another. I saw a tweet from the philosopher Peter Singer, who, as many people know, is a very outspoken defender of the rights of non human animals and has been probably more influential than anyone in philosophy to sensitize people to the ethical problem of what we eat and how we get food to our table. And so he sent out a tweet that contained a link to a Wall Street Journal article about your company, Memphis Meats. And so that's how I heard about you. And I was inspired on the basis of reading that article to put out a poll on Twitter asking people that if synthesized meat was molecularly identical to natural meat, to beef and pork and the other meats we eat, and it tasted the same, would you switch to eating it? And the results of that poll were something like 85% said they would switch. And then I asked those who said no the reasons why. The reasons why were pretty encouraging. Some said they were already vegetarian. About a quarter said they were already vegetarian and therefore weren't interested. So that's obviously not the market you're worried about. And then we'll get into the reasons why people are worried about synthetic meat. But let's get into your background and tell us what you hope to accomplish. Sure. Sam, first of all, I want to thank you for the random sequence of events that led us to talk to each other. And I want to thank Peter Singer for tweeting out our Wall Street Journal article that came out on Monday last week. And since then, it's absolutely been a global response that has inspired us and delighted us that there is a large group of people in the world waiting for a really good meat product that they could get behind and feel good about it. And having said that, to give a little bit of my background, I grew up in India in a family that ate meat, and I really enjoyed eating meat. And I think I had a series of experiences since from I was a twelve year old over five years, until I was 17, and essentially the first one was when I was twelve. I went to my neighbor, who was a good friend of mine, for his birthday party. And in the front of the house there was a well organized party, people gathering, dancing, eating. There was lots of meat out there and singing Happy Birthday, and I just happened to walk to the back of his house, and that's where they were slaughtering the animals that were becoming meat in the front. And to me, it was one of the stark images I remember in my head. There was a birthday and then there was a death day, all in the same span of time and kind of disturbed me. But I did like the taste of meat, and I continued to eat meat growing up into my teenage years. Where were you in India? In South India, in a place called Vijay Varada in Andhra Pradesh. And your family was or is Muslim or Christian or what's your background? So my grandfather was a freedom fighter, worked with Gandhi, and I come from a Hindu family. So you're not eating beef, I presume, right? I never ate beef growing up, but there was all other types of meat chicken, lamb, shrimp, fish. But beef was not part of our daily menu. But as I went to medical school after that, I went to medical school in South India in a place called Pandeshiri. The institution was called Jip Morin. It was a group of 50 students that were selected from the 25 states. Approximately about two kids per state were selected to get into this All India Institute. And we had to run our own cafeteria. It was all a student body led medical school for operations. And I was in charge of the cafeteria for three months. And I worked with lots of chefs and kind of made the cafeteria very popular because we served the best food out there. But I also went to the market to procure a lot of meats, and I actually saw large scale animal slaughter. And I was disturbed by a couple of things. One is the inefficiency with which we were converting all the vegetables and grains into a small amount of meat. But what bothered me was the way it was done. And I told myself on that day that if there is a major problem in the world I'd love to solve, this would be right up there at the top. And continued along on medical science. And I became a vegetarian in medical school, but really missed the taste of meat and really struggled to stay a vegetarian. And subsequent to that, I came to the US. I wanted to train at the Mayo Clinic. So I ended up doing cardiology and international cardiology and advanced imaging. And during that process, I really got interested in understanding muscle and how muscle regenerates from a heart perspective. And I was treating patients that had cardiac arrest or heart attacks, and I was doing procedures on them and injecting stem cells into their hearts and watching that muscle regenerate. And that kind of led to a thought of, why can't we do the same process and develop a method to grow meat? And it was a very out of the box idea. And as I started talking to people about it, I got very curious eyebrows lifting and saying, yeah, that's interesting. But no one really gave it much of a serious thought. And I started searching on the Internet and came across this organization called New Harvest, which was founded by a, you know, brilliant, you know, thinker philosopher named Jason Mathini in 2005, just about the time when I graduated from cardiology at the Mayo Clinic. And I wrote to Jason and said, jason, I really think this is something we should explore. And I used to go to Washington, DC. On a regular basis back then. And I met Jason, and he asked me to be on the board of New Harvest. And after serving on the board of New Harvest for three years, one thing that was abundantly clear to me was that there was a significant amount of interest globally, not just in the US. In places you traditionally called progressive, maybe in a few cities on the coast, but globally. People were asking, could we do this better? Could we do a more sustainable meat production methods or techniques. And there were academics writing, there were investors writing and just general public who were interested in this concept. And at that point, honestly, I never thought I would start a company myself. I was just trying to encourage academics or others to kind of start ventures in this area. And it was very enlightening for me because while there was a lot of interest among people, there was nobody willing to take the step and say, yes, I'm going to dedicate my career to make this a reality. There were a number of experts in tissue engineering, in academic labs who had phenomenal grants to do medical research. But for them to shift their career focus and also their labs focus into a totally new field which did not have any federal funding or NIH funding, was a big risk. And essentially academics are also running their own business because they have to run their labs, pay salaries to their PhDs who came believing in them and it was a huge risk for them to shift their priorities. And that's when I decided that, look, I've been thinking about this since I was twelve. I have a phenomenal career. I've been building in cardiology, but there are 35,000 cardiologists out there in the US. And I decided that I'm going to assemble a team myself and start a venture. And I interviewed a number of PhDs who had deep experience in skeletal muscle biology and found my co founder, whose name is Nick Genovese, who also has been on the same mission for the last 15 years. And we teamed up together and we said, let's put an idea to the venture capital group in San Francisco and if there is interest in the private sector, that is where we should be because we can motivate people to really help us solve this problem. And it's been a surreal experience in the last six months. We wrote to this venture capital group called SOS Ventures and within an hour of our application they were on the phone saying, we want you to move down here and we believe in this idea. And since then it's been a wave of interest from all kinds of people. Meat eaters who love eating meat and some who love the taste of meat but still had some guilt eating it. And then from vegetarians and vegans who were thinking if we should redefine the definition of what a vegetarian or vegan is if this meat comes from not slaughtering an animal. It's been a long answer for you, but I did want to walk you through the process. No, it's great. It's great to know how you came to this. This is such a pain point. And it's a pain point that I think many people are just reluctant to acknowledge given their attachment to and perceive dependence on eating meat. I'm now rather famously one of these people who stumbled into a kind of self intervention on my own podcast where I was talking to the psychologist Paul Bloom, and we each put on our shortlist of things that our future descendants would be scandalized by, as we are scandalized by the slaveholders in our recent past. We both said that our descendants will be horrified to know what we did with factory farming, the way we mistreated and killed billions of animals in a way that we managed to do more or less with a clear conscience, simply because we were keeping the details out of sight and out of mind. And just in that podcast, I more or less confessed my hypocrisy. I realized that I found the details morally indefensible and I found it kind of a starkly unethical area of my life around which I wasn't really paying much of a psychological cost because again, I wasn't thinking about it. Food was magically arriving on my plate every meal. And obviously, I'm not an idiot, I know what the details are, but I managed to not pay attention to them. And many, many millions of people, I would argue most people, are accomplishing the same psychological experiment in their own lives. And if they were forced to meditate on the details, both the ethical details and just the economic and environmental issues which perhaps we'll go into. Even if you're totally sanguine about killing animals and giving them miserable lives up until the moment of their deaths, it seems to me that very few people can be sanguine about the environmental and health and economic implications of what factory farming is doing to our world. So it doesn't surprise me at all that there is or will be a huge market for this if you can accomplish your aim. So let's talk a little bit about just what is entailed, what are the roadblocks between where you are now and what you would hope to accomplish. Yes. So let me explain to you the process in a very high level. What we're doing is instead of growing a full animal over twelve to 24 months and then slaughtering it and just taking the meat we like and throwing away the bones and the skin and the hair, what we're doing is we're growing the same meat from the fundamental building blocks of life, which are the meat cells. So we identify the best meat cells possible from whether it's a cow or a pig, let's say from a pork shoulder or a tops or lawn. And from these cells we identify those that are capable of self renewing themselves. And we cultivate them in a very safe and clean environment so that they can grow just like a small plant grows into a larger plant using nutrients, amino acids, peptides, minerals, vitamins, oxygen, sugars. And once we get the meat to a consistency that we like for the product, we harvest the meat. And if we harvest the meat early on in the process of growing the meat, then it's more like tender cuts of meat. And if we wait a little bit longer, it's more texturized. So that's a very high level picture of what we're trying to do. And we feel pretty confident that the science has been worked out in our minds and in our experiments so far, as well as the prototypes we've been able to make. And as you know from the Wall Street Journal article, we've completely grown, cooked and tasted meatballs as well as fajitas. And that was a watershed moment in our company's life because while we knew we could do it, we just did not know how it was going to taste. And once we put that in our mouths and also some of the investors and tasters, it was abundantly clear within a few seconds that it had a very distinct meat flavor that I completely forgot about for the last several years because I was eating meat analogues, whether they were made from plant proteins or texturized vegetable protein. And that was a watershed moment and we knew, okay, good, we've got the taste issues solved and we have to continue to work on the types of products, texture formulations. So to come back to your original question, what are our hurdles? I think the biggest hurdle for us to get to market as fast as possible is funding and the rate at which we could raise funding. Then the second one is the ability to scale up to a level where we can manufacture this in large quantities and basically align or integrate with the current distribution systems. Because what we're trying to do is to make the upstream processing that's really filthy or not very clean or inhumane be replaced by this new system of growing meat. But we can still continue to use all the distribution, you know, meat, meat distribution, meat formulation, packaging, consumer packaging goods, and the the usual route that current meat industry uses. The third hurdle, I would say, is perceptions. And this is where your poll and our coincidence of our paths really helped because that 15,000 members that you polled, about 83% of them who said they'll absolutely switch, and a few other polls we've seen so far tell us that perception may not be such a big hurdle. But I'm sure we will have some issues with that where we have to explain why our meat is just as natural as, in fact, more natural than what we are eating now because we are growing it in safe, clean environments using natural substances. So, for example, there are no antibiotics, there are no contaminants. And I would say this and maybe other people would also agree with me that there is nothing natural about the conventional meat we are eating now because the chickens that we eat now grow six to seven times faster than what they would in the natural environment. The cows give about ten times more milk than what they would naturally give. And the turkeys are so top heavy that they can't even stand up to breed. And there is nothing natural about that. That's just a state of how modified genetically or environmentally they've been by the current meat production techniques. And to top that off, because they're grown in such intense, confined conditions, let's say 1000 pigs in a small bond that's filled with feces or waste material, they have to pump these animals with antibiotics, which leads to antibiotic. Resistance and superbugs. And also sets up the stage for really bad zonotic diseases like the bird flu or the swine flu we hear about every year. Now, none of that is there in our process. So I would argue instead of calling the synthesized meat or synthetic meat, this is more a naturally cultured meat because we're letting these cells grow naturally and providing them with a naturally safe environment. And I think our work, and I'm hoping lots of other people follow us, is going to define a new kind of agriculture that will change the way we approach food in the future. I want to get on to the perception issue because I think that's a fascinating one and the response to the poll was, I think, very useful there. But I don't want people to ignore the very condensed litany of concerns, health concerns mostly that you just went through because we don't have to get into it at length. But when you talked about the level of antibiotic use or the emerging epidemics and even feared pandemics based on our proximity to livestock and the mingling of livestock, for instance, you've got these open air poultry markets in Asia where wild water fowl drop their droppings or even are caught and sold in in confinement with chickens. I mean, this is the reservoir of bird flu and all of the subsequent mutations in these viruses that, you know, we are wisely worried about, which would very, very likely kill, in the worst case, hundreds of millions of people if we had a proper pandemic analogous to the slew of 1918. That's just one reason why living in proximity to livestock for the indefinite future is a problem. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Miriam Namazi is an Iranian born atheist, a secularist, and a human rights activist. She's a spokesperson for a variety of organizations for Fitna, a woman's liberation movement for equal rights. Now for the one law for all campaign which is against sharia law in britain and for the council of ex muslims of britain. She hosts a weekly television program in Persian and English called Bread and Roses, which is broadcast in Iran and in the Middle East via New Channel TV. And she and I talk today about accusations of bigotry among secularists, profiling, the migration crisis in Europe, all topics that are well known to build rapport between podcast hosts and their guests. And I make a few comments at the end of this, but all I can say is that this conversation struck me as more difficult than it needed to be. I hope one day to be better at having conversations of this sort, but for the moment, what you hear is what you get. So I'm here with Maryam Namazi. Mariam, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Listen, before we get into all the things we have to talk about, and we really have a lot to talk about, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, that many will know who you are and I will have introduced you briefly before we started here. But what's your background and what is it exactly that you do? I'm an Iranian born political activist. I guess that's the best way to describe it. I am very much on the left as well, and I'm a campaigner for women's rights, for secularism, against Islam and Islamism. So I've started various campaigns and organizations around that. But for me, I think fundamentally there are different campaigns that all sort of come to the point of defending human beings citizenship rights, irrespective of very often false identities. And when did you leave Iran? I left Iran in 1980. So when we left, it was a year after the Islamic regime took over from the Iranian revolution, which wasn't originally an Islamic revolution. And then we went to India for two years because that was the only place we could manage to get into. We came to Britain for a year, but we weren't allowed to stay. So my family, we actually moved to the US. And my parents still live in Yonkers, New York, but I've been here in Britain since 2000 now. And so did you leave Iran under duress? Were you fleeing Theocracy, or was there some other motive to leave at that point? Well, originally my mom brought me out to India just to put me in school because the schools were shut down for a while in order for the government to Islamicize things, and we ended up not returning. My father and my three year old sister at the time, they had stayed back in Iran thinking my mom would go back. But things just got so bad that my father told us to just wait in India, and then he joined us when he was able to get out. And are your parents religious or do they share your views at this point? My parents are Muslim. My dad was brought up in a very strict Muslim household. So his father, which is my grandfather, was an Islamic scholar who taught Arabic and issued fatwas and that sort of thing. So he grew up in a very strict family background, but he met my mom, who was a Christian. She was a Protestant in India. They got married. My mom converted to Islam, so they're both Muslims. But it was never a strict Muslim upbringing. To be honest, I didn't really know I was Muslim or knew much about Islam until I was faced with an Islamic regime in Iran. So I went to a mixed school. I never had to veil. I wasn't treated differently because I was a girl. Right. So I just want to inform our listeners about the proximate cause of this conversation because I've followed your work, I guess really just in the form of seeing some videos of you encountering people trying to no platform you. This happened recently, and we'll get into this because you've received more of this than most people. But the proximate cause of this conversation is that I noticed you recently calling my views about profiling bigoted. And also I recently had Douglas Murray on my podcast where we discussed the migration crisis in Europe, and I believe you've called his views on this topic bigoted. At the very least, you forwarded this open letter that was written to me by the blogger Ina, which said as much. There may be not perfect overlap between your position and hers, but we can get into that. But Ina didn't quite call Douglas a bigot. At least she distinguished him from people who she thinks are true bigots, like Donald Trump, but she put him on a spectrum of bigotry in which she said he quote, authorizes and generalizes regarding Muslims. And if I'm not mistaken, you didn't quite call me a bigot either. At least I think you clarified that by email. But you thought that my views about profiling are bigoted or close enough to be troublesome. And I don't want us to dive into those issues yet. I want us to talk about some other things we agree about. But I just want to know if that's a fair characterization of where we're starting out. Well, I wouldn't say they're fair because I think maybe something that will make it more understandable. My perspective of things is, you know, and something that most probably a lot of your listeners will be able to understand better, possibly where I'm coming from is we all know about the regressive left. And I say this as someone who's firmly, very firmly on the left who very often promote and legitimize and normalize the Islamist narrative of things. So they will basically see any criticism of Islam or Islamism as bigotry against Muslims because Islam is often feigned to represent Muslims and they see it as a defense of the Muslim minority. So there are, for example, student unions, people very much who consider themselves progressive on the left who will call me Islamophobic, who will no platform me. And I think it's very clear to possibly your listeners that I would say that they are promoting an Islamist narrative. That doesn't mean they're jihadis. That doesn't mean they are going to decapitate anyone. That doesn't mean that they are defenders of Halifair or Sharia law. But they are normalizing and promoting the Islamist narrative which means that they're sort of giving it some sort of legitimacy. That doesn't make the mislamist. And my argument with regards the arguments that Douglas Murray makes tommy Robinson obviously they're on a continuum. I wouldn't call Douglas Murray a bigot or fascist. I wouldn't call you that either. But my argument is that when we or sections of atheists normalize or justify or encourage certain narratives, it does promote a far right narrative, which is a narrative that places collective blame, that promotes bigotry against people. That doesn't mean that anyone who promotes the far right narrative is necessarily a bigot or a racist. So I think similar to how anyone who promotes the Islamist narrative is not necessarily a fascist. But there is that narrative that concerns me as someone who is both a vehement opponent of Islam and Islamism but also a strong defender of human beings irrespective of their identities and beliefs. As I said, I think we should wait to get into the specifics here but I guess I want to say upfront that I consider these instances of friendly fire where I hear you criticize someone like Douglas or you. Know ina does it? Friendly fire being a case where the people on the same side of in this case, a very important concern about Islamism, are inadvertently mistaking one another for the enemy. And it's not to say that our positions might not be different. In fact, I think you and I will probably disagree about what makes sense from a security point of view and the details of immigration policy. And I think that will be interesting. But I think we can have this discussion without allegations of bigotry being the summary of the position you disagree with. And I feel like I've noticed you and Ina and maybe other people are doing this as well, but I feel like you and Ina pull the trigger on accusations of bigotry fairly early. And it strikes me as pretty counterproductive because I really do not think Douglas is at all bigoted. And that's not to say that I'm going to get you to agree with his views about immigration, but they're not coming from a place of having some animosity against brownskinned people or Middle Eastern people or people from other cultures. He's quite worried about theocracy and intolerance. And again, I want to table a detailed discussion about immigration for a few minutes, but I just feel free to react to that. I just feel like it, I mean so just one more aspect to this here is that I recognize I'm worried about the problem of bigotry and I'm worried about this conflation of a criticism of ideas, in this case Islamism with an actual hatred of Muslims as people. So Douglas and I and many others are in the unfortunate circumstance of being surrounded by real bigots. There are people on the far right who occasionally make the same reasonable noises about the threat of Islamism that we do. And then they also say, obviously, other things that aren't reasonable. And they express genuine religious hatred or racial hatred or blind nationalism or some other ideology that I would want nothing to do with. But given a shortage of time, it isn't always easy to determine who is who. And so I find myself in the strange position of hearing someone make sense on the topic of Islam. But this person has come to me with their reputation pre stigmatized by people like you. We've called them a big. Let's say Tommy Robinson or Mark Stein. And these are people who I am not especially familiar with. If they have books, I haven't read their books. I've just seen them give a speech. I'll give you an example of this. So, for instance, Tommy Robinson just did an interview with Dave Rubin where he made sense, really perfect sense, for an hour and did not say a single bigoted thing. Right now, I'm not very familiar with Tommy Robinson. I don't live in the UK, and I just know that he is under the shadow of more or less constant accusations of racism and bigotry. And yet I hear him speak for an hour. And even when pressed on the topic of past associations with bigots, he made perfect sense and talked about how he left the EDL because of those racist elements that came into it. Can I say something now? I mean, there's a lot of points you've raised and on the issue of friendly fire and the fact that we're all on the same side well, I disagree. I disagree. Not to say that you and I are not on the same side, but I think that being on the same side takes a lot more than just saying that there are people who speak a lot of sense about Islam or Islamism and therefore we're on the same side. We might disagree on certain details. And the example I always give is, for example, I'm against US. Militarism in certain parts of the world and the Iranian regime also thinks the US government is the big Satan. And therefore, because I'm opposed to us. Militarism, I should side with the Iranian regime. And a lot of left actually do this. There are people on the left who have these blinders of antiimperialism. All they see is antiimperialism. And they're willing to side with the Islamist fascists just because they're anti imperialist. They'll side with anyone. And from my perspective, your enemy's enemy is not necessarily your friend. And the decades of work I've done in campaigning, I think my track record is clear is that I worked with lots of people and not people who are left like myself, communists like myself. I mean, I hardly work with people who think like me, but I work with lots of different types of people and I'm open to that. I think when you're building movements, mass movements where you need to challenge something as outrageous as the Islamist movement that is wreaking havoc, you know, the country where I was born, in the region I come from and across the world, it's basically a killing machine. It's destroying lives, dehumanizing women, children, men. When you look at it that way, then obviously you want to have as many allies as possible. But I do draw the line with the far right because I think it's not just Islam and Islamism that's the problem for me. In the same way that the example I gave is not just enough to be anti US. Militarism. I mean, I know you'll find a lot of people on the left what is being called the regressive left, what I call the postmodernist left who will say that Islamists make a lot of sense. They'll talk about discrimination that minorities face in the west. They'll talk about the attacks on the US government or the British government on the war on Iraq. And they'll make a lot of sense and they do speak some truths, even Islamists do. But the problem is these are half truths. They are only part of the whole story. And I think it is a grave mistake to think that Tommy Robinson's criticism of Islam and Islamism is something that's commendable because he says similar things to what you and I say. I disagree fundamentally and I think this is an issue for me that is key because I am not only anti Islam, I am not only anti Islamism. I am not only anti jihadism and Sharia law and the Iranian regime. I am also prosecutorism. I am also against religion's role in the state, including Christianity's role. Anglicanism, as Douglas Murray makes out is not some cuddly, lovely religion. And Britain is so much better off than the US. We still have parliament in this country. Bishops are in the House of Lords. They have not been elected there. You have the Queen, who is the representative of the Church, who heads this country. Religion has a sinister role in this country as well. The fact that it's cuddler is because of the fact that an enlightenment has pushed it back, that has challenged it, that has questioned it. Sure, but I don't think Douglas would disagree with that. I see where you've gone here, but let's not make this I don't know why we're making this about Douglas Murray. Well, no, Ina sent you a letter. You can interview her and talk to her about it. I don't spend my days advocating against Douglas Murray. My problem is with the far right, with the EDL, with Pegida, with stopped Islamization of Europe, with movements, with political movements that are not individuals, but with political movements that I think are placing collective blame and harming the old. No, I got that. They dehumanize people all the time. But I also want to say one other thing, and this thing about bigotry. I think we need to also be very careful. And there is a danger here that seems to be happening, is that bigotry is then being trivialized because there are false accusations of bigotry. And trust me, I've had them much more than you possibly might have. I'm not only called an Islamophobe, but I'm also a coconut. I'm a native informant. I'm also a rape apologist because I defend I say we shouldn't blame all migrants for what happens in Coleman. I'm also called an undercover jihadi because I oppose stopped Islamization of America and Europe. That's something that Robert Spencer has called me. I'm an antisemite because I oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestine, though I defend the right of Israel to exist. And I'm also for the rights of Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace. What I want to say that there are lots of accusations, but to hide behind those and then say that raising an issue of bigotry then trivializing it, when bigotry is a huge issue for many of us, doesn't really help either. And I think for me it's very clear I don't have to read anybody's books to know where they stand on the political spectrum. I have been in politics for several decades now. For me, it's very clear, if you promote our culture, our civilization versus the others, the barbarians, the savages, that is a politics, that is authorizing, that is generalizing, the other, and that sees the other as the barbarian and savage, whereas that's not the case. We have so many secularists and free thinkers and a tsunami of atheism in our region, in the Middle East, in North Africa and South Asia, right? And oftentimes the talk about migrants, even the storming of migrants, as if it's an act of war rather than people fleeing for their lives, many of them fleeing the Islamists that so many are against. But when it comes to their victims, people have very little sympathy, it seems. Okay, you're alleging, but it is more complex. And that's why the accusation of bigotry is so unhelpful here. So listen, I can't own everything that Tommy Robinson has said because I'm unaware of much of what he said. But we're having this conversation because I noticed you calling me a bigot and you sort of walked that back a little bit. But I didn't walk it back. I'm sorry. I didn't walk it back because what I said is that it promotes the far right narrative. It promotes a narrative of bigotry. And as I explained before, when I tell the regressive left that they are promoting an Islamist narrative, it doesn't mean that they're Islamists or fascists. You can say it's promoting it, but that doesn't mean that it actually is promoting it. In fact, I criticize the far right as much as anybody. That's your opinion. What I want to say is that we don't agree. We don't agree on certain things, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with characterizing this disagreement in terms that demonize or to use your phrase otherwise the other person in such a way as to make conversation and reasonable alliances impossible. Friendly fire is a problem. What you're saying is it's not really so friendly. It's legitimate fire against people who you're also opposed to or views you're also opposed to. But I think you're actually misunderstanding these views in important respects. So, for instance, obviously, Miriam, I'm not arguing that the enemy of your enemy is by definition your friend. And I just think that's a false analogy. And so let's forget about Douglas. Let's forget about Tommy Robinson. I can only talk with authority about my own views. But what I witnessed happen here is that I use a term like profiling now, and profiling is a word like torture, right? To use it for any purpose other than to declare one's horror and rejection of it brands you as dangerously right wing in most circles and certainly in your circle. I don't think you actually understand what I mean by profiling, and I think we'll get into that. But I'm just saying is that when you go after me as someone who is irredeemable for using the word profiling, or to say that to use this word is to make common cause with right wing bigots, by definition, one is unhelpful, but two is just untrue. Right? There's absolutely nothing, in my view, about profiling or about security in general or about immigration. And again, we'll get into the details. That is an expression of my bigotry against Muslims, against people from the Middle East, against other cultures. There's none of that. There's not a shred of that. And yet you're responding to it as though there were, and that's what I'm finding so unhelpful. Well, Sam, the thing is that it might be unhelpful to you. I think this is a thing for me, bigotry is an important issue. I'm not saying it's not for you. I didn't mean it that way. But what I'm saying is that it is a very important matter for me because you do often find in a situation that I'm in, that you have people on the far right trying to use ex Muslims, trying to use our criticism of Islam as a way of scapegoating Muslims and immigrants and migrants, refugees. And so it puts me in a very difficult position because I do feel that I'm constantly having to fight on several fronts in order to be able to put my message forward. You are fighting on several fronts, but I notice you starting these fights unnecessarily, as you did with me. You might think it's unnecessary, Sam, I'm sorry. But for me it is an integral part of the fight against Islam and Islamism because I think that if this fight means that bigotry becomes normalized, that it is easy to dehumanize migrants and Muslims, place collective blame on them, then I don't think it helps our movement. And so for me, I feel it is as important to fight against racism and bigotry as it is to fight against Islam and Islamism. Of course it is, but you're acting like I disagree with you. Well, I don't know if you're disagreeing with me, but it's very difficult for me to have my conversation because you're not letting me finish what I have to say. So if you'll just be patient and let me try to explain my position. And it would be great if you could try to understand my position as well. Now, the thing is that I'm not coming after you. I think this is a bit of a I'm not coming after you, but I am making comments, as all political people do, on positions that I disagree with. The fact of the matter is you have come out and you've just said right now that you think there's nothing wrong with what Tommy Robinson said for the hour that you heard him speak. I have a different position on Tommy Robinson, and I also have a right to express it. Now, even in this country, for example, Ukip, which is a right wing political party, they, for example, have prescribed, they don't allow their members to also be members of the English Defense League of the British National Party. So even there are right wing parties who consider these groups off the scale and don't want to be associated with them. So it's not unnatural for me to criticize. It's not me being overly sensitive and throwing out the bigot card at any opportunity. It's a real concern about the English defense league. If you look at Tommy Robinson, he didn't leave the English Defense League because he was concerned about the fascist elements in that group. He has continued to praise and defend the EDL until today. And if you look at his speeches at pigeta rallies, for example, he says that he realized that it was too soon. The EDL was too soon for Europe. Well, no, that's not actually what I heard him say. I want to clarify that effective on it. Sam, I'm sorry, okay. That Tommy has such a wonderful defender from no, listen. No, it's not that, Miriam. That's not fair. This is just a single example of a person who I'm actually not very familiar with, who I know you should listen to me because I'm more familiar with but you're not characterizing the view he expressed in this interview. Did you see his interview with Dave Rubin? It doesn't matter. Listen, a lot of Islamists will come and tell you that Islam is a religion of peace. I'm sorry. You cannot judge political movements by Bush telling you that he's gone to Iraq because he wants to liberate women. It's not enough. I'm sorry. I fully grant that point. It's impossible to have a conversation because you constantly interrupt me. I let you speak for 510 minutes. And I don't want it to be the sort of adversity discussion because we're not really going to get anywhere and we're not going to reach an understanding. And even if we don't agree, I would like us to be able to at least understand the other person's position. Do you know what I mean? I totally understand what you mean, but I want, don't you to assume a disagreement where there isn't one. And when I interrupt you, it's because you're not letting me speak and you keep saying I'm interrupting you when you are attacking me for a view or criticizing a view. I don't have Tommy Robinson. Okay? I don't know why you take it personally when I criticize. I'm not taking it personally. I just don't want us to be wasting our time or our listeners time. That's it. It's not a waste of time because isn't this the whole reason why we're having this discussion? Because there are differences of opinion? No. Yeah, but we haven't actually gotten to those differences of opinion. Listen, I will let you say whatever you want to say. My job is not to interrupt you, but I do have a job to try to get our conversation on track. And I'm noticing it go off track. And you're assuming that I have far more affinity for Tommy Robinson than I in fact do. And when you summarize his view as being, in fact, opposite of the only interview I've ever heard him give, then I can't sign off on the dotted line there and say, yes, that's the Tommy Robinson I was just defending. Okay. In the interview with Dave Rubin, he explained why he left the EDL and it was in fact because he noticed racist elements join it and he couldn't be associated with it. So maybe he's lying, I don't know. But that is the Tommy Robinson I was defending. However tepidly again, I don't even want to talk about Tommy Robinson. I was just using him as an example of someone who's come to me pre stigmatized and who then expresses views that make sense. And I'm in the position of not knowing who is who here and all I can speak about with authority are my views. And I notice that the same kind of thing is being done to me and that is what I'm finding unhelpful. But again, this is not even meant to be, that we are not victims here. There are many people who come to me prestigmatized as well. That's life, that's politics. The fact of the matter is that we all make statements and we will have people supporting it, criticizing it and we need to either defend it and so on and so forth. So I think starting a conversation about how one is stigmatized or how they come into a conversation with people having prejudgment of them, well, that exists for everyone and every movement. What we can do is to try to clarify our positions and to try to make clear why we say certain things and why we are opposed to certain things and why we defend certain things. And that might be the most helpful way to go about it. But the fact that we're prestigmatized, well, everybody is it's unfortunate that there are accusations of bigotry that are untrue. As I've said before, I have been accused of it many times myself. But I would say that it worries me when, because of this sort of false accusations of bigotry, that bigotry now seems to be trivialized now. And the minute you do actually talk about politics, which are bigoted, which are placing collective blame, that suddenly you get this sort of pushback saying well, everything is prestigmatized and the accusation of bigotry doesn't wash anymore. Whereas it is a real concern for a lot of people and it's important to be able to still say it and also to call out when it is false, but also to recognize that there are movements, political movements that are promoting positions against Sharia and Islam in order to scapegoat vulnerable minorities as well as migrants. And that's the position that I come from that for me, I want to fight against Islam and Islamism while at the same time making sure that that fight is not used to scapegoat against people who are people like anyone else and they have different views and values and cultures amongst them. It's not one mass. I don't prescribe to the clash of civilizations sort of thesis where it's us versus them. I think there are many of us across borders and boundaries, believers and non and others who are on an opposing side. So I think that's, okay, well, let's talk about the details. And it seems to me we have. Two topics that are related. I mean, they're basically the same topic, but they show up differently in our conversation about these issues. One is profiling and the other is immigration. And I view them very much the same way. But let's talk about them. Let's start with profiling and what I've said about profiling and what you think about it, because clearly you think my views about profiling lead to a kind of collective punishment, collective blame, give energy to the bigots of the world. And I just think that's untrue. So we'll talk about that and then we'll talk about immigration. And then let's just assume, as in the background for those who aren't familiar with your work, we are having this fraught conversation against a background of considerable agreement about the problem of Islamism, the problem of theocracy in the Muslim world, east and west, the intolerance born of that, the problem of the regressive left becoming apologists for all that. So we agree probably across the board on those points. But now we're talking about how the west should respond to these security concerns and at airports with the security apparatus of a state or at the borders of states. Briefly on profiling. Now, again, profiling is this dirty word, and I don't think it should be, but it inherits all the baggage of other ugly words like pedophilia or beastiality or torture. And so the moment you seem to be giving a sympathetic construal of this word, you have a lot of work to do. But in my view, all profiling is is to use some statistically relevant information in one's self defense. And to be against profiling across the board, to be against profiling of any kind is to be against using any relevant information to solve one security problem. So, for instance, being against all profiling intelligence gathering out in the world is to say that we should spend equal time scrutinizing the Amish or the Anglicans, as we should members of the Muslim community, or indeed of the Muslim Brotherhood or Al Qaeda. Because to focus on Muslims at all or even any specific group of Muslims is profiling. And so I just put that to you. Wouldn't it be irrational when looking for suicidal terrorists who are planning to target civilians, say, to spend equal attention on all religious communities at this point? Well, for me, I think why should the marker be even the idea of the fact that these people are characterized only as Muslims? People have a million characteristics that define them and that they define themselves by just to give you an example, if you look at those who carried out terrorist attacks, for example, and we're only talking about here in the west. Terrorist attacks take place every day in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, and we hardly get to hear about them. But you could say, for example, that is their main characteristic of fact they're Muslim, is it that they are university educated Tommy Robinson talks about the jihadis from Luton. Is it something specific to do with Luton? I think you can pick out any one of these things. And if you want to say that this is the reason why these things happen, for me, I think it's not necessarily that they're Muslim, that it's happening. It's not necessarily that they're refugees or migrants or university educated, but it is their political stance that determines that they are jihadis and terrorists and it comes to behavior, rather than the fact that they're brown or that they're Muslim or that they come from Iran or Iraq or what have you. Because as I said, not all Muslims think the same, just as not all Christians think the same and that just like not necessarily every white male represents also not every brown Muslim represents Sharia values. And so I think there is that danger with profiling. Profiling is an ugly word because I think it is ugly in the sense of the fact that it is seen to be profiling of blacks, for example, in America. It does have that history to it. Profiling Muslims, it does raise those very same connotations and I think there are some security experts that would agree with me as well that you need to profile behavior rather than one's race or religion and so on and so forth. Yes, profiling is often assumed has some racial component and there is such a thing as racial profiling. There's absolutely nothing about my argument with respect to profiling for jihadists that considers race a relevant variable. In fact it would be a starkly misleading variable. There's nothing racial about what I recommend but I'm slightly mystified by what you just said because what percentage of jihadists do you think are Muslim? Sam, I think that is the wrong question. I'm sorry. Well, you might think it's wrong to look for jihadists. Yes, but listen to me, the thing is that what percentage of Muslims are jihadists? Obviously a large percentage. Even if they used to be Hindu or Christian, they are now converts and they have become Muslim and so therefore a large percentage of jihadists are Muslims. Of course there is a link with Islam, I'm not saying that there isn't, but what I'm saying is that you cannot just assume that because someone is Muslim they are a jihadist. Of course not exactly. So profiling Muslims does that. It doesn't if I can explain but let me just give you some more details but again you're talking in vague generalities and I want to give you specifics. I understand everything I say seems to be vague generalities to you, and everything you say seems to be on point. And I'm sorry I'm not able to express myself as well as you can, but what I'd like to say is that the point is that when you profile, I know there's this argument that Muslims are not a race. And therefore anything that targets Muslims is not racist and they're not racial because they're not a race. But the reality of it is that they are seen to be a minority in the west. They are seen to be a minority religion, a minority group that is taking over Christian Western Europe. And therefore, when you talk about the profiling of Muslims, even if there are also white Muslims, it does have those connotations, in my opinion. And as I've said before, profiling Muslims isn't going to help us fight terrorism. What we need to do is profile Islamists. And that, I think, is where behavior the behavior of far right jihadis and Islamists, that's where we can manage to make inroads into this rather than conflate Islam, Muslims and Islamists. I really think there's a misunderstanding at the bottom of this. You're interpreting my interrupting you as hostile, but I keep detecting misunderstanding, and I just want to short circuit it. And we can do that over the course of 5 hours, or we can do it over the course of 90 minutes. And I'm just trying to use your time and our listeners time efficiently. So I think you're reading more hostility into my interruptions than is there because there's none there. I'm not reading hostility. I think there is no misunderstanding. I think we just don't agree. And I think that's what the issue is. Just let me interrupt you a little bit more because we go ahead. Okay? Because when you say we need to profile for Islamists, you could say we should profile for jihadists, right? The thing that I'm arguing for is that we need to admit that we know what we're looking for. If we admit we're looking for jihadists and we admit that 100% of jihadists are Muslim, then the variable of being Muslim is more relevant in the search for jihadist than the variable of being amish is. In fact, if we could be absolutely sure that a person is amish, they suddenly become completely irrelevant with respect to the search for jihadist. Now, I will grant you that there are other problems in the world beyond jihadism. There are other forms of extremists. There are other forms of suicidal terrorists even. And we're worried about them, too, though not in the kinds of numbers we are with respect to jihadism now. But if you're looking for jihadists, let's say you work for the FBI to not profile, to be committed to, not profiling at any cost, to say we are going to be scrupulously fair. We are not going to single out Muslims in any respect. If you're working for the FBI, that means that every time you interview an imam at a mosque to look for any troubling signs of radicalism in his community, you will then be obliged to what? Interview the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to see if they've witnessed troubling signs of radicalism in their community? I mean, you will be obliged to deliberately and consciously waste time in the service of not profiling to go to a mosque is to profile for the variable of adherence to Islam to some degree. And what you seem to be saying initially is that is unfair, it's authorizing, it's collective punishment. And now you suddenly tell me we should be profiling for Islamism. So I see a contradiction there and I would love you to explain it contradiction. And that's, I think, what is fundamentally problem here when there is criticism of far right movements and groups that's hugely different from targeting individuals believers based on the very fact that they are believers. If you are part of a fascist movement, then your politics is very clear. If you are a believer, you can be a secularist, a feminist, you can be even an atheist. And you come from Muslim backgrounds. So there's a huge distinction between targeting groups like the English Defense League targeting Islamists. And I make very little distinction, as though others don't, between jihadis and Islamists. I see them as part of the same movement doing different parts of that movement, taking care of different aspects of that movement. The jihadis are the military wing and the Islamists very often are promoting it politically and via various ways to say if the terrorist attacks are taking place by a movement by a political movement a far right political movement. Called Islamism then targeting the behavior and profiling the behavior of those who are carrying out or susceptible to carrying out terrorist acts is very different to saying one should profile anyone who is a Muslim because every Jihadi is also Muslim. Yes, every jihadi is also Muslim. That's not saying everything. It's not giving the whole truth. And for me, therefore, I think profiling should be done with regards to behavior and not placing collective blame. I have a huge problem with placing collective blame on populations just for the very fact that they are Muslims. The reality is that people are born into a religion out of no choice of their own. The very fact that out of some misfortune of lottery I was born in Iran and I have the label of Muslim on my forehead until the day I die unless I make this very difficult decision to leave it and to publicly leave it. And even then the far right will call me an undercover jihadi. What I'm saying is that people are much more than the religions of their birth. They've often had no choice to it. That choice, lack of choice continues to follow them throughout their lives. And to profile them and to place collective blame on them and equate them with Islamists is not right. It's not fair. And it doesn't see the reality that Muslims are people like anybody else. They have a million different beliefs and to sort of homogenize them and see them as this one collective actually hands them over to the Islamist. Many of them are fighting Islamist, but I'm not doing that. But Murray, I'm not doing that. Okay? You're not doing that. Salam I'm talking about what I think the problem with profiling and collective blame is this is not a personal attack on you. I'm not taking it personally. I'm attempting to express my views about security, in this case, profiling. I'm also concerned about security, Sam. The only thing I've said about profiling comes out of my experience. And again, when I was talking about profiling initially, it was at the airports, right? So you're getting on planes and you see the kind of security theater where we see people who are obviously not jihadists, obviously have not been recruited, getting searched with the same kind of scrupulousness and intensity as people who you might worry could fit a reasonable profile of a jihadist. And my argument here is that we have to admit that we have a finite amount of attention, we have a finite amount of resources, and we should never deliberately waste our time. Now, there is a role for random searches here which increases everyone's safety, and so randomness should be included. But what everyone has found galling or many people have found galling are obvious wastes of time knowing that our resources are limited. So again, so to take it out of the airport, as I tried to do a moment ago, if you're going to profile based entirely on behavior, which is behavioral, profiling is certainly part of it. And I would agree with you. Most of what you need to do is to profile on the basis of behavior. But adhering to a religion or to a neo Nazi organization or whatever your identity is, is a type of behavior, right? So if you're looking for jihadists and you want to reach out to the community of people who might be aware of the jihadists in their midst, you're going to be reaching out to the Muslims. You're not going to be reaching out to the Mormons. Okay, can I explain can I explain this again to Sam, if you don't mind? There's a difference between a religious believer versus a neo Nazi. And I think that's where you know, that's my issue here is that, of course, when you said you just said something about where you're going to a person who's religious or a neo Nazi is very different. The fact of the matter is that for me, a neo Nazi is like the Islamist. Yes, I agree. Those who are part of a political movement have certain characteristics. Very often we see that the security are actually following people who then go on and commit crimes. Well, why haven't they acted more quickly? They shouldn't be waiting until we're at the gates of an airport to be able to find who is willing and able to commit atrocities against the population at large. You said something about, well, we should focus on those who are obviously Muslim. Well, who is that? I went to the US. With my husband's young son. He was 13 at the time. He was taken away and fingerprinted and questioned. He's born in Britain, but he looks obviously, he must look Muslim to them. And my husband now hasn't been to Iran for 40 years. We're opponents of the Iranian regime. He's been atheist for God knows how long. He's got to apply for visa now because he's also considered an Iranian national where the Iranian government is constantly threatening us with death. So what I want to say is that just because of the fact that we happen to be Muslims as well, or seen to be Muslims, doesn't necessarily mean that we should be more susceptible to profiling than someone who's amish. Why should we? I have nothing to do with the Islamist movement. I hate the Islamist movement. The reason I'm here is because I've fled it and I've spent a lot of my life fighting it. So what I'm saying is that what profiling does is it places collective blame. For me, this is an important issue. What it says is that just because all jihadis are Muslims, therefore all Muslims are fair game. I disagree in the same way that you have a lot of white far right terrorists in the US. To argue therefore then that every white male needs to be targeted because every Christian, white male, Christian needs to be targeted because in America, 100% of the white terrorists are Christian and they're white and their male misses the point, but it doesn't necessarily miss the point. So, for instance, if we had a global Marian pulling aside every white male at the airport, you're actually wasting security time. Of course you are. The lack of resources you should be actually profiling Muslims is a waste of time. Well, no waste of time. You just said you're for behavioral profiling. Again, this confusion drinking in here because we're talking about here. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I spoke to Michael Weiss, the senior editor at The Daily Beast and co author of a New York Times bestseller about the Islamic State entitled ISIS Inside the army of Terror. And we focus primarily on ISIS and the civil war in Syria. And as you'll hear, Michael is just a fount of information on these topics. You might have to listen to this twice to get all the details here. Unfortunately, we had a few audio issues with Skype, so you'll hear a few irregularities there, but I think you'll agree by the end that listening to Michael talk about ISIS and the Syrian civil war has made you much smarter on these subjects, and you'll come away with a much clearer sense of how complicated US. Foreign policy and the war on terror now are. And now I give you Michael Weiss. Well, I am here with Michael Weiss from the Daily Beast. Michael, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me on, Sam. Listen, I know you as a writer and editor for The Beast, but why don't you tell me and our audience a little bit more about you and how you come to know so much about the Middle East, which is, I'm sure, going to be the bulk of what we talk about. What's your background? And tell us about your book on ISIS and all the rest. So, my background is in journalism. I started writing about the Middle East about ten years ago. I think some of it was on the Israel Palestine conflict. A lot of it then became covering the so called Arab Spring. In 2011, I was working at a London think tank, the Henry Jackson Society. And of all the countries that had been covered, the one that wasn't, which was just then in its infancy of an uprising against the government, was Syria. So literally one day, my boss sort of dropped it into my lap and said, here, you need to sort of assess this and tell us what we need to know. So it started with a survey of who the opposition on the ground was. We managed to get interviews with activists and leaders of the so called Local Coordination Committees from every province in the country. There's a misconception that the Syrian revolution started when a dozen kids scrawled on the walls in Deha, but actually the earliest protests were registered in Damascus itself, in the Old City. So, you know, in the very capital, in the the heart of Assad's regime. And what struck me is we had seen in Egypt, to a lesser degree in Tunisia, although we can probably get into some of that, particularly how the media has covered groups like Anada. But we saw sort of the late failure of radical hopes, teenagers turning out on the streets of Tucker Square protesting a pretty vicious authoritarian dictatorship, and then it gets hijacked by religious extremists, or, as they were depicted in the west, so called moderate Islamists. So now, Michael, you're talking about what happened during the so called Arab Spring, right. And in Syria, what I was struck by was the people who were leading this uprising. I mean, they really were small, d democrats, and, you know, they had various views on which kind of country they wanted to model a future post Assad Syria on. Some said like Turkey, others said like Tunisia, some many said like the United States or like France. But one of the things that bothers me, and one of the reasons I wrote this book on ISIS was to try and sort of turn back the clock to the very beginning, because for a lot of people, history began when ISIS stormed into Mosul in 2014. And, you know, essentially this was always a jihadist insurgency. It was always being led by Al Qaeda and other sorted elements. And one of the things that I'm most interested in in my work is the relationship between terror and state actors. And this is something that is just characteristic of the region, and it even goes beyond the region now. I mean, I've done a lot of work on Russia's facilitation of jihadism, beginning in Chechnya, but also leading up to the Syria conflict. I mean, they've been sending jihadists into Syria because better they blow stuff up in Aleppo or in Raqqa than they do in Daggistan. And all of this gets alighted in the way that the west tends to COVID these things. But anyway, Assad's relationship with the very element that now claims to be trying to overthrow his regime and establish an Islamic state, I find fascinating. So one of the light motifs of our book, and I've co wrote it with a Syrian national called Hasan Hassan is to kind of dredge up some of this occluded history of the way, not only the Syrian government but also the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein was if not necessarily a catalyst, then at least an underwriter of much of the unpleasantness we're seeing now. People forget. And it is true, the Bush administration misrepresented and lied about a lot of the intelligence in terms of Saddam's relationship with jihadi groups such as al Qaeda. But it is also the case, after the invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf War, he inaugurated something called the Islamic Faith Campaign, which was an attempt to marry the Bath ideology with Salafism. And the reason for this was he saw the greatest threat to his regime. Well, there were two. One was from Iran next door, with whom he had waged a brutal eight year war. And the other was internally from Islamist elements, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood. So one of the unintended consequences of the faith campaign was people abandoned the baptism and took up this alafism and a lot of these elements have wound up, or they did wind up in the so called antamerican and anti Iraqi insurgency from 2003 onwards. But now, funnily enough, a lot of these former regime elements are in the upper echelons of ISIS. You're looking at lieutenant colonels in the Iraqi army or agents of the Mukhabarat intelligence services. And some of the leading operatives, including those who constructed the ISIS franchise in northern Syria in 2013. They behaved very much like state trained, almost Dazzi like intelligence operatives. So this is something I think that needs to get addressed and this is not by any means, and I'm sure you want to talk about this, not to undermine or dismiss the element and occurrence of Islamic fundamentalism that run throughout ISIS. It's very much a prominent factor, particularly amongst the so called foreign fighters in the Mujahideen coming around from around the world who think they're going to usher in the apocalypse. My thesis is at the very high level. You were being asked to presume that people who as of 2002, or even early 2003 were drinking wine, wearing military fatigues with epaulets they had never earned, keeping their twelve mistresses and their eight mansions scattered throughout the state of Iraq that as of today. Now that they've got the long black beard and the dishdasha, they really want to end usher in the end times. Or is there perhaps a political project that's underlying much of what ISIS is doing? And I think that that's something that needs greater discussion. And indeed, I mean one of the sort of mainstays of my work is to try and figure out where the messianic or a scatological element ends and where the political literal state building begins for them. Well, let's talk about that because it's just a truly complicated situation and it's kind of a challenge to figure out how to talk about it and which thread to pull first. Just a few things I want to respond to and then maybe we can figure out how to circle in on the details. But the first thing is that what you said about the Russians exporting their jihadists I had frankly never heard before. So that's very interesting and that's kind of analogous to what the Saudis have done on some basic level. And just to this point about secular people cynically using religion and religious ideology to manipulate, recruit and otherwise advance their political aims. There are obviously instances of that throughout history and people often point to that as a sign that religion isn't really as important a variable as it seems. But what I always say at that point in the conversation is that it only works. A cynical, actually secular leader pretending to be devout only manages to whip up a mob or a political movement under the aegis of those religious ideas because the people on the ground really believe these things. I mean, it's only a successful lever to pull because it's attached to something. So it doesn't embarrass my overriding concern about the potency of religious ideology to have it pointed out that some significant subset of any ostensibly religious regime is actually staffed by cynical, machiavellian, mustache, twirling secularists who are just using the ambient level of religious sectarianism or religious faith for their political aims. Feel free to respond to that. But as you do, let's go into just what you think the psychological and political reality is in ISIS. If they have these ex Baptists who in fact aren't religious, in fact, may even be apostates, what has happened? Have they converted? Does Al Baghdadi just not care who these people are? I mean, Al Baghdadi is sort of an outlier. He has a PhD in Islamic studies from actually it's called Saddam Hussein University, believe it or not. And the only way he could enroll in that program is if his family had Bath Party connections. So, I mean, this is the thing. A lot of people joined the Bath Party not because they were true card carrying Ideologues. And one of the stupider things the United States did after, of course, invading Iraq was the debatification of the first three tiers of the party. So a lot of people engineers, doctors, professionals who had joined up just so they could get ahead in life and make a living, were rendered unemployed with Baghdadi. He is an absolute true believer. By all accounts, he actually does think that the armies of Rome will clash with the armies of Islam in Dabiq, which is a town in Aleppo province. This is the great sort of Chileastic conspiracy that Abu Mussabel Sarkawi had put forward. And with Sarkaw, it was always about bleeding into Syria. So that goal has been achieved. But I absolutely agree with you. Look, life is complicated and messy, and even people who purport to espouse a totalist or pure ideology often have contradictory or alternative modes of thinking or systems of belief creeping in. So again, I don't know. Are these Baptists? Are they quote unquote secular or apostate? Not necessarily. They can have been radicalized or salafized under the faith campaign or even just by the sheer brutality and chaos of living in Iraq, both pre and post Saddam. But I think it is one of the more fascinating issues of looking at ISIS. And look, I'm an atheist like you, and our dearly departed friend Christopher Hitchens used to say that religion was just another form of totalitarianism. I think that was the kind of the driving force behind his critique of it is that he had, in some ways, gone through it himself as a believing Marxist. And Trotskyist Raymond Aron called Marxism a Christian heresy. There are a lot of similarities, and this is why, by the way, you find people who come from secular or temporal ideologies essentially swapping one totalitarianism for another and taking up some extreme form of religion, or not so extreme form of religion. In fact, one of the leading evangelical Christians in the United States discovered Jesus in a Moscow hotel room when he found a stray Bible. Marvin Olaski is his name, right? He's actually Jewish. A Jewish Marxist who became an Evangelical Christian. So things like that happen all the time. And this is not an attempt to embarrass. I mean, I am a great admirer of your work and a co thinker. So it's not an attempt to embarrass it. It is an attempt, though, to try and fully understand. And again, I want to show that ISIS does not exist in this vacuum of fundamentalism. It has state sponsors, or I should say not sponsors, but state accomplices. I mean, to this day, it's running all of Syria's natural gas industry and selling that natural gas back to Damascus, which claims to be at war with it. It runs most of the oil wells in eastern Syria, and it's selling oil not only to free Syrian army groups, but also back to Damascus and to smugglers in Turkey and Iraqi Kurds. I mentioned Russia, and the reason I do is people think Vladimir Putin is this great counterterrorist, right? I mean, he hates Islamic radicalism and he went to war in Syria to destroy ISIS. Well, no, I mean, if you look at the metrics, 10%, according to the Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren, 10% of Russia sortis have been going after ISIS. Now, the rest have been going after groups that range from nationalists to Islamists to jihadist, including the al Qaeda franchise. But with Putin, the goal, I think, is quite simple. It's exactly what Assad and the Iranian's goal has been from the beginning deprive the west of any attractive, credible alternative to the dictatorship in Damascus and make it a stark choice of the Tuck furies on the one hand, or this secular war criminal on the other. And that's not really a choice because no one in the west, as much as they may loathe Bashar al Assad and hold him responsible, as well they should, for the destruction of the country. They don't think he's going to be flying planes into buildings in New York or Washington, DC. ISIS would if it could. And, you know, one of the real challenges, Sam, is ISIS has broken apart or cleaved away from al Qaeda. And I keep saying that we're now at a more dangerous point than we were right after 911, because the way that al Qaeda is going to compete with ISIS is through blood and fire and terror. And that's going to play out on the streets of Europe. It already has. It's playing out in Turkey, which has suffered more ISIS attacks than any other country. So that's a NATO member, and eventually it's going to come here. I mean, arguably it did with San Bernardino, although that was a case of people being inspired by, rather than being trained up and dispatched as operatives. But, yeah, we have underestimated them. At the same time we have, I think, sensationalized them and treated them as this apocalyptic bogeyman, when in fact, there is a pragmatic component to what they're doing. I mean, the way that they've managed to take terrain, it's not because they're great fighters. I did this long interview with a defector from one of their security services who told me they fight like Lebanese going off a cliff. I mean, it's just sort of a human wave of cannon fodder, particularly when they go up against the Kurds in Syria. What they're good at is tradecraft. And also they understand the sociology of the region. So where they have imposed their caliphate, what I call the Briar patch of ISIS is the Euphrates River Valley, mostly eastern Syria, western Iraq, the villages and hamlets and townships alone, that sort of continuum. And these are areas that are occupied by Arab tribes and which are essentially confederations of families that span across borders. Remember, ISIS is dedicated to the dismantling of Sykes Pico, the artificial states that have cobbled up after World War I. Well, to some extent, they have a lot to work with there because the families and the constituents of ISIS are spread fanned across the region. I mean, you've got tribes in Iraq that are also in Saudi Arabia or in Kuwait or the UAE and so on. And the tribes have lived for hundreds of years through a very simple human political calculation. Whoever is the master, you cut a deal with. And that master could be Bashar al Assad or before him, Hafiz al Assad, or it could be Saddam Hussein. It could be the American occupying force of Iraq, or it could be ISIS. And it was just about, how do we get our daily bread and how do we subsist. The tribes have gray and black market economies. They need to make money. They need to be able to smuggle their goods and wares and so on and so forth. And the way that ISIS's predecessor, al Qaeda, was booted out of most of Iraq, it was so overweening and so brutal that the tribes, they didn't like the Americans, but that they at least saw the Americans as a credible, non sectarian intercessory force that they could partner with to expel the tuck furies. Well, today there is no credible non sectarian force because in Iraq you have either ISIS or, let's be honest, Shia militia groups, which in many cases are as bad as ISIS and are driven by the same kind of apocalyptic zeal it's only from a different sect of Islam backed by Iran. Well, if you're a Sunni tribesman, you see these guys as progrramus. They're going to come in and they might expel ISIS, but then they're going to burn your house down and they're going to take your son as a so called collaborator and throw him into a dungeon and take a power drill and stick it into his head. So then here you're without spelling it out, again illustrating the mad work done by religion, whether it's religious belief or sectarian tribalism. When you ask why is ISIS so successful in gaining Sunni support and spreading, the answers are at least twofold and both are religious. Either the Sunnis support their view of tech fearism, which you should probably define in a moment so as to not leave our listeners behind, but two, whether or not they support this extremist religious ideology. They are terrified of the Shia who, as you say, will show up based on their own religious tribalism and mistreat them horribly. And again, we just have whether or not any particular people in power are in fact religious maniacs who believe the prophecies that they're advertising. But we have religion carving up the people's lives on the ground. So before you jump into further thoughts here, just define tech fearism and then we'll start with that. Just define Takfirism for the moment. So Tak theorism is the ideology of excommunication. If I practice Takfir, I claim that even fellow Sunni Muslims are apostates and that's essentially a death sentence. If I call you an apostate, it means you're marked for death and I should kill you. ISIS is a Takfiri organization in the sense that if you are deemed insufficiently pious as a Sunni, you'll be exterminated. Now, that's the sort of marketing and how they present themselves. But again, there are exceptions. They don't necessarily go around and make sure that all Sunnis share the exact same religious construct as they, although it is true they will patrol the streets. They have a security unit called the Hizba, which is essentially like the Saudi morality police. And if you're not in mosque on Friday, you'll be punished and thrown into jail. But takfir ism is a controversial conceit even within the annals of Salafi jihadism. And in fact, Osama bin Laden was always at odds with Abu Musa al Zarqawi, the founder of ISIS, when it was known as Al Qaeda in Iraq over this issue because Zarkawi was a genocidal maniac pathological. I mean, absolutely. I don't think anyone would really try to make it controversial that he was a true believer in all of this stuff. This is the guy who patented the dressing of western or non western hostages in the orange Guantanamo or Abu Graham style jumpsuits and then the beheading on video as he's reading these imprecations against the west and drawing moral equivalence between what the crusader infidel Zionist conspiracy was doing in Iraq and now what he is doing in retaliation. But what I find fascinating is bin Laden. One of the issues he had with al Qaeda, with his own franchise, essentially, was when they were going around blowing up Sunni mosques, shia mosques. And Hussaini is. Sarkawi's goal was very machiavellian. Sunnis are a minority in Iraq. They're the majority of Muslims worldwide, but in Iraq, they're the minority. And the only way you're going to get Sunnis to reclaim the throne, so to speak, in Baghdad, is if Sunnis from around the world pour into Iraq and turn it into this sin ashore of all out, total sectarian war and essentially exterminate the Shia. So his project was genocidal kill all the Shia. And in doing so, you will prompt or foment their radicalization, as you say. I mean, drive them into these sort of paroxysms of religious fervor. They'll be run or overseen by Iran, which is the mothership of Shia Islam in the region, much the way that Saudi Arabia is for Sunni Islam. And these guys will go around and do what we saw them do for almost a decade in Iraq, form death squads, the Badr Corps, a group called the League of the Righteous, the Hezbollah Brigades. Not to be confused with Lebanese Hezbollah, they were going around attacking American soldiers, but also attacking Sunni civilians, rounding them up and saying, what's your name? It's Omar. So you must be a Sunni. Show me your ID card. Right. Okay. So we're going to take you under the COVID by the way, of being an Iraqi state institution. So if you were sick, the guy who drove the ambulance and who purported to take you to hospital would actually be a Shia militiaman in disguise, take you to some dungeon and torture you and probably kill you. So Zarqawi wanted this to happen. He wanted the Shia to become religiously extremist and radicalized so that they would then attack the Sunnis, and the Sunnis would be driven further into the fold of al Qaeda. And then precipitate, of course, this what I call the international or global casting call from Mujahideen. So Iraq would become, in a sense, that another Soviet Afghan war. People from around the world, from the Gulf, from Indonesia, from Turkey, would pour in and join the ranks of al Qaeda. And eventually al Qaeda would subsume everyone and everything else, including other rival Sunni organizations. So remember the insurgency in Iraq? You had groups that were Islamists. You also had groups that were nationalists that just wanted the restoration of the Bath Party or wanted Sunnis to be back on top. So it's very complicated. But look, we now know and we've seen ISIS became top dog because it had the most brutal methods. It became the wealthiest organization. I mean, people forget there's a lot of nonsense in the ether about who's funding ISIS. Well, ISIS is funding ISIS by 2006 because they were controlling so much of the oil and illicit arms and contraband smuggling networks in Iraq. They had actually become wealthier than Al Qaeda, to the point where bin Laden and Aman al Zawari had asked them for a loan so that the subsidiary was meant to be financing the patron. And this is how they get on. And again, the complicating factors here. ISIS, we have seen, takes Anvils and Jackhammers to priceless artifacts and archeological wonders, world Heritage Sites as defined by UNESCO. They also, though, what they don't smash up, they steal, and they sell on the black market. Now, they justify this, and again, they absolutely believe in this sort of codification system for artifacts. Or it could be, well, look, what's too large to smuggle out of the country has to be destroyed and what's small enough to smuggle. Rather, we can then sell and remunerate ourselves. But they justified it as follows if it's idolatrous art, paganist, pre Islamic gods being worshiped, such as the Temple of Ball, that all has to go. If it's Babylonian or Sumerian coins, little trinkets that we dig out of the sand, well, we can sell that. They have a whole department. Actually, Abu Saif, the guy that was killed in the US special Forces raid in eastern Syria last spring, he was in charge of the antiquities smuggling for ISIS. And they do this like it's almost like a Talmudic enterprise of defining what can stay, what can go, and how you have to handle it, and how you have to ask permission for stealing. The cultural patrimony of Syria and Iraq is very sophisticated. Their pretensions of statehood are not really to be underestimated. We like to pretend like, no, they're just a guerrilla insurgency. They really think and again, whether it's motivated by religion purely or religion plus a sense of political restoration, sunni revampism, they believe that they are building a state apparatus, and the caliphate is a legitimate international project. There's no self deception about that. So it's been widely reported of late that ISIS has lost a significant amount of its territory and is showing signs of buckling under the pressure being applied to it. What do you make of those reports? Are they true? Is that wishful thinking? It's true, but only up to a point. So IHS, which is a British defense firm, reckons that ISIS has lost 14% of its territory across Syria and Iraq in 19 months. 14% of territory is not that much, but it is significant in the sense that they have been pushed out of large quadrants of northern Syria by the Kurds. They have lost some significant terrain rocks, such as Ramadi, which is a provincial capital of Anbar province that they had claimed in last May. But what this does not account for is where else they have taken territory. So, for instance, ISIS has what's known as reliance, which is the Arabic word for province. These are essentially affiliate organizations that predate ISIS allegiance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. The leader of the organization. So Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist outfit in West Africa and has pledged allegiance to ISIS with the stroke of a pen, one could argue ISIS gained 20,000 sq mi of territory in West Africa with that pledge of allegiance. Now, does that mean that they have absolute control or the kind of terrain, governance capability that they do in Syria, Iraq? No. But it does mean that they have people who are fired by their ideology and willing to die on their behalf. They have done similarly in Libya, which is now considered both a waste station for foreign fighters who can't make the journey into Syria, into Iraq, and also, depending on who you ask, a fallback base in the event that Mosul or Raqqa should fall. And they're doing this since Sinai, the outfit that took down the metro jet airliner, russian commercial plane, killing over 200 people that will lie at Sinai, is essentially a colonial outpost, if you like, of ISIS. So that that aspect of their international project really can't be discounted by the way their presence in Libya puts them about less than 500 miles away from the coast of Sicily. So you remember, I mean, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi says, if we're lucky and shala we'll, we'll conquer Rome. But they're not going to conquer Rome. And I don't think even the top ISIS guys believe that, but they can certainly come close enough to Europe. And as we know, and as we've seen in Paris and elsewhere, they're already in Europe with their sleeper cells and their sort of COVID operatives, the invisible armies, as I like to call them. And this is the thing. And Sam here is where absolutely religion plays a paramount role. And what worries me the most, ISIS, if you're Baghdadi or if you're in his Shura council, you go to bed at night in Raqqa or Mosul, wherever you're hiding. And you know that. You might wake up tomorrow and some guy you've never heard of who could have been living in his mother's basement in Albuquerque, might take an AK 47 and shoot up a school and do it in the name of your organization. You know, the remote radicalization project, you know, the, the ISIS inspired attack that I think is going to be their stock and trade for acts of terrorism abroad. Because, you know, people look to an organization that seems to be successful, doesn't matter how, in fact the ultraviolence works in its favor for any kind of loser lunatic element living in any part of the world, really. They're state building. The reason that this has to be successful for them is because it has to inspire people to join their ranks. If they're seen to be on the decline or on the back foot, they're not going to inspire as many operatives. So look, they've taken a battering. I know there's a very complicated answer to a pretty simple question, but welcome to the Middle East. They've taken a battering, but they've shown a remarkable degree of resilience. And as I'm talking to you, I've just finished an epilogue to the second edition of our book, where we've interviewed people living in Derz, or, again, the Euphrates River Valley, which is their strategic heartland. And people there say, Look, I don't like ISIS, but I have no alternative. In fact, because of us. Airstrikes and the coalition bombardment, the way I made a living has now been rendered obsolete. So I am sending my youngest son to join ISIS, because at least he'll get a salary. ISIS pays, like, $400 a month to its fighters, and not only do they pay the fighter a salary, but they pay subsidies for the family members of that fighter. So if I were to join ISIS, I'd get $400 a month, my wife would get $200, and my ten month old daughter, I get money to pay for her baby food. So, again, this is their hearts and minds approach. It's very sophisticated, and it's been very successful. And they've lost money in the sense that the oil infrastructure has been pretty depleted. Although, again, another Western misconception. They don't make most of their money from oil sales. I don't know where this myth came from, but it's a dangerous one. They actually make most of their money through running a petty bureaucracy of taxation and surcharging. The reason they want territory well, one of the reasons they want it is with territory comes people, and with people comes the ability to charge, if they're Muslim zakat, if they're non Muslim, jazia, which is an Islamic tax. And not only that, like, if you're caught smoking cigarettes, ISIS will throw you in a cage for three days. But they'll also charge you money, charge you $1,000. You have to pay a fine if you're seen to be a member of a rival organization or any kind of dissident or resistance fighter to ISIS. If you flee a territory that they control, they'll take your house. It's jihadist eminent domain. They'll take your house, they'll take your property, all of your assets. If you run a business, they'll take your business and all of its inventory. So they run a Mafia style state in addition to a terroristic one. Right. You made some interesting points there. One is that you bring up the topic of affiliate groups like Boko Haram suddenly magnifying the influence of ISIS. And as you spelled out, there's really no clear line between an affiliate group and what we tend to call lone wolf attacks. People who are just inspired by the ideology of ISIS and join this global jihadist insurgency really entirely on their own devices, which anyone with a gun or an Internet connection can now do. And I agree with you. That's my larger concern. Obviously, having people who are extremely well trained and battle hardened emigrate to the west and try to get martyred while killing as many people as possible. That is kind of the worst case scenario. But it's good enough to sow terror just by being someone who gets radicalized in his mother's house and goes to a school and kills 20 kids. You can just imagine how few instances of that would be sufficient to accomplish a crazy overreaction and paralysis in any Western country. So, given that, as you just pointed out, the compelling narrative of ISIS that will attract lone wolves and affiliate groups in Perpetuity is anchored to their perceived success as a state, as a caliphate, well, then why not just go in and destroy them to the last man in a month, which presumably is within the capacity of the United States or some coalition of Western powers to do. Now, I'm sure part of your answer will be an acknowledgement of how horrific the collateral damage would likely be in that case, but let's talk about what it would take to defeat ISIS in the most humiliating and decisive way. And why aren't we doing that? So there's two things I want to discuss, to answer your question. First, the state building nothing succeeds like success. That's a main element for sure. But there's another element that I didn't address. The reason that ISIS has been so persuasive in its narrative. What is its narrative? I should define that first. During Ramadan. In his debut sermon in July of 2014, the El Zangi Mosque in Mosul Abu Bakr al Baghdadi gets up and he delivers this sermon, and he says, you know, we are facing a global conspiracy led by the United States and Russia, backed by Iran and the Rafida, which is the bigoted term that jihadis used to describe Shia. Literally, it means rejectionists that this conspiracy is at war with Sunni Islam, and we, the Islamic State, are the only safeguards, the only defenders and guarantors of the Sunni. Uma, now that you might say, well, that's just par for the course for crazy messiah terrorist group, everything is a conspiracy, and everyone's part of it except them. The problem is, Sam, in the last decade, if you're Sunni living in the region, or just you're in, asuk in Cairo, or you're at some bizarre in ontaka southern Turkey, what have you witnessed? The US. Goes into Iraq, topples a minority regime of Saddam Hussein dispossesses, disinherits Sunnis from what had been a very pretty privileged and elite station, you know, ruling one of the major capitals of the region for 30 plus years. Then revolution kicks off in Syria. Syria is a Sunni majority country, so between 60, 70% of the country is is Sunni. People are being barrel bombed. They're having Scud missiles dropped on their heads. They're having sarin gas deployed against them. They're having chlorine bombs deployed against them. Their women and sons are being gang raped in prisons. Their whole families are being burnt alive. This is the thing. ISIS traffic is a moral equivalence. They say, whatever we do, we can point to other enemies of ours who do just as much and if not worse. There's actually truth in that. The Assad regime and its militias, many of them built by Iran, there's a consortium of them called the National Defense Force. They lock whole Sunni families in their house, and they set the house on fire and let the family cook inside. ISIS points to all this and say, well, how come nobody has come to the rescue of Sunnis? All you stupid democratic or secular, pro Western Uncle Toms, basically, you look at NATO and you look at Washington and you beg them for assistance, and they don't come to your aid. And for a while, Sunnis are like, well, it's because of Israel. The Assad is bad as he is. He's kept the Golden Heights quiet for 40 years. So the US. Won't intervene because of Israel. Then it became, well, no, it's because Obama wants to make this nuclear deal with Iran that he doesn't want to rock the boat. Now it's creeped up right to the point of the ISIS conspiracy, which is no, actually there is a conspiracy against the Sunnis. The United States prefers the Shia. It wants to be in bed with Iran, and it wants the Shia led by the Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran and backed by the militias in Iraq, and helped by Lebanese Hezbollah, and helped now by Syrian militias that are being built as we speak. These guys to be the janissaries of a new regional order. And the people who are going to pay the price are the Sunnis. But we outnumber everybody else. So we should pour into the ranks of ISIS, or if you don't like ISIS, Jabbath al Nusra, the al Qaeda franchise in Syria, and we have to defend ourselves. It's become a very compelling narrative. Now, in slightly churlish moments, I joke, it's hard to tell where ISIS conspiracy theory ends and U. S. Foreign policy begins, because if you listen to what President Obama has said, he gave three very evocative interviews. David Remnick of The New Yorker. Tom Friedman of The New York Times. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. In each of the interviews, he was basically asked, well, don't you think that Shia jihadism along the lines of what Hezbollah has got up to or the Kurds force has got up to? Isn't that just as reckless and dangerous as the Sunni variety? And he kind of fudged the answer, and he made it seem like what Iran does, as awful as it might be, car bombings and so on, there's a rationale to it. They're less reckless, they're more self interested. Whereas with the Sunnis, well, these are the guys who brought us 911 and the Taliban, and they're all barbaric crazies, and we really can't negotiate or parlay with them in any way. Sunnis see that as the legitimation of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi's worldview. And I keep insisting the State Department, the US. Government, all Western governments, are putting a lot of money into the counter narrative or essentially anti ISIS propaganda. And in private moments, you talk to these diplomats in charge of the programs and they tell you we're failing and we're failing because we exhibit ISIS atrocities, but they exhibit their atrocities. And we don't understand why are people being driven into the arms of a group that's going to burn a man alive in a cage, or blow up a car filled with guys with an RPG, or drown a collection of innocence in a cage in a giant pool? And the answer is you focus on the snuff component of those videos, but you don't focus on the other 15 or 20 minutes. So let's take muazzle casba. You know, the burning of the Jordanian pilot. This was this was the video that shocked the world in many respects, even worse than the beheading of James Foley and Steven Sotloff and the other American hostages who burns a man alive and alive in a cage. Well, that's a 20 minutes video. The last five minutes of it is the sort of violent pornography. The first 15 minutes of it is what Cassasba sat at a table wearing the orange Guantanamo style jumpsuit, essentially being interrogated, although it's couched as an interview. And he's giving up all the operational tradecraft, all the operational details of what Jordan and the other Arab countries of the region were doing against ISIS. So he was giving the number of sorts that the Jordanian air force was flying, the kinds of fighter jets they were flying, the names of other pilots he flew with, and the attack formations and so on. ISIS used that and counterposed that with images of dead Muslim babies and women and children being pulled from the rubble, as they claim victims of these Arab bombardment attacks. To ISIS, there is no such thing as an Islamic or Muslim country in the contemporary Middle East. These are the so called near enemies. These are apostate regimes led by defunct and corrupt and venal dictatorships, monarchies, hashemite, Wahhabist, whatever. But just to clarify here, this is a distinct complaint and allegation of conspiracy from the Shia Sunni sectarian civil war. Many of these regimes are Sunni that they're complaining about being attacked by. And that's one of the ironies of hearing the ISIS, the ISIS narrative sort of taken up by Sunni. Sunnis have been the dominant sect just by sheer force of numbers. I mean, demography is destiny, right? But Sunnis are now behaving and acting and sounding like an imperiled minority, like the Shia had done for decades, if not centuries, because they are everywhere being besieged and embattled and they feel like they're being taken. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. There. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. And so here I reached out to Jonathan Height, who is a professor of ethical leadership at NYU Stern School of Business. He's a very well known psychologist. Many of you know his work and taught at UVA for many years, and he's the author of The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind. He and I have collided with one another on a number of occasions, and this conversation could have gone either way. I was not surprised that it was as successful as it was, but it was a risk, like many of these things are, and this one paid off. We come out of a history of strong and even ad hominem criticism of one another, and we make progress. I now give you John Height. Well, I'm here with Jonathan Height. John, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure, Sam. I'm looking forward to it. Well, listen, before we get into topics about which we agree, and there are a lot of them, let's start with areas of disagreement, because we've had a few past controversies which I think our listeners should know about. So many of our listeners will know who you are because you've done extremely influential work in psychology and have covered many topics that are really just of enormous importance outside psychology. But many might not know the history of our bickering in public. Right. So you've been among the prominent critics of the so called New Atheists who have gone after Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Dan Dennett and many of you, yes, for what we've said about religion, principally. And you spent less time on Hitch because he didn't claim to be representing science. So you've criticized me in the past and in ways that I thought were pretty wrong headed. And I pushed back fairly hard against this in ways that may have bordered on incivility at times. And so the way things were left, I don't think either of us would have tended to see the other as a natural collaborator. That's right. I find this interesting that just as a social phenomenon, and I find it intellectually quite consequential that people stop talking to one another after they have certain collisions in public. And more and more, I've been attempting to engage people with whom I've had a strong disagreement on important topics just to see if conversation is possible. And I should just point out to you and to our listeners who will know that this doesn't always work out. I had one podcast that I didn't even release because it went so badly. And I had one that I released recently and probably shouldn't have because it just seemed to do nothing more than increase the sum total of frustration in the universe. It was just people found it excruciating to listen to. And I've had very mixed success doing this in writing. The most memorable failure being that I attempted to engage Noam Chomsky and that project just fell apart as fast as that does not sound promising, but I suspect you and I are up to this. So we don't need to spend a lot of time rehearsing our past skirmishes. But I just want to and we can just discover what we disagree about now as the topics come up. But I just want our listeners to know that this history exists, and it was fairly acrimonious, and they should just appreciate that you and I are doing a bit of a high wire act just having this conversation, because most people with our history just actually don't willingly talk to each other in these ways. And so, again, my underlying aim is to demonstrate that two people can have a fairly inauspicious beginning and then successfully communicate and make intellectual progress. Great. I want that, too. Cool. And actually, in preparing for this call, I was looking back over our past conflicts and looking at it as a psychologist who studies morality and moral disagreement. I actually think it's kind of revealing the way this all worked. So initially, as far as I can tell, the first salvo was when I wrote that essay on Edge, very critical of the New Atheists. And I don't think that I was uncivil there, although it was within the bounds of normal Edge conversation. Edge is not a safe zone. I think you and I both agree that intellectual discourse should not be a safe zone. And then you wrote back, and from my point of view, it was when you were saying my ideas would basically justify or lead to Aztec human sacrifice and all these other horrible things. And okay, that too is within the bounds. All right, so we're sort of up against the edge there, but that's sort of normal. Then if I remember the timing, it was like, right after that that we first met face to face at the Beyond Belief Conference. And there, too, if I remember, I think you said my beliefs would lead to either North Korea or something like that. Well, not so. I don't think I would have ever said that it would lead to, but just that you would be hard pressed to say what was wrong with those systems by your lights. Okay, it may be a distinction without a difference in your mind, but the point is just that the way it felt to me was, no matter what I say, you will link me somehow to North Korea or something like that. I don't think you ever did the Nazis, and I thank you for that. But the point is that I felt that you had a particular rhetorical style which was well suited for what you were doing. You were writing for a popular audience about a very hot topic. But I felt like, hey, Sam's, rhetoric, this is, like, not academic rhetoric. This is very different, and I don't like it. So that's the back story. But I never really responded. I didn't do anything in writing after that. And then when you wrote a book on morality in which, again, you were critical of me in the same way, and again, that's fine, but it was like, okay, you had another provocation. I didn't do anything. And then when you came out with the Moral Landscape challenge and you were saying, if anyone can pay me, if anyone can convince me to change my mind, I'll pay him $10,000. And that was, like, too much. But it was like, oh, my God, this is, you know, too much. I've got to respond to this. And so then I wrote that the essay why Sam Harris is unlikely to change his mind. And for the most part, as I was just reading that over, I think it's a perfectly legitimate statement of my research and how my research leads me to believe that you won't change your mind. So all that's fine. The thing, though, that clearly was a kind of a jerk move on my part was, I think, throwing so for listeners who don't know this story, this debate. I analyzed sam's your books. I analyzed your books and a bunch of other books, and I found that, according to this program, Luke, that counts words like always and never in a category of certainty that you came out as the most certain person, even more so than Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and all those guys. So that was a very jerk thing of me to do. And, Sam, I do apologize to you for that. That was inappropriate. Well but it did give me a chance to respond to that, which I still am, to pat my own back. I still am amused by my response to that, where I used every one of your keywords in a paragraph, which was, on its face, a statement of total intellectual humility and openness to being wrong, but it in fact, used all your certainty terms in the same paragraph. In fact, that kind of points to a similarity between us, which is that we both really enjoy being clever. My thing was a very clever thing, your response where you used all those words. We're sort of smart, Alex, and when smart alecs come up against each other, the audience is in for a treat, I suppose. Yeah, well, but but not to trivialize what we're doing here, because I think these issues are hugely important and I think our our disagreements are important and I think our misunderstanding one another is important. And just to talk a little bit more about the genesis of this thing, which it occurs to me now, I never really thought about this as we were sparring about these issues, but I think this may be part of the problem. And correct me if this seems crazy, but your field of social psychology where you've said that upwards of 95% of people are liberal and usually strongly liberal, so you've been surrounded by people who consider political conservatism to be a form of mental illness, essentially. And you've pushed back against this in ways that have been extremely important and really ingenious. And you and I are going to agree about many of the points you have the political correctness part. We both have really come up against political correctness. Yeah. So you've been fighting from that trench for a while, and then when you saw the so called New Atheists, which are just a gang of liberal intellectuals, initiate this frontal assault on religion, and you're arguing that it's not only false, but dangerous. And in my case, hearing me say that science will eventually replace religion on questions of morality and human. Wellbeing, I think you viewed this as yet another example of left leaning secularists who are totally out of touch with the lived experience of religious people doing what left leaning academics often do to social conservatives, which is dismissed them as morally and intellectually defective. I think that's right. Oh, good. Well, that's not crazy. Give me for psychoanalyzing you. But it seems to me that this, from my point of view, has caused you to be too hostile to our criticism of religion and to actually misunderstand it in important ways. And I'm sure we'll touch those points. And it's also made you too soft on religion in ways that can't be scientifically justified because you believe you're correcting for a harmful bias in the scientific community and you have been with respect to the political divide between liberals and conservatives. But I would argue that viewing the New Atheist attack on religion through that lens has caused you to misread us. And at the very least, I feel like you've misread me. I see. Yeah. I don't think that I perceive you guys as a bunch of far left people. So while there is some truth to what you say, I think it's not so much left right as sort of rationalist intuitionist that really, I think, is the heart that sort of the scientific nub of the difference between us is what do we each believe is the nature of human rationality and the reliability of human reason? And you have a much stronger faith or faith belief that individual reason can lead to reliable conclusions than I do. So would you agree with me that that is a fundamental factual difference between us? Yeah. And I want to get into morality second. I think we should deal with religion first. But yes, I think that is a difference between us to some degree, although you'll find me taking most of your points about what people descriptively do under the aegis of reasoning morally or attempting to justify or argue for their moral positions. But let's just focus on religion for a second and we'll get to the foundations of morality after that. So religion, as you've pointed out, is more than just a set of beliefs and you've argued against me as though I have disputed that, which I actually haven't. But you're not alone in this. Many people do that. So I just want to sort of track through a few of the things you say in your book and then talk about them. So you say in your book The Righteous Mind, that trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passion of college football by studying the movements of the ball. You've got to broaden the inquiry, end quote. Now, I think that analogy isn't quite right, but I actually agree with your general point. Religion is obviously more than what people believe. And yet I think it's totally coherent and in fact necessary to worry about the specific consequences of specific beliefs. Yes, let me just reform your analogy a little bit and get you to react to it because I think it's somewhat to stick with your analogy, it's a little bit more like asking the question, why are people on each team always tending to run in one direction? I mean, so if you've seen them running sideways or even backwards for a few moments, it's always with the purpose to get the ball to the other end of the field. So what is so special about the ends of the field that everyone wants to get there? And to explain that, you have to understand the rules of the game. In particular, you have to understand what a touchdown is. But once you know that more or less everything these people are doing is easy to understand. And again, there's more too. There's all the people out having tailgate parties outside the stadium, right? So that's part of the spectacle. But to understand what the most energized participants are doing in this situation, all you really need to know is what they want and what they believe will get them what they want. And so I would argue that this is true for the most destructive behavior and moral attitudes we see inspired by religion. So when you ask yourself, why is ISIS throwing gay people off of rooftops? It's because their scripture tells them to. It's actually written in the rule book. Now, in this case, the specific injunction is in the hadith. It's not in the Quran, but it's part of the larger rule book of Salafi Islam. And you can say anything you want about religion being more than just beliefs and doctrines. And you can talk about doing and belonging, which you do in addition to belief as being central to religion. And you can talk about the power of ritual and strong communities and the importance of transcendence, which is something that interests me. And I agree about all these things being interesting. But if you want to explain the behavior of ISIS, all you really have to know are the rules of the game as they understand them. And if their rule book changed slightly, let's say the rulebook on this point said, don't harm homosexuals under any circumstances. Simply force them to recite the Quran for 12 hours a day and actually create a special cast of priests that there's homosexuals who just chant from the Quran and who are otherwise venerated. Right. I think we can be absolutely sure that this is what they would be doing. In fact, there are analogous behaviors in other religions in human history. So this is why I think specific doctrines matter, and that no one I mean so you're going to talk about the intuitive roots of many of these things, but no one has an intuition that they should throw gaze off of rooftops, specifically, or eat a cracker every Sunday and call it the body of Jesus, or oppose embryonic stem cell research. And in fact, ISIS wouldn't even oppose embryonic stem cell research, and the Catholic Church would. And this is why specific doctrines matter so much. Okay? So I will certainly grant that specific doctrines matter. And that I think your thought experiment is correct. If there was a specific verse, and especially if it appeared in multiple places that said, here's how you treat homosexuals, then they would treat them differently. So I don't deny that the Scripture matters, but first, to understand your analogy, you tell me what is the end zone? What do you think they're all up to? What is the thing they're all striving for to get when you use this end zone analogy? Well, if you're talking about the real players, the real believers who are devoting their lives fully to this, the end zone is paradise and avoiding hell. So it's what happens after death. Playing by this rule book, playing this game, advancing the ball down the field, is ensuring that after death, you will spend eternity in paradise and escape hell. Okay? So I think this is one of the differences between us is that I am opposed to the pursuit of parsimony. I think that the social science, human nature and the social science are so complex, and especially if you look at morality or religion. So anytime someone says the goal of religion ultimately is to attain paradise, or the goal of religion ultimately is to have a sense of meaning or even closer to what I say, if you were to say the goal of religion is ultimately social bonding and connection well, those are all goals. There are lots of different goals. In this case, I was talking about ISIS. I was talking about what we would call the extreme committed death cult of Islam. Now, there's analogous cults in other traditions, but I'm not saying that all religious people in every denomination of every level of commitment, that their main goal is paradise. Some Unitarians don't necessarily even believe in heaven. Right? So I was speaking about ISIS in this case. Okay, I can certainly grant your point that beliefs do matter, and I hope I never said that they don't. But I think I would still claim that your analysis here is too focused on the explicit. My main criticism, my main concern about your writings on religion was I felt like sometimes felt like you were writing your two religion books. I felt like you were writing those mostly with the Bible and the Koran and The New York Times on your desk, and you were sort of saying, okay, well, look at this verse, or look at this event that happened and then just trying to make sense of it yourself. And I was thinking of it much more both from a kind of a jerk hymien point of view or, you know, unconscious motives point of view. I mean, there's just so much going on here, and I have not studied ISIS. I don't know what's going on with them, but I don't believe you could understand them by just by reading the Quran and saying, oh, the Quran says this. This is why ISIS is doing it. Well, there are motives of humiliation, geopolitical. I mean, I don't know what's going on, but there's a lot going on. But the issue is that this is how they understand themselves. And now here, I'm not just speaking about ISIS. I'm just speaking about religious fundamentalists in general. When you ask them how they understand what they're doing, if you ask them why homosexuality is anathema, for instance, they have a scriptural justification for it. And it does explain the belief and subsequent behavior and where in certain cases, nothing else does. It might be relatively easy to come up with other non scriptural reasons to be uncomfortable around the phenomenon of homosexuality. And we can talk about that gets into your kind of moral intuitions, the moral foundations theory. But for many of these things, the only way this idea could ever get into someone's head is based on the tradition and the explicit teaching on a specific point. Agreed? I agree with you on that point. And so let's make a distinction that I think will be very helpful here, which is between fundamentalism and religion more generally. So if we're talking about fundamentalist movements, then you and I are going to agree much more, including in the moral evaluation of them. And so if we live in a diverse society, if we live in a society, or if we value progress and open debate of ideas and challenging each other and the things we need for the sciences, then fundamentalism is incompatible with all of those things. Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, I would say politically correct fundamentalism or social justice fundamentalism. I think you and I both personally dislike fundamentalist the fundamentalist mindset, I should say. I don't mean the people, I mean the fundamentalist mindset is opposed to values that you and I both hold as individuals and for science. So there I think there's not as much disagreement between us. But then if you say, what about non fundamentalist? That's where I think you're much more negative than I am about people who are religious but not fundamentalist. Is that true? Well, yeah, I'm more negative in the sense that I feel like they make one honest talk about the problem of fundamentalism much more difficult because they don't want anything too critical said about their holy books or about a tradition of venerating the concept of revelation. Right. I think revelation is a problem here. The idea that one of our books was not the product of the human mind but the product of omniscience that already just deranges our intellectual and moral discourse really beyond saving. And we have to get out of that part of the religion business. And so insofar as moderates and liberals do well, then my only real concern is that I guess there are two more concerns. One is they tend to not be intellectually honest about the process whereby they have become moderate or liberal. So they pretend that there's something in the tradition, in the books that has been self purifying. But no, when you go back to the books, they're every bit as theocratic as they always were. What's happened is that they have collided with a wider set of values secular values and scientific insights and progress. And they have found being doctrinaire and dogmatic is no longer how they want to live. They can no longer justify it, but they're not really honest about just how that winnowing has taken place. And they tend to give credit to the resources of the tradition, whereas really it's the resources of a much larger conversation that human beings have had. Sure. So if you want to say that people are adopting positions and then searching for a justification and looking for some sort of textual justification of what they've decided to do intuitively, yes, I'm down with that. That's the core of my research, is that that's what a lot of our moral argument and justification is all about. Yeah. I just want to go back to your book briefly. You do one thing in your book which I it's pretty clearly an area where we disagree. I don't think we need to go into it any real depth because it may be a little hard to parse here in a podcast, but I think we should just flag it because I think it's also one reason why you think I and richard Dawkins and others have been too hard on religion. And it's this notion that religion has provided an evolutionary benefit to us. Is it an adaptation or a byproduct? You're right. That is the other core factual or scientific issue that we disagree on. Right. So I just want to introduce this this concept of group selection to those who don't know anything about it and then we can table it, probably, but so you defend this notion of group selection and specifically the idea that religion has helped certain groups survive and perhaps a lack of religion has caused others to fail. And you think that this mechanism hasn't just been cultural, but that it's also been biological. And so this idea of group selection, which obviously relates to much more than just religion, this is very controversial in biology. And its main champion, who you do side with here, is someone named David Sloan Wilson, who, interestingly, he's also attacked the new atheists with a level of energy that I never quite understood. So I should just point out that there are many biologists and I would think still most, as far as I can take the temperature on the whole field, disagree with this idea of group selection. And so if our listeners are interested in it, I think the best summary of the reasons to doubt that group selection occurs was written by our mutual friend Steven Pinker and the title is The False Allure of Group Selection. And that can be found on Edge. I know you must be aware of that paper. No, I responded to it. So you weren't persuaded by it. So that is what the debate comes down to is if is religion a product of evolution, isn't an adaptation, in which case that doesn't mean it's still adaptive today, but it would mean that it conferred some benefit. The really exciting idea that so captivated me when I first read Dawkins in college was, wow, what if it's like a virus? What if it's taken advantage of the hardware up there and it's exploiting it for its purposes? And of course, Dawkins and Dennis are really explicit about that. It's a really cool idea and I used to believe it and that was the prevailing wisdom. Dawkins book, The Selfish Gene was an incredibly powerful book and a testament to the power of good writing to be persuasive. So the state of the art in the was, as you say, that most biologists doubted it. In fact, almost all did. Group selection was dismissed because there wasn't any way to solve the free rider problem. If groups were to cooperate for the benefit of the group, any free rider within the group would get extra benefit and the genes for free riding would spread. And so the topic was put aside and David Slim Wilson was seen as alone, crazy, but a lot has changed since then. So right around that time, the whole idea of major transitions in evolution was being formulated. And there are many other examples of agents that were functioning at an individual level, competing with each other, coming together to be more effective as a group. And even the cells in our body are an example of that. The mitochondria have their own DNA because it was an example of a major transition where multiple entities got together to act as a group. Let's see what else was there. I go through in my book, I go through as though there were four new exhibits, four reasons to re examine the case since the 1970s gene, culture, coevolution, things like that. And while it is still true that their biologists mostly seem to fight against this, this is actually because I think EO. Wilson made a big mistake in writing a paper. I love him. I think he's mostly right about things. But I think he made a big mistake in writing a paper saying that kin selection doesn't matter. And I don't understand. I don't think that makes any sense. Kin selection is really powerful, so he took a lot of flak. And people are conflating his rejection of kin selection with his endorsement of groups, or I should say multilevel selection. So just the final point on this is the whole debate since the 60s with Williams and then Dawkins was always looking at altruism. Can we explain altruism as a product of group selection? We are nice to each other because the benefits then to the group outweigh the cost. To me as an individual, my response to Steve Pinker was, well, if you just focus on being nice or altruistic, well, then, yeah, it's kind of hard to argue that this is from group selection. But if you look at the tribalism, that's what really got me. That's why I'm on this side of the debate. If you look at tribalism, how similar it is, how initiation rights all over the world are actually mimicked in fraternity brothers initiations, I don't think it's because they studied anthropology. It's because there's something in the human mind that makes people, especially young men, want to do things that involve painting their faces or changing their appearance, exposing each other to extreme risk, doing all sorts of things that bond them together as a group makes them quite dangerous, quite able to be predators of other groups. So I think you and I agree on those external costs. So anyway, that's why I'm saying that if you focus on tribalism and try to understand that, I don't see how you can explain that from individual selection. And this is why I think that the arguments for groups limited group selection were overwhelmed. That's why I say we're 90% chimp. We're overwhelmingly evolved by individual level selection in the way that Dawkins describes it. But we have this interesting tribal overlay and I think that's essential for understanding not just morality and religion, but politics, as we're going to talk about very soon. Right. Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't say just a couple of words about why group selection seems spooky from a more traditional evolutionary point of view. And then I'll just get off it because I don't think we'll resolve it here. But I just think from the point of the criticism, it seems to be a metaphor that gets taken too literally and that blurs the lines between genes and individuals and groups as units of selection. As you say, group selection is often called multilevel selection. Yeah, that's the way to think about it. Right. But as Steve and others have pointed out, there are many problems with saying that selection acts on groups in the same way that it acts on individuals to maximize their inclusive fitness, or that it acts on them in the same way that it acts on genes increasing numbers of copies that appear in the next generation. So these things are operating differently. Again, I'm dogged by the fact that I feel like this is a little too hard to parse in a podcast for people to listen. So we can right, we can skip it. We can just point people. Actually, I think you know what, chapter nine of my book, so let's do this. I have made chapter nine of The Righteous Mind available for free on my web page. So if people go to Righteousmind.com, they can find my argument for group selection. And if they Google well, I guess you can direct them to but if they basically just Google Edge Pinker what false? Allure of group selection? Yeah, they can find that. So that Steve steve makes a strong argument against it. So I think we can just pass it off in that way. Yeah. Just to crib Steve briefly, the issue is that there's a lot of causality in the world that you don't need natural selection to explain. And so merely having one tribe outcompete another doesn't require natural selection. So like, for instance, if the Nazis had won the war, right, and we were now living in the first century of the Thousand Year Reich, this wouldn't be an example of group selection. And the difference that would make a difference here is almost certainly cultural and not genetic. So if the Germans had won the war, sequencing Hitler's genome wouldn't tell us why, and yet we would still be living in a world where everyone would now be a Nazi and the Nazis have succeeded. But here again, in talking about success, the success of a group, in this case the Nazis, we're using a metaphor here because this is not analogous to the success we talk about when we talk about gene spreading in a population. Because in here, in this case, the success itself applies to the group, the Nazi party enduring for centuries, not to some entity at the end of generations of replicators that have been copying themselves with some rate of mutation and then out competing all others. So Steve argues, I think, very strongly that it's a confusion over a metaphor. The interesting thing for me, though, is with group selection, I think it's actually leaving it no, no, we are. No, that we are. But it's actually a red herring for me because I'm happy to assume it's true for the sake of argument. Right. And it won't actually change any of the things you and I disagree about in this space because it seems to me that you draw normative claims from the fact that group selection is a fact. Very indirectly, yes. You seem to be saying that even if the tenets of religion are false right. Group selection proves that religion has still been a kind of necessary social glue. Well, hold on. Wait, let me reword that. So I think look, you and I are both atheists. We're both naturalists. We both believe that religion is out there in the world. It's part of human nature in some way, shape or form, and that evolution has to do with the explanation for why it's out there. So we're both naturalists. The question at hand is whether it does something or confers some benefit such that if we could rip it out, we would lose nothing or something. And on Dawkins view, and I think your view, if we could just get rid of it entirely, we'd be better off. And that might be true. I don't know. But if religion is an adaptation, as I believe it is, then it could still be true that it was necessary for getting us to where we are. And I do believe that religion and the psychology of religion helps explain how we and only we, made the transition to living in large scale societies of non kin. It could still be the case that it was useful back in tribal days, and now we've supplanted it with law and other things. So I would never say that religion being an adaptation or the truth of multiple selection would prove anything about how we ought to live today. But what I do draw from it is that seeing it as an adaptation for group solidarity and group coherence makes it easier to see some of the psychological benefits and sociostructural benefits that might be there that are hard to see if you're a secular person on the left? Because that is what I see. Is it's really hard to understand what's good about the other side once you're in an argument or debate with them? And from reading scholarship on religion, from reading books, especially the book, james Alt has this wonderful book, Spirit and Flesh, that really helps you see the sociology of a small evangelical community. So that's my only point. I wouldn't say I draw normative implications directly, but I do draw implications for what kinds of lives are happy and satisfying, what kinds of social patterns and structures make people less selfish and more inclined to think about others. And there I think you just have to think twice if you're going to say religion is just bad and it makes people do bad things, get rid of it. Yeah. So obviously I share your concern for human flourishing and us getting in a position to tune all the dials to maximize it. I guess I was detecting in you some version of the naturalistic fallacy, some version of saying that because this thing is natural to us and in fact selected for and did our ancestors good, that is some argument, some weight on the balance to argue that it is in fact good, morally speaking. Oh, no, I'm only making the argument actually in a way that very much like the way you make in the moral landscape. If we're going to talk about human flourishing, we need a full picture of human psychology, just straight descriptively. So I think you and I differ a little in our descriptive picture of human psychology, but beyond that, it's pretty much a straight flourishing happiness explanation. So I see what you're saying, but I'm pretty sure I'm not making the naturalistic fallacy by saying if it's evolved, therefore it's right or good. I'm not saying that right. If it's evolved, you would suggest that it could be harder to get rid of if bad, because we've all evolved to think in these ways. But one distinction, I still think in this area that divides us, at least it changes the way we tend to talk about this is there is a distinction in thinking about how science can touch this subject and the distinction between how we got here the evolutionary story of just how we came to have the brains and mental capacities we have. And then there's the question of just what is possible given what we are. And for me, those are two distinct and totally interesting and justifiable projects, but they're distinct and science has a very different role to play in each. And so if you're just going to do descriptive science and talk about how we got here, yes, that has no necessary normative implications. And many people stop there and say, well says science can't tell you how to live. Science can just tell you why it is you find certain things disgusting, why we've evolved to have very strong in group out group thinking, but we did not evolve to successfully build a global civil society that's committed to human rights and the free exchange of ideas and racial and gender equality. Right. So the question is, can we accomplish this? And I think we can. But the further question is, would it be moral to accomplish it and would it be a bad thing if we failed? And I think yes, we can answer yes on both of those questions. And the crucial point, though, is that success on this front will entail overcoming a fair amount of what we've evolved to care about. So you cite a bunch of work I remember Putnam and Campbell being some of it that seems to show that religion is good for people. So in this case, it makes them more generous. Yes. In the United States. That's right. It doesn't say globally, but yes, in the United States. There's a lot of evidence that religion makes people happier and better citizens. According to Putnam and Campbell. That's right. And this is the result of their belongingness to a religious community, not their beliefs and doctrines. That's exactly right. And this increased generosity isn't just lavished on their ingroup. It actually extends to the rest of society, which would surprise many atheists. Now, I don't actually know whether or not this is true. Let's just assume it is all true. It seems to me that even if we accept that as true, it obviously isn't the whole story. I mean, I think we could design a dozen invidious experiments where we show that religious people are more homophobic, say, or sexist than secular people on average, or have a lesser understanding of science or less respect for science. And this would help complete the picture. But I think the problem I have with this line of thinking is that there seems to be a tacit assumption that if we can show that religion is doing something good for people, there is no better way to get those goods that's compatible with a truly rational worldview. That's a fine point. I agree with that. But you raised a question that I think would be great for us to try to work out here. I think we might come to different views. So you said, I think we both agree that our evolved human nature did not prepare us to live in a giant, global, peaceful, egalitarian society under rule of law, where in a sense, we're living above our design constraints. And clearly, to some extent it's possible because despite the imperfections, we're sort of doing it nowadays. So our evolutionary past, while it makes it puts on some constraints, they're kind of loose constraints, and we can live in all kinds of ways that we weren't designed for. But here's where I think our different views of religion would lead to different prescriptions for how to do that. So I take part in a lot of discussions. I'm invited to all sorts of sort of lefty meetings about a global society. The left usually wants that global governance. They want more power vest in the UN. I hear a lot of talk on the left about how countries or national borders are bad things. They're arbitrary. So the left tends to want more of a universal I'm just think about the John Lennon song. This is what I always go back to. Just think about imagine. Imagine there's no religion, no countries, no private property, nothing to kill or die for. Then it would all be peace and harmony. So that is the sort of a far leftist view of what the end state of human evolution or social evolution could be. Now, is that possible or is it consistent with our evolved nature? Now, here's the other side. The other side, the conservative view is that we are fundamentally groupish, more parochial creatures. And to have global governance and one giant country or one giant community of all Earth would be a nightmare. It would be chaos. It just wouldn't work far better to have authority at the lowest level possible at all times and build up with nested structures. So a country ends up for conservatives, a country ends up being a very reasonable basic building block. And they would not want as much of a global society. They certainly would want international law. They would want treaties. They'd want all sorts of things. So I think this is a case where if you have a kind of a blank slate view or a very positive view, that our basic nature is love and cooperation and it's only capitalism that screwed it up, you're going to want a kind of a John Lennon vision of the future. And I don't think that that could really work. Whereas if you start with Edmund Burke, who talks about the little platoons of society we develop in the family so conservatives are really, really focused on the family and lower level institutions. And if you focus on making those strong and then you think about some sort of a legal and social architecture that allows multiple families and communities and states and countries to work together with a minimum of friction, I think that's much more workable. So getting a correct view of our evolutionary heritage and the psychology that resulted from it, I think is very helpful. It doesn't tell us what's right or wrong, but I think it does tell us which way is more likely to work. And if you see us as products of multilevel selection with a deep, deep tribalism, that suggests that you're probably better off going for more the Burke way and having groups that are composed of groups and finding ways for them to work together, rather than John Lennon way, which is, let's erase all group boundaries. Let's erase divisions of nation and everything else and just have one giant planet. I just don't think that's likely to work. I think that is like, as with the communist societies, it's making assumptions about human nature that end up, you know, people just refuse to live that way and it's a disaster. One thing about what you said that I want to pull back to the the focus on religion is just that you're essentially exposing some of the holes in secular thinking. And I agree. Those holes are there. In fact, I've written two books that attempt to shore up some of the weaknesses I see in secularism. And what you just said relates to this very topical example of the recent migrant crisis in Europe, where you have secular liberals for the most part, and atheists who really can't find a rationale, morally speaking, for anything less than an open borders policy. And in fact so there's there's two reasons here. There's two connections here because there's this low birth rate in Europe and many people attribute that to secularism. The the loss of religion is is is really leading to a loss of babies and that becomes a justification for bringing in immigrants because they need people to work in these societies. So one could argue that for two reasons, both economically and morally, secularists are now in a position, someone like Angela Merkel, where they're unable to find a reason to keep the borders closed. And let's just say that this happens where you have millions upon millions of Muslims who, on balance, are deeply religious and disposed to have large families. They flood into Europe over the next few decades. And in 100 years, Europe is predominantly Muslim and deeply religious. Right? This is a possible counterfactual or actual history. So what lesson should we draw from this? Many people would conclude that what Europeans needed in the year 2016 is more Christianity, right? That only a belief in Jesus and the associated behavior and belongingness that that confers and the fertility rates that get associated with a taboo around contraception that only that could have protected them from the sweeping changes in their society. And I would just argue is that there must be a truly rational way for secular people just to figure out what sort of world they want to live in and simply build it. Yeah, I totally agree, Sam, and I think this is a nice example for us to talk about because I think you and I both are wary of if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free, relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Okay, well, I'm not going to do what I said I wouldn't do and release the whole conversation I had with Omar Ziz. Now, I'd like to take a few minutes to explain why I've decided to do this and provide some context of the conversation itself. First, why have I changed my mind? As I said before, I didn't want to release this podcast because I thought it was a terrible conversation, and terrible in ways that were not actually interesting. I was attempting something with Omer that he wasn't up to, and I failed repeatedly to get the conversation on track. So it was a failure on both our parts to have a productive conversation, and I just felt that broadcasting this failure wouldn't be good for anyone and that listeners would find it incredibly frustrating. But it received an extraordinary amount of pressure, both well intentioned and not, to release this podcast. In response to the cries of censorship I heard from Omer and Glenn Greenwald and a wide range of silly people. And this pressure has come not merely from the silly themselves, but from my actual supporters, who say that my not releasing the podcast is making the job of defending me much more difficult than it needs to be. According to many of you, even though I told Omer in advance that I wouldn't release the podcast if I thought our conversation had been a total waste of time, my not releasing it is too easily spun as my hiding something and incredibly, as my infringing on Omer's right to free speech. So many of you tell me that I am harming my cause by not releasing it. Now, I don't know whether you're right or not, but I've decided to assume that you are. Now, paradoxically, my claim that the podcast was too boring to release is no longer true. Right? Because given all the controversy and given the charges that Omar has leveled at me, given the speculation that he might have defeated me in a debate and revealed my ignorance of all things Islamic, the podcast is suddenly very interesting to many of you. Not to me, but to you. So I've decided to adapt to these changes and release the podcast. But before I do, I want to give you a few facts. I was absolutely clear with Omer about the format of this conversation in advance about my reasons for insisting upon it, and about the fact that I might ditch the whole podcast if we proved unable to have a productive conversation. As you'll hear, we discussed the possibility of my not airing the podcast at the very end of the conversation in a surprisingly collegial way, given how ugly this aftermath has become, and he seemed to understand. Now, on this point, you should know I've been on the receiving end of this sort of thing many times before. For instance, I once sat with Robert Wright, the journalist with whom I've had many disagreements, for a two hour interview on his video podcast The Meaning of Life TV. Now, to my knowledge, that conversation never saw the light of day. I have no idea why it has never once occurred to me in the intervening years to cry censorship. And Robert never explained why he didn't release the podcast, and he never told me that was a possibility. I once sat for an hour in the NPR studios and spoke with Guy Raz for his Ted Radio Hour about the talk I gave at Ted on the foundations of morality. Guy killed the episode because he had trouble finding another speaker, to, quote, balance my views. Now, I found this annoying. It is annoying, but never in a million years would it occur to me to think that Guy had infringed on my freedom of speech. Nor would it occur to me to publish an article in Salon alleging that Guy had said some extraordinarily hateful and embarrassing things in our conversation as a way of trying to force him to release it as the only way to clear his reputation, which is what Omer has done to me. Now, when Omer grows up, if he grows up, he will realize that people make editorial decisions he doesn't always like. And unlike the way I've treated him, they usually won't tell him about this possibility in advance, and they won't let him make his own copy of the broadcast and release it just because he wants to. As I told Omar in an email exchange explaining my position before our conversation, I once went on the Today Show. I took two days out of my life. I traveled across the country. I spent 90 minutes doing a roundtable interview with a few religious people in Meredith Vieira, and my appearance was cut down to a single sentence and a reaction shot of me looking confused. There is no recourse when this happens to you. People get to control their own broadcasts. So this charge of censorship is ridiculous. But I've been persuaded by many of you that even though it's ridiculous, it still looks like I'm hiding something, and that I don't trust people to come to their own judgments about who made more sense in my conversation with Omer. And there is some truth to both of these claims. First, I have been hiding something. My decision not to publish this was, by definition, a decision to hide something. I've been hiding a fruitless and surprisingly painful waste of my time. And very early in this conversation, you'll hear my patients begin to fray. In fact, I don't start with a lot of patience, because, remember, I was talking to someone who had already proved to be amazingly dishonest in what he wrote about my book with Majid. He wrote a viciously, stupid review in Salon to begin with, and this is why I wanted to talk to him. But once I started getting wrapped around the axle with him in attempting to discuss his review, I got very annoyed, and that certainly didn't help the conversation get on track. And I absolutely consider that a failing of mine. This is not who I want to be in the world, and it's not who I want to be on my own podcast. So given that I couldn't get Omar to stay on topic, and I couldn't even get him to realize that he ever went off topic, and I grew more and more frustrated by this, and we never arrived at an understanding of anything of substance, it's only natural that I didn't want to publish the result. In fact, when I declared the broadcast too boring to release, that wasn't quite accurate. The truth is, I found it too boring to even review. I started to listen to it, but I found that I just could not bear to spend any more time with Omer, really, with me and Omer. I hate who I was with Omer, but in response to this controversy, I've now listened to the whole thing for the first time. And most of it is terribly boring, but parts of it aren't, actually. And I recommend the last hour over the first two. If you're only going to listen to part of it, I can't say I recommend you listen to any of it. In my view, this is a conversation that should have never happened. I should have recognized, based on what Omar wrote in Salon the first time around, that there was no way I could have a real conversation with him. Now, as to the second point about my not trusting people to come up with their own intelligent assessment of what went on here, that's actually somewhat true. There are many people I don't trust to do this. In fact, I trust that they will come to the wrong conclusion about what happened here. In fact, some already have. Based on the excerpts I released in my last podcast, many people have declared that I broke my promise to Omar by releasing those clips. I said I wouldn't edit him, and now I have. But of course, I only release those clips to respond to the false charges he's now made in multiple articles online. In any case, you and Omer are now getting the whole podcast. Be careful what you wish for. But let me give you one example of how many will get confused by Omer. Consider this a brief field guide to human stupidity. Listen to this clip that I aired on my last podcast. The problem for me in general, just to step back before we get into the text here, is that I understand Abu Bakr al Baghdadi better than you understand me and Majid. And I can actually say this with certainty because you are absolutely wrong about me and Majid, and I could ascribe beliefs to al Baghdadi at random and do a better job than you've done here. I could throw the E Ching and come to a better understanding of his motives than you have come to an understanding of ours by reading and reviewing our book. The only thing I want to say to that is I think I understand Baghdadi better than you and Maji understand Baghdadi. Because I actually factor into account his political strategy and his geostrategic policy that he's had in Syria and in Iraq that's allowed al Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq, to go from being a ragtag group of rebels that was decimated in 2011 to be this very powerful militia in 2016. And like the political factors, and I hope we get to them, those are things that you and Majid don't discuss. I don't see you taking an interest in okay, but that's a totally separate point. Whether you understand Baghdadi better than I do, we can discuss I'm saying that I understand him, this person who is practically infinitely distant from me on the moral and political and religious and intellectual spectrum better than you understand me and Majid. And we have told you our motives for writing this book, right? So that's what I find so strange here. Sam, I don't care about your motives, though. For me, it's what the book says. No, and what you said before, you describe what we're going to get into it. Because one of the things I'm going to take issue with very early on in your review is your description of motives to us. Here is what actually happened there. I made a point about how completely omer misunderstands my and Majid's motives for writing our book. He did this in his Salon review in the very opening paragraph. I sought to illustrate this by saying that I understand Abu Bakr al Baghdadi better than he understands me and Majid. It may have seemed like a hyperbolic example, but it actually isn't. I'm claiming that is literally true. Omar then just changed the subject and claimed that he understands Abu Bakr al Baghdadi better than either Majid or I do, because we ignore politics and he doesn't. When I pulled him back to the actual topic I had raised, he claimed not to care about our motives in the first place. This is wrong on every conceivable level. He changed the subject. What he said was just a non sequitur. He then made a claim about Mayan Majid's ignoring politics, which is itself untrue. It's especially untrue of Majid. His whole focus is on political Islam. And then when I brought him back to the topic, he denied that he cares about our motives at all, which is also totally false. The first paragraph of his essay directly impugns our motives. He claims we wrote our book just to make money, and he had said as much on a previous podcast. So this is a small masterpiece of deflection and dishonesty, which, yes, many people will not recognize for what it is. Even now, when I perform an autopsy on this moment, many people will not understand what Omar did wrong. In fact, I've already heard from people who listened to that clip on my last podcast who said, he really got you there on politics. He understands Al Baghdadi better than you and Majid do. Okay, these people are destined to love Omer's side of this podcast. But for anyone actually paying attention, you will hear me struggling in vain to keep Omer on topic. He confidently asserts points like the point about Al Baghdadi you just heard that are non sequiturs. Sometimes I follow him down that rabbit hole and we wind up discussing these topics, and sometimes I don't. And when I don't, I am sure his audience will interpret that as my having conceded the irrelevant point he just raised. But as you'll hear all too clearly in places, I found the resulting conversation deeply frustrating. If there is anything in this podcast that embarrasses me, it's just how annoyed I let myself get, and very early on, merely having a conversation with another human being. And not to demonize Omer, I think that most of this behavior on his part is probably unconscious. Most of the time, he's going off point and being effectively evasive. I don't think he even knows what he's doing. He's very articulate, and he has these chunks of language on the hard drive he wants to download. But the true things he says are usually irrelevant, and the relevant things he says are usually false. And that is a toxic combination, especially for me. That is my Kryptonite. So you will hear me at my least patient, and I'm not proud of who I was in those moments, and you will also hear a fair amount of despair from me at points. This is not the despair of someone who was worried he was losing a debate. On the contrary, if you want to view this as a debate, there are several moments where I appear to win it outright by full knockout. True to form, Omer didn't realize he had been knocked out. But you will. I wasn't trying to have a debate. I was trying to have a truly honest conversation. And the despair you hear, especially at the end, was over the discovery that this just wasn't possible. But here's what you will not find in this podcast. You will not find any of the things that Omer says you would find there virtually every word in his recap of our conversation on Salon is a lie. He claims that I said things I didn't say. He read into my silence as other things I don't believe and would never say. He claims to have demonstrated my ignorance on topics about which I'm not ignorant and which were among the many irrelevant points he raised and we barely touched. But most incredible of all, he said that somewhere in this conversation you are about to hear, I quote, demonized Muslims to such an extreme degree that it verged on bloodlust, and that I communicated in some way that, quote, Muslim looking or brown skinned bodies were of no human value to me. Now, I don't know how he thought he could get away with that. The man and he is a man. He's not a teenager. He's a journalist in his 20s getting his law degree at one of the best law schools on earth. He's published in The New Republic and the New York Times. He's an adult. And he is attempting to destroy my reputation by alleging that I said things I didn't say in a conversation that was recorded. And I have the recording, which I can choose to release as I'm doing now. And he did this so that I would release it. What on earth was he thinking? Well, I'll tell you what I think he's thinking. I think Omer understands that he is writing primarily for an audience that does not care whether or not he is honest. They just want to see the people they disagree with demonized. And this is the audience that Glenn Greenwald writes for and Chris Hedges and Reza Oslon. And I'm afraid Omar is right. But that's not my audience. And when you guys tell me that I've done something that makes me look less than honest, that matters to me a lot. And what's more, it quite obviously matters to you. I'm often charged by people like Glenn Greenwald with having a cult of followers who just agree with everything I say. As far as I can tell, your tolerance for me appearing to be intellectually dishonest is nonexistent, and I wouldn't have it any other way. And the fact that so many of you thought it looked shady for me not to release the full podcast, that really bothered me. So here it is. Now, as you might imagine, I've elected not to spend the $500 to $1,000 it would have cost me to clean up all the breaths and mouth noises. We've edited out all the big Skype glitches and bathroom breaks and coughing fits. And there were many moments when Omar and I were talking over one another, which on Skype just becomes a total mess, and you can barely understand what's being said, and the same thing winds up being said a moment later once one person just stops trying to interrupt the other. So in the interest of preserving your sanity and your hearing, we cut those bids as well. But just to be clear, every meaningful sentence of our conversation has been preserved. And now, for better or worse, I give you Omar Aziz. I've got Omar Aziz on the line. Omer. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. I expect this will be a difficult conversation. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's going to be difficult, but hopefully it will also be useful. But before we get into it, please tell our listeners a little about yourself and where you're from and what you're doing now. Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to exploring our areas of disagreement and potentially of agreement. So I'm a law student at Yale Law School. I focus on human rights and foreign policy. First and foremost, I consider myself a writer. I studied in England and France and Canada and now the US. Born to Muslim family that originally came from Pakistan. And I'm interested in all of these issues around religion, around human rights, around foreign policy, and in exploring fundamentally the best way forward. So in a nutshell, that's what I'm about. So you're getting your JD now at Yale, right? That's right. So what did you do your undergraduate in and where did you do that? So I did my undergraduate in politics, but really more so in books because I spent it more not going to class, of course. And I did it in Canada at Queen's University. I did my masters in International relations in Cambridge. But again, I didn't go to class. I spent my time traveling throughout the Middle East. And I think that was really where my perceptions of Islam and the Muslim world changed a lot. I think before that I was reacting, as many people who come out of religious families do, towards the religion and culture of their birth. And so I probably would have agreed with you more at that point. But then I went to Iraq and Jordan, for example, and did some reporting and saw it for myself and then went and came to Yale to begin my JD. Are you a practicing Muslim? You were born into a Muslim family and have been identified as a Muslim all your life, or you say you came to your commitment to Islam later in life? Yeah, well, I come from an interesting family that I think is representative, really, in terms of one of my parents being very secular and very skeptical and one of my parents being very believing but not proselytizing. And so I was practicing at one point. I don't like that term. Now I identify culturally as a Muslim and was within the community of Islam because it was part of my upbringing. When Ed comes around once a year, I want to be with my family and want to celebrate, but I'm philosophically agnostic and so you could say I might even agree with you on the question of whether God exists. Right? Right. Okay. Well, I'm talking to you now because of the book review you published in Salon. That's right, my favorite website, in which you wrote very critically and dismissively about the book I wrote with Majid Nawaz Islam and the Future of Tolerance. Rather than just talk to you about the review in general, I'm going to have you read it out loud on the podcast so that we can discuss it point for point. Now, you've agreed to do this, but under some duress. You told me by email you think this is a terrible idea, but I want our listeners to understand why I've structured the conversation this way. Now, first, you can say anything you want. I mean, I'm simply insisting that you also read every word of your review so that our listeners can hear it and I can respond to it. But you can make any caveats or supporting points you want, and we can talk about anything under the sun. I just want to deal with your review first and pretty systematically. Just to be clear, there's absolutely nothing about this that is closing down debate or conversation. I'm not going to edit anything you say unless you ask me to. So here is why I want to focus on the review first. It's a very common experience for a person to read a review like this, or even to write one, and to have no idea what the target of this kind of criticism could or would say in response, because there's simply no good format in which to answer charges like this. And so, as an experiment, I want to use my podcast for this, if only just this once. And in particular, I want our listeners to know what it's like. And I want you to know what it's like for me to read a review like this, actually almost in real time, sentence by sentence, because it seems to me you can't possibly know how fully this essay of yours misfires from my point of view. You took the time to write it. Presumably you think your statements are clear and accurate and that you've built a very damning case against me and Majid, in particular me. But there's almost no single sentence here that survives scrutiny. And I want to demonstrate this for you. Yeah, and let me just make a quick point. My initial reservations to doing it in this format, and I highlighted this when you said it's never been done before. And my suggestion that it's never been done before is because this could descend into a kind of telmudic parsing of single sentences and words that won't be helpful at all. Now, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that that's not going to happen. On the second point, I think in an earlier podcast you said that I really hate you, or I hate Majid, and I hate you even more. And I want to correct that. I don't hate you and I don't hate Majid. I find some of your ideas to be repugnant and I was responding to those. I didn't call you a racist. I didn't call you a bigot at all. I didn't call you any names. I'm merely contending and responding to the ideas that I read in your book. And so that was my intention at least. Okay, well, that's fine. And we'll get into what you said specifically and its implications. And again, it's not going to be a rabbinical parsing of every word, but I do want to move through it systematically and I want to also make clear that my goal isn't to embarrass you and my goal really isn't even to debate ultimately. I'm just I'm trying to bridge the gap between your essay and the cynicism that it communicates to me and what I would consider a real conversation. But I think doing this is going to take some real work because I think we're very far apart on the page. And obviously I'm going to cut you some slack because I understand that no one writes an article like this anticipating to then have to read it to its primary target. And I can only assume that even if you kept your opinions about me as they are, you would probably phrase a few of these points differently in the context of an actual conversation. So I think one thing to make clear up front is that your insults don't matter to me. I don't take anything you've written personally, but you shouldn't. The problem is I don't take anything you've written to heart at all because it's as though you're writing from another universe here. And this is what I find so troubling, and this is why I want to have this conversation. The problem for me in general, just to step back before we get into the text here, is that I understand Abu Bakr al Baghdadi better than you understand me and Majid. I can actually say this with certainty because you are absolutely wrong about me and Majid. And I could ascribe beliefs to al Baghdadi at random and do a better job than you've done here. I could throw the E Ching and come to a better understanding of his motives than you have come to an understanding of ours by reading and reviewing our book. The only thing I want to say to that is I think I understand Baghdadi better than you and Mahji understand Baghdadi. Because I actually factor into account his political strategy, his geostrategic policy that he's had in Syria and in Iraq that's allowed Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq, to go from being a ragtag group of rebels that was decimated in 2011, to be this very powerful militia in 2016. And like the political factors, and I hope we get to them, those are things that you and Majid don't discuss I don't see you taking an interest in okay, but that's a totally separate point. Whether you understand Baghdadi better than I do, we can discuss I'm saying that I understand him. This person who is practically, infinitely distant from me on the moral and political and religious and intellectual spectrum better than you understand me and Majid. And we have told you our motives for writing this book. Right? So that's what I find so strange here. Sam, I don't care about your motives, though. For me, it's what the book says. No, what you said before, you describe what we're going to get into it because one of the things I'm going to take issue with very early on in your review is your description of motives to us. But again, let me just step back for a second. You're a very smart person who is capable of writing about these issues honestly. In fact, I told you by email that you had a piece in The New Republic about jihadism. I think it's called The Soul of a Jihadist that I totally agreed with. Right. So that's the mystery I want to attempt to resolve, that you could write an article on jihadism that I could recommend almost without reservation, and yet you could review my dialogue with Majid so uncharitably that I can honestly say from my point of view that you communicated nothing but your own confusion and prejudice. Okay, so my goal here, again, just to be clear, is I want to bridge that gap, essentially between your two articles. But I really think it's not going to be easy because from my point of view, almost no sentence in your review does what you think it does. That's where we're starting. And I think the only other thing I want to say before we before you start reading your review, is that our listeners should know that I've sent you a version of it where I've marked a few I've marked many places where I think there's something for us to talk about. And I did this because, given the time lag on Skype, I didn't want to continually be talking over you as you began reading a new sentence or paragraph. So you have the complete text of your review marked by me, and you'll just read sections, and then we'll pause and then begin speaking about relevant points. Yeah, sure. And I hope that just to respond to your previous point about my New Republic piece, which I still stand by, of course, there's a difference between examining the assumptions, the beliefs, and the motivations of an isolated extremist and then extrapolating that and saying that that is either representative of an authentic or legitimate form of Islam. And my intention in writing this piece and in critiquing your views, is that how do we actually get a reformation? How do we actually get cultural liberalism in the Middle East? And I propose that your solutions and Majid solutions, which. Focus on versus almost to the exclusion of politics is the wrong way forward. So that's what I'll say on that. Okay, let's go. Please start with the title. Sure. The title that the Salon editors put on this, and these are the only words in the entire piece that are not my own, is Sam Harris's Detestable Crusade. And I think that I also want to have my original title, which I put, which they changed, of course. It was originally called the Poverty of the Intellectuals sam Harris, Majid Nawaz and the Illusion of Tolerance. And look, I wouldn't use a phrase like Detestable Crusade because to me, that's clickbait nonsense. And that's what all editors from time immemorial have done. And so you can rebut that. And we probably agree that that's not a helpful title, but I stand by my own in saying that the ideas in here, in this track were very often impoverished. Yes, okay, well, that's very interesting. So please just read the full title and the subtitle and then we'll talk about it. Yeah, sure. Just give me a here. So the full title was Sam Harris's Detestable Crusade. How his latest anti Islam track reveals the bankruptcy of his ideas. And the subtitle was Harris's Haughty ignorance and chauvinism are on full display in his new book, a Dialogue with the Former Radical by Omar Aziz. Right, okay, so it's interesting to as I expected, you didn't write this title and you're not actually happy with it. So now you are. I think the third writer from Salon who I've communicated with, one of them is another Muslim who is just as critical of me as you are, who felt the need to apologize for the title that Salon put on there. No, I don't want apologize to I don't apologize because these are not my words, they're not my article. But this happens with you've written before for public magazines as well, and you're well aware that editors choose the titles. I'm not saying you're apologizing for yourself, but it's not a title that you stand behind. Let me just point out, in case this blew by people too quickly, as with almost every other Salon article about me, there isn't even a pretense of journalistic objectivity here. There's clearly an editorial policy there to make me look as bad as possible. And here the reader is told, just straight out told, that my work is detestable, my ideas are bankrupt, that I am haughty, ignorant and chauvinistic. And I pointed this out in my last interview with Salon. This is the behavior of a tabloid. I mean, no real magazine or newspaper does this. But any case, just get into the article. Yeah, sure. So let's start. There are a few get rich quick schemes left in modern publishing, but one that persists could be called Project Islamic Reformation. Writing a book that fits in this category is actually quite easy. First, label yourself a reformist. Never mind the congratulatory self coronation. The tag implies it is necessary to segregate oneself from all the nonreformists out there. Second, make your agenda clear at the outset by criticizing what is ailing Islam and Muslims. The Quran is a good place to start because Muslims, especially in the Middle East, surely treat their holy book more like a military instruction manual than anything else. Third, propose a few solutions, lest you be accused of nuance. The more vague and generic these are, the better. Fourth, soak up the inevitable publicity that awaits, and with it, your hard earned cash. Voila. Sam okay, so you actually believe that writing a short book like this about reforming Islam for Harvard University Press is an extremely lucrative thing to do? If you do, I need to educate you about the reality of publishing. I don't think it's lucrative. Even if it were lucrative, it's easy, though. It's intellectual fast food. Sam you describe this as a get rich quick scheme, okay? And even if this were a great way to make money, which it isn't, you actually think that money would be our primary motive in writing a book like this? I'm not sure what your primary motive is. I know that if I were to dish out a book about Islam and use the words reformation and terrorist, I could get a book deal in about 5 seconds. In fact, I could write that kind of book in my sleep. It's not that difficult to do. To me, this is intellectual fast food. And frankly, I think you guys could have done better. It's a different point. Okay, I understand you don't like the book, and you think we could have written a better book. You're ascribing motives to us here, right? This is the first paragraph of your piece. You describe this as a get rich quick scheme. Now, I'm talking about your understanding of what Majid and I are up to. Now, I find your cynicism here fairly breathtaking. You think Majid's career as a reformer, okay, as a former Islamist who spent years in an Egyptian prison and who now seeks to deprogram Islamists in jihadist, incurring massive security concerns as a result, and foregoing every other opportunity he might have, you actually think that this is a get rich quick scheme on his part? You think this is how he thinks he can make the most money? Look, I tell you that there's been a litany of books that have been published very recently. They're not scholarly tracks that repeat the same slogans over and over again. They're short pamphlets. And yes, I mean, maybe it's not get rich quick, but it's get rich soon. At least you build a platform on it. You accumulate a mass following based on people who love the idea of saying, telling Muslims that they should reform by cutting out verses of their holy book, which no other religion has been expected or demanded to do. And yes, I don't think it's a serious, serious intellectual exercise. Again, Omar, it's a different point. We can talk about whether it's a serious intellectual exercise, but do you think it's difficult to call for a reform of Islam in America today? Do you actually think it's difficult? Does it threaten your security? Absolutely. We will get into this. This is why one of the major parties of the democracy are calling for have been calling for this in very fascistic tones. I don't think it's an intellectually brave thing to do. I'm sorry, Homer. We got to move through this systematically, all right? I'm talking about your description of motive. You are making assumptions here which are flat wrong. First of all, there's Majid's case of being a reformer. There is little standing in Muslim communities. The price he's paid for this, all right? So the fact he lost a wife and son over this, and you are describing him as an opportunist who's just out to make a buck. Okay, I want to return with right wing organizations is probably why I would do that. There are plenty of reforms working on the ground. I'm not filibuster. I'm trying to get back to the first point you're jumping off of, which is the description of motive. Now, speaking personally, I'm giving you information you don't actually have about me. All right? Speaking personally, right. The challenge for me is to make the work I do on this topic, the topic of Islam remotely viable and not to have the resulting damage done to my reputation by people like you not close the door to other opportunities. Viable to whom? Viable to whom? To get Muslims? No, to even get paid for it. Okay, you describe this as a get rich quick scheme, right? But you realize that having people call you a racist and a bigot and a chauvinist and an Islamophobe isn't good for your career, right? You realize there's a cost to this? Do you realize that many people who agree with me on these issues, just across the board, won't touch this topic because they don't want to deal with the defamatory nonsense I deal with on a daily basis? Look, there are many white, non Muslim authors. I've written books about Islam. This is not about you in particular. And you don't have the kind of offensive language in here that you've said before in terms of we are at war with Islam or all kinds of, yes, chauvinistic viewpoints. But I mean, back to my earlier point. I think that doing something like this is not difficult. And, yes, it does make one money. In fact, I've been offered to do it myself, and I'm not afraid of being called anything, and I am critical of Islam. So, I mean, if you want to complain about having your feelings hurt, that's one thing. Let's have an actual discussion of the merits of what reformation looks like. It has nothing to do with having my feelings hurt. Again, I have to linger on this point because you're so far from reality here, and you're so satisfied that you are in touch with it. So just listen to me for a second. Again, I'm talking about me, my career as a best selling writer and scientist. You've made certain assumptions here, and they're totally wrong by attacking religion, and that's totally fine. What were you doing before you wrote The End of Faith? You're a PhD. Neuroscientist, right? You made a lot of money off of this. Here is a fact. Focusing on Islam to any degree, writing this book with Majid, having you on my podcast now, okay. Alienates a significant percentage of my core audience. Even the people who know I'm not a bigot, the people who see no more merit in defamatory Salon articles than I do, right, don't want to hear me talk about Islam and Islamism because it's the most boring thing in the world. Now, I can tell you that there is almost no one in my core audience who wants me to spend any more time reiterating my concerns about Islam. And yet you seem to think that I am pandering to a huge audience for mercenary reasons. There's not a scintilla of truth to this charge. You just conjured it out of just an unfriendly act of imagination. Yeah, well, I mean, look, if I look at your career and the things that you said before Sam Harris became waking up in meditation sam Harris. It's all been attacks on religion, and that's fair. But some of the things, of course, that you said about Islam before, which garnered a lot of controversy, rightly? So and I hope we can talk about that. Your rhetoric, those are things that you should expect to be criticized for. Look, I don't want to talk about Islamism either. I've got a wide variety of interest and creative pursuits that I'd rather be doing, so this is on me as well. And if your listeners are going to be alienated by an opposing point of view, they're not going to be alienated by an opposing point of view. It's your assumption that Majid and I I mean, it's especially egregious with Majid, but I'm focusing on my part for the moment. It's your assumption that I am pandering to an audience that is hungry to hear me reiterate the problems with Islam and that this is a lucrative thing to do. What sort of advance do you think Majid and I got for this book? I mean, you've probably heard that bestselling authors get six figure or seven figure advances for books. What do you think we got here? I'm not sure. You tell me. There was no advance, right? Yeah. How much? And can I ask you look, I don't want to go into your finances. That's your personal business. But look, this is Islam and the future of tolerance. You weren't talking about reformation of Islam five years ago or four years ago. You were just talking about attacking Islam. And this was originally supposed to be a blog post, if I'm not mistaken. Let me just make one quick point. This was originally supposed to be a blog post, and this reads like a long email exchange between two people. I can't believe I spent $20 on it, or whatever the price was, and Majid proposed that it be a book. And I think part of the reason for that, it's fair to assume, is that you would have made more money by publishing as a book than you would have by publishing it freely on your blog. People pay a premium to read something that should not have a premium price attached to it. This is my point here, okay? Well, no, that's not your point. Again, that's one of my points. You're not in touch with reality here. You're not in touch with the cost professionally reputationally for touching this issue. You think that there are windfall profits for anyone who wants to say something negative about Islam. That's just simply not the case. Let me just give you another example here. When Ben Affleck called my comments about Islam racist on Bill Marshall last year, okay, I was trying to launch a book about meditation and the nature of consciousness and a rational approach to spirituality. And that's a book that I actually had been paid a fair amount to write, okay? And there was literally not a moment for the rest of my book tour where I could talk about my book. Instead, I had to deal with idiots who thought that Affleck made sense, right? And honestly, I've spent much of the last year doing that. Now, do you think just consider this with fresh eyes for a moment. Do you think that when you're trying to launch a book about spirituality and meditation and a scientific understanding of consciousness, do you think that having to endlessly beat back charges of racism and bigotry is a good thing for marketing that book? Is that a money maker? Two points. The first is that there is a huge audience in the United States for right wing politics and right wing views about Islam. This is not new, right? I'm sure that you are aware of this and you encounter it all the time in the media and half of American democracy. At least one of the two major parties has been caught up in this. The second point is that the reason why people were so critical of you and asking you all those questions is because on that appearance on Bill Marshall, you called Islam the mother load of bad ideas. You threw out a number that at the time, I think that this is where some of your critics were unfair, where they said you pulled it out of thin air. And I don't think I give you more credit than that. But you called Islam the mother load of bad ideas. And the guy next to you bill Maher, who I also really like. I think he's a funny comedian and I love watching his show, but he compared Islam to the fucking mafia. Those are his words. Now, what do you expect people not to raise those questions when you're going around? The point I'm making is that there is a cost for this. This is not a self serving, opportunistic profitable thing to do. And most people who agree with me won't go near this topic because of all the pain it causes them. There is no upside to it. Now, yes, there are a few right wing areas of publishing where a couple of people can sell books pandering to what you might call, I think, more legitimately call a racist or xenophobic or bigoted audience. But that is not the market for Majid and me, and it's incredible that you're not seeing this. Okay, so I am someone who deals with many other topics, whose audience wants him to deal with other topics. At this point, almost anything but Islam, right? I mean, just picture this. Do you think that anyone pays a lot of money to hear me come tell their students or employees that Islam is a terrible religion? No. I mean, look, I'm not sure what your sources of income are and who pays you and who doesn't pay you, but I'm certain that if tomorrow or sometime in 2016, you were to, say, expand the part of the end of faith dedicated to Islam and write out the most withering critique of Islam that you could possibly write. I'm sure that would sell very, very well, especially in the United States, especially in Europe, where people are getting very antsy about Islam. Look, if you think that criticizing Islam and doing it when very heated rhetoric doesn't sell well, then honestly, dude, you're diluted, man. It sells extremely well. You get platforms, you can go on the media, you can market your books, and you get more followers and more readers, and people want to hear that you're wrong about this, okay? You're wrong about this. I have five New York Times bestsellers under my belt now, the first one being The End of Faith and Criticism of Religion, which started it all. Yes, okay? But there's much more to the book than that, and it is not focused on Islam. And it was the first book in a wave of, quote, new atheist books that started this publishing trend. You couldn't publish the same book today and hope to get lots of readers. And my book with Majid was never expected to be a New York Times bestseller. Hasn't been a New York Times bestseller, was not written because we thought this was a great angle to make a lot of money. It was written to communicate specific ideas, which I hope we will get into. And it was written as an example of a conversation that succeeded. Right. Majid and I started out far apart when we first met, and we converge in a very happy collaboration. And we're putting it out there as an example of how a conversation on this topic could and we think should start now. The fact that you don't understand the reputational costs to this the fact that you don't understand how much damage has been done to our public conversation on this topic by articles like the one you just wrote. Right? And by periodicals like Salon that title them the way they title them is flabbergasting to me. And I'll draw the picture even wider for you here because you do not understand the implications of this. Do you think that when it comes time to get your kids into elementary school, okay, after handing it an application right? Do you think that having to warn the director of admissions that a Google search on Daddy might just turn up charges of racism and bigotry that aren't true? Right? I didn't call you a bigot. Once again, Chauvinist is in the title of the article. Right? I'm just saying that I hope they would move past the title, which is what an informed reader is supposed to do, but they don't. But first of all, you're deliberately missing the point here. The reality is that to deal with this topic, especially as a white guy, but even Majid doesn't escape charges of bigotry and even racism. Even Ion Hersia Lee doesn't escape charges of bigotry and racism. I mean, Sam, but the reason that okay, you finish your point. The point is, is that to broach this topic is to guarantee a whirlwind of unjustified charges of bigotry, chauvinism, racism, xenophobia directed at you, and an endless trail of this online. And this is something that self respecting public intellectuals, public intellectuals who value their time and their sanity are avoiding at almost any cost. Okay? I know these people. They're my colleagues. And the fact that you not only don't see this, just see it as just pure upside for anyone who wants to defame Islam. They're just going to get a book deal, they're going to get rich, they're going to get fetted in chauvinistic circles, and it's just going to be a gravy train of bigotry that they can ride for the end of their days. That is insanity. There are always costs to entering the marketplace of ideas, regardless of what those ideas are. And there are, of course, benefits as well. And it's in my estimation, the benefits in this case of attacking Islam and attacking Muslims are greater than the cost. And there should be criticism, and there should be withering criticism of people like yourself and of ayan Hercules who basically call for war against Islamic. Let's boil this down, because you're not an impartial, arbiter or peddler of sophisticated arguments. You have said some very chauvinistic things, and you have rightly been criticized for them. Now, no one should be attacking you personally. No one should be threatening you. No one certainly should not be threatening your livelihood or your life, but people should have the right and the responsibility and I think the obligation to offer withering rebuttals to that kind of rhetoric when someone says, that it. Is time we admitted that we are not at war with terrorism. We are at war with Islam. That deserves extreme scrutiny because it is an extreme statement. Okay. Do you disagree? Look, if I came out quickly, let me reverse this quickly, right. I think Israel has a right to exist, and I think that its occupation in the West Bank is illegal, and ultimately there's going to be a two state solution. Now, as a brown skinned, Muslim name person, I am aware that if I came out and said, we are at war with Judaism or with the Jewish people or with Zionism, what do you think the response would be? I don't understand how you're missing this point. Okay, so we can talk about all of that. All right. I am still stuck on this get rich quick scheme, this attribution of motive, this picture you have of everything in the marketplace. Did you make off the book? How much money did you make off the book? I mean, since you claim that there's only costs associated with targeting Islam. Okay, what's interesting okay, so here's a nice question. How many Twitter followers have you gotten since these are all things that accumulate on your platform? Nice question. So since we didn't get an advance for the book right, then, it's all about royalties now. I should be very concerned about book sales. How many times do you think I've checked with the publisher to see how many books we've sold? I don't know, Sam. I don't know. That's right, you don't know. Zero. Zero is the number you're looking for there. So did you make $0 off of this? No, I'm no, I'm sure we've sold some books. I have no idea how many we sold, so and I saw an blog post that was that turned into a book. So you went from $0 to X. That's greater than zero, right? So you made money off of this. And look, to me, that's a secondary point, but you want to focus on it. No, the point is your attribution of a sinister, mercenary, opportunistic, cynical motive to something that is a pure effort to have a publicly valuable conversation. That is what I'm focusing on. I mean, Omar, honestly, your reluctance to concede this point, your reluctance to concede that you actually had no information about publishing here or about our motives or about how much money we were going to make, that you were just saying something that sounded right to you, that you wanted to believe is true. But now, actually, when I give you just admitted that you made money off of this, number one. Number two, it was originally supposed to be a blog post. And number three the New Atheist books. The God Delusion. God is not great. And of faith, of course, as you mentioned, would not be published today. They've already been published. But would you deny that Project Islamic Reformation books on demanding reformation are not in vogue now, that articles calling for reformation don't go viral every two days? Would you deny this? That there's a great market and a great readership and a great listenership for these kinds of ideas? Yes. No. I wouldn't know. I would deny it. It is the least lucrative and most costly thing I could be doing. Right. And I'm informing you about this. I don't expect you to know this, but what I'm saying is true. And your reluctance to step back at all from your get rich quick scheme claim says a lot about you. You're getting your JD at Yale. All right. What could you possibly hope to do as a lawyer if you're showing this little concern not only for the truth, but for the perception of your commitment to the truth? My commitment to the truth is completely independent from, and I think should not factor in financial profit of any kind. I think it's a corrupting motive, number one. And number two, as an attorney and someone who is christ, someone who is actually interested in reforming many communities and inducing cultural liberalism, I want to work with these communities rather than which is apparently what Majid wants to do. And here's something I'll tell you that this book is going to influence and change precisely very few opinions in the Muslim world. Again, you're changing the subject, Omar. The truth I'm talking about here is you made a claim about our motives that is demonstrably false. Okay? I've given you several reasons why you should. You just admitted that you've made money off of it. We have sold some books, but yes, from a blog post originally. I thought we could do a blog post. It became such a substantial conversation, and it was taking so much of our time, and we wanted to do it. Right. And we wanted to spend more time doing it that it justified the further effort to make it a book. Right. So then we wrote a book together, and it was a great collaboration that many, many people have found valuable. We haven't even gotten into the substance of the book yet because I'm trying to get you to concede that the information that you thought you had about our motives and about the reality of publishing and about the lack of security concerns that people like Majid and I have right. All of that was delusional. Okay? And I've given you several reasons to recognize that your charge is false. And I can assure you listen to me, Omer. I want to quote you my own words. What I exactly said was soak up the inevitable publicity that awaits, and with it, you're hard earned cash. You have received plenty of publicity for this book, and you have already conceded that you have received cash for this book. So I'm not sure what your is it with the facts? No. You describe it as a get rich quick scheme. I've heard you on another podcast constantly describe it as a get rich quick scheme. You describe there's a lot of money to be made. You already said there's a big market for it. No, I did not. It is the worst possible market for me. And it comes with massive costs, security costs. It comes with reputational costs. It comes with the cost of having to try to take people's words out of your mouth. It comes with a cost of a conversation like this that many people could find excruciatingly boring. I mean, this is all bad news from my point of view, and yet I do it because I think it's an important topic to raise. And the reason why I'm having this conversation is not just to deal with the topic of Islam and Islamism and our disagreements here, but I'm trying to have hard conversations like this because I find the inability of people to get through hard conversations and to converge right. The inability of people to have their minds changed in real time, the inability for people to admit that they were wrong in real time, that, I think, is actually the biggest social problem we have. It's much bigger than the problem of Islam or religion. Racism is the biggest social problem we have. But maybe this is a close second. I would seriously disagree with you there. But the point is, is that two people have to be able to disagree and find some way of talking about that disagreement in a way that's productive. And even on this point, where I have all the information, where I know about the economics of publishing, where I know what I get paid and when I get paid and when I don't, when I know about the reputational costs and the security costs and you know none of these things, you still won't. Yeah, look, I've seen the books that have come out according to what I call Project Islamic Reformation, both yours and Majids, as well as Ian Hersia Les. I recognize that there is a market for it because I could very easily enter this market and make money off of this kind of project. And you've already admitted that you made money off of this. And so, look, to me, this is a secondary point. But if you cannot concede the fact or admit that there is money to be made and readers to be had by criticizing and denouncing Islam or calling for an Islamic Reformation, then I don't think we live in the same world. I mean, it's so clearly. My point, Omar, is not that there's no money to be made. My point is that this is the least good way for me to attempt to make money. And Majid could make much more. Money doing something else. Ion her cile Lee could make much more money doing something else. We'll get to those, because later in your article, you make charges against them that I want to address. But here we're still on the first paragraph here, right? This is the problem, all right? I've given you several reasons to recognize that this charge that we are involved in a get rich quick scheme is false, and I can assure you that our listeners will recognize it to be false. And you're tenaciously holding to it past the point where it's falsity is obvious to everyone, makes you look like an asshole. Yeah, we've already established that there is a market for this and a readership for this, and that it is a trend. You know what you should have done then, if you don't want to create a perception of trying to make money, if you and Majid don't go and do a scholarly, serious study of Islam and what needs to be done rather than 128 page pamphlet. And this creates the perception of the financial interest, which is just as bad as having a financial no. I'll tell you about why the book is short. Why the book is short is because people love short books now and the reason why there aren't more of them. And again, let me just educate you. Please do not speak to me in such domineering tones. I do not need to be educated. I'm an educated individual. This is something you can't possibly know because everything you say suggests you don't know it. So let me just tell you how many books have you published? Well, soon to be my first. Okay, well, let me tell you a dirty little secret about why there aren't more short books in publishing. There are not more short books in publishing because publishers can't figure out how to make a lot of money publishing short books, but they want to publish a 300 or 400 page book and charge you $30 for it. This is the way the costs scale in publishing. And if you publish the 100 page version of a book, that really doesn't have to be any longer, because it's a very short argument, and you would just be padding it to make it longer. And it's actually what people want to read because they can read it in a single sitting, and they don't have to decide whether or not they can sacrifice that much time to the book. They can just sit down and read it. Publishing has not solved the problem of how to publish those books. And contrary to what you assume, this is a money losing move. From a publishing point of view, to publish a short book and sell it for $17 or $18 is much worse, from a publishing point of view than selling a big $30 book. And that's why more people don't do it. And when Modget and I write a short book, because we think it should be a short book that we want people to absorb in a single sitting. We are pushing against the merely mercenary, merely cynical, merely profit seeking attitudes in publishing, contrary to what you assume. Let me just ask you a question then. Do you think that writing a book about Islam, which encompasses quarter the world's population, as you know, and over a billion people, as you also know, and the subjects of tolerance in the future, do you not think that merits a deeper and longer study? It merits a century of conversation. And Majid and I have absolutely have made absolutely no pretense to delivering the last word on this subject. We're trying to deliver a starting point, a novel starting point, which we did. But the price you pay for writing a comprehensive, scholarly, endlessly footnoted book is that you lose the people who can't invest that much time and energy into reading that book. And that's totally understandable. There's a place for both sorts of books. And we tried to write the book that you could hand to your friend who has been worried about this topic but hasn't spent any time thinking about it, and say, listen, just take an hour and read this, okay? And that was our goal, and it's the goal we've accomplished. But the problem is that's not the people you should be addressing, are they? You want to address Muslims again, not the person who doesn't know anything about Islam. It's a separate topic. All right. No, it's the same thing we're talking about. Who's going to read your book? And what's the project that you want to know? All of the form. All I've been talking about thus far is you're ascribing motives to us that are completely false, and you conceded all the factual points about the market existing, about you making money off of it. This is a stupid little trick that you have to stop using because it makes you look terrible. All right? To falsely summarize what someone has conceded is not only annoying, it is effective only with stupid audiences. Right? It's going to get you fucking nowhere, so just listen to me. I didn't concede that. Don't speak to me in those tones. You're becoming an incredibly frustrating person to talk to. And because you're wandering, endlessly wandering off the point, and you're pretending to be a mind reader. I mean, everyone on the left these days is pretending to be a mind reader, so you're in good company. But on the right as well, who think Muslims are bloodlusting, violent jihadists, all of them? Well, no, even the worst people on the right with whom I have no connection aren't saying that, but I'm certainly not saying that. No one is saying they're all jihadists, and no one is saying they're all bloodlusting. You did say the Muslim world is utterly deranged by its religious tribalism, so that gets very close to it. If you want to read all of that in context. Then we can talk about what I actually said. Again, religious ecstasy, sectarian hatred, and a triumphalist expectation of world conquest in a way other religions do not. Is that Islam or is that ISIS or the same thing? Again, you're changing the subject. I hope to get into those subjects. I can only aspire to get into those subjects with you. But you're digging in here. This should be the easiest point we discuss, right? The point where you really have no information, and I have all the information in terms of what it's like to publish on this topic. But you have dug in so deeply. Okay, a simple question for you, Sam. Is there money to be made or is there not in publishing a criticism of Islam, if you sell a single copy of your book on Macrame, there is technically money to be made selling one book on Macrame. Fine. That is a point that has absolutely no relevance to our conversation. The point I was making, and I'll continue to make as it comes up here if Majin and I were trying to get rich, if we were trying to make money in a way that was as painless as possible and as lucrative as possible, we would not be doing what we're doing. We would be doing anything but what we're doing. Making money in the intellectual sphere, in the publishing world does involve criticizing or criticizing Islam is one way to do it. But publishing on other topics does not involve these endless charges of bigotry and racism. It does not involve the security concerns you reap when you deal with this topic. I could write books about Mormonism and never look over my shoulder, never worry about security concerns, never worry about being attacked as a racist or a bigot, and make the same points about religion in general. This is a unique problem to Islam. If I took all your words that we replaced Islam with Mormonism, I'm sure that you would get some very strong rebukes from the Mormon community. Nothing analogous to what happens with Islam. But let's continue. We literally just went through one paragraph. Yeah. Okay, let's continue. So we are at let me just turn the page here. The books. Okay. Yes. The books that make up Project Islamic Reformation are not works of scholarship or even well crafted popular texts. They are almost exclusively political pamphlets of a very personal nature that often begin as biography and end his self help. Except the self, in this case, includes a quarter of the world's people, and the help may or may not come at the end of a missile. Ayan Hersi Ali, who deserves empathy for her personal ordeals but not her conclusions, released such a book earlier this year with neat, manician categories, delineating good and bad Muslims, as well as the expected checklist of proposed reforms. More tracks will certainly follow, because publishers love a good reformist and the affluent Western audience that consumes these books loves having most of their preexisting beliefs confirmed rather than challenged. Okay, well, let's talk about this. Okay. Again, so if you pay a lip service to ayan deserving, some sympathy no, I would never attack her personally. I think that she went through a tremendous ordeal, and the people who do attack her personally for what she went through or deny the immense ordeals that she went through are lacking in moral empathy. Okay. But you still cynically imply that her work as a critic of the very ideology that produced this misery for her is purely opportunistic and driven by a desire to make money. I think you hit the nail on the head perfectly there when you said that. The ideology that put her through this ordeal. Because you and Ian, Hersi, Ali and other people what you guys do is you do not distinguish between a particular political ideology which is fascistic and totalitarian and Wahhabist and salafist and very violent and the doctrine and religion of Islam. And that is the majority. I do that across the board every time I raise the issue. That's just simply untrue. But really? Okay, yes, I talk about ideas. The mother load of bad ideas, or is Wahhabism the mother load of bad ideas? Islam? Does Islam marry religious ecstasy and sectarian hatred, or is Wahhabism is Islam, as we make, especially belligerent, in your words and inimical to the norms of civil discourse, or is Wahhabism and violent jihadism especially belligerent and inimical to the norms of civil discourse? We will get into that, but as you know, the problem is bigger than Wahhabism, and the fact that you would circumscribe it just to Wahhabism is a real problem. Right. So I want to get it as the prime mover of it. I want to get into that. But I'm just now focused on ayon I want to move through this systematically because what should be interesting from your point of view as a writer and should be interesting, I hope, to our listeners is just how this piece of yours that you took the time to write and that you think just makes the case clearly against us, communicates nothing to me but your misunderstanding of the situation. And that is a misquote. You and I quote her words, homer, what in that paragraph? Do I not understand your treatment of Ian here? So you say, yes, she's had this terrible experience, but again, she is just an opportunist who's out to make money in this reform Islam program. And just consider her circumstance for a second. You realize how much easier her life would be if she were part of the herd that just refuses to engage these issues. Do you realize how talented she is? Do you realize that when a person starts out as an uneducated Somali girl who doesn't speak a word of Dutch and in a few short years gets a degree in political science and becomes a member of Parliament and who speaks half a dozen languages. At that point, you realize that there are other things she can do in life. If she just wants to get ahead and make money beyond just pissing off a mob of religious maniacs and then having to suffer not only their threats, but just the condescending stupidity of critics who don't have a fraction. Of the courage she has, who haven't suffered any of the abuse she has, who haven't taken any of the risks she has, but who then decide that it is probably a good idea to make her situation even more dangerous by attacking her as a bigot. Okay, you want to talk about opportunism? The opportunism is on the side of the Islamist assholes that the Council of American Islamic Relations, care, who try to get ayan disinvited from speaking at universities and pretend that she one of the most persecuted public intellectuals in living memory is the one infringing on people's civil rights. Yeah, I mean, look, that's nonsense. And when she she was supposed to speak at Yale, I think it was either canceled or there was some kerfuffle about that. And look, I'm a free speech fundamentalist, and I defended her right to speak as Bill Maher, anyone, because the marketplace of ideas should not have this kind of estrangement. But look, you're peddling a fallacy here because basically what you are saying is that because of her personal ordeals that exonerates or excuses the words that she has spoken, her arguments this is what I'm focusing on, the arguments that she has made. She said Islam must be defeated. She said that we are at war with Islam. She said that we should bomb the lands of Islam. To me, her personal story now is irrelevant. I'm focusing on exactly what she has said, and to me, that is a deranged, diluted conclusion and that if you do not speak up against that, I think that, well, your morals and ethics should be questioned. If anyone else said it, you wouldn't say, oh, look at all these things that they've done. Look at the personal ordeals that they went through. Look at their CV. No, absolutely nonsense. You detect the arguments. People are not attacking her arguments. First of all, you just conceded that the work of an organization like Care that tries to get her deplatformed right, that goes after her rather than going after the theocrats who are hunting her. I'm not a representative of care, Mr. Harris. No, I understand. Why go after Ayan and not go after the core problem here, which you limit it to Wahhabism, but why not go after I have gone after Wahhabism, actually. But I think anyone who supports that, including the Saudis, who are now funding an institution at Yale, should be barred from doing so and should be criticized very loudly, loudly and roundly, but also an obligation of a writer and an intellectual and someone in the public sphere is to stand up for minorities. The people who would be bombed under Ion, her cile's policy, the people who we werewith, do not ion does not have a policy of bombing the Middle East. Now, Ion is probably more hawkish than you are. I'm probably more hawkish than you are. But if Ian's views have been treated to the misrepresentations that mine have, and I'm sure they have, I followed this reasonably closely I have no confidence that you even know what her views are. And certainly you're not disposed to give a charitable reading of something in context or something that she might have said in an interview that didn't come out exactly right and that a further examination of her views in her books or in other interviews would give you a bigger picture of what she said. The editors of Reason magazine were bewildered when she said this, and they asked her to clarify in the most charitable way that they could, and she still didn't. In fact, she doubled down, and recently she's called for Benjamin Netanyahu to win the Nobel Peace Prize. I hope that's a position you disagree with. She's a great supporter of Cece who has launched a war not only on Islamists, remember, but on atheists as well, and killed more people than Morsi did, probably more than Mubarak has. And so she's supporting right wing dictators in one case, a right wing, extreme right wing chauvinistic politician in another case, and then calling for wars with Islam. I mean, at this point, the personal ordeal and her immense tragedy is irrelevant to me as much as I empathize with and I'm focusing on her arguments, and you should, too, instead of defending and giving her cover if you're a serious intellectual. Listen, I do focus on all of these specific claims, and all of them are incredibly complex to get into. No, let's get into we will get into them, but the fact that we can't even get through the simplest of all possible disagreements where information is very clear to put forward right. Doesn't give me much hope that we can deal with deeper issues here. Take, for instance, your claim here and again, this is why I want to move through your review systematically. You have this line about mannequin categories, right? Delineating good and bad Muslims. Okay, what are you saying here? Are you doubting whether there are good and bad Muslims or tolerant and intolerant strands of Islam? I don't think you can be right, no. What I'm saying is that someone from the outside putting Muslims into a category of Mecca and Medina Muslims is ultimately unhelpful and counterproductive. It's not going to reach anyone. The people you want to convince are not going to listen to you. And in general, I think it's a Stalinist technique when people from the outside begin categorizing. She's not from the outside. She's from the outside. She's an ex Muslim. Right? Okay. She has lived in the Muslim world as a Muslim, was driven out of the Muslim world by violent theocrats, and lives every minute of her life under the shadow of their threats. She is in the Muslim world arguably more than you are. She's certainly not perceived to be and she's not perceived to be an honest interlocutor because of her very militaristic views. Okay, but that says a lot. Forget her militaristic views. She's not no, they're central they're not but no, but they're not central to why she's not perceived as an honest interlocutor. She's not perceived as an honest interlocutor because she's an apostate. People are not trying to kill her because of her militaristic views. People are trying to kill her before she had any views because she was an apostate. Right. Everything is backwards for you. Yes. Certain fascist groups, islamic fascists it's not just certain fascist groups after her. The level of support for the killing of apostates in the Muslim world, as you undoubtedly know, is shockingly high, and it's not limited to Wahhabism. Okay? Way too high. And look, people are you want to talk about apostasy now or you want to talk about it will come up later. But you can't just say way too high, way too high. You just tried to limit the problem to Wahhabism. You just tried to paint Ayan as being someone who has been marginalized for her hawkish views right. Which you still have not characterized accurately. I quoted you her words directly. That reason interview is a famous instance of someone miss speaking, not giving a full context for her views. Look, how do I respond to something like that? If you say something chauvinistic and militaristic, you misspeak it's an unfalsifiable it is impossible. No, it is falsifiable, because she will not hide her views when you talk to her at length. Right. She has written about these things. She's been interviewed again. I've interviewed her trying to put her comments in context. You could throw back at her what she said about Anders Brevik right. That has been distorted and spun and used as a way of lying about her actual beliefs. This has been done to me endlessly. The Islam is the mother load of bad ideas statement on Bill Mars show. I have already said I misspoke there. I should have said it was a mother load of bad ideas, and I can talk to you for an hour about why I think I should have said that. But there are still people who want to hold me to either the mother load of bad ideas as though there is no other source of bad ideas on earth. Right. You either want to understand where someone is coming from or you don't. No, it's not that. It's that you should hold people accountable for their words. You don't hold them accountable for their misstatements that they then clarify. How is it this entire interview, which I hope your readers and listeners read from 2007 and Reason magazine. She says that Islam must be defeated. Do you mean radical Islam? And she says, no Islam, period. Yes, okay, I have said the same thing. Hermanutical interpretation here. It's very clear. No, it does, because what does it mean to say Islam has to be defeated? Islam is a set of ideas. She's not calling for genocide there. She's calling for defeating the ideas. I think Islam is a dangerous religion. I have made no secret of that. I have said things just like that. Islam has to be defeated. I'll say it now. Islam has to be defeated. Why? How is it that that kind of statement should not be perceived? I think all religion has to be defeated. All right, I'm an atheist, okay? But an idea is not merely defeated. You're talking about the people. I have written an article titled science Must Destroy Religion, okay? So these are ideas that we can talk about, and it never will. On that point, it never will. Listen, the problem here is an unwillingness on your part to enter an open ended conversation about ideas about what your partner, your opponent in this case, thinks. That is proceeding on the basis of a modicum of charity where you actually want to understand what the other person's no, because, look, the game is rigged. There's a double standard here. If someone criticizes you or ion that we're attacking your motives or being uncharitable. But if you say militaristic chauvinistic, things happen. No, she misspoke. You misspoke. It's the same thing over and over again. I rarely misspeak. Okay, I occasionally misspeak, but I rarely do. And I rarely, obviously, miss write, but I am increasingly on my guard through cruel experience. I've been taught this against people who are only pretending to want to have a conversation on this topic and are just trying to defame another person. Now, Ayan, you are talking about her as though she would execute a nuclear first strike on the Muslim world, right? Well, that's your position. Right? That is a position that has been ascribed to me by utterly dishonest people, right? I hope you were joking. No. I mean, there were certain preconditions that, of course, that you gave you didn't say, please correct me if I'm wrong, that we should have a nuclear first strike against any country, but if an Islamist regime came to power and had nuclear weapons, that's a possibility you would entertain. Is that a clear understanding of your view? Well, certainly not the way it's situated in your brain. It's not. Again, this is something that will be obvious to our listeners. The fact that you think you're entering this conversation in a way that is intellectually honest and open to having your views challenged and responsive to evidence that you didn't have a moment ago, it's as pure an act of self deception as I've witnessed in a long time. You are so defensive. There is nothing I could say to you about the reality of publishing or about my experience as an author or about the opportunity costs or the security costs or anything else that only I, in this conversation, am in a position to talk about. There's nothing I can say to you that modified your view of my opportunism and get rich quicker, even slightly. And now we're proceeding onto much more difficult ground right now. We're talking about Ayan, and we're going to talk about Islam and apostasy and I mean, this is not how you have a conversation with another human being. You repeat this mantra over and over again as if you are the arbiter of truth. I've quoted you your own words, you dismissed them. I've quoted you Ion's words. You've dismissed them. Okay, well, you were very condescending, let's just say, and you don't want to engage with the text of your own words. And I'm quoting back to you now. Of course I will engage with it. And I can justify saying something like, islam has to be defeated, right? Please do as you notice. What do you mean by that Islam has to be defeated? Let's tease this out. Well, because I can say that I think religion has to be defeated. Islam, you're asking a different question now. You're asking how you think. It's an unrealistic mean by that statement. Otherwise you're going to say I'm misquoting you. I think believing in Revelation is intrinsically dangerous. I think that believing that one of your books was dictated by the creator of the universe is a stupid, divisive, dangerous thing to do. I think it goes nowhere worth going. I think the harms produced by this attitude are obvious, undeniable, and among the worst harms that humanity has ever suffered. And we have to get out of this business of believing in revelation. Now, how do you do that? As you rightly observe, I have spent a lot of time focused on that problem. It's not exclusively what I focus on, and less and less do I want to focus on it, because I am just repeating myself. I have said more or less everything I think on that topic. So it's both boring for me and boring for my listeners. But I think, yes, we have to get out of the religion business. We have to defeat religion. I can say it in a nice way, and I can say it in a provocative way, but I can certainly defend the claim, and I've said it every which way. Now, I also have justified ad nauseam, a focus on specific religions, on specific points where they present specific liabilities. I think that individual religions are not interchangeable. They have very different theologies. They have different ideas. They make different behavioral and logical commitments. Can I just respond to what you said before? Yeah. Okay, so look, seeing that the Quran has problematic and violent verses, that is a statement of fact. Okay? Anyone disagrees with you there is lying. But saying that we are at war with Islam, saying that the central message of the Quran is jihad, these are value judgments. And in my mind, in my opinion, in my estimation, they're very ill informed ones and they're ultimately going to lead to counterproductive strategies. And for me, this boils down to what do you think Islam is? It just the text, the jihadist versus in the Quran? Or is it more capacious than that? Earlier I mentioned scholarly works, serious scholarly works on Islam. I'll give you the name of one that just came out from a very serious scholar, PhD in history, who died recently, was fluent in eight languages, traveled throughout the Middle East. His name was Shahab Ahmad and he wrote a book called what is Islam? And his definition of Islam was the capacious live tradition, tradition of Muslims throughout history and how it actually exists today. So that includes, for example, poetry. That includes wine. I hope that you would not want to defeat either wine or poetry. It includes music and includes a whole host of legal and political and spiritual motivations that are inherent in the live tradition. It's not just about jihad. When you say Islam must be defeated as a kind of blanket statement that to me is ultimately very dangerous and ill conceived one because you're not getting at a the heart of the matter, which is a political ideology. That I refer to as Wahhabism and is a state ideology of our ally, Saudi Arabia, that propagates this and that did not exist before a specific period in history. Did not exist. And number two, I think you denigrate or deny or reduce the actual tradition that people live in to this kind of slogan of jihad that the extremists are parroting. And so we miss the nuances when we use these kind of blanket statements. The pause you hear from me is I'm trying to figure out how to proceed here because given how we have foundered on very simple points, I'm reluctant to just set sail on a rougher part of the sea here. So briefly, islam is many things and on one level you can define it as Islam is the way 1.6 billion Muslims live it. It's whatever they think it is. And now we know a fair amount about the moral and political and theological attitudes of Muslims based on a lot of polls. And most of those polls are frankly terrifying, both in the Muslim world and in and most of those polls are bullshit. I don't know how you would know that. If you ask 50,000 people a question and they give you an answer, I'll tell you why. I don't know where you stand. Let me just finish this point. I don't think we should spend a lot of time right here, right now. The problem for me about revelation, and this is why I focus on the text, is that the texts are. Essentially a software program for rebooting a worldview so we could forget about Islam for a thousand years and someone could discover the full text of the tradition, the Koran and the Hadith and the biography of Muhammad in a cave somewhere and read it and accept its most straightforward, most literalistic claims. I mean, just to give a very plausible literal reading of what they have there and essentially reboot Islam for themselves. And it would be a particular kind of Islam. It would be an Islam that would not at all be influenced by anything else surrounding them, because all of that would have been lost. There'd be no architecture, there'd be no art, there'd be no tradition, there'd be no food. But they would have the text. And if they understood the text in a plausible way, my problem is that what they would get is something very much like Wahhabism and a lot less like Rumi, okay? And that's a problem. A plausible reading of the text. I'm not saying it's the only reading, and again, Majid and I get into this in real detail, but a plausible reading gets you something totalitarian intolerant a rather unlucky circumstance for women. Contradictory as well, right? Schizophrenic you could say no, but not as contradictory as one would hope. It's not as contradictory as Christianity or Judaism. And that's the problem. There's no compulsion in religion and the sword verses, but if you have a doctrine of abrogation that makes sense of that, then you're of course, many people don't adhere to that. What you're basically parroting here is the Salafist version of Islam, which is a particular interpretation that comes out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 17th 18th century and is led by totalitarian radical who's not trained in Islamic tradition at all, and the Ottoman Empire tried to put it down until it grew. So, look, this is a specific political interpretation. If I give you a text sam it doesn't matter what it is. If I give you a text and I tell you you can interpret this however you want, you're going to interpret it according to your political ideology? No, but there are more and less plausible interpretations of any text and what is problematic. And who says that the 99% of the Muslims who interpret it and live peacefully is less? It's not, because it is not 99% who have peaceful attitudes that are commensurate with the values of an open civil society that's simply untrue. How many people are ISIS? 20,000. Maybe? 99% of Muslims are supportive of Ian's right to apostatize. 99% of Muslims are supportive of the rights of cartoonists to cartoon anything they want about Islam. Are you telling me you believe that? So on the point of free speech, that's actually more of a cultural issue than it is of a theological issue, and I hope we can make that distinction. There's nothing in the Quran that says nothing in the text or the tradition. The history, even that says that you cannot depict the Prophet. In fact, in Shia Islam and throughout Islamic history, there were depictions, but no one is for you. I'm clarifying what point for you, but you're all also making a tendencious illegitimate move. You're limiting it to a depiction of the Prophet. That's not the free speech issue. The free speech issue is I should be able to say that Islam sucks and I should be able to say that as a Muslim I should be able to apostatize. That is free speech. Yeah. And look, you can do that in the west and you can get your head cut off in any Muslim society on earth. And many Muslims, many, many Muslims, in many cases majorities support that a fundamental principle of every human being in terms of their dignity is to have whatever private theological views that they want. Now, whether that translates into a public political view you is another matter. Egyptians say 86% of them think that apostates should be killed. Now, A, they never they think this is the word of God. Apparently, according to you, they think it's the word of God. They don't go out and they don't kill ex Muslims. They're friends with them. You can go to Egypt and go to Cairo and you see that they had the opportunity to vote and put in apostasy into their legal code. They didn't do it. They didn't do it in Pakistan either, where there was an election. Haven't done it in Iran either. So people can have all kinds of dangerous, diluted, backwards views. And you have the right to that, as many evangelicals in America do. But to translate that into a political program is something that's very different. And I think that we should be mindful of that distinction rather than saying that, oh, these people over here are so backwards, 99% of them or 80% of them think that apostates should be killed. And that's the end of the story right there. No, it's a little bit more complicated than that. Okay, I want to bring that to light. Again, this is a distinction without a difference. When you have a lynch mob that's willing to enforce their religious attitudes, whether or not there's a formal law against blasphemy on the books, they're willing to kill blasphemers or kill someone who is merely rumored to have burned a Quran or kill someone who is apostasized or hunt them to the ends of the earth in other societies. Right. suborn their murder with fatwas that now have global reach. That is a problem that is bigger than the statutes that were written or not written in any society. 5% of Saudi citizens are convinced atheists and more than that, about 15% or probably about 60 million, around 20% are not religious people. Are there lynch model against them? Yes. Omar, I hear from these people they're in hiding. They can't even tell their parents they have doubts about God for fear of being murdered by their own family and many of them are in open. Many of them are open. You go to the cafes of Cairo, you go to Riyadh, you go to Aman you meet openly critical people. You meet openly agnostic and atheistic people. So it's not as simple, it's not as simple as saying that 86% of Egyptians think apostates should be killed. Therefore those 86% are all backwards people. So if we did the same thing to the United States we'd think that oh merit please. You're telling me that Raif Badawi is one of the 5% of Saudi atheists who's just free to be an atheist, stood up for him many times when other people on the left did not? And I don't deny that there needs to be a liberal and constitutional revolution in the Middle East and in South Asia. In fact, I want to bring this back to the broader point that I'm making. Is that your strategy and ion strategy of telling Muslims we have to excise verses? Let's just say, even if it's the most intellectually honest position that anyone could have, let's assume that strategically and politically it's never going to happen. Because people believe in the Quran in and their tradition and they're not going to take a razor to their holy books. What I want to see happen is a liberal and democratic and constitutional revolution that happens across the Middle East and South Asia where we support the left, the progressive opposition that exists in every country, the democratic opposition that exists in every country. But because of US. Foreign policy and because of domestic tyrants and because of religious tyrants, the religious right that hasn't been allowed to emerge. And when that opposition comes in, it's going to the cultural change they'll implement will be permanent. And so that is basically my view on this. How do you engender those liberal attitudes when a majority of people believe as is written in the books? Whether you're talking about the Koran or you're talking about the Hadith or you're talking about the biography of Muhammad, they believe things like women are essentially the property of the men in their lives or at the very least second class citizens. Or they believe things like apostates should be put to death. Or they believe things like infidels and polytheists are forever your enemy. Right. You have attitudes that can be lifted directly out of the text based on not only a plausible reading I would say on certain of these points the most plausible reading. Even on certain of these points the only plausible reading. And you are saying that these texts are forever to be held sacred. One can never disavow any line in them. Yeah I mean look they're not here's the thing. If you were to present this to an actual believing liberal Muslim who believed every word of it, what they would basically do doesn't matter what and I've engaged in this exercise many times and probably ended up as frustrated as you have. What they would basically do is that a, they would contextualize it to the point and then they would contextualize it first and then they would neutralize the view, right? So they would say, for example, that apostasy leaving Islam in the 9th century when the Quran was revealed, would amount to high treason because the Islamic community was very small. Now that doesn't amount to high treason anymore. So Muslims should be free to leave and of course, to enter the faith. I think the second thing that they would do is to highlight the importance of interpretation. The fact that 86% of Egyptians are not going out and killing apostates who are in many cases their friends, signifies to me that mentally they've already excised those verses. They've already neutralized those verses. They're focusing on the part of the Quran, the tradition, broadly speaking, the rumi and the poetry and the music and the spirituality, which I know that you are a fan of, at least in some contexts. They're focusing on those elements of the religion. Okay, I think we should be mindful of that. And look, the polls are contradictory as well. Across the board you see 97% of South Asians and 85% of Middle Eastern Easterners say religious freedom is a good thing. A higher number of Palestinians that believe in evolution yeah, than, than evangelical Protestants do. So let's start now. Stop with that first poll result. That's not actually the paradox you make it out to be. People can answer that question saying that religious freedom is a good thing purely as it applies to me. I want to be free to practice my Salafi Islam, right? Religious freedom is a good thing. Should apostates be killed? Oh, of course. We have to kill them. Right. There is no paradox there if you understand religious freedom to be your own religious freedom. So let's break this down logically. So like these Salafis who I hope you appreciate are not the majority of in these countries. These Salafis believe that the Quran is the literal interpretation of God. Their reading of the Quran is the most plausible. They think that if you do not, if they do not implement God's will, that they will be sinners. So why don't they go and do it? It's a fear of secular law. Just to back up, let me concede a point you made, which I have made many times before. Perhaps this would surprise you, but we have agreement. There is some distance between what people profess they believe and what they actually believe. Or people hold these beliefs to greater or lesser extents and they're the things they think are probably true. And then there are the things they will bet their life on. The things that are just absolutely going to rule their behavior and emotion whenever that belief becomes relevant. So to have 86% of Egyptians say that apostates should be killed that doesn't tell you that 86% of Egyptians would kill Ion with their own hands. Right. Nor would they vote for someone who has their platform. Okay. Which is the important part. But what percentage would what percentage would vote I don't know. In the Egyptian elections, 48%. 49% voted for voted for the Liberal and the party Mohammed Morsi's Party. The Freedom and Justice Party had 50 years of political organization and development, and they still could only muster 53%. I'm agreeing with you that these numbers come down when you actually ask people to take concrete steps. Yes, every one of these numbers matters. It's just because the people who will say apostates should be killed are on the wrong side of this free speech issue. They're doing nothing good for free speech, and what they're doing is quite harmful. And many of these people, maybe not 86% in the case of Egypt, but some intolerable percentage, would vote the wrong way and would just stand by and watch a mob kill a so called apostate. Is everyone in the mob who isn't helping someone who's about to be lynched? Is everyone in the mob culpable equally culpable? Well, no, not equally. They're the people who are actually doing the lynching, then. They're the people who are just standing there with their cell phones. Right. But all of these people are part of a problem, okay? And, yes, there are gradations of belief. There's gradations of support for terrorism. There's gradations of commitment to jihad. This was the concentric circle image that I talk about in the book and that I tried to talk about on Bill Maher show. There are the people at the absolute center of the bullseye who, yes, they are strapping on the sea for now because they're going to do an operation today, let's say a Sunni who wants to blow up a Shia mosque. Right? That is a full commitment. And where's a theological prerequisite or injunction for that? The whole phenomenon of tech fearism and the whole phenomenon of judging other people to be apostates or infidels or polytheists, whether or not 1400 years was not practiced. And when it was practiced, it was by a very highly institutionalized and legalized profession of of scholars. The independent Dakfiri Fatwas only begin in the 18th century and are perfected by bin Laden. Again, specific political ideologies, specific political circumstances, and specific political actors. We can get into history if we ever get there. But the issue is that today, every one of these degrees of commitment to attitudes and behaviors that are totally hostile to everything we care about in an open, civil society, there are degrees of commitment to those noxious and divisive and dangerous beliefs and behaviors that one can draw directly out of scripture. And, yes, undoubtedly, there are Muslims who want to live in open, creative, peaceful societies who do their best to if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the wakingup app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Apologies in advance. I'm getting over yet another cold. I'm beginning to wonder whether my commitment to vegetarianism isn't just a strategy cooked up by the cold virus to prepare me as a vector by which to lay waste to the rest of society. I have just gotten so many colds since I stopped killing animals or paying others to kill them on my behalf. Well, this is an Ask Me Anything podcast, which I'm doing a day after the Brussels attacks. So the questions I have here really don't reflect what has been going on. So I feel somewhat out of sync with what's been going on. Maybe I'll just say a few words about Brussels at the outset. Everything I've written about Islam and jihadism and profiling and related topics should be viewed through the lens of events like this. I really don't have any more to say about this kind of thing, but I'll just give you a glimpse of what my life is like on this issue. So I'm at a conference talking about things like artificial intelligence, and I opened my phone to discover that there's an article circulating calling me a white supremacist. Now, needless to say, Reyes Aslan has circulated it, saying, what do you think Sam Harris means when he says, profile anyone who could conceivably be Muslim? Even though in the very paragraph where I make that claim, I make it clear that white guys like me also fit the profile I'm talking about. And then the very next day, we have attacks like these in Belgium, and you see the pictures of the likely suicide bombers. And once again, they're not blonde haired old ladies from Iceland. They're not Japanese schoolgirls. They're middle Eastern young men. And again, let me spell this out. White guys like me have also been recruited to ISIS and Al Qaeda. So I'm not putting myself or anyone who looks like me out of the profile. But not everyone is in the profile. My only point about profiling is that we have to admit that we know what we're looking for. We are looking for jihadists. 100% of jihadists are Muslim in a place like an airport. In addition to random searches and searching all luggage, our security personnel should be looking for people who stand a chance of being jihadists now out in the world. They should be looking for muslim extremists who may be planning some sort of attack. Where should they look for them? Everywhere. At random? Is that really what anyone believes? It seems rather obvious that they should be reaching out to the Muslim community. More important, the Muslim community should be scrutinizing itself, profiling itself, one might say. If you are a moderate Muslim, you have to admit that there is a unique problem of religious extremism in your own faith community. And if this offends you, you are part of the problem. And if you don't want Muslims demonized, you have to stop obfuscating this issue. What's more, you have to stop attacking people as bigots and Islamophobes for expressing their totally sane concerns about Islamism and jihadism. And as for the presidential election, assuming it's going to be Clinton versus Trump, it's time for Clinton to stop mincing words or lying outright on this topic. There are no liberals who are suddenly going to vote for Trump because Hillary says something politically incorrect. So to make this clear, I think Trump is dangerously unqualified to be president. And his apparent unawareness of this, his total lack of concern for his obvious ignorance, is fairly terrifying. But in his own idiotic way, at least he is naming the problem. At least he's not pretending that we are also worried about the IRA, or that Middle Eastern Christians are just as likely to be suicide bombers as Muslims are. Just think of what a significant attack in the US prior to our election could do. If Hillary continues to sound delusional on this topic, she has to start using words like Islamic extremism and Islamism and jihadism and political Islam and Muslim terrorism. The so called war on terror is not a war against a generic problem of terrorism. It's a war, as Majid Nawaz has said, over and over, against a global jihadist insurgency. Unless Clinton starts making sense on this topic, she's going to give ISIS a vote in electing our next president. And you can be sure they have a favorite candidate. So to say any more here, I think I will just be saying things you've all heard me say a hundred times maybe there's one more point to clarify. I clearly have followed Majid's line in distinguishing Islamism from Islam, and I've been hearing many disgruntled noises from readers who think this is intellectually dishonest. So maybe I should make it clear how I see this. I am a critic of all religion. I think the notion of revelation and the notion that faith trump's reason is dangerous and intrinsically divisive and something we have to get over. And I have made no secret of the fact that I think Islam is the worst religion on most points currently ruling the minds of a significant part of humanity. So my view hasn't changed here. There is a war of ideas that has to be waged and won with Islam and with anyone who believes that the Quran is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe. But there's a distinction between nominal Muslims or those who are fairly noncommittal in their faith or those who have some interpretation of the faith that allows them to ignore many of its edicts and Islamists. And there's a difference between Islamists and jihadists. And here I follow Majid's definitions. Islamism is the commitment to impose Islam on the rest of society. It's intrinsically political. And jihadism is that variant of Islamism that intends to do this by force as opposed to winning elections or some other process. And I agree with Maja that the way forward is to convince the Muslim world to be increasingly secular and liberal. And that is a much more promising door to try to force 1.6 billion people through than the doorway of atheism. Now, insofar as I can persuade Muslims to be atheists and disavow their faith, that's also something I'm happy to do. And occasionally I notice some success on that front. But I think it is far less realistic in any reasonable time frame to expect 1.6 billion Muslims to apostatize than it is to expect them to reform their religion in a direction of secularism and liberalism. And I will not pretend to be optimistic on that score either. Many of you think that is just a fool's errand. What more reasonable project do you have to recommend? So my view here is that wherever a distinction between Islam and Islamism doesn't exist, we have to create it. Muslims have to create it, and nonmuslims have to insist that they do. And if you're feeling powerless here, if you're feeling there's nothing you can do that's useful after an event like this, I would say that the one thing you can do is lose your patience for people obfuscating the problem. Lose your patience for liars. It is not a lie to say that there is a difference between Islamism and Islam because one can be created. There are many Muslims who do not want a global caliphate. There are many Muslims who do not want homosexuals thrown off of rooftops. There are many Muslims for whom Islam in some form is important, but who are no more religious than the least religious person you met yesterday. And these people need to be supported. These people need to win a war of ideas. And where they're not waging one, they have to be encouraged to wage it. And the only way I know to do that is for all of us to keep speaking honestly about the nature of the problem. Okay, so I got your questions on reddit, and when I last looked at this page, there were over 1300 of them. So, needless to say, I will not make much headway, but I really thank you for delivering so many questions and voting them up. And I can only assume that the ones that came first now were the ones that, in fact, were reliably voted up. Some of these questions surprise me, but maybe I'll dig around a little to find others that are of interest. So there are many questions on anxiety, and one person wrote, anxiety is a monster that is crippling and paralyzing and keeps you in a loop of debilitating negative emotions, even when one desperately wants out. What are the causes? What can one do to help themselves? What steps, big or small, do you suggest? Well, the neurophysiology of anxiety is pretty well understood, but I don't think understanding it in any detail really helps you. There are drugs you can take to mitigate the effects of anxiety. I should say upfront. I have no clinical experience and this is not my area. I would think that if anxiety is really crippling, there's some role for drugs to play, whether it's beta blockers that impede the effect of adrenaline on your heart rate so you don't get the racing heart experience, or antianxiety drugs that work on the neurotransmitter GABA. But in general, the people who work with anxiety therapeutically, to my understanding, don't recommend you take those drugs and that you do something more along the line of cognitive behavioral therapy, which is to say, you expose yourself in manageable ways to the things that provoke anxiety, and you reframe them conceptually. You become open to feeling the effects of anxiety and realize you can get through it. And there's certainly a role for meditation and mindfulness to play in this part of the process. For instance, many people are afraid to fly, and even those of us who aren't especially afraid to fly can feel anxious in significant turbulence. Now, why do we feel anxious? Well, we have some thought that turbulence might be dangerous, right? That it makes it more likely the plane will crash. And of course, truly significant turbulence can cause a plane to crash. But this, as we know from the statistics of plane crashes, is a very, very rare thing. So there are two levels to respond to this experience so as to mitigate anxiety. So picture this. You're in an airplane and it begins to bounce. Now, unless you're in that rare and horrible experience of being actually thrown around the cabin so as to get injured, it's very likely that the bouncing is not physically painful, right? You're not being harmed by this sensation. And in other contexts, you would subject yourself to even more violent bouncing and not be worried about it at all. You might go on some ride at an amusement park which exerts greater force on you bodily, and you do it because you're seeking that experience out. Now, on an airplane, it's totally unwelcome to you because you're afraid of dying. But if you just take the raw sensations, they are not your problem. It's what they pretend, it's your interpretation of them that worries you. There are at least two levels at which you can deal with this. First is to think conceptually about the nature of the problem and about what you fear. Is it rational to worry that your plane will crash if you're experiencing turbulence? No, it actually isn't. The likelihood of dying in a plane crash is minuscule. Over the course of your journey, you should begin to worry as you leave the airport and get in an Uber or a taxi or drive yourself home in your own car. That's when your risk of mortality begins to peak. So if you understand that if you understand that every moment in a plane is in fact safer than many moments you spend on the ground, certainly safer than when you're walking as a pedestrian fixated on your smartphone and stepping into the crosswalk. That's when your adrenaline should surge or when you're driving and glancing down at your phone to see what text just came in. Those are the moments where the sweat should begin beating up on your forehead. So when you're in a plane and it's begun to bounce, it is in fact unreasonable to worry that the bouncing means much of anything. If you understand that that actually can have an effect, then you can become willing to just experience the raw sensations of turbulence. Then you can cease to interpret the experience as a sign of actual danger. The other level at which you can address this and these are totally compatible moves, I recommend both of them is to become mindful of the feeling of anxiety itself. What is it and what does it mean? Well, it's just sensation. It's just a pattern of energy in your body and it actually doesn't mean anything at the level of raw sensation. You might have thoughts about it. And very likely much of your thinking in that moment is purpose toward trying to figure out how not to feel that way or not to let it get worse. But if you step out of your thoughts and just become willing to feel the raw sensation of anxiety, actually just surrender your resistance to it, just feel it as energy, it can lose its meaning. It can become very difficult to distinguish from what under. Another framing would be a positive experience like excitement. How do you know the difference between being anxious about something that's about to happen and being excited? For the most part, it is the thoughts you're thinking. When you're feeling that arousal, there's a cognitive conceptual overlay on top of this raw feeling. You can consciously reframe things or you can step out of it altogether and just feel the raw energy of this experience. And when you do that, anxiety can be like any other experience that has no meaning for you as a person, really. I mean, it doesn't say anything about you. So something like indigestion or itching let's say you have a rash on your elbow and it's itching that doesn't say anything deep about you as a person. That has no psychological implications. It might be unpleasant, it might be extraordinarily unpleasant, but it doesn't reach into your sense of who you are. The deepest way to respond to anxiety and again, I'm not saying that there is no case in which drugs are valuable or even necessary. There may very well be. But for anxiety in its more ordinary range, the deep way to respond to it is to become willing to feel it, to cease, to interpret it as important, and to function in the midst of it. And then it will pass. Anxiety rises and falls like any other emotion. And if you're not continually thinking the thoughts that make you anxious, it actually can't stay around very long. And this is true of other unpleasant emotions like anger and sadness, and they're continually resurrected by our thoughts. And we're spending most of our time thinking without knowing that we're thinking. So mindfulness in particular is a very good antidote to this problem. But the trick is you can't apply it as an antidote. You can't be mindful of anxiety so that it will go away. You can't push it away with meditation, or at least that attempt is more likely to fail. What you're really after in those moments is genuine equanimity, real acceptance of the energy of this emotion. Become interested in it. Become willing to feel it. Just let it burn bright in you and discover that it doesn't matter. Simply comes and it goes, and you can function. Next question what are your thoughts on immortality or at least living a very, very long time, as pursued by researchers like Aubrey de grey? Do you think it's possible? Do you think it's desirable? If you're not familiar with Aubrey de Grey, you should watch some of his talks. I think he's given two ted talks. He has some very good arguments against people's ethical intuitions here. Many people seem to think that if we could cure aging and death and become immortal or live thousands of years, that there's something unethical about that project, that it's either so unnatural as to be unethical or it represents some kind of selfishness that we should be suspicious of. I think Aubrey's rejoinder to those intuitions is compelling as to whether it's possible. I think it probably is in principle, possible. I think Aubrey describes aging as an engineering problem. There are not that many ways, in the end, to grow old and die. I think he points to seven different ways in which our bodies begin to break down. Cancer is one of those ways. The depositing of junk inside of cells or between cells is another way. There are just not that many ways that an old person on the verge of death differs from a person in the prime of his or her life. So I agree that if we understood those ways completely and we could intervene biochemically and make the necessary changes, well, then we may find that aging is now no longer a problem. We can keep repairing ourselves. And I think that would be a good thing. I think, as Aubrey argues, aging is the worst thing there is. And the only reason why anyone's tempted to accept it is because it appears currently unavoidable. But if you think Alzheimer's should be cured and you think cancer should be cured, well, then aging is the super problem you should want solved. Because each of these evils, along with many others, are mere symptoms of aging. Yeah, I agree with Aubrey. I think if there's any way in which I'm skeptical of his discussion of this topic, it may be just a basic uncertainty about whether he's too optimistic about the timeline here, but I think it's an incredibly interesting area to work in. And I think the taboos around declaring one's intent to cure aging are fascinating both ethically and culturally. And I think Aubrey has said some very useful things in that area. Next Question. Sam? I remember you mentioning getting flak from Modget about not liking hip hop. I'm curious what sort of music you do listen to. Stravinsky radiohead. Enya. Well, it's not that I don't like hip hop. I got a lot of grief about this. I'm not a hip hop fan. I don't listen to a lot of hip hop, but I don't recoil at the sound of hip hop. On this list, I would pick Radiohead. Of the three choices, the issue with me in music is one, I'm not a musician, so I'm fairly uneducated in this area. And there's a lot of music I like. But I don't spend a lot of time listening to music because I can't work to music. Certainly not music with lyrics. I can't read to it. I can't write to it. I just spend a lot of time trying to ignore the music. I just find silence works better for me. And when I'm not working, I'm a bit of an information chunky. And so I'm listening to audiobooks or podcasts or the news in the car while traveling. So there's not a lot of time for music to get in. And if I'm going to listen to music, I often just put on Spotify or something. Now and in fact, I don't even know what I'm listening to. I just have something that some AI. Somewhere is piping into my brain based on the few radiohead songs I've selected. And maybe that will be the future of ideas too. At a certain point, you won't know what book you're reading or what lecture you're listening to. Something like spotify will just start feeding. You disconnected ideas. Next Question. Why aren't your books translated into Arabic? I'm an Arab who is fortunate enough to be fluent in English. But many Arabs are not as fortunate as I am. I read all your books, and I love them all. I just wish they could reach a larger Arab audience. Especially the book islam and the Future of Tolerance. I've been sheepish about letting my books get translated into Arabic. There hasn't been much demand, as you might imagine. But on the few occasions when someone has asked permission to translate one of my books, it's been a long time since this has happened, but I remember declining because I just didn't want to have salman Rushdie's experience of learning one day that one of his translators got killed. And when you're talking about Arabic or Urdu or any other language from a Muslim majority country, I begin to worry about this sort of thing. So that's why maybe that will change. Can you please do a podcast with Richard Lang, disciple and close friend of the late Douglas Harding, about the Headless Way, the Westernized version of Zogchen? I imagine getting a Zogchen master on a podcast could be tough and their message a little abstruse. But the way Lang and Harding talk about scene is thrilling. I don't actually know Richard Lange. I've seen a couple of his videos online, and he seems to make perfect sense on this topic, as did Douglas Harding. I will talk about this practice more, and I'll talk about it in particular in the meditation app I'm building. But it's a little difficult for a podcast. So much of it is visual. The exercises that Douglas Harding recommended and which I'm sure Lang teaches, are based on changing your relationship to your visual field. And I write about this a little bit in my book, Waking Up. We define our sense of self visually in particular. It's not the only way. You still, if you feel like a self with your eyes open, you're going to feel like a self with your eyes closed. But the experience of selflessness can be very striking with your eyes open because it changes your felt sense of subject object perception with respect to everything that you see. And the way that Harding described this in particular in his book on having no head is as the experience of headlessness. Whereas he he would look out at his visual field and then he would look for his head. He would recognize that his head was not among the contents of his visual field. And as you listen to me now, you might do this just with your eyes open, look at whatever it is you can see, and notice that your face or your head is not among the things that you see. In fact, where your head is supposed to be, there's just the world. And if you become sensitive to this consideration, if you look for what you presume you're looking out of and fail to find it, you can have, as the questioner says, a thrilling sense of having lost the feeling of subject object perception. And this itself can become a basis of mindfulness. This can be the thing you pay attention to when you meditate, as opposed to your breath or any other object of attention. And some very powerful changes in your conscious experience can happen the more you do this. But as far as talking about this at length on a podcast, it's a little difficult because much of what needs to be said needs to be indicated visually, and so it definitely lends itself more to video than audio. But I will try to be precise about it in my meditation app. What are your preferred news sources? Well, nothing especially esoteric here. I read the New York Times every day. I read the Atlantic. I listen to NPR. I watch television news rather often, whether it's the Evening News or 60 Minutes or Frontline or Vice documentaries. I'll go to the BBC website sometimes. Often somebody on social media will send me a link to something more esoteric, like an English language paper in Pakistan, for instance. So I do see things that are off the beaten path, but for the most part, I have very standard and uninteresting sources of news, but I do consume a fair amount of it. One of the virtues of social media is that if I haven't noticed something through any of these channels, I very often hear about it from one of you. Sam, I heard you say once before that the left has one advantage over the right and that it has a self correcting mechanism. Well, now that the left seems to be going off the deep end, we need those mechanisms. I'm not sure I said that, or at least I don't think I said that it was an advantage. In fact, it's a disadvantage. The self criticism of the left is a disadvantage in its tug of war with the right. The left eats its own in a way that the right never seems to. What you find on the left is a criticism of one's own tribe, which can lead to a kind of masochism. Now, short of masochism, obviously, self criticism is an intellectual virtue. It's very good to wonder whether or not one is wrong, to wonder whether or not one's opponent politically might have a point to wonder whether or not one's group has treated other groups, especially less powerful groups. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriberonly content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with David Chalmers. David is a philosopher at NYU and also at the Australian National University, and he's the co director of the center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at NYU. David, as you'll hear, though we've never met, was instrumental in my turning my mind toward philosophy and science. Ultimately, because of the work he began doing on the topic of consciousness in the early ninety s, and I found it fascinating to talk to David. His interests and intuitions in philosophy align with my own to a remarkable degree. We spend most of our time talking about consciousness and what it is and why it is so difficult to understand scientifically conceptually. We talk about the hard problem of consciousness, which is a phrase he introduced into philosophy, that has been very useful in shaping the conversation here. At least it's been useful for those of us who think that there really is a hard problem that resists any kind of easy neurophysiological solution or computational solution. We talk about artificial intelligence and the possibility that the universe is a simulation, and other fascinating topics, some of which can seem so bizarre or abstract as to not have any real tangible importance. But I would urge you not to be misled here. I think all of these topics will be more and more relevant in the coming years as we build devices which, if they're not in fact conscious, will seem conscious to us. And as we confront the prospect of augmenting our own conscious minds by integrating our brains with machines more and more directly, and even copying our minds onto the hard drives of the future, all of these arcane philosophical problems will become topics of immediate and pressing personal and ethical importance. David is certainly one of the best guides I know to the relevant terrain. So now it's with great pleasure that I bring you David Chalmers. Well, I'm here with philosopher David Chalmers. David, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks. It's a pleasure to be talking with you. I don't think we've ever met. Are you aware of whether or not we've met? I feel like we've met by email, but I don't think so. I've had a couple of emails back and forth over the years, and with anika your wife as well? Never in person that I recall. Yeah, because the reason why I'm confused about this is because this is almost certainly something you don't know, but you served quite an important intellectual role in my life. I went to one of those early Tucson conferences on consciousness. Oh, I didn't know that. I think it was probably 95. Was 94 the first one? Yeah, 94 was the first small one with about 300 people. Then it got really big in 96 with about 2000 people. I think I went to 95 and probably 96 as well. And I had dropped out of school and was, I guess you could say, looking for some direction in life. And I became very interested in the conversations that were happening in the philosophy of mind. I think probably the first thing I saw was some of the sparring between Dan Dennett and John Searle. Then I noticed you in the Journal of Consciousness studies. And then I think I just saw an ad probably in the Journal of Consciousness studies for the Tucson conference and showed up. And I quite distinctly remember your talk there and your articulation of the hard problem of consciousness really just made me want to do philosophy, which led very directly into my wanting to know more about science and sent me back to the ivory tower. And I think a significant percentage of my getting a PhD in neuroscience and continuing to be interested in this issue was the result of just seeing that the conversation you started in Tucson more than 20 years ago. Okay, well, I'm really pleased to hear that. I had no idea. Yeah. Might have been the 96 conference. Was Dan Den up there, you said? I don't recall if Dan was there. I've gone to at least two of them and they were in quick succession. And I think Roger Penrose was there. I remember Stewart Hammeroff talking at least about their thesis. And it was a fascinating time. Yeah, that's the event that people called the Woodstock of consciousness. Getting everyone together for getting the Band together for the first time. It was a crazy conference. It was a whole lot of fun. It was the first time I'd met a lot of these people, too, myself, actually. Oh, interesting. It was very influential for me. I feel like I am a bad judge of how familiar people are with the problem of consciousness because I have been so steeped in it and fixated on it for now decades. So I'm always surprised that people find this a novel problem and difficult to even notice as a problem. So let's start at the beginning and let's just talk about what consciousness is. What do you mean by consciousness and how would you distinguish it from the other topics that it's usually conflated with, like self awareness and behavioral report and access and all the rest? It's awfully hard to define consciousness, but at least I'd like to start by saying consciousness is the subjective experience of the mind and the world it's basically what it feels like from the first person point of view to be thinking and perceiving and judging and so on. So when I look out to the scene, like I'm doing now, out my window, there are trees and there's grass and a pond and so on. Well, there's a word of information processing where all this stuff photons in my redness send a signal of the optic nerve to my brain. Eventually I might say something about it. That's all of a level of functioning and behavior. But there's also really crucially something it feels like from the first person point of view. I might have an experience of the colors, a certain greenness of the green, a certain reflection on the pond. This is a little bit like the inner movie in the head. And the crucial problem of consciousness, for me at least, is this subjective part, what it feels like from the inside. This we can distinguish from questions about, say, behavior and about functioning. People sometimes use the word consciousness just for the fact that, for example, I'm awake and responsive. That's something that can be understood straightforwardly in terms of behavior, and there are going to be mechanisms for how I'm responding and so on. So I like to call those problems of consciousness the easy problems, the ones about how we behave, how we respond, how we function. What I like to call the hard problem of consciousness is the one about how it feels from the first person point of view. Yeah, there was another very influential articulation of this problem, which I would assume influenced you as well, which was Thomas Nagel's essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The formulation he gave there is if it's like something to be a creature or a system processing information, whatever it's like, even if it's something we can't understand, the fact that it is like something the fact that there's an internal, subjective, qualitative character to the thing, the fact that if you could switch places with it, it wouldn't be synonymous with the lights going out. That fact. The fact that it's like something to be a bat is the fact of consciousness in the case of a bat or in any other system. I know people who are not sympathetic with that formulation just think it's a kind of tautology or it's a question begging formulation of it. But as a rudimentary statement of what consciousness is, I've always found that to be an attractive one. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I find that's about as good a definition as we're going to get for consciousness. The idea is roughly that a system is conscious if there's something it's like to be that system. So there's something it's like to be me right now. I'm conscious. There's nothing it's like, presumably, to be this glass of water on my desk. If there's nothing it's like to be that glass of water on my desk, then it's not conscious. Likewise, some of my mental states, my seeing the green leaves right now, there's something it's like for me to see the green leaves. So that's a conscious state for me. But maybe there's some unconscious language processing of syntax going on in my head that doesn't feel like anything to me. Or some motor processes in the cerebellum. Those might be states of me, but they're not conscious states of me because there's nothing it's like for me to undergo those states. So I find this is a definition that's very vivid and useful for me. That said, it's just a bunch of words like anything and for some people so for some people, this bunch of words, I think is very useful in activating the idea of consciousness from the subjective point of view. Other people hear something different in that set of words like what is it like you're saying, what is it similar to? Well, it's like it's kind of similar to my brother, but it's different as well. For those people, that set of words doesn't work. So what I've found over the years is this phrase of Nagles it's incredibly useful for at least some people in getting them on to the problem, although it doesn't work for everybody. What do you make of the fact that so many scientists and philosophers find this the hardness of the hard problem? And I think I should probably get you to state why it's so hard or why you have distinguished the hard from the easy problems of consciousness. But what do you make of the fact that people find it difficult to concede that there's a problem here because this is just a common phenomenon. There are people like Dan Dennett and the Churchillins and other philosophers who just kind of ram their way past the mystery here and declare that it's a pseudo mystery. And you and I have both had the experience of witnessing people either seem to pretend that this problem doesn't exist or they acknowledge it only to change the subject and then pretend that they've addressed it. And so let's state what the hard problem is and perhaps you can say why it's not immediately compelling to everyone that it's in fact hard. Yeah, I mean, there's obviously a huge amount of disagreement in this area. I don't know what your sense is. My sense is that most people at least got a reasonable appreciation of the fact that there's a big problem here. Of course, what you do after that is very different in different cases. Some people think, well, it's only an initial problem and we can we ought to kind of see it as an illusion and get past it. But yeah, to state the problem, I find it useful to first start by distinguishing the easy problems, which are problems basically about the performance of functions from the hard problem, which is about experience. So the easy problems are how is it? For example, we discriminate information in our environment and respond appropriately? How does the brain integrate information from different sources and bring it together to make a judgment and control behavior? How indeed do we voluntarily control behavior to respond in a controlled way to our environment? How does our brain monitor its own states? These are all big mysteries. And actually, neuroscience has not gotten all that far on some of these problems. They're all quite difficult. But in those cases, we have a pretty clear sense of what the research program is and what it would take to explain them. It's basically a matter of finding some mechanism in the brain that, for example, is responsible for discriminating the information and controlling the behavior. And although it's pretty hard work finding the mechanism, we're on a path to doing that. So a neural mechanism for discriminating information, a computational mechanism for the brain to monitor its own states and so on. So for the easy problems, they at least fall within the standard methods of the brain and cognitive sciences, where basically we're trying to explain some kind of function and we just find a mechanism. The Hard Problem what makes the hard problem of experience hard is it doesn't really seem to be a problem about behavior or about functions. You could, in principle, imagine explaining all of my behavioral responses to a given stimulus and how my brain discriminates and integrates and monitors itself and controls. You can explain all that with, say, a neural mechanism, and you might not have touched the central question, which is why does it feel like something from the first person point of view? That just doesn't seem to be a problem about explaining behaviors and explaining functions. And as a result, the usual methods that work for us so well in the brain and cognitive sciences, finding a mechanism that does the job just doesn't obviously apply here. We're going to get correlations. We've certainly got finding correlations between processes in the brain and bits of consciousness, an area of the brain that might light up when you see red or when you feel pain. But nothing there seems yet to be giving us an explanation. Why does all that processing feel like something from the inside? Why doesn't it go on just in the dark as if we were giant robots or zombies without any subjective experience? So that's the hard problem. And I'm inclined to think that most people at least recognize there is at least the appearance of a big problem here from that point. People react in different ways. Someone like Dan Dennett says it's all an illusion or a confusion and one that we need to get past them. I respect that line. I think it's a hard enough problem that we need to be exploring every avenue here. And one avenue that's very much worth exploring is the view that it's an illusion. But there is something kind of faintly unbelievable about the whole idea that the data of consciousness here are an illusion. To me, they're the most real thing in the universe the feeling of pain, the experience of vision or of thinking. So it's a very hard line to take. The line that Dan Dennis takes. He wrote a book, Consciousness Explained back in the early 90s where he tried to take that line. It was very good and very influential book. But I think most people have found that at the end of the day, it just doesn't seem to do justice to the phenomenon. To be fair to Dan, it's been a long time since I've looked at that book that was actually might have been the first book I read on this topic back when it came out, I think, in 91. Does he actually say, and this is strange, I'm very aligned with you and people like Thomas Nagel on these questions in the philosophy of mind, and yet have had this alliance with Dan for many years around the issue of religion. And so I've spent a lot of time with Dan. We've never really gotten into a conversation on consciousness. Perhaps we've been wary of colliding on this topic, and we had a somewhat unhappy collision on the topic of free will. Is it true that he says that consciousness is an illusion? Or is it somehow just the hardness of the hard problem is illusory, that the hard problem is categorically different from the easy problems? I completely understand how he would want to push that intuition. But as I've said before, and I really don't see another way of seeing this, it seems to me that consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion. Even if we are confused about everything, even if we are even confused about the qualitative character of our experience in many important respects, so that we're not subjectively incorrigible. You can be wrong about what it's like to be you in terms of the details, which is to say you can become a better judge of what it's like to be you in each moment. But the fact that it is like something to be you, the fact that something seems to be happening, even if this is only a dream, or you're a brain and a VAT, or you're otherwise misled by everything, there is something seeming to happen. And that seeming is all you need to assert the absolute undeniable reality of consciousness. I mean, that is the fact of consciousness every bit as much as any other case in which you might assert its existence. So I just don't see how a claim that consciousness itself is an illusion can ever fly. Yeah, I think I'm with you on this. I think Dan's views have actually evolved a bit over the years on this. Back in the maybe the 1980s or so, he used to say things that sounded much more strongly like, consciousness doesn't exist. It's an illusion. He wrote a paper called on the Absence of Phenomenology saying there really isn't such a thing as what we call phenomenology, which is basically just another word for consciousness. He wrote another one called Quinning Quaya, which said we just need to get rid of this whole idea of qualia, which, again, is a word that philosophers use for the qualitative character of experience. The thing that makes seeing red different from seeing green. They seem to involve different qualities. At one point, Dan was inclined to say, oh, that's just a mistake. There's nothing there. Over the years, I think he's found that people find that line just a bit too strong to be believable. It just seems frankly unbelievable from the first person point of view that there are no qualities, there is no feeling of red versus the feeling of green, or there is no consciousness. So he's evolved in the direction of saying that, yeah, there's consciousness, but it's really just in the sense of, for example, there's functioning and behavior and information encoded. There's not really consciousness in this strong phenomenological sense that drives the hard problem. In a way. It's a bit of a verbal relabeling of the old line. Of course, you must be familiar. I know you're familiar with these debates over free will where one person says there is no free will and the other person says, well, there is free will, but it's just this much more deflated thing which is compatible with determinism. And it's basically two ways of saying the same thing. I think Dan used to say there is no consciousness. Now he says, well, there is consciousness, but only in this very deflated sense. And I think ultimately it's another way of saying the same thing. He doesn't think there is consciousness in that strong subjective sense that poses the hard problem. I feel super sensitized to the prospect of people not following the plot here because if it's the first time someone is hearing these concerns, it's easy to just lose sight of what the actual subject is. So I just want to retrace a little bit of what you said, sketching the hardness of the hard problem. So you have this the distinction between understanding function and understanding the fact that experience exists. And so we have functions like motor behavior or learning or visual perception. And it's very straightforward to think about explaining these in mechanistic terms. I mean, if you have something like vision, we can talk about the transduction of light energy into neurochemical events and then the mapping of the visual field onto the relevant parts of, in our case, the visual cortex. And this is very complicated, but it's not, in principle, obscure. The fact that it's like something to see, however, remains totally mysterious, no matter how much of this mapping you do. And if you imagine from the other side, if we built a robot that could do all the things we can, it seems to me that at no point in refining its mechanism would we have reason to believe that it's now conscious, even if it passes the Turing test. This is actually one of the things that concerns me about AI. It seems one of the likely paths we could take is that we could build machines that seem conscious, and the effect will be so convincing that we will just lose sight of the problem. All of our intuitions that lead us to ascribe consciousness to other people and to certain animals will be played upon because we will build the machines so as to do that. And it will cease to seem philosophically interesting or even ethically appropriate to wonder whether there's something that it's like to be one of these robots. And yet it seems to me that we still won't know whether these machines are actually conscious unless we've understood how consciousness arises in the first place, which is to say, unless we've solved the hard problem. Yeah, and I think we can. Maybe we should distinguish the question of whether a system is conscious from how that consciousness is explained. I mean, even in the case of other people, or they're behaving as if they're conscious. And we tend to be pretty confident that other people are conscious. So we don't really regard there to be a question about whether other people are conscious. Still, I think it's consistent to have that attitude and still find it very mysterious, this fact of consciousness, and to be utterly puzzled about how we might explain it in terms of the brain. So I suspect that with machines we may well end up, as you say, just finding it undeniable very hard to deny that machine, even if there are machines hanging around with us, talking in a human like way and reflecting on their consciousness. Those machines are saying, hey, I'm really puzzled by this whole consciousness thing because I know I'm just a collection of silicon circuits, but it still feels like something from the inside. If machines are doing that, I'm going to be pretty convinced that they are conscious as I am conscious. But that won't make it any less mysterious. Well, maybe it'll just make it all the more mysterious. How on earth could this machine be conscious, even though it's collection of silicon circuits? Likewise, how on earth could I be conscious just as a result of these processes in my brain? It's not that I see anything intrinsically worse about silicon than about brain processes here. There just seems to be this kind of mysterious gap in the explanation in both cases. And of course, we can worry about other people, too. There's a classic philosophical problem, the problem of other minds. How do you know that anybody else apart from yourself is conscious? Descartes said, Well, I'm certain of one thing I'm conscious. I think, therefore I am. It certainly gets you one data point. It gets me to me, being conscious. Actually, it gets me to me, being conscious right now, who knows if I was ever conscious in the past? Anything else beyond that has got to be something of an inference or an extrapolation. We end up taking for granted most of the time that other people are conscious. But you could try to raise questions there if you wanted to. And then as you move to questions about AI and robots, about animals and so on, the questions just become very fuzzy and murky. Yeah, I think the difference with AI or robots is that presumably we will build them. We may, in fact build them along lines that are not at all analogous to the emergence of our own nervous systems. And so if we follow the line we've taken, say, with, like, chess playing computers, where we have something which we don't even have any reason to believe is aware of chess, but it is all of a sudden the best chess player on Earth, and now will always be. So if we did that for 1000 different human attributes, so that we created a very compelling case for its superior intelligence, it can function in every way, we function better than we can. And we have put this in some format so that it has the memetic facial displays that we find attractive and compelling. We get out of the uncanny valley and these robots no longer seem weird to us. In fact, they detect our emotions better than we can detect the emotions of other people, or than other people can detect ours. And so all of a sudden we are played upon by a system that is deeply unanimous as to our own nervous system. And then we will just then I think it'll be somewhat mysterious whether or not this is conscious because we have cobbled this thing together. Whereas in our case, the reason why I don't think it's parsimonious for me to be a solepst and to say maybe I'm the only one who's conscious, is because there's this obviously deep analogy between how I came to be conscious and how you came to be conscious. So I have to then do further work of arguing that there's something about your nervous system or your situation in the universe that might not be a sufficient base of consciousness. And yet it is clearly in my own case. So to worry about other people or even other higher animals seems a stretch. At least it's unnecessary, and it's only falsely claimed to be parsimonious. I think you have to do extra work to doubt whether other people are conscious, rather than just simply not attribute consciousness to them. How would you feel if we met Martians? Let's say there are intelligent Martians who are behaviorally very sophisticated, and we turn out to be able to communicate with them about science and philosophy, but at the same time, they've evolved through a completely independent evolutionary process from us. So they got there in a different way. Would you have the same kind of doubts about whether they might be conscious? Yeah, well, I think perhaps I would. It would be probably somewhere between our own case and whatever we might build along lines that we have no good reason to think track the emergence of of Consciousness in the universe. Well, this is actually a topic I wanted to raise with you, this, this issue of epiphenomenalism, because it is kind of mysterious. It's. So the the flip side of the hard problem the fact that you can describe all of this functioning and you seem to never need to introduce consciousness in order to describe mere function, leaves you at the end of the day with the possible problem, which many people find deeply counterintuitive, which is that consciousness doesn't do anything. That it is an epiphenomenon, which is an analogy often given for this. It's like the smoke coming out of the smokestack of an old fashioned locomotive. It's always associated with the progress of this train down the tracks, but it's not actually doing anything. It's a mere byproduct of the actual causes that are propelling the train. And so consciousness could be like the smoke rising out of the smokestack. It's not doing anything, and yet it's always here at a certain level of function. If I recall correctly in your first book, you seem to be fairly sympathetic with epiphenomenalism. Talk about that a little bit. Epiphenominalism is not a view that anyone feels any initial attraction for. The consciousness doesn't do anything. It sure seems to do so much. But there is this puzzle that pretty well, for any bit of behavior you try to explain, it looks like there's the potential to explain it without invoking consciousness in this subjective sense. There will be an explanation in terms of neurons or computational mechanisms of our various behavioral responses. One place where at least start to wonder maybe consciousness doesn't have any function, maybe it doesn't do anything at all. Maybe, for example, consciousness gives value and meaning to our lives, which is something we can talk about without actually doing anything. But then obviously there are all kinds of questions how and why would it have evolved? Not to mention how is it that we come to be having this extended conversation about consciousness if consciousness isn't actually playing a role in the causal loop? So in my first book, I at least tried on the idea of epipenomenalism. It didn't come out saying this is definitely true, but tried to say, okay, well, if we're forced in that direction, that's one way we can go. Actually, we're in view skipping ahead a few steps, is that either it's epic phenomenal or it's outside a physical system, but somehow playing a role in physics. That's another kind of more traditionally dualist possibility or third possibility. Consciousness is somehow built in at the very basic level of physics. So to get consciousness to play a. Causal role, you need to say some fairly radical things. I'd like to track through each of those possibilities, but to stick with epiphanominalism for a moment. You've touched on it in passing here, but remind us of the zombie argument that I don't know if that originates with you. It's not something that I noticed before I heard you making it, but the zombie argument really is the thought experiment that describes epiphanominalism introduced the concept of a zombie, and then I have a question about that. So, yeah, the idea of zombies actually I mean, it's been out there for a while in philosophy before me, not to mention out there in the popular culture. But the zombies which play a role in philosophy are a bit different from the zombies that play a role in the movies or in Haitian voodoo culture. The ones in the movies are all supposed to be all the different kinds of zombies are missing something. The zombies in the movie are lacking somehow life there if they're dead. But reanimated, the zombies in the voodoo tradition are lacking some kind of free will. Well, the zombies that play a role in philosophy are lacking consciousness. And this is just a thought experiment, but the conceit is that we can at least imagine a being, at the very least behaviorally identical to a normal human being, but without any consciousness on the inside at all, just acting and walking and talking in a perfectly humanlike way without any consciousness. The extreme version of this thought experiment says we can at least imagine a being physically identical to a normal human being, but without any subjective consciousness. Do I talk about my zombie twin, a hypothetical being in the universe next door who's physically identical to me? He's holding a conversation like this with a zombie analog of you right now saying all the same stuff and responding, but without any consciousness. Now, no one thinks anything like this exists in our universe, but the idea at least seems imaginable or conceivable. There doesn't seem to be any contradiction in the idea. And the very fact that you can kind of make sense of the idea immediately raises some questions like, why aren't we zombies? There's a contrast here. Zombies could have existed. Evolution could have produced zombies. Why didn't evolution produce zombies? It produced conscious beings. It looks like for anything behavioral you could point to, it starts to look as if a zombie could do all the same things without consciousness. So if there was some function we could point to and say, that's what you need consciousness for and you could not, in principle do that without consciousness, then we might have a function for consciousness. But right now it seems I mean, actually this corresponds to the science for anything that we actually do perception, learning, memory, language and so on. It sure looks like a whole lot of it can be performed even in the actual world unconsciously so the whole problem of what consciousness is doing is just thrown into harsh relief by that thought experiment. Yeah. Well, as you say that most of what our minds are accomplishing is unconscious. Or at least it seems to be unconscious from the point of view of the two of us who are having this conversation. So the fact that I can follow the rules of English grammar insofar as I managed to do that, that is all being implemented in a way that is unconscious. And when I make an error, I, as the conscious witness of my inner life, am just surprised at the appearance of the error. And I could be surprised for on all those occasions where I make no errors and I get to the end of a sentence in something like grammatically correct form I could be sensitive to the fundamental mysteriousness of that, which is to say that I'm following rules that I have no conscious access to in the moment. And everything is like that. The fact that I perceive my visual field, the fact that I hear your voice the fact that I effortlessly and actually helplessly decode meaning from your words because I am an English speaker and you're speaking in English, but if you were speaking in Chinese, it would just be noise. And this is all unconsciously mediated. And so, again, it is a mystery why there should be something that it's like to be associated with any part of this process because so much of the process can take place in the dark or at least it seems to be in the dark. This is something that is the topic I raised in my last book waking up and discussing split brain research. But there is some reason to worry or wonder whether or not there are islands of consciousness in our brains that we're not aware of. Which is to say we have the problem of other minds with respect to our own brains. What do you think about that? What do you put the chance of there being something that it's like to be associated with these zombie parts or seemingly zombie parts of your own cognitive processing? Well, I don't rule it out. I think when it comes to the mind body problem, there are you know, the puzzles are large enough that we just one of the big puzzles is we don't know which systems are conscious. And at least some days I see a lot of attraction to the idea of thinking consciousness is much more widespread than we think. So not just I guess most of us think, okay, humans are conscious and probably a lot of the more sophisticated mammals, at least, are conscious. Apes, monkeys, dogs, cats around the point of mice, maybe some people start to flies, some people start to wobble. But I'm attracted by the idea that for many, at least reasonably sophisticated information processing devices there's some kind of some kind of consciousness and maybe this goes down very deep, and at some point maybe we can talk about the idea that consciousness is everywhere. But before even getting to that point, if you're prepared to say that, say, a fly is conscious or a worm with its 300 neurons and so on, then you do start to have to worry about bits of the brain that are enormously more sophisticated than that, but that are also part of another conscious system. There's a guy, Julio Tanoni, who's put forward a well known recent theory of consciousness called the information integration theory. And he's got a mathematical measure called phi of the amount of information that a system integrates and thinks. But roughly whenever that's high enough, you get consciousness. So then, yeah, you'd look at these different bits of the brain, the hemisphere, things like the cerebellum and something well, okay, the phi there is not as high as it is for the brain, but it's still pretty high, high enough that in an animal, he would say it's conscious, so why isn't it? And he ends up having to throw in an extra axiom that he calls the exclusion axiom, saying if you're part of a system that has a higher fire than you, then you're not conscious. So if the hemisphere has a high fi, but the brain as a whole has a higher phi, then the brain gets to be conscious, but the hemisphere doesn't. But to many people, that axiom looks kind of arbitrary. And if it wasn't for that being in there, then you'd be left with a whole lot of conscious subsystems all over. I agree. Who knows what it's like to be a subsystem? What it's like to be my cerebellum or what it's like to be a hemisphere, but at least makes you worry and wonder. On the other hand, there are these experiments where one half of the brain is basically situations where one half of the brain basically gets destroyed and the other half keeps going fine. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about Tanoni's notion of consciousness as integrated information. And to my eye, it seems yet another case of someone just trying to ram past the hard problem. And actually, I noticed Max Tegmark wrote a paper that actually took Tanoi as a starting point. And Max has been on this podcast. I don't think we touched on consciousness, but he also did a version of this. He just basically said, let's start here. We know that there are certain arrangements of matter that just are conscious. We know this. There is no problem. This is a starting point, and now we just have to talk about the plausible explanation for what makes them conscious. And then he sort of went on to embrace Tanoni and then did a lot of physics. But is there anything in Tanoni's discussion here that prize up the lid on the hard problem more than the earlier work he did with Edelman or anyone else's? Attempt to give some information processing construal or a synchronicity of neural firing construal of consciousness. Yeah. To be fair to Julio Tanoni, I think it's true that in some of the presentations of his work and the popular press and so on, you can get this idea all information integration is all there is. Let's explain that we've explained everything. He's actually very sensitive to the problem of consciousness. And when pressed on this, even in some of the stuff he's written, he says, I'm not trying to solve the hard problem in the sense of showing how you can get consciousness from matter. He's not trying to cross the explanatory gap from physical processes to consciousness. Rather, he says, I'm starting with the fact of consciousness. I'm just taking that as a given that we are conscious and I'm trying to map its properties. And he actually starts with some phenomenological axioms of consciousness. It consists of information that's differentiated in certain ways but integrated and unified in other ways. And then what he tries to do is take those phenomenological axioms and turn them into mathematics turn them into mathematics of information and say, what are the informational properties that consciousness has? And then he comes up with this mathematical measure. Then at a certain point, it somehow turns into the theory that all consciousness is what consciousness is is a certain kind of integration of information. The way I would hear the theory I don't know if he puts it this way is basically there's a correlation between different states of consciousness and different kinds of integration of information in the brain. There's still a hard problem here because we still have no idea why all that integration of information in the brain should give you consciousness in the first place. But even someone who believes there's a hard problem can believe there are still really systematic correlations between brain processes and consciousness, that we ought to be able to give a rigorous mathematical theory of just which physical states go with which kind of states of consciousness. And I see Julio's theory is basically as at least a stab in that direction of trying to give a rigorous mathematical theory of the correlations. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I should say that I certainly agree that one can more or less throw up one's hands with respect to the hard problem and then just go on to do the work of trying to map the neural correlates of consciousness and understand what consciousness seems to be, in our case, as a matter of its instantiation in the brain. And never pretend that the mystery has been reduced thereby. So that if it turned out that I think I said this once in response to the work he did with Edelman. So one of the criteria I don't know if he still does this, but one of his criterion for information integration was that there had to be within a window of something like 500 milliseconds, right? And by analogy, extrapolated that out to geological processes in the Earth? What if it was just the fact that integrated processes in the Earth over a time course of a few hundred years was a sufficient basis of consciousness? If we just stipulate that that's true, that's still just a statement of a miracle from my point of view, from the point of view of being sympathetic with the hard problem, that would be an incredibly strange thing to believe. And yet that is the sort of thing we are being forced to believe about our own brains. Just under a slightly different description. I do think there's something intermediate that you can go for here. Even if you do believe, and you're very convinced there's a serious hard problem of consciousness that allows the possibility of at least a broadly scientific approach to something in the neighborhood of the hard problem where it's not just oh, let's look at the neural correlates and see what's going on in the human case. But it's something like try to find the simplest, most fundamental principles that connect physical processes to consciousness as a kind of basic, general and universal principle. So we might start with some correlations we find in the familiar human case between, say, certain neural systems and certain kinds of consciousness, but then try and generalize those based on as much evidence as possible. Of course, the evidence is limited, which is another limitation here. But then try and find principles which might apply to other systems. Ultimately, look for really simple bridging principles that cross the gap from physical systems to consciousness and that would, in principle, predict what kind of consciousness you'd find in what kind of physical system. So I would say something like Chinoni's information integration principle with this mathematical quantity phi as a proposal, maybe a very early proposal about a fundamental principle that might connect physical processes to consciousness. Now, it doesn't exactly remove the hard problem because at some point you've got to take that principle as a basic axiom. Yeah, when there's information integration, there's consciousness. But then you can at least go on to do science with that principle. And it may well be that. My take on this is that we know that elsewhere in science you have to take some laws and some principles as fundamental, fundamental laws of physics, the law of gravity, or the unified field theory or the laws of quantum mechanics. Some things are just basic principles that we don't try and explain any further. But it may well be that when it comes to consciousness we're going to have to take something like that for granted as well. So we don't try to explain space, or at least we didn't try to explain space in terms of something more basic. Some things get taken as primitive and we look at the fundamental laws that involve them. Likewise, the same could be true for consciousness. We ended up pretty satisfied about what goes on in the case of space, space is one of the primitives, but we've got a great scientific theory of how it works. We could end up in that position for a consciousness, too. Yes, we have to take something here as basic, but we'll get this really fundamental principle, say, like the information integration principle that crosses the gap and won't remove the hard problem because that'll be taken as basic, but that will at least be reduced to a situation we're familiar with elsewhere in science. Yeah, actually, I'm quite sympathetic with that line. As you say, there are primitives or brute facts that we accept throughout science and there are no insult to our thinking about the rest of reality. And I said I want to get there, but I realize now I forgot to ask a question that Annika wanted me to ask my wife Anika wanted me to ask on the zombie argument, and she was wondering why, whether it was actually conceivable that a zombie would or could talk about consciousness itself. How is it that you take a zombie, my zombie twin, that has no experience? There's nothing that it's like to be that thing, but it is talking just as I am and is functioning just as I am. What could possibly motivate a zombie that is devoid of phenomenal experience? To say things like, I have experiences but other creatures don't, or to worry about the possibility of zombies. There would seem to be no basis to make this distinction because everything he's doing, he can easily ascribe to others that have no experience. So there's there's no there seems to be no basis for him to distinguish experience from non experience. So so I just wanted to get your reaction to that on on her behalf. I mean, this is a big puzzle and it's probably one of the biggest puzzles when it comes to thinking through this idea of it's on people. I don't know if he's going to be talking about content. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I'm going to be starting today, a series entitled The End of Faith Sessions, and this is inspired by two things. The first is that I've always heard that the audiobook edition of The End of Faith is deeply unsatisfying. I actually haven't heard it myself, but rumor has it that the voice actor who read it didn't do a good job and in places even seem to disagree with me and give a deliberately inflictous reading of the text. And it's also the case that the most controversial things I've ever written are in that book and continue to come back to haunt me. So I'm going to read much of the book, most of the book, perhaps all of the book, in a series of podcasts, and then elaborate on what I wrote there, issuing any caveats as needed, and I may in fact not read certain sections of it. But this is me jailbreaking the audio for better or Worse chapter One Reason in Exile The young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. His pockets are filled with nails, ball bearings and rat poison. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart of the city. The young man takes his seat beside a middle aged couple. He will wait for the bus to reach its next stop. The couple at his side appears to be shopping for a new refrigerator. The woman has decided on a model, but her husband worries it will be too expensive. He indicates another one in a brochure that lies open on her lap. The next stop comes into view. The bus doors swing. The woman observes that the model her husband has selected will not fit in the space underneath their cabinets. New passengers have taken the last remaining seats and begun gathering in the aisle. The bus is now full. The young man smiles. With the press of a button, he destroys himself, the couple at his side, and 20 others on the bus. The nails, ball bearings and rat poison ensure further casualties on the street than in the surrounding cars. All has gone according to plan. The young man's parents soon learn of his fate. Although saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has gone to heaven and prepared a way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for eternity. It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration and honor the young man's parents by giving them gifts of food and money. These are the facts. This is all we know for certain about the young man. Is there anything else that we can infer about him on the basis of his behavior? Was he popular in school? Was he rich or was he poor? Was he low or high intelligence? His actions leave no clue at all. Did he have a college education? Did he have a bright future as a mechanical engineer? His behavior is simply mute on questions of this sort and hundreds like them. Why is it so easy, then? So trivially easy you could almost bet your life on it. Easy to guess the young man's religion. Okay, so that's how I started the book. And this opening has been quite controversial for reasons that make no sense. Many people who object to this beginning, which is a fictionalized account in its details, are merely imagining what a prototypical suicide bombing on a bus might be like. Many have objected that there's something unrealistic about this or that these kinds of events don't happen, that this is a falsehood. To put this forward as somehow indicative of the kind of thing that is happening in our world that has been happening for decades, well, that claim is simply false. This is a prototypical case for a reason. The details I've given here, apart from the fictionalized couple shopping for a refrigerator, are well attested to. This is precisely the sort of thing that Muslim suicide bombers have done and continue to do. And I believe that every detail here is factual, including the penultimate gesture of smiling at the victims. That is also well attested to by those who have survived suicide attacks. And while there are others who have committed suicide bombings, and for quite some time, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka were the most prolific suicide bombers. It was the case when I wrote this. And it is even more true now that when you hear about a suicide bombing, there is one thing you can be virtually certain of, and that is that it was carried out by a believer in Islam. Someone who believes in paradise, someone who believes that he was going to paradise because of his martyrdom. Someone who believed that he was sending infidels to hell where they will burn for eternity. Someone who is in touch with a community of people who believe the same things. That's not to say that a nonmuslim suicide bomber is impossible, but you can know these things about any suicide bomber today with a high order of confidence. And that is a claim about which I think no honest person can pretend to be in doubt at this moment in history. If you tell me that an airplane has been hijacked or that a pilot of a plane has intentionally flown it into a building or into the ground, killing himself and everyone else on board. And you stipulate that this person was not mentally ill or suicidally depressed, as has happened on occasion. I can tell you what you will hear on the black box if that black box gets recovered, I can tell you the pilots or hijackers last words. Now, how can I do that? Is it because I'm psychic? No, but I will take this bet every time. Why do I know that if you recover that black box, you will hear someone screaming Allahu Akbar? Because only one ideology on earth is producing this behavior reliably at this point. And that ideology, which I would call jihadism or Islamism now, depending on the context, comes directly out of the religion of Islam, and no other religion is producing an analogous death cult at this moment. And as I will make very clear in this book, there are theological reasons for this. And while I will go on to criticize Christianity and other religions for their specific problems, their problems are different. And the problem of suicidal jihad is not something that all religions are culpable for. And if you're going to be in the business of criticizing religion or even maintaining the security of your own society, it's only decent to acknowledge that difference. So if you're one of those people who think I have stacked the deck against Islam by providing this generic example of a suicide bombing, I think you're quite clearly fooling yourself back to the book. A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life. Are you a scientist? A liberal? A racist? These are merely species of belief in action. Your beliefs define your vision of the world. They dictate your behavior. They determine your emotional responses to other human beings. If you doubt this, consider how your experience would suddenly change if you came to believe one of the following propositions one, you have only two weeks to live. Two, you've just won a lottery prize of $100,000,000.03. Aliens have implanted a receiver in your skull and are manipulating your thoughts. These are mere words until you believe them. Once believed, they become part of the very apparatus of your mind, determining your desires, fears, expectations and subsequent behavior. There seems, however, to be a problem with some of our most cherished beliefs about the world they are leading us inexorably to kill one another. A glance at history or at the pages of any newspaper reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another only to unite them and slaughter generally have their roots in religion. Now, here, I should say I think the word generally here is inaccurate. I should have said often have their roots in religion. I don't think most wars have been religious in origin. A significant subset have been and certainly when societies break down along tribal lines. Breaking down along confessional lines into religious camps is a very common phenomenon. And this is not to say that people are motivated by theology in their subsequent conflict, but they're motivated by religious tribalism. But I wouldn't say that most wars have been religious, though I think some of the scariest divisions in our world now are explicitly religious. Back to the text. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars, but because it was written in our books. It is what we do with words like God and paradise and sin in the present that will determine our future. Our situation is this most of the people in this world believe that the creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they accept, rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however. Quote respect for other faiths or for the views of unbelievers is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched here and there by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes, really believes, that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one. And I certainly stand by this claim. I'm sure I'll revisit this at some point in the book. But just imagine what it would be like. Some of you might, in fact know what it's like to be certain that the difference between spending eternity in heaven or eternity in hell turns on whether you believe the right things about a book or about the origin of the universe. Now, many people pretend to believe these things or believe it to some degree. But if you are certain of this, if you are certain that someone with the wrong ideas by persuading your child to doubt the truth of your religion, has thereby prepared an eternity of suffering for the person you care about most in this world. Well, if anything is intolerable, that is that is worse than your neighbor kidnapping your child and torturing him or her in his basement for a decade, right? And we're talking about an eternity of hellfire. That is the worst possible fate. And what many people lose sight of is that some people really believe that this fate awaits you if you think the wrong things about the origin of a book, or about the invisible being who is imagined to have dictated it. And it's only insofar as people are uncertain about these claims. It's only insofar as they doubt these doctrines that they otherwise pay lip service to, that they are capable of behaving themselves in a condition of epistemological pluralism, in a condition of rival truth claims, in a condition where teachers and camp counselors and new friends may lead their children to doubt the truth of their religion. Otherwise, the need to resort to violence is absolutely imperative. What would you do if you knew someone was about to inflict an eternity of misery on your child? You would do whatever it took to stop them. And if you couldn't pass the requisite laws, you would become a law unto yourself. This leaves aside, of course, the curious morality of a God. Who would do such a thing. God, the omniscient sociopath who has rigged the game this way, who has condemned to eternal torment people who, by mere accident of birth, by the sheer fact that they have the wrong nouns and verbs in their heads, they will spend eternity being tortured. That is the source of morality on offer in Abrahamic religion. But of that more later. In closing, I'll just say that what we are seeing more and more, especially in the Muslim world, are the antisocial consequences of religious certainty. We see what should otherwise be an unthinkable psychological reality. We see well educated people with other opportunities, often with families willing to blow themselves up and going to their deaths in a spirit of jubilation. Watch some of these videos. See the smiles on the faces of people who are about to blow themselves up. Nothing in your life has made you this enthusiastic in recent memory. And this, once again, is the power of belief. You might call it the power of brainwashing. If you think that these people are on some level victims of propaganda, fine. But to doubt that they believe what they say they believe makes absolutely no sense in these cases. Back to the book. Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocence on a Jerusalem street, the role that his faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always and everywhere exonerated, but technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. Our technical advances in the art of war have finally rendered our religious differences, and hence our religious beliefs, antithetical to our survival. We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the Book of Revelation, or in any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia. Because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, there is no doubt that these developments mark a terminal phase of our credulity. Words like God and Allah must go the way of Apollo and Ball, or they will unmake our world. A few minutes spent wandering the graveyard of bad ideas suggest that such conceptual revolutions are possible. Consider the case of alchemy. It fascinated human beings for over a thousand years, and yet anyone who seriously claims to be a practicing alchemist today will have disqualified himself from most positions of responsibility in our society. Faith based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence. What is the alternative to religion as we know it? As it turns out, this is the wrong question to ask. Chemistry was not an alternative to alchemy. It was a wholesale exchange of ignorance at its most rococo for genuine knowledge. We will find that, as with alchemy, to speak of alternatives to religious faith is to miss the point. Of course, people of faith fall on a continuum. Some draw soulless and inspiration from a specific spiritual tradition and yet remain fully committed to tolerance and diversity, while others would burn the earth to Sindhars if it would put an end to heresy. There are, in other words, religious moderates and religious extremists, and their various passions and projects should not be confused. One of the central themes of this book, however, is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma. They imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance, born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God, is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss. And this is where I introduce what is perhaps the most controversial point in the book. This is where I implicate so called religious moderates in the ongoing problem of religious intolerance and religious violence. Needless to say, moderates are better than fundamentalists. If we could turn all fundamentalists into moderates, that would be great. But moderates, because of the respect they demand for religion and because of their own confusion about what it is that fundamentalists believe, they prevent us from criticizing fundamentalism or even noticing it. Its consequences in the way that we must, and this is something that I spell out at greater length. Soon we have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man. This is not surprising, since many of us still believe that faith is an essential component of human life. Two myths now keep faith beyond the fray of rational criticism, and they seem to foster religious extremism and religious moderation equally. One, most of us believe that there are good things that people get from religious faith for example, strong communities, ethical behavior, spiritual experience that cannot be had elsewhere. Two, many of us also believe that the terrible things sometimes done in the name of religion are the products not of faith per se, but of our baser natures forces like greed, hatred and fear, for which religious beliefs are themselves the best or even the only remedy. Taken together, these myths seem to have granted us perfect immunity to outbreaks of reasonableness in our public discourse. Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly respect the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents. Even now, Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence. And yet intellectuals as diverse as H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Karl Jung, Max Planck, freeman Dyson. And Stephen J. Gould have declared the war between reason and faith to be long over. On this view, there is no need to have all of our beliefs about the universe cohere a person can be a God fearing Christian on Sunday and a working scientist come Monday morning without ever having to account for the partition that seems to have erected itself in his head while he slept. He can, as it were, have his reason and eat it too. As the early chapters of this book will illustrate, it is only because the church has been politically hobbled in the west that anyone can afford to think this way in places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Quran. Gould's notion of a quote loving concordot between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional. This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or even misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional and spiritual needs that are now addressed, however obliquely and at a terrible price by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life. But we will find that it requires no faith in untestable propositions. Jesus was born of a virgin. The Quran is the word of God for us to do this. And so here I begin to touch on a theme which is brought out more later in the book, but also most fully in my recent book Waking Up, that there are rational approaches to quote spiritual experience. I do think finding a rational basis for ethics and finding a rational basis for a contemplative life is an extremely important project and on many levels the most important project for any individual to engage the myth of moderation in religion. The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the one true God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology and art to even be entertained as the beliefs, rituals and iconography of each of our religions, attest to centuries of cross pollination among them. Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherence, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago. For there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas. According to Gallup, 35% of Americans believe that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of the Creator of the universe. Another 48% believe that it is, quote, the inspired word of the same. Still, inerrant though certain of its passages must be interpreted symbolically before their truth can be brought to light. Only 17% of us remain to doubt that a personal God in his infinite wisdom is likely to have authored this text or, for that matter, to have created the earth with its 250,000 species of beetles. Some 46% of Americans take a literalist view of creation, and 40% believe that God has guided creation over the course of millions of years. This means that 120,000,000 of us place the Big Bang 2500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted. Nearly 230,000,000 Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity. A survey of Hindus, Muslims and Jews around the world would surely yield similar results, revealing that we as a species have grown almost perfectly intoxicated by our myths. How is it that in this one area of our lives we have convinced ourselves that our beliefs about the world can float entirely free of reason and evidence? Now, I should say that the numbers have grown slightly more favorable, at least in the US. In the intervening years. So I wrote this 1314 years ago. It was published twelve years ago in 2004. I would say that based on recent polls, we've gained about 10% in the direction of reason. But the general picture is the same, where you have vast numbers, literally more than 100 million, claiming to believe the unbelievable. Now, as to whether there's much distance between what people claim and what they actually believe, that is a topic of real interest and consequence and genuine debate. Surely there is some difference there. But what is also clear is that even if we cut these numbers in half, we have vast numbers of people, even in the US. In the year 2016, believing patently absurd things about the origin of the Bible and therefore about the moral order of the universe. Back to the book. It is with respect to this rather surprising cognitive scenery that we must decide what it means to be a quote, religious moderate in the 21st century, moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret or simply ignore much of their canons in the interest of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here. Societies become considerably less productive whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first thing to observe about the moderate's retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from Scripture, but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God's utterances difficult to accept. As written in America, religious moderation is further enforced by the fact that most Christians and Jews do not read the Bible in its entirety and consequently have no idea just how vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy. Expunged. One look at the book of Deuteronomy reveals that he has something very specific in mind should your son or daughter return from yoga class advocating the worship of Krishna. And this is from Deuteronomy, chapter 13, verses seven through eleven. If your brother, the son of your father, or of your mother or your son or daughter or the spouse whom you embrace or your most intimate friend tries to secretly seduce you, saying, let us go serve other gods. Unknown to you or your ancestors before you. Gods of the people surrounding you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent. You must not listen to him. You must show him no pity. You must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him. Your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the hands of the rest of the people following you must stone him to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh. You are God. Okay, well, that's about as clear an injunction as is possible to write. There is no metaphor there. This is not allegory. This is a direct command to kill people for any semblance of religious diversity. If someone suggests to you that you should be practicing a religion other than the one true one you happen to have in hand, in this case Judaism or some variant of Christianity, you should kill him, and you must be the first to kill him. And as it's spelled out elsewhere, if you're reluctant to do this, your neighbors should kill you. So this is the sort of behavior we're seeing among not Christians for the most part, though, you can get Christians in Africa at the moment killing homosexuals very much in the spirit of this sort of text. But when you consider a group like the Islamic State, this is the sort of literalism to which they are committed. And analogous passages obviously exist in the Qur'an, as we will see. But as I've often said, the Old Testament of the Bible is the worst of the worst when it comes to precise injunctions to kill people for thought crimes. It's only by a loophole in Judaism that Jews don't consider this an actionable doctrine. Now, the Messiah has not yet returned, the temple has not been rebuilt, a sanhedrin has not been reconvened, which is a body of elders that can judge cases of this kind, in this case, a case of heresy. But once all that happens, the ultra Orthodox believe that this is how we should live. And any Jew who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or aligned to you. So it is by theological and historical accident, not the internal moral resources of the tradition of Judaism, that we are not seeing barbaric Jews murdering their neighbors for religious offenses. And it is by extraordinarily unhappy accidents of theology that we are seeing this among Muslims worldwide. And this is a difference, again, that we have to learn to talk about honestly. Back to the Book while the stoning of children for heresy has fallen out of fashion in our country, you will not hear a moderate Christian or Jew arguing for a quote symbolic reading of passages of this sort. In fact, one seems to be explicitly blocked by God himself. In Deuteronomy 13, verse one quote whatever I am now commanding you, you must keep and observe, adding nothing to it, taking nothing away. End quote. The above passage is as canonical as any in the Bible, and it is only by ignoring such barbarisms that the Good Book can be reconciled with life in the modern world. This is a problem for moderation in religion. It has nothing underwriting it other than the unacknowledged neglect of the letter of Divine Law. The only reason that anyone is quote moderate in matters of faith these days is that he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last 2000 years of human thought democratic politics, scientific advancement on every front, concern for human rights, an end to cultural and geographic isolation, etc. The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among non fundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself. Has evolved. It is rather the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not the least among these developments has been the emergence of our tendency to value evidence and to be convinced by a proposition to the degree that there is evidence for it. Even most fundamentalists live by the lights of reason in this regard. It is just that their minds seem to have been partitioned to accommodate the profligate truth claims of their faith. Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he's likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book that he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe. And he seems to require no evidence whatsoever. Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did 2000 years ago. And much of this knowledge is incompatible with Scripture. Having heard something about the medical discoveries of the last hundred years, most of us no longer equate disease processes with sin or demonic possession. Having learned about the known distances between objects in our universe, most of us, about half of us, actually find the idea that the whole works was created 6000 years ago with light from distant stars already in transit toward the Earth impossible to take seriously. Such concessions to modernity do not in the least suggest that faith is compatible with reason, or that our religions are, in principle, open to new learning. It's just that the utility of ignoring, or quote, reinterpreting certain articles of faith is now overwhelming. Anyone being flown to a distant city for heart bypass surgery has conceded tacitly. At least that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering and medicine since the time of Moses. So it's not that these texts have maintained their integrity over time. They haven't. It's just that they've been effectively edited by our neglect of certain of their passages. Most of what remains the quote good parts has been spared the same winnowing because we don't have a truly modern understanding of our ethical intuitions and our capacity for spiritual experience. If we better understood the workings of the human brain, we would undoubtedly discover lawful connections between our states of consciousness, our modes of conduct, and the various ways we use our attention. What makes one person happier than another? Why is love more conducive to happiness than hate? Why do we generally prefer beauty to ugliness and order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to smile and laugh? And why do these shared experiences generally bring people closer together? Is the ego an illusion? And if so, what implications does this have for human life? Is there life after death? These are ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind. If we ever develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more useful to mystics than they now are to astronomers. And again, this is a claim that I stand behind. The only reason why these books have any integrity left in them, apart from the occasional example of good writing, is that we haven't had fundamental breakthroughs in a rational scientific context on ethics and spiritual experience. And insofar as we do, the change you will see in our conversation will be exactly analogous to what has happened in the area of medicine or to questions of cosmology. If you're an astronomer looking to the Bible or the Quran for guidance about how to think, in fact, you are not an astronomer. And the same will be true for what I'm calling here a mystic or a contemplative, someone who cares to explore in the laboratory of his own mind the deepest experiences available based on how he uses his attention. And the more we understand about the human mind, the more technology intrudes upon it, the less sane and rational people will fixate on these books. Now back to the book. While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out in light of all that we have and have not learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy because they're merely practicing their freedom of belief. We cannot even say that they're mistaken in religious terms because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say as religious moderates is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith or even a new species of scriptural exegesis. It is simply a capitulation to a variety of all two human interests that have nothing in principle to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance, and it has no bona fides in religious terms to put it on par with fundamentalism. Perhaps I should say that again because this is an important point. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. It is by knowing more and more about things beyond religion and knowing less and less ultimately about the details of one's own religion, that one becomes a religious moderate. That, by definition, renders religious moderation unconvincing to a fundamentalist and intellectually dishonest to an atheist. Because the moderate doesn't acknowledge the origins of this transformation in his or her thinking. The moderate pretends that this is somehow coming from the tradition itself, that it's the resources internal to Judaism or Christianity or Islam that have allowed for this moderation. No, go back to Deuteronomy now or a thousand years from now, and you will find that same passage demanding that you kill your daughter if she joins the Hari Krishnas back to the book. The texts themselves are unequivocal. They are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God's law by failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question that is, that we know there is a God and that we know what he wants from us religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness. The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance. Nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings. Religious moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics and the building of strong communities. Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas, but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on problems of ethics, social cohesion and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition, acceptable medicine, engineering, not even politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience. And this is a point that I occasionally make, although perhaps not often enough, that one of the other costs to religious moderation is that it blocks the door to a truly rational, truly unembarrassing approach to ethics and spirituality. Moderates insist that we respect the notion of revelation because there's something so good in these books that we couldn't possibly come up with it on our own, or couldn't view all books as the products of merely human minds, and then sample the best wisdom from each without regard for any tradition. This belief, in addition to maintaining the tribalism of separate religious communities in our world, this belief is not only obviously false, but profoundly unhelpful. Back to the text. Imagine that we could revive a well educated Christian of the 14th century. The man would prove to be a total ignorance except on matters of faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy and medicine would embarrass even a child. But he would know more or less everything there is to know about God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is the center of the cosmos or that trepanation is constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach. And for those of you who don't recognize the word trepanine or trepidation or treponine, it's the practice of boring holes in the human skull. Often it's imagined for the purpose of releasing a demon that has taken up residence there. This has gone back thousands of years. I say in a footnote here that archaeological evidence suggests that it's one of the oldest surgical procedures and it was presumably performed on epileptics and mentally ill as an attempt at exorcism. OK, back to the curious fact that a man from the 14th century would know everything there is to know about God. There are two explanations for this. Either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago, while our knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly in coat, or religion being the mere maintenance of dogma is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress. We will see that there is much to recommend in the latter view. With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress. Its doctrines should become more useful rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be discoverable now and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes that have come over us culturally, technologically and even ethically otherwise. There are a few reasons to believe that we will survive it. The point I'm making here, and I believe I make it in these terms near the end of the book, is that I don't think there's any reason to believe that we can survive our religious differences indefinitely for thousands of years into the future. How is it that the most divisive ideology we have ever spawned will serve us well indefinitely? How is it a good idea even now, to have humanity divided against itself in this way? Back to the book. Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word God as though we knew what we were talking about. And they don't want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred to speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world. To say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life destroying gibberish is antithetical to tolerance, as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance, the shadow of the past. Finding ourselves in a universe that seems bent upon destroying us, we quickly discover, both as individuals and as societies, that it is a good thing to understand the forces arrayed against us. And so it is that every human being comes to desire genuine knowledge about the world. This has always posed a special problem for religion, because every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence. In fact, every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. This put the leap in Kirkgarde's leap of faith. What if all our knowledge about the world were to suddenly disappear? Imagine that 6 billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in a state of utter ignorance and confusion. Our books and computers are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We've even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What knowledge would we want to reclaim first? Well, there's that business about growing food and building shelter that we would want to get reacquainted with. We would want to relearn how to use and repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills are necessary for acquiring most others. When, in this process of reclaiming our humanity, will it be important to know that Jesus was born of a virgin or that he was resurrected? And how would we relearn these truths if indeed they are true? By reading the Bible. A tour of our shelves will deliver similar pearls from antiquity, like the quote fact that ISIS, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive pair of cow horns. Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries a hammer and that Marduke's sacred animals are horses, dogs, and a dragon with a fork tongue. Whom shall we give top billing in our resurrected world? Yahweh or Shiva? And when will we want to relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be stoned to death? Or that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception? And what will we think of those curious people who begin proclaiming that one of our books is distinct from all others and that it was actually written by the creator of the universe? There are undoubtedly spiritual truths that we would want to relearn once we manage to feed and clothe ourselves. And these are truths that we have learned imperfectly in our present state. How is it possible, for instance, to overcome one's fear and inwardness and simply love other human beings? Assume for the moment that such a process of personal transformation exists and that there is something worth knowing about it. There is, in other words, some skill or discipline or conceptual understanding or dietary supplement that allows for the reliable transformation of fearful, hateful or indifferent persons into loving ones. If so, we should be positively desperate to know about it. There may even be a few biblical passages that would be useful in this regard. But as for whole rafts of untestable doctrines, clearly there would be no reasonable basis to take them up again. The Bible and the Koran, it seems certain, would find themselves respectfully shelved next to avid's metamorphosis and the Egyptian Book of the Dead the point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than it was thought sacred yesterday. Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature, to say nothing of killing and dying for them, would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now, many have observed that religion, by lending meaning to human life, permits communities, at least those united under a single faith, to cohere. Historically, this is true, and on this score, religion is to be credited as much for wars of conquest as her feast days and brotherly love. But in its effect upon the modern world, a world already united, at least potentially, by economic, environmental, political and epidemiological necessity religious ideology is dangerously retrograde. Our past is not sacred for being past, and there is much that is behind us that we are struggling to keep behind us and to which it is to be hoped, we could never return with a clear conscience. The divine right of kings, feudalism, the caste system, slavery, political executions, forced castration, vivisection, barebaiting, honorable duels, chastity belts, trial by ordeal, child labor, human and animal sacrifice, the stonyan of heretics, cannibalism, sodomy laws, taboos against contraception, human radiation experiments the list is nearly endless. And if it were extended indefinitely, the proportion of abuses for which religion could be found directly responsible is likely to remain undiminished. In fact, almost every indignity just mentioned can be attributed to an insufficient taste for evidence, to an uncritical faith in one dogma or another. The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention, distinguished as it is both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence, is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse cultural singularity, a vanishing point beyond which rational discourse proves impossible. When foisted upon each generation anew, it renders us incapable of realizing just how much of our world has been unnecessarily ceded to a dark and barbarous past the burden of paradise, our world is transcending new to each other. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Juliet Kym. Juliet is, as you'll hear, one of the leading experts on Homeland security, and she's written a book which I'm loving entitled Security Mom an Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home. Juliet served as an Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, where she handled diverse crises such as the H One N One scare and the BP oil spill. She was also the Homeland Security Advisor for the State of Massachusetts. You've seen her very likely on CNN as an analyst, and she was actually a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for her columns in the Boston Globe. She's a graduate from Harvard and Harvard Law School. She's currently on faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School, where I met her because she moderated the event I did with Majin Nawaz to launch her book, islam and the Future of Tolerance for Harvard University Press. Juliet was great at that event. She was really a fantastic moderator. When you look at the background she has, resisting the impulse to take up equal time on the stage, giving her views had to be excruciating, given how qualified she was to have expounded upon those topics. So if you look at that event on YouTube, you will see impeccable generosity intact on the part of a moderator, as well as an impressive case of jet lag on the part of yours truly. In any case, it was a real pleasure to get a chance to return the favor and have Juliet on the podcast. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I hope you do, too. And now I give you Juliet Kym. I'm here with Juliet Kym. Juliet, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Well, listen, you and I first met, you moderated the event I did with Majid for the launch of our book at Harvard's Kennedy School. And I remember joking at the opening there, both when we were setting it up and actually at the event, I think that he and I should have been asking you questions. Now, of course, that really wasn't much of a joke, given your background. So just tell our listeners briefly or at any length you want, just how you got into this and why you are in a position to know anything about security and terrorism and homeland defense. Well, that was a great forum. And thank you for the compliment. I'm not sure it's deserved, but I have spent almost close to 20 years now in counterterrorism national security and homeland security efforts. I was in counterterrorism before 911. There were a few of us in the field. I was a lawyer at the Department of justice. I don't want to call it the quaint days because certainly there were victims of terrorism, but nothing like what happened on 911. And after 911, those of us who were in the field, a very discrete group. I was a lawyer or practicing lawyer, sort of became elevated in various ways as careers do when things happen. Ultimately served on a national commission on terrorism and then served as the state I'm in Massachusetts. The state's Homeland Security Advisor. That was a position that was created after the 911 attacks that served as the point person to oversee the National Guard, emergency management, all the public safety apparatus, and then served in President Obama's transition and then as an assistant secretary dealing with the efforts, the things that were going to impact the United States from a threat perspective. I've been a writer, an academic on them, a CNN analyst, and have had sort of a very career in this space that a lot of people don't know about. And to be honest, it's not going away, as you know. Yeah. So you served under two presidents, right? I did. I was under President Clinton. And that was the days of Oklahoma City. And what got me more involved with international terrorism was the African embassy bombings. People will remember that 1998, few Americans died, but our embassies were targeted in Tanzania and Kenya. Many Africans died. It was really the first time that bin Laden sort of who was known certainly as an entity in national security circles, really did target US. Interests, in particular an embassy, but he wasn't a household name. And so the cases arising out of the Africa Embassy attacks were they were sort of followed by the mainstream media. But most people wouldn't have known what al Qaeda was or bin Laden was. And I remember in one of the trials, a couple of the guys in al Qaeda were captured. There was some testimony from a former al Qaeda member about bin Laden saying not only how intimately involved he was with the Africa embassy bombings, in fact, at one stage had told the planners to move a truck from one side of the embassy to another side. Right. So he was very operational, but also that this was the beginning, that these sort of coordinated attacks. And then, of course, September 11 happened, and I was serving on the National Commission on Terrorism. And the media calls I got that day were so basic. I mean, they were sort of, who's this bin Laden guy we're hearing about? Where is Afghanistan? People just did not have any sense of what was going on in the world or the threat that had caused such terror on September 11. Yeah, I actually want you to describe how you spent your morning of 911 because I should say I've read a little more than a third of your book at this point. I try not to be the journalist who pretends to have read all of your book or shows that he's read none of it. I'm loving the book, and I really recommend that our listeners get it and read it. Thank you. Called security, mom. And you have married the insecurities of starting a new family with the insecurities of our global war on terror in a really wonderful way. So I want you to describe the morning of 911 and just how that proceeded for you. Well, thank you very much for the compliment in the book. Just taking a step back before we get to 911 is attempt to talk about these really difficult issues, whether it's terrorism or homeland security or the threats we face as a nation in a way that maybe people can grasp. And so I tell it in the form of a memoir and what it's like to be in this field and raising three kids. And it begins on the morning of 911. I was in counterterrorism. I have a five week old child on the morning of September 11. I was having difficulties, as most mothers do, of having any semblance of organization in my own life and had decided I was going to get back on my feet and head to New York that morning, go visit my sister and had Cecilia with me. David, my husband, is driving us to the train station to South Station here in Boston, and we hear about the first airplane. And I have to tell you, nothing was further from my mind that this was this was the thing that I had been warning about, right. Those of us in the field have been saying, this guy bin Laden and this group Al Qaeda, wants a mega attack against the United States. I board the train, and about not very much longer, I get another phone call from David that a second tower has been hit. And obviously at that stage, I know that one airplane hitting the World Trade Center may be an accident, two is not. And I am starting to get a lot of media phone calls. A very few people in the field and trying to deal with those at the same time, dealing with the newborn at the same time, heading into ground zero on a train with my new baby. And people were so used to the security apparatus now, right, the TSA and airport security and travel security, but at that time, there was no protocols for anything like this. And so Amtrak, as one would suspect they would do this, keep going into New York, and I keep staying on the train. And then all of a sudden, very far into the train, right? So we're heading into New Haven. It just dawns on me like I have one of responsibility to myself and my child, but also to others. I am an expert that whatever Amtrak was going to decide to do, we had to get off this train. That it was irresponsible, if not dangerous, to enter New York City and so essentially evacuate, stand on a train bench and tell people what I believe to be happening. Because at that stage, information was not like it is today. No iPhone, stuff like that. And sort of evacuate the train, just say, I know this world, and we don't know that this is over yet. And so standing on a platform in New Haven trying to reach friends that I know live there, and my husband, who's back in Cambridge, and thinking, even for me, I can't separate the expert from the mother, right. Both my self preservation and preservation for my newborn, but also the needs of those on the train was that they just needed to be told what to do. And it was the beginning of understanding that the expert and the mother were not so different and that a lot of times the skills in both are somewhat similar. I would then enter government in which that became very clear just to back up. So there was a period when you were on the train when you knew that the second tower had been hit and you're headed into the city with your newborn on your lap. And at this point, you can't call your husband because you can't get cell phone reception, but calls are coming in from journalists, right. So you're actually doing interviews at this point with your interviews. And I admit I did one interview while nursing. I mean, it was such madness. And these calls are from top journalists who are probably have some rolodex in which it says terrorism, and I'm serving on the or had we had just given our report, the Commission on Terrorism essentially saying America was unprepared. For what Bin Laden was trying to do are finding me through my assistant back at work, and I'm doing these interviews and they are questions like who is Bin Laden? What is Al Qaeda? Why is he in Afghanistan? And also, is this war? I mean, already the questions about what is this? What is this attack and how is the United States going to give meaning to it or understand it? And then this sort of realization that not only was I not only am I trying to educate reporters and others that I'm talking to through journalists, but that there's a couple of hundred people on the train heading into New York City, and that sort of my responsibility to them. And of course, Cecilia. Yeah. Because, of course, we didn't know at that point that the attacks were over, so we didn't know what was going to happen next. Yes. Not only were the attacks, not over. I mean, just remember the chain of misinformation that was going on that day. I mean, Bush was dead, cheney has gone missing, the White House has been hit. We had no way on the train to process any of this. And I remember hearing someone saying, the towers fell. And first of all, I didn't know if that was true. We had no images. And then I just remember thinking, how do skyscrapers fall? Because if you haven't seen it, I had assumed, right, that it's like a domino that they're going to tilt over. And it wasn't until we arrived in New Haven and there were TVs up that I thought, that's how towers fall, right? Those images we still remember today, almost 15 years later. I recall that your mother woke you up from your delusion, right? You finally got her on the phone. I did anything a good mother. My parents geography can be a little bit confusing. I grew up in California, where but my parents happened to be in New York that day as well. And so I was actually going to see them. And my sister and my parents, who are in New York but are on the Upper West Side, so they know what's going on, are realizing that the city is about to shut down, they have access to TV that they might not be able to get out, and so they resourcefully rent a car in Connecticut. And so they sort of just say, okay, if we can get out of the city, where they're going to get a car in Connecticut and try to come to Boston? And I'm on a call with her and saying, well, I'll come to New York. And she is the one who said, you realize you're back at work. This is your work, right. I was teaching at the Kennedy School at Harvard. I am on various government programs and advisory councils about this growing threat of terrorism. And it was like, oh, that was like the light bulb that I thought I was going to have a couple of months off and hang out with my newborn and work out, do whatever we do during real maternity leaves. And five weeks into it, when my mother said, you know what? This is you're going back to work. And it was just like, yeah, this is it. And this is the moment that we never wanted to happen, but that those of us in the field had been warning about. And that realization at that moment, eventually, I did get to New Haven. I did reach David, and he picked me up and we drove back home. So you've distilled many of the lessons, maybe all of the lessons you've learned thus far into this concept of resiliency, right, which this phrase, shit happens, which you distinguish I was surprised when I reached this point in the book where you distinguish it from keep calm and carry on. The famous british myth about what those posters did during World War II. So can you just just define your concept of resiliency and how you distinguish it there from just not letting the terrorists win by not doing anything differently? Yeah. So it is remarkable when you know this, when you write a book, what you actually discover when you research things. Right? And so let me start with resiliency by what it's not, because there's various phrases to describe as zeitgeist, right, in times of conflict or potential violence. So what emerged out of the Bush administration after 911 was this concept of never again. The Vice President Cheney said it was the 1% rule, right? If there's a 1% chance of terrorism, we're going to do anything we can. But it was essentially a notion that was easy to understand, hard to implement, which was Fortress America, which was essentially that we would put all of our efforts both abroad and domestically to ensure that never again, that this would never happen again. And as I say in the book and have said consistently, even when I was in government, it's a mythic standard, it is a fool's errand and that no country like ours, either before or after September 11, was ever at 0% risk and that our vulnerability was actually a sign of our strength. But we bought it, right? We bought the never again. And that and that and that our invulnerability was a sign of our American exceptionalism. But that proves an impossible standard. For one, wars abroad show that we are vulnerable and that we can't fix the world like in Iraq and Afghanistan with just troops. But also, as I report in the book, as early as one month after September 11, in October of 2001, president Bush calls Tom Ridge into his office. Tom Ridge, people remember, was the governor of Pennsylvania resigned his job after September 11, becomes the Homeland Security Advisor to President Bush. And he says to Tom Ridge alone in an office with his chiefs, only his chief of staff there, he says, Listen, I just got a call from the president of Mexico and the prime Minister of Canada, and they say that this Fortress America is not working for trade, which is true. And so Bush says to Ridge, we have to let go a little, right? You can't even imagine Bush, who is so known as Fortress America, never again. But just recognizing a month later a country like ours with millions of people crossing borders and trade and commerce and ideas and people moving, was going to get to Fortress America. So I sort of put the never again standard to one side. But what resiliency isn't as well is the exact opposite of that, which is the sort of keep calm and carry on and what will be will be attitude. People remember the keep calm and carry on mantra sort of started emerging in about 2005 as the war in Iraq and hurricane Katrina show a government very unable to keep us that was very incompetent. Keep common. Carry on was understood. And I understood it when I started writing the book as a propaganda campaign coming out of the War Council and Churchill during World War II, as a way to tell the British public about how to face and the attitude that they should have in the face of what truly was for them an existential threat which was Nazi Germany. I believed that this was how they got through it. And then I started doing some research and learned that the keep Calm and Carry on, which, as you know, had many variants. The keep calm and call me Mary. The keep coming. Call me maybe the keep calm and Eat Chocolate never was released by Churchill and his war council. They had a million of the posters made, and they sat on it. It wasn't discovered until 2005 when a bookstore bookstore owner opens up some old boxes in his bookstore and discovers them and he puts them up on the wall. People love them. And then they became sort of a world phenomenon and going back and discovering, why would Churchill and why would the war council have done that? And essentially it was because the keepcom and carry on mantra philosophy was exactly not what society needs in the face of mayhem, whatever it may be. It was too passive. That in fact, what Churchill needed at the time was obviously for the men to go to war and the woman to enter the manufacturing and commercial market and for them to send their kids to the countryside, of all things. And so that idea that Keep Calm and Carry on was passive was really not about resiliency, really did animate a notion of resiliency that really derives from the word itself. Resiliency means remains again, of course, but silient means jumping. It's very active. It means essentially investments in our society, in our capability to respond and recover and then build again better. That is, what are the policies behind resiliency? It is very active, and if I could, through the stories of homeland security, get people to understand that a nation that too focused on stopping all bad things from happening was not going to nurture its response, recovery, and resiliency efforts that that would be in the long term of that investment. I want to stay with this issue because I feel like there's a paradox at the heart here that we need to somehow grapple with because, as you say, we obviously can't protect ourselves against everything. And the mere attempt to do that would be stifling of more or less everything we care about. We can't live in some kind of panopticon, self imposed prison where we subject ourselves to truly orwellian intrusions just to keep us safe from our enemies. But the paradox for me is that I think there's a rational fear to have of irrational fear. So it seems rational to me to be, quote, irrationally concerned about specific risks, given that we can be more or less certain that everyone else will respond irrationally when these events actually happen. So so you take something like and this is this is an example. I don't know if you do this in the book, but my friend Bill Maher has made this point publicly and I thought it was it was quite insightful. He pointed to Hurricane Katrina and he asked us to remember how we responded to this. And as inept as our response was, this was a discrete problem that we just kind of once we got our act together, we cleaned it up, 1000 people died or 1000 plus people died, and there was billions of dollars in damage and we rebuilt New Orleans and it's over. If that had been a terrorist attack that created precisely that level of damage, it could have been another history defining event where we would launch multi trillion dollar wars and the global economy could have been plunged into a depression. Who knows what would happen with another terrorist event that scale? And so his point, of course, is that we should have our response be more in register with the actual costs of the events and not overreact the difference between a, quote, natural event and a man made one. Shouldn't be as big as it is. But I think that given that it will inevitably be that big, that we won't actually be able to we can't reach the dial in our brains that will make a hurricane equivalent with an act of terrorism or an act of terrorism equivalent with a hurricane, given that there will be mass panic and economic damage. That is, in the final analysis, irrational, it seems rational to build those costs back into our planning for these events. And so I just want you to reflect on that a little bit. It's a great point and it does in some ways reflect where I call it in the book the Homeland Security apparatus, which is both maligned and misunderstood and rightfully so, maybe in both instances, just to explain the thinking for those in the field. 2005 Hurricane Katrina was a pivotal moment for Homeland Security because, as you know, people didn't die from the hurricane, right? They don't die from the hurricane. They died from government incompetence. And for those of us in that world looking at it, analyzing, it realized there was a lot of systemic reasons for New Orleans and it was a city that had no resiliency built into it in the first place, just given centuries of neglect, including the fact it was built in a tub basin, essentially. But it really moved the apparatus towards thinking about an all hazards approach to response because before that, we were so focused as a nation on terrorism, right then the night stopping 19 guys from getting on four airplanes, that was our strategy. That we had failed to appropriately plan and prepare for any shit happening, right, that any big thing happening. And so there was a change by 2005 and certainly 2006. The Bush administration changed after Hurricane Katrina. I talk about two different Bush administrations up to 2005 and after. And if you look at the polling, that Iraq was bad, but Bush's polling never bounced back after Hurricane Katrina. And what happened in Homeland Security is we started to talk about an all hazards approach to response, that the firefighter at the moment of the fire does not know whether it's two brothers at the end of the Boston Marathon, a generator or an generator on fire or an errant cigarette that blows something up. And it didn't matter at that moment, because what we need to do is invest in the response to minimize the harm that occurs on the response side. After the boom, as we call it in my world, after the boom, there has been a focus on sort of this all hazards approach. But and as you say, and I agree with this, .1 should not blame the American public for being terrorized by terrorism. In other words, after San Bernardino, you saw the polling go absolutely nuts. That's the terrorist goal, right? Government and good government, and I believe that Obama has been very flat footed on this, recognizes that terrorism, whatever the consequences are of the attack, that terrorism is different. It hits a psyche that people will act irrationally, but that their irrationality, as you say, is somewhat rational. In other words, because it's a purposeful attack. It's very different than a hurricane, very different than the errant cigarette or a generator. So it's purposeful. And that does have a different impact. And so in my ideal world in which government behaves well after something like this, it would be able to guide that irrationality towards rationality, would put it in perspective, would not essentially blame people's irrationality as Obama did on Trump or cable news. No one watches cable news. I mean, the idea that a million people watch CNN I'm on CNN. I know very few people watch CNN. That distinction is, I think, important for government to do, and I describe it as apparent of this irrationality factor. And you certainly know from your work the Black Swan phenomenon, right, that there are black swans, right? And they're very rare. And their appearance has the Black Swan theory is their appearance and has a disruptive impact on the course of history. So there's Black Swan moments, 911 being one of them. And you can tell me as a mother that the chances that my child will die from terrorism is zero 1%. You can tell me that and I get it. And I can get calculations, risk and all that stuff, but if my child is that zero 1%, right? If my child is the one that sees the Black Swan, that is an existential crisis for me, right? I kind of get people's irrationality and also try to steer it towards understanding that in a world like we live in, we have to accept a level of risk and vulnerability regardless of our hopes and wishes that it weren't so. Yeah, well, I'm glad you raised the issue of purpose because that does show how a terrorist attack and a hurricane are not analogous. Because when you have a hurricane, it doesn't suggest that at any moment you could have another hurricane of that scale or that somebody is plotting to deliver you the next hurricane as quickly as possible. Whereas with a terrorist attack, it's ongoing, it's emblematic of the next thing your enemy is attempting to do. In that sense, it's not strictly irrational to quote overreact to terrorism or react differently to terrorism than you would to a natural disaster. But I guess even in a case where it is totally irrational, I see that. I think probably a better example would be like a plane crash. So flying is very safe and famously safe and yet famously feared by many people, even most people. And when a plane does crash, I think most people have a reaction that that would be one of the more horrible ways to die. And yet if you were just going to go by body count, we have more than 30,000 people die on our roads every year, year after year, and we just accept it. And, and I don't know how many people die by plane crash, but it's got to be, you know, less than 100 on, on a yearly basis. It's just tiny. Yeah. And if you, if you, if you compute the, you know, the man hours, person hours exposed to that travel and your danger if you're flying on a reputable airline, those are some of the safest hours of your life being up in the air. Once you get on the ground, you can start worrying. And yet, given the horror people experience in response to a plane crash, I think it makes rational sense to over engineer the safety of planes to make them safer than would be strictly rational if you just were trying to save lives based on body count. Because if we had it, just imagine what would happen if the President said, listen, we're spending a lot of money to make our planes safer than they need to be. We should be making cars safer, we should be making roads safer, we should be making playground equipment safer. This is what's killing all of you and your kids. So I'm going to take some of this money we've spent on the FAA and the engineering of plane engines and we're going to spread this around. It would just take a few big plane crashes to get everyone to react against that and do the irrational thing, which I think in this case would probably be rational because if everyone stopped flying, if someone said, listen, I'm just too afraid to fly now. Which many millions of people might do well, then our economy would grind to a halt. So you have this cascade of effects that, again, even though they are not strictly rational, if they're reliably going to be produced, you have to build that into the cost in advance in your thinking about these problems. I think that's exactly right. The airplane is a perfect example, and it's something I've struggled with, being in the field, which I describe in the book as the ratchet up phenomenon of safety and security. Very easy to ratchet up, right. Because there's fear, especially after a terrorist attack or lots of money, lots of goods, lots of gizmos. Very hard to step back and say, okay, what's the level of risk that we are going to tolerate as a society? And we're doing this all the time anyway. That would justify taking some of that apparatus or those rules or regulations off of, in this case, airline security. And part of this, for, I think, Americans, is the control factor, is what's the aspect of a plane crash that just is so horrible? Every part of it is horrible, but it's that you're sitting there hoping to guide the pilot. You've given control over where when you're driving, right? It's, okay, well, I have some control over where I go, what time I drive, whether I text. And so part of what I think what I'm trying to do through the book and through where I am now in my thinking about homeland security, which is very much focused on the other side of the boom, right? Which is very much focused on preparedness and response and minimizing risk when something does happen, is to give people a sense of control over things that they feel like they have no control over. Because I think that's plane crash is horrible. I think that's also why people freak out about terrorism. It's not just purpose. It's also, oh, my God, I have no control over this stuff happening in Syria, and I don't even understand what ISIS is. It feels like an amorphous blob, but all I know is it can show up in my kids'school one day. And part of accepting a certain level of risk and vulnerability in this country is on the other side, is trying to empower the public, not just with knowledge, but with what tools would you want or would you desire to have to give you more control, given that you're not going to get the vulnerability? Zero. So now what would you say are your greatest security concerns at this point? Given the world I've been in, I must have some good gene that my husband says I don't have the stew gene that I actually tend not to stew on things, which is probably a good thing to have in my field and as a mother of three. But obviously there's infinite numbers of things that worry me. On the substantive side, it's clearly climate change. I'm with Bernie Sanders on this in terms of the existential threat of the movement of the Earth, whether it's the oceans or megastorms or a refugee crisis, that is going to change the way we live globally, the way we live domestically, the way we live in urban societies in ways that we can't even predict right now. And so later on in the book, I get into ways to think about how we might prepare to be more resilient from that harm. I'll tell you, the more maybe philosophically what worries me now is that we've built no resiliency into how we live our lives, that we don't accept that should happen. And therefore, anytime there is a disruption to the system, we have the kind of proposals that are being made by Trump specifically, but even Ted Cruz that will make us more vulnerable over time. I know this is also I'm not a religious scholar, so I just look at this from a safety and security perspective. But I do know that if you asked me from the safety and security perspective, what has made America relatively safe, we have gun problems, we have violence, whatever, I get that. But relatively safe from the generational challenges, problems in the Middle East, the civil wars in Africa, and now what we're seeing the terror in Europe. Why is the United States immune from that in some ways in recent history? So it's clearly our oceans. You can't drive from Boston to Damascus. I get that, right? So one is our oceans, the other is our ability over centuries. Not perfect. We definitely have counter examples. We definitely haven't been great at all times. But to assimilate and acclimate and elevate the other, whether it's the Irish here in Boston or Mexicans in California or Puerto Ricans in New York, or Muslims in America, we have a problem in this country. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with Neil degrasse Tyson, who probably needs no introduction to most of you. He's an astrophysicist and cosmologist and author and very prominent communicator of science to the public. He recently hosted the Cosmos series the Reboot of Carl Sagan's very famous series. I think I originally met Neil at those Salk Institute beyond belief conferences about ten years ago. Some of you have seen the videos of those online, but we haven't seen much of each other since then. He occasionally sends me an email, which he did prior to this podcast, but in good podcast form, we barely cover the topic that occasioned his coming on the podcast. There was so much more to talk about, and we barely scratched the surface of our mutual interests. And I think this podcast may leave you wanting more. It left me wanting more, and hopefully there will be more to come. But here's the first 2 hours of me talking to Neil degrasse Tyson. Enjoy. Okay, well, I have Neil degrasse Tyson on the line. Neil, thanks for coming on the podcast, Sam. It's great. Great to be on. But you don't call, you don't write. Well, I occasionally write to me. Well, listen, this happened quite organically. This was great because I was obviously maybe not obvious to you, but obvious to me, and I think obvious to all of my listeners who requested it. I was obviously planning to invite you on the podcast, but then you just emailed me out of the blue, reacting to something you heard on one of my least successful podcasts, and you offered some advice by email, and it was just a natural segue into twisting your arm and having you on. So thanks for coming on and I look forward to getting into everything that we are mutually obsessed by. Yeah, and I'm impressed you had the time to read at least what I had to send your way. I guess I was noticing just how frequently you're being raked over the coals by people who are chapter and verse Talmudically analyzing your words, but some words and not others. And the balance of the message gets altered. And it seemed like at times everyone is speaking past one another, and I just thought I might be able to throw in some suggestions. Yeah, that would be awesome. Part of our lives in the public eye, then we could have something to share. Yeah, well, before we get into that, I think that's going to be fascinating and useful. This is almost certainly unnecessary. I think most of my listeners are as aware of you as they are of me at this point. But for those few who aren't, how do you describe what you do? And just to give us a brief sense of how you spend your time in the world. Yeah, it's a great question because I don't even know if I can answer that with any coherence of late, but I'm fundamentally an astrophysicist. It's how I think, it's how my brain is wired. And I have this delusional thought that after I write all the books that I want to write and do the TV, that I can do that. I'm going to go back to the lab and just escape back to the lab and publish papers again. But in the meantime, I've spent a good fraction of my professional life bringing the universe down to Earth, in a sense. And one of the ways that has been most successful, I have found, is if I lace science onto this scaffold that we might call pop culture, because you don't have to build that scaffold. It's already there, ready to be clad. And once you find a place to insert science, then the science can be immediately absorbed because people care deeply about their pop culture icons and ideas and thoughts. And just the simplest example I can give is during the Super Bowl. You can't get more pop culture than that. Everybody's watching the Super Bowl. I'll just take the time to tweet any bit of physics that comes to my mind as I'm watching the game. Physics of the momentum of linebackers, the spiral stabilized throw of a quarterback. And in one particular playoff game, there was a kick, an overtime, field goal winning kick that hit the left upright of the goalposts and went in for the win. And I said, wait a minute, what's the orientation? That stadium? I checked quickly and I ran a quick calculation, and I felt confident enough to tweet that that score was enabled by a third of an inch deflection to the right due to Earth's rotation, the coriolis force of Earth's rotation. And so that was fun to calculate, but people lost their minds. Wow, I didn't know that. Okay. And then went on to the websites and it's reaction functions such as that that remind me that people can care about science in ways you might not have imagined, provided it's properly, playfully folded into the pop culture they already care about. Yeah, obviously we're going to get into areas of science affecting the public interests that are that are far more consequential than field goals, but a little bit more on your place in the world at the moment. What are you currently working on? Because you have your own podcast, and if I'm not mistaken. You're taking that on television in the fall. Do I have that right? Yeah. So thanks for mentioning that. So we've had a podcast called well, it was a radio show called Star Talk, and it began about five or six years ago on a grant from the National Science Foundation. And the experiment was, can we make a viable product, radio product, bringing science to the public, to people who either don't know that they like science or know that they don't like science? Is that even possible? And that's what started this pathway into pop culture. So we inverted the normal Science Friday model, where you have a journalist interviewing a scientist. And in this particular case, I am the interviewer. I'm the scientist. And my guest is hardly ever a scientist. It's a famous actor, actress, an inventor, an explorer, a singer, a performer. And The Conversation explores any science that may have touched that person's life. If not, then do they have a secret geek underbelly that we can rub? Often people maybe they're science fiction fanatics, or they love superheroes or any of the topics that would be fair game at a Comic Con. Do any of them have these kinds of leanings? And what happens is, since they are hewn from pop culture, they bring a fan base to this conversation, a fan base that wouldn't otherwise have an excuse to listen to science. And then in that conversation, they get fed science as it matters to the person they care about. And we started this out. It became very successful very quickly, and over several years, the grant money ran out, but then we became commercially viable, and that was the intent. And then we got noticed by National Geographic Channel, and then we jumped species. And now we're also on television, and so we're going to our second season this fall. Well, that's great. I like that model. And by the way, the model is a little more subtle than that. Typically, an actor might have an interest that touches science, but of course they don't have the expertise necessarily in that topic. They could be pro environment or anti this or pro that. And that comes out in the interview. But what we then do in studio, that's the base interview. Then we cut that into a show where in studio we bring in an academic expert on that topic. So the best example here was I interviewed President Jimmy Carter, and he's working heavily by ridding sub Saharan Africa of certain diseases that are peculiar to humans. And once you remove it from the last human, it'll never come back again because it doesn't have the contagious vector. So he's speaking about this, but he's not an expert in that disease. We got someone who's an expert in transmittable diseases to supplement comments that he made about the mission statement of his causes. It turns out this has been working. And we even got an Emmy nomination for Best informational programming this past season. So all quite proud of it because it was got drafted and and molded and and assembled. But other than that, we're in conversation about whether we're going to do another Cosmos, because I hosted the 21st Century. Yeah, it was very big, and I aired on Fox in primetime and then scattered around the world on the National Geographic Channel. So science I'd like to think that science is trending in some way, at least among some demographics. How much did Cosmos bump up your profile? You were already quite famous before that, but has it changed your day to day interaction with the public? So that's a great question. So there are numerical ways to assess this. One of them is how many times a day does a complete stranger come up to me and say, aren't you the guy? Aren't you there's? That that's a number. And that changes. Right. Another number is just purely how many Twitter followers do you have? That's sort of a monotonically increasing function for anyone, because rarely do you unfollow someone on Twitter. And so during Cosmos, the Twitter numbers bumped up, but by maybe 10% or so, not like 50% or 100%. And so I think a lot of people who watch Cosmos already knew me and already followed, and I think that's a stronger statement than if it was just some spontaneous spike, because it means it was kind of sort of earned. People are coming on, they see retweets, and they and and it's kind of the the slow build, I think, is a stronger number at the end of the day. And by contrast, when Charlie Sheen announced he would be on Twitter, 24 hours later, he had a million followers. They're not following him because of the tweets he had posted. They're following because they're fans of his, or they want to see him crash and burn, whichever. My Twitter following, however, has been very slow but real, and I like that because it meant that people are responding to the tweets themselves. Well, it's great to see your platform grow by whatever metric, because you are so good at publicly communicating science, and I think there are people who are cynical about that role when a scientist assumes it. I think undoubtedly there are scientists who attack you as a mere popularizer of science. They did the same thing to Sagan. They did the same thing to Stephen Pinker. Let me just put that to you. How much does that noise even show up on your radar? That's a great question and an important question, and let me just say I benefit from the fact that Carl Sagan sort of did this first, and he sort of cleared the brush and bramble, and there's blood on the tracks from him having done this in a way that no one had even approximated before. Now, here I am on a partially, if not mostly, cleared field, and I get to operate without what I'm doing, surprising people. That's the first point. A second point, and this is I take this very seriously. How do I retain the respect of my colleagues? Let me assume for the moment that the respect is still there. Would they tell me directly? I don't know if they no longer respect me. But what I do know is that I develop. I live in New York City, which is the news gathering headquarters of the United States. And even CNN opened an office here, having only ever been in Atlanta. So everybody's here, whenever there's a late breaking news story, let's say the gravity wave was discovered a few months ago, or the higgs boson, my phone rings off the hook. And what I say to the press is, especially the TV media, I say, have you spoken to the people who actually did this work yet? No. We just want you to tell us what was discovered and why. I said no. Speak to them first. These people work for decades, finally getting a result. It's their time in the sun. Talk to them, then come back to me, and I'll be happy to tie a bow on it. And I've actually cultivated this relationship with the national media based here in New York, and that's precisely what they do. So if you look at news stories of major scientific discoveries that overlap my interest and my expertise, if I come in, it's at the end and I say what the discovery means or its significance. And in that way, I think all boats rise in the tidewaters. And I can't be criticized for that if by my being a part of that story brings more attention to their work. And so I've been very careful about that. And as a result, I still, every now and then, get invitations to do a year sabbatical at prestigious institutions. And I don't think that would happen if somehow people felt that I was a loose cannon out there. Right. I don't think people are aware of how much heat Sagan took for this. I might not even be aware of most of the details, but I just know in the abstract that he got fairly hammered by his colleagues for his role as a communicator of science. Is that correct? Yeah, it happens on many dimensions. Some of it is just what is the state of social maturity of the academic field? And even his closest collaborator for the original Cosmos, Steve Soder, who was also co writer of the Cosmos that I co writer with Andrewian of the Cosmos that I hosted. He at the time, back in the 70s, when Carl Sagan was invited to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, he thought it would be a mistake. How could you do this? This is entertainment. This is not news. He's a comedian. You'll be destroying science. And once that got unfolded and Johnny Carson turned out to be a fan of science and of skepticism and all of a sudden members of Congress would hear from their constituents, oh, I think maybe we should do more science. Is that the science that I saw on TV last night? Good, let's do that. And all of a sudden funding streams would increase. And so my field, the astrophysics field, we were kind of early out of the box on this, and we did recognize, ultimately, even in spite of the blood on the tracks, that it's a good thing for science for people who, in the end paid for the science through the National Science Tax monies that fund NASA, the National Science Foundation and other sort of government agencies that serve this. In the biology field, of course, it's the National Institutes of Health. This sort of thing, if they're paying for it, at some point they ought to know what you're doing. And if you can be good at that, then everybody benefits. So my field, I think we've matured past that and now we can celebrate one another who have given some of their lives to, again, like as I said, bring the universe down to Earth. And resistance to this seems to me to be shortsighted and confused on at least two levels of resistance to the public communication of science or the stigma that attaches to a scientist who spends a lot of time or even most of his time doing this. Because one, as you say, we want a scientifically informed public. And I think it's pretty easy to see the price we pay for people's scientific ignorance on climate change or any other topic that is socially and politically divisive at the moment. But also it's just this idea that there's some kind of clear boundary between the context in which you can make original and useful contributions to scientific thought. It's though, in the covers of a 300 page book, all you could possibly be doing as a scientist is selling out. Whereas in the context of a journal article that only 300 people are going to read there, you're doing real science. And I mean, this demarcation may make a little sense in pure mathematics, for instance, because no one's going to publish your theorem proof widely and you're not going to put it on PBS or your next show. But for most of science, you have people like, as I mentioned, Stephen Pinker, who in the context of a book is saying scientifically edgy and original things. And it's not merely the boundary between communicating science to the public and doing science in the act of just thinking out loud about data. There is no clear boundary between those things. Yeah, there shouldn't be, I think. And in my field, it's just a fact. I don't know do I judge it as a positive or negative. It just is that when we make discoveries, there's huge public interest in them. If we discover a new black hole, a new exoplanet, a new organic molecules in space, the edge of the universe, the multiverse. Our topics tend to be more ripe for public absorption than what I have found to be true in other fields except save for perhaps medicine, where people's health and wellbeing are directly affected by discoveries. And so and also our content feeds very smoothly into movie making and the storytelling of science fiction. And our vocabulary is actually we shouldn't underestimate the value of attractable vocabulary as part of formal lexicon. Consider that the official name, the official term for the beginning of the universe is Big Bang. It's the official term. And how about this region of space you fall in and you don't get black hole, right? Light doesn't come out black hole. We have this trove of single syllable words that are actually official in our field that are just fun for the public to follow. So that when I'm describing new discoveries there isn't this smokescreen of lexicon that you have to get through just to even hear the idea that I'm trying to put on the table. The idea is laid bare immediately because the words don't get in the way. Many of those topics, as you point out, are not I mean, they're certainly not politicized. I guess the Big Bang, if you reach back far enough into our confusion that the Big Bang becomes politicized or you could just say it happened 6000 years ago. But you communicate, I think you communicate on some more highly charged issues as well. Is climate science something you're touching or have touched a good reason? Thanks for bringing that up. I don't present myself as a climate expert. There are plenty of climate experts out there. So when the press calls to me and said what do you think of that storm brewing in the Caribbean? And I'll say, call a climate expert, you're calling me. And yes, I could comment on it, but I won't. Because what I'm trying to do is spread the rolodex base of who they would call when they need commentary. Now, when you take a step back from that and they ask tell us about our responsibility as citizens on planet Earth then there's the larger stratospheric, the cosmic perspective on it that I'm delighted to bring to the dialogue. But people I'm a visible target and people know how to find my Twitter stream. And so people who are climate deniers will try to fight that but I try to always take the high road. I'm not interested in fighting you in the trenches. So, for example, I had a tweet recently that did very well if you measure it by retweet. And it was I just had to put it out there. I said, if you a skeptic is someone who doubts the claim and is convinced by evidence and a denier is someone who doubts the claim and doubts the evidence. I think my tweet was better constructed than that and I put that out there because in the tranches let's fight about climate change. No, I think as an educator, I can help train your mind how to think about information and how to process information and how to arrive at conclusions, because this is the ways and means of what science is and how and why it works. Then you're empowered, and then you can make whatever politically leaning decisions you must, but have them anchor on objectively verifiable science. That's my goal. But that's why you don't see me debating people. I don't have the time or the patience. I'd rather just educate you in the first place so that the debate isn't even necessary. So how political do you view your job in this sense? Because I'm hearing that there are certain things you don't want to talk about, not because you don't have a position on them or that you don't feel yourself qualified to be the one talking about it necessarily. I take your point about climate science, but if I push hard enough, you have a view on it that you don't feel unqualified to express, all the while admitting that you are not the one doing original work in climate science. Yes, that's correct. And I will gladly state that when asked. It's just not I don't have a climate change platform that I occupy. I don't occupy any platform at all, as far as I can tell. And this frustrates some people because they want to attack me based on platform versus platform. And I'll just give you an example. After Cosmos, some months after Cosmos, I was like the COVID story of the National Review. There was a caricature of me on there. And by the way, I didn't think I gained that much weight between what I actually look like the cartoonist hand as £20. I know. You know, I'm not the, you know, the buff guy I was once was, but okay, fine. In there. I became really the effigy to be burned, the liberal effigy to be burned by the article, by the COVID story article. And on my vest, because that's my trademark vest with the moons and planets. They had buttons representing every single liberal cause that's out there. So there's the gay rights button and the women's lib button and the anti GMO button. And I'm looking at I say, wow, I've hardly ever said anything about most of those subjects. And in fact, the little bit that I have said about GMO, I was telling people to chill out because every organ, practically everything you eat that you acquire from a grocery store is a genetically modified version of something that sometime long ago was natural. And so everything's been genetically milk cows, everything big, plump, strawberries, oranges. And somehow people have drawn what they think is a genuine, yet it's arbitrary line between food that is natural and food that is not. I just made this point, by the way. That point is not even progmo or antigmo. I'm teaching people that we as a culture have been genetically modifying organisms for tens of thousands of years, period. Now take it. Do you still want to be against scientist genetically modifying organisms, go ahead, but understand what the foundation is or isn't of that argument and then I go home. I'm not going to debate you. Right. I'm just wondering, though, if you feel a need that, for instance, I don't feel, or certainly someone like Richard Dawkins doesn't apparently feel to preserve a kind of political neutrality on certain questions because you serve in a role that is for instance, I've noticed you've been on presidential commissions, science commissions, over the years. Do you feel that you need to kind of walk a razor's edge between political passions and polls on questions of religion or hot button issues of kind of culture, war, science, evolution, et cetera, because you're trying to preserve kind of trust from both sides, insofar as that's possible. So that's a great, very pointed question. So I'm going to unpack it into several variables, and if I get distracted in myself, just get me back on track. Initially, I thought I was walking a razor's edge because I'm not out here to just offend anybody. I just want to enlighten people as an educator. I have no other objective in this. And I thought that was a razor's edge initially. And then I realized, no, it's not, actually. It's a rather strong position. And that position is there are objective truths out there that you ought to know about. And I, as an educator, have some I don't want to call it an obligation, let me say a duty to alert you of those objective truths. What you do politically in the face of those objective truths is your business, not my business. I have opinions on many things, but they're not the kind of opinions where I give a rat's ass. If you agree with my opinion, that's why it's my opinion. And that's the difference. That's the difference between me, I think, and many others who are scientifically astute or the scientists themselves, and then take on a platform that involves trying to get people to see the world the way they do, even politically. I have no such interest in doing that. Let me just apply a little pressure on that one point, though, because it seems to me that there is if the stakes are high enough, if the facts are clear enough and the consequences of maintaining one's ignorance in the face of those facts are dire enough, let's say climate change rises to that point. Let's say human cause climate change is as disastrous as Al Gore thinks it is. Right. I don't feel especially close to the science here. The Al Gore index. Yes. Let's just say that it's as scary as the most scared person thinks it is. And we had good reason to believe that that was true. And now we're in the current environment of climate change denial that really correlates almost perfectly with where you are in the political spectrum. And you have a candidate like Trump who just gave I don't know if you heard his energy speech the other day or heard about it. No, I didn't. I was traveling and I didn't hear it. So he apparently thinks that I don't think he said this in his speech. He said this in a tweet, but his speech was quite in harmony with his tweet. He said at one point that climate change was a hoax cooked up by the Chinese to destroy our manufacturing base. And then in his speech, he says he's going to get out of the Paris Accords and just ramp up coal production and bring back all the coal jobs, and he's a denier of climate change or human caused climate change. And so let's just say that the jury was not out on this question at all. And again, I think it's probably not out or is virtually not out, but let's just say it was even clearer than it is now to 100% of those qualified to judge the facts. Wouldn't you feel that? So then this position you've just sketched out of I don't give a rat's ass what sort of opinions you have and what sort of public policies you want to enact on the basis of the science, doesn't that collapse? Wouldn't you then have a duty to say that in this case, trump is a dangerous ignorance who's not qualified to be president? So again, there are a couple of variables there. One of them is you're conflating two forces. One of them is that let me back up. So I've never said anything against a politician. Why? Because politicians have electorates that support them, and in a free democracy, that is their right. I, as an educator, could go around hitting politicians on the head, but then there's the matter of all the people who wanted to vote for them. So for me, my target is not the politician. My target is the population who is following statements that are objectively false. I see it as my duty to train the electorate how to think about this information, period. And then once they're trained, they can vote for who they want. This is like the people who said, oh, get George W out of office. He's an idiot. He's this, and then he's finally out of office, and then Sarah Palin rises up. Oh, Sarah Palin. She's an idiot. How many times can you start saying that a leader is an idiot without looking at fellow members of your country who are voting for them? And as an educator, it is a task to educate people so that they can judge what is true and what is not. That's my role here. The easiest way to make the point, though, in many cases, is to push back its most egregious violation, right? So if Trump gives this. Speech on the cusp of becoming elected President. The easiest way to talk about the consequences of the public's ignorance about climate change is to just push back against the speech itself. No. Then you're attacking him. No, I know. You're not attacking the fact that people don't understand the facts. That's the thing. You're attacking the person. You're attacking the fact that, in this case, a person who could well become President doesn't understand the facts. And that's by virtue of the fact that millions of people who support him either don't know or don't care that they're wrong on this point. And for me, the longer term solution is training the electorate. For me, it's just that simple. And and by the way, it's not like I haven't I've tweeted some pointed things. I mean, pointed for me, I suppose. For example, I said it was my Jesus tweet, where I said, who would Jesus vote for? Right? And this is back when we had a dozen Republican candidates in the running, so who would Jesus vote for? And I said, Walls and torture are non starters, so he'd probably vote for the Jewish New Yorker from Vermont. And I think that's probably an objectively, accurate, theologically defensible statement. But what happened when I did that because people are itching to get me to commit the Sanders campaign started calling, oh, we just learned you're a pro Sanders. Can you go public on that so we can it's like no, I said Jesus was pro Sanders. I didn't say I was Pro Sanders. Jesus was pro Sanders. So people will react as they do. But I want to train the electorate. That's my goal. So I guess what I was fishing for exists here, but it has a slightly different focus. When I asked you about the political imperatives of your role and you're wanting to preserve your neutrality for both sides of the spectrum, I was thinking more in terms of the kinds of people you have to work with or at least talk to in government from time to time. But but actually it's more that you want to preserve your trusted neutrality as an educator to everyone in the country, insofar as that's possible. Well, yeah, it's not so much that I want to preserve it in the sense that it's my for self preservation. It's not how I think about it. I just think about it as I guess I'm not being deeper than the simple statement that I'm an educator. And the moment you start choosing sides against things that are political, which is people's right to do in a free, pluralistic society, the moment you start doing that, then anyone who is not in the political leaning is not going to listen to you. You'll be an asshole to them, and you just shut off half the people who you could be educating. Yeah, when I said you're preserving your neutrality, I wasn't thinking you're preserving your reputation. In their eyes, you're just preserving your effectiveness as a communicator, insofar as that's possible. Yes, I think that's an accurate statement. Let's take religion, for example. So here's something. I haven't written this yet, but I've said it multiple times in ways people want me to sort of side up with the whole atheist movement and rid the world of religion and all of this. And and and you, you know, you're the front of that train right there with your writings and your speeches, and I take a slightly different view, and I'm not as extreme. I mean, you're you are on the frontier with terrorism and comparing one religion with another, and that's way out there for me. Where I go and where I stop is I say it does not matter to me what religion you are. Just know that your religion is a belief system and does not queue off of objective truths. Otherwise, we would call it science. And if you have a belief system, that belief system is constitutionally protected. And I don't have any problems with you holding that belief system. But the moment you hold office where now you are making decisions that affect a pluralistic electorate, any laws you pass need to be based in objective reality. Otherwise, you are bringing a personal truth to bear on other people who do not share your personal truths. And that is a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe for revolution. And so it's my way of saying that governmental decisions, policy, laws, need to be secular in a country that preserves religious freedoms. Yeah. So I'm glad you brought this up because I went out on Twitter yesterday, I think just saying that I was looking forward to speaking with you and asking my Twitter followers what we should talk about. And this was probably no surprise to you, probably the most common question they raised, this lack of endorsement of the label atheist, that you're not happily wearing this label. I actually have a talk I gave some years ago, I think, entitled the Problem With Atheism that I gave in an atheist conference. And as I've said before, it was the only talk I've ever given. Certainly, I think it's the only talk I know about that started with a standing ovation and ended with booze and people leaving the room. The point of the talk was, for me, pushing back against the label atheist. I said, there's no reason why we have to meet in bad hotels around this variable of political atheism and call ourselves atheists, and we don't call ourselves non astrologers. If astrology ever became ascendant in this country, and people were making decisions on the basis of the position of the planets, well, then we would talk about reason and evidence and common sense and science to neutralize those claims without ever defining ourselves in opposition to astrology. And I think the same thing can be done with religion. And as chance had it in my first book, which inducted me into the small club of the new atheist, the End of Faith. I never even used the term atheist or atheism. And it's not that I withheld use of that term. It never occurred to me to use the term. I was just talking about the problems of religion, the opposition, as I see it, between reason and faith and science and untestable, unverifiable claims. And so the political variable of atheism, I find it may have its moment historically, it may be necessary to some degree to shine a light on the fact that you have, by and large, to the smartest and most educated people in this society, politically anathematized and marginalized. But I think there's a real weakness in the term. But there is a difference. I think there's a difference between the two of us, at least in in our public persona, which is I don't do anything to dodge the term because if someone asks me if I'm an atheist, I will go on to say very likely I will say how empty that term is. I mean, it has no philosophical content and it doesn't capture any of what interests me about, quote, spiritual experience and things like meditation, et cetera. But I won't dodge the term because from the view of most religious people, I am an atheist. I think these books were merely written by people. And that's really all you need to be sure about to be an atheist from the Christian or Jewish or Muslim perspective. And so I'm wondering, based on this Twitter storm I got, I think somewhere you have called yourself an agnostic as opposed to an atheist. So I just want to ping you about that. How do you relate to those terms? It's not even that I called myself an agnostic versus an atheist. It's that if you require that I give myself a label, then the closest word I can come up with is agnostic, not atheist. But I would rather have no label at all. So that greatly resonates with you, but perhaps for different reasons. The only IST I am as a scientist, beyond that a label is an intellectually lazy way to assert you know more about a person than you actually do and therefore don't have to engage them in a conversation, oh, you're an atheist. Bam, out in comes a whole portfolio of expectations of what you'll say, what your behavior is, what your attitudes are. And what I have found by the way, hold aside dictionary definition of atheist because that's actually irrelevant to me. It's irrelevant because the dictionary does not define words. The dictionary describes words as they have come into meaning, at least in the English language, less so in French, I'm told, because they have like word bureaus that see your usage academy. So words are living things. And I have seen the conduct of outspoken atheists and there is conduct they exhibit that I do not. And so if there's an emergent sense of what an atheist is, and that sense is being defined by those who are most visible, then I have to say there's got to be some other word for me, but not that word. For example for example, this happened some time ago on my Facebook feed. There was a shuttle mission that went back when we went into space with our own spacecraft. There was a shuttle mission that went up to repair the hubble. I was friends with several of the astronauts on board, so I posted Sts. I forgot what it was, 125 or I forgot the number Sts launches today. And I said, God speed. Astronauts. Okay? That's what I said. People in the common thread said God speed. I thought you were an atheist. Okay? The very fact that I get that phrase often in people responding to something I say or do tells me that I'm not behaving in the way they expect an atheist to behave. Forgetting again the formal dictionary definition we are talking about what is happening to that word today. And so, yeah, I use the word God speed because that's historical with the space program. And John Glenn went up. It was headlines god speed. John Glenn and Godspeed is not fundamentally different from goodbye. What was goodbye? You'd leave the city walls, god be with you, because it was dangerous out there, and God be with you got contracted over the years, and it just says goodbye. I was at an atheist conference, and I asked people in the room, who here uses the word after I was raked over the coals for saying God speed? I said, who here uses the word goodbye? Everybody raised their hand. I said, did you know it meant God be with you? I didn't know that. Now we have astronauts putting their lives at risk by going high speed, and then you have this corresponding term God speed. I was perfectly happy to use that term, and I'll use it again. Not only that, I use Ad and BC when I'm referring to years. All right? The Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar were amazing works of timekeeping and credit should go where credit is due. And with the Vatican Observatory, which was founded around the time the Pope Gregory made the measurements to establish the Gregorian calendar. Give it to him. Give it up to him. I have no problems. Oh, I thought you were an atheist. I should use BCE until there's a word that applies to me that doesn't then have people saying, I thought you were an atheist. I'm happy to have no label at all. That's what's at the bottom of this. And that is for much shallower philosophical reasons than how much you thought about the word minor is just very plum practical. You've actually thought really deeply about the word as applied to you. I think about the negative consequences of the label very much in the terms you do, but kind of from the other side. So if you admit to being an atheist, what you have admitted to most religious people, I mean, this is a term that's given its meaning mostly within the echo chamber of religious dogmatists. They think they know a lot about you based on your admission that you're an atheist. And I think in this talk, the analogy I drew is that it's almost like you're in a debate with someone and they draw the outline of a body, like from the police crime scene outline of a dead body on the sidewalk and you just kind of walk up and lie down in it. Just you conform perfectly to their expectations of just how clueless you must be of all the values and richness of experience that they know so much about in a religious context, which is not at all true depending on the atheist. I'm an atheist who spent a lot of time exploring changes in my consciousness that most religious people think only religious people know about, right, classically mystical states of consciousness with psychedelics or a long time spent on silent meditation retreats. There's different ways to change your mind and your brain and it just so happens that only religious language has been applied to this historically. And if you say you're an atheist, you are almost by definition from the religious side, not necessarily from the atheist side. You are disavowing all of that as either just frank psychopathology or conscious fraud or something that just doesn't bear looking into that's just again, it's a failure of communication ultimately. But the price you are paying that I'm not paying, I think in the atheist community is you begin to either look kind of shifty or not altogether honest if you keep dancing around the term or using a term like I'm an agnostic as opposed to an atheist. Whereas you would never say you're agnostic about poseidon in the same way that you're tempted to say you're agnostic about the God of Abraham. That's why I don't even use the word agnostic. It's it's been I said if you had to pick a word, then pick that word, but I don't know that it would. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes, episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm going to continue with the end of Faith sessions. Chapter Two chapter Two The Nature of Belief It is often argued that religious beliefs are somehow distinct from other claims to knowledge about the world. There is no doubt that we treat them differently, particularly in the degree to which we demand in ordinary discourse that people justify their beliefs. But this does not indicate that religious beliefs are special in any important sense. What do we mean when we say that a person believes a given proposition about the world? As with all questions about familiar mental events, we must be careful that the familiarity of our terms does not lead us astray. The fact that we have one word for belief does not guarantee that believing is itself a unitary phenomenon. An analogy can be drawn to the case of memory. While people commonly refer to their failures of quote, memory, decades of experiment have shown that human memory comes in many forms. Not only are our long term and short term memories the products of distinct and dissimilar neural circuits, they have themselves been divided into multiple subsystems. To speak simply of memory, therefore, is now rather like speaking of experience. Clearly, we must be more precise about what our mental terms mean before we attempt to understand them at the level of the brain. Even dogs and cats, insofar as they form associations between people, places and events, can be said to believe many things about the world. But this is not the sort of believing we are after when we talk about the beliefs to which people consciously subscribe. The house is infested with termites tofu is not a dessert, Muhammad descended to heaven on a winged horse. We are talking about beliefs that are communicated and acquired linguistically. Believing a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents some state of the world. And this fact yields some immediate insights into the standards by which our beliefs should function. In particular, it reveals why we cannot help but value evidence and demand that propositions about the world logically cohere. These constraints apply equally to matters of religion. Freedom of belief in anything but the legal sense is a myth. We will see that we are no more free to believe whatever we want about God than we are free to adopt unjustified beliefs about science. Or history, or free to mean whatever we want when using words like poison or north or zero. Anyone who would lay claim to such entitlements should not be surprised when the rest of us stop listening to him. Beliefs as Principles of Action the human brain is a prolific generator of beliefs about the world. In fact, the very humanness of any brain consists largely in its capacity to evaluate new statements of propositional truth in light of innumerable others that it already accepts. By recourse to intuitions of truth and falsity logical necessity and contradiction, human beings are able to knit together private visions of the world that largely cohere what neural events underlie this process. What must a brain do in order to believe that a given statement is true or false? We currently have no idea. Language processing must play a role, of course, but the challenge will be to discover how the brain brings the products of perception, memory, and reasoning to bear on individual propositions and magically transforms them into the very substance of our living. It was probably the capacity for movement enjoyed by certain primitive organisms that drove the evolution of our sensory and cognitive faculties. This follows from the fact that if no creature could do anything with the information it acquired from the world, nature could not have selected for improvements in the physical structures that gather, store and process such information. Even a sense as primitive as vision therefore seems predicated on the existence of a motor system. If you cannot catch food, avoid becoming food yourself, or wander off a cliff, there doesn't seem to be much reason to see the world in the first place. And certainly, refinements in vision of the sort found everywhere in the animal kingdom would never have come about at all. For this reason, it seems uncontroversial to say that all higherorder cognitive states of which beliefs are an example, are in some way an outgrowth of our capacity for action. In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action, whatever they may be. At the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding and misunderstanding of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior. The power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter of moments. Consider the following proposition your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail. What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that such a proposition would loosen the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you don't have a daughter, or you know her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailers are renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason the door to belief has not yet swung upon its hinges. The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. Now, as an aside, that is, I think, without question the most controversial sentence I have ever written. Needlessly so, if you actually make any effort to understand it in context. But this won't surprise you, and, as many of you know, has been lifted out of its context and used to paint me as a total maniac who wants to kill people for thought crimes. So let me start this paragraph again, back to the text. The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherence beyond reach of every peaceful means of persuasion while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people if they cannot be captured, and they often cannot. Otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan and is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt at even greater cost to ourselves and to innocence abroad. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, we will continue to spill blood in what is at bottom a war of ideas. Let me just highlight a few things that appeared in that paragraph which many people don't notice. I am talking about the link between belief and action. I'm talking about beliefs as principles of behavior. It should go without saying that I'm talking about beliefs that are behaviorally effective. Therefore, I'm talking about the proximate cause of things like suicidal terrorism. I'm talking about beliefs that place people quote beyond every peaceful means of persuasion while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. So I was never talking about killing people merely for what they think. And here I'll go to my website where I responded to some of the controversy that that sentence provoked, because, again, I think this is important. And here's part of what I say there. When one asks why it would be ethical to drop a bomb on Ayman al Zawahiri, the current leader of Al Qaeda, the answer cannot be because he killed so many people in the past. To my knowledge, the man hasn't killed anyone personally. However, he is likely to get a lot of innocent people killed for what he and his followers believe about jihad, martyrdom, the ascendancy of Islam, et cetera. A willingness to take preventative action against a dangerous enemy is compatible with being against the death penalty, which I am. Whenever we can capture and imprison jihadists, we should. But in many cases, this is either impossible or too risky. So let's linger on this point for a second. If you imagine dropping a bomb on Al Zawahiri or Al Baghdadi, what would justify that? Again, I don't know that these guys have personally killed anyone or will ever kill anyone, but they are part of a machinery that is grinding up innocent lives. And this machinery is built on belief. Belief that is effective. Belief. That is the proximate cause of action. If you know someone is disposed to act on his beliefs, his beliefs become continuous with the action that you would be justified in preventing. In a case of self defense, for instance, you don't have to wait to be killed in order to defend yourself. And when you ask why it would be ethical to kill someone who's in a leadership and propagandistic role in an organization like ISIS or Al Qaeda, where they themselves don't kill anyone necessarily, they simply tell people to do it. It has a lot to do with the contents of their minds. All I'm an Al Zawahiri and Al Baghdadi do, as far as I know, is talk. And if we could kill them, we should absolutely do it. And the interesting ethical question is why? And I'm getting at some part of that question in this statement about belief as a proximate cause of action. If you're going to conjure some person who believes crazy things that have no behavioral implication, they're never going to harm anyone or cause anyone else to harm anyone on the basis of their beliefs, well then it doesn't matter what they believe. That is precisely the case where beliefs don't matter. And I would never have thought, much less suggested, that those people should be killed for believing in Jesus, say, or believing that Muhammad is the final prophet of the God of Abraham. But what's interesting about belief and consequential is that in most cases, insofar as something is really believed, it shows up behaviorally. It shows up in the kinds of public policies people want to fight for. That's the whole point of this book. And the boundary between a war of ideas and a real war is not always easy to find. As I say a lot. We have a choice between conversation and violence. We live in perpetual choice between conversation and violence. And that's why it's so important to be able to reason about everything, talk about everything, put everything on the table to be pressure tested against new facts and new arguments. And if you're not willing to do that, you live in perpetual invitation to violence or threaten others with it. Dogmatism is a refusal to reason with other people. And when that refusal becomes highly consequential, when lives depend on it, people are going to go hands on your body if there is no talking to you. What are other people going to do with you if you are standing in the way of what life saving medical research, getting out of a burning building. Surely you remember the case of the Saudi girls school, where all those poor girls burned alive because the religious police wouldn't let them out of a burning building because they were not appropriately veiled. You had the fathers of some of those girls standing at the gates being cowed by the religious police. What should those fathers have done? The possibility of violence, necessary violence in that case starts the moment. The conversation ends the moment there is nothing left to say, the moment you're in the presence of someone who will not listen to reason and your daughter is burning up in a fire. The beliefs that we should care about are the beliefs that suddenly spring into life in this way as shocking impediments to basic human decency and a wide open path to well being. So that has been a source of really extraordinary controversy, but for obvious reasons, it is eggsized from its context, a fairly shocking sentence. It's a good sentence. It makes for an interesting paragraph, and if you are at all an honest reader, you will understand what the paragraph says. But like many provocative sentences, it has been a gift to malicious and dishonest critics. Back to the text. The necessity for logical coherence the first thing to notice about beliefs is that they must suffer the company of their neighbors. Beliefs are both logically and semantically related. Each constrains and is in turn constrained by many others. A belief like the Boeing 747 is the world's best airplane logically entails many other beliefs that are both more basic eg. Airplanes exist and more derivative eg. Seven four seven s are better than seven five sevens. The belief that some men are husbands demands that the proposition some women or wives also be endorsed because the very terms husband and wife mutually define one another. I'm pleased to note that that example seems anachronistic now, given that you can have two husbands in a marriage. But hopefully you still understand the point I was making. Back to the text in fact, logical and semantic constraints appear to be two sides of the same coin, because our need to understand what words mean in each new context requires that our beliefs be free from contradiction, at least locally. If I am to mean the same thing by the word mother from one instance to the next, I cannot both believe my mother was born in Rome and believe my mother was born in Nevada. Even if my mother were born on an airplane flying at supersonic speeds, these propositions cannot both be true. There are tricks to be played here. Perhaps there's a town called Rome somewhere in the state of Nevada. Or perhaps mother means biological mother in one sentence and adoptive mother in another. But to know what a belief is about, I must know what my words mean. To know what my words mean, my beliefs must be generally consistent. There's just no escaping the fact that there's a tight relationship between the words we use, the type of thoughts we can think, and what we can believe to be true about the world, and behavioral constraints are just as pressing. When going to a friend's home for dinner, I cannot both believe that he lives north of Main Street and south of Main Street and then act on the basis of what I believe. A normal degree of psychological and bodily integration precludes my being motivated to head in two opposing directions at once. Personal identity itself requires such consistency. Unless a person's beliefs are highly coherent, he will have as many identities as there are. Mutually incompatible sets of beliefs careening around his brain. If you doubt this, just try to imagine the subjectivity of a man who believes that he spent the entire day in bed with the flu but also played a round of golf, that his name is Jim and that his name is Tom, that he has a young son and that he is childless. Multiply these incompatible beliefs indefinitely, and any sense that their owner is a single subject entirely disappears. There's a degree of logical inconsistency that is incompatible with our notion of personhood. So it seems that the value we put on logical consistency is neither misplaced nor mysterious. In order for my speech to be intelligible to others and indeed to myself, my beliefs about the world must largely cohere. In order for my behavior to be informed by what I believe, I must believe things that admit of behavior that is at minimum, possible. Certain logical relations, after all, seem etched into the very structure of our world. The telephone rings. Either it is my brother on the line or it isn't. I may believe one proposition or the other, or I may believe that I do not know. But under no circumstances is it acceptable for me to believe both. Departures from normativity, in particular with respect to the rules of inference that lead us to construct new beliefs on the basis of old ones, have been the subject of much research and much debate. Whatever construal of these matters one adopts, no one believes that human beings are perfect engines of coherence. Our inevitable failures of rationality can take many forms, ranging from mere logical inconsistencies to radical discontinuities in subjectivity itself. Most of the literature on self deception, for instance, suggests that a person can tacitly believe one proposition while successfully convincing himself of a santithesis. For example My wife is having an affair. My wife is faithful. Though considerable controversy still surrounds the question of how or whether such cognitive contortions actually occur, other failures of psychological integration, ranging from splitbrain patients to cases of, quote, multiple personality, are at least partially explicable in terms of areas of belief processing in the brain that have become structurally and or functionally partitioned from one another. And here's a section that relates an experience that I still find just incredible the section is called the American Embassy. A case in point while traveling in France, my fiancee and I experienced a bizarre partitioning of our beliefs about the American Embassy in Paris. Belief System One as the events of September 11 still cast a shadow over the world, we had decided to avoid obvious terrorist targets while traveling. First on our list of such places was the American Embassy in Paris. Paris is home to the largest Muslim population in the Western world, and this embassy had already been the target of a foiled suicide plot. The American Embassy would have been the last place we would have willingly visited while in France. Belief System Two prior to our arrival in Paris, we had difficulty finding a hotel room. Every hotel we checked was full, except for one on the right bank, which had abundant vacancies. The woman at reservations even offered us a complimentary upgrade to a suite. She also gave us a choice of view. We could face the inner courtyard or outward overlooking the American Embassy. Which view would you choose? I asked. Oh, the view of the embassy, she replied. It's much more peaceful. I envisioned a large embassy garden. Great, I said. We'll take it. The next day, we arrived at the hotel and found we had been given a room with a courtyard view. Both my fiance and I were disappointed. We had, after all, been promised a view of the American Embassy. We called a friend living in Paris to inform her of our whereabouts. Our friend, who is wise in the ways of the world, had this to say that hotel is directly next to the American Embassy. That's why they're offering you an upgrade. Have you guys lost your minds? Do you know what day it is? It's the 4 July. The appearance of this degree of inconsistency in our lives was astounding. We had spent the better part of the day simultaneously trying to avoid and gain proximity to the very same point in space. Realizing this, we could scarcely have been more surprised had we both grown antlers. But what seems psychologically so mysterious may be quite trivial. In neurological terms, it appears that the phrase American Embassy, spoken in two different contexts, merely activated distinct networks of association within our brains. Consequently, the phrase had acquired two distinct meanings. In the first case, it signified a prime terrorist target. In the second, it promised a desirable view from a hotel window. The significance of the phrase in the world, however, is single and indivisible. Since only one building answers to this name in Paris, the communication between these networks of neurons appeared to be negligible. Our brains were effectively partitioned. The flimsiness of this partition was revealed by just how easily it came down. All it took for me to unify my fiance's outlook on this subject was to turn to her she who was still silently coveting a view of the American Embassy and say with obvious alarm this hotel is 10ft from the American Embassy. The partition came down and she was as flabbergasted as I was. And yet the psychologically irreconcilable facts are these on the day in question, never was there a time when we would have willingly placed ourselves near the American Embassy, and never was there a time when we were not eager to move to a room with a view of it. I don't know if there's any more to say to extract meaning from that episode, but I just got to say in my memory, it was such a flabbergasting moment. I mean, both of these meanings of American Embassy and our attitude toward them had been spelled out with crystal clarity to both of us. We had articulated that we were not going to go near the American Embassy, especially on the 4 July. There actually had been talk in the news about what a prime target it was, and we were simultaneously making our best effort to get a room with a view of it. This is one thing I do remember and I didn't write about it. There was something about this experience of waking up from this dream of incoherence suddenly recognizing that both of us had been led to this spot by just an astounding level of logical blindness and shared right. The fact that neither of us recognized that the American Embassy is the American Embassy led us both to become suddenly fairly superstitious. I certainly don't believe and didn't believe that there's any plan working that would have led us to our doom, but the fact that we had decided not to go there and yet wound up there was fairly creepy. It just actually seemed impossible that we were in that situation and yet we were. All I can say is it had the character of a Twilight Zone episode where we suddenly felt that the world and our own minds may not be what they seemed. In any case, we promptly checked out of the hotel to the absolute bewilderment of the staff, and powerful wind of superstition blew us across the city to some other hotel that we managed to find. Back to the text. While behavioral and linguistic necessity demands that we seek coherence among our beliefs wherever we can, we know that total coherence, even in a maximally integrated brain, would be impossible to achieve. This becomes apparent the moment we imagine a person's beliefs recorded as a list of assertions like I'm walking in the park, parks generally have animals, lions are animals, and so on, each being a belief unto itself as well as a possible basis upon which to form further inferences. Both good ones I may soon see an animal and bad ones I may soon see a lion, and hence new beliefs about the world. If perfect coherence is to be had, each new belief must be checked against all others and every combination thereof for logical contradictions. But here we encounter a minor computational difficulty. The number of necessary comparisons grows exponentially as each new proposition is added to the list. How many beliefs could a perfect brain check for logical contradictions? The answer is surprising. Even if a computer were as large as the known universe built of components no larger than protons, with switching speeds as fast as the speed of light all laboring in parallel from the moment of the Big Bang up to the present it would still be fighting to add belief number 300 to its list. What does it say about the possibility of our ever guaranteeing that our worldview is perfectly free from contradiction? It is not even a dream within a dream. And yet, given the demands of language and behavior, it remains true that we must strive for coherence wherever it is in doubt, because failure here is synonymous with a failure of either linguistic sense or behavioral possibility. Beliefs as Representations of the World for even the most basic knowledge of the world to be possible, regularities in a nervous system must consistently mirror regularities in the environment. If a different assemblage of neurons in my brain fired whenever I saw a person's face, I would have no way to form a memory of him. His face could look like a face one moment and a toaster the next. And I would have no reason to be surprised by the inconsistency, for there would be nothing for a given pattern of neural activity to be consistent with. As Stephen Pinker points out, it is only the orderly mirroring between a system that processes information a brain or a computer and the laws of logic or probability that explains how rationality can emerge from mindless physical process in the first place. End quote. Words are arranged in a systematic, rule based way. Syntax and beliefs are likewise in that they must logically cohere because both body and world are so arranged. Consider the statement there is an apple and an orange in Jack's lunchbox. The syntactical and hence logical significance of the word and guarantees that anyone who believes this statement will also believe the following propositions there is an apple in Jack's Lunchbox and there is an orange in Jack's Lunchbox. This is not due to some magical property that syntax holds over the world. Rather, it is a simple consequence of the fact that we use words like and to mirror the orderly behavior of objects. Someone who will endorse the conjunction of two statements while denying them individually either does not understand the use of the word and or does not understand things like apples, oranges and lunchboxes. It just so happens that we live in a universe in which if you put an apple and an orange in Jack's Lunchbox you will be able to pull out an apple, an orange or both. There's a point at which the meanings of words, their syntactical relations and rationality itself can no longer be divorced from the orderly behavior of objects in the world. As I say, in an endnote here, there are exceptions. Here, certain words and concepts run afoul of ordinary logic. And I say, for instance, one cannot put the shadow of an apple and the shadow of an orange in Jack's lunchbox, close the lid and then expect to retrieve one or the other at the end of the day, that's just based on an understanding of what shadows are. They are not objects of the same sort. And I should also say that quantum mechanics obviously runs afoul of our intuitions here, and that is what is so hard and counterintuitive about it and why it resists a mapping onto our realistic and logical expectations of the world. Back to the text. Whatever beliefs are, none of us harbors an infinite number of them. While philosophers may doubt why the beliefs are the sort of thing that can be counted, it is clear that we have a finite amount of storage in our brains, a finite number of discrete memories and a finite vocabulary that waxes and wanes somewhere well shy of 100,000 words. There is a distinction to be made, therefore, between beliefs that are causally active I. E. Those that we already have in our heads and those that can be constructed on demand. If believing is anything like perceiving, it is obvious that our intuitions about how many of our beliefs are present within us at any given moment might be unreliable. Studies of change blindness, for instance, have revealed that we do not perceive nearly as much of the world as we think we do, since a large percentage of the visual scene can be suddenly altered without our noticing off text. Now, if you haven't seen change blindness demonstrations, they're pretty phenomenal. So the demonstration runs this way. You'll show someone a slide, let's say a picture of a family picnicking in the park and change it to another slide that is identical to the first but for the fact that you have changed something like 20% of its visual properties like removed a tree or removed a person or put a buffalo in the scene. And it can take people an astonishingly long time to notice the difference between the two images. Once you see what has changed, you can't believe that it took you any time at all to notice it. Back to the text. An analogy with computer gaming also seems apropos. Current generations of computer games do not compute parts of their virtual world until a player makes a move that demands their existence. Perhaps many of our cognitive commitments are just like this. So I'm saying that we may not have the stable model of reality that we think we have. We may continue to compute things all the time and on the fly, and we do this perceptually clearly. We're not seeing everything all the time that we think we're seeing with our eyes open, pointed in the right direction, as change blindness demonstrates. And we. May not believe things all the time, the way we seem to, but construct beliefs on the fly much more often than we think we do. And there is a kind of confabulatory way we do generate our opinions about the world. You can notice this in various experiments and you can notice this about yourself. You just start saying things even on new topics. Think of what it's like to be asked a question that you have never been asked before. For instance, if I were to ask you, do you think human beings will ever outgrow violence entirely right now? Maybe you've thought about this before, maybe you haven't. I doubt anyone has asked you to answer that question. I don't think I've ever been asked that question. I ask you the question now. Give me an answer. If you try this, I think it will be the rare person among you who will simply pause for a moment, reflect and say, I don't know. Of course, it is a perfectly reasonable position. In fact, I think maybe the only reasonable position to take on that question, right? I certainly don't know. But most people ask that question, could answer it one of two ways, I think, with real confidence. And they would begin to just form an answer. They would start talking and it would go something like this would be, oh no, no, no. We're never going to outgrow violence because it's just so deeply rooted in us. There's always we are apes and unless we outgrow our humanity, unless we change ourselves fundamentally so that we're no longer human, the potential for violence will always be there. That sounds pretty good. Okay? That's what I believe. Or we'll have to outgrow violence at some point because the power of our technology is only increasing. The ability for one person to destroy the lives of many others, even millions of others, is only increasing. And it's hard to see how that will ever change. So at a certain point, we will have to figure out how to cancel our violent impulses and we will do this. It will be, at some point, the most important thing for us to do. The human capacity for violence will become literally insufferable at a certain point. Okay, that sounds pretty good too. So you could just start talking. And if your internal bullshit detector doesn't go off, that can suffice to be your belief right? Now, did you harbor that belief, either one of them before talking? Probably not. But the the fact that they survive coincidence. With all the things you do believe, the fact that you didn't say anything in either of those answers that contradicts something you know to be true, well, then it that kind of confabulation will survive and pass as a belief that you have harbored about the world and perhaps now harbor going forward because you said as much. Okay, back to the text. Whether most of what we believe is always present within our minds, or whether it must be continually reconstructed. It seems that many beliefs must be freshly vetted before they can guide our behavior. This is demonstrated whenever we come to doubt a proposition that we previously believed. Just consider what it is like to forget the multiplication table. Twelve times seven equals all of us have had moments when 84 just didn't sound quite right. At such times, we may be forced to perform some additional calculations before we can again be said to believe that twelve times seven equals 84. Or consider what it is like to fall into doubt over a familiar person's name. Is his name really Jeff? Is that what I call him? It is clear that even very well worn beliefs can occasionally fail to achieve credibility in the present. Such failures of truth testing have important implications to which we now turn a matter of true and False imagine that you are having dinner in a restaurant with several old friends. You leave the table briefly to use the restroom, and upon your return you hear one of your friends whisper, just be quiet. He can't know any of this. What are you to make of this statement? Everything turns on whether you believe that you are the he in question. If you are a woman and therefore excluded by this choice of pronoun, you would probably feel nothing but curiosity. Upon retaking your seat, you might even whisper, who are you guys talking about? If you are a man, on the other hand, things have just gotten interesting. What secret could your friends be keeping from you? If your birthday is a few weeks away, you might assume that a surprise party has been planned in your honor, if not, more Shakespearean possibilities await your consideration. Given your prior cognitive commitments and the contextual cues in which the utterance was spoken, some credence granting circuit inside your brain will begin to test a variety of possibilities. You will study your friend's faces. Are there expressions compatible with the more nefarious interpretations of this statement that are now occurring to you? Has one of your friends just confessed to sleeping with your wife? When could this have happened? There has always been a certain chemistry between them. Suffice it to say that whichever interpretation of these events becomes a matter of belief for you will have important personal and social consequences. At present, we have no understanding of what it means at the level of the brain to say that a person believes or disbelieves a given proposition. And yet it is upon this difference that all subsequent cognitive and behavioral commitments turn. And I going off text now. I would say that this has changed a little bit since I wrote that, in part because of the neuroimaging work I did to finish my PhD in neuroscience, as well as some subsequent work I did with my friend Jonas Kaplan, which hopefully will soon be published. We know more about which regions of the brain are active when people believe and disbelieve various propositions. And I summarize the first of those studies in my book, The Moral Landscape. But there are regions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex often associated with reward and self reference selfrepresentation that are more active when we judge something to be true. And in these studies, judging something to be false was associated with activity in the insula, which is often involved in more visceral rejection states like feelings of disgust. So I still consider that work quite preliminary. But the believing brain is not entirely a black box anymore. And another graduate student in the lab at UCLA where I did that work, Pamela Douglas, came along a few years later and used a machine learning analysis on my data to see if she could detect whether or not people believed or disbelieved various propositions at the single statement level. So just training on half the experiment, she went into the other half of the data blind with a machine learning tool to see if she could discriminate whether people believed or disbelieved propositions. And she found that she could do that with 90% accuracy. So even in this very crude paradigm, that was not at all designed to be able to detect individual instances of belief or disbelief, rather, it was designed to compare all of the belief and disbelief trials in a statistically simpler way, she was able to detect belief and disbelief with 90% accuracy. So it was an interesting tweak on that experiment and certainly portends a future where we will have mind reading and lie detection technology that is reliable. I think there's no question about that. And whether you find that terrifying and orwellian or a great relief certainly depends on your own beliefs about how that technology is likely to be used. Back to the text to believe the proposition we must endorse. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, I just got back from BAMF, where I attended the Ted Summit, and I brought a portable recording device to the conference on the odd chance that I might find someone worth talking to who wanted to record a podcast. Needless to say, there were many people worth talking to, but not much time to sit down and do a podcast. But I did record one conversation with the philosopher Dan Dennett, who probably needs no introduction here. As many of you know, Dan and I have been brothers in arms for many years, along with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as the so called New Atheists, or the Four Horsemen, after a video by that name that we recorded in Hitch's apartment some years back. Dan and I once debated together on the same team, along with Hitch at the Cuddon delaci Dais conference in Mexico, where we were pitted against Dinesh D'Souza and Rabbi Schmuley Botiac and Robert Wright, I believe, and Nassim Taleb got in there somehow. I hope it doesn't seem too self serving or contemptuous of our opponents to say that we came out none the worse for wear on that occasion. And needless to say, that video is online for all to see until the end of the world. But as many of you know, Dan and I had a very barbed exchange on the topic of free will some years later, and that was a little over two years ago, and we never resolved it. I came out with my short book on free will, and Dan reviewed it, and then I responded to his review, and the matter was left there in a way that no one found satisfying, least of all our readers. There really was an outpouring of dismay over the tone that we took with each other, and I must say that was totally understandable. I want to begin by reading the first few paragraphs of my response to Dan's review, which includes a quotation from him so you can hear how vexed and vexing things got. And if you're interested, you can read the whole exchange on my blog. In fact, when I post this podcast on my website, I'll provide the relevant links. So this is near the beginning of my response, written as a letter to Dan. I want to begin by reminding our readers and myself that exchanges like this aren't necessarily pointless. Perhaps you need no encouragement on that front, but I'm afraid I do. In recent years, I've spent so much time debating scientists, philosophers and other scholars that I've begun to doubt whether any smart person retains the ability to change his mind. This is one of the great scandals of intellectual life. The virtues of rational discourse are everywhere espoused, and yet witnessing someone relinquish a cherished opinion in real time is about as common as seen a supernova explode overhead. The perpetual stalemate one encounters in public debates is annoying because it is so clearly the product of motivated reasoning, self deception, and other failures of rationality. And yet we've grown to expect it on every topic, no matter how intelligent and well intentioned the participants. I hope you and I don't give our readers further cause for cynicism on this front. Unfortunately, your review of my book doesn't offer many reasons for optimism. It is a strange document, avuncular in places, but more generally sneering. I think it fair to say that one could watch an entire season of Doubton Abbey on Ritalin and not detect a finer note of condescension than you manage for 20 pages running. And now I have a quotation from Dan's review here. This is Dan. I'm not being disingenuous when I say this museum of mistakes is valuable. I am grateful to Harris for saying so boldly and clearly what less outgoing scientists are thinking but keeping to themselves. I've always suspected that many who hold this hard, determinist view are making these mistakes, but we mustn't put words in people's mouths. And now Harris has done us a great service by articulating the points explicitly, and the chorus of approval he's received from scientists goes a long way to confirming that they have been making these mistakes all along. Wolfgang Pauli's famous dismissal of another physicist's work as, quote, not even wrong, reminds us of the value of crystallizing an ambient cloud of hunches into something that can be shown to be wrong. Correcting. Widespread misunderstanding is usually the work of many hands, and Harris has made a significant contribution. End quote. So this is back to me, I say. I hope you will recognize that your beloved Rapoport's rules have failed you here. As an Asia, I should say, for those of you who are not familiar with them, these rules come from Anatole Rapaport, the mathematician, game theorist, and social scientist. And Dan has been a champion of these rules of argumentation for years. And they are one attempt to re express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says thanks. I wish I thought of putting it that way. Two list any points of agreement, especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement. Three mention anything you have learned from your target. Four only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism. So those are the rules, and Dan has often said that he aspires to follow them when criticizing another person's point of view. So back to my text. I hope you will recognize that your beloved Rapaport's rules have failed you here. If you have decided, according to the rule, to first mention something positive about the target of your criticism, it will not do to say that you admire him for the enormity of his errors and the recklessness with which he clings to them, despite the sterling example you've set in your own work. Yes, you may assert, quote, I am not being disingenuous when I say this museum of mistakes is valuable, end quote. But you are in fact, being disingenuous. If that isn't clear, permit me to spell it out just this once. You are asking the word valuable to pass as a token of praise, however faint. But according to you, my book is, quote, valuable for reasons that I should find embarrassing. If I valued it as you do, I should rue the day I wrote it, as you would, had you brought such value into the world. And it would be disingenuous of me not to notice how your prickliness and preening appears. You write as one protecting his academic turf behind and between almost every word of your essay. Like some toxic background radiation, one detects an explosion of professorial vanity. End quote. So that's how snide things got. And I must say that this is really a problem with writing rather than having a face to face encounter. If any of you have ever had the brilliant idea of writing a long letter or email to a friend to sort out some relationship crisis rather than just have a conversation, you've probably discovered how haywire things can go through an exchange of texts, and the same can be true for intellectual debates among philosophers and scientists. And it's especially likely to happen if either or both of the people involved are writers who get attached to their writerly maneuvers. I remember writing that quip about Doubt Nabby, and it made me laugh. At the time, I knew it would make many readers laugh, and so I kept it in. But lines like that just amplify the damage done. So as I told Dan at the end of our podcast, I very much regret the tone I took in this exchange, and I'm very happy we got a chance to have a face to face conversation and sort things out. I don't think we resolved all the philosophical issues, but we spoke for nearly 2 hours. But there were several important topics that never came up. As you'll hear, we were speaking in a bar using a single microphone, and this was at the end of a long day of conferencing. So this isn't us at our most polished or prepared, but I thought it was a very good conversation. I think those of you who are interested in the problem of free will and its connection to ethics will find it useful. I still think there's some sense in which Dan and I are talking past one another. The nature of our remaining disagreement never became perfectly clear to me, so perhaps you guys can figure it out. And now I give you Dan Dennett in a bar overlooking the Canadian Rockies. So I am here with Dan Dennett at the Ted Summit in BAMF, and we have stolen away from the main session, and we are in a bar and about to have a conversation about the misadventure we had in discussing free will online in a series of articles and blog posts. You and I are part of a community and a pretty visible part of a community that prides itself on being willing to change its opinions and views more or less in real time, under pressure from better arguments and better data. And I think I said in my article in response to your review of my book Free Will, that this is a very rare occurrence to see someone relinquish his cherished opinion more or less on the spot under pressure from an interlocutor. That's about as rare as seeing a supernova overhead. And it really shouldn't be, because there's nothing that tokens intellectual honesty more than a willingness to step away from one's views once they are shown to be an error. And I'm not saying we're necessarily going to get there in this conversation about free will, but there was something that went awry in our written exchanges tonally, and neither of us felt good about the result. Again, we'll talk about free will as well. But I think this conversation is proceeding along two levels where there's a thing we're talking about philosophically, which is free will. But then there's just the way in which I want us to both be sensitive to getting hijacked into unproductive lines that make it needlessly hard to talk about what is just a purely intellectual, philosophical matter. And one of great interest is surprisingly great interest to our audiences. There's no topic that I've touched that has surprised me more in the degree to which people find it completely captivating to think about. And I know you and I both think it's a very consequential topic. It's unlike many topics in philosophy. This one really does meet ethics and public policy in a way that is important. So one thing you all should know in listening to this is that we have one microphone. Perhaps this is a good thing because we really can't interrupt each other and we're just going to pass this microphone back and forth. And I now give you Dan Dennett. Thanks, Sam. This is a beautiful setting. If we can't agree on some things here, we shouldn't be in this business. I want to go back one step further in how this got started. You sent me the manuscript of your book, if you will, and asked me for my advice, and I didn't have time to read it I just told you, no, I'm sorry, I don't have time. And then when the book came out, I read it and said, oh, I wish you'd I forgot that we'd had that experience. I wish you'd showed it to me because I think you made some big mistakes here, and I would love to have tried to talk you out of them. Too late. And then time passed, and then you said you wanted me still to say what I thought the mistakes were. And that's when I wrote my piece for your blog and for Naturalism, and it certainly struck you wrong. And I guess I regret a few bits of tone there, but I think everything I said there is defensible. And in particular, I did use Rapaport's rules, contrary to what you say. If you look at the first paragraph of my piece, I applaud the book for doing a wonderful clear job of setting out a position which I largely agreed with. And then I said, you went off the rails a little later. So I did try to articulate your view, and I haven't heard you complain about that articulation of your view and and I said what we agree about. And I even said what I've learned from that book. So I did follow Rapid Horse rules quite well, but we can just set that aside if you want and get down to what remains of the issue. One thing in particular, which I know it came off awfully preachy, but I really think it was most unwise of you to declare that my position sounded like religion, sounded like theology. You have to know that you're insulting me. And that was a pretty deliberate insult, and that was in the book. And I thought, Come on, Sam, so you can't expect kid gloves. If you're going to call me a theologian, then I'm going to call you on it and say, as I said, I tell my students when a view by apparently senior an author worth reading looks that bad, maybe you've misinterpreted it. And of course, the main point of my essay was, yes, you have misconstrued my brand of compatibility. You've got sort of a caricatured version of it. And in fact, as I say late in the piece, you are a compatibility in all the name. You and I agree on so many things. You agree with me that determinism and moral responsibility are compatible. You agree that a system of law, including punishment and justified punishment, is compatible with determinism. We're just that close to compatibility. I've actually toyed with the idea, in part provoked by you and some others, Jerry Coyne and others, to say, all right, I don't want to fight over who gets to define the term free will. As I see it, there are two completely intention themes out there about what free will is. One is that it's incompatible with determinism, and the other is that it's the basis of moral responsibility. I think it's the second one that's the important one. That's the variety of free will worth wanting. And I think the other one's a throwaway. And I agree with you. Indeterminist free will, libertarian free will is a philosopher's fantasy. It is not worth it. It's just a fantasy. So we agree on so much. We have no love for libertarian, indeterminism, for Agent Causation, for all of that metaphysical gobbledygook. We're both good naturalists, and we both agree that the truths of neuroscience and the truths of physics physics doesn't have much to do with it actually are compatible with most of our understanding, our everyday understanding of responsibility, taking responsibility, being morally responsible enough to be held to our word. I mean, you and I both agree that you are competent to sign a contract. Me too. Well, if you go and sign a deed or a mortgage, very often if it's notarized, the notary public will say, are you signing this of your own free will? And recently I said, yeah, I am. That's the sense of free will that I think is important. I have it. There are a lot of people that don't have that free will, and it has nothing to do with indeterminism. It has to do with their being disabled in some way. They don't have a well running nervous system, which you need if you're going to be a responsible agent. I think you agree with all of that. So I certainly agree with most of that. I think there are some interesting points of disagreement on the moral responsibility issue, which we should talk about, and I think that could be very interesting for listeners, for us to unpack those differences. I am, needless to say, very uncomfortable with the idea that I have misrepresented your view, and if I did that in my book, I certainly want to correct that here. So we should clearly state what your view is at a certain point here. But I want to step back for a second before we dive into the details of the philosophy of free will, what I was aware of doing in my book Free Will. And again, I would recommend that our listeners just go back and you don't actually have to read my book, but you can read Dan's review of it on my blog, and you can read my response, which is entitled The Marionette's Lament, I believe. Then you can see the bad blood that was generated there. And I don't know if Dan, if you're aware of this, you don't squander as much of your time on social media or in your inbox, but I heard from so many of our mutual readers that they were just despairing of that contradom between us. It was like mom and dad fighting, and it was totally unpleasant. The thing that I really regret which you regret that you didn't get a chance to read my book before I published it, which that would have been a nice thing for both of us. But what I regret is when you told me that you were planning to write a review of it, I kept urging you and ultimately badgering you to not do that and have a discussion with me because I knew what was going to happen, at least from my point of view, is that you would hit me with this 10,000 word volley, which, a dozen points or more, I would feel you had misconstrued mere or gone off the rails, and there would be no chance to respond to those. And to respond in a further 10,000 word volley in a piecemeal way would just lead to this exchange that was very boring to read and yielded a much bigger sense of disagreement than what was necessary. Right. If I have to spend 90% of my energy taking your words out of my mouth, then this thing begins to look purely adversarial. So one thing I've been struggling for in my professional life is a way of having conversations like this, even ones where there's much less goodwill than you and I have for one another, because you and I are friends and we're on the same side of most of these debates. And so we should be able to have this kind of conversation in a way that's productive. But I've been engaging people who think I'm a racist bigot as a starting point, and I want to find ways of having conversations in real time where you can be as nimble as possible in diffusing unnecessary conflict or misunderstanding. And writing is an especially bad way to do that. Certainly writing the 10,000 word New York Review of Books piece that then someone has to react to in an angry letter. So in any case, I wish we had that conversation, but we're having it now, and this is instructive in its own way. Feel free to react to that, but I guess I want you to also express what compatibilism means to you. And if you recall the way in which I got that wrong, feel free to say that, but I'll then react to your version of compatibility. Well, my view of compatibility is pretty much what I just said, and you were nodding and you were not considering that a serious view about free will, although you were actually almost all of it you were agreeing with. And you also, I think, made this serious strategic or tactical error of saying, this is like theology. It smells of theology. Well, as soon as you said that, I thought, well, you just don't understand what compatibility is. It's the opposite of theology. It's an attempt to look at what matters, to look at the terms and their meanings, and to recognize that sometimes ancient ideology gets in the way of clear thinking so that you can't just trust tradition. If you trusted tradition and the everyday meanings of words, we would have to say all sorts of silly things we've learned. In fact, one of the abiding themes in my work is there are these tactical or diplomatic choice points. You can say, oh, consciousness exists, it just isn't what you think it is. Or you can say, no, consciousness doesn't exist. Well, if you've got one view of consciousness, if it's this mysterious, magical, ultimately insoluble problem, then I agree consciousness in that sense doesn't exist. But there's another sense, much more presentable, I think, which, of course, consciousness exists. It just isn't what you think it is. That was a central theme in Elbow Room with regard to free will and in consciousness explained with regard to consciousness, my view, my tactic and notice those two views, they look as if they're doctrinally opposed. They're not. They're two different ways of dealing with the same issue. Does free will really exist? Well, if if free will means what Dennett says it means yes. And you agree if it means what some people think, then the answer is no. Yeah, I understand that. But I would put to you the question there is a difference between explaining something and changing the subject. So this is my gripe about compatibility, and this is something we'll get into. But I assume you will admit that there is a difference between purifying a real phenomenon of its folk psychological baggage, which I think this is what you think compatibility is doing, and actually failing to interact with some core features that are just in limitable from the concept itself. Let me surprise you by saying I don't think there's a sharp line between those two. And I think that's quite obvious. That whether I'm changing the subject, I'm so used to that retort about any line along this. So, no, I think that's just a debaters point. We should just set that aside. Saying you're just changing the subject is a way of or declaring a whole manifold, a whole variety spectrum of clarification views which you're not accepting because you're clinging to some core part of what free will is. You want to claim that free will the core of free will is its is its denial of determinism. And I've made a career saying that's not the core. In fact, let me try let me try a new line on you because I've been thinking, why doesn't he see this the way I see it? And I think that the big source the likely big source of confusion about this is that when people think about freedom in the context of free will, they're ignoring a very good and legitimate notion of freedom, which is basically the engineering notion of freedom. When you talk about degrees of freedom, my arms, my wrist, and my shoulder and my elbow, those joints there's three degrees of freedom right there. And in control theory, it's all about how you control the degrees of freedom. And if we look around the world, we can see that some things have basically no degrees of freedom that rock over there and some things, like you and me, have uncountably many degrees of freedom because of the versatility of our minds, the capacity that we can be moved by reasons on any topic at all. This gives us a complexity from the point of view of control theory which is completely absent in any other creature. And that kind of freedom is actually, I claim, at the heart of our understanding of free will because it's that complexity which is not just complexity, but it's the competence to control that complexity. That's what free will is. What you want, if you've got free will, is the capacity and it will never be perfect to respond to the circumstances with all the degrees of freedom you need to do what you think would be really the right thing to do. You may not always do the right thing, but let's take a dead simple case. Imagine writing a chess program which, stupidly, it was written wrong so that the king could only move forward or back or left or right, like a rook and it could not move diagonally. And this was somehow hidden in it so that it just never even considered moves diagonal. Moves by the king completely disabled chess program. It's missing in a very important degree of freedom which it should have and be able to control and recognize when to use and so forth what you want. Let me ask you a question about what would be ideal from the point of view of responsibility. What does an ideal responsible agent have? Mainly true beliefs, a well ordered set of desires, the cognitive adjoitness to change one's attention, to change one's mind, to be moved by reasons, the capacity to listen to reasons, the capacity for some self control these things all come in degrees. But our model of a responsible adult, someone you would trust, someone you would make a promise to or you would accept a promise from is somebody with all those degrees of freedom and control of them. Now, what removes freedom from somebody is if either the degrees of freedom don't exist, they're blocked mechanically or some other agent has usurped them and has taken over control. A marionette and a puppeteer. I think that our model of a free agent says nothing at all about indeterminism. We can distinguish free agents from unfree agents in a deterministic world or in an indeterministic world. Determinism and indeterminate make no difference to that categorization and it's that categorization which makes the moral difference. So yeah, I agree with almost all of that. I just need to put a few more pieces in play here. I think there is an important difference. Nevertheless. I agree that there is no bright line between changing the subject and actually purifying a concept of illusions and actually explaining something scientifically about the world. But in this case, the durability of free will as a problem for philosophers and now scientists is based on people's first person experience of something they think they have. People feel like they are the authors of their thoughts and intentions and actions. And so there is a there's a firstperson description of this problem and there's a thirdperson description of this problem. And I think if we bounce between the two without knowing that we're bouncing between the two, we are losing sight of of important details. So people feel that they have libertarian free will. And when I, when I get emails from people who are psychologically destabilized by my argument that free will doesn't exist, these are people who feel like something integral to their psychological life and well being is being put in jeopardy. And I can say this from both sides because I know what it's like to feel that I could have done otherwise. Let me just for listeners who aren't totally up to speed here, libertarian free will is anger to this notion of I could have done otherwise. So if we rewound the universe to precisely as it was a few moments ago, I could complete this sentence differently than I did. Whether you throw indeterminism or determinism or some combination thereof, there is no scientific rationale for that claim. If you rewound the universe to precisely its prior state with all relevant variables intact, whether deterministic or indeterministic, these words would come out of my mouth in exactly the same order and there would be no change. I would speak this sentence a trillion times in a row with its errors, with its glitches. So people feel that if they rewound the movie of their lives, they could do differently in each moment. And that feeling is the thing that is what people find so interesting about this notion that free will doesn't exist because it is so counterintuitive psychologically. Now, I can tell you that I no longer feel that subjectively, my experience of myself. I'm aware of the fact that it is a subjective mystery to me how these words come out of my mouth. It's like I'm hearing these words as you're hearing these words, right? I'm thinking out loud right now. I haven't thought this thought before I thought it right, it's just coming. And I am subjectively aware of the fact that this is all coming out of the darkness of my unconscious mind. In some sense. There's the sphere of my mind that is illuminated by consciousness, for lack of a better word, and I can be subjectively identified with it. But then there's all the stuff that is simply just arriving, appearing in consciousness, the contents of consciousness, which I can't notice until I notice them, and I can't think the thought before I think it. And my direct experience is compatible with a purely deterministic world right now. Most peoples isn't, or they don't think it is. And so that's where when you change the subject, the analogy I used in my article that responded to your review, which. I still think captures it for me. I'll just pitch it to you once more is the notion of Atlantis. So people are infatuated with this idea of Atlantis. I say, actually, Atlantis doesn't exist. It's a myth. There's nothing in the world that answers to the name of Atlantis. There was no underwater kingdom with advanced technology and all the rest. And whoever it was, Plato was confused on this topic or just spinning a yarn. And you compatibilism your variant, and perhaps every variant takes another approach. It says, no, actually, there is something that conserves much of what people are concerned with about Atlantis. And in fact, it may be the historical and geographical antecedent to the first stirrings of this idea of Atlantis. And there's this island of Sicily, the biggest island in the Mediterranean, which answers to much of what people care about with Atlantis. And I say, well, but actually what people really care about is the underwater kingdom with the advanced technology. And that is a fiction. So you and I are going to agree about Sicily. 99% of our truth claims about Sicily are going to converge. But I'm saying the whole reason why we're talking about Atlantis in the first place is there's this other piece that people are attached to which by you purifying the subject, you're actually just no longer interacting with that subjective piece. Yeah, that's well put. I think the analogy is less instructive. I don't think it's entirely fair, but let's leave it at that. Your position is that you can see very clearly that what people really care about is that free will should be something sort of magical. And you're right, a lot of people, if you don't think free will is magical, then you don't believe in free will. And that's what I confront and say, well, I got something which isn't magical, which is perfectly consistent with naturalism and gives us moral responsibility, justification for the way we treat each other, the distinctions that matter to us, like who do we hold responsible and who don't, who do we excuse because they don't have free will. It gives us all of the landmarks of our daily lives and explains why these are what matters. And indeed, though, if the mystery, if the magic is that important to people, I agree with you that magic doesn't exist. And if we're going to tie free will to that, then I would say no, free will doesn't exist. Now, you said something very interesting. You said that the reason people believe in this is because they feel it or they think they do it. They sort of intuit. They could have done something different in exactly the same situation. I agree with you that they that's what they think. But I don't think that it is a forlorn task to show them that that's not really what they should think about this, about the very feelings they have, their sense that they are as Kant says, acting under the idea of freedom. That's right, they are. And that's the only way an agent can be. This is a fairly deep point that an agent has to consider some things fixed and some things not fixed. You can't decide otherwise. The whole setting of decision making depends on there being that kind of freedom. And so it's no wonder, in a way, that people who are impressed with that decide that what they experience is a sense of utter freedom. They don't need utter freedom. What they need and have can have, is the sense that in many very similar circumstances, circumstances which differed maybe only in a few atoms, they would have made another decision. As soon as you allow any tiny change, when you rewind the tape, the whole business about determinism falls out of the picture. And that's why in actually several places, I've gone to considerable length, probably too long to trot out examples where we have a decision maker which is, in a demonstrably deterministic world, spaying chess, and it loses the game. And its designer says, well, it could have Castled. What do you mean, it could have Castled? What the designer means is it was just the luck of the draw. A chess program, like any complicated program, is going to consult a random number generator or a pseudo random number generator at various points. And this time it chose wrong. However, it chose wrong because when it got a number from the pseudo random number generator, it got a one rather than a zero. Flip a single bit and it would have made the other choice. In other words, it's not a design flaw. An agent could be, as it were, impeccably designed. You couldn't improve the design of the agent. So that's what justifies saying, yeah, I could have done otherwise. Half the time or more it would have done otherwise. It's just bad luck on this occasion. Normally it would have done otherwise. So I agree with all that. I think you're not acknowledging, however, how seditious those facts are to the degree to which they undermine people's felt sense of their own personhood. So if you tell me that, but for a single charge at a synapse, I would have decided I didn't want to have this conversation with you or I wouldn't have proposed to my wife, right? And my entire life would be different. Acknowledging the underlying neurophysiology of all of those choice points and how tiny a difference can be, that makes the crucial difference that suddenly brings back the marionette strings. Now, no one's holding the strings. The universe is holding the strings, but that is not what people feel themselves to be. This feeling that if you had had just one mouthful more of lunch, it's something very different, you would make a radically different decision 6 hours from now than you are going to make. That is a life that no one, virtually no one feels they're living this is going in good directions. I think you're largely right and exactly wrong in what you just said. I think you're right that this is a subversive idea to many people. They're so used to the idea that unless they're completely, absolutely undetermined, then they don't have free will. Now, the trouble with that is, if you look closely at that idea, you see if they were absolutely indeterminate, that wouldn't give them free will either. That's a red herring. So let's look at what does matter. It's interesting that you say that if I thought that some tiny atomic change would have altered the course of some big important life decision, let's look closely at that, because what I think we should say is it is indeed true that there are times when a decision is a real toss up. When you've thought about it, thought about it, thought about it, you're going to have to act pretty soon and you just can't make up your mind in cases like that. And it may be something that's morally very important. The idea that when you do make the decision, had the few atoms been slightly different, you would have made the other decision. I don't find that upsetting at all, because that's one of those situations. And it doesn't mean that when the evidence and the reasons are preponderantly on one side no, then you'd have to make a very large change in the world for a different decision to come out. Sometimes the indeterminate, the libertarians, in fact, it's a sort of signature of a lot of their views, say that there has to be an absolutely undetermined choice of some importance at somewhere in the causal chain of your life for your action to be responsible. Now, plus, I had long thrust into their faces the example of Luther who says, I can do no other. He's not ducking responsibility. He's saying, believe me, it wasn't had the light been different or the wind not been blowing, I would have no, he's saying, I was determined to do this. And yet he's not saying it's not a free decision. They some of them, amazingly to me, fall for the bait and say, oh, well, that's only because it must have been the case, that somewhere in Luther's life there was a mode. It might have been in his childhood, when there were two paths, A and B, and he chose A, which led to him putting nailing the theses on the door. And at that moment it was absolutely undetermined that he'd choose A. I think that's the craziest fantasy imaginable. It doesn't depend on that. So I agree with you that when we think about how chance luck enters into our lives, that can be very unsettling. And we should not hide from the fact that there are times when it's a toss up and we may rejoice in the decision we make or we may bitterly regret it. And the fact that we couldn't do that it was not in our control. It's maybe it's a tragic fact, but it's not a fact which disables us for responsibility. You're playing chess to take a deliberately trivial case, considering two possible moves for the life of you, you can't see what the better one is. You sort of mentally flip a coin you don't know works out great. You're very likely to retrospectively decorate that with the claim that that's what you've determined. You're kidding yourself. You're just taking responsibility for a little bit of lucky random coin flip in your decision process. That does not. In fact, not only does that not disable you for free will, I think an important human point about free will is that free responsible agents recognize that when they act, they're going to be held responsible. Whether or not they are in complete control of and they can't be in complete control of the decision making that goes to making up their minds. Well, now, I think we're getting into some very interesting territory where we might actually disagree, because I think perhaps your notion of moral responsibility is something that I don't agree with. I think I can do any kind of compatible if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I'm going to be speaking with David Crackauer, who runs the Santa Fe Institute, one of the most interesting organizations scientifically anywhere. And David is a mathematical biologist. He has a PhD in evolutionary theory from Oxford, but being at the Santa Fe Institute puts him at the crossroads of many different areas of inquiry. We talk a little bit about what the Institute is, but given that its focus is on complex systems, the people there attempt to understand complexity using every scientific and intellectual tool available. So David knows a lot about many things. As you'll hear in this conversation, we start by covering some foundational concepts in science, like information and complexity and intelligence, then move on from there to talk about the implications for society and culture and the future. In any case, I love talking to David, and I hope you enjoy the ground we covered. And now I give you David Krakauer. I have David Krakauer on the line. David, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Pleasure to be with you. So, David, you gave a really fascinating lecture in Los Angeles that I want to talk about, and I essentially want you to just track through that as much as you can without your visuals. And I'm especially interested in the importance of culture and the the importance of artifacts that we create for human intelligence and resisting our slide into stupidity, which you which you talked about, which was the focus of your talk. But before we get there, let's just set the stage a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your scientific interests and background. Well, it's great to be with you first. My scientific interests, as I've come to understand them, are essentially grappling with the problem of the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth. And it's quite common for people to talk about intelligence. It's less common for people to talk about stupidity, even though arguably it's more common. And so my background is in mathematical evolutionary theory and essentially work on information and computation in nature that would include the nature that we've created, that we call technology and where it came from, what it's doing today, and where it's going in the future. And so you would you describe yourself as a mathematical biologist? Is that the right category? Yeah, I think it's reasonable. I think, unfortunately, all of these categories are starting to strain a little. Yeah. Now you're running the Santa Fe Institute, which I think, quite happily, its existence seems to be predicated on the porousness of these boundaries between disciplines or even their nonexistence. And so maybe describe the institute for people who are not familiar with it. Yeah. So the Santa Fe Institute is in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as the name would suggest. It was founded in the mid 80s by a group of Nobel laureates from physics and economics and others who were interested in trying to do for the complex world what mathematical physics had done so successfully for the simple world. I should explain that. So the simple world would be the solar system or inorganic chemistry or black holes. They're not easy to understand, but you can encapsulate their fundamental properties by writing down a system of equations. When you get to the complex world, which basically means networked adaptive systems. So that could be a brain, a network of neurons, it could be a society, it could even be the Internet. And in those networked adaptive systems, complex systems, the kinds of formalisms that we had created historically to deal with simple systems failed. That's why we don't have Maxwell's equations of the brain. We have large textbooks with many anatomical descriptions, some schematic representations of function, and some very specialized models. And the question for us at SFI is, are there general principles that span the economy, brains, the Internet and so on? And what is the most natural way of articulating them mathematically and computationally? And how is SFI different from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where I think you also were, if I'm not mistaken. Yes, that's right. So the IAS in Princeton is a lot older. It was founded in the 30s. We were founded in the IAS is an extraordinary place. But the model, if you like, is much more traditional. So IAS has tenure, it has departments, and it has schools. We do not have tenure, we do not have departments, and we do not have schools. So they've created, in some sense, they've replicated, I guess, a very successful model that is the university model. We decided to start again from a blank slate, and we asked the question, if you are now reinventing a research institute based on everything that we now know, post scientific revolution, post technological revolution, et cetera, what should it look like? And so it's a more radical model. And so we decided very early just to discard any mention of disciplines and departments and focus as hard as we could on the common denominators of the complex systems that we were studying. And it's truly interdisciplinary. You have economists and mathematicians and biologists and physicists all throwing in their two cent on the same problems. Is that correct? Absolutely. I mean, just as an example, there's all this debate now about the demise of the humanities, and but we from the very beginning decided that that wasn't a worthwhile distinction between the natural sciences and the humanities. So we were working on the archaeology of the Southwest and using computational and physical models, since the have produced what is by now a very well known series of theories for why, for example, some of the native civilizations of the American Southwest declined the origin of ancient cities. And all of these are based on computational and energetic theories and close collaborations between archeologists and, say, physicists. So the way we do it, I don't like to call it interdisciplinary, because that's in some sense genuflecting in the direction of a superstition that I know to take seriously. Right. And so what happens when you ignore all of that and say, let's certainly use the skills that we've acquired in the disciplines, but let's leave them at the door and just be intelligent about complex problems? Yeah, really, what you have is an institutional argument, it seems to me, for the unity of knowledge or concilience, that really the boundaries between disciplines are much more a matter of university architecture and just the kind of bandwidth issues of any individual life where it takes a long time to get very good at one thing. And so, by definition, someone starts out in one area as opposed to another and spends rather a long time there in order to get competent. Anyway, I think what you're doing there is very exciting. Thank you. So before we get into your talk, there's a few things I just want you to enlighten me and our audience about, because there's some concepts here that you are going to use that I think are difficult to get one's head around. And the first is the concept of information. And I think there are many senses in which we use this term, and not all of them are commensurable. It seems to me that there is a root concept, however, that potentially unites fields like genetics and brain science and computer science and even physics. So how do you think about information? Yeah, so I should say we've talked about this before, Sam, and that is sometimes what I call the M Cubed Mayhem. That is M raised to the power three mayhem. And the mayhem comes from not understanding the difference between mathematics, the first M, mathematical models, the second M, and metaphors, the third. And there are terms, scientific terms, mathematical terms that are also used idiomatically or have a colloquial meaning. And they very often get us into deep water, energy, fitness, utility, capacity, information, computation. And so we all use them in our daily lives, probably very effectively, but they also have a technical meaning. And what happens often is that arguments flare up because one person is using it mathematically and another person metaphorically, and they don't realize they're doing this. So that's the first point to make. And they're all valuable. I don't mean to say that there is only a mathematical definition of information. But it's worth bearing in mind that when I talk about it, that's what I mean. So that's the first point. It has an in, beautiful, scientific storied history, starting with essentially the birth of the field that we now call statistical mechanics. And this was essentially Boltzman trying to understand the arrow of time in the physical world, the origin of irreversibility. Why is it that you can crack and break an egg, but the reverse almost never happens? Why is it that you can burn wood into ash and smoke, but the reverse almost never happens? And he created, in the 1870s, a theory called the H theorem, where he essentially had in mind lots of little billiard balls bumping into each other chaotically. He called it molecular chaos. And through repeated collisions, you start with a fairly ordered billiard table, but at the end, they're distributed rather randomly all over the table, and that was Boltzman. And he thought maybe the underlying molecular structure of matter was like lots of little billiard balls. And the reason why we observe certain phenomena in nature as irreversible is because of molecular chaos. And that was formalized later by very famous American physicist jaziah willard Gibbs. But many years later, the baton was picked up by an engineer working at Bell Labs, claude Shannon. And he realized that there was a connection between physics and irreversibility and the arrow of time and information. It was a very deep insight that he had. And before explaining how that works, what did Claude Shannon do? He said, look, here's what information is. Let's say I want you to navigate from one part of a city to another, from A to B in a car. I could just drive around randomly. It would take an awful long time to get there, but I might eventually get there. Alternatively, I could give you a map or driving directions, and you'd get there very efficiently. And the difference between the time taken to get there randomly and the time taken to get there with directions is a measure of information. And Shannon mathematized that concept and said, that is the reduction of uncertainty. You start off not knowing where to go. You get information in the form of a map or driving directions, and then you get there directly. And he formalized that, and he called that information. And it's the opposite of what Boltzmann and Gibbs are talking about. It's a system going instead of going from the ordered into the disordered state, the billiard balls on the table, starting maybe in a lattice and ending up randomly distributed, it's going from a state of them being random because you don't know where to go to becoming ordered. And so it turns out that Shannon realized that information is, in fact, the negative of thermodynamic entropy. And it was a beautiful connection that he made between what we now think of as the science of information and what was the science of statistical physics. Well. So let's bring this into the domain of biology, because I've been hearing now, with increasing frequency, this idea that biological systems and even brains do not process information. And that the analogy of the brain as a computer is no more valid than the analogy of it as a system of hydraulic pumps or wheelworks powered by springs and gears or a telegraph. These are all old analogies to the most current technology of the time. And there was an article in Aon magazine, I think it's just an online journal that probably a dozen people sent to me. And I thought it made this case very badly. And you and I talked about this briefly when we first met. Now, it seems to me no one, to my knowledge, thinks that the brain is a computer in exactly the way our current computers are computers. We're not talking about von Neumann architecture in our brains. Yes. But the idea that it doesn't process information at all and the idea that the claim that it does is just as crazy as claiming that it's a mechanism of gears and springs strikes me as fairly delusional. But I keep meeting people who will argue this, and some of them are very high level in the sciences. So I was hoping we could talk a little bit about the ways in which biological systems, in particular brains, encode and transmit information. Yes. So this takes me right back to my M cubed mayhem because that's a beautiful example in that paper of the author not knowing the difference between a mathematical model and a metaphor. And so you gave a beautiful example. You talked about springs and levers and their physical artifacts. Right. And then there are mathematical models of springs and levers which are actually used in understanding string theory. So let's talk a little bit about the computer in the brain. It's very important because you mentioned von Neumann and it spans elegantly that spectrum from mathematics to mathematical models to metaphors. The first real theory of computing that we have is due to Alan Turing in the 1930s. And he was a mathematician. Many people know him from the movie The Imitation Game and for his extraordinary work on Enigma and decoding German submarine codes in the Second World War. But what he's most famous for in our world is answering a really deep mathematical question that was posed by the German mathematician David Hilbert in 1928. And Hilbert said, Could I give a machine a mathematical question or proposition? And it would tell me in reasonable amount of time whether it was true or whether it was false. Right. And that's the question he posed. Could we in some sense automate mathematics? And in 1936, Turing, in answering that question, invented a mathematical model that we now know as the Turing machine. And it's a beautiful thing. I'm sure you've talked about it on your show before. And Turing did something remarkably said you know you can't answer that question. There are certain mathematical statements that are fundamentally uncomputable. You could never answer them. And it was a really profound breakthrough in mathematics because it said there are certain things in the world that we could never know through computation. So years later, Turing himself in the 40s realized that in solving a mathematical problem, he had actually invented a mathematical model, the Turing machine. And he realized that Turing machine was actually not just a model for solving math problems, but it was actually the model of problem solving itself. And the model of problem solving itself is what we mean by computation. And in the 1950s, actually 58, John von Neumann, who you mentioned, wrote a book, very famous book called The Computer and the Brain. He said perhaps what Alan Turing had done in his paper on intelligent machinery has given us the mathematical machinery for understanding the brain itself. And at that point, it became a metaphor. And John Voynoy himself realized it was a metaphor, but he thought it was a very powerful one, as they soften are. So that's the history. And so now up into the present. So, as you point out, there's a tendency to be a bit epistemologically narcissistic. We tend to use whatever current model we use and project that onto the natural world is almost the best fitting template for how it operates. Here's the value or the utility and disutility of the concept the value of what Turing and von Neumann did was give us a framework for starting to understand how a problem solving machine could operate. We didn't really have in our mind's eye an understanding for how that could work. And they gave us a model for how it could work. For many reasons, some of which you've mentioned, the model is highly imperfect. Computers are not robust. If I stick a pencil in your CPU, your machine will stop working. But I can sever the two hemispheres of the brain and you can still function. You're very efficient. Your brain consumes about 20% of the energy of your body, which is about 20 watts, 20% of a light bulb. Your laptop consumes about that and has some tiny fraction of your power, and they're highly connected. The neurons are densely wired, whereas that's not true of computer circuits, which are only locally wired. And most importantly, the brain is constantly rewiring and adapting based on inputs in your computer is not. So we know the ways in which it's not the same. But as I say, it's useful as a thought experiment for how the brain might operate. So that's the computer term. But now let's take the information term. That one for me. And that magazine article you mentioned is criticizing the information concept, not the computer concept, which is limited. And we all agree that the information concept is not right. We've already determined what information is mathematically. It's the reduction of uncertainty. And if you think about your visual system when you open your eyes in the morning and you don't know what's out there in the world. Electromagnetic energy, which is transduced by photoreceptors in your retina and then transmitted through to visual cortex, allows you to know something about the world that you did not know before. So it's like going from the billiard balls all over the table to the billiard balls in a particular configuration. Very formally speaking, you have reduced the uncertainty about the world. You've increased the information. And it turns out you can measure that mathematically and the extent to which that's useful is proved by essentially, neuroprosthetics. The information theory of the brain allows us to build cochlear implants. It allows us to control robotic limbs with our brains. So it's not a metaphor. It's a deep mathematical principle. It's a principle that allows us to understand how the brain is operating and re engineer it. And so it's one of those cases where I think the article is so utterly confused that it's almost not worth attending to. Now, that's information information processing, if that's synonymous in your vocabulary, with computing in the Turing sense, then you and I have just agreed that it's not right. But if information processing is what you do with Shannon information, for example, to transduce electromagnetic impulses into electrical firing patterns in the brain, then it's absolutely applicable. And then how you store it, and then how you combine information sources. So when I see an orange, it's orange color, and it's also a sphere. I have tactile mechanical impulses. I have visual electromagnetic impulses. And in my brain, they're combined into a coherent representation of an object in the world. And the coherent representation is in the form of an informational language, spiking. And so it's extraordinarily useful. It's allowed us to engineer neuro biologically memetic architectures, and it's made a huge difference in the lives of many individuals who have been born with severe disabilities. So I think we can take that article and shred it. Yeah. As I was reading the article again, this was one of those almost not even wrong categories of error. But I was thinking of things like genes can be on or off, right? So there's a digital component going all the way down into the genome. And the genome itself is a kind of memory, right? It's a memory for structure and physiology and even certain behaviors that have proved adaptive in the past, and therefore, it's a template for producing those in future organisms. That's exactly right. And so that's the great power of mathematical concepts, because, and again, we have to be clear in making distinctions between the metaphor of memory and the mathematical model of memory. And the beautiful thing that's why mathematics is so extraordinary and powerful is that once we move to the mathematical model of memory, exactly as you say, you can demonstrate that there are memories stored in genes, there are memories stored in the brain. There are memories stored in culture, and they bear an extraordinary family resemblance through the resemblance in the mathematical equations. So you described it as concilience in Ed Wilson's term. You could describe it as unification in the language of physics. And they're totally legitimate. Where we run into trouble is if we don't move to the mathematics, but we only remain in the world of metaphor. And there, of course, everyone has a slightly different matrix of associations and you can never fully resolve the ambiguity. Right. Except though even at the level forget about the math for a second and let's just talk about something that's perilously close to metaphor. We are simply talking about cause and effect relationships that in this case reliably link inputs and outputs. Right? Even in that article, he was talking about the nervous system being changed by experience. He just didn't want to talk about the resulting changes in terms of memory or information storage or encoding or anything else that suggested an analogy to a computer. But there's just this fact that change in physical structure can produce reliable change in its capacities going forward. And whether we want to call that memory or not or learning or not, biologically, physically, that's what we're talking about. Absolutely. That's what we're talking about. No, you're right. You see, that's the point. It has to do with this legitimate fear of anthropomorphism. And I think that what we do in these sort of more exact sciences is try and pin down our dip definitions so as to eliminate some of the ambiguities. They never go away entirely. But my suspicion, Sam, is that the author of that article will simply find a language that doesn't have its roots, if you like, in the world of information, and apply these new terms. But we would realize if we read it through thoroughly that they were, in fact just synonyms. Right. He would find himself having to use these terms because they are, to the best of our knowledge, the best terms. We have to explain the regularities we observe. Right. And yet we don't have to use terms like hydraulic pumps or the four humors or we can grant that there have been bad analogies in the past where the details are not actually conserved in any way going forward. Well, but look at the good example. It's a beautiful example because where we have used that is, if you're talking about your cardiac system or your U renogenital system, it is entirely appropriate to use Harvey's model, which was the pump. The ones that worked have stuck. And I think it's just time that will tell us whether or not our use of the informational concept will be an anachronism or will have enduring value. Well, for those of you who are interested to read this paper that we are trashing, I will put the link on my blog Beneath, where I embed this podcast. So now, moving on to your core area of interest. We've dealt with information. What is complexity? Yes. And so that's a wonderful example of one of these terms that we use in daily life but also has mathematical meaning. So the simplest way to think about complexity is as follows. Imagine you had a very regular object, like a cube. You could express it just by describing its linear dimensions. And that would tell you what a cube is. And imagine you want to explain something at the other end of the spectrum, like a gas in a room. You could articulate that very reliably by just giving the mean velocities of particles in air. You know? So these two extremes, the very regular, the crystal to the very random gas permit of a description which is very short. And so over the phone or over Skype as we're speaking, I could describe to you very reliably a regular object or a very irregular object. But now let's imagine you said, can you please describe to me, David, a mouse? And I said, well, it's this sort of weird tubular thing, and it's got hairs at one end, it's got long appendage at the other, et cetera. It would take an awfully long time to describe. And complexity is essentially proportional to that description. So that's a metaphor. And it turns out, mathematically that complex phenomena live somewhere between the regular and the random. And their hallmark signature is that their mathematical descriptions are long. And that's what's made complexity science so hard, because Einstein could write down a beautiful equation like equals empty squared that captures the equivalents between energy and mass and has all these beautiful implications and special relativity less than a line. But how would you write down a mouse, which seems like a much more boring thing than energy and matter? And you can't. And so that's one way intuitive way of thinking about a complex phenomena, which is, how long does the description have to be to reliably capture much of what you consider interesting about it? And one point to make immediately is that if you look at physical phenomena, they started off long, too, right? So before Kepler revolutionized our understanding of celestial mechanics, we had armory spheres with all these epicycles and deference, right, explaining incorrectly the circular motion of celestial mass. And it took a while for us to realize that there was a very compact, elegant way of describing them. And it could be that for many complex phenomena, there is a very elegant, compact way of describing them. But many others, I don't think that will be the case. So complexity are, as I said, these networked adaptive systems. Complexity itself, as a concept, mathematically tries to capture how hard it is to describe a phenomenon. And as they get more complex, these descriptions get longer and longer and longer and longer. Right. You said something about randomness there that caught my ear because I thought if I gave you a truly random string of digits, unless you're talking about there was some method by which to produce it reliably, let's say, like the decimal expansion of pi. Yeah. That can be compressed. But if it's just a truly random series of digits, that's not compressible. Right. That's just that's absolutely right. And so that that's a very important distinction. And that is I can describe the process of generating heads and tails by describing the dynamics of a coin. And so that's very short. Right, but if I was trying to describe the thing I observe, then you're saying it would be incompressible and the description would be as long as the sequence described. In all of these cases, you're always talking about the underlying causal process that generates the pattern and not the pattern itself. And that's a very important distinction. So now, this is the first time I've ever conducted a conversation or interview like this, which is just kind of stepping through definitions, but I think it's warranted in this case. So what is intelligence and how is it related to complexity? Yeah. So intelligence is, as I say to people, one of the topics about which we have been most stupid and in so many ways we probably shouldn't get into it. Not least that it is the topic about which we are least evolutionary. Right. Because all of our definitions of intelligence are based on measurements that can only be applied to humans and by and large, humans that speak English or what have you. So it's one of those areas that's been extremely foolishly pursued. So I don't mean an IQ test, okay. Because the IQ test is not interesting if you're trying to calculate the intelligence of an octopus, which I would like to know because I believe in evolution and I think that we need to understand where these things come from. And just having a definition that applies to one particular species doesn't help us. So what is it? And we've talked about entropy and computation, and they're going to be the keys to understanding intelligence. And so let's go back to randomness. The examples I like to give is the Rubik's Cube, because it's a beautiful little mental model metaphor. If I gave you a cube and I asked you to solve it and you just randomly manipulated it, since it has on the order of 10 quintillion solutions, which is a very large number, you basically, if you were immortal, would eventually solve it. And but it would take the lifetime of several universes to do so. That is random performance. Stupid performance is if you took one face of the cube and you just manipulated that one face and turned it, rotated it forever. And as everyone knows, if you did that, you would never solve the queue if you weren't already at the solution. And it would be an infinite process that would never be resolved. That rule is, in my definition, stupid. It is significantly worse than chance. Now, let's take someone who's learned how to manipulate a cube and is familiar with various rules. And these rules allow you, from any initial configuration, to solve the cube in 20 moves or less. That is intelligent behavior. So significantly better than chance. And this sounds a little counterintuitive, perhaps, until you realize that's how we use the word in our daily lives. If I sat down with an extraordinary mathematician and I said, I can't solve that equation, and they say, well, no, it's easy here, this is what you do. And you look at it, you say, oh, yes, it is easy, right? You made that look easy. That's what we mean when we say someone is smart. They make things look easy. If, on the other hand, I sat down with someone who was incapable and they just kept dividing by two for whatever reason, I say, what earth are you doing? What a stupid thing to do. You'll never solve the problem. What a foolish thing to do. What an inefficient thing to do. So that is what we mean by intelligence. It's the thing that we do that ensures that the problem is very efficiently solved and in a way that makes it appear effortless. And stupidity is a set of rules that we use to ensure that the problem will be solved in longer than chance or never and is nevertheless pursued with the leprosy and enthusiasm. So now we're getting closer to the actual substance of the lecture you gave that I want you to recapitulate part of here, because I just found it fascinating. You can recapitulate as much as you want to of it, but I'm in particular interested in the boundary line you drew between biology and culture and the way in which culture is a machine really, for increasing our intelligence. And then you at some point express some real fear that we are producing culture or stewarding our institutional intelligence in a way that is actually making us biologically or personally less intelligent, perhaps to a dangerous degree in certain circumstances. So if you could just get us there at this point. Yeah. So this is a little bit of a lengthy narrative. I'm going to try and compress it or make it as least complex as possible. So most of us are brainwashed to believe that we're born with a certain innate intelligence and we learn things to solve problems, but our intelligence goes basically unchanged. And you hear this all the time in conversations or say that person is really smart, it's just they never worked very hard, they didn't learn very much, whereas that person is not very smart, but they learned a great deal and it makes them look smarter, that sort of thing. And I think that's absolute rubbish. So I think there's a very real sense in which education and learning makes you smarter. So that's sort of, in some sense, my premise. But just stop there for a second. You wouldn't dispute though, that there are differences in what psychologists have come to call G general intelligence and that this is somehow not necessarily predicated upon acquiring new information. I would dispute that you think the concept of IQ is just useless not just in octopi but in people, more or less. And I should explain why. And I think a lot of recent research is required to understand why. Let's just take an example. There are just canonical examples. The young Mozart, right? People will say, well, look, wait a minute, this is a kid who at the age of seven had absolute pitch and in his teens you could play him a symphony that he could recollect note for note and reproduce on a score and et cetera, right? And surely this is an individual who's born. And what we now understand, of course, is that his father was a tyrant who from an extraordinarily young age drilled him and his sister in acquiring perfect pitch in the subtleties of musical notation. And consequently he was able to acquire very young characteristics that normally you wouldn't acquire later because normally you wouldn't be drilled. And so and in fact, more and more studies indicating that if you subject individuals to deliberative practice regimes they can acquire skills that seem almost extraordinary. Let's take G and the IQ in general. So we now know that what it really seems to be measuring is working memory. And many working memory tasks are correlated and they live on this low dimensional space that we call gene. And now one of the classic studies was the number of numbers that you could hold in your head. In other words, I recite off a number of numbers and I ask you to remember them and ten minutes later I ask you you're not allowed to write them down, but what you do is you replay them in your mind and you know, people could do ten, maybe they could do eleven. And this was considered to be some upper limit on our short term memory for numbers. And yet a series of experiments have now been studied where through very intelligent and ingenious means of encoding numbers, we have people now who can remember up to 300. And these are individuals, by the way, who at no point in their lives ever showed any particular extraordinary memory capacity. And so the evidence is on the side of plasticity, not on innate aptitudes. And to the extent that IQ is fundamentally measuring working memory, we now know how to start extending it. So that's an important point. I wouldn't deny that there are innate variations. I mean, I am not six foot five and not even six foot, and so I will never be a basketball player. And so there are functions in the world that are responsive to variation that looks as if it's somewhat inflexible. But in the world of the brain, given that it is not a computer and the wiring diagram is not fixed in the factory, but actually adapts to inputs. There's much more hope that the variation is in fact evidence that the variation is much greater than we had thought. So the plasticity and trainability can just ride atop variation that exists that is innate. So you could have differences in aptitude with and without training. But that's exactly right. And I think that's precisely true. And I think the open question for us is how much of that, if you like, innate Lego material is universal, whereas how many of those pieces had already been preassembled into little castles and cars which we then could build upon. And I think that are some people arriving on the stage with an advantage is actually not known. And I think all I'm reporting is that the current Deliberative practice data suggests that that's less true than we thought it was. That's the point. Right, which puts the onus to an even greater degree than most people would expect on culture and on what you do with your time and on parenting and all of this machinery that is outside any individual brain, which is in a very material sense augmenting its intelligence. And so take us into that direction. Yeah, so that that's a very important point. So that that's why that connection is is important to make. So, okay, so now we've basically understood what intelligence is, what stupidity is. We understand that we are flexible to an extraordinary degree, maybe not infinitely so. And as you point out, the inputs then become much more important than we had thought in the past. And so let's now move into intelligent, or what sometimes gets called cognitive artifacts. So here's an example. Your ability to do mathematics or perform mathematical reasoning is not something you were born with. You did not invent numbers, you did not invent geometry or topology or calculus or algebraic geometry or number theory or anything else for that matter. They were all given to you if you chose to study mathematics as a class in a class. And what those things allow you to do is solve problems that other people cannot solve. And for all of us in our lives, numbers are the, in some sense, the lowest hanging fruit in our mathematical education. And so let's look at numbers. There are many number systems in the world. They're very ancient. Ancient Sumerian, uneiform numbers, about 5000 years old, ancient Egyptian numbers. And here's a good example of stupidity and culture. Western Europe for 1500 years used Roman numbers, roman numerals from about the second century BC to about 1500 Ad. Towards the end of the Holy Roman Empire. And Roman numbers are good at measuring magnitude, the number of objects, but terrible for performing calculation. So adding to what's, x plus v, you know, what's x? One, one multiplied by one v and so on, it just doesn't work. And yet, for 1500 years, the human brain opted to deliberate over arithmetic operations using Roman numerals that don't work. And the consequence of that is that Europeans, for much of their history, could not divide and multiply. And it's an extraordinary thing because it's unbelievably stupid. And it's unbelievably stupid when you realize that in India and Arabia, they had a number system, started in India, moved to Arabia, that was available from about the second century, that is the one that we use today that would effortlessly be able to multiply and divide numbers. And so that's a beautiful example of the interface between culture and our own reasoning. And the reason it's so intriguing is because once I've taught you a number system like the Indian Arabic number system, base ten number system, you don't need the world anymore, you don't need paper anymore to write it down. You can do these operations in your mind's eye. And that's what makes them so fascinating. And I call that kind of object that was invented over the course of centuries by many, many minds, complementary cognitive artifacts. And their unique characteristic to it is not only do they augment your ability to reason in the form, for example, of multiplying or dividing, but when I take them away from you, you have in your mind a trace of their attributes that you can deploy. And that it's interesting. That's probably what's new in thinking about the evolution of cultural intelligence. For a long time, psychologists, cognitive scientists, archeologists, have understood that there are objects in the world that allow us to do things we couldn't do otherwise, right? I mean, a fork or a side or a wheel, it been understood. But there is a special kind of object in the world that not only does what the wheel and the side and the fork does, but it also changed the wiring of your brain so that you can build in your brain a virtual fork or a virtual size or a virtual wheel. Of course, not those bits. And that is, I would claim, by the way, the unique characteristic of human evolution. Wouldn't you put language itself into this category? Absolutely I would. Absolutely I would. The reason I separate them, by the way, is that many people erroneously assume the others are if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. My guest today is Eric Weinstein, who is a mathematician and physicist and economist and all around interesting guy, who is currently the managing Director of Teal Capital. Now, as most of you know who have listened to previous podcasts, my interviews are really more conversations than interviews. I would guess I usually take up about, I don't know, 40% of the space. But if this exchange seems a little more self referential than normal, I would just like to give you a little context as to why, which I briefly do. In the beginning of my conversation with Eric, eric actually reached out to me, suggesting that he could help me think a little more clearly about how to engage the kinds of controversial issues I tend to deal with. So while we talk about many different things, the subtext is that he's performing a bit of an intervention on me. So I hope that explains why I didn't ask him more questions about all the fascinating stuff he's into that'll have to wait until next time. In any case, Eric is a very interesting guy, as you will easily discern, and he was also very generous in his efforts to talk some sense into me. So without any more preamble, I give you Eric Weinstein. So I'm here with Eric Weinstein. Eric, thanks for coming on the podcast. Well, thanks for having me over. So I was trying to remember how we got connected, and I now recognize why I was confused. So I heard you on Tim's podcast, and I loved that conversation and was poised to get in touch with you, but then you got in touch with me, I think just on your own on Twitter, having noticed some of my collisions with people. And you expressed and I have the quote here but by email, you were dismayed to find that people who you expected would be rational and not at all anti intellectual were in conversation with me on various topics proving to be just that. And you said that you found them trying to rescue the failed bits of multiculturalism at seemingly any cost to logic and ethics. And this was, at the time, Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald, who you said that of, and you wanted to just reach out and see if you could help. And I obviously am very happy you did that. And I'm happy to have any help I can get. But then in the setup to this podcast, you had the somewhat comical and perhaps disconcerting experience of pinging some of your friends about me, only to find that at least two of them also counted themselves among my enemies. Maybe enemies is too strong a term for one of them, but you are friends with Naseem Taleb, the quant author of The Black Swan, and he has made his hatred might not be too strong a word, but he certainly made his displeasure with me fairly indelible on Twitter. That is odd for you to discover in the set up here. And also David Eagleman, the neuroscientist, who I had kind of an aborted debate with and that was far less prickly, but still a failure of communication, which from my side happened very much along the lines of these other failures. You notice where there's a kind of I guess I often think of it as my opponent or the interlocutor who becomes my opponent finds him or herself wanting to play a good cop bad cop routine with me. And I have a criticism of religion in most cases here that people find whether they're religious or not. And in most of these cases, the other person is not religious, but they find it somehow synonymous with the breaking of some kind of taboo. Or they consider it uncivil in a way. And they try to take a position against what I think is undeniably. Just the intellectually honest position to take at this moment in human history. The conversation breaks down. And so, yeah, you and I are going to talk about the limits of reason on some level and see if we can advance the tools we have mutually to have rational conversations. But it's just interesting that even the agenda we have here today in this conversation got subtly eroded by you. Perhaps you can tell me, but I would imagine a crisis of confidence on your side where you because you're you're reaching out to your network to figure out who is this guy? And you receive some pushback. But perhaps in the midst of answering that, you can say a bit about who you are and your history of intellectual interests and how you come to this conversation. It'd be a pleasure. I think one of the things that caused me to come down when it's obviously much more convenient to do this over Skype or over the Internet is I've seen too many good marriages and rich friendships break up over ASCII and Unicode and that there's something about the electronic medium which denies us empathy, face to face contact. And very often we get off on the wrong foot and we don't know how to write it in real life. Yeah. And so in part, it's my distrust of whether these are essential conflicts. This could be like the Trotsky's Leninist Stalinists versus the Stalinist Trotskyists. And these are hair's breaths of difference in that they tend to get much more exaggerated in terms of the heat that they generate. And then there's also this very interesting problem, and in fact, around my office, we call it the limits of discourse problem after some of your adventures and misadventures. And the question is, who can play? When two people sit down to discuss a topic, is there any set of descriptors which can predict whether the conversation will be rich or whether it will derail over more or less intellectually trivial features? Yeah. So what is your background, briefly, in just your intellectual history and your current interests? Where are you focused mostly? I mean, I think by education and credential, I would be a mathematician. I've held positions in mathematics, physics and economics departments. I have worked in hedge funds and finance risk, and I'm now managing Director of Teal Capital, working with Peter Teal in San Francisco on a wide variety of things through the Teal Foundation, our macro trading outfit, and various venture funds, and trying to make the world a better place in both the private sector and public intellectualism. So I know Peter and not well, obviously. I've just met him a few times. But the first idea for this conversation was actually to have the three of us speak, and scheduling may have made that difficult. But also I think it's a good thing, given what I've said on the podcast about Trump and his recent speech to the RNC. I just think we would and I would love to talk to Peter. Peter shouldn't take this part the wrong way, but I just think we would have had to have spoken about Trump at length in a way that would have just subsumed everything else in the conversation. And I'm happy to speak about politics with you, but again, this is one of those issues that proved so difficult to talk about. So I don't know what the outcome of my talking to Peter about Trump would be, but what do you think it is about politics, perhaps second only to religion, that makes conversation either reliably impossible or just so difficult? It's a great question. Of course, I have a 2016 version of this answer that might not be the same as the answer I'd given another election year. I think right at the moment, the problem is that a lot of us, and I assume you and I are roughly the same age. I'm 50. You're pretty close. 49. Yeah. Okay. I think that fundamentally, we're we're trying to express ourselves through people who don't represent us. And this isn't their time. This is our time. And there's no way I can represent myself through Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump. They don't share my experience. I don't have the same reference points that they do. My life doesn't resemble theirs. They went through different formative experiences than I did. And I think that part of the problem, is that we're trapped in prisons of language, and we're grooved in ways of thinking that we're adapted to, and I think poorly adapted to the world of the 1980s and beyond. I feel like the Reagan era more or less went from 1980 to 2008. And then we've been in a zombie period where we don't have new theories. We just sort of have these old theories that don't die because we don't have anything to replace them with, and they wander the landscape, wrecking havoc. And I think that the what you're doing and what I I would like to think that I'm trying to do and perhaps Peter is doing is trying to come up with different languages and new ways of speaking so that people don't end up in these cul de sacs intellectually, which seem to be attracting most of the population. So I think in some sense, it's Sam, it's our failure, it's your and my failure and Peter's failure, that we are not expressing ourselves as ourselves. So I'm here as your future running mate, potentially for 2020. I think we're doomed. That says more about me than you. I really think if I can make an analogy, let's assume that the marketplace of ideas is something we take seriously. We've been in sort of an era previously which you might think of as like a mutual fund area where there's only long, only are you for multiculturalism or against it? Are you for immigration or against it? And I think that all of the really interesting positions right now are sort of hedge fund like positions, and we'd call them relative value trades. I'm for a mild increase with a lot of scrutiny on refugees to increase our refugee intake because I think it's humane. And I think that they make great Americans because they're so grateful that somebody took them in in their hour of need if we screened properly. And I'm against other forms of immigration, like skilled immigration increases, where we tether people to their employers through H one B visas. So the idea is I don't have a pro or anti position on immigration. I have a long, short position. And I think that because most people don't have an idea that you can hold a long, short position. We're trapped in this nonsense discussion about, in my opinion, three topics which are dividing us, which are trade, immigration and terror. And fundamentally, because you and I have not done a great job of pushing out simple models and good language for dealing with these things, I think that the generation before us talks in completely inadequate terms, and so it's up to us to rectify it. So that's one of the reasons I'm excited to be here. Yeah, I think we could probably add race to that list, and then I think it covers at least 80% of our problems. So what is it that you worry about now in terms of intellectual trends and bad ideas that are regnant? I have this line that I think is true, and I certainly have used enough to hope it's true that bad ideas are worse than bad people. There are not that many bad people in the world. I think on any appropriate metric, there's probably 1% psychopaths walking around. But what you find more and more often when you pay attention is just that they're good people under the sway more or less good people, certainly psychologically normal people under the sway of bad ideas and they think they're doing good. Or they're committed to some principle that may be even locally good or at least ethically defensible, but doesn't survive scaling. Or they're not paying attention to the associated costs of living that way or thinking that way. And what I constantly find myself in encountering are people who are absolutely sure they are on the right side of an important issue. But they're behaving, to my eye, patently unethically. And I think it probably does have something to do with what you just described as being non obvious to them that you can have a nuanced or a long, short position on any of these topics and have that be not only coherent and intellectually defensible but perhaps the only intellectually defensible position in the end. And yet, because it doesn't survive the broad strokes litmus test of are you for immigration or not or against Islam or not, or for religious pluralism or not, it comes under immediate stigma and kind of straw man attacks anyway. That's one thing that I noticed that worries me. But what sort of shibolifs and fake ideas and bad ones are you worried about this moment? All of them. I mean, I'm really actually worried about the abstraction that makes it so difficult to think. Because one of the things that this is kind of a half compliment, half critique for you is that I think it's so hard to do what you're doing to sort of recreate an entire intellectual world from scratch that is of a piece that is interoperable, self consistent, moral decent, but which allows you to get everywhere. And I see you as sort of having this it's almost like you've built a yacht that only you can sail with all of these cables and riggings. And so that's not going to work. As a gent, you know, I am estimating your vocabulary must be something 40,000 words or more. I don't have that. And I think that we have to, in fact, first understand that most of us aren't going to be able to pull off the trick that you're trying to do. It's too difficult. I've called you the intellectual Alex Honoluld before because you're like this intellectual free soloist where one false movement now watch me fall. Yeah. So I think it can't be that we actually push people to do that. But I think that there's a hidden villain in the story. And I think that the hidden villain are these very often three letter organizations Wsjnyt, DNC, RNC, Fox. And what they're doing is a really interesting trick of subtracting narratives that have this long, short character. And so I've come up with this model, which unfortunately we're not doing this on video. I'd go to a whiteboard. But if you picture an X Y axis, a Dex and a Y axis, and the X axis is some sort of elite rent seeking policy, something that the elite rent seekers want, can you define rent seeking? Rent seeking is the ultimate insult from an economist. It says that you're trying to profit without really producing anything. And so if you're, let's say, what was the founding myth of the Carlisle Group, they figured out that Eskimos had some right to a tax write off from a failed Eskimo business. And so it turned out that you could sell those rights in some way and you could profit from it, right? So it probably wasn't intended to be for a Jewish businessman to figure this out, but that would be some form of rent seeking. And so the real villains in the story aren't the elite, as we say, because I don't think top intellectuals and great scientists and fantastic athletes are the problem. I think it's the elite rent seekers. They have certain things they're trying to accomplish, and most of us don't really know who they are. They don't really want a lot of publicity, but they're very skilled operators in our system. And when they want a policy, what happens is that whatever organs are attached to that group, they tell a story that where there's smoke, there is always fire. And the smoke is opposition to their proposal, and the fire is some sort of moral failing. And so, if you'll permit me, visually imagine that you're going counterclockwise around the XY plane. So the first quadrant I call the Dupes, sometimes the ivy covered Dupes. These are people who have gone to maybe elite schools. They think that they are the elite, but in fact, they're probably making less than half a million a year. They may have a second home, but they're not really in control and they don't realize that they are in fact being propagandized. And it's very difficult to work with this because they're convinced that they're the ones in the know. In the second quadrant, you have first principles, thinkers, contrarians, and people who are fiercely independent. In the third quadrant, you have troglodytes, people who are opposed to the elite policies, but also may have the moral failings that the elite wish to tar them with. And in the fourth quadrant, you have the shadowy rentseeking elite. And so what happens is that the Y axis is the moral virtue vice axis. And the media narrative is like a straight line running from the southwest to the northeast. It says that there's an absolute correlation between people who agree with the elite policy and moral virtue. And so what's happening constantly is if I'm a restrictionist on immigration, but I'm also a xenophob. I have a lifelong love of travel. I care about learning languages. Most of my friends come from foreign places. There's some sort of a story that you couldn't possibly be a restrictionist Xenophile. You couldn't possibly both support the police and be absolutely outraged at their killing of innocence in unforgivable circumstances. And so what we're finding is that every time we try to tell a story about being in the second quadrant, we get mapped to the third quadrant because we oppose these things, but we don't have the moral failings that they would expect. And worse, people who aren't putting the same kind of intellectual energy, but who have an instinct that the elite policies are wrong. They end up in the troglodyte quadrant, in quadrant three, unfortunately, because their intuition says, I think our immigration must be completely out of control. Who calls illegal aliens undocumented workers? If I take an illegal drug, is that an undocumented drug? If I do an illegal act of violence, is that an undocumented act? The orwellian newspeak triggers many people, and if they can't figure out how to hold the right long, short position, they may just have an instinct to actually start behaving badly and maybe believe that Mexicans are the source of our problems if they're crossing illegally over the border rather than becoming mostly landscapers or people in the service industry. And so, in part, what I'm looking to do is to take the small number of people who are strong enough to try to voice this way of thinking and say it's entirely possible to oppose these policies, which are nakedly, rent seeking and still be quite virtuous. That expansion of the left right model to the four quadrant model, I think is going to liberate a lot of people who've been drifting to the right, who wonder, what happened to the left? When did it become a crime to support liberal ideas within what is traditionally thought of as left of center politics? When you started that description of the four quadrants, though, I imagine that you and perhaps I think you suggested that it is very much a top down, somewhat starchamber effort to bend humanity to the will of the elite. And I guess that that may be going on as well. It's just I feel like my encounters with really confused, dogmatic thinking from both the left and the right has been more democratized than that. So it's hard for me to imagine that some of the Salon writers say, who attacked me? Or people on the left who now my friend Majid Nawaz calls the regressive left. People who are who for whom any criticism of Islam as a set of ideas and of its consequences in the world becomes synonymous with bigotry and even racism. I feel like the people who purvey that confusion are just journalists trying to get by and bloggers, people who are not in touch with whatever rent seeking elite you imagine may be behind the scenes. So how I mean, the transmission yeah, are there two are two things going on that are fundamentally disconnected, or is there actually communication between these names we don't know and the journalists and pseudojournalists who we do? There is. I mean, first of all, the people who you're talking about in Salon, I would probably have in the first quadrant, they would think of themselves as very intellectual, very knowledgeable. But let's look at the exact construct of how you get into trouble with some of them. They don't mind you being against religions, but it's very important that you are against all religions equally, that no religion is worse or better than anyone, any other religion. Right? So the idea is that is in some sense the policy that all religions must be treated the same way. And let's take my religion and Jainism rather than anything involving Islam. So I come from a Jewish background. You cannot tell me that we Jews are no more nor less violent than the Jains, right? Deuteronomy suggests that savagery is in our past. We probably started this whole Abramic, murderous frenzy against the apostates and we have to take responsibility for it now. We don't kill apostates anymore because of some fancy footwork to deactivate the bad code. But the idea is that somebody who was neither Jewish nor Jane would feel incredibly uncomfortable making the comment that I just made. Right? And so the idea is that he who breaks the equality between religions, who voices any difference, that some are better or worse on different points, must have a moral failing which that they are secretly bigoted. And so the idea is that you are breaking the inference pattern. There's no vibe that you give off generically that indicates to me that you particularly hate any particular religion or group of people. But the idea is that by breaking that one principle, the next move is that you were allowed to infer the moral failing that must have led you to do that. And so let's now swap out the two religions that we just talked about and talk about, let's say, Islam and Christianity. So if you wish to say that there's more of a connection at the moment between Islam and terror than Christianity and terror, at least in 2016, this is prima facial obvious. There's just some statistics that nobody who's looking at at what's going on, I think, can claim that the suicide bombings are higher in Christianity than they are in Islam. However, I should say it just as a caveat there that you will have people and there have been articles written on this topic, I think even in Salon, claiming that right wing Christian terrorism in the US is a worse problem than Muslim terrorism. And they get to that number by first starting counting the bodies after September 11. Right. And obviously there's been very few terrorist incidents of any type in the US since then and they throw in attempted terrorist attacks and acts of eco terrorism. For instance, you destroy a car dealership, that's domestic terrorism. It gets counted against Islamic terrorism. So in any case, there are people who believe, contrary to all kind of rational analysis of the evidence, that Christian terrorism in the US is a much bigger problem and is a likely bigger problem going forward. I'm not against a careful I mean, I have no prejudices against I might point out something that almost never gets pointed out. That if I'm not mistaken, all of the people who have successfully penetrated the US capitol building as suicide terrorists have been Jewish. I think there's only one guy and he was an Israeli. Now of course that can go crazy on Twitter, but I think this is what we would call steel manning. Our opponents point to we can help our opponents make their case and then try to show them that we come in good faith because what we're really interested in is not pointing fingers at any particular group. We're interested in figuring out how to restore civility. A much better argument against that would be to say that every a ten warthog is an instrument of terror. And I really want to talk about message violence and the way that states communicate message violence, which probably be something that Noam Chomsky would want to discuss. And I think that's a fair point. But where it gets suspicious is where you start to see the motivated reasoning, which is how do I shut you down so that you don't point at something which feels very dangerous. And I think that you have an instinct to point at very dangerous things, not to make the danger worse. But we don't yet have a truly terrible terror problem. Ex Antex post if it's your child is murder, your terror problem is as bad as it gets. However, what you and I are both worried about is where we are headed, future instability, and how we could get into a mess that we will not really be able to get out of without significant damage and injury to the American experiment. That I think that both of us are very excited about, even if we're troubled about where it is at the moment. And I think what you're really doing is you're looking forward and you're extrapolating and you're thinking ahead and you're getting penalized in some sense for that act. Interesting, maybe I'll unpack that a little bit because that's all too true, but you use this phrase, steel manning, which I haven't heard much, but obviously it's the opposite of straw manning someone's argument. And I think it's a crucial feature of what I would generically call intellectual honesty. If you're going to argue against a position, at minimum you should be able to summarize your opponent's view in a way that he wouldn't find fault with. And better still, if you summarize it in a way that's even better than he or she would come up with on his own, then that is the thing you take down in your argument. That is the way any really civil and productive debate should operate and what I find most difficult to deal with. Our podcast listeners will will have heard this a thousand times, but are the misrepresentations of my positions where the critic isn't even interacting with a view I hold, and I'm getting smeared for this fake view. And I think that's a general principle of public conversations and just one's interpersonal dealings with people who you don't agree with Steel Manning is something we should just have in our heads, is something we need to do and expect should be done toward us in these conversations. But the other point you make is true, which is and this is often a point of confusion. It's not that I think that the immediate risk of death from terrorism for any American or any Westerner, really or really, even any person in the Muslim world, though they run a far greater risk than we do outside of it. It's not that I think that risk is immediately intolerable and worse than any other thing we could be worried about. You and I are far more likely to die in a car accident in the US. Than as a result of terrorism. But what I worry about are, as you said, I worry about where this is all headed. And in at least two senses, there there's obviously the risk of much bigger forms of terrorism. We can worry about nuclear terrorism and biological terrorism. And I think it would be, at this point, actually surprising if something orders of magnitude bigger than we've seen doesn't happen in the next 50 years. Right? So this is not science fiction. It's not an irrational fear. I think, given how bad we are at stopping the proliferation of technology, and given that technology is only becoming more potent, and given that there's nuclear materials that are not getting uninvented, and given that the proliferators and the terrorists only have to be right once, as the security people say, and we have to be right all the time, the idea that we're not going to have, at minimum, a dirty bomb go off in a major city, rendering some part of it uninhabitable for decades, that seems actually far fetched to me. And given our capacity to overreact to things so so even so, take what may in fact be the worst case scenario. You have a nuclear bomb that goes off in the port of Los Angeles or in Times Square, and it kills. It's a, you know, a small one, and it kills, let's say, 100,000 people outright. 100,000 people. More than 100,000 people die in our society every year from medical errors. The last time I looked, it was like something like 200,000 people die from Iatrogenic insults because doctors. And nurses don't wash their hands or give the wrong medication, et cetera. So we absorb those deaths year after year after year, and we absorb every other species of death, whether it's from smoking or car accidents or our own use of firearms. And yet, if a bomb went off in a city and killed 100,000 people, our reaction to that, rightly or wrongly, I mean, certainly you could defend a different reaction to that than our reaction to heart disease, say. But our reaction to that and our overreaction to that would very likely just derange human history for a generation at least. So I think you have to price in our capacity to overreact to these things, into the real world cost of these things happening. And so in any case, that's just to expand upon what you already just said. The problem is there's usually not time enough to spell out everything in the context of saying, listen, we need to be worried about this phenomenon of global jihadism, and there's a reason why we are appropriately worried about what is being said and not being said in one community among all the other religious communities. We're worried about the reform of Islam. We're not worried about the reform of Methodism and Mormonism and Scientology, and for good reason. And that's something that at a certain point can't require a ten minute defense. It has to be we have to have the shorthand version of that that's accepted everywhere we talk about these things. Well, one of the things that I say that's unpopular in some quadrants is that things that rhyme tend to be more true. Now, it's not universal, obviously, when somebody says, if the if the glove don't fit, you must acquit, that may or may not be right. But in general, humans, when they have something very important to say, try to hone it to a fairly well, and they make it memetic. They make it easy to remember. It's probably, in some sense, sort of syntactic sugar for the brain so that it remembers the wisdom. And I believe that it's important to have the hyperlinked statement so that when you if you don't agree with the statement, you can click on it. You can see the paragraph version. The paragraph yields to the essay, really yields to the book. So depending upon how much information you need to support an idea, it's there. So if you made a statement, for example, that global jihadism is actually one of the most serious things that we're facing, somebody says, come on, Sam, shark attacks are incredibly rare, but because of Shark Week, we're in a constant state of terror. Okay, well, then that person would need to click on the hyperlink to see why it is that you actually aren't going down that path. And so I think it's important that the user and the listener be able to be in dialogue with your statement. So I think you need to make the same statement at four different levels that fail over into one into the next when you're making these points. And I think that there are too few of these honed statements at top level that neatly point to the backups. Because in general, whenever I run something to ground that you're trying to say, I may not get it at first, I may not understand it, I often am arguing with my misinterpretations of you. And every time I think I've got you on something, I discover some podcast, some book, some talk where you've actually covered it. Maybe not everyone, but it's happened to me enough times in listening to you that I'm feeling that I now expected the default. I need a better me to speak for me in those cases. Does anything come to mind as an example of something that was initially problematic, that you ran to ground and were satisfied or not? I think, for example, some of the spirituality stuff. I have some things that I haven't run to ground yet. For example, I think you've said things that people can't you've said that people can't change their beliefs the way they change their clothes. I think I'm actually pretty good at that. I think I maintain different rooms in my mind. I actually have what I call a jihadi sandbox, where I listen to the Nashids, I watch the videos, I read, inspire and debac and all these things, and I let the jihadi in me become animated so that I can study my own reaction. And I wonder sometimes I see you as this is like me being really critical of you as the guy running into a screening of The Godfather and saying, what's wrong with you people? Don't you realize it's just photons projected against a wall? And you know, I need to know in part how you reconcile my need for fiction theater distortions of belief. I believe that in fact, in my least distorted states, it's usually achieved by having lots of different fictions, falsehoods and incomplete pictures that together yield a fairly complete picture. But I'm fond of the double distortion of somebody wearing glasses where their eyes are distorted and their glasses are further distorted, but the compound of the two is an undistorted picture. So there are ways in which I worry that this sort of new atheist project really has a very limited market because it's very important for me, for example, on Friday nights, to put away my atheism and go into a Jewish traditional Shabbat dinner where it's not that we're wink wink, nudge nudge, going to have Shabbat dinner. We actually kind of go through it and try to do the prayers straight up. And at some point my daughter was in a Jewish preschool and they asked her something about believing in God and she said, oh, I only believe in God on Fridays. And I think that that's actually a more healthy perspective. That's something that I don't know whether you've talked about it or dealt with it. No, I haven't. Well, I don't know that I could sign on the dotted line with your daughter's statement there but I think there's something a little euphemistic creeping in there perhaps for her or for you. But I think the general picture you paint of a multiplicity of beliefs which aren't necessarily reconciled in any single brain or certainly any single moment and a kind of piecemeal worldview that we change in and out depending on context. I think part of that's inevitable. And I said this somewhere, I think it was my first book, The End of Faith. It's probably computationally inevitable. I think there was an example I gave where if you just looked at the computational requirements of checking a list of propositions for logical contradiction and this is an NP complete problem where, as you add propositions, the runtime for even a computer the size of a universe, with components the size of protons, with switching speeds at the speed of light. You still would after 15 billion years. You'd be fighting to add I think it was the 300th belief to the list. Right. So it's like we are not going to be perfectly coherent even if our minds worked as just checking a list of propositions for syllogistic error. So there will be contradictions and there is just, neurologically speaking a committee in there that is pulling the gears and levers of emotion and behavior and we have a very strong emotional attachment to certain things which can cloud our cooler judgments about what is real. But I just think that in science and in clear thinking generally, we do our best to at least in those conversations when we're asked what do you really believe is real? We do our best to only promote to kind of the canonicity in our worldview those things that we think we can defend based on evidence and argument and logic and we can be wrong about that. It's just that the possibility for incoherence in one's worldview can be pretty startling because there are people who in this case, in The End of Faith, my wife and I were in Paris and we had as a conscious decision decided not to go near the American Embassy. This was brilliant. And then we were also and those of you who haven't heard this, you can listen to the I think it was my last podcast where I'm actually reading the End of Faith on the podcast, and I read this. Episode and we were trying to get a hotel room with a view of the embassy garden. And the phrase American Embassy was just functioning in two discrete and incompatible ways in our minds. We just had a folly ade and it wasn't reconciled for us until a friend said don't you realize we had actually checked into the hotel with a view of the American Embassy? And a friend said what the hell are you doing it's the 4 July, you're right next to the American Embassy. And then the walls came down and we realized we had been both seeking and seeking to avoid proximity to the American Embassy all day long. Now, that's an especially crazy instance, which even now I can't understand how it was true of me. But no doubt there are many things I think are true which are incompatible with other things that I think are true. And only conversation with oneself and experiences, reading and argument with others can bring those to light. So, for instance, your Jihadi sandbox, I also have that Jihadi sandbox. And I have a blog post that I've referenced a few times on the podcast entitled Islam and the Misuse of Ecstasy where I try to try to describe in a series of embedded videos just how deep my sympathy with the surface features of Muslim religion and spirituality runs. And I think the call to prayer is one of the most beautiful things ever to appear on earth. I love the sound of it. I love the sound of it. Yeah. And there's a great one that I linked to in that blog post. And I love koali music. Newstrack Patel. I Khan the Pakistani song in Boston. What a show. Oh, yeah. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to do that. And I love the poetry of Rumi and I even get what the attraction talked about this on any of your shows? Not at length, but I wanted to come down here and talk to you about this in particular because I think one of the things that's going on is that you do not spend enough time talking about all of the fantastic contributions of this culture. And you point in one case at the really appalling lack of scientific achievements of Muslims. Let's say since the Nobel Prize has been given out, I think there have been three in the sciences, and one of them was to the great Ahmadi Muslim who contributed to the standard model of physics. So he would be considered not a Muslim in Pakistan. Right. But I think one of the problems is you're not advertising the emotional valence that I've secretly suspected you must have. So when I struggle with this, I have a friend group that is disproportionately Islamic and it's been one of the great experiences of my life since I was 16. My closest friend welcomed me into his family, his culture, completely eye opening experience. This is a friend from high school or a friend from college and his family engaged in traditional practices with the hand kissing and touching feeds and all sorts of I guess the feet touching was a different kind of field of respect. But the family was so courageous. His sister was brutally gang raped in India and the father supported his daughter. Talking about it openly, when you would imagine that the feelings of shame and the issues of honor would have been dominant. And so in my life, I have traveled always openly as a Jew in the Islamic world, and I've been treated incredibly well. I believe that if the Nazis were ever to recur, the floorboards under which I would be hidden would likely be Muslim floorboards. So it's very painful to not have this long, short language where in general, I've been in a largely Islamic social context since I was 16. People don't ever address you as a crusader. That kind of speech that you get used to watching ISIS videos, which most people don't watch, but I've watched a great deal of them just because I need to know about this. You're talking about two completely different worlds that are connected, and I think it's really important to advertise more heart, more empathy, more emotion, because otherwise, the very dry, analytic way in which you go about thinking about this, I think gets too much play in a certain sense. You were so logical that the fact that the texts say these very clear things, or that there's ambiguity, but there's a hierarchy for resolving the ambiguities, this appeals to your analytic mind. And I think both you and I have an analytic bent. And we would be much more tempted, were we highly religious, to go down these sort of well, it says here in the text that this is true. And if I really believe this is the infallible word of the Creator and that I'm going against God not to follow directions, we would be tempted by that interpretation. And so I think in part, it's a little bit perverse that you almost have more sympathies with the literal versions of the religion than you do with what you call and I think it's somewhat disparaging nominal members of these religions if I can tell one story from my own, because I know it better. I grew up in an atheist Jewish household, and my wife, who is from India, grew up as a Jew in Bombay. And so our commonality was Judaism. So we got married in a Jewish context. Now, when I went to the rabbi, I said, I want to do this by the book. So he laughed, and he said, well, why don't you write the Katuba for your wedding contract? So we wrote something. We gave it back to him. He says this. He says, I can't work with this. This is garbage. So he said, Why don't you come back with another version? So we did it, and he said, this is poetry. This is poetry. This is the bride price of virgins. Treat it like a contract. So we went back to the original, tried to do a modern version of it and sort of an isomorphic version, and finally he says, this is the worst I've seen. I've been marrying people for decades. So finally I exploded at him, and I said, Rabbi Gold, I said, I've put hours and hours into this, and I don't think it can be done. And he looks at me and he says and I said, well, what is that about? He said, well, he said, you're trying to get married in a more than 5000 year old tradition and you have an idea that there is a by the book. And it's very important that you understand that it is impossible to be a Jew by the book. Because this particular contract says the bride price of virgins will be in Zazim, some currency that hasn't existed for years. And that the contract itself cannot be a formality. It actually has to mean something. And since nobody knows what a zoos is anymore, it's literally impossible to fulfill. Now, I don't know if that's exactly right or exactly wrong, but his point was that it's all create your own Judaism. There is no true Judaism. And I think that that was liberating for me because I was having a very hard time following some rules, not others. I don't really like pork, really good prosciutto and pepperoni as a pleasure. And it was always too far to walk to the synagogue on Saturdays. So I think that it's very important to realize that there is no way, usually, to fulfill these texts. And as a result, this lines up with what Majid Nawaz talks about. Multiple interpretations are the beginning of deradicalization. I think what you struggle with a lot is that you're very sympathetic to the literal and you're much less sympathetic to the doped with nonsense. Or clearly our Judaism in the modern era is doped with Christianity, which I think is a pretty good thing. If it goes too far, I get very alienated. But I think it's important to realize that the nominal versions of these religions are in some sense the true versions of these religions within the civilized modern era. And the literal attempts to go back to, I don't know, 6th century or some thousands of years before Christ. This is nonsense. So to rewind all the way to the point of my not expressing my sympathy with the liturgy and iconography and spirituality and food architecture and music yeah. Of these cultures enough, I guess, the way I have decided to go, long, short, there is not so much focusing on those features, although I have a little bit. But more to point out that my real sympathy and solidarity is with the people who are suffering most under theocracy. And those are, in this case, actual other Muslims who are not disposed to live under a theocracy. So it's liberal Muslims, it's Muslim women, it's apostates, it's free thinkers. And I try to come around. If I don't do it in every paragraph, I try, without letting too many minutes elapse on the clock to come around to the point, just the stark acknowledgement that obviously no one suffers the consequences of global jihadism and Islamist theocracy more than Muslims do. And it's the Muslims I hear from the ex Muslims and the liberal Muslims who I am always thinking about in addition to worrying about the civilizational consequences of jihadism. And I'm also aware that my sympathy with spiritual aspiration and spiritual experience, my finding something intelligible in the poetry of Rumi, doesn't survive collision with the doubts in the brains of much of my audience. I speak to atheists and secularists who have no idea what I'm talking about when I talk about meditation. And they certainly have no idea what Rumi is talking about and many of them don't want to know. I'm not censoring myself on the basis of that, but it's just rumi is not so interesting to much of my audience, or at least hasn't been thus far. The other reason why I focus on literalism is because I think there's an asymmetry here and a real advantage to the literalist. And I don't know how we ever get out from under this thing because the issue for me is that there is a more and less plausible reading of any scripture. And this is what I ran into with Majid in our conversation together. So the implausible readings don't survive very well because they are, in fact implausible. You can't really read any of these traditions to speak of the Abrahamic ones, judaism, Christianity and Islam. You can't read any of their scripture and get as a plausible reading the value that homosexuality is just as good, ethically speaking, as heterosexuality, or that women are and must be the political equals and the moral equals to men. Right? So what you have to do is you have to bring those modern values to the text and cherry pick and leverage in ways that is a bit of a pantomime of scholarship. You know what you want the answer to be in advance, right? It's not like you're discovering those values in the text because actually the antithesis is in the text, wherever those topics are touched. For the most part, it's certainly clearest on the case of homosexuality, it's anathema, right? So it's anathema in the Hebrew Bible, it's anathema in St. Paul, it's certainly anathema in the Koran and the Hadith. And so it's a if you want gay people in the 21st century to have all the rights and privileges and respect that you do and a right to want, well, then you have to find some rationale by which to ignore these texts now, or at least those parts of the text. So one thing I would like people to be is just honest about that process. But the problem is that once you become honest about that process, there is something fundamentally corrosive about that. Because you are bringing merely human values to this project and based on your own moral wisdom, the 21st century upgrade to your ethical firmware, you are valuing those modern moral intuitions more than you are valuing the word of God in that case. And being honest about that, I think, is in fact, necessary for modern people to really modernize and tolerate a plurality of views and in this case, accept things like gay marriage. But in the face of that, the fundamentalist, the literalist always has the advantage of being able to say, you see, these apostates are not living by the letter of the text. It says right here what you should do by the letter of the text. You might say ISIS, yeah, they're certainly aspiring to they're doing their best job. But let me again drag it back to Judaism, because I'm always happier playing in my own backyard than hopping the fence into somebody else's. I think Sam, even what you just said is not exactly right. Again, I wish this was original to me, but it came from Ben Zion Gold, who just left us. And what he said to me is, he said, you realize that our rules for freeing slaves after I don't know what it is, seven years or something like that, were progressive in their time. He said, do you wish to be loyal to the spirit of Judaism, which was progressive in its day, literal Judaism. But if you tried to implement slavery now, you'd be absolutely regressive. So you are in fact forced into choosing between letter and spirit. And why is it that you have decided that the letter is the true and the spirit is the false? And I think that you were pawing at this with the Quran, and I think this is an incredibly important issue, which is that the Quran resists, and I'm going to dip into science a little bit, a sort of regulated expression model. So if you think about the discovery of the opera in DNA, where you have something that digests, I don't know, sugar, and you don't want that protein produced on moss when there's no sugar around. So you have some repressor that sits on the DNA. And when there's sugar around, the repressor is lured off of it and the proteins are transcribed and they digest the sugar. And so there are parts of the code that you want to be active sometimes and not active others. So the problem, of course, with Islam is that it really is very well constructed to resist a lot of this innovation, which I think is bada bida. It's this concept that you're not supposed to innovate around the literal. But the fact is that regulated expression has always been a part of these religions. And so if you find somebody who is claiming, no, it's a literal, this is just literal, and we have to live by the letter of the book. And you point out the contradictions and you point out all of these things. You point the thing about the spirit, you can start to say God, if God exists, is certainly open source. We've cracked the nucleus of the cell, the nucleus of the atom. We've learned a tremendous amount. And God is inviting us to understand how he or she has put this whole construct together. And so clearly, the Quran is not the last word, nor is the Torah, because in fact, God has left so much information should he or she exist, that wasn't available then, which is our text. If I spit into a tube at some point and sent it off to 23 and me and I was astounded that it came back Jew, it's like 96.8 Ashkenazi Jewish. And so with with the multiple parentheses around your name, those those were added later. But, you know, I think that part of the problem is, is that, I mean, it's almost like the ISIS variant really appeals to your logical, consistent mind, saying if it is about the text, and the text is perfect, this is the closest any nation on earth has come to trying to carry this out. And, you know, I was always bothered why is it that homosexuals are thrown off of buildings? And I had to, you know, chase it down, as you must know, to the hadiths where it says, you know, that sodomites should be taken to the tops of cliffs and thrown off and buildings stand in for cliffs. And then the ultimate weirdness is the denial that there is any link whatsoever between these texts. And let's say this particular method of execution of these supposed sodomites. And I think it's actually entirely possible to push back against these things by looking at the fact that everybody who sets themselves up as a literalist is in fact going to be failing by one form or another. And so when you realize that we are all failing to live within these religions, that it is impossible to be as they instruct, everything opens up. And so I think that in part, this is actually a Sam Harris trap based upon your capacity to decamp and to explore internally consistent ideologies which you do not share. Before I push back against any of that, come to Jesus. Yeah, well, let me just say that I have come to Jesus in the sense that I acknowledge that the trend that we have to foster is just what you describe. We need modernizing, reformist, looser interpretations of all these traditions, and that's the end game for civilization. The endgame is not for everyone to wake up on a Tuesday agreeing with me that all of this is divisive nonsense and they have to hang up their shingle as atheists or skeptics. But first of all, my concern is that any analogy to Judaism is very likely misleading in the sense that Judaism really is an idiosyncrasy for for many reasons theologically, historically, as a matter of just demographics at this moment. And it's true to say of Judaism and impossible to say of most other religions, that you can find people who for whom the religion, their Judaism is very important. And they might even be rabbis, and they might even be conservative rabbis, although they're not going to be ultra Orthodox, and they believe almost nothing in the books, right? They're wedded to the tradition, they like the music, they like Shabbat, they like the food. The food isn't so great. That, I think, is objectively true. Sam, do you know the only problem with Jewish cooking? No. 72 hours later, you're hungry again. So I think analogies to Judaism are dangerous because so many Jews even quote religious jews are deeply secular and some believe almost nothing supernatural in the service of their religion. And I debated the one instance I keep coming back to is I was debating I think it was a debate that Hitch and I did with two rabbis, david Wolpe and Rabbi Artson, I think it was. And at one point I said something that presupposed that. I think it was Wolpe who's conservative, he's not reformed. I said something that presupposed that he believed in a God who can hear our prayers. And he turned to me and he said just aghast. He said, what makes you think I believe in a God who can hear our prayers? Right? And then I was momentarily flabbergasted. What do you actually believe, given that you do? This is your full time job, but you can't really map that on to Islam or Christianity. Certainly it's American variant in any realistic way. But my problem with some of what you said there is that, yes, you can take the claim about slavery in the Hebrew Bible. Yes, you can say, well, there's the letter here, but then there's this, the modernizing spirit or the liberal, liberalizing spirit of the text. But I just have two issues with that. One is that it was possible even 2000 years ago to understand ethically that slavery was wrong and to have a tradition that just repudiated it or certainly never endorsed it. That kind of wisdom was among the Jains or the Buddhists. I'm sure there are Greek philosophers who I can't think of at the moment who thought slavery was wrong. It was possible to have that insight. And my other fundamental concern is just that it would be possible for you and I to invent a religion right now that was better than any existing religion. In fact, we could make it just as irrational. We could put a hell at the back of it, like believe this list of propositions and be committed to these behaviors, or you will spend eternity in hellfire after death. But the list of propositions and behaviors we would come up with would be fundamentally benign and constructive and a much better operating system for a global civilization in the 21st century than any of these religions. I'm not sure about that. Okay, well, then if you're not sure about that, then take your favorite of the old school religions and just remove a few of the bad precepts. Just change the bit about homosexuality and slavery, and in 30 seconds you've improved Judaism and Christianity and. Islam. In part, I'm not sure the best way of making this point. There are several things I care about other than truth, and one of them is fitness in the sort of sense of natural sexual selection. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'll be speaking with Glenn Lowry. Glenn is the Merton P. Stolz professor of Social Sciences and professor of Economics at Brown University. He's taught previously at Boston and Harvard and Northwestern and the University of Michigan. He holds a BA in mathematics from Northwestern and a PhD in economics from MIT. He's a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A former Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, he has published widely and has written several books that I will link to on my blog. I discovered Glenn through his Blogging Heads TV podcast, where he's been having some extraordinarily candid and clarifying conversations about race and racism with the linguist John McWater from Columbia. And I highly recommend you check out Glenn's podcast on Bloggingheads TV, and again, I'll provide a link to that on my website. And the purpose of my conversation with him today was to dive headlong into these controversial waters of race and racism and violence in America. As though my work weren't controversial enough already. But I've been wanting to do this for a while because these issues are just so consequential and politically divisive. But I've been worried about doing this for obvious reasons. I raised the topic in my podcast with Neil degrasse Tyson, if you recall, but he didn't want to touch it, which I understand he didn't feel the time was right to weigh in on these issues personally, but for some reason, I've been feeling like the time is right for me. It's just really been bothering me that so much of what I hear about race and violence in America doesn't make any sense. And the fact that I've been worried about speaking about these issues in public was also bothering me. In fact, the implications of speaking about race in particular caused me to cancel a book contract I had last year. It just seemed like too much of a liability. But I have since stiffened my spine, and I was left wondering who I could talk to about these things. My goal has been to find an African American intellectual who could really get into the details with me, but who I could also trust to have a truly rational conversation that wouldn't be contaminated by identity politics. As you probably intuit, I think identity politics are just poison, unless your identity at this point is Homo sapiens. But I certainly found what I was looking for in Glenn. He is just so good on these topics. And as you'll hear, he spends a fair amount of time giving the counterpoint to his positions on each topic, steel manning rather than straw manning the views of his opponents. Anyway, I found this conversation extremely helpful. It felt like Glenn and I could have gone on for much longer. And many thanks to Glenn for being so generous with his time. If you find this conversation as useful as I did, I encourage you to spread it around and follow Glenn on Twitter at glenlowry glennloury. And please tell him that you appreciate what he's doing. And again, check out his podcast on Bloggingheads TV. And now I give you Glenn Lowry. Well, I'm here with Glenn Lowry. Glenn, thanks for coming on the podcast. Sam. My pleasure. Well, listen, I've really been excited about having this conversation, I think probably irrationally so, because the topics we're going to COVID race and racism and police violence, really can't help but bring us some measure of grief. So thank you for doing this, and I think most of the grief will come my way, probably. But first, I want to say that your podcast that you do on Bloggingheads TV, especially the ones I've seen, that you've done with John Mcwarter, whom I also greatly admire, I've got to say those have just been fantastic. And you guys are just so rare to hear two people talk about these topics honestly. So I just want to point people in the direction of those podcasts and great. Sam, can I tell your audience that's the Glenn Show at Bloggingheads TV that you're referring to and all viewers or listeners are welcome? Yeah, and I'll put a link to your page where I embed this on my blog so people can find that link just to kind of start us off. What I'm noticing now, and it's really as though for the first time it's really been in the last year or so, is that there's a culture of censorship and identity politics and a kind of addiction to being outraged and a resort to outrage in the place of reasoned argument, especially among young people. That is just making it impossible to have productive conversations on important topics. And this is happening on topics other than race. Of course, it happens on religion and terrorism and gender, but race is obviously one of those hotspots. And from what I've seen, you've been illuminating this topic on your show in a way that's really unusual and just cutting through confusion like a laser. So it really is great to be talking to you. That's good to hear. I appreciate it. Yeah. I think one of my motivations and John McWhorter can speak for himself, but I think this would apply to him too, is that in the face of this situation that you just got through describing of addiction to outrage, that's an artful way of putting it of a kind of, I don't know, moral certitude and intolerance of argument that doesn't check the right boxes and all of that. In the face of that, because I care so much about these questions of race and equality and justice, I've felt really compelled in the face of a lot of pushback and vitriol and contempt expressed toward me for doing so. I've just kind of felt compelled to keep challenging, keep raising questions, keep asking questions. I don't think I'm doing any kind of heroic celebration for doing it. It just seems like the right thing to do, but that's a big part of my motivation. Yeah. So before we dive into this topic, perhaps you can just say a few words about your background and just your areas of focus intellectually. How do you describe what you do in general? Okay, so I'm a professor of economics here at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. I've been here for ten years. I've taught economics at a number of other universities harvard in the 1980s, boston University in the 1990s. I'm a quantitative social scientist. I was trained at MIT in the 70s, took a PhD in economics there, and for much of my early career focused on mathematical modeling of various economic processes in the labor market and industrial organization firms, competition, research and development, natural resource economics, economics of invention and exploration, things of this kind. Game theory, information economics, this kind of thing. I became a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and got very much interested in public policy after taking up that post and began writing essays and reviews and commentaries on issues of race in the United States particularly, and was a Reagan conservative during the 1980s. Quite rare for an African American. Moved away from that political identity toward the center of the spectrum a bit and think of myself now as kind of centrist or maybe mildly right of center democrat, though that's not an identity that I claim to with any particular intensity. Yeah. And obviously your background both in mathematics and statistics and social science makes you really perfectly well placed to have the kind of conversation we're going to have. I've been wanting to talk about race and racism for a while because it's a topic of just such huge consequence, and it's a topic that, again, attracts a fair amount of logical and moral confusion, which renders people unable to reason with each other. And this is not a problem just across racial lines, and it's not just a problem in public, frankly. I have white friends who I find I can't have this conversation with because they've become so emotionally hijacked, and they don't realize from my point of view, they don't realize that almost everything that is coming out of their mouths doesn't make moral or logical or historical or psychological sense. And this really worries me because I view the maintenance of civilization and our moral progress as a species, really as a sequence of successful conversations. I've said this many times before on my podcast and in writing. It seems to me that we live in perpetual choice between conversation and violence, just as a species. So when I see conversations reliably fail like this, I start to get worried. And so I've been wanting to talk about race, and this is just the context of how I set up this conversation. I noticed the conversations you have been having with John McWater, and I realized that I had met John at a Ted conference, so I got in touch with him, and then he suggested I speak with you. And so you are my Virgil who's going to guide me through this wilderness of error. And again, thank you for agreeing to do this. If I'm up to the task here, it's a tall order, actually. And I guess a final preliminary point. I feel the need to offer a disclaimer upfront because I think you and I are going to agree about many things. And I'm a little worried about this because my staking out some of these positions as a white guy is going to rub many of our listeners the wrong way. And I really don't want to be in a defensive crouch as we have this conversation. So I think I should just acknowledge upfront a couple of things that should be obvious, and it should be obvious that I would acknowledge them. And the first is just that the history of racism in the US. Has obviously been horrific, right? It seems to me no sane person could doubt that, and there's no doubt that racism remains a problem in our society. And just how big a problem is something that I want us to discuss. But I can check my privilege at the outset here. I have no doubt that I have reaped many advantages from being white, and I have no idea what it's like to grow up as a black man in our society. So I get that. I don't get it. And if there's any way in which my not getting it seems relevant to the issues we're about to touch, I certainly hope you'll point that out to me. But as we drive toward points that many of our listeners will find fairly incendiary, especially coming from a white guy, I just have to make it clear that it is obvious how horrible white racism and its consequences have been in the past. And I am fully prepared to believe that the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow still hangs over our society to a degree that I don't understand in any way, certainly not from my first person experience. But my goal in this conversation is to get an accurate picture of race and racism and police violence as it occurs now so that we can think about how to move forward. So I just wanted to erect that bulwark. However, ineffectual it will prove to be, because I just have no doubt that we're about to say some things that will lend itself to selective quotation. And I've now learned through rather cruel experience that some people listen to this podcast just for the pleasure of quoting me out of context in misleading ways with this caveat, which may do me no good whatsoever. I want to throw that up before we dive into the details. I was just going to comment that I think your caveat is well taken as far as it goes, and that speaks well of you, I would say. But it's such a pity that it's necessary for you to make that kind of elaborate preemptive move here that it bespeaks how closed and tortured is the environment in which we're having the conversation? I mean, I'm black, all right? I am, if anybody is. I mean, grew up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s and the 1960s from a working class background, have had many run in with American racism, you know, all across the board, and descend from people who had been slaves in the United States. On the other hand, we sit here in the year 2016. 1863 is a century and a half in the past. Jim Crow segregation is a distant memory. Barack Hussein Obama is about to step down, having served two terms, winning constable national elections to the highest office in the Ran. The commissioners of the police in many of the cities in which police black community relations are most troubled are themselves African American, as often are the administrative officers running the governments of those cities. We are 50 years past the advent of the onset of affirmative action. This is not this is the year 2016. And the idea that white privilege is such a stain on the country that an otherwise rational and intelligent person who happens to be white needs to give an elaborate preamble before the conversation about race relations in this country. That the benefit of the doubt or the willingness to hear something that one doesn't agree with without impeding invidious motives to the person who's expressed my view is so rampant that a person like yourself needs to, in effect, apologize in advance for having an opinion. That's awful. That's poisonous. That's good. So that's just Glenn Low responding off. And I don't know how that will leave me in the minds of some of your viewers who might want to take what I've said out of context as well. But that's where I'm coming from. You needless to say, I agree with you. But unfortunately, I think it still is necessary because, again, even my conversations in private suggest to me that this topic is so radioactive that it's just very difficult for people to even hear what is being said, much less trace the implications. So I want to start with just a very simple question, a deceptively simple question, and just ask you what is racism. All right, this is not necessarily a scientifically precise response. This is just a more off the cuff response. I would say it is a contempt for or devaluation of the humanity of another in virtue of their presumed racial identity. Racism is the suspension of rational faculty. It's a disregard for a derogation of perception of the unfitness for intimate relations, a presumption about the intelligence imputation of bad character, this kind of thing visa visa another person or a group of people in virtue of what one understands to be their racial identity. Okay, given that definition, which I agree with, who is the evil genius who first convinced the world that being able to honestly say that, quote, some of my best friends are black is not an adequate defense against the charge of racism toward black people? If the path forward toward some colorblind utopia doesn't entail having best friends or even a spouse who is from a different race, if that doesn't represent an adequate surmounting of the problem of racism, and now I'm speaking personally, we can leave aside institutional or structural racism for the moment. But if having one's closest, most intimate friends be of another race isn't an adequate defense of what you just described as racism or the defense against what you just described as racism, explain that to me. Well, it's funny that you use this phrase. Some of my best friends are, because I once wrote an article that's been over 20 years now about self censorship in public discourse, a theory of political correctness that was published in the journal Rationality and Society in 90 94. And in it, I develop an account of political correctness which I could go into in greater detail, should you be interested. But I can say this much about political correctness, and on my account, a regime of political correctness is a moral signaling equilibrium in which people who don't want to be thought of as being on the wrong side of history will suppress an honest expression of what they believe about some controversial issue. Because people who are known to be on the wrong side of history are prominently saying the same things. Okay? So, for example, if back during the day when the fight for independence of blacks in South Africa was going on, a person thought that boycotting South African businesses was not a good policy, but that constructive engagement with those businesses was a better policy for trying to help the blacks in South Africa. If a person thought that, they might not be willing to say so in public because there were other people who were criticizing sanctions, who were basically supporting the apartheid government. The apartheid government itself is putting out the line that sanctions were not as helpful as constructive engagement with the south African society. So a person might not want to say that because they don't want to be thought to be on the wrong side of history. So with that understanding of what political correctness might be thought to be. I was making the observation that once a regime of that kind comes into existence, it's very robust and difficult to dispel. And in particular, declarations of I'm not really racist. Some of my best friends are black. The sincerity of such declarations are called into question because who's going to say such a thing except for somebody who has the positive view that is being sanctioned by common opinion, which they want to avoid being sanctioned for by making a declaration. Talk is cheap. Anybody can say so. There was a time in American history, I think, of American cultural and social history, maybe the 1940s, 50s, maybe even into the 60s, where a person could say sincerely and be taken at face value, some of my best friends are gay, but I'm against gay marriage. Some of my best friends are black. But I think that affirmative action is really a very poor policy, and that would have some kind of weight. But once the convention of value signaling in which correct positions on the sensitive issue in the case of hand affirmative action or homosexual marriage correct positions is a way of signaling moral virtue. The COVID that one might have otherwise gotten from making this declaration. Let's say it's a verifiable declaration. Some of my best friends are no longer covers enough. What does Shakespeare say? Somewhere Me thinks he does protest too much. The guy who's saying, some of my best friends are protested too much, that guy is seeking an exemption from the moral judgment of others for having what he knows, the others know to be unacceptable positions, and he's declaring some kind of fig leaf here. But we see it for what it is a fig leaf and we don't take it seriously. Something like that. And in your definition of racism, I think we have to distinguish between the mere harboring of certain biases and a commitment to enshrining those biases or a sense that those biases are good or something that shouldn't be corrected for. Racism can't merely be a matter of harboring certain biases because it can't be that you fail to be perfectly neutral on an implicit association test. Because if that's the standard, almost no one will escape hanging. Even many black people will be convicted of racism against blacks. And I think that Mazarin Banaji, the psychologist at Harvard who was one of the founders of the implicit bias literature, would agree with that. I don't think she would claim an equivalency between implicit bias as measured by one of her tests, and racism or in the case of gender differences, implicit bias about women's roles in society which can be detected in almost every population of people who take these tests and misogyny. I think she would want to draw a distinction between those two. And I think your observation that in the case of race, many African Americans will also score positive in terms of the detection of implicit bias about race in American society on these tests. That doesn't make them racist. It just means that their cognitive processes implicitly incorporate certain presumptions or stereotypes about racial roles or racial behaviors that are a part of our culture and that are shared across the racial lines. So I agree with what you just said. I should briefly describe this test just so that people know what we're talking about. So Maserine is one of the the founders of this test, and she's used it probably for 20 years. And what it is is it's it's the purpose of the test is to expose beliefs and biases that people hold that they're either unaware of so that they can't report, or that they know to be socially undesirable and so that they won't report. It's just been shown that, for instance, many white people will be faster at associating negative concepts with black faces than positive ones and will show the opposite bias for white faces. And this is interpreted as meaning that they harbor a preference for white people over black people. And it's easy to see why people would think this and view this as either a source or a consequence of racism. And as you pointed out, you can do this kind of test with other things. You can do with cats and dogs or flowers and insects. You can do it with anything, really. But let's just stipulate that most people will show an in group bias on the IAT, and we can even go further and accept that this underlying psychology has something to do with racism. Let's say it's either the cause or the consequence or both. But racism as a social problem to be condemned and eradicated has to be something else. It's showing white bias on the IAT doesn't make you a racist. Racism is the endorsement of norms that support that bias. So it's a person's understanding that he's biased. And his further claim that he's happy to be that way because he believes that society shouldn't correct for such biases because they're good, because white people really are better than black people. He's someone who wants society to be unfair based on the color of a person's skin because he thinks skin color is a good way to determine the moral worth of human beings. That is something quite distinct from just merely harboring these biases however they got there. And there's no question that such people exist, but they have to be a tiny minority in our society at this point. And the rest of us, people of goodwill and moral enlightenment, who may or may not be biased to one or another degree, clearly now support laws and policies that seek to cancel that kind of racism. And as you say, we've elected our first black president who's finishing his second term. This isn't mere tokenism. The people who voted for Obama with enthusiasm, whatever an IAT would have shown about them, these are people who have canceled their personal racism in the form in which any real racist worthy of the name would practice it. Yeah, I think that's true, although I know that many people, if they were to hear this conversation, would be objecting that you've just more or less cleverly defined racism out of the picture because there won't be very many at all racists left if we were to have such a strict definition. So I'm challenging myself right now to try to think where I think might be the problem. And while I don't have an entirely coherent development here, let me just make an observation. Suppose someone observes that the homicide rate is very high in certain quarters of our society that can be distinguished by race. So many people in Chicago have been killed in the last years. A disproportionate number of both the victims and apparent perpetrators are black. The homicide rate in terms of whites perpetrating the crime is much lower. And therefore there seems to be something going on in terms of black proclivity to resort to violence and settling disputes or something like that. Suppose someone says that. Suppose someone says, no wonder the police are so afraid when they encounter African Americans on the street. Have you taken a look at the crime statistics? Somebody says something like that. Somebody says, yes, it may be that blacks are more likely to be shot by the police in terms of the rate of police killings per number in the population than our whites. But after all, blacks are also overrepresented amongst violent criminals and so who can be surprised that they are also overrepresented amongst the people who are shot by police officers? Someone says something like that. So now, in all of these cases, these are statements that are in some way or another, could be consistent with a person who might have certain kinds of implicit biases or whatever, but who wouldn't endorse the norm that those biases are justifiable in some sense or are not a problem or in no way indicative of any kind of malady that needs to be addressed. They would still nevertheless be thought to be racist. Someone who says the Asians are all over the sciences and the engineering departments and our best universities and the blacks are scarce as in teeth there simply makes an observation about the facts that would be thought by many people to be an act of racism. And yet it couldn't be so classified given the definition that you've just been developing. But hence my definition. Because I would argue, while it's possible for racists, real racists, to make precisely those observations, those observations themselves being to my ear, quite factual, I'm going to make observations of the sort you made with respect to crime in a minute. If that is the signature of racism. Well, merely reporting statistics, then we can't even talk about the problem. Well, yeah. Again, I can imagine what a pushback might be a pushback, might be something like, look, you're talking and my talking about this problem is not something that's going on in the abstract, on the moon, unconnected to anything else. It's embedded within a structure, the legitimacy of which is up for debate, a casual conversation of that sort. Merely a recitation of facts. You call it merely a recitation of facts without laboring to place those facts within a context and discipline our enunciation of those facts with a sort of deeper understanding of what history and contemporary social structure have brought in. Terms of racial hierarchy, in terms of white supremacy, in terms of the comfort that you have in enunciating those facts, in terms of the political consequences of so many people enunciating those facts, not taking that on board, abets, reproduces, reifies, legitimates, etches. In more firmly hierarchical structures of racial domination. And so the word racist is or racism is entirely appropriate. No, maybe it doesn't in these cases that I'm describing, identify a kind of classical antipathy on the basis of race. But we're no longer living in 1955, and yet the disparities and inequalities by race of wealth, power, privilege, and comfort in the society, opportunity are very great. So it's lazy. Fair racism is what Larry Bobo, the sociologist at Harvard, calls it. He says you do opinion surveys of populations. If you ask people things like, would you be willing to see your daughter or son married to someone of the opposite race of a black person if the subject and asked is white? And they say yes to that at high rates, do you ask them, do they think blacks are inferior? And they say no to that at high rates. That would be the old classical racism, where they have answered differently still. But still, if you say, are white people disadvantaged by affirmative action? And they say, oh, yeah, because my kid didn't get into Harvard and some black kid with a lower score got in. Well, some white kid with a lower score also got in. But you focused on the black kid getting in. You see, you think you're not a racist because you're willing to see your son or daughter married to someone who's black. You're willing to stay in the same neighborhood if a black neighbor moves next door. But as a matter of fact, you interpret your son's rejection at Harvard as a consequence of racial affirmative action, where Harvard only accepts one in 15 applicants. And a lot of people got in ahead of your son who were not black and who had lower scores. So maybe I'm trying to make more elastic than makes sense, this definition of racism. But I think some of the components of a more capacious definition of racism would say, in the 1950s, your definition was fine. In the year 2016, we need to have a more subtle and expansive understanding of how this American, you know, disease is currently functioning. So let's. Make it as capacious as possible. I want you to now define what is often called structural or institutional racism. And it seems to me that people talk about this in a way that you were just doing, even in such a way that people can participate in a structure that is de facto racist and perpetuating unfair treatment of people based on race. And yet the people operating in the structure may not in fact be at all racist. Let's say everyone passes Mazarine's test, nobody's harboring any bias, and yet structures and institutions could still be deeply unfair. If you could just talk about that. I want to say at the outset, I am not personally Glenn Lowry a big fan of the current fad to invoke structural racism as a meaningful category of social analysis. I often don't know quite what people are talking about beyond observing that blacks come out on the short end of the stick by many measures of social achievement or status, and therefore structural racism. I mean, let me give incarceration as a case in point. So blacks are 12% or so of the American population and 40% or so of the people who are held behind bars. Now, that's a complicated, big social phenomenon. And you could do very elaborate kind of social scientific investigation of what all the sources of that disparity are. But simply put, the weight of the state, the violence of the state, where the police come and they drag you away in handcuffs and they lock you up, a cage where you're guarded, you're surveilled, you're pursued by agents of the state, you're stigmatized, you're civically excommunicated, you're held in contempt, you're treated badly. And such a large disparity in the incidence of that kind of treatment by race exist in a society that is sort of IPSO facto an indication of structural racism. The state stands up police forces, they build these cages, they corral people in them. And look at the impact that this is having on the black community. In some cities, the proportion of young men who are incarcerated or have a criminal record who are black is a third 40%. It becomes a normal way of life. Young women go to the prison to try to find mates and pin pals and such like that. Kids see the role models of ex cons with their tattoos and their buffed up bodies coming in and out of the prison. It becomes normative in these communities. We have a school to prison pipeline because discipline of youngsters in schools seems to be somehow connected to their subsequent development into criminals. We have a prison industrial complex because indeed there is money to be made in the provision of the services that are associated with incarceration, and it's being made by private corporations and so on. So this is structural racism. This is what I think many people would say. This is a prime example of structural racism. The structures of law enforcement come down like a ton of bricks on people who are situated in the society at the margins because of our history of race. And by the way, if the same forces had been coming down with the same degree of severity on white people, the structure would be able to reform itself. Questions would arise. Three strikes in your out would look very differently if most of the people suffering under that kind of punitive regime were white. But because they're black and brown, we can write them off. We don't question ourselves. The business as usual seems acceptable when the people who are bearing the cost of it are black. I'm not sure I'm answering your question. No, you are, but it was or not. But this is one of the reasons why I think the term structural racism is so compelling to many people. And I, a social scientist, find the evocation of that kind of one size fits all narrative structural racism inadequate to giving an account of what's actually going on. In other words, it's not as if there are a bunch of this is Glenn Lowry now speaking culture, the reliance on structural racism as a category. I want to say it's not as if there's a bunch of white people meeting somewhere deciding we're going to make the laws this or that in order to repress blacks. And moreover, it's not as if the outcomes that people are concerned about in the example at hand, disparities and the incidents of incarceration are independent of the free choices and decisions that are being taken and being made by people, in this case black people who might end up finding themselves in prison. They made a decision to participate in criminal activities that were clearly known to be illicit and perhaps carry the consequences that they are now suffering, didn't they? Sometimes the decisions that they make have enormous negative consequences for other black people, don't they? Do we want to inquire about what's going on in the home and community lives and backgrounds from which people are coming? Who are the subjects of this racial inequality? Or are we to assume that any such deficits or disadvantages that are causally associated with their involvement in law breaking and that are related to their own community, organization, structures of family, attentiveness of parenting and so forth are nevertheless themselves the consequence of white racism. Black people wouldn't be acting that way if it weren't for white racism, if there were greater opportunity, if the schools were better funded, if it hadn't been for slavery, the black family would look at it so forth and so on. And if that's what you mean by structural racism, which is to say every racial disparity is almost by definition a consequence of racism, either because it reflects the contempt for the value of black life, the neglect of the development of black people, or because to the extent that it is a consequence of choices that black people are making themselves, they only are making such choices because of the despair, the neglect, the lack of opportunity, et cetera, that they have experienced. Then it seems to me that that's a kind of tautology that says any disparity by race is by definition a reflection of structural racism. And it's a tautology that is a social scientist I don't want to embrace. And as an African American, I'm profoundly skeptical of because at some level it seems to me and I'll conclude I know I've been going on for a while it kind of surrenders the possibility of African American agency saying, that everything that is of a negative character, that is reflection of inequality, of disparity in which blacks are on the short end, everything is a consequence of this history. How is it that blacks are unable to make our own lives, notwithstanding whatever the history may have been? Are there not variations and differentiations within the black population that perhaps one could identify and extol the virtue of certain patterns of behavior and reactions to environmental conditions that seem to be more effective, more life affirming, more successful than others? So I don't like structural racism because it's imprecise, because it's a kind of dead end in a way. It leaves us dependent upon leaves us, I mean, African Americans dependent upon a kind of dispensation to be bestowed by powerful whites who actually are moral agents, who actually do have the ability to choose or not various ways of life, including responding affirmatively to our demands for redress of our subordination. Whites are powerful. Whites are agents. Whites can do the right thing or the wrong thing. Blacks are merely historical chips. We're merely cogs, automatically being driven by the fact of slavery, by the fact of Jim Crow segregation and so on, and ultimately not responsible for our own and our children's lives. Yeah, it's a very complex picture. And I think one thing I just got from what you said is that even if it's true, even if you could draw a straight line from slavery and Jim Crow to the state of inequality and social dysfunction in the black community as a matter of history and a matter of just causality through time. That's not to say that in the year 2016, the ambient level of white racism is the ongoing cause of these problems, and that if you could just get white people to be less racist. But if you could wave a magic wand and literally dissect out all of the racism harbored by white people on any level, that would magically correct for all of the problems you just articulated. That doesn't follow. So what does it get you if you really can trace that line, that 200 year old line, to the present? Where does that leave you? I mean, it leaves you with something like Tanahasi Coates's picture of reality where what we should be talking about now is paying reparations for slavery. I don't know what I think about that. I know what I think about Coates's style of talking about this issue. And the fact that I'm talking to you and not to him suggests where I think the more profitable and civil and rational conversation is going to be had. Frankly, at one point I thought someone recommended that I have them on the podcast, and honestly, I feel like the conversation would be a disaster. This style of talking just strikes me as to put this in kind of starkly invidious terms from which he would want to defend himself. It just strikes me as not intellectually honest in its totality. There's a kind of pandering to white guilt and black rage that never stops, and we can't just talk about facts in a civil way. And so that worries me. Let me say something here. We can talk more about Coats if it suits you, and I'm happy to not do so. But there are a couple of things that I want to say. One of them is I want to mention the name Thomas Chatterton Williams. He's an African American. He's younger than colts. He sees maybe ten years younger than Colts, which puts him in early 30s. He lives in Paris. He's a trained philosopher graduate at Georgetown University. And I'm not sure where he did graduate study, but I think he did some graduate study and philosophy as well. And he has an essay. It's published in the London Review of Books, and it is a review essay of Tanahasi Koepsa's book, between the World and Me. And the burden of Thomas Chatterton Williams argument in that essay is that Coates open letter to his son in which he advises his son that America is so thoroughly contemptuous of your value as a human being that you must not ever relax, you must not trust these people or turn your back on them. They will rip you to shreds. There's nothing more American than taking a guy like you, hanging you from a lamppost and tearing your limbs off one by one. Don't believe in the American dream. We are up against an implacable force that force erases your humanity. It's always been so, and it will always be so. This is a paraphrase of the posture that Coates takes in between me. I think it's an accurate paraphrase. And Williams, Thomas Chatterton Williams in the London Review of Books, uses it as a point of departure to say, there's no place to go from here for black people. This is an absolutely bleak landscape, and it is disempowering. It just surrendered agency. There's only one possible future here in this, and it's a very bleak one indeed. And he thinks that's both untrue of the actual historical, socio historical circumstances in the United States rather more complicated than that, but he also thinks it's soul killing, that it's an existential surrender of one's humanity to take such a posture. So I just want to mention that so that your listeners who might not have come across Thomas Charter to William, who, by the way, submitted that essay to the New Yorker, I happen to know on good authority, and it sat on an editor's desk for many months and was eventually killed. It's an absolutely brilliant and controversial engagement with Tanahasi Colts'book. And so Williams ends up taking it to the London Review of Books because he can get published in the United States. Yeah, the liberal, if you will, cognizanti, the ruling class of cultural mandarins, will not tolerate that kind of argument from an African American culture, the stance that Taunahsiko has taken. So that's one thing I want to mention. The other, and I'll be very brief, is Mitch Landru. Mitch Landru, former mayor of the City of New Orleans out at Aspen. At the Ideas Festival at Aspen a couple of years ago, Landru and Coates were paired up in a panel in which they were discussing, well, race and inequality in America. Coates was taking the posture that we know he would take, and Landru was armed with what he called the Books of the Dead. Now, the Books of the Dead were literally the case books from his police department in the city of New Orleans that recorded the details of as yet unresolved homicide cases in that city. There were hundreds of them, and 90% or more of the victims in these cases were black people. And Landru was trying to say to Colts, in response to Colts's arguments about the implacability of American racism and the erasure of black humanity and the devaluation of the black body, that black people are killing themselves in very large numbers in the industry. Now, he's not Sean Hannity, conservative, with a wagging his finger about black on black crime. This is Mitch Landry, centrist Democrat, mayor of a city, New Orleans in this case, Skyne of a political family, of some prominent Democrats in Louisiana, and served as mayor of New Orleans, and confronting Tanahasi Colts at the Aspen Ideas Festival in a debate about race and inequality in America in which Colts had taken position. That we know that he takes. And Landru had tried to call, to gently call to the attention of the audience the observation that much of the threat to the integrity of black bodies and black life are coming from other black people. Offering as evidence of that his so called Books of the Dead, which were the case books that were a compendium of details about unresolved homicide cases in New Orleans, the vast majority of which of 90% of whom were the victims, were African American. Cos's response to Landru was to dismiss him with the back of his hand. This, by the way, is written up in New York magazine. One searches New York magazine, Coates and Land drew, you'll find a very long essay that is about townhouse Colts and that reports on this encounter Colts'response was to give Landry the back of his hand. There ain't nothing wrong with black people that ending white supremacy wouldn't fit. What do you expect people to do? They're rats in a barrel. You've got the lid on the barrel. You open the lid and peek down in there, and you find that they're at each other's throats. Well, what would you expect to happen? It's the frigging barrel, man. You're going to blame the rats? Okay, that's my metaphor. Not what kind of hussy coats might have used. But it's capturing this idea that the mayhem, the despicable devaluation of life attendant to people riding up and down the street in an automobile with heavy weapons, firing them more. Or less aimlessly out the window at their gang rivals and killing innocent bystanders along the way. And this happening in the scores and hundreds within a year in a given city, that that kind of mayhem, that that kind of despicable contempt for human life shown by black people toward other black people is not relevant. To assessing what it is that actually imperils black life, because those behaviors are understood themselves to be the consequence of a system and a history of oppression. Now, you can say this. You can say this with eloquence and style. You can say this with fury and anger. You can say this with economy of word and clever turn of phrases tonihasi Colts has been given to do, but it doesn't make it a valid moral argument. It seems to me, and I've said this, that Colts was holding a pair of queens and that he was looking at an ace face up and that he was bluffing. In other words, he was daring Mitch Landry to come back at him and say, what an absurdity. You're telling me that people have to run up and down the street firing guns out of windows and killing their brethren because we didn't get reparations for slavery handed over to you yet? Because somebody who was mayor of this city ten years ago happened to be a racist because the police department has somebody who's affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan in it? And you're telling me that that explains or somehow excuses or cancels out the moral judgment that I would otherwise bring to bear against any other community in which I saw this happening? You're telling me that the history of slavery and JeM Crow now assisted in the past is pertinent to our reaction to this lived experience on a daily basis of African Americans in my American city? You're beneath contempt in that way. You're the one who has no real respect for the value of black life. You lived in a bubble. Why don't you get out of it and walk the streets of some of these places where people have died? Now Coats will flash out. Oh, well, I was raised in Baltimore at a time when and I've seen enough gang activity, and I know what's going on inside and out, and I've been there. Whatever. And Landrue can say the body count continues to mount while your blather titillates the cultural elites in Washington DC. And New York City and gives guilty white people an excuse not to feel so guilty while you blather on, we're actually burying the dead. Landry might have responded to him like that. He might have told him to get the heck out of here with that nonsense that attempts to intellectualize what any person with common sense can see is an absolute disaster. You're blaming white people for black people living some like barbarians. You're blaming white people for that. He might have said to him that's what I said to him. Lantern folded the hand with a pair of victims. Now you've convinced me that we need to stage a public debate between you and Coates and put it on primetime television. That will be worth seeing. Let's talk about the the mayhem. Let's get into the question of violence. So so here's the basic picture. As I understand it, america is distinguished as one of the most violent societies. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, as I said in my last podcast, ISIS just released a remarkable document in the latest issue of their magazine, Dabiq, which is named after a city in Syria where they believe they will wage a final battle against a crusader army and usher in the end times. So I promise to discuss that in a separate podcast, which I'll do now. The whole magazine is fairly astonishing. I'll provide a link to a PDF on my blog, but I warn you that some of the pictures are disturbing. There's a photograph of a man getting his head cut off, which leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. But I'm going to read some relevant parts of the magazine on this podcast, and one thing that should alarm you is how well written it is. The writing in this magazine is actually better than you'll find in your average Salon article or on the Intercept. In fact, it's as well written as Fawaz Gurgy's new book on ISIS published by Princeton University Press. And the copy editing in this magazine is actually better than in that book. I'm not exaggerating. I spotted a typo in the Gurgy's book in the first few pages. I haven't seen any typos in this copy of Dubbeek, and it may sound like a strange thing to say, but good writing and good copy editing is a very bad sign. It tells you something about the caliber of people they've managed to recruit. The article I'm going to focus on and read in its entirety is entitled why We Hate You and Why We Fight You. And I think it will inevitably be said that there's something self serving about my reading this to you, because it confirms more or less, everything I've been saying about jihadism for the last 15 years. And perhaps there is something a little self serving about it, because, as you know, I've been pillaried for my views on this topic for about as long. But this really isn't a matter of my just saying, I told you so. I actually think it's important that if you have any lingering doubts about whether or not ISIS and jihadism generally is a religious phenomenon, that you clarify those doubts and just listen to what members of ISIS have to say for themselves. But before I get into that article in particular, here is what I think. Any honest reader will get from this magazine as a whole. The fundamental concerns of these people are theological. The claim they want to press and substantiate in nearly every paragraph and which motivates everything they do, is a claim about the exclusive legitimacy of their religion. Every other way of life leads to hell. They really believe this. Now, most of you, I would wager, have no idea what it's like to believe that either paradise or an eternity in fire awaits you after death. And because you haven't ever believed this, you probably waste a lot of fuel wondering whether anyone actually does. I want to recommend that you stop doing that and simply accept that jihadists believe what they say they believe. Just accept it as a working assumption. If you do that, you will suddenly find that everything they do, including suicide bombing, makes perfect sense. So I recommend that you simply listen to what these people have to say for themselves as you would any other people who are making extreme sacrifices towards some end. The disposition not to do this is really strange. Let's say you went to a medical school and you asked students why they were pursuing careers in medicine. How disposed would you be to second guess their answers? What they're doing is fairly difficult. They're spending all this time in school, they're incurring massive student debt. They're spending their days indoors dissecting cadavers when they could be at the beach. What on earth are they up to? Well, if you ask them, they will tell you and you won't waste any time wondering whether they have some other motive that bears no resemblance to what they say. There might be some diversity of reasons, but 90% of medical students will give you more or less the same story. They'll say that they want to help people, that they want a meaningful career where they know they're doing good in the world, they want a high prestige career, they want to be paid well, and they might have scientific interest in biology and medical research. You'll hear answers like this and these answers make sense of their behavior. You won't hear someone say, I wanted to be a professional football player and found that I just wasn't quite good enough to turn pro. And so I decided to find the thing that was closest to the thrill of sacking a quarterback. And so I became a dermatologist. Right? That wouldn't make sense. It wouldn't make sense to imagine that was the underlying motive. So why did jihadists do what they do? Well, they are telling us ad nauseam. They're telling us even when we don't ask. And a magazine like Dabique advertises their concerns and aspirations with utter clarity. And you might want to say it's just propaganda, and it is propaganda, but it only works as propaganda because many Muslims share these aspirations and concerns and believe the same doctrines. To call it propaganda doesn't mean that it's dishonest for these ideas to successfully recruit people means that they find these ideas compelling. So whether Abu Bakr al Baghdadi believes every word in this magazine isn't the point. The point is that this material is a highly successful means of recruiting foreign born jihadis. The point is that many people find these ideas persuasive, and that's not an accident. Now, recruiting and inspiring jihadis overseas is obviously different from getting Iraqis and Syrians to fight for ISIS at home. And there's no question that many locals have been recruited out of fear. Fear of Shiites with whom they've been locked in a sectarian civil war, and fear of what ISIS will do to them if they don't support the caliphate. So who knows what percentage of local Sunnis really support the extreme salafi jihadism of ISIS? It's probably a terrifying percentage, but it's not everyone. But here we're talking about the spread of Islamism and jihadism globally. So we're talking about persuasion. We're talking about the power of ideas. We're talking about a worldview that must be argued for and which some percentage of Muslims in any society will find compelling. And when you read this magazine, you find that, above all, jihadis are concerned about religious error. They really are concerned about the deviance of Christianity, which they consider a form of paganism, and about rival interpretations of Islam. And needless to say, they're horrified by secularism and atheism and homosexuality. They're concerned about the worship of anything beyond the single reality of Allah, whether it's the worship of Jesus or the Virgin Mary or more metaphorically, things like money and pleasure in the arts and science. And the writers of this magazine go on at great length about how irrational it is to believe that a world as orderly as ours could have arisen from chaos. They give a long argument from design that is at least as lucid or as silly, depending on your view, as any offered by the Discovery Institute. They consider every sign of order in our world, including the beauty of nature and the cuteness of babies and the neurobiology of vision, the details of energy metabolism in the body and the functioning of our immune systems, as well as the faculty of reason itself, to be evidence of a benevolent creator on their account. The harmony between man and nature cannot help but attest to the reality of a just God. And this is spelled out in great detail in a magazine that prominently celebrates the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people. To read this magazine is to discover that the oft mocked line that was delivered by George Bush in his Texas drawl, they hate us for our freedom, is actually true. It is especially true if you include freedom of speech and belief. And those among you who think that they must have some other motive, that they must hate us for our foreign policy, as any rational people would in the aftermath of colonialism. Well, you're simply wrong, and dangerously so. As they make absolutely clear. So everything that has been said and written by people like Noam Chomsky and Robert Pape and Glenn Greenwald and the dozens of prominent Muslim apologists about the motivations of Jihadists, this whole pornography of self doubt that they've been peddling for more than a decade, all of this is pure delusion. The people who are attracted to the Jihadist cause are actually concerned about the work of Darwin and Marx and Nietzsche and Durkheim and Vapor and Freud, who they call, quote, the engineers of Western decadence. They are revolted by the quote sodomite pride they see on display in the west. There's a testimonial from a European convert to Islam that's worth pondering. A woman, actually, and she talks about what it was like to convert in Finland and about how Christianity never made any sense to her, because, of course, it doesn't make any sense. Jesus is both a man and the Son of God, and God himself. He's divine and all powerful, and yet he gets crucified and humiliated. This is ridiculous. Christians haven't been able to make sense of the Trinity for 2000 years. Islam actually is more straightforward than this, which is a real advantage. There's just God and you are his slave. Get with the program or burn in hell. The magazine actually contains a long article on Biblical criticism that does a very good job of dismantling Christian doctrine. The level of theological concern these people have, the absolute primacy of their claim to being metaphysically correct, is really impossible to exaggerate. They care about nothing else. There's only one question that makes any sense. How can you avoid Hell and get into paradise after you die? That question is the black hole at the center of their worldview that sucks everything into it. So this Finnish woman who was born Christian writes, what struck me most as I was reading the Qur'an were the verses about Hellfire and the punishment in the hereafter, end quote. Which isn't a surprise, obviously, because the whole point of the Quran is to admonish you to submit to Allah or else go to Hell. And she talks about how she converted to Islam and how her parents disapproved, and then she married a Muslim man and had a child, and then the happy family decamped to the Caliphate. And then she writes, quote, I can't even describe the feeling when you finally cross that border and enter the lands of the Caliphate, it is such a blessing from Allah to be able to live under the Caliphate. There are so many people who made several attempts to come, but just haven't been able to make it yet. Of course, when you come to the Caliphate after sacrificing everything for the sake of Allah, you'll continue to be tested. You're going to see hardships and trials, but every day you're thankful to Allah for allowing you to perform hydra, that's migration, and to live under the Sharia life in the Islamic state is such a blessing. You face difficulties in hardship. You're not used to the food or the change of life. You may not know the local language, you hear bombings and the children may get scared, but none of that takes away from the gratitude you have towards Allah for allowing you to be here. Also, unless you're living here, you don't realize what kind of life you had before. The life here is so much more pure. When you're in Dar al Kufar, the lands of disbelief, you're exposing yourself and your children to so much filth and corruption. You make it easy for Satan to lead you astray here. You're living a pure life, and your children are being raised with plenty of good influence around them. They don't need to be ashamed of their religion. They are free to be proud of it and are given the proper creed right from the start. After four months of being here, my son was martyred, and this was yet another blessing. Every time I think about it, I wonder to myself, if I stayed in Dar a Kupar, what kind of end would he have had? What would have happened to him? Alhamdulillah praise be to God he was saved from all that. And what could be better than him being killed for the cause of Allah? Obviously, it's not easy, but I ask Allah to allow us to join him. End quote. That's a fairly chilling passage. I'm going to read it again because you weren't ready for it. As you listen again, assume that this is a psychologically normal person who simply believes in the reality of martyrdom in paradise. Which is to say, she believes that this life is fundamentally unimportant. It's merely a test of faith. Believe the wrong thing and you will go to hell for eternity. Believe the right thing and you'll go to paradise. Eternity is all that matters. I'll read the relevant part again. Of course. When you come to the caliphate, after sacrificing everything for the sake of Allah, you'll continue to be tested. You're going to see hardships and trials, but every day you're thankful to Allah for allowing you to perform Hitra and to live under Sharia. Life in the Islamic State is such a blessing. You face difficulties in hardship. You're not used to the food or the change of life. You may not know the local language, you hear bombings, and the children make it scared, but none of that takes away from the gratitude you have towards Allah for allowing you to be here. Also, unless you're living here, you don't realize what kind of life you had before. The life here is so much more pure. When you're in Dara Akufar, the lands of disbelief, you're exposing yourself and your children to so much filth and corruption. You make it easy for Satan to lead you astray. Here. You're living a pure life, and your children are being raised with plenty of good influence around them. They don't need to be ashamed of their religion. They are free to be proud of it and are given the proper creed right from the start. After four months of us being here, my son was martyred, and this was yet another blessing. Every time I think about it, I wonder to myself, if I stayed in Dar al Khafar, what kind of end would he have had? What would have happened to him? Alhamdulillah praise be to God, he was saved from all that. And what could be better than him being killed for the cause of Allah? Obviously, it's not easy, but I ask Allah to allow us to join him. So picture what happened here. She had a young child who, four months after her sojourn in the caliphate, got what? Blown up, crushed by falling concrete? Who knows? But she thinks it's the best thing that could have happened to him. She's from Finland, right? Which, incidentally, has one of the best school systems and social safety nets on earth. And rather than raise him there to become a doctor or a novelist or an entrepreneur or to become one of those things herself, she moves to the hellhole of Iraq as the wife of some religious maniac and decides to live in a cloth bag and now celebrates the fact that her son, who could have been anybody, is now dead. And his death doesn't even rise to the level of some of the other inconveniences she lists. You're not used to the food, the change of life, the local language, the sounds of bombs. Oh, and my son got killed after four months. But that was actually a good thing. This is the world these people are committed to building, a fantasy world of gratuitous religious bullshit that strips all the value out of life, where the death of a child who was intentionally deprived by his parents of every real opportunity in life is a cause for celebration. This is the enemy, not some psychopath who would be killing people anyway and who's now merely doing these things, quote in the name of Islam. No, the enemy is any ordinary person who becomes infected by these extraordinarily stupid ideas. The enemy is someone just like you, who simply got convinced that the only things that matter in this life are martyrdom or victory for the one true faith. They want to conquer the world for Islam or die trying so they can't lose. Really, they can't lose. Can you imagine how good it must feel to know that you can't lose? Think of all your concerns in life. Think of everything you want. Think of everything you don't want and everything you want to avoid. You probably care about your career or your children's education. You don't want too many pesticides in your food. You want political stability in your society. You'd like your favorite museums or movie theaters or restaurants not to close for lack of funds. You probably want to get in shape or stay in shape. You certainly don't want to get cancer from something that a nearby chemical plant has released into your groundwater. Think of all the ways you can lose. And now imagine that you have a belief system that nullifies all of that. Oh, my son died. Good water relief. Now he's safely in paradise, and I hope to be there soon myself. If you don't understand the power of that, you have no idea what we're dealing with. And you lack empathy. You haven't been able to get into these people's heads because you are stuck in your own, and they have made it so easy for you to get into their heads. In fact, you have to make every effort to stay out. You have to imagine that they are lying, endlessly lying for some inexplicable reason, when taking their claims at face value makes perfect sense of their behavior, and when imputing other motives to them makes their behavior entirely mysterious. So just listen. Do your best for the next few minutes to see the world through their eyes. Why we hate you and why we fight you. Shortly following the blessed attack on Sodomite for Satan or Night, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org you./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I am speaking to William McCaskill. Will is an associate professor in philosophy at Lincoln College, Oxford. He was educated at Cambridge, Princeton, and Oxford. He may, in fact, be the youngest tenured professor of philosophy in the world. And he's one of the primary voices in a movement in philanthropy known as Effective Altruism, a movement which he started with a friend. And he's the co founder of three nonprofits based on effective altruist principles, giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and the center for Effective Altruism. He's also the author of a book, which I just started reading, which is really good, and the title is Doing Good Better Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to make a Difference. And there is no question that Will is making a difference if you don't have 2 hours to spend on our whole conversation, which I absolutely loved, please listen to the last few minutes of this podcast so that you at least know the tangible effect the conversation had on me. And now I give you Will McCaskill. Well, I'm here with Will McCaskill. Will, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. I first heard about you when you did your appearance on Tim Ferriss's podcast, and that was a great interview, by the way. And I'm now in the habit, sorry, Tim, of poaching your podcast guests. This is the third time I've done this. I did it with Jacob Willink, the Navy Seal, and Eric Weinstein, the mathematician, VC. Those were both great conversations. And now I have Will here. And so one thing I do is I try not to recapitulate the interview that was done with Tim, so we will not cover much of the ground you did there. So I recommend that interview because that was fascinating, and you have a fascinating bio, much of which we will ignore because you described it with Tim. But briefly, just tell me what it is you're doing in the world and how you come to be thinking about the things you think about. Yeah, so I wear a couple of hats. I'm associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford with a focus on ethics and political philosophy, a little bit of overlap with economics, and I'm also the CEO of the center for Effective Altruism, which is a nonprofit. Designed to develop and promote the idea of effective altruism, which is the use of your time and money to do as much good as you possibly can and using evidence and careful reasoning and high quality thought in order. To ensure that when you try to do good, you actually do as much good as possible, whether that's through your charity or through your career or through what you buy and helps you choose what are the causes where you can have the biggest impact? And put that way, it seems like a purely commonsensical approach to doing good in the world. I think as we get into this conversation, for people who are not familiar with your work or the effect of altruism movement, they'll be surprised to learn just how edgy certain of your positions are, which is why this will be a fascinating conversation. So I should say upfront, though, you have a book entitled Doing Good, Better, which I have only started, I regret to say, but it's a very well written and very interesting book, which I recommend people read. It covers many things we again, probably won't cover in this conversation. But tell me about the play, Pump. You start your book with this story and it really encapsulates much of what is wrong and what much of what is potentially right with philanthropy. Yeah. So the Play Pump was developed in the late 1990s, and it was an idea that really caught the attention of people around the world, but especially in philanthropic development communities. And so the Play Pump was built in South Africa, and the idea behind it was that it was a way of providing clean water to poor villages that didn't suddenly have clean water across sub Saharan Africa and South Africa, where it was a combination invention. It was a children's merry go round. So children would push this thing look just like a merry go round, but the force from the children pushing it would pump clean water up to a reservoir that would provide the clean water for the community. So it looked like a win win. The children of the village would get their first playground immunity and the people of the village would get clean water. And it really took off for that reason. So the media loved to pawn on the idea that it had pumping water as child's play. It's the Magic roundabout. It got a huge amount of funding. The First Lady, Laura Bush, at the time, as part of the Clinton Global Initiative, gave it $17 million in funding to roll this out across sub Saharan Africa. It won a World Bank development marketplace award for being such an innovative invention. Jay Z promoted it. Beyonce, really? It was the thing within development for a while. And when I first heard about it, I thought, wow, yeah, what an amazing idea. This is great that you can do two things at once, making children happy, but then also providing water. It just seems such a good example of and everyone, of course, was, like, very well intentioned behind it. Yeah. I should say, reading that section of your book, which again, is the first few pages, the effect on the reader is really perfect because you find yourself on the wrong side of this particular phenomenon because you just think, oh, my God, that is the greatest idea ever. This is a merry go round for kids that has the effect of doing all of this annoying labor that was otherwise done by women pumping these hand pumps. So now continue to the depressing conclusion. Yeah, as you might expect, there's a twist in the story, which is just that simply, in reality, the play pump was a terrible idea from the start. So unlike a normal merry go round, which spins freely once you push it, in order to pump the clean water, you need constant talk. So actually, pushing this thing would be very tiring for the kids. I mean, there were other problems, too. Sometimes they'd fall off and break limbs. Sometimes the children would vomit from the spinning. But the main problem was that they would just simply get very tired. They wouldn't want to play on this thing all day. But the community still needed this water. And so it was normally left up to the elderly women of the village to push this brightly colored play pump round and round for all hours of the day, a task we found very undignified and demeaning. And then, secondly, just wasn't even very good as a pump. And often it was the placing. Very boring but very functional Zimbabwe hand pumps, which, when you actually asked the communities they preferred it would pump more water with less effort, but actually a third of the place. There were a number of other problems, too. They would often break back down. There had initially been an idea that maintenance would be paid for with billboards on these reservoirs, but none of the advertising companies actually wanted to pay for it. And so these things were often left in disarray and no maintenance would happen to them either. And so this all came to light in a couple of investigations. And thankfully, in what's actually a very admirable and rare case, the people who are funding this, especially the Case Foundation, acknowledged that this had been a big mistake and then said, yeah, we just made a mistake. We're no longer going to keep funding this. What about the man who had invented or was pushing the idea of the pump? Yeah, so the people who were pushing it, play Pumps International, and they have a field behind it, continued to go ahead with it. They didn't accept the criticism. This is perhaps a phenomenon you're very familiar with. Yes. And so actually, the organization does still continue in a vastly diminished capacity today. They're still producing play pumps sponsored by companies like Colgate Palmolive and Ford Motors. But what is unusual in the world of doing good is that actually this actually was investigated, criticisms came to light and people were willing to back out. But the lesson from this is just that what seemed like good intentions aren't good enough. What seems like a really good idea that just seems like, yeah, this is amazing, it's revolutionary. New idea actually can just not be very effective at all. It can even do more harm than good. What we need to do if we want to really make a big difference is do the boring work of actually investigating how much does this thing cost, how many people's lives are going to be affected by how much, what's the evidence behind this? And there are many other things that we could be spending our money on that are much less sexy than the play pump, but do vast amounts of good. And that's why it's absolutely crucial if we really do want to use our time and money to make a difference, that we think about what are the different ways we could be spending this time or money, what's the evidence behind the different programs we could be doing, and what's the one that's going to do the very most good? It seems to me there are at least three elements to what you're doing that are very powerful. And the first is the common sense component, which really is not so common as we know, which is just to actually study the results of one's actions in the spirit of science, see what works and then stop doing what doesn't work. But the other element is you are committed. I know you're personally committed. And to some degree, I guess you can just tell me how much. The EA community is also committed explicitly to essentially giving until it hurts. Giving what many people would view as a heroic amount of one's wealth to the poorest people in the world or to the gravest problems in the world. And we'll talk about Peter Singer in a moment because you've certainly been inspired by him in that regard. And the third component is to no longer be taken in by certain moral illusions where the thing that is sexiest or most disturbing isn't often the gravest need or doesn't represent the gravest need. And to cut through that in a very unsentimental way and this is where people's moral intuitions are going to be pushed around. So let's start with the second piece because I think the first is uncontroversial. We want to know what is actually effective, but how far down the path with Peter Singer do you go in terms of I've heard you say, I've watched a few of your talks at this point. I've heard you say things that more or less align you perfectly with Singer's level of commitment, which where he more or less argues, I don't think he has ever recanted this, that you should give every free cent to help the neediest people on earth. It's morally indefensible to have anything like what we would consider a luxury when you're looking at the zero sum trade off between spending a dollar on ice cream or whatever it is, and saving yet another life. So just tell me how much you've been inspired by Singer and where you may differ with his take. So I think there's just two framings which are both accurate. So the first is the obligation frame. Just how much are we required to give? And Peter Singer argues that we have an obligation to give basically everything we can, and argues for this by saying, well, imagine if you're just walking past a child down in a shallow pond and rescued that child, or failed to rescue that child. Now that would be moderately abominable. What's the difference between that and spending a few thousand dollars on luxury items when that money could have been spent to save a life in a poor country? If you decide to justify not saving the child in the shallow pond because you were going to ruin your knife suit, that cost you £1000. That would just be no moral justification at all, nor wouldn't be a justification if it was £10,000. And so for that reason, he argues, yeah, we have this obligation. There's another flaming as well, which we called this excited altruism, which is I use the story of imagine if you're walking past a burning building and you run in, you see there's a child there, you kick the door down and you save that child. On this framing, the thoughts just, wouldn't that be amazing? Wouldn't you feel like that was a really special moment in your life? You'd feel like this hero. Then imagine if you did that several times in a year you save one child from a burning building, another time you take a bullet for someone, a third time you save someone from demanding you'd think your life was really pretty special and you feel pretty good about yourself. And the truth of the matter is actually, yeah, we can do that every single year. We can do much more than that hero who runs into the burning building and saves that child's life just by deciding to use our money in a different way. And so there's these two framings, obligation and opportunity. I actually just think both are true. Many people in The Effect of Autism community don't actually agree with the obligation framing. They think they're doing what they do because it's part of their values, but there's no sense in which they're obligated to do it. I actually agree with Singer's arguments. I think that certainly if you can help other people to very significant extent, such as by saving a life while not sacrificing anything of model significance, then you're required to do it. In my own case, I just think the level at which I'm at least approximately just maxing out on how much good I can do is just nowhere close to the level at which I think, wow, this is like a big sacrifice for me. And so perhaps a big sacrifice in financial terms. So as an academic, I'll be on a good middle class income, and I'm planning to give away most of my income over the course of my life. So in financial terms, it looks like a big sacrifice, but in terms of my personal well being, I don't think it's like that at all. I don't think money is actually a big factor. And if you look in my own personal happiness, if you look at the literature on, wellbeing, this is also the case. Beyond even quite a low level of about $35,000 per year, the relationship between money and happiness is very small indeed. On some ways of measuring it, it's nonexistent, in fact. And then, on the other hand, being part of this community of people who are really trying to make the world better is just very rewarding, actually just has these positive effect in terms of my own well being. So the kind of answer is just that, yeah, in theory I agree, just even if it was the case that I would think that, yeah, this is a moral requirement and so on. But then in practice, it's actually just not really much of a sacrifice for me, I don't think. Let's linger there because I have heard you say in response to challenges of the sort that singer often receives, well, if you can live comfortably and do good, well, then that's great, that's a bonus. There's nothing wrong with living comfortably, and now you have just claimed that you're living comfortably, but in fact, by most people's view, I think, spell out what is actually your commitment to giving money away at this point. So just giving money. So in 2009, I made a commitment to give everything above £20,000 per year, inflation and purchasing power, paralyte adjusted to Oxford 2009. Right. So now that's about £24,000. A current exchange rate, that's something like $32,000. And just to then give everything above that and not to wait you do that every year? I do it every year and then with my time as well, I just try and spend as much time as I can. Do you actually think that would or will scale with vastly increased economic opportunity? If you get dragged into a startup next week where now you're making millions of dollars, at some point you aspire to keep it where you've set it now. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the amount of money I've been earning over the last year is much greater than when I was a postdoc or PhD student. And in fact, that's just been a plus. I'm happier that I'm able to give away more. The one the biggest worry I have with my commitment is just value of my time. So there's certain ways you can spend money in order to save time eating out of and make free food for yourself, being more willing to get taxi places on the bus. Yeah, that's interesting. That means I think I'd be making a mistake if my pledge. So I have a kind of balancing act. One is just because I'm using my time to build up center for effective altruism and so on, promote these ideas, I want to ensure I have as much time as possible to do that. But then at the same time I don't want to say, oh well, people should be giving it's really good for people to be giving their money effectively, but I don't do that because my time is so valuable. That would just seem kind of hypocritical. So I also just want to demonstrate like, yeah, you can do this and it's actually just a really good life. It's not nearly as much of a sacrifice as it might seem. Let's linger there for a moment because I think that if you are not following Singer all the way so that the implications of his argument is really that there should be some kind of equilibrium state where you are more or less indistinguishable from the people you're helping at a certain point because you've helped them so much. So if you are living a comfortable life, really at all, but a comfortable life by Western standards, you are still, from Singer's view, culpably, standing next to the shallow pond watching yet another child drown. And so I'm wondering how you draw that line. And obviously, and needless to say, there's no judgment in this because the scheme you have just sketched out already qualifies you for sainthood in most people's worldview at this point. But how do you think about that? Yeah, so why don't I give even more? So I think even if you endorse pure utilitarianism just to maximize the amount of good you can do, I think that just for practical reasons, that doesn't mean that you should move all of your, you know, keep donating until you're living on $2 per day. Not if you're then a rich country, because the opportunities you have to spend let's just solely focus on money. So there's lots of other ways of doing good. But if you just say, OK, I'm going to live a normal, you know, keep going in my own job and just donate as much as I can until I'm earning very little. Firstly, I think that's going to damage your ability to earn more later. It means that there's risks of yourself burning out, which is I think very significant. If you're going to wear the hair shirt for three years and then completely give up and modality altogether, that's much worse than just donating a more modular amount, but for the rest of your life. And then also in terms of your productivity and your work as well, it's just actually really important to ensure that you've got the right balance between how much you're donating such that you can do it positively. And then finally, in terms of the influence you have in other people, I think if you're able to, you know, if you're able to act as a role model, something that people actually really aspire towards, think, yeah, this is this amazing way to live a life. And look at these. People are able to donate a very significant amount and still have a really great life that's much more powerful because it might actually mean that many other people go and do the same thing. And if just one other person does the same thing as you do, you've doubled your life's impact. It's like a very big part of the equation. Whereas if you're walking around utterly miserable just so you can donate that expert, that last scent to fight global poverty, you might seem a little bit like an antihero, and I think that's a very important consideration. So I actually think that when it comes to the practical implication of singer's ideas, it doesn't lead you to donate everything above, you know, $2 per day. Instead, you you kind of max. The optimal amount is actually quite quite a higher level, which is maximizing the amount of good you'll do over the course of your life's time, bearing in mind the ability to, say, get promotions or change career, earn more the value of your time, ensuring you're productive and ensuring you're the goodwill model to other people as well. And so I actually think that the case at which I find maximize my own impact is way farther away from the line at which I'd think this is really a big hardship for me. And I think that's true, at least for many people. Yeah, this is really a fascinating area and it's going to get more fascinating because it just becomes strange the closer you look at it. Now, I'm totally convinced by your opportunity framing. And while I had heard it put that way before, your emphasis on that is very attractive and very compelling. Just to remind our listeners, so that by dint of having the resources you have, and if you're listening to this podcast, in any developed country, you almost by definition have vast resources relative to the poorest people on Earth. And this puts you in a position to quite literally save the child from the burning building. Any moment you decide to write a check for what is it that actually, in your view, is sufficient to save a life? Using the best charity, the best guests from GiveWell Donating to Against Malaria Foundation is $3,400. Statistically speaking, on average save a life. And they're keen to emphasize that, you know, that's just an estimate, a lot of kind of assumptions go into that and so on, but they're very careful, very skeptical. It's the best estimate that I know of. That opportunity is always there. And I guess one of the challenges from a philanthropic point of view and they're just the point of view of one's own maximizing one's own psychological well being is to make that opportunity as salient as possible. Because obviously writing a check doesn't feel like rushing across the street and grabbing the child out of the burning building and then being rewarded by all the thanks you'll get from your neighbors. But if you could fully internalize the ethical significance of the act, something like that reward is available to us. At least that's what you're arguing. I'm convinced that is a good way of seeing it. Therefore, taking those opportunities more and more and making them more emotionally real seems like a very important project for all of us who have so much. The other side, the Singerian obligation side I think is fraught with other issues. And so I just want to explore this a little bit. The problem we're dealing with here is that we are beset by many different forms of moral illusion where we effortlessly care about things that are, in the scheme of things, not all that important and can't be goaded to care about things that are objectively and subjectively. When you actually connect with the lives of the people suffering these conditions, the most important problems on earth and the classic example is a girl falls down a well, it's one girl, it's one life. And what you see is wall to wall coverage on every channel for 24 hours tracing the rescue, successful or otherwise, of this little girl. And yet a genocide could be raging in Sudan and not only can't we be moved to care, we so reliably can't be moved to care that the news organizations just can't bear to COVID it. I mean, they give us a little bit of it just because it's their obligation, but it's it's 5 minutes and they know that that's that's a losing proposition for them anyway. Yeah, so that's that's the situation we're in and that seems like a bug, not a feature of our ethical hardware. For me it exposes an interesting paradox here because the most disturbing things are not reliably the most harmful in the world and the most harmful things are not reliably the most disturbing. And you can talk about this from the positive or negative side, we can talk about the goods we don't do and we can talk about the harms people cause. And so this is an example from my first book, The End of Faith. To find out that your grandfather flew a few bombing missions over Dresden in the war is one thing. To find out that he killed a woman and her children with a shovel is another. Now, he undoubtedly would have killed more women and children flying that bombing mission. But given the difference between killing from 30,000ft by dropping bombs and killing up close and personal, this is where the paradox comes in. We recognize that it would take a different kind of person with a very different set of internal motives, intentions and global properties of his mind and emotional life to do the latter versus the former. So a completely ordinary person like ourselves could be, by dint of circumstance, detached enough from the consequences of his actions so as to drop the bombs from the plane. It takes a proper psychopath, or somebody who is pushed into psychopathy by his experience to kill people in that way with a shovel and to flip this back to philanthropy. It is a very different person who throws out the appeal from UNICEF, casually ignoring the fact that he has forgone yet another opportunity to save a life. That person is very different from the person who would pass a child drowning in a shallow pond because they don't want to get his shoes wet. And so the utilitarian equation between life and life, which Singer's obligation story rests on, doesn't acknowledge the fact that it really would require a different person to ignore suffering that was that salient or to perpetrate in the case of of creating harms suffering, that's that salient. And yet we are being asked to view them as equivalent for the purpose of of parsing the ethics. So I think there's an important distinction between assessing acts and assessing a person, assessing a person's character. And I think normally when we go about doing model evening, most of the time we're talking about people's characters. So is this a good person in general? Can I trust them to do good things in the future? Is this the sort of person I want to associate with? Whereas model philosophers are often talking about acts. And so I think Singer as well would agree that it's in some sense a much worse person who kills someone than who intentionally kills someone than who just walks past a downing child. You'd entirely agree with that because in part the idea that's much worse to kill people intentionally is a far greater model wrong in our society than merely failing to save someone. Right? Although the difference between an act of commission and omission, I think it brings in a different variable here. I mean, I agree that that is a difference that we find morally salient. But what I'm talking about here is in both cases you are declining to help someone on the side of not doing good. And in both cases in war, you are knowingly killing people, but they're just very different circumstances. So there's different levels of salience. And so I agree that I would also just be very troubled by someone who wasn't moved by the more salient causes of suffering in human in some way. But when we think about moral progress, I think it's absolutely crucial to pay particular attention to those causes of suffering that are very kind of mechanized or have the salient slipped away from them. I mean, if you look at the orders that were given to SS guards in terms of descriptions of how to treat. Jews in the Holocaust. Every step has been taken to remove their humanity, to turn it into completely banal evil. And it's through that almost mechanization of suffering that I think humanity has committed some of the worst wrongs in its history. And I think that that's also going to be true today. So when you look at practice of factory farming, or if you look at the way we incarcerate people, so if we saw a country, as happens that was regularly flogging or inflicting corporal punishment on its criminals, you think of absolutely barbaric misappractice. But yet putting someone in a prison cell for several years is a worse harm to them. I think it's like considerably worse the punishment inflicting on them. It doesn't give us that same like, emotional resonance. And I think insofar as this track record throughout human history of people doing absolutely abominable acts, not realizing that it was morally problematic at all, even taking its common sense, precisely because the ways in which the harm caused had been stripped away, had been made sterile, as with the case of the SSR guards. That should give us pause when there's some case of extreme harm that has this property of being made sterilize should make us worry. Are we in that situation again? Are we just thinking, oh, yeah, this is common sense, normal part of practice, but only because of the way that things have been framed. And the really powerful thought, I think, from Singer's arguments were thinking about extreme poverty is, well, maybe we're in that situation now with respect to us in the west compared to the global poor. So if we look back to think of Louis the 16th or something, or imagine some monarch with who's incredibly wealthy, with its people starving all around him, thank God, that's absolutely horrific. It doesn't seem so different from the way that we are at the moment. Everyone in a rich country in the US or UK is in. Basically, most of the population are in the richest 10% of the world's population. Even once you've taken into account the fact that money goes further overseas, I imagine most of the listeners of this podcast are in the top few percent. If you're earning above $55,000 per year, you're in the richest 1% of the world's population. And this is a very unusual state to be in. It's only in the last 200 years that we've seen such a radical divergence between our rich countries and the poorest countries in the world. So it's not something that our model intuition, I think, is really caught up to. But in the spirit of thinking, well, what are the ways in which we could be acting in a way that seems radically wrong from the perspective of future generations, but that we take for common sense? I think Singer's definitely put his finger on a possible candidate which is the fact that the fact that we have what by historical standards and global standards is immense wealth, immense luxury. And it's a country like common sense or normal just to use that on yourself rather than to think of it as, in some sense, resources that really belong to all of humanity. Okay, well, we're going to keep digging in this particular hole because this is where we are going to reach moral gold. So you did a debate with Giles Fraser for Intelligence Squared, which I was amused to see that I had actually debated him as well. He liked you much more than he liked me, I think probably because you weren't telling him his religion was bullshit. Judge Giles is a priest, but I thought he raised a very interesting point in your debate and your answer was also interesting. So I'll just take you back to that moment again. We're in a burning house with a child who can be saved, but in this house there is a Picasso on the wall in another room and you really only have a moment to get out of there with one of these precious objects intact. And Giles suggested that on your view, the Picasso is worth so much that you really should save it because you can sell it and turn it into thousands and thousands of bed nets that will save, presumably thousands of lives. I'm not sure that's actually the conversion from bed net to life, but in any case, we're talking about a multi million dollar painting, let's say a $50 million painting, and your child, or the child is just one life. And so he put that to you, I think, expecting, perhaps not, but expecting that that is a knock down argument against your position and you just bit the bullet there. So perhaps you want to respond again to that thought experiment. Yeah. So the first question, the first thing to caveat is that Giles is asking this as a philosophical thought experiment. So you strip away extraneous factors like what's the media going to think of this and what perhaps also kind of, are you going to be able to live with yourself afterwards as a matter of human psychology? And so on. So slipping away those things to just have the pure thought experiment of, well, you can save this child or you can save this Picasso and sell it by bed nets. And the question asked him was, well, supposing it's just two burning buildings and one there's a single child and the other burning building there's, let's say it's 100 children that you could save. And the only way you can save those hundred children is by taking this Picasso off the wall and using it to plop open the door of this other building such that 100 children can go through. What ought you to do? And I think in that case, it's very clear you ought to save the hundred children, even if you're using this painting as a means to doing so. The fact that you're using that as a means doesn't seem irrelevant. And the reason I actually quite like this thought experiment is it really shows what a morally unintuitive world we're in, that actually the situation we're in right now is, is that there's a burning building. It's just that it's behind you, though often in front of you, and that there is those hundreds of children whose lives you can potentially save that are behind you and not a salient to you. And so I think, like, what Giles was wanting to say was that, oh, isn't this very uncompassionate? But actually I think this is just far more sophisticated to compassion, the understanding that there are people on the other side of the world whose lives are just as important, who are just as in need of someone who's right in front of you. That shows a much more sophisticated, much more genuine form of compassion than just simply being moved by whatever happens to be more salient to you at the time. And so, yeah, it's like a conclusion that show like it's a weird conclusion, but the weirdness comes from how weird the world is, how morally unintuitive the world we happened to find ourselves is in. Which is that like, yeah, save the painting, and morally speaking, save the painting and therefore save hundreds of lives. Having said that, of course I wouldn't blame someone. And I think, again, as we talked about, in terms of natural human psychology, it's perfectly natural to save the person who's right in front of you. So I wouldn't blame anyone for doing that. But if we're talking about moral philosophy and what the model ecovet choices, then I think you just have to save the hundred. Also. You wouldn't blame them. And the decision to save the Picasso strikes us as so strange. Those are two, I think, two sides of the same coin. You wouldn't blame them because you're acknowledging how counterintuitive it is to save the Picasso and not the child. And so you're really putting the onus on the world, on the situation, on all the contingent facts of our biology and our circumstance that causes us to not be starkly consequentialist in this situation. So my concern there is that one of the reasons why I don't tend to call myself a consequentialist, even though I am one, is because for me, consequentialism, or historically consequentialism, has been so often associated with just looking at the numbers of bodies on both sides of the balance. And that's how you understand the consequences of an action and judge its moral merits. But there's more to it than that. You just acknowledge that there was more to it than that, but you weren't inclined to put those consequences also into the picture. So, like the question of whether you could live with yourself. Right? And I think that's the spectrum of effects certainly includes whether you could live with yourself, and it includes to come back to the moral paradox here. It also includes what kind of person you would have to be in order to grab the Picasso and not the child. Given all of the contingent facts we just acknowledged, given how weird the world is or given how not optimized the world is, to produce a person who could just algorithmically always save 100 lives over one every time, no matter how the the decision is couched, we can even make the situation more perverse. So, you know, I I have two daughters. I don't have a Picasso on the wall, but certainly I have something that could be sold that could buy enough bed nets to save more than two lives in Africa, right? So the house burns down tonight. I have a choice to grab my daughters or grab this thing, whatever it is. And I reason, thusly having been convinced by you in this podcast that saving at least three lives in Africa is better than saving my two daughters. And it's only a contingent property of my own biology and its attendant. Selfishness and the drive toward kin selection and all the rest that has caused me to even be biased toward my daughter's lives over the lives of faceless children in Africa. So I'm convinced, and I grab the valuable thing and sell it and donate it to give will, and it's used for bed nets. And so I think even you, given everything you believe about the ethical imperative of the singer style argument, would be horrified, and rightly so, that I was capable of doing that. That horror, or at least that distrust of my psychology, I think, summarizes an intuition we have about all of the other consequences that are in play here that we haven't thought much about. And again, this is a very complicated area, because I see that I don't know if you know about my analogy with the moral landscape, where we can have various peaks of well being. I could imagine an alternate peak on the moral landscape where we are such beings as to really care about all lives generically, as much as we care about our own children's lives. So I love my children, but I actually also feel the same love for people in Africa I've never met. And it's just as available to me. And therefore, my disposition not to privilege my children is not a sign of any lack of connection to them. It's just I'm the Dalai Lama squared, the bodhisattva of compassion, and I've got that connection everywhere. So I grabbed the Picasso, and I can feel good about saving more lives in Africa. But my concern is that let's just acknowledge that is another peak on the moral landscape, but between where we are now, where we love our children more than those we haven't met, and would view it as an act of pathological altruism to let them burn and just grab the Picasso based on our knowledge that we could do more good with it. If we wanted to become the Dalai Lama style altruist, there may be this uncanny or unhappy valley between these two peaks that we would have to traverse where there is some there would be something sociopathic about an ability to run this calculus and be motivated by it. Yeah. So there's a ton to say here. So one thing yeah. I want to say I also don't describe myself as a consequentialist. I think the correct thing to do is to in a model decision is have a kind of variety of model lenses my PhD was on this topic have a variety of model lenses and take the action. That's the best kind of compromise between the competing model views that seem most plausible, some of which are consequentialist, others might be non consequentialist. And I do think that the case, and I just emphasize consequences because everyone should agree that consequences matter and that they're very neglected in terms of the impact that we can have in the world that we're in. And so I think the case where you've got special obligations, it's a family member or child or a friend is just very different from the question when it's just strangers. I think it's at least a reasonable moral view to think, I just do have this special obligation to my friends, certainly very deep part of common sense to think I do have a special obligation to my child. And if I can save my child, even if it was they were right in front of me. I can save one child, I can save ten strangers, I should save my child. And so I think that's quite a different case. Although I maybe we should just plant a flag there, because I think that's interesting. I don't know what special obligations actually consistent, apart from some argument that, one, that we just were hardwired that way, and it's it's hard to get over this hardwiring. But two, we are better off for honoring those obligations. It does resolve the consequences in some way. If our world would be much better if we ignored those hardwired obligations or a sense of obligation, then I think there's an argument for ignoring them. So we can table that. Yeah. But then the second question, which is very important, taking us back to the Picasso, is this. And this is a way in which model philosophy can often be very confusing to people who don't do it, is that moral philosophers do engage in these thought experiments where they say, oh, well, put aside all of these other considerations that are normally irrelevant, and then they expect you to still have a reliable intuition, even in this very strange, fantastical case. And so I do think in the case of when you are bringing back factors like, am I actually psychologically capable of doing this? How am I going to, like, think about myself when I, like, hear, like, this child screams in my, like, late at night every day. Of course, that's incredibly relevant. And then similarly, I think, again, the kind of philosopher tends to focus on what acts are the best, whereas in terms of the life decisions we make, biggest decisions tend to be more like what sort of person should I be? What my big project? And I think cultivating in yourself to become the sort of person who's empathetic enough that you won't in this situation simply do the calculations and just go and save the Picasso. I think that might well be right, that you're just going to be a person that will do more good over the long run if you don't do that. That's why it's kind of a subtle case where, again, you want to distinguish between what's the best kind of character to have and the best character to have is plausibly one. That means you do the wrong thing a number of times. That's very interesting. So let's just I don't want to interrupt you if you had much more you wanted to say there because every one of these points is so interesting. This has been my gripe with certain caricatures of utilitarianism or consequentialism. So the idea that if you can sacrifice one to save five, well, then you go into your doctor's office for a checkup and he realizes he's got five other patients who need your organs, so they just grab you and steal your organs and you now are dead. But if you just look at the larger consequence of living in a world where at any moment any of us could be sacrificed by society to save five others, none of us want to live in that world and I think for a good reason. And so you have to grapple with a much larger spectrum of effects when you are going to talk about consequences. So you just acknowledged one here. Where is that? To be the kind of person you want to be, who is really going to do good in the world and to be tuned up appropriately to have the right social connections to other human beings. You may in fact want to be the kind of person who privileges love of one's friends and family over a more generic loving kindness to all human beings. Because if you can't feel those bonds with friends and family, that has moved enough of the moving pieces in your psychology so that you're not the kind of person who is going to care about the suffering of others as much as you might. Yeah. So another example of this is a number of people I know often a consequence of this mindset with respect to their diet, to be choices, just to kind of acknowledge that animal suffering is really bad. And animals have real, like non human animals have real moral status that we should respect and won't eat some very bad forms of meat like factory farmed chicken on that grounds. But for something like beef or lamb. The animals, I think, just have reasonable lives, not amazing lives, but lives that are definitely worth living better than for them if they'd never existed. You actually think that's true of factory farmed beef or just talking about I was talking about fed, pasture raised beef. I mean, it's harder to factory farm a cow in the way that you can you can't feed them nearly as badly as you can a chicken. But as for which animals have lives that are worth living or not, it's a really hard question. But there are at least some people who will kind of justify eating that sort of meat, because what you're doing by buying that meat is increasing the demand for a certain type of meat. That then means that more animals of that type come into existence and those animals have good lives. So the question is, well, who's it bad for then? It's not bad for the cow you're eating because that cow's already dead. It's not bad for the cow that you bring into existence because it wouldn't have existed otherwise. But then I just like I can't imagine in my own case, psychologically, believing both that animal suffering is incredibly important and, you know, you should cared a lot about animals and then also kind of just eating their flesh. I don't think it's a psychological possibility for me. So you're a vegetarian. So I'm a vegetarian. Another case first given to me by Derek Parfitt is your grandmother, who you love very much. You've got a very close relationship with her. When she dies, you just throw it in the garbage. Just questions, well, who's that bad for? It's not bad for her because she's no longer with us. But again, it just seems like there's this as a matter of human psychology doing that is very inconsistent with what seems like genuine regard for that person that's worth acknowledging. So it's easy to cash that intuition out again in the form of consequences, in my view. Which is, yes, it's not bad for your grandmother because she's presumably not there to experience anything but the sense that there's something sacred about a human life or the sense that one's love of a person needs to be honored by an appropriate framing of their death that is good for everyone else who's yet living. Right? And if we just chucked our loved ones in the trash, that would have implications for how we feel about them. And how we feel about them is the thing that causes us to recoil from treating them that way once they've died. And this is going to become more and more pressing, these kinds of seemingly impractical bounce of philosophies, and will become more and more pressing when we can really alter our emotional lives and moral intuitions to a degree that is very granular. So just imagine you had a pill that allowed you to just no longer be sad. This is the perfectly targeted antidepressant that has no other downside, no other symptoms. Pharmacologically. We may in fact get that lucky, maybe not. But imagine a pill that just if you're grief stricken, you take this pill and you are no longer grief stricken and you can take it at any dose you want. Now your child has died or your mother has died and you're in grief, then the question is how long do you want to be sad for? What is normative? Now, would it be normative to 30 seconds after your child has died? Right. In fact, you may still be in the presence of the body to just pop that pill in a sufficient dose to be restored to perfect equanimity. I think most of us would feel that that is some version of chucking your grandmother in the trash. It doesn't honor the connection. I mean, what does love mean if you don't shed a tear when the person you love most has died? But finding what is normative there is really a challenge. I don't know that there's any principle we can invoke or that we're ever going to find that it's going to convince us that we have found the right point. But whatever feels comfortable at the end of the day there, I think is encapsulating all of the consequences that we feel or imagine we would feel in those circumstances. And a loss of connection to other people is certainly a consequence that we're worried about. Yeah, absolutely. And then also just if you never felt sadness that your child injury or death to your child, I'm sure humans, as a matter of fact would therefore take less fewer steps to protect their children and so on. There'd be a whole host of, I think, really bad consequences from that. Quite plausibly and yeah, in terms of the general framing, I agree with you in terms of frustrations at consequentialism where they create these cases where all sorts of real world effects are just abstracted away. This is true for the question of how much to give as well. Where in these debates it's normally imagined that there is just this superhuman person who could just give all of their income to the lowest level and then not have any other areas of their life affected negatively. But that's just a fiction. I mean, I think if someone thinks, well, I should give 10% because if I give more then I'm likely to burn out. And I'm like, yes, you should be really attentive to your own psychology and that's like a really important consideration. Whereas that's the sort of thing that in arguments about consequentialism. For some reason, the critics and sometimes the proponents tend to miss out, tend to be very kind of simplified views of the consequences. Again, the problem comes back to the singer side of this conversation, which is if you're only giving 10% then you you are still standing next to the shallow pond. It is one of those slippery slope conditions where you're just once you acknowledge that there's this the juxtaposition of your casual indulgence of your wants, any one of which is totally dispensable, you could sacrifice it and your life would be no worse off. Alongside the immediate need of someone who's intolerably deprived by dint of pure bad luck, your privilege is a matter of luck entirely and all of the variables that that produce it. No matter how self made you think you are, you didn't pick your genes, you you didn't pick the society into which you were born. You can't account for the fact that you were born in a place that is not now. Syria, fractured by the worst civil war in memory. Elon Musk is as self made as anyone. He can take absolutely no responsibility for his intelligence, his drive, the fact that he could make it to America and America was stable and he did it in a time when there was immense resources to help him do all the stuff that he's doing. So, again, you're still at the pond and it feels like the conversation you would want to have with the person who says, well, if I give any more than 10%, it's going to kind of screw me up and I'm not going to give much and I'm not going to be happy, I'm not going to be effective. It sounds like there's still more Peter Singer style therapy to do with that person, which is, listen, come on, 12% 14%. That's really moving you into a zone of discomfort, and there is no stopping point short of, listen, I could make more money if you would let me get on an airplane now and fly to the meeting I'm now going to miss because I don't have enough money for a ticket. And then you begin to invoke some of the, I think you call it earning to give principles, right, which we can talk about, but unless you're going to bring in other concerns there where you can be more effective at helping more drowning children in shallow ponds, you don't have an argument against Singer? Yeah, I think so. There's a distinction in consequentialist ethics between what gets called actualism and possibleism. So, supposing you have three options. You can stay home and study, you can stay home and watch a feed. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. So I put out a call for questions for this podcast on social media and got literally thousands. That level of response is just amazing. Needless to say, I will only be able to answer the tiniest fraction of them. All I can say is that I hope people don't get discouraged by this. Please just keep asking your questions whenever I put out a call for an AMA and Ask Me Anything podcast and eventually your question or something similar will get addressed. In fact, I often get many questions on the same topic, and rather than answer any specific one, I just fuse a bunch of them together, which I've done here. In many cases, there were many questions about meditation practice that strike me as too esoteric for the podcast. I don't want to assume an interest in meditation that is deeper or broader than it actually is, so those are the kinds of questions I'll deal with in my meditation app that is still being born. Many of you have asked about an ETA on the app. Where the hell is it? Apologies again, this is coming more slowly than I expected, but it really is coming. And in addition to guided meditations, the app will have short talks on relevant topics, so there'll be an expanding curriculum of meditations and lessons that I'm really looking forward to building. But the platform has to be working first and it is coming along. I'm hoping to start a beta test in the next couple of weeks, and I know I said that a couple of months ago, but sometimes things take as long as they take. In fact, they always do. I'm not sure how big the beta test will be, I'll probably limit it to 100 people or so, but I will keep you all posted and once I have something to share on that front, I will not be shy about it because I'm very excited about this. I'm hoping all of you will find this very useful. Also, Richard Dawkins and I are doing two events in Los Angeles on November 1. And second, just to clarify how this came about, richard was doing a speaking tour and was inviting people to be in dialogue with him in various cities, and I agreed to do La. And that event sold out almost immediately. So we decided to add an extra night. I don't know if there'll still be tickets for the second night when this podcast airs, but you could check the center for Inquiry website for that. But many of you have asked whether we could do this event in a city closer to you. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen. Richard had this speaking tour already set up, and I'm really just joining it at the last minute for this one stop. All proceeds from these events go to support the center for Inquiry and Richard's Foundation. And I think one or both of these events will be videotaped. And whether or not they are, I'm hoping to release the audio from one or both events on the podcast or a compilation of the best parts. So you will get to hear these conversations in some form, I am confident. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to sharing the stage with Richard again. It has been several years since that happened, so it does not happen enough. And as the date approaches, I might ask all of you to suggest topics we should talk about, and I will do that by the usual channels. Today also happens to be the 15th anniversary of September 11, and that's always a heavy day and also seems like the wrong day to talk about some of the things I am talking about. Most of the questions that came in were not cognizant of the anniversary, nor was I in soliciting them. So talking about Brazilian jiujitsu and free will and my collision with Hannibal Burris doesn't quite seem thematically correct for the day. But this is the day that's given to me to get this podcast done, and questions hit topics of that sort. So I will do my best. Here one question I noticed on Twitter, I think it was Twitter last night. One of you asked, 15 years ago today, how did you think you would spend the next 15 years? That's pretty interesting for me to think about, because what I've done for the last 15 years really has been defined by September 11 to, I think, an unusual degree. I was in the middle of my PhD at UCLA at the time and just getting into my research and then just found myself writing The End of Faith, and that book was not going to be denied. It led to me being more or less AWOL from my PhD for four years or so, and things would be different. It's kind of easy to answer that question. Looking at the books, I think I could really see myself having written Waking Up free Will and Lying and the Moral Landscape. And in most respects those would have been the same books. But certainly The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation and Islam and the Future of Tolerance and everything I've had to think and say about organized religion, that probably wasn't in the cards. As I've said before, I never even thought of myself as an atheist. I was an atheist, but my life was not organized in defiance of religion in any way. So that's obviously a major disruption of what I would have otherwise done. In some sense, I feel like I am just getting back to the things that really interest me very slowly over the course of decades. But the kinds of conversations I've been having on this podcast with physicists and philosophers and diverse intellectuals that don't necessarily take me toward the topic of theocracy and irrational religious beliefs, those are conversations in which I certainly recognize my former self. And it makes me very happy to get a chance to have those conversations. So, yeah, I'm kind of clawing my way back to my core interests. Things are different, but I think my life course is still recognizable. I don't know that I was planning at any point to be an academic scientist. I went into neuroscience, as I've said before, mostly because I wanted to think about the mind and write about it. And it was very much in the spirit of being a neurophilosopher. And while I'm still doing some research in neuroscience, we have a paper now that is struggling to be born. It is a tiny percentage of what I'm doing. Most of what I'm doing has the character of moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind, which was always a conscious motive of mine. So that really isn't a derailment. But you never know. I suddenly found myself wandering for about four years outside the guidance and at some moments outside the patience of my PhD advisor Mark Cohen. Who knows what would have happened if I actually stayed in the lab at that point, because he certainly had a lot to teach anyway. I feel like my interests are now more or less all within reach. But my frequent return to the topic of religion and the topic of Islam and jihadism in particular, that is really a feature of my life that was just stamped into me on this day 15 years ago. I think many of us share this feeling. It's a little embarrassing, to put it this way somehow, but September 11, 2001 was the first moment I realized viscerally, emotionally, not just intellectually, that we were living in history, right? History is just mayhem. Read the books, things go wrong, really wrong for societies and whole civilizations. Whole civilizations disappear, right? That's history, and we're in it. And I never got that. I never got how fragile civilization was. And the sense of that that was kindled after September 11 has remained quite vivid for me, and there are some moments that are not business as usual, and we can really screw this up. So that was among the many things I learned on that day. And those insights and a spirit of urgency that I had never really had before continue to inform my work. And now on to topics that may seem disconcerting in their irrelevance to the lessons of that day. Let's jump into the questions and see how far we get. I got many questions about the state of my Brazilian jiujitsu practice. Do I still train? What belt do I have? Why do I think the sport is so addictive? Well, I do still train, but far more sporadically than I'm like. And this is mostly due to my being unlucky and acquiring some recurring injuries that I have to keep taking time off the mat for. I've been training now for nearly five years, but I've had to take many long breaks, sometimes for months at a time. So I don't actually know how much training I've actually done in that time. In the first six months, I really went crazy and trained hard three or four days a week. And I got my blue belt after about six or eight months. And that was really a great period of training. And then I started to get injured in ways that worried me and in particular my hip and my neck. So I backed off for long stretches and then when I was feeling better, I'd go back on the mat and re injure myself. So I am still a lowly blue belt. And if I can't shake these injuries, I might always be a blue belt. I would absolutely love to train more and learn more of the art, but it won't really be worth it if I'm hobbling around with a cane or can't turn my head. So I am pushing forward, but at an old man's pace. But I did train today, and that was great. To someone who hasn't trained, it surely sounds crazy that someone like me, or really anyone, would be willing to court injury like this for a sport that just looks like two people wrestling in pajamas. Jujitsu really is one of those things that you can't appreciate what's going on until you do it. And most other sports aren't like that. If you see a great skier or a gymnast or a diver, it's pretty easy to see what the thrill is or what it would be if you could do those things well. But what could be the satisfaction of being able to hold someone down on the ground and not let him up? It's a bit inscrutable if you're just looking from the outside. I wrote a blog post when I started BJJ entitled The Pleasures of Drowning. I guess I'll read you a few passages of that at the beginning. I wrote training in BJJ offers a powerful lens through which to examine some primary human concerns truth versus delusion, self knowledge, ethics, and overcoming fear. And then I go on to say martial artists are often slow to appreciate how their beliefs about human violence can be distorted by their adherence to tradition as well as by a natural desire to avoid injury. During the course of training, it is in fact possible to master an ancient fighting system and to attract students who will spend years trying to emulate your skills without ever discovering that you have no ability to defend yourself. In the real world. Delusions of martial prowess have much in common with religious faith. A crucial difference, however, is that while people of faith can always rationalize apparent contradictions between their beliefs and the data of their senses, an inability to fight is very easy to detect and, once revealed, very difficult to explain away. End quote. And then I link in that blog post to some amazing videos which you really have to see to believe this fake martial artist who has clearly been faking his art so long that he came to believe that he had magic powers. You see him knocking his students down without touching them at distances of 20ft. And who knows how they came to collaborate in this collective delusion? These fake martial arts are really one of the strangest phenomena on earth. But it's pretty clear that the master of this art, who you see in the video, came to believe that he actually had these magic powers, because he then issued a challenge to the martial arts community that he would fight any man intrepid enough to step into the ring with him. And he got fairly lucky, all things considered, because the first guy who showed up was a totally ordinary martial artist, not some killer from the UFC. He could have gotten boss rootin in his prime, but he got just some guy, right? But still, you can see the result. It's about as clear a disconfirmation of a person's delusion as you will ever witness in your life. Now, the amazing thing about any grappling art is that you can train it at something close to full force without risking too much injury. Of course, people do get injured, as I just described, but it's not like training a striking art like boxing, or kickboxing 100% to get hit in the head again and again is to get brain damage. And I did some of that as a teenager and I now regret it. So with Jiujitsu, you can really test to see whether something works, and there's really no luck involved. If you get on the mat with someone who's much better than you at Jiujitsu, it's like playing someone who's much better at chess, right? You will lose. You will lose 100% of the time and in ways that you will find astonishing. It really is like chess if each of the pieces could be moved 20 different ways. There are over 1000 techniques at this point. It's just an amazingly deep game. Here's a little more of what I wrote in The Pleasures of Drowning. I can now attest that the experience of grappling with an expert is akin to falling into deep water without knowing how to swim. You will make a furious effort to stay afloat and you will fail. Once you learn how to swim, however, it becomes difficult to see what the problem is. Why can't a drowning man just relax and tread water? The same inscrutable difference between lethal ignorance and life saving knowledge can be found on the mat. To train in BJJ is to continually drown, or rather to be drowned in sudden and ingenious ways and to be taught again and again how to swim. Whether you're an expert in a striking based art boxing, karate, taekwondo, or just naturally tough, a return to childlike humility awaits you. Simply step onto the mat with a BJJ black belt. There are few experiences as startling as being effortlessly controlled by someone your size or smaller. And despite your full resistance, placed in a chokehold or an arm lock or some other submission, a few minutes of this and whatever your previous training, your incompetence will become so glaring and intolerable that you will want to learn whatever this person has to teach. Empowerment begins only moments later, when you are shown how to escape the various traps that were set for you and to set them yourself. Each increment of knowledge imparted in this way is so satisfying and one's ignorance at every stage so consequential, that the process of learning BJJ can become remarkably addictive. I've never experienced anything quite like it, end quote. And it's really true. The reinforcement seems to be on the most addictive Pavlovian scale. You find yourself being killed, which is to say, put in a position where the other person could choke you to death if he wanted to, or break your limbs and then choke you to death. But he doesn't, obviously. And then you're shown what happened and you're shown how to do it yourself and how to keep it from being done to you. And this whole cycle takes, like, 20 minutes. So every time you train, you experience this amazing encounter with your own ignorance, ignorance that would in fact have killed you had that been a real fight. And then it gets remedied with knowledge. And the knowledge comes in the form of moves that you can actually do, right? You're not being shown how to do a backflip on a balance beam that will take you years to perfect. We're talking about gross motor moves that you can actually do correctly after very little practice. And again, until you've experienced this, you really can't believe the difference between knowledge and ignorance in this domain. It is every bit as decisive as the difference between not knowing how to swim and being totally safe in the water. If someone doesn't know how to swim and falls in the deep end of the pool, he's going to die quickly. And it makes no sense, right? I mean, if you know how to swim, you look at this and think, he's moving his arms and legs furiously, right? In fact, he's probably expending as much energy as Michael Phelps in the pool. And yet it makes no difference. When you train in Jiujitsu, you get to be that drowning man and then you get to stop being him again and again and again. So it's like chess where you die and get resurrected. And it's much more complicated than chess because there are literally at this point, over a thousand different moves. And some of these moves are so brilliant that they effectively cancel the differences between people that would ordinarily be decisive in a fight like size and strength and speed. That's not to say these physical attributes don't matter at all. They do. If you're big and strong and fast, you always have an advantage in a fight. But you're just who makes such brilliant use of physics, the principles of leverage and position, that it really is not an exaggeration to say that a smaller, weaker person can totally dominate a larger one who has less training. And it's astonishing to be on the receiving end of that. And it's also amazing to be able to do it to others once you have been trained. And again, the training is such that you can do it in a way that, you know, you're not just fooling yourself. You're not pretending to do moves and having your training partner pretend to be affected by them, which happens in so many traditional martial arts. I pretend to poke you in the eye or hit you in the throat and you pretend to be affected by it. And then I pretend to do the next move. And then we train this sequence where each of us is compliant with the other to one or another degree and it becomes a kind of pantomime of violence. That's not what happens in a real grappling art and it's not what happens in a real striking art, but in a real striking art, when you're training full force, you're getting hit in the head hard over and over again and kicked in the stomach, and it's not good for you. But you can get injured in BJJ. So all I can say is if you do get into it, do it wisely. So anyway, that's the state of my training and the state of my enthusiasm. I am an addict and I'm trying to maintain my addiction at a level that is compatible with, if not full health and ambulatory lifestyle. There were many questions on free will. People are still fascinated and confused about it, and the podcast I did with Dan Dennett in a Bar failed to change that. So people want more on that topic in a variety of ways. Let's see here. I've argued that there's no such thing as free will. So what is there? Well, there's luck, both good and bad, as well as what we make of it. Actually, that's not quite true. What you make of your luck is also just more luck. Once again, you didn't pick your parents. You didn't pick the society into which you were born. There's not a cell in your body or brain that you created. Nor is there a single influence coming from the outside world that you brought into being. And yet, everything you think and do arises from this ocean of prior causes. So what you do with your luck and the tools with which you do it, even down to the level of the effort and discipline you manage to summon in each moment, is more in the way of luck. Now, most people resist this idea seemingly at any intellectual cost, for reasons that I can't understand, because this single insight is the antidote to arrogance and hatred and a profound basis for compassion for others who are less lucky than you are. But before we get into the ethics, we need to clear away some more confusion. I once met a rabbi who seemed to understand my views about free will the moment I expressed them. And he conceded that the notion of free will made no sense in a naturalistic world, only to then claim that we were therefore lucky to live in a world fashioned by a just and loving God who has given each of us a soul endowed with free will. Hence the possibility of sin and our victory at overcoming it, and hence the reality of God's justice if we fail. Of course, this equation wouldn't apply to children born with congenital diseases who, in most cases didn't even have brains with which to sin before they reaped more than their fair share of justice. But nor does it apply to anyone else, when you really think about it. But I knew not to take this line with the rabbi because he was just the sort of man who would say that God's will is a mystery. As though merely reiterating this platitude could render an all knowing and all powerful God all so good in the face of all the needless misery and death we see all around us. The topic of our conversation was free will and whether or not a soul could confer it. So I did my best to stay on point. I asked the rabbi how much credit he wanted to take for the fact that he hadn't been given the soul of a psychopath. He was aware, of course, that some people have such souls. I suggested that he and I were both very lucky not to have been so endowed. But the rabbi just waved this question away and declared that there was nothing I could say on the topic that could change his mind. Because, you see, the workings of the human soul are wait for it a mystery. I suppose I should have seen that coming. Now, this is where a wiser man than I would see life as a comedy and enjoy a good laugh. I'll admit that these encounters sometimes bring out the nihilist in me, a claim this empty, expressed with such evident self satisfaction causes some part of me, some small part that other parts are struggling even now. To expunge, to hope that a distant asteroid will just be nudged out of its orbit and set on a collision course with Earth. The fact that this educated man with a large congregation who was in a position to lead others intellectually and ethically, could present such an ugly tangle of ignorance and superstition to the world as though it were some marvellous puzzle of his own invention that no mortal could solve, actually made me furious. Now, he must have mistaken the look on my face for a blow landed in debate because his eyes now acquired a triumphant gleam. And he then claimed that without free will, there could be no such thing as reason, because people would be doomed to think whatever they would based on the laws of physics. Indeed, the very effort I was making to reason with him now proved that I, too, believe in free will. In fact, if you search YouTube, you can find Noam Chomsky saying the same thing in response to a question after one of his lectures. This is a very common claim. It is also ridiculous. But the rabbi paused dramatically at this point to let the meaning of his words sink in. And I hear you should picture a peacock, plumage spread in full, wearing a Yamaha. So now please consider what this rabbi wouldn't. Your thoughts and choices arise out of each present state of the universe, which includes your brain and your soul, if such a thing exists, along with all of its influences, whether random or not, your thoughts, intentions and choices are part of this causal framework. So your thoughts, intentions and choices matter, because whether they are the product of a brain or a soul, they are often the proximate cause of your actions. And yet they are caused in turn by events that you did not bring into being. Reasoning is possible not because you're free to think however you want, but because you are not free. Reason makes slaves of us all. This is why the Rabbi's point and and Chomsky's point make no sense. It matters that two plus two equals four. And it matters that you understand this. Are you free not to understand it? No. Not if you do in fact understand it. Are you free to understand it if you don't understand it? Again, no. Whether you understand or not isn't under your control. But the difference matters absolutely. Anyone who believes that two plus two equals five will find no end to his troubles because the world will oppose him at every point, beginning with his own fingers. You are part of reality, whatever it is altogether. Where is the freedom in this? Your beliefs about the world are formed in a perfect crucible of prior causes. If I say something now that changes your mind, it will be through no free will of your own. And if you're left feeling merely doubt or confusion, or you come away convinced that I'm a lunatic you won't have chosen those responses either. So freedom never enters into it. The Universe is pulling your strings. But our beliefs about the world matter because there's an enormous difference between knowledge and delusion. The physicist David Deutsche, who I had on my podcast, has argued that knowledge can produce any change in the Universe compatible with its laws, because if a change can't be accomplished with sufficient knowledge, this could only mean that some law of nature prevents it. Now, you can be forgiven for thinking that this reasoning sounds circular, but I'm convinced it isn't. You should listen to that podcast with David if you want to explore this point further, because I thought it was a great conversation. It was podcast 22 entitled Surviving the Cosmos. Now, according to Deutsche, given the right knowledge, you could take any arbitrary region of space, sweep together its stray hydrogen atoms, transmute them into heavier elements through the process of nuclear fusion. Use these elements to assemble the smallest possible machine capable of building all other machines and then produce intelligent creatures vastly more capable and sensitive than ourselves. Atom by atom. All that is lacking is an understanding of how to do these things at every stage along the way. Which is to say, all that is lacking is knowledge. So knowledge literally is power. And what we do as a species, on the basis of our ignorance might very well destroy us. So the stakes couldn't be higher. A friend of mine once met a group of villagers in India who had made a daily habit of drinking small quantities of a toxic fluid that they discovered in an abandoned generator. It was, after all, beejley juice. Electric juice. They thought, how could a substance so integral to the workings of a dynamo do anything but increase a person's potency? Of course, my friend tried to reason with these people, but he was rebuffed as an ignorance and a tender footed colonialist. He didn't stay long enough to witness the aftermath. And, of course, there's no shortage of such examples. The Chinese still imagine that rhino horn confers similar advantages. Presumably, this belief has less dire consequences for their own health, but it remains quite fatal to the rhinos. With or without free will, beliefs have consequences, and part of living an examined life is putting one's beliefs in order. And one's beliefs about free will are no exception. What is the difference between Eckhart Tolle and osho? According to Dan Harris's book, you seem to give credence to the idea that Tole might actually have had a true spiritual experience, while osho is your go to example for a fake guru. And yet their books and ideas seem almost identical while they're identical. Apart from the nitrous oxide and the blowjobs every 45 minutes and the guns, I would say that osho and Eckartole are pretty similar. I've gotten a fair amount of grief for a few critical things I've said about osho. Osho, for those. Of you who don't recall was also known as Bagwan Shree Raj Niche, the man who had the 94 Rolls Royces, I think had a compound up in Oregon. Well, On, Osho, no matter how much benefit you've derived from Osho's teachings, I hear from many people who have. It seems to me that there's no honest account of his career that doesn't show him to be a cautionary tale. I mean, many gurus have clearly gotten drunk on the power of being perceived as an infallible teacher surrounded by devotees. Osho is a clear case of someone who did, and there have been many books written about how crazy things got for him in the end. I've read at least two of those. The Rolls Royce's alone make him look like a schmuck. But I've always said that I thought OSHA was very smart and had many useful and true things to say about the mind and about the practice of meditation. And I don't doubt that he himself had very interesting experiences in meditation, but he was clearly flawed. Now I know much less about tole. I've never met him. I never met Osho either, but I know much less about Tole's scene. I don't know of any scandals associated with his work. For those of you who don't know Tole, he's a Westerner who claims to have had a kind of spontaneous enlightenment experience, which he describes in a book that became a huge bestseller entitled The Power of now. And he was on Oprah, and he wrote a New Age book that became very visible and from which many people have derived, or claimed to have derived a lot of benefit. So I don't know any scandals associated with him. The worst I could say about him is that he occasionally says things that are scientifically confused. But the experiential claims I've heard him make seem fine to me. I haven't read all of his books, or really any one of his books in its entirety, but I've read enough. But this is true of many of Osho's experiential claims. There's the experience, and then there's what you take the experience to mean. You can have an experience of self transcendence, of losing your sense of self so that there's only consciousness and its contents, and then there's what you decide to say or not say about the universe as a result. Now, I don't think you can say anything about the universe on the basis of that experience. But other people, like Deepak Chopra, think you can say that consciousness preceded the Big Bang and therefore is not a biological phenomenon. And many gurus most probably have fallen on the Chopra side of that schism. But almost none of these people have been scientists, and many haven't even been educated by today's standards. But that doesn't mean they don't have anything to teach, and that doesn't mean that Osho didn't have anything to teach. But the problem with Osho is that if you happen to have been an attractive woman, and especially one with large breasts. What he had to teach rather often entailed you taking your clothes off. So if you think this makes Osho look fully enlightened, you may have a deeper understanding of these matters than I do. Next question why podcasts rather than just spend the time writing? And why ask for listener support rather than read ads like most podcasters do? Okay, well, I write because I love books, and I think that certain things can only be said well when written. But I'm under no illusions about how many people actually read books at this point. Most of the people I meet who say that my work has made a real difference in their lives have never read any of my books. And I reach more people in the first week after I release a podcast than will buy my next book over the course of several years. And we're not talking about a six minute interview on television. We're talking about you guys listening for one or two or 3 hours. So the podcast gives me all the time I need to say something, and it also allows me to be in dialogue with other people who are much more knowledgeable than I am on any given topic, like David Deutsche, who I just mentioned. So since communication is my goal, it's very tempting to keep putting my time into this medium. Now, the problem, of course, is that this is a free medium, which people expect to remain free. And like everything else that's free online, most podcasts are paid for by ads. But I've decided that I don't want to put ads on my podcast for a variety of reasons. The main one is that all I have is my credibility, and there are very few things that I could advertise on this podcast that I can honestly say that I use and love and that you should buy. Also, I see what advertising has done to digital media in general. The desperation for clicks that is the lifeblood of ad revenue has not been good for us or for the work that people are producing. So this podcast is an experiment, and I don't know what will ultimately come of it. I really want this to work, and it seems like it should work. The podcast is invariably what people request I do more of, and there's a lot of engagement here. Many of you have been writing to suggest new topics and interviews you think I should do. I even run into people in public who are listening to the podcast the moment they run into me, and they just flash me their phones. So it feels like a very good thing to be doing. But there is this impressive gulf between what we say we value and what we're willing to support. Only about 1% of listeners actually fund the podcast. So there is this free rider situation with about 99% of the audience. Now, again, this is totally understandable because everyone expects podcasts to be free. We've trained ourselves to expect this, and it is free. And it's good that it's free, because people can discover whether or not they like what I'm doing here without any investment. So it is free, but you can support it if you want to. Obviously, the difference between 1% support and 10% support is enormous. It's tenfold. The truth is, I'd love to get more ambitious and creative in this medium. I could travel to do important interviews, face to face interviews. That will only happen if I show up in person. I don't know where this could go, and it actually wouldn't take that much to bring things to the next level. If only 10% of listeners gave $2 a podcast, that would be a total game changer. Suddenly, that would be a media company. So if you do want to help fund the podcast, you can do it through my website. That's samharris.org support. And those of you who are part of the 1% who are already supporting it, you people are awesome. You have been making this happen. Next question. What's your opinion of Milo Yanopoulos and the alt right? All right, well, I can't say that I followed what Milo has said and written very closely. I've watched a few interviews with him, and I know about his lifetime ban from Twitter. Obviously, I agree with him about a few things, and I disagree with him about others. The points of disagreement are probably unsurprising. He's a huge Trump supporter. He's religious and given to defending a belief in God in terms that are no more impressive than ones you've heard a thousand times before. And I find in someone who is obviously smart and very articulate, these arguments are even more annoying. So our minds don't quite meet there. My basic gripe with Milo, and again, this is based only on a few interviews and a couple of his articles, is that he strikes me as fairly insincere. He appears to be trolling all of humanity at this point and having a lot of fun doing it. And half of what he says about social justice warriors and political correctness and Islamophobia is very incisive and amusing. But he seems to approach everything as a performance, and this leaves me wondering what he actually believes. So I don't see him as a natural ally for what I'm doing, but I do think he's gotten screwed by the media. His ban from Twitter is ridiculous. Given that Twitter doesn't ban jihadists with any reliability, there's definitely a liberal media bias that is cutting against people like Milo, which he and his fans are appropriately outraged about. And as for the alt right for which Milo is the poster boy, I'm not sure I can say anything about it that is fair or useful. It seems to contain some smart people who are outraged by outrageous things, as Milo seems to be at least some of the time, and it contains real racist knit wits and everything in between. It's a bit like the Black Lives Matter movement in that respect, which is to say, a totally mixed bag, and the net result of which is divisive, in my view. As far as I can tell, becoming a part of a movement doesn't help anybody think clearly. So I distrust identity politics of all kinds. I think we should talk about specific issues, whether it's trade or guns or immigration or foreign interventions or abortion or anything else, and we should reason honestly about them. And I'm not the first person to notice that. It's pretty strange that knowing a person's position on any one of these issues generally allows you to predict his position on the others. This shouldn't happen. Some of these issues are totally unrelated. Why should a person's attitude toward guns be predictive of his views on climate change or immigration or abortion? And yet it almost certainly is in our society. That's a sign that people are joining tribes and movements, right? It's not the sign of clear thinking. If you're reasoning honestly about facts, then the color of your skin is irrelevant. The religion of your parents is irrelevant. Whether you're gay or straight is irrelevant. Your identity is irrelevant. In fact, if you're talking about reality, its character can't be predicated on who you happen to be. That's what it means to be talking about reality. And this also applies to the reality of human experience and human suffering. For instance, if vaccines don't cause autism, if that is just a fact, and that's what the best science suggests at this point, well, then, when arguing against this view, you need data, or a new analysis of existing data. You need an argument. And the nature of any argument is that its validity doesn't depend on who you are. That's why a good argument should be accepted by others, right, no matter who they are. So in the case of vaccines causing autism, you don't get to say, as a parent of a child with autism, I believe X, Y and Z, whatever is true about the biological basis of autism can't depend on who you are. And who you are in this case is probably adding a level of emotional engagement with the issue, which would be totally understandable, but would also be unlikely to lead you to think about it more clearly. The facts are whatever they are, and it's not an accident that being disinterested, not uninterested, but disinterested that is, not being emotionally engaged usually improves a person's ability to reason about the facts. When talking about violence in our society. Again, the facts are whatever they are. How many people got shot? How many died? What was the color of their skin? Who shot them? What was the color of their skin? Getting a handle on these facts doesn't require one to say. As a black man. I know X, Y and Z. The color of your skin simply isn't relevant information when talking about the data. That is what is happening throughout a whole society. Your life experience isn't relevant information, and the fact that you think it might be is a problem. And as you'll hear in a minute, it's a problem I recently ran into on another podcast. Now, this isn't to say that a person's life experience is never relevant to a conversation. Of course it is. And it can be used to establish certain kinds of facts. If someone says to you, Catholics don't believe in Hell, it's perfectly valid to retort, actually, my mom is a Catholic and she believes in Hell. Of course, there's a larger question of what the Catholic doctrine actually is, but if a person is making a statement about a certain group of people, and you are a member of the group, you might very well be in a position to falsify his claim on the basis of your experience. But a person's identity and life experience often aren't relevant when talking about facts, and they're usually invoked in ways that are clearly fallacious. And many people seem to be making a political religion out of ignoring this difference. So I urge you not to be one of those people, whether you're on the left or on the right. There were several other questions here. Asking me to describe my political beliefs, it's hard to do in a way that won't give people false assumptions. I'm definitely left of center on most issues. I think we want a social safety net below which we don't want anyone to fall. But I think we should use government and its legal machinery rather sparingly. The problem with having too many laws is that to enforce them, you need to back them up with the threat of violence. If you're going to criminalize drug use, for instance, you've decided that you're willing to send people to kick in your neighbor's door with guns drawn and haul him off to jail for doing something as innocuous as smoking pot. Not only is this unethical, it's dangerous for everyone involved, and it's a patently insane use of resources. So I'm basically a libertarian in feeling that peaceful, honest people have the right to be left alone. And I do think government should get out of our lives. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. The End of Faith Chapter Three in the shadow of God, without warning, you were seized and brought before a judge. Did you create a thunderstorm and destroy the village harvest? Did you kill your neighbor with the evil eye? Do you doubt that Christ is bodily present in the Eucharist? You will soon learn that questions of this sort admit of no exculpatory reply. You are not told the names of your accusers, but their identities are of little account. For even if, at this late hour, they were to recant their charges against you, they would merely be punished as false witnesses, while their original accusations would retain their full weight as evidence of your guilt. The machinery of justice has been so well oiled by faith that it can no longer be influenced. But you have a choice of sorts. You can concede your guilt and name your accomplices. Yes, you must have had accomplices. No confession will be accepted unless other men and women can be implicated in your crimes. Perhaps you and three acquaintances of your choosing did change into hairs and consort with the devil himself. The sight of iron boots designed to crush your feet seems to refresh your memory. Yes, Friedrich, Arthur and Otto are sorcerers, too. Their wives, witches, all. You now face punishment proportionate to the severity of your crimes. Flogging a pilgrimage on foot to the Holy Land, forfeiture of property, or more likely, a period of long imprisonment, probably for life. Your quote, accomplices will soon be rounded up for torture. Or you can maintain your innocence, which is almost certainly the truth. After all, it is a rare person who can create a thunderstorm. In response, your jailers will be happy to lead you to the furthest reaches of human suffering before burning you at the stake. You may be imprisoned in total darkness for months or years at a time, repeatedly beaten and starved or stretched upon the rack. Thumb screws may be applied, or toe screws or a pearshaped vise may be inserted into your mouth, vagina or anus, and forced open until your misery admits of no possible increase. You may be hoisted to the ceiling on a stripato with your arms bound behind your back and attached to a pulley, and weights tied to your feet dislocating your shoulders. To this torment, squausation might be added, which being often sufficient to cause your death may yet spare you the agony of the stake. And there's an endnote here describing squawsation, which was essentially putting someone in the stripado with their arms bound behind their back and hoisting them to the ceiling on the rope, and then dropping them and stopping them before they reach the floor so that their arms are wrenched backwards, no doubt breaking the shoulders and much else. Back to the text. If you're unlucky enough to be in Spain, where judicial torture has achieved a transcendent level of cruelty, you may be placed in the Spanish chair, a throne of iron, complete with iron stocks to secure your neck and limbs in the interest of saving your soul. A coal brazier will be placed beneath your bare feet, slowly roasting them. Because the stain of heresy runs deep, your flesh will be continually larded with fat to keep it from burning too quickly, or you may be bound to a bench with a cauldron filled with mice placed upside down upon your bare abdomen. With the requisite application of heat to the iron, the mice will begin to burrow into your belly in search of an exit. Should you, while in extremis, admit to your torturers that you are indeed a heretic, a sorcerer, or a witch, you'll be made to confirm your story before a judge, and any attempt to recant to claim that your confession has been coerced through torture will deliver you either to your tormentors once again or directly to the stake. If once condemned, you repent of your sins. These compassionate and learned men, whose concern for the fate of your eternal soul really knows no bounds, will do you the kindness of strangling you before lighting your pire. The medieval church was quick to observe that the Good Book was good enough to suggest a variety of means for eradicating heresy, ranging from a communal volley of stones to cremation while alive. A literal reading of the Old Testament not only permits but requires heretics to be put to death. As it turns out, it was never difficult to find a mob willing to perform this holy office, and to do so purely on the authority of the Church, since it was still a capital offense to possess a Bible in any of the vernacular languages of Europe. In fact, Scripture was not to become generally accessible to the common man until the 16th century. As we noted earlier, Deuteronomy was the preeminent text in every inquisitor's, Canon Ford explicitly enjoins the faithful to murder anyone in their midst, even members of their own families, who profess a sympathy for foreign gods, showing a genius for totalitarianism that few mortals have ever fully implemented. The author of this document demands that anyone too squeamish to take part in such religious killing must be killed as well. Deuteronomy, chapter 17, verses twelve and 13. Anyone who imagines that no justification for the Inquisition can be found in Scripture need only consult the Bible to have his view of the matter clarified. Quote. If you hear that in one of the towns which Yahweh, your god, has given you for a home, there are men scoundrels from your own stock who have led their fellow citizens astray, saying, let us go serve other gods hitherto unknown to you. It is your duty to look into the matter, examine it, and inquire most carefully. If it is proved and confirmed that such a hateful thing has taken place among you, you must put the inhabitants of that town to the sword. You must lay it under the curse of destruction, the town and everything in it. You must pile up all its loot in the public square and burn the town and all its loot, offering it all to Yahweh, your God. It is to be a ruin for all time and never rebuilt. Deuteronomy, chapter 13, verses twelve through 16. For obvious reasons, the Church tended to ignore the final edict the destruction of heretic property. In addition to demanding that we fulfill every jot and tittle of Old Testament law, jesus seems to have suggested in John 15, verse six, further refinements to the practice of killing heretics and unbelievers. Quote if a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered, and men gather them and cast them into the fire, and they are burned. End quote. Whether we want to interpret Jesus metaphorically is, of course, our business. The problem with Scripture, however, is that many of its possible interpretations, including most of the literal ones, can be used to justify atrocities in defense of the faith. The Holy Inquisition formally began in 1184 under Pope Lucius III to crush the popular movement of Catharism. The Cathars, from the Greek Catharoi, quote the pure ones had fashioned their own brand of Manicheanism. Mani himself was flayed alive at the behest of Zoroastrian priests in 276, which held that the material world had been created by Satan and was therefore inherently evil. The Cathars were divided by a schism of their own and within each of their sects, by the distinction between the renunciate perfecti and the lay credentes the believers who revered them. The perfecti ate no meat, eggs, cheese or fat fasted for days at a time, maintained strict celibacy, and obsured all personal wealth. The life of the perfecti was so austere that most credentials only joined their ranks once they were safely on their deathbeds, so that, having lived as they pleased, they might yet go to God in holiness. St. Bernard, who had tried in vain to combat this austere doctrine with that of the Church, noted the reasons for his failure. Quote as to the Cathars conversation, nothing can be less reprehensible, and what they speak, they prove by deeds. As for the morals of the heretic, he cheats no one, he oppresses no one, he strikes no one, his cheeks are pale with fasting, his hands labor for his livelihood. End quote. There seems, in fact, there have been nothing wrong with these people apart from their attachment to certain unorthodox beliefs about the creation of the world. But heresy is heresy. Any person who believes that the Bible contains the infallible word of God will understand why these people had to be put to death. The Inquisition took rather genteel steps at first. The use of torture to extract confessions was not officially sanctioned until 1215 at the fourth ladder in council. But two developments conspired to lengthen its strides. The first came in 1199, when Pope Innocent III decreed that all property belonging to a convicted heretic would be forfeited to the church. The church then shared it with both local officials and the victim's accusers as a reward for their candor. The second was the rise of the Dominican order. St. Dominic himself, displaying the conviction of every good Catholic of the day, announced to the Cathars quote for many years I have exhorted you in vain with gentleness preaching, praying, weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, where blessings can accomplish nothing, blows may avail. We shall rouse against you princes and prelates, who, alas, will arm nations and kingdoms against this land. End quote. It would appear that sainthood comes in a variety of flavors. With the founding of Dominic's Holy Order of Mendican friars, the Inquisition was ready to begin its work in earnest. It is important to remember, lest the general barbarity of the time inures to the horror of these historical accounts, that the perpetrators of the Inquisition, the torturers and formers, and those who commanded their actions were ecclesiastics of one rank or another. They were men of God, pops, bishops, friars and priests. They were men who had devoted their lives in word, if not indeed to Christ as we find him in the New Testament, healing the sick and challenging those without sin to cast the first stone. Quote in 1234, the canonization of St. Dominic was finally proclaimed in Toulouse, and Bishop Raymond du Falga was washing his hands in preparation for dinner when he heard the rumor that a fever ridden old woman in a nearby house was about to undergo the cathar ritual. The bishop hurried to her bedside and managed to convince her that he was a friend, then interrogated her on her beliefs, then denounced her as a heretic. He called on her to recant. She refused. The bishop thereupon had her bed carried out into a field, and there she was burned. Then, after the bishop and the friars and their companions had seen their business completed, brother Guillaume wrote, they returned to the refectory and, giving thanks to God and the blessed Dominic, ate with rejoicing what had been prepared for them. End quote. The question of how the church managed to transform Jesus's principal message of loving one's neighbor and turning the other cheek into a doctrine of murder and rapine seems to promise a harrowing mystery, but it is no mystery at all. Apart from the Bible's heterogeneity and outright self contradiction, allowing it to justify diverse and irreconcilable aims, the culprit is clearly the doctrine of faith itself. Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition without evidence that unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants, he becomes capable of anything. The practice for which the Inquisition is duly infamous, and the innovation that secured it a steady stream of both suspects and guilty verdicts, was its use of torture to extract confessions from the accused, to force witnesses to testify, and to persuade a confessing heretic to name those with whom he had collaborated in sin. The justification for this behavior came straight from St. Augustine, who reasoned that if torture was appropriate for those who broke the laws of men, it was even more fitting for those who broke the laws of God. As practiced by medieval Christians, judicial torture was merely a final mad inflection of their faith. That anyone imagined that facts were being elicited by such a lunatic procedure seems a miracle in itself. As Voltaire wrote in 1764, quote There is something divine here, for it is incomprehensible that men should have patiently borne this yoke. End quote. A contemporaneous account of the Spanish Otto defeat the public spectacle at which heretics were sentenced and often burned will serve to complete our picture. The Spanish Inquisition did not cease its persecution of heretics until 1834. The last Otto defeat took place in Mexico in 1850, about the time Charles Darwin set sail on the Beagle and Michael Faraday discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism. Quote the condemned are then immediately carried to the Riberia, the place of execution, where there is many stakes set up, as there are prisoners to be burnt, the negative and relapse being first strangled and then burnt. The professed mount their stakes by a ladder, and the Jesuits, after several repeated exhortations to be reconciled to the Church, consign them to eternal destruction, and then leave them to the fiend, who, they tell them, stands at their elbow to carry them into torments. On this a great shout is raised, and the cry is, Let the dog's beards be made, which is done by thrusting flaming bunches of furs fastened along poles against their beards, till their faces are burnt black. The surrounding populace rending the air with the loudest acclamations of joy. At last fire is set to the furs at the bottom of the stake, over which the victims are chained so high that the flame seldom reaches higher than the seat they sit on and thus they are rather roasted than burnt, although there cannot be a more lamentable spectacle. And the sufferers continually cry out as long as they are able. Pity for the love of God, yet is beheld by persons of all ages and both sexes, with transports of joy and satisfaction. End quote. And while Protestant reformers broke with Rome on a variety of counts, their treatment of their fellow human beings was no less disgraceful. Public executions were more popular than ever heretics were still reduced to ash. Scholars were tortured and killed for impertinent displays of reason, and fornicators were murdered without a qualm. The basic lesson to be drawn from all of this was summed up nicely by Will Durant quote intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith. Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty. Certainty is murderous. End quote. There really seems to be very little to perplex us here. Burning people who are destined to burn for all time seems a small price to pay to protect the people you love from the same fate. Clearly, the common law marriage between reason and faith, wherein otherwise reasonable men and women can be motivated by the content of unreasonable beliefs, places society on a slippery slope, with confusion and hypocrisy at its heights and the torments of the inquisitor waiting below. Witch and Jew historically, there have been two groups targeted by the Church that deserve special mention. Witches are of particular interest in this context because their persecution required an extraordinary degree of credulity to get underway, for the simple reason that a confederacy of witches in medieval Europe seems never to have existed. There were no covens of pagan dissidents meeting in secret, but truth to Satan, abandoning themselves to the pleasures of group sex, cannibalism, and the casting of spells upon neighbors, crops and cattle. It seems that such notions were the product of folklore, vivid dreams and sheer confabulation, and confirmed by confessions elicited under the most gruesome torture. Antisemitism is of interest here, both for the scale of the injustice that it has wrought and for its explicitly theological roots. From the perspective of Christian teaching, Jews are even worse than run of the mill heretics. They are heretics who explicitly repudiate the divinity of Jesus Christ. While the stigmas applied to witches and Jews throughout Christendom shared curious similarities, both were often accused of the lively and improbable offense of murdering Christian infants and drinking their blood. Their cases remained quite distinct. Witches, in all likelihood, did not even exist, and those murdered in their stead numbered perhaps 40 to 50,000 over 300 years of persecution of text here. In an endnote here I report that the numbers of people killed by the Inquisition is routinely exaggerated. Some people talk about millions of people being killed as witches and warlocks, and that doesn't seem to have occurred. Best current estimate that I'm aware of is somewhere around 40 to 50,000. Back to the text. Jews have lived side by side with Christians for nearly two millennia, fathered their religion and for reasons that are no more substantial than those underlying the belief in the Resurrection, have been the objects of murderous intolerance since the first centuries after Christ. The accounts of witch hunts resemble, in most respects the more widespread persecution of heretics throughout the Inquisition imprisonment on the basis of accusations alone, torture to extract confession, confessions deemed unacceptable until accomplices were named, death by slow fire, and the rounding up of the freshly accused. The following anecdote is typical. Quote in 1595, an old woman residing in a village near Constance, angry at not being invited to share the sports of the country people, on a day of public rejoicing, was heard to mutter something to herself, and was afterwards seen to proceed through the fields towards a hill, where she was lost sight of. A violent thunderstorm arose about 2 hours afterwards, which wet the dancers to the skin and did considerable damage to the plantations. This woman, suspected before of witchcraft, was seized and imprisoned, and accused of having raised the storm by filling a hole with wine and stirring it about with a stick. She was tortured till she confessed and burned alive the next evening. End quote. Though it is difficult to generalize about many of the factors that conspired to make villagers rise up against their neighbors, it is obvious that a belief in the existence of witches was the sinnequin non of the phenomenon. But what was it precisely that people believed? They appear to have believed that their neighbors were having sex with the devil, enjoying nocturnal flights upon broomsticks, changing into cats and hares, and eating the flesh of other human beings. More important, they believed utterly in maleficeium, that is, in the efficacy of harming others by occult means. Among the many disasters that could befall a person over the course of a short and difficult life, medieval Christians seemed especially concerned that their neighbor might cast a spell and thereby undermine their health or good fortune. Only the advent of science could successfully undercut such an idea, along with the fantastical displays of cruelty to which it gave rise. We must remember that it was not until the mid 19th century that the germ theory of disease emerged, laying to rest much superstition about the causes of illness. Occult beliefs of this sort are clearly an inheritance from our primitive, magic minded ancestors. The four people of New Guinea, for instance, besides being enthusiastic, cannibals exacted a gruesome revenge upon suspected sorcerers. Quote besides attending public meetings, four men also hunted down men they believed to be sorcerers and killed them in reprisal. The hunters used a specialized attack called tukaboo against sorcerers. They ruptured their kidneys, crushed their genitals, and broke their thigh bones with stone axes, bit into their necks and tore out their tracheas, and jam bamboo splinters into their veins to bleed them. End quote. No doubt each of these gestures held metaphysical significance. This behavior seems to have been commonplace among the four at least until the 1960s. The horrible comedy of human ignorance achieves a rare moment of transparency here. The four were merely responding to an epidemic of kuru, a fatal spongiform infection of the brain brought on not by sorcerers in their midst, but by their own religious observance of eating the bodies and brains of their dead. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was perfectly apparent that disease could be inflicted by demons and black magic. There are accounts of frail old women charged with killing able bodied men and breaking the necks of their horses, actions which they were made to confess under torture. And few people, it seems, found such accusations implausible. Even the relentless torture of the accused was given a perverse rationale. The devil, it was believed, made his charges insensible to pain despite their cries for mercy. And so it was that for centuries, men and women who were guilty of little more than being ugly, old, widowed or mentally ill were convicted of impossible crimes and then murdered. For God's sake. After nearly 400 years, some ecclesiastics began to appreciate how insane all this was. Consider the epiphany of Frederick speed. Quote torture fills our Germany with witches and unheard of wickedness, and not only Germany, but any nation that attempts it. If all of us have not confessed ourselves witches, that is only because we have not all been tortured. End quote. But Speed was led to this reasonable surmise only after a skeptical friend, the Duke of Brunswick, had a woman suspected of witchcraft artfully tortured and interrogated in his presence. This poor woman testified that she had seen spee himself on the brocken shapes, shifting into a wolf, a goat and other beasts, and fathering numerous children by the assembled witches born with the heads of toads and the legs of spiders. Speed, lucky indeed to be in the company of a friend and certain of his own innocence, immediately set to work on his caucio Criminalis, published in 1631, which detailed the injustice of the witch trials. Bertrand Russell observed, however, that not all reasonable men were as fortunate as Speed. Quote, Some few bold rationalists ventured, even while the persecution was at its height, to doubt whether tempests, hailstorms, thunder and lightning were really caused by the machinations of women. Such men were shown no mercy. Thus, towards the end of the 16th century, flayed, rector of the University of Trev and judge for the electoral court, after condemning countless witches, began to think that perhaps their confessions were due to the desire to escape the tortures of the rack, with the result that he showed unwillingness to convict. He was accused of having sold himself to Satan and was subjected to the same tortures he had inflicted upon others like them. He confessed his guilt, and in 1589, he was strangled and then burnt. End quote. As late as 1718, just as the inoculation against smallpox was being introduced in England, and English mathematician Brooke Taylor was making refinements to the calculus, we find the madness of the witch hunt still a potent force. Charles McKay relates an incident in Catholic Northeast Scotland. Quote a silly fellow named William Montgomery, a carpenter, had a mortal antipathy to cats, and somehow or other these animals generally chose his backyard as the scene for their catawallins. He puzzled his brains for a long time to know why he, above all his neighbors, should be so pestered. At last he came to the stage conclusion that his tormentors were no cats, but witches. In this opinion, he was supported by his maid servant, who swore a round oath that she had often heard the aforesaid cats talking together in human voices. The next time the unlucky tabbies assembled in his backyard, the valiant carpenter was on the alert. Arming himself with an axe, a dirk and a broadsword, he rushed out among them. One of them he wounded in the back, a second in the hip and the leg of a third he maimed with his axe, but he could not capture any of them. A few days afterward, two old women of the parish died, and it was said that when their bodies were laid out, there appeared on the back of one the mark as of a recent wound, and a similar scar upon the hip of the other. The carpenter and his maid were convinced that they were the very cats, and the whole county repeated the same story. Everyone was upon the lookout for proof's, corroborative a very remarkable one, was soon discovered. Nancy Gilbert, a wretched old creature upwards of 70 years of age, was found in bed with her leg broken. As she was ugly enough for a witch, it was asserted that she was one of the cats that had fared so ill at the hands of the carpenter. The latter, when informed of the popular suspicion, asserted that he distinctly recovered. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today's guest is Gad Sad. Many of you know Gad from his video blog The Sad Truth. That's Saad, and if you know Gad, you know that he's been fighting some of the same battles online against the regressive left. Gad is a professor of marketing at Concordia University in Montreal. He's also taught at Cornell and Dartmouth and UC Irvine. And he's he's pioneered the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behavior, and his books include The Consuming Instinct the Evolutionary Basis of Consumption, and Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences. He's published many scientific papers, and again, he regularly podcasts at The Sad Truth, Saad on YouTube. As you'll hear, Gad and I get into some controversial areas, and we spend a fair amount of time talking about the attendant risks of doing so. Apologies for my voice throughout. I've just been recovering from a cold, but hopefully I still made some sense. And now I give you Gad Sad. Well, I'm here with Gad Sad. Gad, thanks for coming on the podcast. So great to be with you. Tom, obviously, we have many fans in common, and many people listening will know who you are. But for those who don't, just tell us something about your background. And how do you describe what you do at this point? So, I'm a professor. Professor of Marketing is my official title, and I also hold the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption. I know it's a mouthful, which what basically that means is I try to marry evolutionary theory in the context of consumer behavior. So generally in the behavioral sciences, but in particular, since I'm housed in a business school and I'm in a marketing department, I try to look at what are some of the biological and evolutionary underpinnings that make us who we are as consumers. Cindy, how did you come to focus on consumer behavior? So consumer behavior. I had done an MBA. And where my curiosity with this field had been titillated. Although I had a background, a very technical background in mathematics and computer science and some operations research but I had always been interested in behavioral sciences and so it seemed like consumer behavior would be the nice place for me to marry my technical background because I was originally thinking of being a mathematical modeler of consumer choice. And then when I went to pursue my PhD. At Cornell the gentleman who became my eventual doctoral supervisor suggested that I take some site courses. And in one of those courses, advanced Social Psychology. Halfway through the semester, the professor assigned a book called Homicide, which was written by two Canadian evolutionary psychologists where they explained criminality from biological and evolutionary perspective. And so that was the genesis of my interest in evolutionary psychology. And since I wanted to study consumer behavior, that's where I had the idea, okay, well, since no one has looked at the biological roots of consumer behavior, that's what I will focus on for those who don't know, and they can discover your podcast on YouTube on The Sad Truth. You are a very committed enemy of political correctness and moral relativism postmodernism and identity politics and all of these other intellectual and ethical trends that seem to be going in the wrong direction. But yet you are a professor at the university. Do you ever regret getting into this swamp and dealing with these issues? It's funny because you probably heard the term, of course, having skin in the game, right? It's difficult to have more skin in the game than somebody who is sort of in the cesspool of all of these ideas that you mentioned a few minutes ago and yet try to critique them from within. Look, the reality is, I think, that my unique personhood is such that I sort of couldn't live with myself if I don't tackle, wherever I see some enemies of truth or reason manifesting themselves. And so, in a sense, I can't be anything than what I am. So I regret in the sense that if I were a bit more of a careerist, if I were a bit more strategic in my thinking, then I might have taken a slightly different role. But I simply can't do it. I always try to be polite. I always try to be as kind as I can be, always have the quorum, but I can't sit idly while, you know, the humanities and some of the social sciences are being infected with movements that are genuinely grotesque to human reason. They're an affront to human decency, if I dare say, and so I speak out against it. And that, if you like, shapes a lot of what I do. I mean, of course, when you are an academic, when you're a scientist, you're trying to pursue some area of truth or try to get closer to understanding some phenomenon. But I think that more academics need to be using their training to weigh in on topics outside of their very limited scope of sort of official training and expertise. I'm quite astonished that there aren't more people who lend their voices. I mean, I realized that it takes a particular type of personality to put your ideas out there in front of a large audience. And most people probably feel more comfortable being in their lab speaking only to their colleagues in the ivory tower. But it's a shame because these are all important issues that you mentioned and there has to be many people who are combating them. Which of these issues or which among the many things on the menu that people are inclined not to talk about, which do you think is the most radioactive? Do you have a sense of what gets you into the most trouble at this point? So it depends if you mean in the general campus or in science. So let's do both. So if we're talking about science, there was a paper that was published, I think in 2005 either in Nature or in Science and I think the title was Forbidden Knowledge. What are some research questions or research topics that you should stay away from? And probably the top two ones that are, to use your term, the most radioactive would be racial differences. Any research on racial differences. And then probably second would be sex differences. And of course, that's definitely where I come in because a lot of the research that I do from an evolutionary perspective recognizes that human beings are sexually dimorphic by definition. I mean, that's how we define the species. And so to have a debate as to whether there are sex differences that are innate is preposterous to most people who are biologically encountered. But yet much of the social sciences have built edifices of theories and empirical edifices completely rejecting this possibility. And so from a scientific perspective, I would say probably sex and racial differences. But in the general campus, anybody who attacks not so much postmodernism but political correctness. So anybody who ruffles the feathers of the thought police is in trouble. So it could be if you attack affirmative action, if you're against it, well, that's wrong thing and therefore you'll be into trouble. So I think there are two distinct things. There's the general discourse on campus and then there is the specific scientific fields that are radioactive. Are there any topics that you have just decided you won't touch? Obviously, there are topics that don't interest you or you think to touch them would just be you would just have no motive to touch them or you'd have to have some negative motive in order to want to go there. But is there any topic that you think that is valid and should be productive to talk about but it's just too damn hard to do it, so you just avoid it? So I've never consciously thought of an interesting problem to pursue and then using the calculus that you just mentioned, decided against it. If I've not tackled the problem, typically the criterion that I've used is that I don't find that problem sufficiently interesting for me to spend some time on it. And so really, that's the key driving metric. There's a great paper that I think all doctoral students should read in their doctoral training. It's a paper from the early 70s titled that's interesting with an exclamation point. It was written by a sociologist whereby he was offering a framework for trying to understand how do we determine whether a research question is worthy of pursuit? And oftentimes one of the things that we forget is whether at the end of the journey of your research journey, whether people would scream out in excitement. That's interesting. Right. And so, really, what drives me to a fault, I think and I'll explain in a second, why I say to a fault is what I call cerebral hedonism. I just like to pursue intellectual landscapes for no other reason than because they're interesting. So if Sam Harris comes to me today and says, hey, there's this really interesting fMRI study that I'm thinking of working on, and I think your expertise would be great, and if you convince me that it's an interesting problem, I'm on board. Now, the reason why I think that that's a bit of a fault is because, as you may know and I say this with regret, in academia, what's more promoted is for you to be very narrow and to go very deep. So if you study emotions, then spend the next 40 years studying emotions and fill in the blank, right? But don't foray into different lands. And I find that life is too short. I truly am somebody who's interdisciplinary, and so I just go wherever the spirit moves me, so to speak. Yeah, well, also, reality is interdisciplinary. We don't find actual boundaries on our intellectual landscape apart from those we erect based on just methodological concerns and bureaucratic concerns. And how the fact that you have to physically go to one building to learn about medicine and another built in to learn about biology on a university campus. But obviously, the boundary between medicine and biology is nonexistent once you look closely at it. Obviously, I'm very sympathetic with this appetite to go wherever your interest takes you. I guess I'm also sympathetic and this is where these taboos, I think, creep in for even well intentioned and not especially thin skinned people. I'm sympathetic with the feeling that there are certain questions upon which any kind of significant interest suggests that there's something wrong with you. So one I'm not speaking about you personally get. So I see these people who seem extremely interested in, say, racial differences in intelligence. They want to study this. They're outraged that it's a no go area for science. It's a completely legitimate question to pose biologically. But one wonders, what is the purpose of seeking that information, and what would you do with it if you had it? I can propose a possible criterion of relevance for the exact issue that you just mentioned. So if you're an evolutionist, you study what are the selection pressures that would have resulted in the evolution of a wide range of traits? Right? I mean, why is it that some people are darker skinned than others? And so from a strictly theoretical perspective and I'm glad you said that, it's certainly a valid question to study. One could argue, are there selection pressures that have faced groups of individuals in our evolutionary history that would have resulted in the evolution of various, if you like, intelligence abilities at the group level. Now, the reason why that's of course very, very toxic is because it's one thing to argue for the evolution of a morphological feature like your melanin level. It's another thing to say group A at the group level is somehow less creative or has lower IQ than group B. But from a strictly conceptual theoretical reason, it's perfectly reasonable to ask that question. And incidentally, that's exactly what Philip Rushton, who's probably the most known, he recently passed away a few years ago. So he's a guy who spent his career studying racial differences. And his argument was roughly what I just said, which is, look, it's an interesting question to study for reasons A, B and C. I don't have a racist bone in my body, but I follow wherever the data takes me. And then, of course, people argued, no, there is no way that you could study this question if you didn't have ulterior motives. And so then they would concoct these associations. He got money from the Heritage Foundation Institute and they're in nefarious groups, so he must be a neo Nazi. And I don't know the answer. I don't truly know whether he was a racist or not. But at the conceptual level, there's no reason why that should be a taboo topic. I mean, do you agree? But you just see that of all the topics in the universe to spend weeks and months and years fixated on, it's easy to see how people who would fixate for the wrong reasons be interested there. And you can see them seize upon the data, such as they are, with glee. But the irony, of course, is that both sides of this issue are taboo. So, for instance, if you wanted to talk about a given community and why they may not be thriving to the degree that some other is, and you're going to ask the question, is there a genetic reason for this? Well, that's obviously taboo, correct? But what's left for you to consider at that point is a cultural reason for this. But to say that there's something wrong with a given culture is also taboo. So you have just taken off the table the only two facets of reality that science can deal with. And so you can basically say nothing scientifically about differential degrees of thriving in various communities. And that's obviously not a great situation to maintain for centuries in science. It's interesting that this taboo really only works in one direction. Because if you're looking for good things about a culture, if you're saying that Asians are showing some aptitude academically or let's say quantitatively or Ashkenazi jews have shown a history of real literacy and a contribution to intellectual life disproportionate to their numbers, as is undeniable. To look into the biological or cultural basis of that maybe taboo in some quarters, but it's certainly less taboo. Well, what's interesting about I mean, you're talking about nature nurture and genes and environment. I think on average people would construe the genetic explanation as more taboo than the cultural one if only because it is perceived at times wrongly so that it is more immutable. Right? There's nothing supposedly that I can change about my genes but culture, we can change it. And I think that and the reason why I say that that's incorrect, incidentally is because much of who we are, as you know, is really an interaction between our genes and our environment. And so to sort of separate them as though genes can't be changed genes are turned on or off as a function of environmental inputs. Right? So people have a wrong idea of what's immutable or not. But I think that point is really at the root of, I think, our common friend Stephen Pinker. I mean, when he took on the blank slate and I've taken it on my own research, the blank slate is really appreciated within the social sciences precisely for the reason that we're mentioning right now, which is it's nice to believe it's a very hopeful message. It's nice to believe that no one starts off in life with anything other than equal potentiality right? And that it's only the nefarious forces of our environment and socialization and so on that take us down the life trajectories that we go down. That's a nice message. So anybody could be Lionel Messi. Anybody could be Einstein. Anybody could be Michael Jordan. So I think a lot of the nonsense that's been spewed in the social sciences over the past hundred years is not because, you know, most social scientists are, you know, walking degenerates who don't understand anything about life. It's I think it comes from a good place. Right? So for example, the cultural relativist you mentioned earlier cultural and moral relativism. So that started with Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist who sort of was aware that having a biological explanation for things could have a downstream effect. That's bad. Right? And we know all the different reasons for that. Right? And therefore let's create a worldview that, while completely incorrect, is at least more hopeful and that to me is an affront to the truth and therefore I will attack it again. I'm a little torn on some of these issues because I do see some of them as just not being a direction worth going. Actually, it's interesting because this is really not my bent at all intellectually. I just tend to go where the facts lead. But I'm sympathetic with the idea that certain types of research, certain facts which can be as factual as any other can be so reliably, misunderstood or misappropriated that it's on some level knowledge not worth having. There's nothing to do about it necessarily. Or if there is, that's not obvious and the results could be reasonably expected to be bad or unproductive for society. And so I still think that the search for racial difference in specific areas like intelligence or let's say aggression, there's no doubt they exist. I mean, it would be a miracle if populations that show significant phenotypic differences by dint of their distinct evolutionary paths showed exactly the same level of traits for every trait we value. I mean, there's just no way that's true. Right? So if we could really get down in a fine grained way to the details here and scale all these different populations on intelligence and empathy and aggression and everything else that is psychologically interesting to us, what then? Right. And this does come back to what you said about a misunderstanding of just what it means for something to be genetically determined or to have its basis in biology. Because obviously, as you said, ideas modify the regulation of our genes. Experience does. The brain is not a closed system. The brain is in dialogue with the world. So the boundary between nature and nurture is not hard and fast. And if you look closely enough, it really doesn't exist. So when you're talking about the ways that are left open to you to use this knowledge, you're not talking about changing the genomes of people to improve them. At least you're not talking about that yet. And also there's a misunderstanding that creeps in that the variance is likely to be significant enough that it would be rational to judge someone based on the population they come from. Let's say it's just a fact that Koreans are on average better at math than white Americans. I'm just making this up. But let's say something like that's true. Sure. And you introduce me to a random Korean and a random Caucasian. It would not be rational for me to think I knew anything about their mathematical ability based on their racial characteristics. But no one's going to follow that, really. And people are just going to make these blanket judgments about populations based on the facts we find. Right. And incidentally, by the way, what you just mentioned, I mean, yes, you took the most toxic of the topics, racial differences, but almost verbatim, what you just said has been used to cast a negative light on anybody who does sex differences research. Right. And people say, well, why can't you study something that unites us? Something I remember I received once a reviewer's comments submitted a paper to a top journal. Why are you so focused on sex differences? What's the point of that? Why not study something that unites us? Well, the reality was I was studying sex differences in information search prior to choosing or rejecting a mate. Right. How much information do men need to acquire or women before they decide that they've seen enough information to either reject a prospective suitor or to choose a suitor. So this was really at the intersection of information search and made choice. And by definition, the nature of that research question was about a sex difference, right. I was using principles from biology to argue why I would expect a sex difference. Well, this particular reviewer, in line with some of the language that you use, said, well, what's the point of that? Why not study something that transcends our sex, that unites us? And that is a bit of an arbitrary point to take. If I could just draw another example. Fermat, right? The French mathematician developed theories or proposed or proved theorems several hundred years ago that collected dust for several hundred years. And then today, many of these principles are used in cryptography. Well, had he used the benchmark then of I better do applied research that has clear immediate application value, he would have never done this. So I think when it comes to the issue that we're discussing, I tend to be a purist. If whatever I'm doing adds to this sort of greater pantheon of human knowledge in a way that's valuable, then go for it. That's my benchmark. Yeah, well, but then you smuggled in value there at the end. So the question is, what is valuable given that there's an infinite number of things we can study and there's not enough time to do it? I totally agree with you. Obviously, my bias is in the same direction as the one you expressed. So to some degree, what the noises I'm making now are kind of devil's advocate position. I think the idea that any of these kinds of questions are taboo is ultimately dangerous because the reason why it's taboo is because we're living in a cultural landscape where people are defining themselves in terms of the narrow communities they're a part of. It's the problem of identity politics. There is no result, I can tell you there is no result that could come out about Ashkenazi Jews that I would take personally. Right? The sky is the limit. I mean, it could be everything from penis size to acquisitiveness. I mean, I'm just trying to imagine what would offend people. But it's just there's nothing. Right. And for me, clearly, we have to get to a time where basically everyone feels that way about the community that they're in based on these superficial differences with respect to skin color and all the rest. So I'm sympathetic with your bias here, but I do recognize that it's just though the landscape is changing, there are different trends here, and in some ways it's changing for the worse. And we have, as you say, this commitment to political correctness, especially within academia and especially among the young, that is making it impossible to talk about things that are obviously hugely important to talk about. Not racial difference in intelligence, but things like the spread of political Islam. I worry that if you attach yourself to too many controversial things and aren't kind of curating your offense a little more carefully. And again, I speak not about you personally, but all of us, you sort of wear out your welcome. So that's the reason why I haven't gotten the offer from Stanford. Otherwise, there's no rational reason why it hasn't talked about. Right. And that's an obvious problem that people have to consider, is what happens to your career when you touch any of these topics. When you think about someone like Charles Murray right. Who I don't know. I've met him once briefly, the Bell Curve guy, right, yeah. So he wrote The Bell Curve with his colleague, who I think has passed away. And that was a hugely controversial book, obviously, and and honestly, I never even read it. Right. And and I haven't read the chapter. I think it was just one chapter that was the epicenter of the controversy. And I don't frankly know whether what's in there justifies any of the appropriate that has been heaped upon him, but there's no question that his life has been affected by this. You know, I'm sure everyone who collaborates with him or introduces him as a speaker has to, on some level, apologize in advance for his history of controversy, and some of it might be totally unwarranted. Again, I don't know. But whenever I have looked into one of these scandals, like Larry Summers at Harvard, who's speculating about a different degree of variance in male and female populations with respect to math ability and his remarks, they're just as plain vanilla speculation as you could imagine. And yet he was, you know, hurled out of Harvard for it. In any case, that's the landscape in which we are being asked to function. And I think you do have to sort of pick your battles, although I seem to pick so many of them, that it's kind of strange coming from me. But luckily for you, you're outside of academia, so in a sense, it affords you a bit more leeway. Right. You're not in the Vipers then, so to speak. Right, yeah. But obviously, I still want to be taken seriously and given a fair hearing when I decide to open my mouth, and I have certainly paid the price for having touched so many of these topics, and even this conversation we're having now will be readily spun against me. And what happens is you wind up building all these friction points where you have to start a conversation dealing with the thing that someone heard about you that, in fact, is not true. And again, I see that I am contaminated by this with respect to other people. So someone says, oh, you got to have Stefan Molyneux on on your podcast. Right. And and so I take a look at what he's been saying and what's being said about him, and I think I don't have the time to figure out whether this guy is really a racist crackpot. And to some degree, everyone is dealing with this problem, and certainly they're dealing with this problem with respect to people like ourselves. Well, your point is one that I have had to deal with in my own choice of whom to invite on my show. And as you were trying to come up with some of these names and you came up with Stefan, I could mention a few from my own show tommy Robinson, Robert Spencer and Marie Waters and a whole bunch of other guys, all of whom, I mean, really are probably in the circle of sort of urine Islamophobe land. They probably score much higher than you. And I was very minimally concerned about exactly the issue that you mentioned. And then again, my personhood kicked in, which said, no, I will not be silenced. I will give these guys a fair hearing. And I'm here to report that. You can't imagine how many people wrote to me, Sam, saying I had been hoodwinked into thinking that Tommy Robinson, he's basically Mengily from the Nazi Party. Right. And then I heard him speak on your show, and he struck me as very, very reasonable and very measured. I mean I mean, he's not he's not the most eloquent guy in the world, if if I may say, but he's certainly bright, he's measured, and their opinions were changed. So it's a fine line. I mean, on the one hand, I understand we we don't live in a vacuum and we don't want to be fighting the fight. And of course, you fight them probably a hundredfold more than I do. But on the other hand, if we if we succumb to that mob pressure, then they're basically dictating whom we can speak to. Correct. Have you ever interviewed someone who you regret interviewing for reasons along these lines that you didn't actually appreciate who they were and they managed to fool you and pass for reasonable, but then you discovered something heinous about them and now you feel solid? Yeah. Right. So I have to be a bit diplomatic, which is not easy for me. There is one gentleman that I interviewed who I think it would be pretty fair to say he is an Islamophogist on steroids. But I was very calm and very measured. So I don't have any stories similar to your what do you call it? The greatest podcast ever. The best podcast ever, yeah. Right. So I don't have a story like that. Now. I do have a gentleman who's coming on next week who used to be I hope I'm not mistaken, but I think he used to be a terrorist. And then eventually he reformed, and now he advises the Canadian security services about, quote, radical Islam. And I think that may potentially be a difficult conversation, although it won't be on my end. But I sort of noticed he put out a couple of tweets where he started accusing me of. Oh, so is this what I should expect? You're an anti Muslim bigot type of guy? Then I wrote him privately and I said, look, if this is the kind of discourse that we're going to end up having, then it's not really very fruitful. If you think that simply questioning you on some issue of Islam is going to have this Appalachian thrown at me, then it's a useless conversation, and said, no, okay, brother, no problem. We're good. So I don't know. So I haven't had any that remotely match your level of craziness on your podcast, but hey, the future is long. You never know. Although that craziness is of a different sort. What I'm picturing here is talking to someone who you really should challenge on specific points, because they have said crazy, divisive, irrational things in the past, but they're just not saying them on your show. So you get them there, and it turns out this person is a grand dragon in the KKK. But you don't know that. And you're talking about racial differences in IQ or something in a good natured academic way, and you don't realize that this person's interest in this topic is just the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg is horrendous. I think that's a situation one could be in. Obviously, I think that you could have an interesting, potentially interesting conversation with anyone. I'd be willing to go into a prison and talk to a serial killer because I think that would be a fascinating conversation. There are many questions I would want to ask someone who has killed many people, but at least in that situation, I would understand who I was talking to and what I worry about. With many of the people you name. Someone like Robert Spencer, he comes so fully stigmatized that unless you've paid enough attention to the kinds of battles he's fought to be confident that you know that all of that appropriate is unwarranted. Well, then you don't actually know who you're talking to. One of the ways that I handled specifically the Robert Spencer case is as people started writing to me saying, hey, why are you speaking to this Nazi? And so on, I said, look, the comments section on my YouTube channel is open. Why don't you share some manifestations of some nefariously, racist, horrible things that he's done? And then at least I could be educated. Guess what? I didn't see him. I think that's one of the ways by which you could, I think, take their concerns seriously, right? You're exhibiting that you're open to having the opinion that they'd like you to have of him. You're open to that possibility, but the onus is on you to share that information. So I won't accept that he's simply a vile Nazi Islamophobe at face value and then not bring him on. And I've had this even with guys who are less toxic, right? People said, why are you speaking to Paul Joseph Watson on the Alex Jones network? Alex Jones is this kind of bombastic guy. Do you know what that is? I know Alex Jones. I don't know. Paul Joseph Watson. Yeah, right. And, well, and the reality is that to me, I was very pragmatic about it. It's a forum. It's a large forum that would allow me to share ideas. And probably a bunch of people who otherwise would have never heard of me now know of my work precisely because I went on that show. So I think it's difficult to always run away from folks that come with a dangerous Appalachian, because then it'll be just you and I talking to one another all day. Although, from my perspective, maybe speaking to you is going to get a lot of hate on me. Now. You never know. So let's get into these controversial waters with respect to Islam, because obviously you and I have both spent a lot of time here. I think we agree largely. I think there are probably some interesting points of disagreement, though. But we certainly agree that the reflexive denial that the unique problems we're seeing in the Muslim world have anything to do with religious doctrine, that denial that we see everywhere is a real cause for concern, and it's intellectually and ethically unjustifiable. And you and I both spent a lot of time convincing people that there really is a connection between the way people behave and what they believe, and they're telling us what they believe, and we should believe them in most cases. So jihadism is not merely political. It's amazing that that's still a controversial point. I think we probably do have some different intuitions on certain points. So tell me a little bit. I think you and I once had dinner and you were talking about how living in Montreal gave you a somewhat different picture on questions of immigration and whether Islam was amenable to reform in the way that someone like Majid Nawaz suggests. Give me your picture of what's going on. Incidentally, when you mentioned earlier a Congress that would have been difficult to be had I tried to have that conversation with Majid. I reached out to him because I disagreed with some of his prescriptions and he blew me away because apparently the final inerrant word had been written in a book that you had done with him. So that would be a manifestation in my eyes of someone who wasn't willing to engage in a discussion, notwithstanding the fact that I had started my clip by saying that I applaud his work and this is the type of guy that we should be supporting. But there were specific details that I disagree with him that said so to go to your Montreal question, look, the reality is that and you've said this a million times in very large forums, we have to differentiate between, of course, individuals and between the ideology, let's say, for the 1,000,000th time. So individual Muslims might be lovely. But what happens to a society when it becomes more Islamized? That, if you'd like, is a question that we all have to ask. Actually, Gad, before you get into that, which is exactly where I want you to go, you might just tell listeners who aren't aware of it that you have a background that gives you a kind of a life experience here that many of us don't have. Yeah, no, that's a great point. So I was born in Lebanon, I grew up in Lebanon, and so my mother tongue is Arabic. We're Arabic in a multiplicity of ways, and some of the music that we listen to, and the foods, and if you saw us, you wouldn't know that we are anything but Arabic. The only asterisk is that we're Lebanese Jews. And when the civil war broke out in Lebanon in the mid seventy s, it became about as precarious as anything can be to be Jewish in Lebanon. And so we had to leave under imminent threat of execution. So some of the things that people in the west now are used to seeing in terms of ISIS and so on, is stuff that I grew up with in Lebanon. Right. That was my reality. That's what I escaped from. And so I have first hand experience. I mean, not that that means that whatever I say should be more trusted, but of course I am shaped by my own unique experience. My own unique experience says that at any point something could be dormant and then it comes alive. And when it comes alive, look out. Right? Because people will point to, oh, but didn't you have an otherwise peaceful existence in Lebanon before that point? Well, yes and no. I mean, we were tolerated. Right? To be tolerated in the context of the Middle East is very different than to be equal. Right. You're tolerated, it means that we're not going around decapitating you. Well, that to me, is not the best benchmark of being an equal citizen under the law. Right. So there were institutionalized laws that did not permit Jews to do certain things even in the most progressive of Middle Eastern countries, lebanon. Right. My brother, who was the Lebanese judo champion, I think three years running, had to leave Lebanon before the civil war because there were threats on him that he could no longer compete in judo because it wasn't good for Jew to constantly win the title. So these realities are things that we face every day, even prewar. So that's really the background that I come from. My parents were subsequently after we emigrated to Canada and you may or may not know this, I'm not sure if we had discussed it in our last get together but my parents kept going back to Lebanon after we emigrated to Canada and in 1980 they were kidnapped by Fatah and some really nasty things happened. But luckily we were able to get them out. So I have in the same way that some of the other people who are in this space have personal history with this reality. I mean, I have it, all right? I mean, I've lived it. I've escaped it for about 20 or 25 years after we escaped Lebanon. I used to have a recurring nightmare where they're coming to kill us. And I have a gun that either malfunctions or I run out of ammunition. So this is real, right? This is part of my, if you'd like, my memory, DNA. So that's my background. And it shapes what I'm now seeing in Montreal, which is that Montreal is becoming increasingly Islamized. So if we compare the number of people that we would see in Islamic garb in Montreal 12, 13, 14 years ago to today, it's just breathtaking. Does that mean that we've turned into Yemen? Of course not. But we can sort of guess what the trajectory is with more Islam. Is there more peace? Is there more tolerance? Is there more freedom of speech or less? I mean, it's a very simple calculus, right? In the same way that at the end of every day, we can determine whether that day I've put on weight, nothing has changed in my weight or I've lost weight. We could ask the very same question. When Islam becomes a majority in a particular society, is it for the better? And by better, I mean by all the tenants that we hold dear in the west, is it unchangeable or does it get worse? And so that's what we really have to look at. Not so much whether how many terrorists we let in if we let in immigrants. Does Islam, once it becomes dominant, change the fabric of our societies? And regrettably, the answer is yes. Yeah. This is one of these topics that's very fraught. And I have a position here with respect to Muslim immigration in the current context of the election because I've been struggling to figure out what someone like Hillary Clinton could say that would make sense given the realities we're talking about. That wouldn't be just the sanctimonious drivel that you hear from, unfortunately, from the current president and from really all Democrats, which is that this has nothing to do with Islam. And to even think about paying attention to somebody's religious background when you're deciding whether to admit them into the country, that is synonymous by definition with the worst forms of bigotry. So, as listeners to this podcast know, I'm not a fan of Donald Trump's. And yet if you catch him in the midst of a single sentence or something that purports to be a sentence, you will hear a more honest note struck here. It'll be something like, listen, this is coming from one religion. It's Islam. And we know this and we can't lie about it. And therefore, the fact that someone has a Muslim background tells us something about the possibility of one that they're jihadist and two, that they harbor opinions. Now, I'm starting to speak in a way that Trump wouldn't, but that they may in fact harbor opinions that are deeply inimical to everything we value culturally free speech and the rights of women and the rights of gays and all the rest. And so it is just a fact that if you're going to let in 100,000 Muslims from a country like Syria, even with the best of intentions and even with some process of screening, you will let in some percentage of that 100,000. And you know what that percentage is. By the way, Sam, do you want to take a guess what that number is? Well, this all turns on how good your screening is, right? So if it was no screening, then you're sampling the whole society. But one hopes that there's some process of vetting here that weeds out people who are obviously solophists or obviously sympathetic with ISIS or all the rest. So Douglas Murray was talking about this on the podcast, some probably a year ago now, when the migrant crisis was really kicking off. No matter how good your screening is, you have to honestly acknowledge that no screening paradigm is perfect and that there's so much political correctness on our side that one has good cause to doubt whether any screening procedure would be of the sort that you and I would support, right? So are they really going to ask intrusive questions about a person's religious convictions? And are such questions sufficient to tease out attitudes? Let's say you could screen out all the jihadists by magically asking the right questions. Are you going to be committed to screening out people who really down to the, you know, the soles of their feet, despise freedom of speech? Right. People who, you know, it would take ten years for them to figure out that they want to live in a society where cartoonists can draw the profit, right, because right now they think those people should be hurled from rooftops. The numbers of people who believe that in the Muslim world is far in excess of anyone who would say they support ISIS or even jihadism. And so that's the situation you're left with you is to let in great numbers of Muslims is different than letting in great numbers of Christians, even from the same societies or yazidis from Iraq, because of specific facts about the doctrine. And this is what is refreshing about the juggernaut of narcissism and delusion that is Donald Trump. Most people are in denial about this reality, and it's it's something we just have to honestly talk about now. Now, I say all this believing that the prescription of not letting in Muslims or not letting in anyone who could be Muslim from any of these societies is not workable and in fact, not wise for the reason that many sanctimonious liberals espouse. But obviously they espouse it in the context of not actually acknowledging the nature of the problem. I mean, the buffer against Muslim extremism. And the only prospect for reform in the Muslim world is Muslim moderation on some level. So it's got to be at minimum, it's the ex Muslims, right? It's someone like Sarah Hater, right? 10,000 Sarah Haters given huge platforms. That's what the world needs. And if you keep Sarah Hater out because she came from the wrong country, or you keep Faisal Sayyid AlMutar out because he came from Iraq and he was Muslim, those are the people who have to be empowered, and those are the people who have to be given all the resources we can muster. And those are the people who we need here. And then we need people who are just like them in their commitment to liberalism and pluralism and tolerance and rationality, but who, for whatever reason, are still identified as Muslims, like Majinawas. You need people like that at the mosque in Montreal or New York or Houston or Los Angeles. And those are the people who are our early warning system against, and really our immune system against the spread of, quote, Islamic extremism. So if we just followed the the Trumpian line of saying, okay, no more Muslims, I don't see how we have taken the step to empower the reformers. So, look, I completely agree that somewhere between Trump's prescription of no more entry of Muslims and the open door Muslim Muslims, if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'll be speaking with Peter Singer. Peter is certainly one of the most famous living philosophers and he has been very influential on public morality, both with respect to the treatment of animals and in this growing movement that I spoke about with Will McCaskill on a previous podcast known as Effective Altruism. He's a professor of bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. He's the author of many books, including Animal Liberation, which is often considered the silent spring of the animal rights movement. He's also written The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do and The Ethics of What We Eat and many other books. His most recent book is Ethics in the Real World 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter, and I highly recommend it. Peter and I talk about many things and we ran out of time, frankly. We had 2 hours booked and as you'll hear at the end, I come up against the brick wall of time constraint and really was wanting to talk about many more things. So I'll have to bring Peter back at some point. We spend the first half hour or so talking about how it's possible to talk about moral truth. And if that's not to your taste, if you're not really worried about how we can ground our morality in universal truth claims, you might skip 30 minutes in or so where we start talking about questions of practical ethics. And we touch many things the ethics of violence, politics, free speech, euthanasia. There's just a lot we cover, and I hope you find it useful. And if you do find conversations like this useful, you can once again support the podcast@samharris.org support. And as always, your support is greatly appreciated and it's what allows me to clear my schedule, to do this sort of thing and keeps us all adfree. And now I bring you Peter Singer. So I have Peter Singer on the line. Peter, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Sam, for having me on the podcast. It's good to be talking with you. Listen, everyone will know who you are, but perhaps you can briefly describe what you do at this point and the kinds of questions you focus on. Sure. I'm a professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and I also have a regular visiting position at the university of Melbourne in Australia, which is where I'm originally from. I work in ethics. I've been interested in a range of different issues. I wrote a book called Animal Liberation, published back in 1975, that some regard as having started off the modern animal rights movement. I've also been interested for many years in the obligations of the affluent people like us, to people in extreme poverty elsewhere in the world. And I've written on issues in bioethics, questions about the sanctity of life and a range of other questions that come up in that field. Yeah. And your new book is entitled Ethics in the Real World. And I'll have a link to it on my blog and I certainly encourage listeners to get that. It's great because it's divided into these 82 very short chapters, literally, like three page essays on philosophical questions. And again, emphasis is on the real world here. So you tackle questions like, should poor people be able to sell their organs? Is it more ethical to eat fish than cows? Should Holocaust denial be a crime? These are all questions where public policy and how people actually live their lives are just explicitly in play and just super digestible philosophical essays. So I recommend people get that. If I'm not mistaken, Peter, you and I have only met once, right? I think it was at this Arizona event organized by Lawrence Krause, which was that's right? Yes, that's the only time we've actually met in person. Yeah. Which, unfortunately, it was titled The Great Debate. Somewhat pretentiously, perhaps, but it was you and me and Steve Pinker and Lawrence and Patricia Churchland, I think, and a few other people. And that's available for people to see on YouTube, if I recall correctly. You and I got somewhat bogged down disagreeing about the foundations of morality and human values. But I had the sense at the time that we were talking past one another and getting derailed on semantics more than anything else. So I'd like us to start with the topic of the foundations of morality and to answer the question, or attempt to answer the question, how is it possible for something to be right and wrong in this universe, or good and bad? And then move from there into what is the relationship between the claims we make about good and evil and right and wrong and facts of the sort that fall within the purview of science? And then once we have just a concept of goodness in hand and how it relates to truth claims, then I want to go on to talk about just the practical reality of doing good in the world. And this will lead to questions of effective altruism and population ethics and moral illusions and all the rest. This first question I put to you is how is it that you think about moral truth? Does moral truth exist? And if it does, what is the relationship between the true claims we make about good and evil or right and wrong and facts of the sort we talk about in science, right? That's a good question and a very large question. It's one that I've grappled with on and off for most of my philosophical career, and I have changed my views on it significantly in the last few years. So earlier on in my career, I would have said that there are no objective truths in ethics, but we can prescribe that certain things be done, and we can prescribe them not just for ourselves or out of our own interest, but we can prescribe them in a way that is to use a term that my former Oxford supervisor, Professor RM. Hair, coined universalizable. That doesn't mean that they're the same for everyone, but what it means is that I can express them without referring to myself or without using terms like I or proper names. So, for example, if I were to say, as Donald Trump has recently been saying, it's fine for me not to pay any taxes, then I would have to say it's fine for anyone in my situation not to pay taxes. And of course, one might not be so keen to do that. You can think of other circumstances in which people might say even worse things. The Nazi might say, it's good for me to kill Jews, but then we can ask the Nazi to imagine, well, suppose you suddenly discovered, actually that you're of Jewish ancestry, your parents had hidden this from you. Does that mean that it's fine for any Nazi to kill you? Most Nazi probably would think twice. There might be a few ideological fanatics who would still say yes, but most people wouldn't. So that was as far as I thought you could go, really, that it did depend on people's inclinations and prescriptions and there was no objective truth in it. But I now think that that's not correct. I think that there are some claims which you can say are truths, that there are things that we can reflect on and that strike us as simply undeniable, if you like, as self evident. Although that's not to say that everybody will immediately agree with them. But an example would be that inflicting agony for no real purpose, let's say inflicting agony because on someone else, because it brings you some kind of moderate enjoyment, mild enjoyment, that that's wrong. And what's really at work here is the idea that agony is something that's a bad thing, that the world is a better place if there's less agony in it. And I do think that that's a very hard claim to deny, that the fact that someone is in agony provides us, provides anyone, really with a reason to try to alleviate that agony or to stop it. And the fact that doing an action will cause someone to be in agony is a reason not to do it. Not necessarily an overriding reason, but it is a reason against doing it. But now you say your views here changed recently, I guess. How recently are we talking in the last since actually I saw you in Arizona, or before that? Probably when I saw you in Arizona, I was to some extent in transition. It's been a sort of slow transition. I was always trying even, you know, maybe 30 years ago, I was trying to find ways in which you could tighten up the arguments that you could bring in some role for reason in this. So that the problem with the position that my mentor, RM Hair had developed was that he said that universalizability just depended on the concept of aught. The basic moral concept aught good and right incorporated this idea of universalizability. And the problem with that was that if somebody said, okay, so I'm just not going to use those words right, instead of saying you ought to do something, I'll say, you schmart, do something, or that's schmite. I'm just going to invent my own concepts. And now it's fine for me to not pay any taxes and I don't have to say that anybody else in my position also doesn't have to pay taxes or any of these other implications. And that just didn't seem good enough, that seemed too easy away out of moral arguments. So I was always looking for something a bit stronger and looking at whether you could argue that there was a rational requirement that was corresponding to this universalizability. I guess I only wrote about this in a book called The Point of View of the Universe, which is a co authored book with a Polish philosopher. Karajino de lazari Radic came out in 2014. So it's perhaps a year or two before that. In thinking about that book, I had already come to the conclusion that you can argue that there are some things that are moral truths or self evident. The 19th century philosopher Henry Sidwick, who we discuss in that book, describes them as moral axioms. It's within the last, let's say, five years, definitely, that I've come to this position. So if I'm not mistaken, this is anchored in a kind of consequentialism or utilitarianism. So what do you do with the claim that consequentialism is itself just an expression of a mere preference and is unjustifiable? Well, I don't think that that's correct. There are different forms of consequentialism. What they have in common, of course, is the view that what we ought to do is the act that will have the best consequences. And then the discussion is, what do we mean by best consequences? But I think that that's right. I think that when you think about different actions, if it's clear that one act will have better consequences, all things considered, than any outcome, I'd be prepared to say that it's then true that that act is the right thing to do. Now obviously that can be denied by people who think that there are some moral rules which we ought never to break, no matter what the consequences. That's not a view that I accept. I would try to argue that my view is true, but that really has to be, at least in part, by undermining the foundations of the alternative view. It's not so self evident that the consequentialist view is right, that one can just state it and everybody will see it to be right. Partly because there's been a whole history and culture of moral thinking which is based on rules. Moral rules do have a certain social purpose. They're useful, they simplify decisions. We can't calculate from first principles every time we act, which act will have the best consequences. So it's not all that surprising that people sometimes think that these rules have a kind of inherent objectivity of their own and that we should obey them no matter what the consequences. But that's the kind of argument you need to have. I think we largely agree here. I'm tempted to not spend a lot of time fishing around for areas where we might disagree in met ethics, but I think most of the listeners to this podcast will be familiar with my views on morality and moral realism as I lay out in my book The Moral Landscape. I guess just a couple of points I would make here. I think whenever I hear someone say that they are not a consequentialist, they hold to some rule that they think is important regardless of consequences. What I believe I have found, without exception in those conversations and in reading the work of people like Kant and other famous non consequentialists, is that they smuggle in consequences into the primacy of the rule that if the rule had bad consequences, it would never suggest itself as a reliable basis for ethics. If Kant's categorical imperative reliably produced needless human misery that was otherwise avoidable, no one would think that the categorical imperative was a good idea. Right? And so if you drill down on why people are attached to a rule, you tend to get justifications for it, which have to be cashed out in the form of consequences, whether they're actual or potential. Has that been your experience, or do you see it differently? I certainly think that the tendency of most of the rules that are part of everyday morality is to produce better consequences. I think you're right about that. And I think you're probably right that any rule that reliably produced more misery would be dropped and a different rule would be substituted. But of course, what does often happen and count is a good instance of this, is that you have a rule that generally has good consequences, like the rule that you should tell the truth. And then somebody imagines a situation where a would be murderer comes to your house and asks if you have seen so and so. And it so happens that so and so knows that this guy is pursuing him and has asked if you will hide him in your basement. Now, most of us would, of course say, well, it is justified to lie in those circumstances, but can't actually sticks to the rule and says, no, it's wrong to lie even then. So part of the problem with the people who are not consequentialist, or some of them at least, is they want to stick to their rules no matter what, even if the general tendency of the rule is to have good consequences. And so I would describe that as a rule that we should apply in everyday life, but not as a rule we should stick to no matter what. The other thing here which gives us this sense, or gives many people the sense that there can't be such a thing as moral truth is we value differences of opinion in philosophy, and in particular moral philosophy, in a way that we don't in the rest of our truth claiming about the world. So if someone comes to the table saying that they have a very different idea about how to treat women, we should make them live in bags as the Taliban do, and this is how we want to live. And there's no place to stand where you can tell me that I'm wrong, because I'm just being guided by my age old moral code for which I even have a religious justification. Many people in the West, I think largely as a result of what postmodernism has done to the humanities, but perhaps there are other reasons. Imagine that there's just no place to stand where you can contradict that opinion or dismiss it. You can't actually say, well, some people are not adequate to the conversation for reasons that should be obvious. And yet we do this in science and everywhere else, just in journalism or in history, in any place where people are purporting to make claims that are true. When someone shows up and demands that their conspiracy theory theories about alien abductions or whatever it is get taken seriously, we just say, sorry, these views are so uninteresting and so obviously incredible that they don't actually constitute any kind of rejoinder to what is being said here. And so it's very easy to disregard them. Now. Occasionally some outline view becomes credible for some reason, and then it subverts what we think is true. And that's just a process of criticism that just has to run its course. But I feel like in moral philosophy many people have just tied their hands and imagine that everyone gets a vote in moral epistemology and it's an equal vote. And so what Derek Parfitt thinks about morality doesn't matter any more than what Mullah Omar thinks. And everyone is on all fours in their truth claims. And I think that's been very destabilizing for many people in the west when it comes time to talk about the nature of human values and how we can talk about them in universal terms. Just the fact that you can still meet anthropologists, and it might even be still a majority of anthropologists who doubt whether a universal notion of human values is even a credible thing to aspire to. Yeah, anthropologists seem particularly prone to that. Maybe it's going to occupational hazard of studying a lot of different societies. And of course, you do find different particular practices in different societies, but you also find some common tendencies. For example, reciprocity is pretty much a universal value. It's very hard to find a society in which it's not considered a good thing to do favors to those who've done favors to you, and conversely, that you're entitled to have some kind of retribution on those who've done bad things to you. But that's, of course, not to say that this is actually the right morality. This is just to say that this is kind of the evolved morality of our species, and indeed not just of our species, but of long lived social primates who recognize each other as individuals. But I wanted to get back to the larger point that you were making, and I'm not actually I don't quite see as much reluctance to criticize ethical views of different cultures as you described. I think most people, for example, who are not of that religious group, and it's not all Islam, but it's a particular part of Islam who think that women should not go out in public without you put it wearing a bag over themselves. I think most people who are not of that religious group would be prepared to say that that's wrong. But it's wrong to treat women in that way. It's wrong to deny them privileges that men automatically have and they would reject as unethical that way of treating women. Now, what does come over the top of this is that we have, I think you and I would agree, perhaps excessive respect for religion. And I think that comes out of a long tradition of people fighting over religion and often killing over religion. And at some point, perhaps around the 17th and 18th centuries, people started to say, well, enough of this. I'll leave you alone to practice your religion, and you leave me alone to practice my religion, and then we don't have to kill each other over it. And of course, in some sense, that's a very good idea, that we don't have to kill each other over it. But it can be taken too far. It can be taken to the point of, well, every religion is sort of somehow good in itself or beyond criticism in itself. And I think that that's completely wrong. But if somebody tried to put it forward as a sort of secular belief that women should cover themselves completely whenever they go out in public, whereas men are perfectly free to display their arms and legs and so on. And of course, faith, I think people would be pretty baffled by that view. And I don't think that they would think, oh yeah, that's fine. Well, you haven't spent as much time criticizing these views as I have. I think in public, I would agree that most people feel that there's something wrong there. But I've noticed that the more educated you become, certainly in the humanity, actually not just the humanities, it's science as well. Fumes you can't derive an odd from an is has become this chiboleth among very educated but incompletely educated people. Well, I'm going to disagree with you about that because I think that's true. That's a philosophical claim that I think is defensible. I think it's defensible within a certain construal. Yeah, we can talk about that. But I know physicists who will say, I don't like slavery. I personally would vote against it. I would put my shoulder to the wheel and resisting it. But I have no illusion that in resisting slavery I am making any claim about what is true. There's just no place to stand in science to make those claims with respect to morality. And so what what that does is that divorces morality from any conception of the wellbeing of conscious creatures like ourselves. And it's claiming that no matter how far advanced we become in understanding well being and the possible experiences that suitable minds can have, we will never know anything about what is better or worse in this universe. My view again, I don't want to spend too much time on this because there's so much in applied ethics that I want to talk to you about, but I do want to hear your pushback on the odd and is issue. But my claim here is that we could forget about ought, as you suggested earlier, though I take that in a very different direction. I mean, just imagine we have no conception of ought and we have no conception of morality, but we appear in a universe where certain experiences are possible. So I view morality as a kind of navigation problem. We are conscious systems, and there is a possibility to experience unendurable and pointless misery for as long as possible. And then there are all these other possibilities. And my view is that anything is better than the worst possible misery for everyone. Look, I totally agree with you about that moral judgment. And I also agree with you that understanding well being, what causes brings about wellbeing, what reduces suffering, how our minds work, all of that is highly relevant for deciding what we ought to do. And I also think that the physicist that you mentioned is wrong if he says my judgment that happiness is better than misery, let's say, is not true. I don't think that I can say that this is true. I think you can say that it's true, but I don't think it actually follows from the description of the natural universe. I think it follows only if you make that judgment. And I think you actually made it. You use the word better, that it's better if there's a world in which there's people are living rich, enjoyable, fulfilling lives than if they're miserable suffering and so on. But we have to say, well, what is that judgment that it's better? I think it's a judgment that we use our reason to get at. So I think that we have normative reasons. Even if we didn't use the word ought, even if we decided that the institution of morality is not one that we want to be part of, I think we'd have to say, do we have reasons for acting to bring about the happy world that you described rather than the miserable world that you described? And I would answer yes, we definitely do have reasons for acting because it's a better world. But I wouldn't claim that I can deduce that reason for acting simply from the description of here's one world and here's the other. It's not just the description. There has to be, as I say, something normative, by which I mean reasons that ought to move a rational being towards choosing one world rather than the other. Right? Well, I would fully agree with that, except the reason why the is ought dichotomy is uninteresting to me, is you can't get to any description of what is without obeying certain oughts in the first place. You have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps at some point. And so logical intuitions are not self justifying. We just grab them and use them. And a desire for evidence. Why should you desire evidence? What evidence are you going to provide to convince someone that they should desire evidence if they don't desire evidence for their truth claims? Or, you know, what, what logical argument will you use to prove to someone that they should value logic if they don't value logic? I mean, these are brute facts of epistemology which we use without any apology, really, because we can do no other. I would just say that valuing any movement away from the worst possible misery for everyone. Right? I mean, so again, just I want our listeners to absorb what those words mean. Imagine a universe where everything that can suffer suffers for as long as it possibly can, as deeply as it can, and no good comes of it. Right? There's no silver lining to this. This is a perfect hell for all conscious creatures. That's bad if the word bad is going to mean anything. And getting out of that situation is good and is something you should do if words like good and should mean anything. And that in my view, that's all we need to get this consequentialist machine. Attorney okay. I don't think we're disagreeing on anything very significant here. Perhaps we're disagreeing on whether these are facts that science describes or whether they're reasons that are part of what it is to have reasons for action. Yeah, I don't think we disagree there because the point of confusion that I think you and I got bogged down by the first time around was in a very different definition of the word science. I was always using science in a much more elastic sense to coincide much more with the way you're using the word reason. And so I'm not just talking about people in white lab coats who can run experiments immediately on any given hypothesis or ever. So there are truth claims we want to make or could make about the world, which we know we would never test scientifically, but we know there are facts of the matter and the fact that we can't get the data in hand doesn't make the truth or falsity of those claims any less assured. So again, the one I use all the time, and I might have even used it with you in Arizona was what was JFK thinking the moment he got shot? Well, there's an infinite number of things I know he wasn't thinking. I know he wasn't thinking, I wonder what Peter Singer and Sam Harris are going to say about what I was thinking. And the list can just grow from there. And that's a claim about his inner life and what it was like to be him that is ontologically subjective, right? I'm making a claim about his subjectivity and on some level the state of his brain. But it's epistemologically objective in that, which is to say it's true. There's every reason to believe it. And people doubt that. You can make claims about human subjectivity that are, wherever you stand, surviving all of the tests of credibility that claims about physics and chemistry need to survive. That's my particular hobby horse, that people feel that this area is just by definition less clear, less truthful, less grounded in the kinds of cognition we use to do science. But again, I just think there's nothing more sure than some of these claims we could make about morality once we look at the intuitions we're using to make the claims, the intuition that two plus two makes for and that this abstraction is generalizable. So it works for apples, it works for oranges, it works for boats. That intuition that is at the foundation of arithmetic, again, is just something we apes are doing with our minds. And it works. But I just think it's not in a different sphere from the kinds of intuitions you and I are talking about with respect to it is good to reduce pointless agony, all things considered. Yeah, we're certainly agreed on that and I think we're agreed on rejecting the various forms of subjectivism and relativism that the postmodernist ideas in particular have encouraged some people to have. I find that quite disappointing in a way. You get people who come out of backgrounds where they're doing cultural studies and they come up with the same sort of views that freshmen come up to Princeton with and we discuss in. Early seminars, and they usually fairly rapidly see that those views aren't really tenable, that they have implications that they don't want to accept. But there are certainly more sophisticated forms of that kind of relativism and subjectivism that are still around. And I think we're agreed that ethics is a field in which there are truths. Exactly how we classify those truths is a fine point, but I think probably it didn't really delay us any longer. I think we've clarified where we are. Okay, so let's move forward with that consensus in hand. So we want to reduce suffering, all things considered, and maximize the wellbeing of conscious creatures, and we don't need to waste much time justifying that going forward. So now what do you do in a situation where people claim that suffering is being produced and suffering is in fact being produced, but you feel that the basis for the suffering is illegitimate? Let's say it's based on a religious dogma. So the example that comes to mind now is the cartoon controversy. What if a consequentialist, philosophically minded, but still doctrinaire panel of Muslim philosophers came to you and said, listen, whenever you cartoon the Prophet or tolerate others cartooning the prophet, you produce a tremendous amount of suffering in millions of devout Muslims. Suffering that you can't compensate us for, suffering that we are committed to feeling based on our beliefs, and therefore, it is just wrong to do this. And you need to conform your freedom of speech to our religious sensitivities. How do you think about that? I do think about that in terms of the consequences of the action. So I'm not somebody who's going to say, now I have a right to free speech, and if I choose to exercise that right to free speech, I will do so no matter what the consequences. The question to be considered is what are the consequences of restraining free speech in this area? And there's no doubt, I think, that these cartoons are offensive to Muslims and they will cause some hurt feelings. Perhaps more serious than that, because people can get over their hurt feelings. I'd say more serious is the fact that some of them may then engage in protests that turn violent, may attack Christians. If there are Christians, or let's say non people they consider to be infidels, not necessarily Christians, but not Muslims anyway, if they're living in their country, may attack and kill them. These things have happened. And I think that that's something that anybody thinking of publishing these cartoons needs to give very significant weight to. On the other side, I think that religious intolerance is a major source of suffering in the world. And of course, in the case of militant Islamic views, we've seen very clearly in recent years how that can cause specific violent attacks, which clearly cause a lot of suffering on the people who are killed or injured and the families and relatives and so on. So the question is, do we want to just accept that those religious beliefs cannot be criticized and that therefore they will continue forever or indefinitely? I guess nothing lasts forever. Or do we want to see whether we can, in some ways encourage fewer people to hold those beliefs, or at least encourage people to hold them in a more open, tolerant form? And I think the answer to that is yes, I do think that we should be free to criticize religious beliefs, especially those that do a great deal of harm. And then the further question is, is the use of ridicule an effective means of achieving that end? And on that one, I'm not so sure. So, in other words, if it were a question of publishing arguments against the claims made in Islam, publishing historical studies about how the Quran came to be written, and publishing studies of the Quran showing contradictions or inconsistencies, which of course exist in the Bible and in any of these substantial texts from long ago, going to be demonstrably inaccurate in some places. So is that the way we want to try to persuade people to shift their religious beliefs? Or should we try actually ridiculing those beliefs? And my guess is that probably both have some effect, but I'm not sufficiently convinced at the moment that ridicule is so much more effective as to outweigh the serious consequences that it can have. Yeah, I guess my intuition here is that the rule of privileging free speech over everything else is just so useful that the need to rethink it in any local case is almost never pressing. I think free speech being essentially the equivalent of sunlight spread on bad ideas. It's such a reliable mechanism for bringing bad ideas to light, criticizing them, getting others to react to them, that the moment you begin to look for local instances where you need to calculate the harm done by exercising it, I think it's almost always counterproductive. For instance, is one area here where I know you and I agree, because I've read what you wrote in your most recent book. But the idea that Holocaust denial should be illegal, right, because of all the harm it does both to the survivors and their descendants, and also just the fact that it seems to encourage, or at least as imagined, to encourage the survival of these noxious views Nazism and neo Nazism in Europe. You and I both agree that it shouldn't be illegal and that you shouldn't put people in prison for denying the Holocaust. That the appropriate response there is ridicule and the attendant destruction of their reputation. And just talking more about the evidence for the Holocaust and just the normal process whereby we expose bad ideas to criticism and use the immune system of conversation to deal with them. Yeah, we certainly agree about that example. And I think that the way to deal with Holocaust denial is to simply show the evidence that the Holocaust existed and that evidence is totally overwhelming. Whereas locking somebody up who denies the existence of the Holocaust probably just encourages conspiracy theorists to think, oh well, if they have to prohibit people denying it, that must be because there isn't really good evidence that it happened. So that's a case where we're completely in agreement. But I'm not sure that if you're saying there is no case where a restriction of freedom of speech is justified, then I disagree. And I disagree with the kind of case that John Stewart Mill, who of course is a famous defender of freedom of thought and expression in his book on Liberty, carved out an exception where he said that in his day corn dealers were very unpopular. It was thought that they were hoarding corn, profiting from it and starving the poor. So he gave the example of somebody who, standing in front of the house of a corn dealer, addresses an excited mob saying that corn dealers are starving the poor or robbing the poor or something of that sort. And he thought it was legitimate to prevent that speech taking place. On the other hand, he said, if in different circumstances, somebody wants to hand out a leaflet expressing exactly the same views, but not in front of the house of a corn dealer and in front of an excited mob, then that was perfectly legitimate and there was a right to freedom of thought and expression that extended to expressing that opinion. Now, of course, times have changed somewhat and we have instant communication anywhere. And so the case of the cartoons which are then we know going to get spread over the internet and read about or reported in countries where there is a lot of militant Islamic thought may have a similar effect. In terms of inciting a mob to attack and kill, as I say, the people they regard as infidels or representatives of the government where the cartoons are published, or whoever it might be. So that's why I'm not sure that the exceptions ought not to extend here. Not that I really want to see a law against those cartoons. That might be a step too far and might be difficult to say exactly what is legitimate ridicule or satire and acceptable. But I think if I were an editor and I were aware of what the consequences were going to be if I, let's say, I had reliable evidence that they would cause the death of hundreds of innocent people, I would choose not to publish those cartoons. I would agree that if you are going to make the causality absolutely clear and say, well, somebody is going to die if you publish this cartoon, we know that, well, then it becomes difficult to justify publishing it. But then we're always dealing in probabilities. And if the probability is high enough, as it probably is in this case, you could reasonably expect that people will riot and someone will get injured or killed as a result. But the thing is it puts us in a position where a whole civilization, a whole societies can be held hostage to the whims of, in this case, religious maniacs. But by no means just focusing on the specific case of islam. It's just anyone could announce unabomber style if you say x or you don't say x, I'm going to kill someone. And there's just something so corrosive about that and it can be so consciously and cynically used against us again until the end of the world, that it's tempting to just say, well, sorry, we don't play that particular game. And the game we do play is we basically talk about everything and we encourage you to talk about everything and you will feel a lot better once you do. The other thing that's implicit in having a position of the sort we have sketched out here where we think that moral truths exist and it's possible to be right and wrong or more or less right and more or less wrong about what a good life is. That entails the claim that certain people, and even whole cultures may not know what they're missing. You know, what I would want to claim here is that a religiously, blinkered culture that feels no affinity for freedom of speech and thinks that cartoonists and novelists and other blasphemers should be killed for saying the wrong thing about the provenance of a certain book or about a certain historical figure. These people don't know what they're missing, and they don't realize how much of a price they're paying for this attitude toward freedom of thought and freedom of expression. And on some level we know we're right about this. We know we're on the right side of history and we have to encourage cajole, browbeat and ultimately even coerce people to get on the right side of history. Yeah, again, I largely agree with what you say there and I don't think that if somebody is trying to blackmail us into not saying something by deliberate threats and is using that as a tactic, I don't think we should yield to that, although there might be a significant cost. But obviously once that succeeds, then it's going to be a tactic which will be used over and over again and freedom of thought and expression is something that is really important to defend. I certainly agree about that. So it's really the rather different case that I was talking about where it's not a deliberate tactic, it's just a reaction and it's specifically about cartoons. It's not about expression of ideas. It's not about being able to criticize the religion. I certainly don't want to see any religion insulated from criticism because I do think that there's a lot of harm that flows out of that. So if it gets to that point where people are saying if you even dare to say that it's not the case that every word in the quran is true and ought to be followed. Clearly, we're not going to play that game. We are going to be free to criticize whatever religious texts people put up that we disagree with. That's a very important and fundamental freedom and something that we should defend, even if there is some cost of doing so. Yeah, well, I would just argue that the cartoons were of a piece with that larger consideration back there. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, this is another election related podcast. This might be my last swing at this ball. As many of you know, I've come out strongly against Donald Trump, and the only way to really do this is to support Hillary Clinton. But what I want to do in this podcast is attempt to reach those of you who view any criticism of Trump as partisan. So I'm going to spend a long time here speaking very critically about the lesser evil, Hillary Clinton. About both Clintons, in fact, because they come as a pair. And I've enlisted Andrew Sullivan to help me in this cause because he certainly knows what's wrong with both Clintons. Most of you know him, of course. Andrew has been a very prominent journalist and editor. He ran The New Republic for many years, and he's written for more or less, everybody. He's a frequent political commentator, and the fact that gay marriage is now legal in this country is largely the result of his work. He was also one of the first prominent bloggers, which he did for 15 years at The Daily Dish. He is now a contributing editor at New York Magazine and writes great long form pieces there. He's published several books, including The Conservative Soul, which I've linked to on my website. And what we attempt to do in this podcast is sympathize with those of you who hate the Clintons and don't want to see them return to the White House. And we do this for a good long while. I'm worried that if you only listen to half of this podcast, you'll go vote for Trump. I don't think you've heard two people who support Hillary Clinton do this. I certainly haven't. And then we go on to argue that the lesser evil is still, in this case, the only good you can do. And now I bring you Andrew Sullivan. So I'm here with Andrew Sullivan. Andrew, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks, Sam, for having me. Some of our listeners will be aware of our connection, but for those who aren't, you and I have debated each other twice in print, and the first time was about religion well over a decade ago at this point, and the second was about events in Gaza. And both of those exchanges are on my blog, so people can find them. But one of the great things about our debates, from my point of view, is that they were fairly hard hitting. The first one in particular, if I recall, was pretty barbed, or at least I was pretty barbed, and yet they really became the basis of a friendship. And you and I don't see each other that often. We're not in the same city very much, but I certainly consider you a friend. And in my experience, that doesn't happen all that much in public debates. And it's very valuable to me that our communications, while we started out very far apart on certain issues, really were, in the aggregate, totally civil and better than civil. I mean, they really became the basis of a real connection, which is fantastic. I feel exactly the same way, Sam. However, I've disagree with you. I've always respected and enjoyed what you've had to say, and I think for someone with religious faith, I think that your challenges have been important and certainly not ones that any believer should shrink from. I think they're things that we should consider and think about, and I'm grateful for it. And I've always detected you an openness to dialogue above everything else, and that's increasingly, as I get older, the more valuable that is. Yeah. So I'm grateful too. And also, I must say, as you know, your support for what I would call my spiritual development. I don't know quite what label you put on it, but you were very helpful for me to understand better what meditation is and what Buddhism has to offer, even though I'd had some encounter with it before. Your encouragement and your example has definitely helped my life and I hope helped my thinking process. So I'm grateful. Yeah, I definitely want to get into that. I really view this conversation as being in two parts, and there's a connection between them, but I want to talk about why it is becoming so difficult or seemingly so difficult to communicate effectively on important issues. And and the two parts of this conversation that the first is is politics, which, as you know, is about as toxic as it has ever been in our lifetime. And the second, I want to talk about what you just alluded to now is just basically what the Internet is doing to us. And this could, in some measure, explain why our politics have become so toxic. And I want to talk about how you stepped away from your online life a while back and this article you wrote in New York Magazine entitled I Used to Be a Human Being, which is really a wonderful article, which I'll link to on my blog. Let's get into that and spiritual practice and the kind of contemplative issues you have around what the Internet is doing to the human mind. We'll do that in the second half. And let's start with politics. Maybe just take a moment to describe your political background and leaning so people know where you're coming from? Well, I grew up in England in the was a athaturite. Not only was I Thatcherite, I wasn't. Must have been. I actually was the only boy in my high school in England to have a Reagan 80 button. I really was a sort of member of the right in good standing in the great extent the 90s, even though I supported Clinton in 92 at a time when it was possible, I think, to be interested in ideas and arguments about free markets, about the sclerosis of the European welfare state, about government ownership of the economy and direction of the economy. And so it was kind of recruited as an up and coming right wing intellectual, as it were. I went to Oxford, where I honed some of those thoughts, but my study at Oxford was in history and French literature, so I wasn't a political major, but I did that in coming to Harvard when I did a PhD in political science at the government department. And my supervisor of my dissertation was Harvey Mansfield, a renowned Straussian. Still a renowned Straussian. Amazingly, he seems to have completely avoided any sort of aging. He's done some deal with mortality. He's got a painting somewhere. He does have a painting somewhere, but he's a real character. But I wrote my dissertation not on Strauss, but on the English political philosopher, also understood to be a critical influence in 20th century small C conservatism Michael Oakshott. And that was my dissertation. So I come from what I still regard myself as an Oakshottian in that sense and as much as to have a suspicion of government control of two bigger state sector, a respect for tradition, for how a society evolves organically, for pragmatism in politics and for skepticism in intellectual life. And my dissertation was actually upon an implicit esoteric religious doctrine in Michael Oakshot. So that's where I came from. And then going into America, I supported Reagan in 84, supported Bush in 88, but supported Clinton in 92 on the grounds that while I do believe that it was important to correct for some of the overreach of the left in the, my core commitment is to a civilized and open society. And that requires two parties that share in the responsibilities of government and take turns in power in order to correct the abuses and difficulties and overreach of each other. And so it's important for me as a small C conservative that, for example, the Democratic Party come back to the center and regain power. This is the moment when really my first drift from the right began the idea that I could support Clinton over Bush and Perot on the grounds that he was more in touch with, in 92, an emerging culture and society that was more diverse, more forward looking, younger and obviously on the question of gay rights, at least before he was elected. Relatively hopeful and different position. And so I think I placed myself in that sort of liberal Republican, conservative Democrat mold. And when I edited The New Republic from 91 to 96 I was definitely regarded as a conservative influence on that magazine even though that magazine was at that point a kind of blend of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. I also defended that magazine's core liberal ethos even though I didn't fully share it because, again, I felt a responsibility that institution within American politics and culture. So then I went on excuse me if I'm going on too long just to my trajectory. I found Clinton by 96 to be so ethically and morally despicable that I actually supported Bob Dole in 96 on the grounds that I did not. I actually believe that, given his conduct in office so far that it was simply a matter of time before Clinton sabotaged himself and the country which turned out to be unfortunately true. In 2000, I was really up in the air. I had a great deal of respect for Al Gore, but I liked at least candidate George W. Bush. I liked the humble foreign policy. I liked the compassionate conservatism to some extent. I liked the ability to reach out to demographic groups that had not been properly part of the Republican coalition, primarily Latino voters and thought between a moderate right candidate and a moderate left one. I didn't see a big problem with the moderate right one. It turns out, of course, that I was completely mistaken about that. And I think in the partisan and polarizing moment after 911 I kind of went off the deep end and supported the war and supported Bush largely out of a horror at what Islamist fundamentalism was threatening against core Western values and the mass murder that they were perpetrating in the name of fundamentalist religion. I'm also, I should say, you know, but just a feeling people Roman Catholic I still practice and but grew increasingly concerned with also the trend towards fundamentalism of a different kind within the Catholic Church under Benedict 16th and to some extent John Paul II. Anyway, I'm just trying to give you a brief but then I turned against Bush and the Republicans because of what I saw as an inability to effectively conduct a war and to effectively realize that they had made a terrible error. For me, the fundamental issue in that conflict was the use of torture by the united states, which I found to be a step to take us outside of civilizational boundaries, and also a period of time where I felt the constitution was essentially in abeyance. And I was so repelled by that that I supported a man I really didn't like very much john Kerry in 2004, and then came to see Obama as actually what I believed to be the moderate center right president. That I'd always wanted, but even more thrillingly able to bring african Americans more fully into that center and into American public life and really found in Obama the kind of politician I really could admire as one of the first people to really seize on him and support him and became really in my blog anyway, a sort of key part of the Obama coalition, which I continued through 2012. So that's where I am. A sort of Obamacon, as it were, a moderate conservative that actually thought in Obama that we had a moderate conservative president of really unimpeachable character, considerable moderation reason, and extraordinary eloquence. I still think he's an extraordinary figure, and I think we still need him quite badly, especially over the next few months when things could get really scary and he is calm. His ability to hold the country together, I think, is one reason why in this incredibly fraught period, his approval ratings are where Reagan's were. At this point, I think he will be understood, especially if Hillary obviously if Hillary wins this election as the liberal Reagan, the Reagan of the Democrats. And the silver lining, I see we can talk about this and more about the current moment, which otherwise seems to be the darkest cloud I've ever seen in American politics. The small silver lining is that it might be the final repudiation of the most ugly, disgusting, and foul tendency on the American right. In other words, that this might be the true long game when a president is able to win two elections and then actually get his opposition to recognize their failure and to adjust towards the new mainstream. That's yet to be seen. But at least that's a small sliver of hope that I have out of this really dystopian electoral landscape that we are now looking at. Yeah. So I have an agenda for this part of the conversation that I want to make explicit for our listeners, because I've said many terrible things about Trump on this podcast. And I am sure I will say some terrible things today, but this has revealed some very disconcerting things to me about my audience and about just the possibilities of communication. The first is that there's just the fact that there's a significant number of people who follow me who are Trump supporters and who are amazed that I'm not one, too. And I can only assume that this has something to do with how hard I've been on Islam over the years. But I continually hear from people who claim to have loved my work and to have read my books, but now have lost all respect for me because I'm voting for Hillary Clinton. And one person just wrote saying it's too bad Hitch died when it should have been. You right. These communications are very pointed. The most annoying thing about that one is honestly the fact that this person is certain that Hitch would have voted for Trump right now. We can talk about that. I've talked about that on the podcast. You know, even with all that Hitch wrote about the Clintons, I think there's absolutely no way he would have voted for Trump. But the problem is that no matter how clearly I spell out what is wrong with Trump and describe my endorsement of Clinton as the lesser evil right, I'm accused of being rankly partisan and totally dishonest and of ignoring all that's wrong with Clinton. And this really bothers me because there really is, insofar as I can know my own mind, there is absolutely nothing partisan about my endorsement of Clinton. I could easily imagine a Republican who I would vote for over her, and there's just not much you would have to change about this generic Republican so as to make me vote for him or her over Clinton. I saw your most recent appearance on Real Time talking about Clinton and Trump. And given your background and given that you're in touch with what has been wrong with our system and the way in which the Clintons in many ways crystallize what's wrong with our system, it seems that you could be the perfect person to help me try to bridge this gap. Because what I want us to do is to talk honestly about what's wrong with the Clintons, to give it as sympathetic a view as possible of why people hate them with such passion and why people hate the system of which they are a very clear expression, and then make the case why none of that matters in the current election. Because people are just missing just how terrifyingly unqualified Trump is and on every conceivable level. And they're not only missing it, they're missing how clear this is, right? This is unmissable. So in any case, you and I are speaking on the morning after the third presidential debate, where the evidence of the difference between Clinton and Trump was not in short supply. So let's just start with the issue with the Clinton. So why did you break ranks with Bill Clinton and give me a sympathetic view of why someone would not be happy to see the Clintons back in the White House? Oh, where do I start, really? They're about the pursuit of power by almost any constitutional means possible. There's a lack of integrity to both of them, it seems to me. I witnessed this first hand. I was editor of The New Republic when Clinton first became president. And The New Republic was under. My editorship actually championed the Clinton candidacy. One of the first Sydney Blumenthal, may God forgive me, was my campaign correspondent in 92. And you saw with Sydney when I actually caught him faxing pieces to Hillary in advance of their publication to check that he'd got every single spin right again shows just who these people are. They're operators. They're at the center of a web of, we used to call it clinched of friends and colleagues dedicated to the advancement of each other. They are money grubbers. They are liars. And I for one, for example, in the early 90s, was one of the first advocates of marriage equality and for military service for gay people and to watch them kill us in that period and treat gay people with complete contempt and then to portray themselves as pioneers of gay civil rights. The sheer hotspur of these people when they were actually not just against marriage equality, they did everything in their power to kill off the movement for marriage equality. And I know because I was one of four people in that movement at the beginning. Did you ever hear Hillary Clinton on Fresh Air with Terry Gross trying not to admit that her opinion on marriage equality had changed for about ten minutes and getting more and more defensive? Well, that's part of what drives you crazy about them, is their refusal to tell the truth, even about themselves, the constant spinning, the constant refusal to really be accountable. And this also goes to Bill Clinton's history of sexual assault. One of the things I'm proudest of at The New Republic was running an editorial defending Paula Jones's right to have a say in court, which was greeted by the Democratic left as an act of treason, the way in which honest alleged feminists were prepared to sacrifice every single principle they ever had to advance. This man, who was essentially one of the, you know, one of the most horrendous offenders in dealing with women sexually, just staggered me at the time. And Hillary Clinton, of course, in full knowledge of her husband's history of sexual assault and harassment, went to town in defending him and trashing those women. All of that the Trump campaign has re aired is true, I absolutely believe is true. Actually, one question there, because I'm not as familiar with the history as I might be. I certainly haven't waded through all the relevant biographies, but many people think that Hillary was legitimately deceived by Bill on many of these points. And certainly, let's say, the lewinsky scandal that she had bought, his lie, that nothing had happened. And you could sort of sort of see her reaction to the truth emerging kind of play out in real time between them. I think that's absolutely true with Lewinsky. Okay? It's not true with Jennifer flowers. It's not true with Paula Jones. It's not true with Juanita, broderick. It's not true with Kathleen Willie and others who are beginning to come forward. I think to say that Hillary Clinton was not aware of her husband's tendency for sexual assault and objectification and demeaning and degrading treatment of women is really not to do her justice. She's she's a she's a grown person. She sat for 60 Minutes in 92 brazenly lying about her husband's affair with Jennifer Flowers. Almost everyone around her acknowledges this, and yet she stuck with her husband's. And not only this, but at the very beginning, this pioneer of feminism decided that her career could only really get off the ground if she married an up and coming governor and hitched her wagon to his. This is not what Margaret Thatcher did. It's not what Theresa May did. It's not what Angela Merkel did. It's not what many pioneering women in politics have done, which is why I think it sticks in the crowd to see her and why so many people have not been able to embrace her as the first potential woman president. However much we might want to see a woman become president, somehow the wife of a former president who trashed women on the way up and who herself never did the feminist thing and pioneered her own career and her own life in politics is actually not a great feminist icon at all. And always arguing, always arguing that whatever we do, however we behave, we are so much part of the greater good. And the Republicans are always so evil that anything we do is justified. And that, of course, is how they have succeeded, largely because every time the Republicans have opposed them, they've done so on despicable and overreaching grounds. I mean, impeaching a president the way they did was such a grotesque overreach and the way they poured into Bill Clinton's private life was just appalling. And I think the American people decided, no, if we have to pick between this charlatan, philanderer liar and these fanatics, then I guess we're going to have to put up with the Clintons. And in some ways that's the story of their entire career. And somehow they've managed to always do that, to play the lesser of two evils successfully and in most cases, absolutely rightly. I mean, I drew the line at the impeachment, even though I believed that he was a hideous person. I don't think he should have been taken to that. It should have been taken a vote of censure, would have been perfectly acceptable and would have been better for the Republicans. But there again, you get the sort of sense that not only do they want to just survive by hook or by crook, jettisoning principles, trashing the constituencies they're supposed to support, they then want to turn around and be regarded as civil rights pioneers for women or for gays and all the rest of it. And I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. I just don't buy it. Do you think you're being, or possibly being too cynical here on a few points? So, for instance, what about the possibility that Hillary stuck by Bill through all of this and obviously got married in the first place to him, not based on some machiavellian political scheming, but just this is the person she's in love with. She has accepted his flaws in a way that may harken back to another generation Mad Men style. And she was just all in with him and realized that in some purely pragmatic and obviously not honest way, since they're on the right side of history on most of these issues, since they have the right goals for the country, this is how the sausage gets made. You got to get on 60 Minutes and lie about this meaningless affair that you don't care about. And you're the wife. You're the one who's supposed to care, or you're the only one who needs to care if caring is called for. And you have to lie because this is going to torpedo your political career and your husband's. And it matters because the other side is wrong on issues of consequence for millions of people. Is there a way to sympathize with her in that moment, or is she still a bit of a monster even then? Of course, everybody is a human being. And I don't doubt that she did fall in love with Bill Clinton. But at the same time, I think it would be naive to believe that their marriage was entirely about love. It was also a political partnership and in which she used that partnership to gain political power in a way that I think was fundamentally illegitimate in the first Clinton administration. We elect one president, didn't elect two. If we had elected two presidents or Copresident, she would be ineligible to run right now. But she wanted her cake and eat it too. She wants to be the advocate of a clean system in government and against campaign finance abuses. But there she is making millions of dollars in ways she didn't need to of very many banks, of many entities and many foreign governments that are just despicable. There's plenty of ways to excuse what they did and to justify it, and they provided those excuses and justifications. And in many cases, as I said, I supported Clinton in 92. But over the long run, these things do change you, that if you sacrifice your integrity repeatedly, even if every single time for a little bit, it might be, in your mind, justified. The cumulative effect of this is to render you incapable of taking any principled, a moral position and be seen to be doing so. People, when they say they don't trust her, I think most people have watched closely, and they know that, yes, she will switch around, she will change. She will be pragmatic around principle in a way that cumulatively gets to be disturbing. And I think that's the point. Every no politician is Martin Luther King, Jr. We have to accept that. But there's something particularly sustained and merciless about her sacrifice of principles in pursuit of power. And I think to be skeptical about that and also to believe that that kind of figure can never actually reach people and persuade them in moments of difficulty or crisis that they're someone that they can look to, they're someone they can trust. She still doesn't have that. She doesn't have that with the American people. She's still unable in a crisis. I think if she were president, and I think she probably will be at this point to actually sit down and really be the president of all the people in a way, for example, that Barack Obama could and did, however hostile people are to him, he did have that connection. People do actually think of him as having integrity because he actually does have integrity. Now, he's a hard act to match and that's why he beat her. But here again, you've been in the White House for two terms as First Lady. You've been Secretary of State. You lost your major attempt to win. What do you do? What you do in her case was to try and prevent any rising star in the Democratic Party from ever challenging her, holding on so that it's her turn holding the entire party hostage to her own fortunes, squelching possible new blood in order to get another term in the center of power. And at some point, look, I don't want a saint, but there was something consistent about this, and it's typified. For example, by her claiming to be an avatar of gay rights while her husband signed a Defensive Marriage Act, doubled the number of people discharged from the military. And then crucially, I'll give you two examples. One, ran advertisements in the south touting in 96, his exclusion of gay people from marriage equality. And subsequently, and I'll tell you this, when I went in, I was testifying in Congress for the Defensive Marriage Act, and we were ready to go in and make our case. That very morning, the Clinton Justice Department put out and a completely unnecessary guidance that they believed that the Defensive Marriage Act had no constitutional problems whatsoever, just to kick us in the gut, to kill off this movement because it might threaten, they believed, their reelection prospects. And I think, to be honest, I'd be straightforward, it's the personal experience of this to be personally lied to, to be told, as I was personally told by George Stephanopoulos, that they would indulge completely ensure that no one was subsequently fired. And yet they doubled the discharges from the military and did nothing about it. And to sign the Defensive Marriage Act, for Bill Clinton to do that while he's making a mockery of marriage in the White House, at some point you just have to say there's something about these people. There is something about these people that is not trustworthy. There's something about these people that in the end will defend themselves against any principle. And I admire a certain grittiness in politics, and I certainly understand why you have to make compromises. There's something about the relentless willingness to sacrifice any core principles that they have that has rightly made us, many of us, deeply skeptical of them. I also think just leave the moral and ethical question. I just don't think she's been that good in public life. I just don't think she's a very good not just a very good politician, which now even her supporters acknowledge as a candidate, terribly weak candidate in many respects, but not very good in government. When you ask her. What has she done in 30 years? She doesn't really have a good argument. She has one good argument, I think, which is the S Chip program, which really did give children greater health security, health insurance options than they had before, which I think I don't want to dismiss in any way. That's a huge achievement on her part, but that's about it. She also, by bungling health care reform in the first term of the Clinton administration, made expanding health insurance of people less likely for another 20 years as Secretary of State. She supported the only ways you can see her actual input. She supported Libyan intervention, which, if you've supported the Iraq war and say you've learned the lessons, which is the best way to think of what she said, although she took a hell of a long time admitting it and only admitted it when it would help her politically, one points out. But then to admit that you did something stupid by deciding that you're going to remove a dictator in a Middle East country without planning for the aftermath, and then do it entirely one more time when you were Secretary of State creating chaos in Libya. Right. Although many people have pointed out that there was at least one relevant difference there, which is that you had a significant popular uprising calling for intervention in Libya, which you didn't have in Iraq. Well, you did this year were constantly and the Kurds were constantly asking for intervention, begging for it. I think even now, America's intervention in Libya is still popular. It's like 70% of Libyans think that it was a good thing, that it is a chaotic situation where ISIS has gained ground. I think there was bad judgment on her part, and I think it's one of the greatest mistakes. And even now she is attempting to get us militarily involved in Syria. She's learned very little from her own mistakes. And I think it's very hard, and I think you could see it in the debates for her to actually defend her record, to point anything that really she made a difference that wasn't itself disastrous. Well, there were a couple of great moments last night in the debate that Michigan I think you share my view that she just destroyed him last night. I mean, that was impeccable, but in ways or by techniques that also don't recommend her for any kind of award for honesty. There were two moments where I was really flabbergasted that he let her get away with these moments and that Chris Wallace did as well. The one where he asked her whether she would give back the 20 or $25 million that the Clinton Foundation had taken from the Saudis. He just kept talking there and didn't give her any space to reply. And then she never had to reply to that. And also she didn't address at all his claims about Bill Clinton's sexual indiscretions. But you could see in those moments how compromised she is ethically in that she really has to walk on eggshells there. She can't just give a straightforward defense of what he's pointing to there, and she just has to hope that nobody notices and the topic changes. This is an election which, weirdly enough, became a core issue of sexual assault, the way men treat women, and she is the first woman candidate, the president, and she's barely been able to say a single thing about it. Yeah, it's really excruciating because of her being and she recognizes this utterly morally compromised on the question. She's also utterly compromised by telling all sorts of private audiences that she believes in open borders when she's now advocating to fend off Trump's attacks that she's actually tough on border security. Except do you really think that? Because I've seen that WikiLeaks email, and my reading of that is certainly much closer to what she suggested in the debate, which is she either she was talking about energy and trade and just used the phrase open borders. To signify just the free flow of goods and information and electrons. Or she was talking in a much more utopian style of we all want to live in a world where there is open borders and just the free flow of everything. But she was not claiming that she wants unchecked immigration to the United States. No, I think that's fair, Sam. I think that's a totally fair point you make, and I do think but again, the rhetoric she's using to a particular group, which she then did everything she could to prevent being aired, precisely because she worried about the discrepancy, at least in the rhetoric between her private rhetoric and her public rhetoric, is disconcerting. The rhetoric she gives to the bankers when she's inside and when she's talking about reining them in on the outside. Again, one instance of this might be one thing you can slough up, but this is it. This is a lifetime of doing this. And the other thing I would say is that is her offhand remarks when she's caught privately. So, for example, in these fundraisers, the gay fundraisers, by the way, where she you know, she calls millions of people irredeemable in an election now, not only just pragmatically I think that is stupid, but it's the attitude, the condescension, the dismissal of lots of people. Even if there are plenty of people, obviously, in this alterite trump movement that are just foul and despicable, but no one's irredeemable. I think there are people who are just judging from my communications online and in my inbox, I think there are people who are irredeemable for all practical purposes in terms of getting them to understand what's true in the world. I was just talking to Peter Singer on a previous podcast, I hear from people who claim that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax engineered by the Obama administration to justify him coming to take our guns. But to say that half of his supporters are in this category, which he then had to walk back and she withdrew and retracted what she said. Half of it. Look, yes, there are irredeemable people in that mix. There are also deplorable people, but to dismiss half of his supporters, that's that's certainly not practical. 20% of the country you see, I think what the Clintons really don't fundamentally believe in the American people. They think the American people cannot really adjust or accept the arguments that they really want to make. They think they're bigots and racists neanderthals that have to be lied to in order to get your way. Don't you think the support for Trump and and we're going to segue now into talking about Trump or at least keep bash on the Clinton? Yeah, actually, I want to bash the Clinton a little bit more, but I just want to insist anybody listening to this, I am passionately in favor of her winning this election. Passionately. We're going to get there. I have no illusions at all about what a wretched example of the worst kind of corruption in politics. I don't mean not the worst kind, but a kind of low level, systemic liberal, condescension and arrogance, as well as money grubbing corruption. That really is disgusting. I'm still completely without any qualm supporting her for this election. Believe me, I would not have led us here if I didn't know we were getting to that punchline. Because my goal here is not to reduce the likelihood that she's going to be the next president. Because I really do feel, and I think you feel as well, that we are witnessing a fairly frightening moment in American politics. Not fairly. I think it's the most frightening moment of my adult lifetime. But to take a few more whacks at the lady when Trump said, are you going to give back the money to the Saudis? I forget if it's 20 million or 25 million, and the other Gulf states have given a ton of money to the foundation, what do you think she could have said to that had she given a reply? Here's what she should have said, and it's interesting why she didn't. What you can say is, look, yeah, I took $20 million for however many dollars from a disgusting regime, but I saved 11 million lives. And yes, if you want to really raise big money to help people who are living and dying with HIV in Africa, you'll get it. Take it from whoever, right? And that's the frank answer. But to say that she'd have to say the Saudis are despicable. This is what mystifies me I mean, whose vote is she afraid to lose if she speaks more honestly about Islam and Islamism and the spread of jihadism and the Saudis role in doing that, and the necessity to achieve energy security in light of the Saudi's role, why can't she speak basic human sanity on this point? Because it would give her some political liabilities as president with respect to the US relationship with Saudi Arabia which she wants to keep open. She can't character logically, can't take a clear moral stance on these questions and be completely frank. That's what people say when they don't trust her. They can feel there's an obvious answer to this but she can't do it. Like for example, on border security she actually if she wanted to go at Trump and say, look I'm in favor of tough border security, I believe in that. I voted for many things that beefed up the border. I mean this metaphor of the wall is one thing but yes, she did support the wall. Why can't she forthrightly say that? Because she then worries, well that will alienate some Latinos that I have to keep on my side. She couldn't make a distinction in the convention between legal and illegal immigrants, which is a crucial distinction. One of the things that Trump has been able to use because she doesn't want to offend this constituency. It's always calculation and it's always caution and that's what drives you crazy about them after a while. They can't say what they know. They refuse to be that clear about it and she's worse even than her husband and it's that constant hedging, that constant leaving, abandoning any sort of conviction. So for example, on Obamacare she could not say which she should say what we have to do to make this work is to beef up the individual mandate to make sure more healthy people are brought into this system and the government's going to have to do that to make this work. Now she won't do that because that would possibly alienate some people and so she won't, she won't doesn't want to alienate the Saudi government. She doesn't want to alienate any supporters and so we end up in this sort of calculative muddle in the middle where people don't trust her. And my worry is that if you don't trust her now, how are you going to trust her when really something goes badly wrong? I think it's a dangerous we can talk about this but I'm fearful of her presidency in the sense that I'm not sure she has the ballast to hold this country together at a time when it seems to be careening apart. Well one thing that's causing it to fly apart is this is the way it seems to me based on my communications with people and just what I read online. We're living in just a totally Balkanized epistemology where people are getting their information from sources that you just have kind of the Breitbart universe and the New York Times universe and they almost don't share a world view on any level. Occasionally some fact will cross the boundary there and remain a fact. But the role that conspiracy theory plays in our world and the way in which it is potentiated at every point by tiny, but nevertheless real conspiracies. I mean, you find, like the WikiLeaks emails, my reading of them thus far is that there's really not much there that is surprising. How did you think the sausage was getting made and what did you think the private communications in a campaign would look like? Right. There are things there that we wish wouldn't be there. We wish people wouldn't operate this way. But there's nothing there that I've seen that is fundamentally shocking or that tells us something we don't know or that is or didn't know or that would be disqualifying to her candidacy. No, I agree. What's shocking, however, is that people's private correspondence can be hacked and delivered this way. And I think the ability for politics to function at all, for government to function at all, does require some lack of transparency. Any organization has to have something that's private so that it can actually function. But that is sort of a point in her favor. Yeah, I think it is. The Trump phenomenon is also a point in her favor. To go back to the comment you made a few minutes ago, that one of the things that is odious about her is that she believes you have to have a public and private conversation, which are distinct because the people can't handle the truth. There's so little appetite or ability for honest reasoning that people will seize upon your words, like the way she was using the phrase open borders in context, as opposed to the way that those words can be made to seem. And you'll never become president or you'll never achieve the office you're seeking because people are stupid and cynical and the truth will be used against you. So you have to focus on everything. Compare that with Barack Obama. He's not that way. He actually did articulate what he wanted to do in his speeches, in his State of the Union addresses. He was very clear about what he tried to do, although we don't have his private email communication from his campaign. No. But we do know that he had confidence not in lying to the American people about who he was, what he wanted to do. And he won two elections, and he is ending with an approval rating that's similar to Reagan's. I think the Clintons give up before they even start. And I think they've learned this from being hazed, essentially, and coming of that generation of Democrats who, especially during Reagan and Bush, really believed that the American people did not agree with them. And therefore the only way to advance themselves was to do all this stuff on the hush hush. I saw this, particularly with gay rights, where they refused to make strong, clear arguments for why this mattered. Some of us were out there trying to make the substantive arguments, believing if we made those substantive arguments and the American people would come along. And you know what they did? A third of the American people changed their mind over 15 years because we didn't adhere to this idea that the American people are essentially a bunch of idiots and also bigots, that you have to, in order to advance reasonable goals, you have to somehow dissemble because the people can't be trusted. That is where they come from. They come from the view that no one really agrees with them there, but they have to do this by stealth and they have to have one conversation inside the tent and another conversation out. Now, that is not what Barack Obama has done or has said, and he's been more successful. But actually, in defense of Clinton or to impugn Obama as well, he's done it really in the identical way she has. On the topic of Islam and jihadism, this lie that Islam is a religion of peace that has nothing to do with terrorism and that ISIS is not Islamic and I mean, I've talked about this on the podcast many times. There certainly is a rationale for that lie. And it may in fact be true that it is politically prudent or just geopolitically prudent to lie in this way, but it is a lie and everyone knows it's a lie. And the experience of being lied to on that point, especially in the immediate aftermath of some terrorist atrocity, is so galling. The difference is that Obama has explained candidly why he won't say, for example, radical jihadist terrorism because he thinks it will make it harder to defeat radical jihadist terrorism. Now, you can agree or disagree with that, right? But he said that, yeah, just Obama at the 11th hour be being pushed, I mean, for after years of he said it in a way I found his defense of the way he talks about this fairly infuriating because it was a really bullying, hectoring Sanctimonious attack on people who just want an honest discussion of the issues. And I think I certainly can argue that we would empower the moderate Muslims and the reformers in the Muslim world much more if we just had an honest discussion about the civil war that's occurring in the Muslim world. I'm with you, Sam. You know, I'm with you on this. I do think that the role that you and I have is different than the role of a president running a war. Yes, I've certainly acknowledged that as well. And in wartime, there are some things that you don't want to give the enemy a propaganda advantage. And one of the reasons, for example, I'm for Clinton, not Trump, is that I think a Trump victory would empower jihadist terror in a way that would be terrifying and that his then response to that would be incredibly destructive of our Constitution and our way of life. So in some ways, I think and the fact that she referred to Lincoln in some of these respects, there is a balance, especially in wartime, which is what Lincoln was dealing with. It's what, actually, any president of this country, insofar as jihadist terrorism has declared war on us and who we are, is going to have to have some wartime cavaling of the truth, just as happened in the Second World War. There are some things that are allowed in that context, I think. Now, I agree with you, it's frustrating and I don't think it's actually very helpful, but I think there's a legitimate argument for it and I think Obama finally did explain. It's also true, of course, that just saying these words doesn't actually help us develop a strategy. Although I do agree with you that it I think it would help air the real differences between many Muslims and what this disgusting terroristic and violent impulse is and ideology is, and religion is. But the other problem is that it has, at least from my perspective, given us Trump. Obviously there are other reasons as well, but it is one of the main ones that has brought Trump to the very threshold of the Oval Office. Because, I mean, I'm hearing it is the most common thing I hear, and again, I get a fair amount of this from my, erstwhile, readers and listeners. There are many single issue voters out there and the issue is Islam, terrorism, immigration. Insofar as we're talking about Syrian refugees coming in who are going to be jihadists or Islamists, it's a single issue. These are not people who are worried about Latinos coming to pick our fruit. We're worried about what they see in Europe. I mean, the migrant crisis in Europe is a disaster. As much as your heart breaks for the people who are coming out of the hellhole of Syria, who you would just want to help and who are never going to become jihadists, what is happening in Europe is really horrible for it's. Horrifying and Merkel bears a huge amount of responsibility for that. And I think, for example, some of that is precisely why the UK left, the EU left, but voted that way. So I agree with you. However, the United States is not Europe. It's not absorbing a million. It's absorbed almost no one, comparatively very few from Syria. We have two vast oceans. But, yeah, I do think that not addressing this from a really constructive, clear minded and positive way does allow someone like Trump to gain credibility. Because people want to hear someone telling the truth. Just as it's important that it's true that many people are in this country, especially those without degrees, do have their wages depressed by mass immigration. Especially immigration. That is not in any way legal or documented. And that's a completely legitimate question. And when he says we're either a country or we're not a country, he's right. And it frustrates me that not addressing those facts will lead to extremists and crazy people like Trump being able to secure a foothold. And that's deeply concerning. Yeah. So let's begin to segue into why none of this matters. Given all her flaws, what do you think Clinton will actually do, you know, with respect to immigration, with respect to jihadism? Which happens so for, you know, my argument against the people who whinge at me about Islam and jihadism and Clinton's lying about it, my argument is that clearly she knows where the jihadists are, and she has been prosecuting, or has played her part in prosecuting a war against them. If you're a liberal, perhaps to a fault, right? Sounds like you are that sort of liberal, at least on that point. You think she's too interventionist, probably too eager to fly drones over foreign countries, whether acknowledged or not, and you're too eager to bomb jihadists and not think too hard about the possible collateral damage. We could talk a lot about the wisdom or not of intervening in the Middle East at this point, but it seems to me that there's no question she understands that we have a problem with jihadism, that securing our country against terrorism and against the spread of Islamism is a very high priority for any president. And if you wander too far afield here, you get into the conspiracy theories about Huma Aberdeen and just how she's just in the tank for the Saudis. And the fact that Clinton has taken money from the Saudis and the Qataris and all the rest into the Clinton foundation will make her somehow unable to prosecute the war on terror. I don't find any of that credible. No, I don't either. I mean, precisely because she's such an operator, she's perfectly capable of taking money for them and not feeling any moral obligation to uphold them in future. I mean, that's who these people are. Yeah. This is the point that I was surprised she didn't make in the debate, because she's being often slimed and even slimed by Trump himself, this billionaire or pseudo billionaire, for being completely beholden to the billionaires who given her money both for her campaign and for her foundation, and yet she's explicitly promised to raise taxes on them. Why doesn't she say, listen, if I'm so such a puppet of the billionaires, why can I promise now prior to the election, that I'm going to raise taxes on them? Right. The good thing about having no principles and no core loyalties is that you can do all this. But again, she doesn't want to quite advertise that she has no principles or loyalties. So she is again slightly constraining herself on those issues. But yeah, and vice versa. If Trump is the real tribune of the Plebs, why is he giving you all these people a massive tax cut? It doesn't make any sense at all. Don't you think there's something a little more sympathetic we can say about her at that point, though, where it's not just that she has no principles, it's just that there is to take the foundation as the narrow case. She will take money from even odious people, because she actually knows she can do good with it. And her heart is in the right place insofar as what she wants to get done in the world. If she had all the power, what do you think the world would look like? It would not be a world of shocking inequality and children working, you know, in sweatshops. It would be a world very much like the one you hope to have realized at some point. It's not that her heart's in the wrong place on these issues. And for something like her foundation yeah. Why not take the Saudi money and use it to deal with the AIDS epidemic in sub Saharan Africa? Yeah, in some ways. Yeah, I agree. The one thing I don't like is the personal money grubbing. Oh, you mean so just the personal enrichment through speeches? The personal enrichment through speeches to people and organizations and regimes that are really disgusting. Right. You don't have to do that. It doesn't advance any broader social good. It just makes you money. Yeah. Well and Bill Clinton has been especially egregious there. Do you know the stories of him asking to give speeches I forget which regimes they were, but obviously the wrong ones, with terrible human rights records. He wanted to give his $400,000 keynote somewhere and sent something like three appeals to the State Department to get this. Okayed. And they kept denying it, like, this is not good. The optics are all wrong here. And he just wouldn't take no for an answer. The next $400,000, even when you've made whatever it was, 48 million in a period of four years on your speeches, he's just got to grab that extra check. These people have never seen a check they didn't like. No. And it seems as if they can't just be well off. They have to be extremely well off. They have to hobnob with some of the most wealthy individuals in the world, and they want to compete with those people and be in that league again. Look, we're all human. We're not electing saints. But there's something unseemly about their money grubbing and their ability to accept massive conflicts of interest in order to enrich themselves. There is something unseemly about this. I forget the name of the charity, but you remember that model who was hit in the Asian tsunami and who's I think lost her boyfriend or fiance, and then she started a charity, I think, for Indonesian Relief, tsunami Relief. And this got a fair amount of press at one point, and they held a fundraiser for her charity, and I think it raised, like, a million dollars. And Clinton was the keynote, but then it comes out that he charged $500,000 for his keynote. You bet he did. He's already and maybe this money went to the Clinton Foundation. Let's say that's the best case scenario. But he's already fantastically wealthy. He's ostensibly supporting this charity that's just struggling to be born, right? And all he has to do is show up and give his speech. I'm sure he didn't even have to travel for it, and he takes fully half of the money raised. That tells me everything I need to know about him. It would never occur to me to do that. If I am speaking in a couple of weeks, I'm going to speak with Richard Dawkins at a benefit for the center for Inquiry and the Richard Dawkins Foundation. It would never occur to me to ask to be paid to do that. It's like, let's get every last dime, no matter what you get off these people. And it really is. There's an extremity to them. Even if I were to concede the point that ex presidents should be able to make a huge amount of money off private speaking to private groups, there is simply a degree with which they are money grubbing in a way that really does leave one's jaw open sometimes. That's all I'm saying. And you look at someone like Jimmy Carter who has behaved in such an exemplary fashion, or even George HW. Bush, and I think those things matter in a republic. I think one of the reasons our democracy is in such terrible straits and the reason that people are so cynical about it, is because they see these public officials trying to use public offers for their own personal enrichment. And it may be, in any individual case, defensible, but collectively and politically, it tarnishes our system. It adds to the cynicism. Well, the revolving door that people talk about is obviously corrupting, where you have senators who become lobbyists, who become senators who become lobbyists, who add to the opportunism. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private at our ssfeed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'll be speaking with ayan hersiali. Ayan will be known to many of you, but for those who don't know her, she was born in Somalia in 1969. She was the daughter of a political opponent of the Somali dictatorship, and she lived in exile, moving to Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia and then Kenya. And like 98% of Somali girls, she was subjected to FGM euphemistically called female circumcision and came from a quite blinkered context of Islamic oppression. And then in a few short years, really just recapitulated the full enlightenment project in her own life. She escaped a forced marriage. She was being sent to marry a distant cousin in Canada. And rather than do that, she got off the plane in Frankfurt, I believe, and fled to the Netherlands, where she was granted asylum and then citizenship. And in her first years in Holland she worked as a maid and in factories and quickly learned Dutch and then began studying at the university and wound up getting a master's in political science worked as a translator for Somali immigrants and began to witness this clash of Western liberal values and Islamic culture in this case in Holland. Then eventually became a member of the Dutch Parliament, where she was tasked to work on issues of immigration to raise awareness about violence against women in that society and honor killings and genital mutilation and all the rest. And then in 2004, she became very well known because her colleague, who she made a film with about the oppression of women under Islam, a film, a short film entitled Submission. Her colleague, Theo van Gogh, was murdered, and a note promising the murder of Ayan was pinned to his chest by his killer. And the amazing thing and you can read about this in Ion's books in The Caged, Virgin and Infidel and Nomad and heretic the amazing thing about her story is that it exposed just the complete inability of Dutch society to deal with this problem and keep her safe. And Ian remains a person with exquisite security concerns and most unjustly, she is a frequent target of, quote, feminists and people on the left who object to her criticism of Islam. Here you have one of the most courageous people on earth championing the rights of women and paying an extraordinary price for doing so. And she's derided by people on the left as a bigot. One of the most frustrating things in my life has been to see Ian get criticized by imbeciles. As unpleasant as my encounter with Ben Affleck was on Real Time, my encounter with Nick Christophe of The New York Times in the green room afterwards was worse because Nick is among the army of seemingly enlightened liberals who can't figure out that Ayan is a a true feminist icon and hero. So, in any case, Ayan, though she is liberal in the classical sense, on almost every question, has really only been supported for the most part by conservatives in the US as someone fighting for human rights and the rights of women. And that has been a real disservice to her message. Nevertheless, she was voted in 2005 as one of Time Magazine's 100 most Influential People, and she has started the Ayan Hercule Foundation. The AHA foundation. AHA. A link to that can be found on my website. And she is just an extraordinary woman. Our time was somewhat abbreviated here. We had an hour to work with, but it was great to get her voice on the podcast. And so I now bring you ayan herciali. I am here with ayan hersiale. Ayan thanks for coming on the podcast, Sam. Thank you very much for having me. Great to talk to you. As always. It's great to have an excuse to talk to you. Yes, same here. How do you describe what you do at this point? I describe it as it's almost like running on a treadmill and never getting off. For the last 15 years I've been trying to educate the enlightened world on Islam and the threat that it poses to women, to people like me who have chosen not to believe in God, to Christians, to Jews, even to and probably, I would say mainly to those who actually are Muslims and believe in the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. I was trying to remember how we first got in touch. I think, if I'm not mistaken, and this is the the only time this has happened in my life, I think I actually sent you a piece of fan mail. You sent me a beautiful letter. A beautiful letter in your book. And that's how we met. Yeah, that's how I found out about you. It was just after you had written and the book was The End of Faith. Yeah. That's amazing because, you know, now one imagines it's just impossible to reach someone with a letter. You know, you can occasionally get people with email, but I remember reading about you in the New York Times Magazine and just being totally blown away by you and your story. And then I just I don't know how I got the relevant address, but I remember sending you a letter and that achieving a connection. It's fantastic that it happened. Yeah. You sent it to the parliament in the Hague. The Dutch Parliament? I was a member then. And it's astounding to me today how on that very same platform, those issues that, you know, a decade ago, we were talking about the rights of women, we were talking about Islamic extremism, we were talking about terrorism. It seems nothing has moved forward except way back then were warnings from my side and others are now unfolding in the Netherlands and on the European continent. If you now see how women are treated, not just Muslim women in Muslim households, but how, because of a lot of men coming from Africa, from South Asia, from the Middle East, how they are now treating non Muslim women, it is no longer safe in the public square in Europe, in Germany, in Sweden, in the Netherlands. It it's no longer, you know, the kind of safety I used to take for granted. I remember coming in 90, 92 to the Netherlands and really marveling at how at 01:00 a.m. At night, friends of mine, girls would take their bicycles and just they could go anywhere. And now that's all gone. Well, I want to get deeply into that. I want to talk about immigration and the migrant crisis and the future of Europe. But before we go there, I want to talk a little bit about your personal story. I don't want to go into it in great depth because you and I have done that on my blog, and I will link to that article with this podcast so people can read that first conversation we had. And your story will be pretty familiar to most of our listeners. But what do you think you would be doing if your collision with Islamist theocracy hadn't occurred? I guess I would still be in academia, probably writing on and learning topics that I really care about. I could take time off to do art, learn about music, literature, travel. I think I would lead the life of the average American woman or the average Dutch woman. And in fact, before I got into this, that's exactly what I was doing. I had found a job with a think tank in Amsterdam and I had been asked by my boss to work on the issue of immigration. And I remember complaining and saying, well, are you asking me to do that because I'm an immigrant? I'd like to do the European Union and ever closer integration. I'm fascinated by that topic. Please let me do that. And he said, you can always do that, but we only want you to do immigration now because it's a hot topic. So the answer to your question is I would be leading the life of, I think, the average American woman or the average European woman if it hadn't been for 911 and what happened afterwards. Do you think you'd still be in government? I mean, back then I wasn't in government. I had a healthy interest in politics, but I had no plans to become a politician. I was fascinated by ideas. And that's why I chose to work with this think tank. It was a social democratic think tank, Sam. You have to understand that ideas such as social democracy and liberalism and all that, that was all new to me. And I had this hunger of wanting to find out more and discuss in depth how a small place like the Netherlands was able to be so wealthy and to be able to be so stable. I grew up in Somalia. I lived in Saudi Arabia. In Ethiopia. In Kenya. To me, for a whole nation to live in peace with one another, to respect the rights of girls and women, this used to be just things that we read about. It wasn't real for me. And I was fascinated, and I still am. How did these things come about? And now my big worry is how can we hold on to it? How can we hold on to these freedoms and to the notion of equality and the rule of law? How would you describe yourself politically at this point? I'm still a classical liberal. I think I'll always remain a classical liberal. I always need to explain what that means to the average American. Because a liberal for an American is maybe someone on the far left or the hard left or someone who leads the nation and believes in big government and emphasizes justice more than liberty. Politically, I would describe myself, I would say perhaps right in the middle between the two parties. There are things about the Democratic Party that I do not like and I think are wrong. And the same applies to the Republican Party. So a classic, a liberal, a centrist, a libertarian. I love your work on reason. In that sense, I think I've been very stable in terms of my ideas. I've always found it alarming, and we've spoken about this before, that so many liberals ditch their commitment to gender equality and attack you in the name of religious sensitivity. And I'm wondering and this also explains why you have been associated with classically conservative think tanks. Is this changing at all? Have you made any headway on the left in the US. In particular? I don't want to claim any progress that we now see on the left in admitting that Islam as a doctrine, as a civilization, as a culture, subjugates women and is very intolerant doctrine. Where there is admission of that, I want to say that it mostly probably comes from those people on the left who are still willing to look at facts and allow the facts to change their minds. With the rise of ISIS, even though there is a huge taboo in Western countries on the discussion of Islam, you can see for yourself when verses from the Holy Quran and the practices of the Prophet Muhammad are applied in practice, what that looks like, you get the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. And I think so many people on the left can see that now. And for those who are rational people, I think they're willing to have these facts change their minds. The internet has also helped a lot. Saudi Arabia is a very close society, and it's very difficult to see what's going on there. And people who were very happy to ignore what was going on there are now finding that it's extremely difficult in all this. Their mission work, their darwa, their Islamic missionary work that they have been propagating for at least the last four decades. What we are now seeing is the outcome of that, and that around the world, not just in the Middle East. My continent, the country I come from Africa. Groups like Al Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria, Pakistan, bangladesh. Now you've seen what's going on there with all the free thinkers and free bloggers being targeted and hacked to death on the streets. This is a direct consequence of the propagation of radical Sunni Islam, and people on the left can now see it. And those who want to see and learn, I think they are changing their minds, and I hope that they are alarmed enough by it to know that sitting around and condemning it is not enough. Well, you must get the frequent criticism, as I do, that, and this comes from both Muslim obscurantists and their liberal apologists, that you are promulgating the same interpretation of Islam as ISIS does, or as the extremists do, by drawing this linkage between ideology and behavior, and therefore you're giving it legitimacy. And obviously the president of the United States has taken this line that you really don't want to call ISIS or any similar group Islamic in any sense. What do you say to that? A number of things. I think the first thing is, I know that these things are well intended. I think that our President Obama, he really means well. He has good intentions when he refuses to associate Islam, the religion of yes, one fifth of humanity, with the outcome of that religion. Once you apply that doctrine, that's what you see. It's well intended. But what he's also expressing is a lack of respect for Muslims as reasonable individuals. The assumption that by pretending that what we see has nothing to do with Islam is an assumption. I hear it very I'm trying to choose my words as carefully as I can. If you think that a human being who happens to be Muslim lacks reason, if you think that that human being will lash out in violence if you think of that human being as a child not mature enough to handle ideas, then you're going to talk to that human being. And about that human being in a way, I would say in exactly the same way that our president and many other Western leaders talk to and talk about Muslims. Here's where the world is upside down. You're doing all of this because you want to stimulate respect from the non Western sorry, the non Islamic public for Muslims and not to be prejudiced against them. But how can you ever achieve that when you refuse to allow them onto this platform of reason? Because human beings, I believe, change their minds, not because of the gun, not because of violence, but through persuasion. And if you want to persuade most Muslims to reform their religion or to give up at least those parts, such as jihad and Sharia, that are violent and oppressive, you just have to be explicit about what this doctrine says. Not doing so means you're simply discriminating against them. You don't take them. It is the prejudice of low expectations. Yeah. And ironically, you're doing absolutely nothing to come to the aid of the most vulnerable people in those communities. So you're not empowering reformers and women and everyone else who can't really find their voice because there's no safe context in which to do it. Yeah. It's incredibly frustrating to not have this talked about. It's frustrating because here I am trying to say, okay, I got out of a context where my rights were compromised, and I felt that I was not in control of my life. And in the west, in the Netherlands and here in the US. I have found a life where I am in control of my destiny. Now, I find it my duty, as you do, and I think, as many people here do, that you can't just turn away from the others, the other girls and women who are in that context. But how on earth can I explain the subjugation that they are submitted to, the child marriages, the forced marriages, the honor killings, without talking about the religion, the doctrine, the culture that has brought that forth on that point? How do you address the rights of women, say, in majority Muslim countries and even in the Muslim community in the west, when women themselves are often the oppressors or at least collaborating in oppression? And how do you deal with someone like Dalya Mujahed, who just went on The Daily Show and celebrated the hijab as a sign of female empowerment and got absolutely no pushback? This has to be fairly bewildering. It is fairly bewildering for the liberal non Muslim who looks at this and says, well, what is the reality here? We're being told by women in veils that this is their choice and that it is a sign of colonialist arrogance to judge that anyone wearing the veil, whether it's in Afghanistan or anywhere else, is being oppressed. The only way to do it, the only way that I know is to talk about it, to publish, to take to public platforms, to discuss it, and to air what exactly it means to be forced to wear the veil. I've written about this a lot, and I discuss it. And that fortunately, again, through the Internet, I have found a connection with women who choose not to wear the veil. They write to me, they call me, they talk to me. There's the AHA foundation. And they explain they relate to my experience and they explain to me that they are not like Dalia Mugahid. That all these women who are covering themselves from head to toe and who are saying that they speak for Muslim women, don't really speak for them that if they didn't fear for their lives, if they didn't fear that they would be ostracized in their own communities. Or that their parents would beat them up, lock them up, take away whatever little trites that they have. They would have spoken out themselves if they had these platforms. What would you say to Dalia? Have you ever addressed Dalia or someone like her in a public platform where there's video that I could point people to? I've had when I just published when I just published heretic the last book, I was with her on a discussion on NPR. And I think the way MPR did it, they first interviewed her and then they interviewed me very early on. When I came to the US in 2006, 2007, I was at the Brookings Institute and she and other women were there defending the hijab, defending the position of women and the status of women in Islam and saying that all the excesses that we see are exaggerated and committed by a fringe who are not truly Islamic. So I've had discussions with her, but I've come to the conclusion that I don't need to convince Dalia Mugahid to change her mind. I need to get as many people as possible to see for themselves what is done to women in the name of Islam. I need to remind them that that treatment of women is not going to stay only within Muslim households and Muslim countries. When the world is globalizing as it is, and everything I've been saying so far, we see it now in Europe. There are gangs of Muslim men in Sweden, in Germany, in Britain, who are singling out non Muslim women, sometimes blonde women only. Now, tell me how I know that's misogynistic. But how is that not racist? How is it not racist for men to organize themselves as gangs and only target one group of women based on their skin color and their hair color? And you say target for sexual abuse? Racial sexual abuse, yeah. Do you have a sense that this is being fairly reported on in Europe or is there a kind of politically correct suppression of this news? Because in the initial wave with the Cologne catastrophe, there were reports that this was actually being suppressed and people were I mean, there was even this extreme case of someone in I believe it was the German government. Some woman in the German government had herself been raped by three migrants. And when she reported it to the police, she initially lied about their identities because she didn't want to give further cause for racism in her culture. So she said that three German men had raped her. To speak honestly about the problem, there's this social impediment of an understandable one, especially in a place like Germany, that you don't want to give voice to any kind of kind of global animus toward immigrants or toward any one group of people. What's the level of discussion there? I mean, right I'm following events there, especially in Germany right now, and what I see is that there is on the side of Islamism. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, it has come to pass. President Trump, a man whom many of us treated as a buffoon and only took seriously as a threat at the 11th hour, will be the 45th President of the United States, with a Republican Congress behind him, and with at least one vacancy, probably more, on the Supreme Court to fill. So what went wrong and how bad is this? Well, I think there are two parts to this story. The first is unambiguously depressing, and this is the part that has been seized on by most liberals. But it's only half the story. And it is this trump has ascended to power despite showing every sign of being dangerously unfit for it, and by exposing in himself and in the electorate, the worst that America has to offer racism, sexism, antisemitism, a contempt. For the most vulnerable among us intimations of fascism, a positive love of bullying, total disdain for our democratic institutions, a willingness to make threats of political violence just for the fun of it, a contempt for science and a love of conspiracy theories. I mean, I could run through it all again, the crazy things he said and the toxic alliances he's made. The irony is, if he had been merely half as bad, he would have seemed worse. He would have been more recognizably, dangerous. There were so many awful moments that the media couldn't focus on them for long enough or weigh their significance. And the big things were as big as they get, right? Climate change is a hoax. Why can't we use our nuclear weapons? Maybe nuclear proliferation is a good thing. Let the Saudis and the Japanese and the South Koreans build their own nukes. Who's to say we should support our NATO alliances? What have they done for us? Putin is a great leader. Maybe we should just default on our debt, cut a better deal. Any one of those things should have ended it. But, of course, the little things were just as weird and should have been just as disqualifying. I mean, we have just elected a president who has bragged about invading the dressing rooms of beauty pageant contestants so that he could see them naked when they were effectively his employees. And he he owned the pageant. And then he even bullied some of these young women publicly, some on social media, in the wee hours of the morning while campaigning for the presidency. And then he denied doing any of these things when no denial was even possible. We had all seen his tweets, and in response to the astonishment of the media, he looked the American people in the eye and said, no one respects women more than I do. No one and half the country accepted that as what? The truth? As good theater, as sketch comedy. I mean, there are really no words to describe how far from normal we have drifted here. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, described the situation the night of the election in a piece entitled An American Tragedy. Now, I'll read a little of that, so you get a sense of what the liberal elites were thinking at 03:00 a.m quote the election of Donald Trump to the presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces at home and abroad of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny and racism. Trump's shocking victory, his ascension to the presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African American president, a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit, and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety. And then he goes on in the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the, quote, innate wisdom and essential decency of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism, displayed the cruel decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold plated airliner, but who has staked his claim with the populous rhetoric of blood and soil. The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the FBI, the malign influence of Russian intelligence, the free pass, the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies provided to Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished, as smug, disconnected from suffering as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There's no reason to believe this palliver. There's no reason to believe that Trump and his band of associates chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and, yes, Paul Ryan are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law. He was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment, fascism is not our future. It cannot be. We cannot allow it to be so. But this is surely the way fascism can begin, end quote. I think most of that's true, unfortunately, but it's not the whole truth. And the parts that are true are probably not worth dwelling on at this point. I'm not sure how useful it will be to stay in the well of blame and despair and to resist, quote, normalizing this situation. But it is true that the normalizing seems like an act of prayer. Just consider Trump's victory speech, which was alarming for how untrumpian it was. I mean, it read like it was written by Van Jones on Ambien. It was the most anodyne bit of fence mending, but you could feel the desperation in the media to read into his surprisingly gracious notes. The normalcy that Remnik is talking about here. I mean, maybe we were all just wrong about him, right? Maybe he's a nice guy after all. What are the chances of that? Is it possible that an ethical person merely pretended to be a total asshole for 18 months? It seemed somehow far fetched. But what are we to make of the fact that Trump had nothing but nice things to say about Clinton? What happened to lock her up? Does anyone care that the Trump who spoke on the night of the election was totally unrecognizable? Who did his supporters think they had elected? Were his supporters surprised to see him merely praise Hillary? Is it all theater? Who is this guy? Will he attempt to do anything he promised to do? Does anyone know? Does Ivanka have any idea what her dad will do as president? Now, I've gotten a fair amount of grief from people at this point for having been wrong about the election. I'm not sure what they mean. I admit I did jinx it by posting a suitably repellent picture of Trump on Twitter early in the day and saying, bye bye, Donald. Of course, that wasn't a prediction. I was simply saying how nice it would be to never think about him again. Of course, when I sent that tweet, the polls were giving him around a 20% chance of winning. Now, whether the polls were wrong or not is anyone's guess at this point. A 20% chance of winning is not nothing, right? Spend a few minutes with some dice and see how often a 20% chance comes up. It comes up quite frequently, sometimes on the very first roll. So I jinx the election. Sorry about that. But surely it can't have been a failure of judgment to have trusted the most reputable polls. Basically, everyone was doing that. What else was there to trust? Just the torrents of hatred I saw on social media. But the story about what happened with the polls will be interesting in the weeks and months ahead. And the truth is, I always had a bad feeling about the election. And that's why I talked about it so much on this podcast, I could tell that Hillary's flaws as a candidate were causing people to ignore Trump's flaws as a human being. Well, we're about to find out how high a price we and the rest of the world will pay for that. Speaking personally, I can say I feel that I left more or less everything on the field. I know I alienated many of you in how fully I disparaged Trump, and I kept doing it, even at the risk of boring those of you who actually agreed with me because I thought it was so important. So I don't honestly see how I could have done anymore. And at this moment, that's actually a good feeling. I was preparing myself for this moment, and I certainly know many scientists and business people. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe up now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'll be speaking with the physicist David Deutsch once again about the foundations of morality. And this podcast came about in a slightly unusual way. Since we did our first podcast, david read my book, The Moral Landscape, and he wanted to talk to me about it. And he wanted to do this privately, I think, because there were some fundamental things he disagreed with and he didn't want to break the news to me on my own podcast. But I urged him to let me record the conversation so that we could release it if we wanted to. Because if he was going to dismantle my cherished thesis, I actually wanted you all to hear that. And I also want you to hear anything else he had to say because he's just so interesting. The problem, however, is that I ran into some equipment issues at the time and could only record the Raw Skype call, so the audio leaves a lot to be desired. And David's audio is actually better than mine, so it actually sounds like I'm on his podcast. And because we weren't totally clear that we were doing a podcast, there were parts of the conversation that needed to be cut out, and these cuts leave the resulting exchange slightly free associative. We put in a few music cues to signal those cuts. In any case, David is such an interesting person, and many of you I know are interested in the thesis I put forward in The Moral Landscape, so I decided the best thing to do is release the recording, warts and all. I certainly hope to have David back on the podcast again, but I doubt we'll cover this territory again or cover it in the same way. So that is why I'm bringing you this conversation. Now, one major caveat, however, is that I don't recommend you listen to this podcast without first listening to my first conversation with David, episode 22 entitled Surviving the Cosmos. Because we really just hit the ground running here, and if you're not familiar with David or his way of thinking about knowledge and creativity, you really might get lost, or at least you want to appreciate how interesting some of his seemingly prosaic comments are. David Deutsche is a physicist at Oxford. He's best known as the founding father of quantum computation, and for his work on the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics. His main area of focus is now something he is called Constructor theory, where he's developing a new way to connect information and knowledge to the language of physics. And as with our last podcast, the irony is we don't discuss any of these things, though his views about knowledge and the implications of its being independent of any given physical embodiment the fact that you can have the same information in a molecule of DNA or on a computer disk or chiseled into a piece of granite. This problem of understanding the substrate independence of information and knowledge in the context of a physical world that is occasionally working in the background. And it's one of the things that makes David's take on more ordinary questions so interesting. For instance, his view about something as pedestrian as why it's wrong to coerce people to do things connects directly to his view about what it means for knowledge to accumulate in the physical universe and the error correcting mechanisms that allow it to accumulate. And if you're not familiar with the way David thinks, many of his statements will probably just blow by you without you realizing that something fairly revolutionary has just been said. So again, please listen to that first podcast if you haven't, and then maybe listen to it again. And you should read his book The Beginning of Infinity if you want to get more deeply into his ideas. And now I bring you David Deutsche. Knowledge is basically critical. So this is actually the connection that I want to say about your book. The foundational idea of knowledge that traditionally the idea of knowledge has been that we build it up. We build it up either from nothing like descartes or from the senses or from God or what have you, or from our genes. And thinking consists of building brick upon brick and from our senses, of course. But Papa's view of science, which I want to extend to all thinking and all ideas, is that our knowledge isn't like that. It it consists of a great slew of not very consistent ideas. And thinking consists of wandering about in this slew, trying to make consistent the ideas that seem to be most worst offenders of being inconsistent with each other by modifying them and we modify them just by conjecture. We guess that something might cure the various inconsistencies we see. And if it does, then we move to that. And to get to your book, I'm interested to see what you think of this take on your book. We're so coming from the same place in some respects and so coming from opposite incompatible places in other respects that it's hard to even express to each other what we mean. Exactly. I think the reason correct me if I'm wrong, if I'm seeing this entirely the wrong way I think the reason you developed a theory of morality and took the trouble to write this book about it is not an intellectual reason, or at least not primarily intellectual. It's not that you wanted to tweak the best existing theories and improve them or to contradict some prevalent erroneous theories because there are a lot of true and false theories out there and usually we don't write about them. The life is too short. I think that the reason you wrote this particular book and developed this particular theory, as I said, is not intellectual. It's for a particular purpose in the world, namely to defend civilization. Grandiose term to defend it against it's not really too much hyperbole to say it's an existential danger from or two existential dangers. One is moral relativism and the other is religious dogmatism. Yes. And that's very fair and imputations of grandiosity are also fair. Because I feel like what I was doing in that book is attempting to draw a line in the sand to defend the claim. That the most important questions. In human life. The questions that are, by definition, the most important questions and the questions where the greatest swings in value are to be found that answers to those questions exist whether or not we can ever get them. In hand and certainly better and worse answers exist and that it's possible to be right and wrong or more right and more wrong about those questions. I wanted to carve out the intellectual space where we could unabashedly defend the intuition that moral truths exist. And that it's that morality is not completely different, morality and values altogether, claims about right and wrong and good and evil are not on some completely different footing from the rest of the truth claims and claims to fact that we want to make about the universe. Okay, well, so I agree that there's an existential danger. I wasn't using the word grandiose pejoratively. I think there is that danger. And whether they're the biggest dangers, I'm not entirely sure. But they are existential dangers, which is bad enough. And I agree with what you just said about morality. There is true and false in morality or right and wrong. They are objective. They can be discovered by the usual methods of reason which are essentially the same as those of science, although there are important differences, as I said when we last spoke. Okay, so this was your purpose. You had an intellectual purpose that was morally driven in developing this moral theory and therefore you had this moral purpose before you had the details of the moral theory. So you wanted in advance your theory to have certain properties, as you just said, to create an intellectual space in which one could assert and defend the proposition that there's objective right and wrong. And so these properties that you wanted the theory to have in advance weren't just expressions of your personality or something. They were the fact that you thought that the moral values that made you want to write the book are true, objectively true. Well, forgive me. I'm smiling now. If you could see me, you would see how much I'm smiling because I'm just amused at how tenderly you're leading me down by the hand, down the slippery slope to the dissolution of my theory. I think theory is too big a word for what I thought I was putting forward. I think my theory, such as it is, contains explicitly the assumption that there are many things I can be wrong about right now with the morality that I have in hand. Right. So my theory isn't based on my current moral intuitions. It's based on some of them. It's based on the intuition of what I call, in various places, moral realism, which is just the claim that it's possible to be wrong. It's possible not to know what you're missing. It's possible to be cognitively closed to true facts about well being in this universe, about how good life could be if only you could live it or could discover it if only you had the right sort of mind that would give you access to these states of consciousness. It's not so much that I think, well, my intuition that gay marriage should be legal is so foundational that I know there's no state of the universe that could disconfirm it. That's not where I'm standing. It's the intuition about realism and about the I wasn't making that sort of allegation. In fact, I think I agree with everything you've just said about morality. You see, the thing is, the ideas, the theory, if you don't want to call it a theory, whatever it is that you express in the book contains that. But it also contains something else. It contains the something else that I disagree with. There must be something else because I've agreed with everything you've just said. I suppose the basic thing I disagree with, and this disagreement is probably deeper than it sounds, that one of the properties you wanted to create this space is that this theory of morality, or whatever you call it, should be based on a secure foundation, namely science, and in particular, especially in neuroscience. Actually, the fault is certainly mine from the subtitle onward and the subtitle the way subtitles of books get fashioned, as you probably know, that sometimes outside the author's control, as it was in this case. But I wouldn't put it that way. I would say that it's not that morality has to be founded on the secure foundations of science. It's that the truth claims we want to make about morality are just as well founded, however well founded that turns out to be, as the truth claims we make in science. And that really I'm talking about this larger cognitive space in which we make truth claims, and some of it for bureaucratic reasons or methodological reasons. We call these scientific claims some we call historical, some we call merely factual. Some sciences are still struggling to be as scientific as other sciences but we still call them sciences. But there is just this claims about subjectivity and in particular about well being and what influences it. And those claims, I think, are true whether or not we can or true or false, whether or not we can ever get the data in hand at any moment in history. And I just want to say the example I may have used this last time with you, but the example I often use is there is a fact of the matter about what John F. Kennedy was thinking the moment before he got shot. And we won't know what he was thinking. We don't actually know what it was like to be him. In fact, we know there's no way we could get access to the data at this point. And yet there's an infinite number of things we could say about that that we would know were wrong. I mean, I know he wasn't thinking about string theory. I know he wasn't reiterating the largest prime number that we discovered a year after he died. Again and again in his mind you can go on like that till the end of time knowing what his state of consciousness excluded and that's as factual acclaim as we ever make in science. And so what I was trying to argue is that morality rightly considered is a space of truth claims that is on all fours with all the other kinds of truth claims we make. Differences of methodology aside. Yeah, well, there are two ways that something can be objective and I think you are in favor of one of them and I'm in favor of the other. That is, things can be objective in the sense that they're truths about them just are truths about the other thing. Like for example, chemistry. The truths of chemistry just are truths about physics. And that maybe wasn't obvious when chemistry started but it is obvious now that some of the truths are emergent truths. But still in principle, every law of chemistry, everything you can say about chemical reactions and so on, they are all statements about physics. And chemistry then is objective because physics is objective. Then there's a different way of being objective, the way in which the integers exist objectively. They exist objectively not because again in the history of this there were different theories about the integers that took different positions about whether they're real and if they are real in what sense they're real. I think that they are real in a separate sense from physics. That the truth about them are independent of the truths of physics. Not that integers are objective because there are some aspects of physical objects but they're objective because integers exist in some sense that is not the same as existing physically. And although they have an influence, truths about them are reflected in truths about physical objects but they are not identified as them. Nothing we could discover about the laws of physics could possibly change the truth of theorems about prime numbers. And that is the kind of truth sorry, that's the kind of independence that I think truths of morality have actually david, can I interrupt you there and just explore this a little bit because I think I talk about this in the book at some point. I follow the philosopher John Searle here. I don't follow him in that many things but he made a distinction between the ontological and the epistemological sense in which we can use this word objective. And I think that's a useful one that at least I've been pressing to service a fair amount. If something's ontologically objective it exists, quote in the real world, whether or not anyone knows about it, it's independent of human minds. It is the kinds of facts you just described with chemistry and physics and we can imagine a universe without any conscious creatures and those facts would still be the case even though there's no one around to know them. And so that's ontological objectivity and then there's epistemological objectivity, which is to say that there's the spirit in which we make various claims about facts of all kinds. Which is to say that to be objective in the epistemological sense, you're not being misled by your own confirmation bias or wishful thinking or you are making honest claims about data and the consequences of logical arguments and all the rest and what most people worry about with respect to objectivity versus subjectivity. Well, I guess I should talk about the subjective side of those two things. So something can be ontologically subjective which is to say it doesn't exist independent of human minds or conscious minds. It is a fact. That is only a fact given the existence of minds. So when I'm talking about what JFK experienced the moment he got shot or prior to that moment, I'm making a claim about his subjectivity but I can make that claim in the sense of it being epistemologically objective which is to say it's not subjective epistemologically. I'm not being merely misled by my bias and my dogmatic commitments. I can objectively say that is epistemologically about JFK's subjectivity that it was not characterized by him meditating on the truth of string theory at that moment. I'm more worried that the ontological difference between objective and subjective doesn't really interest me. It's useful for certain conversations and I think not useful for others. And I think in the case of morality what we're talking about is how experience arises in this universe and what its character can be and the extremes of happiness and suffering that conscious minds are susceptible to and what are the material and social and every other kind of requirements to influence those experiences. And so part of that conversation takes us into the classically objective world of in our case, talking about neurotransmitters and neurons and economic systems and quote, objective reality at every scale that in any given instance may not actually require a human mind to be talked about. But the cash value of all of that, if you're talking about morality, from my point of view, is conscious states of conscious creatures and whether they're being made more or less happy. In as capacious a definition of happiness. Or well being as possible as you know. That's kind of a suitcase word I use to incorporate the range of positive experience beyond which the horizon beyond which we can't currently imagine and the opposite being the worst possible misery for everyone. So the status of integers, whether they occupy some kind of Platonic zone of existence that is not in fact linked to material reality in any way, but we still have to talk about as being real, whether or not anyone has discovered it. I don't have strong intuitions about that at all. That seems like I feel like we touched that in our last conversation and I think you could probably argue that one way or the other. But to bring it back to what you were just saying, I guess there's the physical reality, which is often called objective ontologically of chemistry and physics. There are things like integers which are not, as you just said, dependent on what we know about atoms, but then there are the experiences of conscious systems. Whether or not we can ever understand what those experiences are. They have a certain character and that character depends upon whatever material requisites exist for those conscious systems. But that hasn't been worked out. And even if you work that out perfectly, it's the subjective side of that coin that is of interest. Yes. It's funny, just at the end you said what I was about to say. It took me a while. So I know that you use the term science, for example, more broadly than some people, and I think that's quite right. So do I. And so you and I both use it to encroach on things that some people who think they're purists would like to exclude from science but to expand science. So therefore part of philosophy you can call part of science. And the poppers criterion of demarcation is not intended to be either sharp or pejorative or criterion of meaning or worthwhileness or anything like that. It's just a matter of convenience, a matter of convenient classification of subject matter. If you want to extend the term science to COVID certain things that are traditionally considered philosophy like the interpretation of quantum theory, for example, which I think is definitely part of science. But then if you want to sort of make the connection between human well being and neuroscience, then you're trying to encroach on neurophilosophy, as it were. And neurophilosophy is epistemology. It's and the thing. But once you've extended it to neurophilosophy and into epistemology, you run into a deep fact about the physical world which is that epistemology is substrate independent. Once you have once knowledge or feelings or consciousness or any kind of information or computation is instantiated in a universal device, then the laws it obeys are completely independent of the physics and of the neurology, and every kind of physical attribute of the device falls away. And you can talk about the properties of those things as abstract things or not. Perhaps abstract is the wrong word because they're perfectly objective. It's just that they're not atoms, right? They're not neurons. I would just say that I think at this point I'll go with you there. I think that's probably true. But what you seem to be smuggling in there in the leap from atoms is a kind of information based functionalism where we're assuming for the purposes of this conversation that we know consciousness to be an emergent property of information processing. And it's not some other constituent of physical reality that isn't based on bits. But if we assume that it is, if it is just something that non biological computers can one day have yeah, then I'm with you. This is something that is generally true of morality. That morality has a reach. If you don't steal a book from a library when you realize that you easily could do so without getting caught. This doesn't just affect you and the library because this comes from a universal machine which is you. This machine has universal theories or theories which try to be universal theories or are universal in some domain or other. And when you commit the crime, for instance, you're changing the facts. You're changing something that you can't change back. Isn't that change occurring in you? Assuming that there's no one else who will ever discover your act? Where else would the change occur but in you? Well, for example, suppose you're telling your children about morality. Do you say, okay, well, when you're in that library situation, it's okay to seal the book because no one will ever find out? Or do you say, no, you shouldn't? Even in that situation, if the first, then it's affecting your child as well. And if the second, then you are lying to your child, which itself has vast implications. Yeah, I'm totally with you there. Let's linger on this one point that, again, I understand it's disconcertingly far afield, but I just think it's interesting. So if you could apply a painless local anesthetic to the child for the purposes of receiving a vaccine, that would be a better thing to do. And it's being better is the measure of the claim that it's better is synonymous with the claim that it's good to reduce needless suffering. And the suffering is both needless and in fact, probably harmful for the child to whatever degree. Yes, I'd say that my first line of my critique would be that it violates the human rights of the child. But okay, there are all these other things which are related. I think that the way we interpret and value very powerful stimuli is remarkably susceptible to the conceptual frame around which that experience is held and the conceptual frame within which it is held. So which is to say your thoughts about your experience and your thoughts about reality are in many cases constituentative of the sum total of the experience. And there are many things but this does connect back to I agree with you about human rights and consent to a large degree. I think I think we want certainly when you're talking about adults who can consent, you want them to be able to consent to various experiences. But I can still imagine experiences that are unpleasant that it turns out are very good for a person and you have done them a great favor if you subject them to these experiences. And you may in fact, this is just kind of a paternalistic claim possibility you may in fact be doing someone a favor to subject them to these experiences without their explicit consent if in fact the benefits are so great. Now, I don't know what those experiences are, but let's just say it's true that a culture finds that there's a certain ordeal that you can put teenagers through and many of the teenagers don't want to do it, but it is just so good for you as a human being. That strikes me as possible. I just don't have an example. But I see people who do consent to do things which are really incredibly difficult. People become Navy Seals. I've met some of these guys and in many cases literally went through hell to equip themselves with the skills they've got. And part of the training is a kind of culling of all the people who are not fit to go through the training in the first place. And so it is a selection procedure. But these guys go through an intense ordeal and come out in many ways enviably strong psychologically and physically as a result. And I can see that there are extreme experiences that we might not want to rule out just in principle as being bad for us. As I said, it's a matter of knowledge. If we know this, then we have an explanation. If we have an explanation, we can give it to the people. If we have a machine that can detect whether somebody would benefit from Navy Seal training and it can just detect this by putting it on their head and pressing a button, then you would probably find that a lot of people who aren't Navy Seals would benefit from it. And if it's true, if the theory on which this machine is based has a good explanation, then you should be able to persuade those people to take the training. Or they might say, yeah, well, what if you can't? Or what if the benefits you're conferring on someone is out of reach to them? So let's say you have people with severe autism who really can't consent to much of anything, and you can't really explain the benefits you're about to give them but the benefits you're about to give them is a cure for autism. Yes, well, this reminds me of a cure for lesbianism or something there are people who think that raping somebody will do them good under various circumstances but you can't base either a legal system or a memorial system on saying that if one thinks that that's true, one should do it. Well, no, but clearly in that case, it certainly sounds like on its face, to be a delusional and unethical claim. Yes, we're considering all sorts of implausible things here. What I hear you doing is using the principle of consent and human rights to trump everything else. That it's more epistemology because I don't think human rights are fundamental either. They are just a way of implementing institutions that promote the growth of knowledge. And the reason why knowledge trumps everything else here is fallibalism in all these cases where we have a theory that something is better, we're implementing a moral theory and we might be mistaken about that. And it must be a fundamental fact of morality, or an objective truth of morality, that it's immoral to close off the paths to correction of a theory if it turns out to be false. Yeah, I'm totally with you there, but that seems to be asserting my underlying claim, which is human flourishing conceived as broadly as you want. And that's a definition that is continually open in the manner you just described for refinement and fallabalism. That is the point. And we want to move in the direction of better and better worlds with better and better experiences and who knows how far that can go? But we know it's possible to move in the wrong direction and we never want to tie our hands and make it impossible to correct course. Yes. So once you have an institution that allows this is why consent isn't just a nice thing to have. It's a fundamental feature of the way we handle ideas. If you have a system that allows people to enforce an idea on another person who disagrees with the idea, then the means of correcting errors are closed off. You imagined people who had a disability or something and couldn't but could be cured of that disability but they couldn't be explained to them and so on? Well, the thing is, either those people are in a constant state of suffering, in which case applying the thing to them won't change that, or there is a thing that they prefer to some other thing, and then there will be a path towards the better state that involves just doing things that they prefer. Like if it involves an injection, then it might involve either an anesthetic or getting into a certain mood in which an injection doesn't matter. Let me give you an example again I want to get back to these core issues but all this is just, I find, too interesting i. Think this is an example that I mentioned somewhere in the moral landscape, but I'm not sure. The Nobel Laureate in Economics, Danny Kahneman, did some research. I think he was just associated with this research. I don't think he was the main author on this paper, but they did some fascinating research on people receiving colonoscopies, and this wasn't at a point where there was no, like, there was no twilight anesthesia associated with colonoscopy. So people really had to suffer the full ordeal, and they discovered they were trying to figure out what accounted for the subjective measures of suffering associated with this procedure and also what would positively influence the compliance of patients to come back and get another one on schedule five years later or ten years later or whatever it was. So they found that this confirmed. I don't know if this was the first instance, but there's something in psychology called the peak end rule, which is your judgment about the character of an experience is largely determined by the peak intensity of the experience, whether that was good or bad, and what the character of the experience was at the end of the episode. So those are the two real levers you can pull to influence whether someone thought they had a good time or a bad time. And to test this, the control group, they gave these ordinary colonoscopies and took the appliance out at the first moment where the procedure was over. But in the experimental condition, they did everything the same, except they left the apparatus in quite unnecessarily for some minutes at the end, providing a low intensity, a comparatively low intensity, but decidedly negative and again, unnecessary stimulus to the subjects. And the result was that their impression of how much they had suffered was significantly reduced and their willingness to come back and get a potentially life saving colonoscopy in the future was increased. So a greater percentage of them showed up in five years for their next colonoscopy. And so, by any real measure, this was a good thing to have done to these people, except what in fact it was. If you just take the window of time around the procedure, it was prolonging an unpleasant experience without any medical necessity. Right, yeah. I just want you to know there's got to be a way of telling them that you're doing this and it's still working. Presumably. But what if, in fact, it's true that the placebo effect is ruined? If you tell someone that that might be what's happening to them, or that you've done this thing, it's not medically necessary, but we don't leave this tube in for a few minutes because you're going to feel better about it afterwards, what if that actually cancels the effect? Again, the universe hasn't got it in for us. It doesn't like us at all, it doesn't care about us, but it hasn't got it in for us. If what you just said is the case, then there'll be a way of getting rounded. For example, you could say to them, you could say to the patient, look, there is a way of reducing the amount of perceived suffering of this procedure, but it involves placebo. But it won't work if we tell you what the placebo is. So do you give us permission to use this placebo? And of course the information will say yes. And if that doesn't work there'll be some other way. But, but is that really consent? Because what if we just, we'll run the alternate experiment, what if we say we pose it like that to people and then, you know, 99% say sure, you know, sign me up. But we, we have another condition where we just now we're just doing research on compliance and we say we tell them exactly what the placebo is. In this case we're going to leave the tube in you for 5 minutes not doing anything. And for those full 5 minutes, those will be 5 minutes where you would have been saying when is this going to be over already? And you could have been off the table and driving home, but now you're still on the table with this tube in you. But that's the placebo. Let's say the people who sign up for that drops down to 17%. So now we know that there's all these people in the first condition who are only consenting because you have masked what the placebo is and so in fact, they're not really consenting to the thing you're doing. I think that's still consent. Rather like you don't have to be a doctor and have know exactly what the heart surgeon is going to do to your heart in order to validly consent to heart surgery. And it's the same with the placebo. If you're told that it won't work if you know what the placebo is, but there will be one, then you're consenting and the 1% who still say no, those people are just making supposing it's true. Those people are simply making a mistake. The same kind of mistake as you would be making if this whole theory wasn't true. You can't bias the rules under which people interact towards a particular theory that they disagree about. But there are people who have ideas about reality and ideas about how we should all live within it which are so perverse and incompatible with everything we could reasonably want to do in this world that we have to. Wall off their aspirations from the rest of what's going on, whether that's locking them in prison because they just are so badly behaved or just exiling them in some way from the conversation. Again, the people I use are like the Taliban or ISIS. They don't get to vote on our public policy and for good reason, because their votes would be crazy. Yes, well, again, we have institutions, we try to tune the institutions to have the property that the political institutions should have the property that disputes between people are resolved without violence, and the moral institutions include the idea that participating and obeying such institutions is morally right, and also in interpersonal relationships that don't involve the law. We want a bit better than that. We want interpersonal relationships not only to resolve disputes without violence, but we want them to resolve disputes without any kind of coercion. An institution that institutionalizes coercion about something is IPSO facto irrational. Now, I'm not saying that I know of institutions that achieve this perfectly. I'm saying that this is a criterion, any more than I do in the political case. I'm saying that that's the criterion by which institutions should be judged, by how well they are, how good they are at resolving disputes between people. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'll be speaking with Stuart Russell. He is a professor of computer science and engineering at UC Berkeley. He is also an adjunct professor of neurological surgery at UC San Francisco. He is the author of the most widely read textbook on the subject of AI artificial Intelligence a Modern Approach. And over the course of these 90 minutes or so, we explore the topics that you may have heard me raise in my Ted Talk. Anyway, Stuart is an expert in this field and a wealth of information, and I hope you find this conversation as useful as I did. I increasingly think that this is a topic that will become more and more pressing every day. And if it doesn't, for some reason, it will only be because scarier things have distracted us from it. So things are going well if we worry more and more about the consequences of AI, or so it seems to me. And now I give you Stewart Russell. I'm here with Stewart Russell. Stewart, thanks for coming on the podcast. You're welcome. Our listeners should know you've been up nearly all night working on a paper relevant to our topic at hand. So double thank you for doing this. No problem. I hope I will be coherent. Well, you've got now nearly infinite latitude not to be. So perhaps you can tell us a little bit about what you do. How do you describe your job at this point? So I'm a professor at Berkeley, a computer scientist, and I've worked in the area of artificial intelligence for about 35 years now, starting with my PhD at Stanford. For most of that time, I've been what you might call a mainstream AI researcher. I work on machine learning and parabilistic reasoning, planning, game playing, all the things that that AI people work on. And then the last few years, although this has been something that's that's concerned me for for a long time, I wrote a textbook in 90, 94 where I had a section of a chapter talking about what happens if we succeed in AI, meaning what happens if we actually build machines that are more intelligent than us? What does that mean? So that was sort of an intellectual question, and it's become a little bit more urgent in the last few years as progress is accelerating and the resources going into AI have grown enormously. So I'm really asking people to take the question seriously. What happens if we succeed? As you know, I've joined the chorus of people who really, in the last two years have begun warring out loud about the consequences of AI or the consequences of of us not building it with more or less perfect conformity to our interests. And one of the things about this chorus is that it's mostly made up of non computer scientists. And therefore people like myself or Elon Musk or even physicists like Max Tegmark and Stephen Hawking are seemingly dismissed with alacrity by computer scientists who are deeply skeptical of these worried noises we're making. And now you are not so easily dismissed because you have really the perfect bona fide of a computer scientist. So I want to get us into this territory, and I don't actually know that you are quite as worried as I have sounded publicly. So if there's any difference between your take and mine, that would be interesting to explore. But I also want us to at some point, I'd like you to express the soundest basis for this kind of skepticism that we are crying wolf in a way that is unwarranted. But before we get there, I just want to ask you a few questions to get our bearings. The main purpose here is also just to educate our listeners about what artificial intelligence is and what its implications are, whether if everything goes well or if everything goes less than well. So a very disarmingly simple question here. At first, what is a computer? Well, so pretty much everyone these days has a computer, but doesn't necessarily understand what it is. The way it's presented to the public, whether it's your smartphone or your laptop, is something that runs a bunch of applications. And the applications do things like edit Word documents, allow face to face video chat and things like that. And what people may not understand is that a computer is a universal machine, that any process that can be described precisely can be carried out by a computer. And every computer can simulate every other computer. And this property of universality means that intelligence itself is something that a computer can, in principle, emulate. And this was realized among other people by Ada Lovelace in the 1850s when she was working with Charles Babbage. They had this idea that the machine they were designing might be a universal machine, although they couldn't define that very precisely. And so the immediate thought is, well, if it's universal, then it can carry out the processes of intelligence as well as ordinary mechanical calculations. So a computer is really anything you want that you can describe precisely enough to turn into a program. So relate the concept of information to that. These sound like very simple questions, but these are disconcertingly deep questions, I'm aware. I think everyone understands that out there is a world, the real world, and we don't know everything about the real world. So it could be one way or it could be another. In fact, it could be there's gazillion different ways the world could be. All the cars that are out there parked could be parked in different places and I wouldn't even know it. So there are many, many ways the world could be. And information is just something that tells you a little bit more about what the world is. Which way is the real world out of all the possibilities that it could be? And as you get more and more information about the world through, typically we get it through our eyes and ears and increasingly we're getting it through the Internet, then that information helps to narrow down the ways that the real world could be. And Shannon, who is an electrical engineer at MIT, figured out a way to actually quantify the amount of information. So if you think about a coin flip, if I can tell you which way that coin is going to come out, heads or tails, then that's one bit of information. And so that gives you the answer for a binary choice between two things. From information theory we have wireless communication, we have the internet, we have all the things that allow computers to talk to each other through the physical medium. So information theory has been in some sense the complement or the handmaiden of computation and allowing the whole information revolution to happen. Is there an important difference between what you just described? Computers and the information they process and minds will leave consciousness aside for the moment. But if I asked you, what is a mind? Would you have answered that question differently? I think I would, because the word mind carries with it this notion, as you say, of consciousness. With the word mind, you can't really put aside the notion of consciousness, except if you're talking about the unconscious mind, like all the unconscious cognitive processing we do. Does mind seem a misnomer there? Without consciousness? It might, yes. Unconscious mind is kind of like saying artificial grass. It isn't grass, but it kind of is like grass. So just to give you a quote, john Hoagland has written a lot about AI. He's a philosopher and he describes the notion of strong AI, as it used to be called, as building machines with minds in the full and literal sense. So the word mind there is really carrying the idea that there is true conscious awareness, true semantic understanding and perception perceptual experience. And I actually think this is an incredibly important thing because without that, nothing has moral value. There are lots of complicated physical processes in the universe stars exploding and rivers and glaciers melting and all kinds of things like that, but none of that has any moral value associated with it. The things that generate moral value are things that have conscious experience. So it's a really important topic. But AI has nothing to say about it whatsoever? Well, not yet, I guess. So that we're going to get there in terms of if consciousness is at some level just an immersion property of information processing, if, in fact, that is the punchline at the back of the book of nature, well, then we need to think about the implications of building conscious machines, not just intelligent machines. But you introduced a term here which we should define. You talked about strong versus weak AI. And I guess the more modern terms are narrow versus general artificial intelligence. Can you define those for us? Right. So the words strong and weak have actually changed their meaning over time. So strong AI was, I believe, a phrase introduced by John Seoul in his Chinese room paper, or may have been slightly earlier than that. But what he meant was the version of AI that says that if I build something with human level intelligence, then in all probability it's going to be a conscious device. The functional properties of intelligence and consciousness are inseparable. Strong AI is sort of the super ambitious form of AI. And weak AI was about building AI systems that have capabilities that you want, that you want them to have, but they don't necessarily have the consciousness or the first person experience. And then I think there's been a number of people both inside and outside the field sort of using strong and weak AI in various different ways. And now, largely, you will see strong AI. And sometimes general AI or artificial general intelligence to mean building AI systems that have the capabilities comparable to or greater than those of humans without any opinion being given on whether there's consciousness or not. And then narrow AI. Meaning AI systems that don't have the generality. They might be very capable, like AlphaGo is a very capable Go player. But it's narrow in the sense that it can't do anything else. So we don't think of it as general purpose intelligence. Right. And given that consciousness is something that we just don't have a philosophical handle, let alone a scientific handle on, I think for the time being, we'll just have to put it to one side and the discussion is going to have to focus on capabilities, on the functional properties of intelligent systems. Well, there's this other term, one here in this area, which strikes me as a term that names almost nothing possible, but it's human level AI. And that is often put forward as kind of the nearer landmark to superintelligent AI or something that's beyond human. But it seems to me that even our narrow AI at this point, the calculator in your phone or anything else that gets good enough for us to dignify it with the name intelligence very quickly becomes superhuman even in its narrowness. So the phone is a better calculator than I am or will ever be. And if you imagine building a system that is a true general intelligence, its learning is not confined to one domain as opposed to another, but it's much more like a human being and that it can learn across a wide range of domains without having the learning in one domain degrade its learning in another. Very quickly, if not immediately, we'll be talking about superhuman AI, because presumably this system will it's not going to be a worse calculator than my phone, right? It's not going to be a worse chess player than Deep Blue. At a certain point it's going to very quickly be better than humans at everything it can do. So is human level AI a mirage or is there some serviceable way to think about that concept? So I think human level AI is just a notional goal. And I basically agree with you that if we can achieve the generality of human intelligence, then we will probably exceed on many dimensions the actual capabilities of humans. So there are things that humans do that we really have no idea how to do yet, for example, what humans have done collectively in terms of creating science. We don't know how to get machines to do something like that. We can imagine that theoretically it's possible somewhere in the space of programs there exists a program that could be a high quality scientist, but we don't know how to make anything like that. So it's possible that we could have human level capabilities on all the mundane intellectual tasks that don't require these really creative reformulations of our whole conceptual structure that happen from time to time in science. This is sort of what's happening already, right? As you say, in areas where computers become competent, they quickly become super competent. And so we could have super competence across all the mundane areas, like the ability to read a book and answer sort of the kinds of questions that an undergraduate could answer by reading a book. We might see those kinds of capabilities, but it might be then quite a bit more work which we may not learn how to do, to get it to come up with the kinds of answers that a truly creative and deep thinking human could do from looking at the same material. But this is something that at the moment is very speculative. What we do see is the beginning of generality. So you'll often see people in the media claiming, oh well, computers can only do what they're programmed to do, they're only good at narrow tasks. But when you look at, for example, DQN, which was Google DeepMind's first system that they demonstrated, so this learned to play video games and it learned completely from scratch. So it was like a newborn baby opening its eyes for the first time. But it has no idea what kind of a world it's in. It doesn't know that there are objects or that things move, or there's such a thing as time, or good guys and bad guys, or cars or roads or bullets or spaceships or anything, just like a newborn baby. And then within a few hours of messing around with the video game, essentially through a camera. So it's really just looking at the screen. It doesn't have direct access to the internal structures of the game at all. It's looking at the screen very much the way a human being is interfacing with the game. Yeah, exactly. The only thing it knows is that it wants to get more points. So within a few hours, it's able to learn a wide range. Most of the games that Atari produced, it reaches a superhuman level of performance in a few hours entirely, starting from nothing. And it's important to say that it's the same algorithm playing all the games. This is not like Deep Blue that is the best chess player, but he can't play tic TAC toe and will never play tic TAC toe. This is a completely different approach. This is one algorithm. It could be a driving game, it could be Space Invaders, it could be Pacman, it could be undersea SEQUEST with Submarines. So in that sense, when you look at that, if your baby did that, woke up the first day in the hospital, and by the end of the day was beating everyone, beating all the doctors at Atari video games, you'd be pretty terrified. And it's demonstrating generality up to a point. There are certain characteristics of video games that don't hold for the real world in general. One of the main things being that in a video game, the idea is that you can see everything on the screen. But in the course, in the real world, at any given point, there's tons of the real world that you can't see, but it still matters. And then also with video games, they they tend to have very short horizons, because you're supposed to, you know, play them in the pub when you're drunk or whatever. So they typically, unlike chess, they don't require deep thought about the long term consequences of your choices. But other than those two things, which are certainly important, something like DQN and various other reinforcement learning systems are beginning to show generality. And we're seeing with the work in computer vision that the same basic technology, these convolutional deep networks and their recurrent cousins, that these technologies with fairly small modifications, not really conceptual changes, just sort of minor changes in the details of the architecture can learn a wide range of tasks to an extremely high level, including recognizing thousands of different categories of objects in photographs, doing speech recognition, learning to even write captions for photographs, learning to predict what's going to happen next in a video, and so on and so forth. I think we're arguably, if there is going to be an explosion of capabilities that feeds on itself, I think we may be seeing the beginning of it. Now. What are the implications with respect to how people are designing these systems? So if I'm not mistaken, most, if not all of these deep learning approaches, or more generally, machine learning approaches, are essentially black boxes in which you can't really inspect how the algorithm is accomplishing what it is accomplishing. Is that the case? And if so, wherever it is the case, are there implications there that we need to be worried about? Or is that just a novel way of doing business which doesn't raise any special concerns? Well, I think it raises two kinds of concerns, maybe three. So one is a very practical problem that when it's not working, you really don't know why it's not working. And there is a certain amount of blundering about in the dark. Some people call this graduate student descent, which is that's a very nerdy joke. So gradient descent is or, you know, walking down a hill is, is a way to find the lowest point, right? And so graduate student descent meaning that you're, you're trying out different system designs and in the process, you're using up graduate students at a rapid rate. And that's clearly a drawback. In my research, I've generally favored techniques where the design of the system is derived from the characteristics of the problem that you're trying to solve. And so the function of each of the components is clearly understood, and you can show that the system is going to do what it's supposed to do for the right reasons. And the black box approach, there are people who just seem to have great intuition about how to design the architecture of these deep learning networks so that they produce good performance. I think there are also practical questions from the legal point of view that there are a lot of areas, for example, medical diagnosis or treatment recommendations recommending for or against parole, for prisoners, approving credit or declining credit applications, where you really want a clear explanation of why the recommendation is being made. And without that, people simply won't accept that the system is used. One of the reasons for that is that a black box could be making decisions that are biased, you know, racially biased, for example. And without the ability to explain itself, then you can't trust that the system is unbiased. And then there's a third set of reasons, which I think is what's behind your question about why we might be concerned with systems that are entirely black box, that since we can't understand how the system is reaching its decisions or what it's doing, that gives us much less control. So as we move towards more and more capable and perhaps general intelligence systems, the fact that we really might have no idea how they're working or what they're thinking about, so to speak, that would give you some concern, because then one of the reasons that the AI community often gives for why then they're not worried. Right? So the people who are skeptical about there being a risk is that, well, we designed these systems, obviously we would design them so that they did what we want. But if they are completely opaque black boxes that you don't know what they're doing, then that sense of control and safety disappears. Let's talk about that issue of what Bostrom called the control problem. I guess we call it the safety problem as well. And many people listening will have watched my Ted Talk where I spend 14 minutes worrying about this. But just perhaps you can briefly sketch the concern here. What is the concern about General AI getting away from us? How do you articulate that? So you mentioned earlier that this is a concern that's being articulated by non computer scientists. And Bostrom's book Superintelligence was certainly instrumental in bringing it to the attention of a wide audience, people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk and so on. But the fact is that these concerns have been articulated by the central figures in computer science and AI. So I'm actually going to, going back to IJ Good and von Neumann well, and Alan Turing himself, right? So a lot of people may not know about this, but I'm just going to read a little quote. So Alan Turing gave a talk on BBC Radio radio Three in 1951. So he said, if a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be? Even if we could keep the machines in a subservient position, for instance, by turning off the power at strategic moments, we should as a species feel greatly humbled. This new danger is certainly something which can give us anxiety. So that's a pretty clear if we achieve superintelligent AI, we could have a serious problem. Another person who talked about this issue was Norbert Weiner. So Norbert Weiner was one of the leading applied mathematicians of the 20th century. He was the founder of a good deal of modern control theory and automation site. He's often called the father of cybernetics. So he was concerned because he saw Arthur Samuel's checker playing program in 1959, learning to play checkers by itself, a little bit like the DQN that I described, learning to play video games. But this is 1959, so more than 50 years ago, learning to play checkers better than its creator. And he saw clearly in this the seeds of the possibility of systems that could outdistance human beings in general and he was more specific about what the problem is. So Turing's warning is in some sense the same concern that gorillas might have had about humans if they had thought, you know, a few million years ago when the human species branched off from, from the evolutionary line of the gorillas. If the gorillas had said to themselves, you know, should we create these human beings, right, they're going to be much smarter than us, you know, it kind of makes me worried, right? And, and the they would have been right to worry because as a species they sort of completely lost control over their own future and humans control everything that they care about so Turing is really talking about this general sense of unease about making something smarter than you is that a good idea? And what Weiner said was this if we use to achieve our purposes a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot interfere effectively, we'd be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire. So this 1560 nowadays we call this the value alignment problem. How do we make sure that the values that the machine is trying to optimize are in fact the values of the human who is trying to get the machine to do something? Or the values of the human race in general? Weiner actually points to the Sorcerer's Apprentice story as a typical example of when you give a goal to a machine. In this case, fetch water if you don't specify it correctly, if you don't cross every T and dot every I and make sure you've covered everything, then the machines being optimizers, they will find ways to do things that you don't expect. And those ways may make you very unhappy. And this story goes back to King Midas 500 and whatever BC where he got exactly what he said, which is the thing turns to gold, which is definitely not what he wanted. He didn't want his food and water to turn to gold or his relatives to turn to gold, but he got what he said he wanted. All of the stories with the genie is the same thing, right? You you give a wish to a genie. The genie carries out your wish very literally. And then the third wish is always, can you undo the first two because I got them wrong? And the problem with superintelligent AI is that you might not be able to have that third wish or even a second wish. Yeah. So if you get it wrong and you might wish for something very benign sounding, like could you cure cancer? But if you haven't told the machine that you want cancer cured, but you also want human beings to be alive. So a simple way to cure cancer in humans is not to have any humans. A quick way to come up with a cure for cancer is to use the entire human race as guinea pigs for millions of differential drugs that might cure cancer. So there's all kinds of ways things can go wrong. And we have governments all over the world try to write tax laws that don't have these kinds of loopholes, and they fail over and over and over again. And they're only competing against ordinary humans, tax lawyers and rich people. And yet they still fail despite there being billions of dollars at stake. So our track record of being able to specify objectives and constraints completely so that we are sure to be happy with the results, our track record is abysmal. And unfortunately, we don't really have a scientific discipline for how to do this. So generally, we have all these scientific disciplines, AI, control theory, economics, operations, research that are about how do you optimize an objective, but none of them are about, well, what should the objective be so that we're happy with the results. So that's really, I think, the modern understanding, as described in Bostrom's book and other papers of why a superintelligent machine could be problematic. It's because if we give it an objective which is different from what we really want, then we're basically like creating a chess match with a machine. Right now, there's us with our objective, and it with the objective we gave it, which is different from what we really want. So it's kind of like having a chess match for the whole world. And we're not too good at beating machines at chess, so that's a great image, a chess match for the whole world. I want to drill down on a couple of things you just said there, because I'm hearing the skeptical voice even in my own head, even though I think I have smothered it over the last year of focusing on this. But it's amazingly easy, even for someone like me. And this was really kind of the framing of my Ted Talk, where it's just I was talking about these concerns and the value alignment problem, essentially. But the real message of my talk was that it's very hard to take this seriously emotionally, even when you are taking it seriously intellectually. There's something so diaphanous about these concerns, and they seem so far fetched, even though you can't give an account, or I certainly haven't heard anyone give an account of why, in fact, they are far fetched when you look closely at them. So the idea that you could build a machine that is super intelligent and give it the instruction to cure cancer or fetch water and not have anticipated that one possible solution to that problem was to kill all of humanity or to fetch the water from your own body. And that just seems we have an assumption that things couldn't conceivably go wrong in that way. And I think the most compelling version of Pushback on that front has come to me from people like David Deutsche, who you probably know, he's one of the father of quantum computing, or the concept. There a physicist at Oxford who's been on the podcast, he argues, and this is something that I don't find compelling, but I just want to put it forward, and I've told him as much. He argues that superintelligence entails an ethics. If we've built a super intelligent system, we will have given it our ethics to some approximation, but it will have a better ethics than ourselves, almost by definition. And to worry about the values of any intelligent systems we build is analogous to worrying about the values of our descendants. Or our future teenagers where they might have different values, but they are an extension of ourselves. And now we're talking about an extension of ourselves that is more intelligent than we are across the board. And I could be slightly misrepresenting him here, but this is close to what he advocates, that there is something about that that should give us comfort almost in principle, that there's just no, obviously. We could stupidly build a system that's going to play chess for the whole world against us. That is malicious, but we wouldn't do that. And what we will build is, by definition going to be a more intelligent extension of the best of our ethics. That's a nice dream, but as far as I can see, it's nothing more than that. There's no reason why the capability to make decisions successfully is so difficult to if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the wakingup app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'll be speaking with Jamie Kerchick. Jamie is a journalist and foreign correspondent currently based in Washington. He's reported from all over the world africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, various countries in Europe. He writes mainly now for The Daily Beast, and he's also a columnist for Tablet. And his first book, coming out from Yale University Press. I believe next March 2017 is entitled the End of Europe dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age. His writing has appeared everywhere the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and he spent a lot of time thinking about the election and its implications for US. Foreign policy, the kinds of trends and and concerns that brought us here and the trends and concerns that we'll likely endure. I wanted to talk to him, and I'm very glad I got him on the podcast. And we dive back into politics here, talking about the election and the coming Trump presidency, mostly with a focus on the implications for foreign policy. So if you are concerned about the world and what happens to it on our watch, well, then you might find something useful here and now. I give you Jamie Kirchick. I'm here with Jamie Kirchick. Jamie, thanks for being on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Sam, tell our listeners how you describe yourself at this moment and what you mostly focus on. So I'm a journalist based in Washington. I focus mostly, I'd say, on foreign affairs, europe, where I used to live, working for Radio Free Europe for a couple of years. But I write about increasingly domestic American politics. I was sort of pulled into it by this election. I write for The Daily Beast primarily, but also for Tablet, which is a Jewish themed website and lots of other publications. I've been noticing you. I forget how I first noticed you. I think it might have been on Twitter, which is somewhat ironic because the influence of social media on our thinking at this moment is so depressing. And I think we'll probably talk about it, but I think I discovered you that way, and I've actually discovered a few podcast guests that way, so it's useful for something. And I've noticed that you and I are worried about many of the same things, and obviously we share these worries with many people. So there's a lot to get into. It seems to me that we are engaged in a war of ideas. Now that's not really between the left and the right so much as it's between liberals and illiberals, because we're finding illiberals on both the left and the right, and people are falling into identity politics and conspiracy thinking and they're producing fake news stories and standing in opposition to free speech. These trends are just they're antithetical to getting a grasp on reality and reasoning honestly about it. And yet this problem does cut across political lines. We might argue that any one of these things might be worse on the left or the right at this moment, but it's hard to align politically in a way that is easily summarized on many points of real significance. And all of this seems to have crystallized with the election. But there are so many topics here which I've heard you speak about and I've seen you write about, which are related. So there's kind of a through line here where you can talk about the failures of the Obama administration at the level of foreign policy. So the red line in Syria, for instance, and subsequent Russian involvement there, and then the migrant crisis to Europe, which is leading to the possible dissolution of the EU and the rise of nativism everywhere. And this is giving us this spirit of anti globalism and a fundamental distrust of the media and even a disdain for the very concept of a fact. Right. Again, this all seems to have been brought to a kind of a crystal in focus with Donald Trump. So I've kind of put out the terrain there. Tell me, how do things look for you at this moment? There's a lot to unpack there, but I think you're right. And I agree that we're in new political terrain where someone like myself, who really I consider myself center right, I work for a conservative think tank, I usually vote Republican. But I found myself so viscerally opposed to Trump almost even more radically anti Trump than a lot of my left wing friends. And having lived in Europe, you see this sort of political realignment of the extremes coming together on the far left and far right. So there's this Theresa government in Greece which is sort of neocommunist, and they've been praised by Hungarian fascists that I've interviewed because they're all sort of anti liberal illiberal in the classic sense of the word. And during the campaign, I wrote an article for The Daily Beast that got a lot of angry responses where I really called out some of the lefties for Trump. And one of whom I just said out loud was our very good mutual friend Glenn Greenwald, whose entire approach to the election was basically could be summed up as well hillary Clinton is a lying, neocon neoliberal corporate warmonger shill. And how dare you accuse me of passively aggressively supporting Donald Trump? And there were many people I found on the left who they would never come out explicitly and say it because obviously you wouldn't want to ally yourself at this guy who's such a bore and playing all these kind of racist dog whistles. But I think Trump actually had a lot in common with sort of the far left, certainly in terms of his worldview and his view of American power and his belief that America should just kind of mind its own business and stay at home. There's kind of anti imperialist left, if you will. But, yeah, we're in a really dark time. And you also brought up this issue of how much of what we're going through now is it a response to Obama? And I do think that there's an element of this and we can talk more about sort of the alt right. And there seems to be a lot of self flagellation now from liberals in which they're sort of accusing themselves of not being in touch with middle America. And the media was sort of naval gazing, and we talk in this bubble. SNL had a skit about the bubble last week, and I've written a lot about political correctness and free speech, and I am the first person to criticize the left for this. Yet as strongly as I loathe the kind of social justice warrior left. And when President Obama refuses to say Islamic terrorism, none of these things in my mind justify a vote for Donald Trump. And I feel like a lot of people who might not be as nuanced as Sam Harris and Jamie Kirchick, they basically threw up their arms and they said, you know what? I can't stand this anymore. I'm being told that there are 69 different genders. The president won't talk about Islamic extremism. I'm just going to vote for this Trump guy because he tells it like it is. And I get that. I just think it was the wrong choice. Yeah, no doubt. It's interesting because I'm finding it, as you probably know, on my podcast, also on my blog, I've been maybe not as vociferous as you. You may set the standard there, but I've been probably as vociferous as anyone else I could name in my repudiation of Trump, and it really gone on ad nauseam. And it's interesting, I noticed that post election, there's this the wind has gone out of my sales to a significant degree because I basically said everything I had to say. And now he's elected, and there's a sense I have that the moment to do anything has really passed. And, you know, this is politically, this may in fact not be true, but this is not just me. I feel like many people are sort of moving on to just accepting that we're going to have four very interesting and perhaps very depressing years of political incompetence. And I think the worst things about Trump, I mean, the things I fear most about him, are not what liberals and what the mainstream media is tending to focus on. I mean, obviously the we can debate whether, you know, the dog whistles were in fact dog whistles. I think we we both bemoan the eruption of misogyny and antisemitism and racism we've seen that has been a response to Trump and part of his support. But I think it is at least reasonable to expect that that is a tiny fraction of the people who support him. And the scariest thing is just we now have elected somebody who is, as I've said before, just clearly a con man and a pathologically selfish and petty and just unenlightened person. And we are now giving him more responsibility than any person has had in human history. It's incompetence and dogmatism and this kind of petty tyranny of a psychologically not entirely healthy person that I worry about more than the prospect that he is a deeply racist or otherwise ideological person. And so maybe react to that and also just the concept of how normalizing this is almost irresistible even for critics of Trump, because it's just that what, are we just going to complain endlessly for four years now? Is that our new job? Yeah. I mean, like you, I feel sort of exasperated, exhausted. I think from about February or March until two weeks ago when the election was held, I really didn't write about anything other than Trump. And I have to understand, I usually don't write that much about domestic politics. I'm usually writing about foreign policy. I just got so sort of obsessed with doing what I could to kind of warn people and convince them not to support this man. And now there's sort of a feeling like, wow, it didn't even have an effect. And what does it say about our country that however many tens of millions of people would fall for, as you said, an obvious con. And I actually wanted to ask you later, to me, one article I wrote about Trump was that he most reminded me of Elron Hubbard, and he almost seems like a cult leader and that his pull over his supporters is very similar. I mean, when he got up and said I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and my supporters would still support me, he's right. That's not the kind of language of a democratic political leader. It's the language of a dictator or sort of David Koresh or Jim Jones. And as someone who studies faith and religion, I'd be curious to know your views on that. But just one last thing. I mean, I agree that I'm much less worried about the implications and the consequences domestically. I think a lot of people on the left are getting a little hysterical about America turning into Nazi Germany overnight. What I'm much more concerned about, and this stems from my experience having lived and worked in Central and Eastern Europe, is really the effect that he will have on the world, in particularly that part of the world. I think the biggest story of this election that still has not been fully explained is Russia and their involvement and their involvement in this election. I mean, the tactics that they used in hacking the DNC and John Podesta and then using WikiLeaks as a front, these are the sorts of tactics that I witnessed as a reporter in Kyrgyzstan, okay, which is like a Soviet backwater. It's the kind of stuff that the Russians would do in the Third World countries that they once ruled. To see them actually use these kinds of tactics in the world's greatest democracy, so called, and to basically get away with it is really appalling. And I still don't think that we fully wrapped our heads around this. I think part of the reason might be because a lot of the journalists on the left who sort of wrote about this story were kind of like Johnny Come lately Cold Warriors. It's like, oh, wow, all of a sudden, Josh Marshall cares about Russia. All of a sudden, it's like, it would have been nice if you were there for the past eight years during the reset president Obama's disastrous policy towards Russia, or when you were laughing at Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was our greatest global security threat, which I think is evidently true now. So this whole angle, the Russian angle, their involvement in our election, also their involvement in a lot of this kind of fake news that you're hearing a lot about and sort of just kind of there's a friend of mine, Peter Pomeranza, wrote an excellent book about Russia. It's called Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible, and it's about his years living as a TV producer and sort of Putin's Russia. And it's a brilliant book about sort of the surreal postmodernist Russian world where there's fake political parties, and it's called Managed Democracy. And as the title suggests, nothing is True and Everything is Possible. And I never thought that his book, which just came out a couple of years ago, would so accurately describe the kind of postmodern world that we're entering now in the United States, where basically a candidate can get up, lie through his teeth left and right, and people just don't. You and me get really angry and we fume and scream and the media goes crazy, but a lot of people don't care. That's actually been the scariest aspect of this election for me, because intelligent people can disagree about what we should do about trade, say, or immigration or Islamism or I mean, all of these topics have room for diversity of opinion. I mean, not not every relevant topic does. I think if you're dismissing climate science at the moment, you probably don't deserve a seat at the table for debate. But we could disagree about how bad it is or what we should do about it or what the likely implications are. But this kind of post fact moment where people no longer care what the truth is and there's a kind of nihilistic delight in just setting the universe of information on fire, right? This fake news orgy is just unbelievable. So I think you have seen both of these articles, or you know about both of these stories. A couple of days ago, there was an article in The Washington Post about these two guys in California who have made up Liberty Writers News is their website, and they've got millions of readers, and they're making probably some hundreds of thousands of dollars a month just creating fake news stories which have been lapped up by Trump supporters. And they were part of this Facebook scandal that may in fact have influenced the election. Just where Facebook became an organ of disinformation publishing these stories. And as you say, there's this now cottage industry sponsored or at least inspired by Russia, right, in some Eastern European countries, just creating fake news websites that have significant currency in the US. Again, this happens on the left and the right, but now I'm talking about right wing versions of it. But there's other story which was just completely insane, which I just heard about yesterday, which I think is going by the name of Pizza Gate. Oh yes, the story about this pizza parlor in DC that was alleged to be running a child sex trafficking ring run by Hillary Clinton and John Podesta. Right. And this is apparently believed by people. Right. So the owners of this restaurant are getting death threats by the hundreds and their lives are completely upended. They've got photos of their kids online being circulated on crazy websites. It's pure insanity and should be recognizably insane to anyone who cares about what's happening in the world, but apparently it's not. And so this breakdown of valid forms of information and is a kind of moral equivalence where any error found in the New York Times is considered to be on par with a fake news website that is just manufacturing propaganda out of whole cloth. It's terrifying. Let's focus on that piece a little bit and on Russia's putative involvement here, because whenever I have circulated stories about Russia hacking the election, I have gotten back by the dozens and more claims from Trump supporters that all of that's made up. There's no evidence that Russia has been involved in anything. Have you seen that? And what's your evidence? You're being a McCarthy? They love to throw that word around. Look, there's two issues here. I'm not alleging hacking of the ballots or the election system. In fact, it was Donald Trump who was the one who was going on and on about the rigged election system. I'm not alleging that. What we do know is that Russian hackers basically committed cyber watergate at the DNC and then they released and then they used WikiLeaks, which is their front. And you know, that's a whole I can explain that to people, but that's pretty much accepted that WikiLeaks is a Russian intelligence front. Let me just focus on that claim for a second. Now, do you think that WikiLeaks has always been or has just simply been co opted recently? Yeah, I think they've been co opted, and I think it's the same as Edward Snowden. I think people have ideas. Julian Assange. Really, does he? I would say he's a radical transparency activist, although it's very selective, of course. You don't see him publishing documents from Russia or China. What I think he is, is he's he's just your typical sort of far left antiAmerican Australian, of which there's a long pedigree. And, you know, the Russians were very smart and they were able to basically co opt him. He had a show on RT, which is the Russian propaganda channel. And so they're basically being used now as a front for Russian intelligence, and they have been for quite a while. And so what did they do? They released these emails right on the eve of the Democratic National Convention that were designed to anger the Bernie supporters, the Bernie Sanders supporters, to get them all riled up and to hate Hillary Clinton. And that was done for obvious reasons. And you know what? That might have been enough to swing the election, right, to keep the Bernie supporters home on election day. So we know they did that. We know they have to possess the emails. These are not made up. This is true. With regard to the fake news, this is a real I mean, I don't I don't know how we deal with something like this. This is basically this is Russia trying to take advantage of our freedoms, which is freedom of speech, and basically sneak inside and take advantage of it and corrupt it. And we can't censor these things. We can't arrest people for writing fake news stories. What we need is just some sort of media literacy among our population. I mean, people need to understand that when they read something that's in the New York Times or the Washington Post, there's a much better chance it'll be true than if it comes from libertywritersnews.com. And it's just astounding to me that we have a society where there are so many people who don't accept the distinction. Yeah, well, unfortunately, every case of error or bias on the part of an institution like The New York Times does so much damage to their credibility. And obviously there are people who are poised never to accept anything they say ever again. So those people may be irreclaimable, but still it's just to notice because we have people on the op ed page of the New York Times. Someone like Nick Christoph. Right. Who will reliably make the most charitable thing is to, say, an error of judgment about something relevant to Islamism, say, or he won't recognize that ayan hercli is or should be considered a feminist hero. He will basically castigate her as a bigot right? And as you probably know, the Southern Poverty Law Center just did this. They put together a list of, quote, anti Muslim extremists, and Ayan and Majid Nawaz are both on it. The irony here is really painful because if ever we needed a clean and truly wise institution to combat right wing extremism and racism in the US. Right, we needed it now post election. But as far as I'm concerned, the Southern Poverty Law Center is irredeemable on the basis of the magnitude of this error and the fact that they have just doubled down on it and defended it. Yeah, I see them being quoted a lot over the past couple of weeks and sort of the spike in hate crimes after Trump's election. And it really angers me for precisely the reason you say, because they totally have a political agenda. They slandered Majid and Ion Herceli, who are heroes of liberalism, frankly. And so, yeah, they've totally lost credibility. And I think it's a shame when institutions that should play that role, that constructive, sort of arbiter role, get tainted in that way by their own doing. By their own doing. It's completely self inflicted. But the problem is, it does come down on some basic level to intellectual honesty and a commitment to correcting errors. If you made a mistake, right, well, then as long as your overriding goal is to correct your mistake as soon as it comes to light, right, and not be wrong any longer than you need to be, then basically everyone can forgive that. I mean, that's what every institution needs. That's what we need personally. And that's what a nonprofit like the Southern Poverty Law Center needs. And it would have been totally possible, I guess, it's still possible for them to correct this error, and it's possible for someone like Nick Kristoff to realize, oh, you know, I kind of lost the plot here. I've been defending Islamists in many respects and castigating a truly courageous and victimized person. It would be possible to correct this error and issue the appropriate Maya culpa, and the institution would be intact. But either there's just people have too much going on and they just can't they can't take the time to figure out how they got things wrong, or they just there's this all too human tendency to double down in the face of criticism. And it's really damaging. And it allows people to now, going forward, no longer distinguish between real journalistic enterprises that are trying to get the facts straight most of the time, and these confections of just teenage insanity where literally you've got, like, 18 year olds with their laptops defining the worldview of millions of people. Yeah. And what I worry about is that Trump is so awful, he's so manifestly awful, that I feel that a lot of our sort of mediating institutions are just going to kind of become less responsible. They're going to feel that they can kind of get away with more. Perhaps they won't cover him. They might cover him in a more shrill, hyperbolic manner because he's so bad and they'll think that they can just get away with things. There might be some curtailments of facts here and there. And I worry that sort of the average, decent, liberal center is just getting lost in what's becoming almost a kind of Weimarization of American political discourse, where on the right you have this sort of ethnopopulist authoritarianism and on the left. It just seems that the Democrats, the lesson that they're taking from this election is, oh, well, we need to be even more left wing and we need to protest in the streets and we need to make Keith Ellison the head of the DNC. And that's going to be our ticket forward. And it's like, well, where are the people in the middle supposed to go? Unfortunately, being in the middle, I can tell you personally what the inclination is it's to more or less change the subject and focus on other things. I just notice how, again, this is kind of a psychological experiment being run hour by hour whenever I open Twitter, when I see someone like David From or somebody take another hard whack at Trump, right? Like, he'll send out an article revealing how Trump is showing that he's just going to ring out every dollar from the family business in response to this opportunity. And you've got Ivanka's jewelry company advertising the $11,000 bracelet she was wearing in the 60 Minutes interview. And so these these things get tweeted. And, you know, prior to the election, I would have circulated that stuff too, because, you know, anything I can do to put my shoulder to the wheel and stop this guy, right? But now it just seems like I know what the consequences are. Some significant percentage of the people following me are Trump supporters, and I'm going to get just pure pain from them, and I will look boring and repetitive to some and just totally ineffectual and in fact be ineffectual to some significant percentage of the rest of the people following me. So it's sort of the avoidance of boredom and this hunger to be once again free to pay attention to legitimately interesting things, among many other things. Trump is one of the most boring people on Earth. Perversely now we're through the looking glass, and it's hugely consequential, if not interesting, that he now has the power, or is about to have the power he will have. But talk about someone who encapsulates basically the he's like an intellectual vacuum, right? There's just nothing there that you would want to spend any time on. I feel myself kind of wanting to move on to other things and more or less just wanting to hope that he's not as ignorant or as bad as he advertised himself to be. And I just wonder if you can comment on that mood that is growing in me, which it feels frankly, it worries me. Yeah. I mean, I guess the danger is that we become apathetic, right, that we've lost, and we just sort of tend to our gardens, and he goes on and does awful things, and there's just less people to fight him because we've become so demoralized. On the other hand, I think, like you said, I think now that he's going to be in office, we need to perhaps preserve our gunpowder for the real serious fights. So perhaps the Ivanka jewelry marketing scandal, maybe that's not really what we need to get all worked up about. I mean, similarly, there are a lot of people talking about over the weekend how Trump was tweeting these attacks on the Hamilton cast for Lecturing Mike Pence, and how that coincided with the $25 million settlement that he just made in the Trump University case and how that was sort of expertly timed to distract us. You know, he could distract us with this silly scandal about Hamilton, while the real story is the fact that he just settled a fraud case for $25 million. Right? So I think we need to be vigilant in terms of where our outrage goes and in terms of Trump himself and how he performs. Look, no one would be happier if he becomes Harry Truman and becomes this great president and surprises everyone. I really don't think that's going to happen. But if it does happen, then I'll be the first person to admit it. If that does happen, though, what I think will have been lost is this sense of sort of honesty and decency in politics. Maybe it's been gone already, but I feel like if Donald Trump governs as some sort of, like, Rockefeller Republican moderate, then what was the entire point of that election when he got up there screaming and yelling about locking Hillary in prison and a whole litany of things? Then we've truly entered this postmodern era right, where you can just get up and shout ridiculous things and just no one takes anyone seriously anymore. Right? Yeah. That's something. I commented on a couple of podcasts back, I think, after his acceptance speech, which I found alarming just in how benign it was and how antithetical it was to how he had campaigned. And I was just trying to take the position of a person who had voted for him chanting, Lock her up. Lock her up, as the happy mantra of the campaign. What did it mean to that person to see Trump say nothing but good things about Hillary? And now we learn today he said he's not going to pursue her, right? So now we learn who's the cuck now, right? I mean, now we learn he's not going to do any of that right? Now. What else is he not going to do? So is there anyone who supported him rapidly who cares about this mismatch between who he said. He was and what he said he was committed to, and what in fact appears to be true of his looming presidency. It's just this lack of concern about what's real and just this indulgence of the theater of getting people's attention, right? It doesn't matter. As long as I'm up here on stage making noise, I don't even have to speak in complete sentences. And yes, I could shoot someone in Times Square, and you're all going to stay with me because you love this shit, right? And this is not something that, for all her flaws and for all her deceitfulness, right, and all her guardedness with the media, this is not something that Hillary Clinton was remotely doing. It is bizarre. It would be amazing for him to move forward and be essentially the Democrat that everyone thinks is hiding in there, at least on most issues, and pursue a massive infrastructure project that he manages to get through because the Republicans are now in his thrall, and then basically do eight out of ten good things. That would be amazing. Although, again, I share your skepticism about whether it's possible. Yeah. And it seems that there's, like two kinds of Trump supporters. They're the ones who fully believe and want him to carry out every kind of cockamamie promise he made. And then there are the more cynical ones, the operators, the ones in Washington, DC. The Newt Gingriches, the Kellyanne Conway. And these are the people, I think, who always knew that he was a bullshit artist, frankly, but that he obviously, clearly had some amazing ability to connect with people and they were willing to kind of ride the tiger. I'm not sure which is worse, if you actually believe that he's going to deport 7 million people and all this nonsense, or if you cynically attach yourself to this because you want power. Neither of them are very good. What I worry about is, are these kind of radicalized people, if they don't get what they want in a Trump, how are they going to respond? What's their next move going to be? Do they become more radical right wing and go for someone, some other demagogue who comes along? Or do they reconcile themselves to the reality of politics and basically agree with him that, oh, the Trump's whole stick was moving the Overton Window so we could get more money out of our NATO allies. The whole purpose of threatening to leave NATO was to get them to pay up. And we knew that all along. I'm not sure you might define Overton Window. For some listeners. I think it's a little esoteric bit of interaction. Maybe it was Glenn Becker. I'm not sure exactly where it comes from. But it's basically this notion that in politics or in negotiating, you initially come out with an extreme position to sort of move the conversation more in your direction. And it's also this notion of the Window that bounds what is acceptable to talk about, right? So now it's acceptable to talk about deporting 11 million people, say, or a registry for Muslims or something? I mean, we're now actually debating this. Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit more about the Trump presidency before we talk about the whole world. Are any of these appointments that he's made thus far as scary to you as they seem to be to people on the far left? I mean, Bannon is bad, but I think Steve Bannon is the former kind of overlord of brainwarming. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I speak with Shadi Hameed. Shadi is a Senior Fellow at Brookings, and he's a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and he's published widely in other journals. Most recently, he has written a wonderful book entitled Islamic Exceptionalism how the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World, and I highly recommend that and we get into all of these issues. His analysis, as you'll hear, doesn't totally align with mine or with Majid Nawaz's. So it was interesting, and I've been wanting to get Shatty on the podcast for a while because he really is a novel voice in this area, a real political scientist who doesn't make the usual political science noises on the topic, especially on the role that religion plays in inspiring human violence. So without further preamble, I give you Shadi Hamed. So I'm here with Shadi Hamid. Shaddy, thanks for coming on the podcast. Hi, Sam. Thanks for having me tell our listeners a little bit about your background and the kind of work you've been doing. Yeah, sure. So currently I'm a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. I work on Islamist movements and more broadly, the role of Islam in politics. And I'm born and raised in Brinmar, Pennsylvania. My parents my parents came from Egypt in the 1970s. I mean, there's a lot more to say about how I sort of came to do what I do. But I guess two of the crucial moments for me were 911 and then the Iraq war. So I went before 911. I think I did actually want to just be an investment banker or something normal like that. 911 happened. And that sort of sets me along the path that has led me really to where I am right now. Nice. And you have this really illuminating book, Islamic Exceptionalism how the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World, which we will get into. Is this your first book or you have a book before this? It's my second my previous book, which came out in 2014. It's called Temptations of Power, and it's it's more focused on Islamist movements before and after the Arab Spring and their evolution. Before we get into the book, how would you describe yourself politically and religiously at this point? So I consider myself on the left, on the liberal left. And as you can probably guess, I wasn't a Donald Trump supporter and probably won't be anytime soon, I consider myself I self defined as a Muslim, as an American Muslim, and that's part of my identity. And although I think I write more as an analyst or a political scientist who happens to be Muslim, but I think as of late, because events in the Middle East and in the US. With the rise of someone like Donald Trump, some of my work, I think, has become more personal. And I think I've become more comfortable speaking as not just an analyst, but as an American Muslim who is directly affected by some of the proposals that are out there on things like a Muslim registry, for example. So I think more of that personal side has come out in my work, and there's actually more of that in the new book compared to, say, the previous one. I don't know how familiar you are with my work in general or what I've said about Islam in particular. You certainly won't find a friend of Donald Trump in me. That's good to hear. I know you're aware. I know you noticed my happy meeting with Ben Affleck because you mentioned it in the book. I expect we'll disagree about a few things, but I want to start on a point where we really fully agree, and that's the the link between sincere religious belief and behavior. And I actually want to read a passage from your book. Sure. Because it was such a relief to read this. In a September 2014 statement, the Islamic State spokesman Abu Musab Aladdini expounded on the group's inherent advantages. Quote, being killed is a victory, he said. You fight a people who can never be defeated. They either gain victory or are killed. End quote. Now, this is back to you. In this sense, religion matters, and it matters a great deal as individuals. Most, although not necessarily all, Islamic State fighters on the front line are not only willing to die in a blaze of religious ecstasy, they welcome it. It doesn't particularly matter if this sounds absurd to us it's what they believe. But this basic point about intention and motivation applies not only to extremist groups, but to mainstream Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood. That in stark contrast to the Islamic State contest elections and work within the democratic process. As one Brotherhood official would often remind me, many join the movement so they can, quote, get into heaven. Discussing his own reasons for joining, he told me, quote, I was far from religion, and this was unsettling. Islamists resolved it for me. End quote. There's a few more words from you here. We might be tempted to dismiss such pronouncements as irrational bouts of fancy, but if you look at it another way, what could be more rational than wanting eternal salvation? It would be a mistake, then, to view Islamist groups as traditional political parties. I guess I can stop there. It is such a relief to see someone talking honestly about this, and I want to talk about the reasons why people become obscurantists on this point. But are you aware of the novelty here of seeing someone like yourself, both for two reasons, both having an academic background as a political scientist and being a Muslim. To see people in either of those camps calling a spade a spade here is a deeply novel phenomenon. Well, I think it's sort of sad to me that it's novel. I don't think it should be. But look, there's a lot of discomfort in talking about religion, and I see that, especially with my colleagues on the left, who I think are very well intentioned and well meaning. And I have to say that when I heard Ben Affleck on that now famous program with you and Bill Maher, my initial reaction was to cheer him on. I was happy that here's someone, a famous actor and director who's actually defending Muslims on national TV. That doesn't happen so often, right? But then when I thought a little bit more about what he was saying, I could realize that this is actually a pretty vacuous statement. So he pretty much said, Muslims are just like us. They want to raise their kids. And the part that sort of amused me, which I mentioned in the book, is and they want to eat sandwiches, too, as if wanting to eat sandwiches and wanting to implement Islamic law are two things that can go together. I know people who do eat sandwiches but also believe in the implementation of Sharia. But I have to say that I've changed myself over time. So if you had talked to me, I think six or seven years ago, I would have, I think, focused less on religion as a kind of contributing factor. But after spending so much time in the Middle East and spending hundreds of hours really talking to Islamist members and leaders and really trying to get to know them on a personal level and immersing myself in their world, it started to become more and more clear that religion matters more than I think a lot of us are comfortable admitting. And I think the statement you just quoted from the Brotherhood official, it's really stuck with me. I think he probably told me that was pre Arab Spring. And it stays with me now because when I think about my own graduate work in political science seminars, we never talked about paradise. And we don't know how to talk about paradise because it's not tangible. We can't measure it. So that's why I think we have to sort of bring religion back into the conversation, but in a nuanced way, in a careful way. And I should also kind of offer a disclaimer here, and I think I mentioned this in the first chapter of the book. I'm slightly uncomfortable with some of my own conclusions, and that's why I do think a lot about how to present the arguments of the book to a popular audience because when I started writing it, it was before the Trump moment. It was before antimuslim bigotry got as bad as it currently is. And I want to be attuned to the risk that some could misuse my arguments for purposes that I'm not comfortable with. Yeah, you and I both have that particular liability. So yeah, I want to be sensitive to that as well. I want to linger on this point of why people systematically discount the role of religion here because it strikes me as the first problem that we need to overcome. Until you can reason honestly about what's going on in our world and what is actually motivating people who are hostile to the most basic values of civil society, there's just no way to even move forward with a plan about how to address this problem. We'll just see if we differ in the kinds of remedies we imagine are possible. But the first issue here is that and that you discussed this a little bit in your book most secular academics and journalists and, you know, otherwise smart people have no idea what it's like to really believe in God, much less in a paradise that awaits martyrs after death. So it seems to me that they just this leads to a very basic failure of empathy. They just doubt that anyone actually believes this stuff. And perversely no demonstration of sincerity is sufficient. It is apparently insufficient for there to be an endless supply of suicide bombers, for there to be an endless supply of people who are willing to get on video and talk about their expectation of paradise and then blow themselves up. That as I've long lamented. I mean, now it's been 15 years that I've been talking about this that is somehow rhetorically insufficient to establish somebody's sincere belief in paradise. What you have in the social sciences generally and just among non religious people or people who are religious in a very liberal and moderate sense, that would be unrecognizable to most people in the Middle East. You have people assuming that everyone is motivated by rational concerns and that all rational concerns are at bottom terrestrial concerns. But one thing you point out, which is very important to distinguish, is that if paradise exists, right, or if you really believe that paradise exists, trying to get there is perfectly rational. In fact, one could argue it's the only rational aim, right? Anything that happens in 70 years here can't be of much consequence when put on the balance against what's going to happen for eternity. So the dividing line isn't between reason and unreason necessarily here on this point. It's just if you buy into these beliefs, your rational priorities are by definition otherworldly. And that's that is something that people who think everything at bottom must be economic or political just fundamentally discount or overlook or otherwise deceive themselves about. Exactly. And I think that I live in DC. I grew up outside of Philadelphia. I spent most of my time at least in the US. And in major cities. And it's so striking how few people are in those kinds of liberal elite circles, if you will. It's not just to the role of religion. It's something almost beyond that. It's the everyday magic of religion for people who believe in it. And it's hard to describe. And this is why sometimes I struggle to describe it, because unless you're actually immersed in that world and spend time with people who understand the world in those terms, it can be hard to relate to. And I think that even if you spend time with Christian evangelicals, that will help in some ways. And this gets to one of the main arguments of my book, that Islam is fundamentally different than Christianity. So that will get you maybe halfway there or something. But Christianity isn't quite the same thing as Islam. And I almost feel a little bit weird or foolish in saying that because it's kind of self evident that different religions are different from each other. But even that, I think, can be controversial in some circles. But I think then the real challenge for those of us who come from a secular background, who are born and raised in the west, is to kind of go outside of our comfort zone and make an extra effort to understand stand those who are coming from a different religious vantage point. The other thing that I would say is even the way we're talking about this and we can't help it, because we have to use words, we have to use a certain vocabulary, even the way we distinguish between quote unquote religion and, quote, unquote politics is itself problematic, in my view, because at least from the standpoint of Muslim believers in, say, the middle east, the two are endlessly intertwined. And that's something that I had to sort of come to understand a little bit more. So if you ask a member of, let's say, the Muslim Brotherhood to give an example, why are you doing what you're doing? Why are you participating in these parliamentary elections? Why are you going to this protest against the mobaric regime? Is it because of religious motivations or is it because of political motivations? That person will almost certainly struggle to make a clear distinction between the two because in his or her own mind, the two cannot be separated the way that I think we, as products of a post Enlightenment society, we do that. We're comfortable doing that. It's so implicit or even explicit in the way we talk about these things in the media, in public discourse, in the US. Or Europe, that we don't even realize that we're doing it. Yeah, I want to get into what's the heart of your thesis, what makes Islam exceptional? And it's right in the title of your book. And so we need to differentiate it from other religions, and perhaps Christianity in particular, on a few points. But I want to linger with this fundamental lack of empathy or lack of understanding of just how deep and self consistent and on some level rewarding a religious worldview is in this context. You were almost one of these people who couldn't get a handle on what was going on there. And I want to read another passage in your book, which just struck me as just again novel for its insight into what is actually going on and the cognitive and imaginative work people outside of these cultures have to do in order to understand what's going on. So you say here. Despite my best efforts, however, the one element I continue to struggle with is what might be called the willingness to die. If I had joined a protest in a not so democratic country and the army was moving in with live fire, there would be little debate. I'd run for the hills. And that's why my time interviewing Brotherhood activists in Rabbi just days before the massacre took place was at once fascinating and frightening. It forced me to at least try to transcend my own limitations as an analyst. And then you go on with a Brotherhood spokesman who told me that he was very much at peace, he was ready to die. And I knew that he and so many others weren't just saying it, because many of them, more than 800, did in fact, die. And then you go on to wonder about where this willingness to die comes from. This is a passage where, even to my eye, you fall, however subtly, into the trap of one who can't quite believe what he's hearing. You write, Where does this willingness to die come from? One Brotherhood activist, now unable to return to Egypt, told me the story of an activist who was standing on the front lines when the military began dispersing the Rabbi syddin. A bullet grazed his shoulder. Behind him, a young man fell to the ground. The man had been shot to death. The activists looked over to see what had happened and began to cry. He could have died a martyr. He knew the man behind him had gone to heaven in God's glory. This is what he longed for, and it had been denied him. Aspects of the story were, I assume, apocryphal, but the basic point is an important one. This wasn't politics in the normal sense of the word. Now, your assumption that the story was apocryphal, I don't know if there were other cues to suggest that, but there's no reason to think it was generically. I'm sure you've read Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower. Yes. Those stories of Al Qaeda essentially doing the same thing, just weeping tears of envy over their fallen comrades in Afghanistan and even taking absurd risks in an apparent attempt to get themselves martyred. Those stories are a dime a dozen. It's just a sincere belief in paradise gets you there, insofar as you manage to embrace it. Yeah, you're right. I do struggle with this still. I guess one distinction I would make is that members of al Qaeda or ISIS, for that matter, they are more actively trying to die, in a sense. And they're not just willing to die, they're also willing to kill, which is a difference as well. So when I'm talking about Brotherhood activists in a primarily peaceful protest situation, these are not people who are necessarily going there to die. That's not their primary objective. Their primary objective was to try to get the new military government after the coup of 2013, to go back to the barracks and to reinstate Mohammed Morsi, the elected Islamist president, back into office. So for them, there was a very tangible political goal. And I have no doubt that they thought, at least initially, that if they held out for long enough and they had large enough protests and sit ins in various parts of the country, that this would put enough pressure on the military. So I think understanding how the political goals intertwine with the very real religious goals which are mentioned in the passage are still important, and people want to retroactively make sense of something after the fact. So I can't be 100% sure of what these one or two individuals were thinking in the exact moment. But I know it because I, too, do this sometimes that in retrospect, I invest certain acts with more meaning than they actually had at the time, because we all want to make our lives grander in a way. All of us are searching for a kind of epic meaning, for a kind of narrative arc to our own stories. So when this Brotherhood member is telling me this story either before the fact or after the fact so I left Egypt two days before the massacre happened, and I talked to people afterwards, right? And they were trying to make sense of what happened, and they're trying to offer a narrative arc, not just to me, but, I think, also to themselves, if that makes sense. I would certainly grant you that there is a significant distinction between the Brotherhood and the kinds of people who would be likely to join it, and a group like al Qaeda or ISIS or any other classical jihadist group. And it's a distinction, as you know, that you put a lot of weight on, because you almost talk about the Brotherhood as the mainstream alternative to jihadism. Some version of this Islamism needs to be embraced, or at least accepted. And I think that we will definitely get there, because that is a controversial and interesting point. But again, I just want to linger on the Western secular liberal doubt about this phenomenon, because I'm not sure you understand how delusional this skepticism is among academics and how deep it runs. So, for instance, I noticed that you cite the work of the anthropologist Scott Atran at various points in your book. I can see why you would do that. He certainly said several useful things in this area, but he also has been a reliable obscurantist on this point. And he and I once got into what almost amounted to a fight on a panel at the Sauce Institute. This was about ten years ago, and I just couldn't believe the kinds of things he was saying about the irrelevance of religious belief to the phenomenon of jihadist terrorism. He just was going to the mat for religion being a non variable. Right, yeah. So at one point, we found ourselves in the men's room together, and I just looked at him and I said, scott, you mean to tell me that nobody has ever blown himself up with the expectation of arriving in paradise? Is that what you actually think? And he said, yes, that's right. Nobody believes in paradise, full stop. I have to ask you because I do actually remember very vividly reading that on your blog some time back. I remember actually tweeting it, I think, and I had to read it several times because I couldn't actually believe that Scott Atran. It's hard for me to believe that he would actually believe that, and I can't make sense of it. So if you have any insights into what he was trying to tell you, that would be interesting. Well, on some level, he was just trying to tell me to fuck off. The only exculpatory interpretation, or the only interpretation that I can make of what he said, which is compatible with his sanity, really, is that he was telling me to fuck off in terms he knew I would see as provocative and that it was not an honest statement of what he believes. But in fact, when you look at how he's attacked me for things I've said about Islam, and when you look at the points of debate we've had in public, it is in line with everything else he said. So he went on at the Saw Conference to say that the best predictor of whether someone was going to join a jihadist cell was not their religious beliefs or any prior indoctrination, but whether they were a member of a soccer team. Right. So his thesis is that it's affiliation among, quote, fictive kin young men who bond and care about the esteem with which their coevils hold them in. That's what gets you to push the plunger on your suicide vest. Now, I don't need to spend a lot of time on a tran here, but I've pointed out previously all the moves he makes to discount the very obvious emergence of religion as a variable, even within his own data, even when he's got jihadists telling him about God, he manages to ignore all that. But yeah, no, he clearly thinks and there are other people like this I just mentioned him just because I saw him in your book he clearly thinks that this is a matter of the quasi terrestrial concern of caring about your reputation among your friends. And I would never discount that as an important variable in conflict or in war. I mean, it obviously is. It's something that could get a totally secular or atheist person to sacrifice his life in combat in defense of his fellow soldiers. I mean, this is very ordinary psychological motivation that can lead to heroic self sacrifice. But if you are going to deny that the doctrine of Islam is in any way relevant to the phenomenon of jihadism, then it's just God's own miracle that we're seeing more Muslims than Amish or Anglicans blow themselves up in these kinds of conflicts. Right? It makes no sense. Or the cartoon controversy, why isn't the Book of Mormon leading to the headings in Times Square after it gets staged if every religious ideology was equally likely to produce these specific forms of intolerance? Yeah, exactly. But I think it's in my effort to emphasize, let's say I agree with you that it seems really absurd to me that anyone could discount religion as an important variable. But I also get where it's coming from in the sense that these are liberal academics, so I think are generally well intentioned and I think they want to make Islam into something it's not. Or to put it a little bit differently, they want Muslims to be just like us and quotation marks us. And that's what Ben Affleck was trying to do as well, that we have become so uncomfortable with acknowledging difference, as if the fact that we could be different from each other is itself a problem. And that doesn't just apply to how we view practicing or conservative Muslims, but also how we even view Trump voters this unwillingness to think that they are motivated by understandable or rational things and instead we dismiss them as a bunch of bigots racists and deplorables. So in that sense, I do see some parallels with this kind of liberal faith in universal values that are not, in fact universally held and not just in the Middle East, but also increasingly as we're seeing here in the US. Or in Europe. And I think one of the main challenges going forward is how do we come to terms with difference? Yeah, well, I'm going to want to defend universal values, but I think we should talk about Islamic exceptionalism and talk about difference first. But before that, I just want to talk about this obscureantism and the role it has played politically of late. Because it's in large measure, and I've said this in the podcast in large measure, this explains the rise of Trump, or at least this is one of several variables for me that had it been different, wouldn't have given us Trump. The most troubling side of this. And we have this failure of empathy. We have secular people who just don't get it, but then we also have Muslims who very likely do get it. I mean, I'm not saying they're closet Islamists or Jihadists, but these are Muslims who actually understand Islam, who reliably lie about its tenants. So the fact that in the immediate aftermath of any terrorist atrocity, you will see someone from Care jump on CNN and then just lie about Islam, talk about how there's no link between any of its doctrines and Jihadism. Jihad is just an inner spiritual struggle, for instance, and then to immediately sound the bell of concern about Islamophobia, right? This word that, as far as I can tell, has been consciously engineered very cynically to prevent the very observations of a sort that you have made in your book, that I've been making here. That there is a link between specific ideas, specific doctrines and specific behaviors that, as I always remind people, victimize Muslims themselves more than anybody else. I mean, the most common victim of Jihadist terrorism is a fellow Muslim who was standing close to the bomb when it went off, right? It's not non Muslims who are, for the most part, victims of theocracy and oppression and sectarian violence as we see it in the Muslim world. So it's this dishonesty and again, this sort of touches close to home because I noticed Reza Aslan is one of your blurbists. I can't hold you responsible for who blurbs your book. But Reza, again is someone who honestly, I think he has probably never managed to speak five sentences in succession about Islam without shading the truth or lying outright about it. I mean, I've been in debates with him. I've seen him in interviews again on CNN as a prime offender and it's just guaranteed obscurantism. Now, it's either he's he's either he's either confused, which seems incredibly unlikely given that he'll he also can't go five minutes without emphasizing that he's a scholar of religion. But the list of this rogues gallery is quite long. You have Dalia Mogahed, you have all these people who are reasonably prominent, who will not speak honestly in the way that you have. I would take issue with the word lying and the idea that people are being dishonest. I don't have any sense that Reza doesn't believe what he's saying. And the same goes for delia. I can only speak for myself. The way that I approach it is perhaps a little bit different than, say, someone who's part of a Muslim civil rights organization. So after a terrorist attack, it's understandable to me that someone whose job, if your job, is to make Islam look good and to protect the rights of the community, you want to disassociate between ISIS and Islam. I, however, because I say this very straight up, I am an analyst. I have to be faithful to my findings, even if they make me uncomfortable. And it's not my job to make Islam look good. So I actually get this criticism from Muslim friends and family and even. Sometimes my mom, she'll tell me, Shadi, when you talk about ISIS, you should be a little bit more careful so people don't get the wrong idea. And we have this ongoing debate. And I totally get where she's coming from because I know that she believes that ISIS is a total 100% distortion perversion of Islam as she knows it. And for her, it's personal, it's her religion, right? And I would say the same for myself as an American Muslim. I do believe that ISIS's interpretation is a distorted interpretation of Islam as I understand it. Right? So that's why I think that it's sort of my policy in general. When I get in Twitter debates and any kinds of debate, I want to assume that people are not being dishonest and that there is a real or rational or reasonable motivation for them arguing the way that they do. And we just happen to disagree on this point. Let me just emphasize my agreement here. I think this principle of charity is incredibly important. It's the basis of any actual civil conversation about hard topics. So I totally take your point there. When I call out someone like Reyes Oslon, I've seen him violate these norms and the expectation of honesty so often, both in public and in private. His capacity for dishonesty is, again, as plain effect of reality as any other you're going to find in human behavior. So I don't expect you focused on him as much as I have. But there's a phenomenon of a reliable shading of the truth here. Again, it's not always conscious dishonesty. It could just be confirmation bias or just fear that, as you say, Muslims will be tarred broadly with the same brush. The fear is, obviously, that if we admit that there's any connection between the behavior of a group like ISIS and actual tenets of the mainstream religion of Islam, well, then there's nothing to stop a slide into, quote, Islamophobia or more bigotry against Muslims. And we have a President of the United States who's clearly operating under that assumption and who will never say anything honest about the link between religious ideology and jihad and Hillary Clinton. One of the reasons why I think her candidacy was so flawed was that she was the sort of candidate who, in the immediate aftermath of the Orlando massacre, which was took about 15 minutes to figure out, that was an instance of jihadist violence. All she could speak about were our gun laws and sanctimoniously warn us about a rise in Islamophobia. So Donald Trump, as odious a character as he is, I would argue, is one of his saving graces. And again, perhaps I'm unusually in touch with this because I've spoken so much about Islam that I have a fan base that insofar as there was a single issue voter out there who was just concerned about speaking honestly about this problem of jihadism and Islamism, I'm in touch with those people. And I can tell you there are a lot of people out there, including some Muslims, including my friend Azra Nomani, who you may know, the journalist who supported Trump because of this issue alone, because he just stood up. And said, listen, I don't understand Islam any better than you do, but there's clearly something going on here, and we have a president who's lying about it. Now, that as big of a con man as Trump is. That statement, taken on its own, was a true breath of fresh air. Now it's connected to a policy prescription that doesn't make a lot of sense and probably would cause immense harm attempting not to let any Muslims into the country. But still, this is where political correctness has gotten us on this topic, and it remains a huge problem. My concern now with the rise of Trump is that because of everything that's wrong with, you know, the right hand side of the political spectrum, we are going to witness a pendulum swing leftward. And there will be more dishonesty on this point from the left rather than more honesty. And you'll have everyone doubling down on essentially lies about the motivations of jihadists. And I've been saying this for years and years. If the only honest talk about jihad is coming from the right, you are going to push increasingly fearful people, rightward, no matter how ugly the right is on every other topic. And we're witnessing this with the migrant crisis in Europe. We're witnessing it with, I would argue, with Trump in large measure. So like the Southern Poverty Law Center, right? Which if ever we needed the Southern Poverty Law Center to occupy the moral high ground and to be sane and ethical and wise, we need them now with a super empowered white nationalist movement in the US. For the first time in a generation. And yet they just added ayan Hersiali and Majid Nawaz to a list of socalled antimuslim extremists, right? So in addition to the KKK, we should worry about Majid Nawaz and Ayan Hersial le it's complete insanity, and yet this is what the Left has done to us on this topic. Well, that's why I think it's incredibly crucial right now for us to find the middle ground. And that's really what I'm trying to do with this book, is there's got to be something in between the kind of political correctness of the left and what I consider to be the very problematic approach of some on the right who want to make Islam into some kind of Islam is the problem. Or even Islamism is the problem. And to fail to make what I think are important distinctions. So I think there's something in between, and I realize that it's not a very popular place to be, which is why this book has pissed off people on both sides of the spectrum and kind of in between as well. But I feel like I want to do what I can to find that middle ground and encourage other people to search for it. And I'm not under any illusion that people are going to agree with the entirety of my argument, but I hope that we can at least start to have that conversation, because these issues will be an issue pretty much for the rest of our lives. We will be facing the scourge of terrorism and extremism for as long as we live. I don't believe terrorism is something you can eliminate. It's something you can reduce to the best of your ability. But we're going to have to deal with a lot of this. That's why we have to have this conversation sooner rather than later. Yeah. I want to talk to you ultimately about this very provocative comment that not only can't Islam be the problem, but perhaps Islamism can't even be the problem. And that's where you seem to take a slightly different path than I take or that my friend and colleague Majid Nawaz take. We got to get there. But before we do, I want you to educate us a little bit on a few points. And this goes to really the first principle of your thesis, that Islam is in some way exceptional. And so you say things like, for instance, there's nothing equivalent to sharia in Christianity. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, sure. Well, one thing I should just mention, which may be of interest, is that because of the political correctness around this topic, the book's title was actually going to be different until, like, the very last moment. It's kind of a lame title. I've mentioned it elsewhere, so I can tell you, but we were going to call it The Last Caliphate, which sounds kind of poetic and literary, but what the heck does it mean? I had an idea about what it meant, but ultimately I wanted the argument to be right there, and I wanted to own it. I thought, Look, I'm spending a big part of my life writing this book. I can't hide away from my own argument, so let me own it. Even though even the very notion of exceptionalism is going to anger a lot of people, especially in academia, where, oh, my God, exceptionalism shadi is a neo Orientalist or an essentialist. And I've gotten those charges. But anyway, the argument that I'm making, to put it, I guess, simply, is that Islam is in fact exceptional, but not just in any way, because I think it should go without saying that all religions are different from other religions in some way. But I'm arguing that Islam is exceptional in a specific set of ways that matter 14 centuries after its founding, so specifically in its relationship to law, politics, and governance. And what that means in practice, but also in theory, is that Islam has proven to be resistant to secularization, and I would argue it will continue to be resistant to secularization for the foreseeable future for reasons that we can't easily dismiss and we can talk about some of them. And the implications of that I think are important because what it does mean is that hopes for some kind of future reformation or some kind of linear trajectory where Islam goes through what Christianity did, so Reformation, then Enlightenment and secularism towards the end of history of liberal democracy. I don't think that's a helpful way of looking at Islam, because why would Islam follow the same trajectory as Christianity if it's a different religion? Right? And this goes to your point about there being no equivalent of Sharia and Christianity, which is why I think it is very hard to talk about Sharia in America or Europe because it's just really different and it's really complicated. And the closest equivalent, at least in Catholicism, is canon law. But canon law, first of all, doesn't quite cover nearly as much as Islamic law does. But canon law is fundamentally about the internal organization of the Catholic Church and its sort of immediate surroundings. It's about managing a hierarchy. It's about church building more than state building. And that's even the case in the medieval era where there was this clear, maybe at least clear in theory, distinction between civil law and ecclesia law. So there is a kind of inherent dualism, I would argue, in the Christian tradition, not just today, but going back many centuries. Well, it also just falls right out the line in Matthew render unto Caesar those things that are Caesars, unto God those things that are Gods. Exactly. And even if you look at parts of the New Testament where Paul says, christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. So even the attitude towards law, there isn't much public law in the New Testament. And the reason for that, I think, is actually, I don't want to say it's 100% clear, but one of the main reasons is that Jesus was a dissident against Iranian state, so he never had to contend with governance. So naturally the New Testament is not going to talk a lot about that because that's not what the early Christians were dealing with at the founding moment of the religion. And this gets me to another key distinction with Islam, is that, hey, let's be honest about it. I mean, Prophet Muhammad was not just a dissident, he wasn't just a prophet or a religious figure, but he was also a politician. And he was specifically, and this is in some ways even more important, he was ahead of state. So naturally, if you're a believer, right, and if something is coming from God as revelation, then naturally the Quran is going to have to have something to say about law and governance, if that's what the early Muslims are dealing with. Otherwise how would Prophet Muhammad be guided? Right? But putting that aside, even if we're just approaching it from a purely analytical or academic perspective as outsiders, we would also say that any book has to address the needs of the time. So if we all can agree that Prophet Muhammad and the early Muslims were dealing with these questions of state building, then the Quran naturally will have more to say about such issues. Yeah, one of the problems, obviously, is that once you accept the principle of revelation, once you accept the fact that this book is not merely the product of its time, but the product of God's omniscience, well then its edicts need to stand for all time. So they constrain the politics, if there are political edicts in there, they constrain the politics of this at any future time. And that's certainly perhaps not the only possible reading, but it's a natural one and it's the reading many people attempt to take in every revealed religion. And following directly on that point, what's the significance of the Quran being the actual speech of God? Can you make that? Obviously many Christians believe the measure of being a fundamentalist Christian is if you believe that the Bible is perfect in all its parts and the actual word of God. But that's still not quite the same thing as the Quran being the actual speech of God. And many people, I think even most fundamentalist Christians who don't doubt that salafists or truly traditional Muslims believe every word of their holy book, even our own fundamentalists don't understand that you can go one better and believe that the holy book has itself a kind of magical status. Yeah. So this was actually one of the fascinating aspects of writing this book. And there's nearly an entire chapter on the evolution of Christianity and its attitudes towards politics. So I really had to dive into Christian theology and talk to pastors and scholars and theologians and do my best to relate to a tradition that is in some ways foreign to me. Again, like growing up in the Northeast, I didn't have a lot of friends who took the Bible that seriously. It really struck me in my research what an important difference this was. So if you talk to far right evangelicals today, they will say that the Bible is the word of God. Muslims will also tell you that the Quran is the word of God. But they go one step further and they say that the Quran is God's actual speech. And this is not some side thing or some incidental part of the religion, but it's actually a credible requirement of the religion. So similar to how Christianity loses theological content or meaning if you take Christ out of it. So if you say that Christ is some ordinary guy, then you can find that's fine. You can be nominally Christian or culturally Christian, but there's not a lot of theological content there because Christ is pretty central to Christianity. So similarly, the Quran being God's actual speech is central. And what that means is that it's not just inspired by God, it's not preserved or protected by God only, but every word and letter is directly from God. So it's his speech in the quite literal sense of being his speech. So in other words, there's no human role or human authorship. So Muhammad didn't write a certain part of the Quran. On the other hand, even evangelicals will acknowledge, because as a factual matter, it's true that various parts of the Bible have been written by different authors, including people like Paul, who I mentioned earlier. But evangelicals would say that it's still, in a sense, the word of God and it's protected by God and it's in that sense free from falsehood. But they would never pretend that the Bible or the New Testament, let's say, more specifically, is directly from God in the way that Muslims would say the same about the Quran. If I'm not mistaken, the only part of the Bible that God can be said to have written are the two variant Ten commandments. He etched those into stone, apparently, but those have a different status than everything else in, in the book. Exactly. And in the New Testament, there, you know, there are obviously places where Jesus is quoted. Yeah, and that out, you know, that. So in that sense, those parts of the New Testament which aren't a huge part of it are divine speech in a sense. But most of the New Testament is not directly Jesus's words or God's words or whatever. Exactly. So this leads to, for among other reasons, to the problem that there hasn't been the same kind of textual analysis of the Quran academically that you have had of the Bible for now probably at least 200 years. Subjecting the Quran to the normal critical treatment that one sees in the ivory tower has really been either forbidden or anathematized traditionally. And I remember my foundation in part sponsored a conference in Germany that was for the first time in anyone's memory, subjecting the Quran to very ordinary kinds of hermeneutics and linguistic analysis that the Bible has been subjected to for two centuries. And this was actually obviously a risky thing to do. I mean, most of the scholars publishing this work were working under pseudonyms and it's just a completely paranoid exercise in very ordinary academic behavior. Can you say anything about that, about what hasn't been done to the Quran that could or should have happened? So I think that what was done with the Bible can't really be done with the Quran in the sense that this is not just an issue of evangelicals today. But as I say in the book, I mean, there has never been a major sector denomination within Christianity that has argued that the New Testament is God's actual speech. Right. So there has always been a readiness to have more of a critical engagement with the integrity of the text because most people can agree, even Christians, that most of the Bible was written by men. Now, if you want to bring Muslims on board, we have to be pragmatic. If someone goes to a group of even fairly broad minded Muslims who are open to progressive interpretations, and you tell this group, well, hey, there has to be a critical engagement with the text that even starts to dismantle some of the things that are dear to the vast majority, if not all believing Muslims, then it's a non starter. And I just don't know. So even if you believe that or other people believe that, how productive is that? There was a time, I should point out, that the Catholic Church attempted to quash this. There was a movement under the Catholic Church called Modernism where scholars were encouraged to look closely at the Bible using all the modern tools and put it on as firm a scholarly footing as they could. And they quickly found that this had the effect of eroding. Rather than bolstering their faith because they were finding errors or inconsistencies or just learning more about the process of inclusion or rejection of various texts, it revealed that whole generations of Christians had lived with certain books being canonical, which are no longer thought to be canonical, and vice versa. So it was just this carnival of errors and merely all too human efforts to put together a tradition that they exposed. And so the Catholic Church tried to stop it at a certain point. But I don't know if you remember that story that came as now again, something like 1015 years ago, where this scholar who I believe still goes by the pseudonym, I think it's Christopher Luxembourg. Oh, right. Yes. He found that there was the passage in the Koran relating to the virgins that martyrs and other lucky people are supposedly going to get in paradise. That the word for virgin. Excuse my nonexistent Arabic here, but I think it's hur or hurry actually meant at the time, based on textual analysis, white raisins, which were supposedly a delicacy. So rather than getting there were a lot of jokes, you know, among which I I told at the time, rather than getting 72 virgins, you get a fistful of raisins when you get to the paradise. But that's, again, this, this is a scholar of Middle Eastern languages forced to live under a pseudonym and publish obscurely or not publish at all for analyzing the text. But you make the obvious point that one finds when one analyzes text in these ways is that because these books are almost certainly the product of merely human speech, you find evidence of that fact, and you find that parts of the Quran are actually swiped from preexisting literature and all the rest. And there is something in principle seditious and destabilizing about that. But why is it that you close the door to the possibility of that project ever working the same magic it worked on Christianity? Well, so I should say that most muslims aren't literalists in how they engage with the text. So I don't really see that as the I don't think the primary problem within Islam and among Muslims is that the vast majority of Muslims pick up the Koran and subscribe to a very literalist reading. So one way of putting it is that Muslims take the Quran as God's literal speech, but they don't necessarily interpret that speech literally, if that makes sense. And actually so I was brushing up on my, my copy of your book with Majid, Ms. Lamb, in the Future of Tolerance, and I was reminded that there were parts where I was like magic. And I you know, we have friendly disagreements, but we definitely do disagree on a number of issues. But as I was kind of going back, I was like, I like how Majid is putting it here. So he has a section where he talks about the method of interpreting the text and the importance of Muslims acknowledging that there is no one true reading of the text. And I think that's important, that none of us as fallible human beings have access to God's will. We don't know what God really wanted when he in certain verses of the Quran, right? So we can try our best to divine his intent or will. And there's actually a whole classical and academic literature on how to do that kind of interpretation, which is very rich and diverse and complex, but there's no way to know for sure. So I think there is already quite a bit of room to operate. And just to give one example, that comes up a lot for understandable reasons, the Hadoop punishments, so the religiously derived criminal punishments. And I should offer the disclaimer that this is only a small part of Islamic law and we should be careful not to say that, hey, Sharia is just about cutting people's hands off. But they are there, right? And let's not pretend that they aren't. So there are progressive interpretations, and I think Mazid would probably subscribe to these. And we have to be honest too, and say that this is a minority interpretation. So what I'm about to tell you now, the majority of scholars would not agree with me, but the Quran was revealed in a particular time and place in 7th century Arabia. So there were different norms and values then. So something like cutting off the hands of thieves did not offend the sensibilities of people at that time. And so the idea there so what was God's intent? Some scholars will say that God's intent or the objective of those verses is to have a deterrent effect. So the goal is to stop people from stealing. And that was an effective way of doing that back then. But today we live in a different era, and if we want to achieve a similar deterrent effect, there's other ways to do that besides chopping people's hands off, right? I would argue there's probably no better way. I mean, it would have a marvelous deterrent effect still. And if God's goal is to deter theft, well, then why not keep chopping? You can see how what's unstable about that kind of pirouette and why it can easily fall back to the more straightforward and seemingly honest reading of the text, which is if it was good enough for God in the 7th century, it's good enough for God today. And God in his wisdom, would have put it differently if he meant it differently. What you're basically saying and again, obviously, you know I love Majid, and I certainly hope the project of reconstruing everything offensive in the tradition succeeds. But the reason why this is an asymmetric battlefield is that the straightforward, literal, and good for all time interpretation is always available to the person who wants to pick up the book and say, well, listen, what I'm hearing from Majid and Shadi and all these other over educated Muslims is that they know better than what God literally said. They know what God meant more than God did? No. Okay. But I don't think that I do. So I'll say this. I don't know if I'm right. And that's why I don't sometimes people basically ask me for fetch was I'm not a theologian. I'm not in any position to tell people what God may have or may not have meant with certain verses. This is just me speaking as a person, right, as an individual. And I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I'm wrong and God does in fact want people in this world to cut off the hand of thieves. I don't like that idea. It makes me uncomfortable. And I also, not to get into them, have somewhat complex views on the nature of justice and something that you imagine actually get into in your book as well, which is this question of the created versus the uncreated. Coron I don't want to get into all of that, but I'm someone who would like to think that God is not going to commit injustice. God is incapable of being unjust because he is supposed to be the most just. So I consider certain things like, for example, like husbands, I don't know, marital rape, to give one example, or husbands beating up their wives over a disagreement. I'm not comfortable believing in a God that is okay with domestic abuse because that would undermine one of God's qualities, which is being the bearer of justice. Obviously, I can see the ethical wisdom in wanting to parse it that way, but again, it's open to the eternal quibble, which is you're talking about an omniscient author here. If he wanted to say it more clearly, he could have. Right? And he's perfectly clear on on apostasy being a bad thing. Now, he doesn't spell out the penalty for it in the Quran, as you know. We need the hadith for that. But yeah, he's absolutely clear that this is not good, and that you should fear and revile and in no ways befriend atheists and apostates and blasphemers and anyone who would doubt the perfect veracity of this book. And that's a problem. It's a social problem, it's a civilizational problem. It's a problem we have to figure out how to overcome. And so interfaith dialogue and finding some way to moderate that kind of sectarianism, that's all progress in the 21st century sense. But it's just very easy to see how that will keep falling back to the more straightforward interpretation, which is, no, no, it's clear here on virtually every page that God hates infidels, right? And he's prepared a hell for them to go to. It's the whole point, the whole point of this universe is to figure out how to get infidels into Hell, right? If God had wanted to guide them, he would have, right? And so he's in any sane ethical view, this is a totally perverse psychological experiment. Imagine putting stupid people into giving them a puzzle they can't solve, right? Making it just too hard for them to solve, giving them no help at all. In fact, giving them further reasons to be confused about the right solution, and then punishing them with an eternity and fire for failing to solve the puzzle you made that was too hard for them. That's essentially the universe we live in if you're a Muslim or arguably, or if you're a Christian as well. And so that's from the point of view of a non believer, the whole thing is absurd. But more consequentially and more relevantly to this discussion, it seems that the fundamentalist, for lack of a better word, always has the advantage of saying, listen, just read the book and honestly grapple with what it says here and absorb the fact that God had infinite freedom to put it any way he wanted. If he wanted to tell you the universe was billions of years old, he could have told you that. If he wanted to tell you about the importance of learning mathematics, he could have told you that. But no, he's told you to treat women like property, right, or continue the practice of slavery under these more refined conditions, or whatever it is. That's a problem. That's why the Islamic State really is the crystalline version of the retort to any kind of modernizing effort. It's, sorry, guys, we're going to we're going to show you what the project actually looks like and just tell us where we're mistaken. But but if the fundamental if the fundamentalist or literalist reading of Scripture was the default setting, then the majority of Muslims today would be fundamentalists and that they aren't. I think that's a false conclusion. It's understandable. But the truth is that most Muslims, happily are human beings first, insofar as they may believe in paradise, they're not sure of it. Say they're not committed to just seeing this world as a loathsome moment of temptation. On the way to a sublime eternity. They want a nice life in this world for understandable reasons. And so their commitment either they're just not especially educated about what Islam is. But this is not just Muslims we're talking about. We're talking about religious people in general. This is true of Christians and Buddhists and Hindus and everyone else who's enthralled to some other worldly belief system. To the degree that they find life in this world captivating, beautiful, worth maintaining, worth improving, they are captivated and they have another commitment. And when they read God saying something that seems inimical to maximizing human flourishing, whether it's political or economic or intellectual or artistic or any other way, they decide to disregard God's crazy edict there because it is incompatible with what they want out of life. And that's a good thing. And even Muslims for the most part have been captured by that modern secular humanist project. And that's the lever we have to keep pulling on some level. Well, in a sense that I agree with you that Islam so certainly Muslims are pragmatic because they have to be. But I think I would argue that Islam is also pragmatic and flexible, that it can incorporate ideas from outside of Scripture and then sort of retroactively Islamize them. And I know that you argue, if I recall, in parts of the moral landscape, or maybe it was at the end of Faith, one of them. Some of the argument that you're making now, that to the extent that Muslims are pragmatic, it's because of things that are far into their faith and it's because of the sort of indelible pull of secularization that they cannot avoid because they live in the real world. But I don't know why we have to see those things as outside of Islam or not falling within the realm of religion. And that's why I think Islam has been quite flexible and resonant to this very date, despite a lot of challenges to it, is that it is able to bring those other things in so someone can be fully modern. And fully Muslim and not have to choose where I think if you look at Christianity at a crucial moment in the 19th century in particular, where people were essentially making a choice between being Christian and being modern, because the Church was so avowedly against popular modern concepts like universal suffrage or democracy or socialism, where Islam has actually been quite nimble in this regard, in being somewhat comfortable. So that's why you have phrases that people use quite often like Islamic democracy, Islamic socialism, Islamic finance. And I think that's key to understanding why Islam has been resistant to this kind of more aggressive secularization that would privatize Islam or to kind of put it in a box. Muslims have realized, I think, by and large, that they don't have to put Islam in a box to live in the modern world. Let's get to this, because this is drawing to the heart of your claim, which most people find provocative, which differentiates what you're doing or saying from what I certainly hear Majid saying. And this is that for all practical purposes, Islamism is here to stay, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I have a quote here from you where you say, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for Islam to play an outsized role in public life. And you also say, quote, I see very little reason to think that secularism is going to win out in a war of ideas. This is a kind of skepticism about secularism. And that's coupled to something that you do seem to view as a kind of intrinsic good, which is democracy or the respect for democracy or the outcome of a democratic process. So that as long as the people tell you what they want and their wants are made effective at the level of government through the democratic process, it's not for us to say what they should want or to deny them what they want. And you seem to think that there's not really a deep argument for secularism, but there is a deep argument for democracy. I want to talk about that a little bit because I see that the other way around. I don't see democracy to be an intrinsic good. If the people are imbeciles or religious maniacs, well, then you could argue they're not ready for democracy, or democracy is suicidal. It could be suicidal. When I say that religion shouldn't play a role in public policy or government, what I mean is that dogmatism shouldn't play a role and unreason shouldn't play a role, and the denial of science shouldn't play a role, and superstition or a belief in magic shouldn't play a role. And the reason why secularism let's just take a core principle of secularism, which is at odds with much of what Muslims believe and certainly much of what Islamists believe. Just a commitment to free speech and a commitment to freedom of thought, which is really at the core. This is an intrinsic good for this reason. It is the only real error correcting mechanism we've got intellectually and ethically moving forward. The moment you say that unpopular opinions or new opinions or startling opinions are not only unpopular, startling new and worthy of criticism, perhaps, but illegal, we're going to punish you for having them right. We will kill you for your apostasy. We will kill you for the cartoon we didn't like or the novel we didn't like, or the play you shouldn't have staged. The moment you make that move, you put a brick wall at the horizon of human conversation. And there's really no telling how bad that could be in the limit. And the only way we can move forward morally and scientifically and culturally, really is to have conversation, be open. And that is fundamental in a way that democracy merely isn't. Yeah. So let's see a couple of things there. So I guess one thing that's worth mentioning that so my own progressive views on certain issues. So I support gay marriage, I support decriminalization of marijuana, things that are associated with classical liberalism, let's say, and the left as well in the US. I guess I've sort of come to the conclusion that my arguments about those things would be compelling to me and people like me. I'm under no illusion that they'll be compelling to a majority of Egyptians or Pakistanis or whatever. So I actually am willing to acknowledge that my views are not going to win out when it comes to Islam, and I have to be realistic about that. That's one thing I would say. Let me just get you to refine that or unpack that a little bit because half the time I hear you say if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all fulllength episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriberonly content including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is adfree and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I have Paul Bloom on the line. Paul, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Sam, thanks for having me back. You are now officially my well, I have, I think, only two return guests, but you have just edged out David Deutsch, who has two appearances. So you're the only third appearance on this podcast, so that says something. It's not exactly like a 20th appearance on The Tonight Show, but it is a measure of how good a guest you are. I'm touched. Maybe a decade from now, who knows, we could be doing our 20th anniversary show. Well, after we did our second show, people just emailed me saying, just have Paul on the podcast all the time. You don't need any other guests. So you are a popular guest. Well, we had a great discussion, I think, a little bit about what makes for a good discussion, which is you and I agree on a lot. We have a lot of common ground, but there's enough tension and enough things to rub against that we can get some good discussion going. We will see if we can steer ourselves in the direction of controversy, perhaps. But you have just released a book which we talked about to a significant degree, I think, in your first appearance here, and we would be remiss not to talk about it some, so we'll start with that. But people should just know that if they find what we were about to say about empathy intriguing. Our first podcast has a full hour or more on it and it is an incredibly interesting and consequential issue, which we will be giving short shrift here because we've already done it. But the proper intro to this topic is that you have just released a book entitled Against Empathy, which is, I think I told you at the time, is a fantastic title. You seem to steer yourself out of a full collision with the outrage of your colleagues in your subtitle. You have as a subtitle, the case for rational compassion. So you're not against compassion, obviously. Tell us about your position on empathy and how it's different from compassion. So the distinction is super important because if you just hear him against empathy, it'd be fair enough to assume I'm some sort of monster, some sort of person arguing for pure selfishness or entire lack of warmth. Or caring for others. And that's not what I mean by empathy. And that's actually not what psychologists and philosophers mean by empathy either. What I'm against is putting yourself in other people's shoes, feeling their pain, feeling their suffering, and I'm not even against this. In general, I think empathy is a wonderful source of pleasure. It's central to sex, it's central to sports, it's central to the pleasure we get from literature and movies and all sorts of fictional entertainments. But what I argue is, in the moral realm, when it comes to being good people, it steers us dangerously astray it's a moral train wreck. And the reason why is that it zooms us in on individuals like a spotlight. And in fact, the fans of empathy describe it as a spotlight, but because of that, it's very biased. I'll be more empathic towards somebody who is my skin color and have a different skin color towards somebody I know versus a stranger. It's difficult to be empathic at all to somebody who you view as disgusting or unattractive or dangerous or opposed to you. And, in fact, there's a lot of neuroscience studies we could get into that get at this not only through self report, which is kind of unreliable, but actually looking at the correlates of empathy in the brain, finding that some studies find that. One of my favorite studies tested male soccer fans in Europe, and they watch somebody who's been described as a fan of their same team receive electric shocks. And then it turns out they feel empathy. In fact, the same parts of their brain that would be active if they themselves were being shocked light up when they see this other person being shocked. So that's great. But then in another condition, they observe somebody who's described as not being supporting the same team, and there empathy shuts down. And in fact, what you get is kind of a blast of of pleasure circuitry when they watch the other person being shocked. And so empathy is biased and narrow and parochial and and I think leads us astray in a million ways, much of which we discussed the last time we talked about this. Compassion is a bit different. So my argument is what we should replace empathy with for decision making is cold blooded reasoning of a more or less utilitarian sort of where you judge costs and benefits. You ask yourself, what can I do to make the world a better place? What could I do to increase happiness, to reduce suffering? And maybe you could view that in a utilitarian way. You could do it in terms of a conte and moral principles way, but however you do it, it's an act of reason. What's missing in that? And that's the rational part of my subtitle. What's missing in that is everybody from David Hume on down has pointed out you need some sort of motivation, some sort of kick in the pants, and that's where I think compassion comes in. So many people blur empathy and compassion together, and I don't actually care how people use the terminology, but what's important is they're really different. So you can feel empathy, I see you suffer and I feel your pain, and I zoom in on that. But you could also feel compassion, which is you care for somebody, you love them, you want them to thrive, you want them to be happy, but you don't feel their pain. And some really cool experiments on this, for instance, this is going to connect to one of your deep interests out of meditation we're done by Tanya Singer, who's a German neuroscientist, and Matthew Ricard, who's a Buddhist monk and so called happiest man alive. And they did these studies where they train people to feel empathy, to experience the suffering of others, and then they train another group to feel compassion. And the way they do it is through lovingkindness meditation, where you care about others, but you don't feel their pain. Now, it turns out that you activate entirely different parts of the brain. There's always some overlap, but there's distinct parts of the brain, but more to the point, they have different effects. So the empathy training makes people suffer, it makes people selfish, it leads to burnout. While the compassion training is pleasurable, people enjoy it. They enjoy the feeling of kindness towards other people and it makes them nicer. And recent studies, like very recent studies by the psychologist David Destino in Northwestern, back this up by finding that meditation training actually increases people's kindness and the explanation that they give. And it's an open question why it does. So the explanation they give is it ignites compassion, but shuts down empathy circuitry. That is, you deal with suffering and you could deal with it better because you don't feel it. So this is one way I'd make the distinction between empathy and compassion. Yeah, I think we probably raised this last time. But it's difficult to exaggerate how fully our moral intuitions can misfire when guided by empathy, as opposed to some kind of rational understanding of what will positively affect the world. The research done by Paul Slovic on moral illusions is fascinating. Here, when you show someone a picture of a single little girl who's in need, they are maximally motivated to help. But if you show them a picture of a little girl, the same little girl and her brother, their altruistic motive to help is reduced, reliably. And if you show them ten kids, it's reduced further. And then if you give them statistics about hundreds of thousands of kids in need of the same aid, it drops off a cliff. And that is clearly a bug, not a feature. And that, I think, relates to this issue of empathy as opposed to what is a higher cognitive act of just assessing where the needs are greatest in the world. One could argue that we are not evolutionarily well designed to do that. We aren't. I mean, I remember you cited the Slovak findings. I think it was in the moral landscape where you say something to the fact that there's never been a psychological finding. So blatantly shows a moral error. Whatever your moral philosophy is, you shouldn't think that one life is worth more than eight, let alone worth more than 100, especially when the eight contain the one life. You're concerned. Exactly. It's a moral disaster. And I mean, the cool thing is that upon reflection, we could realize this. So I'm not one of these psychologists who go on about how stupid we are because I think every demonstration of human stupidity or irrationality has contained with it a demonstration of our intelligence. Because we know it's irrational. We could point it out and say, God, that's silly. My book cites a lot of research show demonstrating the sort of phenomena you're talking about. But it's an old observation. Adam Smith, like, 300 years ago, about 300 years ago, said gave the example of an educated man of Europe hearing that the country of China was destroyed at a time when no, they would have never known somebody from China. And the Smith says, basically, your average European man would say, well, that's a shame, and he'd go up on his day. But if he was to learn that tomorrow he would lose his little finger, he'd freak out. He wouldn't sleep at all at night. How am I lose my fingers? Will it be painful? How will it affect my life? And he uses an example to show that our feelings are skewed in bizarre ways. But then he goes on to point out that we can step back and recognize that the death of thousands is far greater to tragedy than the loss of our finger. And it's this dualism that this duality that fascinates me between what our gut tells us and what our minds tell us. I believe he also goes on to say that any man who would weigh the loss of his finger over the lives of thousands or millions in some distant country we would consider a moral monster. Yes, he says something human nature shudders at the thought. Right. It's one of the great passages in all of literature, really. I think I quote the whole thing in the moral landscape. So just a few points to pick up on what you just said about the neuroimaging research done on empathy versus compassion. It's something that people don't tend to know about the meditative side of this. But compassion as a response to suffering from a meditative first person and certainly from the view of of Buddhist psychology, is a highly positive emotion. It's not a negative emotion. You're not diminished by the feeling of compassion. The feeling of compassion is really exquisitely pleasurable. It is what love feels like in the presence of suffering. The Buddhists have various modes of what is called lovingkindness and loving kindness is the generic feeling of wishing others happiness. And you can actually form this wish with an intensity that is really psychologically overwhelming, which is to say that it just drowns out every other attitude you would have toward friends or strangers or even enemies, right? You can just get this humming even directed at a person who has done you harm or who is just kind of objectively evil. You wish this person was no longer suffering in all the ways that they are and will to be the kind of evil person they are, and you wish you could improve them. And so Buddhist meditators acquire these states of mind, and it's the antithesis of merely being made to suffer by witnessing the suffering of others. It's the antithesis of being made depressed when you were in the presence of a depressed person, say. The fact that empathy and compassion are used, for the most part as synonyms in our culture is deeply confusing about what normative human psychology promises and just what is on the menu as far as conscious attitudes one can take toward the suffering of other people. I think that's right. I think that I'm now sort of getting in a debate in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences with an excellent neuroscientist who disagrees with me, and there's all sorts of interesting points to go back and forth. But at one point he complains about the terminology, and he says, compassion isn't opposed to empathy. It's a type of empathy to which my response is, who cares? We could I don't care how one calls it. I'm totally comfortable to call them different types of empathy, in which case I'm against one type of empathy for another. But the distinction itself is absolutely critical, and it's so often missed not only in the scientific field but also in everyday life. I published an article on empathy in the Boston Review, and I got a wonderful letter, which I quote in my book, with permission of the writer, by this woman who worked as a first responder after 911. And after doing this for about a week, she couldn't take it anymore. She was too oppressed by what she felt while her husband happily and cheerfully continued his work, and it didn't seem to harm him at all. And she was like, what is going on? Is something wrong with him? Is something wrong with me? And I think we make sense of this by saying that there's at least two processes that lead to kindness and good behavior that can, and one of them, empathy, has some serious problems. And if we could nurture compassion, we not only can make the world a better place, but we could enjoy ourselves while doing it. To be clear, you also differentiate two versions of empathy because there is the cognitive empathy of simply understanding another person's experience, and then there's the emotional contagion version, which we're talking about, which is you are permeable to their suffering in a way that makes you suffer also. That's right. The cognitive empathy is kind of a different bag, and it's very interesting, and we might turn to this later if we talk about Trump, but it's an understanding what goes on in the minds of other people. And sometimes we call this mind reading or theory of mind or social intelligence. And to me, it's neither good nor bad. It's a tool. If you, Sam, want to make the world a better place and help people, help your family, help others, you can't do it unless you understand what people want, what affects people, what people's interests are, what they believe. Any good person, any good policy maker needs to have high cognitive empathy. On the other hand, suppose you wanted to bully and humiliate people, to seduce them against your will, to con them, to torture them. Here, too, high cognitive empathy will help if you want to make me miserable. It really helped to know how I work and how my mind works. So cognitive empathy is a form of intelligence. Like any sort of intelligence can be used in different ways. It's morally neutral. So to say that someone is highly empathic in that way is to simply say that they can take another person's point of view, but that can be used for good or evil. That's right. The worst people in the world have high cognitive empathy. It's how to be able to do so much damage. Right. I wanted to step back to something you said about meditative practice and Buddhism, because there were two things you said, and one is easy, really, to get behind, which is the pleasure that comes through this sort of practice, in doing good, in loving people, in caring about people. But one thing I struggle with, and I don't know whether we have different views on this, is over the blurring of distinctions that comes through Buddhism in this meditative practice. So there's a joke I like. It's my only Buddhism joke. Have you heard about the Buddhist vacuum cleaner? It comes with no attachments. And so one of the criticisms of Buddhist practice, and to some extent a criticism of my positions, is that there's some partiality we do want to have. Not only do I love my children more than one, more than I love you, but I think I'm right to love my children more than I love you. Okay, we're going to end the podcast right now. One of the requirements of my podcast, Guest, is that they love me as much as their own children. I love you. Second, I love it's. My my two children, then you, then my wife. Okay. That's the appropriate ranking. Is that good? Especially for a third time guest yes. I think I'm agnostic as to whether one or the other answers is normative here, or whether there are equivalent norms which are just mutually incompatible. But you could create worlds that are equally good by each recipe. But I share your skepticism, or at least it's not intuitively obvious to me that if you could love everyone equally, that would be better than having some gradations of moral concern. When we extend the circle in the way that Peter Singer talks about of our moral concern, the world does get better and better. We want to overcome our selfishness, our egocentricity, our clannishness, our tribalism, our nationalism. All of those things, all of those boundaries we erect where we care more about what's inside than outside the boundary, those all seem at least they tend to be pathological, and they tend to be sources of conflict, and they tend to explain the inequities in our world that are just on their face, unfair, and in many cases, just unconscionable. But whether you want to just level all of those distinctions and love all homo sapiens equivalently, that I don't know. And I'm not actually skeptical that it is a state of mind that's achievable. I've met enough long term meditators and I've had enough experience in meditation and with psychedelics and just changing the dials on conscious states to believe that it's possible to actually obviate all of those distinctions and to just feel that love is nothing more than a state of virtually limitless aspiration for the happiness of other conscious creatures and that it need not be any more preferential or directed than that. When you're talking about a monk who has come out of a cave doing nothing but compassion meditation for a decade, you're talking about somebody who in most cases has no kids, doesn't have to function in the world the way we have to function. Certainly civilization doesn't depend on people like that forming institutions and running our world. And so I don't know what to make of the fact that let's just grant that it's possible to change your attitude in such a way that you really just feel equivalent love for everybody and there's no obvious cost to you for doing that. I don't know what the costs would be to the species or to society if everyone was like that. And intuitively, I feel like it makes sense for me to be more concerned and therefore much more responsible for and to my kids than for yours. But at a greater level of abstraction, when I talk about how I want society to be run, I don't want to try to legislate my selfishness. I have to understand that at the level of laws and institutions, fairness is a value that more often than not conserves everyone's interests better than successfully gaming a corrupt system. Yeah, I want to zoom in on the last thing you said because it was astonishing to me. But for most of what you're saying, I'm nodding in agreement. Certainly the world would be much better if our moral circle was expanded and certainly the world would be much better if we cared a little bit more for people outside of our group and correspondingly relatively less for people inside of our group. It's not that we don't care for our own enough. The problem is we don't care for others enough. And I love your distinction as well, which is a way I kind of think about it now, is, yeah, I love my children more than I love your children, but I understand stepping back that a just society should treat them the same, right? So so if I have a summer job opening, I understand my university regulations say I can't hire my sons. And, you know, I actually think that's a good rule. I love my sons. I'd like to hire them and be a job for them and everything, but I could step back and say, yeah, we shouldn't be allowed to lit our own personal preferences, our own emotional family ties, distort systems that should be just and fair. The part of what you said, which I just got to zoom in on, is do you really think it's possible, put aside somebody who has no prior attachments at all, some monk living in a cave? Have you met or do you think you ever will meet people who have had children and raised them, who would treat the death of their child no differently than death of a strange child? Yeah, I do, actually, and I'm not sure what I think of it. I can tell you these are extraordinarily happy people. So what you get from them is not a perceived deficit of compassion or love or engagement with the welfare of other people, but you get a kind of obliteration of preference. The problem in their case is it's a surface of compassion and love and engagement so that they don't honor the kinds of normal family ties or preferences that we consider normative and that we would be personally scandalized to not honor ourselves the norms of preference which seem good to us. And we would feel that we feel that we have a duty to enforce in our own lives, and we would be racked by guilt if we noticed a lapse in honoring those duties. These are people who have just blown past all of that because they have used their attention in such an unconventional and in some ways impersonal way. But it's an impersonal way that becomes highly personal or at least highly intimate in their relations with other people. So, for instance, I studied with one teacher in India, a man named Punjiji. Actually, he wasn't Buddhist, he was Hindu, but he was not teaching anything especially Hindu. He was talking very much in the tradition of if people are aware of these terms and I'll get them from my book Waking Up the Tradition of Advice to Vedanta, the nondual teachings of Vedanta, which are nominally Hindu, they're really just Indian. There's nothing about gods or goddesses or any of the Garish religiosity you see in Hinduism. He was a really. I mean, there was a lot that he taught that I disagreed with, or at least there were some crucial bits that he taught that I disagreed with. And again, you can find that in waking up, if you're interested, but he was a really shockingly charismatic and wise person to be in the presence of. He was really somebody who could just bowl you over with his compassion and the force of his attention. If I were not as scrupulous as I am about attributing, you know, causality here, 90% of the people who spent any significant time around this guy thought he had magic powers. This is a highly unusual experience of being in a person's presence. Part of what made him so powerful was that, actually, ironically, he had extraordinarily high empathy of the unproductive kind, but it was kind of anchored to nothing in his mind. So, for instance, if someone would have a powerful experience in his presence and start to cry, tears would just pour out of his eyes. He would just immediately start crying with the person. And when somebody would laugh, he would laugh twice as hard. It was like he was an amplifier of the states of consciousness of the people around him in a way that was really thrilling. Again, there was a feedback mechanism here where people would just have a bigger experience because of the ways in which he was mirroring their experience. And there was no sense at all that this was an act. I mean, he would have to have been the greatest actor on Earth for this to be brought off, but yeah, he's I think I forget the details of the story, but the story about how he behaved when his own son died would shock you with its apparent aloofness. Right? I mean, this is a person for whom a central part of his teaching was that death is not a problem, and he's not hanging on to his own life or the lives of those he loves with any attachment at all. And he was advertising the benefits of this attitude all the time because he was the happiest man you ever met. But I think when push came to shove and he had to react to the death of his son, he wouldn't react the way you or I would or the way you or I would want to react. Given how we view the world, that's an extraordinary story. I mean, you have a lot of stories like that, and waking up of people like that, and I haven't encountered many such people. I met Matthew Ricard once, and it was a profoundly moving experience for me, and I'm not easily impressed. I tend to be cynical about people I tend to be fairly cynical about people who claim to have certain abilities and the like, but I suddenly had a short meeting from Tea, and we just talked, and there's something about people who have attained a certain mental capacity or set of capacities that you can tell by being with them that they have it. Their bodies afford it. They just give it off from a mile away. It's analogous to charisma, which some people have. Apparently. Bill Clinton is supposed to be able to walk into a large room and people just gather around him. Their eyes will be drawn towards him. And whatever it is that someone like Matthew Ricard has is extraordinary in a different way, which is he, in some literal sense, exudes peace and compassion. Having said that, some of it freaks me out. Some of it morally troubles me. I mean, we talked about the bonds of family, but I can't imagine any such people having bonds of friendship. I would imagine you get a lot of emails, Sam. I imagine you get a lot of email asking you for favors. So when I email you and say, hey, you don't have a book coming out, you in a mood for a podcast because we're friends, you respond to me different than if I were a total stranger. Suppose you didn't? Suppose you treated everything on its merits, with no bonds, no connectedness, it'd be hard to see you as a good person. But you don't see Matthew that way? No. If you knew more about the details of his life, you might find that it's not aligned with the way you parcel your concern. For instance, the example you just gave, he might be less preferential toward friends or not. I actually know Matthew. I don't often see him, but I've spent a fair amount of time with him. He's what I would call a minch. He's just like the most decent guy you're going to meet all year. He's just a wonderful person. But I studied with his teacher, Kensey Rinpoche, who was a very famous llama and who many Tibetan lamas thought was one of the greatest meditation masters of his generation. He died, unfortunately, about 20 years ago, but maybe it's more than that. I now notice as I get older, whenever I estimate how much time has passed, I'm off by 50% at least. Someone should study that problem. Self deception, I think, has something to do with it. So anyway, Kenny Rebeccae was just this 800 pound gorilla of meditation. He'd spent more than 20 years practicing in solitude, and Matthew was his closest attendant for years and years. I think just just to give you kind of to rank order what's possible here, matthew certainly wouldn't put himself anywhere near any of his teachers on the hierarchy of what's possible in terms of transforming your moment to moment conscious experience and therefore the likelihood of how you show up for others. Matthew is great because, as you know, he's got this he was a scientist before he became a monster. He was a molecular biologist. And the work he's done in collaborating with neuroscientists who do neuroimaging work on meditation, has been great. And. He's a real meditator, so he can honestly talk about what he's doing inside the scanner, and that's fantastic. But again, even in his case, he's made a very strange life decision, certainly from your point of view. He's decided to be a monk and to not have kids, to not have a career in science. It's in some ways an accident that you even know about him, because he could just be and for the longest time, he was just sitting in a tiny little monk cell in Kathmandu serving his guru. That's right. When I met him, he was spending six months of each year in total solitude, which again, boggles my mind, because if I spend a half hour by myself, I start to want to check my email and get anxious. It is impressive, and I accept your point, which is I need to sort of work to become more open minded about what the world would be like if certain things which I hold dear were taken away. There's a story I like of why economics got called dismal science, and it's because the term was given by Carlyle, and Carlyle was enraged at the economists who were dismissing an institution that Carlyle took very seriously. An economist said, this is an immoral institution, and Carlyle says, you have no sense of feeling, you have no sense of tradition. And he was talking about slavery, and so he was blasting the economists for being so cold blooded they couldn't appreciate the value and importance of slavery. And sometimes when I feel my own emotional pulls towards certain things, and I feel confident that whatever pulls I have along, say, racial lines are immoral, but I'm less certain about family lines or friendship lines, I think I need to be reminded. We all need to be reminded. Well, we need to step back and look, what will future generations say? What can we say when we're at our best? Selves it's going to take more than that for me to give up the idea that I should love my children more than I love your children. But it is worth thinking about, and it's interesting to consider moral emergencies and how people respond in them and how we would judge their response. So just imagine if you had a burning building and our children were in there, and I could run in to save them. Say, I'm on site, and I can run in and save whoever I can save. But because I know my child's in there, my priority is to get my child, and who could blame me for that, right? So I run in there and I see your child, who I can quickly save, but I need to look for my child. So I just run past your child and go looking for mine. And at the end of the day, I save no one, say, or, I only save mine. It really was a zero sum contest between yours and mine. If you could watch that play out, if you had a video of what I did in that house and you saw me run past your child and just go looking for mine, I think it's just hard to know where to find the norm. There. A certain degree of searching and a certain degree of disinterest with respect to the fate of your child begins to look totally pathological. It looks just morbidly selfish. But some bias seems only natural. And we might view me strangely if I showed no bias at all. Again, I don't know what the right answer is there. We're living as though almost a total detachment from other people's fates apart from the fates of our own family is normal and healthy. And when push comes to shove, I think that is clearly revealed to not be healthy. Right. It's plain that the extremes are untenable. Imagine you weren't looking for your child, but your child's favorite teddy bear. Right. Well, then then and you're kind of a monster searching around for that while my child burns to death. I mean, to make matters worse, Peter Singer is famously, I think it very convincingly pointed out that the example you're giving is a sort of weird science fiction example. And you might reassure us, well, that'll never happen. But Singer points out, we're stuck in this dilemma every day of our lives as we devote resources. I, like a lot of parents, spend a lot of money on my kids, including things that they don't things that make their lives better but aren't necessary. And things are just fun, expensive toys and vacations and so on while other children die. And Singer points out that I really am in that burning building I am in that burning building buying my son an Xbox while kids from Africa die in the corner. And it's difficult to confront this, and I think people get very upset when Peter Singer brings it up. But it is a moral dilemma that we are continually living with and continually struggling with. And I don't know what the right answer is, but I do have a sense that the way we're doing it every day is the wrong way. We are not devoting enough attention, those in need. We are devoting too much attention to those we love. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I had Singer on the podcast and I also had Will McCaskill, who very much argues in the same line, and I don't have a good answer. I think one thing I did as a result of my conversation with Will was I realized that I needed to kind of automate this insight. So Will is very involved in the effective altruism community and he arguably, I think, started the movement. And there are websites like Givewell.org That Rate charities, and they've quantified that to save an individual human life costs now $3,500. That's the amount of money you have to allocate where you can say, as a matter of likely math, you have saved one human life. And the calculation there is with reference to the work of the Against Malaria Foundation, they put up these insecticide treated bed nets, and malaria death has come down by 50%. It's still close to a million people dying every year, but it was very recently, 2 million people dying a year from mosquito borne not all mosquito borne illness, just malaria, actually. So in response to my conversation with Will, I just decided, well, I'm still going to buy the Xbox. I know that I can't conform my life and the fun I have with my kids so fully to this logic of this triage, right, so that I strip all the fun out of life and just give everything to the Against Malaria Foundation. But I decided that the first $3,500 that comes into the podcast every month will just, by definition, go to the Against Malaria Foundation. I don't have to think about it just happens every month. I would have to decide to stop it from happening, I think, doing more things like that. So what Will does is there's actually a giving pledge where people decide to give 10% of their I think it's at least 10% of their income to charity and to these most effective charities each year. Any kind of change you want to see in the world that you want to be effective, automating it and taking it out of the cognitive overhead of having to be reinspired to do it each day or each year, each period, that's an important thing to do. That's why I think the greatest changes in human well being and in human morality will come not from each of us individually refining our ethical code to the point where we are bypassing every moral illusion, right? So that every time Paul Slovic shows us a picture of a little girl, we have the exact right level of concern. And when we see eight kids, we have eight fold more, or whatever it would be. But to change our laws and institutions and tax codes and everything else so that more good is getting done without us having to be saints in the meantime. I think that that's right. I think that this comes up a lot in discussions of empathy. So I talk about the failings of empathy in our personal lives, particularly, say, giving to charity or deciding how to treat other people. And a perfectly good response I sometimes get is, well, okay, I'm a high empathy person. What am I going to do about it? And, you know, one answer concerns activities like meditative practice, but, you know, you could be skeptical over how well that works for many people. I mean, I think your answer is best, which is, in a good society and actually as good individuals, we're smart enough to develop procedures, mechanisms that take things out of our hands. And this applies at every level. The political theorist John elster points out that's what a constitution is. A constitution is a bunch of people saying, look, we are irrational people, and sometime in the future we're going to be tempted to make dumb, irrational choices. So let's set up something to stop us, and let's set up something that to override our base instincts. We can change this stopping mechanism, but let's make it difficult to change. So it takes years and years. So no matter how much americans might choose, they want to reelect a popular president for a third term, they can't. If all the white americans decide they want to reinstantiate the institution of slavery, they can't. And laws work that way. Constitutions work that way. I think good diets work that way, and charitable giving could work that way in that you have automatic withdrawal or whatever. So in an enlightened moment, you say, this is the kind of person I want to be, and you don't wait for your gut feelings all the time. I think overriding other disruptive sentiments works the same way. Like, suppose I have to choose somebody to be a graduate student or something like that. And I know full well that there are all sorts of biases having to do with physical attractiveness, with race, with gender. And suppose I believe upon contemplation that it shouldn't matter. It shouldn't matter how good looking the person is. It shouldn't matter whether they were from the same country as me. Well, one thing I could try to do is say, okay, I'm going to try to really be very hard. I'm going to try very hard not to be biased. We're horrible at that. We overcorrect, we under, correct. We justify. So what we do when we're at our best is develop some systems. Like, for instance, you don't look at the pictures. You do some sort of blind reviewing so your biases can't come into play. Now, it's harder to see how this is done when it comes to broader policy decisions, but people are working on it. Paul slovic, actually, who we've referenced a few times, talks about this a lot. So right now, for instance, governments decisions over where to send aid or where to go to war are made basically on gut feelings and are basically based on sad stories and photographs of children washed ashore and so on. And it just makes the world worse. And people like slovak wonder, can we set up some fairly neutral triggering procedures that say in america, when a situation gets this bad, according to some numbers and some objective judgments, it's a national emergency. We send in money overseas. If this many people die under such and so circumstances, we initiate some sort of investigative procedure. It sounds cold and bureaucratic, but I think cold and bureaucratic is much better than hot blooded and arbitrary. There was something you said when referencing the soccer study in group empathy and out group schadenfreude, I guess. Yes. And this reminded me of a question we got on Twitter. Someone was asking about the relationship between empathy and identity politics. I guess based on the research you just cited, there's a pretty straightforward connection there. Do you have any thoughts on that? There's a profound connection. We're very empathic creatures, but it always works out that the empathy tends to focus on those from within our group and not to the outgroup. I got into a good discussion once with Simon Baron Cohen, the psychologist, who's very pro empathy, and he said that if only we were talking about the time of the of the war in Gaza, and he's talking only the Palestinians and the Israelis had more empathy, this wouldn't happen. The Israelis would realize that the suffering of the Palestinians and vice versa, and there would be peace. And my feeling here is that that's exactly it's exactly the opposite, that that conflict in particular suffered from an abundance of empathy. The Israelis at the time felt huge empathy for the suffering of teenagers who were kidnapped, of their families. The Palestinians felt tremendous empathy for their countrymen who were imprisoned and tortured. There were abundant empathy, and there's always abundant empathy at the core of any conflict. And the reason why it drives conflict is I feel tremendous empathy for the American who is tortured and captured. And as a rule, it's very hard for me to feel empathy for the Syrian or for Iraqi and so on. We could now pull it down a little bit in the aftermath of 2016 election. I think Clinton voters are exquisitely good at empathy towards other Clinton voters and Trump voters. For Trump voters, having empathy for your political enemies is difficult, and I think actually, for the most part, so hard that it's not worth attaining. We should try for other things. I think we certainly want the other form of empathy. I mean, we want to be able to understand why people decided what they decided. And we don't want to be just imagining motives that don't exist or awaiting them in ways that are totally unrealistic. We inevitably will say something about politics. People would expect that of us. By law, there could be no discussion of over 30 minutes. It doesn't mention Trump. I'm going to steer you toward Trump. But before we go there, as you may or may not know, I've been fairly obsessed with artificial intelligence over the last, I don't know, 18 months or so. And we solicited some questions from Twitter, and many people asked about this. Have you gone down this rabbit hole at all? Have you thought about AI much? And there was one question I saw here which was, given your research on empathy, how should we program an AI with respect to it? So I actually hadn't taken seriously the AI worries. And honestly, I'll be honest, I dismissed them as somewhat crackpot until I listened to you talk about it. I think it was a ted talk. Thank you. That got me worried about yet something else. No. Good. And I found it fairly persuasive that there's an issue here. We should be devoting a lot more thought to the question of putting empathy into machines, which is, I think, in some way morally fraught, because if I'm right that empathy leads to capricious and arbitrary decisions, then if we put empathy into computers and robots, we end up with capricious and arbitrary computers and robots. I think when people think about putting empathy into machines, they often think about it from a marketing point of view, such that a household robot or even an interface on a Mac computer that is somewhat empathic, will be more pleasurable to interact with more humanoid, more human like, and will get more pleasure dealing with it. And that might be the case. I've actually heard a contrary view from my friend David Pizarro, who points out that when dealing with a lot of interactions, we actually don't want empathy. We want a sort of cold blooded interaction that we don't have to become emotionally invested in. We want professionalism of our superintelligent AI. I think we want professionalism more than we want emotional contagion. If you're anxious and consulting your robot doctor, you don't want that anxiety mirrored back to you. Right. You want as stately a physician as you ever met in the living world now embodied in this machine. Yeah. So I'm very happy if I have a home blood pressure cuff, which just gives me the numbers and doesn't say, oh, man, I feel terrible for you, this must be very upsetting. Whoa. Yeah, dude, I'm holding back here. The machine starts to a little graphical, tears trickle down to interface. I'm sure people involved in marketing these devices think that they're appealing. I think that David is right. And we're going to discover that for a lot of interfaces, we just want sort of an affect free, emotion free interaction. As I find, for instance, with interfaces where you have to call the airport or something when it reassures me that it's worried about me and so on. I find it clawing and annoying and intrusive. I just want the data. I want to save my empathy for real people. Yeah, but I think the question goes to what will be normative on the side of the AI. So do we want AI? I guess let's leave consciousness aside for the moment. That's right. But do we want an AI that actually has more than just factual knowledge of our preferences, insofar as it could emulate our emotional experience? Could that give it capacities I see that we want it to have so as to better conserve our interests? So here's my take on it. I think we want AI with compassion. I think we particularly want AI with compassion towards us. I'm not sure whether this came from you or somebody else, but somebody gave the following scenario for how the world will end. The world is going to end when someone programs a powerful computer that interfaces with other things to get rid of spam on email, and then the computer will promptly destroy the world as a suitable way to do this. We want machines to be have a guard against doing that, where they say, well, human life is valuable, human flourishing and animal feeder flourishing is valuable. So if I want AI that is involved in making significant decisions, I want it to have compassion. I don't, however, want it to have empathy. I think empathy, it makes us, among other things, racist. The last thing in the world we need is racist AI. There's been some concern that we already have racist AI. Have you heard this? Yes, I have. Go ahead, remind me. If I recall correctly, there are algorithms that decide on the parole of prisoners or whether people get mortgages. And there is some evidence I could be making a bit of a hash of this, but there was some evidence in one or both of these categories that the AI was taking racial characteristics into its calculation and then that hadn't been programmed in. That was just an emergent property of it finding of all the data available. This data was relevant. In the case of prisoners, the recidivism rate. If it's just a fact that Black parolees recidivate more, reoffend more I don't know, in fact, that it is, but let's just say that it is, and an AI notices that. Well, then, of course the AI, if you're going to be predicting whether a person is likely to violate their parole, you are going to take race into account. If it's actually descriptively, true of the data, that it's a variable, and so I think there there was at least one story I saw where you had people scandalized by racist AI when I was was young and very nerdy, more nerdy than I am now. I like gobble up all science fiction. And Isaac Asimov had a tremendous influence on me and he had all of his work on robots and he had these three laws of robotics. If you think about it from a more sophisticated view, the laws of robotics weren't particularly morally coherent. Like one of them is you should never harm a human or through an action allow a human to come to harm. But does that mean the robots going to run around trying to save people's lives all the time? Because we're continually not allowing people to come to harm. But the spirit of the endeavor is right, which is I would wire up. In fact, I think in some way as robots now, I become more powerful. You could imagine becoming compulsory to wire up these machines with some morality. This comes up with driving cars, sorry, with automatic drive, the computer driven cars. Where are they going to be utilitarian? Are they going to have principles? And there's a lot of good debates on that. But they have to be something they have to have some consistent moral principles that take into account human life and human flourishing. And the last thing you want to stick in there is is something that says, well, if someone is adorable, care for them more. Always count a single life as more than 100 lives. There's no justification for putting the sort of stupidities of empathy that we're often stuck with to putting them into the machines that we create. That's one thing I love about this moment of having to think about super intelligent AI. It's amazingly clarifying of moral priorities. All these people who, until yesterday, said, well, who's to say what's true in the moral sphere? Once you force them to weigh in on how should we program the algorithm for self driving cars, they immediately see that, okay, you have to solve these problems one way or another. These cars will be driving do you want them to be racist cars? Do you want them to preferentially drive over old people as opposed to children? What makes sense? And to say that there is no norm, there to be followed is to just you're going to be designing one by accident. Then if you make a car that is totally unbiased with respect to the lives it saves, well, then you've made this Buddhist car, right? You've made the Matthew Ricard car say, that may be the right answer, but you have taken a position just by default. And the moment you begin to design away from that kind of pure equality, you are forced to make moral decisions. And I think it's pretty clear that we have trolley problems that we have to solve. And we have at a minimum, we have to admit that killing one person is better than killing five. And we have to design our cars to to have that preference. When you put morality in the hands of the engineers, you see that you can't take refuge in any kind of moral relativism. You actually have to answer these questions for yourself. I envisioned this future where you walk into a car dealership and you order one of these cars and you're sitting back and you're paying for it. And then you're asked, what kind of setting do you want? Do you want racist, Buddhist, radical, feminist, religious fundamentalist? I don't know if you've heard this research, but when they ask people what the cars should do on the question of how biased should it be to save the driver over the pedestrians, say, so if it's a choice between avoiding a pedestrian and killing the driver or killing the pedestrian, how should the car decide? Most people say in the abstract it should just be unbiased. It should be indifferent between those two. But when you ask people, would you buy a car that was indifferent between the driver's life and the and the pedestrians, they say no. They want they want a car that's going to protect their lives. So it's hard to adhere to the thing you think is the right answer, it seems. And there I actually don't know how you solve that problem. I think probably the best solution is to not advertise how you've solved it. That's interesting. Yeah. I think if you make it totally transparent, it will be a barrier to the adoption of technology that will be, on balance, immensely life saving for everyone, drivers and pedestrians included. We now have tens of thousands of people every year reliably being killed by cars. We could bring that down by a factor of ten or 100, and then the deaths that would remain would still be these tragedies that we would have to think long and hard about whether the algorithm performed the way we wanted to, but still that we have to adopt this technology as quickly as is feasible. So I think transparency here could be a bad idea. I think it's true. I know people who have insisted they would never go into a self driving car, and I find this bizarre because the alternative is far more dangerous. But you're right, and I think there's also this fear of new technology where there'll be a reluctance to use them. Apparently there was a reluctance to use elevators that didn't have an elevator operator for a long time, so they have to have some schnucks stand there in order so people would feel calm enough to go inside that. But I agree with the general point, which is a more general one, which is there's no opting out of moral choices. Failing to make a moral choice over, say, giving to charity or what your car should do is itself a moral choice and driven by a moral philosophy. I also just can't resist adding, and I think this is from the very bad Wizards group, but you could imagine a car that had a certain morality and then you got into it and it automatically drove you to, like, Oxfam and refused to let you move until you gave them a lot of money. You don't want too moral a car, you want a car sort of just moral enough to do your bidding, but not much more. Have you been watching any of these shows or films that deal with AI, like Ex Machina or Westworld or Humans? I've been watching all of these shows that deal with AI, and they all deal with Ex Machina and Westworld all deal with the struggle we have. When something looks human enough, acts human enough, it is irresistible not to treat it as a person. And their philosophers and psychologists and lay people might split. They might say, look, if it looks like a person and talks like a person, everything, then it has a consciousness like a person. Dan Dennett would would most likely say that. And it's interesting. Different movies and different TV shows. And I actually think movies and TVs are often instruments of some very good philosophy. They go different ways on this ex machina. I hate to spoil it. So viewers should turn on the sound for next seconds. They don't want to hear it. But there's a robot that's entirely you feel tremendous empathy for her and caring for her. The main character trusts her and then she cold bloodily betrays them, locks them in a room to starve to death while she goes on her way. And it becomes entirely clear that all of this was simply a mechanism that she used to win over his love. Well, for Westworld, it's more the opposite, where the hosts, I guess, Dolores and others are seen as they're really people, as viewers were supposed to see them as people. And the guests who forget about this, who brutalize them, they're the monsters. Yeah, it's very interesting. I think all of these films and shows are worth watching. They're all a little uneven from my point of view. There are moments where you think this isn't the greatest film or the greatest television show you've ever seen, but they all have their moments where they as you said, they're really doing some very powerful philosophy by forcing you. To have this vicarious experience of being in the presence of something that is passing the Turing test in a totally compelling way and not the way that Turing originally set it up. I mean, we're talking about robots that are no longer in the uncanny valley and looking weird. They are looking like humans. They're as human as human, and they are, in certain of these cases, much smarter than people. And this reveals a few things to me that are probably not surprising. But again, it's to experience it vicariously, just hour by hour. Watching these things is different than just knowing it in the abstract. That's right. The best movies and films and movies and TV shows and books often take a philosophical thought experiment and they make it vivid in such a way you could really appreciate it. And I think that sentient's, realistic humanoid AI is a perfect example of these shows. Confronting us with this is a possibility. How will we react? I think it tells us how we will react. I think once something looks like a human and talks like a human and demonstrates intelligence, that is at least at human level, I think for reasons I gave somewhere on this podcast and elsewhere when I've talked about AI, I think human level AI is a mirage. I think that the moment we have anything like human level AI, we we will have superhuman AI. We're not going to make our AI that passes the Turing Test less good at math than your phone is. It'll be a superhuman calculator. It will be superhuman in every way that it does. Anything that narrow, AI does. Now. So once this all gets knit together in a humanoid form, that passes the Turing Test and shows general. Intelligence and looks as good as we look, which is to say it looks as much like a locus of consciousness as we do, then I think a few things will happen very quickly. One is that we will lose sight of the fact of whether or not it's philosophically or scientifically interesting to wonder whether this thing is conscious. I think some people like me who are convinced that the hard problem of consciousness is real, might hold on to it for a while. But every intuition we have of something being conscious, every intuition we have that other people are conscious, will be driven hard in the presence of these artifacts. And it will be true to say that we won't know whether they're conscious unless we understand how consciousness emerges from the physical world. But we will follow Dan Dennett in feeling that it's no longer interesting question because we find we actually can't stay interested in it in the presence of machines that are functioning at least as well, if not better than we are and will almost certainly be designed to talk about their experience in ways that suggest that they're having an experience. And so that's one part that we will grant them consciousness by default, even though we may have no deep reason to believe that they're conscious. And the other thing that is brought up by Westworld to a unique degree, I guess, humans also, is that many of the ways in which people imagine using robots of this sort, we would use them in ways at least we imagine that we wouldn't use other human beings on the assumption that they're not conscious, right? That they're just computers that really can't suffer. But I think this is the other side of this coin. Once we helplessly attribute states of consciousness to these machines, it will be damaging to our own sense of ourselves to treat them badly. We're going to be in the presence of digital slaves. And just how well do you need to treat your slaves? And what does it mean to have a superhumanly intelligent slave that just becomes a safety problem? How do you maintain a master servant relationship to something that's smarter than you are and getting smarter all the time? But part of what Westworld brings up is that you are destroying human consciousness by letting yourself act out all of your base or impulses on robots on the assumption that they can't suffer. Because the acting out is part of the problem. It actually diminishes your own moral worth whether or not these robots are conscious, right? So you have these two things intention. One is that when it starts to look like a person and talk, it'll be irresistible to see it as conscious. You know, you could walk around and you could talk to me and doubt that I'm conscious, and we could doubt that about other people. But it's an intellectual exercise. It's irresistible to treat other people as having feelings emotions, consciousness, and it will be irresistible to treat these machines as well, and then we want to use them. And so in Westworld is a particularly dramatic example of this, where characters are meant to be raped and assaulted and shot, and it's supposed to be fun and games. But the reality of it is these two things are in tension. Anybody who were to assault the character to Loris, the young woman who's a robot, would be seen as morally indistinguishable from someone who would assault any person. And so we are at risk for the first time in human civilization of, in some sense, building machines that we are then it's morally repugnant to use in the sense that they're constructed for it would be like genetically engineering a race of people but wiring up their brains so that they're utterly subservient and enjoy performing at our will. Well, that's kind of gross. And I think we would we're very quickly going to reach a point where we'll see the same thing with our machines. And then what I would imagine is and this goes back to building machines without empathy or perhaps without compassion, is there may be a business in building machines to do things that aren't that smart. I'd rather have my floor vacuumed by Arumba than by somebody who has an IQ of 140 but is wired up to be a slave. I think the humanoid component here is the main variable. If it looks like a roomba, it actually doesn't matter how smart it is. You won't feel that you're enslaving a conscious creature. What if it could talk? It comes down to the interface. Insofar as you humanize the interface, you drive the intuitions that now you're in relationship to a person. But if you make it look like a roomba and sound like Arumba, it doesn't really matter what its capacities are as long as it still seems mechanical. I mean, the interesting wrinkle there, of course, is that, ethically speaking, what really should matter is what's true on the side of the roomba, right? So if the roomba can suffer if you've built a mechanical slave that you can't possibly empathize with because it doesn't have any of the user interface components that would allow you to do it, but it's actually having an experience of the world that is vastly deeper and richer and more poignant than your own, right? Well, then you have just the term of Jargon now in the AI community. I think this is probably due to Nick Bostrom's book, but maybe he got this from somewhere. The term is mind crime. You're creating minds that can suffer, whether in simulation or in individual robots. This would be an unimaginably bad thing to do. I mean, you would be on par with Yahweh, creating a hell and populating it. If there's more evil to be found in the universe than that, I don't know where to look for it. But that's something we're in danger of doing, insofar as we're rolling the dice with some form of information processing being the basis of consciousness. If consciousness is just some version of information processing, well, then if we begin to do that well enough, it won't matter whether we can tell from the outside, we may just create it inside something we can't feel compassion for. That's right. So there are two points. One point is your moral one, which is whether or not we know it. We may be doing terrible moral acts. We may be constructing conscious creatures and then tormenting them. Or alternatively, we may be creating creatures that machines that do our bidding and have no consciousness at all. It's no worse to assault the robot in Westworld than it is to bang a hammer against your toaster. So that's the moral question. But it still could diminish you as a person to treat her like a toaster yes. Given what she looks like. So raping Dolores on some level turns you into a rapist, whether or not she's more like a woman or more like a toaster. Yes. This treatment of robots is akin to I forget the philosopher. I forget who the philosopher was, but the claim was that animals have no moral status at all. However, you shouldn't torment animals because it will make you a bad person with regard to other people. And people count. And it's true. One wonders. After all, we do all sorts of killing and harming of virtual characters on video games, and that doesn't seem to transfer. It hasn't made us worse people. If there is an effect on increasing our violence towards real humans, it hasn't shown up in any of the homicide statistics and the studies are a mess. But I would agree with you that there's a world of difference between sitting in my Xbox and shooting aliens, as opposed to a real physical feeling, say, of strangling someone who's indistinguishable from a person. And that's the second point. Which is, even if they aren't conscious, even if, as a matter of fact, from a god's eye view, they're just things, it will seem to us as if they're conscious. And then the act of tormenting conscious people will either be repugnant to us or if it isn't, it will lead us to be worse moral beings. So those are the dilemmas we're going to run into probably within our lifetimes. Yeah. Actually, there's somebody coming on the podcast in probably a month who can answer this question, but I don't know which is closer realistically machine intelligence that passes the Turing test or robot interface, you know, robot faces that are no longer uncanny to us. Yeah. I don't know which will be built first, but it is interesting to consider that the association here is a strange machine. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast. Along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. On today's podcast. I'll be playing the audio from the first of two live events I did with Richard Dawkins in Los Angeles last month. And these were fundraisers for his foundation, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, which is also in the process of merging with the center for Inquiry, making them the largest foundation for defending science and secularism from politically weaponized religion. Their work is suddenly even more relevant in the US. Because, although Trump himself isn't a religious demagogue, he's promised to appoint a few to the Supreme Court. And he's also put a creationist in charge of the Department of Energy, which both stewards our nuclear weapons and funds more basic science research than any other branch of government. So now we have Rick Perry in charge of all that. His immediate predecessors were each physicists, one was a Nobel laureate, and Perry is a man who I would be willing to bet my life couldn't utter three coherent sentences on the topic of energy as a scientific concept. So I would urge you to become a member of CFI or the Richard Dawkins Foundation. One membership now covers both organizations, and once you are a member, you'll occasionally receive action alerts requesting that you contact your elected representatives on matters of public policy. As many have noted, nonbelievers are somewhere between ten and 2020 5% of the US. Population. It's hard to know for sure, but we almost certainly outnumber many other subgroups in the US. And we are disproportionately well educated, needless to say, and yet we have almost no political power. Now, this will only change once we make ourselves heard. So Richard was doing a speaking tour to raise funds for his foundation and for CFI, and he asked me to join him at one of these events. And our event in La sold out almost immediately, and so we booked the hall for a second night, and that sold out too. And I'll bring you the audio from that second event in a later podcast. But as you'll hear, we had a lot of fun, and it was a great crowd, and it was really satisfying to have a conversation like this live as opposed to privately over Skype. So, as I'll say at the end, this has given me an idea for how to produce some more podcasts like that. And now I give you an evening with Richard Dawkins the first night. Thank you all for coming. This is really an honor to be here and it really is an honor to be here with you, Richard. I get to return the favor. He had me at Oxford, I think, five years ago. So welcome to Los Angeles. So this is going to be very much a conversation. But what I did, I was worried about this. I wasn't worried about tonight, I was worried about tomorrow night. My fear was that Richard and I would have a a scintillating conversation tonight and then tomorrow night try doggedly to recapitulate it word for word and yet feign spontaneity. And if you know my position online, that doesn't work. So what I did is I went out to all of you asking for questions, and I got thousands. And so I picked among what looked promising. So I can guarantee that the two nights will be reasonably different because the different questions will come up. But we won't hew too narrowly to the questions. We'll just have a conversation. But as we come out here, I find that I want to ask you, Richard, about your socks. And I'm not sure what the question is, but I've just come from Las Vegas, the conference of Cyclone, and one of the things we had was a workshop on cold reading, which is a technique whereby so called mentalists are supposed to read each other's thoughts. And what they're really doing is just simply looking at the clothes and the general appearance and assessing it. And we had to pair off for this workshop, and I was with a nice young woman, and we sort of sized each other up. And I said to her, I think I'm guessing that you come from somewhere in the west of the state. I think maybe not California, maybe a bit further north. Of course, I was going to be reading her label, which said she came from Oregon. And then she summed me up when she said, I think you may have some problem with your eyes, maybe color blind. And I'm serious about this. I'm trying to spread a meme for wearing odd socks. There's a kind of tyranny of forcing us to buy socks in tail. Shoes have chirality. Left shoe and right shoe are not interchangeable, but socks don't. And when you lose one of a pair of socks, you're forced to throw the other one away. It's absurd. Then what I want although, honestly, Richard, you just told me a story that suggests that shoes are in. My God. That's right. That's rather an embarrassing story. Someone is going to find this on the relevant video on the Internet story. Now you've let the cat out of the bag. I was doing a television film called Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life. And in the death episode, we were talking about suicide. And there's a famous suicide spot. It's a bit like san Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, where people have famously jumped to their death. And all around this place, Beachy Head is a very, very high cliff in the south of England, there are rather sad little crosses where people have jumped off. And we were filming the sequence on Suicide, and I had to walk very solemnly and slowly, and in a melancholy frame of mind passed these crosses, and the camera was focused on my feet walking past these little low crosses, and I felt incredibly uncomfortable. I had this sort of uncanny feeling of being uncomfortable, and I couldn't understand why. And then eventually it was my feet that were uncomfortable walking past these crosses, and eventually the director called Cart and we went off and I took my shoes off because they were so painful, and only then did irella I put them on the wrong way round. So this is preserved for posterity in close up. I want to see that video. Someone finds that video, none of none of the television audience ever wrote in to complain about this. Maybe this, at least will round their attention. So the first question, Richard, which I thought could provoke some interesting reflection, is why do you both court so much controversy? We don't do it. We don't court it. It pursues us. Well, I think what I've noticed is that there are undoubtedly people who are friends of ours, colleagues of ours, who agree with us down the line, who seem to feel no temptation to pick all of the individual battles we pick. And one doesn't have to be a coward not to want to fight all of these culture war battles, although it helps. But we have friends who are decidedly not cowards, who someone like Steve Pinker. He stakes out controversial positions, but he is not in the trenches in quite the same way as we are. And I'm wondering what you think about that. Did you see a choice for yourself? Do you find yourself revisiting this choice periodically? I think it's a perfectly respectable position to take that a scientist has better things to do, and I don't take that position, and I think you don't either. I do think it's important to fight the good fight when we do have when science, when reason has vocal and powerful and well financed enemies. And so I'm not sure what particular battles the questioner has in mind when he says we caught controversy. But I suppose I believe so strongly in truth, and if I see truth being actively threatened by competing ideologies, which actually not only would fight for the opposite of truth, but would indoctrinate children in the opposite of truth, I feel impelled to fight only verbally. I mean, I don't feel impelled to actually get a rifle or something. Well, there's time yet, I guess, the dogma, that has convinced so many fellow scientists and intellectuals, academics, that there is no reason to fight, certainly. But one of those dogmas is Stephen Jay Gould's idea of noma non overlapping magisteria. That strikes me as a purely wrongheaded and destructive idea. Do you want to explain that though? I think we probably agree about that non overlapping magisteria. He wrote a book called what was it again called? It the Rock of Ages. Rocket Rock of Ages. That's right. So science has the age of the rocks and religion has the Rock of ages. And the idea was that science and religion both have their legitimate territories which they shouldn't hinge upon each other. Science has the truth about the real world in that sciences department. Religion has what he described as moral questions and I think deep questions of existence, meaning and morality. Well I would strongly dispute the idea that we should get our morals from religion. For goodness sake. Whatever else we get our morals from it must not be religion. That would be if you imagine what the world would be like if we actually did get our morals from the Bible or the Quran. It would be totally appalling and was appalling in the time when we did get from the Bible. It is now appalling in those countries where they get it from the Quran. So don't let us get our morals from religion. As for the deep fundamental questions, I take those to be things like where did the laws of physics come from? What is the origin of all things? What is the origin of the cosmos? What happened before the Big bang? Those are scientific questions. It may be that science can never answer them. But if science cannot answer them, sure as hell religion can't answer them. I don't actually think anything can answer them. If science can't. It's an open question whether things like the origin of the physical constants, those numbers which physicists can measure but can't explain the origin of the laws of physics, whether those will ever be explained by science. If they are well and good. If they're not, then nothing will explain them. The idea, I mean Steve Gould was careful to say that these separate magisterium must not encroach on each other's territory. And so the moment religion encroaches on science territory, for example in the case of miracles, then it's fair game for scientific criticism. But my feeling about that is that if you take away the miracles from religion you've taken away most of why people believe in them. People believe in the supernatural because they believe biblical or Quranic stories which suggest that there have been supernatural miracles. And if you deprive them of that then they've lost everything to take. Christianity is only one example that that has been spelled out in every generation. I mean starting with Paul, he said, you know, if Christ be not risen your faith is vain. Exactly. Yeah. Or something close to that. Yes. So it's you can't, you can't get around the fact that religious people care about what's true and they purport to be making claims, truth claims about the nature of reality. They think certain historical figures actually existed. Some of them may be coming back. Yes. Virgin birth books issue occasionally from a divine intelligence and so there's just no way to I never met Gould but I just can't believe the currency this idea has in science. I agree it's become very fashionable among scientific establishment. It was more or less endorsed by the US National Academy of Sciences. As for the separation, as for the idea that religion doesn't stray into science's territory, imagine the following scenario imagine that some sort of scientific evidence, perhaps DNA evidence, were discovered perhaps somewhere in a cave in Palestine and it was demonstrated that, say, Jesus never had a father. It's inconceivable how that could happen. Just suppose it was suppose there was scientific evidence. Can you imagine theologian saying, oh, that science. Is that not our department? They would love it. It would be meat and drink to them. Yeah. Many people who are not atheists believe that your efforts against religion are wasted and that the net result of your work is to simply offend religious people. There's a widespread myth that people can't be reasoned out of their faith. Please talk about this. It's just uncanny that there are the most memorable quips and quotes and phrases. Anything that is aphoristic seems to have undue influence on our thinking. And there's this aphorism that is usually attributed to Swift, I think he said something like it. It's not quite the version that has been passed down to us, but this idea that you can't reason someone out of a view that he wasn't reasoned into and this just strikes the mind of homo sapiens as so obviously true and if you look at my inbox it is so obviously false. So tell me about your experience reasoning with your readers. I think it would be terribly pessimistic to think that you cannot reason I think I'd just give up probably die. I thought I couldn't reason people out of their silliness. Would you agree with this? That there are some people who demonstrably do know all the evidence and even understand the evidence, but yet still persist in? Yeah. Well, so there will be a couple of questions that will bring us onto that territory, because there's more to reason about than science has tended to allow or that secular culture has tended to allow. So people have these intense transformative experiences or they have these hopes and fears that aren't captured by you saying don't you understand the evidence for evolution? But this is more of a conversation that people don't tend to have. But yeah, I would agree that people certainly resist conclusions that they don't like. I mean, the taste of I can think of two examples. One I mentioned in the reception beforehand, a professor of astronomy somewhere in America who writes papers, mathematical papers in astronomical journals in which his mathematics his mathematical ideas accept that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and yet he privately believes it's 6000 years old. So here is a man who knows his physics, he knows his astronomy, he knows the evidence that the universe is 13 billion years old and yet so split brained is he that he actually privately departs from everything in his professional life. Well, surely we have to accept that he I don't know. It cannot be reasoned out. But he already knows the evidence and will not be reasoned out of his foolishness. Yeah, I didn't say that you could always succeed, but I think clearly there are have this bias, as you do, that if the conversation could just proceed long enough, the ground for science would continually be conquered and it never gets reversed. And it is being and will be. Yeah. This is a uni directional conquest of territory. So you never see a point about which science was once the authority, but now the best answer is religious. Yeah, right, but you always see the reverse of that. Actually, most scientists who call themselves religious, if you actually probe them, they don't believe really stupid things like six day creation and things. Although I find that Christian scientists not Christian Scientists as in the cult, but scientists who happen to be Christian believe much more than your average rabbi. This is a way that's true Christianity and Muslim scientists no doubt return the favor. I get the feeling your average rabbi, like your average chaplain of an Oxford college, doesn't actually believe in God at all. Yeah, I've met that rabbi. So just a couple of fun questions here that I just want I just wanted to hear Richard react to. Are there any biological extinctions that you would consider virtuous? For instance, should we eradicate the mosquito? You have 10 seconds to decide. It would have to be more than one mosquito. There's the malaria mosquito, the yellow fever mosquito. Yeah, all mosquitoes. All mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are unbelievably beautiful creatures. That's the most irrational thing ever. The great the great expert on fleas and she she she presented the Department of Zoology in in Oxford with a gigantic blown up photograph of a mosquito. And it was a fantastic piece of work of art by a malevolent god. Yeah. Ever there were proof of God's. Malevolent. It's got to be the mosquito. I have no hesitation in killing individual mosquitoes. Wouldn't you want to be a little more efficient than that with CRISPR or something? I haven't thought about it before. I I think I would not wish to completely extinguish can I throw a little more on the balance? We we've had reliably, year after year, 2 million people killed by mosquito borne illness. Now now it's cut down to, I think, 800,000. So we're making progress with bed nets. But for some reason I find myself less reluctant to extinguish the malarial parasites of the mosquito bears. But that's probably not very logical. We have extinguished the smallpox virus, except for a few lab cultures. Yes. And then, like geniuses, then we tell people how to synthesize it online. So the flip side of that, of course, is the Jurassic Park question. Should we reboot the trex? If we had? Yes. That's fantastic. I thought the Jurassic method of doing it was incredibly ingenious, and I love that. What was not ingenious was the ludicrous injection of was it chaos theory? Or one of those nine days wonder, fashionable fit things? I don't remember. But the idea of getting mosquitoes in amber and extracting DNA and reconstructing dinosaurs, that's an amazingly good science fiction idea. If only it were possible. Unfortunately, the DNA is too old for that for that to happen. If it were, I would definitely wish to see that done. What? What could go wrong? Richard seems to want to live in a maximally dangerous world filled with mosquitoes and T Rexes. So, now, you and I were speaking about your books. You've written some very important books on ten years apart, and so you have an anniversary this year of The Selfish Gene, which is The Blind Watchmakers has its 30th anniversary, and Climbing Mountain Improbable is the 20th, and then The God Delusion is the 10th. So actually, I wanted to give you a chance to talk about the titles of the first two. The Selfish Gene has provoked an inordinate amount of confusion and The Blind Watchmaker is a phrase that is useful to understand. So do you want to yes. The Selfish Gene is misunderstood, I think, mostly by those who've read it by title only, as opposed to the rather substantial footnote to the title, which is the book itself. It could equally well have been called The Altruistic Individual, because one of the main messages of the book is that selfish genes give rise to altruistic individuals. So it is mostly a book about altruist, mostly a book about the opposite of selfishness. So it certainly should not be misunderstood as advocating selfishness or saying that we are, as a matter of fact, are always selfish. All it really means is that natural selection works at the level of the gene as opposed to any other level in the hierarchy of life. So genes that work for their own survival are the ones that survive tautologically enough, and they are the ones that build bodies. So we, all of us, contain genes that are very, very good at surviving because they've come down through countless generations and they are copied accurately, with very high fidelity from generation to generation, such that there are genes in you that have been around for hundreds of millions of years. And that's not true of anything else in the hierarchy of life. And individuals die. They don't. They survive only as a means to the end of propagating the genes that built them. So individual bodies, organisms, should be seen as vehicles, machines built by the genes that ride inside them for passing on those very same genes. And it is the potential eternal long lividness of genes that makes them the unit of selection. So that's really the meaning of the selfish gene. As I say, the book could have been called The Altruistic Individual. It could have been called The Cooperative Gene for another reason. It could have been called The Immortal Gene, which is a more sort of Carl Saganesque title, it's a more poetic title, and in some ways I rather regret not calling it The Immortal Gene. But anyway, I'd stuck with it. Now. There's a common, I think, misunderstanding of evolution that leads people to believe that absolutely everything about us must have been selected for, otherwise it wouldn't exist. So can you like so people ask about what's the evolutionary rationale for posttraumatic stress disorder or depression? Or is it I'm not I'm not saying that there is no conceivable one, but it need not be the case that everything we notice about ourselves was selected for or that there's a gene for that. This is very interesting. I'm actually a bit of an outlier here. I mean, I'm about as close as biologists come to accepting what you've described as a misconception because I do think that selection is incredibly powerful and mathematical models show this. JBS. Haldane, the Great, one of the three founding fathers of population genetics, did theoretical calculation in which he he say he postulated an extremely trivial character. He didn't mention it, but it might have been eyebrows. Suppose you believe that eyebrows have been selected because they stopped sweat running down your forehead into your eyes and it sort of sounds totally trivial. How could that possibly save a life until you realize the first thing you might realize is that it could save your life if you were about to be attacked by a lion. And just a slight split second difference in how quickly you see the lion because you've got sweat in your eyes since the invention of sunblock. I think that's undoubtedly true, yeah. Okay. But Holden actually did a mathematical calculation. He said, let us postulate a character so trivial that the difference between an individual who has it and an individual who doesn't have it is only one in a thousand. Let's say for every thousand individuals who have this, say the eyebrows and survive, 999 who don't have it survive. So from any actuarial point of view, a life insurance calculator would so totally trivial. But it's not trivial when you think that the genes concerned is represented in thousands of individuals in the population and through thousands of generations that multiplies up the odds. And Holden's calculation was that if you postulate that one in the thousand advantage, he then worked out how long would it take for the gene to spread from being I forget exactly the figure that, say, 1% of the population, up to 50% of the population. And it was a number of generations so short that it would be negligible on the geological times. So it would appear to be an instantaneous piece of evolutionary change, even though the selection pressure was trivial. Well, actually, selection pressures in the wild, when they've been measured, have been far, far stronger than that. But there's another way of approaching the question you raise when you say something like selective advantage in various psychological diseases, or something like that. It may be that you're asking the wrong question. It may be that by focusing on the particular characteristic which you asked the question about, you're ignoring the fact that there's something associated with that, which you've let me think, for example, you know that at night, if you've got a lamp outside or a candle is better. If you've got a candle, insects, moths come and sort of, as it were, commit suicide. I mean, they just burn themselves up in the candle. And you could ask the question, what on earth is the survival value of suicidal self immolation behavior in moths? Well, it's the wrong question because a probable explanation for it is that many insects use a light compass to steer a straight line lights at night. Until humans came along and invented candles, lights at night were always at optical infinity. They were things like the moon, the stars, or the sun during the day. And if you maintain a fixed angle relative to these rays that are coming from optical infinity, then you just cruise at a straight line, which is just what you want to do. A candle is not an optical infinity. And if you work out mathematically what happens if you maintain a fixed acute angle to the rays that are emanating in all directions out of a candle, you perform a neat logarithmic spiral into the candle flame. So this is an accidental byproduct of a mechanism which really does have survival value. You have to rephrase the question, what is the survival value of maintaining a fixed angle at light rays? And then you've got the answer. So to ask the question, what's the advantage of suicidal self immolation? You've shifted to the wrong question. Right. And there are related issues. So there are things which provide some survival advantage in if you have one copy of the gene, but if you have both copies, then it's deleterious. Yes. Like sicklefill anemia. Right. What do you do with the concept of a spandrel, though? Gould's concept of a spandrel, is that useful to think about? Yeah. Okay. A spandrels are laurented and Gould wrote a notorious and overrated paper in 179 in which Gould went to King's College, Cambridge, where there's a most beautiful it's the most beautiful building. And the the the Gothic arches have gaps in inevitably form gaps which which are called spandles, and they actually have a name, and they're often filled with ornamentation. And the spandrels themselves are accidental byproducts that's something which really matters, which is the Gothic arch. And so the point they were making is that it's really almost the same point that I was making just now about asking the wrong question. Spandrels are you can't ask what's the purpose of a spandrel that's right derivative of the thing you were building. What are your thoughts about artificial intelligence? Please discuss its relationship to biological evolution and how it could develop in the future. I think it's a question for you, Sam. Yes, I fear everyone's heard my thoughts on artificial intelligence. I find this increasingly interesting. It's something that I became interested in very late. And in fact, unless you were in the AI community until very recently, the dogma that had been exported from computer science to neuroscience and psychology and adjacent fields was that AI basically hadn't panned out. There was no real noticeable success there that should get anyone worried or particularly excited. Then all of a sudden people started making worried noises and then there were obvious gains in narrow AI that were getting sexier and sexier. And now it was really the first time I thought about the implications of ongoing progress in building intelligent machines. And progress at any rate, it really doesn't have to be that Moore's Law continues indefinitely. We just need to keep going. And at a certain point we will find ourselves in the presence of machines that are as intelligent as we are. They may not be humanlike, although presumably we'll build them to be as much like ourselves in all the good ways as possible. But this interests me for many different reasons because one, in terms of existential risk, it's it's on my short list for things to actually worry about. But the flip side of that is that it's one of the most hopeful things. I mean, if anything is seems intrinsically good, it's intelligence and we want more of it. So insofar as it's reasonable to expect that we are going to make more and more progress automating things and building more intelligent systems, that seems very hopeful and I think we can't but do it. And the other point of interest for me, and this is kind of my hobby horse, is that it's actually what we were talking about on stage last time, some years ago when I wrote The Moral Landscape. I'm interested in collapsing this perceived distance between facts and values. The idea that morality somehow is uncoupled to the world of science and truth claims. And I think that once we have to start building and we even have to start even now with things like self driving cars, once we start building our ethics into machines that within their domain are more powerful than we are the sense that there are no better and worse answers to ethical questions, that we should all be moral relativists, that all cultures are equal with respect to what constitutes a good life. There's going to be somebody sitting at the computer waiting to code. Something. And if you don't put you've actually got to build in some moral values. You have to build in the values, and if you don't build it in, you're building in those values. So if you build a self driving car that isn't distinguishing between people and mailboxes, well, then you've built a very dangerous self driving car. The more relevant tuning which people have to confront is, do you want a car that the car is going to have to make a choice between protecting the occupant and protecting pedestrians, say, so how much risk do you want, as the driver of the car, to assume in order to spare the lives of occupants? So you're constantly facing a trolley problem and you're the one to be sacrificed. And your point is that whereas trolley problems are these are these hypothetical things where you have to imagine you've got a runaway trolley and you're standing at points and it's about to mow down five people, and if you pull the lever to swing the points, it'll kill one person. So you, withholding the lever in your hand, have the dilemma, should I save five people and kill one? But you know that by your action in pulling the lever, you're going to kill a person who wouldn't otherwise have died. And I think, Sam, you're saying making the point that AI, automatic machines, robotic machines, are going to need to have a moral system built into them, and so that the trolley problem is going to be faced by the programmer who's actually writing the software. Oh, it's already the case. Yeah. Yes. And it just will proceed from there. So just imagine a system more intelligent than ourselves that we have seeded with our morality. And again, this is going to be a morality that the smartest people we can find doing this work will have to agree by some consensus is the wisest morality we've got. And so, obviously, the Taliban and Al Qaeda are not going to get a vote in that particular project. At that first pass, everything you've heard about moral relativism just goes out the window. Because we will be desperate to find the best answer we can find on every one of these questions and desperate to build a machine that when it in the real limit case, where it begins to make changes to itself. It doesn't make changes that we find in the worst case, incompatible with our survival. Making changes to itself is what more conventionally worries people. The pharma nouman machine which is capable of reproducing and thereby possibly evolving by natural selection and completely supplanting humans completely taking over. This is, of course, a science fiction scenario, but it's not totally unrealistic. Not at all, given the fact that one path toward developing AI is to build genetic algorithms that that function along similar lines, where there's a Darwinian principle of just it getting better and better in response to data and error correction and it may not even be clear how it has gotten better. So we could look forward to a time in the distant future when we have a hole like this filled with silicon and metal machines looking back and speculating on some far distant dawn age when the world was peopled by soft, squishy, organic, water based life forms. But the data transfer would be instantaneous, so there'd been no reason to come out here. You just take the firmware upgrade. The world will be a better and a happier place. Well, my my real fear is that it won't be illuminated by consciousness at all because I'm agnostic at the moment as to whether or not mere information processing and a scaling of intelligence by definition gets you consciousness. It may in fact be the case that it gets you consciousness. I'm not conscious, by the way. It is a very difficult philosophical problem, I think, why it would seem to be perfectly possible to build a machine or an animal or a human which can do all the things that we do, all the intelligent things that we do, all the lifesaving things that we do, and yet not be conscious. And it's genuinely mysterious why we need to be conscious, I think. Yeah, and I think it remains so. I think it's because consciousness is the conscious part of you, is generally the last to find out about what your mind just did. You're playing catch up. And what you call consciousness is in every respect an instance of some form of short term memory. Now, there's different kinds of memory and this is integrated in different ways, but you are, I think, that's just a transmission time for everything. So it's it's you can't be aware of a perception or a sensation the instant it hits your brain, because it's hitting your brain, isn't one discrete moment. And so there's a whole time of integration. The present moment is this layered subjectively speaking, it's this layering of memories, even when you are distinguishing the present from what you classically call a memory. And so it is a genuine mystery why consciousness would be necessary, or what couldn't a machine as complex as a human brain do but for the emergence of this subjective sense, this inner dimension of experience? I don't even know what the solution would look like and whether it would be solved by biologists or by philosophers or by computer scientists. Well, I'm just worried that is you've just articulated what philosophers call the hard problem. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. I am talking with Gary Kasparov, the former world chess champion, perhaps the most famous of modern times, and now a great critic of Vladimir Putin's Russia and a great critic of the failures of American and European foreign policy with respect to Russia. Needless to say, this is a very timely conversation given the man who will soon occupy the Oval Office and given the people he has appointed to advise him. And so, without further preamble, I give you Gary Casparov. I am here with Gary Casparov. Gary, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for inviting me. Listen, it's really an honor to get to talk to you. I'm sorry we can't do it in person, but we will be forgiven. Any audio. Hiccups here. We're doing this by Skype and you are half a world away and it's late at night over there. So again, thank you for taking the time to do this. Okay, thanks for more than technology that we can do, staying thousand miles away from each other. Yeah, there's a lot to talk about. There are really two broad areas that I want to touch with you. The first I want to get into is politics, obviously, and the recent Russian influence on our presidential election. The second is that we have to say something about the future of intelligent machines because I've been talking a lot about artificial intelligence on the podcast. And while you will go down in history for many things, one of those things will be that you are the first person to be beaten by a machine in an intellectual pursuit where you were the most advanced member of our species. You will have a special place in history, even if that history is written by our robot overlords. We have to talk about that, but we'll get into politics first and you've written a fascinating book entitled Winter is Coming. You argue several things in the book, but generally you claim that free and open societies like our own have grown weaker, especially because we no longer think in terms of spreading our values to the rest of the world. Many people consider this a return to some kind of humility and political realism, but you consider it a failure of nerve. And I must say I agree with you there. Your specific claim is that while we're now facing many threats and many which we seem ill prepared to deal with. The worst of these threats is coming from Vladimir Putin and his current Russia. So perhaps you can just start there with your political thesis. Yes, let's start with the title of the book, winter is Coming. I have to confess, I'm a fan of Game of Thrones and I even read all the books, and I thought the title was very appropriate because it could indicate two things. One is that the history is not developed on a linear basis and it was somehow delayed in response to Francis Fukuyama The End of History in 1992, the best selling book. And I have to admit that in 1992, I shared the same optimism, thinking that liberal democracies have won and the rest would be just a bright future. So it's all up to us to build this future and the evil has been defeated once and for all. So I think we get to recognize that the evil doesn't disappear. So it probably happens in the books, in fairy tales, but in real life, the evil could be bird temporarily under the rubbles of Berlin Wall. But at one point it sprouts out, especially if we lose our vigilance and if we turn to be complacent. And also the idea of the title was again reflecting the motto of the House of Stark in Game of Thrones is to indicate that this is not a winter, this is not a climate change, this is not just change of temperature. But this is something that happens again because we are grown weaker. Because we don't understand the threat that is coming to hurt us and maybe to destroy our way of life. But it depends on us, whether this winter is long or short, whether it's devastating or the effect is minimal. So it's like a warning. So that's why I thought the title would be appropriate. And to my surprise, and I publish you books, and Sam, I'm sure you know, the publishers, they always come up with ten different suggestions trying to shoot away your original title. I mean, this time they accepted the title, recognizing that it had merits, but they were very cautious and they almost rejected the subtitle. They said, oh, Vladimir Putin and the enemies of the free world. Is it about Cold war? Is this just old language that may scare people off? I said, yeah, it's a cold war because winter is coming. And now when I talk to my publisher, they're very happy that they actually agreed to have vladimir Putin and Enemies to the Free World I can imagine on the title of the book because when they asked me, so what about the you know, what about advertising? How are you going to do it? Because it was really just a very short cycle for writing and publishing, me and Gringered, my co author. So we approached them in January 2015 and I said at our first meeting that I would like the book to be published in October. They asked me whether I meant October 2016. I said no, 2015, because I hoped that the book would make difference for for upcoming presidential elections, and it could help to shape debates of foreign policy between two between candidates from the major parties. So and they were not sure that you can do it because they said, oh, you know, we have no time for advertising. And I said, look, as long as you have Putin as a centerpiece of the book, he will definitely create enough conflicts to make sure that the book will be always on the front page. Again, unfortunately, this prediction was right. And I have to say that things that I predict in the book, they turn to be even worse than I thought, because probably we live in a time when everything happens much quicker, so the time flies faster than it used to be. I would just want to stop you there, Gary, for a second, because I want to get into Putin specifically in some depth, but you use this term evil, which I want to flag for a moment, because, unfortunately, this term has been really undermined in intelligent conversation. Many people just don't believe in evil. Samuel it's a great point. Thank you very much for raising this point, because if we now look at American politics, the partisanship, it reached such a level where people from two major parties consider their opponents evil. And you're right, the word evil has been used and overused in a political debate between people who disagree on many issues but still share the same core values. They all represent different winks of liberal democracy. And what I wanted to emphasize in the book, and again, thanks for raising this point is that we are being attacked by people that are, again, let me use this old cliche, the enemies of the free world, because they did not share the same values. And one of the fundamental differences between us and them is we believe in the uniqueness of human life. So the one person dead, it's tragedy for people like Putin, hundreds of thousands dead is just a demonstration of strengths. It's just statistics that proves that they are on the winning street by spreading their influence. So we have to realize that despite all the differences between different political groups and activists in the free world, we're still united by values. That makes us very different from the other side of the world, where I could apply world evil because it really threatens the way of life. The very foundation of the free society and value of human life is one of the things that brings together putin, ISIS, al Qaeda, Iranian mullahs. They could look different, but at the end of the day, they believe in something that is not mother, something that pushes us back to the past. And for those who are saying, oh, unlike Soviet Union, putin's russia is no longer an existential threat to the free world because it doesn't have the same ideology. My response is that probably right. But the Soviet project, though it was condemned by history, it was marked by repressions, by bloodshed, by devaluation of human life. It was still a project about the future. It was a futuristic project based on the wrong assumptions about human nature. That's why it failed. But it was still about the future. While today we're dealing with threats that all are looking for ideal society in a distant past. So Putin looks for the 19th century imperial politics, iran Mullahs, for, you know, medieval religious, religious inquisition, and ISIS, of course, goes all the way back to the early caliphate. But it's all about something that has no connection to the modernity. And so that's why we could say that today we see the fight between modernity and archaic forces. And somehow even the last US elections was also about desperate attempt to look for an ideal model of the past. And that's why, again, I think I thought it would be very important to have the book on time for a proper debate about US policy, since foreign policy, since, whether we like it or not, united States as a leader of the free world, defines the way the free world moves one way or another. And unfortunately, this election was about throwing mud at each other rather than talking about serious issues, and I was quite disappointed. But still it's probably now, while we are digesting the surprising results of these elections, we will have time to think about the sort of the potential impact of all these important foreign policy issues to the life in the united States, especially because it become quite apparent that Putin's influence on the elections, even if it was not decisive, it was still a considerable factor that helped to tilt the election to the Trump side. Yeah. So before we get into Putin and the election, you just raised this generic problem we have with dictators, dictators, with regimes that fundamentally don't share our values, just generically speaking, how do you think we should deal with this problem? There's another paradox of modern times that, unlike 50 or 100 years ago, dictators, they have almost equal access to modern technologies. So the technological advantage was always an important factor of the superiority of the free world, because we know that the free society always could mobilize brains and intellectual resources to come up with new ideas, new industries, new technologies, and always to be ahead. Even the Soviet Union eventually lost the space race, though it was not Putin's Russia. It was the country that relied on resources of Russian empire. So the degenerations of scientists, and it was well advanced. So it was quite a unique experiment, though, failed experiment, and it managed to put Sputnik and the man in space even ahead of the Americans. But eventually it lost this race because closed societies, they cannot compete. Even the Soviet Union failed to compete with the United States in the technological race. But today things are different because the globalization, as every new call it, technology, every new technological process has two sides, like every coin. On one side, we can spread things around. We can do business, we can socialize, we can connect people. Many good things can happen by using this modern device, which is in everybody's pocket or a purse. But at the same time, it helps bad guys to advance their cause. So you can socialize on the Net, but you can also build a very sophisticated terrorist network. And dictators, as we can see now, they feel very comfortable with these modern devices because the Internet is not yet regulated. It's something that is yet to become part of international law. And bad guys, they don't pay attention to any rules or limitations, so that they have, by definition of an upper hand. It's something so new and so advanced, and getting access to this is as easy as buying food in the store. So it's quite a paradox that while we relied on Twitter, Facebook, Google and all these new brilliant technologies invented in the free world to promote the ideas of the free world, we are now seeing the opposite effect. That the dictators, the totalitarian regimes they are successfully using these tools, very sophisticated tools for propaganda to actually promote ideas that are opposite to our values. Actually not even ideas, but more likely fake news. It's more like poisoning minds of people because it's almost impossible to identify what's true and what's not, since you are receiving so much information and well organized forces supported by massive budgets, as in Putin's Russia. So the propaganda machine could have a deadly effect, not only in Russia, not only in the Russian speaking people around the world, but also on the minds of people in a free world. And this is a paradox that we have to understand and just to recognize that it's a new challenge and the free world was not ready for it. Yeah, well, one point you make in your book in several places, is that we have pursued a path of engagement with Putin in particular, but with respect to many regimes that are fundamentally illiberal, on the assumption that mere engagement. Mere economic and social integration will moderate these regimes and get them to align with our interests and with the interests of sane and decent people everywhere. And you then observe how foolish this has proved to be. And it's pretty clear that some people only understand strength. And this goes back to this issue of evil, because many people have lost sight of the fact that there are people, whether it's individual dictators or even whole cultures or subcultures, certainly, who are committed to very different aims in life. There are people who are malignantly, selfish or just delusional. There are whole cultures that can be organized around delusional ideals. And I think what we're witnessing on our side, especially in recent years under Obama, and I say this as someone who's a real fan of Obama, I think he's an extremely smart and ethical and thoughtful person. And the contrast to the incoming president here is just appalling to me. But his foreign policy has been so anemic, it seems that our enemies no longer fear us and our friends really can't rely on us. And yet it's easy to see how we got here because there's this perception of just this absolute futility of foreign interventions because of what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. And those are very different wars. As you know. One was probably necessary and one almost certainly wasn't, but they're both viewed as total failures. And there's this, I think, an agreement certainly on the left and now even on what's now called the alternative right, that a sophisticated and realistic vision of America's place in the world is one where we should be more. Isolated, more humble, more any notion of us really leading the world and trying to spread our values all the way across it is some kind of unethical claim upon empire. It seems to me that we have lost our sense that there really are right answers to questions of good and evil. There really is such a thing, potentially, at least as universal human values that we have to fight for. Let's start with this, with your analysis about American intervention or isolationism as an alternative. Look, it's a 21st century. We are just about entering the year 2017. The globalized world is reality. Globalized trade is reality. No matter what President elect says about trade and his threats to sort of to turn it around and just, you know, to go back to, you know, to protectionism, I don't believe it's going to happen because America is the most globalized economy. And when you look at the United States as a country with 330,000,000 people, the country benefits from global trade. Yes, global trade as an average trade, as a capitalism. Some people win, some lose. But clearly, when you look at the balance, more people are on the beneficiary side. So you have to think about sort of softening the blow to others, but trying to change things and to say, oh, now we can go back. This is exactly what I said when I talked about different societies looking for the ideals that are distant past. So America 2017 should look in 20 30, 20 40, 20 50, not in 1950, 1960. There were certain things I wish country could recover from from those decades. And trying to hide in a shell ignores the fact that someone has to leave. If you create vacuum, and this is a lot this is the biggest lesson of Obama's presidency. He meant well. He wanted to reach out American enemies, and he did absolutely. At most to remove America what he thought was negative American influence. In world politics, trying to sort of work through agreements, compromises. What could be great if he had at the other side of the bargaining table people, institutions, states that shared even 50% of his conviction about the world, our world, should function. Unfortunately, it was not the case. So Putin alike, Obama's, what they saw, flexibility and weakness, was an open invitation to spread their influence. America was on retreat, thus creating vacuum. And this vacuum was filled not by forces of peace and prosperity, but by forces of war and hatred. And again, there is no simple answer for America's role in the world. You separated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. My problem with the war in Iraq in 2003 was that as someone who was born and raised in a communist country, I could never blame, could never condemn invasion, even invasion that led to a demise of dictatorship. People like me, we viewed the invasion as a liberation. I understand it could open in an open door box. We can have a big debate about it. But this is also important for people in the United States to understand the views of those who are born on other side of our country, where, you know, anything that led to the collapse of dictatorship was a good idea. So that's why we had different views about American presidents, viewing those who were strongest in opposing Soviet Union and communism as our best friends. Again, I understand it's a subject for debate, but let's move away from 2003 and agreeing that we may disagree on that and go to 2009. And this is, you know, something that the Obama's decision to follow, by the way, that was a Bush plan, you know, to so to eventually move troops out of Iraq. So when in 2009, Obama looked at the global map, I believe he thought that it was a good moment for America to exercise positive influence, soft power, friendship, to even to the nations that wish America ill and to extend the olive branch to everyone, including Cuba and North Korea. Now, the failure, in my view, is based on the fact that if you played the game in a chess and if you believe that you made a mistake a few moves ago, the biggest mistake would be to try to sort of go back and to change things, because you're already having a certain situation at the board. And that's what happened with Iraq in 2009 when Obama tried to sort of rectify mistakes made by the previous administration without recognizing that it's already a new game. America was already there by trying to get out, led to what we are seeing these days in the Middle East. We all know where the road paved with good intelligence leads. In this case, it led to a lap on genocide. So it is very important that we learn from these lessons, because what follows Obama is much more cynical approach. So if Obama wanted to cut these deals out of his ideological beliefs that the world to change. Now, you may have administration that would like to cut these deals out of very pragmatic assumptions that could benefit people who are close to the administration. So ironically, they could pursue the same goals, but for very different purposes. And I think that America, as long as it remains the most powerful economy and the most powerful military force in the world, it's due to remain a leader of the free world, thus carrying these responsibilities for protecting the world order from different attempts to destroy it. Because if America doesn't do anything, then what's going to happen to NATO, what's going to happen to European security? And now we already saw the result in Crimea, and definitely Putin is not going to stop in Crimea and he is now willing to have a great bargain with Trump about dividing the world and eliminating all security institutions that are standing on his way to global dominance. So I think it's very important that America recovers its integrity as a global power and will come up with a view of the foreign policy, which is, by the way you saw it in this election, is somehow extension of domestic policy or other way around and to stop changing these policies from elections to elections. Because from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, and that's what I argued in the book, american foreign policy was quite consistent. There were some modifications with basically all presidents, democrats and Republicans. They knew what was America's role in the world and again disagreements. They were within the reach now since 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. So we saw American foreign policy working more like pendulum, switching from one side to another. You have Clinton who did little, then W, we did too much, then Obama who did almost nothing. And then now it goes to Trump, who can do whatever nobody can predict. And it's quite interesting that when you look at the all presidents were elected since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in last 25 years, I think it's the first time in America history that the four presidents that were elected clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump they had no foreign policy expertise and very little sort of national exposure. Okay, Trump had it, but it's not political. So it's interesting that it seems that if Americans looking for something else so the country didn't want to hear about big problems and wanted us to have a comfortable life, let's enjoy. And now we reached a point after this election that it's time to define America's role in the world. And I don't believe that the United States has a chance to stay away and just to isolate, since the world has changed and very much under American influence. And walking away means that you will have to come back. But when it happens, it will be already under the terms of your enemies. Yeah, that final point is really worth reflecting on, because to retreat and to ignore the world's problems when we alone among nations have this disproportionate potential influence to let genocides happen, especially in the case of we draw a red line and our bluff gets called and then we do nothing, that kind of weakness is really provocative. And as you say, then once we're dragged back into involvement, it's on the terms that are now on the ground. The pieces on the board, to use your analogy, have moved, and we're in a worse position. And so let's talk about the position we're in with respect to Putin at this point, because it seems to me, and you make this point as well, that he's running a very clever dictatorship. It's a dictatorship that, for those who don't want to see it as one, seems to be justified by a high level of support. He holds elections, and he's managed to sanitize his reputation by being taken seriously as a statesman on the world stage. And again, you point this out many times that American many American and European administrations are culpable for this. So this policy of engagement with Putin has given him a free pass to do more or less whatever he's wanted. And of course, this all has been facilitated by a rise in oil prices. But Putin seems like quite a sinister figure. How bad is he? It's very bad, and he's getting worse. But we have to give him credit, and you're right, pointing out at his strengths and his ability to manipulate both domestic and international. He started in the beginning of this century, so as a president of Russia. So whether he had an idea of turning his rule into dictatorship, I don't know. But he wasn't a portugist, and he suddenly saw big opportunities. Oil prices were rising, so giving him a limited amount of cash. And also he just recognized that there was a lot of goodwill on the other side. So he could play games with George W. Bush. It was an amazing psychological game when they met in June 2001, and Putin sold him a story about hiding cross while being in a KGB school because he was baptized by his grandmother or whatever. Obviously, it's a fake story, but it was a perfect calculation for George W. That was a story that always caused him to cry because it was about religion. So just about affects about the Putin's connection to religion. And he built a very strong psychological contact with George W, who, after his meeting, said that he looked into Putin's soul, looked and put his eyes and saw his soul. So that was a big victory. And Putin strengthened his ties with George W by being the first leader calling up to 911 immediately, recognizing that that was a moment, you know, where he could, you know, have Bush, you know, on his side. For many years to come. So he was very good in building this relations and looking for friends, because at that time, he needed friendship from the west leaders to neutralize any opposition in Russia. And I remember in 2006, when Putin was hosting the G Eight meeting in St. Petersburg, and I was always reluctant to call it G Eight because G Seven stood for seven great industrial democracies, and Russia was neither democracy nor industrial power. But Putin, you know, was there. You know, actually, Yeltsin was the first one to be invited, like an advanced payment for immature Russian democracy. And Putin fully capitalized on his position of being one of the members of G Eight. And it was his turn in 2006 to host it. And it was a phenomenal PR success for Putin because Russian television was showing these meetings from every angle. And they say that picture is more powerful than thousand wars. But Putin had both a picture and thousand wars. And how could people like myself or late Boris Dempsey, how could we convince even liberal minded Russians that Putin was not a democrat? Putin was not recognized as democratic elected leader, while every other leader of the free world was there to greet him as one of the equals. So Putin, by using this, by using this game, putin totally neutralized opposition in Russia, and as you pointed out, created an image of a ruler that was not probably a true democrat. But he was not one to fear, not one who could destroy democratic institutions. And that's why his decision to stay behind Medlez, if when he followed constitution, he had to step down. But he stayed as a prime minister, and we're only in Russia knew that he was a puppet muster who was pulling the strings. It caused some kind of an illusion for Europe and for the United States, where politicians, political leaders, believed that they could play inventive against Putin and eventually they could see some kind of peaceful transition of Russia from Putin's, as they thought, slightly authoritarian regime, into something more democratic. Not recognizing that Putin was buying time to strengthen his grip on power, and eventually he would come back as the all powerful dictator, as it happened in 2012. And then, as every dictator, he had to change gears. Because if he needs friends in the beginning of his rule, eventually he needs enemies. Because at certain time he realized that all economic resources that could generate steady growth of Russian GDP and more important, steady improvement of leading standards for the Russians these resources have been wiped out by the lower oil prices and also by the aging infrastructure and by endemic corruption. So economy was no longer serving Putin, and he needed something else to legitimize his endless stay in power. And as every dictator, he turned for foreign aggression, as we warned from the beginning, saying Putin was our problem, eventually it would be everybody's problem, because this is. The way dictatorship works. And it was amazing that Americans and Europeans didn't want to see the rise of anti American, anti Western propaganda on Russian television. And since 2012, it became a staple of Putin's domestic propaganda to blast America for anything that happens in the world, and to present Russia as the sort of besieged fortress of goods surrounded by global evil. By the way they use this language. This is the language used by Russia, right? Is it true that the level of anti Americananism in Russia now is the worst it's ever been? Look, maybe it was worse in the don't know, but it's definitely the worst in my lifetime. And I can rely on my mother's comments. She's turning 80 next March. So she was born on the Stalin, and of course propaganda machine was different because there was no television, there was only radio and then primitive TV. So it's hard to compare to these days. But she said that by listening to Russian media today, she couldn't help but thinking that while Soviet propaganda was very intense and it was brainwashing, but it was still about bright future. So Soviet propaganda tried to present something that is more positive, something futuristic, that could make a great deal of difference for everybody. So they talked about of course it was false talk, but still they talked about communist brotherhood generations ahead of us, and about competition between socialism and capitalism, about socialism gaining ground. So there was some kind of a competition fighting for the better future of humanity. Putin's propaganda is more like cult of death. So Russia has no allies. It's all about Putin defending Russia against global evil. We all maybe have to die. But the language is so poisoning, and my mother says it's depressing. It is so depressing. And because of modern technology, it comes, as we say in Russia, from every kettle, from everywhere, and it's twenty four seven. And this propaganda, which follows oral rules, that it should be total lies. So it's not just some truth, some lies, but it's basically as white as black. War is peace, freedom of slavery. So it's totally reversing the facts. And if it's so intense as it is now, it works. And it works way beyond Russia now, because we could see polls in some European countries where people, ordinary people in these countries, they are just buying the Putin's versions of the events in Ukraine, in the Middle East and elsewhere. What's the significance of his being a former KGB figure? President Bush senior ran the CIA, and I've never heard it said of him that that made him somehow nefarious by definition. Obviously there's a false moral equivalence here, but this is the way many people would think about it. How do you think about his KGB past? Yeah, but you mentioned his false moral equivalence. I mean, KGB is an organization that I believe was criminal from day one. It was built by Lenin and his associates to destroy whatever was left of freedom in Russia. And it had a history of of going after political pointers of the regime. And, you know, it's it's one of the most nefarious acronym in the Soviet history, KGB. So these three letters and Putin, in 1999, while being still a prime minister, when he spoke at the meeting of KGB officers at the headquarter in Lubanca Square, he said, once KGB is always KGB, and he couldn't say it's better. It's a recognition of the fact that, though he never, you know, betrayed his organization, and he always believed that, you know, they they had some kind of rights, you know, to to rule the country and just to to basically, they were they were always above the law. So the if we are talking about Bush 41, who was head of CIA, he was still civilian, and even as a head of CIA, he knew that he was under some kind of supervision of the legislation and the president. So there were many things that and still hopefully there in America that guarantee checks and balances. So you can hardly imagine one institution in the United States going just totally wild. So we still have to see the resilience of US. Democracy in the years to come. But in the Soviet Union, it was the opposite. So the KGB was always above the law. So the whole idea that the organization was the law itself. While today we're looking at Putin's actions, I always warn people that you should remember about his true nature. He's a KGP guy. So that's why he is not he is not alien to the idea of using force. He can decimate cities. He can order carpet bombing. He can order genocide. But at the same time, he always prefers to deal with more Kalandestine methods. So just looking for kind of hybrid wars and every opportunity to buy favors, to blackmail people, to have a covert operation. And the fact is that his reputation is still quite sanitized. As you just said a few minutes ago, worldwide is a result of these operations that have been heavily funded by Putin and, you know, well designed, adjusting to the certain specifics of different countries and regions. Do you think there's any truth to the rumor that he might be the richest person on Earth at this moment? I think we should first agree on the definitions of richest personal Earth, because if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today's guest is Majid Nawaz. Majid is well known to many of you. We wrote Islam and the future of tolerance together. He is a friend and now regular collaborator. There's a film coming out by the same title based on that book, and it's based on a lecture tour we did together in Australia at the beginning of 2016. In any case, Majid is someone who I am proud to call a friend, whose work I deeply support, and once he gets talking, you will understand why. So, without further ado, I bring you Majid Nawaz. I am here with Majid Nawaz. Majid, thanks for coming on the podcast. A pleasure. Thanks for having me again, bringing listeners up to speed. Most will know this, but you and I have collaborated in now a variety of ways. We wrote a book together, Islam in the Future of Tolerance, and there will be a movie based on that book coming out next year, I believe. It's also called Islam in the future of tolerance. So I hear. We'll see how that goes. But it's really been an immense source of gratification for me to collaborate with you, given how fraught our initial meeting was. And this is something we describe in the book and have described on a previous podcast, but relevant to our conversation today, we'll be talking about some of the people who despise us. We both have people who despise us, but a subset of each of those groups are the people who despise each of us for collaborating with the other. That's a weird thing to keep running into, but in any case, there's a lot to talk about here, and in no particular order, I'll read you the topics I have gathered since I knew we were going to meet in this way, and then we can take it as we see fit. Sure, there was a Southern Poverty Law Center debacle where they grouped you and Ian, along with others, as anti Muslim extremists. We will want to hit that. There is Syria and the rather obvious failures of Obama's foreign policy. There's the related migrant crisis and the knock on effects, brexit being one, Trump being arguably another. There is Putin. There's the phenomenon of fake news and the hacking of the election. There is ISIS. There's the assassination of the Turkish ambassador. There's the Atrocity in Germany, at the Christmas market last week. My exchange is with Robert Spencer and Shadi Hamid that I know you'll want to comment on a bunch of other things on this list, actually. So let's get into it. I guess the first place to start for me, let's deal with the Southern Poverty Law Center issue because that really was just a crime against reason and common decency that we need to get into. Actually, this is a similar problem here. There's this general problem of people not being able to figure out who anyone is. Right. Just basic moral confusion about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. And if they're bad guys, how bad are they, how bad are they compared to the next bad guy? And there's a lot of confusion here that we should try to clear up. Yeah, the Prophet Muhammad would tell you that's a sign of the Day of Judgment. Let's hope not, for a variety of reasons. A messy preamble. But once again, welcome Majid and say whatever you want, but let's zero in on what the Southern Poverty Law Center did to you first. Yes, well, that was a debacle is the word you used, I think, but it was certainly deeply disappointing to receive that news. And look, at the end of the day, it doesn't affect my reputation insofar as my name and work is relatively well known. And so if it did affect my reputation, it's a bit like it's going to deflect. You have The Wall Street Journal writing an editorial decrying this decision to list myself and Aaron by name in particular, as antimuslim extremists. But then you had a whole bunch of other UK based outlets, internet and online based outlets and people at the UN. Karima Badoon, who is the head of the UN's cultural rights special representative for cultural and religious rights at the UN, basically tweeting against the southern poverty law center and declaring their decision as against my cultural rights to be self critical of my own culture. And so I don't think in the long run it's going to affect my reputation. Here's what I really worry about with this decision. Two things. First of all, it is a clear and present target on our heads. That's number one. So even if my reputation isn't affected among the middle of the line Muslims who are still trying to work out where they stand on the question of Islamism versus conservative islam versus liberal reforming Muslims, even if it doesn't affect my reputation among them, those hardened extremists don't need any excuses but relish opportunities to target those who are critical of them. And here is another opportunity. What I wrote in my immediate response on The Daily Beast to this decision is that lists are for fascists. The only people that use lists in this climate are, for example, you and I think have spoken before about this. The lists that were produced to target atheists in Bangladesh where they were then picked off one by one. That was a list. And so many of them have been killed by extremists since that list was published against atheists. The list that was put into the body of TIO Van Gok, naming Ayan as the next person that they were going to target. That's what lists do in this day and age. And the Left Criticizes. McCarthyism. And I just find it astonishing that as critical as the left rightly is of McCarthyism, that it finds it somehow justifiable for it to adopt the same tactics against what it deems as its enemies. So that's reason number one. I think lists lead to killing people off of the lists once they are compiled. The second reason is a long term reason. And it's not my reputation. It's the reputation of those who are the next Ali Rizvi, the next people who are coming up who want to be critical of their own culture, their own heritage, and be a bit more introspective about these challenges that we face. And the danger is this puts them off. The danger is that they come to the conclusion that the opportunity cost associated with this work is too high, and so those next voices don't come to the fore. One of the reasons it's so important for me to stay alive, apart from the fact that I want to stay alive, is that by staying alive and by remaining a highly visible figure, speaking out in this way, I'm able to show by my mere existence, practically to the up and coming generation, that you can do this and that in doing so, you can be successful, you can attract supporters around you, and you can defy these people who would rather torture and behead those who disagree with them merely by existing. But if that next generation comes to the conclusion that the opportunity costs associated with that is too high, then it can be offputting. And let's keep in mind, this is not hyperbole. I'm talking about a climate in which Malala Yusuf Zai was shot in the head for speaking in this way. I'm talking about a climate in which those atheist bloggers in Bangladesh have been picked off a list. But 84 atheist bloggers in 2013 were named on a list by the end of 20 1610 of them had been assassinated by jihadist terrorists. You know, this is the climate we're talking about. So when hope not hate in the United Kingdom, which preceded the Southern Poverty Law Center, it's their equivalent in the UK, when they compiled a similar list that included a Danish author, journalist and Islam critic Loss hedergarde he was later subjected to assassination attempt. Yeah, yeah, right. And So Southern Poverty Law Center and hope not hate. They should be ashamed of themselves. And I hope and I believe that history will judge them as shamefully as it judges Senator McCarthy. Yeah, well, let's remind people what the Southern Poverty Law Center is because its name really is kind of opaque. It's a civil rights legal firm, essentially, that has specialized since the the early 70s in suing white racist, Aryan nationalist groups in the United States. So they're the ones who sued the KKK and other groups nearly out of existence. And it's quite a painful irony given the recent rise of white racism and identity politics and nationalism during the most recent presidential election in the States, that the Law Center has just torched its moral compass and reputation here with this judgment on you and Ian and perhaps others on that list as anti Muslim extremists. It's completely insane, obviously, with respect to you and Ian, especially with respect to you, because Ayan, for all her obvious virtues in the world, you could at least argue that she is anti Islam in some basic sense because she's an apostate and she's spoken out very clearly against Islam in totality in the way that I have. But you are still a Muslim. Talking to the Muslim community as a Muslim, and to paint you as a anti Muslim extremist, someone is guilty of being, at best, utterly confused over there. But what's amazing is that when their attention has been called to this problem, they've just doubled down. That's the spirit of the time now. When someone points out an error that you've made, however grievous, you tell them to go fuck themselves and double down. And that's what this person, Mark Potoch at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the author of this list has done, apparently, according to an Atlantic article. Yeah, it's shameful because we need an organization like this to keep watch on the real racists and militia nutcases in the US. And they for decades now have been a resource for journalists to go to and say, is this person crazy and dangerous? And they say, yes, that person's crazy and dangerous. And the story gets published. And it's really astonishing that they did this in the first place and that they have not issued an appropriate May occult. Sam, I'll tell your listeners I'm very tempted to set up a crowdsourced funding to sue them, to do exactly to them what they did to the KKK. It is inexcusable to put people on a hit list in this way. We've just recounted the number of people that have been killed through such hit lists because they've been deemed anti Muslim and they've included atheists. Aaron is no different to those ten or so roughly. It could be more than ten by now. Atheists who were killed in Bangladesh for exactly the same reason after being designated in exactly the same way. And so I'm I'm really tempted to sue them and to them exactly what they did to the KKK. I don't see this tactic as any different to McCarthyism. It is as fascist, it is as disgusting. And I genuinely believe history will look back at these people and see that they became the very monster, the very beast that they sought to defeat in the way that I became an Islamist when I faced neo Nazi racism growing up. And I don't think they're going to back down. They've had ample time to do it. And the only thing that's stopping me is that, unlike in the UK, where libel laws are a lot stricter, here, it's very expensive, very costly and very difficult. But I'm really seriously tempted to do it just to teach them a lesson. They can't get away with this. But anyway, let's see what happens with that. Yeah. Needless to say, you'll have the support of many people if you decide to do that. But again, that is talk about opportunity costs. That's a cost. Forget the money aside, it's a cost in time and attention on your side, and it's all the more galling in that respect. But let's move from that list to a person on it, Robert Spencer. Not to be confused with Richard Spencer, who is now perhaps the most famous white supremacist in the United States. Robert is quite a voluile critic of Islam. He runs a website called Jihad Watch and he and I have never met or spoken publicly, but we've managed to figure out how to skirmish a little bit nonetheless. And this speaks to the larger problem of not being able to figure out who anyone is or how sullied anyone should be by association. And this is a problem that you and I both have ourselves. You wound up on that list, as did Robert. And Robert, I'm sure, feels it's no more justified in his case than it is in yours or ions he's associated with people like Pamela Geller. And I don't know how much daylight there is between Robert and Pamela, and I've spoken about this on the podcast before. I don't know how much anyone deserves their reputation for Islamophobia or bigotry or anything else that's unsavory in this area. Yeah, at one point on my podcast, I spoke about this problem quite transparently and and I spoke about it with respect to Robert. I said, Listen, I see that Robert has been stigmatized in this way, I have been stigmatized in this way. I know I don't deserve it. I don't presume to know whether Robert deserves it in his case, but I see the cost in this. I see the reputational cost for someone like Robert because I have to think long and hard whether I want to have anything to do with him. And I know people are doing that to me based on what's happened to my reputation at the hands of people like Glenn Greenwald and all the usual suspects. It is like toxic waste. It just spreads around and it's very difficult to clean up and no one has enough time or attention to figure out what the hell is going on and you just have to pick your battles. And so I said this this really pissed robert off, and he's attacked me for not having him on the podcast, for not engaging him. He's attacked me for my collaboration with you. He doesn't trust you. No surprise there. So it's a mess. And I'm reasonably convinced that there's a fair amount of confusion operating even here locally with Robert and yourself. So, for instance, before you answer, I would guess that you think there's probably significant daylight between me and Robert, and you think Robert probably is a bigot, or at least deserves some of his reputation for being a bigot. I'm guessing that. And he thinks you're, if not a stealth Islamist, someone who I really shouldn't trust as much as I do. And that's where we are. I am prepared to believe that both of you are significantly confused about the other. I know Robert is confused about you. I suspect you're returning the favor in this case, and I say that just based on what I've heard Robert say publicly and never haven't engaged him personally. So in any case, I tee that up for you. What's your view of the Robert Spencer situation? Let me make this absolutely clear from the outset. I don't think Robert, Pam Geller, or anyone belongs on that list because in principle, I oppose lists. So to begin with, it's not that I think that Ayan and myself shouldn't be on the list and the others deserve it. I oppose lists in principle. And in fact, a good few months before the Southern Poverty Law Centers list, I wrote an article in my regular Daily Beast column decrying the Hope, Not Hate list. And I did so even though I wasn't named on that list, whereas Zohi Jasa, who's an American Republican Muslim reformer, was named on the list, as were a few other Muslims and many non Muslims. So the UK version of the SPLC. The Southern Poverty Law Center did put out a list. I wasn't on it, and I and I wrote an entire column against it because I oppose lists in principle. And so for that reason, I don't think Robert nor Pam Giller deserve to be on the list. I also don't think Robert Spencer is a racist. I want to make that very clear. There is a huge confusion in this conversation around Islam isn't a race and Muslims are not a race. It's easy when your listeners think of Christianity to understand that just as Christianity is not a race and Christians aren't a race, to be critical of Christianity isn't racism. Even to be critical of Christians isn't racism. It may verge sometimes onto bigotry if somebody were to, for example, want to create exceptional models of treatment just for Christians, but that certainly isn't racism. It may be antichristian bigotry, but it isn't racism. And so let's park racism out of this conversation because it really doesn't belong here. And it's incredibly unhelpful when racism gets confused with a conversation around Islam and all Muslims except the obvious problem, though, is that there are actual racists who say negative things about Islam and one can at least imagine that they're in part motivated by their racism. If Richard Spencer said something about Muslims, yeah, I would rightly suspect his motivation behind saying it is racism, even if what he's not saying is racist. And that's the difference between Robert Spencer and Richard Spencer. Right? Richard Spencer being the founder of the Altright blog who is a white supremacist, robert Spencer sharing very little with him apart from his name, his family name. So I think if Richard Spencer said something like, islam is the mother load of bad ideas, to quote a famous neuroscientist, right, I would suspect the motivation for why Richard Spencer is saying it is racism. And he's using an argument that doesn't sound racist because he wants to present himself in a form of a sterilized form, when really his motivation is racism. Whereas if the famous neuroscientist said that, I have no doubt in my mind or heart his motivation is not racism. Right? And so that's the difference. And in fact, Muslims will understand this. Any Muslim listening knows this. It's entrenched within our history that you can say the right thing for the wrong reasons. When the Kawarij, which was the first terrorist sect that emerged in Islam, and they killed some of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. When they went up to one of the companions, his name was Ivna Abbas, and they said to him exactly what ISIS says today. They said, in Iraq, I le, there is no law but God's law. It's the ISIS slogan, right? And they were killing the disciples of the Prophet Muhammad using the very same slogan that ISIS uses today. And the companion of the Prophet said to them in response, he said, kalimatul haq orida Bihal bartel the word of truth. Obviously he'd say that because he's a companion of the Prophet. So I'm not saying here that it is true that God's law must reign, right? I'm just giving you a historical example here. He said Kalimatal hakorida, bihalbatil the word of truth used for unjust ends. And so it's very important to be able to isolate people's racist motivations from something they may be saying which isn't racist, but that isolation isn't done by speculation. And what I'm not saying is let's open up the doors and let's all speculate on Sam Harris's in quotation marks. Racist motivations for saying Islam is a mother load of bad ideas because actually, it's done by evidence. So Richard Spencer, we know it because he's on camera giving a Nazi salute. We've got his writings where he tells us he wants a white ethno state. So we know the guy is a white supremacist. So we have every reason, based on evidence, not to trust that his reasons for disliking Muslims are divorced from his reasons for not liking anyone who's not white. And that's clear with Robert Spencer not related apart from the last name. Likewise, therefore, we mustn't confuse when he says things that sound like what somebody else that is racist may be saying, that doesn't mean Robert Spencer is racist, and as I said at the outset, nor does it mean anyone deserves to be named on hit lists. If we don't like people, either we should name the organization or we should write columns about their opinions, not compile lists. So those are the two points I wanted to just put out there to start with. As for the man himself, the way I look at these things is he and I will, with many people, will probably disagree on lots of things. I mean, I disagree with him when he says that oaths of allegiance in the Congress should be allowed on any book, including any holy book except for the Quran. I think it's a discriminatory practice and it's actually unconstitutional. And therefore I wouldn't agree with him on that. I certainly wouldn't agree with him on his view that Bosnia should not be classified as a genocide despite the killings there. The classification, in his view, it shouldn't be designated as a genocide. I disagree with that. I don't think those disagreements, though they are vehement, I don't think those disagreements mean that I classify him as somehow a racist and certainly wouldn't put him on a list. As for how that would mean I go forward and treat somebody like this, I'm always somebody who leaves open the door for change. I engaged with Tommy Robinson, and though it didn't lead to Tommy necessarily changing his individual views, and I never claimed it did, it did lead to Tommy leaving the EDL, which was Europe's largest populist, anti Muslim or anti Islam street protest movement. And so it was a limited success. The EDL is not the same as it used to be, as it once was with Tommy at its head, and so engagement is always there as an option. But timing and time and how much someone's force fields are diminished by a previous collaboration are all relevant factors to how and when and who you engage with at this moment in time. If you were to ask me my opinion as to whether I'd be happy to engage and take on even more than what I've taken on by having this conversation with you, and, you know, the backlash on both sides that that created, I just don't have the energy or the space at the moment. I don't have the bandwidth. Let's say my force fields need some time to replenish before I engage on any other form. I did Tommy Robinson. It led to him leaving the EDL. Then I spoke with you. I'm not averse to speaking to people, and I think perhaps you've assumed that I'm more critical of somebody like Robert than I may well be. Let's just say my understanding of the importance of dialogue outweighs my vehement disagreement on exactly those two areas, for example, that I mentioned with anyone, I would speak to Islamists who hold views far worse than Robert does, with a view to hoping that dialogue in that sense, leads them to a more centrist liberal ground. I think the purpose of dialogue for me would always be to try and bring people to the classical liberal center. There's one last thing I'd say I'd like to say here, and that's to my fellow liberals and my fellow Muslims listening to this, and that is that we have to be proportionate in our condemnation. I vehemently, as I've said, would disagree with Robert on this notion that any book can be used for an oath of allegiance when swearing somebody in on any official capacity in Congress or the Senate or anywhere except the Quran. I vehemently disagree with that view. But it's not the same as saying that gay people should be executed in an ideal Islamic state, right? It's not the same as a belief that somehow Jews are like pigs and monkeys. It's not the same as a belief that adulterers or adulterers should be stoned to death, or that limbs should be chopped off for various crimes, or that apostates should be killed. And by the way, these beliefs aren't just fairy stories. They are beliefs that are backed up by force in states, not just ISIS, let's keep that in mind but Iran and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan where apostates and blasphemy and homosexuality are punished. So it's not the same as being a fellow traveler for regimes that actually kill people for these things. And so it's really important for my fellow liberals and Muslims to put our disagreements with somebody like Robert Spencer in proportion to the real bad world out there and what's actually going on. The people that are attempting really to destroy our civil liberties are those people that support those sorts of regimes like Iran and Saudi Arabia and other Islamist organizations that are nongovernmental and definitely jihadist, terrorist organizations that make it their business to hunt people like me down and kill me. I've got no doubt Robert Spencer is engaged in anything similar to that. So I want to seize on this issue of the swearing in on the Bible or the Quran because it connects to Keith Ellison, I believe, who Robert has been quite exercised about. But first I want to clean up a mess that I may have made. I now have echoing in my ear my own use of the word Islamophobia from several minutes ago. And I don't know that the scare quotes of derision were conveyed by my tone there, because I don't want to be one of these people who uses this term as though it were a legitimate one. I think this term has been consciously engineered to prevent us from talking honestly about Islam, islamism, jihadism, et cetera. I just want our listeners to know that I have not caught the virus, or if I did, I've only had it for about 5 seconds. And I also don't want to have caricatured Robert in my effort to untangle my previous mentionings of him on the podcast. I have no reason to believe Robert is a bigot and someone I couldn't have a perfectly reasonable conversation with. I simply don't know, and given how much I talk about this issue and how loath I am to keep talking about it, i, like you, feel as a matter of priority, a public engagement with Robert is probably not on the calendar anytime soon. But I don't mean to stigmatize him in the way we're talking about him. But the issue is again, it comes back to points of confusion about who anyone is. And Robert is impressively confused about you, it seems to me. And one reason why he's confused is your recent endorsement of Keith Ellison to head the DNC. And you might just say who Keith Ellison is and why you endorsed him. The only things I've ever said about Ellison are from five years ago, where I saw an interview he did on Real Time with Bill Maher where he was obscurantist about the link between Islam and jihadism in a way that I've come to expect of obscurantists. And he said he didn't seem to say anything reasonable in that context, so I criticized him for that. But beyond that, I haven't paid much attention to who Keith Ellison is. But the fact that you endorsed him recently is one reason why Roberts and his minions think I am insane, frankly, for having collaborated with you because you are now propping up a straight up Islamist in Ellison perfect segue. Actually, Sam, to move on to Keith, because I've just said that I don't think Robert's a bigot, but there are things I vehemently disagree with him on. But also that in principle, there's no boycott. If I had the emotional and intellectual bandwidth and space and my force fields were strong enough and as I said, they've taken a bit of a battering recently, what with the SPLC ruling and then having, before that spoken to you and being battered for that, and before that, having dialogue with Tommy Robinson. Spell that out a little bit more. What you mean by force field, I assume, is your reputation as a Muslim among Muslims who you are trying to reach as a reformer. Yeah, the resilience. Right. So the ability to do things that are out of our own echo chamber, that are out of the box, that take a conversation to areas where previously Muslims hadn't been comfortable taking them, and then take the flak for that absorb it. Allow the dialogue to move on, to allow the conversation to enter new territories and then take it to the next stage. I don't think we're anywhere near where we need to be at the moment, but one takes a hit to their reputation for doing things that are unprecedented. And when I spoke. To tommy Robinson, as I said, was the founder and the leader of the English Defense League, which was an anti Islam populist street protest movement. When I spoke to him to help him leave the EDL, my reputation took a bit of a damage. People like the British version of Reza Aslan Medi Hassan have never forgiven me since then. And though my objective was very clear, it wasn't to change Tommy Robinson, and we never claimed Tommy's views had changed. It was to have him leave the EDL. And the dismantling, the subsequent dismantling of that organization is a good thing that we must bank. Whether Tommy as an individual, changes his views is a secondary thing, which would also have been a good thing, but that we didn't even get the chance to do because the attack was so strong after the first thing was achieved. And then, of course, I spoke to you and, you know, I was called your porch monkey, I was called a native informant. And the attacks, your listeners will be very well aware of what happened after my collaboration with you. And then, of course, the Southern Poverty Law Center listed me as an anti Muslim extremist. So when I say force fields, my resilience, my ability to continue having these dialogues is conditional upon my reputation surviving within Muslim communities and within the Left in particular, as an honest interlocutor. If you want to change a community or communities as I want to do, then your reputation among them needs to, at least on a scale of one to ten, be around four or five. Otherwise there's no point, right? I'm not interested in winning philosophical or intellectual arguments as though I am, as much as I am interested in bringing change to where I believe a large part of, not all of, but a large part of the problem resides and where I think I can be most useful. And so, in that sense, it's just not possible nor plausible at the moment for me to engage in any form of reproachman with somebody like Robert. And also, sometimes personality gets involved as well. I don't think that Robert is in the state of mind at the moment that you and I were when we spoke. I don't think that he's in the frame of mind where the principle of charity will be employed in a conversation, but I think he's more like where you and I were when we first met. And I don't mean to sound patronizing when I say that genuinely, from what I hear and read that he's saying about me, it's going to take him a while to realize that what I'm about to say next about Keith Ellison, he's meant with the best of intents and the most honest of intentions. And that's going to take him, I think, a while, just to see me continue the work I'm doing before he applies such a principle of charity to me. But this allows me to move on to Keith Ellison. So as I said, I'm not averse to actually engaging with anyone. And as I engage with Tommy Robinson, and as I in principle wouldn't be averse to engaging with somebody like Robert Spencer, I likewise am not averse to engaging with somebody like Keith Ellison. And for me, there's no difference whether somebody disagrees with me and I disagree with them. Vehemently on the anti Islam spectrum of things, or on the too much Islam kind of Islamist spectrum of things, I see them as one and the same, that it's a spectrum of engagement. And my aim will be to bring everybody to what I believe is a classically liberal, human rights grounded, critical and skeptical center that is also muscularly liberal, though the only thing we mustn't be skeptical about is our commitment to pluralism human rights and liberal values. It's the only thing that we are certain of them, and that is that nothing is certain and that people making truth claims are not true. And so my reasons for actually extending an olive branch to somebody like Keith Ellison are multifaceted. And the first one I think, is clear. It's what I've just everything I've just said that actually because I've engaged with the anti Islam, let's say anti Islam speakers and activists now for a while, I think it's probably about time to balance it out and to engage on the Islamist side again and on the Muslim side again. And so that's a pragmatic reason number one. And it's that balance that deters the future SBLC from listing me again. So that's reason number one. I'd say reason number two is a bit more political. I'll give you an analogy with the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. He very much liked Keith Ellison, was a politician. Now let's be fair to politicians. And so I'm going to caveat what I'm about to say. It's not that they are bad human beings, but all politicians are opportunistic. It's the nature of the game. And as I say, it's not to say they're bad human beings. The nature of politics is it forces you. That's the job description. You have to seek out an opportunity that you can capitalize and exploit for political gain. And that's how you maneuver. Like a chess game. Politicians lives are like a chess game. And so by definition, whether they want to be or not, they have to be opportunistic. Otherwise by definition they wouldn't be politicians. And so, like Keith Ellison, the now mayor of London, Sadiq Khan was an opportunistic politician before being there, he was a low ranking local member of parliament in an area called Tooting in London. And most of his support base, because he has a British Pakistani Muslim background, opportunistically, much of his support base to get elected came from the Muslim community. But if you're going to get elected from the Muslim community in this day and age, your opportunism is going to reflect where Muslims are when they are surveyed, and you and I have spoken about this in our book, in our collaboration, where Muslims are when they are surveyed isn't exactly liberal in everything, right? In 100% of things. They may be when it comes to things like, whatever, immigration and racism, but they may not be when it comes to things like gay rights. And so that's just the nature of being a politician who's relied up until now on that vote bank to build up a bit of a support base. Now, Sadiq Khan did that and Keith Ellison did that. And what we're lacking on the Muslim liberal and even left side these days around the conversation around Islamism and Islam is strong leadership. Like Keith Ellison, the mayor of London, used to be pretty much involved in sectarian Muslim politics before he became mayor. But he transformed, incredibly so, by all accounts, both his enemies and his supporters. And by the way, I was somebody who was critical of him, the mayor of London, when he was a Tooting MP and he was critical of me. He's called me on television and he's called the quilliam people, quote, Uncle Tom's, for which he had to later apologize while running for office as mayor of London, he had to make a public apology for using that racial slur. And so when I now speak of him in the terms I'm about to, it's as somebody who was on the wrong side of the fence of this man. But by all accounts, including London's Jewish community, the mayor of London now is doing a stellar job. He's performing better than everyone expected as mayor of London. And there are some reasons for that. And what it is is when you take an opportunistic, pragmatic politician who is not an Islamist but happens to be a Muslim, who happens to be religious. And you and I have spoken in our collaboration about the difference between traditional Muslims who are perhaps conservative in their social values even if they are liberal politically and who are not Islamists. When you take a politician like that, a religious Muslim who is politically liberal, but by being religious, it means that they are probably socially a bit conservative and you thrust them into the mainstream, their opportunism remains consistent. What changes is the vote bank they begin appealing to. And so Sadiq Khan had to suddenly appeal to a far broader range of potential electors than just the Muslim sectarian backing he used to enjoy as a member of parliament for Tooting. And I predicted that the same would happen with Keith Ellison. Suddenly, when he realizes he's got to appeal to a far larger vote bank that is opportunistic, muslim politicking would give way, the opportunism would remain and again, caveat that I'm not using the word opportunistic here as a pejorative and that he would have to appeal to a far broader vote bank. And I think the same thing that happened to Sadiq Khan would happen to Keith Ellison. Why is that important that that happens? I think that's important because, as I said, what we are severely lacking on the left and among Muslims and among genuine liberals is leadership. And I think that the sorts of people that can lead are the sorts of people that need to be able to carry people with them. So we need to be able to identify somebody who's an opportunist not in the pejorative sense who is able to say to people I came from where you came from and then drag them to the classically liberal center that I want them to drag them to. Now, like Sadiq Khan, there are a few signs that Keith Ellison is able to do that. One of them is that both Sadiq Khan, who's now the mayor of London and Keith Ellison when faced with a choice on gay marriage equality laws despite their conservative Muslim backgrounds telling them that they should vote against this, both voted for it. An Islamist can't bring themselves to do that. An Islamist believes that that's the cardinal sin that's known as shuk. That's changing God's law for man's law. That's the very thing that makes an Islamist is their fight that they're prepared to die for that God's law takes primacy. And the minute you switch God's law for man's law that's the difference between an Islamist and effectively the rest of the world. That's the very thing they've defined has gone wrong with the world. And Islamists would never vote for gay marriage equality because as we elaborated upon in our collaboration, to an Islamist's mind legislation and religious law are one and the same thing. Whereas through other Muslims who are the vast majority, legislation can be separated from God's law. So you can at once believe as a normal conservative Muslim, which I'm not, you can at once believe that homosexuality would be a sin for you while still voting for others to choose whether they believe it's a sin for them and therefore giving them the freedom to choose that. And that would be somebody who's religiously conservative, yet politically liberal. That is a consistent stance for non Islamist Muslims to take. And so voting on gay marriage equality is a kind of litmus test. And as would be things like normal consensual sexual relationships outside of marriage, voting on the legalization of that would be a litmus test for whether somebody is an Islamist or a Muslim who's engaged in politics. Wouldn't it be rational to worry that a stealth Islamist would be able to pass those litmus tests in the interests of remaining essentially hidden? There's this concern that there are Islamists who are trying to get into power and are willing to sacrifice their apparent Islamism or that they're willing to make their Islamism so non apparent to do that that they might be able to vote for gay marriage. For instance. Let's understand another thing here that jihadists believe in going deep undercover because they're at war. So what matters for a jihadist isn't the proselytization, isn't convincing somebody of their ideological position. What matters, except obviously where they are in Muslim majority countries, where they're trying to recruit people in the west, what matters for jihadist is pretending they are more liberal than me. It's pretending that, in fact, they're debauched so that nobody suspects them. And yet when the time comes, they engage in an attack and that people are attacked from where they never expected it, from the guy that owns the strip club, for example. Right. And so that's what matters for the jihadist, so that they are completely undetected. For the Islamist, it's the opposite. And Islamist doesn't believe that they are actively engaged in a physical war with the west. They believe they're engaged in an ideological war. Those two things are very different. When you believe you're engaged in an ideological war, there are some principles that are non negotiable. Otherwise you've given up in the ideological war. So just to drill down on this so you believe there is no third alternative, which is an Islamist who by stealth will get into a position of power along with obviously a sufficient number of other Islamists, and then turn the tables politically, essentially nonviolence. So they're not jihadists. They're not just waiting for a moment to strike, they're waiting for a moment to strike politically. An organization like Care, for instance, strikes me this way at least some of the time, where they're often tipping their hand, they're saying semi Islamist things. And so that's why I see in them a less than liberal organization. But I also at least imagine that I detect a fair amount of dissembling there where they're not actually being candid about what their actual views are. They're not trying to win a war of ideas purely on the merits of their Islamism. They're trying to they're playing a double game. They have a certain verbiage design for export on CNN and then they have the way they presumably talk behind closed doors. That's what worries me. And I'm sure that's what worries Robert Spencer about a person like Keith Ellison, that he's actually more doctrine there than you might be allowing for, based on his in this case, supporting gay marriage. Well, so there is that third option, and they do exist as well. We have, whether it's Care or organizations in the UK, like the MAB, the Muslim Association of Britain, there are Brotherhood founded and backed organizations that seek what we call entryism. In fact, my critique of entryism in the British context is one of the reasons the SPLC, when they doubled down, listed me as an antimuslim extremist, because we've actually witnessed entire institutions, such as schools in Birmingham, being taken over by these entryists. And in the end, the national body that monitors education, known as ofsted the Office for Standards in Education, had to intervene and sack the entire board of governors of a school and bar them from ever standing as school governors ever again. Because this whole entry, it was major front page news in the UK carried by the Times. And in that British context, I was talking about it and the Southern Poverty Law Center decided that must mean I'm an anti Muslim extremist. Even though by the implication the Office for Standards in Education in the UK is also anti Muslim. Doesn't make sense. But there is that category. We have the borough of Tower Hamlets that was taken over, backed by the Ife Islamic Forum, Europe and other Islamist groups based in Tower Hamlets. And the mayor of that borough had to be struck down by a judge in court and barred from ever standing from office again using a law that had been originally devised in an ancient law that was devised to resist Catholicism during the times of the Reformation. It was a law called undue spiritual Influence. And the judge had to resurrect this law to kick out an elected mayor in the borough of Tower Hamlets so that he didn't because he said he was coming under the undue spiritual influence of Muslims and Muslim groups. And I've written about these things in my columns. I do not think Keith Ellison is one of those. And I know the man. And I know an Islamist. I can smell an Islamist from a mile away. I used to be one myself, and I went to prison for being one. I can assure you that Keith Ellison is not an Islamist. There may be, in fact, just as strongly I can assure you there probably, certainly is a blind spot that he has towards people like that. Everyone has cultural blind spots. I'd suggest that somebody like Robert Spencer has a cultural blind spot to people who are convincing him not to classify Bosnia as a genocide. Everyone has these blind spots because they're more worried about some things than the other, so they don't dedicate as much thought to those other things. And what I'm hoping is Sidi Khan had those blind spots. What I'm hoping is that somebody like Keith Ellison can become somebody like Sadiq Khan. When you get somebody like that in position, they become the best line of defense against those entryists because they're able to then see them and spot them coming from a mile away. Keith Ellison knows. He knows that there are Islamists within our community. I've seen him speak about this in the past because they sometimes called him they've decried him for being too liberal because of some of the stances he's taken in Congress and the fact that he pulled out of the Muslim American Society's annual conference, where he was scheduled to deliver their keynote address. And the Muslim American Society has ties with some Islamistbacked organizations, has hosted some antisemitic speakers like Muhammad Ratibadnabulsi, who who has said I'm going to quote to you he said homosexuality leads to the destruction of the homosexual. That's why brothers homosexuality carries the death penalty. Now, this is a speaker that was scheduled to speak at a conference that Keith Ellison was scheduled to speak at, and he pulled out. So he knows the political cost of being associated with these people. And what I'm hoping is that an opportunistic politician that he is, when he sees that his vote base is significantly broadened, that he realizes that there are more votes in the liberal side of this debate than there are in appealing to extremists and their backers, like this sort of speaker that we've just quoted. And then he acts as the front line of defense against these people, as Sadiq Khan now is. Let me just say that Siddiqan, who prior to becoming the mayor of London called Quilliam an Uncle Tom, has now been called an Uncle Tom by the very types of people that were his audience when calling Quilliam Uncle Tom. The tables have turned on him. And when that happens, these people, not just for politically opportunistic reasons, their emotions get invested in realizing hold on a minute. When you're put on the line like that and called an Uncle Tom or a native informant, you start realizing how ridiculous these sorts of slurs are, and it puts a distance between you and the ignorances who are using this type of language. And I think that's what's going to happen to Keith Edison. And listen, if I'm wrong, I'm somebody who follows his conscience and really doesn't care, right? If he starts pandering to homophobes, if Keith starts pandering to Islamists and justifying their views, I'll call him out on it. And it will hurt him a lot more if I call him out on it because I've just endorsed him. That's where I stand on this. I don't think he's an Islamist, but I'm hopeful. And if I'm not engaged in changing members of my own communities and other fellow liberals and those on the left, if I'm not engaged in changing them and bringing them to the classically liberal center, I'm not sure what I should be doing. I mean, that's what I set out to do. This is my job. It's my job to engage people like Keith Ellison. Yeah. And as I said before, we believe on this podcast, one of the most pressing if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Please forgive me if I croak. I've just had a minor stroke. Basal ganglion on the right makes me walk as if I'm tight. So if my voice descends to squawking, sam will have to do the talking. Thank you all for coming. This is what a sold out house looks like when the Cubs are in the 7th game of the World Series. There's a place in hell for those people who bought tickets that didn't use them. Needless to say, it's an honor to be here and a real honor to be doing this with Richard. And I get to do this twice in one week. This is the second night, I think, you know, and Richard and I were worried about this. We're worried about this event because we thought we would have a great conversation last night, and then we didn't want to spend an hour in front of you here trying to recapitulate that conversation. So as a way of avoiding that fate, I went out to all of you, I think, online, asking for questions. And I got thousands of questions, and I picked many. So the the questions we'll track through tonight are different from the ones we did last night. And this is all being videotaped. And and you can see what you missed last night once that video is available. But I wasn't actually planning to ask this, but I wanted to talk about your stroke because we haven't spoken about this and I'm going to guess that the sock choice is not evidence of your stroke. Well, I was explaining that last night that at the recent Skeptics conference in in Las Vegas, we had a workshop on cold reading, which, you know, that system whereby you pretend to thought read and all you're doing really isizing the other person up. And my partner was a young woman who said, I seem to see there's something wrong with your eyes. Maybe colorblind. She was looking at my I am trying to make a point. I'm trying to spread the meme of odd socks. Now. This is not for the reason given in Stephen Potter's lifemanship under womanship. He recommends the odd Sox ploy as a way of arousing the maternal instincts. And then there's a footnote that says, buy our patent odd socks brand. But my point is different from that. It is that we should not be compelled to buy socks in pairs because unlike shoes, which have genuine chirality, you can't switch a left shoe and a right shoe. Socks do not have this property, and therefore it's ridiculous having to buy socks in pairs. If you lose one sock, you have to throw the other one away. So I want to make the point in as vivid a fashion as possible and encourage everybody to wear odd socks. Tell us about the experience of having a stroke. Well, it was a bit scary. I just suddenly became aware that my left hand wasn't working. I couldn't pick things up, or if I managed to pick something up, I couldn't let go of it again, which is sort of kind of scary. And I was sort of staggering about and not able to stand up straight. I couldn't draw buttons. I think I'm pretty much recovered now. I can both do up and undo buttons. This was in February? Yes. The only thing is I can't sing. I never could sing very well, but I could at least sing in tune, and now I can't, and my voice does tend to croak, so hence my introductory apology. What was there any immediate emotional or cognitive or perceptual component to it, or was it just a motor thing that, you know no, it was just motor. I mean, I was obviously scared. It's in the basal ganglin, as I said, which doesn't affect cognitive function. I hope that will become evident tonight that I've got well, we will see if you come out as a Mormon at any point in the next hour. It would take more than a stroke to do that to me. Our first question that one of you may have asked, if you had a time machine and could travel 500 years into the future, what do you think you would find biologically? Assuming our direct descendants still exist and haven't uploaded themselves into the matrix, will we be recognizably human? 500 years is too short a time to expect any genetic evolutionary change. What about with our own metal in the genetic engineering that we're that's surely going to do? Yes, I suppose that is a possibility. If by then we've colonized Mars such that there's a barrier to gene flow between the parent planet Earth and the colony on Mars, then it's possible that the Mars colony might have diverged. But 500 years is a short time. But how much of an appetite do you think we will have, given what we currently are to change ourselves, given the ability to do so in radical ways? Well, we've had the ability to change cows and horses and pigs and cabbages and dogs and roses for hundreds of thousands of years. And although we've changed all those species almost beyond recognition, when you think that a pekinese or a poodle or a pug or a bulldog is a wolf, still thinks it's a wolf, the world's worst wolf, and yet we haven't done that to humans. So it looks as though we don't seem to have had much of an appetite to do that. With respect to the selection part of the Darwinian equation. We're now just beginning to have the possibility of doing it to the mutation part of the Darwinian equation, namely genetic engineering. But it's not obvious why, if we didn't have the motivation to selectively breed humans, why we should have the motivation to selectively mutate humans. Kind of in a related point, you're obviously very famous for having introduced this concept of a meme. How seriously should we take the analogy to a gene with a meme? It was intended as an analogy to a gene and the idea is that anywhere in the universe where self replicating coded information arises, that could be fair game for Darwinian evolution, for Darwinian selection. And I wanted to end the selfish gene by making that point, because the whole of the rest of the book had been extolling the gene as the unit of selection. So I wanted to make the point it doesn't have to be DNA. It could be anything which is self replicating. Well, and it one could speculate about life on other planets being mediated by a replicator other than DNA. But then I thought or or a computer virus would have done the job as well, but I didn't know about them in 1976, so I thought, well, what about cultural inheritance? Anything where we have imitation is potentially analogous to genetic replications. There's something like a craze at a school, something like craze for a particular kind of toy. I introduced to my boarding school, a craze for origami paper folding to make a Chinese junk, and it spread like exactly like a measles epidemic through the school and then died away like a measles epidemic. Interestingly, I had learned to do this from my father and he had learned it from an almost identical epidemic at the same school 26 years earlier. So the epidemiology of mean spread is very similar to gene spread. But it's only interesting from a Darwinian point of view if the means that spread are the ones that are good at spreading, if there is some kind of selective effect and it's plausible that it should be closed fashion. Spread because people find them cool or something like a reverse baseball cap, which, by the way, lowers the IQ by a full ten points. That's probably the first remark that he's going to get in trouble for encounter. But I think you can probably treat religious memes in the same way. I mean, it's a religious idea spread like a virus, so I call them virus of the mind. So they either pass down the generations like DNA does, and of course, obviously religions pass down generations, but they also spread sideways in epidemics when you've got a particularly charismatic vector of the virus, like Billy Graham or one of those types. So I think it's a genuinely interesting question whether the really successful religions like Roman Catholicism and Islam spread because the memes have high spread ability in their own right like genes in Darwinism or whether they're spread by Nakiavellian priests who get together and work out what's the best marketing strategy to spread them. And I'm inclined to think that pure memetic spread is plausible and I'm interested in that. I haven't really run very much with the meme idea. The people who have are dan Dennett, the philosopher who talks in a very interesting way about memes in most of his recent books and Susan Blackmore is another one who wrote a book called The Meme Machine. Actually, there are about 20 books now with the word meme in the title which emphasize various aspects of it. The fact that memes don't change truly randomly does that run roughshod over that? I don't think that really matters. Genes mutate randomly in the sense that mutation is not directed towards improvement. The only improvement comes from selection but mutation nevertheless is induced by things like cosmic rays, radioactivity, various mutagenic chemicals. The fact that memes are introduced by human creativity doesn't detract from the idea that some memes spread better than others for selective reasons. What do you think your most important contribution to science or culture at large has been, or will be? I suppose the Extended Phenotype, which is the title of my second book. It's the only book that I wrote with a professional audience in mind. I could expound it, but this is supposed to be a conversation, not a monologue. The question is for both of us so I can answer it. But you could not say, okay, you do your uncle first, then I can tell you what I hope it will be. I don't tend to think in these terms this globally but I think what I'm doing most of the time and have done in most of my books is attempt to argue for the unity of knowledge and to resist this balkanization of our epistemology by essentially what I view as as the dictates of university architecture. You know, the the fact that there's the biology department over here where you study biology and then there's the psychology department over there that seems to articulate two separate spheres of inquiry that in the centers they do have different methods but there really are no boundaries between those disciplines. And I see that as true not just for canonical scientific disciplines but just fact based thinking about the nature of reality across the board and also the the distinction that people make between third person facts, classically physical facts and firstperson subjective facts. And some some people make that think that distinction is so hard and fast that they imagine there are no subjective facts. That, I think, is a boundary that I am consciously trying to erode and I think questions about moral truth and the and the truth of possible human experience or the experience of conscious systems. Those are questions that are every bit as grounded in reality as any questions we ask in physics or chemistry. So introspection is a way of getting scientific data? Yeah. Obviously, you have to issue certain caveats there. There are ways in which introspection is a dead end. For instance, I can't tell, even with my best efforts, I cannot tell that I have a brain. That's a pretty big blind spot. But there are many things that you can introspect about which give you scientifically valid data. And in fact, you only I mean, if you if you're studying the mind, if you're studying what it's like to be a person at some point, you are correlating third person, quote objective methods with first person report. Somebody else says, I ask you what it's like to have a stroke? Or your neurologist does, and he needs to know what your experience is with a stroke. The final analysis seems to be looking at your brain, at actually what has been physically affected. But the cash value of those physical effects is always what is showing up in your experience and what is showing up in your function. So if some canonical language area say it was affected, but you spoke fine and appreciated understood language fine and there was no discernible change in your language use, well, then that would be the definition of those being nonguist linguistic areas of the brain being affected no matter how close they are to the standard averaged atlas of languages. So we do always link up with subjective report, too, and first person performance. And so, yeah, in terms of the contribution I want to make, I want to argue that there's a larger set of truth claims we want to make when we're reasoning about reality. And those include things that we will never know. They include abstract things like mathematics, which the physical foundation of which is kind of hard to specify. And they include the example I always use is a question like what was JFK thinking the moment before he got shot? Well, we know we'll never know. There's data we'll never get. But there's an infinite number of things we know he wasn't thinking right, so it would be wrong to say he was thinking, I wonder what Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins think about what I'm thinking right now before I get shot. There's an infinite number of things we could assert about the character of his subjectivity there which we know are wrong. And we know that as fully as we know anything in science. And there are things that get the mystery or pseudo mystery of how to integrate free will. Our experience of free will with our scientific worldview, I think, can be easily resolved if you can introspect with sufficient perspicacity and notice that you don't even have evidence for free will in your first person experience. I think that's those are subjective data that are available. So there are ways to get access to interesting things through introspection but they don't actually include the existence of your brain. Very hard to communicate to other people. Yeah, but that's true of many things that we don't begin to doubt. Just imagine what it would be like if only 1% of the population had vivid dreams at night. So most of us just sleep like animals. There's nothing that it's like to be us for 8 hours a night. But then some percentage of the population talk about traveling and meeting people and having all of these illogical encounters. Dreams would be much stranger and many people would doubt their existence but they would exist just as much as they doubt the sanity of people who had them. Probably as well. Yeah, but did you fully answer your question? Do you want to say more about the extended phenotype? Well, I'll try tell people what a phenotype is not external the manifestation of genetic effects and from a Dominion point of view the phenotypic effects by which a gene is selected. So there'll be genes that affect wing size, eye color, hair color, intelligence these are all phenotypic effects. Conventionally phenotypic effects are confined to the body in which the gene sits. So genes exert their phenotypic effects by influencing embryonic embryological processes. And so the shape of the body, the color of the body, the behavior of the body are all influenced by the genes inside the body. That's conventional phenotype extended phenotype is phenotypic effects of genes which are outside the body in which the gene sits. And the easiest examples to think of are artifacts things like beaver dams, bird's nests. These are quite clearly phenotypes. They quite clearly influence the survival of the genes that make them. So a bird's nest is made by genes in the same limited sense or not so limited sense as the bird's tail and the bird's eyes and the bird's wings. And the nest contributes to the survival of the genes which is what matters in the selfish gene view of life. Just as surely as the wings and the tail of the bird contribute to the survival of the genes that made them. So although the nest is not a part of the bird's body it is a part of the phenotype by which the genes lever themselves into the next generation. Well, if you buy that and I think you have to then effect that parasites have on host. There are numerous examples, fascinating, rather lurid examples of parasites which affect the behavior or the morphology of the host in such a way as to improve the survival of the parasite. Well, that means that parasite genes are influencing host behavior and host morphology in the same kind of way as any gene influences phenotype. So when an animal is induced by there's a thing called a brain worm for example, which is a worm that gets into a fluke or a snail of everything like that and causes the intermediate as the snail or the fluke. Let's stick to snail. Causes a snail to be eaten by a sheep. Sorry the brain worm is a fluke and it gets into the snail and causes the snail to be more likely to be eaten by a sheep. And it does so by moving into the eyes of the snail and making the eyes pulsate in a sort of rather frightening way and calling the attention of an animal like a sheep or a cow to eating the snail which means that the parasite the fluke then gets into the next part of its life cycle. The fluke genes are influencing the behavior of the snail and the eyes of the snail. The change in the snail is part of the phenotype of fluke genes extended phenotype. And if you buy that which is a sort of further step then something like the bird song, say male bird song which say influences female birds actually physically causes the ovaries of the female to swell. This does happen. The swelling of the ovaries of a female bird is extended phenotype of genes in the male which make the male sing the song which has this effect. So the extended phenotype then becomes a way of looking at the whole of animal communication where one animal influences the behavior of another. I have not done justice to the extended phenotype. Read it. So what are the prospects that religion or something like it is part of our extended phenotype? Yes, I don't think I want to say that. I imagine you wouldn't. Well, in order to qualify as extended phenotype, it would be necessary that jeans. Well, say you took two preachers, one of whom was a very good preacher who recruited lots and lots of people into his church, another of whom wasn't. That could be extended to the entirety, but only if there was a genetic difference between these two preachers, which caused one of them to be an effective recruiter, the other one not. That would be, but I don't think that's very likely to be true. Well, wait a minute. Just to quite literally play devil's advocate here, if there's a gene for religious enthusiasm or a set of genes for susceptibility to that range of experience and a fundamental lack of intellectual honesty or a lack of concern whether what you're saying is true, so increased capacity for self deception and therefore deception of others, say I mean, that seems to me plausible. That's a very effective preacher who's filled with the charisma of being absolutely sure about what he's saying and energized by his passion for the whole project, that's true. And I think it probably is true that when you say a gene for something all you ever mean is a genetic difference that causes a phenotypic difference. So the best way to show that would be twin studies. If you can show that with identical twins and monozygotic twins if one of them is a religious maniac, the other one probably will be as well. If if that if that's true, and if that's not so true of fraternal twins, dizzygotic twins, then then you've you've shown that there is a genetic effect on on religiosity, and and that's probably true, and I think certainly true to be extended phenotype. I think you've got to say that genes engineer their own survival and passing on into the next generation by making their victims religious. And I suppose, yeah, maybe that works, actually. So quickly a life's work is undone. Yes. Let's not go there a bit, though. What do you think are the most misunderstood topics in science by otherwise smart and educated people, or what what's one that you think is often misunderstood? That oh, evolution, surely, especially in this in this country. What do you think even many people in this room who obviously are well educated and interested in the topic to even be here, what do you think many people here may be confused about or be wrong about and not know it that's of consequence in science? Well, certainly there are no creationists in this audience. You were screened at the door right, with that wand. I suppose there may be people I would say it was a misconception to believe that the majority of evolutionary change as we observe it is non selective. There are people who believe that natural selection is relatively trivial compared to random genetic effects. Now, that's a genuine scientific controversy, and there may be people here who subscribe to that. And it's true if you stick to molecular genetic changes, but if you're talking about actual externally visible phenotypic changes, then I don't think it is true. And I think that's a confusion which I would expect to find in this sophisticated audience. So just to traverse that one more time, the belief that much of what we notice about ourselves was not selected for, but just kind of came along for the ride, you think that's very likely untrue, yes, but you have to be sophisticated about it, because you may be looking at the wrong thing. We talked about this last night. Perhaps it doesn't matter doing it again. Many people think that quite a lot of characteristics are trivial, sort of frivolous that I mentioned eyebrows last night as being something which nobody could seriously think that eyebrows are doing anything useful. How could eyebrows possibly be naturally selected for? Well, I think that that's a mistake. It's a very it's a very tempting mistake. But something that seems trivial is almost certainly not trivial, because the genes that make it have so many opportunities to be selected. They are represented in thousands of individuals and over lots of generations, and this has been worked out mathematically as well. So that is a very common misconception. I think that very slight effects are too trivial for natural selection to care about, and I think that is wrong. I think natural selection actually does care about even what looked to us like very tiny trivial effects to make a disconcertingly lateral move here. How can we publicly challenge the more dangerous tenets of Islam without further inspiring bigotry against Muslims? Now, you and I have both, unlike many scientists, we have we've sounded off on this. It's been for as long as I've been an atheist, it's been deeply unfashionable amongst atheists, even atheists who think it's a legitimate project to criticize religion. It's been unfashionable to criticize any one religion more than any other, especially one anymore. Yeah, you can go to town on Mormonism or Scientology Christianity. Actually, the default assumption is that if you're against religion, or if you think that the evidentiary claims upon which all these revealed religions are founded are unjustifiable, well, then they're all on all fours together. And you don't really need to weight your concern. But it just has seemed obvious, at least since September 11, 2001, that one of these religions is producing more than its fair share of conflict and depression. So back to the question. Given that you and I both think it's legitimate to focus on the most harmful instances of religion as we see it, how do you avoid energizing those voices who are actually animated by bigotry and xenophobia? Yes, well, I think we both have this problem, I suppose. I listened to one of your podcasts about Islam and arguing against the point of view, which says that the terrorists, which we all know about in the Middle East, are not motivated by religion. They're motivated by anything but religion as a kind of desperate desire to blame anything but religion for what is going on. This was the podcast where that issue of ISIS's magazine Dabiq, where they just spelled out they were as fed up with this as I was, and they just wrote all of their reasons for killing Infidels. It was amazing. I felt like I was in a lucid dream. That it's true. Do listen to it. What's it called? Pablo? I forgot what it's called. But you'll find it sometime in the last ten podcasts what Jihadists really think, and it's why we hate you and why we fight you. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Sam could have written the script. It's just completely we hate you because you're not Muslim. It amounts to nothing more than that. And we fight you for the same reason. But what do you do? Actually, I had a podcast I just released today where I was interviewing our mutual friend Dianne Hercli, and I asked her a related question. Yeah, thank you. This is the true feminist hero who was just declared an anti Muslim extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. That's absolutely unbelievable. But since I asked her and has been disinvited by at least several campuses in this country, including Brandeis, so I asked her more to the point of conspiracy thinking on the right, it is simply a fact that Islamists and jihadists are scheming to spread their views, both by the sword and otherwise, throughout open societies. And they're using the norms and institutions of our open societies against ourselves in a very cynical and calculated way. And it's not even a conspiracy, as Ian pointed out. It's just there in the open. This is an agenda that Islamists have. They're totally open about it. Totally. Honestly. Yeah. But the issue is you can take this one's concern about this in truly paranoid direction. So I hear from people who think Ayan is a stealth Islamist or jihadist. I hear from people who think that Majid, who I wrote Islam and the Future of Tolerance with, is a stealth Islamist and jihadist. And so there's no obvious signage on the way to complete insanity where you're told that you are now too fearful and too concerned about things that actually are contiguous with real reasons for concern. But I asked Ayan, where's the boundary here? How do we differentiate a reasonable fear about genuinely scheming people and right wing paranoia in this case? And she just said facts, just one word. It's like you're either talking about facts or you're not. And when you're talking about facts, you you can't go wrong in this space. And I thought that was a great answer. I think one point to make is that the main victims of these awful people are actually Muslims themselves. But what about the attack from the left, which in liberal left circles in America and Britain, where Islam gets a free pass on all sorts of terrible things like misogyny, which no liberal would actually sanction? And yet if a Muslim behaves in horrifically, misogynistic way, somehow that's ignored, somehow legitimate, oh, it's part of their culture, so they're allowed to do that. I must say, I despise that kind of thing. I think it was an anthropologist who's quote this I'm about to butcher. But it's a great point. He said, when one person grabs a little girl and cuts off her clitoris with a septic blade, he is a dangerous lunatic. When a million people do this, it's a culture and we need to respect it. And that's the little crystal of moral confusion that's just at the center of the liberal worldview that we need to fully I dare to suggest that there's too much respect to if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes, codes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I am speaking with Lawrence Wright. Lawrence is a journalist and an author and a screenwriter and a playwright. He is very well known as a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and he has written many works of nonfiction. A book called Remembering Satan The Looming Tower, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize Going Clear, the revelatory work about Scientology that was made into a documentary 13 days in September. And his most recent book is The Terror Years, which is a compilation of all his writing on Al Qaeda and the Islamic State that he did for The New Yorker. So, needless to say, our interests on a variety of topics here overlap. I've never met Lawrence. I've never gotten the chance to speak with him before, so it was great to have an excuse to do it. That's one of the amazing things about having this podcast as a forum. I can send someone I admire an email. I ask them if they want to have a conversation. Sometimes they do, and you get to hear it. So without further ado, I introduce you to the great Lawrence Wright. I have Lawrence Wright on the line. Lawrence, thanks for coming on the podcast. Good to talk to you, Sam. So I will have introduced you before we got on here, but tell people how you describe yourself. Do you think of yourself as a journalist first or are you an author more generally, how do you think of yourself? I guess I think of myself as a writer in addition to journalism, I write plays and movies, and I've written a novel, so I like experimenting with different forms. Yeah, well, that's actually one of the things I most admire about what you're doing. I'm a huge fan of your work, but the quality of the work aside, I love the way you use so many different platforms to communicate your ideas. It often starts with a New Yorker article, but your articles often become books, and some of these books become documentaries, and one became a stage play and then became a documentary. And so it's very creative and you're like the king of media at this point. It's really very cool to see. Thanks for that. But mainly, I think the hardest thing as a writer is finding the ideas that you want to write about. And there's such a paucity of ideas that you want to devote your life to. And so when I hit on something that I'm really intrigued by, then I sometimes try to work it into different forms. Well, is there a primary concern or set of ideas that unifies all of your work? How do you decide what sorts of topics to address? It's very intuitive, but now that I'm older, I look back and I see that I've had a lifelong interest in religion and why people believe one thing rather than another. It seems to be a thread that goes through much of my work. I was thinking along those lines myself. It seems to me that you and I share a common interest in the power of belief and in particular, the power of bad beliefs, bad ideas that become ascendant in some context or another. And we'll get into specifically these different topics. But you spend a lot of time thinking about Islamic extremism and Scientology and other cult like phenomenon like Jonestown. And what's interesting to me it's been a point of frustration, but it's something I really admire about how you've treated these topics is that many people actually doubt whether or not ideas matter very much. And it's very common to meet people who think that good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things, and that ideology is more or less always just a pretext for good and bad people to do whatever they were going to do anyway. But one of the most refreshing things about your discussion of these aberrant belief systems is that you make it clear how much beliefs matter and that bad beliefs can get even very good people to do terrible things. I would limit that mainly to, at least in our era, to religious beliefs. I think the notion that beliefs are discountable mainly comes from observing the hypocrisy of political figures and people who hold strong political views but then act completely differently in their own behavior. Whereas what intrigued me as a journalist religion has very little status in the world of journalism. It's seen as like covering cooking or something like that in your daily newspaper. It's a religion beat would be off the head in a back section. But I observe somewhere along the line that people can have very strong political views without it changing their lives at all. But people who have strong religious views, that tends to determine their behavior in a very powerful way, for good or ill. Yeah. Well, so let's get into first, I'll name the books. There's really three books I want to focus on here the Looming Tower, which is your amazing book about Al Qaeda. And we could also throw in here the Stage Play and documentary My Trip to Al Qaeda, which is also fascinating and connected to that book. And then you have your most recent book that The Terror Years, which again is also on the same topic. And then there's Going Clear, which is your book and the subsequent documentary on Scientology. And if we have time, I'd like to touch on your book Remembering Satan because that is just one of the strangest stories ever told. We'll see if we get there. Let's start with jihadism and Islamism. Now, you were on this topic, at least to some degree, before most people were aware of these issues because you wrote this film The Siege, which came out in 1998, which depicts jihadist terrorism in New York and then kind of the attendant infringements of civil liberties that came in response. Do you remember at what point you were aware of jihadism as a global issue and not just a local problem that was narrowly focused on Israel? Well, I had lived in Egypt as a young man, and I was there when Nasser died in 19 71 of Sadat who succeeded him. One of his first actions was to let the Muslim brothers out of prison. And one of our professors had a brother who got out. And I was aware of the stirring inside Islam, I suppose, before a lot of other Western people were. And then when I was working on The Siege this is in the middle ninety s, and Egypt was in Tumult at the time. But my producer had asked me to write a movie about a woman in the CIA. And that was that was the whole idea. It was just a notion, really. And I was trying to think about, well, this Cold War is over. Who is the enemy? And it wasn't obvious at the time. And finally I realized that the CIA did have a real life antagonist and it was the FBI. And what they were struggling over was who was going to control terrorism in the United States. And that became the axis for the siege. And Denzel Washington played the FBI chief and Annette Benning was a CIA woman that had, you know, the idea had been spawned from. And as I began researching that, I turned up the information about bin Laden and about, of course, there was Omar Abdul Rahman, who was known as the blind Shake, who had a plan afoot to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel and the Statue of Liberty. And there were a lot of terrorist plots that were going around at the time. And then the trailers in the movie appeared in August of 98. And that, of course, was the same month that the American embassies in East Africa were blown up by al Qaeda. It was their opening blow. There was another bombing that same month in Cape Town, South Africa that people don't really know very much about. It was at a Planet Hollywood, right? And it was an Islamist, radical Islamist group claim credit for blaming the trailers for the movie The Siege as their provocation. And the reason they struck Planet Hollywood is that Bruce Willis, one of the costars of the movie was a partial owner of that chain. So it was a real shock to me because two people were killed and a little girl lost her leg. And all of this came about because I had written this movie. So I was affected by terrorism, I guess earlier than most Americans. Yeah, I heard that story. I think you talk about that at least in my trip to Al Qaeda. Right. And that's always been why I have resisted offers to translate some of my more hard hitting criticisms of Islam into the relevant languages. Because I remember Salman Rushdie's experience, apart from his experience of having to go into hiding, just his experience of finding out that his translators and foreign publishers had been killed or attacked, and that had to be rough. Did you feel there would have been very little basis or at least most people wouldn't have formed an expectation that anything like that would happen in response to a film like this? At that point, were you just blindsided by it or did you feel it was totally thunderstock? Of course. Now at the same time when the movie came out, there were protests, there were muslims were angry at being depicted as terrorists. They thought that was a stereotype of Hollywood and they were picketing the theaters. It was a big box office failure until 911, when it was the most rented movie in America. But it was a scarring experience and it came out of the blue. Where were you on 911 and what were you working on? Well, at that time I was having breakfast with a group. Every Tuesday morning. We get together and speak Spanish, so that's where I was. And at the time I was planning to get out of journalism, I had the idea that I'd become a movie director. I was writing scripts for me to direct. And then suddenly 911 happened and I realized I was going to get back on the fire truck. And in all the work you have done since on Jihadism, what would you say you've learned about it? Well, I've learned for one thing, that belief is very powerful in affecting even violent behavior. But one of the things that intrigued me about the origins of this movement, especially in Egypt, is that a lot of the people who went into Al Jahad, which was the Egyptian organization, and then later al Qaeda, weren't really very religious. In some ways, they were drawn into protest. You'd have to understand that living in Arab countries, most Arab countries at the time, was a very stifling experience. They're tyrannies and the opportunities for expression are very few. And there's not very much alternative to either being a member of the government, a bureaucrat, or a member of the army, and then there's a very diminished private sector. And then if you want to have any kind of alternative expression, you go to the mosque. And that's where the Muslim brothers arose so there were people that I think were drawn into this movement, and some of them were idealist. They were kind of people that you could build a country on in other respects, but their dreams have been kind of perverted and drawn into these radical expressions of Islam. One of the problems in the Arab world is there's so few spiritual choices. You can only believe one thing. Your choice is to believe it, more or less. And so what happened in Egypt was that young men who were not originally very pious would be drawn into these kind of radical groups. They were wanting to effect some kind of change in their country, but at the same time, they underwent changes themselves, and they became radicalized by the more strenuous views of Islam, and they began to use those views to justify the actions that they were taking. Yeah, I want to drill down a little bit on what you just said there, that they were not very religious, because I think people can misunderstand what you're saying. Or perhaps you might disagree about the implications of what you're saying, because it's true that many people don't come from madrasas. Many people don't show any signs of religiosity, much less extremist religiosity, in their earlier life. But the people who become suicide bombers at the point they become committed really do believe what they say. They believe the beliefs are operative at that point. And the history of how they got to that point is an interesting one. And, I mean, you can have kids in Orange County becoming radicalized, but once they are actually radicalized, they do share this belief system. And so a lot of people take, I think, a false comfort in looking at the biographies of some of these people and they say, well, this person didn't come out of a madrasa. This person went to the London School of Economics. So clearly this isn't about religion. There's something else going on here. But for the person who has an awakening experience of some kind that gets channeled into Salafi style Islam, and they take it all the way into the end zone of wanting to get into paradise right now. However secular they had seemed up until a year ago or 15 minutes ago, at a certain point, what gets them to actually act is this worldview that has gotten communicated to them somehow. Do you disagree with that? Do you do you think there's a secular route to to martyrdom that is equally well subscribed in in this world? Well, if you look at, you know, the world that we're talking about now, the radical Islam, there are Islamists who become radicalized, and there are radicalized radicals who become Islamized. You can come from both of those directions and arrive at the same point. And then you have people like Ramsay Yusuf, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, not at all religious. He was just using religious ideas. He didn't really express them himself, but he used religious compatriots and he worked with Omar Abdulrahman to Blind Shake, but he was not at all religious himself. And there are people like that, although he wasn't a suicide bomber. No, but the world of suicide bombers inside is fairly small one. The world of radical Islam is quite large. Yeah, I would agree. I guess my issue is I certainly don't doubt that there are some people who wage war against the west in some sense under the banner of Islam without sincerely believing all of its precepts, but and then there are gradations of this. I saw that you had interviewed my my friend and and collaborator, Majid Nawaz, which I yeah, I'd forgotten. I'd seen my trip to Al Qaeda some years ago when it, I think, first came out and then watched it again in in anticipation of this conversation and then was surprised. I didn't know Majid when I had first seen it, obviously, because I had no recollection he was in there. So Majid is, when he was an Islamist, was not a budding suicide bomber. So there are different points of commitment on that spectrum of being organized under this banner. But for me, the the most toxic part of the center of the bullseye here for the role of belief is in particular this sincere belief in martyrdom. Because it seems to me this has two consequences. It allows people to actually love death more than we love life. That becomes a sincere statement of just psychological fact and therefore to seek death in this. They become really undeterrable. And you describe people like this in The Looming Tower, and particularly the early Al Qaeda members who were fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, who were taking absolutely no steps to protect their own lives. And when queried about this, they said, yeah, we the whole point is to get killed here. Right. But the other thing is it allows people, whether they're suicide bombers or not, to kill innocents without any compunction, because really, by this worldview, nothing can go wrong. The good will go to heaven, the infidels will go to hell where they belong, and you can blow yourself up in a crowd of children and and you have literally done nothing wrong because there's no conceivable outcome. That is a bad outcome, given that God is overseeing all this and everyone gets what they deserve in the end anyway. Yeah, to some extent, I think that we have people that are acting out of beliefs that are giving them a moral cover for actions that one can't otherwise understand, but they're also psychopaths in this as well, and they're drawn like moss to it. And I think that a lot of the phenomenon of ISIS is fed by that. People are excited by the carnage and they flock to it, and then on the way, they pick up these beliefs almost like garments. A lot of the people that you see they don't have this extremist religious background before they get there. And I don't know how seriously we're talking about. There's not a single unified theory for why all these people arrive at the same place. There are many different paths to it and different personalities that are animated by different philosophies and and longings and and and dysfunctions, and so they they can come in many different routes. There's an interesting theory about stefan Hertog wrote a book called Engineers of Jihad, and he talked about the number of people who come into jihad from a technical specialty engineering background, and even speculates that some of them are on the autism spectrum. And I think you can look at if you have the whole universe of people who are dedicating their lives to Islamic jihad, you're going to find that a lot of the leaders are going to be those kinds of engineering people who can use well, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a perfect example. Not a religious man himself, really, and he's runs a Yusuf's uncle. But but he was able to to use people who had these beliefs to force, like, the hijackers of 911 and persuade them to give up their lives to enact the vision that he's created. Yeah. I was struck in watching my trip to al Qaeda again, because I had first seen it before anyone had even heard of ISIS. I believe I was struck at one point. You were reading from some of the stated goals of al Qaeda at that point, and it was interesting to see how much ISIS had achieved those goals. They seem to be in the process of losing those gains. But I had forgotten how explicit al Qaeda's goal was to form a caliphate in Iraq and to use it as a basis by which to ultimately create a global one and to draw us into further into a quagmire there. It just seemed like ISIS was the culmination not merely of al Qaeda in Iraq and the crazy sectarian Sadism that got expressed there, but the original vision of Al Qaeda. How do you view ISIS as being the same or different from Al Qaeda at this point? Well, there are stylistic differences, and their goals are the same. They want to Islamize the world. They want Islam to be the only superpower in the world, and they feel resentful. That has been put on the back shelf in the way. To some extent. The idea of the caliphate was something that bin Laden had in mind is a distant goal, because, first of all, you would have to persuade Muslims that this is something they were going to have to implement eventually. But Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who was the founder of al Qaeda in Iraq, which became the precursor to ISIS, he was in a hurry, and he was not patient as bin Laden was. And also he had a yen to create a civil war inside Islam, which he succeeded in doing by waging war on the Shiites. Bin Laden wanted to fight the west. He wanted to drive the west out of Arab and Muslim lands so that it could be thoroughly Islamized according to his Salafi philosophy. And then eventually, you would create a caliphate. And Zarkawi had just a different battle plan. He became very prominent when we had al Qaeda under such pressure that bin Laden and Zawahri and the other leaders of al Qaeda couldn't keep their heads above the ground. Meanwhile, Zarqawi is out creating total mayhem on the ground in Iraq. And this was exciting to a lot of young Muslims who wanted to get in on the action and believed in the goals that Zarqawi was espousing. He seemed to be a proper psychopath. Would you draw a line between someone like him and bin Laden just psychologically there? There are fascinating differences. When I was working on The Looming Tower, I was puzzled because al Qaeda was essentially an Egyptian organization with a Saudi head on it. And there were a couple of Jordanians in it, but essentially they were Persian Gulf Arabs and Egyptians. And I looked around and I wondered, where are the Palestinians? Where are the Lebanese? Where are the Jordanians and the Syrians? The region that we call the Levant? Where are they? In Al Qaeda. And I realized that there was actually another training camp in Afghanistan at the same time bin Laden was running his and it was run by Zarkawi. And he actually got money support from bin Laden, although he was not formerly a member of al Qaeda at the time. But that was the group that went into Iraq after we invaded and began to prosper there. And so you look at bin Laden, he was an international businessman, college educated, wealthy, extremely wealthy at one point. And I described him as Saudi Arabia's first celebrity. And he had a lot of, not charisma, but more of a mystique about him. And he was in some ways kind of delicate in his mannerisms and so on. Whereas Zorkali was a criminal. He was a street thug and sex criminal. And he was in prison. And it was in prison that he became close to this Sheikh Mukda Z, who's a very influential jihadist philosopher. And I think he was already radical psychopathic, and then in some ways emboldened by this Islamist philosophy that gave him a warrant to act out the way that I think that he normally wanted to anyway. So, you know, his his kind of madness, the way that he rampaged across Iraq, killing anyone in his path, suddenly he had absolute divine permission to do so. And there was something awe inspiring about the way that he waged this unlimited war against the Shiites. And for people that are drawn to conflict, he caught a lot of attention. I imagine you're familiar with the Freud's term the narcissism of minor differences. Yeah, I think that that's really fascinating. Where religion is concerned because Freud talks about how people that are very, very similar in most respects can be the biggest enemies because of very small differences between the two of them. And the Sunnis and the Shiites are a perfect example of that. For outsiders. They're just Muslims. But for Zarkawi and many people who followed him, the small historical differences and the stylistic differences in the way they prayed, for instance, were incredibly inflammatory. And it has created absolute chaos inside the Islamic universe. That gives me an opportunity to point out something that I often point out when I'm talking about Islam and Islamism and jihadism and where everything I say is more or less implicitly or explicitly in criticism of the doctrine here and the consequences of these ideas and linking this doctrine to violence. The thing to point out is that the most common victim of this violence is another Muslim. Yeah. By a thousand folds. Yes. This is not merely the offeat concern of a pampered Westerner who doesn't want terrorism in his movie theaters. The reality is the world is on fire with this particular form of sectarian conflict. And now we're witnessing, very likely, Europe break apart in part as a result of this conflict in Syria and Iraq and the attendant migrant crisis. Something I might raise with you in a minute, but tell me about Imman al Zawahiri in this context. How do you view him as a personality compared to Zarkawi and bin Laden? Well, he was a man of science, which is interesting. He was a medical doctor, a surgeon. His father was a professor at pharmacology at Cairo University. So he came from a science background. But he he was also very religious as a young man, and as was bin Laden, there was not a conversion experience for either man. They just became more deeply implicated in their religion. I think the experience when Zawari went off with Muslim Brother doctors to Afghanistan during the Maja Hadem war against the Soviets, I think that that was a turning point for him. And he had already, at the age of 15, had created a cell to overthrow the Egyptian government. Just think about his predominant, the audacity of this young man. Partly, I think, he was very influenced by his uncle, who was Site Clutheb's lawyer. And Site Klitob is in some ways the godfather. Yeah. It's always intriguing to me, Sam, how movements and belief systems always go back to a book and you can trace it in the Bible or the Koran or Dos Copitol or Hitler's mind Camp or even animal rights as an animal liberation. There's always at the bottom of it a book that is so influential. And the book that really gave rise to the Islamist movement was a book that Kuta Baroque called Mahalam Tiltarik, which means signpost along the road or milestones. And he had in the late 40s, he had kind of fled Egypt because King was mad at him and came to America where he was alarmed and disgusted by the American habits, especially our sexual mores. And he spent time in this little town called Greeley, Colorado, which in some respects would be a total advertisement for the American dream. Yeah, it's a darling little town and had a lot of churches and so on, but there was nothing that anybody could do that pleased him. Even his barber didn't do his hair right. But he saw some things about America that I think Americans weren't willing to look at. For instance, Site Kutib was a very dark Egyptian and he experienced the racism that was common at the time. He had crazy notions about a lot of things about America. But he went back to Egypt and wrote some very influential articles and then became the head of the sort of underground wing of the Muslim brothers, the more violent wing. And when Gamala Abdul Nasser and the colonels and the Egyptian army staged their coup in 1952, nasser offered Kutub an influential post in the new government. But it wasn't influential enough and Kutub fought against Nasser and the regime and eventually Nasser had him hanged. He became this martyr. But this book that he wrote on scrap paper that he smuggled out of the prison became the document and he called for a vanguard of young men who would make this vision real. And and Zawafri was certainly one of those people. One thing that's rarely remarked on and but you do it in places is that the men in Muslim majority countries grow up largely outside the company of women. And for instance, this story you told about Kutub as I recall, the crisis point for him in his sojourn and Greeley was he went to a dance where he saw the young must have been teenagers, young men and women dancing, I think in the basement of a church. So the fact that they had used their church for this desecration and he saw these young men and women kind of pawing at each other. And there's a passage somewhere where he talks about just the utter shamelessness of the batting eyes of the women and the skin exposed. And what comes through more than anything else, baby, is cold outside. I mean, there's such obvious frustrated lust here and the role played by sexual taboos and the disempowerment of being on the outside of any sphere in which you could plausibly gratify your desires in a way that seemed psychologically and morally healthy to you. It's just there's something psychologically so maladaptive about the way sex is viewed in this context and so I just want to do to reflect on that. Is there anything we can generalize about the consequences of keeping the sexes so radically apart and the attendant misogyny, the political non equivalence between men and women in these societies? Well, my experience of it was especially acute in Saudi Arabia. I went there in 2003 or. Four. And the Saudis wouldn't let me in as a journalist. So I took a job as the mentor to these young journalists in Jeddah, which is bin Laden's hometown. And men and women really have almost no interaction at all. We think of, for instance, the women all dressed up in black and sometimes their faces covered as well. But the men are pretty covered up, too. They're in white, and the women are in black. It looks like sometimes I would feel like I was in an opera with a kind of cappuccin monks or something like that going. And one of my reporters, we went to a mall, and there are some malls where men can't go by themselves if they're not in a family. But this was one mall where we could go in. My reporter was an especially avid Romeo, and he spotted a couple of Saudi women coming down the escalator, and they were totally encased in black. Even their eyes were covered. Sometimes you can't even tell what direction they're facing. And he turned to me without a trace of irony. He said check them out. There's some power that he must have to see through those garments. It's clairvoyance. I was always aware. I was totally aware of this sense of longing and frustration. And also a lot of civilization is young men learning how to please girls. You cannot get past that. When they're outside of that world, and in a world of men, almost exclusively, then it's a totally unsettled situation where behaviors are not moderated, and also they take out their frustrations in other ways. What's intriguing about Saudi society is that there's a great sense of passivity, and I think it's born of being demoralized. And at the same time, you have so much of the stream going into radical Islam, into al Qaeda or other groups come out of Saudi Arabia. And certainly the ideas, the propaganda that feeds these religious ideas comes out of Saudi Arabia. It's not entirely traceable to the gender apartheid, but it is a part of it. And the absence of civil society, the inability to mix freely and talk openly, all those things create this stifled atmosphere. Yeah. There's also the fact that this is this division between the sexes is part of a larger honor culture. And what happens there is you have the women become essentially props in the honor economy of the men. I mean, women become viewed as especially their sexual lives. And the prospect that there could be some sexual indiscretion, whether it's your wife or your daughter, the fact that that would reflect back on you and your social currency as a person of honor that all seems so dysfunctional and such a perfect recipe for unhappiness. And yet it's hard to see how to change it, given the status quo. Well, one thing, we should not make the mistake of taking away any sense of agency from these women to Saudi women. I had several young Saudi women reporters who I was supposed to mentor. And at first they wouldn't let me see them. They all worked in this little office under the stairwell. And I said, I can't mentor them if I can't see them. So once a week, they were allowed to come up in this little black train into the conference room. And one I got to know particularly well najwa. She was extremely conservative, and she wore the abaya, which is the black body veil, and the hijab over her head. But she also wore a NA cob to COVID her face, everything except for the eyes. And she used to COVID her eyes as well, but she kept tripping, but she would put on gloves. She talked about how she tried to become more conservative every year. And I also reflected on the fact that Saudi women are the mothers of these boys. They have responsibility in how they turn out. And I went to Saudi Arabia thinking that women would be a reservoir of progressive movement of some sort. And I didn't find that there were some women who were that way. But in general, I would not say that Saudi women are a force of liberal ideas. I would be surprised if they were. The beliefs exist on both sides of this divide. And when I see how a friend like Ian Hersiali gets attacked by women who are defending their faith from her criticism, or Majid. Nawaz gets attacked by women as a as an Uncle Tom, you see what's going on there. Can you say something about the prevalence of conspiracy thinking in the Arab world as you encountered it? Yeah, I was thinking about that as I was preparing to talk with you because I find that there's a kind of parallel through the kind of fake news that we're going through now. And when I was working in the Arab press in Saudi Arabia, one thing I noted is that you can have opinions and the newspapers are full of columnists, but what was dangerous were facts. And when I was trying to teach these young reporters how to go out and gather facts, I was actually providing them with skills that they weren't going to be able to use. So the newspapers were vacuous and and and gossip mongering. And after 911, I remember when I was in Egypt and I was taught talking to this Egyptian woman who suggested to me that 911 was something that the American government did to itself, which was a very common thing. I ran into it again and again, and I said, how can you believe that? I mean, there's no evidence that the American government had any desire to do that or had any way to participate in it. It's a totally nonsensical prejudicial view. What causes you to say that? And she said, well, in Egypt, nobody ever tells us the truth, so we have to determine for ourselves what it might be and the first question we ask is, who benefits? And in her view, the beneficiary of 911 was the American government because it allowed the US. To wage war on the Muslim world. Well, I can't tell you how common this view is, and there's absolutely nothing to sustain it. It is just a conspiracy theory that has taken root and unfortunately, given some support by a number of American conspiracists. Have you gone down that rabbit hole very far? The 911 truth phenomenon in the west, they used to follow me around in my speeches, and Alex Jones and I've had a conversation before. He's one of the main propagators of this kind of nonsense. I've talked to them at length. If you analyze their view of how 911 happened, there's not any doubt that the plane struck the World Trade Center, at least among most of them, unless you think they were holograms or not actual planes. Yeah, there are people that they had no windows. They go even further. That it never happened at all. Yeah, it was like the moon landing never happened. But the 911 truthers normally believe that the planes did strike, but that's not what would happen if a plane hit a skyscraper. And of course, this experiment has only happened twice, so and in both cases, you know, the buildings fell down, but according to the truth, or that's not what would happen, when have you ever seen a building fall into its own footprint? Lawrence? Yes. Right. So what happened? Well, there must have been explosives planted inside the building to make sure that they fell, and that's where the American government came in, because they had to be stealthily done. Nobody could have observed them. There had to be no evidence for it. Then in the case of the Pentagon, which didn't fall down, and there are a lot of troopers who say that that was a missile, it wasn't a plane. If that's the case, where are the passengers? Where's the plane? What about all the people who saw the plane flying low over wire? You know, once you start picking apart the things they accept as gospel, there's there's just nothing but a ludicrous thread of conspiracy all knitted together into something that's totally absurd, but which corresponds to their view of how the world works. Yeah. And crucially, when you follow each one of these anomalies to some alternative conclusion, it's never the same conclusion. There's no unified view of what would explain everything that happened here. There's dozens or hundreds or more different things, all of which are mutually incompatible, but all of which are different from the prevailing story that Al Qaeda did it. But there is no unified view that makes it the perfect work of evil genius to have George Bush sitting reading My Pet Goat when this thing goes off. What evil genius decided that to do it that way? I mean, this larger phenomenon of conspiracy thinking, which, again, now, once you connect it to the the fake news phenomenon that we're living through now, it becomes hugely consequential. It's like this I've always thought of conspiracy thinking as a kind of pornography of doubt. There's an itch that people are scratching here, people who, for the most part, feel disempowered and imagine that people in power are always doing something malicious and that whenever you can explain something based on incompetence, it's never really incompetence. The irony here is they're attributing a superhuman level of competence to people where there's never any evidence of this kind of competence. Bill Clinton couldn't stop a semen stained dress from appearing on the evening news, right? Yeah. Presidents can't do these sorts of things. And yet we're asked to imagine that thousands upon thousands of psychopathic collaborators killed some of the most productive people in our society in downtown Manhattan just for the pleasure of sending us to war in the Middle East. Not to Saudi Arabia, where the hijackers came from, but to Iraq, when we could have easily found a pretext to go to war there anyway. And what a great war that was. And yet they did this without a single leak. There's not one person with a guilty conscience who got on 60 Minutes and spilled the beans. And yet, generally speaking, you can't even keep the next iPhone from being left on the bar before it gets released. It's an amazing double standard of reasonableness there that gives us this kind of thinking. So what's your feeling about the fake news phenomenon, the way that we are? Analysis? I think that the elevation of fake news if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Well, today I am speaking with a guest who many of you may not have heard of. He is a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto by the name of Jordan Peterson, who has become quite famous online recently for standing in opposition to changes to the Human Rights Code in Ontario, Canada that have really direct relevance to him as a professor. And he's been on many different podcasts. Joe Rogan, dave Rubin. Gadsad. I think so many people who you may also listen to have interviewed him. And he is actually, as I say at the beginning of this interview, the most requested guest I have had at this point by all of you. I can't tell you how many people have emailed me or tweeted at me demanding that I have Jordan on the podcast. And it's really in anticipation of us not talking about free speech, but about his beliefs about religion and its importance, the connection between religious truth and scientific truth, the importance of mythology. All of this is stuff that has come out in his other interviews, which many atheists and secularists have found both perplexing and inspiring. I've seen many atheists say that Jordan is giving the first construal of religion that I find hard to grapple with. That is interesting, that seems morally important and intellectually honest. So many, many of you have wanted to get the two of us together so that we could presumably butt heads on these topics. So I did invite Jordan on the podcast, and you were about to hear that conversation, and I am, as I say, at the end, going to rely on all of you to figure out what happened. Because from my point of view, we got bogged down on a very narrow point of more than just philosophical interest. We got bogged down on what it means to say that something is true or not. And to my eye, we didn't take that analysis very far because we immediately hit rather significant impediment and difference of opinion about what is entailed there. And I just couldn't get Jordan to agree on some facts that seem so basic to me that I was uncomfortable moving forward on other topics until we ironed that out. And it took more than 2 hours to get to a point where I thought, well, this is a good stopping point. We will see whether, based on the public reception to this, whether it is useful to move on, to talk about morality and myth and religion and all the rest. I wanted to be my best self for the rest of that conversation and I just I was running out of energy and patience there, so I decided to pull the brakes. But you now have 2 hours of me and Jordan butting heads on a variety of topics related to scientific epistemology, for lack of a better word. Please judge for yourselves how we did and what was going on there. It's not absolutely clear to me what we disagree about, but you'll hear me attempt to push really as hard as I could to get some answers there, and I really don't feel that I got them. So the fault could absolutely be mine, and I will rely on you to inform me of that. So I don't know where this best done, perhaps on Reddit, but somebody bring my attention to what gets said here. If anything useful gets said in response to this podcast, these are all experiments in conversation. Now I bring you another one. Please enjoy my conversation with Jordan Peterson. I am here with Jordan Peterson. Jordan, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Thanks for the invitation. Well, listen, you have the distinction of being, I think, without question, the person who my listeners most requested that I talk to. So congratulations. People really want to hear what you have to say. Yeah, well, I think they want to hear what we both have to say and hopefully we can manage that in a way that works out real well. That would be good as far as I'm concerned. Actually, I'm very hopeful. We'll have an interesting conversation here, I think. You seem to suddenly be everywhere on the Internet, and you've been on many other podcasts, and I think we should talk briefly about the reasons why you've suddenly become so visible. But I don't think we should spend a lot of time on them because I think that's territory where you and I will almost fully converge. And I think that's not what people are most interested in having us talk about, but to just get people up to speed with what's been happening with you and why you've been so visible all of a sudden. Let's talk briefly about the free speech issues, the gender pronoun issues, what's happening in Canada around this bill C 16 and the gender provision in the Ontario Human Rights code. Just bring us up to speed there. And again, I think we should spend probably no more than ten minutes or so there and then we'll move on to areas where you and I may not fully agree. Ten minutes would be plenty. Canada moved at the federal level to institute some legislation that on the surface of it seems more or less in keeping with the extension of human rights protection to different groups that's been occurring, say, over the last 30 to 50 years. This time they extended protection to gender identity and gender expression. The first problem with that, although by no means the worst problem, is that gender expression is not a group, and as far as I can tell from reading the Ontario Human Rights Commission website, policies, which the federal government announced that the provisions of Bill C 16 would be interpreted within it's. Now you can now provisionally be prosecuted under the hate crime hate crime legislation scheduled for criticizing someone's choice of fashion, and I'm not being cynical about that, that's the Ontario Human Rights Commission policies describe gender expression as the manner in which people present themselves through such while doing everyday activities like shopping through their choice of clothes and dress. And the idea that that requires protection of that magnitude, well, I think if you keep extending rights, all you do is weaken them. One person's rights are another person's responsibilities. And anyways, that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that the code, the Ontario provisions, which are like lurking behind the federal law, are already law in Ontario require the use of these so called preferred pronouns if someone requests them. And I have a variety of objections to that, the most fundamental of which is, I believe that the manufactured pronouns, the z and the z, and the 50 sort of variants of those are just for a moment, describe what you're referring to there, because I think even among my audience, this is an arcane topic. What are these manufactured pronouns? Well, it's dogma, I would say, among the radical left that gender is a social construct, and that there are multiple variants of gender identity, and some of those don't fit neatly into male female classifications. The legislation says that people can inhabit any position on that spectrum, or not be on the spectrum at all between male and female, which of course, I find that particular claim essentially incomprehensible. Anyways, the theory is that people who are non binary, which is the terminology, are entitled to be referred to by pronouns other than he or she, which include they, which would, I suppose, be the most moderate compromise. And then a host of other pronouns that have appeared basically out of the void over the last ten years, including words like z and zur and her, which would be H-I-R and them. Truly, there's like 70 different sets of them, and there's no agreement whatsoever on which ones should be used, and none of them have entered popular parlance because they are bad solutions to the problem, and the legislation nonetheless necessitates their use. And this is the first time that Canadian government has moved to make a particular kind of speech content mandatory. There are certain limitations on speech, although not very many of them, but this is the first time out of the commercial realm that the actual contents of speech have been made mandatory. And my particular objection to this is that I believe, and I think I have good evidence for believing, that these made up pronouns, these manufacturer pronouns, are part of the lexicon of the radical postmodern neomarxist left, and it's part of their general agenda to occupy the linguistic territory that we use for common parlance. And I don't like their philosophy. In fact, I regard it as reprehensible, to say the least. And because of that, I'm not willing to seed linguistic territory to them, certainly not by being forced to use ideologically an ideologically saturated lexicon. So I said I wouldn't do it. I made a video, three videos, actually complaining about, let's say, criticizing Bill C 16 in the background legislation, which also, by the way, makes employers responsible for any word that their employees utter that causes anyone any offense intended or unintended, whether or not the employer knows that that utterance occurred. Which seems to me a little bit on the draconian side, but I think is in keeping with the same philosophy, which is by no means probusiness. And there are other elements of what's going on in the background that are equally reprehensible. Toronto, Ontario has set up social Justice Tribunals, that's their technical name, which gives you some insight into their purpose and into their staffing. One of those is the Ontario Human Rights Commission. And they basically decided that they have the right to suspend normal legal and judicial procedure, and that they can more or less ascribe to themselves whatever rights, whatever powers they choose. And that's written in their policy statements. And so I'm not very happy about any of that. And so also at the same time, the University of Toronto made it mandatory for their human resources employees to undergo unconscious bias training against racism, which is also something, again, that I don't believe the science for documenting unconscious. Bias is anywhere near advanced to the point where it should be used as a diagnostic indicator of the potential prejudice of entire classes of people. I don't think there's any question that the tool is too weak to do that, certainly by the standards of appropriate psychometric tests, and there's certainly no evidence that these training programs that are popping up anywhere do any good with regards to prejudice, and a fair bit that they actually make it worse. Right? So anyways, I made two videos, posted them on my YouTube channel mostly. I did it fairly late at night, and I was just trying to think this stuff through to get it straight in my head and to lay out the argument. And, well, the response to them was absolutely insane, really. There's 180 separate newspapers, articles written, and two protests at the University of Toronto, and I received two warning letters from the administration and a letter of censure from a number of my fellow academics and postdocs and graduate students at the University of Toronto. And it was news, literally. Well, yesterday the Toronto Star published like a 3000 word biography of me, and Toronto Life, which is, I suppose are equivalent to New Yorker, although not in the same league, is going to publish a 5000 word bio on me. Well, and then I've talked to Joe Rogan and a whole bunch of other people for podcast. It's been crazy. But the reason for that is because I made something that was bubbling underneath the surface of our culture and was certainly bubbling under the surface of yours at the last election. I made it concrete and put forth my objections in an articulate manner and it struck a chord with people. And it's actually been news not only in Canada, but it stretched its tentacles down to the States and certainly into the Western Europe and Australia and New Zealand. And I'm being interviewed in South Africa this week and it's been like being in a ship in a storm and it's compounding. I can imagine. It's been stressful, I'm sure. Now, is your job at the University of Toronto in jeopardy? Is that the kind of communication you've received? Well, I received two warning letters basically asking me to stop talking about this based on the idea that even mentioning the fact that I might not use these pronouns probably contravene the Ontario Human Rights code and also the university code of conduct. Although hypothetically, the university's code of conduct is dominated by protection for free speech. And so they kind of did the typical HR thing and got the lawyers on it and they're conservative and they warned me twice I didn't stop talking about it. But then the university was roundly criticized by a number of Canada's major journalists, including a coalition of 100 newspapers, and they got a lot of bad press. The press actually turned in support of me quite hard about two weeks after this started, when they started to investigate what I was talking about and found out that I actually knew what I knew, what I was, that my claims weren't exaggerated by any stretch of the imagination. I've seen that criticism. I've paid attention to what you've been saying on this topic, and some people have said that you are at least mistaken about the legal implications of these changes in the law or these rulings. But it seems to me the one thing you can't be mistaken about is the treatment you have received thus far in response to your saying you won't use these pronouns. If the university lawyers hadn't been convinced that I was correct in my interpretation, they wouldn't have sent out a warning that I should stop doing it because it might be illegal. That's the best piece of proof supporting my position that the law has this draconian element, because they didn't send me those letters incautiously. They had their lawyers review the damn legislation and then came to the same conclusion that I did. And the two lawyers who have been making these claims that this legislation is far more innocuous than I'm making it out to be, are both social activist lawyers, and so they have a serious agenda. And one of them, Brenda Kaufman, told me, well, that I wouldn't go to jail, although that is a possibility, despite what she says, because the law does have that power. All that would happen is that essentially I could be financially ruined. Like, well, okay, well, that's not draconian at all. And the Ontario Human Rights Commission has managed to demolish lots of people's lives. It's a kangaroo court, in my opinion, and a very dangerous one at that. One thing we absolutely agree about is that freedom of speech is not just one among many different values. It really is the master value because it's the only corrective to human stupidity. It's the only mechanism by which we can improve our society. And in fact, it's the value that allows us to improve our other values through comprehensive. That's exactly right. It's the fundamental value. It's exactly right. It's the fundamental value upon which our entire cultural edifice is predicated. And I believe that that's part of the reason why the postmodern radicals in particular are opposed to freedom of speech, because they don't believe in dialogue. They don't believe in rationality. They don't believe that groups who have different orientations of power can discuss their differences in a civilized manner and reach resolution, because that isn't how they see the world. That's how modernists see the world. But postmodernists don't believe any of that, and they seriously don't believe it. It's not a facade or it's a very entrenched part of their philosophy. So that's partly why they don't like to why they block speakers who oppose their views from campus and why they're perfectly willing to shut them down, and why they have no platforming policies, which is basically the decision not to let anyone who holds alternative views have a forum, even. And it's because they don't believe in rational dialogue and the possibility of reaching a solution through it. There's something, at least on its face, so wrong headed about this pronoun campaign that it makes me feel like I don't understand something about it. Well, you don't. There's something more nefarious lurking at the bottom of it. And you see in Canada, I know that you're not a social constructionist. I know that you, like Steven Pinker, believe deeply that human behavior is profoundly influenced by its underlying biological substrate, which is another view that we share. But Canada has now written a social constructionist view of human identity into the law. So it's illegal, at least in principle, to claim that biology has anything to do with gender identity, or that biology and gender identity have anything to do with gender expression, or that any of those three have anything to do with social orientation in a causal manner. Right? And that's written into the law. So what the social justice warriors are going to do next is to go after the biologists. And they did that with EO wilson already back 30 years ago, and they're doing it in Germany right now. And there's an antipsychiatry scholarship established at the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education, which is a particularly pernicious institution. And it's no longer obvious what sort of claims you can make as a scientist about the relationship between biology and sex or the hypothetically separate gender identity, right? So that's the worst of the lot, you know, because normally governments shy away from implementing a particular ideology, especially one that's discredited, which certainly the radical social constructionist position is to make that a fundamental part of the law. And that's definitely happened, and that will unfold in a particularly nasty way over the next ten years. Ideology aside, there's just a difference between a positive and negative injunction. So I can ask you to stop doing an infinite number of things and that imposes no energy cost on you. I can say stop using the N word, it offends me, right? Or stop littering, or stop driving your car on the sidewalk, right? And you cannot do those things, and it takes no time not to do those things. It takes no cognitive overhead not to do those things. But I can't ask you to do an infinite number of things. I can't tell you to pick up all the litter you see everywhere, because you'd spend the rest of your life doing that, and you still would fail to comply with the injunction. And asking people to learn a new list of gender pronouns and then live in a state of vigilance to see that they apply them correctly, this is a positive injunction. And you're, you're you're demanding that people do something for me, to demand that people start using a word of my own invention. Or if I say, I want to be addressed by a 16 digit number and I'm going to be offended if you get the number wrong, this is imposing a cost on people. I'm going to be offended, and I'm going to take you to court, and you could be charged under hate speech. And I could change that pronoun in an hour if I want. Or tomorrow or the next day. On. A whim because that's also part of the legislation, because that covers the people who are so called gender fluid and so they have the right to transform their identity according to their subjective whim, I would say, because the other legislation also assumes that this identity that's being protected so hard has no grounding in biology and it's only subjectively determined. So they actually go beyond social constructionism to make it essentially solubilistic. The only thing that determines your identity is the way that you feel at that time. And that's an unbelievably, poverty stricken notion of identity, which at minimum is something that you have to negotiate with other people. I mean, it has to be functional and you have to negotiate it with other people. It's not understandable unless you look underneath it and that's why I was objecting, because I think it's a perfectly reasonable manifestation of the postmodernism that's nested in neomarxism. It's perfectly in keeping with their stated aims, and those aims are not if you are an admirer of Western culture, at least the good parts of Western culture, then you're the enemy of the postmodern neomarxists. They're opposed to absolutely everything you believe we're going to get into that territory, I would imagine by another route. So I don't think there's more to say here because I think we probably agree about everything. I'm obviously not a lawyer, I'm certainly not a Canadian lawyer, so if there's any way in which we're getting some of the legal details wrong, I offer a blanket apology. But in terms of the belief that biology doesn't significantly determine gender or sexuality or the wisdom and utility of inventing new identities and demanding that everyone keep track of them in perpetuity, I think you and I more or less totally overlap there. So I think we should just move on. You better not come to Canada and have that discussion then. Yeah, well, I mean, it's been bizarre to see some of these encounters you've been having, but this is why you've suddenly become so visible to people and it's very interesting to see that this is how it's manifesting but we have bigger, deeper, more perennial fish to fry. I think we need to talk about religion and science and atheism and the foundations of morality things like meaning, your interest in mythology, your fear of nihilism. Let's get into all that. I think you and I share some fundamental concerns and we feel a similar kind of urgency. I think it expresses itself in slightly different ways and different ways of talking but we feel an urgency that our fellow human beings get certain questions right but I think we probably disagree about some fundamental matters and whether those will be, in the end a matter of semantic difference and can be pushed to the periphery or not. I think that remains to be seen but I think it will be interesting to talk about these things. Yeah, well, one of the things that I thought I might do is pursue the tact that you're not enough of a Darwinian, which I thought would be quite comical because I've often thought the same about Richard Dawkins. But I would like to point out some of the things, because I've read I've read a fair bit of what you've written. Now, not by no means comprehensively, but I think I've come to understand your central claims. And of course, they're very powerful because you're an advocate for materialist rationalism, essentially, I would say, with a bit of spirituality on the side. And materialist rationalism is an unbelievably powerful tool, and it's very coherent. And so I address the topic with trepidation because it was certainly the case that the philosophical doctrine to which you adhere has transformed the world and has posed an unbelievably potent threat. Let's say that's one way of challenge that's better to traditional views of the world. But there are some things that we share in common that maybe we could start with, and you tell me if I've got any of this wrong. I think a good starting point is this. It actually leads directly into this claim about not being Darwinian enough, but it's the concept of truth. I've heard you say in a variety of ways that religious truth isn't scientific truth, and that the difference here is that science tells you what things are and that religion tells you how you should act. So let's talk about that. And I think that does connect to this Darwinian concern of yours. Yeah, that's a good well, I'm going to approach that obliquely to begin with. So let me throw a couple of propositions at you, and I know that you don't accept Hughes distinction between an is and an odd, that you're willing to challenge that and, like, fair enough, it's a reasonable thing to try to challenge, although it's quite difficult. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. But I've been thinking a lot about the essential philosophical contradiction between a Newtonian worldview, which I would say your view is nested inside, and a Darwinian worldview, because those views are not the same. They're seriously not the same. The Darwinian view, as the American pragmatists recognized, so that was William James and his crowd recognized almost immediately, was a form of pragmatism. And the pragmatists claim that the truth of statement or process can only be adjudicated with regards to its efficiency in attaining its aim. So their idea was that truths are always bounded because we're ignorant. And every action that you undertake that's gold direct has an internal ethic embedded in it. And the ethic is the claim that if what you do works, then it's true enough, and that's all you can ever do. And what Darwin did, as far as the pragmatists were concerned, was to put forth the following proposition, which was that it was impossible for a finite organism to keep up with a multidimensionally transforming landscape, environmental landscape, let's say. And so the best that could be done was to generate random variants, kill most of them because they were wrong, and let the others that were correct enough live long enough to propagate, whereby the same process occurs again. So it's not like the organism is a solution to the problem of the environment. The organism is a very bad partial solution to an impossible problem. Okay? And the thing about that is that you can't get outside that claim. I can't see how you can get outside that claim if you're a Darwinian, because the Darwinian claim is that the only way to ensure adaptation to the unpredictably transforming environment is through random mutation, essentially, and death and that there is no truth claim whatsoever that can surpass that. And so then that brings me to the next point, if you don't mind, and then I'll shut up and let you talk. So I was thinking about that, and I thought about that for a long time. So it seems to me there's a fundamental contradiction between Darwin's claims and the Newton deterministic claim and the materialist objective claim that science is true in some final sense. And so I was thinking of two things that I read. One was the attempt by the KGB back in the late part of the 20th century to hybridize smallpox and ebola and then aerosol it so it can be used for mass destruction. And the thing is that that's a perfectly valid scientific enterprise as far as I'm concerned. It's an interesting problem. You might say, well, you shouldn't divorce it from the surrounding politics. Well, that's exactly the issue, is how much it can be divorced and from what. And then the second example is a scientist with any sense would say, well, our truths are incontrovertible. Let's look at the results. And we could say, well, let's look at the hydrogen bomb. If you want a piece of evidence that our theories about the subatomic structure of reality are accurate, you don't really have to look much farther than a hydrogen bomb. It's a pretty damn potent demonstration. And so then I was thinking, well, imagine for a moment that the invention of the hydrogen bomb did lead to the outcome, which we were also terrified about during the cold war, which would have been, for the sake of argument, either the total elimination of human life or perhaps the total elimination of life. Now, the latter possibility is quite unlikely, but the former one certainly wasn't beyond comprehension. And so then I would say, well, the proposition that the universe is best conceptualized as subatomic particles was true enough to generate a hydrogen bomb, but it wasn't true enough to stop everyone from dying. And therefore, from a Darwinian perspective, it was an insufficient pragmatic proposition and was therefore, in some fundamental sense, wrong. And perhaps it was wrong because of what it left out. Maybe it's wrong in the Darwinian sense to reduce the complexity of being to a material substrate and forget about the surrounding context. Those are two examples. And so you can have a way at that if you want. Yeah, okay. So there are a few issues here that I think we need to pull apart. I think that the basic issue here and where I disagree with you is you seem to be equivocating on the nature of truth here. You're using truth in two different senses and finding the contradiction that I don't, in fact, think exists. So let's talk about about pragmatism and Darwinism briefly for a second. So I've spent a lot of time in the thicket of of pragmatism because I was a student. Of Richard Roti's at Stanford, and I took every class he taught and just basically did nothing but argue with him about Pragmatism. So I'm very familiar with this way of viewing the concept of scientific truth. I'm not so sure our audience is deeply schooled in this. So briefly, let me just add a little to how you describe Pragmatism. And Royty was one of the leading lights of Pragmatism, as you know. So his view may be slightly idiosyncratic, but it was fairly well subscribed among Pragmatists, and he was influenced by Dewey, and he linked his view in some similar ways to a Darwinian conception of truth, but not quite the way you're doing, it, seems to me. In any case, the idea is that we can never stand outside of human conversation and talk about reality as it is or truth as it is. We never come into contact with naked truth. All we have is our conversation and our tools of augmenting our conversation, scientific instruments and otherwise. And all we really have, the currency of truth, is whatever successfully passes muster in a conversation. So I say something that I think is true, and it seems to work for you. We have a similar we're playing a similar language game, and some people disagree. They criticize what we are claiming to be true. And we go back and forth, and all we ever have is this kind of ever expanding horizon line of successful conversations that allow us to do things technologically that are very persuasive. So, as you say, we can build hydrogen bombs. And so the conversation about the structure of the atom, at the very least, the conversation about the amount of energy hidden in the otherwise nebulous structure of an atom that becomes very well grounded in facts that we all can agree are interest objectively true. Yeah, well, that seems to weaken the claim that it's just within language, which is kind of a postmodern claim too, because it's very difficult for me to believe that the hydrogen bomb is what it is just because we agree what it is in conversation. Absolutely. It immediately reflects a world outside of now, outside of language. That doesn't mean we get permanent and omniscient access to that world, but it's more than language. As far as so maybe I'm misunderstanding royalty. I think you are understanding him. He will say that again. All we ever have is our effort to organize the way the world seems to us with concepts and language, and we just have successful iterations of that and unsuccessful ones. And a hydrogen bomb explosion, no matter how big, assuming we survive, it still falls within this empirical context of an evolving language game. And I agree with you that it does connect with postmodernism in a way that is decidedly unhelpful. And Royty was a fan of Derrida and Foucault. And I remember walking out of Darada's lecture at Stanford. I literally had to climb over the bodies of the credulous who were sitting in the aisles listening to the great man speak, and he didn't speak a single intelligible sentence, as far as I recall. Well, that's obviously just because you don't have the profundity to understand a post modern, French neo Marxist intellectual. I don't. But to get back to some of your claims here, there's this claim you're making about the Darwinian basis of truth and knowledge, that there really is just survival, right? There's just biological change selected against by an environment, and there's what works in that context, what is pragmatic in that context biologically, and there's what doesn't. And what doesn't gets you killed. Now, obviously, that picture of how we got here is something that I agree with, right? But our conception of truth and our conception of truth in general and scientific truth specifically, and even of Darwinian evolution within that subset of truth claims, that is not functioning by merely Darwinian principles, and this just goes to right, but that could be an objection to its validity. There's no reason to assume and don't get me wrong I'm perfectly happy with science. I'm a scientist. But there's no reason to assume that our view of the world, our current scientific view of the world isn't flawed or incomplete in some manner that will prove fundamentally fatal to us as a working assumption. We can decide not to worry too much about that, and that's fine. But, yes, I agree. And more fundamental than that and I think this is the accurate version of the claim you're making. This is something that I spoke about on another podcast with Max Tegmark, physicist from MIT. There is just the fact that within the Darwinian conception of how we got here, there's no reason to believe that our cognitive faculties have evolved to put us in error free contact with reality. That's not how they evolved. We did not evolve to be perfect mathematicians or perfect logical operators or perfect conceivers of scientific reality at the very small subatomic level or at the very large cosmic level or at the very old cosmological level. We are designed by the happenstance of evolution to function within a very narrow band of of light, intensities, and physical parameters. The things we are designed to do very well are, you know, recognize the facial expressions of apes just like ourselves and to throw objects in parabolic arcs within 100 meters and all of that. And so the fact that we are able to succeed to the degree that we have been in creating a vision of scientific truth and the structure of the cosmos at large that radically exceeds those narrow parameters, that is a kind of miracle. It's an amazing fact about us that seems not to be true, remotely true, of any other species we know about. And that's that's something to be celebrated. And it's a lot of fun to see how far we can get in that direction. But I would grant you that there are no guarantees as we move forward in that space. And in fact, we should be skeptical about how easy we can have it in this space. Yes. One thing that Max Tagmark said, which I thought was fascinating. He goes one step further than I had tended to go along these lines where he said that we should expect, as just based on accepting the logic of evolution we should expect that we will have our common sense intuitions frequently and really incessantly violated by what we discover to be true about the nature of reality through science. Yeah, what we discover scientifically to be true about the nature of reality. Partly I made the case that I made to indicate to you and the listeners where I'm starting from in some sense. So I think it's not unreasonable to assume that you're making the metaphysical claim in some sense that Darwinian truth is nested inside Newtonian truth. I wouldn't call it Newtonian. Let me just change your words a little bit. But it may be a distinction without a difference here. But I would oppose realism, scientific realism, and even moral realism. I consider myself a moral realist. I think there are right and wrong answers to moral questions. I would oppose realism with pragmatism. And the core tenet of realism for me is that it's possible for everyone to be mistaken. It's possible for there to be a consensus around truths that are in fact not true. It's possible to not know what you're missing. There's a horizon of cognition beyond which we can't currently see, and we may be right or wrong about what we think exceeds our grasp at the moment. And so that's something that the pragmatist can't say. The pragmatist has to locate truth always within the context of existing conversations, existing consensus. And in this Darwinian conception of truth, you are saying that there's just what works for us biologically pragmatically as apes on earth now and there's no larger context of truth claims that we can make that situates that in a larger sphere where you can intelligently say that everyone is wrong about something. Well, it's complicated. And I wouldn't say I'm saying exactly that. I certainly don't agree with the language. Gain part of it and see if you think of the Darwinian process as something you can't escape. Like there's no outside of it. And partly the reason for that is that you're just too damn ignorant to get outside of it in any transcendent manner. Now, you might say, well, you can do that to some degree with science, and I'm not going to argue with that. But before you move on, let me just understand the claim, because it seems to me we are outside of it in every respect, where you want to emphasize the Darwinian component of it. So we're outside of the implications that certain phenotypes would have killed you outright 5000 years ago, whereas now we have a civilizational mechanism to protect those people. So if you're wearing eyeglasses and you are able to function just as well as your neighbor who's got perfect vision, you're out of a Darwinian paradigm there. It doesn't matter that you're wearing eyeglasses. Right. On 1000 points we can make that same observation and therefore, more or less everything we care about has followed along those lines. So just the fact that we are one of the greatest gains we are attempting to make, although we have done it imperfectly thus far, is to outgrow tribalism in all its forms, right? So we recognize that tribalism is not the best moral bedrock. And yet in a Darwinian paradigm, tribalism is really the only game in town. And so we stand outside of Darwinian logic both morally and intellectually all the time. Now, are you denying that? What am I confused about? I'm calling that into question. I'm not necessarily denying it. And I'm certainly not presuming that what I'm saying is right because I'm trying to solve another problem at the same time. But you see, the thing about the scientific viewpoint is that it leaves certain things out and it leaves out what it doesn't know. Obviously, although the same might be said for any other system of belief and should be, but it also looks at the world in a particular way. For example, it strips the world of its subjectivity. And it may be that that's a fatal error. Now, that doesn't mean that it stopped science from being unbelievably useful as a tool. But I think of science as a tool rather than as a description of reality. That's where we differ. It's fair that we differ. It isn't obvious which of those two positions could be held to be correct because you could say that the more we learn about the objective world in your realist manner, the higher the probability that we'll survive. And it's conceivable that those things are aligned in that manner, but it's also conceivable that they're not. And I'm wary of that because radical changes produce unintended consequences. And we've lived relatively successfully as primates for a couple of dozen million years and we're transforming things pretty damn rapidly. I mean, one potential outcome is that in 500 years we're more machine than human and that we're not really human at all in any realistic sense. And I can't necessarily see that as you could claim that that's a positive outcome, but it isn't necessarily that it's a positive outcome. So you're assuming that there is an alignment between the two. No, I'm not doing that. And now I'm getting a little confused about what you're claiming. So let me just go over that ground you just sketched just to get myself on track. So it seems to me that you're saying that the reductio out of certain of a Darwinian conception of knowledge would be if we ever learned certain truths that got us all killed. Well, then that would prove that these things weren't true or that this was an intellectual dead end. Yeah, they weren't true enough. I would say two things here. One is that there's nothing about my conception of science that discounts the reality or the significance of subjectivity. So I understand what you're saying when you say that science or materialism leaves out subjectivity. And I've ridden that same hobby horse against that conception of science myself. So you won't find a friend of eliminative materialism in me. That's just not how I think about the human mind. Well, do you think that that's true of your views on consciousness? Because that's another place where I would say we radically disagree. Yeah, well, I don't know that you understand my views on consciousness if you think that, but we can get there. I think there is a subjective dimension of reality that is undeniable. In fact, I've said, for instance, that consciousness is the one thing in this universe that can't be an illusion. It's the only thing that you can be absolutely sure exists at this moment. In the sense that I actually like another claim that you make better that's related to that, I think the one thing and this is, I think, part of your fundamental ethical metaphysics. And it's a point on which we agree, I believe you are very concerned with let's call it pain, for lack of a better word. And one of the conclusions that I've reached, which is, I think, in keeping with what you just said, because it necessarily involves consciousness. So let's call it consciousness a reality. But then I would say that the most undeniable form of consciousness is acute agony, because no one doubts that, not if you watch them act. And that's one of the criteria by which I judge whether or not someone believes something. So if people act out something uncontrollably, then I'm convinced that they believe it, regardless of what they think they believe. And I think it's for that reason that so many religious systems start with the same metaphysics, which is life is suffering. That's the ultimate reality. And that's that's associated with consciousness, certainly. But it's more precise than that, because maybe you can doubt whether you're happy, but it's very difficult to doubt that you're in agony and have that actually work. So people act as if that's the most real thing. And part of your ethical metaphysics, as far as I can tell, is you take that as bedrock in some sense and then say, well, whatever we do, we shouldn't go there. And in a way, the way that I think parallels that, except that you posit well being as the opposite, let's say, of suffering. And this is something I really want to talk to you about, because I think there's a paradox in your thinking, and I could be wrong, but tell me what you think. Let's wait to get there, because this is a different topic. I definitely want to get into morality with you, okay? And that's all ripe for discussion. But this conception of truth I think we have to nail down because it just seems to me undeniable that there are facts whether or not any of us, any existing population of human beings are aware of those facts. So before there was any understanding of the energy trapped in an atom, the energy was still trapped in the atom right? And the Trinity test proved that beyond any possibility of doubt. So prior to the bomb going off at Alamogordo, you had some of the world's best physicists not entirely sure what was going to happen. They had an educated guess about what was going to happen. I think there was a betting pool on the question of just how big the detonation would be. There were some people who thought that nothing would happen, they would actually fail to initiate a chain reaction. The point is that there was a kind of a probability distribution among the smartest people over the range of possible outcomes there. So this was a linguistically mediated conception of what was true at the level of the very, very small in physical reality. And we got more information once we saw that bright light and mushroom cloud and now the conversation continues. But it seems to me that a realistic conception of what's going on there and really the only sane one if you look long enough at it, is that our language didn't put the energy in the atom. It's not because we spoke a certain way about it that determined the character of physical reality. No physical reality has a character whether or not they're apes around to talk about it. Okay, so look, everything you said there I agree with. I guess my one objection to that is the well is it true enough objection. So in order to establish an objective fact, we have to parameterize the search, we have to narrow the search, we have to exclude many, many things. And I think sometimes when we do that, we end up generating a truth. And I would say it's a pragmatic truth that works within the confines of the parameters that have been established around the experiment. But then when launched off into the broader world, much of which was excluded from the theorizing, the results can be catastrophic. And I would say that's akin to the problem of there's operationalization, right, where you reduce the phenomena to something that you can discover and discuss scientifically and then there's generalization back to the real world. And one of the things that you see happen very frequently is that the operationalization succeeds but the generalization is a catastrophe. That's very frequently the case with the application of social science theories to the world. Okay? They leave so much out. Okay, so let's just focus on this claim or this concern about certain forms of knowledge or certain descriptions of the world leading to catastrophe. Now I completely agree that that's possible, but it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means here. So it's possible for there to be scientifically correct, realistically, true conceptions of the world that are bad for us? There are not many examples of that, I think. We think the utility if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversation I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster, along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking once again to my friend Joseph Goldstein. Joseph is a meditation teacher. He started the Insight Meditation Society in Barry, Massachusetts, where I did, I think, most of my retreats back in the day. And he's been on two earlier podcasts, podcast number four and 15. And if you haven't heard those, those are worth listening to because you find out who Joseph is and how he got so deeply into practice. It is no exaggeration to say that Joseph is as responsible as anyone for bringing the practice of apasna, otherwise known as mindfulness, to the west from India. Joseph is certainly one of the finest meditation teachers I know, and today we take your questions in an AMA and we deal with some basic questions like why meditate in the first place? And how long do negative emotions actually last when you pay attention to them? But then we get into esoterica like selflessness and the Buddhist concept of enlightenment, and topics that will only be of interest, perhaps, to a subset of you. And again, as always, if you find conversations like this valuable, you are free and encouraged to support the podcast@samharris.org support. And now I bring you Joseph Goldstein. I am back here for a third podcast with my friend Joseph Goldstein. Joseph, thank you for doing this once again. My pleasure. So we have taken questions from the Internet this time around so as to ensure that we answer questions that are interesting to people rather than try to find our way through the maze of our minds. Together, we went out on Twitter and Facebook and got a bunch of questions. First, I got many questions about my meditation app, and I am increasingly embarrassed to say it is still coming. It is still coming. But I have just been a long and somewhat painful education in what is required to develop an app. I'm confident that we will beta test this soon, so more on that, hopefully within a month or so. But Joseph, you already have a meditation app that you did with our friend Dan Harris. So if you are hungry for a meditation app, you can get Joseph's immediately, and that is called 10% Happier. There are a few questions on why one would use an app and the utility of guided meditations, and so we'll talk about that. But Joseph is available to you right now on an app as a meditation teacher. So Joseph, the first question why should I care about meditation practice or mindfulness? Why should I start a practice like this? What am I missing? Well, I think the answer to that is really very simple. The first time when I went to India, when I was looking for a teacher, ended up in India Bodgaia. That's where place the Buddha was enlightened. I met my first teacher there and he said something very simple to me the first time I met him, and I think it conveys the underlying reason why we meditate. He said, if you want to understand your mind, sit down and observe it. And I just appreciated the simplicity of that. There was nothing to join, no rituals, no ceremonies, just the simple understanding that understanding ourselves is possible. It's very pragmatic and very simple. And there is a methodology for doing it. In that understanding of ourselves, we begin to see what creates suffering in our lives and what brings greater happiness and peace. And when we see that, we can make wiser choices. And as we make wiser choices, we become happier. And as we become happier, we make wiser choices in our lives. So it becomes a spiral of greater fulfillment and greater ease. So you would say there's a direct connection between understanding the nature of your mind and in particular, being able to observe its character moment to moment and actually living a wiser life and making better decisions that translate into your own happiness or ceasing to suffer unnecessarily? Definitely. Because we're all a mixture. We all have a whole range of skillful and unskillful thoughts. And we begin to see very directly, without an intermediary, the kinds of thoughts and feelings and emotions that are productive of suffering for ourselves and others. We feel greedy or angry or envious or jealous or a lot of what are called the afflictive emotions. We can see directly and feel directly their nature. And we say this would be good to let go of. And we see those kind of thought patterns and emotions that are actually happiness producing. But this is not theoretical. That's the beauty of meditation, that it's not theoretical. It's not just following what we read in the book. We're actually experiencing for ourselves the nature of these thoughts, of these emotions. And we see that when we're feeling generous, we're feeling kind, we're feeling compassionate. It makes us happy and it makes the people around us happy. And so the choices become more obvious. This is not to say that in the first hour of our meditation, all the old habit patterns of our mind, the unskillful ones, are going to disappear. This is why it's called meditation practice. It takes a repeated seeing and learning to effect the transformation. Well, can you say something about how being able to observe the nature of your own thoughts and emotions and reactions, merely being able to observe, it translates into being able to change course in any way that's not intuitively obvious that that would be the case. It happens, I think, in a couple of ways. In one very obvious way, we begin to see the difference between being lost in a thought pattern where we're just carried away in a train of association, and we're just lost in the thought, in all the emotions involved with it. And it can be lost for a short period of time, it can be lost for a really long period of time. We see the difference between that and being mindful, that the thought and emotion are present. So this is a huge understanding, because before people begin some kind of introspection, some kind of meditative discipline, mostly we're just lost in and acting out whatever particular pattern of thoughts and emotions are there. With meditation and with mindfulness, we're actually beginning to observe the fact that they're there as they're happening. And so that gives us a little space, gives us the possibility of not being carried away by them. And in that space, we have the choice do I want to build on this? Do I want to follow this, or do I want to let it go? So that's one way the mindfulness gives us that freedom. Second way is what we actually learn from being mindful. And one of the things we learn is that all of these thoughts, emotions and everything else are impermanent, that they're there and they're there for some time and then they disappear. And even though we all know this intellectually, we don't live it as if we know it. We take our thoughts and the emotions to be so stable and who we are. So seeing the impermanence of them again and again and again begins to loosen the bonds of attachment to them. It's interesting to be precise in describing just how much of a change this is experientially when you really grasp the impermanence of an emotion like anger, say, so how long would you say you could stay angry without being lost in thought about the reasons why you should be angry? So you're thinking about an argument you just had, say, and you're not aware of a thought that thought arising. So you're identified with a thought, you're lost in the thought, you're getting angry. And now, because you know how to practice mindfulness, you notice a thought as a thought you unhook from. You're no longer identified with that bit of language or image in your mind. And the emotion of anger is still present because it's a matter of physiology. It arose and it takes some time to subside. It has some sort of halflife. Most people are walking around with the impression that it's possible to stay angry for hours or even days. Right? How long would you think you could be angry if you were not subsequently lost in the next train of thought? I think not. Very long. Generally, when people are not watching their minds this carefully, may not be realizing that there's a pretty continual stream of thoughts that's feeding the anger. So we may catch a thought or two, see it release a little bit, and maybe feel an easing of the anger. And then 10 seconds later, or a minute later, another thought comes which triggers the emotion. Again, without that continual feeding of the emotion, I don't know exactly how long it would last, but it certainly wouldn't last as long as it usually does. But, I mean, I would put it on the order of seconds, not even minutes, and certainly not hours, right? Like, if you if you are actually completely unhooked from the discursive thinking that is producing the anger, how long can the emotion of anger stay present in your mind? You think you could be angry for five minutes here. This gets to be an interesting question, because it's really about then how we define anger. So, for example, the mind changes a lot more quickly than the body, just the rapidity of change. So the feeling of anger in the mind might disappear pretty quickly, as you say. But there may be a residue of what we would call anger in terms of the bodily feeling, right, in terms of the logic. So that may last a bit longer than the actual emotional feeling of anger in the mind. But emotion seems to me a complex phenomenon that involves both the body and mind. Yeah. So it's hard to isolate just the mental aspect. Yeah. Well, it also has the the physiology of two different emotions can be very similar, and it's the cognitive interpretation of what's going on. Yes. I think this is still known as the James Lang theory of emotion and psychology. Going back to William James, many, perhaps even before William James, have noticed that an emotion like fear or anxiety is very similar to to it a positive emotion like excitement. And yet it's the interpretation of that arousal that makes for the difference. So when you're no longer interpreting and then you just feel pure physiology, in my experience, at that moment, as you say, it goes to the question of what is an emotion, what is anger? In this case, it's not mere physiological arousal, right. It's arousal that has a psychological significance and points to very likely, some subsequent goal oriented actions you may want to take based on this. It's a motive or a set of intentions. And when you break the spell of your thinking about it and all you're left with is the physiology, I would say it ceases to be anger. Yes. It basically has all the psychological import of something like indigestion or a pain in your knee or something that really has absolutely no implications at all. It's just your body at that moment. But then again, as you say, if in the next moment, you are lost in thought about why you have every right to be angry at this person. Well, then it instantly becomes anger. Again, there's another component of this which and this is kind of what makes the meditation so interesting, because there are just different levels to what's going on. So if we can unhook from the thoughts and we're just left with the physiological remains of whatever the thought pattern was. So then the question becomes, how are we relating to those physical energetic sensations? If they're unpleasant, we may no longer be feeling anger towards the content of our previous thoughts, but we may be feeling, we could say, aversion to the unpleasant sensations that are the residue. So that becomes another level to look at. How is the mind relating to that energetic phenomenon? Right? That becomes another place of investigation. So the flip side of this, and this is another question we have more or less on this topic can meditation or mindfulness be bad for you? Are there people who shouldn't meditate or shouldn't go on silent retreat? And I guess I would add to this, you've just talked about how increasing your ability to observe the flow of your own consciousness reduces suffering, seemingly almost by definition, and gives you an ability to choose more wisely. But is there a period in one's practice where seeing more actually just translates into more suffering or new kinds of suffering that wouldn't be there otherwise? So take both parts of that. Even if meditation is ultimately good for you, are there periods where it can certainly seem to be bad for you? And are there people for whom it's actually bad? I think for different people at different times. I would say it's not recommended, certainly in terms of intensive silent retreat. You know, so something might be good in short doses, but in larger doses may not be helpful. For example, if somebody is really suffering from a deep depression, the isolation of a meditation retreat where people are in silence and not talking, that might be counterproductive. What might be needed more is some kind of engagement with other people or therapeutic skills. So that would be one area where it would be worth looking to see. Is the form of meditation the right form for what's going on? And we should say that you do encounter this problem with some regularity on silent retreat where people who have some psychopathology like schizophrenia get in over their heads and it's just objectively bad for them to be in isolation and silence. Yes, I would say that does happen, definitely. And over the years we've experienced that it's not the common experience for most people. The practice and the various forms of practice work well. But there are these cases where it doesn't. So then there's the question of even if meditation is good for you, there can be periods where it doesn't seem to be good for you in terms of the character of your experience is getting worse by some metric, this points to kind of a key question in understanding the appropriateness of meditation at a particular time. And it has less to do with what it is that's arising, whether what's arising is difficult or not. Because in meditation, lots of difficult things come, whether it's physical pain or really difficult emotions or memories. So sometimes we're really facing different aspects of suffering in our lives. The question of whether it's skillful to continue and proceed really has to do with the quality of balance in the mind and whether there's enough balance, enough mindfulness, to hold those difficulties without being overwhelmed by them, without getting caught up in them too much. We do get caught up to some extent until we learn how to create a place of balance. But that's where a teacher can be really helpful. Because very often when I'm teaching retreats and other teachers as well, if we see somebody losing their balance, really getting overwhelmed by what's coming up, we'll very often suggest back. Off a little bit and go for a walk or relax or do a little reading as a way of titrating the speed of the material that may be coming up. So it's very much a question of finding the right balance for dealing with particularly difficult material. The difficulties themselves are not a problem. They come up for everybody. But it's really our capacity to be with them either in a skillful way or not. And that's that's the key question. The analogy I often use is to physical exercise. So physical exercise is, in a generic sense, objectively good and basically good for everyone. But if you have a specific injury, if you've got a bad knee, well, then you have to work around that. And there could be some exercises you just shouldn't do because it's synonymous with hurting an already injured knee. So there's all of those caveats, and yet you can still say that exercise is good for you in general. And there's a kind of a range of competence where you see, though you will never be, say, an Olympic athlete, right? You're not talking about me. Yeah, I will never be an Olympic athlete. I can still see that the same principles by which an Olympic athlete becomes an Olympic athlete apply to me and will make me as good as I can be. I think a pole vault analogy, and my pole vault is terrible. Have you interacted with Willoughby Britton, the scientist who has focused on the cautionary tales of intensive meditation practice, where she just thinks that some number of people are harmed by meditation. And we in the scientific community have to understand that more and be less boosterish about meditation, certainly intensive meditation practice and more honest that there's a potential downside here. I don't know her and she's someone who ultimately I probably should have on the podcast, but is there anything to react to in there beyond what we just saw? I think she has pointed to the fact that in intensive practice where people are on like a silent retreat, meditating all day long, it can go very deep. We're really going into the psyche on levels that we usually don't in our ordinary life. So it's a very powerful process and we're learning things about ourselves on many, many levels. It's not just the content of our stories, which in some ways the most obvious level, but we're learning about the basic ephemerality of our experience. And when we're experiencing the bodies in energy field dissolving, which can be a meditative experience, it can be both exhilarating, but also for certain people, it could be destabilizing because it's very different than our usual solid sense of self. So I think she's pointing to that level of experience and the need to take a lot of care when we enter into that realm. And that's where well trained teachers are really important because if somebody's not familiar with that terrain as somebody enters into it, they may not be giving the best advice for how to stay balanced with it. And it's not to say that even well trained teachers may make mistakes in offering some guidance, although that doesn't happen so often when people are familiar with those experiences. As I said before, over the years of teaching and something we've learned and it took some time to learn, it is to know when people should back off, when things are getting out of balance. And with experience, that just becomes more clear. Okay, next question. I'd love to hear both of your thoughts on the use of meditation to cope with negative emotion. This is something we've already gotten into. Is it fundamentally misguided from either of your perspectives to use meditation to make yourself feel better when you aren't happy? So this cuts to really something that falls out of the definition of mindfulness, which we should probably just remind people what it entails as a matter of attention. Mindfulness, by definition, is a type of mere attention to character of one's experience which does not have an agenda. You have to surrender your agenda to be mindful because your agenda would be subtly or grossly coloring your attention with grasping what's pleasant or aversion to what's unpleasant. So you have to be willing to just be aware of an unpleasant emotion, a negative emotion in this case, or an unpleasant sensation without seeking to change it. And yet the reason why one is mindful in the first place is implicitly goal oriented because you want to change the character of your experience. You want to be less distracted, you want to stop suffering unnecessarily. You want to be able to make the wise choices of the sort that you just described. So how do you deal with that apparent paradox in the moment? I think this points to an interesting question that I think is coming up more and more these days. With the growing popularity of mindfulness in more secular situations. There's even kind of a movement called secular mindfulness. And it really points to the need to define how we're using the word mindfulness in different contexts because in the ordinary way it's being used now, broadly speaking, I think one could define it in the way you suggested of just paying attention in the moment, being undistracted, coming back when you lost. So just a very kind of simple, generic kind of awareness, which is very helpful, that begins to open us up to a different understanding of our minds. But there are also deeper meanings of mindfulness, which become more significant when we undertake it or understand it as a vehicle for something more than simply being a little happier in the moment, but rather see mindfulness as a vehicle or a methodology for what we could call awakening or a more profound spiritual understanding that there's something else that it has the potential to reveal. In that meaning of mindfulness, there's not only a choiceless awareness which you were talking about, but embedded in the meaning of mindfulness in that context is also, you could say, a discerning wisdom of what is skillful and what is unskillful, what causes wholesome and unwholesome, whatever words you'd like to use. So there is the acknowledgement and the understanding embedded in that kind of mindfulness that some mind states are the cause or cause us or others suffering, that create suffering in our experience, both for ourselves and others. And there are certain mind states which are freeing. So already there's a wisdom component in that kind of mindfulness which takes us a bit further than simply being attentive to what's arising. It's like it's attentive to what's arising but also learning from being attentive. What is it we're actually learning from being mindful. And in that you could say there is an implicit choice being made to cultivate the skillful and to let go of the unskillful except in the moment. There's another level there where the choicelessness is actually the deeper insight in that if you can truly be mindful of the anger, say that was there a moment ago as anger because you were identified with thought and not being mindful. If you're truly mindful in the next moment, then you realize that anger is just as good an object of mindfulness or the residue of anger is just as good an object of mindfulness as anything else, including a skillful emotion. You know, this is the phrase one taste in the Tibetan tradition. Yes. So the agenda goes away in that moment of mindfulness. It's it's almost like I'm not sure I remember this correctly, so you might clarify it if I don't. But that Zen teaching about in the beginning trees or trees and rivers or rivers. First there is a mountain, then yeah, and there is no mountain, then there is it says Donovan Song. Yeah, it was first as end teaching and then it was a Donovan Song so things are first, we see them as being ordinary. So that's the first kind of attention. We're just seeing things arise without this discernment. Then we're seeing them with a discernment of what's skillful and unskillful. And through seeing that, we drop into the level you just described, where we're experiencing everything as being empty, empty of substance, and therefore equal in that sense. It's very few people who can jump to and sustain that level. There's a whole foundation of understanding that makes that possible. And I think in all the Meditative traditions that's understood in the Tibetan tradition, and certainly in Tarada tradition, there are practices which help to stabilize that deeper level. Right in the beginning of virtually any tradition, I wouldn't say every, but certainly most, there's an acknowledgement that there are certain classically positive mental states that are a better foundation for exploring than the classically negative mental states. That just entangle you in your own neurotic misadventures. Exactly. And that discernment actually provides the motivation for going deeper, for going to the other level, because if one is not seeing that, why do anything? And this is, I think, a cautionary note. It's very easy to bypass. Sometimes people talk about emotional bypass, and they jump to a level where everything's empty. It doesn't matter. There's also, you could call it a Meditative bypass. Oh, everything is equal, therefore it doesn't matter what I do or what kinds of thoughts are being cultivated. But that's missing an important piece. Even though we eventually come to the place of what you called one taste, that comes through a very clear discernment of what on another level, we see, oh, yeah, this is helpful. This is wholesome. This is not, I think, the bypass. And I've seen this in various meditators and communities where people can justify unwholesome actions with the rubric. It's all empty. Yeah, well, you can see some film footage of Rajnishi's community and get a sense of where that leads. Once you admit to yourself that no matter how much you're meditating, a significant percentage of your time will be spent merely captive to the contents and character of your thought, then it matters what you tend to think and feel about other people, say, the kinds of relationships you form on that basis and all the rest. So I just want to jump in here for a minute. I think that's why it's important and acknowledged, as you say in most meditative or spiritual traditions, that there needs to be an ethical foundation to the practice, because until the mind is extremely well trained, we do get lost in the conditioning of our habit patterns. And so we will be acting out both the more positive and more negative thought patterns and emotional patterns. Having an explicit ethical foundation becomes another kind of support and protection. So as we're about to do something, maybe we're about to lie or to speak unskillfully, if we have in our minds, no, this is unethical. This is a harmful action, just that in that moment can become a reminder to actually pay attention, say more about speaking unskillfully. Obviously that's a term of art or jargon within Buddhism. What are the range of things that covers? I love talking about this because this is a practice that for everybody can have such a tremendous impact in our lives, mostly because we speak a lot. We get up in the morning and we spend most of the day, or a good part of the day speaking. I think very few people actually pay attention before they speak to what they're going to say. And I've certainly seen this in myself enough times where words seem to just come tumbling out in the enthusiasm one way or another of the moment. Also the intention behind what they're saying. Well, exactly. Why are they saying exactly? Very often there is a motivation to divide or to cause harm in some way or to speak what is untrue. Or one of my favorites, which it amuses me to see it, is what in the Buddhist tradition is called useless talk, where it serves no purpose. And the word in poly, which is the ancient language of India, that a lot of the text are written in the polyword for useless talk. It's really anamatapiya because the polyword is some papa lapa. So it sounds just like what it is. And very often I'll be in a conversation with friends or group of people and just see the urge to say something that is completely useless. And it's just a way of declaring, here I am. That's its only purpose. And when I see that, when I can catch that impulse, see that this is some bubble up, this is useless and refrain, it actually feels good. It feels like a conservation of energy. It's not just spilling out verbal energy and it makes our words more valuable. People have more respect for what we say, if what we say is useful in some way. So it's just one example. I think there might be ways in which the Buddhist conception of right speech may not totally map on to what we understand about human speech now. So for instance, like gossip is a classic example of wrong speech in a Buddhist sense. And you can see how divisive gossip often is. You can see how you tend to feel when you are around people who are gossiping, especially if it's malicious gossip. The impulse in oneself to dish about somebody who's not present can certainly seem under scrutiny, seem like not the noblest of things. But gossip also does serve a function and in many cases it serves a good social function. Gossiping about others serves a function. And living in a context where you know you might be gossiped about so you have a reputation that you are concerned to manage that also serves a function. It actually builds in a kind of moral shame and. It puts a few breaks on the system, you know, and people who are totally shameless well, some of them get elected President of the United States, but in the usual case it doesn't work out quite that well. So what do you think about gossip? Do you just think it's intrinsically bad across the board? No, I think what you're pointing to is that we use that term to COVID quite a wide range of speech and I would say kind of the dividing line, or a dividing line between what one might call useful gossip and harmful gossip. One dividing line, which is very interesting to observe, is what our motivation is. Is our motivation really to harm someone or to cause divisiveness? Or is it in some way the sharing of information that seems useful to share? Because if the motivation is to harm in the repetition of that kind of speech, we are creating within ourselves a toxic mental environment. We're creating in our own mindstream impulses and actions filled with some degree of aversion, of hatred, of fear, whatever the unholts of motivation is. So we're just strengthening these forces in the mind that cause us suffering, creating an inner world for ourselves that's not a peaceful one, as well as causing harm to others. So I would say really looking at the motivation behind whatever it is that we're calling gossip is a key element. But what about the case where the motivation certainly isn't obviously noble, but nor is it obviously malicious? It seems to me that most gossip arises on the basis of people wanting to have amusing, entertaining conversations. So, like, I have a great, oh, you won't believe what happened to X. It's not that I have a malicious attitude toward X. It's not that I necessarily want to harm X's reputation with you, but this is just something amusing that has come to mind. And the crucial variable for me, I guess now I'm kind of looking for the algorithm that covers all of these cases. The measure of the toxicity of any of these moments is, I think, largely in the distance between how I'm talking about X now to you and how I would be willing to talk about X knowing that X was going to overhear it or if X were in the room. Right. If there's a drastic difference there that suggests something unskillful, to put it in Buddhist terms, about my attitude and motives and all the rest. No, I think that's a good simple frame in which to assess. I think there is a more subtle level which would not fall within that framework. And that is something that I've noticed in myself and I see it in others as well, even in what seems like benign gossip. Kind of the example you say an interesting aspect to pay attention to is whether in some way whether speaking in that way is coming from or reinforces a sense of self. And I think in very subtle ways, even when it's, you know, it's non malicious and we're not intending to harm. Very often there's just a self aggrandizing motive something, or self satisfaction or shot and Freuder something. And so that would just be worth investigating to see whether that's there or not. Let's talk about that, because this notion that something about the success of meditation translates into an erosion of self right sense of self, now, that is surprising to most people and on its face, I think, undesirable to most people. And it's also something you don't find very much in what you call the secularization of mindfulness. Mindfulness as a useful thing to have in your business toolkit or your efficiency toolkit or something a life coach would give you to improve your functioning in one domain or another. So how do you view the secularization and popularization of mindfulness in the absence of a clear teaching about selflessness or the illusoryness of the self and the other elements of classic Buddhist anchor to the practice? Basically, I think it's great. I think mindfulness at whatever level, and this seems to be borne out in people's experience when it's taught in a secular way, it seems to be helpful. People are getting something from it. So I think that's great. I don't have any problems with that at all, and I'm glad that it's happening in that I'm hoping that the deeper aspects of the practice and the teachings are not lost for those who want to pursue them. So people are not left with the impression that that's all that mindfulness can offer. If people choose to stay with that, we could say level of practice, that's fine because it definitely enhances the quality of one's life and there's more. And so I think it's just helpful even in the teaching of secular mindfulness for people who are aware of the greater depth of potential that's possible, even just to mention that for those of you who are interested, there are other possibilities as well in this practice. So the whole spectrum of what's possible is known. If I recall correctly, there is a Buddha sutta this is where my limits as a polyscholar will likely show themselves. But isn't there a suta called the Mahamangala Sutra where the Buddha talked about different levels of happiness? And basically it's just a straightforward acknowledgment that there's a hierarchy of happiness or many tiers to happiness, where the fact that there are deeper, more profound forms of happiness that go into very esoteric areas of things like Buddha, that doesn't negate that every one of these steps is a step in the direction of happiness. So just having a healthy family is a form of happiness. It just goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into the esoterica of nabonic. There's the flip side of that as well. For those people who might be thinking that by going or aiming for the higher happiness, somehow they're going to miss out on the kinds of happiness we're more familiar with. My first teacher, his name was Meningji, used to say something which I really loved. He said, if you aim for the highest happiness, all the others come along the way. So it's not a question of missing out on anything. It's actually enhancing the probability that we'll experience all the kinds of happiness because we understand their causes, we understand what gives rise to them. That's a nice sentiment. I'm not so sure I've seen that borne out in the Dharma community what I believe I've seen among Buddhists and Hippies and New Agers and people who have, quote, aimed at the highest happiness in explicitly meditative terms. I feel like I've seen a lot of Casualties of the Dharma. I've seen people who have because they spent crucial years of their lives engaged in these esoteric pursuits. They actually didn't become self actualized in ways that they really would want to have been to access ordinary levels of happiness. To have ordinary careers or to start families at the right time or to make money when it was easy to make money so that they had money when it was harder to make money when they're older. And so there's a kind of mismatch between the Enlightenment project we should get to what the most esoteric goal of meditation actually is. But I feel like I've seen people who, I guess, fell through the cracks in a way, because obviously it's hard to reach the goal, it's hard to meditate so effectively that your feeling of well being becomes impregnable and is no longer dependent on anything substantive happening in your life. Right? So it's hard to become the person who doesn't really care whether you got to have kids if you're the person who really want, you know, really wanted kids. Right. But now you've spent 20 years in Nepal studying with llamas and you missed that chapter of your life. So do you want to say anything about the Casualties of the Dharma or any other way you want to frame it? Well, I think the 60s are fast fading into the myths of history. The 60s are back with psychedelics, are now being used in science. Note. I think the point you raised is an important one in that undertaking a path of practice in the way that you talked about really requires or is helped by a certain level of, you could say, emotional maturity or understanding and realistic assessment both of one's life, one's opportunities, one's aspirations, one's goals. And to somehow integrate all of that in one's decision. So there are many ways to practice, and even in the Buddhist time, many laypeople practiced and achieved high levels of realization. So if there is that strong wish to both go as deep as possible in a spiritual path and also live a fulfilled, we could say, worldly life, it's helpful to know that about oneself. And so then one makes the choices appropriate to that. And it may not be going off for 20 years to Nepala. We may be doing intensive practice in ways that fit into the more worldly aspirations, but it's really no different than somebody who just has this thirst or hunger or passion to become an artist. And they devote years of their life to their art and they may never be a remembrance, and they may end up in a worldly situation that's not so successful in worldly terms, but they have fulfilled that side of themselves. And so I think it's the same thing. Some people have a passion for this kind of practice and are willing to say, okay, whatever comes will come from it, right? And as I said, other people may also be very dedicated but want to be more inclusive of other aspects of their lives. So I think both are really possible. And there'll be some people who make mistakes, who make the wrong choice, which happens in every arena. Let's talk about this concept of realization. You just use that term enlightenment. I guess an earlier stage could be called awakening. What do these words mean and how do you explain them to someone who hasn't had any experience in meditation? I think the simplest and most pragmatic way of understanding it, and I think we probably have talked about this before in previous discussions, but I find this just the most down to the way if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org. You./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. OK, there's been a lot going on. Does anyone else feel like this year has been going fast? We're about six weeks into it. Feels like six months. Feels like Trump has been President for six months. Jesus. In any case, I am doing an AMA podcast today. So I went out to all of you on Twitter and Facebook and I got to say, whenever I do this, the response is just hugely gratifying and overwhelming. I get no exaggeration thousands of questions whenever I go out to you guys, so thank you for that. Needless to say, I can only answer a tiny fraction of them, but many of you hit similar topics in similar ways, so I'm aggregating a fair amount here. Also recovering from a cold. Hopefully that won't play too much havoc with your listening pleasure. And I don't mention anyone's names when I do Q and A's like this because again, I do aggregate questions. I occasionally reword them a little bit to make them more on point. So if you asked any of these, you will no doubt recognize your handiwork. But sorry, not to give you credit because I can't really keep track of how I change things here. And also, I can only assume that some of you actually want to remain anonymous. And given that I haven't communicated with you directly about this, I will air on the side of safety before I get to the questions. I will do some brief housekeeping. Just to put all of this in context, I just did Bill Mars show and you can see the response to that playing out online. I felt that interview was a bit of a tightrope walk given the previous time I'd been on the show, and I'm reasonably satisfied that the whole story came out in those twelve minutes. So that's good. Of course, that doesn't prevent people from the left and the right going crazy in response to it. And it's really been instructive to see that there's virtually no space to occupy between the extreme left and the extreme right. That doesn't get you attacked by both sides on this issue. By virtue of that conversation, I am getting attacked as an Islamist shill and a racist xenophobe. It's incredible. There is no place, it is not even a razor's edge where you can stand to make sense on this issue. At the moment. So in any case, if you've missed that, you can see that on my blog. It's on YouTube. I've embedded it on my blog. And thanks to Bill for having me on. It's always good to talk to him. I was also just in New York with Majid Nawaz, and we finished filming this documentary on our collaboration. I don't know when that's coming out, but I will keep you all apprised of that. And it was great to see Modid again face to face. It's always instructive in the aftermath of an interview like the one I did with Bill to receive Majid's hate mail, which is just mind boggling. The self proclaimed moderates who attack Majid and Ayan for their bigotry. It just proves how far we have to go. I just noticed, for instance, among the usual suspects, and it really is the usual suspects, there's Bina Shaw, who is a columnist for The New York Times and didn't like my conversation with Bill at all, and she disavows Majid and Ayan and then says that she loves reformers like Tariq Ramadan. This is the Tarik Ramadan who, when asked whether stonyan women for adultery was okay, he recommended that there be a moratorium on it. We just pause this edict for a while so that we can consider its wisdom. That's how far he would go. It's unbelievable. This woman writes for The New York Times. So if nothing else, it proves this is a necessary conversation. And again, to clarify, and I said this in my interview with Bill, I don't think I'm going to reform Islam. That is obvious. I am urging Muslims to reform Islam and to speak honestly about the need for reform. And if you think reform need go no further than a moratorium on stoning women to death for adultery, your theocracy is showing. And the fact that you could be that confused as a woman New York Times columnist, is fairly jawdropping. Okay, first question. Any update on the project manager position? Many questions of this sort came in. Yes, we are still in process over here. There have been over 900 applications at this point, so closing in on 1000, I actually need this position filled in order to vet the applicants, unfortunately, but I do have some help with the vetting. In fact, I'm not doing the first round. I will see only the final 50 or so. But yeah, there's been a lot of interest, and I look forward to hiring that person. That would be very helpful. Question two many questions on my conversation with Jordan Peterson. Jordan is the clinical psychologist I had on two podcasts Back, and we got bogged down in a conversation about scientific epistemology. On the question of truth, many listeners seem confused about my reasons for not accepting Peterson's version of truth, which amounted to some odd form of pragmatism pegged to our ultimate survival as a species. If you recall, according to Peterson, a claim is true if it helps us survive, and false or not, true enough if it doesn't. I see so much wrong with this claim that it was really hard to know where to begin. And while I don't think I said this in the podcast, one wonders whether this claim applies to itself. Is this claim about truth only true if it helps us survive? And what if it doesn't? Does it then bite its own tail and just disappear? Do you see the problem there? But I went round and round with Peterson for 2 hours on this, and this prevented us from getting into topics that listeners really wanted us to explore. Again, he was my most requested podcast guest ever. Now, some of Peterson's fans blamed me for this entirely and they were alleging mostly that I'm a materialist and that I'm somehow dogmatically opposed to the idea that mind might play some role in defining reality or parts of it. But that's just not true and it's not even relevant as far as I can see. Even if it were true, if mind helps create reality, I would just claim that we can stand outside those facts as well and say they are true whether or not anyone knows them. Right? So for instance, if it's true to say that the moon really isn't there unless someone is looking at it, which is to say consciousness is somehow constitutive of its being in reality, well, that fact about the mind's power would be true whether or not any of us know about it or understand it. Right? So this you can still get a realistic picture of truth being as spooky as you want about the mind. All I was arguing for was that there are facts of the matter, whether or not anyone understands them. And some of these facts have nothing to do with the survival of the species. Now, some other defenders of Peterson have argued that I just don't understand pragmatism. But that's not true either. As far as I can tell. Pragmatism in its usual form has to make sense of the kinds of challenges I was posing to Peterson. But Peterson's version wasn't doing that. Pragmatism isn't just predicated on survival, it's predicated on what works in conversation, what actually conserves the data, what makes our statements about the world seem to cohere, and the kinds of statements that square with our experience, the kinds that become predictive of future experience scientifically. All of that is what it means to be pragmatic in the usual sense. Most of that has nothing to do with the survival of the species. So again, statements about prime numbers can be understood pragmatically. When I make a claim that there is a prime number higher than any we have represented, unfortunately, that's actually a paradox. To say that there's a prime number larger than any we have represented is in fact a representative. But leaving that aside, right, let's talk about explicitly representing it. Which is to say it hasn't been discovered yet. There are different ways to think about that being true, but a pragmatic way is just to say, well, it certainly seems true. Those kinds of statements function and conserve the experience of what it's like to be us continually discovering new prime numbers or seeming to discover them. It doesn't mean that there is a reality outside of our conversation where prime numbers really exist. That's what the pragmatist wants to say. Now, of course, the mathematical idealist wants to say that there is some realm of number on some level to be discovered by sentient beings like ourselves, and it exists in some sense, whether or not we discover it. This is the kind of thing I got into with Max Tegmark, who seems to be fairly idealistic on this topic. In any case, normal pragmatism can skate across that thin ice fairly elegantly, if not persuasively, but a pragmatism that suggests that every statement about prime numbers must be resolved in terms of the survival of apes like ourselves. That doesn't make any sense. But I couldn't seem to get Peterson to acknowledge that. And most of you, the vast majority of you, it seems to me, thought I made that case fairly well, and therefore you agreed with me that Peterson's concept of truth was pretty wacky, or at least that he wasn't communicating it well. But many of you still faulted me as a podcast host for not being gracious enough to just move on to other topics once we reach that impasse. Now, I totally understand that criticism and I even, I think, anticipated at some point in the podcast, and I might have even learned something from it. We'll see. We'll see what I'm like next time I get bogged down like that with a guest. But the truth is, I'm not a normal podcast host. I view these exchanges as conversations, not really as interviews, though occasionally it does play out a little bit like an interview, but I'm usually trying to have a conversation and I'm trying to pressure test my own views and refine my own understanding of the world. So if the person I'm talking to isn't making any sense, at least to me, I really want to get to the bottom of what the problem is. And now this is necessarily intrusive because on many of these points, really, one of us has to be wrong or at least confused, and in this case that the disagreement was so fundamental. And I knew Jordan wanted to move on to topics like the existence of Jungian archetypes, for instance, and I just couldn't see how we were going to make sense on that topic if we couldn't agree about what it means to say that something is true. Right? How do you distinguish fact from fantasy? We couldn't converge there really at all. And the next topics on the menu were things like archetypes and mythology and the reality of christian doctrine, and I wanted to get on to those topics because I knew how much our listeners wanted us to get there. I was making increasingly desperate attempts to try to get to some consensus so that we could move on. And this had somewhat the character of my attempting to perform an exorcism, which didn't work. It was like that scene in The Exorcist when Max von Cedar does his whole spiel in Latin and still winds up with a face full of green vomit. Anyway, at the end of that podcast, those of you who heard it know if you got to the end. I put it out to all of you to crowdsource the post mortem on it, to tell us what happened and to decide whether we should go forward and have a second conversation on other topics. And I put out a poll on Twitter which about 30,000 of you responded to, and 81% of you said, yes, we should have another conversation. Now, I got to think that poll went fairly viral among Jordan's crowd, because on my own social media channels, I got a lot of complaints about the conversation, and I'd be very surprised if 81% of my listeners want to hear Jordan and I go round and round again. But I will take this recommendation seriously. I don't yet know what I'm going to do. It's somewhat amusing and somewhat disconcerting that a fairly frequent criticism from Jordan's crowd seems to be that I didn't let the conversation move on because I was afraid that Jordan was going to dismantle my atheism that he was? Going to say something there that was so powerful or so well reasoned that he would have revealed my doubts about God to be completely bankrupt. I got to say I'm open to that. But the fact that anyone thinks that is the reason why I didn't move on. I got to hope that those of you who are regular listeners to the podcast know me better than that. Anyway, I will let you know if Jordan's coming back on. I'm going to have a few more podcast guests. In the meantime, before I rethink that, I guess the implications of putting into a vote would be that I would simply do whatever the majority of you say I should do. I'm not sure this is actually a democracy. I may be a little more autocratic than that, but I certainly hope Jordan realizes there are no hard feelings in everything he has said since the podcast, some of which I responded to on my blog. None of that has clarified his position to me. And if we do go for a second round, I think we really do have to avoid getting bogged down again the way we did. So I have to figure out some kind of guidelines so that we can actually have a conversation that is productive and not excruciating for all of you. So more on that when I figure it out. Question three. Many of you asked me about my views on the so called Muslim ban. I'm just answering this now just to say that I wrote a blog post about it, and then I was on Billmar's show to talk about it, and both of those are on my blog. Perhaps I'll just say that in my last meeting with Majid, we spoke about it, and he had a good distinction or a reformulation of what is reasonable here, which I fully agree with. I think I said something like, it's hard to get away from the logic of some kind of religious test. It is actually relevant once you realize you are looking for jihadists. It is relevant to know whether somebody is a Salafi Muslim, right? Because he would stand more of a chance of being a jihadist than a Unitarian Universalist would. But the way Majid talks about this, we just want to know about people's beliefs and attitudes, right? We're looking for illiberal beliefs. And yes, it is true that Islam has more than its fair share of people who are fundamentally illiberal at this moment, who don't support free speech, who think apostates should be killed, say. But we are looking for illiberalism of that sort in general. And if there's some new cult born tomorrow that produces the same kind of illiberalism, well, then we'd want to stop those people at the border too, if we could. So a Muslim ban doesn't make any sense, but nor does it make any sense to say, you can't ask people detailed questions about their worldview in the process of vetting them. Of course you have to ask people, how would you feel if your daughter married outside your religion, say, and there's a wrong answer to that question. If you say, Well, I would cut her head off. We don't want you in the country. Right? And we are right not to want you in the country. And it's instructive that there are Muslim organizations that don't want those sorts of questions asked in the vetting process. Of course, there's a very common theme with me. This comes down to ideas and beliefs and the degree to which people subscribe to them, because this is the best predictor of what they will do in the world, and we care about what people will do and how likely they are to assimilate into our society in a productive way. And we're right to care about those things. So if you want any more on Trump's executive order and why I don't think it was a good idea, you can see those blog articles and the aforementioned interview with Bill Moore. Next question. Milo at Berkeley. Wow, that was amazing. Well, I guess I will just point out the obvious that that was one of the best things that could have ever happened to Milo in terms of proving his points, both the legitimate and illegitimate ones, and raising his stature, right. Just what a shortsighted, idiotic, counterproductive thing to do. And what worries me about this moment politically, is that the left seems capable of doing everything wrong in response to the rise of the so called alt right and the Trump presidency. This antipathy to free speech, this idea that rioting to prevent a lecture, is an example of liberal free speech in action that is just so confused and destructive that I'm tempted to say that the left is just irredeemable. At this point, there seems to be so little insight. And coming fresh out of my interview with Bill Maher, I can see this. There are people who have tweeted at me and written to me who heard in my discussion with Bill a horrifying expression of racist hatred or are pretending to have heard such a thing. And this kind of judgment is again echoed by the usual suspects on the left. That position is so crazy that I just don't know how to interact with it. So it's not an accident that people on the right can't see any way to interact with it. All I can say is that if I'm a bigot and a racist and a xenophobe, if that's how I appear to you, based on what I said on real time, what words are you going to use for the real bigots and racists and xenophobes? And what I've said before about Milo milo is, at this point, kind of a professional troll, right? Some of his criticism of the left is no doubt sincere, but he's a kind of performance artist. I mean, he's he's just winding up the left. And, you know, perhaps I've missed it, but I haven't seen anything from him that is real racist bigotry. Please take this caveat on board. I have not read all of Milo's stuff, or much of it. Maybe there's something I've missed. Feel free to point that out to me. But the Milo I've seen is very far from being a neo Nazi or someone whose attitudes are truly of the right. That's probably not an accident. I mean, he's flamboyantly, gay, and half Jewish, I believe. I don't know how right wing he could be in the end, but this response at Berkeley wouldn't even be warranted if he was actually a KKK member. Again, the moment you're using violence to prevent someone from speaking, you are on the wrong side of the argument by definition. How is that not obvious on the left at this moment? You're going to, what, burn down your own university to prevent someone from expressing views that you could otherwise just criticize? All of these protests were seen in response to right wing or quasi right wing speakers being invited to college campuses by, I'm sure that the campus Republicans. These are so uncivil and unproductive. And again, this is almost entirely a phenomenon of the Left. If you heard generically that some college campus had erupted in violence because a student mob had prevented a lecture from taking place. And the people who wanted to hear that lecture were spat upon as they tried to enter the hall and finally attacked. You could bet with, what, 99% confidence that this was coming from the left. Now, in the age of Trump, when you really want to be able to say things against creeping right wing authoritarianism, having an authoritarian, anti free speech movement subsume the left is a disaster politically. But I actually think the left is irredeemable at this point. And this is why I begun to use the phrase the new center. I think we need a new center to our politics. I mean, I don't know how you ever get the people writing for the Intercept or the people on the Young Turks to be reasonable human beings given what they've done in recent years. And so that's the left as it currently stands. Of course, there's no accident that the Women's March, which otherwise seemed like a great thing, was vitiated by its alliance with Linda Sarsur and these closeted and semicloseted Islamists who have coopted the women's movement and convinced millions of women, apparently, that the hijab is a sign of women's empowerment. That's fairly mind boggling. Just so there's no confusion on this point, I think you, dear listener, should be free to wear the hijab if you want to. But you should also recognize that most women the world over who are veiled to one or another degree, are living that way, not out of choice or certainly not out of what could be considered a free choice. They're living in the context of a community that will treat them like whores or worse if they don't veil themselves right. That's not the political empowerment of women. And someone like Linda Sarsur, again, one of the principal organizers of the Women's March is a theocrat who lies about this, who attacks ayan hercule. This is how the left will die by on the basis of its own moral relativism, locking arms with Islamism and stealth theocracy, which is what it has done. Just as, you know, if you travel too far right on the political spectrum, you will encounter the most repulsive, the most callous, the most authoritarian attitudes. I think you should know that if you travel too far left, you will encounter a kind of moral confusion and identity politics that is, in its actual application to the world, little better. And I don't see how that changes at this point. Next question how do you think we can reasonably expect to break the echo chamber mentality and social media and online information? Do you think it's possible, or do you expect our conversation to grow increasingly factionalized? This is a good question to which I really don't have a good answer. Apart from my acknowledging that this is just a huge problem. This has to be high on everyone's list of problems that really could make it hard to maintain our way of life. What we're talking about how human beings reach a common understanding of reality, right? How do we get our view of the facts to converge? And how do we get the moral norms that should guide our behavior to become aligned collectively? And if we're not dealing with the same facts, if my news sources are fake news according to your own, and vice versa, it is hard to see how we will make any progress. This isn't just about agreeing that climate change is a problem. This is everything. This is the wars we fight, the laws we pass, the research we fund or don't fund. It is everything. There is a difference between truth and lies. There is a difference between real news and fake news. There's a difference between actual conspiracies and imagined ones. And we cannot afford to have hundreds of millions of people in our own society on the wrong side of those epistemological chasms. And we certainly can't afford to have members of our own government on the wrong side of them. As I've said many, many times before, all we have is conversation, right? You have conversation and violence. That's how we can influence one another. When things really matter and words are insufficient, people show up with guns. That is the way things are. So we have to create the conditions where conversations work. And now we are living in an environment where words have become almost totally ineffectual. And this is what has been so harmful, I would say, about Trump's candidacy and his first few weeks as President. Just the degree to which the man lies and the degree to which his supporters do not care, that is one of the most dangerous things to happen in my lifetime. Politically, there simply has to be a consequence for lying on this level. And the retort from a Trump fan is, well, all politicians lie. No, all politicians don't lie like this. What we are witnessing with Trump and the people around him is something quite new. Even if I grant that all politicians lie a lot, I don't even know if I should grant that all politicians lie sometimes say. But even in their lying, they have to endorse the norm of truthtelling. That's what it means to lie successfully in politics in a former age of the earth, you can't be obviously lying, you can't obviously be repudiating the very norm of honest communication. But what Trump has done and the people around him have gotten caught in the same vortex. It's almost like a giddy nihilism in politics, right, where you just say whatever you want and it doesn't matter if it's true. Just try to stop me, is the attitude. It's unbelievable. So finally, on this point, I would just say that finding ways to span this chasm between people, finding ways where we can reliably influence one another through conversation based on shared norms of argumentation and self criticism, that is the operating system we need. That is the only thing that stands between us and chaos, and they're the people who are trying to build that, and they're the people who are trying to tear it down. And now one of those people is president. And again, I really don't think this is too strong. Trump is, by all appearances, consciously destroying the fabric of civil conversation, and his supporters really don't seem to care. And I'm sure that those of you who support him will think I'm just whinging now in a spirit of partisanship, right? That's why I'm against Trump. I'm a Democrat or I'm a liberal. That's just not the case. Most normal Republican candidates who I might dislike for a variety of reasons, marco Rubio or Jeb Bush or even a quasi theocrat like Ted Cruz would still function within the normal channels of attempting a fact based conversation about the world. Their lies would be normal lies, and when caught, there'd be a penalty to pay. They would lose face. Trump has no face to lose. This is an epistemological potlatch. Do you know what a potlatch is? It's a traditional native practice of burning up your wealth, burning up your prized possessions so as to prove how wealthy you are, right? Look at me. I can burn down my own house. This is a potlatch of civil discourse. Every time Trump speaks, he's saying, I don't have to make sense. I'm too powerful to even have to make sense. That is his message, and half the country, or nearly half, seems to love it. So when he's caught in a lie, he has no face to lose. Trump is chaos. And one of the measures of how bad he seems to me is that I don't even care about the theocrats he has brought to power with him. And there are many of them. You know, he has brought in Christian fundamentalists to a degree that would have been unthinkable ten years ago. And ten years ago, I was spending a lot of time worrying about the rise of the Christian right in this country. Well, it has risen under Trump. But honestly, it seems like the least of our problems at this moment. And it's amazing for me to say that, given what it means and might yet mean to have people like Pence and Jeff Sessions and the other Christian fundamentalists in his orbit empowered in this way. Next question. Are you still giving $3,500 each month from the podcast to the Against Malaria Foundation, as you spoke about in your podcast with Will McCaskill? Yes. Yes, I'm doing that. That's happening automatically. I'm not continuing to talk about it, so it's not to wear my philanthropy on my sleeve, but that was the result of my conversation with Will. I highly recommend you listen to that podcast, because Will McCaskill is fantastic. I just came out of that feeling that however conflicted I might be about the results of any podcast, however conflicted I might be about the. Use of my time on any given month, however conflicted I might be around asking listeners to support the podcast, I wanted to know that, at minimum, I was doing some good in the world, and the value of saving a human life each month really can't be disputed. And $3,500 is still the statistical minimum for what it takes to save a life through the most efficient means, which is still antimalarial bed nets. So anyway, listen to my conversation with Will, and you may find it as inspiring as I did. Okay, next question. One argument I've heard from someone who believes in God and an afterlife is that, quote, energy can never be destroyed. I assume what is meant by this is that consciousness survives the body as a soul. Perhaps. I think this is nonsense, but I don't really have a good enough comeback for it. What would your response be? Well, it's not a matter of energy so much as it is information and organization. When you're talking about minds and even living systems, the difference between a living system and a dead one is not merely a difference in matter or energy. When you die, you don't suddenly become physically lighter. Actually, when your body begins to cool, you have to become a little lighter because you're losing kinetic energy. But I doubt the effect is measurable. There was actually a doctor at the beginning of the 20th century, a nicknamed Duncan MacDougall, who assumed that the soul must have mass, and therefore he weighed people at the moment of death. And he claimed to have found that the weight of the human body diminished by something on the order of 21 grams. I think he also did experiments in dogs and found that there was no weight difference. And this confirmed the thesis that unlike human beings, dogs have no souls. Right. Well, obviously there's no reason to believe any of this is true, but you can sympathize with the good doctor's thinking there. It's really not a question of matter or energy going somewhere else. Nobody thinks that heat energy is the basis of your conscious life. In fact, you're losing heat every moment now. You're just producing more of it. It's not like your mind has migrated out into the environment, because some of the molecular energy in your body has. So whatever consciousness is, whatever its relationship is to the brain, if it is the product of what the brain is doing, it is the product of the organized information processing in the brain. And once that ceases to be organized, once those processes stop, once neurons are no longer firing, once their connections begin to break down, it's not a matter of so much of matter and energy being lost. It's a matter of activity. Ceasing where does a song go when you stop singing? Where does a dance go when you stop dancing? Do they still exist in some way? The distinction between having a mind and not having one or being alive and being dead is more like that. It's more like a verb than a noun. Living bodies do things that dead bodies don't, and when they stop doing those things, they're dead. Systems that process information and could be the basis of minds are doing things that disorganized systems don't, and when they become disorganized, they cease to do those things. So this is a bad analogy, this idea that the conscious mind is energy and energy can't be destroyed, energy can be converted into forms that are no longer useful, where it can no longer do work, where it contains no more information. This is entropy, and we are fighting entropy every moment of our lives, and when we die, entropy wins. If you think in terms of process, it's a little easier to see that processes can become disordered and disrupted and finally cease. So this is not where I would put my hopes for immortality. Next question. What would you say to someone who claims that the humanities are an unnecessary waste of money because they have no immediate practical purpose and thus should not be taught at universities or given funds for research? I refer to subjects such as history, sociology or philosophy. While I'm a huge fan of the sciences, obviously, and also a critic of some of the ideological trends in the humanities, much of the derangement of the left on college campuses that I've spoken about could be laid at the doorsteps of many of the departments in the humanities. But speaking generally, there's much more to living a life worth living and having a mind worth having than just understanding the world scientifically or producing better technology. The humanities are absolutely central to intellectual life and ethical life. And while there really isn't an infinite amount to learn, and I wish I had studied some things differently as an undergraduate, I'm very happy to have done my undergraduate degree in philosophy because it gets you thinking and arguing clearly about more or less everything, or at least potentially can do that. And I think that's extremely important. So I don't you know, while it's not obvious what the jobs are for most people coming out of a philosophy degree, when people ask me whether I recommend a degree in philosophy if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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+Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcaster along with other subscriber only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today, I will be speaking with David From. David is a senior editor at The Atlantic Magazine. He was a speechwriter for George Bush and has been well known in Republican political circles for many years. He's written many books, and he is one of Trump's most notable Republican critics. I wanted to get David on the podcast because he's obviously much more knowledgeable about government in general and the Republican Party in particular than I am. And I wanted him to walk us through this moment in history and just talk about what we might expect to happen in the near term here and how maybe something good might come of all this. We don't say much that will be viewed as charitable toward Trump, but if you listen to the podcast, you'll hear that we really do our best to be even handed. That doesn't paint a rosy picture, you'll see. But David's conservative bona fides are beyond dispute, and that makes his opinions about Trump and the people around him and the Republican support for him all the more incisive. So without further preamble, I bring you David From. I am here with David From. David, thank you for coming on the podcast. What a pleasure to be here. So listen, we've never met. It's it's great to talk to you. I've been a fan of your work for quite some time, but my appreciation for you has just gone up by a factor of ten in recent months. Seen your opposition to Trump and just imagine what your experience is like holding the line there. So I want to get into that. I want to talk about Trump, obviously, and the state of our country and the state of the media. But the challenge for us, given that we're going to agree so much about the problem here and given how much we each hate Trump, the challenge is really for us to say something that could conceivably persuade someone who doesn't already agree with us. I don't want us to just be indulging confirmation bias here or just rattling around our own echo chamber. I'd like us to be on our guard against exaggerating anything, and I really want us to say things about Trump and about the current situation that are as fully defended as possible. So with that in mind, let's just start with can you summarize your political background and background as a writer so people who are less familiar with you can be up to speed. Sure. And those are great cautions. And thank you for the generous welcome. It's really wonderful for you to say that. I really appreciate it. And maybe to answer your question about not getting bottleneck, maybe after I give that introduction, maybe the place to start is by I'm going to present some things where I think Donald Trump is saying some things that are worth hearing, some things that are true, and if he's not right, he's on to something important. But here's my background. I was born and grew up in Canada, in Toronto. My mother was a quite well known Canadian journalist, in fact, a very well known Canadian journalist host of a radio show called as It Happens in the 1970s. And she went on to host a program called The Journal, which was the the CBC's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's main late night, face to face television talk show in the 1980s. She died in 1992, age 54. An extraordinary career and much missed a huge influence on me. I graduated from college in 1982, and I was very caught up in the politics of that time. The class of 1982 was these are people who had grown up during the chaos of the 1970s, caught up in the Reagan moment, and I think to this day, we are probably the most Republican oriented court of people who are not absolutely old. So that was a huge influence on me. I worked for many conservative magazines over the years national Review. I was on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. I worked for conservative think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute. And to catch the story, I'll skip over most of the earlier parts. But to catch the story up into the more recent times, in 2001, I joined the staff of the George W. Bush White House. I worked as a speech writer there for two years. After that, I departed and wrote some books. I read a history of the 1970s called How We Got Here that was published just before I went into government. I wrote a memoir of my Bush time. I've written about eight books altogether, including, mostly recently, a novel of All Foolish Things. I went to work from the Bush administration in the at the American Enterprise Institute, where I did a lot of work on the need to understand the consequences of the failure of economic expansion to pay off for middle income people. I wrote a book about that. It was published in 2007, and I started a website on that subject called From Form that Flourished from 2009 to 2012. I think I obviously overdid it because I got sacked by AEI in 2010. We're going a little too far. I was kind of disgruntled about that at the time. But in retrospect, I think if you drive through enough red lights you can't be angry if the state trooper writes you a ticket and have arrived at the atlantic, where I'm senior editor. I've been working here since 2014, and I've written a number of articles on all of these various subjects and continue to write on the Atlantic website almost every day. You've done some amazing journalism there with respect to this current moment. There's one article that has got to be among the most viral in recent history from the Atlantic. The title is how to build an autocracy. So many people have been talking about that. I actually want to ask you about the good case to be made for trump, if there is one, but let's hold off on that for a second. There's one sort of scene setting question that I'd like to ask you here, kind of a personal one. What your experience has been taking the stand that you have because you're among the few really prominent conservatives who came out against Trump early and stayed against him. I put Bill Kristol and David Brooks and I guess Brett Stevens of the Wall Street Journal in that category as well. I've heard from other conservatives who have taken similar positions that their experience has just been a nightmare. I'm wondering, have you had a rough go of it at all, or have you just come out of this unscathed? First, I can't complain. Compared to what anybody has to put up with in a genuinely unfree country, it's not. Second, I would say, remember that saying, if you want a friend in washington, get a dog. I have two dogs. I have good friends. But more seriously, actually, I think I've gotten off quite lightly compared to some other people, and that was maybe due to the experience I mentioned in the setup bit, where I I've been through this before this happened. I went through this experience in a much more traumatic way between 2009 and 2010. And at that point, I was concerned that the the then new tea party movement was way too radical, way too hot, and I urged a more restrained form of opposition to president Obama. The article that got me fired from AEI actually was one I'd been writing through 2009 and 2010. To those conservatives who imagined that by stopping the health care law, they would destroy the Obama administration, please remember the democrats have also seen this movie. They know how it ends. If they don't hold together, they will hold together, they will pass this law. And so the smart thing to do is it's full of things that you don't like, but it's also got things in it that you should like. So this is a time to do business, to negotiate, because this law will pass. And if it passes over your opposition, you will be spending the next quarter century trying to fix things that you could fix. Really asking today on the day the law passed at the end of march that it overcame the last procedural hurdle, after which it was a clear shot toward the President's signature. And that was the end of March 2010. I wrote a blog post on my site called Waterloo that said people like in Dement had promised that by breaking this law they would deliver a Waterloo of defeat to President Obama. This is the Waterloo indeed of the radical Republican opposition. This law will never be repealed. I still hold to that prediction. Yes, Republicans will do well in 2010, but legislative majorities come and go. This law is forever. And the radicals led us to disaster. And after that I went through the experience that many of my anti Trump conservative friends are having now of true social isolation, true accusations of betrayal, saying the only reason you say this thing is because of those legendary Georgetown cocktail parties than anybody, that radical critics always presume that people would pay any price to attend. They're not so great. And I went through that experience. In fact, for me now on a personal level, I find I've been operating this little lemonade stand by the side of the road and I'm now seeing a lot of people stopping by to buy lemonade. So it's actually been a kind of congenial experience. And I've had this kind of grim amusement, not surprise of seeing that. A lot of the people told me in 2010 that by saying we should try to come up with a market centered approach to universal health care coverage and I was a sellout with that principles. They are now working for Donald Trump or apologizing for him and a case where there is no principal case for doing this. And that has been a kind of grim amusement to watch that. Yeah. Well, what was your experience watching the actual election results come in? I was totally surprised. Totally surprised. I was in Canada, I was on the set of CBC News. They had a panel covering the election results and I was stunned. They were not what I'd expected. I've been quite sure, for example, that Trump could not break through in Michigan because the high levels of minority vote in that state. But he did. So I was blindsided. I was up to 03:00 in the morning that night. It was an overpowering thing. I was actually coming out of a TV studio at three in the morning with the streets deserted in Toronto foreign city and walked back to the hotel I was staying at. It was really cold, but I walked anyway. And you just felt like there had been this a chapter in one's life in human history had just turned in a way that I knew then was not going to be good. Nothing good was waiting for us. We're going to get into the dark side in a moment, but to start and to be as generous as possible without being delusional, what is the smartest case you have heard in defense of Trump. If you had to give the most respectable case for having supported him until this point and for continuing to support him even now, what is that case? Well, Donald Trump got and even continues to get three big things right that the rest of the political process had tended to ignore. The first of those things is the crisis in what is happening in American rural life. Donald Trump uses the phrase inner city a lot when he wants to convey trouble and drugs and crime and despair. But actually American center cities are having an amazing revival almost everywhere. Even in some pretty hard pressed places like the Clevelands and the Philadelphia. Center cities are doing fine. Where you see real trouble is in the small towns and rural areas. Drug abuse and family breakdown and levels of imprisonment, signs of social dysfunction that you would associate with the beginnings of the crisis in black America in the 1970s. And Donald Trump went to those places and channeled the unhappiness of those people who a lot of the rest of the political process, they should just move. They should just move to Brooklyn and serve coffee. He understood them and intuited what they were about. And that is really important. They have not been heard and they needed to be heard. The drug crisis in America is a rural phenomenon as much or more as an urban phenomenon. He got right that we have had a series of beliefs about trade that grew up in the days when we were building a trade system that included fellow democracies and then the Pacific Rim countries that maybe they weren't always democratic, but at least they were small places like Taiwan and Singapore. They weren't at the time we brought them into the world trade system, not democratic, but they were not also so big as to make a difference to anybody else. And then we applied all of those ideas to China's arrival into the world economy and it has not worked in the same way. We have had chronic and massive trade imbalances with China and those have caused real harsh, ongoing dislocation for a lot of Americans who do who work in traded sectors. And while we talk a lot about, well, the winners will compensate the losers and we can retrain people, we don't do anything about that in proportion to the severity of the shock. Donald Trump was talking about something important when he talked about the trade arrangements that worked in the past have stopped working for a lot of Americans since the year 2000. And the third thing I think he has made perceived something true and made a real contribution was on the immigration issue. Immigration is described by economists as the only policy that creates no that has no costs, only benefits. Well, that's not true. It has large costs. They are invisible to those of us who talk about it because we don't pay them. But the costs of immigration, both economic and cultural, are heavy. They fall on the bottom 30% or 40% of American society. And even discussing those costs has been so beyond the pale in mains in the media mainstream and the political mainstream, that this issue just went was waiting there for somebody to talk to it, and Donald Trump did, right? There's another case that people tend to make. I grant all of that, I think. I think all of that is interesting. But none of that suggests that Trump himself would be the right person to implement any changes in any of those three areas. One argument I keep encountering from reasonably smart people, or ostensibly smart people in defense of Trump the man, really, and all of his erratic unprofessionalism as, was totally on display in his last press conference. People seem to think that there's something about him being a little nuts or seeming a little nuts, which in just a purely game theoretic way could turn out well for us, both domestically and as a matter of foreign policy. Domestically, we have just this ossified political system with vested interests and bureaucracy and deep state, and he is like a wrecking ball that is just swinging through that and clearing out the mess that it would take someone like Trump, perhaps someone as unhinged as Trump, someone as narcissistic as Trump to do that dirty work. And as a matter of foreign policy, it could be advantageous, again, just along game theoretic lines, to have a bull in a China shop, right? Who will break the right stuff and who will keep our adversaries on their toes because now they're dealing with a genuinely erratic, not always rational person. And so we could expect our adversaries like North Korea or Iran or even China and Russia to be somehow more compliant. Does any of that make sense to you? No, I'm sorry to say. I know it's not your own view first, when you connect, when you speak about Trump the man, I think I have something to learn from his voters on trade, and I'm quite sympathetic to his message on immigration. And I've been worrying about the problems of rural life and what's happening to the American working class comp that's been a major theme of my writing since 2000. But this is a little bit like the story of the legendary Plotkin Diamond. The Plot and diamond is one of the most beautiful diamonds on earth. Very romantic. It's got a long and storied history. The Plotkin Diamond, unfortunately, comes, attended, as famous diamonds often do, by a terrible curse. And the terrible curse is Mr. Plotkin. And that is true here. For Donald Trump the man, there is no defense. And all the things that case you make, I mean, it's sort of ingenious and you can well see that somebody would have made it during the campaign. But Donald Trump, on the day we speak, has been president for close to a month. And we have seen that it's just not true, actually, that he's not domestically, he's not cutting through the bureaucracy. On the contrary, because he is so massively disorganized and incompetent that on something like staffing his government, he is lagging far behind. He has not nominated the 700 or so Senate confirmed positions he's nominated. He's only about 90 of those. The that has if you're a Republican leaning person who wants to get, say, a tax cut through Congress, that has really ominous potential because if people the Senate is not confirming people in January and February, that means it will be confirming them in April and May, by which time you should be passing major bills. The Senate's time is a very finite resource, and if the schedule gets clogged later because the president was too disorganized to get his appointments done early, then you're going to discover major parts of your legislative agenda fall apart abroad. It's even worse. The President of the United States has the power to and organize human life on this planet. He has there are almost zero checks on his power to do that. It is really important that the United States, as a nuclear superpower, it's the dominant power on Earth behave in a way that is predictable, in fact, an unpredictable United States empowers adversaries. It does not deter them. And what is especially ominous here you listed potential adversaries north Korea, Iran, China and Russia. Well, one of those adversaries russia has just graduated from the rank of adversary to something else that is really sinister, and that goes back again to the unpredictability of this government is I don't know what Russia is now. Is it quasi ally? Is it a patron? But it's got a power inside the US government that is unjustified and undisclosed and deeply ominous. And that too comes from Trump's erratic nature. So no, I think there is note for him. I think the verdict is there is a dispute whether Warren Harding ever actually said these words, but words attributed to him on his deathbed. Looking back on his presidency, I'm unfit for this place and never should have come here. That is going to be Donald Trump's epitaph, although he would lack the self knowledge ever to pronounce that himself. Yeah, well, needless to say, I am deeply sympathetic with that summary of him. I've never seen even for a moment, a real method to the guy is madness. People have been interpreting his boastfulness and his speaking style as a kind of stagecraft, as a kind of master level communication to the masses and a brilliant plane of the media. I have just been seeing the ejaculations of a disordered personality. I've seen someone who's so malignantly selfish and so uninformed, though occasionally he can string a few sentences together. At bottom he is deeply inarticulate. He has a kind of confabulatory mind where he will get tripped up by his own word choices and take garden paths through his own mind that he was clearly not intending right. He was not intending to speak of something, but the word just came out, and then he's off and running on that topic. And this goes to questions of policy, goes to questions of what our country will do next. It's terrifying to behold, but you have people who are enamored of an interpretation of this which is not only exculpatory, but just praises the man to the skies as a kind of next level genius communicator. Well, the thought that you're in the car with a hopelessly drunk driver at the wheel is so upsetting that you want to believe that the driver must have some secret plan. But I do think there is some method to the madness. I don't think Donald Trump is a strategic visionary. He never has a plan. But what he is very good at in his business career, he makes impulsive decisions that are usually bad decisions. All of his shrewdness and cannons is applied after the fact. What he's very good at is having made a bad decision, shifting the cost of that decision onto other people, finding people to blame, finding people to cheat. He's very good at that. And he is a master communicator of a particular kind. He is so deeply aggrieved, he is so irresponsible that he is able to speak in ways that strike a chord with other people who feel those same levels of grievances. I am not in any way making a Hitler analogy here. We have occasion said it more than once. The analogy I often use is that people one of the reasons to study history is so that you're not always making Hitler analogies, and you understand that there are a lot of ways that things can be better. You can be on a bad train, but it has many stops before you arrive at Hitler's station. Yeah, but one of the contemporary observers of Hitler's rise to power, an American journalist named Dorothy Thompson, wrote an essay in the early 1930s about who was susceptible in Germany to Hitler and who was not. And one of the things she noted was that happy people never became Nazis. And I think there is something, but there's something donald Trump is so full of bitterness and rage, and you look at the people in his inner circle. There is not a person in a circle except for his daughter and son in law, and they have to be there. But there's not a person who's come into his inner circle who has a fully functioning personal life. They are all people who are full of rage. General Flynn enraged at Obama for firing him from the defense intelligence agency for incompetence. Steve Bannon, a man who obviously has tremendous rage and addiction issues. Three marriages, three divorces, the others as well. And there are millions of people in America who say, you know what? I am just delighted to see Donald trump be rude to the snobs. I don't care what he's going to do to me. It'll be worth it. Right. Let's take a moment to talk about the Republicans for a second, because obviously they are shouldering a lot of the responsibility for what happens now. By no means the first person to make this point, but I think it's very interesting and uncanny to consider what the world would be like if this situation were reversed. Imagine if Clinton had won the presidency without winning the popular vote and with evidence of assistance from Russia, right? The RNC had been hacked, and Clinton had delighted in this during the campaign, had even called for more hacking and then inexplicably, she had only positive things to say about Vladimir Putin, a thug who jails and even kills his political opponents. And let's say she's vastly wealthy, even more than she is, and yet known to have financial ties to Russia, right? And she's refused to release her tax returns, even though she promised to release them once her audit was over. But now she now as president, she's refusing, and she's appointed multiple people to her administration who have unusually deep connections to Russia, right? And then we learned that some of these people were in dialogue with Russian intelligence during the campaign and that Russia was attempting to influence the election with a continuous stream of hacked leaks and state propaganda. So you have this just reverse picture with Clinton. Imagine how the Republicans, the party of Reagan, the party that won the Cold War, would have responded to this. Is it safe to say that we would be in a completely different situation with the Republicans just going berserk? Well, that's clearly right. I mean, it's occasion to point out alchemists have a lousy job with the Department of Agriculture, and that seems like a big deal. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe@samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now@samharris.org./n
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